This is very true. Having worked at a large software company writing developer tools, we had HIE (Human Interface Engineering) people evaluate everything with a GUI that was shipped to customers. Mind you, this was software written by and for developers so the rules were a bit relaxed but, I have never been so close to committing homicide as I was when I would get e-mails like this in my inbox:
- The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be 1 pixel closer to widget foo. - The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be color #111111 instead of #000000 - The splitpane between widgets foo and bar should default to 437 pixels wide and not 450 pixels wide - The vertical scrollbar should scroll 5% slower - The hotkey for menu item foo should be Ctrl-baz and not Ctrl-bar Etc, etc, etc.
It took me slightly longer than normal to implement all these changes because I was distracted trying to decide a fitting way to end the e-mail authors life but, in the end I implemented all their "suggestions". I'm ashamed to say that they were right. The product was far more polished after I did all those seemingly pointless things.
To summarize: Developers shouldn't be in charge of GUIs. Even if those GUIs are only intended for other developers.
Until recently it's only been Slashdot Types that were aware of the evils of DRM. Once the general masses are aware of it, they won't stand for it. Or maybe I give them too much credit...
Libraries don't offer the same level of "stumble upon" knowledge that the internet can. More than once I've seen someone here on/. say something interesting with a wikipedia link and then spent the rest of the day learning things I wasn't even aware I wanted to know about. I probably couldn't do that in a library because 1) If someone came up to me and said "Hey! Did you know you can build a rocket engine out of nuclear bombs?", my first instinct would be to tazer him. 2) In high school, I used to read books that our library had about particle physics. Most were published before I was born and out of date. 3) Books don't have links to clarify what they are talking about.
I grew up in libraries but, dismissing the value of the internet (specifically wikipedia in this context) is pure crazy talk. The two aren't mutually exclusive and the internet is MUCH better at getting you curious about something while a library with sufficiently up to date books would probably be better at giving you more in depth knowledge of something.
Though probably not for data center use, VirtualBox would add a fourth virtualization technology to their list. I'm more interested to see what they do with VirtualBox than what they do with all their overlapping Xen offerings.
For most users, the machine is probably at a CPU load of less than 7.5% the vast majority of the time. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to rate battery life on the assumption that the machine will almost always be at the lowest P and C states. The wifi and brightness settings are a bit dubious but, they vendors aren't claiming that this what users will actually get. They are just claiming that this is what the machine is capable of. And it is.
Think of this in terms of benchmarking other things. If a CPU vendor says a chip is capable of 10Gflops based on numbers from their highly tuned LINPACK numbers and you are able to compute that your application is only getting 5Gflops do you feel cheated? Of course not. If you care enough, you analyze your application and tweak it until you start getting closer to the theoretical peak of 10Gflops. If you don't care, you simply don't do anything.
As a side note, these vendors could probably claim higher numbers than they already do if they benchmarked on linux and understood all the power savings features available. Most linux distros come with most or all of the power savings features turned off but, with aggressive tuning, it's entirely possible to actually exceed the vendors "trumped up" numbers under casual but real world usage. Unfortunately, most see linux as a poor platform for power savings because to get right on linux, it needs to be done by hand rather than coming pre-configured that way.
When I've installed Ubuntu on other peoples the machines the first thing I do is remove PulseAudio. It offers no benefit for the average user and is the source of many headaches. Imagine being a new user and, when when discovering you can't do anything sound related, have to dive into a nasty tome of a HOWTO like this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578. You'd be looking for your Windows install disk before you even started scrolling down.
A company that only begrudgingly supports linux with a massive binary blob and no real support thinks that it may be easier to support a platform where that kind of treatment is considered the norm. This does not surprise me. I have a lot of respect for the nvidia linux engineers and they seem like knowledgeable and good guys but, I would imagine that management has tied their hands and this is a political rather than an engineering decision.
The chips already exist on the machines. This change might make it easier to use the chips for nefarious purposes (like "tivoization") but there has been nothing preventing people from writing their own driver (or possibly finding a reference implementation) to do this anyway. It sounds like there are a number of compelling reasons to add the feature and the only drawback is that now it's slightly easier for vendors to take advantage of this functionality for anti-consumer type behavior. In that case, simply do research before buying a new device and don't buy it if it's using the TPM hardware.
It seems like if you are able to collect a quart of rainwater in a reasonably sized, "barrel", then there is a lot more than a gallon of water in the air over that acre.
Actually, I thought the interesting bit was the part where Microsoft Research was involved in creating a device that ran linux. I find it very hard to believe that they couldn't slim down Vista enough for this project.
I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 at the moment (a year old OS). All of the "applications" I'm using are 100% up to date. In fact, I'm writing this from the Firefox 3.5 beta. People only use a handful of applications and things like getdeb.net or the various Ubuntu PPAs mean that it's perfectly viable to run an "old but stable" OS and still run the most recent versions of stuff. In fact, it's easier to run up to date applications on something like Ubuntu than on Windows. If you go the PPA route, those applications simply update themselves. On Windows you'd have to manually download them, install them, hope everything works, etc.
Saying that a distro doesn't update the package versions for the lifetime of the distro is usually true (except for rolling release distros). Saying that it's impossible to upgrade those packages is not only false, it's ignorant. It's easier to do on something like Ubuntu than on Windows.
Just because corruption isn't high doesn't mean it doesn't exist. When money is involved, corruption increases. The companies that brought these lawsuits had A LOT of money.
I disagree. The government has decided that what they are doing is wrong. Maybe not as "wrong" as what the corporations thought but, wrong nonetheless. It sets a very bad precedent.
I didn't RTFA (so, I fully expect to get modded up for this comment) but, it's probably based on how they collect (or pay for) their statistics. If they are based on some sort of phone-home technology, then an 80% gain in the market share is probably based on invented and construed numbers. A good PR spin can make statistics say whatever you want in most cases. It's good to have "innocent bloggers" around to spin this PR. It must be true then!
Have you ever fucked up your system and had to reboot for hours of trial and error to fix it? Yeah, me neither... oh wait that was yesterday when I upgraded my kernel!
Why didn't you just reboot and choose the old kernel?
It appears that this could well improve the speed of lots of different operations. A definite boon for graphics like operations, but also a lot of DSP (audio/maths)stuff can benefit from these enhancements. It would also appear that general code could easily be sped up, however, compiler writers need to get their collective arses into gear for this to happen.
Yeah, and while they are at it, I hope they finally get around to fixing that damn segfault bug. It's been around for YEARS.
Ubuntu has had readahead as part of it's boot sequence for a few years if I remember right. It essentially reads files that it knows it's going to need into RAM in an optimal (in regards to seek times) way. From there, you can either extend the functionality with a guide like this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=565651 or just install preload. Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon that learns what you are keeping in the cache and makes sure they stay there.
5) It's almost not worth it to put the hard disk to sleep. Modern laptop drives you might save.2-.4w over just idle, but spin up might take 5w. So telling hd to spin down every 3 min for instance might actually use more power.
Power savings isn't always about the direct savings. Putting the disk to sleep and keeping it that way (which is admittedly difficult in linux) generates less heat. That in turn causes the fans to spin less and saves more power.
As for power savings between linux and XP, for most hardware linux is much better at power savings but much harder to configure to get that savings. A good starting point is Intels excellent site: http://www.lesswatts.org/. The Ubuntu forums also have some good information. For example: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=847773
People are still doing data flow things even on commodity hardware. For example, Suns implementation of LAPACK uses data flow techniques in many of the important functions (LU/QA factorizations and matrix multiples). I worked on the tool that made this feasible. The initial data flow techniques were done by hand and took a very smart engineer about 6 months to do a matrix multiple. With the tool it took about a week to define and debug a blocked matrix multiple in a data flow manner. Scalability was through the roof.
fsyncs have other nasty side effects other than performance. For example, in Firefox 3, places.sqlite is fsynced after every page is loaded. For a laptop user, this behavior is unacceptable as it prevents the disks from staying spun down (not to mention the infuriating whine it creates to spin the disk up after every or nearly every page load). The use of fsync in Firefox 3 has actually caused some people (myself included), to mount ~/.mozilla as tmpfs and just write a cron job to write changed files back to disk once every 10 minutes.
So, while I'm all for applications using fsync when it's really needed, the last thing I'd like to see every application on the planet sprinkling their code with fsync "just to be sure".
rupesh (article author) stated, "Google's hardly publicized method for sending free text messages has been revoked..."
Google stated, "SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs."
Nowhere did anyone state they wanted to "test it with limited numbers of users"
Not explicitly, no. I just implied it from the exact things you highlighted in bold. When I see "hardly publicized", "experiment" and "early testing stages" to describe something, I don't think it's unreasonable to infer, "test it with limited numbers of users". Regardless, I wasn't aiming for an exact summary of the TFA but a rough rebuttal as to why the GP was nonsense.
That's not what TFA says (or the part that I read at least). It says, "Our experimental feature that we didn't widely publicize because we wanted to test it with limited numbers of users suddenly got slammed with traffic and we didn't feel like supporting it". That's a bit different than what you are implying.
Slashdot Mirror
This is very true. Having worked at a large software company writing developer tools, we had HIE (Human Interface Engineering) people evaluate everything with a GUI that was shipped to customers. Mind you, this was software written by and for developers so the rules were a bit relaxed but, I have never been so close to committing homicide as I was when I would get e-mails like this in my inbox:
- The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be 1 pixel closer to widget foo.
- The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be color #111111 instead of #000000
- The splitpane between widgets foo and bar should default to 437 pixels wide and not 450 pixels wide
- The vertical scrollbar should scroll 5% slower
- The hotkey for menu item foo should be Ctrl-baz and not Ctrl-bar
Etc, etc, etc.
It took me slightly longer than normal to implement all these changes because I was distracted trying to decide a fitting way to end the e-mail authors life but, in the end I implemented all their "suggestions". I'm ashamed to say that they were right. The product was far more polished after I did all those seemingly pointless things.
To summarize: Developers shouldn't be in charge of GUIs. Even if those GUIs are only intended for other developers.
Until recently it's only been Slashdot Types that were aware of the evils of DRM. Once the general masses are aware of it, they won't stand for it. Or maybe I give them too much credit...
Libraries don't offer the same level of "stumble upon" knowledge that the internet can. More than once I've seen someone here on /. say something interesting with a wikipedia link and then spent the rest of the day learning things I wasn't even aware I wanted to know about. I probably couldn't do that in a library because 1) If someone came up to me and said "Hey! Did you know you can build a rocket engine out of nuclear bombs?", my first instinct would be to tazer him. 2) In high school, I used to read books that our library had about particle physics. Most were published before I was born and out of date. 3) Books don't have links to clarify what they are talking about.
I grew up in libraries but, dismissing the value of the internet (specifically wikipedia in this context) is pure crazy talk. The two aren't mutually exclusive and the internet is MUCH better at getting you curious about something while a library with sufficiently up to date books would probably be better at giving you more in depth knowledge of something.
Though probably not for data center use, VirtualBox would add a fourth virtualization technology to their list. I'm more interested to see what they do with VirtualBox than what they do with all their overlapping Xen offerings.
For most users, the machine is probably at a CPU load of less than 7.5% the vast majority of the time. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to rate battery life on the assumption that the machine will almost always be at the lowest P and C states. The wifi and brightness settings are a bit dubious but, they vendors aren't claiming that this what users will actually get. They are just claiming that this is what the machine is capable of. And it is.
Think of this in terms of benchmarking other things. If a CPU vendor says a chip is capable of 10Gflops based on numbers from their highly tuned LINPACK numbers and you are able to compute that your application is only getting 5Gflops do you feel cheated? Of course not. If you care enough, you analyze your application and tweak it until you start getting closer to the theoretical peak of 10Gflops. If you don't care, you simply don't do anything.
As a side note, these vendors could probably claim higher numbers than they already do if they benchmarked on linux and understood all the power savings features available. Most linux distros come with most or all of the power savings features turned off but, with aggressive tuning, it's entirely possible to actually exceed the vendors "trumped up" numbers under casual but real world usage. Unfortunately, most see linux as a poor platform for power savings because to get right on linux, it needs to be done by hand rather than coming pre-configured that way.
When I've installed Ubuntu on other peoples the machines the first thing I do is remove PulseAudio. It offers no benefit for the average user and is the source of many headaches. Imagine being a new user and, when when discovering you can't do anything sound related, have to dive into a nasty tome of a HOWTO like this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578. You'd be looking for your Windows install disk before you even started scrolling down.
A company that only begrudgingly supports linux with a massive binary blob and no real support thinks that it may be easier to support a platform where that kind of treatment is considered the norm. This does not surprise me. I have a lot of respect for the nvidia linux engineers and they seem like knowledgeable and good guys but, I would imagine that management has tied their hands and this is a political rather than an engineering decision.
The chips already exist on the machines. This change might make it easier to use the chips for nefarious purposes (like "tivoization") but there has been nothing preventing people from writing their own driver (or possibly finding a reference implementation) to do this anyway. It sounds like there are a number of compelling reasons to add the feature and the only drawback is that now it's slightly easier for vendors to take advantage of this functionality for anti-consumer type behavior. In that case, simply do research before buying a new device and don't buy it if it's using the TPM hardware.
It seems like if you are able to collect a quart of rainwater in a reasonably sized, "barrel", then there is a lot more than a gallon of water in the air over that acre.
Actually, I thought the interesting bit was the part where Microsoft Research was involved in creating a device that ran linux. I find it very hard to believe that they couldn't slim down Vista enough for this project.
I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 at the moment (a year old OS). All of the "applications" I'm using are 100% up to date. In fact, I'm writing this from the Firefox 3.5 beta. People only use a handful of applications and things like getdeb.net or the various Ubuntu PPAs mean that it's perfectly viable to run an "old but stable" OS and still run the most recent versions of stuff. In fact, it's easier to run up to date applications on something like Ubuntu than on Windows. If you go the PPA route, those applications simply update themselves. On Windows you'd have to manually download them, install them, hope everything works, etc.
Saying that a distro doesn't update the package versions for the lifetime of the distro is usually true (except for rolling release distros). Saying that it's impossible to upgrade those packages is not only false, it's ignorant. It's easier to do on something like Ubuntu than on Windows.
That, I can agree with. I DID think they would come out of the courts covered in flowers but, other than that, I understand what you are saying.
Just because corruption isn't high doesn't mean it doesn't exist. When money is involved, corruption increases. The companies that brought these lawsuits had A LOT of money.
I disagree. The government has decided that what they are doing is wrong. Maybe not as "wrong" as what the corporations thought but, wrong nonetheless. It sets a very bad precedent.
It's ok to have space angels. As long as they are hot. And really pissed off.
What would Google's reasons be, for not dealing with that?
Here a few:
1) Not my problem
2) Too bad
3) Not my problem
I didn't RTFA (so, I fully expect to get modded up for this comment) but, it's probably based on how they collect (or pay for) their statistics. If they are based on some sort of phone-home technology, then an 80% gain in the market share is probably based on invented and construed numbers. A good PR spin can make statistics say whatever you want in most cases. It's good to have "innocent bloggers" around to spin this PR. It must be true then!
Have you ever fucked up your system and had to reboot for hours of trial and error to fix it? Yeah, me neither... oh wait that was yesterday when I upgraded my kernel!
Why didn't you just reboot and choose the old kernel?
It appears that this could well improve the speed of lots of different operations. A definite boon for graphics like operations, but also a lot of DSP (audio/maths)stuff can benefit from these enhancements. It would also appear that general code could easily be sped up, however, compiler writers need to get their collective arses into gear for this to happen.
Yeah, and while they are at it, I hope they finally get around to fixing that damn segfault bug. It's been around for YEARS.
Ubuntu has had readahead as part of it's boot sequence for a few years if I remember right. It essentially reads files that it knows it's going to need into RAM in an optimal (in regards to seek times) way. From there, you can either extend the functionality with a guide like this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=565651 or just install preload. Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon that learns what you are keeping in the cache and makes sure they stay there.
5) It's almost not worth it to put the hard disk to sleep. Modern laptop drives you might save .2-.4w over just idle, but spin up might take 5w. So telling hd to spin down every 3 min for instance might actually use more power.
Power savings isn't always about the direct savings. Putting the disk to sleep and keeping it that way (which is admittedly difficult in linux) generates less heat. That in turn causes the fans to spin less and saves more power.
As for power savings between linux and XP, for most hardware linux is much better at power savings but much harder to configure to get that savings. A good starting point is Intels excellent site: http://www.lesswatts.org/. The Ubuntu forums also have some good information. For example: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=847773
People are still doing data flow things even on commodity hardware. For example, Suns implementation of LAPACK uses data flow techniques in many of the important functions (LU/QA factorizations and matrix multiples). I worked on the tool that made this feasible. The initial data flow techniques were done by hand and took a very smart engineer about 6 months to do a matrix multiple. With the tool it took about a week to define and debug a blocked matrix multiple in a data flow manner. Scalability was through the roof.
fsyncs have other nasty side effects other than performance. For example, in Firefox 3, places.sqlite is fsynced after every page is loaded. For a laptop user, this behavior is unacceptable as it prevents the disks from staying spun down (not to mention the infuriating whine it creates to spin the disk up after every or nearly every page load). The use of fsync in Firefox 3 has actually caused some people (myself included), to mount ~/.mozilla as tmpfs and just write a cron job to write changed files back to disk once every 10 minutes.
So, while I'm all for applications using fsync when it's really needed, the last thing I'd like to see every application on the planet sprinkling their code with fsync "just to be sure".
rupesh (article author) stated, "Google's hardly publicized method for sending free text messages has been revoked ..."
Google stated, "SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs."
Nowhere did anyone state they wanted to "test it with limited numbers of users"
Not explicitly, no. I just implied it from the exact things you highlighted in bold. When I see "hardly publicized", "experiment" and "early testing stages" to describe something, I don't think it's unreasonable to infer, "test it with limited numbers of users". Regardless, I wasn't aiming for an exact summary of the TFA but a rough rebuttal as to why the GP was nonsense.
That's not what TFA says (or the part that I read at least). It says, "Our experimental feature that we didn't widely publicize because we wanted to test it with limited numbers of users suddenly got slammed with traffic and we didn't feel like supporting it". That's a bit different than what you are implying.