No when you're using ChromeOS the way google describes it deployed on the ARM-based netbooks... everything climatologically signed, and no unauthorized software, no local applications, not even an installed print driver; if the netbook detects tampering, it re-images itself "from the cloud."
I'd rather pay the $25 Microsoft tax and buy a netbook that I can wipe down and install what *I* want on it.
Netbooks are $250... by Christmas 2010, they'll be $200. The only people that are going to want a "free google 'welfarebook' with your 24-month wireless internet data contract - some conditions apply, yadda yadda yadda rip-off contract" will be those who can't come up with $200. Far from "do no evil", this will be "gouge the poor."
[_] In Soviet Russia, IT guy hates YOU!
[_] Netcraft confirms it, IT.GUY is dead!
[_] CowboyNeal is my IT guy. I hate calling him, period!
[_] IT guy was rescued after he crashed his vehicle into a tree. His wife used a golf club to break the rear window and free him. He was NOT driving while under the influence of pain-killers, and his wife did NOT just chase him from their home at 2:30 am and she did NOT confront him about his cheating on her, did NOT bitch-slap him (and not 5 times), and did NOT smash the window before the accident to "teach him to drive only on the authorized golf course" or "putt to the wrong hole". Tht is IT guys' story, and he's sticking to it.
For the integrated hypervisor of Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft has bravely resorted to a timer function that they themselves had classified as unreliable for former processors: the timer of the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC). Unlike, for example, the CPU timer (Time Stamp Counter, TSC) - which by now is comparatively resistant to power-saving, SpeedStep and turbo-boost modes, but is also virtualised by virtual machines - the APIC timer can also trigger interrupts. Unfortunately, right now, the Nehalem has too many of those, so that the hypervisor falters and then stops, returning the message "Clock_Watchdog_Time-out".
So yes, if you depend on something that generates an interrupt whose code path may be suspended in certain power-saving modes, don't be surprised if it doesn't get serviced promptly. It looks more like a bug in Windows Server.
Back in the old days, when you issued a CLI instruction, you made sure your routine didn't do too much work before issuing an STI, because that code isn't re-entrant (it's directly modifiable by the hardware, which is why you have to use the "volatile" keyword to make sure that compilers didn't "optimize away" any loops, etc). Kind of hard to guarantee that if you're putting that portion of the hardware to sleep between interrupts. As the article points out, disabling those power-saving modes fixes the problem.
Don't forget to include "buying stocks on-line." After all, the stock market IS gambling.
And "mail-order Russian brides."
And "Investing in Internet companies".
These all meet any definition of online gambling that would include wagers on the outcome of an event, same as betting on horse races, football games, and powerball draws.
After all, now you can simulate it and see how real people react to the evidence. Figure out what clues to plant to misdirect, hide, obfuscate, or even frame someone else... yep, fun for the whole family - if your family name is Cosa Nostra...
I can't wait for Google to record all of our conversations, run them through a voice to text converter and then email/SMS/call me with "targeted" advertisements.
I see the Googlebots modded you -1 Troll. Why? Because it's very believable. And it's probably what they'd end up doing. So there'd be all these nice transcripts lying around... that could be VERY profitable.
The Google fan crowd are as bad as the Microsofties and Apple polishers together.
To them, Google can do no wrong. Sure, you sacrifice privacy, but "LOOK AT THE SHINY!"
I for one don't want an advertising company (which is what Google is) listening in on my phone calls. They would be pissed if their cell phone company sold their call information to advertisers - but Google can listne in - they're not evil.
You forgot to include "and have said they want ChromeOS to run on ARM netbooks that are totally locked down so you can't even install a printer driver".
Tivo, meet Google. Google, meet Tivo.
"It's for security reasons!" - yeah - their security. Can't have people installing adblock on that Google netbook.
>p>
How about them using Google voice-to-text so they can search your conversations to "deliver more targeted ads for a better experience"?
Google is an advertising ocmpany - EVERYTHING else is secondary to that. Remember that.
Home theatres start at 42". 30" is a tv, not a "home theatre". Also, today's plasmas have excellent darkness levels, and your CRT - the one you call a "home theatre" - the one sitting in your home right now - suffers from terrible glare. It's a real piece of shit, the amount of light it reflects. It reflects so much that I can tell you are a slob, with crap all over the place (on the floor in front of your couch, on the two tv trays in front of the couch, on the end table, etc.)
As for sound, I'm not deaf - I run mine at 5% - 10% volume. Maybe 20% for a movie. At those levels, there's no problem with distortion - unlike your setup, where you have one speaker mounted to the wall right beside the person's head when they're sitting on the couch. That's just SO f***ed up in terms of speaker placement.
You don't know what you're talking about, and you really need to clean up your "home theatre room". It's a f***ing pigsty.
... and you don't think they wouldn't? It's not like they don't have the source code - it's their own apps, and the market could very well boom. They can't afford to ignore it.
If the person can't be trusted with root, they can't be trusted to work with sudo without being supervised by someone with root access anyways, to make sure they don't completely f*** up.
So, either get someone who won't screw it up with root access, and they will create a privileged account with the proper group permissions and work in it, or don't let them near it if they're too stupid to do that. sudo doesn't fix not having the right people.
Still, we're not talking about a comercial device. Not yet, at least. When transistors were first conceived, you can be damn sure that no one could make a completely accurate numerical computer out of it. So it's just a matter of time.
Transistor radios were out 5 years (1952) after the transistor was invented (1947). Between 1955 and 1957 several companies were selling fully-transistorized calculators and computing devices.
I doubt we'll be seeing fully-quantized computers in 10 years.
Apple isn't doing an after-sale tie-in. You don't *have* to ever upgrade your computer.
What they're doing is saying that when you buy a software upgrade, here are the terms and conditions. If they offer the upgrade and they also offer a different SKU as a bare install disk, then they shouldn't be allowed to say what hardware you can run it on, but that's a different story. In psystars' case, they were acting as retailers, not end-users. I don't think apple cares if the end user makes themselves a hackintosh, but they don't want competition in the hardware segment.
Is what they're doing anti-competitive? Yes. That's why they're using trademark and copyright law, not saying "this is illegal because we control the hardware." Or they're exporting the Steve Jobs RDF. At this point, who gives a crap?
After all, if you don't want Windows, you can get linux, you can get bsd, you can get menuet, and a bunch of other freely available operating systems. You want OSX? Then help someone make a works-alike port of Cocoa and Carbon and Aqua and IOKit - or go play around with this, or any one of a number of things.
And if you have code that is non-trivial, then you're going to have more than one function call. Say you have code that executes a few billion function calls (not too hard to imagine - your computer does it every day just surfing the web and drawing pretty icons on-screen). Your 4/10000 error for each function call after picking the median of 5 iterations means that we can pretty much guarantee that every run of the overall program for the rest of your life will be in error. So, you say, increase the number of iterations at each step. The problem is, the number of iterations needed to keep the overall error rate down increases rapidly with each new function call because errors do accumulate for non-trivial programs.
The problem is you want to look at the accuracy of the entire system, not just one line. In a 100,000 line program, making multiple recursive calls to many functions, 21% errors in each function will mean you'll pretty much never get the same answer twice between runs, whereas conventional hardware is pretty darned deterministic.
It's not like FP arithmetic, but the errors still do accumulate, because bad output from one step becomes bad input for the next - the errors accumulate aggressively.
If however, I was looking at purchasing a car, and the license agreement said that I had to buy high priced tires, you can bet I wouldn't want to buy that car. If I did for whatever reason buy that car, I would be obligated to hold up my end of the license agreement.
No, you wouldn't. The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act forbids after-sale tie-ins, just like you don't void your warranty agreement by getting your oil changed elsewhere, or doing it yourself.
Note the article - hundreds of different functions were tested, with an overall accuracy of 79%. How are you intending to build more than a trivial piece of code when you have 79% accuracy from each function, on average? The fact is, the more function calls you add, and the more functions you add, the more likely that at least one will be wrong - and then the errors will, of course, cascade, since now you already have bad data for the next fuction, and it's highly unlikely you'll get just the right error to cancel it out.
The more complex the program, the more likely that you'll never get the same answer twice over n runs... it's still useless at this point - the only quantum computing device that has the necessary power to correct for bad inputs is your brain, and that's because it doesn't need to find "the right" answer - just one good enough to survive.
Now imagine that the problem that this computer solves is extremely difficult, and would take billions of years to solve on a conventional computer.
Suddenly it doesn't sound so stupid anymore, eh?
Problems have a way of falling down a lot quicker than you'd think. When they started sequencing the human genome, they thought it would take 100 years. Gee, how time flies - it sure didn't seem like it took 100 years.
There's almost always a better algorithm if you look at a problem long enough.
... you notice that it's backed up by similar interviews on video all over the net? Americans who think that the US invaded Israel, who point to Australia and think it's Iraq, etc...
Just because it's satire doesn't mean it isn't true - satire is used to expose truth, not hide it.
Think about it - the posters' premise was that take a sample of 5 to 15 times, and go with the majority answer. I pointed out some of the hazards of that. There are many more, all obvious to anyone who wants to think for a few minutes.
Let's say we do a calculation, 2+2. We do it 5 times. If it's only right 79% of the time, every once in a while, we'll get a sample of 5 where the majority is not 4... So, if we have a condition like if (2+2 == 4), it will fail once in a while, in a non-predictable way. So now, instead of having just a 79% accuracy, you have a cascade of inaccuracies. If every line of your code has a 1 in 5 chance of failing, anything more complicated than trivial programs like "goodbye, world!" will fail more than they will succeed.
Think of it - if you have 100 lines of code, with a chance of 1% error every time any one line was run, your program will almost always give wrong output.
It's like in the old days of tube computers - sure, a tube might last 10,000 hours - but with 10,000 tubes, you'd better make sure your program didn't require a week to run - on average, at least one tube would burn out long before then.
My point is simple - we laugh at the American citizens who think the United States is a foreign country and can't find it on the map, but we take:quantum computing" seriously when it has equally laughable results. Until it's accurate, the "computing" part should be removed. It might be quantum, but it ain't computing, because it simply doesn't compute (pun intended:-).
Next buzzword bingo article - "Cloud quantum computing at the LHC makes baguette disappear 50% of the time! Latest theory is toast! Physicists blame the French. EU demands youtube videos be removed because they make fun of scientists!"
There were examples where people had the same (lousy) accuracy as this. Try reading the links instead of just looking at the portions I quoted for brevity.
Slashdot Mirror
s/climatologically/cryptologically/'
Sorry about that ...
No when you're using ChromeOS the way google describes it deployed on the ARM-based netbooks ... everything climatologically signed, and no unauthorized software, no local applications, not even an installed print driver; if the netbook detects tampering, it re-images itself "from the cloud."
I'd rather pay the $25 Microsoft tax and buy a netbook that I can wipe down and install what *I* want on it.
Netbooks are $250 ... by Christmas 2010, they'll be $200. The only people that are going to want a "free google 'welfarebook' with your 24-month wireless internet data contract - some conditions apply, yadda yadda yadda rip-off contract" will be those who can't come up with $200. Far from "do no evil", this will be "gouge the poor."
[X] I'm not a guy, you ignorant clod!
Other options:
[_] In Soviet Russia, IT guy hates YOU!
[_] Netcraft confirms it, IT.GUY is dead!
[_] CowboyNeal is my IT guy. I hate calling him, period!
[_] IT guy was rescued after he crashed his vehicle into a tree. His wife used a golf club to break the rear window and free him. He was NOT driving while under the influence of pain-killers, and his wife did NOT just chase him from their home at 2:30 am and she did NOT confront him about his cheating on her, did NOT bitch-slap him (and not 5 times), and did NOT smash the window before the accident to "teach him to drive only on the authorized golf course" or "putt to the wrong hole". Tht is IT guys' story, and he's sticking to it.
Sorry, didn't get the message - running with interrupts disabled due to too many interrupts - so Im goo@#@!%!!#)(MN!NO CARRIER
I for one welcome our non-interrupted cpu overlords, because in Soviet Russia, interrupts disable YOU!
FTFA:
So yes, if you depend on something that generates an interrupt whose code path may be suspended in certain power-saving modes, don't be surprised if it doesn't get serviced promptly. It looks more like a bug in Windows Server.
Back in the old days, when you issued a CLI instruction, you made sure your routine didn't do too much work before issuing an STI, because that code isn't re-entrant (it's directly modifiable by the hardware, which is why you have to use the "volatile" keyword to make sure that compilers didn't "optimize away" any loops, etc). Kind of hard to guarantee that if you're putting that portion of the hardware to sleep between interrupts. As the article points out, disabling those power-saving modes fixes the problem.
Don't forget to include "buying stocks on-line." After all, the stock market IS gambling.
And "mail-order Russian brides."
And "Investing in Internet companies".
These all meet any definition of online gambling that would include wagers on the outcome of an event, same as betting on horse races, football games, and powerball draws.
After all, now you can simulate it and see how real people react to the evidence. Figure out what clues to plant to misdirect, hide, obfuscate, or even frame someone else ... yep, fun for the whole family - if your family name is Cosa Nostra ...
I see the Googlebots modded you -1 Troll. Why? Because it's very believable. And it's probably what they'd end up doing. So there'd be all these nice transcripts lying around ... that could be VERY profitable.
The Google fan crowd are as bad as the Microsofties and Apple polishers together.
To them, Google can do no wrong. Sure, you sacrifice privacy, but "LOOK AT THE SHINY!"
I for one don't want an advertising company (which is what Google is) listening in on my phone calls. They would be pissed if their cell phone company sold their call information to advertisers - but Google can listne in - they're not evil.
The days of Google not doing evil are long gone.
You forgot to include "and have said they want ChromeOS to run on ARM netbooks that are totally locked down so you can't even install a printer driver".
Tivo, meet Google. Google, meet Tivo.
"It's for security reasons!" - yeah - their security. Can't have people installing adblock on that Google netbook. >p> How about them using Google voice-to-text so they can search your conversations to "deliver more targeted ads for a better experience"?
Google is an advertising ocmpany - EVERYTHING else is secondary to that. Remember that.
Home theatres start at 42". 30" is a tv, not a "home theatre". Also, today's plasmas have excellent darkness levels, and your CRT - the one you call a "home theatre" - the one sitting in your home right now - suffers from terrible glare. It's a real piece of shit, the amount of light it reflects. It reflects so much that I can tell you are a slob, with crap all over the place (on the floor in front of your couch, on the two tv trays in front of the couch, on the end table, etc.)
As for sound, I'm not deaf - I run mine at 5% - 10% volume. Maybe 20% for a movie. At those levels, there's no problem with distortion - unlike your setup, where you have one speaker mounted to the wall right beside the person's head when they're sitting on the couch. That's just SO f***ed up in terms of speaker placement.
You don't know what you're talking about, and you really need to clean up your "home theatre room". It's a f***ing pigsty.
Restrict the people - not the process.
If the person can't be trusted with root, they can't be trusted to work with sudo without being supervised by someone with root access anyways, to make sure they don't completely f*** up.
So, either get someone who won't screw it up with root access, and they will create a privileged account with the proper group permissions and work in it, or don't let them near it if they're too stupid to do that. sudo doesn't fix not having the right people.
Transistor radios were out 5 years (1952) after the transistor was invented (1947). Between 1955 and 1957 several companies were selling fully-transistorized calculators and computing devices.
I doubt we'll be seeing fully-quantized computers in 10 years.
Apple isn't doing an after-sale tie-in. You don't *have* to ever upgrade your computer.
What they're doing is saying that when you buy a software upgrade, here are the terms and conditions. If they offer the upgrade and they also offer a different SKU as a bare install disk, then they shouldn't be allowed to say what hardware you can run it on, but that's a different story. In psystars' case, they were acting as retailers, not end-users. I don't think apple cares if the end user makes themselves a hackintosh, but they don't want competition in the hardware segment.
Is what they're doing anti-competitive? Yes. That's why they're using trademark and copyright law, not saying "this is illegal because we control the hardware." Or they're exporting the Steve Jobs RDF. At this point, who gives a crap?
After all, if you don't want Windows, you can get linux, you can get bsd, you can get menuet, and a bunch of other freely available operating systems. You want OSX? Then help someone make a works-alike port of Cocoa and Carbon and Aqua and IOKit - or go play around with this, or any one of a number of things.
And if you have code that is non-trivial, then you're going to have more than one function call. Say you have code that executes a few billion function calls (not too hard to imagine - your computer does it every day just surfing the web and drawing pretty icons on-screen). Your 4/10000 error for each function call after picking the median of 5 iterations means that we can pretty much guarantee that every run of the overall program for the rest of your life will be in error. So, you say, increase the number of iterations at each step. The problem is, the number of iterations needed to keep the overall error rate down increases rapidly with each new function call because errors do accumulate for non-trivial programs.
The problem is you want to look at the accuracy of the entire system, not just one line. In a 100,000 line program, making multiple recursive calls to many functions, 21% errors in each function will mean you'll pretty much never get the same answer twice between runs, whereas conventional hardware is pretty darned deterministic.
It's not like FP arithmetic, but the errors still do accumulate, because bad output from one step becomes bad input for the next - the errors accumulate aggressively.
No, you wouldn't. The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act forbids after-sale tie-ins, just like you don't void your warranty agreement by getting your oil changed elsewhere, or doing it yourself.
Note the article - hundreds of different functions were tested, with an overall accuracy of 79%. How are you intending to build more than a trivial piece of code when you have 79% accuracy from each function, on average? The fact is, the more function calls you add, and the more functions you add, the more likely that at least one will be wrong - and then the errors will, of course, cascade, since now you already have bad data for the next fuction, and it's highly unlikely you'll get just the right error to cancel it out.
The more complex the program, the more likely that you'll never get the same answer twice over n runs ... it's still useless at this point - the only quantum computing device that has the necessary power to correct for bad inputs is your brain, and that's because it doesn't need to find "the right" answer - just one good enough to survive.
Problems have a way of falling down a lot quicker than you'd think. When they started sequencing the human genome, they thought it would take 100 years. Gee, how time flies - it sure didn't seem like it took 100 years.
There's almost always a better algorithm if you look at a problem long enough.
Just because it's satire doesn't mean it isn't true - satire is used to expose truth, not hide it.
Think about it - the posters' premise was that take a sample of 5 to 15 times, and go with the majority answer. I pointed out some of the hazards of that. There are many more, all obvious to anyone who wants to think for a few minutes.
Let's say we do a calculation, 2+2. We do it 5 times. If it's only right 79% of the time, every once in a while, we'll get a sample of 5 where the majority is not 4 ... So, if we have a condition like if (2+2 == 4), it will fail once in a while, in a non-predictable way. So now, instead of having just a 79% accuracy, you have a cascade of inaccuracies. If every line of your code has a 1 in 5 chance of failing, anything more complicated than trivial programs like "goodbye, world!" will fail more than they will succeed.
Think of it - if you have 100 lines of code, with a chance of 1% error every time any one line was run, your program will almost always give wrong output.
It's like in the old days of tube computers - sure, a tube might last 10,000 hours - but with 10,000 tubes, you'd better make sure your program didn't require a week to run - on average, at least one tube would burn out long before then.
My point is simple - we laugh at the American citizens who think the United States is a foreign country and can't find it on the map, but we take :quantum computing" seriously when it has equally laughable results. Until it's accurate, the "computing" part should be removed. It might be quantum, but it ain't computing, because it simply doesn't compute (pun intended :-).
Next buzzword bingo article - "Cloud quantum computing at the LHC makes baguette disappear 50% of the time! Latest theory is toast! Physicists blame the French. EU demands youtube videos be removed because they make fun of scientists!"
I want 1005 accuracy. I don't want 2+2 = 3.9999999999882 on average after 100 runs, then having it fail every time when I do an if(2+2) == 4).
Sure, I could use a delta, and then make sure it's under that, but then you have the accumulation of errors and tolerances.
Take a barrel of shit, add a cup of wine, you still have a barrel of shit.
Take a barrel of wine, add a cup of shit, you have a barrel of shit.
A failure rate of 21% is bad business. Ask Microsoft wrt the XBox RRofD
There were examples where people had the same (lousy) accuracy as this. Try reading the links instead of just looking at the portions I quoted for brevity.