Me too. But I'm pretty sure the VMS versioning was just a convenience feature, and that the versions were independent files - not implemented in the filesystem and not implemented using copy-on-write. I vaguely recall being able to rename a;2 file to something like "name_SAVE" so that I didn't lose that particular version when it purged. But it has been a long time since I've touched VMS.
Given that Unix has had the concept of file "versioning" since I don't know when (but a long-azz time!)
*scratches head* Unix? Versioning? Never seen it myself. Not to say it isn't there, but over the years I've used several *ix flavors and fs versioning isn't something I've come across. I suppose next you'll tell us Unix has file locking (afaik it doesn't, unless you count advisory locks. I don't).
This is a reverse-engineering of Apple's Time Machine, through and through.
I hate to be one to point this out, but, er... Time Machine is a BACKUP tool. Don't believe me? Go to http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.ht ml and read the copy yourself, being sure to pay special attention to use of phrases like "the drive you're backing up to". How on earth you could possibly confuse a backup tool with a versioned file system is beyond me.
The information I've seen is that the new rates are 3x-5x what the old rates were. No, I don't recall where I saw it, might have been somewhere on savenetradio.org. I think the answer to your question is, "it depends", since it sounds like the pricing model has changed from per-listener-per-song to percent-total-revenue.
Regardless, its probably a smart move to make the rates consistent with what satellite radio pays, and a % revenue model won't shut down small broadcasters as easily as a flat rate would. It also takes away any possibility that the CRB might again try to use this tactic to shutdown Internet radio in favor of the commercial outlets.
In addition, once this road is crossed -- impeaching for , and every time the president/vp is in office, and a different party has a majority in the senate and house, you'll see an impeachment.
That line was crossed in 1998 when they impeached Clinton.
Finally, does Kucinich this this will help him get elected President?
Maybe, maybe not. Its certainly consistent with his politics. From what little I know of Kucinich, he's a radical that is more interested in calling attention to unpopular issues, rather than having a sound political strategy that will get him elected.
The basic idea is that CISC/RISC architectures rely on storing intermediate data in registers (or in main memory on old skool CISC). EDGE bypasses registers: the output of one instruction is fed directly to the input of the next. No need to do register allocation while compiling. I'm still reading the PDF, this sounds like a really neat idea, though.
What I liked even more was the idea of "execution blocks", where a given (processor pipeline width) worth of instructions are treated as an atomic "transaction"... clearly this is a nod to minimize the branch prediction penalty. I haven't been keeping up with hardware arch enough to know if this is a new idea or not, but it was new to me.
The only question is, will this be so much better than existing ISA's to eventually replace them? -- even if only for specific applications like high-performance computing.
I think it may be a contender, or at least gain some popularity (like MIPS did in the 90's), if nothing else for the fact that the big limitation in the EDGE design appears to be in the ability for real programs to exploit parallelism. This is exactly the same problem we're fancing with the latest batch of multi-core processors from Intel: all those processing units are nice, but its a b**ch to keep them all busy.
And for those who were going to wait, they now have to make the choice continuing until the October release or biting the bullet and getting a new computer before then.
Buying early isn't a big deal. Apple used to (probably still does, I just can't find the link right now) have an "Up To Date" program, whereby you would be entitled to a free OS upgrade if you bought a new system within X many months prior to the new version of the OS coming out. They've been running this program for years, I can't imagine they'd stop now. Worth checking into (as in ask the rep, or call Apple, before you buy) if you're really chomping at the bit to buy a new system.
Y'know, if I were trying to pass off my personal recollection of events as a "credible source" (as in "challenge anyone to cite a credible source that says otherwise", in the parent post), I certainly wouldn't have posted as an Anonymous Coward. I might have, oh I don't know, cited a transcript of the speech I'm quoting, maybe put a name to this mysterious IBMer, a date to the keynote, a place to the stage. Just because you know someone who knows someone who's brother's younger sister's boyfriend overheard some people who were walking near the building where the conference may or may not have been taking place, doesn't make it true.
Not that it really matters a rat's arse who dumped who. Its as if Slashdotters somehow believe there is an objective reality when it comes to corporate politics.
At least Moto hasn't been dragged into this thread yet. Er, oops.
Ok, so I'm late to the party, and this might be a little off-topic, but... well, patent issues aren't new for the FreeType devs. They used to (I think its gone now) have an #ifdef for a rendering technique that, like this one, was by default disabled. That particular one (I forget what it covered) infringed on patents held by Apple. It was off by default to keep the default build of the library OSS-friendly. Anyway, to make a long story short, the FT devs did eventually develop a better alternative to Apple's patented technique and now that particular limitation is history. FT v2.1.3, iirc.
Reading the article (and, sorry, I missed the original FUD), this looks to be more of the same. FT devs are concerned that they have something in the library that might infringe a patent. So, as before, they mark it with an #ifdef and, as before, disable it by default so that the library is OSS-friendly. SOP for them, and given their charter is to create a free alternative to a technology that is swarming with proprietary IP, it comes with the territory. I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. If history is any guide, the devs will come up with a patent-free alternative that is better than the original, its just a matter of time. Until then you'll have to live with the fact that the distro vendors will ship pre-built versions with the feature turned off so they can CYA. The code is still there, and the only thing stopping you from enabling it is 1) your ability to build from source, and 2) your conscience, depending on how you feel about software patents.
SET speeds up data transfers by simultaneously downloading different chunks of a desired data file from multiple sources, rather than downloading an entire file from one slow source.
So does ed2k, Bittorrent,...,...,.... this is hardly news. Even plain ol' FTP and HTTP can do this to a degree.
As far as the 99.9% similar "speedup"... I seriously doubt that you'll see any gains other than in lab conditions. MP3 is about the only format that might be agreeable to this, since I imagine its reasonably common for people to fix ID3's and then share the modified file. I just don't see it happening for other formats (.avi,.zip,.rar). And unless you've still got a 14.4 modem I doubt you'll notice the speedup even with MP3's, since they are so small to begin with.
Blizzard really doesn't have much of a case. The copyright infringement and DMCA is bunk, unless they manage to show that WoWGlider enables people to make unauthorized copies of WoW. Seeing as how last time I checked, WoW was a free download, I really doubt there's this sort of infringement going on.
As for the "bot destroys economy" argument. Well, I might be sympathetic to them if they also went after the gold farmers. But they don't. Or, if they didn't have a history of allowing bots like this in their games ( remember D2's Pindlebot? ). Or if they didn't design the game in such a way that it encourages and rewards farming. I think its very telling that they don't have an issue with people grinding over and over again to earn items to sell for real money, and destroy the in-game economy that way. Instead, their complaint is that the bot allows you to farm and profit without being chained to the computer. The bot still has to take the same in-game actions that a player would, so they aren't losing any subscription revenue.
The only possible valid claim Blizzard has are the violations of the EULA and TOS. Which MDY claims are unenforceable. I'm interested to see what, if anything, comes from that. MDY did not itself violate EULA or TOS, but provides a program the use of which constitutes a violation. Given that the "Tortuous Interference with Contract" seems to require that Blizzard prove "that MDY acted with improper means and motive, without economic justification, and that MDY damaged the defendants", I doubt they will win that either. I think the damages will be especially difficult to prove.
This does not make going in and stealing the property any more legal.
I would think it would reduce the charges from "Breaking and Entering" to "Criminal Trespass", as they didn't commit the crime of forcing their way into someone else's house. So in that sense its "more" legal.
And as another poster already pointed out, if the doors had been locked, the crime may not have happened in the first place. Its still a terrible thing that it happened, but leaving the house wide open is just irresponsible. Zero sympathy from me.
In short: abolishing copyright entirely completely eradicates the financial incentive to pay artists to make work. I'm sure some will do it anyway, but most people have to make a living, so there will be virtually no professional, full-time artists of any kind ever again. That, to me, is insane.
otoh, it would discourage those artists who are cranking out mindless drivel (*cough* *cough* Robert Jordan *cough* *cough*) just to sell a few copies so that they can make a living.
As far as what J.K. Rowling might do in your hypothetical scenario, I think these options are more likely:
hold out for more money upfront, as a lump sum payment
switch publishers
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should abolish copyright law entirely, but holding on to outdated business models doesn't make sense either. IMO, its only a matter of time before the book publishers lose their monopoly position just as the music and movie publishers have. Music and movies got hit first because you don't have to interact with the media itself to enjoy the content - you load it into the player and walk away. Its different with a book. At least, for now.
I used to have Speakeasy IDSL. I went with them initially because they were the only ISP that would touch me (I was too far from the CO for DSL, and the clueless cable company only had asymmetric lines back them). But even paying a king's ransom for a terrible line speed, I have to say that Speakeasy had above and beyond the most knowledgeable, helpful staff I ever had the pleasure of working with. The only reason I'm not still with them is that Bellsouth finally put a 'repeater' (wrong word I know, remote switching unit maybe?) and are able to get me 60x the line speed that Speakeasy can. Ironically, it was a Speakeasy tech that told me to ask BS about the switching unit in the first place.
To combine them with Best Buy, who are legendary for their fleet of inept non-technical drooling mouthbreathers, is truly a tragedy. I will hope against hope that Speakeasy weathers the storm and remains a Company That Doesn't Suck, but for some reason this announcement has Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" running through my head.
Nicely put. I cut my teeth on 6502 assembler back in the 80's, to the point where I figured out some of the illegal instructions by looking at the bit patterns between related opcodes (LDA vs LDX vs LDY is a good starting point). When I think of how much I learned hacking assembler on my trusty old C-64, with the Compute! Mapping the C-64 book at my side, and then I think of how much "knowledge" I frequently encounter when talking to Java programmers or (*ack*) "web developers" (LAMP,.ASP, etc.)... I shudder at the thought of someone who is so oblivous to the internals writing an application that I might need to use someday.
And yeah, having deep knowlege definitely makes "hacking" movies hilarious on a whole new level.
(Nothing against Java or LAMP, btw. I've done both. But they are just SO far removed from the hardware, its not even funny.)
Personally I feel that the total # of bugs reported is a pretty meaningless statistic - after all, we don't know what % of the total population they represent - but I do find the ratio of severe / total for each OS to be interesting:
- for Windows, there is a 12/39 = approx 30% chance that if you find a bug, it'll be "severe" (whatever that means)
- for Mac, there is a 1/49 = approx. 2% chance that it'll be severe
- for RHEL, there is a 2/208 = approx 0.9% chance that it'll be severe
Or, Windows is 15x more likely to have a severe bug than a Mac which is 4x more likely than RHEL (and, Windows is 60x more likely than RHEL).
<quote> The only thing different was that I had been surfing the web a bit while the render was going on that day, where the day before I had not. "Surely surfing the web on a mulit-processor machine shouldn't add 15 minutes to a render", I thought. Well, yes it does actually, if you're using Safari. </quote>
<p>Put another way: "Surely letting the computer ONLY do my render won't be any faster than letting the computer render AND surf the web". Surely you jest? Doing a standalone render vs. doing (anything else) while rendering should make your render take longer. If it doesn't, file a bug with Adobe and ask them why they aren't utilizing the hardware properly.</p>
This from the original article, maybe it will clear things up:
In the initial commissioning test, researchers measured the amount of diesel oil burned and electricity produced to calculate its efficiency.
So, one way to read this (ignoring the reactants - yeast and oxygen), is that 1 joule of diesel + (an undisclosed amount of trash) = 1.9 joule of electricity. The potential energy in (undisclosed amount of trash) is necessarily >=.9 joule, since, last time I checked, energy can neither be created nor destroyed: it can only be converted from one form to another (that's what I remember from Physics 101 anyway). The machine probably is not 90% efficient, and certainly not 190% efficient as the article excerpt would have you believe. We don't know what its efficiency rating is without having some idea about the chemical potential energy in the trash. Not that its especially relevant. What is relevant, is if you have N gallons of diesel fuel and enough trash and you run the generator "long enough" that it gets a chance to switch from diesel power to "trash power", then you would end up with 90% more electricity than you would if you used a plain old diesel generator and just buried the trash instead. Put another way, if you require 100 kW of power, you could get it either with X amount of diesel, or X / 1.9 diesel + trash. So your diesel goes further and you've got a handy way to dispose of those Ho-Ho wrappers to boot.
You're right. I'd much rather have a server that has to be rebuilt from scratch (new partition, new OS install, re-install all the applications, try to remember all your config tweaks, then migrate the user data and hope they don't mind their profiles being borked) than a system that will just upgrade the existing software for me. NOT !
I used to use Mandrake (now Mandriva) starting from Mandrake 7 I think it was. Two OS upgrades later I switched. The OS upgrade NEVER worked - each 'upgrade' made the system more and more unstable. Then a coworker recommended Gentoo, with its promise of "our users never worry about version upgrades", which seemed like a godsend. And so far it has been. Sure, updating can be a pain - I usually set aside a weekend of downtime to do it, and do it on a test box first (never on a production box, what are you mad???!!!) - but, more often than not, its not the fault of the package system but the packages themselves (modular X anyone?). Gentoo tends to make you more aware of the incompatibilities in the packages you're upgrading, which to me is a good thing.
This was the only point in the article I agreed with - the rest of the points were basically "make it more like Windows". Apple really does need to pick a UI theme and stick with it - they've been going downhill since the half-assed introduction of "brushed metal" appeared in Panther. C'mon Apple, we know the window manager is at least somewhat aware of themes, given that there are tools like Unsanity's Metallifizer that let us fix your goofs.
And don't even get me started on the new iTunes interface... it just sucks. Yet another theme, to introduce a slightly different shade of grey, and loses the "both arrows at both ends" scrollbar option in the process.
I would have absolutely NO IDEA how to even begin writing it.
You probably do, you're just letting yourself get overwhelmed by the size of the problem. As the Arthur C. Clarke quote goes, "any suitably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That's what you're dealing with here. Think back to the lectures that were about managing complexity... when I was in college, it was called functional decomposition, it might be called something else now ( OO A&D? ). That's how you proceed. Like anything else, its a skill that will improve the more you use it. It's the same thought process that leads you to organize your code into classes/modules/functions/methods, but on a larger scale.
As far as your question about how to learn about things that interest you... learn it on your own time! Most of the really good programmers I've known over the years, do it that way. If you're going to last in this field for any length of time, you have to keep your skills current. Don't count on your boss giving you training to help with that. It's rare. Equally, its unlikely that you'll get help acquiring the skills you need for your dream job (writing emu's or whatever). You'll need to do it on your own time, either with your own projects, helping with an OSS, etc.
Paying taxes on virtual goods that are exchanged for real money... That I can understand.
Yup. And the only news here is that the MMO companies may have to start providing the data the IRS needs to catch people that aren't reporting their in-game earnings. The IRS already has the authority to tax that money. Its 1099 income. What would interest me, is to see if they will go after the non-U.S. gold sellers, classifying them as unregistered foreign business entities. Not that I have the slightest idea how that works, but I imagine U.S. Dept of Commerce has some kind of regs that would cover it.
Paying taxes on virtual goods where you don't exchange for real money is stupid.
Yup, that's why we repealed the Intangibles Tax here in Florida.
What, are they going to start looking through my character's inventory, evaluating how much my +10 Sword of Uberness is worth?
Yes, that's exactly what they would do if they tried for an Alternative Minimum or Intangibles tax. It would be based on the FMV of the item at the time you acquired it (if it worked like AMT... yes, Virginia, AMT sucks!!!!) or the FMV at tax time (if it worked like Intangibles). I don't see them doing this, its too controversial and too hard to implement. Besides, the beast is likely to be sated after feeding on all the 1099 dodgers.
Not in the US, because that 10.00 counts as income, which is taxable. =P
Wrong. As the previous poster stated, you have zero tax liability because you didn't realize a gain on the sale. That's how it works in the US. If your accountant has told you otherwise, hire a new accountant. If you're not using an accountant, maybe you should be. The IRS isn't likely to tell you that you payed too much tax.
In the words of Universal Music's Doug Morris, 'These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it's time to get paid for it.'
Is there a citation for this quote? I followed the link, and this quote isn't in the article. Maybe it was removed?
Not that I don't believe he said it, but it seems a little irresponsible to say "In the words of..." and then not provide a reference so that we can verify he was actually dumb enough to say that.
Slashdot Mirror
Me too. But I'm pretty sure the VMS versioning was just a convenience feature, and that the versions were independent files - not implemented in the filesystem and not implemented using copy-on-write. I vaguely recall being able to rename a ;2 file to something like "name_SAVE" so that I didn't lose that particular version when it purged. But it has been a long time since I've touched VMS.
*scratches head* Unix? Versioning? Never seen it myself. Not to say it isn't there, but over the years I've used several *ix flavors and fs versioning isn't something I've come across. I suppose next you'll tell us Unix has file locking (afaik it doesn't, unless you count advisory locks. I don't).
This is a reverse-engineering of Apple's Time Machine, through and through.I hate to be one to point this out, but, er... Time Machine is a BACKUP tool. Don't believe me? Go to http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.ht ml and read the copy yourself, being sure to pay special attention to use of phrases like "the drive you're backing up to". How on earth you could possibly confuse a backup tool with a versioned file system is beyond me.
The information I've seen is that the new rates are 3x-5x what the old rates were. No, I don't recall where I saw it, might have been somewhere on savenetradio.org. I think the answer to your question is, "it depends", since it sounds like the pricing model has changed from per-listener-per-song to percent-total-revenue.
Regardless, its probably a smart move to make the rates consistent with what satellite radio pays, and a % revenue model won't shut down small broadcasters as easily as a flat rate would. It also takes away any possibility that the CRB might again try to use this tactic to shutdown Internet radio in favor of the commercial outlets.
That line was crossed in 1998 when they impeached Clinton.
Finally, does Kucinich this this will help him get elected President?Maybe, maybe not. Its certainly consistent with his politics. From what little I know of Kucinich, he's a radical that is more interested in calling attention to unpopular issues, rather than having a sound political strategy that will get him elected.
What I liked even more was the idea of "execution blocks", where a given (processor pipeline width) worth of instructions are treated as an atomic "transaction"... clearly this is a nod to minimize the branch prediction penalty. I haven't been keeping up with hardware arch enough to know if this is a new idea or not, but it was new to me.
The only question is, will this be so much better than existing ISA's to eventually replace them? -- even if only for specific applications like high-performance computing.I think it may be a contender, or at least gain some popularity (like MIPS did in the 90's), if nothing else for the fact that the big limitation in the EDGE design appears to be in the ability for real programs to exploit parallelism. This is exactly the same problem we're fancing with the latest batch of multi-core processors from Intel: all those processing units are nice, but its a b**ch to keep them all busy.
Buying early isn't a big deal. Apple used to (probably still does, I just can't find the link right now) have an "Up To Date" program, whereby you would be entitled to a free OS upgrade if you bought a new system within X many months prior to the new version of the OS coming out. They've been running this program for years, I can't imagine they'd stop now. Worth checking into (as in ask the rep, or call Apple, before you buy) if you're really chomping at the bit to buy a new system.
Y'know, if I were trying to pass off my personal recollection of events as a "credible source" (as in "challenge anyone to cite a credible source that says otherwise", in the parent post), I certainly wouldn't have posted as an Anonymous Coward. I might have, oh I don't know, cited a transcript of the speech I'm quoting, maybe put a name to this mysterious IBMer, a date to the keynote, a place to the stage. Just because you know someone who knows someone who's brother's younger sister's boyfriend overheard some people who were walking near the building where the conference may or may not have been taking place, doesn't make it true.
Not that it really matters a rat's arse who dumped who. Its as if Slashdotters somehow believe there is an objective reality when it comes to corporate politics.
At least Moto hasn't been dragged into this thread yet. Er, oops.
Ok, so I'm late to the party, and this might be a little off-topic, but... well, patent issues aren't new for the FreeType devs. They used to (I think its gone now) have an #ifdef for a rendering technique that, like this one, was by default disabled. That particular one (I forget what it covered) infringed on patents held by Apple. It was off by default to keep the default build of the library OSS-friendly. Anyway, to make a long story short, the FT devs did eventually develop a better alternative to Apple's patented technique and now that particular limitation is history. FT v2.1.3, iirc.
Reading the article (and, sorry, I missed the original FUD), this looks to be more of the same. FT devs are concerned that they have something in the library that might infringe a patent. So, as before, they mark it with an #ifdef and, as before, disable it by default so that the library is OSS-friendly. SOP for them, and given their charter is to create a free alternative to a technology that is swarming with proprietary IP, it comes with the territory. I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. If history is any guide, the devs will come up with a patent-free alternative that is better than the original, its just a matter of time. Until then you'll have to live with the fact that the distro vendors will ship pre-built versions with the feature turned off so they can CYA. The code is still there, and the only thing stopping you from enabling it is 1) your ability to build from source, and 2) your conscience, depending on how you feel about software patents.
So does ed2k, Bittorrent, ..., ..., .... this is hardly news. Even plain ol' FTP and HTTP can do this to a degree.
As far as the 99.9% similar "speedup"... I seriously doubt that you'll see any gains other than in lab conditions. MP3 is about the only format that might be agreeable to this, since I imagine its reasonably common for people to fix ID3's and then share the modified file. I just don't see it happening for other formats (.avi, .zip, .rar). And unless you've still got a 14.4 modem I doubt you'll notice the speedup even with MP3's, since they are so small to begin with.
Blizzard really doesn't have much of a case. The copyright infringement and DMCA is bunk, unless they manage to show that WoWGlider enables people to make unauthorized copies of WoW. Seeing as how last time I checked, WoW was a free download, I really doubt there's this sort of infringement going on.
As for the "bot destroys economy" argument. Well, I might be sympathetic to them if they also went after the gold farmers. But they don't. Or, if they didn't have a history of allowing bots like this in their games ( remember D2's Pindlebot? ). Or if they didn't design the game in such a way that it encourages and rewards farming. I think its very telling that they don't have an issue with people grinding over and over again to earn items to sell for real money, and destroy the in-game economy that way. Instead, their complaint is that the bot allows you to farm and profit without being chained to the computer. The bot still has to take the same in-game actions that a player would, so they aren't losing any subscription revenue.
The only possible valid claim Blizzard has are the violations of the EULA and TOS. Which MDY claims are unenforceable. I'm interested to see what, if anything, comes from that. MDY did not itself violate EULA or TOS, but provides a program the use of which constitutes a violation. Given that the "Tortuous Interference with Contract" seems to require that Blizzard prove "that MDY acted with improper means and motive, without economic justification, and that MDY damaged the defendants", I doubt they will win that either. I think the damages will be especially difficult to prove.
This does not make going in and stealing the property any more legal.
I would think it would reduce the charges from "Breaking and Entering" to "Criminal Trespass", as they didn't commit the crime of forcing their way into someone else's house. So in that sense its "more" legal.
And as another poster already pointed out, if the doors had been locked, the crime may not have happened in the first place. Its still a terrible thing that it happened, but leaving the house wide open is just irresponsible. Zero sympathy from me.
Reminds me a bit of Neal Stephenson's novel, Diamond Age.
otoh, it would discourage those artists who are cranking out mindless drivel (*cough* *cough* Robert Jordan *cough* *cough*) just to sell a few copies so that they can make a living.
As far as what J.K. Rowling might do in your hypothetical scenario, I think these options are more likely:
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should abolish copyright law entirely, but holding on to outdated business models doesn't make sense either. IMO, its only a matter of time before the book publishers lose their monopoly position just as the music and movie publishers have. Music and movies got hit first because you don't have to interact with the media itself to enjoy the content - you load it into the player and walk away. Its different with a book. At least, for now.
I used to have Speakeasy IDSL. I went with them initially because they were the only ISP that would touch me (I was too far from the CO for DSL, and the clueless cable company only had asymmetric lines back them). But even paying a king's ransom for a terrible line speed, I have to say that Speakeasy had above and beyond the most knowledgeable, helpful staff I ever had the pleasure of working with. The only reason I'm not still with them is that Bellsouth finally put a 'repeater' (wrong word I know, remote switching unit maybe?) and are able to get me 60x the line speed that Speakeasy can. Ironically, it was a Speakeasy tech that told me to ask BS about the switching unit in the first place.
To combine them with Best Buy, who are legendary for their fleet of inept non-technical drooling mouthbreathers, is truly a tragedy. I will hope against hope that Speakeasy weathers the storm and remains a Company That Doesn't Suck, but for some reason this announcement has Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" running through my head.
Nicely put. I cut my teeth on 6502 assembler back in the 80's, to the point where I figured out some of the illegal instructions by looking at the bit patterns between related opcodes (LDA vs LDX vs LDY is a good starting point). When I think of how much I learned hacking assembler on my trusty old C-64, with the Compute! Mapping the C-64 book at my side, and then I think of how much "knowledge" I frequently encounter when talking to Java programmers or (*ack*) "web developers" (LAMP, .ASP, etc.)... I shudder at the thought of someone who is so oblivous to the internals writing an application that I might need to use someday.
And yeah, having deep knowlege definitely makes "hacking" movies hilarious on a whole new level.
(Nothing against Java or LAMP, btw. I've done both. But they are just SO far removed from the hardware, its not even funny.)
Personally I feel that the total # of bugs reported is a pretty meaningless statistic - after all, we don't know what % of the total population they represent - but I do find the ratio of severe / total for each OS to be interesting:
- for Windows, there is a 12/39 = approx 30% chance that if you find a bug, it'll be "severe" (whatever that means)
- for Mac, there is a 1/49 = approx. 2% chance that it'll be severe
- for RHEL, there is a 2/208 = approx 0.9% chance that it'll be severe
Or, Windows is 15x more likely to have a severe bug than a Mac which is 4x more likely than RHEL (and, Windows is 60x more likely than RHEL).
From the article:
<quote>
The only thing different was that I had been surfing the web a bit while the render was going on that day, where the day before I had not. "Surely surfing the web on a mulit-processor machine shouldn't add 15 minutes to a render", I thought. Well, yes it does actually, if you're using Safari.
</quote>
<p>Put another way: "Surely letting the computer ONLY do my render won't be any faster than letting the computer render AND surf the web". Surely you jest? Doing a standalone render vs. doing (anything else) while rendering should make your render take longer. If it doesn't, file a bug with Adobe and ask them why they aren't utilizing the hardware properly.</p>
This from the original article, maybe it will clear things up:
In the initial commissioning test, researchers measured the amount of diesel oil burned and electricity produced to calculate its efficiency.So, one way to read this (ignoring the reactants - yeast and oxygen), is that 1 joule of diesel + (an undisclosed amount of trash) = 1.9 joule of electricity. The potential energy in (undisclosed amount of trash) is necessarily >= .9 joule, since, last time I checked, energy can neither be created nor destroyed: it can only be converted from one form to another (that's what I remember from Physics 101 anyway). The machine probably is not 90% efficient, and certainly not 190% efficient as the article excerpt would have you believe. We don't know what its efficiency rating is without having some idea about the chemical potential energy in the trash. Not that its especially relevant. What is relevant, is if you have N gallons of diesel fuel and enough trash and you run the generator "long enough" that it gets a chance to switch from diesel power to "trash power", then you would end up with 90% more electricity than you would if you used a plain old diesel generator and just buried the trash instead. Put another way, if you require 100 kW of power, you could get it either with X amount of diesel, or X / 1.9 diesel + trash. So your diesel goes further and you've got a handy way to dispose of those Ho-Ho wrappers to boot.
You're right. I'd much rather have a server that has to be rebuilt from scratch (new partition, new OS install, re-install all the applications, try to remember all your config tweaks, then migrate the user data and hope they don't mind their profiles being borked) than a system that will just upgrade the existing software for me. NOT !
I used to use Mandrake (now Mandriva) starting from Mandrake 7 I think it was. Two OS upgrades later I switched. The OS upgrade NEVER worked - each 'upgrade' made the system more and more unstable. Then a coworker recommended Gentoo, with its promise of "our users never worry about version upgrades", which seemed like a godsend. And so far it has been. Sure, updating can be a pain - I usually set aside a weekend of downtime to do it, and do it on a test box first (never on a production box, what are you mad???!!!) - but, more often than not, its not the fault of the package system but the packages themselves (modular X anyone?). Gentoo tends to make you more aware of the incompatibilities in the packages you're upgrading, which to me is a good thing.
This was the only point in the article I agreed with - the rest of the points were basically "make it more like Windows". Apple really does need to pick a UI theme and stick with it - they've been going downhill since the half-assed introduction of "brushed metal" appeared in Panther. C'mon Apple, we know the window manager is at least somewhat aware of themes, given that there are tools like Unsanity's Metallifizer that let us fix your goofs.
And don't even get me started on the new iTunes interface... it just sucks. Yet another theme, to introduce a slightly different shade of grey, and loses the "both arrows at both ends" scrollbar option in the process.
You probably do, you're just letting yourself get overwhelmed by the size of the problem. As the Arthur C. Clarke quote goes, "any suitably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That's what you're dealing with here. Think back to the lectures that were about managing complexity... when I was in college, it was called functional decomposition, it might be called something else now ( OO A&D? ). That's how you proceed. Like anything else, its a skill that will improve the more you use it. It's the same thought process that leads you to organize your code into classes/modules/functions/methods, but on a larger scale.
As far as your question about how to learn about things that interest you... learn it on your own time! Most of the really good programmers I've known over the years, do it that way. If you're going to last in this field for any length of time, you have to keep your skills current. Don't count on your boss giving you training to help with that. It's rare. Equally, its unlikely that you'll get help acquiring the skills you need for your dream job (writing emu's or whatever). You'll need to do it on your own time, either with your own projects, helping with an OSS, etc.
Yup. And the only news here is that the MMO companies may have to start providing the data the IRS needs to catch people that aren't reporting their in-game earnings. The IRS already has the authority to tax that money. Its 1099 income. What would interest me, is to see if they will go after the non-U.S. gold sellers, classifying them as unregistered foreign business entities. Not that I have the slightest idea how that works, but I imagine U.S. Dept of Commerce has some kind of regs that would cover it.
Paying taxes on virtual goods where you don't exchange for real money is stupid.Yup, that's why we repealed the Intangibles Tax here in Florida.
What, are they going to start looking through my character's inventory, evaluating how much my +10 Sword of Uberness is worth?Yes, that's exactly what they would do if they tried for an Alternative Minimum or Intangibles tax. It would be based on the FMV of the item at the time you acquired it (if it worked like AMT... yes, Virginia, AMT sucks!!!!) or the FMV at tax time (if it worked like Intangibles). I don't see them doing this, its too controversial and too hard to implement. Besides, the beast is likely to be sated after feeding on all the 1099 dodgers.
Wrong. As the previous poster stated, you have zero tax liability because you didn't realize a gain on the sale. That's how it works in the US. If your accountant has told you otherwise, hire a new accountant. If you're not using an accountant, maybe you should be. The IRS isn't likely to tell you that you payed too much tax.
Is there a citation for this quote? I followed the link, and this quote isn't in the article. Maybe it was removed?
Not that I don't believe he said it, but it seems a little irresponsible to say "In the words of..." and then not provide a reference so that we can verify he was actually dumb enough to say that.
So its true... when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.