This entire article seems to forget one thing. The income from a university on phones was never that that great. The article says that it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.... As far as I can tell from a university thats nothing.
The average private universities tuition is rapidly approaching $30k/year (not counting room and board). I know my school is just off from that (But I'm a grad student so I don't worry as much). With costs like that the university doesn't care about a few hundred thousand dollars. Accept 4 more students and its done.
Its especially scary when you factor in that the school claims that tuition accounts for less then half of its income. Granted much of this tuition goes to cover financial aid for other students (note I said financial aid as scholarships are now reserved for athletics).
But as far as dropping land lines.. I don't really like that idea. I was one of those hold outs. I didn't have a phone until a year ago after a couple car problems when I broke down and got one. But I still know people without cell phones. And no these aren't the anti technology crowd, but the comp e's and comp scis. They just don't want to be reached all the time. Granted their the same people who didn't answer their phones half the time anyways. I think their biggest excuse is why should I pay $50 a month for a phone.... If i need to call someone I can borrow someones phone, and if they need me well they can try around or leave me a message on aim.
The assumption that everyone has a phone is just overrated.
Actually theres more to it then just this. These reasons are exactly why Monsanto wouldn't get involved in this sort of stuff.
They have a pretty sweet deal going for them right now with their ip rights in their seeds etc. And their ability to sue farmers at will. Well there is no way they'd be able to keep that up if they launched into suburbia.
The people can tolerate this behavior toward corporate farmers and the occasional local farmer. But if they tried stopping the home gardners from sharing flowers or sueing people who's grass grew into a neighbors yard etc... They'd get killed in an instant. The government would redefine what rights they have because you can't allow everyone to get sued like that (although the riaa/mpaa are trying).
It would be disastrous to their business model as they could no longer do the things they do.
yes this is partially true, but isn't it ironic that the swiftboat veterans had to spend months trying to get stories on kerry mentioned in the news. Although they had the facts and videos of Kerry denouncing Vietnam veterans (of which many of the stereotypes he made out of them are still haunting veterans). All this while Dan Rather gets some documents about Bush supposedly skipping out on his national guard duty etc etc. Of course no one had a shred of credible evidence on this, and no one questioned the authenticity of it until those pesky bloggers etc started making a deal of it.
Even then Rather claimed that even though the documents are false that Bush probably would have skipped out or whatever.
That seems unbiased to me. yep, an unbiased media is what we have. No questions there. you can believe theres no bias in the media if you want. thats your opinion. But if you want the full truth i'd suggest checking what any media says. Everyone has biases on what they choose to cover what details they share and which ones they don't. Republicans and Democrats will both do it. Everyone will do it, its natural. Bias is to be expected, and isn't inherently bad. What is bad however is when half the country is conservative but 2/3rds or 3/4's or whatever of reporters are liberal. Just doesn't quite make sense to me.
How dense are you to believe that the media is conservative in their views. Granted it partially depends on your definition of conservative. If you're in the green party anything less then socialism is conservative in your eyes. Same goes for the other side.
But assuming the traditional US-centric view that democrat=liberal and republican=conservative then no the media is not conservative. I don't even think Fox news is really that conservative by this ranking.
Where do I get these ideas in my head? Well countless studies have been performed asking political leanings of people in the media. http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/welcome.as p lists some of them. Granted I can't vouche for this site (i just found it now), but there are plenty of studies I've read showing these same trends.
As an example from the above site:
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Yeah, let me tell you these are really conservative institutions. The scary part is the numbers are even worse at institutions of higher learning. I think it was something like 9 out of 10 professors at Berkley are liberal/Democratic. Thats just sad. You can't deny theres a bias there, and if you ask me it equates to a focused sort of brain washing thats being attempted.
While claims could be made about liberal/democrats are on average more inteligent. Sure it may be true, Im not going to argue it because I don't know, but what I do know is that of the majority of students 9 out of 10 of them are not liberal/democratic and of the general population its definately not this ratio. Granted most schools are better than this with only 75/25 or something like that (especially in the humanities, engineers tend not to care thank god). But the bias is so pronounced that any deviation from the bias in our society is considered highly conservative.
Phil
Wow what a load of flame bait. Apparently in the socialist paradise known as slashdot its bad for a company to work to make money.
I'd argue that Gates has done more good for the world through his software company then through the money he has and will give out. Sure you'll see the shoddy products and things that don't work right, but he's done far more then make giant piles of money.
I may not be a big fan of his products (in fact I am writing this on my ibook and my desktop runs linux) or of his business practices, but I show that through the usage of my checkbook by not buying his products.
What Microsoft has done is dumbed down computers so that they're useable by the average person. We may hate it, but its a fact of life. He's created an enterprise that people can understand. The software isn't perfect, but for most people it gets the job done. He's created "standards" albeit closed standards that work for business. No longer do people need to find ways to open up a document written up in word perfects or wordstar or whatever and try to get it to work in word.
Sure the softwares not perfect, and it may not be the best software available. But the value percieved by most people is that it is. Companies aren't forced to pay for microsoft office, they choose to because they feel its a valid expenditure of their money. They're in it to make money.
You decry his selfish actions. Selfish actions are what make the world run. People don't go about doing something because they want to help the world. They might do something to help the world because they want to help it, but its a selfish action. They want to do it, they want it for their own satisfaction (even if its anonymous as is sometimes the case).
As for companies plowed under by microsofts prowess. sure its heartless, but it happens. what about the companies that were making small niche products and then bought out by microsoft. I'm sure the owners of those businesses were laughing all the way to the bank. Sure people were hurt by it, but is it inherently bad? The assembly line caused hundreds of thousands of people to lose their jobs. no longer does it take 1000s of man hours to build a car. On the other hand now most every family (in the us) has one or 2 cars in their driveway. As well as a million other gadgets.
People were put out of jobs by microsoft. Now most every family in this country has a computer on their desk. The operating system on it may not be very stable or the best, but microsoft enabled it.
If you want to condemn microsofts business practices personally, thats your own business... don't buy or use their products. To call them evil for being "selfish" well I guess we're all evil. I'm proud to act in my own self interest. Any other motivation is just stupid and illogical.
I always find it amusing how the cell phone companies manage to gouge the public on something as stupid as SMS messages. They charge per message more then what a minute of phone conversation would take. Doing the math thats pretty crazy. Assuming a cell conversation takes up a stream of 32kbps (I'm not really sure how much it is but I assume its something near that as they're relatively clear), that yields nearly 2 million bits of information per minute for voice calls. Assuming a ridiculous plan that costs 10 cents per minute, that yield ~200kb per cent. Assuming a 128 character message, and after ECC (and resends) and headers etc we have at most 256 bytes being sent per message. Or 2kb. Seems to me that 10 cents for 2kb of data vs 1cent for 200kb of data seems a bit ridiculous.
Although here I'm leaving out how much of the overhead is for the initiation of the conversation (creating the connection etc), but I'm pretty sure the phones always have a nominal connection so its not a big deal.
this leads me to what I do with my phone. Using t-mobile and their tzones internet feature ($5/month extra) you can check your email etc from your phone. It also allows your phone to connect to their gprs internet service. However I recently realized that they blocked connections to most outgoing ports (ie i could only connect to other machines mail ports). Using aim was simple enough as I just set aim to connect to port 143 (pop3).
The harder part was browsing the web. For this I set up an ssh server to answer to port 143. I connected to it using a -L portnum:proxyserver:80 and then just setup my browser to use localhost:portnum as a proxy server. Of course you need to have access to a proxy server to do this, but if your in school you probably have access to one already.
Then on my vacation I just sat there with my laptop on the internet. It was a bit slow but I used unlimited aim (with a real keyboard), and could browse the web check my mail etc. And all it cost me was the nominal $5 a month the cell company charges for "unlimited t-zones".
After the month was done no extra fees etc. Even if there was I could argue that as tmobile advertised the plan as unlimited tzones and stated nowhere explicitly about usage fees they have no right to charge me. Also as I've had my phone over the initial year contract now I have a bit of leverage over them. But if the cell companies are going to work their damnest to screw us over, its well within my rights to abuse their service when I can.
No; The entire point of a military is rarely to advance society. A militaries purpose is to destroy, and I've never known destruction to advance society. However it has been proven thousands of times that a lack of a military will cause society to degress. Not due to a social collapse, but due to an outside force. Frances society had some major set backs in WWI and WWII... not because of their advanced military but their lack of an adequate one.
There are plenty of examples. There are also examples of countries failing duing to spending too much on their military (it was one of the downfalls of the USSR, and I still thank Reagan for leading them to their doom). However we're not spending anywhere near the amount that led to the USSRs doom (percentage of GDP wise).
If spending money on a purely defensive weapon isn't worth it, I don't know what to say. The fact that 1 nuclear missile can cause millions of deaths, not to mention 100s of billions of dollars in damages seems like a good incentive. Even if it doesn't work right. What if it merely causes a missile to go off course? Well maybe the deathtoll might be merely in the 100s of thousands
Before cursing the military for existing, think what we'd be like without one. I'm personally a supporter of missile defense systems. Sure they may not work right even in 20 years, but maybe by then we'll have a chance.
Brilliant idea. Sounds amazing. Because everytime the government gets involved in a program it works great. And here its even easier because we could have all the worlds governments work together to come up with laws.
They could fully regulate the internet. Take out all the nasty things that the majority don't want. The majority doesn't want spam, they don't want spyware, fine the regulatory body can illegalize it.
Then if someone tries spreading a virus or distributing a program that could be in the grey areas, fine, send them to the gulag.
Ah yes the government could do a wonderful job with this task. Count me on board, because if you ask me you can never have too much government regulation
What could make for a very interesting move on IBMs part would be to make a power5 x86 processor. Of course the idea initially sounds crazy, but how much extra work would it be. Sure adding the emulation and x86 decode layer to the chip would make the chip larger and make it a bit slower (say 10%), but the core of an opteron and the core of a ppc aren't incredibly different. Its just that the opteron does extra work to decode the x86 instructions.
If IBM wanted to play hardball on their processors against Intel and AMD they could make a competing product. Sure it would take a few years to get to market, but when it did. . . However IBMs business is primarily in the high end server field where they don't want to lose the 10% efficiency (or whatever it is) and add to the already massive die area. Would be fun to see though, then maybe i could have the power of a power chip on my pc (of course seeing as I run linux on my pc desktop which also runs on ppcs).
While I am not a fan of taxation in most any form, I don't see why the internet should be protected when everything else is free game to be taxes. The interstate commerce clause of the constitution can kind of be applied to say the states couldn't tax the internet in the first place.
Regardless when it comes to a federal law on this I have to laugh. For some reason the internet is protected while every thing else is taxed. Seems like a waste of a massive revenue source to me. Not to say we need it. If I had my way the government would be scaled back to a quarter of its size and taxes cut accordingly. Of course with the big government republicans in charge (i guess it could be worse and we could have even bigger government democrats in charge) this isn't really an option.
So the protection of the internet is more of a popularity thing. I've always wondered what makes the internet so different the traditional telecoms. I mean if we were taxed on data the same we are on voice I'd hate to see what it would cost to send a gigabyte across the network. Consider every voice converation yields plenty in taxes, and takes far less bandwidth (even when you consider its duration). Of course if taxes were the same for voice and data the internet would cease to exist. I'm pretty sure taxes would be well over 100% if they were set to the same (dsl is ~$40/month and assuming ~10GB of traffic/month. . . and not sure the exact taxing). Eh, its kinda ridiculous.
But I guess the government will continue to do whats popular at the moment and then come crying when they lose all their revenue from the telecoms, or the telecoms simply continue to crumble or drop out of the voice market due to overregulation.
I know this isn't too relevant, but oh well. I've been following Wilco for years now (think i picked up my first wilco cd in 97 or so). anyhow, I must say I'm proud to be a fan of a band that sees the internet as a tool and not as damning them.
While I haven't followed Wilco too much in recent years (i do still own a ghost is born and YHF, but sometimes find it a bit too experimental for my tastes), I am a huge fan of being there, and an even bigger fan of tupelo. If only I was born earlier and could have seen some of those shows... Or to have seen a Golden Smog show back when Tweedy still played with them. Its kinda weird seeing them with all this fame. The new albums are good, but kinda weird. Sorry to slam any fans of the band, I still love them, and would take a ghost is born over 99% of the crap out there, but I miss having Wilco, and not simply Tweedy and company.
By the way, if anyone wants to reccomend other alt-country bands to me, feel free to send an email. I'm always looking for more to get into (although there's a good chance I'm already into them).
no... theres a big difference. I remember as a cub scout learning how to shoot a bb gun. it was a fun and rewarding experience. Comparing a gun with cigarettes, booze, hookers and illegal drugs is just not valid. The above do not have many legitimate uses. Guns however can be a hobby.
It teaches kids hand eye coordination as well, and the practice of aiming, being careful, thinking about what your doing, taking your time, and being responsible. All things a kid should learn.
When used responsibly with supervision there's nothing wrong with them. Is shooting a coke can with bb's really such a horrible thing?
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Thats why im glad to have an older brother. I remember having the duplos, but I was probably 3 when my brother started getting real legos (he was 5). I think my mom realized it was pointless to get me to try and play with the bigger ones by that point.
I always loved building everything out of them. You just have to have room for it. I still don't know how my mom would put up with us having a city built across the bottom of my room for weeks at a time as it was being created. Oh those were the days. I think we even used the guest room for the lego room at one point. That worked great. You really need a place to keep them and build.
Its just sad that today legos are more about the premade movie legos. While they're neat, they're just no match. I remember the generic things you could make. The city buildings, police buildings, fire stations etc. And then the fact that the instructions included pictures of other buildings made from the set. That was always half the fun to make something similar without instructions.
I still think my favorite lego creations were my circuit city built of legos (that was fun), the cd factory, and my hotel. heh, and then of course there was the hotel after getting hit by hurricane andrew (including palm trees through the windows etc).
Hmm, makes me want to bring them out again. Between legos, constructs, lincoln logs, and those wooden train sets, who needed video games... I never owned a video game system as a kid (although played enough at friends houses), and think im all the better for it.
phil
Sure, we have our homeless, and we have our poor. The difference is how many people live like that? As far as I know its very few. Even driving around the poor parts of town i see direct TV dishes up on houses, cars in peoples driveways etc. Not to say that there aren't some people starving to death, but the amount is relatively small.
As far as the homeless, or dare I refer to them as bums without offending someone, well most of them tend to choose that sort of life. Some people are always going to want to avoid society, avoid responsibility, and avoid work. To some the choice of living a poor life with a shorter life expectancy etc is their choice.
Also, how do you compare the US where these things are rare with a country where it is common. If the newspaper runs a story on one of these people in the US people are lining up to help them out and get their live straightened out. If this happened all the time this just simply wouldn't be the case. You can easily drive around our cities and not see these side effects. ..and we don't even have a government thats trying to hide these simple facts.
Ah how good it is to live here. Proud to be an american where our cell coverage doesn't go coast to coast, but I can drive 20 miles from the city and be out in the middle of empty forests or fields where no one is around. Its wonderful to have open space, and more importantly freedom.
I don't know if I'd agree exactly with this comment. While a 3.8 GHz P4 does not perform as highly as a 3.8GHz Athlon chip would, an AMD chip can not physically run at these speeds. The pipeline would not support it.
The slashdot crowd is quick to attack Intel because they're the big guys, but the NetBurst architecture is an extremely powerful and (gasp!) good architecture. While the engineers designing it designed a processor for maximum pipelinability (over 30 stages now) this is not really a bad thing. Pipelining a processor is a good thing in general. Its main claim to usage is that it allows a processor to run at a higher clock speed. That is what pipelining was created for; to break down the time into smaller slices so more can occur in parallell. This process works great when each stage is of approximately equal length, and I have enough faith in the Intel engineers that no single stage was much longer then the next longest stage.
Back to the point though the pipeline does have downsides. A processor with 20 stages will lose ~ twice as many cycles on a branch missprediction (and more on a cache miss, but that number varies further) when compared to a 10 stage processor. However assuming that by using 20 stages we cut the cycle length by even 50% the additional stages were worthwhile. Cache misses are not a "common" event and branch prediction is in the 95+% range now, so the stalls added there are not as large as you'd think.
What the pentium 4 has done was manifest these to a larger scale. Unfortunately the engineers desiging the processor did not realize the massive leakage currents that are seen with processors at the speeds Intel is using. From a computer architect's standpoint they build upon past assumptions, and more stages in a pipe generally help out, so thats what they did. While the end result is not as impressive as they were hoping the end result is not a poor product.
Now what has the NetBurst architecture offered to the consumers? Well one of the main offerings its had is building an SMT processor (hyperthreading in marketing speak). SMT is more then mere marketing hype. It was not an afterthought thrown onto the P4 due to less then stellar performance as people have hinted at. SMT was originally designed for the Alpha ev8 chip that was scrapped. Intel however bought the alpha design team and used the SMT technology (albeit to a lesser extent then some would hope for) in the NetBurst architecture.
What else has NetBurst added? The trace cache is a wonderful feature as well. This removes the x86 decode logic from the runtime pipeline for most instructions.
So where can Intel go from here? My hope isn't so much in the multicore logic that some talk about. While multicore is interesting, I personally would rather see a wider P4 core (more execution units) and have them extend their implementation of SMT to allow for more concurrent threads of execution. a 4 or 8 way SMT processor could show some real results.
And for those of you who are going to question what I'm saying... No I don't work for Intel. And no my desktop processor is not an Intel processor either (I run an athlon 1600 for my workstation). However in my lab I am working on algorithms designed specifically around SMT processors (as well as cache aware/prefetching enabled applications). Intel's processors happen to enable quite a bit of optimization if done properly.
While I never agreed with Intel playing the MHz game, or their ridiculous prices, I would not say that the engineers were completely against the super-pipelining of the NetBurst architecture. While they may have questioned the reasons behind it, the real world performance gain does exist do to it.
These numbers are interesting in many respects. First the artist royalties seem awfully high. Are these assuming the top artists that are selling millions of albums? Marketing and promotion. . . Where does this go? Sure I see posters up at record stores, and they supply cds for free to radio stations etc, and producing music videos that are grossly overpriced and never played (at least I've never seen music videos played on MTV anymore). But even then thats not that much. Not enough to justify that sort of price overhead.
Then we get to the root of the problem. Walmart sells only the top 5000 cds or so. Seems logical enough for them. They ask the question of why the top 5000 cds are costing as much as the less popular cds. Its a valid question. Most every other product sold comes with volume discounts. Shouldn't the overhead for a cd be far less when you're selling 20 million copies of an album? Wouldn't that justify a smaller price?
Then of course we get indie record labels who are selling maybe 20,000 albums selling them to retailers for $10 a piece. Somehow without all the savings accrued by selling tens of millions of albums they're able to make the product cheaper. Its all highly entertaining.
My theory behind it all goes if Walmart pushes to lower prices why not. Hit the industry where it counts and prevent them from gouging the customers. The industry needs walmart. A lot of people buy their cds there because (surprise surprise) they're cheap. Many of these people are willing to pay $10 or $12 for a cd, but when asked to pay $16 they might say "nah, I'll just download it for free".
So the "evil" walmart corporation (whom does more good for this country then most every other group in the nation combined like it or not) is simply fighting to lower prices for the rest of us. Regardless of what you think of the store, they offer many of the same products for far less then other stores. Sure some stores go out of business because of them, but why should I care? As long as I can still buy stuff cheaply I'm happy.
While it is highly likely that a new space telescope would give results superior to this proposed telescope the real question is "at what cost?" Like it or not, science always has been and always will be (at least for the forseeable future) limited by the cost of the project.
A new space telescope would be awesome to have, but if we can build something almost as good for say a quarter of the cost (probably less then that), and where the maintenance (even crossing the harsh tundra etc) is cheap in comparison to launching another space mission to fix one. But the real question comes here; is the difference in quality of a new ground based antarctica telescope vs a new orbital one worth a couple billion dollars?
Sure many astronomers would argue it is, but I'm sure scientists working at more immediately useful projects would argue that the money would be better spent on their projects. It all comes down to the almighty buck. Spend an extra couple billion dollars on a new telescope or hire a small army of ~50,000 grad students (assuming 2 billion dollar surplus with a grad student costing ~$40,000 a year after tuition and stipend and beaurocratic waste) to do research in other fields.
As I'm a computer engineering grad student, I can tell you where my vote lies.
Uh, actually there are significant advantages to having a shared cache depending on the application. While it may not be too obvious, and its not true in all cases (ie 2 single core processors with 1MB L2 cache each will be a dual core with 1MB L2 in most all situations). In general however they will give the dual core chip a larger L2 cache to make up for the fight between the two processors to use (often including heuristics to ensure that one processor doesn't kick out all the other processors data from cache).
Where then do performance gains over simple dual core operation come from then? Well in many multithreaded applications there is a significant ammount of shared data. When processing this shared data only one copy needs to exist in the L2 cache. On top of that if one core is using the data (or used it recently) and the second processor needs to use it, the data exists in the first processors L1 cache (generally dual cores won't share L1 cache due to the necessity to locate L1 cache near the core of the processor for speed reasons. When this happens the 2nd processor must wait longer then normal for the first processor to update the L2 cache (cache coherence protocols and the fact that L1 cache is duplicated in L2 cache), but this is still an order of magnitude faster then a standard dual processor setup.
So there you have it, the advantages of a shared cache.
Or he could be a frenchie. ..they don't believe in hurting people who try to take their property. Twice in the 20th century the US had to step up to the plate and kick german ass because they wanted french property. The ultimate answer to the removal of property has always been and will always be death. As sad as it may appear.
Even here the university has a trump card. I imagine they can't do anything to someone at the apartment who is not a student, but the school could possibly sign an agreement with the apartment building owner banning APs there. This could be done, and probably was agreement assuming they are separate entities (as the apartment appears to be non-university run).
I would imagine enough apartment buildings right off campuses have agreements with the university over many different issues, and its generally a beneficial relationship for both parties (the university lists the apartments as off campus housing for student interested in living off campus, and the apartment gets more tenants, more full rooms, etc). Such an arangement works well, and if the university asks the apartment owners to ammend their lease policy it would probably be done.
The university also has other trump cards. I know most universities can impose university actions against students even if the action in question did not occur on campus (if you are arrested off campus for something, the university will also oftentimes impose their own disciplinary policy on you as well). This is acceptable.
On top of that the university supplies many computer services to their students. If they said "any student operating an AP will have their e-mail accounts suspended" . . . theres not much else you can do.
Phil
Im amazed in glancing over these posts that no one has asked the question "who gets the money here". If you ask me SOCAN sounds like a corrupt union. Every musician has to be in it (or pretty much must agree with it), and they collect royalties etc. Who gets the money they earn from billing these people?
I understand albums are expensive to produce etc, but how can you arbitrarily grab a chunk of money for playing this music, and redistribute it? Does everyone get the money equal? That wouldn't make sense as there aren't many dental offices playing death metal. Do artists who released a single cd 2 years ago get a check in the mail for $.75? I would understand the system better if a company had to buy special more expensive cds to play over their intercoms etc (with companies paying a different overhead percentage based on square footage or something weird). While still annoying, it would make sense as it would set up a form of accounting for where this money is going.
Where is the accounting here, there is only one group that has something to gain from this, and its SOCAN. The artists are an afterthought. Thats what I don't understand about these RIAA lawsuits fines like this etc. I haven't read anywhere that says where this money is going, except to go to further enfoce copyright law. Seems that if this is the case it needs to continually find new targets to devour.
This has past beyond the point of the artists getting funded, its an industry swimming in its own corruption trying to fight back. Is it working? It appears to, just look at how things are being done.
I guess the music industry has grown up in the ranks, and can now grow up to be as successful as other massively corrupt unions. Maybe some day they'll compare to the teachers union. ..of course by then none of us will realize it.
The real question here is not whats wrong with the big media, but what does Ted Turner see wrong with it? There has to be something in it for him, and the real question is what? Sure the big media is larger then he likes, but if he truely felt that way deep down inside he would have done something far more effective then sending off this letter. He would have when he sold his company off done it in bits and pieces to people all over the world, and cover the loss to his stock holders.
Of course no one would uphold their principles to that level. Now he is at an advantage. If he forces rules through (which he may or may not want personally), he can gobble up the pieces at low prices, and reform his media empire. So he sells large to Time Warner, and buys back for far less then he got paid for it.
What else could possibly be in it for him? I guess there are other "change of heart" things, but I find those hard to believe, and extremely week, because he only "changed heart" once he wasn't the media.
I hate to sound like a consiparcy theorist here, and I'm not usually one to bust out the tin foil hats, but get real people, there has to be something in this for Ted. People don't just do this sort of stuff after spending your entire life as a media mogul. He's a stereotypical liberal. . . . Do what you think the people want, when the profits greatest for yourself.
I think the idea of a cell phone directly highlights his point in "Make the common case easy". With the new cell phones you can do most anything with them. Mine can run aim, play games, be used as a GSM modem, plan schedules, send email, set a billion different ring tones, etc. I can program in tons of people to auto dial, I can take pictures, I can do tons of things that are not "simple".
But, that brings us to the question of "what is the purpose of my cell phone?" For most everyone that is to make phone calls and not to do all that other stuff.
Has this goal of "make the common case easy" been accomplished? Maybe its not as simple as using a landline phone, but I press the buttons for the number I want to call (and if you live somewhere where you're used to 10 digit dialing this is no different then anything else) and press the send key. When I'm done I press the hangup key. It doesn't take a new user of the phone (assuming he's used a phone before) long at all to figure out how to do this.
As far as the other functionality of the phone, no its not as simple, nor would you expect it to be. Secondary functions can't be as simple. If you use you're phone primarily for sending text messages to people, you probably have thought of getting a blackberry or whatever to "make the common case easy".
His entire point was that things should be designed for a primary purpose, and secondary usages should be just that. ..secondary. If on opening MS word you couldn't start typing in a white box, users would be quite upset. They don't want to have to go through a million forms. They don't want a wizard popping up on their screen every 5 seconds asking them what they're trying to do. They want to sit down and write a document.
For the record there is no such thing as fine grained or coarse grained SMT. You can have fine grained or coarse grained multithreading, but simultaneous multithreading is a form of multithreading that implies that it can read opcodes from multiple instruction stream simultaneously (although not neccessarily all the instruction streams at the same time). If I remember the architecure correctly the P4 can fetch up to 3uops from the first thread, and up to 3 from the second. It will issue all the instructions from the first one, and however many it can of the second for no more then 3 issues per cycle (this is one of the limiting factors of Intels SMT architecture).
While I'm sure there are differences between the SMT appraoch in the varying chips, it is not fine grained vs coarse grained multithreading (These imply only one thread can execute at a given time and the two are almost identical with the exception that finegrained can thread switch once per cycle).
Granted wide-issue super scalars are area-hungry and more expensive to implement, that doesn't explain the question I had asked. It stands by obvious reasoning that doubling the number of functional units in a processors (and adding 100 or so extra registers to the rename unit) is less expensive then doubling the entire processor die. What may get tricky is the VLSI design of the extra functional units (as going from 1 to 2 cores in VLSI layout should be straightforward enough in terms up chip area, but I'm no expert in this matter).
From this simple fact it seems intuitive that a super wide issue processor would take up maybe 10-15% more die area then a conventional superscalar. Then you add another 5-10% of the die area to the required duplicated structures and extra rename registers, and you end up with a super wide-issue SMT processor that takes the advantages of a superwide issue processor, and adds the latency hiding features of SMT to get a speedup of well over 2 times.
I think the most accurate reason may have more to do with the simplicity of going the CMP route.
Slashdot Mirror
This entire article seems to forget one thing. The income from a university on phones was never that that great. The article says that it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.... As far as I can tell from a university thats nothing.
The average private universities tuition is rapidly approaching $30k/year (not counting room and board). I know my school is just off from that (But I'm a grad student so I don't worry as much). With costs like that the university doesn't care about a few hundred thousand dollars. Accept 4 more students and its done.
Its especially scary when you factor in that the school claims that tuition accounts for less then half of its income. Granted much of this tuition goes to cover financial aid for other students (note I said financial aid as scholarships are now reserved for athletics).
But as far as dropping land lines.. I don't really like that idea. I was one of those hold outs. I didn't have a phone until a year ago after a couple car problems when I broke down and got one. But I still know people without cell phones. And no these aren't the anti technology crowd, but the comp e's and comp scis. They just don't want to be reached all the time. Granted their the same people who didn't answer their phones half the time anyways. I think their biggest excuse is why should I pay $50 a month for a phone.... If i need to call someone I can borrow someones phone, and if they need me well they can try around or leave me a message on aim.
The assumption that everyone has a phone is just overrated.
Phil
Actually theres more to it then just this. These reasons are exactly why Monsanto wouldn't get involved in this sort of stuff.
They have a pretty sweet deal going for them right now with their ip rights in their seeds etc. And their ability to sue farmers at will. Well there is no way they'd be able to keep that up if they launched into suburbia.
The people can tolerate this behavior toward corporate farmers and the occasional local farmer. But if they tried stopping the home gardners from sharing flowers or sueing people who's grass grew into a neighbors yard etc... They'd get killed in an instant. The government would redefine what rights they have because you can't allow everyone to get sued like that (although the riaa/mpaa are trying).
It would be disastrous to their business model as they could no longer do the things they do.
Oh well GM grass does seem like a nice idea.
Phil
yes this is partially true, but isn't it ironic that the swiftboat veterans had to spend months trying to get stories on kerry mentioned in the news. Although they had the facts and videos of Kerry denouncing Vietnam veterans (of which many of the stereotypes he made out of them are still haunting veterans). All this while Dan Rather gets some documents about Bush supposedly skipping out on his national guard duty etc etc. Of course no one had a shred of credible evidence on this, and no one questioned the authenticity of it until those pesky bloggers etc started making a deal of it.
Even then Rather claimed that even though the documents are false that Bush probably would have skipped out or whatever.
That seems unbiased to me. yep, an unbiased media is what we have. No questions there. you can believe theres no bias in the media if you want. thats your opinion. But if you want the full truth i'd suggest checking what any media says. Everyone has biases on what they choose to cover what details they share and which ones they don't. Republicans and Democrats will both do it. Everyone will do it, its natural. Bias is to be expected, and isn't inherently bad. What is bad however is when half the country is conservative but 2/3rds or 3/4's or whatever of reporters are liberal. Just doesn't quite make sense to me.
Phil
How dense are you to believe that the media is conservative in their views. Granted it partially depends on your definition of conservative. If you're in the green party anything less then socialism is conservative in your eyes. Same goes for the other side. But assuming the traditional US-centric view that democrat=liberal and republican=conservative then no the media is not conservative. I don't even think Fox news is really that conservative by this ranking. Where do I get these ideas in my head? Well countless studies have been performed asking political leanings of people in the media. http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/welcome.as p lists some of them. Granted I can't vouche for this site (i just found it now), but there are plenty of studies I've read showing these same trends.
As an example from the above site:
>
Yeah, let me tell you these are really conservative institutions. The scary part is the numbers are even worse at institutions of higher learning. I think it was something like 9 out of 10 professors at Berkley are liberal/Democratic. Thats just sad. You can't deny theres a bias there, and if you ask me it equates to a focused sort of brain washing thats being attempted.
While claims could be made about liberal/democrats are on average more inteligent. Sure it may be true, Im not going to argue it because I don't know, but what I do know is that of the majority of students 9 out of 10 of them are not liberal/democratic and of the general population its definately not this ratio. Granted most schools are better than this with only 75/25 or something like that (especially in the humanities, engineers tend not to care thank god). But the bias is so pronounced that any deviation from the bias in our society is considered highly conservative.
Phil
Wow what a load of flame bait. Apparently in the socialist paradise known as slashdot its bad for a company to work to make money.
.. don't buy or use their products. To call them evil for being "selfish" well I guess we're all evil. I'm proud to act in my own self interest. Any other motivation is just stupid and illogical.
I'd argue that Gates has done more good for the world through his software company then through the money he has and will give out. Sure you'll see the shoddy products and things that don't work right, but he's done far more then make giant piles of money.
I may not be a big fan of his products (in fact I am writing this on my ibook and my desktop runs linux) or of his business practices, but I show that through the usage of my checkbook by not buying his products.
What Microsoft has done is dumbed down computers so that they're useable by the average person. We may hate it, but its a fact of life. He's created an enterprise that people can understand. The software isn't perfect, but for most people it gets the job done. He's created "standards" albeit closed standards that work for business. No longer do people need to find ways to open up a document written up in word perfects or wordstar or whatever and try to get it to work in word.
Sure the softwares not perfect, and it may not be the best software available. But the value percieved by most people is that it is. Companies aren't forced to pay for microsoft office, they choose to because they feel its a valid expenditure of their money. They're in it to make money.
You decry his selfish actions. Selfish actions are what make the world run. People don't go about doing something because they want to help the world. They might do something to help the world because they want to help it, but its a selfish action. They want to do it, they want it for their own satisfaction (even if its anonymous as is sometimes the case).
As for companies plowed under by microsofts prowess. sure its heartless, but it happens. what about the companies that were making small niche products and then bought out by microsoft. I'm sure the owners of those businesses were laughing all the way to the bank. Sure people were hurt by it, but is it inherently bad? The assembly line caused hundreds of thousands of people to lose their jobs. no longer does it take 1000s of man hours to build a car. On the other hand now most every family (in the us) has one or 2 cars in their driveway. As well as a million other gadgets.
People were put out of jobs by microsoft. Now most every family in this country has a computer on their desk. The operating system on it may not be very stable or the best, but microsoft enabled it.
If you want to condemn microsofts business practices personally, thats your own business.
Phil
I always find it amusing how the cell phone companies manage to gouge the public on something as stupid as SMS messages. They charge per message more then what a minute of phone conversation would take. Doing the math thats pretty crazy. Assuming a cell conversation takes up a stream of 32kbps (I'm not really sure how much it is but I assume its something near that as they're relatively clear), that yields nearly 2 million bits of information per minute for voice calls. Assuming a ridiculous plan that costs 10 cents per minute, that yield ~200kb per cent. Assuming a 128 character message, and after ECC (and resends) and headers etc we have at most 256 bytes being sent per message. Or 2kb. Seems to me that 10 cents for 2kb of data vs 1cent for 200kb of data seems a bit ridiculous.
Although here I'm leaving out how much of the overhead is for the initiation of the conversation (creating the connection etc), but I'm pretty sure the phones always have a nominal connection so its not a big deal.
this leads me to what I do with my phone. Using t-mobile and their tzones internet feature ($5/month extra) you can check your email etc from your phone. It also allows your phone to connect to their gprs internet service. However I recently realized that they blocked connections to most outgoing ports (ie i could only connect to other machines mail ports). Using aim was simple enough as I just set aim to connect to port 143 (pop3).
The harder part was browsing the web. For this I set up an ssh server to answer to port 143. I connected to it using a -L portnum:proxyserver:80 and then just setup my browser to use localhost:portnum as a proxy server. Of course you need to have access to a proxy server to do this, but if your in school you probably have access to one already.
Then on my vacation I just sat there with my laptop on the internet. It was a bit slow but I used unlimited aim (with a real keyboard), and could browse the web check my mail etc. And all it cost me was the nominal $5 a month the cell company charges for "unlimited t-zones".
After the month was done no extra fees etc. Even if there was I could argue that as tmobile advertised the plan as unlimited tzones and stated nowhere explicitly about usage fees they have no right to charge me. Also as I've had my phone over the initial year contract now I have a bit of leverage over them. But if the cell companies are going to work their damnest to screw us over, its well within my rights to abuse their service when I can.
Phil
No;
The entire point of a military is rarely to advance society. A militaries purpose is to destroy, and I've never known destruction to advance society. However it has been proven thousands of times that a lack of a military will cause society to degress. Not due to a social collapse, but due to an outside force. Frances society had some major set backs in WWI and WWII... not because of their advanced military but their lack of an adequate one.
There are plenty of examples. There are also examples of countries failing duing to spending too much on their military (it was one of the downfalls of the USSR, and I still thank Reagan for leading them to their doom). However we're not spending anywhere near the amount that led to the USSRs doom (percentage of GDP wise).
If spending money on a purely defensive weapon isn't worth it, I don't know what to say. The fact that 1 nuclear missile can cause millions of deaths, not to mention 100s of billions of dollars in damages seems like a good incentive. Even if it doesn't work right. What if it merely causes a missile to go off course? Well maybe the deathtoll might be merely in the 100s of thousands
Before cursing the military for existing, think what we'd be like without one. I'm personally a supporter of missile defense systems. Sure they may not work right even in 20 years, but maybe by then we'll have a chance.
Phil
Brilliant idea. Sounds amazing. Because everytime the government gets involved in a program it works great. And here its even easier because we could have all the worlds governments work together to come up with laws.
They could fully regulate the internet. Take out all the nasty things that the majority don't want. The majority doesn't want spam, they don't want spyware, fine the regulatory body can illegalize it.
Then if someone tries spreading a virus or distributing a program that could be in the grey areas, fine, send them to the gulag.
Ah yes the government could do a wonderful job with this task. Count me on board, because if you ask me you can never have too much government regulation
Phil
What could make for a very interesting move on IBMs part would be to make a power5 x86 processor. Of course the idea initially sounds crazy, but how much extra work would it be. Sure adding the emulation and x86 decode layer to the chip would make the chip larger and make it a bit slower (say 10%), but the core of an opteron and the core of a ppc aren't incredibly different. Its just that the opteron does extra work to decode the x86 instructions.
If IBM wanted to play hardball on their processors against Intel and AMD they could make a competing product. Sure it would take a few years to get to market, but when it did. . . However IBMs business is primarily in the high end server field where they don't want to lose the 10% efficiency (or whatever it is) and add to the already massive die area. Would be fun to see though, then maybe i could have the power of a power chip on my pc (of course seeing as I run linux on my pc desktop which also runs on ppcs).
Phil
While I am not a fan of taxation in most any form, I don't see why the internet should be protected when everything else is free game to be taxes. The interstate commerce clause of the constitution can kind of be applied to say the states couldn't tax the internet in the first place.
Regardless when it comes to a federal law on this I have to laugh. For some reason the internet is protected while every thing else is taxed. Seems like a waste of a massive revenue source to me. Not to say we need it. If I had my way the government would be scaled back to a quarter of its size and taxes cut accordingly. Of course with the big government republicans in charge (i guess it could be worse and we could have even bigger government democrats in charge) this isn't really an option.
So the protection of the internet is more of a popularity thing. I've always wondered what makes the internet so different the traditional telecoms. I mean if we were taxed on data the same we are on voice I'd hate to see what it would cost to send a gigabyte across the network. Consider every voice converation yields plenty in taxes, and takes far less bandwidth (even when you consider its duration). Of course if taxes were the same for voice and data the internet would cease to exist. I'm pretty sure taxes would be well over 100% if they were set to the same (dsl is ~$40/month and assuming ~10GB of traffic/month. . . and not sure the exact taxing). Eh, its kinda ridiculous.
But I guess the government will continue to do whats popular at the moment and then come crying when they lose all their revenue from the telecoms, or the telecoms simply continue to crumble or drop out of the voice market due to overregulation.
Phil
I know this isn't too relevant, but oh well. I've been following Wilco for years now (think i picked up my first wilco cd in 97 or so). anyhow, I must say I'm proud to be a fan of a band that sees the internet as a tool and not as damning them.
While I haven't followed Wilco too much in recent years (i do still own a ghost is born and YHF, but sometimes find it a bit too experimental for my tastes), I am a huge fan of being there, and an even bigger fan of tupelo. If only I was born earlier and could have seen some of those shows... Or to have seen a Golden Smog show back when Tweedy still played with them. Its kinda weird seeing them with all this fame. The new albums are good, but kinda weird. Sorry to slam any fans of the band, I still love them, and would take a ghost is born over 99% of the crap out there, but I miss having Wilco, and not simply Tweedy and company.
By the way, if anyone wants to reccomend other alt-country bands to me, feel free to send an email. I'm always looking for more to get into (although there's a good chance I'm already into them).
Phil
no... theres a big difference. I remember as a cub scout learning how to shoot a bb gun. it was a fun and rewarding experience. Comparing a gun with cigarettes, booze, hookers and illegal drugs is just not valid. The above do not have many legitimate uses. Guns however can be a hobby.
It teaches kids hand eye coordination as well, and the practice of aiming, being careful, thinking about what your doing, taking your time, and being responsible. All things a kid should learn.
When used responsibly with supervision there's nothing wrong with them. Is shooting a coke can with bb's really such a horrible thing?
phil
> Thats why im glad to have an older brother. I remember having the duplos, but I was probably 3 when my brother started getting real legos (he was 5). I think my mom realized it was pointless to get me to try and play with the bigger ones by that point. I always loved building everything out of them. You just have to have room for it. I still don't know how my mom would put up with us having a city built across the bottom of my room for weeks at a time as it was being created. Oh those were the days. I think we even used the guest room for the lego room at one point. That worked great. You really need a place to keep them and build. Its just sad that today legos are more about the premade movie legos. While they're neat, they're just no match. I remember the generic things you could make. The city buildings, police buildings, fire stations etc. And then the fact that the instructions included pictures of other buildings made from the set. That was always half the fun to make something similar without instructions. I still think my favorite lego creations were my circuit city built of legos (that was fun), the cd factory, and my hotel. heh, and then of course there was the hotel after getting hit by hurricane andrew (including palm trees through the windows etc). Hmm, makes me want to bring them out again. Between legos, constructs, lincoln logs, and those wooden train sets, who needed video games... I never owned a video game system as a kid (although played enough at friends houses), and think im all the better for it. phil
Sure, we have our homeless, and we have our poor. The difference is how many people live like that? As far as I know its very few. Even driving around the poor parts of town i see direct TV dishes up on houses, cars in peoples driveways etc. Not to say that there aren't some people starving to death, but the amount is relatively small.
.and we don't even have a government thats trying to hide these simple facts.
As far as the homeless, or dare I refer to them as bums without offending someone, well most of them tend to choose that sort of life. Some people are always going to want to avoid society, avoid responsibility, and avoid work. To some the choice of living a poor life with a shorter life expectancy etc is their choice.
Also, how do you compare the US where these things are rare with a country where it is common. If the newspaper runs a story on one of these people in the US people are lining up to help them out and get their live straightened out. If this happened all the time this just simply wouldn't be the case. You can easily drive around our cities and not see these side effects. .
Ah how good it is to live here. Proud to be an american where our cell coverage doesn't go coast to coast, but I can drive 20 miles from the city and be out in the middle of empty forests or fields where no one is around. Its wonderful to have open space, and more importantly freedom.
Phil
I don't know if I'd agree exactly with this comment. While a 3.8 GHz P4 does not perform as highly as a 3.8GHz Athlon chip would, an AMD chip can not physically run at these speeds. The pipeline would not support it.
The slashdot crowd is quick to attack Intel because they're the big guys, but the NetBurst architecture is an extremely powerful and (gasp!) good architecture. While the engineers designing it designed a processor for maximum pipelinability (over 30 stages now) this is not really a bad thing. Pipelining a processor is a good thing in general. Its main claim to usage is that it allows a processor to run at a higher clock speed. That is what pipelining was created for; to break down the time into smaller slices so more can occur in parallell. This process works great when each stage is of approximately equal length, and I have enough faith in the Intel engineers that no single stage was much longer then the next longest stage.
Back to the point though the pipeline does have downsides. A processor with 20 stages will lose ~ twice as many cycles on a branch missprediction (and more on a cache miss, but that number varies further) when compared to a 10 stage processor. However assuming that by using 20 stages we cut the cycle length by even 50% the additional stages were worthwhile. Cache misses are not a "common" event and branch prediction is in the 95+% range now, so the stalls added there are not as large as you'd think.
What the pentium 4 has done was manifest these to a larger scale. Unfortunately the engineers desiging the processor did not realize the massive leakage currents that are seen with processors at the speeds Intel is using. From a computer architect's standpoint they build upon past assumptions, and more stages in a pipe generally help out, so thats what they did. While the end result is not as impressive as they were hoping the end result is not a poor product.
Now what has the NetBurst architecture offered to the consumers? Well one of the main offerings its had is building an SMT processor (hyperthreading in marketing speak). SMT is more then mere marketing hype. It was not an afterthought thrown onto the P4 due to less then stellar performance as people have hinted at. SMT was originally designed for the Alpha ev8 chip that was scrapped. Intel however bought the alpha design team and used the SMT technology (albeit to a lesser extent then some would hope for) in the NetBurst architecture.
What else has NetBurst added? The trace cache is a wonderful feature as well. This removes the x86 decode logic from the runtime pipeline for most instructions.
So where can Intel go from here? My hope isn't so much in the multicore logic that some talk about. While multicore is interesting, I personally would rather see a wider P4 core (more execution units) and have them extend their implementation of SMT to allow for more concurrent threads of execution. a 4 or 8 way SMT processor could show some real results.
And for those of you who are going to question what I'm saying... No I don't work for Intel. And no my desktop processor is not an Intel processor either (I run an athlon 1600 for my workstation). However in my lab I am working on algorithms designed specifically around SMT processors (as well as cache aware/prefetching enabled applications). Intel's processors happen to enable quite a bit of optimization if done properly.
While I never agreed with Intel playing the MHz game, or their ridiculous prices, I would not say that the engineers were completely against the super-pipelining of the NetBurst architecture. While they may have questioned the reasons behind it, the real world performance gain does exist do to it.
Philip Garcia
These numbers are interesting in many respects. First the artist royalties seem awfully high. Are these assuming the top artists that are selling millions of albums? Marketing and promotion. . . Where does this go? Sure I see posters up at record stores, and they supply cds for free to radio stations etc, and producing music videos that are grossly overpriced and never played (at least I've never seen music videos played on MTV anymore). But even then thats not that much. Not enough to justify that sort of price overhead.
Then we get to the root of the problem. Walmart sells only the top 5000 cds or so. Seems logical enough for them. They ask the question of why the top 5000 cds are costing as much as the less popular cds. Its a valid question. Most every other product sold comes with volume discounts. Shouldn't the overhead for a cd be far less when you're selling 20 million copies of an album? Wouldn't that justify a smaller price?
Then of course we get indie record labels who are selling maybe 20,000 albums selling them to retailers for $10 a piece. Somehow without all the savings accrued by selling tens of millions of albums they're able to make the product cheaper. Its all highly entertaining.
My theory behind it all goes if Walmart pushes to lower prices why not. Hit the industry where it counts and prevent them from gouging the customers. The industry needs walmart. A lot of people buy their cds there because (surprise surprise) they're cheap. Many of these people are willing to pay $10 or $12 for a cd, but when asked to pay $16 they might say "nah, I'll just download it for free".
So the "evil" walmart corporation (whom does more good for this country then most every other group in the nation combined like it or not) is simply fighting to lower prices for the rest of us. Regardless of what you think of the store, they offer many of the same products for far less then other stores. Sure some stores go out of business because of them, but why should I care? As long as I can still buy stuff cheaply I'm happy.
Phil
While it is highly likely that a new space telescope would give results superior to this proposed telescope the real question is "at what cost?" Like it or not, science always has been and always will be (at least for the forseeable future) limited by the cost of the project.
A new space telescope would be awesome to have, but if we can build something almost as good for say a quarter of the cost (probably less then that), and where the maintenance (even crossing the harsh tundra etc) is cheap in comparison to launching another space mission to fix one. But the real question comes here; is the difference in quality of a new ground based antarctica telescope vs a new orbital one worth a couple billion dollars?
Sure many astronomers would argue it is, but I'm sure scientists working at more immediately useful projects would argue that the money would be better spent on their projects. It all comes down to the almighty buck. Spend an extra couple billion dollars on a new telescope or hire a small army of ~50,000 grad students (assuming 2 billion dollar surplus with a grad student costing ~$40,000 a year after tuition and stipend and beaurocratic waste) to do research in other fields.
As I'm a computer engineering grad student, I can tell you where my vote lies.
Phil
Uh, actually there are significant advantages to having a shared cache depending on the application. While it may not be too obvious, and its not true in all cases (ie 2 single core processors with 1MB L2 cache each will be a dual core with 1MB L2 in most all situations). In general however they will give the dual core chip a larger L2 cache to make up for the fight between the two processors to use (often including heuristics to ensure that one processor doesn't kick out all the other processors data from cache).
Where then do performance gains over simple dual core operation come from then? Well in many multithreaded applications there is a significant ammount of shared data. When processing this shared data only one copy needs to exist in the L2 cache. On top of that if one core is using the data (or used it recently) and the second processor needs to use it, the data exists in the first processors L1 cache (generally dual cores won't share L1 cache due to the necessity to locate L1 cache near the core of the processor for speed reasons. When this happens the 2nd processor must wait longer then normal for the first processor to update the L2 cache (cache coherence protocols and the fact that L1 cache is duplicated in L2 cache), but this is still an order of magnitude faster then a standard dual processor setup.
So there you have it, the advantages of a shared cache.
Phil
Or he could be a frenchie. . .they don't believe in hurting people who try to take their property. Twice in the 20th century the US had to step up to the plate and kick german ass because they wanted french property. The ultimate answer to the removal of property has always been and will always be death. As sad as it may appear.
Phil
Even here the university has a trump card. I imagine they can't do anything to someone at the apartment who is not a student, but the school could possibly sign an agreement with the apartment building owner banning APs there. This could be done, and probably was agreement assuming they are separate entities (as the apartment appears to be non-university run). I would imagine enough apartment buildings right off campuses have agreements with the university over many different issues, and its generally a beneficial relationship for both parties (the university lists the apartments as off campus housing for student interested in living off campus, and the apartment gets more tenants, more full rooms, etc). Such an arangement works well, and if the university asks the apartment owners to ammend their lease policy it would probably be done. The university also has other trump cards. I know most universities can impose university actions against students even if the action in question did not occur on campus (if you are arrested off campus for something, the university will also oftentimes impose their own disciplinary policy on you as well). This is acceptable. On top of that the university supplies many computer services to their students. If they said "any student operating an AP will have their e-mail accounts suspended" . . . theres not much else you can do. Phil
Im amazed in glancing over these posts that no one has asked the question "who gets the money here". If you ask me SOCAN sounds like a corrupt union. Every musician has to be in it (or pretty much must agree with it), and they collect royalties etc. Who gets the money they earn from billing these people?
.of course by then none of us will realize it.
I understand albums are expensive to produce etc, but how can you arbitrarily grab a chunk of money for playing this music, and redistribute it? Does everyone get the money equal? That wouldn't make sense as there aren't many dental offices playing death metal. Do artists who released a single cd 2 years ago get a check in the mail for $.75? I would understand the system better if a company had to buy special more expensive cds to play over their intercoms etc (with companies paying a different overhead percentage based on square footage or something weird). While still annoying, it would make sense as it would set up a form of accounting for where this money is going.
Where is the accounting here, there is only one group that has something to gain from this, and its SOCAN. The artists are an afterthought. Thats what I don't understand about these RIAA lawsuits fines like this etc. I haven't read anywhere that says where this money is going, except to go to further enfoce copyright law. Seems that if this is the case it needs to continually find new targets to devour.
This has past beyond the point of the artists getting funded, its an industry swimming in its own corruption trying to fight back. Is it working? It appears to, just look at how things are being done.
I guess the music industry has grown up in the ranks, and can now grow up to be as successful as other massively corrupt unions. Maybe some day they'll compare to the teachers union. .
Phil
The real question here is not whats wrong with the big media, but what does Ted Turner see wrong with it? There has to be something in it for him, and the real question is what? Sure the big media is larger then he likes, but if he truely felt that way deep down inside he would have done something far more effective then sending off this letter. He would have when he sold his company off done it in bits and pieces to people all over the world, and cover the loss to his stock holders.
Of course no one would uphold their principles to that level. Now he is at an advantage. If he forces rules through (which he may or may not want personally), he can gobble up the pieces at low prices, and reform his media empire. So he sells large to Time Warner, and buys back for far less then he got paid for it.
What else could possibly be in it for him? I guess there are other "change of heart" things, but I find those hard to believe, and extremely week, because he only "changed heart" once he wasn't the media.
I hate to sound like a consiparcy theorist here, and I'm not usually one to bust out the tin foil hats, but get real people, there has to be something in this for Ted. People don't just do this sort of stuff after spending your entire life as a media mogul. He's a stereotypical liberal. . . . Do what you think the people want, when the profits greatest for yourself.
Phil
I think the idea of a cell phone directly highlights his point in "Make the common case easy". With the new cell phones you can do most anything with them. Mine can run aim, play games, be used as a GSM modem, plan schedules, send email, set a billion different ring tones, etc. I can program in tons of people to auto dial, I can take pictures, I can do tons of things that are not "simple".
.secondary. If on opening MS word you couldn't start typing in a white box, users would be quite upset. They don't want to have to go through a million forms. They don't want a wizard popping up on their screen every 5 seconds asking them what they're trying to do. They want to sit down and write a document.
But, that brings us to the question of "what is the purpose of my cell phone?" For most everyone that is to make phone calls and not to do all that other stuff.
Has this goal of "make the common case easy" been accomplished? Maybe its not as simple as using a landline phone, but I press the buttons for the number I want to call (and if you live somewhere where you're used to 10 digit dialing this is no different then anything else) and press the send key. When I'm done I press the hangup key. It doesn't take a new user of the phone (assuming he's used a phone before) long at all to figure out how to do this.
As far as the other functionality of the phone, no its not as simple, nor would you expect it to be. Secondary functions can't be as simple. If you use you're phone primarily for sending text messages to people, you probably have thought of getting a blackberry or whatever to "make the common case easy".
His entire point was that things should be designed for a primary purpose, and secondary usages should be just that. .
Phil
For the record there is no such thing as fine grained or coarse grained SMT. You can have fine grained or coarse grained multithreading, but simultaneous multithreading is a form of multithreading that implies that it can read opcodes from multiple instruction stream simultaneously (although not neccessarily all the instruction streams at the same time). If I remember the architecure correctly the P4 can fetch up to 3uops from the first thread, and up to 3 from the second. It will issue all the instructions from the first one, and however many it can of the second for no more then 3 issues per cycle (this is one of the limiting factors of Intels SMT architecture).
While I'm sure there are differences between the SMT appraoch in the varying chips, it is not fine grained vs coarse grained multithreading (These imply only one thread can execute at a given time and the two are almost identical with the exception that finegrained can thread switch once per cycle).
Philip Garcia
Granted wide-issue super scalars are area-hungry and more expensive to implement, that doesn't explain the question I had asked. It stands by obvious reasoning that doubling the number of functional units in a processors (and adding 100 or so extra registers to the rename unit) is less expensive then doubling the entire processor die. What may get tricky is the VLSI design of the extra functional units (as going from 1 to 2 cores in VLSI layout should be straightforward enough in terms up chip area, but I'm no expert in this matter).
From this simple fact it seems intuitive that a super wide issue processor would take up maybe 10-15% more die area then a conventional superscalar. Then you add another 5-10% of the die area to the required duplicated structures and extra rename registers, and you end up with a super wide-issue SMT processor that takes the advantages of a superwide issue processor, and adds the latency hiding features of SMT to get a speedup of well over 2 times.
I think the most accurate reason may have more to do with the simplicity of going the CMP route.
Phil