Thank you for typing so eloquently my precise take on this.
Multi-threaded programming is a lot like pointers or recursive functions. It takes programmers a while to "get" the idea, but one day, it just makes sense, and from that point forward it's easy. What makes pointers and multi-threaded apps "hard" is when someone who didn't quite get the idea yet writes something and it has to be debugged and maintained.
It's also like both of those in the sense that while it's a powerful tool to use, it's not a tool you use whenever you want to. Calculating factorial, for example, is much faster and simpler when written iteratively than when written as a recursive function, even though that's the archetypal recursive function. Same goes for multi-threaded apps, where I've seen multi-threaded apps designed such that no more than one thread was active at any given point. Why have threads at all, then?
Parallelization is a different thing entirely -- a solution to only a small subset of all of the computational problems. For example, you can parallelize multiple instances of a state machine, but you can't parallelize the processing of a single state machine. This is one problem with parallelization in games; the player represents an unpredictably changing state machine that forces the serialization of all other actions in response to it. You can parallelize the rendering of the scene within that context, since the algorithm for rendering one pixel is identical to the algorithm for rendering another... but you can't parallelize "the game."
Loaned Ubuntu Feisty to a co-worker desperate to ditch Windows just last month. After 3 days, he went back to Windows, because he had to download some software to be able to play his music library and couldn't figure out how to actually get that thing to install and work.
It's not just that there is a ton of software that all does the same thing; it's that there are so few things that do what people want to do: Listen to music, download videos, that sort of thing, and anti-licensing religious fervor prevents these distributions from making the codecs available right from the get-go.
Now he'd probably have to do the same thing with Windows, but he can just ask some guy next to him how to get it working.
I don't think the government is protecting "one side" in the case of the RIAA because the RIAA does not represent one side; it represents a cartel that dominates the recording market, but is neither a group of artists nor is it all of recording.
The fact is that the price of music distribution has gone down dramatically. I've been able to produce and distribute an album all my own, legally, for example, with legit pressed shrink-wrapped CDs and digital sales through iTunes and Sony Connect and everything. The digital studio I produced this with was all of $1k, and the distribution costs for 100 CDs are well under $500. I'm not raking in a ton of cash this way, but let's face it, this is well within the range of Joe Schmoe.
Where the RIAA comes into play is that the bulk of the royalties made from playing these recordings that I have made don't go to me. They go to the RIAA. The blank CDs have a tax levied on them that goes to the RIAA. This is my competitor in the market. The government is taking money from the poor to feed the rich here. I'm on the same "side" of the CD sales equation, but my ability to generate revenue is affected by the fact that these companies claim to own me, when I have signed no contract giving them these rights.
Now, does that sound to you like a "free market?" Me neither.
On the other hand, my CD is crap, so it's not like I'm getting my panties all in a wad about this. But if I actually put some effort and had some talent into this sort of thing, or depended on it for a living like many musicians do, I'd be outraged.
That's a better way of putting it. I'd say that the one who has the best information has the most control in general, but there are important exceptions to that rule, ones that don't just prove the rule.
Dangit, I agree with you: I'm sick of people who are unclear on the concept of just what a "free market" is.
"Free market" implies that there is no single party or group that has control over a market, not just governments. A single company (e.g. Microsoft in the OS space), or a cartel (e.g., the RIAA member companies) that can dictate the vast bulk of a market's behavior thus means the market is no longer free or capable of the self-correcting behavior that are the benefits of a free market.
Gas prices are high because a single cartel, OPEC, dictates the price per barrel. This is not a free market.
California's "deregulation" was more appropriately a "re-regulation," and was only called "deregulation" for marketing purposes. It failed to help end consumers, of course, because they really don't have a choice where their power comes from; there's no way to go to the corner store and buy a few kilowatt-months to take home and keep in the fridge til ya need them. In other words, it's a market that is necessarily never free, because you always have one company controlling delivery.
It keeps being used only in the sense of "no government interference," which is just wrong. Maybe that's an accepted meaning, but since a market dominated by any entity or cartel cannot be free and does not have the benefits of a really free market, then... why use it to mean anything else?
That's a great idea; why don't we ask Mazda to release all of their patents and research info so that everyone else can start building more? Or should we just all do nothing but buy Mazdas until they have enough money to do it themselves?
The problem is that the inventors can't be selfish if they want to change the world.
Yep, and they're usually made by the manufacturer of the hardware. ARM has one guy up in the UK doing the whole toolchain, which is why it's still using GCC 2.95 for most platforms (although I now have access at work to a platform using gcc 3.4).
"Apple did go on without Jobs,"...almost into bankruptcy, until they hired him again, and he turned the company into NeXT 2.0.
"MS is going on without Gates at the helm..."...into the latest, most expensive, least-desirable version of Windows yet, a product that makes ME look enchanting by comparison.
"And HP is getting along fine without Carly." my point; WITH her, they were not getting along so well.
You can say the same thing for any major endeavor. What would Apple be without Steve Jobs? Microsoft without Bill Gates? HP without Carly Fiorina? Who's at the top, and what decides who's the successor, makes a huge difference.
Greenpeace has not been a credible pro-environment organization for a long time. In fact, a lot of the pro-environment organizations have been known to oversell their cases. Rush Limbaugh exploited this in the late 80's/early 90's to gain credibility in his rise to fame.
By overselling their cases, they helped establish the political landscape we have today, where proof of environmental destruction is a tough sell, and the habit of lying even to themselves about the true state of things leads to nutjobs like the Earth Liberation Front, who destroy the environment in order to save it.
The best thing for the environment remains to be considerate of what things you consume and dispose of and where they come from and go to. And doing so almost always ends up saving you money as well.
Yeah, that's not "Funny," and it's not even "Insightful," it's "Informative."
This is a code phrase for "This guy did a really lousy job and we're finally happy to be rid of him."
If you follow college football at all, this kind of thing is normal. You learn that, for example, the administration making an official statement to the effect of "We stand behind Coach Winsnogames 100%" is pretty much a guarantee that the guy is either about to be fired, or will be if he doesn't win it all the next year. "I committed to this school because of their outstanding academic support" means that someone will take the tests for him. And "I committed to Texas A&M" means the athlete's only committed to that school until a real school offers him a scholarship.
I mean seriously... A&M's had what, 6 decommits already?:)
...there really hasn't ever been anything like it before.
Al Gore's "Information Superhighway" is a lot closer than the "series of tubes," although it's more like the transportation system of the entire world.
Slashdot Mirror
"You chose wrong!"
Thank you for typing so eloquently my precise take on this.
Multi-threaded programming is a lot like pointers or recursive functions. It takes programmers a while to "get" the idea, but one day, it just makes sense, and from that point forward it's easy. What makes pointers and multi-threaded apps "hard" is when someone who didn't quite get the idea yet writes something and it has to be debugged and maintained.
It's also like both of those in the sense that while it's a powerful tool to use, it's not a tool you use whenever you want to. Calculating factorial, for example, is much faster and simpler when written iteratively than when written as a recursive function, even though that's the archetypal recursive function. Same goes for multi-threaded apps, where I've seen multi-threaded apps designed such that no more than one thread was active at any given point. Why have threads at all, then?
Parallelization is a different thing entirely -- a solution to only a small subset of all of the computational problems. For example, you can parallelize multiple instances of a state machine, but you can't parallelize the processing of a single state machine. This is one problem with parallelization in games; the player represents an unpredictably changing state machine that forces the serialization of all other actions in response to it. You can parallelize the rendering of the scene within that context, since the algorithm for rendering one pixel is identical to the algorithm for rendering another... but you can't parallelize "the game."
I think the heart of the debate about violence in video games comes when you contrast TFA with this.
Really, is there anything left to discuss about the issue?
Actually, he downloaded something that didn't have an .exe and didn't know what to do with it.
Loaned Ubuntu Feisty to a co-worker desperate to ditch Windows just last month. After 3 days, he went back to Windows, because he had to download some software to be able to play his music library and couldn't figure out how to actually get that thing to install and work.
It's not just that there is a ton of software that all does the same thing; it's that there are so few things that do what people want to do: Listen to music, download videos, that sort of thing, and anti-licensing religious fervor prevents these distributions from making the codecs available right from the get-go.
Now he'd probably have to do the same thing with Windows, but he can just ask some guy next to him how to get it working.
I don't think the government is protecting "one side" in the case of the RIAA because the RIAA does not represent one side; it represents a cartel that dominates the recording market, but is neither a group of artists nor is it all of recording.
The fact is that the price of music distribution has gone down dramatically. I've been able to produce and distribute an album all my own, legally, for example, with legit pressed shrink-wrapped CDs and digital sales through iTunes and Sony Connect and everything. The digital studio I produced this with was all of $1k, and the distribution costs for 100 CDs are well under $500. I'm not raking in a ton of cash this way, but let's face it, this is well within the range of Joe Schmoe.
Where the RIAA comes into play is that the bulk of the royalties made from playing these recordings that I have made don't go to me. They go to the RIAA. The blank CDs have a tax levied on them that goes to the RIAA. This is my competitor in the market. The government is taking money from the poor to feed the rich here. I'm on the same "side" of the CD sales equation, but my ability to generate revenue is affected by the fact that these companies claim to own me, when I have signed no contract giving them these rights.
Now, does that sound to you like a "free market?" Me neither.
On the other hand, my CD is crap, so it's not like I'm getting my panties all in a wad about this. But if I actually put some effort and had some talent into this sort of thing, or depended on it for a living like many musicians do, I'd be outraged.
That's a better way of putting it. I'd say that the one who has the best information has the most control in general, but there are important exceptions to that rule, ones that don't just prove the rule.
Dangit, I agree with you: I'm sick of people who are unclear on the concept of just what a "free market" is.
... why use it to mean anything else?
"Free market" implies that there is no single party or group that has control over a market, not just governments. A single company (e.g. Microsoft in the OS space), or a cartel (e.g., the RIAA member companies) that can dictate the vast bulk of a market's behavior thus means the market is no longer free or capable of the self-correcting behavior that are the benefits of a free market.
Gas prices are high because a single cartel, OPEC, dictates the price per barrel. This is not a free market.
California's "deregulation" was more appropriately a "re-regulation," and was only called "deregulation" for marketing purposes. It failed to help end consumers, of course, because they really don't have a choice where their power comes from; there's no way to go to the corner store and buy a few kilowatt-months to take home and keep in the fridge til ya need them. In other words, it's a market that is necessarily never free, because you always have one company controlling delivery.
It keeps being used only in the sense of "no government interference," which is just wrong. Maybe that's an accepted meaning, but since a market dominated by any entity or cartel cannot be free and does not have the benefits of a really free market, then
Heh. Ford lost 12.6 billion dollars last year, on 6 billion in revenues. That means Ford somehow found a way to spend $18 billion.
There isn't going to be much of Ford left at that rate, takin' Mazda with 'em. Then, who'll get the Wankel?
That's a great idea; why don't we ask Mazda to release all of their patents and research info so that everyone else can start building more? Or should we just all do nothing but buy Mazdas until they have enough money to do it themselves?
The problem is that the inventors can't be selfish if they want to change the world.
Actually, that makes sense. For one thing, there's no literal equivalent to "no" or "yes" in Chinese. And for another, it sounds really good:
O OOOOOOOO"
"BU YAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
If you take away the human cost and human horrors of war, of what benefit is peace?
Yep, and they're usually made by the manufacturer of the hardware. ARM has one guy up in the UK doing the whole toolchain, which is why it's still using GCC 2.95 for most platforms (although I now have access at work to a platform using gcc 3.4).
Hahahahaha -- okay, now THAT was funny. :)
So how is this materially different from the US system, then?
"Apple did go on without Jobs," ...almost into bankruptcy, until they hired him again, and he turned the company into NeXT 2.0.
...into the latest, most expensive, least-desirable version of Windows yet, a product that makes ME look enchanting by comparison.
"MS is going on without Gates at the helm..."
"And HP is getting along fine without Carly." my point; WITH her, they were not getting along so well.
You can say the same thing for any major endeavor. What would Apple be without Steve Jobs? Microsoft without Bill Gates? HP without Carly Fiorina? Who's at the top, and what decides who's the successor, makes a huge difference.
So if a judge makes a mistake, you just have to bend over and take it like a man?
Where did I say or imply that I agreed with or liked Rush Limbaugh?
Greenpeace has not been a credible pro-environment organization for a long time. In fact, a lot of the pro-environment organizations have been known to oversell their cases. Rush Limbaugh exploited this in the late 80's/early 90's to gain credibility in his rise to fame.
By overselling their cases, they helped establish the political landscape we have today, where proof of environmental destruction is a tough sell, and the habit of lying even to themselves about the true state of things leads to nutjobs like the Earth Liberation Front, who destroy the environment in order to save it.
The best thing for the environment remains to be considerate of what things you consume and dispose of and where they come from and go to. And doing so almost always ends up saving you money as well.
Yeah, that's not "Funny," and it's not even "Insightful," it's "Informative."
:)
This is a code phrase for "This guy did a really lousy job and we're finally happy to be rid of him."
If you follow college football at all, this kind of thing is normal. You learn that, for example, the administration making an official statement to the effect of "We stand behind Coach Winsnogames 100%" is pretty much a guarantee that the guy is either about to be fired, or will be if he doesn't win it all the next year. "I committed to this school because of their outstanding academic support" means that someone will take the tests for him. And "I committed to Texas A&M" means the athlete's only committed to that school until a real school offers him a scholarship.
I mean seriously... A&M's had what, 6 decommits already?
...there really hasn't ever been anything like it before.
Al Gore's "Information Superhighway" is a lot closer than the "series of tubes," although it's more like the transportation system of the entire world.
Well, you could solve the Gnome problem by switching to KDE, and the Office problem by switching to OOo.
I mean, I did, and I've never lost a setting in KDE or text in OOo -- not in the past 5 years, anyway.
Oh, I don't think he decided anything. This is how executives get pushed out while allowing them to save face.
Anyway, thanks to Ken, for one of the most entertaining business dramas I've seen since 3dfx.
No kidding... how the hell did this article title get past the editors?