Perhaps there needs to be an OS implementation of workqueues (not the kernel kind), where you can queue up n jobs, and the kernel will spawn as many threads as is "ideal", and run the jobs in those threads, one by one.
I was under the impression that a processor did this now, by itself. If not, I think personally there should be some sort of processor section, at least in multi-core systems, that makes these decisions. Why should applications even need to do any types of negotiation to find out what sort of processor they are dealing with. Perhaps in the future we will see processors that do this, get data in lumps, and based on their personal architecture / configuration decide what the best way to deal with this data and get it through the stages is. Lets just make that die 10% fatter and implement your work queues onto the chip itself. Arent they trying to do something sorta like this with NCQ and SATA hard drives? Imagine the Plinko board on The Price Is Right. the last 25% of the board (the EBD) could be equipped with gates, that according to current core / threads bings incoming jobs to a less heavily burdened core? Or, maybe in the interest of complete simplicity, let's say every newly created thread runs on the +1th core, like app A says "make 50 threads" and processor says "ok, will do, core1, heres thread1, core2 heres thread2, core3 heres thread3, oops, out of cores, ok back to you, core1, heres thread4...
Or, how about doing something like having the application use the SPD values to adjust it's thread creation techniques from conservative to aggressive based on cores, architecture, stage count..etc.
Was anybody hurt while you were all stumbling over yourselves to post something about the "640k should be enough for anybody.." line?
And please, immidiatly dissasociate "core count" from "clock speed" in your minds. Sure, software that takes advantage of lots of cores will come around sooner or later, but don't forget, we haven't even properly taken advantage of 2 cores / processors yet with 80% of current software, while dual processor machines have been around now for years. Creating an application that takes advantage of more cores requires being written for THAT MANY CORES to begin with, or at least patched to do the same. Maybe I'm slightly incorrect on that, but at least I can guarantee you it's not as easy as ratcheting up clock speed.
Funny, but I seem to remember alot of comments emerging from Slashdot about it being Microsoft's fault whenever there is anything like this targeted at IE.
The MS bashing machine runs Linux around here, and it would seem it's been added to crontab on a 10 second cycle.
Rather than cry about whats not going to work or what will work, if you meet the conditions of a.) Being a webmaster / designer and b.) Being at all responsible, then you should probably go download the beta on your testing platform (you have one of those riiiight???) and make sure your site isn't going to break. The whole argument is moot when you can negate the badness with 60 seconds of effort.
Oh, and to appease the "anti-trust" conspiracy theorists, some of which seem to be responsible for the submission of articles here of late, chances are 99% that this push WON'T affect anybody not currently using Internet Explorer 6. In which case, it counts as a program UPDATE and not some sort of forcible takeover of the users default browser.
You'd have to make it randomize a game of poker, while getting rich and sueing the MPAA. Oh, and it would have to run Linux as well. Oh, and a few mislabeled facts about Vista thrown in for assurance.
This is just another attempt by the powers that be to aliviate yet one more thing that parents should be responsible for and lay it on technology. While I do agree that it should be illigal for sombody to knowingly meta-tag spam a search engine, I think people are thinking about it the wrong way.
A website that sells tools is not going to create a "Blowjob saw" to get around having the word "blowjob" in their meta tags to fluff their page ranking. Same thing with porn sites that currently use tags like "barbie dolls". I seriously don't think that porn can evolve enough, nor would it, to incorporate enough "normal sounding things" in order to evade a law suit. Sure, a few sites might encorporate the next biggest thing as being "pokemoning" but I don't think that they would do what would be nessesary to avoid the law and incorporate them ALL, as that is what would be nessesary to generate the hits, pump the page rank, inflate the "relevancy" numbers or anything else they REALLY do it for. Trust me, their goal ISN'T to lure your 12 year old daughter to their site to spend money. It's to lure 50,000 12 year old girls to load their intro page.
"I think I'm having an attack of Vujaday! It's the feeling that none of this has ever happened before!" -George Carlin
Seriously though, it's like that annoying stuff networks do on series shows, IE Lost. The first 10 minutes of the show is about what happened last week, then the last 10 minutes are whats going to happen next week. An hour long show only has about 25-30 minutes of content you haven't seen twice or haven't been prepped for already. And, as if seeing it in triplicate isn't enough, at least once per season, they will not only devote the first and last parts, but the ENTIRE show to a recap. This story reeks of (looming deep voice:)"Last week, on...SLASHDOT..."
Would sombody please help this guy out already and code a small trojan that links up to bitorrent and downloads a random movie? There's your reasonable doubt right there. "Maybe it was that virus thats goin around. Prove I did it intentionally." And, as I've stated many, many times in any / all of these types of discussions, I fully agree with the argument against lumping of downloading material with theft. If sombody steals your car, you come outside in the morning, and it's just fucking gone. Thats theft. If you are a record label exec and sombody downloads a song, does that mean that the artist now has to go back in the studio, record it again, edit it again, send it to the presses again? Ship it to stores again? not even that? you mean it actually doesn't affect them at all? Jesus Harold Christ then whats all the fuss about? OH! you mean "I" didn't give you money. Hm. Prove I would have anyway. Help me to understand how you are managing to predict that I would have purchased something if I could not have downloaded it. Bring that same crystal ball into court please, so everybody can take a look.
It would be wonderful if anti-virus / rootkit / malware companies were in fact pro-consumer, but sadly, they are really all pro themselves / bottom line / corporation / shareholders. I don't find it strange at all that one company might accuse another of not being able to remove malware.
I remember having a fight on a CentOS 4 box because the directories I was trying to copy from one drive to another were too long, and causing the command input buffer to not receive the entire command. What good are super long file names / directories if you have to recompile a kernel in order to sucsessfully copy a directory from one drive to another thats buried a few directories under root?
I think I'll probably end up buying one eventually. However, when will be based on this calculation:
Exactly one revision past the first Blu Ray stand alone player released past PS3's release date.
I've heard from a couple of places that Sony is inflating the price of Blu Ray stand alone players because they want the PS3 to be the cheapest Blu Ray player on the market once it's released. Groovy. Means we should all wait until Sony releases a stand alone Blu Ray player after the release of the PS3. What justification would they have for releasing one more expensive than a PS3? If it stays the cheapest player for 2 months after it's release, then I'll buy one.
Agreed, not original. We have several docks here at work for the Compaq M700 series that has internal PCI slots. I haven't checked, but I would imagine in their bios, they pack the same feature, boot from AGP or PCI. Im going to guess that there will be a large Dell docking station that has a PCI Express card slot in it at some point. Not that farfetched, and definatly not newsworthy.
As for people talking about multi GPU setups with laptops, have you all lost your fucking minds? Once you take the portability (read:battery life) out of a laptop, you basically destroy 80% of the reason anybody would want one. It wouldnt matter in this instance, due to the card being in the dock (which would probably stop SLi from working due to different iterations of the same card) but it's still quite fabulously silly.
You know what, I will continue to use a regular machine for gaming. The monitor sits on my table, the case is on the other side of the room where I don't have to hear it, and if I want to sit back with the keyboard on my lap it's not going to bake my cock because there's 512 megs of DDR3 on some goofy semi-pci express video card under the G key.
I'd take having my browsing habits looked into before I'd take having my house snuck into while im on vacation so that the FBI can take snapshots of all my hard drives.
As long as there are people that can be fooled, there will be people around to fool them. Technology, at it's best, can only ever be used as a padding, if you will, for the average user. You have to develop technology that hits the magical balance between . Once you hit that mark, then there is no excuse for complaining about technology. At that point, the responsibility for the continued problem lies essentially with the users alone.
I think, honestly, game designers are going to be the deciding factor. Microsoft can do whatever they want with versions, support, backwards compatibility and directx. If game designers don't want to develop for DX10, then they won't. I'm going to go out on a very thick limb here and say that DX10 will still run all the DX9 features. As long as the relationship stays that way, then there is no problem, and nothing to discuss! This is all completely moot. I'm 100% sure we've all seen games that "require" Windows XP. We're basically crying that Microsoft is going to do the exact same thing again that they have done in the past.
The printing on game boxes that read "Requires Windows 95" "Requires Windows 98" and "Requires Windows XP" will soon have a brother. Big shock guys, there is going to be a "Requires Windows Vista"
Seriously though, from a player's perspective.. is anybody going to get on this server and play, and build up a character, just to find out in a few months that the lawyers sent a nastygram to sombody and the servers get turned off? Or, are you going to end up with modded servers that just are not fun to play on because they are only hosted on some cable modem somewhere?
Meh, I dunno. If they can really hold 3000 people, thats great. If they can stave off Sony's lawyers for a few years, they may even be able to breathe life back into this game.
You (as well as others) still seem to be confusing "fair use" with "theft". Stop that. That is the single most annoying thing that people keep doing, that in fact is the root cause of all these problems with DRM incumberment. You and your thinking, and people that think like you are the reason that no matter how much I pay for a cd, I still don't own it. Fuck you. When I buy something, I would like to be able to use it however I want. If that includes copying it to my hard drive and archiving the disc in case anything ever happens to my drive, then that should be my right.
I think the theft argument is tired. People have been using it for decades now, and when it comes to media usage, it really, honestly doesn't apply. If I buy a car from a car dealership, and then turn it around and give it away to a friend, does the car company sue me? But! they didn't get a profit from my giving that car away! Perhaps, they should sue me! I know, your saying to yourself right now "but that's not the same because if you give the car away you don't have it anymore for yourself." Exactly. We've been applying the term "theft" to something that can't be stolen. Sure, it can be traded. It can be given to sombody without charging them. You might eeevvvven be able to stretch it into "unfair trading", but to call it theft is lunacy. It's a word thats applied simply to generate sensationalism. "But! They're stealing my music!" sounds alot more we-need-protection-ish than "But! They're trading my music!"
Right now, in the US, there are alot of states that make it legal to shoot sombody who comes into your house who you beleive might be there to steal something.
Now, imagine for a second, if trading a couple of music files could really be bundled into "theft", then, should it be legal for a performer to open fire on sombody in the crowd he sees with a microphone? How about bursting into your house and shooting you dead?
You are absolutely right my friend, the problem does look alot different in their shoes. It looks alot like this: How, oh how do we convince the legislature and governing bodies that something that is less of a crime than "copyright infringment without monetary gain" can be publicised, and then treated as if its grand larceny?
Speaking from an audiophile point of view, some of the best recordings you can get now are from labels that use minimalistic techniques, IE single blumlein mic techniques, direct-to-disc recording and so forth. I think using some of these techniques could probably same a considerable amount of money and time when talking about studio time, as well as save folks like me alot of time when designing and building speakers. It's more difficult to do with bands that sound horrible when they "really" play (The White Stripes live anybody? Don't mean to offend.), but then again, what better way to convince them to spend more time practising together and developing a good sound.
If you want to see what I'm talking about, check out http://www.chesky.com/ David Chesky has been doing minimalist recording and producing fantastic sounding albums for, I want to say, probably decades.
The RIAA is a business. Their customers are record label execs. As has happened in the past, business are most hurt by robbing them of customers. People calling the RIAA isn't going to discourage anybody from conducting business, especially not record label execs.
If you want to hurt them, we need to convince record labels that they don't need to employ what is basically a "task force posse" to protect their interests. Striking at the heart of the beast would be most productive. What we need to do as good, strong minded, mostly intelligent people is start some new record labels that are specifically designed with low profit margins and realistic salaries, and start campaigning to get major artists moved over to our labels that pass on more profit to them. We need to rob the RIAA supporting labels in the good old fasioned american way, which is build a better alternative.
I think part of the problem here is, for many years, most people have regarded apple hardware as being superior to most of what was available for PC manufacturers to use. The reason, IMHO, that we seem to have a sudden rash of stories about apple hardware problems, be it iPod or macbook pro, is that the company is finally starting to succomb to the same thing most huge businesses do, which is "get it for less.". Once opon a time they had fantastic hardware that most PC geeks would have loved to snag and put Windows on, but they couldn't. Now, it's just a shame that the product quality is slipping at the same time that the machines become compatible with windows. Now, nobody gives a shit. 5-10 years ago I would have fallen over myself to get a Mac that ran Windows.
You are all falling over yourselves comically to point out the fact that sombody said "shinese". It's not that funny.
Out of all you wonderfully articulate people, nobody has anything interesting to say? I think this kinda squashes a huge mis conception that most of the Slashdot community seems to have, that is only people who don't know any better want anything to do with IE. Obviously, these people who created this aren't newbs.
Half the fun of taping an encounter with a female is hiding the camera. No fun if you can just plug your skull into your PC and rewind it. Agreed on the Strange Days reference.
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that a processor did this now, by itself. If not, I think personally there should be some sort of processor section, at least in multi-core systems, that makes these decisions. Why should applications even need to do any types of negotiation to find out what sort of processor they are dealing with. Perhaps in the future we will see processors that do this, get data in lumps, and based on their personal architecture / configuration decide what the best way to deal with this data and get it through the stages is. Lets just make that die 10% fatter and implement your work queues onto the chip itself. Arent they trying to do something sorta like this with NCQ and SATA hard drives? Imagine the Plinko board on The Price Is Right. the last 25% of the board (the EBD) could be equipped with gates, that according to current core / threads bings incoming jobs to a less heavily burdened core? Or, maybe in the interest of complete simplicity, let's say every newly created thread runs on the +1th core, like app A says "make 50 threads" and processor says "ok, will do, core1, heres thread1, core2 heres thread2, core3 heres thread3, oops, out of cores, ok back to you, core1, heres thread4...
Or, how about doing something like having the application use the SPD values to adjust it's thread creation techniques from conservative to aggressive based on cores, architecture, stage count..etc.
I dunno, just a mental fart, pay no mind.
And please, immidiatly dissasociate "core count" from "clock speed" in your minds. Sure, software that takes advantage of lots of cores will come around sooner or later, but don't forget, we haven't even properly taken advantage of 2 cores / processors yet with 80% of current software, while dual processor machines have been around now for years. Creating an application that takes advantage of more cores requires being written for THAT MANY CORES to begin with, or at least patched to do the same. Maybe I'm slightly incorrect on that, but at least I can guarantee you it's not as easy as ratcheting up clock speed.
Funny, but I seem to remember alot of comments emerging from Slashdot about it being Microsoft's fault whenever there is anything like this targeted at IE.
Rather than cry about whats not going to work or what will work, if you meet the conditions of a.) Being a webmaster / designer and b.) Being at all responsible, then you should probably go download the beta on your testing platform (you have one of those riiiight???) and make sure your site isn't going to break. The whole argument is moot when you can negate the badness with 60 seconds of effort.
Oh, and to appease the "anti-trust" conspiracy theorists, some of which seem to be responsible for the submission of articles here of late, chances are 99% that this push WON'T affect anybody not currently using Internet Explorer 6. In which case, it counts as a program UPDATE and not some sort of forcible takeover of the users default browser.
You'd have to make it randomize a game of poker, while getting rich and sueing the MPAA. Oh, and it would have to run Linux as well. Oh, and a few mislabeled facts about Vista thrown in for assurance.
A website that sells tools is not going to create a "Blowjob saw" to get around having the word "blowjob" in their meta tags to fluff their page ranking. Same thing with porn sites that currently use tags like "barbie dolls". I seriously don't think that porn can evolve enough, nor would it, to incorporate enough "normal sounding things" in order to evade a law suit. Sure, a few sites might encorporate the next biggest thing as being "pokemoning" but I don't think that they would do what would be nessesary to avoid the law and incorporate them ALL, as that is what would be nessesary to generate the hits, pump the page rank, inflate the "relevancy" numbers or anything else they REALLY do it for. Trust me, their goal ISN'T to lure your 12 year old daughter to their site to spend money. It's to lure 50,000 12 year old girls to load their intro page.
Seriously though, it's like that annoying stuff networks do on series shows, IE Lost. The first 10 minutes of the show is about what happened last week, then the last 10 minutes are whats going to happen next week. An hour long show only has about 25-30 minutes of content you haven't seen twice or haven't been prepped for already. And, as if seeing it in triplicate isn't enough, at least once per season, they will not only devote the first and last parts, but the ENTIRE show to a recap. This story reeks of (looming deep voice:)"Last week, on...SLASHDOT..."
Would sombody please help this guy out already and code a small trojan that links up to bitorrent and downloads a random movie? There's your reasonable doubt right there. "Maybe it was that virus thats goin around. Prove I did it intentionally." And, as I've stated many, many times in any / all of these types of discussions, I fully agree with the argument against lumping of downloading material with theft. If sombody steals your car, you come outside in the morning, and it's just fucking gone. Thats theft. If you are a record label exec and sombody downloads a song, does that mean that the artist now has to go back in the studio, record it again, edit it again, send it to the presses again? Ship it to stores again? not even that? you mean it actually doesn't affect them at all? Jesus Harold Christ then whats all the fuss about? OH! you mean "I" didn't give you money. Hm. Prove I would have anyway. Help me to understand how you are managing to predict that I would have purchased something if I could not have downloaded it. Bring that same crystal ball into court please, so everybody can take a look.
It would be wonderful if anti-virus / rootkit / malware companies were in fact pro-consumer, but sadly, they are really all pro themselves / bottom line / corporation / shareholders. I don't find it strange at all that one company might accuse another of not being able to remove malware.
I remember having a fight on a CentOS 4 box because the directories I was trying to copy from one drive to another were too long, and causing the command input buffer to not receive the entire command. What good are super long file names / directories if you have to recompile a kernel in order to sucsessfully copy a directory from one drive to another thats buried a few directories under root?
Exactly one revision past the first Blu Ray stand alone player released past PS3's release date.
I've heard from a couple of places that Sony is inflating the price of Blu Ray stand alone players because they want the PS3 to be the cheapest Blu Ray player on the market once it's released. Groovy. Means we should all wait until Sony releases a stand alone Blu Ray player after the release of the PS3. What justification would they have for releasing one more expensive than a PS3? If it stays the cheapest player for 2 months after it's release, then I'll buy one.
Nuff said.
As for people talking about multi GPU setups with laptops, have you all lost your fucking minds? Once you take the portability (read:battery life) out of a laptop, you basically destroy 80% of the reason anybody would want one. It wouldnt matter in this instance, due to the card being in the dock (which would probably stop SLi from working due to different iterations of the same card) but it's still quite fabulously silly.
You know what, I will continue to use a regular machine for gaming. The monitor sits on my table, the case is on the other side of the room where I don't have to hear it, and if I want to sit back with the keyboard on my lap it's not going to bake my cock because there's 512 megs of DDR3 on some goofy semi-pci express video card under the G key.
Wait, does this mean a targeted DDoS isn't illigal if we can prove the target has at least one peice of improperly licenced software?
Of course, I am a Canadian living in the USA.
Should have read "hits the magical balance between helpfulness and intrusiveness."
PEBKAC!
The printing on game boxes that read "Requires Windows 95" "Requires Windows 98" and "Requires Windows XP" will soon have a brother. Big shock guys, there is going to be a "Requires Windows Vista"
Seriously though, from a player's perspective.. is anybody going to get on this server and play, and build up a character, just to find out in a few months that the lawyers sent a nastygram to sombody and the servers get turned off? Or, are you going to end up with modded servers that just are not fun to play on because they are only hosted on some cable modem somewhere?
Meh, I dunno. If they can really hold 3000 people, thats great. If they can stave off Sony's lawyers for a few years, they may even be able to breathe life back into this game.
I think the theft argument is tired. People have been using it for decades now, and when it comes to media usage, it really, honestly doesn't apply. If I buy a car from a car dealership, and then turn it around and give it away to a friend, does the car company sue me? But! they didn't get a profit from my giving that car away! Perhaps, they should sue me! I know, your saying to yourself right now "but that's not the same because if you give the car away you don't have it anymore for yourself." Exactly. We've been applying the term "theft" to something that can't be stolen. Sure, it can be traded. It can be given to sombody without charging them. You might eeevvvven be able to stretch it into "unfair trading", but to call it theft is lunacy. It's a word thats applied simply to generate sensationalism. "But! They're stealing my music!" sounds alot more we-need-protection-ish than "But! They're trading my music!"
Right now, in the US, there are alot of states that make it legal to shoot sombody who comes into your house who you beleive might be there to steal something.
Now, imagine for a second, if trading a couple of music files could really be bundled into "theft", then, should it be legal for a performer to open fire on sombody in the crowd he sees with a microphone? How about bursting into your house and shooting you dead?
You are absolutely right my friend, the problem does look alot different in their shoes. It looks alot like this: How, oh how do we convince the legislature and governing bodies that something that is less of a crime than "copyright infringment without monetary gain" can be publicised, and then treated as if its grand larceny?
If you want to see what I'm talking about, check out http://www.chesky.com/ David Chesky has been doing minimalist recording and producing fantastic sounding albums for, I want to say, probably decades.
If you want to hurt them, we need to convince record labels that they don't need to employ what is basically a "task force posse" to protect their interests. Striking at the heart of the beast would be most productive. What we need to do as good, strong minded, mostly intelligent people is start some new record labels that are specifically designed with low profit margins and realistic salaries, and start campaigning to get major artists moved over to our labels that pass on more profit to them. We need to rob the RIAA supporting labels in the good old fasioned american way, which is build a better alternative.
I think part of the problem here is, for many years, most people have regarded apple hardware as being superior to most of what was available for PC manufacturers to use. The reason, IMHO, that we seem to have a sudden rash of stories about apple hardware problems, be it iPod or macbook pro, is that the company is finally starting to succomb to the same thing most huge businesses do, which is "get it for less.". Once opon a time they had fantastic hardware that most PC geeks would have loved to snag and put Windows on, but they couldn't. Now, it's just a shame that the product quality is slipping at the same time that the machines become compatible with windows. Now, nobody gives a shit. 5-10 years ago I would have fallen over myself to get a Mac that ran Windows.
Out of all you wonderfully articulate people, nobody has anything interesting to say? I think this kinda squashes a huge mis conception that most of the Slashdot community seems to have, that is only people who don't know any better want anything to do with IE. Obviously, these people who created this aren't newbs.
Half the fun of taping an encounter with a female is hiding the camera. No fun if you can just plug your skull into your PC and rewind it. Agreed on the Strange Days reference.