Remember Niven's "The Soft Weapon"? What do you do when the mine decides that you're not actually authorized to deactivate it, and tells its comrades about you?
In all seriousness, a networked minefield that could be given a simple, "go blow yourselves up all at once" command would certainly improve many parts of the world. Of course, even better would be a mobile smart mine that looks for other mines, and then blows up.
To be entirely honest, I don't remember fscking the JFS (G30 -> SP2), or XFS (PowerIndigo2 -> Origin2000, Linux) file systems anywhere nearly as much as I've had to EXT2/EXT3, and frankly, have been in much less danger of losing data on those than I have on an ext3 partition on an adaptec SCSI RAID controller about two years ago. Yes, the performance is nice, but in terms of where I've lost data, it's been on ext2/3, and not on JFS/XFS. I've run XFS on Linux as well, and not had any noticeable issues with it. Maybe this is luck, maybe the drive controller/scsi drives weren't as compatible as they should have been, maybe a terabyte filesystem was a bad idea circa 2003, maybe I shouldn't have cut in front of that Wiccan in undergrad, but I've had many fewer "Oh S*!" moments with the filesystems that came down from the big-iron OS's.
I'm sorry that I don't do enough vector web-graphics to make use of Inkscape more, because the posts from the Inkscape team are the some of the most open and honest of program development groups that reply here. Just really nice to see.
Re:Why EXT4 ?
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, XFS (SGI), JFS (IBM), and ZFS (Sun) are very well proven in the field, on their respective native operating systems. Given the situations they're used in (financial sector, pharmaceutical research data, supercomputing), they're far more proven that EXT(anything). Now, whether the average Linux user knows how to install, tune, and use them is a different issue, but if I were worried about scalable, mission-critical, filesystems, those three would be on the top of my list. (and my personal history says that while XFS never gave me any trouble, JFS would be my first choice. Nobody ever let me have a budget large enough to buy a machine that would justify ZFS).
With IBM's know-how in the mix, EXT4 may be able to join the above three, but it would seem to be time better spent fixing XFS/JFS support in Linux first, rather than worrying about backwards compatibility with EXT2.
As a number-cruncher, may I politely say that most days, I really don't care. I do care that they provide good math libs (they do), or documentation that helps me optimize my code for their hardware (they do), and hardware that for some combination of price/reliability/speed, performs to my specs (they do). They also provide a good development environmnent that plays well with other compilers, and a good desktop environment that supports both native and legacy (X11) apps, which I can seamlessly link to the HPC side. For the previous generation of processors, there was IBM fortran (which made it easy to go from AIX -> OSX), and now there is Intel Fortran ( Linux -> OSX), both of which are extremely strong performers on their respective processors, and both of which make more difference to my actual runs than would the ability to recompile my kernel from scratch. Neither of those compilers are open-source either, yet we purchase them because their performance is high enough that it outweighs whatever political misgivings we may have.
As you say, the real HPC guys on the nitty-gritty end (people optimizing TCP stacks for high-performance network interfaces, for instance), will sign the NDAs, then those of us in the field will decide whether or not we can use their solution. Whether or not we can get the kernel source code is not going to matter to 98% of us. We ran Irix (closed), UNICOS (closed), AIX (closed), VMS (closed), and Linux (open), and will run OSX whether it's open or closed, as long as we get reliable simulations done in an acceptable amount of time on equipment we can stand to work with.
I'll give the Rocks guys a plug (and not just because they were great guys when I was setting my first clusters up), for the elegance, and portability, of their solutions. The configuring nodes through XML scripts, scalable authentication system, support for I386/x86-64/IA-64 simultaneously, auto-configuring drivers for Myrinet, correctly configured Sun Grid Engine with no end-user interaction to set it up, and the funky solutions such as the Display Wall, makes them a stand-out distribution.
On the other hand, there are places, such as Cornell's Theory Center, which have 'successfully' gone to windows clusters. I personally think it's the Wrong Thing, given the difficulty of porting to Windows from Unix, and doubt it's as easy to set up as Rocks, but they're making it work. More likely, this will be used in Windows-heavy environments for high-throughput computing, rather than high-performance.
That depends, if they did time in the military, they probably do. My brother and three friends (3 ex-army and 1 ex-navy) all seem to know it by heart, despite a rather wide spread of politics and job classification. It must just go with the job.
Although curiously Ziebart http://www.ziebart.com/ is still in business, so maybe RJ just had a bad business plan? These companies didn't go away when Windows started including tools such as Defraggers (and started optimizing their filesystems so they didn't need defragging before the computer needed fragging instead), they just switched to other "value-added" propositions. Even if Windows becomes more secure, there is still going to be the User to deal with, and tools to clean up after the user will be popular instead.
- Prepare files in which the file content conforms to the Portable Document
Format.
- Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the
Portable Document Format.
- Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document
Format and displays the results, prints the results, or otherwise interprets a
file represented in the Portable Document Format.
- Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of operators and data structures, as well as
the PDF sample code and PostScript language Function definitions in the
written specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document
Format for the above purposes."
Therefore.... without expansion of the original article, we really don't know what the issue is. It's possible that Microsoft has extended PDF in some incompatible manner, or that Adobe's more recent innovations, allowing PDF to be edited, aren't being respected, or that someone panicked about The Beast implementing it's own version, and making the original irrelevant.
Basically, we have a smallish company with a few dedicated niches on one side, and a convicted, predatory, behemoth on the other, except that the behemoth looks vulnerable to EU anti-trust hunters. Years ago Jeff Danziger http://www.danzigercartoons.com/, an editorial cartoonist, summed up the New IBM with a drawing of a man at a desk, the old IBM THINK logo in the trash, and a new "BUY" logo on the desk. If updated for 2006, and for a generic tech-company, the new logo would read "SUE".
Chemolithoautotrophs, probably. Microorganisms that are metabolising compounds from the rocks to get their energy, then everything bigger eats the next step smaller below them. Similar to deep-smoker vent communities.
Actually, for my field (Chemistry), what GCC -O3 does is irrelevant, except during the development phase of a program, or as a last resort for portability. We care about what the fastest native compiler we can find + optimized libraries does. The Cell will be no different; a few hand-optimized routines such as BLAS, FFTPack, etc, in libraries, then an auto-vectorizing Fortran-95 compiler on top. I will be interested in seeing how packages such as GAMESS or NWChem http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/docs/nwchem/nwchem.html/ behave once Fortran is available, and Cell shipped in something other than game consoles.
On the other hand, the GROMACS guys http://www.gromacs.org/, who write hand-optimized code on a per-processor basis, ought to be stoked. It already runs well using single-precision, so it looks to be tailor-made to a Cell-based setup.
If people with scientific and engineering mindsets just "left things alone", you'd be sitting in a cave wondering why rocks weren't edible.
Most likely, as the natural product needs to be modified before being an effective pharmaceutical, the compounds of interest will be identified. Then either the necessary gene sequence will be cloned into a workhorse organism, such as yeast or E. coli, or retrosynthetic techniques will be used to make the compound and derivatives thereof under abiotic conditions.
Translation: no company expecting to sell billions of dollars worth of product would rely on such a low-yield source such as mining coral reefs for drugs. Even Taxol( (R) Bristols-Meyer-Squibb) http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/taxol/t axol.htm/, which could be grown on vast yew ranches, is preferrentially synthesized via standard organic chemistry techniques. Our methods of finding new molecules may be from the Dark Ages, but our methods of synthesizing them are not.
Coming from the deliberately-synthesized school of chemistry, I was surprised when I sat on a PhD committee recently, and asked the student what the sponge did with the chemical she was discussing. I got a blank stare from the student, and one of the committee members told me that nobody knows, and the natural-product researchers just pick an organism, puree it (or some part of it), make separations, then try them on anything they'd like to cure/killl, and see what works.
As much as I applaud my colleagues for getting the state to fund their diving expedition, it would be nice if some of that money went to trying to understand what role the compounds have in the original organism, then working outward from there to design new pharmaceuticals. It might give us to the tools to stop prospecting, and instead rationally design our molecular targets to fit the application.
Of course, if you read this week's New Yorker, you can see how much effort has gone into rationally designing a replacement for sugar in food, versus how much success on the other end.
You beat me to it. I was going to suggest that Perl's syntax is a good enough reason to lock Larry Wall up. Of course, since he was good enough to license it in a community friendly manner, is a brilliant programmer, and gives great addresses, I would settle for him being incarcerated on some Hawaiian beach. The golden handshake and , "No, Really, you've done enough. Don't add anything else to Perl".
Of course, using the above criteria, they'll be hunting the author of APL with dogs.
Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8s, probably. The State Department should be finalizing the procurement procedures for 2 or 3 of those any day now.
In all seriousness, unlike our 80s Moscow Embassy (which did have microphones embedded in the cement), a laptop phoning home is pretty easy to detect. Don't do anything serious on it, hook it up to the network, start typing while someone watches your packets. It's not like the Chinese have their new MagicNet(tm) which doesn't require wires, or emit electromagnetic radiation detectable by standard instruments.
OTOH, one could make the distinction between (for example) HP or Dell, which are built by Taiwainese companies, and Lenovo, which is Mainland Chinese, if you're really worried about embedded tracking devices, etc, but that's still a political, rather than a technical argument. Of course, someone at State could simply decide that auditing every 30th laptop for phoning home is too much work and risk, but even then they'd probaby only find a standard set of phishing tools and DOS zombie installs, rather than hostile foreign government spyware.
Any congresscritter proposing legislation involving technology should have to show credit from MIT for a recent course in computing/electrical engineering.
"repair" may be too strong of a word, but "spent a month doing forensics, properly securing the machines, and filling out endless paperwork on why this happened plus risking never being promoted again because it's in my file" sounds far too plausible. The Bureacracy has been roused from slumber, and all must flee while it thrashes around before going back to sleep.
As others said, he got busted, they know who he is, and now is a good time to make an example of him. Not quite as dramatic as simply blowing up his flat with a missile fired from a UCAV, but they're probably saving that demo for when they find the location of the "V1aGr8" guys.
Actually, up until a few months ago, Apple could have built OS-X on a completely closed-source base by using AIX (which already ran on the PPC) or Solaris (probably portable). On the other hand, they did the right thing and used a base which included the GNU toolchain and X11 as an add-on, making it easier for OSS developers to transition over. In a way a pity, as I'd love to be able to order a Power5 system from IBM, and run OSX on it, but I digress.
Based on years of subjecting users to Linux desktops (we were a chemistry shop, and Linux desktops replaced Solaris desktops, as this gave us a uniform environment from developers through supercomputers), I would say the militantly libre-software only distributions got the most push-back. The politics didn't matter, because people spending 10-12 hrs/day at their terminals (grad students and post-docs) wanted to be able to listen to their CDs and MP3s, and wanted the fastest possible run-times for their programs. This meant compiling XMMS with MP3 support (rather than telling them to convert everything to OGG), providing something like real-player (get the news from the home country, etc), and Intel Fortran/C++, rather than GCC/G77, because some times 100% or greater improvements in runtimes matter. In practice this meant SuSE/RH9/Fedora over RHEL, which was ok as our cluster was RH based. Debian was (vocally) Right Out. I'd run it on my laptop for a while, but my tech-savvy user community (20% of my users) had encountered it and made their opinions clear.
Bully for Linspire. As long as they keep the core open, and provide the open developers tools (proper GNU toolchain and associated libraries), then they should feel free to include whatever is needed to make it work, and make people adopt it.
Nice to see someone else had this problem, and it's not just me reacting badly to my former Reps. Let's change their names, just in case they read slashdot, but I had "Jack", who looked like a slightly more dissapated Donald Sutherland from "Animal House" and made you feel greasy after talking to him, "Mark" who had been my DEC rep a month before, and used the sames spiel, but with "SGI" replacing "DEC" in his sentences (and who still didn't seem to understand what the product was", and "Joe", who was encouraging us to buy not only SGI's hardware, but their stock as well, as there was nowhere but Up for them to go. (this was in 1998, when it was obvious that for SGI, there was an alternate direction that had increasing possibilities).
This is where you can get nostalgic about SGI the hardware (the R10K PowerIndigo2 Solid Impact, for instance, or the 4 proc O200), but still wish to call SGI to the attention of the Dark Gods when you think of their reps.
It's not just the commodity workstations that did them in. Their high-end equipment was increasingly uncompetitive against IBM/HP/Sun. They did a lot of thrashing; they were going to compete on mid-range business systems (crushed by Sun/Linux from below and IBM/HP/Sun from above), then they were going to compete on supercomputers by buying Cray (sold the machine they didn't understand to Sun, which called it the E10000 Starfire, and sold billions, while SGI ended up selling Cray to Tera for a loss), then they hitched their star to Itaniums. There was also the issue of software quality control during the version 7 compiler development, which gained them a reputation for wonky compilers (hint: if you're selling to the HPC guys, rock-solid, DEC/IBM quality Fortran is a must), and the slipping performance advantage versus conventional PC. (The R5000 was equal, roughly, to a Pentium 233, when the PII/PIII were available for less than $2K, though you couldn't tell the SGI reps that if you waved actual simulation run times in their face)
So, in a way, gross mismanagement over a period of about a decade. The amazing thing is that it took so long to finally go bankrupt. Pity, as I remember my Indigo2 SolidImpact (with the CrystalEyes stereo adapter) rather fondly. On the other hand, I don't remember my days securing Irix nearly as fondly. Another contender who actually believed their PR, and lost sight of their market.
I can certainly come up with reasons why they won't suppress free energy:
(1) Because somehow when it's released, the controlling interests in it will look suspiciously like the current energy companies. This will be analogous to how your new phone/internet company looks suspiciously like your old phone company, but with a shiny new logo. NYSEG is still selling me electricity produce by burning gaseous hydrocarbons, and if they had access to free energy technology, they'd sell me electricity derived from that, probably at the old price + a little fillip on top to recover their stranded costs in gas and coal-fired plants.
(2) Because pulling oil out of the ground is expensive, refinining it is expensive, and shipping it is expensive. As you may have noticed, many companies today would like to have no employees and make all their money from outside investments and off-shoring. The people in charge won't lose a dime, and as for the average worker, who cares?
(3) Thirdly, petrochemicals are a great industrial feedstock. We'd still need them to make things ranging from plastic iPod cases to Velveeta processed cheese food. Nobody at Halliburton/Exxon-Mobil/Dow would even notice a hiccup in their revenue stream from free energy, while our government would tell the oil producing foreigners to go pound sand. This is known as a win/win scenario, as various isolationist nativist populations/political groups would finally get what they want; we have the upper hand, and the rest of you will do as we please.
Therefore, since the current president required the intervention of his father to patch up relationships with the House of Saud, we're worried about the continuing oil flows from various unstable satrapies, and the electorate gets angry and tends to stop reelecting the party in power when gas gets expensive, one can logically conclude that we don't have free energy systems hidden away. It's a pity. You'd like to believe that there is an omnipresent, omnipotent "They" who are keeping the future away from us, but in reality, there is only the lack of the future technology keeping the future technology away.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember Niven's "The Soft Weapon"? What do you do when the mine decides that you're not actually authorized to deactivate it, and tells its comrades about you?
In all seriousness, a networked minefield that could be given a simple, "go blow yourselves up all at once" command would certainly improve many parts of the world. Of course, even better would be a mobile smart mine that looks for other mines, and then blows up.
To be entirely honest, I don't remember fscking the JFS (G30 -> SP2), or XFS (PowerIndigo2 -> Origin2000, Linux) file systems anywhere nearly as much as I've had to EXT2/EXT3, and frankly, have been in much less danger of losing data on those than I have on an ext3 partition on an adaptec SCSI RAID controller about two years ago. Yes, the performance is nice, but in terms of where I've lost data, it's been on ext2/3, and not on JFS/XFS. I've run XFS on Linux as well, and not had any noticeable issues with it. Maybe this is luck, maybe the drive controller/scsi drives weren't as compatible as they should have been, maybe a terabyte filesystem was a bad idea circa 2003, maybe I shouldn't have cut in front of that Wiccan in undergrad, but I've had many fewer "Oh S*!" moments with the filesystems that came down from the big-iron OS's.
I'm sorry that I don't do enough vector web-graphics to make use of Inkscape more, because the posts from the Inkscape team are the some of the most open and honest of program development groups that reply here. Just really nice to see.
Actually, XFS (SGI), JFS (IBM), and ZFS (Sun) are very well proven in the field, on their respective native operating systems. Given the situations they're used in (financial sector, pharmaceutical research data, supercomputing), they're far more proven that EXT(anything). Now, whether the average Linux user knows how to install, tune, and use them is a different issue, but if I were worried about scalable, mission-critical, filesystems, those three would be on the top of my list. (and my personal history says that while XFS never gave me any trouble, JFS would be my first choice. Nobody ever let me have a budget large enough to buy a machine that would justify ZFS).
With IBM's know-how in the mix, EXT4 may be able to join the above three, but it would seem to be time better spent fixing XFS/JFS support in Linux first, rather than worrying about backwards compatibility with EXT2.
As a number-cruncher, may I politely say that most days, I really don't care. I do care that they provide good math libs (they do), or documentation that helps me optimize my code for their hardware (they do), and hardware that for some combination of price/reliability/speed, performs to my specs (they do). They also provide a good development environmnent that plays well with other compilers, and a good desktop environment that supports both native and legacy (X11) apps, which I can seamlessly link to the HPC side. For the previous generation of processors, there was IBM fortran (which made it easy to go from AIX -> OSX), and now there is Intel Fortran ( Linux -> OSX), both of which are extremely strong performers on their respective processors, and both of which make more difference to my actual runs than would the ability to recompile my kernel from scratch. Neither of those compilers are open-source either, yet we purchase them because their performance is high enough that it outweighs whatever political misgivings we may have.
As you say, the real HPC guys on the nitty-gritty end (people optimizing TCP stacks for high-performance network interfaces, for instance), will sign the NDAs, then those of us in the field will decide whether or not we can use their solution. Whether or not we can get the kernel source code is not going to matter to 98% of us. We ran Irix (closed), UNICOS (closed), AIX (closed), VMS (closed), and Linux (open), and will run OSX whether it's open or closed, as long as we get reliable simulations done in an acceptable amount of time on equipment we can stand to work with.
I'll give the Rocks guys a plug (and not just because they were great guys when I was setting my first clusters up), for the elegance, and portability, of their solutions. The configuring nodes through XML scripts, scalable authentication system, support for I386/x86-64/IA-64 simultaneously, auto-configuring drivers for Myrinet, correctly configured Sun Grid Engine with no end-user interaction to set it up, and the funky solutions such as the Display Wall, makes them a stand-out distribution.
On the other hand, there are places, such as Cornell's Theory Center, which have 'successfully' gone to windows clusters. I personally think it's the Wrong Thing, given the difficulty of porting to Windows from Unix, and doubt it's as easy to set up as Rocks, but they're making it work. More likely, this will be used in Windows-heavy environments for high-throughput computing, rather than high-performance.
That depends, if they did time in the military, they probably do. My brother and three friends (3 ex-army and 1 ex-navy) all seem to know it by heart, despite a rather wide spread of politics and job classification. It must just go with the job.
The real test is do they know the Motocycle Song.
Although curiously Ziebart http://www.ziebart.com/ is still in business, so maybe RJ just had a bad business plan? These companies didn't go away when Windows started including tools such as Defraggers (and started optimizing their filesystems so they didn't need defragging before the computer needed fragging instead), they just switched to other "value-added" propositions. Even if Windows becomes more secure, there is still going to be the User to deal with, and tools to clean up after the user will be popular instead.
Look, it's not *my* word, but Scientist Union Rules prevent me from using a shorter one in public.
What Adobe (apparently) thinks of that may be found at http://trace.wisc.edu:8080/mailarchive/eitaac-l/we b/eitaac.9901/msg00025.html/
From the article on the web-page:
"Adobe gives copyright permission to anyone to:
- Prepare files in which the file content conforms to the Portable Document Format.
- Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable Document Format.
- Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format and displays the results, prints the results, or otherwise interprets a file represented in the Portable Document Format.
- Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of operators and data structures, as well as the PDF sample code and PostScript language Function definitions in the written specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document Format for the above purposes."
Therefore.... without expansion of the original article, we really don't know what the issue is. It's possible that Microsoft has extended PDF in some incompatible manner, or that Adobe's more recent innovations, allowing PDF to be edited, aren't being respected, or that someone panicked about The Beast implementing it's own version, and making the original irrelevant.
Basically, we have a smallish company with a few dedicated niches on one side, and a convicted, predatory, behemoth on the other, except that the behemoth looks vulnerable to EU anti-trust hunters. Years ago Jeff Danziger http://www.danzigercartoons.com/, an editorial cartoonist, summed up the New IBM with a drawing of a man at a desk, the old IBM THINK logo in the trash, and a new "BUY" logo on the desk. If updated for 2006, and for a generic tech-company, the new logo would read "SUE".
Chemolithoautotrophs, probably. Microorganisms that are metabolising compounds from the rocks to get their energy, then everything bigger eats the next step smaller below them. Similar to deep-smoker vent communities.
Except for the flying cars, the future predicted in "Blade Runner" is correct; it's just not LA. It's Detroit, or possibly a 'burb of Philly.
Actually, for my field (Chemistry), what GCC -O3 does is irrelevant, except during the development phase of a program, or as a last resort for portability. We care about what the fastest native compiler we can find + optimized libraries does. The Cell will be no different; a few hand-optimized routines such as BLAS, FFTPack, etc, in libraries, then an auto-vectorizing Fortran-95 compiler on top. I will be interested in seeing how packages such as GAMESS or NWChem http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/docs/nwchem/nwchem.html/ behave once Fortran is available, and Cell shipped in something other than game consoles.
On the other hand, the GROMACS guys http://www.gromacs.org/, who write hand-optimized code on a per-processor basis, ought to be stoked. It already runs well using single-precision, so it looks to be tailor-made to a Cell-based setup.
If people with scientific and engineering mindsets just "left things alone", you'd be sitting in a cave wondering why rocks weren't edible.
t axol.htm/, which could be grown on vast yew ranches, is preferrentially synthesized via standard organic chemistry techniques. Our methods of finding new molecules may be from the Dark Ages, but our methods of synthesizing them are not.
Most likely, as the natural product needs to be modified before being an effective pharmaceutical, the compounds of interest will be identified. Then either the necessary gene sequence will be cloned into a workhorse organism, such as yeast or E. coli, or retrosynthetic techniques will be used to make the compound and derivatives thereof under abiotic conditions.
Translation: no company expecting to sell billions of dollars worth of product would rely on such a low-yield source such as mining coral reefs for drugs. Even Taxol( (R) Bristols-Meyer-Squibb) http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/taxol/
Coming from the deliberately-synthesized school of chemistry, I was surprised when I sat on a PhD committee recently, and asked the student what the sponge did with the chemical she was discussing. I got a blank stare from the student, and one of the committee members told me that nobody knows, and the natural-product researchers just pick an organism, puree it (or some part of it), make separations, then try them on anything they'd like to cure/killl, and see what works.
As much as I applaud my colleagues for getting the state to fund their diving expedition, it would be nice if some of that money went to trying to understand what role the compounds have in the original organism, then working outward from there to design new pharmaceuticals. It might give us to the tools to stop prospecting, and instead rationally design our molecular targets to fit the application.
Of course, if you read this week's New Yorker, you can see how much effort has gone into rationally designing a replacement for sugar in food, versus how much success on the other end.
Regrettably, Dijkstra beat me to quite a bit in the field, including the much-needed screed against GOTO.
You beat me to it. I was going to suggest that Perl's syntax is a good enough reason to lock Larry Wall up. Of course, since he was good enough to license it in a community friendly manner, is a brilliant programmer, and gives great addresses, I would settle for him being incarcerated on some Hawaiian beach. The golden handshake and , "No, Really, you've done enough. Don't add anything else to Perl".
Of course, using the above criteria, they'll be hunting the author of APL with dogs.
Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8s, probably. The State Department should be finalizing the procurement procedures for 2 or 3 of those any day now.
In all seriousness, unlike our 80s Moscow Embassy (which did have microphones embedded in the cement), a laptop phoning home is pretty easy to detect. Don't do anything serious on it, hook it up to the network, start typing while someone watches your packets. It's not like the Chinese have their new MagicNet(tm) which doesn't require wires, or emit electromagnetic radiation detectable by standard instruments.
OTOH, one could make the distinction between (for example) HP or Dell, which are built by Taiwainese companies, and Lenovo, which is Mainland Chinese, if you're really worried about embedded tracking devices, etc, but that's still a political, rather than a technical argument. Of course, someone at State could simply decide that auditing every 30th laptop for phoning home is too much work and risk, but even then they'd probaby only find a standard set of phishing tools and DOS zombie installs, rather than hostile foreign government spyware.
Any congresscritter proposing legislation involving technology should have to show credit from MIT for a recent course in computing/electrical engineering.
For those needing a clue: "...This actors career will self-destruct in 10 seconds".
"repair" may be too strong of a word, but "spent a month doing forensics, properly securing the machines, and filling out endless paperwork on why this happened plus risking never being promoted again because it's in my file" sounds far too plausible. The Bureacracy has been roused from slumber, and all must flee while it thrashes around before going back to sleep.
As others said, he got busted, they know who he is, and now is a good time to make an example of him. Not quite as dramatic as simply blowing up his flat with a missile fired from a UCAV, but they're probably saving that demo for when they find the location of the "V1aGr8" guys.
Actually, up until a few months ago, Apple could have built OS-X on a completely closed-source base by using AIX (which already ran on the PPC) or Solaris (probably portable). On the other hand, they did the right thing and used a base which included the GNU toolchain and X11 as an add-on, making it easier for OSS developers to transition over. In a way a pity, as I'd love to be able to order a Power5 system from IBM, and run OSX on it, but I digress.
Based on years of subjecting users to Linux desktops (we were a chemistry shop, and Linux desktops replaced Solaris desktops, as this gave us a uniform environment from developers through supercomputers), I would say the militantly libre-software only distributions got the most push-back. The politics didn't matter, because people spending 10-12 hrs/day at their terminals (grad students and post-docs) wanted to be able to listen to their CDs and MP3s, and wanted the fastest possible run-times for their programs. This meant compiling XMMS with MP3 support (rather than telling them to convert everything to OGG), providing something like real-player (get the news from the home country, etc), and Intel Fortran/C++, rather than GCC/G77, because some times 100% or greater improvements in runtimes matter. In practice this meant SuSE/RH9/Fedora over RHEL, which was ok as our cluster was RH based. Debian was (vocally) Right Out. I'd run it on my laptop for a while, but my tech-savvy user community (20% of my users) had encountered it and made their opinions clear.
Bully for Linspire. As long as they keep the core open, and provide the open developers tools (proper GNU toolchain and associated libraries), then they should feel free to include whatever is needed to make it work, and make people adopt it.
Nice to see someone else had this problem, and it's not just me reacting badly to my former Reps. Let's change their names, just in case they read slashdot, but I had "Jack", who looked like a slightly more dissapated Donald Sutherland from "Animal House" and made you feel greasy after talking to him, "Mark" who had been my DEC rep a month before, and used the sames spiel, but with "SGI" replacing "DEC" in his sentences (and who still didn't seem to understand what the product was", and "Joe", who was encouraging us to buy not only SGI's hardware, but their stock as well, as there was nowhere but Up for them to go. (this was in 1998, when it was obvious that for SGI, there was an alternate direction that had increasing possibilities).
This is where you can get nostalgic about SGI the hardware (the R10K PowerIndigo2 Solid Impact, for instance, or the 4 proc O200), but still wish to call SGI to the attention of the Dark Gods when you think of their reps.
It's not just the commodity workstations that did them in. Their high-end equipment was increasingly uncompetitive against IBM/HP/Sun. They did a lot of thrashing; they were going to compete on mid-range business systems (crushed by Sun/Linux from below and IBM/HP/Sun from above), then they were going to compete on supercomputers by buying Cray (sold the machine they didn't understand to Sun, which called it the E10000 Starfire, and sold billions, while SGI ended up selling Cray to Tera for a loss), then they hitched their star to Itaniums. There was also the issue of software quality control during the version 7 compiler development, which gained them a reputation for wonky compilers (hint: if you're selling to the HPC guys, rock-solid, DEC/IBM quality Fortran is a must), and the slipping performance advantage versus conventional PC. (The R5000 was equal, roughly, to a Pentium 233, when the PII/PIII were available for less than $2K, though you couldn't tell the SGI reps that if you waved actual simulation run times in their face)
So, in a way, gross mismanagement over a period of about a decade. The amazing thing is that it took so long to finally go bankrupt. Pity, as I remember my Indigo2 SolidImpact (with the CrystalEyes stereo adapter) rather fondly. On the other hand, I don't remember my days securing Irix nearly as fondly. Another contender who actually believed their PR, and lost sight of their market.
I can certainly come up with reasons why they won't suppress free energy:
(1) Because somehow when it's released, the controlling interests in it will look suspiciously like the current energy companies. This will be analogous to how your new phone/internet company looks suspiciously like your old phone company, but with a shiny new logo. NYSEG is still selling me electricity produce by burning gaseous hydrocarbons, and if they had access to free energy technology, they'd sell me electricity derived from that, probably at the old price + a little fillip on top to recover their stranded costs in gas and coal-fired plants.
(2) Because pulling oil out of the ground is expensive, refinining it is expensive, and shipping it is expensive. As you may have noticed, many companies today would like to have no employees and make all their money from outside investments and off-shoring. The people in charge won't lose a dime, and as for the average worker, who cares?
(3) Thirdly, petrochemicals are a great industrial feedstock. We'd still need them to make things ranging from plastic iPod cases to Velveeta processed cheese food. Nobody at Halliburton/Exxon-Mobil/Dow would even notice a hiccup in their revenue stream from free energy, while our government would tell the oil producing foreigners to go pound sand. This is known as a win/win scenario, as various isolationist nativist populations/political groups would finally get what they want; we have the upper hand, and the rest of you will do as we please.
Therefore, since the current president required the intervention of his father to patch up relationships with the House of Saud, we're worried about the continuing oil flows from various unstable satrapies, and the electorate gets angry and tends to stop reelecting the party in power when gas gets expensive, one can logically conclude that we don't have free energy systems hidden away. It's a pity. You'd like to believe that there is an omnipresent, omnipotent "They" who are keeping the future away from us, but in reality, there is only the lack of the future technology keeping the future technology away.
Obligatory Rolf Harris: "In the Wet"
... to Teach Them How to Swim!"
"But the Cows Don't Float, and I Can't Find a Boat, and It's Too Late