I started as a Netflix DVD customer about six years ago. Then I was paying $20/mo for the 3-at-a-time service. At some point, they informed me they were dropping the price down to $17 a month. Cool. Then they added a streaming service for free. There wasn't much on it, there was no Mac support, quality was so-so, but I used it sometimes. Cool. Progressively, the quality of the streaming improved, support was added for tons of set-to boxes and Macs, and the amount of content has been continuously growing. At some point in there the price went back up to the $20/mo I was paying when I first signed up. Oh well. Now I watch far more on instant than on DVD. When I got the email about the latest price increases, I changed my subscription from 3-at-a-time to 2-at-a-time DVDs, and now I'm still paying $20 a month.
I've got better service now than I did six years ago and I'm still paying the same price. I'm not complaining.
This is not an Internet2 speed record
(lsr.internet2.edu), which is measured between single host pair. This demo was done for the SC2004 bandwidth challenge using a large number of hosts.
This is a very complicated question, the answer to which varies with the evolution of certain technologies. Some factors include processor speeds (in FLOPS), memory latency and bandwidth, system bus/interconnect latency and bandwidth, mass storage bus bandwidth. It actually tunrs out to be kind of a linear programming problem. There are some crucial software factors involved as well.
The people at the large supercomputing centers, those who fund them, and the companies making supercomputing equipment, all spend a lot of time weighing these criteria to determine the most cost effective solution for a certain class of performance.
Also, in a grid environment where those executing code do not trust those buying cycles, there is more significant overhead because the farmed-out code must run in a sandbox. So when neither party trusts the other, you might reasonably expect to end up with a 200% reduction in speed, or worse.
Further, there is a really fundamental bit not mentioned at all in the article -- the effect of network latency. Many parallel applications require frequent synchronization between nodes, and performance quickly becomes dominated by latency as it increases. That is why "real" supercomputers typically have interconnect latency on the order of a few microseconds. "Beowulfs" with commodity network gear as an interconnect have tens of microseconds. A widely distributed computation will necessarily have latencies of tens of thousands of microseconds (unless someone figures out how to change the speed of light).
Basically, all he's said is having good security is hard, and your average user is not up to the task. Another way of saying this is that the weakest part of most security systems now is the people that use them. I think this is pretty well-known already.
SSH and SSL, when used correctly, can provide good security. They aren't idiot-proof, but then again, what security system is?
I guess at a basic level they replaced the mirrored internal of the "sphere" with a complex 360 degree video screen you would have a similar effect.
I don't think it's quite that simple. The hard problem is getting it to look different at different angles. (If you look at a video screen, it's not like looking at a mirror.)
The kernel is no better off than user apps, since it can be interrupted at any time.
Most processors now have hardware test-and-set instructions, or something similar.
In the absence of hardware support, there are a number of algorithms for guaranteeing mutual exclusion. (Any OS textbook should have a few.) These are just kinda slow compared to hardware, and are mainly used for distributed systems.
Arguing definitions is pointless
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
Most of the words in the article are devoted to arguing the definition of the term Operating System. However, I see thie question as purely academic, and its answer (if an answer really exists) really doesn't matter much. His argument seems to have little point, except to say that most people expect more than a CLI when they sit down at their computers, which nobody really disputes.
The real meat of the article is in the end where the author describes the features Apple will be adding that will distinguish MacOS X from the average joe UNIX-ish system.
I wonder how much we'll notice the load difference on the Internet in the next few days. From what I've heard, Napster traffic is actually a substantial portion of traffic on some backbones.
Seriously, the idea of Slashdot vs. Kasparov is silly. The MSN game was really Krush and a few other grandmasters and computers vs. Kasparov.
A Slashdot vs. Slashdot game might be entertaining, though it wouldn't likely be a very good game. Also, that's really not the point of slashdot. That type of event would be better for a game site, not a news site.
No matter how much hand-waving you do, there's still only 2^32 (4 billion-ish) possible unique addresses. (And many of these are unusable.) This is just a mathematical fact.
This guy's fallacy is that he thinks the same address can be used for several hosts that have different subnet masks. This would be true if the subnet masks were sent along with the addresses. However, the subnet masks are not known, and under his scheme, there is no way to determine from just the address whether a host address that starts with 128, for example, is in A-1, A-2, or A-3.
I'm not sure what kind of scrutiny the IETF gives the Internet Drafts it publishes, but I really thought it would be more than that. Apart from its bad construction and obscure language, it is simply inaccurate. He seems to be complaining about not being able to pass the CISCO Certification Examination in the Abstract. At least CISCO knows when someone is just a putz.
Hey Rob, I don't see engineering and art as mutually exclusive at all. There's no reason why a piece of brilliant engineering cannot be viewed as artful.
I really doubt it will be PowerPC compatible. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Power line of chips has little in common with the PowerPC line, except for that they are made my IBM and are both RISC.
How is it possible to index the entire web? The entire *static* web should be relatively simple, but dynamic content really throws a monkey wrench in things. And dynamic content is becoming much more commonplace. Not even going into forms, a page referenced by a URL may be different day to day, or even minute to minute (like slashdot).
I haven't seen this book, but it looks like it probably doesn't do a very good job of teaching C, though it probably doesn't require any previous knowledge. I would strongly suggest that if you're going to do any C programming, get Kernighan and Ritchie's _The C Programming Language_ (Prentice Hall). It is useful both for learning the language (it's in a textbook-ish format and has problems), and is also very useful as a reference.
Does anybody know if there has been any research done on if age matters in how susceptible we are to being influenced by watching movies? I don't know anything about psychology, but I would imagine some good research would make this issue a lot clearer. Instead of bickering about pricnciples like freedom and morality, let us instead look at the scientific facts. What are the effects of watching movies with sex, violence, and "bad" language on people of different age groups? Also, other factors should be explored, like IQ, years in school, religious affiliation, etc. I would imagine this has already been explored, but I haven't heard it mentioned. Perhaps someone knows more than I do?
The article says BSD stands for Berkeley Software Design. I've see other things that say it stands for Berkeley Standard Distribution. Is it the former, latter, or neither?
Regardless of the political implications of Internet taxation, I don't see exactly how a government could technically tax e-mail. There would be of course no possible way for them to tax traffic on local networks (like intra-campus or intra-office email). But even outside of that, there's basically no way to tax just email. The government can't monitor the entire Internet. It is (as it was designed to be) distributed, not centralized. This isn't like the US Post Office, where everything has to go through a government agency. I'm not sure what this UN economist was thinking exactly... Anybody know more than I do about her proposition?
Actually, from what I understand, it would not be bad for carpel tunnel. A heavier touch would probably actually be *good*. If you have a heavier touch, people are encouraged to use the weight of their hands instead of their fingers to push the keys down, much like a pianist does. Pianists, or typists who use old typewriters, rarely or never get carpel tunnel. Of course, I'm no expert. This is just what I've heard...
You're right of course that the copyright issue has little or nothing to do with privacy. I hinted at that (perhaps not very well) but did not state so explicitly.
I'm not sure if I agree with your opinion, though. Admittedly, it is hard to imagine Mickey Mouse being used by everyone and anyone. I think Mickey Mouse should be treated as more like a trademark than a copyright. Perhaps there should be some changes in copyright law. I don't know really. I'm obviously no expert.
However, I do beleive that all copyrighted works should be released into the public domain. Would it make sense if we weren't allowed to make reproductions of the Mona Lisa? If we couldn't produce a Shakespeare play without permission of a corporation, and without paying them royalties?
I beleive the purpose (or at least the original purpose) behind copyright law is to provide incentive for creativity. Once an artist has made his or her fortune, that incentive is no longer necessary.
I honestly wasn't very impressed with this piece. All he did was state that the world is quickly becoming an Orwellian nightmare, then cited several events over the last few years which he claims support his argument. He does make a decent argument, but I'm not entirely convinced. All of his examples are fairly superficial and pulled straight out of news stories written just to get attention. I don't doubt that many of these things are taken out of context. In my experience, simple explainations like his are rarely the whole story. It usually takes an insider fullly understand what's going on.
He does hit a few things right on the mark, though, especially the extended copyright issues. Walt Disney and others are (successfuly, it seems) trying to proect their empires by lobbying the government. This, however, is nothing new. This kind of crap has been going on forever. That's just the way our government works, for better or worse.
I'm disappointed in the author's use of his own opinion in this article. This is supposed to be a hard news story, not an editorial. He does present the Cult of the Dead Cow's explanation for why they write these programs, but then makes an argument agains them directly. He doesn't even bother to get quotes from anyone, but simply makes the argument himself. (He says something about "computer security experts" but doesn't elaborate.) This is just plain bad journalism. I learned not to do that in high school journalism class. I would imagine that someone who works for a major news organization like IDG would know better.
Slashdot Mirror
I started as a Netflix DVD customer about six years ago. Then I was paying $20/mo for the 3-at-a-time service. At some point, they informed me they were dropping the price down to $17 a month. Cool. Then they added a streaming service for free. There wasn't much on it, there was no Mac support, quality was so-so, but I used it sometimes. Cool. Progressively, the quality of the streaming improved, support was added for tons of set-to boxes and Macs, and the amount of content has been continuously growing. At some point in there the price went back up to the $20/mo I was paying when I first signed up. Oh well. Now I watch far more on instant than on DVD. When I got the email about the latest price increases, I changed my subscription from 3-at-a-time to 2-at-a-time DVDs, and now I'm still paying $20 a month.
I've got better service now than I did six years ago and I'm still paying the same price. I'm not complaining.
This is not an Internet2 speed record (lsr.internet2.edu), which is measured between single host pair. This demo was done for the SC2004 bandwidth challenge using a large number of hosts.
This is a very complicated question, the answer to which varies with the evolution of certain technologies. Some factors include processor speeds (in FLOPS), memory latency and bandwidth, system bus/interconnect latency and bandwidth, mass storage bus bandwidth. It actually tunrs out to be kind of a linear programming problem. There are some crucial software factors involved as well.
The people at the large supercomputing centers, those who fund them, and the companies making supercomputing equipment, all spend a lot of time weighing these criteria to determine the most cost effective solution for a certain class of performance.
Also, in a grid environment where those executing code do not trust those buying cycles, there is more significant overhead because the farmed-out code must run in a sandbox. So when neither party trusts the other, you might reasonably expect to end up with a 200% reduction in speed, or worse.
Further, there is a really fundamental bit not mentioned at all in the article -- the effect of network latency. Many parallel applications require frequent synchronization between nodes, and performance quickly becomes dominated by latency as it increases. That is why "real" supercomputers typically have interconnect latency on the order of a few microseconds. "Beowulfs" with commodity network gear as an interconnect have tens of microseconds. A widely distributed computation will necessarily have latencies of tens of thousands of microseconds (unless someone figures out how to change the speed of light).
Basically, all he's said is having good security is hard, and your average user is not up to the task. Another way of saying this is that the weakest part of most security systems now is the people that use them. I think this is pretty well-known already.
SSH and SSL, when used correctly, can provide good security. They aren't idiot-proof, but then again, what security system is?
I don't think it's quite that simple. The hard problem is getting it to look different at different angles. (If you look at a video screen, it's not like looking at a mirror.)
-John
The kernel is no better off than user apps, since it can be interrupted at any time.
Most processors now have hardware test-and-set instructions, or something similar.
In the absence of hardware support, there are a number of algorithms for guaranteeing mutual exclusion. (Any OS textbook should have a few.) These are just kinda slow compared to hardware, and are mainly used for distributed systems.
Most of the words in the article are devoted to arguing the definition of the term Operating System. However, I see thie question as purely academic, and its answer (if an answer really exists) really doesn't matter much. His argument seems to have little point, except to say that most people expect more than a CLI when they sit down at their computers, which nobody really disputes.
The real meat of the article is in the end where the author describes the features Apple will be adding that will distinguish MacOS X from the average joe UNIX-ish system.
I wonder how much we'll notice the load difference on the Internet in the next few days. From what I've heard, Napster traffic is actually a substantial portion of traffic on some backbones.
Seriously, the idea of Slashdot vs. Kasparov is silly. The MSN game was really Krush and a few other grandmasters and computers vs. Kasparov.
A Slashdot vs. Slashdot game might be entertaining, though it wouldn't likely be a very good game. Also, that's really not the point of slashdot. That type of event would be better for a game site, not a news site.
No matter how much hand-waving you do, there's still only 2^32 (4 billion-ish) possible unique addresses. (And many of these are unusable.) This is just a mathematical fact.
This guy's fallacy is that he thinks the same address can be used for several hosts that have different subnet masks. This would be true if the subnet masks were sent along with the addresses. However, the subnet masks are not known, and under his scheme, there is no way to determine from just the address whether a host address that starts with 128, for example, is in A-1, A-2, or A-3.
I'm not sure what kind of scrutiny the IETF gives the Internet Drafts it publishes, but I really thought it would be more than that. Apart from its bad construction and obscure language, it is simply inaccurate. He seems to be complaining about not being able to pass the CISCO Certification Examination in the Abstract. At least CISCO knows when someone is just a putz.
Hey Rob, I don't see engineering and art as mutually exclusive at all. There's no reason why a piece of brilliant engineering cannot be viewed as artful.
I really doubt it will be PowerPC compatible. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Power line of chips has little in common with the PowerPC line, except for that they are made my IBM and are both RISC.
How is it possible to index the entire web? The entire *static* web should be relatively simple, but dynamic content really throws a monkey wrench in things. And dynamic content is becoming much more commonplace. Not even going into forms, a page referenced by a URL may be different day to day, or even minute to minute (like slashdot).
I haven't seen this book, but it looks like it probably doesn't do a very good job of teaching C, though it probably doesn't require any previous knowledge. I would strongly suggest that if you're going to do any C programming, get Kernighan and Ritchie's _The C Programming Language_ (Prentice Hall). It is useful both for learning the language (it's in a textbook-ish format and has problems), and is also very useful as a reference.
Uh, Altavista doesn't ignore home pages. I hit them all the time when they happen to have a word I'm searching for.
Does anybody know if there has been any research done on if age matters in how susceptible we are to being influenced by watching movies? I don't know anything about psychology, but I would imagine some good research would make this issue a lot clearer. Instead of bickering about pricnciples like freedom and morality, let us instead look at the scientific facts. What are the effects of watching movies with sex, violence, and "bad" language on people of different age groups? Also, other factors should be explored, like IQ, years in school, religious affiliation, etc. I would imagine this has already been explored, but I haven't heard it mentioned. Perhaps someone knows more than I do?
You don't want one *already*? I'd like one even if it had NT on it! Their hardware is just so danmed cool.
The article says BSD stands for Berkeley Software Design. I've see other things that say it stands for Berkeley Standard Distribution. Is it the former, latter, or neither?
Does anyone know about Canada's crypto export laws? Are they similar to the US's? Because exporting crypto software to Canada is legal, right?
Regardless of the political implications of Internet taxation, I don't see exactly how a government could technically tax e-mail. There would be of course no possible way for them to tax traffic on local networks (like intra-campus or intra-office email). But even outside of that, there's basically no way to tax just email. The government can't monitor the entire Internet. It is (as it was designed to be) distributed, not centralized. This isn't like the US Post Office, where everything has to go through a government agency. I'm not sure what this UN economist was thinking exactly... Anybody know more than I do about her proposition?
Actually, from what I understand, it would not be bad for carpel tunnel. A heavier touch would probably actually be *good*. If you have a heavier touch, people are encouraged to use the weight of their hands instead of their fingers to push the keys down, much like a pianist does. Pianists, or typists who use old typewriters, rarely or never get carpel tunnel. Of course, I'm no expert. This is just what I've heard...
You're right of course that the copyright issue has little or nothing to do with privacy. I hinted at that (perhaps not very well) but did not state so explicitly.
I'm not sure if I agree with your opinion, though. Admittedly, it is hard to imagine Mickey Mouse being used by everyone and anyone. I think Mickey Mouse should be treated as more like a trademark than a copyright. Perhaps there should be some changes in copyright law. I don't know really. I'm obviously no expert.
However, I do beleive that all copyrighted works should be released into the public domain. Would it make sense if we weren't allowed to make reproductions of the Mona Lisa? If we couldn't produce a Shakespeare play without permission of a corporation, and without paying them royalties?
I beleive the purpose (or at least the original purpose) behind copyright law is to provide incentive for creativity. Once an artist has made his or her fortune, that incentive is no longer necessary.
I honestly wasn't very impressed with this piece. All he did was state that the world is quickly becoming an Orwellian nightmare, then cited several events over the last few years which he claims support his argument. He does make a decent argument, but I'm not entirely convinced. All of his examples are fairly superficial and pulled straight out of news stories written just to get attention. I don't doubt that many of these things are taken out of context. In my experience, simple explainations like his are rarely the whole story. It usually takes an insider fullly understand what's going on.
He does hit a few things right on the mark, though, especially the extended copyright issues. Walt Disney and others are (successfuly, it seems) trying to proect their empires by lobbying the government. This, however, is nothing new. This kind of crap has been going on forever. That's just the way our government works, for better or worse.
I'm disappointed in the author's use of his own opinion in this article. This is supposed to be a hard news story, not an editorial. He does present the Cult of the Dead Cow's explanation for why they write these programs, but then makes an argument agains them directly. He doesn't even bother to get quotes from anyone, but simply makes the argument himself. (He says something about "computer security experts" but doesn't elaborate.) This is just plain bad journalism. I learned not to do that in high school journalism class. I would imagine that someone who works for a major news organization like IDG would know better.