They probably would have got further making the request under the UK Data Protection Act.
Yes, although the DPA allows organisations to make a charge of £20 for providing the requested information. With "80 locations" that would have come in at £1600, probably more than the band wanted to spend on this project.
Is it just me, or is the important part of this not "band makes music video" but than 75% of organisations will deny a legitimate request under the Freedom of Information Act? Surely someone should be investigating this...
My suspicion is that the band doesn't actually understand the FIA. From the article:
They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester - including on a bus - and proceeded to play to the cameras.
Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.
[...]
Only a quarter of the organisations contacted fulfilled their obligation to hand over the footage - perhaps predictably, bigger firms were reluctant, while smaller companies were more helpful - but that still provided enough for a video with 20 locations.
The bus and "bigger firms" are referring to cameras operated by private organisations which have no legal obligation to respond to such a request. "Smaller companies" were presumably more helpful due to the fact that they didn't have lawyers to inform them of this fact.
I kind of just assumed that the government/law enforcement were the "owners". Who is the summary referring to as "the CCTV owners" ?
Almost all of the CCTV cameras that are frequently cited as being part of a "surveillance state" in the UK are owned and operated by private individuals, not the government. Specifically, most are run by shops. The article refers to the band using one on a bus.
Which raises the question -- why did the band expect the freedom of information act to apply to these? It only applies to government-run organisations, so the owners of the cameras in question had no obligation to comply with the request.
Dunno why this is modded 'funny'. It's a valid method of using UML, and is favored by most "agile" processes at least.
You can also get tools that will allow you to modify the generated UML diagram and then apply the changes to the code (I've played with an eclipse plugin that does this, although I didn't find it particularly helpful for me).
Unless the performance has creative elements which stand on their own, i.e. the arrangement, the guitar solo, the intonations chosen when singing the lyrics, etc. Of course, that would technically be a composer's copyright, but that sounds confusing, so most groups that deal with legal fan-made recordings (i.e. the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive) usually just refer to it as a performance copyright. Basically, what it boils down to is that Prince's performance constitutes a derivative work, and unless Radiohead is now releasing their music under a copyleft, they have no say in the matter. The most they could do is ask the fan to remove the creative elements from the derivative work that Prince owns and release whatever is left, but the result would probably be incomprehensible, assuming that such removal were even possible. (Alternatively, they could try to prove that Prince's additions to his arrangement were too minimal to justify copyright protection, but that's likely to be very difficult.)
My god. Somebody on slashdot understands copyright. I'm stunned!;)
I wrote: (e.g. Byte.compareTo(Object), which existed only so that Byte could implement the Comparable interface was removed, and Byte now implements Comparable instead with the method Byte.compareTo(Byte))
Err... for the second "Comparable" in that sentence, read "Comparable<Byte>".
Having a minimum JRE version is fine, but did the Java developers remove features from the language and not leave and backwards-compatibility hooks in it? That's the only reason I can see why a Java software package would require a version LOWER than "current."
If you write a new version of a programming language you created, and old programs do not work AT ALL, then you have done something wrong. Adding features, improving efficiency, etc is fine (great). Removing functionality does not make sense.
What happened with Java 1.5 was a little peculiar. Normally, stuff is not removed from Java but is instead deprecated (so that a compiler warning is issued). But with 1.5, they introduced generics, and there were a lot of non-typesafe methods that they decided to remove (e.g. Byte.compareTo(Object), which existed only so that Byte could implement the Comparable interface was removed, and Byte now implements Comparable instead with the method Byte.compareTo(Byte)). They effectively saw this as fixing flaws that previously existed in the language, not removing features.
LISP, SCHEME and SMALLTALK were all developed when space was at a premium. so, you kept the source file small by using as obtuse-as-possible a syntax.
While I take your point re LISP and Scheme, I must disagree regarding smalltalk. A stated design goal of the language, in fact, was to make it as readable as possible. The syntax of smalltalk is very simple, yes, but its use of keyword/value pairs instead of traditional 'list of expressions' for passing parameters to methods results in very readable code.
Strangely, the only drug liberals I see are upper class people with no personal experience of drug abuse among friends or family. Marijuana is one thing, the the harder drugs cause a lot of problems. And no, most problems are not because of the illegality itself.
A lot of the problems with drugs are due to illegality:
- A rather large number of people die every year because they get drugs that are either higher concentration than they're expecting or have been cut with something else that is harmful. In a regulated industry, this would not happen. - People with drug habits are often reluctant to seek treatment for fear of prosecution. - The difficulty of acquiring drugs causes a form of vendor lock-in which allows dealers to raise prices after their customer is hooked; this escalation of prices often forces the addict to turn to crime and/or prostitution to fund their habit.
Please note that it is VERY difficult to conceal a 4-foot long rifle in the front pocket of a hooded sweatshirt. And walking around on the street with one is likely to get you very odd looks, if not phone calls to and visits from the police.
Or you could just come to England, where simply wearing the hooded sweatshirt is likely to get the same reaction.
The brief description in the article sounds suspicious and incompetent. 1. A common killer in parallelization is false sharing. That is, threads on two processors fight over a cache-line even though they are accessing independent variables. A cache-line is typically bigger than an individual variable. The approach of using adjacent elements of an array for parallelism sounds naive. One needs to pad the array.
The keyword in your statement is "typically". Click is working on the Azul processor, which is designed from the ground up for this kind of task. While I haven't been able to find details of its cache organisation, I'd say it's pretty safe money that it uses smaller than average cache lines. The hashtable structure described uses the contents of the array in pairs, i.e. 64 bits at a time. If each cache line were 64 bits wide, this would be efficient, no?
2. Updating a shared variable, especially a non-scaler, in an inner loop is naive. One should reference local scalers in inner loops when parallelizing. Just once, should the thread update the shared variable. Don't reference non-scalers or shared variables in an inner loop. Don't lock in the inner loop, either, if you can avoid it.
What if the bottleneck of your application is referencing shared data that needs to be updated in real time? There are many applications for which this is the case, and this kind of work is useful for anyone who is working on such an application. Just throwing an example out there: the scheduler for a massively parallel operating system would typically need to have many cores referring to a single queue of waiting threads with a high chance for collisions between read and write operations. I'm sure there are plenty more, too.
3. Java, really, Java?
Yes. Java. Really. Java is probably the most important language at the moment for enterprise application development, which is the environment where this kind of issue most frequently occurs, so developing solutions to these problems that work in Java is particularly important. Azul, Click's employer, specialises in high performance computers optimized for running Java software.
What if you find the whole concept of nations with millions of inhabitants ridiculous? How do you fix that without resorting to escapism?
There are plenty of existing nations that have very small populations. I suspect you can find somewhere between Pitcairn (50 inhabitants) and Cyprus (855,000 inhabitants) that suits you.
Haven't spent any time on a P2P network have you? Try downloading Limewire and searching on those terms.
Yeah. And then try downloading some of the results. Most porn on P2P networks is misnamed, I don't know why. It seems for some reason there's people out there who will take "becky33.jpg" and rename it "becky33 16yo 15yo 14yo 13yo childfucker kiddyporn illegal qwerty rape bestiality anal.jpg" for no apparent reason.
Yeah...ending cheap oil was a very good thing.....along with the resulting:
1) High food prices. 2) High price of going ANYWHERE but home. (Work, school, dentist, doctor, etc.) 3) Inability to keep mortgage payments due to the fact people spent the rest of their money on food and fuel. 4) People losing their homes because they defaulted due to the fact there was no money left, after paying for food and fuel, to pay the mortgage/rent. 5) Prohibitive costs of heating during the winter. 6) Higher electricity prices, due to the price of fuel going up. 7) Higher transportation costs, due to the price of fuel going up. 8) Higher cost of living, due to EVERYTHING going up, becuase the price of fuel went up.
So, yeah.....if you are an idiot, ending a century of cheap oil prices was a good thing.
I live in a country where the cost of fuel is on average 50-60% higher than in the US. Yet, somehow, these horrific consequences haven't destroyed our quality of life, and we are well on our way to meeting our Kyoto target, which of course the US considered so problematic they wouldn't even accept one.
Realise that just because your economy right now is based on cheap fuel doesn't mean that's the only way it can work, and also realise that in the long term this has to change anyway, because new oil reserves are getting harder and harder to find.
Slashdot Mirror
That's part of extreme programming. The other major part is obsessively testing everything.
Extreme Programming would never be used by NASA. They don't do things that way.
Careful, stable, and well tested.
Have you ever done XP? XP values tested, working software over all other priorities. I fail to see any conflict here.
You seem to assume that if they read it, they'd send you your pizza patent back and tell you to go fly a kite. That's actually incorrect.
Well, of course it is. The patent office can't advise you to do something that may involve infringing a patent.
They probably would have got further making the request under the UK Data Protection Act.
Yes, although the DPA allows organisations to make a charge of £20 for providing the requested information. With "80 locations" that would have come in at £1600, probably more than the band wanted to spend on this project.
How is being illegally refused in 75% of requests considered "[not] too bad"?
Because the refusals probably weren't illegal. See my comment here.
Is it just me, or is the important part of this not "band makes music video" but than 75% of organisations will deny a legitimate request under the Freedom of Information Act? Surely someone should be investigating this...
My suspicion is that the band doesn't actually understand the FIA. From the article:
They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester - including on a bus - and proceeded to play to the cameras.
Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.
[...]
Only a quarter of the organisations contacted fulfilled their obligation to hand over the footage - perhaps predictably, bigger firms were reluctant, while smaller companies were more helpful - but that still provided enough for a video with 20 locations.
The bus and "bigger firms" are referring to cameras operated by private organisations which have no legal obligation to respond to such a request. "Smaller companies" were presumably more helpful due to the fact that they didn't have lawyers to inform them of this fact.
I kind of just assumed that the government/law enforcement were the "owners". Who is the summary referring to as "the CCTV owners" ?
Almost all of the CCTV cameras that are frequently cited as being part of a "surveillance state" in the UK are owned and operated by private individuals, not the government. Specifically, most are run by shops. The article refers to the band using one on a bus.
Which raises the question -- why did the band expect the freedom of information act to apply to these? It only applies to government-run organisations, so the owners of the cameras in question had no obligation to comply with the request.
//not a troll, just a person with a pet peeve ///hopefully there's a difference.
Of course there's a difference. If the moderators agree with you, the post is informative. If they disagree, its a troll.
Dunno why this is modded 'funny'. It's a valid method of using UML, and is favored by most "agile" processes at least.
You can also get tools that will allow you to modify the generated UML diagram and then apply the changes to the code (I've played with an eclipse plugin that does this, although I didn't find it particularly helpful for me).
Yes, the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince is still around and pissing people off. It's what he does best.
Unless the performance has creative elements which stand on their own, i.e. the arrangement, the guitar solo, the intonations chosen when singing the lyrics, etc. Of course, that would technically be a composer's copyright, but that sounds confusing, so most groups that deal with legal fan-made recordings (i.e. the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive) usually just refer to it as a performance copyright. Basically, what it boils down to is that Prince's performance constitutes a derivative work, and unless Radiohead is now releasing their music under a copyleft, they have no say in the matter. The most they could do is ask the fan to remove the creative elements from the derivative work that Prince owns and release whatever is left, but the result would probably be incomprehensible, assuming that such removal were even possible. (Alternatively, they could try to prove that Prince's additions to his arrangement were too minimal to justify copyright protection, but that's likely to be very difficult.)
;)
My god. Somebody on slashdot understands copyright. I'm stunned!
I wrote: (e.g. Byte.compareTo(Object), which existed only so that Byte could implement the Comparable interface was removed, and Byte now implements Comparable instead with the method Byte.compareTo(Byte))
Err... for the second "Comparable" in that sentence, read "Comparable<Byte>".
Should've used preview.
Having a minimum JRE version is fine, but did the Java developers remove features from the language and not leave and backwards-compatibility hooks in it? That's the only reason I can see why a Java software package would require a version LOWER than "current."
If you write a new version of a programming language you created, and old programs do not work AT ALL, then you have done something wrong. Adding features, improving efficiency, etc is fine (great). Removing functionality does not make sense.
What happened with Java 1.5 was a little peculiar. Normally, stuff is not removed from Java but is instead deprecated (so that a compiler warning is issued). But with 1.5, they introduced generics, and there were a lot of non-typesafe methods that they decided to remove (e.g. Byte.compareTo(Object), which existed only so that Byte could implement the Comparable interface was removed, and Byte now implements Comparable instead with the method Byte.compareTo(Byte)). They effectively saw this as fixing flaws that previously existed in the language, not removing features.
LISP, SCHEME and SMALLTALK were all developed when space was at a premium. so, you kept the source file small by using as obtuse-as-possible a syntax.
While I take your point re LISP and Scheme, I must disagree regarding smalltalk. A stated design goal of the language, in fact, was to make it as readable as possible. The syntax of smalltalk is very simple, yes, but its use of keyword/value pairs instead of traditional 'list of expressions' for passing parameters to methods results in very readable code.
Strangely, the only drug liberals I see are upper class people with no personal experience of drug abuse among friends or family. Marijuana is one thing, the the harder drugs cause a lot of problems. And no, most problems are not because of the illegality itself.
A lot of the problems with drugs are due to illegality:
- A rather large number of people die every year because they get drugs that are either higher concentration than they're expecting or have been cut with something else that is harmful. In a regulated industry, this would not happen.
- People with drug habits are often reluctant to seek treatment for fear of prosecution.
- The difficulty of acquiring drugs causes a form of vendor lock-in which allows dealers to raise prices after their customer is hooked; this escalation of prices often forces the addict to turn to crime and/or prostitution to fund their habit.
You say Al Qaeda. I say Emmanuel Goldstein.
Let's call the whole thing off?
Please note that it is VERY difficult to conceal a 4-foot long rifle in the front pocket of a hooded sweatshirt. And walking around on the street with one is likely to get you very odd looks, if not phone calls to and visits from the police.
Or you could just come to England, where simply wearing the hooded sweatshirt is likely to get the same reaction.
Nowhere in the article is it mentioned anywhere that they are running "700 hardware threads".
Quoth the article: "On Azul's hardware it obtains linear scaling to 768 CPUs"
That kind-of implies 768 hardware threads are in use.
The brief description in the article sounds suspicious and incompetent.
1. A common killer in parallelization is false sharing. That is, threads on two processors fight over a cache-line even though they are accessing independent variables. A cache-line is typically bigger than an individual variable. The approach of using adjacent elements of an array for parallelism sounds naive. One needs to pad the array.
The keyword in your statement is "typically". Click is working on the Azul processor, which is designed from the ground up for this kind of task. While I haven't been able to find details of its cache organisation, I'd say it's pretty safe money that it uses smaller than average cache lines. The hashtable structure described uses the contents of the array in pairs, i.e. 64 bits at a time. If each cache line were 64 bits wide, this would be efficient, no?
2. Updating a shared variable, especially a non-scaler, in an inner loop is naive. One should reference local scalers in inner loops when parallelizing. Just once, should the thread update the shared variable. Don't reference non-scalers or shared variables in an inner loop. Don't lock in the inner loop, either, if you can avoid it.
What if the bottleneck of your application is referencing shared data that needs to be updated in real time? There are many applications for which this is the case, and this kind of work is useful for anyone who is working on such an application. Just throwing an example out there: the scheduler for a massively parallel operating system would typically need to have many cores referring to a single queue of waiting threads with a high chance for collisions between read and write operations. I'm sure there are plenty more, too.
3. Java, really, Java?
Yes. Java. Really. Java is probably the most important language at the moment for enterprise application development, which is the environment where this kind of issue most frequently occurs, so developing solutions to these problems that work in Java is particularly important. Azul, Click's employer, specialises in high performance computers optimized for running Java software.
Like Google Image search?
By my reading, not quite. It's more like an ordinary text search engine, only it shows the site's logo next to its entry (or something like that).
So, it was created to prototype a video card, and it's only practical uses are real-time video (output) processing, thus it is a video card.
Not without a suitable netlist to program the FPGA with, it isn't.
What if you find the whole concept of nations with millions of inhabitants ridiculous? How do you fix that without resorting to escapism?
There are plenty of existing nations that have very small populations. I suspect you can find somewhere between Pitcairn (50 inhabitants) and Cyprus (855,000 inhabitants) that suits you.
Haven't spent any time on a P2P network have you? Try downloading Limewire and searching on those terms.
Yeah. And then try downloading some of the results. Most porn on P2P networks is misnamed, I don't know why. It seems for some reason there's people out there who will take "becky33.jpg" and rename it "becky33 16yo 15yo 14yo 13yo childfucker kiddyporn illegal qwerty rape bestiality anal.jpg" for no apparent reason.
you'd have an online child porn fight?
Is that the new version of rickrolling?
I live in a country where the cost of fuel is on average 50-60% higher than in the US. Yet, somehow, these horrific consequences haven't destroyed our quality of life, and we are well on our way to meeting our Kyoto target, which of course the US considered so problematic they wouldn't even accept one.
Realise that just because your economy right now is based on cheap fuel doesn't mean that's the only way it can work, and also realise that in the long term this has to change anyway, because new oil reserves are getting harder and harder to find.