Well, Daniel Lyons could have actually investigated the issue, instead of just swallowing what Darl Mcbride CEO said. The fact that he clearly didn't, says a lot about his skill as a journalist.
Had he done some investigation, he would have found:
SCO had not produced any evidence.
SCO was stalling.
SCO's CEO (Mcbride) was all hot air.
Linux is developed in the open.
Linux has a very well documented history e.g mailing list archives, patches, and changelogs.
Any attempt to insert stolen source code into such a public project would be very visible.
Anyone accusing another party of inserting stolen source code into Linux, yet unable to produce any proof of this, is most likely full of shit.
But instead Lyons (and others like Didio and O'gara) appears to have chosen which side to support based on 'partisan' issues i.e money makes the world go 'round, so those filthy hippies must have stolen stuff from good, honest, hard-working American corporations to make Linux work properly. Lyons' previous "apology" basically said "oops, they duped me as well. I bet on the wrong horse". If he was a real journalist, he would have quickly found some of the things I mentioned above and at least been suspicious of SCO and their claims. But he didn't. He's just a troll calling himself a "journalist".
I literally have a problem with people literally overusing the word "literally". They literally misuse it to literally emphasis something, instead of literally indicating that a phrase is not being literally used as a common expression. If these writers literally realised what they were literally writing, their heads would literally explode. Figuratively speaking, of course.
Anybody else out there think that this was going to be an article about robotics?
No. You must be American. You call these things "cell phones". The vast majority of the rest of the English-speaking world calls them "mobile phones", or just "mobiles" for short.
I actually know someone who is a lecturer, and when he sets papers, goes on the relevant Wikipedia entries and inserts misinformation. Then, when this nonsense crops up in papers, marks them down in a "haha pwnt" sort of way. He says it's a way of teaching people not to rely on such sources.
The problem with this moral code is it assumes all others share your basic feelings.
How is that a problem that only affect atheists? People who are sadistic, psychopathic, etc are a problem for society no matter what their faith or belief system.
Hurricane Katrina didn't harm those people, living below sea level with dykes holding back the ocean did. That was poor planning and stupidity, and I haven't felt empathy towards them ever. Especially since they could have evacuated, but chose to stay. Nope, no empathy for fools.
Nice. You're blaming the victims. You do understand that the residents of New Orleans didn't build and maintain the levies? And they also weren't the ones that divided up the land? And many of the residents were very poor, leaving them with very little choice but to live where they could afford. Oh, and hurricane Katrina didn't just cause flood damage. It was a fucking hurricane! It had strong winds and brought lots of rain. I'm thinking the differences between us aren't just our "moral codes", but perhaps political and one of us being brainwashed by the pundits on a certain cable news channel.
But they still are based on an assumption that everyone _should_ agree with them because all people have empathy, reason, compassion, morality, or whatever. That is not the case, and cannot be the case. Evolution does not breed for those traits, so they are rare in the population.
Why do you say that? I think the opposite - a society of individuals that look out for each other is going to be more successful than one composed of selfish individuals.
Meanwhile, if you want a well supported argument for morality out of reason, you only need to learn the basics of the field of bioethics, which can develop a moral code far more consistent than anything that has come out of religion. (It starts from "I don't enjoy suffering, therefore other sentient being also likely don't enjoy suffering, so I should not inflict it upon them" and builds from there.)
We evolved from lower life forms. Do lower life forms feel remorse for killing each other, even within a species? Do lions feel a moral relationship to the zebras they eat?
Having never been a lion, I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing they don't. But us humans are different. We show empathy towards other humans, well as other animals and even plants. So Do unto others... etc.
If you're going to go by LOC, then the operating system should be called "Sun/Linux" because Sun contributed a lot more code than GNU. OpenOffice dwarfs the GNU toolchain in terms of LOC.
But I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider OO.o a part of the Linux "operating system". Even desktops like GNOME and KDE are pushing the definition, but OO.o is definitely an application suite.
Please mod the parent down. If it's not a troll, it sure sounds like one.
First it appeals to "Linux developers" as if "Linux" was developed by one company or group. Then it goes on to complain about compiling stuff from source! Hey, we've had these things called package managers for over a decade now. Debian has APT, there's YUM and a few others for various distros. If you want to compile stuff from source instead of just installing some binary packages, that's your problem. Don't go blaming the mythical "Linux developers" for your own stupid mistakes.
Please post some citations for your serious accusations.
Don't have much of a memory do you? Try reading some Groklaw. In fact, PJ posted about this just today. Mr. Lyons has quite a history around the SCO case. He's also attacked bloggers for being largely anonymous and lacking credibility. Pot calling the kettle something...
Probably because if you get the PNG instead of the TIFF, the reason is you need to save space and/or bandwidth.
I don't follow your reasoning. They're both just image formats. And in this case, the PNG can hold the exact same information as the TIFF. The only difference would be the size reduction due to the use of LZ compression in PNG. There's no point to differentiate due to file type in this case - just put the different resolutions in different directories or name them slightly differently.
If it's so simple to make the package provide the functionality, why hasn't anyone done it?
They have. There's Debian-Multimedia, which has been around for a few years. I know there's one or two specific to Ubuntu, five minutes Googling will probably find one. I've been using D-M for years now and have not had a problem. Automatix is an ugly hack and should be avoided at all costs.
Please note that it doesn't *run* 64 threads simultaneously. It *manages* 8 threads per core -- but each core has only two integer units, one load-store unit, and one floating point unit. At best a core can have ops from four different threads in simultaneous execution, but this will be a very rare case (when int, int, float, load/store happen at same cycle). Most often each core will be able to simultaneously execute instructions from just one or two threads -- which all is still excellent for 84W!
Quite true. For more info on the way its cores work, see the UltraSPARC T1 article on Wikipedia (which I have edited quite a bit). Each core is a barrel processor, meaning each stage in the pipeline is handling an instruction from a different thread. This adds complexity, but in exchange it means that branch mis-prediction is no longer a problem - any branch instruction has already been through the execute stage and the Program Counter modified before the next instruction of the thread gets fetched.
The other big advantage with the multi-threaded UltraSPARC T1/T2 design is that it has high throughput. While a single-threaded CPU has to wait on cache misses, the T1/T2 just continues chugging along with its remaining threads. It's switching threads on every clock cycle, so each thread gets only 1/8th of the 'power' of each core. But because it's doing something on every single clock cycle, it can do a lot of work - as long as the work is multi-threaded. That's its weakness.
This processor will also have a floating-point unit for each core, unlike the UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) which only had one shared amongst all 8 cores. This should make it much more suitable than the T1 for a wide variety of applications. The T1 did great on multithreaded server-type tasks (e.g web, email, database) but would have been pretty hopeless for anything doing more than a bare minimum of FP work.
Do the people really have much a choice in who they elect? I thought the prez. over there was pretty much appointed by the mullahs that are really the ones in charge?
I gather they do have some choice, although the mullahs do exert a lot of control. Ahmadinejad's predecessor Mohammad Khatami was a moderate and apparently appealed to both women and the younger generation. Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, two years after the U.S. invaded Iraq. They elected a president that rants about the evils of the U.S. and Israel, but not much else. I'm sure the outcome of the U.S. election in 2008 (and the actions of the new administration in the first 7-8 months) will have a big influence on the outcome of the Iranian elections in late 2009. If the U.S. elects another neocon and continues down the path of warmongering, the Iranians might elect a similar figure and I'm afraid where that might lead.
Iran's president has said that he will wipe Israel from the map
Please stop repeating this mistranslation - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israel: Translation of phrase "wiped off the map". Ahmadinejad is a nut job and anti-Israel, but he said no such thing about wiping Israel off of the map. Please stop using this mistranslation to demonize Iran and their nuclear program. Iranians are not happy with him either - he spends more effort ranting at the U.S. than doing anything for Iran. The next election is in two years. Hopefully he will be removed and Iran can get back to slowly renormalising relations with the west. There's a whole generation that's grown up since the Islamic revolution and many don't see the point in continued isolation.
Why would you change though? Bioses are only used for booting these days
Really now? Ever heard of a thing called ACPI? If you have a laptop and have used the hibernation mode, you're executing code that is more or less in the BIOS. There's also lots of other power management, hot swapping and thermal management code in the BIOS.
And lets not forget that booting is still an important role in itself. Not only is there hardware initialisation, but there's the important role of loading the OS and/or boot loader. In fact, the reason that boot loaders exist (e.g NT boot loader, LILO, GRUB) is because the PC BIOS (interface) is so simple and unable to do anything more than load the first sector from a device and jump into it. Booting from the network or other unusual devices has always been a little difficult. OpenBoot and now EFI makes this stuff easy because it's based on an extensible framework instead of hacks and workarounds for the backward-compatible legacy from an ancient platform (the original IBM PC, over a quarter of a century ago).
Perhaps the problem of lots of little images vs a single 'sprite' is more psychological. Perhaps it just appears fast seeing lots of individual images load.
Well, it's not even the case that you can just make the image easy to cache and be home free. Eventually you're going to want to change some part of the image.
True. You'd really only want to use 'sprites' on site graphics that don't change very often.
Honestly, the more I think about this strategy, the less sense it makes. If you have to change the name of the resource to invalidate everyone's eternally-cached copies, that means you have to change everything that uses it as well.
Yeah, come to think of it, it really sounds more like a dodgy work-around to proper caching. Surely simply using last-modifed and Etags, handling if-modified-since and if-none-match, and giving out 304 responses is a much more reliable and flexible scheme. Assuming, of course, that browsers and caching proxies also do the proper thing. That's always the weak point and might be what long-ranged Expires values + versioned filenames is trying to work around.
This is only a win if your images are tiny. Why are you optimizing for this? Tiny images do not take long to download, even on dialup, because they are tiny.
And because they are tiny and numerous, the overhead from the HTTP headers is huge. Headers can easily be a few hundred bytes. Looking at the default 'icons' that come with Apache, the majority are little GIF's under 400 bytes. So if you go and download them with individual HTTP requests, you're throwing away 30-50% of your bandwidth just in HTTP overhead. Not to mention the delay as the request is sent and handled by the server, or TCP connection overhead, although hopefully your web/proxy server supports keep-alives and pipelining.
Your point about having a single 'sprite' image fail and losing lots of page graphics stands. But if you make sure the image is nice and cacheable, it will hang around longer and there will be fewer opportunities to fail.
Using data: URL's for inline graphics does sound stupid. Because of the Base64 encoding you wouldn't want to use it on anything too big. And it couldn't be for anything you use on a lot of pages, because then it would make more sense to put it in a file and allow it to be cached. Just odd.
Using an Expires: header with distant dates also sounds dodgy to me. You'd really only want to do that with static content. And like they noticed, be sure to increment some version/revision number in the filename/URL.
The Etag advice was a little discouraging. The gist was basically: Apache and IIS can produce inconsistent Etags on server farms, invalidating the whole purpose behind Etags. I imagine this is the case because they're operating directly from the filesystem and don't have much information to use. I'm working on a wiki engine and it uses Etags but generates them itself from the revision number of the page/resource requested. Etags are a simple and good mechanism to reduce bandwidth and help caching of content, but they must be generated well.
The question I want to ask is why there is a driver developer working for Samsung who is able to understand the function of the setuid bit but not the security implications of using it. It seems that there is a very special type of stupidity involved here, along with some extremely thoughtless design. Samsung is taking a big risk employing morons like that.
My guess: the programmer or programmers is/are more experienced with the Windows environment, where this sort of tom-foolery with permissions and privileges is standard practice and often necessary. So they know that to get around some problem, certain programs have to run as root/administrator. But they are unaware (or minimally aware) of the decades of security vulnerabilities and their solutions that are a part of the UNIX world. It may sound like the standard Slashdot cop-out, but once again we can likely blame Microsoft for another security vulnerability, even though it does not involve their software at all!
Screw you man, I did these changes and my machine died.
Oh, sorry to hear that. My machine did seem to struggle under the load initially. The mouse pointer jerked around and the rest of my desktop seemed pretty unresponsive. But it improved after a short while. The mouse pointer at least didn't chug, and focus followed my mouse after a short delay. But I was unable to kill the process with ctrl-c, instead having to kill it from another terminal window. Quite impressive for 32k threads in a tight loop.
I am curious though. You said it took like 20 minutes to start them all up.
That sounds about right. I tried nschubach's sample program and added some printf's to show the threads starting up. My machine hit 16 threads quickly but then slowed right down, seemingly doing them in batches. Adding a sleep(10); before the while (1); in the thread function helped immensely. With that small change, all 32k threads started in a matter of seconds before they hit the infinite loop. Wow, my system load went up to >350!
Probably not the best example. MPEG4 encoding takes so much time because it's not classical compression, the encoder has to figure out which pieces are less psychorelevant to big picture, and throw them away.
No, the most time-consuming part of most video encoders (including h.263 and h.264) is finding how the blocks have moved - searching for good matches between one frame and another. For best results, h.264 allows for the matches to not only come from the last frame, but up to the last 16! That allows for h.264 to handle flickering content much better, or situations where something is quickly covered and uncovered again e.g a person or car moving across frame, briefly covering parts of the background. Previous codecs did not handle those situations well and had to waste bandwidth redrawing blocks that were on screen just a moment prior.
The point does remain, most "compression" involves some sort of searching which is not performed when decompressing.
Except Infogear (acquired by Cisco in 2000) had the iPhone name trademarked years before Apple came up with it. And 1973 is the year the first call on a mobile phone was made. I dare say the 'Neo1973' name is a little more original that slapping a lower case 'i' on the front of a generic term.
Slashdot Mirror
From the source of that page:
So... we have a nine year old piece of JavaScript written by an AOL'er. No wonder it doesn't work with modern, standards-compliant web browsers.
Well, Daniel Lyons could have actually investigated the issue, instead of just swallowing what Darl Mcbride CEO said. The fact that he clearly didn't, says a lot about his skill as a journalist.
Had he done some investigation, he would have found:
But instead Lyons (and others like Didio and O'gara) appears to have chosen which side to support based on 'partisan' issues i.e money makes the world go 'round, so those filthy hippies must have stolen stuff from good, honest, hard-working American corporations to make Linux work properly. Lyons' previous "apology" basically said "oops, they duped me as well. I bet on the wrong horse". If he was a real journalist, he would have quickly found some of the things I mentioned above and at least been suspicious of SCO and their claims. But he didn't. He's just a troll calling himself a "journalist".
I literally have a problem with people literally overusing the word "literally". They literally misuse it to literally emphasis something, instead of literally indicating that a phrase is not being literally used as a common expression. If these writers literally realised what they were literally writing, their heads would literally explode. Figuratively speaking, of course.
No. You must be American. You call these things "cell phones". The vast majority of the rest of the English-speaking world calls them "mobile phones", or just "mobiles" for short.
HTH
Any tips on this idiot's identity so I can point him at Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point?
Oh, come on. Toolbars have got to be worth something.
How is that a problem that only affect atheists? People who are sadistic, psychopathic, etc are a problem for society no matter what their faith or belief system.
Nice. You're blaming the victims. You do understand that the residents of New Orleans didn't build and maintain the levies? And they also weren't the ones that divided up the land? And many of the residents were very poor, leaving them with very little choice but to live where they could afford. Oh, and hurricane Katrina didn't just cause flood damage. It was a fucking hurricane! It had strong winds and brought lots of rain. I'm thinking the differences between us aren't just our "moral codes", but perhaps political and one of us being brainwashed by the pundits on a certain cable news channel.
Why do you say that? I think the opposite - a society of individuals that look out for each other is going to be more successful than one composed of selfish individuals.
Well that part is obvious.
Here's the part relevant to your post:
Meanwhile, if you want a well supported argument for morality out of reason, you only need to learn the basics of the field of bioethics, which can develop a moral code far more consistent than anything that has come out of religion. (It starts from "I don't enjoy suffering, therefore other sentient being also likely don't enjoy suffering, so I should not inflict it upon them" and builds from there.)
Having never been a lion, I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing they don't. But us humans are different. We show empathy towards other humans, well as other animals and even plants. So Do unto others... etc.
But I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider OO.o a part of the Linux "operating system". Even desktops like GNOME and KDE are pushing the definition, but OO.o is definitely an application suite.
Please mod the parent down. If it's not a troll, it sure sounds like one.
First it appeals to "Linux developers" as if "Linux" was developed by one company or group. Then it goes on to complain about compiling stuff from source! Hey, we've had these things called package managers for over a decade now. Debian has APT, there's YUM and a few others for various distros. If you want to compile stuff from source instead of just installing some binary packages, that's your problem. Don't go blaming the mythical "Linux developers" for your own stupid mistakes.
Don't have much of a memory do you? Try reading some Groklaw. In fact, PJ posted about this just today. Mr. Lyons has quite a history around the SCO case. He's also attacked bloggers for being largely anonymous and lacking credibility. Pot calling the kettle something...
I don't follow your reasoning. They're both just image formats. And in this case, the PNG can hold the exact same information as the TIFF. The only difference would be the size reduction due to the use of LZ compression in PNG. There's no point to differentiate due to file type in this case - just put the different resolutions in different directories or name them slightly differently.
They have. There's Debian-Multimedia, which has been around for a few years. I know there's one or two specific to Ubuntu, five minutes Googling will probably find one. I've been using D-M for years now and have not had a problem. Automatix is an ugly hack and should be avoided at all costs.
Quite true. For more info on the way its cores work, see the UltraSPARC T1 article on Wikipedia (which I have edited quite a bit). Each core is a barrel processor, meaning each stage in the pipeline is handling an instruction from a different thread. This adds complexity, but in exchange it means that branch mis-prediction is no longer a problem - any branch instruction has already been through the execute stage and the Program Counter modified before the next instruction of the thread gets fetched.
The other big advantage with the multi-threaded UltraSPARC T1/T2 design is that it has high throughput. While a single-threaded CPU has to wait on cache misses, the T1/T2 just continues chugging along with its remaining threads. It's switching threads on every clock cycle, so each thread gets only 1/8th of the 'power' of each core. But because it's doing something on every single clock cycle, it can do a lot of work - as long as the work is multi-threaded. That's its weakness.
This processor will also have a floating-point unit for each core, unlike the UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) which only had one shared amongst all 8 cores. This should make it much more suitable than the T1 for a wide variety of applications. The T1 did great on multithreaded server-type tasks (e.g web, email, database) but would have been pretty hopeless for anything doing more than a bare minimum of FP work.
I gather they do have some choice, although the mullahs do exert a lot of control. Ahmadinejad's predecessor Mohammad Khatami was a moderate and apparently appealed to both women and the younger generation. Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, two years after the U.S. invaded Iraq. They elected a president that rants about the evils of the U.S. and Israel, but not much else. I'm sure the outcome of the U.S. election in 2008 (and the actions of the new administration in the first 7-8 months) will have a big influence on the outcome of the Iranian elections in late 2009. If the U.S. elects another neocon and continues down the path of warmongering, the Iranians might elect a similar figure and I'm afraid where that might lead.
Please stop repeating this mistranslation - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israel: Translation of phrase "wiped off the map". Ahmadinejad is a nut job and anti-Israel, but he said no such thing about wiping Israel off of the map. Please stop using this mistranslation to demonize Iran and their nuclear program. Iranians are not happy with him either - he spends more effort ranting at the U.S. than doing anything for Iran. The next election is in two years. Hopefully he will be removed and Iran can get back to slowly renormalising relations with the west. There's a whole generation that's grown up since the Islamic revolution and many don't see the point in continued isolation.
Really now? Ever heard of a thing called ACPI? If you have a laptop and have used the hibernation mode, you're executing code that is more or less in the BIOS. There's also lots of other power management, hot swapping and thermal management code in the BIOS.
And lets not forget that booting is still an important role in itself. Not only is there hardware initialisation, but there's the important role of loading the OS and/or boot loader. In fact, the reason that boot loaders exist (e.g NT boot loader, LILO, GRUB) is because the PC BIOS (interface) is so simple and unable to do anything more than load the first sector from a device and jump into it. Booting from the network or other unusual devices has always been a little difficult. OpenBoot and now EFI makes this stuff easy because it's based on an extensible framework instead of hacks and workarounds for the backward-compatible legacy from an ancient platform (the original IBM PC, over a quarter of a century ago).
Perhaps the problem of lots of little images vs a single 'sprite' is more psychological. Perhaps it just appears fast seeing lots of individual images load.
True. You'd really only want to use 'sprites' on site graphics that don't change very often.
Yeah, come to think of it, it really sounds more like a dodgy work-around to proper caching. Surely simply using last-modifed and Etags, handling if-modified-since and if-none-match, and giving out 304 responses is a much more reliable and flexible scheme. Assuming, of course, that browsers and caching proxies also do the proper thing. That's always the weak point and might be what long-ranged Expires values + versioned filenames is trying to work around.
And because they are tiny and numerous, the overhead from the HTTP headers is huge. Headers can easily be a few hundred bytes. Looking at the default 'icons' that come with Apache, the majority are little GIF's under 400 bytes. So if you go and download them with individual HTTP requests, you're throwing away 30-50% of your bandwidth just in HTTP overhead. Not to mention the delay as the request is sent and handled by the server, or TCP connection overhead, although hopefully your web/proxy server supports keep-alives and pipelining.
Your point about having a single 'sprite' image fail and losing lots of page graphics stands. But if you make sure the image is nice and cacheable, it will hang around longer and there will be fewer opportunities to fail.
Using data: URL's for inline graphics does sound stupid. Because of the Base64 encoding you wouldn't want to use it on anything too big. And it couldn't be for anything you use on a lot of pages, because then it would make more sense to put it in a file and allow it to be cached. Just odd.
Using an Expires: header with distant dates also sounds dodgy to me. You'd really only want to do that with static content. And like they noticed, be sure to increment some version/revision number in the filename/URL.
The Etag advice was a little discouraging. The gist was basically: Apache and IIS can produce inconsistent Etags on server farms, invalidating the whole purpose behind Etags. I imagine this is the case because they're operating directly from the filesystem and don't have much information to use. I'm working on a wiki engine and it uses Etags but generates them itself from the revision number of the page/resource requested. Etags are a simple and good mechanism to reduce bandwidth and help caching of content, but they must be generated well.
My guess: the programmer or programmers is/are more experienced with the Windows environment, where this sort of tom-foolery with permissions and privileges is standard practice and often necessary. So they know that to get around some problem, certain programs have to run as root/administrator. But they are unaware (or minimally aware) of the decades of security vulnerabilities and their solutions that are a part of the UNIX world. It may sound like the standard Slashdot cop-out, but once again we can likely blame Microsoft for another security vulnerability, even though it does not involve their software at all!
Oh, sorry to hear that. My machine did seem to struggle under the load initially. The mouse pointer jerked around and the rest of my desktop seemed pretty unresponsive. But it improved after a short while. The mouse pointer at least didn't chug, and focus followed my mouse after a short delay. But I was unable to kill the process with ctrl-c, instead having to kill it from another terminal window. Quite impressive for 32k threads in a tight loop.
That sounds about right. I tried nschubach's sample program and added some printf's to show the threads starting up. My machine hit 16 threads quickly but then slowed right down, seemingly doing them in batches. Adding a sleep(10); before the while (1); in the thread function helped immensely. With that small change, all 32k threads started in a matter of seconds before they hit the infinite loop. Wow, my system load went up to >350!
System: Athlon XP 2600+, 2.5GB ram, kernel 2.6.22.1, HZ=1000, preemptable kernel, BKL preemption, tickless
No, the most time-consuming part of most video encoders (including h.263 and h.264) is finding how the blocks have moved - searching for good matches between one frame and another. For best results, h.264 allows for the matches to not only come from the last frame, but up to the last 16! That allows for h.264 to handle flickering content much better, or situations where something is quickly covered and uncovered again e.g a person or car moving across frame, briefly covering parts of the background. Previous codecs did not handle those situations well and had to waste bandwidth redrawing blocks that were on screen just a moment prior.
The point does remain, most "compression" involves some sort of searching which is not performed when decompressing.
Except Infogear (acquired by Cisco in 2000) had the iPhone name trademarked years before Apple came up with it. And 1973 is the year the first call on a mobile phone was made. I dare say the 'Neo1973' name is a little more original that slapping a lower case 'i' on the front of a generic term.