Would eliminating it entirely fix those problems without creating even worse problems? Not a chance!
I responded to a statement that patents have nothing to do with morality. I provided a clear counterexample
(unless you consider "profit" a greater moral good than "lifesaving").
I also didn't call for the complete abolition of IP law - A hefty overhaul, yes, but I agree with you to the extent that
companies need some incentive to do real R&D rather than just clone the work of others.
So, exactly why would big Pharma spend millions of dollars to develop a new drug,
if they must give it away once it has been proven to work?
As I see it, Company-X could still have a limited monopoly on actual sales of their drug, in relatively wealthy
areas. Denying a lifesaving drug that costs pennies in actual manufacturing costs to those for whom even a modest few
bucks means their entire lifetime earning potential? Sorry but I call that straight-out "evil", no ambiguity about it.
So scientology is a crock. You think the abrahamic religions which believe in a magic garden with a talking
snake and a man made out of clay and a woman made out of a rib make any more logical sense??
The Abrahamic religions at least have the defense that they didn't know any better back then, then glossing over
the utterly absurd foundations of their religion with some fluff about moral lessons.
Scientologists know, in their founder's own words, that they follow a religion written as a work of sci-fi on a
bet that he could create a (somewhat) successful religion. Their "morality" consists of nothing more than "make money
and give it to us, oh and destroy our critics by any means necessary".
Not to call the former any more valid than the latter; but when I decided I could no longer believe in my
familial religion, no one systematically blackmailed my boss at every job I've ever held to get me fired and make
me generally unemployable.
The last pirated games I looked at had all the DRM still.
The fact that you failed to obtain a functional copy doesn't diminish the GP's point.
Perhaps the GP should have said "cracked" rather than merely "pirated".
Yeah, I'm not big on administrating a single player game. I just want to install and go, fortunately, my
legitimate purchases have all been like that.
Then consider yourself lucky that you never bought a game that damaged your CD drive - Or "allowed" a forced update
that bricked your PS3 - Or had to run two years of MBR-overwriting tax software simultaneously - Or simply wanted to
skip the 27-language FBI (etc) warning on your new DVD purchase. But hey, you've had good luck with DRM, congratulations,
you fall into a rather small minority.
Not your software however, software is licensed.
Pedantry, the last argument of the losing side. You can say the same of movies and music. Regardless of what you
(and the law) say, the vast majority of people consider such content as their property. Yes, they know
the difference between owning a copy and owning the rights to the original, but people simply don't think in terms of
buying a license to access that content.
When they do something that truly endangers a child's safety, that's when the state gets involved. Not some unaffiliated pressure group, but a government tasked with protecting the child's fundamental rights.
You mean, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/1119/1224259105905.htmlLike this?
Um, so which religions teach tax cuts for the rich?
You missed the point. We get draconian drug policy that only benefits the pharmaceutical industry "for the children". We get
leaders that eliminate inheritance taxes for less than the top 1% wealthiest people by appealing to the anti-abortion crowd. And
let's not leave out the elephant in the room - "Good" religions get federal dollars to fund their proselytizing (oh and some vaguely defined
"charitable works" to justify it), while "bad" religions can't even get tax exempt status (seen a lot of Wiccan 501(c)(3)s, lately?).
The largest Christian sect in the world I don't think could really be described as attacking science, anymore.
Yeah, very kind of them to pardon Galileo only 400 years after he could no longer threaten them anymore. Good thing they've stopped
worrying about little things like the Go... I mean, Higgs boson, and embraced the scientific progress of the 19th century wholeheartedly.
it doesn't mean that the power to harm them is then passed to an unaccountable group.
When the state won't protect us from an invading enemy, it falls to the people to defend themselves.
Usually people I see who consider copyright immoral are people who are too cheap to pay a dollar for a song.
No doubt the millions dying needlessly of AIDS and Malaria (etc) would find your statement a comforting explanation of why
big Pharma has no obligation to license their on-patent lifesaving drugs to low-cost (and even outright charitable)
manufacturers.
So yes, "immoral". Patents quite literally mean people suffer and die for no better reason than profit.
As for copyright - Apply the current trend of perpetual extensions to a few works that actually mean something to you, to which you
have access only because they lack a current copyright... How about the bible? "Sorry, not yours, the Vatican holds
the copyright and forbids any distribution". Newton's Principia. Darwin's Origin of Species. Hubbard's
Dianetics - Oh, wait, that one does have a current copyright, and look how open and morally they behave.
Why do we bother traveling around the world to fight religious extremist terrorists when we can do it right in
our own back yard? And then to put people in prison for it... Okay, I suppose Anonymous' activities probably
caused some unintended network congestion outside their specific targets, but hey, I'll take "lag" over "DU syndrome".
"Now, at home they'd hang me, here they'll give me a fucking medal, sir."
Microsoft doing something illegal, and then getting sued for it???
Sure, lets all get our kicks in while we can, but realize that this involves a much deeper issue than
our hate for Microsoft.
How many times have you gotten some form of promo code for something free, only to have a hideous web site
design (or even legitimate network problems) cause you to "redeem" that code without actually getting
anything - And then of course the site refuses the code as "already used" when you try again? Personally,
I'd put it at over half the time for me.
And this doesn't only include free material, either, though (so far) companies take a bit more
care when you actually pay for the service/product in question... Case in point, just this week
I tried to use a 60 minute card on a contractless cellphone (more for the time extension than the actual minutes),
only to have it rejected for some ill-defined reason. Fortunately they have actual humans you can deal
with, but clearly the motivation to just make it work right simply doesn't exist; they already have your
money at that point.
I have been waiting for insurances to start charging more for people that have poor diet and exercises habits ever
since they went after the smokers.
Except, the study in TFA has nothing to do with poor diet and exercise in general.
My line of work tends to have me sitting in front of a computer all day every day. Despite that (or perhaps, to make up for
it), I engage in fairly strenuous recreational activities that keep me in decent shape. I also don't sit at the computer and
munch chips all day, but prefer to have three or four protein-heavy meals a day.
So basically, this study says that even though I keep myself in good shape, I still end up screwed because of my
career choice.
Thanks a heap, science... Perhaps next you can tell me that porn really will make me go blind.
Out-of-order execution lets you get away with a lot of stupid things, since many of the pipeline stalls you would otherwise create can be re-ordered around.
...Of course, since the biggest bottlenecks in code usually occur in essentially serial sections of code, you can't just reorder them and hope for the best. In which case, the coder who understands where the target CPU will stall can still blow away even the best of compilers.
TFA using examples such as shift-vs-multiply sound like your grandfather complaining that you don't double-clutch on downshifting into first gear. "True" in the sense that yes, it once had meaning and no longer does - But totally wrong in the sense that people who think about their code at that level have moved beyond such trivialities and onto actual modern ones such as how to feed N pipelines so as to minimize stalls, or what degenerate conditions flog the latest branch prediction techniques (or more usefully, as a classic example, how to write your code so as to minimize branching).
In contrast, the memory subsystem can do relatively little for you if your working set is too large and you don't access memory in an efficient pattern.
Now explain to a Java programmer how to align your data and code on machine-page boundaries. How to insure that each read/write sequence takes advantage of read/write combining. How to properly interleave memory access with number crunching to minimize waiting around for a 1000x slower subsystem to wake up and respond.
Mostly this article sounds like exactly the reasons I don't like Java for every task, and why the vast majority of Java apps feel like molasses in January despite every benchmark telling you that in theory they run just as fast as unmanaged code - Because although you can do the above, you have to work against the language rather than with it. When merely assigning a value to a basic machine-supported data type (32 bit integer, as the simple example) involves an implicit function call (and the whole stack-frame preservation that entails), the little details such as memory row size (which, incidentally, can trivially double the CPU time sitting around doing nothing if not explicitly considered) vanish in the haze of inefficiency.
I would also point out that some of us really do still work with CPUs that have memory capacities measured in mere hundreds or thousands of bytes and an instruction set that doesn't even include a general-purpose integer multiply instruction. But I suppose we can't fault TFA's author for overlooking the single dominant use of CPUs in our world today, the ultra-low-horsepower embedded market, now can we?
I guess there will be no more Raising Skinny Elephants on a Lenovo anymore. And while I have only used it a few times in the last year, I have used it.
Huh, I never actually bother using R and E (just a quick SUB). But if you do... Shouldn't you E (or even I) before S?
And skipping the U, not a good idea if you have large drives. Checking an okay-but-not-clean 1TB drive can take a good half hour on rebooting.:)
*Specifically* social networking sites like Facebook where there are real names attached to accounts
and visible out in the open.
Advertisements? Real names? I don't know what all of you have started smoking, but two words:
"Adblock" and "lie".
"My" Facebook account has absolutely nothing to do with me. I made it as a place to placate friends
who kept asking if I had a FB account - So I do, named after one of my pets, with not one single shred
of information on it that links back to me (unless you already know what my dining room looks like,
with my cat sitting in the window).
Now, the apparently required SMS authentication Facebook uses disturbed me somewhat... Until I got a
random Google Voice account. So congrats, Zuckhead, you can now connect two throwaway accounts
and send SMS spam to one throwaway phone number.
Granted, it does indeed get harder to protect one's privacy every day... But at the moment, anyone who
cares, still can.
If only there was SOME way to use the net to safely download the latest.
What news this would be to groups of people seeking an alternative to bit torrent for their binary files.
You can thank that asshole Spitzer for single-handedly destroying one of the oldest internet protocols in the laughable
name of child-porn, of all the weak excuses he could have come up with.
Yes, it still exists... But getting anonymous access to a decent-retention server? Dream on. Better to just do like the
rest of us and swap USB drives with friends. Not quite as good of a selection, but zero risk and nearly infinite bandwidth
if they have what you want (and if you pick your trading partners well, you'll guarantee yourself far better quality than a
typical public torrent).
This is really starting to get on my nerves. Speak friggin english, don't use random coding shortcuts in your everyday speech.
Um, the word "this" predates programming. Even as a coder myself, I never took its use in the context you quoted to mean a "random coding shortcut", just the (usually grammatically incorrect) use of a standard English pronoun to refer to the concept preceeding it.
You're using it wrong anyway, it's not agreement or anything, just a class reference within the class itself
Perhaps that particular use of it looks "wrong" because it doesn't have anything to do with its use in coding? If anything, you can object to it as nothing more than a "me too" post (which you do in your third paragraph), but it makes a convenient way to either add to or disagree with the previous point without needing to restate that point in its entirety.
Of course, you might have meant that as humor, in which case... Well done, but perhaps a bit too subtle for a text-only medium.:)
Want to screw off at work? Get an smartphone and do it on your own device.
Unfortunately, the "block everything" attitude you express does result in this exact solution... Except,
people don't want to browse the web on a smartphone, so they use it as a WiFi or Bluetooth proxy for their
(work-issued) PC.
Meaning, in your attempt to block people from surfing the web on their breaks/lunch/"need a few minutes of
downtime", you have in effect lost control of real threats such as viruses, spyware, P2P, etc.
Most people will behave if you trust them. And five minutes per week spent analyzing your Squid logs will
quickly identify those who abuse your trust.
The question is, why would anyone want to do that?
Because Amazon has a good storefront for buying eBooks of a known quality in a consistent format. You don't
need to deal with 6 different formats, 27 different storefronts, and quality going as low as scans of the
actual pages.
I don't like reading books in the PC
Some people don't mind it. More importantly, plenty of devices other than the Kindle or iPhone exist on
which you might read eBooks... Netbooks, for instance (basically just PCs, but they finally hit a sweet
spot between utility, weight, and battery life), or non-Amazon/Apple-approved smartphones.
I would rather buy a physical copy (to pay the author) and then download a digital copy from torrents or whatever
than support DRM infested products.
I suspect most of us agree with you on that - However, the legality between the two differs radically. Stripping DRM
for purposes of interoperability might count as a protected use (IANAL); downloading a torrent definitely does
not. Also, keep in mind that publishers have increasingly tried to play the "X different products" game, claiming
that the dead-tree edition requires a separate purchase from the eBook which requires a separate purchase from the audiobook
(even if digitally produced) - Geeks tend to scoff at that sort of thinking, but the courts sadly haven't caught on to it
as nothing more than a shell-game yet.
Google wasn't found guilty. They were openly, admittedly, unabashedly guilty of digitizing and putting up excerpts
of books they did not hold ANY copyright to. They only thing that happened was that the court decided the this law is
valid even for a mega corp like Google.
I think you've missed the bigger picture of what Google does...
Every single website in existence falls under the Berne treaty, and no one except the author has any legal right whatsoever
to view it except as the author wishes. Which means, put simply, Google can't legally exist under this ruling. This has nothing
to do with books, except insofar as publishers whined the loudest so far, and found a forum willing to humor them (note that the
RIAA, as evil as we consider them, deliberately chose a visible yet inherently useless strategy; the publishing industry has
chosen to actually attack the real "problem", for good or for bad).
Do you remember the dark days before internet search engines? I, for one, do; and to state it bluntly, the modern web
as we know it centers around the search engine. Without that, you have nothing but a collection of megacorp portals and
ego sites. Thanks, but no thanks. If what Google does breaks the law, we need the law broken.
If you use those same 3 megabytes to store a lossy jpeg, you can store a lot more detail in the same file space
Absolutely true.
Now just let me know when I can realistically have a system that handles lossy HD streams at 2.97 gigabits per
second, at a price people other than Billy G can afford, and I'll gladly upgrade from the crap we have now.
Until then, apples and oranges. Yes, you can store more useful information in a lossy stream than in a lossless
stream at the same bitrate. But simply put, we don't use lossy compression for that purpose. We use it so BluRay
looks halfway decent at a mere 1.35% (40Mbps) of the raw size.
I'm sure I could honor requests to remove all of these photos, but I simply don't want to. It involves a lot of time and effort on my end, to accomplish something that's actively taking away from things I take pride in myself.
So basically, you take pride in getting people turned down for jobs in a shit economy because you won't take a few 10YO pics offline. Wow dude, you need to meet some of these people in a dark alley.
Of course, if you consider yourself such an awesome photographer that you just can't bear to ruin the artistic integrity of your site, you could always, y'know, redact their names.
As for how you got modded "insightful", just... Wow. I hope you just managed to sneak a troll post (or some form of sarcasm I totally missed) past the mods, because if serious, you really do suck as a human being.
Why did the parent get modded troll? "Crude humor", perhaps, but hardly a troll.
Although we may well go for less base reasons, let's not act all stuck-up about it. We go to these events
for two reasons - Our jobs force us to; or our jobs "allow" us to, pay for it, and will count the three days in
Vegas as actually "working".
Now, if I see some cool toys relating to my profession while there, yeah, I might chat up the poor bastard at the
booth about what he has. But at every single convention I've ever seen, you can predict per-location attendance
simply by considering in attractiveness of the booth babes, and whether or not they give away free stuff. One or
the other? You get a normal level. Both? You have lines waiting to talk to you. Neither? Hope you brought a
good book to read.
All the major printer manufacturers have recycling programs. Usually these only apply to ink and toner, but you
decide exactly what you put in the box.
HP toner, for example, comes with a prepaid UPS shipping label. Of course, they want you to use that to send them
back their toner (and even prefer you to send them back in bulk, thus saving on the total shipping cost for them).
So when you next replace your toner or ink, you take the mailing label, put it on a box big enough for the toner plus
the printer, and send it on its way.
As for whether or not this counts as abusive of their recycling program - First, they shouldn't make crap printers that cost
less than replacement supplies, period. And second, don't think they do this out of the kindness of their hearts and
a concern for the environment - They do so solely to keep you (or a third party) from refilling their supplies and
getting more than your "fair" share of use out of them.
Oh... And you might not want to give a return address if you do this. I doubt it breaks any laws, but better safe than sorry.
The SETI project is, to put it bluntly, a complete waste of time and resources.
Many people disagree.
Personally, I would rather throw away my CPU cycles on looking for ET, than donate them to the likes of AmGen or Monsanto so they can
lock the Next Great Breakthrough(tm) up in patent hell for the rest of my life.
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation.
I doubt most organization's ethics rules would cover this - Particularly since he had the authority to determine
how he wanted to configure each machine, and in no way profited from his actions. As for the cost of electricity (I think
we can safely write the rest of the claims of "accelerated hardware depreciation" off as complete BS, talkin' about school
lab computers, not a datacenter here), although he really should have considered that, I wouldn't call it beyond the realm
of possibility that he simply didn't. Keep in mind he started doing this before self-throttling CPUs became popular,
meaning it made next to no difference in power consumption whether you kept your CPU idle or pegged at 100%.
If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately,
which violates ethics laws.
Although most organizations actually do have rules specifically relating to network use (as opposed to what screensavers you
may run, about which I've never seen anything more than "no porn walpaper/screensavers/themes"), in the absence thereof and
depending on the terms of internet connection, I would arguably call that less abusive. If you have a flat fee for
a fixed bandwidth, and limited your use to legitimate works (ie, no porn or copyright violations) and made sure it never
interfered with legitimate traffic, such use costs the organization literally nothing. But... Beside the point.
I will further defend this guy for having school-owned hardware at his house - Schools and local governments rarely have
proper procedures in place for EOL'ing older computers. I personally had two from a local college that technically would have
counted as "stolen property" if it ever came up, but I had obtained them by as close to kosher means as possible (the guy in charge
of their computer labs, the father of a friend, had literally hundreds of decommissioned PCs piled floor to ceiling in
a storage area and begged anyone who dropped by to take a few). So if he had a dozen brand new quad-core boxes the district
didn't even know they bought, okay, problem; If he had a collection of P4s and 32-bit Athlons in various states of disrepair, I'd
have a hard time returning a guilty verdict on that jury.
Personally, the fact that they let him resign makes me wonder about the truth of the issue. Given the facts as stated - Generally
abusing the hell out of his authority, outright failing to do his job, and stealing from the school - I find it mind-boggling that
they wouldn't have him arrested and fired for cause, never mind the "spend more time with his family" line.
Slashdot Mirror
Would eliminating it entirely fix those problems without creating even worse problems? Not a chance!
I responded to a statement that patents have nothing to do with morality. I provided a clear counterexample (unless you consider "profit" a greater moral good than "lifesaving").
I also didn't call for the complete abolition of IP law - A hefty overhaul, yes, but I agree with you to the extent that companies need some incentive to do real R&D rather than just clone the work of others.
So, exactly why would big Pharma spend millions of dollars to develop a new drug, if they must give it away once it has been proven to work?
As I see it, Company-X could still have a limited monopoly on actual sales of their drug, in relatively wealthy areas. Denying a lifesaving drug that costs pennies in actual manufacturing costs to those for whom even a modest few bucks means their entire lifetime earning potential? Sorry but I call that straight-out "evil", no ambiguity about it.
So scientology is a crock. You think the abrahamic religions which believe in a magic garden with a talking snake and a man made out of clay and a woman made out of a rib make any more logical sense??
The Abrahamic religions at least have the defense that they didn't know any better back then, then glossing over the utterly absurd foundations of their religion with some fluff about moral lessons.
Scientologists know, in their founder's own words, that they follow a religion written as a work of sci-fi on a bet that he could create a (somewhat) successful religion. Their "morality" consists of nothing more than "make money and give it to us, oh and destroy our critics by any means necessary".
Not to call the former any more valid than the latter; but when I decided I could no longer believe in my familial religion, no one systematically blackmailed my boss at every job I've ever held to get me fired and make me generally unemployable.
The last pirated games I looked at had all the DRM still.
The fact that you failed to obtain a functional copy doesn't diminish the GP's point.
Perhaps the GP should have said "cracked" rather than merely "pirated".
Yeah, I'm not big on administrating a single player game. I just want to install and go, fortunately, my legitimate purchases have all been like that.
Then consider yourself lucky that you never bought a game that damaged your CD drive - Or "allowed" a forced update that bricked your PS3 - Or had to run two years of MBR-overwriting tax software simultaneously - Or simply wanted to skip the 27-language FBI (etc) warning on your new DVD purchase. But hey, you've had good luck with DRM, congratulations, you fall into a rather small minority.
Not your software however, software is licensed.
Pedantry, the last argument of the losing side. You can say the same of movies and music. Regardless of what you (and the law) say, the vast majority of people consider such content as their property. Yes, they know the difference between owning a copy and owning the rights to the original, but people simply don't think in terms of buying a license to access that content.
Strange, I swear that this link worked when I previewed the post!
When they do something that truly endangers a child's safety, that's when the state gets involved. Not some unaffiliated pressure group, but a government tasked with protecting the child's fundamental rights.
You mean, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/1119/1224259105905.htmlLike this?
Um, so which religions teach tax cuts for the rich?
You missed the point. We get draconian drug policy that only benefits the pharmaceutical industry "for the children". We get leaders that eliminate inheritance taxes for less than the top 1% wealthiest people by appealing to the anti-abortion crowd. And let's not leave out the elephant in the room - "Good" religions get federal dollars to fund their proselytizing (oh and some vaguely defined "charitable works" to justify it), while "bad" religions can't even get tax exempt status (seen a lot of Wiccan 501(c)(3)s, lately?).
The largest Christian sect in the world I don't think could really be described as attacking science, anymore.
Yeah, very kind of them to pardon Galileo only 400 years after he could no longer threaten them anymore. Good thing they've stopped worrying about little things like the Go... I mean, Higgs boson, and embraced the scientific progress of the 19th century wholeheartedly.
it doesn't mean that the power to harm them is then passed to an unaccountable group.
When the state won't protect us from an invading enemy, it falls to the people to defend themselves.
Usually people I see who consider copyright immoral are people who are too cheap to pay a dollar for a song.
No doubt the millions dying needlessly of AIDS and Malaria (etc) would find your statement a comforting explanation of why big Pharma has no obligation to license their on-patent lifesaving drugs to low-cost (and even outright charitable) manufacturers.
So yes, "immoral". Patents quite literally mean people suffer and die for no better reason than profit.
As for copyright - Apply the current trend of perpetual extensions to a few works that actually mean something to you, to which you have access only because they lack a current copyright... How about the bible? "Sorry, not yours, the Vatican holds the copyright and forbids any distribution". Newton's Principia. Darwin's Origin of Species. Hubbard's Dianetics - Oh, wait, that one does have a current copyright, and look how open and morally they behave.
Why do we bother traveling around the world to fight religious extremist terrorists when we can do it right in our own back yard? And then to put people in prison for it... Okay, I suppose Anonymous' activities probably caused some unintended network congestion outside their specific targets, but hey, I'll take "lag" over "DU syndrome".
"Now, at home they'd hang me, here they'll give me a fucking medal, sir."
Microsoft doing something illegal, and then getting sued for it???
Sure, lets all get our kicks in while we can, but realize that this involves a much deeper issue than our hate for Microsoft.
How many times have you gotten some form of promo code for something free, only to have a hideous web site design (or even legitimate network problems) cause you to "redeem" that code without actually getting anything - And then of course the site refuses the code as "already used" when you try again? Personally, I'd put it at over half the time for me.
And this doesn't only include free material, either, though (so far) companies take a bit more care when you actually pay for the service/product in question... Case in point, just this week I tried to use a 60 minute card on a contractless cellphone (more for the time extension than the actual minutes), only to have it rejected for some ill-defined reason. Fortunately they have actual humans you can deal with, but clearly the motivation to just make it work right simply doesn't exist; they already have your money at that point.
You know, you got a lot of nerve, telling people who live in China that they don't know what they're talking about.
They don't know, because their government won't let them... Kinda hard to have an informed stance on something you officially can't know.
I have been waiting for insurances to start charging more for people that have poor diet and exercises habits ever since they went after the smokers.
Except, the study in TFA has nothing to do with poor diet and exercise in general.
My line of work tends to have me sitting in front of a computer all day every day. Despite that (or perhaps, to make up for it), I engage in fairly strenuous recreational activities that keep me in decent shape. I also don't sit at the computer and munch chips all day, but prefer to have three or four protein-heavy meals a day.
So basically, this study says that even though I keep myself in good shape, I still end up screwed because of my career choice.
Thanks a heap, science... Perhaps next you can tell me that porn really will make me go blind.
Out-of-order execution lets you get away with a lot of stupid things, since many of the pipeline stalls you would otherwise create can be re-ordered around.
...Of course, since the biggest bottlenecks in code usually occur in essentially serial sections of code, you can't just reorder them and hope for the best. In which case, the coder who understands where the target CPU will stall can still blow away even the best of compilers.
TFA using examples such as shift-vs-multiply sound like your grandfather complaining that you don't double-clutch on downshifting into first gear. "True" in the sense that yes, it once had meaning and no longer does - But totally wrong in the sense that people who think about their code at that level have moved beyond such trivialities and onto actual modern ones such as how to feed N pipelines so as to minimize stalls, or what degenerate conditions flog the latest branch prediction techniques (or more usefully, as a classic example, how to write your code so as to minimize branching).
In contrast, the memory subsystem can do relatively little for you if your working set is too large and you don't access memory in an efficient pattern.
Now explain to a Java programmer how to align your data and code on machine-page boundaries. How to insure that each read/write sequence takes advantage of read/write combining. How to properly interleave memory access with number crunching to minimize waiting around for a 1000x slower subsystem to wake up and respond.
Mostly this article sounds like exactly the reasons I don't like Java for every task, and why the vast majority of Java apps feel like molasses in January despite every benchmark telling you that in theory they run just as fast as unmanaged code - Because although you can do the above, you have to work against the language rather than with it. When merely assigning a value to a basic machine-supported data type (32 bit integer, as the simple example) involves an implicit function call (and the whole stack-frame preservation that entails), the little details such as memory row size (which, incidentally, can trivially double the CPU time sitting around doing nothing if not explicitly considered) vanish in the haze of inefficiency.
I would also point out that some of us really do still work with CPUs that have memory capacities measured in mere hundreds or thousands of bytes and an instruction set that doesn't even include a general-purpose integer multiply instruction. But I suppose we can't fault TFA's author for overlooking the single dominant use of CPUs in our world today, the ultra-low-horsepower embedded market, now can we?
I guess there will be no more Raising Skinny Elephants on a Lenovo anymore. And while I have only used it a few times in the last year, I have used it.
:)
Huh, I never actually bother using R and E (just a quick SUB). But if you do... Shouldn't you E (or even I) before S?
And skipping the U, not a good idea if you have large drives. Checking an okay-but-not-clean 1TB drive can take a good half hour on rebooting.
*Specifically* social networking sites like Facebook where there are real names attached to accounts and visible out in the open.
Advertisements? Real names? I don't know what all of you have started smoking, but two words: "Adblock" and "lie".
"My" Facebook account has absolutely nothing to do with me. I made it as a place to placate friends who kept asking if I had a FB account - So I do, named after one of my pets, with not one single shred of information on it that links back to me (unless you already know what my dining room looks like, with my cat sitting in the window).
Now, the apparently required SMS authentication Facebook uses disturbed me somewhat... Until I got a random Google Voice account. So congrats, Zuckhead, you can now connect two throwaway accounts and send SMS spam to one throwaway phone number.
Granted, it does indeed get harder to protect one's privacy every day... But at the moment, anyone who cares, still can.
If only there was SOME way to use the net to safely download the latest.
What news this would be to groups of people seeking an alternative to bit torrent for their binary files.
You can thank that asshole Spitzer for single-handedly destroying one of the oldest internet protocols in the laughable name of child-porn, of all the weak excuses he could have come up with.
Yes, it still exists... But getting anonymous access to a decent-retention server? Dream on. Better to just do like the rest of us and swap USB drives with friends. Not quite as good of a selection, but zero risk and nearly infinite bandwidth if they have what you want (and if you pick your trading partners well, you'll guarantee yourself far better quality than a typical public torrent).
This is really starting to get on my nerves. Speak friggin english, don't use random coding shortcuts in your everyday speech.
:)
Um, the word "this" predates programming. Even as a coder myself, I never took its use in the context you quoted to mean a "random coding shortcut", just the (usually grammatically incorrect) use of a standard English pronoun to refer to the concept preceeding it.
You're using it wrong anyway, it's not agreement or anything, just a class reference within the class itself
Perhaps that particular use of it looks "wrong" because it doesn't have anything to do with its use in coding? If anything, you can object to it as nothing more than a "me too" post (which you do in your third paragraph), but it makes a convenient way to either add to or disagree with the previous point without needing to restate that point in its entirety.
Of course, you might have meant that as humor, in which case... Well done, but perhaps a bit too subtle for a text-only medium.
Want to screw off at work? Get an smartphone and do it on your own device.
Unfortunately, the "block everything" attitude you express does result in this exact solution... Except, people don't want to browse the web on a smartphone, so they use it as a WiFi or Bluetooth proxy for their (work-issued) PC.
Meaning, in your attempt to block people from surfing the web on their breaks/lunch/"need a few minutes of downtime", you have in effect lost control of real threats such as viruses, spyware, P2P, etc.
Most people will behave if you trust them. And five minutes per week spent analyzing your Squid logs will quickly identify those who abuse your trust.
The question is, why would anyone want to do that?
Because Amazon has a good storefront for buying eBooks of a known quality in a consistent format. You don't need to deal with 6 different formats, 27 different storefronts, and quality going as low as scans of the actual pages.
I don't like reading books in the PC
Some people don't mind it. More importantly, plenty of devices other than the Kindle or iPhone exist on which you might read eBooks... Netbooks, for instance (basically just PCs, but they finally hit a sweet spot between utility, weight, and battery life), or non-Amazon/Apple-approved smartphones.
I would rather buy a physical copy (to pay the author) and then download a digital copy from torrents or whatever than support DRM infested products.
I suspect most of us agree with you on that - However, the legality between the two differs radically. Stripping DRM for purposes of interoperability might count as a protected use (IANAL); downloading a torrent definitely does not. Also, keep in mind that publishers have increasingly tried to play the "X different products" game, claiming that the dead-tree edition requires a separate purchase from the eBook which requires a separate purchase from the audiobook (even if digitally produced) - Geeks tend to scoff at that sort of thinking, but the courts sadly haven't caught on to it as nothing more than a shell-game yet.
Google wasn't found guilty. They were openly, admittedly, unabashedly guilty of digitizing and putting up excerpts of books they did not hold ANY copyright to. They only thing that happened was that the court decided the this law is valid even for a mega corp like Google.
I think you've missed the bigger picture of what Google does...
Every single website in existence falls under the Berne treaty, and no one except the author has any legal right whatsoever to view it except as the author wishes. Which means, put simply, Google can't legally exist under this ruling. This has nothing to do with books, except insofar as publishers whined the loudest so far, and found a forum willing to humor them (note that the RIAA, as evil as we consider them, deliberately chose a visible yet inherently useless strategy; the publishing industry has chosen to actually attack the real "problem", for good or for bad).
Do you remember the dark days before internet search engines? I, for one, do; and to state it bluntly, the modern web as we know it centers around the search engine. Without that, you have nothing but a collection of megacorp portals and ego sites. Thanks, but no thanks. If what Google does breaks the law, we need the law broken.
If you use those same 3 megabytes to store a lossy jpeg, you can store a lot more detail in the same file space
Absolutely true.
Now just let me know when I can realistically have a system that handles lossy HD streams at 2.97 gigabits per second, at a price people other than Billy G can afford, and I'll gladly upgrade from the crap we have now.
Until then, apples and oranges. Yes, you can store more useful information in a lossy stream than in a lossless stream at the same bitrate. But simply put, we don't use lossy compression for that purpose. We use it so BluRay looks halfway decent at a mere 1.35% (40Mbps) of the raw size.
I'm sure I could honor requests to remove all of these photos, but I simply don't want to. It involves a lot of time and effort on my end, to accomplish something that's actively taking away from things I take pride in myself.
So basically, you take pride in getting people turned down for jobs in a shit economy because you won't take a few 10YO pics offline. Wow dude, you need to meet some of these people in a dark alley.
Of course, if you consider yourself such an awesome photographer that you just can't bear to ruin the artistic integrity of your site, you could always, y'know, redact their names.
As for how you got modded "insightful", just... Wow. I hope you just managed to sneak a troll post (or some form of sarcasm I totally missed) past the mods, because if serious, you really do suck as a human being.
Why did the parent get modded troll? "Crude humor", perhaps, but hardly a troll.
Although we may well go for less base reasons, let's not act all stuck-up about it. We go to these events for two reasons - Our jobs force us to; or our jobs "allow" us to, pay for it, and will count the three days in Vegas as actually "working".
Now, if I see some cool toys relating to my profession while there, yeah, I might chat up the poor bastard at the booth about what he has. But at every single convention I've ever seen, you can predict per-location attendance simply by considering in attractiveness of the booth babes, and whether or not they give away free stuff. One or the other? You get a normal level. Both? You have lines waiting to talk to you. Neither? Hope you brought a good book to read.
Yeah, and spend $20 for the postage there...
Ah, but therein lies the beauty.
All the major printer manufacturers have recycling programs. Usually these only apply to ink and toner, but you decide exactly what you put in the box.
HP toner, for example, comes with a prepaid UPS shipping label. Of course, they want you to use that to send them back their toner (and even prefer you to send them back in bulk, thus saving on the total shipping cost for them).
So when you next replace your toner or ink, you take the mailing label, put it on a box big enough for the toner plus the printer, and send it on its way.
As for whether or not this counts as abusive of their recycling program - First, they shouldn't make crap printers that cost less than replacement supplies, period. And second, don't think they do this out of the kindness of their hearts and a concern for the environment - They do so solely to keep you (or a third party) from refilling their supplies and getting more than your "fair" share of use out of them.
Oh... And you might not want to give a return address if you do this. I doubt it breaks any laws, but better safe than sorry.
...When I insisted on lining the walls of my house with grounded copper flashing.
// Wishes I really did have a Tempested home, though.
'Course, I only wanted a basic Faraday cage to block RF snooping, but it will work just fine for this as well.
Who gets the last laugh now, Inspector?
/ Not serious.
The SETI project is, to put it bluntly, a complete waste of time and resources.
Many people disagree.
Personally, I would rather throw away my CPU cycles on looking for ET, than donate them to the likes of AmGen or Monsanto so they can lock the Next Great Breakthrough(tm) up in patent hell for the rest of my life.
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation.
I doubt most organization's ethics rules would cover this - Particularly since he had the authority to determine how he wanted to configure each machine, and in no way profited from his actions. As for the cost of electricity (I think we can safely write the rest of the claims of "accelerated hardware depreciation" off as complete BS, talkin' about school lab computers, not a datacenter here), although he really should have considered that, I wouldn't call it beyond the realm of possibility that he simply didn't. Keep in mind he started doing this before self-throttling CPUs became popular, meaning it made next to no difference in power consumption whether you kept your CPU idle or pegged at 100%.
If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws.
Although most organizations actually do have rules specifically relating to network use (as opposed to what screensavers you may run, about which I've never seen anything more than "no porn walpaper/screensavers/themes"), in the absence thereof and depending on the terms of internet connection, I would arguably call that less abusive. If you have a flat fee for a fixed bandwidth, and limited your use to legitimate works (ie, no porn or copyright violations) and made sure it never interfered with legitimate traffic, such use costs the organization literally nothing. But... Beside the point.
I will further defend this guy for having school-owned hardware at his house - Schools and local governments rarely have proper procedures in place for EOL'ing older computers. I personally had two from a local college that technically would have counted as "stolen property" if it ever came up, but I had obtained them by as close to kosher means as possible (the guy in charge of their computer labs, the father of a friend, had literally hundreds of decommissioned PCs piled floor to ceiling in a storage area and begged anyone who dropped by to take a few). So if he had a dozen brand new quad-core boxes the district didn't even know they bought, okay, problem; If he had a collection of P4s and 32-bit Athlons in various states of disrepair, I'd have a hard time returning a guilty verdict on that jury.
Personally, the fact that they let him resign makes me wonder about the truth of the issue. Given the facts as stated - Generally abusing the hell out of his authority, outright failing to do his job, and stealing from the school - I find it mind-boggling that they wouldn't have him arrested and fired for cause, never mind the "spend more time with his family" line.