Well what I meant was this: if it takes so many gallons of fuel to farm TTT tons of grain, how many GGG1 gallons of fuel does it take to farm, distill, and convert TTT tons of grain to GGG2 gallons of fuel?
Well, yes and no. Note his words "glad I was billable". Presumably these other employees had nothing better to do, so their cost would have been incurred anyway. Although when a company is eating an employee's costs, I can think of any variety of better things to do with skilled engineering talent than make them crimp cables, eh?
Well, you do know, don't you, that there is no reason why Seagate can't be selling those 15,000 RPM Cheetahs with an IDE interface if they wanted to, right? The SCSI bus issue doesn't significantly impact the drive speed in any way. It's a _BUS_.
If they carry out this plan, they'll find it incredibly not worth their time.
The problem with this premise is that you have misvalued the result. To wit: it is not their objective to get financial rewards from the misusers (although there are likely employees using company hardware who make their employers unwitting potential defendants). Their objective is to create a climate of fear that makes the community of every day Shmoes think twice about casual pirating.
If my girlfriend is sharing mp3s using LimeWire on her computer, am I going to get sued because the cable service is in my name?
Yes you will, and yes you are fucked. If you testify in a lawsuit against yourself that it wasn't you and that it was your girlfriend, they can sue your girlfriend, and the testimony from the first case will most certainly be used against her. You won't be able to show up and change your story, either. That's against some fairly long standing legal traditions, dontcha know...
Parochialism... *shrug*. I prefer to call it Jingoism, but whatever.
American culture has historically had going for it a situational venue in which adaptation to "new stuff" has been resoundingly supported. Hence, "electric lights weren't invented here, but first adopted here." And "the motor and the automobile: not invented here, but made very popular here". If we lose this meme, we'll go the way of... well, the Arabs maybe.
Sure, but what you just proposed isn't really all that different than deliberately relaxing transitor-density and thereby increasing the amount of silicon space used by a single CPU. There's also a point at which maximum density has been reached, but no further clock cycles can be pumped. At that point, one would expect that the natural solution is to increase cpu real estate with additional parallel transistors, not unlike what Power-4 is doing with their dual-on-chip-CPU solution for the high end right now. This is, I might add, working out pretty well for them. Instead of trying to pump up clocks and find more ILP, they've just come up with a very efficient way of putting "two cpus" on board one single silicon die, and then tied them together with an on-die bus that has the sort of bandwidth you could only ever dream of getting right on board silicon. I expect to see more of this in the future, just not very much, probably.
Although I could be mistaken. There is some complexity function past which one will no further complicate a single cpu; at such a point, one would prefer multiple-on-die cpus, because the complexity is far easier to manage. IOW, managing a single cpu with a few billion transistors is probably a lot harder to do than to manage 8 exact copies of some similar cpu interconnected/routed by some simple but nevertheless high efficiency switch.
It's an _old_ race, actually. Here's the deal. If Moore's Law stalls a bit, there is a tendency to move a bit towards multiprocessing. This mostly caters to products which can afford the additional silicon and space. Since Moore's Law is all about reduction, however, there is a practical limit to how much silicon will really fit in a box. Since the chips at any given process are all the same size, adding chips increases size linearly. And if the process is shrinking, well, you don't have this problem, and SMP tends to be not as important. This puts an absolute maximum upper limit on the number of CPUs you can _ever_ expect to see in a machine if you think about it. At least with basic semiconductor technology that we have today.
Really. Consider. If process shrinks stopped at say,.01 micron, a top end CPU might be (making this up) 1 centimeter^2. Pretending for the sake of an argument that no smaller transistors were possible, our smallest CPU is 1 cm^2. Moving to 2-way SMP requires 2 cm^2, plus whatever additional logic and hardware you need on the board in order to make the chips work together.
There is a dynamic between SMP and single-processor process shrinks and speed improvements.
There are other things to think about (read: system responsiveness; threads/CPUS that aren't tied up can reply quickly to requests), but the ultimate equation means that very highly parallel SMP is second string to process shrinkages, and in any case, limited absolutely in its extent by the physics of the whole affair.
About the only mitigating circumstance is economies of scale and industry. 20 years after we get stuck at.01 micron (or wherever), even though there hasn't been any more shrinkage, we'd still expect chips to be a lot cheaper. In that case, we get fudge-factor, because you might not care if your 1-processor computer costs $50, and you're 8-processor machine costs $500.
You're still not talking very highly parallel machines, though, right?
Well, the easiest way to achieve such a thing would be to back it with what is called a "job-worker-thread model" where you ask for something to be done and then have a pool of threads service the request. What makes this hard is time-dependencies between the tasks, and mutual resources that they each depend on. For example, does the underlying OS _itself_ allow multiple threads to blit to areas of the screen at the same time? While certainly each thread can _prepare_ its bit plane simultaneously, it's likely that there will be some resource-contention going on there, in some way limiting what we can actually get out of multithreading. Note that I actually don't know what OS constraints will be faced. Let's just say that even on a multiprocessor machine, multithreading results can be somewhat disappointing, some of the time. There's a whole stack of issues to be addressed, including the application, the OS, mutual resources like memory and storage, as well as absolute hardware issues like (on some machines) shared bus limitations between the multiple processors.
Um, not wanting to sound too internationalist here, but when will you septics break out of your parochial "we invented everything" state of mind?
Everyone who believes that "we in country X invented such and such" should take a good gander at the Pulitzer Prize winning _Guns, Germs, and Steel_. Great book.
Anyway, to wit: the ascendancy of any one culture/nation is not based on its ability to invent, but rather on its embracing of those new technologies.
AMD now faces even more serious competition from Intel, who could bury them, performance-wise, with this kind of memory bandwidth.
That was the original promise of RDRAM, but turned out that where the rubber meets the road, latency will win this particular drag race with most people. I suspect this will slowly change as programmers start to make more resource-hungry applications that address very large regions of memory. But by the time that changes, all the AMD systems will be Hypertransport-backed, yes? Speaking of Hypertransport, it appears to me that the Hypertransport alliance is winning the bandwidth game in terms of adoptees and so forth. This has been one of AMD's better moves.
Frankly, I'm wondering what's stopping us from using this approach to increasing performance?
Multithreaded programming is tricky, and writing efficient multithreaded programs that don't suffer from mutual thread-contention issues is even trickier. The sovoir noire of thread programming is just now reaching the mainstream, in part due to Java, actually. Which isn't to say I'm any kind of Java fanboy, but credit where credit is due.
Speaking of Java and threads, I think it's past time for someone to seriously think about creating a language with even more first class structures for dealing with parallelism.
Yes, but this rather begs the question of why it is you are proposing one change (to wit: making software not copyrightable) and not considering another: limited durations for software copyright. I propose the latter: limited durations and no patents.
If code had to be patented to be protected, we'd have every line of DOS, Wordstar, & Word 2.0 open and free for the taking.
No, you would have (potentially) had every word of code upfront. But for 17 years, the only operating system using the innovations of DOS would be DOS. Any other operating system using any of the novel items of DOS would have been out of luck and been injuncted from the market place by government fiat unless they paid M$ a hefty license fee. Copyrights, while not servicing an objective you desire (to wit: leaving at the end of the period a product that is per se useful) do not squelch innovation in similar areas. Patents do.
With copyright, the term lasts and lasts and lasts--and there's no guarantee that the code will be useable when it's finally public domain.
Why do you keep talking about code? Patents cover the general governing principle behind the code. The code is only a matter of an embodiment of the invention. The exact expression of the code, even the language it's written in, hell, even if it's not a computer language per se, is only a barely relevant detail.
And this is different from copyright how?
By quite a bit, actually. Patents, because they are so general, when directed at an offending part often are actually correct on the basis of the patent as written, leading one to have to face a costly attempt at invalidating the patent itself. A copyright violation charge, if not correct, is easily disproven and dismissed. It costs far less.
For me, preventing pain in my hands and wrists is all about having the keyboard at exactly the right height. If it's at the wrong height, I'll eventually get pain. If it's a the right height, I won't. The only other issue is working the mouse in very cold rooms. For some reason that causes my hands to hurt.
Yes, I'm sure. Patents *only* cover either exact design (which copyright is currently used for) or an honest-to-goodness new innovation...
First, as the author of two patents pending and two more in process, I can say that you really need to rethink your position, and look far more carefully at patents as they are written as a matter of practice today. You don't want software patents. A software patent is far worse than a copyright. With a copyright, no one can duplicate your code or a reasonable fascimile thereof. With patent, no one can render the described procedure into practice in any language or any form even accidentally without risking an infringement case to which you will have no real recourse without spending a good $10 million dollars if things heat up.
Indeed. Basically, I believe that "terraforming" a planet won't really be possible until we have some form of self-replicating/assembling machine. If we had that, I suppose we wouldn't be that far off from being able to build a soletta to reflect additional sunlight onto the planet. For now, however, this will all have to realistically remain science fiction.
Personally, I think the whole sheebang would just go away if code was covered by patents...
Huh? Are you sure you understand what a patent is and the broadness of its scope? You really don't want software to be governed by patents! This grants the author exclusive rights not only to the expression of their invention (i.e., "the code") but any other expression that follows the same process, in any language, form, or construct!
The thing that I came to understand, that I didn't before reading the article, was the connection between copyright and monopoly.
Huh? Copyright is obviously and plainly a government-granted monopoly. It's always been that way, and is understood that way by the courts. That's why we have abuse-of-copyright (and patent) rules in the courts.
I immediately thought of games (who didn't!?) retailing at hugely above their production cost, and books the same. Why do we accept these things?
A game doesn't "retail hugely above its production cost" until it passes a certain number of titles. A game that sells for $59 on the shelf can easily be losing money, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
...most job ads now are specifying U.S. citizens ...
This is actually illegal unless you have a government requirement for it.
C//
Well what I meant was this: if it takes so many gallons of fuel to farm TTT tons of grain, how many GGG1 gallons of fuel does it take to farm, distill, and convert TTT tons of grain to GGG2 gallons of fuel?
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What you _should_ be asking is how much fossil fuel is currently expended in the farming of those grains?
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"1. Patent law makes you enforce your patents. If you don't, you lose them."
This is incorrect.
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You know that was really stupid, right?
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Well, yes and no. Note his words "glad I was billable". Presumably these other employees had nothing better to do, so their cost would have been incurred anyway. Although when a company is eating an employee's costs, I can think of any variety of better things to do with skilled engineering talent than make them crimp cables, eh?
C//
Well, you do know, don't you, that there is no reason why Seagate can't be selling those 15,000 RPM Cheetahs with an IDE interface if they wanted to, right? The SCSI bus issue doesn't significantly impact the drive speed in any way. It's a _BUS_.
C//
How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does?
Um, because it simply IS illegal. You can read more at: http://www.loc.gov/copyright. Have a good one,
C//
If they carry out this plan, they'll find it incredibly not worth their time.
The problem with this premise is that you have misvalued the result. To wit: it is not their objective to get financial rewards from the misusers (although there are likely employees using company hardware who make their employers unwitting potential defendants). Their objective is to create a climate of fear that makes the community of every day Shmoes think twice about casual pirating.
C//
If my girlfriend is sharing mp3s using LimeWire on her computer, am I going to get sued because the cable service is in my name?
Yes you will, and yes you are fucked. If you testify in a lawsuit against yourself that it wasn't you and that it was your girlfriend, they can sue your girlfriend, and the testimony from the first case will most certainly be used against her. You won't be able to show up and change your story, either. That's against some fairly long standing legal traditions, dontcha know...
C//
Parochialism... *shrug*. I prefer to call it Jingoism, but whatever.
American culture has historically had going for it a situational venue in which adaptation to "new stuff" has been resoundingly supported. Hence, "electric lights weren't invented here, but first adopted here." And "the motor and the automobile: not invented here, but made very popular here". If we lose this meme, we'll go the way of... well, the Arabs maybe.
C//
Sure, but what you just proposed isn't really all that different than deliberately relaxing transitor-density and thereby increasing the amount of silicon space used by a single CPU. There's also a point at which maximum density has been reached, but no further clock cycles can be pumped. At that point, one would expect that the natural solution is to increase cpu real estate with additional parallel transistors, not unlike what Power-4 is doing with their dual-on-chip-CPU solution for the high end right now. This is, I might add, working out pretty well for them. Instead of trying to pump up clocks and find more ILP, they've just come up with a very efficient way of putting "two cpus" on board one single silicon die, and then tied them together with an on-die bus that has the sort of bandwidth you could only ever dream of getting right on board silicon. I expect to see more of this in the future, just not very much, probably.
Although I could be mistaken. There is some complexity function past which one will no further complicate a single cpu; at such a point, one would prefer multiple-on-die cpus, because the complexity is far easier to manage. IOW, managing a single cpu with a few billion transistors is probably a lot harder to do than to manage 8 exact copies of some similar cpu interconnected/routed by some simple but nevertheless high efficiency switch.
C//
It's an _old_ race, actually. Here's the deal. If Moore's Law stalls a bit, there is a tendency to move a bit towards multiprocessing. This mostly caters to products which can afford the additional silicon and space. Since Moore's Law is all about reduction, however, there is a practical limit to how much silicon will really fit in a box. Since the chips at any given process are all the same size, adding chips increases size linearly. And if the process is shrinking, well, you don't have this problem, and SMP tends to be not as important. This puts an absolute maximum upper limit on the number of CPUs you can _ever_ expect to see in a machine if you think about it. At least with basic semiconductor technology that we have today.
.01 micron, a top end CPU might be (making this up) 1 centimeter^2. Pretending for the sake of an argument that no smaller transistors were possible, our smallest CPU is 1 cm^2. Moving to 2-way SMP requires 2 cm^2, plus whatever additional logic and hardware you need on the board in order to make the chips work together.
.01 micron (or wherever), even though there hasn't been any more shrinkage, we'd still expect chips to be a lot cheaper. In that case, we get fudge-factor, because you might not care if your 1-processor computer costs $50, and you're 8-processor machine costs $500.
Really. Consider. If process shrinks stopped at say,
There is a dynamic between SMP and single-processor process shrinks and speed improvements.
There are other things to think about (read: system responsiveness; threads/CPUS that aren't tied up can reply quickly to requests), but the ultimate equation means that very highly parallel SMP is second string to process shrinkages, and in any case, limited absolutely in its extent by the physics of the whole affair.
About the only mitigating circumstance is economies of scale and industry. 20 years after we get stuck at
You're still not talking very highly parallel machines, though, right?
C//
Well, the easiest way to achieve such a thing would be to back it with what is called a "job-worker-thread model" where you ask for something to be done and then have a pool of threads service the request. What makes this hard is time-dependencies between the tasks, and mutual resources that they each depend on. For example, does the underlying OS _itself_ allow multiple threads to blit to areas of the screen at the same time? While certainly each thread can _prepare_ its bit plane simultaneously, it's likely that there will be some resource-contention going on there, in some way limiting what we can actually get out of multithreading. Note that I actually don't know what OS constraints will be faced. Let's just say that even on a multiprocessor machine, multithreading results can be somewhat disappointing, some of the time. There's a whole stack of issues to be addressed, including the application, the OS, mutual resources like memory and storage, as well as absolute hardware issues like (on some machines) shared bus limitations between the multiple processors.
C//
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Um, not wanting to sound too internationalist here, but when will you septics break out of your parochial "we invented everything" state of mind?
Everyone who believes that "we in country X invented such and such" should take a good gander at the Pulitzer Prize winning _Guns, Germs, and Steel_. Great book.
Anyway, to wit: the ascendancy of any one culture/nation is not based on its ability to invent, but rather on its embracing of those new technologies.
C//
AMD now faces even more serious competition from Intel, who could bury them, performance-wise, with this kind of memory bandwidth.
That was the original promise of RDRAM, but turned out that where the rubber meets the road, latency will win this particular drag race with most people. I suspect this will slowly change as programmers start to make more resource-hungry applications that address very large regions of memory. But by the time that changes, all the AMD systems will be Hypertransport-backed, yes? Speaking of Hypertransport, it appears to me that the Hypertransport alliance is winning the bandwidth game in terms of adoptees and so forth. This has been one of AMD's better moves.
C//
Frankly, I'm wondering what's stopping us from using this approach to increasing performance?
Multithreaded programming is tricky, and writing efficient multithreaded programs that don't suffer from mutual thread-contention issues is even trickier. The sovoir noire of thread programming is just now reaching the mainstream, in part due to Java, actually. Which isn't to say I'm any kind of Java fanboy, but credit where credit is due.
Speaking of Java and threads, I think it's past time for someone to seriously think about creating a language with even more first class structures for dealing with parallelism.
C//
Copyright lasts forever--patents don't.
Yes, but this rather begs the question of why it is you are proposing one change (to wit: making software not copyrightable) and not considering another: limited durations for software copyright. I propose the latter: limited durations and no patents.
If code had to be patented to be protected, we'd have every line of DOS, Wordstar, & Word 2.0 open and free for the taking.
No, you would have (potentially) had every word of code upfront. But for 17 years, the only operating system using the innovations of DOS would be DOS. Any other operating system using any of the novel items of DOS would have been out of luck and been injuncted from the market place by government fiat unless they paid M$ a hefty license fee. Copyrights, while not servicing an objective you desire (to wit: leaving at the end of the period a product that is per se useful) do not squelch innovation in similar areas. Patents do.
With copyright, the term lasts and lasts and lasts--and there's no guarantee that the code will be useable when it's finally public domain.
Why do you keep talking about code? Patents cover the general governing principle behind the code. The code is only a matter of an embodiment of the invention. The exact expression of the code, even the language it's written in, hell, even if it's not a computer language per se, is only a barely relevant detail.
And this is different from copyright how?
By quite a bit, actually. Patents, because they are so general, when directed at an offending part often are actually correct on the basis of the patent as written, leading one to have to face a costly attempt at invalidating the patent itself. A copyright violation charge, if not correct, is easily disproven and dismissed. It costs far less.
C//
I read somewhere that CTS vulnerability is probably inherited. Apparently some folks just won't get it, no matter how bad their ergonomics.
C//
For me, preventing pain in my hands and wrists is all about having the keyboard at exactly the right height. If it's at the wrong height, I'll eventually get pain. If it's a the right height, I won't. The only other issue is working the mouse in very cold rooms. For some reason that causes my hands to hurt.
C//
Yes, I'm sure. Patents *only* cover either exact design (which copyright is currently used for) or an honest-to-goodness new innovation...
First, as the author of two patents pending and two more in process, I can say that you really need to rethink your position, and look far more carefully at patents as they are written as a matter of practice today. You don't want software patents. A software patent is far worse than a copyright. With a copyright, no one can duplicate your code or a reasonable fascimile thereof. With patent, no one can render the described procedure into practice in any language or any form even accidentally without risking an infringement case to which you will have no real recourse without spending a good $10 million dollars if things heat up.
C//
C//
Indeed. Basically, I believe that "terraforming" a planet won't really be possible until we have some form of self-replicating/assembling machine. If we had that, I suppose we wouldn't be that far off from being able to build a soletta to reflect additional sunlight onto the planet. For now, however, this will all have to realistically remain science fiction.
C//
Personally, I think the whole sheebang would just go away if code was covered by patents...
Huh? Are you sure you understand what a patent is and the broadness of its scope? You really don't want software to be governed by patents! This grants the author exclusive rights not only to the expression of their invention (i.e., "the code") but any other expression that follows the same process, in any language, form, or construct!
C//
The thing that I came to understand, that I didn't before reading the article, was the connection between copyright and monopoly.
Huh? Copyright is obviously and plainly a government-granted monopoly. It's always been that way, and is understood that way by the courts. That's why we have abuse-of-copyright (and patent) rules in the courts.
C//
I immediately thought of games (who didn't!?) retailing at hugely above their production cost, and books the same. Why do we accept these things?
A game doesn't "retail hugely above its production cost" until it passes a certain number of titles. A game that sells for $59 on the shelf can easily be losing money, after all.
C//