Although, then there is the problem of "Ya, I know the highway was crowded, but I _paid_ to speed, so I weaved in and out of traffic to keep up at 90mph."
Just because you are allowed to drive 90mph doesn't mean you can't be pulled over for reckless driving. The midwest is full of very straight often very empty highways where, as long as you have a safe vehicle, 90mph is a perfectly reasonable speed to drive.
What scares me just as much is if not having your life exposed on the internet works against you: "We googled you and couldn't find anything. What are you hiding?" To some extent this already happens if you leave the U.S. for prolonged periods of time (years). When you return, you may find some things difficult to do because you become a suspicious person without verifiable previous addresses, employment histories, etc.
He must have forgotten to turn on optimization (or the MS compiler is *that* bad at optimizing). Even my lowly 2.5Ghz Core2 Duo T9300 renders this in 2m10s on Linux. Core for core, that makes my 2.5 year old laptop chip nearly twice as fast as his i7 980X.
Android and iOS combined don't even come close to Symbian.
Since it's not a modern mobile OS on just about all those phones the point is irrelevant. Like saying there are not as many Android devices as grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.
To use a car analogy, it's more like saying that the number of people that own a Lexus or BMW is dwarfed by the number of people that own a Honda. While the Honda owners may be more concerned with reliably getting from point A to point B, and the Lexus/BMW owners may be more concerned with comfort, status or performance, in the end, they are all cars and perform the same basic service.
That page doesn't say that at all. You've quoted numbers (and even incorrectly inflated the iOS numbers by instead quote the linux desktop numbers) about browser strings. If you scroll down, you will see a VERY different picture of the marketplace for mobile devices (including iPhone, iPad and iPod):
Privoxy does a good job but, even with the web-based "gui" for configuration, it's probably too complicated/inconvenient for most people. Without a point and click "Block this" and a blacklist that auto-updates, it takes a lot more effort than using a good browser integrated ad blocker.
However, one benefit that was true last time I benchmarked it was that privoxy was significantly faster at filtering a page than, for example, AdBlock Plus. It's also useful if you have it running as an intercepting proxy on a household/company router with very moderate settings. You can prevent a lot of badness from entering your company/home with no interaction on the users part. All they will notice is that the internet is much faster.
I guess it depends on what you consider ID. I've had to give Social Security Number, Drivers Licence number, Credit card number for any number of mundane reasons. Want electricity? SSN. Want car insurance? SSN. If you want a fucking bank account, it's Social Security Number, Drivers Licence, and more.
I lived more or less out of the U.S. for almost 10 years. When I came back, I was treated as a criminal because I couldn't prove I was me. Several banks flat out rejected me to even open a bank account because of my ID. When one finally accepted me, they were stunned to find that my credit score was 800. I wasn't rejected for credit reasons.
I was rejected for ID reasons. I'm a nerd that's too lazy to get off his couch to kill a fly but has lived all over the world in the last decade. That apparently makes me very suspect.
You can buy a phone and pre-paid minutes in the US for cash.
Without any ID whatsoever? When I've tried to do almost anything in the U.S., they've wanted ID, proof of "whatever" and have nearly insinuated at a rectal exam.
Yes, I exaggerate but, I don't even think I'm in the realm of Tinfoil Hat Paranoia here.
France takes their mobile phones communications very seriously - you have to provide a photocopy of your ID just to get a Mobicarte (Pay-As-You-Go) SIM card. Even then it will be deactivated if you don't use it after three months.
I get the impression they really want to know the identity of anyone who surfs the web.
Isn't that the case everywhere? I only have experience in 3 countries (though, on 3 different continents) and they all wanted detailed information (passport/drivers licence/credit card). From what I've seen, getting an "anonymous phone" is basically impossible in every country I've ever lived in. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if an "anonymous phone" was illegal in most parts of the world.
As much as I enjoy ridiculing The French, I think in this case they are just following the status quo. I'm strong against the status quo in this case but, I don't think they are being any worse than anywhere else.
Sure, but, Linksys doesn't make openly Cisco products. Yes, all tech people recognize that Linksys is Cisco but, the name Cisco usually means expense and quality in the IT world. I again assert that this is bizarre. How do you go from making $5000 routers to making Android tablets?
That's a very good breakdown of what you need to benefit from GPU based computing but, really, only #1 has any relevance vs. an x86 chip.
#2) Yes, an x86 chip will have a high clock speed but, unless you can use SSE instructions, x86 is crazy slow. Also, most (if not all) architectures will give you half the flops for using the double precision vector instructions vs. the single precision ones.
#3) This is a problem with CPUs as well except, as you point out, the memory is much slower. Performance is often about hiding latency. You don't need your problem to fit in the L2/L3 cache of a CPU, but, if the compiler/programmer/CPU can prefetch things into L2/L3 before it's accessed, it's a huge win. The same goes for having things in GPU memory before it's needed. The difference is that the GPU has a TON of memory compared to an L2/L3 cache.
#4) You might be right here. I know that with hyperthreading a CPU will yield to another "thread" when it mispredicts a branch. However, the fact that branch misprediction is a condition in which the CPU will switch to another thread, to me, means that mispredicting a branch on an x86 CPU is also a fairly expensive thing to do. Maybe not as expensive as on a GPU but, expensive nonetheless.
I suppose it all comes down to what kind of problem you are trying to compute but, if you can make your problem work in a way that is pleasing to #1, using a GPU is probably going to be a win.
The name is not only used in English (the language of England) but also in German (Fussbal), French (football), Spanish (fútbol), Portuguese (futebol),...
I would imagine that the number of languages that call it some variation of the word "football" is probably larger than the languages that don't. At the very least, I would be surprised if anyone outside of the U.S. conjures up images of armored men throwing an oblong ball to each other when hearing the word "football".
I'm not so sure. Chromes claim to fame is fast Javascript. I imagine that many, many people didn't even know they *wanted* fast Javascript until Chrome claimed they had it. If a browser is 5x as fast as the competition for something that people need, the competition takes notice.
If I have the right to remain silent, do I also have the right to refuse giving my DNA away? IANAL but if I have the right to not speak so as to not incriminate myself, why wouldn't I also have the right to not have my blood drawn (or mucus swabbed) so as to not incriminate myself?
I don't live in New York but, I'm often there. If an officer there wanted to take a sample of my DNA for an offense such as speeding, I'd refuse. If he persisted, I'd try to invoke Miranda Rights. If he persisted after that, I'd fight back as he tried to take the sample, recover for a few months in the hospital after he beat me senseless and then sue for police brutality. Essentially, that's what it's going to take to get this law overturned if it gets passed.
For every person that looked at this list to further their career, I wonder how many looked at it just to verify that, no, thankfully, their job is *not* as good as it gets.
No, this is like Google driving around on public roads with a tape recorder stuck to the roof to create a Google Street Sounds component to their maps. They didn't open, tamper with or otherwise go out of their way to invade anyones privacy. Now, IANAL so, it's entirely possible that driving with a tape recorder affixed to your car is illegal.
Apple has already patented this and they have introduced devices to market for a generation where people will be used to typing without a keyboard on their portable devices. This will not be something foreign or new. And with OLED technology, it does not need to affect battery life and can act as a secondary (albeit lower res) screen.
Just because it won't be "foreign and new" doesn't mean it will be better.
Technology changes and those who scoff at the changes are usually the older generation who doesn't want to change. And they usually end up being those engineers who are unable to adapt.
I don't mind one bit if the "newer generation" forgoes physical keyboards for virtual keyboards. In fact, I welcome it. It means that we "older generation" will be more valuable because we can type faster, more accurately and be less prone to typing injuries. Nothing would please me more than to be clacking away on my Model M while some kid thumps away at a dead spot on his virtual keyboard.
"Want to fix this? Stop buying RIAA member's products."
Negative. The only way to fix this, given what you say about congress, is to start killing RIAA members, AND congress members.
That's the ONLY way this bullshit will EVER stop, is to show them with absolute certainty that we will no longer tolerate this shit.
It would be interesting if your battle call was heeded. What if the nerds at/. really do decide to start a revolution? I imagine the first order of business would be to draft a new constitution and then arguing over whether to use 4 or 8 spaces for tabs and whether or not to line wrap at 80 character.
In which case, $1.5 trillion seems pretty conservative on their part. The previous slashdot article on portable games sales claimed they had lost $45 billion in *sales* due to pirating. If the average game retails for $45, that's 1 billion lost sales. If they were to sue everyone who had pirated a game for the maximum damages, they could potentially make US$150 trillion dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
Although, then there is the problem of "Ya, I know the highway was crowded, but I _paid_ to speed, so I weaved in and out of traffic to keep up at 90mph."
Just because you are allowed to drive 90mph doesn't mean you can't be pulled over for reckless driving. The midwest is full of very straight often very empty highways where, as long as you have a safe vehicle, 90mph is a perfectly reasonable speed to drive.
What scares me just as much is if not having your life exposed on the internet works against you: "We googled you and couldn't find anything. What are you hiding?" To some extent this already happens if you leave the U.S. for prolonged periods of time (years). When you return, you may find some things difficult to do because you become a suspicious person without verifiable previous addresses, employment histories, etc.
He must have forgotten to turn on optimization (or the MS compiler is *that* bad at optimizing). Even my lowly 2.5Ghz Core2 Duo T9300 renders this in 2m10s on Linux. Core for core, that makes my 2.5 year old laptop chip nearly twice as fast as his i7 980X.
Android and iOS combined don't even come close to Symbian.
Since it's not a modern mobile OS on just about all those phones the point is irrelevant. Like saying there are not as many Android devices as grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.
To use a car analogy, it's more like saying that the number of people that own a Lexus or BMW is dwarfed by the number of people that own a Honda. While the Honda owners may be more concerned with reliably getting from point A to point B, and the Lexus/BMW owners may be more concerned with comfort, status or performance, in the end, they are all cars and perform the same basic service.
That page doesn't say that at all. You've quoted numbers (and even incorrectly inflated the iOS numbers by instead quote the linux desktop numbers) about browser strings. If you scroll down, you will see a VERY different picture of the marketplace for mobile devices (including iPhone, iPad and iPod):
From Gartner:
Symbian: 44.3%
Blackberry: 19.4%
iOS: 15.4%
Windows Mobile: 6.8%
Android: 9.6%
Linux: 3.7%
Other: 0.7%
Even allowing for a hefty margin of error, compared to Symbian, iOS is a very distant third.
Count Android all you like, if you count every Android device sold to date it would not equal the number of iPhone and iPod Touch units sold.
The Touch (and iPad) all run the same mobile iOS the phones do.
Note that link was from back in 2009...
Android and iOS combined don't even come close to Symbian.
This is a feature in the same way the antenna problem is: "Well, at least I get a free bumper out of it!"
Privoxy does a good job but, even with the web-based "gui" for configuration, it's probably too complicated/inconvenient for most people. Without a point and click "Block this" and a blacklist that auto-updates, it takes a lot more effort than using a good browser integrated ad blocker.
However, one benefit that was true last time I benchmarked it was that privoxy was significantly faster at filtering a page than, for example, AdBlock Plus. It's also useful if you have it running as an intercepting proxy on a household/company router with very moderate settings. You can prevent a lot of badness from entering your company/home with no interaction on the users part. All they will notice is that the internet is much faster.
I guess it depends on what you consider ID. I've had to give Social Security Number, Drivers Licence number, Credit card number for any number of mundane reasons. Want electricity? SSN. Want car insurance? SSN. If you want a fucking bank account, it's Social Security Number, Drivers Licence, and more.
I lived more or less out of the U.S. for almost 10 years. When I came back, I was treated as a criminal because I couldn't prove I was me. Several banks flat out rejected me to even open a bank account because of my ID. When one finally accepted me, they were stunned to find that my credit score was 800. I wasn't rejected for credit reasons.
I was rejected for ID reasons. I'm a nerd that's too lazy to get off his couch to kill a fly but has lived all over the world in the last decade. That apparently makes me very suspect.
Then I stand corrected. I'm actually quite surprised that this is true.
You can buy a phone and pre-paid minutes in the US for cash.
Without any ID whatsoever? When I've tried to do almost anything in the U.S., they've wanted ID, proof of "whatever" and have nearly insinuated at a rectal exam.
Yes, I exaggerate but, I don't even think I'm in the realm of Tinfoil Hat Paranoia here.
France takes their mobile phones communications very seriously - you have to provide a photocopy of your ID just to get a Mobicarte (Pay-As-You-Go) SIM card. Even then it will be deactivated if you don't use it after three months.
I get the impression they really want to know the identity of anyone who surfs the web.
Isn't that the case everywhere? I only have experience in 3 countries (though, on 3 different continents) and they all wanted detailed information (passport/drivers licence/credit card). From what I've seen, getting an "anonymous phone" is basically impossible in every country I've ever lived in. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if an "anonymous phone" was illegal in most parts of the world.
As much as I enjoy ridiculing The French, I think in this case they are just following the status quo. I'm strong against the status quo in this case but, I don't think they are being any worse than anywhere else.
Sure, but, Linksys doesn't make openly Cisco products. Yes, all tech people recognize that Linksys is Cisco but, the name Cisco usually means expense and quality in the IT world. I again assert that this is bizarre. How do you go from making $5000 routers to making Android tablets?
This is completely bizarre. Cisco doesn't have a history of making consumer grade products. And they decide to dive in with an Android tablet? WTF?
That's a very good breakdown of what you need to benefit from GPU based computing but, really, only #1 has any relevance vs. an x86 chip.
#2) Yes, an x86 chip will have a high clock speed but, unless you can use SSE instructions, x86 is crazy slow. Also, most (if not all) architectures will give you half the flops for using the double precision vector instructions vs. the single precision ones.
#3) This is a problem with CPUs as well except, as you point out, the memory is much slower. Performance is often about hiding latency. You don't need your problem to fit in the L2/L3 cache of a CPU, but, if the compiler/programmer/CPU can prefetch things into L2/L3 before it's accessed, it's a huge win. The same goes for having things in GPU memory before it's needed. The difference is that the GPU has a TON of memory compared to an L2/L3 cache.
#4) You might be right here. I know that with hyperthreading a CPU will yield to another "thread" when it mispredicts a branch. However, the fact that branch misprediction is a condition in which the CPU will switch to another thread, to me, means that mispredicting a branch on an x86 CPU is also a fairly expensive thing to do. Maybe not as expensive as on a GPU but, expensive nonetheless.
I suppose it all comes down to what kind of problem you are trying to compute but, if you can make your problem work in a way that is pleasing to #1, using a GPU is probably going to be a win.
The name is not only used in English (the language of England) but also in German (Fussbal), French (football), Spanish (fútbol), Portuguese (futebol), ...
I would imagine that the number of languages that call it some variation of the word "football" is probably larger than the languages that don't. At the very least, I would be surprised if anyone outside of the U.S. conjures up images of armored men throwing an oblong ball to each other when hearing the word "football".
I'm not so sure. Chromes claim to fame is fast Javascript. I imagine that many, many people didn't even know they *wanted* fast Javascript until Chrome claimed they had it. If a browser is 5x as fast as the competition for something that people need, the competition takes notice.
If I have the right to remain silent, do I also have the right to refuse giving my DNA away? IANAL but if I have the right to not speak so as to not incriminate myself, why wouldn't I also have the right to not have my blood drawn (or mucus swabbed) so as to not incriminate myself?
I don't live in New York but, I'm often there. If an officer there wanted to take a sample of my DNA for an offense such as speeding, I'd refuse. If he persisted, I'd try to invoke Miranda Rights. If he persisted after that, I'd fight back as he tried to take the sample, recover for a few months in the hospital after he beat me senseless and then sue for police brutality. Essentially, that's what it's going to take to get this law overturned if it gets passed.
I always thought hookers were better than wives because you can pay them to leave afterwards.
For every person that looked at this list to further their career, I wonder how many looked at it just to verify that, no, thankfully, their job is *not* as good as it gets.
No, this is like Google driving around on public roads with a tape recorder stuck to the roof to create a Google Street Sounds component to their maps. They didn't open, tamper with or otherwise go out of their way to invade anyones privacy. Now, IANAL so, it's entirely possible that driving with a tape recorder affixed to your car is illegal.
Apple has already patented this and they have introduced devices to market for a generation where people will be used to typing without a keyboard on their portable devices. This will not be something foreign or new. And with OLED technology, it does not need to affect battery life and can act as a secondary (albeit lower res) screen.
Just because it won't be "foreign and new" doesn't mean it will be better.
Technology changes and those who scoff at the changes are usually the older generation who doesn't want to change. And they usually end up being those engineers who are unable to adapt.
I don't mind one bit if the "newer generation" forgoes physical keyboards for virtual keyboards. In fact, I welcome it. It means that we "older generation" will be more valuable because we can type faster, more accurately and be less prone to typing injuries. Nothing would please me more than to be clacking away on my Model M while some kid thumps away at a dead spot on his virtual keyboard.
"Want to fix this? Stop buying RIAA member's products."
Negative. The only way to fix this, given what you say about congress, is to start killing RIAA members, AND congress members.
That's the ONLY way this bullshit will EVER stop, is to show them with absolute certainty that we will no longer tolerate this shit.
It would be interesting if your battle call was heeded. What if the nerds at /. really do decide to start a revolution? I imagine the first order of business would be to draft a new constitution and then arguing over whether to use 4 or 8 spaces for tabs and whether or not to line wrap at 80 character.
The problem is that criticizing the government is one of the primary reasons to have the notion of "freedom of speech".
In which case, $1.5 trillion seems pretty conservative on their part. The previous slashdot article on portable games sales claimed they had lost $45 billion in *sales* due to pirating. If the average game retails for $45, that's 1 billion lost sales. If they were to sue everyone who had pirated a game for the maximum damages, they could potentially make US$150 trillion dollars.