To mods: I consider it rude to moderate down on your own personal opinion.
And as an occasional mod, I find it abusive to the mod system to try to tell me what to do. I actually tend to mod posts with 'moderation instructions' harsher than I otherwise would.
Yes, this is offtopic.
Otherwise, I basically agree with your post; lots of complaining that an unstable branch of FreeBSD was used, but nary a peep that the Linux version tested is unstable as well. Had stable FreeBSD been used, people would have flamed him for that instead.
Yes. And not because BBC of Reuters are dishonest in their reporting either; they have a good rep for a reason, and they mostly try to report accurately.
But any news source suffers from two (at least) problems: First, they have to winnow down what is reportable as news. This sieving can not be done "objectively". You are going to miss parts - perhaps important parts - of any story, if not hing else than because no news outlet can dedicate enough time and resources for complete coverage of anything, really.
Second, any reporter, no matter how honest, suffers from reporting stuff two steps (or more) removed from the events. It's not "I did this", or "I saw him do x", but "I talked to people who saw him do x". The inevitable results are errors, misconceptions, oversimplifications, skewing and omissions.
Basically, don't really trust any one source for anything of significance.
What I don't get is how they could possibly enforce such a ban. If I understand correctly, they aren't the organization giving out the Oscars; what's stopping any movie studio from simply ignoring the ban and sending them out anyway?
It's always the same thing: "We all need to get behind _one_ XYZ, lest users get confused and developers split their work". But never a thought on how to decide which XYZ to get behind, and how to enforce the ban on rival XYZ:s.
Some will refuse to use Qt, since they feel the license is not open enough, or not enough good language bindings exist. Others will balk at anything based on GTK, since they feel those people are mutant commie traitors for refusing to back Qt and KDE in the first place. And a bunsh of people will want to develop and use whatever is not the standard, simply because they like being different, going their own way, or simply because they think they can do a better job and have fun doing it. And so on and so forth no matter which toolkit or display system you would propose.
Sure, it shows up for Windows soon. When does it show up for Linux? xxxBSD? Palm? WinCE? Symbian?
"Least Painful" != "Acceptable". I can't use the Apple's offering today, and it is unlikely I ever will. With DRM, it becomes even worse, as you can't get the content from a sanctioned device and move to the device you actually want to use.
My point is, Apple is not the answer to the issues lined out in the parent post; they suffer from the same problems. THat they can gloss it over with hip advertising and a large cagre of apologists does not change this.
My point was just that if you disregard the advantages of anything, there is little point left to it.
And again, I prefer books too. Unlike you, I also find great advantages with text in electronic form as well. We are all different ("-Yes, we are all different!" "- I'm not."), so while I find such advantages, that is not contradictory to you not finding them.
If DRM is the future of selling content, then I guess P2P networks are the future of finding content for me. I don't object to paying for content. I do object to a technology that limits me to where and how I digest, move, backup or refer to the content I have paid for.
Advantages of electronic text aside, I can't see why anyone would want one.
Um, yeah. And advantages of food, clothing or appendicitis operations aside, I can't see why anyone would want that either. Methinks you have been shopping at Tautologies-r-Us.:)
I prefer books too. But I _greatly_ prefer electronic texts to no text at all - such as when I am travelling and the bulk of even one book is a hassle, and more than one is out of the question. Instead, wherever I bring my laptop, I bring a whole library of books. It's not an either-or question for me; the formats complement each other.
If Apple's entry into downloadable music is anything to go by, it is not looking encouraging. Their "solution" has all the problems described in the parent post: available in the US only, works only for a specific hardware platform, and has restrictions in place to prevent the consumer from using the stuff the way they want. Their music store is not really a good way to do it, and if they follow the same pattern for books, that won't be good either.
I agree on your points; having a physical book is great. I'm at the point where I even print out often-used manuals and API references and have them cheaply bound at a print shop to have them in physical format.
However, I really long for good electronic books as well. I, like most people travel - and that may be to a different continent over several weeks, or to and from work every day. I can comfortably bring along one, maybe two books, then it starts getting cumbersome. Having books (including fiction) in an electronic format allows me to pretty much bring along my entire library. No more sitting in a hotel room with nothing to read, or sitting on a commuter train, bored out of my mind. It's not like having a real book, but it's a _lot_ better than having nothing at all.
And there are quite a few resources out there with lots of available works; Project Gutenberg is only one of them. In most countries it is also perfectly legal to make a conversion to other formats of books that you already own.
Actually, at least in our case we thread the app, with one thread handling disk IO and other threads handling other aspects (such as CPU intensive stuff), precisely to squeeze out a bit more performance and so disk accesses do not interfere with and stall other stuff. You get this as soon as you try to do something in soft realtime (such as video applications). On one hand, you want to stream video to/from a drive as quickly and efficiently as possible; on the other, you want to do some CPU-intensive operations (filtering, resizing) on the video stream at the same time.
I'm not saying that trading CPU for filesystem speed is a bad idea; it isn't. What I'm saying is that it's not a simple "more is better" function, and that the cutoff for when it no longer makes sense does depend a lot on the application you intend it for. Again, to take an extreme, you would not want to have a system where the filesystem eats so much CPU the rest of the system essentially blocks, starved for CPU time, when the disk is used.
To take an even more extreme way of doing the tradeoff: you could compress and uncompress all data on the fly. That way you would increase transfer speed (and increase it quite a bit in the case of text files and similar) as well as decrease disk usage. It is not often done, though, because the tradeoff is not worth it in general.
For us, and our app, Reiser is on the wrong side of that cutoff point (and Reiser4 is not even on the horizon yet).
Well, on the other hand, for most Linux workstations and small servers, that is pretty much the standard setup. It means the results are a lot more relevant to most people than would a more "professional" one.
Not always, though, and there are definite limits. If CPU usage is too high, throughput will suddenly depend critically on the overall load of the system. To take an extreme, if it sucks up every available cycle, you can no longer depend on running other tasks while one is blocking for disk IO. There is a point, depending on the applciation and overall system load, where sacrificing more CPU for higher disk performance will hurt overall execution speed. And for stuff that is both disk and CPU intensive, that limit can be rather low.
A major reason I'm interested in a high-performace file system is an application that is CPU intensive and needs high disk throughput. For that reason, ReiserFS has never been a candidate for us, as it is so CPU-hungry.
Yes - in theory. In practice, there is a very large (even unavoidable) risk that the windowing system, and the applications built on top, will be written to maximize throughput using hardware, at the expense of software rendering speed. The software OpenGL implementation is written to emulate 3D as best it can, and does not as a rule have a good, efficient mapping to 2D hardware for the special case when that is possible. You will essentially run your 2D on a dumb framebuffer.
Also, and (I think) unavoidably, many apps, and aybe even the WM itself, will think nothing of using real 3D functionality, not just using it for strict 2D, as they can assume a hardware layer to be present anyway. We want windows with shadows to emphasize stacking order? Just render the windows at different depth - no need to do clumsy 2D approximations! Buttons with relief? Render real 3d-buttons! Looks better and is faster!
As soon as you start using stuff that can not be efficiently mapped on to 2D routines, you can forget about running it on anything without 3D accelleration. This will happen, unfortunately.
Having OpenGL as the default, main rendering model absolutely stinks. It means you can not feasibly run a desktop that does not have hardware accellerated 3d. "So what?" I hear you cry. Well, a major "desktop" class of devices for Linux are PDA:s and similar handheld stuff. You would have to run something else on them as they do not have the hardware for your "light" system.
The other major problem are laptops. I use a fairly modern laptop, with hardware 3d. Problem is, running hardware 3d absolutely kills battery lifetime (and has the fan noisily running on high all the time). Running a desktop that uses those circuits at all times is simply not an option. And as other components such as CPU and the screen are continuous ly reworked to use less power and power down at any opportunity, this added drain will only become more, not less noticeable in the future. Add to that that laptops are becoming a lot more common as desktop systems, and you have a real conflict./Janne
Well, actually not. The definition is for speed of light in a vacuum. So you could (theoretically) use this to determine the speed of light in warm, chockolate-odor filled air, which will be lower than the speed in vacuum.
And, if you already know the speed (or the refractive index) of warm air, and find out the index for chockolate, you can use this to determine how much of the chockolate actually precipitates into the air of the oven as it is heated. This all depends on a little more accurate measurement than a school ruler between melted spots, of course.
Re:Can we use languages not by lunatics?
on
Perl 5.8.1 Released
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
Um, yes he is, but the language is good anyway. Rejecting Perl because of this is about as stupid as rejecting Sendmail because its author is gay (which, apparently some people in the lunatic fringe have done).
Don't want to get into a big argument here, but for me, LyX is _exactly_ the wrong tool. It removes the disjunction between writing and typesetting that is the whole point of LaTeX for me (and most other LaTeX users). LyX is, for me, to remove the best parts of working with LaTeX, only to replace it with the worst parts of wordprocessors.
Oh, btw, it may not have been clear in my previous post, but I am very happy with the tools I use, by and large. Vim+LaTeX for big texts and Abiword for the short stuff I mentioned.
Not at all at the level of "real" wordsmithing, but I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in Vi (Vim, to be exact) using LaTeX. Same goes for all papers and other 'professional' text generation.
What a word processor does well, on the other hand, are short documents that are due to be printed and consumed immediately, such as letters, applications and so on. For such stuff, you can't really separate content creation and formatting anymore, and LaTeX becomes too heavyweight to deal with it. Of course, with that focus for wordprocessing, 95% of all features are absolutely worthless.
Those demands are entirely reasonable. They also have nothing to do with pushing the performance edge. A current gen cpu could do all of those things easy - if you could use it in a small device.
Getting that functionality has everything do do with lowering power consumption, something which is becoming _more_ important, at the same time the maximum possible speed is becoming less so. Lower power consumption means we can have portable devices that are smaller, more capable and can run longer without recharging.
I have a digital camera. I use it quite a bit. I _never_ edit the images, despite having the tools and ample computing power to do so. What I do is take a bunch of pictures, and throw away most of them. The rest I use in one way or another. Very few are actually saved semipermanently. And as far as I know, none in my circle of aquaintances edit their pictures either.
The mac-toting people I know have all enthused over the video editing tools they have. None of them have ever actually used them. Editing video is like editing still images, but much more demanding in time.
Doing SFX is even worse; it implies an artistic and narrative idea to be expressed, not just exposed. Like most of the people I know, I could not express myself out of a wet paper bag. I have no interest in actually creating movies, with or without FX, and I would likely shoot myself rather than being exposed to any creations from my normally talented (ie. no at all) friends. Holiday pictures are bad. Amateurishly edited holiday mmovies with cheesy special effects are enough to make people clinically depressed.
My point? This new "killer app" for more processor power isn't one. Great application - for the small minority that have the interest, talent and time to actually create stuff with it. A non-issue for the vast majority.
If you want a simulation framework that is more flexible than a dedicated NN simulator, we are developing Ikaros, a discrete-time modular simulator. Runs on Linux, OSX and Windows. Implement your modules in C or C++ (and implementing bindings for other languages would be easy), then specify a connection matrix for inputs and outputs between modules to form a complete simulation.
The next step in development is creating some graphical visualizing tools, and to make it run multiple instances transparently across a network.
Slashdot Mirror
The environmental problems from uranium mining are pretty bad. You need to take that (and other factors as well) into account.
To mods: I consider it rude to moderate down on your own personal opinion.
And as an occasional mod, I find it abusive to the mod system to try to tell me what to do. I actually tend to mod posts with 'moderation instructions' harsher than I otherwise would.
Yes, this is offtopic.
Otherwise, I basically agree with your post; lots of complaining that an unstable branch of FreeBSD was used, but nary a peep that the Linux version tested is unstable as well. Had stable FreeBSD been used, people would have flamed him for that instead.
Yes. And not because BBC of Reuters are dishonest in their reporting either; they have a good rep for a reason, and they mostly try to report accurately.
But any news source suffers from two (at least) problems: First, they have to winnow down what is reportable as news. This sieving can not be done "objectively". You are going to miss parts - perhaps important parts - of any story, if not hing else than because no news outlet can dedicate enough time and resources for complete coverage of anything, really.
Second, any reporter, no matter how honest, suffers from reporting stuff two steps (or more) removed from the events. It's not "I did this", or "I saw him do x", but "I talked to people who saw him do x". The inevitable results are errors, misconceptions, oversimplifications, skewing and omissions.
Basically, don't really trust any one source for anything of significance.
What I don't get is how they could possibly enforce such a ban. If I understand correctly, they aren't the organization giving out the Oscars; what's stopping any movie studio from simply ignoring the ban and sending them out anyway?
And you suggest enforcing this how, exactly?
It's always the same thing: "We all need to get behind _one_ XYZ, lest users get confused and developers split their work". But never a thought on how to decide which XYZ to get behind, and how to enforce the ban on rival XYZ:s.
Some will refuse to use Qt, since they feel the license is not open enough, or not enough good language bindings exist. Others will balk at anything based on GTK, since they feel those people are mutant commie traitors for refusing to back Qt and KDE in the first place. And a bunsh of people will want to develop and use whatever is not the standard, simply because they like being different, going their own way, or simply because they think they can do a better job and have fun doing it. And so on and so forth no matter which toolkit or display system you would propose.
There, there, don't cry now. /me gives whiny kid a lollipop.
Sure, it shows up for Windows soon. When does it show up for Linux? xxxBSD? Palm? WinCE? Symbian?
"Least Painful" != "Acceptable". I can't use the Apple's offering today, and it is unlikely I ever will. With DRM, it becomes even worse, as you can't get the content from a sanctioned device and move to the device you actually want to use.
My point is, Apple is not the answer to the issues lined out in the parent post; they suffer from the same problems. THat they can gloss it over with hip advertising and a large cagre of apologists does not change this.
My point was just that if you disregard the advantages of anything, there is little point left to it.
And again, I prefer books too. Unlike you, I also find great advantages with text in electronic form as well. We are all different ("-Yes, we are all different!" "- I'm not."), so while I find such advantages, that is not contradictory to you not finding them.
If DRM is the future of selling content, then I guess P2P networks are the future of finding content for me. I don't object to paying for content. I do object to a technology that limits me to where and how I digest, move, backup or refer to the content I have paid for.
Advantages of electronic text aside, I can't see why anyone would want one.
:)
Um, yeah. And advantages of food, clothing or appendicitis operations aside, I can't see why anyone would want that either. Methinks you have been shopping at Tautologies-r-Us.
I prefer books too. But I _greatly_ prefer electronic texts to no text at all - such as when I am travelling and the bulk of even one book is a hassle, and more than one is out of the question. Instead, wherever I bring my laptop, I bring a whole library of books. It's not an either-or question for me; the formats complement each other.
If Apple's entry into downloadable music is anything to go by, it is not looking encouraging. Their "solution" has all the problems described in the parent post: available in the US only, works only for a specific hardware platform, and has restrictions in place to prevent the consumer from using the stuff the way they want. Their music store is not really a good way to do it, and if they follow the same pattern for books, that won't be good either.
I agree on your points; having a physical book is great. I'm at the point where I even print out often-used manuals and API references and have them cheaply bound at a print shop to have them in physical format.
However, I really long for good electronic books as well. I, like most people travel - and that may be to a different continent over several weeks, or to and from work every day. I can comfortably bring along one, maybe two books, then it starts getting cumbersome. Having books (including fiction) in an electronic format allows me to pretty much bring along my entire library. No more sitting in a hotel room with nothing to read, or sitting on a commuter train, bored out of my mind. It's not like having a real book, but it's a _lot_ better than having nothing at all.
And there are quite a few resources out there with lots of available works; Project Gutenberg is only one of them. In most countries it is also perfectly legal to make a conversion to other formats of books that you already own.
Actually, at least in our case we thread the app, with one thread handling disk IO and other threads handling other aspects (such as CPU intensive stuff), precisely to squeeze out a bit more performance and so disk accesses do not interfere with and stall other stuff. You get this as soon as you try to do something in soft realtime (such as video applications). On one hand, you want to stream video to/from a drive as quickly and efficiently as possible; on the other, you want to do some CPU-intensive operations (filtering, resizing) on the video stream at the same time.
I'm not saying that trading CPU for filesystem speed is a bad idea; it isn't. What I'm saying is that it's not a simple "more is better" function, and that the cutoff for when it no longer makes sense does depend a lot on the application you intend it for. Again, to take an extreme, you would not want to have a system where the filesystem eats so much CPU the rest of the system essentially blocks, starved for CPU time, when the disk is used.
To take an even more extreme way of doing the tradeoff: you could compress and uncompress all data on the fly. That way you would increase transfer speed (and increase it quite a bit in the case of text files and similar) as well as decrease disk usage. It is not often done, though, because the tradeoff is not worth it in general.
For us, and our app, Reiser is on the wrong side of that cutoff point (and Reiser4 is not even on the horizon yet).
Well, on the other hand, for most Linux workstations and small servers, that is pretty much the standard setup. It means the results are a lot more relevant to most people than would a more "professional" one.
Not always, though, and there are definite limits. If CPU usage is too high, throughput will suddenly depend critically on the overall load of the system. To take an extreme, if it sucks up every available cycle, you can no longer depend on running other tasks while one is blocking for disk IO. There is a point, depending on the applciation and overall system load, where sacrificing more CPU for higher disk performance will hurt overall execution speed. And for stuff that is both disk and CPU intensive, that limit can be rather low.
A major reason I'm interested in a high-performace file system is an application that is CPU intensive and needs high disk throughput. For that reason, ReiserFS has never been a candidate for us, as it is so CPU-hungry.
Yes - in theory. In practice, there is a very large (even unavoidable) risk that the windowing system, and the applications built on top, will be written to maximize throughput using hardware, at the expense of software rendering speed. The software OpenGL implementation is written to emulate 3D as best it can, and does not as a rule have a good, efficient mapping to 2D hardware for the special case when that is possible. You will essentially run your 2D on a dumb framebuffer.
Also, and (I think) unavoidably, many apps, and aybe even the WM itself, will think nothing of using real 3D functionality, not just using it for strict 2D, as they can assume a hardware layer to be present anyway. We want windows with shadows to emphasize stacking order? Just render the windows at different depth - no need to do clumsy 2D approximations! Buttons with relief? Render real 3d-buttons! Looks better and is faster!
As soon as you start using stuff that can not be efficiently mapped on to 2D routines, you can forget about running it on anything without 3D accelleration. This will happen, unfortunately.
Having OpenGL as the default, main rendering model absolutely stinks. It means you can not feasibly run a desktop that does not have hardware accellerated 3d. "So what?" I hear you cry. Well, a major "desktop" class of devices for Linux are PDA:s and similar handheld stuff. You would have to run something else on them as they do not have the hardware for your "light" system.
/Janne
The other major problem are laptops. I use a fairly modern laptop, with hardware 3d. Problem is, running hardware 3d absolutely kills battery lifetime (and has the fan noisily running on high all the time). Running a desktop that uses those circuits at all times is simply not an option. And as other components such as CPU and the screen are continuous ly reworked to use less power and power down at any opportunity, this added drain will only become more, not less noticeable in the future. Add to that that laptops are becoming a lot more common as desktop systems, and you have a real conflict.
Well, actually not. The definition is for speed of light in a vacuum. So you could (theoretically) use this to determine the speed of light in warm, chockolate-odor filled air, which will be lower than the speed in vacuum.
And, if you already know the speed (or the refractive index) of warm air, and find out the index for chockolate, you can use this to determine how much of the chockolate actually precipitates into the air of the oven as it is heated. This all depends on a little more accurate measurement than a school ruler between melted spots, of course.
Um, yes he is, but the language is good anyway. Rejecting Perl because of this is about as stupid as rejecting Sendmail because its author is gay (which, apparently some people in the lunatic fringe have done).
I'm not even sure you _can_ get a support contract from HP without getting both hardware and software from them in the first place.
Don't want to get into a big argument here, but for me, LyX is _exactly_ the wrong tool. It removes the disjunction between writing and typesetting that is the whole point of LaTeX for me (and most other LaTeX users). LyX is, for me, to remove the best parts of working with LaTeX, only to replace it with the worst parts of wordprocessors.
Oh, btw, it may not have been clear in my previous post, but I am very happy with the tools I use, by and large. Vim+LaTeX for big texts and Abiword for the short stuff I mentioned.
Not at all at the level of "real" wordsmithing, but I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in Vi (Vim, to be exact) using LaTeX. Same goes for all papers and other 'professional' text generation.
What a word processor does well, on the other hand, are short documents that are due to be printed and consumed immediately, such as letters, applications and so on. For such stuff, you can't really separate content creation and formatting anymore, and LaTeX becomes too heavyweight to deal with it. Of course, with that focus for wordprocessing, 95% of all features are absolutely worthless.
Those demands are entirely reasonable. They also have nothing to do with pushing the performance edge. A current gen cpu could do all of those things easy - if you could use it in a small device.
Getting that functionality has everything do do with lowering power consumption, something which is becoming _more_ important, at the same time the maximum possible speed is becoming less so. Lower power consumption means we can have portable devices that are smaller, more capable and can run longer without recharging.
Um, do I have to?
I have a digital camera. I use it quite a bit. I _never_ edit the images, despite having the tools and ample computing power to do so. What I do is take a bunch of pictures, and throw away most of them. The rest I use in one way or another. Very few are actually saved semipermanently. And as far as I know, none in my circle of aquaintances edit their pictures either.
The mac-toting people I know have all enthused over the video editing tools they have. None of them have ever actually used them. Editing video is like editing still images, but much more demanding in time.
Doing SFX is even worse; it implies an artistic and narrative idea to be expressed, not just exposed. Like most of the people I know, I could not express myself out of a wet paper bag. I have no interest in actually creating movies, with or without FX, and I would likely shoot myself rather than being exposed to any creations from my normally talented (ie. no at all) friends. Holiday pictures are bad. Amateurishly edited holiday mmovies with cheesy special effects are enough to make people clinically depressed.
My point? This new "killer app" for more processor power isn't one. Great application - for the small minority that have the interest, talent and time to actually create stuff with it. A non-issue for the vast majority.
If you want a simulation framework that is more flexible than a dedicated NN simulator, we are developing Ikaros, a discrete-time modular simulator. Runs on Linux, OSX and Windows. Implement your modules in C or C++ (and implementing bindings for other languages would be easy), then specify a connection matrix for inputs and outputs between modules to form a complete simulation.
The next step in development is creating some graphical visualizing tools, and to make it run multiple instances transparently across a network.