I guess this has nothing to do with the fact that right-wing parties in Austria have won a large share of votes in recent elections, furthering the already prevalent mindset of isolationism that is present in Austria.
It is a telling fact that the 20M budget for CERN is outstandingly tiny compared to the 3.4 billion EUR science budget Austria has.
On the serverside you just fire up a few more processes.
On the clientside you rarely need the juice that multiple cores provide. Processor speed still keeps improving _per core_. In most cases it is simply not worth the effort yet.
Since I don't believe in any god and it's particularly sad to see churches trying to spread misinformation more effectively, I'd like to approach this topic constructively and point towards and interesting lecture I've seen lately that explains how and why religion evolved.
...of course. It's just that the rules we recognize as classical laws of physics work well enough at that scale for us not to notice the effects that had to be explained by quantum physics.
It's far more important that I know the performance quirks of my language of choice -- for instance, string interpolation is faster than any sort of string concatenator, which is faster than straight-up string concatenation ('foo' + 'bar').
This reminds me of a very educational example. On Perl forums sometimes the question arises: which is faster - single quotes or double quotes, the difference being that the latter interpolates variables.
People in the know pointed it out multiple times that the single vs. double quote issue is a benchmarking mistake. See, Perl is a VM based language, with compile time optimizations. The code that people write as single or double quotes gets compiled down to the same thing. This is the kind of knowledge that is useful, knowing a bit of the theory and design of the underlying language, instead of having benchmark results, but not knowing how to interpret the results...
but work per clock doesn't seem to have improved at all and if anything have even slid back a bit.
What are you talking about? A processor sold today as mainstream beats the crap out of a processor that was mainstream 3 years ago at the same GHz, per core. Processor speeds have considerably improved even for single-threaded applications!
Also, the ongoing miniaturization efforts are great, ensuring that processing power / watt goes up.
What's the advantage of being first to market when your competitor is offering exactly the same copy for free the very next day or even hour. Remember, there is no DRM, no barriers whatsoever to making as many copies as you want and distributing as far and wide if you like. In theory the first person to buy it will post a copy of it online so everybody else can download it for free. How do you get the endorsement from the author? You pay them for it? How, if you don't have any expectation of profit?
Once again, digital and deadtree has to be separated. In the digital world you don't care if things get distributed or not. Convenience rules. Subscription/deviced based services rule. Take the Kindle or the Apple iPod + iStore. There are copies available for free within minutes of anything that has been produced in a digital form. Apple seems to be doing just fine with the iStore though. Abolishing copyright would decriminalize the masses, while stores like that would still work based on the convenience factor. You're not paying for the music, you're paying for the convenience of having an easily accessible online repository of music you can sync to your iPod easily.
Your example of what happens in deadtree world (such as with 911 report) just proves my point. The only reason that works is exactly what you say, obstacles in copying, formatting etc. If making copying difficult is what you want, then you should be in favor of some flavor of copy protection software (gasp DRM?) that makes copying difficult or impossible, right? But aren't those obstacles exactly what you want to remove?
In a world without copyright, DRM would be mostly pointless aswell. Sure, you can try to make your competitor's job harder, but you can't make it impossible and it costs you to do so. I didn't say that making copying difficult is a goal. Even without the advantage of being first on the market and being the official publisher, it would still be worth it for publishers to publish books and pay the authors for it. Publishers don't need the artificial and destructive monopoly copyright creates. Competition is good.
Depending on the medium, if it is digital then Amazon is pretty much on the right track already with the Kindle and an online subscription/content delivery based service.
If it is deadtree, the author's publisher would still have the advantage of first to market. Keep in mind that by abolishing copyright, legal restrictions on copying a work would be removed, but the technical challenges of formatting, printing one will still remain. As anyone could tell you, the one who is first in a market has a very strong foothold, even if the product isn't all that great in comparison to later rivals.
With copyright abolished, the author's publisher still has a headstart and the advantage of being able to publish the "official" version, with the support of the author. There are contemporary examples showing this works, for example when books or documents are published for the US government (like in the case of the 9/11 commission report) usually a publisher buys the right to be able to release the book first and turns a decent profit, despite having no copyright protection. The free market, beautiful thing, is it not?
Would it? Without copyright, it is not only commercially viable to create* content, but would lead to a much healthier, competitive environment aswell.
Not much would change from the author-publisher relation's perspective, since people still want to read books, listen to music, etc. and are willing to pay for that, but the author would be free to work with whatever idea he/she has and the end-user wouldn't be restricted.
*Most things are incremental improvements over some older content, this is an often missed point. Pretty much everything is a derivative work of the culture the author lives in. Focusing on the soletary author is missing the forest from the tree.
No, it will be the deathblow when people start to openly defy copyright, instead of doing the equivalent today what used to be sneaking into the whites only area back then for a black person. We need people to oppose copyright the way Rosa Parks sat on the bus.
(I do consider the current copyright regime bad on almost the same level as apartheid used to be. Putting ambigous monopoly on information is not only paramountly stupid in the information age, but causes the very real retardation of our culture. How could we have an open and enlightened society with artificial monopolies in place and patent law retarding scientific progress?)
And to make matters worse, in my opinion the current government is still better than the opposition.
Hungary has to be viewed in context of the past 25 or so years. I like to liken the situation to a nuclear explosion. The communist dictatorship part was the direct hit and the short term effects, but the more insidious parts are the long term effects, the radiation. Hungary became a democracy pro forma in 1990, but the mindset and thinking of the people didn't really change. They lived under a communist dictatorship for almost 50 years and that dictatorship mastered the ways of propaganda.
Communists weren't banned from holding public office or persecuted for the crimes they did before 1990. What's more, they exchanged their waning political power for power over the economy by privatising lots of state property under very shifty circumstances. The first free government that followed the first free elections had it's support eroded in the period of 1990-94, since the media was still in the hands of the communists, coupled with the transitioning pains of switching the country over to a market based economy.
The communists won the 1994 election with a 2/3rd majority, that carried the power to alter even the constitution. They went back to doing what they were doing before 1990, namely borrowed foreign money, introduced some austerity measures (Borkos-package) and generally did no structural reforms. That is how they lost the 1998 elections, despite their overwhelming media majority.
The 1998-2002 period saw Hungary's first competent government in the past 50+ or more years and the first competent democratic government ever. During those 4 years, Hungary became a model country in Central/Eastern Europe, was in the first 3 countries from among those 10 waiting to join the EU. It was expected that Hungary introduces the euro in 2007 or in 2008. All the major economical indicators were strong. National dept, unemployment, budget deficit, inflation went down, GDP kept growing at a fast rate, etc.
That right wing government narrowly lost the elections in 2002, due to the media being still controlled by the ex communists, the memory of their reign fading and them promising to deliver lots of pork. From there, the country's economy went downhill. GDP growth decreased, unemployment first started to stagnate and then increase again, national debt rapidly increased despite renewed interest in privatising state property, the budget deficit started to become larger and larger again. Things were starting to get bad, but not bad fast enough for the ex-communists to win the election of 2006 again.
The speech you've linked to leaked shortly afterwards, from which the working methodology of the ex-communists is readily apparent. In their own words, they were "lieing night and day", "almost got broken trying to pretend we were governing", etc. From that moment on, the whole country has been in a state of moral and political crisis, for the past 3 years.
There is the demographical fact, that a lot of pensioners who had the ways of the old dictatorship burned into them died and a new generation has reached adulthood, one that did not experience the old system. Old propaganda doesn't have the intended effect anymore. There are much more independent media organizations, civilian organizations, unions than they were 20 or even 10 years ago.
Currently about 2/3rd of the total voting population wants a snap election and to force out the ex-communists from power. The government survived the past three years and ever stronger resentment by ignoring the people and on occasions using measures reminiscent from a dictatorship.
The country was almost bankrupt even before the financial crisis hit and we are currently on the life support of the biggest IMF+EU loan that was granted.
It is difficult to see this situation clearly from abroad. There are a couple of difficulties in getting a clear picture, since for one Hungary is a rela
I'm not optimistic either about the sincerity of this attempt. The guy who made this statement might not be a minister from next Tuesday, when there'll be a new PM, who will reshuffle the government. I also hope that Hungary might have a snap election too. This reeks as if the minister was trying to look as if he did something neutral/good in the last few days he has.
In any case, the language the minister used is a bit deceptive. Unfortunately after taking a close look at what he said, it seems the money can only be spent on _licences_. Training costs, etc. are explicitly excluded from funding (have to be covered by the given organizations themselves).
If this gets followed through though, it is a step-up from the previous mindset of MS only that is highly prevalent in the hungarian government.
There isn't anything in x86 or it's various extensions that could be a licensing issue.
Intel, AMD, the patent lawyers and the government are the crazies here for trying to claim ownership of not only the most widespread processor architecture that is decades old, but of improvements over that architecture that are trivial to anyone who would want to improve it.
The patent craziness is causing real damage to the economy and innovation and it has to stop.
My experience is the opposite, to the point I don't understand who, apart from the most hardcore PVP players, could like this game.
Whoever says Warhammer had a smooth is at best not aware of what really happened. Many people started out at launch and many of them including me left without paying a single subscription cycle, because the game is lacking on so many levels. Let's start with the performance/visual problems. I have high-end, but mainstream hardware and I've been getting absolutely awful framerates and graphical glitches.
The visual engine was full of bugs and design mistakes. The UI was a joke from a design perspective. The game logic suffered dozens of irritating bugs.
Content was thrown together, lacking polish. I don't even have the patience to list all the irritating things, the list just goes on. Now, this was 6 months ago and I absolutely won't pay for another month to the company that cheated me once to find out what improved, but the real problem is that while there were lots of bugs that can be fixed and hopefully they did, there were also lots of design mistakes in how the game is put together from a technical perspective that I don't think they could fix even in years.
Apart from releasing an alpha quality game, they also had server problems and horrid queueing for the first month. It is true that they introduced more servers shortly afterwards, but it wasn't at launch and that ment that while some servers were crowded because their characters were on it, others were empty. Only a few people switched to "cloned" servers.
All in all, I'm trying to forget about my experience with WAR and I'm betting this is why people are going back to WOW and LOTRO. WAR is another AOC.
I hate to reply to my own posts, but I linked to the wrong article for my last claim. This is the correct article and quoting what it says:
Customers, such as a large OEM we won't mention, have been trying to validate flash SSDs for enterprise applications by looping hardcore I/O loads, and they all failed with write errors after only a few months.
There are a few tricks up the manufacturer's sleeve to make this slightly better than it really is:
1. large block size (120k-200k?) means that even if you write 20 bytes, the disk physically writes a lot more. For logfiles and databases (quite common on desktops too, think of index dbs and sqlite in firefox for storing the search history...) where tiny amounts of data are modified, this can add up rapidly. Something writes to the disk once every second? That's 16.5GB / day, even if you're only changing a single byte over and over.
2. Even if the memory cells do not die, due to the large block size, fragmentation will occur (most of the cells will have a small amount of space used in them). There has been a few articles about this that even devices with advanced wear leveling technology like Intel's exhibit a large performance drop (less than half of the read/write performance of a new drive of the same kind) after a few months of normal usage.
3. According to Tomshardware unnamed OEMs told them that all the SSD drives they tested under simulated server workloads got toasted after a few months of testing. Now, I wouldn't necessary consider this accurate or true, but I'd sure as hell would not use SSDs in a serious environment until this is proven false.
QA? What QA? That game was released as a festering pile of dungheap barely deserving the name alpha quality. It is patently obvious it is another AoC in the making.
No, actually non-commercial in this context means that you can't copy the articles themselves and make money off doing that, not that the information contained within those articles cannot be applied to commercial ventures.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess this has nothing to do with the fact that right-wing parties in Austria have won a large share of votes in recent elections, furthering the already prevalent mindset of isolationism that is present in Austria.
It is a telling fact that the 20M budget for CERN is outstandingly tiny compared to the 3.4 billion EUR science budget Austria has.
...and blow your family to smithereens!
So why are you still using it then? Why can't you use kpdf or document viewer that is built into Gnome?
Two easy answers:
On the serverside you just fire up a few more processes.
On the clientside you rarely need the juice that multiple cores provide. Processor speed still keeps improving _per core_. In most cases it is simply not worth the effort yet.
You've got it backwards. Urandom reuses the entrophy pool, so it will not block, but will be slower. /dev/random is the real deal.
Since I don't believe in any god and it's particularly sad to see churches trying to spread misinformation more effectively, I'd like to approach this topic constructively and point towards and interesting lecture I've seen lately that explains how and why religion evolved.
...of course. It's just that the rules we recognize as classical laws of physics work well enough at that scale for us not to notice the effects that had to be explained by quantum physics.
This reminds me of a very educational example. On Perl forums sometimes the question arises: which is faster - single quotes or double quotes, the difference being that the latter interpolates variables.
People in the know pointed it out multiple times that the single vs. double quote issue is a benchmarking mistake. See, Perl is a VM based language, with compile time optimizations. The code that people write as single or double quotes gets compiled down to the same thing. This is the kind of knowledge that is useful, knowing a bit of the theory and design of the underlying language, instead of having benchmark results, but not knowing how to interpret the results...
I've reduced the copyright duration I'm willing to observe to 0 years.
What are you talking about? A processor sold today as mainstream beats the crap out of a processor that was mainstream 3 years ago at the same GHz, per core. Processor speeds have considerably improved even for single-threaded applications!
Also, the ongoing miniaturization efforts are great, ensuring that processing power / watt goes up.
Get the improved code here.
Once again, digital and deadtree has to be separated. In the digital world you don't care if things get distributed or not. Convenience rules. Subscription/deviced based services rule. Take the Kindle or the Apple iPod + iStore. There are copies available for free within minutes of anything that has been produced in a digital form. Apple seems to be doing just fine with the iStore though. Abolishing copyright would decriminalize the masses, while stores like that would still work based on the convenience factor. You're not paying for the music, you're paying for the convenience of having an easily accessible online repository of music you can sync to your iPod easily.
In a world without copyright, DRM would be mostly pointless aswell. Sure, you can try to make your competitor's job harder, but you can't make it impossible and it costs you to do so. I didn't say that making copying difficult is a goal. Even without the advantage of being first on the market and being the official publisher, it would still be worth it for publishers to publish books and pay the authors for it. Publishers don't need the artificial and destructive monopoly copyright creates. Competition is good.
Depending on the medium, if it is digital then Amazon is pretty much on the right track already with the Kindle and an online subscription/content delivery based service.
If it is deadtree, the author's publisher would still have the advantage of first to market. Keep in mind that by abolishing copyright, legal restrictions on copying a work would be removed, but the technical challenges of formatting, printing one will still remain. As anyone could tell you, the one who is first in a market has a very strong foothold, even if the product isn't all that great in comparison to later rivals.
With copyright abolished, the author's publisher still has a headstart and the advantage of being able to publish the "official" version, with the support of the author. There are contemporary examples showing this works, for example when books or documents are published for the US government (like in the case of the 9/11 commission report) usually a publisher buys the right to be able to release the book first and turns a decent profit, despite having no copyright protection. The free market, beautiful thing, is it not?
Would it? Without copyright, it is not only commercially viable to create* content, but would lead to a much healthier, competitive environment aswell.
Not much would change from the author-publisher relation's perspective, since people still want to read books, listen to music, etc. and are willing to pay for that, but the author would be free to work with whatever idea he/she has and the end-user wouldn't be restricted.
*Most things are incremental improvements over some older content, this is an often missed point. Pretty much everything is a derivative work of the culture the author lives in. Focusing on the soletary author is missing the forest from the tree.
No, it will be the deathblow when people start to openly defy copyright, instead of doing the equivalent today what used to be sneaking into the whites only area back then for a black person. We need people to oppose copyright the way Rosa Parks sat on the bus.
(I do consider the current copyright regime bad on almost the same level as apartheid used to be. Putting ambigous monopoly on information is not only paramountly stupid in the information age, but causes the very real retardation of our culture. How could we have an open and enlightened society with artificial monopolies in place and patent law retarding scientific progress?)
Hungary has to be viewed in context of the past 25 or so years. I like to liken the situation to a nuclear explosion. The communist dictatorship part was the direct hit and the short term effects, but the more insidious parts are the long term effects, the radiation. Hungary became a democracy pro forma in 1990, but the mindset and thinking of the people didn't really change. They lived under a communist dictatorship for almost 50 years and that dictatorship mastered the ways of propaganda.
Communists weren't banned from holding public office or persecuted for the crimes they did before 1990. What's more, they exchanged their waning political power for power over the economy by privatising lots of state property under very shifty circumstances. The first free government that followed the first free elections had it's support eroded in the period of 1990-94, since the media was still in the hands of the communists, coupled with the transitioning pains of switching the country over to a market based economy.
The communists won the 1994 election with a 2/3rd majority, that carried the power to alter even the constitution. They went back to doing what they were doing before 1990, namely borrowed foreign money, introduced some austerity measures (Borkos-package) and generally did no structural reforms. That is how they lost the 1998 elections, despite their overwhelming media majority.
The 1998-2002 period saw Hungary's first competent government in the past 50+ or more years and the first competent democratic government ever. During those 4 years, Hungary became a model country in Central/Eastern Europe, was in the first 3 countries from among those 10 waiting to join the EU. It was expected that Hungary introduces the euro in 2007 or in 2008. All the major economical indicators were strong. National dept, unemployment, budget deficit, inflation went down, GDP kept growing at a fast rate, etc.
That right wing government narrowly lost the elections in 2002, due to the media being still controlled by the ex communists, the memory of their reign fading and them promising to deliver lots of pork. From there, the country's economy went downhill. GDP growth decreased, unemployment first started to stagnate and then increase again, national debt rapidly increased despite renewed interest in privatising state property, the budget deficit started to become larger and larger again. Things were starting to get bad, but not bad fast enough for the ex-communists to win the election of 2006 again.
The speech you've linked to leaked shortly afterwards, from which the working methodology of the ex-communists is readily apparent. In their own words, they were "lieing night and day", "almost got broken trying to pretend we were governing", etc. From that moment on, the whole country has been in a state of moral and political crisis, for the past 3 years.
There is the demographical fact, that a lot of pensioners who had the ways of the old dictatorship burned into them died and a new generation has reached adulthood, one that did not experience the old system. Old propaganda doesn't have the intended effect anymore. There are much more independent media organizations, civilian organizations, unions than they were 20 or even 10 years ago.
Currently about 2/3rd of the total voting population wants a snap election and to force out the ex-communists from power. The government survived the past three years and ever stronger resentment by ignoring the people and on occasions using measures reminiscent from a dictatorship.
The country was almost bankrupt even before the financial crisis hit and we are currently on the life support of the biggest IMF+EU loan that was granted.
It is difficult to see this situation clearly from abroad. There are a couple of difficulties in getting a clear picture, since for one Hungary is a rela
I'm not optimistic either about the sincerity of this attempt. The guy who made this statement might not be a minister from next Tuesday, when there'll be a new PM, who will reshuffle the government. I also hope that Hungary might have a snap election too. This reeks as if the minister was trying to look as if he did something neutral/good in the last few days he has.
In any case, the language the minister used is a bit deceptive. Unfortunately after taking a close look at what he said, it seems the money can only be spent on _licences_. Training costs, etc. are explicitly excluded from funding (have to be covered by the given organizations themselves).
If this gets followed through though, it is a step-up from the previous mindset of MS only that is highly prevalent in the hungarian government.
There isn't anything in x86 or it's various extensions that could be a licensing issue.
Intel, AMD, the patent lawyers and the government are the crazies here for trying to claim ownership of not only the most widespread processor architecture that is decades old, but of improvements over that architecture that are trivial to anyone who would want to improve it.
The patent craziness is causing real damage to the economy and innovation and it has to stop.
My experience is the opposite, to the point I don't understand who, apart from the most hardcore PVP players, could like this game.
Whoever says Warhammer had a smooth is at best not aware of what really happened. Many people started out at launch and many of them including me left without paying a single subscription cycle, because the game is lacking on so many levels. Let's start with the performance/visual problems. I have high-end, but mainstream hardware and I've been getting absolutely awful framerates and graphical glitches.
The visual engine was full of bugs and design mistakes. The UI was a joke from a design perspective. The game logic suffered dozens of irritating bugs.
Content was thrown together, lacking polish. I don't even have the patience to list all the irritating things, the list just goes on. Now, this was 6 months ago and I absolutely won't pay for another month to the company that cheated me once to find out what improved, but the real problem is that while there were lots of bugs that can be fixed and hopefully they did, there were also lots of design mistakes in how the game is put together from a technical perspective that I don't think they could fix even in years.
Apart from releasing an alpha quality game, they also had server problems and horrid queueing for the first month. It is true that they introduced more servers shortly afterwards, but it wasn't at launch and that ment that while some servers were crowded because their characters were on it, others were empty. Only a few people switched to "cloned" servers.
All in all, I'm trying to forget about my experience with WAR and I'm betting this is why people are going back to WOW and LOTRO. WAR is another AOC.
There are a few tricks up the manufacturer's sleeve to make this slightly better than it really is:
1. large block size (120k-200k?) means that even if you write 20 bytes, the disk physically writes a lot more. For logfiles and databases (quite common on desktops too, think of index dbs and sqlite in firefox for storing the search history...) where tiny amounts of data are modified, this can add up rapidly. Something writes to the disk once every second? That's 16.5GB / day, even if you're only changing a single byte over and over.
2. Even if the memory cells do not die, due to the large block size, fragmentation will occur (most of the cells will have a small amount of space used in them). There has been a few articles about this that even devices with advanced wear leveling technology like Intel's exhibit a large performance drop (less than half of the read/write performance of a new drive of the same kind) after a few months of normal usage.
3. According to Tomshardware unnamed OEMs told them that all the SSD drives they tested under simulated server workloads got toasted after a few months of testing. Now, I wouldn't necessary consider this accurate or true, but I'd sure as hell would not use SSDs in a serious environment until this is proven false.
...it's my birthday. I've been telling people for years that my birthday is at 1234567890.
QA? What QA? That game was released as a festering pile of dungheap barely deserving the name alpha quality. It is patently obvious it is another AoC in the making.
No, actually non-commercial in this context means that you can't copy the articles themselves and make money off doing that, not that the information contained within those articles cannot be applied to commercial ventures.
If you need gravity, take an object that has large gravity without atmosphere - like the moon.