Well, not all of it: sure, things can happen which will cause the car to effectively "floor the gas pedal". Cruise control failures may be possible, and let's even say that the cruise control kill switch fails. Mechanical failures are even simpler, happened to me once (broken morot mount). But applying the brakes disengages transmission on automatic cars. Also, he could have shifted into neutral, that always works. In both cases the engine will rev up and probably fail, unless it has a red-zone cutoff (which in many cars is as simple as a valve redirecting exhaust into air intake when RPM exceeds maximum - works like a charm, engine halts in half a second). I suspect he either made up the whole story so he could get away with a fun ride, mixed up brakes and gas, or was more concern with the danger of killing his engine than the danger to himself and other drivers on the road.
Actually, no, it would still be 1 gram: if you drop it, it will fall down, not fly up (positive gravitational mass) if you push it, it resists the acceleration, not accelerates faster than you pushed it (positive inertial mass).
There is a fundamental problem with antimatter weapon, which has nothing to do with storing antimatter or any other engineering issues. Antimatter weapon does not produce "new" energy, it only stores energy which went into generating antimatter and then releases it. By comparison, nuclear explosives are "their own energy source", i.e. they release much more energy than went into their manufacturing, because we do not have to make uranium (and making plutonium from uranium takes relatively little energy). The energy balance of an antimatter weapon is similar to what a nuclear weapon would require if we had to make uranium from iron.
Nuclear bomb, in effect, stores the energy of long-gone supernovas (which did convert iron into uranium), an energy source we cannot directly tap into. We don't have such sources for antimatter, so we have to produce it with our own energy. If we had an energy source which could generate antimatter in large quantities, we'd use whatever powers that energy source directly to make weapons, not store that energy as antimatter and then use antimatter like a rechargeable battery.
The only use of this process would be to convert a large source of energy into a very compact one. The other alleged advantage, "clean nuke", is an outright lie. The gamma radiation will interact with surrounding matter which will cause all sorts of secondary nuclear reactions and create radioactive isotopes. If it wasn't the case, the antimatter explosion would be totally ineffective, the gamma photons which do not get absorbed or scattered by matter simply fly through it without any effect. What kills you is not the gamma rays whcih went right through you, it's those which did not make it through.
Primarily because it was not meant or made to influence anything. Moore is a genius, and I'm totally awed by the brillant idea and perfect execution, but the idea was not to influence. Moore came up with a way to create the "Badge of a true Bush-hater", something any true Bush-hater MUST have, or he does not belong. So now half the country absolutely positively 100% must have The Badge aka watch the movie. If you manage to do that, you can sell the badges for $8 a piece, rake in the dough and laugh all the way to the bank. Pure genius, and I am not being sarcastic, it really is.
However it's not a very effective tool to bring in people who were not sure whetehr they want to wear The Badge to begin with, because they were not True Bush-haters.
If it's shown on the eve of elections, it won't sway anyone (the other reason is that there's nobody left to sway, everyone is either for Bush or for Anybody-But-Bush). It may, however, energize "the base" and increase turnout for Kerry. But it may also make the other base mad and increase turnout for Bush. But either way, the effect on turnout will be the key, because this election will be decided not by how many independent or undecided voters swing to either side in the end, but by few committed Bush or Kerry loyalists who may or may not run out of gas or get lost on their way to polls or get sick on the election day or for some other reason go or not go to vote.
This is about GPL, because this is how GPL works. You cannot "violate GPL", you can refuse to accept it (explicitly, or, as IBM claims in this case, by virtue of your conduct), then you don't have the rights which GPL would grant you. So far, no problem, nothing bad is going to happen to you, yet. But now you can commit copyright infrigement if you copy the code copyrighted by someone else, unless some other license or contract gives you the right to copy. The latter would be a consistent defense for SCO since they seem to claim that they gain full rights for anything which touches "their" code, the original Unix codebase, in any way. Not that I expect anyone to salute when they fly this.
If you just have a processor, you can probably do without the case fans, there are plenty of PCs made with just CPU cooler from boxed Athlon and a standard power supply and no other cooling, and they work ok. You need case fans if you have other heat-producing hardware in the case. Say, you have a high-end 3D video card, and RAID from 6 hard drives. Now you need to vent hot air from the case, and you need to maintain circulation to avoid hot spots (which probably means blowing air onto the hard drives). As for water cooling, the whole point of that is noise, not cooling capacity. Numerous tests by folks from sites like TomsHardware and Anandtech show that the best water coolers cool may be a tad better than the best air coolers, and the mediocre water coolers can be beat with a good air cooler. But there is no comparison on the noise. You can even get a perfectly silent water cooler, Zalman Reserator, with no fans in it at all (does not solve the problem of cooling the rest of your stuff, only the CPU and may be video card).
You think it's wrong to put dollar value on life? Well, did you drive to work this morning? Driving is dangerous, certainly more dangerous than sitting at home. So you put your life in some extra danger, and you put the lifes of other people in extra danger too. Even if you are the best driver in the world, may be the guy who is about to run the red light would make it through safely if you weren't in the intersection. Why did you drive to work then? You might be able to find some work within walking distance, or work from home. It probably would not pay as well, though. So here we are: for some dollars you have taken a small chance of losing your life. In other words, by your own actions you just placed a dollar value on your life. If you know the average accident rate for your neighborhood, your car type, your driving habits, you could even estimate how much you value your own life. Note that if you don't drive to work, the same arguments can be made about many other activities you engage it. Biking puts your life in danger too. May be you flew across the country for a job interview. Every time you choose to expose yourself to some extra danger in exchange for some money or other benefits, you make a statement that the you yourself place a finite value on your own life.
Ah, but IBM is seeking declaratory judgement, not summary judgement. IANAL, but as far as I understand, summary judgement means "you can't prove anything", while declaratory judgement means "even if you could prove all your claims, the law provides no penalty for me or remedy for you, so your best possible result is nothing at all". While summary judgement requires the judge to weigh the facts, declaratory one only involves interpretation of the law.
So, as long as we don't use the EFF one-click interface to send campain contributions, we're ok? Otherwise, it's buying congressmen with one click and we're back to "Amazon sues the EFF".
Yes, redhat backported tons of code from development 2.5 series, and later from 2.6, into their 2.4 kernels. And as far as I am concerned, it was a good thing. For example, for a long time RedHat kernel supported USB2 hard disks reliably, while stock and -ac kernels would hang after transferring few hundred megabytes. USB1 worked fine, USB2 would hang the machine. Yes, I could move to 2.5 kernels, but I don't want to. I want a stable kernel on a production system. And I'm not moving to 2.6 yet for the same reason, too many changes. Just the last version changed the API and broke all drivers except the in-tree ones. But RedHat ports most of the stuff I want back into their kernel, so I don't have to choose between not having the features I want and getting more features than I bargained for.
A little too late and a little too expensive. What's the target market for this? Home users? DVD writers go for less than $100 now, and DVD-Rs are $1/disk, RW's are may be $1.80. The new Iomega disk is 35GB, that's 7-8 DVD's (depending on how you can pack files on DVDs). So the drive is 4x more expensive, and the media is >2x more. All for convenience of not changing the media quite as often during the backup. Few people will pay. Sysadmins/power users who need to back up large amounts of data? They are likely to use tape, because they need 100s of GBs of backups, unattended.
But hey, this is not the worst yet. I can get a 160GB IDE drive for around $0.5/GB. That's still more expensive than DVD-Rs, assuming I can ammortize the cost of the writer. But it's about the same as the IOmega disks, and that's before the $400 for the IOmega drive! So what possible insentive could I have to buy this "Son of Jaz" at the price they ask?
For a MS-Windows users, this is as simple as clicking "Windows Update" and hitting "Accept" a few times. I'm not sure if any of the Linux distros have gotten the process simplified to that extent?
Yeah, Fedora Core 1 cap be updated with apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade;, and you can have a cron script do it every now and then (if you add -y to apt-get). Yum, the other FC1 RPM manager, can do the same thing.
If they are'nt CONSUMING more, they aren't costing the society any more. The extra money they make either gets invested (and eventually paid out to someone as salaries or dividents, used for consumption, and taxed), or it sits in the bank, then it doesn't cost anything to the country. As soon as the guy with the billion dollars decides to enjoy some of it, he starts consuming, and gets taxed.
Actually, very few creationists argue against evolution as adaptation (otherwise called microevolution). The changes in species like those Darwin observed at Galapagoss islands happen all the time, many become observable in lifetime of one or two generations (of humans), so a) it's hard to argue with, and b) it does not really threaten the creationist ideology. What creationists rally against is the macroevolution, emergence of completely new species, and even more so, creation of life itself. Not coincidentally, it's also the weakest point of the evolution theory - we don't really know how and why the life first formed in some primordial goop. The odds of that happening seem pretty low, on the other hand, over a billion years even low-odds things tend to happen once or twice.
Tariff on information? Not exactly, but here is how to do it: allow re-imports. Consider this: why outsorcing of the textile jobs, while painful for some sectors of the economy, can be beneficial for the economy overall? Because the prices of textile drop, so the rest of Americans buy their t-shirts cheaper. Why can't the textile companies produce at "Chineese" costs and sell in the US at "American" prices? Because someone will re-import t-shirts from China, which are sold there at "Chineese" prices.
But it does not work with the software (and few other industries, entertainment and farmaceutical come to mind). They have "authorised distributors" and use copyright laws to maintain their distribution channels so that their product cannot be legally re-imported (Note that I'm not talking about pirate copies made abroad, but the legal copies, or legal drugs, intended for sale there).
The solution, I think, is that as a default, all re-importation should be allowed (drugs prompt some safety concerns, but, at least for countries like Canada, UK, Japan, or Germany, the safety is as important and as for the US). Then, as a twist, a company which can show that they do not outsorce any jobs other than regional sales and support, may regain some of the priotections, may be - this needs some careful thought.
Increased re-imports will likely drive the outsorcing to even higher degree, but at least it'll inject the gains back into the economy, instead of the companies pocketing the gains under the cover of copyright protection.
Unrealistic expectations? Yes. Of the management? That's the least of our problems. The "common sense" expectations for software are vastly unrealistic. Modern software tools are incredibly complex systems, both in the number of internal "degrees of freedom" and in their interaction with the environment. Yet they are expected by the public at large to function properly under circumstances which could be more different from what it was designed for than, say, driving a Ford across the lake (why is nobody complaining that Ford was lax in their testing because they only tested their cars on roads, which, after all, cover a tiny fraction of Earth surface?)
At the same time, software is perhaps the only industry where everyone is a friggin expert. Most people (in the US anyway) happily pay someone $25 to change their oil. How many are willing to pay someone $25 to install a new sound card in their PC and load drivers? And, if you look at the complexity of interactions between parts of the system and open-endedness of the interface with the environment, oil change is downright primitive compared to sound card change. But no, for some reason it should be "easy". Look at everyone who enables "expert mode" on their software, while even "novice mode" presents more controls than a smal airplane.
And the only people who actually understand the complexity of the software, the software engineers, somehow let themselves become convinced that software really should allow millions of users to do thousands of things they want, the way they want, all at once, and be "easy" at the same time.
Re:FInger-pointing, blame shifting, FAD
on
Can Software Kill?
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· Score: 1
I don't see any responsibility on the part of Multidata. The software in all likelyhood came with the manual which said something like this: "1) Unless you are smarter that those who made this software and know exactly what you are doing, take off your creative hat and do EXACTLY as you are told. Specifically, use FOUR shields (that's the number less than five but greater than three), and enter data EXACTLY as instructed and in NO OTHER WAY. 2) If you think that you know what you are doing, you are wrong, see item 1."
The users found a "creative way of entering the data", in other words, went out of their way to break the tool. You can build some safeguards in, but if the user is persistent enough he will always find for the mind to triumph over machine.
Unless the users entered data and used the tool as instructed, or the manual and user interface were ambigous about the right way of doing things, the maker of the software has no responsibility.
You can write on the hammer with big bold letters "KEEP AWAY FROM THE HEAD!", you can add protective foam pads and proximity sensor, and someone will always figure out a way to disable the sensor, rip off the foam, and misread the warning, and in the end whacks himself on the head (himself would not be too bad, its Darwinism at work, in this case, unfortunately, innocent people paid the price for someone's misguided creativity).
I've seen this behavior, but I don't think it's a female trait. It's just anyone who hasn't played many 3D games. I know that me and my male friends did this in back in 94 when we first played Doom.
I think it was something about Doom, the way it was done. I never had the slightest inclination to move out of the way when playing Quake, or any other FPS later, but I still lean sideways in my chair sometimes when an imp throws a fireball at me.
When I sign up for a supermarket card, I should be able to check a box which says "contact me if I bought a product under recall". Then they can call me or send me a postcard.
Depends mainly on what data the test is using. If it's floating-point heavy, and uses double, then it always was 64-bit. On 64-bit hardware it'll gain the full-width data path and will be able to load/store 64-bit floating-point numbers faster, all things being equal. If it uses ints (not longs), it is and will stay 32-bit, there will be no difference unless the hardware is capable of loading two 32-bit numbers at once, effectively splitting the memory bus in two (HP-PA RISC can do it, his old Sun cannot, newest Suns can, I don't know if Opterons can). Finally, if the test uses data types which convert from 32 to 64 bits it will become slower, but only if it does enough math on these types. The later is important, since every half-complicated program uses pointers, explicitly or implicitly, but not every program does enough pointer arithmetics compared to other operations to make a difference. However, if it does, then it'll copy pointers in and out of main memory all the time, and you can fit half as many 64-bit pointers into the cache. That's where the slowdown comes (plus some possible library issues, early 64-bit HP and Sun system libraries were very slow for some operations). If your process resident memory size is the same in 64 and 32-bit mode, you should not see any slowdown. If you do, it's an issue with the library of the compiler (even though the compiler in this case is the same, the code generator is not, and there may be some low-level optimizations it does differently). If resident size of 64-bit application is larger, you are likely to see slowdown, and the more memory-bound the program is the larger it'll be.
If you cracked the systems someone else owns you go to jail. If you cracked your wife's laptop, which is property of your entire family, you may have problems with the co-owner, but you did not break any laws. Republicans and democrats alike are the employees of the owner of the systems, the government. Apparently, the owner of the systems in this case does not have a policy which forbids its employees from doing such things. It has some sort of general ethics violations policy, and internal procedures for applying it, so they will look into whether this policy was violated or not.
> "These pop-up blockers, as they become too > widely used, will definitely cut into my > income," said William Smith, who runs 40 > Web sites from Winnipeg, Manitoba. > "A guy has to make money," he said.
"These bank vaults, as they become too widely used, will definitely cut into my income," said Smilliam With, bank robber and safecracker. "A guy has to make money," he said.
EA owns this game. If they think that banning a particular individual from their game will enhance gaming experience of other players, they should do it. If they thought wrong, they will lose players, and, with them, lose money. Similarly, if EA thinks that this player is "high-maintenance" and costs more money than he and those who might get upset by the ban bring, it's fine for EA to ban him.
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Well, not all of it: sure, things can happen which will cause the car to effectively "floor the gas pedal". Cruise control failures may be possible, and let's even say that the cruise control kill switch fails. Mechanical failures are even simpler, happened to me once (broken morot mount). But applying the brakes disengages transmission on automatic cars. Also, he could have shifted into neutral, that always works. In both cases the engine will rev up and probably fail, unless it has a red-zone cutoff (which in many cars is as simple as a valve redirecting exhaust into air intake when RPM exceeds maximum - works like a charm, engine halts in half a second).
I suspect he either made up the whole story so he could get away with a fun ride, mixed up brakes and gas, or was more concern with the danger of killing his engine than the danger to himself and other drivers on the road.
Actually, no, it would still be 1 gram:
if you drop it, it will fall down, not fly up (positive gravitational mass)
if you push it, it resists the acceleration, not accelerates faster than you pushed it (positive inertial mass).
There is a fundamental problem with antimatter weapon, which has nothing to do with storing antimatter or any other engineering issues. Antimatter weapon does not produce "new" energy, it only stores energy which went into generating antimatter and then releases it. By comparison, nuclear explosives are "their own energy source", i.e. they release much more energy than went into their manufacturing, because we do not have to make uranium (and making plutonium from uranium takes relatively little energy). The energy balance of an antimatter weapon is similar to what a nuclear weapon would require if we had to make uranium from iron.
Nuclear bomb, in effect, stores the energy of long-gone supernovas (which did convert iron into uranium), an energy source we cannot directly tap into. We don't have such sources for antimatter, so we have to produce it with our own energy.
If we had an energy source which could generate antimatter in large quantities, we'd use whatever powers that energy source directly to make weapons, not store that energy as antimatter and then use antimatter like a rechargeable battery.
The only use of this process would be to convert a large source of energy into a very compact one. The other alleged advantage, "clean nuke", is an outright lie. The gamma radiation will interact with surrounding matter which will cause all sorts of secondary nuclear reactions and create radioactive isotopes. If it wasn't the case, the antimatter explosion would be totally ineffective, the gamma photons which do not get absorbed or scattered by matter simply fly through it without any effect. What kills you is not the gamma rays whcih went right through you, it's those which did not make it through.
Primarily because it was not meant or made to influence anything. Moore is a genius, and I'm totally awed by the brillant idea and perfect execution, but the idea was not to influence. Moore came up with a way to create the "Badge of a true Bush-hater", something any true Bush-hater MUST have, or he does not belong. So now half the country absolutely positively 100% must have The Badge aka watch the movie. If you manage to do that, you can sell the badges for $8 a piece, rake in the dough and laugh all the way to the bank. Pure genius, and I am not being sarcastic, it really is.
However it's not a very effective tool to bring in people who were not sure whetehr they want to wear The Badge to begin with, because they were not True Bush-haters.
If it's shown on the eve of elections, it won't sway anyone (the other reason is that there's nobody left to sway, everyone is either for Bush or for Anybody-But-Bush). It may, however, energize "the base" and increase turnout for Kerry. But it may also make the other base mad and increase turnout for Bush. But either way, the effect on turnout will be the key, because this election will be decided not by how many independent or undecided voters swing to either side in the end, but by few committed Bush or Kerry loyalists who may or may not run out of gas or get lost on their way to polls or get sick on the election day or for some other reason go or not go to vote.
This is about GPL, because this is how GPL works. You cannot "violate GPL", you can refuse to accept it (explicitly, or, as IBM claims in this case, by virtue of your conduct), then you don't have the rights which GPL would grant you. So far, no problem, nothing bad is going to happen to you, yet. But now you can commit copyright infrigement if you copy the code copyrighted by someone else, unless some other license or contract gives you the right to copy. The latter would be a consistent defense for SCO since they seem to claim that they gain full rights for anything which touches "their" code, the original Unix codebase, in any way. Not that I expect anyone to salute when they fly this.
If you just have a processor, you can probably do without the case fans, there are plenty of PCs made with just CPU cooler from boxed Athlon and a standard power supply and no other cooling, and they work ok.
You need case fans if you have other heat-producing hardware in the case. Say, you have a high-end 3D video card, and RAID from 6 hard drives. Now you need to vent hot air from the case, and you need to maintain circulation to avoid hot spots (which probably means blowing air onto the hard drives).
As for water cooling, the whole point of that is noise, not cooling capacity. Numerous tests by folks from sites like TomsHardware and Anandtech show that the best water coolers cool may be a tad better than the best air coolers, and the mediocre water coolers can be beat with a good air cooler. But there is no comparison on the noise. You can even get a perfectly silent water cooler, Zalman Reserator, with no fans in it at all (does not solve the problem of cooling the rest of your stuff, only the CPU and may be video card).
You think it's wrong to put dollar value on life? Well, did you drive to work this morning? Driving is dangerous, certainly more dangerous than sitting at home. So you put your life in some extra danger, and you put the lifes of other people in extra danger too. Even if you are the best driver in the world, may be the guy who is about to run the red light would make it through safely if you weren't in the intersection. Why did you drive to work then? You might be able to find some work within walking distance, or work from home. It probably would not pay as well, though. So here we are: for some dollars you have taken a small chance of losing your life. In other words, by your own actions you just placed a dollar value on your life. If you know the average accident rate for your neighborhood, your car type, your driving habits, you could even estimate how much you value your own life.
Note that if you don't drive to work, the same arguments can be made about many other activities you engage it. Biking puts your life in danger too. May be you flew across the country for a job interview. Every time you choose to expose yourself to some extra danger in exchange for some money or other benefits, you make a statement that the you yourself place a finite value on your own life.
Ah, but IBM is seeking declaratory judgement, not summary judgement. IANAL, but as far as I understand, summary judgement means "you can't prove anything", while declaratory judgement means "even if you could prove all your claims, the law provides no penalty for me or remedy for you, so your best possible result is nothing at all". While summary judgement requires the judge to weigh the facts, declaratory one only involves interpretation of the law.
So, as long as we don't use the EFF one-click interface to send campain contributions, we're ok?
Otherwise, it's buying congressmen with one click and we're back to "Amazon sues the EFF".
Yes, redhat backported tons of code from development 2.5 series, and later from 2.6, into their 2.4 kernels. And as far as I am concerned, it was a good thing. For example, for a long time RedHat kernel supported USB2 hard disks reliably, while stock and -ac kernels would hang after transferring few hundred megabytes. USB1 worked fine, USB2 would hang the machine. Yes, I could move to 2.5 kernels, but I don't want to. I want a stable kernel on a production system. And I'm not moving to 2.6 yet for the same reason, too many changes. Just the last version changed the API and broke all drivers except the in-tree ones. But RedHat ports most of the stuff I want back into their kernel, so I don't have to choose between not having the features I want and getting more features than I bargained for.
A little too late and a little too expensive.
What's the target market for this? Home users?
DVD writers go for less than $100 now, and DVD-Rs are $1/disk, RW's are may be $1.80. The new Iomega disk is 35GB, that's 7-8 DVD's (depending on how you can pack files on DVDs). So the drive is 4x more expensive, and the media is >2x more. All for convenience of not changing the media quite as often during the backup. Few people will pay.
Sysadmins/power users who need to back up large amounts of data? They are likely to use tape, because they need 100s of GBs of backups, unattended.
But hey, this is not the worst yet. I can get a 160GB IDE drive for around $0.5/GB. That's still more expensive than DVD-Rs, assuming I can ammortize the cost of the writer. But it's about the same as the IOmega disks, and that's before the $400 for the IOmega drive! So what possible insentive could I have to buy this "Son of Jaz" at the price they ask?
Yeah, Fedora Core 1 cap be updated with apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade;, and you can have a cron script do it every now and then (if you add -y to apt-get). Yum, the other FC1 RPM manager, can do the same thing.
If they are'nt CONSUMING more, they aren't costing the society any more. The extra money they make either gets invested (and eventually paid out to someone as salaries or dividents, used for consumption, and taxed), or it sits in the bank, then it doesn't cost anything to the country. As soon as the guy with the billion dollars decides to enjoy some of it, he starts consuming, and gets taxed.
Actually, very few creationists argue against evolution as adaptation (otherwise called microevolution). The changes in species like those Darwin observed at Galapagoss islands happen all the time, many become observable in lifetime of one or two generations (of humans), so a) it's hard to argue with, and b) it does not really threaten the creationist ideology. What creationists rally against is the macroevolution, emergence of completely new species, and even more so, creation of life itself. Not coincidentally, it's also the weakest point of the evolution theory - we don't really know how and why the life first formed in some primordial goop. The odds of that happening seem pretty low, on the other hand, over a billion years even low-odds things tend to happen once or twice.
But it does not work with the software (and few other industries, entertainment and farmaceutical come to mind). They have "authorised distributors" and use copyright laws to maintain their distribution channels so that their product cannot be legally re-imported (Note that I'm not talking about pirate copies made abroad, but the legal copies, or legal drugs, intended for sale there).
The solution, I think, is that as a default, all re-importation should be allowed (drugs prompt some safety concerns, but, at least for countries like Canada, UK, Japan, or Germany, the safety is as important and as for the US). Then, as a twist, a company which can show that they do not outsorce any jobs other than regional sales and support, may regain some of the priotections, may be - this needs some careful thought. Increased re-imports will likely drive the outsorcing to even higher degree, but at least it'll inject the gains back into the economy, instead of the companies pocketing the gains under the cover of copyright protection.
Unrealistic expectations? Yes. Of the management? That's the least of our problems. The "common sense" expectations for software are vastly unrealistic. Modern software tools are incredibly complex systems, both in the number of internal "degrees of freedom" and in their interaction with the environment. Yet they are expected by the public at large to function properly under circumstances which could be more different from what it was designed for than, say, driving a Ford across the lake (why is nobody complaining that Ford was lax in their testing because they only tested their cars on roads, which, after all, cover a tiny fraction of Earth surface?)
At the same time, software is perhaps the only industry where everyone is a friggin expert. Most people (in the US anyway) happily pay someone $25 to change their oil. How many are willing to pay someone $25 to install a new sound card in their PC and load drivers? And, if you look at the complexity of interactions between parts of the system and open-endedness of the interface with the environment, oil change is downright primitive compared to sound card change. But no, for some reason it should be "easy". Look at everyone who enables "expert mode" on their software, while even "novice mode" presents more controls than a smal airplane.
And the only people who actually understand the complexity of the software, the software engineers, somehow let themselves become convinced that software really should allow millions of users to do thousands of things they want, the way they want, all at once, and be "easy" at the same time.
I don't see any responsibility on the part of Multidata. The software in all likelyhood came with the manual which said something like this:
"1) Unless you are smarter that those who made this software and know exactly what you are doing, take off your creative hat and do EXACTLY as you are told. Specifically, use FOUR shields (that's the number less than five but greater than three), and enter data EXACTLY as instructed and in NO OTHER WAY.
2) If you think that you know what you are doing, you are wrong, see item 1."
The users found a "creative way of entering the data", in other words, went out of their way to break the tool. You can build some safeguards in, but if the user is persistent enough he will always find for the mind to triumph over machine.
Unless the users entered data and used the tool as instructed, or the manual and user interface were ambigous about the right way of doing things, the maker of the software has no responsibility.
You can write on the hammer with big bold letters "KEEP AWAY FROM THE HEAD!", you can add protective foam pads and proximity sensor, and someone will always figure out a way to disable the sensor, rip off the foam, and misread the warning, and in the end whacks himself on the head (himself would not be too bad, its Darwinism at work, in this case, unfortunately, innocent people paid the price for someone's misguided creativity).
I think it was something about Doom, the way it was done. I never had the slightest inclination to move out of the way when playing Quake, or any other FPS later, but I still lean sideways in my chair sometimes when an imp throws a fireball at me.
I can just see the new ad campain for the Direct Marketing Association...
"Want privacy? You must be mad as a cow!"
When I sign up for a supermarket card, I should be able to check a box which says "contact me if I bought a product under recall". Then they can call me or send me a postcard.
Depends mainly on what data the test is using. If it's floating-point heavy, and uses double, then it always was 64-bit. On 64-bit hardware it'll gain the full-width data path and will be able to load/store 64-bit floating-point numbers faster, all things being equal. If it uses ints (not longs), it is and will stay 32-bit, there will be no difference unless the hardware is capable of loading two 32-bit numbers at once, effectively splitting the memory bus in two (HP-PA RISC can do it, his old Sun cannot, newest Suns can, I don't know if Opterons can). Finally, if the test uses data types which convert from 32 to 64 bits it will become slower, but only if it does enough math on these types. The later is important, since every half-complicated program uses pointers, explicitly or implicitly, but not every program does enough pointer arithmetics compared to other operations to make a difference. However, if it does, then it'll copy pointers in and out of main memory all the time, and you can fit half as many 64-bit pointers into the cache.
That's where the slowdown comes (plus some possible library issues, early 64-bit HP and Sun system libraries were very slow for some operations).
If your process resident memory size is the same in 64 and 32-bit mode, you should not see any slowdown. If you do, it's an issue with the library of the compiler (even though the compiler in this case is the same, the code generator is not, and there may be some low-level optimizations it does differently). If resident size of 64-bit application is larger, you are likely to see slowdown, and the more memory-bound the program is the larger it'll be.
If you cracked the systems someone else owns you go to jail. If you cracked your wife's laptop, which is property of your entire family, you may have problems with the co-owner, but you did not break any laws. Republicans and democrats alike are the employees of the owner of the systems, the government. Apparently, the owner of the systems in this case does not have a policy which forbids its employees from doing such things. It has some sort of general ethics violations policy, and internal procedures for applying it, so they will look into whether this policy was violated or not.
> "These pop-up blockers, as they become too
> widely used, will definitely cut into my
> income," said William Smith, who runs 40
> Web sites from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
> "A guy has to make money," he said.
"These bank vaults, as they become too widely used, will definitely cut into my income," said Smilliam With, bank robber and safecracker. "A guy has to make money," he said.
Non-smoking section in an airplane is about as effective as a non-peeing section in a pool.
EA owns this game. If they think that banning a particular individual from their game will enhance gaming experience of other players, they should do it. If they thought wrong, they will lose players, and, with them, lose money. Similarly, if EA thinks that this player is "high-maintenance" and costs more money than he and those who might get upset by the ban bring, it's fine for EA to ban him.