If everyone's hard drives (and net connections) are getting huge, there's no disincentive to increasing the size of everything. If, on the other hand, a significant percentage of your potential customer base are running netbooks (just take a look at how many Eee PCs were sold this year), then there's a significant incentive to making your stuff small enough that you don't cut them out of your potential market. So I think there will be some trend towards caring about storage efficiency, for mass-market end-user-targeted stuff at least.
In the next decade, a number of extremely profitable back catalogues of 1960s UK music groups would be going out of copyright without an extension: at least the early works of the Beatles, Cliff Richard, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, The Kinks, The Who, etc.
The article is all over the map, discussing in vague terms everything from boot-up speed to I/O speed to some sort of generic "runs a little faster" that I assume (?) means overall system or app benchmark performance.
When actual numbers are quoted, they sound somewhere between questionable and boring. The article quotes all sorts of differences in the range of 1% and 2%. Leaving aside the question of what this is a 2% difference in, and whether a difference that small is even consistently measurable outside of sampling error and quirks of their particular setup, does it actually matter? I'm certainly not going to choose an OS based on a 2% difference in SSD performance.
Finally! We usually have to get someone sentenced on trumped-up charges to get our weekly execution, because nobody ever responds to the call for volunteers.
I have many relatives in southern Europe, who are somewhat surprised by our high standards of living when it comes to materialism, which seem vaguely wasteful to them. Things like running A/C at 72 when you live in a climate that's typically 90s in the summer, living in homes that are on average 2350 square feet (all of which has to be air-conditions or heated, of course), driving inefficient cars, owning strangely large numbers of gigantic televisions, etc.
When it comes to the things you mentioned, though, they're actually ahead. They work fewer hours on average than Americans, get better health care, much more vacation, more stringently policed working conditions, etc.
A lot of the money ends up going to other countries, including China, via materials. China produces approximately 35% of the world's steel, for example; the U.S. produces around 7%. Fixtures? Windows? Siding? Tiles? All mostly made abroad. Even elevators, a sort of high-end specialty thing, are imported from Germany more often than they're made in the U.S.
The Supreme Court overturned the former ban on retail price ceilings a decade before they overturned the one on retail price floors. See State Oil v. Khan (1997), which held that a gasoline distributor could put a cap on the retail price the gasoline stations could resell it for.
The case that went to the Supreme Court actually didn't involve a suit against unauthorized distributors at all: the manufacturer simply cut off the retailer from further shipments after they started offering discounts, and the retailer sued the manufacturer over that, alleging an antitrust violation.
Property taxes tend to be regressive when look at on income terms, because someone making $1m doesn't on average own a 10x as expensive house as someone making $100k.
You're correct legally, but NetEnforcers et al seem to be demanding that eBay take down all sales of new products below the minimum price, assuming that these must be prohibited first-sales.
Some of this was tried in the Haskell community, with relatively unimpressive results---a lot of algorithms are mostly sequential, even in a parallel language, and the speedups, especially after futures/whatever overhead, aren't amazing, especially past 2 cores or so.
That's my understanding of why most current research is on adding primitives that let the programmer specify parallel algorithms at the source level, such as Parallel Haskell's par and seq primitives.
Basically the automatic reordering the compiler can do doesn't really suffice, at least with any method anyone's figured out so far; to get anything close to a 64x speedup with 64 cores, you really do need the programmer to write parallel algorithms explicitly.
I agree the original caption should be retained for historical purposes, but Wikimedia Commons images also have captions, which are intended to be neutral and descriptive. So one of those should be written as well, if the original caption doesn't fit those criteria.
Some of the captions are in need of being rewritten into a reasonable form even in German, especially older ones that are either out of date or hilariously biased. The worst are probably those that were apparently entered during World War II and never updated.
For example, this one (which has in fact been updated), originally came with a caption that reads roughly:
Poland, Jew ordered to perform hard labor
For the first time they can make themselves useful. These Polish Kaftan-Jews (?), whose activity so far has only consisted of working against the volk-conscious German nation in the most detestable and conniving manner, receive the opportunity on the eastern front to make themselves really useful for the first time in their lives. Here they can be seen ready to embark on their work orders.
I can't say if it was a decisive factor in this particular image donation, but that's one of the arguments free-content proponents have been using to try to get other governments to open up at least some portion of their images: pointing out that since there is this large public-domain repository of US government images, if they want to promote their history and culture on par with that of the US, they need to provide us with a similarly high-quality, free-licensed collection of images.
Otherwise a large portion of generic examples are going to be US-based ones, simply because they gave us the images whereas other countries didn't.
Sometimes it leads to almost comical results, where dozens of other countries' leaders, ministers, and other figures are illustrated on Wikipedia by a photograph of them shaking hands with Reagan or Carter or Kissinger or whoever, because that US-visit photograph was freely released by the US State Department, while their photographs from back home are under a more restrictive copyright.
Auto-parallelization of functional programs has been proposed for decades now, and every attempt has fallen on its face as the overhead has killed any gains. Current parallel FP research isn't even putting that much effort into auto-parallelization, because most PLs researchers consider it a dead end---taking a random FP and evaluating all its thunks in parallel as futures, or some similar mechanism, is not going to solve the problem.
Instead, most of the current research is in programmer-level primitives for designing and specifying inherently parallel algorithms. There is some of this in both the FP and non-FP communities.
One problem is that there are relatively frequent types of disk-access patterns where caching them gives little to no benefit in return for the paging out of RAM it requires. A virus scan (touching most of your files exactly once) is one canonical example. Media playback (touching a few large files in sequential block reads) is another.
The difficult question is how to exclude these kinds of wasted caching while still retaining the benefits of caching frequently accessed files, and not introducing excessive overhead in the process.
I'd assume what he's asking is: in modern systems where the amount of physical RAM is considerably larger than what most people's programs in total use, why does the OS ever swap RAM out to disk?
The answer is basically to free up RAM for disk cache, based on a belief (sometimes backed up by benchmarks) that for typical use patterns, the performance hit of sometimes having to swap RAM back into physical memory is outweighed by the performance gain of a large disk cache.
Of course, OS designers are always revisiting these assumptions---it may be that for some kinds of use patterns using a smaller disk cache and swapping RAM out to disk less leads to better performance, or at least better responsiveness (if that's the goal).
Having someone pay for you to exercise your constitutional rights is not itself a constitutional right.
It's a constitutional right to rip up Bibles in your spare time to exercise your first-amendment right to demonstrate an antipathy to Christianity, but Medicare is not going to pay for a specialized Bible-ripper if you're too infirm to rip them properly yourself.
It's getting increasingly common for companies and especially universities to object to vendor lock-in for some of the data formats, even if they don't care about the openness of the source. It can *store* its data in a proprietary format, but if it can't at least export to some sort of interoperable format, that can raise objections.
My own (large) university is in the midst of a huge mess trying to migrate off of Exchange, and is not likely to make the same mistake in the near future. The new integrated email/calendaring/webmail solution replacing Exchange (just about done being rolled out) is actually open source as it turns out, Zimbra, though that wasn't a large factor in the decision.
Universities have historically existed for a combination of research and intellectual (not career-oriented) education. Places like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, University of Paris, etc., were all founded as centers of scholarship, primarily to support professors doing research, and students learning from them as something like an apprenticeship (so they could someday be researchers as well).
A vocational-training model in which students attend post-secondary education to gain skills useful in career employment is much more recent, and most top universities have not really switched to it, except sometimes in their advertising materials when needed to mollify parents. In short, research universities were not founded, and are not currently judged, on their education, but rather on their research output. The fact that students can also attend them is sort of secondary, often pretty openly so, as the students take many classes from a parallel system of lecturers, not from the top researchers.
Many university IP contracts specifically allow researchers to release their software under free-software licenses. If his does, and if that were his intent, then it wouldn't be necessary to resolve the question of whether they can claim any rights, since the free-software license would be valid either way.
If, on the other hand, his intent is to make a proprietary commercial software product out of it, and avoid them getting a cut of the royalties, then he would be more interested in the specifics of IP ownership.
My impression was that AMD's lead over Intel only really lasted until the introduction of the Core architecture around 2006. Some of AMD's offerings were arguably competitive with the Core, but it seemed to start taking back market share, whereas before that AMD was generally always the chip of choice on a price/performance basis.
AMD was kicking Intel's ass only during the time period where Intel was making what turned out to be a losing gamble on the end of x86, putting most of their resources into Itanium instead. They ran their x86 line during that period largely on autopilot, which AMD took advantage of to catch up and surpass Intel in the x86 space, betting (correctly) that x86 would remain the platform of choice, and Itanium would go nowhere.
When Intel eventually realized this was the case, and shifted most of their R&D back to x86, the result was the Core architecture, and we were back to the usual scenario of Intel dominating the market.
Basically I don't think AMD has the resources to take on Intel head-on, unless Intel is putting a significant proportion of their resources elsewhere, as was the case in the Itanium years.
AMD didn't really destroy Itanium and then rest on their laurels. Although you have to give them some credit for coming up with reasonably good chips that the market wanted, it was more that Itanium was the reason AMD was competitive with Intel in the x86 space for a few years in the first place.
Intel has orders of magnitude more R&D budget and especially capital for fab construction than AMD does. So AMD is perpetually at least a half-generation behind Intel on the tech curve: they keep coming up with chips that could beat Intel... if they had come out a year ago. Now when Intel effectively skips a generation, as they did when they sunk all their resources into Itanium and mostly ignored x86 for a year or two, this is enough to give AMD the lead. But once Intel shifted fully back into x86, they crushed AMD again.
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone's hard drives (and net connections) are getting huge, there's no disincentive to increasing the size of everything. If, on the other hand, a significant percentage of your potential customer base are running netbooks (just take a look at how many Eee PCs were sold this year), then there's a significant incentive to making your stuff small enough that you don't cut them out of your potential market. So I think there will be some trend towards caring about storage efficiency, for mass-market end-user-targeted stuff at least.
In the next decade, a number of extremely profitable back catalogues of 1960s UK music groups would be going out of copyright without an extension: at least the early works of the Beatles, Cliff Richard, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, The Kinks, The Who, etc.
The article is all over the map, discussing in vague terms everything from boot-up speed to I/O speed to some sort of generic "runs a little faster" that I assume (?) means overall system or app benchmark performance.
When actual numbers are quoted, they sound somewhere between questionable and boring. The article quotes all sorts of differences in the range of 1% and 2%. Leaving aside the question of what this is a 2% difference in, and whether a difference that small is even consistently measurable outside of sampling error and quirks of their particular setup, does it actually matter? I'm certainly not going to choose an OS based on a 2% difference in SSD performance.
Finally! We usually have to get someone sentenced on trumped-up charges to get our weekly execution, because nobody ever responds to the call for volunteers.
I have many relatives in southern Europe, who are somewhat surprised by our high standards of living when it comes to materialism, which seem vaguely wasteful to them. Things like running A/C at 72 when you live in a climate that's typically 90s in the summer, living in homes that are on average 2350 square feet (all of which has to be air-conditions or heated, of course), driving inefficient cars, owning strangely large numbers of gigantic televisions, etc.
When it comes to the things you mentioned, though, they're actually ahead. They work fewer hours on average than Americans, get better health care, much more vacation, more stringently policed working conditions, etc.
A lot of the money ends up going to other countries, including China, via materials. China produces approximately 35% of the world's steel, for example; the U.S. produces around 7%. Fixtures? Windows? Siding? Tiles? All mostly made abroad. Even elevators, a sort of high-end specialty thing, are imported from Germany more often than they're made in the U.S.
The Supreme Court overturned the former ban on retail price ceilings a decade before they overturned the one on retail price floors. See State Oil v. Khan (1997), which held that a gasoline distributor could put a cap on the retail price the gasoline stations could resell it for.
The case that went to the Supreme Court actually didn't involve a suit against unauthorized distributors at all: the manufacturer simply cut off the retailer from further shipments after they started offering discounts, and the retailer sued the manufacturer over that, alleging an antitrust violation.
Property taxes tend to be regressive when look at on income terms, because someone making $1m doesn't on average own a 10x as expensive house as someone making $100k.
You're correct legally, but NetEnforcers et al seem to be demanding that eBay take down all sales of new products below the minimum price, assuming that these must be prohibited first-sales.
Some of this was tried in the Haskell community, with relatively unimpressive results---a lot of algorithms are mostly sequential, even in a parallel language, and the speedups, especially after futures/whatever overhead, aren't amazing, especially past 2 cores or so.
That's my understanding of why most current research is on adding primitives that let the programmer specify parallel algorithms at the source level, such as Parallel Haskell's par and seq primitives.
Basically the automatic reordering the compiler can do doesn't really suffice, at least with any method anyone's figured out so far; to get anything close to a 64x speedup with 64 cores, you really do need the programmer to write parallel algorithms explicitly.
I agree the original caption should be retained for historical purposes, but Wikimedia Commons images also have captions, which are intended to be neutral and descriptive. So one of those should be written as well, if the original caption doesn't fit those criteria.
Some of the captions are in need of being rewritten into a reasonable form even in German, especially older ones that are either out of date or hilariously biased. The worst are probably those that were apparently entered during World War II and never updated.
For example, this one (which has in fact been updated), originally came with a caption that reads roughly:
I can't say if it was a decisive factor in this particular image donation, but that's one of the arguments free-content proponents have been using to try to get other governments to open up at least some portion of their images: pointing out that since there is this large public-domain repository of US government images, if they want to promote their history and culture on par with that of the US, they need to provide us with a similarly high-quality, free-licensed collection of images.
Otherwise a large portion of generic examples are going to be US-based ones, simply because they gave us the images whereas other countries didn't.
Sometimes it leads to almost comical results, where dozens of other countries' leaders, ministers, and other figures are illustrated on Wikipedia by a photograph of them shaking hands with Reagan or Carter or Kissinger or whoever, because that US-visit photograph was freely released by the US State Department, while their photographs from back home are under a more restrictive copyright.
Auto-parallelization of functional programs has been proposed for decades now, and every attempt has fallen on its face as the overhead has killed any gains. Current parallel FP research isn't even putting that much effort into auto-parallelization, because most PLs researchers consider it a dead end---taking a random FP and evaluating all its thunks in parallel as futures, or some similar mechanism, is not going to solve the problem.
Instead, most of the current research is in programmer-level primitives for designing and specifying inherently parallel algorithms. There is some of this in both the FP and non-FP communities.
One problem is that there are relatively frequent types of disk-access patterns where caching them gives little to no benefit in return for the paging out of RAM it requires. A virus scan (touching most of your files exactly once) is one canonical example. Media playback (touching a few large files in sequential block reads) is another.
The difficult question is how to exclude these kinds of wasted caching while still retaining the benefits of caching frequently accessed files, and not introducing excessive overhead in the process.
I'd assume what he's asking is: in modern systems where the amount of physical RAM is considerably larger than what most people's programs in total use, why does the OS ever swap RAM out to disk?
The answer is basically to free up RAM for disk cache, based on a belief (sometimes backed up by benchmarks) that for typical use patterns, the performance hit of sometimes having to swap RAM back into physical memory is outweighed by the performance gain of a large disk cache.
Of course, OS designers are always revisiting these assumptions---it may be that for some kinds of use patterns using a smaller disk cache and swapping RAM out to disk less leads to better performance, or at least better responsiveness (if that's the goal).
Having someone pay for you to exercise your constitutional rights is not itself a constitutional right.
It's a constitutional right to rip up Bibles in your spare time to exercise your first-amendment right to demonstrate an antipathy to Christianity, but Medicare is not going to pay for a specialized Bible-ripper if you're too infirm to rip them properly yourself.
It's getting increasingly common for companies and especially universities to object to vendor lock-in for some of the data formats, even if they don't care about the openness of the source. It can *store* its data in a proprietary format, but if it can't at least export to some sort of interoperable format, that can raise objections.
My own (large) university is in the midst of a huge mess trying to migrate off of Exchange, and is not likely to make the same mistake in the near future. The new integrated email/calendaring/webmail solution replacing Exchange (just about done being rolled out) is actually open source as it turns out, Zimbra, though that wasn't a large factor in the decision.
Gold: ~$750 per troy ounce
Silver: ~$10 per troy ounce
Nickel: ~$0.30 per troy ounce
Copper: ~$0.10 per troy ounce
Lead: ~$0.03 per troy ounce
Universities have historically existed for a combination of research and intellectual (not career-oriented) education. Places like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, University of Paris, etc., were all founded as centers of scholarship, primarily to support professors doing research, and students learning from them as something like an apprenticeship (so they could someday be researchers as well).
A vocational-training model in which students attend post-secondary education to gain skills useful in career employment is much more recent, and most top universities have not really switched to it, except sometimes in their advertising materials when needed to mollify parents. In short, research universities were not founded, and are not currently judged, on their education, but rather on their research output. The fact that students can also attend them is sort of secondary, often pretty openly so, as the students take many classes from a parallel system of lecturers, not from the top researchers.
Many university IP contracts specifically allow researchers to release their software under free-software licenses. If his does, and if that were his intent, then it wouldn't be necessary to resolve the question of whether they can claim any rights, since the free-software license would be valid either way.
If, on the other hand, his intent is to make a proprietary commercial software product out of it, and avoid them getting a cut of the royalties, then he would be more interested in the specifics of IP ownership.
My impression was that AMD's lead over Intel only really lasted until the introduction of the Core architecture around 2006. Some of AMD's offerings were arguably competitive with the Core, but it seemed to start taking back market share, whereas before that AMD was generally always the chip of choice on a price/performance basis.
AMD was kicking Intel's ass only during the time period where Intel was making what turned out to be a losing gamble on the end of x86, putting most of their resources into Itanium instead. They ran their x86 line during that period largely on autopilot, which AMD took advantage of to catch up and surpass Intel in the x86 space, betting (correctly) that x86 would remain the platform of choice, and Itanium would go nowhere.
When Intel eventually realized this was the case, and shifted most of their R&D back to x86, the result was the Core architecture, and we were back to the usual scenario of Intel dominating the market.
Basically I don't think AMD has the resources to take on Intel head-on, unless Intel is putting a significant proportion of their resources elsewhere, as was the case in the Itanium years.
AMD didn't really destroy Itanium and then rest on their laurels. Although you have to give them some credit for coming up with reasonably good chips that the market wanted, it was more that Itanium was the reason AMD was competitive with Intel in the x86 space for a few years in the first place.
Intel has orders of magnitude more R&D budget and especially capital for fab construction than AMD does. So AMD is perpetually at least a half-generation behind Intel on the tech curve: they keep coming up with chips that could beat Intel... if they had come out a year ago. Now when Intel effectively skips a generation, as they did when they sunk all their resources into Itanium and mostly ignored x86 for a year or two, this is enough to give AMD the lead. But once Intel shifted fully back into x86, they crushed AMD again.