More and more these commodity graphics cards are being used for non-graphical high speed computing by taking advantage of the insane parallelism of the GPUs.
Someone please develop CUDA benchmarks to be included in future reviews.
We need several apps: one with a kernel that is trivial enough to be constantly starved for memory, one that is the opposite (compute heavy, memory light), integer vs. FP, and something that specifically benefits from the new double-precision floating point that only the newer stuff has.
[this is] a rather unique publication in that it seeks to educate teenage youth about an array of issues ranging from privacy, free software, security and the impact of politics on personal freedom as it relates to the use of technology.
Perhaps you'd be interested in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. [Free PDF download or buy the dead tree version.]
It was written for da youth by the editor of Boing Boing, someone steeped in the issues of personal freedoms and identity in the Surveillance Age. Here's the Purblisher's Weekly article.
With the new crop of machines like the EEE PC it seems that we're moving back to small, power-efficient machines as opposed to huge hulkers.
What's interesting to me is the tension this sets up with operating systems like Vista which are moving in the opposite direction.
Just when the ultimate in MS bloatware comes out, suddenly a new (again) market appears for ultra-portable general-purpose PCs that can't run Vista.
So we have WinXP on the OLPC XO-1 and Asus EEE PC, etc., because Vista's too big and WinCE is too small. XP or linux+xfce are juuust right.
Personally I *want* my desktop to handle speech recognition and swooshy graphics if it has the beef. And I want my portable to have a huge battery life AND a general-purpose OS.
So I think this OS bloat bifurcation should continue.
Nah. Back then we used the 300baud modem to log in to Compuserve or MCImail and we liked it.
That was back when people would see your email address on your business card and say "what's that?". And when you told them, they'd say "oh you nerds can talk to each other, how cute". Those people are now getting phished by hackers, so it's all good.
They do single precision floating point, so yes there are limitations. But if you google for CUDA examples, there are plenty of useful computational applications like modelling physics for purposes other than graphical display.
Interesting. Did you find it necessary like the Antwerp people to have a multi-core CPU to keep CPU-to-GPU communication bubbling along smoothly?
I'm looking to CUDA-ize some algorithms (for computation as opposed to real-time graphics). Are there any books or sites that you found really helpful? (I have GPU Gems 3 on order.)
No doubt other countries in the region, including Egypt, are being offered similar enticements.
Perhaps you missed the link in my post, which if you're an Aussie is forgivable since it refers the US law which makes it illegal for US companies to bribe foreign gov't officials.
Nevertheless, if the XO came with Windows, one might think MS would no longer have an incentive to pressure Egypt to buy the ClassmatePC instead. Intel is another story.
I'd tell the Egyptian authorities that I don't sell Nancy Drew novels, and then explain how they will corrupt the morality of their children.
Well that does explain it then. I liked Nancy Drew novels when I was a kid, so my morality must have been corrupted. And I can't even image what the Hardy Boys and Encylopedia Brown must have done to me.
In TFA, Negroponte seems to be saying that countries like Egypt are holding back from potentially massive deployment because the XO doesn't run Windows. For whatever reasons, the customers are demanding Windows. I believe that orders for the XO have been less than hoped, and they're doing this to stay alive.
If that means running Sugar on Windows, so be it. My personal hatred for Microsoft was *violently* re-affirmed recently when I had to click the EULA for Vista's SP1 update. But the truth is, XOs running educational software on top of Windows will still provide a huge benefit. Hold your nose and click through.
That said, I hope FOSS hackers will rally around the Sugar/Linux stack and make it solid. Right now it has a lot of problems that are fixable with enough eyeballs.
This seems doubtful to me, but it's classic./ paranoia of the type I'm constantly guilty of.
The truth is, who knows what's going on in Negroponte's head? He isn't being all that forthcoming, even with the recent statement. From what he has said, he seems to think that availability of Windows will end up in more XO's being distributed.
So maybe countries are demanding it, and you can imagine that any country thinking of buying into the XO is going to have Microsoft/Intel Classmate reps on their other shoulder, saying "but does it run Windows? This one does".
The funny thing about this to me is that lots of developing countries are skipping generations of technology, like going straight to wireless phones without ever having laid copper Ma-Bell style.
And here they have a chance to skip the horrors of Microsoft and go straight to Linux (which the developed world is coming around to), but instead they think they want XP. These are probably the same countries buying Camel cigarettes now that we've stopped smoking. Oh well.
WPA has been working fine for me (with a Linksys WRT54G), but I guess some people still have trouble with it. Of course, us G1G1 folks are in a different boat than the intended recipients, who won't be setting up their own home routers.
At least *some* of the criticisms of OLPC are really criticisms of the G1G1 program in particular, which was a nice concept but breaks expectations because this isn't a consumer product with the usual bubble of customer support around it.
So personally I separate out all the G1G1 issues before weighing the merit of criticisms.
Back in the day (1985-ish), a disk drive company called MiniScribe got caught for *shipping palettes of bricks* (I'm talking about baked clay here people) in order to make their quarterly sales numbers.
Build your Library of Congress out of that, sonny. Terra-cotta-bytes indeed.
I think the confusion here is this article is about a previous trial that involved client-side spying by the same company that is now doing network-side spying.
But IMHO, either way it's still spying and it's just plain wrong, unless users opt-IN with informed consent because they believe they'll get something valuable in exchange, as is the case with using Google Mail.
And by opt-in, I mean they have to have a genuine choice, not "here's a 10-page EULA, like it or lump it, we're the only broadband you can get."
You'd have to pry it from my cold, dead -- oh wait, they're only like $30 from surlatable.com But I have to warn you, the resemblance to a big fat syringe is not without coincidence.
Hey I'm with you on not giving over totally to cynicism. I'll vote hope over known-quantity any day if hope looks like it has half a shot.
My thing is: I'll keep giving Google benefit of the doubt as a *consumer* while they deserve it, but as a *citizen* I still want effective privacy regulation, even if that's stronger than Google (who I choose because they aren't Evil) or ChoicePoint (who gets my data whether I like or not) might want.
And believe me, in these times advocating for privacy takes as much hope as lighting a candle in a hurricane. But I'll be damned if years down the road history looks back and says my generation gave up on individual freedom for all future generations without so much as a whimper. (OK, that's enough Americanos for today. I'm cutting me off.)
I don't disagree that Comcast deserves its reputation as a classic cigar-chomping, take-no-prisoners, screw-the-customer-to-an-inch-of-their-lives and barely-try-to-hide-it, dinosaur capitalist. But at least you *know* where they stand.
Google is a bit like an Obama. Lots of falutin' rhetoric promising new horizons, but not on the scene long enough to be trusted to not "Be Evil" in the way that the bottom line ultimately demands. You want to hope, and hey that China thing, that DoubleClick thing, everybody's doing it, right? So here, take my private emails and go ahead and keep track of everything I see and buy online, who my friends are, my documents, everything. Because I like solar panels too, and you seem cool.
But if I join your trust in Google for now, consider this -- to the extent that Google neuters new privacy regulation for themselves through good PR (and yes, good behaviour), that's less protection for US from all the other businesses who behave like Comcast.
More importantly, though, is why you'd give up caffeine?;-)
After this rant, do you still need to ask?? Problem is, the AeroPress is making it too easy to blast out several Americanos a day, and my willpower is more like Comcast's than Google's.;-)
On the finesse side, there *is* a lot about Google that is potentially subversive in a good way. But I can't help but notice this story about Google promising Washington they'll be good (so please don't regulate us) on the same page as one about Comcast suddenly promising to be good when threatened by net-neutrality regulation.
Bruce sold his company Counterpane to BT some time ago, and is now a BT employee. BT is going to sell it's DSL users clickstream data to an advertising company. This sort of thing seems to be a huge invasion of privacy, and part of the march of "inevitability" that this Brin guy seems to be selling books about.
So I wonder what Bruce has to say about Webwise, and if BT even asked him for his input on its implementation.
However much $ Dell gets, they seem willing to listen to the masses who voted for the ideastorm entry that begged for no crapware. They list this as "partially implemented".
I bought two Dells with Windows recently (not for myself), about 6 months apart. On both I configured the order with the least amount of crapware I could, and then cleaned up what was actually installed. My impression was that the second box had noticeably less stuff that needed removing, though I didn't take notes or anything.
Dell does have their own applet which is supposed to give "alerts" for important updates or something, but is also (mainly) a marketing channel. And they bombard me with direct mail. I'm not complaining about either of those channels, because I can probably opt out, and sometimes the mailings are actually useful (the second machine was bought from a sale advertised by mail). So they do have ways to make incidental sales that are less obnoxious than massive crapware. Both of those channels could be implemented to some degree for their Ubuntu customers also.
"It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without apparent restrictions."
I'm guessing that traffic to the billing system is enough to do the kind of datamining I was talking about. (It's not clear at this point whether this line could tap that traffic, or simply has un-firewalled access to the network that contains the billing system, two entirely different animals.)
Of course, the DS3 wouldn't be needed for that unless they wanted it in real time for some reason. We already know that the Feds can and have presented National Security Letters which entitle them to "business records", which of course could easily be a magtape full of billing records for millions of customers. Direct access to the billing system could amount to the same thing, without having to re-submit those pesky NSLs.
The most likely explanation for DS3s or other low-speed (yes, a DS3 is low-speed to a serious carrier) circuits between the FBI and a carrier is that it would be used for the specific monitoring of individuals after permission is granted.
Given the limited facts at this point, I agree that it's probably used to aggregate active wiretaps. Whether it's done with the ISPs active per-tap permission or not I have no way to judge with the present facts.
What you're worried about is the strength of the "permission is granted" part, rather than the technical details. That's necessarily a matter of policy, and I agree that Congress has done a crummy job of creating clear regulations on the matter. Lots of hot air, yes, but little clarity.
Spot on. I would only add that the Executive has been neither forthcoming nor straightfoward in this area, quite the opposite on all counts. They did not take the opportunity to ask Congress for modifications to FISA, which by all evidence Congress would have gladly done while wagging its tail. All of which feeds the mistrust.
Do you have any facts about how much Dell (e.g.) gets paid to install third-party crapware? It must be non-zero, but "a significant portion" of $200? I bet they would do it for $5 total/PC since it's pure profit. That's probably much less than what they pay Microsoft for Vista. Therefore, an Ubuntu-based PC should still be cheaper than Windows
And that's without even considering the Moore's Law angle -- that Vista requires higher specs to run gracefully than Ubuntu.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough.
More and more these commodity graphics cards are being used for non-graphical high speed computing by taking advantage of the insane parallelism of the GPUs.
Someone please develop CUDA benchmarks to be included in future reviews.
We need several apps: one with a kernel that is trivial enough to be constantly starved for memory, one that is the opposite (compute heavy, memory light), integer vs. FP, and something that specifically benefits from the new double-precision floating point that only the newer stuff has.
Get back to me soon, mmmmK?
Perhaps you'd be interested in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. [Free PDF download or buy the dead tree version.]
It was written for da youth by the editor of Boing Boing, someone steeped in the issues of personal freedoms and identity in the Surveillance Age. Here's the Purblisher's Weekly article.
What's interesting to me is the tension this sets up with operating systems like Vista which are moving in the opposite direction.
Just when the ultimate in MS bloatware comes out, suddenly a new (again) market appears for ultra-portable general-purpose PCs that can't run Vista.
So we have WinXP on the OLPC XO-1 and Asus EEE PC, etc., because Vista's too big and WinCE is too small. XP or linux+xfce are juuust right.
Personally I *want* my desktop to handle speech recognition and swooshy graphics if it has the beef. And I want my portable to have a huge battery life AND a general-purpose OS.
So I think this OS bloat bifurcation should continue.
Nah. Back then we used the 300baud modem to log in to Compuserve or MCImail and we liked it.
That was back when people would see your email address on your business card and say "what's that?". And when you told them, they'd say "oh you nerds can talk to each other, how cute". Those people are now getting phished by hackers, so it's all good.
They do single precision floating point, so yes there are limitations. But if you google for CUDA examples, there are plenty of useful computational applications like modelling physics for purposes other than graphical display.
Interesting. Did you find it necessary like the Antwerp people to have a multi-core CPU to keep CPU-to-GPU communication bubbling along smoothly?
I'm looking to CUDA-ize some algorithms (for computation as opposed to real-time graphics). Are there any books or sites that you found really helpful? (I have GPU Gems 3 on order.)
upstart? If you count Fedora as Red Hat.
There's also this one. It's not Netcraft, but still.
I expect to burn in flamebait karma hell for this, but as a Fedora user I do find it sad. But not surprising.
Fedora *did* descend from RHL, which Fedora replaced. This is not RHEL, which is their commercial product.
Ah, then we agree completely. It's probably not a deep love for MS Windows that is motivating these governments' choices.
Perhaps you missed the link in my post, which if you're an Aussie is forgivable since it refers the US law which makes it illegal for US companies to bribe foreign gov't officials.
Nevertheless, if the XO came with Windows, one might think MS would no longer have an incentive to pressure Egypt to buy the ClassmatePC instead. Intel is another story.
Well that does explain it then. I liked Nancy Drew novels when I was a kid, so my morality must have been corrupted. And I can't even image what the Hardy Boys and Encylopedia Brown must have done to me.
In TFA, Negroponte seems to be saying that countries like Egypt are holding back from potentially massive deployment because the XO doesn't run Windows. For whatever reasons, the customers are demanding Windows. I believe that orders for the XO have been less than hoped, and they're doing this to stay alive.
If that means running Sugar on Windows, so be it. My personal hatred for Microsoft was *violently* re-affirmed recently when I had to click the EULA for Vista's SP1 update. But the truth is, XOs running educational software on top of Windows will still provide a huge benefit. Hold your nose and click through.
That said, I hope FOSS hackers will rally around the Sugar/Linux stack and make it solid. Right now it has a lot of problems that are fixable with enough eyeballs.
This seems doubtful to me, but it's classic ./ paranoia of the type I'm constantly guilty of.
The truth is, who knows what's going on in Negroponte's head? He isn't being all that forthcoming, even with the recent statement. From what he has said, he seems to think that availability of Windows will end up in more XO's being distributed.
So maybe countries are demanding it, and you can imagine that any country thinking of buying into the XO is going to have Microsoft/Intel Classmate reps on their other shoulder, saying "but does it run Windows? This one does".
The funny thing about this to me is that lots of developing countries are skipping generations of technology, like going straight to wireless phones without ever having laid copper Ma-Bell style.
And here they have a chance to skip the horrors of Microsoft and go straight to Linux (which the developed world is coming around to), but instead they think they want XP. These are probably the same countries buying Camel cigarettes now that we've stopped smoking. Oh well.
WPA has been working fine for me (with a Linksys WRT54G), but I guess some people still have trouble with it. Of course, us G1G1 folks are in a different boat than the intended recipients, who won't be setting up their own home routers.
At least *some* of the criticisms of OLPC are really criticisms of the G1G1 program in particular, which was a nice concept but breaks expectations because this isn't a consumer product with the usual bubble of customer support around it.
So personally I separate out all the G1G1 issues before weighing the merit of criticisms.
The headline reminded me of this story:
Back in the day (1985-ish), a disk drive company called MiniScribe got caught for *shipping palettes of bricks* (I'm talking about baked clay here people) in order to make their quarterly sales numbers.
Build your Library of Congress out of that, sonny.
Terra-cotta-bytes indeed.
I think the confusion here is this article is about a previous trial that involved client-side spying by the same company that is now doing network-side spying.
But IMHO, either way it's still spying and it's just plain wrong, unless users opt-IN with informed consent because they believe they'll get something valuable in exchange, as is the case with using Google Mail.
And by opt-in, I mean they have to have a genuine choice, not "here's a 10-page EULA, like it or lump it, we're the only broadband you can get."
Hey I'm with you on not giving over totally to cynicism. I'll vote hope over known-quantity any day if hope looks like it has half a shot.
My thing is: I'll keep giving Google benefit of the doubt as a *consumer* while they deserve it, but as a *citizen* I still want effective privacy regulation, even if that's stronger than Google (who I choose because they aren't Evil) or ChoicePoint (who gets my data whether I like or not) might want.
And believe me, in these times advocating for privacy takes as much hope as lighting a candle in a hurricane. But I'll be damned if years down the road history looks back and says my generation gave up on individual freedom for all future generations without so much as a whimper. (OK, that's enough Americanos for today. I'm cutting me off.)
Google is a bit like an Obama. Lots of falutin' rhetoric promising new horizons, but not on the scene long enough to be trusted to not "Be Evil" in the way that the bottom line ultimately demands. You want to hope, and hey that China thing, that DoubleClick thing, everybody's doing it, right? So here, take my private emails and go ahead and keep track of everything I see and buy online, who my friends are, my documents, everything. Because I like solar panels too, and you seem cool.
But if I join your trust in Google for now, consider this -- to the extent that Google neuters new privacy regulation for themselves through good PR (and yes, good behaviour), that's less protection for US from all the other businesses who behave like Comcast. After this rant, do you still need to ask?? Problem is, the AeroPress is making it too easy to blast out several Americanos a day, and my willpower is more like Comcast's than Google's.
Weak, I know. The switch to decaf is killing me.
On the finesse side, there *is* a lot about Google that is potentially subversive in a good way.
But I can't help but notice this story about Google promising Washington they'll be good (so please don't regulate us) on the same page as one about Comcast suddenly promising to be good when threatened by net-neutrality regulation.
Bruce sold his company Counterpane to BT some time ago, and is now a BT employee.
BT is going to sell it's DSL users clickstream data to an advertising company.
This sort of thing seems to be a huge invasion of privacy, and part of the march of "inevitability" that this Brin guy seems to be selling books about.
So I wonder what Bruce has to say about Webwise, and if BT even asked him for his input on its implementation.
However much $ Dell gets, they seem willing to listen to the masses who voted for the ideastorm entry that begged for no crapware. They list this as "partially implemented".
I bought two Dells with Windows recently (not for myself), about 6 months apart. On both I configured the order with the least amount of crapware I could, and then cleaned up what was actually installed. My impression was that the second box had noticeably less stuff that needed removing, though I didn't take notes or anything.
Dell does have their own applet which is supposed to give "alerts" for important updates or something, but is also (mainly) a marketing channel. And they bombard me with direct mail. I'm not complaining about either of those channels, because I can probably opt out, and sometimes the mailings are actually useful (the second machine was bought from a sale advertised by mail). So they do have ways to make incidental sales that are less obnoxious than massive crapware. Both of those channels could be implemented to some degree for their Ubuntu customers also.
I'm guessing that traffic to the billing system is enough to do the kind of datamining I was talking about. (It's not clear at this point whether this line could tap that traffic, or simply has un-firewalled access to the network that contains the billing system, two entirely different animals.)
Of course, the DS3 wouldn't be needed for that unless they wanted it in real time for some reason. We already know that the Feds can and have presented National Security Letters which entitle them to "business records", which of course could easily be a magtape full of billing records for millions of customers. Direct access to the billing system could amount to the same thing, without having to re-submit those pesky NSLs.
Given the limited facts at this point, I agree that it's probably used to aggregate active wiretaps. Whether it's done with the ISPs active per-tap permission or not I have no way to judge with the present facts.
Spot on. I would only add that the Executive has been neither forthcoming nor straightfoward in this area, quite the opposite on all counts. They did not take the opportunity to ask Congress for modifications to FISA, which by all evidence Congress would have gladly done while wagging its tail. All of which feeds the mistrust.
Do you have any facts about how much Dell (e.g.) gets paid to install third-party crapware?
It must be non-zero, but "a significant portion" of $200? I bet they would do it for $5 total/PC since it's pure profit.
That's probably much less than what they pay Microsoft for Vista.
Therefore, an Ubuntu-based PC should still be cheaper than Windows
And that's without even considering the Moore's Law angle -- that Vista requires higher specs to run gracefully than Ubuntu.