The Linux desktop would be further along if QT were LGPL instead of GPL. Requiring a multi-thousand dollar license is fine for anything besides platform software, which is why QT can never be incorporated as a core Linux platform library (like glibc).
Case in point: I am at a university and we write software for research. We cannot release the source for various reasons, but we also do not sell the software and our goals are strictly academic. And I can't justify the license fee to the PI (principal investigator) given the alternatives. Heck, even Microsoft Visual Studio is substantially cheaper.
Flame away. I always get flamed for this argument.
I agree that more secure voting machines are needed.
But at some point, we simply have to rely on the best method of all to prevent fraud (and all crime): the law. Existing, paper-based voting can be tampered with as well. Does somebody actually follow the truck carrying the ballots to make sure they are not "swapped" en-route to the collection centers? There is all kinds of fraud that can occur with paper-based voting.
Tampering with voting is highly illegal. If you get caught, you go to jail. Sure, we don't want to leave the front-doors unlocked to our homes, but I'm also not going to go overboard making my home impossible to break into.
Yes Good story, but if its better than any book you've read, then you need to expand your reading list!! Start plowing through those classics...not modern crap. A lot of great books out there.
since Apple was the largest PPC system maker
This is false. Apple's use of PPC was/is small compared to their use in embedded systems.
/proc on steroids
on
Driving Plan 9
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
My university had a visitor from Los Alamos several weeks ago and he gave a live demo of using Plan9 to control a 10,000-machine cluster.
Really cool how _everything_ was a file.
To start a program on some machine, he would cd to some directory corresponding to the machine. I don't remember exactly, but this directory had files corresponding to "exe", "stdin", and "stdout" among others. To start a job, the program was just copied to the exe file. And then if you looked at the "stdout" file, the output from the running job was there. Now you can imagine how launching a job on thousands of machines and collecting the output becomes really trivial.
I got the impression that this was sort of like the Linux/proc filesystem, but expanded to work seamlessly across a cluster and with more functionality.
Right on. I just bought an HP Pavilion from Circuit City. $550 got me an Athlon X2 3800, 1GB memory, 250GB disk drive, DVD-Burner, fancy smartcard ports on the front, etc. The price for the CPU alone is $297 from newegg.com.
You don't get it. Rebates are a way for manufacturers to move products off of the store shelves. Once OfficeMax purchases products, they can't sell them for below invoice without taking a loss. A manufacturer's rebate allows the manufacturer to take the loss so that retails stores are not adverse to keeping an inventory of a certain manufacture's product.
It is obvious that not many Slashdotter's have ever taken an advanced business class.
At the International Symposium of Computer Architecture (ISCA) a couple weeks ago in Boston, Dr. Phil Emma of IBM gave a keynote talk. He said that CPUs will become commodized to the same level as DRAM is today.
I think there could be truth to what he says and that innovation will have to come from higher levels than the CPU. And he is one of IBM's lead technologists.
Why wait? Instead of building my own this time, I bought a brand new HP Pavilion from Circuit City. $550 got me an Athlon X2 3800, 1GB memory, 250GB hard drive, DVD-burner, legal license of Windows XP, and all the bells & whistles including those tight "Dancers" in XP Media Center:).
2) Keep adding more cache so more synthetic benchmarks fit completely in high speed memory to inflate those SPEC scores
LOL! Now we criticize Intel for their superior SRAM technology (Intel can fit twice as much cache capacity as AMD for the same chip area). Server workloads see much higher working sets than SPEC. Even assuming you have AMD's fast on-chip memory controller, every cache miss will result in the processor spending 50+ nanoseconds doing nothing (the instruction window will fill up in no time). With a 3-issue superscalar at 3GHz, this is ~ 450 lost opportunities to retire an instruction.
So yeah Intel, keep adding more cache "to inflate those SPEC scores".
MOD UP if the new Slashdot HTML sucks
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
I'm burning karma, but really, the old HTML was much much better. Things are in the wrong spot including "Read More", and the rating of each message.
I used to work for a Fortune-50 company and we had Unix workstations for software development. The system was configured such that if you tried or accidently entered "su", you got a visit from security within 5-10 minutes.
It happened to me when I mistakenly typed "su" instead of "du".
The problem with Wikis is the lack of a standardized markup language. They all differ in subtle ways. This is fine if you only use one, but I use several.
How do you scan a 4x5 negative, is there some adapter for it?
A $400 Epson flatbed can scan up to an 8x10 negative. They claim 4800dpi, but in reality (because it is a consumer flatbed), I get about 2000dpi. Still good for 80 megapixels w/ 4x5 film. This is the nice part about huge negatives-- you don't need a great scanner! If I want a higher-quality scan, my local professional lab can do a drum scan at 4000dpi (or higher).
Which means for an 8x10, you need an image that is 2400x3000 (or 7.2 megapixels).
Many claim that the human eye can indeed resolve the differences between 300dpi and 400dpi. At 400dpi, an 8-megapixel sensor falls well short of an 8x10 print.
Personally I shoot with a large-format 4x5" camera. This gives me 20" inches of film area, and when scanned at a modest 2400dpi, this gives me 115 megapixels. And my equipment (besides the scanner and film) is 30+ years old.
I just tried this on OpenOffice 2.0. First, it didn't just show the section number which is what I want. Second, it doesn't seem to automatically update when the number changes (due to an insertion or deletion in the numbering sequence). Thus unless I'm missing something, this is worthless.
Doing cross-references in OpenWriter is clunky and difficult. For each section heading or similar (e.g. Section 2.3.5.13), you need to manually create some kind of bookmark. It is not automatic like MS Word or Framemaker. This is definitely a showstopper for using OpenWriter with complex legal documents and their dozens or hundreds of cross-references.
Slashdot Mirror
Case in point: I am at a university and we write software for research. We cannot release the source for various reasons, but we also do not sell the software and our goals are strictly academic. And I can't justify the license fee to the PI (principal investigator) given the alternatives. Heck, even Microsoft Visual Studio is substantially cheaper.
Flame away. I always get flamed for this argument.
I agree that more secure voting machines are needed.
But at some point, we simply have to rely on the best method of all to prevent fraud (and all crime): the law. Existing, paper-based voting can be tampered with as well. Does somebody actually follow the truck carrying the ballots to make sure they are not "swapped" en-route to the collection centers? There is all kinds of fraud that can occur with paper-based voting.
Tampering with voting is highly illegal. If you get caught, you go to jail. Sure, we don't want to leave the front-doors unlocked to our homes, but I'm also not going to go overboard making my home impossible to break into.
http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm
Yes Good story, but if its better than any book you've read, then you need to expand your reading list!! Start plowing through those classics...not modern crap. A lot of great books out there.
However the Planescape: Torment story is so well-written that you do get drawn emotionally into the game.
since Apple was the largest PPC system maker
This is false. Apple's use of PPC was/is small compared to their use in embedded systems.
Really cool how _everything_ was a file.
To start a program on some machine, he would cd to some directory corresponding to the machine. I don't remember exactly, but this directory had files corresponding to "exe", "stdin", and "stdout" among others. To start a job, the program was just copied to the exe file. And then if you looked at the "stdout" file, the output from the running job was there. Now you can imagine how launching a job on thousands of machines and collecting the output becomes really trivial.
I got the impression that this was sort of like the Linux /proc filesystem, but expanded to work seamlessly across a cluster and with more functionality.
Right on. I just bought an HP Pavilion from Circuit City. $550 got me an Athlon X2 3800, 1GB memory, 250GB disk drive, DVD-Burner, fancy smartcard ports on the front, etc. The price for the CPU alone is $297 from newegg.com.
You don't get it. Rebates are a way for manufacturers to move products off of the store shelves. Once OfficeMax purchases products, they can't sell them for below invoice without taking a loss. A manufacturer's rebate allows the manufacturer to take the loss so that retails stores are not adverse to keeping an inventory of a certain manufacture's product.
It is obvious that not many Slashdotter's have ever taken an advanced business class.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:RDPNrJimnyQJ:w ww.circuitcity.com/ssm/HP-Pavilion-Media-Center-De sktop-PC-A1430N-/sem/rpsm/oid/147182/catOid/-12962 /rpem/ccd/productDetail.do+A1430n&hl=en&gl=us&ct=c lnk&cd=1
As you can see, I'm not blowing smoke. Would you like me to fax you the receipt?
Sorry, wrong. There is a huge difference between an Athlon X2 3800 and the single-core Athlon 3800. The former is $297.
At the International Symposium of Computer Architecture (ISCA) a couple weeks ago in Boston, Dr. Phil Emma of IBM gave a keynote talk. He said that CPUs will become commodized to the same level as DRAM is today. I think there could be truth to what he says and that innovation will have to come from higher levels than the CPU. And he is one of IBM's lead technologists.
Why wait? Instead of building my own this time, I bought a brand new HP Pavilion from Circuit City. $550 got me an Athlon X2 3800, 1GB memory, 250GB hard drive, DVD-burner, legal license of Windows XP, and all the bells & whistles including those tight "Dancers" in XP Media Center :).
The CPU alone goes for $297 on newegg.
The same exact processor can exhibit up to 50% variation in average power usage. Manufacturing variability.
2) Keep adding more cache so more synthetic benchmarks fit completely in high speed memory to inflate those SPEC scores
LOL! Now we criticize Intel for their superior SRAM technology (Intel can fit twice as much cache capacity as AMD for the same chip area). Server workloads see much higher working sets than SPEC. Even assuming you have AMD's fast on-chip memory controller, every cache miss will result in the processor spending 50+ nanoseconds doing nothing (the instruction window will fill up in no time). With a 3-issue superscalar at 3GHz, this is ~ 450 lost opportunities to retire an instruction.
So yeah Intel, keep adding more cache "to inflate those SPEC scores".
I'm burning karma, but really, the old HTML was much much better. Things are in the wrong spot including "Read More", and the rating of each message.
the Texans would blow them away with 20 gauge shotguns.
:-)
20-gauge shotguns are for wusses. In Texas, you aren't considered a man until you can handle shooting a 12-gauge slug
You are only seeing the web front-end. eBay uses expensive, high-end Sun hardware for all the back-end stuff.
It happened to me when I mistakenly typed "su" instead of "du".
The problem with Wikis is the lack of a standardized markup language. They all differ in subtle ways. This is fine if you only use one, but I use several.
Hopefully GUI editors will minimize this problem.
How do you scan a 4x5 negative, is there some adapter for it?
A $400 Epson flatbed can scan up to an 8x10 negative. They claim 4800dpi, but in reality (because it is a consumer flatbed), I get about 2000dpi. Still good for 80 megapixels w/ 4x5 film. This is the nice part about huge negatives-- you don't need a great scanner! If I want a higher-quality scan, my local professional lab can do a drum scan at 4000dpi (or higher).
Which means for an 8x10, you need an image that is 2400x3000 (or 7.2 megapixels).
Many claim that the human eye can indeed resolve the differences between 300dpi and 400dpi. At 400dpi, an 8-megapixel sensor falls well short of an 8x10 print.
Personally I shoot with a large-format 4x5" camera. This gives me 20" inches of film area, and when scanned at a modest 2400dpi, this gives me 115 megapixels. And my equipment (besides the scanner and film) is 30+ years old.
I just tried this on OpenOffice 2.0. First, it didn't just show the section number which is what I want. Second, it doesn't seem to automatically update when the number changes (due to an insertion or deletion in the numbering sequence). Thus unless I'm missing something, this is worthless.
Right. The sensor is effectively diffraction limited.
Doing cross-references in OpenWriter is clunky and difficult. For each section heading or similar (e.g. Section 2.3.5.13), you need to manually create some kind of bookmark. It is not automatic like MS Word or Framemaker. This is definitely a showstopper for using OpenWriter with complex legal documents and their dozens or hundreds of cross-references.