Neither is Apple. What the heck are you talking about?
I'd disagree -- Apple is propped up by Microsoft in the form of Office for OS X. Office for OS X pretty clearly is not just a port of Office for Windows, which means it probably cost almost as much to develop as Office for Windows -- but its sales are almost certainly quite trivial by comparison.
Microsoft's SEC filings aren't detailed enough to say with certainty, but I'd venture to guess that Office for OS X has been a losing proposition for Microsoft from the beginning. In terms of current operating revenue vs. operating cost, it's probably breaking even and may even be somewhat profitable -- but there's probably no foreseeable possibility of its sales paying for its initial development.
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they wouldn't have been better off if they'd invested in Dell.
I'm guessing you're basing that on the statement elsethread about their relative performance over the past 5 years. This has an obvious problem: 5 years is not 8 years.
If you take a look at their performance over the last 8 years here you'll quickly find that they'd really be tremendously better off having invested in Dell eight years ago.
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It may sound arrogant, but it's entirely possible that Mr. Dell really had it right -- Apple's making 9.6% profit margins today, but certainly hasn't for that entire eight years. The real question isn't "how well is Apple doing right now?", but "would the stockholders be better off if they'd invested elsewhere?"
At the same time, the fact is that most stockholders are reasonably intelligent adults, and (IMO) it's perfectly fine that it's been left up to them to decide to keep their money there instead of investing elsewhere. If the investors had all agreed with Michael Dell, Apple would simply be gone -- or perhaps, like SGI, being de-listed for having too low of a stock price.
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Surely a 2d barcode would be better, or just use old tech mag swipe?
According to the State Department the chip will contain a complete electronic picture of the passport holder. Neither barcodes (even the 2D variety) nor mag stripes store information at high enough density to make this practical.
Fortunately, there is some middle ground here: smart cards that require direct electrical contact to read the data. This isn't an instant panacea by any means, but it certainly eliminates a lot of the most obvious problems in a hurry. As a bonus, smart cards designed to be secure have been widely deployed for quite a while now. Admittedly, "designed to be secure" doesn't necessarily mean they are secure -- but they do have had 10+ years of design, testing, vetting, and refinement behind them.
This is a decided contrast to the state department's situation. From the looks of things, they haven't even nailed down the details of the design yet, but the plan to have it fully deployed less than a year from now.
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Of course. I'm just amused that Microsoft has made "a sudden discovery!" that real OS designers have known about for an incredibly long time. In fact, OSes designed in C are actually a step back from some of the Mainframe OSes designed in languages such as ALGOL. The key was that C could give you maximum performance by letting you perform hacks no sane person would ever make. But it was fast, so people ran with it.
While I sympathize with your position, I don't think all your statements are particularly accurate. First of all, when UNIX was new, quite a few OSes were still written in assembly language, and computer time was still expensive enough that nearly everybody was quite concerned with efficiency. Even the systems written in higher level languages didn't necessarily use particularly clean languages -- BLISS, JOVIAL and PL/I virtually spring to mind as counterexamples.
Second, UNIX was originaly oriented far more toward being small and simple rather than attempting to be particularly fast. If (for example) you get a copy of Lion's book and read through the source to UNIX V6, you'll find lots of simplicity at the expense of efficiency. Admittedly, since then a lot of work has been put into improving performance, so the code in current systems has a lot more emphasis on efficiency, but that happened LONG after mainframe OSes written in things like ALGOL were mostly gone and forgotten.
At the same time, as I said, I am largely sympathetic with your basic position. It's really true that OSes written for big mainframes placed a much higher emphasis on reliability than currently seems to be the case almost anywhere. I can still remember sitting at a terminal and doing a quick check to find that the college's mainframe currently had between 300 and 350 people logged on, and it just kept on chugging -- and this on a machine with (IIRC) about an 8 or 10 MHz CPU and (in round numbers) one megabyte of RAM...
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As previously noted, largely derived from MULTICS. Admittedly, some of the derivation is by reversal -- i.e. attempting to do exactly the opposite of what MULTICS did. That was obviously true of the name, but only slightly less obviously of many other parts as well. The result is still surprisingly MULTICS-like in many respects.
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Better question: when's the last time anybody wrote an OS from scratch?
Minix and Linux
I'd have thought it was quite obvious that both were based pretty closely on UNIX -- which, of course, derives a lot from MULTICS. In fairness, MULTICS did have considerably more originality than most -- but an awful lot of its most original ideas have disppeared in the derivatives.
As far as how close a basis these formed: just to go back to one of the examples up the thread, certainly closer than relationship between Windows NT and OS/2 (not that that means much, since Windows NT is really much more a derivative of VMS than of OS/2).
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Come to think of it - has MS EVER written their own OS from scratch?
Better question: when's the last time anybody wrote an OS from scratch?
As far as I can see, the answer to that is really "never". Before there were OSes, there were collections of macros to act like device drivers and such. The first OSes were based on those, and added slightly more uniform interfaces and such.
Pretty much everything since can be traced back to something previous.
DOS - Borrowed from Tim Patterson's QDOS.
Windows - Shell extention to DOS
Xenix - AT&T/Berkley clone
OS/2 - Co-built with IBM
NT / XP / Vista - Built off of OS/2
DOS 1.0 was based on QDOS, but DOS 2.0 was essentially a complete rewrite that was really based much more closely on UNIX than on QDOS.
In fairness it should also be added that QDOS was based on (according to some, just a re-compile of) CP/M. Lest any CP/Mers get all holier-than-thou about it, in his original announcement letter about it to "Doctor Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia", Gary Kildall openly stated that CP/M was derived from DEC RT/11. I'll assume there aren't enough DECies left to bother debunking the notion that RT/11 was entirely original.
I'd say the others are much the same way: on one hand, MS contributed more originality than you imply, and on the other hand, others contributed less than you imply.
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There's another problem with general-purpose FPGAs.
(order of magnitude comparison only):
Athlon 64 4000 (from pricewatch): $330
Xilinx 2.4Million gate design (from digikey): $2100-$5000.
You haven't specified which FPGAs you're talking about, but at those prices, you should be getting more like 6 million gates or so (e.g. an XC2V6000 goes for about $4000). Perhaps you're looking at something like a Virtex-4 FX? If so, you should be aware that what you're looking at not only includes FPGA gates, but also includes a PowerPC core (or perhaps 2) as well.
The computing world would look a lot different if there were good $100 high-speed, high-capacity FPGAs. Now, I wouldn't argue with a good ASIC or highspeed DSP implementation for some algorithms...
It depends a bit on what you mean by high capacity and high speed. At around $100US, you can get a 1.5 million gate Spartan 3, or a somewhat smaller Virtex (which will generally run a bit faster).
These obviously aren't the biggest or fastest FPGAs available, but for the right kind of job, they'll still blow away a general purpose CPU pretty easily.
As far as ASICs vs. FPGAs goes, it's really not a contest: ASICs are fast, but have specific purposes. FPGAs are slower, but can be programmed. Given the idea originally stated in this thread, ASICs simply don't seem (to me) like contenders at all.
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What is the benefit to having a 3d~acellerator over having a dual~CPU system with one CPU dedicated to graphic processing?
That depends on what you mean by the "one CPU dedicated to graphic processing." If you mean something on the order of a second Pentium or Athlon that's dedicated to graphics processing, the advantage is tremendous: a typical current CPU can only do a few floating point operations in parallel, where a GPU has lots of pipes to handle multiple pixels at a time (or multiple vertexes at a time, depending on which part of the pipeline you're looking at), and each pipe (at least potentially) does vector processing to work on all four pixel components at once.
The result of all that is that the GPU has substantially higher overall floating point throughput than the CPU does.
If, OTOH, what you're suggesting is that the second CPU that's dedicated to graphics processing be optimized for that by having lots of floating point hardware, a much larger number of parallel pipelines to process multiple pixels at once, etc., then what you're suggesting really comes down to pretty close what we have right now, but re-naming the "GPU" as "secondary CPU".
In fairness, there are some differences even now. First of all, you program the GPU using a slightly different programming language that includes primitives for working on things like 3- and 4-element vectors, and for doing the kinds of things you typically have to do with them (e.g. compute normals) that require a series of instructions on a normal CPU.
The other obvious difference is that the GPU normally has its own memory, mostly for the sake of improved bandwidth. You could more or less homogenize the memory, using (for example) half a dozen or so DDR channels to your main memory, and have all the processors share them symmetrically -- but that imposes some extra difficulties on design and would probably drive the price up considerably (or limit the overall design).
In particular, the main memory bus normally allows you to plug in varying numbers of varying sizes of memory modules, where the GPU typically has a specific number of modules of known sizes. This makes it much easier to design bus drivers in the GPU because the bus loading is known at design time. That's a large part of the reason motherboards are still transitioning to DDR 2 memory while high-end graphics cards are now univerally using GDDR 3.
The other problem with that would be that it would then require essentially everybody to pay (most of) the price of a high-end graphics system whether they wanted it or not. Given the number of machines sold with (for example) Intel Integrated Graphics, it's pretty clear that most people are willing to sacrifice performance for lower price.
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This probably won't be a popular comment, but I think Mac OS will eventually be bigger on the desktop than Linux.
IMO, about the only part of that that's open to question is the "eventually". I suspect that right now there are substantially more desktop users running OS X than Linux.
Granted, it's difficult to tell how many people use what OSes in what situations. It's even more difficult with Linux than most, since sales numbers mean nearly nothing. That leaves more or less apocryphal evidence as about all that's really available, but certainly just keeping my eyes open when I go into various offices and such, I see people running OS X considerably more often than I see them running Linux.
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Not a word on user interfaces in the article itself.
While it's true that the summary mis-characterizes the article as being about the UI when it's really about the whole OS, it's also true that the article contains a fair amount that really is related to the UI -- specifically the section on common controls, which are much of what comprise the UI.
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Wouldn't this also make it easier for predators to find them? How sensitive are marine predators to heat?
In theory yes. In reality, it's probably not enough to make any noticeable difference. The problem is that the volume of water grows cubicly with distance from the fish. A calorie is also quite a small unit of energy -- only enough to raise the temperature of one gram of (distilled) water one degree C (and ocean water is denser than distilled water, so it most likely has a higher specific heat). To make a long story short, even if the fish burns a million calories a day, by the time you get close enough for the temperature to have been raised even a significant fraction of a degree, the fish is not only visible, but generally pretty easy to touch.
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The performance of GPU's seem to grow faster than those of CPU's. I remember someone had proposed to use GPU's to proces generic data. It would be 12 times faster than a CPU.
Go here for several examples of this -- far from simply having been proposed, it's been done a fair number of times.
The thing to keep in mind with this is that while the GPU has a lot of bandwidth and throughput, most of that is due to a high degree of parallelism. Obviously 1 GHz hasn't been a major milestone for CPUs for quite a while, but CPUs are only recently starting to do multi-core processing, while GPUs have been doing fairly seriously parallel processing for quite a while.
Along with that, the GPU has a major advantage for some tasks in having hardware support for some relatively complex operations that require a fair amount of programming on the CPU (e.g. multiplying, inverting, etc., small vectors, typically has a single instruction to find Euclidean distance between two 3D points, etc.)
That means the GPU can be quite a bit faster for some things, but it's a long ways from a panacea -- you can get spectacular results applying a single mathematical transformation to a large matrix, but if you have a process that's mostly serial in nature, it'll probably be substantially slower than on the CPU.
Along with that, development for the GPU is generally somewhat difficult compared to development on the CPU. Writing the code itself isn't too bad, as there are decent IDEs (e.g ATI's RenderMonkey) but you're working in a strange (though somewhat C-like) language. Much worse is essentially a complete lack of debugging support. Along with that, you have to take the target GPU into account in the code (to some extent). I just got a call in the middle of a meeting this morning from one of my co-workers, pointing out that some of my code works perfectly on my own machine, but not at all on any his. I haven't had a chance to figure out what's wrong yet, but I'm betting it stems from the difference in graphics controllers (my machine has an nVidia board but his has Intel "Extreme" (ly slow) graphics).
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No more than your comment. In fact, that's my point. You make ASSumptions that you have no basis to make, and then you draw conslusions from them. You'd be much safer assuming that publishers know more about publishing than you do, than assuming the opposite. But since you're a programmer, you only think in terms of strict logic, and the logic of this doesn't appeal to you. However, that is just because your premises are wrong.
What you're saying would undoubtedly be true of the average programmer, who typically knows little or nothing of publishing. That's not even close to true in my case, however. First of all, while I do programming to support what we publish, the company I work for is fundamentally a publishing house (admittedly, a small one, but most of what we do is clearly publishing nonetheless).
Second, I was employee number three at this particular company and I've been here for just under eleven years now -- and especially back when we were smaller, I was involved in every aspect of the publishing process from sales out through (literally) driving like a madman to FedEx to get a delivery out the door on time.
To make a long story short, I know the publishing business inside and out, and have been intimately involved in all its aspects. When you get right down to it, the number of executives at most of the bigger publishers who can honestly claim the same is exceedingly small -- vanishingly so, truth be said.
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I wonder how long it will be before the population of/. realizes that the people running $industry know more about what is good and bad for $industry than they do.
Objection your honor -- assumes facts not in evidence.
Sustained!
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Your comment implies that publishers have realized the good that libraries do for them.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply anything of the sort. Call me foolish if you will (I probably merit it) but, like any software developer, even though I often sound somewhat cynical, I have an incurable streak of optimism. I really do think of their gaining some perspective as a matter of time rather than chance, even though they've certainly managed to remain clueless long enough that if I was more reasonable, I'd probably realize the chances of their ever learning is minimal.
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I once almost collided with Pat Schroeder crossing the street in downtown Denver. Maybe I should have (we were both on foot, btw).
The idea of colliding with Pat Scrhoeder suddenly made me realize that maybe there really IS a good reason for huge SUVs after all.
I'm surprised Pat Schroeder is involved with or leading the charge in attempts to throttle Google. She offers tepid reasoning (probably not enough prep time spent with handlers)
I find this about as surprising as the sun coming up in the morning. Pat's primary use in life (IMO) has always been that her full and undying support has been available to the highest bidder, so it's easy to for onlookers to see where the money is.
Of course having said that I'll probably be banned from the People's Republic of Boulder for a while, but such is life sometimes...:-)
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I wonder how long it will be before the publishers realize that Google (like paper libraries before them) are really doing the publishers a favor. I've bought a whole lot of books in my life, and I'd guess about half of them I read in whole or in part at a library before I bought them.
Books are a bit like software, and the try before you buy model works well. I have a hard time imagining most people deciding to read the entirety of a long book on their computer, even if it's available for free. I can imagine quite a few people looking at a new book online and using that as the basis for choosing to buy the book if they're going to read it though.
Fortunately, at least a few companies display a bit of understanding. The people initiating these lawsuits should read the introduction Here, and then check Baen's profits, and note that they're still in business and doing reasonably well, thank you very much.
Of course, everybody else should go there simply to check out some books for free, and (perhaps) to support Baen Books for being decent people and doing good things.
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No, I'm not. The current policy (e.g. in the US) allows patents on software. You're advocating a change in that policy. Anytime a change in policy is advocated, the people advocating that change have the burden of proving that the change is necessary, good, etc.
IMO, you're the one who's distorted the facts somewhat. You've acted as if at one time computer software was universally legally excluded as patentable subject matter, and then the laws were changed to allow it. At least in the countries of which I'm aware, this simply is not the case -- there never was a time that laws said software wasn't patentable subject matter. There was simply a time at which software didn't exist, and the laws didn't mention it at all. Most patent offices originally (and wrongly, IMO) interpeted the exclusion of mathematical formulae from patentable subject matter as covering software as well. A program is not a mathematical formula, and in the end bears only a passing resemblance to one. The formula is a passive thing, where the program is an active one.
[...] and rather distorting the facts: You may only ever have seen exceptionally weak arguments, but that is not because only exceptionally weak arguments have ever been deployed - quite the converse is true*.
I went through most of the links you cited. Some of them are only links to pages of other links, many of which seem unrelated to the question at hand, and I didn't attempt to follow all the links to find those you might have considered relevant. Those links that went directly to an actual article I did read though. These seem to contain exactly the kinds of arguments I've seen for years.
The first real link (Kahin's) only sort of contained a single argument, that patents are a barrier to entry. This seems to ignore the fact that since 1980 (or so) when software patents first started to be allowed in the US, the number of entries into the software business, far from being reduced, has grown tremendously. The bottom line is that while the argument might sound reasonable enough on its face, the facts just don't support it at all -- quite the opposite.
The second (Phalin's) is just as wrong -- it attempts to treat software as simple writing, like books, plays, etc. This is wrong for a simple reason: as mentioned above, software is NOT like a book, a song, etc. at all. A book is published to be read, a song to be listened to, and so on. By contrast, the average user of a computer program never has and never will read the source (or executable) code at all.
Software is a way of taking a general-purpose machine, and specializing that machine to a specific purpose. Its essence is action. This is wholly different from a book, the essence of which is passive.
Much as I hate to disagree with somebody as distinguished as Knuth, in this case I'm forced to do so. His agrument is similar to Kahin's, and equally disproven by the level of activity and innovation in software for the last 25 years. His citations seem to display a decided lack of knowledge about patents in any case, such as apparently assuming that anybody's ever considered issuing patents that would last for millenia rather than a couple of decades (i.e. long enough for the Pythagorean theorem to still be covered by anything).
Stiglitz really says very little specific to software patents at all. He more or less implies that they lead to lack of innovation -- obviously ignoring reality when he finds it inconvenient. He attempts to imply that the costs of IP protection are higher than the benefits -- but fails to quantify either. When an economists fails to quantify costs and benefits in a cost vs. benefit analysis, one of two things has happened. The first possibility is that he hasn't really researched the situation at hand, and he's just doing handwaving. The second is that he's done the research, but he's ignoring it because it
Will current posters please instead offer suggestions for how to get the Government to pay attention instead of whining?
Sure. Start by coming up with a really solid reason the government officials should believe what you believe, and finish by making sure the governemnt officials know there are a lot of people who agree with you. As a bonus, make it apparent that most (if not all) of those people are (at least potential) voters.
It really is that simple in most cases. The problem so far has been that nearly every argument against (for one example) patents applying to software has been exceptionally weak.
You have to be prepared to deal with issues like why expressing a particular piece of logic in C or Ada doesn't deserve patent protection, while expressing the same logic in Verilog or VHDL, which look identical to a non-programmer should deserve that protection. Likewise, why a device that fits the description in a patent claim should not be protected if the implementation happens to be (even in part) carried out with an embedded processor with embedded code, even though it's not at all apparent to the outside world that there's any software involved at all.
Along with that, you're going to have to define your terms so the distinction you're trying to make is sensible to somebody who neither knows nor wants to learn the details of the issue at hand.
At least in the US, you also have to deal with the fact that patents on inventions are enshrined in the constitution, so you'll have to figure out whether you want to revise the constitution itself, or only the patent laws that are written under that constitution. Again, when/if you do that, you'll have to make your decisions and arguments sensible to relatively average Joes on the street, not just to other programmers.
In the end, laws need to make clear-cut distinctions between what is allowed and what isn't. The reasons for those distinctions generally need to be seen not only by specialists, but by by the public at large, as meaningful and sensible. If that is not the case, even if a law is passed, changed, etc., it will almost certainly be ignored anyway.
So far, what I've seen indicates that the major problem with software patents isn't that they're allowed -- it's that for a long time they were NOT allowed. The problem here is that the patent offices of the world tend to treat previous patents (and applications) as their primary source of information about existing art. Since (for a long time) patents on software weren't allowed, nobody applied for them, so the patent office lacks a base of knowledge about what's really new and what's not.
Another factor tends to apply to patents in general, not just software patents -- I think there's a general belief that the tendency should be to assume something is not not patentable, and require the applicant to prove that it is original. At least in the US, the law more or less reverses that though, saying the patent shall be issued unless the patent office can prove that it's not patentable.
There are some other details along with that (e.g. the standard of evidence for getting a patent issued is much lower than for proving it's invalid) but it seems to me that when you get down to it, the problems we see are far less with software patents in general than with the way they've been implemented, that has led to the patent offices of the world believing, in essence, that any example of having an IQ higher than the average dog qualifies as novel and brilliant.
At least in my opinion, this is where the real changes need to take place. As it happens, along with making more sense, at least to me, these are also changes that are likely to be much easier to make. Most lawmakers are also lawyers, and doing something like adjusting the standard of evidence one step higher in a particular area is something with which they're quite comfortable. My guess is that they're likely to see s
If you are developing your own cyberattack techniques, here's your chance to test them while "hiding in plain sight".
Doubtful. Though it's not explicitly stated in the original article, for a test like this to be at all meaningful, the attackers and attackees will compare notes very carefully at the end of the test to help the attackees harden their servers against whatever attacks worked. Any other attacks during the test are likely to be examined in even more detail, by more skilled specialists, than usual.
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This is the perfect smokescreen for some 'renegade' Chinese to do some real damage.
Nonsense. Next time you might try RTFA instead of hurrying so much to get in an early post. If you'd read it you'd realize that the intent is to set up mirrors of the real machines, and the scheduled attacks will be against the mirrors. Any attack against the real machine will look just like it always would.
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Slashdot Mirror
I'd disagree -- Apple is propped up by Microsoft in the form of Office for OS X. Office for OS X pretty clearly is not just a port of Office for Windows, which means it probably cost almost as much to develop as Office for Windows -- but its sales are almost certainly quite trivial by comparison.
Microsoft's SEC filings aren't detailed enough to say with certainty, but I'd venture to guess that Office for OS X has been a losing proposition for Microsoft from the beginning. In terms of current operating revenue vs. operating cost, it's probably breaking even and may even be somewhat profitable -- but there's probably no foreseeable possibility of its sales paying for its initial development.
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I'm guessing you're basing that on the statement elsethread about their relative performance over the past 5 years. This has an obvious problem: 5 years is not 8 years.
If you take a look at their performance over the last 8 years here you'll quickly find that they'd really be tremendously better off having invested in Dell eight years ago.
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At the same time, the fact is that most stockholders are reasonably intelligent adults, and (IMO) it's perfectly fine that it's been left up to them to decide to keep their money there instead of investing elsewhere. If the investors had all agreed with Michael Dell, Apple would simply be gone -- or perhaps, like SGI, being de-listed for having too low of a stock price.
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According to the State Department the chip will contain a complete electronic picture of the passport holder. Neither barcodes (even the 2D variety) nor mag stripes store information at high enough density to make this practical.
Fortunately, there is some middle ground here: smart cards that require direct electrical contact to read the data. This isn't an instant panacea by any means, but it certainly eliminates a lot of the most obvious problems in a hurry. As a bonus, smart cards designed to be secure have been widely deployed for quite a while now. Admittedly, "designed to be secure" doesn't necessarily mean they are secure -- but they do have had 10+ years of design, testing, vetting, and refinement behind them.
This is a decided contrast to the state department's situation. From the looks of things, they haven't even nailed down the details of the design yet, but the plan to have it fully deployed less than a year from now.
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While I sympathize with your position, I don't think all your statements are particularly accurate. First of all, when UNIX was new, quite a few OSes were still written in assembly language, and computer time was still expensive enough that nearly everybody was quite concerned with efficiency. Even the systems written in higher level languages didn't necessarily use particularly clean languages -- BLISS, JOVIAL and PL/I virtually spring to mind as counterexamples.
Second, UNIX was originaly oriented far more toward being small and simple rather than attempting to be particularly fast. If (for example) you get a copy of Lion's book and read through the source to UNIX V6, you'll find lots of simplicity at the expense of efficiency. Admittedly, since then a lot of work has been put into improving performance, so the code in current systems has a lot more emphasis on efficiency, but that happened LONG after mainframe OSes written in things like ALGOL were mostly gone and forgotten.
At the same time, as I said, I am largely sympathetic with your basic position. It's really true that OSes written for big mainframes placed a much higher emphasis on reliability than currently seems to be the case almost anywhere. I can still remember sitting at a terminal and doing a quick check to find that the college's mainframe currently had between 300 and 350 people logged on, and it just kept on chugging -- and this on a machine with (IIRC) about an 8 or 10 MHz CPU and (in round numbers) one megabyte of RAM...
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As previously noted, largely derived from MULTICS. Admittedly, some of the derivation is by reversal -- i.e. attempting to do exactly the opposite of what MULTICS did. That was obviously true of the name, but only slightly less obviously of many other parts as well. The result is still surprisingly MULTICS-like in many respects.
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I'd have thought it was quite obvious that both were based pretty closely on UNIX -- which, of course, derives a lot from MULTICS. In fairness, MULTICS did have considerably more originality than most -- but an awful lot of its most original ideas have disppeared in the derivatives.
As far as how close a basis these formed: just to go back to one of the examples up the thread, certainly closer than relationship between Windows NT and OS/2 (not that that means much, since Windows NT is really much more a derivative of VMS than of OS/2).
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Better question: when's the last time anybody wrote an OS from scratch?
As far as I can see, the answer to that is really "never". Before there were OSes, there were collections of macros to act like device drivers and such. The first OSes were based on those, and added slightly more uniform interfaces and such.
Pretty much everything since can be traced back to something previous.
DOS 1.0 was based on QDOS, but DOS 2.0 was essentially a complete rewrite that was really based much more closely on UNIX than on QDOS.
In fairness it should also be added that QDOS was based on (according to some, just a re-compile of) CP/M. Lest any CP/Mers get all holier-than-thou about it, in his original announcement letter about it to "Doctor Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia", Gary Kildall openly stated that CP/M was derived from DEC RT/11. I'll assume there aren't enough DECies left to bother debunking the notion that RT/11 was entirely original.
I'd say the others are much the same way: on one hand, MS contributed more originality than you imply, and on the other hand, others contributed less than you imply.
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You haven't specified which FPGAs you're talking about, but at those prices, you should be getting more like 6 million gates or so (e.g. an XC2V6000 goes for about $4000). Perhaps you're looking at something like a Virtex-4 FX? If so, you should be aware that what you're looking at not only includes FPGA gates, but also includes a PowerPC core (or perhaps 2) as well.
It depends a bit on what you mean by high capacity and high speed. At around $100US, you can get a 1.5 million gate Spartan 3, or a somewhat smaller Virtex (which will generally run a bit faster).
These obviously aren't the biggest or fastest FPGAs available, but for the right kind of job, they'll still blow away a general purpose CPU pretty easily.
As far as ASICs vs. FPGAs goes, it's really not a contest: ASICs are fast, but have specific purposes. FPGAs are slower, but can be programmed. Given the idea originally stated in this thread, ASICs simply don't seem (to me) like contenders at all.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
That depends on what you mean by the "one CPU dedicated to graphic processing." If you mean something on the order of a second Pentium or Athlon that's dedicated to graphics processing, the advantage is tremendous: a typical current CPU can only do a few floating point operations in parallel, where a GPU has lots of pipes to handle multiple pixels at a time (or multiple vertexes at a time, depending on which part of the pipeline you're looking at), and each pipe (at least potentially) does vector processing to work on all four pixel components at once.
The result of all that is that the GPU has substantially higher overall floating point throughput than the CPU does.
If, OTOH, what you're suggesting is that the second CPU that's dedicated to graphics processing be optimized for that by having lots of floating point hardware, a much larger number of parallel pipelines to process multiple pixels at once, etc., then what you're suggesting really comes down to pretty close what we have right now, but re-naming the "GPU" as "secondary CPU".
In fairness, there are some differences even now. First of all, you program the GPU using a slightly different programming language that includes primitives for working on things like 3- and 4-element vectors, and for doing the kinds of things you typically have to do with them (e.g. compute normals) that require a series of instructions on a normal CPU.
The other obvious difference is that the GPU normally has its own memory, mostly for the sake of improved bandwidth. You could more or less homogenize the memory, using (for example) half a dozen or so DDR channels to your main memory, and have all the processors share them symmetrically -- but that imposes some extra difficulties on design and would probably drive the price up considerably (or limit the overall design).
In particular, the main memory bus normally allows you to plug in varying numbers of varying sizes of memory modules, where the GPU typically has a specific number of modules of known sizes. This makes it much easier to design bus drivers in the GPU because the bus loading is known at design time. That's a large part of the reason motherboards are still transitioning to DDR 2 memory while high-end graphics cards are now univerally using GDDR 3.
The other problem with that would be that it would then require essentially everybody to pay (most of) the price of a high-end graphics system whether they wanted it or not. Given the number of machines sold with (for example) Intel Integrated Graphics, it's pretty clear that most people are willing to sacrifice performance for lower price.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
IMO, about the only part of that that's open to question is the "eventually". I suspect that right now there are substantially more desktop users running OS X than Linux.
Granted, it's difficult to tell how many people use what OSes in what situations. It's even more difficult with Linux than most, since sales numbers mean nearly nothing. That leaves more or less apocryphal evidence as about all that's really available, but certainly just keeping my eyes open when I go into various offices and such, I see people running OS X considerably more often than I see them running Linux.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
While it's true that the summary mis-characterizes the article as being about the UI when it's really about the whole OS, it's also true that the article contains a fair amount that really is related to the UI -- specifically the section on common controls, which are much of what comprise the UI.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
In theory yes. In reality, it's probably not enough to make any noticeable difference. The problem is that the volume of water grows cubicly with distance from the fish. A calorie is also quite a small unit of energy -- only enough to raise the temperature of one gram of (distilled) water one degree C (and ocean water is denser than distilled water, so it most likely has a higher specific heat). To make a long story short, even if the fish burns a million calories a day, by the time you get close enough for the temperature to have been raised even a significant fraction of a degree, the fish is not only visible, but generally pretty easy to touch.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
According to most of the reviews, nVidia's competitive model is the 6800GT -- which is now a generation out of date.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Go here for several examples of this -- far from simply having been proposed, it's been done a fair number of times.
The thing to keep in mind with this is that while the GPU has a lot of bandwidth and throughput, most of that is due to a high degree of parallelism. Obviously 1 GHz hasn't been a major milestone for CPUs for quite a while, but CPUs are only recently starting to do multi-core processing, while GPUs have been doing fairly seriously parallel processing for quite a while.
Along with that, the GPU has a major advantage for some tasks in having hardware support for some relatively complex operations that require a fair amount of programming on the CPU (e.g. multiplying, inverting, etc., small vectors, typically has a single instruction to find Euclidean distance between two 3D points, etc.)
That means the GPU can be quite a bit faster for some things, but it's a long ways from a panacea -- you can get spectacular results applying a single mathematical transformation to a large matrix, but if you have a process that's mostly serial in nature, it'll probably be substantially slower than on the CPU.
Along with that, development for the GPU is generally somewhat difficult compared to development on the CPU. Writing the code itself isn't too bad, as there are decent IDEs (e.g ATI's RenderMonkey) but you're working in a strange (though somewhat C-like) language. Much worse is essentially a complete lack of debugging support. Along with that, you have to take the target GPU into account in the code (to some extent). I just got a call in the middle of a meeting this morning from one of my co-workers, pointing out that some of my code works perfectly on my own machine, but not at all on any his. I haven't had a chance to figure out what's wrong yet, but I'm betting it stems from the difference in graphics controllers (my machine has an nVidia board but his has Intel "Extreme" (ly slow) graphics).
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
What you're saying would undoubtedly be true of the average programmer, who typically knows little or nothing of publishing. That's not even close to true in my case, however. First of all, while I do programming to support what we publish, the company I work for is fundamentally a publishing house (admittedly, a small one, but most of what we do is clearly publishing nonetheless).
Second, I was employee number three at this particular company and I've been here for just under eleven years now -- and especially back when we were smaller, I was involved in every aspect of the publishing process from sales out through (literally) driving like a madman to FedEx to get a delivery out the door on time.
To make a long story short, I know the publishing business inside and out, and have been intimately involved in all its aspects. When you get right down to it, the number of executives at most of the bigger publishers who can honestly claim the same is exceedingly small -- vanishingly so, truth be said.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Objection your honor -- assumes facts not in evidence.
Sustained!
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply anything of the sort. Call me foolish if you will (I probably merit it) but, like any software developer, even though I often sound somewhat cynical, I have an incurable streak of optimism. I really do think of their gaining some perspective as a matter of time rather than chance, even though they've certainly managed to remain clueless long enough that if I was more reasonable, I'd probably realize the chances of their ever learning is minimal.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The idea of colliding with Pat Scrhoeder suddenly made me realize that maybe there really IS a good reason for huge SUVs after all.
I find this about as surprising as the sun coming up in the morning. Pat's primary use in life (IMO) has always been that her full and undying support has been available to the highest bidder, so it's easy to for onlookers to see where the money is.
Of course having said that I'll probably be banned from the People's Republic of Boulder for a while, but such is life sometimes... :-)
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Books are a bit like software, and the try before you buy model works well. I have a hard time imagining most people deciding to read the entirety of a long book on their computer, even if it's available for free. I can imagine quite a few people looking at a new book online and using that as the basis for choosing to buy the book if they're going to read it though.
Fortunately, at least a few companies display a bit of understanding. The people initiating these lawsuits should read the introduction Here, and then check Baen's profits, and note that they're still in business and doing reasonably well, thank you very much.
Of course, everybody else should go there simply to check out some books for free, and (perhaps) to support Baen Books for being decent people and doing good things.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
No, I'm not. The current policy (e.g. in the US) allows patents on software. You're advocating a change in that policy. Anytime a change in policy is advocated, the people advocating that change have the burden of proving that the change is necessary, good, etc.
IMO, you're the one who's distorted the facts somewhat. You've acted as if at one time computer software was universally legally excluded as patentable subject matter, and then the laws were changed to allow it. At least in the countries of which I'm aware, this simply is not the case -- there never was a time that laws said software wasn't patentable subject matter. There was simply a time at which software didn't exist, and the laws didn't mention it at all. Most patent offices originally (and wrongly, IMO) interpeted the exclusion of mathematical formulae from patentable subject matter as covering software as well. A program is not a mathematical formula, and in the end bears only a passing resemblance to one. The formula is a passive thing, where the program is an active one.
I went through most of the links you cited. Some of them are only links to pages of other links, many of which seem unrelated to the question at hand, and I didn't attempt to follow all the links to find those you might have considered relevant. Those links that went directly to an actual article I did read though. These seem to contain exactly the kinds of arguments I've seen for years.
The first real link (Kahin's) only sort of contained a single argument, that patents are a barrier to entry. This seems to ignore the fact that since 1980 (or so) when software patents first started to be allowed in the US, the number of entries into the software business, far from being reduced, has grown tremendously. The bottom line is that while the argument might sound reasonable enough on its face, the facts just don't support it at all -- quite the opposite.
The second (Phalin's) is just as wrong -- it attempts to treat software as simple writing, like books, plays, etc. This is wrong for a simple reason: as mentioned above, software is NOT like a book, a song, etc. at all. A book is published to be read, a song to be listened to, and so on. By contrast, the average user of a computer program never has and never will read the source (or executable) code at all.
Software is a way of taking a general-purpose machine, and specializing that machine to a specific purpose. Its essence is action. This is wholly different from a book, the essence of which is passive.
Much as I hate to disagree with somebody as distinguished as Knuth, in this case I'm forced to do so. His agrument is similar to Kahin's, and equally disproven by the level of activity and innovation in software for the last 25 years. His citations seem to display a decided lack of knowledge about patents in any case, such as apparently assuming that anybody's ever considered issuing patents that would last for millenia rather than a couple of decades (i.e. long enough for the Pythagorean theorem to still be covered by anything).
Stiglitz really says very little specific to software patents at all. He more or less implies that they lead to lack of innovation -- obviously ignoring reality when he finds it inconvenient. He attempts to imply that the costs of IP protection are higher than the benefits -- but fails to quantify either. When an economists fails to quantify costs and benefits in a cost vs. benefit analysis, one of two things has happened. The first possibility is that he hasn't really researched the situation at hand, and he's just doing handwaving. The second is that he's done the research, but he's ignoring it because it
Sure. Start by coming up with a really solid reason the government officials should believe what you believe, and finish by making sure the governemnt officials know there are a lot of people who agree with you. As a bonus, make it apparent that most (if not all) of those people are (at least potential) voters.
It really is that simple in most cases. The problem so far has been that nearly every argument against (for one example) patents applying to software has been exceptionally weak.
You have to be prepared to deal with issues like why expressing a particular piece of logic in C or Ada doesn't deserve patent protection, while expressing the same logic in Verilog or VHDL, which look identical to a non-programmer should deserve that protection. Likewise, why a device that fits the description in a patent claim should not be protected if the implementation happens to be (even in part) carried out with an embedded processor with embedded code, even though it's not at all apparent to the outside world that there's any software involved at all.
Along with that, you're going to have to define your terms so the distinction you're trying to make is sensible to somebody who neither knows nor wants to learn the details of the issue at hand.
At least in the US, you also have to deal with the fact that patents on inventions are enshrined in the constitution, so you'll have to figure out whether you want to revise the constitution itself, or only the patent laws that are written under that constitution. Again, when/if you do that, you'll have to make your decisions and arguments sensible to relatively average Joes on the street, not just to other programmers.
In the end, laws need to make clear-cut distinctions between what is allowed and what isn't. The reasons for those distinctions generally need to be seen not only by specialists, but by by the public at large, as meaningful and sensible. If that is not the case, even if a law is passed, changed, etc., it will almost certainly be ignored anyway.
So far, what I've seen indicates that the major problem with software patents isn't that they're allowed -- it's that for a long time they were NOT allowed. The problem here is that the patent offices of the world tend to treat previous patents (and applications) as their primary source of information about existing art. Since (for a long time) patents on software weren't allowed, nobody applied for them, so the patent office lacks a base of knowledge about what's really new and what's not.
Another factor tends to apply to patents in general, not just software patents -- I think there's a general belief that the tendency should be to assume something is not not patentable, and require the applicant to prove that it is original. At least in the US, the law more or less reverses that though, saying the patent shall be issued unless the patent office can prove that it's not patentable.
There are some other details along with that (e.g. the standard of evidence for getting a patent issued is much lower than for proving it's invalid) but it seems to me that when you get down to it, the problems we see are far less with software patents in general than with the way they've been implemented, that has led to the patent offices of the world believing, in essence, that any example of having an IQ higher than the average dog qualifies as novel and brilliant.
At least in my opinion, this is where the real changes need to take place. As it happens, along with making more sense, at least to me, these are also changes that are likely to be much easier to make. Most lawmakers are also lawyers, and doing something like adjusting the standard of evidence one step higher in a particular area is something with which they're quite comfortable. My guess is that they're likely to see s
Nothing in "100" tells you it has more than one significant digit, so it would be just about anything above 50%.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Doubtful. Though it's not explicitly stated in the original article, for a test like this to be at all meaningful, the attackers and attackees will compare notes very carefully at the end of the test to help the attackees harden their servers against whatever attacks worked. Any other attacks during the test are likely to be examined in even more detail, by more skilled specialists, than usual.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Nonsense. Next time you might try RTFA instead of hurrying so much to get in an early post. If you'd read it you'd realize that the intent is to set up mirrors of the real machines, and the scheduled attacks will be against the mirrors. Any attack against the real machine will look just like it always would.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.