wrong, this very well could be what is happening. kmail (the KDE mail app) has a very similar bug with pop email. If your hard drive gets full while the "fetcher" thread is downloading mail, there is no way for this thread to notify the parent process, which then happily issues the delete command to the POP server once the "fetcher" returns... and bamo! No email downloaded (cause the disk is full) and the email is deleted from the server... all gone to the bit bucket. The only fix to this problem is to "de-multithread" the application. Which is why Kmail still has this problem (it was reported 3 years ago, and I found the bug 2 years ago, but I don't have time to re-write kmail to not use the fetcher thread).
If this is your fix for the problem (removing threading) you really should not EVER touch multithreaded code. Hell, you probably shouldn't be trusted with any code more advanced than javascript. There are many ways to share data between threads in a multithreaded shared-memory machine. A fix could be as simple as having an array of status codes for each thread spawned. Another thread in the system is likely spinning in a loop polling the other threads to see if operations have completed. If the status code is valid (obviously access to the status code array is protected by a lock or some similar technique) the polling thread can go ahead and tell another thread to delete the data. Of course this requires that the status code is initially invalid, is never written to valid on a termination of the thread, and serialization of accesses to it. Also there should be memory ordering instructions around it (they're implicit on x86 when using atomic primitives, so locking handles this case).
Of course, this particular problem is unrelated to multithreading, and actually occurred in prior versions of OSX according to many comments. This makes sense, as I don't know why anyone would ever want to move files between volumes like this. I regularly copy data around, but almost never want to move it.
You don't silence rude cell phone people by cutting off the cell phone universe. You don't stop obnoxious car drivers by blockading the interstate.
Actually, your analogy is partially broken, but perfectly expresses why jammers SHOULD be used. The law doesn't stop bad drivers by blockading an interstate, as the interstate is designed for high speed traffic. By the same respect your home is a perfectly reasonable place to use your cell phone, and no one is talking about stopping rude and obnoxious people from using their cell phone at home.
However some roads aren't designed for high speed traffic. While police officers sometimes enforce this by fining people (just like a bar owner can tell you to get off your phone, or kick you out), sometimes this isn't enough. Many neighborhoods build speed bumps that stop high speed traffic, the same should be true for cell phones. Find a way to stop the assholes, and we'll all be better off.
Then there's the spinning beachball of death crashes which are a sore point with me.. they happen every time it decides it can't access a network resource* and the only way out is to pull the power cord (since if finder is dead you can't even power off or run the kill application). Got rather sick of doing that last night...
* Which happens rather a lot if you decide to use NFS. NFS under Tiger is broken on intel macs but works OK on ppc macs.. same OS version (allegedly), same NFS share, even the same damned cables.. different result every time.
Funny, I mount my nfs server's drives all the time on my macbook, and routinely forget to unmount my nfs shares. If finder becomes unresponsive I normally go to safari and do a save as. This will stall safari for a minute or two, but then it will pop up a box saying the connection has timed out, and you can disconnect it and the system is fine again. The only thing you should NEVER do is to explicitly tell finder to unmount an inaccessible NFS server. I've also learned that sometimes I have to use expose to find the time out window as it'll be hidden.
Of course, if you have your home directory mounted on a stale nfs server there's nothing you can really do about it, but I don't know of any systems that handle that gracefully. Then again, reboots won't help that if the servers down.
This is only true if all people who graduate from law school become lawyers, and stay lawyers for life. I very much doubt this is the case, as many can't cut it. I imagine the percentage of lawyers that were in the top half of their class is quite a bit higher than 50%... I'd think the same is true for most professions.
So... in 5 or 6 years when the FOSS community finally makes decent video card drivers for this generations radeon's we can compare the performance against. . . Wait, what are we comparing? Against the same 6 year old card when running on windows? Who cares! The reason the drivers are closed source is that much of the work in developing a graphics card is in the driver. parallel programs that run across 128 vector processors are not trivial to write. If they were open sourced, nvidia would then have a reference on how ati does things. It's not going to happen.
Resistance to opening specs had more to do with a "why do you want these anyhow" attitude. It's a lot of work to put specs out for everyone to read, and can be difficult to make sure you remove some examples that give a little too much detail. It's amusing how everyone arguing for these to be open doesn't seem to have a clue what the hardware is actually like, or why things were closed in the first place.
A matter of branding rather than suer needs. This is a problem to be solvedby marketing. I have no idea what you mean by "quaint". Open Office does its job perfectly well.
It is true, Open office does its job perfectly well (albeit slow, and buggy), however its job is NOT the same job that Microsoft Office. It might be okay for your needs and for your grandma's needs, but it is not okay for many business users (which is their target market, the user market they only have by pirating and offering huge discounts on office home).
Everyone I've talked to who's used Office functionality above and beyond a simple letter, or presentation, and has used open office has agreed that open office is crap in comparison. You can't do serious worksheet manipulation in open office, you can't track changes in your documents, you can't integrate with countless applications, you just can't do a lot of things that people take for granted in MS Office. Oh, you also can't properly open MS Office documents. That's a big killer alone.
Its the countless people who parrot each other saying that an open source alternative is always better than a closed source alternative that turn people off from linux. If you showed me open office and said "see, this free software stuff is awesome, and so much better than the pay stuff", I'd just think you're a zealot with a highly biased opinion that's not worth listening to.
IN ten years, according to moore's law python will be 32 times faster than it is now.
Moore's law says nothing at all about the speed of a processor, or of a program. It only says the number of transistors will double every 2 years. The fact that performance benefits have traditionally been had by adding transistors does not mean this will hold. In fact today the performance of most applications is no faster on current computers than top of the line computers from 2 years ago (it's definitely not twice).
Your assumption that Nintendo only wins if everyone buys lots of games is based on the idea that the console is sold at a loss. Nintendo is likely making a hefty profit off each Wii they sale. Therefore to them, every Wii sold is a win, even if the user doesn't buy a single game. This is in contrast to Sony and Microsoft who LOSE money on every console, and are relying on the fact that every person who buys their console also buys at least 4 or 5 games. . . This is just to break even, to match the profit that nintendo is making off EVERY wii sale, they have to sell a couple more games.
Additionally, I do not think most wii owners only have one or two games. There are a lot of people who are "gamers", but aren't hard core enough to pay $600 for a system. There are lots of good games for the Wii, many of which aren't available on other consoles (just wait till smash brothers comes out).
Plus, when taking profits into account, you can't forget about the profit on accessories. How many Wii owners also have at least 2 or 3 wii motes. Those aren't cheap by any means, and likely lead to more profit for Nintendo. Particularly in the short term Nintendo is dominating the field when it comes to profit. I doubt the others have even recouped their development costs.
You do realize there's a reason drivers are becoming more "closed", it's not that they don't want consumers to tweak their drivers, or that they don't want to be Linux friendly. It's because their drivers are increasingly the companies IP. As the cost of manufacturing custom ASICs has increased tremendously with each new generation of technology, it just isn't practical to build custom ASICs if one exists that does most of what you need it to do. Also when you do make custom ASICs (someone has to) more and more of it is software based, to allow programmers to work around bugs in the hardware (spinning new silicon costs millions more and takes months). This source code is often disclosed under NDAs (it's part of the ASIC, and almost as valuable as the verilog describing the ASIC). This code is then often used in the device drivers (assuming that cost is an issue and the manufacturer chooses to save a dollar or two a card by not integrating flash memory or a ROM on the board).
Now the drivers can't be made completely open due to needing to upload this code to the card. While a driver could be made that's partially open, partially closed, there's really no incentive to. The FOSS community will complain either way, so to the company it seems like a wasted endeavor.
Sure someone could make a better board with flash on board, and sell it for a bit more, but there's very little incentive to. Rabid FOSS fans are not a huge market, and likely never will be.
I don't blame apple for not supporting ogg/vorbis out of the box. Just because ogg/vorbis is free, does not mean it is free for apple to include. Sure they could include a free implementation with iTunes, but they would still have to worry about patent trolls suing them. You might think that ogg/vorbis isn't patent encumbered, and I don't think anyones tried suing them, but just wait until a big company decides to use it. If some troll thinks they can make millions off it, they will, which is why they haven't gone after the format yet.
From apple's perspective, does it make sense to take this risk? They can license mp3 and aac playback, and the risks are relatively known, and who owns the patents is somewhat well defined. Businesses like known expenses, and don't like risking lawsuits. Especially taking such a risk for a feature that few people want/need, and of those that need it fewer want to use a commercial product like iTunes anyhow.
My response wasn't clear, I was directly implying in the event of a plane crash what the worst that could happen (see parent post), and the person said the worst would be maybe some radiation leaking out, and I was implying that a crash could be much much worse.
I think you grossly underestimate the worst that could happen. The WORST that could happen is that someone besides the US government recovers the missile first, and uses it against us. Or, almost as bad, they could use it against one of the US's enemies and start a nuclear war.
I think in the light of some of those possibilities the idea of a nuke exploding due to a plane crash doesn't sound so bad.
Uh, I'm pretty sure every company that operates in the united states is subject to US law. There really is no way around it. A foreign company can't set up an office in the USA and say they don't owe taxes because they don't have to obey US laws. Additionally if they open up factories they're bounded by EPA regulations etc. I'm pretty sure every country has some minimal requirements for foreign companies operating within their boundaries. It's the reason allofmp3.com claims they operate wholly from within russia, and that the users are leaving their native country when they download the songs, and then importing the songs themselves into the country. That way all the blame can be passed on to the users who have likely broken the law in their native country.
Arguing a company doesn't have to follow laws of a nation it does business in is just stupid. Of course they have to obey the laws, however the laws may or may not have exceptions (i'm not sure in this case).
Politicians never listened to the stuff you talked about anyhow. Name one politician (at a high federal level) who did, and I would like to call BULLSHIT! Politicians don't do something because it's "rational", or because they think it's the best thing for the nation. They do something because it either helps their approval ratings, or helps themselves, or helps their buddies out. That, or it helps them get funding for their next election. You people who believe that politicians are acting out of reason are true, their reason being to help themselves. Using logical thought to decide a course of action in the best interest of the nation... yeah... right. Your whole car analogy is also way off base. The car company knows better than to do what you say, and WOULD NOT save millions by discontinuing seatbelts. In fact, they'd lose billions when people stop buying their cars. It's the same reason cars have added more airbags than I can name. They're not mandated, but they're a "feature".
If you think a candidate for office's beliefs in evolution really matter, I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in. The most important questions to ask about a candidate are who is he loyal to/owe favors, who has supported him the most, and who is keeping him in power. Are these peoples interests remotely in line with your own? If they are, it's a good thing, if not, are their interests more in your interests than the other guy's interests? And for those candidtates where you don't know their interests... Don't trust them, they're bound to be a loose cannon responsible to absolutely no one.
Ah yes, and I forgot that all analog equipment has infinite fidelity and can perfectly reproduce all sound.... Oh wait, it can't do this at all! Imperfections in the vinyl cause it to contract and expand, this can change amplitudes and frequencies.
It's all great to knock CDs as an imperfect standard and say that they don't adequately represent live sound. Sure, I don't think anyone pretended they did, just that they make a damn good approximation of it. The sound quality that can be produced by a CD player approaches the limits of what our ANALOG amplifiers and speakers can adequately represent anyhow.
Additionally CDs have the advantage that, when played back on the same stereo, they sound the same today as they did 10 years ago. This alone makes them far superior to analog.
There may be instances where the analog signal sent to the speakers when the source is from vinyl is a more accurate representation of the signal than when the analog signal sent to the speakers is sourced from a CD. However for the vast majority of signals I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the signal coming from the CD player is a more faithful representation of the original input waveform. And if the analog signal is from a record that was ever played, let dust hit it etc etc, the differences will be even greater.
The "audiophiles" buying vinyl today really just need to get their heads out of their asses and stop trying to look cool with their turntables and better than thou attitude.
Besides, the vast majority of the public voted with their wallets. 100% accurate sound representation just isn't important. Portability, ease of playback, quality over time, durability, etc are far more important.
CS work is very different than other fields. Conferences are held by the major organizations (IEEE and ACM), and most all of them are peer reviewed full papers. Other fields accept papers into a conference based on abstracts and you submit the paper afterward. In computer science/engineering things are very different.
As the field is growing so fast, we can't wait for journals to get the final version of a paper (additionally this would result in too many groups doing the same work simultaneously). Conferences additionally provide a chance for researchers in the same field to meet up and discuss their work. This is extremely valuable to the community as a whole.
After conference papers are accepted, many are later changed into a journal paper, however this is done later, and a "after the fact" thing where the conference paper is augmented with a little bit of additional work (that wouldn't be worthy of a new paper, and wasn't thought about at the time of the original work), and submitted to the journal.
It may make lesser known publications more well known, and get more citations, but it likely won't make a difference on important publications. The internet in general has made it so that the size of most bibliographies is huge (in my field 20-30 citations in a 10 page paper is common). However, despite increased access, good papers are still the ones most cited. These important works will be cited regardless of how hard it is to find (although these papers can generally be found at any university or company). The whole idea of opening up the scientific community to the rest of the world isn't necessarily a good thing. As it stands I barely have time to answer questions to people in my field doing important work. If you want me to now have to answer to the rest of the world, forget it (not that they'd care as my work, like most research is too specific for them to grasp).
All these open access journals will end up doing is causing more crap to get published. This means there is more stuff to look through when deciding what work is relevant to yours and worth citing.
In honesty the costs of journals and conferences isn't so unreasonable. They have to do a lot of work to publish these things (even if just online). And yes they technically own the copyrights on the papers, but most publishers (at least those from IEEE and ACM) are pretty lax. I am allowed to post my papers online, I just have to put up a disclaimer saying this isn't the official version. And no one is policing my email to see if I'm sending my papers to other people. As things stand there are many things that get published that really shouldn't be (not original work, not good work, or just written too poorly to be acceptable). In particular finding papers that aren't original work (especially if they don't cite the original work) is extremely annoying. This just makes literature search more complicated. Lessening standards and allowing for "open journals" will likely make this worse.
As for the peer reviewers who are unpaid.... Reviewing papers is part of a researchers job (at least in a university). It's expected of people who will be submitting their own papers. However there are many other costs that must be taken into account.
Your calculations of how much damage a truck does to the road are likely flawed. While this would be true of point masses, the same doesn't hold true with cars. An 8000 lb car with 4 axles won't do 4 times as much damage as a single 4000lb car with 2 axles. Otherwise, 2 cars driving next to each other would do 4 times the damage to the road as a single car. Splitting the load up across multiple axles makes a huge huge difference. Also, the cost of using the road isn't solely wear on the road, but also how much added "congestion" the vehicle adds to the road, and how likely they are to get in accidents. Of course, we can't really factor those things easily into the gas tax.
Actually, in many respects toll roads are a net loss. The reason the government funds things like roads is that private enterprise can't provide it as efficiently as they can. One of the reasons for this is the tolls. Toll roads require paying more people, as you need people to collect tolls, you need toll booths installed etc. Those cost money, but, one of the biggest costs of them is the hidden one, which is the travelers time. If every driver spends an extra minute at toll booths, twice a day, that gets quite expensive over the course of the year. Figuring hundreds of millions of people losing tens of hours each, at a fairly decent hourly wage, and you're talking about many many billions of dollars.
Uh, I'm pretty sure the taxes are there to help build the roads that people are driving on. As cars get more enviornmentally friendly, the states will need to start finding new ways to tax them for using their infrastructures. Roads aren't exactly cheap to build you know, and maintaining them isn't cheap either.
NO! You are assuming that fairness is that the rich pay more than the poor. That is not true! Fairness would state that the person who uses the roads the most would pay the most in taxes. No if ands or buts about it. Personally, I feel that gas taxes are one of the fairest taxes the government imposes, as it's an actual usage tax. If you use the infrastructure more, you pay more in taxes. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
The only thing that makes gas taxes unfair is that they unfairly penalize people who have cars with poor gas mileage. The tax would more accurately go against the weight of the car and the number of miles driven, as those two factors have more to do with how much wear and tear you cause on the states infrastructure.
As far as taxes on vehicles go, it makes sense to tax them the same, at least if the tax is earmarked to pay for the states roads. If anything, it's more likely that a car that costs $50k causes less damage to the roads than the old clunker that cost $500. I kind of wish gas taxes were higher. I imagine for something like gas with supply constrained at a relatively constant amount at any given time, the impact of the tax would hit the oil companies more than it would hit the average consumers. It would slightly reduce the available supply, but that's also not necessarily bad. This story is just garbage. The guy was evading taxes (even if he didn't realize it), and must pay the price. End of story.
This isn't really true. A pentium 66 could rarely outperform a 486 120MHz. Technically the pentium had 2 pipelines and could do 2 operation per cycle. The pipelines were similar to the 486s, a u and v one if i remember correctly, and one was crippled only able to execute certain instructions. What was it's real ipc though? That's what matters, not some theoretical max. Someone could design a processor that could execute 16 instructions per cycle (current do 4 or so), and it might execute 30 or 40% (yes percent) faster than current machines (try it in simplescalar or your simulator of choice). It would also use up 4-8x more area than current machines (cpu core size, not counting caches).
Yes, there have been an explosion in the number of clusters etc. However these generally are running HPC applications. Many are applications that are either embarrasingly parallel, or were written tens of years ago. Many newer HPC apps also share common code bases, or use a single algorithm that was written by highly experienced coder.
Translating general purpose applications is a lot more difficult. There is much ongoing research into the area, but little results. Mostly people have been focussing on solutions that address small portions of the problem (transactional memory), or are simply looking into designing more novel computer architectures. The problem is that the Von Neuman architecture is what everyone knows, and what comes natual. Until someone comes up with an archticture model that is as simple as this for parallel programming, it will be quite difficult for programmers to take advantage of them. The model is just unknown, and the results of programs have too much indeterminance.
Since when were embedded systems a "niche" field. Unless you want to call the windows world a niche field as well. There are far more embedded systems out there than there are windows PCs. In fact the vast majority of computers are embedded systems. They don't get the glory of a lot of the higher performance systems, but they are extremely common.
In the IT world C may not be useful. But IT isn't about skilled coders as much as it is about finding monkeys to write bundles of code using an alpahabet soup of "tools". A good C programmer is too valuable to work in an IT field. Good C programmers understand the basics of computer architecture, and are extremely familiar with pointers etc. Being a basic "competent" C programmer won't really get you anywhere, it's just a tool that people who know what they're doing can use.
Uh no, you're actually quite wrong on that one. What you say is true in the case where a company has no competition selling the same goods, and alternative goods do not exist. This is not the case in retail stores. Grocery store A can't maximize the price of it's milk, because in doing so he might drive customers away from the store, causing a net loss. Likewise the same holds true for Grocery store B, and all grocery stores in the area. If crime is added into the area, and effects all stores in the area equally, then the price of goods at all stores in the area will have to go up, or the stores that aren't raising their prices might go out of business.
The cost will get passed on to consumers. We almost never see "cheap" products being sold at a cost of way more than their cost of manufacture. There are exceptions in the entertainment industry where a "near monopoly" exists, in that no one else can make the same product, but similar ones exist. The cost of theft is considered in the marginal cost of many goods. This in turn sets how much companies are willing to charge for it. Theft is similar to the retail overhead costs associated with products.
And prior history has shown that when the retail overhead of a product decreases, its cost will decrease. Just look at what Walmart and the big name grocery stores have done. They do things more efficiently and reduce prices, and in the event drive out less competitive retail businesses. If Walmart could cut their theft by a significant margin, they'd have an even greater advantage over their competitors. In such a case prices could fall even further.
Claiming theft doesn't impact the price of a good is almost as naive as claiming that the cost of oil doesn't effect the cost of gasoline.
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If this is your fix for the problem (removing threading) you really should not EVER touch multithreaded code. Hell, you probably shouldn't be trusted with any code more advanced than javascript. There are many ways to share data between threads in a multithreaded shared-memory machine. A fix could be as simple as having an array of status codes for each thread spawned. Another thread in the system is likely spinning in a loop polling the other threads to see if operations have completed. If the status code is valid (obviously access to the status code array is protected by a lock or some similar technique) the polling thread can go ahead and tell another thread to delete the data. Of course this requires that the status code is initially invalid, is never written to valid on a termination of the thread, and serialization of accesses to it. Also there should be memory ordering instructions around it (they're implicit on x86 when using atomic primitives, so locking handles this case).
Of course, this particular problem is unrelated to multithreading, and actually occurred in prior versions of OSX according to many comments. This makes sense, as I don't know why anyone would ever want to move files between volumes like this. I regularly copy data around, but almost never want to move it.
Phil
However some roads aren't designed for high speed traffic. While police officers sometimes enforce this by fining people (just like a bar owner can tell you to get off your phone, or kick you out), sometimes this isn't enough. Many neighborhoods build speed bumps that stop high speed traffic, the same should be true for cell phones. Find a way to stop the assholes, and we'll all be better off.
Phil
Funny, I mount my nfs server's drives all the time on my macbook, and routinely forget to unmount my nfs shares. If finder becomes unresponsive I normally go to safari and do a save as. This will stall safari for a minute or two, but then it will pop up a box saying the connection has timed out, and you can disconnect it and the system is fine again. The only thing you should NEVER do is to explicitly tell finder to unmount an inaccessible NFS server. I've also learned that sometimes I have to use expose to find the time out window as it'll be hidden.
Of course, if you have your home directory mounted on a stale nfs server there's nothing you can really do about it, but I don't know of any systems that handle that gracefully. Then again, reboots won't help that if the servers down.
Phil
This is only true if all people who graduate from law school become lawyers, and stay lawyers for life. I very much doubt this is the case, as many can't cut it. I imagine the percentage of lawyers that were in the top half of their class is quite a bit higher than 50%... I'd think the same is true for most professions.
Phil
So... in 5 or 6 years when the FOSS community finally makes decent video card drivers for this generations radeon's we can compare the performance against. . . Wait, what are we comparing? Against the same 6 year old card when running on windows? Who cares! The reason the drivers are closed source is that much of the work in developing a graphics card is in the driver. parallel programs that run across 128 vector processors are not trivial to write. If they were open sourced, nvidia would then have a reference on how ati does things. It's not going to happen.
Resistance to opening specs had more to do with a "why do you want these anyhow" attitude. It's a lot of work to put specs out for everyone to read, and can be difficult to make sure you remove some examples that give a little too much detail. It's amusing how everyone arguing for these to be open doesn't seem to have a clue what the hardware is actually like, or why things were closed in the first place.
Phil
It is true, Open office does its job perfectly well (albeit slow, and buggy), however its job is NOT the same job that Microsoft Office. It might be okay for your needs and for your grandma's needs, but it is not okay for many business users (which is their target market, the user market they only have by pirating and offering huge discounts on office home).
Everyone I've talked to who's used Office functionality above and beyond a simple letter, or presentation, and has used open office has agreed that open office is crap in comparison. You can't do serious worksheet manipulation in open office, you can't track changes in your documents, you can't integrate with countless applications, you just can't do a lot of things that people take for granted in MS Office. Oh, you also can't properly open MS Office documents. That's a big killer alone.
Its the countless people who parrot each other saying that an open source alternative is always better than a closed source alternative that turn people off from linux. If you showed me open office and said "see, this free software stuff is awesome, and so much better than the pay stuff", I'd just think you're a zealot with a highly biased opinion that's not worth listening to.
Phil
Moore's law says nothing at all about the speed of a processor, or of a program. It only says the number of transistors will double every 2 years. The fact that performance benefits have traditionally been had by adding transistors does not mean this will hold. In fact today the performance of most applications is no faster on current computers than top of the line computers from 2 years ago (it's definitely not twice).
Phil
Your assumption that Nintendo only wins if everyone buys lots of games is based on the idea that the console is sold at a loss. Nintendo is likely making a hefty profit off each Wii they sale. Therefore to them, every Wii sold is a win, even if the user doesn't buy a single game. This is in contrast to Sony and Microsoft who LOSE money on every console, and are relying on the fact that every person who buys their console also buys at least 4 or 5 games. . . This is just to break even, to match the profit that nintendo is making off EVERY wii sale, they have to sell a couple more games.
Additionally, I do not think most wii owners only have one or two games. There are a lot of people who are "gamers", but aren't hard core enough to pay $600 for a system. There are lots of good games for the Wii, many of which aren't available on other consoles (just wait till smash brothers comes out).
Plus, when taking profits into account, you can't forget about the profit on accessories. How many Wii owners also have at least 2 or 3 wii motes. Those aren't cheap by any means, and likely lead to more profit for Nintendo. Particularly in the short term Nintendo is dominating the field when it comes to profit. I doubt the others have even recouped their development costs.
Phil
You do realize there's a reason drivers are becoming more "closed", it's not that they don't want consumers to tweak their drivers, or that they don't want to be Linux friendly. It's because their drivers are increasingly the companies IP. As the cost of manufacturing custom ASICs has increased tremendously with each new generation of technology, it just isn't practical to build custom ASICs if one exists that does most of what you need it to do. Also when you do make custom ASICs (someone has to) more and more of it is software based, to allow programmers to work around bugs in the hardware (spinning new silicon costs millions more and takes months). This source code is often disclosed under NDAs (it's part of the ASIC, and almost as valuable as the verilog describing the ASIC). This code is then often used in the device drivers (assuming that cost is an issue and the manufacturer chooses to save a dollar or two a card by not integrating flash memory or a ROM on the board).
Now the drivers can't be made completely open due to needing to upload this code to the card. While a driver could be made that's partially open, partially closed, there's really no incentive to. The FOSS community will complain either way, so to the company it seems like a wasted endeavor.
Sure someone could make a better board with flash on board, and sell it for a bit more, but there's very little incentive to. Rabid FOSS fans are not a huge market, and likely never will be.
Phil
I don't blame apple for not supporting ogg/vorbis out of the box. Just because ogg/vorbis is free, does not mean it is free for apple to include. Sure they could include a free implementation with iTunes, but they would still have to worry about patent trolls suing them. You might think that ogg/vorbis isn't patent encumbered, and I don't think anyones tried suing them, but just wait until a big company decides to use it. If some troll thinks they can make millions off it, they will, which is why they haven't gone after the format yet.
From apple's perspective, does it make sense to take this risk? They can license mp3 and aac playback, and the risks are relatively known, and who owns the patents is somewhat well defined. Businesses like known expenses, and don't like risking lawsuits. Especially taking such a risk for a feature that few people want/need, and of those that need it fewer want to use a commercial product like iTunes anyhow.
Phil
My response wasn't clear, I was directly implying in the event of a plane crash what the worst that could happen (see parent post), and the person said the worst would be maybe some radiation leaking out, and I was implying that a crash could be much much worse.
Phil
I think you grossly underestimate the worst that could happen. The WORST that could happen is that someone besides the US government recovers the missile first, and uses it against us. Or, almost as bad, they could use it against one of the US's enemies and start a nuclear war.
I think in the light of some of those possibilities the idea of a nuke exploding due to a plane crash doesn't sound so bad.
Phil
Uh, I'm pretty sure every company that operates in the united states is subject to US law. There really is no way around it. A foreign company can't set up an office in the USA and say they don't owe taxes because they don't have to obey US laws. Additionally if they open up factories they're bounded by EPA regulations etc. I'm pretty sure every country has some minimal requirements for foreign companies operating within their boundaries. It's the reason allofmp3.com claims they operate wholly from within russia, and that the users are leaving their native country when they download the songs, and then importing the songs themselves into the country. That way all the blame can be passed on to the users who have likely broken the law in their native country.
Arguing a company doesn't have to follow laws of a nation it does business in is just stupid. Of course they have to obey the laws, however the laws may or may not have exceptions (i'm not sure in this case).
Phil
Politicians never listened to the stuff you talked about anyhow. Name one politician (at a high federal level) who did, and I would like to call BULLSHIT! Politicians don't do something because it's "rational", or because they think it's the best thing for the nation. They do something because it either helps their approval ratings, or helps themselves, or helps their buddies out. That, or it helps them get funding for their next election. You people who believe that politicians are acting out of reason are true, their reason being to help themselves. Using logical thought to decide a course of action in the best interest of the nation... yeah... right. Your whole car analogy is also way off base. The car company knows better than to do what you say, and WOULD NOT save millions by discontinuing seatbelts. In fact, they'd lose billions when people stop buying their cars. It's the same reason cars have added more airbags than I can name. They're not mandated, but they're a "feature".
If you think a candidate for office's beliefs in evolution really matter, I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in. The most important questions to ask about a candidate are who is he loyal to/owe favors, who has supported him the most, and who is keeping him in power. Are these peoples interests remotely in line with your own? If they are, it's a good thing, if not, are their interests more in your interests than the other guy's interests? And for those candidtates where you don't know their interests... Don't trust them, they're bound to be a loose cannon responsible to absolutely no one.
Phil
Ah yes, and I forgot that all analog equipment has infinite fidelity and can perfectly reproduce all sound.... Oh wait, it can't do this at all! Imperfections in the vinyl cause it to contract and expand, this can change amplitudes and frequencies.
It's all great to knock CDs as an imperfect standard and say that they don't adequately represent live sound. Sure, I don't think anyone pretended they did, just that they make a damn good approximation of it. The sound quality that can be produced by a CD player approaches the limits of what our ANALOG amplifiers and speakers can adequately represent anyhow.
Additionally CDs have the advantage that, when played back on the same stereo, they sound the same today as they did 10 years ago. This alone makes them far superior to analog.
There may be instances where the analog signal sent to the speakers when the source is from vinyl is a more accurate representation of the signal than when the analog signal sent to the speakers is sourced from a CD. However for the vast majority of signals I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the signal coming from the CD player is a more faithful representation of the original input waveform. And if the analog signal is from a record that was ever played, let dust hit it etc etc, the differences will be even greater.
The "audiophiles" buying vinyl today really just need to get their heads out of their asses and stop trying to look cool with their turntables and better than thou attitude.
Besides, the vast majority of the public voted with their wallets. 100% accurate sound representation just isn't important. Portability, ease of playback, quality over time, durability, etc are far more important.
Phil
CS work is very different than other fields. Conferences are held by the major organizations (IEEE and ACM), and most all of them are peer reviewed full papers. Other fields accept papers into a conference based on abstracts and you submit the paper afterward. In computer science/engineering things are very different.
As the field is growing so fast, we can't wait for journals to get the final version of a paper (additionally this would result in too many groups doing the same work simultaneously). Conferences additionally provide a chance for researchers in the same field to meet up and discuss their work. This is extremely valuable to the community as a whole.
After conference papers are accepted, many are later changed into a journal paper, however this is done later, and a "after the fact" thing where the conference paper is augmented with a little bit of additional work (that wouldn't be worthy of a new paper, and wasn't thought about at the time of the original work), and submitted to the journal.
Phil
It may make lesser known publications more well known, and get more citations, but it likely won't make a difference on important publications. The internet in general has made it so that the size of most bibliographies is huge (in my field 20-30 citations in a 10 page paper is common). However, despite increased access, good papers are still the ones most cited. These important works will be cited regardless of how hard it is to find (although these papers can generally be found at any university or company). The whole idea of opening up the scientific community to the rest of the world isn't necessarily a good thing. As it stands I barely have time to answer questions to people in my field doing important work. If you want me to now have to answer to the rest of the world, forget it (not that they'd care as my work, like most research is too specific for them to grasp).
All these open access journals will end up doing is causing more crap to get published. This means there is more stuff to look through when deciding what work is relevant to yours and worth citing.
In honesty the costs of journals and conferences isn't so unreasonable. They have to do a lot of work to publish these things (even if just online). And yes they technically own the copyrights on the papers, but most publishers (at least those from IEEE and ACM) are pretty lax. I am allowed to post my papers online, I just have to put up a disclaimer saying this isn't the official version. And no one is policing my email to see if I'm sending my papers to other people. As things stand there are many things that get published that really shouldn't be (not original work, not good work, or just written too poorly to be acceptable). In particular finding papers that aren't original work (especially if they don't cite the original work) is extremely annoying. This just makes literature search more complicated. Lessening standards and allowing for "open journals" will likely make this worse.
As for the peer reviewers who are unpaid.... Reviewing papers is part of a researchers job (at least in a university). It's expected of people who will be submitting their own papers. However there are many other costs that must be taken into account.
Phil
Your calculations of how much damage a truck does to the road are likely flawed. While this would be true of point masses, the same doesn't hold true with cars. An 8000 lb car with 4 axles won't do 4 times as much damage as a single 4000lb car with 2 axles. Otherwise, 2 cars driving next to each other would do 4 times the damage to the road as a single car. Splitting the load up across multiple axles makes a huge huge difference. Also, the cost of using the road isn't solely wear on the road, but also how much added "congestion" the vehicle adds to the road, and how likely they are to get in accidents. Of course, we can't really factor those things easily into the gas tax.
Phil
Actually, in many respects toll roads are a net loss. The reason the government funds things like roads is that private enterprise can't provide it as efficiently as they can. One of the reasons for this is the tolls. Toll roads require paying more people, as you need people to collect tolls, you need toll booths installed etc. Those cost money, but, one of the biggest costs of them is the hidden one, which is the travelers time. If every driver spends an extra minute at toll booths, twice a day, that gets quite expensive over the course of the year. Figuring hundreds of millions of people losing tens of hours each, at a fairly decent hourly wage, and you're talking about many many billions of dollars.
Phil
Uh, I'm pretty sure the taxes are there to help build the roads that people are driving on. As cars get more enviornmentally friendly, the states will need to start finding new ways to tax them for using their infrastructures. Roads aren't exactly cheap to build you know, and maintaining them isn't cheap either.
Phil
NO! You are assuming that fairness is that the rich pay more than the poor. That is not true! Fairness would state that the person who uses the roads the most would pay the most in taxes. No if ands or buts about it. Personally, I feel that gas taxes are one of the fairest taxes the government imposes, as it's an actual usage tax. If you use the infrastructure more, you pay more in taxes. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
The only thing that makes gas taxes unfair is that they unfairly penalize people who have cars with poor gas mileage. The tax would more accurately go against the weight of the car and the number of miles driven, as those two factors have more to do with how much wear and tear you cause on the states infrastructure.
As far as taxes on vehicles go, it makes sense to tax them the same, at least if the tax is earmarked to pay for the states roads. If anything, it's more likely that a car that costs $50k causes less damage to the roads than the old clunker that cost $500. I kind of wish gas taxes were higher. I imagine for something like gas with supply constrained at a relatively constant amount at any given time, the impact of the tax would hit the oil companies more than it would hit the average consumers. It would slightly reduce the available supply, but that's also not necessarily bad. This story is just garbage. The guy was evading taxes (even if he didn't realize it), and must pay the price. End of story.
Phil
This isn't really true. A pentium 66 could rarely outperform a 486 120MHz. Technically the pentium had 2 pipelines and could do 2 operation per cycle. The pipelines were similar to the 486s, a u and v one if i remember correctly, and one was crippled only able to execute certain instructions. What was it's real ipc though? That's what matters, not some theoretical max. Someone could design a processor that could execute 16 instructions per cycle (current do 4 or so), and it might execute 30 or 40% (yes percent) faster than current machines (try it in simplescalar or your simulator of choice). It would also use up 4-8x more area than current machines (cpu core size, not counting caches).
Phil
Yes, there have been an explosion in the number of clusters etc. However these generally are running HPC applications. Many are applications that are either embarrasingly parallel, or were written tens of years ago. Many newer HPC apps also share common code bases, or use a single algorithm that was written by highly experienced coder.
Translating general purpose applications is a lot more difficult. There is much ongoing research into the area, but little results. Mostly people have been focussing on solutions that address small portions of the problem (transactional memory), or are simply looking into designing more novel computer architectures. The problem is that the Von Neuman architecture is what everyone knows, and what comes natual. Until someone comes up with an archticture model that is as simple as this for parallel programming, it will be quite difficult for programmers to take advantage of them. The model is just unknown, and the results of programs have too much indeterminance.
Phil
Since when were embedded systems a "niche" field. Unless you want to call the windows world a niche field as well. There are far more embedded systems out there than there are windows PCs. In fact the vast majority of computers are embedded systems. They don't get the glory of a lot of the higher performance systems, but they are extremely common.
In the IT world C may not be useful. But IT isn't about skilled coders as much as it is about finding monkeys to write bundles of code using an alpahabet soup of "tools". A good C programmer is too valuable to work in an IT field. Good C programmers understand the basics of computer architecture, and are extremely familiar with pointers etc. Being a basic "competent" C programmer won't really get you anywhere, it's just a tool that people who know what they're doing can use.
Phil
Uh no, you're actually quite wrong on that one. What you say is true in the case where a company has no competition selling the same goods, and alternative goods do not exist. This is not the case in retail stores. Grocery store A can't maximize the price of it's milk, because in doing so he might drive customers away from the store, causing a net loss. Likewise the same holds true for Grocery store B, and all grocery stores in the area. If crime is added into the area, and effects all stores in the area equally, then the price of goods at all stores in the area will have to go up, or the stores that aren't raising their prices might go out of business.
The cost will get passed on to consumers. We almost never see "cheap" products being sold at a cost of way more than their cost of manufacture. There are exceptions in the entertainment industry where a "near monopoly" exists, in that no one else can make the same product, but similar ones exist. The cost of theft is considered in the marginal cost of many goods. This in turn sets how much companies are willing to charge for it. Theft is similar to the retail overhead costs associated with products.
And prior history has shown that when the retail overhead of a product decreases, its cost will decrease. Just look at what Walmart and the big name grocery stores have done. They do things more efficiently and reduce prices, and in the event drive out less competitive retail businesses. If Walmart could cut their theft by a significant margin, they'd have an even greater advantage over their competitors. In such a case prices could fall even further.
Claiming theft doesn't impact the price of a good is almost as naive as claiming that the cost of oil doesn't effect the cost of gasoline.
Phil