Improvements are good.
on
Revising the GPL
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's why Version 2 says you can distribute under any later version of the GPL.
That was a good article, but as always the "viral" thing is nonsense. I can understand them bringing it up, but why do they always say "raising the specter that the inadvertent or surreptitious inclusion of GPL code in a proprietary product would require the release of all source code under the GPL" without adding the obvious "OR stop using and distributing the GPL code"? Oh well. Maybe clarifying this aspect is also something that Version 3 can do.
It sounds like clarification is mostly what the GPL needs. It's not so hard to understand now, as long as you aren't afraid of it, but certainly things like what "derivative works" means could be made more clear.
The patent issue surely could use more clarity. I'm not sure I like the idea of a mutual-defense patent clause. That might be scary for a corporation simply because there is so much free software that they are using. If they had a patent issue with GIMP to pick a random example, would they have to stop using Linux? Probably shouldn't deploy Linux then...
Certainly making it explicit that releasing code under the GPL that may be protected by one of your patents is also a grant to use the patent is a good, necessary change. Software patents are bad enough (may they die, and soon); we definitely don't want people to be able to directly sabotage free software by putting their own patented ideas into it and then attacking.
Anyway, life goes on, the GPL continues, and the inevitable victory of freedom (in software) gets another day closer.
I couldn't agree more. However, if you need a break from your ranting, you could consider one positive (probably unintended) side-effect of the 'Evil Empire': Their development of a hugely successful, industry standard OS, based entirely on cheap commodity hardware, has given us powerful personal computers for as little as $350 dollars.
That has nothing to do with Microsoft. That has to do with the IBM PC and the successful reverse engineering of the BIOS which allowed the clone market to explode. Microsoft did nothing but ride the wave. If it had been DRDOS or QDOS or CMS or whatever that IBM picked instead, you might be claiming that they were the ones responsible for giving us the $350 PC, but you'd still be wrong. It was the commoditization of hardware that resulted in the PC revolution. If you want to know who to thank for your cheap PC, thank IBM, Phoenix, and the copyright laws of the day.
Can you imagine how different the world would be if they had gone the route of Apple and many other manufacturers, of locking their software to expensive, proprietry hardware? Maybe now, our only choice would be 'Microsoft PCs', at $5000 a pop with $1 charges every time you booted the thing.
They'd have loved to do that, but didn't really have the option, now did they? Their OS was used on the IBM PC and clones, and that is the reason why everyone uses MS. If MS had wanted to be the hardware company as well they could have tried, but they'd be niche players just like Apple, only less successful because their product -- particularly prior to Win95 -- wasn't nearly as good. Nobody thought MS-DOS or even Windows3.1 was great, it was just the thing that came on an IBM PC.
The fastest way for MS to lose their monopoly would be for them to ditch the commodity hardware that makes them cheaper and try to lock people into $5k machines. As it is, they're perfectly happy being the most expensive component of your average PC, and using their muscle to control where the commodity hardware market goes.
If it wasn't for business users, I have little doubt that MS Office would be a subscription based 'service' by now, costing $15-20 dollars per month to use.
Oh, I agree with that completely. That's pretty much what they tried to do with Licensing 6.0, but businesses gave MS the finger quite readily on that one. I'm surprised they haven't tried it in the consumer market, and the fact that they haven't indicates to me that for a reason that I can't think of right now it wouldn't work at all.
Yeah, their mice, keyboards, joysticks and gamepads are all rather nice (though I prefer Logitech for mice). I've always found it ironic and hilarious that MS insists they aren't a hardware company when that's the only thing they make that's worth using.:)
Why is it that nobody ever thinks it is possible to have a biased, negative opinion of something for a reason? Why is it that people assume that the bias came first, and apparently from nowhere?
Yes, I have a negative view of Microsoft. How did I get it? By using their software, and paying attention to their business practices! It's not like I woke up one day from a troubled sleep and cried "Microsoft is teh suck! From now on I will believe this truth without paying attention to what they do!" Um, no. I payed attention to what they do, and thus I think they are 'teh suck'. I couldn't stand Microsoft well before Linux was even on my radar.
Oh, and if you think it all goes back to MS stealing Mac's code and nothing else, you haven't been paying attention yourself. It's funny how often people who don't understand someone else's bias also don't understand the history that produced that bias. "Gee, why is everyone so down on facism, you're just biased. Huh? What's World War II?"
Yeah, I just didn't think you were going far enough to destroy civilization in the name of fighting terrorism.;)
Truly, honestly, the only way to defeat these terrorists is not to combat them directly, (I am not saying we should cease efforts to stop them) but to combat them indirectly by taking away their power. We need to fight global ignorance, we need to teach acceptance of one another's differences, we need to learn how to respect one another, from the heads of every nation to the most downtrodden of people on this planet.
Absolutely, but there's more to it than that as well. Tolerance and respect are of course necessary for peace, but it isn't like terrorism is born solely out of lack of respect for other's beliefs. Whether we're talking about England/Ireland, Israel/Palestine or Yugoslavia, there are some real issues that create these conflicts and need to be sorted out. Tolerance and respect are just what will allow the healing to occur and peace to become lasting.
If the whole problem is terrorists meeting in metaphorical dark alleys on the internet, what about them meeting in actual dark alleys in real life?
We must eliminate all alleys, entryways, nooks, corridors, subways, booths, cul de sacs, and anywhere else two terrorists might converse without being observed! In fact, we should eliminate all private residences -- nay, all buildings! -- lest terrorists hide in or behind them and discuss their nefarious plans. And forests! Where better to have a conspiratorial chat than deep in the traitorous woods, obscured from the eye of Justice by terrorist-loving trees?
Burn the cities and forests! It's the only way to stop the terrorists! Because nothing is more important than stopping terrorists.
That's a feature, because it discourages Source Safe usage. Source Safe is so bad Microsoft won't use it. Since the SS integration also sucks (which it does), that leaves no excuse not to just use a separate CVS GUI client or some other non-shit version control.
Case in point, I logged out to see if that was still the case, and accidentally posted AC. If you don't know what I'm talking about, try lowering your threshold and see what you're missing.
I imagine they don't mention that in the NYT article. "And as an added bonus, those who are sick of our insipid online registration can simply install the BugMeNot extension that uses common usernames/passwords to bypass registration forms. Truly the free software community provides what the people want."
Well if democracy costs $2.6 million, how much for a quasi-constitutional theocracy?
I've lost count, but so far I think the tab is over $200 billion.
No, I don't think I can do anything more on-topic than a smarmy Iraq joke. I can't formulate words about this right now... it just pisses me off too much.
Of no value? Sounds to me like it has a value of $26,500 USD.
Oh, so you'd pay $26,500 for a virtual island if you had the jack? *snicker*
The only one it is proven to have a value of $26,500 to is the company that sold it. "Deathifier" thinks it's worth more than that (that's why he was willing to pay what he did, comprende?), but that's purely hypothetical at this point, isn't it? Funny how the only ones claiming it is resellable for $30k are the ones who auctioned it in the first place.
Or do you mean some kind of ambiguous ethical or moral value?
I mean "utility". Money has utility (because it can be traded for other useful things) but utility isn't money.
Me, I call something valuable when someone else is willing to pay for it. This has certain conveniences, such as being able to attribute real numbers to its value. You know, numbers like "$26,500."
Ah, the wonderful circular definition of money = value = money. Let me illustrate why this is retarded: If everyone grew enough food for themselves, no one would be willing to pay for food (staples, anyway), and by your definition then food would have no value. Before our water supplies became polluted you could get water just about anywhere and nobody would think to pay for it, therefore water has no value. Air has no value; who would pay for air?! Must I go on?
Yes it is convenient to use money to estimate value but that doesn't make them the same.
The only thing protecting the value of that investment is the hope that the people running the company don't let it go out of business. Kind of like investing in an imaginary island hoping that the people running that company don't go ahead and devalue it.
Right! And when I fly in a plane I'm hoping it doesn't crash, and when I ride a unicycle blindfolded down the wrong way of the highway I'm hoping nobody hits me. These things are obviously the same since they involve some kind of risk, and since the first isn't stupid neither is the second! Care to hop on my unicycle?
The owners of a company have a strong incentive not to run it into the ground. The makers of this MMOG have what incentive not to devalue his island? They've already sold it to him; if it became worthless tomorrow they'd still have his $26K and their MMOG (and as many more islands as they want).
I'm sure your brilliant insight into the realities of the situaion will change the practices of the stock market.
My insight won't affect the stock market at all. You're trying to say the existence of risk makes stocks the same as islands, and if that's true then surely all stocks are the same, and it doesn't matter what stock you buy. IBM or Pets.com, what's the difference since both involve risk? Clearly wall street disagrees. I have no worries in their ability to distinguish.
Try this on for size: what's the difference between owning a virtual island and owning a copyright? They're both insubstantial, and both count on someone else not giving away the good for nothing to maintain value. Yet we seem to have an awful lot of very intelligent people investing in copyrights. Again, you should probably explain to them how things really work. It would save them a lot of money.
The difference is that if you own a copyright, you decide if it gets given away or not. If you own a virtual island, you have no control over the sale of other, even identical islands. Simple, isn't it? Then why can't you understand it?
You're entirely backwards. In this case Entropia is the copyright holder and Deathifier merely purchased a copy. This is like paying $10,000 for a copy of Britney Spears. That'd be pretty silly!
Hang on a second, let me parse this. It's not stupid because it counts on someone else buying it. It's stupid because...wait, you don't really give a reason, do you?
Actually, I have. But there's no reason to go over it a
Of course they did, because the only people who gave a crap about Alpha at this point were lockedin VMS customers.
Um... right, because it wasn't marketed well. Duh. Just like the PA-RISC customers were the only ones who cared about PA-RISC, and who are now locked onto Itanium. They moved with HP, and HP could have moved them onto Alpha. Now they're simply screwed.
Alpha just did not sell. period. end of story.
Always the statement of someone who wishes the story ended there. You can't ignore the dynamics of who owned the chip and what they did with it and just say it was Alpha that was unsellable.
All they wanted was to stop spending tens of billions on proprietary CPU designs and buy something off the shelf instead.
Where "off the shelf" means "manufactured by Intel". Right. My whole point is that for the things HP and Intel wanted to do Alpha would have been a much better choice than Itanium. Erm... okay, Intel wanted to leave IA-32 to an instruction set nobody else had rights to, and I'm not sure Alpha would fit that bill. But that was an evil goal, so let's pretend it doesn't matter one way or the other.:)
"Benchmarks blah blah blah" whatever. You can't deny that even standing on the gallows with the noose around its neck, Alpha solutions were beating Itanium solutions because HP's own benchmarks showed it. You can't deny that the whole first generation of Itanium parts were performance writeoffs because Intel themselves said so. To this day they have mediocre integer performance which is what most server/enterprise solutions care about. Their main way around this has been to throw tons of cache at the problem which is fine but works for any chip. You don't think lackluster performance out of the gate hindered adoption of the brand-new shave-the-world Itanium? Pshaw.
Though in hindsight it is obvious that the best solution was x86 with 64 bit extensions. I don't think IA-64 (meaning Intel Alpha) would have changed that value proposition. But with a decent 64-bit part Intel may have been able to grab more marketshare before AMD came out with K8.
Well that cache miss comment is about the most false statement I've seen in a long time.
Woops! Right, that's a big gaff. I should have said that the problem is finding the misses, in part due to the stall-on-dependency (of course, it's in-order) and also loads bypassing stores with uncomputed addresses. I.e. you'd like to move your load as far forward in the execution stream as possible so you find the miss sooner, but you can't move it in front of a store because it might conflict. I have no excuse; I just recently talked with someone researching ways around this problem (and I may still be misrepresenting it). Oddly their funding (from HP) was canceled.:)
Unless of course you hit in the 1-cycle L0d cache
Of course because that's not a miss.:)
In-order execution certainly puts more burden on compilers, but it frees up a ton of area for registers, functional units, and cache.
Eh, in theory. First, area clearly isn't a big issue with Intel and Itanium.;) Registers aren't really that big a deal, either. Most compilers don't use all of the 32 most RISC cpus have, which is only the logical registers not the physical (of which there are many more, on par with the EPIC machines). Sure, the 8-ish of IA-32 is woefully inadequate, but that doesn't mean you needs gobs of them.
And functional units aren't a big deal at all, because neither the compilers nor OoO schedulers are able to find enough ILP to use them. They're mostly idle anyway and adding more is just wasting area. The exception is highly parallelizable FP code, but the solution there is to add vector units (which gives you more bang per unit of fetch bandwidth than non-vector in-order scheduling).
As to cache, look at any server part. On Itanium, Xeon MP, and even to a lesser extent Opteron with only 1MB of L2, the die size is dominated by the cache. Getting rid of schedulers and reorder buffers isn't going to allow them to add a significant amount of L2/L3 cache. The size of the L1 cache is a tradeoff between miss rate and access time, not miss rate and area.
Fundamentally, when you're willing to make chips that are 600mm^2, the area benefits of in-order don't really buy you much.:)
The real benefit, as I understand, of in-order was supposed to be complexity. Remembering Merced, I'm not sure that ever panned out either.
Regardless, this is all a case of reality trumping theory. The original plan for Willamette (P4) had a 32K L1 cache running on the same (double pumped) clock as the ALUs, but strangely it couldn't work at that speed. If K8 had come out when it was originally planned at the speeds planned, we'd already be singing the eulogies for Itanium and Xeon. Also, if I'd have just been bitten by that radioactive lemur I'd be out fighting crime from the treetops instead of working a day job and posting on/.
Alpha wasn't a proven market failure. DEC was a proven failure at marketing Alpha.
HP deliberately carried on the tradition of poorly marketing the Alpha, because they were tied to Itanium. Yet still their Alpha solutions outperformed their Itanium solutions. If HP had been as dedicated to Alpha as they were to Itanium, then Alpha may have been a success. If Intel, who grabbed all the Alpha engineers, had joined with HP to promote Alpha as the 64-bit platform of the future, along with a commitment by Microsoft to support it (part of what hurt Alpha) then it would have had a much better chance of success.
Alpha solutions with the marketing muscle of Itanium and the performance of, well, Alpha. Don't tell me that doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
Itanium's main problem was that it was a CPU designed by compiler people. That it took several years for the compilers -- the thing that actually gets you the performance on Itanium -- to become decent was a big sign. The biggest sign to me, the one that told me Itanium was doomed, was the ISCA(?) paper by Intel that concluded that predicated execution for branch resolution -- one of the touted great ideas of the architecture -- wasn't worth much except in carefully hand-tuned code. Since the upside turned out not to be there, the downsides of in-order-execution (e.g. not being able to service more than one cache miss at a time) dominated. Since then, Itanium has been holding out by having big caches. That's not a long-term solution, though, since you can put big caches on any CPU as long as you can afford it -- see recent Xeon MPs.
The funny thing is that Intel will simply double-think their way out of any embarassent, claiming that Itanium was always meant to only go in an ever-shrinking market segment until nobody remembers how they were promised the world and got a small pail of dirt instead. Besides, they still have mounds of cash and their IA-32 with NotAMD64 extensions. No, the real ones who are going to suffer are HP who killed off two good CPU lines and as a result are getting beaten up by IBM with the occasional sucker punch by Sun.
And yes, that is entirely Carly's fault. If I was an HP employee, I'd be screaming for her head (for other reasons too, beyond the scope of this article).
That same argument could be used to prove that America has colonized Germany.
No, because that isn't the whole argument.
America is not imperialistic -- it's only interested in self-defense. There is a difference.
How was invading Iraq self-defensive? I mean truly, not what we were duped into believing initially.
If we were imperialistic, the oil fields of Iraq would be pumping out America's New Source of Free Oil.
Never Free. Oil from Texas isn't free, you know. But let me ask you a question: Which is more reliable, the flow of oil from Iraq or the electricity in Baghdad? Which was secured first, the streets of Iraqi cities or the oil fields? Watch how the price of oil fluctuates with the security situation in Iraq, specifically regarding the pipelines. Consider how Iraq's output helps ensure that oil continues to be bought and sold in U.S. dollars. Then consider what happens if Peak Oil occurs before the Hydrogen Economy (or whatever), and whether it'd be advantageous to have a large military presence on top of the world's second largest oil reserve.
Remember that after WWII we stood astride the world with a war machine unmatched in history, totally unopposed by the shattered remains of the rest of the civilized world, in sole possession of the Ultimate Weapon. What did we do? Taxed ourselves to rebuild not only our wartorn allies, but also our defeated enemies.
Yep, and the world noticed that and by everything I can tell greatly appreciated it. That generation of Americans has a lot to be proud of. However, it wasn't long before we started to burn through that good will. Maybe it's just me, but the burn rate seems to have gone up a lot in the last two years. However, American pride has not diminished in relation with the actions taken. I've always believed that pride is justified by actions, not vice-versa.
The America of today is not the America of 1945. Using WWII as an example of our good intent only throws current events into sharper relief.
We have no longterm designs on the Middle East.
A telling moment for me was in the debates, when Kerry said it was important to demonstrate that we had no long-term designs on the Middle East. Bush made no comment. Probably because if he had, the obvious rebuttle would have mentioned the huge permament military bases we're building in Iraq.
By the way, there is a narrow difference between outright imperialism and the pseudo-imperialism where you place a "soverign" but for all intents and purposes puppet government in power and tie the economy of the country to your own corporations while maintaining a massive military presence. The only people who are fooled by this difference are the ones doing it.
In other words, if it is true that we (meaning the government) have no long term designs on the Middle East, we are a long way from proving it.
Hey, I enjoy the odd day off as much as anyone else, but I'm paying a lot of money based on the assumption that I'm going to be getting something in return -- if I were to subscribe to a magazine and then only get 2/3rds of the issues, do you thing I'd be within my rights to object?
You can take that too far. IIRC, someone (a law student, as the story goes) sued U. of Michigan for shutting down after a really bad snow for robbing him of the education he paid for. Now the school doesn't close for anything, and "anything" in a Michigan winter can be no fun at all. Thanks, guy! You couldn't have just read your books and emailed your prof with questions that day?!
That's the worst argument I've ever heard. That argument implies investing in anything is stupid, because it requires other, bigger idiots to buy it from you for it to be worthwhile.
No, because "anything" isn't a non-existant item of no value and dubious future. Extrapolating a comment about one thing to everything else regardless of the similarity to what is being discussed is the worst argument I've ever heard. Too bad ad absurdum is so many's only argument.
You should probably explain that to Wall Street, I'm sure they'll all stop buying notional ownership of corporations. I mean, they're of no value unless they can find bigger idiots to buy them.
Ha ha ha! See, this is exactly what I mean. Stocks, when they don't pay dividends, still represent ownership and voting power in a real, valuable corporation. The value of the stock is practically related to the success or potential success of the real corporation it represents ownership in. Try issuing "stock certificates" without a real corporation behind them and see how many on Wall Street buy them!
I think Wall Street could discern the subtle differences between ownership of a business and ownership of a virtual "island". Why can't you?
You could make an argument about the fact that what he bought is inherently a non-scarce resource, but saying it's stupid just because it counts on someone else buying it from you is...well, stupid. That's where the value of anything comes from.
You've missed the point. It's not stupid "just because it counts on someone else buying it". It was stupid the moment he paid $26K for a virtual island. I was rebutting the argument that possibly being able to resell it makes it not stupid. And like Amway, once you do the stupid thing your only choice is to try to find other people at least as stupid to climb out of the hole you just dug yourself. Some people succeed -- are they geniuses, or just smarter than the ones they passed the hot potato to?
As far as non-scarce resources are concerned, there's a remarkably large body of law centered around making the sale of non-scarce resources possible. It covers things like "copyright" and "patent" and "trademark."
The term is "artificial scarcity", and once again you miss the key difference: it only works if you are the one controlling the scarcity, because it is indeed artificial.
Here's a real world example: Certain older Magic: The Gathering cards were worth decent money in aftermarket trading due to their power and rarity. "Rarity" of course being nothing more than Wizard of the Coast's decision of how many of the cards to print -- i.e. artificial scarcity. A few years later they decide to release an expansion which includes reprints of many of these powerful cards and just like that -- poof! -- the value of the original cards plummets. For collectors who want the original version they still have some value, but for those who don't there's no reason to pay a lot because the card simply isn't rare anymore. The ones who paid out the nose for the rare cards may have been upset, but that's their problem since they aren't the ones controlling the scarcity.
Now, what do you think is going to happen when Project Entropia realizes that they can make a lot more money selling lots of islands for $100 than they can selling a few for $26K?
Ultimately, it's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. Just because you won't pay for it doesn't mean no one else will. Also just because you won't pay for it doesn't mean anyone who will is a sucker.
So the only way he comes out not a sucker for springing $26K for a virtual island is if he finds other, bigger suckers to spring for pieces of his virtual island totalling more than $26K.
It's just like Amway, without the up-passing of future proceeds so it isn't a pyramid scheme but the mentality is similar. If you can find enough suckers yourself, you end up not a sucker and can make some money off of Amway. Most people just end up as suckers, though.
If that's what people are looking for, I should be able to make an absolute fortune out of my virtual Mars base! It has a minor hellspawn infestation, and plenty of weapons, ammo, and medical supplies for the enterprising individual. We'll start the bidding at ten million spacebucks.
It bought the lithography folks another few hundred megahertz, but it's not going to keep moore's law alive for another couple decades, at least not by itself.
This has been true for every innovation since before Moore first made his observation that is now known as Moore's Law.
To get a 100% increase in transistor count (or popularly and probably more relevently, processor performance) every 18 months has required numerous individual ideas, each of which is worth a one-time-only boost of 30%, 20%, 10%. Hell, a lot of times we're happy with 1%. Moore's Law isn't a Law like gravity, it's a testament to how successfull engineers have been in finding those 10%, 20%, 30% increases repeatedly and consistantly for several decades. There have been predictions that Moore's Law would end due to some problem for almost as long, and the truth is that it would end if the stream of innovations like strained silicon ever stopped.
You probably realize that, I just wanted to state it explicitly for those who may think Moore's Law is some trend that will continue on its own until some major roadblock is hit. There's always a major roadblock but engineers keep finding ways around them because they rock.
Oh, and I agree that the major problems today are wire capacitance and leakage current. Wire cap has been known as a big hurdle for quite a while, since just from the math you could tell that when you scale down the transistors get smaller and faster but the wire cap stays constant. Leakage current seems to have more or less snuck up on the industry, though, and it's causing some shakeups that may disrupt Moore's Law for a bit. You can already see it if you look at performance graphs for the last few years.
No chance. First, the poster has no clue about modern processors -- that stuff about a 4-cycle "simplified" instruction set performing like an 8ghz processor was pure nonsense -- so I doubt he actually knows anything about historical computers either. Nevertheless, since a modern processor (e.g. 2Ghz K8) can perform a 64-bit multiply in 2 ns, there's simply no way 70's tech could even come close.
I like the sites that ask you to provide a challenge question that they will ask if you forget your password. My question is always "Go fuck yourself" and the response is whatever happens when I smack my palm on the keyboard repeatedly until the character limit is reached. I don't forget my passwords.:)
Of course, then you call up your bank and all they want is your SSN and mailing address... Sheesh.
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That's why Version 2 says you can distribute under any later version of the GPL.
That was a good article, but as always the "viral" thing is nonsense. I can understand them bringing it up, but why do they always say "raising the specter that the inadvertent or surreptitious inclusion of GPL code in a proprietary product would require the release of all source code under the GPL" without adding the obvious "OR stop using and distributing the GPL code"? Oh well. Maybe clarifying this aspect is also something that Version 3 can do.
It sounds like clarification is mostly what the GPL needs. It's not so hard to understand now, as long as you aren't afraid of it, but certainly things like what "derivative works" means could be made more clear.
The patent issue surely could use more clarity. I'm not sure I like the idea of a mutual-defense patent clause. That might be scary for a corporation simply because there is so much free software that they are using. If they had a patent issue with GIMP to pick a random example, would they have to stop using Linux? Probably shouldn't deploy Linux then...
Certainly making it explicit that releasing code under the GPL that may be protected by one of your patents is also a grant to use the patent is a good, necessary change. Software patents are bad enough (may they die, and soon); we definitely don't want people to be able to directly sabotage free software by putting their own patented ideas into it and then attacking.
Anyway, life goes on, the GPL continues, and the inevitable victory of freedom (in software) gets another day closer.
I couldn't agree more. However, if you need a break from your ranting, you could consider one positive (probably unintended) side-effect of the 'Evil Empire': Their development of a hugely successful, industry standard OS, based entirely on cheap commodity hardware, has given us powerful personal computers for as little as $350 dollars.
That has nothing to do with Microsoft. That has to do with the IBM PC and the successful reverse engineering of the BIOS which allowed the clone market to explode. Microsoft did nothing but ride the wave. If it had been DRDOS or QDOS or CMS or whatever that IBM picked instead, you might be claiming that they were the ones responsible for giving us the $350 PC, but you'd still be wrong. It was the commoditization of hardware that resulted in the PC revolution. If you want to know who to thank for your cheap PC, thank IBM, Phoenix, and the copyright laws of the day.
Can you imagine how different the world would be if they had gone the route of Apple and many other manufacturers, of locking their software to expensive, proprietry hardware? Maybe now, our only choice would be 'Microsoft PCs', at $5000 a pop with $1 charges every time you booted the thing.
They'd have loved to do that, but didn't really have the option, now did they? Their OS was used on the IBM PC and clones, and that is the reason why everyone uses MS. If MS had wanted to be the hardware company as well they could have tried, but they'd be niche players just like Apple, only less successful because their product -- particularly prior to Win95 -- wasn't nearly as good. Nobody thought MS-DOS or even Windows3.1 was great, it was just the thing that came on an IBM PC.
The fastest way for MS to lose their monopoly would be for them to ditch the commodity hardware that makes them cheaper and try to lock people into $5k machines. As it is, they're perfectly happy being the most expensive component of your average PC, and using their muscle to control where the commodity hardware market goes.
If it wasn't for business users, I have little doubt that MS Office would be a subscription based 'service' by now, costing $15-20 dollars per month to use.
Oh, I agree with that completely. That's pretty much what they tried to do with Licensing 6.0, but businesses gave MS the finger quite readily on that one. I'm surprised they haven't tried it in the consumer market, and the fact that they haven't indicates to me that for a reason that I can't think of right now it wouldn't work at all.
Yeah, their mice, keyboards, joysticks and gamepads are all rather nice (though I prefer Logitech for mice). I've always found it ironic and hilarious that MS insists they aren't a hardware company when that's the only thing they make that's worth using. :)
Why is it that nobody ever thinks it is possible to have a biased, negative opinion of something for a reason? Why is it that people assume that the bias came first, and apparently from nowhere?
Yes, I have a negative view of Microsoft. How did I get it? By using their software, and paying attention to their business practices! It's not like I woke up one day from a troubled sleep and cried "Microsoft is teh suck! From now on I will believe this truth without paying attention to what they do!" Um, no. I payed attention to what they do, and thus I think they are 'teh suck'. I couldn't stand Microsoft well before Linux was even on my radar.
Oh, and if you think it all goes back to MS stealing Mac's code and nothing else, you haven't been paying attention yourself. It's funny how often people who don't understand someone else's bias also don't understand the history that produced that bias. "Gee, why is everyone so down on facism, you're just biased. Huh? What's World War II?"
Yeah, I just didn't think you were going far enough to destroy civilization in the name of fighting terrorism. ;)
Truly, honestly, the only way to defeat these terrorists is not to combat them directly, (I am not saying we should cease efforts to stop them) but to combat them indirectly by taking away their power. We need to fight global ignorance, we need to teach acceptance of one another's differences, we need to learn how to respect one another, from the heads of every nation to the most downtrodden of people on this planet.
Absolutely, but there's more to it than that as well. Tolerance and respect are of course necessary for peace, but it isn't like terrorism is born solely out of lack of respect for other's beliefs. Whether we're talking about England/Ireland, Israel/Palestine or Yugoslavia, there are some real issues that create these conflicts and need to be sorted out. Tolerance and respect are just what will allow the healing to occur and peace to become lasting.
If the whole problem is terrorists meeting in metaphorical dark alleys on the internet, what about them meeting in actual dark alleys in real life?
We must eliminate all alleys, entryways, nooks, corridors, subways, booths, cul de sacs, and anywhere else two terrorists might converse without being observed! In fact, we should eliminate all private residences -- nay, all buildings! -- lest terrorists hide in or behind them and discuss their nefarious plans. And forests! Where better to have a conspiratorial chat than deep in the traitorous woods, obscured from the eye of Justice by terrorist-loving trees?
Burn the cities and forests! It's the only way to stop the terrorists! Because nothing is more important than stopping terrorists.
Right?
VS doesn't even integrate with Source Safe well.
That's a feature, because it discourages Source Safe usage. Source Safe is so bad Microsoft won't use it. Since the SS integration also sucks (which it does), that leaves no excuse not to just use a separate CVS GUI client or some other non-shit version control.
Case in point, I logged out to see if that was still the case, and accidentally posted AC. If you don't know what I'm talking about, try lowering your threshold and see what you're missing.
I imagine they don't mention that in the NYT article. "And as an added bonus, those who are sick of our insipid online registration can simply install the BugMeNot extension that uses common usernames/passwords to bypass registration forms. Truly the free software community provides what the people want."
Well if democracy costs $2.6 million, how much for a quasi-constitutional theocracy?
I've lost count, but so far I think the tab is over $200 billion.
No, I don't think I can do anything more on-topic than a smarmy Iraq joke. I can't formulate words about this right now... it just pisses me off too much.
Of no value? Sounds to me like it has a value of $26,500 USD.
Oh, so you'd pay $26,500 for a virtual island if you had the jack? *snicker*
The only one it is proven to have a value of $26,500 to is the company that sold it. "Deathifier" thinks it's worth more than that (that's why he was willing to pay what he did, comprende?), but that's purely hypothetical at this point, isn't it? Funny how the only ones claiming it is resellable for $30k are the ones who auctioned it in the first place.
Or do you mean some kind of ambiguous ethical or moral value?
I mean "utility". Money has utility (because it can be traded for other useful things) but utility isn't money.
Me, I call something valuable when someone else is willing to pay for it. This has certain conveniences, such as being able to attribute real numbers to its value. You know, numbers like "$26,500."
Ah, the wonderful circular definition of money = value = money. Let me illustrate why this is retarded: If everyone grew enough food for themselves, no one would be willing to pay for food (staples, anyway), and by your definition then food would have no value. Before our water supplies became polluted you could get water just about anywhere and nobody would think to pay for it, therefore water has no value. Air has no value; who would pay for air?! Must I go on?
Yes it is convenient to use money to estimate value but that doesn't make them the same.
The only thing protecting the value of that investment is the hope that the people running the company don't let it go out of business. Kind of like investing in an imaginary island hoping that the people running that company don't go ahead and devalue it.
Right! And when I fly in a plane I'm hoping it doesn't crash, and when I ride a unicycle blindfolded down the wrong way of the highway I'm hoping nobody hits me. These things are obviously the same since they involve some kind of risk, and since the first isn't stupid neither is the second! Care to hop on my unicycle?
The owners of a company have a strong incentive not to run it into the ground. The makers of this MMOG have what incentive not to devalue his island? They've already sold it to him; if it became worthless tomorrow they'd still have his $26K and their MMOG (and as many more islands as they want).
I'm sure your brilliant insight into the realities of the situaion will change the practices of the stock market.
My insight won't affect the stock market at all. You're trying to say the existence of risk makes stocks the same as islands, and if that's true then surely all stocks are the same, and it doesn't matter what stock you buy. IBM or Pets.com, what's the difference since both involve risk? Clearly wall street disagrees. I have no worries in their ability to distinguish.
Try this on for size: what's the difference between owning a virtual island and owning a copyright? They're both insubstantial, and both count on someone else not giving away the good for nothing to maintain value. Yet we seem to have an awful lot of very intelligent people investing in copyrights. Again, you should probably explain to them how things really work. It would save them a lot of money.
The difference is that if you own a copyright, you decide if it gets given away or not. If you own a virtual island, you have no control over the sale of other, even identical islands. Simple, isn't it? Then why can't you understand it?
You're entirely backwards. In this case Entropia is the copyright holder and Deathifier merely purchased a copy. This is like paying $10,000 for a copy of Britney Spears. That'd be pretty silly!
Hang on a second, let me parse this. It's not stupid because it counts on someone else buying it. It's stupid because...wait, you don't really give a reason, do you?
Actually, I have. But there's no reason to go over it a
Of course they did, because the only people who gave a crap about Alpha at this point were lockedin VMS customers.
:)
Um... right, because it wasn't marketed well. Duh. Just like the PA-RISC customers were the only ones who cared about PA-RISC, and who are now locked onto Itanium. They moved with HP, and HP could have moved them onto Alpha. Now they're simply screwed.
Alpha just did not sell. period. end of story.
Always the statement of someone who wishes the story ended there. You can't ignore the dynamics of who owned the chip and what they did with it and just say it was Alpha that was unsellable.
All they wanted was to stop spending tens of billions on proprietary CPU designs and buy something off the shelf instead.
Where "off the shelf" means "manufactured by Intel". Right. My whole point is that for the things HP and Intel wanted to do Alpha would have been a much better choice than Itanium. Erm... okay, Intel wanted to leave IA-32 to an instruction set nobody else had rights to, and I'm not sure Alpha would fit that bill. But that was an evil goal, so let's pretend it doesn't matter one way or the other.
"Benchmarks blah blah blah" whatever. You can't deny that even standing on the gallows with the noose around its neck, Alpha solutions were beating Itanium solutions because HP's own benchmarks showed it. You can't deny that the whole first generation of Itanium parts were performance writeoffs because Intel themselves said so. To this day they have mediocre integer performance which is what most server/enterprise solutions care about. Their main way around this has been to throw tons of cache at the problem which is fine but works for any chip. You don't think lackluster performance out of the gate hindered adoption of the brand-new shave-the-world Itanium? Pshaw.
Though in hindsight it is obvious that the best solution was x86 with 64 bit extensions. I don't think IA-64 (meaning Intel Alpha) would have changed that value proposition. But with a decent 64-bit part Intel may have been able to grab more marketshare before AMD came out with K8.
Well that cache miss comment is about the most false statement I've seen in a long time.
:)
:)
;) Registers aren't really that big a deal, either. Most compilers don't use all of the 32 most RISC cpus have, which is only the logical registers not the physical (of which there are many more, on par with the EPIC machines). Sure, the 8-ish of IA-32 is woefully inadequate, but that doesn't mean you needs gobs of them.
:)
/.
Woops! Right, that's a big gaff. I should have said that the problem is finding the misses, in part due to the stall-on-dependency (of course, it's in-order) and also loads bypassing stores with uncomputed addresses. I.e. you'd like to move your load as far forward in the execution stream as possible so you find the miss sooner, but you can't move it in front of a store because it might conflict. I have no excuse; I just recently talked with someone researching ways around this problem (and I may still be misrepresenting it). Oddly their funding (from HP) was canceled.
Unless of course you hit in the 1-cycle L0d cache
Of course because that's not a miss.
In-order execution certainly puts more burden on compilers, but it frees up a ton of area for registers, functional units, and cache.
Eh, in theory. First, area clearly isn't a big issue with Intel and Itanium.
And functional units aren't a big deal at all, because neither the compilers nor OoO schedulers are able to find enough ILP to use them. They're mostly idle anyway and adding more is just wasting area. The exception is highly parallelizable FP code, but the solution there is to add vector units (which gives you more bang per unit of fetch bandwidth than non-vector in-order scheduling).
As to cache, look at any server part. On Itanium, Xeon MP, and even to a lesser extent Opteron with only 1MB of L2, the die size is dominated by the cache. Getting rid of schedulers and reorder buffers isn't going to allow them to add a significant amount of L2/L3 cache. The size of the L1 cache is a tradeoff between miss rate and access time, not miss rate and area.
Fundamentally, when you're willing to make chips that are 600mm^2, the area benefits of in-order don't really buy you much.
The real benefit, as I understand, of in-order was supposed to be complexity. Remembering Merced, I'm not sure that ever panned out either.
Regardless, this is all a case of reality trumping theory. The original plan for Willamette (P4) had a 32K L1 cache running on the same (double pumped) clock as the ALUs, but strangely it couldn't work at that speed. If K8 had come out when it was originally planned at the speeds planned, we'd already be singing the eulogies for Itanium and Xeon. Also, if I'd have just been bitten by that radioactive lemur I'd be out fighting crime from the treetops instead of working a day job and posting on
God damn reality.
Alpha wasn't a proven market failure. DEC was a proven failure at marketing Alpha.
HP deliberately carried on the tradition of poorly marketing the Alpha, because they were tied to Itanium. Yet still their Alpha solutions outperformed their Itanium solutions. If HP had been as dedicated to Alpha as they were to Itanium, then Alpha may have been a success. If Intel, who grabbed all the Alpha engineers, had joined with HP to promote Alpha as the 64-bit platform of the future, along with a commitment by Microsoft to support it (part of what hurt Alpha) then it would have had a much better chance of success.
Alpha solutions with the marketing muscle of Itanium and the performance of, well, Alpha. Don't tell me that doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
Itanium's main problem was that it was a CPU designed by compiler people. That it took several years for the compilers -- the thing that actually gets you the performance on Itanium -- to become decent was a big sign. The biggest sign to me, the one that told me Itanium was doomed, was the ISCA(?) paper by Intel that concluded that predicated execution for branch resolution -- one of the touted great ideas of the architecture -- wasn't worth much except in carefully hand-tuned code. Since the upside turned out not to be there, the downsides of in-order-execution (e.g. not being able to service more than one cache miss at a time) dominated. Since then, Itanium has been holding out by having big caches. That's not a long-term solution, though, since you can put big caches on any CPU as long as you can afford it -- see recent Xeon MPs.
The funny thing is that Intel will simply double-think their way out of any embarassent, claiming that Itanium was always meant to only go in an ever-shrinking market segment until nobody remembers how they were promised the world and got a small pail of dirt instead. Besides, they still have mounds of cash and their IA-32 with NotAMD64 extensions. No, the real ones who are going to suffer are HP who killed off two good CPU lines and as a result are getting beaten up by IBM with the occasional sucker punch by Sun.
And yes, that is entirely Carly's fault. If I was an HP employee, I'd be screaming for her head (for other reasons too, beyond the scope of this article).
That same argument could be used to prove that America has colonized Germany.
No, because that isn't the whole argument.
America is not imperialistic -- it's only interested in self-defense. There is a difference.
How was invading Iraq self-defensive? I mean truly, not what we were duped into believing initially.
If we were imperialistic, the oil fields of Iraq would be pumping out America's New Source of Free Oil.
Never Free. Oil from Texas isn't free, you know. But let me ask you a question: Which is more reliable, the flow of oil from Iraq or the electricity in Baghdad? Which was secured first, the streets of Iraqi cities or the oil fields? Watch how the price of oil fluctuates with the security situation in Iraq, specifically regarding the pipelines. Consider how Iraq's output helps ensure that oil continues to be bought and sold in U.S. dollars. Then consider what happens if Peak Oil occurs before the Hydrogen Economy (or whatever), and whether it'd be advantageous to have a large military presence on top of the world's second largest oil reserve.
Making sense yet?
Remember that after WWII we stood astride the world with a war machine unmatched in history, totally unopposed by the shattered remains of the rest of the civilized world, in sole possession of the Ultimate Weapon. What did we do? Taxed ourselves to rebuild not only our wartorn allies, but also our defeated enemies.
Yep, and the world noticed that and by everything I can tell greatly appreciated it. That generation of Americans has a lot to be proud of. However, it wasn't long before we started to burn through that good will. Maybe it's just me, but the burn rate seems to have gone up a lot in the last two years. However, American pride has not diminished in relation with the actions taken. I've always believed that pride is justified by actions, not vice-versa.
The America of today is not the America of 1945. Using WWII as an example of our good intent only throws current events into sharper relief.
We have no longterm designs on the Middle East.
A telling moment for me was in the debates, when Kerry said it was important to demonstrate that we had no long-term designs on the Middle East. Bush made no comment. Probably because if he had, the obvious rebuttle would have mentioned the huge permament military bases we're building in Iraq.
By the way, there is a narrow difference between outright imperialism and the pseudo-imperialism where you place a "soverign" but for all intents and purposes puppet government in power and tie the economy of the country to your own corporations while maintaining a massive military presence. The only people who are fooled by this difference are the ones doing it.
In other words, if it is true that we (meaning the government) have no long term designs on the Middle East, we are a long way from proving it.
Hey, I enjoy the odd day off as much as anyone else, but I'm paying a lot of money based on the assumption that I'm going to be getting something in return -- if I were to subscribe to a magazine and then only get 2/3rds of the issues, do you thing I'd be within my rights to object?
You can take that too far. IIRC, someone (a law student, as the story goes) sued U. of Michigan for shutting down after a really bad snow for robbing him of the education he paid for. Now the school doesn't close for anything, and "anything" in a Michigan winter can be no fun at all. Thanks, guy! You couldn't have just read your books and emailed your prof with questions that day?!
Ahh, this is such stuff that pointless flamewars are made on.
No it isn't, you moron!
That's the worst argument I've ever heard. That argument implies investing in anything is stupid, because it requires other, bigger idiots to buy it from you for it to be worthwhile.
No, because "anything" isn't a non-existant item of no value and dubious future. Extrapolating a comment about one thing to everything else regardless of the similarity to what is being discussed is the worst argument I've ever heard. Too bad ad absurdum is so many's only argument.
You should probably explain that to Wall Street, I'm sure they'll all stop buying notional ownership of corporations. I mean, they're of no value unless they can find bigger idiots to buy them.
Ha ha ha! See, this is exactly what I mean. Stocks, when they don't pay dividends, still represent ownership and voting power in a real, valuable corporation. The value of the stock is practically related to the success or potential success of the real corporation it represents ownership in. Try issuing "stock certificates" without a real corporation behind them and see how many on Wall Street buy them!
I think Wall Street could discern the subtle differences between ownership of a business and ownership of a virtual "island". Why can't you?
You could make an argument about the fact that what he bought is inherently a non-scarce resource, but saying it's stupid just because it counts on someone else buying it from you is...well, stupid. That's where the value of anything comes from.
You've missed the point. It's not stupid "just because it counts on someone else buying it". It was stupid the moment he paid $26K for a virtual island. I was rebutting the argument that possibly being able to resell it makes it not stupid. And like Amway, once you do the stupid thing your only choice is to try to find other people at least as stupid to climb out of the hole you just dug yourself. Some people succeed -- are they geniuses, or just smarter than the ones they passed the hot potato to?
As far as non-scarce resources are concerned, there's a remarkably large body of law centered around making the sale of non-scarce resources possible. It covers things like "copyright" and "patent" and "trademark."
The term is "artificial scarcity", and once again you miss the key difference: it only works if you are the one controlling the scarcity, because it is indeed artificial.
Here's a real world example: Certain older Magic: The Gathering cards were worth decent money in aftermarket trading due to their power and rarity. "Rarity" of course being nothing more than Wizard of the Coast's decision of how many of the cards to print -- i.e. artificial scarcity. A few years later they decide to release an expansion which includes reprints of many of these powerful cards and just like that -- poof! -- the value of the original cards plummets. For collectors who want the original version they still have some value, but for those who don't there's no reason to pay a lot because the card simply isn't rare anymore. The ones who paid out the nose for the rare cards may have been upset, but that's their problem since they aren't the ones controlling the scarcity.
Now, what do you think is going to happen when Project Entropia realizes that they can make a lot more money selling lots of islands for $100 than they can selling a few for $26K?
Ultimately, it's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. Just because you won't pay for it doesn't mean no one else will. Also just because you won't pay for it doesn't mean anyone who will is a sucker.
Yeah, how's that Amway sales plan coming along?
So the only way he comes out not a sucker for springing $26K for a virtual island is if he finds other, bigger suckers to spring for pieces of his virtual island totalling more than $26K.
It's just like Amway, without the up-passing of future proceeds so it isn't a pyramid scheme but the mentality is similar. If you can find enough suckers yourself, you end up not a sucker and can make some money off of Amway. Most people just end up as suckers, though.
If that's what people are looking for, I should be able to make an absolute fortune out of my virtual Mars base! It has a minor hellspawn infestation, and plenty of weapons, ammo, and medical supplies for the enterprising individual. We'll start the bidding at ten million spacebucks.
It bought the lithography folks another few hundred megahertz, but it's not going to keep moore's law alive for another couple decades, at least not by itself.
This has been true for every innovation since before Moore first made his observation that is now known as Moore's Law.
To get a 100% increase in transistor count (or popularly and probably more relevently, processor performance) every 18 months has required numerous individual ideas, each of which is worth a one-time-only boost of 30%, 20%, 10%. Hell, a lot of times we're happy with 1%. Moore's Law isn't a Law like gravity, it's a testament to how successfull engineers have been in finding those 10%, 20%, 30% increases repeatedly and consistantly for several decades. There have been predictions that Moore's Law would end due to some problem for almost as long, and the truth is that it would end if the stream of innovations like strained silicon ever stopped.
You probably realize that, I just wanted to state it explicitly for those who may think Moore's Law is some trend that will continue on its own until some major roadblock is hit. There's always a major roadblock but engineers keep finding ways around them because they rock.
Oh, and I agree that the major problems today are wire capacitance and leakage current. Wire cap has been known as a big hurdle for quite a while, since just from the math you could tell that when you scale down the transistors get smaller and faster but the wire cap stays constant. Leakage current seems to have more or less snuck up on the industry, though, and it's causing some shakeups that may disrupt Moore's Law for a bit. You can already see it if you look at performance graphs for the last few years.
No chance. First, the poster has no clue about modern processors -- that stuff about a 4-cycle "simplified" instruction set performing like an 8ghz processor was pure nonsense -- so I doubt he actually knows anything about historical computers either. Nevertheless, since a modern processor (e.g. 2Ghz K8) can perform a 64-bit multiply in 2 ns, there's simply no way 70's tech could even come close.
No Microsoft desktops means huge savings on the annual IT cost, more than enough to pay for a day's training in how to open Open Office et al.
Would this class be abbreviated as oOOo?
I like the sites that ask you to provide a challenge question that they will ask if you forget your password. My question is always "Go fuck yourself" and the response is whatever happens when I smack my palm on the keyboard repeatedly until the character limit is reached. I don't forget my passwords. :)
Of course, then you call up your bank and all they want is your SSN and mailing address... Sheesh.