>. Why does the IRS need access to medical records, anyway? Financial records, sure -- but diagnostics, etc? Seems a bit odd.
The IRS has a major role in administering the ACA (Obamacare). The agencies in part write their own regulations about what they want to have access to.
If I'm NOW understanding you correctly, you're saying that the big core is better IF the pause is long enough to enter low-power and sleep long enough to make it worth it, correct? Further, I'm reading between the lines and thinking you're saying that on a phone, that's normally the case - that the 53 cores aren't used often, or shouldn't be. Is that correct?
I little ole me does most of what TFA describes UK intelligence doing. OF COURSE you pay attention to open sources like Twitter and blogs.
TFA is silly in asserting that the government said Anonymous is a threat "but" their own memo says the threat is small COMPARED TO THE THREAT FROM NATION STATES. Duh, China is a bigger threat than Anonymous. That doesn't mean hacktivists aren't a threat.
> that it's better to use the little core for long-running tasks that have a lot of I/O and so can't put the core to sleep, but aren't CPU-bound.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying it only saves power to use the little cores if there is io involved, such as a mobile network which is obviously much slower than the CPU cores. Or maybe storage device, like and SD card. Or any user interaction.
You're right, very few things that you do on a mobile phone would involve either the network, the SD card, or the user. My original statement is only true for those few cases. For the NORMAL use of a mobile phone (as a 3D rendering farm), the fat core is better.
Agreed. Also, even if it's not _broken_, I don't want things constantly changing under my feet without even being able to meaningfully talk about what changed in different versions.
It's good to be able to say "here are the major changes between "Windows 7 and Windows 8". It's definitely good to be able to say "this software works on Windows 8", rather than "this software works on versions released between 2013-10-12 and 2015-01-03".
Under the current set of regulations, the information needs to be accessible. The insurance company has to access it, of course, as well as partners like billing and collection companies, doctors and hospitals query the system, and to enforce ACA the IRS needs access, the state exchange you bought it through... Probably three more types of entities I'm not thinking of off the top of my head. I'd bet there are at least a dozen different government agencies involved with ACA who can query your information.
If the IRS, the insurance company, the hospital, the state, and the billing company can read the data, the bad guy can read it too. The data may very well be encrypted on-disk, so if someone stole the hard drive they couldn't easily read it. It has to be decrypted by the system, though in order to be useful. Therefore, any encryption used must be mostly "feel good" encryption that doesn't actually do much to protect your data.
To protect it, we first need address the issue that all of these different companies and government agencies get access - treat it as PRIVATE data, not to be passed around. THEN effective measures could be put in place to ensure it never leaves the insurance company's network. So long as the IRS demands access to query it, it has to be accessible via the internet.
The information needs to be accessible. The insurance company has to access it, of course, as well as partners like billing and collection companies, doctors and hospitals query the system, and to enforce ACA the IRS needs access, the state exchange you bought it through... Probably three more types of entities I'm not thinking of off the top of my head. I'd bet there are at least a dozen different government agencies involved with ACA who can query your information.
If the IRS, the insurance company, the hospital, the state, and the billing company can read the data, the bad guy can read it too. The data may very well be encrypted on-disk, so if someone stole the hard drive they couldn't easily read it. It has to be decrypted by the system, though in order to be useful. Therefore, any encryption used must be mostly "feel good" encryption that doesn't actually do much to protect your data.
To protect it, we first need address the issue that all of these different companies and government agencies get access - treat it as PRIVATE data, not to be passed around. THEN effective measures could be put in place to ensure it never leaves the insurance company's network.
I'll specifically address two things you mentioned:
> why not just keep any encryption keys in memory only where it's that much harder to get them
So the computer system has access to the decrypted data, because it has the key. The bad guy has control of the computer system...
> these systems are already hugely expensive and it makes it incredibly difficult for anyone without physical access to get at the actual data.
So only the guy in the server room can access any patient^H^H^H^H^H^H customer data, for a company with millions of customers? That's going to be one busy guy! Roughly everyone who works at the insurance company needs some access to their customers' information, so it has to be on the network. The IRS demands access too, so the insurance company has to connect it to the internet.
You realize you're claiming that ARM's chip architects are completely wrong and have been for a while now, now? You know they actually measure this stuff before they spend a few billion dollars fabbing chips.
>. can consume less energy to power one of the big cores for 250ms than power the little core for 1s
If you need to do 500 million operations, you're close to to the point where it makes sense to power the faster core, yes. Your phone spends 99% of it's time with picoseconds of CPU work to be done, not seconds or milliseconds of work.
Computations per joule is not the relevant measurement. The relevant measurement is hours per charge. If you keep the computations per second below the threshold that the 53s can handle, the big cores never light and the battery lasts longer.
A tractor-trailer gets better mileage per pound than a sedan. So do you drive a big rig to work to save gas?
The newer SOCs have two high-performance cores and two low power cores. Like the old quadrajet carburetors, efficiency drops quite a bit when the high-perfomance side kicks in.
That said, the screen and radios take up most of the power for most people. Dim the screen and turn off Bluetooth and WiFi as appropriate, or use power-saving mode to automate that process.
In many states, the overwhelming majority of the money collected from gas taxes goes to pay interest on debt. Very little of it it used for road construction and maintenance. If we stopped borrowing to build bridges to nowhere, we'd have plenty of money for maintenance and new roads as needed.
One division of IBM is Global Services, which has two arms, one called IBM Global Business Services (GBS), which provides management consulting and other services. So they have a bunch of management consultants on staff. If customers aren't buying management consulting services from IBM, they have to lay off the management consultants (MBAs). If they keep people around getting paid, but not producing any revenue, they'll go out of business.
Would YOU pay IBM to advise you on how to run your business? No will anyone else, so they have no work for all those MBAs they hired to provide consultations to customers.
However, mandatory minimums aren't always so mandatory. Due to waiting until the last minute to handle some paperwork, I once went to jail for driving without a license. That had a mandatory minimum sentence of three days in jail. I was picked up Monday night and got out first thing Tuesday morning - so about 10 hours. Later, the prosecutor said to me "time served will work, right? Monday to Tuesday, that's three days isn't it?"
If Netflix and other content providers are paying the cable companies costs, but aren't allowed to pay the mobile providers' costs, that means mobile providers have to charge the customer more than Comcast does.
In other words, Netflix customers using mobile broadband pay Netflix, then Netflix uses that money to pay Comcast. In effect, mobile users will be subsidizing Comcast.
His statement says he wants to apply it to MOBILE broadband The only affect on Comcast is that it makes it harder for Sprint's mobile service to compete with Comcast. Wheeler is going to need a new job in two years, you know, and his career is in the cable industry.
Wheeler is talking about applying these rules to MOBILE broadband. That means Sprint and others are at a disadvantage compared to Comcast, who will benefit from the more intense regulation of their competitors. Two years from now, when the new president appoints a new FCC chairman, Wheeler can go back to working directly for the cable companies and be treated as a hero.
Wheeler is talking about applying these rules to MOBILE BROADBAND. That means Sprint and others are at a disadvantage compared to Comcast, who will benefit from the more intense regulation of their competitors.
> In such cases the government should step in, if: > - The number of problem cases far outweighs the number of normally functioning users, and
I wonder if we can make this a bit more specific and clear. You said "the number of problem cases", but I wonder if you meant "the direct and indirect effects of problem cases". Here's why I say that:
Suppose that smoking Z has limited negative effects on 90% of users. Perhaps most just get lazy and unmotivated. However, 10% of users commit mass murder. Going strictly by the words you wrote, substance Z shouldn't be regulated - most users don't become dangerous. The people who are not dangerous ARE however killed by the 10% who go postal. That would be a problem.
I understand what you're saying, and honestly they have legal (and other) responsibilities to each group. For example, the #1 legal responsibility they have to employees is to pay them. Shareholders don't have to get paid. The primary responsibility to shareholders is that executives may not enrich themselves at the expense of shareholders, such as by making a sweetheart deal with their brother to be a supplier, or just simply taking corporate (investor) money and spending it on themselves. (Salaries and benefits approved by the board are of course the exception, execs can and do get paid, obviously).
There are thousands of pages of laws and regulations covering the company's responsibilities to it's customers. Just yesterday, I think it was, we had a story on Slashdot about the New York Attorney General going after some companies who didn't fulfill their responsibility of fair dealing with their customers.
Outside of legally enforced responsibilities, there are others too. A company has a responsibility to treat employees with dignity and respect. A tech company which fails to treat employees with dignity and respect will lose their good employees and suffer by it. Several specific types of "treat employees with dignity and respect" are of course legal requirements too, such as sexual harassment and all the stuff the EEOC deals with. Companies that don't have sound policies in place in this regard find themselves on the wrong end of wrongful termination law suits and such as well.
> you observe that IBM's problem is that their existing business is not generating new revenue. OK, but how does firing your employees help? It seems to me that by firing their work force, IBM is closing any doors for new revenue opportunities.
The revenue from those units have been falling for quite some time, and there's no reason to think that trend will reverse. To pick a random example, one division of IBM is Global Services, which has two arms, one called IBM Global Business Services (GBS), which provides management consulting and other services. So they have a bunch of management consultants on staff. If customers aren't buying management consulting services from IBM*, they have to lay off the management consultants. If they keep people around getting paid, but not producing any revenue, they'll go out of business.
That said, what they probably haven't done a good job of is moving staff that can be moved. For example, that consulting section probably has some accountants who could move to their cloud division. That may be a poor management decision to do layoffs by division rather than by job role. Maybe there's a reason people aren't asking IBM for management advice very much anymore.:)
* I don't know how their consulting division has been doing long term, I just chose one part of the company at random to use as an example.
>. Most are no less social than standard for intelligent, literate people; football isn't the center of their life.
In my area, at least, there are several thousand kids being homeschooled and it is a social community. They take classes at each other's homes, do field trips together, have sports teams who play against traditional schools... there is a strong social element, if you choose to engage in it.
As far as football, in one homeschooled family we're close to, the oldest boy looks like he just might be headed to the NFL. If not that's okay - he's getting excellent grades at a prestigious university.
This is an important point. It isn't a binary choice between the typical public school (government school) or homeschooling by yourself. There are charter schools, there are schools that run half days and you homeschooled the other half. There are schools that meet one day per week. There are schools where you select which classes to send them to school for and which to do at home.
I was surprised to learn that in my town of about 90,000 households, 1,000 of those homeschooled their kids. That's 1,000 partners to work with. Families share curriculums, there are homeschool sports teams who play against the government schools, and parents teach small classes of three or four other students. So maybe we'll have three or four kids from other families come over for math class, or business or computers, while our daughter goes to music class taught by a friend who is a career musician.
Figure 1,000 families is about 1,800 parents. There are probably some parents who are chemists, some professional musician somebody runs an art studio, etc. So I don't have to teach my daughter art - she can do that at her friend's mother's art studio, then I teach her and her friend computer and technology stuff.
Anyway, there are a LOT of different options. In my area there are "crunchy" homeschool groups, specifically non-crunchy groups... many choices.
Slashdot Mirror
>. Why does the IRS need access to medical records, anyway? Financial records, sure -- but diagnostics, etc? Seems a bit odd.
The IRS has a major role in administering the ACA (Obamacare). The agencies in part write their own regulations about what they want to have access to.
>. Before you try to sound patronising again,
Sorry about that.
If I'm NOW understanding you correctly, you're saying that the big core is better IF the pause is long enough to enter low-power and sleep long enough to make it worth it, correct? Further, I'm reading between the lines and thinking you're saying that on a phone, that's normally the case - that the 53 cores aren't used often, or shouldn't be. Is that correct?
> Although I can't read
if you could read, you'd read that it's mostly interest payments.
I little ole me does most of what TFA describes UK intelligence doing. OF COURSE you pay attention to open sources like Twitter and blogs.
TFA is silly in asserting that the government said Anonymous is a threat "but" their own memo says the threat is small COMPARED TO THE THREAT FROM NATION STATES. Duh, China is a bigger threat than Anonymous. That doesn't mean hacktivists aren't a threat.
> that it's better to use the little core for long-running tasks that have a lot of I/O and so can't put the core to sleep, but aren't CPU-bound.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying it only saves power to use the little cores if there is io involved, such as a mobile network which is obviously much slower than the CPU cores. Or maybe storage device, like and SD card. Or any user interaction.
You're right, very few things that you do on a mobile phone would involve either the network, the SD card, or the user. My original statement is only true for those few cases. For the NORMAL use of a mobile phone (as a 3D rendering farm), the fat core is better.
Agreed. Also, even if it's not _broken_, I don't want things constantly changing under my feet without even being able to meaningfully talk about what changed in different versions.
It's good to be able to say "here are the major changes between "Windows 7 and Windows 8". It's definitely good to be able to say "this software works on Windows 8", rather than "this software works on versions released between 2013-10-12 and 2015-01-03".
Under the current set of regulations, the information needs to be accessible. The insurance company has to access it, of course, as well as partners like billing and collection companies, doctors and hospitals query the system, and to enforce ACA the IRS needs access, the state exchange you bought it through ... Probably three more types of entities I'm not thinking of off the top of my head. I'd bet there are at least a dozen different government agencies involved with ACA who can query your information.
If the IRS, the insurance company, the hospital, the state, and the billing company can read the data, the bad guy can read it too. The data may very well be encrypted on-disk, so if someone stole the hard drive they couldn't easily read it. It has to be decrypted by the system, though in order to be useful. Therefore, any encryption used must be mostly "feel good" encryption that doesn't actually do much to protect your data.
To protect it, we first need address the issue that all of these different companies and government agencies get access - treat it as PRIVATE data, not to be passed around. THEN effective measures could be put in place to ensure it never leaves the insurance company's network. So long as the IRS demands access to query it, it has to be accessible via the internet.
The information needs to be accessible. The insurance company has to access it, of course, as well as partners like billing and collection companies, doctors and hospitals query the system, and to enforce ACA the IRS needs access, the state exchange you bought it through ... Probably three more types of entities I'm not thinking of off the top of my head. I'd bet there are at least a dozen different government agencies involved with ACA who can query your information.
If the IRS, the insurance company, the hospital, the state, and the billing company can read the data, the bad guy can read it too. The data may very well be encrypted on-disk, so if someone stole the hard drive they couldn't easily read it. It has to be decrypted by the system, though in order to be useful. Therefore, any encryption used must be mostly "feel good" encryption that doesn't actually do much to protect your data.
To protect it, we first need address the issue that all of these different companies and government agencies get access - treat it as PRIVATE data, not to be passed around. THEN effective measures could be put in place to ensure it never leaves the insurance company's network.
I'll specifically address two things you mentioned:
> why not just keep any encryption keys in memory only where it's that much harder to get them
So the computer system has access to the decrypted data, because it has the key. The bad guy has control of the computer system ...
> these systems are already hugely expensive and it makes it incredibly difficult for anyone without physical access to get at the actual data.
So only the guy in the server room can access any patient^H^H^H^H^H^H customer data, for a company with millions of customers? That's going to be one busy guy! Roughly everyone who works at the insurance company needs some access to their customers' information, so it has to be on the network. The IRS demands access too, so the insurance company has to connect it to the internet.
You realize you're claiming that ARM's chip architects are completely wrong and have been for a while now, now? You know they actually measure this stuff before they spend a few billion dollars fabbing chips.
>. can consume less energy to power one of the big cores for 250ms than power the little core for 1s
If you need to do 500 million operations, you're close to to the point where it makes sense to power the faster core, yes. Your phone spends 99% of it's time with picoseconds of CPU work to be done, not seconds or milliseconds of work.
Computations per joule is not the relevant measurement. The relevant measurement is hours per charge. If you keep the computations per second below the threshold that the 53s can handle, the big cores never light and the battery lasts longer.
A tractor-trailer gets better mileage per pound than a sedan. So do you drive a big rig to work to save gas?
The newer SOCs have two high-performance cores and two low power cores. Like the old quadrajet carburetors, efficiency drops quite a bit when the high-perfomance side kicks in.
That said, the screen and radios take up most of the power for most people. Dim the screen and turn off Bluetooth and WiFi as appropriate, or use power-saving mode to automate that process.
In many states, the overwhelming majority of the money collected from gas taxes goes to pay interest on debt. Very little of it it used for road construction and maintenance. If we stopped borrowing to build bridges to nowhere, we'd have plenty of money for maintenance and new roads as needed.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/st...
One division of IBM is Global Services, which has two arms, one called IBM Global Business Services (GBS), which provides management consulting and other services. So they have a bunch of management consultants on staff. If customers aren't buying management consulting services from IBM, they have to lay off the management consultants (MBAs). If they keep people around getting paid, but not producing any revenue, they'll go out of business.
Would YOU pay IBM to advise you on how to run your business? No will anyone else, so they have no work for all those MBAs they hired to provide consultations to customers.
The statute specifies a mandatory minimum of 20 years:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc...
Good time takes 13% off of that.
However, mandatory minimums aren't always so mandatory. Due to waiting until the last minute to handle some paperwork, I once went to jail for driving without a license. That had a mandatory minimum sentence of three days in jail. I was picked up Monday night and got out first thing Tuesday morning - so about 10 hours. Later, the prosecutor said to me "time served will work, right? Monday to Tuesday, that's three days isn't it?"
If Netflix and other content providers are paying the cable companies costs, but aren't allowed to pay the mobile providers' costs, that means mobile providers have to charge the customer more than Comcast does.
In other words, Netflix customers using mobile broadband pay Netflix, then Netflix uses that money to pay Comcast. In effect, mobile users will be subsidizing Comcast.
His statement says he wants to apply it to MOBILE broadband The only affect on Comcast is that it makes it harder for Sprint's mobile service to compete with Comcast. Wheeler is going to need a new job in two years, you know, and his career is in the cable industry.
Wheeler is talking about applying these rules to MOBILE broadband. That means Sprint and others are at a disadvantage compared to Comcast, who will benefit from the more intense regulation of their competitors. Two years from now, when the new president appoints a new FCC chairman, Wheeler can go back to working directly for the cable companies and be treated as a hero.
Wheeler is talking about applying these rules to MOBILE BROADBAND. That means Sprint and others are at a disadvantage compared to Comcast, who will benefit from the more intense regulation of their competitors.
> In such cases the government should step in, if:
> - The number of problem cases far outweighs the number of normally functioning users, and
I wonder if we can make this a bit more specific and clear. You said "the number of problem cases", but I wonder if you meant "the direct and indirect effects of problem cases". Here's why I say that:
Suppose that smoking Z has limited negative effects on 90% of users. Perhaps most just get lazy and unmotivated. However, 10% of users commit mass murder. Going strictly by the words you wrote, substance Z shouldn't be regulated - most users don't become dangerous. The people who are not dangerous ARE however killed by the 10% who go postal. That would be a problem.
I understand what you're saying, and honestly they have legal (and other) responsibilities to each group. For example, the #1 legal responsibility they have to employees is to pay them. Shareholders don't have to get paid. The primary responsibility to shareholders is that executives may not enrich themselves at the expense of shareholders, such as by making a sweetheart deal with their brother to be a supplier, or just simply taking corporate (investor) money and spending it on themselves. (Salaries and benefits approved by the board are of course the exception, execs can and do get paid, obviously).
There are thousands of pages of laws and regulations covering the company's responsibilities to it's customers. Just yesterday, I think it was, we had a story on Slashdot about the New York Attorney General going after some companies who didn't fulfill their responsibility of fair dealing with their customers.
Outside of legally enforced responsibilities, there are others too. A company has a responsibility to treat employees with dignity and respect. A tech company which fails to treat employees with dignity and respect will lose their good employees and suffer by it. Several specific types of "treat employees with dignity and respect" are of course legal requirements too, such as sexual harassment and all the stuff the EEOC deals with. Companies that don't have sound policies in place in this regard find themselves on the wrong end of wrongful termination law suits and such as well.
> you observe that IBM's problem is that their existing business is not generating new revenue. OK, but how does firing your employees help? It seems to me that by firing their work force, IBM is closing any doors for new revenue opportunities.
The revenue from those units have been falling for quite some time, and there's no reason to think that trend will reverse. To pick a random example, one division of IBM is Global Services, which has two arms, one called IBM Global Business Services (GBS), which provides management consulting and other services. So they have a bunch of management consultants on staff. If customers aren't buying management consulting services from IBM*, they have to lay off the management consultants. If they keep people around getting paid, but not producing any revenue, they'll go out of business.
That said, what they probably haven't done a good job of is moving staff that can be moved. For example, that consulting section probably has some accountants who could move to their cloud division. That may be a poor management decision to do layoffs by division rather than by job role. Maybe there's a reason people aren't asking IBM for management advice very much anymore. :)
* I don't know how their consulting division has been doing long term, I just chose one part of the company at random to use as an example.
So you're a firefighter? If you ever come out to TEEX for training I'd like to buy you lunch.
if I give %6 of my paycheck to a politician, that's the party I support (pretty strongly).
>. Most are no less social than standard for intelligent, literate people; football isn't the center of their life.
In my area, at least, there are several thousand kids being homeschooled and it is a social community. They take classes at each other's homes, do field trips together, have sports teams who play against traditional schools ... there is a strong social element, if you choose to engage in it.
As far as football, in one homeschooled family we're close to, the oldest boy looks like he just might be headed to the NFL. If not that's okay - he's getting excellent grades at a prestigious university.
This is an important point. It isn't a binary choice between the typical public school (government school) or homeschooling by yourself. There are charter schools, there are schools that run half days and you homeschooled the other half. There are schools that meet one day per week. There are schools where you select which classes to send them to school for and which to do at home.
I was surprised to learn that in my town of about 90,000 households, 1,000 of those homeschooled their kids. That's 1,000 partners to work with. Families share curriculums, there are homeschool sports teams who play against the government schools, and parents teach small classes of three or four other students. So maybe we'll have three or four kids from other families come over for math class, or business or computers, while our daughter goes to music class taught by a friend who is a career musician.
Figure 1,000 families is about 1,800 parents. There are probably some parents who are chemists, some professional musician somebody runs an art studio, etc. So I don't have to teach my daughter art - she can do that at her friend's mother's art studio, then I teach her and her friend computer and technology stuff.
Anyway, there are a LOT of different options. In my area there are "crunchy" homeschool groups, specifically non-crunchy groups ... many choices.