This one was pretty pathetic. The first mention of the actual product's name that the story is about is in the 12th of 13 lines in the blurb. I read all the way to the end before I knew what the title or article was even about, and I still don't know what it all means. Of course, Zonk apparently knows plenty about this, as he put up two articles on the subject today. Maybe an update to the previous article or a new article that didn't show up on the front page was in order instead of a brand-new, totally incomprehensible one right there, up front.
Also, as to those people saying that "sku" == "product," you're wrong. SKU stands for stock keeping unit, and according to Wikipedia they are assigned at the merchant level. Use real words when you are writing journalism, if not solely for the sake of appearing to be fluent in the language you are being paid to write in.
I have been involved with the use of povray as part of a DNA visualization suite in a commercial context. That said, I agree that there is a very low probability of anyone who would buy a CPU based on its povray performance and nothing else.
I didn't miss the point. I merely corrected your unsupported assumption that prison is per se at odds with rehabilitation. There exists the possibility of a prison system that accomplishes rehabilitation either with or without vindicating the other rationales for the criminal justice system, and your wording assumes away that entire possibility.
You are an early adopter of a new CPU and are involved either in porting an OS or a compiler to it
You are debugging a compiler (even unintentionally; I had to learn PowerPC assembly language when I was porting Warzone 2100 to the Mac and came across a truly bizarre but, which turns out to be caused by a bug in gcc 4.0.1 as installed on Tiger)
(More importantly) You are debugging software to which you don't have the source code (either in researching a security vulnerability as noted by another commenter or, more generally, in tracking down the cause of an error or crash)
Long story short, assembly language is still relevant to programmers and still ought to be required learning for at least a few credit-hours toward a CS degree. It's just like learning how to conjugate a verb in a class on conversational Spanish: it's a skill that you will not often use consciously, but will always have available when you need it and will often subconsciously apply, and it's a skill that underlies everything you do. If you don't want to learn how to conjugate Spanish verbs, don't take a course in Spanish and find something else that better suits your needs; if you don't want to learn how to program in assembly language, get a degree in Information Systems or Basketry instead of in Computer Science. It's not like any other CS required classes have much application to installing Windows or writing a user interface to a database in PHP, anyhow.
The Declaration of Independence is also not a good place to hang one's hat in this debate. The lack of an exception for felons or even for slaves is due to two things: (a) it would break the flow of the prose; and (b) it was unnecessary because the meaning of the words used in 1776 did not include such people. This much is obvious when you look at the punishment for anyfelony at the time: death or forfeiture of property. (I'll cite Wikipedia for this only because I don't have the time to dig up the more authoritative sources that I personally learned this fact from.) Saying that the Declaration of Independence, which is one document in a legal system that contemporaneously punished all violent felons with death for their first offense, forbids the death penalty is a tad silly.
There are arguments against the death penalty that are perfectly logical (regardless of their validity). Those based on anything in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment, or the Old Testament tend not to be.
Correction: Attempts to rehab people in our existing prison system fail miserably. There are bugs in the system - you don't fix the system by throwing it out completely.
If there is an actual performance benefit to doing so, then a careful reading of my comments here shows that I'm not at all opposed to doing so. It's when people go out of their way to break a single-threaded concept into multiple threads and get a net loss of performance that I take issue with.
It's not per se bad to think of the children. It is, however, per se bad to justify something bad with an amorphous call to "think of the children." "My idea is good, and if you question it then you are against the children" is the type of argument that's bad. Logically sound arguments that happen to involve specific thoughts about children are just fine.
I agree. Provided that "rehabilitated" and "cannot be rehabilitated" ought to have very high standards set for showing each one, I tend to go with the following:
If you are not in prison, you should have every right that I have
If you are not rehabilitated, you should not be out of prison
If you cannot be rehabilitated, you should not remain alive
No purpose is served by a rehabilitated former prisoner being denied any rights, except that he is less likely to remain rehabilitated if he has decreased liberty because of what he used to be but no longer is.
There are certainly cases where the foreground task can properly make use of multiple threads. However, it takes a great deal of burying one's head in the sand to think that the foreground task is the only program doing anything related to the user experience on a desktop machine.
You are, of course, correct. The other thing that people need to keep in mind is that there is rarely only a single process running on a given machine. For applications where it makes sense, such as video rendering on a machine doing nothing else, multithreading can increase overall performance. For applications where it doesn't or where there are other things running on the same machine, you normally end up with worse overall performance by trying to get your naturally single-threaded program to run on multiple cores at once when the extra cores would be better dedicated to running things other than your program.
Multithreading is a tool. Just like more traditional tools, like the hammer, this one is useful for certain applications. But multithreading is not the only tool at your disposal - people need to stop looking at everything as if it were a nail.
While I agree that the duration of a patent has gotten out of hand and should either be specified per-patent or at least shortened in the case of most patents (algorithms and pharmaceuticals alike), I disagree with a couple of things you say. First off, y=mx+b is not an algorithm. It is merely an equation. But that doesn't really matter here. What matters is that algorithm and possibly even data structure patents should not be per se invalid. Rather, they should be subject to the same rules as any other patent. That is, to patent an algorithm, it must be novel, useful, and non-obvious. If the article summary is correct and this is just a regular doubly linked list, then not only is there prior art but it is obvious to anyone based on the pre-doubly-linked-list prior art, namely the single-linked list. There very well may be more to this patent than the submitter, editor, and commentators here on Slashdot care to read about, but the central point is that obvious things are not patentable.
Google occasionally cites Wikipedia URLs in its responses, but I agree that a dedicated link to Wikipedia (Google, if you are reading this, add some kind of syntax like 'wp: *' to get Wikipedia articles) would be nice.
Apparently I bought the insurance without knowing about it. I did declare the actual value of what I shipped, and provided receipts and invoices later when filing my claim. I also accepted the risk of shipping damage - not the risk of running over my package with a truck, which is beyond garden-variety negligence. You'll note that I'm not really bitching, either. I'm mostly warning people that FedEx runs packages over with their trucks, so that other people either insure their shipments or take other precautions. They sound the same but my intentions are good.:)
What I mean is that being run over by a truck is not within the realm of what a person buying FedEx insurance contemplates. When you ship something, you can assume a certain level of negligence is possible - such as dropping your package from a height of 4 feet or setting a package that leaks liquids on top of it. You don't normally think that FedEx will be so careless as to run your package over with a truck.
I use the word "intentional" because it wouldn't surprise me if the kind people at my local FedEx depot apply the same attitude toward package handling as they do toward customer service.
Re-reading my comment, I am fairly certain that I allowed for installing SP2 directly. What about the security updates since then? Let's even assume that you can slipstream the most recent security updates into the WinXP install process. You still need (1) another machine with (2) a CD burner and (3) Windows installed on it. I need none of these three things to do a direct install of the most up-to-date Debian system. Am I wrong?
I would agree with you, except that I don't think that the average consumer should be held to that level of sophistication. This is mostly a cheaper cost avoider issue, for me. Who can more efficiently discover the relevant information? Clearly, the answer here is FedEx.
The difference is that you can directly install a new, fully patched version of Apache. You can't directly install a fully patched version of Windows. Instead, you have to install what you have on CD, which will at best be the most recent service pack not including patches released since then but is more typically an older service pack or the original version of the OS, and then patch it while it is running. When I install, for instance, Debian's 'stable' distribution, I have the option of doing so using packages from the internet, which means that there is never a point at which my system is running an old or known-insecure version of any piece of software.
Or maybe you are just lucky. I don't ship that often, and FedEx has to date managed only once or twice to get a package through without undue delay or damage. As to the $100 they paid this time, I had never before that had any of their insurance honored. I wasn't about to pay for it again on the off chance that it'd work out for once. You can hardly hold the end result against my decision, obviously made without knowledge of the outcome. Besides, insurance is meant to cover damage due to normal mishandling, such as dropping a box by mistake, not the kind of (at least nearly) intentional damage that must have been involved in my case. Or maybe you have a theory of how my box got squashed that badly in the normal course of FedEx's business. (It was the original box and packing material that Newegg sent to me, by the way, so this isn't a question of quality of packaging.)
As to the form I filled out - FedEx stores vary wildly with how they do things and how knowledgeable their staffs are. I acknowledge that I could have taken additional steps to insure the package, but given my prior experience doing so seemed to be wasteful at best. At least Newegg treated me well throughout the process, helping me find the phone numbers to call to make a claim, e-mailing me the pictures of the damaged merchandise, and holding onto the goods for FedEx to inspect.
Slashdot Mirror
This one was pretty pathetic. The first mention of the actual product's name that the story is about is in the 12th of 13 lines in the blurb. I read all the way to the end before I knew what the title or article was even about, and I still don't know what it all means. Of course, Zonk apparently knows plenty about this, as he put up two articles on the subject today. Maybe an update to the previous article or a new article that didn't show up on the front page was in order instead of a brand-new, totally incomprehensible one right there, up front.
Also, as to those people saying that "sku" == "product," you're wrong. SKU stands for stock keeping unit, and according to Wikipedia they are assigned at the merchant level. Use real words when you are writing journalism, if not solely for the sake of appearing to be fluent in the language you are being paid to write in.
I have been involved with the use of povray as part of a DNA visualization suite in a commercial context. That said, I agree that there is a very low probability of anyone who would buy a CPU based on its povray performance and nothing else.
I didn't miss the point. I merely corrected your unsupported assumption that prison is per se at odds with rehabilitation. There exists the possibility of a prison system that accomplishes rehabilitation either with or without vindicating the other rationales for the criminal justice system, and your wording assumes away that entire possibility.
Two more:
Long story short, assembly language is still relevant to programmers and still ought to be required learning for at least a few credit-hours toward a CS degree. It's just like learning how to conjugate a verb in a class on conversational Spanish: it's a skill that you will not often use consciously, but will always have available when you need it and will often subconsciously apply, and it's a skill that underlies everything you do. If you don't want to learn how to conjugate Spanish verbs, don't take a course in Spanish and find something else that better suits your needs; if you don't want to learn how to program in assembly language, get a degree in Information Systems or Basketry instead of in Computer Science. It's not like any other CS required classes have much application to installing Windows or writing a user interface to a database in PHP, anyhow.
The Declaration of Independence is also not a good place to hang one's hat in this debate. The lack of an exception for felons or even for slaves is due to two things: (a) it would break the flow of the prose; and (b) it was unnecessary because the meaning of the words used in 1776 did not include such people. This much is obvious when you look at the punishment for anyfelony at the time: death or forfeiture of property. (I'll cite Wikipedia for this only because I don't have the time to dig up the more authoritative sources that I personally learned this fact from.) Saying that the Declaration of Independence, which is one document in a legal system that contemporaneously punished all violent felons with death for their first offense, forbids the death penalty is a tad silly.
There are arguments against the death penalty that are perfectly logical (regardless of their validity). Those based on anything in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment, or the Old Testament tend not to be.
Correction: Attempts to rehab people in our existing prison system fail miserably. There are bugs in the system - you don't fix the system by throwing it out completely.
If there is an actual performance benefit to doing so, then a careful reading of my comments here shows that I'm not at all opposed to doing so. It's when people go out of their way to break a single-threaded concept into multiple threads and get a net loss of performance that I take issue with.
You take all the fun out of over-simplification. :)
It's not per se bad to think of the children. It is, however, per se bad to justify something bad with an amorphous call to "think of the children." "My idea is good, and if you question it then you are against the children" is the type of argument that's bad. Logically sound arguments that happen to involve specific thoughts about children are just fine.
- If you are not in prison, you should have every right that I have
- If you are not rehabilitated, you should not be out of prison
- If you cannot be rehabilitated, you should not remain alive
No purpose is served by a rehabilitated former prisoner being denied any rights, except that he is less likely to remain rehabilitated if he has decreased liberty because of what he used to be but no longer is.There are certainly cases where the foreground task can properly make use of multiple threads. However, it takes a great deal of burying one's head in the sand to think that the foreground task is the only program doing anything related to the user experience on a desktop machine.
You are, of course, correct. The other thing that people need to keep in mind is that there is rarely only a single process running on a given machine. For applications where it makes sense, such as video rendering on a machine doing nothing else, multithreading can increase overall performance. For applications where it doesn't or where there are other things running on the same machine, you normally end up with worse overall performance by trying to get your naturally single-threaded program to run on multiple cores at once when the extra cores would be better dedicated to running things other than your program.
Multithreading is a tool. Just like more traditional tools, like the hammer, this one is useful for certain applications. But multithreading is not the only tool at your disposal - people need to stop looking at everything as if it were a nail.
But - 100 million years without sex. That's gotta suck... or NOT!
Presumably, it's not your original sense of humor that you rely on in these matters.
While I agree that the duration of a patent has gotten out of hand and should either be specified per-patent or at least shortened in the case of most patents (algorithms and pharmaceuticals alike), I disagree with a couple of things you say. First off, y=mx+b is not an algorithm. It is merely an equation. But that doesn't really matter here. What matters is that algorithm and possibly even data structure patents should not be per se invalid. Rather, they should be subject to the same rules as any other patent. That is, to patent an algorithm, it must be novel, useful, and non-obvious. If the article summary is correct and this is just a regular doubly linked list, then not only is there prior art but it is obvious to anyone based on the pre-doubly-linked-list prior art, namely the single-linked list. There very well may be more to this patent than the submitter, editor, and commentators here on Slashdot care to read about, but the central point is that obvious things are not patentable.
You have to love it when things get so slow around here that we post story blurbs that explicitly say they aren't news.
I don't find it all that amazing that people got the joke. ;)
Google occasionally cites Wikipedia URLs in its responses, but I agree that a dedicated link to Wikipedia (Google, if you are reading this, add some kind of syntax like 'wp: *' to get Wikipedia articles) would be nice.
Text anything to 46645. That's the only such service I use.
Apparently I bought the insurance without knowing about it. I did declare the actual value of what I shipped, and provided receipts and invoices later when filing my claim. I also accepted the risk of shipping damage - not the risk of running over my package with a truck, which is beyond garden-variety negligence. You'll note that I'm not really bitching, either. I'm mostly warning people that FedEx runs packages over with their trucks, so that other people either insure their shipments or take other precautions. They sound the same but my intentions are good. :)
It sounds like Google uses the SKB insurance policy. Smart move. :)
What I mean is that being run over by a truck is not within the realm of what a person buying FedEx insurance contemplates. When you ship something, you can assume a certain level of negligence is possible - such as dropping your package from a height of 4 feet or setting a package that leaks liquids on top of it. You don't normally think that FedEx will be so careless as to run your package over with a truck.
I use the word "intentional" because it wouldn't surprise me if the kind people at my local FedEx depot apply the same attitude toward package handling as they do toward customer service.
Re-reading my comment, I am fairly certain that I allowed for installing SP2 directly. What about the security updates since then? Let's even assume that you can slipstream the most recent security updates into the WinXP install process. You still need (1) another machine with (2) a CD burner and (3) Windows installed on it. I need none of these three things to do a direct install of the most up-to-date Debian system. Am I wrong?
I would agree with you, except that I don't think that the average consumer should be held to that level of sophistication. This is mostly a cheaper cost avoider issue, for me. Who can more efficiently discover the relevant information? Clearly, the answer here is FedEx.
The difference is that you can directly install a new, fully patched version of Apache. You can't directly install a fully patched version of Windows. Instead, you have to install what you have on CD, which will at best be the most recent service pack not including patches released since then but is more typically an older service pack or the original version of the OS, and then patch it while it is running. When I install, for instance, Debian's 'stable' distribution, I have the option of doing so using packages from the internet, which means that there is never a point at which my system is running an old or known-insecure version of any piece of software.
Or maybe you are just lucky. I don't ship that often, and FedEx has to date managed only once or twice to get a package through without undue delay or damage. As to the $100 they paid this time, I had never before that had any of their insurance honored. I wasn't about to pay for it again on the off chance that it'd work out for once. You can hardly hold the end result against my decision, obviously made without knowledge of the outcome. Besides, insurance is meant to cover damage due to normal mishandling, such as dropping a box by mistake, not the kind of (at least nearly) intentional damage that must have been involved in my case. Or maybe you have a theory of how my box got squashed that badly in the normal course of FedEx's business. (It was the original box and packing material that Newegg sent to me, by the way, so this isn't a question of quality of packaging.)
As to the form I filled out - FedEx stores vary wildly with how they do things and how knowledgeable their staffs are. I acknowledge that I could have taken additional steps to insure the package, but given my prior experience doing so seemed to be wasteful at best. At least Newegg treated me well throughout the process, helping me find the phone numbers to call to make a claim, e-mailing me the pictures of the damaged merchandise, and holding onto the goods for FedEx to inspect.