Having the source to NT isn't surprising at all. They're a microsoft partner. Companies do it all the time. However, I agree completely on the other points. Linux GUI developers (read: anyone working on GNOME, KDE, GTK, etc.) should be looking at a scalable vector-based graphics API now, because it will take a long time to roll over legacy apps. The longer the infrastructure is in place, the less painful this transition will be.
I'm a little confused by Carmack's statements in this interview.
On one hand, he talks about how much he loves RPGs, even though he doesn't play them anymore because it takes a lot of time in preparation. He even goes so far as to say that Quake was originally intended to be an RPG.
On the other hand, he talks about how complex games, while appealing to some people, do not appeal to him because he just likes a game you can sit down and play and get instant gratification.
Have his tastes changed over the last few years, or is he just talking out of his ass?
This is a good thing. It means that in addition to the typical L1 cache which is on the chip, the L2 cache (probably smaller than offboard) is there as well. This dramatically decreases L2 access time, and can improve performance significantly.
Note that I say can. There are a lot of factors that go into cache design, so it really depends on the relative sizes of the L1 and L2 caches as well as stuff like the block size, associativity, and application running on the processor.
You could easily wrap a script around the link that puts an innocent-looking URL in the status bar, even though the real URL has malicious code in it. A more common form of this attack can be seen by going to some of those crappy "Top 50" sites and rolling the mouse over some of the links. The link displayed does not match the link in the tag.
Personally, I think whoever decided to allow control of the status bar from a script should be summarily executed. It hides real information a browser might be trying to display. This is especially annoying on pages that use the status bar as a scrolling message display.
I completely disagree. With the appropriate wrappers, Motif is a breeze in C++. I haven't seen Motif++, having used home-grown wrappers, but the coding I did in Motif was some of the easiest UI stuff I've ever done. I've been doing MFC code lately, and many times I groan at some of the crap I have to pull to get the UI to look or behave the way I want. I never had such hassles using my wrappers.
Fourth, Gtk and KDE support inter-application communication, in a way Motif did not.
I had no trouble doing all kinds of neat drag-n-drop stuff between multiple applications in Motif. Is there another example of inter-application communication (UI stuff, I don't mean pipes, messages, or sockets) that you are referring to?
...but what is the precedent for something like a safe or strongbox which has been confiscated as evidence? Granted, the fact that it is physically accessible probably means there's never been a case where they couldn't get the safe open, but I wouldn't be so sure there isn't already a precedent on the books.
I was severely disappointed to not find my personal favorite comment poster on the list. Had he been on the list, I would have voted for Dan Kaminsky (Effugas). I find his comments regularly insightful and well thought-out. I get the feeling he thinks about things a lot more than most posters before actually putting pen to paper, and this shows.
Naturally, on the first iteration, crusoe will behave almost exactly like a JIT compiler, but adaptive optimization is another story. I would present the case that crusoe is more like Sun's HotSpot technology. If you are interested in the details, here is a lecture presented at JavaOne about java optimization, which talks about the adaptive run-time optimization in HotSpot.
Actually, in this case I believe the correct term should be slander, which _is_ illegal. Lying isn't illegal until it damages a person's or company's character or reputation.
What is really needed is something like (gag) Windows Scripting Host. I hate to say it, but they did something right with that system. Basically, it's a completely pluggable architecture that allows you to script an application using any language you want. WSH currently comes with VBScript, JavaScript, and some other miscellany, and you can also plug ActivePerl into it, and code your application in Perl. All that is needed is for the language implementation to support the WSH interface, and voila!
I thought of that, but it's pretty easy to find out someone's SSN, since it's used for just about everything. A PIN might work, but that also is easy to hack unless it's exceedingly long.
I would think that one of the main problems with internet-based voting is verification of the voter's identity. Right now, when I go to the voting booth, there are people there to check my ID and voter registration. On the internet, however, you pretty much have to depend on the voter registration by itself. Voter registration numbers are pretty much sequential, so it would be easy (currently) to write a hack and stuff the ballot box, so to speak. I think that before internet-based voting becomes a viable option, a whole new infrastructure will have to be created which supports identification in a more robust manner.
What planet do you live on? Where I live, most big companies already license everything per annum. Not just software, either. Many companies out-source their system administrators for extremely high rates, and go so far as to license the hardware that they run their licensed software on.
Licensing is hardly a new concept to big business. It's really the little consumers that will have a tough time understanding that even though they paid $50 for Quake 7, they don't actually own the game, they just have the right to play it for a while.
Some of the things stated in the paper are true, but they missed the boat on some of the supposed new features that will be incorporated into the processor and IA64 OSes, that I think will change the way we look at processor architecture.
The authors make a big stink about the fact that IA64, by it's VLIW (or EPIC) nature, cannot dynamically reschedule instructions. Here's the three main points against IA64 in the paper:
Branch Prediction The Compaq slant Since all the scheduling is done at compile time, IA64 has (supposedly) no way to accurately predict which instructions to fetch during branches. As stated in the paper, compilers can't do a good job of this prediction, and in most processors special counters are used to keep track of how often branches go a certain way, to make them fetch the (hopefully) correct instructions the next time around.
How IA64 handles this VLIW processors don't do branch prediciton, because they essentially process both branches simultaneously, and drop the results from whichever branch doesn't get executed. Perhaps I'm missing something in the author's argument, but it seems like he forgot this.
Register Renaming The compaq slant The author states that the large number of registers in IA64 would be better served with an out-of-order (dynamic reschduling) processor, but presents no arguments as to why this might be true.
The IA64 side Frankly, this looks to me like a non-issue. I can't even see why the author brought it up. I would personally think that compile-time scheduling would have a much better shot at using the large number of registers effectively, since it can look further ahead in the instruction stream.
Dynamic scheduling + memory latency The compaq slant When a cache miss occurs, dynamically scheduling processors can simply keep feeding unrelated instructions through unused functional units (FU's) while those long LOADs and STOREs are taking place. IA64, by its very nature, cannot do this, since all the instructions in a particular "packet" must feed through simultaneously. Therefore, the processor stalls for however long it takes to go to memory.
How does IA64 fix this? This is a sticky issue. Depending upon the particular program, cache size and structure, and various other factors, this may or may not come up. What the author does is present a worst-case scenario, and prove (rightly) that IA64 doesn't handle it as well. There is a good chance that this would be caught at compile time, and the compiler would change the cache structure to compensate. If not, dynamic recompilation can be performed, using cache miss information to restructure the code.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents. Personally, I feel that things could go either way. VLIW gives you a big performance boost on the front end, with (ideally) a lower cycle time, more FU's and a larger register space. How IA64 will match up, no one really knows yet.
That doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I assume that the ftpd does a chroot() to the top-level ftp directory. This, by itself, does not explain how someone got root on the machine.
Yes, they can patent this stuff. Even though the research may have been done partially with DARPA and NASA funds. For example, if the research was done as part of a consulting contract, the consultant usually retains the rights to the IP he/she uses to fulfill the contract. Have you noticed how many universities, professors, and students patent stuff? All that stuff is paid for with public funds, but I don't see anyone complaining. A lot of times, university research is funded for the express purpose of coming up with some technology to start a company. This is not a new thing.
Frankly I don't mind Google's patent. They have come up with a unique process that enables sophisticated search results, and they don't need every Yahoo!, Lycos, or Excite in the world getting rich off their ideas while Google withers away. They don't have to charge to license the technology to say, open-source developers, but they could charge commercial developers to keep themselves competitive in the marketplace.
I've already seen plenty of comments regarding the fact that they only use 2 fingers to type, or there's already a keyboard in front of their computer, etc.
The point of this technology is not that it will replace the keyboard sitting on your desk, but that for those with a desire to gargoyle will have an effective input method. I know everyone says speech recognition is the way to go, but I've been keeping up with the technology, and it's just not ready for prime time. Also, what if you don't want everyone to see/hear what you're inputting? Sounds like a virtual keyboard has plenty of application in wearable computing.
I am uncertain how the company is at fault. It seems like they offer email as a service to customers, and are being blamed for debugging their service.
I can also recall a time before the internet, when users were warned that public and private messages stood the chance of being monitored or reviewed at any time. I don't see how this case is different.
Mononoke Hime is an ok movie, it has beautiful scenery and detailed animation. However, I think the only reason it was the highest grossing domestic film in Japan is that it was Miyazaki-san's last production, not that it was his best film.
Other films by Miyazaki, which I think are better, are "Tenkuu no Shiro no Laputa" (the rough translation is "The sky castle laputa") and "Kaze no Tani no Naussica" ("Naussica of/in the valley of wind"). I'm not a big anime fan, but I think these films stand out much more than Mononoke Hime in terms of plot, setting, character development, and technical merit.
Now, IANAL, but I do know that different companies can trademark the same name so long as they aren't competing in the same market. What constitutes "bad faith?" Is it possible that the small company who chooses a similar trademark for a legitimate, yet non-competitive product to lose their domain name through this bill? What if the company who wants the domain claims that even though the products do not compete, the registered company chose that name simply to increase their own name recognition?
In a similar case, SuperHyperGlobalNet has filed an international patent for the human sexual reporoduction process.
"We plan to license the technology to prospective families for a small fee," says SHGN CEO Bob Babimaker. "As it stands, we are looking at a very large revenue stream from countries such as India and China."
Babimaker acknowledges, that accounting will be a problem, especially in cases where application of the process does not directly result in a new human life.
"We've worked out deals with mattress and car manufacturers to have sensors installed which detect a 'rocking' motion. We feel this will cover 90% of the cases in the US, Europe, and Japan. For the rest of the world we plan to employ infrared imaging."
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is reportedly planning his own patent to a competing process. Although details have not been disclosed, insider rumors indicate the process is long and painful, and the participants are forced to restart several times before they get anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the same process used to etch wafers for ICs. How much did you pay for that AMD?
Having the source to NT isn't surprising at all. They're a microsoft partner. Companies do it all the time. However, I agree completely on the other points. Linux GUI developers (read: anyone working on GNOME, KDE, GTK, etc.) should be looking at a scalable vector-based graphics API now, because it will take a long time to roll over legacy apps. The longer the infrastructure is in place, the less painful this transition will be.
I'm a little confused by Carmack's statements in this interview.
On one hand, he talks about how much he loves RPGs, even though he doesn't play them anymore because it takes a lot of time in preparation. He even goes so far as to say that Quake was originally intended to be an RPG.
On the other hand, he talks about how complex games, while appealing to some people, do not appeal to him because he just likes a game you can sit down and play and get instant gratification.
Have his tastes changed over the last few years, or is he just talking out of his ass?
This is a good thing. It means that in addition to the typical L1 cache which is on the chip, the L2 cache (probably smaller than offboard) is there as well. This dramatically decreases L2 access time, and can improve performance significantly.
Note that I say can. There are a lot of factors that go into cache design, so it really depends on the relative sizes of the L1 and L2 caches as well as stuff like the block size, associativity, and application running on the processor.
You could easily wrap a script around the link that puts an innocent-looking URL in the status bar, even though the real URL has malicious code in it. A more common form of this attack can be seen by going to some of those crappy "Top 50" sites and rolling the mouse over some of the links. The link displayed does not match the link in the tag.
Personally, I think whoever decided to allow control of the status bar from a script should be summarily executed. It hides real information a browser might be trying to display. This is especially annoying on pages that use the status bar as a scrolling message display.
First, Motif is =HORRIBLE= to use, with C++.
I completely disagree. With the appropriate wrappers, Motif is a breeze in C++. I haven't seen Motif++, having used home-grown wrappers, but the coding I did in Motif was some of the easiest UI stuff I've ever done. I've been doing MFC code lately, and many times I groan at some of the crap I have to pull to get the UI to look or behave the way I want. I never had such hassles using my wrappers.
Fourth, Gtk and KDE support inter-application communication, in a way Motif did not.
I had no trouble doing all kinds of neat drag-n-drop stuff between multiple applications in Motif. Is there another example of inter-application communication (UI stuff, I don't mean pipes, messages, or sockets) that you are referring to?
...but what is the precedent for something like a safe or strongbox which has been confiscated as evidence? Granted, the fact that it is physically accessible probably means there's never been a case where they couldn't get the safe open, but I wouldn't be so sure there isn't already a precedent on the books.
Does anyone know?
My bad, I figured out by reading the source that the tags were just a little messed up. ;-)
Where's Jim's answer to question #6?
I was severely disappointed to not find my personal favorite comment poster on the list.
Had he been on the list, I would have voted for Dan Kaminsky (Effugas). I find his comments regularly insightful and well thought-out. I get the feeling he thinks about things a lot more than most posters before actually putting pen to paper, and this shows.
Naturally, on the first iteration, crusoe will behave almost exactly like a JIT compiler, but adaptive optimization is another story. I would present the case that crusoe is more like Sun's HotSpot technology. If you are interested in the details, here is a lecture presented at JavaOne about java optimization, which talks about the adaptive run-time optimization in HotSpot.
Actually, in this case I believe the correct term should be slander, which _is_ illegal. Lying isn't illegal until it damages a person's or company's character or reputation.
What is really needed is something like (gag) Windows Scripting Host. I hate to say it, but they did something right with that system. Basically, it's a completely pluggable architecture that allows you to script an application using any language you want. WSH currently comes with VBScript, JavaScript, and some other miscellany, and you can also plug ActivePerl into it, and code your application in Perl. All that is needed is for the language implementation to support the WSH interface, and voila!
I thought of that, but it's pretty easy to find out someone's SSN, since it's used for just about everything. A PIN might work, but that also is easy to hack unless it's exceedingly long.
I would think that one of the main problems with internet-based voting is verification of the voter's identity. Right now, when I go to the voting booth, there are people there to check my ID and voter registration. On the internet, however, you pretty much have to depend on the voter registration by itself. Voter registration numbers are pretty much sequential, so it would be easy (currently) to write a hack and stuff the ballot box, so to speak. I think that before internet-based voting becomes a viable option, a whole new infrastructure will have to be created which supports identification in a more robust manner.
Has everyone seen www.microsfot.com?
What planet do you live on? Where I live, most big companies already license everything per annum. Not just software, either. Many companies out-source their system administrators for extremely high rates, and go so far as to license the hardware that they run their licensed software on.
Licensing is hardly a new concept to big business. It's really the little consumers that will have a tough time understanding that even though they paid $50 for Quake 7, they don't actually own the game, they just have the right to play it for a while.
The authors make a big stink about the fact that IA64, by it's VLIW (or EPIC) nature, cannot dynamically reschedule instructions. Here's the three main points against IA64 in the paper:
Branch Prediction
The Compaq slant
Since all the scheduling is done at compile time, IA64 has (supposedly) no way to accurately predict which instructions to fetch during branches. As stated in the paper, compilers can't do a good job of this prediction, and in most processors special counters are used to keep track of how often branches go a certain way, to make them fetch the (hopefully) correct instructions the next time around.
How IA64 handles this
VLIW processors don't do branch prediciton, because they essentially process both branches simultaneously, and drop the results from whichever branch doesn't get executed. Perhaps I'm missing something in the author's argument, but it seems like he forgot this.
Register Renaming
The compaq slant
The author states that the large number of registers in IA64 would be better served with an out-of-order (dynamic reschduling) processor, but presents no arguments as to why this might be true.
The IA64 side
Frankly, this looks to me like a non-issue. I can't even see why the author brought it up. I would personally think that compile-time scheduling would have a much better shot at using the large number of registers effectively, since it can look further ahead in the instruction stream.
Dynamic scheduling + memory latency
The compaq slant
When a cache miss occurs, dynamically scheduling processors can simply keep feeding unrelated instructions through unused functional units (FU's) while those long LOADs and STOREs are taking place. IA64, by its very nature, cannot do this, since all the instructions in a particular "packet" must feed through simultaneously. Therefore, the processor stalls for however long it takes to go to memory.
How does IA64 fix this?
This is a sticky issue. Depending upon the particular program, cache size and structure, and various other factors, this may or may not come up. What the author does is present a worst-case scenario, and prove (rightly) that IA64 doesn't handle it as well. There is a good chance that this would be caught at compile time, and the compiler would change the cache structure to compensate. If not, dynamic recompilation can be performed, using cache miss information to restructure the code.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents. Personally, I feel that things could go either way. VLIW gives you a big performance boost on the front end, with (ideally) a lower cycle time, more FU's and a larger register space. How IA64 will match up, no one really knows yet.
That doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I assume that the ftpd does a chroot() to the top-level ftp directory. This, by itself, does not explain how someone got root on the machine.
Yes, they can patent this stuff.
Even though the research may have been done partially with DARPA and NASA funds. For example, if the research was done as part of a consulting contract, the consultant usually retains the rights to the IP he/she uses to fulfill the contract. Have you noticed how many universities, professors, and students patent stuff? All that stuff is paid for with public funds, but I don't see anyone complaining. A lot of times, university research is funded for the express purpose of coming up with some technology to start a company. This is not a new thing.
Frankly I don't mind Google's patent. They have come up with a unique process that enables sophisticated search results, and they don't need every Yahoo!, Lycos, or Excite in the world getting rich off their ideas while Google withers away. They don't have to charge to license the technology to say, open-source developers, but they could charge commercial developers to keep themselves competitive in the marketplace.
I've already seen plenty of comments regarding the fact that they only use 2 fingers to type, or there's already a keyboard in front of their computer, etc.
The point of this technology is not that it will replace the keyboard sitting on your desk, but that for those with a desire to gargoyle will have an effective input method. I know everyone says speech recognition is the way to go, but I've been keeping up with the technology, and it's just not ready for prime time. Also, what if you don't want everyone to see/hear what you're inputting? Sounds like a virtual keyboard has plenty of application in wearable computing.
I am uncertain how the company is at fault. It seems like they offer email as a service to customers, and are being blamed for debugging their service.
I can also recall a time before the internet, when users were warned that public and private messages stood the chance of being monitored or reviewed at any time. I don't see how this case is different.
Mononoke Hime is an ok movie, it has beautiful scenery and detailed animation. However, I think the only reason it was the highest grossing domestic film in Japan is that it was Miyazaki-san's last production, not that it was his best film.
Other films by Miyazaki, which I think are better, are "Tenkuu no Shiro no Laputa" (the rough translation is "The sky castle laputa") and "Kaze no Tani no Naussica" ("Naussica of/in the valley of wind"). I'm not a big anime fan, but I think these films stand out much more than Mononoke Hime in terms of plot, setting, character development, and technical merit.
Now, IANAL, but I do know that different companies can trademark the same name so long as they aren't competing in the same market. What constitutes "bad faith?" Is it possible that the small company who chooses a similar trademark for a legitimate, yet non-competitive product to lose their domain name through this bill? What if the company who wants the domain claims that even though the products do not compete, the registered company chose that name simply to increase their own name recognition?
This just in:
In a similar case, SuperHyperGlobalNet has filed an international patent for the human sexual reporoduction process.
"We plan to license the technology to prospective families for a small fee," says SHGN CEO Bob Babimaker. "As it stands, we are looking at a very large revenue stream from countries such as India and China."
Babimaker acknowledges, that accounting will be a problem, especially in cases where application of the process does not directly result in a new human life.
"We've worked out deals with mattress and car manufacturers to have sensors installed which detect a 'rocking' motion. We feel this will cover 90% of the cases in the US, Europe, and Japan. For the rest of the world we plan to employ infrared imaging."
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is reportedly planning his own patent to a competing process. Although details have not been disclosed, insider rumors indicate the process is long and painful, and the participants are forced to restart several times before they get anywhere.