Another government basher content to never read past the title getting up-voted insightful. I was watching "Yes Minister" reruns the other day, a skewer of infinitely greater penetration. Every idiot can see the disease, but only the idiots know the cure. You could match the script line for line with corporate boardroom politics. And all the worst disasters I know of consisted of a marriage between the two.
The man lost his defense for "tortious interference". He shouldn't have mentioned the man's employment. He could have asked around this matter on the subject of University of Minnesota employee conduct standards. He could have taken credit for fuelling the investigation rather than it's outcome.
He is also doomed to look like a fool, as it is supposedly his technical savvy that lead to market dominance by Microsoft.
Bill did study history. He studied Xerox and their inability to extract profit. And he probably cocked a snook at Adam Osborne. I expect better from a primordial UID.
This is classic motive substitution. Bill has never been about beauty or progress. He's all about the tsunami of monetization. Innovation never had much to do with their business model. That's why you can hardly find three paragraphs from the mouth of any Microsoft executive in which the word "innovation" doesn't appear. Innovation is Microsoft's FTC shibboleth.
In information technology, innovation is more generally a code word for "those who won deserved to win". Also known as "history is written by the victor" or its corollary "those who study history are doomed to rewrite it".
The ugly truth is that when you an exponential technology curve so uniform over thirty doubling cycles that a Tour rider would select a fixed gear bicycle for weight reduction, technological innovation is not what separates the fit from the fallout. What separates the fit from the fallout is expertise in non-linear business methods and continuous disruption. Anyone who studies the naked Napalm children of the PC revolution with a gun-steel gaze will recognize Microsoft for expertise and innovation in both of these areas.
Telling me that PLATO is a viable present day reference is like discovering that some ancient civilization had a system for loaning out graven stone tablets exactly like a modern day library right down to the papyrus library card.
Here's where innovation enters the ancient picture. Some prescient dude observes "if only we carved the same symbols onto gold leaf, the whole concept would take the demographic leap".
The oldest memory chip I recall is the 2102, which cost $50/kB back in 1975. I learned how to fat finger on a board with 8 of these chips. We're presently in the vicinity of $10/GB. Mesopotamian libraries with books hammered out of gold leaf is not much of a mental stretch for me.
But somehow if I skipped the introductory chapter on Mesopotamia 101, I'd be doomed to repeat some classic mistake != coming to market with a technology pounded out of gold leaf.
Little known fact: Jacques Cousteau spent the majority of his career in secret pursuit of an overdue gold-leaf copy of a Mesopotamian page turner entitled "Roots". According to legend, the author complained bitterly over it being "passed around".
The only thing we can go on is the fact that the pro-nuclear lobby turn out repeatedly to be a bunch of complete liars.
Well then, you're not the sharpest card in the deck. If you make the converse argument that the anti-nuke lobby is nicker-bunched with liars, we would later discover that this nicker-bunch was funded by the pro-nuclear side for the purpose of instigating the brain-on-dialtone anti-liar over-reaction, ka-ching ka-ching.
Either way, you can't base a decision strategy on a perception that can be manipulated to mean something opposite to what you think you're observing. Chip-on-shoulder bright-lines are best relegated to sports blogs and radio call-in shows.
To reach a good decision on any issue, the strategy is to tune out the idiots in favour of the people with something useful to contribute; if the adults at the table take an intellectual risk, put forward a considered opinion, depart from the trusty never-say-you're-sorry ad hominem heuristic.
Failure to achieve a considered debate gives a rational person reason for pause, but even there, you can't be making blanket game-theory declarations, or some side of the issue will discover they can get the outcome they want just by starting a food fight. Pre-declaring an automatic response works equally well at the poker table, unless you're bluffing. "You a hustler, Amos?" Lucky if that ruse lasts you the night in a podunk pool hall.
I don't think there's any useful debate on nuclear as a self-contained category. Useful debate begins with the proposed fuel cycle. That leads to resource dependencies, weaponization risk, disaster profiles, and disposal mess. This tends not to happen. The pro side doesn't wish to enumerate specific risks and the anti side doesn't want it known that many of the specific risks are smaller than other risks already built into the system.
I would never vote pro-nuclear without first knowing the proposed fuel cycle. Generally I believe that nuclear done right would not pose significantly worse risks than other activities displaced (e.g. Nigerian oil despots, building some of the world's largest cities on earthquake fault lines). I'm not keen on our odds of doing it right.
If we aren't debating at the level of the fuel cycle, odds of doing it right are significantly diminished. The pro/anti debate is the natural terrain of foot-draggers and carpetbaggers.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the nuclear debate will be decided very quickly on the back on an oil price shock, much worse than any present complaints.
Even the industry-standard 'SPEC' CPU benchmarks use the wrong type of averaging which leads to incorrect results -- in some cases a faster computer (which completes all benchmarks faster than a slower computer) can have a *worse* score than the slower computer.
This comment is incomprehensible, on several levels.
No one who works seriously with benchmarks thinks there's any correct form of averaging that diminishes salt consumption. Benchmarking is inherently a high salt diet. Low sodium, high sucrose benchmarks are known as pie charts.
There is one form of averaging I dislike more than most: Apple Pie charts, the primary ingredient of which is a carefully selected Photoshop filter whose slices precisely match a particular CPU's scheduling slots, and never denominated in performance/dollar. We know how fundamentally accurate that benchmark was from all the suicides reported among professional Photoshoppers when Apple switched to Intel (none that I can recall).
Are you trying to imply that the SPEC averaging method has the property that there exits machines x,y such that for all benchmark disciplines b: time[x,b] < time[y,b] yet SPEC[x] > SPEC[y]? That would violate some deep ordering relations, which I've never seen short of fraud.
If you were implying that sum{b} time[x,b] < sum{b} time [y,b] yet SPEC[x] > SPEC[y], and this is somehow prima facie illegitimate, you need to repeat some stats courses. If machine x scores times (20,45) and machine y scores times (31,31) the arithmetic mean and harmonic mean achieve different rankings. Which mean is the wrong mean? You'll be seeking a course which covers the covariance of principle components, one of several reasons why you can't normalize benchmark disciplines to unit weight over measured scores without the copious addition of salt.
I'd love to have seen published the processor heat map after running the Apple Pie benchmark suite. That little red spot is the AltiVec unit, which never gets a break. It takes more than a "correct type of averaging" to ensure fair benchmark coverage.
A good benchmark is one where I look at the numbers and go "that's why I thought, the (pre-Intel) Apple sucks" and the guy beside me goes "yeah, that's what I thought, AltiVec rocks" and we're both right because we filtered our needs and budgets through the numbers presented.
From a purist perspective, I happen to think than on any CPU ever made, it's inexcusable that time to reverse the bit order of a 64-bit integer is greater than the time to increment a 64-bit integer (whose ripple carry unit subsumes every possible path length, making it's implementation a superset of bit reversal propagation paths).
I think of that comparison as benchmarking down to the bare wires. Every CPU I can recall fails this basic test all the way back to the SC/MP. Is symmetry of no importance in computer science? It makes me wonder about CS education altogether.
And don't get me started on popcnt. Not counting either? For shame.
If we all buy AMD's product on the virtue of their openness, it won't be long before AMD holds the upper hand on features and stability. I think they're heading in a good direction already.
How much entrenched advantage does inferior need before you lock in? Your personal FIR filter on "what have you done for me lately" seems to have unit delay of hours rather than years.
If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.
The flood has already happened. It's the genomics flood, and we're drowning in data. The evolution deniers have lost the war on data. Not a life jacket in sight. Round two, pound the facts (construed as social consensus). Round three, pound the table (after elite stamina drills).
I'm sure I'm ready to listen to a yellow jacket on the subject of troll diminishment. This house is a yellow jacket free zone.
Sometimes trolls inspire useful thinking, if you haven't heard it a dozen times already. You can learn a lot about Platonic solids from the contemplation of square pegs and round holes.
I tend to respond with a humorous paragraph-long extrapolation of troll's cognitive bias (ignoring the person behind the idea promulgated), followed immediately with several paragraphs making a useful on-topic contribution, or an extended riff on lateral associations.
Perhaps I copied my formula from Mozart during his appreciation of Salieri's gift composition.
Heads I win, tails you lose. It's new the world order. Everything old is new again.
It took me nearly 25 years to figure out my political and economic slant. Never identified myself as liberal or conservative. Trade unions are the worst form of racketeering, except for all the others; and conservatives define intelligence as knowing when to limit its use (e.g. whenever anything matters). Conservatives most admire a trait once they erect bars around it (or should I say stone tablets?), and because it's readily on view, prowling in sleek captivity, they also think they have more of it. But enough bear baiting.
I've discovered I'm a die-hard transactionist. I believe the beneficence of the invisible hand prevails only when transactions take place between equally informed parties who care enough about the outcome to make a considered decision. Against the orchestrated forces of rational ignorance, the invisible hand wears no clothes. Who would have guessed faith in the invisible has a dark underbelly? Open source equals (or at least enables) informed participants. That's why I'm here.
I've made an informed, considered decision to limit my music purchases from the music-industrial complex. Their response: impose a tax payable by people who won't benefit on the grounds that downloaders are guilty before proven innocent, so there's no moral compunction against harvesting dolphin. If you swim in the ocean, you're whale meat by definition.
Given my economic views, and my belief about the importance of those views for the proper function of democratic government, this proposal falls barely short of treasonable, if anyone's keeping score from the nose-bleed bleachers.
I favour things such as the Vickrey auction. Truthful bidding lubricates the invisible hand. Most humans just don't want to think that hard, most of the time. We tend to reserve our best effort for our dominant economic concern (usually our employment) and tap into the gratification bypass as much as possible in every other circumstances. The day divides into 9-5 and 4:20. Rationality is hard work. The invisible hand runs a taxation department, and most people welsh. (Welsh, origin unknown, but one can guess.)
In a perfect world, we'd solve these proposals by laughing any government that lends an ear straight out of office.
Unfortunately, most people living within capitalist democracy have only the shallowest belief in either. Too many people seem to define capitalism as the right to pursue a fat profit by any means (including bail-out or central planning) and democracy as a two-party pendulum, with both sides beholden to power minorities.
As George Orwell observed, if you can get language straight, many of these problems go away. Somehow we need to paint these music industry connivers as the politburo leaches they aspire to become. The term just needs to be a little more catchy to enter the popular consciousness. Klepto-kittens? "Kitten" has a lifetime pass on the gratification bypass. Or maybe klepto-critters, since they're renouncing much of their claim to human dignity.
And for their worldview, perhaps grubism (rhymes with pube). Grubist minions, for those who fail to rise in opposition?
Grubism: the economic philosophy of collective responsibility for individual theft to the benefit of minority power elites. Antonym, liberal democracy.
Also (one wishes) the Incumbent Reelection Prevention Act. Unfortunately, as a Canadian, I have to say we're just not that smart.
Aren't the MIME headers or some rot supposed to solve this problem? IE6 documents need a distinct MIME header. It's not HTML, we all know that (unless the H stands for Hemocyanin). Maybe these legacy apps could identify themselves as HCML.
If an application doesn't comply with a standard, it shouldn't be opening up documents which advertise themselves as that document type.
Then like everything else, IE6 opens it's own documents, an standard documents are opened by standard applications. Wow, who would have guessed we already have a solution for this immense kerfuffle.
Everyone knows deep down that "most important of" originates from the part of the brain responsible for mating behaviours and penis size comparisons. People are attracted to the dialog in the aspiration to become one of the lucky lekkers. And even if the lek has nubility factor zero, it's good practice just in case if your prospects are poor and you have nothing better to do.
At a certain age, you tire of the loud clatter of penis rulers and you just want to hand the participants a scalpel and a bassinet labelled "least important" to find out whether they really believe that every infinite series can be approximated (for the purpose of getting laid) by the first term alone.
I sometimes wonder if the donning the coat of arms of truncated approximation functions as a sexual status symbol. If the well runs deep, no need to bother with second order effects; leave those worries to the mincing greybeards whose primary term has shrivelled up.
For me the miracle of conception is how quickly the brain reprises all those forgotten terms, if there were any in there to begin with.
Congratulations to the person posting this story for telling the world that your swimmers have yet to enter the pool.
I'm working on a TDT technology where we measure signal propagation velocity down to ps accuracy using ensemble averaging and some fancy LVPECL circuitry.
Once we achieve this accuracy, you'll be able to watch someone tighten the hex nut on the coax feed. I worked it out once that 1ps is about 60 degrees of arc on the SMA hex nut. c in coax is often 0.68 or 0.86 off the top of my head.
The obsession with first mover advantage is obscene, but it's not as easy to eliminate as it looks. In any discrete system (trade auctions executing at fixed points in time), there is still a first mover advantage to the party who learns a fact about the world just in time to make the next auction, while the guy down the street doesn't.
If you follow the game theory in this scenario, soon corporations will be timing their press releases to the microsecond to ensure that favoured parties get in on the next auction tick and disfavoured parties don't.
What would work is that if all new knowledge about the universe arrived on the rising edge to all parties, and all auctions cleared on the falling edge. I doubt this could be arranged at the Planck scale, but I think it would be a level playing field, regardless.
First mover advantage has been shaping neurology since it was a glint in a skin patch. Traders are seeking picosecond advantage, but the same force can't evolve an eyeball in a billion years, in pre-Newtonian plausibility calculus. Lucy, you got some splainin' to do.
The two extra cores play a vital role in multithreaded tasks...
Do they mean like the way our second eyeball is plays a vital role in stereoscopic vision? Or like our second set of wisdom teeth plays a vital role in oral symmetry? Or like our second testicle plays a vital role in having two testicles?
Apple users seem to have different vitals than the rest of us.
I'd like to hold this flashy gadget up to my ear, to see how long it takes before the thunder arrives after the discharge of shiny coin.
10Gbps with a six month latency. Get them while they last.
From the perspective of the wealthy one percent--whose greatest concern is finding a bank of historical Swiss virtue with a fresh coating of wikicaulk--the Gini has delivered unfathomable riches.
In America, with the repeal of the estate tax, tau is better than ever. The majority of the population who tacitly supported the "death" tax revocation against their present interests--in favour of interests they wish someday to have--now find themselves pinching their threads. Who would have guessed?
Here's an interesting theoretical question. Under what conditions does accelerated inequity appeal to the majority of a democratic population? And how long can you keep the descending majority from figuring out they have more to gain by repealing the obsolescence tax (which they actually pay) rather than the death tax (as aspirational indignity increasingly far from reach)?
The original 8088 instruction set is crap, but it has improved since.
I've ranted on the theme of 8086 evolution and adequacy several times in the past. You do know that the 8086 instruction set was designed in 1976-1978? I recall 1976. Year of the first cheap four-function calculator, the TI-30. It was also the year of the Summer Olympics in Montreal, where Canada as host country failed to win a single gold medal (courtesy I figured out later of East German steroids). The 1976 summer Olympics also featured the original decimal conversion bug, when Nadia was awarded a 1.0 gymnastics score due to a shortage of display digits. Intel engineers took notes and later conducted a replay attack.
35 years later, the planet's deployed x86 execution capacity is on the order of 10^18 instructions per second. Failures don't come any bigger than that.
Would the course of history differ much if someone teleported back to 1976 and beat the Intel engineers responsible with the clue stick of winsome orthogonality?
I would settle for one change only: an eight bit segment register offset instead of the four bit offset, giving the original PC a 16MB address space. 16MB has you covered until machines become powerful enough for a multitasking OS. It also has the PC encroaching on traditional IBM markets right out of the starting gate, and might have died a grim death of a thousand memos before IBM publicly announced the product.
And then, if it hadn't been so crippled, maybe fewer people would have rushed into the marketplace to fix it. Maybe Apple would have controlled the original PC marketplace instead, and locked the whole thing down with pentalobular vengeance.
This first fusion chip underwhelms me, but it's the tip of a program with bigger splashes to come. Since I'm older than dirt, I also recall that the original Pentium 60 was nearly booed out of the marketplace. Hotter and more expensive than a DX4, without any real benefit to show for it unless you had a fetish for fast (and wrong) floating point math. There were howls of outrage at the unfathomable 30W TDP (IIRC, the figure doesn't come up in a quick Google). You needed a heat sink the size of your hand and maybe *gasp* even a fan.
Superscalar, DOA. Fusion, DOA. Perhaps let's not jump to conclusions yet. The entire industry is built on the ashes of suckhood.
What the user wants is probably one system where everything works.
I agree with you. It's very important I can fix anything that breaks. That's the only way you can achieve a system that works. If the component doesn't come with source code, my efforts to address brokenness are stymied.
Glad we've all agreed to jettison binary blobs in favour of a platform where everything works. How nice to live in a world where you never reach a fork in the road, such as a stable 2D video card with source code vs a faster 3D video card with no source code. When confronted with a fork in the road, all travellers choose the same path: whichever works. Now I have no insight into the one true user, so I'm rarely able to guess which of these paths is the one that works for everyone. I have to pull up my horse and wait for someone such as yourself to come along and explain which path is which.
It's the same spectrum with relationships. Many users define a good marriage as mind-blowing sex on the honeymoon. Others are in for the long haul, and put a higher priority on constructive conflict.
Some of the same people value engineering principles over straw polls, even when its difficult and obscure.
APL rocks when your floating point addition latency exceeds your main memory fetch latency and your programmers don't mind that the trig operators are selected by manifest constants on the left side of the circle operator.
Itanium is trying to fit the niche where SIMD is not applicable, yet arithmetic instruction density is high relative to memory transactions.
I spent too much time last night reading about big constants. y-cruncher is sick. It's also not open source, and the core algorithm (Hybrid NTT multiplication, which finds a nice niche between FFT and SS) hasn't been published. There are, however, some highly-tuned Linux binaries for common architectures.
Unlike the majority of compute-intensive applications, y-cruncher does not exclusively use floating-point. As of v0.5.4, only about 30% of a Pi computation is floating-point bound. The remainder of the time is spent on integer operations and stalling on memory access.[my bold] So cutting that 30% in half yields little overall speedup. Speeding up the code in this manner exposes more memory bottlenecks - which ends up reducing the speedup to only 10%...
Integer operations can be largely be emulated using floating-point (albeit with overhead). But most of the integer work involves carry-propagation, so it is not very vectorizable. For now, integer operations are still faster using the normal integer instructions.
I'm sure the program would find some love the 54MB on-chip cache, but the Itanium instruction set would only be a burden, and stalls would be horrendous.
Why does y-cruncher create more threads than I tell it to use?
[] Because of the nature of some of the algorithms, I find it necessary to spam threads in order to maximize multi-core efficiency.
The cool thing about this program is that it scales nearly linearly in number of cores, and overscheduling doesn't impact it much if the aggregate memory bandwidth can be supported.
Can you make a CUDA version?
The memory bandwidth between the GPU and main memory will almost certainly be a bottleneck. This isn't a problem for small computations that will fit entirely into GPU memory, but small computations isn't the point of y-cruncher.
Cancel the love for 54MB of on-chip cache. That about cancels the love for the entire architecture. What might rescue the iBerg someday is an optical memory interconnect, if they're looking to blow another $4b burning a hole in the other pocket.
I'm a staunch Google apologist masquerading as an open mind, and even I think this is off-the-charts stupid.
If there was an agenda, it was fear that FB would colour in the social graph for the younger generation before the kids learned how to surf.
We need a some core curriculum in the grade two/three age range on how to falsify personal data in online profiles. It used to be as a parent, you could wait for the kids to teach themselves the gutter skills (the little angels can hardly restrain themselves).
The old joke was that Ubuntu is Swahili for "can't install Debian".
I bailed from Debian during the three year Sarge release cycle. Any for what purpose? To paraphrase Spiro Agnew: frittering fruitloops of freedom.
Ubuntu is Swahili for "pissed off about mending my broken backport LAMP stack". Maybe I shouldn't have gone down that road and just stuck with what worked out of the box in 2002. I mean really, if a three year old LAMP stack isn't broken, why fix it?
To my mind, Debian submitted a formal resignation from the torch that Ubuntu now carries.
America is no longer free because the government has become the monopoly.
How is it that the government became the black box for incomprehension? You know, the systems theory diagram of human society that wouldn't fit into twenty volumes of Wikipedia. This corrupt black box meme seems to appeal most strongly to atheists who deeply crave some one-stop shopping.
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
~ Mark Twain
That was around the age he turned his attention to the government, wasn't it?
It's deeply wired in our species for males to look around and decide what political force is denying the rightfully deserved fawning attention of nubile females. Step two: howl with outrage until that primate is you.
A Libertarian is a guy who isn't getting any, with no ambition to complete step two. The howl is directed at the institution least likely to go away. Outrage as comfortable status quo.
Here's the same joke as told by Lazarus Long:
In 1000BC, the Romans were becoming so vile, I couldn't stand to have them around. In 2000AD, I was astonished at the durability of indoor plumbing.
Now, what was this tread about again? I'm not sure if I'm still on topic.
The only time I ever used BCC was to send a copy to my other me on some other account, whose existence I didn't wish to publicize.
I don't know why FB doesn't implement "burning carbon copy". Never been on the service, maybe that's also too much to ask people to understand. Perhaps the major downside is getting sued for implementing this by the visually impaired.
The upside of Facebook is that we can now explain dark matter to your average dim bulb: it's like a person without a FB account. It shows up on an abstract census, but there's no public record of its birth date, mother's maiden name, or SIN number, and it doesn't even interact with likinos, so for most practical purposes, it's not really there.
Affairs on planet earth would be so much improved to tune in the latest exoplanet night show discussing yesterday's current affairs: the great pyramids of Giza. You know it's a slow galactic news day when they spare a moment to humiliate planet earth.
I bet they're working up a great punch line about the Great Wall, coming to a screen near you on a slow news day sometime in 4'th m. AD
To quote the immortal Tammy Meztler, who cares?
But I'm sure there's someone out there rushing to sign up the Millennium Clock with a twitter account, just in case.
And between the clearly legal and clearly illegal I do see shades of gray.
What people often fail to understand is that the shades of grey are usually small potatoes. You have to cut somewhere as a practical matter. The large potatoes are touchy quibbles over intent, but I tend not to think of these as shades of grey.
Clearly illegal: I think everyone in group X should be exterminated.
Free speech: I would be happier if group X didn't exist.
Clearly illegal: I would also be happier if group X didn't exist [and I'm pleased to join your movement to bring this about].
Sometimes you have to bust people on unspoken subtext.
Clearly legal: I also have an irrational hatred of group X.
Someone might use this dodge to advertise a hate campaign if it was the best they could get away with, but I have trouble imagining it as effective without also crossing the line somewhere else. Self-illuminated hate speech doesn't really work, does it?
There's no algorithm to decide this without making judgements within a theory of mind. Yes, surely some pompous ass will show up to advocate a wacko theory of mind to construe black as white. So what? Any good decision in life is made inside a pompous ass rejection field. I don't actually like Sam Harris's objective morality, but neither do I think it's turtles all the way down.
The question is one of sensibilities as some could feel slandered, intimidated or harassed for practically nothing.
The only requirement for a smart investor to take a position in an overpriced stock is belief in having an edge in knowing when to unload overpriced stock.
How many Apple fanbois are going to unload their prized Apple stock at the first tremor?
Apple is doing pretty good lately in annual compound illusion.
HTTPS Everywhere is great if you have 3 minutes for every minute to do something. I used it while on vacation and I was forced to use Barnes and Noble.
The bar to resist dictatorship keeps going up. First you have to learn HTTPS Everywhere, then you have to learn tabbed browsing, cyclic tasking, and delayed gratification.
https should have become the default long ago. As it stands, I'm sure the Algerian santa is keeping a list. One shouldn't have to stand out by defending oneself against man-in-the-middle.
On the other hand, the portion of the rebel alliance with "allahakbar" as their FB password were unlikely to put up stiff resistance against sand-troopers with scimitars. Hmmm, I should watch my language.
Chief Elgin: I don't care if he's from Johannesburg. I don't want to hear "dune coon" or "sand nigger" from him or anybody else. Conrad Vig: Captain uses those terms. Sgt. Troy Barlow: That's not the point, Conrad. The point is that "towelhead" and "camel jockey" are perfectly good substitutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Another government basher content to never read past the title getting up-voted insightful. I was watching "Yes Minister" reruns the other day, a skewer of infinitely greater penetration. Every idiot can see the disease, but only the idiots know the cure. You could match the script line for line with corporate boardroom politics. And all the worst disasters I know of consisted of a marriage between the two.
The man lost his defense for "tortious interference". He shouldn't have mentioned the man's employment. He could have asked around this matter on the subject of University of Minnesota employee conduct standards. He could have taken credit for fuelling the investigation rather than it's outcome.
He is also doomed to look like a fool, as it is supposedly his technical savvy that lead to market dominance by Microsoft.
Bill did study history. He studied Xerox and their inability to extract profit. And he probably cocked a snook at Adam Osborne. I expect better from a primordial UID.
This is classic motive substitution. Bill has never been about beauty or progress. He's all about the tsunami of monetization. Innovation never had much to do with their business model. That's why you can hardly find three paragraphs from the mouth of any Microsoft executive in which the word "innovation" doesn't appear. Innovation is Microsoft's FTC shibboleth.
In information technology, innovation is more generally a code word for "those who won deserved to win". Also known as "history is written by the victor" or its corollary "those who study history are doomed to rewrite it".
The ugly truth is that when you an exponential technology curve so uniform over thirty doubling cycles that a Tour rider would select a fixed gear bicycle for weight reduction, technological innovation is not what separates the fit from the fallout. What separates the fit from the fallout is expertise in non-linear business methods and continuous disruption. Anyone who studies the naked Napalm children of the PC revolution with a gun-steel gaze will recognize Microsoft for expertise and innovation in both of these areas.
Telling me that PLATO is a viable present day reference is like discovering that some ancient civilization had a system for loaning out graven stone tablets exactly like a modern day library right down to the papyrus library card.
Here's where innovation enters the ancient picture. Some prescient dude observes "if only we carved the same symbols onto gold leaf, the whole concept would take the demographic leap".
Memory Prices (1957-2010)
The oldest memory chip I recall is the 2102, which cost $50/kB back in 1975. I learned how to fat finger on a board with 8 of these chips. We're presently in the vicinity of $10/GB. Mesopotamian libraries with books hammered out of gold leaf is not much of a mental stretch for me.
But somehow if I skipped the introductory chapter on Mesopotamia 101, I'd be doomed to repeat some classic mistake != coming to market with a technology pounded out of gold leaf.
Little known fact: Jacques Cousteau spent the majority of his career in secret pursuit of an overdue gold-leaf copy of a Mesopotamian page turner entitled "Roots". According to legend, the author complained bitterly over it being "passed around".
The only thing we can go on is the fact that the pro-nuclear lobby turn out repeatedly to be a bunch of complete liars.
Well then, you're not the sharpest card in the deck. If you make the converse argument that the anti-nuke lobby is nicker-bunched with liars, we would later discover that this nicker-bunch was funded by the pro-nuclear side for the purpose of instigating the brain-on-dialtone anti-liar over-reaction, ka-ching ka-ching.
Either way, you can't base a decision strategy on a perception that can be manipulated to mean something opposite to what you think you're observing. Chip-on-shoulder bright-lines are best relegated to sports blogs and radio call-in shows.
To reach a good decision on any issue, the strategy is to tune out the idiots in favour of the people with something useful to contribute; if the adults at the table take an intellectual risk, put forward a considered opinion, depart from the trusty never-say-you're-sorry ad hominem heuristic.
Failure to achieve a considered debate gives a rational person reason for pause, but even there, you can't be making blanket game-theory declarations, or some side of the issue will discover they can get the outcome they want just by starting a food fight. Pre-declaring an automatic response works equally well at the poker table, unless you're bluffing. "You a hustler, Amos?" Lucky if that ruse lasts you the night in a podunk pool hall.
I don't think there's any useful debate on nuclear as a self-contained category. Useful debate begins with the proposed fuel cycle. That leads to resource dependencies, weaponization risk, disaster profiles, and disposal mess. This tends not to happen. The pro side doesn't wish to enumerate specific risks and the anti side doesn't want it known that many of the specific risks are smaller than other risks already built into the system.
I would never vote pro-nuclear without first knowing the proposed fuel cycle. Generally I believe that nuclear done right would not pose significantly worse risks than other activities displaced (e.g. Nigerian oil despots, building some of the world's largest cities on earthquake fault lines). I'm not keen on our odds of doing it right.
If we aren't debating at the level of the fuel cycle, odds of doing it right are significantly diminished. The pro/anti debate is the natural terrain of foot-draggers and carpetbaggers.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the nuclear debate will be decided very quickly on the back on an oil price shock, much worse than any present complaints.
Even the industry-standard 'SPEC' CPU benchmarks use the wrong type of averaging which leads to incorrect results -- in some cases a faster computer (which completes all benchmarks faster than a slower computer) can have a *worse* score than the slower computer.
This comment is incomprehensible, on several levels.
No one who works seriously with benchmarks thinks there's any correct form of averaging that diminishes salt consumption. Benchmarking is inherently a high salt diet. Low sodium, high sucrose benchmarks are known as pie charts.
There is one form of averaging I dislike more than most: Apple Pie charts, the primary ingredient of which is a carefully selected Photoshop filter whose slices precisely match a particular CPU's scheduling slots, and never denominated in performance/dollar. We know how fundamentally accurate that benchmark was from all the suicides reported among professional Photoshoppers when Apple switched to Intel (none that I can recall).
Are you trying to imply that the SPEC averaging method has the property that there exits machines x,y such that for all benchmark disciplines b: time[x,b] < time[y,b] yet SPEC[x] > SPEC[y]? That would violate some deep ordering relations, which I've never seen short of fraud.
If you were implying that sum{b} time[x,b] < sum{b} time [y,b] yet SPEC[x] > SPEC[y], and this is somehow prima facie illegitimate, you need to repeat some stats courses. If machine x scores times (20,45) and machine y scores times (31,31) the arithmetic mean and harmonic mean achieve different rankings. Which mean is the wrong mean? You'll be seeking a course which covers the covariance of principle components, one of several reasons why you can't normalize benchmark disciplines to unit weight over measured scores without the copious addition of salt.
I'd love to have seen published the processor heat map after running the Apple Pie benchmark suite. That little red spot is the AltiVec unit, which never gets a break. It takes more than a "correct type of averaging" to ensure fair benchmark coverage.
A good benchmark is one where I look at the numbers and go "that's why I thought, the (pre-Intel) Apple sucks" and the guy beside me goes "yeah, that's what I thought, AltiVec rocks" and we're both right because we filtered our needs and budgets through the numbers presented.
From a purist perspective, I happen to think than on any CPU ever made, it's inexcusable that time to reverse the bit order of a 64-bit integer is greater than the time to increment a 64-bit integer (whose ripple carry unit subsumes every possible path length, making it's implementation a superset of bit reversal propagation paths).
I think of that comparison as benchmarking down to the bare wires. Every CPU I can recall fails this basic test all the way back to the SC/MP. Is symmetry of no importance in computer science? It makes me wonder about CS education altogether.
And don't get me started on popcnt. Not counting either? For shame.
If we all buy AMD's product on the virtue of their openness, it won't be long before AMD holds the upper hand on features and stability. I think they're heading in a good direction already.
How much entrenched advantage does inferior need before you lock in? Your personal FIR filter on "what have you done for me lately" seems to have unit delay of hours rather than years.
If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.
The flood has already happened. It's the genomics flood, and we're drowning in data. The evolution deniers have lost the war on data. Not a life jacket in sight. Round two, pound the facts (construed as social consensus). Round three, pound the table (after elite stamina drills).
I'm sure I'm ready to listen to a yellow jacket on the subject of troll diminishment. This house is a yellow jacket free zone.
Sometimes trolls inspire useful thinking, if you haven't heard it a dozen times already. You can learn a lot about Platonic solids from the contemplation of square pegs and round holes.
I tend to respond with a humorous paragraph-long extrapolation of troll's cognitive bias (ignoring the person behind the idea promulgated), followed immediately with several paragraphs making a useful on-topic contribution, or an extended riff on lateral associations.
Perhaps I copied my formula from Mozart during his appreciation of Salieri's gift composition.
On the other hand, There's nothing wrong with an old-fashioned traditional shunnin'.
Heads I win, tails you lose. It's new the world order. Everything old is new again.
It took me nearly 25 years to figure out my political and economic slant. Never identified myself as liberal or conservative. Trade unions are the worst form of racketeering, except for all the others; and conservatives define intelligence as knowing when to limit its use (e.g. whenever anything matters). Conservatives most admire a trait once they erect bars around it (or should I say stone tablets?), and because it's readily on view, prowling in sleek captivity, they also think they have more of it. But enough bear baiting.
I've discovered I'm a die-hard transactionist. I believe the beneficence of the invisible hand prevails only when transactions take place between equally informed parties who care enough about the outcome to make a considered decision. Against the orchestrated forces of rational ignorance, the invisible hand wears no clothes. Who would have guessed faith in the invisible has a dark underbelly? Open source equals (or at least enables) informed participants. That's why I'm here.
I've made an informed, considered decision to limit my music purchases from the music-industrial complex. Their response: impose a tax payable by people who won't benefit on the grounds that downloaders are guilty before proven innocent, so there's no moral compunction against harvesting dolphin. If you swim in the ocean, you're whale meat by definition.
Given my economic views, and my belief about the importance of those views for the proper function of democratic government, this proposal falls barely short of treasonable, if anyone's keeping score from the nose-bleed bleachers.
I favour things such as the Vickrey auction. Truthful bidding lubricates the invisible hand. Most humans just don't want to think that hard, most of the time. We tend to reserve our best effort for our dominant economic concern (usually our employment) and tap into the gratification bypass as much as possible in every other circumstances. The day divides into 9-5 and 4:20. Rationality is hard work. The invisible hand runs a taxation department, and most people welsh. (Welsh, origin unknown, but one can guess.)
In a perfect world, we'd solve these proposals by laughing any government that lends an ear straight out of office.
Unfortunately, most people living within capitalist democracy have only the shallowest belief in either. Too many people seem to define capitalism as the right to pursue a fat profit by any means (including bail-out or central planning) and democracy as a two-party pendulum, with both sides beholden to power minorities.
As George Orwell observed, if you can get language straight, many of these problems go away. Somehow we need to paint these music industry connivers as the politburo leaches they aspire to become. The term just needs to be a little more catchy to enter the popular consciousness. Klepto-kittens? "Kitten" has a lifetime pass on the gratification bypass. Or maybe klepto-critters, since they're renouncing much of their claim to human dignity.
And for their worldview, perhaps grubism (rhymes with pube). Grubist minions, for those who fail to rise in opposition?
Grubism: the economic philosophy of collective responsibility for individual theft to the benefit of minority power elites. Antonym, liberal democracy.
Also (one wishes) the Incumbent Reelection Prevention Act. Unfortunately, as a Canadian, I have to say we're just not that smart.
Aren't the MIME headers or some rot supposed to solve this problem? IE6 documents need a distinct MIME header. It's not HTML, we all know that (unless the H stands for Hemocyanin). Maybe these legacy apps could identify themselves as HCML.
If an application doesn't comply with a standard, it shouldn't be opening up documents which advertise themselves as that document type.
Then like everything else, IE6 opens it's own documents, an standard documents are opened by standard applications. Wow, who would have guessed we already have a solution for this immense kerfuffle.
Everyone knows deep down that "most important of" originates from the part of the brain responsible for mating behaviours and penis size comparisons. People are attracted to the dialog in the aspiration to become one of the lucky lekkers. And even if the lek has nubility factor zero, it's good practice just in case if your prospects are poor and you have nothing better to do.
At a certain age, you tire of the loud clatter of penis rulers and you just want to hand the participants a scalpel and a bassinet labelled "least important" to find out whether they really believe that every infinite series can be approximated (for the purpose of getting laid) by the first term alone.
I sometimes wonder if the donning the coat of arms of truncated approximation functions as a sexual status symbol. If the well runs deep, no need to bother with second order effects; leave those worries to the mincing greybeards whose primary term has shrivelled up.
For me the miracle of conception is how quickly the brain reprises all those forgotten terms, if there were any in there to begin with.
Congratulations to the person posting this story for telling the world that your swimmers have yet to enter the pool.
I'm working on a TDT technology where we measure signal propagation velocity down to ps accuracy using ensemble averaging and some fancy LVPECL circuitry.
Once we achieve this accuracy, you'll be able to watch someone tighten the hex nut on the coax feed. I worked it out once that 1ps is about 60 degrees of arc on the SMA hex nut. c in coax is often 0.68 or 0.86 off the top of my head.
The obsession with first mover advantage is obscene, but it's not as easy to eliminate as it looks. In any discrete system (trade auctions executing at fixed points in time), there is still a first mover advantage to the party who learns a fact about the world just in time to make the next auction, while the guy down the street doesn't.
If you follow the game theory in this scenario, soon corporations will be timing their press releases to the microsecond to ensure that favoured parties get in on the next auction tick and disfavoured parties don't.
What would work is that if all new knowledge about the universe arrived on the rising edge to all parties, and all auctions cleared on the falling edge. I doubt this could be arranged at the Planck scale, but I think it would be a level playing field, regardless.
First mover advantage has been shaping neurology since it was a glint in a skin patch. Traders are seeking picosecond advantage, but the same force can't evolve an eyeball in a billion years, in pre-Newtonian plausibility calculus. Lucy, you got some splainin' to do.
The two extra cores play a vital role in multithreaded tasks ...
Do they mean like the way our second eyeball is plays a vital role in stereoscopic vision? Or like our second set of wisdom teeth plays a vital role in oral symmetry? Or like our second testicle plays a vital role in having two testicles?
Apple users seem to have different vitals than the rest of us.
I'd like to hold this flashy gadget up to my ear, to see how long it takes before the thunder arrives after the discharge of shiny coin.
10Gbps with a six month latency. Get them while they last.
From the perspective of the wealthy one percent--whose greatest concern is finding a bank of historical Swiss virtue with a fresh coating of wikicaulk--the Gini has delivered unfathomable riches.
In America, with the repeal of the estate tax, tau is better than ever. The majority of the population who tacitly supported the "death" tax revocation against their present interests--in favour of interests they wish someday to have--now find themselves pinching their threads. Who would have guessed?
Here's an interesting theoretical question. Under what conditions does accelerated inequity appeal to the majority of a democratic population? And how long can you keep the descending majority from figuring out they have more to gain by repealing the obsolescence tax (which they actually pay) rather than the death tax (as aspirational indignity increasingly far from reach)?
The original 8088 instruction set is crap, but it has improved since.
I've ranted on the theme of 8086 evolution and adequacy several times in the past. You do know that the 8086 instruction set was designed in 1976-1978? I recall 1976. Year of the first cheap four-function calculator, the TI-30. It was also the year of the Summer Olympics in Montreal, where Canada as host country failed to win a single gold medal (courtesy I figured out later of East German steroids). The 1976 summer Olympics also featured the original decimal conversion bug, when Nadia was awarded a 1.0 gymnastics score due to a shortage of display digits. Intel engineers took notes and later conducted a replay attack.
35 years later, the planet's deployed x86 execution capacity is on the order of 10^18 instructions per second. Failures don't come any bigger than that.
Would the course of history differ much if someone teleported back to 1976 and beat the Intel engineers responsible with the clue stick of winsome orthogonality?
I would settle for one change only: an eight bit segment register offset instead of the four bit offset, giving the original PC a 16MB address space. 16MB has you covered until machines become powerful enough for a multitasking OS. It also has the PC encroaching on traditional IBM markets right out of the starting gate, and might have died a grim death of a thousand memos before IBM publicly announced the product.
And then, if it hadn't been so crippled, maybe fewer people would have rushed into the marketplace to fix it. Maybe Apple would have controlled the original PC marketplace instead, and locked the whole thing down with pentalobular vengeance.
This first fusion chip underwhelms me, but it's the tip of a program with bigger splashes to come. Since I'm older than dirt, I also recall that the original Pentium 60 was nearly booed out of the marketplace. Hotter and more expensive than a DX4, without any real benefit to show for it unless you had a fetish for fast (and wrong) floating point math. There were howls of outrage at the unfathomable 30W TDP (IIRC, the figure doesn't come up in a quick Google). You needed a heat sink the size of your hand and maybe *gasp* even a fan.
Superscalar, DOA. Fusion, DOA. Perhaps let's not jump to conclusions yet. The entire industry is built on the ashes of suckhood.
What the user wants is probably one system where everything works.
I agree with you. It's very important I can fix anything that breaks. That's the only way you can achieve a system that works. If the component doesn't come with source code, my efforts to address brokenness are stymied.
Glad we've all agreed to jettison binary blobs in favour of a platform where everything works. How nice to live in a world where you never reach a fork in the road, such as a stable 2D video card with source code vs a faster 3D video card with no source code. When confronted with a fork in the road, all travellers choose the same path: whichever works. Now I have no insight into the one true user, so I'm rarely able to guess which of these paths is the one that works for everyone. I have to pull up my horse and wait for someone such as yourself to come along and explain which path is which.
It's the same spectrum with relationships. Many users define a good marriage as mind-blowing sex on the honeymoon. Others are in for the long haul, and put a higher priority on constructive conflict.
Some of the same people value engineering principles over straw polls, even when its difficult and obscure.
APL rocks when your floating point addition latency exceeds your main memory fetch latency and your programmers don't mind that the trig operators are selected by manifest constants on the left side of the circle operator.
Itanium is trying to fit the niche where SIMD is not applicable, yet arithmetic instruction density is high relative to memory transactions.
I spent too much time last night reading about big constants. y-cruncher is sick. It's also not open source, and the core algorithm (Hybrid NTT multiplication, which finds a nice niche between FFT and SS) hasn't been published. There are, however, some highly-tuned Linux binaries for common architectures.
Announcing 5 trillion digits of Pi!
From the FAQ:
Unlike the majority of compute-intensive applications, y-cruncher does not exclusively use floating-point. As of v0.5.4, only about 30% of a Pi computation is floating-point bound. The remainder of the time is spent on integer operations and stalling on memory access. [my bold] So cutting that 30% in half yields little overall speedup. Speeding up the code in this manner exposes more memory bottlenecks - which ends up reducing the speedup to only 10%...
Integer operations can be largely be emulated using floating-point (albeit with overhead). But most of the integer work involves carry-propagation, so it is not very vectorizable. For now, integer operations are still faster using the normal integer instructions.
I'm sure the program would find some love the 54MB on-chip cache, but the Itanium instruction set would only be a burden, and stalls would be horrendous.
Why does y-cruncher create more threads than I tell it to use?
[] Because of the nature of some of the algorithms, I find it necessary to spam threads in order to maximize multi-core efficiency.
The cool thing about this program is that it scales nearly linearly in number of cores, and overscheduling doesn't impact it much if the aggregate memory bandwidth can be supported.
Can you make a CUDA version?
The memory bandwidth between the GPU and main memory will almost certainly be a bottleneck. This isn't a problem for small computations that will fit entirely into GPU memory, but small computations isn't the point of y-cruncher.
Cancel the love for 54MB of on-chip cache. That about cancels the love for the entire architecture. What might rescue the iBerg someday is an optical memory interconnect, if they're looking to blow another $4b burning a hole in the other pocket.
I'm a staunch Google apologist masquerading as an open mind, and even I think this is off-the-charts stupid.
If there was an agenda, it was fear that FB would colour in the social graph for the younger generation before the kids learned how to surf.
We need a some core curriculum in the grade two/three age range on how to falsify personal data in online profiles. It used to be as a parent, you could wait for the kids to teach themselves the gutter skills (the little angels can hardly restrain themselves).
I think technology has surpassed that now.
The old joke was that Ubuntu is Swahili for "can't install Debian".
I bailed from Debian during the three year Sarge release cycle. Any for what purpose? To paraphrase Spiro Agnew: frittering fruitloops of freedom.
Ubuntu is Swahili for "pissed off about mending my broken backport LAMP stack". Maybe I shouldn't have gone down that road and just stuck with what worked out of the box in 2002. I mean really, if a three year old LAMP stack isn't broken, why fix it?
To my mind, Debian submitted a formal resignation from the torch that Ubuntu now carries.
America is no longer free because the government has become the monopoly.
How is it that the government became the black box for incomprehension? You know, the systems theory diagram of human society that wouldn't fit into twenty volumes of Wikipedia. This corrupt black box meme seems to appeal most strongly to atheists who deeply crave some one-stop shopping.
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
That was around the age he turned his attention to the government, wasn't it?
It's deeply wired in our species for males to look around and decide what political force is denying the rightfully deserved fawning attention of nubile females. Step two: howl with outrage until that primate is you.
A Libertarian is a guy who isn't getting any, with no ambition to complete step two. The howl is directed at the institution least likely to go away. Outrage as comfortable status quo.
Here's the same joke as told by Lazarus Long:
In 1000BC, the Romans were becoming so vile, I couldn't stand to have them around. In 2000AD, I was astonished at the durability of indoor plumbing.
Now, what was this tread about again? I'm not sure if I'm still on topic.
The only time I ever used BCC was to send a copy to my other me on some other account, whose existence I didn't wish to publicize.
I don't know why FB doesn't implement "burning carbon copy". Never been on the service, maybe that's also too much to ask people to understand. Perhaps the major downside is getting sued for implementing this by the visually impaired.
The upside of Facebook is that we can now explain dark matter to your average dim bulb: it's like a person without a FB account. It shows up on an abstract census, but there's no public record of its birth date, mother's maiden name, or SIN number, and it doesn't even interact with likinos, so for most practical purposes, it's not really there.
Affairs on planet earth would be so much improved to tune in the latest exoplanet night show discussing yesterday's current affairs: the great pyramids of Giza. You know it's a slow galactic news day when they spare a moment to humiliate planet earth.
I bet they're working up a great punch line about the Great Wall, coming to a screen near you on a slow news day sometime in 4'th m. AD
To quote the immortal Tammy Meztler, who cares?
But I'm sure there's someone out there rushing to sign up the Millennium Clock with a twitter account, just in case.
And between the clearly legal and clearly illegal I do see shades of gray.
What people often fail to understand is that the shades of grey are usually small potatoes. You have to cut somewhere as a practical matter. The large potatoes are touchy quibbles over intent, but I tend not to think of these as shades of grey.
Clearly illegal: I think everyone in group X should be exterminated.
Free speech: I would be happier if group X didn't exist.
Clearly illegal: I would also be happier if group X didn't exist [and I'm pleased to join your movement to bring this about].
Sometimes you have to bust people on unspoken subtext.
Clearly legal: I also have an irrational hatred of group X.
Someone might use this dodge to advertise a hate campaign if it was the best they could get away with, but I have trouble imagining it as effective without also crossing the line somewhere else. Self-illuminated hate speech doesn't really work, does it?
There's no algorithm to decide this without making judgements within a theory of mind. Yes, surely some pompous ass will show up to advocate a wacko theory of mind to construe black as white. So what? Any good decision in life is made inside a pompous ass rejection field. I don't actually like Sam Harris's objective morality, but neither do I think it's turtles all the way down.
The question is one of sensibilities as some could feel slandered, intimidated or harassed for practically nothing.
Like engineering without a license?
The only requirement for a smart investor to take a position in an overpriced stock is belief in having an edge in knowing when to unload overpriced stock.
How many Apple fanbois are going to unload their prized Apple stock at the first tremor?
Apple is doing pretty good lately in annual compound illusion.
HTTPS Everywhere is great if you have 3 minutes for every minute to do something. I used it while on vacation and I was forced to use Barnes and Noble.
The bar to resist dictatorship keeps going up. First you have to learn HTTPS Everywhere, then you have to learn tabbed browsing, cyclic tasking, and delayed gratification.
https should have become the default long ago. As it stands, I'm sure the Algerian santa is keeping a list. One shouldn't have to stand out by defending oneself against man-in-the-middle.
On the other hand, the portion of the rebel alliance with "allahakbar" as their FB password were unlikely to put up stiff resistance against sand-troopers with scimitars. Hmmm, I should watch my language.
From Three Kings:
Chief Elgin: I don't care if he's from Johannesburg. I don't want to hear "dune coon" or "sand nigger" from him or anybody else.
Conrad Vig: Captain uses those terms.
Sgt. Troy Barlow: That's not the point, Conrad. The point is that "towelhead" and "camel jockey" are perfectly good substitutes.
Barnes and Noble? Damn! That's rough.
Well, if we're not deduplicating, I'm sure a billion teaspoons/day of baby batter creams the blogobytes.