Sony BMG officials insist that they acted as quickly as they could,
In this case, "as quickly as they could" seems to really mean "as slowly as they could get away with."
How long is it going to be before these companies realize that attacking their customers and treating them like criminals really is NOT a good way to do business? Microsoft's "product activation", Sony's rootkit, etc. ad naseum do essentially nothing to stop real hackers from copying software, music, etc., as much as they want, so the only thing they really accomplish is hurting the legitimate customers.
These lousy business practices are reflected in their (lack of) sales too. I don't mean to say a boycott of Sony would necessarily be a bad thing, but for those who haven't looked, take a look at Sony's stock prices -- boycott or no, they're not exactly burning up the charts right now.
Now, Sony (etc.) will undoubtedly point to Napster and such as the reason they're not doing as well recently. I don't think that's the case. I think what's happened is that Sony is now concentrating more on forcing customers to pay than they are on producing things customers want. As is visible in their stock price, that simply leads to oblivion, not prosperity.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
I didn't really figure you were -- but this makes sure if I missed something relevant in reading TFA, I'd hear about what it was (loudly, most likely). Personally, I'd rather get flamed now and then than miss something interesting.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Anyone got the cliff notes version of the responses?
Note: I've attempted to be fair to the original questions and responses, but my opinion may have affected how I've summarized things. If so, I apologize.
1) What were the assumptions?
a) one year transition from basic purchasing site to
personalized portal.
b) administrators free to adminster systems as needed.
c) systems kept up-to-date wrt patches and such.
d) no in-house software development.
e) same requirements/acceptance tests for all platforms.
f) attempted similar level of experience in admininstrators.
2) does publishing studies like this help or hurt credibility?
That mostly depends on how well you do the study.
3) Why did you force the Linux side to do so much more work?
We set the same requirements for both sides. The whole point of the study was to how much work each would have to do to meet those requirements.
4) Did you pick the metrics, or did Microsoft?
We did.
5) Why does Diebold make good ATMs but lousy voting machines?
Did your flame resistant suit include a matching tinfoil hat?
ATMs are constantly audited and nobody will settle for one that doesn't work extremely dependably. Voting machines are hardly audited at all, so people often don't even know whether it's worked right.
I didn't get a tinfoil hat -- the manufacturer is apparently still filling backorders from SCO.
6) Why did you require 4-5 years experience for Windows but only 3-4 for Linux?
That was a typo. Both had 4-5 years experience.
7) You only tested three administrators on one Linux distro. How does that really mean anything about the situation in general?
It doesn't give a final answer, but it does at least give some indication, especially since the Linux distro in question is fairly typical.
8) Is it good that vendors seem to be taking more control over what happens on my machine?
For ignorant users it's good. For sufficiently experienced users, BSD is good -- but any more, even a lot of programmers are basically ignorant, at least when it comes to security.
9) Which model has better security, especially fewer attacks and faster patches?
A problem in Linux will usually have some patch faster, but a patch that's been verified to fix the problem without side-effects will usually be considerably slower, just like on Windows.
Windows is obviously attacked more, but that's probably at least partly because it's a bigger target, and attackers realize that it's often adminstered poorly as well.
10) Is it good that OS vendors keep bundling more and more into the OS, or would it be better to just keep it a basic OS?
It depends on the user. Ideally, the user could configure exactly how much he needs/wants without compromising integration, ease of use, etc., but that isn't really available, so you have to pick what you value more and go with it. Personally I have stripped-down Redhat on my fileserver, XP on my laptop, and Windows Server 2003 on my desktop, (with virtual machines to run everything else under it).
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If considering only a specific platform and no existing libraries, you're even completely wrong: Coding ASM is significantly more time-consuming than coding C, but the difference is 3-5 times "only".
From what I've seen, it's frequently closer to a 10:1 ratio, but that doesn't change the fact that the original ratio given (months vs. half a day, or at least 100:1) is something of an exaggeration.
Hardly anybody is able to optimize for speed a modern x86 processor "by hand", but RISCs and even some CISCs like the 68000 are another story.
Half true, but half not. It's true that very few people know assembly language well enough to optimize for anything, at all. It's also true, however, that compilers for x86 do a pretty poor job -- in fact, I'd say those of 68K and most RISCs produce code that's much closer to optimal than compilers for x86 do.
Wonder why a number of not-very-powerful embedded platforms, like calculators, are still partly programmed in ASM...
Regardless of how well or poorly compilers do at optimizing for speed, they nearly all do a really poor job compared to hand-written assembly language when it comes to optimizing for size.
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Yes, maybe one out of 100 programmers _may_ be able to beat a compiler at optimization.
At least by my definition, 1 out of 1 programmers can beat a compiler for optimization on a fairly regular basis -- because anybody who can't manage that clearly isn't really a programmer at all.
Even though that may only be my definition, the reality is that nearly everybody who really gives it a serious shot can beat a compiler pretty easily -- though beating it by enough to care about is a completely different story. Most people can produce substantially smaller code than a compiler pretty easily, but it takes quite a bit more work to win purely on a basis of speed -- and of course, with reasonably fast memory available for less than $100/gigabyte, few people are willing to allow expensive programmers to spend much time on making code smaller.
It's more important to get that one out of a hundred people to contribute those techniques to the compiler itself so more people benifit.
I've written both compilers and assembly language, but the compiler work I've done has made almost no real use of what I know of assembly language. You can make use of it in writing library routines, but in the compiler itself, you have to basically give the compiler a set of rules, where writing assembly by hand is more a matter of having a feel for the flow (for lack of better terminology).
With FPGA's I don't think anyone would seriously consider doing their own layout, cell by cell, for a design.
First of all, I don't think FPGAs are really directly comparable. Nonetheless, while I don't know of many people who'd do all of an FPGA by hand, I've certainly done a fair amount of locking a particular block of logic to a specific cell to get the timing to work, and things like that. When you leave the FPGA realm and look at ASICs and such, hand-done logic becomes even more common. You can certainly bet that quite a bit of an average big, high-volume processor or anything like that has quite a bit of human input right down to the level of physical layout. There are a few people who have tools that really do produce better ASIC layouts automatically than most people can by hand, but they're fairly unusual -- most ASIC layout still involves quite a bit of hand work.
In both the software and hardware realms, however, it's quite true that compilers often do better than they're typically given credit for. It's also true that quite a few people write code to try to "force" the compiler to produce specific output. In doing so, they often produce marginally better results on their current target, but as soon as the target changes, their extra effort produces hurts the results (and often by quite a bit more than they gained on the original target).
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Can anyone explain the idea behind dark matter and dark energy ? I mean if it is just a mathematical problem or has some experimental justification as well.
Fair Warning: what follows is a really simplified version of reality, and at least a couple of points go beyond simplification to the point that they're arguably flat out wrong. If somebody wants to correct part or all of this, please feel free, but if you do so please try to keep with the spirit of actually explaining things so they're understandable.
The situation with dark matter is simpler than dark energy, so we'll start with that.
We've observed a certain amount of matter in the universe. Those observations lead to a rough estimate of what the total amount of matter in the universe might be.
Now, there was a certain amount of energy released in the big bang. For quite a while, it was assumed to be the primary reason that the universe was expanding. I.e. there as a big explosion, and matter went flying off in all directions (and we're basically just living on a bit of shrapnel from that explosion).
Now, if there was enough matter in the universe, the gravity between it would eventually slow it down, stop it, and finally start it contracting back together. That was a rather attractive idea -- that the big bang wasn't a one-time thing, but that we just happened to be seeing evidence of the most recent occurrence.
The problem was that our estimates of how much matter there was in the universe came out well below what was needed for there to be enough gravity to make the expansion stop and eventually reverse.
One answer that was postulated to that was dark matter -- a lot more matter out there that we couldn't see, so it wasn't being figured into our estimates of how much matter there was in the universe. Therefore, a lot of people spent a lot of time and energy trying to find ways to observe a lot more matter than we had previously. To some extent they succeeded -- better telecsopes, observing techniques, etc., have allowed us to observe quite a bit more than we had previously.
By this idea, however, almost regardless of the exact amount of matter in the universe, the gravity should act to slow down the expansion over time -- i.e. the energy pushing things apart was all expended during the big bang, and now gravity should be acting in the general direction of pulling things back together again or at least slowing down the rate at which they're moving apart.
That doesn't fit reality though. In reality, it appears that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. The original theory was that the expansion was due to energy released during the big bang. If that was the case, the expansion of the universe should basically just be "coasting", and there's no way it could be accelerating.
The obvious way for the expansion to accelerate is to figure that even though we generally think of the space beyond the edge of the universe as a complete vacuum, devoid of matter or energy, that there really is a little bit of something there afterall, and being a little bit of something (energy or mass) it has some gravitational pull on the matter that we think of as part of the universe, so it's more or less pulling the universe apart -- i.e. accelerating the outward movement.
Given that the expansion of the universe is accelerating (which certainly seems to be accepted as fact right now anyway), it seems to me that the existence of the cosmological constant isn't really the question. The primary questions are 1) what is its exact value, and 2) where exactly does it come from.
If you read the article from the University of Colorado cited elsehwere (for one example), you can find both some estimates of upper and lower limits on the value, and at least one possible explanation for its source. I've heard at least one person give what sounded (to me) like a different explanation of its source, but it wouldn't surprise me too much i
"Sleekest," though? It looks like every other usb flash drive. Maybe if they mounted a spoiler on it, or added some racing stripes. Or speed holes. Speed holes make everything sleeker.
Ummm... okay, somebody help me out here. Why would I spend $30 to get an album on a USB stick when I can get an album on CD for $16 or on Itunes for less than that? I suppose there's some collector value there but practically speaking, that's an awful lot of money for an album.
Depending on where you buy it and how much you pay for shipping, tax if you buy locally, etc., you might easily pay that much for an empty 128 MB flash drive. IOW, if you have any real use for the drive, the music is nearly free.
Now if they just had them on a 2 GB CF drive (especially for the same price...)
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Most of the time, this isn't exposed to customers, but employees of the organization are trained to ignore the "This certificate was not issued by a trusted authority," warnings, and I fear such people will take away that that box with all of its technobabble is one they should ignore at all times. That box is a last line of defense against an encrypted connection that isn't trustworthy...
Self-signed certs aren't the problem, and you shouldn't train users to ignore warning boxes either. If you're going to set up your own CA, you should plan on also adding your root CA to the list of CAs trusted by the client machines that will normally be used with it. Your users will get warnings when the should, but not when they shouldn't, and you don't have to pay an external authority to make it happen.
Personally, I'd almost tend toward saying the opposite: quite a few people would really be better off taking Verisign (etc.) off of their list of trusted CAs, and only add the root CAs they really do trust. I certainly trust my self-signed certificates more than I trust theirs.
Getting back to the original subject, maybe the browsers could support this as well: allow me to specify how much I trust a particular root CA, and have the coloring in the address bar (for example) reflect this -- my own would give bright green, and the commercial ones in a paler green to reflect a lower level of trust.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
If a problem like this was found in Firefox...There would already be a fix available for it.
This gets modded as "Insightful"? What nonsense.
Looking through this thread, it looks like I'm far from unique in getting essentially identical results with IE and FireFox. IOW, FireFox needs a patch just as much (or little) as IE. In neither case does work as intended, but in both cases I get roughly the most trivial possible denial of service -- i.e. it takes roughly 5 seconds to kill the browser and (if you want) start up a new copy. I realize that if the attack really worked it would be serious, but as it stands right now, I'm probably in more danger from the possibility of accidentally hitting the wrong key in the debugger (not that it's dangerous either, but sometimes I have to do twice as much work: kill both the debugger AND the debuggee -- wasting 10 seconds instead of 5...)
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Yes, the slashdot story confused two different studies:-)
Ah, that explains a bit. The/. summary didn't sound much like the study, but I just assumed (understandably, I think) that the summary was poorly written and/or edited.
Thanks for the heads-up -- I'll have to look for the other study.
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One thing I did not see in the study was a good description of assumptions you made.
I guess I must have found a different study -- the one I found has a section titled "Assumptions and Rules" starting on page 11, then an "Additional assumptions on Quantitative Data" running from around the middle of page 12 through about the top third of page 14.
I have wondered why Linux hasn't come up with a similar system. When you install and RPM or some other style of package the system could "translate" from a perfect ISA to the native ISA of the system you are running on.
If you were feeling really corporate, you could call this an "Architecture Neutral Binary Distribution" format. Then with a little looking, you could even find an old copy of DEC OSF/1 that implemented it!
Seriously, 10 or 15 years ago (or so) the UNIX vendors saw this as a way they could compete with Microsoft, so they formed the OSF (Open Software Foundation, for those who don't remember it) and came up with a standard for this. Then, with the exception of DEC who apparently missed the memo, they all ignored it to death -- followed shortly by Microsoft ignoring most of them to death...
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Oh, and "Triplanetary" would be a better sugestion than Grey Lensman, being the first book in the series.
It'd work, but it starts off slowly enough that I suspect most people who've really read it started out elsewhere.
I also neglected to mention Edgar Rice Burroughs. Interesting in his own right, as well as being nearly necessary for some of Heinlein's stuff to really make sense.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
But hardly a surprising omission -- just too few people have actually read the whole thing. I only barely finished it, and I'm not sure I've met anybody else who did at all. Certainly more Biblical anyway...
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
With no Grey Lensman, this was obviously compiled by mostly young geeks!:-)
Also, while Heinlein clearly had non-geeky characters, others pretty clearly were geeks by almost any definition -- Andrew Libby was the most obvious, but when Lazarus Long meets Andrew (in Methusalah's Children) and they start talking about Lazarus' modifications to Andrew's design for a ship's computer ("Integrator" IIRC) it becomes pretty clear that Lazarus is at least a part-time geek as well (then again, live long enough and you'll do almost everything at least part of the time). It is sad that one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time is represented only by one he openly stated was one of his worst (IIRC, in one of his later books, he has one of his characters comment on it saying something like "it's sad how far some authors stoop when they're desparate for money" (anybody remember that, or is my memory playing tricks on me?)
Then again, any list that has science fiction but no Frederik Pohl, Stanislaw Lem, David Weber, Niven/Pournelle or Theodore Sturgeon clearly has some pretty large holes, to say the least (and that's still far from an exhaustive list...)
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It doesn't look like there are many RT programmers on/.?
RT applications are said to be so because of the requirement for them to react in *real time* even though that is not the actual case. It just needs to seem that they do.
I suppose I'll get modded as troll (again) for saying so, but from what you've said, I'd guess you're one of the people who's not an RT programmer.
Real-time programs do need to react in real time. A typical example is that the program needs to react within X microseconds of an interrupt happening. A hard real-time requirement is exactly that -- no "seem that they do" about it. For example, a navigation system for an aircraft must react within the right amount of time to input from the pilot, radars, etc. A late reaction carries the possibility of killing hundreds of people (conceivably even thousands with particularly bad luck about where it lands).
ABS systems are not allowed to have delay, mail servers are.
Every system has some delay -- the questions are 1) how much?, and 2) how much does it matter if it misses its window by some small amount? A hard real-time system is one where you have an absolute maximum delay, and you must never miss it. A soft real-time system is one where you may be able to get away with slightly greater delays on rare occasion -- the "softness" of the real time being determined largely by how large the delay can be, and how often it can happen. The situations above with brakes or aircraft navigation are about as hard of real-time as you can get -- excessive delay is likely to cause deaths. A router or mail server has substantially softer requirements. If it misses receiving part of a packet very often, it won't work well -- but as long as it's not very often, it's probably not a problem, and endangering lives is pretty far-fetched even at worst.
Also note that real-time does not necessarily mean much about being fast. Years ago, I worked on some software to control some of the operations in a sewage plant. In most cases, the computers' requirements on the reaction times were measured in entire seconds and sometimes even minutes -- but if it missed a deadline, millions of dollars in damage could be expected, and endangering lives was possible as well. Ridiculously slow by most standards, but hard real-time nonetheless.
So -- the essence of real-time is not about "high speed" it's about "dependable and predictable speed". Real-time requirements are specified not only in terms of "How fast?", but "How serious is too slow a reaction?" -- and the latter is often what really dominates.
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What will really be interesting to see is the advancement in real-time interpreted languages like java. This should allow for portability of embedded applications on all kinds of embedded devices regardless of what OS is in use.
Despite the claims of "Write Once Run Anywhere", my experience with Java has been rather the opposite -- that writing portable Java is (as a rule) even more difficult that writing portable C or C++. It's nice that the portable GUI library is part of the spec instad of an add-on like wxWidgets, but from a practical viewpoint has little real effect on portability. That may be mostly a matter of the kinds of code I write though -- some people certainly seem to find it a lot more useful than I have so far.
Warning: I hadn't previously looked at the RT Java spec (at least that I recall) so these comments are based on looking at it for no more than an hour or so.
In this case, it looks like portability may be even more difficult than usual -- for one thing, it allows raw access to physical memory. Though the functions involved allow the system to throw exceptions when/if this is abused, at least at first glance it looks like an obvious point of attack on such a system.
Maybe I'm reading it incorrectly, but the introduction section of the specification seems to imply that this is basically intended as a set of extensions to a normal (non-RT) Java environment, that would (in turn) normally be running on top of a non-RT OS. It appears that while it allows predictability of scheduling of one thread vs. another within the JVM, little or nothing is implied about the scheduling of the JVM vs. other processes on the system. From the looks of things, the system could be implemented on top of a non-RT OS, in which case the RT applications would run, but RT response would be more or less accidental. Given the nature of a JVM, that may be difficult (at best) to prevent though.
Finally, looking through the project web page, the only implementation I find mentioned is the reference -- this may imply that even though the spec is now over 4 years old, it has seen little or no real use. That isn't necessarily a major criticism, but it doesn't seem like a ringing endorsement either. Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical, but it strikes as being a bit like DPMI 1.0: a nice spec, but I'm not yet convinced it'll ever really mean a whole lot.
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what about a complete embedded linux distribution for x86. Just think how much faster your system would become.
This has already been modded as a troll, but giving you the benefit of the doubt, do you mean something different from things like Monta Vista or Lynuxworks ?
Of course, it's also worth mentioning that "real time" doesn't necessarily mean "fast." In fact, rather the opposite is typically true: a real-time system must (by nature) make the worst case predictable -- but often compromises the average performance to do so.
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It is very much the case. RTFA. The fact of the matter is this: Record sales are going down. Illegal P2P downloads are going up.
That depends on who you listen to -- according to the RIAA (i.e. representing only the largest labels) sales are going down. NARM (representing record stores) disagrees -- they claim that although it's slow, there is actually growth in record sales.
IOW, much of what's happening is that independent labels are growing at the expense of the major labels. The assertion that illegal P2P downloads in increasing seems completely unsupported. I'd guess that, if anything, the opposite is true: since Napster was shut down, illegal P2P downloads have slowed substantially.
All of this also ignores the economy as a whole: the fact is that the economy in general slowed substantially around five years ago, and especially luxury industries have had flat to falling sales since then. IMO, P2P downloads are purely a red herring, and record sales would be down about the same (or even a bit worse) if nobody had ever invented "P2P" at all. Again, NARM takes this into account -- for example, though they it was "offset by cannibalization", they admit that "...sales were stimulated by file sharing". Also note that this is from 2000, when file-sharing was at its height.
You missed one minor technical detail: Musicians, producers, studio engineers, and session musicians actually like getting paid for their hard work.
[...]
You forgot "paying all the people who work hard to make a great album of music".
I didn't miss this at all -- I ignored it because it's irrelevant. An engineer, musician (session or otherwise), etc., working for an independent label doesn't do it for free either. Likewise, when a musician decides to publish directly, he's rarely doing it for the sake of charity either.
In any case, a great album rarely needs much expensive production work. A great album is recorded, and transferred to its final form with a minimum of fuss or bother. The albums that are expensive to produce are mostly mediocre garbage made by "musicians" whose talent (if any) is in areas like synchronized dancing, not music.
It's also worth noting that costs in this area are really substantially lower than they used to be as well -- as with many other things, computerization has made engineering/post product substantially easier and faster than used to be the case.
Oh, it's very much what they care about. Case in point: Record companies did nothing to stop IUMA, who was delivering musicial content in mpeg compressed format before mp3 even existed.
You're making a fundamental mistake here. On one hand, there's what they really care about. On the other, there's what they have at least some minimal excuse to take people to court over. The fact that something doesn't fall into the latter doesn't necessarily exclude it from the former.
One thing to keep in mind is that many, many people can make music. Very few can make music that is actually worth listening to. This is why people download the latest Gwen Stefani song instead of some garage band.
Sorry, but this is pure BS. The reality is that lots of people can came music that's actually worth listening to. Addding things up in my head, so far this year I've heard at least seven local acts who are every bit as good as Gwen Stefani, and IMO, at least one of them is substantially better. Unless you happen to live near me, and go to listen to local bands, you've probably never heard of any of them though.
There are a lot worse examples than Gwen Stefani too. Face reality though: complete lack of musical talent hasn't stopped a lot of boy bands (to name just one class) from making tremendous amounts of money.
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Instead of hounding the net, the music industry should be celebrating how it has helped people find new bands and new genres that they like.
This would only make sense if the music industry really wanted to serve their customers -- and based on their actions, that's quite apparently not the case at all.
First of all, I'm pretty sure that while the recording industry makes lots of noise about how much revenue they're losing due to P2P, they also have good enough financial analysts that when they're being honest with themselves, they realize that the real loss is essentially zero.
First of all, the ability to actually search and find what you want to a large extent makes the recording companies irrelevant. Until recently, bands fell into two discrete categories: those with recording contracts, and those without. Anybody without a contract remained essentially a nonentity. Many bands were quite willing to sign virtually any possible recording contract, because even if they realized it was horribly unfair, they still ended up far better off than without it.
Most of this derived from two things: distribution and promotion.
With P2P, both of those are largely nullified. The P2P network provides absolutely anybody with essentially instant, worldwide distribution. Likewise, searching means people can find what they really want instead of depending on the record company promotions to tell them what they want.
Now, it's true that the majority of what has been distributed over P2P networks has been material copyrighted by the record labels. Frankly, I doubt that's what they really cared about though -- what they cared about was the fact that if Napster (for example) had been allowed to survive for very long, there would have been a migration away from "their" music, and they would have faced utter irrelevancy.
For them, this isn't a matter of boosting sales by an extra few percent -- it's a matter of outright survival. They probably also realize that it's really a losing battle. As an industry they're currently providing no value, and despite attacks on their intelligence, they're smart enough to realize that if they provide no value, they'll die.
What they're doing right now is (I suspect) mostly a delaying tactic, trying to maintain some degree of relevance until they can figure out how to put themselves back onto the mainstream.
I suspect iTunes (and its ilk) will be a large part of that. Contrary to implication elsewhere, while iTunes is certainly a way for people to download music, it's most assuredly not a p2p network. iTunes is a perfectly average centralized network where you're downloading music from ITMS' servers. It's centralized and controlled in almost exactly the same way as traditional music publishing was. In fact, in the long run it probably creates a situation even MORE favorable to the recording industry.
With traditional brick and mortar distribution, the big distributors (Best Buy, Sam Goody's, etc.) had quite a bit of power over the recording companies. Most of this power derived from the fact that building thousands of record stores was expensive and difficult, so the supply of national distributors was fairly limited. The Internet and non-P2P record distribution like iTunes changes that: it takes virtually nothing to set up a reasonably usable international recording distribution network. ITMS is way out in front right now, but I'm pretty sure Apple realizes that there are thousands of other people with the capability and resources to put together a reasonably competitive offering in a matter of months.
This means ITMS has virtually not power when they bargain with the record labels. Previously the record labels probably had something like 80% control over the music stores. I'd guess with Yahoo! Music, ITMS, MP3.com, etc., they see a chance to have more like 95% control, and they like that idea a whole lot.
What a waste -- I used up all my moderator points about 15 seconds before I saw this, but it's the funniest I've seen all day.
New idea for Slashdot: ability to "borrow" against future moderation points -- if you see something that really deserves moderation, you can do it, but you have to pay "interest" on what you use -- using one point ahead of time takes up two points (or whatever) when you next get them -- and of course there's a limit on how far in debt you can go as well.
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Slashdot Mirror
Yes -- as in "it stinks" :-)
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In this case, "as quickly as they could" seems to really mean "as slowly as they could get away with."
How long is it going to be before these companies realize that attacking their customers and treating them like criminals really is NOT a good way to do business? Microsoft's "product activation", Sony's rootkit, etc. ad naseum do essentially nothing to stop real hackers from copying software, music, etc., as much as they want, so the only thing they really accomplish is hurting the legitimate customers.
These lousy business practices are reflected in their (lack of) sales too. I don't mean to say a boycott of Sony would necessarily be a bad thing, but for those who haven't looked, take a look at Sony's stock prices -- boycott or no, they're not exactly burning up the charts right now.
Now, Sony (etc.) will undoubtedly point to Napster and such as the reason they're not doing as well recently. I don't think that's the case. I think what's happened is that Sony is now concentrating more on forcing customers to pay than they are on producing things customers want. As is visible in their stock price, that simply leads to oblivion, not prosperity.
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I didn't really figure you were -- but this makes sure if I missed something relevant in reading TFA, I'd hear about what it was (loudly, most likely). Personally, I'd rather get flamed now and then than miss something interesting.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Note: I've attempted to be fair to the original questions and responses, but my opinion may have affected how I've summarized things. If so, I apologize.
1) What were the assumptions?
2) does publishing studies like this help or hurt credibility?
3) Why did you force the Linux side to do so much more work?
4) Did you pick the metrics, or did Microsoft?
5) Why does Diebold make good ATMs but lousy voting machines?
Did your flame resistant suit include a matching tinfoil hat?
6) Why did you require 4-5 years experience for Windows but only 3-4 for Linux?
7) You only tested three administrators on one Linux distro. How does that really mean anything about the situation in general?
8) Is it good that vendors seem to be taking more control over what happens on my machine?
9) Which model has better security, especially fewer attacks and faster patches?
10) Is it good that OS vendors keep bundling more and more into the OS, or would it be better to just keep it a basic OS?
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
From what I've seen, it's frequently closer to a 10:1 ratio, but that doesn't change the fact that the original ratio given (months vs. half a day, or at least 100:1) is something of an exaggeration.
Half true, but half not. It's true that very few people know assembly language well enough to optimize for anything, at all. It's also true, however, that compilers for x86 do a pretty poor job -- in fact, I'd say those of 68K and most RISCs produce code that's much closer to optimal than compilers for x86 do.
Regardless of how well or poorly compilers do at optimizing for speed, they nearly all do a really poor job compared to hand-written assembly language when it comes to optimizing for size.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
At least by my definition, 1 out of 1 programmers can beat a compiler for optimization on a fairly regular basis -- because anybody who can't manage that clearly isn't really a programmer at all.
Even though that may only be my definition, the reality is that nearly everybody who really gives it a serious shot can beat a compiler pretty easily -- though beating it by enough to care about is a completely different story. Most people can produce substantially smaller code than a compiler pretty easily, but it takes quite a bit more work to win purely on a basis of speed -- and of course, with reasonably fast memory available for less than $100/gigabyte, few people are willing to allow expensive programmers to spend much time on making code smaller.
I've written both compilers and assembly language, but the compiler work I've done has made almost no real use of what I know of assembly language. You can make use of it in writing library routines, but in the compiler itself, you have to basically give the compiler a set of rules, where writing assembly by hand is more a matter of having a feel for the flow (for lack of better terminology).
First of all, I don't think FPGAs are really directly comparable. Nonetheless, while I don't know of many people who'd do all of an FPGA by hand, I've certainly done a fair amount of locking a particular block of logic to a specific cell to get the timing to work, and things like that. When you leave the FPGA realm and look at ASICs and such, hand-done logic becomes even more common. You can certainly bet that quite a bit of an average big, high-volume processor or anything like that has quite a bit of human input right down to the level of physical layout. There are a few people who have tools that really do produce better ASIC layouts automatically than most people can by hand, but they're fairly unusual -- most ASIC layout still involves quite a bit of hand work.
In both the software and hardware realms, however, it's quite true that compilers often do better than they're typically given credit for. It's also true that quite a few people write code to try to "force" the compiler to produce specific output. In doing so, they often produce marginally better results on their current target, but as soon as the target changes, their extra effort produces hurts the results (and often by quite a bit more than they gained on the original target).
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Fair Warning: what follows is a really simplified version of reality, and at least a couple of points go beyond simplification to the point that they're arguably flat out wrong. If somebody wants to correct part or all of this, please feel free, but if you do so please try to keep with the spirit of actually explaining things so they're understandable.
The situation with dark matter is simpler than dark energy, so we'll start with that.
We've observed a certain amount of matter in the universe. Those observations lead to a rough estimate of what the total amount of matter in the universe might be.
Now, there was a certain amount of energy released in the big bang. For quite a while, it was assumed to be the primary reason that the universe was expanding. I.e. there as a big explosion, and matter went flying off in all directions (and we're basically just living on a bit of shrapnel from that explosion).
Now, if there was enough matter in the universe, the gravity between it would eventually slow it down, stop it, and finally start it contracting back together. That was a rather attractive idea -- that the big bang wasn't a one-time thing, but that we just happened to be seeing evidence of the most recent occurrence.
The problem was that our estimates of how much matter there was in the universe came out well below what was needed for there to be enough gravity to make the expansion stop and eventually reverse.
One answer that was postulated to that was dark matter -- a lot more matter out there that we couldn't see, so it wasn't being figured into our estimates of how much matter there was in the universe. Therefore, a lot of people spent a lot of time and energy trying to find ways to observe a lot more matter than we had previously. To some extent they succeeded -- better telecsopes, observing techniques, etc., have allowed us to observe quite a bit more than we had previously.
By this idea, however, almost regardless of the exact amount of matter in the universe, the gravity should act to slow down the expansion over time -- i.e. the energy pushing things apart was all expended during the big bang, and now gravity should be acting in the general direction of pulling things back together again or at least slowing down the rate at which they're moving apart.
That doesn't fit reality though. In reality, it appears that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. The original theory was that the expansion was due to energy released during the big bang. If that was the case, the expansion of the universe should basically just be "coasting", and there's no way it could be accelerating.
The obvious way for the expansion to accelerate is to figure that even though we generally think of the space beyond the edge of the universe as a complete vacuum, devoid of matter or energy, that there really is a little bit of something there afterall, and being a little bit of something (energy or mass) it has some gravitational pull on the matter that we think of as part of the universe, so it's more or less pulling the universe apart -- i.e. accelerating the outward movement.
Given that the expansion of the universe is accelerating (which certainly seems to be accepted as fact right now anyway), it seems to me that the existence of the cosmological constant isn't really the question. The primary questions are 1) what is its exact value, and 2) where exactly does it come from.
If you read the article from the University of Colorado cited elsehwere (for one example), you can find both some estimates of upper and lower limits on the value, and at least one possible explanation for its source. I've heard at least one person give what sounded (to me) like a different explanation of its source, but it wouldn't surprise me too much i
You mean like the heat spreaders on these?
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Depending on where you buy it and how much you pay for shipping, tax if you buy locally, etc., you might easily pay that much for an empty 128 MB flash drive. IOW, if you have any real use for the drive, the music is nearly free.
Now if they just had them on a 2 GB CF drive (especially for the same price...)
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Self-signed certs aren't the problem, and you shouldn't train users to ignore warning boxes either. If you're going to set up your own CA, you should plan on also adding your root CA to the list of CAs trusted by the client machines that will normally be used with it. Your users will get warnings when the should, but not when they shouldn't, and you don't have to pay an external authority to make it happen.
Personally, I'd almost tend toward saying the opposite: quite a few people would really be better off taking Verisign (etc.) off of their list of trusted CAs, and only add the root CAs they really do trust. I certainly trust my self-signed certificates more than I trust theirs.
Getting back to the original subject, maybe the browsers could support this as well: allow me to specify how much I trust a particular root CA, and have the coloring in the address bar (for example) reflect this -- my own would give bright green, and the commercial ones in a paler green to reflect a lower level of trust.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The short version is that he's a guy on a crusade against video games. One longer version can be found Here.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
This gets modded as "Insightful"? What nonsense.
Looking through this thread, it looks like I'm far from unique in getting essentially identical results with IE and FireFox. IOW, FireFox needs a patch just as much (or little) as IE. In neither case does work as intended, but in both cases I get roughly the most trivial possible denial of service -- i.e. it takes roughly 5 seconds to kill the browser and (if you want) start up a new copy. I realize that if the attack really worked it would be serious, but as it stands right now, I'm probably in more danger from the possibility of accidentally hitting the wrong key in the debugger (not that it's dangerous either, but sometimes I have to do twice as much work: kill both the debugger AND the debuggee -- wasting 10 seconds instead of 5...)
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Ah, that explains a bit. The /. summary didn't sound much like the study, but I just assumed (understandably, I think) that the summary was poorly written and/or edited.
Thanks for the heads-up -- I'll have to look for the other study.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
I guess I must have found a different study -- the one I found has a section titled "Assumptions and Rules" starting on page 11, then an "Additional assumptions on Quantitative Data" running from around the middle of page 12 through about the top third of page 14.
Is this a different one than you were looking at?
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
If you were feeling really corporate, you could call this an "Architecture Neutral Binary Distribution" format. Then with a little looking, you could even find an old copy of DEC OSF/1 that implemented it!
Seriously, 10 or 15 years ago (or so) the UNIX vendors saw this as a way they could compete with Microsoft, so they formed the OSF (Open Software Foundation, for those who don't remember it) and came up with a standard for this. Then, with the exception of DEC who apparently missed the memo, they all ignored it to death -- followed shortly by Microsoft ignoring most of them to death...
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
It'd work, but it starts off slowly enough that I suspect most people who've really read it started out elsewhere.
I also neglected to mention Edgar Rice Burroughs. Interesting in his own right, as well as being nearly necessary for some of Heinlein's stuff to really make sense.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
But hardly a surprising omission -- just too few people have actually read the whole thing. I only barely finished it, and I'm not sure I've met anybody else who did at all. Certainly more Biblical anyway...
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Also, while Heinlein clearly had non-geeky characters, others pretty clearly were geeks by almost any definition -- Andrew Libby was the most obvious, but when Lazarus Long meets Andrew (in Methusalah's Children) and they start talking about Lazarus' modifications to Andrew's design for a ship's computer ("Integrator" IIRC) it becomes pretty clear that Lazarus is at least a part-time geek as well (then again, live long enough and you'll do almost everything at least part of the time). It is sad that one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time is represented only by one he openly stated was one of his worst (IIRC, in one of his later books, he has one of his characters comment on it saying something like "it's sad how far some authors stoop when they're desparate for money" (anybody remember that, or is my memory playing tricks on me?)
Then again, any list that has science fiction but no Frederik Pohl, Stanislaw Lem, David Weber, Niven/Pournelle or Theodore Sturgeon clearly has some pretty large holes, to say the least (and that's still far from an exhaustive list...)
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
I suppose I'll get modded as troll (again) for saying so, but from what you've said, I'd guess you're one of the people who's not an RT programmer.
Real-time programs do need to react in real time. A typical example is that the program needs to react within X microseconds of an interrupt happening. A hard real-time requirement is exactly that -- no "seem that they do" about it. For example, a navigation system for an aircraft must react within the right amount of time to input from the pilot, radars, etc. A late reaction carries the possibility of killing hundreds of people (conceivably even thousands with particularly bad luck about where it lands).
Every system has some delay -- the questions are 1) how much?, and 2) how much does it matter if it misses its window by some small amount? A hard real-time system is one where you have an absolute maximum delay, and you must never miss it. A soft real-time system is one where you may be able to get away with slightly greater delays on rare occasion -- the "softness" of the real time being determined largely by how large the delay can be, and how often it can happen. The situations above with brakes or aircraft navigation are about as hard of real-time as you can get -- excessive delay is likely to cause deaths. A router or mail server has substantially softer requirements. If it misses receiving part of a packet very often, it won't work well -- but as long as it's not very often, it's probably not a problem, and endangering lives is pretty far-fetched even at worst.
Also note that real-time does not necessarily mean much about being fast. Years ago, I worked on some software to control some of the operations in a sewage plant. In most cases, the computers' requirements on the reaction times were measured in entire seconds and sometimes even minutes -- but if it missed a deadline, millions of dollars in damage could be expected, and endangering lives was possible as well. Ridiculously slow by most standards, but hard real-time nonetheless.
So -- the essence of real-time is not about "high speed" it's about "dependable and predictable speed". Real-time requirements are specified not only in terms of "How fast?", but "How serious is too slow a reaction?" -- and the latter is often what really dominates.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Despite the claims of "Write Once Run Anywhere", my experience with Java has been rather the opposite -- that writing portable Java is (as a rule) even more difficult that writing portable C or C++. It's nice that the portable GUI library is part of the spec instad of an add-on like wxWidgets, but from a practical viewpoint has little real effect on portability. That may be mostly a matter of the kinds of code I write though -- some people certainly seem to find it a lot more useful than I have so far.
Warning: I hadn't previously looked at the RT Java spec (at least that I recall) so these comments are based on looking at it for no more than an hour or so.
In this case, it looks like portability may be even more difficult than usual -- for one thing, it allows raw access to physical memory. Though the functions involved allow the system to throw exceptions when/if this is abused, at least at first glance it looks like an obvious point of attack on such a system.
Maybe I'm reading it incorrectly, but the introduction section of the specification seems to imply that this is basically intended as a set of extensions to a normal (non-RT) Java environment, that would (in turn) normally be running on top of a non-RT OS. It appears that while it allows predictability of scheduling of one thread vs. another within the JVM, little or nothing is implied about the scheduling of the JVM vs. other processes on the system. From the looks of things, the system could be implemented on top of a non-RT OS, in which case the RT applications would run, but RT response would be more or less accidental. Given the nature of a JVM, that may be difficult (at best) to prevent though.
Finally, looking through the project web page, the only implementation I find mentioned is the reference -- this may imply that even though the spec is now over 4 years old, it has seen little or no real use. That isn't necessarily a major criticism, but it doesn't seem like a ringing endorsement either. Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical, but it strikes as being a bit like DPMI 1.0: a nice spec, but I'm not yet convinced it'll ever really mean a whole lot.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
This has already been modded as a troll, but giving you the benefit of the doubt, do you mean something different from things like Monta Vista or Lynuxworks ?
Of course, it's also worth mentioning that "real time" doesn't necessarily mean "fast." In fact, rather the opposite is typically true: a real-time system must (by nature) make the worst case predictable -- but often compromises the average performance to do so.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
That depends on who you listen to -- according to the RIAA (i.e. representing only the largest labels) sales are going down. NARM (representing record stores) disagrees -- they claim that although it's slow, there is actually growth in record sales.
IOW, much of what's happening is that independent labels are growing at the expense of the major labels. The assertion that illegal P2P downloads in increasing seems completely unsupported. I'd guess that, if anything, the opposite is true: since Napster was shut down, illegal P2P downloads have slowed substantially.
All of this also ignores the economy as a whole: the fact is that the economy in general slowed substantially around five years ago, and especially luxury industries have had flat to falling sales since then. IMO, P2P downloads are purely a red herring, and record sales would be down about the same (or even a bit worse) if nobody had ever invented "P2P" at all. Again, NARM takes this into account -- for example, though they it was "offset by cannibalization", they admit that "...sales were stimulated by file sharing". Also note that this is from 2000, when file-sharing was at its height.
I didn't miss this at all -- I ignored it because it's irrelevant. An engineer, musician (session or otherwise), etc., working for an independent label doesn't do it for free either. Likewise, when a musician decides to publish directly, he's rarely doing it for the sake of charity either.
In any case, a great album rarely needs much expensive production work. A great album is recorded, and transferred to its final form with a minimum of fuss or bother. The albums that are expensive to produce are mostly mediocre garbage made by "musicians" whose talent (if any) is in areas like synchronized dancing, not music.
It's also worth noting that costs in this area are really substantially lower than they used to be as well -- as with many other things, computerization has made engineering/post product substantially easier and faster than used to be the case.
You're making a fundamental mistake here. On one hand, there's what they really care about. On the other, there's what they have at least some minimal excuse to take people to court over. The fact that something doesn't fall into the latter doesn't necessarily exclude it from the former.
Sorry, but this is pure BS. The reality is that lots of people can came music that's actually worth listening to. Addding things up in my head, so far this year I've heard at least seven local acts who are every bit as good as Gwen Stefani, and IMO, at least one of them is substantially better. Unless you happen to live near me, and go to listen to local bands, you've probably never heard of any of them though.
There are a lot worse examples than Gwen Stefani too. Face reality though: complete lack of musical talent hasn't stopped a lot of boy bands (to name just one class) from making tremendous amounts of money.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
This would only make sense if the music industry really wanted to serve their customers -- and based on their actions, that's quite apparently not the case at all.
First of all, I'm pretty sure that while the recording industry makes lots of noise about how much revenue they're losing due to P2P, they also have good enough financial analysts that when they're being honest with themselves, they realize that the real loss is essentially zero.
First of all, the ability to actually search and find what you want to a large extent makes the recording companies irrelevant. Until recently, bands fell into two discrete categories: those with recording contracts, and those without. Anybody without a contract remained essentially a nonentity. Many bands were quite willing to sign virtually any possible recording contract, because even if they realized it was horribly unfair, they still ended up far better off than without it.
Most of this derived from two things: distribution and promotion.
With P2P, both of those are largely nullified. The P2P network provides absolutely anybody with essentially instant, worldwide distribution. Likewise, searching means people can find what they really want instead of depending on the record company promotions to tell them what they want.
Now, it's true that the majority of what has been distributed over P2P networks has been material copyrighted by the record labels. Frankly, I doubt that's what they really cared about though -- what they cared about was the fact that if Napster (for example) had been allowed to survive for very long, there would have been a migration away from "their" music, and they would have faced utter irrelevancy.
For them, this isn't a matter of boosting sales by an extra few percent -- it's a matter of outright survival. They probably also realize that it's really a losing battle. As an industry they're currently providing no value, and despite attacks on their intelligence, they're smart enough to realize that if they provide no value, they'll die.
What they're doing right now is (I suspect) mostly a delaying tactic, trying to maintain some degree of relevance until they can figure out how to put themselves back onto the mainstream.
I suspect iTunes (and its ilk) will be a large part of that. Contrary to implication elsewhere, while iTunes is certainly a way for people to download music, it's most assuredly not a p2p network. iTunes is a perfectly average centralized network where you're downloading music from ITMS' servers. It's centralized and controlled in almost exactly the same way as traditional music publishing was. In fact, in the long run it probably creates a situation even MORE favorable to the recording industry.
With traditional brick and mortar distribution, the big distributors (Best Buy, Sam Goody's, etc.) had quite a bit of power over the recording companies. Most of this power derived from the fact that building thousands of record stores was expensive and difficult, so the supply of national distributors was fairly limited. The Internet and non-P2P record distribution like iTunes changes that: it takes virtually nothing to set up a reasonably usable international recording distribution network. ITMS is way out in front right now, but I'm pretty sure Apple realizes that there are thousands of other people with the capability and resources to put together a reasonably competitive offering in a matter of months.
This means ITMS has virtually not power when they bargain with the record labels. Previously the record labels probably had something like 80% control over the music stores. I'd guess with Yahoo! Music, ITMS, MP3.com, etc., they see a chance to have more like 95% control, and they like that idea a whole lot.
ITMS (for one) may seem a lot like Napster in a
What a waste -- I used up all my moderator points about 15 seconds before I saw this, but it's the funniest I've seen all day.
New idea for Slashdot: ability to "borrow" against future moderation points -- if you see something that really deserves moderation, you can do it, but you have to pay "interest" on what you use -- using one point ahead of time takes up two points (or whatever) when you next get them -- and of course there's a limit on how far in debt you can go as well.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
What percentage of cell phone conversations are intelligent in any case?
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.