The stuff that you're talking about, keeping tabs on visited countries, suspicious contacts, etc, are all part of basic intelligence work. Stuff the CIA should be doing anyway. CAPPS II and all its "rooted in the community" crap is quite a different thing.
Do you know how naive that is? Human civilization has existed for thousands of years. After thousands of years, it still sucks. It has alternating periods of sucking less, and sucking more. We're in one of those periods of sucking less, but don't doubt it, eventually, it will suck more. We have no protections that weren't in place when McCarthyism happened. Or the internment of the Japanese. The only thing we have is the vigilence of the people. That *is* this country's protection against corruption.
Whether or not you're doing anything wrong and whether or not you're doing something the government doesn't like are two different things. Let me give you an example (for you republicans, feel free to replace 'democrat' with 'republican' and 'Bush' with 'Clinton' and the policies with your pet-peeves). I'm a rabid, vocal democrat. I don't like the Bush admistrations domestic policy, and I think its foreign policy is totally braindead. I doubt I'm the current government's favorite type of person. They more data they have on me, the easier it is for them to keep me quiet (I'm not talking FBI halo, but stuff like auditing my taxes or looking closer at my parking tickets, etc). Everyone has some dirt on them. Its fairly easy for someone to use that dirt against you, even if its minor. If the government has reason to dislike you, and has the mechanism to cause some problems for you, then the situation is problematic to say the least.
It's a simple fact that the Arab culture is in opposition to Western culture and values. >>>>> Now, I consider myself a fairly easy going guy when it comes to things outside of operating systems, but this pisses me off. First, there is nothing "simple" about this situation. There are many different, weighted, positions along with a huge amount of information about cultural and political happenings over the past few hundred years. Making a blanket statement like the one above just reveals how completely ignorant you are. First of all, there is no "Arab" culture. There is a somewhat coherent concept called Western culture, because (among other reason) the intellectuals who developed it were in communication with (and thus influenced) each other. The situation was entirely different in the Middle East. At the time "Arab" culture developed, there was a large part of the population that belonged to nomadic tribes, with little contact between them. Additionally, this situation doesn't just involve Arab culture. Its not just Arab's who are targeted, but Muslims in general. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are not rooted in the Middle East, and those Muslims have vastly different cultulres. The Muslims on the Indian subcontinent have a basically Indian culture, along with a large amount of western culture (thanks to British rule) thrown in. The Muslims in Turkey and Southeastern Europe have, similarly, an Eastern-European culture. Besides, many of the people who travel are fairly well-off, and (because of the British school system) western culture has permeated that segment. That said, none of these cultures is in opposition to Western culture. Islam's cultural history is rooted in the wealthy, intellectual urban areas of the Muslim empires. These cities where cultural meccas that could easily compare with the cultural capitals of Europe much later in history. This cultural history is a whole lot different from the Islamic culture you see on CNN. The culture you see on T.V. is rooted in war-torn, poor desert regions. Basing your opinion of Islamic culture on that is like basing your opinion of Western culture on trailer communities or the inner city. For further enlightenment, take a look at the situation in Israel. You've got a bunch of Muslims committing terrorist actions against Israel. On the other hand, you've got Israel, whose police actions kill just as many Palestinian civilians, and who treats Arab residents of Israel as third class citizens. If you make everything black and white, the Palestinians are terrorists and the Israeli's are fascists. Extrapolate from there, you've got that Islam encourages terrorism/hate of America and that Judaism encourages fascism. What? Does that make any sense? No! Thus, the initial black and white assumption was wrong! Proof by contridiction! If you had any sense at all, you'd realize that this is an isolated situation, with violence caused by people in impovrished/war-torn conditions lashing out at a convenient (and not entirely blameless!) entity. Same thing with Afghanistan. Same thing with Chechnya. Same thing with Ireland. Same thing everywhere else terrorism occurs.
Now, you've got me riled up. I like history, and I think you could use the lesson, so let's delve into the details of Islamic vs Western culture, while bearing in mind that both are amorphous enough to be impossible to pin down exactly. To start off, the religious distinction is fairly small (and please, people more enlightened then me in religious matters please chime in!) Once you seperate the traditions from the ideology of the religion, you get the following differences. Muslims believe Jesus was just another prophet, no the son of God. Christians, of course, believe otherwise. The both, however, believe that Jesus is the messiah (or savior, I think they're similar, correct me on this) but differ in the fact that Christians believe that he has already come, while Muslims believe he will come in the future. Overall, other aspects of the religions are similar. Both emphasize self-sacrifice (which is reflected in western culture in the idea of hard work) with Islam leaning a bit more towards ascetism. Both emphasize charity, both emphasize belief in one God (the exact same God, btw). Now, once you get outside the core beliefs, then things get strange. All that stuff about the virgins and heaven is akin to the gothic stuff in Christianity. These "details" arose in both religions during the cultural flourishes of their respective civilizations. In this respect, modern Christianity differs from medival christianity just as much as modern Christianity differs from modern Islam. Now, moving on to the women issue. Let me say for the record that my stance on this is that all you women-supressing people can go to hell, whether or not your christian or muslim. This, I must admit, is a point of contention that makes Islam look very bad in the press. Yes, Islam does tend to supress women. Of course, the Bible also says that slavery is okay, and women should be obedient to their husbands. The main thing that people don't realize is that it is characteristic of pre-industrial civilizations to supress women. The western world did it just as well as any other civilization up until a hundred years ago. The main problem is that Islamic countries as a whole tend to be pre-industrial, while Western countries are post-industrial. Again, ideology takes a front seat to economics. Lastly, this whole thing about Jihad. Yes, the Quran does say that people who fight against the enemies of Islam will go to heaven. This statement is *literal*. When Islam was "growing up" as a religion, its central community was vunerable to attacks from neighboring areas. As a result, it became important to fight to protect the community, and by extension the religion. In no way does that mean that the religion condones killing innocent people.
It simply makes statistical sense to keep an eye on those who are most likely to come from the country we're at war with. >>>>>>>>> There is no way to parse this sentence in a way that sheds favorable light upon your meaning. I'll assume that you don't think we're at war with a specific country, that you just made a typo. If you mean keeping tabs on people who come from parts of the world that harbor terrorists, that also doesn't make sense. Terrorists are all over the place, and given current incidents, your list of countries would be Afghanistan, France, and Latin America. If you mean keeping tabs on people of the same faith as those who bombed the WTC, then the sentence makes sense, but the concept doesn't. You're talking about the second largest religion in the world. You're not narrowing it down any, and Islam covers so many parts of the world you're not even getting geographical factors to help you.
If you tried preventing bombings by watching all young, white, Christian men - you'd be wasting a *lot* of time. We've got LOTS of them here in the U.S. -- much more than we've got of Muslims. >>>>> No duh. That's why it doesn't make sense to look at race! White men commit far more crimes than Muslims (numerically). By looking at just Muslims, yes you narrow your search, but are you more likely to find criminals?
People screaming about "racial profiling" seem to be neglecting the numerical facts. Why focus on a single group at all, unless it's statistically beneficial to you? In this case, focusing on Arabs is. >>>>> Fool. Statistics is only useful for larger datasets. We've got three data points here (Oklahoma and the two attacks on the WTC). One was white, the other two were Arab. Thus, 33% of terrorists are white, and 66% are Arab. Exactly...
The "people screaming about racial profiling" are the people like me. I've personally been harrassed at the Canadian border by some self-important shithead who thought he had this big important job guarding the fucking US-Canadian border. Protecting Mother Canada from all a manner of evils exported from the US. Yes I'm Muslim. Yes I'm brown. But I've grown up here and understand America better than 90% of those people that claim to be patriotic. I vote, post on/. and watch Will & Grace. I'm about as much a terrorist threat as Jack. Racial profiling would be fine if I was the only one. But I'm not. Like I said, most travellers (even brown ones) tend to be just like me. Well-off, well-educated, entirely unthreatening. Targeting these people makes absolutely no sense. Its false comfort. You might catch the fundementalist muslim, but how about the irate IRA-man? Or a crazy Basque? Well, you say, those two groups haven't attacked us yet. Well hell. We've had one attack, so of course we know exactly what our enemy looks like! Are we just going to wait until one of those groups attacks us to screen for them? Great plan!
I'm tired of weak-minded people. Those without the brain capacity to handle the idea that the world is complex. Those without the learning necessary to have valid opinions. Those without the mental strength to constantly look at their outlook on life and reevaluate it in light of the current situation. These are the people who champion racial profiling. These are the people who make knee-jerk reactions to events. These are the people that make the world suck, because these are the people that make up 90% of the population.
Usually, criminals are the ones that get fingerprinted, not the general, law abiding public. Keeping tabs on criminals or potential criminals is one thing, but keeping tabs on everyone is a giant leap.
It probably is a matter of personal preference. I like multithreading because if you look at each thread seperately, each on by itself is linear. With state machines, everything is together, but its non-linear.
The thing with AIO and multithreading is that it isn't really faster, but it *seems* faster (to the user). User-interface code takes very little CPU power, but its extremely time sensitive. Doing UI handling asyncronously prevents any sort of background work (efficient or not) from influencing the speed of the UI.
I/O can be done asynchronously, but that forces an interrupt-driven model, which (IMO) is even more complex than a threaded model. As someone who started programming in the 90's (when threads were commonplace) and started GUI programming by playing around with BeOS, it seems much more natural to me to just have a thread that sleeps unless its drawing or getting updated information about the window contents. AIO vs threads aside, the aversion to threads causes a major problem with GUI programming. Most current windowing systems tend to encourage multithreaded GUI apps (take a look at Win32, apps there use as many threads as BeOS apps ever did) while none encourage AIO. As a result, programmers who don't like threads end up not using *either* model.
I don't know the details of the Galeon code, but it doesn't seem to be the connection to the X server that's holding it up. While its loading a web page in one tab, it doesn't respond to events going on in another tab. Galeon could not possibly be spending all that time rendering (especially since Gecko is supposed to be so fast). What it seems to me is that the parsing and rendering and event handling are all occuring in one thread, so while the browser is parsing and loading one page, it can't render or respond to input events. Breaking the user-interaction into another thread would allow the GUI to respond while the page was loading.
That's a rather funny statement. In my experience, tech support tends to be almost as dumb as users. Its incredible how, the second you get away from the script or whatever it is that they use, they actively hinder your progress in solving the problem.
Therefore there is no "IBM Open PC Architecture." >>>>>>>> You were correct right until you made that statement. Like it or not, legal or not, the IBM PC architecture is open. All the BIOS stuff that IBM made isn't even used in protected mode operating systems beyond initial boot, and hasn't been for years now. The thing that matters is I can get dirt cheap commodity PC hardware on www.pricewatch.com and I can't do the same for Mac hardware. The PC platform *is* open, technicalities aside, and its foolish to claim otherwise. As for IBM-DOS, that came *after* MS-DOS. Microsoft tricked Seattle Computing into letting them use QDOS.
An OS is a very different thing than a game. A game is a one-night stand. You play it for awhile and its over. An OS is a long term commitment. The OS is your entire computing environment. You tie your tools to it, as well as, to a great extent, the work you produce with it. As such, its much more important to have a free OS than a free game. And OS X is slow. Look up the lmbench results for it (its about half as fast as LinuxPPC at basic UNIX operations), as well as compare OpenGL benchmarks on for popular games. Most of the work on the much-touted 10.1 and 10.2 versions was done to make the GUI more bearable, not the underlying kernel. And having used X.2 on a new flat panel iMac, I have to say its nowhere near as fast as KDE 3.x on a comparable priced Athlon machine, or as fast as Win2K on a *much* cheaper Duron 750. Its more "stately" in that it doesn't flicker or rubber-band when you resize, but that's due to tricks (spending inordinate amounts of memory to buffer window contents, not letting the mouse move the window-border until the contents inside can redraw, etc) than any underlying speed.
A bus almost never gets its peak throughput. What percentage of that peak throughput the bus attains is determined by its architecture. Firewire puts a lot more emphasis on "smart" hardware, which reduces the load on the host and allows it to attain higher throughputs.
"use only as many threads as CPUs" >>>>>>>> Then please stay away from my GUI apps. I hate those UNIX grognards that come from that school of thought, then try to code GUI applications with only one thread and end up with apps that can't update the GUI while doing I/O. On my 300 MHz PII, that particular trait made Galeon unusable. It had one rendering thread for all the tabs, so when I was loading a complex page like/. in another tab, whatever tab I was actually reading would freeze up.
Err, Windows NT does use the native 4KB page size on Intel, but is designed to be expandable to systems with up to a 64KB page size. As a result, certain operations (like the reserve mapping that goes on for the thread stack) aligns data in 64KB increments. IIRC, there is also 64KB of virtual slack between memory mapped objects as well.
Oh, yeah, the interface will probably suck too." >>>>>>>>>> The Apple interface sucks. Give me an ftp port and leave me alone. Even better, let me mount it as an NFS share!
1) The 80 mpbs "advantage" USB 2.0 has is far outweighed by Firewire's architectural superiority.
B) I'd bet that, since USB 2.0 is so new, there are more Firewire ports out there. Most Sony machines have em, as do Dell multimedia units (including my Inspiron 8200, which doesn't have USB), and some others.
Sigh... isn't it wonderful to start a post being as judgemental and condescending as possible... without having any idea who you are talking to? >>>>>>> Sorry for being rude, but I'm sick of Apple's marketing department and all their lies. I'm equally sick of all the Apple fanatics that their whatever Apple Marketing says as Holy Writ.
Uh right... and accellerated "window compositing" is exactly what I would expect in a system that was good at "visualization." (Partridge's post). >>>>> No. Accelerated window compositing is just an eye-candy trick that makes all the fancy drop-shadowed translucent gidgets in MacOS X run at a bearable speed. Partridge was referring to "real work" visualization. He meant that SGI systems had good graphics processing units, which allows animators and CAD users to edit very complex models while still getting real-time previews of how their changes affect the final image.
As I have no experience with SGI's systems, I would have to wonder at this point if this is something like AGP or how this is different from AGP (being as how 'Intel has really done a number' on me). >>>>>>> Kinda. In current systems (including Macs) AGP connects the NorthBridge chip and the GPU (graphics processor). (For reference, the CPU bus connects the NorthBridge to the CPU and the memory bus connects the north-bridge to memory). This layout allows the CPU to directly access graphics memory, and allows the GPU to directly access main memory. In SGI systems, this link is either beefed up (meaning its like AGP except faster with fewer limitations) or non-existant. The second case happens in some SGI machines that use something called UMA (uniform memory architecture). In this model, the GPU has no local memory of its own, but instead uses system memory. This way, textures and other data doesn't have to be copied over a bus; the GPU can access it directly.
All right. I think I follow you so far: the 3D-card isn't controlling the shots as far as windowing and window-management or application-graphics-management. So, on to how SGI's graphics are different... >>>>>> Right. The GPU has no idea of windows or anything. It simply has some registers that specify output buffers, depth buffers, and other state, and the OS saves and restores these registers as different programs use the GPU.
SGI's hardware has hardware support for defining and switching between the rendering states of different programs. >>>>>>> Yep.
application level management on the Mac will be impossible because Quartz is the only part of the window-management/rendering that actually can access the hardware. >>>>> I never said that. Quartz and Quartz Extreme are actually two entirely different things, and the because of Apple's marketing department, people have no clue what either of them do. In OS X Jaguar Quartz (the PDF software renderer) draws each window to a buffer. Then Quartz Extreme (which SHOULD be called "the window compositor" note the lack of caps or other flourishes) takes all the window buffers, sets the graphics card to treat the whole screen as an output buffer, textures the window buffers to polygons, and draws the polygons onscreen with the appropriate translucency. This mechanism allows the 3D card to do the translucent window calculations, which used to be done in software before. None of this precludes hardware level context switching. In this case, the window server is simply just another program, with the special case that its output buffer is the whole screen. In an SGI-style hardware context switching situation, the other programs would simply have output buffers that were offscreen (and thus not visible until Quartz Extreme composited them to the main screen buffer). Also, the window server is *not* the only program that directly does drawing. Each seperate program can (and does) get to draw, using hardware, into its own offscreen buffer.
Oh, and by the way, adding a level of abstraction to the Window Manager/compositor and integrating it as an Open-GL system-level application is a great idea given the state of today's 3-D cards, regardless of their ability to do hardware-level applications-graphics management. Bravo Apple! >>>>>>>::sigh:: This is what I'm talking about. Apple's design sucks. Yes, it allows for fancy translucent windows, but it puts a significant burden on 3D hardware that is already memory-bandwidth limited to begin with. Second, because PDF is used as an internal representation, OS X can't easily use OpenGL for the "real work" case of accelerating all Quartz 2D drawing commands rather than just window-compositing. Other designs like Longhorn, EVAS, and Berlin, do not have this limitation.
Why do statements like this pop up all the time? What exactly do you do with your computer, and why do you assume that "most other users" do the same. There are legions of people trying to do C++/Java development that can't wait for hardware that will make templated code in G++ quick to compile and make the java-vm start up quickly enough for 'ls' type programs. Then there are the people doing DTP who want more resolution, the people playing games that need more FPS, the people doing rendering that need more raytracing capacity, etc ad nauseum.
Could you identify yourself as a prick in a more obvious way than using the term PeeCee? Seriously. I hate that term. What's the rationale? Micro$oft is okay because, like them or not, its clear that they are only interested in money. But why PeeCee?
::sigh:: Apple has really done a number on people, haven't they. Quartz extreme is a software mechanism that uses OpenGL (which is almost always hardware accelerated these days) to accelerate window compositing. What this guy is talking about is the hardware design of SGI's graphics chips. SGI builds graphics chips with large amounts of bandwidth (which measures how quickly data can be sent to the graphics chip) and that accelerate more of the OpenGL pipeline. For example, current 3D cards has no notion of multiple clients. The operating system has to manually save and restore resources to switch between graphical applications. SGI's hardware has hardware support for defining and switching between the rendering states of different programs. Quartz Extreme wouldn't even really benefit from SGI's extra hardware because only the window server uses the OpenGL pipeline while doing the compositing. Quartz Extreme has no bearing on the actual design of Apple's 3D hardware (which is EXACTLY the same as that of PC hardware).
Um, Quartz Extreme is something else entirely. Basically, it uses the hardware on your graphics card to accelerate window transparency and stuff like the genie effect. That's directly from Apple's docs. Anything else (especially crap about "accelerated Quartz") is just exaggeration of the above features.
Slashdot Mirror
The stuff that you're talking about, keeping tabs on visited countries, suspicious contacts, etc, are all part of basic intelligence work. Stuff the CIA should be doing anyway. CAPPS II and all its "rooted in the community" crap is quite a different thing.
Do you know how naive that is? Human civilization has existed for thousands of years. After thousands of years, it still sucks. It has alternating periods of sucking less, and sucking more. We're in one of those periods of sucking less, but don't doubt it, eventually, it will suck more. We have no protections that weren't in place when McCarthyism happened. Or the internment of the Japanese. The only thing we have is the vigilence of the people. That *is* this country's protection against corruption.
Whether or not you're doing anything wrong and whether or not you're doing something the government doesn't like are two different things. Let me give you an example (for you republicans, feel free to replace 'democrat' with 'republican' and 'Bush' with 'Clinton' and the policies with your pet-peeves). I'm a rabid, vocal democrat. I don't like the Bush admistrations domestic policy, and I think its foreign policy is totally braindead. I doubt I'm the current government's favorite type of person. They more data they have on me, the easier it is for them to keep me quiet (I'm not talking FBI halo, but stuff like auditing my taxes or looking closer at my parking tickets, etc). Everyone has some dirt on them. Its fairly easy for someone to use that dirt against you, even if its minor. If the government has reason to dislike you, and has the mechanism to cause some problems for you, then the situation is problematic to say the least.
28th of July, 2002 at 21:34? /.
/.
:)
>>>
Posting on
but then pick another date and time?
>>>
Posting on
I've got the logs to prove it
which is obviously not the case.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Really. Proof. I'd think about the situations in China, Ireland, Spain, and Italy before posting...
It's a simple fact that the Arab culture is in opposition to Western culture and values.
/. and watch Will & Grace. I'm about as much a terrorist threat as Jack. Racial profiling would be fine if I was the only one. But I'm not. Like I said, most travellers (even brown ones) tend to be just like me. Well-off, well-educated, entirely unthreatening. Targeting these people makes absolutely no sense. Its false comfort. You might catch the fundementalist muslim, but how about the irate IRA-man? Or a crazy Basque? Well, you say, those two groups haven't attacked us yet. Well hell. We've had one attack, so of course we know exactly what our enemy looks like! Are we just going to wait until one of those groups attacks us to screen for them? Great plan!
>>>>>
Now, I consider myself a fairly easy going guy when it comes to things outside of operating systems, but this pisses me off. First, there is nothing "simple" about this situation. There are many different, weighted, positions along with a huge amount of information about cultural and political happenings over the past few hundred years. Making a blanket statement like the one above just reveals how completely ignorant you are. First of all, there is no "Arab" culture. There is a somewhat coherent concept called Western culture, because (among other reason) the intellectuals who developed it were in communication with (and thus influenced) each other. The situation was entirely different in the Middle East. At the time "Arab" culture developed, there was a large part of the population that belonged to nomadic tribes, with little contact between them. Additionally, this situation doesn't just involve Arab culture. Its not just Arab's who are targeted, but Muslims in general. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are not rooted in the Middle East, and those Muslims have vastly different cultulres. The Muslims on the Indian subcontinent have a basically Indian culture, along with a large amount of western culture (thanks to British rule) thrown in. The Muslims in Turkey and Southeastern Europe have, similarly, an Eastern-European culture. Besides, many of the people who travel are fairly well-off, and (because of the British school system) western culture has permeated that segment. That said, none of these cultures is in opposition to Western culture. Islam's cultural history is rooted in the wealthy, intellectual urban areas of the Muslim empires. These cities where cultural meccas that could easily compare with the cultural capitals of Europe much later in history. This cultural history is a whole lot different from the Islamic culture you see on CNN. The culture you see on T.V. is rooted in war-torn, poor desert regions. Basing your opinion of Islamic culture on that is like basing your opinion of Western culture on trailer communities or the inner city. For further enlightenment, take a look at the situation in Israel. You've got a bunch of Muslims committing terrorist actions against Israel. On the other hand, you've got Israel, whose police actions kill just as many Palestinian civilians, and who treats Arab residents of Israel as third class citizens. If you make everything black and white, the Palestinians are terrorists and the Israeli's are fascists. Extrapolate from there, you've got that Islam encourages terrorism/hate of America and that Judaism encourages fascism. What? Does that make any sense? No! Thus, the initial black and white assumption was wrong! Proof by contridiction! If you had any sense at all, you'd realize that this is an isolated situation, with violence caused by people in impovrished/war-torn conditions lashing out at a convenient (and not entirely blameless!) entity. Same thing with Afghanistan. Same thing with Chechnya. Same thing with Ireland. Same thing everywhere else terrorism occurs.
Now, you've got me riled up. I like history, and I think you could use the lesson, so let's delve into the details of Islamic vs Western culture, while bearing in mind that both are amorphous enough to be impossible to pin down exactly. To start off, the religious distinction is fairly small (and please, people more enlightened then me in religious matters please chime in!) Once you seperate the traditions from the ideology of the religion, you get the following differences. Muslims believe Jesus was just another prophet, no the son of God. Christians, of course, believe otherwise. The both, however, believe that Jesus is the messiah (or savior, I think they're similar, correct me on this) but differ in the fact that Christians believe that he has already come, while Muslims believe he will come in the future. Overall, other aspects of the religions are similar. Both emphasize self-sacrifice (which is reflected in western culture in the idea of hard work) with Islam leaning a bit more towards ascetism. Both emphasize charity, both emphasize belief in one God (the exact same God, btw). Now, once you get outside the core beliefs, then things get strange. All that stuff about the virgins and heaven is akin to the gothic stuff in Christianity. These "details" arose in both religions during the cultural flourishes of their respective civilizations. In this respect, modern Christianity differs from medival christianity just as much as modern Christianity differs from modern Islam. Now, moving on to the women issue. Let me say for the record that my stance on this is that all you women-supressing people can go to hell, whether or not your christian or muslim. This, I must admit, is a point of contention that makes Islam look very bad in the press. Yes, Islam does tend to supress women. Of course, the Bible also says that slavery is okay, and women should be obedient to their husbands. The main thing that people don't realize is that it is characteristic of pre-industrial civilizations to supress women. The western world did it just as well as any other civilization up until a hundred years ago. The main problem is that Islamic countries as a whole tend to be pre-industrial, while Western countries are post-industrial. Again, ideology takes a front seat to economics. Lastly, this whole thing about Jihad. Yes, the Quran does say that people who fight against the enemies of Islam will go to heaven. This statement is *literal*. When Islam was "growing up" as a religion, its central community was vunerable to attacks from neighboring areas. As a result, it became important to fight to protect the community, and by extension the religion. In no way does that mean that the religion condones killing innocent people.
It simply makes statistical sense to keep an eye on those who are most likely to come from the country we're at war with.
>>>>>>>>>
There is no way to parse this sentence in a way that sheds favorable light upon your meaning. I'll assume that you don't think we're at war with a specific country, that you just made a typo. If you mean keeping tabs on people who come from parts of the world that harbor terrorists, that also doesn't make sense. Terrorists are all over the place, and given current incidents, your list of countries would be Afghanistan, France, and Latin America. If you mean keeping tabs on people of the same faith as those who bombed the WTC, then the sentence makes sense, but the concept doesn't. You're talking about the second largest religion in the world. You're not narrowing it down any, and Islam covers so many parts of the world you're not even getting geographical factors to help you.
If you tried preventing bombings by watching all young, white, Christian men - you'd be wasting a *lot* of time. We've got LOTS of them here in the
U.S. -- much more than we've got of Muslims.
>>>>>
No duh. That's why it doesn't make sense to look at race! White men commit far more crimes than Muslims (numerically). By looking at just Muslims, yes you narrow your search, but are you more likely to find criminals?
People screaming about "racial profiling" seem to be neglecting the numerical facts. Why focus on a single group at all, unless it's statistically beneficial to you? In this case, focusing on Arabs is.
>>>>>
Fool. Statistics is only useful for larger datasets. We've got three data points here (Oklahoma and the two attacks on the WTC). One was white, the other two were Arab. Thus, 33% of terrorists are white, and 66% are Arab. Exactly...
The "people screaming about racial profiling" are the people like me. I've personally been harrassed at the Canadian border by some self-important shithead who thought he had this big important job guarding the fucking US-Canadian border. Protecting Mother Canada from all a manner of evils exported from the US. Yes I'm Muslim. Yes I'm brown. But I've grown up here and understand America better than 90% of those people that claim to be patriotic. I vote, post on
I'm tired of weak-minded people. Those without the brain capacity to handle the idea that the world is complex. Those without the learning necessary to have valid opinions. Those without the mental strength to constantly look at their outlook on life and reevaluate it in light of the current situation. These are the people who champion racial profiling. These are the people who make knee-jerk reactions to events. These are the people that make the world suck, because these are the people that make up 90% of the population.
large Americans are would do anything to feel secure
>>>>>>>>>
Hey, just because they're fat...
Usually, criminals are the ones that get fingerprinted, not the general, law abiding public. Keeping tabs on criminals or potential criminals is one thing, but keeping tabs on everyone is a giant leap.
It probably is a matter of personal preference. I like multithreading because if you look at each thread seperately, each on by itself is linear. With state machines, everything is together, but its non-linear.
The thing with AIO and multithreading is that it isn't really faster, but it *seems* faster (to the user). User-interface code takes very little CPU power, but its extremely time sensitive. Doing UI handling asyncronously prevents any sort of background work (efficient or not) from influencing the speed of the UI.
I/O can be done asynchronously, but that forces an interrupt-driven model, which (IMO) is even more complex than a threaded model. As someone who started programming in the 90's (when threads were commonplace) and started GUI programming by playing around with BeOS, it seems much more natural to me to just have a thread that sleeps unless its drawing or getting updated information about the window contents. AIO vs threads aside, the aversion to threads causes a major problem with GUI programming. Most current windowing systems tend to encourage multithreaded GUI apps (take a look at Win32, apps there use as many threads as BeOS apps ever did) while none encourage AIO. As a result, programmers who don't like threads end up not using *either* model.
I don't know the details of the Galeon code, but it doesn't seem to be the connection to the X server that's holding it up. While its loading a web page in one tab, it doesn't respond to events going on in another tab. Galeon could not possibly be spending all that time rendering (especially since Gecko is supposed to be so fast). What it seems to me is that the parsing and rendering and event handling are all occuring in one thread, so while the browser is parsing and loading one page, it can't render or respond to input events. Breaking the user-interaction into another thread would allow the GUI to respond while the page was loading.
That's a rather funny statement. In my experience, tech support tends to be almost as dumb as users. Its incredible how, the second you get away from the script or whatever it is that they use, they actively hinder your progress in solving the problem.
Therefore there is no "IBM Open PC Architecture."
>>>>>>>>
You were correct right until you made that statement. Like it or not, legal or not, the IBM PC architecture is open. All the BIOS stuff that IBM made isn't even used in protected mode operating systems beyond initial boot, and hasn't been for years now. The thing that matters is I can get dirt cheap commodity PC hardware on www.pricewatch.com and I can't do the same for Mac hardware. The PC platform *is* open, technicalities aside, and its foolish to claim otherwise. As for IBM-DOS, that came *after* MS-DOS. Microsoft tricked Seattle Computing into letting them use QDOS.
Hah! A Mac user claiming that the GUI is not a part of the OS? Whoa. That's really streching it.
An OS is a very different thing than a game. A game is a one-night stand. You play it for awhile and its over. An OS is a long term commitment. The OS is your entire computing environment. You tie your tools to it, as well as, to a great extent, the work you produce with it. As such, its much more important to have a free OS than a free game. And OS X is slow. Look up the lmbench results for it (its about half as fast as LinuxPPC at basic UNIX operations), as well as compare OpenGL benchmarks on for popular games. Most of the work on the much-touted 10.1 and 10.2 versions was done to make the GUI more bearable, not the underlying kernel. And having used X.2 on a new flat panel iMac, I have to say its nowhere near as fast as KDE 3.x on a comparable priced Athlon machine, or as fast as Win2K on a *much* cheaper Duron 750. Its more "stately" in that it doesn't flicker or rubber-band when you resize, but that's due to tricks (spending inordinate amounts of memory to buffer window contents, not letting the mouse move the window-border until the contents inside can redraw, etc) than any underlying speed.
A bus almost never gets its peak throughput. What percentage of that peak throughput the bus attains is determined by its architecture. Firewire puts a lot more emphasis on "smart" hardware, which reduces the load on the host and allows it to attain higher throughputs.
I think I wasn't paying attention. Entirely unconcious.
"use only as many threads as CPUs" /. in another tab, whatever tab I was actually reading would freeze up.
>>>>>>>>
Then please stay away from my GUI apps. I hate those UNIX grognards that come from that school of thought, then try to code GUI applications with only one thread and end up with apps that can't update the GUI while doing I/O. On my 300 MHz PII, that particular trait made Galeon unusable. It had one rendering thread for all the tabs, so when I was loading a complex page like
Err, Windows NT does use the native 4KB page size on Intel, but is designed to be expandable to systems with up to a 64KB page size. As a result, certain operations (like the reserve mapping that goes on for the thread stack) aligns data in 64KB increments. IIRC, there is also 64KB of virtual slack between memory mapped objects as well.
Oh, yeah, the interface will probably suck too."
>>>>>>>>>>
The Apple interface sucks. Give me an ftp port and leave me alone. Even better, let me mount it as an NFS share!
1) The 80 mpbs "advantage" USB 2.0 has is far outweighed by Firewire's architectural superiority.
B) I'd bet that, since USB 2.0 is so new, there are more Firewire ports out there. Most Sony machines have em, as do Dell multimedia units (including my Inspiron 8200, which doesn't have USB), and some others.
Sigh... isn't it wonderful to start a post being as judgemental and condescending as possible... without having any idea who you are talking to?
::sigh:: This is what I'm talking about. Apple's design sucks. Yes, it allows for fancy translucent windows, but it puts a significant burden on 3D hardware that is already memory-bandwidth limited to begin with. Second, because PDF is used as an internal representation, OS X can't easily use OpenGL for the "real work" case of accelerating all Quartz 2D drawing commands rather than just window-compositing. Other designs like Longhorn, EVAS, and Berlin, do not have this limitation.
>>>>>>>
Sorry for being rude, but I'm sick of Apple's marketing department and all their lies. I'm equally sick of all the Apple fanatics that their whatever Apple Marketing says as Holy Writ.
Uh right... and accellerated "window compositing" is exactly what I would expect in a system that was good at "visualization." (Partridge's post).
>>>>>
No. Accelerated window compositing is just an eye-candy trick that makes all the fancy drop-shadowed translucent gidgets in MacOS X run at a bearable speed. Partridge was referring to "real work" visualization. He meant that SGI systems had good graphics processing units, which allows animators and CAD users to edit very complex models while still getting real-time previews of how their changes affect the final image.
As I have no experience with SGI's systems, I would have to wonder at this point if this is something like AGP or how this is different from AGP (being as how 'Intel has really done a number' on me).
>>>>>>>
Kinda. In current systems (including Macs) AGP connects the NorthBridge chip and the GPU (graphics processor). (For reference, the CPU bus connects the NorthBridge to the CPU and the memory bus connects the north-bridge to memory). This layout allows the CPU to directly access graphics memory, and allows the GPU to directly access main memory. In SGI systems, this link is either beefed up (meaning its like AGP except faster with fewer limitations) or non-existant. The second case happens in some SGI machines that use something called UMA (uniform memory architecture). In this model, the GPU has no local memory of its own, but instead uses system memory. This way, textures and other data doesn't have to be copied over a bus; the GPU can access it directly.
All right. I think I follow you so far: the 3D-card isn't controlling the shots as far as windowing and window-management or application-graphics-management. So, on to how SGI's graphics are different...
>>>>>>
Right. The GPU has no idea of windows or anything. It simply has some registers that specify output buffers, depth buffers, and other state, and the OS saves and restores these registers as different programs use the GPU.
SGI's hardware has hardware support for defining and switching between the rendering states of different programs.
>>>>>>>
Yep.
application level management on the Mac will be impossible because Quartz is the only part of the window-management/rendering that actually can access the hardware.
>>>>>
I never said that. Quartz and Quartz Extreme are actually two entirely different things, and the because of Apple's marketing department, people have no clue what either of them do. In OS X Jaguar Quartz (the PDF software renderer) draws each window to a buffer. Then Quartz Extreme (which SHOULD be called "the window compositor" note the lack of caps or other flourishes) takes all the window buffers, sets the graphics card to treat the whole screen as an output buffer, textures the window buffers to polygons, and draws the polygons onscreen with the appropriate translucency. This mechanism allows the 3D card to do the translucent window calculations, which used to be done in software before. None of this precludes hardware level context switching. In this case, the window server is simply just another program, with the special case that its output buffer is the whole screen. In an SGI-style hardware context switching situation, the other programs would simply have output buffers that were offscreen (and thus not visible until Quartz Extreme composited them to the main screen buffer). Also, the window server is *not* the only program that directly does drawing. Each seperate program can (and does) get to draw, using hardware, into its own offscreen buffer.
Oh, and by the way, adding a level of abstraction to the Window Manager/compositor and integrating it as an Open-GL system-level application is a great idea given the state of today's 3-D cards, regardless of their ability to do hardware-level applications-graphics management. Bravo Apple!
>>>>>>>
Why do statements like this pop up all the time? What exactly do you do with your computer, and why do you assume that "most other users" do the same. There are legions of people trying to do C++/Java development that can't wait for hardware that will make templated code in G++ quick to compile and make the java-vm start up quickly enough for 'ls' type programs. Then there are the people doing DTP who want more resolution, the people playing games that need more FPS, the people doing rendering that need more raytracing capacity, etc ad nauseum.
Could you identify yourself as a prick in a more obvious way than using the term PeeCee? Seriously. I hate that term. What's the rationale? Micro$oft is okay because, like them or not, its clear that they are only interested in money. But why PeeCee?
Okay boys, mod me down, I've got karma to spare!
::sigh:: Apple has really done a number on people, haven't they. Quartz extreme is a software mechanism that uses OpenGL (which is almost always hardware accelerated these days) to accelerate window compositing. What this guy is talking about is the hardware design of SGI's graphics chips. SGI builds graphics chips with large amounts of bandwidth (which measures how quickly data can be sent to the graphics chip) and that accelerate more of the OpenGL pipeline. For example, current 3D cards has no notion of multiple clients. The operating system has to manually save and restore resources to switch between graphical applications. SGI's hardware has hardware support for defining and switching between the rendering states of different programs. Quartz Extreme wouldn't even really benefit from SGI's extra hardware because only the window server uses the OpenGL pipeline while doing the compositing. Quartz Extreme has no bearing on the actual design of Apple's 3D hardware (which is EXACTLY the same as that of PC hardware).
Um, Quartz Extreme is something else entirely. Basically, it uses the hardware on your graphics card to accelerate window transparency and stuff like the genie effect. That's directly from Apple's docs. Anything else (especially crap about "accelerated Quartz") is just exaggeration of the above features.