On the second point, if they were to release all of their hardware specs, then, it's theoretically possible for someone with a bigger budget (Intel comes to mind) to come in, build these exact same chipsets in higher quantities and undercut AMD at sales.
That is ridiculous. The specifications needed to interface with a hardware device are roughly comparable to a complete definition of a software API. The implementation details are typically thousands of times more complicated.
For example, if you had the complete interface specification for a modern desktop microprocessor (freely available, easily a couple of thousand pages), just add several hundred million dollar research and development budget, and you too can produce a compatible device with comparable performance, if you are lucky.
no attempt is offered at explaining why SPDY should be slower than plain ol' HTTP, only why it might not be faster
The author was testing SPDY over TLS, which has a significant connection startup overhead. That probably explains all the performance degradation relative to regular HTTP.
In fact, if SPDY support was ubiquitous tommorrow, I would be surprised to see SPDY+TLS used for third party ad serving for this very reason. SPDY+TLS isn't likely to be used for that without _major_ standards modifications to allow third party content to be transparently proxied through first party sites cookies and all.
Let's see if I've got this straight: "You gave me A, B, and C for free yesterday, and now you're only giving me an improved A and B for free?
What would really happen if Microsoft crippled future versions of Visual Studio Express is that a market would be created for low or no cost alternatives. That would probably be a good thing but it would be annoying for many people to convert. It probably wouldn't be too hard to port KDevelop to Windows, for example.
The question was not about support, but bug fixing.
For most mid-range and custom business software, fixes to anything but the most serious bugs (and often not even then) only come with a support contract. A support contract is typically both how you get bug fix releases and reasonable attention to the bugs that you would like to have fixed.
Google only paid $74k in tax on the multiple billions which Australian people and companies paid to them for services provided in Australia.
That is a function of the tax laws. The only reliable way to generate tax revenue on services provided by a foreign company is to charge a goods and services tax on purchases of those services. If the GST was not included in those figures, they are misleading. If the GST applied and was not collected, it should have been. If the GST does not apply, perhaps the powers that be should think about changing that.
It is unreasonable to expect to collect corporate income taxes from corporations that are not actually domiciled in the taxing entity. Legally speaking, it is essentially impossible. Tariffs and GSTs are about the only options.
The main problem with having thirteen months is that it is not evenly divisible into halves, quarters, thirds, etc. That results in scheduling difficulties for a lot of things.
That is probably a livable deficiency, given the other advantages though. It is much cleaner than having intercalary weeks every so many years. The proposal referred to in the original post is a scheduling, accounting, budgeting, and billing disaster.
Credit unions, on the other hand, can maintain capital only through profits from loans, investments, and certain income like fees and interchange fees
May I ask how a credit union gets its initial capital? Does it require a donation? The requirements seem strict enough that without a relatively large initial infusion, it seems like it would be next to impossible to start a credit union at all.
If the company is making a profit and you pay out distributions equivalent or greater to what you should be earning as an employee in order to avoid payroll taxes, you can get in trouble. And yes, there have been court cases about this very issue. See here, for example.
A perfect vacuum is at absolute zero. But the thing is there are no perfect vacuums - electromagnetic radiation for example traverses vacuums rather well and gives an effective equilibrium temperature to the not-so-perfect vacuum itself. Random EM radiation plus cosmic rays and solar wind is what makes the equilibrium temperature of a typical near earth vacuum about 4K instead of 0K.
If you want to measure this, you put a small thermometer into the appropriate test environment, wait a sufficiently long amount of time until the extra heat radiates away (or is absorbed) and now your thermometer reads the same as the temperature of the environment it is in, even if it is a vacuum. Of course this has to be done in the shade, if you have a bunch of light coming from one direction, that is not really a thermal equilibrium with the random contents of the "vacuum", and the temperature will rise much higher. If it is not random, it is not really thermal, but rather some other form of energy transfer.
It should be pointed out that the temperature and thermal conductivity are quite different. It is of course harder to heat up an object with poor thermal conductivity, but if you wait long enough both the highly conductive objects (like metal) and poorly conductive objects (like a near vacuum) will indeed reach equilibrium at the same temperature.
Chaffetz is not a senator either, but rather a member of the House of Representatives.
Re:Optimized for 64-bit processors
on
Skein Hash... In Bash
·
· Score: 3, Informative
On the slowest 32 bit processor tested (32 bit, ARM v4, 75 Mhz), NIST benchmarked Skein using portable C code at just under 1 megabyte / sec. That is about twice as slow as SHA-2 on the same processor, and certainly slow enough that you might notice in the case you mention. On modern 64 bit processor (Intel Q6600, x86_64, 2.4 Ghz), more like 286 MB / sec for Skein, about twice as fast as SHA-2. See here (pdf).
The striking difference between 32 bit and 64 bit implementations is much more than I would have guessed, but that may be merely a matter of optimization. For now it looks like a good excuse to use SHA-1 or SHA-2 when doing the sort of thing you describe on slow processors. For something like SSL or IPSEC, you aren't likely to notice the difference, because the bandwidth to a typical mobile device just isn't that high.
You have got to be kidding. Implementing a hash algorithm in a scripting language is an inside joke. The overhead of the language in this case is easily ten thousand times the overhead of the actual calculations, and more likely ten times that.
A slightly slower than usual hash algorithm is not likely to be noticeable on a modern client, even a handheld device.
All else equal, a 64 bit algorithm should get roughly twice the amount of work done per operation as a comparable 32 bit algorithm, so the performance overhead on 32 bit architectures isn't nearly as bad as it looks. Ten to twenty percent maybe.
And if you are really concerned about performance, you write an implementation in assembly language.
Modern SSDs don't work like that. The mapping of device sectors to flash pages is not one to one - instead there is an internal mapping maintained that is not unlike the way a filesystem maps the blocks of a very large file onto a block device.
So if the SSD controller needs to overwrite a sector it is almost certainly not going to erase a flash page and rewrite it in place, rather it is much more likely to write the flash page in an empty area and change the internal mapping. Then the old page can be placed on a list of pages to be cleared for future use.
And yes, SSDs keep spare storage around so they can do this even when a drive is completely full. The write latency (including a device cache flush) isn't ideal, but in most cases it is a lot better than a traditional hard drive.
It was great, as long as it wasn't a problem going out to lunch when the garbage collector kicked in. Machines are much faster now, but watching your network stack grind to a halt for several hundred milliseconds can't be fun for anything that needs hard real time performance. VoIP for example.
Depending on the storage stack you are using, that may have no effect at all. No guarantees on any copy on write filesystem or SSD, for example. On an SSD, if you overwrite every available sector, the original data may still be in an overflow area, although somewhat hard to get at there.
it is illegal for workers to delay scabs from taking their jobs.
Their jobs? If you don't want to keep a job, not showing up for work is a great start. Now of course it is unfortunate that wealthy people own most of Verizon, but that is not the sort of problem that is going to be solved by demanding above market wages and benefits. You could run for Congress and promote a national property tax for example. Surely there are plenty of like minded people out there who would like to see the same thing.
This means the patent holder is typically faced with losing his intellectual property rights altogether.
Unless the probability of independent invention of the same thing over the next twenty years or so is vanishingly small, you have no business being granted a government monopoly in the first place. It also means that whatever you "invented" wasn't much of an invention at all, just a minor and altogether obvious advance on existing practice.
The problem of course is that determining what is "obvious" by this standard or any other is virtually impossible, so we get endless perversions that everyone with a clue considers more than obvious but which get government granted extortion rights anyway.
That's the purpose of vocational education, not university education.
If that were actually believed to be the case, every public university in the country would have to close its doors for lack of funding. The only reason why public universities get non-grant related funding is because they are believed to improve the economic prospects of the students and the community.
To start with, they would have to cut the schools of law, medicine, business, engineering, and every graduate program in existence. What is a masters or doctoral program good for other than preparing someone for a profession? If you cut out all the professional stuff out of a university, what you would be left with would be a high end monastery.
Not that pure academic subjects aren't interesting, they just aren't the sort of thing legislatures are going to fund completely detached from professional training. Divorced from professional training, even private universities would largely cease to exist.
The RCA patent in question (3345458) used digital electronics. Check it out.
Supposing the idea of digital character output on a raster display was non-obvious at the time it was patented, that doesn't mean it is good public policy for the government to grant an artificial seventeen year monopoly on it.
Slashdot Mirror
On the second point, if they were to release all of their hardware specs, then, it's theoretically possible for someone with a bigger budget (Intel comes to mind) to come in, build these exact same chipsets in higher quantities and undercut AMD at sales.
That is ridiculous. The specifications needed to interface with a hardware device are roughly comparable to a complete definition of a software API. The implementation details are typically thousands of times more complicated.
For example, if you had the complete interface specification for a modern desktop microprocessor (freely available, easily a couple of thousand pages), just add several hundred million dollar research and development budget, and you too can produce a compatible device with comparable performance, if you are lucky.
no attempt is offered at explaining why SPDY should be slower than plain ol' HTTP, only why it might not be faster
The author was testing SPDY over TLS, which has a significant connection startup overhead. That probably explains all the performance degradation relative to regular HTTP.
In fact, if SPDY support was ubiquitous tommorrow, I would be surprised to see SPDY+TLS used for third party ad serving for this very reason. SPDY+TLS isn't likely to be used for that without _major_ standards modifications to allow third party content to be transparently proxied through first party sites cookies and all.
Let's see if I've got this straight: "You gave me A, B, and C for free yesterday, and now you're only giving me an improved A and B for free?
What would really happen if Microsoft crippled future versions of Visual Studio Express is that a market would be created for low or no cost alternatives. That would probably be a good thing but it would be annoying for many people to convert. It probably wouldn't be too hard to port KDevelop to Windows, for example.
Have you considered that the economics of the support business change dramatically depending on how many million customers you have?
The question was not about support, but bug fixing.
For most mid-range and custom business software, fixes to anything but the most serious bugs (and often not even then) only come with a support contract. A support contract is typically both how you get bug fix releases and reasonable attention to the bugs that you would like to have fixed.
Google only paid $74k in tax on the multiple billions which Australian people and companies paid to them for services provided in Australia.
That is a function of the tax laws. The only reliable way to generate tax revenue on services provided by a foreign company is to charge a goods and services tax on purchases of those services. If the GST was not included in those figures, they are misleading. If the GST applied and was not collected, it should have been. If the GST does not apply, perhaps the powers that be should think about changing that.
It is unreasonable to expect to collect corporate income taxes from corporations that are not actually domiciled in the taxing entity. Legally speaking, it is essentially impossible. Tariffs and GSTs are about the only options.
The main problem with having thirteen months is that it is not evenly divisible into halves, quarters, thirds, etc. That results in scheduling difficulties for a lot of things.
That is probably a livable deficiency, given the other advantages though. It is much cleaner than having intercalary weeks every so many years. The proposal referred to in the original post is a scheduling, accounting, budgeting, and billing disaster.
Credit unions, on the other hand, can maintain capital only through profits from loans, investments, and certain income like fees and interchange fees
May I ask how a credit union gets its initial capital? Does it require a donation? The requirements seem strict enough that without a relatively large initial infusion, it seems like it would be next to impossible to start a credit union at all.
If the company is making a profit and you pay out distributions equivalent or greater to what you should be earning as an employee in order to avoid payroll taxes, you can get in trouble. And yes, there have been court cases about this very issue. See here, for example.
Is a PDF reader written in Javascript going to be as fast as a PDF reader written in a standard compiled language?
No.
A perfect vacuum is at absolute zero. But the thing is there are no perfect vacuums - electromagnetic radiation for example traverses vacuums rather well and gives an effective equilibrium temperature to the not-so-perfect vacuum itself. Random EM radiation plus cosmic rays and solar wind is what makes the equilibrium temperature of a typical near earth vacuum about 4K instead of 0K.
If you want to measure this, you put a small thermometer into the appropriate test environment, wait a sufficiently long amount of time until the extra heat radiates away (or is absorbed) and now your thermometer reads the same as the temperature of the environment it is in, even if it is a vacuum. Of course this has to be done in the shade, if you have a bunch of light coming from one direction, that is not really a thermal equilibrium with the random contents of the "vacuum", and the temperature will rise much higher. If it is not random, it is not really thermal, but rather some other form of energy transfer.
It should be pointed out that the temperature and thermal conductivity are quite different. It is of course harder to heat up an object with poor thermal conductivity, but if you wait long enough both the highly conductive objects (like metal) and poorly conductive objects (like a near vacuum) will indeed reach equilibrium at the same temperature.
Chaffetz is not a senator either, but rather a member of the House of Representatives.
On the slowest 32 bit processor tested (32 bit, ARM v4, 75 Mhz), NIST benchmarked Skein using portable C code at just under 1 megabyte / sec. That is about twice as slow as SHA-2 on the same processor, and certainly slow enough that you might notice in the case you mention. On modern 64 bit processor (Intel Q6600, x86_64, 2.4 Ghz), more like 286 MB / sec for Skein, about twice as fast as SHA-2. See here (pdf).
The striking difference between 32 bit and 64 bit implementations is much more than I would have guessed, but that may be merely a matter of optimization. For now it looks like a good excuse to use SHA-1 or SHA-2 when doing the sort of thing you describe on slow processors. For something like SSL or IPSEC, you aren't likely to notice the difference, because the bandwidth to a typical mobile device just isn't that high.
You have got to be kidding. Implementing a hash algorithm in a scripting language is an inside joke. The overhead of the language in this case is easily ten thousand times the overhead of the actual calculations, and more likely ten times that.
A slightly slower than usual hash algorithm is not likely to be noticeable on a modern client, even a handheld device.
All else equal, a 64 bit algorithm should get roughly twice the amount of work done per operation as a comparable 32 bit algorithm, so the performance overhead on 32 bit architectures isn't nearly as bad as it looks. Ten to twenty percent maybe.
And if you are really concerned about performance, you write an implementation in assembly language.
If it only happens below 5% free space, you can always partition your drive leaving 5% unused at the end...
But I can see why for streaming, non-random access applications like video a traditional hard drive could be a lot better.
Modern SSDs don't work like that. The mapping of device sectors to flash pages is not one to one - instead there is an internal mapping maintained that is not unlike the way a filesystem maps the blocks of a very large file onto a block device.
So if the SSD controller needs to overwrite a sector it is almost certainly not going to erase a flash page and rewrite it in place, rather it is much more likely to write the flash page in an empty area and change the internal mapping. Then the old page can be placed on a list of pages to be cleared for future use.
And yes, SSDs keep spare storage around so they can do this even when a drive is completely full. The write latency (including a device cache flush) isn't ideal, but in most cases it is a lot better than a traditional hard drive.
It was great, as long as it wasn't a problem going out to lunch when the garbage collector kicked in. Machines are much faster now, but watching your network stack grind to a halt for several hundred milliseconds can't be fun for anything that needs hard real time performance. VoIP for example.
Depending on the storage stack you are using, that may have no effect at all. No guarantees on any copy on write filesystem or SSD, for example. On an SSD, if you overwrite every available sector, the original data may still be in an overflow area, although somewhat hard to get at there.
it is illegal for workers to delay scabs from taking their jobs.
Their jobs? If you don't want to keep a job, not showing up for work is a great start. Now of course it is unfortunate that wealthy people own most of Verizon, but that is not the sort of problem that is going to be solved by demanding above market wages and benefits. You could run for Congress and promote a national property tax for example. Surely there are plenty of like minded people out there who would like to see the same thing.
This means the patent holder is typically faced with losing his intellectual property rights altogether.
Unless the probability of independent invention of the same thing over the next twenty years or so is vanishingly small, you have no business being granted a government monopoly in the first place. It also means that whatever you "invented" wasn't much of an invention at all, just a minor and altogether obvious advance on existing practice.
The problem of course is that determining what is "obvious" by this standard or any other is virtually impossible, so we get endless perversions that everyone with a clue considers more than obvious but which get government granted extortion rights anyway.
pedantic: "paid developers"
That's the purpose of vocational education, not university education.
If that were actually believed to be the case, every public university in the country would have to close its doors for lack of funding. The only reason why public universities get non-grant related funding is because they are believed to improve the economic prospects of the students and the community.
To start with, they would have to cut the schools of law, medicine, business, engineering, and every graduate program in existence. What is a masters or doctoral program good for other than preparing someone for a profession? If you cut out all the professional stuff out of a university, what you would be left with would be a high end monastery.
Not that pure academic subjects aren't interesting, they just aren't the sort of thing legislatures are going to fund completely detached from professional training. Divorced from professional training, even private universities would largely cease to exist.
The RCA patent in question (3345458) used digital electronics. Check it out.
Supposing the idea of digital character output on a raster display was non-obvious at the time it was patented, that doesn't mean it is good public policy for the government to grant an artificial seventeen year monopoly on it.
The word of the day is "copyright assignment". q.v.