but yes, I think making and enforcing standards for CAs is a good role for the government.
Which "the government" are you talking about here? You might have noticed the internet is worldwide, and there's no single authority to control it. Browser makers are also free to put whatever CA's root certificates in their browsers that they wish (along with all anyone else who distributes software that uses an x509 certificate).
I hope the article author understands that unless he's really lucky, he is in deep legal trouble already.
How? Was someone defrauded? Was their money lost? Was someone unjustly damaged? I just don't see the law broken here.
From what I can tell, what happened is the author found a way to get a signed SSL cert from a CA for mozilla.org. He doesn't mention that he tried to pass it to anyone, or even released the cert to anyone. The only party that might claim injury is the CA, and if they're smart they'll try to keep this as quite as possible. (Because they're the giant incompetent boobs here, and a lawsuit would only draw attention to that fact).
Site owners (the ones paying the bills) have no incentive to demand that the CA be competent.
What do you mean they have no incentive for competent CA's? They have every incentive, since without competent CAs the security of the system will collapse. The site owner presumably cares about the security of the communication. If they didn't, why use SSL at all?
The real problem with the current system is that ALL the common CA's have to be trusted, not just some or one. A better system would involve only the CA who the site owner contracted with has to be trusted for that sites security.
2) Techies have a serious communication problem. They believe in free without copyright, right to pirate, etc, etc. Take that attitude to lawyers and guess what answer you are going to get.
Some believe in that, and some have a communication problem. The larger problem is that it only takes a few politicians with a "don't want to listen" problem to create this kind of nonsense. 3) Techies don't get the business world. They don't think in terms of ROI, etc. And last I looked that is how the world turns, ROI, etc.
What I've observed is that Big Interests don't like change, because it winds up costing them money. That's the much larger force (there are others, but hey we're generalizing here) that makes the world turn. Shit, I _wish_ it was all about ROI. Then people might invest in longer term solutions rather than pumping up the sales and stock price for next quarter.
I'm guessing that car-parts-incubators is just radical enough to get anyone who tries to market it into trouble. Even if it saved a million livess, it would bring a thousand lawsuits and while I'm sure if some parents saw an infant die because of a lack of incubators, they would say these are needed, but if an infant dies while it's in an incubator, they'll look for someone to blame. Not that commercial units are any more reliable. But what judge is going to beleive that a $1000 unit was just as good as a $40,000 unit?
This device is supposed to be for places like Africa, where parts are expensive, hard to come by, and the locals aren't trained to repair the medical technology.
Your concerns would certainly be valid in the industrialized rich world, where people have lots of money to pay lawyers to sue medical companies. I kind of doubt that that's the case in a lot of countries in Africa. Poor people don't sue.
You've only got "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel"
Right.. With a name like that I just can't understand why people would commonly refer to it as "The Nobel prize in Economics". As for the peace prize, it has had its scope extended a bit
The peace prize has always been strange and political, and often not given to people who "solved the problem". Henry Kissinger got the thing in 1973.. not exactly a guy you associate with peace. Yassir Arafat got it in 1994.
I don't think the role has really changed with Al Gore either. Linus Pauling got the peace prize in 1962 for raising awareness of nuclear weapon testing. A partial test ban on above ground testing wasn't signed until 1963. France only stoped in 1974, and it took China until 1980. So there's definite precedent set for people raising awareness of a cause getting the prize.
Well, not sure what kind of software engineer you are if you did not study physics, mathematics, chemistry and economics at your university
You have a very strange university where chemistry and physics is part of the software program. As of now my studies and experience suggests that transmitting whatever over wireless is far more expensive (as in needs more effort) then doing the same thing over a solid connection (copper, aluminium, gold, zinc, silver..... etc
Thanks. I guess I'll stick with people that actually have experience in the field they're talking about rather than some undergraduate classes in related fields who made a spitball guess at the plausibility of it.
But it's not. My point is that we do (or rather will) have to consider the same ethical questions the movie raises, and it doesn't require genetic manipulation.
Do you really believe genetic screening hasn't been going on for years? Amniocentesis and the ability to diagnose downs syndrome in a fetus has been around for 40 years. I don't know how long it's been a routine procedure, but I'd guess 20 years or more.
The movie is still a movie, and I really don't think the "issues" that it raises are going to be the hard ones (nor is this breast cancer thing a hard question).
He's an example of a hard question for you. Suppose we find a gene that highly correlates with homosexuality.. let's say 80%. What then? Here's a slightly easier one (and likely more plausible). What do we do about fetal testing for deafness? (I think we've already found genes responsible for that).
but when you tell me that replacing copper wires with a (wireless) transmitter and receiver helps save power: well I am a non-believer.
Uhh.. and what about being a software developer qualifies you to have a valid opinion on saving power in radio transmission? I'm a software developer as well, and I found it surprising... but it astonishes me that you think you have the ability to have any kind of valid opinion on something so far afield of your area of expertise.
By your argument Linux in theory should be light-years faster then Windows Mac OS or any other OS
Why should linux be faster simply because the source is available? I didn't say linux is faster than windows because the source is open.. I believe what I said was that open source lets the software consumers control their own destiny (or a rough approximation of that). However if Microsoft could whip Linux in Java Performance they would love it. Fine Vista loss these benchmark but the excusing the one area it did win was in very poor taste.
You seem to have a very strange attitude, as if this is a sports competition with winners and losers. Microsoft really doesn't care about Java performance. Why would they? Java is a cross platform language, and Microsoft has always tried to get everyone over to ONLY the Windows platform. It's really at the heart of the Microsoft strategy.
As far as "excusing" goes, that also seems a strange attitude. This isn't a competition, it's a comparison. As in something that might actually be useful to someone who's interested in performance. I actually _am_ a Java developer, and I don't do anything 3d graphics related whatsoever. So tell me why the 3d performance of either platform is at all relevant to me?
I'm a developer. That doesn't mean I have the skill set to and muck with the java vm.
OSS isn't a panacea, and it's not going to give you things you don't have. It just means it's POSSIBLE to fix those problems. With closed source software, all the training, knowledge, and possibly even money in the world won't help you fix the closed source software. Sure, in a perfect world where people gladly donate their time to cater to your particular need . This is an empty argument. Just because, hypothetically, someone can fix it, doesn't mean they will, and in my experience over the year, they won't.
Who the hell said anything about donating? Either pay for your fixes, or DIY. Nobody "donates" their time to fix my car, why should I expect software to be any different? You seem to be under the mistaken impression that "free" software is all free as in beer. Sorry, but that just ain't the case. Software costs, sorry. Most OSS worth anything has funded development by people with weight to throw around.
You think? There's plenty of OSS that's funded by people without any money. I've been paid to produce OSS. I'm not sure what you mean by "worth anything", but the software I've made produced value and runs a business. There's tons of other examples of exactly this happening. You don't have to have a million dollars to have someone fix your OSS problem. unless they are a skilled developer with a lot of time on their hands, they have little to no chance that their particular needs will be catered to.
Well you sure as hell aren't going to be catered to by just asking someone nicely to do it for free. You _could_ pay someone to fix your problem.. developers take money you know. Is that why most large corps are running Microsoft on the desktop and closed source unix implementations on the back end?
"Most"? I'd say "most" large corps also have some OSS software running somewhere. Why wouldn't they? It'd be stupid to not take advantage of a lower cost, no lock-in option. They don't do it more because the largest corps are just slow to change because they view it as too risky. Stop thinking that OSS claims to solve everyones problems 100% for free. You can't hold some non-entity accountable when their open source product fails.
There's this company called Red Hat that provides that "responsibility" you're taking about. Maybe you've heard of them? Sheesh, your responses sound like they're from 1997. Perhaps this topic has fallen through a wormhole, and you're replying in 1997? If so, 2008 is a bit different.
This is a typical OSS fallacy. "It's open, that means you can fix everything yourself!"
Ignoring for the moment this discussion was posted under "developers", and therefore relates to the actual people who CAN fix it themselves, I'll respond more generally.
Being at the mercy of "anyone whom you wish to find to fix the problem" (which may or may not include the maintainer) is a lot better than being at the mercy of one entity (the license owner). Most people can't fix their own car either, but would you really prefer a car that you can only go to the dealer to get it fixed? Much to the contrary, when you pay for a license you have more weight to throw around. Maybe not so much as an individual licensee, but corporations can certainly raise a stink and get issues resolved quickly.
The difference is that with closed source software you HAVE to have a lot of weight to throw around to get it fixed. At least with open source software even an individual has a chance of getting something fixed. Not really the case with closed source. As far as large corps go, they're MUCH better off with open source software, since they can just throw some money at the problem and get it fixed. If they bought the support contract from a 3rd party, even better. If the support contractor doesn't want to fix it, they can ditch that contractor and do it themselves. So you're really trying to tell me that having MORE options, and less of a barrier is a bad thing?
I would imagine if you've signed an exclusive supplier contract with Seagate and received a tidy discount for doing so, then Seagate find out you're putting Hitachi drives in their laptops, they'd be inclined to "fine" you (and quite justified in doing so).
I think the difference here is that hard-drives are a commodity, and operating systems are only just starting to become so. In other words most people don't really care (or even know) which HD you put in a machine. They do care which OS you put in the machine.
Thus Microsoft has had a lot more power to strong arm the OEMs with exclusivity agreements than a HD maker ever would.
they used java 1.6.0_10 on linux and 1.6.0_07 on windows.
Yah, and they also tested with the new openJDK 1.6.0_0, which had nearly identical results as Suns JVM. The differences between Windows and Linux are NOT subtle, and you normally don't get 3x performance increases with mature code. So I have a hard time believing that these major performance differences are really from going from 07 to 10, especially when you factor in the results from openJDK.
I still think it'd be interesting to repeat the tests with the same JVM version on Vista and Ubuntu, but I'd hardly call the results "meaningless".
It's quite possible for software to get slower not faster.
Very true. I guess I was referring to this specific instance, where the article mentions the openGL layer of Mesa wasn't geared towards performance yet, but eventually will be.
Sorry, that's just a stupid argument. Because an application is closed source they're never going to boost performance?
No, because the OS is closed source you'll always be at the mercy of the license provider to boost performance. Honestly, how much does Microsoft _really_ care about Java performance? Not a hell of a lot. Besides which, benchmarks are for the here and now. OpenGL drivers may improve for Linux, Vista may improve its file handling, JavaVMs may see better optimisation, heck, even the damn benchmarks will probably get updated. None of this has anything to do with open or closed source.
I guess I have to disagree here. None of those improvements happen in a vacuum. Microsoft decides whether to improve performance based on market decisions. The linux community makes decisions largely based on user needs. If someone really needed super-duper Java performance, they could go out and craft something that's soley performance based.
The point here is that closed source performance improvements are granted to you by the software company (The Great And Powerfull Oz!). Open source performance improvements can come from the guy who actually wants the improvements.
Microsoft is like a castle under siege, there's an attack from Asus on one wall, then IBM on another, then Dell at the main gate, now Toshiba... Each wave is beaten back, but the defenders look increasingly shaky.
I don't agree that Asus, Dell and Toshiba really care a hell of a lot about taking down Microsoft. They sell hardware, Microsoft sells software. They really don't compete very much, and have traditionally been partners. The partnership is becoming a bit more shaky as it makes more sense for those three to start looking at alternative OS providers. But ultimately to the OEMs, the OS is just another component in the laptop/desktop/server. They don't really want to attack Microsoft any more than they want to attack Seagate. Sure, competition in operating systems would be helpful in many ways, but don't think that the OEMs are anything like IBM, who DOES more directly (but not entirely) compete with Microsoft.
I love the way in every test test Vista loses it's "Ubuntu is faster" but in the test where Vista wins, they explain and excuse it going "bad opengl drivers".
Maybe that's because Ubuntu is an open source application where we actually know why the test gave bad performance, and actually know that it's going to improve in the future? Who's to say the Vista performance gap wasn't caused by bad drivers?
Don't dismiss the advantages of an open system where you can actually understand what's under the hood as just "test bias".
its great to see that OEM companies are realizing that having a choice is a good thing.
I'm not sure I exactly agree with you. OEM companies don't really care about "choice", they care about selling laptops. What's good is that the market has opened up enough that OEMs think they might gain some sales by selling other operating systems. The choice of OpenSolaris puzzles me a little though. Solaris isn't exactly a large market, and as the OP pointed out it's not really a good desktop OS.
The only thing I can guess is Toshiba is hope to capture a high-end developer market that's already using Solaris, and would jump at the chance to have it supported and installed from the start.
Think of it this way, nobody bats an eyelid when you say "filesharing is illegal", but you would get some surprised looks if you said "video recording is illegal" or "photocopying is illegal" - they have managed to taint the technology with a possible illegal use.
I never thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right. There's now (if there wasn't already) a whole group of people that think "peer to peer" is somehow illegal. It's as if the Recipe Book industry started suing housewives who share recipes, and now a large segment of them think they're doing something clandestine when they exchange a recipe.
Why is it so sad? People die every day, most of which I've never heard of. Do you feel sad for every one of them? I'd hope not.
I didn't know her, and never met her. she died maybe a few years to young, but such is life. She was on a television show that I've watched. I guess I don't feel that's enough reason to be sad about her death.
I find it a little odd that you want everyone to behave as if it was their own mother that died.
Just because someone is a Administrator or politician does not mean they are a GOOD administrator or GOOD politician.
That's true of any job. I guess I don't really understand your point. That we shouldn't assume someone we don't know will be good at a job they've never done?
I don't know if he'll be any good at being Energy secretary. I did see him speak a couple years ago at the Nobel Conference on Energy, and he was a great speaker with very good ideas. From what I recall one of his main messages was "Fail fast", in other words try a lot of ideas and see which ones work and which don't quickly. IMO that's really _exactly_ what we need to do. I will say this though. The past Energy secretaries certainly haven't done jack-squat for energy policy in this country, and the vast majority of them were politicians. So it's not like the politicians have some great track record that Chu has to live up to.
Faster computation doesn't help communication-limited tasks. Faster communication doesn't help computation-limited tasks.
I thought the same thing. Years ago with the massively-parallel architectures you could have said that massively-parallel architectures don't help inherently serial tasks.
The other thing I wonder is how server and desktop tasks will drive the multi-core architecture. It may be the case that many of the common server and desktop tasks have massive IO need (gaming?). The current memory architectures aren't set in stone, but I also doubt they'll be driven by what the Supercomputers consumers need.
Is there something wrong with the word "reflections" now?
In human experience, a reflection is instantaneous, where an echo appears after a period of time. Thus echo is more descriptive to layman (remember them?). You know and I know that a reflection isn't instantaneous, it's just not generally perceptible to our eyes like an echo is perceptible to our ears.
It's just part of the mounting evidence that username/password combinations for banks is inherently flawed. "Somthing you know" can always easily be known by someone else. Bank security should (IMO) be also based on "something you have", like an ATM card.
If banks really wanted two-way authentication to work properly, they'd use a hardware device (USB-key) that had to be present in the machine to login to your account. The hardware device would be implemented in such a way to make it impossible to copy the functionality of it without physical access to it.
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but yes, I think making and enforcing standards for CAs is a good role for the government.
Which "the government" are you talking about here? You might have noticed the internet is worldwide, and there's no single authority to control it. Browser makers are also free to put whatever CA's root certificates in their browsers that they wish (along with all anyone else who distributes software that uses an x509 certificate).
I hope the article author understands that unless he's really lucky, he is in deep legal trouble already.
How? Was someone defrauded? Was their money lost? Was someone unjustly damaged? I just don't see the law broken here.
From what I can tell, what happened is the author found a way to get a signed SSL cert from a CA for mozilla.org. He doesn't mention that he tried to pass it to anyone, or even released the cert to anyone. The only party that might claim injury is the CA, and if they're smart they'll try to keep this as quite as possible. (Because they're the giant incompetent boobs here, and a lawsuit would only draw attention to that fact).
Site owners (the ones paying the bills) have no incentive to demand that the CA be competent.
What do you mean they have no incentive for competent CA's? They have every incentive, since without competent CAs the security of the system will collapse. The site owner presumably cares about the security of the communication. If they didn't, why use SSL at all?
The real problem with the current system is that ALL the common CA's have to be trusted, not just some or one. A better system would involve only the CA who the site owner contracted with has to be trusted for that sites security.
2) Techies have a serious communication problem. They believe in free without copyright, right to pirate, etc, etc. Take that attitude to lawyers and guess what answer you are going to get.
Some believe in that, and some have a communication problem. The larger problem is that it only takes a few politicians with a "don't want to listen" problem to create this kind of nonsense.
3) Techies don't get the business world. They don't think in terms of ROI, etc. And last I looked that is how the world turns, ROI, etc.
What I've observed is that Big Interests don't like change, because it winds up costing them money. That's the much larger force (there are others, but hey we're generalizing here) that makes the world turn. Shit, I _wish_ it was all about ROI. Then people might invest in longer term solutions rather than pumping up the sales and stock price for next quarter.
I'm guessing that car-parts-incubators is just radical enough to get anyone who tries to market it into trouble. Even if it saved a million livess, it would bring a thousand lawsuits and while I'm sure if some parents saw an infant die because of a lack of incubators, they would say these are needed, but if an infant dies while it's in an incubator, they'll look for someone to blame. Not that commercial units are any more reliable. But what judge is going to beleive that a $1000 unit was just as good as a $40,000 unit?
This device is supposed to be for places like Africa, where parts are expensive, hard to come by, and the locals aren't trained to repair the medical technology.
Your concerns would certainly be valid in the industrialized rich world, where people have lots of money to pay lawyers to sue medical companies. I kind of doubt that that's the case in a lot of countries in Africa. Poor people don't sue.
You've only got "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel"
Right.. With a name like that I just can't understand why people would commonly refer to it as "The Nobel prize in Economics".
As for the peace prize, it has had its scope extended a bit
The peace prize has always been strange and political, and often not given to people who "solved the problem". Henry Kissinger got the thing in 1973.. not exactly a guy you associate with peace. Yassir Arafat got it in 1994.
I don't think the role has really changed with Al Gore either. Linus Pauling got the peace prize in 1962 for raising awareness of nuclear weapon testing. A partial test ban on above ground testing wasn't signed until 1963. France only stoped in 1974, and it took China until 1980. So there's definite precedent set for people raising awareness of a cause getting the prize.
Well, not sure what kind of software engineer you are if you did not study physics, mathematics, chemistry and economics at your university
You have a very strange university where chemistry and physics is part of the software program.
As of now my studies and experience suggests that transmitting whatever over wireless is far more expensive (as in needs more effort) then doing the same thing over a solid connection (copper, aluminium, gold, zinc, silver
Thanks. I guess I'll stick with people that actually have experience in the field they're talking about rather than some undergraduate classes in related fields who made a spitball guess at the plausibility of it.
But it's not. My point is that we do (or rather will) have to consider the same ethical questions the movie raises, and it doesn't require genetic manipulation.
Do you really believe genetic screening hasn't been going on for years? Amniocentesis and the ability to diagnose downs syndrome in a fetus has been around for 40 years. I don't know how long it's been a routine procedure, but I'd guess 20 years or more.
The movie is still a movie, and I really don't think the "issues" that it raises are going to be the hard ones (nor is this breast cancer thing a hard question).
He's an example of a hard question for you. Suppose we find a gene that highly correlates with homosexuality.. let's say 80%. What then? Here's a slightly easier one (and likely more plausible). What do we do about fetal testing for deafness? (I think we've already found genes responsible for that).
but when you tell me that replacing copper wires with a (wireless) transmitter and receiver helps save power: well I am a non-believer.
Uhh.. and what about being a software developer qualifies you to have a valid opinion on saving power in radio transmission? I'm a software developer as well, and I found it surprising... but it astonishes me that you think you have the ability to have any kind of valid opinion on something so far afield of your area of expertise.
By your argument Linux in theory should be light-years faster then Windows Mac OS or any other OS
Why should linux be faster simply because the source is available? I didn't say linux is faster than windows because the source is open.. I believe what I said was that open source lets the software consumers control their own destiny (or a rough approximation of that).
However if Microsoft could whip Linux in Java Performance they would love it. Fine Vista loss these benchmark but the excusing the one area it did win was in very poor taste.
You seem to have a very strange attitude, as if this is a sports competition with winners and losers. Microsoft really doesn't care about Java performance. Why would they? Java is a cross platform language, and Microsoft has always tried to get everyone over to ONLY the Windows platform. It's really at the heart of the Microsoft strategy.
As far as "excusing" goes, that also seems a strange attitude. This isn't a competition, it's a comparison. As in something that might actually be useful to someone who's interested in performance. I actually _am_ a Java developer, and I don't do anything 3d graphics related whatsoever. So tell me why the 3d performance of either platform is at all relevant to me?
I'm a developer. That doesn't mean I have the skill set to and muck with the java vm.
OSS isn't a panacea, and it's not going to give you things you don't have. It just means it's POSSIBLE to fix those problems. With closed source software, all the training, knowledge, and possibly even money in the world won't help you fix the closed source software.
Sure, in a perfect world where people gladly donate their time to cater to your particular need . This is an empty argument. Just because, hypothetically, someone can fix it, doesn't mean they will, and in my experience over the year, they won't.
Who the hell said anything about donating? Either pay for your fixes, or DIY. Nobody "donates" their time to fix my car, why should I expect software to be any different? You seem to be under the mistaken impression that "free" software is all free as in beer. Sorry, but that just ain't the case. Software costs, sorry.
Most OSS worth anything has funded development by people with weight to throw around.
You think? There's plenty of OSS that's funded by people without any money. I've been paid to produce OSS. I'm not sure what you mean by "worth anything", but the software I've made produced value and runs a business. There's tons of other examples of exactly this happening. You don't have to have a million dollars to have someone fix your OSS problem.
unless they are a skilled developer with a lot of time on their hands, they have little to no chance that their particular needs will be catered to.
Well you sure as hell aren't going to be catered to by just asking someone nicely to do it for free. You _could_ pay someone to fix your problem.. developers take money you know.
Is that why most large corps are running Microsoft on the desktop and closed source unix implementations on the back end?
"Most"? I'd say "most" large corps also have some OSS software running somewhere. Why wouldn't they? It'd be stupid to not take advantage of a lower cost, no lock-in option. They don't do it more because the largest corps are just slow to change because they view it as too risky. Stop thinking that OSS claims to solve everyones problems 100% for free.
You can't hold some non-entity accountable when their open source product fails.
There's this company called Red Hat that provides that "responsibility" you're taking about. Maybe you've heard of them? Sheesh, your responses sound like they're from 1997. Perhaps this topic has fallen through a wormhole, and you're replying in 1997? If so, 2008 is a bit different.
This is a typical OSS fallacy. "It's open, that means you can fix everything yourself!"
Ignoring for the moment this discussion was posted under "developers", and therefore relates to the actual people who CAN fix it themselves, I'll respond more generally.
Being at the mercy of "anyone whom you wish to find to fix the problem" (which may or may not include the maintainer) is a lot better than being at the mercy of one entity (the license owner). Most people can't fix their own car either, but would you really prefer a car that you can only go to the dealer to get it fixed?
Much to the contrary, when you pay for a license you have more weight to throw around. Maybe not so much as an individual licensee, but corporations can certainly raise a stink and get issues resolved quickly.
The difference is that with closed source software you HAVE to have a lot of weight to throw around to get it fixed. At least with open source software even an individual has a chance of getting something fixed. Not really the case with closed source. As far as large corps go, they're MUCH better off with open source software, since they can just throw some money at the problem and get it fixed. If they bought the support contract from a 3rd party, even better. If the support contractor doesn't want to fix it, they can ditch that contractor and do it themselves. So you're really trying to tell me that having MORE options, and less of a barrier is a bad thing?
I would imagine if you've signed an exclusive supplier contract with Seagate and received a tidy discount for doing so, then Seagate find out you're putting Hitachi drives in their laptops, they'd be inclined to "fine" you (and quite justified in doing so).
I think the difference here is that hard-drives are a commodity, and operating systems are only just starting to become so. In other words most people don't really care (or even know) which HD you put in a machine. They do care which OS you put in the machine.
Thus Microsoft has had a lot more power to strong arm the OEMs with exclusivity agreements than a HD maker ever would.
they used java 1.6.0_10 on linux and 1.6.0_07 on windows.
Yah, and they also tested with the new openJDK 1.6.0_0, which had nearly identical results as Suns JVM. The differences between Windows and Linux are NOT subtle, and you normally don't get 3x performance increases with mature code. So I have a hard time believing that these major performance differences are really from going from 07 to 10, especially when you factor in the results from openJDK.
I still think it'd be interesting to repeat the tests with the same JVM version on Vista and Ubuntu, but I'd hardly call the results "meaningless".
It's quite possible for software to get slower not faster.
Very true. I guess I was referring to this specific instance, where the article mentions the openGL layer of Mesa wasn't geared towards performance yet, but eventually will be.
Sorry, that's just a stupid argument. Because an application is closed source they're never going to boost performance?
No, because the OS is closed source you'll always be at the mercy of the license provider to boost performance. Honestly, how much does Microsoft _really_ care about Java performance? Not a hell of a lot.
Besides which, benchmarks are for the here and now. OpenGL drivers may improve for Linux, Vista may improve its file handling, JavaVMs may see better optimisation, heck, even the damn benchmarks will probably get updated. None of this has anything to do with open or closed source.
I guess I have to disagree here. None of those improvements happen in a vacuum. Microsoft decides whether to improve performance based on market decisions. The linux community makes decisions largely based on user needs. If someone really needed super-duper Java performance, they could go out and craft something that's soley performance based.
The point here is that closed source performance improvements are granted to you by the software company (The Great And Powerfull Oz!). Open source performance improvements can come from the guy who actually wants the improvements.
Microsoft is like a castle under siege, there's an attack from Asus on one wall, then IBM on another, then Dell at the main gate, now Toshiba... Each wave is beaten back, but the defenders look increasingly shaky.
I don't agree that Asus, Dell and Toshiba really care a hell of a lot about taking down Microsoft. They sell hardware, Microsoft sells software. They really don't compete very much, and have traditionally been partners. The partnership is becoming a bit more shaky as it makes more sense for those three to start looking at alternative OS providers. But ultimately to the OEMs, the OS is just another component in the laptop/desktop/server. They don't really want to attack Microsoft any more than they want to attack Seagate. Sure, competition in operating systems would be helpful in many ways, but don't think that the OEMs are anything like IBM, who DOES more directly (but not entirely) compete with Microsoft.
I love the way in every test test Vista loses it's "Ubuntu is faster" but in the test where Vista wins, they explain and excuse it going "bad opengl drivers".
Maybe that's because Ubuntu is an open source application where we actually know why the test gave bad performance, and actually know that it's going to improve in the future?
Who's to say the Vista performance gap wasn't caused by bad drivers?
Don't dismiss the advantages of an open system where you can actually understand what's under the hood as just "test bias".
its great to see that OEM companies are realizing that having a choice is a good thing.
I'm not sure I exactly agree with you. OEM companies don't really care about "choice", they care about selling laptops. What's good is that the market has opened up enough that OEMs think they might gain some sales by selling other operating systems. The choice of OpenSolaris puzzles me a little though. Solaris isn't exactly a large market, and as the OP pointed out it's not really a good desktop OS.
The only thing I can guess is Toshiba is hope to capture a high-end developer market that's already using Solaris, and would jump at the chance to have it supported and installed from the start.
Think of it this way, nobody bats an eyelid when you say "filesharing is illegal", but you would get some surprised looks if you said "video recording is illegal" or "photocopying is illegal" - they have managed to taint the technology with a possible illegal use.
I never thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right. There's now (if there wasn't already) a whole group of people that think "peer to peer" is somehow illegal. It's as if the Recipe Book industry started suing housewives who share recipes, and now a large segment of them think they're doing something clandestine when they exchange a recipe.
Why is it so sad? People die every day, most of which I've never heard of. Do you feel sad for every one of them? I'd hope not.
I didn't know her, and never met her. she died maybe a few years to young, but such is life. She was on a television show that I've watched. I guess I don't feel that's enough reason to be sad about her death.
I find it a little odd that you want everyone to behave as if it was their own mother that died.
Just because someone is a Administrator or politician does not mean they are a GOOD administrator or GOOD politician.
That's true of any job. I guess I don't really understand your point. That we shouldn't assume someone we don't know will be good at a job they've never done?
I don't know if he'll be any good at being Energy secretary. I did see him speak a couple years ago at the Nobel Conference on Energy, and he was a great speaker with very good ideas. From what I recall one of his main messages was "Fail fast", in other words try a lot of ideas and see which ones work and which don't quickly. IMO that's really _exactly_ what we need to do. I will say this though. The past Energy secretaries certainly haven't done jack-squat for energy policy in this country, and the vast majority of them were politicians. So it's not like the politicians have some great track record that Chu has to live up to.
Faster computation doesn't help communication-limited tasks. Faster communication doesn't help computation-limited tasks.
I thought the same thing. Years ago with the massively-parallel architectures you could have said that massively-parallel architectures don't help inherently serial tasks.
The other thing I wonder is how server and desktop tasks will drive the multi-core architecture. It may be the case that many of the common server and desktop tasks have massive IO need (gaming?). The current memory architectures aren't set in stone, but I also doubt they'll be driven by what the Supercomputers consumers need.
Is there something wrong with the word "reflections" now?
In human experience, a reflection is instantaneous, where an echo appears after a period of time. Thus echo is more descriptive to layman (remember them?). You know and I know that a reflection isn't instantaneous, it's just not generally perceptible to our eyes like an echo is perceptible to our ears.
It's just part of the mounting evidence that username/password combinations for banks is inherently flawed. "Somthing you know" can always easily be known by someone else. Bank security should (IMO) be also based on "something you have", like an ATM card.
If banks really wanted two-way authentication to work properly, they'd use a hardware device (USB-key) that had to be present in the machine to login to your account. The hardware device would be implemented in such a way to make it impossible to copy the functionality of it without physical access to it.