Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Uh... (Score 5, Insightful) 101

Dave Winer has just launched a petition to Obama asking the President to declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark, thus (by Dave's reckoning) legally protected from arbitrary withdrawal or wholesale changes by its corporate masters."

Yeah nice meaningless stunt.

If the API is truly "open" then this guy can buy the servers and the network connectivity and the electricity and the hosting support needed to host the sotfware that keeps it going in perpetuity and he won't have to worry about Flickr suing him becuase it's "open".

Something tells me he is more upset that somebody else won't be paying for all of those things for his personal gain. Well guess what: When you live by the "free" service you die by the "free" service.

Comment Re:Corporate Taxes == Political Favoritism (Score 1) 780

I wouldn't tax *completely foreign entities*. If a corporation is doing some type of business in the U.S... then by definition it isn't completely foreign! (duh). If you open a shoe shop in Burundi, you don't pay U.S. taxes selling shoes to people in Burundi. If you are multi-national corporation based in Burundi doing business in the U.S., you pay taxes for your U.S. activities. It really isn't that difficult to regulate those businesses since they have to be doing something in the U.S. to begin with.

Comment Re:Corporate Taxes == Political Favoritism (Score 1) 780

I responded to this in an earlier post: Taxes are on reported profits that arise from business in the U.S. If your company posts zero profits in the U.S., then you get skinned alive by your shareholders in the stock market, so there is a strong incentive to not play games. Also: The Cayman Islands shell corporation game isn't going to help you with the loopholes that allow those games taken out of the system.

Comment Re:Define Profit (Score 1) 780

Profits are easy: They get reported every quarter for the stockholders. If the CEO wants to cheat on taxes by lying and saying that the company lost money or didn't make a large profit, then he'll get skinned alive by the stock market. The reporting puts checks in place to prevent a company from claiming that it made no money.

Comment Re:Corporate Taxes == Political Favoritism (Score 1) 780

It's a rate that isn't confiscatory while also making corporations like GE who don't pay anything right now make some contribution.

The corporate tax rate should be low because there is massive double taxation going on since every person who works for the corporation is paying income taxes, every purchase the corporation makes is getting hit with sales tax, property taxes, etc. etc.

In spite of what most people on Slashdot think (that the U.S. has no taxes at all) the corporate tax rate in the U.S. is one of the highest in the entire world. It should be much much lower, but with no loopholes: All corporations have to play by the same rules instead of rigging the game by pandering to politicians.

Comment Corporate Taxes == Political Favoritism (Score 4, Interesting) 780

The corporate tax rate should be on the order of 10% *but* with zero loopholes: Any profits from sales made in the U.S. get taxed regardless of where the company is based.

That would actually increase taxes on some major companies (but not to the stupid levels for the nominal tax rates that are in place now).

What we have now is a system where politicians can strut around talking about "taxing those evil corporations" while the corporations that pander to the politicians pay zero tax. Offender Number 1: General Electric that was paying zero taxes while Jeffrey Immelt was jetting around the world with Obama at taxpayer expense while the convenient liberals at MSNBC railed that Mitt Romney never paid taxes while conveniently never talking about their own corporate masters.

Comment Improved SAMBA client support? (Score 5, Informative) 151

experimental SMBv2 protocol support;

This can't come soon enough for Linux clients. SAMBA already has SMBv2+ server-side support, with SAMBA 4 apparently even supported SMB 3.0. This is especially true for a high-latency connection through the VPN where the reduced chattiness of newer SMB protocols gives a nice performance bump.

You can post all day & all night about how NFS/CODA/GlusterFS/etc./etc. is better, but at the end of the day the CIFS protocols are supported by every Windows machine out there and should be supported by Linux too. Plus, if you are a free-software purist, then you could setup a 100% GPL'd installation with SAMBA servers and Linux clients, so it would totally make sense for the Linux clients to actually support the modern protocols.

Comment System76: Good support (Score 4, Informative) 260

System76 gives good support. They aren't the cheapest option out there though.

If your goal is not to play 3D games, then Intel HD graphics have by far the best open-source support and HD 4000 graphics are actually pretty good overall. If your goal is to play games, then Nvidia or AMD with proprietary drivers will be your best bet, with the edge in driver quality going to Nvidia.

AMD does have some open source support *BUT* the 7000 series cards (meaning everything released in the last year) are extremely poorly supported with AMD only having released part of the necessary documentation so far (and it took them 10 months to release the part that is out there....).

Comment Re:Not watching the trends? (Score 1) 128

One problem is that xorg is using 75%... but only of one core. Xorg is a notorious offender when it comes to a program that you'd think would be very well multi-threaded but is actually single-threaded (Firefox being another although that is gradually changing).

Comment Re:Those performance numbers are BS (Score 4, Insightful) 258

First of all: Lots of non-x86 high-performance computers have similar memory controller layouts. Look at high-end SPARC or Power architecture systems.

Second of all: Thanks for proving me right with your screed about how ARM chips don't have good memory controllers. Guess what: you're right! They don't! And guess what: The Cortex-A15 is the first ARM chip capable of beating a 4 year old Atom when clocked north of 1.5 Ghz! So that's the type of performance that even the supposedly miraculous ARM gets with its architecture and a similar memory controller! You are now claiming to be insanely smarter than everyone at ARM and Intel simultaneously.. if chips could be designed and built based solely on arrogance & ego, you'd put ARM & Intel out of business by next Tuesday.

So basically you have been trolling this thread calling everybody who has pointed out flaws in the grandiose promises that you have put forth "007" in a smarmy and condescending manner while presenting zero facts to backup your arguments and contradicting yourself at every turn.

From your annoying and repetitive use of "007", do you perchance speak with a British accent? Do you appear in informercials at 2AM pushing whatever fake product of the day some insomniac can buy for $19.95? Because that's exactly how you come across in these discussions, and if you actually are associated with this project and aren't just troll then I'd highly recommend that the FSF immediately disavow this project before they end up getting sued when you make off with somebody's money.

Comment Re:Those performance numbers are BS (Score 1) 258

Uh... moron: " In fact, teh only performance difference between float and doubles comes from vectorial SIMD instructions."

Thanks for proving my point: the x86 chips run at 1/2 the effective throughput for double precision operations because the operands are twice as large. I never said a single word about instruction latency, you just invented that to make yourself sound smart while actually being stupid.

Tell me, do you go around to kindergarten classes and call the kids stupid when they say that 1 + 1 = 2 too?

Slashdot Top Deals

"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai

Working...