Well the point is that you don't need the source code to be able to find exploits. See the fiasco that is Windows.
Also having source-code to secure systems in the public domain doesn't hurt. In fact it actively can be of benfit as the more people look at it, the more loopholes get found and fixed. PGP source code has been freely available for decades but the algorithm that the code implements is still widely understood to be one of the most secure encryption methods out there.
I disgree with you that this typically is the case, as that means absolutely every operation of your code is fully dependent on the result of the previous one. I've been a professional software developer for 25+ years in a variety of industries and haven't come across a problem like that yet.
I think the reason that most people think most problems have no parallelism is because they're used to thinking about solving problems in terms of sequential steps and implemtning code that way, so are not experienced or intuitive in identifying possible areas of parallelism and therefore overlook some real possibilities.
But given the case that there is absolutely no opportunity for parallelism, then accept it and write a single-threaded application as forcing a design that uses multiple threads won't gain you anything except extra inefficiency.
>> If Linux were to instantly become the most used OS in the world, there would be viruses.
Possibly but they wouldn't be able to do as much if any damage because of the security model. Microsoft made some epically bad architectural decisions when they designed Windows that will always mean windows is realtively wide-open compared to Linux.
Examples of two fatally terrible decisions are the existence of the registry, and that installing apps under windows usually puts DLLs in the windows directory, thus extending/modifying the operating system itself.
For PC gamers it is harder, but many games have native linux versions if you look around. Also there is always Wine or Cedega you can run the windows versions under.
Also ATI's linux drivers have always been awful to non-existant. I read that they are getting better now but its still true that if you plan to run Linux, you're much better of buying nVidia.
yes, I do wonder, especially as Ubuntu is better than Windows (especially Vista) even for GUI-only users.
You don't ever have to use the command-line if all you want to do is run office apps, send emails and surf the web.
After a while, you may choose to learn some command-line stuff to let you discover the many things like the example above that you just can't do in Windows at all.
>> You clearly don't have any idea what 'most Americans' really think
Baloney.
Sitting here in Phoenix AZ and looking out the window I dont exactly see too many fuel-efficient cars being driven around comapred to the number of gas-guzzlers. I'm looking at a soccer mum driving a hummer right now as a matter of fact. I mean obviously you need a miliatry vehicle to go to the mall, right? So yes I do feel justified in claiming the vast majority of the American people are living in denial, as what car they drive is largely their own decision.
>> As the company raises the core count with each generation of new products, it will get harder and harder for programmers to manage the complexity associated with all of that available parallelism.
I'm very surprised and dissapointed by the pervasiveness of the incorrect myth thats being promoted even amongst supposedly technically knowledgeable groups that: a) Writing multithreaded code is terribly difficult b) You need to implement code to have the same number of threads as your target hardware has cores Both of these is completely not true at least for the PC marchitecture.
The way to develop multithreaded code is to exploit the natural parallelism of the problem itself. If the problem decomposes down most neatly into one, three or 6789 threads, then design and write the implementation that way. Consequently the complexity of the problem does not increase as the number of cores available increases.
In the PC architecture case, attempting to design your code based on the number of cores in your target hardware just leads to a twisted and therefore bad and also non-portable design.
I'm surprised how few developers seem to understand that in fact its OK, normal and often desireable to have more than one application thread running on the same core. In fact you really can't even ensure or even assume that your multi-threaded app will get one core per thread even if the hardware has enough cores, or work best if it does, as core/thread allocation is dynamically scheduled by the OS depending on loading. Not to mention there's all sorts of other apps, drivers and operating system tasks running concurrently too, so depending on each core's load, one app-thread per core may actually not be the most optimal approach anyway.
I don't see why OpenOffice has this warning. Microsoft Office has been crashing and losing data for years but some people still use it in a production environment.
that the Whitehouse seems to actually expect that intelligent people won't see right through their argument.
The other thing that gets me is that most Americans seem to prefer to believe the Whitehouse's argument because it conveniently eliminates their need to take responsibility for their own pollution.
The third thing that gets me is that even though its actually just stating true facts, this post will probably be moderated (by an American) as 'Flamebait' or 'Troll' just so they can continue to live in denial.
I wonder how long it will be before Sony release their "similar enough to fill the same needs except more expensive and totally incompatible with anything except Sony hardware" version.
The UK police are completely focussed on automatic revenue-generating activites like giving out speeding tickets. They don't want to actually do real police work and deal with the crime that affects peoples lives on a day to day basis.
You never see a policeman on the beat any more. The few that you still see are all in cars avoiding any contact with the public.
Seriously though, I've often wondered if constantly being hit with all the different radio signals in the air isn't actually doing us harm somehow, say corrupting DNA or increasing our chances of cancer.
I buy players wisely first. I make a point of researching beforehand and only buy players that:
1) Appear as a generic storage device when plugged into USB and doesn't require drivers or other software to be installed on your PC. ( this gets around any Windows-only and most DRM limitations, and also means I can use it as portable storage for other files).
This would be a complete nightmare for back problems. Bad posture-related issues would far more frequrently occur with this device as you're much more hunched over the display.
Regardless of wheter they have been wrongly accused this time or not, this isn't the first time by a long way that CCP have been in the headlines following accusals of corruption of the game.
1) happens automatically if you analyse the problem properly and engineer a good architecture.
2) Simple. Just use Posix threads.
3) You shouldn't worry at all about this low-level stuff at the application level. You espeically shouldn't write your code with a specific number of cores in mind. ( # of threads ) is not in anyway related to ( # of cores ). The only difference the number of cores actually makes is different scheduling. Your code should not assume any particular scheduling otherwise that means its buggy and/or badly architected.
As long as you do proper locking etc. Your threads will all get time. Remember a locked thread gives up its time to other threads. Let the kernel worry about the actual scheduling.
Parallel programming is NOT too hard. Yes its harder than a single-threaded approach sometimes, but in my experience usually the problem maps more naturally into a multi-threaded paradigm. The real probelm is this: I've seen time and again that the real problem is that most companies do not require, recognise, or reward high technical skill, experience and ability instead they favour minimal cost and speed of product delivery times over quality. Also it seems most Human Resources staff/agents don't have the necessary skills to actually identify skilled Software Developers compared to useless Software Developers that have a few matching buzzwords on their resume, because they themselves don't understand enough to ask the right questions so resort to resume-keyword matching. The consequence is that the whole notion of Software Development being a skilled profession is being undermined and devalued. This is allowing a vast amount of people to be employed as Software Developers that don't have the natural ability and/or proper training to do the job. To those people, parallel programming IS hard. To anyone with some natural ability, the proper understanding of the issues (you get from say a BS Computer Science degree) and a naturally rigorus approach, no it really isn't.
>> But advertising executives who have seen some of the entries say that Heinz may be hard pressed to find any that it is proud to run on television in September.
Welcome to the real world. No-one actually looks like those perfect families in TV ads, so no home movies will actually look like that. Maybe Heinz needs to take this opportunity to be a pioneer and break the mold of stupidly unrealistic tv advertising.
If I have my cellphone near my desk phone at work, (say within 6 inches), about once an hour and just before an incoming call, I get a series of loud raspy tones coming from the deskphones earpiece even though its on the cradle. I'm thinking the signal from my phone must be very powerful. Scary considering its in my pocket quite often and that cell phones operate in the microwave band.
>> But jumping into half-baked actions is not the right approach.
Reducing human CO2 emissions is NOT a half baked approach. We already know our global Co2 levels are a serious problem and we already know human activities such as transport do release large amounts of Co2. Taking no action until the sometime-never when we figure out exactly who/what is the primary cause is terminally stupid.
In fact nearly all environmental scientists in the world except a few of Bush's cronies in the US are united that human activity is the primary cause of global warming.
>>The Kyoto Treaty, for example, would simply destroy our economy A little dramatic there dontcha think? Anyway even if its true, which is more important, the economy or our whole frickin planet?
>> while doing nothing about China (which is now the major emitter of CO2).
No it isn't, at least not yet. See US Gov's own references cited on Wikipedia:
The United States was, as of 2005, the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. China is projected to take over at the top of the table by late 2007.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the point is that you don't need the source code to be able to find exploits. See the fiasco that is Windows.
Also having source-code to secure systems in the public domain doesn't hurt. In fact it actively can be of benfit as the more people look at it, the more loopholes get found and fixed. PGP source code has been freely available for decades but the algorithm that the code implements is still widely understood to be one of the most secure encryption methods out there.
I disgree with you that this typically is the case, as that means absolutely every operation of your code is fully dependent on the result of the previous one. I've been a professional software developer for 25+ years in a variety of industries and haven't come across a problem like that yet.
I think the reason that most people think most problems have no parallelism is because they're used to thinking about solving problems in terms of sequential steps and implemtning code that way, so are not experienced or intuitive in identifying possible areas of parallelism and therefore overlook some real possibilities.
But given the case that there is absolutely no opportunity for parallelism, then accept it and write a single-threaded application as forcing a design that uses multiple threads won't gain you anything except extra inefficiency.
>> If Linux were to instantly become the most used OS in the world, there would be viruses.
Possibly but they wouldn't be able to do as much if any damage because of the security model. Microsoft made some epically bad architectural decisions when they designed Windows that will always mean windows is realtively wide-open compared to Linux.
Examples of two fatally terrible decisions are the existence of the registry, and that installing apps under windows usually puts DLLs in the windows directory, thus extending/modifying the operating system itself.
For PC gamers it is harder, but many games have native linux versions if you look around. Also there is always Wine or Cedega you can run the windows versions under.
Also ATI's linux drivers have always been awful to non-existant. I read that they are getting better now but its still true that if you plan to run Linux, you're much better of buying nVidia.
yes, I do wonder, especially as Ubuntu is better than Windows (especially Vista) even for GUI-only users.
You don't ever have to use the command-line if all you want to do is run office apps, send emails and surf the web.
After a while, you may choose to learn some command-line stuff to let you discover the many things like the example above that you just can't do in Windows at all.
>> but I don't suppose you'll be getting around to that until about 2011.
Makes perfect sense to me as Vista is a bloated piece of crap.
>> You clearly don't have any idea what 'most Americans' really think
Baloney.
Sitting here in Phoenix AZ and looking out the window I dont exactly see too many fuel-efficient cars being driven around comapred to the number of gas-guzzlers. I'm looking at a soccer mum driving a hummer right now as a matter of fact. I mean obviously you need a miliatry vehicle to go to the mall, right? So yes I do feel justified in claiming the vast majority of the American people are living in denial, as what car they drive is largely their own decision.
>> As the company raises the core count with each generation of new products, it will get harder and harder for programmers to manage the complexity associated with all of that available parallelism.
I'm very surprised and dissapointed by the pervasiveness of the incorrect myth thats being promoted even amongst supposedly technically knowledgeable groups that:
a) Writing multithreaded code is terribly difficult
b) You need to implement code to have the same number of threads as your target hardware has cores
Both of these is completely not true at least for the PC marchitecture.
The way to develop multithreaded code is to exploit the natural parallelism of the problem itself. If the problem decomposes down most neatly into one, three or 6789 threads, then design and write the implementation that way. Consequently the complexity of the problem does not increase as the number of cores available increases.
In the PC architecture case, attempting to design your code based on the number of cores in your target hardware just leads to a twisted and therefore bad and also non-portable design.
I'm surprised how few developers seem to understand that in fact its OK, normal and often desireable to have more than one application thread running on the same core. In fact you really can't even ensure or even assume that your multi-threaded app will get one core per thread even if the hardware has enough cores, or work best if it does, as core/thread allocation is dynamically scheduled by the OS depending on loading. Not to mention there's all sorts of other apps, drivers and operating system tasks running concurrently too, so depending on each core's load, one app-thread per core may actually not be the most optimal approach anyway.
I don't see why OpenOffice has this warning.
Microsoft Office has been crashing and losing data for years but some people still use it in a production environment.
that the Whitehouse seems to actually expect that intelligent people won't see right through their argument.
The other thing that gets me is that most Americans seem to prefer to believe the Whitehouse's argument because it conveniently eliminates their need to take responsibility for their own pollution.
The third thing that gets me is that even though its actually just stating true facts, this post will probably be moderated (by an American) as 'Flamebait' or 'Troll' just so they can continue to live in denial.
>> I have a small RAID-0 pair of disks for my music and such that I don't want to lose.
It seems you think RAID-0 has some level of error-redundancy, but it doesn't. Its no better than JBOD or a single drive in this respect.
EMACS is a great operating system, it just needs a good editor.
I wonder how long it will be before Sony release their "similar enough to fill the same needs except more expensive and totally incompatible with anything except Sony hardware" version.
I agree.
The UK police are completely focussed on automatic revenue-generating activites like giving out speeding tickets. They don't want to actually do real police work and deal with the crime that affects peoples lives on a day to day basis.
You never see a policeman on the beat any more. The few that you still see are all in cars avoiding any contact with the public.
every radio signal that passes through my body.
Seriously though, I've often wondered if constantly being hit with all the different radio signals in the air isn't actually doing us harm somehow, say corrupting DNA or increasing our chances of cancer.
I buy players wisely first. I make a point of researching beforehand and only buy players that:
1) Appear as a generic storage device when plugged into USB and doesn't require drivers or other software to be installed on your PC.
( this gets around any Windows-only and most DRM limitations, and also means I can use it as portable storage for other files).
2) Supports ogg ( and FLAC if possible )
3) Doesn't contain DRM
This would be a complete nightmare for back problems. Bad posture-related issues would far more frequrently occur with this device as you're much more hunched over the display.
Regardless of wheter they have been wrongly accused this time or not, this isn't the first time by a long way that CCP have been in the headlines following accusals of corruption of the game.
Baloney.
1) happens automatically if you analyse the problem properly and engineer a good architecture.
2) Simple. Just use Posix threads.
3) You shouldn't worry at all about this low-level stuff at the application level. You espeically shouldn't write your code with a specific number of cores in mind. ( # of threads ) is not in anyway related to ( # of cores ). The only difference the number of cores actually makes is different scheduling. Your code should not assume any particular scheduling otherwise that means its buggy and/or badly architected.
As long as you do proper locking etc. Your threads will all get time. Remember a locked thread gives up its time to other threads. Let the kernel worry about the actual scheduling.
Their aint no dekline in literasy. I 4 1 dont know what there talkin bout.
Parallel programming is NOT too hard. Yes its harder than a single-threaded approach sometimes, but in my experience usually the problem maps more naturally into a multi-threaded paradigm.
The real probelm is this: I've seen time and again that the real problem is that most companies do not require, recognise, or reward high technical skill, experience and ability instead they favour minimal cost and speed of product delivery times over quality.
Also it seems most Human Resources staff/agents don't have the necessary skills to actually identify skilled Software Developers compared to useless Software Developers that have a few matching buzzwords on their resume, because they themselves don't understand enough to ask the right questions so resort to resume-keyword matching.
The consequence is that the whole notion of Software Development being a skilled profession is being undermined and devalued. This is allowing a vast amount of people to be employed as Software Developers that don't have the natural ability and/or proper training to do the job.
To those people, parallel programming IS hard. To anyone with some natural ability, the proper understanding of the issues (you get from say a BS Computer Science degree) and a naturally rigorus approach, no it really isn't.
>> But advertising executives who have seen some of the entries say that Heinz may be hard pressed to find any that it is proud to run on television in September.
Welcome to the real world. No-one actually looks like those perfect families in TV ads, so no home movies will actually look like that. Maybe Heinz needs to take this opportunity to be a pioneer and break the mold of stupidly unrealistic tv advertising.
If I have my cellphone near my desk phone at work, (say within 6 inches), about once an hour and just before an incoming call, I get a series of loud raspy tones coming from the deskphones earpiece even though its on the cradle.
I'm thinking the signal from my phone must be very powerful. Scary considering its in my pocket quite often and that cell phones operate in the microwave band.
>> But jumping into half-baked actions is not the right approach.
Reducing human CO2 emissions is NOT a half baked approach. We already know our global Co2 levels are a serious problem and we already know human activities such as transport do release large amounts of Co2. Taking no action until the sometime-never when we figure out exactly who/what is the primary cause is terminally stupid.
In fact nearly all environmental scientists in the world except a few of Bush's cronies in the US are united that human activity is the primary cause of global warming.
>>The Kyoto Treaty, for example, would simply destroy our economy
A little dramatic there dontcha think? Anyway even if its true, which is more important, the economy or our whole frickin planet?
>> while doing nothing about China (which is now the major emitter of CO2).
No it isn't, at least not yet. See US Gov's own references cited on Wikipedia:
The United States was, as of 2005, the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. China is projected to take over at the top of the table by late 2007.
its running Microsoft software... where's the Ctrl-Alt-Del keys for when it crashes?