Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Not necessarily.
A lot of the "rigid thinking" I ran across from youngsters
related to basic assumptions about sockets and Unix.
Alternate methods, such as completion queues, were
'wrong'. The boomers who remembered when sockets
and TCP/IP were new-fangled proposals treated
completion queues as just one more new-fangled
proposal and figured out how to use them.
Hypertransport could probably be used for inter-processor
communication, if you had processors that didn't share
their memory but were in the same case.
The key is that it is very fast, switchable, but can't
cover great distances or deal with lots of addresses.
It would be important for things like very fast NICs
that the old PCI bus just can't keep up with.
So if you want a Beowolf cluster communicating
with 10 GigE NICs then hypertransport will help.
But to really work well at those rates the applications
have to forget the sockets interface totally and
embrace direct data placement (RDMA).
I wouldn't expect real benefits from
something like hypertransport to be visible
to desktop machine users anytime soon.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a good idea,
just that its an enabler that needs lots of
follow up steps.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, you can have old fuddy duddies who don't learn.
But I've run across far more "rigid thinking" from
"youngsters" than from experienced baby-boomers.
Good engineers with decades of experience have seen many ways to do things, remember when all of these ideas
were new, and are willing to try new ideas quickly.
Bad engineers aren't worth hiring no matter what their
age or whether they are "cheap".
So fundamentally, any engineer who stopped learning when they left college should not be hired or retained. Even if they left college last year.
An engineer who has been learning for 10-30 years obviously
is going to be a better buy than an engineer of the same
raw skill who has only been learning for 5 years.
Products that are "Unix" pretty much have one of two characteristics:
1. Built from a cut of the original Unix code base.
2. Pass the Single Unix Specification (1170) or a newer incarnation.
As far as I know, MacOS X qualifies under neither standard.
1) Mac OS X is a GUI wrapper and some application
libraries wrapped around BSD and a kernel. Both of the
latter having been previously referred to as "Unix".
1a) If Apple is guilty of any deception it is in calling
Mac OS X "Mac OS", because it has very little to do with prior Operating systems called "Mac OS". But then, that's
a good thing.
1b) It is a very nice wrapper.
2) Unix existed before the Single Unix Specification.
Is it now incorrect to refer to the OS that Kernighan
and Ritchie worked on as "Unix"?
You cannot use a trademark to end the legitimate
use of a term. This is not a "kleenex" or "escalator"
issue. The term "Unix" was in use before the Single
Unix Specification existed. The Open Group can't
change the meaning of the term ex post facto.
If Apple were advertising that they complied with the
Single Unix Specification without paying the Open Group
then they would have a complaint. The Open Group
has to convince Apple that doing so would be of
value to Apple.
Of course Apple may have this silly idea that they
don't need to recruit developers who are going to treat their box as a generic Unix system. For one thing,
they seem to show up pretty spontaneously, as
can be noted by the amount of open source projects
that have been ported to Darwin.
One slight little detail you've overlooked here...
The roads are not free. You pay for them with
gasoline taxes and/or tolls.
You might be able to make a case for
the communications infrastructure being a natural
monopoly that could be regulated.
Oh wait, we tried that already...
Besides if the Internet were a public resource it
wouldn't take long for the John Ashcrofts of the
world to try to eliminate all the "waste" from it.
Having worked with many different pre-Linux Unixes,
Darwin feels very much like Unix to me.
The biggest difference is that X is not the default
display, and the default desktop is not X based.
But X is an add-on to Unix. Many of the Unix systems
I worked on did not have it installed or routinely
activated.
There are differences. There are also differences
between BSD, Linux and any of the commercial
Unixes.
I'm not sure which company I like less anymore, Microsoft or SCO
That's easy.
Microsoft may be an arrogant monopolist. But at least they
produce products that are useful for some people. They also get their revenue from people paying to use those products.
Agreed. None of the classic purposes of trademarks apply.
Apple's labeling of Darwin as "Unix" is neither:
misleads consumers.
creates confusion with other products
impairs the ability of anyone else's product to be recognized.
Apple's use of the term "Unix" is clearly descriptive.
The Open Group is merely seeking testing fees.
If they have a complaint that Darwin somehow
deviates wildly from other "official" Unixes in a way
that discourages development of Unix applications
I'd love to hear it. As it stands, Darwin is the single
largest reminder to developers that Linux
is not Unix.
It would be extremely reasonable for retailers to insist that a government that wants them to collect taxes as their agent should supply the tax tables.
I thought the rhetoric here was supposed to be at least
somewhat technically informed.
Most of the cost in any lookup operation is in the
key field. Adding an extra returned field is practically
free.
The real challenge is the amount of data that must
be submitted to the the tax rate: i.e when it goes
beyond a postal code and gets into types of services.
But more to the point. The eRetailer is clearing a
payment for this purchase. The bank/credit card
obviously knows the legal address of their customer.
And they know the local layws, because they know
which law enforcement to use to ensure that you
pay them.
It's legitimate for retailers to insist that tax collection
be made simple and easy for them. It is not legitimate
to insist that they get an advantage over their competitors
who do collect taxes.
And if you're going to take the "all taxes are evil" troll
seriously, then this is a good thing because lax enforcement of a tax just delays the mass revolt
against it.
If EU citizens don't think they are getting enough value
for their VAT, they can vote for someone else in
their parliament.
Nobody has ever made a valid argument why a
person should be exempt from a VAT
or sales tax simply because they make their
purchase on-line. It has always been a question
of how much effort governments could reasonably
impose on merchants to calculate and impose the
tax on their behalf.
This remains true for US sales tax, which varies
not only state by state, but count-by-county
and city-by-city. And its not only the rates,
its which items are covered at what rate.
But it will happen eventually. In this case the
wonders of technology will eventually make even
the most complex tax code imaginable a simple
web service that can be queried. You certainly
can't claim to be lacking an Internet connection
if you're selling via the Internet, now can you?
AAC is acceptable to consumers because they
find the DRM restrictions do not interfere with their
normal use of purchased music, and the sound
quality at least matches other distribution methods.
Personally, I find the sound quality of 128 Kbit AAC
to be equivalent to 192 Kbit VBR MP3. But I still use the
latter format when I rip my CDs. AAC is only for material
that I bought that way. It sounds great, but I'll minimize
my exposure until I've seen several brands of portable
players with full AAC support.
It has always been the rule that parents had the
right to shield their children from certain material.
And I don't think you'll get much argument that
this is a good thing when applied to pre-teens.
That is why retail stores are not allowed to display
certain items for sale where they have no basis
to believe that they will only be seen by adults.
It is also why Cigarettes are behind the counter.
Clearly anyone who has a good-faith basis to believe
that an email address belongs to an adult should be
prosecuted merely because they were wrong.
But that would require actually knowing something
about your customer before sendig the email.
It would end 99.9% of spam.
I'll admit to thinking of "PNG" as "Patent Negating Graphic" format. Whatever technical advantages there may be have
never been apparent in my use.
PNGs and GIFs occupy a narrow range of graphics that
are not better handled by JPG or a structured drawing
format. In fact most things I have exported as PNG
were because of lack of a widely supported structured
drawing format. Whether PNGs hang-on, disappear
or replace GIFS is actually minor to whether the web
will ever embrace a structured drawing format.
The real issue here is not that emailing can be automated.
It's that an email server would accept mail without accurately logging the IP address of the other end,
or otherwise validating a traceable authorizing user.
That's an open relay.
Which should get them blacklisted
by lots of other email servers.
Under basic common law, you are not responsible
for having taken receipt of stolen property unless
you knew or should have known it was stolen.
I am not certain that the "Linux Community" is capable
of being "aware" of anything. I certainly do not know how
you would prove it. And the general skeptical reaction
to SCO's claims would strongly indicate that the Linux
Community does not consider the Linux code to be
a common repository for stolen code.
The common law procedure to follow when you determine
someone is the innocent recepient of property that was
stolen from you is to ask for its return.
Etiquette sugests that this be done politely. But I do not
believe that is a legal requirement. Instead you provide
proof of ownership, and under most cases the receient
is obligated to return the stolen property.
I am certain that 80 lines of Linux code could be replaced
in less than 80 minutes. I don't know which code is
involved, but in all likelihood it is a simple algorithm
that is implemented in similar ways in many Unix
variants.
Even if SCO is the legitimate owner of those lines of code,
what they are doing would be the equivalent of an author
who found out that another other had submitted their
story to an anthology sending letters to everyone who
bought the book demanding that they pay the real author
more money that they had paid for the book in the first place.
Anyone who has the CD can rip it themselves. That is also true for vinyl, but that's a bit more work, and some folks will pay for the convenience (either that or their vinyl
is already scratched).
I would think that replacing music that you've
misplaced somewhere over the years is much more common.
If I'm replacing an album I rememer fondly from my youth,
I already know that there are only three good tracks on it.
I'll buy those tracks, not the album.
If there's a new album from an artist I like, then all of the tracks are potentially great. That is unless the 30 second clip is really bad. Beside, if I'm a fan of an artist, I want to believe that all twelve/whatever tracks will be wonderful. And it would be just terrible if I skipped the one that turned out to be the big hit.
Track buying will be prevelant when people aren't sold
on the artist yet, just the song.
The name of the executable having an effect
on the behavior of the driver is a smoking gun.
What's the defense, "Oh, that's an optimization
interface that we forgot to document?"
It is the reviewer's fault, too, for being stupid.
Good restaurant critics make it a point to dine anonymously so that they will receive the same meal
and service as a regular customer would. A test program
that does not conceal its identity is asking to be tricked.
What will be interesting to watch over time is how
Album sales hold up, and whether it is an across
the board ratio.
With any luck, artists who supply an album worth
buying will see most of their tracks actually bought,
with the drop-off hitting those that filled their album
with junk just to have a complete "album".
It could also mean that artists will release more singles
when they are ready, instead of hording them until
they have a complete album.
In either case, more consumer choice should result
in better music in the long run.
There was at least one major consumer flaw with 4.0.0.
Unless you were expert enough to manually configure
the firewall yourself, offering to share your music
within your home would force you to share with
the entire world.
Believe it or not, some people would prefer to honor
the copyrights of their favorite artists.
Forcing all file formats to be openly-licensed could
indeed have the effect of discouraging innovation
in efficient/robust storage formats.
But there is a distinction between the content
that the user owns and the innovative way it is stored.
Database vendors have long recognized the need of
users to unload their data without loss of any
semantics. Document editors need to recognize
this same need.
But there is no need for a law. If the federal government
merely made this a requirement for any software that
edited their documents the market (even MS)
would have to adjust quickly.
Frankly, I do not understand why the bean-counters did
not figure out decades ago that allowing Intellectual
Property that they value at millions of dollars to be
stored in a Proprietary format is a very bad idea.
An optimization that is overly specific may or may not be a good thing. Shading code that is good enough for games may optimize games, but be bad if falsely applied to a serious 3D modelling application.
Whether or not it wise, it is not cheating. Cheating is when you write code for the sole purpose of improving your benchmark.
I have heard no evidence that NVidia did anything that was not a valid optimization for at least some applications. I would not buy a card based solely on its optimizations for gameplay, but then I probably won't pay extra for a video card as opposed to what was built-in.
So NVidia's optimization may have been smart marketing,
whether or not they were good long-term engineering.
An excellent test will expose solutions that are overly optimized for certain conditions. Accusations of cheating should be reserved for clear attempts to rig scores.
Either way, FutureMark looks bad here. Either they caught someone trying to rig scores and backed off under a threat, or they made an unfounded accusation. Neither is flattering for someone who claims to be an impartial tester.
Did you test this with 4.0.1? I believe that 4.0.1 will
only connect to a Rendezvous advertised service.
Which means you'll have to set up a transparent
bridge, complete with proxy arping, not just
a single tunneled connection.
A far simpler method is to simply to export
your MP3s via your web server.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily.
A lot of the "rigid thinking" I ran across from youngsters related to basic assumptions about sockets and Unix.
Alternate methods, such as completion queues, were 'wrong'. The boomers who remembered when sockets and TCP/IP were new-fangled proposals treated completion queues as just one more new-fangled proposal and figured out how to use them.
Hypertransport could probably be used for inter-processor communication, if you had processors that didn't share their memory but were in the same case.
The key is that it is very fast, switchable, but can't cover great distances or deal with lots of addresses.
It would be important for things like very fast NICs that the old PCI bus just can't keep up with.
So if you want a Beowolf cluster communicating with 10 GigE NICs then hypertransport will help. But to really work well at those rates the applications have to forget the sockets interface totally and embrace direct data placement (RDMA).
I wouldn't expect real benefits from something like hypertransport to be visible to desktop machine users anytime soon. That doesn't mean that it isn't a good idea, just that its an enabler that needs lots of follow up steps.
Yes, you can have old fuddy duddies who don't learn.
But I've run across far more "rigid thinking" from "youngsters" than from experienced baby-boomers. Good engineers with decades of experience have seen many ways to do things, remember when all of these ideas were new, and are willing to try new ideas quickly.
Bad engineers aren't worth hiring no matter what their age or whether they are "cheap".
So fundamentally, any engineer who stopped learning when they left college should not be hired or retained. Even if they left college last year. An engineer who has been learning for 10-30 years obviously is going to be a better buy than an engineer of the same raw skill who has only been learning for 5 years.
1) Mac OS X is a GUI wrapper and some application libraries wrapped around BSD and a kernel. Both of the latter having been previously referred to as "Unix".
1a) If Apple is guilty of any deception it is in calling Mac OS X "Mac OS", because it has very little to do with prior Operating systems called "Mac OS". But then, that's a good thing.
1b) It is a very nice wrapper.
2) Unix existed before the Single Unix Specification.
Is it now incorrect to refer to the OS that Kernighan and Ritchie worked on as "Unix"?
You cannot use a trademark to end the legitimate use of a term. This is not a "kleenex" or "escalator" issue. The term "Unix" was in use before the Single Unix Specification existed. The Open Group can't change the meaning of the term ex post facto.
If Apple were advertising that they complied with the Single Unix Specification without paying the Open Group then they would have a complaint. The Open Group has to convince Apple that doing so would be of value to Apple.
Of course Apple may have this silly idea that they don't need to recruit developers who are going to treat their box as a generic Unix system. For one thing, they seem to show up pretty spontaneously, as can be noted by the amount of open source projects that have been ported to Darwin.
One slight little detail you've overlooked here...
The roads are not free. You pay for them with gasoline taxes and/or tolls.
You might be able to make a case for the communications infrastructure being a natural monopoly that could be regulated. Oh wait, we tried that already...
Besides if the Internet were a public resource it wouldn't take long for the John Ashcrofts of the world to try to eliminate all the "waste" from it.
Having worked with many different pre-Linux Unixes, Darwin feels very much like Unix to me.
The biggest difference is that X is not the default display, and the default desktop is not X based. But X is an add-on to Unix. Many of the Unix systems I worked on did not have it installed or routinely activated.
There are differences. There are also differences between BSD, Linux and any of the commercial Unixes.
Unlike the Patriot Act, this proposal only allows temporary secrecy.
That's a vital constraint against government abuse.
If they want to secretly investigate you they have to claim you're a terrorist, and not just a spammer.
I just hope it doesn't inspire terrorist to start sending SPAM in order to get the better terms.
That's easy.
Microsoft may be an arrogant monopolist. But at least they produce products that are useful for some people. They also get their revenue from people paying to use those products.
Compare that with SCO's apparent "business plan".
Agreed. None of the classic purposes of trademarks apply.
Apple's labeling of Darwin as "Unix" is neither:
Apple's use of the term "Unix" is clearly descriptive. The Open Group is merely seeking testing fees.
If they have a complaint that Darwin somehow deviates wildly from other "official" Unixes in a way that discourages development of Unix applications I'd love to hear it. As it stands, Darwin is the single largest reminder to developers that Linux is not Unix.
It would be extremely reasonable for retailers to insist
that a government that wants them to collect taxes
as their agent should supply the tax tables.
I thought the rhetoric here was supposed to be at least somewhat technically informed.
Most of the cost in any lookup operation is in the key field. Adding an extra returned field is practically free.
The real challenge is the amount of data that must be submitted to the the tax rate: i.e when it goes beyond a postal code and gets into types of services.
But more to the point. The eRetailer is clearing a payment for this purchase. The bank/credit card obviously knows the legal address of their customer. And they know the local layws, because they know which law enforcement to use to ensure that you pay them.
It's legitimate for retailers to insist that tax collection be made simple and easy for them. It is not legitimate to insist that they get an advantage over their competitors who do collect taxes.
And if you're going to take the "all taxes are evil" troll seriously, then this is a good thing because lax enforcement of a tax just delays the mass revolt against it.
If EU citizens don't think they are getting enough value for their VAT, they can vote for someone else in their parliament.
Nobody has ever made a valid argument why a person should be exempt from a VAT or sales tax simply because they make their purchase on-line. It has always been a question of how much effort governments could reasonably impose on merchants to calculate and impose the tax on their behalf.
This remains true for US sales tax, which varies not only state by state, but count-by-county and city-by-city. And its not only the rates, its which items are covered at what rate.
But it will happen eventually. In this case the wonders of technology will eventually make even the most complex tax code imaginable a simple web service that can be queried. You certainly can't claim to be lacking an Internet connection if you're selling via the Internet, now can you?
AAC is used by distributors for its DRM features.
AAC is acceptable to consumers because they find the DRM restrictions do not interfere with their normal use of purchased music, and the sound quality at least matches other distribution methods.
Personally, I find the sound quality of 128 Kbit AAC to be equivalent to 192 Kbit VBR MP3. But I still use the latter format when I rip my CDs. AAC is only for material that I bought that way. It sounds great, but I'll minimize my exposure until I've seen several brands of portable players with full AAC support.
It has always been the rule that parents had the right to shield their children from certain material. And I don't think you'll get much argument that this is a good thing when applied to pre-teens.
That is why retail stores are not allowed to display certain items for sale where they have no basis to believe that they will only be seen by adults.
It is also why Cigarettes are behind the counter.
Clearly anyone who has a good-faith basis to believe that an email address belongs to an adult should be prosecuted merely because they were wrong.
But that would require actually knowing something about your customer before sendig the email. It would end 99.9% of spam.
It would depend on how the index was formed, and whether the site made any statements encouraging its use.
Without that, the host of an index should be entitled to the most favorable interpretation of its existence.
So obviously he created this index to help the RIAA determine who was hosting illegal music on campus. They should have thanked him, not sued.
I'll admit to thinking of "PNG" as "Patent Negating Graphic" format. Whatever technical advantages there may be have never been apparent in my use.
PNGs and GIFs occupy a narrow range of graphics that are not better handled by JPG or a structured drawing format. In fact most things I have exported as PNG were because of lack of a widely supported structured drawing format. Whether PNGs hang-on, disappear or replace GIFS is actually minor to whether the web will ever embrace a structured drawing format.
The real issue here is not that emailing can be automated. It's that an email server would accept mail without accurately logging the IP address of the other end, or otherwise validating a traceable authorizing user.
That's an open relay.
Which should get them blacklisted by lots of other email servers.
Maybe I'm missing something here.
Under basic common law, you are not responsible for having taken receipt of stolen property unless you knew or should have known it was stolen.
I am not certain that the "Linux Community" is capable of being "aware" of anything. I certainly do not know how you would prove it. And the general skeptical reaction to SCO's claims would strongly indicate that the Linux Community does not consider the Linux code to be a common repository for stolen code.
The common law procedure to follow when you determine someone is the innocent recepient of property that was stolen from you is to ask for its return.
Etiquette sugests that this be done politely. But I do not believe that is a legal requirement. Instead you provide proof of ownership, and under most cases the receient is obligated to return the stolen property.
I am certain that 80 lines of Linux code could be replaced in less than 80 minutes. I don't know which code is involved, but in all likelihood it is a simple algorithm that is implemented in similar ways in many Unix variants.
Even if SCO is the legitimate owner of those lines of code, what they are doing would be the equivalent of an author who found out that another other had submitted their story to an anthology sending letters to everyone who bought the book demanding that they pay the real author more money that they had paid for the book in the first place.
Anyone who has the CD can rip it themselves. That is also true for vinyl, but that's a bit more work, and some folks will pay for the convenience (either that or their vinyl is already scratched).
I would think that replacing music that you've misplaced somewhere over the years is much more common.
If I'm replacing an album I rememer fondly from my youth, I already know that there are only three good tracks on it. I'll buy those tracks, not the album.
If there's a new album from an artist I like, then all of the tracks are potentially great. That is unless the 30 second clip is really bad. Beside, if I'm a fan of an artist, I want to believe that all twelve/whatever tracks will be wonderful. And it would be just terrible if I skipped the one that turned out to be the big hit.
Track buying will be prevelant when people aren't sold on the artist yet, just the song.
Two Points
What will be interesting to watch over time is how Album sales hold up, and whether it is an across the board ratio.
With any luck, artists who supply an album worth buying will see most of their tracks actually bought, with the drop-off hitting those that filled their album with junk just to have a complete "album".
It could also mean that artists will release more singles when they are ready, instead of hording them until they have a complete album.
In either case, more consumer choice should result in better music in the long run.
There was at least one major consumer flaw with 4.0.0.
Unless you were expert enough to manually configure the firewall yourself, offering to share your music within your home would force you to share with the entire world.
Believe it or not, some people would prefer to honor the copyrights of their favorite artists.
Forcing all file formats to be openly-licensed could indeed have the effect of discouraging innovation in efficient/robust storage formats.
But there is a distinction between the content that the user owns and the innovative way it is stored.
Database vendors have long recognized the need of users to unload their data without loss of any semantics. Document editors need to recognize this same need.
But there is no need for a law. If the federal government merely made this a requirement for any software that edited their documents the market (even MS) would have to adjust quickly.
Frankly, I do not understand why the bean-counters did not figure out decades ago that allowing Intellectual Property that they value at millions of dollars to be stored in a Proprietary format is a very bad idea.
Imprudent, to be more precise.
An optimization that is overly specific may or may not be a good thing. Shading code that is good enough for games may optimize games, but be bad if falsely applied to a serious 3D modelling application.
Whether or not it wise, it is not cheating. Cheating is when you write code for the sole purpose of improving your benchmark.
I have heard no evidence that NVidia did anything that was not a valid optimization for at least some applications. I would not buy a card based solely on its optimizations for gameplay, but then I probably won't pay extra for a video card as opposed to what was built-in.
So NVidia's optimization may have been smart marketing, whether or not they were good long-term engineering. An excellent test will expose solutions that are overly optimized for certain conditions. Accusations of cheating should be reserved for clear attempts to rig scores.
Either way, FutureMark looks bad here. Either they caught someone trying to rig scores and backed off under a threat, or they made an unfounded accusation. Neither is flattering for someone who claims to be an impartial tester.
Did you test this with 4.0.1? I believe that 4.0.1 will only connect to a Rendezvous advertised service. Which means you'll have to set up a transparent bridge, complete with proxy arping, not just a single tunneled connection. A far simpler method is to simply to export your MP3s via your web server.