Such a licence cannot be enforced in my country even though our laws are much more gestapoish compared to U.S. I don't think it can be enforced in states either.
Even if law allows such a licence, how can they really enforce it? If someone comes along to inspect the software and you tell them you never clicked that "I agree" button and they better fsck off before police comes, how on earth can they inspect if you are actually using the product unregistered? You are giving them the right to enter only by accepting the licence, not by reading it.
Well, if they have a brother like you, then there is no problem. Using administered linux is just as easy, I already said that.
These are not bad examples, I recently bought an Alcatel Speedtouch USB ADSL modem. Under w2k, you plug in into usb port (as explained in the document sheet, with a single sentence), you put the cd in the tray (again, a simple sentence tells you to do that), press "next" until you can't. That is it, really. There is not even a reboot.
If you have a mandrake 8.1, installing this modem just requires a rpm install and PPPoE configuration. While considerably harder, not impossible for the inexperienced.
BUT if you have any other distro (including mdk 8.0, all suses, all rhs) installing this modem requires downloading, patching and compiling the kernel. Also PPPo(E/ATM) is probably not compiled into kernel as default, you have to configure kernel for it too. Ofcourse you have to configure these options after compiling the kernel, which requires RTFM.
As for rpms, I recently installed ogle dvd player. My dvd was correctly configured (symlinks and hdparm) so it was just a software install. I had to download 6 source rpms, and installed a total of binary 14 rpms (2 happly provided by mdk 8.1) in correct order... Just to get a single program work. In the end, ogle gui refused to work, I have no idea why. As command line part works, it doesn't bug me much, but the point is I had to search and install more than 10 rpms just to get a dvd player work. I can't imagine MY sister doing that, perhaps your sister is more intelligent.
Well, that leaves the TV card. It might be a bad example, perhaps it is easy to configure it under linux or configuring it under windows is just as hard. Since my parents could install it under windows without any assistance, and I could not get it work under linux with assistance of harddrake and HOWTOs, I assumed it was harder to do so under linux. Perhaps I underestimate my parents.
Using an administred linux is no problem, it is as easy as using anything else. BUT installing anything, making any changes under linux requires considerable effort and knowledge. Eg, just because someone cannot afford a full computer does not mean that they cannot afford a tv card, or an ADSL connection either. Now who will tell them how to install these under linux? Compaq? I don't think so, they would have to resort to community help or if they can speak english RTFM. Can you sister search for rpms? compile kernel? patch it? Resolve tens of dependencies before intalling a single program? Can she do these after having R TFM? Notice that installing these devices is only a click and a reboot away in windows.
The idea of impossibility does not make any reference to how the data is compressed, that is irrelevant. Think of it this way, call a compressed file a label. You have n files, and m labels. When the decompressor finds a label it creates the file corresponding to it. Clearly, if there is less than n labels the decompressor cannot decide which label corresponds to which file (at least for some labels), so it must be the case that m>=n. Now the problem is for a population of exactly k bit long files, there must be at least 2^k labels, which can be represented by at least k bits, which happens to be the original length. If labels are not shorter than files they represent, there is no compression so there is no such thing as overall compression. The trick is, you can label common files with labels that require less than k bits, and uncommon ones with labels that require more than k bits, which would give you an average compression ratio in daily usage other than 1. How you make this is where the nature of compression algorithm comes into play.
Now, if the data is truely random and normally distributed the frequency of occurance statistics does not exists. You cannot exploit the trick of making common ones with shorter labels, since every file is equally common. This, also, is independent of how you plan to make labeling process.
I have been pretty late to this thread, and I'm sorry if this is redundant. I just can't read all 700 posts.
1:100 average compression on all data is just impossible. And I don't mean "improbable" or "I don't belive that", it is impossible. The reason is pigeon hole principle, for simplicity assume that we are talking about 1000bit files, although you can compress some of these 1000bit files to just 10bits, you cannot possibly compress all of them to 10bits, as with 10 bits is just 1024 different configurations while 1000bits call for representations of 2 different configurations. If you can compress the first 1024, there is simply no room to represent remaining 2-1024 files.
...And that is assuming the compression header takes no space at all...
So every loseless compression algorithm that can represent some files with other files less than original in length must expand some other files. Higher compression on some files means number of files that do not compress at all is also greater. Average compression rate other than 1 is only achiveable if there is some redundancy in original encoding. I guess you can call that redundancy "a pattern." Rar, zip, gzip etc. all achieve less than 1 compressed/original length on average because there is redundancy in originals : programs that have some instructions, prefixes with common occurance, pictures that are represented with full dword although they use a few thousand colors, sound files almost devoid of very low and very high numbers because of recording conditions etc. No compression algorithm can achive less than 1 ratio averaged over all possible strings. It is a simple consequence of pigeon hole principle and cannot be tricked.
I didn't watch AI, though I have read and heard a lot about it. From what I gathered it was not a movie worth watching, so I didn't. I have read the stories, Aldiss's introduction about stories and the movie project and it was not really suprising that film turned out to be so bad.
"Supertoys last all summer long" is a fine story, and it really has little to do with android boy trying to be human. It is about his confusion about his mother, why doesn't she love her, why isn't she happy when he is around? The remaining supertoys stories were written with a movie script in mind, and they sucked. Aldiss himself states that "supertoys last all sumer long" was a story that could not be expanded, and he tried very hard to write sequels for it as there were not enough full length movie material in it. Kubrick was a genius but he misjudged story's potential. And after 30 years, two sequels and a director change AI is what we got.
BTW an adult film inspired by PKD sounds OK to me; although not graphical, PKD novels include a lot of sex. Someone, please shoot movies of "the man in the high castle" or "a scanner darkly"; I asssure you that they would make fine movies.
An "Ubik" would be a perfect geek movie, what do you think?
First of all, editors, who do a considerable amount of troll/offtopic moderation, perhaps will not opt for such a thing. At least that was the reason given for infinite mod points to them, eliminating negative posts so that normal users can moderate positively, but as it is not transparent noone can be sure. If they do mark someone as foe, it would beat the purpose of giving them infinite mod points.
Second is there are people like reading trolls, I for one read at -1 often enough. If I ever make someone my foe, that would be users pretending to know everything but don't know shit, or just can't discuss without flames; not delibrate trolls. Trolling is an art.
Distilled water do conduct, it just conducts less than tap water, which in turn conducts less than sea water etc. How much water conduct is a direct function of ion count and even pure water (which distilled water isn't) have 2E-7 ions per liter (at STP). The best you can achive with water is demineralized water, which conducts almost as low as "pure" water can be made. I don't know if that would be non-conducting enough to use safely, but it doesn't really matter: it will collect impurities fast and will start to conduct just like tap water (that would happen to distilled water too) unless all contact with anything soluble is prevented (which is hard to do with run-of-the mill pumps.) Once leaked there is no possibility that water will stay pure and continue to conduct very little. I personally wouldn't risk it.
Is IA64 better? Yes it is. IA64 has 128 usable 64bit registers, predicates... But that is not all.. in single 64bit register you can store 4 16bit values(common integer). (or 8 8bit or 2 32bit)
Um, and guess how many 16 bit values you can store in a 64 bit sledgehammer register? Ah, and guess how many fp/mms instructions sledge can retire per cycle?
If I understood the whitepaper the answer is 2. You can also store 2 8 bit values in a 64 bit hammer registers. I know the math doesn't hold, but the ISA does; you can't access an arbitrary byte, word or dword section of hammer registers. Ofcourse the number you can just store is 64/r_size of r_sized values, but accessing them (except the lower two) requires rotate or swap operations.
It all depends on how good register renaming and out-of-order execution units on hammer will be and how well ia64 compilers generate asm code. It doesn't matter how many registers are visible to the programmer or how many actually exists, the only important thing is how many of them are actually used. Other advantages of RISC-like arch. of ia86 over x86-64 are also depend on implementation. E.g. : in all current offerings (except P4) x86 floating point registers are essentialy on an array, not a stack. Legacy code generators can produce stack based code, and cpu can use it as if it was executing on a array based fpu. In the end you get a superior design's speed with full backward compatibility. Current x86 processors have a lot of tricks to sidestep limitations of x86 ISA, hammer will have more. Let's wait until the real benchmaks pour in, will we?
And if all else fails, SSE-3 and MMX-2 can provide your lovely 128 visible registers.
IA64 is an incompatible and new instruction set, intel is not adding anything to their x86 ISA.
Hammer does not have an 3MB L3 but it has an integrated memory controller, that would drastically reduce latencies of cache misses.
Assuming amd will go fro bigger than 32 kb L1 cache, and will not succeed in making cache hits as fast as mckinley (speculation based on current offerings) picture is a bit complicated:
Watch it: hammer and mckinley asks for an instruction/piece of data, both hit, mckinley wins, but a more probable scenerio is mckinley misses and hammer hits - a clear win for hammer, a still more probable scenerio is that both misses. If data is in the L2, mckinley is faster, it has lower miss penalty and can fetch from L2 faster but it is more probable that it is in hammer's cache, but not in mckinley's cache, that would benefit hammer . If L2 misses too, but mckinley scores an L3 hit, mckinley wins, if it suffers from an L3 miss, it has to suffer both L3 miss latency and memory latency, but hammer suffers no L3 miss latency and its memory latency is probably much lower, so with huge data processed in not-so-tight loops hammer wins hands down, while for medium sized data that could fit into L3 mckinley wins hands down.
Although mckinley is a server product and hammer is not (or so it is said), an integrated memory controller benefits hammer in multiway systems so much that it may as well be positioned as a server product. No more asking the chipset to fetch a piece of data and wait until chipset serves other processors' requests, just go and grab it!
Finally, some of the hammer line will have L3 caches and hammer line will have a higher clockrate than mckinley. If Amd can deliver what they have promised, they have a clear winner overall. But I'm still a bit scpetical.
yes, they can prevent you from commanding the sat iff they can track and transmit to it from somewhere near your base. I'm not aware of any non-directed sat antennas, but then again I'm not an expert either.
In general case any single channel signal can be drowned with another signal at the same freq. and with a comparable power.
Re:everything I "know" about flight is wrong?
on
Flying on Mars
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· Score: 1
I guess that is everything we know about how a plane looks like is wrong. I don't thing anythig resembling a jet would work on mars; onot because it can't be designed, but other flight machine designs make more sense. Like a vast glider powered, when required, by rockets.
Someday, someone may fit 19" or 21" foldable screens and expanding keyboards on laptops, or direct projection to eye and typing onto void may become a cheap alternatives to traditional input/output. Until then desktops are here to stay.
I think it's safe to say that he's worse than Katz....
Don't believe anything he writes. 99.99% of the time it's bullshit and wrong.
99.99% beats Katz any day, infact for any finite number of 9s after the dot, Dvorak wins against Katz.
Everybody (with the possible exception of you) knows that these photshop benchmarks are not reliable indications of real world performance, since they make use of large caches and SIMD instructions on G4 but not many apps can use those caches or instructions that effectively. Photoshop plugins presented there (which are not all photoshop plugins, conspicously) are extreme examples. Would you consider SPECFP and SPECINT instead? Maybe you would see the light.
OTOH, even if those benches are considered valid, cpus on my rig already beats p4 1.7 when they are in a single configuration, so a pair of them would beat that 83% faster dual G4 in any case (provided plugins are coded in an efficient multi-threaded way, which I believe is the case.) I paid just 2000$ for the whole system and save for a translucent case and OS X, I'm missing nothing at all. Nothing in terms of quality, nothing in terms of performance...
Emulation on mac? Give me a break. Mac can't run even its own applications with sufficient speed. Or is that another myth invented by...ummm.. mac os x users?
Someone give me a ppc mac emulator (preferably with dynamic recompilation) and I'll give mac osx a try. Until then, well, sorry steve.
By buying a mac you lose choice, you lose performance, you lose money. What you gain is a very very nice UI. OTOH when using an emulator you lose less money or none at all, you lose some performance or none at all (compared to mac, that is) and you don't lose choice. I know that two ppc mac emulators are in the works (but neither support dynamic recompilation AFAIK), so why bother with osx now?
The question is, if an emulator with respectable performance comes along, will people stick to native open desktops or use osx on their linux boxes instead? I, for one, will run osx, but I don't think I will be among the majority.
Re:How stable is the preempt patch?
on
Kernel 2.4.17 Out
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· Score: 1
I used it against 2.4.12-ac? on a single athlon machine, it seemed to be stable and useless. I didn't run FreesWan or Apache, so I can comment on them, but X, KDE and Samba was OK. Infact, none of the programs I tried was affected in a negative way. It just didn't help.
Last I heard, Mars was indeed in the habitable zone. In fact, habitable zone started just a bit inside earth's orbit (and I suspect that was because arguing erath is NOT in the habitable zone would be a bit far off) and extended up until halfway between mars and asteroid belt. Did they update the definition or what?
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Even if law allows such a licence, how can they really enforce it? If someone comes along to inspect the software and you tell them you never clicked that "I agree" button and they better fsck off before police comes, how on earth can they inspect if you are actually using the product unregistered? You are giving them the right to enter only by accepting the licence, not by reading it.
These are not bad examples, I recently bought an Alcatel Speedtouch USB ADSL modem. Under w2k, you plug in into usb port (as explained in the document sheet, with a single sentence), you put the cd in the tray (again, a simple sentence tells you to do that), press "next" until you can't. That is it, really. There is not even a reboot.
If you have a mandrake 8.1, installing this modem just requires a rpm install and PPPoE configuration. While considerably harder, not impossible for the inexperienced.
BUT if you have any other distro (including mdk 8.0, all suses, all rhs) installing this modem requires downloading, patching and compiling the kernel. Also PPPo(E/ATM) is probably not compiled into kernel as default, you have to configure kernel for it too. Ofcourse you have to configure these options after compiling the kernel, which requires RTFM.
As for rpms, I recently installed ogle dvd player. My dvd was correctly configured (symlinks and hdparm) so it was just a software install. I had to download 6 source rpms, and installed a total of binary 14 rpms (2 happly provided by mdk 8.1) in correct order... Just to get a single program work. In the end, ogle gui refused to work, I have no idea why. As command line part works, it doesn't bug me much, but the point is I had to search and install more than 10 rpms just to get a dvd player work. I can't imagine MY sister doing that, perhaps your sister is more intelligent.
Well, that leaves the TV card. It might be a bad example, perhaps it is easy to configure it under linux or configuring it under windows is just as hard. Since my parents could install it under windows without any assistance, and I could not get it work under linux with assistance of harddrake and HOWTOs, I assumed it was harder to do so under linux. Perhaps I underestimate my parents.
Using an administred linux is no problem, it is as easy as using anything else. BUT installing anything, making any changes under linux requires considerable effort and knowledge. Eg, just because someone cannot afford a full computer does not mean that they cannot afford a tv card, or an ADSL connection either. Now who will tell them how to install these under linux? Compaq? I don't think so, they would have to resort to community help or if they can speak english RTFM. Can you sister search for rpms? compile kernel? patch it? Resolve tens of dependencies before intalling a single program? Can she do these after having R TFM? Notice that installing these devices is only a click and a reboot away in windows.
Now, if the data is truely random and normally distributed the frequency of occurance statistics does not exists. You cannot exploit the trick of making common ones with shorter labels, since every file is equally common. This, also, is independent of how you plan to make labeling process.
1:100 average compression on all data is just impossible. And I don't mean "improbable" or "I don't belive that", it is impossible. The reason is pigeon hole principle, for simplicity assume that we are talking about 1000bit files, although you can compress some of these 1000bit files to just 10bits, you cannot possibly compress all of them to 10bits, as with 10 bits is just 1024 different configurations while 1000bits call for representations of 2 different configurations. If you can compress the first 1024, there is simply no room to represent remaining 2-1024 files.
So every loseless compression algorithm that can represent some files with other files less than original in length must expand some other files. Higher compression on some files means number of files that do not compress at all is also greater. Average compression rate other than 1 is only achiveable if there is some redundancy in original encoding. I guess you can call that redundancy "a pattern." Rar, zip, gzip etc. all achieve less than 1 compressed/original length on average because there is redundancy in originals : programs that have some instructions, prefixes with common occurance, pictures that are represented with full dword although they use a few thousand colors, sound files almost devoid of very low and very high numbers because of recording conditions etc. No compression algorithm can achive less than 1 ratio averaged over all possible strings. It is a simple consequence of pigeon hole principle and cannot be tricked.
"Supertoys last all summer long" is a fine story, and it really has little to do with android boy trying to be human. It is about his confusion about his mother, why doesn't she love her, why isn't she happy when he is around? The remaining supertoys stories were written with a movie script in mind, and they sucked. Aldiss himself states that "supertoys last all sumer long" was a story that could not be expanded, and he tried very hard to write sequels for it as there were not enough full length movie material in it. Kubrick was a genius but he misjudged story's potential. And after 30 years, two sequels and a director change AI is what we got.
BTW an adult film inspired by PKD sounds OK to me; although not graphical, PKD novels include a lot of sex. Someone, please shoot movies of "the man in the high castle" or "a scanner darkly"; I asssure you that they would make fine movies.
An "Ubik" would be a perfect geek movie, what do you think?
Second is there are people like reading trolls, I for one read at -1 often enough. If I ever make someone my foe, that would be users pretending to know everything but don't know shit, or just can't discuss without flames; not delibrate trolls. Trolling is an art.
The whole point of backward compatability is not requiring recompilation.
Um, and guess how many 16 bit values you can store in a 64 bit sledgehammer register? Ah, and guess how many fp/mms instructions sledge can retire per cycle?
If I understood the whitepaper the answer is 2. You can also store 2 8 bit values in a 64 bit hammer registers. I know the math doesn't hold, but the ISA does; you can't access an arbitrary byte, word or dword section of hammer registers. Ofcourse the number you can just store is 64/r_size of r_sized values, but accessing them (except the lower two) requires rotate or swap operations.
And if all else fails, SSE-3 and MMX-2 can provide your lovely 128 visible registers.
Hammer does not have an 3MB L3 but it has an integrated memory controller, that would drastically reduce latencies of cache misses.
Assuming amd will go fro bigger than 32 kb L1 cache, and will not succeed in making cache hits as fast as mckinley (speculation based on current offerings) picture is a bit complicated:
Watch it: hammer and mckinley asks for an instruction/piece of data, both hit, mckinley wins, but a more probable scenerio is mckinley misses and hammer hits - a clear win for hammer, a still more probable scenerio is that both misses. If data is in the L2, mckinley is faster, it has lower miss penalty and can fetch from L2 faster but it is more probable that it is in hammer's cache, but not in mckinley's cache, that would benefit hammer . If L2 misses too, but mckinley scores an L3 hit, mckinley wins, if it suffers from an L3 miss, it has to suffer both L3 miss latency and memory latency, but hammer suffers no L3 miss latency and its memory latency is probably much lower, so with huge data processed in not-so-tight loops hammer wins hands down, while for medium sized data that could fit into L3 mckinley wins hands down.
Although mckinley is a server product and hammer is not (or so it is said), an integrated memory controller benefits hammer in multiway systems so much that it may as well be positioned as a server product. No more asking the chipset to fetch a piece of data and wait until chipset serves other processors' requests, just go and grab it!
Finally, some of the hammer line will have L3 caches and hammer line will have a higher clockrate than mckinley. If Amd can deliver what they have promised, they have a clear winner overall. But I'm still a bit scpetical.
In general case any single channel signal can be drowned with another signal at the same freq. and with a comparable power.
I guess that is everything we know about how a plane looks like is wrong. I don't thing anythig resembling a jet would work on mars; onot because it can't be designed, but other flight machine designs make more sense. Like a vast glider powered, when required, by rockets.
Someday, someone may fit 19" or 21" foldable screens and expanding keyboards on laptops, or direct projection to eye and typing onto void may become a cheap alternatives to traditional input/output. Until then desktops are here to stay.
Don't believe anything he writes. 99.99% of the time it's bullshit and wrong. 99.99% beats Katz any day, infact for any finite number of 9s after the dot, Dvorak wins against Katz.
The large part of social science is an oxymoron.
It was definetly the egg which preceeded. Don't know about the others though.
The translations are identical, what a coincidence! (Perhaps babelfish bought wordlingo?)
AFAIK Lem did write all of his novels in Polish. Don't know about his other works though.
OTOH, even if those benches are considered valid, cpus on my rig already beats p4 1.7 when they are in a single configuration, so a pair of them would beat that 83% faster dual G4 in any case (provided plugins are coded in an efficient multi-threaded way, which I believe is the case.) I paid just 2000$ for the whole system and save for a translucent case and OS X, I'm missing nothing at all. Nothing in terms of quality, nothing in terms of performance...
Emulation on mac? Give me a break. Mac can't run even its own applications with sufficient speed. Or is that another myth invented by ...ummm.. mac os x users?
By buying a mac you lose choice, you lose performance, you lose money. What you gain is a very very nice UI. OTOH when using an emulator you lose less money or none at all, you lose some performance or none at all (compared to mac, that is) and you don't lose choice. I know that two ppc mac emulators are in the works (but neither support dynamic recompilation AFAIK), so why bother with osx now?
The question is, if an emulator with respectable performance comes along, will people stick to native open desktops or use osx on their linux boxes instead? I, for one, will run osx, but I don't think I will be among the majority.
I used it against 2.4.12-ac? on a single athlon machine, it seemed to be stable and useless. I didn't run FreesWan or Apache, so I can comment on them, but X, KDE and Samba was OK. Infact, none of the programs I tried was affected in a negative way. It just didn't help.
Seriously, I haven't seen the movie yet but if that is true I wonder how can frodo disappear with Sam. That would be changing story too much.
Last I heard, Mars was indeed in the habitable zone. In fact, habitable zone started just a bit inside earth's orbit (and I suspect that was because arguing erath is NOT in the habitable zone would be a bit far off) and extended up until halfway between mars and asteroid belt. Did they update the definition or what?