If you look through all historical American data and see that failure of 60% of mortgages has never happened (assuming here that we're taking the mortgages from different markets in theis simple example) then you have created a security that, based on all available historical data, is quite reliable.
You forgot about 1929, didn't you? There is prior precedence for such a fall. And the US housing market really sucked thereafter too until just after WWII at which point it picked up steam and stabilized until the late 1980's where it jumped and started the creation of a big bubble that is only just starting to deflate.
There's a study out there of housing data from the late 1800's until pretty recently. (Wish I had the specific link, but you can find it on-line. It was done by Harvard/Standford/ or such.) The study adjusted for inflation and leveled, which set the adjusted housing price at $100k. During the Great Depression it dropped considerably (over 50%), and didn't revive until after WWII, when it came back up to around $100k and stayed there until the late 1980's when it started to go skyward, peaking near $190k or so around 2002 or so, and then starting to decline. I think the most recent number was still above $180k. Guess what? That number still has a long ways to drop before it'll be back in reality.
The problem is larger than simply what you are stating, though it certainly didn't help at all - and problem made things worse.
What you have to look at is the long term trend and also the affordability to the base market. For example, in Northern Virginia buying a house went skyward after 2000. My sister's townhouse went from $93k (1997) to a peak of $330k (2005) - little to no change in the property itself outside of standard maintenance. It's settled down some, but is still well above $200k. The primary causes were (a) zoning laws modified to "keep the way of life the same" (i.e. houses spread apart, country feel), (b) growing increase in population, and (c) the belief that the prices would forever go up b/c the gov't is there and thus makes a stable economy.
The problems ended up being: (a) there existed a $20k gap between what an individual could leave on under subsidized housing ($42k salary max) and what the same person could live on without subsidized housing (roughly $60k salary) due to housing (renting) prices alone, and (b) the base market (people in their mid-20's to early 30's) were being forced out of the market - they simply couldn't afford to buy a house any longer; moreover, it was showing signs of the problems even in 2005 when people that had been in the area for a while wouldn't have been able to buy their own homes.
I still have quite a few friends in that area, and while the market has come down some, it is still quite crazy and unaffordable (the reason my wife & I moved out of that area). Sadly, many are in a very tough position b/c if the housing market keeps going the way it is (and it will until it reaches a full correction) many are going to end up in bankruptcy as a result. But that's the "high demand" side of the story.
On the other hand, out in Columbus, OH - city officials decided they wanted to "clean-up downtown" and get rid of the "poor people", so they worked with lenders to get those people loans and move them out to the suburbs. For example, in my parents development there was a high school student who (a) just graduated high school, and (b) didn't have a job (period!) but had been qualified for a mortgage and allowed to buy a home. She's now in bankruptcy. The "clean-up" simply put the poor people elsewhere, essentially making them someone else's problem while making the politicians look good. In the meantime, that "someone else's problem" has resulted in mass foreclosures in neighborhoods as things caught up to people that weren't have been able to pay the mortgage to start with and ended up in foreclosures quite predictably, which is on
It's also very small, extremely fast, highly modular, and extraordinarily robust. It could take the load of a root name server, if you had the bandwidth. It actually approaches the almost-mythical status of "bug-free software"; I certainly would be surprised by any remaining security or stability issues being discovered in it.
The man himself can often come across as arrogant - but you can't deny with djbdns he's written extraordinarily stable, virtually bug-free code that he has now (along with almost all of his other work) explicitly gifted to the public domain. He deserves a little credit for that, imho, and djbdns certainly deserves being considered alongside any other DNS server. Your code would probably be pretty secure too if you called all your variables and functions by single letters of the alphabet and made it harder to decipher.
Honestly, djbdns is great software, but having tried to look through the code a while back (because of a compilation problem that I later was able to find a patch for due to his lack of updates and the changes in compilers since he last released it) it's difficult as hell to understand simply because it code like:
void f(int a, int b, int c) { do(a); b = g(c) + x(a); int g = 0; p(g,b,a); return (b+c); }
Granted things can still be susceptible to attack, which his software has withstood as well, but it's nowhere near the elegance it should have. Will be interesting to see if the new license changed that - perhaps his release were just highly obfuscated (my guess is they are).
Enter the clueless PHB with a metric and chart fetish, stage left. This guy doesn't understand what those things are, but might make it his personal duty to chart some progress by showing how much fewer warnings he's got from the team this week than last week. So useless man-hours are spent on useless morphing perfectly good code, into something that games the tool. For each 1 real bug found, there'll be 100 harmless warnings that he makes it his personal mission to get out of the code.
I've found that eliminating compiler warnings will do a lot for finding bugs. Sure, there may be a number of "harmless" ones, but cleaning them up will still do a lot of good to the code too, and make the other not-so-harmless ones stand out even more. It also gives good practice for resolving the issues so that you become more proactive than reactive to bugs in the code.
Just 2 cents.
Unless you want to be a college professor, don't go for Computer Science degree - it's pretty much junk, at least at most any higher education institution in the U.S, and companies are starting to pick up on it. Instead, go for a Computer Engineering degree. You'll get a good engineering background, and you'll still get the coding background. You'll be able to work with either hardware (OS, device drivers, etc.) or software (systems, user, embedded), and you'll have more opportunities available to you than someone with the CS degree would have.
Also (the bit of advice I really wish I had before college) - if you want to do anything with hardware or operating systems, you need a Computer Engineering degree. Everyone you'll be in competition with will have it, and its what the employers look for. CS will be a complimentary degree for them, not the degree that qualifies them for the job.
FYI - if you do get a CS, then they'll want either an Bachelors or Master in EE to as well.
Any how...save yourself the trouble, and just get a Computer Engineering degree. It's a little tougher, but more than worth it.
...the banks will have to support more than Windows, no? And more than simply IE, no? Otherwise, customers could sue saying that's all the bank allowed them to use...though, I'm guessing from the summary there is probably a clause to get them out of that too.
I'll grant you there's no built-in function for it, but I also can't conceive of a useful reason for doing so.
Converting a single bitmap image into a PDF is a grossly inefficient operation for no benefit.
(Where the file format can sensibly be exported to PDF, most open source software does provide it; eg Inkscape.)
Some companies use PDF for a lot of things - such as proofs, etc. Also, a lot of print shops use PDFs for proofs and as part of the process just prior to printing as the PDF format yields the exact printing output.
However, that is no longer how processors function - they are now two slower processors working together.
But there aren't two slower processors. Core for core modern processors are faster then 5-year-old processors. Even if they have lower clock speeds.
And while the average home user probably can't use 16 cores, they can use two cores. Their foreground app can get 100% of the cycles on core 1, and all the kernel-space calls can run on core 2 -- all the overhead of USB, TCP/IP, etc. can happen on a second core so the first core can run the user app exclusively. Not exactly. A kernel-space call will delay the foreground app, thus even the scenario you propose would utilize both cores and starve the rest of the system. Now, you could use the one core for a foreground app, and the other core for all background apps; but that too would not be the best scenario. Honestly, the best utilization of both cores in most desktop scenarios would be to treat them like separate processors and utilize them nearly the same as before.
But needless to say, the OS cannot break a single program/thread across more than one core.
Let's take your example - primary program runs on the first core, the OS pushes all the kernel stuff onto the second core. Two things are wrong with this: (1) If the app was only designed for a single processor, then there will be all kinds of timing issues that will arise including but not limited to race conditions. (2) Assuming the OS solves the race conditions - which it can only do internally to itself, not the application it is providing service for, the first core will stall whenever any kernel request is made - even if just for a few milliseconds - as the request is handled by the second core, since the first core is now waiting. But it gets even better - some kernel operations are designed to operate without calling out, thus they will perform their function and return without causing a context switch, etc. Now, if it tried to do all OS functions on the second core, a context switch AND a core switch (double overhead) would now be required for even those calls that could be optimized to run without having to do so. So you've now slowed down your computer.
But you're still left with the issue that the application may not be written to be thread safe - so now, your kernel does something (even if that is thread safe!) on a different core whilst the program continues on the original core and it has an adverse affect on the application since it happens faster than the application needs it to. (Been there - done that. Big problem and hard to find and resolve.)
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to the home user whether the processor has one core, two cores, or 80 cores. What matters is whether their software runs. Now OS's mitigate a lot of these issues by leaving things mostly the same - programs typically operate on a single core just like they would have if there only existed a single core and single processor in the system - changing that would break a lot of applications, which OS kernel vendors have no desire to do - especially Microsoft. But the programs cannot take any more advantage of the multi-cores than they could before unless they were designed with SMP in mind, in which case the same benefit would be derived through multiple processors.
What do the OS's that run on them have to do with the processors' performance? Recent processors have had significant improvements in performance in the last 5-7 years, which makes the GP incorrect.
Perhaps you missed my statement about the user's perceived performance. It is true, I grant you, that hardware performance has gotten better. But the user's perception of that performance has not - it's gone the opposite. Some of that is because programmer's rely on a single faster core to correct for their inept programming, lack of optimization, added abstraction layers, etc. However, that is no longer how processors function - they are now two slower processors working together.
And yes, the OS can, and has been able to for years since SMP first came about, spread loads across multiple processors and cores. But that cannot change how a single program functions in and of itself - it cannot make that single program work at any given moment on more than one single core if it was not designed to do so (i.e. if the program is not designed to use multiple threads or processes).
Clock frequency is not an indicative of CPU performance. For example, the Core 2 chips, despite generally operating at a lower frequency than the Pentium 4's outperform them significantly.
Each core would perform nearly the same as a similarly clocked P4, of course, optimizations in the instructions have changed since then too. But they would still perform similarly. Of course, comparing a P4 to a Core2 is like comparing Apples to Oranges as there are architecture changes across the whole chip that would change that (like the move away from P4's netburst architecture). So there are reasons other than clock frequency for that performance difference.
If I'm not mistaken, even if a specific program was not designed to use several cores, the OS can still run different programs in each core, improving the overall user performance. Correct me if I'm wrong.
That only works across all the different programs. An OS cannot break a single program into multiple threads/processes for the program - the program has to be coded to do so.
Your second point in the blockquote corroborates the first one: the problem isn't that the CPU isn't getting faster, we're just throwing bigger and more bloated stuff at it.
It's both issues. Programmers have gotten lazier and since roughly 2000 (at least from my perspective, likely before that) have come to rely on the ever increasing sizes of hard drives, RAM, and Clock Frequency. The prime directive in the Java community is if you don't like the performance, toss more hardware at it (e.g. Processors); however, that doesn't work if your 1.6 GHz chip single core processors goes to a 1.8 GHz dual core consisting of two 1.1 GHz cores that roughly equate to a 1.8 GHz single core processor in performance. They only equate because the OS can move processes and threads between them, but a program that is designed for a single process cannot take advantage of the second core, and thus effectively runs at the 1.1 GHz instead of the full 1.8 GHz. Programs that are designed to be multi-threaded (or multi-processed) would feel the full benefit of the second core.
This also goes to the bloat - as programmers have typically stopped optimizing code. Thus there are more lines of code in delivered software - often having more and more abstraction layers in them, which doesn't help either. So the overall effect is that the software takes longer to do the same function.
In the end, despite the increase in processing power, the programs run as slow or slower than before. Numerous reasons for it. The GP of my original post in this thread is still correct.
"...the speed the user experiences has not improved much [in the last 5-7 years]."
This may almost be true if you stay on the cutting edge, but not even close for the average user (or the power-user on a budget, like myself). 5 years ago I was running a 1.2 GHz Duron. Today I have a 2.3 GHz Athlon 64 in my notebook (which is a little over a year old, I think), and an Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (that's a dual-core 2.8 GHz, for those who don't know) in my desktop. I'd be lying if I said I didn't notice much difference between the three.
Do notice that in 5 years we have barely increased the clock frequency of the CPUs
Do notice that multi-cores don't increase the overall clock frequency, just divide the work up among a set of lower clock frequency cores - yet most programs don't take advantage of that.;-)
Do notice that despite clock frequencies going from 33 mhz to 2.3 GHz, the user's perceived performance of the computer has either stayed the same (most likely) or diminished over that same time period.
Do notice that programs are more bloated than ever, and programmers are lazier than ever.
...
In the end the GP is right.
It's not good for business. It's good for the user. But the AIM model relies on advertising revenue from the AIM client. If you encourage people to use something other than your spammy ad-ridden client, you get less ad clicks and less revenue. There were ads in the AIM client? Hmmm...never noticed.
...the Software Engineering grads are increasing. That'll be when this line of talk really means something. Until then, it's still just a junk degree as it is too much theory and not enough practice.
I'm doing fine in my math and science, but I'm betting not everybody is. I'm not quite sure why you need all of this excessive math and science (except when the Computer Science is in the School of Engineering--but not all colleges are like this).
As a 3rd year undergraduate computer science student, here is my best answer:
Undergraduate education is about "well-roundedness." They want everybody to at least familiarize themselves with at least one topic in every major area of academia. Computer science students are required to do science courses for this reason, partly.
Computer science is much more than just programming. Learning math and the other sciences exposes you to the reasoning and problem-solving skills that are also important in computer science, and also forces you to deal with the problem of learning a new area that you don't have much exposure or prior interest (something that will occur in graduate school or on the job).
I can't say much about the sciences, but mathematics is heavily used in computer science, especially discrete math and combinatorics. Certain applications of computer science, such as computer graphics, use linear algebra and physics heavily. There are many interesting interdisciplinary fields that combine a science with the applications of computer science (e.g., bioinformatics). In my favorite area of computer science (information retrieval, which is also highly interdisciplinary), statistics is heavily used.
An undergraduate education is about exposing you to new things in a wide range of disciplines, while providing a detailed (but not too narrow) view of your major. You might not like your physics courses (it's sad for me to say, but I didn't), but at least you were exposed to it, learned something from it, and lived to tell the tale XD. Specialization within your major is what graduate school and starting your career is for.
Perhaps this is why US Colleges and Universities are falling behind the rest of world. Honestly, you can get a pretty well rounded education as an undergrad for any Engineering Major (e.g. Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical, etc.) without the diluted-ness that the CS major has come to have. So, no - saying that the undergrad level is for "well roundedness" is just an excuse not to provide the right education for the degree. Sadly, the schools want more money - so they try to push the "well roundedness" for the undergrad saying "come back to the grad level for the real thing". Eventually it'll happen to the grad level too when they can figure out how to push another higher degree.
I bet the number of GPL'd NDIS drivers for Windows can be counted on one toe. I myself started writing an NDIS 6 driver for a chipset that has no native Vista drivers (although the NDIS 5 XP driver works on Vista x86) but have recently lost interest, despite almost completing basic functionality, because I realised I will never be able to use it under Vista x64 due to the OS's draconian driver signing policy..which cannot be disabled. Actually you can. It's a simple change in the registry. There is an MSDN/KB article or whitepaper on how to do it. However, your users would need to as well, which is the primary problem, as Microsoft wants it to only be used by developers for testing.
For example, the following links:
More to the point, though, as long as something provides a public interface and uses only public interfaces, it is entirely the right of the author to decide how to license it, and if the author decides to license it under the GPL but provide a linking exception to allow closed source drivers to call it, that is the author's right. Linus himself said that he felt binary-only drivers should be allowed, so he took advantage of the right to provide a linking exception, and yet now he wants to deny it to others? What's wrong with this picture?
He's not denying access to it. The issue (from what I can tell) seems to be that he/others find the the NDISWrapper is not using the proper set of kernel functionality.
As you point out "it is entirely the right of the author to decide how to license it" and "Linus himself said that he felt binary-only drivers should be allowed, so he took advantage of the right to provide a linking exception". That "linking" exception requires that a module properly declare whether its license is GPL or not. If not, then its access to the kernel is restricted; if it is, it is given access to most all the symbols - the GPLONLY symbols. This is for (a) compatibility, but also (b) stability. They didn't want binary drivers breaking the kernel.
From the sounds of it, they don't agree with the NDISWrapper guys (or whoever is complaining) that NDISWrapper deserves the ability to access the GPLONLY symbols. Perhaps the way NDISWrapper functions is breaks compatibility with the GPL - by loading non-GPL code . I don't know the whole story, but I think I would have to side with the Linux guys on this one. It's their "linking" exception, and you have to play by the rules.
Note: This is not a GPL issue with respect to the Linux kernel; if it's a GPL issue at all, it is with NDISWrapper not validly being able to use the GPL, and if that is the case, then they should not be allowed to access the GPLONLY symbols. The primary issue is a matter of playing by the rules the developers set - and that goes for GPL and non-GPL code alike, regardless of projects, commercialization, etc. (And no, I'm not claiming, implying, or otherwise stating the the Linux Kernel guys determine that for everyone. Look at the project authors and who has the right, the ability, to make such a rule. It'll change for every project.)
Okay, so someone needs to watch Cowboy Bebop Episode 9 (Jamming with Edward) before this thing gets off the ground, lest "[l]aser satellites in Earth orbit begin carving pictures onto the planet's surface, in the style of the Nazca Lines" when the AI gets bored from watching all of us. (Quote from the episode description on Wikipedia.)
It would be faster until some guy arrives 5 minutes later then everyone else and has to go through security and get on the plane, because of the order everyone would have to stop, let him through, reorganize and then go through. In an ideal situation it would be faster but chaos is quicker then order because order can never truly happen. True. I had thought of a similar approach - only instead of doing everyone in order as suggested, figuring out an algorithm that would put people in groups such that you'd have a few people boarding at a time spread throughout the plane, the farthest back would board first. Eventually you'd get everyone on. The idea was more towards the issue of people moving through the aisles and putting stuff in the overhead compartments.
The mentioned route probably only works best when (a) everyone is on time, and (b) no one has anything to put in the overhead compartments, so they can just sit down. Needless to say, neither of those is very likely; and needless to say, my approach would have required 'a' as well, which is also not likely.
Meh, I actually think that Obama has a small chance of being a once-in-a-lifetime figure that might get *some* good done. He's certainly the best Democrat since I've been alive (but that isn't saying too much).
I might actually vote for him in the general if he doesn't throw away half his issues like most politicians do after the primary. The Libertarians and Greens are both going to run unpalatable candidates, and Nader will be lucky if he gets on more than a handful of state ballots.
Now in a Clinton-McCain race, all bets are off. I could see myself writing in some joker or just leaving the ballot blank. Personally, I think I might vote for CowboyNeal just to vote for someone that might do some good. I really don't like _any_ of the candidates. Obama would be better than Clinton, but McCain is no better than either. Oh well...
The sad this is that I really am not even half-joking. The candidates are just so abysmal this go round.
The NT kernel was designed to be able to project different "personalities", much in the same way that Mac OS X does. The POSIX system necessary has been available in Windows for just shy of forever in an effort to win government contracts and companies that require POSIX as a checkbox on their requisition forms.
Odd you mention gov't contracts since the Windows Gold Disk (put out by Microsoft!) disables the POSIX sub-system, and removing all the supporting DLLs for it.
Windows NT has had a POSIX layer since the beginning. At any point Microsoft could have extended this and ported over GNU tools if they had wanted. The whole thing smells of bullshit, and Powershell is not bash. It may have its advantages, but you sure can't bring over a library of thousands of shell scripts.
Cygwin is a solution, but of course, that has nothing to do with Microsoft. They did - it's called Service for Unix and it mostly utilizes GNU tools. It's otherwise primarily based on Interix. At one point you could get the SFU Source code - I thought it was for 3.5 but might have been for an earlier version, which was all GNU tools. Some quick searches aren't finding it. Possible it's with the installer. (Downloading now to find out.)
The POSIX sub-system works quite well, and is quite functional. However, they didn't give it the performance they gave Win32 - the plan being, tell them it can run on Windows under the POSIX sub-system, then get them to port to Win32 when they realize that they can't get the performance under POSIX they can under Win32.
Someone could probably figure out how to write a sub-system for the NT Kernel that could provide better performance to replace the POSIX one. But good luck figuring out the detailed interaction to deal directly with the NT Kernel as an API sub-system.
Tetris was originally designed as a training tool for late Soviet-era transport interests. The idea was to reduce shipping costs by training load masters to improve the density of packing freight cars, container ships, and trucks.
This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry. Obviously you didn't see the BBC documentary on Tetris (it's available on YouTube - can't provide a link right now). Alex created it as a variant of a popular board game with a couple extra twists according to the documentary. It then started selling, and only later did the USSR find out about it - after it had already swept through the USSR and other countries wanted to buy it. The USSR's software group ended up sole-sourcing the market to Nintendo through some interesting twists, which through Atari for a spin as they had already pumped a lot of money into their own version of Tetris since they thought they had licensed it for the PC. Quite a good documentary.
We have no right to drive on public roads, it is a privilege. We knowingly enter into a contract in order to exercise that privilege.
Roads have existed long before cars and used by horse, carriage, and other methods of transportation for millenia. Yet, only recently have we tried this mantra of "it's not a right, it's a privilege". I can see where people come from, given that today's modern vehicles are far more heavy and faster than those older methods - so there are safety concerns; but let's not forget that we do have an inherent and essential right to travel through the methods available to us. Horse & carriage is really available any more. Vehicles are. It's more of a right, than a privilege, than you may realize.
Also, remember that the Constitution (in the US) grants only a specific set of rights/abilities to the federal government (intra-state, and external activities), the states (within their borders, and according to their Constitution which must be similar to the it), and releases all else to the people.
BTW - that doesn't mean we shouldn't ensure people know how to use the methods of transportation.
Isn't intel's new quad (the one not released) going to be the same as AMD's quad? AMD has an on board memory controller so will intel's new quad line. Intel did that due to the memory issues with multi CPU (each being a quad core) systems. The on board memory controller fixes the memory issues. Why do you think there are not too many multi socketed quad core motherboards. Just moving the memory controller on-die, like AMD had from the get-go with AMD64, does not make them the same. Yes, it does bring them one step closer to AMD, and a necessary step at that. However, AMD's quad-core offerings are true Quad-Core, where as Intel just took two true-dual core, put them onto one chip and spliced them together - then celebrated having a quad-core. Frankly, it is like taking two people, cutting their side open, and stitching them together, and celebrating a two-brained, single "soul", single person. Fact is, they are no more one person than they were before they were stitched together. Same with the Intel's quad cores.
Here's some ASCII Art to depict what I mean. Even if Intel brought the memory-controller into the super-package, it would still be inferior; if it took it into the package, it would then have to communicate with the other package - and thus two memory controllers would be required in the super package, plus a 'negotiator' - end result, inferior. AMD's solution is far superior as all cores can effectively use the same memory-controller and don't have to do any of this other-package/super-package junk. They only have to operate with a 'negotiator' if it is a multi-processor system - e.g. two quad-core processors on the same motherboard - and that's no different than previous multi-processor systems - e.g. a dual processor AMD64 prior to the advent of even dual-cores.
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You forgot about 1929, didn't you? There is prior precedence for such a fall. And the US housing market really sucked thereafter too until just after WWII at which point it picked up steam and stabilized until the late 1980's where it jumped and started the creation of a big bubble that is only just starting to deflate. There's a study out there of housing data from the late 1800's until pretty recently. (Wish I had the specific link, but you can find it on-line. It was done by Harvard/Standford/ or such.) The study adjusted for inflation and leveled, which set the adjusted housing price at $100k. During the Great Depression it dropped considerably (over 50%), and didn't revive until after WWII, when it came back up to around $100k and stayed there until the late 1980's when it started to go skyward, peaking near $190k or so around 2002 or so, and then starting to decline. I think the most recent number was still above $180k. Guess what? That number still has a long ways to drop before it'll be back in reality.
The problem is larger than simply what you are stating, though it certainly didn't help at all - and problem made things worse.
What you have to look at is the long term trend and also the affordability to the base market. For example, in Northern Virginia buying a house went skyward after 2000. My sister's townhouse went from $93k (1997) to a peak of $330k (2005) - little to no change in the property itself outside of standard maintenance. It's settled down some, but is still well above $200k. The primary causes were (a) zoning laws modified to "keep the way of life the same" (i.e. houses spread apart, country feel), (b) growing increase in population, and (c) the belief that the prices would forever go up b/c the gov't is there and thus makes a stable economy.
The problems ended up being: (a) there existed a $20k gap between what an individual could leave on under subsidized housing ($42k salary max) and what the same person could live on without subsidized housing (roughly $60k salary) due to housing (renting) prices alone, and (b) the base market (people in their mid-20's to early 30's) were being forced out of the market - they simply couldn't afford to buy a house any longer; moreover, it was showing signs of the problems even in 2005 when people that had been in the area for a while wouldn't have been able to buy their own homes.
I still have quite a few friends in that area, and while the market has come down some, it is still quite crazy and unaffordable (the reason my wife & I moved out of that area). Sadly, many are in a very tough position b/c if the housing market keeps going the way it is (and it will until it reaches a full correction) many are going to end up in bankruptcy as a result. But that's the "high demand" side of the story.
On the other hand, out in Columbus, OH - city officials decided they wanted to "clean-up downtown" and get rid of the "poor people", so they worked with lenders to get those people loans and move them out to the suburbs. For example, in my parents development there was a high school student who (a) just graduated high school, and (b) didn't have a job (period!) but had been qualified for a mortgage and allowed to buy a home. She's now in bankruptcy. The "clean-up" simply put the poor people elsewhere, essentially making them someone else's problem while making the politicians look good. In the meantime, that "someone else's problem" has resulted in mass foreclosures in neighborhoods as things caught up to people that weren't have been able to pay the mortgage to start with and ended up in foreclosures quite predictably, which is on
Honestly, djbdns is great software, but having tried to look through the code a while back (because of a compilation problem that I later was able to find a patch for due to his lack of updates and the changes in compilers since he last released it) it's difficult as hell to understand simply because it code like: Granted things can still be susceptible to attack, which his software has withstood as well, but it's nowhere near the elegance it should have. Will be interesting to see if the new license changed that - perhaps his release were just highly obfuscated (my guess is they are).
Unless you want to be a college professor, don't go for Computer Science degree - it's pretty much junk, at least at most any higher education institution in the U.S, and companies are starting to pick up on it. Instead, go for a Computer Engineering degree. You'll get a good engineering background, and you'll still get the coding background. You'll be able to work with either hardware (OS, device drivers, etc.) or software (systems, user, embedded), and you'll have more opportunities available to you than someone with the CS degree would have.
Also (the bit of advice I really wish I had before college) - if you want to do anything with hardware or operating systems, you need a Computer Engineering degree. Everyone you'll be in competition with will have it, and its what the employers look for. CS will be a complimentary degree for them, not the degree that qualifies them for the job.
FYI - if you do get a CS, then they'll want either an Bachelors or Master in EE to as well.
Any how...save yourself the trouble, and just get a Computer Engineering degree. It's a little tougher, but more than worth it.
...the banks will have to support more than Windows, no? And more than simply IE, no? Otherwise, customers could sue saying that's all the bank allowed them to use...though, I'm guessing from the summary there is probably a clause to get them out of that too.
But there aren't two slower processors. Core for core modern processors are faster then 5-year-old processors. Even if they have lower clock speeds.
And while the average home user probably can't use 16 cores, they can use two cores. Their foreground app can get 100% of the cycles on core 1, and all the kernel-space calls can run on core 2 -- all the overhead of USB, TCP/IP, etc. can happen on a second core so the first core can run the user app exclusively. Not exactly. A kernel-space call will delay the foreground app, thus even the scenario you propose would utilize both cores and starve the rest of the system. Now, you could use the one core for a foreground app, and the other core for all background apps; but that too would not be the best scenario. Honestly, the best utilization of both cores in most desktop scenarios would be to treat them like separate processors and utilize them nearly the same as before.
But needless to say, the OS cannot break a single program/thread across more than one core.
Let's take your example - primary program runs on the first core, the OS pushes all the kernel stuff onto the second core. Two things are wrong with this: (1) If the app was only designed for a single processor, then there will be all kinds of timing issues that will arise including but not limited to race conditions. (2) Assuming the OS solves the race conditions - which it can only do internally to itself, not the application it is providing service for, the first core will stall whenever any kernel request is made - even if just for a few milliseconds - as the request is handled by the second core, since the first core is now waiting. But it gets even better - some kernel operations are designed to operate without calling out, thus they will perform their function and return without causing a context switch, etc. Now, if it tried to do all OS functions on the second core, a context switch AND a core switch (double overhead) would now be required for even those calls that could be optimized to run without having to do so. So you've now slowed down your computer.
But you're still left with the issue that the application may not be written to be thread safe - so now, your kernel does something (even if that is thread safe!) on a different core whilst the program continues on the original core and it has an adverse affect on the application since it happens faster than the application needs it to. (Been there - done that. Big problem and hard to find and resolve.)
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to the home user whether the processor has one core, two cores, or 80 cores. What matters is whether their software runs. Now OS's mitigate a lot of these issues by leaving things mostly the same - programs typically operate on a single core just like they would have if there only existed a single core and single processor in the system - changing that would break a lot of applications, which OS kernel vendors have no desire to do - especially Microsoft. But the programs cannot take any more advantage of the multi-cores than they could before unless they were designed with SMP in mind, in which case the same benefit would be derived through multiple processors.
And yes, the OS can, and has been able to for years since SMP first came about, spread loads across multiple processors and cores. But that cannot change how a single program functions in and of itself - it cannot make that single program work at any given moment on more than one single core if it was not designed to do so (i.e. if the program is not designed to use multiple threads or processes).
All-in-all, the OP is correct.
This also goes to the bloat - as programmers have typically stopped optimizing code. Thus there are more lines of code in delivered software - often having more and more abstraction layers in them, which doesn't help either. So the overall effect is that the software takes longer to do the same function.
In the end, despite the increase in processing power, the programs run as slow or slower than before. Numerous reasons for it. The GP of my original post in this thread is still correct.
"...the speed the user experiences has not improved much [in the last 5-7 years]."
This may almost be true if you stay on the cutting edge, but not even close for the average user (or the power-user on a budget, like myself). 5 years ago I was running a 1.2 GHz Duron. Today I have a 2.3 GHz Athlon 64 in my notebook (which is a little over a year old, I think), and an Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (that's a dual-core 2.8 GHz, for those who don't know) in my desktop. I'd be lying if I said I didn't notice much difference between the three.
Do notice that in 5 years we have barely increased the clock frequency of the CPUsDo notice that multi-cores don't increase the overall clock frequency, just divide the work up among a set of lower clock frequency cores - yet most programs don't take advantage of that.
Do notice that despite clock frequencies going from 33 mhz to 2.3 GHz, the user's perceived performance of the computer has either stayed the same (most likely) or diminished over that same time period.
Do notice that programs are more bloated than ever, and programmers are lazier than ever.
In the end the GP is right.
...the Software Engineering grads are increasing. That'll be when this line of talk really means something. Until then, it's still just a junk degree as it is too much theory and not enough practice.
As a 3rd year undergraduate computer science student, here is my best answer:
An undergraduate education is about exposing you to new things in a wide range of disciplines, while providing a detailed (but not too narrow) view of your major. You might not like your physics courses (it's sad for me to say, but I didn't), but at least you were exposed to it, learned something from it, and lived to tell the tale XD. Specialization within your major is what graduate school and starting your career is for.
Perhaps this is why US Colleges and Universities are falling behind the rest of world. Honestly, you can get a pretty well rounded education as an undergrad for any Engineering Major (e.g. Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical, etc.) without the diluted-ness that the CS major has come to have. So, no - saying that the undergrad level is for "well roundedness" is just an excuse not to provide the right education for the degree. Sadly, the schools want more money - so they try to push the "well roundedness" for the undergrad saying "come back to the grad level for the real thing". Eventually it'll happen to the grad level too when they can figure out how to push another higher degree.I bet the number of GPL'd NDIS drivers for Windows can be counted on one toe. I myself started writing an NDIS 6 driver for a chipset that has no native Vista drivers (although the NDIS 5 XP driver works on Vista x86) but have recently lost interest, despite almost completing basic functionality, because I realised I will never be able to use it under Vista x64 due to the OS's draconian driver signing policy..which cannot be disabled. Actually you can. It's a simple change in the registry. There is an MSDN/KB article or whitepaper on how to do it. However, your users would need to as well, which is the primary problem, as Microsoft wants it to only be used by developers for testing. For example, the following links:
How to let a user apply a Group Policy that has the "Devices: Unsigned driver installation behavior" Group Policy setting from a Windows Vista-based computer to a client computer
Installing an Unsigned Driver During Development and Test (Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista)
Google search for how to disable driver signing
Granted, it is typically something that is to be "temporary" - so YMMV - but it should do the trick.
As you point out "it is entirely the right of the author to decide how to license it" and "Linus himself said that he felt binary-only drivers should be allowed, so he took advantage of the right to provide a linking exception". That "linking" exception requires that a module properly declare whether its license is GPL or not. If not, then its access to the kernel is restricted; if it is, it is given access to most all the symbols - the GPLONLY symbols. This is for (a) compatibility, but also (b) stability. They didn't want binary drivers breaking the kernel.
From the sounds of it, they don't agree with the NDISWrapper guys (or whoever is complaining) that NDISWrapper deserves the ability to access the GPLONLY symbols. Perhaps the way NDISWrapper functions is breaks compatibility with the GPL - by loading non-GPL code . I don't know the whole story, but I think I would have to side with the Linux guys on this one. It's their "linking" exception, and you have to play by the rules.
Note: This is not a GPL issue with respect to the Linux kernel; if it's a GPL issue at all, it is with NDISWrapper not validly being able to use the GPL, and if that is the case, then they should not be allowed to access the GPLONLY symbols. The primary issue is a matter of playing by the rules the developers set - and that goes for GPL and non-GPL code alike, regardless of projects, commercialization, etc. (And no, I'm not claiming, implying, or otherwise stating the the Linux Kernel guys determine that for everyone. Look at the project authors and who has the right, the ability, to make such a rule. It'll change for every project.)
Okay, so someone needs to watch Cowboy Bebop Episode 9 (Jamming with Edward) before this thing gets off the ground, lest "[l]aser satellites in Earth orbit begin carving pictures onto the planet's surface, in the style of the Nazca Lines" when the AI gets bored from watching all of us. (Quote from the episode description on Wikipedia.)
The mentioned route probably only works best when (a) everyone is on time, and (b) no one has anything to put in the overhead compartments, so they can just sit down. Needless to say, neither of those is very likely; and needless to say, my approach would have required 'a' as well, which is also not likely.
I might actually vote for him in the general if he doesn't throw away half his issues like most politicians do after the primary. The Libertarians and Greens are both going to run unpalatable candidates, and Nader will be lucky if he gets on more than a handful of state ballots.
Now in a Clinton-McCain race, all bets are off. I could see myself writing in some joker or just leaving the ballot blank. Personally, I think I might vote for CowboyNeal just to vote for someone that might do some good. I really don't like _any_ of the candidates. Obama would be better than Clinton, but McCain is no better than either. Oh well...
The sad this is that I really am not even half-joking. The candidates are just so abysmal this go round.
Cygwin is a solution, but of course, that has nothing to do with Microsoft. They did - it's called Service for Unix and it mostly utilizes GNU tools. It's otherwise primarily based on Interix. At one point you could get the SFU Source code - I thought it was for 3.5 but might have been for an earlier version, which was all GNU tools. Some quick searches aren't finding it. Possible it's with the installer. (Downloading now to find out.)
The POSIX sub-system works quite well, and is quite functional. However, they didn't give it the performance they gave Win32 - the plan being, tell them it can run on Windows under the POSIX sub-system, then get them to port to Win32 when they realize that they can't get the performance under POSIX they can under Win32.
Someone could probably figure out how to write a sub-system for the NT Kernel that could provide better performance to replace the POSIX one. But good luck figuring out the detailed interaction to deal directly with the NT Kernel as an API sub-system.
Couldn't post a link earlier as the network I was on forbids access to youtube and similar sites. Here's a YouTube Link. Enjoy!
This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry. Obviously you didn't see the BBC documentary on Tetris (it's available on YouTube - can't provide a link right now). Alex created it as a variant of a popular board game with a couple extra twists according to the documentary. It then started selling, and only later did the USSR find out about it - after it had already swept through the USSR and other countries wanted to buy it. The USSR's software group ended up sole-sourcing the market to Nintendo through some interesting twists, which through Atari for a spin as they had already pumped a lot of money into their own version of Tetris since they thought they had licensed it for the PC. Quite a good documentary.
Also, remember that the Constitution (in the US) grants only a specific set of rights/abilities to the federal government (intra-state, and external activities), the states (within their borders, and according to their Constitution which must be similar to the it), and releases all else to the people.
BTW - that doesn't mean we shouldn't ensure people know how to use the methods of transportation.
Here's some ASCII Art to depict what I mean. Even if Intel brought the memory-controller into the super-package, it would still be inferior; if it took it into the package, it would then have to communicate with the other package - and thus two memory controllers would be required in the super package, plus a 'negotiator' - end result, inferior. AMD's solution is far superior as all cores can effectively use the same memory-controller and don't have to do any of this other-package/super-package junk. They only have to operate with a 'negotiator' if it is a multi-processor system - e.g. two quad-core processors on the same motherboard - and that's no different than previous multi-processor systems - e.g. a dual processor AMD64 prior to the advent of even dual-cores.