It stores more data. From an end user perspective, isn't this pretty much the #1 thing that matters? Back in the day when 4GB disk drives were considered large, there was a meme floating around that no drive would ever be large enough to contain the next version of Windows.
When the 8GB drives arrived, the clueless continued to repeat this meme. When the 30GB generation showed up, even the clueless drifted off and found other things to become clueless about.
It's been established by the movie industry for decades that the attention span of your average movie watcher ranges somewhere between 90m and 3h, if the upper bound avoids water scenes.
How many movies are released theatrically with a running time longer than 3h? Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Ghandi, Titanic, Schindler's List, ROTK, King Kong. Just the trivial productions. Any one of those movies would fit on a single HD disk plus features.
Those among us determined to watch the entire Godfather series in a single sitting without flipping a disk are probably also equiped with a condom catheter and a leg flask.
3h was always the sensible target. If a movie hasn't entered the 3rd act by the 2h mark, I'm going to get up and make popcorn anyway. How long does a movie have to be to start the 3rd act after the 2h mark? 2h45 at a minimum.
If you can cram three 3h movies onto a single disk, that's great too, fewer disks for the landfill, but it was never essential to the sales model.
In psychology they talk about "confirmation bias". Well, there's a similar effect with "capacity bias". We pay a lot of attention when the shoe pinches, but then when it doesn't we're quick to forget it once mattered.
Now that I think about it, I'm actually talking about "availability bias", where we recall the situations where the shoe pinched more readily than the cases where the shoe didn't pinch, so we assert "not pinching" as the dominant controlling variable across all scenarios.
Of course, if a person is conditioned to think that playing length is a problem with the current DVD format, they might not realize that playing length has been reduced to irrelevancy as a purchasing criteria in the next technology generation.
Too bad ethics prohibits running a mass experiment on HD consumers. We could corroborate an amazingly broad range of psychological effects.
OTOH we've been hearing the doomsday scenarios from the ipv6 zealots for 10 years now, and I'm not seeing it - it's still easy to get a block of IP addresses (I asked for 8 and got given 16 'just in case' for example).. we're not seeing the beginnings of a shortage yet. What worked for New Orleans, will work for me.
Living in a stadium thinking "if I had just noticed 30 minutes sooner, I could have made it out" is a nice way to pass the time. But the phone rang, and the dog barked, and the coffee filter collapsed and had to be poured out and brewed again... and by then, it was too late.
Personally, when I'm walking through the park and some "playful" pitbull makes an aggressive lunge in my direction (which happens often because I'm large, male, and walk with a force of purpose that a Texan would define as a trot) I'm not entirely mollified when the owner informs me "don't worry, he's friendly". As if my having a choice in the matter was entirely irrelevant.
I've one of those people who would like to pull out a gun and cap the pit bull at the last moment where I can reasonably prevent it from biting me. I'm not one of those people who wants to stand there and wait until the answer comes back "not friendly".
I'm just saying, my personal standards of brinkmanship are quite different than yours.
I also live in a fault zone, but we haven't felt the big one yet, so no worries. I just opened my tap, and fresh water is still gushing out.
If it costs a bunch of money to produce and you don't get any money back for having produced, yeah, that's what they call a loss in the business world. You lose money. Loss vs. gain, not loss vs. win. Zing. The original point went right over your head.
You have an eager customer who wants to make a huge purchase. Customer is concerned about documentation over the longer time frame. In order to close the sale, your salesdrone mutters the reassurance "the documentation will be provided in due time". Profit!
Documentation never arrives. "Oh, well, we've changed the product again, there's really no point in documenting what you purchased back then." Unilateral disavowal of implied sales promise. Double profit!
"Uh, do we have to, like that would be expensive, and it would cut into profits we already declared. Hey, it's not like we promised this in the first place, but if you *really* insist, I guess we'll do it, just to keep you happy."
That's how business works. A loss leader is finally making good on an obligation you tried for all the world to forget you'd made.
Meanwhile, the corporation got to play the game about how fabulously wealthy and profitable and powerful it has always been, and beat the street, and chuff a lot of executive parachutes.
Then when these forgotten/hidden/disavowed liabilities finally come to roost, the hard-headed CEO declares "but we're not making a profit!"
Translation: "creating this mess vested my predecessor's options, fixing this mess won't vest my own".
In the investment world this same practice is known as an RRSP/401k. You owe the tax, but you don't pay. You get to keep all the money and pretend it's your own. Until later. Then you have to give some back. But meanwhile, you benefit from the pretense. You legally get to keep the profits earned by investing the tax portion that wasn't exactly yours in the first place.
When I get old, I'll be happy to call the tax cut that comes out of my RRSP withdrawals a "loss leader" while fantasizing that I'm a captain of industry.
Not really, most communication satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, 22,000 some odd miles out from LEO. Much harder and much longer to get there. It's not particularly hard to get to geosynchronous orbit with a payload designed to take out *everything* in that orbit until the next ice age. A few hundred pounds of ball bearings in anti-geosynchronous orbit will shred a lot of lettuce.
3.07 km/s times two. Just over 20,000 fps. A couple hundred thousand 1g bearings in a slowly expanding cluster. I always liked the shotgun in Quake, but this is better.
http://homepages.solis.co.uk/~autogun/highvel.htm
It is probable that conventional chemistry has pushed muzzle velocities about as far as they can go; the rate of expansion of propellant gasses places a practical ceiling on muzzle velocity of around 6,000 fps. The military are now examining other technologies such as electromagnetic rail guns, which have on test fired 300 gm projectiles at over 13,000 fps, with projectiles of a few grams being accelerated to over 30,000 fps. If you figure 300 satellites in that orbit, average value $500m, that adds up to $150b worth of clay pigeons nicely aligned in single file, that come around again every 12 hours for another pass through the killer beebee swarm.
You can bet there are some people out there who lose sleep over this.
It's as good a measure as any. Talk about damning with faint praise. That's how I aspire to be evaluated: lined up naked against a wall while my vital statistics are transcribed by a group of bonobo monkeys. Hey, it's as good a measure as any.
In fact, the monkey-measure is probably better than commit-count, because no matter how my spam box bulges, the monkey-measure is less likely to persuade me to exchange an effective work habit for an ineffective work habit in an effort to sway a useless statistic.
People who fail to vomit when linearity is projected on inherently non-linear systems soon become known as economists or middle managers.
There is a potential upside. If this new bit-pimp metric catches on, I'd love to be able to sell my commit-count history on eBay, or perhaps pull an exchange for a level 70 Druid.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Cell processor yet. I guess everyone hates it.
The first power word that a toddler learns is "mine!" It's the capstone to a complete working vocabulary: mommy, daddy, more, enough, and mine. My laptop, my hardware, my data, my privacy. The word "mine" has a direct bypass to the neurological circuit "you can't make me", which as adults lingers as a deeply-rooted fascination with rubber-hose cryptography, and bravado propositions such as "if the Feds bust through your windows". Wrong answer.
Let's look at this from Sony's perspective: my media, my hardware, my design, my copyright, my profits. But guess what? They have a small physical access problem. Millions of zit faced kids with access to liquid nitrogen can get their paws inside the PS3.
This is why an entire SPU is locked down on the PS3 for security / DRM purposes. The SPU contains 256K of SRAM which is carefully guarded. The instruction set is synchronous and deterministic to guard against timing attacks. They were aware of power attacks as well. These can be partially mitigated in software for critical routines by executing non-conditional instruction sequences and then discarding the portions of the computation you didn't want. By design, the SPU doesn't dance on the power line the way most modern speculative out-of-order processors do to begin with. You can't use latency effects, because the local SRAM has constant access time. You can't use contention effects because there aren't any below the level of DMA bursts, which are controlled by a companion processor within the SPU. Plus I think it is possible to schedule SPU-SPU and SPU-memory DMA transfers deterministically, if you really need to. None of this was accidental.
The hardest part of the problem is bootstrapping the secure SPU with the security kernel. I've forgotten how they went about it. There must be some kind of decrypt key buried in the Cell hardware which functions during initial code upload during processor initialization.
In the long run it might be an unwinnable battle, but the PS3 certainly has a far better facility to maintain data security in the complete absence of hardware security than your average PC.
Why can't the average hacker Harry wants to enjoy the same security as Sony/IBM, why can't you achieve this? You've already got the PS3 in your living room. Impediment: the secure system init decrypt key is probably burned into the silicon. It's probably a one-way key, so even if you crack the key, you won't be able to encrypt a replacement block of your own code that matches the decrypt key. But let's suppose you break that too. Problem: Sony knows the decrypt key for the SPU initialization sequence. Game over.
Let's suppose you figure out how to physically change the silicon with an initialization decrypt code known only to yourself. Congratulations, you now enjoy the same protection for your secrets that Sony enjoys for "Untraceable". In doing so, you have now upgraded yourself to a sufficiently threatening fish to swim in a tank in Syria, where your nervous system will be similarly reconfigured.
Ew, I feel like I've just written the script for "Adaptation".
After that satisfying little burst of hostility, it suddenly occurred to me that this CNN story is the best argument in favour of a la carte cable TV service I've yet encountered.
I was just thinking about the meth heads in East Vancouver, those whom the various levels of well-meaning administration is desperately trying to sweep under the carpet for the duration of the 2010 winter games. We also have a very high residential property crime rate across the puddle. Gotta support the habit, you know. What do they get, maybe 10 cents on the dollar of the item when they fence it at the local pawn shop?
Reminds me I was reading about this lately. This guy writes really well, but if you enough of his blog, you'll figure out that he's totally into the "fear" business. First, here's a good example of his morbid fear-mongering:
http://www.providentsecurity.ca/blog/2006/04/does_an_800lb_s.html
I told him a story about a home in Shaughnessy that was burglarized several years ago. Three men broke into the house and stole a huge safe from the master bedroom closet that weighed over 700lbs. The safe was not 'installed' and the men were able to get it out of the closet and down the upstairs hallway. Rather than carry the safe down the stairs, they simply pushed it down the curved marble staircase. No matter what you do, you're royally screwed and your marble is cracked if Provident is not on the job. However, he does write some good pieces. His main blog has some interesting crime maps, too.
http://www.providentsecurity.ca/blog/ http://www.providentsecurity.ca/blog/2006/04/a_typical_resid.html
Once inside, the crook(s) will go straight to the master bedroom and empty out the bedside tables and dressers. The next stop is the closet where they will rifle through everything looking for cash, jewellery and anything that can be easily turned into cash. After the master bedroom, they'll typically do a quick tour of the entire house looking for other portable items like cameras before heading out to their waiting stolen car.... As most of the property crime in Vancouver is committed by drug addicts trying to support their habit, stolen goods are sold very quickly, often within an hour of the burglary. Most of the time, a crook gets about 10 cents on the dollar. As a result of these economics, a typical burglar needs to break into multiple homes every day to support their drug habit. What does this have to do with CNN firing a blogger?
I've always wondered who are the people who buy this "recently owned" merchandise from these corrupt brokers. Without that income stream, the whole system collapses. Apparently there is no limit to the number of people out there whose material needs place no boundaries on the recently owned. I hope they're the same people getting their windows busted.
I feel the same way about anyone who subscribes to a cable TV service. People, you are all enablers to CNN behaving as they do. Have your fill of the brain-sucking CNN horror show on your hot TV. You deserve it.
Another slashdot story this morning has Joel commenting about binary Office formats. I read a little more while I was there, and came across this excellent post:
* Why? - Our switch appears to have put the port in a failed state
* Why? - After some discussion with the Peer1 NOC, we speculate that it was quite possibly caused by an Ethernet speed / duplex mismatch
* Why? - The switch interface was set to auto-negotiate instead of being manually configured
* Why? - We were fully aware of problems like this, and have been for many years. But - we do not have a written standard and verification process for production switch configurations.
* Why? - Documentation is often thought of as an aid for when the sysadmin isn't around or for other members of the operations team, whereas, it should really be thought of as a checklist. Apparently, *manually overriding* all this automatic shit (that makes our manual skills obsolete) hasn't died yet.
Skill not destined to die any time soon: credit repair.
Useful when: your crap-ass Wifi is breached
Reason: the skill of hardening wireless consumer convenience-toys is receiving a long course of immunotherapy at a clinic in Cuba, after years of dissolute, party-hard lifestyle
No, this actually proves that you can reuse data gathered with large expensive apparatus. You do realize you just managed to correct the truly stupid with no marginal cash outlay? I had a good laugh. But wait. The union of careless journalism will soon assert their rights to ludicrous assertions: "Hey, that's my stupidity you're laughing at! You can't do that! You haven't paid me! I own the Mockyrights!"
Then it won't be possible to do anything for free.
I've been saying for years that any technology which has yet to characterize its physical limits is snake oil in training. I always read stories about quantum computing where it states "with enough qubits", but never yet read an account which explains what becomes more difficult as the qubits are piled high, and whether this difficulty increases linearly or exponentially. Perhaps qubits can be stacked arbitrarily high... in an otherwise empty universe.
One upon a time thermodynamics was an open frontier. Actually, no. It turns out in most realistic scenarios you are lucky to extract 40% of the milk and honey. Thermodynamics, welcome to entropy.
What would obtaining 40% of a solution to the class of NP-complete problems look like? How many qubits can be stacked together before the computation interacts with statistically improbable vacuum states? What's the catch, and why do so few articles on the subject clearly elucidate the bounding condition? Worse, why do people who already understand the relationship between thermodynamics (greed) and entropy (death and taxes) fall for these one-sided journalistic prognostications?
This is even sillier than your reply indicates. By the same logic we could conclude by the failure of the Pentium IV that x86 was doomed. Then Intel came up with Core Duo to show what should have been achieved in the first place (and saved the world many gigawatt years of unnecessary power generation in the meanwhile).
Intel botched their first hack at Itanium. They weren't willing to pony up another couple of billion to get it right the second time. By then their performance war against AMD had set the bar so high on x86 performance, their "pull the rug and own the world" marketing strategy was no longer viable (not even within the Intel boardroom ego chamber).
Intel killed Itanium in the false belief they could go cold turkey on out-of-order (OoO) execution. It's true that OoO scales badly, both in terms of complexity and power consumption, as you broaden the execution pathways. Intel's solution: exterminate OoO. Right from the beginning I thought this was a daft and deadly embrace of determinism.
The sensible solution: constrain the design to a reasonable fixed upper bound on OoO depth. They could have done this by having bundles express groups of *dependent* operations. The OoO ceiling would then be a single bundle unit.
I would have set up bundles to encode at least five operations under ideal conditions. If the operations are dependent, you need to specify fewer total registers (and in fact, commit fewer total registers back to the register file, which can only be an advantage). I'm sure this would complicate validation and maybe there are some other gotchas I haven't consider, but it always seemed obvious to me that this would work better relative to the algorithms I worked with (which have sources of non-determinism you can't eliminate).
You would also add a rule concerning bundle independence. Say the architecture was designed to scale up to four bundles wide, with a peak five operations per bundle. Each of the bundles within the bundle group would be required to be fully independent (shared inputs would be allowed, nothing more).
You'd probably set up four bundle execution pipelines (each internally with an OoO dispatch queue). There would have to be rules on the maximum rate of forwarding operands from one bundle pipeline to another. Some portions of the register file would be somewhat "bound" to particular bundle pipelines. You'd have to sacrifice register file orthogonality. But it's a false orthogonality to begin with: a recently computed result can only be forwarded so far in a fixed time increment, and you can't afford to provision worst-case forwarding pathways from everywhere to everywhere on a fat uarch.
The Itanium design team was seduced by determinism and orthogonality. Partly this was because x86 instruction encoding is a horror show. With a more sensible ISA, you could have 90% of the advantage of x86 non-orthogonality (code density improvements) at 10% of the complexity of an x86 instruction decoder. I've been saying this for years. Finally, ARM came up with Thumb-2 to demonstrate my point: the best design is a carefully constrained and balanced non-orthogonality.
Why didn't ARM do this long ago? The 16/32 decoding mode is maybe 5% as difficult as x86 decoding, and look at the huge advantage it gives you in balanced time/space.
For an Itanium bundle, I would set up the rules for a finite fan out / fan in for every instruction field. In my version of things, a 128 bit bundle would be able (under ideal circumstances) to encode five operations. A bundle decoder must break the bundle into up to five independent instructions.
In my approach, you might have a rule that any bit-field within the bundle can have at most four distinct possible destinations (within the five exploded instructions). Each field within the exploded instructions can obtain bits from (one of) at most four different
Funny that, I was looking at the US per-state GDP just last night.
Oregon is a nice place. I was through Portland many years ago after biking from Port Angeles around the mountainous backside of Washington, then back inland along the Columbia River through to Portland (elevation 60 feet IIRC) where we visited Peter Norton's alma mater, the west again to the Oregon coast along the Van Duzer corridor, a rather wussy pass through the Rockies as these things go, but we happened to buck the headwind of all time. On a Ferry, I would have been looking for spray. One of those days where you crest a false flat, then gear *down* for the descent.
Portland reminded me of Vancouver, minus East Hastings, but also minus the international food scene. Mother-earth Birkenstocks, check. Birkenstocks with purple daisies, check. Birkenstocks with bike cleats, check. What's not to like?
Let's take a GDP stroll mostly along the Appalachians, the one region of the US I've never visited (unless you count Pittsburgh). 44 Kentucky 29,842 45 Alabama 29,697 46 South Carolina 29,642 47 Oklahoma 29,545 48 Montana 27,942 49 Arkansas 27,875 50 West Virginia 24,748 51 Mississippi 24,062
The only reason Oregon looks bad by any measure is having done so little with so much. Reminiscent of the Hudson's Bay Company, the oldest commercial corporation in North America. Sold off more assets than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined (fur trade, oil and gas, trans-continental railway rights, etc.) but always kept its eye on the prize: $10 dress shirts. With a competent management team, a business plan, a vast supply-chain infrastructure, a will to succeed, a grasp on reality, and lots of immigrant labour, it could have been Walmart. Who knew?
If you want a cheap cooling bill at the site of massive Hydro infrastructure, check out Cold and colder.
Kitimat would need undersea cables tapping into the Pacific grid, but if you wanted your data center to resemble Cheyenne Mountain, that could be arranged. In Sept-Iles you would enjoy the language laws and two layers of Federal government. In both locations you would enjoy Canadian privacy laws we have passed, and the DMCA we haven't yet passed. 30 annual days with a high above 20 degrees C (68 F). 100MW there would barely ripple the meters.
You'd end up with higher latencies, and less routing redundancy. The ports and heavy infrastructure would be world class, but you might also discover that Fedex doesn't guarantee same week delivery for six months out of the year.
The one concession I would have demanded from Google at Dulles is an Enron-esque contract to shed load during a grid crisis. Should be no problem for Google to design the data center to shed load a a MW/minute for half an hour. The spiders, for example, can tolerate a little downtime. Plus Google has the capacity to load-balance globally.
Not many people realize this, but the phone companies in the 1970s routinely routed long distance calls from Boston to Tampa through western time zone
Emphasis, mine. Interjections, mine. Brackets, mine.
After the Intel 8080 microprocessor was chosen for the Altair, two young computer buffs from Seattle, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, won the job of writing software that would allow it to be programmed in BASIC. The weedy buffs win again, no fair.
Nowhere was interest in personal computing more intense than in the vicinity of Palo Alto, California, a place known as Silicon Valley because of the presence of many big semiconductor firms. Electronics hobbyists abounded there, and two of them--Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak--turned their tinkering into a highly appealing consumer product: the Apple II, a plastic-encased computer with a keyboard, screen, and cassette tape for storage. Holy Tinker Bell, Batman. Pass the duct tape, Robin.
Among them were three kinds of applications that made this desktop device a truly valuable tool for business--word processing, spreadsheets [VisiCalc], and databases. The market for personal computers exploded, especially after IBM weighed in with a crap product in 1981. Its crap offering used a crap operating system from Microsoft, MS-DOS, but due to a truly superior keyboard was quickly adopted by other manufacturers, allowing any given program to run on a wide variety of machines. Nothing clacked quite like the original IBM PC.
Hardware like the [Xerox] mouse made the computer easier to control; operating systems allowed the [Xerox] screen to be divided into independently managed [Xerox] windows; applications programs steadily widened the range of what computers could do; and processors were lashed together--thousands of them in some cases-in order to solve pieces of a problem in parallel. Meanwhile, new communications standards [Xerox, AT&T, Berkeley] enabled computers to be joined in private networks or the incomprehensibly intricate global weave of the Internet. To be fair, Xerox gets its due in the timeline section.
1970 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Xerox Corporation assembles a team of researchers in information and physical sciences in Palo Alto, California, with the goal of creating "the architecture of information." Over the next 30 years innovations emerging from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) include the concept of windows (1972), the first real personal computer (Alto in 1973), laser printers (1973), the concept of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processors (1974), and EtherNet (1974). In 2002 Xerox PARC incorporates as an independent company--Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. Here he finds a fancy way to explain he still lives in his parent's basement:
1975 First home computer is marketed to hobbyists
The Altair 8800, widely considered the first home computer, is marketed to hobbyists by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems. The build-it-yourself kit doesn't have a keyboard, monitor, or its own programming language; data are input with a series of switches and lights. But it includes an Intel microprocessor and costs less than $400. Seizing an opportunity, fledgling entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Paul Allen propose writing a version of BASIC for the new computer. They start the project by forming a partnership called Microsoft. A fledgling is a young bird that has recently left its nest (it has fledged) but is still dependent upon parental care and feeding.
Speaking of which, the other history-rewriting seizure-in-residence, Darl McBride, appears to have finally come to the end of his feather.
Geeks might think it's funny, but if someone who didn't know about the FSF and RMS walked in, they'd just think, "Who is this tosser?"
I was thinking about this aspect of human nature at my favorite coffee shop yesterday. The curious aspect of this is our ingrained tendency to admire (or mentally confer social status toward) the kind of person who takes one look at something like this, and makes the snap "loser" judgment. There is in practice no social approbation for the fact that this snap social judgment might be wrong, or that making this snap social judgment is a talentless act (the average nine year old does it six times before recess).
The tried and true human strategy is this: if you haven't got a clue, enforce conformity. That never gets you into any significant trouble.
This is a lesson we learn somewhere in our preschool / elementary school years, and then in puberty the lesson is reinforced with a pile driver of social derision.
There was a new girl who showed up in my grade six year. She had been in an accident with some boiling water. Her entire lower face below the nose was hideously disfigured. This was back in the era of the Jackson Five. Back then, you couldn't alter your hideous disfigurement with a new one. By that age I had spent some time in a children's hospital, down the hall from the burn unit. I wasn't inclined to laugh. Nor was the rest of my class for the first two months: they were too freaked out by the red and pink planetscape of moonbuggy skin folds. The girl was in heaven. Within a few weeks, she had convinced herself this school was different.
Not for long. Soon the pre-adolescent piranhas gathered their nerve. The burned girl made the rest of us uncomfortable, she deserved to suffer. Not only was she taunted, but anyone who spoke a nice word to her risked incarceration in their hallway locker.
These are the same people who grew up to become the adults who make these snap judgments about RMS's peculiarities.
So there I am in back in grade six, horrified by my membership in the human race. Not a good omen for my own future popularity, either. I was developing the illness known as "writer".
I don't have much respect for the kind of social security one obtains by having an unfailing instinct for whom to ridicule next. That's my choice, I know the world will never conform. What shocks me is the implicit justification of this behaviour when people put forward assertions that RMS's kooky behaviour is a liability. If I were RMS, I wouldn't have much use for these people of low investment and lightning derision, either.
What would actually happen if we rounded all these people up and blasted them into space on Arc B? How would human civilization fail if deprived of lightening derision? What essential element of human social cohesion would immediately fail us?
I have a suspicion it's a self-populating niche. Remove the worst offenders, those who remain will quickly spill into the vacant niche. Maybe we're *all* wired for asshole ascendency, and at any given time, those of us deprived of the social advantage of asshole in residence make chicken salad out of chicken shit proclaiming our virtuous forbearance. It's not as if you can read the lkml and not detect the agents of conformity bridling to assume power. The more extreme a group of non-conformists styles themselves, the more debate rages over their code of conduct.
I think because the harsh lessons on conformity are first learned at the elementary school age, the lessons enter the mind as inviolate rules of the universe. We acquire these lessons before we acquire the capacity to reflect upon them.
Here's a piece that ran at aldaily recently: What the New Atheists Don't See. I have no idea if this article is any good, I just looked long enough to see that it mentions all the neo-atheist books that have been in the news lately. Children acquire rel
I agree. Video is even slower than reading a 40 page article at Toms Hardware, sliced up to contain one paragraph of text and 17 bar charts on each page.
Reading at +5, with a preference of funny: -2. It's not that I don't like humour, I just think humour needs to be interesting *before* it can be funny. Except for Bill Murray's hair in Kingpin. That made me cry with or without a cymbal crash.
Let's see what's on this thread's "threshold 5" sampler plate:
Once again there are people missinterpreting religious dogma in order to satisfy their desires to express themselves.
This being Islam we're talking about, it propably won't take too long before death threats start flying, and it's always possible some lunatic will decide to carry them out,...
Sadly, any religion that claims to be a religion of peace is lying through its teeth.
Except that there isn't anything in the new testament telling Christians to go out and bomb abortion clinics...
Lines like "Go and kill the infidels" without the line right before that said something like "and when the infidels break their peace treaty...
Regardless of atrocities committed (...), there certainly seems to be a higher atrocity/individual rate...
Really? Is killing because you are a uniformed soldier any better in the eyes of god...
I can assure you that "Muslims" who bomb people they think are repressing them...
Because it is a crime to be gay in most Islamic countries, punishable by torture and/or death...
Lets see, one is the bastard offspring of Judaism, and the other is the bastard offspring of Judaism...
At least the anti-abortion-nutjob can aim a rifle at the abortion doctor in specific...
I mean, Baptists had a person or two blow up abortion clinics is about the closes we have, and usually no one was there except somebody with bad luck...
Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 38.5). Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?"
If you are referring to Catholic Church's semi-official policy of protecting practicing pedophiles...
Since when does Slashdot give mod points to people who don't know UNIX? -- You must be new here.
Last but not least, here's what you'd have to print to be murdered in Europe.
After all, a group of muslim children named a teddy bear after him but their teacher was the one who was almost stoned to death.
What's next? Are they gonna complain about the pictures all over the net (and even Wikipedia) of exposed women?
We've been utter dicks to them for the last 100 years (European colonialism, the USSR/USA using them as pawns during the Cold War, c
Speaking of Digg, the first phrase to enter by head when I saw "Delver" was "Dirk Diggler". I guess they couldn't call themselves Diggler due to a likely trade name dispute.
The second line to enter my head was a quip from Manhattan.
"Let's do it some strange way that you always wanted do but nobody would do it with you."
"I'm shocked. What kind of talk is that from a kid your age? Well, I'll get my scuba diving equipment..."
The third thing that entered my mind was "dowsing with doodlebugs".
I'm not sure "Delver" was a good name. How about "Delver!"? Stocks that end with a bang are trading at a premium lately.
Or, Delver could be cool and style themselves with codepoint U+00A1, which slashdot is apparently too tame to render. Slashdot won't render entity
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either.
Ooh, Delver could have been really cool and styled their name *entirely* out of symbols/. won't render, with pronunciations exclusively in
Microsoft has been hard at work trying to create a beachhead in the living room. Speaking of Sony, wonder if they have been missing that giant bite out of their backside. You can see Google is concerned about shaping the cell phone industry so as not to become locked-out from those clients. It strikes me that Google would have the same concern about Xbox/YaMShooN. The problem is that Google's motto is "don't do evil" and Sony's motto is "do unto others, before they do unto you". Has their ever been a standard Sony hasn't tried to coop? Wireless USB anyone?
Meanwhile, Sony has acquired that massive half-backside limp, and they would warmly welcome a cash injection, if Google can figure out how to sufficiently distance themselves from Blu-ray DRM hell. Bad, bad, bad for Google to get the reputation of root-kitting its userbase. I wonder whether Google would kick some funds to Sony to ensure a Google-friendly living room?
This might provide enough incentive for as-yet unjoined IBM/AMD to take Cell to the next level, if anyone still believes this technology can outperform. I've long had a suspicion that Cell might actually make a good datacenter platform for the kinds of highly specialized algorithms Google employs.
From Google's perspective, the horrible Blu-ray DRM must strike them as a PR poison pill with regard to entering into a high-profile Sony alliance. But it might make sense with Xbox aligned to the searches of evil.
APL had a global system variable known as "quad IO" (the quad was written as a tall medium-wide box symbol) which controlled "index origin". All sane programmers soon set this value to zero.
If you had to sane functions with insane functions, you declared quad-IO in your list of local variables and assigned it the value assumed by the code within that function. Exiting that function, the local quad-IO would cease to mask the global quad-IO.
We're probably talking late 1960s here.
I'm not sure the first language to standardize on short circuit evaluation. The first I knew of was C. But then C didn't manage to get malloc (0) right, so even the best of us refuse to learn from our forebears.
Of course, VB raised hearing impairment to the level of an art form, but not in the way Beethoven managed to write his ninth symphony. More like a John Cage requiem set to the lyrics "Don't worry, be happy".
Reading Debunking Linus's Latest I actually convulsed out loud, and dry-dribbled milk I wasn't drinking.
The fundamental result of [address] space separation is that you can't share data structures. That means that you can't share locking, it means that you must copy any shared data, and that in turn means that you have a much harder time handling coherency. The last sentence is obviously wrong: when you do not share data structures, there is no coherency problem by definition. I don't always believe in the rule of thumb that what is declared obvious isn't, but this sentence defines it to a new level.
Nice, thought, dude. Wouldn't it be nice if we only had to worry about the coherence of data representations, and not coherence of what the data represents?
I don't see much obvious coherence in my web browser rendering a stale copy of a document that has already been updated on the authoritative server. This is a great exercise in finger pointing. The software won't fail. It will highly reliable, faultlessly delivering data in some unknown relationship to its best-before date. I guess what I then choose to do myself with the possibly stale date my OS reliably feeds me is my own liability.
At the level of a web browser, this might be OK in practice. At the level of an OS, I'm not so sure. What Linus was saying is that with shared data structures, it's a practical matter to have all processes deliver a *fresh* view of the data, but apparently "fresh" is orthogonal to "coherent" in some definitional Shapiroverse.
How useful is it for a process to have a partial copy of a page table the OS has since modified? What kind of coherence is that?
Basically the problem is that copyright is unenforceable, and a majority of the population feels no moral compunctions about violating it. (I happen to disagree with the majority, but that battle is lost, and it's time to move on.) The copyright system lost what moral authority it once claimed when it enacted the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act. I don't get how anyone is appealing to moral authority at this late stage in the square dance.
Jefferson cribbed from http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/2005/10/intellectual-property-monopoly-regime.html
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. The natural order of things is no copyright system at all. Copyright is a social construct. Exclusivity is granted on the premise that copyright promotes creation, and that the exclusivity does not outlast its virtue.
In modern society, the impediments to creation are not terribly high. If the copyright system ended tomorrow, creativity would not cease. While certain distribution channels (big budget Hollywood movies) would cease to exist, other forms of creativity would soon spring up to fill the void.
The main function of our present copyright system is to manufacture celebrity. Instead one million people investing $300 each worth of their time and energy (the Wikipedia model), we have one person overproducing $300 million (the Peter Jackson model).
Celebrity culture is a useful political tool.
Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes they both Oh yes, they both Oh yes, they both reached for The gun, the gun, the gun, the gun, Oh yes, they both reached for the gun for the gun. While we're collectively obsessed with the spectacle of OJ escaping justice, our political elites rob church basements.
Personally, I've had enough of the glove and the gun already, and I'm not buying this old "moral compunction" canard.
That Edison meme is so tired. It's not difficult to make a filament that glows a dull red without burning up. I'm sure every material he tried was different with respect to how bright he could make it, what voltage was required, and how long it would last. Given the underlying distribution (all over the map) it didn't take a genius to recognize the possibility that with some persistence one might stumble upon an amazing outlier. Furthermore, the utility of an incandescent lamp goes up rapidly with sustainable filament temperature.
But no, he wasn't even that far along. Turns out Edison was working with carbon filaments, and was just as concerned with high resistivity as filament duration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb
In addressing the question "Who invented the incandescent lamp?" historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Swan and Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable. Another historian, Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he invented an entire, integrated system of electric lighting. "The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting." You first hear the story about the light bulb sometime around your grade two school year, and notice the amazing teflon power of the light bulb meme to bead and repel the corrosive schoolyard "oh really?" retort. If you came equipped with the "standard" human learning circuit, you'll soon find yourself repeating this meme as an adult without once having activated critical thinking. Lean fast, never look back.
Here's a crappy Wikipedia article explaining how Edison's famed persistence has now been industrialized:
I'm sure the robots who replace us will regale their helpless cooing replicants with clever aphorisms about virtue of persistence when confronted with combinatorial parameter spaces. The most common injury in the field of robotic invention will be a blown nano-rotator cuff, and there will be a roaring spam trade in suspended silica-flouride fullerenes. "Robby can't come out to play today, he's caught a malware trojan, and it's highly contagious. Plus he's way behind in his paleochemistry assignment to iterate a few billion tetracyclic backbones with aliphalic side chains."
The Tree of Life tells the story of life on Earth, and our research can say something about how quickly life developed. Our discovery suggests that there were fewer big "events" than we have previously assumed in the development of higher life forms. I really hate it when your average scientist tries to think. What we can determine (from what we know so far) of the history of life on earth is that there is a fairly large term representing a "winner take all" effect that determines how this tree is ultimately pruned. The insight this scientist was trying to express is that there are relatively few "split pots" on earth's evolutionary tree.
I've long suspected that a few twinges of our human predilection for genocide stems from a deeply rooted evolutionary belief that we are still seated at such a table. Do unto others before they do unto you.
Up until the Cambrian era, mother nature was doing quite the nice job of covering up her dirty work. Then she tried to hide the equatorial crime scene high atop a cliff face of a mountain range in desolate southern Alberta. She was just in the process of tuning up a rabid strain of stampeding bison to cover off the eastern approach, but then some upstart seafaring albino monkey got the notion that India lay due south of Newfoundland, and her reputation has never been quite the same since.
Well, we do have a tradition in Canada where our political midges intrude upon the affairs of independent oversight: Lunn defends firing of nuclear watchdog head The man is a pox, duly elected, for the present duration.
I wouldn't assume the same fate for our privacy commissioner. You need to understand something about national character, which is best expressed in a recent article in the NY Times: Pinker on moral instinct
The notion is that there are five fundamental moral instincts that cut across all human societies: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity. Where nations differ is relative priority.
Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible -- what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother? I've long had issues with Pinker's writing style, but he does consistently raise good points (if you don't get hung up on his first introduction of an idea, where he holds back essential refinements out of some misguided notion of rhetorical linearity).
Scratch a Russian, you find a peasant (plus three bottles of Stolichnaya and a Kalashnikov). Scratch a Canadian, you'll find 40 acres of dirt, a dour British deference to civic order, a Mennonite spirit of community and fair play, and the irascibility of Scotsman with the hand of authority up his kilt.
At the end of the day, the American fetish for harm and authority is just a passing chest cold. We just need to expectorate a Gary Lunn or two, and we'll revert right back to our traditional boring selves.
Slashdot Mirror
When the 8GB drives arrived, the clueless continued to repeat this meme. When the 30GB generation showed up, even the clueless drifted off and found other things to become clueless about.
It's been established by the movie industry for decades that the attention span of your average movie watcher ranges somewhere between 90m and 3h, if the upper bound avoids water scenes.
How many movies are released theatrically with a running time longer than 3h? Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Ghandi, Titanic, Schindler's List, ROTK, King Kong. Just the trivial productions. Any one of those movies would fit on a single HD disk plus features.
Those among us determined to watch the entire Godfather series in a single sitting without flipping a disk are probably also equiped with a condom catheter and a leg flask.
3h was always the sensible target. If a movie hasn't entered the 3rd act by the 2h mark, I'm going to get up and make popcorn anyway. How long does a movie have to be to start the 3rd act after the 2h mark? 2h45 at a minimum.
If you can cram three 3h movies onto a single disk, that's great too, fewer disks for the landfill, but it was never essential to the sales model.
In psychology they talk about "confirmation bias". Well, there's a similar effect with "capacity bias". We pay a lot of attention when the shoe pinches, but then when it doesn't we're quick to forget it once mattered.
Now that I think about it, I'm actually talking about "availability bias", where we recall the situations where the shoe pinched more readily than the cases where the shoe didn't pinch, so we assert "not pinching" as the dominant controlling variable across all scenarios.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
Of course, if a person is conditioned to think that playing length is a problem with the current DVD format, they might not realize that playing length has been reduced to irrelevancy as a purchasing criteria in the next technology generation.
Too bad ethics prohibits running a mass experiment on HD consumers. We could corroborate an amazingly broad range of psychological effects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
IMHO, the unbiased opinion of HD is "I'll wait".
Living in a stadium thinking "if I had just noticed 30 minutes sooner, I could have made it out" is a nice way to pass the time. But the phone rang, and the dog barked, and the coffee filter collapsed and had to be poured out and brewed again
Personally, when I'm walking through the park and some "playful" pitbull makes an aggressive lunge in my direction (which happens often because I'm large, male, and walk with a force of purpose that a Texan would define as a trot) I'm not entirely mollified when the owner informs me "don't worry, he's friendly". As if my having a choice in the matter was entirely irrelevant.
I've one of those people who would like to pull out a gun and cap the pit bull at the last moment where I can reasonably prevent it from biting me. I'm not one of those people who wants to stand there and wait until the answer comes back "not friendly".
I'm just saying, my personal standards of brinkmanship are quite different than yours.
I also live in a fault zone, but we haven't felt the big one yet, so no worries. I just opened my tap, and fresh water is still gushing out.
You have an eager customer who wants to make a huge purchase. Customer is concerned about documentation over the longer time frame. In order to close the sale, your salesdrone mutters the reassurance "the documentation will be provided in due time". Profit!
Documentation never arrives. "Oh, well, we've changed the product again, there's really no point in documenting what you purchased back then." Unilateral disavowal of implied sales promise. Double profit!
Knock, knock. Who's there? Aunty. Aunty who? Aunty Trust. We'd like our documentation finally.
"Uh, do we have to, like that would be expensive, and it would cut into profits we already declared. Hey, it's not like we promised this in the first place, but if you *really* insist, I guess we'll do it, just to keep you happy."
That's how business works. A loss leader is finally making good on an obligation you tried for all the world to forget you'd made.
Meanwhile, the corporation got to play the game about how fabulously wealthy and profitable and powerful it has always been, and beat the street, and chuff a lot of executive parachutes.
Then when these forgotten/hidden/disavowed liabilities finally come to roost, the hard-headed CEO declares "but we're not making a profit!"
Translation: "creating this mess vested my predecessor's options, fixing this mess won't vest my own".
In the investment world this same practice is known as an RRSP/401k. You owe the tax, but you don't pay. You get to keep all the money and pretend it's your own. Until later. Then you have to give some back. But meanwhile, you benefit from the pretense. You legally get to keep the profits earned by investing the tax portion that wasn't exactly yours in the first place.
When I get old, I'll be happy to call the tax cut that comes out of my RRSP withdrawals a "loss leader" while fantasizing that I'm a captain of industry.
3.07 km/s times two. Just over 20,000 fps. A couple hundred thousand 1g bearings in a slowly expanding cluster. I always liked the shotgun in Quake, but this is better.
http://homepages.solis.co.uk/~autogun/highvel.htm It is probable that conventional chemistry has pushed muzzle velocities about as far as they can go; the rate of expansion of propellant gasses places a practical ceiling on muzzle velocity of around 6,000 fps. The military are now examining other technologies such as electromagnetic rail guns, which have on test fired 300 gm projectiles at over 13,000 fps, with projectiles of a few grams being accelerated to over 30,000 fps. If you figure 300 satellites in that orbit, average value $500m, that adds up to $150b worth of clay pigeons nicely aligned in single file, that come around again every 12 hours for another pass through the killer beebee swarm.
You can bet there are some people out there who lose sleep over this.
In fact, the monkey-measure is probably better than commit-count, because no matter how my spam box bulges, the monkey-measure is less likely to persuade me to exchange an effective work habit for an ineffective work habit in an effort to sway a useless statistic.
People who fail to vomit when linearity is projected on inherently non-linear systems soon become known as economists or middle managers.
There is a potential upside. If this new bit-pimp metric catches on, I'd love to be able to sell my commit-count history on eBay, or perhaps pull an exchange for a level 70 Druid.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Cell processor yet. I guess everyone hates it.
The first power word that a toddler learns is "mine!" It's the capstone to a complete working vocabulary: mommy, daddy, more, enough, and mine. My laptop, my hardware, my data, my privacy. The word "mine" has a direct bypass to the neurological circuit "you can't make me", which as adults lingers as a deeply-rooted fascination with rubber-hose cryptography, and bravado propositions such as "if the Feds bust through your windows". Wrong answer.
Let's look at this from Sony's perspective: my media, my hardware, my design, my copyright, my profits. But guess what? They have a small physical access problem. Millions of zit faced kids with access to liquid nitrogen can get their paws inside the PS3.
This is why an entire SPU is locked down on the PS3 for security / DRM purposes. The SPU contains 256K of SRAM which is carefully guarded. The instruction set is synchronous and deterministic to guard against timing attacks. They were aware of power attacks as well. These can be partially mitigated in software for critical routines by executing non-conditional instruction sequences and then discarding the portions of the computation you didn't want. By design, the SPU doesn't dance on the power line the way most modern speculative out-of-order processors do to begin with. You can't use latency effects, because the local SRAM has constant access time. You can't use contention effects because there aren't any below the level of DMA bursts, which are controlled by a companion processor within the SPU. Plus I think it is possible to schedule SPU-SPU and SPU-memory DMA transfers deterministically, if you really need to. None of this was accidental.
The hardest part of the problem is bootstrapping the secure SPU with the security kernel. I've forgotten how they went about it. There must be some kind of decrypt key buried in the Cell hardware which functions during initial code upload during processor initialization.
In the long run it might be an unwinnable battle, but the PS3 certainly has a far better facility to maintain data security in the complete absence of hardware security than your average PC.
Why can't the average hacker Harry wants to enjoy the same security as Sony/IBM, why can't you achieve this? You've already got the PS3 in your living room. Impediment: the secure system init decrypt key is probably burned into the silicon. It's probably a one-way key, so even if you crack the key, you won't be able to encrypt a replacement block of your own code that matches the decrypt key. But let's suppose you break that too. Problem: Sony knows the decrypt key for the SPU initialization sequence. Game over.
Let's suppose you figure out how to physically change the silicon with an initialization decrypt code known only to yourself. Congratulations, you now enjoy the same protection for your secrets that Sony enjoys for "Untraceable". In doing so, you have now upgraded yourself to a sufficiently threatening fish to swim in a tank in Syria, where your nervous system will be similarly reconfigured.
Ew, I feel like I've just written the script for "Adaptation".
After that satisfying little burst of hostility, it suddenly occurred to me that this CNN story is the best argument in favour of a la carte cable TV service I've yet encountered.
CNN, however, disagrees: Why a la carte cable TV is a nutty idea
Nutty like a fox, if you ask me.
I was just thinking about the meth heads in East Vancouver, those whom the various levels of well-meaning administration is desperately trying to sweep under the carpet for the duration of the 2010 winter games. We also have a very high residential property crime rate across the puddle. Gotta support the habit, you know. What do they get, maybe 10 cents on the dollar of the item when they fence it at the local pawn shop?
Reminds me I was reading about this lately. This guy writes really well, but if you enough of his blog, you'll figure out that he's totally into the "fear" business. First, here's a good example of his morbid fear-mongering:
http://www.providentsecurity.ca/blog/2006/04/does_an_800lb_s.html I told him a story about a home in Shaughnessy that was burglarized several years ago. Three men broke into the house and stole a huge safe from the master bedroom closet that weighed over 700lbs. The safe was not 'installed' and the men were able to get it out of the closet and down the upstairs hallway. Rather than carry the safe down the stairs, they simply pushed it down the curved marble staircase. No matter what you do, you're royally screwed and your marble is cracked if Provident is not on the job. However, he does write some good pieces. His main blog has some interesting crime maps, too.
http://www.providentsecurity.ca/blog/
http://www.providentsecurity.ca/blog/2006/04/a_typical_resid.html Once inside, the crook(s) will go straight to the master bedroom and empty out the bedside tables and dressers. The next stop is the closet where they will rifle through everything looking for cash, jewellery and anything that can be easily turned into cash. After the master bedroom, they'll typically do a quick tour of the entire house looking for other portable items like cameras before heading out to their waiting stolen car.
As most of the property crime in Vancouver is committed by drug addicts trying to support their habit, stolen goods are sold very quickly, often within an hour of the burglary. Most of the time, a crook gets about 10 cents on the dollar. As a result of these economics, a typical burglar needs to break into multiple homes every day to support their drug habit. What does this have to do with CNN firing a blogger?
I've always wondered who are the people who buy this "recently owned" merchandise from these corrupt brokers. Without that income stream, the whole system collapses. Apparently there is no limit to the number of people out there whose material needs place no boundaries on the recently owned. I hope they're the same people getting their windows busted.
I feel the same way about anyone who subscribes to a cable TV service. People, you are all enablers to CNN behaving as they do. Have your fill of the brain-sucking CNN horror show on your hot TV. You deserve it.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html Our link to Peer1 NY went down
* Why? - Our switch appears to have put the port in a failed state
* Why? - After some discussion with the Peer1 NOC, we speculate that it was quite possibly caused by an Ethernet speed / duplex mismatch
* Why? - The switch interface was set to auto-negotiate instead of being manually configured
* Why? - We were fully aware of problems like this, and have been for many years. But - we do not have a written standard and verification process for production switch configurations.
* Why? - Documentation is often thought of as an aid for when the sysadmin isn't around or for other members of the operations team, whereas, it should really be thought of as a checklist. Apparently, *manually overriding* all this automatic shit (that makes our manual skills obsolete) hasn't died yet.
Skill not destined to die any time soon: credit repair.
Useful when: your crap-ass Wifi is breached
Reason: the skill of hardening wireless consumer convenience-toys is receiving a long course of immunotherapy at a clinic in Cuba, after years of dissolute, party-hard lifestyle
Then it won't be possible to do anything for free.
I've been saying for years that any technology which has yet to characterize its physical limits is snake oil in training. I always read stories about quantum computing where it states "with enough qubits", but never yet read an account which explains what becomes more difficult as the qubits are piled high, and whether this difficulty increases linearly or exponentially. Perhaps qubits can be stacked arbitrarily high ... in an otherwise empty universe.
One upon a time thermodynamics was an open frontier. Actually, no. It turns out in most realistic scenarios you are lucky to extract 40% of the milk and honey. Thermodynamics, welcome to entropy.
What would obtaining 40% of a solution to the class of NP-complete problems look like? How many qubits can be stacked together before the computation interacts with statistically improbable vacuum states? What's the catch, and why do so few articles on the subject clearly elucidate the bounding condition? Worse, why do people who already understand the relationship between thermodynamics (greed) and entropy (death and taxes) fall for these one-sided journalistic prognostications?
This is even sillier than your reply indicates. By the same logic we could conclude by the failure of the Pentium IV that x86 was doomed. Then Intel came up with Core Duo to show what should have been achieved in the first place (and saved the world many gigawatt years of unnecessary power generation in the meanwhile).
Intel botched their first hack at Itanium. They weren't willing to pony up another couple of billion to get it right the second time. By then their performance war against AMD had set the bar so high on x86 performance, their "pull the rug and own the world" marketing strategy was no longer viable (not even within the Intel boardroom ego chamber).
Intel killed Itanium in the false belief they could go cold turkey on out-of-order (OoO) execution. It's true that OoO scales badly, both in terms of complexity and power consumption, as you broaden the execution pathways. Intel's solution: exterminate OoO. Right from the beginning I thought this was a daft and deadly embrace of determinism.
The sensible solution: constrain the design to a reasonable fixed upper bound on OoO depth. They could have done this by having bundles express groups of *dependent* operations. The OoO ceiling would then be a single bundle unit.
I would have set up bundles to encode at least five operations under ideal conditions. If the operations are dependent, you need to specify fewer total registers (and in fact, commit fewer total registers back to the register file, which can only be an advantage). I'm sure this would complicate validation and maybe there are some other gotchas I haven't consider, but it always seemed obvious to me that this would work better relative to the algorithms I worked with (which have sources of non-determinism you can't eliminate).
You would also add a rule concerning bundle independence. Say the architecture was designed to scale up to four bundles wide, with a peak five operations per bundle. Each of the bundles within the bundle group would be required to be fully independent (shared inputs would be allowed, nothing more).
You'd probably set up four bundle execution pipelines (each internally with an OoO dispatch queue). There would have to be rules on the maximum rate of forwarding operands from one bundle pipeline to another. Some portions of the register file would be somewhat "bound" to particular bundle pipelines. You'd have to sacrifice register file orthogonality. But it's a false orthogonality to begin with: a recently computed result can only be forwarded so far in a fixed time increment, and you can't afford to provision worst-case forwarding pathways from everywhere to everywhere on a fat uarch.
The Itanium design team was seduced by determinism and orthogonality. Partly this was because x86 instruction encoding is a horror show. With a more sensible ISA, you could have 90% of the advantage of x86 non-orthogonality (code density improvements) at 10% of the complexity of an x86 instruction decoder. I've been saying this for years. Finally, ARM came up with Thumb-2 to demonstrate my point: the best design is a carefully constrained and balanced non-orthogonality.
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/archi-thumb2.html
Why didn't ARM do this long ago? The 16/32 decoding mode is maybe 5% as difficult as x86 decoding, and look at the huge advantage it gives you in balanced time/space.
For an Itanium bundle, I would set up the rules for a finite fan out / fan in for every instruction field. In my version of things, a 128 bit bundle would be able (under ideal circumstances) to encode five operations. A bundle decoder must break the bundle into up to five independent instructions.
In my approach, you might have a rule that any bit-field within the bundle can have at most four distinct possible destinations (within the five exploded instructions). Each field within the exploded instructions can obtain bits from (one of) at most four different
Funny that, I was looking at the US per-state GDP just last night.
Oregon is a nice place. I was through Portland many years ago after biking from Port Angeles around the mountainous backside of Washington, then back inland along the Columbia River through to Portland (elevation 60 feet IIRC) where we visited Peter Norton's alma mater, the west again to the Oregon coast along the Van Duzer corridor, a rather wussy pass through the Rockies as these things go, but we happened to buck the headwind of all time. On a Ferry, I would have been looking for spray. One of those days where you crest a false flat, then gear *down* for the descent.
Portland reminded me of Vancouver, minus East Hastings, but also minus the international food scene. Mother-earth Birkenstocks, check. Birkenstocks with purple daisies, check. Birkenstocks with bike cleats, check. What's not to like?
Let's take a GDP stroll mostly along the Appalachians, the one region of the US I've never visited (unless you count Pittsburgh).
44 Kentucky 29,842
45 Alabama 29,697
46 South Carolina 29,642
47 Oklahoma 29,545
48 Montana 27,942
49 Arkansas 27,875
50 West Virginia 24,748
51 Mississippi 24,062
The only reason Oregon looks bad by any measure is having done so little with so much. Reminiscent of the Hudson's Bay Company, the oldest commercial corporation in North America. Sold off more assets than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined (fur trade, oil and gas, trans-continental railway rights, etc.) but always kept its eye on the prize: $10 dress shirts. With a competent management team, a business plan, a vast supply-chain infrastructure, a will to succeed, a grasp on reality, and lots of immigrant labour, it could have been Walmart. Who knew?
If you want a cheap cooling bill at the site of massive Hydro infrastructure, check out Cold and colder.
Kitimat would need undersea cables tapping into the Pacific grid, but if you wanted your data center to resemble Cheyenne Mountain, that could be arranged. In Sept-Iles you would enjoy the language laws and two layers of Federal government. In both locations you would enjoy Canadian privacy laws we have passed, and the DMCA we haven't yet passed. 30 annual days with a high above 20 degrees C (68 F). 100MW there would barely ripple the meters.
You'd end up with higher latencies, and less routing redundancy. The ports and heavy infrastructure would be world class, but you might also discover that Fedex doesn't guarantee same week delivery for six months out of the year.
The one concession I would have demanded from Google at Dulles is an Enron-esque contract to shed load during a grid crisis. Should be no problem for Google to design the data center to shed load a a MW/minute for half an hour. The spiders, for example, can tolerate a little downtime. Plus Google has the capacity to load-balance globally.
Not many people realize this, but the phone companies in the 1970s routinely routed long distance calls from Boston to Tampa through western time zone
Computer History 5 - Personal Computers by William H. Gates III, (C) 2008 by National Academy of Engineering.
Emphasis, mine. Interjections, mine. Brackets, mine. After the Intel 8080 microprocessor was chosen for the Altair, two young computer buffs from Seattle, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, won the job of writing software that would allow it to be programmed in BASIC. The weedy buffs win again, no fair. Nowhere was interest in personal computing more intense than in the vicinity of Palo Alto, California, a place known as Silicon Valley because of the presence of many big semiconductor firms. Electronics hobbyists abounded there, and two of them--Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak--turned their tinkering into a highly appealing consumer product: the Apple II, a plastic-encased computer with a keyboard, screen, and cassette tape for storage. Holy Tinker Bell, Batman. Pass the duct tape, Robin. Among them were three kinds of applications that made this desktop device a truly valuable tool for business--word processing, spreadsheets [VisiCalc], and databases. The market for personal computers exploded, especially after IBM weighed in with a crap product in 1981. Its crap offering used a crap operating system from Microsoft, MS-DOS, but due to a truly superior keyboard was quickly adopted by other manufacturers, allowing any given program to run on a wide variety of machines. Nothing clacked quite like the original IBM PC. Hardware like the [Xerox] mouse made the computer easier to control; operating systems allowed the [Xerox] screen to be divided into independently managed [Xerox] windows; applications programs steadily widened the range of what computers could do; and processors were lashed together--thousands of them in some cases-in order to solve pieces of a problem in parallel. Meanwhile, new communications standards [Xerox, AT&T, Berkeley] enabled computers to be joined in private networks or the incomprehensibly intricate global weave of the Internet. To be fair, Xerox gets its due in the timeline section. 1970 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Xerox Corporation assembles a team of researchers in information and physical sciences in Palo Alto, California, with the goal of creating "the architecture of information." Over the next 30 years innovations emerging from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) include the concept of windows (1972), the first real personal computer (Alto in 1973), laser printers (1973), the concept of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processors (1974), and EtherNet (1974). In 2002 Xerox PARC incorporates as an independent company--Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. Here he finds a fancy way to explain he still lives in his parent's basement: 1975 First home computer is marketed to hobbyists
The Altair 8800, widely considered the first home computer, is marketed to hobbyists by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems. The build-it-yourself kit doesn't have a keyboard, monitor, or its own programming language; data are input with a series of switches and lights. But it includes an Intel microprocessor and costs less than $400. Seizing an opportunity, fledgling entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Paul Allen propose writing a version of BASIC for the new computer. They start the project by forming a partnership called Microsoft. A fledgling is a young bird that has recently left its nest (it has fledged) but is still dependent upon parental care and feeding.
Speaking of which, the other history-rewriting seizure-in-residence, Darl McBride, appears to have finally come to the end of his feather.
Geeks might think it's funny, but if someone who didn't know about the FSF and RMS walked in, they'd just think, "Who is this tosser?"
I was thinking about this aspect of human nature at my favorite coffee shop yesterday. The curious aspect of this is our ingrained tendency to admire (or mentally confer social status toward) the kind of person who takes one look at something like this, and makes the snap "loser" judgment. There is in practice no social approbation for the fact that this snap social judgment might be wrong, or that making this snap social judgment is a talentless act (the average nine year old does it six times before recess).
The tried and true human strategy is this: if you haven't got a clue, enforce conformity. That never gets you into any significant trouble.
This is a lesson we learn somewhere in our preschool / elementary school years, and then in puberty the lesson is reinforced with a pile driver of social derision.
There was a new girl who showed up in my grade six year. She had been in an accident with some boiling water. Her entire lower face below the nose was hideously disfigured. This was back in the era of the Jackson Five. Back then, you couldn't alter your hideous disfigurement with a new one. By that age I had spent some time in a children's hospital, down the hall from the burn unit. I wasn't inclined to laugh. Nor was the rest of my class for the first two months: they were too freaked out by the red and pink planetscape of moonbuggy skin folds. The girl was in heaven. Within a few weeks, she had convinced herself this school was different.
Not for long. Soon the pre-adolescent piranhas gathered their nerve. The burned girl made the rest of us uncomfortable, she deserved to suffer. Not only was she taunted, but anyone who spoke a nice word to her risked incarceration in their hallway locker.
These are the same people who grew up to become the adults who make these snap judgments about RMS's peculiarities.
So there I am in back in grade six, horrified by my membership in the human race. Not a good omen for my own future popularity, either. I was developing the illness known as "writer".
I don't have much respect for the kind of social security one obtains by having an unfailing instinct for whom to ridicule next. That's my choice, I know the world will never conform. What shocks me is the implicit justification of this behaviour when people put forward assertions that RMS's kooky behaviour is a liability. If I were RMS, I wouldn't have much use for these people of low investment and lightning derision, either.
What would actually happen if we rounded all these people up and blasted them into space on Arc B? How would human civilization fail if deprived of lightening derision? What essential element of human social cohesion would immediately fail us?
I have a suspicion it's a self-populating niche. Remove the worst offenders, those who remain will quickly spill into the vacant niche. Maybe we're *all* wired for asshole ascendency, and at any given time, those of us deprived of the social advantage of asshole in residence make chicken salad out of chicken shit proclaiming our virtuous forbearance. It's not as if you can read the lkml and not detect the agents of conformity bridling to assume power. The more extreme a group of non-conformists styles themselves, the more debate rages over their code of conduct.
I think because the harsh lessons on conformity are first learned at the elementary school age, the lessons enter the mind as inviolate rules of the universe. We acquire these lessons before we acquire the capacity to reflect upon them.
Here's a piece that ran at aldaily recently: What the New Atheists Don't See. I have no idea if this article is any good, I just looked long enough to see that it mentions all the neo-atheist books that have been in the news lately. Children acquire rel
I agree. Video is even slower than reading a 40 page article at Toms Hardware, sliced up to contain one paragraph of text and 17 bar charts on each page.
Let's see what's on this thread's "threshold 5" sampler plate:
-- You must be new here.
The second line to enter my head was a quip from Manhattan.
"Let's do it some strange way that you always wanted do but nobody would do it with you."
"I'm shocked. What kind of talk is that from a kid your age? Well, I'll get my scuba diving equipment..."
The third thing that entered my mind was "dowsing with doodlebugs".
I'm not sure "Delver" was a good name. How about "Delver!"? Stocks that end with a bang are trading at a premium lately.
Or, Delver could be cool and style themselves with codepoint U+00A1, which slashdot is apparently too tame to render. Slashdot won't render entity either.
Ooh, Delver could have been really cool and styled their name *entirely* out of symbols
Microsoft has been hard at work trying to create a beachhead in the living room. Speaking of Sony, wonder if they have been missing that giant bite out of their backside. You can see Google is concerned about shaping the cell phone industry so as not to become locked-out from those clients. It strikes me that Google would have the same concern about Xbox/YaMShooN. The problem is that Google's motto is "don't do evil" and Sony's motto is "do unto others, before they do unto you". Has their ever been a standard Sony hasn't tried to coop? Wireless USB anyone?
Meanwhile, Sony has acquired that massive half-backside limp, and they would warmly welcome a cash injection, if Google can figure out how to sufficiently distance themselves from Blu-ray DRM hell. Bad, bad, bad for Google to get the reputation of root-kitting its userbase. I wonder whether Google would kick some funds to Sony to ensure a Google-friendly living room?
This might provide enough incentive for as-yet unjoined IBM/AMD to take Cell to the next level, if anyone still believes this technology can outperform. I've long had a suspicion that Cell might actually make a good datacenter platform for the kinds of highly specialized algorithms Google employs.
From Google's perspective, the horrible Blu-ray DRM must strike them as a PR poison pill with regard to entering into a high-profile Sony alliance. But it might make sense with Xbox aligned to the searches of evil.
APL had a global system variable known as "quad IO" (the quad was written as a tall medium-wide box symbol) which controlled "index origin". All sane programmers soon set this value to zero.
If you had to sane functions with insane functions, you declared quad-IO in your list of local variables and assigned it the value assumed by the code within that function. Exiting that function, the local quad-IO would cease to mask the global quad-IO.
We're probably talking late 1960s here.
I'm not sure the first language to standardize on short circuit evaluation. The first I knew of was C. But then C didn't manage to get malloc (0) right, so even the best of us refuse to learn from our forebears.
Of course, VB raised hearing impairment to the level of an art form, but not in the way Beethoven managed to write his ninth symphony. More like a John Cage requiem set to the lyrics "Don't worry, be happy".
Nice, thought, dude. Wouldn't it be nice if we only had to worry about the coherence of data representations, and not coherence of what the data represents?
I don't see much obvious coherence in my web browser rendering a stale copy of a document that has already been updated on the authoritative server. This is a great exercise in finger pointing. The software won't fail. It will highly reliable, faultlessly delivering data in some unknown relationship to its best-before date. I guess what I then choose to do myself with the possibly stale date my OS reliably feeds me is my own liability.
At the level of a web browser, this might be OK in practice. At the level of an OS, I'm not so sure. What Linus was saying is that with shared data structures, it's a practical matter to have all processes deliver a *fresh* view of the data, but apparently "fresh" is orthogonal to "coherent" in some definitional Shapiroverse.
How useful is it for a process to have a partial copy of a page table the OS has since modified? What kind of coherence is that?
Jefferson cribbed from http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/2005/10/intellectual-property-monopoly-regime.html If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. The natural order of things is no copyright system at all. Copyright is a social construct. Exclusivity is granted on the premise that copyright promotes creation, and that the exclusivity does not outlast its virtue.
In modern society, the impediments to creation are not terribly high. If the copyright system ended tomorrow, creativity would not cease. While certain distribution channels (big budget Hollywood movies) would cease to exist, other forms of creativity would soon spring up to fill the void.
The main function of our present copyright system is to manufacture celebrity. Instead one million people investing $300 each worth of their time and energy (the Wikipedia model), we have one person overproducing $300 million (the Peter Jackson model).
Celebrity culture is a useful political tool. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes they both
Oh yes, they both
Oh yes, they both reached for
The gun, the gun, the gun, the gun,
Oh yes, they both reached for the gun
for the gun. While we're collectively obsessed with the spectacle of OJ escaping justice, our political elites rob church basements.
Personally, I've had enough of the glove and the gun already, and I'm not buying this old "moral compunction" canard.
But no, he wasn't even that far along. Turns out Edison was working with carbon filaments, and was just as concerned with high resistivity as filament duration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb In addressing the question "Who invented the incandescent lamp?" historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Swan and Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable. Another historian, Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he invented an entire, integrated system of electric lighting. "The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting." You first hear the story about the light bulb sometime around your grade two school year, and notice the amazing teflon power of the light bulb meme to bead and repel the corrosive schoolyard "oh really?" retort. If you came equipped with the "standard" human learning circuit, you'll soon find yourself repeating this meme as an adult without once having activated critical thinking. Lean fast, never look back.
Here's a crappy Wikipedia article explaining how Edison's famed persistence has now been industrialized:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-throughput_screening
I'm sure the robots who replace us will regale their helpless cooing replicants with clever aphorisms about virtue of persistence when confronted with combinatorial parameter spaces. The most common injury in the field of robotic invention will be a blown nano-rotator cuff, and there will be a roaring spam trade in suspended silica-flouride fullerenes. "Robby can't come out to play today, he's caught a malware trojan, and it's highly contagious. Plus he's way behind in his paleochemistry assignment to iterate a few billion tetracyclic backbones with aliphalic side chains."
I've long suspected that a few twinges of our human predilection for genocide stems from a deeply rooted evolutionary belief that we are still seated at such a table. Do unto others before they do unto you.
Up until the Cambrian era, mother nature was doing quite the nice job of covering up her dirty work. Then she tried to hide the equatorial crime scene high atop a cliff face of a mountain range in desolate southern Alberta. She was just in the process of tuning up a rabid strain of stampeding bison to cover off the eastern approach, but then some upstart seafaring albino monkey got the notion that India lay due south of Newfoundland, and her reputation has never been quite the same since.
Shun Lunn from Vote Splitting for Dummies.
I wouldn't assume the same fate for our privacy commissioner. You need to understand something about national character, which is best expressed in a recent article in the NY Times: Pinker on moral instinct
The notion is that there are five fundamental moral instincts that cut across all human societies: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity. Where nations differ is relative priority. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible -- what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother? I've long had issues with Pinker's writing style, but he does consistently raise good points (if you don't get hung up on his first introduction of an idea, where he holds back essential refinements out of some misguided notion of rhetorical linearity).
Scratch a Russian, you find a peasant (plus three bottles of Stolichnaya and a Kalashnikov). Scratch a Canadian, you'll find 40 acres of dirt, a dour British deference to civic order, a Mennonite spirit of community and fair play, and the irascibility of Scotsman with the hand of authority up his kilt.
At the end of the day, the American fetish for harm and authority is just a passing chest cold. We just need to expectorate a Gary Lunn or two, and we'll revert right back to our traditional boring selves.