Great set of quality subjects on offer, but I'm wondering how they intend to sustain it in the long term; I'm guessing the current funders see it as a public-good project. It's a lot cheaper than offering class-room time, but there is still the hosting costs, the staff costs, and the time that the lecturers and grad students are putting into content and forum feedback. I hope they have a sustainable model, because it looks good so far.
imagine the old sequence of updates, except randomly alternated between the left and right hand of two columns, and a faint line with dots down the middle so your eyes hopefully know which way to jump
The problem is that a company is not "people trying to do good things". A company can change its personality at the whim of the directors. Or even change its identity when it is bought out. The Twitter commitment says a lot about the intentions of the current employers, and it is a great gesture, but a company can't be trusted with that sort of power in the long term.
There is a non-relativistic version of the Schrödinger equation. Some theories attempt to explain rogue waves in the open sea using these non-linear equations as a model, because the distribution of wave heights that would result from the linear model substantially underpredicts the occurrence and size of rogue waves.
Yes, I'd agree with that too. I have some older machines where the blob already does not work because it has not been maintained by Nvidia. Yes, those machines are ready for retirement, but I'll retire them when I'm ready, not when Nvidia decides they are obsolete.
The comments "if only you don't care about performance..." came from the anonymous submitter of the slashdot summary, not from the original article.
The original article is talking about how the nouveau driver is becoming part of the stable kernel, and benchmarks it against the proprietary Nvidia driver. The benchmarks show that for some applications the nouveau driver has quite acceptable performance, and for others it is significantly slower.
Becoming stable is not a claim that it is finished, just that the ABI is stable. Those people who don't care about licences are going to continue to use the proprietary driver for the foreseeable future; the announcement is primarily relevant to those of us who do care about licences and appreciate the effort and intelligence that has gone into the nouveau driver.
If you are going to make a decision based on the number of public exploits, then you probably should choose the most proprietary system you can find, where the bug report database is hidden from view.
Good luck with your security through obscurity, you'll need it.
The radeon driver for the ATI/AMD cards has improved dramatically, the graphics cards have published programming specifications, and AMD actively support the driver. It supports 3D acceleration, and is a viable alternative to the proprietary catalyst drivers in many contexts.
In contrast, to have 3D acceleration on an Nvidia card, you are often forced to install a non-free driver, and Nvidia may or may not drop support for your card as you move to newer Linux kernels. The nouveau project, while making great advances under difficult circumstances, have to reverse engineer the programming interface to the card, and do not yet have sufficient 3D support for many applications. I would hope that one day Nvidia will give them more support.
Note that this is not a comment on the relative performance merits of graphics cards from the two different manufacturers. But if you want to run 3D graphics intensive applications, and also have the benefits of a libre software environment, then it is hard to justify using an Nvidia card at present.
Ain't gonna happen. They won't introduce a UTC internal time. And as we move to UEFI based machines, we will all be forced to use at least indirectly use local time (though UEFI does keep track of the timezone and daylight savings mode). So if there is a bug in the UEFI timezone code, good luck to you...
that might just say more about the type of English used in Engineering documents than it does about the ease of parsing natural language...
Anyway, parsing natural language is not hard in the sense of computational complexity. It is hard in the sense that natural language is imperfectly modelled, requires a lot of context, varies between speakers, and has enough complexity to often seem irregular. Even humans can misunderstand natural language, despite being particularly good at language.
Lenovo is not a person. They should get only as much liberty as our social consensus allows them. Only Straw Man is claiming that Lenovo should be forced to offer every possible choice.
You seem to miss that it is not Lenovo being critiqued here, it is the system of licensing that has been put in place by Microsoft. We shouldn't be forced to pay for a software licence just because we want to buy a piece of hardware.
Shouldn't a consumer as principled as that not buy from a vendor that sells MS products at all?
Wouldn't leave too many vendors, would it! Are you suggesting Apple is a better choice! The principle is not to attack the vendor (or even Microsoft), it is that the consumer should have a choice, and sufficient information to make that choice wisely.
It's called a volume discount
Funny, in most cases vendors are more than happy to quote how much of a volume discount you are getting. Why all the secrecy? Could it be that knowing the true value of the product might actually have some negative PR effect!
You've missed the point - the issue is not the cost to the consumer. It is that there are consumers that do not wish to subsidize Microsoft, no matter whether the money is coming from their own pocket or from some parasitic software company. Do you think after all his time in court that the French laptop buyer actually made a profit on this whole affair? The whole point is for consumers to fight back against the abuse of monopoly positions.
And you notice that Lenovo does not reveal to the court the actual cost of the licence? They might well have trouble explaining the difference between this cost ("peanuts") and the amount that is being charged for separate licences.
It was Daniel Gajdusek and Michael Alpers that showed that Kuru could be transmitted by brain material. Margaret Mead was not in this part of Papua New Guinea, and Kuru is not the same as CJD (although both are prion diseases with similar effects).
Slashdot Mirror
You may like to read:
http://slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/186252/ask-slashdot-my-company-wants-me-to-astroturf-should-i
Surprise, surprise, yet another anti-GPL study from Black Duck software.
so I guess we can't expect to shed much light on the matter? :-)
Great set of quality subjects on offer, but I'm wondering how they intend to sustain it in the long term; I'm guessing the current funders see it as a public-good project. It's a lot cheaper than offering class-room time, but there is still the hosting costs, the staff costs, and the time that the lecturers and grad students are putting into content and forum feedback. I hope they have a sustainable model, because it looks good so far.
imagine the old sequence of updates, except randomly alternated between the left and right hand of two columns, and a faint line with dots down the middle so your eyes hopefully know which way to jump
The problem is that a company is not "people trying to do good things". A company can change its personality at the whim of the directors. Or even change its identity when it is bought out. The Twitter commitment says a lot about the intentions of the current employers, and it is a great gesture, but a company can't be trusted with that sort of power in the long term.
and a thousand patents already touching on the same idea...
There is a non-relativistic version of the Schrödinger equation. Some theories attempt to explain rogue waves in the open sea using these non-linear equations as a model, because the distribution of wave heights that would result from the linear model substantially underpredicts the occurrence and size of rogue waves.
Yes, I'd agree with that too. I have some older machines where the blob already does not work because it has not been maintained by Nvidia. Yes, those machines are ready for retirement, but I'll retire them when I'm ready, not when Nvidia decides they are obsolete.
The comments "if only you don't care about performance..." came from the anonymous submitter of the slashdot summary, not from the original article.
The original article is talking about how the nouveau driver is becoming part of the stable kernel, and benchmarks it against the proprietary Nvidia driver. The benchmarks show that for some applications the nouveau driver has quite acceptable performance, and for others it is significantly slower.
Becoming stable is not a claim that it is finished, just that the ABI is stable. Those people who don't care about licences are going to continue to use the proprietary driver for the foreseeable future; the announcement is primarily relevant to those of us who do care about licences and appreciate the effort and intelligence that has gone into the nouveau driver.
I daresay you haven't had much practice.... Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
I think you meant like comparing apples and lemons.
day of the triffids
nobody was tricked into buying an iPod or iPhone
But on the other hand, the iPad...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-28/apple-offers-ipad-refunds/3917440
Which is why we fund the ACCC, because we aren't complete putzes.
If you are going to make a decision based on the number of public exploits, then you probably should choose the most proprietary system you can find, where the bug report database is hidden from view.
Good luck with your security through obscurity, you'll need it.
not to mention the potential compression of the text file...
Your impression is five years out of date.
The radeon driver for the ATI/AMD cards has improved dramatically, the graphics cards have published programming specifications, and AMD actively support the driver. It supports 3D acceleration, and is a viable alternative to the proprietary catalyst drivers in many contexts.
In contrast, to have 3D acceleration on an Nvidia card, you are often forced to install a non-free driver, and Nvidia may or may not drop support for your card as you move to newer Linux kernels. The nouveau project, while making great advances under difficult circumstances, have to reverse engineer the programming interface to the card, and do not yet have sufficient 3D support for many applications. I would hope that one day Nvidia will give them more support.
Note that this is not a comment on the relative performance merits of graphics cards from the two different manufacturers. But if you want to run 3D graphics intensive applications, and also have the benefits of a libre software environment, then it is hard to justify using an Nvidia card at present.
Ain't gonna happen. They won't introduce a UTC internal time. And as we move to UEFI based machines, we will all be forced to use at least indirectly use local time (though UEFI does keep track of the timezone and daylight savings mode). So if there is a bug in the UEFI timezone code, good luck to you...
that might just say more about the type of English used in Engineering documents than it does about the ease of parsing natural language...
Anyway, parsing natural language is not hard in the sense of computational complexity. It is hard in the sense that natural language is imperfectly modelled, requires a lot of context, varies between speakers, and has enough complexity to often seem irregular. Even humans can misunderstand natural language, despite being particularly good at language.
I think you might be getting Seventh Day Adventists mixed up with Jehovah's Witnesses?
Lenovo is not a person. They should get only as much liberty as our social consensus allows them. Only Straw Man is claiming that Lenovo should be forced to offer every possible choice.
You seem to miss that it is not Lenovo being critiqued here, it is the system of licensing that has been put in place by Microsoft. We shouldn't be forced to pay for a software licence just because we want to buy a piece of hardware.
Shouldn't a consumer as principled as that not buy from a vendor that sells MS products at all?
Wouldn't leave too many vendors, would it! Are you suggesting Apple is a better choice! The principle is not to attack the vendor (or even Microsoft), it is that the consumer should have a choice, and sufficient information to make that choice wisely.
It's called a volume discount
Funny, in most cases vendors are more than happy to quote how much of a volume discount you are getting. Why all the secrecy? Could it be that knowing the true value of the product might actually have some negative PR effect!
You've missed the point - the issue is not the cost to the consumer. It is that there are consumers that do not wish to subsidize Microsoft, no matter whether the money is coming from their own pocket or from some parasitic software company. Do you think after all his time in court that the French laptop buyer actually made a profit on this whole affair? The whole point is for consumers to fight back against the abuse of monopoly positions.
And you notice that Lenovo does not reveal to the court the actual cost of the licence? They might well have trouble explaining the difference between this cost ("peanuts") and the amount that is being charged for separate licences.
It was Daniel Gajdusek and Michael Alpers that showed that Kuru could be transmitted by brain material. Margaret Mead was not in this part of Papua New Guinea, and Kuru is not the same as CJD (although both are prion diseases with similar effects).