What would you say about those who claim that the deniable encryption doesn't work because the parts of an encrypted volume that hold actual data has lower entropy than the parts that hold the random data? I cannot understand that claim since, as far as I understand it, encryption algorithms such as the AES uses probabilistic encryption and should have as high entropy as random data. Usually high entropy data is associated with data that is hard to compress (especially when discussing lossy compression of video) and AES encrypted data is just as incompressible as random data.
I think that one cannot yield statistically significant measures of entropy that can tell the difference between random data and encrypted data in a deniably encrypted volume. But other people say otherwise. If that is the case, it shouldn't be difficult to generate random data that matches the entropy of encrypted non-random data.
If that's you opinion then you are really out of touch with reality. I can agree that it is likely not as nice to grow up with older parents as it probably would be with younger. An older person may not be as physically fit and capable of sports activities and such things as when he was young. And sure it is a sad thing if being older means that the children will not be as healthy. I'm saying *if* here because I'm not entirely convinced that this really is the case.
But the rest of what you write is naught but hogwash. It's not a parent's job to be 'hip' with what you call 'current culture'. It is his job to represent his or her own and be a good role model for the child. Age has absolutely nothing to do with this. A person does not go obsolete because he older either, on the contrary! Just because you think you're cool using your iPad, iPod, iPhone and all manner of social channels it doesn't mean that you are anything. Pretty much all this technology that is around you is made and founded by the ones you would like to call 'geriatrics' and not the younger generation.
The thing is that there are a lot of people out there who spent a lot of time and energy on their education and careers, simply because they have the genetic capabilities to do so. So I find it kind of sad that such gifted and talented people don't get to have children and pass their talents on to them. The world needs more smart people and to be rid of the low gifted ones. Now that's a sad truth that cannot be denied.
I'm still doubtful with this research because how common is it that a 40 something male marries a 20 something female and have children with her? I think such couples are too unusual to yield any statistical significance to such a research.
According to a Wikipedia article the "Average age difference between couples in developed world is between two to three years, with the female partner being younger". The article supporting this statement can be found here.
I think a more detailed changelog should be in order, particularly with the bugfixes presented. That way if there is an issue that I had with a prior release I can see in the changelog whether the issue has been addressed or not. If not, I can continue to nag them about the issue.
I have an idea here; closer examinations have shown that the intestines actually contain brain tissue or at least brain-like tissue. Such tissues have also been found in other organs, but particularly in the intestines. Other studies have also found that drugs such as SSRI and tranquilizers also affect the intestines, even to such a degree that treatments of some cases of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) with such medications have been successful. So the 'function' of this 'brain tissue' in the intestines appears to be quite essential.
The digestion process ought to be very complicated and delicate so it is no surprise that a more 'intelligent' form of tissue is needed to control it carefully. We don't know exactly how this tissue works and how it interacts with the gut bacteria. Some small changes in this brain tissue's configuration could probably make or break the prosperity of healthy gut bacteria.
So perhaps the connection between autism and the gut problems may be due to a general disorder of the neural system that also affects the intestinal "brain tissue". Interestingly, also people who suffer migraine (which is also another form of neural disorder) also tend to suffer from digestive disorders in connection to a migraine outbreak.
It would also be interesting to find out whether there is a link between autism and other organs' "brain tissue". E.g. the heart has brain tissue in it so perhaps there is also a link between neurological heart disorders (such as arrhythmia; both the lethal as well as the benign variants...) and disorders such as autism.
I'm not arguing against 4K resolution per se. Personally, I would really like to have 4K, 8K resolution or even higher. For tasks such as word processing (or any task that involves working with text or letters) and getting desktop estate it is the more the merrier that applies, at least for now at the screen resolutions that are available for current desktop or laptop PCs. I totally agree with what Linus Torvalds said about this a while ago.
For FPS gaming on the other hand, I agree that 4K is overkill, at least with the polygon capability of current gen GPUs. I think that when dealing with photo, a resolution beyond 1080p (and perhaps 720p) is probably not very beneficial to the experience of immersion. But then again, I have yet to see a truly highly-detailed video-clip at 4K, perhaps that would be a mind-blowing experience. When looking at IMAX in theatres it is indeed a more capturing experience than regular 35mm footage. But the experience will be greater when it comes from say outdoor shots with a nice view and a lot of details from say trees and foliage than from camera shots taken inside a room with much less details.
I find the "Uncanny Valley analogy" to be very inappropriate here because firstly "uncanny valley" applies to human-like robots vs humans which is a very different story, some aspects of why this is different is discussed e.g. here, and secondly, the higher resolution makes the fps games look less realistic than at lower resolution. The high resolution reveals how "empty" the artificial world really is, something that could be concealed behind a blur or a coarse matrix of pixels which is now floating up to the surface.
But is using such a high resolution really necessary? I've looked into those 4K BF4 video clips and to be honest, it looks pretty terrible. I could barely see the city and the buildings in the game level, it looked more like a bunch of squary boxes with textures painted on top of them.
When using a lower resolution I could more easily suspend my disbelief, the coarseness of the pixels makes the primitive polygons look less,... boxy. Perhaps GPU hardware a few orders of magnitude faster is required so that there are enough hardware resources to render the extra detail needed to make 4K rendered 3D environments in real-time look fairly realistic again.
Not to mention all of the different research projects taken by students. I myself have indulged in more complex computer simulations using software such as Matlab. Simulations that took a few days of computing to complete on each run. If I had better hardware I would definitely use even more advanced models and conduct more simulations. So, there you have a forth reason:)
While I agree to some extent to what you are saying, I believe that sometimes it is desired to deliver that cinematic experience. Also directors can eliminate lens flares and motion blurs during shootings with the right set of lightings and aperture times but they don't. The reason for that is that they want to emphasize that something is extremely bright or is moving extremely fast. All this is part of cinematic storytelling. Something modern digital cameras such as the over-hyped Red(tm) cameras are lacking considerably compared to traditional film cameras that have been tweaked for over half a century.
Possible, but nowhere near as easy. I've read most of volume 3A of Intel's architecture reference while doing background reading for my Xen book, but the complete architecture reference is well over 3,000 pages. The GPU reference - if you can get it - is a similar length, and that's before you get to the OS. The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is 720 pages. It's a good book, but it skips over a lot of details. The copy of the X11 protocol reference that I read was several hundred pages, and it's a few revisions old. The OpenGL reference was a similar length. But now you can do 2D and 3D graphics and, once you've read the C spec (not so bad, only a couple of hundred pages) and spent some time familiarising yourself with your C compiler and standard library you can draw things.
To get the level of understanding that the original poster is talking about, on a modern computer, means reading and remembering around 10,000 pages of reference books, and gaining familiarity with the source code that they mention. And that's just going to give you one CPU architecture and the core bits of the OS.
as a reply to a guy who basically said that a modern PC is essentially no more than a faster C64 with more memory and expandability options...
Now, my question to you is; what would you say about the ARM platform and Arduino? Would you say that e.g. a Raspberry Pi system is as simple to program as a C64 or Amiga?
You have to understand that also science and research is heavily influenced by politics. Research is simply spent only on things people want to find out about. If a politician wants to find research that supports the political views his party represents he will only fund such research and not research that refutes his views. Also scientists want and need money for their research. In fact, they need the money to keep their jobs and do what they like to do; research. This seriously tends to make research heavily biased and just because a person wears a lab coat and has a PhD degree it doesn't mean you can trust him and what he says. There is a famous quote from the Ghostbusters movie:
"Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say. "
The same goes with research and so called experts. There is another example of how research can get biased by politics: In Scandinavian regions a feministic political agenda is pushing through and influencing people in various ways. There is also a strong influence of anti-racism (some people refer to this ideology as anti-white) and multiculturalism in the politics of western Europe.
Under these political views the sexes are both perfectly equal and actually born the same. The book "Men Areähg from Mars, Women Are from Venus" by John Gray is almost as taboo as "Mein Kampf" in a Jewish community and e.g. research that would indicate that some ethnic groups would have a higher (or lower) IQ level than other is highly unethical and banned in these countries. Also scientifically trying to find evidence that would support that there would be some physiological differences between homosexuals (and other HBT people) and normal heterosexual people is a definite no-no.
I recommend watching the following Norwegian documentary Hjernevask (Brainwash):
It is the first of a 7 part documentary that explores the concepts of what I mentioned above. The subjects themselves are not as interesting as how the research institutions in Norway are totally blinded by the political ideologies they are trying to uphold. It shows how you can conduct research into something over years and years and yet be totally blind to the truth. Norway is far from the only country with these problems and I seriously believe that a lot of this "environmental research" suffers from these issues as well.
Yep, I have eaten both breads, this sounds like a stupid question. The bread needs to be fresh when frozen and the defrosted bread needs to be consumed immediately after defrosted. Also if you let the frozen bread sit to long in the microwave it goes dry and stiff so you need to experiment for a while until you find the proper time. Some oil or butter may help preventing it from going dry/stiff in the microwave. I'm not really sure why I'm explaining all this as this is naught but common sense.
So even an Intel SSD drive with the SandForce controller shoud be avoided?
Lately, the Samsung drives have become very popular but there is one caveat to them as well; they don't have a unique WWN like normal hard drives have. This drawback leads to problems using several SSDs on the same controller; the system cannot tell them apart. It's like a router or a switch cannot tell two computers apart because their NICs use the same MACs. Unlike NICs you cannot change the WWN of a Samsung drive.
I think the reason why Asperger's Syndrome is classified as a disease or a disorder is because that a lot people with this disorder have problems with social interactions just like a person with dyslexia or even myopia have a problem with reading. Some people even have problems with taking care of themselves so the spectrum may vary. So whenever there is a problem there is a desire to find a solution to this problem.
Ultimately I don't think this classification is intended to judge or put any sort of moral value on this medical condition but to understand what's going on and to find ways to help these people better cope with their surroundings and the surroundings to better cope with them. After all there are quite a few successful people out there diagnosed with this condition such as Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Daryl Hannah, Alfred Hitchcock,... the list is long.
My pet peeve with all of those window managers is that they don't scale well on high resolution displays, especially xfce. I know Linus Torvalds have written a critical post about this awhile ago in connection with Apple's retina displays on their macbooks. But even on a low-resolution 1080p display, fonts and the user interface don't scale well.
Nowhere did I state that it should be free. If you remove the "F" from the FOSS you are mentioning then you are talking my language. While I'm a proponent of FOSS I don't think all open source software necessarily should be free. If people are concerned about this openness then perhaps some kind of encryption or other ways to obfuscate the source code that would make it understandable only to the compiler would be in place. However, in the end I don't think people would want to obfuscate the code before distribution. After all, even binaries can be reverse engineered and cracked so going open source shouldn't be that big of a deal.
The problem many CISC CPUs (such as x86 based CPUS) are facing today is that they are encumbered by legacy instruction sets so as to maintain backwards compatibility. I understand that there is an abstraction layer in many x86 CPUs that emulates some of these legacy instructions at the hardware level. The downside with this is that the wafer space required for this circuitry logic could be used for something else that would improve performance instead of maintaining this backwards compatibility.
As an abstraction layer between hardware and software; CISC cannot be compared to the implementations I mentioned in prior post. Assume that Intel introduces a new instruction set that would make any concurrent CPU without it pale in comparison. Let us call this instruction set SSE6. Any precompiled software will not take advantage of this new instruction set. The software has to be recompiled. In the examples I mentioned, the hardware support is determined at the driver level while the applications take advantage of whatever is available. As we all know, hardware and their drivers/compiler stick together like a horse and carriage.
Maybe the ideal CPU is EPIC based, maybe it is a CISC that is not encumbered by legacy instructions or even a RISC. We will not know until we spend time and research to find out. Most likely, what is optimal will depend on circumstances or the quantum mechanical properties of the materials used which is likely to change as newer and more efficient materials are discovered. Maybe we will see all these CPUs in one and the same system eventually as they are all good at specific tasks. So it would mean a great deal if existing software could immediately take advantage of the new hardware features and optimizations as they reach the market.
Perhaps breaking of compatibility between CPU generations is not a weakness of the VLIW/EPIC architecture per se but rather a weakness in how people look at software and software distribution. First of all, why should software be distributed as pre-compiled binaries? A much better way would be to distribute the sources while maintaining a compiler/installation environment that automatically handles the software. This environment would then automatically optimize the software for the specific computer system and its particular hardware configuration during the installation process and migration of this software to newer generation systems would be a non-issue.
Another approach would be to add an abstraction layer between the hardware and software very much like what is done with virtualization, Java, ZFS, LVM, DirectX, Crossbow et al. That would make the software more independent of the underlying hardware...
Who is to judge whether developing and marketing the Itanium is worthwhile other than Intel themselves? Perhaps the development and marketing of these chips will give them valuable information that is useful for the development of future generation processors.
The EPIC architecture (which is looked upon as a continuation of the development of the WLIV architecture) is significantly different from other more wide-spread architectures and perhaps the performance issues are there because people have not yet figured out how to fully utilize such an architecture in an efficient manner. So maybe one day when the compiler tools get more mature we might see EPIC CPUs with a competitive price/performance in the market. But that's my two cents.
Btw, damn to the depths whatever muttonhead thought up 'all butt'!
Wind power is not as clean and safe as you may seem to imply. Windmills have given rise to mass death of endangered bird species when they get hit by the turbine blades while in the air. Piles of dead birds, especially birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles are commonly found dead near those windmills.
Hydro power is a very strong intrusion on the course of nature and the aquatic ecosystem therein. Many species of fish, especially trouts, crayfish are now extinct from waters upon where a hydro power plant has been built, but nobody talks about it.
But will/does HAMMER2 have end-to-end checksumming like ZFS has? Will it have support for software raid similar to ZFS raidz/raidz2/raidz3 (like hardware RAID5/6/7 but safer)? Will it have support for ditto blocks, or par2-like single disk/vdev redundancy on both data and meta-data?
If it doesn't have these above features it will be a deal-breaker at least for me.
Other things that I miss in some of these file systems are; defrag (even ZFS has potential fragmentation issues), the possibility to convert a raidz2 pool to raidz3 after adding an extra disk to cover for that extra redundancy, a laid out "contingency plan" if a corruption would occur.
Back when I waited tables in a restaurants to pay for college, I can promise you me and the other servers were not taking Facebook breaks outside the back door.
Maybe this is about to change now that we have smartphones and mobile broadband/4G.
Slashdot Mirror
What would you say about those who claim that the deniable encryption doesn't work because the parts of an encrypted volume that hold actual data has lower entropy than the parts that hold the random data? I cannot understand that claim since, as far as I understand it, encryption algorithms such as the AES uses probabilistic encryption and should have as high entropy as random data. Usually high entropy data is associated with data that is hard to compress (especially when discussing lossy compression of video) and AES encrypted data is just as incompressible as random data.
I think that one cannot yield statistically significant measures of entropy that can tell the difference between random data and encrypted data in a deniably encrypted volume. But other people say otherwise. If that is the case, it shouldn't be difficult to generate random data that matches the entropy of encrypted non-random data.
If that's you opinion then you are really out of touch with reality. I can agree that it is likely not as nice to grow up with older parents as it probably would be with younger. An older person may not be as physically fit and capable of sports activities and such things as when he was young. And sure it is a sad thing if being older means that the children will not be as healthy. I'm saying *if* here because I'm not entirely convinced that this really is the case.
But the rest of what you write is naught but hogwash. It's not a parent's job to be 'hip' with what you call 'current culture'. It is his job to represent his or her own and be a good role model for the child. Age has absolutely nothing to do with this. A person does not go obsolete because he older either, on the contrary! Just because you think you're cool using your iPad, iPod, iPhone and all manner of social channels it doesn't mean that you are anything. Pretty much all this technology that is around you is made and founded by the ones you would like to call 'geriatrics' and not the younger generation.
The thing is that there are a lot of people out there who spent a lot of time and energy on their education and careers, simply because they have the genetic capabilities to do so. So I find it kind of sad that such gifted and talented people don't get to have children and pass their talents on to them. The world needs more smart people and to be rid of the low gifted ones. Now that's a sad truth that cannot be denied.
I'm still doubtful with this research because how common is it that a 40 something male marries a 20 something female and have children with her? I think such couples are too unusual to yield any statistical significance to such a research.
According to a Wikipedia article the "Average age difference between couples in developed world is between two to three years, with the female partner being younger". The article supporting this statement can be found here.
I think a more detailed changelog should be in order, particularly with the bugfixes presented. That way if there is an issue that I had with a prior release I can see in the changelog whether the issue has been addressed or not. If not, I can continue to nag them about the issue.
I have an idea here; closer examinations have shown that the intestines actually contain brain tissue or at least brain-like tissue. Such tissues have also been found in other organs, but particularly in the intestines. Other studies have also found that drugs such as SSRI and tranquilizers also affect the intestines, even to such a degree that treatments of some cases of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) with such medications have been successful. So the 'function' of this 'brain tissue' in the intestines appears to be quite essential.
The digestion process ought to be very complicated and delicate so it is no surprise that a more 'intelligent' form of tissue is needed to control it carefully. We don't know exactly how this tissue works and how it interacts with the gut bacteria. Some small changes in this brain tissue's configuration could probably make or break the prosperity of healthy gut bacteria.
So perhaps the connection between autism and the gut problems may be due to a general disorder of the neural system that also affects the intestinal "brain tissue". Interestingly, also people who suffer migraine (which is also another form of neural disorder) also tend to suffer from digestive disorders in connection to a migraine outbreak.
It would also be interesting to find out whether there is a link between autism and other organs' "brain tissue". E.g. the heart has brain tissue in it so perhaps there is also a link between neurological heart disorders (such as arrhythmia; both the lethal as well as the benign variants...) and disorders such as autism.
I'm not arguing against 4K resolution per se. Personally, I would really like to have 4K, 8K resolution or even higher. For tasks such as word processing (or any task that involves working with text or letters) and getting desktop estate it is the more the merrier that applies, at least for now at the screen resolutions that are available for current desktop or laptop PCs. I totally agree with what Linus Torvalds said about this a while ago.
For FPS gaming on the other hand, I agree that 4K is overkill, at least with the polygon capability of current gen GPUs. I think that when dealing with photo, a resolution beyond 1080p (and perhaps 720p) is probably not very beneficial to the experience of immersion. But then again, I have yet to see a truly highly-detailed video-clip at 4K, perhaps that would be a mind-blowing experience. When looking at IMAX in theatres it is indeed a more capturing experience than regular 35mm footage. But the experience will be greater when it comes from say outdoor shots with a nice view and a lot of details from say trees and foliage than from camera shots taken inside a room with much less details.
I find the "Uncanny Valley analogy" to be very inappropriate here because firstly "uncanny valley" applies to human-like robots vs humans which is a very different story, some aspects of why this is different is discussed e.g. here, and secondly, the higher resolution makes the fps games look less realistic than at lower resolution. The high resolution reveals how "empty" the artificial world really is, something that could be concealed behind a blur or a coarse matrix of pixels which is now floating up to the surface.
But is using such a high resolution really necessary? I've looked into those 4K BF4 video clips and to be honest, it looks pretty terrible. I could barely see the city and the buildings in the game level, it looked more like a bunch of squary boxes with textures painted on top of them. When using a lower resolution I could more easily suspend my disbelief, the coarseness of the pixels makes the primitive polygons look less, ... boxy. Perhaps GPU hardware a few orders of magnitude faster is required so that there are enough hardware resources to render the extra detail needed to make 4K rendered 3D environments in real-time look fairly realistic again.
Not to mention all of the different research projects taken by students. I myself have indulged in more complex computer simulations using software such as Matlab. Simulations that took a few days of computing to complete on each run. If I had better hardware I would definitely use even more advanced models and conduct more simulations. So, there you have a forth reason :)
Wrong, I have bought cars from car dealers for cash and they had no problems accepting it.
While I agree to some extent to what you are saying, I believe that sometimes it is desired to deliver that cinematic experience. Also directors can eliminate lens flares and motion blurs during shootings with the right set of lightings and aperture times but they don't. The reason for that is that they want to emphasize that something is extremely bright or is moving extremely fast. All this is part of cinematic storytelling. Something modern digital cameras such as the over-hyped Red(tm) cameras are lacking considerably compared to traditional film cameras that have been tweaked for over half a century.
Possible, but nowhere near as easy. I've read most of volume 3A of Intel's architecture reference while doing background reading for my Xen book, but the complete architecture reference is well over 3,000 pages. The GPU reference - if you can get it - is a similar length, and that's before you get to the OS. The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is 720 pages. It's a good book, but it skips over a lot of details. The copy of the X11 protocol reference that I read was several hundred pages, and it's a few revisions old. The OpenGL reference was a similar length. But now you can do 2D and 3D graphics and, once you've read the C spec (not so bad, only a couple of hundred pages) and spent some time familiarising yourself with your C compiler and standard library you can draw things.
To get the level of understanding that the original poster is talking about, on a modern computer, means reading and remembering around 10,000 pages of reference books, and gaining familiarity with the source code that they mention. And that's just going to give you one CPU architecture and the core bits of the OS.
as a reply to a guy who basically said that a modern PC is essentially no more than a faster C64 with more memory and expandability options...
Now, my question to you is; what would you say about the ARM platform and Arduino? Would you say that e.g. a Raspberry Pi system is as simple to program as a C64 or Amiga?
You have to understand that also science and research is heavily influenced by politics. Research is simply spent only on things people want to find out about. If a politician wants to find research that supports the political views his party represents he will only fund such research and not research that refutes his views. Also scientists want and need money for their research. In fact, they need the money to keep their jobs and do what they like to do; research. This seriously tends to make research heavily biased and just because a person wears a lab coat and has a PhD degree it doesn't mean you can trust him and what he says. There is a famous quote from the Ghostbusters movie:
"Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say. "
The same goes with research and so called experts. There is another example of how research can get biased by politics: In Scandinavian regions a feministic political agenda is pushing through and influencing people in various ways. There is also a strong influence of anti-racism (some people refer to this ideology as anti-white) and multiculturalism in the politics of western Europe.
Under these political views the sexes are both perfectly equal and actually born the same. The book "Men Areähg from Mars, Women Are from Venus" by John Gray is almost as taboo as "Mein Kampf" in a Jewish community and e.g. research that would indicate that some ethnic groups would have a higher (or lower) IQ level than other is highly unethical and banned in these countries. Also scientifically trying to find evidence that would support that there would be some physiological differences between homosexuals (and other HBT people) and normal heterosexual people is a definite no-no.
I recommend watching the following Norwegian documentary Hjernevask (Brainwash):
Brainwash (1/7) - The Gender Equality Paradox
It is the first of a 7 part documentary that explores the concepts of what I mentioned above. The subjects themselves are not as interesting as how the research institutions in Norway are totally blinded by the political ideologies they are trying to uphold. It shows how you can conduct research into something over years and years and yet be totally blind to the truth. Norway is far from the only country with these problems and I seriously believe that a lot of this "environmental research" suffers from these issues as well.
Yep, I have eaten both breads, this sounds like a stupid question. The bread needs to be fresh when frozen and the defrosted bread needs to be consumed immediately after defrosted. Also if you let the frozen bread sit to long in the microwave it goes dry and stiff so you need to experiment for a while until you find the proper time. Some oil or butter may help preventing it from going dry/stiff in the microwave. I'm not really sure why I'm explaining all this as this is naught but common sense.
So even an Intel SSD drive with the SandForce controller shoud be avoided?
Lately, the Samsung drives have become very popular but there is one caveat to them as well; they don't have a unique WWN like normal hard drives have. This drawback leads to problems using several SSDs on the same controller; the system cannot tell them apart. It's like a router or a switch cannot tell two computers apart because their NICs use the same MACs. Unlike NICs you cannot change the WWN of a Samsung drive.
I think the reason why Asperger's Syndrome is classified as a disease or a disorder is because that a lot people with this disorder have problems with social interactions just like a person with dyslexia or even myopia have a problem with reading. Some people even have problems with taking care of themselves so the spectrum may vary. So whenever there is a problem there is a desire to find a solution to this problem.
... the list is long.
Ultimately I don't think this classification is intended to judge or put any sort of moral value on this medical condition but to understand what's going on and to find ways to help these people better cope with their surroundings and the surroundings to better cope with them. After all there are quite a few successful people out there diagnosed with this condition such as Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Daryl Hannah, Alfred Hitchcock,
Or store it in the freezer. Just defrost the slices you want to consume in the microwave and they will be just as fresh as newly baked bread.
My pet peeve with all of those window managers is that they don't scale well on high resolution displays, especially xfce. I know Linus Torvalds have written a critical post about this awhile ago in connection with Apple's retina displays on their macbooks. But even on a low-resolution 1080p display, fonts and the user interface don't scale well.
Nowhere did I state that it should be free. If you remove the "F" from the FOSS you are mentioning then you are talking my language. While I'm a proponent of FOSS I don't think all open source software necessarily should be free. If people are concerned about this openness then perhaps some kind of encryption or other ways to obfuscate the source code that would make it understandable only to the compiler would be in place. However, in the end I don't think people would want to obfuscate the code before distribution. After all, even binaries can be reverse engineered and cracked so going open source shouldn't be that big of a deal.
The problem many CISC CPUs (such as x86 based CPUS) are facing today is that they are encumbered by legacy instruction sets so as to maintain backwards compatibility. I understand that there is an abstraction layer in many x86 CPUs that emulates some of these legacy instructions at the hardware level. The downside with this is that the wafer space required for this circuitry logic could be used for something else that would improve performance instead of maintaining this backwards compatibility.
As an abstraction layer between hardware and software; CISC cannot be compared to the implementations I mentioned in prior post. Assume that Intel introduces a new instruction set that would make any concurrent CPU without it pale in comparison. Let us call this instruction set SSE6. Any precompiled software will not take advantage of this new instruction set. The software has to be recompiled. In the examples I mentioned, the hardware support is determined at the driver level while the applications take advantage of whatever is available. As we all know, hardware and their drivers/compiler stick together like a horse and carriage.
Maybe the ideal CPU is EPIC based, maybe it is a CISC that is not encumbered by legacy instructions or even a RISC. We will not know until we spend time and research to find out. Most likely, what is optimal will depend on circumstances or the quantum mechanical properties of the materials used which is likely to change as newer and more efficient materials are discovered. Maybe we will see all these CPUs in one and the same system eventually as they are all good at specific tasks. So it would mean a great deal if existing software could immediately take advantage of the new hardware features and optimizations as they reach the market.
Perhaps breaking of compatibility between CPU generations is not a weakness of the VLIW/EPIC architecture per se but rather a weakness in how people look at software and software distribution. First of all, why should software be distributed as pre-compiled binaries? A much better way would be to distribute the sources while maintaining a compiler/installation environment that automatically handles the software. This environment would then automatically optimize the software for the specific computer system and its particular hardware configuration during the installation process and migration of this software to newer generation systems would be a non-issue.
Another approach would be to add an abstraction layer between the hardware and software very much like what is done with virtualization, Java, ZFS, LVM, DirectX, Crossbow et al. That would make the software more independent of the underlying hardware...
Who is to judge whether developing and marketing the Itanium is worthwhile other than Intel themselves? Perhaps the development and marketing of these chips will give them valuable information that is useful for the development of future generation processors.
The EPIC architecture (which is looked upon as a continuation of the development of the WLIV architecture) is significantly different from other more wide-spread architectures and perhaps the performance issues are there because people have not yet figured out how to fully utilize such an architecture in an efficient manner. So maybe one day when the compiler tools get more mature we might see EPIC CPUs with a competitive price/performance in the market. But that's my two cents.
Btw, damn to the depths whatever muttonhead thought up 'all butt'!
Wind power is not as clean and safe as you may seem to imply. Windmills have given rise to mass death of endangered bird species when they get hit by the turbine blades while in the air. Piles of dead birds, especially birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles are commonly found dead near those windmills.
Hydro power is a very strong intrusion on the course of nature and the aquatic ecosystem therein. Many species of fish, especially trouts, crayfish are now extinct from waters upon where a hydro power plant has been built, but nobody talks about it.
But will/does HAMMER2 have end-to-end checksumming like ZFS has? Will it have support for software raid similar to ZFS raidz/raidz2/raidz3 (like hardware RAID5/6/7 but safer)? Will it have support for ditto blocks, or par2-like single disk/vdev redundancy on both data and meta-data?
If it doesn't have these above features it will be a deal-breaker at least for me.
Other things that I miss in some of these file systems are; defrag (even ZFS has potential fragmentation issues), the possibility to convert a raidz2 pool to raidz3 after adding an extra disk to cover for that extra redundancy, a laid out "contingency plan" if a corruption would occur.
Back when I waited tables in a restaurants to pay for college, I can promise you me and the other servers were not taking Facebook breaks outside the back door.
Maybe this is about to change now that we have smartphones and mobile broadband/4G.
It's the so called Voight-Kampff test in the Sci-Fi movie Blade Runner to test whether a human is real or a so called "Replicant".