The agreement is not public, but there are three possible cases:
If could be pure FUD and there are no patents involved at all. Given the amount was not disclosed, it could be that Microsoft paid Casio to spread FUD.
It could be that the license that Casio have bought is automatically granted to anyone that they distribute the code to. In this case, there are no problems.
It could be that Casio has paid for non-transferable patent licenses. In this case, clause 7 of the GPL kicks in and, upon becoming aware that they can not distribute the GPL'd code (e.g. the Linux kernel) in a way that grants the downstream users all of the rights that they have, then they lose the right to distribute the GPL'd software. This opens them up to lawsuits from anyone whose code they distribute. Given that Linux doesn't require copyright assignment, potentially every contributor could individually sue Casio for wilful copyright infringement, with a maximum statutory penalty of $150,000.
If you can have a discussion about war without talking about economics, then you're probably a child. If you can have a discussion about war without talking about ethics, then you're probably a politician.
Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity
on
Diablo III Beta Begins
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· Score: 2
I bought Diablo II. I bought Lord of Destruction. The last time I played them was about 18 months ago - not bad for a game from 2001. I won't be buying Diablo II though. Blizzard's policy on aggressively tethering the game to their servers means that it's not of any interest to me. Fortunately for Blizzard, I'm sure a large chunk of their WoW players will disagree.
The difference is that this core is not like the others. Something like a Cortex A5 core can run the same userspace code as an A9 core, but in a much smaller power envelope (and much slower), both in terms of idle and full load. This means that you can turn off the the four fast cores and leave the slow one running. Userspace code doesn't notice, but your power is a lot lower than if you'd left one of the fast cores running. I don't know exactly what this core is, but something with a single in-order pipeline would make sense. You leave it running all the time, and it draws 10mW or so, and when the load shoots up (e.g. when the user is doing stuff) then you bring the other cores online. Additionally, it sounds like this core is hidden from the OS, so the OS just sees 4 cores, and when it's only scheduling things on one core the CPU will move them to the low-power core.
What is the industry standard for laptop DC connectors? Last time I checked there wasn't one. Of all of the non-standard connectors, Apple's magsafe connector is the best design I've seen.
AMD did a lot of research before settling on 16, more added significantly to complexity but on increased average program executing speed by low single digit percentages.
This is not constant, it depends a lot on the language. For a more dynamic language, like Lisp or JavaScript, more registers give you a significant benefit. For C, 16 is usually more than enough.
They STILL refuse to call it AMD64, which is what AMD calls the architecture
AMD called it x86-64. People called it AMD64 because IA64 was used for Itanium. AMD64 is misleading, since x86-64 is a relatively small set of tweaks to x86, yet it gives all of the credit (or, perhaps, blame) to AMD. Calling it x86-64 is vendor neutral and descriptive.
IBM has cut costs on both the POWER and System/z lines a lot in the last few years by combining the chip development. The POWER6 and z/10 are different chips, but they share a lot of the same functional units (including things like BCD). This means that the System/z hardware people only need to develop things that are specific to the large mainframes, not worry about the complete system design.
The problem is that the UK advertises houses in terms of the number of bedrooms, rather than the floor area. If you look at an estate agent's web site, you'll see that prices are more or less broken down into 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-bedroom properties, with only a little bit of overlap between them. When I was looking for somewhere to buy, I found that a lot of old houses had had partition walls installed in the bedrooms so that one reasonable-sized bedroom became two small rooms. And, weirdly, this increases the sale price. The place I ended up buying is two bedrooms, but both bedrooms are at least twice the size of bedrooms I saw in other places I looked at and the total floor area is comparatively huge (according to that article, it's about the size recommended for 5 people!). Yet, because it was only two bedrooms, it was very cheap.
The article you link to is about new-build homes, and it's even worse there. The person they interviewed says:
We made a big mistake when we bought it. They call it a three-bedroom house - but really it's only big enough for two
As you can see, she's judging the house size by the number of bedrooms, not by a sensible metric. Property developers know this, which is why they build tiny 3-bedroom houses. These houses are probably quite a reasonable size for two bedroom houses, if the second bedroom is a spare or a study, but they've partitioned it into a lot of tiny rooms so that the usable space is nonexistent and they can sell it to people who only look in the '3 bedroom' category, and then look for the cheapest properties in that category.
Not necessarily. Apple is generally content with the highest margin parts of the markets that it enters. If you have 10% of the sales, but 60% of the profit from a particular market, then getting 70% of the profit might mean that you'd need to double your market share, which can often be very difficult because it would involve diversifying your product line and diluting your brand. In this situation, it's often better to move into another market. This has been Apple's model for a little while, moving from computers to portable media players to phones to tablets, after taking control of the most profitable segment of each market. It would be very hard for Apple to compete with Dell, because they'd have to offer something like the range of products that Dell offers at similar prices, without compromising on quality at the low end (because that would affect the perception of the high end - people think Dells are cheap crap, even though the high end ones are more expensive and better put together than a lot of Macs).
I know that people don't like the idea of everyone having to pay taxes and they balk at the idea that rich people will get to spend all of the money they receive, but a sales tax is the only fair tax. Rich people spend more money, thus pay more in taxes. Poor people spend less money, thus less in taxes.
In absolute terms, you're correct. As a percentage of income, however, you are completely wrong. A person on minimum wage, for example, is likely to be spending close to 100% of his or her income, because they only just earn enough to cover their cost of living. A middle class person may be saving up to around 50%. If someone's income is $1m (the figure in TFA) then they can live very comfortably spending only 10% of their income each year and can invest the rest.
A sales tax is a regressive tax - the poor pay a larger proportion of their income than the rich - and so the result is that you end up with wealth concentrating in the hands of the rich. Those people with an income of $1m spend $100K and invest $900K. Those with an income of $10K spend $10K. After 10 years, the person with an initial income of $1m has now saved $9m and is getting far more than enough to live on just from dividends / interest. Meanwhile, the person with an income of $10K is still living hand to mouth.
Oh, and you've also provided a strong incentive to spend money abroad where you aren't taxed.
Yup, that's irritating. With the old comment system, I'd create a new tab to enter replies in. If I tried to close it, my browser would warn me. Now, I can accidentally hit cancel while typing a post and the entire text is gone.
You realise Nokia sells about 300 different models of phone that meet your listed requirements, right? Your complaint is like objecting to a sports care manufacturer, on the grounds that they don't make anything for off-road use.
So, I guess, the moral is not to make your business dependent on a single company that is much larger than you? That's okay, I'd already learned that lesson - the last two startups I worked with that did that both went bust.
But for that matter why not start teaching 7 year olds calculus and advanced microbiology
Because calculus requires you to know algebra, so you'd need to teach them algebra at 6, and so on. Microbiology requires a lot of chemistry and biology, so they'd need to start those aged 3...
In contrast, programming is the fundamental building block of computing. It has no prerequisites other than being able to turn the computer on. On a modern system, they'd also need to launch the programming environment, but give them something like Pharo and basic mouse and keyboard skills (which they can learn as they go) are the only things that they need.
Programming, now, is as much a fundamental life skill as writing was a hundred years ago. Any job these children get - and a lot of hobbies - will require some programming, even if it's only VBA or some DSL. Your argument sounds a lot like the arguments against teaching peasants to read.
ICs require a lot of machinery to produce. The cost of a wafer fab is measured in billions of dollars. Even if you start with clean silicon wafers as the input, you've got a lot of work to etch the die and then package it. Every IC requires a lot of complicated setup for that specific chip. We don't have factories that you can just upload a mask to and get a single IC out, we have factories where you set up a mask and then do a production run of a few tens of thousands of chips (at least) because otherwise it isn't worth the cost of the setup.
It's not totally unbelievable, when you consider the fact that it's using WebGL. Doubling the speed at which the CPU prepares data for the GPU to render can more than double the overall throughput.
Not entirely. One of the features of Sun's cancelled Rock CPU was something they called Thread Scout. The idea was to run one core ahead of another, skipping most computation, to pre-fault memory addresses. This ensured that data was in cache when it was needed. There was also an idea to use multiple cores to extend the superscalar concept, so when you encountered a branch one core took each potential path and you discarded the wrong one. A lot of GPUs used to do this, but no general purpose CPUs (that I'm aware of, although ARM and Itanium do something similar with their predicated instructions).
You're right that you won't get the full benefit of writing proper concurrent code, but you will get some.
The issue I have with teaching computer programing at such a young age is that programing languages tend to be transient
Languages do, but concepts don't. I learned to program at school in the '80s with BASIC, Logo, and PL/M then C, C++, and Java in the '90s. Since then I've learned very few completely new concepts from new languages. For example:
Erlang - actor model concurrency.
Go - CSP (I'd already encountered this in theory, but never in a real language)
Haskell - monads
Objective-C - a metaobject protocol.
None of these are particularly core idea. In contrast, those first languages taught me things like flow control, structured programming, abstraction, isolation, and logical reasoning. These techniques could have been learned in pretty much any programming language and they'd be relevant no matter what language people ended up using, from VBA macros to Verilog.
Slashdot Mirror
The agreement is not public, but there are three possible cases:
If could be pure FUD and there are no patents involved at all. Given the amount was not disclosed, it could be that Microsoft paid Casio to spread FUD.
It could be that the license that Casio have bought is automatically granted to anyone that they distribute the code to. In this case, there are no problems.
It could be that Casio has paid for non-transferable patent licenses. In this case, clause 7 of the GPL kicks in and, upon becoming aware that they can not distribute the GPL'd code (e.g. the Linux kernel) in a way that grants the downstream users all of the rights that they have, then they lose the right to distribute the GPL'd software. This opens them up to lawsuits from anyone whose code they distribute. Given that Linux doesn't require copyright assignment, potentially every contributor could individually sue Casio for wilful copyright infringement, with a maximum statutory penalty of $150,000.
If you can have a discussion about war without talking about economics, then you're probably a child. If you can have a discussion about war without talking about ethics, then you're probably a politician.
I bought Diablo II. I bought Lord of Destruction. The last time I played them was about 18 months ago - not bad for a game from 2001. I won't be buying Diablo II though. Blizzard's policy on aggressively tethering the game to their servers means that it's not of any interest to me. Fortunately for Blizzard, I'm sure a large chunk of their WoW players will disagree.
The difference is that this core is not like the others. Something like a Cortex A5 core can run the same userspace code as an A9 core, but in a much smaller power envelope (and much slower), both in terms of idle and full load. This means that you can turn off the the four fast cores and leave the slow one running. Userspace code doesn't notice, but your power is a lot lower than if you'd left one of the fast cores running. I don't know exactly what this core is, but something with a single in-order pipeline would make sense. You leave it running all the time, and it draws 10mW or so, and when the load shoots up (e.g. when the user is doing stuff) then you bring the other cores online. Additionally, it sounds like this core is hidden from the OS, so the OS just sees 4 cores, and when it's only scheduling things on one core the CPU will move them to the low-power core.
What is the industry standard for laptop DC connectors? Last time I checked there wasn't one. Of all of the non-standard connectors, Apple's magsafe connector is the best design I've seen.
AMD did a lot of research before settling on 16, more added significantly to complexity but on increased average program executing speed by low single digit percentages.
This is not constant, it depends a lot on the language. For a more dynamic language, like Lisp or JavaScript, more registers give you a significant benefit. For C, 16 is usually more than enough.
They STILL refuse to call it AMD64, which is what AMD calls the architecture
AMD called it x86-64. People called it AMD64 because IA64 was used for Itanium. AMD64 is misleading, since x86-64 is a relatively small set of tweaks to x86, yet it gives all of the credit (or, perhaps, blame) to AMD. Calling it x86-64 is vendor neutral and descriptive.
IBM has cut costs on both the POWER and System/z lines a lot in the last few years by combining the chip development. The POWER6 and z/10 are different chips, but they share a lot of the same functional units (including things like BCD). This means that the System/z hardware people only need to develop things that are specific to the large mainframes, not worry about the complete system design.
The problem is that the UK advertises houses in terms of the number of bedrooms, rather than the floor area. If you look at an estate agent's web site, you'll see that prices are more or less broken down into 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-bedroom properties, with only a little bit of overlap between them. When I was looking for somewhere to buy, I found that a lot of old houses had had partition walls installed in the bedrooms so that one reasonable-sized bedroom became two small rooms. And, weirdly, this increases the sale price. The place I ended up buying is two bedrooms, but both bedrooms are at least twice the size of bedrooms I saw in other places I looked at and the total floor area is comparatively huge (according to that article, it's about the size recommended for 5 people!). Yet, because it was only two bedrooms, it was very cheap.
The article you link to is about new-build homes, and it's even worse there. The person they interviewed says:
We made a big mistake when we bought it. They call it a three-bedroom house - but really it's only big enough for two
As you can see, she's judging the house size by the number of bedrooms, not by a sensible metric. Property developers know this, which is why they build tiny 3-bedroom houses. These houses are probably quite a reasonable size for two bedroom houses, if the second bedroom is a spare or a study, but they've partitioned it into a lot of tiny rooms so that the usable space is nonexistent and they can sell it to people who only look in the '3 bedroom' category, and then look for the cheapest properties in that category.
Not necessarily. Apple is generally content with the highest margin parts of the markets that it enters. If you have 10% of the sales, but 60% of the profit from a particular market, then getting 70% of the profit might mean that you'd need to double your market share, which can often be very difficult because it would involve diversifying your product line and diluting your brand. In this situation, it's often better to move into another market. This has been Apple's model for a little while, moving from computers to portable media players to phones to tablets, after taking control of the most profitable segment of each market. It would be very hard for Apple to compete with Dell, because they'd have to offer something like the range of products that Dell offers at similar prices, without compromising on quality at the low end (because that would affect the perception of the high end - people think Dells are cheap crap, even though the high end ones are more expensive and better put together than a lot of Macs).
I know that people don't like the idea of everyone having to pay taxes and they balk at the idea that rich people will get to spend all of the money they receive, but a sales tax is the only fair tax. Rich people spend more money, thus pay more in taxes. Poor people spend less money, thus less in taxes.
In absolute terms, you're correct. As a percentage of income, however, you are completely wrong. A person on minimum wage, for example, is likely to be spending close to 100% of his or her income, because they only just earn enough to cover their cost of living. A middle class person may be saving up to around 50%. If someone's income is $1m (the figure in TFA) then they can live very comfortably spending only 10% of their income each year and can invest the rest.
A sales tax is a regressive tax - the poor pay a larger proportion of their income than the rich - and so the result is that you end up with wealth concentrating in the hands of the rich. Those people with an income of $1m spend $100K and invest $900K. Those with an income of $10K spend $10K. After 10 years, the person with an initial income of $1m has now saved $9m and is getting far more than enough to live on just from dividends / interest. Meanwhile, the person with an income of $10K is still living hand to mouth.
Oh, and you've also provided a strong incentive to spend money abroad where you aren't taxed.
I suspect that this would not be the case if everyone moved to New Zealand...
Yup, that's irritating. With the old comment system, I'd create a new tab to enter replies in. If I tried to close it, my browser would warn me. Now, I can accidentally hit cancel while typing a post and the entire text is gone.
You realise Nokia sells about 300 different models of phone that meet your listed requirements, right? Your complaint is like objecting to a sports care manufacturer, on the grounds that they don't make anything for off-road use.
A 7" Android 2.2 tablet can be had here in SA for R1000 (+-$135)
If you can get them for -$135, I'll take ten thousand of them please.
Psychopaths are in fact not easy to spot
I thought you just needed to ask them what they'd do if they were walking along the desert and saw a tortoise lying on its back...
People planning Software Freedom Day parties with Google Maps. Maybe they'll send invitations by sharing MS Word documents on Facebook too...
So, I guess, the moral is not to make your business dependent on a single company that is much larger than you? That's okay, I'd already learned that lesson - the last two startups I worked with that did that both went bust.
But for that matter why not start teaching 7 year olds calculus and advanced microbiology
Because calculus requires you to know algebra, so you'd need to teach them algebra at 6, and so on. Microbiology requires a lot of chemistry and biology, so they'd need to start those aged 3...
In contrast, programming is the fundamental building block of computing. It has no prerequisites other than being able to turn the computer on. On a modern system, they'd also need to launch the programming environment, but give them something like Pharo and basic mouse and keyboard skills (which they can learn as they go) are the only things that they need.
Programming, now, is as much a fundamental life skill as writing was a hundred years ago. Any job these children get - and a lot of hobbies - will require some programming, even if it's only VBA or some DSL. Your argument sounds a lot like the arguments against teaching peasants to read.
ICs require a lot of machinery to produce. The cost of a wafer fab is measured in billions of dollars. Even if you start with clean silicon wafers as the input, you've got a lot of work to etch the die and then package it. Every IC requires a lot of complicated setup for that specific chip. We don't have factories that you can just upload a mask to and get a single IC out, we have factories where you set up a mask and then do a production run of a few tens of thousands of chips (at least) because otherwise it isn't worth the cost of the setup.
It's not totally unbelievable, when you consider the fact that it's using WebGL. Doubling the speed at which the CPU prepares data for the GPU to render can more than double the overall throughput.
Not entirely. One of the features of Sun's cancelled Rock CPU was something they called Thread Scout. The idea was to run one core ahead of another, skipping most computation, to pre-fault memory addresses. This ensured that data was in cache when it was needed. There was also an idea to use multiple cores to extend the superscalar concept, so when you encountered a branch one core took each potential path and you discarded the wrong one. A lot of GPUs used to do this, but no general purpose CPUs (that I'm aware of, although ARM and Itanium do something similar with their predicated instructions).
You're right that you won't get the full benefit of writing proper concurrent code, but you will get some.
The issue I have with teaching computer programing at such a young age is that programing languages tend to be transient
Languages do, but concepts don't. I learned to program at school in the '80s with BASIC, Logo, and PL/M then C, C++, and Java in the '90s. Since then I've learned very few completely new concepts from new languages. For example:
None of these are particularly core idea. In contrast, those first languages taught me things like flow control, structured programming, abstraction, isolation, and logical reasoning. These techniques could have been learned in pretty much any programming language and they'd be relevant no matter what language people ended up using, from VBA macros to Verilog.
GCSE IT shouldn't exist at all. GCSEs are for academic subjects, IT is a vocational subject. There should be NVQs in IT, not GCSEs.