No. It's a monopoly (I think) and it's a good product.
There's nothing inherently illegal or immoral about monopolies.
On the other hand, certain things that some monopolistic companies try to do are illegal, only because they are monopolies; if a non monopolistic company had done it, they'd be fine.
Yeah, well, that isn't 6502 assembler. I don't have the code to hand.
But IRC the inner loop of the multiply needed something like 5 or 6 instructions, and each instruction takes 2-5 cycles to execute. Worst case you need to go around the loop up to 8 times; so it's easy to add up to over a hundred cycles.
Interestingly, I think the RISC processor concept was actually based on the 6502. IRC the designers wondered how a processor with 1/8 the clock rate could run the same speed as the Z80. The answer was the low number of clock cycles per instruction, which in turn was related to the simple instructions. RISC just takes this concept to an extreme.
Seriously, I suspect that combined with the add (sorry adc) instruction.. (and sub, add a two's complemented negative number), pretty much any multipication/division can be performed, and probably not much slower (and in a lot of cases faster) than a proper multiply instruction.
I seem to remember that a multiply or divide took more like 100 cycles on the 6502, but the 6809 could manage a multiply in something like 32 clock cycles, so a multiply instruction would probably have been a fair amount faster.
Re:Universal expansion doesn't mean *we* expand!
on
The Big Rip
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· Score: 1
So there's a HUGE difference between what goes on inside them and the large scale behavior of the universe, which is what the Friedmann equations are about.
I agree completely. All that happens as the expansion accelerates is the line between 'large scale' and smaller moves. Eventually, the line is smaller than molecules, and then no more chemical reactions will occur.
Basically, the Russians launched Buran once, and then a top politician looked at the overall cost, and immediately cancelled the program. I think this is to the Russians total credit, personally. That kind of pragmatism only helps make NASA look more stupid really. The architecture of the two systems was very similar; and the architecture presumably has similar effects on the cost.
Per kg the shuttle costs NASA about 3-4x more than Apollo; and Apollo could lift 4x more payload. So for hardly any more cost it was incredibly more capable. NASA really, really screwed up.
Buran will never fly again- Energia on the other hand may do so, if a good reason to is found. The Russians did suggest using it on the ISS, but the Americans didn't think it was a good idea, for mostly political reasons- it would have showed up how bad the Shuttle was- Energia could have launched the whole ISS in about 2-4 launches.
Not unless there are some radical changes in female reproductive organs, like being born with more eggs, or being able to produce an unlimited number of eggs as men do sperm.
Well, clearly it would work with men; and since men and women share a lot of genes, it's likely that women would inherit the longevity genes from their father, they'd just cease to be fertile after 50 years in the normal way.
It's not currently known why women go through the menopause; it's possible that their eggs are ageing too, or are linked in some way to the effective age of the mother; so mutations that allow women to live longer, or different mutations may allow their eggs to live longer as well.
Hey I was under the impression that there was no generally accepted scientific theory of ageing.
There's no accepted scientific theory of the mechanisms of aging, but the genetic influences of evolution are somewhat understood, and are believed to be more or less as I described. And the theory has experimental support. Some worms had their lifespan doubled by only breeding from the oldest members.
Why don't you just reference a few scientific papers in peer-reviewed publications so that I can enlighten myself.
Horses, water, lead etc. Why don't you do your own research into it, rather than make a bunch of half arsed assertions and then expect me to do all your hard work for you?
The generally accepted scientific theory about why we get old and die eventually is as follows.
Every animal in the animal kingdom generally gets killed occasionally. Take a mouse. A mouse is small and crunchy to cats. Cats predate mice, so the chances of a mouse surviving say, a year and half is low.
Therefore from the mouse genes point of view is it better to spend most of the energy of a nut it just ate on repair or reproduction?
Clearly if chances are the mouse is dead anyway after a year and half anyway, and so won't reproduce after that time, then it is better to use most of the nut on reproduction. So mice reproduce fairly rapidly and die young.
In contrast, tortoises which are very well protected live for centuries. Birds, for their size, are also very long lived- this appears to be because they can escape most danger by flying away. Incidentally, flying squirrels live much longer than normal squirrels, elephants live a long while, cats live much longer than dogs etc. etc.
Now humans have sort of outgrown all this stuff- we are really, really good at protecting ourselves- even risks as low as 1 in million upset lots of people- "my kid just ate an Alar infested apple- he could die!"; and currently if it weren't for old age we would all live to be about 400 years old; until we had a car accident or died of flu or something.
Our genes just simply haven't had a chance to adapt yet. So we die 'early'.
If nothing is done then the longer lived members of our society- those that look better ('younger') for longer will have more children, because they have more time to do it; and their genes will eventually spread through the human population; and life expectency will go up. But this will take hundreds or thousands of generations.
I say we should help nature along; the current situation sucks.
It's too easy for a message to get corrupted by accident. Though error-correction solves this in practice, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of a malicious conspiracy of men in the middle from f*ing with the network.
Big deal. Use SSL or some form of digital signature.
Encryption magic doesn't solve denial of service attacks. But then again, with normal landlines they can always cut your telephone cable.
Reed's article is based on the observation that Maxwell's Equations are linear (for most materials) and that, therefore the waves pass through each other without modification (again, unless you're in pretty exotic environments --- early universe, etc.)
Yes. In practice at microwave frequencies the radio waves are rapidly absorbed. This actually raises the potential capacity of the network, since it acts a bit like sound deadening in a building.
The problem with interference arises because of imperfect spectral content and non ideal antenna response for both transmitters and receivers.
Not just that though. It also happens because one or other of the users of a particular band is using too much power, or is using it too much. Think of the airwaves as a multidrop ethernet and you're probably more what Reed is talking about. You wouldn't try to use 1 ethernet cable for a whole country- but they seem to want to do that with radio- why are the transmitters so 'loud'?
Also, are you claiming that the interference is likely to be so bad that none of the frequencies available to you are free? Because that's what it would take. Don't forget that you don't have to see the source directly, you can route through other radio users; and they can be situated at different angles. Also, consider that if both sources are interfering at your location, there's a high probability that they are interfering at other locations as well; a protocol that changes one of them to a different frequency automatically would do very well.
Interference is like being at a party: There are a lot of people talking, and your ears hear in all directions, so you have to be near the person you're trying to talk to.
Good analogy. Trouble is, ears are unidirectional. But if we give everyone cat ears, the party gets much quieter; even though cat ears are imperfect. Also if someone in the middle of the party needs to talk to someone across the room- he can always whisper it to his neighbour, who can pass it along, rather than standing up and bellowing at the top of his voice.
Squeak is an interpreted language similar to Smalltalk. Could be ssslooooww.
Maybe, but bearing in mind we currently have multiple gigahertz computers, most of the 3D graphics is dealt with by hardware, and interpreters are usually at worst only 20x slower (at the very worst), this means that your program will run as slow as machine code did about 4 years ago; but the graphics will go at full speed. I'll think I'll survive.
Also, Java is "interpreted" (actually it's typically a JIT, but it behaves like an interpreter), and that's currently about half the speed of optimised C or there abouts.
Also, check out dynamo, which is a machine code interpreter that interprets the same machine code as the machine it runs on somewhat faster than the microprocessor executes it (atleast about half the time anyway). It actually performs run time optimisation like code rearrangement and stuff, it's very clever.
Anyway, interpreters are not always slow; and they are usually plenty fast enough in practice.
I think quite a lot of FPS games have interpreters in them anyway to run the game code.
I dunno, sounds like it'd be good if it were able to detect the error, carry on with what it was doing, and alert the sysadmin to the problem, who can then schedule downtime to fix it, rather than having an unexpected hardware error in the middle of something important...
No. The idea of the patch wasn't to stop it crashing, you probably can't do that; the idea was to analyse it when the system booted and work around it then- it's perfectly possible to send the admin an email summarising it though.
There's something very cool about the concept of buying a tonne of memory for a tenth of the price and suddenly having a system with nearly four gigabytes of memory;-)
Then again, isn't that what ECC memory is for?
No. AFAIK ECC memory can correct only bit errors within a word; but addressing errors slip right past it. The patch can handle addressing errors, blocks that just don't work, blocks that mirror back to the same location etc. etc.
I vaguely remember reading about a kernel patch that analysed faulty RAM, worked out what was wrong with it, and then modified the virtual memory handling so that you could carry on using it; at reduced capacity anyway.
Needless to say I find this very cool indeed, but I'm not sure I'd want to run it on my high availability, mission-critical web server for a bank;-)
Re:so, in other words....
on
World of Ends
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· Score: 1
Empty. 0% utilization. No need for QoS.
I assume you mean 0-10%; that's really my point though, in my view IP networks need to have entry controls to allow, up to say, 10% of the available to be high priority traffic. That way the high priority traffic sees an empty network, giving excellent latency, jitter and bandwidth, even in the face of congestion.
Free markets are unstable.
They are stabler than any other economic system yet attempted.
No, I hope I never see a truly free market; that way leads to Enron, robber barons and a tremendous amount of evil; businesses are essentially amoral (not immoral or moral); and yet we require a certain level of morality in our societies to survive and flourish. We need to impose morality on companies, even the trivial example of not continuing to trade whilst bankrupt.
Also, rules to stabilise situations are often beneficial. For example having a minimum percentage of assets as collateral against loans.
On the internet stability is very important; also morality (in a totally non religious sense) is critical for the internet to work.
Re:Spam can be avoided without protocol changes.
on
IETF to Look at Spam
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Spam is highly redundant commercial advertisement. And we don't want it. So the basic approach would be to exploit this redundancy to filter from the original message streams.
No. Not all redundant mail is spam. There are plenty of legitimate distribution lists out there.
However highly localized approaches like personal mail filters will always fail due to the high variety of spam.
Yes. However, if a high enough % of people point at an email message and say 'spam' then it's spam. People are very good at spotting spam- so a mechanism that records what people think about the mail and not deliver it to anyone that hasn't already read it would be very successful. If 90% of the first few thousand people to read an email say it's spam, the other million need never see it at all.
Re:Universal expansion doesn't mean *we* expand!
on
The Big Rip
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· Score: 1
The Solar system isn't expanding.
Bzzt. Wrong. If the expansion is accelerating, then the solar system is expanding.
It's only doing it slowly, but an accelerating universe is injecting energy into the planets- they are gradually moving into larger and larger orbits.
A constant expansion doesn't do that; the planets end up just a bit nearer to the sun for the same speed than than they would be if the expansion wasn't there; but if the expansion rate keeps increasing, they continually spiral out. Eventually they will individually reach escape velocity and be lost.
But the Friedmann equations assume a homogeneous universe for mathematical convenience, so not all of their predictions apply everywhere in the real universe.
Doubtless true; all equations have limits to their applicability. It seems very unlikely that that would be enough though.
If the rate continues to accelerate, the universe is really screwed. It may slow down again I suppose; the expansion is not well understood.
Re:so, in other words....
on
World of Ends
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· Score: 1
That is not the common case optimizations should be targeted for. Congested states should be rare- plan to avoid them, not discard other plans because they'd have flaws during it.
Hey, let me introduce you. Real world meet Minna Kirai. Minna Kirai meet the real world. In the absence of congestion QOS is basically not an issue; you have great QOS- all of the queues are empty all the way. The whole point of QOS is to handle the network better when congestion occurs- the high priority packets need to see the network as empty even when the low priority packets are congested.
To allow the free market to automatically solve the problem of consumers requesting more than they need, we need a mechanism to allow some variation in price for using the service.
Free markets are unstable. We require stability in our network protocols.
Re:so, in other words....
on
World of Ends
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· Score: 1
Anyone who hacks his FTP client to request low latency will boost his usage charges, and recieve the total file in 24:36.67, instead of 24:38.12 for a normal connection (for one representative set of numerical assumptions). 1 whole second faster.
Not if the network is congested.
I guess you skipped reading my post. It was all based on the ISP charging a higher fee for faster packets!
So was mine. I just didn't find that 'your' idea is a good one. Charging per packet is expensive for the provider. Also if the incremental cost is low, then everyone will end up using high priority traffic all of the time, and then it makes no difference. If it's high, then people won't use it at all; and the breakeven point varies depending on the user, not on the nature of the service.
Also, when I used "fast packets" above, I was referring primarily to latency, which is different from bandwidth.
Yes. It's also different to jitter, which is normally about as important; probably more.
You seem to be focusing on bandwidth, which is unrelated to QoS
I don't know why you say that. A high priority packet system improves latency, bandwidth (particularly worse case bandwidth) and helps jitter.
the response time for updates is 25% of what it had been. Yet the total data rate he can transmit remains the same.
Not in the face of congestion it isn't. Also, it solves issues with timeouts- if high priority packets are permitted then the chances of a connection dying from congestion is much reduced, and may be negligable.
QoS for low-latency doesn't help FTP at all. Email, IM, HTTP, and audio streaming likewise recieve no benefit. There is no incentive to request QoS for those applications.
I don't agree. They all can benefit from a minimum guaranteed bandwidth/improved latency/improved jitter; especially audio streaming.
Only a few uses- voice chat, remote desktop, and gaming- can get much benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also have a sort of space division multiplexing- i.e. using directional antennas. That concept is used on TV aerials among others.
On that basis, so is Michael.
No. It's a monopoly (I think) and it's a good product.
There's nothing inherently illegal or immoral about monopolies.
On the other hand, certain things that some monopolistic companies try to do are illegal, only because they are monopolies; if a non monopolistic company had done it, they'd be fine.
But IRC the inner loop of the multiply needed something like 5 or 6 instructions, and each instruction takes 2-5 cycles to execute. Worst case you need to go around the loop up to 8 times; so it's easy to add up to over a hundred cycles.
Interestingly, I think the RISC processor concept was actually based on the 6502. IRC the designers wondered how a processor with 1/8 the clock rate could run the same speed as the Z80. The answer was the low number of clock cycles per instruction, which in turn was related to the simple instructions. RISC just takes this concept to an extreme.
I seem to remember that a multiply or divide took more like 100 cycles on the 6502, but the 6809 could manage a multiply in something like 32 clock cycles, so a multiply instruction would probably have been a fair amount faster.
Not always.
I agree completely. All that happens as the expansion accelerates is the line between 'large scale' and smaller moves. Eventually, the line is smaller than molecules, and then no more chemical reactions will occur.
Yes, it does; it's called ADC if I remember correctly.
Per kg the shuttle costs NASA about 3-4x more than Apollo; and Apollo could lift 4x more payload. So for hardly any more cost it was incredibly more capable. NASA really, really screwed up.
Buran will never fly again- Energia on the other hand may do so, if a good reason to is found. The Russians did suggest using it on the ISS, but the Americans didn't think it was a good idea, for mostly political reasons- it would have showed up how bad the Shuttle was- Energia could have launched the whole ISS in about 2-4 launches.
Well, clearly it would work with men; and since men and women share a lot of genes, it's likely that women would inherit the longevity genes from their father, they'd just cease to be fertile after 50 years in the normal way.
It's not currently known why women go through the menopause; it's possible that their eggs are ageing too, or are linked in some way to the effective age of the mother; so mutations that allow women to live longer, or different mutations may allow their eggs to live longer as well.
There's no accepted scientific theory of the mechanisms of aging, but the genetic influences of evolution are somewhat understood, and are believed to be more or less as I described. And the theory has experimental support. Some worms had their lifespan doubled by only breeding from the oldest members.
Why don't you just reference a few scientific papers in peer-reviewed publications so that I can enlighten myself.
Horses, water, lead etc. Why don't you do your own research into it, rather than make a bunch of half arsed assertions and then expect me to do all your hard work for you?
Every animal in the animal kingdom generally gets killed occasionally. Take a mouse. A mouse is small and crunchy to cats. Cats predate mice, so the chances of a mouse surviving say, a year and half is low.
Therefore from the mouse genes point of view is it better to spend most of the energy of a nut it just ate on repair or reproduction?
Clearly if chances are the mouse is dead anyway after a year and half anyway, and so won't reproduce after that time, then it is better to use most of the nut on reproduction. So mice reproduce fairly rapidly and die young.
In contrast, tortoises which are very well protected live for centuries. Birds, for their size, are also very long lived- this appears to be because they can escape most danger by flying away. Incidentally, flying squirrels live much longer than normal squirrels, elephants live a long while, cats live much longer than dogs etc. etc.
Now humans have sort of outgrown all this stuff- we are really, really good at protecting ourselves- even risks as low as 1 in million upset lots of people- "my kid just ate an Alar infested apple- he could die!"; and currently if it weren't for old age we would all live to be about 400 years old; until we had a car accident or died of flu or something.
Our genes just simply haven't had a chance to adapt yet. So we die 'early'.
If nothing is done then the longer lived members of our society- those that look better ('younger') for longer will have more children, because they have more time to do it; and their genes will eventually spread through the human population; and life expectency will go up. But this will take hundreds or thousands of generations.
I say we should help nature along; the current situation sucks.
Actually yes.
It's too easy for a message to get corrupted by accident. Though error-correction solves this in practice, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of a malicious conspiracy of men in the middle from f*ing with the network.
Big deal. Use SSL or some form of digital signature.
Encryption magic doesn't solve denial of service attacks. But then again, with normal landlines they can always cut your telephone cable.
Yes. In practice at microwave frequencies the radio waves are rapidly absorbed. This actually raises the potential capacity of the network, since it acts a bit like sound deadening in a building.
The problem with interference arises because of imperfect spectral content and non ideal antenna response for both transmitters and receivers.
Not just that though. It also happens because one or other of the users of a particular band is using too much power, or is using it too much. Think of the airwaves as a multidrop ethernet and you're probably more what Reed is talking about. You wouldn't try to use 1 ethernet cable for a whole country- but they seem to want to do that with radio- why are the transmitters so 'loud'?
Also, are you claiming that the interference is likely to be so bad that none of the frequencies available to you are free? Because that's what it would take. Don't forget that you don't have to see the source directly, you can route through other radio users; and they can be situated at different angles. Also, consider that if both sources are interfering at your location, there's a high probability that they are interfering at other locations as well; a protocol that changes one of them to a different frequency automatically would do very well.
Interference is like being at a party: There are a lot of people talking, and your ears hear in all directions, so you have to be near the person you're trying to talk to.
Good analogy. Trouble is, ears are unidirectional. But if we give everyone cat ears, the party gets much quieter; even though cat ears are imperfect. Also if someone in the middle of the party needs to talk to someone across the room- he can always whisper it to his neighbour, who can pass it along, rather than standing up and bellowing at the top of his voice.
Maybe, but bearing in mind we currently have multiple gigahertz computers, most of the 3D graphics is dealt with by hardware, and interpreters are usually at worst only 20x slower (at the very worst), this means that your program will run as slow as machine code did about 4 years ago; but the graphics will go at full speed. I'll think I'll survive.
Also, Java is "interpreted" (actually it's typically a JIT, but it behaves like an interpreter), and that's currently about half the speed of optimised C or there abouts.
Also, check out dynamo, which is a machine code interpreter that interprets the same machine code as the machine it runs on somewhat faster than the microprocessor executes it (atleast about half the time anyway). It actually performs run time optimisation like code rearrangement and stuff, it's very clever.
Anyway, interpreters are not always slow; and they are usually plenty fast enough in practice.
I think quite a lot of FPS games have interpreters in them anyway to run the game code.
Actually, it was a seminal conception of his; the labour was performed by someone else.
Uh no. You may be able to harden the OS against a memory failure but this won't be a 100% cure against all memory failure.
No. The idea of the patch wasn't to stop it crashing, you probably can't do that; the idea was to analyse it when the system booted and work around it then- it's perfectly possible to send the admin an email summarising it though.
There's something very cool about the concept of buying a tonne of memory for a tenth of the price and suddenly having a system with nearly four gigabytes of memory ;-)
Then again, isn't that what ECC memory is for?
No. AFAIK ECC memory can correct only bit errors within a word; but addressing errors slip right past it. The patch can handle addressing errors, blocks that just don't work, blocks that mirror back to the same location etc. etc.
Needless to say I find this very cool indeed, but I'm not sure I'd want to run it on my high availability, mission-critical web server for a bank ;-)
I assume you mean 0-10%; that's really my point though, in my view IP networks need to have entry controls to allow, up to say, 10% of the available to be high priority traffic. That way the high priority traffic sees an empty network, giving excellent latency, jitter and bandwidth, even in the face of congestion.
Free markets are unstable.
They are stabler than any other economic system yet attempted.
No, I hope I never see a truly free market; that way leads to Enron, robber barons and a tremendous amount of evil; businesses are essentially amoral (not immoral or moral); and yet we require a certain level of morality in our societies to survive and flourish. We need to impose morality on companies, even the trivial example of not continuing to trade whilst bankrupt.
Also, rules to stabilise situations are often beneficial. For example having a minimum percentage of assets as collateral against loans.
On the internet stability is very important; also morality (in a totally non religious sense) is critical for the internet to work.
No. Not all redundant mail is spam. There are plenty of legitimate distribution lists out there.
However highly localized approaches like personal mail filters will always fail due to the high variety of spam.
Yes. However, if a high enough % of people point at an email message and say 'spam' then it's spam. People are very good at spotting spam- so a mechanism that records what people think about the mail and not deliver it to anyone that hasn't already read it would be very successful. If 90% of the first few thousand people to read an email say it's spam, the other million need never see it at all.
Bzzt. Wrong. If the expansion is accelerating, then the solar system is expanding.
It's only doing it slowly, but an accelerating universe is injecting energy into the planets- they are gradually moving into larger and larger orbits.
A constant expansion doesn't do that; the planets end up just a bit nearer to the sun for the same speed than than they would be if the expansion wasn't there; but if the expansion rate keeps increasing, they continually spiral out. Eventually they will individually reach escape velocity and be lost.
But the Friedmann equations assume a homogeneous universe for mathematical convenience, so not all of their predictions apply everywhere in the real universe.
Doubtless true; all equations have limits to their applicability. It seems very unlikely that that would be enough though.
If the rate continues to accelerate, the universe is really screwed. It may slow down again I suppose; the expansion is not well understood.
Hey, let me introduce you. Real world meet Minna Kirai. Minna Kirai meet the real world. In the absence of congestion QOS is basically not an issue; you have great QOS- all of the queues are empty all the way. The whole point of QOS is to handle the network better when congestion occurs- the high priority packets need to see the network as empty even when the low priority packets are congested.
To allow the free market to automatically solve the problem of consumers requesting more than they need, we need a mechanism to allow some variation in price for using the service.
Free markets are unstable. We require stability in our network protocols.
Not if the network is congested.
I guess you skipped reading my post. It was all based on the ISP charging a higher fee for faster packets!
So was mine. I just didn't find that 'your' idea is a good one. Charging per packet is expensive for the provider. Also if the incremental cost is low, then everyone will end up using high priority traffic all of the time, and then it makes no difference. If it's high, then people won't use it at all; and the breakeven point varies depending on the user, not on the nature of the service.
Also, when I used "fast packets" above, I was referring primarily to latency, which is different from bandwidth.
Yes. It's also different to jitter, which is normally about as important; probably more.
You seem to be focusing on bandwidth, which is unrelated to QoS
I don't know why you say that. A high priority packet system improves latency, bandwidth (particularly worse case bandwidth) and helps jitter.
the response time for updates is 25% of what it had been. Yet the total data rate he can transmit remains the same.
Not in the face of congestion it isn't. Also, it solves issues with timeouts- if high priority packets are permitted then the chances of a connection dying from congestion is much reduced, and may be negligable.
QoS for low-latency doesn't help FTP at all. Email, IM, HTTP, and audio streaming likewise recieve no benefit. There is no incentive to request QoS for those applications.
I don't agree. They all can benefit from a minimum guaranteed bandwidth/improved latency/improved jitter; especially audio streaming.
Only a few uses- voice chat, remote desktop, and gaming- can get much benefit.
Yeah right.