No, they didn't break the treaty. Iran is only required by the NPT to inform the IAEA 6 months before such a site goes operational. Iran insists that no nuclear enrichment had yet taken place at Qom. Despite being caught red-handed by the US for having the plant, once Iran publicly confirmed its existence they informed the IAEA that they would soon be enriching from there in the future. Like I said, they broke their word, not the treaty.
Sure, but accepting that reasoning would mean accepting Iran's own definition of whether or not they're breaking the NPT.
I wasn't going for moral relativism, I was faulting the people who keep spouting that "Iran is irrational" because of religion. It isn't, and there are other parties more apocalypticly-minded than Iran is.
True, the danger in Iran isn't millenarianism. It's the fact that the people who are leading the various factions won't have anything to lose once they feel their power (and by extension their very lives) is at stake.
So far they haven't broken the treaty. Have they broken their word? Yes, by building the Qom facility when they told the IAEA they would announce any new developments.
By building a nuclear facility in secret they have broken the treaty. That's what the sanctions are about.
Iran is not stupid and not that crazy; they are rational and pragmatic.
The regime appears to be locked in a power struggle between the 'regular government' (for lack of a better term) and the Revolutionary Guard. Last week's on the media has a good analysis on how Iran has now become a dangerous place even for those who vocally support its policies because of this. Regimes that feel threatened in their existence are generally not known for the rationality of their actions.
Christian Zionists they do not believe they can "speed the coming of the apocalypse" by their actions
I'm not quite sure what you mean, but at best it smells of moral relativism stemming from a laziness to think or to get informed (I'm sure there's a term for that).
I guess they're staying in the NPT so that their facility in Bushehr can be legitimately maintained by Russia. What Russia gains from this isn't very clear to me, though.
Iran is a ratified signatory to the Nuclear Non-Profileration Treaty, so: they certainly don't have the right to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear facilities except with IAEA oversight. Iran's nuclear activity is pretty clearly in contravention of this (they built a nuclear facility in secret near Qom, for example), and there are now several UN sanctions in force against Iran because of this.
Is it 'Western hubris' to demand that a country abide by treaties it ratified? Especially a treaty on a matter as important as nuclear armament...
The reason the West is so hostile to the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that the only peaceful doctrine nuclear weapons allow, MAD, assumes rational actors on all sides. In Iran that rationality might well be subservient to theology.
Take a look at/sys/devices/system/cpu: it has information about cpu topology, cpu hot-swap, cache sizes and layout across cores, current power state, etc.
It's all there, in an architecture-independent way in/sys/devices.
They don't have any obligations outside the US whatsoever, of course. Until they want to do business in the biggest economy of the world. Then they have to play by their rules.
I really don't understand how this is so hard to fathom - the biggest market in the world is not something a business like Oracle can ignore, even if they share your misguided xenophobia.
BTW, movie industries sell regionally because they can make more that way, not less.
You don't seem to understand the difference between financial modeling and financial transactions.
Apparently your dumb ignorant ass missed the part where square roots of dollar amounts were taken, which clearly points towards some kind of random walk diffusional modeling which has nothing to do with financial transactions and pennies.
If you would have been really clever, you would have noted that what he wanted (complex values for dollars) is mathematically the same as asking for imaginary negative time. The GGP should have been talking about logarithmic dollars to begin with to just avoid this whole issue. It's the only quantity where such quantities make sense.
You're completely right, though, in asserting that distributed computing clients don't need numerical accuracy per se. Getting an estimate of the size of phase space is often more than enough - it's what makes simulation different from single-point energy evaluations, it's exactly what makes CPU time useful for scientific applications.
I'd still advise anybody against working with you, or for you, for the sole reason that the pedantry you're bringing forward in your arguments would seem to make you a very poor manager of actual people. There's an aggression there that is simply not professional.
If you're running one of the most popular distributed computing clients out there, you're actually running some of my floating point work, mr. Troll.
If you'd looked at GPs post it'd be obvious that he's talking about taking square roots of dollar amounts, which no financial transaction software should ever do, so doubles are perfectly appropriate here, and probably overkill.
That'll be a problem if you ever have to handle extremally large transactions. Doubles round. Finance guys really hate it when their cents go missing.
Note that he's using doubles. 'Extremely large' here would be bigger than $10^15. If he's in Zimbabwe, or his company has transactions two orders of magnitude bigger than the GDP of the EU, there may be a few dollars lost in rounding. But anything less than that should be safe.
Hardly. Considering SCO still owes Novell, and that this ruling only overturns a summary judgement, doesn't make Novell's copyright claim much weaker.
This case is not about end-users, but about whether SCO even has standing to begin to sue Linux end-users. Which it doesn't (the nature of their copyright deal with Novell was pretty clear, but apparently not enough for a summary judgement).
In the very unlikely event that SCO wins this case, big end-users like IBM may again have to begin to worry about defending against SCO's bizarre claims.
Until then, this case has about as much impact on Linux users as one of the many claims against Apple, Microsoft or Sun have on their respective products' end users.
That's true, and it will make a big difference for some applications, but once the problem set fits in cache (and for many applications it already does) you won't get any faster.
The truly interesting thing, though, is that CPUs will look more like GPUs when there's many of them. My prediction would be that the distinction between cores will get fuzzier and CPUs and GPUs will be integrated into devices that can reconfigure themselves into a massive number of very simple cores (like a GPU), or a smaller number of superscalar traditional CPU cores.
The relative complexity of instruction decoding will get smaller and smaller as the number of transistors increases, so reconfiguring CPUs like that will get cheaper and cheaper.
Multicore CPUs are more about what CPU designers can deliver than about what people can actually use.
Because the limiting factors in single-cpu performance have been memory latency and instruction-level parallelism for the last half decade, there has been very little progress in single-core cpu performance over that period of time.
Both these problems won't find a solution any time soon, so don't expect the cores of your 64-core CPU of 2015 to be much faster than the cores of today.
True: calling a lot isn't too expensive in the US: it's calling a little that's (relatively) expensive. The last time I checked the cheapest plans were around $30 a month.
In Europe I've had plans for about $15 a month that allow me to call for about 250 minutes (counted in seconds, so a 15 second call is counted as a quarter minute) in the country, or more than an hour to anywhere in Europe or North America. AFAIK There's nothing comparable in the US.
I thought it sucked too, in the beginning, but the upside is the cell phone has a normal telephone number with a real area code.
Calling somebody on a cell phone costs the same as calling somebody on a land line, so the cell phone carriers can't do the scam they're pulling off in Europe, where calling a cell phone in a different country is an order of magnitude more expensive than calling a landline in that same country.
I was happy to pay to receive calls because of that (the per-minute rate is pretty low).
The point still stands; 10^26 unknown variables are really not to be argued with, and as a century of physics has shown us, are nothing to be afraid of~.
Your premise -- the one about about enough knowledge leading to a deterministic outcome of any system -- is inherently so impractical that it is unworkable: there is no system we know of that is so completely cut off from the rest of the universe that we know it to be isolated and describable completely without influence of the outside world's microstate - i.e. we need the rest of the universe's microstate to deterministically predict its path in phase space: something that no computer smaller than the universe itself is able to describe. This is true in the 'macro' world (a coin toss is straddling that border you artificially erected) as it is in the 'micro' world.
That is 20th century physics in a nutshell for you, and it's time to embrace it~.
BTW We certainly do know enough about quantum physics to rule out the 'hidden variables' model you seem to be proposing; look up the Alain Aspect experiments if you will.
and, PS you're right about computers generating pseudo-random numbers: most algorithms that use random numbers have such voracious apetites for them that generating them efficiently becomes an issue, and the only way to do that is through fairly simple algorithms (algorithms being the key word here) that are inherently pseudo-random: there's simply no time to wait for thermal/quantum noise to make its way up the observable orders of magnitude.
Now, if you'll excuse me, it's friday night and I just had a lovely bottle of wine; good night.
So in effect the situation in Sweden is now like in the US, then? The people sued by the RIAA must have had their identities revealed to the RIAA by the ISP, right?
The mandatory part - the most expensive part for most people, though may be cheaper for you if you have the right zip code - is what people usually mean when they say 'car insurance' - and the reason it's mandatory is that most people don't have the means to pay the amount of damage they can potentially inflict with their cars; that's when insurance makes sense.
Besides, the hospital figures you're quoting seem very low; from my experience, in the US, a 3 hour emergency room visit - with no operation - will quickly run you in the $20k range. If you have to return for an operation, be prepared to multiply that. How else do you imagine healthcare spending is almost $8000/year per person in the US?
Interestingly, people not getting health insurance is one of the main reasons why getting insurance is so expensive in the first place: if you're healthy and willing/forced to gamble, there's a strong incentive not to insure yourself. This makes it more expensive to get insurance, forcing more people out of insurance.
Together with the complete bureaucratic nightmare that comes with the many types of insurance on offer - and the unwillingness to pay of the insurers (forcing even primary care physicians to hire people to just do the billing), makes the US system the most expensive by far for most people.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but here in the real world car insurance is not for your car, but for the damage you inflict on others. That insurance is there to keep you from spending the rest of your life paying off that debt you incurred because you hit a bicyclist and caused permanent injury.
The same goes for health insurance: if you hit a tree tomorrow with your car, break a few bones and rupture your kidney, you could very easily be looking at a 6-figure hospital bill.
... except that Rome had been very close to adecisively defeat by Carthage - a power, then, of comparable strength to Rome. If that would have happened, Rome would have likely become a footnote in history.
That was hardly the situation in the buildup to the Iraq war.
Actually, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands didn't even exist until 1581, and it did NOT include what is now Belgium (the which became the Spanish Netherlands in 1581).
You are right, though, that before that, the Burgundian Netherlands were both modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands (and parts of Northern France, where Flemish was spoken until the 20th century).
In the 13th century, though, most of Holland was sparsely inhabited (they were essentially flood-planes) and 'colonized' from the south.
That only happened near the end of the 17th century - well after the start of the decline of the Dutch empire. Earlier that century, the Dutch did defeat the English at sea - three times. So whatever advantage these guns gave, it wasn't very long-lasting.
The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, so maybe everybody else had caught up by the mid 17th century?
is this simply a spec that people expect ati and nvidia to conform to? or is this another api outside of CUDA and CAL, that wraps the two up so that a single api can execute code on all GPGPU's?
It's the latter: a single API + kernel language for any GPU. Because both NVIDIA and AMD are represented in the contributor list, it actually has a chance of being adopted.
The camera that was reviewed was the Canon 1Ds, an 11 megapixel camera that shoots 4064 x 2704 pixel images. The 1Ds mk III has 21 megapixels, and shoots 5616x3744, so the number of pixels in any given (linear) direction only went up by ~1.4 times.
That's isn't 'worlds beyond' by any stretch of the imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they didn't break the treaty. Iran is only required by the NPT to inform the IAEA 6 months before such a site goes operational. Iran insists that no nuclear enrichment had yet taken place at Qom. Despite being caught red-handed by the US for having the plant, once Iran publicly confirmed its existence they informed the IAEA that they would soon be enriching from there in the future. Like I said, they broke their word, not the treaty.
Sure, but accepting that reasoning would mean accepting Iran's own definition of whether or not they're breaking the NPT.
I wasn't going for moral relativism, I was faulting the people who keep spouting that "Iran is irrational" because of religion. It isn't, and there are other parties more apocalypticly-minded than Iran is.
True, the danger in Iran isn't millenarianism. It's the fact that the people who are leading the various factions won't have anything to lose once they feel their power (and by extension their very lives) is at stake.
So far they haven't broken the treaty. Have they broken their word? Yes, by building the Qom facility when they told the IAEA they would announce any new developments.
By building a nuclear facility in secret they have broken the treaty. That's what the sanctions are about.
Iran is not stupid and not that crazy; they are rational and pragmatic.
The regime appears to be locked in a power struggle between the 'regular government' (for lack of a better term) and the Revolutionary Guard. Last week's on the media has a good analysis on how Iran has now become a dangerous place even for those who vocally support its policies because of this. Regimes that feel threatened in their existence are generally not known for the rationality of their actions.
Christian Zionists they do not believe they can "speed the coming of the apocalypse" by their actions
I'm not quite sure what you mean, but at best it smells of moral relativism stemming from a laziness to think or to get informed (I'm sure there's a term for that).
I guess they're staying in the NPT so that their facility in Bushehr can be legitimately maintained by Russia. What Russia gains from this isn't very clear to me, though.
Iran is a ratified signatory to the Nuclear Non-Profileration Treaty, so: they certainly don't have the right to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear facilities except with IAEA oversight. Iran's nuclear activity is pretty clearly in contravention of this (they built a nuclear facility in secret near Qom, for example), and there are now several UN sanctions in force against Iran because of this.
Is it 'Western hubris' to demand that a country abide by treaties it ratified? Especially a treaty on a matter as important as nuclear armament...
The reason the West is so hostile to the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that the only peaceful doctrine nuclear weapons allow, MAD, assumes rational actors on all sides. In Iran that rationality might well be subservient to theology.
It heats the coolants at the power station. But maybe your power station uses that heat to heat cities, like in some cold places in Europe.
Take a look at /sys/devices/system/cpu: it has information about cpu topology, cpu hot-swap, cache sizes and layout across cores, current power state, etc.
It's all there, in an architecture-independent way in /sys/devices.
They don't have any obligations outside the US whatsoever, of course. Until they want to do business in the biggest economy of the world. Then they have to play by their rules.
I really don't understand how this is so hard to fathom - the biggest market in the world is not something a business like Oracle can ignore, even if they share your misguided xenophobia.
BTW, movie industries sell regionally because they can make more that way, not less.
You don't seem to understand the difference between financial modeling and financial transactions.
Apparently your dumb ignorant ass missed the part where square roots of dollar amounts were taken, which clearly points towards some kind of random walk diffusional modeling which has nothing to do with financial transactions and pennies.
If you would have been really clever, you would have noted that what he wanted (complex values for dollars) is mathematically the same as asking for imaginary negative time. The GGP should have been talking about logarithmic dollars to begin with to just avoid this whole issue. It's the only quantity where such quantities make sense.
You're completely right, though, in asserting that distributed computing clients don't need numerical accuracy per se. Getting an estimate of the size of phase space is often more than enough - it's what makes simulation different from single-point energy evaluations, it's exactly what makes CPU time useful for scientific applications.
I'd still advise anybody against working with you, or for you, for the sole reason that the pedantry you're bringing forward in your arguments would seem to make you a very poor manager of actual people. There's an aggression there that is simply not professional.
If you're running one of the most popular distributed computing clients out there, you're actually running some of my floating point work, mr. Troll.
If you'd looked at GPs post it'd be obvious that he's talking about taking square roots of dollar amounts, which no financial transaction software should ever do, so doubles are perfectly appropriate here, and probably overkill.
That'll be a problem if you ever have to handle extremally large transactions. Doubles round. Finance guys really hate it when their cents go missing.
Note that he's using doubles. 'Extremely large' here would be bigger than $10^15. If he's in Zimbabwe, or his company has transactions two orders of magnitude bigger than the GDP of the EU, there may be a few dollars lost in rounding. But anything less than that should be safe.
Hardly. Considering SCO still owes Novell, and that this ruling only overturns a summary judgement, doesn't make Novell's copyright claim much weaker.
This case is not about end-users, but about whether SCO even has standing to begin to sue Linux end-users. Which it doesn't (the nature of their copyright deal with Novell was pretty clear, but apparently not enough for a summary judgement).
In the very unlikely event that SCO wins this case, big end-users like IBM may again have to begin to worry about defending against SCO's bizarre claims.
Until then, this case has about as much impact on Linux users as one of the many claims against Apple, Microsoft or Sun have on their respective products' end users.
That's true, and it will make a big difference for some applications, but once the problem set fits in cache (and for many applications it already does) you won't get any faster.
The truly interesting thing, though, is that CPUs will look more like GPUs when there's many of them. My prediction would be that the distinction between cores will get fuzzier and CPUs and GPUs will be integrated into devices that can reconfigure themselves into a massive number of very simple cores (like a GPU), or a smaller number of superscalar traditional CPU cores.
The relative complexity of instruction decoding will get smaller and smaller as the number of transistors increases, so reconfiguring CPUs like that will get cheaper and cheaper.
Multicore CPUs are more about what CPU designers can deliver than about what people can actually use.
Because the limiting factors in single-cpu performance have been memory latency and instruction-level parallelism for the last half decade, there has been very little progress in single-core cpu performance over that period of time.
Both these problems won't find a solution any time soon, so don't expect the cores of your 64-core CPU of 2015 to be much faster than the cores of today.
Not just wikipedia, but also Intel itself: http://www.intel.com/products/processor/atom/specifications.htm
Very strange.. are you sure it's not an Atom 230?
True: calling a lot isn't too expensive in the US: it's calling a little that's (relatively) expensive. The last time I checked the cheapest plans were around $30 a month.
In Europe I've had plans for about $15 a month that allow me to call for about 250 minutes (counted in seconds, so a 15 second call is counted as a quarter minute) in the country, or more than an hour to anywhere in Europe or North America. AFAIK There's nothing comparable in the US.
I thought it sucked too, in the beginning, but the upside is the cell phone has a normal telephone number with a real area code.
Calling somebody on a cell phone costs the same as calling somebody on a land line, so the cell phone carriers can't do the scam they're pulling off in Europe, where calling a cell phone in a different country is an order of magnitude more expensive than calling a landline in that same country.
I was happy to pay to receive calls because of that (the per-minute rate is pretty low).
The point still stands; 10^26 unknown variables are really not to be argued with, and as a century of physics has shown us, are nothing to be afraid of~.
Your premise -- the one about about enough knowledge leading to a deterministic outcome of any system -- is inherently so impractical that it is unworkable: there is no system we know of that is so completely cut off from the rest of the universe that we know it to be isolated and describable completely without influence of the outside world's microstate - i.e. we need the rest of the universe's microstate to deterministically predict its path in phase space: something that no computer smaller than the universe itself is able to describe. This is true in the 'macro' world (a coin toss is straddling that border you artificially erected) as it is in the 'micro' world.
That is 20th century physics in a nutshell for you, and it's time to embrace it~.
BTW We certainly do know enough about quantum physics to rule out the 'hidden variables' model you seem to be proposing; look up the Alain Aspect experiments if you will.
and, PS you're right about computers generating pseudo-random numbers: most algorithms that use random numbers have such voracious apetites for them that generating them efficiently becomes an issue, and the only way to do that is through fairly simple algorithms (algorithms being the key word here) that are inherently pseudo-random: there's simply no time to wait for thermal/quantum noise to make its way up the observable orders of magnitude.
Now, if you'll excuse me, it's friday night and I just had a lovely bottle of wine; good night.
So in effect the situation in Sweden is now like in the US, then?
The people sued by the RIAA must have had their identities revealed to the RIAA by the ISP, right?
The mandatory part - the most expensive part for most people, though may be cheaper for you if you have the right zip code - is what people usually mean when they say 'car insurance' - and the reason it's mandatory is that most people don't have the means to pay the amount of damage they can potentially inflict with their cars; that's when insurance makes sense.
Besides, the hospital figures you're quoting seem very low; from my experience, in the US, a 3 hour emergency room visit - with no operation - will quickly run you in the $20k range. If you have to return for an operation, be prepared to multiply that. How else do you imagine healthcare spending is almost $8000/year per person in the US?
Interestingly, people not getting health insurance is one of the main reasons why getting insurance is so expensive in the first place: if you're healthy and willing/forced to gamble, there's a strong incentive not to insure yourself. This makes it more expensive to get insurance, forcing more people out of insurance.
Together with the complete bureaucratic nightmare that comes with the many types of insurance on offer - and the unwillingness to pay of the insurers (forcing even primary care physicians to hire people to just do the billing), makes the US system the most expensive by far for most people.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but here in the real world car insurance is not for your car, but for the damage you inflict on others. That insurance is there to keep you from spending the rest of your life paying off that debt you incurred because you hit a bicyclist and caused permanent injury.
The same goes for health insurance: if you hit a tree tomorrow with your car, break a few bones and rupture your kidney, you could very easily be looking at a 6-figure hospital bill.
... except that Rome had been very close to adecisively defeat by Carthage - a power, then, of comparable strength to Rome. If that would have happened, Rome would have likely become a footnote in history.
That was hardly the situation in the buildup to the Iraq war.
Actually, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands didn't even exist until 1581, and it did NOT include what is now Belgium (the which became the Spanish Netherlands in 1581).
You are right, though, that before that, the Burgundian Netherlands were both modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands (and parts of Northern France, where Flemish was spoken until the 20th century).
In the 13th century, though, most of Holland was sparsely inhabited (they were essentially flood-planes) and 'colonized' from the south.
That only happened near the end of the 17th century - well after the start of the decline of the Dutch empire. Earlier that century, the Dutch did defeat the English at sea - three times.
So whatever advantage these guns gave, it wasn't very long-lasting.
The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, so maybe everybody else had caught up by the mid 17th century?
is this simply a spec that people expect ati and nvidia to conform to? or is this another api outside of CUDA and CAL, that wraps the two up so that a single api can execute code on all GPGPU's?
It's the latter: a single API + kernel language for any GPU. Because both NVIDIA and AMD are represented in the contributor list, it actually has a chance of being adopted.
Hardly.
The camera that was reviewed was the Canon 1Ds, an 11 megapixel camera that shoots 4064 x 2704 pixel images. The 1Ds mk III has 21 megapixels, and shoots 5616x3744, so the number of pixels in any given (linear) direction only went up by ~1.4 times.
That's isn't 'worlds beyond' by any stretch of the imagination.