Not so sure about Goodwill. Last time I talked to a Goodwill employee, I was told that they really only want items that are in good working order - something that can be resold without repair. So as long as its still useful, they are an option. But if its actually broken, don't waste their time or yours - they will just throw it away. This is true for everything with them, not just tech. Might be true of Salvation Army, not sure. I've heard that both of them get a lot more donations (in terms of physical items, not money, putting that loose change in Santa's bucket is okay!) than they can actually make use of.
Personally, I'd give to Food for the Poor before either Goodwill or Salvation Army, though not for tech. They are a lot less picky about what they take and seem to do a good job of finding a home for your worn out consumer goods.
Threaten to countersue him under RICO (racketeering and extortion). Your suit would be just a frivolous as his, but it might shut him up.
If it were me, I'd ignore him. My recollection of the ICANN rules is that the burden is on him to prove:
1. That he has a legitimate, real-world business that could reasonably be expected to be associated with the name; and,
2. That you don't: that your primary reason for registering the domain is to profit by selling it to someone who does
Having a registered trademark or business identity can help show 1., and lack of can help show 2. But afaik (ianal), trademark law per se has nothing definitive to say when it comes to domain names. Also, afaik, the only entity that has made any sort of rules around domain name use is ICANN.
Agree - there is no such thing as a "simple" RAM failure. RAM failures are rare, and hard to diagnose, unless its completely fried and even BIOS doesn't detect it. I've seen them before and its still not on the short list of failing components I think to check for. HDD failures, viruses, and configuration problems are more common by a good margin.
I couldn't watch the video (it doesn't load, due to a "bad path" error - maybe they're running another "sting" ?), but in the teaser they mention that they "simulated" a RAM failure. Short of putting a flaky RAM stick in (which would be an *actual* RAM failure) I don't know how you would simulate one. The fact that 3 out of the 10 techs could guess that the machine had the *symptoms* of bad RAM (due to a whacked BIOS or whatever else they did to "simulate" it) is pretty amazing to me. Who's to say it even acted like a RAM failure?
When it comes to diagnostics, the possibility that a machine is "faking" that it is sick isn't something I'd even consider. So a big "BOO" to the so-called journalists for flawed methodology.
From the record companies perspective, you need to persuade them to make more and then go buy them!
On the software side, this is what is sometimes referred to as "abandonware" or "zombieware". People will often make a copy of it and don't feel as bad about it because there is no other way to purchase the title. Its still illegal. Its just less likely that the copyright holder will take action.
Fair use doesn't help you with getting a copy of a rare title, in fact its the opposite: copyright ensures that such rare titles will remain expensive and hard-to-find. However if the copyright on it ever expires and it becomes public domain then you can copy the out-of-print title to your heart's content and preserve it. Until then you have to hope there is a library or a collector that is holding on to it who will make it available once the copyright runs out.
I have a dual BA in Comp Sci and Management (Bus Admin). I have been in enough management positions to know that, although I've been told I'm good at it, I prefer not to do it. My take on it is this: you can't teach someone to be a manager. You either have it, or you don't. And, I think that you don't, or you wouldn't have asked in the first place. But feel free to try to prove me wrong.
The job of the manager is to provide leadership. On a day to day basis it means three things:
1. Being decisive. This isn't just making decisions, it is both being able to make hard decisions appear easy and giving the appearance of being confident that those decisions are correct. It is entirely about perception. You can have doubts, but in most cases, you need to keep those to yourself so that the decision will be enacted effectivley (if you doubt, then others will doubt, and you will make less progress).
2. Playing politics. Once you get off the lines and out of direct technical work, politics becomes a major factor, both within the company and without (vendor relationships, etc). (Aside: this is what you're supposed to "get" out of the Organizational Behavior classes). All human endeavors are inherently political, so beware anyone that tells you that "there are no politics here" or that politics aren't part of the job. As an architect, one thing you will find is that you'll need to be able to work well with the development managers (the ones who own the code) in order to accomplish your goals.
3. The Golden Rule. "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Well, that, and the other one, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.". If you keep this in mind in your dealings with your employees, you will do ok. It's the PHB's that forget that their employees are people that tend to be the ones that are ineffective and disliked. You won't be able to be their friend all the time - in the business world, sh** happens - but do try to make a conscious effort to treat your people like people and not cogs.
Oh, come on, many of you are thinking it already... its time to boycott J&J !
Personally, for me the symbol is 100% associated with the Red Cross (they use it in all of their commercials), and J&J is Band-Aids and Children's Shampoo. Now if the Red Cross started using a teardrop-shaped "No More Tears" logo, it would be a different story.
The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses
available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an
application that requires that many. Assuming that you can actually
come up with one, it could easily be solved with Network Address
Translation, or NAT as it is commonly known.
Sure, if you want to limit yourself to Terra Firma.
This is a non-argument. It wasn't that long ago that people were saying 'no personal computer will ever need more than 64K of RAM". Look at where we are now, just 25 years later.
Each ideally needs its own address, and it's not hard to see how 4 bln addresses will be used up.
While I agree with the "NAT is for geeks" sentiment, I disagree that putting every last possible consumer device on the publicly addressible Internet backbone is a good idea. On that basis, I would say that it is NOT ideal for each device to have its own (globally unique) address. Given what a festering pool of viruses and hacker slime the Internet has become, using a router to minimize the number of moving parts that come in contact with the outside world (and a firewall to keep that point-of-contact safe) is probably still a good idea, even if we don't *need* to do it because of an address shortage. Once you accept that - and realize that it means that having a global unique address doesn't benefit "interactivity" at all - it doesn't matter as much what the address space in your house looks like. NAT or no NAT, the challenges of managing the environment are the same.
I have done absolutely no searches to find out if any of the ideas described in this article have been patented or not.
Yeah, no kidding.
Agree - obviously he didn't do any research, given that there are patents on at least certain types of one-handed keyboards, such as U.S. Patent No. 5288158 held by Edgar Matias. That's one which he aggressively defends, btw, as any Mac user who used uControl might know. And never mind how many Google hits you get on "patent one-handed keyboard". *sigh*
They are capturing more than i.p. addresses, they are inspecting packets, to the point where they can determine which web pages ("page number" in the article ) you visited. So the analogy to the "pen register" (which is the device they use to sniff the telephone #'s on a phone call - according to the article anyway) is false. Hopefully we will see an appeal on that basis.
Having actually used S3 (its hard to beat the price!) a quick-and-dirty summary is that its essentially WebDAV with a proprietary protocol - at least on the front end. But, rather than use proprietary HTTP verbs like WebDAV did, they used web services (both REST and SOAP). If they want to patent their proprietary protocol, fine. But for a general process of remotely accessing objects over HTTP... sorry, no. Maybe if S3 used something other than URL's to be the object key, but they don't. You can't call a directory a "bucket", call a file an "object" and expect us to believe you invented something! Trademark those words for your particular web service if you like, but its hardly an invention.
As for the backend, maybe Amazon did something unique, but I'd be surprised. NAS isn't exactly new, even if they have the biggest bestest darn NAS there is.
So, yet another brilliant "invention" from Amazon.
Nice points on the importance of units. I still remember my first exposure to unit math in high school chemistry. I personally think that conversion factors and the "math of units" (as in, if you multiply grams by grams you get grams-squared) should be taught in mainstream math, not just the science classes. afaik, the closest you get in mainstream math is with story problems, and its usually accompanied by a lot of hand-waving.
It's a bit of a leap to get from there to the gold standard and Iraq. It gave me a good laugh, though, if that was the intent.
Microsoft "given up" on beter/quicker? Microsoft is/has been a lot of things, but innovation isn't one of them. They are far more successful at letting someone else identify a profitable niche (WordPerfect, Lotus Notes, dBase, Novell, cc:Mail, windowed UI, Netscape, RealPlayer, Apache...) and then dominating it by any means necessary. I'm not even sure better/quicker applies.
As for Google... meh. A commodity search engine and some amusing toys that I download once and never use again. I don't really think of them as a products company, just a services company that is (unsuccessfuly so far) trying to enter the products space. If they were to disappear tomorrow, I'd pick another search engine off the list and not think twice about it. They certainly aren't a company I think of as "making a better, quicker, more effective product" or even "filling a need". But that's just my opinion. They are certainly getting some good press and people seem to be raving about them as if they matter... but beyond the search engine, I just don't see it, myself.
So we all have to conduct our lives the way you want us to? Whatever happened to "different strokes for different folks?"
I agree with the OP: Leave work at work! For me it took a nervous breakdown for that to sink in. As for "different strokes for different folks"... I'm all for that, but let me ask you this: if you just read an article glamourizing what you knew to be a self-destructive lifestyle (based on personal experience), would you not want to add your $.02 to keep others from making the same mistake?
The article deals specifically with the software industry, which is what I work in, so this is all hitting close to home. The software industry will chew you up, spit you out and throw you away. It is an industry in which you have to constantly retrain just to stay current. And an industry that is infamous for employee burnout. That's where I'm coming from, and possibly, where the OP is coming from as well (lots of industry folks here on/.). I've done my share of 80+ hour weeks (and 16+ hour days, eating at my desk, stopping only to sleep) because I "wanted to". I've hit the wall with depression (mentioned in the comments in the FA) when a project got cancelled. I've watched companies toss entire divisions out on the streets because some corporate mucky-muck got cooking the books. This isn't sour grapes, I'm not bitter about it at all. But it did make for a hell of a wakeup call as to the reality of the business world.
Never forget that it is *just* a job. The company is using you to meet their objectives. You are using them to meet yours. To pretend that it is anything other than a "mutually beneficial arrangement" is naive.
If someone likes working all the time, why not respect that and move on with your life?
Because, as a former co-worker pointed out to me, "no one sits on their death bed wishing they spent more time at the office".
This isn't about respect, as much as a warning "please don't make the mistakes that I've made" and "If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't do that, because...". I'm sure there are people that think they are balancing things, that they have it under control, they can handle it. So does your average junkie, right up until they OD.
This seems to have the same flawed logic as the last time, which I posted about (and which I can't find to link to, sorry), which is this:
THE TOTAL NUMBER OF VULNERABILITIES IS IRRELEVANT.
See, the problem is, we have no idea what the total number of vulnerabilities is for a given OS, thus it is meaningless to compare the absolute numbers. It is however meaningful to compare the %, and from that you get a different conclusion:
- approx 30% of currently reported Vista bugs are High Severity. Or, the odds of a new bug being high severity is 30%. - 25/45 (55% or so) of XP bugs are High Severity. - 98/348 (28%) of RHEL bugs are High Severity - 52/160 (32%) for Ubuntu - 20/75 (26%) for Mac OS X
At best, we can conclude from this that Vista is almost as good as Linux / Mac now. At least, in the absence of other factors, such as low adoption rate (low # users = low # of reports, all else equal) and "undisclosed, reported" vulnerabilities, both of which are unaccounted for in the article.
It is also important to remember that these numbers only represent vulnerabilities that:
1) were discovered by a user (which is easier to do if you have the source)
2) reported to the vendor (which in my experience is more likely in a receptive OSS community than a corporate environment)
3) are disclosed by the vendor (again, more likely in OSS than corporate)
Agree with the parent post. The review can be summed up as "its not Firefox".
As far as Safari ignoring Windows conventions... *shrug*. The shoe is on the other foot? Word 6 for Mac was the same: Windows conventions on a Mac, in the interest of "portability" or "consistent user interface". Everyone hated it. The difference here being, I wouldn't expect anyone to be surprised by this, since iTunes does the same thing (Mac L&F in Windows) and has been around for quite awhile. Maybe the reviewer has been living under a rock, and hasn't seen iTunes?
Last, from the article: "it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox." Again, the statement "it's not Firefox" applies. In this case though, with all due respect, the author has missed the point. That is one of Safari's advantages: it isn't bloatware (yet). I cringe every time I need to use Firefox (thankfully rare) because it is so painfully slow, especially to launch (its slower overall, but launch is especially painful).
Personally I am very excited about seeing Safari ported to Windows, and look forward to trying it out once it goes GA. Who knows, it might even gain enough of a foothold that webdev's start testing with it, which will benefit both Safari and Konqueror (since Safari's render engine is based on KHTML, iirc that's what Konqueror uses also).
Rather than try to answer the questions directly, I thought I'd try a different approach.
From the perspective of the software you are writing:
- BSD vs. Linux is irrelevant, in terms of the GPL. Commercial, closed source apps can and are built on both, with no encumbrance due to the license of the OS itself.
- In terms of libraries you may use: the OS itself (BSD vs Linux) is irrelevant. If you go with BSD OS and use a LGPL library, you are still bound by LGPL wrt that library. If you go with Linux and avoid all encumbering licenses, as you suggest write it all from scratch, then you are also in the clear
From the perspective of the hardware:
- If you go with Linux, you are considered a distributor under GPL, and bound by it to the extent that it covers distributors, even if you don't do anything with your Linux except install it. iirc this means you need to be able to provide users with the same source media you received with your Linux, so that they can hack the OS (and any other GPL you include, such as GNU tools) however they see fit. I *think* that your own code is o.k., but the line can get blurry, esp. if you start patching the OS to make your app work (ex: TiVo). It's a good idea to get a copy of GPL yourself and read it, talk to the FSF if you need clarification (you may get a "closed source is bad spiel", but you should get the information you're after), and sit down with your lawyer to make sure you understand what you're getting in to.
- If you go with BSD, you avoid this entire hassle, other than possibly if you use a version of BSD that has an acknowledgment / advertising clause, then you still have to comply with that. Unlike GPL, BSD doesn't burden distributors with a political agenda.
I used that example because it was a real world example, in which "illusory contract" (not "duress") was just one of the affirmative defenses, referring to the scenario I described. But it was just an example. It hasn't gone to trial so I have no idea what bearing it has on the case. See, that's the odd thing about the U.S. legal system, is that you get to go before a judge (maybe also a jury), argue your case, and the judge will then (ideally) make a decision based on the merits of the case and relevant case law. As opposed to leaving it up to armchair lawyers like you and I. If there's one thing I've learned about the U.S. legal system, the only hard and fast rule is that there are no hard and fast rules.
The point I was trying to make, which follows from the parent argument, is that not only are there situations where not signing something can still result in a contract, there are situations in which having a signature is not enough to make it a contract. Apparently I wasn't clear enough on that, or maybe you dislike my particular example. Fine. That doesn't change the fact that having your signature on a document doesn't guarantee that there is a contract. Your comments appear to agree with this general statement (maybe not the specific example), or at least imply that if you can show duress, the contract can become invalid, regardless of the signature. There is always the example of someone literally holding a gun to your head until you sign, but that seemed unrealistic and exaggerated to me, and I have no experience with it, so I didn't use it. I went with something I knew. Matlock? Hardly.
I won't even get into the flaws in your logic about hospitals being required to treat you (agreed, that is true), and whether that has any relevance. It is my belief, that if you handed someone a sheaf of papers, told them "sign these so we can admit him" (implied: if you don't, we can't, and he'll die), the vast majority of people will sign them without reading them. Also, that many people don't know they have the option to do the paperwork later when they can think straight. And also, that the hospital is obligated to treat life-threatening cases regardless of the paperwork, or your ability to pay. The hospitals are full aware that this scenario is common. It is hardly a coincidence that hospital staff pick inopportune moments to get you to sign the paperwork.
Agreed. In point of fact, just because you signed a piece of paper, doesn't make it a contract. Here's an example:
You rush your loved one to the hospital emergency room, something terrible has happened and now his/her life is in danger. While you are fraught with distress over the possibility of losing him/her, and just generally trying not to lose it, some nameless person from the hospital business office hands you a stack of paperwork, one of which is a document where you "agree" to pay the hospital bills. You are told "fill these out so we can admit her". Does the fact that you signed a piece of paper make the contract valid? The hospitals want you to think so, but the tactic amounts to "sign this or he dies". One can reasonably argue that you did not agree to the terms, regardless of the fact there is a piece of paper with your signature on it.
FTFA: I've outlined before how multicore moves the burden of taking advantage of Moore's law from hardware onto developers.
Alrighty, then. It's been a while since my CS classes. How does that apply to software?
It doesn't. But its either that, or Intel has to come out and tell us the truth: "We hardware guys are tired of all this focus on Moore's Law. Let's let the software guys bang their heads against Amdahl's Law for awhile."
The Thread Building Blocks look interesting, and are available for multiple compilers (MS, Intel, GCC) and platforms (Win, Linux, Mac). Reading between the lines, it looks like their strategy is to convince you to use TBB for your threading (maybe not a bad idea, by-hand threading code is boring and error prone), and then profile your code with VTune (which I have used before, its good as profilers go) plus the VTune plugin to do thread performance analysis.
As far as this actual announcement, there's not much to it. Looks like they upgraded their Fortran and C++ compliers to work better with TBB. TBB and VTune are Intel's strategy when it comes to optimizing for multiple cores. No surprise there - VTune has been the tool for optimizing for Intel for awhile now, if you want to optimize for Intel (which != optimizing for x86).
So depending on what you mean by "add these features to GCC", they already have. If you're looking for GCC extension support in the Intel compiler, though - well, I can't help you there. And likely neither can they, thanks to GPL. You painted yourself in that corner when you chose to code to the GCC compiler (and not ANSI) in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I like GCC, but coding to a specific compiler is always a bad idea, in my book.
But I thought the new Intel macs had upgradeable CPUs (didn't someone upgrade one to an 8 core before apple released one?) and you can upgrade the ram and the hard drive. I admit I know nothing about upgrading video cards on the mac these days (laptop again) so that might be an issue.
Off the top of my head, the story was that the original high-end Intel tower shipped from Apple had 2x Core Duo's in them; and early on there was a reviewer (one of the reputable ones) that slotted it with a couple of (then) brand new 4x Cores. There was a bit in the article about the reviewer being unable to hit it with a workload capable of keeping the CPU's busy, like he could with the Apple-stock 2x Cores. It was a typical Adobe-something or other pipeline render test, iirc.
As for video cards, upgrades are pretty much the same as with PC's these days. Apple sold out to the standard bus architecture a while ago, back when AGP was still in fashion (they're PCI-X now). It helps that the industry has come to its senses on that front (USB and DVI all around), proprietary peripherals appear to finally be a thing of the past.
What this would seem (at least on the surface) to bring us closer to is the ansible communications technology employed most famously in the Ender's Game series.
I've not read Ender's so I've no idea whether quantum entanglement relates to "ansible" or not, but I did read Chris Moriarty's Spin State quite recently. Quantum entanglement features prominently in that story as both a communications mechanism for a universe-spanning computer network, as well as for an FTL transportation mechanism. It also has an impressive bibliography, which led me to believe that some of the ideas may have a basis in contemporary theories.
> Well, that and the fact the legal power to enforce GPL to people not actually distributing any GPL'ed > software (but only binary BLOBs intended to link with GPL'ed software) is somewhat dubious. A > new version of the GPL will not change either of these.
This relates a bit to a point I've always wondered about w.r.t. GPL (which perhaps in the spirit of the OP, could be called "OS-ization"), perhaps someone has the answer, the question is this: how do you draw the line between the GPL'd software and non-GPL'd components that software depends upon? To be specific, think of any GPL'd software (for sake of argument lets say GIMP) that runs on Windows. In some sense of the word, GIMP cannot legally be placed under GPL, because it is not possible to put "the entire work" under GPL: portions of GIMP will link against Windows.DLL's, and those.DLL's aren't GPL'd. What is the criteria that exempts those.DLL's? Because it was produced by a different vendor? Because it is 'obviously' an 'independent' component? What? And whatever logic you use to draw the line, what is to prevent someone from using that same logic to construct some other GPL/non-GPL hybrid program? To send the point home, think about the case of a Windows-only (hasn't been ported, and perhaps couldn't be) program placed under GPL? You have the 'freedom' to port the OS-dependent code, you just have to re-implement those portions to use different API's that provide equivalent functionality. Seems to me it would be mighty easy to use that same logic to incorporate any non-GPL code you wish.
Not only do Microsoft fans call everything they disagree with "FUD" because they can't address it, but they're being very ironic by using a Microsoft-coined term.
I'd always heard that the term FUD originated with IBM, since for awhile they were infamous for using FUD tactics to sell mainframes.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so sure about Goodwill. Last time I talked to a Goodwill employee, I was told that they really only want items that are in good working order - something that can be resold without repair. So as long as its still useful, they are an option. But if its actually broken, don't waste their time or yours - they will just throw it away. This is true for everything with them, not just tech. Might be true of Salvation Army, not sure. I've heard that both of them get a lot more donations (in terms of physical items, not money, putting that loose change in Santa's bucket is okay!) than they can actually make use of.
Personally, I'd give to Food for the Poor before either Goodwill or Salvation Army, though not for tech. They are a lot less picky about what they take and seem to do a good job of finding a home for your worn out consumer goods.
Threaten to countersue him under RICO (racketeering and extortion). Your suit would be just a frivolous as his, but it might shut him up.
If it were me, I'd ignore him. My recollection of the ICANN rules is that the burden is on him to prove:
1. That he has a legitimate, real-world business that could reasonably be expected to be associated with the name; and,
2. That you don't: that your primary reason for registering the domain is to profit by selling it to someone who does
Having a registered trademark or business identity can help show 1., and lack of can help show 2. But afaik (ianal), trademark law per se has nothing definitive to say when it comes to domain names. Also, afaik, the only entity that has made any sort of rules around domain name use is ICANN.
Agree - there is no such thing as a "simple" RAM failure. RAM failures are rare, and hard to diagnose, unless its completely fried and even BIOS doesn't detect it. I've seen them before and its still not on the short list of failing components I think to check for. HDD failures, viruses, and configuration problems are more common by a good margin.
I couldn't watch the video (it doesn't load, due to a "bad path" error - maybe they're running another "sting" ?), but in the teaser they mention that they "simulated" a RAM failure. Short of putting a flaky RAM stick in (which would be an *actual* RAM failure) I don't know how you would simulate one. The fact that 3 out of the 10 techs could guess that the machine had the *symptoms* of bad RAM (due to a whacked BIOS or whatever else they did to "simulate" it) is pretty amazing to me. Who's to say it even acted like a RAM failure?
When it comes to diagnostics, the possibility that a machine is "faking" that it is sick isn't something I'd even consider. So a big "BOO" to the so-called journalists for flawed methodology.
From the record companies perspective, you need to persuade them to make more and then go buy them!
On the software side, this is what is sometimes referred to as "abandonware" or "zombieware". People will often make a copy of it and don't feel as bad about it because there is no other way to purchase the title. Its still illegal. Its just less likely that the copyright holder will take action.
Fair use doesn't help you with getting a copy of a rare title, in fact its the opposite: copyright ensures that such rare titles will remain expensive and hard-to-find. However if the copyright on it ever expires and it becomes public domain then you can copy the out-of-print title to your heart's content and preserve it. Until then you have to hope there is a library or a collector that is holding on to it who will make it available once the copyright runs out.
I have a dual BA in Comp Sci and Management (Bus Admin). I have been in enough management positions to know that, although I've been told I'm good at it, I prefer not to do it. My take on it is this: you can't teach someone to be a manager. You either have it, or you don't. And, I think that you don't, or you wouldn't have asked in the first place. But feel free to try to prove me wrong.
The job of the manager is to provide leadership. On a day to day basis it means three things:
1. Being decisive. This isn't just making decisions, it is both being able to make hard decisions appear easy and giving the appearance of being confident that those decisions are correct. It is entirely about perception. You can have doubts, but in most cases, you need to keep those to yourself so that the decision will be enacted effectivley (if you doubt, then others will doubt, and you will make less progress).
2. Playing politics. Once you get off the lines and out of direct technical work, politics becomes a major factor, both within the company and without (vendor relationships, etc). (Aside: this is what you're supposed to "get" out of the Organizational Behavior classes). All human endeavors are inherently political, so beware anyone that tells you that "there are no politics here" or that politics aren't part of the job. As an architect, one thing you will find is that you'll need to be able to work well with the development managers (the ones who own the code) in order to accomplish your goals.
3. The Golden Rule. "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Well, that, and the other one, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.". If you keep this in mind in your dealings with your employees, you will do ok. It's the PHB's that forget that their employees are people that tend to be the ones that are ineffective and disliked. You won't be able to be their friend all the time - in the business world, sh** happens - but do try to make a conscious effort to treat your people like people and not cogs.
Oh, come on, many of you are thinking it already... its time to boycott J&J !
Personally, for me the symbol is 100% associated with the Red Cross (they use it in all of their commercials), and J&J is Band-Aids and Children's Shampoo. Now if the Red Cross started using a teardrop-shaped "No More Tears" logo, it would be a different story.
Sure, if you want to limit yourself to Terra Firma.
This is a non-argument. It wasn't that long ago that people were saying 'no personal computer will ever need more than 64K of RAM". Look at where we are now, just 25 years later.
Each ideally needs its own address, and it's not hard to see how 4 bln addresses will be used up.While I agree with the "NAT is for geeks" sentiment, I disagree that putting every last possible consumer device on the publicly addressible Internet backbone is a good idea. On that basis, I would say that it is NOT ideal for each device to have its own (globally unique) address. Given what a festering pool of viruses and hacker slime the Internet has become, using a router to minimize the number of moving parts that come in contact with the outside world (and a firewall to keep that point-of-contact safe) is probably still a good idea, even if we don't *need* to do it because of an address shortage. Once you accept that - and realize that it means that having a global unique address doesn't benefit "interactivity" at all - it doesn't matter as much what the address space in your house looks like. NAT or no NAT, the challenges of managing the environment are the same.
Agree - obviously he didn't do any research, given that there are patents on at least certain types of one-handed keyboards, such as U.S. Patent No. 5288158 held by Edgar Matias. That's one which he aggressively defends, btw, as any Mac user who used uControl might know. And never mind how many Google hits you get on "patent one-handed keyboard". *sigh*
They are capturing more than i.p. addresses, they are inspecting packets, to the point where they can determine which web pages ("page number" in the article ) you visited. So the analogy to the "pen register" (which is the device they use to sniff the telephone #'s on a phone call - according to the article anyway) is false. Hopefully we will see an appeal on that basis.
Having actually used S3 (its hard to beat the price!) a quick-and-dirty summary is that its essentially WebDAV with a proprietary protocol - at least on the front end. But, rather than use proprietary HTTP verbs like WebDAV did, they used web services (both REST and SOAP). If they want to patent their proprietary protocol, fine. But for a general process of remotely accessing objects over HTTP... sorry, no. Maybe if S3 used something other than URL's to be the object key, but they don't. You can't call a directory a "bucket", call a file an "object" and expect us to believe you invented something! Trademark those words for your particular web service if you like, but its hardly an invention.
As for the backend, maybe Amazon did something unique, but I'd be surprised. NAS isn't exactly new, even if they have the biggest bestest darn NAS there is.
So, yet another brilliant "invention" from Amazon.
Nice points on the importance of units. I still remember my first exposure to unit math in high school chemistry. I personally think that conversion factors and the "math of units" (as in, if you multiply grams by grams you get grams-squared) should be taught in mainstream math, not just the science classes. afaik, the closest you get in mainstream math is with story problems, and its usually accompanied by a lot of hand-waving.
It's a bit of a leap to get from there to the gold standard and Iraq. It gave me a good laugh, though, if that was the intent.
Microsoft "given up" on beter/quicker? Microsoft is/has been a lot of things, but innovation isn't one of them. They are far more successful at letting someone else identify a profitable niche (WordPerfect, Lotus Notes, dBase, Novell, cc:Mail, windowed UI, Netscape, RealPlayer, Apache...) and then dominating it by any means necessary. I'm not even sure better/quicker applies.
As for Google... meh. A commodity search engine and some amusing toys that I download once and never use again. I don't really think of them as a products company, just a services company that is (unsuccessfuly so far) trying to enter the products space. If they were to disappear tomorrow, I'd pick another search engine off the list and not think twice about it. They certainly aren't a company I think of as "making a better, quicker, more effective product" or even "filling a need". But that's just my opinion. They are certainly getting some good press and people seem to be raving about them as if they matter... but beyond the search engine, I just don't see it, myself.
I agree with the OP: Leave work at work! For me it took a nervous breakdown for that to sink in. As for "different strokes for different folks"... I'm all for that, but let me ask you this: if you just read an article glamourizing what you knew to be a self-destructive lifestyle (based on personal experience), would you not want to add your $.02 to keep others from making the same mistake?
The article deals specifically with the software industry, which is what I work in, so this is all hitting close to home. The software industry will chew you up, spit you out and throw you away. It is an industry in which you have to constantly retrain just to stay current. And an industry that is infamous for employee burnout. That's where I'm coming from, and possibly, where the OP is coming from as well (lots of industry folks here on /.). I've done my share of 80+ hour weeks (and 16+ hour days, eating at my desk, stopping only to sleep) because I "wanted to". I've hit the wall with depression (mentioned in the comments in the FA) when a project got cancelled. I've watched companies toss entire divisions out on the streets because some corporate mucky-muck got cooking the books. This isn't sour grapes, I'm not bitter about it at all. But it did make for a hell of a wakeup call as to the reality of the business world.
Never forget that it is *just* a job. The company is using you to meet their objectives. You are using them to meet yours. To pretend that it is anything other than a "mutually beneficial arrangement" is naive.
If someone likes working all the time, why not respect that and move on with your life?Because, as a former co-worker pointed out to me, "no one sits on their death bed wishing they spent more time at the office".
This isn't about respect, as much as a warning "please don't make the mistakes that I've made" and "If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't do that, because...". I'm sure there are people that think they are balancing things, that they have it under control, they can handle it. So does your average junkie, right up until they OD.
This seems to have the same flawed logic as the last time, which I posted about (and which I can't find to link to, sorry), which is this:
THE TOTAL NUMBER OF VULNERABILITIES IS IRRELEVANT.
See, the problem is, we have no idea what the total number of vulnerabilities is for a given OS, thus it is meaningless to compare the absolute numbers. It is however meaningful to compare the %, and from that you get a different conclusion:
- approx 30% of currently reported Vista bugs are High Severity. Or, the odds of a new bug being high severity is 30%.
- 25/45 (55% or so) of XP bugs are High Severity.
- 98/348 (28%) of RHEL bugs are High Severity
- 52/160 (32%) for Ubuntu
- 20/75 (26%) for Mac OS X
At best, we can conclude from this that Vista is almost as good as Linux / Mac now. At least, in the absence of other factors, such as low adoption rate (low # users = low # of reports, all else equal) and "undisclosed, reported" vulnerabilities, both of which are unaccounted for in the article.
It is also important to remember that these numbers only represent vulnerabilities that:
1) were discovered by a user (which is easier to do if you have the source)
2) reported to the vendor (which in my experience is more likely in a receptive OSS community than a corporate environment)
3) are disclosed by the vendor (again, more likely in OSS than corporate)
Agree with the parent post. The review can be summed up as "its not Firefox".
As far as Safari ignoring Windows conventions... *shrug*. The shoe is on the other foot? Word 6 for Mac was the same: Windows conventions on a Mac, in the interest of "portability" or "consistent user interface". Everyone hated it. The difference here being, I wouldn't expect anyone to be surprised by this, since iTunes does the same thing (Mac L&F in Windows) and has been around for quite awhile. Maybe the reviewer has been living under a rock, and hasn't seen iTunes?
Last, from the article: "it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox." Again, the statement "it's not Firefox" applies. In this case though, with all due respect, the author has missed the point. That is one of Safari's advantages: it isn't bloatware (yet). I cringe every time I need to use Firefox (thankfully rare) because it is so painfully slow, especially to launch (its slower overall, but launch is especially painful).
Personally I am very excited about seeing Safari ported to Windows, and look forward to trying it out once it goes GA. Who knows, it might even gain enough of a foothold that webdev's start testing with it, which will benefit both Safari and Konqueror (since Safari's render engine is based on KHTML, iirc that's what Konqueror uses also).
Rather than try to answer the questions directly, I thought I'd try a different approach.
From the perspective of the software you are writing:
- BSD vs. Linux is irrelevant, in terms of the GPL. Commercial, closed source apps can and are built on both, with no encumbrance due to the license of the OS itself.
- In terms of libraries you may use: the OS itself (BSD vs Linux) is irrelevant. If you go with BSD OS and use a LGPL library, you are still bound by LGPL wrt that library. If you go with Linux and avoid all encumbering licenses, as you suggest write it all from scratch, then you are also in the clear
From the perspective of the hardware:
- If you go with Linux, you are considered a distributor under GPL, and bound by it to the extent that it covers distributors, even if you don't do anything with your Linux except install it. iirc this means you need to be able to provide users with the same source media you received with your Linux, so that they can hack the OS (and any other GPL you include, such as GNU tools) however they see fit. I *think* that your own code is o.k., but the line can get blurry, esp. if you start patching the OS to make your app work (ex: TiVo). It's a good idea to get a copy of GPL yourself and read it, talk to the FSF if you need clarification (you may get a "closed source is bad spiel", but you should get the information you're after), and sit down with your lawyer to make sure you understand what you're getting in to.
- If you go with BSD, you avoid this entire hassle, other than possibly if you use a version of BSD that has an acknowledgment / advertising clause, then you still have to comply with that. Unlike GPL, BSD doesn't burden distributors with a political agenda.
Gotta love these ad hominem attacks...
I used that example because it was a real world example, in which "illusory contract" (not "duress") was just one of the affirmative defenses, referring to the scenario I described. But it was just an example. It hasn't gone to trial so I have no idea what bearing it has on the case. See, that's the odd thing about the U.S. legal system, is that you get to go before a judge (maybe also a jury), argue your case, and the judge will then (ideally) make a decision based on the merits of the case and relevant case law. As opposed to leaving it up to armchair lawyers like you and I. If there's one thing I've learned about the U.S. legal system, the only hard and fast rule is that there are no hard and fast rules.
The point I was trying to make, which follows from the parent argument, is that not only are there situations where not signing something can still result in a contract, there are situations in which having a signature is not enough to make it a contract. Apparently I wasn't clear enough on that, or maybe you dislike my particular example. Fine. That doesn't change the fact that having your signature on a document doesn't guarantee that there is a contract. Your comments appear to agree with this general statement (maybe not the specific example), or at least imply that if you can show duress, the contract can become invalid, regardless of the signature. There is always the example of someone literally holding a gun to your head until you sign, but that seemed unrealistic and exaggerated to me, and I have no experience with it, so I didn't use it. I went with something I knew. Matlock? Hardly.
I won't even get into the flaws in your logic about hospitals being required to treat you (agreed, that is true), and whether that has any relevance. It is my belief, that if you handed someone a sheaf of papers, told them "sign these so we can admit him" (implied: if you don't, we can't, and he'll die), the vast majority of people will sign them without reading them. Also, that many people don't know they have the option to do the paperwork later when they can think straight. And also, that the hospital is obligated to treat life-threatening cases regardless of the paperwork, or your ability to pay. The hospitals are full aware that this scenario is common. It is hardly a coincidence that hospital staff pick inopportune moments to get you to sign the paperwork.
Agreed. In point of fact, just because you signed a piece of paper, doesn't make it a contract. Here's an example:
You rush your loved one to the hospital emergency room, something terrible has happened and now his/her life is in danger. While you are fraught with distress over the possibility of losing him/her, and just generally trying not to lose it, some nameless person from the hospital business office hands you a stack of paperwork, one of which is a document where you "agree" to pay the hospital bills. You are told "fill these out so we can admit her". Does the fact that you signed a piece of paper make the contract valid? The hospitals want you to think so, but the tactic amounts to "sign this or he dies". One can reasonably argue that you did not agree to the terms, regardless of the fact there is a piece of paper with your signature on it.
Alrighty, then. It's been a while since my CS classes. How does that apply to software?
It doesn't. But its either that, or Intel has to come out and tell us the truth: "We hardware guys are tired of all this focus on Moore's Law. Let's let the software guys bang their heads against Amdahl's Law for awhile."
The Thread Building Blocks look interesting, and are available for multiple compilers (MS, Intel, GCC) and platforms (Win, Linux, Mac). Reading between the lines, it looks like their strategy is to convince you to use TBB for your threading (maybe not a bad idea, by-hand threading code is boring and error prone), and then profile your code with VTune (which I have used before, its good as profilers go) plus the VTune plugin to do thread performance analysis.
As far as this actual announcement, there's not much to it. Looks like they upgraded their Fortran and C++ compliers to work better with TBB. TBB and VTune are Intel's strategy when it comes to optimizing for multiple cores. No surprise there - VTune has been the tool for optimizing for Intel for awhile now, if you want to optimize for Intel (which != optimizing for x86).
So depending on what you mean by "add these features to GCC", they already have. If you're looking for GCC extension support in the Intel compiler, though - well, I can't help you there. And likely neither can they, thanks to GPL. You painted yourself in that corner when you chose to code to the GCC compiler (and not ANSI) in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I like GCC, but coding to a specific compiler is always a bad idea, in my book.
Off the top of my head, the story was that the original high-end Intel tower shipped from Apple had 2x Core Duo's in them; and early on there was a reviewer (one of the reputable ones) that slotted it with a couple of (then) brand new 4x Cores. There was a bit in the article about the reviewer being unable to hit it with a workload capable of keeping the CPU's busy, like he could with the Apple-stock 2x Cores. It was a typical Adobe-something or other pipeline render test, iirc.
As for video cards, upgrades are pretty much the same as with PC's these days. Apple sold out to the standard bus architecture a while ago, back when AGP was still in fashion (they're PCI-X now). It helps that the industry has come to its senses on that front (USB and DVI all around), proprietary peripherals appear to finally be a thing of the past.
I've not read Ender's so I've no idea whether quantum entanglement relates to "ansible" or not, but I did read Chris Moriarty's Spin State quite recently. Quantum entanglement features prominently in that story as both a communications mechanism for a universe-spanning computer network, as well as for an FTL transportation mechanism. It also has an impressive bibliography, which led me to believe that some of the ideas may have a basis in contemporary theories.
> Well, that and the fact the legal power to enforce GPL to people not actually distributing any GPL'ed
.DLL's, and those .DLL's aren't GPL'd. What is the criteria that exempts those .DLL's? Because it was produced by a different vendor? Because it is 'obviously' an 'independent' component? What? And whatever logic you use to draw the line, what is to prevent someone from using that same logic to construct some other GPL/non-GPL hybrid program? To send the point home, think about the case of a Windows-only (hasn't been ported, and perhaps couldn't be) program placed under GPL? You have the 'freedom' to port the OS-dependent code, you just have to re-implement those portions to use different API's that provide equivalent functionality. Seems to me it would be mighty easy to use that same logic to incorporate any non-GPL code you wish.
> software (but only binary BLOBs intended to link with GPL'ed software) is somewhat dubious. A
> new version of the GPL will not change either of these.
This relates a bit to a point I've always wondered about w.r.t. GPL (which perhaps in the spirit of the OP, could be called "OS-ization"), perhaps someone has the answer, the question is this: how do you draw the line between the GPL'd software and non-GPL'd components that software depends upon? To be specific, think of any GPL'd software (for sake of argument lets say GIMP) that runs on Windows. In some sense of the word, GIMP cannot legally be placed under GPL, because it is not possible to put "the entire work" under GPL: portions of GIMP will link against Windows
That's the great thing about standards - there are so many to choose from !
I'd always heard that the term FUD originated with IBM, since for awhile they were infamous for using FUD tactics to sell mainframes.