The real surprise is why it took so long? 14 years is a heck of a long time to be running large redundant stores. From the parking lot of my local Future Shop, you could literally see the Best Buy store, and neither store was ever busy enough to really justify having two so close together, and I've heard that some were so close as to share a parking lot. It might be different if there were significant differences in the product lines they carried, but as it is it never really made much sense.

The Wayback Machine...

Or, see the Slashdot article, "Beautiful Code Interview" that discusses an entire book about the very topic.

This is one thing I wish the US could import from France. Over there, all radio stations, newspapers, and other places have to have a percentage of their artists be local to that country.

Canada has that sort of system, too, to protect local "culture" from the US marketing behemoth.

When it works, it seems to work pretty well.

The main issue with that sort of system is that it's based on a minimum quantity of local content. Yes, you do get some good local talent which you might not hear about otherwise. Unfortunately, most of the time you just get Nickelback.

I think the majority of Canadians would prefer to just drop the CanCon requirements entirely.

That would almost make sense, except Quebec, like Louisiana, has a legal system based / influenced on French civil law, rather than the more common (in US and Canada) English common law heritage.

That said, state and provincial governments are facing deficits and short-falls, so anything that promises increased revenue would certainly catch their attention.

I guess it depends on what the fine is for not complying. For your above scenario to make sense, the fine itself would have to be more than the cost of installing the line.

It doesn't have to be a big fine. It just has to be a fine that continues to apply until they install it. $50/day until the service is turned on would get compliance... eventually.

Once they've installed your lines, you're basically a slave to paying that provider's rates.

That's a tougher problem, but I'm sure it could be managed.

Well, that's pretty lame then. They did say "sync" in the paper, but I didn't get to the actual code since, quite frankly, I was being blinded by the daylight already coming through the holes in the rest of the paper.

Their "writes to disk" are just being stored in disk cache hence the "faster" speed.

According TFA, they actually do an explicit sync to disk at the end of the writes. So it's not purely writing into cache.

Pretty much my thoughts. Writing to disk is slow, but it's also semi-async operation (in that much of the time, the job is offloaded to the I/O subsystem before the write is complete), which generally means the sooner you start writing your results the sooner you'll finish, and if you start early you can do computational work while the I/O is happening rather than spinning wheels while trying to write the whole thing in one go. All they seem to have done is add a pile of latency and may even have introduced other impacts such as garbage collection or VM swap.

Heh. They put him in the "Open Source Development" category. He's going to just love that...

So you think the rest of the world should just accept the illegal (in the rest of the world) spying that the NSA does to them, just because it's a foreign government? That's a foolish argument.

It is hypocritical to continuous publicly call a nation an ally, often pressuring them them into working with US on fighting terrorism, etc., and then spy on said government who practises what US calls good governance, i.e. an independent government consisting of democratically elected representatives. That's the part of hypocrisy in foreign affair approach of US that upsets people from the rest of the world. That and the fact they do it even when there is no evidence or even fear of hostile or undemocratic activity.

Why should any law-aiding, peaceful, democracy supporting person in the world be subjected to espionage?

Actually in most of world the intelligence agencies are limited to investigate suspects of terrorism, and international criminal activities, not whatever they feel like. While unlawful and unreasonable spying does happen, the democratic governments do try to limit the powers of their intelligence agencies. Economic espionage is regarded as an illegal activity, even though numerous countries have been found to be engaged in it, it is still considered wrong.

No other country in the world has an intelligence community even half the size of US. The Americans have always complained about allegedly Russians and Chinese spying on UN activities during negotiations, etc., but I doubt the Soviets ever managed a fraction of the spying the US conducted on the UN representatives.

It is quite rational to be considered with being spied upon by all parties, foreign and domestic. The idea that US is somehow above the law when dealing with other countries in one of the prime reasons the US suffers from poor public image internationally, it undermines the massive good the US also does do in many cases.

Do people also not have the right to complain about fascist governments, because they didn't elect them? Do Americans have no right to be opposed to ISIL / ISIS because they are not primarily active within US?

Why should you complain about what others complain about? Or are not a supporter and believer in free speech? It is one of those so-called key "American values" in theory.

While border crossing has typically meant displaying government issues documentation, primarily a passport and any related travel/entry visas. This requires informed consent of the traveller, they are asked to display their papers. The question is, what about programs that aren't obvious or informed consent?

The part that is concerning is the existence of classified "experiments" where is it not clear what information is being gathered, who has access to it, and how it is being used.

History has repeatedly shown that undisclosed, and/or unchecked surveillance ends up being misused against the public, not in the public interest.

If everything is legal, robust, and accurate, why does law enforcement has to be done in such a clandestine manner? The vast majority of identification / evidence techniques used in court are robust enough to withstand being challenged by the defence.

While these clandestine techniques being "experimented" with may be pure BS, being misused simply as a basis for law enforcement agents to continue practising age-old discrimination based on racial profiling, bigotry, and sterotypes, not any actual accurate information.

Yes, the Titan series is an odd bridge between consumer price/ performance, and professional reliability (ECC RAM) and unhampered double precision performance at painfully professional level prices of the CUDA / GPGPU oriented Quadro and Telsa cards. (Telsa K20 to K80 cost $3500 - $5000 USD approx AFAIK)

So they are great alternatives for CUDA aware 3D graphics application users who traditionally can't afford a Quadro or Telsa card (are not professional movie / video-game studio artists or CAD designers), and students and researchers looking for low(er)-cost prototypes for developing CUDA / GPGPU software / experience. I assume any graduate CS/EE student studying parallelism / many-core hardware or software wants a Titan as an affordable alternative to the tuition-like pricing of the Quadro and Telsa cards.

I had considering putting the Titan X on my own personal wish list, until I read that the FP64 isn't in line with performance improvements over previous generation Titans.

OMG !? I feel sick just reading that. You do know that you can clean keyboards, right?!

For your own health and those around you, I strongly recommend a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, available off-the-shelf from any pharmacy (or chemist) and a toothbrush (not the one you use for your mouth at present). Did no one teach you germ theory?

All you have to do is unplug the keyboard before cleaning, and ensure it is dry before plugging it back it.

Placing it in a dishwasher may not be optimal, unless the damage is too severe to clean by other methods, and be aware that the heat from the drying cycle may deform the plastic.

That should be modded Funny, or Sad. But in truth Slashdot opinions are nearly as likely to be "astroturf" as legitimate compared to anywhere else.

Personally I do like mechanical keyboards, and for a non-backlit model the Cherry mechanical keyboard (not a 3rd-party keyboard using Cherry switches) I own and can recommend the G80-3000 (USB 104-keys US keymap), available Digikey and other (industrial) electronic suppliers globally. Likely just not your local / mail-order computer shop.

Otherwise for mechanical keyboards it is more a matter of selecting which key switch characteristics (resistance, push-length, noise, etc) than particular brands.

Of course any good keyboard discussion requires mentioning the IBM Model-M successors from UniComp with distinctive yet potentially annoyingly loud, buckling spring switches.

Except that there is not one other fully-featured NTP client/server software system that I know of.

Half of the so called "NTP clients" are really S-NTP clients (Simple NTP) that are barely if at all better than using the ancient BSD rdate command to jerk the time forward or back (whichever is needed) in a discontinuous fashion, that can cause gaps in logs, missing time-based trigger events from being fired, and other well-known woes.

As far as I know PHK doesn't pretend that Ntimed is finished or fully functional. As far as I know it also doesn't pretend to support a large amount of "legacy" systems that still exist within companies networks, even if the vendor(s) disappeared 20 years ago in some cases. OpenNTPd is a pure network client/server system that AFAIK does not support external or master references (i.e. Cesium clocks or GPS modules) so while it may serve the purpose for a large number of users, it still depends on the continued operation of NTP.org's NTP software which is the de facto evolution of David Mill's reference implementation that was not intended to be a global or even enterprise-grade critical infrastructure project, but his research implementation as he, his colleagues, and students researched time synchronization.

Some of NTPd's problem are that a) it has been maintained in a hap-hazarded fashion for 15 years longer than it should have been. b) any system where a single individual is critical or irreplaceable is broken. c) NTPd has been weak in release management / engineering for a long time now, and Stenn's ad-hoc approach hasn't done much to make the work easier for himself. I admit I had not realised that the software project, NTPd, has fallen into depending on a single person. I fact I thought the ISC (Internet Systems Consortium, the group that also maintain BIND, the most common Unix DNS server on the Internet) partnership was more than a means of managing payment and offering a few servers, I thought it was intended to take NTPd, like BIND, and make it into a healthy development community, revitalize the documentation, and share expertise in maintaining a critical infrastructure scale project Open Source of Free Software ecosystem.

The most important yet non-technical solution is for Harlan Stenn to extract himself from being a critical piece of the NTPd software development and release process. IMHO he should focus 100% of his time on mentoring others to take over the various roles he is currently doing himself, and documenting the not so obvious knowledge about the protocol, its implementation, and the history surrounding pieces of code, to preserve his own knowledge, and what he can of David Mill's knowledge that isn't currently enshrined in Mill's papers and technical notes.

Perhaps like OpenBSD that had to learn the hard way many years ago, companies can be leery (wisely from a legal point of view) of funding a seemingly one-man controlled Open Source project. Legally it may open up the possibility of being considered illegally hiring an employee in some jurisdictions ("perma-temps" or "consultants as de facto employees"), as it serves to primarily fund ongoing work that does benefit the sponsor either for their in-house or their product/service offerings.

I have no ill feelings for or any dislike of Harlan Stenn. In fact I suspect he has unwittingly painted himself into a corner, and is now approaching the breaking point. And I believe the solution is radical, but not necessarily financially or technically challenging.