> the dividing line is legal OR illegal, so if it's illegal, GET OUT
Your faith in the law seems odd, considering how much the people who make them suck. (As you said, you wouldn't trust them to watch your vegetable stand...) I'm all for doing things the legal way, but that can be a problem when the gov't decides that they don't want to let people in. If you get fucked over while trying to immigrate (or even just return to university from a visit home), what can you do about it? That article mentions that not letting in students who want to come to the US could be a mistake, because there will be less smart, motivated people in the country in the future.
BTW, In your rant, you said people don't even try to hijack El Al flights anymore. Not true. Maybe he needs a psychiatrist more than a jail.
I wish more people would take your advice and overthrow their mofo dictators, before development brings television to every home and results in a population too complacent to challenge anything, because they'd have to miss an episode of Survivor...
I poked around on google news, and it seems that just recently some (literally) crazy aussi computer engineer tried to hijack a plane (with wooden stakes), but got his ass kicked, because he's not Buffy, and the flight crew weren't vamps... The guy is a committed (to a mental instituion:) Christian, and was raving about Armageddon.
No sane people have hijacked planes lately, except in Israel. This guy didn't figure out the one-time-only thing with that kind of hijacking, so you've got to wonder about his sanity. He tried to rush the cockpit on an El Al flight, and got his ass kicked.
Oh, and I found this insane diatribe from Pravda. I wonder whether that's the same Pravda as during the Soviet era, because they're talking about the poor capitalists getting fucked over by the Earth Summit people, and how George Bush is saving the world from sustainable development, and how that's great...
Not to mention this site. Watch out for those Armenians...
It took me a long time after Sept. 11 to figure out why so many people would go so far as to claim that it changed the world, etc. Since I had already been paying attention to world events, and I was aware that there are lots of reasons why people might want to hurt the US, I wasn't "shocked" when I first heard about the terrorist attacks (on the radio, which is less shocking than TV, I suppose). I was surprised, but in the same sort of way I am when I hear about nasty stuff being inflicted upon people anywhere in the world (e.g. south american death squads trained at the School of the Americas), or upon the environment (e.g. big corps getting away with dumping toxic waste). The fact that I'm coldly rational was also a factor. It's not like I knew anyone who was killed that day, so why should I feel worse than for all the people killed by drunk drivers, for example. Obviously it's terrible for families who lost people, esp. when their neighbours lost people too. I guess that really makes it feel big for the people involved.
Sept. 11 did change the world for some people, because they never worried about any of the bad things happening in the world before then. Suddenly waking up to the harsh reality of the world must have been a shock for complacent non-Chomsky-listening people:) It's not that Sept. 11 actually changed the world, it's that it did significantly change a lot of people's view and conception of it.
There's a huge problem with being more worried about terrorism than about the creation of all-powerful state agencies run with no accountability. Unfortunately that seems to be the case with American voters.
Yeah, see if you can do something about that. I'm still plotting the revolution up here in Canada, and we don't seem to have much influence on things down south.
I've heard that too, but I think it's bullshit. If you get blown up right some good, you die from your brain being in lots of little pieces (all of them exposed to oxygen). I think it makes sense to say you die from lack of oxygen in the brain in cases where the brain remains intact.
> Second, copyrights do not help creators, for every creator they help there are thousnads that they restrict and harm.
That's a weak argument. Copyright helps the few good creators that everybody wants to copy. Without copyright, there would be floods of bad e.g. Star Wars books, because so many people want to write about it. (heh, bad example. There are currently floods of bad SW books...) OTOH, it's not that bad as long as people have some mechanism for separating the wheat from the chaff, such as book reviews. Having more drek out there makes people more dependent on book reviewers to tell them what is good. There is certainly a case to be made for not preventing people from creating what they want, because the good stuff will win on its own merits anyway.
One thing copyrights do is protect a creator's work from being used in ways they don't like. It's not just about money: Some musicians wouldn't let McDonalds use their song in an add for any amount of money. Similarly, other musicians wouldn't let George Bush use their music in an election campaign. It's about rights other than property rights. This obviously applies to paintings, writings, and so on.
Copyrights these days are really screwed up, esp. since they seem to be growing fast enough to starve the public domain indefinitely, but the principle behind them makes some sense. For functional creations like software, it might be more beneficial to not give copyright on code. (I would be happy to buy a game, and know that I was paying for the artwork and other non-executable information, and that the source and binaries were on the CD in the retail box.)
Many people on both sides of the debate claim that a majority of public opinion is behind their position. Some poll questions have elicited nearly 50:50 responses, IIRC, while others have shown a significant majority for one side or the other.
Any foreigners interested in what Candians think about US foreign policy should take people's claims with a grain of salt. Try to find some news stories about opinion polls that asked different questions.
Suffice it to say that many people feel very strongly on both sides. Phone-in shows are full of people spouting off about how they're proud to be Canadian because x, or they're ashamed to be Canadian because y, or whatever. (Incidentally, claiming to be ashamed of your country is not going to convince anyone to agree with you. People who start off their phone-in tirade with such a claim invariably add nothing to the debate.)
More people might vote, but they'll still be the same people who don't care about it, and are more impressed by image than substance. Getting elected these days is more about showmanship than good ideas, integrity, or even politics. Money spent on advertising is _strongly_ correlated to election victory, which either indicates that advertizing works, or that people are more likely to vote for politician with rich allies. Given that political advertizing is all about image, and maybe some grandiose promises, it's a bad thing that people are so dependent on the ads they see to make their voting decisions. Online voting will make this worse, because now some of the people who don't care just don't bother voting at all. If they can vote online, they might be sitting at home watching TV, and see an ad (if ads are allowed to be shown during polling hours), or something about one of the candidates that makes them decide to vote for that person without knowing anything about what policies that candidate supports. After voting, they'll probably stop feeling guilty for not voting, like in the past, since they think they've done their civic duty just by voting. Of course, they haven't. They've diluted the vote of people who are familiar with the candidates. The media is a critical part of democracy, but biased media (check out FAIR) and flashy ads don't help.
I think the Mafia and Micros~1 are a lot more impressive than lamers who try to make money by gaming the legal system to extract money they don't really deserve. It's harder, and thus more impressive, to do things without resorting to misusing the legal system. (It's so easy to do bad things with the legal system that whining in court has become a major part of some company's strategies; At least that's my impression.)
True, the core's (basically) the same, but I think introducing a new processor mode and instruction set to go with it counts for something. All the integer units had to be 64bit now, and it probably took some changes to get everything to fit with twice as wide signal paths.
> !(whole new generation) != same generation
I usually think about generations as integers, and thus they're either equal or non-equal. If you're going to use fuzzy logic-style comparisons, then yeah, I guess there's too much that's still the same to say "whole new gen", but the new stuff does warrant a description of "new gen". OTOH, who says you have to fundamentally change the way the core works (like going from Alpha 21164 (in-order superscalar) to Alpha 21264 (OO execution)) to call it a new generation? I don't really care, since I want to know the tech details anyway, instead of judging by who's calling it a "whole new" or just "new" generation!
A few months ago I was looking at buying a new computer, and I tried to find out anything about whole-life environmental impact of computing gear. i.e. including toxic waste produced during manufacturing, and ease of disposal/recycling. It was pretty hard to find anything useful about specific products. I want to know which hard drive was produced in the most environmentally friendly manner, even within the same company. The only web pages I could find were about laws in different countries; I don't think I even found anything about any specific manufacturers. One interesting site I found was the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Other than that, there was some stuff from greenpeace IIRC, and some gov't web sites about international treaties.
Does anyone know how to buy an environmentally friendly computer?
>Slashdot whines about how dumb that is. >... >Slashdot cheers.
Slashdot both loves and hates everything. Why? Because different people read and post on different stories, and the opinions of the/. crowd are extremely diverse (of course, there aren't many who like everything MS has ever done...)
I'd love to see games get distributed in source form, but with copyrights on the data files, so you can hack the source but you still have to buy stuff to use it. That would give you freedom while still sticking to the conventional model for selling software, so it wouldn't be such a leap for companies to take. That way, anyone could compile even old games for a new CPU. This wouldn't work so well for non-games, where the artwork/data files are a much smaller portion of the whole thing, and free substitutes would probably be created.
It's not the Opteron that can't use the extra registers, it's the software. Machine code is compiled to refer to specific registers by name, so if the software wasn't compiled to refer to the extra registers, of course it's not going to be able to use them.
The point is that you _can't_ compile software to use the extra regs in 32bit mode on win32, since the OS doesn't run the CPU in a mode that supports it. (MS is working on x86-64 Windows, but tomshardware didn't/couldn't get a copy.) Hypertransport and built-in mem controllers still help, of course.
64bit pointers take up more space in your data structures (like linked lists and trees), and thus take more room in the data cache, and take longer to load from memory, slowing everything else down (slightly, of course). It's not a big problem, but there's non-zero overhead. I'm sure adding more general purpose int and FP registers, and other architectural changes, more than makes up for it.
> They are too abstract and unreliable to influence smart buyers.
Unless you're actually choosing a computer based on how fast it can run crafty (the chess engine), gcc, perl, gzip, or bzip2. Those programs are part of the SPEC2000 benchmark suite. It is interesting to note that Athlons tend to run crafty relatively faster than the other benchmarks, probably because it's harder to predict branches or something along the lines of chess being unpredictable and thus more likely to screw up the P4 than the Athlon. (For a P4 and an Athlon with equal SPECINT2000 scores, the Athlon has a higher crafty score than the P4.) My dad ended up getting a P4 laptop anyway, and it's faster than any of the other computers we have, so we're pretty happy with it, so that just goes to show that CPU speed isn't everything.
A 64-bit processor can natively calculate the important 64-bit floating point format ("double precision" - precise up to 15 decimal places) and is therefore faster - this is the main reason why 64-bit processors take the lead in the floating point benchmarks.
That's pure bullshit. x87 floating point has always had 80bit precision in hardware, even when the 80x87 FPU was a co-processor on a separate chip from the x86 CPU (back in the days of 286, 386SX, and 486SX). "64bit CPU" can mean several different things, including address size (i.e. sizeof(char *) == 8), or integer register size (i.e. sizeof(int) == 8), but never size of floating point registers. Everyone has at least 64bit (IEEE double precision) floating point registers. Some have larger registers, such as x87, where sizeof(long double) == 10 (80 bits), or Sun SPARC's 128bit hardware floating point.
The real reasons for 64bit machines having better FP performance than x86 is probably only due to the fact that x86 sucks at FP, because it doesn't have enough registers. Not to mention the fact that until everyone started using SSE for even non-parallel FP ops, it was saddled with the stack-based x87. 64bit arches can't be backward compatible with ia32 (while running 64bit code), so they simply use good floating point design. More registers helps because you can do software pipelining, and have more intermediate results kept around, which is good for calculating big formulae where there are lots of common sub-expressions.
(BTW, some floating point hardware only runs at full speed in non-IEEE compliant modes, even if they have 64bit wide FP registers. What I said about everyone having IEEE double precision hardware is thus not strictly true. The differences are usually in FP exceptions (i.e. whether you can tell exactly which instruction caused a divide-by-zero) and rounding modes. This only matters for numerical algorithms whose stability depends on e.g. rounding toward zero, instead of always rounding down. This is what gcc -ffast-math or -mno-ieee-fp affects, and why games, and pretty much anything except Octave use that.)
bullshit. If they're doing this on purpose to make it hard to break, they're not going to connect some pins you can short to turn it off, or it would defeat the purpose of it (stopping vendors from selling fake O/Ced systems). This would be implemented inside the CPU, so you'd have to crack open the plastic case, at the very least. If they can implement their timer and pulse-counter on the same silicon as the rest of the CPU, you'd have to hack the silicon in a clean-room. That's nice for people with access to a high-quality clean-room (and something to hack silicon with!), but most people would buy a brand-new Alpha workstation instead of buying the gear it would take to even _try_ to O/C such a CPU. (An on-chip implementation would need a high-frequency oscillator, but you can't make inductors in an IC. They'd probably have some sort of laser-trimmed RC oscillator if they did it all on chip.) Even if there were some off-chip components, like a quartz oscillator to provide a reference frequency (they could use a standard freq, and multiply it on chip according to the rated clock speed, which could be burned into a specially prepared area with a laser or something), you'd have to crack open the CPU, which might be mechanically very difficult to do without damaging the silicon, esp. if Intel wanted that to be the case. You could then replace the reference quartz crystal with a faster one. (As long as underclocking was allowed, you could use crystal twice as fast, and then you wouldn't have to replace it every time you wanted to try a different speed.)
Anyway, the issue here isn't whether O/C'ing is still possible, it's whether it's worth it. If you're more likely to destroy the CPU (while trying to "unlock" it, or otherwise) than you are to make it run faster, it doesn't matter what's theoretically possible.
Intel should sic the lawyer on people who sell relabeled CPUs instead of doing annoying shit like this. Buying a 3GHz CPU means you're buying a piece of silicon, and a guarantee that it will work right at 3GHz. All bets are off if you take it beyond that; The guarantee doesn't apply, but it's still your piece of silicon. Not being able to try it at higher speeds makes it less valuable. I hope, as the article suggested, that any CPUs incorporating this are noticeably cheaper than they would otherwise be. I really like stable computers, so I only overclock my older computers that need to feel a bit faster:) (and where overclockability is pretty well tested for that kind of CPU), and even then only by a little bit.
But if your computer crashes, it can't hurt you (excluding ridiculous situations like using your GNU system to run your pacemaker, that anyone could trivially avoid.), unlike your car.
Or are people chomping at the bit to sue Intel when their overclocked system crashes and they lose data? I hope rabid lawyers aren't forcing Intel into this, and I doubt that's the case.
There is no safety issue. The only issue I'm aware of surrounding this is remarked CPUs. I don't know what's wrong with making this detectable by coding the CPU's rated clock frequency into it (by burning bits with a laser in an already set). That's what they do now, AFAIK. I think the rated speed can be read with CPUID. All you need is to get BIOS makers to check that and print a big warning when the computer boots up. People who sell overclocked systems would then have to customize the BIOS to skip that check. hmm, actually that might not be very hard, if they're already willing to go to the trouble of putting fake labels on CPUs, so that wouldn't work. If Intel got MS to put a check for O/Ced CPUs into windoze, system vendors could hack it to not print any warning messages about it. I think a legal solution to this would be better. There can't be too many of these system vendors willing to go to the trouble of hacking a BIOS and sticking a fake label on a CPU, so you just need to prosecute them. The checked-by-the-BIOS thing would stop the less hard-core unscrupulous vendors.
With option 2, murderers are eventually let back out, and kill multiple innocent people. The potential for loss of innocent lives is far greater. Murderers are much more efficient at killing people than the justice system. So what's YOUR threshold? Seriously.
Good point. I think there's a difference between the government killing someone, and someone else killing someone. Since the gov't represents the people, the people collectively have blood on their hands when they execute someone.
Executing serial killers who obviously would kill again is not too bad. My threshold doesn't exclude executing them, as long as you have very strong evidence to prove you have the right person. Some people committed murder because of very special circumstances not likely to be repeated (esp. if the murderer didn't mean to kill anyone, and tries to make sure it doesn't happen again. (Unfortunately, you can't tell what someone's thinking.)
My threshold is to have less people wrongfully executed than killed by released murderers by at least 1:1000. If I knew more statistics about this stuff, I'd be able to make a more reasonable decision on a ratio, but 1:1000 feels ok.
> What kind of an influence is he on the other inmates?
Hmm, I hadn't thought of that before. Thanks for pointing that out.
I guess I could accept the death penalty if, and only if, a very high standard of proof was required (maybe requiring DNA evidence), and it wouldn't be considered for anyone under 21, or some reasonable age, no matter what. Also, no executing the mentally retarded. I would like to come up with a way to apply it only to "hardened criminals", maybe by requiring a previous criminal record of serious (i.e. not possession of small amounts of marijuana). Unfortunately, I can't think of a reasonable condition that would make sense to put in a law. I really want to avoid executing people who could easily become productive members of society, such as writer Mumia Abu Jamal.
Counterspin is produced by the center for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. If you get your news from US media, you _need_ to listen to this weekly half-hour show. They have all their archives online back to 1996!
> it was technically legal. That's why I get annoyed when people start ranting about the "stolen" election
There are lots of things that are technically legal, but aren't the kind of thing you want your president to be doing! I think most people know that nothing is going to change what happened, and now just make a reference to it as just another dig against Bush, without spending too much time on it. (There's lots of bad stuff Bush has done since the election to talk about that would still be bad even if he had clearly won the election.)
You should listen to this report on the media-funded recount, and distorted coverage of it.
> it distracts attention away from the underlying problems and makes it harder to get mainstream support.
Good point. It sure plays well when preaching to the choir, though.
> ("Voting machine improvements? That's just another whiny democrat who can't accept that he lost!")
That's unfortunate. I hate politicians who try to find reasons not to do good things.
> Kurdish (that's the ethnic group in Northern Iraq) refugees in Germany have been > holding massive anti-war demonstrations. That's right -- the oppressed people > are against the war.
Most of the Kurds still in northern Iraq apparently support war. I don't know why they're more optimistic about the chance of something good happening, whether they just don't have good media sources to give them the idea that most who oppose war still don't like Saddam, and would like to see him removed. (Personally, I think a firing squad would be too good for Saddam, but starting a war was the wrong thing to do. Now that it's started, the damage is done with displaced refugees and destruction of stuff, and I couldn't see the US pulling out now being good for the Iraqi people, so I hope the "good guys" win soon and send Saddam to the international criminal court. I also hope that now that the American people have had a good look at what Bush is like, they won't vote for him, and will never again elect a president who would let a bunch of military goons run the show.)
Some people on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence which wasn't available when they were sentenced. That is not a technicallity.
Personally, I think it's morally wrong to risk killing even one innocent person. I can accept that many people have a higher threshold for wrongly killing people, though. What's yours? 1 innocent in a thousand people executed? 1%, 10%, 50%? 99%? Seriously.
I could maybe live with a system that had a very high standard of proof, such as good DNA evidence, and no factors which cast doubt. More guilty people would be not executed, but that's the best we can do unless we have time machines that can go back and see what happened. If we stopped throwing people in jail for most consensual crimes, that would free up a lot of resources to deal with murderers, rapists, and psychopathic CEOs. Canada is looking at reducing penalties for small amount of marijuana, but I couldn't see the US backing down in the War on Drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
> the dividing line is legal OR illegal, so if it's illegal, GET OUT
Your faith in the law seems odd, considering how much the people who make them suck. (As you said, you wouldn't trust them to watch your vegetable stand...) I'm all for doing things the legal way, but that can be a problem when the gov't decides that
they don't want to let people in. If you get fucked over while trying to immigrate (or even just return to university from a visit home), what can you do about it? That article mentions that not letting in students who want to come to the US could be a mistake, because there will be less smart, motivated people in the country in the future.
BTW, In your rant, you said people don't even try to hijack El Al flights anymore. Not true. Maybe he needs a psychiatrist more than a jail.
I wish more people would take your advice and overthrow their mofo dictators, before development brings television to every home and results in a population too complacent to challenge anything, because they'd have to miss an episode of Survivor...
I poked around on google news, and it seems that just recently some (literally) crazy aussi computer engineer tried to hijack a plane (with wooden stakes), but got his ass kicked, because he's not Buffy, and the flight crew weren't vamps... The guy is a committed (to a mental instituion:) Christian, and was raving about Armageddon.
Also, a woman wrote a threatening note to a flight attendant. She's crazy, too.
No sane people have hijacked planes lately, except in Israel. This guy didn't figure out the one-time-only thing with that kind of hijacking, so you've got to wonder about his sanity. He tried to rush the cockpit on an El Al flight, and got his ass kicked.
Oh, and I found this insane diatribe from Pravda. I wonder whether that's the same Pravda as during the Soviet era, because they're talking about the poor capitalists getting fucked over by the Earth Summit people, and how George Bush is saving the world from sustainable development, and how that's great...
Not to mention this site. Watch out for those Armenians...
Sept. 11 did change the world for some people, because they never worried about any of the bad things happening in the world before then. Suddenly waking up to the harsh reality of the world must have been a shock for complacent non-Chomsky-listening people
Yeah, see if you can do something about that. I'm still plotting the revolution up here in Canada, and we don't seem to have much influence on things down south.
I've heard that too, but I think it's bullshit. If you get blown up right some good, you die from your brain being in lots of little pieces (all of them exposed to oxygen). I think it makes sense to say you die from lack of oxygen in the brain in cases where the brain remains intact.
Changing your system time? That's a lot harder than
touch -m -d "-3 years" whatever.c
> Second, copyrights do not help creators, for every creator they help there are thousnads that they restrict and harm.
That's a weak argument. Copyright helps the few good creators that everybody wants to copy. Without copyright, there would be floods of bad e.g. Star Wars books, because so many people want to write about it. (heh, bad example. There are currently floods of bad SW books...) OTOH, it's not that bad as long as people have some mechanism for separating the wheat from the chaff, such as book reviews. Having more drek out there makes people more dependent on book reviewers to tell them what is good. There is certainly a case to be made for not preventing people from creating what they want, because the good stuff will win on its own merits anyway.
One thing copyrights do is protect a creator's work from being used in ways they don't like. It's not just about money: Some musicians wouldn't let McDonalds use their song in an add for any amount of money. Similarly, other musicians wouldn't let George Bush use their music in an election campaign. It's about rights other than property rights. This obviously applies to paintings, writings, and so on.
Copyrights these days are really screwed up, esp. since they seem to be growing fast enough to starve the public domain indefinitely, but the principle behind them makes some sense. For functional creations like software, it might be more beneficial to not give copyright on code. (I would be happy to buy a game, and know that I was paying for the artwork and other non-executable information, and that the source and binaries were on the CD in the retail box.)
Many people on both sides of the debate claim that a majority of public opinion is behind their position. Some poll questions have elicited nearly 50:50 responses, IIRC, while others have shown a significant majority for one side or the other.
Any foreigners interested in what Candians think about US foreign policy should take people's claims with a grain of salt. Try to find some news stories about opinion polls that asked different questions.
Suffice it to say that many people feel very strongly on both sides. Phone-in shows are full of people spouting off about how they're proud to be Canadian because x, or they're ashamed to be Canadian because y, or whatever. (Incidentally, claiming to be ashamed of your country is not going to convince anyone to agree with you. People who start off their phone-in tirade with such a claim invariably add nothing to the debate.)
More people might vote, but they'll still be the same people who don't care about it, and are more impressed by image than substance. Getting elected these days is more about showmanship than good ideas, integrity, or even politics. Money spent on advertising is _strongly_ correlated to election victory, which either indicates that advertizing works, or that people are more likely to vote for politician with rich allies. Given that political advertizing is all about image, and maybe some grandiose promises, it's a bad thing that people are so dependent on the ads they see to make their voting decisions. Online voting will make this worse, because now some of the people who don't care just don't bother voting at all. If they can vote online, they might be sitting at home watching TV, and see an ad (if ads are allowed to be shown during polling hours), or something about one of the candidates that makes them decide to vote for that person without knowing anything about what policies that candidate supports. After voting, they'll probably stop feeling guilty for not voting, like in the past, since they think they've done their civic duty just by voting. Of course, they haven't. They've diluted the vote of people who are familiar with the candidates. The media is a critical part of democracy, but biased media (check out FAIR) and flashy ads don't help.
I think the Mafia and Micros~1 are a lot more impressive than lamers who try to make money by gaming the legal system to extract money they don't really deserve. It's harder, and thus more impressive, to do things without resorting to misusing the legal system. (It's so easy to do bad things with the legal system that whining in court has become a major part of some company's strategies; At least that's my impression.)
True, the core's (basically) the same, but I think introducing a new processor mode and instruction set to go with it counts for something. All the integer units had to be 64bit now, and it probably took some changes to get everything to fit with twice as wide signal paths.
> !(whole new generation) != same generation
I usually think about generations as integers, and thus they're either equal or non-equal. If you're going to use fuzzy logic-style comparisons, then yeah, I guess there's too much that's still the same to say "whole new gen", but the new stuff does warrant a description of "new gen". OTOH, who says you have to fundamentally change the way the core works (like going from Alpha 21164 (in-order superscalar) to Alpha 21264 (OO execution)) to call it a new generation? I don't really care, since I want to know the tech details anyway, instead of judging by who's calling it a "whole new" or just "new" generation!
A few months ago I was looking at buying a new computer, and I tried to find out anything about whole-life environmental impact of computing gear. i.e. including toxic waste produced during manufacturing, and ease of disposal/recycling. It was pretty hard to find anything useful about specific products. I want to know which hard drive was produced in the most environmentally friendly manner, even within the same company. The only web pages I could find were about laws in different countries; I don't think I even found anything about any specific manufacturers. One interesting site I found was the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Other than that, there was some stuff from greenpeace IIRC, and some gov't web sites about international treaties.
Does anyone know how to buy an environmentally friendly computer?
>Slashdot whines about how dumb that is. ...
/. crowd are extremely diverse (of course, there aren't many who like everything MS has ever done...)
>
>Slashdot cheers.
Slashdot both loves and hates everything. Why? Because different people read and post on different stories, and the opinions of the
I'd love to see games get distributed in source form, but with copyrights on the data files, so you can hack the source but you still have to buy stuff to use it. That would give you freedom while still sticking to the conventional model for selling software, so it wouldn't be such a leap for companies to take. That way, anyone could compile even old games for a new CPU. This wouldn't work so well for non-games, where the artwork/data files are a much smaller portion of the whole thing, and free substitutes would probably be created.
> yeaahh right, too bad : it's not a whole new generation of CPU
What else is in the same generation as Opteron, then? Nothing from AMD, which is what he meant.
The point is that you _can't_ compile software to use the extra regs in 32bit mode on win32, since the OS doesn't run the CPU in a mode that supports it. (MS is working on x86-64 Windows, but tomshardware didn't/couldn't get a copy.) Hypertransport and built-in mem controllers still help, of course.
64bit pointers take up more space in your data structures (like linked lists and trees), and thus take more room in the data cache, and take longer to load from memory, slowing everything else down (slightly, of course). It's not a big problem, but there's non-zero overhead. I'm sure adding more general purpose int and FP registers, and other architectural changes, more than makes up for it.
> They are too abstract and unreliable to influence smart buyers.
Unless you're actually choosing a computer based on how fast it can run crafty (the chess engine), gcc, perl, gzip, or bzip2. Those programs are part of the SPEC2000 benchmark suite. It is interesting to note that Athlons tend to run crafty relatively faster than the other benchmarks, probably because it's harder to predict branches or something along the lines of chess being unpredictable and thus more likely to screw up the P4 than the Athlon. (For a P4 and an Athlon with equal SPECINT2000 scores, the Athlon has a higher crafty score than the P4.) My dad ended up getting a P4 laptop anyway, and it's faster than any of the other computers we have, so we're pretty happy with it, so that just goes to show that CPU speed isn't everything.
That's pure bullshit. x87 floating point has always had 80bit precision in hardware, even when the 80x87 FPU was a co-processor on a separate chip from the x86 CPU (back in the days of 286, 386SX, and 486SX). "64bit CPU" can mean several different things, including address size (i.e. sizeof(char *) == 8), or integer register size (i.e. sizeof(int) == 8), but never size of floating point registers. Everyone has at least 64bit (IEEE double precision) floating point registers. Some have larger registers, such as x87, where sizeof(long double) == 10 (80 bits), or Sun SPARC's 128bit hardware floating point.
The real reasons for 64bit machines having better FP performance than x86 is probably only due to the fact that x86 sucks at FP, because it doesn't have enough registers. Not to mention the fact that until everyone started using SSE for even non-parallel FP ops, it was saddled with the stack-based x87. 64bit arches can't be backward compatible with ia32 (while running 64bit code), so they simply use good floating point design. More registers helps because you can do software pipelining, and have more intermediate results kept around, which is good for calculating big formulae where there are lots of common sub-expressions.
(BTW, some floating point hardware only runs at full speed in non-IEEE compliant modes, even if they have 64bit wide FP registers. What I said about everyone having IEEE double precision hardware is thus not strictly true. The differences are usually in FP exceptions (i.e. whether you can tell exactly which instruction caused a divide-by-zero) and rounding modes. This only matters for numerical algorithms whose stability depends on e.g. rounding toward zero, instead of always rounding down. This is what gcc -ffast-math or -mno-ieee-fp affects, and why games, and pretty much anything except Octave use that.)
bullshit. If they're doing this on purpose to make it hard to break, they're not going to connect some pins you can short to turn it off, or it would defeat the purpose of it (stopping vendors from selling fake O/Ced systems). This would be implemented inside the CPU, so you'd have to crack open the plastic case, at the very least. If they can implement their timer and pulse-counter on the same silicon as the rest of the CPU, you'd have to hack the silicon in a clean-room. That's nice for people with access to a high-quality clean-room (and something to hack silicon with!), but most people would buy a brand-new Alpha workstation instead of buying the gear it would take to even _try_ to O/C such a CPU. (An on-chip implementation would need a high-frequency oscillator, but you can't make inductors in an IC. They'd probably have some sort of laser-trimmed RC oscillator if they did it all on chip.) Even if there were some off-chip components, like a quartz oscillator to provide a reference frequency (they could use a standard freq, and multiply it on chip according to the rated clock speed, which could be burned into a specially prepared area with a laser or something), you'd have to crack open the CPU, which might be mechanically very difficult to do without damaging the silicon, esp. if Intel wanted that to be the case. You could then replace the reference quartz crystal with a faster one. (As long as underclocking was allowed, you could use crystal twice as fast, and then you wouldn't have to replace it every time you wanted to try a different speed.)
:) (and where overclockability is pretty well tested for that kind of CPU), and even then only by a little bit.
Anyway, the issue here isn't whether O/C'ing is still possible, it's whether it's worth it. If you're more likely to destroy the CPU (while trying to "unlock" it, or otherwise) than you are to make it run faster, it doesn't matter what's theoretically possible.
Intel should sic the lawyer on people who sell relabeled CPUs instead of doing annoying shit like this. Buying a 3GHz CPU means you're buying a piece of silicon, and a guarantee that it will work right at 3GHz. All bets are off if you take it beyond that; The guarantee doesn't apply, but it's still your piece of silicon. Not being able to try it at higher speeds makes it less valuable. I hope, as the article suggested, that any CPUs incorporating this are noticeably cheaper than they would otherwise be. I really like stable computers, so I only overclock my older computers that need to feel a bit faster
> Uh, maybe the car is unsafe at speeds over 85?
But if your computer crashes, it can't hurt you (excluding ridiculous situations like using your GNU system to run your pacemaker, that anyone could trivially avoid.), unlike your car.
Or are people chomping at the bit to sue Intel when their overclocked system crashes and they lose data? I hope rabid lawyers aren't forcing Intel into this, and I doubt that's the case.
There is no safety issue. The only issue I'm aware of surrounding this is remarked CPUs. I don't know what's wrong with making this detectable by coding the CPU's rated clock frequency into it (by burning bits with a laser in an already set). That's what they do now, AFAIK. I think the rated speed can be read with CPUID. All you need is to get BIOS makers to check that and print a big warning when the computer boots up. People who sell overclocked systems would then have to customize the BIOS to skip that check. hmm, actually that might not be very hard, if they're already willing to go to the trouble of putting fake labels on CPUs, so that wouldn't work. If Intel got MS to put a check for O/Ced CPUs into windoze, system vendors could hack it to not print any warning messages about it. I think a legal solution to this would be better. There can't be too many of these system vendors willing to go to the trouble of hacking a BIOS and sticking a fake label on a CPU, so you just need to prosecute them. The checked-by-the-BIOS thing would stop the less hard-core unscrupulous vendors.
Good point. I think there's a difference between the government killing someone, and someone else killing someone. Since the gov't represents the people, the people collectively have blood on their hands when they execute someone.
Executing serial killers who obviously would kill again is not too bad. My threshold doesn't exclude executing them, as long as you have very strong evidence to prove you have the right person. Some people committed murder because of very special circumstances not likely to be repeated (esp. if the murderer didn't mean to kill anyone, and tries to make sure it doesn't happen again. (Unfortunately, you can't tell what someone's thinking.)
My threshold is to have less people wrongfully executed than killed by released murderers by at least 1:1000. If I knew more statistics about this stuff, I'd be able to make a more reasonable decision on a ratio, but 1:1000 feels ok.
> What kind of an influence is he on the other inmates?
Hmm, I hadn't thought of that before. Thanks for pointing that out.
I guess I could accept the death penalty if, and only if, a very high standard of proof was required (maybe requiring DNA evidence), and it wouldn't be considered for anyone under 21, or some reasonable age, no matter what. Also, no executing the mentally retarded. I would like to come up with a way to apply it only to "hardened criminals", maybe by requiring a previous criminal record of serious (i.e. not possession of small amounts of marijuana). Unfortunately, I can't think of a reasonable condition that would make sense to put in a law. I really want to avoid executing people who could easily become productive members of society, such as writer Mumia Abu Jamal.
Counterspin is produced by the center for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. If you get your news from US media, you _need_ to listen to this weekly half-hour show. They have all their archives online back to 1996!
> it was technically legal. That's why I get annoyed when people start ranting about the "stolen" election
There are lots of things that are technically legal, but aren't the kind of thing you want your president to be doing! I think most people know that nothing is going to change what happened, and now just make a reference to it as just another dig against Bush, without spending too much time on it. (There's lots of bad stuff Bush has done since the election to talk about that would still be bad even if he had clearly won the election.)
You should listen to this report on the media-funded recount, and distorted coverage of it.
> it distracts attention away from the underlying problems and makes it harder to get mainstream support.
Good point. It sure plays well when preaching to the choir, though.
> ("Voting machine improvements? That's just another whiny democrat who can't accept that he lost!")
That's unfortunate. I hate politicians who try to find reasons not to do good things.
> Kurdish (that's the ethnic group in Northern Iraq) refugees in Germany have been
> holding massive anti-war demonstrations. That's right -- the oppressed people
> are against the war.
Most of the Kurds still in northern Iraq apparently support war. I don't know why they're more optimistic about the chance of something good happening, whether they just don't have good media sources to give them the idea that most who oppose war still don't like Saddam, and would like to see him removed. (Personally, I think a firing squad would be too good for Saddam, but starting a war was the wrong thing to do. Now that it's started, the damage is done with displaced refugees and destruction of stuff, and I couldn't see the US pulling out now being good for the Iraqi people, so I hope the "good guys" win soon and send Saddam to the international criminal court. I also hope that now that the American people have had a good look at what Bush is like, they won't vote for him, and will never again elect a president who would let a bunch of military goons run the show.)
Anyway, read about Iraqi Kurds in the Globe and Mail.
Some people on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence which wasn't available when they were sentenced. That is not a technicallity.
Personally, I think it's morally wrong to risk killing even one innocent person. I can accept that many people have a higher threshold for wrongly killing people, though. What's yours? 1 innocent in a thousand people executed? 1%, 10%, 50%? 99%? Seriously.
I could maybe live with a system that had a very high standard of proof, such as good DNA evidence, and no factors which cast doubt. More guilty people would be not executed, but that's the best we can do unless we have time machines that can go back and see what happened. If we stopped throwing people in jail for most consensual crimes, that would free up a lot of resources to deal with murderers, rapists, and psychopathic CEOs. Canada is looking at reducing penalties for small amount of marijuana, but I couldn't see the US backing down in the War on Drugs.