I have a friend who specified: "data to be delivered in MS access '97 format", assuming that a Windows-98 CD and Access'97 CD would be bootable when the data is due (in 3 years from now). He'd be in trouble if MS decided to pull a trick like this on him.
I maintain a machine (Linux) which by contract has to run until at least 2008. If my OS vendor would pull something like this on me I'd be pissed.
I think I clicked on a link to the FTC in the main article. It's now gone.
That FTC page explains about the spammers they warned, and that they stinged them. The article concluded with something like: If you have deceptive spam, forward it to us.
Now, with 40000 spams a day, I can understand that they can handle a couple of uninteresting spams. Personally, I'd set things up that they ask the public to help them sort them out. pyramid@spam.ftc.gov, nigerian_scam@spam.ftc.gov, porn@spam.ftc.gov etc.
Sometimes people send spams out with the "from" inside one of my domains. I get to see all the bounces. Trust me, there are too many of them to allow automatic detection of them all.It's even harder to find the original destination from the bounce.
On the other hand, it is hard to get/keep the database populated: you need cooperation of the people who "move". If I know an address is going to stop working I can almost always get to install a forward.
Now suppose this works, and my friends keep on mailing me on my old address, there is noone who will notice that they are using the old address until someone else grabs that address.
For example, I could stop paying for say "Roger@Wolff.net", and that frees up that address for anybody to grab it. So it silently keeps on working until the second that someone else grabs my old email address, and the bounces stop coming....
If Dell, HPaq, etc all say "we are going to sell these OSless systems whether you like it or not", Microsoft can still say "ok, you have to pay full price for windows"
From a contract-viewpoint it is entirely microsoft's right to argue that way. However, with the monopoly abuse complaints still not resolved, I would have thought that this was something they better not do right now....
One of the things that the judge (or the states still sueing) should demand is that OEMS should be free to deliver any OS, and that MS can give volume discounts, but not a "MS Only" bounty.
Thus if DELL sells 10000 PCs with windows, they should pay the same as GateWay, who sells maybe 11000 PCs of which 1000 are sold OS-less.
Enforcing this would be difficult unless you force them to publish the volume discounts, and disallow any extra deals. IMHO, Microsoft has already abused their position enough to warrant such measures.
Unfortunately 1366 isn't on the list, the nearest choice is 1368
That's a hardware issue. This same hardware issue most likely applies to the screen though. Thus the screen he's looking at is most likely 1368 or 1384 pixels wide...
Oh, and it is no problem if you tell the computer to display two pixels more than fit on the screen. It's not like you'll suddenly get horribly bad quality or something...
I saw Men In Black in an "IMAX Theatre". They blow up the movie as large as it gets, and then leave about 75% of the screen unused. At that size you already get annoyingly fuzzy pictures.
Sure they can remaster the thing to IMAX media, but that won't really make it less fuzzy. The information to do that simply isn't there.
Whatever "bugs" you're chasing, fortran is not going to make you stop making those mistakes.
Switching languages once or twice would allow you to combine the practises that one compiler enforces on the other language. However, switching to fortran is not going to have that effect.
Fortran is a bit simpler than C. This allows the compiler to make more assumptions about what you're doing. This allows the compiler for example to find paralellism. A for-next loop that goes over 100 thousand elements can be split in fortran into two loops over 50 thousand elements, each of your two processors doing half the work. However, after this one loop that the compiler happened to optimize, the second CPU will become idle again until anohter optimization opportunity occurs.
Humans are much better at finding parallelism than compilers. Thus if an optimizing compiler can find 50% "things to do" for a second CPU you should be able to find almost 100%.
Thus if you have an OLD, debugged, program that you want to run on the new parallel machine, a fortran compiler can boost your performance better than a C compiler. But you shouldn't learn fortran just because it's often used in high perofrmance computing. It's just that those guys happen to have large patches of code lying around, they have the fortrna experience, and lack the incentive to learn anything else.
Flywheels are (theoretically) more efficient than batteries or fuel cells. IIRC,
If you have a connection to the power grid you can deliver the energy back to the power grid. You can then hope that some other subway is "using" your regenerated power.
Generators can be had at 98% efficiency, electrical motors around 90%.
Someone suggested that "for normal use your average PCI bus is not enough". Well. I disagree. For normal use a PCI bus is quite enough.
I fully agree that with several 100mpbs cards, and/or one gigabit ethernet card, you can easily saturate a PCI bus. With specialized applications as well.
I have a system where I need HD troughput. I use the 66MHz PCI bus on that one. If it hadn't been enough I would have had to use 64bit/66MHz PCI. But this is a specialized application and not "normal use".
OK. That's 100 mbps, or 12 mbyte per second. That's 10% of your available PCI bandwidth. You need that bandwidth twice: once to get it off your disk, once to get it to the network. That's 20% of your PCI bandwidth. That's significant, but not close to saturating your PCI bus. Right?
The Hard Drive may be the slowest component, but the PCI bus is the big bottleneck for MANY applications.
May I ask you what you are doing on your computer that uses your PCI bus?
You should be browsing the web (internet at a couple of megabits), playing mp3s (160k/sec uncompressed audio plus 20k/sec compressed audio), and you'll be editing stuff, and doing things with your screen. That's highbandwidth alright, but doesn't have anything to do with your PCI bus.
On a side note, I have sucessfully pulled 130Mbytes/sec out of 5400 RPM IDE Disks on 3ware controllers, with a cost less than $9000. 3 controllers, 24 disks, 64 bit 33Mhz PCI. RAID 0 over 5. So the potential is there to exceed current GigE, without too many disks or controllers, or getting too expensive.
What ARE you talking about?
Get an Asus A7M266-D based computer, two Athlons, and 4 maxtor 160G 5400 RPM drives on the on-board controller and you get 130Mb per second. $2500?
We have the rule of law,you know, and an excelent constitution. I trust our constitution to protect my rights. More so than in most "first world" countries.
Ehmm. Suppose Mike Lawrie states that he's doing a good job, and is not going to hand over the domain. Eventually the "men with guns" show up to haul him into court.
Of course he will probably get the chance to go to court by himself. But the fact that he goes is based on the knowledge that the "men with guns" will show up a bit later on if he doesn't.
Maybe I'm stupid (Well, feel free to call me stupid: I just read the slashdot header and not the referenced articles), but as I see it, they also used patented techology from Seagate on their harddisks during the development. Does that mean that Seagate can claim a licence fee on distributing Linux? No!
Same here. They used a patented technology in the process of improving the Linux code. So that doesn't make the Linux code fall under the patent....
Now, "Type enforcement" is a technology that dates back from at least the early seventies (Pascal, algol). Those patents are either expired, or there is prior art. Or maybe they patented something like "type enforcement in relation to computer security". Well, that was invented in the sixties.....
There is no "if" in "if they can find a good way to efficiently parallel the analysis".
To play chess well, you recurse into a "deep" tree. You analyse say 10 moves, and then ten moves for the opponent. That explodes pretty quickly. So you end up evaluating millions of chess positions several moves down the road. But there are only a hundred or so "shallow" moves.
It's trivial to do the first 2 moves on the computer "distributing the work", and then to pass out the +/- 100 problems of recursing those resulting moves to 100 computers.
Sure, there is some optimization to be had by breaking off "useless" trees. That optimization will not run as good in parallel than it does on one computer. Then you may waste say half your compute nodes. But the other half is providing you with a 50-fold increase in performance.
The "personal itch" model is starting to take on larger forms.
It all started out when someone had an itch, did something about it, and released the code. Now, companies are starting to do this. See for example the slashdot article at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/09/0236 22 1&mode=flat&tid=152
Another model where companies are making money by releasing code as open source is hardware.
Some manufacturers pay developers to develop an open source driver for their hardware, and then hope to sell more hardware because they support Linux. Granted, some hardware manufacturers think they can get away with releasing binary only drivers.
The "pay to get some Open source stuff further" principle varies from: not forbidding an employee to work on open source during his work, to: paying an external developer to work the open source project...
Line of sight doesn't start until past 1.2 GHZ 802.11 equipment at 2.4ghz act like line of sight outside because of water vapro and water bearing items (leaves, squirrels, children) suck up large amounts of signal..
We're talking about electromagnetic radiation. Forms include "radio", "tv signals", "light", and "X-rays". It's all one phenomenon.
None of these is "line of sight". (Catch the paradox?:-)
They all bounce off some stuff, get diffracted by different stuff, and pass through still others.
So in our normal world FM radio waves tend to go "line of sight", but pass through several meters of concrete without problems. Mountains are a problem though. (try seeing through a mile of fog: you can see fine for several tens of meters, but a mile becomes a problem). But FM radio also bounces off some atmospheric phenomena.
Somewhere beyond 1GHz, you get less of that bouncing off the atmosphere, and more and more absorption by water (remember the fog example?!).
32 bit rules in both the desktop world and in the embedded world. Can someone tell me why we aren't on 128 bit chips or more by now?
It's Moore's law.
With doubling computer-capacity almost every year or so, you hit the addressing limits of a 4 bit processor pretty quickly, the 4 extra bits of an 8bit processor will last you about 4 years (78-82). The "life time" of 16 bit processsors is therefore about 8 years (80-88), and 32 bit should last some 16 years ('88-2004) before you regularly hit the adressing limit of the processor.
Sure there are some "advanced" processors that are ahead of the curve. The 32bit 68000 was launched in '80. The alpha has been 64 bit for quite a while already. But the mainstream will have to move to 64 bit in a couple of years.
Slashdot Mirror
static voltage is 60V DC, ring tone is an extra 90V AC, for a peak of over 160!
We do.
I have a friend who specified: "data to be delivered in MS access '97 format", assuming that a Windows-98 CD and Access'97 CD would be bootable when the data is due (in 3 years from now). He'd be in trouble if MS decided to pull a trick like this on him.
I maintain a machine (Linux) which by contract has to run until at least 2008. If my OS vendor would pull something like this on me I'd be pissed.
Roger.
I think I clicked on a link to the FTC in the main article. It's now gone.
That FTC page explains about the spammers they warned, and that they stinged them. The article concluded with something like: If you have deceptive spam, forward it to us.
Now, with 40000 spams a day, I can understand that they can handle a couple of uninteresting spams. Personally, I'd set things up that they ask the public to help them sort them out. pyramid@spam.ftc.gov, nigerian_scam@spam.ftc.gov, porn@spam.ftc.gov etc.
Roger.
The FTC encourages consumers to forward any spam they receive to the e-mail address uce@ftc.gov'. [Emphasis mine.]
NO. This is not true: They are prosecuting the chain mail sending people, and they sollicit forwarding of those types of SPAMs.
I bet the FTC is very happy about this SlashDot posting.....
Roger.
Take an LCD screen, remove the front-polarizer and there you go. Simple.
-- Roger.
Trust me: It won't work.
Sometimes people send spams out with the "from" inside one of my domains. I get to see all the bounces. Trust me, there are too many of them to allow automatic detection of them all.It's even harder to find the original destination from the bounce.
On the other hand, it is hard to get/keep the database populated: you need cooperation of the people who "move". If I know an address is going to stop working I can almost always get to install a forward.
Now suppose this works, and my friends keep on mailing me on my old address, there is noone who will notice that they are using the old address until someone else grabs that address.
For example, I could stop paying for say "Roger@Wolff.net", and that frees up that address for anybody to grab it. So it silently keeps on working until the second that someone else grabs my old email address, and the bounces stop coming....
Roger.
If Dell, HPaq, etc all say "we are going to sell these OSless systems whether you like it or not", Microsoft can still say "ok, you have to pay full price for windows"
From a contract-viewpoint it is entirely microsoft's right to argue that way. However, with the monopoly abuse complaints still not resolved, I would have thought that this was something they better not do right now....
One of the things that the judge (or the states still sueing) should demand is that OEMS should be free to deliver any OS, and that MS can give volume discounts, but not a "MS Only" bounty.
Thus if DELL sells 10000 PCs with windows, they should pay the same as GateWay, who sells maybe 11000 PCs of which 1000 are sold OS-less.
Enforcing this would be difficult unless you force them to publish the volume discounts, and disallow any extra deals. IMHO, Microsoft has already abused their position enough to warrant such measures.
Roger.
Unfortunately 1366 isn't on the list, the nearest choice is 1368
That's a hardware issue. This same hardware issue most likely applies to the screen though. Thus the screen he's looking at is most likely 1368 or 1384 pixels wide...
Oh, and it is no problem if you tell the computer to display two pixels more than fit on the screen. It's not like you'll suddenly get horribly bad quality or something...
Roger.
I saw Men In Black in an "IMAX Theatre". They blow up the movie as large as it gets, and then leave about 75% of the screen unused. At that size you already get annoyingly fuzzy pictures.
Sure they can remaster the thing to IMAX media, but that won't really make it less fuzzy. The information to do that simply isn't there.
Roger.
Whatever "bugs" you're chasing, fortran is not going to make you stop making those mistakes.
Switching languages once or twice would allow you to combine the practises that one compiler enforces on the other language. However, switching to fortran is not going to have that effect.
Fortran is a bit simpler than C. This allows the compiler to make more assumptions about what you're doing. This allows the compiler for example to find paralellism. A for-next loop that goes over 100 thousand elements can be split in fortran into two loops over 50 thousand elements, each of your two processors doing half the work. However, after this one loop that the compiler happened to optimize, the second CPU will become idle again until anohter optimization opportunity occurs.
Humans are much better at finding parallelism than compilers. Thus if an optimizing compiler can find 50% "things to do" for a second CPU you should be able to find almost 100%.
Thus if you have an OLD, debugged, program that you want to run on the new parallel machine, a fortran compiler can boost your performance better than a C compiler. But you shouldn't learn fortran just because it's often used in high perofrmance computing. It's just that those guys happen to have large patches of code lying around, they have the fortrna experience, and lack the incentive to learn anything else.
Roger.
Flywheels are (theoretically) more efficient than batteries or fuel cells. IIRC,
If you have a connection to the power grid you can deliver the energy back to the power grid. You can then hope that some other subway is "using" your regenerated power.
Generators can be had at 98% efficiency, electrical motors around 90%.
Roger.
Someone suggested that "for normal use your average PCI bus is not enough". Well. I disagree. For normal use a PCI bus is quite enough.
I fully agree that with several 100mpbs cards, and/or one gigabit ethernet card, you can easily saturate a PCI bus. With specialized applications as well.
I have a system where I need HD troughput. I use the 66MHz PCI bus on that one. If it hadn't been enough I would have had to use 64bit/66MHz PCI. But this is a specialized application and not "normal use".
Roger.
OK. That's 100 mbps, or 12 mbyte per second. That's 10% of your available PCI bandwidth. You need that bandwidth twice: once to get it off your disk, once to get it to the network. That's 20% of your PCI bandwidth. That's significant, but not close to saturating your PCI bus. Right?
Roger.
640 mbit per second of outgoing ftp?
You can make me believe that you have 10mbs internet. That's 1Mbyte per second.
Roger.
The Hard Drive may be the slowest component, but the PCI bus is the big bottleneck for MANY applications.
May I ask you what you are doing on your computer that uses your PCI bus?
You should be browsing the web (internet at a couple of megabits), playing mp3s (160k/sec uncompressed audio plus 20k/sec compressed audio), and you'll be editing stuff, and doing things with your screen. That's highbandwidth alright, but doesn't have anything to do with your PCI bus.
Roger.
Some of the systems with poor 'attack feasibility' ratings in the article may in fact implement this mechanism.
Ehmm. No. They found exactly that in Solaris, and reported the issue.
Roger.
Same here :-)
On a side note, I have sucessfully pulled 130Mbytes/sec out of 5400 RPM IDE Disks on 3ware controllers, with a cost less than $9000. 3 controllers, 24 disks, 64 bit 33Mhz PCI. RAID 0 over 5. So the potential is there to exceed current GigE, without too many disks or controllers, or getting too expensive.
What ARE you talking about?
Get an Asus A7M266-D based computer, two Athlons, and 4 maxtor 160G 5400 RPM drives on the on-board controller and you get 130Mb per second. $2500?
Roger.
We have the rule of law,you know, and an excelent constitution. I trust our constitution to protect my rights. More so than in most "first world" countries.
Ehmm. Suppose Mike Lawrie states that he's doing a good job, and is not going to hand over the domain. Eventually the "men with guns" show up to haul him into court.
Of course he will probably get the chance to go to court by himself. But the fact that he goes is based on the knowledge that the "men with guns" will show up a bit later on if he doesn't.
Roger.
IANAL... but,
Maybe I'm stupid (Well, feel free to call me stupid: I just read the slashdot header and not the referenced articles), but as I see it, they also used patented techology from Seagate on their harddisks during the development. Does that mean that Seagate can claim a licence fee on distributing Linux? No!
Same here. They used a patented technology in the process of improving the Linux code. So that doesn't make the Linux code fall under the patent....
Now, "Type enforcement" is a technology that dates back from at least the early seventies (Pascal, algol). Those patents are either expired, or there is prior art. Or maybe they patented something like "type enforcement in relation to computer security". Well, that was invented in the sixties.....
Roger.
There is no "if" in "if they can find a good way to efficiently parallel the analysis".
To play chess well, you recurse into a "deep" tree. You analyse say 10 moves, and then ten moves for the opponent. That explodes pretty quickly. So you end up evaluating millions of chess positions several moves down the road. But there are only a hundred or so "shallow" moves.
It's trivial to do the first 2 moves on the computer "distributing the work", and then to pass out the +/- 100 problems of recursing those resulting moves to 100 computers.
Sure, there is some optimization to be had by breaking off "useless" trees. That optimization will not run as good in parallel than it does on one computer. Then you may waste say half your compute nodes. But the other half is providing you with a 50-fold increase in performance.
Roger
The "personal itch" model is starting to take on larger forms.
6 22 1&mode=flat&tid=152
It all started out when someone had an itch, did something about it, and released the code. Now, companies are starting to do this. See for example the slashdot article at
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/09/023
Another model where companies are making money by releasing code as open source is hardware.
Some manufacturers pay developers to develop an open source driver for their hardware, and then hope to sell more hardware because they support Linux. Granted, some hardware manufacturers think they can get away with releasing binary only drivers.
The "pay to get some Open source stuff further" principle varies from: not forbidding an employee to work on open source during his work, to: paying an external developer to work the open source project...
Roger.
Line of sight doesn't start until past 1.2 GHZ 802.11 equipment at 2.4ghz act like line of sight outside because of water vapro and water bearing items (leaves, squirrels, children) suck up large amounts of signal..
:-)
We're talking about electromagnetic radiation. Forms include "radio", "tv signals", "light", and "X-rays". It's all one phenomenon.
None of these is "line of sight". (Catch the paradox?
They all bounce off some stuff, get diffracted by different stuff, and pass through still others.
So in our normal world FM radio waves tend to go "line of sight", but pass through several meters of concrete without problems. Mountains are a problem though. (try seeing through a mile of fog: you can see fine for several tens of meters, but a mile becomes a problem). But FM radio also bounces off some atmospheric phenomena.
Somewhere beyond 1GHz, you get less of that bouncing off the atmosphere, and more and more absorption by water (remember the fog example?!).
Roger.
32 bit rules in both the desktop world and in the embedded world. Can someone tell me why we aren't on 128 bit chips or more by now?
It's Moore's law.
With doubling computer-capacity almost every year or so, you hit the addressing limits of a 4 bit processor pretty quickly, the 4 extra bits of an 8bit processor will last you about 4 years (78-82). The "life time" of 16 bit processsors is therefore about 8 years (80-88), and 32 bit should last some 16 years ('88-2004) before you regularly hit the adressing limit of the processor.
Sure there are some "advanced" processors that are ahead of the curve. The 32bit 68000 was launched in '80. The alpha has been 64 bit for quite a while already. But the mainstream will have to move to 64 bit in a couple of years.
Roger.