The goal of SOPA is to make everyone guilty. Not everyone will be prosecuted, but once everyone is guilty selective prosecution can be used at the discretion of those who wish to silence any unwanted criticism, opposing viewpoints, etc.
Conversely I feel pretty proud of what I've accomplished at my job and I hope I'll feel that way on my death bed (and no, I don't work for a private company).
He admitted to being a spy. Capture and possible execution is part of the job.
If I imprison you, torture you, and threaten your family, I'm pretty sure I can get you to admit to being a spy. Doesn't mean you are one. I didn't realize imprisonment and execution as a political propaganda tool came along with simply visiting family.
I think it's hilarious to hear Americans complain about this practice. I suppose all the confessions that were elicited at Guantánamo Bay are completely different, and totally legit(tm).
It sounds like it probably should've been hosted by a 3rd party based on the GP's post, but the point I was making about support is that if I was a small shop without in-house IT and I need support for a specific issue and I open up the yellow pages and look at my options there are going to be way more options for me that will be less expensive if I need to hire someone to take a look at a Windows server.
...go through the trouble trying to set up and debug PHP as FastCGI...
I think it's funny how common it is for anyone who mentions working with Windows professionally on Slashdot to be called out for being inexperienced or some kind of unauthentic system administrator with no real skills, but no doubt there are just as many who consider themselves experienced *nix system administrators who I could make fun of for being inept at basic Windows administration tasks.
Anyway, there are plenty of good reasons that web server should have been a Windows box. Even if it wasn't joined to the domain by switching that box to Linux they would lose the ability to leverage their existing update (SUS) and backup infrastructure. Also, the cost of a Windows license for a small shop like that would pay for itself probably 3 times over if they had to even try to get some kind of professional support for the Linux box even once.
Actually, what you're thinking of 24 continuous frames per second, ie. what you see in most films. It looks smooth to the eye because each frame actually consists of the accumulated light during the 1/24th of a second duration between that frame and the next frame. The resulting "motion blur" can give the illusion of a higher frame rate than what there actually is. I can still EASILY tell the difference between 24 motion blurred frames per second and a higher frame rate, but I'll grant you that it is more subtle.
Now, in video games we don't have this luxury. Although some modern games implement some form of motion blur no game that I know of would actually attempt to render the "sub-frames" required to achieve a kind of continuous motion blur, and even if you could, why wouldn't you just display those frames you rendered then? In video games each frame you are shown is an an exact point in time which is why you need a much higher frame rate to achieve perceptibly smooth animation.
... 30-40 fps on average, and 25 fps+ on coruscant (coruscant is waaaaaaay too big). same for skyrim...
Looks like PCs isn't the only thing gaming consoles have been retarding. Most PC gamers would have considered 25 fps nearly unplayable, and 30-40 FPS highly undesirable before the proliferation of poor frame rates in modern console games. There are still many of us that are unsatisfied with that level of performance, but are unwilling to compromise graphics quality.
On a CPU, your dataset can be several MB and still fit on-chip...
Clearly you've never dealt with any HPC programming before. In the vast majority of massively parallel compution problems, the kind which are solved by these kind of chips the data sets are also necessarily large; hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes of data. The algorithms that allow massively parallel compution will compute a single step of an algorithm on a large number of elements.
Consider the scenario the GP was referring to, massively parallel dot product, for matrix operations or other algorithms used in things like computer graphics, weather and physics simulations, neural networks and AI processing. In each DP4 you are reading 8 elements and writing 1, so you need (8 + 1) * 8 = 72 bytes of memory bandwidth per DP4 operation which is 8 flops, so to maintain peak performance without bottlenecking you would need at least 9 bytes of memory bandwidth per flop, which at 1 terraflop is around 8000 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Obviously the chip won't have that much, but that just goes to show you that the vast majority of modern HPC is limited by memory bandwidth, not flops, with notable exceptions for a small number of applications like hash cracking and such.
Maybe, but probably not. The key to high performance computing when dealing with parallel workloads like this is not just raw processing power, but memory bandwidth. The Nvidia Tesla M2090 mentioned in TFS has a peak memory bandwidth of 177GB/s with specially designed memory and controllers designed for raw throughput. Conventional CPUs with fastest DDR3 memory available can barely crack a small fraction of that. A terraflop of sustained DP performance is going to be completely useless without the memory bandwidth to back it up.
Mercy me the Slashdot audience is getting dumber. Packing spheres into any container as efficiently as possible is a deceptively complex problem with a huge variety of applications.
For me personally working in computer graphics, packing spheres as tightly as possible into other spheres has practical application in computing efficient bounding volume hierarchies as an acceleration structure for efficient ray tracing.
This deals with packing spheres into a cylinder so it is a different subset of the same problem, but it is still interesting and useful.
A simpler system might be ideal, but I don't think you can discount entirely the purpose of specific taxes incentivizing certain types of behavior. "Taxes on everything" can also link revenue and incentives directly to expenditures for government programs and services which might not be simpler for you, but it's safer and more self-regulating to administer.
A better idea might be to segregate trust based on jurisdiction. We need to do away with the generic TLDs (.com..net,.org, etc.) and use a national CA system in which a CA is only trusted for it's associated national TLD. Just a thought.
There might be good reasons on both sides, but the tinfoil hatter in me believes this might have more to do with fact that both companies might want to see a little more profit out of the R&D that went into the current generation of products before obsoleting them. The performance of the current generation is high enough that it is getting harder to introduce a new generation at a price point that could both recover R&D and provide reasonable value for the customer.
Just delete DigiNotar from your trusted CAs. Honestly I was just going to wait for the revocation lists like everybody else but seeing the scope of this now I think they've earned the right to be fired from the Internet forever.
Just a word about teacher's unions. Here in Alberta the ATA (Alberta Teacher's Association) is one of the most powerful and influential unions in the province. The salary and benefits teachers receive are second to none. As of September 1st this year it is in fact possible to make over $100,000 a year in this province as a teacher teaching gym class as long as you have 10 years experience and 6 years of formal education. If that sounds like a bad thing to you then I suppose you're partially right, but we also have the best teachers in the country. You get what you pay for.
That's a compelling argument, but a lot of people play games to escape reality. That said, if anyone gets to own the dark brown/grey/chrome atmosphere it's ID and they can do whatever they want, and maybe that is the atmosphere of their game, however, to say too many games have (pointlessly) copied that atmosphere is a legitimate complaint.
Does anyone remember when an article was posted a while back highlighting techniques for practical stenography based encryption for network traffic? Does anyone remember all the snarky comments and derision because you would never need that kind of encryption? This is how it begins.
Has / does Windows have security problems? Sure, but I disagree that you can blame Microsoft for everything.
Does anyone remember the huge outcry and fear and tinfoil hatting when it was announced that Windows 7 would require driver signing by default? Microsoft gets blamed for anything that takes away control of the computer from the end user, but they also get blamed for the results of whatever every stupid end user happens to do.
If you even think that secure defaults would prevent these kinds of problems you have probably never worked in IT. Users will click and ignore and install and agree to anything that stands between them and whatever goat porn / Rebecca Black garbage bullshit they want to download.
So? Employers can already coerce employees' behavior literally 2 billion other ways that they shouldn't be able to. This is a bullshit reason. Fix the problem by updating your country's archaic labor legislation.
Without revealing any spoilers I think you should watch The Dark Knight. I enjoyed that movie immensely because it doesn't do any of the things you described. There are still some good movies out there, but they're pretty damn rare these days.
So what are you guys going to do about it now? The machine is in motion. Next election date the same thing will happen, lather, rinse, repeat for eternity. Good luck starting an armed revolution too by the way, you know that military you've been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars a year into for the last 50 years will have a much easier time putting down any kind of revolution than the dictators you guys have been deposing recently.
Ah, thanks for putting "Rampantly Offensive" in your review title Ars, now I can safely close that tab and disregard the rest of your opinions. I'm not interested in reading a review that even assumes something can rampantly offensive. Obligatory SMBC http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2164
Slashdot Mirror
The goal of SOPA is to make everyone guilty. Not everyone will be prosecuted, but once everyone is guilty selective prosecution can be used at the discretion of those who wish to silence any unwanted criticism, opposing viewpoints, etc.
Conversely I feel pretty proud of what I've accomplished at my job and I hope I'll feel that way on my death bed (and no, I don't work for a private company).
He admitted to being a spy. Capture and possible execution is part of the job.
If I imprison you, torture you, and threaten your family, I'm pretty sure I can get you to admit to being a spy. Doesn't mean you are one. I didn't realize imprisonment and execution as a political propaganda tool came along with simply visiting family.
I think it's hilarious to hear Americans complain about this practice. I suppose all the confessions that were elicited at Guantánamo Bay are completely different, and totally legit(tm).
It sounds like it probably should've been hosted by a 3rd party based on the GP's post, but the point I was making about support is that if I was a small shop without in-house IT and I need support for a specific issue and I open up the yellow pages and look at my options there are going to be way more options for me that will be less expensive if I need to hire someone to take a look at a Windows server.
...go through the trouble trying to set up and debug PHP as FastCGI...
I think it's funny how common it is for anyone who mentions working with Windows professionally on Slashdot to be called out for being inexperienced or some kind of unauthentic system administrator with no real skills, but no doubt there are just as many who consider themselves experienced *nix system administrators who I could make fun of for being inept at basic Windows administration tasks.
Anyway, there are plenty of good reasons that web server should have been a Windows box. Even if it wasn't joined to the domain by switching that box to Linux they would lose the ability to leverage their existing update (SUS) and backup infrastructure. Also, the cost of a Windows license for a small shop like that would pay for itself probably 3 times over if they had to even try to get some kind of professional support for the Linux box even once.
Actually, what you're thinking of 24 continuous frames per second, ie. what you see in most films. It looks smooth to the eye because each frame actually consists of the accumulated light during the 1/24th of a second duration between that frame and the next frame. The resulting "motion blur" can give the illusion of a higher frame rate than what there actually is. I can still EASILY tell the difference between 24 motion blurred frames per second and a higher frame rate, but I'll grant you that it is more subtle.
Now, in video games we don't have this luxury. Although some modern games implement some form of motion blur no game that I know of would actually attempt to render the "sub-frames" required to achieve a kind of continuous motion blur, and even if you could, why wouldn't you just display those frames you rendered then? In video games each frame you are shown is an an exact point in time which is why you need a much higher frame rate to achieve perceptibly smooth animation.
... 30-40 fps on average, and 25 fps+ on coruscant (coruscant is waaaaaaay too big). same for skyrim...
Looks like PCs isn't the only thing gaming consoles have been retarding. Most PC gamers would have considered 25 fps nearly unplayable, and 30-40 FPS highly undesirable before the proliferation of poor frame rates in modern console games. There are still many of us that are unsatisfied with that level of performance, but are unwilling to compromise graphics quality.
On a CPU, your dataset can be several MB and still fit on-chip...
Clearly you've never dealt with any HPC programming before. In the vast majority of massively parallel compution problems, the kind which are solved by these kind of chips the data sets are also necessarily large; hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes of data. The algorithms that allow massively parallel compution will compute a single step of an algorithm on a large number of elements.
Consider the scenario the GP was referring to, massively parallel dot product, for matrix operations or other algorithms used in things like computer graphics, weather and physics simulations, neural networks and AI processing. In each DP4 you are reading 8 elements and writing 1, so you need (8 + 1) * 8 = 72 bytes of memory bandwidth per DP4 operation which is 8 flops, so to maintain peak performance without bottlenecking you would need at least 9 bytes of memory bandwidth per flop, which at 1 terraflop is around 8000 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Obviously the chip won't have that much, but that just goes to show you that the vast majority of modern HPC is limited by memory bandwidth, not flops, with notable exceptions for a small number of applications like hash cracking and such.
Maybe, but probably not. The key to high performance computing when dealing with parallel workloads like this is not just raw processing power, but memory bandwidth. The Nvidia Tesla M2090 mentioned in TFS has a peak memory bandwidth of 177GB/s with specially designed memory and controllers designed for raw throughput. Conventional CPUs with fastest DDR3 memory available can barely crack a small fraction of that. A terraflop of sustained DP performance is going to be completely useless without the memory bandwidth to back it up.
Mercy me the Slashdot audience is getting dumber. Packing spheres into any container as efficiently as possible is a deceptively complex problem with a huge variety of applications.
For me personally working in computer graphics, packing spheres as tightly as possible into other spheres has practical application in computing efficient bounding volume hierarchies as an acceleration structure for efficient ray tracing.
This deals with packing spheres into a cylinder so it is a different subset of the same problem, but it is still interesting and useful.
A simpler system might be ideal, but I don't think you can discount entirely the purpose of specific taxes incentivizing certain types of behavior. "Taxes on everything" can also link revenue and incentives directly to expenditures for government programs and services which might not be simpler for you, but it's safer and more self-regulating to administer.
A better idea might be to segregate trust based on jurisdiction. We need to do away with the generic TLDs (.com. .net, .org, etc.) and use a national CA system in which a CA is only trusted for it's associated national TLD. Just a thought.
There might be good reasons on both sides, but the tinfoil hatter in me believes this might have more to do with fact that both companies might want to see a little more profit out of the R&D that went into the current generation of products before obsoleting them. The performance of the current generation is high enough that it is getting harder to introduce a new generation at a price point that could both recover R&D and provide reasonable value for the customer.
Just delete DigiNotar from your trusted CAs. Honestly I was just going to wait for the revocation lists like everybody else but seeing the scope of this now I think they've earned the right to be fired from the Internet forever.
Just a word about teacher's unions. Here in Alberta the ATA (Alberta Teacher's Association) is one of the most powerful and influential unions in the province. The salary and benefits teachers receive are second to none. As of September 1st this year it is in fact possible to make over $100,000 a year in this province as a teacher teaching gym class as long as you have 10 years experience and 6 years of formal education. If that sounds like a bad thing to you then I suppose you're partially right, but we also have the best teachers in the country. You get what you pay for.
Ironically in a 400m race I think there's a good chance you would actually still lose.
Yes it does, don't you know anything? Guilty until proven innocent, etc.
That's a compelling argument, but a lot of people play games to escape reality. That said, if anyone gets to own the dark brown/grey/chrome atmosphere it's ID and they can do whatever they want, and maybe that is the atmosphere of their game, however, to say too many games have (pointlessly) copied that atmosphere is a legitimate complaint.
Does anyone remember when an article was posted a while back highlighting techniques for practical stenography based encryption for network traffic? Does anyone remember all the snarky comments and derision because you would never need that kind of encryption? This is how it begins.
Or conversely, if you are on the buyer end and purchase something NOT through Ebay, Paypal won't give a flying fuck about you or your claim.
Has / does Windows have security problems? Sure, but I disagree that you can blame Microsoft for everything.
Does anyone remember the huge outcry and fear and tinfoil hatting when it was announced that Windows 7 would require driver signing by default? Microsoft gets blamed for anything that takes away control of the computer from the end user, but they also get blamed for the results of whatever every stupid end user happens to do.
If you even think that secure defaults would prevent these kinds of problems you have probably never worked in IT. Users will click and ignore and install and agree to anything that stands between them and whatever goat porn / Rebecca Black garbage bullshit they want to download.
So? Employers can already coerce employees' behavior literally 2 billion other ways that they shouldn't be able to. This is a bullshit reason. Fix the problem by updating your country's archaic labor legislation.
Without revealing any spoilers I think you should watch The Dark Knight. I enjoyed that movie immensely because it doesn't do any of the things you described. There are still some good movies out there, but they're pretty damn rare these days.
So what are you guys going to do about it now? The machine is in motion. Next election date the same thing will happen, lather, rinse, repeat for eternity. Good luck starting an armed revolution too by the way, you know that military you've been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars a year into for the last 50 years will have a much easier time putting down any kind of revolution than the dictators you guys have been deposing recently.
Ah, thanks for putting "Rampantly Offensive" in your review title Ars, now I can safely close that tab and disregard the rest of your opinions. I'm not interested in reading a review that even assumes something can rampantly offensive. Obligatory SMBC http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2164