You don't oversubscrbe the physical T1. (neither do you oversubscribe the physical ADSL by the way!)
But you do most certainly oversubscribe the connection onwards from wherever the lines (be they t1 or adsl) terminate.
Yeah. But the point is that the ADSL is oversubscribed at a local level, between your local exchange and your ISP, whereas the T1 is guaranteed bandwidth as far as the ISP. So there are two stages of contention in a DSL link, one of which is much smaller and therefore much more likely to effect you, compared to the T1 where the only contention is for the ISPs outward link(s), which you can be sure they monitor closely and will upgrade as soon as congestion becomes a real issue (as long as you have a reasonably good ISP). Congestion on your local DSL segment? Live with it, it's part of the service plan.
Correction: It's the Van der Waals radius that's important, not the atomic radius. A 4nm length of crystalline silicon will contain just 19 atoms. Seems even more unlikely we'll get there now.
Give it ten years and what will we have? 256-core processors running with core clock speeds of 100GHz?
100GHz is probably pushing it. You'll note that we haven't seen a huge increase in clock speeds recently, but rather continuing increases in instructions per cycle. I'd guess we'll reach a plateau somewhere around the 10GHz mark.
Moore's Law will soon hit a much more fundamental law: physics. You can't keep shrinking transistors like they are at the moment; it was predicted that we'd reach the limit years ago (yes, I too remember the advent of 200MHz desktop processors, and thinking they couldn't get much faster), but the fact we haven't so far doesn't mean we won't. Moore's Law demands a shrinking by a factor of 1.4 every 18 months. We're currently on 45nm. This gives us the following trend:
end 2008 - 32nm start 2010 - 22nm end 2011 - 16nm start 2013 - 12nm end 2014 - 8nm start 2016 - 6nm end 2017 - 4nm
4 nanometres is only 38 atomic radii of silicon. It seems unlikely that a transistor this small could be produced. Therefore, as long as we continue to use silicon transistors (and no promising alternative that solves this issue exists right now) we will see the end of Moore's Law within the next 10 years. I'm sure of it.
And an end of Moore's Law will not only slow GHz increases, but also will slow the adoption of larger numbers of cores, because without shrinking transistors the only way to increase number of cores is by having a larger die size, which is more expensive and requires larger chip size, which requires larger system board size, which requires larger case size, which consumers don't like.
Actually, HT isn't open. It's licensed royalty free to members of a consortium who have to pay annual membership fees.
Of course, the fact that they don't pay any per-device royalties means they can sublicense that tech to you (e.g. by including it on an FPGA) really cheaply.
I don't have the knowledge to pick a bus based on merit but, from what I've read, Hypertransport is better. Can anyone with experience here chime in?
Do we want Hypertransport or Intel's bus? What about licensing?
HT can run with approximately twice the number of transfers per second per pin as current-generation Intel FSBs. HT is also more readily expandible to use more pins, because it's an autonegotiating variable-width bus, similar to PCI-express. It also wastes fewer pins on control signals. HT is clearly the best, technologically.
Licensing wise, HT is licensed "royalty-free" for an annual fee. I don't believe the fee is particularly large. Many chip producers have already licensed it and will license modules to connect your own chip design to it for very small fees. Such modules exist on some modern FPGAs. This is not currently true of the Intel FSB spec.
You miss his point; the wave form collapses repeatedly, once for each observer. Each waveform collapse transfers information about previous waveform collapses, but until it takes place, previous collapses could have gone in either direction, so from the viewpoint of the observer of the latest waveform collapse don't take place until the last observation.
Just a question, have you readed the linked article?
What, you mean the one that reads "404 Not Found / The following error occurred: [code=CONTENT_NOT_PRESENT] Content is temporarily not present. Contact your system administrator. / Could not open error file"?
A school-friend had one, and brought it in one day. Really nice; the SCART connection gave it a crystal clear display on a TV even on a high resolution display mode, which you couldn't say for any of the other systems I'd played with until then.
The TV standard - NTSC has less scan lines than PAL, so while a US computer could easily be tweaked to output frequencies that a PAL TV could cope with, going the other way tended to mean losing a row or two of text or graphics from the screen - which broke any software with the screen size hard-coded in (which, in those days, was most of it).
I'll take your word for it, having never tried an NTSC conversion of a UK machine, but I'd point out that it ought to have been more than possible to fit the 176 vertical pixels of the spectrum's display within the 240 lines (200 in the safe area) of a single field of an NTSC frame.
EM emission standards. At the time, I don't think the UK had got round to regulating this and a Speccy or BBC Micro had no EM shielding and would wipe out any FM radio within earshot, so cases etc. had to be redesigned to accommodate EM shielding.
Strange; I regularly used my standard UK-edition Spectrum right next to my FM radio without any loss of signal/interference issues. Also, given that there was no signal on the board higher than 8MHz, it shouldn't have been able to interfere. Maybe it was a lower-frequency AM interference issue?
Sadly, instead of consolidating this niche by producing a BBC with more memory and 80-column text (actually, the first would have enabled the latter) Acorn tried to compete with Sinclair by prodicing a BBC-with-all-the-good-features-removed and lost ground.
The BBC Model B supported 80 column text (MODE 3, IIRC). Worked horribly if you tried to use it with the RF TV output, though; it was only really viable with an RGB monitor.
A Z80 could do a 16 bit add in 11 cycles - it took the 6502 around 20 cycles to do the same thing. The fastest 6502 instructions took 3 clock cycles to complete, the fastest Z80 instructions took four.
Many 6502 instructions completed in only 2 cycles, although I believe the decode phase of the instruction was executed in parallel with the register write phase of the previous instruction, so in some circumstances it may have taken 3 cycles to execute the same instruction.
Re 16 bit add, and assuming one memory operand and other operand in A and X registers:
12 cycles; results are in Y and A registers. Can be cut to 10 cycles if you know the carry flag will be clear on entry.
In Z80, again with one reg and one mem, this time the mem is pointed to by HL (Z80 doesn't support direct addressing) and the reg value is in DE.
LD BC, (HL) (10 cycles) ADD BC, DE (11 cycles)
Result is in BC, total time to execute is 21 cycles. Can be cut to 11 cycles if both operands are in registers. Given that most of the time your values won't be in registers and that the 6502 runs at half the number of cycles per second as the Z80, it's pretty much neck and neck. In the case where you have an inner loop with data requirements that fit in your available 6 pairs of general purpose registers, though, the Z80's a clear winner.
Machines like the BBC Micro got better performance than the Spectrum not from the 6502, but because they had more hardware support which meant the CPU didn't have to do everything.
The main thing that made the BBC faster than the Spectrum, IMO, was its BASIC interpreter's support for integer variables.
As i am active in several anti-dataretention groups, i know the new rules pretty well. The dataretention-rules do not apply to private citizens.
On what grounds do you make this claim? Having just read the directive in question, I see nothing that restricts it from applying to a private citizen; it seems to apply to anyone who provides a "public access data communication service", which an open access point would appear to me to be.
Thats like saying because you wanted to get a hand gun, your going to be a school shooter. There are TONS of open WAPs because people don't know better. It gives me the desire to go from home to home and do child porn searchs and FBI searches from all the homes to force this decision to get overturned. I mean come on.
It is, therefore, probably a good thing that this isn't what's being said at all. The story submitter misinterpreted the ruling. The article doesn't even suggest that this is the case. An open access wireless network is not going to be treated as probable cause. What is probable cause is illegal activity being traced to your IP address, whether or not you have an open network. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Exactly. 100W runs a modern average PC. OK, so this guy has RAID0 (one extra hard disk, say 20W more) and dual graphics cards (PCI express delivers a maximum of 75W to each card) so his machine might use as much as 200W.
With modern PCs it could easily use less than 50 watts when idle.
Or, like the one I purchased recently, it could use 70 watts when plugged in but not even switched on. The power usage actually drops when you turn the machine on; it's completely crazy.
Was any authority or elected official involved? Highly unlikely.
Highly likely. The decision to block inappropriate sites on the municipal wifi was almost certainly made by such an official. Did that official decide to block boing-boing? Probably not, but it is a consequence of that person's decision that this government sanctioned censorship (for whatever reasons the site is being censored, as you point out we don't know) is happening.
Really folks, there is utterly no information here except that some filter somewhere blocked one page on Boingboing's website.
Hardly the First Amendment case that's being suggested and debated.
You mean, like a certain arrangement of pits on a DVD, causing the playing of that DVD to show a movie based on that plot? Maybe you should also add a claim for specific arrangements of color particles on Celluloid generating that same plot. Oh, and the arrangement of ink, toner or other colored material on paper or other surfaces to form an arrangement of letters which, when read, results in a story following that plot.
Actually you can make a fine case against it with common sense, that's why the majority of developers abhor software patents. Can I patent a fictional plot if I phrase the application so that it's a part of a physical device for conveying a story?
Possibly. I never used VB, so I'm not sure. Questions:
1. Did the language, its standard library or its development environment provide any facilities for separation of content, form and functionality? 2. When you used a 3rd party widget, was the process of integrating it into your application automated?
I think the answer to both of these would have to be 'yes', but if they were, MS is sitting on their own prior art.
Open office has a form designer, with a designer mode too.
To be infringing, it would need to allow arbitrary objects to be included in the form from the library. I haven't used this feature of OO, but my experience has generally been that this is unusual. Open source projects that I expect would be found infringing include Eclipse, SharpDevelop, probably some content management systems.
Should we be rooting for a Microsoft victory to stop this nonsense?
Yes. We should always hope that all software patent litigation fails, whoever the plaintiff and defendant are.
DO search the patents for possible infringement, and:
1. If you find out what you have been programming is patented, do not release it to avoid patent infringement OR buy a license for the patent.
2. If you find it is not patented, go ahead and use it. You will be able to show beyond reasonable doubt that your use should classified as "in good faith".
The problem with this approach is that (a) there are so many patents out there that seem to cover everything that a developer is likely to never be able to produce anything and (b) it's very easy for somebody who isn't trained in patent searching to miss one.
No, it doesn't refer to XAML. The article makes it sound like XML has something to do with it, but if you read the actual patent what it's about is having a design-time facility that allows you to select components from a library and automatically integrate them with the object you're building, like Visual Studio's design mode does.
From the wording of the patent (overly broad of course), other affected may be:
Adobe's FLEX platform (the XML language being MXML) Sun's Java JSP W3C (the language being.. XHTML)
Have you actually read the patent? I don't know anything about FLEX, but I'm sure neither JSP nor XHTML are infringing. The patent says nothing about XML, nor is it about separation of procedural and declarative components. It's about automatic application generation by maintaining a library of component types that can be integrated into an application by some means.
I don't think what's covered is MVC. Read the first claim, which all the rest are derivitives of:
A method for generating a computer application on a host system in an arbitrary object framework that separates a content of said computer application, a form of said computer application and a functionality of said computer application, said method comprising: creating arbitrary objects with corresponding arbitrary names of various object types for generating said content of said computer application, said form of said computer application, and said functionality of said computer application; managing said arbitrary objects in an object library; and deploying said arbitrary objects from said object library into a design framework to create said computer application. (emphasis mine)
What they've patented is the use of "design mode" with a "toolbox" of object types, in the specific way that visual studio does it.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't oversubscrbe the physical T1. (neither do you oversubscribe the physical ADSL by the way!)
But you do most certainly oversubscribe the connection onwards from wherever the lines (be they t1 or adsl) terminate.
Yeah. But the point is that the ADSL is oversubscribed at a local level, between your local exchange and your ISP, whereas the T1 is guaranteed bandwidth as far as the ISP. So there are two stages of contention in a DSL link, one of which is much smaller and therefore much more likely to effect you, compared to the T1 where the only contention is for the ISPs outward link(s), which you can be sure they monitor closely and will upgrade as soon as congestion becomes a real issue (as long as you have a reasonably good ISP). Congestion on your local DSL segment? Live with it, it's part of the service plan.
His point is wrong. Waveform collapse is not relative to the observer.
The Everett interpretation says it is. Do you know of any experimental invalidation of this interpretation?
I wrote:
4 nanometres is only 38 atomic radii of silicon.
Correction: It's the Van der Waals radius that's important, not the atomic radius. A 4nm length of crystalline silicon will contain just 19 atoms. Seems even more unlikely we'll get there now.
Give it ten years and what will we have? 256-core processors running with core clock speeds of 100GHz?
100GHz is probably pushing it. You'll note that we haven't seen a huge increase in clock speeds recently, but rather continuing increases in instructions per cycle. I'd guess we'll reach a plateau somewhere around the 10GHz mark.
Moore's Law will soon hit a much more fundamental law: physics. You can't keep shrinking transistors like they are at the moment; it was predicted that we'd reach the limit years ago (yes, I too remember the advent of 200MHz desktop processors, and thinking they couldn't get much faster), but the fact we haven't so far doesn't mean we won't. Moore's Law demands a shrinking by a factor of 1.4 every 18 months. We're currently on 45nm. This gives us the following trend:
end 2008 - 32nm
start 2010 - 22nm
end 2011 - 16nm
start 2013 - 12nm
end 2014 - 8nm
start 2016 - 6nm
end 2017 - 4nm
4 nanometres is only 38 atomic radii of silicon. It seems unlikely that a transistor this small could be produced. Therefore, as long as we continue to use silicon transistors (and no promising alternative that solves this issue exists right now) we will see the end of Moore's Law within the next 10 years. I'm sure of it.
And an end of Moore's Law will not only slow GHz increases, but also will slow the adoption of larger numbers of cores, because without shrinking transistors the only way to increase number of cores is by having a larger die size, which is more expensive and requires larger chip size, which requires larger system board size, which requires larger case size, which consumers don't like.
Hypertransport is an open protocol.
Actually, HT isn't open. It's licensed royalty free to members of a consortium who have to pay annual membership fees.
Of course, the fact that they don't pay any per-device royalties means they can sublicense that tech to you (e.g. by including it on an FPGA) really cheaply.
I don't have the knowledge to pick a bus based on merit but, from what I've read, Hypertransport is better. Can anyone with experience here chime in?
Do we want Hypertransport or Intel's bus? What about licensing?
HT can run with approximately twice the number of transfers per second per pin as current-generation Intel FSBs. HT is also more readily expandible to use more pins, because it's an autonegotiating variable-width bus, similar to PCI-express. It also wastes fewer pins on control signals. HT is clearly the best, technologically.
Licensing wise, HT is licensed "royalty-free" for an annual fee. I don't believe the fee is particularly large. Many chip producers have already licensed it and will license modules to connect your own chip design to it for very small fees. Such modules exist on some modern FPGAs. This is not currently true of the Intel FSB spec.
You miss his point; the wave form collapses repeatedly, once for each observer. Each waveform collapse transfers information about previous waveform collapses, but until it takes place, previous collapses could have gone in either direction, so from the viewpoint of the observer of the latest waveform collapse don't take place until the last observation.
Just a question, have you readed the linked article?
What, you mean the one that reads "404 Not Found / The following error occurred: [code=CONTENT_NOT_PRESENT] Content is temporarily not present. Contact your system administrator. / Could not open error file"?
We came over the pond, not out of it. And the spectrum was 8-bit, not 2-bit. What do you take us for?
A school-friend had one, and brought it in one day. Really nice; the SCART connection gave it a crystal clear display on a TV even on a high resolution display mode, which you couldn't say for any of the other systems I'd played with until then.
The TV standard - NTSC has less scan lines than PAL, so while a US computer could easily be tweaked to output frequencies that a PAL TV could cope with, going the other way tended to mean losing a row or two of text or graphics from the screen - which broke any software with the screen size hard-coded in (which, in those days, was most of it).
I'll take your word for it, having never tried an NTSC conversion of a UK machine, but I'd point out that it ought to have been more than possible to fit the 176 vertical pixels of the spectrum's display within the 240 lines (200 in the safe area) of a single field of an NTSC frame.
EM emission standards. At the time, I don't think the UK had got round to regulating this and a Speccy or BBC Micro had no EM shielding and would wipe out any FM radio within earshot, so cases etc. had to be redesigned to accommodate EM shielding.
Strange; I regularly used my standard UK-edition Spectrum right next to my FM radio without any loss of signal/interference issues. Also, given that there was no signal on the board higher than 8MHz, it shouldn't have been able to interfere. Maybe it was a lower-frequency AM interference issue?
Sadly, instead of consolidating this niche by producing a BBC with more memory and 80-column text (actually, the first would have enabled the latter) Acorn tried to compete with Sinclair by prodicing a BBC-with-all-the-good-features-removed and lost ground.
The BBC Model B supported 80 column text (MODE 3, IIRC). Worked horribly if you tried to use it with the RF TV output, though; it was only really viable with an RGB monitor.
A Z80 could do a 16 bit add in 11 cycles - it took the 6502 around 20 cycles to do the same thing. The fastest 6502 instructions took 3 clock cycles to complete, the fastest Z80 instructions took four.
Many 6502 instructions completed in only 2 cycles, although I believe the decode phase of the instruction was executed in parallel with the register write phase of the previous instruction, so in some circumstances it may have taken 3 cycles to execute the same instruction.
Re 16 bit add, and assuming one memory operand and other operand in A and X registers:
CLC (2 cycles)
ADC (3 cycles)
TAY (2 cycles)
TXA (2 cycles)
ADC (3 cycles)
12 cycles; results are in Y and A registers. Can be cut to 10 cycles if you know the carry flag will be clear on entry.
In Z80, again with one reg and one mem, this time the mem is pointed to by HL (Z80 doesn't support direct addressing) and the reg value is in DE.
LD BC, (HL) (10 cycles)
ADD BC, DE (11 cycles)
Result is in BC, total time to execute is 21 cycles. Can be cut to 11 cycles if both operands are in registers. Given that most of the time your values won't be in registers and that the 6502 runs at half the number of cycles per second as the Z80, it's pretty much neck and neck. In the case where you have an inner loop with data requirements that fit in your available 6 pairs of general purpose registers, though, the Z80's a clear winner.
Machines like the BBC Micro got better performance than the Spectrum not from the 6502, but because they had more hardware support which meant the CPU didn't have to do everything.
The main thing that made the BBC faster than the Spectrum, IMO, was its BASIC interpreter's support for integer variables.
As i am active in several anti-dataretention groups, i know the new rules pretty well. The dataretention-rules do not apply to private citizens.
On what grounds do you make this claim? Having just read the directive in question, I see nothing that restricts it from applying to a private citizen; it seems to apply to anyone who provides a "public access data communication service", which an open access point would appear to me to be.
Thats like saying because you wanted to get a hand gun, your going to be a school shooter. There are TONS of open WAPs because people don't know better. It gives me the desire to go from home to home and do child porn searchs and FBI searches from all the homes to force this decision to get overturned. I mean come on.
It is, therefore, probably a good thing that this isn't what's being said at all. The story submitter misinterpreted the ruling. The article doesn't even suggest that this is the case. An open access wireless network is not going to be treated as probable cause. What is probable cause is illegal activity being traced to your IP address, whether or not you have an open network. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Exactly. 100W runs a modern average PC. OK, so this guy has RAID0 (one extra hard disk, say 20W more) and dual graphics cards (PCI express delivers a maximum of 75W to each card) so his machine might use as much as 200W.
With modern PCs it could easily use less than 50 watts when idle.
Or, like the one I purchased recently, it could use 70 watts when plugged in but not even switched on. The power usage actually drops when you turn the machine on; it's completely crazy.
Was any authority or elected official involved? Highly unlikely.
Highly likely. The decision to block inappropriate sites on the municipal wifi was almost certainly made by such an official. Did that official decide to block boing-boing? Probably not, but it is a consequence of that person's decision that this government sanctioned censorship (for whatever reasons the site is being censored, as you point out we don't know) is happening.
Really folks, there is utterly no information here except that some filter somewhere blocked one page on Boingboing's website.
Hardly the First Amendment case that's being suggested and debated.
"In 1998, a United States federal district court in Virginia ruled that the imposition of mandatory filtering in a public library violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights. [Mainstream Loudon v. Board of Trustees of the Loudon County Library, 24 F. Supp. 2d 552 (E.D. Va. 1998)]" (source).
This filtering is almost certainly unconstitutional, based on the same arguments used in that case.
You mean, like a certain arrangement of pits on a DVD, causing the playing of that DVD to show a movie based on that plot? Maybe you should also add a claim for specific arrangements of color particles on Celluloid generating that same plot. Oh, and the arrangement of ink, toner or other colored material on paper or other surfaces to form an arrangement of letters which, when read, results in a story following that plot.
Are you sure you aren't a patent attorney? 'Cause if you aren't, you could probably make a fortune if you switched careers.
Actually you can make a fine case against it with common sense, that's why the majority of developers abhor software patents. Can I patent a fictional plot if I phrase the application so that it's a part of a physical device for conveying a story?
Device, or process. Specifically, a process of relaying a story having a unique plot. Not granted as yet, but it hasn't been rejected either.
Possibly. I never used VB, so I'm not sure. Questions:
1. Did the language, its standard library or its development environment provide any facilities for separation of content, form and functionality?
2. When you used a 3rd party widget, was the process of integrating it into your application automated?
I think the answer to both of these would have to be 'yes', but if they were, MS is sitting on their own prior art.
Open office has a form designer, with a designer mode too.
To be infringing, it would need to allow arbitrary objects to be included in the form from the library. I haven't used this feature of OO, but my experience has generally been that this is unusual. Open source projects that I expect would be found infringing include Eclipse, SharpDevelop, probably some content management systems.
Should we be rooting for a Microsoft victory to stop this nonsense?
Yes. We should always hope that all software patent litigation fails, whoever the plaintiff and defendant are.
DO search the patents for possible infringement, and:
1. If you find out what you have been programming is patented, do not release it to avoid patent infringement OR buy a license for the patent.
2. If you find it is not patented, go ahead and use it. You will be able to show beyond reasonable doubt that your use should classified as "in good faith".
The problem with this approach is that (a) there are so many patents out there that seem to cover everything that a developer is likely to never be able to produce anything and (b) it's very easy for somebody who isn't trained in patent searching to miss one.
No, it doesn't refer to XAML. The article makes it sound like XML has something to do with it, but if you read the actual patent what it's about is having a design-time facility that allows you to select components from a library and automatically integrate them with the object you're building, like Visual Studio's design mode does.
From the wording of the patent (overly broad of course), other affected may be:
Adobe's FLEX platform (the XML language being MXML)
Sun's Java JSP
W3C (the language being.. XHTML)
Have you actually read the patent? I don't know anything about FLEX, but I'm sure neither JSP nor XHTML are infringing. The patent says nothing about XML, nor is it about separation of procedural and declarative components. It's about automatic application generation by maintaining a library of component types that can be integrated into an application by some means.
I don't think what's covered is MVC. Read the first claim, which all the rest are derivitives of:
A method for generating a computer application on a host system in an arbitrary object framework that separates a content of said computer application, a form of said computer application and a functionality of said computer application, said method comprising: creating arbitrary objects with corresponding arbitrary names of various object types for generating said content of said computer application, said form of said computer application, and said functionality of said computer application; managing said arbitrary objects in an object library; and deploying said arbitrary objects from said object library into a design framework to create said computer application. (emphasis mine)
What they've patented is the use of "design mode" with a "toolbox" of object types, in the specific way that visual studio does it.