Do you really think that anyone who is getting their Internet from Rupert Murdoch and has other options actually cares about him sharing info with an anti piracy group? A data breach yes, after the UK gov lost so much data over the last decade even regular people are starting to care about that, but the fact that they were cooperating in the first place? Anyone who cares about that either has no choice or is using another ISP.
I don't think you really understand exactly what it takes to code for a GPGPU, it's not just about optimizing it, it's about totally different ways of writing code.
Even pure multi-threaded isn't all that easy, it's one thing to split a task into two parts, it's totally another to split it into 4 or 6 or 8 or whatever arbitrary number of parallel execution tasks. It's a bit like the old story about using 9 women to get a baby in 1 month, some processes just don't work that way.
I'd also like to see the evidence that heavy threading is going to become the norm any time soon in most applications. It's had the better part of a decade to get there and still substantially less than half of all software supports multi-threading and most of that is lucky to support 2 cores.
People don't seem to realize how much more difficult writing properly multi-threaded software is, or that not all software lends itself to multi-threading.
Even if AMD came out with an amazing GPGPU architecture tomorrow and could sell it at a profit for $1 it really wouldn't matter.
Programming for a GPGPU is an entirely different paradigm than programming for a standard CPU and GPU combination, it involves totally different ways of thinking, totally different ways of designing, and totally different tools. You're just not going to see programmers making that sort of leap until there's serious motivation for them to do so, which there really just isn't at the moment.
We're only just starting to see applications take advantage of 64 bit and that's been around for the better part of a decade. The kind of programming models required to take advantage of a GPGPU are far stranger and more alien than converting from 32 to 64 bit.
By the time there's any serious usage of GPGPU chips, AMD will have long run out of money.
Opteron is not and has never been a desktop chip, and it's not high end in comparison to the offerings Intel has in the same space.
AMD's foray into being a major player was almost entirely due to Intel screwing up by making the Itanium a chip no on actually wanted. They failed to capitalize on that market share and they lost it.
There's no evidence whatsoever that Intel is going to do something stupid like the Itanium again any time soon, or that AMD has a product on its road map to do what they've never managed before, which is take serious market share from Intel in a race Intel is actually playing in.
AMD might try to give you more performance for the price now, and when they started they certain did, but remember that AMD are in the boat they are now largely because they used the advantage they gained from Intel's Itanium blunder to sell $400 mid range chips. Intel won their market back because AMD got greedy and Intel under cut them by about 50% with faster chips.
AMD have no high end, with no high end they cannot survive because today's high end is tomorrow's mid range. You need to be tooling up that process 6 - 12 months in advance to compete. As much as I love AMD(I bought AMD for years, until my most recent PC), they're done.
Come on, let's be serious here for a second. HTML 5 will replace a lot of flash video players, as it should, it's a lot simpler for everyone.
It will not however ever replace all web video, simply because it doesn't allow any kind of DRM to be implemented. Now you and I know that DRM doesn't work, and to be honest, most web media companies know it too, but their shareholders don't seem to, and so it has to be implemented. You're never going to see things like film trailers, music videos etc using straight HTML 5, because it's too easy to just download the video.
The other side of the coin is that, while Adobe Air was pretty much a bust, silver light is not just about playing videos, but about providing some sort of functionality to deliver rich web applications without the horror that is modern javascript. It, like a lot of Microsoft's good ideas is tainted by the fact they can't seem to ever work out any way to generate revenue aside from selling OS, Office, and to a lesser extend Visual Studio licenses, and that's a lot of the reason it's sitting at 51% instead of much higher, but it's actually a surprisingly useful product.
Personally I predict silverlight on the iPhone within the next few years, probably not until Microsoft has had a tilt at apple with Windows Mobile 7, but still within the next few years. I think the Adobe/Apple relationship is too damaged to be salvaged at this point, even if a lot of Steve Job's tirades about Flash didn't have an element of truth to them, and Apple and Google are getting increasingly antagonistic as Google pushes further into the smart phone market. Apple and Microsoft on the other hand seem to be a lot less hostile. Despite their rather tacky advertisements the two don't really play in the same field on desktops, and Lord Steve seems to be a bit more forgiving of people who have the gall to challenge him in markets if they were already there when he got in.
Not exactly what I meant. A lot of brits commute, and they commute distances which boggle the mind of most Americans. However, the place they commute to is full of shops within walking distance, and the place they commute from may have very few shops at all. Therefor the sensible thing is to buy stuff on your way to or from work.
The same thing sort of thing in theory applies in the US, except that people don't.
Britain has very different population and transport patterns than the US.
As a specific example, the delineation between the city and the country is rather more extreme than is the case in most US cities, and due to property prices, commuting distances of two or more hours each way are not by any means unusual or unheard of. Combined with a substantially better public transport network than is present in the US, and you can see how things would be very different.
If you're driving or taking the train into the city every day, and you pick up something while you're there, then it's likely to be substantially more efficient than ordering the item online, as the detour you made from your regular schedule is a) more than likely to be on foot, and b) a tiny percentage of the distance the shipment would have to travel to get to your home.
In the US, and in a number of other countries, while a lot of people still work in inner city areas, most people shop in outer suburban areas and tend to make special trips for the specific purpose of picking up said items. If I drive 15 minutes each way to buy something, it's quite possible that an efficient shipping company could probably generate less pollution than I would doing that single item purchase.
That's true, but you really need to disappear someone either literally or metaphorically(by turning them into a terrorist or kiddy fiddler) so that the fact that you beat them with a wrench doesn't lose you votes.
It's not that you can't do that to an innocent person, but they can't do it to everyone or else there wouldn't be anyone left to pay taxes and the security officers would have to go do a real job for a living instead of beating up innocent people(not that this is all that security people do, but they wouldn't have much time for anything else in this theoretical world).
Now randomly pulling someone out of the crowd and making them into a terrorist/kiddy fiddler your brave officers arrested is good for morale, but they hardly need to decrypt your content to do that to you, so logically the only reason they would bother trying to beat your crypto password out of you is if there might be some actual value in it for them to do so.
Well whenever they came up with a new level they'd repeat it with only minor changes 10 or 12 times until you wanted to throw the console through a window, so I guess it encouraged violence.
The ratings system also tends to err on the side of caution, which is probably appropriate under the circumstances. I'm not saying I wouldn't let my son play M rated games when he's significantly older, just that I'd like to have some degree of say in it. Ratings may not be super important for really young kids since they're probably going to have a hard time getting to the shops without an adult anyway, but there's that stretch in the mid teens where they're somewhat able to look after themselves, but not necessarily ready for certain kinds of games. I like rating systems because it means that my kid has to con an adult into buying it for him, which gives me a chance to stop it before he buys it.
Not that I can't take it away from him afterwards, or that I won't have to keep an eye out for downloaded stuff, but it might theoretically allow my kid to save $90-100(what games cost here) on a game I'm not ever going to let him play.
There are indeed no laws, but game retailers have been sensible enough to know that any government regulation in this area is just going to make life more difficult(see Australia, the lack of an R rating and what that does to games everywhere). Therefor the ESRB was created and, at least when I was a kid, it was fairly difficult to buy M rated games as a minor.
Unless retailers have gotten slack again and stopped enforcing their own rules, there's really no need to implement a law. If they have, it might be. Kids don't need M or R rated games.
Consumer grade canon scanners are crap, they've had issues with upgrades to windows since before XP. It's deliberate, Canon has no interest in you keeping your gear working so they don't make drivers, they also work pretty hard to make sure no one else does either.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with using Ubuntu if it meets your needs, but if you buy hardware from a bunch of evil bastards who want you to throw away your scanner every 18 months, don't be surprised if it has issues.
And I'm not arguing that the actions of said managers shouldn't be illegal and that said managers shouldn't be prosecuted and jailed.
For that matter of that I think shale oil is a bit of a farce, we need alternatives to fossil fuels not harder to get at fossil fuels.
My point is that blowing shit up is terrorism. If you kill people while you do it you're a murderer and there are better ways to solve problems. If you want to consider yourself a soldier and not a murderer don't be surprised when the intelligence agencies of the government you go to war with are investigating you.
Eco-Terrorists give everyone who cares about the environment a bad name. They give the impression anyone who wants to do something about climate change, or endangered species, or pollution is some sort of raving nutter who thinks that any number of human lives can be sacrificed to save one rat.
That's where you need more information. It depends what info was shared, and why.
If the information pertained to the safety of the plant or its staff, it's appropriate, if it's a list of people who might be a threat, that's a bit gray, if it's personal details of people who show no evidence of being a threat, that's wrong. TFA doesn't say.
The unfortunate reality is that there are always protestors in these kind of groups who go too far, and if we're honest, given the combustible nature of the stuff being extracted, anyone playing around with vandalism on these sorts of sites is playing around with explosives and exactly the kind of people who ought to be investigated by homeland security.
That sure sucks for the people who are against shale oil extraction but are not and do not support vandals or terrorists, but unfortunately sometimes life isn't fair.
There are all sorts of non profit and not for profit organizations all over the world, just as there are all sorts of "journalists" all over the world. Microsoft wants to look good and protect small non profits and journalists from government interference. They don't want to allow NBC or Fox to call their entire staff "journalists" and get out of paying license fees, or allow larger not for profit organizations to do the same. Which is fair enough. I work for a not for profit which has revenues approaching a billion dollars a year in local currency, we don't need nor deserve free Microsoft licenses, nor does the PR guy at NBC.
Now if they put in additional exceptions to rule out organizations like the FSF you might have a case that they're being nefarious(not that the FSF would want free Microsoft licenses, but that's largely beside the point), putting a qualification on non profit and journalist to stop huge corporations from dodging license fees on the other hand isn't a problem.
And if you've got a real legitimate reason to hang onto it, that's fine(though the professional version of 7 comes with a quite reasonable 32 bit XP emulation layer which might be worth looking at.
My issue is with the foaming at the mouth types who constantly criticize Microsoft for not having any major advances in their operating system since 2003, while continuing to use an operating system from 2003 for no real reason.
I'd only heard of Hockey saying it. Not that I'm saying you're wrong, just what I'd actually heard confirmed.
Whatever good traits he might have had, Rudd was almost as much of a religious loony as Abbott is, though he hid his better and we didn't realize till after he'd been elected.
Either way, the filter which hadn't a chance of hell in passing before the election, now has even less of a chance of passing, which is good because it's expensive and it won't work, unlike the alternative plans which were cheap, and might in theory protect people from accidentally seeing things they didn't want to see. When the senate gets replaced and fielding is gone, it'll have even less of a chance.
While I agree with you, it's important to remember that the Liberals haven't actually said they won't support the filter. Joe Hockey has said they won't support the filter, but he is neither the leader, nor the communications minister.
That said, the filter was always a dead scheme, which is why Labor never tried to push it through.
Just as a point of clarification, Outlook is actually a very good e-mail client. Outlook Express however, is not by any stretch of the imagination the same product, and is an insecure PoS, it also doesn't exist in Vista or Windows 7.
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Do you really think that anyone who is getting their Internet from Rupert Murdoch and has other options actually cares about him sharing info with an anti piracy group? A data breach yes, after the UK gov lost so much data over the last decade even regular people are starting to care about that, but the fact that they were cooperating in the first place? Anyone who cares about that either has no choice or is using another ISP.
I don't think you really understand exactly what it takes to code for a GPGPU, it's not just about optimizing it, it's about totally different ways of writing code.
Even pure multi-threaded isn't all that easy, it's one thing to split a task into two parts, it's totally another to split it into 4 or 6 or 8 or whatever arbitrary number of parallel execution tasks. It's a bit like the old story about using 9 women to get a baby in 1 month, some processes just don't work that way.
I'd also like to see the evidence that heavy threading is going to become the norm any time soon in most applications. It's had the better part of a decade to get there and still substantially less than half of all software supports multi-threading and most of that is lucky to support 2 cores.
People don't seem to realize how much more difficult writing properly multi-threaded software is, or that not all software lends itself to multi-threading.
And nobody cares.
Even if AMD came out with an amazing GPGPU architecture tomorrow and could sell it at a profit for $1 it really wouldn't matter.
Programming for a GPGPU is an entirely different paradigm than programming for a standard CPU and GPU combination, it involves totally different ways of thinking, totally different ways of designing, and totally different tools. You're just not going to see programmers making that sort of leap until there's serious motivation for them to do so, which there really just isn't at the moment.
We're only just starting to see applications take advantage of 64 bit and that's been around for the better part of a decade. The kind of programming models required to take advantage of a GPGPU are far stranger and more alien than converting from 32 to 64 bit.
By the time there's any serious usage of GPGPU chips, AMD will have long run out of money.
Opteron is not and has never been a desktop chip, and it's not high end in comparison to the offerings Intel has in the same space.
AMD's foray into being a major player was almost entirely due to Intel screwing up by making the Itanium a chip no on actually wanted. They failed to capitalize on that market share and they lost it.
There's no evidence whatsoever that Intel is going to do something stupid like the Itanium again any time soon, or that AMD has a product on its road map to do what they've never managed before, which is take serious market share from Intel in a race Intel is actually playing in.
AMD might try to give you more performance for the price now, and when they started they certain did, but remember that AMD are in the boat they are now largely because they used the advantage they gained from Intel's Itanium blunder to sell $400 mid range chips. Intel won their market back because AMD got greedy and Intel under cut them by about 50% with faster chips.
AMD have no high end, with no high end they cannot survive because today's high end is tomorrow's mid range. You need to be tooling up that process 6 - 12 months in advance to compete. As much as I love AMD(I bought AMD for years, until my most recent PC), they're done.
Come on, let's be serious here for a second. HTML 5 will replace a lot of flash video players, as it should, it's a lot simpler for everyone.
It will not however ever replace all web video, simply because it doesn't allow any kind of DRM to be implemented. Now you and I know that DRM doesn't work, and to be honest, most web media companies know it too, but their shareholders don't seem to, and so it has to be implemented. You're never going to see things like film trailers, music videos etc using straight HTML 5, because it's too easy to just download the video.
The other side of the coin is that, while Adobe Air was pretty much a bust, silver light is not just about playing videos, but about providing some sort of functionality to deliver rich web applications without the horror that is modern javascript. It, like a lot of Microsoft's good ideas is tainted by the fact they can't seem to ever work out any way to generate revenue aside from selling OS, Office, and to a lesser extend Visual Studio licenses, and that's a lot of the reason it's sitting at 51% instead of much higher, but it's actually a surprisingly useful product.
Personally I predict silverlight on the iPhone within the next few years, probably not until Microsoft has had a tilt at apple with Windows Mobile 7, but still within the next few years. I think the Adobe/Apple relationship is too damaged to be salvaged at this point, even if a lot of Steve Job's tirades about Flash didn't have an element of truth to them, and Apple and Google are getting increasingly antagonistic as Google pushes further into the smart phone market. Apple and Microsoft on the other hand seem to be a lot less hostile. Despite their rather tacky advertisements the two don't really play in the same field on desktops, and Lord Steve seems to be a bit more forgiving of people who have the gall to challenge him in markets if they were already there when he got in.
Not exactly what I meant. A lot of brits commute, and they commute distances which boggle the mind of most Americans. However, the place they commute to is full of shops within walking distance, and the place they commute from may have very few shops at all. Therefor the sensible thing is to buy stuff on your way to or from work.
The same thing sort of thing in theory applies in the US, except that people don't.
Britain has very different population and transport patterns than the US.
As a specific example, the delineation between the city and the country is rather more extreme than is the case in most US cities, and due to property prices, commuting distances of two or more hours each way are not by any means unusual or unheard of. Combined with a substantially better public transport network than is present in the US, and you can see how things would be very different.
If you're driving or taking the train into the city every day, and you pick up something while you're there, then it's likely to be substantially more efficient than ordering the item online, as the detour you made from your regular schedule is a) more than likely to be on foot, and b) a tiny percentage of the distance the shipment would have to travel to get to your home.
In the US, and in a number of other countries, while a lot of people still work in inner city areas, most people shop in outer suburban areas and tend to make special trips for the specific purpose of picking up said items. If I drive 15 minutes each way to buy something, it's quite possible that an efficient shipping company could probably generate less pollution than I would doing that single item purchase.
That's true, but you really need to disappear someone either literally or metaphorically(by turning them into a terrorist or kiddy fiddler) so that the fact that you beat them with a wrench doesn't lose you votes.
It's not that you can't do that to an innocent person, but they can't do it to everyone or else there wouldn't be anyone left to pay taxes and the security officers would have to go do a real job for a living instead of beating up innocent people(not that this is all that security people do, but they wouldn't have much time for anything else in this theoretical world).
Now randomly pulling someone out of the crowd and making them into a terrorist/kiddy fiddler your brave officers arrested is good for morale, but they hardly need to decrypt your content to do that to you, so logically the only reason they would bother trying to beat your crypto password out of you is if there might be some actual value in it for them to do so.
Well whenever they came up with a new level they'd repeat it with only minor changes 10 or 12 times until you wanted to throw the console through a window, so I guess it encouraged violence.
The ratings system also tends to err on the side of caution, which is probably appropriate under the circumstances. I'm not saying I wouldn't let my son play M rated games when he's significantly older, just that I'd like to have some degree of say in it. Ratings may not be super important for really young kids since they're probably going to have a hard time getting to the shops without an adult anyway, but there's that stretch in the mid teens where they're somewhat able to look after themselves, but not necessarily ready for certain kinds of games. I like rating systems because it means that my kid has to con an adult into buying it for him, which gives me a chance to stop it before he buys it.
Not that I can't take it away from him afterwards, or that I won't have to keep an eye out for downloaded stuff, but it might theoretically allow my kid to save $90-100(what games cost here) on a game I'm not ever going to let him play.
Actually this question is rather relevant to that example.
If said three letter agency doesn't know you have encrypted information they probably won't bother to hit you with the wrench until you tell them.
There are indeed no laws, but game retailers have been sensible enough to know that any government regulation in this area is just going to make life more difficult(see Australia, the lack of an R rating and what that does to games everywhere). Therefor the ESRB was created and, at least when I was a kid, it was fairly difficult to buy M rated games as a minor.
Unless retailers have gotten slack again and stopped enforcing their own rules, there's really no need to implement a law. If they have, it might be. Kids don't need M or R rated games.
Consumer grade canon scanners are crap, they've had issues with upgrades to windows since before XP. It's deliberate, Canon has no interest in you keeping your gear working so they don't make drivers, they also work pretty hard to make sure no one else does either.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with using Ubuntu if it meets your needs, but if you buy hardware from a bunch of evil bastards who want you to throw away your scanner every 18 months, don't be surprised if it has issues.
And I'm not arguing that the actions of said managers shouldn't be illegal and that said managers shouldn't be prosecuted and jailed.
For that matter of that I think shale oil is a bit of a farce, we need alternatives to fossil fuels not harder to get at fossil fuels.
My point is that blowing shit up is terrorism. If you kill people while you do it you're a murderer and there are better ways to solve problems. If you want to consider yourself a soldier and not a murderer don't be surprised when the intelligence agencies of the government you go to war with are investigating you.
Eco-Terrorists give everyone who cares about the environment a bad name. They give the impression anyone who wants to do something about climate change, or endangered species, or pollution is some sort of raving nutter who thinks that any number of human lives can be sacrificed to save one rat.
That's where you need more information. It depends what info was shared, and why.
If the information pertained to the safety of the plant or its staff, it's appropriate, if it's a list of people who might be a threat, that's a bit gray, if it's personal details of people who show no evidence of being a threat, that's wrong. TFA doesn't say.
The unfortunate reality is that there are always protestors in these kind of groups who go too far, and if we're honest, given the combustible nature of the stuff being extracted, anyone playing around with vandalism on these sorts of sites is playing around with explosives and exactly the kind of people who ought to be investigated by homeland security.
That sure sucks for the people who are against shale oil extraction but are not and do not support vandals or terrorists, but unfortunately sometimes life isn't fair.
There are all sorts of non profit and not for profit organizations all over the world, just as there are all sorts of "journalists" all over the world. Microsoft wants to look good and protect small non profits and journalists from government interference. They don't want to allow NBC or Fox to call their entire staff "journalists" and get out of paying license fees, or allow larger not for profit organizations to do the same. Which is fair enough. I work for a not for profit which has revenues approaching a billion dollars a year in local currency, we don't need nor deserve free Microsoft licenses, nor does the PR guy at NBC.
Now if they put in additional exceptions to rule out organizations like the FSF you might have a case that they're being nefarious(not that the FSF would want free Microsoft licenses, but that's largely beside the point), putting a qualification on non profit and journalist to stop huge corporations from dodging license fees on the other hand isn't a problem.
And if you've got a real legitimate reason to hang onto it, that's fine(though the professional version of 7 comes with a quite reasonable 32 bit XP emulation layer which might be worth looking at.
My issue is with the foaming at the mouth types who constantly criticize Microsoft for not having any major advances in their operating system since 2003, while continuing to use an operating system from 2003 for no real reason.
I'd only heard of Hockey saying it. Not that I'm saying you're wrong, just what I'd actually heard confirmed.
Whatever good traits he might have had, Rudd was almost as much of a religious loony as Abbott is, though he hid his better and we didn't realize till after he'd been elected.
Either way, the filter which hadn't a chance of hell in passing before the election, now has even less of a chance of passing, which is good because it's expensive and it won't work, unlike the alternative plans which were cheap, and might in theory protect people from accidentally seeing things they didn't want to see. When the senate gets replaced and fielding is gone, it'll have even less of a chance.
Actually, CISCO would be a more likely candidate, since a filter on that scale would have to be hardware.
While I agree with you, it's important to remember that the Liberals haven't actually said they won't support the filter. Joe Hockey has said they won't support the filter, but he is neither the leader, nor the communications minister.
That said, the filter was always a dead scheme, which is why Labor never tried to push it through.
Just as a point of clarification, Outlook is actually a very good e-mail client. Outlook Express however, is not by any stretch of the imagination the same product, and is an insecure PoS, it also doesn't exist in Vista or Windows 7.
Outlook Express also doesn't exist in any version of Windows past XP.
XP is an insecure badly designed PoS, but everyone clings to it like it's their dying grandmother.
For the purposes of most home PC's THE USERS FILES ARE THE ONLY ONES THAT MATTER Very few home pc's have multiple isolated users.
Desktop windows is not a truly multi-user system, but it isn't supposed to be because that's not how it's used.