Considering A3, one could argue that the comment in A1 is not entirely correct: going north from the north pole is undefined and ambiguous, but the limit of A3 is one possible way to define it.
MS could completely destroy Blu-Ray in one blow: announce that Windows will not support Blu-Ray security, and any content from a Blu-Ray disk can be copied to the hard drive, while HDDVD will be fully supported in all its DRM goodness.
Why would you need a ship with airlift (i.e. wing) if there was no gravity? Just push off of the ground... Now coming back is where some preparation is required.
We're becoming specialists. The old geezer knows how tech works and the kids don't? Ask an even older geezer who knows how several different areas of tech work. Do you know how to make gunpowder or rubber, how to build an elecric generator, and how the telephone works too? What about how to saddle a horse? Every next generation is more specialized than the previous one, and for every previous generation the things they don't know "are just there" and things they do know are "basic education".
Imagine a thought experiment: a modern man, a well educated one, is transported back in time, where the local population believes him to be a god, so he has endless supply of labor, but he lost the entire technological base and must rebuild it from scratch.
How many different people would it take to reconstruct the techology of the age they were taking from? I would not be surprised if one man from 1500's knew enough to rebuild his entire technology from ground up. In 1800 there were scientists who worked in a good many of the available areas of science, may be half a dozen of those could reconstruct the entire scientific and technological knowledge of their civilization. How many we would need now? How many of the best-educated modern humans would need to come together to build a car or an airplane using only what's in their heads, no books, no libraries, nobody else to ask, only them and endless unskilled labor?
Let's see now... a smart kid who was first at everything at the local high school without ever doing any work comes to a University full of even smarter kids. Suddenly he needs to *work* to keep up. Oh my god! Work! No! That's hard, man! Wah-wah-wah-wah! And nobody will chew the knowledge for him and spoon-feed him the bits, how dare they. Instead he has to work to understand the problem before he can even start solving the problem. Hey, that's not right! All problems must be presented in a clear and unambiguous way so it's easy to relate them to the page of the textbook where the answers are, because that's how the engineering problems will be at work, after he graduates. Or will they? Oh no, what a terrible thought! I bet over there on the other side one can make tons of money without ever lifting a finger, all those rich investment bankers can't possibly be working hard, that's for these freaks over here at engineering, normal people don't do that. That's it, he's off to where money grows on trees! And guess what, the engineers across the country, and anyone who has to use their work, are better off for it too.
They have the source code, you got back, you recompile, you get at 64-bit binary.
Try doing that to openoffice. Every distro I've seen so far has only 32-bit office, and that alone drags in a huge train of 32-bit libraries, so you end up with almost a dual install of Gnome. Then there is 64-bit Firefox or Mozilla but it won't load 32-bit shared libraries, so if you want flash or acroread or Real plugins you need 32-bit Mozilla. By the time you're done half the libraries on your system are dual-arch.
The first point is entirely on the money. At least 10 years too late, but totally accurate.
The second is just too overreaching: would you like a computer which can run 30 programs from a master list and nothing else? There are many cases where "enumerating goodness" is exactly the right thing to do, and - guess what - that's exactly how such cases are done, for example, sudo.
The rest of the article is basically boils down to this: if you don't want your system to be hacked, don't make it hackable. Sure thing. Don't debug your programs, just write them correctly. Don't install airbags into cars, just avoid crashes. Stupid us, doing all the precautions and safety things for years. Just don't make mistakes, see how easy it is?
No, the Mayans were not avoiding anything, they were indeed predicting. But what they were predicting was the end of calendars, since calendar publishers will no longer be allowed to print years. You can see how such little details would get lost in translation, so "end of timekeeping" became "end of time" which was interpreted as "end of world".
As was already pointed out, innovation per person is not a very useful measure, it takes only one invented cell phone to start making cell phones for everyone.
Furthermore, I would argue that Huebner's statistics are wrong: he counts innovations made by a tiny fraction of the world's population, but divides it by the entire population. The innovations he counts can only take place in the most advanced countries, because he counts innovations which move humanity forward. You have to be at the forefront of humanity's achievments to move it forward. Right now there are almost a billion chineese and indian farmers who may be very innovative in their own way, figuring out how to feed their families with the primitive tools they have, but it does not count because their innovations were already made, probably centuries ago. I doubt Huebner's innovation count includes some farmer's clever way to improve his oxen-pulled plow, but that's the kind of innovation the absolute majority of the world population does every day.
The population which has at least a chance of making an innovation which Huebner would count does not grow fast, if at all. You have to exclude most "3rd world" countried (not because their people are not innovative, but because Huebner's study does not count their innovations). That leaves you with population which is hardly growing at all, fertility rates in most "1st world" countries are around or below 2.
So Huebner's methodology excludes the majority of world's population when he counts the numerator, but includes everyone in denominator. If this ratio was not shrinking I'd say that bad statistics was compounded by bad arithmetics.
And proprietary software imposes on developing nations a rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their money back to the wealthiest nation in the world. Only this disgorging goes only one way. Incidentally, that would be the way towards where Sun is.
I remember when I was a kid growing up in the Soviet Union, we had yearly tuberculosis tests. Some years they were given not with a syringe but with a device about the size of hand-held bycicle pump: the nurse would "pump" it once, i.e. pull the top half and press it back into the bottom half, this armed some spring which was enough for several shots. The device was placed on the skin but it had no needle, it made a hiss and fired a jet of liquid into the skin. Did not penetrate very far, just under the skin. When I first saw it, it was way cool. But that was about 25 years ago.
I never understood why prevending pop-ups is such a big deal. After all, to create a window, the application must call some function of the window manager or X server or whatever environment it's written for. Browser writers could provide an option which says "if enabled, never, under any circumstances, issue the new window call". The option cannot be disabled from a script. After all, you cannot abuse functionality if it's not there. What more would you need to deal with popups?
I foresee that one of my cars will be driven very little but will suddenly start to consume tons of gas. The other car will become super-efficient and never see a gas station in its life.
I also foresee a brisk business in fuel transfer pumps. Better run invest in stocks of companies which make them.
Now they don't. But in the boom time in the valley stock options were like second currency. Even some small coffehouses and Chineese restaurants took options or shares from startups in liew of cash payments. Some companies which provided services to said startups actually insisited on equity instead of cash.
Does not seem like anything is mounted, not the way we usually mean it. Rather, components are encased in lego bricks from all sides and supported by lego ridges or shelves sticking out of the case. So to remove something from the bottom of the case you have to take off everything above it. I wonder what happens if you turn it upside down, too...
Yes, they could make it so that SWIOTLB is not needed when you have less than 4G RAM, but, unfortunately, it's not done this way. I really wish it was, nay be future Linux kernels will change this. But SWIOTLB is always used on EM64T systems, so the problem is not for folks with over 4GB of RAM, it's for those with 1GB of RAM and 256MG video card.
As far as having the card reside at 256-512MB memory region, that's exactly what bounce buffers do. The problem is, once you allow kernel to give out memory from that region to other applications, there is no way to get it back, so the only safe way is to hoard this region in case DMA ever needs it.
It's much worse than that, unfortunately. The bounce buffers must be allocated in the low memory (below 4G for sure), and the only way to ensure that is to allocate them at boot time. Linux kernel does it with the SWIOTLB buffer. You can specify the size at boot, but after that it's fixed. If DMA ever requests more memory than the buffer has, the kernel will panic (apparently latest 2.6 kernels have some more graceful way to handle it, but in any case DMA requests cannot be fulfilled once there is no memory for bounce buffers). On the other hand, SWIOTLB memory effectively disappears from the system.
So, if you have a nice gaming system with 256MB video card, you may need at least that much memory just for bounce buffers, or more: I'm not sure what the exact requirements are, but I've seen EM64T boxes which would be stable only if SWIOTLB is twice the size of video RAM. Half a gig of RAM not available to the system. So at least for gaming boxes, buy AMD64, don't buy EM64T.
If it is such a useful, valuable technology, why are the manufacturers not informing the customers of this "feature" in their instruction manuals or on their packaging?
I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but how about this one: this way, law-enforcement can quickly weed out stupid counterfeiters and forgers, the "script-kiddies" of fake money. They get arrested and convicted before they get a chance to graduate to more advanced fakes. If the box had a warning, the bar of stupidity would be raised somewhat, instead of just stupid they'd be catching only the extra stupid ones:)
Good point. Hardly unique to closed source though. Remember when Fedora Core 2 was released, they disabled Firewire in the kernel? Firewire maintainer stopped supporting the drivers, for whatever reason, and they were broken in 2.6 kernels for long long time. And the best thing the FC developers could do is to disable the feature alltogether.
In theory, there are all these nice things about OSS and its support and how if it gets dropped someone else can pick it up and so on. Sometimes it happens this way, and sometimes it does not. And lately it's more often the latter. One example: say, I have some strange error message in the log, or some module won't work. I search google, net and news. Two years ago, if I found an article describing this problem, most of the time there was a followup. Not always resolution, but at least followup. Someone was at least answering. Today, at least 80% of hits the search finds are one-article threads. Nobody bothers answering. It's really depressing, but I just don't see the current OSS support model scaling and keeping up with the rate of Linux adoption.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the 225 votes were *for* the act, which is an almost party-line majority. It just wasn't a large enough majority.
6. What if I'm a UK user pretending to be a non-UK user? Can I get a Gmail address?
Considering A3, one could argue that the comment in A1 is not entirely correct: going north from the north pole is undefined and ambiguous, but the limit of A3 is one possible way to define it.
MS could completely destroy Blu-Ray in one blow: announce that Windows will not support Blu-Ray security, and any content from a Blu-Ray disk can be copied to the hard drive, while HDDVD will be fully supported in all its DRM goodness.
Why would you need a ship with airlift (i.e. wing) if there was no gravity? Just push off of the ground... Now coming back is where some preparation is required.
We're becoming specialists. The old geezer knows how tech works and the kids don't? Ask an even older geezer who knows how several different areas of tech work. Do you know how to make gunpowder or rubber, how to build an elecric generator, and how the telephone works too? What about how to saddle a horse? Every next generation is more specialized than the previous one, and for every previous generation the things they don't know "are just there" and things they do know are "basic education".
Imagine a thought experiment: a modern man, a well educated one, is transported back in time, where the local population believes him to be a god, so he has endless supply of labor, but he lost the entire technological base and must rebuild it from scratch.
How many different people would it take to reconstruct the techology of the age they were taking from? I would not be surprised if one man from 1500's knew enough to rebuild his entire technology from ground up. In 1800 there were scientists who worked in a good many of the available areas of science, may be half a dozen of those could reconstruct the entire scientific and technological knowledge of their civilization. How many we would need now? How many of the best-educated modern humans would need to come together to build a car or an airplane using only what's in their heads, no books, no libraries, nobody else to ask, only them and endless unskilled labor?
Let's see now... a smart kid who was first at everything at the local high school without ever doing any work comes to a University full of even smarter kids. Suddenly he needs to *work* to keep up. Oh my god! Work! No! That's hard, man! Wah-wah-wah-wah! And nobody will chew the knowledge for him and spoon-feed him the bits, how dare they. Instead he has to work to understand the problem before he can even start solving the problem. Hey, that's not right! All problems must be presented in a clear and unambiguous way so it's easy to relate them to the page of the textbook where the answers are, because that's how the engineering problems will be at work, after he graduates. Or will they? Oh no, what a terrible thought! I bet over there on the other side one can make tons of money without ever lifting a finger, all those rich investment bankers can't possibly be working hard, that's for these freaks over here at engineering, normal people don't do that. That's it, he's off to where money grows on trees! And guess what, the engineers across the country, and anyone who has to use their work, are better off for it too.
The register article is a bit alarmist, at least compared to the response Linus gives in this thread : http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0311 .0/0621.html
They have the source code, you got back, you recompile, you get at 64-bit binary.
Try doing that to openoffice. Every distro I've seen so far has only 32-bit office, and that alone drags in a huge train of 32-bit libraries, so you end up with almost a dual install of Gnome. Then there is 64-bit Firefox or Mozilla but it won't load 32-bit shared libraries, so if you want flash or acroread or Real plugins you need 32-bit Mozilla. By the time you're done half the libraries on your system are dual-arch.
The first point is entirely on the money. At least 10 years too late, but totally accurate.
The second is just too overreaching: would you like a computer which can run 30 programs from a master list and nothing else? There are many cases where "enumerating goodness" is exactly the right thing to do, and - guess what - that's exactly how such cases are done, for example, sudo.
The rest of the article is basically boils down to this: if you don't want your system to be hacked, don't make it hackable. Sure thing. Don't debug your programs, just write them correctly. Don't install airbags into cars, just avoid crashes. Stupid us, doing all the precautions and safety things for years. Just don't make mistakes, see how easy it is?
No, the Mayans were not avoiding anything, they were indeed predicting. But what they were predicting was the end of calendars, since calendar publishers will no longer be allowed to print years. You can see how such little details would get lost in translation, so "end of timekeeping" became "end of time" which was interpreted as "end of world".
Well, not entirely: most of the times when you read Slashdot you don't have mod points, so even if you read at 3 otherwise.
As was already pointed out, innovation per person is not a very useful measure, it takes only one invented cell phone to start making cell phones for everyone.
Furthermore, I would argue that Huebner's statistics are wrong: he counts innovations made by a tiny fraction of the world's population, but divides it by the entire population. The innovations he counts can only take place in the most advanced countries, because he counts innovations which move humanity forward. You have to be at the forefront of humanity's achievments to move it forward. Right now there are almost a billion chineese and indian farmers who may be very innovative in their own way, figuring out how to feed their families with the primitive tools they have, but it does not count because their innovations were already made, probably centuries ago. I doubt Huebner's innovation count includes some farmer's clever way to improve his oxen-pulled plow, but that's the kind of innovation the absolute majority of the world population does every day.
The population which has at least a chance of making an innovation which Huebner would count does not grow fast, if at all. You have to exclude most "3rd world" countried (not because their people are not innovative, but because Huebner's study does not count their innovations). That leaves you with population which is hardly growing at all, fertility rates in most "1st world" countries are around or below 2.
So Huebner's methodology excludes the majority of world's population when he counts the numerator, but includes everyone in denominator. If this ratio was not shrinking I'd say that bad statistics was compounded by bad arithmetics.
And proprietary software imposes on developing nations a rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their money back to the wealthiest nation in the world. Only this disgorging goes only one way. Incidentally, that would be the way towards where Sun is.
and you never have to worry about rm * in ~, not even rm -rf.
I remember when I was a kid growing up in the Soviet Union, we had yearly tuberculosis tests. Some years they were given not with a syringe but with a device about the size of hand-held bycicle pump: the nurse would "pump" it once, i.e. pull the top half and press it back into the bottom half, this armed some spring which was enough for several shots. The device was placed on the skin but it had no needle, it made a hiss and fired a jet of liquid into the skin. Did not penetrate very far, just under the skin. When I first saw it, it was way cool. But that was about 25 years ago.
I never understood why prevending pop-ups is such a big deal. After all, to create a window, the application must call some function of the window manager or X server or whatever environment it's written for. Browser writers could provide an option which says "if enabled, never, under any circumstances, issue the new window call". The option cannot be disabled from a script. After all, you cannot abuse functionality if it's not there. What more would you need to deal with popups?
I foresee that one of my cars will be driven very little but will suddenly start to consume tons of gas. The other car will become super-efficient and never see a gas station in its life.
I also foresee a brisk business in fuel transfer pumps. Better run invest in stocks of companies which make them.
Now they don't. But in the boom time in the valley stock options were like second currency. Even some small coffehouses and Chineese restaurants took options or shares from startups in liew of cash payments. Some companies which provided services to said startups actually insisited on equity instead of cash.
Does not seem like anything is mounted, not the way we usually mean it. Rather, components are encased in lego bricks from all sides and supported by lego ridges or shelves sticking out of the case. So to remove something from the bottom of the case you have to take off everything above it. I wonder what happens if you turn it upside down, too...
Fortunately, most of them are too dumb to figure out how to edit a Wiki page...
Yes, they could make it so that SWIOTLB is not needed when you have less than 4G RAM, but, unfortunately, it's not done this way. I really wish it was, nay be future Linux kernels will change this. But SWIOTLB is always used on EM64T systems, so the problem is not for folks with over 4GB of RAM, it's for those with 1GB of RAM and 256MG video card.
As far as having the card reside at 256-512MB memory region, that's exactly what bounce buffers do. The problem is, once you allow kernel to give out memory from that region to other applications, there is no way to get it back, so the only safe way is to hoard this region in case DMA ever needs it.
It's much worse than that, unfortunately. The bounce buffers must be allocated in the low memory (below 4G for sure), and the only way to ensure that is to allocate them at boot time. Linux kernel does it with the SWIOTLB buffer. You can specify the size at boot, but after that it's fixed. If DMA ever requests more memory than the buffer has, the kernel will panic (apparently latest 2.6 kernels have some more graceful way to handle it, but in any case DMA requests cannot be fulfilled once there is no memory for bounce buffers). On the other hand, SWIOTLB memory effectively disappears from the system.
So, if you have a nice gaming system with 256MB video card, you may need at least that much memory just for bounce buffers, or more: I'm not sure what the exact requirements are, but I've seen EM64T boxes which would be stable only if SWIOTLB is twice the size of video RAM. Half a gig of RAM not available to the system. So at least for gaming boxes, buy AMD64, don't buy EM64T.
If it is such a useful, valuable technology, why are the manufacturers not informing the customers of this "feature" in their instruction manuals or on their packaging?
:)
I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but how about this one: this way, law-enforcement can quickly weed out stupid counterfeiters and forgers, the "script-kiddies" of fake money. They get arrested and convicted before they get a chance to graduate to more advanced fakes. If the box had a warning, the bar of stupidity would be raised somewhat, instead of just stupid they'd be catching only the extra stupid ones
Good point. Hardly unique to closed source though. Remember when Fedora Core 2 was released, they disabled Firewire in the kernel? Firewire maintainer stopped supporting the drivers, for whatever reason, and they were broken in 2.6 kernels for long long time. And the best thing the FC developers could do is to disable the feature alltogether.
In theory, there are all these nice things about OSS and its support and how if it gets dropped someone else can pick it up and so on. Sometimes it happens this way, and sometimes it does not. And lately it's more often the latter. One example: say, I have some strange error message in the log, or some module won't work. I search google, net and news. Two years ago, if I found an article describing this problem, most of the time there was a followup. Not always resolution, but at least followup. Someone was at least answering. Today, at least 80% of hits the search finds are one-article threads. Nobody bothers answering. It's really depressing, but I just don't see the current OSS support model scaling and keeping up with the rate of Linux adoption.