One way to have avoided this problem in the first place is to make use of the adage "If you don't want no for an answer, don't ask".
I have seen many research groups at my university go ahead and release software under the GPL without ever asking the lawyers. I have never heard of any problems resulting from this tactic. But if the suits ever did get mad at you, you can just say "Hey, I didn't realize that this software was commercially viable. No problem, we can still sell a closed source version!".
The reviewer uses the word gypped. This is an allusion to the stereotype of Gypsies ripping people off. I trust that the reviewer is unaware of its origins and used it without meaning to degrade anyone. However, I think the time has come to drop this disprespectful word from our vocabulary.
OK, I have a humble request. Is it against the rules to put some examples in man pages? The language of man pages is sometimes so arcane. I think people learn best by example, why can't man pages have a couple?
Agreed.
For system calls, a good introductory paragraph that explains why function exists would be useful. For example, just looking at the mmap() man pages (on Solaris) gives one no clue as why one would use (it has to be inferred). This is a massive barrier for newbies.
Those are well written man pages. .
Great Description of Drafting Tactics
on
Game Theory at 190mph
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I am not a big racing fan and have never really understood the allure, but the section Basic Dynamics of Drafting is a fantastic read. It gives great insight into tactics used by these highly skilled drivers.
The floating point performance is a function of the target market. If a CPU manufacturer was so inclined, they could create an X86 with world-record FPU performance. It's just not needed for the majority of places where X86's get used today.
An x86-based FPU will always be slower than a comparable FPU in a processor with RISC instruction set. The x86 uses stack-oriented instructions for the FPU. It turns out that register renaming can't be done as aggressively on stack-based instruction sets as it can be done on register-based instruction sets. This can cause the input stream to the FPU to choke on the x86 for an FPU-intensive application. So x86 FPU operation will always be slower than a similarly designed register-based FPU. This is probably the only real performance bottleneck with the x86 instruction set that hasn't been overcome by advanced architectural techniques.
while we're at it, let's burn our Makefiles too
on
Subversion Hits Alpha
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
While we're considering throwing away CVS, let's also throw out make. Check out Scons, a replacement for make. I have been using it for a few months on small projects and it's shaping up to be a really great tool.
Burn your Makefiles!
Conservation of Momentum always applies
on
Physics in the Movies
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm probably posting this way too late for anyone to actually notice, and I'm probably being a pedant for pointing it out, but...
From the article:
A load of buckshot hitting a vest can be considered an inelastic collision. This qualifies it as one of the situations which can be analyzed using conservation of momentum.
Momentum is always conserved. An inelastic collision implies that kinetic energy is conserved.
If you scale something in only one or two dimensions, then yes, the results will be horrible. Of course a person 6 times taller (but all other dimensions normal) will be in bad shape. However, if you scale it inal all dimensions, they will do just fine--until they try to walk down main street and take a 6kV power line in the crotch.
You are absolutely and completely, without an ounce of doubt, dead wrong. I think;)
From my first year civil engineering course (for non-civil engineers), Lecture 27 entitled The Design of Bones and Towers. A person who is 6 times bigger (with intelligent scaling) than an average human would snap his tibia with his first step. From what I can decipher from my poorly written and deteriorating notes, the basic problem is that area/volume ratios change when you scale a design. Your bones, at the same relative thickness for a 30 foot tall person woudn't be able to withstand the scaled up forces. For anyone with more intuition in this area, please feel free to post a more intelligent analysis.
everyone knows how pentiums etc are RISC at the core level
Apparently not. The original post got it wrong.
it means completely jack to anyone developing for the cpu
First, this article is about the Transmeta architecture not the interface, so your point is moot. Second, compiler writers target the CPU, and I can guarantee you that they are very interested in the actual internal architecture, in addition to the interface, so your point is wrong. (Although not directly exposing architectural features, like delayed branches in the Sparc, is a good idea.)
no matter how intelligent and efficnet the CISC->RISC decoder is, i doubt it's anything close to just using RISC. fewer transistors for decode/translate logic saves more power/space
Even though a CISC-to-RISC decoder may consume more power/area, there may be a power savings in the external and internal instruction path due to a potentially denser instruction encoding. As with most architectural issues, this is a non-trivial trade-off that requires careful analysis. Of course, Intel doesn't have much choice since they've have been commited (until IA64) to backward compatibility.
Sorry. You are absolutely wrong about Intel architectures. Although the instruction set is CISC the internal architecture of anything after the original Pentium is decidedly RISC. Almost all high-performance CPUs of the 90's have internal RISC architectures (Intel, AMD, Alpha, Sparc, MIPS).
The Intel chips have a mapping stage that maps CISC instructions to multiple internal RISC instructions (what they call microcoded instructions).
It's reassuring to see that Slashdot's advanced moderation system promoted a techically incorrect posting to a score of 5!!!
I seriously doubt that the internal datapath of this machine will be 256 bits. I think it is safe to assume that only the instruction bandwidth will be 256 bits and the data bandwidth will be 32 or 64 bits or some combination.
I don't think this will be a real 256-bit processor.
Question: Can you get the six names of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charmed into one sentence without it being nonsensical and without being clever like writing, "There are six types of quark: up, down, bottom, strange and charmed."?
I remember my physics teacher saying that the Europeans preferred the quark names truth and beauty to top and bottom. Unfortunately, top and bottom seem to have won out.
So I think that top and bottom should be replaced with truth and beauty in the challenge!
While these branes are a cute idea in a number of respects - not just because a parallel plane full of dark matter is 100% cool
old school science fiction - it strikes me that they answer "how can we match our observations to what we want to be true?"
rather than "how can we match our explanations to what we observe?"
Which is not to say that it isn't an excellent theory - merely that there is extreme intellectual danger associated this sort of
speculation.
I think that you are overly restrictive in your requirements of how we generate our theories. Really, there should be absolutely no constraints on how we generate our theories. Theory generation may be driven by observation or driven by the fantasies of a madman---it doesn't matter. In the end, all theories have to stand up to experimental scrutiny, irrespective of how they were generated.
After all, even Einstein was driven by need for beauty when he came up with General Relativity. By your standards he definitely was working in an intellectual danger zone. In fact, I would prefer theorists operate in the danger zone more often than they currently do.
I saw Jan Rabaey's talk at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC, the hardest of hardcore circuit conferences). The research is bold and fairly interesting. The slides from the presentation are worth the read. The research might not pan out, but it's definitely worth a shot.
You can find more technical info about his research on the PicoRadio page.
I am a bit wary of any claims that come without corroboration. No offense is meant to the poster; my fear of fraud is due to my own dream of planting false information on the Internet that becomes widespread;)
As a small step toward corroboration I found an Internet reference to strigiphilus garylarsoni, but no reference to microphallus schmidti. I did find a reference to microphallus pygmaeus, but this name sounds more decriptive of the species than combative.
My personal nomination for a species name is microphallus scatophagus (small-dicked shit-eater).
For those of us who won't be downloading the development code but still want a sneak peak, here's a page that discusses user-visible changes in GNOME 2.0:
Removing the limits on liability would not only affect Microsoft, but the GNU GPL. Would you want to be personally responsible for any GPL'ed code you wrote? Perhaps the solution would be to form a corporation and assign GPL copyright to it.
Anyway, at the very least, this sort of law would light a fire under the ass of the software engineering community. Maybe it cause some actual progress!
Are we actually going in there and destroying capital? (I'm not talking obvious situations such as war (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, etc).
Well, those obvious situations are just extensions of less obvious situations. Look at Afghanistan. Certainly, the Soviets/Russians are largely responsible for the current plight of Afghanistan. But the US backed the mujahadeen fighters against the Soviets. It got the Soviets out of Afghanistan but then the mujahadeens helped form the Taliban government which was possibly the the most oppressive government that existed at the time.
Supporting oppressive and corrupt dictators such as Saddam Hussein (pre-Gulf war), Manuel Noriega (pre-Panama invasion), Marcos of the Phillipines, etc. who toe the American line is one clear and direct affect US policy has in promoting poverty around the world.
I can't think of any US economic policy that is somehow keeping the Chinese poor. I place the blame for their poverty, squarely on them. (I think they need to kill their leaders.) But if you've got some evidence I haven't heard of, I'm all ears.
I wasn't thinking about China specifically. Instead, take for example any Central or South American country. The US has a huge influence on local policy through the IMF and World Bank. Once money is owed to the IMF or World Bank, they start to dictate policy, and the policy usually is to exploit workers and natural resources to pay off the debts. Don't bother with education or health care because that would just be a drain on debt repayment. Only in extreme circumstances, like the present situation in Argentina, can countries suspend debt payments (it will be interesting to see how long this lasts in Argentina).
All this negative talk merits some disclaimers. I certainly don't believe that the US is inherently evil. I'm Canadian, and if Canada wasn't such a small country we'd probably do the same. (In fact, Canada tries its best to promote poverty. Some of Canada's biggest oil companies have a notorious record of cooperating with oppressive regimes in Africa with the Sudan being the most prominent example.) Certainly there are positive humanitarian steps that are taken throughout the world due to US efforts, but unfortunately they tend to pale in comparison to negative effects.
The US is essentially a colonial power--albeit a modern, 21st century-style, colonial power. (I live in their favourite colony--Canada!). When you look at the Soviets, it was obvious to us that they were a colonial power (until they fell). It's just that since we live in North America we tend too be blind to the fact that the US is a colonial power.
I think that spending large amounts of resources to eliminate the "digital divide" is a waste of time and effort.
The real problem in the world is that the economic policy of rich countries (the G7 countries---but primarily the US, given the demise of the Soviets) serves to keep the majority of people in the Third World impoverished.
Promote education, health care, and worker's rights throughout the world, and we'll be in a position to eliminate the "digital divide."
Trying to eliminate the digital divide directly is akin to going to a homeless person on your street corner and handing him a Palm Pilot with Internet access. He's not in a position to use it to his advantage. His problems are deeper than that.
When Neil Schwartzman, the person who received the spam, forwarded it to the appropriate places why did he include the spammer on the email?
I hate spammers as much as the next guy. I report them (without copying them on the email) and move on. Although the spam receiver is, of course, blamess in this, I think he could have avoided this whole silly mess.
AA fonts may not have been promised by any developers but how can we live in the year 2002 without anti-aliased fonts on our desktop? Sometimes I find a quiet, isolated spot and just sob quietly thinking about it.
I know there's the gdkxft project, but let's get it into standard distributions soon.
Slashdot Mirror
One way to have avoided this problem in the first place is to make use of the adage "If you don't want no for an answer, don't ask". I have seen many research groups at my university go ahead and release software under the GPL without ever asking the lawyers. I have never heard of any problems resulting from this tactic. But if the suits ever did get mad at you, you can just say "Hey, I didn't realize that this software was commercially viable. No problem, we can still sell a closed source version!".
Maybe a bit offtopic, but...
The reviewer uses the word gypped. This is an allusion to the stereotype of Gypsies ripping people off. I trust that the reviewer is unaware of its origins and used it without meaning to degrade anyone. However, I think the time has come to drop this disprespectful word from our vocabulary.
8. The creation uses a flux capacitor.
9. The creation requires 1.2 GW of power.
OK, I have a humble request. Is it against the rules to put some examples in man pages? The language of man pages is sometimes so arcane. I think people learn best by example, why can't man pages have a couple?
Agreed.
For system calls, a good introductory paragraph that explains why function exists would be useful. For example, just looking at the mmap() man pages (on Solaris) gives one no clue as why one would use (it has to be inferred). This is a massive barrier for newbies.
Those are well written man pages. .I am not a big racing fan and have never really understood the allure, but the section Basic Dynamics of Drafting is a fantastic read. It gives great insight into tactics used by these highly skilled drivers.
Respect to pudge for actually taking the time to run a test to verify the story.
Respectable journalism exercised by Slashdot? Is that a pig flying past my window?
Good post, but I have one quibble.
The floating point performance is a function of the target market. If a CPU manufacturer was so inclined, they could create an X86 with world-record FPU performance. It's just not needed for the majority of places where X86's get used today.
An x86-based FPU will always be slower than a comparable FPU in a processor with RISC instruction set. The x86 uses stack-oriented instructions for the FPU. It turns out that register renaming can't be done as aggressively on stack-based instruction sets as it can be done on register-based instruction sets. This can cause the input stream to the FPU to choke on the x86 for an FPU-intensive application. So x86 FPU operation will always be slower than a similarly designed register-based FPU. This is probably the only real performance bottleneck with the x86 instruction set that hasn't been overcome by advanced architectural techniques.
While we're considering throwing away CVS, let's also throw out make. Check out Scons, a replacement for make. I have been using it for a few months on small projects and it's shaping up to be a really great tool.
Burn your Makefiles!
I'm probably posting this way too late for anyone to actually notice, and I'm probably being a pedant for pointing it out, but...
From the article:A load of buckshot hitting a vest can be considered an inelastic collision. This qualifies it as one of the situations which can be analyzed using conservation of momentum.
Momentum is always conserved. An inelastic collision implies that kinetic energy is conserved.
High school physics is fun.
If you scale something in only one or two dimensions, then yes, the results will be horrible. Of course a person 6 times taller (but all other dimensions normal) will be in bad shape. However, if you scale it inal all dimensions, they will do just fine--until they try to walk down main street and take a 6kV power line in the crotch.
You are absolutely and completely, without an ounce of doubt, dead wrong. I think ;)
From my first year civil engineering course (for non-civil engineers), Lecture 27 entitled The Design of Bones and Towers. A person who is 6 times bigger (with intelligent scaling) than an average human would snap his tibia with his first step. From what I can decipher from my poorly written and deteriorating notes, the basic problem is that area/volume ratios change when you scale a design. Your bones, at the same relative thickness for a 30 foot tall person woudn't be able to withstand the scaled up forces. For anyone with more intuition in this area, please feel free to post a more intelligent analysis.
everyone knows how pentiums etc are RISC at the core level
Apparently not. The original post got it wrong.
it means completely jack to anyone developing for the cpu
First, this article is about the Transmeta architecture not the interface, so your point is moot. Second, compiler writers target the CPU, and I can guarantee you that they are very interested in the actual internal architecture, in addition to the interface, so your point is wrong. (Although not directly exposing architectural features, like delayed branches in the Sparc, is a good idea.)
no matter how intelligent and efficnet the CISC->RISC decoder is, i doubt it's anything close to just using RISC. fewer transistors for decode/translate logic saves more power/space
Even though a CISC-to-RISC decoder may consume more power/area, there may be a power savings in the external and internal instruction path due to a potentially denser instruction encoding. As with most architectural issues, this is a non-trivial trade-off that requires careful analysis. Of course, Intel doesn't have much choice since they've have been commited (until IA64) to backward compatibility.
Sorry. You are absolutely wrong about Intel architectures. Although the instruction set is CISC the internal architecture of anything after the original Pentium is decidedly RISC. Almost all high-performance CPUs of the 90's have internal RISC architectures (Intel, AMD, Alpha, Sparc, MIPS).
The Intel chips have a mapping stage that maps CISC instructions to multiple internal RISC instructions (what they call microcoded instructions).
It's reassuring to see that Slashdot's advanced moderation system promoted a techically incorrect posting to a score of 5!!!
I seriously doubt that the internal datapath of this machine will be 256 bits. I think it is safe to assume that only the instruction bandwidth will be 256 bits and the data bandwidth will be 32 or 64 bits or some combination.
I don't think this will be a real 256-bit processor.
Question: Can you get the six names of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charmed into one sentence without it being nonsensical and without being clever like writing, "There are six types of quark: up, down, bottom, strange and charmed."?
I remember my physics teacher saying that the Europeans preferred the quark names truth and beauty to top and bottom. Unfortunately, top and bottom seem to have won out.
So I think that top and bottom should be replaced with truth and beauty in the challenge!
While these branes are a cute idea in a number of respects - not just because a parallel plane full of dark matter is 100% cool old school science fiction - it strikes me that they answer "how can we match our observations to what we want to be true?" rather than "how can we match our explanations to what we observe?"
Which is not to say that it isn't an excellent theory - merely that there is extreme intellectual danger associated this sort of speculation.
I think that you are overly restrictive in your requirements of how we generate our theories. Really, there should be absolutely no constraints on how we generate our theories. Theory generation may be driven by observation or driven by the fantasies of a madman---it doesn't matter. In the end, all theories have to stand up to experimental scrutiny, irrespective of how they were generated.
After all, even Einstein was driven by need for beauty when he came up with General Relativity. By your standards he definitely was working in an intellectual danger zone. In fact, I would prefer theorists operate in the danger zone more often than they currently do.
I saw Jan Rabaey's talk at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC, the hardest of hardcore circuit conferences). The research is bold and fairly interesting. The slides from the presentation are worth the read. The research might not pan out, but it's definitely worth a shot.
You can find more technical info about his research on the PicoRadio page.
There is an interesting article in IEEE Spectrum magazine regarding a similar case.
I am a bit wary of any claims that come without corroboration. No offense is meant to the poster; my fear of fraud is due to my own dream of planting false information on the Internet that becomes widespread ;)
As a small step toward corroboration I found an Internet reference to strigiphilus garylarsoni, but no reference to microphallus schmidti. I did find a reference to microphallus pygmaeus, but this name sounds more decriptive of the species than combative.
My personal nomination for a species name is microphallus scatophagus (small-dicked shit-eater).
For those of us who won't be downloading the development code but still want a sneak peak, here's a page that discusses user-visible changes in GNOME 2.0:
http://www106.pair.com/rhp/gnome-2-new.htmlBrief but nice overview of quantum gravity:
Quantum Gravity @ Dr. Jim Jessen
Removing the limits on liability would not only affect Microsoft, but the GNU GPL. Would you want to be personally responsible for any GPL'ed code you wrote? Perhaps the solution would be to form a corporation and assign GPL copyright to it.
Anyway, at the very least, this sort of law would light a fire under the ass of the software engineering community. Maybe it cause some actual progress!
Are we actually going in there and destroying capital? (I'm not talking obvious situations such as war (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, etc).
Well, those obvious situations are just extensions of less obvious situations. Look at Afghanistan. Certainly, the Soviets/Russians are largely responsible for the current plight of Afghanistan. But the US backed the mujahadeen fighters against the Soviets. It got the Soviets out of Afghanistan but then the mujahadeens helped form the Taliban government which was possibly the the most oppressive government that existed at the time.
Supporting oppressive and corrupt dictators such as Saddam Hussein (pre-Gulf war), Manuel Noriega (pre-Panama invasion), Marcos of the Phillipines, etc. who toe the American line is one clear and direct affect US policy has in promoting poverty around the world.
I can't think of any US economic policy that is somehow keeping the Chinese poor. I place the blame for their poverty, squarely on them. (I think they need to kill their leaders.) But if you've got some evidence I haven't heard of, I'm all ears.
I wasn't thinking about China specifically. Instead, take for example any Central or South American country. The US has a huge influence on local policy through the IMF and World Bank. Once money is owed to the IMF or World Bank, they start to dictate policy, and the policy usually is to exploit workers and natural resources to pay off the debts. Don't bother with education or health care because that would just be a drain on debt repayment. Only in extreme circumstances, like the present situation in Argentina, can countries suspend debt payments (it will be interesting to see how long this lasts in Argentina).
All this negative talk merits some disclaimers. I certainly don't believe that the US is inherently evil. I'm Canadian, and if Canada wasn't such a small country we'd probably do the same. (In fact, Canada tries its best to promote poverty. Some of Canada's biggest oil companies have a notorious record of cooperating with oppressive regimes in Africa with the Sudan being the most prominent example.) Certainly there are positive humanitarian steps that are taken throughout the world due to US efforts, but unfortunately they tend to pale in comparison to negative effects.
The US is essentially a colonial power--albeit a modern, 21st century-style, colonial power. (I live in their favourite colony--Canada!). When you look at the Soviets, it was obvious to us that they were a colonial power (until they fell). It's just that since we live in North America we tend too be blind to the fact that the US is a colonial power.I think that spending large amounts of resources to eliminate the "digital divide" is a waste of time and effort.
The real problem in the world is that the economic policy of rich countries (the G7 countries---but primarily the US, given the demise of the Soviets) serves to keep the majority of people in the Third World impoverished.
Promote education, health care, and worker's rights throughout the world, and we'll be in a position to eliminate the "digital divide."
Trying to eliminate the digital divide directly is akin to going to a homeless person on your street corner and handing him a Palm Pilot with Internet access. He's not in a position to use it to his advantage. His problems are deeper than that.
When Neil Schwartzman, the person who received the spam, forwarded it to the appropriate places why did he include the spammer on the email?
I hate spammers as much as the next guy. I report them (without copying them on the email) and move on. Although the spam receiver is, of course, blamess in this, I think he could have avoided this whole silly mess.
...goes to GNOME's lack of anti-aliased fonts.
AA fonts may not have been promised by any developers but how can we live in the year 2002 without anti-aliased fonts on our desktop? Sometimes I find a quiet, isolated spot and just sob quietly thinking about it.
I know there's the gdkxft project, but let's get it into standard distributions soon.