But more importantly, many programming tasks simply aren't meaningful to break up into such units of granularity is OS-level threads. Many programs would benefit from being able to run just some small operations (like iterations of a loop) in parallel, but just the synchronization work required to wake up even a thread from a pool to do such a thing would greatly exceed the benefit of it.
Its a question of scale. The programs that could not significantly benefit from current parallel execution methods are either bottlenecked on something else (that also needs parallel innovation) or are simply not time-consuming. Really.
Multi-core tackles volume, not latency. Many of the posters here seem to be stuck on latency, primarily on system responsiveness issues, where multicore isnt really the best solution. Our OS's really arent designed to maximize responsiveness, and if they were they would have to sacrifice volume in order to do so.
IMHO, my systems responsiveness is good enough for now.. its the volume of computation that is lacking, and that is why I welcome many-core. I want general-purpose teraflops for a reasonable cost.
Its math. If you do not want to believe in math, thats fine. You can believe whatever you want, but the theory of gambling isnt swept under the rug by your ignorance of it.
To blow a hole in your theory as simply as possible, I have chosen to sign TWO of your "not gambling" insurance contracts for the SAME asset: The car I might be planning on crashing.
Your theory sounds nice and all, and it would probably be a great thing if it were true, but it is not a reality.
While it may be true that when YOU insure your home, you arent trying to gain anything.. but that just shows that YOU do not believe the insurance on the home is a good bet or that you do not know what to do when you do recognize a good bet.
If you thought it was a good bet, would you double-up? Think about that. It seems to me that you have not considered the possibility that you might be in a good-bet situation. You might know that the wiring in the home is sub-standard, or that the people living in it are careless and reckless, or you may simply know that the assessed value is much more than the fair open market value.
The theory of gambling works both ways. The insurance company wants to wager as much as possible on +EV situations, and so its also true that a standard everyday bloke who buys insurance ALSO wants to wager as much as possible on +EV situations.
Insurance survives not because all policy holders are in a -EV situation, but only because the majority of policy holders are. Some holders are in +EV land, some of those even know that they are, and some of THOSE actual act correctly on that knowledge.
Insurance is gambling.. pure and simple.
The worst part of it all is that a lot of insurance contracts actualy allow the buyer to control the outcome, relying on the good nature of the majority in order to keep margins small enough to fool those same good natured people into thinking that they benefit in some way from the wager.
Well Opera is "officialy" only at 9.64, so they got 36 more versions to actualy tackle this problem before it adversely effects its users.
Quite honestly, I love the browser. I have always been an Opera user from way back when I ran Win3.1. Opera was the smallest fastest graphical browser at the time and is still one of the best by those metrics. It has also always been ahead of its time in the feature war.
And even though its "browser share" is pretty pathetic, that doesnt count the real business that Opera is in: Browsers for devices, where it is pretty much the indisputed king.
If you are really a "web developer" then I got news for you buddy..
If there was indeed broad standards support then you would probably be out of a job.
Here you are in an industry that is continualy changing in such a way that it makes you personally worth less and less, and you are screaming "hurry up!"
Yeah... i'll take the karma hit here.. your religion has convinced you that suicide is a good thing. All that specialty knowledge you have had to learn to support the quirks of the various browsers has VALUE that you are currently benefiting from. It is the quirks of the browsers that makes you special. Take away those quirks and you are no longer special.
All other things being equal, doubling the computing power of a raster card will net you double the number of primitives.
All other things being equal, doubling the computing power of a raytracer card will net you the square of the number of primitives.
As soon as these two technologies are on par with each other, rasterization dies on the following hardware generation.
If a raytracer can handle 1 million objects in realtime, then it only takes a 5% computational performance improvement to then handle 2 million objects at the same realtime rate.
The exponential growth of hardware power only helps raytracing dominate, and the root of it all is that raytracing is "For Each Pixel..." while rasterization is "For Each Primitive..."
Raytracing, and other similar alternatives, have very large per-pixel costs. It is only the disparity between the low per-primitive cost of rasterization and the high per-pixel cost of raytracing that has allowed rasterization to survive this long. Yes, it currently still is better for realtime, but no.. that absolutely cannot remain true as long as demand for primitive counts keep rising.
To raytrace a soft shadow you have to send out at least 16 rays per shadow calculation, for each light and even then your gonna suffer from nasty artefacts. Compared to the raster solution which involves rendering the zbuffer of any given light source and merely doing some blurring. same quality, much reduced cost.
It seems to me that the algorithmic complexity grows just as fast for both rendering techniques in the case of many lightsources. Both are accomplished in steps linear to the number of lights.
Its all well and good that rasterization is "fast" for what we use it for today. But, its growth is linear to the number of primitives while there are other methods that are sublinear. For a large enough number of primitives the sublinear algorithm must be superior in performance.
The way I see it, TomTom is not 'forced' to license FAT.
It is to their advantage to do so, just like all the others things TomTom needs to license. TomTom, like all businesses, is motivated to maximize profits. Its FAT handling improves the product by offering its customers a pleasant FAT-compatible experience. FAT compatability is more valuable than the alternative choices.
If its valuable, then pay the damn licensing fee.
This is essentialy no different than the situation that had arrisen when the LZW patent was still in effect. Yeah, patent laws suck.. but its law.
You can do a FULL WRITE to a 10,000 write SSD every day for 27 years. In the case of a 128GB drive, we are talking about a writable limit at 1280TB. Given that a typical performance drive today will write something on the order of 100MB per second at best, it will take 148 days of 24/7 full blast highly optimized write activity in order to wear the drive out.
The reliability fear is irrational, even in the case of liberal swapping.
But are these SSD's really worth $3-$8 per gigabyte? How about just within the affordable $3/GB budget? You get 30+ times more storage for your buck with conventional drives, so its not easy to pick SSD's if conventional drives are still good enough performance-wise.
Internet Explorer 67.44% 100% FREE
Firefox 21.77% 100% FREE
Safari 8.02% 100% FREE
Chrome 1.15% 100% FREE
Thats 98.38%. Lets move on!
Opera 0.71% 100% FREE
Netscape 0.66% 100% FREE
Mozilla 0.07% 100% FREE
Thats 99.82%.
I can continue. You really are letting your bias with a close association cloud your judgement on this. There is obviously no market here that needs protecting. While its all well and good that you really want web standards or whatever bias it is thats influencing you, the fact remains that there is no market here.
The money changing hands are all to do with other markets, and they arent even dominated by microsoft.
I think the main reason that a complete ban on guns will never fly is that it would eliminate too much bureaucracy. That the regulating bureaucracy is a significant part of the whole bureaucracy and there is no way in hell that they are ever going to shave off a big chunk of themselves. They already have big budgets, so how is this replacement smaller budget going to benefit those participating in the decision making?
Sometimes politics is simple. The decision is actualy made by men on a hill who maximize their own self-interests. They want budgets assigned to regulating ownership, complete with a restore-all-your-rights fee.
I'm not sure that you want to open the 'lets go by the book' can of worms.
For there to be a real anti-trust case against Microsoft, there needs to be a real market that is being undermind.
That is not the case, yet the E.U. is going after Microsoft anyways.
You would think that they had something better to do with their time, but they don't.
If this court is going to (again) leverage against this company, for billions of dollars, with the power to distribute vested to this same body, and do so when there is no market being protected by their ruling...
..then it is quite clear what is happening. Repeated abuse of judicial power for the power to decide the fate of billions of dollars.
Who the heck doesnt want to decide the fate of billions of dollars? Where do I sign up?
But TomTom has gone much farther than trying to use the ideas.. they are implementing the file system verbatim for obvious (its a standard, be compatible) reasons, and thats much worse than simply working off the ideas.
We can argue all day long that anything FAT32 shouldn't be patented from a moral standpoint, but at the end of the day there are numerous patents related to FAT32 that are still on the books, unexpired.
..certainly cannot blame Microsoft for trying to defend a patent that was granted to them, especialy if the abuser is in direct competition in a marketplace. If this was NTFS the situation would be a little more clear, but because its "the standard" FAT32, some people cannot see the similarity.
TomTom chose FAT32 for economic reasons.. they should have to pay the costs of that choice.
WMA is actualy superior to MP3 from a sound quality perspective when comparing equal bit rates, mostly because MP3 only uses a fixed size (and small) fourier window.
Basically, MP3 was designed to fit the hardware economics of the time with no provisions for future improvement.
...but MP3 is "good enough".. just like DEFLATE is "good enough".. mp3 and zip are standards even though they are both markedly inferior to the current cutting edge.
What the poster did not know is that the ruling had nothing to do with WMP's mp3 support, but instead to do with the services (media guide) tied to WMP. Other competitors in the field, such as Real, thought that they could not gain a foothold because of WMP
..the reality is that no media player can gain a foothold in the market because FLASH is good enough.
ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN,... they used to use WMP or REALPLAYER, but no longer.. now they just have a FLASH player and let your standard everyday web browser be the "media guide"
So not only did the E.U's ruling not accomplish what it wanted (nobody purchased Windows N), it wasn't really a fucking issue to begin with.
The only true success story in regards to windows-based media players is WinAmp, who pimped themselves to AOL almost exactly when the time was right. What is most commical is that WinAmp's media guide now offers lots of pirated content through its "ShoutCast TV" browser.
ICC is hands down the best C++ compiler for x86 and x64 from a performance perspective. GCC isnt even in the running on that front. All GCC has going for it is that its "free"..
If I was heading the GCC development effort, I would be stearing towards being 100% ICC 10.x compatible because of the massive benefits of doing so, because that would fucking rock and everyone fucking knows it.
While its cool and all that you have found an excuse not to use ICC, the fact remains that its fucking fantastic in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
The really funny part is that someone in that thread suggested that you use the same base router being hacked up in this article.
If you guys had taken a chance to read what was on that page..
You would find that the 70% is a part of a 100% total which does not include any write-in votes.
Serenity didnt get 70% of the votes, after-all.. and further, Colbert got nearly as many votes as ALL four of the NASA suggested names... *COMBINED*
I'm sure that Colbert secretly hopes that NASA does not name it Colbert, because that act would generate YEARS of comedy material.
But more importantly, many programming tasks simply aren't meaningful to break up into such units of granularity is OS-level threads. Many programs would benefit from being able to run just some small operations (like iterations of a loop) in parallel, but just the synchronization work required to wake up even a thread from a pool to do such a thing would greatly exceed the benefit of it.
Its a question of scale. The programs that could not significantly benefit from current parallel execution methods are either bottlenecked on something else (that also needs parallel innovation) or are simply not time-consuming. Really.
Multi-core tackles volume, not latency. Many of the posters here seem to be stuck on latency, primarily on system responsiveness issues, where multicore isnt really the best solution. Our OS's really arent designed to maximize responsiveness, and if they were they would have to sacrifice volume in order to do so.
IMHO, my systems responsiveness is good enough for now.. its the volume of computation that is lacking, and that is why I welcome many-core. I want general-purpose teraflops for a reasonable cost.
I do not want to buy a mis-manufactured robe being sold off as a "wear it backward" marvel.
Hard to believe that they made so many before noticing.. but there it is.
Its math. If you do not want to believe in math, thats fine. You can believe whatever you want, but the theory of gambling isnt swept under the rug by your ignorance of it.
You are wrong. Insurance is gambling.
To blow a hole in your theory as simply as possible, I have chosen to sign TWO of your "not gambling" insurance contracts for the SAME asset: The car I might be planning on crashing.
Your theory sounds nice and all, and it would probably be a great thing if it were true, but it is not a reality.
While it may be true that when YOU insure your home, you arent trying to gain anything.. but that just shows that YOU do not believe the insurance on the home is a good bet or that you do not know what to do when you do recognize a good bet.
If you thought it was a good bet, would you double-up? Think about that. It seems to me that you have not considered the possibility that you might be in a good-bet situation. You might know that the wiring in the home is sub-standard, or that the people living in it are careless and reckless, or you may simply know that the assessed value is much more than the fair open market value.
The theory of gambling works both ways. The insurance company wants to wager as much as possible on +EV situations, and so its also true that a standard everyday bloke who buys insurance ALSO wants to wager as much as possible on +EV situations.
Insurance survives not because all policy holders are in a -EV situation, but only because the majority of policy holders are. Some holders are in +EV land, some of those even know that they are, and some of THOSE actual act correctly on that knowledge.
Insurance is gambling.. pure and simple.
The worst part of it all is that a lot of insurance contracts actualy allow the buyer to control the outcome, relying on the good nature of the majority in order to keep margins small enough to fool those same good natured people into thinking that they benefit in some way from the wager.
In the end, a geek gets to do it with Angelina Jolie, so its all good.
Well Opera is "officialy" only at 9.64, so they got 36 more versions to actualy tackle this problem before it adversely effects its users.
Quite honestly, I love the browser. I have always been an Opera user from way back when I ran Win3.1. Opera was the smallest fastest graphical browser at the time and is still one of the best by those metrics. It has also always been ahead of its time in the feature war.
And even though its "browser share" is pretty pathetic, that doesnt count the real business that Opera is in: Browsers for devices, where it is pretty much the indisputed king.
If you are really a "web developer" then I got news for you buddy..
If there was indeed broad standards support then you would probably be out of a job.
Here you are in an industry that is continualy changing in such a way that it makes you personally worth less and less, and you are screaming "hurry up!"
Yeah... i'll take the karma hit here.. your religion has convinced you that suicide is a good thing. All that specialty knowledge you have had to learn to support the quirks of the various browsers has VALUE that you are currently benefiting from. It is the quirks of the browsers that makes you special. Take away those quirks and you are no longer special.
Yes it is a problem.
..." while rasterization is "For Each Primitive ..."
All other things being equal, doubling the computing power of a raster card will net you double the number of primitives.
All other things being equal, doubling the computing power of a raytracer card will net you the square of the number of primitives.
As soon as these two technologies are on par with each other, rasterization dies on the following hardware generation.
If a raytracer can handle 1 million objects in realtime, then it only takes a 5% computational performance improvement to then handle 2 million objects at the same realtime rate.
The exponential growth of hardware power only helps raytracing dominate, and the root of it all is that raytracing is "For Each Pixel
Raytracing, and other similar alternatives, have very large per-pixel costs. It is only the disparity between the low per-primitive cost of rasterization and the high per-pixel cost of raytracing that has allowed rasterization to survive this long. Yes, it currently still is better for realtime, but no.. that absolutely cannot remain true as long as demand for primitive counts keep rising.
To raytrace a soft shadow you have to send out at least 16 rays per shadow calculation, for each light and even then your gonna suffer from nasty artefacts. Compared to the raster solution which involves rendering the zbuffer of any given light source and merely doing some blurring. same quality, much reduced cost.
It seems to me that the algorithmic complexity grows just as fast for both rendering techniques in the case of many lightsources. Both are accomplished in steps linear to the number of lights.
Its all well and good that rasterization is "fast" for what we use it for today. But, its growth is linear to the number of primitives while there are other methods that are sublinear. For a large enough number of primitives the sublinear algorithm must be superior in performance.
But if you are the devs then you get to decide what 'desirable' things stay and what 'desirable' things go.
If you take away some significant reward bonus from the people who hang out in one area, then most people will travel.
The way I see it, TomTom is not 'forced' to license FAT.
It is to their advantage to do so, just like all the others things TomTom needs to license. TomTom, like all businesses, is motivated to maximize profits. Its FAT handling improves the product by offering its customers a pleasant FAT-compatible experience. FAT compatability is more valuable than the alternative choices.
If its valuable, then pay the damn licensing fee.
This is essentialy no different than the situation that had arrisen when the LZW patent was still in effect. Yeah, patent laws suck.. but its law.
Someone owns it: pay them their fee.
Stop segmenting your playing population into multiple independent copies of the universe.
Instead, segment your universe.
Oh come on..
Do you honestly believe that the Linux driver ecosystem is better?
This is spot-on.
You can do a FULL WRITE to a 10,000 write SSD every day for 27 years. In the case of a 128GB drive, we are talking about a writable limit at 1280TB. Given that a typical performance drive today will write something on the order of 100MB per second at best, it will take 148 days of 24/7 full blast highly optimized write activity in order to wear the drive out.
The reliability fear is irrational, even in the case of liberal swapping.
But are these SSD's really worth $3-$8 per gigabyte? How about just within the affordable $3/GB budget? You get 30+ times more storage for your buck with conventional drives, so its not easy to pick SSD's if conventional drives are still good enough performance-wise.
Math is hard! Lets buy both!
So you arent going to show me the money?
Lets make this simple.
Internet Explorer 67.44% 100% FREE
Firefox 21.77% 100% FREE
Safari 8.02% 100% FREE
Chrome 1.15% 100% FREE
Thats 98.38%. Lets move on!
Opera 0.71% 100% FREE
Netscape 0.66% 100% FREE
Mozilla 0.07% 100% FREE
Thats 99.82%.
I can continue. You really are letting your bias with a close association cloud your judgement on this. There is obviously no market here that needs protecting. While its all well and good that you really want web standards or whatever bias it is thats influencing you, the fact remains that there is no market here.
The money changing hands are all to do with other markets, and they arent even dominated by microsoft.
If I am wrong, then show me the market.
Where is the money? If anti-trust laws arent about money anymore, then its a sad sad time for us all.
I think the main reason that a complete ban on guns will never fly is that it would eliminate too much bureaucracy. That the regulating bureaucracy is a significant part of the whole bureaucracy and there is no way in hell that they are ever going to shave off a big chunk of themselves. They already have big budgets, so how is this replacement smaller budget going to benefit those participating in the decision making?
Sometimes politics is simple. The decision is actualy made by men on a hill who maximize their own self-interests. They want budgets assigned to regulating ownership, complete with a restore-all-your-rights fee.
I'm not sure that you want to open the 'lets go by the book' can of worms.
..then it is quite clear what is happening. Repeated abuse of judicial power for the power to decide the fate of billions of dollars.
For there to be a real anti-trust case against Microsoft, there needs to be a real market that is being undermind.
That is not the case, yet the E.U. is going after Microsoft anyways.
You would think that they had something better to do with their time, but they don't.
If this court is going to (again) leverage against this company, for billions of dollars, with the power to distribute vested to this same body, and do so when there is no market being protected by their ruling...
Who the heck doesnt want to decide the fate of billions of dollars? Where do I sign up?
But TomTom has gone much farther than trying to use the ideas.. they are implementing the file system verbatim for obvious (its a standard, be compatible) reasons, and thats much worse than simply working off the ideas.
..certainly cannot blame Microsoft for trying to defend a patent that was granted to them, especialy if the abuser is in direct competition in a marketplace. If this was NTFS the situation would be a little more clear, but because its "the standard" FAT32, some people cannot see the similarity.
We can argue all day long that anything FAT32 shouldn't be patented from a moral standpoint, but at the end of the day there are numerous patents related to FAT32 that are still on the books, unexpired.
TomTom chose FAT32 for economic reasons.. they should have to pay the costs of that choice.
WMA is actualy superior to MP3 from a sound quality perspective when comparing equal bit rates, mostly because MP3 only uses a fixed size (and small) fourier window.
...but MP3 is "good enough" .. just like DEFLATE is "good enough" .. mp3 and zip are standards even though they are both markedly inferior to the current cutting edge.
..the reality is that no media player can gain a foothold in the market because FLASH is good enough.
... they used to use WMP or REALPLAYER, but no longer .. now they just have a FLASH player and let your standard everyday web browser be the "media guide"
Basically, MP3 was designed to fit the hardware economics of the time with no provisions for future improvement.
What the poster did not know is that the ruling had nothing to do with WMP's mp3 support, but instead to do with the services (media guide) tied to WMP. Other competitors in the field, such as Real, thought that they could not gain a foothold because of WMP
ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN,
So not only did the E.U's ruling not accomplish what it wanted (nobody purchased Windows N), it wasn't really a fucking issue to begin with.
The only true success story in regards to windows-based media players is WinAmp, who pimped themselves to AOL almost exactly when the time was right. What is most commical is that WinAmp's media guide now offers lots of pirated content through its "ShoutCast TV" browser.
When did WMP not play MP3?
Basically.. what the fuck are you talking about?
Let me enlighten you.. it has supported MP3 playback since version 6.1, which came with Windows 98 SE. It has never stopped supporting it.
I bet you are talking about MP3 encoding.. the patent minefield that keeps many away. The first patent didnt expire until 2007.
The patent issue didnt just spawn WMA, it also spawned AAC and Vorbis.
Now, WTF are you talking about?
ICC is hands down the best C++ compiler for x86 and x64 from a performance perspective. GCC isnt even in the running on that front. All GCC has going for it is that its "free" ..
If I was heading the GCC development effort, I would be stearing towards being 100% ICC 10.x compatible because of the massive benefits of doing so, because that would fucking rock and everyone fucking knows it.
While its cool and all that you have found an excuse not to use ICC, the fact remains that its fucking fantastic in comparison.