Those laws exist in a legal limbo (similar to the medical marijuana laws); they basically exist at the sufferance of the Department of Justice, and to my knowledge have not been well tested in court at the federal level.
The one thing that will turn me into a killer is if this continues because I'm growing to hate society more and more by the day. It's been shown many times throughout history that people will only take so much before heads start to roll.
Yeah, but that was before the politicians came up with the "Think of the children" ploy. That one still seems to have quite a bit of juice left in it.
You are aware that Switzerland is *more* capitalistic than the rest of Western Europe right? Due to the lack of a common ethnic or linguistic background, they adopted a form of government quite similar to that of the U.S.; federalist in nature, with significant autonomy for the cantons. Their health care is provided by private organizations, and while the base level health care is required to be offered on a non-profit basis, anything above the base level is offered on a for-profit basis similar to our own. It's one of the few countries to allow assisted suicide, which is a personal freedom even the U.S. denies. Troll all you want, but Switzerland is not the country to use as an object lesson.
Riiight... Creating a feature that works on 90% of modern computers to enable backwards compatibility with an older OS is trying to force people to stop using said older OS. Stop and think for a moment. If those people's computers don't support virtualization, that would be an incentive *not* to upgrade. Your premise is moronic.
Intentionally restricted? Not exactly. Rough quote from Raymond Chen: "Every feature starts at -100." That is to say, you need more than just a faint "it would be nice" feeling to write a feature. If every helpful feature were implemented, the product wouldn't ship until the end of time, and the testing and support headaches would multiply exponentially. The features needs to be *very* useful or *very* easy to implement. Since most modern CPUs come with virtualization tech, and few programs require XP mode, the cost/benefit analysis says that easier to implement hardware virtualization is worth the time and effort, while software isn't. Simple as that.
That was my initial thought as well. Yes, well-written software-only virtualization can perform at a similar level, but if they can get it out the door faster with hardware supported virtualization, they may have decided the software-only approach wasn't worth the resources at the time. It's called prioritization; if they put the resources into software-only virtualization, they neglect something else.
I was willing to consider your argument until I got to this:
They all run DDR2, at a low speed that is unsuitable for good HD performance. The bottle neck is there. Fastest graphics card in the world is useless if you cant supply it data fast enough!
At a clock speed of 100 MHz, DDR2 RAM has a throughput of 3200 MB/s. The slowest RAM I've seen marketed at all recently ran at four times that speed. Looking around, the FSB on a recent Atom was clocked at 667 MHz.
Compressed, 720p video + audio uses about a gigabyte of space per hour. Lets say memory cost is 100x that during decompression (I suspect it is less, but this is for the sake of argument). To process 100 GB of data over the course of an hour, you'll need a throughput of about 28-29 MB/s. Or roughly 1/100 of what the weakest DDR2 RAM out there provides.
I might believe you when it came to games and other tasks that aren't highly linear, but video processing is about the most linear, parallelizable task out there. The RAM is not the problem, period.
Atom is the CPU. If designed for it, the GPU is what will count. The reason Atom based machines have sucked for HD video is because they have crappy graphics and/or codecs that don't do GPU offloading, not because the Atom itself is unsuitable. For an all-in-one device with a single unvarying configuration, offloading should be a snap.
I run one instance of GPU, one of CPU (non-SMP). I've only got a dual core, and the GPU client uses about 10% of one core. Running a second CPU client seems to measurably slow the GPU client, so I only run one CPU. At "idle" my machine is at 55% CPU usage (+/- 3%). Also means that I've got some free CPU to run the background tasks and run apps without affecting performance or interfering with the F@H clients (since 90% of a single CPU runs just about everything but games without issue anyway).
My understanding is that even DX10+ compliant GPUs still suffer badly when conditional branching occurs. They can do it, but it basically causes them to throw away everything.
As for Larrabee, while it was designed as a GPU in some ways, I got the impression it still hewed to CPU roots. It was integer based, not floating point based. They wanted to make all those college raytracer programs practical for use, replacing the current model which is somewhat more fuzzy and less accurate, but *way* faster.
I did note that it has virtually no support for conditional statements. I suppose "conditional branching" would have been a bit more accurate, but I didn't leave it out.
Apparently ElcomSoft has some employees with/. accounts and mod points. Because I don't see how the PP is a Troll (and it wasn't a mistake, someone modded it Troll quite a while after it was modded to 5).
I run the Folding@homeGPU client on my GeForce 8800 GTX. On Vista and later OSes (pre-Vista, the driver model wasn't well adapted to GPGPU and this leads to a polling driven communication scheme which is really inefficient), the effect on resources is unnoticeable aside from during games (where I kill the client to reduce jerkiness); the GPGPU work is lower priority and gets shunted aside from rendering, though the latency involved is a problem for graphics intensive games. For less demanding work and general usage, it's unnoticeable; the GPU is perfectly capable of drawing the screen and curing Alzheimer's at the same time.:-)
...most things must be done linearly, not parallel.
Or to be a bit more precise: Humans can't think about parallelism well. Certain obvious, discrete tasks can be split up, but having whole threads of execution constantly communicating and touching shared resources overwhelms the capacity of most programmers. You could write a massively multi-threaded program to do a lot of stuff that is currently done linearly, but you'd risk a whole lot of crashes and deadlocks from the inevitable bad code and you wouldn't get the full increase in speed since the thread and synchronization management would eat up a lot of the gain. Because of that, most successful programs that use multiple threads of execution either completely separate the running environments (heavily segregated threads or completely different processes). The ones that don't need that level of separation (video encoding, password cracking, etc.) are often the same programs that can benefit from running on a GPU.
That's not really the same thing. The Intel 80 core prototype was still a CPU at heart, they just made improvements to communication. GPUs are quite different. GPUs are designed as primarily floating point processors (though newer ones can do low precision integer math with similar efficiency), but more importantly, they are vector processors with virtually no support for conditional statements and optimized for sequential access to memory instead of random access. They're halfway between dedicated circuitry and a general purpose CPU; what they can do, they do *very* well, and they can generalize a little, but tasks they weren't designed for need to be rewritten to accommodate their quirks, and eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Integrating GPUs into the CPU will allow more programs to use it (and possibly speed processing and enable new scenarios where the CPU and GPU need to communicate frequently), but for run of the mill computing tasks, the relatively inflexible design of GPUs is a problem.
Hey, if it's regulated at all (like the same check-less system is in Europe), then it's not a big deal. As is, my paycheck is deposited to my savings account automatically and 90% of my bills are debited automatically. While you want debits tied to a card to reduce fraud, making it easier to set up one-time direct deposits (which is basically what a check-less scheme looks like) should be trivial. PayPal is designed around it; the fact that banks *don't* do it is the confusing thing.
If everyone did it, it would. An advantage to being technologically savvy is that you can do things most people don't, basically demonstrating the tragedy of the commons. If you use this filter, and a few thousand other people use the filter, it won't be abused. But if Microsoft or Gmail add it as a default, spammers will use it. Same with AdBlock. Right now, less than a quarter of the planet uses Firefox (and the big money market for ads, the U.S., uses it less than that); a much smaller percentage use AdBlock. Because of that, AdBlock doesn't extract a heavy toll on advertising revenue. On the other hand, if it shipped as a built-in function of IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc., you'd expect to see advertising revenues fall, and a concerted effort made to bypass the filters (and a few lawsuits).
At the risk of changing moderation from Insightful to Flamebait, the same thing applies to most operating systems. Yes, there are differences in architecture that make some OSes more vulnerable to attack, but the fact remains that whichever operating system is used by the majority of clueless home users is going to have the most effort made to compromise it. A tech savvy person can use this to their advantage by choosing an OS that fewer clueless home users use, but if everyone switched to it, the attackers would start to focus on it instead.
Yup. Originally, that would have meant Congress has to declare war, and then Congress has to pass a law enabling the quartering of troops. Since the advent of the atomic bomb, Congress de facto relinquished its power to declare war and left it to the President. The War Powers Act codified this, basically allowing the President to wage limited war without congressional approval, while escalation or extension required approval from Congress, though not a proper "declaration" of war. I'm sure constitutional lawyers would have a field day if Congress passed a law allowing quartering today, since we're de facto at war. The question is whether it would count legally.
Just for the record, Auvergne, like most of Western Europe, stands to cool as a result of global warming. The North Atlantic Current keeps Western Europe warm, but it stands to be disrupted by decreased ocean salinity caused by an excess of melting ice. Without that current, Western Europe would become markedly colder (closer to the temperatures in Eastern Europe and Canada which are at the same latitude but don't benefit from warming currents). Of course, it's unclear exactly how much it would be affected. Historically, the Gulf Stream (which feeds the North Atlantic current) seems to strengthen with warming, as it isn't driven by thermohaline circulation, while the North Atlantic current seems to weaken. The problem is that we don't know enough to say what would happen. Worst case scenario is a general shift to extremes; very cold regions and very hot regions with the temperate zone (that supports modern civilization most efficiently) being squeezed.
Judaism disagrees with you. God's intentions are not known, so a great deal of interpretation has to go into it. Since many of the rules apply only to Jews, as long as the rule breaking is done by Gentiles (generation of power and all that), all is well. Keep in mind, to even identify the use of electricity as a violation of the law required interpretation (what with electricity not being a factor in the Torah). So they expanded the rule to cover something not found in the Torah just in case, but interpreted what constitutes use in a way that doesn't render you a shut-in from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
Slashdot Mirror
Those laws exist in a legal limbo (similar to the medical marijuana laws); they basically exist at the sufferance of the Department of Justice, and to my knowledge have not been well tested in court at the federal level.
The one thing that will turn me into a killer is if this continues because I'm growing to hate society more and more by the day. It's been shown many times throughout history that people will only take so much before heads start to roll.
Yeah, but that was before the politicians came up with the "Think of the children" ploy. That one still seems to have quite a bit of juice left in it.
You are aware that Switzerland is *more* capitalistic than the rest of Western Europe right? Due to the lack of a common ethnic or linguistic background, they adopted a form of government quite similar to that of the U.S.; federalist in nature, with significant autonomy for the cantons. Their health care is provided by private organizations, and while the base level health care is required to be offered on a non-profit basis, anything above the base level is offered on a for-profit basis similar to our own. It's one of the few countries to allow assisted suicide, which is a personal freedom even the U.S. denies. Troll all you want, but Switzerland is not the country to use as an object lesson.
Riiight... Creating a feature that works on 90% of modern computers to enable backwards compatibility with an older OS is trying to force people to stop using said older OS. Stop and think for a moment. If those people's computers don't support virtualization, that would be an incentive *not* to upgrade. Your premise is moronic.
Intentionally restricted? Not exactly. Rough quote from Raymond Chen: "Every feature starts at -100." That is to say, you need more than just a faint "it would be nice" feeling to write a feature. If every helpful feature were implemented, the product wouldn't ship until the end of time, and the testing and support headaches would multiply exponentially. The features needs to be *very* useful or *very* easy to implement. Since most modern CPUs come with virtualization tech, and few programs require XP mode, the cost/benefit analysis says that easier to implement hardware virtualization is worth the time and effort, while software isn't. Simple as that.
That was my initial thought as well. Yes, well-written software-only virtualization can perform at a similar level, but if they can get it out the door faster with hardware supported virtualization, they may have decided the software-only approach wasn't worth the resources at the time. It's called prioritization; if they put the resources into software-only virtualization, they neglect something else.
Tag the article as randalckennedy. At least we can identify obvious FUD for what it is.
They all run DDR2, at a low speed that is unsuitable for good HD performance. The bottle neck is there. Fastest graphics card in the world is useless if you cant supply it data fast enough!
At a clock speed of 100 MHz, DDR2 RAM has a throughput of 3200 MB/s. The slowest RAM I've seen marketed at all recently ran at four times that speed. Looking around, the FSB on a recent Atom was clocked at 667 MHz.
Compressed, 720p video + audio uses about a gigabyte of space per hour. Lets say memory cost is 100x that during decompression (I suspect it is less, but this is for the sake of argument). To process 100 GB of data over the course of an hour, you'll need a throughput of about 28-29 MB/s. Or roughly 1/100 of what the weakest DDR2 RAM out there provides.
I might believe you when it came to games and other tasks that aren't highly linear, but video processing is about the most linear, parallelizable task out there. The RAM is not the problem, period.
Atom is the CPU. If designed for it, the GPU is what will count. The reason Atom based machines have sucked for HD video is because they have crappy graphics and/or codecs that don't do GPU offloading, not because the Atom itself is unsuitable. For an all-in-one device with a single unvarying configuration, offloading should be a snap.
I run one instance of GPU, one of CPU (non-SMP). I've only got a dual core, and the GPU client uses about 10% of one core. Running a second CPU client seems to measurably slow the GPU client, so I only run one CPU. At "idle" my machine is at 55% CPU usage (+/- 3%). Also means that I've got some free CPU to run the background tasks and run apps without affecting performance or interfering with the F@H clients (since 90% of a single CPU runs just about everything but games without issue anyway).
My understanding is that even DX10+ compliant GPUs still suffer badly when conditional branching occurs. They can do it, but it basically causes them to throw away everything.
As for Larrabee, while it was designed as a GPU in some ways, I got the impression it still hewed to CPU roots. It was integer based, not floating point based. They wanted to make all those college raytracer programs practical for use, replacing the current model which is somewhat more fuzzy and less accurate, but *way* faster.
I did note that it has virtually no support for conditional statements. I suppose "conditional branching" would have been a bit more accurate, but I didn't leave it out.
Apparently ElcomSoft has some employees with /. accounts and mod points. Because I don't see how the PP is a Troll (and it wasn't a mistake, someone modded it Troll quite a while after it was modded to 5).
That explains the Xbox coffin story immediately prior to this one. But Taco posted this story, not samzenpus.
I run the Folding@home GPU client on my GeForce 8800 GTX. On Vista and later OSes (pre-Vista, the driver model wasn't well adapted to GPGPU and this leads to a polling driven communication scheme which is really inefficient), the effect on resources is unnoticeable aside from during games (where I kill the client to reduce jerkiness); the GPGPU work is lower priority and gets shunted aside from rendering, though the latency involved is a problem for graphics intensive games. For less demanding work and general usage, it's unnoticeable; the GPU is perfectly capable of drawing the screen and curing Alzheimer's at the same time. :-)
...most things must be done linearly, not parallel.
Or to be a bit more precise: Humans can't think about parallelism well. Certain obvious, discrete tasks can be split up, but having whole threads of execution constantly communicating and touching shared resources overwhelms the capacity of most programmers. You could write a massively multi-threaded program to do a lot of stuff that is currently done linearly, but you'd risk a whole lot of crashes and deadlocks from the inevitable bad code and you wouldn't get the full increase in speed since the thread and synchronization management would eat up a lot of the gain. Because of that, most successful programs that use multiple threads of execution either completely separate the running environments (heavily segregated threads or completely different processes). The ones that don't need that level of separation (video encoding, password cracking, etc.) are often the same programs that can benefit from running on a GPU.
That's not really the same thing. The Intel 80 core prototype was still a CPU at heart, they just made improvements to communication. GPUs are quite different. GPUs are designed as primarily floating point processors (though newer ones can do low precision integer math with similar efficiency), but more importantly, they are vector processors with virtually no support for conditional statements and optimized for sequential access to memory instead of random access. They're halfway between dedicated circuitry and a general purpose CPU; what they can do, they do *very* well, and they can generalize a little, but tasks they weren't designed for need to be rewritten to accommodate their quirks, and eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Integrating GPUs into the CPU will allow more programs to use it (and possibly speed processing and enable new scenarios where the CPU and GPU need to communicate frequently), but for run of the mill computing tasks, the relatively inflexible design of GPUs is a problem.
Hey, if it's regulated at all (like the same check-less system is in Europe), then it's not a big deal. As is, my paycheck is deposited to my savings account automatically and 90% of my bills are debited automatically. While you want debits tied to a card to reduce fraud, making it easier to set up one-time direct deposits (which is basically what a check-less scheme looks like) should be trivial. PayPal is designed around it; the fact that banks *don't* do it is the confusing thing.
And for the curious, TFA is no better. They're calling it a benchmark so they can advertise more effectively, that's all.
This isn't really about GPUs, it's an advert for ElcomSoft products. The whole summary is in marketing-speak for crying out loud.
If everyone did it, it would. An advantage to being technologically savvy is that you can do things most people don't, basically demonstrating the tragedy of the commons. If you use this filter, and a few thousand other people use the filter, it won't be abused. But if Microsoft or Gmail add it as a default, spammers will use it. Same with AdBlock. Right now, less than a quarter of the planet uses Firefox (and the big money market for ads, the U.S., uses it less than that); a much smaller percentage use AdBlock. Because of that, AdBlock doesn't extract a heavy toll on advertising revenue. On the other hand, if it shipped as a built-in function of IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc., you'd expect to see advertising revenues fall, and a concerted effort made to bypass the filters (and a few lawsuits).
At the risk of changing moderation from Insightful to Flamebait, the same thing applies to most operating systems. Yes, there are differences in architecture that make some OSes more vulnerable to attack, but the fact remains that whichever operating system is used by the majority of clueless home users is going to have the most effort made to compromise it. A tech savvy person can use this to their advantage by choosing an OS that fewer clueless home users use, but if everyone switched to it, the attackers would start to focus on it instead.
Yup. Originally, that would have meant Congress has to declare war, and then Congress has to pass a law enabling the quartering of troops. Since the advent of the atomic bomb, Congress de facto relinquished its power to declare war and left it to the President. The War Powers Act codified this, basically allowing the President to wage limited war without congressional approval, while escalation or extension required approval from Congress, though not a proper "declaration" of war. I'm sure constitutional lawyers would have a field day if Congress passed a law allowing quartering today, since we're de facto at war. The question is whether it would count legally.
Just for the record, Auvergne, like most of Western Europe, stands to cool as a result of global warming. The North Atlantic Current keeps Western Europe warm, but it stands to be disrupted by decreased ocean salinity caused by an excess of melting ice. Without that current, Western Europe would become markedly colder (closer to the temperatures in Eastern Europe and Canada which are at the same latitude but don't benefit from warming currents). Of course, it's unclear exactly how much it would be affected. Historically, the Gulf Stream (which feeds the North Atlantic current) seems to strengthen with warming, as it isn't driven by thermohaline circulation, while the North Atlantic current seems to weaken. The problem is that we don't know enough to say what would happen. Worst case scenario is a general shift to extremes; very cold regions and very hot regions with the temperate zone (that supports modern civilization most efficiently) being squeezed.
Because Jews aren't all tied up in sin like Christians are. They're tied up in rules. And as long as *they* didn't break the rule, all is well.
Judaism disagrees with you. God's intentions are not known, so a great deal of interpretation has to go into it. Since many of the rules apply only to Jews, as long as the rule breaking is done by Gentiles (generation of power and all that), all is well. Keep in mind, to even identify the use of electricity as a violation of the law required interpretation (what with electricity not being a factor in the Torah). So they expanded the rule to cover something not found in the Torah just in case, but interpreted what constitutes use in a way that doesn't render you a shut-in from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.