Libby's commutation was obviously part of the deal he made with Bush and Cheney to lie to Plame prosecutor Fitzgerald so Fitzgerald wouldn't catch Bush or Cheney for their conspiracy in the original case. Libby lied to cover up Bush and Cheney's outing Plame to cover up their lies about fake Niger/Iraq uranium "yellowcake". So Bush made sure that Libby would never go to jail, or otherwise be punished, to ensure Libby would never tell the truth about the rest of their conspiracy.
Libby hasn't told, so he's not going to jail. And his fines, left in place, are getting paid by Tucker Carlson's father's Republican committee friends. While the rest of his career is guaranteed to be rich in book deals and/or speaking fees for Republican audiences.
This commutation isn't just a technical stunt. It's central to Bush/Cheney's conspiracy to lie us into war and get away with even more power than anyone expected.
This question is not so much a cosmological one as a philosophical one. That far in the future, any intelligence could, if increasing its accuracy and precision model of the universe at the rate we have in our recorded history, find other evidence than any of which we conceive today to reconstruct the early conditions. Much like we have kinds of evidence now of which no one conceived in 1900.
Another way to pop this conundrum is to ask whether anyone has proven that we will not be able to record our current information about the Universe's origin in such a way that the distant future will just be able to read its history, rather than start from scratch with matter/energy/whatever found ambient in its environment. It seems likely any recordings from today would be lost over so long a duration, but again, we're just getting started making recordings and thinking about long histories.
Unless someone can prove that any recordings of current origin info made now will strictly inevitably be lost over that long time, even if we used all the matter and energy in which we could possibly record that info, then they cannot prove that the future will be unable to have that info.
The genius behind Array Tech really wanted to make orbital (around the Earth, in microgravity and near vacuum) rod logic nanocomputers. Now he works at Xilinx. A lot of these mechanical paradigms will come back again as nanomachines are interfaced with optical networks fast enough to feed and care for them.
The time we spent getting away from his wife to brainstorm his "pipe dreams" was by far the most educational time I've spent in my life. I expect it will guide me for decades, though it only lasted across about a year or two, whether it guides my inventions or just understanding the new ones that come across.
Well, the guy I worked with, who has run Cell seminars for NASA and IBM, exploring some Cell programming prototypes this year explained to me that the EIB is indeed coherent across chips. And Mercury makes its modules in pairs of Cells because they're already well integrated by EIB in that config. The 128-core chip is actually something of my conjecture, because the Cell guy I mentioned told me he'd seen IBM prototypes with 1024 SPEs - which, at 8 per core, would be 128 cores, though I suppose a single core could have 1024 SPEs. I don't think 1 PPE or 1 SPE pumping data for all of them (like on PS3's 1:6) would work well.
The SPEs work in a unified memory model across all local stores and the PPE memory, by DMA across the EIB, even though they're physically segregated. That is really the basic magic of the Cell's speeds.
Programming the SPEs is a different model than more familiar CPUs. Its architecture of small addressable onchip memory, per independent SPE, and superfast bus (with crossbars for some extra optimizations) make its model stream processing. The network is supposed to pump data really fast across the Cell, which is mainly concerned (like most DSP) with keeping its pipeline full. Its high costs for failed branch prediction (relative to ALU) means that it really is supposed to process multimedia, which is already tagged for processing, with little control logic per bit processed.
The saving grace of SPE programming is supposed to be the auto scheduling of tasks to available SPEs. You can send a task to the pool with a mask saying any SPE, or multiple SPEs (MISD), etc. Which novelty makes it harder to program, even if just because there's no existing code or code generators that use that facility.
I think the Cell really is a new architecture. The x86 model had a fair amount of advantages, but many disadvantages. PPC too, though fewer disadvantages (other than less existing SW and smaller dev community), because it was newer, but still limited in many ways, mostly large binaries because of RISC and low clock rate (despite RISC). Having taken a stab at it, it's more like an extremely fast LAN of dedicated engineering workstations.
I think a dataflow "language", like a flowchart with topological/graph analytics and techniques, will help programmers best describe to the chip what it is to do with data. But maybe I'm just projecting my own feelings about the new SW paradigm that's been overdue since at least 1995 or so. I thought Java would work like that, and even saw some of its first IDEs demonstrating runtime flowcharts with dynamic properties, even inheritance. But for some reason, programmers hate flowcharts. Maybe the benefit of flowcharting will finally be the best way to use these seductively powerful chips. And maybe the PS3 community will find it in their style, without whatever baggage keeps regular programmers away from it.
IBM is really betting a lot on the Cell. They are responsible for its Linux kernel and gcc. I hope we see IBM finally get in the lead on mainstream products again with an IDE for this chip that makes the "Pentium" era look like the way the PC made the Zilog era look.
If my phone were an open platform (Linux + OSS apps) that had a "wallet" unifying all my financial accounts, but segregated from each other from their point of view over the network, I would trust it. I'd love a wallet that kept my cash, credit and portfolio available from which to pay vendors, if it kept a DB of all my transactions on the phone, backed up at my own server, and secured. Especially if it automatically set one-time passwords on each transaction, with a fairly rapid expiration for completion.
I'd like every payment to appear on my phone (auditable as OSS without vendor/network lockin) as an "OK/Cancel/Revise" invoice dialog. I just want to make sure it's my phone, and not the bank's, or Apple's, or worst of all AT&T's phone that they just let me use as long as I don't complain too much about getting exploited or privacy invaded.
In 1990, at Array Technologies on the SF Bay, we invented a multi-DSP (scalable chip count) parallel processor for image processing. 3-9+ AT&T DSP32Cs were connected by Xilinx FPGAs, with several buses to host PCs, including EISA, SCSI, GPIB/IEEE-488, and later a RAM bus. One DSP was the master, distributing tasks around the board to resources it monitored for availability. That master DSP also reprogrammed the FPGA in realtime. Tasks were selected and distributed for execution, and data routed, and logic configured, to match parameters in incoming data streams, which came from a custom parallel bus from a 4-color-channel video sensor chip behind a Nikkor mount (for Nikon 35mm lenses). The DSP array also controlled the microposition of a subsampling stepper array on which the videochip was mounted, giving 8Kx8K (at 40b color) real data, interpolated by the DSPs into 16Kx16K.
We invented everything ourselves, starting with a raw Hitachi videochip (for TV), blank FPGAs, and DSP32Cs. In 1990. We produced all the software, from DSP and FPGA to host apps to drivers to Photoshop plugins etc. The programming model used "spaces" of data with attached operations and dataflow dependencies, implemented in C structures (before C++ was viable), which we preprocessed to parallelize into the spatial processors (including color spaces, edge enhancing convolution spaces, etc). So both the compiler and runtime maximized parallelism while presenting a simple model of "the computer" to coders, who could reuse existing C code (including DSP libraries optimized for the AT&T chips). The hardest part was writing a single-stepping debugger - really hard was its UI. But we did it, even going to the extent of writing a "C interpreter" in it that could simulate C well enough that many programmers used it as a "command line" to solve simple offline programs, like a really fancy scientific calculator.
Again, that was in 1990. We promoted a lot at parallel computing forums and imaging forums worldwide. And we were in Silicon Valley (up the street, towards Berkeley), so lots of other people in the area got turned on to us. Our model has turned up quite a lot. The Cell task management architecture reads like a direct descendent. And I can tell you that we didn't use any existing architecture, implemented or even just planned, when we made our own. But I'm not sure that the Cell or any other architecture or approach is based on any explicitly transmitted info. I think that architecture is just one of the best ways to do it, and we just thought of it (and pulled it off) very early. But we were ahead of our time: the company died after shipping only a few working systems. Partly because just fixing images in Photoshop for a few hundred bucks was cheap and easy (with lots of staff available), while the much better results we got cost a whole lot more. While people's expectations of image quality in most publishing were lowered by the booming popularity at the low end of digital shooting and retouching.
But I do like seeing other work that validates how smart we were then. And keeps me current on ways to exploit what we developed as even faster, more complex HW comes across. That Array machine used 12.5MFLOPS DSPs, for up to something like 200MFLOPS total at $100K. Today my PS3 has 200GFLOPS just on its Cell, running Linux and all its apps (though needing porting to SPEs to really fly), for about $500. That's 1000x the power at 1/200th the price, or 200,000 the bang per buck. Finally getting to the point where everyone will have to learn to do what we made up almost 20 years ago.
If only I could plug a Xilinx Virtex II board running Microblaze/uCLinux directly into the Cell bus, I might have to learn something new again;).
How is that "fair"? By the time this new chip is even properly named, TBM will have Cell chips in 45nm silicon. Partly because their engine is simpler. And the Cell is designed for scalable multicore/chip parallelism. Its main magic is its coherent, superfast "elements" bus, which retains coherency even at 1.6Tbps across multiple cores and chips. IBM has 4-core chips in pairs already deployed in public, and 128-core chips in the lab, where a massive new top-predator supercomputer is being built on the new architecture.
There are other, more parallel processors. The PS3's Cell at 204GFLOPS is matched to a 128-shader RSX at 1.8TFLOPS. But you can't run Linux, or anything else so general purpose, on an RSX - not without a prohibitively difficult development process, if at all retaining the speed.
The Cell has builtin allocation facilities, so app code doesn't have to schedule or otherwise closely manage the fast SPEs, just send tasks to a generic pool. Which SPEs just DMA into a unified memory model. That kind of simplicity makes Cell programming harder than, say, PowerPC programming, but much easier than other parallel programming, without losing its speed. Once there are some basic libraries for programming "common" new parallel tasks on the Cell, it won't be considered any harder than it was to program x86 "Protected Mode", Extended vs Expanded Memory, word alignment, etc.
Before I start to wade through that UMD paper, are you saying that its model might have been an inspiration for the Cell, or that it is just similar to, but designed after, the Cell? Are you saying the UMD design provides implicit engine allocation, or just confirming the fact that the Cell does?
"Imperfect" laws have unintended consequences. I'd spoof my mobile number to everyone once it was set up. What if I'm getting divorced, and my ex/wife files spoofing charges to harass me?
My phone carrier might threaten legal action to ensure I used the CallerID it assigned, for its own "DB consistency" reasons. Or, more likely, if it's a different carrier than the carrier whose number I advertise, the omitted carrier might try to force me to advertise its number for callbacks, rather than their competition I'm advertising. Don't think so? Ask the RIAA/MPAA. Telcos are even more evil.
Just because no law is perfect doesn't mean that we should accept a law that ignores fundamental fair uses of our own technology. If the lawyers who wrote this law really understood spoofing, they'd have defined it to exclude "spoofing" that doesn't misrepresent the person calling from different devices that are all "themself". Since they missed that basic case, they clearly don't understand spoofing. Which means that law is probably a lot more "imperfect" that it seems, with lost more problems waiting to bite us once it's in effect.
The devil is in the details, and these details now look hellish.
I call the "supercomputer on a chip" the "Cell microprocessor". Of course, next year, it won't be so super. But there will be a new one that's really super.
Which TrollMods are they? Just Google fanboys? Or Chinese mafia astroturfers? Maybe they're just Chinese Google botnets trollModding anonymously from unsuspecting Slashdotter's accounts, after they've installed Google Desktop.
Although Google has released other projects as open-source software, where it can be freely modified and redistributed by anyone, Google Desktop for Linux is proprietary. The software was developed by Google's Beijing engineering team
So not only will Google get the index to what's on my local disks, and probably also every keystroke/mouse/click/URL, but it'll get Cc'ed to China's mafia Communist government. Google has a huge evil deal with those evil bastards, and there's no way to know that their Desktop isn't part of it. It wouldn't be the only serious privacy risk Google "mitigates" with only PR, not security.
I'll just wait for Beagle to copy all Google Desktop's features, but in open source that people examine for spyware.
You don't need an SDK to code for a platform. All you need is the API definitions, a compiler/linker and a method for installing the executables.
Apple originally said "no 3rd Party apps" but then backpedaled to just "no SDK (yet)". Jobs says 3rd party apps will be a normal part of the iPhone ecosystem once they've got "security" worked out. Which could mean Java, could mean signed apps. But it does mean that someone will crack whatever's keeping them out before Apple allows it.
Probably someone a Slashdotter knows.
So I'm not asking for a summary of Apple's PR. I'm asking for a hacker, until Apple gives me an easy way.
If I have my own software that implements a better onscreen keyboard than the default iPhone one, like my version of T9, how would I code it and deliver it to iPhones so it overrides the builtin one (at the user's option, of course)?
You favor adult stemcells, and portray embryonic research as a longshot. The embryonic researchers say you're wrong. You're not even a stemcell researcher in either field. And you say the embryonic researchers are doing exactly what you are doing in rhetoric.
That gets you steamed. But Bush's hideous reality you find boring, too boring to even bother explicitly disagreeing.
You are a classic Republican piece of shit with your projections and demented sense of proportion and value.
Your protests are meaningless whines in the shitstorm you people have created in everything you touched with your lying hands. Stop pretending you have any credibility on anything and shut up.
This dump is very valuable. But what about all the covert operations run since the end of this dump's timeframe? The current Bush government is run by people who made their bones in Iran/Contra and earlier. Hell, Robert Gates was the CIA director who both covered up Iran/Contraandcreated Osama's "mujahideen" in Afghanistan. Now Gates runs the Pentagon while we're at war in Afghanistan and Iraq against mostly covert enemies, while trying to start a hot, open war with Iran.
The past is prelude. And with the Bush gang, the spook wars never stop.
Why would you think that? It's common knowledge that CA emissions standards force car makers to sell one model to not only that single largest market, but also to to the entire USA, rather than lose scale economies to different factories/lines/models for different states. Not only do other US states set their requirements to follow California, but so do many countries around the world. "California emissions" is a market many times larger than California's 35M population.
And the costs of meeting it aren't that high in the car, compared to tweaking different models. The car industry's entire economy is based on Henry Ford's original mass production model. Parts are shared across not just markets, but across models, across model years, across manufacturers. Mass manufacturing and standardization are so economical that most parts and systems are redundant across even competing manufacturers, supplied from the same 3rd party sources. It's one reason why a given garage can service so many different competing brands.
California's leading standards are consistent with economy and ecology. That's why the original US emissions standards were defined to match them, even though they were the strictest in the country, and specified reducing hydrocarbons by 72%, CO by 56%, crankcase emissions 100%, in just 5 years. And they did it.
This battle in the NY state legislature was between Microsoft's lobbyists for proprietary voting machines vs IBM's lobbyists to make the machines open and auditable outside the closed certification system that is totally rigged to sell vendor products.
IBM has won this battle. Possibly because it's a NY state based company (Armonk, NY). The trick will be seeing this victory applied elsewhere in the country.
NY is famous for being tough, smart and understanding security. I hope other people in other states are lucky enough to follow our lead.
Let me remind you that "anti-Clinton hysteria" has remained the #1 product of the Bush administration and its apologists, whose motto is "But Clinton...".
And let me further remind you that Bush Jr's signing statements have already been documented to have set policy for probably at least 30% of the laws he's subverted with them to be violated by the agencies he controls.
And under Bush, we're looking at our country is the worst shape since Vietnam & Watergate, and probably worse.
And on the topic at hand, Bush has not actually managed to divide the country into the adult vs embryonic stemcells camps, despite drying up funding so they become competition. I'm not in any one camp, despite your baseless assertions. But you are so firmly in the Bush apologist camp that now you're winding down with "they could impeach him, but so what?"
You talk about repugnant. But your attitude towards therapies that could save lives, and the crimes of an unprecedented tyrant president stopping those therapies while killing so many more directly around the world, are so callous that you're like a serial killer. Or, more precisely, you're a serial killer's apologist. Subhuman in your inability to empathize, or have any sense of proportion of evil, or any remorse.
You've got the government you deserve. But I deserve better than either of you.
Copyright law isn't fuzzy in this regard, it's perfectly clear. Market practice is fuzzy, within the rights of people to waive their copyright enforcement in beneficial cases without ceding any copyright control.
No, because we could benefit enormously from studying the remains or live samples of an existing extraterrestrial organism. And there is a moral loss if we do destroy a fragile ecosystem, beyond the purely scientific and economic benefits of exploiting it.
We didn't even detect substantial water there until this year, and now it's possible that there's a tremendous amount now that we've got real instruments at and below the surface.
"Not as destructive as algae" is a good wrap up to your demonstration of just what blunderers humans are when we don't take our real costs, benefits and risks of colonizing new places into account.
That's why I'm cautioning that we shouldn't just assume it's dead as you are, and that we've checked enough already, and no big deal if we blow it. It is a big deal.
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Impeachment is a pretty good leash. Especially because it's the gateway to a traitor's noose.
Libby's commutation was obviously part of the deal he made with Bush and Cheney to lie to Plame prosecutor Fitzgerald so Fitzgerald wouldn't catch Bush or Cheney for their conspiracy in the original case. Libby lied to cover up Bush and Cheney's outing Plame to cover up their lies about fake Niger/Iraq uranium "yellowcake". So Bush made sure that Libby would never go to jail, or otherwise be punished, to ensure Libby would never tell the truth about the rest of their conspiracy.
Libby hasn't told, so he's not going to jail. And his fines, left in place, are getting paid by Tucker Carlson's father's Republican committee friends. While the rest of his career is guaranteed to be rich in book deals and/or speaking fees for Republican audiences.
This commutation isn't just a technical stunt. It's central to Bush/Cheney's conspiracy to lie us into war and get away with even more power than anyone expected.
Can you be more specific?
About Vancouver, that is. The alien planets I've got covered. But their shipping rates are too high.
Where are the cheap, highly efficient photonic crystals for storing optical energy without transduction to electrons or chemical potential?
This question is not so much a cosmological one as a philosophical one. That far in the future, any intelligence could, if increasing its accuracy and precision model of the universe at the rate we have in our recorded history, find other evidence than any of which we conceive today to reconstruct the early conditions. Much like we have kinds of evidence now of which no one conceived in 1900.
Another way to pop this conundrum is to ask whether anyone has proven that we will not be able to record our current information about the Universe's origin in such a way that the distant future will just be able to read its history, rather than start from scratch with matter/energy/whatever found ambient in its environment. It seems likely any recordings from today would be lost over so long a duration, but again, we're just getting started making recordings and thinking about long histories.
Unless someone can prove that any recordings of current origin info made now will strictly inevitably be lost over that long time, even if we used all the matter and energy in which we could possibly record that info, then they cannot prove that the future will be unable to have that info.
Wake me when they're so sure.
The genius behind Array Tech really wanted to make orbital (around the Earth, in microgravity and near vacuum) rod logic nanocomputers. Now he works at Xilinx. A lot of these mechanical paradigms will come back again as nanomachines are interfaced with optical networks fast enough to feed and care for them.
The time we spent getting away from his wife to brainstorm his "pipe dreams" was by far the most educational time I've spent in my life. I expect it will guide me for decades, though it only lasted across about a year or two, whether it guides my inventions or just understanding the new ones that come across.
Well, the guy I worked with, who has run Cell seminars for NASA and IBM, exploring some Cell programming prototypes this year explained to me that the EIB is indeed coherent across chips. And Mercury makes its modules in pairs of Cells because they're already well integrated by EIB in that config. The 128-core chip is actually something of my conjecture, because the Cell guy I mentioned told me he'd seen IBM prototypes with 1024 SPEs - which, at 8 per core, would be 128 cores, though I suppose a single core could have 1024 SPEs. I don't think 1 PPE or 1 SPE pumping data for all of them (like on PS3's 1:6) would work well.
The SPEs work in a unified memory model across all local stores and the PPE memory, by DMA across the EIB, even though they're physically segregated. That is really the basic magic of the Cell's speeds.
Programming the SPEs is a different model than more familiar CPUs. Its architecture of small addressable onchip memory, per independent SPE, and superfast bus (with crossbars for some extra optimizations) make its model stream processing. The network is supposed to pump data really fast across the Cell, which is mainly concerned (like most DSP) with keeping its pipeline full. Its high costs for failed branch prediction (relative to ALU) means that it really is supposed to process multimedia, which is already tagged for processing, with little control logic per bit processed.
The saving grace of SPE programming is supposed to be the auto scheduling of tasks to available SPEs. You can send a task to the pool with a mask saying any SPE, or multiple SPEs (MISD), etc. Which novelty makes it harder to program, even if just because there's no existing code or code generators that use that facility.
I think the Cell really is a new architecture. The x86 model had a fair amount of advantages, but many disadvantages. PPC too, though fewer disadvantages (other than less existing SW and smaller dev community), because it was newer, but still limited in many ways, mostly large binaries because of RISC and low clock rate (despite RISC). Having taken a stab at it, it's more like an extremely fast LAN of dedicated engineering workstations.
I think a dataflow "language", like a flowchart with topological/graph analytics and techniques, will help programmers best describe to the chip what it is to do with data. But maybe I'm just projecting my own feelings about the new SW paradigm that's been overdue since at least 1995 or so. I thought Java would work like that, and even saw some of its first IDEs demonstrating runtime flowcharts with dynamic properties, even inheritance. But for some reason, programmers hate flowcharts. Maybe the benefit of flowcharting will finally be the best way to use these seductively powerful chips. And maybe the PS3 community will find it in their style, without whatever baggage keeps regular programmers away from it.
IBM is really betting a lot on the Cell. They are responsible for its Linux kernel and gcc. I hope we see IBM finally get in the lead on mainstream products again with an IDE for this chip that makes the "Pentium" era look like the way the PC made the Zilog era look.
If my phone were an open platform (Linux + OSS apps) that had a "wallet" unifying all my financial accounts, but segregated from each other from their point of view over the network, I would trust it. I'd love a wallet that kept my cash, credit and portfolio available from which to pay vendors, if it kept a DB of all my transactions on the phone, backed up at my own server, and secured. Especially if it automatically set one-time passwords on each transaction, with a fairly rapid expiration for completion.
I'd like every payment to appear on my phone (auditable as OSS without vendor/network lockin) as an "OK/Cancel/Revise" invoice dialog. I just want to make sure it's my phone, and not the bank's, or Apple's, or worst of all AT&T's phone that they just let me use as long as I don't complain too much about getting exploited or privacy invaded.
In 1990, at Array Technologies on the SF Bay, we invented a multi-DSP (scalable chip count) parallel processor for image processing. 3-9+ AT&T DSP32Cs were connected by Xilinx FPGAs, with several buses to host PCs, including EISA, SCSI, GPIB/IEEE-488, and later a RAM bus. One DSP was the master, distributing tasks around the board to resources it monitored for availability. That master DSP also reprogrammed the FPGA in realtime. Tasks were selected and distributed for execution, and data routed, and logic configured, to match parameters in incoming data streams, which came from a custom parallel bus from a 4-color-channel video sensor chip behind a Nikkor mount (for Nikon 35mm lenses). The DSP array also controlled the microposition of a subsampling stepper array on which the videochip was mounted, giving 8Kx8K (at 40b color) real data, interpolated by the DSPs into 16Kx16K.
;).
We invented everything ourselves, starting with a raw Hitachi videochip (for TV), blank FPGAs, and DSP32Cs. In 1990. We produced all the software, from DSP and FPGA to host apps to drivers to Photoshop plugins etc. The programming model used "spaces" of data with attached operations and dataflow dependencies, implemented in C structures (before C++ was viable), which we preprocessed to parallelize into the spatial processors (including color spaces, edge enhancing convolution spaces, etc). So both the compiler and runtime maximized parallelism while presenting a simple model of "the computer" to coders, who could reuse existing C code (including DSP libraries optimized for the AT&T chips). The hardest part was writing a single-stepping debugger - really hard was its UI. But we did it, even going to the extent of writing a "C interpreter" in it that could simulate C well enough that many programmers used it as a "command line" to solve simple offline programs, like a really fancy scientific calculator.
Again, that was in 1990. We promoted a lot at parallel computing forums and imaging forums worldwide. And we were in Silicon Valley (up the street, towards Berkeley), so lots of other people in the area got turned on to us. Our model has turned up quite a lot. The Cell task management architecture reads like a direct descendent. And I can tell you that we didn't use any existing architecture, implemented or even just planned, when we made our own. But I'm not sure that the Cell or any other architecture or approach is based on any explicitly transmitted info. I think that architecture is just one of the best ways to do it, and we just thought of it (and pulled it off) very early. But we were ahead of our time: the company died after shipping only a few working systems. Partly because just fixing images in Photoshop for a few hundred bucks was cheap and easy (with lots of staff available), while the much better results we got cost a whole lot more. While people's expectations of image quality in most publishing were lowered by the booming popularity at the low end of digital shooting and retouching.
But I do like seeing other work that validates how smart we were then. And keeps me current on ways to exploit what we developed as even faster, more complex HW comes across. That Array machine used 12.5MFLOPS DSPs, for up to something like 200MFLOPS total at $100K. Today my PS3 has 200GFLOPS just on its Cell, running Linux and all its apps (though needing porting to SPEs to really fly), for about $500. That's 1000x the power at 1/200th the price, or 200,000 the bang per buck. Finally getting to the point where everyone will have to learn to do what we made up almost 20 years ago.
If only I could plug a Xilinx Virtex II board running Microblaze/uCLinux directly into the Cell bus, I might have to learn something new again
How is that "fair"? By the time this new chip is even properly named, TBM will have Cell chips in 45nm silicon. Partly because their engine is simpler. And the Cell is designed for scalable multicore/chip parallelism. Its main magic is its coherent, superfast "elements" bus, which retains coherency even at 1.6Tbps across multiple cores and chips. IBM has 4-core chips in pairs already deployed in public, and 128-core chips in the lab, where a massive new top-predator supercomputer is being built on the new architecture.
There are other, more parallel processors. The PS3's Cell at 204GFLOPS is matched to a 128-shader RSX at 1.8TFLOPS. But you can't run Linux, or anything else so general purpose, on an RSX - not without a prohibitively difficult development process, if at all retaining the speed.
The Cell has builtin allocation facilities, so app code doesn't have to schedule or otherwise closely manage the fast SPEs, just send tasks to a generic pool. Which SPEs just DMA into a unified memory model. That kind of simplicity makes Cell programming harder than, say, PowerPC programming, but much easier than other parallel programming, without losing its speed. Once there are some basic libraries for programming "common" new parallel tasks on the Cell, it won't be considered any harder than it was to program x86 "Protected Mode", Extended vs Expanded Memory, word alignment, etc.
Before I start to wade through that UMD paper, are you saying that its model might have been an inspiration for the Cell, or that it is just similar to, but designed after, the Cell? Are you saying the UMD design provides implicit engine allocation, or just confirming the fact that the Cell does?
"Imperfect" laws have unintended consequences. I'd spoof my mobile number to everyone once it was set up. What if I'm getting divorced, and my ex/wife files spoofing charges to harass me?
My phone carrier might threaten legal action to ensure I used the CallerID it assigned, for its own "DB consistency" reasons. Or, more likely, if it's a different carrier than the carrier whose number I advertise, the omitted carrier might try to force me to advertise its number for callbacks, rather than their competition I'm advertising. Don't think so? Ask the RIAA/MPAA. Telcos are even more evil.
Just because no law is perfect doesn't mean that we should accept a law that ignores fundamental fair uses of our own technology. If the lawyers who wrote this law really understood spoofing, they'd have defined it to exclude "spoofing" that doesn't misrepresent the person calling from different devices that are all "themself". Since they missed that basic case, they clearly don't understand spoofing. Which means that law is probably a lot more "imperfect" that it seems, with lost more problems waiting to bite us once it's in effect.
The devil is in the details, and these details now look hellish.
If I send my landline phone# from my mobile phone, is that "illegal spoofing"?
I call the "supercomputer on a chip" the "Cell microprocessor". Of course, next year, it won't be so super. But there will be a new one that's really super.
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Which TrollMods are they? Just Google fanboys? Or Chinese mafia astroturfers? Maybe they're just Chinese Google botnets trollModding anonymously from unsuspecting Slashdotter's accounts, after they've installed Google Desktop.
So not only will Google get the index to what's on my local disks, and probably also every keystroke/mouse/click/URL, but it'll get Cc'ed to China's mafia Communist government. Google has a huge evil deal with those evil bastards, and there's no way to know that their Desktop isn't part of it. It wouldn't be the only serious privacy risk Google "mitigates" with only PR, not security.
I'll just wait for Beagle to copy all Google Desktop's features, but in open source that people examine for spyware.
You don't need an SDK to code for a platform. All you need is the API definitions, a compiler/linker and a method for installing the executables.
Apple originally said "no 3rd Party apps" but then backpedaled to just "no SDK (yet)". Jobs says 3rd party apps will be a normal part of the iPhone ecosystem once they've got "security" worked out. Which could mean Java, could mean signed apps. But it does mean that someone will crack whatever's keeping them out before Apple allows it.
Probably someone a Slashdotter knows.
So I'm not asking for a summary of Apple's PR. I'm asking for a hacker, until Apple gives me an easy way.
If I have my own software that implements a better onscreen keyboard than the default iPhone one, like my version of T9, how would I code it and deliver it to iPhones so it overrides the builtin one (at the user's option, of course)?
You favor adult stemcells, and portray embryonic research as a longshot. The embryonic researchers say you're wrong. You're not even a stemcell researcher in either field. And you say the embryonic researchers are doing exactly what you are doing in rhetoric.
That gets you steamed. But Bush's hideous reality you find boring, too boring to even bother explicitly disagreeing.
You are a classic Republican piece of shit with your projections and demented sense of proportion and value.
Your protests are meaningless whines in the shitstorm you people have created in everything you touched with your lying hands. Stop pretending you have any credibility on anything and shut up.
This dump is very valuable. But what about all the covert operations run since the end of this dump's timeframe? The current Bush government is run by people who made their bones in Iran/Contra and earlier. Hell, Robert Gates was the CIA director who both covered up Iran/Contra and created Osama's "mujahideen" in Afghanistan. Now Gates runs the Pentagon while we're at war in Afghanistan and Iraq against mostly covert enemies, while trying to start a hot, open war with Iran.
The past is prelude. And with the Bush gang, the spook wars never stop.
Why would you think that? It's common knowledge that CA emissions standards force car makers to sell one model to not only that single largest market, but also to to the entire USA, rather than lose scale economies to different factories/lines/models for different states. Not only do other US states set their requirements to follow California, but so do many countries around the world. "California emissions" is a market many times larger than California's 35M population.
And the costs of meeting it aren't that high in the car, compared to tweaking different models. The car industry's entire economy is based on Henry Ford's original mass production model. Parts are shared across not just markets, but across models, across model years, across manufacturers. Mass manufacturing and standardization are so economical that most parts and systems are redundant across even competing manufacturers, supplied from the same 3rd party sources. It's one reason why a given garage can service so many different competing brands.
California's leading standards are consistent with economy and ecology. That's why the original US emissions standards were defined to match them, even though they were the strictest in the country, and specified reducing hydrocarbons by 72%, CO by 56%, crankcase emissions 100%, in just 5 years. And they did it.
This battle in the NY state legislature was between Microsoft's lobbyists for proprietary voting machines vs IBM's lobbyists to make the machines open and auditable outside the closed certification system that is totally rigged to sell vendor products.
IBM has won this battle. Possibly because it's a NY state based company (Armonk, NY). The trick will be seeing this victory applied elsewhere in the country.
NY is famous for being tough, smart and understanding security. I hope other people in other states are lucky enough to follow our lead.
Oh, yeah, it's all no big deal. Right.
Let me remind you that "anti-Clinton hysteria" has remained the #1 product of the Bush administration and its apologists, whose motto is "But Clinton...".
And let me further remind you that Bush Jr's signing statements have already been documented to have set policy for probably at least 30% of the laws he's subverted with them to be violated by the agencies he controls.
And under Bush, we're looking at our country is the worst shape since Vietnam & Watergate, and probably worse.
And on the topic at hand, Bush has not actually managed to divide the country into the adult vs embryonic stemcells camps, despite drying up funding so they become competition. I'm not in any one camp, despite your baseless assertions. But you are so firmly in the Bush apologist camp that now you're winding down with "they could impeach him, but so what?"
You talk about repugnant. But your attitude towards therapies that could save lives, and the crimes of an unprecedented tyrant president stopping those therapies while killing so many more directly around the world, are so callous that you're like a serial killer. Or, more precisely, you're a serial killer's apologist. Subhuman in your inability to empathize, or have any sense of proportion of evil, or any remorse.
You've got the government you deserve. But I deserve better than either of you.
Copyright law isn't fuzzy in this regard, it's perfectly clear. Market practice is fuzzy, within the rights of people to waive their copyright enforcement in beneficial cases without ceding any copyright control.
No, because we could benefit enormously from studying the remains or live samples of an existing extraterrestrial organism. And there is a moral loss if we do destroy a fragile ecosystem, beyond the purely scientific and economic benefits of exploiting it.
We didn't even detect substantial water there until this year, and now it's possible that there's a tremendous amount now that we've got real instruments at and below the surface.
"Not as destructive as algae" is a good wrap up to your demonstration of just what blunderers humans are when we don't take our real costs, benefits and risks of colonizing new places into account.
That's why I'm cautioning that we shouldn't just assume it's dead as you are, and that we've checked enough already, and no big deal if we blow it. It is a big deal.