You laugh, I laugh, and put my money on Opteron for my latest purchase, but...if you want pure single-processor floating point performance and don't need x86 compatability, then Itanium 2 is still worth a look (as is Power5 and the latest G5 chips).
It's the ultimate irony that Intel is getting spanked by the same lesson that other manufacturers have learned from Intel even back in the 486 era. Namely,
that the market size for non-x86 compatable high performance RISC chips is too small to be profitable.
Subtle clue: It's not "Intel" that customers are locked into, it's "x86". (Likewise, it's not Microsoft, it's the Windows API.)
But that does not imply that laws should be changed to create artificial markets.
Technology exists now to record every instance of a person learning or expressing an idea in public. Eg, I sit in a lecture hall and learn about electronic circuit design.
Does that mean that a marketplace should be setup to exact a toll on each of those transmissions of information by changing the laws?
Before dismissing the idea because "it doesn't compare to current situation", consider that people have invested millions of dollars and much of their time coming up with these ideas - it would be "unfair" to let those valuable ideas flow from one person to another without compensating the originators/funders of the original idea, eh?
I am saying that it should be the IP's owners decision, not anyone elses decision, to set the price.
I believe the creator of the content should have the decision to set the price for their work. And they do.
But, the reality of copying and recording technology means that they really only have the right to set the price for the very first copy of their work.
This is much like centuries ago when, after a great composer allowed their work to be performed, it was possible for musicians with good ears and memory to copy down a transcription of a great piece of music.
That it was possible to do this was regarded as reality.
If laws that distort the market by granting exclusive rights to sell duplicated information are reformed, then we might well have artists that would be paid by enough fans getting money together for induce them to perform a First Performance, since that is the only service for which they inherently ought to have the right to charge for. They are permitted to set the price for this First Performance as they wish, they can refuse to play unless the price is to their liking, and they can refuse to perform in the presence of recording equipment. All of those choices are the right of the content creator and I believe those rights should be preserved.
But, when I copy one file of bits to another on my computer and email it to a friend and RIAA demands payment, it's an artificial distortion of the market. Next thing you know, the authors of child-rearing advice books will want cameras in my home to help them charge me in case I actually use on their copyrighted techniques for child-rearing.
I know for a fact that in the Netherlands (where i live) it's illegal to 'spy' on your users
Sounds more progressive than in the U.S.
While our founding fathers recognized the abuses that were possible from a powerful government and put safeguards into our constitution to protect us from the kinds of abuses they could see in the 18th century, they did not foresee the rise of corporate power in America. In the U.S. there is no inherent right to privacy except as interpreted through the protection against unreasonable search and seizure. A private contract of employment will typically permit the employer to do drug-testings, credit checks, interviews with people you know, etc. You can always choose to not work for that employer, but with a special skill and few potential employers most people choose to swallow their pride in order to eat.
Without such protections against powerful private entities, we pretty much fall back on the a legal system that guarantees specific rights of property holders from the feudal era. Monitoring, everywhere, everyway, everytime is growing in most U.S. workplaces, aided by most people's ignorance of just how widespread it is.
The U.K. has pretty intrusive government monitoring of public places using video cameras that would unnerve me if it became more commonplace in the U.S.
There was a case a few years ago where a former and disgruntled Intel employee posted an email to all his co-workers that Intel did not like. The court rulings were in favor of Intel IIRC. Replacing "Intel" with "federal government" would have probably put greater protection onto free speech in that case.
In the US the press needs to keep the political parties happy with them.
Only indirectly.
I used to think that Rupert Murdoch's main purpose was to drive a particular political agenda, particularly with hiring Roger Ailes to run a "News" channel.
I was wrong.
Newscorp's political agenda is, in turn, driven by his main objective: to make money by drawing in as many viewers as possible and correspondingly large advertisement revenue.
If the "news" you're watching isn't either boring (Medicare costs are going up) or make you feel despair about the bad things going on (Iraqi's are blowing up their liberators/occupiers), then you're getting entertained rather than informed.
It'll go into a scrap heap when sensors can pick up arbitrary 3D motion of every finger without having to bang down on a key. OK, maybe early prototypes will require that you glue foil patterns onto your fingernails.
Getting out of the 2D keyboard into full 3D gesturing will improve text input speed.
Probably most importantly, it will more easily permit non-Latin alphabets to be input, such as Chinese.
If the freeloaders have convinced you to build a bureaucracy to sort out the freeloaders from the needy, it's already over.
As much as I'd love to see the freeloaders forced off their butts into gainful employment, I'd hate to see the needy die in the streets like they do in India or Brazil.
are afraid to deliver those features^* because the content copyright holders would sue them into a Napster-like oblivion. About the only desired innovation I've seen squeak out of this gauntlet of DRM paranoia is the write to DVD archiver.
Networking of recorded shows to any PC, Mac or Linux box anywhere on the net.
Use network filesystems to increase storage space.
Editting of shows to clip out unwanted commercials.
Outputting various different codecs digitally out of the back of the box in Ethernet, USB, IEEE1394, 802.11.
Watching your TiVo-recorded shows over the web
Checking and changing the scheduled recordings over the web.
One of TiVo's biggest problems is that its word of mouth advertising has given it a market full of geeks (not just Joe Averages) that rapidly discover (a) just how great TiVo is (b) just where TiVo's limitations are.
I love my 2 TiVo units, have lifetime subscriptions on them, but will probably build my own HD PVR.
The rumor I heard was that insurance companies have been canceling people's policies when they submit a claim.
Typically not for burglary, kitchen fire things.
Where they do cancel policies are for large claims that look like they could grow unbounded, like water damage resulting from leaking pipes under a concrete slab, or mildew.
Windows isn't much use there. Nor can you strip out the parts you don't need, or customize the kernel for performance.
I'm positive that using a stripped down version of XP embedded that MS could release something that could do this job well. They could price it so reasonably that people could put it on as many nodes as they wanted, or run as many instances on virtual machines as they wanted. MS could even open up the APIs so completely that people could do more of the customization that they do now on Linux.
But even though they are technically capable of doing this MS won't do this because it will collide with their business objectives elsewhere.
I think it's all a PR thing - kind of like Ford sponsoring autoracing, with the idea that people buying the Escorts will think they're getting part of a Formula One racer.
they ensured that we behaved rationally by giving cash payouts tied to our economic success in the experimental system.
I've participated in economic experimental games like that, too. Rational behavior sounds like something that should be easy to gauge, but it's not.
The problem is that, in the real world, there is this constantly shifting layer of perception that participants have of cost and of reward. By changing peoples' perceptions, it doesn't matter too much that they have this rational decision-making capability. If you can be made to believe a choice is critical to your very survival, then you will be willing to bear high costs. Even if I, by rational analysis, think you are being deluded.
When cars, deodorants and extended warranties are sold by appealing to fear or to anxieties about one's sexual attractiveness, and sold quite effectively, you get an idea of just how weird our system is.
We're small and everyone works either on customer sites or from home.
Before I made it Real Easy for my co-workers to VPN in from home I'd be checking to make sure their home computers had pristine reputations. I know this kind of touchy issue, too. "Whaddya mean suggesting my computer sleeps around!"
Think this funny all you want, but the parent post may have a point there. Perhaps this is another devious way MS is going to try to get ahead of rival products - i.e. by labelling them as Spyware. Some windows users are just silly enough to believe anything MS says.
I suspect that scary warning pop-ups about "No trusted signature", where $TRUSTED_SIGNATURE are from public keys that MSDN hands out to people who pay and become a Certified Secure Partner or some such.
Anti-competitive, absolutely.
But, it can be quite effectively argued as being more secure than the current state of affairs (even open source projects use PGP signatures), while the general public and the politicians will never have enough patience to look at the devilish details of the issue.
One of the stealthily-growing pieces of tax revenue has not been U.S. federal withholding, but the OASDI, the Social Security taxes. Doubly so, for the self-employed.
But that's OK, they're currently running a surplus and accumulating lots of U.S. Treasury general obligation bonds that will be used to pay for my retirement.
I'm basically a compassionate person and I pay a lot of taxes willingly, but some mechanism needs to be put in place to prevent the unrestrained growth of entitlement spending in the U.S.
If we need a bureacracy to sort out freeloaders from the truly needy, so be it.
how do you limit a user's access without making it look like you're limiting their access?
Start users without dangerous guns they know nothing about.
Then, if they ask for access, say you'll be happy to provide them with access if they sign this responsibility form you need to keep on file to cover yourself. Load the form up with I have read and understood my responsibilities, etc.
You can mumble something about how you need to do this to keep out of trouble after another user asking for access that wasn't nearly so responsible as Professor Bigname ended up with a machine serving child porn and a nightmare investigation....
It seems to me that the efforts of emergency responders could well be hampered by lack of information, particularly if the information network were shutdown. This includes GPS information. You can never know for certain who will be in a critical position to relay important information. If they don't have it, the system won't be able to respond effetively. (eg, "I just saw a gasoline tanker truck going by at 85 mph down this lonely highway - where am I? I dunno, my GPS isn't working."
A similar characterization could be made of the cell phone network: shutting it down could prevent the kind of remote activated explosives such as the ones used in 3/11 in Madrid, but, at the same time, people needing help or calling the authorities to tell them about a suspicious character fleeing the scene would also be hampered.
There needs to be more thoughtful critical analysis going into security measures and less heavy-handed measures based on fear and knee-jerk reactions.
The screwy thing about Linux market size estimates and revenue estimates are that so many deployments can be made for so little cost that the total number of Linux installations can be huge and the dollar value of the market can be small.
This is great for Linux users, not so great for Linux vendors that think they're going to be the next Microsoft or Oracle.
Customers are getting what they want: the same drastic standardisation and commoditisation in software that they got in hardware.
Linux vendors are having to look hard at providing true value-added in terms of service or niche applications, integrating with legacy proprietary systems, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the 1980's I learned UNIX for the first time on a Celerity 1260D running BSD 4.2 that was running a Motorola 680x0 CPU.
You laugh, I laugh, and put my money on Opteron for my latest purchase, but...if you want pure single-processor floating point performance and don't need x86 compatability, then Itanium 2 is still worth a look (as is Power5 and the latest G5 chips).
It's the ultimate irony that Intel is getting spanked by the same lesson that other manufacturers have learned from Intel even back in the 486 era. Namely,
Subtle clue: It's not "Intel" that customers are locked into, it's "x86". (Likewise, it's not Microsoft, it's the Windows API.)have reached the point where they are packaged in that impossible to open plastic card
These were bad enough, but recently I've seen them with fscking rivets around to make them even harder to open!
Has anyone found a quick elegant and safe way to open these packages?
Remember, technologies have changed
Yes, technologies have changed.
But that does not imply that laws should be changed to create artificial markets.
Technology exists now to record every instance of a person learning or expressing an idea in public. Eg, I sit in a lecture hall and learn about electronic circuit design.
Does that mean that a marketplace should be setup to exact a toll on each of those transmissions of information by changing the laws?
Before dismissing the idea because "it doesn't compare to current situation", consider that people have invested millions of dollars and much of their time coming up with these ideas - it would be "unfair" to let those valuable ideas flow from one person to another without compensating the originators/funders of the original idea, eh?
Not to be a troll, but what is it with all these intriguing Java products, free for downloading, that don't go too far?
- Jini
- Java 2D
- Java 3D
- Java Mail
- etc.
Is it that they are insufficient, too expensive, not completely open, or what?I am saying that it should be the IP's owners decision, not anyone elses decision, to set the price.
I believe the creator of the content should have the decision to set the price for their work. And they do.
But, the reality of copying and recording technology means that they really only have the right to set the price for the very first copy of their work.
This is much like centuries ago when, after a great composer allowed their work to be performed, it was possible for musicians with good ears and memory to copy down a transcription of a great piece of music.
That it was possible to do this was regarded as reality.
If laws that distort the market by granting exclusive rights to sell duplicated information are reformed, then we might well have artists that would be paid by enough fans getting money together for induce them to perform a First Performance, since that is the only service for which they inherently ought to have the right to charge for. They are permitted to set the price for this First Performance as they wish, they can refuse to play unless the price is to their liking, and they can refuse to perform in the presence of recording equipment. All of those choices are the right of the content creator and I believe those rights should be preserved.
But, when I copy one file of bits to another on my computer and email it to a friend and RIAA demands payment, it's an artificial distortion of the market. Next thing you know, the authors of child-rearing advice books will want cameras in my home to help them charge me in case I actually use on their copyrighted techniques for child-rearing.
I know for a fact that in the Netherlands (where i live) it's illegal to 'spy' on your users
Sounds more progressive than in the U.S.
While our founding fathers recognized the abuses that were possible from a powerful government and put safeguards into our constitution to protect us from the kinds of abuses they could see in the 18th century, they did not foresee the rise of corporate power in America. In the U.S. there is no inherent right to privacy except as interpreted through the protection against unreasonable search and seizure. A private contract of employment will typically permit the employer to do drug-testings, credit checks, interviews with people you know, etc. You can always choose to not work for that employer, but with a special skill and few potential employers most people choose to swallow their pride in order to eat.
Without such protections against powerful private entities, we pretty much fall back on the a legal system that guarantees specific rights of property holders from the feudal era. Monitoring, everywhere, everyway, everytime is growing in most U.S. workplaces, aided by most people's ignorance of just how widespread it is.
The U.K. has pretty intrusive government monitoring of public places using video cameras that would unnerve me if it became more commonplace in the U.S.
There was a case a few years ago where a former and disgruntled Intel employee posted an email to all his co-workers that Intel did not like. The court rulings were in favor of Intel IIRC. Replacing "Intel" with "federal government" would have probably put greater protection onto free speech in that case.
When Bill Gates frames the debate between the capitalists on his side and communists on the other
...it only shows just how dated he is.
in fact by forcing it to be open and free for the public you are saying you should share it
No.
Rather, by allowing free and open commerce in recorded media you are saying let the available technology and the market set the price.
If that price comes down to US$0.32 per Brittney Spears CD, then consumers have benefitted. I think.
In the US the press needs to keep the political parties happy with them.
Only indirectly.
I used to think that Rupert Murdoch's main purpose was to drive a particular political agenda, particularly with hiring Roger Ailes to run a "News" channel.
I was wrong.
Newscorp's political agenda is, in turn, driven by his main objective: to make money by drawing in as many viewers as possible and correspondingly large advertisement revenue.
If the "news" you're watching isn't either boring (Medicare costs are going up) or make you feel despair about the bad things going on (Iraqi's are blowing up their liberators/occupiers), then you're getting entertained rather than informed.
You can't install shit.
Say it again, brother!
Keyboard ain't going anywhere.
It'll go into a scrap heap when sensors can pick up arbitrary 3D motion of every finger without having to bang down on a key. OK, maybe early prototypes will require that you glue foil patterns onto your fingernails.
Getting out of the 2D keyboard into full 3D gesturing will improve text input speed.
Probably most importantly, it will more easily permit non-Latin alphabets to be input, such as Chinese.
If the freeloaders have convinced you to build a bureaucracy to sort out the freeloaders from the needy, it's already over.
As much as I'd love to see the freeloaders forced off their butts into gainful employment, I'd hate to see the needy die in the streets like they do in India or Brazil.
They know what their customers want/need and...
are afraid to deliver those features^* because the content copyright holders would sue them into a Napster-like oblivion. About the only desired innovation I've seen squeak out of this gauntlet of DRM paranoia is the write to DVD archiver.
One of TiVo's biggest problems is that its word of mouth advertising has given it a market full of geeks (not just Joe Averages) that rapidly discover (a) just how great TiVo is (b) just where TiVo's limitations are.
I love my 2 TiVo units, have lifetime subscriptions on them, but will probably build my own HD PVR.
The rumor I heard was that insurance companies have been canceling people's policies when they submit a claim.
Typically not for burglary, kitchen fire things.
Where they do cancel policies are for large claims that look like they could grow unbounded, like water damage resulting from leaking pipes under a concrete slab, or mildew.
Since when did the NYT become the Journal "Duh!"?
There are ever-so-slight differences of opinion expressed by the editorial staffs of the NYT and of the WSJ.
Windows isn't much use there. Nor can you strip out the parts you don't need, or customize the kernel for performance.
I'm positive that using a stripped down version of XP embedded that MS could release something that could do this job well. They could price it so reasonably that people could put it on as many nodes as they wanted, or run as many instances on virtual machines as they wanted. MS could even open up the APIs so completely that people could do more of the customization that they do now on Linux.
But even though they are technically capable of doing this MS won't do this because it will collide with their business objectives elsewhere.
I think it's all a PR thing - kind of like Ford sponsoring autoracing, with the idea that people buying the Escorts will think they're getting part of a Formula One racer.
they ensured that we behaved rationally by giving cash payouts tied to our economic success in the experimental system.
I've participated in economic experimental games like that, too. Rational behavior sounds like something that should be easy to gauge, but it's not.
The problem is that, in the real world, there is this constantly shifting layer of perception that participants have of cost and of reward. By changing peoples' perceptions, it doesn't matter too much that they have this rational decision-making capability. If you can be made to believe a choice is critical to your very survival, then you will be willing to bear high costs. Even if I, by rational analysis, think you are being deluded.
When cars, deodorants and extended warranties are sold by appealing to fear or to anxieties about one's sexual attractiveness, and sold quite effectively, you get an idea of just how weird our system is.
We're small and everyone works either on customer sites or from home.
Before I made it Real Easy for my co-workers to VPN in from home I'd be checking to make sure their home computers had pristine reputations. I know this kind of touchy issue, too. "Whaddya mean suggesting my computer sleeps around!"
Think this funny all you want, but the parent post may have a point there. Perhaps this is another devious way MS is going to try to get ahead of rival products - i.e. by labelling them as Spyware. Some windows users are just silly enough to believe anything MS says.
I suspect that scary warning pop-ups about "No trusted signature", where $TRUSTED_SIGNATURE are from public keys that MSDN hands out to people who pay and become a Certified Secure Partner or some such.
Anti-competitive, absolutely.
But, it can be quite effectively argued as being more secure than the current state of affairs (even open source projects use PGP signatures), while the general public and the politicians will never have enough patience to look at the devilish details of the issue.
One of the stealthily-growing pieces of tax revenue has not been U.S. federal withholding, but the OASDI, the Social Security taxes. Doubly so, for the self-employed.
But that's OK, they're currently running a surplus and accumulating lots of U.S. Treasury general obligation bonds that will be used to pay for my retirement.
I'm basically a compassionate person and I pay a lot of taxes willingly, but some mechanism needs to be put in place to prevent the unrestrained growth of entitlement spending in the U.S.
If we need a bureacracy to sort out freeloaders from the truly needy, so be it.
how do you limit a user's access without making it look like you're limiting their access?
Start users without dangerous guns they know nothing about.
Then, if they ask for access, say you'll be happy to provide them with access if they sign this responsibility form you need to keep on file to cover yourself. Load the form up with I have read and understood my responsibilities, etc.
You can mumble something about how you need to do this to keep out of trouble after another user asking for access that wasn't nearly so responsible as Professor Bigname ended up with a machine serving child porn and a nightmare investigation....
It seems to me that the efforts of emergency responders could well be hampered by lack of information, particularly if the information network were shutdown. This includes GPS information. You can never know for certain who will be in a critical position to relay important information. If they don't have it, the system won't be able to respond effetively. (eg, "I just saw a gasoline tanker truck going by at 85 mph down this lonely highway - where am I? I dunno, my GPS isn't working."
A similar characterization could be made of the cell phone network: shutting it down could prevent the kind of remote activated explosives such as the ones used in 3/11 in Madrid, but, at the same time, people needing help or calling the authorities to tell them about a suspicious character fleeing the scene would also be hampered.
There needs to be more thoughtful critical analysis going into security measures and less heavy-handed measures based on fear and knee-jerk reactions.
The screwy thing about Linux market size estimates and revenue estimates are that so many deployments can be made for so little cost that the total number of Linux installations can be huge and the dollar value of the market can be small.
This is great for Linux users, not so great for Linux vendors that think they're going to be the next Microsoft or Oracle.
Customers are getting what they want: the same drastic standardisation and commoditisation in software that they got in hardware.
Linux vendors are having to look hard at providing true value-added in terms of service or niche applications, integrating with legacy proprietary systems, etc.
How much speed up could be got by "compiling" the scripts in /etc/init.d?
I like the other idea that independent processes can be marked for concurrent startups without waiting.
Everywhere I look these days, system boot up scripts, package dependency installation, it seems like dependency analysis lurks.