*sigh* Does the right to free speach then give me the right to walk into a crowded mall and shout "BOMB!"?
I doubt many people will agree that in that case total free speach should be allowed/be without concequences.
Suppose I had a habit of finding the biggest jock on the field and saying "You American Footballer's are wusses for wearing all that armour - play a proper sport like rugby and stop being a girl hiding behind that padding". Would I expect the police to protect me from that guy kicking 7 bells of $h*t out of me?
I've come to the conclusion that free speach is about the right to express opinions, as opposed to the right to say anything anywhere. It is also my responsibility to society to show some sensibilty and not antagonise my fellow man. To use the above example, I should be able to sit with my mates in a pub and express the opinion that american footballers are a bunch of wusses, if a jock overhears this then that's different to me seeking him out and saying to to his face. i.e. i would expect protection in that case.
That said though, the right to cause offense is more important than the right to not be offended.
bacteria + rotting biomass has long been able to produce energy. I can see this is new because it produces hydrogen as opposed to other gasses, but is a hydrogen economy that much better than a methane economy if it is based on biomass? Maybe in 50 years time?
I know i try and educate people that it is possible to make any website that works in all browsers - so therefore to do no buisness with one that doesn't make a website work with anything other than IE. Either that website designer/specifier is lazy, ignorant, or arrogant - one way or the other, not someone anyone should want to do buisness with.
Not that I'm saying it's your fault, (in this case) it just sounds like bad practice - like buisnesses who don't consider accesibility needs. After all the disabled are only 5% of the market share, so screw them if they can't use our product:-)
And i also got the impression that your boss preferred it if it was IE only - i.e. put in extra effort to exclude other browsers
I heard the same thing as well while working at nortel I got the impression they were saying this so people would believe it, so people would buy the equipment needed to light up that dark fibre (which Nortel did a very nice line in:-))
when someone is telling you need something (which you will need because all your competitors will buy it, so why not be ahead of the game) then you have to take it with a pinch of salt when they are also selling it:->
I think the point is that Censorship exists both in China and the US (and in just about every other country) but to a different degree. Despite what you say, I could not put _anything_ on my livejournal, the act of publishing means extra laws come into force such as liable checks. Similarly I am not free to publish (offer for sale) any item I wish, home-made pron being an easy example of something you'd need to take care about offering for sale. But I'd agree most of the time in western countries you're allowed to publish anything that does not depict/involve an illegal act or violate national security. And it is in this area that Western societies differ. On this subject it does surprise me that the US censors more legal acts than illegal (e.g. censoring a film for being sexually explicit, whilt giving a 13 rating to a film about mass murderers - a vital part f human life is censored, while a dispicable illegal act isn't). That's the US for you, better a gun than a shag.
FWIW here in the UK censorship is also very screwed up, what with people getting in trouble for taking photos of their babies in the bath! What's the line, censorship is telling a man he cannot have a steak because a baby cannot chew it?
I think I may misunderstand you, but I would argue that murder being wrong is an opinion. I can imagine a society where muder is a vital part of society. A popular example would be the Piggies in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the dead.
So disliking murder is as arbitrary as disliking spinach. But otherwise I think your point holds up that we have to be careful when we say something is wrong, what we mean by wrong.
I can't argue with any of that really. However some points:
Until Friday i worked for the company that did make graphics IP (PowerVR if you remember them from when they did PC graphics cards - videologic) and can answer that there were 2 main aspects. Firstly it was no secret that the performance advantage we had was that we were tile based rendering which although very difficult to make work in hardware give a massive performance advantage. So to release the drivers to most of that was no problem. However, because doing it is _so_ difficult (we were the only company ever to make it work) some of the none patented tricks we used to make that work would be discoverable from the code. i.e. yes some graphics stuff was very secret, as we were the only company that could/can do it. So to specificlly answer your question, 90% of the time no there is nothing much magic in there; however details about how you set up the pixel shaders for example, or the internal formats you use in your texture compression can tell your competitor how to reverse engineer your deisgn, that 10% of the time however is enough to make the managers nervous:-) The other issue is we partnered with other using bits of their IP too. (e.g. the LCD panel interface was a common one to buy in) Were we to accidently give their secrets away we'd be liable. many interefaces to hardware are at least covered by license agreements - try and get a copy of the PCI spec legally without paying for it! This is an issue shared with pure software too though. (I suppose most media players hit this one)
If I understand you correctly, you're saying you're happy with an open source driver that is low performance, and a binary driver (possibly windows only) that is high(er) performance. This would imply to me then that the high end servers (in the network card case) perform much better under Windows. Not a situation I'd like to encourage. I'd prefer a standardised binary interface to the kernel that although none ideal, gives a compromise most of the time.
The reason i used a network card example has nothing to do with the company i just moved to at all...
FWIW I'm just comming from the perspective that I believe there is a place for open source and closed source in all fields. I'm as happy to have a mobile phone running BSD or Symbian, they have different advantages, I'm as happy to use winamp as I am XMMS. It's VI vs Emacs if we're not careful though;-)
And while we're bashing people for not giving back to the open source community, consider google who apparantly run everything on Linux, but don't release the source code to their search engine:-> Ok I've just got modded flaimebait haven't I:-)
Ok I'm building a new network card with uber hardware protocol assist.
I've invested $30Mill on this thing. I release the source code. What do I get? Well some people might find bug fixes, but at $10 Mill per spin of the masks, I'm not going to get very rapid development cycles. The kid in the backroom that is good at re-compiling the kernel isn't going to be able to do the same thing for this chip as he can in the Kernel.
Meanwhile my competitor and all my partners now know every trick I have. and can take the best bits and I'm in trouble.
I agree closed source has some problems, but how can you call closed source "dated". Can you propose another way that silicon development could work? Consider what would happen to Intel if tomorrow they released ALL of their IP (all processors, all their network card IP, everything!) Would many people submit bug fixes to Pentium 4, or would they loose out as a buisness because AMD now knew all their secrets?
"why should the linux kernel team care about people who want to leverage the linux kernel without contributing their source code back"
Because most companies in this position make hardware, not software. Until the open source hardware movement takes off (and there's good reasons why it never will), they make their money from their hardware and doing anything that gets in the way of this is a bad thing.
It's not about not giving anything back (the company i used to work for released closed source drivers, and had closed source projects built on linux, but did submit bug fixes and features to the Kernel - nortel contributed a LOT to real time linux) it's about protecting your revenue stream. So things that weren't part of how they made money (the OS) they gave to the community; stuff that they made money from (the hardware architecture and services) they kept to themselves.
Perfectly allowed by the GPL, and as far as I can see a perfect case of community and buisness working together. But this requires binary drivers to be allowed and even encouraged. Just because someone doesn;t have exactly your values doesn't mean you shouldn't try and help him out.
But she does give something back to it. For a startoff their is mindshare - might not get you many geek points, but that fact that the average person on the street is starting ot hear of and use linux helps everyone, especially those who develop. Second if she chooses hardware that is supported under linux, then she is helping the case for more people supporing Linux hardware - the more money people make from selling compatable hardware, the more companies will put effort into drivers. Third, with any luck it's money that MS won't see, while not directly helping the linux cause, it's $200 less that MS can spend on SCO...
Async processors normally use less area (well the one I'm aware of did - all down to the clock tree) Multiple clock areas already exist (infact I'd say exist in all modern SOCs (certainly every one I've ever worked on)).
Certainly the last 3 chips I worked on were more power limited than area limited, and with modern processes is becomming ever more so - so another tool in the chest to trade area against power would be welcomed
Clock skew impacts your timing margin (If you've got 2 flip flops that in theory see the clock at the same instant, any uncertainty in the clock arriving will inpact your timing from one to the other). One concequence of this is you often have to have larger faster drivers on both your clock tree and your logic to work around this timing problem. Larger drivers = larger power.
Therefore if you've got a method to make your clocks arrive more accuratly then you've more timing margin between FFs and therfore can use smaller drivers.
Clock trees are also the major consumer of power in most designs, so anything that can reduce them is good.
Async removes the clock altogether so you save power there.
"if you de-orbited a satellite or two you might be able to make a hole in the system's coverage that would take a while for the operators to replace from spares"
Not really, they're in none geo-synchronous orbit, so it's only be a matter of minutes before another comes into replace them. Very convenient if you're trying to take out the entire system (the targets come to you); but not so good i you just want a hole.
Galileo is capable of selectively producing these holes if the controllers want to. If not, then the US has 2 choices: * put up with it * Shoot all the galileo system down (and effectively decalre war on Europe, Russia, China and Japan in a single move)
This is a good thing to me, because perhaps like MAD it makes war much less likley, because to do any attack at all is assured destruction for yourself.
They would attack if they had enough to gain by the attack, as anyone would.
Given that Galileo is a joint project between all of Europe, Russia, China and Japan, the US would have to be at war with quite a bit of the world to have enough to gain from the attack, but the possibility exists.
The question is, was a missle to hit US target suspected to be guided by the galileo system, would that be the provocation/excuse the pentagon needs to prove a point and yet get away with it. It has been said by Europe that an attack by the US on Galileo would be considered an act of war though...
I can only comment on the ones I know in this list, but: "Romeo and Juliet" I think a story about how the families got to be quite so at each other's throats has the potential for an interesting story.
"Star Wars" I did find the prequels interesting. I know this is almost flaimbait saying this on Slashdot, but I think what he was trying to do was very interesting, I hate a lot of the dialogue, but that's a separate issue.
"Star Trek" (TOS)" Again, this had potential, just because they screwed it up when they tried doesn't mean the concept is totally flawed.
"Battlestar Galactica" (TOS) Well that's the point of this discussion:-)
So I believe prequels have the chance to be interesting - see things like "prelude to foundation" for how prequels can be interesting in novels. If the thought that "if the big screen does it badly then it must all be rubbish" were true, then I'd never have read Azimov.
While you're at it, Dell didn't build this PC; it was built by XYZ motherboard manufacturer and ABC memory supplier. Oh and don't forget to mention Bob who was subcontracted to work at the canteen...
When Lockhead go out and build a space telescope they can take the credit for it. When Boeing builds a spaceplane off their own back then they can claim the credit and not mention all those who they paid to help build it - including subcontractors!
Thinking back to the miniseries, the schematic the guy in the space station had for the cylons were the centurions we knew from the 1978 series. Does this mean the new series will have to go back to men in suits to maintain that canon? Or will there be new CGI-tastic cylons that are supposedly created for more mundane tasks that humans origonally used them for? i.e. this show will be set before the cylons split off and created the centurions?
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh*
Does the right to free speach then give me the right to walk into a crowded mall and shout "BOMB!"?
I doubt many people will agree that in that case total free speach should be allowed/be without concequences.
Suppose I had a habit of finding the biggest jock on the field and saying "You American Footballer's are wusses for wearing all that armour - play a proper sport like rugby and stop being a girl hiding behind that padding". Would I expect the police to protect me from that guy kicking 7 bells of $h*t out of me?
I've come to the conclusion that free speach is about the right to express opinions, as opposed to the right to say anything anywhere. It is also my responsibility to society to show some sensibilty and not antagonise my fellow man.
To use the above example, I should be able to sit with my mates in a pub and express the opinion that american footballers are a bunch of wusses, if a jock overhears this then that's different to me seeking him out and saying to to his face. i.e. i would expect protection in that case.
That said though, the right to cause offense is more important than the right to not be offended.
see also:
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/5/23/3693
bacteria + rotting biomass has long been able to produce energy.
I can see this is new because it produces hydrogen as opposed to other gasses, but is a hydrogen economy that much better than a methane economy if it is based on biomass?
Maybe in 50 years time?
Ok I'll mod myself Troll now...
I know i try and educate people that it is possible to make any website that works in all browsers - so therefore to do no buisness with one that doesn't make a website work with anything other than IE. Either that website designer/specifier is lazy, ignorant, or arrogant - one way or the other, not someone anyone should want to do buisness with.
:-)
Not that I'm saying it's your fault, (in this case) it just sounds like bad practice - like buisnesses who don't consider accesibility needs.
After all the disabled are only 5% of the market share, so screw them if they can't use our product
And i also got the impression that your boss preferred it if it was IE only - i.e. put in extra effort to exclude other browsers
For my own interest, why does you boss what IE only? What's there to gain from this?
I heard the same thing as well while working at nortel :-))
:->
I got the impression they were saying this so people would believe it, so people would buy the equipment needed to light up that dark fibre (which Nortel did a very nice line in
when someone is telling you need something (which you will need because all your competitors will buy it, so why not be ahead of the game) then you have to take it with a pinch of salt when they are also selling it
I think the point is that Censorship exists both in China and the US (and in just about every other country) but to a different degree.
Despite what you say, I could not put _anything_ on my livejournal, the act of publishing means extra laws come into force such as liable checks. Similarly I am not free to publish (offer for sale) any item I wish, home-made pron being an easy example of something you'd need to take care about offering for sale.
But I'd agree most of the time in western countries you're allowed to publish anything that does not depict/involve an illegal act or violate national security. And it is in this area that Western societies differ.
On this subject it does surprise me that the US censors more legal acts than illegal (e.g. censoring a film for being sexually explicit, whilt giving a 13 rating to a film about mass murderers - a vital part f human life is censored, while a dispicable illegal act isn't). That's the US for you, better a gun than a shag.
FWIW here in the UK censorship is also very screwed up, what with people getting in trouble for taking photos of their babies in the bath!
What's the line, censorship is telling a man he cannot have a steak because a baby cannot chew it?
I think I may misunderstand you, but I would argue that murder being wrong is an opinion. I can imagine a society where muder is a vital part of society.
A popular example would be the Piggies in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the dead.
So disliking murder is as arbitrary as disliking spinach.
But otherwise I think your point holds up that we have to be careful when we say something is wrong, what we mean by wrong.
I can't argue with any of that really.
:-)
;-)
:-> :-)
However some points:
Until Friday i worked for the company that did make graphics IP (PowerVR if you remember them from when they did PC graphics cards - videologic) and can answer that there were 2 main aspects. Firstly it was no secret that the performance advantage we had was that we were tile based rendering which although very difficult to make work in hardware give a massive performance advantage. So to release the drivers to most of that was no problem. However, because doing it is _so_ difficult (we were the only company ever to make it work) some of the none patented tricks we used to make that work would be discoverable from the code. i.e. yes some graphics stuff was very secret, as we were the only company that could/can do it.
So to specificlly answer your question, 90% of the time no there is nothing much magic in there; however details about how you set up the pixel shaders for example, or the internal formats you use in your texture compression can tell your competitor how to reverse engineer your deisgn, that 10% of the time however is enough to make the managers nervous
The other issue is we partnered with other using bits of their IP too. (e.g. the LCD panel interface was a common one to buy in) Were we to accidently give their secrets away we'd be liable. many interefaces to hardware are at least covered by license agreements - try and get a copy of the PCI spec legally without paying for it! This is an issue shared with pure software too though. (I suppose most media players hit this one)
If I understand you correctly, you're saying you're happy with an open source driver that is low performance, and a binary driver (possibly windows only) that is high(er) performance. This would imply to me then that the high end servers (in the network card case) perform much better under Windows. Not a situation I'd like to encourage. I'd prefer a standardised binary interface to the kernel that although none ideal, gives a compromise most of the time.
The reason i used a network card example has nothing to do with the company i just moved to at all...
FWIW I'm just comming from the perspective that I believe there is a place for open source and closed source in all fields. I'm as happy to have a mobile phone running BSD or Symbian, they have different advantages, I'm as happy to use winamp as I am XMMS. It's VI vs Emacs if we're not careful though
And while we're bashing people for not giving back to the open source community, consider google who apparantly run everything on Linux, but don't release the source code to their search engine
Ok I've just got modded flaimebait haven't I
Ok I'm building a new network card with uber hardware protocol assist.
I've invested $30Mill on this thing. I release the source code. What do I get? Well some people might find bug fixes, but at $10 Mill per spin of the masks, I'm not going to get very rapid development cycles. The kid in the backroom that is good at re-compiling the kernel isn't going to be able to do the same thing for this chip as he can in the Kernel.
Meanwhile my competitor and all my partners now know every trick I have. and can take the best bits and I'm in trouble.
I agree closed source has some problems, but how can you call closed source "dated". Can you propose another way that silicon development could work? Consider what would happen to Intel if tomorrow they released ALL of their IP (all processors, all their network card IP, everything!) Would many people submit bug fixes to Pentium 4, or would they loose out as a buisness because AMD now knew all their secrets?
"why should the linux kernel team care about people who want to leverage the linux kernel without contributing their source code back"
Because most companies in this position make hardware, not software. Until the open source hardware movement takes off (and there's good reasons why it never will), they make their money from their hardware and doing anything that gets in the way of this is a bad thing.
It's not about not giving anything back (the company i used to work for released closed source drivers, and had closed source projects built on linux, but did submit bug fixes and features to the Kernel - nortel contributed a LOT to real time linux) it's about protecting your revenue stream. So things that weren't part of how they made money (the OS) they gave to the community; stuff that they made money from (the hardware architecture and services) they kept to themselves.
Perfectly allowed by the GPL, and as far as I can see a perfect case of community and buisness working together. But this requires binary drivers to be allowed and even encouraged.
Just because someone doesn;t have exactly your values doesn't mean you shouldn't try and help him out.
But she does give something back to it.
For a startoff their is mindshare - might not get you many geek points, but that fact that the average person on the street is starting ot hear of and use linux helps everyone, especially those who develop.
Second if she chooses hardware that is supported under linux, then she is helping the case for more people supporing Linux hardware - the more money people make from selling compatable hardware, the more companies will put effort into drivers.
Third, with any luck it's money that MS won't see, while not directly helping the linux cause, it's $200 less that MS can spend on SCO...
Async processors normally use less area (well the one I'm aware of did - all down to the clock tree)
Multiple clock areas already exist (infact I'd say exist in all modern SOCs (certainly every one I've ever worked on)).
Certainly the last 3 chips I worked on were more power limited than area limited, and with modern processes is becomming ever more so - so another tool in the chest to trade area against power would be welcomed
Clock skew impacts your timing margin (If you've got 2 flip flops that in theory see the clock at the same instant, any uncertainty in the clock arriving will inpact your timing from one to the other). One concequence of this is you often have to have larger faster drivers on both your clock tree and your logic to work around this timing problem.
Larger drivers = larger power.
Therefore if you've got a method to make your clocks arrive more accuratly then you've more timing margin between FFs and therfore can use smaller drivers.
Clock trees are also the major consumer of power in most designs, so anything that can reduce them is good.
Async removes the clock altogether so you save power there.
So yes both of them can be right.
it's not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-heating_can
The technlogy has been around since the 1900s and yet they still manage to get a patent...
Nerds like coffee?
I do anyway
"if you de-orbited a satellite or two you might be able to make a hole in the system's coverage that would take a while for the operators to replace from spares"
Not really, they're in none geo-synchronous orbit, so it's only be a matter of minutes before another comes into replace them. Very convenient if you're trying to take out the entire system (the targets come to you); but not so good i you just want a hole.
Galileo is capable of selectively producing these holes if the controllers want to. If not, then the US has 2 choices:
* put up with it
* Shoot all the galileo system down (and effectively decalre war on Europe, Russia, China and Japan in a single move)
This is a good thing to me, because perhaps like MAD it makes war much less likley, because to do any attack at all is assured destruction for yourself.
They would attack if they had enough to gain by the attack, as anyone would.
Given that Galileo is a joint project between all of Europe, Russia, China and Japan, the US would have to be at war with quite a bit of the world to have enough to gain from the attack, but the possibility exists.
The question is, was a missle to hit US target suspected to be guided by the galileo system, would that be the provocation/excuse the pentagon needs to prove a point and yet get away with it.
It has been said by Europe that an attack by the US on Galileo would be considered an act of war though...
"Did you just fall for the:
What's heavier, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers? "
Depends on if one of them is in orbit...
I can only comment on the ones I know in this list, but:
:-)
"Romeo and Juliet"
I think a story about how the families got to be quite so at each other's throats has the potential for an interesting story.
"Star Wars"
I did find the prequels interesting. I know this is almost flaimbait saying this on Slashdot, but I think what he was trying to do was very interesting, I hate a lot of the dialogue, but that's a separate issue.
"Star Trek" (TOS)"
Again, this had potential, just because they screwed it up when they tried doesn't mean the concept is totally flawed.
"Battlestar Galactica" (TOS)
Well that's the point of this discussion
So I believe prequels have the chance to be interesting - see things like "prelude to foundation" for how prequels can be interesting in novels.
If the thought that "if the big screen does it badly then it must all be rubbish" were true, then I'd never have read Azimov.
While you're at it, Dell didn't build this PC; it was built by XYZ motherboard manufacturer and ABC memory supplier. Oh and don't forget to mention Bob who was subcontracted to work at the canteen...
When Lockhead go out and build a space telescope they can take the credit for it. When Boeing builds a spaceplane off their own back then they can claim the credit and not mention all those who they paid to help build it - including subcontractors!
Space had been expanding whilst the photos are in transit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_light_horizon
I think the lost scripture of how god was made would be very interesting !-)
You asked who would buy it. Clearly then anyone who isn't you average slashdotter would then be a candidate to buy.
Last I heard there were still a few of them around.
Thinking back to the miniseries, the schematic the guy in the space station had for the cylons were the centurions we knew from the 1978 series.
Does this mean the new series will have to go back to men in suits to maintain that canon? Or will there be new CGI-tastic cylons that are supposedly created for more mundane tasks that humans origonally used them for?
i.e. this show will be set before the cylons split off and created the centurions?
Give me one story worth reading that cannot have a prequel made.
Interesting situations always have untold backstory.