> where is the list touting the manufacturers that stepped forward and provided documentation
That's an excellent idea. A simple wiki page would suffice, providing links to each manufacturer, their open docs page, and their sources page, if any. Use a wiki so that people can add their own entries, and so that the admin can revert abuse easily.
As the list grows, people would start looking there before buying equipment, and to not be listed on it would become a problem for manufacturers by giving their competitors a boost. Don't list manufacturers who don't offer this, as listing them in red might get their lawyers agitated. Omitting them is enough.
Oh, and provide links below it to one or two products produced by each of these friendly manufacturers... ie. free advertising. They rub our backs, we rub theirs.
> OK, it's unrealistic to believe that New Zealand would let anyone write the law. That would lead to anarchy.
You've been reading too much government propaganda.
"Anarchy" is a bogeyman that governments trot out whenever there's a danger that citizens want to control their politicians and make them servants of the people, which of course would never do.
It ranks alongside "Who will think of the children?", manufactured wars, and dozens of other diversionary tactics that they use.
> "this is due to legal actions from the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) who ordered Demonoid's ISP to shut down the site."
I assume it was a judge who ordered Demonoid's ISP to disconnect Demonoid. If a trade organization like CRIA can order an ISP to disconnect a customer directly, then things are extremely bad in Canada.
But even a judge ordering that seems highly wrong. For example, a judge would not ordinarily order a person's electricity supply to be cut off (unless they're in default of paying their electricity bill of course). Surely here a judge would order Demonoid to immediately drop its site instead, and not order a service supplier to disconnect them upstream. After all, the same Internet feed could be serving many other businesses or private customers perfectly legally.
Something seems wrong with this (or maybe it's just bad reporting). Otherwise, Canada is in dire straights.
> Wouldn't it make sense to sell any part that had at least one working core?
Indeed it would, and that strategy will make even more sense as the maximum number of cores per chip rises beyond 4. For an 8-core CPU, we should expect to see several versions sold in which 1, 2, 3... etc cores are non-functional and disabled. There will always be a market for devices with fewer working cores, as long as the pricing reflects it.
It becomes even more obvious that this is the way to go if you look ahead a bit. On a 64-core CPU in which one core has failed testing, should it be chucked away, or would it still be useful as a 63-core device? Clearly the latter.
NetApp and Sun should jointly back down and call it quits. And fire all their lawyers, or at least give them something useful to do like bring in the coffee.
When a company resorts to legal crap, it's because they're no longer viable on technical merit. And both Sun and NetApp *are* still good technically, so this argument is pointless.
Seriously, fire the lawyers on both your staffs who suggested to litigate, as they are bringing your companies down. And no, I don't care who started it, since you're both at it now.
If the RIAA labels were actually competing among themselves, then any one of them would be happy to see the others suffer alleged loss of sales. Paying RIAA lawyers to safeguard their alleged competitors' profits is therefore direct anti-competitive collusion, rather than mere pooling of legal costs: they pay shared lawyers to perform actions which they know will support their "competitors".
If real competition between labels existed, then individual labels would reduce their own prices to make official purchases as attractive as file sharing, and they would provide vast band sites to attract the purchaser, and broaden their music spectrum away from the incredibly narrow current crap, and entice fans into buying the physical albums and accessories later for profit, as fans like to do. (Often much later in life, when they have more money.) In a nutshell, they would compete on product.
If you stand back from this whole scene and try to see it through the spectacles of a free market and competition analyst, you'll find none of those elements present in their music marketting. RIAA labels simply do not respond to drop in sales by reducing their prices or raising their quality and music coverage, like indies do.
It's often described as a cartel, but some cartels are relatively shallow and defensive, whereas this one effectively has the entirety of public media in its grasp and the ears/wallets of politicians too, and has a strategy based on offence and intimidation. It is about as malevolant and anti-competitive as you can get without breaking kneecaps. And while they don't break kneecaps, they certainly have no compunction about destroying lives economically, based on legal theories which they lobbied to create.
Their slimy lawyers will probably slither out from under a charge of anti-competitive economic collusion because the legal system is driven by technicalities rather than substance. But the RIAA labels are certainly guilty as sin of it. They lost any concept of competition between them long ago.
Others have commented on the TPM and DRM aspects of vPro, but the part that interests me most is the remote access functionality. Is this coming to desktops now?
Most modern servers have remote management capability these days, through some kind of Lights-Out Management (LOM) system that works even when the operating system is dead or when the host CPU is powered off. It's not just the high profile Sun/HP/IBM brands that have such capability --- even Dell servers have BMC hardware (a small embedded microcontroller) running a LOM and providing access through IPMI, and have had it for many years. I've found all these LOM systems extremely useful, even without the more recent remote KVM features.
I'd love this kind of functionality independent of the running O/S to appear on desktop motherboards too, but motherboard manufacturers have traditionally kept server and desktop markets separate. Is there any sign that the new vPro chipsets could start moving such functionality towards the desktop too?
From the videos, it doesn't seem so, as they're targetted at corporates. But the worries that people have expressed about the TPM/DRM side of vPro suggest that the desktop isn't far away... which on the positive side could mean that we get BMC/LOM capabilities soon on normal home machines as well.
As always, a powerful tool can be used both for good and for bad, and a BMC could do unwanted things as well as providing a very useful LOM. However, if it can be controlled by the end user, this sounds like useful technology.
OSI needs to present itself as an impartial organization
The OSI's impartiality and pragmatism will be its downfall. Like the sky-diver without a parachute, the OSI will keep saying "it looks OK so far" until it's too late. Microsoft isn't just any old party.
There is a fundamental difference between the normal FOSS world and Microsoft's world: the first is cooperative, whereas MS is competitive, or even combative.
Microsoft consorts with open source (but not with Free Software) because it can see a way to first stand on its shoulders, and then stomp it into the ground. That's how MS works. It doesn't have a cooperative bone in its body.
The OSI doesn't have a means of defending itself against that --- it pretty much assumes that everyone is cooperative if they make their source code visible, without taking into account that some parties have malicious intent. Well MS's view of the OSI is probably "There's a sucker born every minute". It's not going to end well for the OSI.
As far as the FSF and GPL are concerned though, Microsoft siding up to the OSI will probably work in their favor. By distancing themselves from the GPL and then shafting the OSI, Microsoft might well achieve the closing of ranks between open-source and free software camps, once the OSI's very dead and post-humously humped corpse is plain for all to see.
"Due to the longevity of Windows XP Professional, it has become necessary to produce more product keys for system builders in order to support the continued availability of Windows XP Professional through the scheduled system builder channel end-of-life (EOL) date, wrote the Microsoft system builder team on its blog Thursday.
A hardware product has an official End-Of-Life date beyond which it is no longer sold nor supported. That's fairly logical, because it is a standalone physical item, and its physical end of life is inescapable.
But the concept of EOL'ing an operating system that's at the heart of bazillion old machines out there seems completely wrong, to the point of being bizarre. Those machines will (mostly) never change their operating system, and why should they --- after all, their manufacturer created them as XP machines, not as Vista boxes, and their manufacturer-supplied drivers might not even work with Vista.
Yet, except in the case of non-networked machines, their continued survival requires fairly regular O/S updates in response to the changing face of the Internet. End-Of-Lifing XP reflects a very myopic stance by Microsoft, as if their product Windows XP were somehow standalone. Well it's not.
Microsoft enjoys the $$$ benefits of Windows being adopted worldwide as the most popular operating system, but with that comes the responsibility of maintaining the heart of those myriad machines which use it... even when they are old ones beyond the current retail life cycle.
Yes, it's a responsibility. Operating systems are not toasters. They sustain the continued viability of machinery that uses them, and can't be treated as independent items. Their manufacturers committed to a dependency on Microsoft support.
While End-Of-Life is a common concept in commercial products, there is something fundamentally wrong with declaring an operating system as dead. While the hardware survives (at least 10 years, maybe 15), a degree of support should continue to be provided, as I see it. The rate of support calls will dwindle to zero over time, so "It would cost us too much" is not really a good excuse. Especially given the size of MS coffers.
Killing off older machines by denying support for their O/S seems irresponsible by the O/S manufacturer, regardless of which O/S that is.
Yes, but it doesn't matter, because *fans* always buy the CDs, go to concerts, get the merchandise, or pass the buzz around to their friends. That's what makes them fans.
The non-fans are irrelevant to the sales ledger, since they would never have bought anything anyway.
The RIAA wants to everyone to pay of course, even if they've downloaded the music but hate it.
But that just shows that the RIAA are fucking morons. They can't distinguish between the economics of virtual and physical goods. Alleged losses to non-fans equate to zero.
is the fact that the geothermal advocates look forward to 100 GW as their limit horizon, whereas we need 20 TW (== 20,000 GW) to meet demand in 2 decades' time.
Compare that to the 150,000 TW (== 150,000,000 gigawatts) of solar irradiation at the Earth's surface. and you can see just how "funny" (in the sense of inconsequential) 100 GW really is. And then to see the greater picture, just rise above the atmosphere to find some real power. With acreage no object, solar energy tends towards infinity.
By all means use geothermal sources as well as all other renewables... but just remember that solar has absolutely no equal. Not even remotely close.
And the reason why the state affords a patentee such a protected period is so that the public disclosure does not place the patentee at a disadvantage while bringing the invention to market, versus others who have obtained the details without effort through the disclosure.
There has been no actual invention here whatsoever, there are no innovative details to offer the public, and only one single unremarkable choice was made. The alleged "invention" consists merely of taking one class of datum (a gene sequence) and using it as input to a process, a generative music generator. Neither one nor the other is new, and this kind of juxtaposition is arbitrary and does not result from insight nor from effort. And as many others have pointed out, it's not even a novel choice, but has been done countless times before.
Also, the lawyers aren't actually producing anything so there is nothing to protect, and release of the details provides the public with absolutely nothing of benefit in exchange. What we have here are the usual worthless sons of bitches thinking they can carve out a piece of the public ideas space and claim that they own it --- totally at odds with the very concept of patents.
So no, it's not worth protecting, regardless of any other point. It's simply contemptible, corrupting of the patent system (as if it could get any worse), and totally ill-founded.
While the article correctly observes a massive slowdown, unfortunately it blames it on enterprise crap without testing that assumption.
It's easy to show that that theory is flawed, because anyone can easily prove to themselves which factor should carry the blame, as follows:
1) Get rid of Gnome, KDE, all Gtk+ apps, all Qt apps, and (people will love this...) all your web browsers except lynx. Or prefereably build a new Gentoo or Slackware or LFS or DSL system from scratch without any of that "modern crap" installed.
2) Replace your X11 window manager with icewm (ie. no docks, no icons, no Windows-type desktop). Install xv for playing with images, and mpg123 for playing music.
3) Now play. What happened to all the sluggishness? It's all 10 times faster than before, wow! But that's not the end.
4) Kill X11. Make sure that GPM is installed, and get acquainted with the text-mode mouse. Log in on 6 VTs and get used to working across all of them as you would across a pile of xterms, switching VTs as needed. Observe responsiveness....
5) OMFG!!! It's 1000 times faster! In fact, everything is instantaneous on a modern CPU. Admittedly it'll probably be a culture shock to work without graphics for 95% of current Linux users, unless you're one of us old timers who did our Unix hacking very productively that way for over a decade...:-)
The point of the above isn't to suggest that we should work like we did in the 80's. It's to highlight that everything has slowed down because we have tied up 99% of our vastly faster CPUs into driving our fancy graphic user interfaces. Slim the GUI down and you get an immediate speedup. Get rid of the GUI altogether and the slowdown goes away entirely.
So the blame does NOT lie with enterprise crap, primarily. It may have a contributing effect, fair enough, but the main culprit (by a mile) is vastly and pointlessly over-elaborate, multi-layered, and highly inefficient graphic user interfaces, which really do nothing terribly useful. Eye candy doesn't come free.
My advice for those wanting responsiveness: restart Linux GUI design from scratch. Remember what the Amiga achieved with an 8 MHz 16-bit CPU and near-zero RAM compared to what we have today. There's a lesson there.
> There are a few problems, such as the fact that important and well known scientists are still reluctant to contribute. [My emphasis]
You probably didn't mean it quite the way you wrote it, but it's worth correcting anyway for the benefit of other eyeballs.
The accuracy of scientific reporting does not have a strong correlation with the public visibility of the scientist doing it, in general. In some cases, the well known scientists are not the important ones at all, but merely those who are best at self-promotion. And beware that the word "important" itself has a very different meaning within science and in society at large.
There is often good correlation with the publication record of the scientist (and that certainly results in visibility), but also quite often the correspondance is quite poor (many insightful scientists made their mark on science just once or only a few times), and in a few fields the correspondance is absolutely attrocious because of a semi-corrupt system of "papers for the boys" that makes a mockery of true science.
On top of that, remember that science is so intimately related with engineering that huge numbers of highly competent and qualified practitioners forgo the academic trappings of publication and do their science cloaked under the veil of company secrecy, so they may well be "important" but will not be "well known" in the slightest. And yet, we require their insight in Wikipedia as well.
So, I wouldn't have phrased it quite the way you did. We need scientific insight and strong logic backed by good citations, whatever the source.
Examine that paper carefully and you'll realize that when you use NUMA to prevent contention from descaling your performance, then you also have to decouple the code that runs in the local memories and the management structures that control it. You can't maintain centralized controls and expect NUMA-decoupled CPUs to give you maximum speedup, since it's the centralized structures that will queue up your mountains of CPUs. The paper itself ackowledged that, in suggesting that for high numbers of CPUs you might have to implement 2-level locking schemes.
In other words, beyond smallish numbers, NUMA doesn't provide OS scalability unless you partition your management structures to match. As a result, it's inevitable that functionality will drift away from a monolithic core into autonomous subsystems, in order to make the speedup gained from NUMA as high as possible.
Contrary to your assumption then, NUMA *promotes* the breakup of Linux's monolithic structures into decoupled and decentralized designs that bear more in common with microkernels than monolithic ones. And the pressure of wanting to scale well under natural kernel growth just adds to that. It really is a tide that doesn't want to get swept back.
> Linux should absolutely never become a microkernel
Religion notwithstanding, it will become microkernel-like, because a monolithic kernel just doesn't scale. It's as simple as that.
Monolithic kernels don't scale as the number of CPUs rises, nor as the number of drivers and other logical components goes up.
Because of the need to scale, in time Linux will partition itself into independent subsystems, and slowly but surely will become a microkernel-type design, because the alternative to that would be to suffer astronomic bug rates from combinatorial complexity explosion and very poor performance from CPU contention compared to a decoupled, decentralized design.
That microkernel future is 100% inevitable, because fighting growth is like trying to sweep back the tide. In due course, the debate will just fade away, and engineering will take over. And engineers always decouple.
The paper answers some of the questions that others have posed in this thread, particularly about the efficiency of the process achieved so far (0.57%). These are their conclusions:
Conclusions
In conclusion, we have successfully fabricated polymer photovoltaic devices based on C60-modified SWCNTs and a conjugated polymer P3HT. The composites were made by first microwave irradiating a mixture of SWCNT-water solution and C60 solution in toluene, followed by adding a conjugated polymer P3HT. The best power conversion efficiency of 0.57% under simulated solar irradiation (95 mW cm22) was achieved on a cell annealed at 120 uC for 10 min. Introduction of SWCNTs into the composite not only enhanced the short circuit current density, JSC, because of faster electron transport via the network of SWCNTs, but also improved the fill factor due to the morphology change. The net effect was improved power conversion efficiency as compared to cells without SWCNTs. Further optimization is necessary to further improve the performance. These results clearly indicate that the polymer : C60-SWCNT composite is an excellent candidate for the fabrication of low cost polymer photovoltaic cells, because C60 is significantly less expensive than PCBM, and only a small amount of the more expensive SWCNT is needed in the photoactive composite.
It's clearly at a very early stage of research/development, but polymer photovoltaic cells have such enormous potential that it's an extremely valuable direction to pursue.
1) While you might think that makes it 'ok', Heinlein didn't have that requirement. Farnham's Freehold postulated incest for reproduction, and with unmitigated zeal too, rather than any sort of reluctance at the supposed 'necessity'.
In Farnham's Freehold, there was little alternative, they were cooped up in a bomb shelter for years! What had to happen, happened. You can't just switch it off, you know --- there was no "supposed" reluctance, it was unmitigated zeal alright! And entirely normal, very human, and honest.
It is also somewhat telling that practically ALL of his female characters were relentlessly promiscuous, and even in his books aimed at a younger audience his female characters were unfailingly sexually precocious when you consider their age.
That's because *everybody* is relentlously promiscuous, even those who are inhibited from showing it. It's a part of the human condition. Heinlein shrugged off the political correctness of not showing it, that's all. You're criticizing him for honesty about what makes the vast majority of humans tick, every day!
Far too much plot, and effort were dedicated to it in title after title after title for it to be merely inadvertantly 'showing through'.
You're not even close, because you misunderstand his worldview, and you think there is an unfortunate "showing through". No, it didn't merely "show through"... he embraced it with open arms! And with not a hint of embarassment or restraint at all, because that dishonest condition belongs to the inhibited "regressives" that he was purposely trying to leave behind. To be PC is the opposite of being honest. He was honest.
I can see where your interpretation comes from, but it's completely incorrect, and simply stems from your own inhibitions and lack of belief that people like him can be decoupled from them.
He was. I am. You're not. We exist, in billions! Welcome to the real world, not the PC fiction.:-)
Where it's OK to sleep with your mom... because she's your mom.
And indeed it is OK to sleep with your mom (and with all your other family members who might yield offspring too), once technology removes the danger of genetic mishaps.
Heinlein didn't let himself be constrained by political correctness, and good for him. That's what great science fiction is all about, leaving behind the shackles of the past, and seeing where it leads. And the more Jurassic people that that annoys, the better.:-)))
Disclaimer: I have all of his books.
Funnily enough though, he's not my favourite author... his horizons were far too close to the present, and far too restrictive. But he did open the eyes of a generation, so he occupies pride of place on my shelf.
This is an area in which any amount of investment in battery research using traditional materials science and chemistry is going to be rapidly overtaken by fallout from nanotechnology research --- and that's under the assumption that MNT research just continues bumping along the bottom without that crucial bootstrapping breakthrough that actually launches MNT assembly.
The reason is that battery technology will benefit enormously even from somewhat underwhelming "nanoscale materials" development, ie. still bulk materials rather than real MNT, but with ever-increasing nanoscale benefits as a result of improving surface and nanoparticle chemistry, and the emergence of remarkable engineering components like nanotubes. It may be "just fallout" from MNT work, but it's very impressive and useful all the same.
This is one of the things that isn't often appreciated amid the much more sexy talk about SciFi-type nanomachinery. Along the way and long before, *millions* of stunning improvements to old bulk materials and processes will pop out in the wash, because finding that key MNT bootstrap method isn't going to happen suddenly, and every bit of research will yield something new.
So by all means invest in battery research, but do it in nanotechnology areas, because that's pretty much guaranteed to yield lots of useful byproducts, even if you're just meandering along quite randomly. It's a great area in which to work at this time.
Once MNT actually happens though, there's no telling what will happen to investments and economies, but it'll be interesting, that's for sure. Meanwhile, invest in the basic research and your wallet is likely to look pretty healthy regardless of direction.
It's almost all new down there, so almost anything you do is likely to yield.... 3) Profit.:P
It predates Moses, and is quite likely to survive the heat death of the universe.
Is Vista a product, or a service?
on
Vista is Watching You
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I expect that the majority of people believe that they're buying a product when they purchase Vista, or when they purchase a PC with Vista pre-installed. That presumption may be entirely wrong though.
Certainly from Microsoft's point of view, and in view of their total focus on WGA, you've agreed to a single-payment licensing deal. EULAs may not be valid in some jurisdictions, but that doesn't seem to concern them. You live within their worldview, or else... or else nothing, that's the only option. In fact then, you haven't purchased a product at all, but a service without any agreed terms.
Likewise, from the content providers' point of view, your PC and its software certainly doesn't belong to you, which implies that you haven't purchased Vista as a product. Instead, it's just a delivery vehicle for their content, and Microsoft is the guarantor of DRM safety to ensure that this is so. The fact that you've paid for your hardware and software as if it were yours seems to have escaped both content providers and Microsoft alike.
Perhaps in the future, people who are not technical will not own computers at all, but only rent content delivery vehicles?
That's where Vista seems to be heading... although Microsoft probably wants you to continue purchasing without owning.
>> This analogy is flawed. The Open Source community creates code from ideas to create programs and systems. In the Biohacking world, genetic code is copied from one system into another system
I don't find it flawed at all.
Free and Open Source Software is concerned not with the creation of a bag of abstract ideas, but a bag (or pyramid) of software components of various kinds (libraries, classes, utilities, etc). Those components are copied around from one application to another very freely, and not restricted to just one type of application or system (analoguous to "species"). This is very close indeed to horizontal gene transfer, cutting them out of one sequence and splicing them into another.
The analogy may be little more than a coincidence of course, so one shouldn't read too much into it, but I think that Dyson uses it quite accurately. Moreover, the equivalent to horizontal gene transfer pervades every single one of our fields of technology, so I think it's true to say that speciation is totally dead in all activities of Man, and biotech is just one example.
>> One more nail...in the coffin for the argument that these laws and regulations protect creators and innovators.
This ruling actually very strongly promotes technological innovation in distribution of works.
If the ruling holds up, copyright holders (regardless of whether they are creators or publishers) will not be able to demand renegociation of fees or royalties simply because a work was reissued in a different form.
Given that new forms of media or new methods of download appear continually as part of progress, this should reduce the chilling effect of opportunistic litigation by money-grabbing parties of either kind.
Of course it will be challanged, because money-grabbers are everywhere. In principle though, it places the onus on creators to find a suitable fee structure JUST ONCE, and then be bound to that regardless of what progress holds in store.
Like TFA said, it's a widespread problem in virtual worlds, but it can become even worse when the world itself introduces voice support, without requiring 3rd party software. Then you get a presumption of voice availability, and not wishing to use voice can then get interpreted in various destructive ways.
This came to a head recently in Second Life, when they introduced voice chat functionality (actually still in beta). One of the most cogent discussions about it was made by a well-known SL commentator in her essay The End of Anonymity, Part II, which focussed mainly on the end of immersion in SL. Her conclusion, that it will force non-politically-correct roleplayers into "ghettos" and destroy mainstream immersion, does seem reasonable.
Avatars in SL can be anything you like, no limit, so not surprisingly roleplay is extremely popular. The main grid is expressly for adults only, and so of course there is much interest in gender roleplay, in both directions (the gender spread is almost exactly 50/50). Needless to say, the loss of immersion through voice immediately gave rise to a lot of concern among roleplayers. This still has to be played out on the main grid, but it's certain that the impact will be large.
Slashdot Mirror
> where is the list touting the manufacturers that stepped forward and provided documentation
... ie. free advertising. They rub our backs, we rub theirs.
That's an excellent idea. A simple wiki page would suffice, providing links to each manufacturer, their open docs page, and their sources page, if any. Use a wiki so that people can add their own entries, and so that the admin can revert abuse easily.
As the list grows, people would start looking there before buying equipment, and to not be listed on it would become a problem for manufacturers by giving their competitors a boost. Don't list manufacturers who don't offer this, as listing them in red might get their lawyers agitated. Omitting them is enough.
Oh, and provide links below it to one or two products produced by each of these friendly manufacturers
> OK, it's unrealistic to believe that New Zealand would let anyone write the law. That would lead to anarchy.
You've been reading too much government propaganda.
"Anarchy" is a bogeyman that governments trot out whenever there's a danger that citizens want to control their politicians and make them servants of the people, which of course would never do.
It ranks alongside "Who will think of the children?", manufactured wars, and dozens of other diversionary tactics that they use.
Be wise to manufactured bogeymen.
> "this is due to legal actions from the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) who ordered Demonoid's ISP to shut down the site."
I assume it was a judge who ordered Demonoid's ISP to disconnect Demonoid. If a trade organization like CRIA can order an ISP to disconnect a customer directly, then things are extremely bad in Canada.
But even a judge ordering that seems highly wrong. For example, a judge would not ordinarily order a person's electricity supply to be cut off (unless they're in default of paying their electricity bill of course). Surely here a judge would order Demonoid to immediately drop its site instead, and not order a service supplier to disconnect them upstream. After all, the same Internet feed could be serving many other businesses or private customers perfectly legally.
Something seems wrong with this (or maybe it's just bad reporting). Otherwise, Canada is in dire straights.
> Wouldn't it make sense to sell any part that had at least one working core?
... etc cores are non-functional and disabled. There will always be a market for devices with fewer working cores, as long as the pricing reflects it.
Indeed it would, and that strategy will make even more sense as the maximum number of cores per chip rises beyond 4. For an 8-core CPU, we should expect to see several versions sold in which 1, 2, 3
It becomes even more obvious that this is the way to go if you look ahead a bit. On a 64-core CPU in which one core has failed testing, should it be chucked away, or would it still be useful as a 63-core device? Clearly the latter.
This will be the norm in the years ahead.
NetApp and Sun should jointly back down and call it quits. And fire all their lawyers, or at least give them something useful to do like bring in the coffee.
When a company resorts to legal crap, it's because they're no longer viable on technical merit. And both Sun and NetApp *are* still good technically, so this argument is pointless.
Seriously, fire the lawyers on both your staffs who suggested to litigate, as they are bringing your companies down. And no, I don't care who started it, since you're both at it now.
And then go back to doing good things.
If the RIAA labels were actually competing among themselves, then any one of them would be happy to see the others suffer alleged loss of sales. Paying RIAA lawyers to safeguard their alleged competitors' profits is therefore direct anti-competitive collusion, rather than mere pooling of legal costs: they pay shared lawyers to perform actions which they know will support their "competitors".
If real competition between labels existed, then individual labels would reduce their own prices to make official purchases as attractive as file sharing, and they would provide vast band sites to attract the purchaser, and broaden their music spectrum away from the incredibly narrow current crap, and entice fans into buying the physical albums and accessories later for profit, as fans like to do. (Often much later in life, when they have more money.) In a nutshell, they would compete on product.
If you stand back from this whole scene and try to see it through the spectacles of a free market and competition analyst, you'll find none of those elements present in their music marketting. RIAA labels simply do not respond to drop in sales by reducing their prices or raising their quality and music coverage, like indies do.
It's often described as a cartel, but some cartels are relatively shallow and defensive, whereas this one effectively has the entirety of public media in its grasp and the ears/wallets of politicians too, and has a strategy based on offence and intimidation. It is about as malevolant and anti-competitive as you can get without breaking kneecaps. And while they don't break kneecaps, they certainly have no compunction about destroying lives economically, based on legal theories which they lobbied to create.
Their slimy lawyers will probably slither out from under a charge of anti-competitive economic collusion because the legal system is driven by technicalities rather than substance. But the RIAA labels are certainly guilty as sin of it. They lost any concept of competition between them long ago.
Others have commented on the TPM and DRM aspects of vPro, but the part that interests me most is the remote access functionality. Is this coming to desktops now?
... which on the positive side could mean that we get BMC/LOM capabilities soon on normal home machines as well.
Most modern servers have remote management capability these days, through some kind of Lights-Out Management (LOM) system that works even when the operating system is dead or when the host CPU is powered off. It's not just the high profile Sun/HP/IBM brands that have such capability --- even Dell servers have BMC hardware (a small embedded microcontroller) running a LOM and providing access through IPMI, and have had it for many years. I've found all these LOM systems extremely useful, even without the more recent remote KVM features.
I'd love this kind of functionality independent of the running O/S to appear on desktop motherboards too, but motherboard manufacturers have traditionally kept server and desktop markets separate. Is there any sign that the new vPro chipsets could start moving such functionality towards the desktop too?
From the videos, it doesn't seem so, as they're targetted at corporates. But the worries that people have expressed about the TPM/DRM side of vPro suggest that the desktop isn't far away
As always, a powerful tool can be used both for good and for bad, and a BMC could do unwanted things as well as providing a very useful LOM. However, if it can be controlled by the end user, this sounds like useful technology.
OSI needs to present itself as an impartial organization
The OSI's impartiality and pragmatism will be its downfall. Like the sky-diver without a parachute, the OSI will keep saying "it looks OK so far" until it's too late. Microsoft isn't just any old party.
There is a fundamental difference between the normal FOSS world and Microsoft's world: the first is cooperative, whereas MS is competitive, or even combative.
Microsoft consorts with open source (but not with Free Software) because it can see a way to first stand on its shoulders, and then stomp it into the ground. That's how MS works. It doesn't have a cooperative bone in its body.
The OSI doesn't have a means of defending itself against that --- it pretty much assumes that everyone is cooperative if they make their source code visible, without taking into account that some parties have malicious intent. Well MS's view of the OSI is probably "There's a sucker born every minute". It's not going to end well for the OSI.
As far as the FSF and GPL are concerned though, Microsoft siding up to the OSI will probably work in their favor. By distancing themselves from the GPL and then shafting the OSI, Microsoft might well achieve the closing of ranks between open-source and free software camps, once the OSI's very dead and post-humously humped corpse is plain for all to see.
A hardware product has an official End-Of-Life date beyond which it is no longer sold nor supported. That's fairly logical, because it is a standalone physical item, and its physical end of life is inescapable.
But the concept of EOL'ing an operating system that's at the heart of bazillion old machines out there seems completely wrong, to the point of being bizarre. Those machines will (mostly) never change their operating system, and why should they --- after all, their manufacturer created them as XP machines, not as Vista boxes, and their manufacturer-supplied drivers might not even work with Vista.
Yet, except in the case of non-networked machines, their continued survival requires fairly regular O/S updates in response to the changing face of the Internet. End-Of-Lifing XP reflects a very myopic stance by Microsoft, as if their product Windows XP were somehow standalone. Well it's not.
Microsoft enjoys the $$$ benefits of Windows being adopted worldwide as the most popular operating system, but with that comes the responsibility of maintaining the heart of those myriad machines which use it
Yes, it's a responsibility. Operating systems are not toasters. They sustain the continued viability of machinery that uses them, and can't be treated as independent items. Their manufacturers committed to a dependency on Microsoft support.
While End-Of-Life is a common concept in commercial products, there is something fundamentally wrong with declaring an operating system as dead. While the hardware survives (at least 10 years, maybe 15), a degree of support should continue to be provided, as I see it. The rate of support calls will dwindle to zero over time, so "It would cost us too much" is not really a good excuse. Especially given the size of MS coffers.
Killing off older machines by denying support for their O/S seems irresponsible by the O/S manufacturer, regardless of which O/S that is.
Won't higher prices mean more piracy?
Yes, but it doesn't matter, because *fans* always buy the CDs, go to concerts, get the merchandise, or pass the buzz around to their friends. That's what makes them fans.
The non-fans are irrelevant to the sales ledger, since they would never have bought anything anyway.
The RIAA wants to everyone to pay of course, even if they've downloaded the music but hate it.
But that just shows that the RIAA are fucking morons. They can't distinguish between the economics of virtual and physical goods. Alleged losses to non-fans equate to zero.
is the fact that the geothermal advocates look forward to 100 GW as their limit horizon, whereas we need 20 TW (== 20,000 GW) to meet demand in 2 decades' time.
... but just remember that solar has absolutely no equal. Not even remotely close.
Compare that to the 150,000 TW (== 150,000,000 gigawatts) of solar irradiation at the Earth's surface. and you can see just how "funny" (in the sense of inconsequential) 100 GW really is. And then to see the greater picture, just rise above the atmosphere to find some real power. With acreage no object, solar energy tends towards infinity.
By all means use geothermal sources as well as all other renewables
No it is not worth protecting this kind of patent, under any circumstances, because it corrupts the entire basis on which patents are granted.
A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a patentee for a fixed period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention.
And the reason why the state affords a patentee such a protected period is so that the public disclosure does not place the patentee at a disadvantage while bringing the invention to market, versus others who have obtained the details without effort through the disclosure.
There has been no actual invention here whatsoever, there are no innovative details to offer the public, and only one single unremarkable choice was made. The alleged "invention" consists merely of taking one class of datum (a gene sequence) and using it as input to a process, a generative music generator. Neither one nor the other is new, and this kind of juxtaposition is arbitrary and does not result from insight nor from effort. And as many others have pointed out, it's not even a novel choice, but has been done countless times before.
Also, the lawyers aren't actually producing anything so there is nothing to protect, and release of the details provides the public with absolutely nothing of benefit in exchange. What we have here are the usual worthless sons of bitches thinking they can carve out a piece of the public ideas space and claim that they own it --- totally at odds with the very concept of patents.
So no, it's not worth protecting, regardless of any other point. It's simply contemptible, corrupting of the patent system (as if it could get any worse), and totally ill-founded.
While the article correctly observes a massive slowdown, unfortunately it blames it on enterprise crap without testing that assumption.
...) all your web browsers except lynx. Or prefereably build a new Gentoo or Slackware or LFS or DSL system from scratch without any of that "modern crap" installed.
....
... :-)
It's easy to show that that theory is flawed, because anyone can easily prove to themselves which factor should carry the blame, as follows:
1) Get rid of Gnome, KDE, all Gtk+ apps, all Qt apps, and (people will love this
2) Replace your X11 window manager with icewm (ie. no docks, no icons, no Windows-type desktop). Install xv for playing with images, and mpg123 for playing music.
3) Now play. What happened to all the sluggishness? It's all 10 times faster than before, wow! But that's not the end.
4) Kill X11. Make sure that GPM is installed, and get acquainted with the text-mode mouse. Log in on 6 VTs and get used to working across all of them as you would across a pile of xterms, switching VTs as needed. Observe responsiveness
5) OMFG!!! It's 1000 times faster! In fact, everything is instantaneous on a modern CPU. Admittedly it'll probably be a culture shock to work without graphics for 95% of current Linux users, unless you're one of us old timers who did our Unix hacking very productively that way for over a decade
The point of the above isn't to suggest that we should work like we did in the 80's. It's to highlight that everything has slowed down because we have tied up 99% of our vastly faster CPUs into driving our fancy graphic user interfaces. Slim the GUI down and you get an immediate speedup. Get rid of the GUI altogether and the slowdown goes away entirely.
So the blame does NOT lie with enterprise crap, primarily. It may have a contributing effect, fair enough, but the main culprit (by a mile) is vastly and pointlessly over-elaborate, multi-layered, and highly inefficient graphic user interfaces, which really do nothing terribly useful. Eye candy doesn't come free.
My advice for those wanting responsiveness: restart Linux GUI design from scratch. Remember what the Amiga achieved with an 8 MHz 16-bit CPU and near-zero RAM compared to what we have today. There's a lesson there.
> There are a few problems, such as the fact that important and well known scientists are still reluctant to contribute. [My emphasis]
You probably didn't mean it quite the way you wrote it, but it's worth correcting anyway for the benefit of other eyeballs.
The accuracy of scientific reporting does not have a strong correlation with the public visibility of the scientist doing it, in general. In some cases, the well known scientists are not the important ones at all, but merely those who are best at self-promotion. And beware that the word "important" itself has a very different meaning within science and in society at large.
There is often good correlation with the publication record of the scientist (and that certainly results in visibility), but also quite often the correspondance is quite poor (many insightful scientists made their mark on science just once or only a few times), and in a few fields the correspondance is absolutely attrocious because of a semi-corrupt system of "papers for the boys" that makes a mockery of true science.
On top of that, remember that science is so intimately related with engineering that huge numbers of highly competent and qualified practitioners forgo the academic trappings of publication and do their science cloaked under the veil of company secrecy, so they may well be "important" but will not be "well known" in the slightest. And yet, we require their insight in Wikipedia as well.
So, I wouldn't have phrased it quite the way you did. We need scientific insight and strong logic backed by good citations, whatever the source.
Examine that paper carefully and you'll realize that when you use NUMA to prevent contention from descaling your performance, then you also have to decouple the code that runs in the local memories and the management structures that control it. You can't maintain centralized controls and expect NUMA-decoupled CPUs to give you maximum speedup, since it's the centralized structures that will queue up your mountains of CPUs. The paper itself ackowledged that, in suggesting that for high numbers of CPUs you might have to implement 2-level locking schemes.
In other words, beyond smallish numbers, NUMA doesn't provide OS scalability unless you partition your management structures to match. As a result, it's inevitable that functionality will drift away from a monolithic core into autonomous subsystems, in order to make the speedup gained from NUMA as high as possible.
Contrary to your assumption then, NUMA *promotes* the breakup of Linux's monolithic structures into decoupled and decentralized designs that bear more in common with microkernels than monolithic ones. And the pressure of wanting to scale well under natural kernel growth just adds to that. It really is a tide that doesn't want to get swept back.
> Linux should absolutely never become a microkernel
Religion notwithstanding, it will become microkernel-like, because a monolithic kernel just doesn't scale. It's as simple as that.
Monolithic kernels don't scale as the number of CPUs rises, nor as the number of drivers and other logical components goes up.
Because of the need to scale, in time Linux will partition itself into independent subsystems, and slowly but surely will become a microkernel-type design, because the alternative to that would be to suffer astronomic bug rates from combinatorial complexity explosion and very poor performance from CPU contention compared to a decoupled, decentralized design.
That microkernel future is 100% inevitable, because fighting growth is like trying to sweep back the tide. In due course, the debate will just fade away, and engineering will take over. And engineers always decouple.
The paper answers some of the questions that others have posed in this thread, particularly about the efficiency of the process achieved so far (0.57%). These are their conclusions:
It's clearly at a very early stage of research/development, but polymer photovoltaic cells have such enormous potential that it's an extremely valuable direction to pursue.
1) While you might think that makes it 'ok', Heinlein didn't have that requirement. Farnham's Freehold postulated incest for reproduction, and with unmitigated zeal too, rather than any sort of reluctance at the supposed 'necessity'.
... he embraced it with open arms! And with not a hint of embarassment or restraint at all, because that dishonest condition belongs to the inhibited "regressives" that he was purposely trying to leave behind. To be PC is the opposite of being honest. He was honest.
:-)
In Farnham's Freehold, there was little alternative, they were cooped up in a bomb shelter for years! What had to happen, happened. You can't just switch it off, you know --- there was no "supposed" reluctance, it was unmitigated zeal alright! And entirely normal, very human, and honest.
It is also somewhat telling that practically ALL of his female characters were relentlessly promiscuous, and even in his books aimed at a younger audience his female characters were unfailingly sexually precocious when you consider their age.
That's because *everybody* is relentlously promiscuous, even those who are inhibited from showing it. It's a part of the human condition. Heinlein shrugged off the political correctness of not showing it, that's all. You're criticizing him for honesty about what makes the vast majority of humans tick, every day!
Far too much plot, and effort were dedicated to it in title after title after title for it to be merely inadvertantly 'showing through'.
You're not even close, because you misunderstand his worldview, and you think there is an unfortunate "showing through". No, it didn't merely "show through"
I can see where your interpretation comes from, but it's completely incorrect, and simply stems from your own inhibitions and lack of belief that people like him can be decoupled from them.
He was. I am. You're not. We exist, in billions! Welcome to the real world, not the PC fiction.
Where it's OK to sleep with your mom... because she's your mom.
:-)))
... his horizons were far too close to the present, and far too restrictive. But he did open the eyes of a generation, so he occupies pride of place on my shelf.
:-)
And indeed it is OK to sleep with your mom (and with all your other family members who might yield offspring too), once technology removes the danger of genetic mishaps.
Heinlein didn't let himself be constrained by political correctness, and good for him. That's what great science fiction is all about, leaving behind the shackles of the past, and seeing where it leads. And the more Jurassic people that that annoys, the better.
Disclaimer: I have all of his books.
Funnily enough though, he's not my favourite author
Happy Birthday, Robert!
This is an area in which any amount of investment in battery research using traditional materials science and chemistry is going to be rapidly overtaken by fallout from nanotechnology research --- and that's under the assumption that MNT research just continues bumping along the bottom without that crucial bootstrapping breakthrough that actually launches MNT assembly.
.... 3) Profit. :P
The reason is that battery technology will benefit enormously even from somewhat underwhelming "nanoscale materials" development, ie. still bulk materials rather than real MNT, but with ever-increasing nanoscale benefits as a result of improving surface and nanoparticle chemistry, and the emergence of remarkable engineering components like nanotubes. It may be "just fallout" from MNT work, but it's very impressive and useful all the same.
This is one of the things that isn't often appreciated amid the much more sexy talk about SciFi-type nanomachinery. Along the way and long before, *millions* of stunning improvements to old bulk materials and processes will pop out in the wash, because finding that key MNT bootstrap method isn't going to happen suddenly, and every bit of research will yield something new.
So by all means invest in battery research, but do it in nanotechnology areas, because that's pretty much guaranteed to yield lots of useful byproducts, even if you're just meandering along quite randomly. It's a great area in which to work at this time.
Once MNT actually happens though, there's no telling what will happen to investments and economies, but it'll be interesting, that's for sure. Meanwhile, invest in the basic research and your wallet is likely to look pretty healthy regardless of direction.
It's almost all new down there, so almost anything you do is likely to yield
It predates Moses, and is quite likely to survive the heat death of the universe.
I expect that the majority of people believe that they're buying a product when they purchase Vista, or when they purchase a PC with Vista pre-installed. That presumption may be entirely wrong though.
... or else nothing, that's the only option. In fact then, you haven't purchased a product at all, but a service without any agreed terms.
... although Microsoft probably wants you to continue purchasing without owning.
Certainly from Microsoft's point of view, and in view of their total focus on WGA, you've agreed to a single-payment licensing deal. EULAs may not be valid in some jurisdictions, but that doesn't seem to concern them. You live within their worldview, or else
Likewise, from the content providers' point of view, your PC and its software certainly doesn't belong to you, which implies that you haven't purchased Vista as a product. Instead, it's just a delivery vehicle for their content, and Microsoft is the guarantor of DRM safety to ensure that this is so. The fact that you've paid for your hardware and software as if it were yours seems to have escaped both content providers and Microsoft alike.
Perhaps in the future, people who are not technical will not own computers at all, but only rent content delivery vehicles?
That's where Vista seems to be heading
>> This analogy is flawed. The Open Source community creates code from ideas to create programs and systems. In the Biohacking world, genetic code is copied from one system into another system
I don't find it flawed at all.
Free and Open Source Software is concerned not with the creation of a bag of abstract ideas, but a bag (or pyramid) of software components of various kinds (libraries, classes, utilities, etc). Those components are copied around from one application to another very freely, and not restricted to just one type of application or system (analoguous to "species"). This is very close indeed to horizontal gene transfer, cutting them out of one sequence and splicing them into another.
The analogy may be little more than a coincidence of course, so one shouldn't read too much into it, but I think that Dyson uses it quite accurately. Moreover, the equivalent to horizontal gene transfer pervades every single one of our fields of technology, so I think it's true to say that speciation is totally dead in all activities of Man, and biotech is just one example.
>> One more nail ...in the coffin for the argument that these laws and regulations protect creators and innovators.
This ruling actually very strongly promotes technological innovation in distribution of works.
If the ruling holds up, copyright holders (regardless of whether they are creators or publishers) will not be able to demand renegociation of fees or royalties simply because a work was reissued in a different form.
Given that new forms of media or new methods of download appear continually as part of progress, this should reduce the chilling effect of opportunistic litigation by money-grabbing parties of either kind.
Of course it will be challanged, because money-grabbers are everywhere. In principle though, it places the onus on creators to find a suitable fee structure JUST ONCE, and then be bound to that regardless of what progress holds in store.
Like TFA said, it's a widespread problem in virtual worlds, but it can become even worse when the world itself introduces voice support, without requiring 3rd party software. Then you get a presumption of voice availability, and not wishing to use voice can then get interpreted in various destructive ways.
This came to a head recently in Second Life, when they introduced voice chat functionality (actually still in beta). One of the most cogent discussions about it was made by a well-known SL commentator in her essay The End of Anonymity, Part II, which focussed mainly on the end of immersion in SL. Her conclusion, that it will force non-politically-correct roleplayers into "ghettos" and destroy mainstream immersion, does seem reasonable.
Avatars in SL can be anything you like, no limit, so not surprisingly roleplay is extremely popular. The main grid is expressly for adults only, and so of course there is much interest in gender roleplay, in both directions (the gender spread is almost exactly 50/50). Needless to say, the loss of immersion through voice immediately gave rise to a lot of concern among roleplayers. This still has to be played out on the main grid, but it's certain that the impact will be large.