then i suppose the top 3 languages (2 of which have actually grown in the short-term) are dying since they've all decreased in popularity in the long-term?
well, they actually provide an online storage service with at least some of their web hosting packages. you just can't use it for public data storage.
so if you yourself want to backup a few hundred gigs of personal files that only you will have access to, you can (as long as it's not pirated material). though if you create a dreamhost account just so you can dump your company's 200 TB data warehouse onto their servers and exploit their "unlimited" storage offer, then you'll probably run into some trouble.
because we all know that self-hosted servers never get hacked or suffer down-time. and i'm sure a small business can afford better network & server management/equipment than Amazon, Google, or Microsoft.
do you also keep all of your savings (which is no doubt in gold bullions) in a safe at home that you stand guard over yourself with a 12-gauge shotgun?
it might help to look at the context of the ranking in order to see things in perspective. coming in 8th out of 50 is hardly "dying." and if Perl is dying then Python (7th) isn't far behind, and JavaScript (9th), Ruby (11th), Lisp/Scheme (19th), and Lua (20th) are all definitely dead. not to mention the rest of the ranked languages: 21. ActionScript 22. MATLAB 23. FoxPro/xBase 24. Fortran 25. Ada 26. Transact-SQL 27. Prolog 28. RPG. (OS/400) 29. Erlang 30. NXT-G 31. Awk 32. LabVIEW 33. Haskell 34. ML 35. Objective-C 36. Focus 37. Groovy 38. Smalltalk 39. Euphoria 40. CL. (OS/400) 41. Alice 42. Tcl/Tk 43. Scala 44. Caml 45. Bourne. shell 46. Q 47. Forth 48. Natural 49. APL 50. R
hey, i never claimed that the holy bibble was divinely inspired literature.
and i actually agree with you that other theists are being hypocrites when they single out mormons or scientologists as being irrational cult members. the only difference between mainstream religions and these "cults" is that Christianity/Judaism/Buddhism/Hinduism/Islam/etc. have become well-established social institutions over the centuries and are thus socially acceptable to most people. but every one of these religions started off as small cults with members just as crazy as early mormons and today's scientologists.
like De Sousa said:
When enough people share a delusion, it loses its status as a psychosis and gets religious tax exemption instead.
there's folie à deux (madness shared by two), folie à trois (by three), folie à quatre (by four), and folie à plusieurs (by many)--all of which are considered psychiatric disorders. but there's no discrete boundary between mass delusion and a legitimate subculture. so how many people have to share in an irrational belief before it becomes socially acceptable?
i think the author's point is that dynamic scaling should always be planned; partly because it results in better understanding of traffic patterns, and thus better long-term capacity planning, and partly because you need to be able to distinguish between valid traffic and DDoS attacks. still, i think the author is overstating it a bit. one of the main draws of cloud computing to smaller businesses is the ability to pool resources more efficiently through multitenancy, part of which is precisely due to auto-scaling. without the cloud being able to dynamically allocate resources to different applications as needed in real-time (i.e. without human intervention), there isn't much of an advantage to sharing a cloud infrastructure over leasing dedicated servers.
for instance, let's say there are 10 different startups with similar hosting needs, and they can each afford to lease 10 application servers on their own. so using traditional hosting models they would each lease 10 servers and balance the load between the them. but after a few months they realize that 75% of the time they only really need 5 servers, and 20% of the time they need all 10, but an occasional 5% of the time they need more than 10 servers to adequately handle their user traffic. this means that in their current arrangement, they're wasting money on more computing resources than they actually need most of the time, and yet they still have service availability issues during peak loads 5% of the time (that's over 2.5 weeks a year).
all 10 of these startups share a common problem--they each have variable/fluctuating traffic loads severely reducing server utilization & efficiency. luckily, cloud computing allows them to pool their resources together. since the majority of the time each startup needs only 5 servers, the minimum number of virtual servers their cloud infrastructure needs is 50. and since each startup needs double that 20% of the time, 10 extra virtual servers are needed (shared through auto-scaling). but since each startup needs more than 10 servers for about 2.5 weeks each year, we'll add another 15 extra virtual servers. so all in total, the 10 startups are now sharing the equivalent of 75 servers in their cloud.
by hosting their applications together on a cloud network, each startup not only has their hosting needs better met, but they also stand to save a lot of money because of better server utilization. and each startup now has access to up to 30 virtual servers when their application requires it. this kind of efficiency would not be possible without a cloud infrastructure and auto-scaling.
it's different because those calls aren't trying to steal your credit card info. they're trying to sell you something using, what seems at first glance, an enticing risk-free offer. one is a bait-and-switch tactic, the other is just phishing over the phone. they might both be scams, but the first one is legal and the second one is not.
i mean, a lot of companies use fine print to lure unsuspecting consumers into really unfavorable contracts. but would you consider that phishing as well? i agree they're both equally scummy and there is a large consumer advocacy movement against deceptive business practices, but there's still a big difference between things like predatory lending and phishing, and it's not just that one is institutionalized and the other isn't.
he doesn't even seem like that great of a sci-fi author. i mean, DC-8s? really? that's the best design he could come up with for an intergalactic ship?
the article talks about the use of a tow plane. if they use the tow plane to get the space plane to high sub-orbital altitudes, then the rocket fuel stored in the space plane could be enough to help it reach low earth orbit. it's really not all that different from the launch methods used by X-15 or SpaceShip One.
besides, have you taken a look at the design diagram? nearly 2/3rds of the fuselage is taken up by the plane's two propellant tanks.
personally, i think in terms of commodity computing, we don't really need to squeeze any more power out of the CPU than we've already got. use fully pipelined superscalar architectures, perhaps multithreaded dual or quad cores (for high-end workstations) and VLIW to maximize ILP efficiency. even at current processor speeds, 99% of the applications people (especially casual computer users) use have bottlenecks elsewhere (like memory & disk I/O speeds, internet bandwidth, user response time, etc.).
for the really resource-intensive stuff, like image/video/audio processing, cryptography, 3D graphics, CAD/engineering applications, scientific modeling, processing/manipulating financial data, etc. you would be much better off using a specialized dedicated vector coprocessor (as opposed to a general-purpose scalar processor that commodity CPUs tend to be). this way you can have a relatively low-power (and low clock rate) CPU for processing common SISD instructions that constitute 99% of all computing tasks, greatly cutting the cost of consumer and pro-sumer systems. and by using highly specialized coprocessors to handle the heavy lifting, those applications can be processed more efficiently while using less power (and at lower clock speeds) than trying to get a general-purpose scalar CPU to do the same work.
that is why GPGPUs are generating so much interest these days. it just so happens that most of the really processor-intensive applications consumers run greatly benefit from stream processing. game developers have long taken advantage of dedicated vector coprocessors with highly-specialized instruction sets and architecture made specifically for 3D gaming. DSPs with specialized architectures are also commonly used for hardware-accelerated video encoding, audio processing, etc. and now companies like Adobe are also seeing the advantages to using specialized vector coprocessors for their resource-intensive applications rather than having the CPU handle it.
and, honestly, how many different kinds of processor-intensive applications do most users run on a regular basis? if you're a graphic designer, your main processing power concern is only in relation to 2D/3D graphics. if you're an audio engineer or musician, then you're only going to use audio-related resource-intensive software. likewise, if you're a cryptographer/cryptanalyst, you probably won't ever run any audio editing software or 2D graphics software. therefore, it makes sense to pair moderately powered general-purpose scalar CPUs up with a powerful & highly specialized vector coprocessor like a GPU/DSP/Stream Processor/etc.
actually, i can't because my sources are mainly: a.) my boss, who runs his own record label and has been working in the music industry for close to 30 years, and b.) a friend & former co-worker who now manages a bar/venue out in L.A.
however, if you do a google search for "ASCAP" and "public domain" you'll find a lot of articles that support these claims. for instance, here's one that discusses the ASCAP holding some 40 Beethoven songs on their catalog along with 80 versions of Row, Row, Row Your Boat and countless other works that should be in public domain by now.
you might also take a look at this Wired article. the Wired content itself isn't particularly interesting, but the comments are very telling of how the ASCAP screws over indie artists and venue owners. and i'm sure if you talk to local venue owners in your area you'll here the same kind of stories.
the fact of the matter is, the ASCAP may have been created out of a real need, but over the years this unregulated monopoly (they even faced an anti-trust case a while back, i believe) has devolved into a protection racket of sorts. it's similar to the situation with the RIAA suing alleged file sharers. it doesn't matter whether you're guilty or not, the threat of lawsuit (and the subsequent legal costs) itself is enough to coerce most venue owners to pay their licensing fees, even if they only intend on playing original music or material that's already in public domain.
well, supercomputing has always been about maximizing system performance through parallelism, which can only be done in three main ways: instruction level parallelism, thread level parallelism, and data parallelism.
ILM can be achieved through instruction pipelining, which means breaking down instructions into multiple stages so that CPU modules can work in parallel and reduce idle time. for instance, in a RISC pipeline you break an instruction down into 5 operations:
instruction fetch
instruction decode / register fetch
instruction execute
memory access
register write-back
so while the first instruction is still in the decode stage the CPU is already fetching a second instruction. thus if fully-pipelined there are no stalls or wasted idle time, and a new instruction is loaded every clock cycle, resulting in a maximum of 5 parallel instructions being processed simultaneously.
then there are superscalar processors, which have redundant functional units--for instance, multiple ALUs, FPUs, or SIMD (vector processing) units. and if each of these functional units are also pipelined, then the result is a processor with an execution rate far in excess of one instruction per cycle.
thread level parallelism OTOH is achieved through multiprocessing (SMP, ASMP, NUMA, etc.) or multithreading. this is where multicore and multiprocessor systems come in handy. multithreading is generally cheaper to achieve than multiprocessing since fewer processor components need to be replicated.
lastly, there's data level parallelism, which is achieved in the form of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) vector processors. this type of parallelism, which originated from supercomputing, is especially useful for multimedia applications, scientific research, engineering tasks, cryptography, and data processing/compression, where the same operation needs to be applied to large sets of data. most modern CPUs have some kind of SWAR (SIMD Within A Register) instruction set extension like MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, AltiVec, but these are of limited utility compared to highly specialized dedicated vector processors like GPUs, array processors, DSPs, and stream processors (GPGPU).
upon more research, it appears that i was indeed mistaken. but this iterative upgrade to the DS still confuses me. i mean, why not just come out with a camera attachment for the DS and DS lite so that early adopters don't get left out on new titles?
i'm still really torn about the DS. its larger market share means that it gets the lion's share of games, especially smaller non-mainstream titles. it's sort of in the same niche as the PSX or PS2 in terms of all the import RPGs it gets, most of which are 2D and sprite-based isometric perspective. even franchises that were traditionally native to the PS1 and PS2, such as the Front Mission series, are going to the DS rather than PSP.
but i still can't bring myself to buy a second portable gaming device for those games alone (i still have plenty of PSP games i haven't even had time to play through), plus a used PS2 would probably be cheaper if i want to play games from those franchises. so for now i guess i'll just have to settle for playing old PSX titles using PopStation.
who the hell are you people who are constantly having hardware issues (and just put up with it)?
if my video card or sound card breaks, and there's no way to fix it, i replace it. if my system is acting strange and affecting my productivity, i troubleshoot the problem and resolve the issue, or reformat and do a fresh install when necessary. there's no reason to put up with a system that is constantly crashing or that "goes black once a week." it's not a problem with technology; it's a problem of, either having the incredibly bad luck of consistently buying defective hardware, or simply being too undiscerning when shopping for a computer.
honestly, this idea that computers can never work properly for long periods of time is incredibly misguided. in my experience the only people who resign themselves to a fate of having a computer that never functions properly are generally people who aren't very computer savvy. otherwise, it shouldn't take more than 2-3 weeks to troubleshoot a problem and get it resolved one way or another. and you shouldn't be having computer problems all the time.
heck, even the computers i have to fix at work usually stay fixed for at least 3-4 months. and only very rarely do hardware problems crop up (maybe once every 1~2 years one of the 5 computers in the office will need something replaced). and we don't even get manufacturer warranties. honestly, there's no reason to settle for a less than fully functional system. after all, you paid good money for it. so fix it yourself, or find someone who can.
what malware are you talking about? there have been more than one malware targeted at IE, and not all of them were trojans. some of them did exploit known vulnerabilities that allowed users to be infected just by visiting a malicious web page.
perhaps you should look up what a trojan is before making inapt comparisons.
you young whippersnappers... back in my day we didn't have a uniform currency. we had to invent our own money using clam shells and animal scat. the rear end of an incontinent mammoth was our ATM machine.
oh, and we were happy to have it--up hill, both ways, in the snow, barefoot, with a full orchestra strapped to our backs, and Roman phalanxes chasing us the entire way while the orchestra played Wagner to goad them on.
the sad thing is, this sort of music tax is already in effect. BMI and ASCAP already collect royalties from any public venue that has a jukebox or plays CDs/radio over a PA system. basically, if you operate a bar or club you have to pay them a yearly licensing fee, regardless of what kind of music you play or don't play. they have their own auditors that they send out regularly to check up on venues and operate in a similar fashion to the IRS.
even if you play international music that is in the public domain, or music by indie artists that aren't members of their organization (meaning don't pay them a membership fee and thus don't receive their royalties), you still have to pay them. unfortunately, this system removes any incentive a venue owner might have to play music by indie musicians who actually want their music played in public for as many people to hear as possible. i don't know what gives them the right to collect royalties on music they don't hold the rights to (or have the copyright holder's permission to collect royalties on), but most bar/club owners just pay the licensing fee to avoid legal repercussions.
well, the DSi looks to be the next generation of the DS (as the DS won't be forwards-compatible with DSi games), and it's pretty much going to be exactly what you said--DS controls with much more processing power.
and you're absolutely right about the PSP. the DS, like the Wii, appeals to a lot more casual gamers and thus outsells the PSP. however, the PSP is an incredible device in its own right. as a portable general entertainment system, it beats the DS hands down. and though the DS' touchscreen creates a lot of new & interesting gameplay possibilities, the DS' hardware just doesn't cut it for modern 3D graphics. the two systems are made for two different markets; just because the DS appeals to a larger population doesn't mean it's superior.
personally, i'd rather have a portable device that surfs the web, plays music/videos, displays e-books, and can play 3D sports games, racers, shooters, etc. than a device that only plays games, and that can't run the type of games that i like.
the malware was designed to target Firefox, but it doesn't exploit any known Firefox vulnerability. also it's a trojan, meaning the only way you can catch it is if you are tricked into downloading it and executing it, or if it is downloaded & executed by another piece of malware. if you have malicious code running (with read/write privilege) on your system, then your system is already compromised at that point. therefore, it doesn't really matter where the malware hides itself afterwards. it could just as easily sit in your iTunes directory or target Opera users. the only reason this malware was news is that Firefox is finally gaining enough widespread adoption to be seriously targeted by malware writers. that's something that just can't be helped.
not to mention the loss of farmers' right to recycle harvested crops via saved seeds (see: terminator gene), the risk of lawsuits independent non-GM farmers face if their crops get cross-pollinated on accident (or intentionally), and the general loss of non-patented natural plant species.
it's simply insane to allow international conglomerates to patent the genetic code of living organisms. first off, the code they started with was not of their own creation. modern crops are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding by human farmers and millions of years of natural cross-pollination. they're the shared ecological inheritance of our planet and our civilization. even the genes that are artificially spliced into GM crops came from other natural species originally.
there's nothing inherently wrong with genetic modification, but only if it's done in a way that is ethical and socially/ecologically responsible. a commercial corporation can patent the method they use to modify their plants (if it indeed qualifies as a non-trivial invention), but they can't patent the DNA sequence of plants they didn't design from scratch, especially not plants that can cross-pollinate with someone else' crops and infect them with this "patented" DNA.
still, i think a better (more useful) test would be conducted by:
enlisting a 100 or so test subjects from various non-technical (in terms of computer knowledge) backgrounds.
give each one of the 9 best-selling anti-virus solutions to 10 different volunteers.
give the last 10 volunteers a 2-week course on basic computer security and malware-prevention.
subject all 100 subjects to the same gauntlet of viruses/trojans/malware over a 6-month period. (perhaps 4-5 viruses a week, for a total of around 120 threats tested)
note how many infections per person each group averaged, how many false-positives each group reported, and how much time/productivity was lost due to the threats & false-positives--for instance, time spent on reboots, reformats, dealing with virus alerts, waiting for anti-virus updates, etc.
lastly, measure the cost-effectiveness of the anti-virus solution used in each of the 10 groups.
i suspect that preventative education/training is probably the most effective method of combating viruses & malware. and though it might not be cost-effective in the short-term, it might be cheaper to train long-term employees how to avoid viruses/malware than to pay for yearly-subscriptions and still suffer down-time and loss of productivity from infections.
ah you're right. i actually saw a documentary show on the problems with such "expert testimony." i think forensic ballistics to match the rifling pattern of a firearm with recovered bullets is also being questioned by many scientists and reformists.
just to be clear, i absolutely agree with this push for reform in the justice system. the use of bad "science" to give a false sense of scientific objectivity/legitimacy to a prosecution's claims is a very dangerous pattern in our legal system. this is in a way related the the controversial issue of using base rates and probabilistic arguments in criminal trials.
the difference between DNA evidence and something like ballistic analysis or metallurgic analysis is that you cannot objectively quantify the statistical meaning/relevance or probative strength of the latter two tests. with ballistic tests, there's no objective metric or set of established criteria for what's considered a "good match"--it's entirely up to the discretion of the lab technician. likewise, there's no scientific basis for the translation of metallurgic analysis results into statistical evidence. so while base rates may be admissible in court as evidence, metallurgic analysis should not. there's just no way to present such evidence in an objective, non-misleading manner.
however, that does not preclude the usefulness of metallurgic analysis in a criminal investigation. you may not be able to ethically convict someone based on metallurgic evidence, but you can certainly use it to find leads during the investigation. if you find 2 tons of scrap metal in someone's garage, and metallurgic analysis shows that it perfectly matches some recently stolen copper, then it's probably a good idea to focus your investigation around this potential suspect. this isn't any different from eye-witness testimony, which is similarly a form of non-quantifiable probabilistic evidence (as explained Koehler in the previously linked book). it's not solid proof of guilt/wrongdoing, but it can be strong circumstantial evidence to guide your investigation.
Slashdot Mirror
then i suppose the top 3 languages (2 of which have actually grown in the short-term) are dying since they've all decreased in popularity in the long-term?
well, they actually provide an online storage service with at least some of their web hosting packages. you just can't use it for public data storage.
so if you yourself want to backup a few hundred gigs of personal files that only you will have access to, you can (as long as it's not pirated material). though if you create a dreamhost account just so you can dump your company's 200 TB data warehouse onto their servers and exploit their "unlimited" storage offer, then you'll probably run into some trouble.
because we all know that self-hosted servers never get hacked or suffer down-time. and i'm sure a small business can afford better network & server management/equipment than Amazon, Google, or Microsoft.
do you also keep all of your savings (which is no doubt in gold bullions) in a safe at home that you stand guard over yourself with a 12-gauge shotgun?
it might help to look at the context of the ranking in order to see things in perspective. coming in 8th out of 50 is hardly "dying." and if Perl is dying then Python (7th) isn't far behind, and JavaScript (9th), Ruby (11th), Lisp/Scheme (19th), and Lua (20th) are all definitely dead. not to mention the rest of the ranked languages:
21. ActionScript
22. MATLAB
23. FoxPro/xBase
24. Fortran
25. Ada
26. Transact-SQL
27. Prolog
28. RPG. (OS/400)
29. Erlang
30. NXT-G
31. Awk
32. LabVIEW
33. Haskell
34. ML
35. Objective-C
36. Focus
37. Groovy
38. Smalltalk
39. Euphoria
40. CL. (OS/400)
41. Alice
42. Tcl/Tk
43. Scala
44. Caml
45. Bourne. shell
46. Q
47. Forth
48. Natural
49. APL
50. R
hey, i never claimed that the holy bibble was divinely inspired literature.
and i actually agree with you that other theists are being hypocrites when they single out mormons or scientologists as being irrational cult members. the only difference between mainstream religions and these "cults" is that Christianity/Judaism/Buddhism/Hinduism/Islam/etc. have become well-established social institutions over the centuries and are thus socially acceptable to most people. but every one of these religions started off as small cults with members just as crazy as early mormons and today's scientologists.
like De Sousa said:
there's folie à deux (madness shared by two), folie à trois (by three), folie à quatre (by four), and folie à plusieurs (by many)--all of which are considered psychiatric disorders. but there's no discrete boundary between mass delusion and a legitimate subculture. so how many people have to share in an irrational belief before it becomes socially acceptable?
i think the author's point is that dynamic scaling should always be planned; partly because it results in better understanding of traffic patterns, and thus better long-term capacity planning, and partly because you need to be able to distinguish between valid traffic and DDoS attacks. still, i think the author is overstating it a bit. one of the main draws of cloud computing to smaller businesses is the ability to pool resources more efficiently through multitenancy, part of which is precisely due to auto-scaling. without the cloud being able to dynamically allocate resources to different applications as needed in real-time (i.e. without human intervention), there isn't much of an advantage to sharing a cloud infrastructure over leasing dedicated servers.
for instance, let's say there are 10 different startups with similar hosting needs, and they can each afford to lease 10 application servers on their own. so using traditional hosting models they would each lease 10 servers and balance the load between the them. but after a few months they realize that 75% of the time they only really need 5 servers, and 20% of the time they need all 10, but an occasional 5% of the time they need more than 10 servers to adequately handle their user traffic. this means that in their current arrangement, they're wasting money on more computing resources than they actually need most of the time, and yet they still have service availability issues during peak loads 5% of the time (that's over 2.5 weeks a year).
all 10 of these startups share a common problem--they each have variable/fluctuating traffic loads severely reducing server utilization & efficiency. luckily, cloud computing allows them to pool their resources together. since the majority of the time each startup needs only 5 servers, the minimum number of virtual servers their cloud infrastructure needs is 50. and since each startup needs double that 20% of the time, 10 extra virtual servers are needed (shared through auto-scaling). but since each startup needs more than 10 servers for about 2.5 weeks each year, we'll add another 15 extra virtual servers. so all in total, the 10 startups are now sharing the equivalent of 75 servers in their cloud.
by hosting their applications together on a cloud network, each startup not only has their hosting needs better met, but they also stand to save a lot of money because of better server utilization. and each startup now has access to up to 30 virtual servers when their application requires it. this kind of efficiency would not be possible without a cloud infrastructure and auto-scaling.
it's different because those calls aren't trying to steal your credit card info. they're trying to sell you something using, what seems at first glance, an enticing risk-free offer. one is a bait-and-switch tactic, the other is just phishing over the phone. they might both be scams, but the first one is legal and the second one is not.
i mean, a lot of companies use fine print to lure unsuspecting consumers into really unfavorable contracts. but would you consider that phishing as well? i agree they're both equally scummy and there is a large consumer advocacy movement against deceptive business practices, but there's still a big difference between things like predatory lending and phishing, and it's not just that one is institutionalized and the other isn't.
but Scientology's foundational mythology is based on Hubbard's sci-fi works. i'm sure by now most people have heard of Xenu, the galactic dictator who scientologists believe flew billions of people to Earth on DC-8s, stacked them around volcanoes, and blew them up with H-bombs. well ever heard of Battlefield Earth?
he doesn't even seem like that great of a sci-fi author. i mean, DC-8s? really? that's the best design he could come up with for an intergalactic ship?
the article talks about the use of a tow plane. if they use the tow plane to get the space plane to high sub-orbital altitudes, then the rocket fuel stored in the space plane could be enough to help it reach low earth orbit. it's really not all that different from the launch methods used by X-15 or SpaceShip One.
besides, have you taken a look at the design diagram? nearly 2/3rds of the fuselage is taken up by the plane's two propellant tanks.
personally, i think in terms of commodity computing, we don't really need to squeeze any more power out of the CPU than we've already got. use fully pipelined superscalar architectures, perhaps multithreaded dual or quad cores (for high-end workstations) and VLIW to maximize ILP efficiency. even at current processor speeds, 99% of the applications people (especially casual computer users) use have bottlenecks elsewhere (like memory & disk I/O speeds, internet bandwidth, user response time, etc.).
for the really resource-intensive stuff, like image/video/audio processing, cryptography, 3D graphics, CAD/engineering applications, scientific modeling, processing/manipulating financial data, etc. you would be much better off using a specialized dedicated vector coprocessor (as opposed to a general-purpose scalar processor that commodity CPUs tend to be). this way you can have a relatively low-power (and low clock rate) CPU for processing common SISD instructions that constitute 99% of all computing tasks, greatly cutting the cost of consumer and pro-sumer systems. and by using highly specialized coprocessors to handle the heavy lifting, those applications can be processed more efficiently while using less power (and at lower clock speeds) than trying to get a general-purpose scalar CPU to do the same work.
that is why GPGPUs are generating so much interest these days. it just so happens that most of the really processor-intensive applications consumers run greatly benefit from stream processing. game developers have long taken advantage of dedicated vector coprocessors with highly-specialized instruction sets and architecture made specifically for 3D gaming. DSPs with specialized architectures are also commonly used for hardware-accelerated video encoding, audio processing, etc. and now companies like Adobe are also seeing the advantages to using specialized vector coprocessors for their resource-intensive applications rather than having the CPU handle it.
and, honestly, how many different kinds of processor-intensive applications do most users run on a regular basis? if you're a graphic designer, your main processing power concern is only in relation to 2D/3D graphics. if you're an audio engineer or musician, then you're only going to use audio-related resource-intensive software. likewise, if you're a cryptographer/cryptanalyst, you probably won't ever run any audio editing software or 2D graphics software. therefore, it makes sense to pair moderately powered general-purpose scalar CPUs up with a powerful & highly specialized vector coprocessor like a GPU/DSP/Stream Processor/etc.
actually, i can't because my sources are mainly: a.) my boss, who runs his own record label and has been working in the music industry for close to 30 years, and b.) a friend & former co-worker who now manages a bar/venue out in L.A.
however, if you do a google search for "ASCAP" and "public domain" you'll find a lot of articles that support these claims. for instance, here's one that discusses the ASCAP holding some 40 Beethoven songs on their catalog along with 80 versions of Row, Row, Row Your Boat and countless other works that should be in public domain by now.
you might also take a look at this Wired article. the Wired content itself isn't particularly interesting, but the comments are very telling of how the ASCAP screws over indie artists and venue owners. and i'm sure if you talk to local venue owners in your area you'll here the same kind of stories.
the fact of the matter is, the ASCAP may have been created out of a real need, but over the years this unregulated monopoly (they even faced an anti-trust case a while back, i believe) has devolved into a protection racket of sorts. it's similar to the situation with the RIAA suing alleged file sharers. it doesn't matter whether you're guilty or not, the threat of lawsuit (and the subsequent legal costs) itself is enough to coerce most venue owners to pay their licensing fees, even if they only intend on playing original music or material that's already in public domain.
well, supercomputing has always been about maximizing system performance through parallelism, which can only be done in three main ways: instruction level parallelism, thread level parallelism, and data parallelism.
ILM can be achieved through instruction pipelining, which means breaking down instructions into multiple stages so that CPU modules can work in parallel and reduce idle time. for instance, in a RISC pipeline you break an instruction down into 5 operations:
so while the first instruction is still in the decode stage the CPU is already fetching a second instruction. thus if fully-pipelined there are no stalls or wasted idle time, and a new instruction is loaded every clock cycle, resulting in a maximum of 5 parallel instructions being processed simultaneously.
then there are superscalar processors, which have redundant functional units--for instance, multiple ALUs, FPUs, or SIMD (vector processing) units. and if each of these functional units are also pipelined, then the result is a processor with an execution rate far in excess of one instruction per cycle.
thread level parallelism OTOH is achieved through multiprocessing (SMP, ASMP, NUMA, etc.) or multithreading. this is where multicore and multiprocessor systems come in handy. multithreading is generally cheaper to achieve than multiprocessing since fewer processor components need to be replicated.
lastly, there's data level parallelism, which is achieved in the form of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) vector processors. this type of parallelism, which originated from supercomputing, is especially useful for multimedia applications, scientific research, engineering tasks, cryptography, and data processing/compression, where the same operation needs to be applied to large sets of data. most modern CPUs have some kind of SWAR (SIMD Within A Register) instruction set extension like MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, AltiVec, but these are of limited utility compared to highly specialized dedicated vector processors like GPUs, array processors, DSPs, and stream processors (GPGPU).
upon more research, it appears that i was indeed mistaken. but this iterative upgrade to the DS still confuses me. i mean, why not just come out with a camera attachment for the DS and DS lite so that early adopters don't get left out on new titles?
i'm still really torn about the DS. its larger market share means that it gets the lion's share of games, especially smaller non-mainstream titles. it's sort of in the same niche as the PSX or PS2 in terms of all the import RPGs it gets, most of which are 2D and sprite-based isometric perspective. even franchises that were traditionally native to the PS1 and PS2, such as the Front Mission series, are going to the DS rather than PSP.
but i still can't bring myself to buy a second portable gaming device for those games alone (i still have plenty of PSP games i haven't even had time to play through), plus a used PS2 would probably be cheaper if i want to play games from those franchises. so for now i guess i'll just have to settle for playing old PSX titles using PopStation.
who the hell are you people who are constantly having hardware issues (and just put up with it)?
if my video card or sound card breaks, and there's no way to fix it, i replace it. if my system is acting strange and affecting my productivity, i troubleshoot the problem and resolve the issue, or reformat and do a fresh install when necessary. there's no reason to put up with a system that is constantly crashing or that "goes black once a week." it's not a problem with technology; it's a problem of, either having the incredibly bad luck of consistently buying defective hardware, or simply being too undiscerning when shopping for a computer.
honestly, this idea that computers can never work properly for long periods of time is incredibly misguided. in my experience the only people who resign themselves to a fate of having a computer that never functions properly are generally people who aren't very computer savvy. otherwise, it shouldn't take more than 2-3 weeks to troubleshoot a problem and get it resolved one way or another. and you shouldn't be having computer problems all the time.
heck, even the computers i have to fix at work usually stay fixed for at least 3-4 months. and only very rarely do hardware problems crop up (maybe once every 1~2 years one of the 5 computers in the office will need something replaced). and we don't even get manufacturer warranties. honestly, there's no reason to settle for a less than fully functional system. after all, you paid good money for it. so fix it yourself, or find someone who can.
what malware are you talking about? there have been more than one malware targeted at IE, and not all of them were trojans. some of them did exploit known vulnerabilities that allowed users to be infected just by visiting a malicious web page.
perhaps you should look up what a trojan is before making inapt comparisons.
you young whippersnappers... back in my day we didn't have a uniform currency. we had to invent our own money using clam shells and animal scat. the rear end of an incontinent mammoth was our ATM machine.
oh, and we were happy to have it--up hill, both ways, in the snow, barefoot, with a full orchestra strapped to our backs, and Roman phalanxes chasing us the entire way while the orchestra played Wagner to goad them on.
the sad thing is, this sort of music tax is already in effect. BMI and ASCAP already collect royalties from any public venue that has a jukebox or plays CDs/radio over a PA system. basically, if you operate a bar or club you have to pay them a yearly licensing fee, regardless of what kind of music you play or don't play. they have their own auditors that they send out regularly to check up on venues and operate in a similar fashion to the IRS.
even if you play international music that is in the public domain, or music by indie artists that aren't members of their organization (meaning don't pay them a membership fee and thus don't receive their royalties), you still have to pay them. unfortunately, this system removes any incentive a venue owner might have to play music by indie musicians who actually want their music played in public for as many people to hear as possible. i don't know what gives them the right to collect royalties on music they don't hold the rights to (or have the copyright holder's permission to collect royalties on), but most bar/club owners just pay the licensing fee to avoid legal repercussions.
well, the DSi looks to be the next generation of the DS (as the DS won't be forwards-compatible with DSi games), and it's pretty much going to be exactly what you said--DS controls with much more processing power.
and you're absolutely right about the PSP. the DS, like the Wii, appeals to a lot more casual gamers and thus outsells the PSP. however, the PSP is an incredible device in its own right. as a portable general entertainment system, it beats the DS hands down. and though the DS' touchscreen creates a lot of new & interesting gameplay possibilities, the DS' hardware just doesn't cut it for modern 3D graphics. the two systems are made for two different markets; just because the DS appeals to a larger population doesn't mean it's superior.
personally, i'd rather have a portable device that surfs the web, plays music/videos, displays e-books, and can play 3D sports games, racers, shooters, etc. than a device that only plays games, and that can't run the type of games that i like.
what security holes? did you even RTFA?
the malware was designed to target Firefox, but it doesn't exploit any known Firefox vulnerability. also it's a trojan, meaning the only way you can catch it is if you are tricked into downloading it and executing it, or if it is downloaded & executed by another piece of malware. if you have malicious code running (with read/write privilege) on your system, then your system is already compromised at that point. therefore, it doesn't really matter where the malware hides itself afterwards. it could just as easily sit in your iTunes directory or target Opera users. the only reason this malware was news is that Firefox is finally gaining enough widespread adoption to be seriously targeted by malware writers. that's something that just can't be helped.
not to mention the loss of farmers' right to recycle harvested crops via saved seeds (see: terminator gene), the risk of lawsuits independent non-GM farmers face if their crops get cross-pollinated on accident (or intentionally), and the general loss of non-patented natural plant species.
it's simply insane to allow international conglomerates to patent the genetic code of living organisms. first off, the code they started with was not of their own creation. modern crops are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding by human farmers and millions of years of natural cross-pollination. they're the shared ecological inheritance of our planet and our civilization. even the genes that are artificially spliced into GM crops came from other natural species originally.
there's nothing inherently wrong with genetic modification, but only if it's done in a way that is ethical and socially/ecologically responsible. a commercial corporation can patent the method they use to modify their plants (if it indeed qualifies as a non-trivial invention), but they can't patent the DNA sequence of plants they didn't design from scratch, especially not plants that can cross-pollinate with someone else' crops and infect them with this "patented" DNA.
still, i think a better (more useful) test would be conducted by:
i suspect that preventative education/training is probably the most effective method of combating viruses & malware. and though it might not be cost-effective in the short-term, it might be cheaper to train long-term employees how to avoid viruses/malware than to pay for yearly-subscriptions and still suffer down-time and loss of productivity from infections.
you could try Jim Jones's wacky purple instant-salvation-aid.
how many people did anthrax or hydrogen bombs kill last year?
i guess they're not dangerous either...
he must be using one of those analog texting services.
ah you're right. i actually saw a documentary show on the problems with such "expert testimony." i think forensic ballistics to match the rifling pattern of a firearm with recovered bullets is also being questioned by many scientists and reformists.
just to be clear, i absolutely agree with this push for reform in the justice system. the use of bad "science" to give a false sense of scientific objectivity/legitimacy to a prosecution's claims is a very dangerous pattern in our legal system. this is in a way related the the controversial issue of using base rates and probabilistic arguments in criminal trials.
the difference between DNA evidence and something like ballistic analysis or metallurgic analysis is that you cannot objectively quantify the statistical meaning/relevance or probative strength of the latter two tests. with ballistic tests, there's no objective metric or set of established criteria for what's considered a "good match"--it's entirely up to the discretion of the lab technician. likewise, there's no scientific basis for the translation of metallurgic analysis results into statistical evidence. so while base rates may be admissible in court as evidence, metallurgic analysis should not. there's just no way to present such evidence in an objective, non-misleading manner.
however, that does not preclude the usefulness of metallurgic analysis in a criminal investigation. you may not be able to ethically convict someone based on metallurgic evidence, but you can certainly use it to find leads during the investigation. if you find 2 tons of scrap metal in someone's garage, and metallurgic analysis shows that it perfectly matches some recently stolen copper, then it's probably a good idea to focus your investigation around this potential suspect. this isn't any different from eye-witness testimony, which is similarly a form of non-quantifiable probabilistic evidence (as explained Koehler in the previously linked book). it's not solid proof of guilt/wrongdoing, but it can be strong circumstantial evidence to guide your investigation.