Developers have a need for a high performance / inexpensive timer. How many applications are massively slowed by repeated calls to gettimeofday() on platforms that don't optimize this into a vgettimeofday() equivalent? It's a huge penalty on many operating systems. We need something better, and for a time, RDTSC provided that. Now the architecture has grown past that, and we still don't have anything super useful to replace what RDTSC was providing during that era.
Secondly, Windows developers and possibly developers on other platforms weren't using actual assembly language calls to RDTSC, but where instead using calls to QueryPerformanceCounter or other APIs that were supposed to provide high resolution inexpensive timing. From a software perspective, it is those APIs which now without CPU affinity flags, will provide a lack of monotonicity to the point where they are generally useless. Basically, there should have been something widely implemented that replaced RDTSC like HPET or something, that was then used in QueryPerformanceCounter and other formerly RDTSC based APIs to provide us with a similar source of inexpensive high resolution timing.
You can blame developers who wrote assembly language, but most of us were offered up an API that gave certain guarantees on certain platforms, and those APIs broke when independently dynamically clocked multi-CPU and multi-core systems were introduced, breaking our code in the process.
(b) Intel could have added decent Itanium support at almost no cost.
Since this is ridiculously untrue, you've definitely finished off your effort to prove to everyone that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Nevermind the fact that your total ignorance of the subject of Itaniums and high end compilers makes it clear that you'd never be in a position to purchase an Itanium, thus bringing the irrelevency of your opinion to its climax. Next time just type it in caps like this:
COMPANIES WITH MONIES SHOULD GIVE MORE OF THEIR DEVELOPER TIME TO MAKING FREE/OSS PROJECTS COMPETITIVE WITH THEIR PROFITABLE PRODUCTS SO THAT I MIGHT CARE TO BUY THEIR CHIPZ BECAUSE I AM SUPER IMPORTANT CHIP BUYING GUY.
That way it won't take us two posts to figure out that you're talking out of your ass.
The whole point of Itanium's VLIW architecture is to offload a massive amount of complexity on the compiler. To say that making these kinds of changes to the GCC backend for Itanium would be "at almost no cost" is just ignorant. And to make it out like it's easy for companies to integrate support for the design of their new architectures into OSS products is just ridiculous. Look at how much Vmware gets flamed over the implementation of the VMI interface. It's not like Intel just needed to contract a developer for two weeks to make the changes and `cvs ci -m "Itanium kicks ass now"`.
Actually it does mitigate that vulnerability. Internet Explorer 7 and 8 both have the ability to enable DEP/NX heap protection. Unfortunately, due to certain extensions like Adobe Flash being written like shi... written in such a way that they weren't compatible with DEP/NX (I won't even get into them dodging protected mode, just see: http://keznews.com/4244_Vista_hacked_on_3rd_day_thru_Adobe_Flash__Linux_Undefeated_), but anyway, because of extensions like Flash and Java which weren't compatible with DEP/NX, Microsoft was unable to enable by default the DEP/NX protection in Internet Explorer 7 at release. However, you can enable it now since most plugins have been modified to work with DEP/NX.
To enable this protection in IE7 right now, go to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, and check the check box next to "Enable memory protection to help mitigate online attacks". If you're running IE8 beta 2, you should notice that this check box is checked by default. This change should mitigate a significant number of future remote attacks against Internet Explorer 8.
If you check the advisory, one of the work arounds is enabling the DEP/NX protection in IE7.
Yes, actually. There are many concurrency projects for.NET. Take a look at declarative languages like F#, PLINQ (parallel LINQ), Parallel C#, Polyphonic C#
It's called Commitment and Consistency my friends.
Commitments are most effective when they are active, public, effortful, and viewed as internally motivated and not coerced. Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with the stand. The drive to be and look consistent constitutes a highly potent tool of social influence, often causing people to act in ways that are clearly contrary to their own best interests.
Commitment decisions, even erroneous ones, have a tendency to be self-perpetuating--they often "grow their own legs." That is--those involved may add new reasons and justifications to support the wisdom of commitments they have already made. As a consequence, some commitments remain in effect long after the conditions that spurred them have changed. This phenomenon explains the effectiveness of certain deceptive compliance practices.
The above is from Dr. Robert Cialdini's book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion."
There's no need to fear! Apple Apologist Squad to the rescue!
Quick, spin that security vulnerability into a feature! Now, follow up by making excuses for ridiculously overpriced hardware! Finish them off by implying that 6.5% PC market share growing to 7.2% PC market share is the new "Apple Revolution"!
We've done it! Truths about the downsides to Apple products have been dismissed and discredited, and the comfort provided by our elitism can continue for years to come. Well done Apple Apologist Squad!
That's great, you can turn that feature off in IE8, don't run IE8, and/or don't run any adblockers / tracking blockers. If you want to be tracked, be tracked! I just think it should be an opt-in choice not an opt-out choice. But that train left the station a long time ago, so we need tools (esp mainstream tools like IE features defaulting to on) to put a hurt on this business model of tracking people for profit.
Wow, I've made some generalizations in my time, but to make a billion person generalization, that's amazing.
I know your 80 year old friend has seen a lot of years, but I highly doubt with 1 billion people, he has seen nearly enough of the quality of life of at the very least hundreds of millions of Chinese who are drinking water poisoned by industry and starving because their natural food sources like fish are being wiped out.
On top of that, working 15 hours a day for peanuts is what it is. There's no amount of "relative" standard you can apply to it to spin it to sound not so bad.
This kind of #1 economy apologism is the type of disgusting crap you see from Bill O'Reilly. "They don't need more than a couple dollars a day. They don't know any better. They have enough money to buy a bowl of rice and they're happy." The fact that someone has meager goals because they live in a poor situation isn't a justification for the broad statements that presume that they're satisified and happy with their quality of life.
Now personally I believe this is China's problem to deal with internally and we have our own domestic poor that we're not handling that well, but to try to escape any moral association with taking advantage of disgusting labor conditions and wages by making uninformed generalizations and excuses about how self-limiting they are...
I think the argument is ridiculous, the points brought up are illogical and unsupported, and generally the whole effort to whitewash the situation turns my stomach.
Nobody cares what's in your house. The point is, using IBM and irrelevant in a sentence is stupid. It was clear to everyone that your intention was to try to make the point that IBM is an old and irrelevant company, when in fact it was just due to your limited perspective and experience that amounted to an ignorance of how hugely relevant IBM is, from the enterprise level all the way down to products that support the lifestyle the common person lives daily.
Your ignorance of their relevance does not make them irrelevant.
Sure, but are you going to choose your vendor lock-in for development and database/storage technology in the same decision that you make regarding a choice in hosting providers? It would be like if I had to choose one colocation facility or hosted server provider based on whether I wanted to do J2EE or.NET. I'd rather not bundle my hosting purchasing decisions with my development platform purchasing decisions. These are obviously two of the most critical technology decisions a company can make, and making the wrong decisions and not having flexibility can make or break a company, especially in the early growth phase.
So why would you accept any restrictions of this nature on your platform choice. If I had to use a Sun|Microsoft colocation facility or Sun|Microsoft hosted servers/services platform in order to use J2EE|.NET, I'm not sure I'd feel very comfortable with that sortof all-or-nothing dichotomy.
If you expand that to databases like on the Google platform, now you're having to choose their language, their database technology, their hosting/services, etc. When we make the choice of J2EE or.NET, there are thousands of providers out there that can host our virtual machines, and we can choose between MySQL, Postgres, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, etc. We can even choose a mix of those, like MySQL for your web databases, Microsoft SQL for your accounting databases. There are plenty of hybrid systems out there. That kind of flexibility doesn't need to be given up just to get scalable hosted services.
You can have a large percentage of these services without giving up the flexibility, control, and mobility that smart systems architects should value. Often times the best design is a hybrid of products from different vendors, selecting components based on their individual strengths.
Keep control of your system in your hands and learn how to make a scalable system while taking advantage of hosted servers and services that don't lock you into one platform and technology set.
Use a RAID technology that supports bandwidth over storage, like RAID 10
Upgrade your SAN heads for greater throughput and more ports (be they fibre channel or iSCSI)
Upgrade your SAN switch for greater throughput if you're using fibre channel
Add more paths to your clients and use smart load balancing SAN client software
Partition your load among different LUNs on different SAN heads
There's no reason SANs can't scale up through upgraded SAN equipment, and scale out through partitioning with a SAN just like anything else. And if you're maxing out 4Gbps fibre channel with 10+ spindle LUNs in RAID 10, perhaps you just need an object cache?
So it sounds like you have hosted virtual servers and some hosted SAN storage. That's cool, and it's a smart way to do business.
It's only when people call it "cloud" and act like it's something crazy and new beyond a combination of virtualization and SAN storage, managed by someone else just doesn't seem like it's worth all this hype.
I have a Vmware ESX cluster. I have an EMC SAN. They're supported through contracts with my reseller. When there are problems, the high availability features of my ESX cluster and my EMC SAN protect me. When I need to add storage, like the 15TB of storage I just added, I add storage. When I need to add another ESX node to expand my CPU or memory availablility, I add another ESX node. Each time I do, my HA gets a little better too. I use pre-built virtual machines ("appliances") for certain things either from vendors or that I build myself, just like the images Amazon offers.
If you can find someone that hosts this for you, that's great. It would probably save a lot of headaches that people with real equipment on site have to deal with. There's probably quite a bit of cost savings associated. My only point is, this isn't a massive shift of computing as we know it, it's just a turn-key solution made out of existing parts. Nothing wrong with that under you hit the vendor lock-in part.
When you start replacing SQL with Amazon's SimpleDB or Google's database, just so you can have a hosted virtualization/SAN solution, you're probably locking yourself in too much. I think your use of Amazon's service makes the most sense, because you're taking advantage of the hosting without the lock-in.
SQL's scalability is next to nil for any real web application these days if all you are going to do is partitions. If you shard you get significantly more mileage but you still don't come anywhere near the reaches of Amazon and Googles simple database solutions. They didn't put all the time and effort into making those solutions because SQL scales well, they put the time and effort into it because SQL (and relational databases in general) do not scale at all past a certain threshold. Relational, partitioned SQL is for small to medium sized companies. If you're one of the big boys good luck keeping SQL up to speed with any type of real usage/growth.
I'll let Oracle and their customers running Oracle RAC that the "big boys" can't run relational SQL databases and that it is only for small to medium sized companies.
The "big boys" have been solving this problem for a lot longer than Amazon and Google have, so to appeal to their authority and the "time and effort" they put into making this product as proof that SQL doesn't scale is ridiculous. On the low end, there's sharding, and on the high end, there's scalable clustered SQL systems like Oracle RAC and IBM DB2 ICE. Making broad statements about some overall lack of scalability of SQL speaking from your MySQL and/or Postgres experience makes you look a little underinformed, when there are enterprise class solutions to SQL server scalability problems from major vendors, on top of the roll your own solutions you can do by doing partitioning / sharding.
On top of that, consider that database servers are optimizing for multi-core systems with things like parallel index scans, breaking up single indexes and joins into sub-processes, dispatched to different cores. This kind of scale up only serves to complement the scale out provided by sharding.
People who say that SQL is dead are just bored. Get over it.
PS. Go check out the TPC benchmarks for the biggest and baddest SQL servers you can buy to see how far people are scaling SQL up, and then explain why a few shards of those "big boy" SQL servers can't handle the load of any "real web application". Or go read the MySpace case study.
I agree, for the "cloud" systems like Amazon's EC2, but then isn't this just managed/hosted servers plus clustered virtualization plus their proprietary database system (S3)? You're still moving from fairly industry standard SQL (despite so many damned vendor extensions to SQL), to Amazon's S3 storage. Similar to how part of the "value" Google is trying to add is locking you into their non-SQL database storage.
I certainly understand that SQL has shortcomings, but is vendor lock-in, especially hosting provider lock-in, the answer? Plenty of people are scaling SQL with partitioning, which you can do with basic managed/hosted servers (even virtualized ones) without giving up control. I'd rather be able to pack up my virtual machines and move to another hosted provider if I don't like their performance.
Finally, a burst of common sense on the latest hype. Hosted servers have offered many of the benefits you get out of "cloud" computing for years, without locking you into a particular vendor or platform. With virtualization, you should be able to build your own images and farm them out to hosting companies, using your technology and platform of choice. Clustered ESX and SANs already give us the resource scalability we need for most systems, partitioning finishes the job. You can just pay a hosted server company to host your vmware image on their ESX cluster and scale up your storage as needed on their SAN. The key is that YOU build a scalable design.
I highly doubt a majority of businesses are going to lock themselves into one hosting provider's specific development platform just to take advantage of hosted servers that push themselves into the next layer.
"which is easily correctable with a change in the default install"
When you figure out how to get all of the people installing AVG to make this simple change to their default install, let us know. We can use the same technique to get all the IE6 users to upgrade to a secure browser.
Until then, we're stuck cleaning up the mess created by this irresponsible and not very well thought out feature.
How exactly do the websites getting slammed with this bullshit traffic "not even install this part of the program" and "if you don't like it don't use it"?
Did you miss this part: (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now)
So how does Slashdot "just not use" the AVG product and recover that 6% of their page traffic again?
The complaint is that they are "spamming the internet with deceptive traffic". That's a server/hosting complaint, not a user complaint about some user who can't figure out how to disable that feature.
Kudos on getting a "4 Insightful" for a ridiculously inapplicable and nonsensical response though!
Yeah... because oil and coal are elements you douchebag. My point was, he's making all of these stupid references to extinction, as though the element itself is going to go extinct. The whole concept he's pushing is false. We use oil and coal as sources of energy, but the rare elements he is describing are not used as sources of energy. So the only "extinction" of these elements, or even "exhaustion" of these elements, is going to be that the energy cost of recovering them goes up significantly. And besides, again as to your ridiculous oil and coal comparison, the result of "using" these rare elements typically doesn't turn them into a gas that floats away like hydrocarbon emissions. If they use a rare element to make your LCD monitor, and the world is running out of a ready supply of that element, we can ask you to RETURN your old LCD monitor to a recycling center or facility, which is something already being done with some electronics components, rather than have you dump it in the trash. You know, like we do with cans, paper, glass, plastic, etc. Clearly asking you to give your old LCD monitor to a recycling center is on the same level as trying to capture burned hydrocarbons and recreate the original fossil fuels out of them...
How exactly are these elements "used up"? Yes, they might be more expensive to recover, but it's not like they're exhausted by their use. Unless we're shooting them into space, or changing them via nuclear fusion/fission, the elements aren't gone. You know, matter cannot be created or destroyed and all that? I'm no chemist, but as far as I learned chem in high school and college, we still haven't found a chemical way to transform one element into another element (alchemy?).
So basically what is really going to happen is these rare elements are going to get much more expensive because they will have to be recovered from what we're using them for. That's not great, but it's not "element extinction".
Microsoft could release the entire source code for every version of Windows under the GPL license and people would find a reason to find fault with them. I literally clicked through this story to the comments to confirm that the comments I expected to see would be here.
They accept ODF as the the winner of the document format wars, work to implement ODF in Office, and release the specs for all of their legacy formats, and still it's not good enough for you trolls. Pass the haterade.
I would like to also declare along these lines that the following subjects are also OLD and STALE:
Microsoft abused their monopoly power to destroy old competitors such as Netscape and others.
Pointing out that IE6 and IE7 are horribly not web standard compliant.
Pointing out that older versions of Microsoft products (XP SP1, IIS 5, IE6) had massive security problems.
See, because it's Apple, Apple fanbois think that once their problems have been discussed (and minimized, rationalized, and written off as not problems at all) that even if these problems are never addressed they should never be discussed again. But we don't afford any other vendor that courtesy. We don't say "Oh, everyone knows Microsoft's browsers aren't very standards compliant, lets not discuss that again."
It's comments like this, trying to knock people who are pointing out that this problem STILL exists, and the legion of fanbois posting on this story coming up with 20 different reasons why Apple has to charge this much and why it makes sense, or posts like yours saying this isn't news that's just how Apple is, stop talking about it, that make the best response in the whole set of threads: "Kool aid much?"
Yes, Apple can price gouge if they want. Yes, we can and will talk about it.
And yes, I own a Macintosh, an Apple TV, an iPod nano, and I have about $2,000 into iTunes store so far. --- (Apple fanboi street cred)
Just for everyone's entertainment, the california statute that applies is:
California Penal Code Section 502(c)(3) and 502(c)(7).
And for all of the idiots stating that the "router" gave them permission, give me a break. The router isn't a legal entity, and only works in the way you interact with it. Just like the door knob.
I twisted the doorknob (initiated association with the accesspoint), and the doorknob gave me permission to enter by retracting the latch (allowing me to associate and giving me a DHCP lease). The owner of the door could have configured the door differently, by engaging the lock mechanism (using WEP or WPA), so since he didn't I'm free to enter and watch his HBO (use his broadband internet access). I'm not "stealing" from him, because it's not like he has less HBO (internet) now that I've viewed some of his HBO (internet).
A big part of what a lot of people are missing is, even if you had a point regarding associating with his wireless network because it is open (which you don't), that only gives you authorization to access his LAN. You still have no right to use his paid broadband internet services. You don't have that right, because you aren't paying the ISP, and because the owner of the access point doesn't have the right to share or transfer his right to use his internet service with all of his neighbors, just like I don't have the right to share my HBO programming with all of my neighbors. It's called theft of service. Even if you claim the right to access the wireless owner's network, you certainly do not have permission to access the ISP's network. And even if I run coax down my lawn, and put a coax jack at the end of my property so that people on the sidewalk can screw into it and watch HBO, that doesn't mean I have any right to share my HBO or that you have any right to leech service that you're not paying for.
Using someone else's wifi is a crime, because you're not just accessing their network, you're accessing their ISP's network without permission. Giving away your wifi by intentionally hosting open access points is very likely a breach of your contract with your ISP.
It has nothing to do with the fact that they're foreign nationals, nor that it happens "abroad". The federal government has no powers that the constitution does not grant. They can't do anything "abroad" nor to foreign nationals without constitutional power. It's not as though they have infinite power outside our borders "just because".
The consitution says, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." This specifically states that unless there is rebellion or invasion, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended. There is no rebellion or invasion in progress, therefore, the federal government, both the executive and legislative branches, has no power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is the power of the judicial branch to review any and all detainments, jailings, or imprisonments.
There's nothing in the consitution that states that the executive and legislative branches can operate internationally, but the judicial branches cannot review international actions. The three branches of government are co-equal. I hate this recent distaste for judges by conservatives who want to reinterpret the laws of the land to let their idiot of a president do whatever they want. The judges are doing their duty to interpret the law. The fact that they're not elected by popular vote is BY DESIGN and should not be used to try to make their *co-equal* role seem less important.
The constitution doesn't apply to a particular location. It applies to a particular federal government, regardless of the location. The consitution says, the government cannot restrict habeas corpus, it doesn't say, it cannot restrict habeas corpus on US citizens. Habeas corpus isn't a right of American Citizens defined affirmatively in the consitution, instead, the federal government is prohibited from suspending the right period, with no other conditions. Currently, the government is claiming the power to suspend the right of habeas corpus for the people at gitmo. The constitution says, NO, you cannot suspend that right. Doesn't matter who. Doesn't matter where.
As far as your argument of "will Al Qaeda reciprocate"? Do we decide our standards of behavior by the enemy's standards of behavior? For example, the enemy punishes us by attacking civilians, so why don't we attack civilians aligned with their cause or civilians whom they claim to represent and fight for? Would that be the right thing to do? It's really sad to me that people don't understand the *reason* we're the good guys is the fact that we're willing to fight based on principles, and that Americans have been willing to die for those principles for as long as this nation has existed. Fools who would give up those principles in a heartbeat for security, fools who would disgrace all those who fought and died fighting the right way, when we could have won faster by fighting the wrong way, those people don't understand what it means to be an American. If more Americans have to die to defend the constitutional principles that make us who we are, then at least they die as Americans, rather than reducing themselves to the level of the terrorists. By giving up our principles and violating our constitution, we let the terrorists win, because we let them take away who we are and we let them take away what we believe in.
I prefer to believe that we can beat these people, that we can chase them down and kill them, without violating our principles and without giving up who we are. I'm willing to accept that there is a greater risk that there might be more terrorist attacks, and that my city could be bombed, and that I could lose loved ones in this battle, if it means that we stay true to our American principles and we fight like the good, strong, and moral people that we consider ourselves to be, and I consider anyone who is unwilling to accept the additional risk involved with sticking to our principles to be a coward and to have no claim to patriotism, and have no understanding of what America is and why we're the greatest nation on Earth.
I would think that a very slight randomization of the packets with filler would add a trivial amount of data to the packet and would tend to interfere with thier analysis. I'm sure after a certain point of added bytes and randomization, you would change their margin of error such that the process wasn't useful or effective anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right to an extent, but consider:
Developers have a need for a high performance / inexpensive timer. How many applications are massively slowed by repeated calls to gettimeofday() on platforms that don't optimize this into a vgettimeofday() equivalent? It's a huge penalty on many operating systems. We need something better, and for a time, RDTSC provided that. Now the architecture has grown past that, and we still don't have anything super useful to replace what RDTSC was providing during that era.
Secondly, Windows developers and possibly developers on other platforms weren't using actual assembly language calls to RDTSC, but where instead using calls to QueryPerformanceCounter or other APIs that were supposed to provide high resolution inexpensive timing. From a software perspective, it is those APIs which now without CPU affinity flags, will provide a lack of monotonicity to the point where they are generally useless. Basically, there should have been something widely implemented that replaced RDTSC like HPET or something, that was then used in QueryPerformanceCounter and other formerly RDTSC based APIs to provide us with a similar source of inexpensive high resolution timing.
You can blame developers who wrote assembly language, but most of us were offered up an API that gave certain guarantees on certain platforms, and those APIs broke when independently dynamically clocked multi-CPU and multi-core systems were introduced, breaking our code in the process.
(b) Intel could have added decent Itanium support at almost no cost.
Since this is ridiculously untrue, you've definitely finished off your effort to prove to everyone that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Nevermind the fact that your total ignorance of the subject of Itaniums and high end compilers makes it clear that you'd never be in a position to purchase an Itanium, thus bringing the irrelevency of your opinion to its climax. Next time just type it in caps like this:
COMPANIES WITH MONIES SHOULD GIVE MORE OF THEIR DEVELOPER TIME TO MAKING FREE/OSS PROJECTS COMPETITIVE WITH THEIR PROFITABLE PRODUCTS SO THAT I MIGHT CARE TO BUY THEIR CHIPZ BECAUSE I AM SUPER IMPORTANT CHIP BUYING GUY.
That way it won't take us two posts to figure out that you're talking out of your ass.
The whole point of Itanium's VLIW architecture is to offload a massive amount of complexity on the compiler. To say that making these kinds of changes to the GCC backend for Itanium would be "at almost no cost" is just ignorant. And to make it out like it's easy for companies to integrate support for the design of their new architectures into OSS products is just ridiculous. Look at how much Vmware gets flamed over the implementation of the VMI interface. It's not like Intel just needed to contract a developer for two weeks to make the changes and `cvs ci -m "Itanium kicks ass now"`.
Actually it does mitigate that vulnerability. Internet Explorer 7 and 8 both have the ability to enable DEP/NX heap protection. Unfortunately, due to certain extensions like Adobe Flash being written like shi... written in such a way that they weren't compatible with DEP/NX (I won't even get into them dodging protected mode, just see: http://keznews.com/4244_Vista_hacked_on_3rd_day_thru_Adobe_Flash__Linux_Undefeated_), but anyway, because of extensions like Flash and Java which weren't compatible with DEP/NX, Microsoft was unable to enable by default the DEP/NX protection in Internet Explorer 7 at release. However, you can enable it now since most plugins have been modified to work with DEP/NX.
To enable this protection in IE7 right now, go to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, and check the check box next to "Enable memory protection to help mitigate online attacks". If you're running IE8 beta 2, you should notice that this check box is checked by default. This change should mitigate a significant number of future remote attacks against Internet Explorer 8.
If you check the advisory, one of the work arounds is enabling the DEP/NX protection in IE7.
Yes, actually. There are many concurrency projects for .NET. Take a look at declarative languages like F#, PLINQ (parallel LINQ), Parallel C#, Polyphonic C#
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_programming_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLINQ
http://www.parallelcsharp.com/
http://research.microsoft.com/~nick/polyphony/
Bring on the Windows haterade!
It's called Commitment and Consistency my friends.
Commitments are most effective when they are active, public, effortful, and viewed as internally motivated and not coerced. Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with the stand. The drive to be and look consistent constitutes a highly potent tool of social influence, often causing people to act in ways that are clearly contrary to their own best interests.
Commitment decisions, even erroneous ones, have a tendency to be self-perpetuating--they often "grow their own legs." That is--those involved may add new reasons and justifications to support the wisdom of commitments they have already made. As a consequence, some commitments remain in effect long after the conditions that spurred them have changed. This phenomenon explains the effectiveness of certain deceptive compliance practices.
The above is from Dr. Robert Cialdini's book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion."
There's no need to fear! Apple Apologist Squad to the rescue!
Quick, spin that security vulnerability into a feature! Now, follow up by making excuses for ridiculously overpriced hardware! Finish them off by implying that 6.5% PC market share growing to 7.2% PC market share is the new "Apple Revolution"!
We've done it! Truths about the downsides to Apple products have been dismissed and discredited, and the comfort provided by our elitism can continue for years to come. Well done Apple Apologist Squad!
That's great, you can turn that feature off in IE8, don't run IE8, and/or don't run any adblockers / tracking blockers. If you want to be tracked, be tracked! I just think it should be an opt-in choice not an opt-out choice. But that train left the station a long time ago, so we need tools (esp mainstream tools like IE features defaulting to on) to put a hurt on this business model of tracking people for profit.
Wow, I've made some generalizations in my time, but to make a billion person generalization, that's amazing.
I know your 80 year old friend has seen a lot of years, but I highly doubt with 1 billion people, he has seen nearly enough of the quality of life of at the very least hundreds of millions of Chinese who are drinking water poisoned by industry and starving because their natural food sources like fish are being wiped out.
On top of that, working 15 hours a day for peanuts is what it is. There's no amount of "relative" standard you can apply to it to spin it to sound not so bad.
This kind of #1 economy apologism is the type of disgusting crap you see from Bill O'Reilly. "They don't need more than a couple dollars a day. They don't know any better. They have enough money to buy a bowl of rice and they're happy." The fact that someone has meager goals because they live in a poor situation isn't a justification for the broad statements that presume that they're satisified and happy with their quality of life.
Now personally I believe this is China's problem to deal with internally and we have our own domestic poor that we're not handling that well, but to try to escape any moral association with taking advantage of disgusting labor conditions and wages by making uninformed generalizations and excuses about how self-limiting they are...
I think the argument is ridiculous, the points brought up are illogical and unsupported, and generally the whole effort to whitewash the situation turns my stomach.
Nobody cares what's in your house. The point is, using IBM and irrelevant in a sentence is stupid. It was clear to everyone that your intention was to try to make the point that IBM is an old and irrelevant company, when in fact it was just due to your limited perspective and experience that amounted to an ignorance of how hugely relevant IBM is, from the enterprise level all the way down to products that support the lifestyle the common person lives daily.
Your ignorance of their relevance does not make them irrelevant.
Sure, but are you going to choose your vendor lock-in for development and database/storage technology in the same decision that you make regarding a choice in hosting providers? It would be like if I had to choose one colocation facility or hosted server provider based on whether I wanted to do J2EE or .NET. I'd rather not bundle my hosting purchasing decisions with my development platform purchasing decisions. These are obviously two of the most critical technology decisions a company can make, and making the wrong decisions and not having flexibility can make or break a company, especially in the early growth phase.
So why would you accept any restrictions of this nature on your platform choice. If I had to use a Sun|Microsoft colocation facility or Sun|Microsoft hosted servers/services platform in order to use J2EE|.NET, I'm not sure I'd feel very comfortable with that sortof all-or-nothing dichotomy.
If you expand that to databases like on the Google platform, now you're having to choose their language, their database technology, their hosting/services, etc. When we make the choice of J2EE or .NET, there are thousands of providers out there that can host our virtual machines, and we can choose between MySQL, Postgres, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, etc. We can even choose a mix of those, like MySQL for your web databases, Microsoft SQL for your accounting databases. There are plenty of hybrid systems out there. That kind of flexibility doesn't need to be given up just to get scalable hosted services.
You can have a large percentage of these services without giving up the flexibility, control, and mobility that smart systems architects should value. Often times the best design is a hybrid of products from different vendors, selecting components based on their individual strengths.
Keep control of your system in your hands and learn how to make a scalable system while taking advantage of hosted servers and services that don't lock you into one platform and technology set.
To handle an increase in I/O bandwidth:
Add disks, thus adding spindles
Use a RAID technology that supports bandwidth over storage, like RAID 10
Upgrade your SAN heads for greater throughput and more ports (be they fibre channel or iSCSI)
Upgrade your SAN switch for greater throughput if you're using fibre channel
Add more paths to your clients and use smart load balancing SAN client software
Partition your load among different LUNs on different SAN heads
There's no reason SANs can't scale up through upgraded SAN equipment, and scale out through partitioning with a SAN just like anything else. And if you're maxing out 4Gbps fibre channel with 10+ spindle LUNs in RAID 10, perhaps you just need an object cache?
You're right, I did have those confused.
So it sounds like you have hosted virtual servers and some hosted SAN storage. That's cool, and it's a smart way to do business.
It's only when people call it "cloud" and act like it's something crazy and new beyond a combination of virtualization and SAN storage, managed by someone else just doesn't seem like it's worth all this hype.
I have a Vmware ESX cluster. I have an EMC SAN. They're supported through contracts with my reseller. When there are problems, the high availability features of my ESX cluster and my EMC SAN protect me. When I need to add storage, like the 15TB of storage I just added, I add storage. When I need to add another ESX node to expand my CPU or memory availablility, I add another ESX node. Each time I do, my HA gets a little better too. I use pre-built virtual machines ("appliances") for certain things either from vendors or that I build myself, just like the images Amazon offers.
If you can find someone that hosts this for you, that's great. It would probably save a lot of headaches that people with real equipment on site have to deal with. There's probably quite a bit of cost savings associated. My only point is, this isn't a massive shift of computing as we know it, it's just a turn-key solution made out of existing parts. Nothing wrong with that under you hit the vendor lock-in part.
When you start replacing SQL with Amazon's SimpleDB or Google's database, just so you can have a hosted virtualization/SAN solution, you're probably locking yourself in too much. I think your use of Amazon's service makes the most sense, because you're taking advantage of the hosting without the lock-in.
SQL's scalability is next to nil for any real web application these days if all you are going to do is partitions. If you shard you get significantly more mileage but you still don't come anywhere near the reaches of Amazon and Googles simple database solutions. They didn't put all the time and effort into making those solutions because SQL scales well, they put the time and effort into it because SQL (and relational databases in general) do not scale at all past a certain threshold. Relational, partitioned SQL is for small to medium sized companies. If you're one of the big boys good luck keeping SQL up to speed with any type of real usage/growth.
I'll let Oracle and their customers running Oracle RAC that the "big boys" can't run relational SQL databases and that it is only for small to medium sized companies.
The "big boys" have been solving this problem for a lot longer than Amazon and Google have, so to appeal to their authority and the "time and effort" they put into making this product as proof that SQL doesn't scale is ridiculous. On the low end, there's sharding, and on the high end, there's scalable clustered SQL systems like Oracle RAC and IBM DB2 ICE. Making broad statements about some overall lack of scalability of SQL speaking from your MySQL and/or Postgres experience makes you look a little underinformed, when there are enterprise class solutions to SQL server scalability problems from major vendors, on top of the roll your own solutions you can do by doing partitioning / sharding.
On top of that, consider that database servers are optimizing for multi-core systems with things like parallel index scans, breaking up single indexes and joins into sub-processes, dispatched to different cores. This kind of scale up only serves to complement the scale out provided by sharding.
People who say that SQL is dead are just bored. Get over it.
PS. Go check out the TPC benchmarks for the biggest and baddest SQL servers you can buy to see how far people are scaling SQL up, and then explain why a few shards of those "big boy" SQL servers can't handle the load of any "real web application". Or go read the MySpace case study.
I agree, for the "cloud" systems like Amazon's EC2, but then isn't this just managed/hosted servers plus clustered virtualization plus their proprietary database system (S3)? You're still moving from fairly industry standard SQL (despite so many damned vendor extensions to SQL), to Amazon's S3 storage. Similar to how part of the "value" Google is trying to add is locking you into their non-SQL database storage.
I certainly understand that SQL has shortcomings, but is vendor lock-in, especially hosting provider lock-in, the answer? Plenty of people are scaling SQL with partitioning, which you can do with basic managed/hosted servers (even virtualized ones) without giving up control. I'd rather be able to pack up my virtual machines and move to another hosted provider if I don't like their performance.
Finally, a burst of common sense on the latest hype. Hosted servers have offered many of the benefits you get out of "cloud" computing for years, without locking you into a particular vendor or platform. With virtualization, you should be able to build your own images and farm them out to hosting companies, using your technology and platform of choice. Clustered ESX and SANs already give us the resource scalability we need for most systems, partitioning finishes the job. You can just pay a hosted server company to host your vmware image on their ESX cluster and scale up your storage as needed on their SAN. The key is that YOU build a scalable design.
I highly doubt a majority of businesses are going to lock themselves into one hosting provider's specific development platform just to take advantage of hosted servers that push themselves into the next layer.
"which is easily correctable with a change in the default install"
When you figure out how to get all of the people installing AVG to make this simple change to their default install, let us know. We can use the same technique to get all the IE6 users to upgrade to a secure browser.
Until then, we're stuck cleaning up the mess created by this irresponsible and not very well thought out feature.
How exactly do the websites getting slammed with this bullshit traffic "not even install this part of the program" and "if you don't like it don't use it"?
Did you miss this part: (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now)
So how does Slashdot "just not use" the AVG product and recover that 6% of their page traffic again?
The complaint is that they are "spamming the internet with deceptive traffic". That's a server/hosting complaint, not a user complaint about some user who can't figure out how to disable that feature.
Kudos on getting a "4 Insightful" for a ridiculously inapplicable and nonsensical response though!
Yeah... because oil and coal are elements you douchebag. My point was, he's making all of these stupid references to extinction, as though the element itself is going to go extinct. The whole concept he's pushing is false. We use oil and coal as sources of energy, but the rare elements he is describing are not used as sources of energy. So the only "extinction" of these elements, or even "exhaustion" of these elements, is going to be that the energy cost of recovering them goes up significantly. And besides, again as to your ridiculous oil and coal comparison, the result of "using" these rare elements typically doesn't turn them into a gas that floats away like hydrocarbon emissions. If they use a rare element to make your LCD monitor, and the world is running out of a ready supply of that element, we can ask you to RETURN your old LCD monitor to a recycling center or facility, which is something already being done with some electronics components, rather than have you dump it in the trash. You know, like we do with cans, paper, glass, plastic, etc. Clearly asking you to give your old LCD monitor to a recycling center is on the same level as trying to capture burned hydrocarbons and recreate the original fossil fuels out of them...
How exactly are these elements "used up"? Yes, they might be more expensive to recover, but it's not like they're exhausted by their use. Unless we're shooting them into space, or changing them via nuclear fusion/fission, the elements aren't gone. You know, matter cannot be created or destroyed and all that? I'm no chemist, but as far as I learned chem in high school and college, we still haven't found a chemical way to transform one element into another element (alchemy?).
So basically what is really going to happen is these rare elements are going to get much more expensive because they will have to be recovered from what we're using them for. That's not great, but it's not "element extinction".
Buried as inaccurate.. oh wait Slashdot.
Microsoft could release the entire source code for every version of Windows under the GPL license and people would find a reason to find fault with them. I literally clicked through this story to the comments to confirm that the comments I expected to see would be here.
They accept ODF as the the winner of the document format wars, work to implement ODF in Office, and release the specs for all of their legacy formats, and still it's not good enough for you trolls. Pass the haterade.
I would like to also declare along these lines that the following subjects are also OLD and STALE:
Microsoft abused their monopoly power to destroy old competitors such as Netscape and others.
Pointing out that IE6 and IE7 are horribly not web standard compliant.
Pointing out that older versions of Microsoft products (XP SP1, IIS 5, IE6) had massive security problems.
See, because it's Apple, Apple fanbois think that once their problems have been discussed (and minimized, rationalized, and written off as not problems at all) that even if these problems are never addressed they should never be discussed again. But we don't afford any other vendor that courtesy. We don't say "Oh, everyone knows Microsoft's browsers aren't very standards compliant, lets not discuss that again."
It's comments like this, trying to knock people who are pointing out that this problem STILL exists, and the legion of fanbois posting on this story coming up with 20 different reasons why Apple has to charge this much and why it makes sense, or posts like yours saying this isn't news that's just how Apple is, stop talking about it, that make the best response in the whole set of threads: "Kool aid much?"
Yes, Apple can price gouge if they want. Yes, we can and will talk about it.
And yes, I own a Macintosh, an Apple TV, an iPod nano, and I have about $2,000 into iTunes store so far. --- (Apple fanboi street cred)
Just for everyone's entertainment, the california statute that applies is:
California Penal Code Section 502(c)(3) and 502(c)(7).
And for all of the idiots stating that the "router" gave them permission, give me a break. The router isn't a legal entity, and only works in the way you interact with it. Just like the door knob.
I twisted the doorknob (initiated association with the accesspoint), and the doorknob gave me permission to enter by retracting the latch (allowing me to associate and giving me a DHCP lease). The owner of the door could have configured the door differently, by engaging the lock mechanism (using WEP or WPA), so since he didn't I'm free to enter and watch his HBO (use his broadband internet access). I'm not "stealing" from him, because it's not like he has less HBO (internet) now that I've viewed some of his HBO (internet).
A big part of what a lot of people are missing is, even if you had a point regarding associating with his wireless network because it is open (which you don't), that only gives you authorization to access his LAN. You still have no right to use his paid broadband internet services. You don't have that right, because you aren't paying the ISP, and because the owner of the access point doesn't have the right to share or transfer his right to use his internet service with all of his neighbors, just like I don't have the right to share my HBO programming with all of my neighbors. It's called theft of service. Even if you claim the right to access the wireless owner's network, you certainly do not have permission to access the ISP's network. And even if I run coax down my lawn, and put a coax jack at the end of my property so that people on the sidewalk can screw into it and watch HBO, that doesn't mean I have any right to share my HBO or that you have any right to leech service that you're not paying for.
Using someone else's wifi is a crime, because you're not just accessing their network, you're accessing their ISP's network without permission. Giving away your wifi by intentionally hosting open access points is very likely a breach of your contract with your ISP.
It has nothing to do with the fact that they're foreign nationals, nor that it happens "abroad". The federal government has no powers that the constitution does not grant. They can't do anything "abroad" nor to foreign nationals without constitutional power. It's not as though they have infinite power outside our borders "just because".
The consitution says, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." This specifically states that unless there is rebellion or invasion, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended. There is no rebellion or invasion in progress, therefore, the federal government, both the executive and legislative branches, has no power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is the power of the judicial branch to review any and all detainments, jailings, or imprisonments.
There's nothing in the consitution that states that the executive and legislative branches can operate internationally, but the judicial branches cannot review international actions. The three branches of government are co-equal. I hate this recent distaste for judges by conservatives who want to reinterpret the laws of the land to let their idiot of a president do whatever they want. The judges are doing their duty to interpret the law. The fact that they're not elected by popular vote is BY DESIGN and should not be used to try to make their *co-equal* role seem less important.
The constitution doesn't apply to a particular location. It applies to a particular federal government, regardless of the location. The consitution says, the government cannot restrict habeas corpus, it doesn't say, it cannot restrict habeas corpus on US citizens. Habeas corpus isn't a right of American Citizens defined affirmatively in the consitution, instead, the federal government is prohibited from suspending the right period, with no other conditions. Currently, the government is claiming the power to suspend the right of habeas corpus for the people at gitmo. The constitution says, NO, you cannot suspend that right. Doesn't matter who. Doesn't matter where.
As far as your argument of "will Al Qaeda reciprocate"? Do we decide our standards of behavior by the enemy's standards of behavior? For example, the enemy punishes us by attacking civilians, so why don't we attack civilians aligned with their cause or civilians whom they claim to represent and fight for? Would that be the right thing to do? It's really sad to me that people don't understand the *reason* we're the good guys is the fact that we're willing to fight based on principles, and that Americans have been willing to die for those principles for as long as this nation has existed. Fools who would give up those principles in a heartbeat for security, fools who would disgrace all those who fought and died fighting the right way, when we could have won faster by fighting the wrong way, those people don't understand what it means to be an American. If more Americans have to die to defend the constitutional principles that make us who we are, then at least they die as Americans, rather than reducing themselves to the level of the terrorists. By giving up our principles and violating our constitution, we let the terrorists win, because we let them take away who we are and we let them take away what we believe in.
I prefer to believe that we can beat these people, that we can chase them down and kill them, without violating our principles and without giving up who we are. I'm willing to accept that there is a greater risk that there might be more terrorist attacks, and that my city could be bombed, and that I could lose loved ones in this battle, if it means that we stay true to our American principles and we fight like the good, strong, and moral people that we consider ourselves to be, and I consider anyone who is unwilling to accept the additional risk involved with sticking to our principles to be a coward and to have no claim to patriotism, and have no understanding of what America is and why we're the greatest nation on Earth.
I would think that a very slight randomization of the packets with filler would add a trivial amount of data to the packet and would tend to interfere with thier analysis. I'm sure after a certain point of added bytes and randomization, you would change their margin of error such that the process wasn't useful or effective anymore.