The time to question a massive, stupid expenditure of money and lives is every minute until it's over.
Sure. But not in public. The war ends when one side decides it's not worth fighting anymore. When the other side is constantly arguing and in-fighting, it emboldens their enemy, prolonging the war.
Do you read what the radical Islamists write about to each other? That they must stay strong and fight, and that they are winning because of internal U.S. conflict? This message wouldn't be too influential if the New York Times weren't proving their point daily.
You can disagree all you want, but to me, the importance of solidarity winning and ending wars quickly is self-evident. And I'm about to leave and go to one in six months, so I don't think I'm underestimating the importance of loss of life. I like living. I think the best way for me to continue to live would be for everyone to get behind the war effort, or, failing that, shut up about it until it's over.
Again, the decision to go to war may have been stupid, but second-guessing that now is the real sunk cost. We're in it, we should be in it to win, in order to minimize the protracted loss of life.
And as far as rooting for failure goes, nobody even waited to see how things were going to work out. You had critics from day one -- even the same people who voted to go to war. So don't pretend that it's a simple "oh, this didn't turn out right, let's change course." It never was about the war, or the country, it was about political gain.
The Amiga was released long before the Microsoft and the PC was the 800 pound gorilla of the home PC market. There was no dominant software platform. If anything, it was the Commodore 64, the best selling home computer up to that point. It was everywhere. Toys R' Us had an entire aisle devoted to C64 software -- it was Nintendo and Dell rolled into one. There was no Microsoft Office, it wasn't even on the radar. Totally level playing field as far as software goes.
On top of that, the Amiga was far and away the best machine for price/performance. The Amiga 500 was $500. You couldn't touch a Mac or a PC at that price, let alone one that had a color GUI.
So, on all counts, the Amiga was exactly what the customer wanted.
But nobody knew about it, not because there was bad marketing, but because there was no marketing. Not ever. Nobody outside of the the hard-core tech nerds had ever heard of the damn thing. It wasn't in the business computer mags, it wasn't on TV, it wasn't anywhere.
It was, perhaps, the biggest missed marketing opportunity of the 80's. Commodore was a household name, and I guess they expected that, and that alone, to translate into Amiga sales. Huge mistake. Even Microsoft pushes Vista, even though it's nearly inevitable you'll buy a copy someday.
I think you have this totally backwards. The right time for questioning was BEFORE the war is begun. The next good time to question is before the next casualty.
Question the war before, and after, not during. If you must question it during, it must be done in private. The country should be a unified front when not being seen as such will put soldiers' lives at greater risk. That's all.
My greatest beef with Kerry and the entire Democratic party at this point is that they either don't understand this, or they completely understand this, and don't care.
If Kerry doesn't understand this even after all the heat he took for his actions during Vietnam, he's way too dense for me to vote for. If he does understand and chooses to ignore the cost in lives in favor of his own political benefit, that's much, much worse. And I strongly suspect that's the case.
Still, I could not in good conscience vote for someone like that, knowing full well it would be a vote of no confidence in the war effort and totally undermine the military's ability to get out quickly and cleanly.
This is not to say that Bush has done a stellar job, but I think Kerry's failure was more inevitable at that point.
I abstained, but had I been forced, I would have voted for Bush over Kerry.
Kerry is despicable to me. The type of man that Kerry is (if you can call him that) is one of the few things more despicable to me than someone who runs for president touting a conservative/moderate isolationist policy and then does a complete 180 once in office.
I'm of the mindset that you don't play sides against one another, you don't sit on the fence with your finger in the breeze waiting to see which way the wind blows before you act out of conviction. ESPECIALLY if you're in a position of leadership, which apparently doesn't include Senators anymore.
I think the Iraq war was possibly one of the biggest strategic mistakes ever made, but I believe that Bush made the decision on good conscience while being fed bad information. Now we have to deal with it. Such is life.
I think that once your country is involved in the war, the only option you have is to win it, and win it quickly. All this handwringing and second-guessing and berating the president serves to do one thing. ..prolong a bad war and ensure that the U.S. has a severely handicapped foreign policy for years to come, which can only cause more violence and destabilization.
I think anyone who seriously thinks protests and political attacks are going to end violence in Iraq one second sooner, and actually benefit the people there, are deluding themselves. Once the country entered the war, our choice was no longer to be in a war or not -- that choice was made and could not be revisited. Our choice was to win decisively and leave the country moderately stable, or leave Iraq in a state of chaos and civil war.
The time to question whether the war was a good idea is after the war is over. Otherwise there will always be those who can say, "Well, if we had support of the press, congress, people, etc., it would have been different."
This is the tragedy of Vietnam that people like Kerry seem to think was some great victory for their "side." They can't let a bad policy fail and be evaluated on its own terms, because their egos are too big not to make a scene.
Nobody seriously wants to prolong a war. When it ends, it ends, protests or no. It can't be cut short either without tremendous loss of life and damage -- most people know this. This is why the Dems in congress now will never vote to cut off funding for it, it's political suicide, because it's stupid.
If Kerry really "supported the troops," he'd keep his damn mouth shut about the war. He'd have likely gotten elected and been able to make a real, positive change if he had. But he doesn't have the concern of the country as his focus, he's so self-centered his selfishness comes over TV broadcasts.
I'd have more respect for someone who actually voted against the war, and to cut off funding for it, instead of the spineless types who publically oppose the war but do nothing real to stop it, which only prolongs the war and encourages the enemy to keep fighting. And hell, I'm one of the "troops".
Kerry is a spineless egotist, not a man. You can at least say Bush has convictions, as wrong as they may be.
And by real-world, I don't mean using the sample similar file set on a real network like you did for the paper, I mean finding the similarity data among thousands or millions of users.
For every new file available on the network, a comparison is going to have to be done between that file and *every other file* available on the network to check for similarity. This is feasible for some small number of files, but when you have, say, a million files, this is no longer insignificant.
Your paper assumes you already have this similarity data. But in a real-world situation, you won't.
This is neglecting the fact that a hash of a chunk of data doesn't guarantee that another chunk with the same hash is a match and not a collision. You substantially reduce the risk of a collision by using similar files, but because the files aren't identical, it can't be guaranteed. Since any collision of any chunk will corrupt the entire file and necessitate downloading the entire thing over, (because you don't know which chunk collides), this could severely reduce performance. Any numbers on when hash collisions become a factor, and by how much?
Let's say, for example, hash collisions are extremely rare if you use 99% similar files. What are the performance gains for that threshold, including the outside chance that a collision corrupts the entire download?
How do you know a file is similar? By hashing? There's no guarantee that a particular chunk of a file with an md5 hash (for example) contains the same bytes as that of another file.
There are 2^256 possible chunks of 256 bits of data. There are 2^16 possible hashes with (using a 16 bit binary key) for that same data. That means that for every hash match, the data has a 1 in 16 chance of actually matching.
You can extend the key length to reduce this ratio, but you'll end up with a key length equal to your data size before you're sure the data is not a collision.
The problem gets worse if the chunks of data aren't equal in size.
This can only work if you have a centralized database of every possible file combination on your network. It's workable for a small amount of files, but will grow exponentially in a real environment. Not to mention, the centralized database would have to handle a significant amount of traffic, reducing the speed gains possible.
I don't know about other states, but in California you can now get rid of a CRT for free.
Have you tried this? A few months ago, I brought my old TV to the Monterey County waste disposal reclamation center whatever-they-call-it, and they charged me a $10 handling fee to take my old, working television and sell it to someone else.
I subsequently found out about the recycling fee. To tell you the truth, nothing in this wacky state surprises me anymore. I'd be mad if I weren't leaving it so soon.
Of course, I'm sure you'd like all things to look as they did in the 1950's: rough, matted, somewhat childish.
You're whole comment is right on about aesthetics, but seriously, the 1950's were a pinnacle for industrial design.
I wish I could by a modern car with tail fins on it, or a surf-green art deco blender. Even the commonplace appliances were works of art.
There are so few aesthetic innovations today that are as cool. This is the future, dammit! Everything's supposed to be rounded and chrome, and look like it's taking off into outer space. Even the future looked better in the 1950's than it does today.
Almost all of the NY Times is an op-ed piece these days. They're just not all labeled as such.
That said, this particular piece was excellent. Although a bit sad, it makes me hopeful that the 12 or so great musicians/bands of the last 40 years that were actually pushed by the major labels will still find fans online, and that the thousands of artist who are just as good but I've never heard of will be able to make a living that way too.
And that I'll be able to find them much more easily.
I think the end result will be that this is the best thing that could have happened to popular music. If you're not a 13 year old girl, or a 45 year old girl with the same taste in music that you had since you were 13, the RIAA companies produced very little of value to you anyway.
I believe that the grandparent was referring to the hardware acceleration that common GPUs provide, which is fairly useless for raytracing.
This is not to say that ray tracing can't be accelerated by providing the appropriate routines in hardware, just that there's a mismatch between what is needed for ray-tracing and what nVidia et al. provide to support OpenGL and DirectX, so even if the graphics hardware on the PS-3 were available in Linux, it wouldn't be that beneficial for this project.
Focus follows mouse (without auto-raise) is the only way to read one window while typing in another, without the window you're typing in raising to the foreground and obscuring the window you're reading from.
For laptops or any non-multi screen system it's the only way to go.
When I'm using windows it's the biggest thing I miss. There's a power tool that allows you to set it up, but many windows apps behave badly without the click to focus behavior.
How else would you separate very rich and foolish people from their money, aside from forcibly taking it?
The best thing about this is that rich people create incentives for creativity and growth, and spending on luxury items just fuels that.
Think about the laptop maker, web designer, advertising agency -- all of the people who make a living off of the sale of just one of these.
Plus, the $1,000,000 is obviously far better off in the hands of somebody willing to use it for a laptop selling business than someone who would spend it on a diamond laptop.
Besides, someone who is dirt poor in Africa would say the same thing about you. Why do you need to spend an amount of money that would supply a lifetime of food on a computer in the first place?
In a perfect world, there would be no market for $1,000,000 laptops because everyone would be busy creating more wealth by curing diseases and solving energy crises. Since that's never going to happen, this is the next best thing.
If you never learn assembly language, it's a very strong possibility that:
- You can't write a compiler - You can't debug C/C++ programs - You don't really know why buffer overflows are bad - You don't really understand memory management and what the heap and stack really are - You don't really know why threads are different than processes - You can't write a device driver - You don't know any computer architecture at any depth that matters - You won't ever understand garbage collection - You don't know how your CPU works - You won't think the movies with "hacking" in them are as funny as the rest of us do.
If not being able to do those things doesn't bother you, by all means, don't learn assembly.
The thing is, in order to be a really good programmer, you have to know how the machine works, all the way down. Once you do, you can pick up any language very easily, because you know what they're trying to do and how.
Just learn it. It's really one of the simplest languages to learn. Realize it's not a programming language, but simply the actual machine code represented by mnemonics. So you'll have to learn an architecture. Intel 386 is a great place to start, and it couldn't be easier than on Linux. You have a flat, protected memory model, GNU "as" is likely already installed, and you make system calls using interrupt 0x80 after setting up the arguments.
You should be printing stuff to the screen within minutes, and interfacing with C object files in hours. You can write the GTK "hello world" program in a combination of C and assembly fairly easily.
Amen. If ever there were a chance for a Ross Perot-type candidate to win, it's right now.
I don't know anyone from either party who is pleased with the current crop of candidates, as both parties have run to their respective wacko nutjob base for support.
Obama impressed me in his senate run during his debate with Alan Keyes, and I really like a lot of the stuff Alan Keyes has to say. Obama's gun control stance is a deal breaker for me, though.
Hillary's universal health care history scares the crap out of me. Not to mention she's the most condescending a*&hole on the planet. No way in hell I'd vote for her.
I can't stand Edwards for many of the same reasons, and I find malpractice attorneys of his ilk despicable. Surprisingly, he's probably the least distasteful of all the Democrats.
On the Republican side, McCain is a disaster. He's the guy who means well but creates a much bigger mess than existed before he tried to fix it. Rudy's gun control stance is a deal breaker, and so is Romney's.
The Democrats have a huge opportunity to change their party into a fiscal conservative/socially liberal party that probably 70% of the country would agree with on just about everything, and sweep the 2008 elections. Instead, they run candidates least likely to give the party a new image. (I'm sorry, but, "Obama is young, and BLACK!" isn't a very convincing argument as to why he would be any different from the rest.) The very public Nancy Pelosi isn't helping things, either.
The Republicans could try to do the same thing, but the more libertarian Republican supporters have heard this story before and wouldn't believe it a second time. And their new base of religious fundies would abandon them.
Ah well, looks like we'll continue to get mediocrity.
Nope, still the same. The OS has to flush the TLB when it switches processes, which is the cache for virtual memory address lookups.
This and the reduced startup time are the most compelling reasons to use threads instead of processes on a single core.
However, on a large number of cores, things aren't so clear-cut, since if you have as many cores as active processes, you're not doing the context switching as much, and the benefit of using threading to reduce cache flushes isn't so clear. You'd still benefit from the quick startup of threads, so for things like a highly concurrent web server that creates a thread per user, threads may still be a better solution.
Interestingly, the much maligned cooperative threads (user-space) are the fastest of all since the programmer can control when the context switch happens. However, if there's blocking or an infinite loop, the whole application will hang. You have to use asynchronous I/O and make sure no thread runs for too long.
Like most things, it's a trade off between protection from various mistakes and errors vs. speed and control. Processes give you the most protection with the greatest amount of overhead, while user level threads give you the best performance, but only if you design everything correctly.
You're exactly right, and it was so obvious that this would happen.
The rise of feminism and the idea that you weren't a real woman unless you had a career, essentially doubled the size of the work force in a generation.
When the supply of labor doubles, demand will react to that negatively. Wages decrease significantly.
This is incredibly difficult on single parent families and stay-at-home moms, but we have to remember, this is what we all wanted, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Careful . . . I don't think you want your super sexy real doll to think like an actual woman.
That is, unless you want your old doll to get jealous of the new one and steal half your money and burn your house down.
The time to question a massive, stupid expenditure of money and lives is every minute until it's over.
Sure. But not in public. The war ends when one side decides it's not worth fighting anymore. When the other side is constantly arguing and in-fighting, it emboldens their enemy, prolonging the war.
Do you read what the radical Islamists write about to each other? That they must stay strong and fight, and that they are winning because of internal U.S. conflict? This message wouldn't be too influential if the New York Times weren't proving their point daily.
You can disagree all you want, but to me, the importance of solidarity winning and ending wars quickly is self-evident. And I'm about to leave and go to one in six months, so I don't think I'm underestimating the importance of loss of life. I like living. I think the best way for me to continue to live would be for everyone to get behind the war effort, or, failing that, shut up about it until it's over.
Again, the decision to go to war may have been stupid, but second-guessing that now is the real sunk cost. We're in it, we should be in it to win, in order to minimize the protracted loss of life.
And as far as rooting for failure goes, nobody even waited to see how things were going to work out. You had critics from day one -- even the same people who voted to go to war. So don't pretend that it's a simple "oh, this didn't turn out right, let's change course." It never was about the war, or the country, it was about political gain.
The Amiga was released long before the Microsoft and the PC was the 800 pound gorilla of the home PC market. There was no dominant software platform. If anything, it was the Commodore 64, the best selling home computer up to that point. It was everywhere. Toys R' Us had an entire aisle devoted to C64 software -- it was Nintendo and Dell rolled into one. There was no Microsoft Office, it wasn't even on the radar. Totally level playing field as far as software goes.
On top of that, the Amiga was far and away the best machine for price/performance. The Amiga 500 was $500. You couldn't touch a Mac or a PC at that price, let alone one that had a color GUI.
So, on all counts, the Amiga was exactly what the customer wanted.
But nobody knew about it, not because there was bad marketing, but because there was no marketing. Not ever. Nobody outside of the the hard-core tech nerds had ever heard of the damn thing. It wasn't in the business computer mags, it wasn't on TV, it wasn't anywhere.
It was, perhaps, the biggest missed marketing opportunity of the 80's. Commodore was a household name, and I guess they expected that, and that alone, to translate into Amiga sales. Huge mistake. Even Microsoft pushes Vista, even though it's nearly inevitable you'll buy a copy someday.
I think you have this totally backwards. The right time for questioning was BEFORE the war is begun. The next good time to question is before the next casualty.
Question the war before, and after, not during. If you must question it during, it must be done in private. The country should be a unified front when not being seen as such will put soldiers' lives at greater risk. That's all.
My greatest beef with Kerry and the entire Democratic party at this point is that they either don't understand this, or they completely understand this, and don't care.
If Kerry doesn't understand this even after all the heat he took for his actions during Vietnam, he's way too dense for me to vote for. If he does understand and chooses to ignore the cost in lives in favor of his own political benefit, that's much, much worse. And I strongly suspect that's the case.
You make an excellent point.
Still, I could not in good conscience vote for someone like that, knowing full well it would be a vote of no confidence in the war effort and totally undermine the military's ability to get out quickly and cleanly.
This is not to say that Bush has done a stellar job, but I think Kerry's failure was more inevitable at that point.
Hence my not voting.
That's right, because we all know the Internet itself is vulnerable to this kind of physical attack, so putting it in space is just silly!
Oh wait.
I abstained, but had I been forced, I would have voted for Bush over Kerry.
.prolong a bad war and ensure that the U.S. has a severely handicapped foreign policy for years to come, which can only cause more violence and destabilization.
Kerry is despicable to me. The type of man that Kerry is (if you can call him that) is one of the few things more despicable to me than someone who runs for president touting a conservative/moderate isolationist policy and then does a complete 180 once in office.
I'm of the mindset that you don't play sides against one another, you don't sit on the fence with your finger in the breeze waiting to see which way the wind blows before you act out of conviction. ESPECIALLY if you're in a position of leadership, which apparently doesn't include Senators anymore.
I think the Iraq war was possibly one of the biggest strategic mistakes ever made, but I believe that Bush made the decision on good conscience while being fed bad information. Now we have to deal with it. Such is life.
I think that once your country is involved in the war, the only option you have is to win it, and win it quickly. All this handwringing and second-guessing and berating the president serves to do one thing. .
I think anyone who seriously thinks protests and political attacks are going to end violence in Iraq one second sooner, and actually benefit the people there, are deluding themselves. Once the country entered the war, our choice was no longer to be in a war or not -- that choice was made and could not be revisited. Our choice was to win decisively and leave the country moderately stable, or leave Iraq in a state of chaos and civil war.
The time to question whether the war was a good idea is after the war is over. Otherwise there will always be those who can say, "Well, if we had support of the press, congress, people, etc., it would have been different."
This is the tragedy of Vietnam that people like Kerry seem to think was some great victory for their "side." They can't let a bad policy fail and be evaluated on its own terms, because their egos are too big not to make a scene.
Nobody seriously wants to prolong a war. When it ends, it ends, protests or no. It can't be cut short either without tremendous loss of life and damage -- most people know this. This is why the Dems in congress now will never vote to cut off funding for it, it's political suicide, because it's stupid.
If Kerry really "supported the troops," he'd keep his damn mouth shut about the war. He'd have likely gotten elected and been able to make a real, positive change if he had. But he doesn't have the concern of the country as his focus, he's so self-centered his selfishness comes over TV broadcasts.
I'd have more respect for someone who actually voted against the war, and to cut off funding for it, instead of the spineless types who publically oppose the war but do nothing real to stop it, which only prolongs the war and encourages the enemy to keep fighting. And hell, I'm one of the "troops".
Kerry is a spineless egotist, not a man. You can at least say Bush has convictions, as wrong as they may be.
Not my bank routing number!
Someone please fix this before someone finds out how to deposit money into my account!
How will this work in a real world situation?
And by real-world, I don't mean using the sample similar file set on a real network like you did for the paper, I mean finding the similarity data among thousands or millions of users.
For every new file available on the network, a comparison is going to have to be done between that file and *every other file* available on the network to check for similarity. This is feasible for some small number of files, but when you have, say, a million files, this is no longer insignificant.
Your paper assumes you already have this similarity data. But in a real-world situation, you won't.
This is neglecting the fact that a hash of a chunk of data doesn't guarantee that another chunk with the same hash is a match and not a collision. You substantially reduce the risk of a collision by using similar files, but because the files aren't identical, it can't be guaranteed. Since any collision of any chunk will corrupt the entire file and necessitate downloading the entire thing over, (because you don't know which chunk collides), this could severely reduce performance. Any numbers on when hash collisions become a factor, and by how much?
Let's say, for example, hash collisions are extremely rare if you use 99% similar files. What are the performance gains for that threshold, including the outside chance that a collision corrupts the entire download?
This seems to be an intractable problem.
How do you know a file is similar? By hashing? There's no guarantee that a particular chunk of a file with an md5 hash (for example) contains the same bytes as that of another file.
There are 2^256 possible chunks of 256 bits of data. There are 2^16 possible hashes with (using a 16 bit binary key) for that same data. That means that for every hash match, the data has a 1 in 16 chance of actually matching.
You can extend the key length to reduce this ratio, but you'll end up with a key length equal to your data size before you're sure the data is not a collision.
The problem gets worse if the chunks of data aren't equal in size.
This can only work if you have a centralized database of every possible file combination on your network. It's workable for a small amount of files, but will grow exponentially in a real environment. Not to mention, the centralized database would have to handle a significant amount of traffic, reducing the speed gains possible.
Count me as skeptical.
I don't know about other states, but in California you can now get rid of a CRT for free.
Have you tried this? A few months ago, I brought my old TV to the Monterey County waste disposal reclamation center whatever-they-call-it, and they charged me a $10 handling fee to take my old, working television and sell it to someone else.
I subsequently found out about the recycling fee. To tell you the truth, nothing in this wacky state surprises me anymore. I'd be mad if I weren't leaving it so soon.
1) Buy business card stock ...
2) Print out cards that say "http://www.postgresql.org"
3)
4) Profit!
Of course, I'm sure you'd like all things to look as they did in the 1950's: rough, matted, somewhat childish.
You're whole comment is right on about aesthetics, but seriously, the 1950's were a pinnacle for industrial design.
I wish I could by a modern car with tail fins on it, or a surf-green art deco blender. Even the commonplace appliances were works of art.
There are so few aesthetic innovations today that are as cool. This is the future, dammit! Everything's supposed to be rounded and chrome, and look like it's taking off into outer space. Even the future looked better in the 1950's than it does today.
Almost all of the NY Times is an op-ed piece these days. They're just not all labeled as such.
That said, this particular piece was excellent. Although a bit sad, it makes me hopeful that the 12 or so great musicians/bands of the last 40 years that were actually pushed by the major labels will still find fans online, and that the thousands of artist who are just as good but I've never heard of will be able to make a living that way too.
And that I'll be able to find them much more easily.
I think the end result will be that this is the best thing that could have happened to popular music. If you're not a 13 year old girl, or a 45 year old girl with the same taste in music that you had since you were 13, the RIAA companies produced very little of value to you anyway.
Good riddance.
Don't worry -- if you keep having sex, it will get better.
I believe that the grandparent was referring to the hardware acceleration that common GPUs provide, which is fairly useless for raytracing.
This is not to say that ray tracing can't be accelerated by providing the appropriate routines in hardware, just that there's a mismatch between what is needed for ray-tracing and what nVidia et al. provide to support OpenGL and DirectX, so even if the graphics hardware on the PS-3 were available in Linux, it wouldn't be that beneficial for this project.
Focus follows mouse (without auto-raise) is the only way to read one window while typing in another, without the window you're typing in raising to the foreground and obscuring the window you're reading from.
For laptops or any non-multi screen system it's the only way to go.
When I'm using windows it's the biggest thing I miss. There's a power tool that allows you to set it up, but many windows apps behave badly without the click to focus behavior.
(Install FreeBSD)
./.fvwm2rc
.emacs with vi - the very best editor for editing .emacs - make sure to set viper-mode t)
> scp oldcomp:/home/bluesman/.fvwm2rc
> pkg_add -r fvwm-devel
> pkg_add -r emacs
> pkg_add -r clisp
> pkg_add -r sbcl
> pkg_add -r firefox
(Download slime)
(Edit
> pkg_add -r gimp
> pkg_add -r gaim
And I'm home. Install openoffice, Qt, Java, etc as necessary.
Study your history.
GNU/America took off years ago, and didn't work out.
Nah, it's what's right with the world.
How else would you separate very rich and foolish people from their money, aside from forcibly taking it?
The best thing about this is that rich people create incentives for creativity and growth, and spending on luxury items just fuels that.
Think about the laptop maker, web designer, advertising agency -- all of the people who make a living off of the sale of just one of these.
Plus, the $1,000,000 is obviously far better off in the hands of somebody willing to use it for a laptop selling business than someone who would spend it on a diamond laptop.
Besides, someone who is dirt poor in Africa would say the same thing about you. Why do you need to spend an amount of money that would supply a lifetime of food on a computer in the first place?
In a perfect world, there would be no market for $1,000,000 laptops because everyone would be busy creating more wealth by curing diseases and solving energy crises. Since that's never going to happen, this is the next best thing.
Yeah, sure.
If you never learn assembly language, it's a very strong possibility that:
- You can't write a compiler
- You can't debug C/C++ programs
- You don't really know why buffer overflows are bad
- You don't really understand memory management and what the heap and stack really are
- You don't really know why threads are different than processes
- You can't write a device driver
- You don't know any computer architecture at any depth that matters
- You won't ever understand garbage collection
- You don't know how your CPU works
- You won't think the movies with "hacking" in them are as funny as the rest of us do.
If not being able to do those things doesn't bother you, by all means, don't learn assembly.
The thing is, in order to be a really good programmer, you have to know how the machine works, all the way down. Once you do, you can pick up any language very easily, because you know what they're trying to do and how.
Just learn it. It's really one of the simplest languages to learn. Realize it's not a programming language, but simply the actual machine code represented by mnemonics. So you'll have to learn an architecture. Intel 386 is a great place to start, and it couldn't be easier than on Linux. You have a flat, protected memory model, GNU "as" is likely already installed, and you make system calls using interrupt 0x80 after setting up the arguments.
You should be printing stuff to the screen within minutes, and interfacing with C object files in hours. You can write the GTK "hello world" program in a combination of C and assembly fairly easily.
Get to work.
Amen. If ever there were a chance for a Ross Perot-type candidate to win, it's right now.
I don't know anyone from either party who is pleased with the current crop of candidates, as both parties have run to their respective wacko nutjob base for support.
Obama impressed me in his senate run during his debate with Alan Keyes, and I really like a lot of the stuff Alan Keyes has to say. Obama's gun control stance is a deal breaker for me, though.
Hillary's universal health care history scares the crap out of me. Not to mention she's the most condescending a*&hole on the planet. No way in hell I'd vote for her.
I can't stand Edwards for many of the same reasons, and I find malpractice attorneys of his ilk despicable. Surprisingly, he's probably the least distasteful of all the Democrats.
On the Republican side, McCain is a disaster. He's the guy who means well but creates a much bigger mess than existed before he tried to fix it. Rudy's gun control stance is a deal breaker, and so is Romney's.
The Democrats have a huge opportunity to change their party into a fiscal conservative/socially liberal party that probably 70% of the country would agree with on just about everything, and sweep the 2008 elections. Instead, they run candidates least likely to give the party a new image. (I'm sorry, but, "Obama is young, and BLACK!" isn't a very convincing argument as to why he would be any different from the rest.) The very public Nancy Pelosi isn't helping things, either.
The Republicans could try to do the same thing, but the more libertarian Republican supporters have heard this story before and wouldn't believe it a second time. And their new base of religious fundies would abandon them.
Ah well, looks like we'll continue to get mediocrity.
Nope, still the same. The OS has to flush the TLB when it switches processes, which is the cache for virtual memory address lookups.
This and the reduced startup time are the most compelling reasons to use threads instead of processes on a single core.
However, on a large number of cores, things aren't so clear-cut, since if you have as many cores as active processes, you're not doing the context switching as much, and the benefit of using threading to reduce cache flushes isn't so clear. You'd still benefit from the quick startup of threads, so for things like a highly concurrent web server that creates a thread per user, threads may still be a better solution.
Interestingly, the much maligned cooperative threads (user-space) are the fastest of all since the programmer can control when the context switch happens. However, if there's blocking or an infinite loop, the whole application will hang. You have to use asynchronous I/O and make sure no thread runs for too long.
Like most things, it's a trade off between protection from various mistakes and errors vs. speed and control. Processes give you the most protection with the greatest amount of overhead, while user level threads give you the best performance, but only if you design everything correctly.
You're exactly right, and it was so obvious that this would happen.
The rise of feminism and the idea that you weren't a real woman unless you had a career, essentially doubled the size of the work force in a generation.
When the supply of labor doubles, demand will react to that negatively. Wages decrease significantly.
This is incredibly difficult on single parent families and stay-at-home moms, but we have to remember, this is what we all wanted, right?