In the UK, McDonalds sued to green activists who demonstrated outside one of their stores, handing out leaflets. Most of the information on the leaflets was legally pretty dubious - the UK has strict libel laws, and the slightest untruth opens you up to a lawsuit. McDonalds spend a fortune on lawyers and the activists defended themselves. McDonalds technically won the case, but it was a public relations disaster, and they have no hope of recovering any of the costs, not even the ones they were awarded (the real costs were much higher)
I suspect that any Microsoft litigation against Linux would prove much the same. And they seem to have been severely chastened by the anti trust lawsuit, so I'd predict they wouldn't want to do anything which would be perceived as crushing a competitor.
Additionally, sueing one of the Linux vendors would encourage patent pooling and dragging in IBM's patent lawyers, and that would be very bad for them, given that they are sitting on far more cash than any of the Linux vendors. Oh, and it's much easier to remove offending code from Linux than from Windows.
And Microsoft hasn't as far started a patent lawsuit, they have only been on the receiving end of them, and they got into the patent business fairly late and are thus at a disadvantage.
So I think even if they had a cast iron case of patent infringement, they would probably decide not to persue it.
No, I don't, fucking boy meets girl, I don't give a shit about that. Fuck boy meets girl, fuck motorcycle movie. No, what is really being said? What's really being said, that's what you're talking about. 'Cause the whole idea, man, is subversion. You want subversion on a massive level. You know what one of the greatest fucking scripts ever written in the history of Hollywood is? Top Gun.
[Duane: Oh, come on.]
Top Gun is fucking great. What is Top Gun? You think it's a story about a bunch of fighter pilots. [Duane: It's about a bunch of guys waving their dicks around.] It is a story about a man's struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what Top Gun is about, man.
You've got Maverick, all right? He's on the edge, man. He's right on the fucking line, all right? And you've got Iceman, and all his crew. They're gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they're saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways.
[Duane: What about Kelly McGillis?]
Kelly McGillis, she's heterosexuality. She's saying: no, no, no, no, no, no, go the normal way, play by the rules, go the normal way. They're saying no, go the gay way, be the gay way, go for the gay way, all right? That is what's going on throughout that whole movie...
He goes to her house, all right? It looks like they're going to have sex, you know, they're just kind of sitting back, he's takin' a shower and everything. They don't have sex. He gets on the motorcycle, drives away. She's like, "What the fuck, what the fuck is going on here?" Next scene, next scene you see her, she's in the elevator, she is dressed like a guy. She's got the cap on, she's got the aviator glasses, she's wearing the same jacket that the Iceman wears. She is, okay, this is how I gotta get this guy, this guy's going towards the gay way, I gotta bring him back, I gotta bring him back from the gay way, so I'm do that through subterfuge, I'm gonna dress like a man. All right? That is how she approaches it.
Okay, now let me just ask you--I'm gonna digress for two seconds here. I met this girl Amy here, she's like floating around here and everything. Now, she just got divorced, right?...
All right, but the REAL ending of the movie is when they fight the MIGs at the end, all right? Because he has passed over into the gay way. They are this gay fighting fucking force, all right? And they're beating the Russians, the gays are beating the Russians. And it's over, and they fucking land, and Iceman's been trying to get Maverick the entire time, and finally, he's got him, all right? And what is the last fucking line that they have together? They're all hugging and kissing and happy with each other, and Ice comes up to Maverick, and he says, "Man, you can ride my tail, anytime!" And what does Maverick say? "You can ride mine!" Swordfight! Swordfight! Fuckin' A, man!
What separates NT from 9x is that 95/98/Me supported real mode (as MSDOS) drivers, network code and so.
When 9x boots, it boots MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS. It's hacked so that the command win.com is put into the end of the autoexec.bat file. Win.com starts the 9x kernel. That checks for legacy, Dos stuff. If it doesn't find any, it uses 32 bit code. But if you have any Dos drivers, the kernel switches back to real mode when it needs to use them. There are drivers called VxD's to catch and sometimes emulate hardware access, whether from 32 bit code or 16 bit. Even if you don't, the kernel is not re-entrant - there are parts which can only have one thread in them. Other threads have to queue up on a semaphore to get access. Most of this is in x86 assembler, only bits like the 32 bit filesystem are not. There are lots of subtle hacks to improve performance on low end chips, and save memory. Because it can use parts of Dos, and loads a virtualisation layer under it, Dos applications run very well. But because it doesn't really have any concept of protection, it wasn't too stable. All this was heavily tied to the original PC architecture, both the x86 CPU and also the companions chips, like PICs - most VxD's uses in and out instructions to talk to the PIC directly. The kernel architecure was incredibly complicated, and changes depending on how much legacy hardware you had at boot time.
When NT boots, NTLDR loads a completely 32 bit kernel. It doesn't support any legacy code, and is portable to any architecture. It's also re-entrant for better SMP performance. Pretty much the whole of the kernel was designed to allow multiple threads at once. It also uses ACL security - every object in the system has a access control list, to enforce security. Back when it was developed, everyone thought that PC's would move to one of the Risc archiectures with a very different chipset, and probably to multiple CPUs. So NT was designed to have a fairly clean architecture so that you could change the interrupt or dma controller just by replacing the HAL. It also has a fairly aggressive IO system, where operations are pipelined and the calls can be asynchronous. All this costs though, and an NT based Windows uses a lot more Ram than a 9x one. It also can't really run Dos games etc very well - Dos boxes in NT trap IO acceses and reflect them to a user mode Win32 process, NTVDM. This is slow, and Microsoft never bothered to make it work very well, e.g. by emulating sound cards, since they planned to move the games industry to DirectX.
In a strange kind of way, the industry will move to multi core, non x86, non PC compatible hardware. x64 uses a non x86 compatible instruction set since some of the instruction fields have been widened, along with the registers. And modern PC hardware supports legacy standards like PIC and VGA for booting, but all the new stuff (APIC, 3d graphics accelerators) can only be used by switching that off. So Microsoft made the right choice with a rewrite, even though it took time for it to pay off.
Shared Source Limited Permissive License for use of MechCommander® 2
This license governs use of the accompanying software. If you use the software, you accept this license. If you do not accept the license, do not use the software.
1. Definitions The terms reproduce, reproduction and distribution have the same meaning here as under U.S. copyright law. You means the licensee of the software. Licensed patents means any Microsoft patent claims which read directly on the software as distributed by Microsoft under this license.
2. Grant of Rights (A) Copyright Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, Microsoft grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce the software, prepare derivative works of the software and distribute the software or any derivative works that you create.
(B) Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, Microsoft grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under licensed patents to make, have made, use, practice, sell, and offer for sale, and/or otherwise dispose of the software or derivative works of the software.
So you can create and sell derivative works, and you won't get clobbered with patent lawsuits from Microsoft. There aren't any obligations, like for example having to release the source code to any of your code which you statically link to it, like with GPL code.
3. Conditions and Limitations (A) Limitation on Commercial Distribution- Notwithstanding the rights granted in section 2(A) above, you are not granted any rights to commercially distribute any artwork from the software (Art Assets) in any derivative work or otherwise. Microsoft grants you a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to use, reproduce and distribute the Art Assets on a non-commercial basis only.
But the bitmap/texture files can only be used non commercially.
(B) No Trademark License- This license does not grant you any rights to use Microsofts name, logo, or trademarks.
So you can't claim that your game is linked to Microsoft.
(C) If you begin patent litigation against Microsoft over patents that you think may apply to the software (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit), your license to the software ends automatically.
And if you sue them, your license goes away.
(D) If you distribute copies of the software or derivative works, you must retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the software.
This is like in the old BSD license
(E) If you distribute the software or derivative works in source code form you may do so only under this license (i.e., you must include a complete copy of this license with your distribution), and if you distribute the software or derivative works in compiled or object code form you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
All licenses say this, otherwise you could take GPL code and distribute it under a different license.
(F) The software is licensed as-is. You bear the risk of using it. Microsoft gives no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws which this license cannot change. To the extent permitted under your local laws, Microsoft excludes the implied warranties of merchantability,
Hmm, I could start a ECT based mind wiping business.
Actually doing poach jobs on paranoid armchair lawyers all day would give me so much job satisfaction, I wouldn't even need to charge. Just the cost of the Joules delivered and a little extra to keep the office in coffee and broadband.
Alec Douglas Home was in the lords, but he decided to resign from it and stand for election when being made Prime Minister. Note that 'he believed it to be impractical' serve as Prime Minister from the Lords, not that there was anything illegal about it.
If you really don't like what your MP does, you can vote him or her out of office. MPs fear being kicked out, and this fear puts an upper limit on their folly and venality. That's not true of the Lords.
The problem with the CELL is that the the SPE's - the small processing units that you can add easily have a lot of issues. They don't have access to the host CPU's memory. They do have a small amount of local memory, 256K IIRC though. They are also a lot simpler than modern CPU's - they execute instructions in order for example. The problem is that it's hard to take a game designed for a traditional CPU, which runs a single thread very well, and has access to lots of memory, and partition it into enough pieces to keep all the SPE's busy.
I'd think something like Sun's Niagara might be a good idea, but only for servers. For games, I think even an XBox 360 might be too far along the 'have more but simpler processors' axis.
Isn't unity a security risk, since you'd have a single government? If evil or incompetent people took over, you'd be screwed.
E.g. compare China in the 19th Century and Europe. China was unified, and the government decided to cut off the outside world, lest it's people got subversive ideas. Europe was split into multiple states, and people were free to leave the ones that tried this sort of thing. So Europe surpassed China in terms of technology, science and military ability.
And the number of people killed in conflicts was probably a small price to pay for this, in the sense that more would have died of famine and so on under an autocratic but incompetent central government.
And you can't trust people in general, it would be almost suicidally risky to do so. You need to authenticate them with recommendations from other people that you've already authenticated.
Ok, I admit I'm just writing this to make you reconsider your prejudices.
Disables nearly all pre-installed ActiveX controls to prevent potentially vulnerable controls from being exposed to attack. You can easily enable or disable ActiveX controls as needed through the Information Bar and the Add-on Manager.
The beta of Internet Explorer 7 is neat to play with but it has one quirky feature where it does not allow users to install unsigned Active X controls. Unfortunately since it's still beta, virtually all Active X addons (like Shockwave, Flash) are unsigned which means they cannot be installed by default. Trying to do so causes IE 7 to spit out an error message. Not all is lost however, if you load up the Internet Options (Tools -> Internet Options...), click the "Security" tab and in Internet security settings click the Custom Level... utton. In the "ActiveX Controls and plugins" section, find the "Download unsigned ActiveX Controls" option and change it from "Disable" to "Prompt". After that's done click the OK button and you're set!
He he, "one quirky feature". Way to miss the point. Note that you can disable Download Signed ActiveX controls too, or make at least make it prompt you.
I think the basic problem is that they still want to avoid breaking websites that rely on ActiveX as much as possible. You can see lots of stuff in that document which means that some ActiveX controls will still automatically on a webpage. If anyone develops and exploit for them and you run it on XP as an admin, you have a problem. Of course, if the user knows what they are doing they can make it secure, but the default setting is more geared to compatibility than security.
The original post was about Apple losing their SSH implementation. My point was that they'd take the last OpenSSH release and base future releases off that.
Big software companies have version control systems to release software from e.g Clearcase, they presumably already have OpenSSH in that and thus essentially forked anyway - they have some employee to merge in the changes from the project in the wild. If that project stopped, they'd stop merging but keep releasing. If they needed to fix bugs, I'm sure they could find someone inside Apple who'd do it. OpenSSH doesn't become untested or untrustworthy just because it becomes extinct outside Apple.
Umm, but if they give stuff away for free, it is OK to ignore their call for donations. Legally if not morally.
That's the reason that most companies make sure there is a link between being able to use something and paying for it. Sure the idealistic 1% of the population will chip in with $5 donations, but a load of hard nosed companies will take the free stuff and use without the slightest trace of guilt. And the fatal problem is that it's those hard nosed companies that have the sort of cash to fund development. Even with idealists, making the payment voluntary means that it slips way down their todo list.
Umm, it's Open Source. They can just pick up the source code and find some employee who's enthusiastic about such things to manage their fork. I'd bet if they use it, that's what they do anyway.
Can't say I really agree with the 2nd Amendment to be honest, but then I'm Tory rather than a Republican.
At the moment, I don't fundamentally disagree with the sort of people who get to be the UK government. They do some dumb things of course, but they have the right sort of values. The sort of people who want to replace it with something different via some sort violent of revolution are the scum of the Earth - communists, fascists, Islamic extremists and so on. Now if we had more liberal gun laws it would give these people a slight advantage in the short term, but I suspect the main effect would be to give the UK a murder rate closer to the US. Also, if the people you agree with are in control of the state, it's no bad thing that they have an extreme advantage if things turn violent.
And if one of the violent alternatives actually took power, they would have to kill or expel most of the existing armed forces to do so. Plus they would be ruthless enough to put down any protest from the civillians that were left, peaceful or otherwise. It's hard to believe that liberal gun laws would be particularly helpful in that case, and in any case they'd repeal them as soon as they could and collect the weapons. I suspect the only way to get rid of them would be to ask the ever helpful USAF to bomb the shit out of what remains of the government buildings and infrastructure.
So I can't say, in the UK case that I'm in favour of liberal guns laws. Maybe it's different in the US though, since the system has to be completely self sufficient - there is no real chance that the US's allies would be able to topple a totalitarian government that took over. It would certainly be politically impossible for any democratic US government to take away the 2nd Amendment. And I can certianly see that at the time it was enacted it made sense. My argument is that modern totalitarianism has a much higher level of control of people, and that changes the calculation.
Actually if you look at Iraq pre-invasion, they had a fairly high level of gun ownership, didn't they? So it looks that an armed citizenry is not really a limit on tyranny, because an efficient dictatorship can keep people scared enough that they won't step out of line, and the fact that they have access to firearms doesn't really change this.
Notice the poor reading comprehension, caused by impaired eyesight and dulled wits. Impatience with human contact, caused by an addiction to quick fix sexual imagery. Typos caused by hairy hands connected to grossly overdeveloped forearms on a spindly body. A quick resort to crude, sexual insults.
NB - the grandparent post was from a Christian who seems to be against the mandatory ISP level filter.
The other problem is that it breaks the case insensitivity of English. As you point out, you could write your post all in lower case, the capitalistion of the first letter of a sentence or proper nouns is redundant. You can write English on a device which only supports upper case, and it's still ok too. This free vs Free distinction stops you doing that. Shouldn't in be free for the normal dictionary definition of free and some new phrase for the new definition. What about "open source" for example?
Seems to me that whoever thought up this free vs Free thing needs to spend time reading Raymond Chen on adding new features without breaking back compatibility.
Except that hardware engineers don't get emotional about technology in my experience. And most hardware standards, like TTL are defacto ones, set by some big company and usually patented by them. If they are popular, other companies license the patents or figure out alternative solutions to the problems and patent those.
So it's a completley different world from some goateed dude complaining he has to type a few more lines of text because "OMFG IE is not compliant with teh standards!!1". Like it or not, IE is the standard for 80-90% of the world, if your code doesn't work on that then it's going to be regarded as wrong by the majority of the people that see it.
Plus most hardware designers I know have websites written in vi or notepad ten years ago that look a bit primitive but work on all browsers, from lynx up to current IE and firefox. I can't imagine them relying on some feature which any popular browser doesn't support and then blaming the browser for rather than their own poor research/design.
Just imagine if you hired some guy to design a chip. At the interview he makes a few strange comments about the market leading HDL from one company being bad, and an alternative multi source one is much better. He claims, however to have only worked with the market leader at work, the alternative is only used at home. You point out that the project he will work in will use the market leader, but that you'll consider about alternative for future projects. He grudgingly accepts this and you hire him. Then he starts working, but none of the chips he designs work when they come back from the chip fab. When you confront him, he makes the excuse that the HDL you work in isn't standards compliant.
The drivers expect the ATI Bios to be present in order to initialize the chip. Things like clock frequencies, memory
frequencies, power management, all the is done through the video bios. The macpro video chip only supports EFI, it has the
old BIOS completely stripped out. Thus I find it very doubtfull any video drivers work out of the box. As I see it there
are a couple of possible solutions, from easiest to hardest.
1. Flash the onboard chip with the bios from a PC version and hope to god it has the EFI support as well.
2. Have the custom bootloader load the bios from a PC version into RAM and map all BIOS calls to that.
3. Have the custom bootloader load the video EFI driver, and a thin BIOS layer that reroutes all BIOS calls into the
corresponding EFI calls.
4. Try to duplicate all the video BIOS functionality.
You can certainly do this in an NT driver, IIRC it's discouraged because the kernel has to disable interrupts, switch to v86 mode, call the bios, and then switch back. xom.efi (presumably - I've never seen the source code) handles int 13 calls to read the disk, but it can't handle the custom int 10 calls that the XP driver makes to the video bios.
I dunno, I think it makes them angrier if we pirate it.
'Course I only listen to Laoitian lesbian Ska and PBS myself and I don't watch TV, so I sometimes forget to start enough torrents to do that effectively. I try though. Those of you with more plebeian tastes should find this much easier of course.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, McDonalds sued to green activists who demonstrated outside one of their stores, handing out leaflets. Most of the information on the leaflets was legally pretty dubious - the UK has strict libel laws, and the slightest untruth opens you up to a lawsuit. McDonalds spend a fortune on lawyers and the activists defended themselves. McDonalds technically won the case, but it was a public relations disaster, and they have no hope of recovering any of the costs, not even the ones they were awarded (the real costs were much higher)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case
I suspect that any Microsoft litigation against Linux would prove much the same. And they seem to have been severely chastened by the anti trust lawsuit, so I'd predict they wouldn't want to do anything which would be perceived as crushing a competitor.
Additionally, sueing one of the Linux vendors would encourage patent pooling and dragging in IBM's patent lawyers, and that would be very bad for them, given that they are sitting on far more cash than any of the Linux vendors. Oh, and it's much easier to remove offending code from Linux than from Windows.
And Microsoft hasn't as far started a patent lawsuit, they have only been on the receiving end of them, and they got into the patent business fairly late and are thus at a disadvantage.
So I think even if they had a cast iron case of patent infringement, they would probably decide not to persue it.
It's from the movie Sleep With Me - Tarantino has a bit part, and his character comes out with this monologue
t ml
I like Val Kilmer's reaction to it here
http://www.godamongdirectors.com/scripts/sleep.sh
Office Space/Simpsons/Monty Python quotes aren't literally obligatory you know.
http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/10012
[Duane: What, like the spine? Like one sentence?]
No, I don't, fucking boy meets girl, I don't give a shit about that. Fuck boy meets girl, fuck motorcycle movie. No, what is really being said? What's really being said, that's what you're talking about. 'Cause the whole idea, man, is subversion. You want subversion on a massive level. You know what one of the greatest fucking scripts ever written in the history of Hollywood is? Top Gun.
[Duane: Oh, come on.]
Top Gun is fucking great. What is Top Gun? You think it's a story about a bunch of fighter pilots. [Duane: It's about a bunch of guys waving their dicks around.] It is a story about a man's struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what Top Gun is about, man.
You've got Maverick, all right? He's on the edge, man. He's right on the fucking line, all right? And you've got Iceman, and all his crew. They're gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they're saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways.
[Duane: What about Kelly McGillis?]
Kelly McGillis, she's heterosexuality. She's saying: no, no, no, no, no, no, go the normal way, play by the rules, go the normal way. They're saying no, go the gay way, be the gay way, go for the gay way, all right? That is what's going on throughout that whole movie...
He goes to her house, all right? It looks like they're going to have sex, you know, they're just kind of sitting back, he's takin' a shower and everything. They don't have sex. He gets on the motorcycle, drives away. She's like, "What the fuck, what the fuck is going on here?" Next scene, next scene you see her, she's in the elevator, she is dressed like a guy. She's got the cap on, she's got the aviator glasses, she's wearing the same jacket that the Iceman wears. She is, okay, this is how I gotta get this guy, this guy's going towards the gay way, I gotta bring him back, I gotta bring him back from the gay way, so I'm do that through subterfuge, I'm gonna dress like a man. All right? That is how she approaches it.
Okay, now let me just ask you--I'm gonna digress for two seconds here. I met this girl Amy here, she's like floating around here and everything. Now, she just got divorced, right?...
All right, but the REAL ending of the movie is when they fight the MIGs at the end, all right? Because he has passed over into the gay way. They are this gay fighting fucking force, all right? And they're beating the Russians, the gays are beating the Russians. And it's over, and they fucking land, and Iceman's been trying to get Maverick the entire time, and finally, he's got him, all right? And what is the last fucking line that they have together? They're all hugging and kissing and happy with each other, and Ice comes up to Maverick, and he says, "Man, you can ride my tail, anytime!" And what does Maverick say? "You can ride mine!" Swordfight! Swordfight! Fuckin' A, man!
What separates NT from 9x is that 95/98/Me supported real mode (as MSDOS) drivers, network code and so.
When 9x boots, it boots MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS. It's hacked so that the command win.com is put into the end of the autoexec.bat file. Win.com starts the 9x kernel. That checks for legacy, Dos stuff. If it doesn't find any, it uses 32 bit code. But if you have any Dos drivers, the kernel switches back to real mode when it needs to use them. There are drivers called VxD's to catch and sometimes emulate hardware access, whether from 32 bit code or 16 bit. Even if you don't, the kernel is not re-entrant - there are parts which can only have one thread in them. Other threads have to queue up on a semaphore to get access. Most of this is in x86 assembler, only bits like the 32 bit filesystem are not. There are lots of subtle hacks to improve performance on low end chips, and save memory. Because it can use parts of Dos, and loads a virtualisation layer under it, Dos applications run very well. But because it doesn't really have any concept of protection, it wasn't too stable. All this was heavily tied to the original PC architecture, both the x86 CPU and also the companions chips, like PICs - most VxD's uses in and out instructions to talk to the PIC directly. The kernel architecure was incredibly complicated, and changes depending on how much legacy hardware you had at boot time.
When NT boots, NTLDR loads a completely 32 bit kernel. It doesn't support any legacy code, and is portable to any architecture. It's also re-entrant for better SMP performance. Pretty much the whole of the kernel was designed to allow multiple threads at once. It also uses ACL security - every object in the system has a access control list, to enforce security. Back when it was developed, everyone thought that PC's would move to one of the Risc archiectures with a very different chipset, and probably to multiple CPUs. So NT was designed to have a fairly clean architecture so that you could change the interrupt or dma controller just by replacing the HAL. It also has a fairly aggressive IO system, where operations are pipelined and the calls can be asynchronous. All this costs though, and an NT based Windows uses a lot more Ram than a 9x one. It also can't really run Dos games etc very well - Dos boxes in NT trap IO acceses and reflect them to a user mode Win32 process, NTVDM. This is slow, and Microsoft never bothered to make it work very well, e.g. by emulating sound cards, since they planned to move the games industry to DirectX.
In a strange kind of way, the industry will move to multi core, non x86, non PC compatible hardware. x64 uses a non x86 compatible instruction set since some of the instruction fields have been widened, along with the registers. And modern PC hardware supports legacy standards like PIC and VGA for booting, but all the new stuff (APIC, 3d graphics accelerators) can only be used by switching that off. So Microsoft made the right choice with a rewrite, even though it took time for it to pay off.
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?Pos tID=310374&SiteID=1
So you can create and sell derivative works, and you won't get clobbered with patent lawsuits from Microsoft. There aren't any obligations, like for example having to release the source code to any of your code which you statically link to it, like with GPL code.
But the bitmap/texture files can only be used non commercially.
So you can't claim that your game is linked to Microsoft.
And if you sue them, your license goes away.
This is like in the old BSD license
All licenses say this, otherwise you could take GPL code and distribute it under a different license.
Hmm, I could start a ECT based mind wiping business.
Actually doing poach jobs on paranoid armchair lawyers all day would give me so much job satisfaction, I wouldn't even need to charge. Just the cost of the Joules delivered and a little extra to keep the office in coffee and broadband.
So your saying that you didn't like your MP (which one BTW?) and voted him out. doesn't that prove my point?
Alec Douglas Home was in the lords, but he decided to resign from it and stand for election when being made Prime Minister. Note that 'he believed it to be impractical' serve as Prime Minister from the Lords, not that there was anything illegal about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Douglas-Home
If you really don't like what your MP does, you can vote him or her out of office. MPs fear being kicked out, and this fear puts an upper limit on their folly and venality. That's not true of the Lords.
The problem with the CELL is that the the SPE's - the small processing units that you can add easily have a lot of issues. They don't have access to the host CPU's memory. They do have a small amount of local memory, 256K IIRC though. They are also a lot simpler than modern CPU's - they execute instructions in order for example. The problem is that it's hard to take a game designed for a traditional CPU, which runs a single thread very well, and has access to lots of memory, and partition it into enough pieces to keep all the SPE's busy.
I'd think something like Sun's Niagara might be a good idea, but only for servers. For games, I think even an XBox 360 might be too far along the 'have more but simpler processors' axis.
Well I asked my Folk Wisdom Consultant and he said
"Well, the cow, is not a smart animal. The ol' he-coon walks just before the light of day."
I believe this resolves your issue with the use of homey folk wisdom in engineering.
Here in Columbine, we don't much care for the word 'straightshooter'. We prefer the term 'true American'.
Isn't unity a security risk, since you'd have a single government? If evil or incompetent people took over, you'd be screwed.
E.g. compare China in the 19th Century and Europe. China was unified, and the government decided to cut off the outside world, lest it's people got subversive ideas. Europe was split into multiple states, and people were free to leave the ones that tried this sort of thing. So Europe surpassed China in terms of technology, science and military ability.
And the number of people killed in conflicts was probably a small price to pay for this, in the sense that more would have died of famine and so on under an autocratic but incompetent central government.
And you can't trust people in general, it would be almost suicidally risky to do so. You need to authenticate them with recommendations from other people that you've already authenticated.
Ok, I admit I'm just writing this to make you reconsider your prejudices.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/featureta
From here
http://forum.pcstats.com/showthread.php?t=35534
He he, "one quirky feature". Way to miss the point. Note that you can disable Download Signed ActiveX controls too, or make at least make it prompt you.
There's a best practices document here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
I think the basic problem is that they still want to avoid breaking websites that rely on ActiveX as much as possible. You can see lots of stuff in that document which means that some ActiveX controls will still automatically on a webpage. If anyone develops and exploit for them and you run it on XP as an admin, you have a problem. Of course, if the user knows what they are doing they can make it secure, but the default setting is more geared to compatibility than security.
The original post was about Apple losing their SSH implementation. My point was that they'd take the last OpenSSH release and base future releases off that.
Big software companies have version control systems to release software from e.g Clearcase, they presumably already have OpenSSH in that and thus essentially forked anyway - they have some employee to merge in the changes from the project in the wild. If that project stopped, they'd stop merging but keep releasing. If they needed to fix bugs, I'm sure they could find someone inside Apple who'd do it. OpenSSH doesn't become untested or untrustworthy just because it becomes extinct outside Apple.
Umm, but if they give stuff away for free, it is OK to ignore their call for donations. Legally if not morally.
That's the reason that most companies make sure there is a link between being able to use something and paying for it. Sure the idealistic 1% of the population will chip in with $5 donations, but a load of hard nosed companies will take the free stuff and use without the slightest trace of guilt. And the fatal problem is that it's those hard nosed companies that have the sort of cash to fund development. Even with idealists, making the payment voluntary means that it slips way down their todo list.
Umm, it's Open Source. They can just pick up the source code and find some employee who's enthusiastic about such things to manage their fork. I'd bet if they use it, that's what they do anyway.
Can't say I really agree with the 2nd Amendment to be honest, but then I'm Tory rather than a Republican.
At the moment, I don't fundamentally disagree with the sort of people who get to be the UK government. They do some dumb things of course, but they have the right sort of values. The sort of people who want to replace it with something different via some sort violent of revolution are the scum of the Earth - communists, fascists, Islamic extremists and so on. Now if we had more liberal gun laws it would give these people a slight advantage in the short term, but I suspect the main effect would be to give the UK a murder rate closer to the US. Also, if the people you agree with are in control of the state, it's no bad thing that they have an extreme advantage if things turn violent.
And if one of the violent alternatives actually took power, they would have to kill or expel most of the existing armed forces to do so. Plus they would be ruthless enough to put down any protest from the civillians that were left, peaceful or otherwise. It's hard to believe that liberal gun laws would be particularly helpful in that case, and in any case they'd repeal them as soon as they could and collect the weapons. I suspect the only way to get rid of them would be to ask the ever helpful USAF to bomb the shit out of what remains of the government buildings and infrastructure.
So I can't say, in the UK case that I'm in favour of liberal guns laws. Maybe it's different in the US though, since the system has to be completely self sufficient - there is no real chance that the US's allies would be able to topple a totalitarian government that took over. It would certainly be politically impossible for any democratic US government to take away the 2nd Amendment. And I can certianly see that at the time it was enacted it made sense. My argument is that modern totalitarianism has a much higher level of control of people, and that changes the calculation.
Actually if you look at Iraq pre-invasion, they had a fairly high level of gun ownership, didn't they? So it looks that an armed citizenry is not really a limit on tyranny, because an efficient dictatorship can keep people scared enough that they won't step out of line, and the fact that they have access to firearms doesn't really change this.
This post slows the effect of pornography!
Notice the poor reading comprehension, caused by impaired eyesight and dulled wits. Impatience with human contact, caused by an addiction to quick fix sexual imagery. Typos caused by hairy hands connected to grossly overdeveloped forearms on a spindly body. A quick resort to crude, sexual insults.
NB - the grandparent post was from a Christian who seems to be against the mandatory ISP level filter.
The other problem is that it breaks the case insensitivity of English. As you point out, you could write your post all in lower case, the capitalistion of the first letter of a sentence or proper nouns is redundant. You can write English on a device which only supports upper case, and it's still ok too. This free vs Free distinction stops you doing that. Shouldn't in be free for the normal dictionary definition of free and some new phrase for the new definition. What about "open source" for example?
Seems to me that whoever thought up this free vs Free thing needs to spend time reading Raymond Chen on adding new features without breaking back compatibility.
How do you write the difference between free and Free when it's the first word of a sentence?
E.g, how would I write this -
free software is free as in beer, Free software is free as in speech.
or
free beer is when someone gives you a pint of Guiness, Free beer means that someone gives you a recipe for homebrew real ale.
Except that hardware engineers don't get emotional about technology in my experience. And most hardware standards, like TTL are defacto ones, set by some big company and usually patented by them. If they are popular, other companies license the patents or figure out alternative solutions to the problems and patent those.
So it's a completley different world from some goateed dude complaining he has to type a few more lines of text because "OMFG IE is not compliant with teh standards!!1". Like it or not, IE is the standard for 80-90% of the world, if your code doesn't work on that then it's going to be regarded as wrong by the majority of the people that see it.
Plus most hardware designers I know have websites written in vi or notepad ten years ago that look a bit primitive but work on all browsers, from lynx up to current IE and firefox. I can't imagine them relying on some feature which any popular browser doesn't support and then blaming the browser for rather than their own poor research/design.
Just imagine if you hired some guy to design a chip. At the interview he makes a few strange comments about the market leading HDL from one company being bad, and an alternative multi source one is much better. He claims, however to have only worked with the market leader at work, the alternative is only used at home. You point out that the project he will work in will use the market leader, but that you'll consider about alternative for future projects. He grudgingly accepts this and you hire him. Then he starts working, but none of the chips he designs work when they come back from the chip fab. When you confront him, he makes the excuse that the HDL you work in isn't standards compliant.
From what I've read, the XP drivers for the onboard graphics call the video bios
m ware/lddm_bios.mspx
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Drivers
The drivers expect the ATI Bios to be present in order to initialize the chip. Things like clock frequencies, memory
frequencies, power management, all the is done through the video bios. The macpro video chip only supports EFI, it has the
old BIOS completely stripped out. Thus I find it very doubtfull any video drivers work out of the box. As I see it there
are a couple of possible solutions, from easiest to hardest.
1. Flash the onboard chip with the bios from a PC version and hope to god it has the EFI support as well.
2. Have the custom bootloader load the bios from a PC version into RAM and map all BIOS calls to that.
3. Have the custom bootloader load the video EFI driver, and a thin BIOS layer that reroutes all BIOS calls into the
corresponding EFI calls.
4. Try to duplicate all the video BIOS functionality.
You can certainly do this in an NT driver, IIRC it's discouraged because the kernel has to disable interrupts, switch to v86 mode, call the bios, and then switch back. xom.efi (presumably - I've never seen the source code) handles int 13 calls to read the disk, but it can't handle the custom int 10 calls that the XP driver makes to the video bios.
Interestingly, it's not possible in Vista
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/fir
I dunno, I think it makes them angrier if we pirate it.
'Course I only listen to Laoitian lesbian Ska and PBS myself and I don't watch TV, so I sometimes forget to start enough torrents to do that effectively. I try though. Those of you with more plebeian tastes should find this much easier of course.