If he's dumb, there will be an easier way to decrypt the suspect data. Maybe the perp left the encryption key in plaintext somewhere, or used an obvious passphrase, or a weak or buggy encryption software.
There's no happy medium. What can you break with 20 PS3's? Maybe 56-bit DES?
While the key of DES is easy to brute-force today, and 80-bit keys are becoming questionable, 128-bit keys of high-quality algorithms are thought to be unbreakable via conventional (non-quantum) computers for the foreseeable future. There's a reason that the NSA is the second-largest electric utility user in Maryland...
ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part.
WTF!?
If I were going on a trip to Mars, the last thing I'd take along would be some techno-listening Eurotrash with unreasonable demands for prompt health care and a propensity for labor unrest. Hell, with their thin figures and tight jeans, some Eurotrashtronaut might get sucked out of the spacecraft through some any ol' tiny tear in the outer wall.
Don't they need any good old corn-fed Midwestern American boys on this mission? Sign me up.
This test isn't a complete experimental fiasco (like some of the Microsoft-sponsored listening tests that deem WMA to sound as good at 64k as MP3 at 128k).
But there are a couple of significant flaws with it, that make the results pretty useless:
They used the AB method, rather than the superior ABX method. In the AB method, a participant hears the two versions of the song, without knowing which is which, and then much choose whether one is better, or whether they are equal. In the ABX method, the participant hears two distinct versions, then a third which is identical to ONE OF the first two. They are asked to figure out which of the first two samples is the same as the third. If they perform no better than chance at this task, it's a good indication that the null hypothesis may be correct. Which is very important, since modern audio codecs have gotten so good that their quality is often indistinguishable in practice. It's disingenuous to argue about slight degrees of preference without an attempt to determine their statistical significance.
We don't know exactly which codecs were used!!! There are many implementations of AAC+ encoders, which may differ markedly in quality (though in 2006, a credible ABX test found that none was preferred over another to a statistically significant to a 95% confidence interval). Likewise, there are multiple implementations of Ogg Vorbis encoders. The aoTuV patches, in particular, are widely considered to considerably improve sound quality.
If you want to know about some methodologically-better comparisons of audio codec quality, please see the Codec listening test page at Wikipedia. Full disclosure: I wrote most of this article, and have attempted to compile the results of all the carefully-conducted independent tests that I could find.
Finally, none of this is to say that we should all demand 160kbps streaming audio if 48kbps can be made to sound just as good. It's just that this study doesn't establish that, not by a long shot. The headline is also wrong in claiming that 1/3 of the participants couldn't distinguish 48k from 160k audio: in fact, they preferred the 48k audio. And preferring one format is very different from claiming that it is of a high-fidelity: for example, audio with a compressed dynamic range is by definition degraded, and yet it persists in commercial rock recordings because uniformly loud music grabs listeners' attention more easily.
I'd like to see an attempt to breed them via nation-wide contests to evolve the fish into a more efficient walker or hopper. Races could be held at high-schools and colleges, and the winners would be bread with other regional winners to produce a more land-friendly next generation. The gradual process could be observed by all.
Won't affect the "debate"...
Creationists/IDers always acknowledge the efficacy of artificial selection, or breeding. They usually claim that artificial selection can add "information" to a genotype because it's the product of a conscious design effort directed by an intelligent being, namely a human breeder. Whereas they deny natural macroevolution, claiming that mutation can only destroy information, and never create it, sometimes with pseudo-scientific arguments about entropy and thermodynamics.
Of course, creationists never understand or accept mainstream scientific theories about what constitutes information.
Well, the weird thing is that most of the info on superconductors.org is actually pretty good... Eck's History of Superconductors page is actually pretty good, and he even acknowledges the 138 K ambient-pressure cuprate semiconductor as the current high-Tc record.:-)
Does he say anything about the facilities he has to do this materials synthesis and measurements???
Someone mentioned earlier - he's creating a bulk material that naturally forms a variety of crystals - some of those crystals have better high temp superconductuivity than others. By doing the bulk resistance test, he can see small jumps when individual crystals start to contribute.
Later they'll have to isolate those crystals and figure out how to recreate them in viable quantities.
So it's sort of a combinatorial approach, wherein he synthesizes a range of related crystals, and then measures them all at once and tries to discern the individual properties?
Hmmm... my understanding is that long-range ordering contributes significantly to many kinds of high-Tc superconductivity, and superconducting-like properties on may not scale up.
Yeah, he may be a crackpot. But even if the data presented are 100% accurate, it's not really clear that the phenomena he observes constitute superconductivity.
The first chart (labeled "4-point resistance test") seems to show a slight but noticeable jump in resistivity at 254 K. Okay... why is the jump so small? High-temperature superconductors generally have/some/ measurable resistivity just below their transition temperature, but this appears to be much greater than that.
The Magnetization Test graph is totally unclear. The y-axis shows only relative values and no data is showed *below* the supposed transition temperature. I'm not entirely clear on what he's claiming to measure here. The Meissner Effect? The disruption of superconductivity in a strong field?
So, even if these measurements are correct, it's not clear at all to me that they demonstrate superconductivity.
I was pretty mystified by the mechanics of the whole scheme described here, so I read a bunch of the sources cited here, and wrote a Wikipedia article on Traffic pumping. Hope it will be useful to others trying to understand this weird regulatory scam.
There doesn't have to be 2^128 mem, there just needs to be a desire for 2^64+1.
Okay, I'll bite.
Doubling the size of all or nearly all 64-bit buses and registers in a processor would vastly increase the transistor count and complexity, depressing performance and increasing cost for little gain ("one extra addressable byte" in the extremely marginal case that you suggest).
More likely, once we reach the need for a 65-80 bit bus, we'll see some kind of bank-switching solution for a few years. This was used in old 8-bit computers with 16-bit address buses that needed more than 64k RAM, the segmented memory of 8086-80286 processors is a variant of this, and Physical Address Extension allowed 32-bit Pentium Pro through Pentium IV processors to address >2^32 memory locations using similar techniques.
It's not a pretty solution, but it does reduce the transistor cost of enlarging the addressable memory while Moore's Law catches up. It's been done time and time again, and I expect we'll see it again once 64-bit address buses are no longer sufficient. Which is still quite a ways off (e.g. AMD64 processors are hardware-limited to 40-bit physical address space with the possibility to extend to 52-bits).
Don't let that stop you from talking shit though.
I wasn't talking shit or trashing the concept. I was thinking about the relative uselessness of a homogeneously 128-bit processor in the near future.
I've seen estimates that address space requirements increase by about 0.8-1 bits per year. So 20 years ago, 20 bits (1 MiB) was about enough for a "typical" desktop user, while today 32 bits (4 GiB) is about enough for the same. By this admittedly rough estimate, it will be at least a couple of decades until typical desktop applications want 64 bits of physical address space. Power users and servers are perhaps 2-4 bits ahead of the curve... I don't think I know of any commercially-available systems with more than 64 GiB of DRAM directly addressable (that'd be 36 bits of address space).
None of the linked articles say that the 128 bits is for the filesystem only, but I still believe you're right:
Making the entire os 128-bit would simply waste a _lot_ of memory, for zero real gain. (Rather the opposite: A larger working set always leads to slower code.)
Right. There's no widely-used 128-bit-native processor architecture either. And there is no reason to have 128-bit address bus either.
I don't think there are 2^128 bytes of DRAM on the planet, even. Lessee... that's 2^98 GiB. Which is almost 10^20 GiB of RAM for every single person on the planet. I think that I personally can account for 10 GiB or so. Maybe 100 GiB if my parents have a secret DRAM trust fund for me that I don't know about. So yeah, 128-bit memory addresses are waaaaay off. I believe current 64-bit processors are currently limited to 40-bit external address buses... that'd be 1 TiB of RAM.
Well, that really takes the wind out of my righteous sails:-P. So Dell isn't actually trying to be difficult, huh? They were proactively adopting an up-and-coming industry standard, albeit one that fizzled. I guess it never pays to be an early adopter.
Presumably, at this point, they have suppliers and designers lined up for BTX mobos and cases and aren't too anxious to switch again. Also, it seems to me that their cases have very efficient processor ventilation, probably a feature that big OEMs value. Is that part of the BTX standard? Now that I see the BTX wikipedia article, it seems like BTX was aimed at cooling hot Pentium IV processors and such, and has been kind of been left at the wayside as processors have moved back from the thermal-death-brink in the last few years...
The thing that really sucks about Dell and HP in particular is that they never use standard motherboard and case form factors. Hell, until a couple of years ago Dell would even use non-standard pseudo-ATX PSUs... had the standard motherboard connector, but with the pins rearranged so that it might actually fry a non-Dell mobo. Evil.
A Dell or HP tower might look *pretty close to* an ATX or mATX form factor, but you'll find the non-standard placement of the I/O panel, or different spacing of the mounting screws, or the use of weird riser cards, or any of a zillion variations of these. Makes it highly impractical to upgrade such a computer: there's no reasonable way to replace the motherboard.
I grant that, to some degree, these companies are trying to innovate with their form factors in things like Slimline PCs, and may not always be able to adhere to standards for those cases and still get the feature sets they want. But with standard-sized desktop, tower, or mini-tower cases, I feel there is no good excuse to deviate from standard form factors.
Contrasting with HP and Dell, many of the Taiwanese computer makers like Asus, Acer, Foxconn use standard form factors in their prebuilt systems, whether ATX or micro-ATX or mini-ITX. For example, my Acer Aspire E360 purchased in 2004 used a standard mATX mobo in a very well-built case, and as a result it was a breeze to upgrade it with a new Socket AM2+ motherboard last fall.
Namely, the project shows that its authors consider "gayness"/homosexuality to be something that many people would like to hide, to the point that they would suffer embarrassment or worse if someone else was able to infer it from other data.
Why not make "Project White-dar"? I'll bet you could figure out if someone is white (or black, or Hispanic, or Zoroastrian) based on their Facebook friends. Most white people don't go around online pointing out loudly that they're white. You don't see too many Slashdot sigs that say, "Hey, I'm Caucasian." But I'm guessing most white people would also not really care if you figured out that they were white based on their Facebook friends, or where they live, or some other data.
I think there are lots of kinds of information that people broadcast about themselves--income, education level, relationship status, etc.--which are expressed implicitly in various forms--language usage, clothing style, social networks, etc. Nevertheless people often don't state these things openly.
Why should being gay be any different in this day and age, at least in countries that no longer have widespread institutionalized discrimination against gays?
Bottom line: All of the interest in this study seems to derive from the tacit notion that there is or should be something inherently shameful about being gay.
I see a significant barrier to ARM adoption in GCC's code generator, which is poor and apparently getting worse as the optimisations are more tuned for x86 than RISC processors. ARM, like Intel, has its own commercial compiler but it would probably make business sense for them to contribute to GCC as well, just as Intel does.
Interesting... I hadn't heard much about the GCC code generator. Do you have any sites with more info?
I know that GCC is pretty darn good for some other RISC processors, like MIPS.
I imagine GCC's ARM code generator would get more attention in a hurry if it got more use on the desktop. That's a great thing about free software:-) And I agree that it would make sense for ARM to fund GCC development, or simply hire coders to work on it.
Does anyone really want disposable computers? Most of the cheap cases you can buy on Newegg or other online computer stores are already made of very flimsy, lightweight aluminum. They dent easily, chip easily, and the paint sucks. It's a shame, because the case is one of the easiest parts of a computer to reuse: the ATX form factor has been around since 1995, and still works very for full-size desktop systems, along with its moderately smaller variant microATX.
My current workstation got all-new components in 2008, but the sturdy, accessible case, PSU, and DVD-RAM drive date from the Acer system I bought in 2003. And I see no reason why they can't last another generation of components as well.
My point is: if you want cheap computer cases, reuse them! It's better for the environment, and easy to do.
Don't expect nVidia to open anything up: they're pushing ARM too.
True. But they're pushing ARM (in the form of their Tegra systems-on-a-chip) for totally closed and locked-down portable platforms, like cell phones and media players and the Zune HD.
Open and extensible non-x86 platforms, such as cheap ATX motherboards with ARM rather than x86 processors, would totally throw nVidia for a loop. They'd have to scramble to support their proprietary drivers on such systems, or risk losing market share very quickly.
The Linux kernel already has the code to make a lot of ATI video cards work fully on an ARM system, should anyone manage to acquire an ARM board with a functioning PCI-Express slot. The Linux kernel already has the code to make an Atheros wireless card work fully on a MIPS system... the same driver code can run your desktop PCI wifi card, or the one in your router. The Linux kernel has no open-source code to do 3D acceleration with nVidia cards. Why not? Because nVidia won't open up any specs...
Basically, all the companies that have done The Right Thing and opened up hardware specs have gotten free cross-platform code written by the Linux kernel developers. Those, like nVidia, that haven't, they're at risk of being left in the dust.
If you're talking about laptops, there have been vendors that specialize in Linux laptops for years.
Yes, and their prices are uniformly higher than those of the big-volume laptop vendors, enough to negate any savings from the Windows OEM license. They have fewer models, sell less volume, and offer many fewer sales.
If you go looking for coupon codes and deals for a new laptop on Slickdeals or eDealinfo or Fatwallet, you'll never come across a system pre-loaded with Linux (with the still very rare exception of some netbooks in the last couple of years).
They are almost a moot point now, however, with most major OEMs starting to preload Linux on their x86 laptops and netbooks despite licensing threats from Microsoft.
A change that I whole-heartedly welcome, and eagerly await!
But still, most OEMs offer preloaded Linux with only a fairly restricted subset of their products, and offer no OS-less options for the rest. While part of this may be due to difficulties adjusting to the support and driver distribution models prevalent in the Linux world, I suspect part of it is still due to threats and sanctions from Microsoft.
The short and sweet solution is to buy it on a credit card, print out the EULA, highlight the pertinent part, mail it to your CC company, and then have them charge back the OEM cost of Windows. You'll have to prove you contacted customer service, but that's typically not hard, and just notify them you're going to do a chargeback for the cost of the OEM windows install. I doubt they'll balk much about it; there's not much they can do once the laptop has delivered.
Have you personally done this? Just because you think the law or some contract or agreement allows you to do something, does not mean it will be easy, worthwhile, or even possible in practice.
I have dealt with chargebacks for credit card companies several times. While they are generally very happy to chargeback an obviously fraudulent or unfulfilled process, I highly doubt they would happily agree to do the legal and technical legwork to determine if chargeback for the Windows license (price undisclosed) of a system is justified.
Slashdot Mirror
If the child porn smuggler is smart and careful, 20 PS3's won't be anywhere near enough to break strong, modern, encryption.
If he's dumb, there will be an easier way to decrypt the suspect data. Maybe the perp left the encryption key in plaintext somewhere, or used an obvious passphrase, or a weak or buggy encryption software.
There's no happy medium. What can you break with 20 PS3's? Maybe 56-bit DES?
While the key of DES is easy to brute-force today, and 80-bit keys are becoming questionable, 128-bit keys of high-quality algorithms are thought to be unbreakable via conventional (non-quantum) computers for the foreseeable future. There's a reason that the NSA is the second-largest electric utility user in Maryland...
Twitter is not the only place you count characters.
URLs longer than 80 characters might split in multiple lines in emails.
Personally, every time someone emails me a link to tinyurl, or bit.ly, or tr.im... I murder a kitten. And I don't read the email.
Well, I didn't mean this as flamebait OR insightful... just funny.
I guess looking for humor on Slashdot is like looking for life on Mars ;-)
ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part.
WTF!?
If I were going on a trip to Mars, the last thing I'd take along would be some techno-listening Eurotrash with unreasonable demands for prompt health care and a propensity for labor unrest. Hell, with their thin figures and tight jeans, some Eurotrashtronaut might get sucked out of the spacecraft through some any ol' tiny tear in the outer wall.
Don't they need any good old corn-fed Midwestern American boys on this mission? Sign me up.
OpenOffice, like Word and everything else I can think of, gets
one fundamental thing wrong in the user interface design.
Documents are 8 1/2" wide x 11" tall with say 6.5" x 9" tall
useable writing area.
Hey!!! In my country, documents are 210 × 297 mm, you insensitive clod.
(Okay, so I'm actually an American too. Fine :-P.)
This test isn't a complete experimental fiasco (like some of the Microsoft-sponsored listening tests that deem WMA to sound as good at 64k as MP3 at 128k).
But there are a couple of significant flaws with it, that make the results pretty useless:
If you want to know about some methodologically-better comparisons of audio codec quality, please see the Codec listening test page at Wikipedia. Full disclosure: I wrote most of this article, and have attempted to compile the results of all the carefully-conducted independent tests that I could find.
Finally, none of this is to say that we should all demand 160kbps streaming audio if 48kbps can be made to sound just as good. It's just that this study doesn't establish that, not by a long shot. The headline is also wrong in claiming that 1/3 of the participants couldn't distinguish 48k from 160k audio: in fact, they preferred the 48k audio. And preferring one format is very different from claiming that it is of a high-fidelity: for example, audio with a compressed dynamic range is by definition degraded, and yet it persists in commercial rock recordings because uniformly loud music grabs listeners' attention more easily.
I'd like to see an attempt to breed them via nation-wide contests to evolve the fish into a more efficient walker or hopper. Races could be held at high-schools and colleges, and the winners would be bread with other regional winners to produce a more land-friendly next generation. The gradual process could be observed by all.
Won't affect the "debate"...
Creationists/IDers always acknowledge the efficacy of artificial selection, or breeding. They usually claim that artificial selection can add "information" to a genotype because it's the product of a conscious design effort directed by an intelligent being, namely a human breeder. Whereas they deny natural macroevolution, claiming that mutation can only destroy information, and never create it, sometimes with pseudo-scientific arguments about entropy and thermodynamics.
Of course, creationists never understand or accept mainstream scientific theories about what constitutes information.
Well, the weird thing is that most of the info on superconductors.org is actually pretty good... Eck's History of Superconductors page is actually pretty good, and he even acknowledges the 138 K ambient-pressure cuprate semiconductor as the current high-Tc record. :-)
Does he say anything about the facilities he has to do this materials synthesis and measurements???
Someone mentioned earlier - he's creating a bulk material that naturally forms a variety of crystals - some of those crystals have better high temp superconductuivity than others. By doing the bulk resistance test, he can see small jumps when individual crystals start to contribute.
Later they'll have to isolate those crystals and figure out how to recreate them in viable quantities.
So it's sort of a combinatorial approach, wherein he synthesizes a range of related crystals, and then measures them all at once and tries to discern the individual properties?
Hmmm... my understanding is that long-range ordering contributes significantly to many kinds of high-Tc superconductivity, and superconducting-like properties on may not scale up.
Yeah, he may be a crackpot. But even if the data presented are 100% accurate, it's not really clear that the phenomena he observes constitute superconductivity.
The first chart (labeled "4-point resistance test") seems to show a slight but noticeable jump in resistivity at 254 K. Okay... why is the jump so small? High-temperature superconductors generally have /some/ measurable resistivity just below their transition temperature, but this appears to be much greater than that.
The Magnetization Test graph is totally unclear. The y-axis shows only relative values and no data is showed *below* the supposed transition temperature. I'm not entirely clear on what he's claiming to measure here. The Meissner Effect? The disruption of superconductivity in a strong field?
So, even if these measurements are correct, it's not clear at all to me that they demonstrate superconductivity.
I was pretty mystified by the mechanics of the whole scheme described here, so I read a bunch of the sources cited here, and wrote a Wikipedia article on Traffic pumping. Hope it will be useful to others trying to understand this weird regulatory scam.
You are a fool.
Um... ouch?
There doesn't have to be 2^128 mem, there just needs to be a desire for 2^64+1.
Okay, I'll bite.
Doubling the size of all or nearly all 64-bit buses and registers in a processor would vastly increase the transistor count and complexity, depressing performance and increasing cost for little gain ("one extra addressable byte" in the extremely marginal case that you suggest).
More likely, once we reach the need for a 65-80 bit bus, we'll see some kind of bank-switching solution for a few years. This was used in old 8-bit computers with 16-bit address buses that needed more than 64k RAM, the segmented memory of 8086-80286 processors is a variant of this, and Physical Address Extension allowed 32-bit Pentium Pro through Pentium IV processors to address >2^32 memory locations using similar techniques.
It's not a pretty solution, but it does reduce the transistor cost of enlarging the addressable memory while Moore's Law catches up. It's been done time and time again, and I expect we'll see it again once 64-bit address buses are no longer sufficient. Which is still quite a ways off (e.g. AMD64 processors are hardware-limited to 40-bit physical address space with the possibility to extend to 52-bits).
Don't let that stop you from talking shit though.
I wasn't talking shit or trashing the concept. I was thinking about the relative uselessness of a homogeneously 128-bit processor in the near future.
I've seen estimates that address space requirements increase by about 0.8-1 bits per year. So 20 years ago, 20 bits (1 MiB) was about enough for a "typical" desktop user, while today 32 bits (4 GiB) is about enough for the same. By this admittedly rough estimate, it will be at least a couple of decades until typical desktop applications want 64 bits of physical address space. Power users and servers are perhaps 2-4 bits ahead of the curve... I don't think I know of any commercially-available systems with more than 64 GiB of DRAM directly addressable (that'd be 36 bits of address space).
None of the linked articles say that the 128 bits is for the filesystem only, but I still believe you're right:
Making the entire os 128-bit would simply waste a _lot_ of memory, for zero real gain. (Rather the opposite: A larger working set always leads to slower code.)
Right. There's no widely-used 128-bit-native processor architecture either. And there is no reason to have 128-bit address bus either.
I don't think there are 2^128 bytes of DRAM on the planet, even. Lessee... that's 2^98 GiB. Which is almost 10^20 GiB of RAM for every single person on the planet. I think that I personally can account for 10 GiB or so. Maybe 100 GiB if my parents have a secret DRAM trust fund for me that I don't know about. So yeah, 128-bit memory addresses are waaaaay off. I believe current 64-bit processors are currently limited to 40-bit external address buses... that'd be 1 TiB of RAM.
Thanks, I remember Intel pushed BTX!
Well, that really takes the wind out of my righteous sails :-P. So Dell isn't actually trying to be difficult, huh? They were proactively adopting an up-and-coming industry standard, albeit one that fizzled. I guess it never pays to be an early adopter.
Presumably, at this point, they have suppliers and designers lined up for BTX mobos and cases and aren't too anxious to switch again. Also, it seems to me that their cases have very efficient processor ventilation, probably a feature that big OEMs value. Is that part of the BTX standard? Now that I see the BTX wikipedia article, it seems like BTX was aimed at cooling hot Pentium IV processors and such, and has been kind of been left at the wayside as processors have moved back from the thermal-death-brink in the last few years...
Are *all* of their (recent) tower and desktop cases BTX? Does anyone know why they picked BTX and stuck with it?
The thing that really sucks about Dell and HP in particular is that they never use standard motherboard and case form factors. Hell, until a couple of years ago Dell would even use non-standard pseudo-ATX PSUs... had the standard motherboard connector, but with the pins rearranged so that it might actually fry a non-Dell mobo. Evil.
A Dell or HP tower might look *pretty close to* an ATX or mATX form factor, but you'll find the non-standard placement of the I/O panel, or different spacing of the mounting screws, or the use of weird riser cards, or any of a zillion variations of these. Makes it highly impractical to upgrade such a computer: there's no reasonable way to replace the motherboard.
I grant that, to some degree, these companies are trying to innovate with their form factors in things like Slimline PCs, and may not always be able to adhere to standards for those cases and still get the feature sets they want. But with standard-sized desktop, tower, or mini-tower cases, I feel there is no good excuse to deviate from standard form factors.
Contrasting with HP and Dell, many of the Taiwanese computer makers like Asus, Acer, Foxconn use standard form factors in their prebuilt systems, whether ATX or micro-ATX or mini-ITX. For example, my Acer Aspire E360 purchased in 2004 used a standard mATX mobo in a very well-built case, and as a result it was a breeze to upgrade it with a new Socket AM2+ motherboard last fall.
According to Linus, Linus Is "Bloated"
Well gosh... why doesn't he get his fat ass on a treadmill and start working off some of those extra pounds then? Nerds are so lazy.
Especially that Linus Torvalds. Honestly, has he done *anything* useful at all over the past 15 years??
Namely, the project shows that its authors consider "gayness"/homosexuality to be something that many people would like to hide, to the point that they would suffer embarrassment or worse if someone else was able to infer it from other data.
Why not make "Project White-dar"? I'll bet you could figure out if someone is white (or black, or Hispanic, or Zoroastrian) based on their Facebook friends. Most white people don't go around online pointing out loudly that they're white. You don't see too many Slashdot sigs that say, "Hey, I'm Caucasian." But I'm guessing most white people would also not really care if you figured out that they were white based on their Facebook friends, or where they live, or some other data.
I think there are lots of kinds of information that people broadcast about themselves--income, education level, relationship status, etc.--which are expressed implicitly in various forms--language usage, clothing style, social networks, etc. Nevertheless people often don't state these things openly.
Why should being gay be any different in this day and age, at least in countries that no longer have widespread institutionalized discrimination against gays?
Bottom line: All of the interest in this study seems to derive from the tacit notion that there is or should be something inherently shameful about being gay.
Gotcha. Did they mention any specific compilers that do generate good code for ARM? Presumably ARM's own is the best, but any others...?
Did someone not tell me? Is it Government Does The Right Thing Day today???
So far we have, in succession, on Slashdot:
Not bad for one day. The cynic in me assumes all this is going to be reversed tomorrow... :-p
I see a significant barrier to ARM adoption in GCC's code generator, which is poor and apparently getting worse as the optimisations are more tuned for x86 than RISC processors. ARM, like Intel, has its own commercial compiler but it would probably make business sense for them to contribute to GCC as well, just as Intel does.
Interesting... I hadn't heard much about the GCC code generator. Do you have any sites with more info?
I know that GCC is pretty darn good for some other RISC processors, like MIPS.
I imagine GCC's ARM code generator would get more attention in a hurry if it got more use on the desktop. That's a great thing about free software :-) And I agree that it would make sense for ARM to fund GCC development, or simply hire coders to work on it.
Does anyone really want disposable computers? Most of the cheap cases you can buy on Newegg or other online computer stores are already made of very flimsy, lightweight aluminum. They dent easily, chip easily, and the paint sucks. It's a shame, because the case is one of the easiest parts of a computer to reuse: the ATX form factor has been around since 1995, and still works very for full-size desktop systems, along with its moderately smaller variant microATX.
My current workstation got all-new components in 2008, but the sturdy, accessible case, PSU, and DVD-RAM drive date from the Acer system I bought in 2003. And I see no reason why they can't last another generation of components as well.
My point is: if you want cheap computer cases, reuse them! It's better for the environment, and easy to do.
Don't expect nVidia to open anything up: they're pushing ARM too.
True. But they're pushing ARM (in the form of their Tegra systems-on-a-chip) for totally closed and locked-down portable platforms, like cell phones and media players and the Zune HD.
Open and extensible non-x86 platforms, such as cheap ATX motherboards with ARM rather than x86 processors, would totally throw nVidia for a loop. They'd have to scramble to support their proprietary drivers on such systems, or risk losing market share very quickly.
The Linux kernel already has the code to make a lot of ATI video cards work fully on an ARM system, should anyone manage to acquire an ARM board with a functioning PCI-Express slot. The Linux kernel already has the code to make an Atheros wireless card work fully on a MIPS system... the same driver code can run your desktop PCI wifi card, or the one in your router. The Linux kernel has no open-source code to do 3D acceleration with nVidia cards. Why not? Because nVidia won't open up any specs...
Basically, all the companies that have done The Right Thing and opened up hardware specs have gotten free cross-platform code written by the Linux kernel developers. Those, like nVidia, that haven't, they're at risk of being left in the dust.
If you're talking about laptops, there have been vendors that specialize in Linux laptops for years.
Yes, and their prices are uniformly higher than those of the big-volume laptop vendors, enough to negate any savings from the Windows OEM license. They have fewer models, sell less volume, and offer many fewer sales.
If you go looking for coupon codes and deals for a new laptop on Slickdeals or eDealinfo or Fatwallet, you'll never come across a system pre-loaded with Linux (with the still very rare exception of some netbooks in the last couple of years).
They are almost a moot point now, however, with most major OEMs starting to preload Linux on their x86 laptops and netbooks despite licensing threats from Microsoft.
A change that I whole-heartedly welcome, and eagerly await!
But still, most OEMs offer preloaded Linux with only a fairly restricted subset of their products, and offer no OS-less options for the rest. While part of this may be due to difficulties adjusting to the support and driver distribution models prevalent in the Linux world, I suspect part of it is still due to threats and sanctions from Microsoft.
The short and sweet solution is to buy it on a credit card, print out the EULA, highlight the pertinent part, mail it to your CC company, and then have them charge back the OEM cost of Windows. You'll have to prove you contacted customer service, but that's typically not hard, and just notify them you're going to do a chargeback for the cost of the OEM windows install. I doubt they'll balk much about it; there's not much they can do once the laptop has delivered.
Have you personally done this? Just because you think the law or some contract or agreement allows you to do something, does not mean it will be easy, worthwhile, or even possible in practice.
I have dealt with chargebacks for credit card companies several times. While they are generally very happy to chargeback an obviously fraudulent or unfulfilled process, I highly doubt they would happily agree to do the legal and technical legwork to determine if chargeback for the Windows license (price undisclosed) of a system is justified.