And the tradeoffs between RISC/CISC can be complex and balance each other out in many ways. For example, on a CISC machine you might have an instruction to move a block of memory where on a RISC machine you might have to loop on load/store instructions. The CISC machine may break the move down internally to pretty much the same loop, but the instruction itself takes less memory. This leads to more instructions in the same cache space and possibly a shorter instruction pipeline needed for CISC. To balance that off, you might need more instruction cache memory for the equivalent amount of work on the RISC system.
Add "unrolling the loop" in the compiler for the RISC machine and you need even more physical instructions in the cache for the same function.
I'm not arguing that one architecture is "better" than the other here, just noting that the tradeoffs are complex and each architecture has quite an array of reasons for and/or against it. In the real world, the tradeoffs and complexities of either design philosophy have tended to pretty much equal each other out, and the performance of systems based on either architecture tend to be roughly equivalent on the same relative amount of chip real estate in the same physical circuit architecture.
I just want to point out that mainframe user's groups like SHARE are still going strong. They have always been a great place to learn what others are doing, keep up with what's new, meet other people doing interesting things and find others you can call for help when you need it.
The only reason we're in this situation is because the politicians have used all sorts of sneaky tricks to get around efforts to limit spending on campaigns. Including having individuals pay to place ads instead of donating directly to the campign in order to give more to the campign than they ordinarily would be able to.
And including paying to run blogs as "grass roots" segments of their campaigns.
The idea of bloggers being treated as journalists seems like a good one, but how do they intend to stop the politicians (themselves) from using "all sorts of sneaky tricks" with blogs to get around efforts to limit campaign spending?
I thought the DMCA was justified because, now that things are digital, copies are just like the original and that's why we needed all that new protection. Now we find that the rights for analog have to be just like the rights for digital. If it's really such a big issue that all the rights have to be the same, the easy way would be just to pitch the DMCA, wouldn't it?
The redistribution rights under the GPL aren't exactly hidden. If you sign a contract saying you will "kill a kindergartener each month" in return for the use of a car, I'm pretty sure that the entire contract would be invalid and you wouldn't get to keep the car.
In this case, SCO clearly knows about and understands the rights and obligations covered by the GPL. They have claimed that the contract is invalid and illegal in court.
NOW they are distributing software that REQUIRES them to agree to the terms they publically claim are invalid, in return for the rights to use and distribute that software. Any copyright owner of the GPL'ed code they are distributing could probably get a court order prohibiting them from distributing copyright code without a license to do so.
Boies turned down the stock deal and renegotiated a cash deal. The cash to pay them is locked in, even in the case of the company going down or being bought out.
I see this as nothing more than something to appease shareholders and discourage the low end pirate. They are trying to make it look like they are trying to prevent the claimed "100 trillion" lost every year in software piracy.
So you're saying that anyone running Linux, especially anyone running Linux with Wine is part of the "100 trillion" they lose to software piracy every year?
How about just changing the registration process to disallow registering any name that "looks" identical to an already registered name? Just keep a list of character synonyms on the registration sites and don't let anyone register synonyms.
5% overhead for running a system that has all the features in reliability alone has got to be well worth it.
When you think about it, a system running 5% slower than today's system is only one month behind on Moore's curve. (2x performance in 18 months is 5%/month system speed increase). Wait an extra month to buy your next machine and you can have the same performance on a far sounder foundation. (Of course this assumes you're doing your conversion sometime after Hurd L4 actually runs the things you need).
Speakeasy seems to already have spam filtering in place. When I try to forward phishing on to eBay, paypal and banks, I get bounced regularly. They also provided a mechanism for me to pass the information along.
B gains many customers. However, the more customers the more loss they incur. Recall EVERY SEAT costs them $75. Eventually B just runs out of money and ups the costs.
Remember, this is an airline we're talking about. Try the math this way:
A and B have 100 seats per plane and the trip costs $30,000 to fly (that's $300/seat).
A sells tickets at $300 for a $0 loss on a full plane. B sells tickets at $225 for a $75 loss per passenger on a full plane.
A sells zero tickets because all 100 passengers that day buy B. B sells 100 tickets.
A loses $30,000. B loses $7,500.
A runs out of cash quicker than B and goes bankrupt. B ups their fares to $500.
Anyone have a link to this? Did SCO try to defend themselves, or just give up and ignore it and lose? I'd love to see the arguments they used and the court's response to them.
The SCO Group is unlikely to have any money left in 1-2 quarters
In addition to that, any new lawsuits they start have to come out of their meager operating budget. Most of their cash is in a restricted reserve for their legal cases, but that ONLY covers the currently active cases. With their declining revenues and nonexistent future prospects, that will just make them crash faster.
Anyone want to bet on whether they find any customers if they ever come out with their "Legend" software slated for early next year? What customer is going to go through an upgrade rather than a switch to Linux, especially with the near immediate prospect of no support? And what potential customer in their right mind wants to become an SCO customer, and therefore a potential target for their lawsuits? The only potential "customer" I can see would be M$, and if they license it, it makes it all the more obvious why, and I doubt M$ would take the risk of such an obvious ploy to support SCO. If they do, I hope IBM has a field day with them.
Worse than that, with sealed settlements and sealed documents filed in the court cases, the rest of the people who are affected by the proceedings have no way of knowing how they were affected. Rulings on the ownership of code and agreements between the various parties to lawsuits leave the rest of the world unable to know how to react.
Can I contribute to BSD code, or does someone else own it who can sue me for derivitive works? Can I legally use various open source software, or has it been decided that the company who allowed me that option has conceded that they really didn't own it in a sealed agreement? Do I owe SCO extortion fees because of something AT&T and BSD decided in a sealed settlement (SCO seems to think so, and somehow they seem to have the documents)? Has SCO, as they have claimed, given the courts proof of their ownership of Linux code in sealed documents? Can I be held liable for not knowing the contents of those documents?
As soon as something affects third parties, whether it's a settlement agreement, a court decision, or documents filed with the courts, it should not be allowed to be sealed and hidden from the other parties who are affected.
my fax server was getting about a dozen a day (five days in Cancun for only $300! Free timeshare in Florida!)
I was getting about a dozen a day too, but about 1/3 of them were from outfits offering to sell me toner cartridges cheap. I could pretty much tell the ones selling ink just by looking at how densely the page was printed.
However, my gripe about pre-recorded messages is it puts the burden on the consumer to get off the list -- you have to call the company that just called you back, then get a person on the phone and get them to remove you from their list.
Of course, there doesn't seem to be anything here to prevent them from putting the information you need (who they are, how to opt out, etc.) at the end of their five minute telemarketing recording, forcing you to listen to the whole thing in order to even be able to opt out.
"[Electronic voting's] impact was was proportional to the Democratic support in the county, i.e., it was especially large in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. This evidence for this is the statistical signifigance of terms in our model that gauge the average impact of e-voting accross Florida's 67 counties and statistical interaction effects that gauge it's larger-than-life effect in counties where Vice President Gore did best in 2000...."
So, in other words, this study proves that Bush did better with Democratic voters in 2004 than he did in 2000. I think we already knew that. Since the electronic voting was concentrated in Democratic counties, he also did better in electronic voting counties than he did in 2000.
Nothing in this study takes into account that Bush visited those areas much more than Kerry did, and more than he did in 2000. Nothing takes into account that Kerry might have done worse with those voters than Gore did, although we know that Kerry did worse with Democratic voters nationwide than Gore did. Nothing takes into account that these people were in a Federal disaster area and had just received attention and monetary payments from the Federal government and might have been more pleased with the Republican administration. Nothing takes into account that the 2000 election in Florida was extremely close and more marginal voters (ones that weren't motivated to vote in 2000) might have been statistically different than the ones who voted in both elections.
Heck, Kerry is now saying "it was the Osama tape that did it". What was it that Kerry thinks it was that the Osama tape did? He's saying that it switched people who would have voted for him to cast their vote for Bush. Wouldn't that show up exactly like this in the way votes were cast. Of course, it would show up the same way if there were other reasons that voters just didn't like Kerry as much as they liked Gore in the previous election.
Didn't work out quite as well as MS might have hoped.
"A year ago we had $6 million. Now we have $60 million, with $50 million of that coming in through the investment. We have a war chest to defend our rights, to fight our claims in the courtroom," he said earlier this year, adding that the cash is enough for the long haul. "We think the legal battles we have won't even go through half that amount of cash, even played over a multiple number of years."
Looks like they've gone through way more than half that cash already, and the remainder is going fast. It will be really interesting to see the SCO Annual Report that's due out soon. Their fiscal year ended last month, and I doubt that they can avoid reporting results for too long (last year they reported on Dec. 22nd).
AIX: the only operating system that supports the Unix standard!
Not as funny as some earlier "standards" efforts. I used to love the ads from Motorola proclaiming loudly that "only Motorola supports the industry standard Versabus".
I would rather have faster processors than multiple cores, as it is not enough is multi-threaded. Even the highest end 3D apps, their render engines are SMP capable, but all geometry translation/deformation is not. That would be one core right? Unless multiple cores could show up as one single core/proc in the OS..
If dual core processors become the new high-end norm, those cpu intensive apps are going to migrate to use them effectively. Currently, there is not a huge market for software that works across multiple CPUs except in the server arena. Once they become available at reasonable prices for the video processing and gaming users, the software to use them effectively will follow.
Notice that the InfoWorld article states that the SCO litigation is over patent infringement. So far, it's been about almost everything else (copyright, contracts, the Constitution, criminal theft, destruction of the world economy, etc.), but I don't recall the issue of patents ever coming up in any of the cases or in any of Darl's rants before.
"McBride, whose company is mired in litigation with IBM Corp. and others over patent infringement claims concerning Unix source code, warned of the "high stakes" if companies in the software and music businesses don't protect their property now."
It's going to come down rapidly over time. Dennis Tito paid $20M for a trip to the space station, Paul Allen paid $20M for his own spaceship company (and he's already got $10M back from it). Give it a while and it won't be that expensive to spend a week in an inflatable space hotel.
That's the kind of thing I was expecting from the current round of "fix the voting systems"... instead, we get the Diebolds of the world putting togegher amazingly complex "solutions" that don't even manage to insure that they can add a bunch of ones together and come up with the correct answer.
Unfortunately, we're buying these voting systems now on an "emergency" basis, and I don't see any way that there will be anything other than bandaids applied to the systems once they are purchased.
I wish I had mod points to throw on the parent here.
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And the tradeoffs between RISC/CISC can be complex and balance each other out in many ways. For example, on a CISC machine you might have an instruction to move a block of memory where on a RISC machine you might have to loop on load/store instructions. The CISC machine may break the move down internally to pretty much the same loop, but the instruction itself takes less memory. This leads to more instructions in the same cache space and possibly a shorter instruction pipeline needed for CISC. To balance that off, you might need more instruction cache memory for the equivalent amount of work on the RISC system.
Add "unrolling the loop" in the compiler for the RISC machine and you need even more physical instructions in the cache for the same function.
I'm not arguing that one architecture is "better" than the other here, just noting that the tradeoffs are complex and each architecture has quite an array of reasons for and/or against it. In the real world, the tradeoffs and complexities of either design philosophy have tended to pretty much equal each other out, and the performance of systems based on either architecture tend to be roughly equivalent on the same relative amount of chip real estate in the same physical circuit architecture.
I just want to point out that mainframe user's groups like SHARE are still going strong. They have always been a great place to learn what others are doing, keep up with what's new, meet other people doing interesting things and find others you can call for help when you need it.
Could be. It seems to be compatible with their business plan.
And including paying to run blogs as "grass roots" segments of their campaigns.
The idea of bloggers being treated as journalists seems like a good one, but how do they intend to stop the politicians (themselves) from using "all sorts of sneaky tricks" with blogs to get around efforts to limit campaign spending?
I thought the DMCA was justified because, now that things are digital, copies are just like the original and that's why we needed all that new protection. Now we find that the rights for analog have to be just like the rights for digital. If it's really such a big issue that all the rights have to be the same, the easy way would be just to pitch the DMCA, wouldn't it?
"somewhere in small type"?
The redistribution rights under the GPL aren't exactly hidden. If you sign a contract saying you will "kill a kindergartener each month" in return for the use of a car, I'm pretty sure that the entire contract would be invalid and you wouldn't get to keep the car.
In this case, SCO clearly knows about and understands the rights and obligations covered by the GPL. They have claimed that the contract is invalid and illegal in court.
NOW they are distributing software that REQUIRES them to agree to the terms they publically claim are invalid, in return for the rights to use and distribute that software. Any copyright owner of the GPL'ed code they are distributing could probably get a court order prohibiting them from distributing copyright code without a license to do so.
Boies turned down the stock deal and renegotiated a cash deal. The cash to pay them is locked in, even in the case of the company going down or being bought out.
I see this as nothing more than something to appease shareholders and discourage the low end pirate. They are trying to make it look like they are trying to prevent the claimed "100 trillion" lost every year in software piracy.
So you're saying that anyone running Linux, especially anyone running Linux with Wine is part of the "100 trillion" they lose to software piracy every year?
How about just changing the registration process to disallow registering any name that "looks" identical to an already registered name? Just keep a list of character synonyms on the registration sites and don't let anyone register synonyms.
5% overhead for running a system that has all the features in reliability alone has got to be well worth it.
When you think about it, a system running 5% slower than today's system is only one month behind on Moore's curve. (2x performance in 18 months is 5%/month system speed increase). Wait an extra month to buy your next machine and you can have the same performance on a far sounder foundation. (Of course this assumes you're doing your conversion sometime after Hurd L4 actually runs the things you need).
Speakeasy seems to already have spam filtering in place. When I try to forward phishing on to eBay, paypal and banks, I get bounced regularly. They also provided a mechanism for me to pass the information along.
B gains many customers. However, the more customers the more loss they incur. Recall EVERY SEAT costs them $75. Eventually B just runs out of money and ups the costs.
Remember, this is an airline we're talking about. Try the math this way:
A and B have 100 seats per plane and the trip costs $30,000 to fly (that's $300/seat).
A sells tickets at $300 for a $0 loss on a full plane.
B sells tickets at $225 for a $75 loss per passenger on a full plane.
A sells zero tickets because all 100 passengers that day buy B.
B sells 100 tickets.
A loses $30,000.
B loses $7,500.
A runs out of cash quicker than B and goes bankrupt.
B ups their fares to $500.
B now makes $20,000 on each flight.
Anyone have a link to this? Did SCO try to defend themselves, or just
give up and ignore it and lose? I'd love to see the arguments they
used and the court's response to them.
The SCO Group is unlikely to have any money left in 1-2 quarters
In addition to that, any new lawsuits they start have to come out of their meager operating budget. Most of their cash is in a restricted reserve for their legal cases, but that ONLY covers the currently active cases. With their declining revenues and nonexistent future prospects, that will just make them crash faster.
Anyone want to bet on whether they find any customers if they ever come out with their "Legend" software slated for early next year? What customer is going to go through an upgrade rather than a switch to Linux, especially with the near immediate prospect of no support? And what potential customer in their right mind wants to become an SCO customer, and therefore a potential target for their lawsuits? The only potential "customer" I can see would be M$, and if they license it, it makes it all the more obvious why, and I doubt M$ would take the risk of such an obvious ploy to support SCO. If they do, I hope IBM has a field day with them.
Worse than that, with sealed settlements and sealed documents filed in the court cases, the rest of the people who are affected by the proceedings have no way of knowing how they were affected. Rulings on the ownership of code and agreements between the various parties to lawsuits leave the rest of the world unable to know how to react.
Can I contribute to BSD code, or does someone else own it who can sue me for derivitive works? Can I legally use various open source software, or has it been decided that the company who allowed me that option has conceded that they really didn't own it in a sealed agreement? Do I owe SCO extortion fees because of something AT&T and BSD decided in a sealed settlement (SCO seems to think so, and somehow they seem to have the documents)? Has SCO, as they have claimed, given the courts proof of their ownership of Linux code in sealed documents? Can I be held liable for not knowing the contents of those documents?
As soon as something affects third parties, whether it's a settlement agreement, a court decision, or documents filed with the courts, it should not be allowed to be sealed and hidden from the other parties who are affected.
my fax server was getting about a dozen a day (five days in Cancun for only $300! Free timeshare in Florida!)
I was getting about a dozen a day too, but about 1/3 of them were from outfits offering to sell me toner cartridges cheap. I could pretty much tell the ones selling ink just by looking at how densely the page was printed.
However, my gripe about pre-recorded messages is it puts the burden on the consumer to get off the list -- you have to call the company that just called you back, then get a person on the phone and get them to remove you from their list.
Of course, there doesn't seem to be anything here to prevent them from putting the information you need (who they are, how to opt out, etc.) at the end of their five minute telemarketing recording, forcing you to listen to the whole thing in order to even be able to opt out.
So, in other words, this study proves that Bush did better with Democratic voters in 2004 than he did in 2000. I think we already knew that. Since the electronic voting was concentrated in Democratic counties, he also did better in electronic voting counties than he did in 2000.
Nothing in this study takes into account that Bush visited those areas much more than Kerry did, and more than he did in 2000. Nothing takes into account that Kerry might have done worse with those voters than Gore did, although we know that Kerry did worse with Democratic voters nationwide than Gore did. Nothing takes into account that these people were in a Federal disaster area and had just received attention and monetary payments from the Federal government and might have been more pleased with the Republican administration. Nothing takes into account that the 2000 election in Florida was extremely close and more marginal voters (ones that weren't motivated to vote in 2000) might have been statistically different than the ones who voted in both elections.
Heck, Kerry is now saying "it was the Osama tape that did it". What was it that Kerry thinks it was that the Osama tape did? He's saying that it switched people who would have voted for him to cast their vote for Bush. Wouldn't that show up exactly like this in the way votes were cast. Of course, it would show up the same way if there were other reasons that voters just didn't like Kerry as much as they liked Gore in the previous election.
Let's hope you're not citing it in your research paper.
I've seen it cited on Aljazeera such as here.
Looks like they've gone through way more than half that cash already, and the remainder is going fast. It will be really interesting to see the SCO Annual Report that's due out soon. Their fiscal year ended last month, and I doubt that they can avoid reporting results for too long (last year they reported on Dec. 22nd).
AIX: the only operating system that supports the Unix standard!
Not as funny as some earlier "standards" efforts. I used to love the ads from Motorola proclaiming loudly that "only Motorola supports the industry standard Versabus".
I would rather have faster processors than multiple cores, as it is not enough is multi-threaded. Even the highest end 3D apps, their render engines are SMP capable, but all geometry translation/deformation is not. That would be one core right? Unless multiple cores could show up as one single core/proc in the OS..
If dual core processors become the new high-end norm, those cpu intensive apps are going to migrate to use them effectively. Currently, there is not a huge market for software that works across multiple CPUs except in the server arena. Once they become available at reasonable prices for the video processing and gaming users, the software to use them effectively will follow.
It's going to come down rapidly over time. Dennis Tito paid $20M for a trip to the space station, Paul Allen paid $20M for his own spaceship company (and he's already got $10M back from it). Give it a while and it won't be that expensive to spend a week in an inflatable space hotel.
That's the kind of thing I was expecting from the current round of "fix the voting systems" ... instead, we get the Diebolds of the world putting togegher amazingly complex "solutions" that don't even manage to insure that they can add a bunch of ones together and come up with the correct answer.
Unfortunately, we're buying these voting systems now on an "emergency" basis, and I don't see any way that there will be anything other than bandaids applied to the systems once they are purchased.
I wish I had mod points to throw on the parent here.