This was also the era were the activities of the American clandestine agencies became so egregious that even congress took a look and grew something resembling teeth.
Given that the Office of The Inspector General, not exactly a noted hotbed of antigovernment radicals or clinical paranoids, fairly recently concluded that the FBI's use of 'National Security Letters', 'Exigent Letters', and similar spook stuff was in flagrant violation even of their own extremely broad discretion and weak internal policies, I'm going to say that you haven't heard because the FBI does their best to be quiet, and nobody really cares that much...
How handy. That(again) makes everything except the 'critical mass' part even easier. Heck, there are already plenty of places with public wifi that don't bother, or don't properly implement, client isolation, and I'd imagine that virtually none of them would be configured to do much meaningful filtering of traffic between LAN clients(anybody who cares just seems to use client isolation, or doesn't offer wifi to the public), everybody else either does nothing, or does some basic throttling/blocking to keep spammers and leeches from ruining everybody else's latte-and-email.
You'd still need to get enough people, and enough material, together that it wouldn't be easier just to swap USB drives; but with the feature you describe, and basically any router, you could have a LAN swarm immediately, if you wanted one.
I don't know of anything pre-rolled(or, more importantly, enjoying critical mass); but it doesn't strike me as a terribly difficult problem(aside from the critical mass bit).
While the use case is comparatively rare, bittorrent clients will happily enough interact with other nodes on the same LAN. With DHT, you wouldn't even need a tracker(though it wouldn't be rocket surgery to configure the router serving the LAN to have a little captive portal page where people on the LAN could upload.torrents for the benefit of others on the LAN who don't have them(and thus don't participate in the DHT). As long as DHCP is provided, pretty much any vaguely contemporary OS/BT client configuration would Just Work. To avoid spilling onto public internet, and attracting the wrath of the ISP or the Copy Cops, you could either simply not have a WAN connection, or have one; but not route the BT traffic(or shape it to lowest priority, to allow fresh material to come into the local swarm; but not swamp other things).
There are really two main issues:
1. Critical mass: Unless this sort of thing is relatively common, it'd be little more than a cute trick, arranged well ahead of time, for your local LUG or LAN-party or whatever.
2. What client hardware to use: In one sense, this is easy. If it has wifi or ethernet(or even bluetooth/zigbee/IrDA/PPP-over-RS-232 if you are feeling perverse) and can run a bittorrent client, it will work. However, compared to almost anybody's internet connections, LAN transfers will be Fast, but the inconvenience of going out to use bittorrent will be sufficient that it won't be worth it unless everybody brings a bunch of stuff with them, and a bunch more space for the stuff they want. Nothing stops a cellphone user or somebody with a 320GB(total, much of it already used) laptop from taking part; but it'll be the guy who shows up and plugs in his 6-bay NAS, with the (almost always Linux) firmware hacked to include a BT client that will really keep things running...
To be sufficiently rich that you can just start spending money is such quantities that both the size, and the specifically chosen value, signal "I don't give a fuck, because I don't have to!"
Yeah, what I was wondering, given that patents actually have a finite term in some meaningful sense, what is the distribution of the pool of patents being sold? Are most of them quite new, with 15-20 years on the clock? Were the bulk of them done a decade ago, when Nortel was not bleeding out, and are now half gone? Are these companies paying for some that are nice and foundational; but will only give them an edge for another year to 3 years?
While their liquidation has been a protracted affair, Nortel supposedly wound down most of its operations in 2009 in order to focus on legal and financial shenanigans. Presumably, then, their newest patents were probably applied for then, granted now-ish, and the bulk of them (one naively assumes) would have been filed back when the company was healthier and doing more R&D spending.
How close to expiration are the patents being purchased here?
QA has the unfortunate status of "Cost Center". And, no matter what their best intentions are, people and organizations inevitably face a strong pressure toward hating those. It's the same as those prick 'mechanics' with their "safety concerns" who cause flight delays. All cost centers attract a certain amount of dislike, ones that also have the power to cause schedule slips, or whose work deals with heading off things that merely might be a problem, are especially at risk. QA, unfortunately for them, fulfills all three: They cost money, the issues they point out have to be fixed, and can cause deadlines to slip, and(thankfully for the existence and survival of complex software in the world) many bugs are only harmful under unusual conditions, or are never discovered and exploited, this leaves them open to the charge that they are delaying important things with their insistence on fixing purely theoretical issues.
Don't think of the distortions caused by bending as 'distortions' think of them as "signals caused by exactly the occurrences I am trying to measure"...
A flexible surface that can measure its own deformation state with reasonable speed and accuracy is a touch sensor, albeit not the most sensitive...
My thought was exactly the opposite: When I saw that TFS had a quotation from the guy "Why is he still in a state capable of speech?" was what lept immediately to mind.
Spammers should be serving life sentences, shackled to the production lines and making the real thing...
An experience with a lovebot that possesses actuators of sufficient power to be interesting, without a touch-sense feedback system might give you considerable insight in to things that are worse.
This post brought to you by the phrase "TRAUMATIC DEGLOVING LESION OF PENILE AND SCROTAL SKIN"
It depends on what you are using it for: As you say, the GPU does not directly lean on the CPU to any significant extent; but most people buying fancy GPUs(with the specific exception of people using them for entirely GPU-based compute tasks), are buying them to run applications that eat both considerable CPU time and considerable GPU time. If somebody is buying some serious GPU power, this usually means that they are running something, or cranking up their game's settings, or whatever it happens to be, in a way that will also place considerable demands on the CPU.
CPUs don't directly bottleneck GPUs; but for mixed CPU/GPU tasks(like pretty much any gaming, CAD, etc. application) there is often some degree of correlation between the power of the GPU needed for a given visual quality level, or model mesh complexity, or what have you and the amount of CPU power needed. So, if somebody finds themselves with a GPU that can handle 1920x1080, super-high-quality, with high detail models; but finds that CPU load spikes to 100% and they get half the framerate expected, they speak of being "CPU bottlenecked".
The same is true, if less commonly whined about, in the reverse situation. If you fire up a game on somebody's badly-specced business box, the screaming CPU will just sit there, yawning politely, and making snarky comments about whether you are getting frames per second or seconds per frame. Aside from the modest demands of running the driver, the lousy GPU isn't literally bottlenecking the CPU; but the application performance you can expect to achieve is being bottlenecked by the GPU.
Biological systems have an impressive advantage in that their complexity is cheap(in fact, given that they have to grow it, and thus vascularize or otherwise provide for nutrient and gas exchange, it might even be that structural complexity is their only option in many cases)...
Even a small, boring, bug might have several thousand sensory hairs, each capable of detecting mechanical disturbance(possibly even the direction of that disturbance). With machines, by contrast, semiconductor fabrication technology has brought the cost of small areas of extremely high complexity down(CCDs, MEMS components, microprocessors); but the cost and difficulty of having thousands to hundreds of thousands of distributed sensors(and a wiring harness to connect them all...) is still quite considerable.
I suspect that the "see and be seen" crowd will be much less disconcerted by this(as they are with Facebook and friends), as you say.
I have to wonder, though, if they will ever find themselves becoming less sanguine when the camera analytics data(as seems more or less inevitable) start to mission creep. Somebody who as no theoretical privacy-related problems might grow a few practical ones when HR pulls up a slide deck containing your "Getting hammered with my Brewskis!!!" album and asks to have a little chat about your sick day last Monday...
That does help to seal the fate of the lower-end i3s as the budget CPU of choice only for the must_have_intel brigade(I'm guessing that a lot of corporate typing boxes will be sold therewith...); and it certainly won't help Nvidia's chances of selling lower-end expansion boards to AMD users. However, at the higher end, I suspect that, while nice, the asymmetric Crossfire won't matter much: in the battle between two ~$50-80 expansion boards, having a bit of help from the most competent integrated graphics yet will tip the balance. In the battle between two ~$250-500 expansion boards, the assistance of the onboard shaders will be worth maybe a one-model bump worth of performance. Since you simply cannot buy a Llano part with a faster than 2.9GHz quad CPU; but you can buy incrementally better GPU performance right up until you bump into the limits of two of the highest end presently available, anybody who wants more CPU power than that will simply have to go with an iSomething and buy one tier higher on the discrete GPU side.
IIRC, the contemporary i3s are Sandy Bridge parts(or older) and that intel's on-die graphics options come in a few tiers, depending on the tier of the CPU they are integrated with.
So, if, in fact, the Llano's graphics are "2-4x better than the best Sandy Bridge has to offer" they should crush the i3's IGP like a bug, and be a better gaming part generally unless a given game is atypically CPU bound.
I suspect that AMD will have themselves a cheapskate(and/or space constrained) hit, since their part would appear to be a natural winner for any system that wants to do GPU-bound stuff without an additional 80+ dollars worth of add on board; but if you were planning on an add-on GPU anyway, the i3, or better, would start to look pretty good unless the motherboards are substantially more expensive.
I'd be fairly surprised, even if the NNSA has any interest in Tor, to see much effect...
Tor involves enough crypto-twiddling that it isn't quite as computationally trivial as static-content webserving; but on anything remotely resembling modern hardware it is still going to be bandwidth constrained, rather than limited by anything else.
A huge supercomputer at a site likely using IPs from a well-known and early allocated government block would be a lousy place to put it. What a hypothetical interested party would want is a whole bunch of cheap and annonymous 1Us colo-ed in various random places and/or cheapy VPS instances all being paid for by front companies with PO boxes and horribly forgettable names.
If anybody does, I've never met them. Even its own mother(Sandisk) EOLed it, so it can't have been that popular even with the sort of people who use IncrediMail...
Yeah, TFA sounds pretty seriously confused on that point. Commercial software sourcecode is, in part or in full, shown to Customers Who Matter all the time. Sometimes, it is even made publicly available, but under a license that forbids much of anything other than inspecting it. It isn't rocket surgery.
It seems to vary rather unpredictably, possibly by chipset, possibly by how much the motherboard manufacturer cares, sometimes by the phase of the moon. On the high end, I've had damaged connectors with
I assume that it's rather like the old PS/2 situation, where the +5 was supposed to be limited and regulated; but most outfits ended up just saying "fuck it" and tying it to a +5 rail, possibly through a teeny fuse. Nothing like having a situation where a keyboard with a single bent pin could hard-crash the PC and prevent it from booting...
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This was also the era were the activities of the American clandestine agencies became so egregious that even congress took a look and grew something resembling teeth.
Given that the Office of The Inspector General, not exactly a noted hotbed of antigovernment radicals or clinical paranoids, fairly recently concluded that the FBI's use of 'National Security Letters', 'Exigent Letters', and similar spook stuff was in flagrant violation even of their own extremely broad discretion and weak internal policies, I'm going to say that you haven't heard because the FBI does their best to be quiet, and nobody really cares that much...
How handy. That(again) makes everything except the 'critical mass' part even easier. Heck, there are already plenty of places with public wifi that don't bother, or don't properly implement, client isolation, and I'd imagine that virtually none of them would be configured to do much meaningful filtering of traffic between LAN clients(anybody who cares just seems to use client isolation, or doesn't offer wifi to the public), everybody else either does nothing, or does some basic throttling/blocking to keep spammers and leeches from ruining everybody else's latte-and-email.
You'd still need to get enough people, and enough material, together that it wouldn't be easier just to swap USB drives; but with the feature you describe, and basically any router, you could have a LAN swarm immediately, if you wanted one.
I don't know of anything pre-rolled(or, more importantly, enjoying critical mass); but it doesn't strike me as a terribly difficult problem(aside from the critical mass bit).
.torrents for the benefit of others on the LAN who don't have them(and thus don't participate in the DHT). As long as DHCP is provided, pretty much any vaguely contemporary OS/BT client configuration would Just Work. To avoid spilling onto public internet, and attracting the wrath of the ISP or the Copy Cops, you could either simply not have a WAN connection, or have one; but not route the BT traffic(or shape it to lowest priority, to allow fresh material to come into the local swarm; but not swamp other things).
While the use case is comparatively rare, bittorrent clients will happily enough interact with other nodes on the same LAN. With DHT, you wouldn't even need a tracker(though it wouldn't be rocket surgery to configure the router serving the LAN to have a little captive portal page where people on the LAN could upload
There are really two main issues:
1. Critical mass: Unless this sort of thing is relatively common, it'd be little more than a cute trick, arranged well ahead of time, for your local LUG or LAN-party or whatever.
2. What client hardware to use: In one sense, this is easy. If it has wifi or ethernet(or even bluetooth/zigbee/IrDA/PPP-over-RS-232 if you are feeling perverse) and can run a bittorrent client, it will work. However, compared to almost anybody's internet connections, LAN transfers will be Fast, but the inconvenience of going out to use bittorrent will be sufficient that it won't be worth it unless everybody brings a bunch of stuff with them, and a bunch more space for the stuff they want. Nothing stops a cellphone user or somebody with a 320GB(total, much of it already used) laptop from taking part; but it'll be the guy who shows up and plugs in his 6-bay NAS, with the (almost always Linux) firmware hacked to include a BT client that will really keep things running...
To be sufficiently rich that you can just start spending money is such quantities that both the size, and the specifically chosen value, signal "I don't give a fuck, because I don't have to!"
Yeah, what I was wondering, given that patents actually have a finite term in some meaningful sense, what is the distribution of the pool of patents being sold? Are most of them quite new, with 15-20 years on the clock? Were the bulk of them done a decade ago, when Nortel was not bleeding out, and are now half gone? Are these companies paying for some that are nice and foundational; but will only give them an edge for another year to 3 years?
Skimming the real money off the undulating torrents of pretend money is one of America's most influential industries.
Now that the adventure in real-estate has largely dried up, a new fad is needed.
While their liquidation has been a protracted affair, Nortel supposedly wound down most of its operations in 2009 in order to focus on legal and financial shenanigans. Presumably, then, their newest patents were probably applied for then, granted now-ish, and the bulk of them (one naively assumes) would have been filed back when the company was healthier and doing more R&D spending.
How close to expiration are the patents being purchased here?
Wait, wait: Are you saying that "programmer", "software engineer", and "computer scientist" aren't actually synonyms?
QA has the unfortunate status of "Cost Center". And, no matter what their best intentions are, people and organizations inevitably face a strong pressure toward hating those. It's the same as those prick 'mechanics' with their "safety concerns" who cause flight delays. All cost centers attract a certain amount of dislike, ones that also have the power to cause schedule slips, or whose work deals with heading off things that merely might be a problem, are especially at risk. QA, unfortunately for them, fulfills all three: They cost money, the issues they point out have to be fixed, and can cause deadlines to slip, and(thankfully for the existence and survival of complex software in the world) many bugs are only harmful under unusual conditions, or are never discovered and exploited, this leaves them open to the charge that they are delaying important things with their insistence on fixing purely theoretical issues.
Only little people are capable of error, so it must have been a programming mistake.
The Honorable Mayor Bloomberg is shocked, shocked, to discover fraud and waste going on here...
Don't think of the distortions caused by bending as 'distortions' think of them as "signals caused by exactly the occurrences I am trying to measure"...
A flexible surface that can measure its own deformation state with reasonable speed and accuracy is a touch sensor, albeit not the most sensitive...
My thought was exactly the opposite: When I saw that TFS had a quotation from the guy "Why is he still in a state capable of speech?" was what lept immediately to mind.
Spammers should be serving life sentences, shackled to the production lines and making the real thing...
An experience with a lovebot that possesses actuators of sufficient power to be interesting, without a touch-sense feedback system might give you considerable insight in to things that are worse.
This post brought to you by the phrase "TRAUMATIC DEGLOVING LESION OF PENILE AND SCROTAL SKIN"
It depends on what you are using it for: As you say, the GPU does not directly lean on the CPU to any significant extent; but most people buying fancy GPUs(with the specific exception of people using them for entirely GPU-based compute tasks), are buying them to run applications that eat both considerable CPU time and considerable GPU time. If somebody is buying some serious GPU power, this usually means that they are running something, or cranking up their game's settings, or whatever it happens to be, in a way that will also place considerable demands on the CPU.
CPUs don't directly bottleneck GPUs; but for mixed CPU/GPU tasks(like pretty much any gaming, CAD, etc. application) there is often some degree of correlation between the power of the GPU needed for a given visual quality level, or model mesh complexity, or what have you and the amount of CPU power needed. So, if somebody finds themselves with a GPU that can handle 1920x1080, super-high-quality, with high detail models; but finds that CPU load spikes to 100% and they get half the framerate expected, they speak of being "CPU bottlenecked".
The same is true, if less commonly whined about, in the reverse situation. If you fire up a game on somebody's badly-specced business box, the screaming CPU will just sit there, yawning politely, and making snarky comments about whether you are getting frames per second or seconds per frame. Aside from the modest demands of running the driver, the lousy GPU isn't literally bottlenecking the CPU; but the application performance you can expect to achieve is being bottlenecked by the GPU.
Biological systems have an impressive advantage in that their complexity is cheap(in fact, given that they have to grow it, and thus vascularize or otherwise provide for nutrient and gas exchange, it might even be that structural complexity is their only option in many cases)...
Even a small, boring, bug might have several thousand sensory hairs, each capable of detecting mechanical disturbance(possibly even the direction of that disturbance). With machines, by contrast, semiconductor fabrication technology has brought the cost of small areas of extremely high complexity down(CCDs, MEMS components, microprocessors); but the cost and difficulty of having thousands to hundreds of thousands of distributed sensors(and a wiring harness to connect them all...) is still quite considerable.
I suspect that the "see and be seen" crowd will be much less disconcerted by this(as they are with Facebook and friends), as you say.
I have to wonder, though, if they will ever find themselves becoming less sanguine when the camera analytics data(as seems more or less inevitable) start to mission creep. Somebody who as no theoretical privacy-related problems might grow a few practical ones when HR pulls up a slide deck containing your "Getting hammered with my Brewskis!!!" album and asks to have a little chat about your sick day last Monday...
That does help to seal the fate of the lower-end i3s as the budget CPU of choice only for the must_have_intel brigade(I'm guessing that a lot of corporate typing boxes will be sold therewith...); and it certainly won't help Nvidia's chances of selling lower-end expansion boards to AMD users. However, at the higher end, I suspect that, while nice, the asymmetric Crossfire won't matter much: in the battle between two ~$50-80 expansion boards, having a bit of help from the most competent integrated graphics yet will tip the balance. In the battle between two ~$250-500 expansion boards, the assistance of the onboard shaders will be worth maybe a one-model bump worth of performance. Since you simply cannot buy a Llano part with a faster than 2.9GHz quad CPU; but you can buy incrementally better GPU performance right up until you bump into the limits of two of the highest end presently available, anybody who wants more CPU power than that will simply have to go with an iSomething and buy one tier higher on the discrete GPU side.
IIRC, the contemporary i3s are Sandy Bridge parts(or older) and that intel's on-die graphics options come in a few tiers, depending on the tier of the CPU they are integrated with.
So, if, in fact, the Llano's graphics are "2-4x better than the best Sandy Bridge has to offer" they should crush the i3's IGP like a bug, and be a better gaming part generally unless a given game is atypically CPU bound.
I suspect that AMD will have themselves a cheapskate(and/or space constrained) hit, since their part would appear to be a natural winner for any system that wants to do GPU-bound stuff without an additional 80+ dollars worth of add on board; but if you were planning on an add-on GPU anyway, the i3, or better, would start to look pretty good unless the motherboards are substantially more expensive.
I'd be fairly surprised, even if the NNSA has any interest in Tor, to see much effect...
Tor involves enough crypto-twiddling that it isn't quite as computationally trivial as static-content webserving; but on anything remotely resembling modern hardware it is still going to be bandwidth constrained, rather than limited by anything else.
A huge supercomputer at a site likely using IPs from a well-known and early allocated government block would be a lousy place to put it. What a hypothetical interested party would want is a whole bunch of cheap and annonymous 1Us colo-ed in various random places and/or cheapy VPS instances all being paid for by front companies with PO boxes and horribly forgettable names.
If anybody does, I've never met them. Even its own mother(Sandisk) EOLed it, so it can't have been that popular even with the sort of people who use IncrediMail...
Yeah, TFA sounds pretty seriously confused on that point. Commercial software sourcecode is, in part or in full, shown to Customers Who Matter all the time. Sometimes, it is even made publicly available, but under a license that forbids much of anything other than inspecting it. It isn't rocket surgery.
It seems to vary rather unpredictably, possibly by chipset, possibly by how much the motherboard manufacturer cares, sometimes by the phase of the moon. On the high end, I've had damaged connectors with
I assume that it's rather like the old PS/2 situation, where the +5 was supposed to be limited and regulated; but most outfits ended up just saying "fuck it" and tying it to a +5 rail, possibly through a teeny fuse. Nothing like having a situation where a keyboard with a single bent pin could hard-crash the PC and prevent it from booting...
We could just turn them into biofuels. Sociopaths seem to be a readily renewable resource.