After all, how do you know that he's gay or that he isn't a masochist? I question the assumptions that underly your suggested method of punishment.
Now coating various parts of his body in peanut butter and honey and strapping him to a fire ant hill and later letting a few dobermen loose, that could be interesting.
Wherre I set on Google Text Ads and ads in general
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Why Do You Block Ads?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh, they aren't pretty compared to, say, a flower in a vase. But, bless their little hearts, they just sit there. They don't blink. They don't flash. They don't scroll by the top of the screen. They don't periodically hop in front of the content I'm trying to read. They don't even cycle through a handful of images, updating every couple seconds. They just sit there and get noticed when I feel like noticing them.
And that, my friends, is beautiful.
I've actually clicked on some Google Ads purposefully. But I generally won't click on a banner except by accident. Sites that affront me visually like the Vegas Strip are less likely to get a return visit from me.
You see, I don't watch TV regularly. I haven't for a decade or so. Now, when I go to restaurants, when there's a TV on somewhere, my eyes will drift to it: "Moving picture box funny!::blankfaced drool::" It could be golf of all things. My ability to filter out noisy moving sh*t has gone away. So, if I end up at a website with even just a couple animated ads around the edges, I have a supremely hard time reading the article of interest before I've nuked all the ads. That includes that scrolling headline marquee so many news sites seem to love. (I love the Nuke Anything extension to Firefox.)
So maybe it's just super common among the handful of us that don't numb ourselves on the boob tube every night that really get annoyed by ads. Dunno.
I do know I usually don't bother with the newspaper or most magazines (and get annoyed playing "find the article" in the latter when I do), and I still don't turn on TV. (Who wants to see the same feminine hygene product commercial 3 times in a single commercial break? You do? Ok, I prescribe watching TBS and UPN for the rest of your days.) What magazines I do subscribe to (Mother Jones and Pontiac Enthusiast) have low ad content of high relevance. They get my renewals year upon year. (Heck, I would've never learned of ZZPerformance if it weren't for a tasteful ad in Pontiac Enthusiast, and they've gotten a few thousand $$ from me over the years.)
Ditto with websites. I return to the ones that don't assault me like a gaggle of epileptic clowns, and make my visit worth my while. Google text ads are a tool to enable that, and that my friends is beautiful.
JPEG has a 12-bit mode. It's just not widely supported.
Re:What I want to know: Can I paint circles in it?
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First Look at GIMP 2.4
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· Score: 1
The best way I've found is to make a perfect circular selection (see other replies), do whatever you need to do (e.g. selection-to-path so you can stroke it), and then Shrink or Grow the selection to get the next circle. You have really precise control over how far apart each band of selection is, since you specify # of pixels in the shrink/grow dialog.
Re:What I want to know: Can I paint circles in it?
on
First Look at GIMP 2.4
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· Score: 1
Yeah, the selection stuff kinda is wonky. One thing worth pointing out: The modifiers you hold when you click set the selection mode (combine, replace, subtract, intersect). You can then let those modifier keys go and press different modifiers to get things like "circle centered on initial point," etc. Not the greatest UI, but it does work.
As for to get concentric circles, I recommend dragging a couple ruler guides to form a cross-hair that indicates the common center for all the circles. If you click close to this center point, I'm pretty sure GIMP will snap you to it, which should simplify things quite a bit for you.
Anyone have the patent numbers handy? None of the articles I clicked on bothered to actually say which patents were under dispute, only that there are two involved here.
Something tells me most people will stick with GPL v2, rather than migrate the license to GPL v3 or accept GPL v3-licensed patches into their core. You will probably find FSF packages will go to GPL v3, and where it's a problem people will fork their last GPL v2 release.
You might say "Open software interprets zealotry as damage and routes around it.":-) Why else do we have so much software under the GPL, BSD and Artistic licenses? It's not like all open and/or free software is GPL.
Besides, isn't it rather irrelevant? Ok, suppose editing the Makefile to get program X to build constitutes modification, and GPL v3 requires you to post your modifications. Big deal. You'd have a link on your website to the modified Makefile. How edifying. *snort*
I personally don't mind that GPL v2 allows companies and websites to take my GPL'd code, make proprietary modifications, and then deploy that code on their servers without sharing the modifications. In a sense, it's an awful lot like the First Sale doctrine, although that space is already confusing enough wrt. to software. The real point is, I offer my software to people to use and modify as they see fit. If they want to start distributing a modified version, though, they need to pony up the changes. That seems fair. If they just want to use it to run their site, I don't mind that GPL v2 doesn't require them to share the changes.
Incidentally, if you have GPL v2 Java applets, JavaScript, or other code that gets downloaded by your web browser, that is distribution in my opinion. But, then, "View Source..." lets you get at most of that. (Just not the Java applets.)
Yes and no. Apple machines offer a higher quality experience, but mostly because the number of configurations is tightly controlled. Thus, Apple avoids many hardware quirks and incompatibilities and can spend there effort on a narrower set of drivers. If they open themselves to the hairy world of PC hardware, they open themselves to that land of mix-match hardware and all the instability it brings.
Not quite perpetual motion. It needs power input that's released from the running engine, and that power comes from the gasoline, not the hydrogen. That's an awful lot like a supercharger which gives you more horsepower, but requires horsepower to drive it. The difference is, the 8-10HP required to drive the supercharger is dwarfed by the 40-50HP the engine makes with all that extra air in there. (These numbers are approximate, based on some calculations a friend of mine did for the supercharger on my car.) I imagine it's a similar power balance for this device.
And that's the point. Adding straight up oxygen and hydrogen into the intake apparently makes the resulting combustion more efficient. This shifts the stochiometric ratio the engine operates at, it sounds like, such that more of the fuel gets burned.
There are two fuel/air ratios that matter for gasoline engines: The air/fuel ratio when your cruising is the stochiometric ratio (about 14.6:1), and the "max burn" ratio (forget the name for it, but around 12:1). The former ratio is the mixture where all (or nearly all) of gasoline gets burned, and the latter is the one in which all the oxygen gets consumed (leaving some fuel unburned). Obviously, a properly functioning car would only run near 12:1 during heavy acceleration.
I imagine throwing oxygen and hydrogen in the mix during periods of acceleration, rather than merely richening up the mixture would have very positive effects on fuel economy, since you really are burning nearly every bit of gas you put in there.
You're right that cracking water into H2 and O2 doesn't give you enough of either that you can make it self sustaining. This system still could actually work because you're getting continuous energy input from an outside source.
You're forgetting that the line fill comes "critical word first" on many systems. Once the first word arrives (e.g. the word that the CPU tried to access and which caused a cache miss), the CPU can unstall and proceed as the rest of the cache line arrives in the background. That's why there's such a quick drop off in marginal benefit as you make your bus wider.
I know C99 added this, but I have a codebase that I've been maintaining since before C99. Also, I work with platforms that are still C89, not C99. My main project is an Intellivision emulator that currently ports to Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, and Windows. I intend to port it to a DSP also. I'm pretty sure it'll run just about anywhere with some effort. (There once was a MacOS 9 port.)
It would be a good idea to use inttypes.h if it's available. I just haven't updated my code. One of these days I'll learn autoconf.
The data type "long" is probably the most useless C data-type these days, having been equal in size to int for so long. In my own code, I tend to have a header with typedefs defining "int_8", "int_16", "int_32" etc. (and unsigned variants) for when the width matters, and I use bare "int" everywhere else.
Code written with "long" everywhere was probably written back in the days when sizeof(int) might be 2. (Or written by someone who coded quite a bit during that era...)
You actually pass the point of diminishing returns at a size somewhat smaller than a cache line typically unless you can deeply pipeline commands. In a lot of cases, latency matters most, so that limits the chip's ability to pipeline commands. At some point going wider on your external bus is a waste. It complicates too many things at the board level also.
That's why you see processors with L2 line sizes in the 64-byte to 128-byte range, but external busses in the 64-bit to 128-bit range--a ratio that ranges from 4:1 to 16:1 depending on the exact combination.
Errr... memory footprint doesn't double. Only the size of a pointer doubles in the currently accepted ABIs. So, your memory footprint increases a little but not dramatically. A byte's a byte. GIFs, JPEGs, MP3s, 3-D textures, Word documents... they all take up the same amount of space on a 64-bit machine as they do on a 32-bit machine.
The main advantage of 64 bits is large addressable space. If your working set is below 2GB, you won't benefit from that. The main advantage of x86-64 is the larger addressable register file, and that's completely separate of its 64-bit address space.
People keep mentioning register renaming, and that helps to a point. Mainly it enables out-of-order instruction issue and retirement. The problem is, many functions need more than 8 values "live" simultaneously. Any that do not fit in registers get spilled to the stack. Once on the stack, these values become memory operands as opposed to register operands.
Memory operands are not candidates for register renaming, typically. Thus, code with a large number of "temporaries" will benefit greatly from the increased number of explicit registers. Boring "control code" won't notice much of a difference. Tight compute loops and large, complex functions will.
Unfortunately, it'll be hard to gauge what the impact is, because in parallel we've doubled the size of pointers, thus increasing the memory footprint of the application. Grumble, grumble. That will work against performance.
Technically the 64-bit Xeons are EM64T, which isn't precisely x86-64, but close enough. (Just like a 32-bit Athlon isn't precisely the same as a Pentium 4, even at the instruction set level, but it's close enough to run nearly all the same code.)
I guess the hair we're splitting is this: I think of the code as "FooBar v1.03", and I can decide to change license I offer it under from GPL to Whatever. What you're saying is that "FooBar v1.03 (GPL)" and "FooBar v1.03 (Whatever)" are different packages and so I haven't changed the license so much as introduced a new package. In either way of phrasing it, the GPL version doesn't go away, and on that point I think we violently agree.
If license A lets you do "X but not Y" and license B lets you to "Y but not X", code offered under a dual license allows you to do "X or Y, but not both, depending on which license you accept." (When code gets offered under a dual license, the end users essentially get to pick which one they accept.
However, I think in many cases it would be difficult to enforce this - with free (beer) licences there is usually nothing stopping someone from "purchasing" more than one licence at the selling price (£0) and using both at the same time.
Depending on what X and Y are, you should still be able to enforce a single user with a single copy of the software from doing X and Y simultaneously. And if I were the author of the software, I might even implement such a restriction in the source code, and it would be against the license to remove the restriction.
One example might be a program that can either rip CDs or burn CDs. License A lets you rip but not burn, and license B lets you burn but not rip. (Admittedly a silly example, but at least it's easily explained.) Sure, you could keep two "copies" for essentially free, and use one for ripping and one for burning. What you're barred from doing is a direct CD-to-CD copy (say, if you have two drives).
Well, the RIAA managed to get something of a tax onto blank CD-R media (though not much of one here). Granted, it's only for media designated "Audio," and the "Data" stuff works just fine for audio in most cases, but it does provide a model. (In Canada, I believe there's no such distinction between "audio" and "data" CD-Rs for purpose of taxation.)
All you'd need to do is tax the big data pipes. That's it. That'd raise the cost of access to the Internet infrastructure, and those costs will get passed up the chain, eventually back to the consumer. It's just like how tollways and turnpikes ultimately raise the price of milk and veggies.
I can take the code as it exists today, not change a single line other than the comments which state the license, and re-release it as non-GPL code. How is that not retrospectively changing the license on that code? I can even dig up previous versions and re-release them under a different license.
I guess the point is, you can always relicense code, but that never removes from existence the previous versions. And so, any change in license tends to only increase the freedoms available to users.
Of course, that last point is not strictly true: If license A lets you do "X but not Y" and license B lets you to "Y but not X", code offered under a dual license allows you to do "X or Y, but not both, depending on which license you accept." (When code gets offered under a dual license, the end users essentially get to pick which one they accept. Only one license affects a given user at a time.) Adding a second license did not strictly increase the total freedom available to the user, but it did increase their choices among restrictions.
Sure you can, if you hold the copyrights to the code. The difference is, you can't remove from existence the older versions of the code or bar people from using those under the older license.
This is a minor but important point. If I want to take my GPL'd stuff private and proprietary, I can. Any GPL'd copies floating about are fully legit. But, if you want any features from newer versions, you're ponying up for the proprietary version. (Take a look at Aladdin vs. GPL Ghostscript for an example of this model in reverse.)
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After all, how do you know that he's gay or that he isn't a masochist? I question the assumptions that underly your suggested method of punishment.
Now coating various parts of his body in peanut butter and honey and strapping him to a fire ant hill and later letting a few dobermen loose, that could be interesting.
Oh, they aren't pretty compared to, say, a flower in a vase. But, bless their little hearts, they just sit there. They don't blink. They don't flash. They don't scroll by the top of the screen. They don't periodically hop in front of the content I'm trying to read. They don't even cycle through a handful of images, updating every couple seconds. They just sit there and get noticed when I feel like noticing them.
::blankfaced drool::" It could be golf of all things. My ability to filter out noisy moving sh*t has gone away. So, if I end up at a website with even just a couple animated ads around the edges, I have a supremely hard time reading the article of interest before I've nuked all the ads. That includes that scrolling headline marquee so many news sites seem to love. (I love the Nuke Anything extension to Firefox.)
And that, my friends, is beautiful.
I've actually clicked on some Google Ads purposefully. But I generally won't click on a banner except by accident. Sites that affront me visually like the Vegas Strip are less likely to get a return visit from me.
You see, I don't watch TV regularly. I haven't for a decade or so. Now, when I go to restaurants, when there's a TV on somewhere, my eyes will drift to it: "Moving picture box funny!
So maybe it's just super common among the handful of us that don't numb ourselves on the boob tube every night that really get annoyed by ads. Dunno.
I do know I usually don't bother with the newspaper or most magazines (and get annoyed playing "find the article" in the latter when I do), and I still don't turn on TV. (Who wants to see the same feminine hygene product commercial 3 times in a single commercial break? You do? Ok, I prescribe watching TBS and UPN for the rest of your days.) What magazines I do subscribe to (Mother Jones and Pontiac Enthusiast) have low ad content of high relevance. They get my renewals year upon year. (Heck, I would've never learned of ZZPerformance if it weren't for a tasteful ad in Pontiac Enthusiast, and they've gotten a few thousand $$ from me over the years.)
Ditto with websites. I return to the ones that don't assault me like a gaggle of epileptic clowns, and make my visit worth my while. Google text ads are a tool to enable that, and that my friends is beautiful.
--Joe
JPEG has a 12-bit mode. It's just not widely supported.
The best way I've found is to make a perfect circular selection (see other replies), do whatever you need to do (e.g. selection-to-path so you can stroke it), and then Shrink or Grow the selection to get the next circle. You have really precise control over how far apart each band of selection is, since you specify # of pixels in the shrink/grow dialog.
Yeah, the selection stuff kinda is wonky. One thing worth pointing out: The modifiers you hold when you click set the selection mode (combine, replace, subtract, intersect). You can then let those modifier keys go and press different modifiers to get things like "circle centered on initial point," etc. Not the greatest UI, but it does work.
As for to get concentric circles, I recommend dragging a couple ruler guides to form a cross-hair that indicates the common center for all the circles. If you click close to this center point, I'm pretty sure GIMP will snap you to it, which should simplify things quite a bit for you.
Anyone have the patent numbers handy? None of the articles I clicked on bothered to actually say which patents were under dispute, only that there are two involved here.
Something tells me most people will stick with GPL v2, rather than migrate the license to GPL v3 or accept GPL v3-licensed patches into their core. You will probably find FSF packages will go to GPL v3, and where it's a problem people will fork their last GPL v2 release.
:-) Why else do we have so much software under the GPL, BSD and Artistic licenses? It's not like all open and/or free software is GPL.
You might say "Open software interprets zealotry as damage and routes around it."
--Joe
Besides, isn't it rather irrelevant? Ok, suppose editing the Makefile to get program X to build constitutes modification, and GPL v3 requires you to post your modifications. Big deal. You'd have a link on your website to the modified Makefile. How edifying. *snort*
I personally don't mind that GPL v2 allows companies and websites to take my GPL'd code, make proprietary modifications, and then deploy that code on their servers without sharing the modifications. In a sense, it's an awful lot like the First Sale doctrine, although that space is already confusing enough wrt. to software. The real point is, I offer my software to people to use and modify as they see fit. If they want to start distributing a modified version, though, they need to pony up the changes. That seems fair. If they just want to use it to run their site, I don't mind that GPL v2 doesn't require them to share the changes.
Incidentally, if you have GPL v2 Java applets, JavaScript, or other code that gets downloaded by your web browser, that is distribution in my opinion. But, then, "View Source..." lets you get at most of that. (Just not the Java applets.)
--Joe
Yes and no. Apple machines offer a higher quality experience, but mostly because the number of configurations is tightly controlled. Thus, Apple avoids many hardware quirks and incompatibilities and can spend there effort on a narrower set of drivers. If they open themselves to the hairy world of PC hardware, they open themselves to that land of mix-match hardware and all the instability it brings.
*raises hand*
And with Dubya in office and two slots for the Supreme Court open, it really makes you think twice about the Group Dubya Bench.
Not quite perpetual motion. It needs power input that's released from the running engine, and that power comes from the gasoline, not the hydrogen. That's an awful lot like a supercharger which gives you more horsepower, but requires horsepower to drive it. The difference is, the 8-10HP required to drive the supercharger is dwarfed by the 40-50HP the engine makes with all that extra air in there. (These numbers are approximate, based on some calculations a friend of mine did for the supercharger on my car.) I imagine it's a similar power balance for this device.
And that's the point. Adding straight up oxygen and hydrogen into the intake apparently makes the resulting combustion more efficient. This shifts the stochiometric ratio the engine operates at, it sounds like, such that more of the fuel gets burned.
There are two fuel/air ratios that matter for gasoline engines: The air/fuel ratio when your cruising is the stochiometric ratio (about 14.6:1), and the "max burn" ratio (forget the name for it, but around 12:1). The former ratio is the mixture where all (or nearly all) of gasoline gets burned, and the latter is the one in which all the oxygen gets consumed (leaving some fuel unburned). Obviously, a properly functioning car would only run near 12:1 during heavy acceleration.
I imagine throwing oxygen and hydrogen in the mix during periods of acceleration, rather than merely richening up the mixture would have very positive effects on fuel economy, since you really are burning nearly every bit of gas you put in there.
You're right that cracking water into H2 and O2 doesn't give you enough of either that you can make it self sustaining. This system still could actually work because you're getting continuous energy input from an outside source.
--Joe
You're forgetting that the line fill comes "critical word first" on many systems. Once the first word arrives (e.g. the word that the CPU tried to access and which caused a cache miss), the CPU can unstall and proceed as the rest of the cache line arrives in the background. That's why there's such a quick drop off in marginal benefit as you make your bus wider.
I know C99 added this, but I have a codebase that I've been maintaining since before C99. Also, I work with platforms that are still C89, not C99. My main project is an Intellivision emulator that currently ports to Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, and Windows. I intend to port it to a DSP also. I'm pretty sure it'll run just about anywhere with some effort. (There once was a MacOS 9 port.)
It would be a good idea to use inttypes.h if it's available. I just haven't updated my code. One of these days I'll learn autoconf.
The data type "long" is probably the most useless C data-type these days, having been equal in size to int for so long. In my own code, I tend to have a header with typedefs defining "int_8", "int_16", "int_32" etc. (and unsigned variants) for when the width matters, and I use bare "int" everywhere else.
Code written with "long" everywhere was probably written back in the days when sizeof(int) might be 2. (Or written by someone who coded quite a bit during that era...)
--JoeYou actually pass the point of diminishing returns at a size somewhat smaller than a cache line typically unless you can deeply pipeline commands. In a lot of cases, latency matters most, so that limits the chip's ability to pipeline commands. At some point going wider on your external bus is a waste. It complicates too many things at the board level also.
That's why you see processors with L2 line sizes in the 64-byte to 128-byte range, but external busses in the 64-bit to 128-bit range--a ratio that ranges from 4:1 to 16:1 depending on the exact combination.
On my dual Opteron 246 system, it prints out:
Ignore the crummy formatting... that's Slashdot's fault.
Errr... memory footprint doesn't double. Only the size of a pointer doubles in the currently accepted ABIs. So, your memory footprint increases a little but not dramatically. A byte's a byte. GIFs, JPEGs, MP3s, 3-D textures, Word documents... they all take up the same amount of space on a 64-bit machine as they do on a 32-bit machine.
The currently accepted x86-64 ABI is something called "LLP64," which means long long and pointers are 64 bit, whereas int and long are both 32 bit. Here's a handy page describing LLP64 and some alternatives.
The main advantage of 64 bits is large addressable space. If your working set is below 2GB, you won't benefit from that. The main advantage of x86-64 is the larger addressable register file, and that's completely separate of its 64-bit address space.
People keep mentioning register renaming, and that helps to a point. Mainly it enables out-of-order instruction issue and retirement. The problem is, many functions need more than 8 values "live" simultaneously. Any that do not fit in registers get spilled to the stack. Once on the stack, these values become memory operands as opposed to register operands.
Memory operands are not candidates for register renaming, typically. Thus, code with a large number of "temporaries" will benefit greatly from the increased number of explicit registers. Boring "control code" won't notice much of a difference. Tight compute loops and large, complex functions will.
Unfortunately, it'll be hard to gauge what the impact is, because in parallel we've doubled the size of pointers, thus increasing the memory footprint of the application. Grumble, grumble. That will work against performance.
Technically the 64-bit Xeons are EM64T, which isn't precisely x86-64, but close enough. (Just like a 32-bit Athlon isn't precisely the same as a Pentium 4, even at the instruction set level, but it's close enough to run nearly all the same code.)
There's two sides to it: He can claim anything he wants, and we can choose whether we recognize those claims.
Is that true of the 64-bit edition also?
I guess the hair we're splitting is this: I think of the code as "FooBar v1.03", and I can decide to change license I offer it under from GPL to Whatever. What you're saying is that "FooBar v1.03 (GPL)" and "FooBar v1.03 (Whatever)" are different packages and so I haven't changed the license so much as introduced a new package. In either way of phrasing it, the GPL version doesn't go away, and on that point I think we violently agree.
Depending on what X and Y are, you should still be able to enforce a single user with a single copy of the software from doing X and Y simultaneously. And if I were the author of the software, I might even implement such a restriction in the source code, and it would be against the license to remove the restriction.
One example might be a program that can either rip CDs or burn CDs. License A lets you rip but not burn, and license B lets you burn but not rip. (Admittedly a silly example, but at least it's easily explained.) Sure, you could keep two "copies" for essentially free, and use one for ripping and one for burning. What you're barred from doing is a direct CD-to-CD copy (say, if you have two drives).
--JoeWell, the RIAA managed to get something of a tax onto blank CD-R media (though not much of one here). Granted, it's only for media designated "Audio," and the "Data" stuff works just fine for audio in most cases, but it does provide a model. (In Canada, I believe there's no such distinction between "audio" and "data" CD-Rs for purpose of taxation.)
All you'd need to do is tax the big data pipes. That's it. That'd raise the cost of access to the Internet infrastructure, and those costs will get passed up the chain, eventually back to the consumer. It's just like how tollways and turnpikes ultimately raise the price of milk and veggies.
--JoeI can take the code as it exists today, not change a single line other than the comments which state the license, and re-release it as non-GPL code. How is that not retrospectively changing the license on that code? I can even dig up previous versions and re-release them under a different license.
I guess the point is, you can always relicense code, but that never removes from existence the previous versions. And so, any change in license tends to only increase the freedoms available to users.
Of course, that last point is not strictly true: If license A lets you do "X but not Y" and license B lets you to "Y but not X", code offered under a dual license allows you to do "X or Y, but not both, depending on which license you accept." (When code gets offered under a dual license, the end users essentially get to pick which one they accept. Only one license affects a given user at a time.) Adding a second license did not strictly increase the total freedom available to the user, but it did increase their choices among restrictions.
--JoeSure you can, if you hold the copyrights to the code. The difference is, you can't remove from existence the older versions of the code or bar people from using those under the older license.
This is a minor but important point. If I want to take my GPL'd stuff private and proprietary, I can. Any GPL'd copies floating about are fully legit. But, if you want any features from newer versions, you're ponying up for the proprietary version. (Take a look at Aladdin vs. GPL Ghostscript for an example of this model in reverse.)
--Joe