I suppose I can understand your anti Alan whining too.
That could be read two ways. anti-(Alan-whining) or (anti-Alan)-whining. I hope you meant the first, since I'm certainly not anti-Alan, and I don't believe I'm whining.
I bet you've got something you wouldn't do even if it paid good $$. If not, I suppose there's nothing left to add to this discussion.
There are many such things I wouldn't do. Therefore, let's continue the discussion.
First: Alan Cox is a major player in kdev, and the fact that he gets paid to do it makes him all the more productive. I'm sure he'll continue working on Linux, sans Redhat, but he might not have the time he once had.
Second: Alan might be standing up, but no one is looking. It will not appear in the papers next month, "AOL/TW buys Redhat, Alan Cox quits." If he's trying to foment a revolution, he's not making much progress. Us geeks are already with him, regarding DMCA etc. He's just preaching to the choir.
If Alan needs to quit to sleep better at night, then fine. But if he's trying to make a public political statement, he needs to come up with a better way to do it.
I notice that my original post has been re-modded as a troll. It would be nice if the moderators would look up the definition of "troll" and think more carefully before modding something "Troll" simply because they disagree with it.
I remember an old story (can't remember the source, so I'll paraphrase):
One day, the makers of a processor for a particular computer system decided to be developers for a day, and do some profiling. They found a particular sequence of several instructions that was being executed quite often, and they figured they could speed up the entire system by adding an instruction to the CPU that carried out that particular operation in fewer clock cycles.
They did their redesign, and tested the new system. There was no speedup.
They had optimized the operating system's idle loop.
Thanks for the reply. I have to admit that your second paragraph was well stated and might actually have had some influence on me.
Sometimes in the grip of anger or irritation I will make sarcastic remarks, along with solid arguments (maybe in this case the argument was not so solid). It seems you've done the same, in your first paragraph. If you leave the sarcasm out of it I think you'll have better effect.
I just view the development industry a little differently from you and Alan, I guess. I enjoy coding, and getting paid to code, and if someone over in Department 19987-H is doing unethical things, first of all I probably won't even know about it, and second of all I won't really care. I am doing nothing to further the unethical behavior, and if I leave I really doubt that the behavior will stop -- so why should I risk my livelihood to make a political statement that will be listened to by fellow geeks, but which will be largely ignored by the company itself?
If, OTOH, I am personally asked to write missile guidance software for this nice neutron-bomb-tipped ICBM that Department 19987-H has just developed, I will refuse. If I can personally stop unethical behavior through action, I will do so.
But if AC leaves Redhat, will that cause AOL to drop all of their digital millenium garbage? I seriously doubt it. It's a maneuvre made in vain, and it can only hurt AC and the Linux community.
There is a big difference between working for a company you do not fully agree with, and spying for an enemy state. I can just as easily take any argument that you make, and extend it to an absurd extreme, but it doesn't invalidate your argument.
Grishnakh, eh? Didn't you get shot by an arrow of the Rohan?
No. The fact that he's ready to leave the company makes him much more than a whiner. Whiners whine. They don't act. Alan seems to be prepared to act.
One day, when I was a young teenager, I decided that I was fed up with the stupidity on one of the BBS systems I frequented. I whined for a while, and then I acted, by leaving the BBS. Soon, I realized that this was a stupid decision, as I was cut off from some of my close online friends. But I couldn't go back -- I'd look like a fool. Action is not always an act of bravery. It can be an act of cowardice as well.
Yes, we all know that RedHat is Linux.
If you thought for longer than the several seconds you seem to have, you would realize that if Alan Cox leaves Redhat, he will no longer be paid to work on Linux.
The fact that Linux will continue on, unhindered by this event, is just more evidence that Alan Cox is just one man in the big scheme of things.
That and the fact that AOL is nothing but dorks. I mean, ya gotta have some self respect.
And you gotta have some source of income. Let's say I'm a big software company and I'm thinking of hiring Alan Cox. First, I know that he's very political and voiceful. Second, he has the nasty habit of leaving whenever office politics conflict with his politics.
Why would I want to hire such a person? Why would I want to place myself at risk of becoming dependent on someone who is admittedly an astounding programmer, but who might leave at any moment on a whim, simply because he doesn't like what's going on? Why would I want to risk having a story appear on Slashdot about how my company pissed off Alan Cox, and now there's hell to pay?
If Alan keeps this up, he's going to garner a reputation for being an individualistic, sour developer who won't play ball if he doesn't like the color. Who wants someone like that on their team?
So if Red Hat is bought by AOL, I expect much of their user base will move to Mandrake, Debian, and Suse.
Why in holy hell would I want to do that? I've spent the last several years getting used to the way RedHat does their stuff. Why would I want to learn a new way of doing it, even if it is still Linux? If I had to leave RedHat, I wouldn't go to Mandrake, Debian, or Suse. I'd probably go to OS X and start from the ground up all over again.
I use Linux for development. I don't use it because I get a nice woody while doing so. I expect that, contrary to what you believe, a great portion of RedHat's userbase is also developers, and developers really don't care about politics. At all. Those who do shouldn't be calling themselves developers, but marketers, IMHO;)
Whenever a software/politics story like this comes up, I can't help but speak my mind. It's interesting to see how many geeks really care about this political, idealistic stuff.
Isn't it more fun to just code?
So, Alan Cox will be insulted. So what? Every day I'm insulted by the stupidity and capitalistic fervor of those around me -- but I don't drop my work, pack up shop, and leave town.
Business is business is business, and when Redhat went into business, they went into business which means things like this buy-out can happen. Alan Cox is just whining because he's a geek and he doesn't want to deal with capitalistic reality. He can make all the complex, serpentine, philosophical excuses he wants to make -- but in the end he's just a whiner.
Let him whine. I'll still use Linux, with or without the support of Alan Cox. One man does not an operating system make (not even Linus).
Thanks for enlightening me. I'm fairly familiar with the mathematical side of DSP but I don't know much about what's actually happening in the guts of an ADC/DAC. So are you saying that the input signal is filtered by a perfect low-pass filter over the entire time domain, instead of on a per-sample basis? I suppose this makes sense, doesn't it:)
So? Reverse the situation. Suppose the input signal was triangular and is sampled at the Nyquist rate. Then the reconstructed signal will be sinusoidal.
The point is, the Nyquist rate tells you the highest spectral component that can be sampled without aliasing. But a triangular wave has frequency components higher than this threshold. These components will be lost in the sampling, and the waveform will not be preserved, although its spectrum will be -- up to the Nyquist rate.
I think we are just using different terminology, not talking about different concepts. I just meant that the signal is smoothed out over the sampling period, and the sample value is representative of the entire period, not just a momentary voltage. I certainly did not mean "integrate" in the sense of an integrating filter.
I wasn't talking about "the time the signal stays the same," I was talking about the time period over which the prediction error reaches some threshold value. For example if I am using a first-order linear predictor for digital-to-analog conversion, and the signal changes linearly from 0 to 1 over a period of 1 second, then I only have to send two samples during that one second period in order to completely describe the behavior of the signal.
Nyquist was talking about aliasing of the input signal. If you sample a 220 Hz sinusoidal wave at 440 Hz, then output it through a linearly interpolating DAC, you will hear a triangular wave. In other words, there is aliasing of the output signal.
If you are sampling audio at 44100 Hz, then an 8000 Hz tone will only be sampled at about 5 spots in its cycle. Although the frequency information of that 8000 Hz tone is retained, the actual waveform is lost. Exactly what the reconstructed waveform will look like is up to the DAC.
Whether the human ear can hear the difference at higher sampling rates is another question, however.
First of all, sampling rate implies sampling size. A "sample" is meant to represent the value of a signal over a period of time, not at an instant in time. Consider the following situation. A 44100-th of a second segment of waveform enters an ADC chip. Imagine that the signal has a very high value over this entire duration, except for a brief instant in the middle. It is at this point that the ADC takes a sample. What results is a sample which is not a very good representative of that portion of wave.
This is why ADCs do not just sample the incoming voltage -- they integrate over a period of time, to "boil down" the voltage over that time period to an average value, that best represents what the signal was doing during that sampling period.
Now, moving on to your point, which is to vary the sampling rate according to the characteristics of the source; this is somewhat a wasted effort, since in order to determine the source characteristics, you must perform some type of frequency analysis, or autoregression. This is intensive computation, and you would be better off spending that time doing some real compression, such as spectral quantization, or perceptual coding.
Varying the sampling rate from sample-to-sample would be the ultimate, if it were possible to gain anything from it. Unfortunately, if you vary the sampling rate at each sample, then in order to transmit the sampled stream you must transmit not only the samples, but the duration between samples as well. In the worst case you have doubled your data rate, not compressed it.
However, as you say, this could work wonders for the fidelity of the sampled signal. Instead of sampling at regular time intervals, we could build a predictive ADC that samples only when the predicted signal value becomes different from the actual by some predetermined amount. Then, send two values: the sample itself, and the duration since the last sample. This works because the DAC which converts the signal also does interpolation. It would be possible to keep the error arbitrarily small, no matter what the characteristics of the signal, up to the limits of the ADC chip itself.
I said "when X crashes and hangs the console." That is, the console driver itself is hung because X f*cked it up. ctrl-alt-bkspc does nothing, nor does ctrl-alt-num to switch consoles. Only way in is via telnet, and sometimes I can't.
Actually, the compiler is smart enough to access the array only as many times as is needed. Load list[i] into a register, list[len - i - 1] into another, do the xors, and store at the end. A good compiler on a register-rich machine will only compute the indices once, and you'll end up with the same 4 accesses as before.
To understand why it works, remember that xor is a bitwise orthogonal operation; that is, it operates on each bit completely independent of every other bit.
Essentially, a virtual particle is the mechanism by which potential energy is changed into kinetic energy, and vice-versa. Correct?
Re:Kernel is ok, biggest problem is the applicatio
on
2.4, The Kernel of Pain
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So true. I often have to reboot my home machine, because X crashes and locks up the console. The kernel itself is ok, I just can't type anything. On the occasions when I have my laptop available, I can just telnet in and reboot the system cleanly. Unfortunately, most of the time I have to hard-reset it and experience the joy of fsck.
I intended to mod this message +1, insightful, but for some reason it got modded as -1, flamebait.
If this was due to a bug in Slash, then shame on someone.
If it was due to me accidentally selecting "Flamebait" instead of "Insightful," although I can't imagine how that could have happened, I sincerely apologize.
Yes, I had thought of that. Is this a good argument for the existence of gravitons? If they didn't exist, what else would carry away the angular momentum?
I meant 'account for' as in conservation of angular momentum. If the system moves to a lower energy state, its angular momentum will change -- so what else in the universe also changes angular momentum in order to make the total change zero?
Thanks for your reply. One more question, if I may: if we have an isolated gravitationally bound system, and that system moves to a lower energy state, how do we account for the change in angular momentum of the system?
Since you're a Ph.D. candidate, maybe you can answer this question I've had for a while...
Why can't we use the same idea De Broglie used to explain quantized electron orbits, and apply it to orbiting macroscopic objects? You know, like the Rydberg constant but for gravitationally bound systems instead of Coulombic ones.
E=1/2*m*v^2-G*M*m/r, do the usual substitution for v, rewrite r in terms of n*lambda, where lambda=h/p, and solve for E? Would the resulting energy transitions correspond to the energy of the radiated gravitons? Since gravitons have zero mass, they should obey E=hf, and we can take the limit as n->infinity. Will f reduce to the orbital frequency, as in the case of Coulombic bound systems?
Slashdot Mirror
That could be read two ways. anti-(Alan-whining) or (anti-Alan)-whining. I hope you meant the first, since I'm certainly not anti-Alan, and I don't believe I'm whining.
I bet you've got something you wouldn't do even if it paid good $$. If not, I suppose there's nothing left to add to this discussion.
There are many such things I wouldn't do. Therefore, let's continue the discussion.
First: Alan Cox is a major player in kdev, and the fact that he gets paid to do it makes him all the more productive. I'm sure he'll continue working on Linux, sans Redhat, but he might not have the time he once had.
Second: Alan might be standing up, but no one is looking. It will not appear in the papers next month, "AOL/TW buys Redhat, Alan Cox quits." If he's trying to foment a revolution, he's not making much progress. Us geeks are already with him, regarding DMCA etc. He's just preaching to the choir.
If Alan needs to quit to sleep better at night, then fine. But if he's trying to make a public political statement, he needs to come up with a better way to do it.
I notice that my original post has been re-modded as a troll. It would be nice if the moderators would look up the definition of "troll" and think more carefully before modding something "Troll" simply because they disagree with it.
One day, the makers of a processor for a particular computer system decided to be developers for a day, and do some profiling. They found a particular sequence of several instructions that was being executed quite often, and they figured they could speed up the entire system by adding an instruction to the CPU that carried out that particular operation in fewer clock cycles.
They did their redesign, and tested the new system. There was no speedup.
They had optimized the operating system's idle loop.
Sometimes in the grip of anger or irritation I will make sarcastic remarks, along with solid arguments (maybe in this case the argument was not so solid). It seems you've done the same, in your first paragraph. If you leave the sarcasm out of it I think you'll have better effect.
Anyway, thanks.
How do you optimize a chip for an operating system, anyway?
If, OTOH, I am personally asked to write missile guidance software for this nice neutron-bomb-tipped ICBM that Department 19987-H has just developed, I will refuse. If I can personally stop unethical behavior through action, I will do so.
But if AC leaves Redhat, will that cause AOL to drop all of their digital millenium garbage? I seriously doubt it. It's a maneuvre made in vain, and it can only hurt AC and the Linux community.
Grishnakh, eh? Didn't you get shot by an arrow of the Rohan?
Your friend, Ugluk (who is also dead).
One day, when I was a young teenager, I decided that I was fed up with the stupidity on one of the BBS systems I frequented. I whined for a while, and then I acted, by leaving the BBS. Soon, I realized that this was a stupid decision, as I was cut off from some of my close online friends. But I couldn't go back -- I'd look like a fool. Action is not always an act of bravery. It can be an act of cowardice as well.
Yes, we all know that RedHat is Linux.
If you thought for longer than the several seconds you seem to have, you would realize that if Alan Cox leaves Redhat, he will no longer be paid to work on Linux.
The fact that Linux will continue on, unhindered by this event, is just more evidence that Alan Cox is just one man in the big scheme of things.
And you gotta have some source of income. Let's say I'm a big software company and I'm thinking of hiring Alan Cox. First, I know that he's very political and voiceful. Second, he has the nasty habit of leaving whenever office politics conflict with his politics.
Why would I want to hire such a person? Why would I want to place myself at risk of becoming dependent on someone who is admittedly an astounding programmer, but who might leave at any moment on a whim, simply because he doesn't like what's going on? Why would I want to risk having a story appear on Slashdot about how my company pissed off Alan Cox, and now there's hell to pay?
If Alan keeps this up, he's going to garner a reputation for being an individualistic, sour developer who won't play ball if he doesn't like the color. Who wants someone like that on their team?
Why in holy hell would I want to do that? I've spent the last several years getting used to the way RedHat does their stuff. Why would I want to learn a new way of doing it, even if it is still Linux? If I had to leave RedHat, I wouldn't go to Mandrake, Debian, or Suse. I'd probably go to OS X and start from the ground up all over again.
I use Linux for development. I don't use it because I get a nice woody while doing so. I expect that, contrary to what you believe, a great portion of RedHat's userbase is also developers, and developers really don't care about politics. At all. Those who do shouldn't be calling themselves developers, but marketers, IMHO ;)
Whenever a software/politics story like this comes up, I can't help but speak my mind. It's interesting to see how many geeks really care about this political, idealistic stuff. Isn't it more fun to just code?
Business is business is business, and when Redhat went into business, they went into business which means things like this buy-out can happen. Alan Cox is just whining because he's a geek and he doesn't want to deal with capitalistic reality. He can make all the complex, serpentine, philosophical excuses he wants to make -- but in the end he's just a whiner.
Let him whine. I'll still use Linux, with or without the support of Alan Cox. One man does not an operating system make (not even Linus).
Thanks for enlightening me. I'm fairly familiar with the mathematical side of DSP but I don't know much about what's actually happening in the guts of an ADC/DAC. So are you saying that the input signal is filtered by a perfect low-pass filter over the entire time domain, instead of on a per-sample basis? I suppose this makes sense, doesn't it :)
The point is, the Nyquist rate tells you the highest spectral component that can be sampled without aliasing. But a triangular wave has frequency components higher than this threshold. These components will be lost in the sampling, and the waveform will not be preserved, although its spectrum will be -- up to the Nyquist rate.
I wasn't talking about "the time the signal stays the same," I was talking about the time period over which the prediction error reaches some threshold value. For example if I am using a first-order linear predictor for digital-to-analog conversion, and the signal changes linearly from 0 to 1 over a period of 1 second, then I only have to send two samples during that one second period in order to completely describe the behavior of the signal.
If you are sampling audio at 44100 Hz, then an 8000 Hz tone will only be sampled at about 5 spots in its cycle. Although the frequency information of that 8000 Hz tone is retained, the actual waveform is lost. Exactly what the reconstructed waveform will look like is up to the DAC.
Whether the human ear can hear the difference at higher sampling rates is another question, however.
This is why ADCs do not just sample the incoming voltage -- they integrate over a period of time, to "boil down" the voltage over that time period to an average value, that best represents what the signal was doing during that sampling period.
Now, moving on to your point, which is to vary the sampling rate according to the characteristics of the source; this is somewhat a wasted effort, since in order to determine the source characteristics, you must perform some type of frequency analysis, or autoregression. This is intensive computation, and you would be better off spending that time doing some real compression, such as spectral quantization, or perceptual coding.
Varying the sampling rate from sample-to-sample would be the ultimate, if it were possible to gain anything from it. Unfortunately, if you vary the sampling rate at each sample, then in order to transmit the sampled stream you must transmit not only the samples, but the duration between samples as well. In the worst case you have doubled your data rate, not compressed it.
However, as you say, this could work wonders for the fidelity of the sampled signal. Instead of sampling at regular time intervals, we could build a predictive ADC that samples only when the predicted signal value becomes different from the actual by some predetermined amount. Then, send two values: the sample itself, and the duration since the last sample. This works because the DAC which converts the signal also does interpolation. It would be possible to keep the error arbitrarily small, no matter what the characteristics of the signal, up to the limits of the ADC chip itself.
I said "when X crashes and hangs the console." That is, the console driver itself is hung because X f*cked it up. ctrl-alt-bkspc does nothing, nor does ctrl-alt-num to switch consoles. Only way in is via telnet, and sometimes I can't.
To understand why it works, remember that xor is a bitwise orthogonal operation; that is, it operates on each bit completely independent of every other bit.
Essentially, a virtual particle is the mechanism by which potential energy is changed into kinetic energy, and vice-versa. Correct?
So true. I often have to reboot my home machine, because X crashes and locks up the console. The kernel itself is ok, I just can't type anything. On the occasions when I have my laptop available, I can just telnet in and reboot the system cleanly. Unfortunately, most of the time I have to hard-reset it and experience the joy of fsck.
If this was due to a bug in Slash, then shame on someone.
If it was due to me accidentally selecting "Flamebait" instead of "Insightful," although I can't imagine how that could have happened, I sincerely apologize.
Yes, I had thought of that. Is this a good argument for the existence of gravitons? If they didn't exist, what else would carry away the angular momentum?
I meant 'account for' as in conservation of angular momentum. If the system moves to a lower energy state, its angular momentum will change -- so what else in the universe also changes angular momentum in order to make the total change zero?
list[i] ^= list[len - i - 1];
list[len - i - 1] ^= list[i];
list[i] ^= list[len - i - 1];
Thanks for your reply. One more question, if I may: if we have an isolated gravitationally bound system, and that system moves to a lower energy state, how do we account for the change in angular momentum of the system?
Why can't we use the same idea De Broglie used to explain quantized electron orbits, and apply it to orbiting macroscopic objects? You know, like the Rydberg constant but for gravitationally bound systems instead of Coulombic ones.
E=1/2*m*v^2-G*M*m/r, do the usual substitution for v, rewrite r in terms of n*lambda, where lambda=h/p, and solve for E? Would the resulting energy transitions correspond to the energy of the radiated gravitons? Since gravitons have zero mass, they should obey E=hf, and we can take the limit as n->infinity. Will f reduce to the orbital frequency, as in the case of Coulombic bound systems?
Or am I on crack?