Politicians are greedy, and want to have control on everything. Including economy and research. And AFAIK, even more so in Israel, because of the military background of prominent state officials.
Respectfully, it's clear you don't really know anything about Israeli exact science academia and high-tech industry, both of which rely very little on government money; most of their funding comes from international competitive research funds and international investors, respectively.
If anything, Israel's army is a driving force for innovation.
Bottom line: your thesis about Israel is nice. It's just unrelated to reality.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the billions of dollars that pour in to Israel each year as welfare from the U.S.
You are right. The 3$ billions per year Israel receives from the U.S. is ~1% of Israel's yearly budget. Importantly, most of the U.S. aid comes in the form of military equipment (that is, the actual funds flow directly to the pockets of U.S. military industry). It has nothing to do with start-ups and CS departments.
For a military state such as Israel, it is impressive that every now and then they come up with innovations; not very many, but they do come up with them.
"How is it that Israel -- a country of 7.1 million people, only sixty years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources -- produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the United Kingdom?[4] The Economist notes that Israel now has more high-tech start-ups and a larger venture capital industry per capita than any other country in the world."
Or, e.g., browse the list that ranks the top-100 computer science departments in the world and observe where and how many times the Israeli flag appears in the list. (FYI, Israel has only 6 universities.)
How about all the other things that can be found in one's browser history, such as Google searches, or, say, one's own name on some websites, such as Facebook when viewing one's own profile?
I think you don't get it. The same-origin principle, enforced by all contemporary browsers, prevents sites from just querying the history. Thus, an arbitrary site is by no means able to just view the user's Google searches or Facebook profile from the browser's history, contrary to what you seem to suggest.
The problem is that it's very, very hard to truly enforce 100% of the same-origin principle. Some limited information might leak due to side channels. For example, an attacker can try to find out if the victim visited site X by attempting to retrieve X, timing how long it takes, and concluding whether or not X was retrieved from the browser's cache based on the response time; see, e.g., "timing attacks on web privacy" (which was BTW published 10 years ago). There are lots of other tricks unrelated to timing that an attacker can employ.
As far as I understand, the contribution of TFA is noticing that group membership information is nearly unique, per user, and (based on the aforesaid methods) suggesting practical ways to trick the browser into revealing this information.
Not sure why you think it's worthless.
Like you say, the paper shows that browser-history-stealing can be exploited in a new way, allowing any web site to uniquely identify those who actively participate in social networks. All people who fall under the latter category (presumably very many) are affected, and I imagine quite a few of them do not wish to be identified. So why is this worthless?
and observe how, unfortunately, XP consistently outperforms Linux:(
I went through the first 10 entries which support both OS's and found 8 were exactly the same and two were longer under Windows XP. Is that what you call "Consistently outperforming"?
Out of the 28 machines that are listed in http://event.asus.com/eeepc/comparison/eeepc_comparison.htm, there are exactly 22 that have both a Linux and XP configuration; the remaining 6 machines are either exclusively Linux, or exclusively XP, which means their battery life under the two OSes can't be compared.
From within the 22 machines that can be compared, 11 (=50%) have longer battery life under XP, and 11 have exactly the same battery life under both OSes.
So yes. This is what I call consistently outperforming.
Here's some concrete evidence. Take a look at http://event.asus.com/eeepc/comparison/eeepc_comparison.htm in which Asus compares their different eee netbooks. Go to the battery life column and observe how, unfortunately, XP consistently outperforms Linux:(
Pamela Samuelson, a Professor at Berkeley (with a joint appointment in the School of Information and the School of Law) has written an interesting short article about the subject in the July 2009 issue of the Communication of the ACM, titled "Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement". She argues that
In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement--more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.
The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.
It's disallowed by MS specifically for Office-like applications. (nothing else) I have always assumed that clause was added to gain a usability edge over OpenOffice. So this could be interesting. *grabs popcorn*
Mike Gunderloy, a former Microsoft developer left the company partially over his disagreement with the company's "sweeping land grab" including its attempt to patent the Ribbon interface. He refused to "contribut[e] to the eventual death of programming."[10] He states: "Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans."[11] KDE developer Jarosaw Staniek[12] has expressed beliefs that the patent cannot be acquired due to the ambiguity of prior art.[12] As no patent has been acquired yet[update], they assert that anyone who has not signed the license can legally implement the concept in their applications without having to conform to Microsoft's requirements.[13] Microsoft will grant free licensing for all to implement the ribbon interface except for products competing directly with Microsoft Office programs.[14] If the design guidelines contain legal loopholes that give Microsoft a basis for future lawsuits against products exploiting this concept, those disenfranchised would not be able to inform others due to the non-disclosure agreement.[8]
KDE developer Jarosaw Staniek notes that the ribbon concept has historically appeared extensively as "tabbed toolbars" in applications such as Macromedia HomeSite, Dreamweaver and Borland Delphi.[12]
TFA indeed says this, but notes that Sprint is an exception. The point, however, is that no pre-recorded caller instructions should be the default behavior.
There's a standard library function that performs the required functionality, see: http://linux.die.net/man/3/localtime . I think there's only one (good) excuse to do time-related calculations directly "by hand" rather than through a standard library function: It is only justified if the standard library is unavailable. But since this library, as its name suggests, is in fact _standard_ (in Windows and Unix variants alike), such situations are not that frequent...
This link describes the manner by which problematic reset packets are detected. Apparently, an RST packet would be flagged as generated by the ISP based on the time at which it arrives, namely, if it arrives too early, or too late:
spoofed resets have only a relatively narrow time window in which they can be both effective at disrupting connections and simultaneously be resistant to detection as potentially anomalous events. The question is what prevents the ISP from sending the packet within the said "narrow time window" and thereby avoid detection?
The response of Tannenbaum to this sort arguments, which I think is very well worded, is:
"While MINIX 3, QNX, Integrity, PikeOS, Symbian, L4Linux, Singularity, K42, HURD, Coyotos, and others [all microkernels] are an eclectic bunch; clearly I am not alone in seeing something in microkernels. If you are wondering why microkernels aren't even more widely used, well, there is a lot of inertia in the system. Why haven't Linux or Mac OS X replaced Windows? Well, there is a lot of inertia in the system. Most cars in Brazil can run on home-grown ethanol so Brazil uses relatively little oil for vehicle fuel. Why doesn't the U.S. do that and reduce its dependence on the volatile Middle East? Well, there is a lot of inertia in the system. Getting people to change, even to superior practices, is very hard."
Mind you, the word on the street is that Microsoft has assembled a group to attempt to commercialize Singularity, which means microkernels might all of a sudden find their way into the very heart of mainstream...
It depends on what you mean by "proof"... namely, I suspect that many would disagree with you and argue that science equally requires one to believe, as even the most elegant mathematical structure relies on a set of axioms: it is only correct if the axioms are correct; the proof comes after. You can call yourself a nonbeliever only if you truly doubt the axioms.
There's an interesting paper that analyzes the data accumulated in the top500 list site, which ranks the 500 most powerful supercomputers twice a year: it shows that, over time, the share of vector machines within the list is sharply declining, both in aggregated power and in number: from around 60% in 1993 to around 10% in 2003 (see Figure 3, page 6, in said paper). Still, vector machines refuse to die and always seem to maintain a presence in the top500, as is evident from the above slashdot post. Will vector machines live forever?
Google now sells storage to people that reached the space limit: 10GB for $20 per year, 40GB for $75, 150GB for $250, or 400GB for $500; the prices are specified in https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage, but you need to have a gmail account to access this page.
Google repeatedly refuses to users' requests to add to the gmail interface an option to delete attachments, which is one of the most wanted gmail features, thereby making it hard to save space.
Likewise, google repeatedly
refuses to let you sort email messages by size, making it almost impossible to locate the most space-consuming emails, a functionality one really needs when one reaches the space limit.
Considering the above non-existent options are really trivial to add, one can only conclude that google wants you to reach the limit and pay up. And they claim they're "not evil"...
here are some reasons why we'd want to preserve dying languages [from the paper]:
When a language is lost, centuries of human thinking about animals, plants, mathematics, and time may be lost with it, Swarthmore's Harrison said.
"Eighty percent of species have been undiscovered by science, but that doesn't mean they're unknown to humans, because the people who live in those ecosystems know the species intimately and they often have more sophisticated ways of classifying them than science does," he said.
"We're throwing away centuries' worth of knowledge and discoveries that they have been making all along."
In Bolivia, Harrison and Anderson met with Kallawaya people, who have been traditional herbalists since the time of the Inca Empire.
In daily life the Kallawaya use the more common Quechua language. But they also maintain a secret language to encode information about thousands of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science, that the Kallawayas use as remedies.
The navigational skills of peoples in Micronesia, meanwhile, are similarly encoded in small, vulnerable languages, Harrison said.
"There are people who may have a special set of terms... which enable them to navigate thousands of miles of uncharted ocean... without any modern instruments of navigation."
How can a person be "orders of magnitude a better programmer" if they repeatedly make significant errors of judgement?
Ingo wrote the bad scheduler that Con dramatically improved! Con only had work to do because Ingo dug Linux into this poor scheduler design to begin with.
Maybe you could argue that Ingo writes cleaner code or something, but to me good judgement is what makes a programmer good.
I guess I would say that everybody that is actually doing something, makes mistakes. But I do agree that the O(1) was a big mistake, which no doubt reflects badly on the Linux development process. And Con's work has indeed managed to put the scheduling subsystem back on track. Plus, I think it's safe to say that Con is orders of magnitude a nicer guy than Ingo.
But I'm being realistic here: Please consider that even though Ingo implemented the O(1), Linus was the one that decided that all this messy interactivity mambo jumbo would make it into the mainline and replace the scheduler Linus implemented more than a decade ago. At the bottom line, it's Linus's mistake and Linus's responsibility. Also, a lot of really sharp guys didn't fight against the O(1). So there's something of a collective responsibility here.
In light of this, if you were Linus, who would you choose? I'm not at all suggesting that the answer is carved in stone. I'm merely saying that the Ingo alternative has significant benefits. He is after all a very talented professional (Con used the work "brilliant" to describe him) that gets paid to do the work. I argue that these pros shouldn't be dismissed.
There Ingo explains that the "sleep events" mechanism you mentioned survives in CFS too, so you get both "fairness" and "sleeper fairness".
I read the post. There's a big difference between sleep-duration (to which you refer) and sleep-frequency (to which I refer). Basing decisions about sleep-duration is fine, and is equivalent in every respect to basing decision on runtime (as the two are complementary). The O(1) was largely based on sleep-frequency. In contrast to what the lwn post claims, the two schedulers have a lot in common.
But did you read Con's messages sent to the LKML (rather than just those sent to Con's private ML)?
Not all of them, but many.
Con really did get quite whiny and argumentative at times, in bad ways. He seemed to be prone to taking criticism from certain people much too personally when he should have just focused on discussing the technical issues.
I disagree. I felt his comments were usually to the point, even though towards the end you could feel his more emotional. But see more on this below.
I do have sympathy for Con, but I also believe he could have helped his cause a lot by growing a thicker skin. The Linux kernel community has had problems in the past with subsystem maintainers who were drama queens. Richard Gooch and Andre the IDE guy come to mind. It's not too surprising that core kernel developers react negatively to similar behavior, even if it's much milder than the examples I gave.
My read is different, but it'll take a few paragraphs to explain why, so please bare with me. The O(1) so called "improved interactivity" was just a hack upon a hack upon a hack that never worked. If you ever read the code you know what I'm talking about. It was a complete mess. The mess was the result of trying to obtain a goal that is unobtainable: very roughly speaking, Ingo (and others) believed that it is possible to deduce how "important" a process is, based on the frequency of the process' sleep events (not the duration of the sleep). I can point you to a few research papers that show that this can simply *not* be done. Briefly, it has been shown that for each "important" application you can find an "unimportant" application such that the CPU usage pattern of the two is very similar; Hence, you would never be able to distinguish the important from the unimportant (if you are only basing you decision on CPU usage). All you can do is (1) divide the CPU equally, and (2) provide good response time to applications that sleep for long periods of time (like editors). According to several of his emails, Ingo is not reading scheduling papers, and proud of it.
I suspect Con doesn't read such papers either. But he knew this is the case nevertheless. For years Ingo and his followers attacked Con on this. Note that this is a purely technical issue, and Con was *completely* right, e.g. take a look at CFS, or at Linus's original scheduler that lasted until 2.2, or, Solaris, *BSD (with the exception of ULE), HPUX, etc. They are all much closer to the SD's philosophy than to the O(1)'s. (BTW, the only other OS that tried to do what Ingo wanted is... the Windows family).
The discussion between Con and others regarding this issue was not about minor details. Ingo and his followers view towards Con was plain and simple: "your design is crap, it doesn't do what schedulers are supposed to do". Con resisted. And I agree, after years in the business, he was occasionally emotional about it. But this is really understandable and reasonable. Especially when you compare it to the way Ingo and Linus express themselves from time to time (talk about "drama queens"). For example, notice how Linus talks to Ingo when Ingo doesn't understand something immediately.
The bottom line is that most of them are "drama queens" from time to time. Nobody is perfect. In absolute terms, however, I think Con usually expresses himself in a calm, quiet, and relatively humble manner. Certainly in comparison to Ingo/Linus.
Slashdot Mirror
The Turtles project, from IBM, allows nested virtualization on x86 Intel machines; see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbH63kVGTek
Respectfully, it's clear you don't really know anything about Israeli exact science academia and high-tech industry, both of which rely very little on government money; most of their funding comes from international competitive research funds and international investors, respectively.
If anything, Israel's army is a driving force for innovation.
Bottom line: your thesis about Israel is nice. It's just unrelated to reality.
You are right. The 3$ billions per year Israel receives from the U.S. is ~1% of Israel's yearly budget. Importantly, most of the U.S. aid comes in the form of military equipment (that is, the actual funds flow directly to the pockets of U.S. military industry). It has nothing to do with start-ups and CS departments.
Funny.
I suggest you take a look at, e.g, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-up_Nation. Here's one paragraph (the source is backed by reference):
"How is it that Israel -- a country of 7.1 million people, only sixty years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources -- produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the United Kingdom?[4] The Economist notes that Israel now has more high-tech start-ups and a larger venture capital industry per capita than any other country in the world."
Or, e.g., browse the list that ranks the top-100 computer science departments in the world and observe where and how many times the Israeli flag appears in the list. (FYI, Israel has only 6 universities.)
etc. etc.
How about all the other things that can be found in one's browser history, such as Google searches, or, say, one's own name on some websites, such as Facebook when viewing one's own profile?
I think you don't get it. The same-origin principle, enforced by all contemporary browsers, prevents sites from just querying the history. Thus, an arbitrary site is by no means able to just view the user's Google searches or Facebook profile from the browser's history, contrary to what you seem to suggest.
The problem is that it's very, very hard to truly enforce 100% of the same-origin principle. Some limited information might leak due to side channels. For example, an attacker can try to find out if the victim visited site X by attempting to retrieve X, timing how long it takes, and concluding whether or not X was retrieved from the browser's cache based on the response time; see, e.g., "timing attacks on web privacy" (which was BTW published 10 years ago). There are lots of other tricks unrelated to timing that an attacker can employ.
As far as I understand, the contribution of TFA is noticing that group membership information is nearly unique, per user, and (based on the aforesaid methods) suggesting practical ways to trick the browser into revealing this information.
Is this worthless?
Not sure why you think it's worthless. Like you say, the paper shows that browser-history-stealing can be exploited in a new way, allowing any web site to uniquely identify those who actively participate in social networks. All people who fall under the latter category (presumably very many) are affected, and I imagine quite a few of them do not wish to be identified. So why is this worthless?
and observe how, unfortunately, XP consistently outperforms Linux :(
I went through the first 10 entries which support both OS's and found 8 were exactly the same and two were longer under Windows XP. Is that what you call "Consistently outperforming"?
I take you know what they say about half truths. But just in case you're interested in the whole truth, then here it is:
Out of the 28 machines that are listed in http://event.asus.com/eeepc/comparison/eeepc_comparison.htm, there are exactly 22 that have both a Linux and XP configuration; the remaining 6 machines are either exclusively Linux, or exclusively XP, which means their battery life under the two OSes can't be compared.
From within the 22 machines that can be compared, 11 (=50%) have longer battery life under XP, and 11 have exactly the same battery life under both OSes.
So yes. This is what I call consistently outperforming.
Here's some concrete evidence. Take a look at http://event.asus.com/eeepc/comparison/eeepc_comparison.htm in which Asus compares their different eee netbooks. Go to the battery life column and observe how, unfortunately, XP consistently outperforms Linux :(
In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement--more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.
The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.
It's disallowed by MS specifically for Office-like applications. (nothing else) I have always assumed that clause was added to gain a usability edge over OpenOffice. So this could be interesting. *grabs popcorn*
Here's what Wikipedia has to say about this "patent":
Mike Gunderloy, a former Microsoft developer left the company partially over his disagreement with the company's "sweeping land grab" including its attempt to patent the Ribbon interface. He refused to "contribut[e] to the eventual death of programming."[10] He states: "Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans."[11] KDE developer Jarosaw Staniek[12] has expressed beliefs that the patent cannot be acquired due to the ambiguity of prior art.[12] As no patent has been acquired yet[update], they assert that anyone who has not signed the license can legally implement the concept in their applications without having to conform to Microsoft's requirements.[13] Microsoft will grant free licensing for all to implement the ribbon interface except for products competing directly with Microsoft Office programs.[14] If the design guidelines contain legal loopholes that give Microsoft a basis for future lawsuits against products exploiting this concept, those disenfranchised would not be able to inform others due to the non-disclosure agreement.[8]
KDE developer Jarosaw Staniek notes that the ribbon concept has historically appeared extensively as "tabbed toolbars" in applications such as Macromedia HomeSite, Dreamweaver and Borland Delphi.[12]
TFA indeed says this, but notes that Sprint is an exception. The point, however, is that no pre-recorded caller instructions should be the default behavior.
There's a standard library function that performs the required functionality, see: http://linux.die.net/man/3/localtime . I think there's only one (good) excuse to do time-related calculations directly "by hand" rather than through a standard library function: It is only justified if the standard library is unavailable. But since this library, as its name suggests, is in fact _standard_ (in Windows and Unix variants alike), such situations are not that frequent...
"I know it and it's installed" aren't really strong advocacy arguments"
I disagree. I think these are very, very good arguments for using a language.
and didn't put vmware out of business... arguably, sun's hypervisor isn't any different.
It seems that this is currently not the case
There's an interesting paper that analyzes the data accumulated in the top500 list site, which ranks the 500 most powerful supercomputers twice a year: it shows that, over time, the share of vector machines within the list is sharply declining, both in aggregated power and in number: from around 60% in 1993 to around 10% in 2003 (see Figure 3, page 6, in said paper). Still, vector machines refuse to die and always seem to maintain a presence in the top500, as is evident from the above slashdot post. Will vector machines live forever?
I guess I would say that everybody that is actually doing something, makes mistakes. But I do agree that the O(1) was a big mistake, which no doubt reflects badly on the Linux development process. And Con's work has indeed managed to put the scheduling subsystem back on track. Plus, I think it's safe to say that Con is orders of magnitude a nicer guy than Ingo.
But I'm being realistic here: Please consider that even though Ingo implemented the O(1), Linus was the one that decided that all this messy interactivity mambo jumbo would make it into the mainline and replace the scheduler Linus implemented more than a decade ago. At the bottom line, it's Linus's mistake and Linus's responsibility. Also, a lot of really sharp guys didn't fight against the O(1). So there's something of a collective responsibility here.
In light of this, if you were Linus, who would you choose? I'm not at all suggesting that the answer is carved in stone. I'm merely saying that the Ingo alternative has significant benefits. He is after all a very talented professional (Con used the work "brilliant" to describe him) that gets paid to do the work. I argue that these pros shouldn't be dismissed.
I read the post. There's a big difference between sleep-duration (to which you refer) and sleep-frequency (to which I refer). Basing decisions about sleep-duration is fine, and is equivalent in every respect to basing decision on runtime (as the two are complementary). The O(1) was largely based on sleep-frequency. In contrast to what the lwn post claims, the two schedulers have a lot in common.
My read is different, but it'll take a few paragraphs to explain why, so please bare with me. The O(1) so called "improved interactivity" was just a hack upon a hack upon a hack that never worked. If you ever read the code you know what I'm talking about. It was a complete mess. The mess was the result of trying to obtain a goal that is unobtainable: very roughly speaking, Ingo (and others) believed that it is possible to deduce how "important" a process is, based on the frequency of the process' sleep events (not the duration of the sleep). I can point you to a few research papers that show that this can simply *not* be done. Briefly, it has been shown that for each "important" application you can find an "unimportant" application such that the CPU usage pattern of the two is very similar; Hence, you would never be able to distinguish the important from the unimportant (if you are only basing you decision on CPU usage). All you can do is (1) divide the CPU equally, and (2) provide good response time to applications that sleep for long periods of time (like editors). According to several of his emails, Ingo is not reading scheduling papers, and proud of it.
I suspect Con doesn't read such papers either. But he knew this is the case nevertheless. For years Ingo and his followers attacked Con on this. Note that this is a purely technical issue, and Con was *completely* right, e.g. take a look at CFS, or at Linus's original scheduler that lasted until 2.2, or, Solaris, *BSD (with the exception of ULE), HPUX, etc. They are all much closer to the SD's philosophy than to the O(1)'s. (BTW, the only other OS that tried to do what Ingo wanted is... the Windows family).
The discussion between Con and others regarding this issue was not about minor details. Ingo and his followers view towards Con was plain and simple: "your design is crap, it doesn't do what schedulers are supposed to do". Con resisted. And I agree, after years in the business, he was occasionally emotional about it. But this is really understandable and reasonable. Especially when you compare it to the way Ingo and Linus express themselves from time to time (talk about "drama queens"). For example, notice how Linus talks to Ingo when Ingo doesn't understand something immediately.
The bottom line is that most of them are "drama queens" from time to time. Nobody is perfect. In absolute terms, however, I think Con usually expresses himself in a calm, quiet, and relatively humble manner. Certainly in comparison to Ingo/Linus.