It's already illegal to discriminate on these bases in America. As an employer, you should know about the Equal Employment act that is required by law to be posted in the place of work, no?
You're talking out of your ass. "In the movies...this. In the movies...that." Barf. You need more than someone's DNA to frame them for a crime.
OJ Simpson's (and no one else's) DNA was smeared at the scene of the crime, the victims' DNA was found in his Bronco, on the gloves found at his residence, on the driveway at his residence...the list goes on and on. Yet he was acquitted. Acquitted. Not mistrial, hung jury, but acquitted.
Most of the time DNA does not make or break a case. It is circumstantial evidence at best. That's why in America you have to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Motive, access, and intent have to be shown. DNA doesn't make the case. How do you think they proved crimes before DNA testing!?
There are examples where DNA has been the primary evidence, and convictions have been based on DNA alone, but it is a tiny fraction of all crimes. In fact, many results based on DNA alone have been overturned in light of new evidence.
Courts and juries don't put as much faith in DNA evidence as you and all your movies make them out to. I'm not saying that a centralized DNA database is a great idea, I'm just saying that your ideas of DNA theft are childish and overblown.
If the governement wants my DNA, I'm moving to another country where my privacy is respected.
If you feel strongly enough that you would move out of the country to be free from it, why are you so spineless that you'd run away from the problem? In America, slow as it may be, change is possible. We can affect government policies and have them legitimately changed. If everyone who disagrees with a policy just ran away, what kind of country would this be?
Look at prohibition. It took a decade and an ammendment to the Constitution (no easy task!), but it was repealed. Look at Women's suffrage. That took over a hundred years, but enough women held their ground for long enough to convince those in power that change was needed.
So please, don't lie back and let them push legislation through apathetically, and then suddenly be so upset that you would actually move out of the country to get away from it. You have to stand up and fight. If you're not willing to do that, you don't have any right to bitch.
What they don't mention is the increased price of chipsets this is going to cause. Silicon wafers don't fall out of the sky. They are fabricated in factories under stringent controls. They are speed rated and the dies that can't hit the required frequencies without errors are trashed. It costs money every time any core is fabricated, working or not, so every core that is wasted increases the cost of production of the working cores, which in terms raises the cost of the chipset.
On-die caches are more dense than logic, and cause sharp decreases in yields for silicon wafers. The larger the proportion of the cache on die, the easier it is to cause the chip to fail. By just throwing huge amounts of cache onto a chip, you do four things:
1. Decrease yields.
2. Increase power consumption, which of course increases waste heat.
3. Increase die size.
4. Decrease clock speed ramping possibilities.
This huge amount of cache will not only cause larger power consumption, higher chipset temperatures, and higher chipset prices it will also reduce overclocking possibilities.
If it was just that easy to throw 8mb of cache onto a silicon wafer, Intel would have done this to their processors ages ago. The problem is that yields are poor (part of the reason Xeon processors are so expensive) and they don't ramp up very well (the reason why Xeons with larger caches are harder to get in higher speeds, and basically don't overclock worth anything).
What I want to know is what in GOD's name was the transistor budget for the chipset? 8mb of cache is going to cost easily over 100 million transistors! That means their transistor budget as at least 250 million transistors...which is about 8x as big as current CPUs...something doesn't make sense...
we are crumpling styrafome on an industrial scale to increase global warming
Wrong global disaster. CFC's cause the depletion of the Ozone, which is almost entirely unrelated to global warming, which is caused by (mainly) CO2 emissions, which cause the greenhouse effect.
Well, that would be the case, if the Code Morphing Layer was a stupid one-to-one translator from x86 to native VLIW instructions, but in reality, that is not the case. The Code Morphing layer inserts small bits of accounting code into the VLIW instructions generated which it uses to profile code while it is actually running. From this it can find the hotspots and spend more time aggressively optimizing those parts.
So, if you run one section of code 1 time, or the same section of code 1 million times, you get different results, because the Code Morphing layer is smart enough to realize that a large proportion of the execution time is spent in that section and that spending more time optimizing it will in the end yield greater performance.
The amount of power used is measured in kilowatt-hours... meaing [sic] the amount of energy equivalent to drawing a kilowatt for an hour.
One more time, power != energy! Kilowatts is the power, Kilowatt-hours is the energy!
Power is energy divided by time.
Energy is power multiplied by time.
Of course, power is really an instantaneous measurement (the derivative of energy vs time) while energy is often though of as cumulative (the definate integral of power vs time on some interval).
Like IBM hasn't had terascale computers for two years. Hell, even Intel's ASCII Red has been chugging over a teraflop for a couple years, and it runs Pentium Pros.
$45 million and all they can come up with is 6 teraflops? IBM's budget for Blue Gene is $100 million and they expect to reach 1,000 teraflops (1 petaflop). I am unimpressed.
That's a great idea, because not only is that the most important thing we could ever hope to know, but we're not able to generate gamma rays in the lab to test their effects on a US flag!
Gravitational lensing has never been and will never be used to detect the presence of a black hole.
The reason? It's not that gravitational lensing does not exist, or even that it's not dramatic enough to detect. The reason is that no black hole is close enough for us to use parallax to know the true positions of stars behind it. The way gravitational lensing works is by being able to detect when stars are out of place (not where they should be) due to their light being bent by a super-massive black hole. We would never know where these background stars should be so we can never figure out if they have moved.
So you just demonstrated how horribly uniformed on the tremendous size of the universe you are, and how that results in us not being able to use gravitational lensing to detect black holes.
Human property made some of us slaves, intellectual property will make us all slaves. Nobody owns ideas.
Except that they do. It's called copyrights, trademarks, and patents. Violating these is called either infringement or plagiarism. Why don't you take a passage of Jules Verne and try to pass it off as your own? Is that moral, under your standards of morality? The open, unabated theft of due credit and the opportunities to be gained from that?
Wake the hell up. People own things. Cars, houses, computers, art, and ideas. In the latter case, you shouldn't be restricted from thinking them, but from passing them off as your own. That's theft and plagiarism. Duh.
I get fed up with people who want to web-enable everything in your entire house. They want to put barcode readers in your fridge to tell you when your milk is bad, internet access so the fridge can order more milk for you, heaters/airconditioners that can access the weather forecasts to more efficiently mantain your thermostat, web-enabled robots to feed your pets, even lightbulbs that have built-in TCP/IP support so you can turn them off via the web! Why in the hell would we ever need such silliness? Is it too much trouble to flip a god damn switch!? Who are the geniuses that think these things up?
"Hey, I got an idea! Why don't we make people so lazy that they don't ever have to get out of bed to do anything, and at the same time forget about how totally insecure the technology we are creating is, and thus give all those kiddie h4xxors the ability to spoil peoples' food, freeze them to death, starve their animals to death, and submit them to torturous light shows, all via the anonymity and distance of the internet!"
No literal interpretation
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 1
A lot of the confusion over the true definition of an operating system arises mainly because of the consituent words of "operating system" not only have broad definitions, but multiple ones.
First of all, operating.
Operate what? The processor, memory, devices, and peripherals? Would you include filesystems, video buffers, and audio hardware? Where does the term operate end? You could spend an eternity trying to come to terms with what it means to operate something. You could try to include every application that ever manipulates a hardware device as part of the operating system because it "operates" hardware. Does the program "operate" the hardware or does it just "use" the hardware? Which is correct? What about drivers? Do they "operate" hardware? What about libraries? Do they really "operate" anything? Or system calls? Do they "operate"? They might be part of the kernel, but do they really "operate" anything? Well, do you mean "operate on," "operate by," "operate with," or what?
Trying to use the term operate to define what is part of an OS and what is not is completely fruitless.
Secondly, what is a system? Is it only a singular entity, or is it made of constituent parts? Are those parts completely independent, partially dependent, or just simply related? If there are multiple parts of the system, can they be removed, replaced, or more added? The definition of system doesn't come anywhere close to addressing these types of questions.
This is what makes the interpretation of the term so difficult (and often totally arbitrary) because there is not a narrow literal definition of these words.
There isn't any concensus by any means on what the term really means, and there is no accepted definition either. So you must understand that someone else's more broad interpretation of the term may in fact be warranted on basis that you don't particularly agree on, but can't really be qualitatively debated.
the term operating system must be redifined to deal with the context with which it is used, ie. are we discussing a desktop or server environment? will it be used for development or multimedia purposes.
It never really was defined in the first place. You have to keep in mind that a system can be made up parts that aren't mandatory. You may be running a window manager on one machine and on another, no window manager. Calling that window manager part of the operating system doesn't necessarily make the statement that the system without the window manager is not an operating system.
Moreover, this broad interpretation of the word system detracts away from the basis for flip side of the argument, that only a small (and non-replaceable) part, the common denominator, is the system. The term system doesn't make any indications on the size, the number of components, or the relationship between any of the components. It doesn't specify that the only parts are x, y, and z. It's just too broad.
Arguments would be different if we still used antiquated terms like Master Control Program, which might be a more precise term, but as it is, the term operating system encapsulates both arguments and requires arbitrary interpretation, which there is no sense in really trying to come to terms with.
The nature of the term is broad. Quit trying to tell everyone they are wrong because they don't draw the same arbitrary conclusions you have made.
When a programmer writes code, even if they happen to write the entire program, it is not the intellectual product of the programmer, but of the company that sells it. And who, dare i ask, is going to try and tell me that programs are not art and should not be protected in the same way that music should. There are so many ways to write any given program, just like there are so many ways to draw an apple. You have medium (language); you have a canvas (platform); you have art ( the program ).
Uhh, duh. Programmers sign contracts that eliminate their control over the code that they create. They no longer have legal control over what happens to it and don't command any say in what it is eventually used for. It is in all ways the company's property. This is the purpose of a legal contract.
It seems like a whole lot of you are just glossing over the fact that artists sign contracts. They forfeit their own rights, knowingly, in exchange for a tiny sliver of the profits and the marketing power of a huge recording label. That's the contract. They don't own the rights to their music because they gave them up to the recording industry. There isn't any legal basis for arguing otherwise.
It's the same as any contract artist of any type. You don't see painters who work for Joe and Bob's Painting claiming that they own the rights to a particular beige wall in someone's place of business. They're doing work for a company, and that company then owns the rights to that, exclusively. That's the whole point of the contract. It would be utter chaos if everyone tried to claim the copyright on every piece of work they ever contributed to. Car designers copyrighting a particular style, florists copyrighting a certain combination of flowers, factory workers copyrighting individual shoes, where would it end? This is why contracts exist.
It's another matter if you believe that the RIAA has a such strangle hold on recording that artists have no choice but to sign with them, but when you get right down to it, artists virtually sign their lives away when they put their John Hancock on that 100 page contract. It's not all the big bad RIAA's fault for being mean and nasty and wanting to enforce contracts that artists knowingly signed.
I attend Purdue University and also work at Purdue University Computing Center. Because of this, I am considered an employee of the state of Indiana. Therefore, under Indiana State Law (not sure about Federal Laws, but it may in fact, be similar) all my correspondence through email on Purdue's servers is considered public domain. Anyone, anywhere in Indiana can request a copy of my email correspondence, and Purdue must provide it. For this reason, some of Purdue's other departments that have their own mail servers back up their data in the following way: All data is backed up indefinately, and all email is backed up only 5 days. Therefore, these departments only are responsible for the last 5 days of email correspondence of their employees. Not that many people are requesting my mail, but by Indiana law, they can.
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It's already illegal to discriminate on these bases in America. As an employer, you should know about the Equal Employment act that is required by law to be posted in the place of work, no?
You're talking out of your ass. "In the movies...this. In the movies...that." Barf. You need more than someone's DNA to frame them for a crime.
OJ Simpson's (and no one else's) DNA was smeared at the scene of the crime, the victims' DNA was found in his Bronco, on the gloves found at his residence, on the driveway at his residence...the list goes on and on. Yet he was acquitted. Acquitted. Not mistrial, hung jury, but acquitted.
Most of the time DNA does not make or break a case. It is circumstantial evidence at best. That's why in America you have to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Motive, access, and intent have to be shown. DNA doesn't make the case. How do you think they proved crimes before DNA testing!?
There are examples where DNA has been the primary evidence, and convictions have been based on DNA alone, but it is a tiny fraction of all crimes. In fact, many results based on DNA alone have been overturned in light of new evidence.
Courts and juries don't put as much faith in DNA evidence as you and all your movies make them out to. I'm not saying that a centralized DNA database is a great idea, I'm just saying that your ideas of DNA theft are childish and overblown.
If the governement wants my DNA, I'm moving to another country where my privacy is respected.
If you feel strongly enough that you would move out of the country to be free from it, why are you so spineless that you'd run away from the problem? In America, slow as it may be, change is possible. We can affect government policies and have them legitimately changed. If everyone who disagrees with a policy just ran away, what kind of country would this be?
Look at prohibition. It took a decade and an ammendment to the Constitution (no easy task!), but it was repealed. Look at Women's suffrage. That took over a hundred years, but enough women held their ground for long enough to convince those in power that change was needed.
So please, don't lie back and let them push legislation through apathetically, and then suddenly be so upset that you would actually move out of the country to get away from it. You have to stand up and fight. If you're not willing to do that, you don't have any right to bitch.
What they don't mention is the increased price of chipsets this is going to cause. Silicon wafers don't fall out of the sky. They are fabricated in factories under stringent controls. They are speed rated and the dies that can't hit the required frequencies without errors are trashed. It costs money every time any core is fabricated, working or not, so every core that is wasted increases the cost of production of the working cores, which in terms raises the cost of the chipset.
On-die caches are more dense than logic, and cause sharp decreases in yields for silicon wafers. The larger the proportion of the cache on die, the easier it is to cause the chip to fail. By just throwing huge amounts of cache onto a chip, you do four things:
1. Decrease yields.
2. Increase power consumption, which of course increases waste heat.
3. Increase die size.
4. Decrease clock speed ramping possibilities.
This huge amount of cache will not only cause larger power consumption, higher chipset temperatures, and higher chipset prices it will also reduce overclocking possibilities.
If it was just that easy to throw 8mb of cache onto a silicon wafer, Intel would have done this to their processors ages ago. The problem is that yields are poor (part of the reason Xeon processors are so expensive) and they don't ramp up very well (the reason why Xeons with larger caches are harder to get in higher speeds, and basically don't overclock worth anything).
What I want to know is what in GOD's name was the transistor budget for the chipset? 8mb of cache is going to cost easily over 100 million transistors! That means their transistor budget as at least 250 million transistors...which is about 8x as big as current CPUs...something doesn't make sense...
we are crumpling styrafome on an industrial scale to increase global warming
Wrong global disaster. CFC's cause the depletion of the Ozone, which is almost entirely unrelated to global warming, which is caused by (mainly) CO2 emissions, which cause the greenhouse effect.
Well, that would be the case, if the Code Morphing Layer was a stupid one-to-one translator from x86 to native VLIW instructions, but in reality, that is not the case. The Code Morphing layer inserts small bits of accounting code into the VLIW instructions generated which it uses to profile code while it is actually running. From this it can find the hotspots and spend more time aggressively optimizing those parts.
So, if you run one section of code 1 time, or the same section of code 1 million times, you get different results, because the Code Morphing layer is smart enough to realize that a large proportion of the execution time is spent in that section and that spending more time optimizing it will in the end yield greater performance.
The amount of power used is measured in kilowatt-hours... meaing [sic] the amount of energy equivalent to drawing a kilowatt for an hour.
One more time, power != energy! Kilowatts is the power, Kilowatt-hours is the energy!
Power is energy divided by time.
Energy is power multiplied by time.
Of course, power is really an instantaneous measurement (the derivative of energy vs time) while energy is often though of as cumulative (the definate integral of power vs time on some interval).
We should read "the new Vaio uses 10 Watts of energy, whereas the previous ones used twice as much for the same functions."
Wrong again. Let's try this one more time class, Watts are power, power is work per time, work is energy...Energy is not power, or watts.
Like IBM hasn't had terascale computers for two years. Hell, even Intel's ASCII Red has been chugging over a teraflop for a couple years, and it runs Pentium Pros.
$45 million and all they can come up with is 6 teraflops? IBM's budget for Blue Gene is $100 million and they expect to reach 1,000 teraflops (1 petaflop). I am unimpressed.
That's a great idea, because not only is that the most important thing we could ever hope to know, but we're not able to generate gamma rays in the lab to test their effects on a US flag!
Gravitrons? Are you serious?
Gravity is NOT a particle. It is a distortion of space time.
I just wanna know how fast the images were accelerating.
Let me say this once and for all.
Gravitational lensing has never been and will never be used to detect the presence of a black hole.
The reason? It's not that gravitational lensing does not exist, or even that it's not dramatic enough to detect. The reason is that no black hole is close enough for us to use parallax to know the true positions of stars behind it. The way gravitational lensing works is by being able to detect when stars are out of place (not where they should be) due to their light being bent by a super-massive black hole. We would never know where these background stars should be so we can never figure out if they have moved.
So you just demonstrated how horribly uniformed on the tremendous size of the universe you are, and how that results in us not being able to use gravitational lensing to detect black holes.
Human property made some of us slaves, intellectual property will make us all slaves. Nobody owns ideas.
Except that they do. It's called copyrights, trademarks, and patents. Violating these is called either infringement or plagiarism. Why don't you take a passage of Jules Verne and try to pass it off as your own? Is that moral, under your standards of morality? The open, unabated theft of due credit and the opportunities to be gained from that?
Wake the hell up. People own things. Cars, houses, computers, art, and ideas. In the latter case, you shouldn't be restricted from thinking them, but from passing them off as your own. That's theft and plagiarism. Duh.
I get fed up with people who want to web-enable everything in your entire house. They want to put barcode readers in your fridge to tell you when your milk is bad, internet access so the fridge can order more milk for you, heaters/airconditioners that can access the weather forecasts to more efficiently mantain your thermostat, web-enabled robots to feed your pets, even lightbulbs that have built-in TCP/IP support so you can turn them off via the web! Why in the hell would we ever need such silliness? Is it too much trouble to flip a god damn switch!? Who are the geniuses that think these things up?
"Hey, I got an idea! Why don't we make people so lazy that they don't ever have to get out of bed to do anything, and at the same time forget about how totally insecure the technology we are creating is, and thus give all those kiddie h4xxors the ability to spoil peoples' food, freeze them to death, starve their animals to death, and submit them to torturous light shows, all via the anonymity and distance of the internet!"
A lot of the confusion over the true definition of an operating system arises mainly because of the consituent words of "operating system" not only have broad definitions, but multiple ones.
First of all, operating.
Operate what? The processor, memory, devices, and peripherals? Would you include filesystems, video buffers, and audio hardware? Where does the term operate end? You could spend an eternity trying to come to terms with what it means to operate something. You could try to include every application that ever manipulates a hardware device as part of the operating system because it "operates" hardware. Does the program "operate" the hardware or does it just "use" the hardware? Which is correct? What about drivers? Do they "operate" hardware? What about libraries? Do they really "operate" anything? Or system calls? Do they "operate"? They might be part of the kernel, but do they really "operate" anything? Well, do you mean "operate on," "operate by," "operate with," or what?
Trying to use the term operate to define what is part of an OS and what is not is completely fruitless.
Secondly, what is a system? Is it only a singular entity, or is it made of constituent parts? Are those parts completely independent, partially dependent, or just simply related? If there are multiple parts of the system, can they be removed, replaced, or more added? The definition of system doesn't come anywhere close to addressing these types of questions.
This is what makes the interpretation of the term so difficult (and often totally arbitrary) because there is not a narrow literal definition of these words.
There isn't any concensus by any means on what the term really means, and there is no accepted definition either. So you must understand that someone else's more broad interpretation of the term may in fact be warranted on basis that you don't particularly agree on, but can't really be qualitatively debated.
the term operating system must be redifined to deal with the context with which it is used, ie. are we discussing a desktop or server environment? will it be used for development or multimedia purposes.
It never really was defined in the first place. You have to keep in mind that a system can be made up parts that aren't mandatory. You may be running a window manager on one machine and on another, no window manager. Calling that window manager part of the operating system doesn't necessarily make the statement that the system without the window manager is not an operating system.
Moreover, this broad interpretation of the word system detracts away from the basis for flip side of the argument, that only a small (and non-replaceable) part, the common denominator, is the system. The term system doesn't make any indications on the size, the number of components, or the relationship between any of the components. It doesn't specify that the only parts are x, y, and z. It's just too broad.
Arguments would be different if we still used antiquated terms like Master Control Program, which might be a more precise term, but as it is, the term operating system encapsulates both arguments and requires arbitrary interpretation, which there is no sense in really trying to come to terms with.
The nature of the term is broad. Quit trying to tell everyone they are wrong because they don't draw the same arbitrary conclusions you have made.
When a programmer writes code, even if they happen to write the entire program, it is not the intellectual product of the programmer, but of the company that sells it. And who, dare i ask, is going to try and tell me that programs are not art and should not be protected in the same way that music should. There are so many ways to write any given program, just like there are so many ways to draw an apple. You have medium (language); you have a canvas (platform); you have art ( the program ).
Uhh, duh. Programmers sign contracts that eliminate their control over the code that they create. They no longer have legal control over what happens to it and don't command any say in what it is eventually used for. It is in all ways the company's property. This is the purpose of a legal contract.
It seems like a whole lot of you are just glossing over the fact that artists sign contracts. They forfeit their own rights, knowingly, in exchange for a tiny sliver of the profits and the marketing power of a huge recording label. That's the contract. They don't own the rights to their music because they gave them up to the recording industry. There isn't any legal basis for arguing otherwise.
It's the same as any contract artist of any type. You don't see painters who work for Joe and Bob's Painting claiming that they own the rights to a particular beige wall in someone's place of business. They're doing work for a company, and that company then owns the rights to that, exclusively. That's the whole point of the contract. It would be utter chaos if everyone tried to claim the copyright on every piece of work they ever contributed to. Car designers copyrighting a particular style, florists copyrighting a certain combination of flowers, factory workers copyrighting individual shoes, where would it end? This is why contracts exist.
It's another matter if you believe that the RIAA has a such strangle hold on recording that artists have no choice but to sign with them, but when you get right down to it, artists virtually sign their lives away when they put their John Hancock on that 100 page contract. It's not all the big bad RIAA's fault for being mean and nasty and wanting to enforce contracts that artists knowingly signed.
Yes, but in binary tera is 2^40 and exa is 2^50.
I attend Purdue University and also work at Purdue University Computing Center. Because of this, I am considered an employee of the state of Indiana. Therefore, under Indiana State Law (not sure about Federal Laws, but it may in fact, be similar) all my correspondence through email on Purdue's servers is considered public domain. Anyone, anywhere in Indiana can request a copy of my email correspondence, and Purdue must provide it. For this reason, some of Purdue's other departments that have their own mail servers back up their data in the following way: All data is backed up indefinately, and all email is backed up only 5 days. Therefore, these departments only are responsible for the last 5 days of email correspondence of their employees. Not that many people are requesting my mail, but by Indiana law, they can.