(over 90% of kids will suffer a computer accident before the age of 18), you should always keep your computers and kids securely locked in separate compartments.
He didn't use an example, he appealed to that example as reason for continuing in the same vein, which means it is exactly an appeal to tradition.
And no, I wasn't using it to mean "widely understood". Read it again, or ask for clarification instead of putting words in my mouth.
WTF? If someone steals a computer and puts a drive in another computer the windows/BIOS password won't do shit, encryption will.
He's talking about asymmetric keys vs. symmetric passwords, not passwords of the kind that a bios uses, which has more in common with cinema movie ratings than security.
No magic tricks at all, dependencies are the user's responsibility.
Not on the more reasonable distros we've all been using for years now. Slackware was my first real linux distro, over 13 years ago, and I still hold a lot of respect for it, but let's not pretend it's always right. Debian-like package management is certainly a feature, and something certainly lacking in slackware, even if slackware has its own features.
Given that Linux is yet to even standardise on a single unified sound output API, how can we expect anything more? Just to load and play a sound, you need a sound API, and codecs. For sound, you have alsa, OSS, and layers on top like NAS, ESD, pulse, SDL, JACK, whatever KDE went with that I forget, etc. Arguably, some or all of these may fail to meet requirements. For codecs, you have gstreamer, (probably) SDL, etc., and a nightmare of communicating to customers what extra libraries they'll need, even if one of these works.
Linux will get people bothering to provide native support when Linux people bother to provide decent APIs and docs, and unify around them.
You're the one posting snippy remarks. Your post suggested no knowledge of such things, so I pointed them out to you.
p.s.: if I wanted to get snippy, I would. Tell your kids what to do, not me.
You seem to mean that you love free speech, open access to information, etc. Unfortunately the internet USED to be those things, but now it's as much the opposite as it is that. Too many kids are growing up thinking the internet is whatever comes back in an search on MSN, or whatever their XBox tells them they can get "online" when they pay for it with XBox Live Credits.
Accuracy with financial calculations is extremely important.
So is basic estimating, which helps you to come up with and verify an accurate answer sooner. That, and standard optimisation techniques based on it, are all this seems to be suggesting.
I'm sure the professor isn't trying to claim a big innovation here. This is probably some rookie reporter out looking for a big story, and failing to realise that big stories take actual research, donkey work, and guts.
That may or may not be the case. However, most other products
don't involve nearly the same degree of vendor-lock.
Agreed. The average citizen has no idea how much they'll hate their current attitude to software in future, when they realise just how important software is to their lives.
Didn't Intel already implement this technology in their Pentium 2 FPUs? Didn't seem very desirable to me...
I assume this is a joke referring to pentium bugs, but actually, I think instruction-level implementations WOULD be (and is) the desirable place for this. Essentially we're just talking about hardware RNGs and fuzzy calculations. As I understand it, this is widely available already.
The problem with doing this CPU-wide is that, as others have pointed out, we DO need accuracy most of the time. Processors are all about executing algorithms. We need algorithms to be predictable. Some algorithms are lossy, yes, but the algorithm itself is predictable. The best example (I know of) is probably genetic algorithms, where all of the "lifeforms" are largely random and most can be WAY off the desired outcome, but the testing system MUST be accurate. So essentially what you need is a clearly lossless execution system, with only a few instructions using randomness. Which is what we have now, including hardware-assisted randomness in some cases. Aside from that, the only lossy testing I can see a use for is things like not checking the least significant bits of a real number when the most significant bits are clearly wrong. That's essentially a lossy test, but it's also just a well-known optimisation technique.
Yes, so I understood; it's much like copyright in that regard. I'm not saying that it's a secret that's become public knowledge, and shouldn't be recognised as a secret anymore. I'm saying that it's become a fundamental technology; a core commodity upon which our society depends, and therefore should not be allowed to belong to any organisation at this point. There must surely come a point when society's needs outweigh patent law. If the goal of patents and copyright is to reward invention, then that cannot seriously apply when the inventor has invented something so fundamental and ubiquitous that they'll be famous for all time whatever happens. Anyone with an ounce of sense could make a living on the back of that on books, talks, teaching, etc., without the assistance of continuing patent grants that hold back competition on a fundamental technology.
Actually I was speaking on a much less technical, and more human level. My point was that something that we all use and that has become a backbone of our society has essentially become public domain by nature of its own success.
At this point, I think it's ridiculous for any part of the x86 (or even AMD64) arch to be patentable. Almost every office on the planet has one --- you don't get much more public domain than that.
However, assuming they really can't get patent licenses and can't get around that by some legal loophole, what does that leave? The only thing I can think of is that patents don't apply to software, and that they may be able to achieve decent performance running an x86 emulator on a modified instruction set GPU.
It may have been a wonderous time, but it's also the time when Windows was starting to offer a stable platform that competed in some respects. Back in '94 or so... now THAT was a good time. A full 32-bit, fully multitasking OS, with server apps, programming tools, music players, virtual desktops, decent package management, good internet, tried and tested security, choice of window system and widgets (not just X and KDE or GNOME, but Openlook, MGR, etc.) all while Windows was still deciding whether to include a browser by default.
You waited for Ubuntu? Should've just switched to Debian straight away; it's been easily the best distro ever since apt-get was added, which was a LONG time ago now.
No, he's simply drawing conclusions based on MS's modus operandi so far. They've tried to control the desktop, the browser, tried to create their own login scheme for all web identity management, tried to control instant messaging, tried to supplant the standard POP/IMAP system with exchange's MAPI (or whatever), essentially wiped out borland's and others' compiler competition, supplanted java with a slower clone and hid the performance figures, recently tried to supplant flash with silverlight, recently tried to supplant PDF with their X(whatever) document format, strongarmed governments and played hardball with good people's careers to keep their proprietary, ugly, insane XML document formats into government instead of the sane and standardised OpenDocument, and much more besides.
You're not paranoid if the corporation is really being an ass.
Fair enough. The way you said it earlier, it sounded like you thought you could only have government intervention, or people dying by their own stupidity. Glad to see that was false impression:)
Slashdot Mirror
Every joke offends someone, sadly.
There, fixed that for you.
That would be a zombie president. I thought we just tried that.
He didn't use an example, he appealed to that example as reason for continuing in the same vein, which means it is exactly an appeal to tradition. And no, I wasn't using it to mean "widely understood". Read it again, or ask for clarification instead of putting words in my mouth.
You must have meant cylon.
He's talking about asymmetric keys vs. symmetric passwords, not passwords of the kind that a bios uses, which has more in common with cinema movie ratings than security.
Not on the more reasonable distros we've all been using for years now. Slackware was my first real linux distro, over 13 years ago, and I still hold a lot of respect for it, but let's not pretend it's always right. Debian-like package management is certainly a feature, and something certainly lacking in slackware, even if slackware has its own features.
Given that Linux is yet to even standardise on a single unified sound output API, how can we expect anything more? Just to load and play a sound, you need a sound API, and codecs. For sound, you have alsa, OSS, and layers on top like NAS, ESD, pulse, SDL, JACK, whatever KDE went with that I forget, etc. Arguably, some or all of these may fail to meet requirements. For codecs, you have gstreamer, (probably) SDL, etc., and a nightmare of communicating to customers what extra libraries they'll need, even if one of these works. Linux will get people bothering to provide native support when Linux people bother to provide decent APIs and docs, and unify around them.
You're the one posting snippy remarks. Your post suggested no knowledge of such things, so I pointed them out to you. p.s.: if I wanted to get snippy, I would. Tell your kids what to do, not me.
You seem to mean that you love free speech, open access to information, etc. Unfortunately the internet USED to be those things, but now it's as much the opposite as it is that. Too many kids are growing up thinking the internet is whatever comes back in an search on MSN, or whatever their XBox tells them they can get "online" when they pay for it with XBox Live Credits.
So is basic estimating, which helps you to come up with and verify an accurate answer sooner. That, and standard optimisation techniques based on it, are all this seems to be suggesting. I'm sure the professor isn't trying to claim a big innovation here. This is probably some rookie reporter out looking for a big story, and failing to realise that big stories take actual research, donkey work, and guts.
Agreed. The average citizen has no idea how much they'll hate their current attitude to software in future, when they realise just how important software is to their lives.
I assume this is a joke referring to pentium bugs, but actually, I think instruction-level implementations WOULD be (and is) the desirable place for this. Essentially we're just talking about hardware RNGs and fuzzy calculations. As I understand it, this is widely available already. The problem with doing this CPU-wide is that, as others have pointed out, we DO need accuracy most of the time. Processors are all about executing algorithms. We need algorithms to be predictable. Some algorithms are lossy, yes, but the algorithm itself is predictable. The best example (I know of) is probably genetic algorithms, where all of the "lifeforms" are largely random and most can be WAY off the desired outcome, but the testing system MUST be accurate. So essentially what you need is a clearly lossless execution system, with only a few instructions using randomness. Which is what we have now, including hardware-assisted randomness in some cases. Aside from that, the only lossy testing I can see a use for is things like not checking the least significant bits of a real number when the most significant bits are clearly wrong. That's essentially a lossy test, but it's also just a well-known optimisation technique.
Yes, so I understood; it's much like copyright in that regard. I'm not saying that it's a secret that's become public knowledge, and shouldn't be recognised as a secret anymore. I'm saying that it's become a fundamental technology; a core commodity upon which our society depends, and therefore should not be allowed to belong to any organisation at this point. There must surely come a point when society's needs outweigh patent law. If the goal of patents and copyright is to reward invention, then that cannot seriously apply when the inventor has invented something so fundamental and ubiquitous that they'll be famous for all time whatever happens. Anyone with an ounce of sense could make a living on the back of that on books, talks, teaching, etc., without the assistance of continuing patent grants that hold back competition on a fundamental technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition
No, it's not. Go learn the reason for patents and copyright existing in the first place, and you might understand a little better.
Actually I was speaking on a much less technical, and more human level. My point was that something that we all use and that has become a backbone of our society has essentially become public domain by nature of its own success.
Microsoft is far from the only corporation that collectively behaves as a sociopath. In fact, most of the corporations do.
Well said :)
At this point, I think it's ridiculous for any part of the x86 (or even AMD64) arch to be patentable. Almost every office on the planet has one --- you don't get much more public domain than that. However, assuming they really can't get patent licenses and can't get around that by some legal loophole, what does that leave? The only thing I can think of is that patents don't apply to software, and that they may be able to achieve decent performance running an x86 emulator on a modified instruction set GPU.
It may have been a wonderous time, but it's also the time when Windows was starting to offer a stable platform that competed in some respects. Back in '94 or so... now THAT was a good time. A full 32-bit, fully multitasking OS, with server apps, programming tools, music players, virtual desktops, decent package management, good internet, tried and tested security, choice of window system and widgets (not just X and KDE or GNOME, but Openlook, MGR, etc.) all while Windows was still deciding whether to include a browser by default.
You waited for Ubuntu? Should've just switched to Debian straight away; it's been easily the best distro ever since apt-get was added, which was a LONG time ago now.
Actually, the RFC1149 protocol has been deprecated in favor of RFC4376, the lunch protocol.
No, he's simply drawing conclusions based on MS's modus operandi so far. They've tried to control the desktop, the browser, tried to create their own login scheme for all web identity management, tried to control instant messaging, tried to supplant the standard POP/IMAP system with exchange's MAPI (or whatever), essentially wiped out borland's and others' compiler competition, supplanted java with a slower clone and hid the performance figures, recently tried to supplant flash with silverlight, recently tried to supplant PDF with their X(whatever) document format, strongarmed governments and played hardball with good people's careers to keep their proprietary, ugly, insane XML document formats into government instead of the sane and standardised OpenDocument, and much more besides. You're not paranoid if the corporation is really being an ass.
Fair enough. The way you said it earlier, it sounded like you thought you could only have government intervention, or people dying by their own stupidity. Glad to see that was false impression :)