No, it's not an abridgment. Any newspaper publisher would still be free to make political endorsements, just not with the same tax advantages that they could have if they took non-profit status.
Rights come with responsibilities. The right of absolute freedom of speech also comes with the responsibility to pay the full costs of their organization.
We received a couple of racks worth of HP machines for a cluster, which included Ethernet and Myrinet connectivity. Each cable for the interconnect (3 Ethernet and 1 Myrinet Fiber cable) came individually twist-tied (twice, on opposite sides of the coil), bagged (sealed, not zip lock, nor open), encased in egg-crate foam, placed into a small cardboard box, and labelled with a unique serial number. Fortunately, these were collected into a couple of larger shipping boxes, but these boxes were only filled to about 1/3 capacity, the remainder of the space was filled with expanded foam peanuts AND sealed air bubble packaging. Each weighed (maybe) 10 pounds. We got 6 such boxes.
GCC's IA64 support is functional, but you can't call it much better than that. Intel's answer was their own compiler suite, which did much better than GCC.
Note that on basic OS stuff, neither compiler was dramatically different in performance (so don't bother to recompile your whole system). But for application code, which is what all of the customers bought the system for, the Intel compiler was notably better.
If I remember correctly, GCC breaks things down to the lower level RTL too early to allow the sort of optimizations that EPIC requires. I think the new internals format used in GCC 4 is supposed to make the sort of work that IA64 requires possible.
Take the entire previous paragraph with a grain of salt.
I spent a while working on building cluster of IA64 machines in the HPC space. I don't anymore, and I can't say as I miss them.
First, as noted elsewhere, at the time when opinions were being formed, the cost of a decent dual processor machine with a useful amount of memory was about $30K (a typical HP cluster machine) while the comparable x86 box was about $3000. Today those prices are lower, but the x86 is still cheaper by several times.
Second, the HPC folks were perfectly happy running Linux, while no one else seemed to be. And Linux works on the machines. But in general purpose computing the advantages of the IA64 aren't seen. Especially now when we have x86 with 64 bit memory addressing.
Next, the hardware (when you're willing to pay for it) was lousy. One box from HP had 15 fans for the 2 processors, in a 6 or 7U box. I think it would take off if you aligned it properly before turning it on. I can't imagine a rack full of these, much less a whole machine room (we had 2, and wouldn't allow them both on at the same time, but we had these in office space).
The EFI BIOS is truly an amazing piece of work. It's hard to work with on the console if you're a PC user expecting normal menu traversal with arrow keys (left and right arrow keys worked, but to move up or down you needed to use 'u' or 'd'). But we were building clusters, and expected to do things with the machine via serial interfaces. But the UI was even worse over a serial line. What happened to nice, easy to program command line firmware? (Note to HP Fort Collins: you're supposed to take the BEST of both worlds when you try to merge paradigms).
Yes, there was also a network interface which would take the place of the serial connection. But this wouldn't use DHCP, but rather manual network configuration, which required this funky hydra cable to connect to some other machine in order to set up properly. And each person connecting to this system would get write access to the console. There are decent ways to share a console across multiple logged in users (c.f. http://conserver.com/ for one example).
For a set of machines designed for cluster computing, they were about as unfriendly as you can get for us infrastructure people.
(Note, these hardware obvservations are only based on about 6 classes of HP machines that I've put my fingers onto; I have no knowledge of any non-HP IA64 machines).
Once up and running, they're not bad systems. But they're not so much better than x86 systems to win over most people. There's always a class of user who is willing to pay for the highest performance. But the larger part of the market pays attention to flops/dollar, and building a thousand node x86 system is still cheaper than 500 nodes of IA64.
(Disclaimer: I haven't had to price out IA64 systems for a year and change now; I don't believe my claims are invalid, but if someone can show me I'm wrong, I'd love to know it).
I have no interest in working on IA64 systems anymore, unless you're paying me to do it.
I worked with the NSCP LDAP server extensively, and I believe the heritage of that server is a rewrite of the codebase than OpenLDAP evolved into (done by the original authors), with an understanding of what went wrong with the slapd code.
So they look very similar from an external point of view, excepting the features that were added to NSCP (the replication code has always been more advanced than OpenLDAP, for one).
After several years working with NSCP Directory Server, I've had a hard time using OpenLDAP. It's just much less flexible. I suspect that if the NSCP code goes to an appropriate open source license, that this will more or less spell the end of OpenLDAP. What features OpenLDAP may have over NSCP will quickly be migrated.
It's not possible to add encryption to any problem without also adding complexity. Or, more precisely, the complexity is inversely proportional to the strength of the system.
Key management in a massively distributed system is a hard problem. It WILL create additional complexity.
EVM's aren't the problem (IMO). Unauditable systems are the problem. India appears to audit a vote count and ensure that there aren't more voters than expected. But I don't see how their system allows someone to ensure that their ballot was thrown to the correct candidate.
And because the Indian election spans multiple weeks, it's feasible to call for a re-election in certain locales. This would be a major change to the US system, which expects results within hours of the polls closing.
The Morph Files was early Aardman animation, with clay characters that could easily, well, morph from one shape to another as the story required. The first production is from 1980.
Because, under the US Constitution, exclusive rights to so called intellectual properties are granted for a limited time. This is in contrast with the physical properties (your house, your car, the physical manifestation of your writings), which are real property and cannot fall into the public domain.
Walt Disney himself should have believed that his creations would fall out of copyright after a time, because that was the law of the land at the time of creation. He may not have liked the idea, but that's was the social contract for gaining the exclusive rights immediately after creation.
Article I, Section 8, under the enumerated powers of the Congress.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
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No, it's not an abridgment. Any newspaper publisher would still be free to make political endorsements, just not with the same tax advantages that they could have if they took non-profit status.
Rights come with responsibilities. The right of absolute freedom of speech also comes with the responsibility to pay the full costs of their organization.
We received a couple of racks worth of HP machines for a cluster, which included Ethernet and Myrinet connectivity. Each cable for the interconnect (3 Ethernet and 1 Myrinet Fiber cable) came individually twist-tied (twice, on opposite sides of the coil), bagged (sealed, not zip lock, nor open), encased in egg-crate foam, placed into a small cardboard box, and labelled with a unique serial number. Fortunately, these were collected into a couple of larger shipping boxes, but these boxes were only filled to about 1/3 capacity, the remainder of the space was filled with expanded foam peanuts AND sealed air bubble packaging. Each weighed (maybe) 10 pounds. We got 6 such boxes.
GCC's IA64 support is functional, but you can't call it much better than that. Intel's answer was their own compiler suite, which did much better than GCC.
Note that on basic OS stuff, neither compiler was dramatically different in performance (so don't bother to recompile your whole system). But for application code, which is what all of the customers bought the system for, the Intel compiler was notably better.
If I remember correctly, GCC breaks things down to the lower level RTL too early to allow the sort of optimizations that EPIC requires. I think the new internals format used in GCC 4 is supposed to make the sort of work that IA64 requires possible.
Take the entire previous paragraph with a grain of salt.
I spent a while working on building cluster of IA64 machines in the HPC space. I don't anymore, and I can't say as I miss them.
First, as noted elsewhere, at the time when opinions were being formed, the cost of a decent dual processor machine with a useful amount of memory was about $30K (a typical HP cluster machine) while the comparable x86 box was about $3000. Today those prices are lower, but the x86 is still cheaper by several times.
Second, the HPC folks were perfectly happy running Linux, while no one else seemed to be. And Linux works on the machines. But in general purpose computing the advantages of the IA64 aren't seen.
Especially now when we have x86 with 64 bit memory addressing.
Next, the hardware (when you're willing to pay for it) was lousy. One box from HP had 15 fans for the 2 processors, in a 6 or 7U box. I think it would take off if you aligned it properly before turning it on. I can't imagine a rack full of these, much less a whole machine room (we had 2, and wouldn't allow them both on at the same time, but we had these in office space).
The EFI BIOS is truly an amazing piece of work. It's hard to work with on the console if you're a PC user expecting normal menu traversal with arrow keys (left and right arrow keys worked, but to move up or down you needed to use 'u' or 'd'). But we were building clusters, and expected to do things with the machine via serial interfaces. But the UI was even worse over a serial line. What happened to nice, easy to program command line firmware? (Note to HP Fort Collins: you're supposed to take the BEST of both worlds when you try to merge paradigms).
Yes, there was also a network interface which would take the place of the serial connection. But this wouldn't use DHCP, but rather manual network configuration, which required this funky hydra cable to connect to some other machine in order to set up properly. And each person connecting to this system would get write access to the console. There are decent ways to share a console across multiple logged in users (c.f. http://conserver.com/ for one example).
For a set of machines designed for cluster computing, they were about as unfriendly as you can get for us infrastructure people.
(Note, these hardware obvservations are only based on about 6 classes of HP machines that I've put my fingers onto; I have no knowledge of any non-HP IA64 machines).
Once up and running, they're not bad systems. But they're not so much better than x86 systems to win over most people. There's always a class of user who is willing to pay for the highest performance. But the larger part of the market pays attention to flops/dollar, and building a thousand node x86 system is still cheaper than 500 nodes of IA64.
(Disclaimer: I haven't had to price out IA64 systems for a year and change now; I don't believe my claims are invalid, but if someone can show me I'm wrong, I'd love to know it).
I have no interest in working on IA64 systems anymore, unless you're paying me to do it.
I worked with the NSCP LDAP server extensively, and I believe the heritage of that server is a rewrite of the codebase than OpenLDAP evolved into (done by the original authors), with an understanding of what went wrong with the slapd code.
So they look very similar from an external point of view, excepting the features that were added to NSCP (the replication code has always been more advanced than OpenLDAP, for one).
After several years working with NSCP Directory Server, I've had a hard time using OpenLDAP. It's just much less flexible. I suspect that if the NSCP code goes to an appropriate open source license, that this will more or less spell the end of OpenLDAP. What features OpenLDAP may have over NSCP will quickly be migrated.
It's not possible to add encryption to any problem without also adding complexity. Or, more precisely, the complexity is inversely proportional to the strength of the system.
Key management in a massively distributed system is a hard problem. It WILL create additional complexity.
EVM's aren't the problem (IMO). Unauditable systems are the problem. India appears to audit a vote count and ensure that there aren't more voters than expected. But I don't see how their system allows someone to ensure that their ballot was thrown to the correct candidate.
And because the Indian election spans multiple weeks, it's feasible to call for a re-election in certain locales. This would be a major change to the US system, which expects results within hours of the polls closing.
The Morph Files was early Aardman animation, with clay characters that could easily, well, morph from one shape to another as the story required. The first production is from 1980.
to the Aardman site
Because, under the US Constitution, exclusive rights to so called intellectual properties are granted for a limited time. This is in contrast with the physical properties (your house, your car, the physical manifestation of your writings), which are real property and cannot fall into the public domain.
Walt Disney himself should have believed that his creations would fall out of copyright after a time, because that was the law of the land at the time of creation. He may not have liked the idea, but that's was the social contract for gaining the exclusive rights immediately after creation.
Article I, Section 8, under the enumerated powers of the Congress.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;