It's just nice seeing a linux article (featuring Iraqis ) that doesn't paint Linux users as terrorists.
I agree that's nice. What I think is even nicer is to see a blurb about Iraqi people living a normal life, developing their minds and industries, excercising free association, instead of getting blown up, tortured, starved, or gassed.
Even though I think the Administration's rationalization for the war was a sham, I still think a lot of good could come from it it if the new government becomes stable and protects freedom for its citizens.
We always decried countries where police could demand "papers'' at will for no reason. Now we are, i n effect, one of those countries.
No, we are not. You are not required to carry identification, nor are you required to present it to any police officer.
For the most part you are, because you have to drive to get anywhere.
But besides that, if it is accepted that the police may demand anybody's identity at any time, demanding proof of that ID seems like a short next step. After all, if it's OK for them to force you to identify yourself (even without probable cause of wrongdoing), it certainly must NOT be OK to lie when asked! So in practice the only way the police can exercise this new power is to obtain proof if ID.
It may not be in the form of papers you carry. More likely it would be in the form of a biometric, or DNA. Like Social Security numbers, submitting the biometric would probably start out optional, then become less optional over time, until only "kooks" (who don't require the "priveliges" of riding on airplanes or driving a car or holding a job or owning a gun) continue to hold out.
Until there's probable cause to suspect me of a crime, I should not be police business!
We shouldn't need a reason to not give information. Rather, the Goverment should need a reason todemand it. It seems so simple. We always decried countries where police could demand "papers'' at will for no reason. Now we are, i n effect, one of those countries.
This is a very common issue, and in fact, our New Mexico magazine has a back cover feature dedicated to people disregarding this state as a legitimate part of the U.S.
Well to be fair, a good chunk of New Mexico is allocated to various more-or-less sovereign 'nations.'
It's hard to believe that a band that has prided itself on pushing the envelope and being controversial would do something like this.
Hey, that's pop culture for you. One minute they're making millions singing about shooting cops, the next they're throwing a tizzy fit over unauthorized copies of a CD. Absolute freedom of speech is wonderful when it protects your right to get attention by shocking people, but not so cool when it means somebody performing your songs in some coffee shop (unless they pay you first).
what? that was the only time anyone got killed in MA? People get killed in MA every damn day, often for very petty, selfish reasons by scum of the earth. It doesn't sound much different, now does it?
Look, I think it's great that we all have respect for others, and "people are the same everywhere," and we shouldn't be stuck up, and all that. But can you honestly say that Iraq isn't an especially dangerous place to be right now, especially for a Westerner? Do you seriously believe that living in Iraq right now is a lot like living in Massachusetts? That's outright ridiculous.
I'd much rather get gunned down by surprise one day at my nice comfy job, rather than kidnapped, blindfolded and abused for a month or two, then watch some lunatic with a knife give my eulogy for a video camera before he gets his buddies to hold me down while I scream and he hacks my head off.
At least what happened in Massachusetts was an anomoly. There are foreign aid workers, contractors, and of course soldiers killed in Iraq every day, and that's out of a population much smaller than that of MA.
I'm not saying I wouldn't consider it, but I think I would at least run the numbers first.
Well, I suggest you read the other two replies to your last post, because they are correct as to transformations (even if they don't have karma bonus).
Your other assertion here is that a recursive algorithm rewritten iteratively is still recursive if you don't do anything more complicated than maintain the state with a stack. Well this is not true. A function that does not invoke itself is not recursive, period. In fact just by looking at some (non-recursive) function that uses a stack, and judging that it could obviously be rewritten as recursion, you are finding an equivalance between them, which according to you is impossible.
Well, I know the halting problem and I don't see how it relates to what you're saying. The conversion from recursive to iterative isn't arbitrarily complex, it's simple and mechanical. The easiest way is to simply use a stack to maintain the state of what were previously recursive calls. Then there are other more clever and efficient ways in most cases too. But you can always use the stack trick, which is just what the "recursive" language normally does behind the scenes anyhow.
Anyways, all the halting problem implies is that an optimizer will never be able to find every situation where a particular optimization is applicable. But the exceptions might be obscure corner cases. But in any case it doesn't imply that converting from recursion to iteration is impossible, or even difficult.
1) available and supported in the US
2) substantially cheaper than this Sony
3) run Windows (tablet edition OK, CE not OK)
4) have a vga video out
5) are as small as this one?
Most of those tablet PCs are bigger and not much cheaper (under 80% the cost) of the celeron version of this Sony.
Sony's stuff is never particularly cheap, but what direct competitors do they have for this thing? What's the low-price whitebox alternative?
This baby has a standard VGA output and can run (real) PowerPoint. This is the best thing I've seen for people who have to travel and give presentations.
You will have to focus and refine your talents to get anywhere. The ability to work really hard for a short time when you happen to feel like it won't help you any. Otherwise you will feel cheated when those without your "raw ability" whiz by you in life.
As for two slower cores instead of one faster one, that definitely can save power and increase speed. The problem is that most consumer software is single threaded, so will run slower than the single high speed core alternative.
But thats a Software / OS issue right? It it strikes me if MS realises this with Intel prodding them then in a few years it wont be such an issue.
It is not just an integration issue. Sure some things are easily parallelized (like a Photoshop filter that does the same thing to every pixel) but others are not (e.g. use multiple CPUs to make a browser or word processor "snappier"). Anyways, introducing parallelism just to utilitize the hardware complicates the software, increases the prevalance of hard-to-catch timing bugs, and adds the overhead of synchronizing processors and memory.
As a developer, it's the more difficult programming model that bothers me. I don't have phobia about multithreading - just the opposite, I've done it enough to know that writing correct software is much harder when you have to worry about concurrency.
Besides correctness, there is performance. Writing software to fully utilize two processors is MUCH harder than to fully utilize one. For instance, you might write a multi-cpu aware game by doing the physics in one thread and the graphics in a second thread. But unless those tasks happen to require exactly the same CPU power, you will not achieve full utilization. So you resort to partitioning the functionality in some unnatural way to make it balance.
When I discuss this with my office mate he says: "Great! That will keep us in the job." And I guess he's right. I think there will be a lot of opportunities for new language features (or languages) to exploit all this parallel hardware. And of course a lot of education for software developers. (Not that parallel processing is brand new, but networking wasn't brand new when the Internet hit either - broad acceptance changes things).
So what's the upshot to the consumer? Simple: the whole parallel computer is less than the sum of its parts. If it were easy to make anything faster by throwing more processors at it, multiple processors would have become ubiquitous years ago.
Well,the thing still hasn't arrived yet, but somebody on the 'net wrote that you can sync over wifi, and it's very fast.
I think that could be cool; I'd like my PDA to wake up automatically and sync with my home server every night, regardless of which room I happened to leave my PDA in.
I use linux because it is lighter, especially on a 486 laptop I still use sometimes.
The newer kernels actually work BETTER than the older ones on such slow hardware; they take no more memory and seem more responsive (scheduler improvements? pre-emptible kernel?.
I'm just glad the bloated GUIs aren't built right into the sleek & functional kernel. I am one of the lucky guys who gets to choose linux for my work environment, and I like fvwm2 (with my custom setup) even on fast machines. I just don't like all the crap hogging screen real estate.
Then there's my AMD K6233 home server. It would be an outright tragedy if I were forced to use up its 64 megs of ram for a bloated GUI, considering it doesn't even have a monitor. Yet that little system runs quite a huge range of services.
Purdue will take the money, because he works there. It will be used to build a new scoreboard for the football stadium.
Then the IRS will send de Branges a huge bill for the 45% tax rate on "winnings."
Then his ex-wife will sue for 50% of the million dollars because "he used to moan 'oh, Riemann' while we were doing it."
Then de Branges will spend 25 years opening letters from the poor and destitute who desparately deserve a chunk of his newfound yet nonexistent wealth.
Then eventually he will take his place in an unmarked mass grave reserved for all the great mathematicians who died peniless and unloved.
Except taht most people stop their research into what chip they want when they see a RBFN with the letters "MHz" or "GHz" printed next to it. Nevermind how other factors influnence true optimality of a chip.
I think you're misreading the article. It isn't (mainly) decrying the "MHz Myth."
What it is saying is that the expectation of exponential growth in processor speed (not just MHz) can no longer be maintained. Processors are not going to improve as fast as in the past. So they are trying to turn attention from the CPU, and optimizing the computer at other levels, up to the level of "how much will it cost to obtain and support a payroll system?"
Then go find some relevant information before you buy the product.
If that were possible we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Now that you have the relevant information about Netgear, if you don't trust Netgear anymore, don't buy their products.
Millions already bought their products.
Every time you buy a product, a service, whatever, there is an implied risk that it won't turn out the way you like it. Tough shit. Take responsibility for your own actions.
Interesting how in the same breath you can be so big on personal responsibility (even for things the consumer has no control over), yet totally dismiss corporate responsibility (even for things the corporation did intentionally). Why the discrepancy?
This whole argument over whether Linus could possibly have written Linux reminds me of a quote from Bill Joy
If I had to rewrite Unix from scratch, I could do it in a summer, easily," says Joy. "And it would be much better. A much, much better job. The ideas are old."
The article, by the way, is very interesting if you've forgotten or never read it. It's about BSDs legal coming of age, or path to freedom, or whatever you want to call it. By comparison Linux seems almost cleanroom.
The whole notion of making buying decisions carefully is irrelevant if companies are dishonest about what their products do. Sure, if you're lucky somebody like heise will eventually shed some light so you can make informed decisions. Until the truth is known, you can't act on it no matter how vigilant you are. The geek world at large was just as surprised as anybody else when it turned out that Cisco had been selling products with backdoors.
I think it's a very interesting story, even if they only registered in NM. This give a strong indication that Gentoo will not have an IPO and morph into annoying spam-ridden piece of nagware. So I think it's great.
Slashdot Mirror
We all know what we want. Now how do we convince the content providers to allow it?
Even though I think the Administration's rationalization for the war was a sham, I still think a lot of good could come from it it if the new government becomes stable and protects freedom for its citizens.
But besides that, if it is accepted that the police may demand anybody's identity at any time, demanding proof of that ID seems like a short next step. After all, if it's OK for them to force you to identify yourself (even without probable cause of wrongdoing), it certainly must NOT be OK to lie when asked! So in practice the only way the police can exercise this new power is to obtain proof if ID.
It may not be in the form of papers you carry. More likely it would be in the form of a biometric, or DNA. Like Social Security numbers, submitting the biometric would probably start out optional, then become less optional over time, until only "kooks" (who don't require the "priveliges" of riding on airplanes or driving a car or holding a job or owning a gun) continue to hold out.
Until there's probable cause to suspect me of a crime, I should not be police business!
We shouldn't need a reason to not give information. Rather, the Goverment should need a reason todemand it. It seems so simple. We always decried countries where police could demand "papers'' at will for no reason. Now we are, i n effect, one of those countries.
At least what happened in Massachusetts was an anomoly. There are foreign aid workers, contractors, and of course soldiers killed in Iraq every day, and that's out of a population much smaller than that of MA.
I'm not saying I wouldn't consider it, but I think I would at least run the numbers first.
Your other assertion here is that a recursive algorithm rewritten iteratively is still recursive if you don't do anything more complicated than maintain the state with a stack. Well this is not true. A function that does not invoke itself is not recursive, period. In fact just by looking at some (non-recursive) function that uses a stack, and judging that it could obviously be rewritten as recursion, you are finding an equivalance between them, which according to you is impossible.
Anyways, all the halting problem implies is that an optimizer will never be able to find every situation where a particular optimization is applicable. But the exceptions might be obscure corner cases. But in any case it doesn't imply that converting from recursion to iteration is impossible, or even difficult.
1) available and supported in the US
2) substantially cheaper than this Sony
3) run Windows (tablet edition OK, CE not OK)
4) have a vga video out
5) are as small as this one?
Most of those tablet PCs are bigger and not much cheaper (under 80% the cost) of the celeron version of this Sony.
This baby has a standard VGA output and can run (real) PowerPoint. This is the best thing I've seen for people who have to travel and give presentations.
2. More people come to your business
Simple, huh?
You will have to focus and refine your talents to get anywhere. The ability to work really hard for a short time when you happen to feel like it won't help you any. Otherwise you will feel cheated when those without your "raw ability" whiz by you in life.
Then again, in the summer I have to pay once to power the PC, then again for the AC to pump out the waste heat. That sucks.
As a developer, it's the more difficult programming model that bothers me. I don't have phobia about multithreading - just the opposite, I've done it enough to know that writing correct software is much harder when you have to worry about concurrency.
Besides correctness, there is performance. Writing software to fully utilize two processors is MUCH harder than to fully utilize one. For instance, you might write a multi-cpu aware game by doing the physics in one thread and the graphics in a second thread. But unless those tasks happen to require exactly the same CPU power, you will not achieve full utilization. So you resort to partitioning the functionality in some unnatural way to make it balance.
When I discuss this with my office mate he says: "Great! That will keep us in the job." And I guess he's right. I think there will be a lot of opportunities for new language features (or languages) to exploit all this parallel hardware. And of course a lot of education for software developers. (Not that parallel processing is brand new, but networking wasn't brand new when the Internet hit either - broad acceptance changes things).
So what's the upshot to the consumer? Simple: the whole parallel computer is less than the sum of its parts. If it were easy to make anything faster by throwing more processors at it, multiple processors would have become ubiquitous years ago.
I think that could be cool; I'd like my PDA to wake up automatically and sync with my home server every night, regardless of which room I happened to leave my PDA in.
The newer kernels actually work BETTER than the older ones on such slow hardware; they take no more memory and seem more responsive (scheduler improvements? pre-emptible kernel?.
I'm just glad the bloated GUIs aren't built right into the sleek & functional kernel. I am one of the lucky guys who gets to choose linux for my work environment, and I like fvwm2 (with my custom setup) even on fast machines. I just don't like all the crap hogging screen real estate.
Then there's my AMD K6233 home server. It would be an outright tragedy if I were forced to use up its 64 megs of ram for a bloated GUI, considering it doesn't even have a monitor. Yet that little system runs quite a huge range of services.
Then the IRS will send de Branges a huge bill for the 45% tax rate on "winnings."
Then his ex-wife will sue for 50% of the million dollars because "he used to moan 'oh, Riemann' while we were doing it."
Then de Branges will spend 25 years opening letters from the poor and destitute who desparately deserve a chunk of his newfound yet nonexistent wealth.
Then eventually he will take his place in an unmarked mass grave reserved for all the great mathematicians who died peniless and unloved.
Well, that's my guess anyways.
What it is saying is that the expectation of exponential growth in processor speed (not just MHz) can no longer be maintained. Processors are not going to improve as fast as in the past. So they are trying to turn attention from the CPU, and optimizing the computer at other levels, up to the level of "how much will it cost to obtain and support a payroll system?"
The whole notion of making buying decisions carefully is irrelevant if companies are dishonest about what their products do. Sure, if you're lucky somebody like heise will eventually shed some light so you can make informed decisions. Until the truth is known, you can't act on it no matter how vigilant you are. The geek world at large was just as surprised as anybody else when it turned out that Cisco had been selling products with backdoors.
I think it's a very interesting story, even if they only registered in NM. This give a strong indication that Gentoo will not have an IPO and morph into annoying spam-ridden piece of nagware. So I think it's great.