I don't know too much about the physics of photography, but it seems to me that the real problem in the picture quality of tiny cameras is that the lenses are terrible.
It seems to anybody who knows anything about the problem with digital cameras that you don't have a clue. And this statement proves it:
Even as things stand now, a older camera with good optics and a 5MP sensor produces much better images than a new camera with cheap optics and a 12MP sensor. It seems to me that sensor isn't the bottleneck anymore.
The reason the old 5mp camera produces a better picture than the 12mp camera is not because of the optics, it's because of the size of the individual pixels on the chip. The 5mp camera has sensors that are 2-3 times larger than the 12mp camera, which means they can collect that much more light, and therefore can have shorter exposure times and/or more accurate color.
That's why the $1000 + 12mp cameras use an image sensor that is many times the size of a $100 12mp camera - so they can pick up more light. The optics can't improve the picture the image sensor picks up, they can only avoid harming it. That's why they are so expensive, because meticulous care goes into ensuring the lenses don't ruin the picture the image sensor picks up while enabling you to zoom great distances.
What this quantum film is supposed to do is improve the light sensitivity without increasing the size of the image sensor, or allow you to shrink the image sensor without losing light sensitivity. Applying this to camera-phones would allow them to come somewhere in-between current consumer grade cameras and professional cameras, consumer grade cameras would be in the realm of the professional grade sans-optics, and they'd be able to crank up the resolution on professional cameras without losing any quality.
The big problem with digital cameras is light sensitivity, we can pack 15 mega-pixels into a camera-phone but the loss in light sensitivity means you'd have been better off sticking with 1 mega-pixel, the picture quality will be abysmal. That's why high end cameras use image sensors that are many times larger for the same amount of pixels than cheap consumer models.
There is a physics problem when your image sensor is too small - photons have size and mass, and there is a point at which you cannot collect enough light to take a good picture.
That's why expensive cameras have larger image sensors - they aren't packing more pixels per square inch, they are actually packing fewer pixels per square inch. A high end 10 mega-pixel will have an image sensor that is 10x bigger than a pocket-sized 10 mega-pixel camera, and it will take phenomenally better pictures.
This is the source of the GP's confusion about what the summary means - is "quantum film" more sensitive to light? Or are they simply able to pack more sensors in a smaller area? If they are actually able to collect accurate color information from fewer photons (i.e. more sensitive to light), then you can shrink the size of high end image sensors and still maintain quality. If it simply allows them to pack more pixels onto a sensor without being able to collect accurate color data with fewer photons, then quantum film is absolutely worthless. It offers no benefit to the quality of images in that case, even if they can crank a camera up to 30 megapixels it will still look like shit.
The quake code is available in a non-gpl distributable format, so it is not unreasonable to assume they did this correctly in that regard. Was any of the community contributed code GPL'd? If they don't throw their own GPL tag on the code when they send it back, I don't think it gets covered by GPL automatically.
Java or JavaScript? The two have nothing in common except the word "Java" in the name, they are completely unrelated to each other. Java is separate from the browser though it can, like many other programs, be embedded into the browser with plug-ins. JavaScript is integral to the browser, and you can't brows 9/10ths of the web without it.
Microsoft has both a Java implementation, which is in no way related to the browser except for its plugin, and a JavaScript implementation, which is part of the browser engine and determines exactly how the browser renders any web pages containing javascript.
As for history, IE is not top dog because of its default nature, Netscape is proof of that. Netscape dominated IE until they decided to completely re-write their code from the ground up. It was the most costly mistake they could have made, and it cost them the browser wars (they now lagged behind IE after instead of leading IE, destroying their advantage). However, thanks to that stupid move Mozilla was born, and we now have FireFox.
Netscape would still be around if they simply tuned their code and continued adding features instead of starting over and falling behind. It took years for FF to come into its own after that mistake, and it is only recently (the last few years) becoming a serious contender to IE's market dominance.
Don't try to re-write history people, I was there for it. The only reason IE was able to dominate in the first place was because Netscape allowed a hole in the market and IE simply took advantage of it and eventually destroyed Netscape. In the Win3.1 and Win95 days -everybody- went out and bought Netscape, because it was so much better. It wasn't free, and downloading it was not really an option at 28.8kbps. It took more effort to get than anything we have to day, yet it still creamed IE. You used IE if you used AOL, but a lot of people were already getting off AOL, and even with AOL a lot of people would close out the AOL screen after signing on and run netscape to hit the web. A lot of people used Prodigy or local providers too, and weren't stuck with AOL's IE.
The cheapest complete systems (pre-built, including OS) are Windows systems, every time. For one thing nobody uses Linux, so you can't even find a Linux PC in stores, and between Windows and Mac, Windows is always cheaper for the same performance (not quality).
Windows doesn't even work particularly well; I have had a lot more problems with hardware and software compatibility and usability with my Windows system than with my Linux systems.
So what you're saying is you never use Windows, eh? Because there is almost nothing that does not work with Windows, yet it is a standard recommendation that someone double-check their desired machine for compatibility with Linux first. A lot of people recommend going in to a store with a live-cd to make sure you'll be able to fix all the issues that will pop up.
Seriously, don't trot out that bullshit. Anybody who has used a current version of Linux next to a current version of Windows knows the difference, and while there are a lot of reasons to love Linux, hardware compatibility on an x86 system compared with Windows is not one of them. As bad as Vista was in the hardware arena, it was simply a temporary taste of what Linux desktop users go through regularly. Windows 7 has none of Vista's hardware problems.
Because, Congress are the ones making the law, and they sure as hell aren't going to give up THEIR secrecy.
Just like they've exempted themselves from this healthcare bill, or at least most of it. It's one of the first things they did, and nobody made a big deal about it.
One thing you should be asking is if everything is going to be so much better under this bill, why doesn't it apply to the people who wrote it?
A wonderful example of this is the public school system in America.
On average the government spends about $6k per student per year. Private school tuition, however, averages about $3k per student (that's factoring the super-expensive schools, most are cheaper), and you would have a very difficult time arguing that private school students are less educated than their public school counterparts.
So where does that $3k per student go, if not to educate the kids?
One word: Administration.
In a private school, generally the only people above a principal is some sort of board of directors or an owner. Public, however, has an entire management infrastructure above the principal, and in fact the principal of a public school would be considered lower-middle management.
It's the same story with all government programs, and it's the reason they -always- cost significantly more than their private counterpart. Where a private charity can spend 75 cents on the dollar toward whatever charitable issue they are attempting to promote, government programs spend more like 40-50 cents on the dollar. All government programs have significantly more layers than even the worst private programs, and it's simply because it is all run out of a single organization, and so requires a massive administration to manage.
why do people choose a life where they have millions of $$$/Euros but have to live where they can't show it off and like they are poor?
Because before they were on the lamb they were living like kings.
Seriously, why the hell else would you think they do it? You've only seen them at the end of their time as mob boss, they haven't been living in basements for the last 20 years, they've only been living in a basement for the last three weeks. Get it?
It takes years, decades even, to close the noose on these guys because of their money and influence, and even then you'd better have out-witted them at every turn or they'll find a way to slip away clean. In the mean time, they are living in multi-million dollar houses, eating like kings, wearing clothes worth more than ordinary people's cars, etc. There is a lot of advantage that goes with the risk - the only thing that sucks is if you get caught you are as bad off as the poor people these guys despise.
And what OS would you replace it with, given that Linux, OSX, Unix, and all other OS's have the exact same problem?
If you had read the the article, you'd realize there is nothing windows specific in it. He is talking about the underlying architecture of ALL operating systems that is the problem, and it stems from the very first time it was decided that a CPU should run more than one program at a time.
I joke at work that the reason I have to select tools twice sometimes in autocad is because the dual processors are figuring the other processor is doing it, but when I pick the tool twice, they run out of excuses and do it...mostly.
The reason you have to select tools twice is because autocad is waiting for its turn at a CPU. That's exactly what the article is about, and if you'd read a little before posting you wouldn't look like a dumbass who hates Windows because it's popular to hate windows. If Linux were better* you'd be using it. If Apple were better* you'd be using it. The fact is, they aren't better at this than Windows, and in fact, Windows 7 is as good or better at it than anything on the market.
*Note that there are a whole host criteria that go into "better", most of which you'll ignore when you piss and moan about Linux or Apple being better. They aren't. They may not be worse, but they definitely aren't better.
You're thinking too small. TFA's point was that the standard paradigm is a symptom of having too few CPU's to run all the applications we want, so we had to create an OS to split CPU time among the different applications (and then had to split OS time from application time, and then schedular time from OS time from application time, ad infinitum). The original computers ran a single application at a time, and nothing else. There was no operating system, you simply fed the properly formatted machine code into the computer and it ran it. The closest thing to an OS was the CPU's instruction set.
Ironically, with the current paradigm, the more processors you have the more overhead there is managing the processors, so your gains fall off dramatically after about 8 cores. 8 cores is a little less than twice as powerful as 4 cores, and when you bump it up to 16 cores the gap shortens further. The GP's 4096 processors is less than double the power of 2048 processors by a huge margin, and that epitomizes the problem TFA is addressing. The original problem has been stood on its head, and we now have too many cores to deal with. All we really need to do is go back to having a single application run on a single processor, and make the OS's job simply to connect them all. With this type of architecture, 4096 processors truly would be twice as powerful as 2048 processors, which would be double 1024 processors, etc.
Obviously, a change to an architecture like that would take a massive amount of work to bring it up to where we are now in terms of features in a modern OS, but I see the server virtualisation industry taking baby steps in this direction.
This would really only work on CPUs with a few thousand cores, and even then the CPUs would need to have some very intelligent power management for cores that aren't being used, or are in use but waiting on something like I/O.
Most people only want to run 5-10 applications at a time at most. By eliminating the need to divide processing time among applications, you eliminate the need for most of the supporting applications in the OS. Think about it. You wouldn't need thousands of cores, in a simple setup you could probably get away with around 30. Heavy users would want 50-100 to handle applications that have been designed for real parallel programming.
We already have servers with 16 processors standard. Higher-end virtualization systems have 30+.
All we're missing is an OS designed to divvy up processors among applications instead of divvying applications among processors.
Why has it taken so long for the OS designers to get with the program?
Demand.
Seriously, what the hell do you think drives this stuff?
Things aren't going to shift in a major way until one of two things happen:
1.) Microsoft decides it's finally time to re-design Windows from the ground up. They hold 95% of the market, so it is they who must make this change.
2.) Someone develops an OS that is so mind-blowingly awesome that people are willing to dump Windows in large numbers, forcing the market to turn in this new direction in order to compete.
2 isn't likely, but it could happen. This is something the Linux crowd could be pushing, because being the most flexible OS group on the market they are in the best position to both pursue this direction and still maintain the status-quo. I'd bank more on something of a hybrid happening, where Microsoft starts losing business because smaller companies start writing killer apps to run on an individual core in a hypervisor. By ignoring the OS completely and interfacing directly with the hardware, whatever that application does it will be the fastest one on the market by far. Before too long you'll end up with a hypervisor-OS that merely tells the applications which CPU it gets and where its memory is. The OS will be shoved further into the background, as it should be, and everything will be just plain cooler.
First, the article in question talks about OS architecture, not Windows specifically. He specifically states that what he is speaking about is not something MS is working on. Quite the opposite, many of his MS colleagues disagree with him.
Second, the fundamental problems with OS design are exactly that: fundamental problems with OS design. Nobody is making an OS that truly takes advantage of multiple cores, it's still single-processor thinking with the ability to use more than one processor, and this leads to a number of inherent problems.
The article talks about what an OS might look like if built from scratch specifically for multiple core processing power, and there is nothing on the market like it at the moment. It's basically a hypervisor-based OS, where instead of giving programs slices of CPU time, the OS gives programs actual CPUs and slices of memory to use.
Something like that would be extremely slick, we already do that for virtual machines and we end up with 8+ full-fledged servers running on the same machine. Why can't you pull that back a little more so it's individual programs assigned to each CPU such that they don't have to interact with the OS at all once they are up and running? Can you imagine?
The refined palate is the key, and while some people definitely have it, most people don't taste nearly enough wine to develop it (and I mean sip-spit, not sip-sip-sip).
For most people a $400 bottle of wine is nothing more than a status symbol, they'd probably enjoy a less complicated $20 wine a hell of a lot more.
Note: personally, I can barely remember which types of wines I like, let alone get all snobbish on age and vinyard.
Same kind of thing would happen if medical care was completely privatised.
Wrong, you get the same thing if medical care was completely monopolized.
Private or government, only a monopoly can have the kind of bureaucracy that consistently creates these kinds of decisions. You don't see this stuff happen in independent hospitals with lots of competition - the drive in such cases is always to provide better service at lower cost. If service drops off too far people go to another hospital. If the price drifts too high people go to another hospital. This dynamic creates the optimum price to service balance possible, and the result is premium hospital care.
Monopolies, whether governmental or private, destroy this dynamic and you end up with mind blowing decisions like "Even though we know falls over 6 feet are potentially life threatening and require immediate care, in order to save money we are lowering the priority of such cases." All it takes now is for someone to fuck up the logic and suddenly ALL cases of falls over 6 feet are given low priority, no matter how high and no matter how hurt the person is.
What's bad is not really the mistake, it's easy to see where they went wrong, and in a more competitive system someone would have fixed the problem as soon as it came to light (the first hospital will fix it in order to gain an advantage over their competitors, the rest will have to follow suit to stay competitive). What's bad is the government has known about it for the last 10 years and didn't do anything to fix it! Instead a little over half the Trusts manually over-ride such cases. It took an inquiry into the health department by someone who happened to know how the system was supposed to work to get the damn thing fixed!
So yes, the bureaucrats caused the problem, but the only reason they exist to cause the problem is because it is a monopoly, which tends to create such maddening bureaucracies to sustain itself.
Actually it actually sounds like they screwed up when they altered the parameters.
Instead of raising the threshold for a Cat A response from 6 feet to say, 8 feet, they set an exclusion which said "if the fall is greater than 6 feet, set to Category B".
There is a huge difference between the two. In the first instance, extenuating factors (a knife wound, abnormal breathing, etc) will always bump the Category up despite the height of the fall. It could be four feet or ten feet, it wouldn't matter. With an exclusion, however, ALL falls over 6 feet, regardless of extenuating factors, will always be bumped down to Cat B.
The fault lies squarely on the people who modified the system, and that was driven shortsightedly by this governmental committee.
More to the root problem, though, why the hell would they alter the well-established criteria for a dangerous fall to reduce the load on their ambulance network? Why in god's name didn't they get more frickin ambulances?!
All I can say is, welcome to government managed health care, where the least important person in the system is the patient.
I always want to beat my head against the wall when I encounter people who think like that. I'm surprised I've managed to keep my senses since there are so damn many people who are just sheep.
The fear mongering is bullshit. If someone attacks us, we kick the shit out of them, and that's the end of it. We should not be punishing citizens because foreigners have attempted to hurt us.
The US is full of it these days, and I really don't understand it. Have we all turned into such spineless wimps that we'd rather suffer constant humiliation and inconvenience than suffer that 1 in a million chance that some dumbass is stupid enough to pull the exact same trick someone else was caught trying?
Sorry for the tangent, but seriously, taking off our shoes at the airport didn't help us catch the underwear bomber now did it? Some food for thought: just how willing do you think a terrorist is going to be to try to take down a plane if he knows that every passenger on the plane with him has been issued a handy-dandy Emergency Terrorist Prevention Dagger when they boarded? I can tell you for certain that the 9/11 hijackings would not have gone the way they did were that the case, and the underwear bomber would have been incapacitated before his underwear could burn up. Future bombers/hijackers would definitely think twice.
And how does any of that change if the government ran the power grid (which, in one form or another, is the only other option)? Have you seen how piss-poor inter-governmental communication is?
The market based approach is like the god-damned golden age compared to the way the government runs it. Without constant competition we would never see any improvements in the system and we'd be orders of magnitude more vulnerable than we are now.
Also, news flash, but EVERY industrialized country in the world is just as vulnerable to an attack on their power grid as the US is. The technology is virtually identical, and in most cases the companies supplying the equipment and building the infrastructure are exactly the same.
Your argument is a red herring, as without such free flowing communication the market based approach provides the situation would automatically be as bad as your worst scenario, it would not be better in any way.
So do you make the system as good as possible with the potential for it to go bad, or do you just live with a bad system? Hmm... let me think about that...
I think a better example would be Global Warming alarmists who have been cherry-picking studies for the last couple decades or so. Not many people take the ID guys seriously, but an alarming number take the GW guys seriously even though the vast majority of studies indicate the current climate trends are nothing out of the ordinary. Even when the cherry-picked studies are debunked they somehow continue to be used as evidence, because the people using them have bought a bigger megaphone than anybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know too much about the physics of photography, but it seems to me that the real problem in the picture quality of tiny cameras is that the lenses are terrible.
It seems to anybody who knows anything about the problem with digital cameras that you don't have a clue. And this statement proves it:
Even as things stand now, a older camera with good optics and a 5MP sensor produces much better images than a new camera with cheap optics and a 12MP sensor. It seems to me that sensor isn't the bottleneck anymore.
The reason the old 5mp camera produces a better picture than the 12mp camera is not because of the optics, it's because of the size of the individual pixels on the chip. The 5mp camera has sensors that are 2-3 times larger than the 12mp camera, which means they can collect that much more light, and therefore can have shorter exposure times and/or more accurate color.
That's why the $1000 + 12mp cameras use an image sensor that is many times the size of a $100 12mp camera - so they can pick up more light. The optics can't improve the picture the image sensor picks up, they can only avoid harming it. That's why they are so expensive, because meticulous care goes into ensuring the lenses don't ruin the picture the image sensor picks up while enabling you to zoom great distances.
What this quantum film is supposed to do is improve the light sensitivity without increasing the size of the image sensor, or allow you to shrink the image sensor without losing light sensitivity. Applying this to camera-phones would allow them to come somewhere in-between current consumer grade cameras and professional cameras, consumer grade cameras would be in the realm of the professional grade sans-optics, and they'd be able to crank up the resolution on professional cameras without losing any quality.
Nice, sounds pretty sweet.
The big problem with digital cameras is light sensitivity, we can pack 15 mega-pixels into a camera-phone but the loss in light sensitivity means you'd have been better off sticking with 1 mega-pixel, the picture quality will be abysmal. That's why high end cameras use image sensors that are many times larger for the same amount of pixels than cheap consumer models.
There is a physics problem when your image sensor is too small - photons have size and mass, and there is a point at which you cannot collect enough light to take a good picture.
That's why expensive cameras have larger image sensors - they aren't packing more pixels per square inch, they are actually packing fewer pixels per square inch. A high end 10 mega-pixel will have an image sensor that is 10x bigger than a pocket-sized 10 mega-pixel camera, and it will take phenomenally better pictures.
This is the source of the GP's confusion about what the summary means - is "quantum film" more sensitive to light? Or are they simply able to pack more sensors in a smaller area? If they are actually able to collect accurate color information from fewer photons (i.e. more sensitive to light), then you can shrink the size of high end image sensors and still maintain quality. If it simply allows them to pack more pixels onto a sensor without being able to collect accurate color data with fewer photons, then quantum film is absolutely worthless. It offers no benefit to the quality of images in that case, even if they can crank a camera up to 30 megapixels it will still look like shit.
The quake code is available in a non-gpl distributable format, so it is not unreasonable to assume they did this correctly in that regard. Was any of the community contributed code GPL'd? If they don't throw their own GPL tag on the code when they send it back, I don't think it gets covered by GPL automatically.
Amen to that, I couldn't stand Opera. I've given it several honest tries and it just hasn't stuck for me.
However, I immediately fell in love with Chrome the very first time I used it, it's so neat and clean and attractive - I love it.
Java or JavaScript? The two have nothing in common except the word "Java" in the name, they are completely unrelated to each other. Java is separate from the browser though it can, like many other programs, be embedded into the browser with plug-ins. JavaScript is integral to the browser, and you can't brows 9/10ths of the web without it.
Microsoft has both a Java implementation, which is in no way related to the browser except for its plugin, and a JavaScript implementation, which is part of the browser engine and determines exactly how the browser renders any web pages containing javascript.
As for history, IE is not top dog because of its default nature, Netscape is proof of that. Netscape dominated IE until they decided to completely re-write their code from the ground up. It was the most costly mistake they could have made, and it cost them the browser wars (they now lagged behind IE after instead of leading IE, destroying their advantage). However, thanks to that stupid move Mozilla was born, and we now have FireFox.
Netscape would still be around if they simply tuned their code and continued adding features instead of starting over and falling behind. It took years for FF to come into its own after that mistake, and it is only recently (the last few years) becoming a serious contender to IE's market dominance.
Don't try to re-write history people, I was there for it. The only reason IE was able to dominate in the first place was because Netscape allowed a hole in the market and IE simply took advantage of it and eventually destroyed Netscape. In the Win3.1 and Win95 days -everybody- went out and bought Netscape, because it was so much better. It wasn't free, and downloading it was not really an option at 28.8kbps. It took more effort to get than anything we have to day, yet it still creamed IE. You used IE if you used AOL, but a lot of people were already getting off AOL, and even with AOL a lot of people would close out the AOL screen after signing on and run netscape to hit the web. A lot of people used Prodigy or local providers too, and weren't stuck with AOL's IE.
Oh that's easy, you just buy a new computer, the OS is included for free. ;)
Have you ever actually bought a computer before?
The cheapest complete systems (pre-built, including OS) are Windows systems, every time. For one thing nobody uses Linux, so you can't even find a Linux PC in stores, and between Windows and Mac, Windows is always cheaper for the same performance (not quality).
Windows doesn't even work particularly well; I have had a lot more problems with hardware and software compatibility and usability with my Windows system than with my Linux systems.
So what you're saying is you never use Windows, eh? Because there is almost nothing that does not work with Windows, yet it is a standard recommendation that someone double-check their desired machine for compatibility with Linux first. A lot of people recommend going in to a store with a live-cd to make sure you'll be able to fix all the issues that will pop up.
Seriously, don't trot out that bullshit. Anybody who has used a current version of Linux next to a current version of Windows knows the difference, and while there are a lot of reasons to love Linux, hardware compatibility on an x86 system compared with Windows is not one of them. As bad as Vista was in the hardware arena, it was simply a temporary taste of what Linux desktop users go through regularly. Windows 7 has none of Vista's hardware problems.
How can you have over 100% of market share?
Easy, you can learn to read, then you will avoid such stupid statements.
Because, Congress are the ones making the law, and they sure as hell aren't going to give up THEIR secrecy.
Just like they've exempted themselves from this healthcare bill, or at least most of it. It's one of the first things they did, and nobody made a big deal about it.
One thing you should be asking is if everything is going to be so much better under this bill, why doesn't it apply to the people who wrote it?
A wonderful example of this is the public school system in America.
On average the government spends about $6k per student per year. Private school tuition, however, averages about $3k per student (that's factoring the super-expensive schools, most are cheaper), and you would have a very difficult time arguing that private school students are less educated than their public school counterparts.
So where does that $3k per student go, if not to educate the kids?
One word: Administration.
In a private school, generally the only people above a principal is some sort of board of directors or an owner. Public, however, has an entire management infrastructure above the principal, and in fact the principal of a public school would be considered lower-middle management.
It's the same story with all government programs, and it's the reason they -always- cost significantly more than their private counterpart. Where a private charity can spend 75 cents on the dollar toward whatever charitable issue they are attempting to promote, government programs spend more like 40-50 cents on the dollar. All government programs have significantly more layers than even the worst private programs, and it's simply because it is all run out of a single organization, and so requires a massive administration to manage.
why do people choose a life where they have millions of $$$/Euros but have to live where they can't show it off and like they are poor?
Because before they were on the lamb they were living like kings.
Seriously, why the hell else would you think they do it? You've only seen them at the end of their time as mob boss, they haven't been living in basements for the last 20 years, they've only been living in a basement for the last three weeks. Get it?
It takes years, decades even, to close the noose on these guys because of their money and influence, and even then you'd better have out-witted them at every turn or they'll find a way to slip away clean. In the mean time, they are living in multi-million dollar houses, eating like kings, wearing clothes worth more than ordinary people's cars, etc. There is a lot of advantage that goes with the risk - the only thing that sucks is if you get caught you are as bad off as the poor people these guys despise.
And what OS would you replace it with, given that Linux, OSX, Unix, and all other OS's have the exact same problem?
If you had read the the article, you'd realize there is nothing windows specific in it. He is talking about the underlying architecture of ALL operating systems that is the problem, and it stems from the very first time it was decided that a CPU should run more than one program at a time.
I joke at work that the reason I have to select tools twice sometimes in autocad is because the dual processors are figuring the other processor is doing it, but when I pick the tool twice, they run out of excuses and do it...mostly.
The reason you have to select tools twice is because autocad is waiting for its turn at a CPU. That's exactly what the article is about, and if you'd read a little before posting you wouldn't look like a dumbass who hates Windows because it's popular to hate windows. If Linux were better* you'd be using it. If Apple were better* you'd be using it. The fact is, they aren't better at this than Windows, and in fact, Windows 7 is as good or better at it than anything on the market.
*Note that there are a whole host criteria that go into "better", most of which you'll ignore when you piss and moan about Linux or Apple being better. They aren't. They may not be worse, but they definitely aren't better.
You're thinking too small. TFA's point was that the standard paradigm is a symptom of having too few CPU's to run all the applications we want, so we had to create an OS to split CPU time among the different applications (and then had to split OS time from application time, and then schedular time from OS time from application time, ad infinitum). The original computers ran a single application at a time, and nothing else. There was no operating system, you simply fed the properly formatted machine code into the computer and it ran it. The closest thing to an OS was the CPU's instruction set.
Ironically, with the current paradigm, the more processors you have the more overhead there is managing the processors, so your gains fall off dramatically after about 8 cores. 8 cores is a little less than twice as powerful as 4 cores, and when you bump it up to 16 cores the gap shortens further. The GP's 4096 processors is less than double the power of 2048 processors by a huge margin, and that epitomizes the problem TFA is addressing. The original problem has been stood on its head, and we now have too many cores to deal with. All we really need to do is go back to having a single application run on a single processor, and make the OS's job simply to connect them all. With this type of architecture, 4096 processors truly would be twice as powerful as 2048 processors, which would be double 1024 processors, etc.
Obviously, a change to an architecture like that would take a massive amount of work to bring it up to where we are now in terms of features in a modern OS, but I see the server virtualisation industry taking baby steps in this direction.
This would really only work on CPUs with a few thousand cores, and even then the CPUs would need to have some very intelligent power management for cores that aren't being used, or are in use but waiting on something like I/O.
Most people only want to run 5-10 applications at a time at most. By eliminating the need to divide processing time among applications, you eliminate the need for most of the supporting applications in the OS. Think about it. You wouldn't need thousands of cores, in a simple setup you could probably get away with around 30. Heavy users would want 50-100 to handle applications that have been designed for real parallel programming.
We already have servers with 16 processors standard. Higher-end virtualization systems have 30+.
All we're missing is an OS designed to divvy up processors among applications instead of divvying applications among processors.
Holy cow, you just made the point of TFA (bottlenecks due to scheduler performance and architecture)!
Nice!
Why has it taken so long for the OS designers to get with the program?
Demand.
Seriously, what the hell do you think drives this stuff?
Things aren't going to shift in a major way until one of two things happen:
1.) Microsoft decides it's finally time to re-design Windows from the ground up. They hold 95% of the market, so it is they who must make this change.
2.) Someone develops an OS that is so mind-blowingly awesome that people are willing to dump Windows in large numbers, forcing the market to turn in this new direction in order to compete.
2 isn't likely, but it could happen. This is something the Linux crowd could be pushing, because being the most flexible OS group on the market they are in the best position to both pursue this direction and still maintain the status-quo. I'd bank more on something of a hybrid happening, where Microsoft starts losing business because smaller companies start writing killer apps to run on an individual core in a hypervisor. By ignoring the OS completely and interfacing directly with the hardware, whatever that application does it will be the fastest one on the market by far. Before too long you'll end up with a hypervisor-OS that merely tells the applications which CPU it gets and where its memory is. The OS will be shoved further into the background, as it should be, and everything will be just plain cooler.
First, the article in question talks about OS architecture, not Windows specifically. He specifically states that what he is speaking about is not something MS is working on. Quite the opposite, many of his MS colleagues disagree with him.
Second, the fundamental problems with OS design are exactly that: fundamental problems with OS design. Nobody is making an OS that truly takes advantage of multiple cores, it's still single-processor thinking with the ability to use more than one processor, and this leads to a number of inherent problems.
The article talks about what an OS might look like if built from scratch specifically for multiple core processing power, and there is nothing on the market like it at the moment. It's basically a hypervisor-based OS, where instead of giving programs slices of CPU time, the OS gives programs actual CPUs and slices of memory to use.
Something like that would be extremely slick, we already do that for virtual machines and we end up with 8+ full-fledged servers running on the same machine. Why can't you pull that back a little more so it's individual programs assigned to each CPU such that they don't have to interact with the OS at all once they are up and running? Can you imagine?
The refined palate is the key, and while some people definitely have it, most people don't taste nearly enough wine to develop it (and I mean sip-spit, not sip-sip-sip).
For most people a $400 bottle of wine is nothing more than a status symbol, they'd probably enjoy a less complicated $20 wine a hell of a lot more.
Note: personally, I can barely remember which types of wines I like, let alone get all snobbish on age and vinyard.
Same kind of thing would happen if medical care was completely privatised.
Wrong, you get the same thing if medical care was completely monopolized.
Private or government, only a monopoly can have the kind of bureaucracy that consistently creates these kinds of decisions. You don't see this stuff happen in independent hospitals with lots of competition - the drive in such cases is always to provide better service at lower cost. If service drops off too far people go to another hospital. If the price drifts too high people go to another hospital. This dynamic creates the optimum price to service balance possible, and the result is premium hospital care.
Monopolies, whether governmental or private, destroy this dynamic and you end up with mind blowing decisions like "Even though we know falls over 6 feet are potentially life threatening and require immediate care, in order to save money we are lowering the priority of such cases." All it takes now is for someone to fuck up the logic and suddenly ALL cases of falls over 6 feet are given low priority, no matter how high and no matter how hurt the person is.
What's bad is not really the mistake, it's easy to see where they went wrong, and in a more competitive system someone would have fixed the problem as soon as it came to light (the first hospital will fix it in order to gain an advantage over their competitors, the rest will have to follow suit to stay competitive). What's bad is the government has known about it for the last 10 years and didn't do anything to fix it! Instead a little over half the Trusts manually over-ride such cases. It took an inquiry into the health department by someone who happened to know how the system was supposed to work to get the damn thing fixed!
So yes, the bureaucrats caused the problem, but the only reason they exist to cause the problem is because it is a monopoly, which tends to create such maddening bureaucracies to sustain itself.
Actually it actually sounds like they screwed up when they altered the parameters.
Instead of raising the threshold for a Cat A response from 6 feet to say, 8 feet, they set an exclusion which said "if the fall is greater than 6 feet, set to Category B".
There is a huge difference between the two. In the first instance, extenuating factors (a knife wound, abnormal breathing, etc) will always bump the Category up despite the height of the fall. It could be four feet or ten feet, it wouldn't matter. With an exclusion, however, ALL falls over 6 feet, regardless of extenuating factors, will always be bumped down to Cat B.
The fault lies squarely on the people who modified the system, and that was driven shortsightedly by this governmental committee.
More to the root problem, though, why the hell would they alter the well-established criteria for a dangerous fall to reduce the load on their ambulance network? Why in god's name didn't they get more frickin ambulances?!
All I can say is, welcome to government managed health care, where the least important person in the system is the patient.
I always want to beat my head against the wall when I encounter people who think like that. I'm surprised I've managed to keep my senses since there are so damn many people who are just sheep.
The fear mongering is bullshit. If someone attacks us, we kick the shit out of them, and that's the end of it. We should not be punishing citizens because foreigners have attempted to hurt us.
The US is full of it these days, and I really don't understand it. Have we all turned into such spineless wimps that we'd rather suffer constant humiliation and inconvenience than suffer that 1 in a million chance that some dumbass is stupid enough to pull the exact same trick someone else was caught trying?
Sorry for the tangent, but seriously, taking off our shoes at the airport didn't help us catch the underwear bomber now did it? Some food for thought: just how willing do you think a terrorist is going to be to try to take down a plane if he knows that every passenger on the plane with him has been issued a handy-dandy Emergency Terrorist Prevention Dagger when they boarded? I can tell you for certain that the 9/11 hijackings would not have gone the way they did were that the case, and the underwear bomber would have been incapacitated before his underwear could burn up. Future bombers/hijackers would definitely think twice.
And how does any of that change if the government ran the power grid (which, in one form or another, is the only other option)? Have you seen how piss-poor inter-governmental communication is?
The market based approach is like the god-damned golden age compared to the way the government runs it. Without constant competition we would never see any improvements in the system and we'd be orders of magnitude more vulnerable than we are now.
Also, news flash, but EVERY industrialized country in the world is just as vulnerable to an attack on their power grid as the US is. The technology is virtually identical, and in most cases the companies supplying the equipment and building the infrastructure are exactly the same.
Your argument is a red herring, as without such free flowing communication the market based approach provides the situation would automatically be as bad as your worst scenario, it would not be better in any way.
So do you make the system as good as possible with the potential for it to go bad, or do you just live with a bad system? Hmm... let me think about that...
Why is 5 the highest you can mod a post? This deserves so much more.
I think a better example would be Global Warming alarmists who have been cherry-picking studies for the last couple decades or so. Not many people take the ID guys seriously, but an alarming number take the GW guys seriously even though the vast majority of studies indicate the current climate trends are nothing out of the ordinary. Even when the cherry-picked studies are debunked they somehow continue to be used as evidence, because the people using them have bought a bigger megaphone than anybody else.