How can something that can easily be turned off be a "show stopper". My current distro, Sabayon Linux, runs just as well with or without beryl enabled. When it locks up all keyboard input, requiring either a reboot, or logging in remotely through ssh (you're running sshd and remember your ip, don't you?).
That post looks a bit screwed up that I made, but he's a central member of Ubuntu, a member of the laptop, kernel, and acpi teams and one of 4 members of the technical board. I had hoped his insightful analysis would have been enough, but it seems I botched a link or two. To make up for it, here's a video of him detailing how hacking acpi is done.
Unfortunately, the world is far more complicated than you'd like. Matthew Garrett has extensively about the subject. Truth is, ACPI a standard that nobody follows intelligently. Garrett writes about how part of the spec involves an interpreted machine code called DSDT (this already sounds like a recipe for disaster) that is used to guide actions. The problem is two fold:
DSDT's are buggy (go figure)
The common method for fixing a broken DSDT is to patch it after the machine has booted via some driver
Microsoft has troubles with vendors who don't care much about suspend resume functionality.
The solution isn't to go out and make yet another spec that vendors wont follow intelligently. The solution is vertical integration. Apple does it, and they can know everything they want to about their hardware. And open source software like Linux also offers the potential to do so. Dell potentially has the tools to make their Linux offering compete. I've been hoping one of the Linux laptop vendors springing up would move towards speccing their own laptops but it hasn't quite happened yet (that I know of).
It seems like the difference is that people call it an O(1) scheduler to reflect the fact that all the work required to be done at the end of a timeslice (record keeping, picking a new process etc) is done in constant time, and people arguing for O(n) are referring to the cost to schedule all processes. Nobody's saying they can find a schedule for n processes without looking at all of them.
Because MP3 is patented technology that requires payment to / permission from people who uphold the sorts of principals that RMS and the FSF fight in their day jobs?
I think that's the point: men associate with people with similar interests, forming a peer group. And I think that people concerned about impressing peers do better than those maximizing return on their investment (chasing after high value jobs).
Pretend I am a tech-illiterate typical PC user, with little to back up my choices apart from how professional each OS appears. Here are my choices:... 3) Feisty Fawn with "Beryl", whoever she is, written by a whole bunch of random geeks.
If you're my crossword loving grandmother, you might recognize the word "beryl" as a class of precious gem. This explains the icon, and names, at least. As for the random geeks, I'm not sure why random geeks hired by Microsoft are different than the ones working on beryl, though the company itself might be different.
You know, my hardware works with Ubuntu, so I used get pissed that people say things like "Ubuntu never works" and "horrible hardware support" or "the live cd fails to boot", but when you go to the effort to link to a launchpad bug about it, with several subscribers, I'm forced to admit that Ubuntu is not perfect. And I think its fair to warn people, especially when one of the computers affected is a laptop built and sold with Ubuntu on it. Point is, your personal situation is one point -- an anecdote, not data.
It's better to acknowledge that your users may encounter problems than pretend they don't exist. Normally, I'd point to this flaw as why you should try out beta releases of Ubuntu, but this was found fairly early on, and still hasn't been adequately fixed. On the one hand, Ubuntu doesn't write the linux kernel, so there's only so much they can do on most fronts and offer for free to the public. On the other, Ubuntu made some pretty strong promises that most people probably interpret differently than the Ubuntu Foundation does. Most people would assume that fixing driver bugs would be part of the support commitment, but the Foundation seems most concerned (and rightly so) about security fixes.
Whats worse is that there's a spec that's intended to pick the important parts of automatix / easyubuntu and do them correctly. It's my hope that eventually Automatix is entirely pointless, but I suspect the Automatix developers will be hunting down new things to break as Ubuntu takes / fixes older problems.
"Natural selection should select the most fit to survive."
That's not strictly true. Natural selection is survival of the fittest, to reproduce. Once you stop having children, natural selection becomes much weaker, as your contributions to the population is merely ensuring that your children survive and reproduce, en masse. Not much selection against cancer when you're 80.
Even though our society has shifted away from having children to make ends on the farm meet, to investing in the survival of every child some selective forces still apply. If your children are predisposed to diseases, at the margin I imagine you'll have to reduce the number of children you have. So there's still a shift, it's just much slower thanks to the progress of modern medicine. And like you said, there's plenty of people opposed to contraceptives that wind up with large families.
Eventually gene therapy may allow us to fight off bad mutations, but there's some that theorize that bad genes exist for a reason and curing genetic diseases reduces important genetic variations.
But the problem most departments are seeking to address is undergraduate enrollment. Our own graduate programs are closer to balanced, but for reasons that we can only attribute to culture and the undergraduate program itself, there's far greater gender imbalance in enrollment and admission for our undergraduate program, which is dominated by in-state students rather than international students.
Well, I don't know about that. The default view in a wikipedia is certainly an uncertain proposition, but why should we trust wikipedia less than any other site? Yes, it's editable, but it also has revision control. As long as we generally trust website citations, wikipedia provides for demonstrating WHEN an article said something and for how long. I doubt writing about an idea counts as prior art though, so I'm not sure what the gain is.
I'm sure lawyers can pick up on this. Whether judges can accurately measure what they're looking at is another matter and one that probably means it shouldn't be allowed any more than any other site.
"What I see is more the horrible state of software security. A security model that relies on all the writers of driver code in your computer to do their job right is a poor security model."
I'm not sure how separating drivers into a user process would make things more secure. At best, such a system would require both a remote exploit and a local exploit to do the same thing. At worst, it does nothing -- botnets don't do much that require special privileges. The only difference is that instead of talking about how an attacker could do anything with your computer, we'd be talking about how they can do most anything.
Actually, I had more trouble getting my wireless card to work in Windows XP than Ubuntu 5.10. Turns out not every wireless card supports Windows' wifi config tool, and mine was one of them. For some reason, nobody seems to tell hardware vendors that their Value-add software feels more like value subtract.
Of course, I did have the foresight to ask my friends about what works on Linux, which I'm sure helped tremendously. However the laptop I bought didn't really let me choose a wifi card, and it still works with Ubuntu. Of course, Ubuntu takes a much more friendly stance on closed source drivers than Debian or Fedora, and that also helps a great deal. I'm pretty sure neither of my wifi devices work out of the box with Fedora (one more reason I didnt switch back to Fedora after trying out Ubuntu).
It's actually quite simple to explain the hardware. In essence there's two kinds of screens, one that fight the ambient light and ones that rely on it. Some screens act as filters to a backlight -- this backlight has to fight the ambient light if you want to see anything. Others reflect the ambient light -- without light they're hosed. Reflective screens block the light behind them. Engineering a solution that works in both cases is tricky, but doable for small screens. The GBA SP had a reflective screen, a very bright led and a "light guide" placed above the reflective screen. For small screens the light guide works, but larger screens this would fail to evenly light the screen. And note, trying to outcompete the sun is never going to work for laptops. As it is, the biggest draw on the battery is the backlight. The sun is something like a thousand times brighter, though our eyes adjust well to it. The big downsides to this stuff is glare and probably color gamut. You'd have a hard time reflecting wavelengths the sun isn't producing.
I'm guessing you don't own a laptop, or you would have discovered that your experiment contradicts your explanation. I've managed to hibernate on windows, restart the laptop, boot into linux and hibernate that, with no ill effects. Whatever state windows recorded has to have been blown away by that. Primarily because hibernate is also known as "suspend to disk". Suspend to RAM though, is another story. The "good" news is that as of Vista business edition, Linux has caught up with Windows on that front. Video fails to restore after resume for me on Vista about 50 percent of the time.
But suspend to ram has a spec in ACPI. It does have to set a few registers, so that ACPI knows where to run code from on the warm restart. mjg59 has a nice article detailing the specifics of suspend and Linux, and the common culprits (video cards).
With respect to the topic, I don't think multithreaded apps are what's important here. Distributed apps are probably more important. The sub processors in Cell don't have shared memory, after all. I think your requirement for multithreadedness might be slightly bogus, and the technologies that are in use now for computational clusters may fare better when used in alternative GPU designs.
Seriously though, looking at the Debian compiler shootout, ocaml does fairly well at CPU intensive applications. In the past I've seen some applications claimed to be written in it (unison), but I can't find a decent list of them, and I don't remember any being parallel / distributed. Yahoo! stores was apparently written in Lisp, and Paul Graham won't shut up about it.
But the GGP is talking about extending such languages, already sparsely in use, to distributed computations. Erlang is the poster child for this. For those acquainted with functional languages the concept seems simple. But many a student I know has trouble wrapping their mind around functional languages. Whether we want to apply these students to distributed computation is one question, whether we'll have a choice in the future is another. There's numerous apps written in erlang that claim some advantage over a non-erlang oss competitor, like a webserver that handles far more open connections than apache (and likely supports far fewer features). Skepticism is healthy, but you've taken it into the unhealthy realm of being combative.
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That post looks a bit screwed up that I made, but he's a central member of Ubuntu, a member of the laptop, kernel, and acpi teams and one of 4 members of the technical board. I had hoped his insightful analysis would have been enough, but it seems I botched a link or two. To make up for it, here's a video of him detailing how hacking acpi is done.
- DSDT's are buggy (go figure)
- The common method for fixing a broken DSDT is to patch it after the machine has booted via some driver
Microsoft has troubles with vendors who don't care much about suspend resume functionality.The solution isn't to go out and make yet another spec that vendors wont follow intelligently. The solution is vertical integration. Apple does it, and they can know everything they want to about their hardware. And open source software like Linux also offers the potential to do so. Dell potentially has the tools to make their Linux offering compete. I've been hoping one of the Linux laptop vendors springing up would move towards speccing their own laptops but it hasn't quite happened yet (that I know of).
It seems like the difference is that people call it an O(1) scheduler to reflect the fact that all the work required to be done at the end of a timeslice (record keeping, picking a new process etc) is done in constant time, and people arguing for O(n) are referring to the cost to schedule all processes. Nobody's saying they can find a schedule for n processes without looking at all of them.
Because MP3 is patented technology that requires payment to / permission from people who uphold the sorts of principals that RMS and the FSF fight in their day jobs?
I think that's the point: men associate with people with similar interests, forming a peer group. And I think that people concerned about impressing peers do better than those maximizing return on their investment (chasing after high value jobs).
If you're my crossword loving grandmother, you might recognize the word "beryl" as a class of precious gem. This explains the icon, and names, at least. As for the random geeks, I'm not sure why random geeks hired by Microsoft are different than the ones working on beryl, though the company itself might be different.
You know, my hardware works with Ubuntu, so I used get pissed that people say things like "Ubuntu never works" and "horrible hardware support" or "the live cd fails to boot", but when you go to the effort to link to a launchpad bug about it, with several subscribers, I'm forced to admit that Ubuntu is not perfect. And I think its fair to warn people, especially when one of the computers affected is a laptop built and sold with Ubuntu on it. Point is, your personal situation is one point -- an anecdote, not data.
It's better to acknowledge that your users may encounter problems than pretend they don't exist. Normally, I'd point to this flaw as why you should try out beta releases of Ubuntu, but this was found fairly early on, and still hasn't been adequately fixed. On the one hand, Ubuntu doesn't write the linux kernel, so there's only so much they can do on most fronts and offer for free to the public. On the other, Ubuntu made some pretty strong promises that most people probably interpret differently than the Ubuntu Foundation does. Most people would assume that fixing driver bugs would be part of the support commitment, but the Foundation seems most concerned (and rightly so) about security fixes.
Whats worse is that there's a spec that's intended to pick the important parts of automatix / easyubuntu and do them correctly. It's my hope that eventually Automatix is entirely pointless, but I suspect the Automatix developers will be hunting down new things to break as Ubuntu takes / fixes older problems.
"Natural selection should select the most fit to survive."
That's not strictly true. Natural selection is survival of the fittest, to reproduce. Once you stop having children, natural selection becomes much weaker, as your contributions to the population is merely ensuring that your children survive and reproduce, en masse. Not much selection against cancer when you're 80.
Even though our society has shifted away from having children to make ends on the farm meet, to investing in the survival of every child some selective forces still apply. If your children are predisposed to diseases, at the margin I imagine you'll have to reduce the number of children you have. So there's still a shift, it's just much slower thanks to the progress of modern medicine. And like you said, there's plenty of people opposed to contraceptives that wind up with large families.
Eventually gene therapy may allow us to fight off bad mutations, but there's some that theorize that bad genes exist for a reason and curing genetic diseases reduces important genetic variations.
Of course, you're asking for disease troubles with a biologically identical herd.
Yes. I'd like you to explain to me why wikipedia is less authoritative than geocities. Good luck.
I think he was being ironic.
But the problem most departments are seeking to address is undergraduate enrollment. Our own graduate programs are closer to balanced, but for reasons that we can only attribute to culture and the undergraduate program itself, there's far greater gender imbalance in enrollment and admission for our undergraduate program, which is dominated by in-state students rather than international students.
There's enough speed limit signs with buckshot in them that I'd have to say enough people aren't responsible with the guns they already own.
So is Digg the market or legislation? Because I'm beginning to lead towards whatever the opposite of Digg is.
Well, I don't know about that. The default view in a wikipedia is certainly an uncertain proposition, but why should we trust wikipedia less than any other site? Yes, it's editable, but it also has revision control. As long as we generally trust website citations, wikipedia provides for demonstrating WHEN an article said something and for how long. I doubt writing about an idea counts as prior art though, so I'm not sure what the gain is.
I'm sure lawyers can pick up on this. Whether judges can accurately measure what they're looking at is another matter and one that probably means it shouldn't be allowed any more than any other site.
No need to go that far, the reflective ones fare just fine in the sun.
"What I see is more the horrible state of software security. A security model that relies on all the writers of driver code in your computer to do their job right is a poor security model."
I'm not sure how separating drivers into a user process would make things more secure. At best, such a system would require both a remote exploit and a local exploit to do the same thing. At worst, it does nothing -- botnets don't do much that require special privileges. The only difference is that instead of talking about how an attacker could do anything with your computer, we'd be talking about how they can do most anything.
Actually, I had more trouble getting my wireless card to work in Windows XP than Ubuntu 5.10. Turns out not every wireless card supports Windows' wifi config tool, and mine was one of them. For some reason, nobody seems to tell hardware vendors that their Value-add software feels more like value subtract.
Of course, I did have the foresight to ask my friends about what works on Linux, which I'm sure helped tremendously. However the laptop I bought didn't really let me choose a wifi card, and it still works with Ubuntu. Of course, Ubuntu takes a much more friendly stance on closed source drivers than Debian or Fedora, and that also helps a great deal. I'm pretty sure neither of my wifi devices work out of the box with Fedora (one more reason I didnt switch back to Fedora after trying out Ubuntu).
It's actually quite simple to explain the hardware. In essence there's two kinds of screens, one that fight the ambient light and ones that rely on it. Some screens act as filters to a backlight -- this backlight has to fight the ambient light if you want to see anything. Others reflect the ambient light -- without light they're hosed. Reflective screens block the light behind them. Engineering a solution that works in both cases is tricky, but doable for small screens. The GBA SP had a reflective screen, a very bright led and a "light guide" placed above the reflective screen. For small screens the light guide works, but larger screens this would fail to evenly light the screen. And note, trying to outcompete the sun is never going to work for laptops. As it is, the biggest draw on the battery is the backlight. The sun is something like a thousand times brighter, though our eyes adjust well to it. The big downsides to this stuff is glare and probably color gamut. You'd have a hard time reflecting wavelengths the sun isn't producing.
I'm guessing you don't own a laptop, or you would have discovered that your experiment contradicts your explanation. I've managed to hibernate on windows, restart the laptop, boot into linux and hibernate that, with no ill effects. Whatever state windows recorded has to have been blown away by that. Primarily because hibernate is also known as "suspend to disk". Suspend to RAM though, is another story. The "good" news is that as of Vista business edition, Linux has caught up with Windows on that front. Video fails to restore after resume for me on Vista about 50 percent of the time.
But suspend to ram has a spec in ACPI. It does have to set a few registers, so that ACPI knows where to run code from on the warm restart. mjg59 has a nice article detailing the specifics of suspend and Linux, and the common culprits (video cards).
With respect to the topic, I don't think multithreaded apps are what's important here. Distributed apps are probably more important. The sub processors in Cell don't have shared memory, after all. I think your requirement for multithreadedness might be slightly bogus, and the technologies that are in use now for computational clusters may fare better when used in alternative GPU designs.
Wouldn't Apache's server thread pool be an example? And surely there's some open source version of seti@home (possibly seti itself?)
How about Hadoop?
Seriously though, looking at the Debian compiler shootout, ocaml does fairly well at CPU intensive applications. In the past I've seen some applications claimed to be written in it (unison), but I can't find a decent list of them, and I don't remember any being parallel / distributed. Yahoo! stores was apparently written in Lisp, and Paul Graham won't shut up about it.
But the GGP is talking about extending such languages, already sparsely in use, to distributed computations. Erlang is the poster child for this. For those acquainted with functional languages the concept seems simple. But many a student I know has trouble wrapping their mind around functional languages. Whether we want to apply these students to distributed computation is one question, whether we'll have a choice in the future is another. There's numerous apps written in erlang that claim some advantage over a non-erlang oss competitor, like a webserver that handles far more open connections than apache (and likely supports far fewer features). Skepticism is healthy, but you've taken it into the unhealthy realm of being combative.