Insightful? Sorry, copyright infringement was made criminal more than 30 years ago. In the 70s, at least. Which if you check your history, was when China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution, persecuting the intellectuals and idolizing the peasant lifestyle.
So yeah, I don't think it was China that inspired criminalizing copyright infringement.
I don't know why it posted the previous comment anonymously. Here it is again, under my name...
Notice how the Gematik spokesman never actually denies that they didn't want to pay for a backup. A better translation:
"The service provider offered a backup service but we didn't want to pay for it. But they lost the key, so even though they warned us of this and we still said no, it's their responsibility."
A lot of commenters don't seem to understand this distinction. Personally, I like to use the terms concurrent program and parallel program to distinguish.
There is a lot of concurrent software out there... the often cited examples of web servers, database engines, UI threads and the like are concurrent. There is parallel execution going on, but fundamentally each thread is working on a separate task and the problem that needs to be solved is making sure that the threads don't step on each other's toes (deadlocks, priority inversions, etc.). This is tough, but it's simpler than parallel programming.
In a truly parallel program, you have parallel streams of execution solving one problem. This is two orders of magnitude harder, since most of the algorithms we use regularly aren't easily parallelizable. I do this as my day job; it's two orders of magnitude harder since for every day we spend working on the concurrency problems, we spend a hundred working on the parallelization problems.
You didn't expect them to actually work for their money, did you? Here's the way these things work: the government pays a lot of money to an organization for policy "consulting", so they can have a report which recommends doing what the lobbyists wanted them to do in the first place.
The report is a foregone conclusion. The $15,000 is spent to passing the blame, not on any actual work, and for a politician, it's money well spent. You can't really blame the conference board for plagiarizing their report, usually nobody bothers reading those things anyway.
It's great work if you can get it. You get to sit around, getting paid to accept blame for public policy. Except since you're just a private individual, there's no actual responsibility or consequences involved. Meanwhile, the politicians can point at you, defusing any potential scandal by claiming they're just doing as was recommended by the "experts" and if they made a mistake, well it was well intentioned and they did their best.
Czars have a mandate and little authority, they're not supposed to actually accomplish anything. They get appointed for two reasons:
1. To give the appearance of activity without actually doing anything. ("Of course we care about issue X! We appointed a czar to oversee it.")
2. To reward allies and contributors with plum patronage positions but few actual responsibilities to worry about.
The "best" part is everybody cynically expects them to fail, so there's no complaint or comment when the appointee accomplishes nothing. It's really quite brilliant... Bush's mistake was making patronage appointments to positions which actually hold responsibilities, like managing FEMA.
You might be surprised, but a lot of commercial HPC sales are already based on flops/watt.
Lots of companies make extensive use of computational models these days, but have offices in older buildings that don't have sufficient power infrastructure. When your power supply maxes out at 50kW, flops/watt becomes more important than straight flops.
Absolutely, this summary makes me feel dirty just reading it. Its intentionally misleading, otherwise why say 'was consistently slower' rather than just 'is slower'? It's a weasely way of lying.
The same way you could always sell apps for Windows Mobile. This isn't Apple we're talking about here, Microsoft doesn't restrict how you write, install or sell apps at all. These are just the rules to use their store.
It's still worth raising hell over, just in case someone does think it's a good idea. This is Labour we're talking about, a government notoriously fond of the shotgun approach to taxation.
I for one, would rather not rely on the good intentions of politicians.
And the layout of the executable. If commonly used pages are stored sequentially then they'll be loaded more quickly from a normal hard drive than if they're intermixed with code that's infrequently used. MS Office, for example, is linked to take advantage of this.
What's funny is if you read the article, you'll find out that Microsoft originally thought as you did. Then they did a study and found out that the way it works now is better. It's not immediately obvious, but everybody actually using it figures it out very quickly.
The problem here is the standard is broken, and has been broken for a very long time. But, there are decade old best-practices which worked in 99.99% of situations in the past, so it was never critical to fix the standard. Ext4 may be 100% compliant with the published standard, but it's 0% compliant with best practices, the defacto standard. What used to be a perfectly good and cheap way to accomplish a simple task (doing an atomic update to a file) now has to be replaced with a very expensive mechanism (fsync) to achieve the same results. The reason for this change was to improve performance, but now every program is going to have to be changed to fsync whenever it does a write+rename, completely negating any benefit that this supposed performance enhancement brought. It's idiotic.
And you can bitch about Microsoft, but they've gone the opposite route to Ext4. NTFS now supports transactional updates, so you can make updates and never have to worry about this kind of situation.
In Vista and Win7, NTFS supports atomic transactions. With TxNTFS KDE could do all those config file updates as a transaction and have guaranteed atomicity. No need for an extra registry-like database.
Slashdot Mirror
Insightful? Sorry, copyright infringement was made criminal more than 30 years ago. In the 70s, at least. Which if you check your history, was when China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution, persecuting the intellectuals and idolizing the peasant lifestyle.
So yeah, I don't think it was China that inspired criminalizing copyright infringement.
I don't know why it posted the previous comment anonymously. Here it is again, under my name...
Half of the increase is because the listed EU prices include sales tax. Conventionally in North America sales tax is not included in the listed price.
The other half is because Euros are generally willing to pay more than Americans.
Notice how the Gematik spokesman never actually denies that they didn't want to pay for a backup. A better translation:
"The service provider offered a backup service but we didn't want to pay for it. But they lost the key, so even though they warned us of this and we still said no, it's their responsibility."
As someone actually possessing geography skills rather than just assuming he has them due to his nationality, there is no continent of America.
Mathematica is a computational algebra system and isn't designed or good for large calculations.
Matlab and Octave are okay for prototyping, but hideously slow for anything non-trivial.
estoppel
A lot of commenters don't seem to understand this distinction. Personally, I like to use the terms concurrent program and parallel program to distinguish.
There is a lot of concurrent software out there... the often cited examples of web servers, database engines, UI threads and the like are concurrent. There is parallel execution going on, but fundamentally each thread is working on a separate task and the problem that needs to be solved is making sure that the threads don't step on each other's toes (deadlocks, priority inversions, etc.). This is tough, but it's simpler than parallel programming.
In a truly parallel program, you have parallel streams of execution solving one problem. This is two orders of magnitude harder, since most of the algorithms we use regularly aren't easily parallelizable. I do this as my day job; it's two orders of magnitude harder since for every day we spend working on the concurrency problems, we spend a hundred working on the parallelization problems.
Even with the best automatic parallelization tools, typically the performance gains you get are in line with the amount of programmer effort put in.
There's no throttling bug, you just have spotty wifi.
You didn't expect them to actually work for their money, did you? Here's the way these things work: the government pays a lot of money to an organization for policy "consulting", so they can have a report which recommends doing what the lobbyists wanted them to do in the first place.
The report is a foregone conclusion. The $15,000 is spent to passing the blame, not on any actual work, and for a politician, it's money well spent. You can't really blame the conference board for plagiarizing their report, usually nobody bothers reading those things anyway.
It's great work if you can get it. You get to sit around, getting paid to accept blame for public policy. Except since you're just a private individual, there's no actual responsibility or consequences involved. Meanwhile, the politicians can point at you, defusing any potential scandal by claiming they're just doing as was recommended by the "experts" and if they made a mistake, well it was well intentioned and they did their best.
Czars have a mandate and little authority, they're not supposed to actually accomplish anything. They get appointed for two reasons:
1. To give the appearance of activity without actually doing anything. ("Of course we care about issue X! We appointed a czar to oversee it.")
2. To reward allies and contributors with plum patronage positions but few actual responsibilities to worry about.
The "best" part is everybody cynically expects them to fail, so there's no complaint or comment when the appointee accomplishes nothing. It's really quite brilliant... Bush's mistake was making patronage appointments to positions which actually hold responsibilities, like managing FEMA.
You might be surprised, but a lot of commercial HPC sales are already based on flops/watt.
Lots of companies make extensive use of computational models these days, but have offices in older buildings that don't have sufficient power infrastructure. When your power supply maxes out at 50kW, flops/watt becomes more important than straight flops.
Absolutely, this summary makes me feel dirty just reading it. Its intentionally misleading, otherwise why say 'was consistently slower' rather than just 'is slower'? It's a weasely way of lying.
The same way you could always sell apps for Windows Mobile. This isn't Apple we're talking about here, Microsoft doesn't restrict how you write, install or sell apps at all. These are just the rules to use their store.
It's still worth raising hell over, just in case someone does think it's a good idea. This is Labour we're talking about, a government notoriously fond of the shotgun approach to taxation.
I for one, would rather not rely on the good intentions of politicians.
What are you talking about? WOW has been around for more than 15 years and has never had anything to do with hardware virtualization.
Wrong. They broke the entire OpenSSL library, not just some initialization scripts.
Try a version of Windows less than ten years old please.
And the layout of the executable. If commonly used pages are stored sequentially then they'll be loaded more quickly from a normal hard drive than if they're intermixed with code that's infrequently used. MS Office, for example, is linked to take advantage of this.
It already does. Try using a version of Windows released in the last 5 years.
What's funny is if you read the article, you'll find out that Microsoft originally thought as you did. Then they did a study and found out that the way it works now is better. It's not immediately obvious, but everybody actually using it figures it out very quickly.
The problem here is the standard is broken, and has been broken for a very long time. But, there are decade old best-practices which worked in 99.99% of situations in the past, so it was never critical to fix the standard. Ext4 may be 100% compliant with the published standard, but it's 0% compliant with best practices, the defacto standard. What used to be a perfectly good and cheap way to accomplish a simple task (doing an atomic update to a file) now has to be replaced with a very expensive mechanism (fsync) to achieve the same results. The reason for this change was to improve performance, but now every program is going to have to be changed to fsync whenever it does a write+rename, completely negating any benefit that this supposed performance enhancement brought. It's idiotic.
And you can bitch about Microsoft, but they've gone the opposite route to Ext4. NTFS now supports transactional updates, so you can make updates and never have to worry about this kind of situation.
It was explained in T2.
Actually, I believe you'll find it targets no true Scotsmen.
In Vista and Win7, NTFS supports atomic transactions. With TxNTFS KDE could do all those config file updates as a transaction and have guaranteed atomicity. No need for an extra registry-like database.
How ironic. :-)