It IS TRUE that MHz are not a good way to measure performance. It IS TRUE that a G4 is faster than a Pentium or Athlon that's similarly clocked. But that DOESN'T MEAN that all G4s are faster than Pentiums or Athlons!
Show me any sensible, general-purpose benchmark (not something commissioned by Apple) that shows the G4s are faster, and I'll shut up. But it's insane to be extending this "MHz myth" to essentially that BECAUSE the P4 has higher clock speeds, it is SLOWER!
> easy, it is 2 off the shelf systems, you plug it in and see that one system performs > better then a diffrent system. (last i checked, there wern't any dual P4 systems > avalible.) this test shows that apples high end system beet out sony's system (i'm asuming > it's their high end system but i didn't read the artical)
Uh, fine, but the poster's point was that G4s perform better than P4s despite their lower clock speed. This article definitely doesn't corroborate that claim.
> the test i'd like to see is apples high end system up against a high end athlon system > 1, 2, 4 CPU's it doesn't matter, the athlon will smoke the apple in perfomance, but the > apple will smoke the athlon in usability.
If there's some way to objectively test usability, the results might be as you suggest... but since this is about the possibility of apple using intel chips in their computers in the future, what does that matter? Does anyone actually think that the processor in the computer somehow affects "usability"?
It's true that Photoshop has filters optimized for the Mac, and the benchmarks for those are somewhat irrepresentative of general performance. Most programs do not have this kind of parallelism available, and even fewer are actually optimized to use the processor's vector capabilities. (A better benchmark would compile the same C program using the vendor's compiler on both platforms and measure how the two stacked up. Or at least allow both vendors a shot at optimizing the filters in question...)
But the main problem with this test is that he's testing a dual processor G4 against a single processor Pentium in a multi-threaded app doing highly parallelizable work!! How can we make sense of those results?
"Feasable" in what sense? Most general-purpose processors don't like to share a bus (etc.) with another chip, especially one with a different architecture and endianness!
Well, it's not false information, just misleading. Though you can't compare the clock speeds directly, it IS true that because the P4s run at 2.5 GHz, they are a performance boost over the G4 (which would need to run at around 1.25 GHz to get equal performance).
Re:"Performance Boost" a result of the MHz myth?
on
Intel Inside For Apple?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's true that you can't compare chips directly, but try an actual benchmark (ie, not a photoshop filter commissioned by apple) and you'll see that the 2.5 GHz P4 beats the 1 GHz G4 pretty easily. Try cpuscorecard.com, for instance, which says a 1 GHz G4 is a little worse than the 2 GHz P4.
It's not a forgery if you wrote it. If you mean when they try to reuse it, yes, of course -- my point is that he's not doing anything to protect himself with this little scheme.
> Despite all the noise on slashdot, I suspect that the majority of piracy nowadays still > uses more traditional techniques: "sharing" a friends CD, obtaining "warez" CDs, "sharing" > CDs with friends, etc.
Well, you can expect what you want, but my whole family uses Kazaa to download mp3s off the internet in minutes. They could hardly use the computer, let alone dial up a BBS and learn all of the conventions, in 1992. CDRs weren't even available at an acceptable price until about 1995, and MP3 encoding wasn't taking off until 1997.
It's true that copyright violation has been around for a long time, but in the last few years it has become MUCH easier to share on a much larger scale. It's more than just noise on slashdot; it sounds like you are pretty disconnected...!
> It will not go away because of this. It has been around for a long time, and it is not > substantially easier today to violate copyright than it was 10 years ago.
The growth of the internet, broadband, and the consumerization of programs like Napster and Kazaa have absolutely made it substantially easier to violate copyright than it was in 1992. (In 1992, you'd dial up a local BBS with 20 megs of hard drive space and a 14.4k modem... if you're lucky!)
I don't know how you can claim that with a straight face!
All it takes is a merchant account, your name, number, and expiration date to make charges to your card. (Some cards get you slightly better rates if you provide an actual address and zip code.) The signature doesn't do anything except give them some leverage in case you reject the charges; a dozen transactions with the same signature "proof" is not going to be any leverage worth speaking of!
In my opinion, if copyright goes it will be because it is unworkable economically (ie, unenforceable) and therefore, we won't still have companies trying to "own" their works. Instead, former IP shops will become service firms, charging for the creation rather than the duplication of ideas.
While copyright exists, a 'click-through GPL' is unnecessary because everyone is *by default* forbidden from distributing the software. They gain this privilege by accepting the license.
If some day copyright goes away, then we'll be in a different boat. But then there won't be as much of a need for licenses like the GPL, because the culture will be so different.
As someone who's tracking many Mozilla bugs, I can tell you that Mozilla has more than 20 open security issues. Search for "security", "buffer overflow", etc. on bugzilla and see.
Though one thing that Mozilla has in its favor is a highly diverse distribution -- there have been so many versions that many bugs would be hard to exploit for any significant portion of the population. IE doesn't have this "feature".
Yes, it certainly has changed... real world considerations are much different from the memory-poor days when knuth invented mix and all of his insane bit-twiddling techniques. The theoretical analysis of basically any sort of sensible hashing will wind up resulting in constant time access... so it's really a question of addressing the constant factors on modern machines (as well as the ease in implementing these different schemes!). Knuth is quite outdated in that respect.
It's possible that your design or execution of your part of the program makes it difficult to write the others. Not for you, since you know all the tricks and hidden invariants of your code, but for others, who don't understand what you're doing. The key to successful team programming is carefully defining modules and interfaces between them such that they can be implemented with minimal interaction and understanding of the other programmer's code.
Anyway, I am probably just guilty of giving the benefit of the doubt to your co-workers, but don't overlook the fact that your personal code output is not the only measure of how good you are for the project.
If you need a quick fix, I suggest taking a few hours with each other team member and getting them started on their code in a pair. Programming in pairs (the best idea in 'XP') is pretty good, and it usually results in high knowledge transfer and low bugs.
NT Emacs is awesome. I use it on my windows boxes, and aside from some unix-ish features like command-prompt interaction, it is quite stable and mature. It even has decent integration with the shell, letting you (for instance) drag files into the emacs window to be opened.
I don't know what killer features gvim has that you use, but I assure you they're all there.
I'm inclined to think that I'm morally in the right to make such modifications in the privacy of my home, but not to tote around this dangerous weapon or sell it or fire it off in the town square.
Sadly, it's difficult to reconcile a law with morality! (I think I know which side the DMCA falls on, though...)
I know that. I'm saying that this read-only hard drive thing does nothing that can't be done with non-proprietary inexpensive hardware. You were (at one point) arguing that it was useful. I agree that machines tend to be vulnerable to security problems.
> Well you're wrong. If it comes to a battle between you and the huge number of people > affected by your sophmoric beliefs, you will lose.
> As for mp3.com, most people expect to make a small quantity of money from it. Of course > they also expect free advertising, which they get. But if in general no one sells, > mp3.com will not make money and you'll see it disappear along with all of those people > that "care" about their music. > This doesn't touch on the fact that most of the music to be found there is rather bad, > but since I have a friend that distribute music via mp3.com, I can also understand why. > He, like many (as is obvious) don't really have much experience making music, nor are > overly talented. You might find some bands you like, and I'm not apt to like them. And > my neice that adores Britney Spears probably won't, either. > > Not that you have any clue when you mention people recording an entire disc in a day. > Yeah, that happens so often. Like never.
Well, a day is a bit of an exaggeration. The point is that it is done in a short amount of time . Anyway, it is not unheard of to record an album in one session. I know Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band did it with their classic Trout Mask Replica. When you write the songs and practice beforehand it's not too hard to play them all in a good take or two during one day in the studio.
(Indeed, as I've shown with my album-a-day project, it's possible to even write *and* record an album in a single day. I have plenty of experience with this!)
Anyway, please do not assert that my beliefs are wrong and then go on to make up some scenario yourself. Most people have access to free web hosting, and really the only thing mp3.com does is act as a service that helps people find amateur music. (It doesn't even do a good job at that, which, combined with your stubbornness, is probably why you never found anything you like.) Is it really more likely that the music industry will find some way to silence all of the free mp3s (and pirate mp3s, for that matter) and make music replication on silver platters profitable?
PS. "sophomoric" has an 'o' between the 'h' and 'm'. That's a pretty amusing error.
> Running arbitrary binary code is not as easy as simply reconfiguring a web server.
But basically all ways I know of hacking into a server *involve* running arbitrary binary code. That's what buffer overflows and format string attacks do. Removing the binaries only makes it inconvenient, but in no way difficult, for the hacker to get the functionality of those commands. Talk about a false sense of security!
Slashdot Mirror
Man, you mac guys are just incredible!
It IS TRUE that MHz are not a good way to measure performance. It IS TRUE that a G4 is faster than a Pentium or Athlon that's similarly clocked. But that DOESN'T MEAN that all G4s are faster than Pentiums or Athlons!
Show me any sensible, general-purpose benchmark (not something commissioned by Apple) that shows the G4s are faster, and I'll shut up. But it's insane to be extending this "MHz myth" to essentially that BECAUSE the P4 has higher clock speeds, it is SLOWER!
> easy, it is 2 off the shelf systems, you plug it in and see that one system performs
... but since this is about the possibility of apple using intel chips in their computers in the future, what does that matter? Does anyone actually think that the processor in the computer somehow affects "usability"?
> better then a diffrent system. (last i checked, there wern't any dual P4 systems
> avalible.) this test shows that apples high end system beet out sony's system (i'm asuming
> it's their high end system but i didn't read the artical)
Uh, fine, but the poster's point was that G4s perform better than P4s despite their lower clock speed. This article definitely doesn't corroborate that claim.
> the test i'd like to see is apples high end system up against a high end athlon system
> 1, 2, 4 CPU's it doesn't matter, the athlon will smoke the apple in perfomance, but the
> apple will smoke the athlon in usability.
If there's some way to objectively test usability, the results might be as you suggest
It's true that Photoshop has filters optimized for the Mac, and the benchmarks for those are somewhat irrepresentative of general performance. Most programs do not have this kind of parallelism available, and even fewer are actually optimized to use the processor's vector capabilities. (A better benchmark would compile the same C program using the vendor's compiler on both platforms and measure how the two stacked up. Or at least allow both vendors a shot at optimizing the filters in question...)
But the main problem with this test is that he's testing a dual processor G4 against a single processor Pentium in a multi-threaded app doing highly parallelizable work!! How can we make sense of those results?
"Feasable" in what sense? Most general-purpose processors don't like to share a bus (etc.) with another chip, especially one with a different architecture and endianness!
Well, it's not false information, just misleading. Though you can't compare the clock speeds directly, it IS true that because the P4s run at 2.5 GHz, they are a performance boost over the G4 (which would need to run at around 1.25 GHz to get equal performance).
It's true that you can't compare chips directly, but try an actual benchmark (ie, not a photoshop filter commissioned by apple) and you'll see that the 2.5 GHz P4 beats the 1 GHz G4 pretty easily. Try cpuscorecard.com, for instance, which says a 1 GHz G4 is a little worse than the 2 GHz P4.
It's not a forgery if you wrote it. If you mean when they try to reuse it, yes, of course -- my point is that he's not doing anything to protect himself with this little scheme.
> Despite all the noise on slashdot, I suspect that the majority of piracy nowadays still
...!
> uses more traditional techniques: "sharing" a friends CD, obtaining "warez" CDs, "sharing"
> CDs with friends, etc.
Well, you can expect what you want, but my whole family uses Kazaa to download mp3s off the internet in minutes. They could hardly use the computer, let alone dial up a BBS and learn all of the conventions, in 1992. CDRs weren't even available at an acceptable price until about 1995, and MP3 encoding wasn't taking off until 1997.
It's true that copyright violation has been around for a long time, but in the last few years it has become MUCH easier to share on a much larger scale. It's more than just noise on slashdot; it sounds like you are pretty disconnected
> It will not go away because of this. It has been around for a long time, and it is not
... if you're lucky!)
> substantially easier today to violate copyright than it was 10 years ago.
The growth of the internet, broadband, and the consumerization of programs like Napster and Kazaa have absolutely made it substantially easier to violate copyright than it was in 1992. (In 1992, you'd dial up a local BBS with 20 megs of hard drive space and a 14.4k modem
I don't know how you can claim that with a straight face!
Anyway, I guess we'll see if/when we get there.
If you wrote it, it's still a legal signature, regardless of whether it's your "real" signature or not.
All it takes is a merchant account, your name, number, and expiration date to make charges to your card. (Some cards get you slightly better rates if you provide an actual address and zip code.) The signature doesn't do anything except give them some leverage in case you reject the charges; a dozen transactions with the same signature "proof" is not going to be any leverage worth speaking of!
In my opinion, if copyright goes it will be because it is unworkable economically (ie, unenforceable) and therefore, we won't still have companies trying to "own" their works. Instead, former IP shops will become service firms, charging for the creation rather than the duplication of ideas.
While copyright exists, a 'click-through GPL' is unnecessary because everyone is *by default* forbidden from distributing the software. They gain this privilege by accepting the license.
If some day copyright goes away, then we'll be in a different boat. But then there won't be as much of a need for licenses like the GPL, because the culture will be so different.
As someone who's tracking many Mozilla bugs, I can tell you that Mozilla has more than 20 open security issues. Search for "security", "buffer overflow", etc. on bugzilla and see.
Though one thing that Mozilla has in its favor is a highly diverse distribution -- there have been so many versions that many bugs would be hard to exploit for any significant portion of the population. IE doesn't have this "feature".
Yes, it certainly has changed... real world considerations are much different from the memory-poor days when knuth invented mix and all of his insane bit-twiddling techniques. The theoretical analysis of basically any sort of sensible hashing will wind up resulting in constant time access... so it's really a question of addressing the constant factors on modern machines (as well as the ease in implementing these different schemes!). Knuth is quite outdated in that respect.
It's possible that your design or execution of your part of the program makes it difficult to write the others. Not for you, since you know all the tricks and hidden invariants of your code, but for others, who don't understand what you're doing. The key to successful team programming is carefully defining modules and interfaces between them such that they can be implemented with minimal interaction and understanding of the other programmer's code.
Anyway, I am probably just guilty of giving the benefit of the doubt to your co-workers, but don't overlook the fact that your personal code output is not the only measure of how good you are for the project.
If you need a quick fix, I suggest taking a few hours with each other team member and getting them started on their code in a pair. Programming in pairs (the best idea in 'XP') is pretty good, and it usually results in high knowledge transfer and low bugs.
Oh, come on, be a man. Backup if you need to, and delete the thing.
NT Emacs is awesome. I use it on my windows boxes, and aside from some unix-ish features like command-prompt interaction, it is quite stable and mature. It even has decent integration with the shell, letting you (for instance) drag files into the emacs window to be opened.
I don't know what killer features gvim has that you use, but I assure you they're all there.
Nope. I think they've given up (but things happen really slowly in the legal world...)
I'm inclined to think that I'm morally in the right to make such modifications in the privacy of my home, but not to tote around this dangerous weapon or sell it or fire it off in the town square.
Sadly, it's difficult to reconcile a law with morality! (I think I know which side the DMCA falls on, though...)
I know that. I'm saying that this read-only hard drive thing does nothing that can't be done with non-proprietary inexpensive hardware. You were (at one point) arguing that it was useful. I agree that machines tend to be vulnerable to security problems.
I did. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/dmca.html
... and you post as anonymous coward. Well, stand up to fight!
An AC flames,
> Well you're wrong. If it comes to a battle between you and the huge number of people
> affected by your sophmoric beliefs, you will lose.
> As for mp3.com, most people expect to make a small quantity of money from it. Of course
> they also expect free advertising, which they get. But if in general no one sells,
> mp3.com will not make money and you'll see it disappear along with all of those people
> that "care" about their music.
> This doesn't touch on the fact that most of the music to be found there is rather bad,
> but since I have a friend that distribute music via mp3.com, I can also understand why.
> He, like many (as is obvious) don't really have much experience making music, nor are
> overly talented. You might find some bands you like, and I'm not apt to like them. And
> my neice that adores Britney Spears probably won't, either.
>
> Not that you have any clue when you mention people recording an entire disc in a day.
> Yeah, that happens so often. Like never.
Well, a day is a bit of an exaggeration. The point is that it is done in a short amount of time . Anyway, it is not unheard of to record an album in one session. I know Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band did it with their classic Trout Mask Replica. When you write the songs and practice beforehand it's not too hard to play them all in a good take or two during one day in the studio.
(Indeed, as I've shown with my album-a-day project, it's possible to even write *and* record an album in a single day. I have plenty of experience with this!)
Anyway, please do not assert that my beliefs are wrong and then go on to make up some scenario yourself. Most people have access to free web hosting, and really the only thing mp3.com does is act as a service that helps people find amateur music. (It doesn't even do a good job at that, which, combined with your stubbornness, is probably why you never found anything you like.) Is it really more likely that the music industry will find some way to silence all of the free mp3s (and pirate mp3s, for that matter) and make music replication on silver platters profitable?
PS. "sophomoric" has an 'o' between the 'h' and 'm'. That's a pretty amusing error.
> Running arbitrary binary code is not as easy as simply reconfiguring a web server.
But basically all ways I know of hacking into a server *involve* running arbitrary binary code. That's what buffer overflows and format string attacks do. Removing the binaries only makes it inconvenient, but in no way difficult, for the hacker to get the functionality of those commands. Talk about a false sense of security!