I'll refrain from expressing any view pro or con here, as I think it is an issue with many greys. I just want to make an observation that you say, "but in other cases, it is not so clear.." then you go forth with two examples that many would argue clearly show the opposite viewpoint. If you wanted to discuss ambiguity, take a look at an average sized software company, like maybe one that produces software for a niche market. Let's say this company has 100 people, 25 of whom are the developers. These are typical programmer types like you maybe and certainly like me. Let's say this company is run by some fat cat who pays the programmers a decent wage, but keeps the profits for himself. Now if this companies customers start saying, "hey, we already paid for this software, it's okay if we install it on a few more machines," then the companies revinues will subsequently go down. Now being a fat cat, the owner doesn't want to give up any of his income, so he lets a few employees go (including, inevitably, some of those "overpaid" programmers). Then a few more. Eventually all the customers are gone and the company has closed shop. Didn't hurt the owner at all, he's still rich and will go off and find another tax write-off. So is piracy acceptable in this case? I mean, it didn't hurt the fat cat, who is the one that was risking his money on that company, right? Even that example isn't that great, but it's certainly greyer that either picture that you painted. And I think that's really the thing about piracy: it's not a black and white issue.
You know, open file standards would be nice, but I'd just be happy if I could just use the MSOffice I bought 5 years ago to edit an MSOffice document that was created today.
You know I just saw something recently that showed that most of the Carabeian (sp?) was above water, like as a land mass, in the relatively recent past (recent in geological terms that is) and that most of the Great Plains in the US was submerged. I can't remember where I saw it though, like maybe the end of a show on TLC or something. Anyone else recall seeing something about that?
You know, that's not the only one - there are a lot of items on there that would seem to be of primarily personal value to one or a small group of people. And what's up with the suveneers (sp?) for resturants and country clubs? I mean, I think the flags for those struck by the tragedy of September 11 is great, and I see the use of many of the items for agency presentations or diplomatic relations, but I really wonder what the selection criteria is for the rest of the items? I'm sure every elementary school would like to send their school flag or picture into space (okay, at least that was the case when I was a kid 15-20 years ago), so what made those that were selected so special? (Maybe they've been waiting 15 years for a slot?) I imagine there have got to be some good stories there.
No offense taken - I always appreciate having my sphere of knowledge expanded.
Overlays though. Can't say I appreciate those. I mean, they were a slick solution to the problem at hand back in the day, but I've had to port a heavily overlayed program (origionally written in the DOS 2.x days) to a proper virtual memory system (NT). Ever since, whenever I have a problem, I always try to consider what effect any "slick" solution will have on maintenance down the road.
The Alpha certainly was the fastest processor on the market when it came out (and if Compaq pushed it the way they should have, it still would be). But this wasn't due to the addressable space - it was having a very clean instruction, designed for multiple issue (the 21064 was a dual issue as I recall: one memory instruction and one other instruction per cycle) that allowed them to crank the clock rate up way past anything else available at the time.
Neither the memory bandwidth nor the issue rate of a machine is necessarily a function of the addressable space on the machine. I had a 486 mainboard that had an effective 64-bit memory pipeline - it blew every other 486 I ever saw out of the water and remained useable well into the Pentium age. The SGI Onyx-2 I used to work on (a 64-bit MIPS machine) had, if memory serves, a 256-bit memory bus.
Similarly, the ability to do multiple issue has nothing to do with the addressable memory space. The Transmeta Crusoe is, as far as I know, a 32-bit processor, and at its core it's issuing something like 128-bit VLIWs, comprised of 4 RISC instructions each. Likewise, the latest Intel & AMD offerings are superscaler - I've lost track of how many x86 instructions they're capable of issuing per cycle, but they certainly haven't been limited by the 32-bit address space. Of course, whenever you're issuing multiple instructions per cycle, having a fat pipe to memory helps.
I was not aware of the 18 or 22 bit addressing on the 45 or 70 - the source that Patterson & Hennessy cited was from 1976, which I think was before both. The point was that expanding the address space of a machine beyond what it was origionally designed for is hard and often ends up as a kludge.
I can't claim to really know anything about the PDP-6, and I thought the 10 was an 18-bit machine. ..
I didn't mention the VAX because I was trying to remain brief & to the point. It was a very good & successful machine. So good, in fact, that it was widely known that the Soviets cloned them for use in the USSR. In return, the DEC engineers started including little phrases on the die, like "VAX: When you only want to clone the very best" (or something close thereto). I applogize if I left the impression that DEC jumped straight from the PDP-11 to the Alpha. The point was that they had the foresight to see that the VAX architecture wasn't going to remain viable in the future, so they started migrating to the Alpha in more of a preemptive move.
When they were incorporated or started working on their product is irrelevant. As I understand the rules concerning prior art, all that matters is when TiVo made public information about their invention. Other posters have pointed out that they did file a couple patents prior to SonicBlue/ReplayTV - that's what would probably become a major factor if this becomes a legal issue.
In reality, it looks like both companies were inventing in tandem, so both hold patents that the other needs, so my guess would be that they have some sort of cross licensing agreement going on. That allows them to compete on other terms (such as pricing, marketing, offerings, etc) and locks out anyone else from entering the market.
This wouldn't have happened if people didn't Dump broadband and dug out their modems. Sorry, just occured to me and I couldn't resist. If you didn't read the comments with the story, now would be a good time (it's worth a chuckle).
This makes question #11 on my Architecture midterm today. ..
The jump from 32 to 64 bits isn't about speed or precision, it's about the amount of useable address space on a given architecture. For whatever reason (call it functionality, call it bloat, whatever), the amount of address space that programs require is going up by.5 to 1 bit per year. Have you noticed that a lot of people are starting to complain that their PC's are maxed out at 4GB, especially for things like heavyweight apps like db servers, simulation programs or MSWord? Or that there's been a lot of work on Linux or NT to allow the user to access more of the 4GB on the box? Guess what? The 80386 came out 16 years ago.
So the jump now is mostly to allow us to continue to grow for another 32 years. Most processor manufactures tried to get the migration started early - the SPARC, MIPS and Power(PC) chips have all supported 64-bit operation for some time now. The Alpha was origionally designed as a 64-bit processor 10 years ago. Intel and AMD are actually rather late to the game.
It's been said that the only thing that killed the PDP-11 from DEC was its small (16-bit) address space - Users were very happy with it, but when they needed more room for their programs, the PDP just couldn't be expanded to handle them. This is probably why DEC started migrating everyone to the Alpha 10 years ago. The origional release of the Alpha only used a 34-bit address path (so it could access 16GB of RAM - the rest is reserved). If you want the details check out chapter 5 of Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach by Patterson & Hennessy.
Here's the patent in question from the USPTO's website. Note that it was filed August 7, 1998 - long before TiVo went into operation. I also notice that I don't think it reference's the 1992 patent on pausing a live TV feed (as other posters were asking about) - I could be wrong on that though.
He told my boss he had a dissability and he decided to fire him. Actually he had me do it to cover his ass.:-(
On the contrary, what your boss did was blatently illegal, assuming, of course, that you're in the United States. What your boss did was in blatent violation of the EOC and labor laws - you absolutely can not fire someone due to a disability. My wife handles the personel issues for her company and she's citing all these regultions all the time (like if she's complaining about someone and I say, "Why don't you just fire him?"). Judging by your other comment about your ex-boss, it sounds like he knows the law well (he's trying to get out of paying unemployment), which is why he had you fire your friend (he wanted to wash his hands of it). If you're feeling really vengeful towards your ex-boss/employer, report them to the Feds.
My $.02,
-"Zow"
Re:Similar Problems
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
9. Keep a close eye on possible haxors. You know how to identify them, the kids who bring their own Cisco routers to school.
Be more concerned about the ones that bring someone else's Cisco routers with them.
I was pleased to see that the author of this little adventure was none other than Simson Garfinkel. Garfinkel is an excellent author who, among other things, co-wrote Practical Unix & Internet Security with Spaf. So this little missive suddenly gave me a whole new perspective on the term firewall. ..
Okay, I've just started reading and already I've hit:
As a member of the BSD faithful I want to have access to the fundamental tools that I find with the other major BSD platforms, like a web and database server, compilers and network utilities.
I guess the author & I have a different idea of "fundamental". My idea of a fundamental is being able to dd to a raw device. I'll grant that compilers and network utilities can be fundamental depending on the application, but web & db servers? Besides, it's not like you couldn't get all four of those under MacOS. I think OS X is much more impressive under the hood as opposed to just the benefits of adding a CLI.
But then you must find another place to leave your beverages.
Actually. . . The lab consultants always used a particular workstation at the front of the room. Since there was a consultant there 6 - 12 hours each day, that workstation got hit the hardest, including the CD-ROM drive, which blew a gear or something sometime during the second semester, so it stopped working. One day I jimmied the tray out and set my Coke can on it (it's not like I was going to break it, right? And the Coke was still sealed, so it wasn't going to spill.) One of the other consultants came into the lab, took one glance, and colapsed on the floor laughing. Good times, those.
My vote is definitely for John Tesh (I got a good laugh out of the ad he did for that new show on Comedy Central).
Back in college I worked as a consultant in the undergrad computer science lab (only CS students had accounts). Like most CS labs, many people brought in CDs and listened to them on their headphones using the CD-ROM drive on the machines. Ocassionally someone would forget their CD when they left, but we'd just put them next to the machine and they'd be back for them. One time someone forgot their John Tesh CD. We put that one up next to the blackboard with a big arrow and something like "Whoever forgot their John Tesh CD it's right here->".
Nobody would claim it.
It sat up there for the next month until the semester was over and the CD was, presumeably, discarded. Hence my vote is for John Tesh all the way!
I agree that the limitation with MySQL is probably with I/O, but to answer your query, MySQL is multithreaded, but I've had to really pound on it in order to need more than one CPU on a four headed Sun box.
Slashdot Mirror
takochan,
I'll refrain from expressing any view pro or con here, as I think it is an issue with many greys. I just want to make an observation that you say, "but in other cases, it is not so clear.." then you go forth with two examples that many would argue clearly show the opposite viewpoint. If you wanted to discuss ambiguity, take a look at an average sized software company, like maybe one that produces software for a niche market. Let's say this company has 100 people, 25 of whom are the developers. These are typical programmer types like you maybe and certainly like me. Let's say this company is run by some fat cat who pays the programmers a decent wage, but keeps the profits for himself. Now if this companies customers start saying, "hey, we already paid for this software, it's okay if we install it on a few more machines," then the companies revinues will subsequently go down. Now being a fat cat, the owner doesn't want to give up any of his income, so he lets a few employees go (including, inevitably, some of those "overpaid" programmers). Then a few more. Eventually all the customers are gone and the company has closed shop. Didn't hurt the owner at all, he's still rich and will go off and find another tax write-off. So is piracy acceptable in this case? I mean, it didn't hurt the fat cat, who is the one that was risking his money on that company, right? Even that example isn't that great, but it's certainly greyer that either picture that you painted. And I think that's really the thing about piracy: it's not a black and white issue.
-"Zow"
Humm, I had no idea we were viewed this way by the rest of the world. . .
"Hi, I'm from the United States."
"Oh, yes, big land of Borax!"
"Well, um, sure, I guess. . ."
That one, I'm guessing, had more to do with the strong NASA element in Texas than any connection with dub'ya.
-"Zow"
You know, open file standards would be nice, but I'd just be happy if I could just use the MSOffice I bought 5 years ago to edit an MSOffice document that was created today.
-"Zow"
You know I just saw something recently that showed that most of the Carabeian (sp?) was above water, like as a land mass, in the relatively recent past (recent in geological terms that is) and that most of the Great Plains in the US was submerged. I can't remember where I saw it though, like maybe the end of a show on TLC or something. Anyone else recall seeing something about that?
-"Zow"
This would give an all new meaning to system crash.
I know, I know. I'm just lucky there isn't a "Punny (-1)" moderation category.
-"Zow"
You know, that's not the only one - there are a lot of items on there that would seem to be of primarily personal value to one or a small group of people. And what's up with the suveneers (sp?) for resturants and country clubs? I mean, I think the flags for those struck by the tragedy of September 11 is great, and I see the use of many of the items for agency presentations or diplomatic relations, but I really wonder what the selection criteria is for the rest of the items? I'm sure every elementary school would like to send their school flag or picture into space (okay, at least that was the case when I was a kid 15-20 years ago), so what made those that were selected so special? (Maybe they've been waiting 15 years for a slot?) I imagine there have got to be some good stories there.
-"Zow"
No offense taken - I always appreciate having my sphere of knowledge expanded.
Overlays though. Can't say I appreciate those. I mean, they were a slick solution to the problem at hand back in the day, but I've had to port a heavily overlayed program (origionally written in the DOS 2.x days) to a proper virtual memory system (NT). Ever since, whenever I have a problem, I always try to consider what effect any "slick" solution will have on maintenance down the road.
-"Zow"
The Alpha certainly was the fastest processor on the market when it came out (and if Compaq pushed it the way they should have, it still would be). But this wasn't due to the addressable space - it was having a very clean instruction, designed for multiple issue (the 21064 was a dual issue as I recall: one memory instruction and one other instruction per cycle) that allowed them to crank the clock rate up way past anything else available at the time.
Neither the memory bandwidth nor the issue rate of a machine is necessarily a function of the addressable space on the machine. I had a 486 mainboard that had an effective 64-bit memory pipeline - it blew every other 486 I ever saw out of the water and remained useable well into the Pentium age. The SGI Onyx-2 I used to work on (a 64-bit MIPS machine) had, if memory serves, a 256-bit memory bus.
Similarly, the ability to do multiple issue has nothing to do with the addressable memory space. The Transmeta Crusoe is, as far as I know, a 32-bit processor, and at its core it's issuing something like 128-bit VLIWs, comprised of 4 RISC instructions each. Likewise, the latest Intel & AMD offerings are superscaler - I've lost track of how many x86 instructions they're capable of issuing per cycle, but they certainly haven't been limited by the 32-bit address space. Of course, whenever you're issuing multiple instructions per cycle, having a fat pipe to memory helps.
-"Zow"
I was not aware of the 18 or 22 bit addressing on the 45 or 70 - the source that Patterson & Hennessy cited was from 1976, which I think was before both. The point was that expanding the address space of a machine beyond what it was origionally designed for is hard and often ends up as a kludge.
I can't claim to really know anything about the PDP-6, and I thought the 10 was an 18-bit machine. . .
I didn't mention the VAX because I was trying to remain brief & to the point. It was a very good & successful machine. So good, in fact, that it was widely known that the Soviets cloned them for use in the USSR. In return, the DEC engineers started including little phrases on the die, like "VAX: When you only want to clone the very best" (or something close thereto). I applogize if I left the impression that DEC jumped straight from the PDP-11 to the Alpha. The point was that they had the foresight to see that the VAX architecture wasn't going to remain viable in the future, so they started migrating to the Alpha in more of a preemptive move.
-"Zow"
When they were incorporated or started working on their product is irrelevant. As I understand the rules concerning prior art, all that matters is when TiVo made public information about their invention. Other posters have pointed out that they did file a couple patents prior to SonicBlue/ReplayTV - that's what would probably become a major factor if this becomes a legal issue.
In reality, it looks like both companies were inventing in tandem, so both hold patents that the other needs, so my guess would be that they have some sort of cross licensing agreement going on. That allows them to compete on other terms (such as pricing, marketing, offerings, etc) and locks out anyone else from entering the market.
-"Zow"
This wouldn't have happened if people didn't Dump broadband and dug out their modems. Sorry, just occured to me and I couldn't resist. If you didn't read the comments with the story, now would be a good time (it's worth a chuckle).
-"Zow"
This makes question #11 on my Architecture midterm today. . .
The jump from 32 to 64 bits isn't about speed or precision, it's about the amount of useable address space on a given architecture. For whatever reason (call it functionality, call it bloat, whatever), the amount of address space that programs require is going up by .5 to 1 bit per year. Have you noticed that a lot of people are starting to complain that their PC's are maxed out at 4GB, especially for things like heavyweight apps like db servers, simulation programs or MSWord? Or that there's been a lot of work on Linux or NT to allow the user to access more of the 4GB on the box? Guess what? The 80386 came out 16 years ago.
So the jump now is mostly to allow us to continue to grow for another 32 years. Most processor manufactures tried to get the migration started early - the SPARC, MIPS and Power(PC) chips have all supported 64-bit operation for some time now. The Alpha was origionally designed as a 64-bit processor 10 years ago. Intel and AMD are actually rather late to the game.
It's been said that the only thing that killed the PDP-11 from DEC was its small (16-bit) address space - Users were very happy with it, but when they needed more room for their programs, the PDP just couldn't be expanded to handle them. This is probably why DEC started migrating everyone to the Alpha 10 years ago. The origional release of the Alpha only used a 34-bit address path (so it could access 16GB of RAM - the rest is reserved). If you want the details check out chapter 5 of Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach by Patterson & Hennessy.
-"Zow"
Here's the patent in question from the USPTO's website. Note that it was filed August 7, 1998 - long before TiVo went into operation. I also notice that I don't think it reference's the 1992 patent on pausing a live TV feed (as other posters were asking about) - I could be wrong on that though.
-"Zow"
Um, that's what I thought at first too, but I think the origonal poster is on a Mac.
-"Zow"
On the contrary, what your boss did was blatently illegal, assuming, of course, that you're in the United States. What your boss did was in blatent violation of the EOC and labor laws - you absolutely can not fire someone due to a disability. My wife handles the personel issues for her company and she's citing all these regultions all the time (like if she's complaining about someone and I say, "Why don't you just fire him?"). Judging by your other comment about your ex-boss, it sounds like he knows the law well (he's trying to get out of paying unemployment), which is why he had you fire your friend (he wanted to wash his hands of it). If you're feeling really vengeful towards your ex-boss/employer, report them to the Feds.
My $.02,
-"Zow"
Be more concerned about the ones that bring someone else's Cisco routers with them.
Man, I remember when my school of 30 000+ students was served by just two T-1 lines. And that was just 8 years ago. . . I'm starting to feel old.
-"Zow"
I was pleased to see that the author of this little adventure was none other than Simson Garfinkel. Garfinkel is an excellent author who, among other things, co-wrote Practical Unix & Internet Security with Spaf. So this little missive suddenly gave me a whole new perspective on the term firewall. . .
-"Zow"
Okay, I've just started reading and already I've hit:
I guess the author & I have a different idea of "fundamental". My idea of a fundamental is being able to dd to a raw device. I'll grant that compilers and network utilities can be fundamental depending on the application, but web & db servers? Besides, it's not like you couldn't get all four of those under MacOS. I think OS X is much more impressive under the hood as opposed to just the benefits of adding a CLI.
There, I've said my peace - flame away.
-"Zow"
Actually. . . The lab consultants always used a particular workstation at the front of the room. Since there was a consultant there 6 - 12 hours each day, that workstation got hit the hardest, including the CD-ROM drive, which blew a gear or something sometime during the second semester, so it stopped working. One day I jimmied the tray out and set my Coke can on it (it's not like I was going to break it, right? And the Coke was still sealed, so it wasn't going to spill.) One of the other consultants came into the lab, took one glance, and colapsed on the floor laughing. Good times, those.
-"Zow"
My vote is definitely for John Tesh (I got a good laugh out of the ad he did for that new show on Comedy Central).
Back in college I worked as a consultant in the undergrad computer science lab (only CS students had accounts). Like most CS labs, many people brought in CDs and listened to them on their headphones using the CD-ROM drive on the machines. Ocassionally someone would forget their CD when they left, but we'd just put them next to the machine and they'd be back for them. One time someone forgot their John Tesh CD. We put that one up next to the blackboard with a big arrow and something like "Whoever forgot their John Tesh CD it's right here->".
Nobody would claim it.
It sat up there for the next month until the semester was over and the CD was, presumeably, discarded. Hence my vote is for John Tesh all the way!
-"Zow"
I agree that the limitation with MySQL is probably with I/O, but to answer your query, MySQL is multithreaded, but I've had to really pound on it in order to need more than one CPU on a four headed Sun box.
-"Zow"
I thought UTP was only good to something like 500m - I'm sure 15km is way over spec.
(For the humour impared, I know what they mean, but that's how I read it at first.)
-"Zow"
#!/bin/sh /dev/random | mmencode
/dev/random).
head -c 6
Much easier & faster, and certainly just as random as your cup of tea (of course, you have to be on a system with a reasonable
-"Zow"