Looks like there isn't a whole lot there that you couldn't get using existing performance counters and a tool like oprofile....
Sony had a $10k PS2 called the PA that recorded exactly what happened to every cycle on the cpu, gpu etc. without changing the way the game ran. It was the most incredible thing, like you had been sitting in the dark for years and then suddenly someone turned on the lights.
Is it cache misses, dma contention, background threads, branch stalls or actual work? Optimizing on the PC just feels like groping around in the dark again.
People get giddy with their money and spend it foolishly, yes;
Sure Google's stock is way up there, and the price/earnings ratio is a little foolish on some of the brand name tech stocks, but go back and look at the stock charts. This time around, there is none of the obscene spiking that sends investors into a "buying panic." And without those heights to fall from we won't have a "selling panic." So the basic mechanics of a bubble in the investment sense are missing. Investors have mostly been thinking about commodities and uranium, and are generally wary of tech stocks after the dot bomb.
Complaining about a product/service is arguably one of the more important aspects of free speech in our society. It is often our only defence against the abuses of large businesses.
Whether Con was aware of it, when he tried to integrate into mainline Ingo was his main customer. Specifically the person he was trying to deliver work to. And Con committed the cardinal sin of telling a customer that the customer was wrong about what he wanted. Even if Ingo were too coked up to operate a keyboard reliably and had it all wrong, trying that never seems to work.
Did Con gain anything by refusing to re-introduce the hack to get X working the way it had previously under load? Even if he'd just put in a #define that allowed it, and then spent the next year arguing to take it out, there wouldn't have been this breakdown.
Having had my fair share disagreements with customers over technical issues, it just isn't worth trying to "win." The damage to your working relationships is still there even if you are shown to be 100% right. Try and help them address their problems as much as you possibly can, while trying to compromise as little as possible of the design. It's called diplomacy, and it's the difference between being given huge amounts of responsibility, and wanting to quit. You don't even have to agree with them, you just have to make them think you care.
Finally, it is common for programmers to try to avoid a subset of the problems in an area because it gives them the ability to write something "correct." Certainly a very satisfying experience for a programmer. However, that is exactly why it can be a bad idea to let a programmer rewrite a messy module. Very soon you can find the users of that module asking why a laundry list of things don't work anymore and an idealist developer trying to argue that they shouldn't... And it is exactly those idealists that like to rewrite working code. Not that major rewrites are bad, just that they have to be approached by someone mature enough to both expect a list of things they overlooked, and be willing to work with customers to resolve them.
Wonder what percentage of/. readers are not American, and think NSF is a bounced cheque? $5.5 billion, wish I could bounce that kind of cheque on some poor sucker... As for the 3 months, that number NASA pulled out of their asses to prevent the appearance of having another expensive failure.
yeah, a bot isn't a irc server I get that. I was being general, but if you like you can add "black-listing sites that do not prevent themselves from being used in the command-control of a bot-net" to my list of things that are fine by me.
This doesn't seem much different than blocking access to a mail server that is sending too much spam. Except they went one step further and redirected their customers to a site that fixed the problem.
The ISP hasn't done anything to the actual IRC site, just cut off communication with it because it is allowing itself (inadvertently) to assist in abusing the ISPs and it's customers.
Personally, blacklisting machines that have bots installed seems fine to me. This is all good in my books.
It is well known the CIA did this with a cat in the 60s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty I would be quite reasonable to expect them to have moved on to smaller animals by now. The CIA has an overwhelming need to spy on Iran. Sure this story is funny, but not really all that unlikely.
You are right that this is a huge headache. But there are only two endians, and in reality only a handful of relevant processor architectures. Not that I'm suggesting you try it yourself, but a motivated community has done similar things in the past.
WTF?!? Still not an April Fool's Joke
on
iPods Don't Run OS X
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The iPods use ARM7-based CPUs. They do not have an MMU, which means you cannot run Darwin on it. Eg. the iPod Linux project is based on uClinux which does not require an MMU.
Ok, because someone modified Linux to remove the MMU requirement means that Darwin couldn't be modified to work on hardware without an MMU? I'm so lost as to how that makes sense as a logical argument. But that's ok, don't RTFA just mod up the guy who isn't making sense.
Please RTFA people. It talks about how it isn't the related April fools joke and provides concrete evidence. It doesn't claim that it *IS* Darwin but that you can see evidence of the Mach/OS kernel and bits of userland. Proof is provided. Proof that wasn't sourced from a joke.
I have worked on embedded systems with microkernels (QNX) and this all seems perfectly reasonable. You can run a UNIX app in 4 megs with a microkernel and userland. And with the number of iPods Apple is selling you can understand why they would want to own the OS it was running in house.
After years of spoofs about running Mac OS X on the iPod, from a macoshints.com April Fools Joke in 2005, to the fake YouTube video regularly unearthed to titillate the readers of Digg, it turns out that truth was that iPods have been running OS X all along. Or at least that makes for a good story.
It really isn't that unlikely or hard for Apple to use the same microkernel on the iPod. Calling it the "same OS" is strictly correct, even if slightly deceiving.
You cant blame Microsoft. This crack was a really long time coming all things considered. I guess if it was more popular somebody might have cared to crack it sooner. I still think congratulations are in order for surviving this long. Also, even if buying a Zune seems somewhat silly, this provides an interesting statistic on the ongoing failures of DRM.
If Microsoft sold vouchers before the GPLv3, then they did so under the assumption that the vouchers covered GPLv2 software.
The fact is, they sold a contract to support software that is being released under a licence they didn't control. Software that is developed by people who are hostile to their interests. And that left them open to being unable to meet their obligations. They should have known that the GPLv3 could have specifically said "M$ is teh evil, you cannot run this software and theirs in the same company" and had provisions in their support contract to deal with it. Did they really think Stillman et al would just let it slide? It's absurd.
Here is where I don't understand all the "Microsoft is screwed" talk though. If they refuse to honour the contracts, the worst a court can do is make them refund the money paid to them, and possibly a bit more for damages. I don't think Microsoft is loosing sleep over this.
If Wal-Mart ends up feeling burned by being left with unsupported Linux installs, and wants a bit of money, does Microsoft really need to feel all that bad about it? If just proves their point that running Linux can leave you out in the cold.
Looks like you are the first actual manager to respond to this. Because you do absolutely *nothing* and then make it sound like you are somehow the glue that holds the team together. "You heard about quantum cryptography? Think you can do something like that?"
Rising Tech announced on the 30th of May that they were planning to sue the Beijing office of Kaspersky for unfair competitive practices (though it isn't known whether this suit was brought to court).
This is a few scraps of slap talk dredged up from the bowels of the net. It isn't even a lawsuit or a comment by a legal professional, let alone an injunction or any kind of legal ruling.
Also, anti-virus software on Windows is so invasive that running two different scanners at the same time is just plain crazy. I imagine root kits and virus scanners do a lot of the same things. They all make a total mess of your OS. And not being a monopoly, I can't see how Kaspersky has an obligation to play nice with others.
For a second I thought you were going to mention boolean and predicate logic. You know like !(a && b) == (!a || !b). Something that seems sooo fundamental, and yet people without that kind of education take up programming all the time. Anyway I avoided math in university and then taught myself some very hardcore 3d data-structures on the job. And it wasn't so damn' boring that way. Although, I did have to hire a PHd mathematician and teach him software engineering just to balance out the team. It seems that even in a math intensive area you really only need one person translating white-papers into code or doing research for every four people doing architecture, optimization, integration and support.
If this is the simple combination of existing technologies it shouldn't be enforceable. "Distributed storage system..." check. "Web services client interface..." yeah we have that too. Sorry no patent, that is specifically excluded. Then again American law seems to be for sale, and Amazon has a history of bullying the patent office.
I really object to the word "socialised" in this context. Access to medical care is a basic human right. Not some commodity that is better off provided at different levels of quality to those who can afford it, without the bumbling interference of the state. So yes, technically the term may be applicable, but it also has possible negative connotations that just do not apply. "Universal" means that it is not some kind of privilege, which is obvious to any decent person.
If everybody is covered then there is no need to have a bureaucracy to decide if a person is covered.
I know the post has good intentions. But the very idea of a group of legal and medical professionals sitting around trying to figure out who can be allowed to die without reasonable medical attention is so over the top grotesque that bringing their paychecks into it seems to really miss the point.
their idea seems to be to get rid of uninsured by declaring it illegal
That is actually what we are doing in Canada (BC in this case) and it works fine. People with jobs are *required to pay* a monthly fee for healthcare. About $50/month for a single adult covers absolutely everything.
Most Canadians would riot in the streets if hospitals started turning away the sick and dying for any reason. The very idea is sickening.
They haven't gone a single step forward in fixing the underlying problem of why healthcare costs so much.
On a per-country basis universal healthcare tends to be far cheaper than over-priced healthcare for the rich. I'm sorry you live in the USA.
Asking for a "best" without specifying a genre is pointless. Comedy just cannot compete with tragedy in terms of critical review. But that doesn't mean gut wrenching tragedy makes for a better choice of movie.
Keep in mind that a good programmer is not the same as a good teacher
When it comes to this level of specialization you take what you can get, and be happy about it. There is a reason many Universities have brilliant professors doing incredible research who also happen to be poor teachers. (At least in the sciences.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sony had a $10k PS2 called the PA that recorded exactly what happened to every cycle on the cpu, gpu etc. without changing the way the game ran. It was the most incredible thing, like you had been sitting in the dark for years and then suddenly someone turned on the lights.
Is it cache misses, dma contention, background threads, branch stalls or actual work? Optimizing on the PC just feels like groping around in the dark again.
--
thegirlorthecar.com - a dating game for guys
Sure Google's stock is way up there, and the price/earnings ratio is a little foolish on some of the brand name tech stocks, but go back and look at the stock charts. This time around, there is none of the obscene spiking that sends investors into a "buying panic." And without those heights to fall from we won't have a "selling panic." So the basic mechanics of a bubble in the investment sense are missing. Investors have mostly been thinking about commodities and uranium, and are generally wary of tech stocks after the dot bomb.
--
thegirlorthecar.com - a dating game for guys
Yeah, the rest of us download our movies.
Complaining about a product/service is arguably one of the more important aspects of free speech in our society. It is often our only defence against the abuses of large businesses.
Whether Con was aware of it, when he tried to integrate into mainline Ingo was his main customer. Specifically the person he was trying to deliver work to. And Con committed the cardinal sin of telling a customer that the customer was wrong about what he wanted. Even if Ingo were too coked up to operate a keyboard reliably and had it all wrong, trying that never seems to work.
Did Con gain anything by refusing to re-introduce the hack to get X working the way it had previously under load? Even if he'd just put in a #define that allowed it, and then spent the next year arguing to take it out, there wouldn't have been this breakdown.
Having had my fair share disagreements with customers over technical issues, it just isn't worth trying to "win." The damage to your working relationships is still there even if you are shown to be 100% right. Try and help them address their problems as much as you possibly can, while trying to compromise as little as possible of the design. It's called diplomacy, and it's the difference between being given huge amounts of responsibility, and wanting to quit. You don't even have to agree with them, you just have to make them think you care.
Finally, it is common for programmers to try to avoid a subset of the problems in an area because it gives them the ability to write something "correct." Certainly a very satisfying experience for a programmer. However, that is exactly why it can be a bad idea to let a programmer rewrite a messy module. Very soon you can find the users of that module asking why a laundry list of things don't work anymore and an idealist developer trying to argue that they shouldn't... And it is exactly those idealists that like to rewrite working code. Not that major rewrites are bad, just that they have to be approached by someone mature enough to both expect a list of things they overlooked, and be willing to work with customers to resolve them.
Wonder what percentage of /. readers are not American, and think NSF is a bounced cheque? $5.5 billion, wish I could bounce that kind of cheque on some poor sucker... As for the 3 months, that number NASA pulled out of their asses to prevent the appearance of having another expensive failure.
When I started out, you edited your x-config *before* launching x for the first time, to make sure it wouldn't fry your monitor.
yeah, a bot isn't a irc server I get that. I was being general, but if you like you can add "black-listing sites that do not prevent themselves from being used in the command-control of a bot-net" to my list of things that are fine by me.
This doesn't seem much different than blocking access to a mail server that is sending too much spam. Except they went one step further and redirected their customers to a site that fixed the problem.
The ISP hasn't done anything to the actual IRC site, just cut off communication with it because it is allowing itself (inadvertently) to assist in abusing the ISPs and it's customers.
Personally, blacklisting machines that have bots installed seems fine to me. This is all good in my books.
It is well known the CIA did this with a cat in the 60s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty I would be quite reasonable to expect them to have moved on to smaller animals by now. The CIA has an overwhelming need to spy on Iran. Sure this story is funny, but not really all that unlikely.
And now like the rest of us, they know why they are the less fortunate. (What did OLPC expect?!?)
You are right that this is a huge headache. But there are only two endians, and in reality only a handful of relevant processor architectures. Not that I'm suggesting you try it yourself, but a motivated community has done similar things in the past.
Ok, because someone modified Linux to remove the MMU requirement means that Darwin couldn't be modified to work on hardware without an MMU? I'm so lost as to how that makes sense as a logical argument. But that's ok, don't RTFA just mod up the guy who isn't making sense.
Please RTFA people. It talks about how it isn't the related April fools joke and provides concrete evidence. It doesn't claim that it *IS* Darwin but that you can see evidence of the Mach/OS kernel and bits of userland. Proof is provided. Proof that wasn't sourced from a joke.
I have worked on embedded systems with microkernels (QNX) and this all seems perfectly reasonable. You can run a UNIX app in 4 megs with a microkernel and userland. And with the number of iPods Apple is selling you can understand why they would want to own the OS it was running in house.
It really isn't that unlikely or hard for Apple to use the same microkernel on the iPod. Calling it the "same OS" is strictly correct, even if slightly deceiving.
You cant blame Microsoft. This crack was a really long time coming all things considered. I guess if it was more popular somebody might have cared to crack it sooner. I still think congratulations are in order for surviving this long. Also, even if buying a Zune seems somewhat silly, this provides an interesting statistic on the ongoing failures of DRM.
The fact is, they sold a contract to support software that is being released under a licence they didn't control. Software that is developed by people who are hostile to their interests. And that left them open to being unable to meet their obligations. They should have known that the GPLv3 could have specifically said "M$ is teh evil, you cannot run this software and theirs in the same company" and had provisions in their support contract to deal with it. Did they really think Stillman et al would just let it slide? It's absurd.
Here is where I don't understand all the "Microsoft is screwed" talk though. If they refuse to honour the contracts, the worst a court can do is make them refund the money paid to them, and possibly a bit more for damages. I don't think Microsoft is loosing sleep over this.
If Wal-Mart ends up feeling burned by being left with unsupported Linux installs, and wants a bit of money, does Microsoft really need to feel all that bad about it? If just proves their point that running Linux can leave you out in the cold.
Looks like you are the first actual manager to respond to this. Because you do absolutely *nothing* and then make it sound like you are somehow the glue that holds the team together. "You heard about quantum cryptography? Think you can do something like that?"
This is a few scraps of slap talk dredged up from the bowels of the net. It isn't even a lawsuit or a comment by a legal professional, let alone an injunction or any kind of legal ruling.
Also, anti-virus software on Windows is so invasive that running two different scanners at the same time is just plain crazy. I imagine root kits and virus scanners do a lot of the same things. They all make a total mess of your OS. And not being a monopoly, I can't see how Kaspersky has an obligation to play nice with others.
For a second I thought you were going to mention boolean and predicate logic. You know like !(a && b) == (!a || !b). Something that seems sooo fundamental, and yet people without that kind of education take up programming all the time. Anyway I avoided math in university and then taught myself some very hardcore 3d data-structures on the job. And it wasn't so damn' boring that way. Although, I did have to hire a PHd mathematician and teach him software engineering just to balance out the team. It seems that even in a math intensive area you really only need one person translating white-papers into code or doing research for every four people doing architecture, optimization, integration and support.
If this is the simple combination of existing technologies it shouldn't be enforceable. "Distributed storage system..." check. "Web services client interface..." yeah we have that too. Sorry no patent, that is specifically excluded. Then again American law seems to be for sale, and Amazon has a history of bullying the patent office.
I really object to the word "socialised" in this context. Access to medical care is a basic human right. Not some commodity that is better off provided at different levels of quality to those who can afford it, without the bumbling interference of the state. So yes, technically the term may be applicable, but it also has possible negative connotations that just do not apply. "Universal" means that it is not some kind of privilege, which is obvious to any decent person.
I know the post has good intentions. But the very idea of a group of legal and medical professionals sitting around trying to figure out who can be allowed to die without reasonable medical attention is so over the top grotesque that bringing their paychecks into it seems to really miss the point.
That is actually what we are doing in Canada (BC in this case) and it works fine. People with jobs are *required to pay* a monthly fee for healthcare. About $50/month for a single adult covers absolutely everything.
Most Canadians would riot in the streets if hospitals started turning away the sick and dying for any reason. The very idea is sickening.
On a per-country basis universal healthcare tends to be far cheaper than over-priced healthcare for the rich. I'm sorry you live in the USA.
Asking for a "best" without specifying a genre is pointless. Comedy just cannot compete with tragedy in terms of critical review. But that doesn't mean gut wrenching tragedy makes for a better choice of movie.
When it comes to this level of specialization you take what you can get, and be happy about it. There is a reason many Universities have brilliant professors doing incredible research who also happen to be poor teachers. (At least in the sciences.)