I had hoped you were being sarcastic, and I was going to make a little apology in this post, but then I noticed the following sig from your comment history:
Hell hath no fury like the vast robot army of a woman scorned
So now, I just don't know what to think.;) In all seriousness, though, please know that my comment was made with my tongue firmly lodged in my cheek. It's just a little joke my geek friends and I tell eachother to lighten the mood, say, after a breakup. You know, a breakup... with one of our girlfriends... you know, those girlfriends that we have.
After chatting with Caesar (who also helped test the airpanel), we agreed that this device is really a "glimpse of the future". We imagine that one day we will not need to be right in front of a computer just to control our other computers. We will be able to travel anywhere in a modern city and use an independent, portable device (cell phone, PDA, tablet PC, airpanel, etc.) to access or control the PC sitting at home. Will such a day ever arrive? Who's to say? But the airpanel does seem kind of futuristic.
Such a day came for me a long time ago, when I started running a TightVNC server on my desktop. I can access it on my laptop. I can access it on my PDA (a little cumbersome on my iPaq's 320x240 screen, though). And, here's the best part, I can access it anywhere, through any java-enabled web browser.
VNC, on my home network, is extremely zippy (as in watching DVDs is no problem zippy), and is even entirely useful for web browsing and document editing from far across the Internet. The TightVNC enhancements (integrated JPEG compression, etc.) also make a big difference in maximizing the intelligent use of available bandwidth which, judging by the article, Microsoft's RDC definitely does not. There is, however, one caveat: no integrated audio support. For that, I suppose you'll have to look at the network transparency feature in arts.
Yep, you're exactly right. We constructed a multiblock design and controlled the whole thing with an Apple IIe.
Incidentally, PCR was patented in 1993, if I recall properly, meaning the patent has at least another decade on it. And yes, polymerase is irritatingly expensive.
Well, the impact of this all depends on what is meant by "tools". A lot of the tools of the trade for genetic research (lysing and ligand enzymes, PCR machines, etc.) can easily be purchased from many scientific suppliers, and the methods for creating such tools are well enough known that they can easily be replicated (at my old high school, I kid you not, the Biology teacher and some students constructed a fully functional home-made PCR setup using off-the-shelf hobbyist robotics compnents).
Now, what I'm thinking is that this fellow is proposing "open research". This is a direct reaction to the flurry of biotech patents we've seen over the last few years. Instead of jeleaously gaurding any new biotechnological inventions or discoveries, they would be shared with the community and opened up for peer review. My, that sounds familiar... maybe because it's what the process of scientific inquiry has depended on for centuries. In fact, you might recall that when RMS founded the FSF, his goal was to rekindle the spirit of "software as science" that had existed in the early days of computing. In the days of "biotech as business", scientific openness is an old idea whose time has once again come.
No offense taken. In actuality, I agree with you that trust is a necessary basis for any healthy human relationship. Also, please don't think that I meant to offend your generation with my comments, as they were meant in a very tongue in cheek manner. In fact, my mother was programming mainframes before I was born, so my chances to actually outsmart her are few and far between (she programmed on OS/360, and I'm a UNIX kid, but you get the idea).
Anyway, I think parents do have a right, even a responsibility, to control what their children encounter at a young age. If the rules are not relaxed as the child grows older, however, the parent is not preparing their child for the real world. From what I've read, you seem to be a very good parent in that you're teaching your children to rely on their own conscience for moral guidance.
Ultimately, it becomes an issue of what's appropriate at what age. Should your 10-year-old be allowed to use IM without supervision? Almost definitely not. Sould your 17-year-old? Of course. The responsibility of the child also matters (e.g. in High School I could basically set my own curfew, because I always called to check in with my parents, I didn't drink, etc. My younger sister has stricter rules).
Please know that I only intended my comments to lampoon that small minority of parents who are both technically clueless and paternally tyrannical. For children faced with that situation, I've detailed a few methods as a partial remedy, but as I indicated in another post, you have a responsibility *to yourself* if you use them. Ultimately, both parents and children have to remember that the Internet, for better or worse, is becoming a more and more integral part of society. Just as children need both guidance and freedom to become good citizens, they need the same to become good Internet citizens. Neither unfettered Internet access nor a parental censorship regime is an appropriate substitute for good parenting, which as you so aptly put, requires trust.
By no means would I encourage anyone to use my tips to do things truly morally reprehensible. I'd just like to remind everyone that, with the freedom gained through the methods I outlined, there comes a certain responsibility. Remember, you're trying gain some privacy, not proove that your parents were right not to trust you in the first place.
Anyway, part of the need teenagers feel for privacy is tied in with their desire to become individuals independent from their parents. Are they totally ready at age 15? Hell, no, but in order to develop as human beings, they're going to need freedom, which they won't always make the best use of. The fact is, however, when the kids move out and are off on their own, whether they behave as ethical people depends mostly on whether their parents instilled moral values in them and TRUSTED them to make the right decisions even when they weren't looking.
So kids, if you devise ways of taking matters into your own hands, so to speak, remember that you have a responsibility *to yourself* when you do so. Think about the kind of person you want to be in 5, 10, 20 years, and you'll do fine.
Well, I find that being able to outsmart one's parents definitely provides a measure of privacy. Here's a few steps you can follow at home, kids (don't forget NOT to ask Mom and Dad's permission):
1. If you have your own computer, install Linux. If your parents have ties to the NSA, better make that OpenBSD instead. The fact is that, unless one of your parents has a beer gut, wears t-shirts with slacks, and hasn't groomed their beard in a couple of decades, they don't know how to use UNIX. You could leave it logged in as root all the time, and they probably wouldn't know what the hell was going on (not that I'm suggesting you do that. Use strong passwords!).
2. Encrypt your data. You can do this on your own machine or the family one, doesn't matter. GPG is available for Windows, Mac, and loads of Unices. It's also a simple, unobtrusive command-line tool that you can use to pretty well scramble anything.
3. Hide your files. On UNIX machines where you have root, chown them to root, then put them in a directory that only root can read (su to retrieve them). If you don't have root on a UNIX box, at least give them the standard '.' prefix. In windows, I recommend tacking on a ".sys" extension and hiding them somewhere in the C:\WINDOWS tree. As far as Macs go, just use the ol' unix '.' trick, and Finder will be none the wiser (I think, I don't have a Mac to test this on).
4. Browse anonymously. Back when anonymizer was free, it was a great solution. Nowadays, you'll probably need a friend to set up a server in a safe, uncensored environment. I recommend school buddies with apathetic/permissive/hippie/workaholic parents, as this lessens the likelyhood that you'll run into trouble. A dedicated *nix server with a simple redirector CGI would be nice, but for all the legions of windows users out there, this would appear to be an excellent option.
5. Cover your tracks. Clear browser history. On Windows, clear the list of recently accessed documents. If you have root on a UNIX box, flush the logs.
6. Encrypt transfers. Enigmail for mozilla and the encryption plugin for gaim are your friends.
7. Make your data look innocuous. Chatting with some friends on IM? Why not chat in Arabic (if you're on an unecrypted connection, be aware that this method reduces the possibility for parental-snooping, but increases the likelyhood of unconstitutional racial profiling. You've been warned). If you don't have the time or inclination to learn a foreign language, at least learn ROT-13. ROT-13 is so simple that, after a few weeks of practice, the overhead for conversing in it online gets to be pretty low. Keep in mind that it's by no means secure, but it prevents parents from catching naughty words with their peripheral vision. If your friends aren't as "safety-conscious" as you, you can probably write a quick script to do ROT-13 on the fly to incoming messages. Learning to do RSA in your head would be truly impressive (I can do it with small keys with pen and paper, but nothing's stopping you short of the computational limit of the human brain)
The moral of this story is that clever children can cheat their way out of a lot of parental and societal rules. When I was living at home, I used some of the methods above to keep certain data safe (e.g. IMs with my girlfriend), but curiously, I didn't use it to browse porn and the like. The reason? My parents didn't constantly snoop to make sure I wasn't breaking the rules, they just raised me with the conviction that sexual intimacy is a beautiful thing between two people, and that commercial exploitation cheapens that, and they trusted me to make the right choices when they weren't around. If you never give your kids a chance to make bad decisions, they'll never learn how to make good ones.
Ah, good point (and from an AC, I'm impressed). The preemtible kernel and fast-scheduling patches on my machine probably do make a big difference.
One then has to wonder whether the benchmarkers in the article made use of gaming-sources. My bet is they didn't, since one of their benchmarks was a kernel-compile, and vanilla-sources were most likely used to balance that out. Anyway, the available experimental kernels on Gentoo are a part of the Gentoo advantage.
Of course, you CAN manually patch your kernel with any other distro, but there's something so satisfying about just typing "emerge gaming-sources". Come to think of it, there's something very satisfying about typing emerge anything. It's like a better apt (no download sources editing, and automatic optimized compiles). Of course, the downside is that compiling everything from source means that installs take much longer, but a single-command install is also pretty damn user-friendly.
Anyway, don't get me wrong, performance isn't the only reason I use gentoo. The fact that it's super-configurable is a big plus, too, as is the portage system, which I just love. I'm really not suggesting it as an end-user distro, though, as I doubt most home users want to tweak compile flags. Mandrake is still damn good for those folks.
What Linux on the desktop all comes down to, though, is options. Not every desktop needs a windows media player sidebar or a pretty auto-zooming dock. Gentoo Linux basically lets enterprises (and enterprising end-users) build whatever desktop they want, while some other distros make it painless to get up-and-running with very sensible defaults.
I haven't benchmarked this personally, but I can tell you that, qualitatively, Gentoo "feels" significantly faster than Mandrake or Debian on the same machine, and leaves Win2K in the dust.
I noticed that, in the article, the following CFLAGS were used in the test:
CFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -pipe -O3"
Now, even ignoring all the various hacks tacked on to the end of my CFLAGS line, there are some VERY important flags that the benchmarkers seem to have left out. For one, on a 2 GHz Celeron, march should be set to pentium4, so that gcc will optimize for the newer celeron core and use sse2, among other things. Using mfpmath=sse also yeilds a very significant performance benefit, as it optimizes ALL floating-point calculations for the sse SIMD instructions.
Anyway, if we had a different set of CFLAGS, one could definitely expect sse/sse2 optimizations to have yeilded a GREAT performance increase in the GIMP test, while the various memory and loop optimizations from my CFLAGS would almost certainly have edged Gentoo ahead in the gnumeric and kernel compile benchmarks.
1. Mozilla is actually quite fast, especially compared to the competition (in essence, Internet Explorer). The monolithic Internet suite approach definitely does introduce some unnecessary overhead, but as Mozilla moves towards a modular model based on Firebird and Thunderbird, you can expect this to be remedied. The only major desktop browser that's left to consider, really, is Safari. Well, as it happens, Safari is based on KHTML, and the advantages of the very lightweight and speedy Safari are all present on Linux with Konqueror (which, incidentally, doesn't have the additional CPU/GPU overhead associated with Apple's Quartz framework).
2. X is not a bad framework. Features like network-transparency and the like are, in fact, VERY important in environments where thin-clients/servers are common. XFree86, in particular, is being forked every which way at the moment which, while at first glance seems like trouble, will probably wind up introducing some very interesting innovations, both in terms of processing and memory-efficiency and eye-candy. In the meantime, XFree86 provides a compatible, stable base that is more than fast enough on modern desktop hardware.
3. KDE and GNOME are not one-size-fits-all desktop environments. They are designed to be flexible and extensible and, as such, they tend to be more complex than, say, XP's Luna or the Mac's Aqua (incidentally, Luna absolutely sucks eggs as far as speed and bloat go, and while Aqua is admirably efficient given all that it does, one still must consider all that it does in terms of rendering iCandy). This flexibility is not necessarily a weekness, as it allows a desktop to be tuned for a particular user's needs, ranging from thin-client type apps to my dual-display K desktop littered with SuperKaramba themes. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that feature-set vs. performance is not a huge issue on modern desktops, and in places where it is (like embedded systems) Linux has very sleek, slim alternatives that still manage to be pretty and functional (like, for example, Opie). There are also desktop alternatives available for the KDE and GNOME-hating, thanks again to the modularity of X keeping the window manager and the display server seperate, ranging from GNUStep to Ratpoison.
4. You've got a point about OpenOffice, I must admit. It's not necessarily a bad system, but then again, it's not really anything more than an Office clone. A free and very portable Office clone, but an Office clone nonetheless. One of the good things about Linux desktop software that I mentioned above is that it doesn't try to recreate Windows or Mac with precision, but rather provide a very flexible framework that can be adapted to the user's needs. OpenOffice definitely doesn't fit in with this philosophy, but I'm sure that there are other projects going on out there working to redefine how we think of Office suites. And if not, somebody ought to get to work on that.;)
5. Just a side note, Fedora isn't exactly the examplar of Linux's efficiency and performance. Go Gentoo!
What all the above boils down to is this: Does Linux have a way to go before becoming the perfect desktop OS? Certainly, and work is ongoing towards this goal. However, we must also ask another question: Is Linux, at this moment in time, a better choice than Windows or Mac for many users and businesses? Absolutely, and it's looking better every day.
In all likelyhood, the K9 will be based on AMD's x86-64 instruction set, the same as the Opteron and Athlon 64/FX. x86-64, as far as I know, looks pretty much like a regular CISC x86 cpu at the assembly level, just with intruction and data blocks that are twice the size (it's even natively binary-compatible with regular 32-bit x86 code).
A good comparison here is Sun's SPARC line of RISC processors. The original SPARC chips were 32-bit, then Sun introduced the UltraSPARC, a 64-bit version of the same architecture that retained binary compatibility, but could be programmed in 64 bits as well.
Hell, those of us who are old enough remember when x86 was only a 16-bit architecture (80286, anyone?). The 386 was the chip that made the transition, and it, like the K8, was fully backwards compatible and programmed very much like its predecessor. Incidentally, Linux was a fully 32-bit OS in 1991, and Windows only got there with NT, and not on the desktop until::shudder:: XP (and before someone says it, Windows 9X wasn't a fully 32-bit OS. It was enough to break compatibility with 16-bit processors, sure, but a lot of the system was still implemented in old-school 286-style assembly). Nowadays, Linux already has mature ports on a bunch of 64-bit platforms, including the two x86-ish ones: ia64 and x86-64. Windows users can have fun waiting for 64-bit XP to crash their systems up to 4 TIMES FASTER. Hooray!
First of all, I'd like to say that it's pretty damn ironic that the PRC would be the source of the world's only free (as in freedom) microprocessor architecture, given the pretty horrendous record that the chinese government has regarding freedom of expression, dissent, etc. That said, despite my distaste for the governement (which is *slowly*, but somewhat consistently, reforming), I do have a great admiration for the Chinese people and their cultural, scientific, and technological achievements, and if China can produce the next uppity underdog of the CPU world (think AMD's K6), then more power to them. And bonus points if the thing stays DRM-free (which isn't a sure thing. You might just be "trusted" by the government instead of big corporations).
One thing we ought to remember, though, is that the chip is RISC-based (no word on which subset of the RISC family, though), and thus binary-incompatible with x86, x86-64, and Itanium/Merced (all CISC) software. Of course, we can assume that Linux and other multiplatform free OSes will be highly source-compatible with the new platform, but then again, it's quite unlikely that any of those OSes would move in a pro-DRM direction (and, of course, a DRM-free fork could always be developed). If you want to run commercial apps, though, your only option on the Dragon is emulation, which is going to be vastly more complex when a Palladium-type architecture has to be emulated or faked as well.
That said, I think I may have an idea for how a truly free architecture might be developed: software-defined CPUs. Transmeta's crusoe is one example of this sort of technology. A small, simple VLIW processor core could "run" what, externally, appears to be an x86, Dragon, or practically anything else on top of itself. If someone designed such a chip with freely available documentation, it would be MUCH easier for hobbyist developers to create and maintain computing architectures without draconian IP restrictions. It would even, conceivably, be possible to write a virtual processor that emulates DRM functionality externally to commercial software, but protects the user's privacy at a level that is not visible to system software. Or, you can just use free software and not worry about all that, focusing instead on building a kick-ass virtual processor architecture, which is itself protected from DRM in the same way that OSS is.
I actually know one of the people on the hall of fame, a young man named Douglas Li. A couple of months after he completed his solution, he and I competed together on Michigan's all-star high school math team for ARML (American Regions Math League). He's quite good with mathematics in general, and both he and I scored about par for the course in the individual portion of the competition.
What I'll never forget, though, is that on the bus ride from Michigan to Iowa, he would take particular challenges on his Rubik's cube. Before the trip, he disassembled and oiled his cube so that he could make moves more quickly. He could solve any 3x3x3 in under 30 seconds by examining all faces of the cube, then pretty much spinning it on autopilot. He took a little longer for a 5x5x5. A rubik's dodecahedron actually gave him a run for his money, but after about 45 minutes of puzzling, he got it.
The most interesting thing he accomplished, though, was creating an image of a rose, with stem, on one of the faces of a 5x5x5. We suggested that he use it to ask a girl to prom. No word yet on whether he did, but if so, that's surely worthy of the hall of fame, don't you think?
Funny, I always thought the Matrix was more like Descartes' "Malicious Demon", who has conspired to decieve an individual from birth into believing in an utterly false conception of reality. Starting by assuming that the existence of said demon is possible, Descartes began to reason that only his own internal thoughts were not suspect (and even then, his thoughts must have been colored by perception. Who is to say that 2 + 2 = 4 is not itself a deception?). This led to his eventual famous formulation: I think, therefore I am.
I could go on at length about his "ghost in the machine" concept here, but I'll hold my tongue, as I don't feel like typing all that. Suffice to say, the Matrix has a good number of Cartesian themes.
Anyway, the Matrix isn't meant to introduce genuinely revolutionary concepts in Philosophy. It does, however, serve as an excellent vehicle for conveying Philosophical concepts in an entertaining, easily accesible way. Plato himself did this by writing dialogues: Sure, he expoused all sorts of interesting ideas in works like the Republic, but he related them much more fluidly in the dialogues (except for Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito, which were really about his teacher Socrates). No, the Wachowskis aren't possessed of Socratic wisdom, but they are much like the great poets whom Socrates questioned: they have an intuitive knowledge of their art, and through their work they introduce the masses to ideas that they wouldn't ordinarily come across, and this is definately a *good thing*.
China IS negotiating with North Korea. The problem is that the North Korean government keeps refusing to engage in any productive dialogue with China, South Korea, or Japan until they can get the US to talk directly.
Actually, I think you misunderstand me. I do NOT in any way approve of the US invading North Korea. The costs would simply be far too high, even if the DPRK did not possess nuclear weapons (which it might). Even now, there are North Korean artillery in place which can fire 50,000 rounds an hour into downtown Seoul. A military conflict there would be disasterous.
What I am advocating is that we step up negotiations with North Korea, which China, South Korea, and Japan are all trying to persuade us to do. If our senate would have ratified the 1994 treaty, which would have given North Korea a couple of nuclear power plants jointly run by the US and Japan, this nuclear standoff could likely have been averted. In the meantime, North Korea's goals are still basically diplomatic: the regime there wants normalization of relations with the US, a non-agression treaty, and a return of fuel and power aid.
Additionally, I would like to note that China's government does have mixed feelings about North Korea. On the one hand, China has always enjoyed having another communist state as a "buffer" in the region. On the other hand, North Korea has become an albatross about China's neck. Without assistance from the Chinese government, North Korea would essentially collapse, both politically and economically, and the cost to China of maintaining that regime keeps getting higher. Additionally, China has (albiet slowly) been making economic and political reforms aimed at democratizing Chinese society and promoting more private industry. North Korea is not making similar efforts, which has caused the two countries to be farther apart politically than ever before. If anything, China is interested in being a partner with the US in resolving the Korean crises. The PRC, like the US, realizes it is in noone's interested to have a nuclear Korean peninsula.
Personally, I have opposed this war for a long time. I agree absolutely with the Bush administration that Hussein is a terrible dictator, but I have a hard time grasping why we are not dealing with a fundamentally more dangerous situation in North Korea, or why we are at this very moment "allied" with a military government in Pakistan, a Monarchy which is only nominally friendly in Saudi Arabia (interesting note: about half of all Americans believe most of the September 11th hijackers were Iraqi, not Saudi). Anyway, I believe that supporting bad governments for short-term gain is only going to wind up hurting us in the long run (as it did with our support of Hussein in the 1980s).
Furthermore, it is impossible to declare war on one man. If we could truly only direct our action against Hussein and his thugs, this would be an entirely different matter. The fact is, though, that the Iraqi people, as well as the American and allied troops, are going to suffer terrible losses in this war. War is always hell, no matter what the reason, and if a war can be averted, and the noble goals of disarmament and democratization achieved through peaceful means, then the path of diplomacy, however difficult, should be pursued.
That said, it is now entirely apparant that we are at war. I, like the vast majority of anti-war Americans, support our troops. I am grateful that my country has so many brave young men and women who are willing to endure the horrors of combat for their country. I pray that their lives and the lives of the Iraqi people are spared. I still, however, disagree with my president's decision. As Theodore Roosevelt once said, it is even more important for the people of America to scrutinize their leader's actions of time of war than in time of peace. I hope for the best possible outcome to be salvaged from this conflict, but I am deeply saddened that it came to this.
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I had hoped you were being sarcastic, and I was going to make a little apology in this post, but then I noticed the following sig from your comment history:
Hell hath no fury like the vast robot army of a woman scorned
So now, I just don't know what to think. ;) In all seriousness, though, please know that my comment was made with my tongue firmly lodged in my cheek. It's just a little joke my geek friends and I tell eachother to lighten the mood, say, after a breakup. You know, a breakup... with one of our girlfriends... you know, those girlfriends that we have.
From the article:
After chatting with Caesar (who also helped test the airpanel), we agreed that this device is really a "glimpse of the future". We imagine that one day we will not need to be right in front of a computer just to control our other computers. We will be able to travel anywhere in a modern city and use an independent, portable device (cell phone, PDA, tablet PC, airpanel, etc.) to access or control the PC sitting at home. Will such a day ever arrive? Who's to say? But the airpanel does seem kind of futuristic.
Such a day came for me a long time ago, when I started running a TightVNC server on my desktop. I can access it on my laptop. I can access it on my PDA (a little cumbersome on my iPaq's 320x240 screen, though). And, here's the best part, I can access it anywhere, through any java-enabled web browser.
VNC, on my home network, is extremely zippy (as in watching DVDs is no problem zippy), and is even entirely useful for web browsing and document editing from far across the Internet. The TightVNC enhancements (integrated JPEG compression, etc.) also make a big difference in maximizing the intelligent use of available bandwidth which, judging by the article, Microsoft's RDC definitely does not. There is, however, one caveat: no integrated audio support. For that, I suppose you'll have to look at the network transparency feature in arts.
This one requires a little bit of visualization, so get out a pen and paper if necessary. Some friends and I once wrote the following on a chalkboard:
integral e^x = f(un)
The teacher, upon seeing this, showed his appreciation by adding a subscript ny to the right side of the equation.
Now for another one of my personal favorites, told in the manner of an algebraic proof.
1. Girls require time and money. Or, to say it another way, girls are the product of an investment of time and money:
girls = time * money
2. Time is money:
time = money
3. Therefore, by substitution:
girls = (money)^2
4. According to the new testament, money is the root of all evil:
money = (all evil)^(1/2)
5.Performing another subsitution:
girls = all evil
Yep, you're exactly right. We constructed a multiblock design and controlled the whole thing with an Apple IIe.
Incidentally, PCR was patented in 1993, if I recall properly, meaning the patent has at least another decade on it. And yes, polymerase is irritatingly expensive.
Well, the impact of this all depends on what is meant by "tools". A lot of the tools of the trade for genetic research (lysing and ligand enzymes, PCR machines, etc.) can easily be purchased from many scientific suppliers, and the methods for creating such tools are well enough known that they can easily be replicated (at my old high school, I kid you not, the Biology teacher and some students constructed a fully functional home-made PCR setup using off-the-shelf hobbyist robotics compnents).
Now, what I'm thinking is that this fellow is proposing "open research". This is a direct reaction to the flurry of biotech patents we've seen over the last few years. Instead of jeleaously gaurding any new biotechnological inventions or discoveries, they would be shared with the community and opened up for peer review. My, that sounds familiar... maybe because it's what the process of scientific inquiry has depended on for centuries. In fact, you might recall that when RMS founded the FSF, his goal was to rekindle the spirit of "software as science" that had existed in the early days of computing. In the days of "biotech as business", scientific openness is an old idea whose time has once again come.
Well, I'll be damned, you're right. I'm getting significantly better performance from the following:
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -m3dnow -msse -mfpmath=sse -mmmx -Os -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -frename-registers"
Good call.
No offense taken. In actuality, I agree with you that trust is a necessary basis for any healthy human relationship. Also, please don't think that I meant to offend your generation with my comments, as they were meant in a very tongue in cheek manner. In fact, my mother was programming mainframes before I was born, so my chances to actually outsmart her are few and far between (she programmed on OS/360, and I'm a UNIX kid, but you get the idea).
Anyway, I think parents do have a right, even a responsibility, to control what their children encounter at a young age. If the rules are not relaxed as the child grows older, however, the parent is not preparing their child for the real world. From what I've read, you seem to be a very good parent in that you're teaching your children to rely on their own conscience for moral guidance.
Ultimately, it becomes an issue of what's appropriate at what age. Should your 10-year-old be allowed to use IM without supervision? Almost definitely not. Sould your 17-year-old? Of course. The responsibility of the child also matters (e.g. in High School I could basically set my own curfew, because I always called to check in with my parents, I didn't drink, etc. My younger sister has stricter rules).
Please know that I only intended my comments to lampoon that small minority of parents who are both technically clueless and paternally tyrannical. For children faced with that situation, I've detailed a few methods as a partial remedy, but as I indicated in another post, you have a responsibility *to yourself* if you use them. Ultimately, both parents and children have to remember that the Internet, for better or worse, is becoming a more and more integral part of society. Just as children need both guidance and freedom to become good citizens, they need the same to become good Internet citizens. Neither unfettered Internet access nor a parental censorship regime is an appropriate substitute for good parenting, which as you so aptly put, requires trust.
By no means would I encourage anyone to use my tips to do things truly morally reprehensible. I'd just like to remind everyone that, with the freedom gained through the methods I outlined, there comes a certain responsibility. Remember, you're trying gain some privacy, not proove that your parents were right not to trust you in the first place.
Anyway, part of the need teenagers feel for privacy is tied in with their desire to become individuals independent from their parents. Are they totally ready at age 15? Hell, no, but in order to develop as human beings, they're going to need freedom, which they won't always make the best use of. The fact is, however, when the kids move out and are off on their own, whether they behave as ethical people depends mostly on whether their parents instilled moral values in them and TRUSTED them to make the right decisions even when they weren't looking.
So kids, if you devise ways of taking matters into your own hands, so to speak, remember that you have a responsibility *to yourself* when you do so. Think about the kind of person you want to be in 5, 10, 20 years, and you'll do fine.
Dude, you made your girlfriend chat with you using ROT-13? I bet that took some doing.
Who says it wasn't HER who made ME use ROT-13. ;)
In actuality, we chatted in plaintext, since I was using my own machine in my room most of the time. I encrypted my logs with GPG, however.
Well, I find that being able to outsmart one's parents definitely provides a measure of privacy. Here's a few steps you can follow at home, kids (don't forget NOT to ask Mom and Dad's permission):
1. If you have your own computer, install Linux. If your parents have ties to the NSA, better make that OpenBSD instead. The fact is that, unless one of your parents has a beer gut, wears t-shirts with slacks, and hasn't groomed their beard in a couple of decades, they don't know how to use UNIX. You could leave it logged in as root all the time, and they probably wouldn't know what the hell was going on (not that I'm suggesting you do that. Use strong passwords!).
2. Encrypt your data. You can do this on your own machine or the family one, doesn't matter. GPG is available for Windows, Mac, and loads of Unices. It's also a simple, unobtrusive command-line tool that you can use to pretty well scramble anything.
3. Hide your files. On UNIX machines where you have root, chown them to root, then put them in a directory that only root can read (su to retrieve them). If you don't have root on a UNIX box, at least give them the standard '.' prefix. In windows, I recommend tacking on a ".sys" extension and hiding them somewhere in the C:\WINDOWS tree. As far as Macs go, just use the ol' unix '.' trick, and Finder will be none the wiser (I think, I don't have a Mac to test this on).
4. Browse anonymously. Back when anonymizer was free, it was a great solution. Nowadays, you'll probably need a friend to set up a server in a safe, uncensored environment. I recommend school buddies with apathetic/permissive/hippie/workaholic parents, as this lessens the likelyhood that you'll run into trouble. A dedicated *nix server with a simple redirector CGI would be nice, but for all the legions of windows users out there, this would appear to be an excellent option.
5. Cover your tracks. Clear browser history. On Windows, clear the list of recently accessed documents. If you have root on a UNIX box, flush the logs.
6. Encrypt transfers. Enigmail for mozilla and the encryption plugin for gaim are your friends.
7. Make your data look innocuous. Chatting with some friends on IM? Why not chat in Arabic (if you're on an unecrypted connection, be aware that this method reduces the possibility for parental-snooping, but increases the likelyhood of unconstitutional racial profiling. You've been warned). If you don't have the time or inclination to learn a foreign language, at least learn ROT-13. ROT-13 is so simple that, after a few weeks of practice, the overhead for conversing in it online gets to be pretty low. Keep in mind that it's by no means secure, but it prevents parents from catching naughty words with their peripheral vision. If your friends aren't as "safety-conscious" as you, you can probably write a quick script to do ROT-13 on the fly to incoming messages. Learning to do RSA in your head would be truly impressive (I can do it with small keys with pen and paper, but nothing's stopping you short of the computational limit of the human brain)
The moral of this story is that clever children can cheat their way out of a lot of parental and societal rules. When I was living at home, I used some of the methods above to keep certain data safe (e.g. IMs with my girlfriend), but curiously, I didn't use it to browse porn and the like. The reason? My parents didn't constantly snoop to make sure I wasn't breaking the rules, they just raised me with the conviction that sexual intimacy is a beautiful thing between two people, and that commercial exploitation cheapens that, and they trusted me to make the right choices when they weren't around. If you never give your kids a chance to make bad decisions, they'll never learn how to make good ones.
Ah, good point (and from an AC, I'm impressed). The preemtible kernel and fast-scheduling patches on my machine probably do make a big difference.
One then has to wonder whether the benchmarkers in the article made use of gaming-sources. My bet is they didn't, since one of their benchmarks was a kernel-compile, and vanilla-sources were most likely used to balance that out. Anyway, the available experimental kernels on Gentoo are a part of the Gentoo advantage.
Of course, you CAN manually patch your kernel with any other distro, but there's something so satisfying about just typing "emerge gaming-sources". Come to think of it, there's something very satisfying about typing emerge anything. It's like a better apt (no download sources editing, and automatic optimized compiles). Of course, the downside is that compiling everything from source means that installs take much longer, but a single-command install is also pretty damn user-friendly.
Anyway, don't get me wrong, performance isn't the only reason I use gentoo. The fact that it's super-configurable is a big plus, too, as is the portage system, which I just love. I'm really not suggesting it as an end-user distro, though, as I doubt most home users want to tweak compile flags. Mandrake is still damn good for those folks.
What Linux on the desktop all comes down to, though, is options. Not every desktop needs a windows media player sidebar or a pretty auto-zooming dock. Gentoo Linux basically lets enterprises (and enterprising end-users) build whatever desktop they want, while some other distros make it painless to get up-and-running with very sensible defaults.
Gentoo's advantage all depends on how heavily you optimize with default CFLAGS. I use the following on my Athlon XP:
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -m3dnow -msse -mfpmath=sse -mmmx -O3 -pipe -fforce-addr -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -falign-functions=4 -maccumulate-outgoing-args -ffast-math -fprefetch-loop-arrays"
I haven't benchmarked this personally, but I can tell you that, qualitatively, Gentoo "feels" significantly faster than Mandrake or Debian on the same machine, and leaves Win2K in the dust.
I noticed that, in the article, the following CFLAGS were used in the test:
CFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -pipe -O3"
Now, even ignoring all the various hacks tacked on to the end of my CFLAGS line, there are some VERY important flags that the benchmarkers seem to have left out. For one, on a 2 GHz Celeron, march should be set to pentium4, so that gcc will optimize for the newer celeron core and use sse2, among other things. Using mfpmath=sse also yeilds a very significant performance benefit, as it optimizes ALL floating-point calculations for the sse SIMD instructions.
Anyway, if we had a different set of CFLAGS, one could definitely expect sse/sse2 optimizations to have yeilded a GREAT performance increase in the GIMP test, while the various memory and loop optimizations from my CFLAGS would almost certainly have edged Gentoo ahead in the gnumeric and kernel compile benchmarks.
Just a few notes here:
1. Mozilla is actually quite fast, especially compared to the competition (in essence, Internet Explorer). The monolithic Internet suite approach definitely does introduce some unnecessary overhead, but as Mozilla moves towards a modular model based on Firebird and Thunderbird, you can expect this to be remedied. The only major desktop browser that's left to consider, really, is Safari. Well, as it happens, Safari is based on KHTML, and the advantages of the very lightweight and speedy Safari are all present on Linux with Konqueror (which, incidentally, doesn't have the additional CPU/GPU overhead associated with Apple's Quartz framework).
2. X is not a bad framework. Features like network-transparency and the like are, in fact, VERY important in environments where thin-clients/servers are common. XFree86, in particular, is being forked every which way at the moment which, while at first glance seems like trouble, will probably wind up introducing some very interesting innovations, both in terms of processing and memory-efficiency and eye-candy. In the meantime, XFree86 provides a compatible, stable base that is more than fast enough on modern desktop hardware.
3. KDE and GNOME are not one-size-fits-all desktop environments. They are designed to be flexible and extensible and, as such, they tend to be more complex than, say, XP's Luna or the Mac's Aqua (incidentally, Luna absolutely sucks eggs as far as speed and bloat go, and while Aqua is admirably efficient given all that it does, one still must consider all that it does in terms of rendering iCandy). This flexibility is not necessarily a weekness, as it allows a desktop to be tuned for a particular user's needs, ranging from thin-client type apps to my dual-display K desktop littered with SuperKaramba themes. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that feature-set vs. performance is not a huge issue on modern desktops, and in places where it is (like embedded systems) Linux has very sleek, slim alternatives that still manage to be pretty and functional (like, for example, Opie). There are also desktop alternatives available for the KDE and GNOME-hating, thanks again to the modularity of X keeping the window manager and the display server seperate, ranging from GNUStep to Ratpoison.
4. You've got a point about OpenOffice, I must admit. It's not necessarily a bad system, but then again, it's not really anything more than an Office clone. A free and very portable Office clone, but an Office clone nonetheless. One of the good things about Linux desktop software that I mentioned above is that it doesn't try to recreate Windows or Mac with precision, but rather provide a very flexible framework that can be adapted to the user's needs. OpenOffice definitely doesn't fit in with this philosophy, but I'm sure that there are other projects going on out there working to redefine how we think of Office suites. And if not, somebody ought to get to work on that. ;)
5. Just a side note, Fedora isn't exactly the examplar of Linux's efficiency and performance. Go Gentoo!
What all the above boils down to is this: Does Linux have a way to go before becoming the perfect desktop OS? Certainly, and work is ongoing towards this goal. However, we must also ask another question: Is Linux, at this moment in time, a better choice than Windows or Mac for many users and businesses? Absolutely, and it's looking better every day.
In all likelyhood, the K9 will be based on AMD's x86-64 instruction set, the same as the Opteron and Athlon 64/FX. x86-64, as far as I know, looks pretty much like a regular CISC x86 cpu at the assembly level, just with intruction and data blocks that are twice the size (it's even natively binary-compatible with regular 32-bit x86 code).
::shudder:: XP (and before someone says it, Windows 9X wasn't a fully 32-bit OS. It was enough to break compatibility with 16-bit processors, sure, but a lot of the system was still implemented in old-school 286-style assembly). Nowadays, Linux already has mature ports on a bunch of 64-bit platforms, including the two x86-ish ones: ia64 and x86-64. Windows users can have fun waiting for 64-bit XP to crash their systems up to 4 TIMES FASTER. Hooray!
A good comparison here is Sun's SPARC line of RISC processors. The original SPARC chips were 32-bit, then Sun introduced the UltraSPARC, a 64-bit version of the same architecture that retained binary compatibility, but could be programmed in 64 bits as well.
Hell, those of us who are old enough remember when x86 was only a 16-bit architecture (80286, anyone?). The 386 was the chip that made the transition, and it, like the K8, was fully backwards compatible and programmed very much like its predecessor. Incidentally, Linux was a fully 32-bit OS in 1991, and Windows only got there with NT, and not on the desktop until
So in other words, use an OO language or use complete and utter shit (*cough* VB *cough*).
First of all, I'd like to say that it's pretty damn ironic that the PRC would be the source of the world's only free (as in freedom) microprocessor architecture, given the pretty horrendous record that the chinese government has regarding freedom of expression, dissent, etc. That said, despite my distaste for the governement (which is *slowly*, but somewhat consistently, reforming), I do have a great admiration for the Chinese people and their cultural, scientific, and technological achievements, and if China can produce the next uppity underdog of the CPU world (think AMD's K6), then more power to them. And bonus points if the thing stays DRM-free (which isn't a sure thing. You might just be "trusted" by the government instead of big corporations).
One thing we ought to remember, though, is that the chip is RISC-based (no word on which subset of the RISC family, though), and thus binary-incompatible with x86, x86-64, and Itanium/Merced (all CISC) software. Of course, we can assume that Linux and other multiplatform free OSes will be highly source-compatible with the new platform, but then again, it's quite unlikely that any of those OSes would move in a pro-DRM direction (and, of course, a DRM-free fork could always be developed). If you want to run commercial apps, though, your only option on the Dragon is emulation, which is going to be vastly more complex when a Palladium-type architecture has to be emulated or faked as well.
That said, I think I may have an idea for how a truly free architecture might be developed: software-defined CPUs. Transmeta's crusoe is one example of this sort of technology. A small, simple VLIW processor core could "run" what, externally, appears to be an x86, Dragon, or practically anything else on top of itself. If someone designed such a chip with freely available documentation, it would be MUCH easier for hobbyist developers to create and maintain computing architectures without draconian IP restrictions. It would even, conceivably, be possible to write a virtual processor that emulates DRM functionality externally to commercial software, but protects the user's privacy at a level that is not visible to system software. Or, you can just use free software and not worry about all that, focusing instead on building a kick-ass virtual processor architecture, which is itself protected from DRM in the same way that OSS is.
Now altruism, love, honesty, and virtue are all patent infringement.
I actually know one of the people on the hall of fame, a young man named Douglas Li. A couple of months after he completed his solution, he and I competed together on Michigan's all-star high school math team for ARML (American Regions Math League). He's quite good with mathematics in general, and both he and I scored about par for the course in the individual portion of the competition.
What I'll never forget, though, is that on the bus ride from Michigan to Iowa, he would take particular challenges on his Rubik's cube. Before the trip, he disassembled and oiled his cube so that he could make moves more quickly. He could solve any 3x3x3 in under 30 seconds by examining all faces of the cube, then pretty much spinning it on autopilot. He took a little longer for a 5x5x5. A rubik's dodecahedron actually gave him a run for his money, but after about 45 minutes of puzzling, he got it.
The most interesting thing he accomplished, though, was creating an image of a rose, with stem, on one of the faces of a 5x5x5. We suggested that he use it to ask a girl to prom. No word yet on whether he did, but if so, that's surely worthy of the hall of fame, don't you think?
Of course it has Cartesian themes. It's a Matrix, after all.
I apologize for the prior lame math joke in response to my own post and hereby hang my head in shame.
Funny, I always thought the Matrix was more like Descartes' "Malicious Demon", who has conspired to decieve an individual from birth into believing in an utterly false conception of reality. Starting by assuming that the existence of said demon is possible, Descartes began to reason that only his own internal thoughts were not suspect (and even then, his thoughts must have been colored by perception. Who is to say that 2 + 2 = 4 is not itself a deception?). This led to his eventual famous formulation: I think, therefore I am.
I could go on at length about his "ghost in the machine" concept here, but I'll hold my tongue, as I don't feel like typing all that. Suffice to say, the Matrix has a good number of Cartesian themes.
Anyway, the Matrix isn't meant to introduce genuinely revolutionary concepts in Philosophy. It does, however, serve as an excellent vehicle for conveying Philosophical concepts in an entertaining, easily accesible way. Plato himself did this by writing dialogues: Sure, he expoused all sorts of interesting ideas in works like the Republic, but he related them much more fluidly in the dialogues (except for Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito, which were really about his teacher Socrates). No, the Wachowskis aren't possessed of Socratic wisdom, but they are much like the great poets whom Socrates questioned: they have an intuitive knowledge of their art, and through their work they introduce the masses to ideas that they wouldn't ordinarily come across, and this is definately a *good thing*.
To the above two responders: Of course it's a joke! I'm just not trendy enough to use sarcasm tags.
Not on slashdot, my friend. And, incidentally, the title of your post should instead read "While your at it".
China IS negotiating with North Korea. The problem is that the North Korean government keeps refusing to engage in any productive dialogue with China, South Korea, or Japan until they can get the US to talk directly.
Actually, I think you misunderstand me. I do NOT in any way approve of the US invading North Korea. The costs would simply be far too high, even if the DPRK did not possess nuclear weapons (which it might). Even now, there are North Korean artillery in place which can fire 50,000 rounds an hour into downtown Seoul. A military conflict there would be disasterous.
What I am advocating is that we step up negotiations with North Korea, which China, South Korea, and Japan are all trying to persuade us to do. If our senate would have ratified the 1994 treaty, which would have given North Korea a couple of nuclear power plants jointly run by the US and Japan, this nuclear standoff could likely have been averted. In the meantime, North Korea's goals are still basically diplomatic: the regime there wants normalization of relations with the US, a non-agression treaty, and a return of fuel and power aid.
Additionally, I would like to note that China's government does have mixed feelings about North Korea. On the one hand, China has always enjoyed having another communist state as a "buffer" in the region. On the other hand, North Korea has become an albatross about China's neck. Without assistance from the Chinese government, North Korea would essentially collapse, both politically and economically, and the cost to China of maintaining that regime keeps getting higher. Additionally, China has (albiet slowly) been making economic and political reforms aimed at democratizing Chinese society and promoting more private industry. North Korea is not making similar efforts, which has caused the two countries to be farther apart politically than ever before. If anything, China is interested in being a partner with the US in resolving the Korean crises. The PRC, like the US, realizes it is in noone's interested to have a nuclear Korean peninsula.
Personally, I have opposed this war for a long time. I agree absolutely with the Bush administration that Hussein is a terrible dictator, but I have a hard time grasping why we are not dealing with a fundamentally more dangerous situation in North Korea, or why we are at this very moment "allied" with a military government in Pakistan, a Monarchy which is only nominally friendly in Saudi Arabia (interesting note: about half of all Americans believe most of the September 11th hijackers were Iraqi, not Saudi). Anyway, I believe that supporting bad governments for short-term gain is only going to wind up hurting us in the long run (as it did with our support of Hussein in the 1980s).
Furthermore, it is impossible to declare war on one man. If we could truly only direct our action against Hussein and his thugs, this would be an entirely different matter. The fact is, though, that the Iraqi people, as well as the American and allied troops, are going to suffer terrible losses in this war. War is always hell, no matter what the reason, and if a war can be averted, and the noble goals of disarmament and democratization achieved through peaceful means, then the path of diplomacy, however difficult, should be pursued.
That said, it is now entirely apparant that we are at war. I, like the vast majority of anti-war Americans, support our troops. I am grateful that my country has so many brave young men and women who are willing to endure the horrors of combat for their country. I pray that their lives and the lives of the Iraqi people are spared. I still, however, disagree with my president's decision. As Theodore Roosevelt once said, it is even more important for the people of America to scrutinize their leader's actions of time of war than in time of peace. I hope for the best possible outcome to be salvaged from this conflict, but I am deeply saddened that it came to this.