Posts by E 2

Open source - the once and future dream

@Sean Timarco Baggaley

No, there is more to it. When GPL v1 was written a bottom end Sun UNIX workstation retailed for more than $15000, and I think it did not include a C compiler. A lot of people who knew they could make their own got together and made GCC and other people made Linux and the *BSDs.

None of them wanted to see other people rape their work, or take their work and assume control of it - which is possible with a public domain release. Their work was not 'the commons', and they cared that it not become so. Thus the constraints built into the GPL.

The GPL does not stop a corp using GPL code: it requires only acknowledgment if the corp keeps it's changes private; it requires disclosure if the corp release it's changes. The GPL stops nobody from using GPL code, but it does stop corps using GPL'd code as a product of the commons.

At least in the USA there is the question of free speech. And in the USA 'free speech' is written with capital letters... IIRC there was a landmark court case in the late 1990's that established that software is speech, thus free from coercion. A gov't of the USA can no more than a corp in the USA restrict free speech.

@Anonymous Coward, Feb 20

Depends on the market segment. How many of the things you own that have CPUs inside them are running a Linux kernel? I'd wager many if not most. How then has Linux lost?

As for desktop operating systems, speaking as a sysadmin, every time MS or Apple releases a new version of their OS, or MS released the latest greatest Office with no menus as such, I have to teach my people how to deal with all the changes. Do you seriously contend that for MS users KDE would be too hard to use? KDE is a knock of of Windows GUI. Same for Gnome in relation to Apple. Same for OpenOffice

People are not stupid, they can learn and the learning curve is hardly steep qua KDE or Gnome or OpenOffice.

I will grant that people are often lazy or bigoted. I offer you as a case in point.

Route 66

I, you, anyone who writes code, has the right in at least the USA to release it under the license that best suites my, your, desires and priorities. This is backed up and provided for all the way back to the USA constitution's protection of free speech.

Period.

If you do not live in the USA then YMMV. You might need to take a look at the utility of your particular country's protection of free speech in that case.

RIM unveils free BlackBerry server

Sendmail & Postfix

Much (perhaps most) of the world runs on sendmail and postfix. Would be nice if this thing talked to them.

Big Blue demos 100GHz chip

@Hungry Sean

Wow, thanks!

First approx use case question?

Is this a fair first approximation?

240 nM feature size versus 32 nM feature size => 56.25 = (240/32)^2. So 56.25 times fewer graphene transistors per unit area than silicon.

100GHz/3.33GHz => 30.03 time faster operation of a graphene transistor vs silicon.

At first blush this looses against silicon (30/56.25 < 1.0).

But if an IBM graphene CPU was made with 1/30 the number of transistors but simpler design needing less deep pipelines, less branch prediction, the graphene CPU could still be faster at, say, floating point or integer/logic but maybe not both, despite having many times fewer number of transistors.

I'm just a sysadmin and programmer, no kind of hardware guru. So I know I could be quite out to lunch...

@Mectron

Yeah, I suspect it would run Doom :-) But it would cost about 100 times the price of a bottom end current x86 CPU! Almost certainly it would become a top dollar IBM blade server product CPU, just like the Cell. Grrr.

I think we got Doom on cell phones. Except maybe not the iPhone. You know, not wholesome enough.

Power7 power lunch and launch next Monday

@Kebabbert

Hey, thanks for the explanation, but it was just a joke I was making.

If I...

bung in 4 5970's will it get me 100+ FPS in Crysis? Under Vista?

US plans crewless automated ghost-frigates

Can't these guys even spell?

Surely they could have come up with some even more fraught terminology and called the thing ACTIVE?

Obama scraps Constellation moon mission

@Pete 2

Except of course China has industrial capacity to rival the USA and China holds enough USA foreign debt to cause a default on the USA dollar. So it is not really like back in the good old days of Apollo - the USSR had no whip hand over the USA.

Not so exceptional any more.

@Stinky

No argument here, Stinky, about NASA.

But you would need a revolution and a lot of CEO/CIO/CTO/ congressperson/senator/id-level-mgmt/bottom-end-mgmt heads on pikes before you root out the bureaucratic mentality that has infested the USA, the UK, Canada, the rest of the west.

It is not just a NASA thing, it is a systemic thing,

Everybody just wants a box of chocolates these days.

Extreme Pr0n - One Year On

"database of cases"

Publish it

Facebook plans PHP changes

Imply Facebook controls PHP

AFAIK PHP is defined by php.net in cooperation with Zend. So how is that Facebook will change PHP? Do you mean that Facebook will propose soome changes to PHP?

UK moob jobs rocket 80 per cent

De-obscured terminology

Male tit reduction

Reduction of fat bloating around base of penis

Penis extension

How about clear English, Lester? The Reg Lexicographic Army must be getting restless.

Missile missed in criticism-busting interceptor test failure

@AC

AC, we have electromagnetic radiation to play with. Radio propogates well thru the atmosphere, light does not. We haven't yet mastered gravity, though my neighbour assures me she is doing repeated cyclical work on the matter.

Thus to call radar old tech is rather silly. It's the only tech we have.

Chinese tablet maven threatens iPad suit

I call BS

Most of the differences are function of OS, not design or, god help me or the US Patent Office, new ideas.

Oracle in MySQL, OpenOffice autonomy vow

Imperitives

I cannot understand how anyone cannot see Oracle owning mySQL as anything other than an attempt to control the market. Microsoft would have bought Sun, but it would have been too obvious an attempt to acquire mySQL.

PostgreSQL has better enterprise features than MySQL. This is fine, I am not complaining. Do you really believe that Oracle will let MySQL acquire features that will in any way compete with Oracle DBMS? Since the corps got their hands on mySQL it has hardly advanced at all.

Two things may happen:

1. MySQL remains a slightly stupid little brother of the for-pay Oracle DBMS, and when serious open source based websites need real enterprise DBMS features they cave in, suck the erect penis, and pay for Oracle or MS DBMS products.

2. People on the 'net get over the 'My', 'My', 'My' thing and give up on mySQL and move their support to the mySQL spin offs or to PostgreSQL. I swear that if someone had put forward 'my_MSDOS_batch_file_web_server_script_language' at around the time PHP and Python stated to get mindshare, then we'd be hearing little indeed about PHP and Python today.

For those of you still working with mySQL 3.x and 4.x: joins are supposed to be done by the DBMS not by the scripting language. This is why you want mySQL to advance.

Apple's iPad - fat iPhone without the phone

1024x768

Good quality still image porn these days is offered at around 3000 pixels short dimension.

New inside out hover-magnet fusion reactor debuts at MIT

What is the glow?

About halfway thru the vid, there is a glow around the toroid. What is that? Is it the dimensional gate trying to open?

Only nukes can stop planetsmash asteroids, say US boffins

Don't nuke the planet from orbit

Just drop cathedral-size rocks on it. Very destructive and less radiation. Everybody wins!

Stargazers spy super-Earth waterworld

Let's go!

Massive amount of water, solves one of the bigger problems wrt colonization. Let us go forth and colonize that solar system!

Intel's initial mobile CPU+GPU chips named

vs. AMD combined product...

Am I correct then in assuming that AMD's2010 CPU+GPU product will compete in the roughly siame market as this Intel stuff - the notebook and thin notebook market?

Exoplanets dubbed 'Vulcan', 'Romulus' and 'Female Pigeon'

Voice from .ca

I want to see Planet Bob, Planet Doug, Solar System Trudeau, and Planets Joni Mitchell & Gordon Downey.

Sonic 'hyperlens' offers hi-res ultrasound scans, naval sonar

The lede on the photo is absolutely brilliant!

''nuff said.

Apple plans turbocharged Mac Pro speedster

It is 6:20 AM

and I thought the headline said Macbook Pro, and I was thinking OMG now that's a laptop!

Robot nuclear windjammer to sail patio-gas oceans of Titan

Why not

Place a relay satellite some 200 million miles or so above the north pole of the sun. With this we'd have year round comms with all the exploration vehicles.

Google Chrome gets friendly with Native Client

ActiveX

Just wanted to echo the comments above.

Most Mac owners getting Windows on the side

mobile slant

That's because macbook pro/macbook are an even better way for the mac fanboies to give their money to Apple. The notebook products have a higher ratio of $/(kg of computer) and are thus more satisfying to the mac fanboie.

IBM Linux chief: Chasing desktop Windows a 'dead-end'

@Kevin Bailey

Ubuntu is Linux' answer to MacOS, and it's adherents betray the same slavish devotion to the object of their fetish.

What you should have said: "Ordinary users are fine with Linux and a dumbed Gnome deaktop."

"You won't thrive unless you specialize"

Linux has specialized considerably already, just look at all the kinds of devices it is used in now. Of course it could specialize and thrive even more.

I have XP as second OS on my box because I like to play FPS games sometimes. That's the only thing I've used Windows for in years. If the games developers published for Linux as well as Windows I'd remove Windows altogether.

Games aside, Linux is great on the desktop. People just don't like to change.

Archos punts 9-inch Windows 7 tablet PC

I want to...

"consume the internet".

There's water on the Moon, scientists confirm

Let's grind up the moon

and take all it's water

Authors ask court to delay Googlebooks hearing

Worried about monopoly

I certainly do not see Google as a bad or grasping company, and I think the two guys behind the company have good intentions. In the fullness of time, good intentions will not count for much in the face of a monopoly on the books.

Google should not be stopped from scanning all the books it wants to, but it must respect copyright and it must not prevent other vendors from doing the same.

It may be the case that we do not have an adequate technological solution to distributing copywritten material while respecting copyright. I think copyright must trump Google's library in that case, at least until someone figures out the tech to support copyright.

Finally, there is a large corpus of books out of copyright. These should not be 'enclosed' by Google, or Sony with it's ebook, nor Yahoo with Kindle, nor anyone else.

AMD chipsets: the feeds and speeds

YEAAAAAHHHHHH!

Woohoo yeah yeah yeah woohooo! Fireworks ferris wheels bumper cars!

Dot Hill starts Software RAID

Software raid is pants.

You can't trust Windows not to crash, how can you trust a Windows driver to reliably do RAID calculations? Arguably Linux is more stable than Windows, but I've seen some kernel panics too.

Give me hardware RAID, or give me rsnapshot.

Well, actually, give me both.

Suicide bum-blast bombing startles Saudi prince

@Pablo

Despite the dead on 9/11 and the dollar value of the destruction of the WTC buildings & damage to the Pentagon, those attacks were in comparison to the scale of the USA economy nothing more than pin pricks. Their effect was overwhelmingly political not economic, and it is very hard to believe bin Laden intended anything other than a political effect.

Indeed the WTC was long held by it's sheer size to have distorted the market for office space in Manhattan. It was not built in response to market demand, but rather to satisfy the egos of the people who ran the NYC port authority.

@Anonymous Coward 21st September 2009 15:24 GMT

Not correct. That most A are not B does not imply that some B cannot be an instance of A.

There are many reasons to become a suicide bomber, and there is some reason to believe that what is driving some or many of 'em in the middle east is either brainwashing or despair. You think someone yelling "Insh' Allah" is automatically a religious zealot, but if you listen closer or beyond that, you find a lot of people in the middle east who: (a) want their despotic gov'ts gone; (b) want the big powers out of their oil fields and politics; (c) have no better idea how to achieve it that you or I would were we in their shoes.

Western military forces have traditionally used some species of Christian religious ceremonies - that never made them Christian zealots, did it?

Raise your game, AC, try to understand what is really also going on in the world.

AMD grows very own Opteron chipsets

Probably the dumbest question on this page

Do these new AMD chipsets support Crossfire? Some of the boards described here (Supermicro at least) have of PCIe 16x slots: some mad gamers, and also graphics professionals, would pay for dual CPU quadfire boxes.

Power grid takedown: A new how-to

@JohnG

John, almost all serious countries study each other in this manner.

Gulf War 1 & Gulf War 2 featured info-war and anti-C3I directed against Iraq, and Iraq couldn't manufacture a transistor for love or money.

Certainly in a war between USA and PRC, info-war and anti-C3I would play large parts. Imagine: the country with premier science & tech and good manufacturing versus the country with premier manufacturing and good tech. Who would win?

German inventor gushes over portable women's weebag

@various

Pushing 1l limit: beer drinking!

Recoup costs: recycle the piss, surely there is lots of nitrate, salts and hormone in a bag of piss?

Festivals: at a punk rock show you could hurl the used bags at the band!

Israelis offer unmanned robo smart-missile 8-pack

Long term effect

What is to stop battles of dueling Jumper-type systems? Once one side takes out the other's Jumpers it can roll out the armour.

Boffins fail to detect Moon's strangeness

The solution is

Wrap the problem in a 100 meter thick layer of string theory, then apply variational methods to constrain the theory to the data. That done, obviously you will have an answer.

Samsung N110

What would move the form factor forward

Netbooks need higher screen resolution. 1024x600 is serviceable but higher rez screens as standard for the platform would be very nice. I've read that Intel and/or M$ pressure the netbook makers to not exceed 1024x600 - is this true?

UK cops eye shotgun cartridge Taser

Shooting people

Well certainly it is less damaging than shooting someone with a slug from a shotgun. It does not follow from this that one should be willing to shoot people with taser rounds.

Boffins in 'let's create black holes in the lab' jape

Gimme a portable model

It could be used to suck Brit cops' shotgun taser rounds right out of the air!

Amazon limits PS3 Slim sales

n/a

And 100% unlikely to run Linux. That nifty new XCell processor and no Linux!

US Navy aims to make jetfuel from seawater uranium

It's a matter of the design, and of politics

If fission reactor designs are used which are intrinsically unlikely to run away after a coolant failure then fission reactors are probably not a bad idea.

I'm thinking of the heavy water CANDU, where the cooling water is also the moderator. If the water is lost in some mishap, the fission-produced neutrons are be going too fast to induce further fissions. All you have without heavy water is some moderately hot fuel. So a CANDU cannot do a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Probably there are other such designs.

AFAIK though, CANDU type reactors are not as efficient as some other popular designs which can melt down. It comes down as always to a question of politics and management. Will we trust people to operate reactor designs that can melt down in exchange for some extra output or profit, or will we decide to go with safety at the cost of some output and profit?

San Francisco dumps city data online

Proper TLD?

Should not a USA municipality use a .gov or .us TLD?

Zombie plague analysed by Canadian maths prof

@Apocalypse Later

Yes indeed. George W. Bush handing Wall Street one trillion dollars with essentially no strings attached was a complete betrayal of small-c conservatism.