I've been an advocate of requiring companies to give something up in exchange for limited liability for a while now. Companies get a great power which makes much of their work possible and/or reasonably efficient. Usually I've discussed lawyers, doctors, etc... where there's a clear and easy way to see how they give back. But this is a great way to generalize it.
Does your RAM have better things to be doing? If so, why isn't your operating system using the RAM for that instead?
Large caches can remain in RAM and the only reason not to keep them there would be if you wanted to ensure persistence across sessions or you were running out of virtual address space. Otherwise the operating system should really be doing it's job in swapping out unused portions of memory to disk on your behalf.
That's not to say that a program can't take some consideration in its allocation strategies to maximize efficiency. For example if a program was just blindly calling new or malloc (assuming C/C++ here, given we're talking web browsers that's basically the case) then presumably those allocators would be doing their best to not fragment memory across all allocations. But for a web browser you really want to not fragment memory across significant user-accessed boundaries.
One simply idea is you have all data structures related to a web page to be allocated in 1 continious chunk of memory. That memory would be mmap/mmap2/VirtualAlloc/brk/sbrk's depending on your poison of choice and then handed out in suballocations for various things related to the page. Because the memory is contigiously allocated the OS, after detecting those pages haven't been used in a while, would swap that out to disk.
In the end you get exactly what you want: your large cache is on disk. But it's only on disk if you're using your memory for something else, otherwise it's in RAM. Best of all the developer didn't have to write code that: dealt with how much memory there was on the system, and how much they should keep on disk, write code to write it out to disk, read it back from disk, deal with navigating to a page which might be on disk so you have to check, first reading back in it's date/time to see if you actually should refresh the page, and if so then go and read back to the page, and have algorithms to reconstitute all your data structures, and then deal with the inevitable feature requests to enable cross-session caching, and fixing all the bugs that come out of this featutre, and finally keeping all these pieces in sync as you evolve the program.
Instead all that needs to be written is a dumb memory allocator (really, it's just incrementing a pointer and returning the previous value - allocate a new set of blocks if you run out of space) that has easy life time management rules (page going away? just free all the blocks). Even better the dumb allocator provides assurances that you don't leak memory. When a page is dead it's allocator is destroyed and all memory associated with it is freed. Forgot to free some suballocation along the way? No problem, the allocator freed it up anyway. Now, maybe this isn't how web browsers are working these days. But one would hope their creators are masters of the art and are applying techniques like these to leverage all the great facilities of modern OSes: in this case paging.
On point #1 I have to wonder what happened to "the right of the people peaceably to assemble"?
Assuming they're either on public or private property where the owner does not object I don't see what the problem is. While raves may or may not make money they are typically at best border-line commercial enterprises, not full blown commercial enterprises. Typically the "operators" primary interest is in creating an environment for people to do their rave thing. It is usually not designed to create great profits (even if the promoters haven't gone the full step of making themselves a not-for-profit).
As for the drugs... that's an entirely different issue. But you seem to imply that they were aware and responsible for the drugs. While I certainly believe they were aware of some illegal drug use (just like any concert promoter is aware there are going to be drugs used at their venue) I would suspect they almost certainly did not contribute to this atmosphere directly.
The fact of the matter is that a non-violent party is not a reason for the police to come and invade. It's just a violation of civil liberties unless people are complaining. If people are complaining then the police should respond to those complaints. But permits for gatherings of people just strike me as being entirely un-American.
Good starter list, but I think you're off on ripping CDs (DVDs sure, but CDs are so mainstream. Even *I* don't rip DVDs and I write C++ and C# code for fun and for a living).
To paraphrase a famous "redneck" comedian, you might be a Windows power user if you:
Install anti-spyware software (if only users would do this!)
Use cmd.exe
Write batch files,.vbs, or.js files for automation
Organize your start menu (again, if only...)
Tweak "Group Policy" on your personal PC (e.g. to disable shutdown from the start menu or other random tweaks)
run Regedit to make modifications
Install the Power Toys pack (come on, it's got Power in it's name!)
Inspect Start->Programs->Startup & removing bloat on a regular basis.
Running msconfig to remove more programs from startup
Running Server 2k3 instead of XP
You've resized your task bar, or moved it to anywhere other than the start.
Fun topic! I'm sure others can come up with more...
What I can't really answer is why like 90% of cell phones seem to be gray flip phones. Is it really that important not to offend? Is colored plastic that much more expensive? Are the conformity-loving Asian manufacturers who make 90% of the phones to blame? Do they not want to irritate the accessory makers who sell color cases?
Here's my guess:
Gray will sell to just about anybody. But colors will set to particular markets. So if you sell colors (or worse, more complex designs or worse yet branded phones) you're limiting your market. Therefore you either have to have more stock (*n colors/patterns/etc) or cause delayed gratification to customers ("No, but we can order it for you...") that may either cause them to not get a phone, go somewhere else to get there phone, or possibly go for some other phone (which may be good or bad for the retailer).
If as a general pratice people bought cell phones on-line then maybe the increased inventory would be a non-issue. But for stores it is probably a significant issue.
The color covers allow the companies to stock a decent number of each phone in a single color and then optionally stock covers. If you don't have the cover someone wants it's no longer a deal breaker. They buy the phone, hell, they may even buy a cover from you too, and then they buy a cover from someone else. Also the covers can be purchased & changed over time - so you get more repeat sales than you would with people buying new phones.
And finally you have manufacturing costs. The color covers would be the final implementation that any reasonable company would come to (versus having custom manufacturing for every phone which would drive up manufacturing costs). So they may as well make it a "feature" and sell multiple covers (or sell license rights to use their "patented cellphone/cellphone cover interface").
So basically all around there's more money to be made by the current strategy.
If my house falls over and kills 4000 people, I am liable. If my company (Toxico) falls over and kills 4000 people, I am not liable, due to, IMHO, government fiction. This is wrong. If a bad company is bankrupted by civil action, the
This isn't the problem. Limited liability is actually a very good thing. Without limited liability it would place a much higher burden upon investors and therefore less people would be inclined to invest. And it could potentially be enough risk that investment generally didn't happen. That'd make it extremely difficult for people to create new businesses and that'd generally be bad.
The *problem* with our system (where our system == the US system) is that we do not extract sufficient reward for this mighty benefit that we give companies and investors. In fact we go so far as to treat companies as individuals with nearly all the same rights. But corporations get this huge benefit over your average person. If some imaginary business owner doesn't incorporate they can't limit their liability. Today they'll just go ahead and form their limited liability corporation for some small fee and be done with it. It'd be better if there were some trade offs involved where society gets some benefit out of the advantages it's providing to the business owners.
Because corporations shouldn't really be individuals those restrictions could include things like restriction (or elimination) of political speech, providing some free or discounted services to the government and/or societies most helpless, etc... The balances there could change over time as societies needs change - but it's always a choice for the corporation. They're trading the investment & legal benefits off for restrictions and stipulations of their business (they continue to be able to act independently & freely, of course). The best part though is that this could help free up many of these restrictions that are now getting applied to individuals as well.
I think that Novell is worthy of the Linux community's support.... They... help to insure that those companies stay the course of the One True Faith - FOSS
I think Novell is definitely good for Linux. I think it's a whole lot less clear that Novell is good for FOSS. Novell has always been a software company. Can they make a transition to a services company instead? I think given their current course the answer is NO. They're not developing a servicing arm - instead they're developing software (you mention their sys management tools, but you also have Mono, they're identification offerings, etc...) I think they're doing more to bring commercial software to Linux than anyone else. The key here though is whats_good_for_linux != whats_good_for_foss.
I'm amazed with the number of comments in this article that no one's really picked up on this.
I find it hard to agree that this teaches that "it's OK to diss people because they are a woman, they're a different colour or they're from a different place." is accurate.
The common argument against this is that did playing super mario brothers make us all want to jump on and throw turtles around? Did playing tetris make people obsessive about placing blocks in tightly packed configuration? If you played Monopoly as a child are you bound to end up trying to corner a market in your adult life? It's obvious that the things we do as a child have affects upon who we become when we're adults. What isn't clear is what effect playing a violent video game will have on the developing mind. Maybe it causes more violence, maybe it causes LESS evidence (as it serves as an outlet), or maybe it's just a wash... We really need multiple case studies in order to judge this, and I don't believe we have these multiple case studies.
Now let me come back to some specifics on Hillary's comment. First I think if killing a prositute is a diss on all women, isn't jailing prositutes also a diss on all women? I mean after all in both cases an external party is depriving the women of her rights to treat her body as she wishes. Is Hillary for legalized prostituion as well?
Next I haven't heard of any overtly racist portions of GTA or other equally popular games. I think it would have made a pretty big stink if there were racist elements to the games, so I'm not sure where this comes from. I would say the US public has a pretty low level of tolerance for overt racism and you usually hear about it when it occurs anywhere in mainstream media.
Finally, we're allowed to discriminate against people from a different place. We can hate the French all day long for example (American Fries anyone?) and for the most part this doesn't spark outrage. We have a long history of hating different countries for different reasons. Russia, Cuba, etc... We hate the people of a country all the time. It's hating them for their race that's bad! And the US government continues to discrimate against those from foreign countries today. We see it overtly in the form of immigration laws and more recently in the treatment of people siezed during Bush's little war.
On a slightly different note I don't see why this is an issue for the federal government. Do you not want your kids to play GTA? Fine, don't buy them GTA. Oh, but one of their friends might have it! God forbid that as a parent you might need to get involved in your childs life, talk to their friends parents, or even have to say no to your child once in a while. This is just the government pandering to lazy parents who aren't willing to take responsibility for how they raise their children. The more the government does this the lazier parents are bound to become as their responsibilities (and along with those rights!) are taken away from them.
So to sumarize: No one needs to admit anything's true. Saying that without providing any facts is a really lame. Just like Hillary you're playing off the fears of people without any hard data. Where's the problem? As video games have become more and more popular crime rates have been going down. It seems to me that video games occupy teenagers time and cause crime to go down. Perhaps you could get your head out of your ass and admit that this is true.
Along with many GCs there are also many unmanaged memory allocators. I think it's pretty likely that in the choice between malloc/free & GC that GC wins lots of times. Allocation is nearly free in many GCs which goes a long way towards beating malloc.
But if you're coding in C/C++ instead of using malloc/free you can roll your own memory allocators that are highly specialized to the task at hand (and C++ even provides operator new to overload for this task). You get memory from the OS (or large chunks from malloc/free) and then hand it out as appropriate. You can then optimize for address space (keeping little unused address space in the process because you need >2-3gigs on a 32-bit machine), you can optimize for free (condensing multiple allocations into a single free), you can optimize for large number of fixed size large objects (allocating from a large slab of memory, freeing onto a linked list), optimize for locality (if you have a tree or some other data structure) or any other number of reasons.
Like all engineering decisions you need to evaluate the requirements of what you're building and determine which one's better for you. Personally I think GC kicks ass for almost everything. It's really such a productivity boost to not have to worry about freeing memory. And if you're not rolling your own allocators then there's a good chance that it will beat malloc/free.
I think you're absolutely correct about everything except for not being beneficial for normal folks.
Obviously using this for counter strike isn't going to be a great use of the technology. But what if the technology allowed you to type at 300 wpm ? That would be a productivity reason to use the technology, and if a business had an employee who could do that they'd be more profitable.
You could also imagine military applications. They could have a display that is mentally controlled - or it could even be used for weapons, just like a video game. And if the technology can be taken to the point where your brain is also reading data you could get rid of the display as well.
And finally I'm sure the porn industry will find some way to apply it - but probably the technology that doesn't require brain surgery:).
Between porn, business, and the military you touch a large portion of western society. And if there are enough reasons to justify the use of the technology and it's shown to be safe over the long term you could start to see it's profileration. That would lead to even more uses, and it'll probably grow just as the use of computers themselves have.
Personally I think it'd be fun to play around with the SDK kit - let alone actually using it for something practical.
ntsd.exe ships with the OS (since NT4? It certainly ships with XP), which most certainly is a debugging tool. It's the same debugging tool shipped in the Platform SDK (cdb.exe / windbg.exe). The difference between cdb.exe and ntsd.exe is that ntsd.exe opens a new window when you launch it. The difference between windbg.exe and ntsd.exe is that ntsd.exe doesn't have a GUI - it's all command line based. But make no mistake, they are all the same debugger.
For example you should be able to do:
ntsd.exe %windir%\system32\calc.exe .symfix .reload
x shell32!*
And you get all the shell functions listed out with names. Likewise x gdi32!* gives you all the GDI functions. If that's not an integrated debugging experience I'm afraid I don't know what one is.
(Note an internet connection is required for.symfix, but I think I can assume everyone here has one of those;)
I think 64bit systems are useful for certain applications. On the other hand, most individuals don't need 64bit systems.
I think large address spaces are more important than you give them credit for. Today there is an address space crunch for a large number of systems and it approaches the consumer market in some areas (video & photo processing being the big ones today) and it will only get worse.
There's also little gains you get from having a large address space. For example small (heh, 4gig and below) address spaces limit the effectiveness of burning absolute addresses into a program image. The OS will be required to fixup these addresses for applications making the memory non-sharable between processes. Net result: Increased memory usage where large address spaces would be able to share. The chance of a collision in 48bit address space range is much lower (for the time being). And in addition to using more memory, you have to actualy adjust the addresses which takes time and CPU power.
Consider that PCs today now typically have 1/8th to 1/4 of the total addressable space as physical RAM. It's a pretty tough ratio to contend with.
I think in general you point to one of the greatest weaknesses in Linux. For all the bitching you hear on Slashdot regarding X-Windows, or Gnome spatial interfaces, or KDE being slow and bloated, the biggest problem is QA.
It's not really the fault of any individual team. They're going to write their code on Linux distribution X, and test it there, and if you're lucky they'll run less grueling tests elsewhere. Ultimately you'll get to the distribution level where you'd hope everything gets tested once and for all. But does Red Hat pick up Ximian's test suites? Or do they just build, run smoke tests, and ship? Certainly they'll test the kernel, as they have active developers there. What about all the other people's source they ship?
I think there may be a bit of blind cheer that integration issues somehow don't exist in Linux land. That components act over clean interfaces and don't take any reliance upon implementation issues. But this is a problem that software engineering has faced since the dawn of the industry, and I don't see a smoking gun pointing to how Linux has solved this problem. And until this problem has been solved the best thing our industry has to offer in it's abscence is end to end testing.
What Linux does have going for it's self is hordes of developers... But lots of cooks does not make a good cookie.
While typically computers do use powers of 2, you can run SMP machines w/o powers of two. For example I've heard of 3-proc machines. I believe it's just a quad proc w/o the 4th processor. Odd, but true.
But seriously, you bring up an interesting point - proving your worth to the company. In this modern age your employer doesn't say ANYTHING about you, and as you point out, its hard for you to say much about them.
I think the solution is obvious - just become famous. You know, be the next Linus or Bill or Woz. It's so simple, I don't know why more people don't do it:).
Does ClearChannel really play large amounts of copyright music? No, they play the same singles over and over again. If all you want is the 1-3 songs the record company choose to promote the album, hey, more power to you.
In fact this is what most radio stations do. If internet radio stations start deviating from this model I think you'll see changes.
And, depending on how you read the law, it's 100% legal.
This is exactly what was said about Napster, look at how long that lasted. I think its a bit of a pipe dream to believe that there will be a legal way to acquire large amounts of copyrighted music for free w/o the consent of the copyright holder.
And on the off chance it was legal to do this you can be sure that Congress would put a stop to it pretty fast.
There's a real good way to handle (pun intended) this: handles!
You have an API that returns a handle instead of returning data its self. This handle could even be a pointer in disguise, but as far as the caller is concerned, it's a handle. There are quick ways to disguise pointers, for example shifting the lowest 2 bits off and setting the high 2 bits to some pre-determined value. Then you have a quick validity check for whether a handle is valid or not (if the high 2 bits are set appropriately). And the handle doesn't point to anything that's close to memory.
From there on out if the caller wants to do anything with the handle they call your APIs to get additional data. At some point you may need to hand someone a buffer, but it can either be an agreed to size (eg, some fixed structure) or it can be passed with a maximum size, or there can be some method for the caller to determine the size of the buffer. Any APIs that doesn't work for can also return handles:)
A GC isn't going to be able to trace through this but the two pieces of code could have independent GCs that won't be able to trace into each other's memory space. The library half would have a set of static roots that keep this memory alive until the app side calls a free handle API. Then the library half removes the static root and the memory can be reclaimed by it's own GC (or whatever memory allocation scheme its using).
I noticed this as well. I reported it to them via their Contact Us link. But the really weird thing is if you Google for it you get a good number of results. And Intel's site isn't the only one!
Finally I consulted the umsystem web site it's self and proved me correct. But it's really odd that there's so many people refering to it as Columbus. I lived there for apx. 2 years (and went to college for 1 semester - after Rolla for 2 1/2 years. Incidentally Rolla was lower which is funny given that Rolla has the better Comp. Sci. department) and NEVER heard ANYONE refer to it as Columbus. Anyway, I don't live in Missouri any more, but I was born and raised there: and went to Parkway North high school, just incase anyone feels the need to ask:).
I thought the human race was a little less dull than the thousands of cublicle dwellers posting how bad of idea this is. Just because it is someone non-american...its unsafe?
I don't know where you got this idea from my post. It's unsafe because it's a FRIGGIN TRIP TO MARS. Just like it was unsafe to cross over to the Americas from Europe at one point in time. Just like it's STIL unsafe to go to space at all (didn't a US space shuttle recently blow up?). The people who are willing to risk their lives for this are doing us all a great service.
I am pro space exploration who ever does it. There may be some strife from the politics involved (either due to the issue you bring up, or the issue of environmentalism on Mars as the post I responded to brought up). I say bring the strife on, let's get it over with and hurry up and advanced the human race.
It seems like you were looking for a US vs Russia fight to pick, but I'm sorry, you picked the wrong post to latch onto for this.
If someone wants to risk their life to be the first human to land on another planet AND they can find someone to pay for it, I say let 'em go.
All the unmanned exploration in the pristine Mars will not advance the human cause as much as landing people there. Not only are there bound to be large scientific break throughs from the effort, but there are bound to be large psychological break throughs as well. And it ultimately is a great insurance policy for the survival of the human species.
As an aside if anyone hasn't read Red Mars / Blue Mars / Green Mars (by Kim Stanley Robinson) its a great triology that deals with the colonization mars in a really interesting way. So if you're looking for something to read, check it out...
George has his plan, and Russians have their plan... It looks like the US has been served!
I can see the movie now... Space Race 2: Mars
It'll come to a thrilling climax. The Russian plan is filled with set backs allowing the US to catch up. But the Russians manage to launch first! But the US manages to catch up at the last minute and astronauts from both teams come touching down at nearly the same time.
No one knows who landed first! And there's only one way to prove who gets the title: It's On!
Slashdot Mirror
I've been an advocate of requiring companies to give something up in exchange for limited liability for a while now. Companies get a great power which makes much of their work possible and/or reasonably efficient. Usually I've discussed lawyers, doctors, etc... where there's a clear and easy way to see how they give back. But this is a great way to generalize it.
Does your RAM have better things to be doing? If so, why isn't your operating system using the RAM for that instead?
Large caches can remain in RAM and the only reason not to keep them there would be if you wanted to ensure persistence across sessions or you were running out of virtual address space. Otherwise the operating system should really be doing it's job in swapping out unused portions of memory to disk on your behalf.
That's not to say that a program can't take some consideration in its allocation strategies to maximize efficiency. For example if a program was just blindly calling new or malloc (assuming C/C++ here, given we're talking web browsers that's basically the case) then presumably those allocators would be doing their best to not fragment memory across all allocations. But for a web browser you really want to not fragment memory across significant user-accessed boundaries.
One simply idea is you have all data structures related to a web page to be allocated in 1 continious chunk of memory. That memory would be mmap/mmap2/VirtualAlloc/brk/sbrk's depending on your poison of choice and then handed out in suballocations for various things related to the page. Because the memory is contigiously allocated the OS, after detecting those pages haven't been used in a while, would swap that out to disk.
In the end you get exactly what you want: your large cache is on disk. But it's only on disk if you're using your memory for something else, otherwise it's in RAM. Best of all the developer didn't have to write code that: dealt with how much memory there was on the system, and how much they should keep on disk, write code to write it out to disk, read it back from disk, deal with navigating to a page which might be on disk so you have to check, first reading back in it's date/time to see if you actually should refresh the page, and if so then go and read back to the page, and have algorithms to reconstitute all your data structures, and then deal with the inevitable feature requests to enable cross-session caching, and fixing all the bugs that come out of this featutre, and finally keeping all these pieces in sync as you evolve the program.
Instead all that needs to be written is a dumb memory allocator (really, it's just incrementing a pointer and returning the previous value - allocate a new set of blocks if you run out of space) that has easy life time management rules (page going away? just free all the blocks). Even better the dumb allocator provides assurances that you don't leak memory. When a page is dead it's allocator is destroyed and all memory associated with it is freed. Forgot to free some suballocation along the way? No problem, the allocator freed it up anyway. Now, maybe this isn't how web browsers are working these days. But one would hope their creators are masters of the art and are applying techniques like these to leverage all the great facilities of modern OSes: in this case paging.
On point #1 I have to wonder what happened to "the right of the people peaceably to assemble"?
Assuming they're either on public or private property where the owner does not object I don't see what the problem is. While raves may or may not make money they are typically at best border-line commercial enterprises, not full blown commercial enterprises. Typically the "operators" primary interest is in creating an environment for people to do their rave thing. It is usually not designed to create great profits (even if the promoters haven't gone the full step of making themselves a not-for-profit).
As for the drugs... that's an entirely different issue. But you seem to imply that they were aware and responsible for the drugs. While I certainly believe they were aware of some illegal drug use (just like any concert promoter is aware there are going to be drugs used at their venue) I would suspect they almost certainly did not contribute to this atmosphere directly.
The fact of the matter is that a non-violent party is not a reason for the police to come and invade. It's just a violation of civil liberties unless people are complaining. If people are complaining then the police should respond to those complaints. But permits for gatherings of people just strike me as being entirely un-American.
To paraphrase a famous "redneck" comedian, you might be a Windows power user if you:
Fun topic! I'm sure others can come up with more...
What I can't really answer is why like 90% of cell phones seem to be gray flip phones. Is it really that important not to offend? Is colored plastic that much more expensive? Are the conformity-loving Asian manufacturers who make 90% of the phones to blame? Do they not want to irritate the accessory makers who sell color cases?
Here's my guess:
Gray will sell to just about anybody. But colors will set to particular markets. So if you sell colors (or worse, more complex designs or worse yet branded phones) you're limiting your market. Therefore you either have to have more stock (*n colors/patterns/etc) or cause delayed gratification to customers ("No, but we can order it for you...") that may either cause them to not get a phone, go somewhere else to get there phone, or possibly go for some other phone (which may be good or bad for the retailer).
If as a general pratice people bought cell phones on-line then maybe the increased inventory would be a non-issue. But for stores it is probably a significant issue.
The color covers allow the companies to stock a decent number of each phone in a single color and then optionally stock covers. If you don't have the cover someone wants it's no longer a deal breaker. They buy the phone, hell, they may even buy a cover from you too, and then they buy a cover from someone else. Also the covers can be purchased & changed over time - so you get more repeat sales than you would with people buying new phones.
And finally you have manufacturing costs. The color covers would be the final implementation that any reasonable company would come to (versus having custom manufacturing for every phone which would drive up manufacturing costs). So they may as well make it a "feature" and sell multiple covers (or sell license rights to use their "patented cellphone/cellphone cover interface").
So basically all around there's more money to be made by the current strategy.
If my house falls over and kills 4000 people, I am liable. If my company (Toxico) falls over and kills 4000 people, I am not liable, due to, IMHO, government fiction. This is wrong. If a bad company is bankrupted by civil action, the
This isn't the problem. Limited liability is actually a very good thing. Without limited liability it would place a much higher burden upon investors and therefore less people would be inclined to invest. And it could potentially be enough risk that investment generally didn't happen. That'd make it extremely difficult for people to create new businesses and that'd generally be bad.
The *problem* with our system (where our system == the US system) is that we do not extract sufficient reward for this mighty benefit that we give companies and investors. In fact we go so far as to treat companies as individuals with nearly all the same rights. But corporations get this huge benefit over your average person. If some imaginary business owner doesn't incorporate they can't limit their liability. Today they'll just go ahead and form their limited liability corporation for some small fee and be done with it. It'd be better if there were some trade offs involved where society gets some benefit out of the advantages it's providing to the business owners.
Because corporations shouldn't really be individuals those restrictions could include things like restriction (or elimination) of political speech, providing some free or discounted services to the government and/or societies most helpless, etc... The balances there could change over time as societies needs change - but it's always a choice for the corporation. They're trading the investment & legal benefits off for restrictions and stipulations of their business (they continue to be able to act independently & freely, of course). The best part though is that this could help free up many of these restrictions that are now getting applied to individuals as well.
I think that Novell is worthy of the Linux community's support. ... They ... help to insure that those companies stay the course of the One True Faith - FOSS
I think Novell is definitely good for Linux. I think it's a whole lot less clear that Novell is good for FOSS. Novell has always been a software company. Can they make a transition to a services company instead? I think given their current course the answer is NO. They're not developing a servicing arm - instead they're developing software (you mention their sys management tools, but you also have Mono, they're identification offerings, etc...) I think they're doing more to bring commercial software to Linux than anyone else. The key here though is whats_good_for_linux != whats_good_for_foss.
I'm amazed with the number of comments in this article that no one's really picked up on this.
I find it hard to agree that this teaches that "it's OK to diss people because they are a woman, they're a different colour or they're from a different place." is accurate.
The common argument against this is that did playing super mario brothers make us all want to jump on and throw turtles around? Did playing tetris make people obsessive about placing blocks in tightly packed configuration? If you played Monopoly as a child are you bound to end up trying to corner a market in your adult life? It's obvious that the things we do as a child have affects upon who we become when we're adults. What isn't clear is what effect playing a violent video game will have on the developing mind. Maybe it causes more violence, maybe it causes LESS evidence (as it serves as an outlet), or maybe it's just a wash... We really need multiple case studies in order to judge this, and I don't believe we have these multiple case studies.
Now let me come back to some specifics on Hillary's comment. First I think if killing a prositute is a diss on all women, isn't jailing prositutes also a diss on all women? I mean after all in both cases an external party is depriving the women of her rights to treat her body as she wishes. Is Hillary for legalized prostituion as well?
Next I haven't heard of any overtly racist portions of GTA or other equally popular games. I think it would have made a pretty big stink if there were racist elements to the games, so I'm not sure where this comes from. I would say the US public has a pretty low level of tolerance for overt racism and you usually hear about it when it occurs anywhere in mainstream media.
Finally, we're allowed to discriminate against people from a different place. We can hate the French all day long for example (American Fries anyone?) and for the most part this doesn't spark outrage. We have a long history of hating different countries for different reasons. Russia, Cuba, etc... We hate the people of a country all the time. It's hating them for their race that's bad! And the US government continues to discrimate against those from foreign countries today. We see it overtly in the form of immigration laws and more recently in the treatment of people siezed during Bush's little war.
On a slightly different note I don't see why this is an issue for the federal government. Do you not want your kids to play GTA? Fine, don't buy them GTA. Oh, but one of their friends might have it! God forbid that as a parent you might need to get involved in your childs life, talk to their friends parents, or even have to say no to your child once in a while. This is just the government pandering to lazy parents who aren't willing to take responsibility for how they raise their children. The more the government does this the lazier parents are bound to become as their responsibilities (and along with those rights!) are taken away from them.
So to sumarize: No one needs to admit anything's true. Saying that without providing any facts is a really lame. Just like Hillary you're playing off the fears of people without any hard data. Where's the problem? As video games have become more and more popular crime rates have been going down. It seems to me that video games occupy teenagers time and cause crime to go down. Perhaps you could get your head out of your ass and admit that this is true.
Along with many GCs there are also many unmanaged memory allocators. I think it's pretty likely that in the choice between malloc/free & GC that GC wins lots of times. Allocation is nearly free in many GCs which goes a long way towards beating malloc.
But if you're coding in C/C++ instead of using malloc/free you can roll your own memory allocators that are highly specialized to the task at hand (and C++ even provides operator new to overload for this task). You get memory from the OS (or large chunks from malloc/free) and then hand it out as appropriate. You can then optimize for address space (keeping little unused address space in the process because you need >2-3gigs on a 32-bit machine), you can optimize for free (condensing multiple allocations into a single free), you can optimize for large number of fixed size large objects (allocating from a large slab of memory, freeing onto a linked list), optimize for locality (if you have a tree or some other data structure) or any other number of reasons.
Like all engineering decisions you need to evaluate the requirements of what you're building and determine which one's better for you. Personally I think GC kicks ass for almost everything. It's really such a productivity boost to not have to worry about freeing memory. And if you're not rolling your own allocators then there's a good chance that it will beat malloc/free.
where did those rules come from? where did anything come from?
Where did your god come from?
I actually know the answer. It's turtles all the way up!
I think you're absolutely correct about everything except for not being beneficial for normal folks.
:).
Obviously using this for counter strike isn't going to be a great use of the technology. But what if the technology allowed you to type at 300 wpm ? That would be a productivity reason to use the technology, and if a business had an employee who could do that they'd be more profitable.
You could also imagine military applications. They could have a display that is mentally controlled - or it could even be used for weapons, just like a video game. And if the technology can be taken to the point where your brain is also reading data you could get rid of the display as well.
And finally I'm sure the porn industry will find some way to apply it - but probably the technology that doesn't require brain surgery
Between porn, business, and the military you touch a large portion of western society. And if there are enough reasons to justify the use of the technology and it's shown to be safe over the long term you could start to see it's profileration. That would lead to even more uses, and it'll probably grow just as the use of computers themselves have.
Personally I think it'd be fun to play around with the SDK kit - let alone actually using it for something practical.
For example you should be able to do:And you get all the shell functions listed out with names. Likewise x gdi32!* gives you all the GDI functions. If that's not an integrated debugging experience I'm afraid I don't know what one is.
(Note an internet connection is required for
I think 64bit systems are useful for certain applications. On the other hand, most individuals don't need 64bit systems.
I think large address spaces are more important than you give them credit for. Today there is an address space crunch for a large number of systems and it approaches the consumer market in some areas (video & photo processing being the big ones today) and it will only get worse.
There's also little gains you get from having a large address space. For example small (heh, 4gig and below) address spaces limit the effectiveness of burning absolute addresses into a program image. The OS will be required to fixup these addresses for applications making the memory non-sharable between processes. Net result: Increased memory usage where large address spaces would be able to share. The chance of a collision in 48bit address space range is much lower (for the time being). And in addition to using more memory, you have to actualy adjust the addresses which takes time and CPU power.
Consider that PCs today now typically have 1/8th to 1/4 of the total addressable space as physical RAM. It's a pretty tough ratio to contend with.
A PC in every room, except the bathroom...
Maybe Intel is just trying to save some room for growth for after every other room in the house has a PC.
I think in general you point to one of the greatest weaknesses in Linux. For all the bitching you hear on Slashdot regarding X-Windows, or Gnome spatial interfaces, or KDE being slow and bloated, the biggest problem is QA.
It's not really the fault of any individual team. They're going to write their code on Linux distribution X, and test it there, and if you're lucky they'll run less grueling tests elsewhere. Ultimately you'll get to the distribution level where you'd hope everything gets tested once and for all. But does Red Hat pick up Ximian's test suites? Or do they just build, run smoke tests, and ship? Certainly they'll test the kernel, as they have active developers there. What about all the other people's source they ship?
I think there may be a bit of blind cheer that integration issues somehow don't exist in Linux land. That components act over clean interfaces and don't take any reliance upon implementation issues. But this is a problem that software engineering has faced since the dawn of the industry, and I don't see a smoking gun pointing to how Linux has solved this problem. And until this problem has been solved the best thing our industry has to offer in it's abscence is end to end testing.
What Linux does have going for it's self is hordes of developers... But lots of cooks does not make a good cookie.
While typically computers do use powers of 2, you can run SMP machines w/o powers of two. For example I've heard of 3-proc machines. I believe it's just a quad proc w/o the 4th processor. Odd, but true.
Easy solution:
:).
Starting Salary: Confidential
Ending Salary: Confidential*1.25
But seriously, you bring up an interesting point - proving your worth to the company. In this modern age your employer doesn't say ANYTHING about you, and as you point out, its hard for you to say much about them.
I think the solution is obvious - just become famous. You know, be the next Linus or Bill or Woz. It's so simple, I don't know why more people don't do it
Does ClearChannel really play large amounts of copyright music? No, they play the same singles over and over again. If all you want is the 1-3 songs the record company choose to promote the album, hey, more power to you.
In fact this is what most radio stations do. If internet radio stations start deviating from this model I think you'll see changes.
And, depending on how you read the law, it's 100% legal.
This is exactly what was said about Napster, look at how long that lasted. I think its a bit of a pipe dream to believe that there will be a legal way to acquire large amounts of copyrighted music for free w/o the consent of the copyright holder.
And on the off chance it was legal to do this you can be sure that Congress would put a stop to it pretty fast.
There's a real good way to handle (pun intended) this: handles!
:)
You have an API that returns a handle instead of returning data its self. This handle could even be a pointer in disguise, but as far as the caller is concerned, it's a handle. There are quick ways to disguise pointers, for example shifting the lowest 2 bits off and setting the high 2 bits to some pre-determined value. Then you have a quick validity check for whether a handle is valid or not (if the high 2 bits are set appropriately). And the handle doesn't point to anything that's close to memory.
From there on out if the caller wants to do anything with the handle they call your APIs to get additional data. At some point you may need to hand someone a buffer, but it can either be an agreed to size (eg, some fixed structure) or it can be passed with a maximum size, or there can be some method for the caller to determine the size of the buffer. Any APIs that doesn't work for can also return handles
A GC isn't going to be able to trace through this but the two pieces of code could have independent GCs that won't be able to trace into each other's memory space. The library half would have a set of static roots that keep this memory alive until the app side calls a free handle API. Then the library half removes the static root and the memory can be reclaimed by it's own GC (or whatever memory allocation scheme its using).
I noticed this as well. I reported it to them via their Contact Us link. But the really weird thing is if you Google for it you get a good number of results. And Intel's site isn't the only one!
:).
Check out this page. There's a professor who apparently went to this university! And here's another professor.
Finally I consulted the umsystem web site it's self and proved me correct. But it's really odd that there's so many people refering to it as Columbus. I lived there for apx. 2 years (and went to college for 1 semester - after Rolla for 2 1/2 years. Incidentally Rolla was lower which is funny given that Rolla has the better Comp. Sci. department) and NEVER heard ANYONE refer to it as Columbus. Anyway, I don't live in Missouri any more, but I was born and raised there: and went to Parkway North high school, just incase anyone feels the need to ask
I thought the human race was a little less dull than the thousands of cublicle dwellers posting how bad of idea this is. Just because it is someone non-american...its unsafe?
I don't know where you got this idea from my post. It's unsafe because it's a FRIGGIN TRIP TO MARS. Just like it was unsafe to cross over to the Americas from Europe at one point in time. Just like it's STIL unsafe to go to space at all (didn't a US space shuttle recently blow up?). The people who are willing to risk their lives for this are doing us all a great service.
I am pro space exploration who ever does it. There may be some strife from the politics involved (either due to the issue you bring up, or the issue of environmentalism on Mars as the post I responded to brought up). I say bring the strife on, let's get it over with and hurry up and advanced the human race.
It seems like you were looking for a US vs Russia fight to pick, but I'm sorry, you picked the wrong post to latch onto for this.
FYI: I don't work in a cube.
Ahh, whatever...
If someone wants to risk their life to be the first human to land on another planet AND they can find someone to pay for it, I say let 'em go.
All the unmanned exploration in the pristine Mars will not advance the human cause as much as landing people there. Not only are there bound to be large scientific break throughs from the effort, but there are bound to be large psychological break throughs as well. And it ultimately is a great insurance policy for the survival of the human species.
As an aside if anyone hasn't read Red Mars / Blue Mars / Green Mars (by Kim Stanley Robinson) its a great triology that deals with the colonization mars in a really interesting way. So if you're looking for something to read, check it out...
George has his plan, and Russians have their plan... It looks like the US has been served!
I can see the movie now... Space Race 2: Mars
It'll come to a thrilling climax. The Russian plan is filled with set backs allowing the US to catch up. But the Russians manage to launch first! But the US manages to catch up at the last minute and astronauts from both teams come touching down at nearly the same time.
No one knows who landed first! And there's only one way to prove who gets the title: It's On!
It looks more and more like the days of research for the sake of in and itself are slowly coming to an end.
Our Civilization's Golden Age has ended. So say our analysts...