I agree that this is a good step towards fixing the price model for internet access as the currently model is horribly broken. For customers with bursty traffic (i.e. most residential customers), it's insane to charge based on the maximum rate at which they can move data. This would be like charging people for the diameter of the water pipe entering their house rather than the amount of water that actually flows through it. This model only makes sense when the faucet is always on. The same holds for a data connection.
The sooner ISPs figure this out and charge based on actual usage, the sooner they'll be incentivized to give us more bandwidth and will lose any interest in cutting off their best customers (why kill a cash cow?). They'll want to provide more bandwidth to heavy usage customers in hopes that those people take advantage of the additional bandwidth to move more data generate more revenue.
Agreed, this is just another example of gcc failing to follow the spec. gcc is known to optimize away side-effects such as segmentation faults that might occur from a pointer dereference which is optimized away or a divide by zero error from a division that has been optimized out. It's really annoying that gcc thinks it's ok to change the meaning of programs in this way when it's optimizing them.
I strongly recommend An Imaginary Tale: The Story of i [the square root of minus one]. I received a copy of it when I was in high school and had a very hard time putting it down. The book takes the approach of teaching the history of complex numbers - what problems needed to be solved, how complex numbers were discovered, and how they solved these problems. The book is fantastic as it is a good, fun read, while simultaneously being extremely educational. It requires no prior understanding of complex numbers to read, and should, therefore, be easily accessible to high school students. At the same time, it goes more in depth into complex numbers than I have encountered anywhere else in my academic career (including a BS in Math). I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about complex numbers or anyone who wants a fun, educational, math read.
The television is an entertainment device, nothing more. We have so much more to worry about in this country other than if someone will continue view ads on the tv when we move on from an archaic system.
If people stop viewing ads on the TV then how will our politians get re-elected? Without ads, the general public will have no idea how slimy and terrible the person they are running against is....
Where do I go to sign up to be a part of this. Anything to pound EA in the ass.
Typically you need only purchase the product to be a member of the class. If the lawsuit is successful then the court will require that the company, in this case EA, notify you of the case and the resolution so that you can get your part. In this case that means purchasing a copy of Spore and hoping that the lawsuit is successful. Given the way these things go, however, you'll almost certainly hurt EA more by not buying Spore in the first place. The compensation is likely to be far less than the cost of Spore and may well come in part in coupons for future purchases or other mostly worthless things...
Depending on your particular reasons for wanting a sub-notebook, the Asus S5NE might appeal. I have had one for 4 or 5 years and have been quite happy with it. It has a 12.1" screen, so it's not actually a sub-notebook, but it only weighs 2.8 pounds which makes it unnoticeable in a backpack. It came with a 1Ghz Pentium M processor and 256MB of RAM (upgradeable to 768MB for those who feel the need for more), so it's adequately capable for all of the things you've listed and also plays older games without difficulty. With the extended life battery, Asus claims it will run for 8.5 hours, but I cannot confirm that as I've always stuck with the regular battery.
The main reason I like this laptop is that it is very light while still maintaining a normal size screen and keyboard so that I can actually use it.
This showed up a little bit late. The bill
failed to pass 239-178 with 14 not voting. While this is a 55% vote in favor, it required a 2/3 supermajority to pass due to a motion to suspend the rules.
Anyway, DRM based on a "do not read before" timestamp would be hard to effect. It would require that any reader be set with an unhackable internal clock that knows the time zone the reader is in, otherwise people could circumvent the "do not read before" settings rather handily.
That's easy, just use GPS. It'll tell you the timezone you are in and give you the exact time with atomic clock accuracy. It also seems highly likely that you'll find the DRM encryption algorithm easier to crack than GPS.
On noting the open point, this guy should have at least tried to locate its owner and let them know about it, maybe even offer to help them fix the problem.
I'm not sure that this is a reason request. I know in my apartment that I get upwards of 20 wireless networks depending on where I stand. Of these, about half use WEP and the other half are completely open. I cannot come up with a reasonable way to track down where these 10 open wireless networks are coming from, let allow trying to explain the issue to all of the people. Given the range of wireless and the size of my community, there are probably hundreds of open wireless networks.
One can prove that no sorting algorithm using binary comparisons can do better than use O(n log n) comparisons. Hence GPUsort couldn't have been asymptotically more efficient that qsort.
Actually, qsort is O(n^2), so there are many known asymptotically more efficient algorithms. If we talk about average case instead of worse case, then qsort is THETA(n log n) and your argument holds.
It's nice to see a piece of hardware that ships with linux drivers and promises Windows support later. So frequently applications and hardware are first supported under Windows and occasionally ported to other platforms.
It occurs to me that the wording of this section of the bill may allow for more than what Congress expects:
"No court shall have jurisdiction to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security, or order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision."
As it says that the courts cannot hear anything arising from action undertaken or decisions made by the Secretary of Homeland security it seems that one need only claim that their actions were in response to such an action or decision. Any such response can be said to have arisen from the action, as it would not have occured without it. Thus it may be possible to use this bill to prevent a suit for any reason as long as one can show that it is a result of a decision of the Se cretary of Homeland Security.
The classic solution to this "problem" is to put toll booths on the highway and charge people either for every booth they go through or for the amount of time they spend on the highway. The main problem with this approach is the overhead. In order to charge people based on the mileage they travel on toll roads it is necessary to build toll booths and to staff them with people. Another problem is the increase in traffic that tends to surround the toll booths on these roads. This idea of using a GPS in a car to log taxes owed to the state is an elegant new solution to this old problem. By using a GPS and having it read at gasstations (presumably automatically), the overhead of building and staffing toll booths is elimated along with the annoying side effect of increased traffic. Charging people based on the mileage that they drive is an old idea, but the implementation through the use of GPS is a brilliant new solution.
The correct solution to this problem was investigated in Plan 9. Plan 9 has a great many features that one could discuss, but the relevant one to this discussion is its threatment of filesystems. In Plan 9 EVERYTHING is a filesystem. Probably as a result of this, there are a lot more things that you can do with filesystems. In particular, you can mount multiple filesystems at the SAME location in the filesystem and view the contents of both filesystems. (in case you're worried, the behavior for writing to such a location is well defined) Thus each program could have its own files in its personal set of filesystems which could automatically be mounted on top of/usr/lib and/usr/local/bin without actually combining everything in one place. To remove an application, it would just be necessary to remove its filesystems and all the relevent files would disappear. This is one of the excellent results of the great experiment called Plan 9 that should be integrated into other systems like *NIX.
The legality of such a license is questionable, at best. First of all, can an encryption key (a purely functional item, usually automatically designed) be considered copyrightable?
Yes. One could write a poem or a song or an essay, copyright it, and use it as an encryption key. Such works are works of art and subject to copyright.
You are entirely correct that you can craft code to negate the usefulness of the cache on any system. For the average application, however, the cache is extremely effective and this special case does not arise. If it were to arise accidently, it would not be difficult to rewrite the code in a cache-friendly manner.
The interesting difference between the single core and the multiple core sharing a unified cache is that two memory intensive cache-friendly programs could trample each other's cache and result in "Absolute cache destruction". The result could be that the two programs running on seperate cores and sharing a cache would run slowing than the programs taking turns on a single core as every instruction on the single core might be a cache hit(data is in the cache), but when moved to the dual-core with unified cache could become a cache miss(data is not in the cache). This would me a huge performance hit because memory access is orders of magnitude slower than accessing the cache (resulting in worse performance on the dual-core system).
It's not entirely true that single is better. It depends on what the system is used for. If both cores are accessing the same memory (likely the case in a multi-threaded webserver for instance), then they can benefit from sharing a cache and effectively doubling the cache size. However, if both cores are accessing different memory (almost any situation where different applications are running on the different cores), then sharing a cache could have devastating effects on performance. As each process running on each of the cores would be likely to be evicting the other processes cached memory, there would be a plethora of cache misses. In the worst case, this could effective make the system as slow as if there were no cache at all. In the average case there would likely be a significant performance hit. A better strategy than unified or seperate caches would be to have a read/write cache for each core and allow each core to read the other core's cache. This would allow the benefits of the shared cache in the case where both cores were accessing the same memory without having the major performance hit when each process is accessing different memory. Unfortunately the hardware for this would be even more complicated than for the unified or seperate cache techniques.
Safer until a bug turns up, someone hacks the system, or it crashes. Imagine the accident when all the cars speeding through the intersection at 50mph when the system stops responding.....
The problem I see with this is Moore's Law. Sure you can make a stamp that is computationally expensive now, but if 5 years it'll be dirt cheap. It seems like a bad idea to design a system that is going to require constant updates if we can avoid it.
I think I would much rather see a system where the sender of an e-mail pays a penny to the receiver. That way it would cost $100,000/msg to send spam to 10 million people, but for the average user it would work out about even. Just a few pennies added to or deducted from your monthly internet access bill. Such a system could support white lists just as easily as the suggested system and it would be extremely easy for a corporation to make all internal mail free as they are supplying the e-mail address to both the sender and receiver and thus responsible for billing them.
Heck, people would be paid to use AOL given the amount of spam those addresses receive....
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I agree that this is a good step towards fixing the price model for internet access as the currently model is horribly broken. For customers with bursty traffic (i.e. most residential customers), it's insane to charge based on the maximum rate at which they can move data. This would be like charging people for the diameter of the water pipe entering their house rather than the amount of water that actually flows through it. This model only makes sense when the faucet is always on. The same holds for a data connection.
The sooner ISPs figure this out and charge based on actual usage, the sooner they'll be incentivized to give us more bandwidth and will lose any interest in cutting off their best customers (why kill a cash cow?). They'll want to provide more bandwidth to heavy usage customers in hopes that those people take advantage of the additional bandwidth to move more data generate more revenue.
Agreed, this is just another example of gcc failing to follow the spec. gcc is known to optimize away side-effects such as segmentation faults that might occur from a pointer dereference which is optimized away or a divide by zero error from a division that has been optimized out. It's really annoying that gcc thinks it's ok to change the meaning of programs in this way when it's optimizing them.
I strongly recommend An Imaginary Tale: The Story of i [the square root of minus one]. I received a copy of it when I was in high school and had a very hard time putting it down. The book takes the approach of teaching the history of complex numbers - what problems needed to be solved, how complex numbers were discovered, and how they solved these problems. The book is fantastic as it is a good, fun read, while simultaneously being extremely educational. It requires no prior understanding of complex numbers to read, and should, therefore, be easily accessible to high school students. At the same time, it goes more in depth into complex numbers than I have encountered anywhere else in my academic career (including a BS in Math). I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about complex numbers or anyone who wants a fun, educational, math read.
The television is an entertainment device, nothing more. We have so much more to worry about in this country other than if someone will continue view ads on the tv when we move on from an archaic system.
If people stop viewing ads on the TV then how will our politians get re-elected? Without ads, the general public will have no idea how slimy and terrible the person they are running against is....
Where do I go to sign up to be a part of this. Anything to pound EA in the ass.
Typically you need only purchase the product to be a member of the class. If the lawsuit is successful then the court will require that the company, in this case EA, notify you of the case and the resolution so that you can get your part. In this case that means purchasing a copy of Spore and hoping that the lawsuit is successful. Given the way these things go, however, you'll almost certainly hurt EA more by not buying Spore in the first place. The compensation is likely to be far less than the cost of Spore and may well come in part in coupons for future purchases or other mostly worthless things...
Depending on your particular reasons for wanting a sub-notebook, the Asus S5NE might appeal. I have had one for 4 or 5 years and have been quite happy with it. It has a 12.1" screen, so it's not actually a sub-notebook, but it only weighs 2.8 pounds which makes it unnoticeable in a backpack. It came with a 1Ghz Pentium M processor and 256MB of RAM (upgradeable to 768MB for those who feel the need for more), so it's adequately capable for all of the things you've listed and also plays older games without difficulty. With the extended life battery, Asus claims it will run for 8.5 hours, but I cannot confirm that as I've always stuck with the regular battery. The main reason I like this laptop is that it is very light while still maintaining a normal size screen and keyboard so that I can actually use it.
This showed up a little bit late. The bill failed to pass 239-178 with 14 not voting. While this is a 55% vote in favor, it required a 2/3 supermajority to pass due to a motion to suspend the rules.
Anyway, DRM based on a "do not read before" timestamp would be hard to effect. It would require that any reader be set with an unhackable internal clock that knows the time zone the reader is in, otherwise people could circumvent the "do not read before" settings rather handily.
That's easy, just use GPS. It'll tell you the timezone you are in and give you the exact time with atomic clock accuracy. It also seems highly likely that you'll find the DRM encryption algorithm easier to crack than GPS.
On noting the open point, this guy should have at least tried to locate its owner and let them know about it, maybe even offer to help them fix the problem.
I'm not sure that this is a reason request. I know in my apartment that I get upwards of 20 wireless networks depending on where I stand. Of these, about half use WEP and the other half are completely open. I cannot come up with a reasonable way to track down where these 10 open wireless networks are coming from, let allow trying to explain the issue to all of the people. Given the range of wireless and the size of my community, there are probably hundreds of open wireless networks.
One can prove that no sorting algorithm using binary comparisons can do better than use O(n log n) comparisons. Hence GPUsort couldn't have been asymptotically more efficient that qsort.
Actually, qsort is O(n^2), so there are many known asymptotically more efficient algorithms. If we talk about average case instead of worse case, then qsort is THETA(n log n) and your argument holds.
It's nice to see a piece of hardware that ships with linux drivers and promises Windows support later. So frequently applications and hardware are first supported under Windows and occasionally ported to other platforms.
It occurs to me that the wording of this section of the bill may allow for more than what Congress expects:
"No court shall have jurisdiction to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security, or order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision."
As it says that the courts cannot hear anything arising from action undertaken or decisions made by the Secretary of Homeland security it seems that one need only claim that their actions were in response to such an action or decision. Any such response can be said to have arisen from the action, as it would not have occured without it. Thus it may be possible to use this bill to prevent a suit for any reason as long as one can show that it is a result of a decision of the Se cretary of Homeland Security.
The classic solution to this "problem" is to put toll booths on the highway and charge people either for every booth they go through or for the amount of time they spend on the highway. The main problem with this approach is the overhead. In order to charge people based on the mileage they travel on toll roads it is necessary to build toll booths and to staff them with people. Another problem is the increase in traffic that tends to surround the toll booths on these roads. This idea of using a GPS in a car to log taxes owed to the state is an elegant new solution to this old problem. By using a GPS and having it read at gasstations (presumably automatically), the overhead of building and staffing toll booths is elimated along with the annoying side effect of increased traffic. Charging people based on the mileage that they drive is an old idea, but the implementation through the use of GPS is a brilliant new solution.
The correct solution to this problem was investigated in Plan 9. Plan 9 has a great many features that one could discuss, but the relevant one to this discussion is its threatment of filesystems. In Plan 9 EVERYTHING is a filesystem. Probably as a result of this, there are a lot more things that you can do with filesystems. In particular, you can mount multiple filesystems at the SAME location in the filesystem and view the contents of both filesystems. (in case you're worried, the behavior for writing to such a location is well defined) Thus each program could have its own files in its personal set of filesystems which could automatically be mounted on top of /usr/lib and /usr/local/bin without actually combining everything in one place. To remove an application, it would just be necessary to remove its filesystems and all the relevent files would disappear. This is one of the excellent results of the great experiment called Plan 9 that should be integrated into other systems like *NIX.
The legality of such a license is questionable, at best. First of all, can an encryption key (a purely functional item, usually automatically designed) be considered copyrightable?
Yes. One could write a poem or a song or an essay, copyright it, and use it as an encryption key. Such works are works of art and subject to copyright.
You are entirely correct that you can craft code to negate the usefulness of the cache on any system. For the average application, however, the cache is extremely effective and this special case does not arise. If it were to arise accidently, it would not be difficult to rewrite the code in a cache-friendly manner.
The interesting difference between the single core and the multiple core sharing a unified cache is that two memory intensive cache-friendly programs could trample each other's cache and result in "Absolute cache destruction". The result could be that the two programs running on seperate cores and sharing a cache would run slowing than the programs taking turns on a single core as every instruction on the single core might be a cache hit(data is in the cache), but when moved to the dual-core with unified cache could become a cache miss(data is not in the cache). This would me a huge performance hit because memory access is orders of magnitude slower than accessing the cache (resulting in worse performance on the dual-core system).
I claim the first post! That means I get free copies of the first PG-13 movies, right? Yay! Temple of DOOOOMMM!! (worst Indiana Jones movie ever....)
It's not entirely true that single is better. It depends on what the system is used for. If both cores are accessing the same memory (likely the case in a multi-threaded webserver for instance), then they can benefit from sharing a cache and effectively doubling the cache size. However, if both cores are accessing different memory (almost any situation where different applications are running on the different cores), then sharing a cache could have devastating effects on performance. As each process running on each of the cores would be likely to be evicting the other processes cached memory, there would be a plethora of cache misses. In the worst case, this could effective make the system as slow as if there were no cache at all. In the average case there would likely be a significant performance hit. A better strategy than unified or seperate caches would be to have a read/write cache for each core and allow each core to read the other core's cache. This would allow the benefits of the shared cache in the case where both cores were accessing the same memory without having the major performance hit when each process is accessing different memory. Unfortunately the hardware for this would be even more complicated than for the unified or seperate cache techniques.
Safer until a bug turns up, someone hacks the system, or it crashes. Imagine the accident when all the cars speeding through the intersection at 50mph when the system stops responding.....
The problem I see with this is Moore's Law. Sure you can make a stamp that is computationally expensive now, but if 5 years it'll be dirt cheap. It seems like a bad idea to design a system that is going to require constant updates if we can avoid it.
I think I would much rather see a system where the sender of an e-mail pays a penny to the receiver. That way it would cost $100,000/msg to send spam to 10 million people, but for the average user it would work out about even. Just a few pennies added to or deducted from your monthly internet access bill. Such a system could support white lists just as easily as the suggested system and it would be extremely easy for a corporation to make all internal mail free as they are supplying the e-mail address to both the sender and receiver and thus responsible for billing them.
Heck, people would be paid to use AOL given the amount of spam those addresses receive....