The facts? What facts would you be referring to, the scientific studies have lead the other way, and according to reports by people such as Brian Josephon, Randi is neither scientific nor unbiased. Quoting Brian Josephon: "Let me make the point, that there is actually a difference between a conjuring show and a scientific experiment. Now if James Randi is so certain that it can all be done by conjuring, I think the challenge is now up to him, to go along to a scientific laboratory where this is being investigated and get perfect results in telepathy, instead of about 20% better than you'd expect by chance. "
While the schedular has a lot to do with how responsive a system feels, a dual-processor machine is more tolerant to a bad schedular than a single-processor machine. This can be demonstrated by simulating the same task load on both using Shortest Job First and Longest Job First scheduling--the latter is bad, the former is optimal given perfect information. The dual processor machine covers a multitude of sins in a poorly written scheduler.
I'll quote myself, to save you the trouble of hitting the back button.
----
As to how dual core helps almost all users in terms of the responsiveness of the user interface even running relatively "low processor" tasks and even discounting the possibility of a MPI simulation running simultaneously on the same system, just diagram it out using a simple chart and shortest-job-first scheduling. The dual processor system pretty much always comes out ahead, even if all you are doing is playing music while working on a word processor or in photoshop.
Is it worthwhile? Maybe, maybe not, but it is more than the "novelty" you make it out to be. I'd rather two lower-performing processors and dual-core than a single higher-performance processor for most day-to-day computing tasks--even though virtually all of them are single-threaded and will not directly benefit from the extra processor.
-----
Now, where in this am I talking about "specialised apps" that geeks might use?
It is more than arguable that today's machines are more than fast enough, but that wasn't what you originally said or what I was arguing against. What you originally said was "We actually buy many single core systems since you can get faster single cores and wer have a number of apps that are not multi-threaded."
This shows a misunderstanding of how dual-cores help even single-threaded applications in a multitasked environment. Whether the extra speed is necessary can be a matter for debate, as can whether one should buy the latest single core system or an older one that is "fast enough," but I reiterate my earlier statement that a dual core system--even with slower individual cores--will seem faster and give a smoother overall user experience than one faster single core.
Even if it is slower for individual user tasks.
Why? Because I would run Matlab (despite your assertion that it is a "lab program" I owned and used a copy of that and Mathematica on my home system for almost the entirety of my time in school, as did a large number of people in my classes), have iTunes playing in the background, have a LaTeX editor open, my email client open, a web client open, a game of Go running over a go server in the background, etc. Even though each one is single threaded, they all are taking advantage of the dual cores.
Is it "twice as fast"? No. Are the individual tasks going to run faster? Slightly, because they will not be interupted as frequently. Will it *seem* faster and more responsive? Almost certainly.
"When you are talking university work, you are talking very unintensive apps"
You clearly did not go to my University. Of course, you make a specific exemption for Engineers, but...
"I suppose if you were an EE major and were doing somthing like Matlab simulations then maybe the power is needed but things like that are largely academic since licensing requires it be run on lab systems anyhow."...you show your ignorance here.
Matlab has academic licensing to individuals (or at least did when I was in school), and it was relatively inexpensive. I've purchased textbooks that cost me more than the academic licenses of either Matlab or Mathematica.
As to how dual core helps almost all users in terms of the responsiveness of the user interface even running relatively "low processor" tasks and even discounting the possibility of a MPI simulation running simultaneously on the same system, just diagram it out using a simple chart and shortest-job-first scheduling. The dual processor system pretty much always comes out ahead, even if all you are doing is playing music while working on a word processor or in photoshop.
Is it worthwhile? Maybe, maybe not, but it is more than the "novelty" you make it out to be. I'd rather two lower-performing processors and dual-core than a single higher-performance processor for most day-to-day computing tasks--even though virtually all of them are single-threaded and will not directly benefit from the extra processor.
"In my experience, most bugs that could be detected by static analysis are usually caught relatively quickly anyway."
In my experience the *opposite* is true, at least for code that I am not writing myself.
For instance, since I started using FindBugs on our project (which is fairly large and complex as these things go, with ~5 development teams working on it and with many threads running at the same time), I've caught several potential deadlock issues that would have probably been uncaught until a deadlock happened (most likely after this is deployed), a small host of synchronization (e.g., inconsistent synchronization) and locking problems (e.g., running a bit of code outside of a try block but after the lock is acquired), some memory/performance problems (e.g., inner classes that should have been declared static), and other things of that nature.
I might, if I went through all of the code by hand, catch all of these issues and a few more, but a tool such as FindBugs gives me a better idea of where to look, and allows me to quickly make a bunch of useful changes without combing through each file that uses synchronization by hand. Sure, a dedicated review of the code would be best, but these are usually changes I can make quickly and easily, and some of these problems might have been difficult to find otherwise (e.g., inconsistent synchronization).
There is also the benefit in that, while giving me an idea of where to look, it helps me catch other issues that FindBugs does not directly detect.
I, on the other hand have tried just about every major programming language and most programming paradigms. To put in context, I do NOT have a CS major.
I would argue that programming languages were some of the least valuable things I picked up from my education. The most valuable were mathematics, design, and how to think like an engineer.
Don't get me wrong, languages and paradigms are valuable, but I've determined that if you are a good software engineer then the language (/os/api/whatever) doesn't matter, and if you are a bad one then the language also doesn't seem to matter.
Not quite as "fucked" as you might otherwise think.
First, turning a military against one's own population tends to be a very Bad Idea(tm)--in the US there is a strong possibility that it would demoralize troops, and this becomes extraordinarily difficult if the government doesn't know who the "bad guys" specifically are.
The Iraqi insurgency is woefully "undergunned" compared to the american military, yet they can still persist (not indefinitely, but it isn't precisely in its "last throes" either), and that's when the troops are still fighting against someone other than their immediate neighbors.
d) A voting system has to be used which discourages (or at least fails to encourage) voting for a candidate you do not like at the expense of one that you do (i.e., tactical voting).
It doesn't matter if everyone votes if the voting system is still First Past the Post--the voting system is too horribly flawed.
Wanting to actually get things done without having to be a software engineer isn't "whining", it's reasonable.
Even for those of us who are software engineers, I have better things to do with my time than fiddle with configurations for things that work out of the box on another system. I've pointed this out before: I work in a professional environment, if I need something to work then I need it to work yesterday.
It strikes me that many people seem to want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to Linux distros. They want it to compete with Windows and MacOS X as a desktop platform, but they also want to treat it as a hobby job that "is free, so don't complain or implement it yourself." These two are mutually exclusive--"free" is not enough, by itself, to entice me to use something.
There are two events in college that helped me more with writing than anything else. I attended an engineering university, and continued with scientific/engineering coursework after graduation.
The first was an honors class that required me to write a paper ever week. The catch? It had to be under two pages. These papers covered a variety of reading material--short stories, essays, and books. I had to find something in the reading material to write about, and write two pages on it. This helped me an enormous amount--it gave me constant feedback on my writing, helped me be clear, concise, and precise, and it enabled me to write a two page paper with these characteristics very quickly.
The second event happened in a class called, strangely enough, "Technical Writing." After I turned in one paper the professor handed it back to me and said "take this back and write it again in English. All of your sentences are inversions--70% of them should be Subject, Verb, Object."
The biggest thing through all of it was practice, practice, practice with constant feedback.
The licensing tricks that work in Russia do not extend to the US. Its legality is questionable even in Russia, though it has thusfar avoided prosecution.
In the US, the issue has not been ruled on, but it seems exceedingly unlikely that they will rule in the favor of allofmp3.com, particularly given the way that licensing works in the US and that the authors do not need to give their consent in order for allofmp3 to turn a profit on that author's music, or that Russia's copyright law terminates before the US copyright law does.
As an additional note, I have heard that Germany has ruled it to be illegal.
IANAL, but Citations of note: 17 USC 501(a)
"Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 122 or of the author as provided in section 106A (a), or who imports copies or phonorecords into the United States in violation of section 602, is an infringer of the copyright or right of the author, as the case may be."
17 USC 106: "Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords; (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;"
There's nothing wrong with buying media in another country, but there's a difference between buying pirated media in another country where it is legal to do so and buying a CD in another country.
The only reason this is even legal in Russia is because of a loophole in their law that allows for music to be "broadcast" over a cable without the artist's permission. This, combined with the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems's ability to license material that doesn't belong to them, makes this in no way equivalent to simply purchasing a CD in a foreign country.
I work in a production environment. There are a wide array of things I have learned to do myself by trial and error, but if I need something to work I need it to work yesterday.
Wind power will not work for most large-scale power grids for one simple reason.
The amount of power produced is proportional to the speed of wind CUBED.
What this means is that, if for some reason the wind speed drops by half for one day, the company will get blackouts since the system cannot adapt to its wind generators now producing only 12.5% of the power they produced the day before.
Wind power is all fine and good, but power companies have trouble using it as a primary source of power in most places simply because it is too unpredictable.
I can explain most of these problems to an eight year old in at least one level of detail or another. The problem is that it is foolish to then think that eight year old could turn around and provide the insight necessary into solving these problems.
As another person put it, it would take two years of education for most people just to realize that they don't know enough about the subject.
Over the short term the price of gasoline is relatively inelastic. This means it takes a large increase in price before there is *any* impact on demand. Over the longer term one might see a trend towards more efficient vehicles, but I don't know of any evidence that large masses of people would suddenly consider giving up their cars.
All that happens in the meantime, while people convert to a longer term model, is that such an increase hurts the economy (busses, public transportation, shipping companies, etc all use gasoline in various ways) and those in the middle income bracket--since the price of gasoline is relatively inelastic, it just impacts the amount of money they have to budget into gas purchases every month, which cuts down on what they spend elsewhere.
An economic ripple effect.
For the record. I don't own a car. I get everywhere on foot or using a bicycle or, in a few cases, by taking the bus. In the US, cars are so convienient that many people--particularly those with kids--just cannot give them up easily.
Re:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole
on
Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
That would require me to use Internet Explorer, which is just replacing one security hole with another.
If the GPU is used for *anything* on one system and not on the other, then it means that the processor has to do things on one that it doesn't have to do on the other. One processor would be `busier' than the other one.
Video encoding is not done in isolation (i.e., the OS is running), so it could affect the results even if nothing in video encoding is being bounced through the GPU.
Slashdot Mirror
The facts? What facts would you be referring to, the scientific studies have lead the other way, and according to reports by people such as Brian Josephon, Randi is neither scientific nor unbiased. Quoting Brian Josephon: "Let me make the point, that there is actually a difference between a conjuring show and a scientific experiment. Now if James Randi is so certain that it can all be done by conjuring, I think the challenge is now up to him, to go along to a scientific laboratory where this is being investigated and get perfect results in telepathy, instead of about 20% better than you'd expect by chance. "
While the schedular has a lot to do with how responsive a system feels, a dual-processor machine is more tolerant to a bad schedular than a single-processor machine. This can be demonstrated by simulating the same task load on both using Shortest Job First and Longest Job First scheduling--the latter is bad, the former is optimal given perfect information. The dual processor machine covers a multitude of sins in a poorly written scheduler.
I don't think you read my post.
I'll quote myself, to save you the trouble of hitting the back button.
----
As to how dual core helps almost all users in terms of the responsiveness of the user interface even running relatively "low processor" tasks and even discounting the possibility of a MPI simulation running simultaneously on the same system, just diagram it out using a simple chart and shortest-job-first scheduling. The dual processor system pretty much always comes out ahead, even if all you are doing is playing music while working on a word processor or in photoshop.
Is it worthwhile? Maybe, maybe not, but it is more than the "novelty" you make it out to be. I'd rather two lower-performing processors and dual-core than a single higher-performance processor for most day-to-day computing tasks--even though virtually all of them are single-threaded and will not directly benefit from the extra processor.
-----
Now, where in this am I talking about "specialised apps" that geeks might use?
It is more than arguable that today's machines are more than fast enough, but that wasn't what you originally said or what I was arguing against. What you originally said was "We actually buy many single core systems since you can get faster single cores and wer have a number of apps that are not multi-threaded."
This shows a misunderstanding of how dual-cores help even single-threaded applications in a multitasked environment. Whether the extra speed is necessary can be a matter for debate, as can whether one should buy the latest single core system or an older one that is "fast enough," but I reiterate my earlier statement that a dual core system--even with slower individual cores--will seem faster and give a smoother overall user experience than one faster single core.
Even if it is slower for individual user tasks.
Why? Because I would run Matlab (despite your assertion that it is a "lab program" I owned and used a copy of that and Mathematica on my home system for almost the entirety of my time in school, as did a large number of people in my classes), have iTunes playing in the background, have a LaTeX editor open, my email client open, a web client open, a game of Go running over a go server in the background, etc. Even though each one is single threaded, they all are taking advantage of the dual cores.
Is it "twice as fast"? No. Are the individual tasks going to run faster? Slightly, because they will not be interupted as frequently. Will it *seem* faster and more responsive? Almost certainly.
"When you are talking university work, you are talking very unintensive apps"
...you show your ignorance here.
You clearly did not go to my University. Of course, you make a specific exemption for Engineers, but...
"I suppose if you were an EE major and were doing somthing like Matlab simulations then maybe the power is needed but things like that are largely academic since licensing requires it be run on lab systems anyhow."
Matlab has academic licensing to individuals (or at least did when I was in school), and it was relatively inexpensive. I've purchased textbooks that cost me more than the academic licenses of either Matlab or Mathematica.
As to how dual core helps almost all users in terms of the responsiveness of the user interface even running relatively "low processor" tasks and even discounting the possibility of a MPI simulation running simultaneously on the same system, just diagram it out using a simple chart and shortest-job-first scheduling. The dual processor system pretty much always comes out ahead, even if all you are doing is playing music while working on a word processor or in photoshop.
Is it worthwhile? Maybe, maybe not, but it is more than the "novelty" you make it out to be. I'd rather two lower-performing processors and dual-core than a single higher-performance processor for most day-to-day computing tasks--even though virtually all of them are single-threaded and will not directly benefit from the extra processor.
"In my experience, most bugs that could be detected by static analysis are usually caught relatively quickly anyway."
In my experience the *opposite* is true, at least for code that I am not writing myself.
For instance, since I started using FindBugs on our project (which is fairly large and complex as these things go, with ~5 development teams working on it and with many threads running at the same time), I've caught several potential deadlock issues that would have probably been uncaught until a deadlock happened (most likely after this is deployed), a small host of synchronization (e.g., inconsistent synchronization) and locking problems (e.g., running a bit of code outside of a try block but after the lock is acquired), some memory/performance problems (e.g., inner classes that should have been declared static), and other things of that nature.
I might, if I went through all of the code by hand, catch all of these issues and a few more, but a tool such as FindBugs gives me a better idea of where to look, and allows me to quickly make a bunch of useful changes without combing through each file that uses synchronization by hand. Sure, a dedicated review of the code would be best, but these are usually changes I can make quickly and easily, and some of these problems might have been difficult to find otherwise (e.g., inconsistent synchronization).
There is also the benefit in that, while giving me an idea of where to look, it helps me catch other issues that FindBugs does not directly detect.
In this case yes. While probably not "well" within it it is covered. In general though it is possible to have a margin of error much smaller than 3%.
I, on the other hand have tried just about every major programming language and most programming paradigms. To put in context, I do NOT have a CS major.
I would argue that programming languages were some of the least valuable things I picked up from my education. The most valuable were mathematics, design, and how to think like an engineer.
Don't get me wrong, languages and paradigms are valuable, but I've determined that if you are a good software engineer then the language (/os/api/whatever) doesn't matter, and if you are a bad one then the language also doesn't seem to matter.
Not quite as "fucked" as you might otherwise think.
First, turning a military against one's own population tends to be a very Bad Idea(tm)--in the US there is a strong possibility that it would demoralize troops, and this becomes extraordinarily difficult if the government doesn't know who the "bad guys" specifically are.
The Iraqi insurgency is woefully "undergunned" compared to the american military, yet they can still persist (not indefinitely, but it isn't precisely in its "last throes" either), and that's when the troops are still fighting against someone other than their immediate neighbors.
d) A voting system has to be used which discourages (or at least fails to encourage) voting for a candidate you do not like at the expense of one that you do (i.e., tactical voting).
It doesn't matter if everyone votes if the voting system is still First Past the Post--the voting system is too horribly flawed.
Wanting to actually get things done without having to be a software engineer isn't "whining", it's reasonable.
Even for those of us who are software engineers, I have better things to do with my time than fiddle with configurations for things that work out of the box on another system. I've pointed this out before: I work in a professional environment, if I need something to work then I need it to work yesterday.
It strikes me that many people seem to want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to Linux distros. They want it to compete with Windows and MacOS X as a desktop platform, but they also want to treat it as a hobby job that "is free, so don't complain or implement it yourself." These two are mutually exclusive--"free" is not enough, by itself, to entice me to use something.
There are two events in college that helped me more with writing than anything else. I attended an engineering university, and continued with scientific/engineering coursework after graduation.
The first was an honors class that required me to write a paper ever week. The catch? It had to be under two pages. These papers covered a variety of reading material--short stories, essays, and books. I had to find something in the reading material to write about, and write two pages on it. This helped me an enormous amount--it gave me constant feedback on my writing, helped me be clear, concise, and precise, and it enabled me to write a two page paper with these characteristics very quickly.
The second event happened in a class called, strangely enough, "Technical Writing." After I turned in one paper the professor handed it back to me and said "take this back and write it again in English. All of your sentences are inversions--70% of them should be Subject, Verb, Object."
The biggest thing through all of it was practice, practice, practice with constant feedback.
The licensing tricks that work in Russia do not extend to the US. Its legality is questionable even in Russia, though it has thusfar avoided prosecution.
s c_sec_17_00000501----000-.html
s c_sec_17_00000106----000-.html
In the US, the issue has not been ruled on, but it seems exceedingly unlikely that they will rule in the favor of allofmp3.com, particularly given the way that licensing works in the US and that the authors do not need to give their consent in order for allofmp3 to turn a profit on that author's music, or that Russia's copyright law terminates before the US copyright law does.
As an additional note, I have heard that Germany has ruled it to be illegal.
IANAL, but Citations of note: 17 USC 501(a)
"Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright
owner as provided by sections 106 through 122 or of the author as
provided in section 106A (a), or who imports copies or phonorecords into
the United States in violation of section 602, is an infringer of the
copyright or right of the author, as the case may be."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/u
17 USC 106:
"Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;"
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/u
There's nothing wrong with buying media in another country, but there's a difference between buying pirated media in another country where it is legal to do so and buying a CD in another country.
The only reason this is even legal in Russia is because of a loophole in their law that allows for music to be "broadcast" over a cable without the artist's permission. This, combined with the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems's ability to license material that doesn't belong to them, makes this in no way equivalent to simply purchasing a CD in a foreign country.
How, while one is in the US, does this differ legally or ethically from downloading from a P2P network?
Or play Eve-Online.
I work in a production environment. There are a wide array of things I have learned to do myself by trial and error, but if I need something to work I need it to work yesterday.
Wind power will not work for most large-scale power grids for one simple reason.
The amount of power produced is proportional to the speed of wind CUBED.
What this means is that, if for some reason the wind speed drops by half for one day, the company will get blackouts since the system cannot adapt to its wind generators now producing only 12.5% of the power they produced the day before.
Wind power is all fine and good, but power companies have trouble using it as a primary source of power in most places simply because it is too unpredictable.
I can explain most of these problems to an eight year old in at least one level of detail or another. The problem is that it is foolish to then think that eight year old could turn around and provide the insight necessary into solving these problems.
As another person put it, it would take two years of education for most people just to realize that they don't know enough about the subject.
I don't think you get the GPs point.
Over the short term the price of gasoline is relatively inelastic. This means it takes a large increase in price before there is *any* impact on demand. Over the longer term one might see a trend towards more efficient vehicles, but I don't know of any evidence that large masses of people would suddenly consider giving up their cars.
All that happens in the meantime, while people convert to a longer term model, is that such an increase hurts the economy (busses, public transportation, shipping companies, etc all use gasoline in various ways) and those in the middle income bracket--since the price of gasoline is relatively inelastic, it just impacts the amount of money they have to budget into gas purchases every month, which cuts down on what they spend elsewhere.
An economic ripple effect.
For the record. I don't own a car. I get everywhere on foot or using a bicycle or, in a few cases, by taking the bus. In the US, cars are so convienient that many people--particularly those with kids--just cannot give them up easily.
That would require me to use Internet Explorer, which is just replacing one security hole with another.
If the GPU is used for *anything* on one system and not on the other, then it means that the processor has to do things on one that it doesn't have to do on the other. One processor would be `busier' than the other one.
Video encoding is not done in isolation (i.e., the OS is running), so it could affect the results even if nothing in video encoding is being bounced through the GPU.
" Would you really want to date someone like that?"
Depends, is she cute?
You mean like the work of a certain Nicolaus Copernicus?
The line between the two has been a bit fuzzy at times.
Without having read the article, was it rooted or was a webpage defaced?
These are two separate things.
Did everyone miss the announcement about the Mac Mini, or are they simply ignoring it to take stabs at Apple for releasing a leather ipod case?