That's because the summary is terrible, and so is the person who wrote it, and also the Slashdot editors, for posting it.
Google appears to be content to remain in China doing business as usual while it finds a way to work within the system, according to one of the search giant's founders. This despite a strong statement 30 days ago that it would stop censoring search results in China and possibly pull its business out of that country.
The usage of "despite" here would suggest there's some sort of contradiction betweeen these sentences, however Google's original post said:
We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
Which is to say, the lack of obvious action thus far isn't particularly notable. When it's been half a year and there's been no further news, then you can start bitching, but not now.
In the mean time, shortly after we celebrated google.cn lifting censorship, the exact same censorship has been quietly re-enabled
And this part is just outright false. They were never disabled in the first place, as noted even by several comments in the article that was linked to there. Furthermore, Google's announcement never said anything like that they'd be immediately removing the censorship.
Basically, there's nothing of note here and anyone whining about how Google hasn't pulled out and uncensored their search engine and organized an elite team to overthrow the oppressive Chinese government and given everyone on Earth their own personal unicorn has gotten vastly inflated expectations due to poor reading comprehension.
Nice strawman - I didn't say "threats of violence", I said the burning hatred in your former colleagues' eyes.
Actually, you said this:
Would you want to say anything that would want your colleagues slobber at the thought of crushing your skull?
An unstated threat is still a threat, and that certainly qualifies.
That burning hatred was very clearly displayed in the hacked e-mails
No, nothing of the sort was.
and the scientific community went out in crowds.to say that this was _perfectly normal behaviour_.
Some members of the scientific community, hardly crowds, defended what was actually in the emails: frustration with, and contempt for, the ideologically-driven anti-science actions of the denialists, which is certainly normal behavior. Breaking fucking news, if people think you're an idiot they're going to call you such behind your back. Welcome to humanity.
Your attempts to "refute" that phenomenon through ridicule and asshattery simply shows what a lowlife piece of shit you are. Nothing motivates ME as much as the "climate crowd" showing they are full of crap, lies, and willingness to act like clowns if it can "win" them an argument.
I can only assume this portion of your post was written while staring into a mirror.
I'm sorry, did you just seriously imply that the broad scientific consensus in favor of AGW is a result of threats of violence? I've seen some pretty insane denialist conspiracy theories on Slashdot, but this is certainly one of the craziest. Tell me, where does the commie fascist UN plot for a world government fit into this?
You might have a point if the golden ratio were an entirely arbitrary number and not one derived from a simple geometric relation. Pointing to the golden ratio as evidence for the existence of god is like pointing to occurrences of pi in nature, or the Fibonacci sequence. It isn't god's fingerprints, it's math's fingerprints.
There is no "divorce from nature". In fact, man is doing the most natural thing possible: expanding and consuming until nature's limiter of resources, death, kicks in. This sort of thing isn't particularly odd in nature, the only difference is that usually there are other predators and such that keep the other species in line. Humans, however, are the predator above all predators, and with all these shiny toys we've built up over the millennia, there's not really any threat from any animal on the planet to us, so the usual checks and balances that would keep such behavior from going to such pathological extents do little.
I don't think you quite understand. The only thing DRM has is security by obscurity. When you freely hand out both the ciphertext *and* the key to whoever asks, you can't have anything else. And if it's open source, you don't get even that. So no, you're not going to see any open source DRM systems any time soon.
The key part to note is that they only included a single game which fits very cleanly into a single genre. All it tells us is that female gamers play EQ2 more on average than male gamers. It's also a bit of evidence towards the same for MMORPGs in general. However, it's ridiculous to from this conclude that female gamers amongst the (much, much) broader gaming community play more than males.
Do you seriously believe "the addresses are really long" is going to be the main thing blocking IPv6 adoption? Or even something the average person will care about in the slightest?
And when there was the story a little while back about the Republican who raped his daughters and was trying to censor news about it where Slashdot didn't mention his political affiliation, that was a clear example of Evil Liberal Bias too, right?
If this is what you mean when you're talking about "liberal bias" then it's no wonder everyone looks at you like you're a paranoid lunatic.
That's because fighting terrorism merely requires giving up your freedoms, whereas fighting climate change requires giving up your SUV and that shit is serious fucking business.
No, they changed "global warming" to "climate change" because idiots like you thought "global warming" meant that every single point on the planet would monotonically increase year-over-year, and to a lesser extent because "climate change" is more accurate anyway because the increase in carbon dioxide has other effects too, such as ocean acidification. Unfortunately, they failed to consider that idiots like you would think this is more evidence of a massive global conspiracy to steal your freedom and monies.
And various cryptographic things (and somewhat relatedly, checksums) can take advantage of SSE stuff to various extents. And probably other little things in rare situations. Thus why I said "pretty much all" instead of simply "all".
Some would argue that discriminating based on arbitrary metrics like "being alive" is wrong, and that a rock is as equally deserving of rights and freedom as any human.
These people are quite reasonably regarded as being batshit insane.
The various SSE instruction sets provide SIMD instructions, which is an acronym for "single instruction, multiple data". As the name suggests, they allow you to perform operations on multiple pieces of data with a single instruction. SIMD is great for media applications, where you often have to do the same mathematical operations over and over again to lots of data at once, however pretty much all of the stuff that happens in a kernel is logic-heavy tasks that only deal with single pieces of data at a time, and thus can't really take advantage of these instructions in any way.
Because highly dynamic languages that do everything at runtime are not so easy to optimize at compile time. It is possible though to do all sorts of fancy things at runtime, such as with, for example, Java (though ironically Java is the exact opposite of this sort of language and doesn't really need it so much), and some traditionally purely interpreted languages like JavaScript have started getting snazzy JIT implementations these days. PHP wouldn't benefit from this sort of stuff too much as it's largely IO-bound in practice, and, as a few other users here have noted, most of the heavy lifting in PHP applications is done in databases which are most certainly not written in this sort of language.
I see. You think optimizations would work the same between an AMD chip and an Intel chip and would be guaranteed to have no side effects.
That's because they do. If your compiler makes the code use SIMD extensions it'll improve the performance everywhere they're implemented properly. The only sort of optimization that wouldn't work everywhere is stuff that takes into account intimate knowledge of model-specific details, and that's unlikely to work any worse than unoptimized code (and if it does, so what). If your optimization breaks the program on any CPU that properly implements the ISA it's compiled for, your optimization is broken, and the one processor it works on has a bug.
In your rosy little world Intel can just assume any processor with cpuid flags matching a specific feature will work exactly the same as Intel's chips will.
They can because it does, and if it doesn't the other CPU maker has a bug in one of their chips and will shortly be getting a lot of angry customers and bad press and Intel will be getting neither, and the whole situation is a massive win for Intel.
I should really stop arguing with clueless people, it leads nowhere.
What, you were arguing with yourself? You should be more clear about it then.
Wow, you don't know much about, well, anything do you?
The ironing, it is delicious.
If Intel just released a compiler with optimizations that may or may not work on AMD there would be hell to pay.
No there wouldn't.
Intel would have to thoroughly validate their compiler against AMD products.
No they wouldn't.
Who's the clueless one, again? "Durr, can't they just release a compiler with optimizations targetted for a processor without thoroughly validating that said optimizations work on said processor?". Jesus Christ dude, really? Are you that stupid?
When did I say anything about including AMD-specific optimizations? What I said is that they shouldn't specifically disable the optimizations for AMD chips, which work fine on AMD chips.
Supporting (yes, even enabling support for) AMD chips would have cost Intel time and money, and not inconsiderable amounts of either.
It would have cost them nothing because it would already work by default. They already have to check the completely standard and implemented by AMD CPUID feature flags to see if their own chips support the features in question.
No one in their right mind will dictate that Intel should spend money giving AMD a free fucking compiler.
What a wondrous coincidence this is then, for it is that no one is making such demands and you're just a whiny asshole who fails reading comprehension.
Yes, actually, but that's not the material issue here. If they want to put in an instruction that says "if processor_type 'Intel' then skip_optimizations=1" then all the power to them. It's theirs. Not AMDs. Not yours.
Unless it is part of a massive pattern of grossly anti-competitive behavior which they then get repeatedly sued all over the world for. Then, not so much.
But if the product is then changed so the third party's products no longer work, that's always bad? It's always anticompetitive?
If they intentionally and maliciously change it for no purpose but to prevent their competitor's product working with it, yes.
What you're suggesting here is that not "harming the competition" is more important than a company's right to design its products to be as beneficial to use together as possible.
"Suggesting"? I guess I was too subtle. I'll state it very explicitly: The proper functioning of the market is far more important than the ability of a company to do with its products as it pleases. And this doesn't make their products more "beneficial to use together", it just makes it less beneficial to use it with the product of a competitor to them in a different market, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you by both me and others. And after talking about how we should "unbundle" things like with Windows and IE, it doesn't make much sense to be saying companies should be allowed to do that sort of stuff freely.
And no, they're very bundled -- I can't use an AMD processor with an Intel chipset. Motherboards are designed around the CPUs -- and while the peripherals (memory, expansion cards, etc.) may have standardized interfaces, the guts of the system does not.
If there were published standards about how CPUs connect to the mainboard, and if the mainboard's major components were made interoperable (open BIOS, SMC, all that jazz--) that would be unbundling. The bottom line here is that if these parts were interchangable -- so that you didn't have to decide on the CPU first and then the rest of the system, that would be "unbundled". That would be a more fair marketplace than what exists right now.
"But then Intel can't make their products work as best possible with each other! What right do you have to tell them what to do with their own products!" And so on. Your arguments are once again not being internally consistent, even within the same post. While it'd certainly be nice if hardware manufacturers were completely open about all their stuff, this sort of thing in particular (making every processor work on every motherboard) is quite a bit of effort for very little benefit, particularly in this case. Being able to run an AMD processor on a motherboard for an Intel processor whilst giggling to yourself about how funny it is is about all you get out of it. It wouldn't prevent any of the highly anti-competitive things Intel has been doing, not even just the specific case of them being jerks with their compiler.
So Intel should be required to test out their competitors products for compatibility with these optimizations, as well as its own products?
Are you fucking kidding me? Intel didn't just "not test" it with AMD's stuff, they went out of their way to make sure it wouldn't work on it. And if AMD's processors didn't run x86 code properly a whole lot more people would notice then just the ones using Intel's compilers. Do you even have any clue how a compiler works?
I'm not defending Intel here
You are saying that what Intel did with their compiler is perfectly legitimate. I don't see how you can spin that as anything but defending them.
the issue is whether Intel is allowed control over its own products
And that issue is long-settled: they are not allowed control over their own products to they extent they can harm competition in the market as they please. The only possible "issue" is whether their actions did or did not illegally harm competition.
If you ask me, the solution is to unbundle the CPU from the rest of the system architecture. I know, it's difficult to imagine even amongst IT people because the CPU has long been the center of the system -- everything is designed around that. Well, maybe it's time for that to change. And the FTC should put its focus there -- just as we unbundled Internet Explorer from Windows -- the software, it's time to unbundle the hardware.
Okay, now I'm definitely sure you don't understand the slightest bit about the technology involved. The CPU is already "unbundled" from everything to the maximum extent technically possible. They cannot "unbundle" it any further. The code would've run just fine on AMD's chips precisely because it is "unbundled" and is an interchangeable piece of hardware with multiple independent implementations. Intel has absolutely no defense here, certainly not on technical grounds, and you're just making yourself look like a fool trying to argue for them.
There is no conspiracy: This is business. Business is inherently anti-competitive.
Which is why there is regulation to keep the sociopathic asshats that run major corporations in line, so they compete like they're supposed to.
If I'm competing with you, I want you out of the game, and just like in a video game, I will use combo attacks and drop-kick you right as you get up (repeatedly) to keep you from recovering until you throw the controller at me. That's just how the game is played.
Yes, but if you cut the cord for my controller in the middle of the match, I'm going to be quite rightfully pissed. There are rules as to what you can and cannot do within the game, and breaking these rules through unethical means is not going to win you any friends. And in the game of business, you're going to get a lot worse than people getting angry at you if you get caught.
And most fighting games won't let you just constantly knock someone down while they're getting up like that, because trivial and unbreakable infinite combos may be fun while you're the one on top, but they ruin it for everyone else. Your analogy seems to have been even more apt than you had considered.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the summary is terrible, and so is the person who wrote it, and also the Slashdot editors, for posting it.
The usage of "despite" here would suggest there's some sort of contradiction betweeen these sentences, however Google's original post said:
Which is to say, the lack of obvious action thus far isn't particularly notable. When it's been half a year and there's been no further news, then you can start bitching, but not now.
And this part is just outright false. They were never disabled in the first place, as noted even by several comments in the article that was linked to there. Furthermore, Google's announcement never said anything like that they'd be immediately removing the censorship.
Basically, there's nothing of note here and anyone whining about how Google hasn't pulled out and uncensored their search engine and organized an elite team to overthrow the oppressive Chinese government and given everyone on Earth their own personal unicorn has gotten vastly inflated expectations due to poor reading comprehension.
Actually, you said this:
An unstated threat is still a threat, and that certainly qualifies.
No, nothing of the sort was.
Some members of the scientific community, hardly crowds, defended what was actually in the emails: frustration with, and contempt for, the ideologically-driven anti-science actions of the denialists, which is certainly normal behavior. Breaking fucking news, if people think you're an idiot they're going to call you such behind your back. Welcome to humanity.
I can only assume this portion of your post was written while staring into a mirror.
I'm sorry, did you just seriously imply that the broad scientific consensus in favor of AGW is a result of threats of violence? I've seen some pretty insane denialist conspiracy theories on Slashdot, but this is certainly one of the craziest. Tell me, where does the commie fascist UN plot for a world government fit into this?
You might have a point if the golden ratio were an entirely arbitrary number and not one derived from a simple geometric relation. Pointing to the golden ratio as evidence for the existence of god is like pointing to occurrences of pi in nature, or the Fibonacci sequence. It isn't god's fingerprints, it's math's fingerprints.
There is no "divorce from nature". In fact, man is doing the most natural thing possible: expanding and consuming until nature's limiter of resources, death, kicks in. This sort of thing isn't particularly odd in nature, the only difference is that usually there are other predators and such that keep the other species in line. Humans, however, are the predator above all predators, and with all these shiny toys we've built up over the millennia, there's not really any threat from any animal on the planet to us, so the usual checks and balances that would keep such behavior from going to such pathological extents do little.
I've never heard any physicist say such an absurd thing. Perhaps you are confusing them with creators of popular "science" fiction?
That sounds exactly like what a Jewdot editor would say. I knew it, you're one of them too!
I don't think you quite understand. The only thing DRM has is security by obscurity. When you freely hand out both the ciphertext *and* the key to whoever asks, you can't have anything else. And if it's open source, you don't get even that. So no, you're not going to see any open source DRM systems any time soon.
The key part to note is that they only included a single game which fits very cleanly into a single genre. All it tells us is that female gamers play EQ2 more on average than male gamers. It's also a bit of evidence towards the same for MMORPGs in general. However, it's ridiculous to from this conclude that female gamers amongst the (much, much) broader gaming community play more than males.
Do you seriously believe "the addresses are really long" is going to be the main thing blocking IPv6 adoption? Or even something the average person will care about in the slightest?
Here you go.
And when there was the story a little while back about the Republican who raped his daughters and was trying to censor news about it where Slashdot didn't mention his political affiliation, that was a clear example of Evil Liberal Bias too, right?
If this is what you mean when you're talking about "liberal bias" then it's no wonder everyone looks at you like you're a paranoid lunatic.
You could've phrased it far more succinctly as "Poor people are poor, so fuck 'em!"
That's because fighting terrorism merely requires giving up your freedoms, whereas fighting climate change requires giving up your SUV and that shit is serious fucking business.
No, they changed "global warming" to "climate change" because idiots like you thought "global warming" meant that every single point on the planet would monotonically increase year-over-year, and to a lesser extent because "climate change" is more accurate anyway because the increase in carbon dioxide has other effects too, such as ocean acidification. Unfortunately, they failed to consider that idiots like you would think this is more evidence of a massive global conspiracy to steal your freedom and monies.
And various cryptographic things (and somewhat relatedly, checksums) can take advantage of SSE stuff to various extents. And probably other little things in rare situations. Thus why I said "pretty much all" instead of simply "all".
I've seen all the films as an adult, never had any of the toys, and I still like them and you are still a trolling asshat.
Some would argue that discriminating based on arbitrary metrics like "being alive" is wrong, and that a rock is as equally deserving of rights and freedom as any human.
These people are quite reasonably regarded as being batshit insane.
The various SSE instruction sets provide SIMD instructions, which is an acronym for "single instruction, multiple data". As the name suggests, they allow you to perform operations on multiple pieces of data with a single instruction. SIMD is great for media applications, where you often have to do the same mathematical operations over and over again to lots of data at once, however pretty much all of the stuff that happens in a kernel is logic-heavy tasks that only deal with single pieces of data at a time, and thus can't really take advantage of these instructions in any way.
Because highly dynamic languages that do everything at runtime are not so easy to optimize at compile time. It is possible though to do all sorts of fancy things at runtime, such as with, for example, Java (though ironically Java is the exact opposite of this sort of language and doesn't really need it so much), and some traditionally purely interpreted languages like JavaScript have started getting snazzy JIT implementations these days. PHP wouldn't benefit from this sort of stuff too much as it's largely IO-bound in practice, and, as a few other users here have noted, most of the heavy lifting in PHP applications is done in databases which are most certainly not written in this sort of language.
That's because they do. If your compiler makes the code use SIMD extensions it'll improve the performance everywhere they're implemented properly. The only sort of optimization that wouldn't work everywhere is stuff that takes into account intimate knowledge of model-specific details, and that's unlikely to work any worse than unoptimized code (and if it does, so what). If your optimization breaks the program on any CPU that properly implements the ISA it's compiled for, your optimization is broken, and the one processor it works on has a bug.
They can because it does, and if it doesn't the other CPU maker has a bug in one of their chips and will shortly be getting a lot of angry customers and bad press and Intel will be getting neither, and the whole situation is a massive win for Intel.
What, you were arguing with yourself? You should be more clear about it then.
The ironing, it is delicious.
No there wouldn't.
No they wouldn't.
When did I say anything about including AMD-specific optimizations? What I said is that they shouldn't specifically disable the optimizations for AMD chips, which work fine on AMD chips.
It would have cost them nothing because it would already work by default. They already have to check the completely standard and implemented by AMD CPUID feature flags to see if their own chips support the features in question.
What a wondrous coincidence this is then, for it is that no one is making such demands and you're just a whiny asshole who fails reading comprehension.
Unless it is part of a massive pattern of grossly anti-competitive behavior which they then get repeatedly sued all over the world for. Then, not so much.
If they intentionally and maliciously change it for no purpose but to prevent their competitor's product working with it, yes.
"Suggesting"? I guess I was too subtle. I'll state it very explicitly: The proper functioning of the market is far more important than the ability of a company to do with its products as it pleases. And this doesn't make their products more "beneficial to use together", it just makes it less beneficial to use it with the product of a competitor to them in a different market, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you by both me and others. And after talking about how we should "unbundle" things like with Windows and IE, it doesn't make much sense to be saying companies should be allowed to do that sort of stuff freely.
"But then Intel can't make their products work as best possible with each other! What right do you have to tell them what to do with their own products!" And so on. Your arguments are once again not being internally consistent, even within the same post. While it'd certainly be nice if hardware manufacturers were completely open about all their stuff, this sort of thing in particular (making every processor work on every motherboard) is quite a bit of effort for very little benefit, particularly in this case. Being able to run an AMD processor on a motherboard for an Intel processor whilst giggling to yourself about how funny it is is about all you get out of it. It wouldn't prevent any of the highly anti-competitive things Intel has been doing, not even just the specific case of them being jerks with their compiler.
Are you fucking kidding me? Intel didn't just "not test" it with AMD's stuff, they went out of their way to make sure it wouldn't work on it. And if AMD's processors didn't run x86 code properly a whole lot more people would notice then just the ones using Intel's compilers. Do you even have any clue how a compiler works?
You are saying that what Intel did with their compiler is perfectly legitimate. I don't see how you can spin that as anything but defending them.
And that issue is long-settled: they are not allowed control over their own products to they extent they can harm competition in the market as they please. The only possible "issue" is whether their actions did or did not illegally harm competition.
Okay, now I'm definitely sure you don't understand the slightest bit about the technology involved. The CPU is already "unbundled" from everything to the maximum extent technically possible. They cannot "unbundle" it any further. The code would've run just fine on AMD's chips precisely because it is "unbundled" and is an interchangeable piece of hardware with multiple independent implementations. Intel has absolutely no defense here, certainly not on technical grounds, and you're just making yourself look like a fool trying to argue for them.
Which is why there is regulation to keep the sociopathic asshats that run major corporations in line, so they compete like they're supposed to.
Yes, but if you cut the cord for my controller in the middle of the match, I'm going to be quite rightfully pissed. There are rules as to what you can and cannot do within the game, and breaking these rules through unethical means is not going to win you any friends. And in the game of business, you're going to get a lot worse than people getting angry at you if you get caught.
And most fighting games won't let you just constantly knock someone down while they're getting up like that, because trivial and unbreakable infinite combos may be fun while you're the one on top, but they ruin it for everyone else. Your analogy seems to have been even more apt than you had considered.