Perhaps Google could come up with a standard for pushing all these control signals and keep alives through a single gateway. That way apps could piggyback on each other to reduce traffic.
I must have at least 5 different ways to asynchronously receive messages on my phone. I would love a way to combine the traffic for all of these down to something small. Especially if (and I realize I'm an extremely rare case for wanting this) I could redirect it through a web app or something running on my server at home.
It's like how almost every social website grows some form of instant messaging that's relayed through the website's servers. Why can't they all just use Jabber and be done with it?
I see your point, but you sort of speak against yourself by bringing up the CEO pay example. After all, isn't the complaints about CEO pay by everyone just a plea for someone to collude to keep people with certain rare skills (Executive Management) from making as much as the market will bear? You may not think much of CEOs, but it's the same thing. The only difference is that you either simply don't like CEOs or you devalue their skill set, and while there are definitely some sociopaths out there in the CEO position, I'd argue that it is a position you need some very stong skills to do successfully.
I think this is much less rare a skill than it seems. There are a combination of factors that massively inflate CEO pay far beyond what they are actually worth to the company.
A lot of it is 'risk avoidance'. If I, as a board member, bring on someone who has a reputation for being a great CEO (or at least, being a CEO at all) I'm much less at risk for shareholder lawsuits than if I choose some random schmuck from the rank and file of the company.
Barring that, bringing in someone I know personally has a CEO feels much less risky than bringing in someone else. If you look at the boards of large publicly traded corporations, you'll see that it's actually a very small network of people, most of whom serve on the boards of multiple companies. That really limits the pool of friends.
And lastly, if I'm a CEO, I can claim that, since the company is profitable, I'm doing a great job, and I should be paid more than the CEO of that company over there that isn't doing as well. But, of course, while a CEO can have a huge influence on whether or not a company does well, the CEO is certainly not the only determining factor. Also, some CEOs are much better at handling certain kinds of situations and not so great at others. As the economy changes and fluxes, this means that CEOs rise and fall. Their pay is almost never reduced of course, but whenever the right combination of factors and skill puts a CEO on the rise, their pay goes up.
I argue that this combination of factors is what causes CEO pay to be so ridiculous as compared to a rank and file worker. Even though I would also argue that the rank and file workers, in aggregate, have a far bigger impact on whether or not a company succeeds.
Yes, I agree. You have to take a very different approach to the design of software and algorithms to minimize communication with 'far away' entities. The complex cache system in most CPUs is to this as CISC and modern RISC is to WISC architectures. It's basically an attempt to manage with complex specialized hardware something that you might be able to better manage in software.
Whether or not you actually can of course is the question.
That's not the issue. It's the massive parallelism that's the issue. And most models for getting a grip on that tacitly assume symmetric access to all memory by all CPUs. It's just now that C++ is getting the atomic operations that have as an implicit assumption that perhaps some memory is seen differently by one thread vs. another.
I've noticed that locality has become more and more important as speeds have gone up. I kind of wonder if something like this isn't the future.
I'm noticing, for example, that programming models involving channels and lots of threads have shown up and seem like a viable model for something like this. Erlang and Go are the two languages that do this that I can think of right offhand.
How many thousands of young people die every single day? Should we have a story for each one? If not, how do you pick? Why should this one be any more relevant than any other?
I submit that all of these stories are sad and tragic. And lifting one up like this cheapens all of the others by comparison. The story is a disservice to all children who die who are not her.
I think it's very sad she died. But a Microsoft certification, while somewhat impressive for a 9 year old, does not a prodigy make. If she had made some lasting contribution to the world, that would be one thing, but near as I can tell, she didn't.
Children die for stupid and horrible reasons all over the world all the time every single day. There is a story as tragic as hers that happens at least once a day. And they are all sad. Why should her story get special treatment?
If she had done something that touched us all in some way, sure, then it's a relevant story for everybody. Like the Dennis Ritchie or Steve Jobs story. But she hasn't yet. It's just another in a huge pool of tragic and unhappy things that happen.
I was programming at age 9. I was learning the difference between 'serial' and 'random access' mode for files on Apple II Basic. I was setting about trying to write a program to automate my elementary school's checkout system for their little library. I didn't finish it, but that's what I was doing.
There is more to it than that. For example, I think most Chinese people think their government is tolerable. The government successfully represses or minimizes the evils it causes. That, anti-western rhetoric and rising economic prospects keep the people in line. They are complicit in their own oppression. Much like the 99%ers here.
Most of the OWS people still feel the government can be reformed. They don't consider the government itself intolerable, just some of its actions and a situation that has been created.
I think they will eventually come to the conclusion (which I think is the correct conclusion) that the problem is systemic and a major house-cleaning is in order.
The kicker is that the main people who care about middle eastern oil are the europeans. By trying to ensure a supply of oil from that region, we're basically helping out european governments.
It works if they do not hate you. If they hate you, it doesn't actually work. No matter how feared a dictator is, as soon as a significant percentage of people know that they find him intolerable, and know that a significant number of others share their belief, that dictator has huge problems. All the fear in the world will just make them more determined.
Machiavelli wrote in an environment where there were many competing factions of approximately equal power, none of whom were significantly different from any of the others.
So much of modern software engineering is basically reverse engineering something someone else wrote who's no longer around. This could be an incredibly useful tool for just about anybody do software work.
While I can understand doing that, and sometimes do things that way myself, I find it highly inconvenient and annoying. My personal devices are like my house. I set them up a certain way and expect things in certain places. It's far easier for me if I have my own 'house' to work in. My employer will get higher quality and quantity from me if I do things that way.
It can happen with your own mind, but it's very hard and require a superbly deft con-artist to accomplish. But yes, I agree, that's a fly in the ointment. We need some major improvements in security technology for software. It's a 'non-trivial' problem.
I've kind of felt that personal devices like phones and such should be treated as extensions of your own mind. For example, they should be covered by the fifth amendment.
This means, from a trade secret standpoint, that transmission of the secret from your device to an unrelated third party should be treated as if you personally wrote out the trade secret and sent it. And if your device was hacked, it should be legally treated the same as if you were conned into revealing the trade secret. But you employer should have absolutely no rights with regards to examining what's on your device. It should be treated as a black box.
That is true. But regulations will also not likely be put forward until bitcoin is past that stage. Controlling the conversation about and perception of bitcoin at this early stage lays the foundation for regulating it later.
One could make the same argument for the Internet. But now we have SOPA, which has a real chance of passing. It is true that SOPA will not actually stop piracy, and likely not even make a significant dent in it. But for the average person, the Internet will become a significantly more regulated and diverse place. Censorship masquerading as copyright enforcement.
There used to be (and mostly still is) a regime had censorship masquerading as media consolidation with the resultant centralized control over distribution. Sure, you can say anything you want, but your ability to reach an audience is gated by people who have a vested interest in making sure certain ideas aren't heard.
Regulation doesn't have to be absolute in order to succeed as a tool of social and economic control. It just has to be successful enough to make not following it seem like something only unsavory people do.
I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent. But I don't think his or her paranoia is unwarranted.
The point of many of the actions of Anonymous is that these restrictions render the first amendment significantly less important or useful for its intended purpose when all these different modes of expression are controlled by monolithic corporate entities who campaign vigorously for laws that make it easier and easier for them to do these things.
In the end, if you can't say something because the entities that control the primary means of expression won't allow you to say it, does it matter if those entities are a corporation or the government? A corporation is perfectly capable of using existing laws to mobilize the use of violence against you for trying to say it.
Being able to board a train or bus without having my bag be searched (ostensibly for weapons, but really for drugs).
Being able to post a video criticizing Universal Studios copyright policy with licensed music by famous artists without having it be taken down.
Be able to play games on a decent computer without having that computer run software that spies on me and makes sure I'm not doing something the company would prefer I not do.
Being reasonably confident that my representative cares more about what I and 50 of my neighbors say than what his or her corporate sponsor says (though that's been a serious problem for more than 20 years).
Being sure that if Watergate happened again it would be exposed and the president forced to resign over it.
Those are just some of the things I've lost in the past 20 years. Some of those are related to the first amendment, some to the fourth. Some of them are rights we've always had, but are not specifically enumerated in the constitution. Some represent a weakening of first amendment rights due to the right being made useless for its intended purpose (like getting my representative to pay attention to me).
We had those amendments and civil liberties. They are in the process of being destroyed or made to be impotent often by the companies being attacked. Do you have any suggestions as to the correct course of action in the face of that Mr. Shawn Henry?
Games do not spend that much time doing disk IO after they've started. And most modern drives deliver nowhere near a gigabit of streaming performance anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. But I would add one more thing...
Perhaps Google could come up with a standard for pushing all these control signals and keep alives through a single gateway. That way apps could piggyback on each other to reduce traffic.
I must have at least 5 different ways to asynchronously receive messages on my phone. I would love a way to combine the traffic for all of these down to something small. Especially if (and I realize I'm an extremely rare case for wanting this) I could redirect it through a web app or something running on my server at home.
It's like how almost every social website grows some form of instant messaging that's relayed through the website's servers. Why can't they all just use Jabber and be done with it?
I see your point, but you sort of speak against yourself by bringing up the CEO pay example. After all, isn't the complaints about CEO pay by everyone just a plea for someone to collude to keep people with certain rare skills (Executive Management) from making as much as the market will bear? You may not think much of CEOs, but it's the same thing. The only difference is that you either simply don't like CEOs or you devalue their skill set, and while there are definitely some sociopaths out there in the CEO position, I'd argue that it is a position you need some very stong skills to do successfully.
I think this is much less rare a skill than it seems. There are a combination of factors that massively inflate CEO pay far beyond what they are actually worth to the company.
A lot of it is 'risk avoidance'. If I, as a board member, bring on someone who has a reputation for being a great CEO (or at least, being a CEO at all) I'm much less at risk for shareholder lawsuits than if I choose some random schmuck from the rank and file of the company.
Barring that, bringing in someone I know personally has a CEO feels much less risky than bringing in someone else. If you look at the boards of large publicly traded corporations, you'll see that it's actually a very small network of people, most of whom serve on the boards of multiple companies. That really limits the pool of friends.
And lastly, if I'm a CEO, I can claim that, since the company is profitable, I'm doing a great job, and I should be paid more than the CEO of that company over there that isn't doing as well. But, of course, while a CEO can have a huge influence on whether or not a company does well, the CEO is certainly not the only determining factor. Also, some CEOs are much better at handling certain kinds of situations and not so great at others. As the economy changes and fluxes, this means that CEOs rise and fall. Their pay is almost never reduced of course, but whenever the right combination of factors and skill puts a CEO on the rise, their pay goes up.
I argue that this combination of factors is what causes CEO pay to be so ridiculous as compared to a rank and file worker. Even though I would also argue that the rank and file workers, in aggregate, have a far bigger impact on whether or not a company succeeds.
Yes, I agree. You have to take a very different approach to the design of software and algorithms to minimize communication with 'far away' entities. The complex cache system in most CPUs is to this as CISC and modern RISC is to WISC architectures. It's basically an attempt to manage with complex specialized hardware something that you might be able to better manage in software.
Whether or not you actually can of course is the question.
That's not the issue. It's the massive parallelism that's the issue. And most models for getting a grip on that tacitly assume symmetric access to all memory by all CPUs. It's just now that C++ is getting the atomic operations that have as an implicit assumption that perhaps some memory is seen differently by one thread vs. another.
*nod* I'm not surprised it isn't new.
I've noticed that locality has become more and more important as speeds have gone up. I kind of wonder if something like this isn't the future.
I'm noticing, for example, that programming models involving channels and lots of threads have shown up and seem like a viable model for something like this. Erlang and Go are the two languages that do this that I can think of right offhand.
How many thousands of young people die every single day? Should we have a story for each one? If not, how do you pick? Why should this one be any more relevant than any other?
I submit that all of these stories are sad and tragic. And lifting one up like this cheapens all of the others by comparison. The story is a disservice to all children who die who are not her.
Or maybe it's because the commenters are right?
I think it's very sad she died. But a Microsoft certification, while somewhat impressive for a 9 year old, does not a prodigy make. If she had made some lasting contribution to the world, that would be one thing, but near as I can tell, she didn't.
Children die for stupid and horrible reasons all over the world all the time every single day. There is a story as tragic as hers that happens at least once a day. And they are all sad. Why should her story get special treatment?
If she had done something that touched us all in some way, sure, then it's a relevant story for everybody. Like the Dennis Ritchie or Steve Jobs story. But she hasn't yet. It's just another in a huge pool of tragic and unhappy things that happen.
I was programming at age 9. I was learning the difference between 'serial' and 'random access' mode for files on Apple II Basic. I was setting about trying to write a program to automate my elementary school's checkout system for their little library. I didn't finish it, but that's what I was doing.
There is more to it than that. For example, I think most Chinese people think their government is tolerable. The government successfully represses or minimizes the evils it causes. That, anti-western rhetoric and rising economic prospects keep the people in line. They are complicit in their own oppression. Much like the 99%ers here.
But that will eventually cease to be.
Most of the OWS people still feel the government can be reformed. They don't consider the government itself intolerable, just some of its actions and a situation that has been created.
I think they will eventually come to the conclusion (which I think is the correct conclusion) that the problem is systemic and a major house-cleaning is in order.
The kicker is that the main people who care about middle eastern oil are the europeans. By trying to ensure a supply of oil from that region, we're basically helping out european governments.
It works if they do not hate you. If they hate you, it doesn't actually work. No matter how feared a dictator is, as soon as a significant percentage of people know that they find him intolerable, and know that a significant number of others share their belief, that dictator has huge problems. All the fear in the world will just make them more determined.
Machiavelli wrote in an environment where there were many competing factions of approximately equal power, none of whom were significantly different from any of the others.
So much of modern software engineering is basically reverse engineering something someone else wrote who's no longer around. This could be an incredibly useful tool for just about anybody do software work.
There are many more liquids in the world than water. How does this coating stand up to something as corrosive as salt water or Coke?
Remind me to never be your friend. How do you live with your own mistakes, or don't you ever make any?
While I can understand doing that, and sometimes do things that way myself, I find it highly inconvenient and annoying. My personal devices are like my house. I set them up a certain way and expect things in certain places. It's far easier for me if I have my own 'house' to work in. My employer will get higher quality and quantity from me if I do things that way.
It can happen with your own mind, but it's very hard and require a superbly deft con-artist to accomplish. But yes, I agree, that's a fly in the ointment. We need some major improvements in security technology for software. It's a 'non-trivial' problem.
I've kind of felt that personal devices like phones and such should be treated as extensions of your own mind. For example, they should be covered by the fifth amendment.
This means, from a trade secret standpoint, that transmission of the secret from your device to an unrelated third party should be treated as if you personally wrote out the trade secret and sent it. And if your device was hacked, it should be legally treated the same as if you were conned into revealing the trade secret. But you employer should have absolutely no rights with regards to examining what's on your device. It should be treated as a black box.
That is true. But regulations will also not likely be put forward until bitcoin is past that stage. Controlling the conversation about and perception of bitcoin at this early stage lays the foundation for regulating it later.
One could make the same argument for the Internet. But now we have SOPA, which has a real chance of passing. It is true that SOPA will not actually stop piracy, and likely not even make a significant dent in it. But for the average person, the Internet will become a significantly more regulated and diverse place. Censorship masquerading as copyright enforcement.
There used to be (and mostly still is) a regime had censorship masquerading as media consolidation with the resultant centralized control over distribution. Sure, you can say anything you want, but your ability to reach an audience is gated by people who have a vested interest in making sure certain ideas aren't heard.
Regulation doesn't have to be absolute in order to succeed as a tool of social and economic control. It just has to be successful enough to make not following it seem like something only unsavory people do.
I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent. But I don't think his or her paranoia is unwarranted.
The point of many of the actions of Anonymous is that these restrictions render the first amendment significantly less important or useful for its intended purpose when all these different modes of expression are controlled by monolithic corporate entities who campaign vigorously for laws that make it easier and easier for them to do these things.
In the end, if you can't say something because the entities that control the primary means of expression won't allow you to say it, does it matter if those entities are a corporation or the government? A corporation is perfectly capable of using existing laws to mobilize the use of violence against you for trying to say it.
Those are just some of the things I've lost in the past 20 years. Some of those are related to the first amendment, some to the fourth. Some of them are rights we've always had, but are not specifically enumerated in the constitution. Some represent a weakening of first amendment rights due to the right being made useless for its intended purpose (like getting my representative to pay attention to me).
Yes, that was my thought exactly.
We had those amendments and civil liberties. They are in the process of being destroyed or made to be impotent often by the companies being attacked. Do you have any suggestions as to the correct course of action in the face of that Mr. Shawn Henry?
An SSD would not be my first choice when trying to improve the performance of a gaming machine. But yes, you're right, almost all SSDs do.
Games do not spend that much time doing disk IO after they've started. And most modern drives deliver nowhere near a gigabit of streaming performance anyway.