Come on, he's not saying that you can use C++ templates in C. They have implemented a user space library to support user space steared inter-process parallelization and scheduling. If you want to use it, you have to use C++ for writing your app, but it does not have to be inside the OS. What he wants the OS to do, is to keep out of the way of what his liubrary does by scheduling processes as a whole instead of single threads.
He's not talking about binding. Or at least not only. He's talking about the OS scheduling processes and the application (i.e. user space) scheduling the threads within them. Not a new idea either, but then again he has not said the idea was new, he has only said he would want people to use it.
1: Where does iut say that Intel is demanding a bunch of volunteers to do their dirty work?
2: How do you know what Intel is doing? Do you work for them? Or do you at least work with them on such topics? Or do you at the very least work in the same area (I personally did so until a little over a year ago)?
3: Why should they at all cost try to implement a new scheduler when the Linux community is already fighting over two of them, written by people who are being paid for it? Better to explain what they think should be done and let the other guys think about that first. This is called an open discussion, which is good for open source (and other things, such as the advancement of science) Besides, the message was not directed at Linux, but at OS scheduling theorists and practitioners in general.
He's an expert at (amonst other things) providing automatically optimised applicaton parallelisation in general, which as such is not available (I can know, I used to be a reaesrch team leader in a company that was working on it as well, but from a power management angle).
What he said about OS-level schedulers is that he ideally wants them to behave in a specific way, without even saying that specifically Linux needs to be changed (again: there are hundreds of OS-es out there). He has not said that Linux is "behind" or "retarted" anything. He has not said that Intel needs volunteers to do his dirty work for free. The only person who used the word Linux during that interview was the interviewer (as usual, the/. title gets it completely wrong and the/. summary is a composition of two quotes originating from the guy's anwers to two different questions). Read and understand the bloody article before posting nonsense!
In any case, if the thing has been available for many years and people are to be ridiculed for seemingly not knowing that, they what the hell are Ingo and Con fighting about? They must be non-experts doing useless work. Both of them.
Nope, you complainers got it backwards. This is a tech expert in his area, saying that he would want OS developrs - which he is not - do change their ways. Being the expert that he is, he is very much entitled to say that. What's more, he would still be entitled to say that even if he were in charge of the OS. Note that he doesn't say: "go out and do it for me because I'm lazy and don't want to pay". For all we know, he might be busy pulling "evangelical" levers to get it done at Intel and we are just observing one of those levers in action. Besides, he said "OS" not "Linux". It may come as a surprise to some of you, but Linux is not the only OS in the world.
Of course there is plenty potential for profit by doing things that are helpful. But you are comparing apples and oranges. Novell is helping Linux development for free, because Linux actually also is a Novell product that helps them sell a lot of other stuff in their "natural home market". TomTom sells to end-users, most of whom couldn't care less about Linux. Hell, TomTom developers could even he actively belping Linux kernel development, without it impacting the company's sales (I've seen this happen in my own company). I personally always refuse to buy computer-related goodies that do not work with Linux, but you need to look at it from the company's point of view: suporting Linux users will inevitably cost them something and if that is not compensated by extra income, be it from sales or goodwill, it makes perfect business sense for them not to do it. That's irrespective of how much us zealots would want things to be done differently.
I'm not going to claim that the numbers he gave are correct (on the contrary: they feel "weird" to me). But I can imagine that people who buy wine over the internet are more computer-addicted - and hence more likely to run OSX or Linux - than those who buy wine in a shop. Wether the addicts tend to buy more expensively, is something I can't judge, but it should not be excluded in by means of blanket statements. Real wine freaks don't use the net at all for buying wine anyway. Also, the likes of Mr Gates swim in money and may buy very expensive stuff, but surely don't do it over the net. They have somebody else doing it for them or have long-standing relationships with specific companies.
Any MBA worth his 3 letters will know that one needs to study one's own specific market instead of using very general and irrelevant numbers. Studying one's own market actually implies extracting the browser stats from the logs instead of using the "MS has 70%" number, so that part of the story is actually what they should do. The more tricky part is that one also needs to look at the segmentation of the market: which brower segments generate most revenue, as opposed to just "most items sold", or "most web site visits". This is actually what all those tracking cookies are for. Again, any MBA worth his 3 letters should know this.
In Frankfurt the ICE solution works just fine. The key is not only the speed (although killing the intermediate stops would help), but the connectivity. If you fly into Munich but actually need to be in another city in or near Bavaria, you're mostly stuck to loosing time switching trains. The maglev project doesn't solve that in any way (and will actually make it worse as an other poster explained), but ICEs that actually "go somewhere" would.
Having flown several times into and out of Munich before, I know what the current connection between the airport and the city is like: a complete nightmare. So I fully understand that they want to do something about it. But this maglev project of theirs is a complete waste of resources, economically (way too expensive) and technically (way to many dedicated material inputs). What they really should do, IMHO, is upgrade the rail connection to use standard high speed ICE trains. That's a lot cheaper and about just as effective.
This Maglev is only worth it for really long distances, like the Hamburg-Berlin line they once planned. But then again, there are good reasons why that is not working out. In short, I love the technology, but after about 30 years they should at long last admit that it was a practical failure and can the thing. But certain people can't admit mistakes and certain others (e.g. someone the Germans will be able to identify as soon as I write "Edmund":-) ) are looking to build a monument for themselves at all cost (that idea totally fits his personality and current cereer status, by the way).
I love rigid logic and thus can see some nice aspects in what you're trying to say. But I also have to say that I feel like you're trying to weaselword out of something you wrote that didn't really fit either "reality" or "what you truely meant". On top of that, if you decide to make blanket statements in which you consider every single person a monopolist becase he holds the exclusive rights to everything he ever wrote or every picture he ever took, then you're going way outside what the public (on/. or elsewhere) will think of when seeing the word "monopoly". It's your prerogative to mean something else, but then at least make it so that people can knnw.
You sound like a professor I know: very bright, but totally impossible to work with because he redefines just about every word he uses. And then he goes on to do that "on the fly" in order to talk himself out of any corner. Trouble is, people are starting to see through it. So now they often say "yes sir" but really mean "forget it".
I'm saying that you do not seem to understand copyright and licensing.
Yes, they are different. But copyright is an absolutely essential underpinning of licensing in general and the GPL in particular. The copyright of everything you write (even posts on/.) automatically belongs to you and nobody else, unless you willing signedly it away. Sounds bad, heh? It is only because of this copyright that you can prevent others from abusing your work. Sounds even worse, right? But this is exaclty what the GPL is about: preventing others from abusing (i.e.: taking private and exploiting without giving back) something that you as the author want to be free for all. And this vitally depends on the existance and enforcability of copyrights! So if you declare users of copyright to be monopolies "by definition"...
However, any company that uses any kind of copyright or patents are by definition monopoly's.
Irrespective of your valid point of refering to MS as an oligopoly player later on, where did you take your "Econ 101 for dummies" and "IP for dummies" courses? Coz' I sure don't want to see my friends go there. You do realise that you just declared Linux authoring companies (and people) to be a monopoly, right? Jeez...
I couldn't care less. When the time comes, I'll dump my last surviving Windows partition and go back to "Linux only", which I used to be anyway for many years. No tears will be shed.
There's no way that I'll let MicroSoft dictate when I have to replace hardware that is still plenty fast enough for my real needs. Besides, there was to be no XP SP3, but now they're making one for "sometime in 2008". I bet they'll extend support as well.
Dropping all the irrelevant car analogies, your quote: "While the machines themselves idle most of the time, they respond a lot faster when I actually want them to work" says it all: if these machines are faster than you require them to be, they will last longer than you think (speedwise that is). Come back in a year of two and tell us whether they are still acceptable. Assuming that you don't drastically change your needs, they should be. Then try again affter four years (from now). Same point, probably.
My personal strategy always has been to buy the best/fastest money can get me at any one time and then to use the machines for years and years and years. The one I used longest - admittedly a dual-cpu when those still was a very geeky thing and you needed linux to be able to do anything with it - has lasted for 10 years as my main box, only during the last 2 of which I also had a Windows laptop for semi-business use. My father still uses a machine that by now has over 16 years of service. It suits his needs (amd was blazingly fast when I built it). Overall, I've saved a lot of money and senseless upgrading misery by skipping (at least) every other PC generation.
Sorry, but 4 units out of a 300mm wafer leaves a big waste "around the edges". Of course you can try to fill that with smaller chips, but then having a non-uniform wafer adds complexity. So you're better off with 4x4cm units, of which you can put several extra on a single wafer. Now repeat the same logic until you reach the economically optimal point. I don't know exactly where that is, but is sure is not at 8x8, IMHO. Also don't forget that certain parts of the production costs are essentially determined by the amount of wafers, not the amount of dies. The less dies you get, the larger the part of those costs each of them has to carry. And since the semiconductor industry is ruled by very low margins...
A yield 100%? Have you ever been near / inside a fab? I know I have. I used to work in a company that has two of it's own, including one of the first 300mm ones. For starters, you're conveniently redefining yield to mean "as long as part of the circuit works, the die works". That's not correct: you may be able to sell a partially working one, but you also need a sufficient number of fully working ones to meet demand for those markets, otherwise the whole price segmentation plan breaks down. Next, depending on the exact fault, the entire die may be out of order due do a simple fault in a critical place. now, before you say "yes but redundancy...", please be aware that the bigger the die, the bigger the probability that it has multiple faults. In short, there simply is no such thing as 100% yield.
I agree with both of you. But I'd like to point out that Firefox has garbage collection mechanisms built-in, written in C++. But, as it turns out, garbage collection is not as simple to write as one might think and the presence of garbage collection support makes people lazy, also in C++. And of course, especially in C++ this is a Bad Thing (TM). Lazy programmers quickly start assuming that malloc() and strdup() are auto-collected as well.
Garbage collection in C++ is especially tricky, actually, because a single forgotten pointer "at the broder of the collection scope" can prevent many megabytes of interlinked "garbage collected" data structures from being detected as a loop and hence collected for real. Everybody assumes that the whole thing will auto-die and writes code accordingly, allocating like hell and not caring about resources; nobody is aware of the fact that somewhere in one single file a pointer assignment might be missing that blows their collection dreams out of the water.
Oh yes! Look up the Volvo-Scania case, for instance. And that's just one example of many.
I wonder why Americans always become so defensive when an US firm is has to deal with non-US policy makers. No, the rest of the world is not out to get you.
The problem in this particular case that the required formal statement that they will not sue companies making devices in accordance with the spec also sort of kills the whole patent for them. In order to succesfully "request a royalty per device from manufacturers, and go home" they have to be able to sue those manufacturers who don't pay. This is true even if they were to price that royalty in the micropayments range. It's even true if they were to just ask for a one-time 10$ fee per manufacturer. (Of course in the latter extreme case, the lawsuit would not pay itself anyway, but I'm simply trying to clarify my point by "going extreme".)
Standards are not free-of-charge by definition. A standard is exactly what the word says: a specification that you can choose to adhere to or not. Each international standard body can define its own rules as to what technology an IP limitations they will consider. If you don't want to adhere to a particular standard because there's a patent involved, you simply don't. It's your choice.
Now, arguably, a proposed standard stands a bigger chance of success if it is not subject to restrictive patents, but that in turn is the choice of the inventors of the technology. If the technology really is of outstanding quality, the developers may want to take that risk. Again, that is their choice, not yours.
I actually have a script called cookie_eater. It runs each time before I start Mozilla and: 1) removes all cookies matching a small but very powerful black-list of regexps; 2) preserves all cookies matching white-list of regexps; 3) removes all known nasty cookies not recognised so far using a second site-based black-list; 4) reports all cookies that it does not know what to do about to me. The very first step in this process is a recent addition and very sweet: I used it to quickly kill all Google Analytics cookies, even those associated with white-listed sites.
Of course I also use extensive cookie blocking at the source, but I don't want to simply deny all cookies, because then I'd not be able to easily grow my whitelist. Also, the original idea behind the script was that I'd rather spoil the tracking databases with tons of unrelated small bits of tracking that make no sense, than just to be invisible. (I.e.: don't just defend yourself, fight back in stead!) Because of this, the script also the ability to generate fake cookies for certain sites, but I don't actively use that anymore now that Google Analytics gets killed up front.
Slashdot Mirror
Who still cares about Natalie Portman? She's an old woman by now.
... however, when the first article was not read before posting replies, for that day is more clearly known than any other in slashdot.
Where I typed "inter" please read "intra". Quite important difference. Stupid me...
Come on, he's not saying that you can use C++ templates in C. They have implemented a user space library to support user space steared inter-process parallelization and scheduling. If you want to use it, you have to use C++ for writing your app, but it does not have to be inside the OS. What he wants the OS to do, is to keep out of the way of what his liubrary does by scheduling processes as a whole instead of single threads.
He's not talking about binding. Or at least not only. He's talking about the OS scheduling processes and the application (i.e. user space) scheduling the threads within them. Not a new idea either, but then again he has not said the idea was new, he has only said he would want people to use it.
1: Where does iut say that Intel is demanding a bunch of volunteers to do their dirty work?
2: How do you know what Intel is doing? Do you work for them? Or do you at least work with them on such topics? Or do you at the very least work in the same area (I personally did so until a little over a year ago)?
3: Why should they at all cost try to implement a new scheduler when the Linux community is already fighting over two of them, written by people who are being paid for it? Better to explain what they think should be done and let the other guys think about that first. This is called an open discussion, which is good for open source (and other things, such as the advancement of science) Besides, the message was not directed at Linux, but at OS scheduling theorists and practitioners in general.
4: Read and understand the bloody article!
He's an expert at (amonst other things) providing automatically optimised applicaton parallelisation in general, which as such is not available (I can know, I used to be a reaesrch team leader in a company that was working on it as well, but from a power management angle).
What he said about OS-level schedulers is that he ideally wants them to behave in a specific way, without even saying that specifically Linux needs to be changed (again: there are hundreds of OS-es out there). He has not said that Linux is "behind" or "retarted" anything. He has not said that Intel needs volunteers to do his dirty work for free. The only person who used the word Linux during that interview was the interviewer (as usual, the /. title gets it completely wrong and the /. summary is a composition of two quotes originating from the guy's anwers to two different questions). Read and understand the bloody article before posting nonsense!
In any case, if the thing has been available for many years and people are to be ridiculed for seemingly not knowing that, they what the hell are Ingo and Con fighting about? They must be non-experts doing useless work. Both of them.
Nope, you complainers got it backwards. This is a tech expert in his area, saying that he would want OS developrs - which he is not - do change their ways. Being the expert that he is, he is very much entitled to say that. What's more, he would still be entitled to say that even if he were in charge of the OS. Note that he doesn't say: "go out and do it for me because I'm lazy and don't want to pay". For all we know, he might be busy pulling "evangelical" levers to get it done at Intel and we are just observing one of those levers in action. Besides, he said "OS" not "Linux". It may come as a surprise to some of you, but Linux is not the only OS in the world.
Of course there is plenty potential for profit by doing things that are helpful. But you are comparing apples and oranges. Novell is helping Linux development for free, because Linux actually also is a Novell product that helps them sell a lot of other stuff in their "natural home market". TomTom sells to end-users, most of whom couldn't care less about Linux. Hell, TomTom developers could even he actively belping Linux kernel development, without it impacting the company's sales (I've seen this happen in my own company). I personally always refuse to buy computer-related goodies that do not work with Linux, but you need to look at it from the company's point of view: suporting Linux users will inevitably cost them something and if that is not compensated by extra income, be it from sales or goodwill, it makes perfect business sense for them not to do it. That's irrespective of how much us zealots would want things to be done differently.
I'm not going to claim that the numbers he gave are correct (on the contrary: they feel "weird" to me). But I can imagine that people who buy wine over the internet are more computer-addicted - and hence more likely to run OSX or Linux - than those who buy wine in a shop. Wether the addicts tend to buy more expensively, is something I can't judge, but it should not be excluded in by means of blanket statements. Real wine freaks don't use the net at all for buying wine anyway. Also, the likes of Mr Gates swim in money and may buy very expensive stuff, but surely don't do it over the net. They have somebody else doing it for them or have long-standing relationships with specific companies.
Any MBA worth his 3 letters will know that one needs to study one's own specific market instead of using very general and irrelevant numbers. Studying one's own market actually implies extracting the browser stats from the logs instead of using the "MS has 70%" number, so that part of the story is actually what they should do. The more tricky part is that one also needs to look at the segmentation of the market: which brower segments generate most revenue, as opposed to just "most items sold", or "most web site visits". This is actually what all those tracking cookies are for. Again, any MBA worth his 3 letters should know this.
PS: I have an MBA. And a CS degree. :-)
In Frankfurt the ICE solution works just fine. The key is not only the speed (although killing the intermediate stops would help), but the connectivity. If you fly into Munich but actually need to be in another city in or near Bavaria, you're mostly stuck to loosing time switching trains. The maglev project doesn't solve that in any way (and will actually make it worse as an other poster explained), but ICEs that actually "go somewhere" would.
Just about any of 80 million Germans will. And that's the intended audience of those footnotes.
Having flown several times into and out of Munich before, I know what the current connection between the airport and the city is like: a complete nightmare. So I fully understand that they want to do something about it. But this maglev project of theirs is a complete waste of resources, economically (way too expensive) and technically (way to many dedicated material inputs). What they really should do, IMHO, is upgrade the rail connection to use standard high speed ICE trains. That's a lot cheaper and about just as effective.
This Maglev is only worth it for really long distances, like the Hamburg-Berlin line they once planned. But then again, there are good reasons why that is not working out. In short, I love the technology, but after about 30 years they should at long last admit that it was a practical failure and can the thing. But certain people can't admit mistakes and certain others (e.g. someone the Germans will be able to identify as soon as I write "Edmund" :-) ) are looking to build a monument for themselves at all cost (that idea totally fits his personality and current cereer status, by the way).
I love rigid logic and thus can see some nice aspects in what you're trying to say. But I also have to say that I feel like you're trying to weaselword out of something you wrote that didn't really fit either "reality" or "what you truely meant". On top of that, if you decide to make blanket statements in which you consider every single person a monopolist becase he holds the exclusive rights to everything he ever wrote or every picture he ever took, then you're going way outside what the public (on /. or elsewhere) will think of when seeing the word "monopoly". It's your prerogative to mean something else, but then at least make it so that people can knnw.
You sound like a professor I know: very bright, but totally impossible to work with because he redefines just about every word he uses. And then he goes on to do that "on the fly" in order to talk himself out of any corner. Trouble is, people are starting to see through it. So now they often say "yes sir" but really mean "forget it".
I'm saying that you do not seem to understand copyright and licensing.
Yes, they are different. But copyright is an absolutely essential underpinning of licensing in general and the GPL in particular. The copyright of everything you write (even posts on /.) automatically belongs to you and nobody else, unless you willing signedly it away. Sounds bad, heh? It is only because of this copyright that you can prevent others from abusing your work. Sounds even worse, right? But this is exaclty what the GPL is about: preventing others from abusing (i.e.: taking private and exploiting without giving back) something that you as the author want to be free for all. And this vitally depends on the existance and enforcability of copyrights! So if you declare users of copyright to be monopolies "by definition"...
However, any company that uses any kind of copyright or patents are by definition monopoly's.
Irrespective of your valid point of refering to MS as an oligopoly player later on, where did you take your "Econ 101 for dummies" and "IP for dummies" courses? Coz' I sure don't want to see my friends go there. You do realise that you just declared Linux authoring companies (and people) to be a monopoly, right? Jeez...
I couldn't care less. When the time comes, I'll dump my last surviving Windows partition and go back to "Linux only", which I used to be anyway for many years. No tears will be shed.
There's no way that I'll let MicroSoft dictate when I have to replace hardware that is still plenty fast enough for my real needs. Besides, there was to be no XP SP3, but now they're making one for "sometime in 2008". I bet they'll extend support as well.
Dropping all the irrelevant car analogies, your quote: "While the machines themselves idle most of the time, they respond a lot faster when I actually want them to work" says it all: if these machines are faster than you require them to be, they will last longer than you think (speedwise that is). Come back in a year of two and tell us whether they are still acceptable. Assuming that you don't drastically change your needs, they should be. Then try again affter four years (from now). Same point, probably.
My personal strategy always has been to buy the best/fastest money can get me at any one time and then to use the machines for years and years and years. The one I used longest - admittedly a dual-cpu when those still was a very geeky thing and you needed linux to be able to do anything with it - has lasted for 10 years as my main box, only during the last 2 of which I also had a Windows laptop for semi-business use. My father still uses a machine that by now has over 16 years of service. It suits his needs (amd was blazingly fast when I built it). Overall, I've saved a lot of money and senseless upgrading misery by skipping (at least) every other PC generation.
Sorry, but 4 units out of a 300mm wafer leaves a big waste "around the edges". Of course you can try to fill that with smaller chips, but then having a non-uniform wafer adds complexity. So you're better off with 4x4cm units, of which you can put several extra on a single wafer. Now repeat the same logic until you reach the economically optimal point. I don't know exactly where that is, but is sure is not at 8x8, IMHO. Also don't forget that certain parts of the production costs are essentially determined by the amount of wafers, not the amount of dies. The less dies you get, the larger the part of those costs each of them has to carry. And since the semiconductor industry is ruled by very low margins...
A yield 100%? Have you ever been near / inside a fab? I know I have. I used to work in a company that has two of it's own, including one of the first 300mm ones. For starters, you're conveniently redefining yield to mean "as long as part of the circuit works, the die works". That's not correct: you may be able to sell a partially working one, but you also need a sufficient number of fully working ones to meet demand for those markets, otherwise the whole price segmentation plan breaks down. Next, depending on the exact fault, the entire die may be out of order due do a simple fault in a critical place. now, before you say "yes but redundancy...", please be aware that the bigger the die, the bigger the probability that it has multiple faults. In short, there simply is no such thing as 100% yield.
I agree with both of you. But I'd like to point out that Firefox has garbage collection mechanisms built-in, written in C++. But, as it turns out, garbage collection is not as simple to write as one might think and the presence of garbage collection support makes people lazy, also in C++. And of course, especially in C++ this is a Bad Thing (TM). Lazy programmers quickly start assuming that malloc() and strdup() are auto-collected as well.
Garbage collection in C++ is especially tricky, actually, because a single forgotten pointer "at the broder of the collection scope" can prevent many megabytes of interlinked "garbage collected" data structures from being detected as a loop and hence collected for real. Everybody assumes that the whole thing will auto-die and writes code accordingly, allocating like hell and not caring about resources; nobody is aware of the fact that somewhere in one single file a pointer assignment might be missing that blows their collection dreams out of the water.
Why don't you try http://www.google.com/search?q=natural+monopoly and/or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly ?
Oh yes! Look up the Volvo-Scania case, for instance. And that's just one example of many.
I wonder why Americans always become so defensive when an US firm is has to deal with non-US policy makers. No, the rest of the world is not out to get you.
The problem in this particular case that the required formal statement that they will not sue companies making devices in accordance with the spec also sort of kills the whole patent for them. In order to succesfully "request a royalty per device from manufacturers, and go home" they have to be able to sue those manufacturers who don't pay. This is true even if they were to price that royalty in the micropayments range. It's even true if they were to just ask for a one-time 10$ fee per manufacturer. (Of course in the latter extreme case, the lawsuit would not pay itself anyway, but I'm simply trying to clarify my point by "going extreme".)
Standards are not free-of-charge by definition. A standard is exactly what the word says: a specification that you can choose to adhere to or not. Each international standard body can define its own rules as to what technology an IP limitations they will consider. If you don't want to adhere to a particular standard because there's a patent involved, you simply don't. It's your choice.
Now, arguably, a proposed standard stands a bigger chance of success if it is not subject to restrictive patents, but that in turn is the choice of the inventors of the technology. If the technology really is of outstanding quality, the developers may want to take that risk. Again, that is their choice, not yours.
I actually have a script called cookie_eater. It runs each time before I start Mozilla and: 1) removes all cookies matching a small but very powerful black-list of regexps; 2) preserves all cookies matching white-list of regexps; 3) removes all known nasty cookies not recognised so far using a second site-based black-list; 4) reports all cookies that it does not know what to do about to me. The very first step in this process is a recent addition and very sweet: I used it to quickly kill all Google Analytics cookies, even those associated with white-listed sites.
Of course I also use extensive cookie blocking at the source, but I don't want to simply deny all cookies, because then I'd not be able to easily grow my whitelist. Also, the original idea behind the script was that I'd rather spoil the tracking databases with tons of unrelated small bits of tracking that make no sense, than just to be invisible. (I.e.: don't just defend yourself, fight back in stead!) Because of this, the script also the ability to generate fake cookies for certain sites, but I don't actively use that anymore now that Google Analytics gets killed up front.