Now wait. Direct democracy is cool and something I have been advocating for several years (not that anybody listened:D). Most laws that are made take quite long anyway, and they aren't urgent, so taking a month longer doesn't hurt at all.
And it prevents the *numerous* cases where representatives don't even represent their people.
Of course I still don't like democracy, with the tyrannical majority, and I want to outlaw political advertising for that reason, but direct democracy is a big improvement over the status quo.
If people can't agree: easy, just like you had nobody to protect you anyway (which is often the case): take up your own arms, and let every citizen defend themselves. Maybe a democratic country could still run an army in addition, but it never hurts to defend your own family personally.
Reading the original/. post, yes, it's VERY intrusive.
Just because the state feels like it, you have to:
* pay $35 (IMHO not very cheap)
* obtain a $5000 bond, whatever that is
* go to one of several approved schools
Now seriously, what we're talking about is just visiting a web site and publishing a sale offer. Would you consider a license to go to the pawn store reasonable state intervention?
This is not about driving, or a pilot's license (which make sense for safety)! It's about minding your own business (selling something), which it seems people can't do without undergoing mandatory schooling (?)...
If you need revenue for the local government, how about
* reducing costs in the first place
* raising money through a couple of easy-to-understand taxes (income, VAT)
* not creating arbitary stupid (IMHO totalitarian) requirements, such as requiring ebayers to attend school?
BTW, of course this measure doesn't yet make ND equal to Hitler or Mussolini. But it introduces something totally unnecessary, controlling its citizens and what they may do on the internet. I think that's pretty harsh, as I expect to be able to do anything I want on the net, as long as I don't break any reasonable laws. YMMV, but that wouldn't give you the right to impose such a measure upon fellow citizens, even if you liked the idea.;)
By the way, the text talks about that it maybe doesn't apply to casual sellers. Now that sounds much better, but I still don't like the idea. If I sell stuff for someone else for money, there's still no reason at all to attend school. (yeah, the usual excuses, such as "protecting people" which this law obviously doesn't.)
Apparently it wasn't enough that Europe spawned several fascist states in the 20th century. The 21st belongs to the USA.
What's next? Requiring you to get an official license to help your neighbors? A license to cook your own food?
And talking about enforcement: they should really put wiretaps on every US household, intercept all traffic, and if anybody *gasp* sells anything on ebay without a license, shoot them. Optionally broadcast that on TV, so that everybody is warned.
Are you ironic now? It's hard to tell. To be honest, tyranny of the majority, as we have it today (in the US case with Bush) is pretty scary, and solitary confinement isn't pretty either (well, maybe better than getting f***ed by other prisoners).
Well, I agree that effective intervention that magically removed cheats from the world would be great, but I don't believe it exists, especially given the nature of state-based systems and bureaucracy.
It's interesting that we would have the economy go different ways (telling by your name), but in a short-term direction we'd even agree.
The problems are problems, yes (except the stock buyout if you control your stock).
In general I don't know of any real solution, though. In any case the price of memory is then something that we have to live with, and - honestly - even if it were 50% higher, it's quite affordable.
You end up with some industries with only "natural" profits, while investment-intensive oligopolies have higher profits, but that doesn't make me believe in (expensive) intervention. Assuming you have the ton of resources needed to build a fab, you could probably compete in that market. Also, increasingly more investment-heavy projects seem to be done by joint-ventures of big corps, in order to spread the risk. This could be done by any set of companies that depend on cheap memory (say, Dell, IBM, Apple + HP).
I guess it's the difference between a problem in reality, and one in practice, but that's just my heavily biased opinion;)
First of all, nobody is "trying to break up" anything. The state only decided to fine Samsung.
Secondly, why? The Reuters article isn't too insightful, but http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=198 3 says that the "Big 4" fixed prices. Great! If the big 4 in any market fixed prices (probably HIGH prices), then guess what I'd do? Buy memory from the competition! If there is no competition, build competition! After all, if the big 4 make a huge profit (because of inflated prices) you should make a decent profit (and cut deeply into the market) with lower prices.
Thirdly, the economy isn't regulated. It's distorted in many ways, but in the RAM market there's maybe no distortion except for tariffs. Anyway, government only fined Samsung *years* after they fixed prices. Now THAT made a difference in the world!
And most importantly an underage girl having relations with an adult is totally immoral and bad.
I don't know why, but it's ok if two 15year-olds or two 18-year-olds do dirty stuff, but when a 17year-old and a 19year-old start an affair, the world is going to end!
My ex-girlfriend was 19 (that was five years difference) and we were fine. The example above are two years difference, but unfortunately cross the magical 18-year frontier.
I don't get this. Everything (including sex) between consenting people should be ok, everything between nonconsenting ones clearly not. What's so hard to get about that?
Yes, we all hate ads on TV and everywhere else. But that's not the point. All that stuff has to be produced, and it has to feed people's families, so it costs money. Now who decides what channels you can receive, and how much money to pay to each channel?
If you don't want to force everybody to pay for a large set of channels that arguably suck you're left with a free-to-choose system, i.e. the channels are without government funding and provide their own income. That leaves you with ads and pay-TV.
So sure, I hate ads too, but for good content I'd be willing to pay, too. Of course for web content I'd pay much less than for a good movie channel without ads... I'm sure if you are willing to support the companies and families behind some good TV channel, you can find a pay-TV offer in the US.
Samsung sold lots of chips to Apple. If it was price-dumping, they lost lots of money.
Nobody else was willing to sell chips at that cut-throat price, so nobody else should care.
Lots of people bought an iPod for a good price. They are happy now.
If any company should in the future sell chips for another price, where's the problem? It's not that the sale by Samsung will forever result in Samsung having a monopoly or anything. Seriously, maybe they even LOST money...
It's much better if a child gets sued
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 1
and spends the next 30 years paying off debt (that'll teach them about justice and stuff!) than if they watch Superbowl and see a piece of the human body that babies drink from.
Y'know, it's all about what's right and wrong, and about who's boss... Well, cut the "right and wrong".
Oh, hanging when the disk is full wouldn't be that bad. The real problem is that once your disk (i.e. the log) is full, you'll never have a non-full hard disk again, because NILFS doesn't yet have a working garbage collector;)
I tried it in NetBSD 1.6 and it worked. *Before* then it had been broken for quite some time, but there's no reason why it shouldn't work. Ok, on the enterprise thing I agree.
Easy. While the concept of LFS and the original implementation are almost 15 years old, this isn't about a file system, it's about a technology that's being implemented on Linux, AND AS SUCH IT'S REVOLUTIONARY.
Never mind that they don't even have a garbage collector running, and when I ran LFS on NetBSD 1.6 it worked quite well, but hey, this is Slashdot;)
No. Forks can happen and are done with either license. But the GPL does have its problems with contributed code. There's the case of graphics drivers and other binary kernel modules, which are tolerated but illegal.
That said, there are cases where the GPL (or LGPL) make sense, but IMHO the kernel isn't one of them.
I don't know about other Smug Lisp Weenies, but to me point is not that Lisp has always been the best. In fact, older Lisps sucked a lot, with dynamic scoping, slow implementations, and subtle incompatibilities everywhere. For reasons like these I still refuse to learn Emacs Lisp, even though I like Scheme and Common Lisp (more the latter).
The point is that Lisp is a great, useful language, and its good features (talking of CL now) get picked up by all languages over time, so you might as well get the real thing.
Name one feature of another language that hasn't been present in Common Lisp since its inception in 1984. Feature, not library function.
BTW: ML started in the '80s, Smalltalk in the '70s, Lisp in the '60s, and the first two were first implemented on top of Lisp. That doesn't mean they're inferior, in fact ML is a great language, and Smalltalk one of the languages that show how Java *should* have been. But it shows that the viability of GC came from the Lisp culture.
Funny that the same people that decades ago argued that GC is too slow now argue that everybody should use Java, not C, because manual memory management is too error-prone. Ten years from now those weenies will say "look, restarts are so much cooler than exceptions", "multiple inheritance rocks", "multimethods are really convenient", and "why didn't they have macros in 200X?"
I'm not talking of something like Lisp, just C with more syntax for abstraction mechanisms, like real closures, maybe a type system that wouldn't get in the way with tuples and higher-order functions (or no type system).
Basically closures can be managed like objects, and the non-GCed C dialects use objects/structs routinely.
I've never had a big problem with freeing memory in C. Of course making closures more convenient will mean that there's more memory to manage. But something like unwind-protect in Lisp, or Region-Based memory management could make this really manageable, IMHO.
Of course for many problems, a language with GC like Lisp is more appropriate. You have to choose when to use it, and when to use the lower-level language. For stuff like file systems or databases or OS kernels, I think a more powerful language than C would result in more sanity, less duplicated features (that look different, because the abstraction level is too low) and more stability and performance.
You're thinking of the old Geode. The new ones, running at 600MHz to 1GHz (last I looked) are merely clocked-down Athlon CPUs, so they should run even better than a VIA C3 at the same clock, and that using just as little power.
I like Lisp and ML, really. But the issue of automatic memory management is (or should be) orthogonal to the choice of language. There could be better languages than C with manual memory management. In fact, IMHO the world could use just such a language, as "managed" languages aren't appropriate for everything.
Given good libraries, a mail daemon or web server isn't a problem in C. But while I used to like C, I'd prefer to use Java, or better - Lisp, today, because it's tedious to write all that support code in C that the others have built-in. A C with better syntax and abstraction facilities, and more extensive and non-braindead standard libraries could do a great job for me.
Who is "not giving back?" Feel free to download all of their source code before complaining. If you don't like it, don't use it, even though I'm sure you too benefited from some security fixes that originated with OpenBSD.
I don't know if GNU malloc uses mmap() or brk() for its allocation, but in both cases small memory chunk that the user allocates are taken from bigger, contiguous blocks of memory.
Maybe that's primitive, but it ensures that usually small memory requests are fast, and don't have to much space overhead, either.
If the memory de/allocation patterns are really bad, though, you get fragmentation with the mentioned problems. It's a tradeoff. Note that OpenBSD didn't choose its way for reducing heap usage (maybe they use even more memory, due to overheads), but for security reasons.
There would be one solution, and that's using different arenas, or memory regions for allocation. For instance every window might have its own allocation region, so when you close the window/document, the memory BLOCK is freed. No fragmentation, almost no overhead. I really wish Java apps, Cocoa apps, and other (Mozilla) would do this, as they seem to suffer from this fragmentation problem, only increasing their memory usage, even after closing all documents/windows etc.
Anyway, I love the new malloc, and kudos to the whole OBSD team!
Slashdot Mirror
Now that would be cool, if I could put a G4 or XScale in it.
But what the poster really meant is probably "all kinds of x86 CPUs".
Duh.
Now wait. Direct democracy is cool and something I have been advocating for several years (not that anybody listened :D). Most laws that are made take quite long anyway, and they aren't urgent, so taking a month longer doesn't hurt at all.
And it prevents the *numerous* cases where representatives don't even represent their people.
Of course I still don't like democracy, with the tyrannical majority, and I want to outlaw political advertising for that reason, but direct democracy is a big improvement over the status quo.
If people can't agree: easy, just like you had nobody to protect you anyway (which is often the case): take up your own arms, and let every citizen defend themselves. Maybe a democratic country could still run an army in addition, but it never hurts to defend your own family personally.
Reading the original /. post, yes, it's VERY intrusive.
;)
Just because the state feels like it, you have to:
* pay $35 (IMHO not very cheap)
* obtain a $5000 bond, whatever that is
* go to one of several approved schools
Now seriously, what we're talking about is just visiting a web site and publishing a sale offer. Would you consider a license to go to the pawn store reasonable state intervention?
This is not about driving, or a pilot's license (which make sense for safety)! It's about minding your own business (selling something), which it seems people can't do without undergoing mandatory schooling (?)...
If you need revenue for the local government, how about
* reducing costs in the first place
* raising money through a couple of easy-to-understand taxes (income, VAT)
* not creating arbitary stupid (IMHO totalitarian) requirements, such as requiring ebayers to attend school?
BTW, of course this measure doesn't yet make ND equal to Hitler or Mussolini. But it introduces something totally unnecessary, controlling its citizens and what they may do on the internet. I think that's pretty harsh, as I expect to be able to do anything I want on the net, as long as I don't break any reasonable laws. YMMV, but that wouldn't give you the right to impose such a measure upon fellow citizens, even if you liked the idea.
By the way, the text talks about that it maybe doesn't apply to casual sellers. Now that sounds much better, but I still don't like the idea. If I sell stuff for someone else for money, there's still no reason at all to attend school. (yeah, the usual excuses, such as "protecting people" which this law obviously doesn't.)
Apparently it wasn't enough that Europe spawned several fascist states in the 20th century. The 21st belongs to the USA.
What's next? Requiring you to get an official license to help your neighbors? A license to cook your own food?
And talking about enforcement: they should really put wiretaps on every US household, intercept all traffic, and if anybody *gasp* sells anything on ebay without a license, shoot them. Optionally broadcast that on TV, so that everybody is warned.
Are you ironic now? It's hard to tell. To be honest, tyranny of the majority, as we have it today (in the US case with Bush) is pretty scary, and solitary confinement isn't pretty either (well, maybe better than getting f***ed by other prisoners).
Ultimate intervention?? Aaaaaaaargh! ;)
Well, I agree that effective intervention that magically removed cheats from the world would be great, but I don't believe it exists, especially given the nature of state-based systems and bureaucracy.
It's interesting that we would have the economy go different ways (telling by your name), but in a short-term direction we'd even agree.
The problems are problems, yes (except the stock buyout if you control your stock).
;)
In general I don't know of any real solution, though. In any case the price of memory is then something that we have to live with, and - honestly - even if it were 50% higher, it's quite affordable.
You end up with some industries with only "natural" profits, while investment-intensive oligopolies have higher profits, but that doesn't make me believe in (expensive) intervention. Assuming you have the ton of resources needed to build a fab, you could probably compete in that market. Also, increasingly more investment-heavy projects seem to be done by joint-ventures of big corps, in order to spread the risk. This could be done by any set of companies that depend on cheap memory (say, Dell, IBM, Apple + HP).
I guess it's the difference between a problem in reality, and one in practice, but that's just my heavily biased opinion
First of all, nobody is "trying to break up" anything. The state only decided to fine Samsung.
8 3 says that the "Big 4" fixed prices. Great! If the big 4 in any market fixed prices (probably HIGH prices), then guess what I'd do? Buy memory from the competition! If there is no competition, build competition! After all, if the big 4 make a huge profit (because of inflated prices) you should make a decent profit (and cut deeply into the market) with lower prices.
Secondly, why? The Reuters article isn't too insightful, but http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=19
Thirdly, the economy isn't regulated. It's distorted in many ways, but in the RAM market there's maybe no distortion except for tariffs. Anyway, government only fined Samsung *years* after they fixed prices. Now THAT made a difference in the world!
And most importantly an underage girl having relations with an adult is totally immoral and bad.
I don't know why, but it's ok if two 15year-olds or two 18-year-olds do dirty stuff, but when a 17year-old and a 19year-old start an affair, the world is going to end!
My ex-girlfriend was 19 (that was five years difference) and we were fine. The example above are two years difference, but unfortunately cross the magical 18-year frontier.
I don't get this. Everything (including sex) between consenting people should be ok, everything between nonconsenting ones clearly not. What's so hard to get about that?
Yes, we all hate ads on TV and everywhere else. But that's not the point. All that stuff has to be produced, and it has to feed people's families, so it costs money. Now who decides what channels you can receive, and how much money to pay to each channel?
If you don't want to force everybody to pay for a large set of channels that arguably suck you're left with a free-to-choose system, i.e. the channels are without government funding and provide their own income. That leaves you with ads and pay-TV.
So sure, I hate ads too, but for good content I'd be willing to pay, too. Of course for web content I'd pay much less than for a good movie channel without ads... I'm sure if you are willing to support the companies and families behind some good TV channel, you can find a pay-TV offer in the US.
Samsung sold lots of chips to Apple. If it was price-dumping, they lost lots of money.
Nobody else was willing to sell chips at that cut-throat price, so nobody else should care.
Lots of people bought an iPod for a good price. They are happy now.
If any company should in the future sell chips for another price, where's the problem? It's not that the sale by Samsung will forever result in Samsung having a monopoly or anything. Seriously, maybe they even LOST money...
and spends the next 30 years paying off debt (that'll teach them about justice and stuff!) than if they watch Superbowl and see a piece of the human body that babies drink from.
Y'know, it's all about what's right and wrong, and about who's boss...
Well, cut the "right and wrong".
But where does Dell guarantee that it will even run Linux with 100% of the hardware working?
Maybe *that* is why they don't bundle Ubuntu or Fedora with it...?
I'd rather go with something like Sun's Ultra 20, which comes with Solaris pre-installed and is certified to run Solaris, Linux (RedHat), and Windows.
Oh, hanging when the disk is full wouldn't be that bad. The real problem is that once your disk (i.e. the log) is full, you'll never have a non-full hard disk again, because NILFS doesn't yet have a working garbage collector ;)
News that matters.
I tried it in NetBSD 1.6 and it worked. *Before* then it had been broken for quite some time, but there's no reason why it shouldn't work. Ok, on the enterprise thing I agree.
Easy. While the concept of LFS and the original implementation are almost 15 years old, this isn't about a file system, it's about a technology that's being implemented on Linux, AND AS SUCH IT'S REVOLUTIONARY.
;)
Never mind that they don't even have a garbage collector running, and when I ran LFS on NetBSD 1.6 it worked quite well, but hey, this is Slashdot
No. Forks can happen and are done with either license. But the GPL does have its problems with contributed code. There's the case of graphics drivers and other binary kernel modules, which are tolerated but illegal.
That said, there are cases where the GPL (or LGPL) make sense, but IMHO the kernel isn't one of them.
I don't know about other Smug Lisp Weenies, but to me point is not that Lisp has always been the best. In fact, older Lisps sucked a lot, with dynamic scoping, slow implementations, and subtle incompatibilities everywhere. For reasons like these I still refuse to learn Emacs Lisp, even though I like Scheme and Common Lisp (more the latter).
The point is that Lisp is a great, useful language, and its good features (talking of CL now) get picked up by all languages over time, so you might as well get the real thing.
Name one feature of another language that hasn't been present in Common Lisp since its inception in 1984. Feature, not library function.
BTW: ML started in the '80s, Smalltalk in the '70s, Lisp in the '60s, and the first two were first implemented on top of Lisp. That doesn't mean they're inferior, in fact ML is a great language, and Smalltalk one of the languages that show how Java *should* have been. But it shows that the viability of GC came from the Lisp culture.
Funny that the same people that decades ago argued that GC is too slow now argue that everybody should use Java, not C, because manual memory management is too error-prone. Ten years from now those weenies will say "look, restarts are so much cooler than exceptions", "multiple inheritance rocks", "multimethods are really convenient", and "why didn't they have macros in 200X?"
What's wrong with an easy association rule that equally applies to ALL binary operations, not just math + and *?
I'm not talking of something like Lisp, just C with more syntax for abstraction mechanisms, like real closures, maybe a type system that wouldn't get in the way with tuples and higher-order functions (or no type system).
Basically closures can be managed like objects, and the non-GCed C dialects use objects/structs routinely.
I've never had a big problem with freeing memory in C. Of course making closures more convenient will mean that there's more memory to manage. But something like unwind-protect in Lisp, or Region-Based memory management could make this really manageable, IMHO.
Of course for many problems, a language with GC like Lisp is more appropriate. You have to choose when to use it, and when to use the lower-level language. For stuff like file systems or databases or OS kernels, I think a more powerful language than C would result in more sanity, less duplicated features (that look different, because the abstraction level is too low) and more stability and performance.
You're thinking of the old Geode. The new ones, running at 600MHz to 1GHz (last I looked) are merely clocked-down Athlon CPUs, so they should run even better than a VIA C3 at the same clock, and that using just as little power.
Still, the thing is waay to expensive.
I like Lisp and ML, really. But the issue of automatic memory management is (or should be) orthogonal to the choice of language. There could be better languages than C with manual memory management. In fact, IMHO the world could use just such a language, as "managed" languages aren't appropriate for everything.
Given good libraries, a mail daemon or web server isn't a problem in C. But while I used to like C, I'd prefer to use Java, or better - Lisp, today, because it's tedious to write all that support code in C that the others have built-in. A C with better syntax and abstraction facilities, and more extensive and non-braindead standard libraries could do a great job for me.
Who is "not giving back?"
Feel free to download all of their source code before complaining.
If you don't like it, don't use it, even though I'm sure you too benefited from some security fixes that originated with OpenBSD.
I don't know if GNU malloc uses mmap() or brk() for its allocation, but in both cases small memory chunk that the user allocates are taken from bigger, contiguous blocks of memory.
Maybe that's primitive, but it ensures that usually small memory requests are fast, and don't have to much space overhead, either.
If the memory de/allocation patterns are really bad, though, you get fragmentation with the mentioned problems. It's a tradeoff. Note that OpenBSD didn't choose its way for reducing heap usage (maybe they use even more memory, due to overheads), but for security reasons.
There would be one solution, and that's using different arenas, or memory regions for allocation. For instance every window might have its own allocation region, so when you close the window/document, the memory BLOCK is freed. No fragmentation, almost no overhead. I really wish Java apps, Cocoa apps, and other (Mozilla) would do this, as they seem to suffer from this fragmentation problem, only increasing their memory usage, even after closing all documents/windows etc.
Anyway, I love the new malloc, and kudos to the whole OBSD team!
talking about the server, huh?