These people are doing some very nice things with parallel compilers. Write once, run on Sony's core, GPGPU, or a traditional multicore x86. They are just now coming out of stealth mode. The compilers are free; rather they license based on deployment. The license charges are quite modest for deploying a few solutions ($1K for one deployment... scales down from there).
Just out of curiosity, why would that be a bad thing? ----------
What you are talking about is disenfranchising the low population states, almost completely. Amongst other things, this breaks the original contract between them and the federal government, from the beginning. Such a proposal--to discard the electoral college system--would hardly be fair unless it also included an opt-out option where any state so choosing could secede from the Union.
Never-you-mind, though. It will never happen. It would require an Amendment that could never pass for the very same reasons.
I don't have an example, although I do recall the case of a famous inventor who did this all the time, and made common practice of avoiding the manufacturer entirely, and approaching only users of manufactured equipment for licenses.
My understanding is that what makes patent law distinct is that operating an infringing "embodiment of the invention" without license is itself actionable. I.e., if I have a patent on principles in use in an engine in your shop, you (or someone) has to pay may for a license to continue to operate the engine... or shut it down.
This I recall also from a short IP course I took.
I'd love to see some lawyer comment on it further. Human memory fallible and all that.:)
I really wish what you said ("permanently unpatentable") were true. Alas, it is not. Rather, what can and will happen is that people will get patents, and it will take literally millions of dollars to get them undone.
I understand you were speaking figuratively, but I wanted to clarify. A patent holder does not have to sue the author of the infringing work. They can (and frequently have, successfully) sue the customers that have bought the infringing work. Patents are different than copyrights.
Doesn't matter in the small. Peak use is when the power providers have the worst time providing power. Having a little solar... or even a lot of solar... out in cogeneration land just relieves the primary power plants of generation requirements.
How do you not know that you're missing $20 every month for a year and a half? Seriously, look at your bank statements every now and then.
While that's fine advice, the wisdom of looking at your statements every once in a while does not absolve the illegal biller of their duty not to illegally bill you.
It's more than that. Sunlight deprivation is associated with both depression and heart disease, the latter of which is one of the largest killers in all first world countries, and the first of which will certainly shorten your life. People who stay indoors to avoid skin cancer are making a life-damaging error. The impact of sunshine on heart disease is much, much more significant than your chance of getting melanoma.
For our most recent trade, what we looked at was blade systems holistically. We do image processing... we need both lots of compute power and reams of I/O. Peak IO was held by Sun, for their 8000s, which if you look, you'll find to be ridiculously equipped for IO. However, we were somewhat cost sensitive, and went more for a CPU/$$$, IO/$$$, with some additional sensitivities towards footprint and power and the like. Dell's 1955 blade was the winner here.
Sun's 8 core blades are really impressive. However, we're moving to a scale-out environment where larger SMP boxen aren't so important. Stateless SOA, blah, blah, you get me I'm sure.
I'm a little confused why you think that ("Opterons are the better buy"). I personally think that the 51XX series is really rompin'. Granted, I haven't twiddled my trade for some months... have the price changes really changed the price-performance ratio? I do know that at the time the 5160 first hit the market, it was king for $$$/unit-of-compute, as well as $$$/watt continuous power. Idle was still advantage AMD, mind.
But go ahead and elaborate. I conduct trade studies for a major corporation, have input into a large data center. Am always happy to hear various opinions...
I see. You were speaking figuratively when you said "almost all".
Their peak category is 48% of 4 socket boxen, at 48%, which would be "almost half," not "almost all," and I agree, because of HT they are going to own >= 4 socket space.
Woodcrest systems are selling out left and right, though, and the 4 *CORE* space is a bigger space then the 8 core (4 socket) space, with more total sales. Every blade except Sun's is 4 cores (and the Sun solution is specialized towards ridiculously high IO and is therefore very expensive).
I agree with all that. IIRC, advantage is to AMD for idle power consumption also; OTOH, with virtualization on the upswing, CPU's are less and less idle these days.
Speaking of virtualization, AMD seems to be doing the right thing there... nested page tables and so forth, along with the L2/L3 cache combo which they tested out as being better for virtual environments.
AMD has an advantage over Intel at any given process size, on the grounds that the IBM-AMD SOI process is basically better at any given process size...
I'm definitely looking forward to Barcelona and near-family releases from AMD. Should be interesting.
Intel pulling their head out of their ass was interesting, too. If they hadn't of, they'd be facing a generalized collapse of their market right now. AMD was utterly killing them.
Any infection is a constant state of body-trying-to-disinfect, the infectant-trying-to-reinfect. Anything that sets back propagation generally causes a reversal of the infection for this reason.
- Management typically sees engineers as a means to an end, and an interchangable means at that. You pay market rate for engineering and they get the job done. Engineers do NOT make companies money - products do.
Um. The trend is away from manufacturing and towards services. Increasingly, it is indeed the engineers who DO make the company money. And will be more and more so as time goes on.
a new producer (or 2, or 5 or 23 or 42) can show up anytime to wreck the game.
When the new producer shows up, those in collusion drop their price below the new arrival's loss point. This happens once or twice, and new producers become afraid to even try to enter the business.
All it takes is one player who sees the value of not actively alienating his distribution channels.
Or a few players realizing that competing with each other was harder than colluding together to achieve a common price structure with minimum fat profit margins...
Figuring out how other businesses can stay just as or more productive with less staff than other businesses and building the infrastructure to make it happen is my business.
So you're telling us that 90% reduction in staff is a reality in businesses you advise?
[wry] Since 90% of the population is non productive, all you have to do is figure out a way to start a business using 90% less staff than other business. What an incredible profit you could have for yourself! [/wry]
I found your whole response to be quite lucid, agreed with it on a whole. Granted I'm quibbling, but the thing is, I fall into the school of thought where a copyright violation by an ordinary citizen can only be called a "real loss" in the most thin of senses. Going with that, if there is no "real loss," should there be no real penalty? I suppose the question is rhetorical; I am agreeing with you that the system is trying to break (even more so with patents), however I'm still at a loss as to how we could have copyright law enforcement at all where an ordinary person operating off their desktop can disseminate thousands of copies to others without a risk of serious punishment. I view the DMCA as well as recent RIAA tactics as mere evidence of a breaking system... desperate increasing of punishment severity and frequency... kindof sounds like what's happening with our drug laws, actually. Talk about a conflict between parties with different opinions!
While I cannot disagree with the overall sentiment of your post, I have a difficult time imagining what you're intended us to understand with this last sentence. The RIAA's techniques are plain and simple barratry -- abuse of process, really, an attempt to use the legal system as a system of threat and intimidation. I cannot conceive of any "reasonable" modification of copyright law that could pertain to this, however. Can you clarify?
Slashdot Mirror
What's really missing are better libraries and compilers.
Look here:
http://www.rapidmind.net/
These people are doing some very nice things with parallel compilers. Write once, run on Sony's core, GPGPU, or a traditional multicore x86. They are just now coming out of stealth mode. The compilers are free; rather they license based on deployment. The license charges are quite modest for deploying a few solutions ($1K for one deployment... scales down from there).
Joe.
Fair enough.
But suing them will be equally difficult.
C//
Since they've been told not to come back, why not break out the big guns? ILLEGAL ACCESS TO ELECTRONIC DEVICE. Federal felony.
C//
Just out of curiosity, why would that be a bad thing?
----------
What you are talking about is disenfranchising the low population states, almost completely. Amongst other things, this breaks the original contract between them and the federal government, from the beginning. Such a proposal--to discard the electoral college system--would hardly be fair unless it also included an opt-out option where any state so choosing could secede from the Union.
Never-you-mind, though. It will never happen. It would require an Amendment that could never pass for the very same reasons.
C//
I don't have an example, although I do recall the case of a famous inventor who did this all the time, and made common practice of avoiding the manufacturer entirely, and approaching only users of manufactured equipment for licenses.
:)
My understanding is that what makes patent law distinct is that operating an infringing "embodiment of the invention" without license is itself actionable. I.e., if I have a patent on principles in use in an engine in your shop, you (or someone) has to pay may for a license to continue to operate the engine... or shut it down.
This I recall also from a short IP course I took.
I'd love to see some lawyer comment on it further. Human memory fallible and all that.
C//
I really wish what you said ("permanently unpatentable") were true. Alas, it is not. Rather, what can and will happen is that people will get patents, and it will take literally millions of dollars to get them undone.
C//
no, MS has to take on you.
I understand you were speaking figuratively, but I wanted to clarify. A patent holder does not have to sue the author of the infringing work. They can (and frequently have, successfully) sue the customers that have bought the infringing work. Patents are different than copyrights.
C//
Well. Yes, but the "lawyer" who is the CPU is usually spelled "judge". Reducing the legal code to practice is the sole purview of the judiciary.
C//
*shrug*
Doesn't matter in the small. Peak use is when the power providers have the worst time providing power. Having a little solar... or even a lot of solar... out in cogeneration land just relieves the primary power plants of generation requirements.
C//
How do you not know that you're missing $20 every month for a year and a half? Seriously, look at your bank statements every now and then.
While that's fine advice, the wisdom of looking at your statements every once in a while does not absolve the illegal biller of their duty not to illegally bill you.
C//
It's more than that. Sunlight deprivation is associated with both depression and heart disease, the latter of which is one of the largest killers in all first world countries, and the first of which will certainly shorten your life. People who stay indoors to avoid skin cancer are making a life-damaging error. The impact of sunshine on heart disease is much, much more significant than your chance of getting melanoma.
C//
For our most recent trade, what we looked at was blade systems holistically. We do image processing... we need both lots of compute power and reams of I/O. Peak IO was held by Sun, for their 8000s, which if you look, you'll find to be ridiculously equipped for IO. However, we were somewhat cost sensitive, and went more for a CPU/$$$, IO/$$$, with some additional sensitivities towards footprint and power and the like. Dell's 1955 blade was the winner here.
Sun's 8 core blades are really impressive. However, we're moving to a scale-out environment where larger SMP boxen aren't so important. Stateless SOA, blah, blah, you get me I'm sure.
C//
I'm a little confused why you think that ("Opterons are the better buy"). I personally think that the 51XX series is really rompin'. Granted, I haven't twiddled my trade for some months... have the price changes really changed the price-performance ratio? I do know that at the time the 5160 first hit the market, it was king for $$$/unit-of-compute, as well as $$$/watt continuous power. Idle was still advantage AMD, mind.
But go ahead and elaborate. I conduct trade studies for a major corporation, have input into a large data center. Am always happy to hear various opinions...
C//
I see. You were speaking figuratively when you said "almost all".
Their peak category is 48% of 4 socket boxen, at 48%, which would be "almost half,"
not "almost all," and I agree, because of HT they are going to own >= 4 socket space.
Woodcrest systems are selling out left and right, though, and the 4 *CORE* space
is a bigger space then the 8 core (4 socket) space, with more total sales. Every blade
except Sun's is 4 cores (and the Sun solution is specialized towards ridiculously
high IO and is therefore very expensive).
C//
"It's almost all Opterons." Source?
C//
I agree with all that. IIRC, advantage is to AMD for idle power consumption also; OTOH, with virtualization on the upswing, CPU's are less and less idle these days.
Speaking of virtualization, AMD seems to be doing the right thing there... nested page tables and so forth, along with the L2/L3 cache combo which they tested out as being better for virtual environments.
AMD has an advantage over Intel at any given process size, on the grounds that the IBM-AMD SOI process is basically better at any given process size...
I'm definitely looking forward to Barcelona and near-family releases from AMD. Should be interesting.
Intel pulling their head out of their ass was interesting, too. If they hadn't of, they'd be facing a generalized collapse of their market right now. AMD was utterly killing them.
C//
Agree, caveat that performance-per-watt needs to be added in, at least in part because watts are money.
C//
Any infection is a constant state of body-trying-to-disinfect, the infectant-trying-to-reinfect. Anything that sets back propagation generally causes a reversal of the infection for this reason.
C//
- Management typically sees engineers as a means to an end, and an interchangable means at that. You pay market rate for engineering and they get the job done. Engineers do NOT make companies money - products do.
Um. The trend is away from manufacturing and towards services. Increasingly, it is indeed the engineers who DO make the company money. And will be more and more so as time goes on.
C//
a new producer (or 2, or 5 or 23 or 42) can show up anytime to wreck the game.
When the new producer shows up, those in collusion drop their price below the new arrival's loss point. This happens once or twice, and new producers become afraid to even try to enter the business.
C//
All it takes is one player who sees the value of not actively alienating his distribution channels.
Or a few players realizing that competing with each other was harder than colluding together to achieve a common price structure with minimum fat profit margins...
C//
Figuring out how other businesses can stay just as or more productive with less staff than other businesses and building the infrastructure to make it happen is my business.
So you're telling us that 90% reduction in staff is a reality in businesses you advise?
C//
[wry]
Since 90% of the population is non productive, all you have to do is figure out a way to start a business using 90% less staff than other business. What an incredible profit you could have for yourself!
[/wry]
I found your whole response to be quite lucid, agreed with it on a whole. Granted I'm quibbling, but the thing is, I fall into the school of thought where a copyright violation by an ordinary citizen can only be called a "real loss" in the most thin of senses. Going with that, if there is no "real loss," should there be no real penalty? I suppose the question is rhetorical; I am agreeing with you that the system is trying to break (even more so with patents), however I'm still at a loss as to how we could have copyright law enforcement at all where an ordinary person operating off their desktop can disseminate thousands of copies to others without a risk of serious punishment. I view the DMCA as well as recent RIAA tactics as mere evidence of a breaking system... desperate increasing of punishment severity and frequency... kindof sounds like what's happening with our drug laws, actually. Talk about a conflict between parties with different opinions!
C//
It is time to make copyright reasonable again.
While I cannot disagree with the overall sentiment of your post, I have a difficult time imagining what you're intended us to understand with this last sentence. The RIAA's techniques are plain and simple barratry -- abuse of process, really, an attempt to use the legal system as a system of threat and intimidation. I cannot conceive of any "reasonable" modification of copyright law that could pertain to this, however. Can you clarify?
C//