Self-replying in the absence of edit feature: Here's what I think has happened. Slashdot picked up the story on July 2, Ars guys read it among the stories from another news outlets, and produced their own breakdown of the same events.
Then ScuttleMonkey has read the Ars story, and thus the circle has been completed. The only question is: do the Slashdot editors read their own site?
Yes, it looks like a troll, nothing to do with Microsoft or ASUS whatsoever.
If you google rdcpro@hotmail.com email address from the WHOIS record of that domain, you'll find this:
"I am an independant web and application developer, specializing in Content Management and Collaboration. My company, CollaborationPeople, Inc. serves clients in Seattle, Washington and the greater Puget Sound Region, although I have clients as far away as Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, CA and Portland, Or."... Regards, Mike Sharp
Wait a minute, are you implying that the US attacked Afghanistan to spur the stalled production of opium? I can't see other parallels to the Opium wars here.
Frankly I indeed wanted to point out a possible involvement of the US in the flourishing Afghanistan drug business, but you went even further than that!
On another note, I wouldn't exactly call heroin a "recreational" drug.
Interesting that while US is trying to do something about Mexican drug smuggling (probably because it borders with US), they turn the blind eye (or even worse) to the Afghanistan drug production, which floods the Europe with locally-produced opium. It is estimated that Afghanistan is accountable for more than 90% of world's opium production, and most of it goes to the Europe.
It is also worth to note that before the US invasion of Afghanistan, Taliban was able to contain the problem - the drug production declined some 94% during its reign. But ever since the fall of Taliban regime, opium production has continued to rise each year at an alarming rate:
The survey does not attempt to count back-end servers (application or database servers) or servers other than web (HTTP) servers.
One more thing: some hosting companies provide private network only servers, not visible outside of the virtual private network assigned to the customer. Perfect for the backend. Softlayer does that, for example.
Re:Could have been a huge deal.
on
When Comets Attack
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Alas - Lenin was in Geneva in 1908. Hardly Western Russia, or even Eastern Europe.
BTW, I think the GP means that if the explosion was off a few hours, it would have happened almost exactly over St. Petersburg - a capital of Russia back then.
There's nothing mysterious about the impact shape
on
When Comets Attack
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It was shown back in 1966 that the butterfly shape of the fallen trees may be caused by the several explosions combined with the ballistic wave.
The Russian researchers built a model of the site (1:10000), with explosion modeled by an explosive cord with an explosive charge at the end. The forest model was built from the tiny flexible wires with plastic crowns.
They have shown that placing the cord at some inclination angle (close to 30 degrees) the impact shape was clearly resembling the butterfly shape of Tunguska event.
I guess 50% of slashdot visitors do not even finish the summary to begin with:) Even less are going to the linked source. And watching the video? Unlikely!
You probably mean CHDK for Canon Powershot series cameras, which isn't firmware per se - it's a firmware addon, and you don't flash it into the camera, but load it separately from the inserted flash card. From here: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK
CHDK does not replace the original firmware, and does not make any permanent changes to the camera. Instead, it is loaded from the SD card, either at startup or using the built in menu.
You are correct that it's open source indeed.
I'm using it on Powershot A650 and its feature set is amazing. The killer feature is probably recording RAW files, but there are many many more cool things to explore.
Just imagine the things possible to achieve with such camera if the firmware and specifications were open.
Ok, I should have been more clear, of course I mean the web apps performance, serving pure static content doesn't require much CPU.
One could say that SPECjbb2005 test could be used to approximate the web apps performance, but I wouldn't call "the performance of server side Java by emulating a three-tier client/server system (with emphasis on the middle tier)" a typical web server workload. I mean, a PHP forum or CMS is much more common on the web servers out there than a 3-tier threaded Java app.
Seeing how these new server CPU's handle various database tasks would be great, too.
I find it disappointing that the test of the supposed server-oriented processors does not include web server tests - after all it's probably the largest market for such processors.
I mean, does anyone really care about Folding@Home number these processors can crunch? Or "VRAD map build benchmark"? WTF?
So it would be interesting to know what President Saakashvili was thinking when, on Thursday night, after days of relatively low-level shelling around the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali (which both South Ossetians and Georgians blamed on each other), and literally hours after he announced on state-controlled TV the cessation of hostilities, he ordered a full-scale assault on Tskhinvali. And mind you, the assault could only succeed if the Georgian units went right through the battalion of Russian troops serving as international peacekeepers according to agreements signed by Tbilisi itself in the 1990s.
Under the circumstances, the Russian forces had three choices: to surrender, to run away, or to fight. And fight they did - particularly because many of the Russian soldiers were in fact South Ossetians with families and friends in Tskhinvali under Georgian air, tank, and artillery attacks. Saakashvili was reckless to count on proceeding with a blitzkrieg in South Ossetia without a Russian counterattack.
Basically they've got tangled in the implementation details and decided to play it safe with OpenGL 3.0 instead of starting from scratch.
======== What happened to Longs Peak?
In January 2008 the ARB decided to change directions. At that point it had become clear that doing Longs Peak, although a great effort, wasn't going to happen. We ran into details that we couldn't resolve cleanly in a timely manner. For example, state objects. The idea there is that of all state is immutable. But when we were deciding where to put some of the sample ops state, we ran into issues. If the alpha test is immutable, is the alpha ref value also? If we do so, what does this mean to a developer? How many (100s?) of objects does a developer need to manage? Should we split sample ops state into more than one object? Those kind of issues were taking a lot of time to decide.
Furthermore, the "opt in" method in Longs Peak to move an existing application forward has its pros and cons. The model of creating another context to write Longs Peak code in is very clean. It'll work great for anyone who doesn't have a large code base that they want to move forward incrementally. I suspect that that is most of the developers that are active in this forum. However, there are a class of developers for which this would have been a, potentially very large, burden. This clearly is a controversial topic, and has its share of proponents and opponents.
While we were discussing this, the clock didn't stop ticking. The OpenGL API *has to* provide access to the latest graphics hardware features. OpenGL wasn't doing that anymore in a timely manner. OpenGL was behind in features. All graphics hardware vendors have been shipping hardware with many more features available than OpenGL was exposing. Yes, vendor specific extensions were and are available to fill the gap, but that is not the same as having a core API including those new features. An API that does not expose hardware capabilities is a dead API.
Thus, prioritization was needed, and we made several decisons.
1) We set a goal of exposing hardware functionality of the latest generations of hardware by this Siggraph. Hence, the OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 API you guys all seem to love;\)
2) We decided on a formal mechanism to remove functionality from the API. We fully realize that the existing API has been around for a long time, has cruft and is inconsistent with its treatment of objects (how many object models are in the OpenGL 3.0 spec? You count). In its shortest form, removing functionality is a two-step process. First, functionality will be marked "deprecated" in the specification. A long list of functionality is already marked deprecated in the OpenGL 3.0 spec. Second, a future revision of the core spec will actually remove the deprecated functionality. After that, the ARB has options. It can decide to do a third step, and fold some of the removed functionality into a profile. Profiles are optional to implement (more below) and its functionality might still be very important to a sub-set of the OpenGL market. Note that we also decided that new functionality does not have to, and will likely not work with, deprecated functionality. That will make the spec easier to write, read and understand, and drivers easier to implement.
3) We decided to provide a way to create a forward-compatible context. That is an OpenGL 3.0 context with all deprecated features removed. Giving you, as a developer, a preview of what a next version of OpenGL might look like. Drivers can take advantage of this, and might be able to optimize certain code paths in the forward-compatible context only. This is described in the WGL_ARB_create_context extension spec.
4) We decided to have a formal way of defining profiles. During the Longs Peak design phase, we ran into disagreement over what features to remove from the API. Longs Peak removed quite a lot of features as you might remember. Not coincidentally, most of those features are marked deprecated in OpenGL 3
Their goal isn't to copy F/LOSS or the principles of open source movement,but to influence the general public (or at least those pointy-haired guys in charge) so it will associate MS products with Open Source and openness in general. This rhetoric does just that, nothing more, nothing less.
The recent "opening" of some of MS protocols and specifications blends well into this PR strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
Self-replying in the absence of edit feature:
Here's what I think has happened. Slashdot picked up the story on July 2, Ars guys read it among the stories from another news outlets, and produced their own breakdown of the same events.
Then ScuttleMonkey has read the Ars story, and thus the circle has been completed. The only question is: do the Slashdot editors read their own site?
I could swear I already saw this a few days ago here, on Slashdot. And indeed:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/184251/Browser-Vendors-Force-W3C-To-Scrap-HTML-5-Codecs?from=rss
five years ago, not a few months.
Since no one so far cared to provide a link to the actual Chromium Linux builds, here it is:
http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/
Yes, it looks like a troll, nothing to do with Microsoft or ASUS whatsoever.
If you google rdcpro@hotmail.com email address from the WHOIS record of that domain, you'll find this:
"I am an independant web and application developer, specializing in Content Management and Collaboration. My company, CollaborationPeople, Inc. serves clients in Seattle, Washington and the greater Puget Sound Region, although I have clients as far away as Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, CA and Portland, Or." ...
Regards,
Mike Sharp
rdcpro@hotmail.com"
http://www.experts-exchange.com/M_1301691.html
And also this site:
http://rdcpro.com/
Wait a minute, are you implying that the US attacked Afghanistan to spur the stalled production of opium? I can't see other parallels to the Opium wars here.
Frankly I indeed wanted to point out a possible involvement of the US in the flourishing Afghanistan drug business, but you went even further than that!
On another note, I wouldn't exactly call heroin a "recreational" drug.
Interesting that while US is trying to do something about Mexican drug smuggling (probably because it borders with US), they turn the blind eye (or even worse) to the Afghanistan drug production, which floods the Europe with locally-produced opium. It is estimated that Afghanistan is accountable for more than 90% of world's opium production, and most of it goes to the Europe.
It is also worth to note that before the US invasion of Afghanistan, Taliban was able to contain the problem - the drug production declined some 94% during its reign.
But ever since the fall of Taliban regime, opium production has continued to rise each year at an alarming rate:
"The increase in opium production in Afghanistan was from 185 metric tons in 2001 to 6,100 metric tons in 2006." http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/afghanistan/drugs-market.htm
One has to wonder about the US involvement in this:
"Who benefits from the Afghan Opium Trade?" http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3294
Evidence suggests first zombie Mac botnet is active: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/04/evidence-suggests-first-zombie-mac-botnet-is-active.ars
They also do not count non-HTTP servers:
The survey does not attempt to count back-end servers (application or database servers) or servers other than web (HTTP) servers.
One more thing: some hosting companies provide private network only servers, not visible outside of the virtual private network assigned to the customer. Perfect for the backend.
Softlayer does that, for example.
Alas - Lenin was in Geneva in 1908. Hardly Western Russia, or even Eastern Europe.
BTW, I think the GP means that if the explosion was off a few hours, it would have happened almost exactly over St. Petersburg - a capital of Russia back then.
It was shown back in 1966 that the butterfly shape of the fallen trees may be caused by the several explosions combined with the ballistic wave.
The Russian researchers built a model of the site (1:10000), with explosion modeled by an explosive cord with an explosive charge at the end. The forest model was built from the tiny flexible wires with plastic crowns.
They have shown that placing the cord at some inclination angle (close to 30 degrees) the impact shape was clearly resembling the butterfly shape of Tunguska event.
The abstract (in Russian) is here:
http://tunguska.tsc.ru/ru/science/conf/1966/zotkin/
Maybe you mean Russian Tzar?
You see, Lenin came to power only in late 1917...
I guess 50% of slashdot visitors do not even finish the summary to begin with :)
Even less are going to the linked source. And watching the video? Unlikely!
Here's "lost in translation" explanation from linked article comments:
http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/36591
Yes it does, and surprisingly, so do many many more Sony products:
http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/search.html
Seeing that more than two dozen recent Sony cameras already run Linux ( http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/category14.html ), I find this new piece quite obsolete.
You probably mean CHDK for Canon Powershot series cameras, which isn't firmware per se - it's a firmware addon, and you don't flash it into the camera, but load it separately from the inserted flash card. From here: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK
CHDK does not replace the original firmware, and does not make any permanent changes to the camera. Instead, it is loaded from the SD card, either at startup or using the built in menu.
You are correct that it's open source indeed.
I'm using it on Powershot A650 and its feature set is amazing. The killer feature is probably recording RAW files, but there are many many more cool things to explore.
Just imagine the things possible to achieve with such camera if the firmware and specifications were open.
A notebook with Fedora 8 (2.6.26.6-49_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8) has survived the New Year leap.
Here's a followup to this Slashdot story:
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/2009/01/01/post-leap-seconds/
Ok, I should have been more clear, of course I mean the web apps performance, serving pure static content doesn't require much CPU.
One could say that SPECjbb2005 test could be used to approximate the web apps performance, but I wouldn't call "the performance of server side Java by emulating a three-tier client/server system (with emphasis on the middle tier)" a typical web server workload. I mean, a PHP forum or CMS is much more common on the web servers out there than a 3-tier threaded Java app.
Seeing how these new server CPU's handle various database tasks would be great, too.
Don't other tests, especially those involving HD encoding, use RAM, IO and chipset to run?
I mean, all these semi-synthetic benchmarks tell me nothing about how the system would fare in the real-world usage such as web hosting.
I find it disappointing that the test of the supposed server-oriented processors does not include web server tests - after all it's probably the largest market for such processors.
I mean, does anyone really care about Folding@Home number these processors can crunch? Or "VRAD map build benchmark"? WTF?
Indeed, one has to wonder.
This article asks the same questions and gives some insight into it:
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/08/guest_post_by_d_1/
So it would be interesting to know what President Saakashvili was thinking when, on Thursday night, after days of relatively low-level shelling around the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali (which both South Ossetians and Georgians blamed on each other), and literally hours after he announced on state-controlled TV the cessation of hostilities, he ordered a full-scale assault on Tskhinvali. And mind you, the assault could only succeed if the Georgian units went right through the battalion of Russian troops serving as international peacekeepers according to agreements signed by Tbilisi itself in the 1990s.
Under the circumstances, the Russian forces had three choices: to surrender, to run away, or to fight. And fight they did - particularly because many of the Russian soldiers were in fact South Ossetians with families and friends in Tskhinvali under Georgian air, tank, and artillery attacks. Saakashvili was reckless to count on proceeding with a blitzkrieg in South Ossetia without a Russian counterattack.
Surely it's a conspiracy! Apparently not.
They just do not have good enough data for the whole region:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/where-is-georgia-on-google-maps.html
Basically they've got tangled in the implementation details and decided to play it safe with OpenGL 3.0 instead of starting from scratch.
========
What happened to Longs Peak?
In January 2008 the ARB decided to change directions. At that point it had become clear that doing Longs Peak, although a great effort, wasn't going to happen. We ran into details that we couldn't resolve cleanly in a timely manner. For example, state objects. The idea there is that of all state is immutable. But when we were deciding where to put some of the sample ops state, we ran into issues. If the alpha test is immutable, is the alpha ref value also? If we do so, what does this mean to a developer? How many (100s?) of objects does a developer need to manage? Should we split sample ops state into more than one object? Those kind of issues were taking a lot of time to decide.
Furthermore, the "opt in" method in Longs Peak to move an existing application forward has its pros and cons. The model of creating another context to write Longs Peak code in is very clean. It'll work great for anyone who doesn't have a large code base that they want to move forward incrementally. I suspect that that is most of the developers that are active in this forum. However, there are a class of developers for which this would have been a, potentially very large, burden. This clearly is a controversial topic, and has its share of proponents and opponents.
While we were discussing this, the clock didn't stop ticking. The OpenGL API *has to* provide access to the latest graphics hardware features. OpenGL wasn't doing that anymore in a timely manner. OpenGL was behind in features. All graphics hardware vendors have been shipping hardware with many more features available than OpenGL was exposing. Yes, vendor specific extensions were and are available to fill the gap, but that is not the same as having a core API including those new features. An API that does not expose hardware capabilities is a dead API.
Thus, prioritization was needed, and we made several decisons.
1) We set a goal of exposing hardware functionality of the latest generations of hardware by this Siggraph. Hence, the OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 API you guys all seem to love ;\)
2) We decided on a formal mechanism to remove functionality from the API. We fully realize that the existing API has been around for a long time, has cruft and is inconsistent with its treatment of objects (how many object models are in the OpenGL 3.0 spec? You count). In its shortest form, removing functionality is a two-step process. First, functionality will be marked "deprecated" in the specification. A long list of functionality is already marked deprecated in the OpenGL 3.0 spec. Second, a future revision of the core spec will actually remove the deprecated functionality. After that, the ARB has options. It can decide to do a third step, and fold some of the removed functionality into a profile. Profiles are optional to implement (more below) and its functionality might still be very important to a sub-set of the OpenGL market. Note that we also decided that new functionality does not have to, and will likely not work with, deprecated functionality. That will make the spec easier to write, read and understand, and drivers easier to implement.
3) We decided to provide a way to create a forward-compatible context. That is an OpenGL 3.0 context with all deprecated features removed. Giving you, as a developer, a preview of what a next version of OpenGL might look like. Drivers can take advantage of this, and might be able to optimize certain code paths in the forward-compatible context only. This is described in the WGL_ARB_create_context extension spec.
4) We decided to have a formal way of defining profiles. During the Longs Peak design phase, we ran into disagreement over what features to remove from the API. Longs Peak removed quite a lot of features as you might remember. Not coincidentally, most of those features are marked deprecated in OpenGL 3
Their goal isn't to copy F/LOSS or the principles of open source movement,but to influence the general public (or at least those pointy-haired guys in charge) so it will associate MS products with Open Source and openness in general. This rhetoric does just that, nothing more, nothing less.
The recent "opening" of some of MS protocols and specifications blends well into this PR strategy.
Rivatuner can plot a nice graph of local and non-local video memory in use, among a zillion of other cool things.
Some news outlets have reported that the botnet was of Ukranian origin.
Also check out this posting by nenastnyj promoting the OCR/CAPTCHA recognition service:
http://gofuckbiz.com/showthread.php?p=10620#post10620