"Best effort" is what we had for years without a tiered Internet. Using that label for a second tier is seriously disingenuous. Before, effort was made to ensure that pipes had sufficient capacity, and that congestion was the exception, and not the rule--that is "best effort". No longer.
Relegating all second class traffic to a permanently congested and insufficient pipe can hardly be considered "best effort". There is no incentive for them to provide sufficient capacity for Internet services which compete with their own services. In fact, quite the opposite.
The reason that the Internet was such a powerful engine for innovation, is exactly because it had excess capacity, and the ability to support new applications. If all Internet traffic is now to be relegated to the scraps of bandwidth remaining from so called "managed services", it is dead for all practical purposes.
Sure, it will hobble along, but a tiered Internet can never provide the rich opportunities for innovation, or even competition with established services. That is why it is crucial that this not happen. Under a neutral Internet, there is every incentive to provide sufficient bandwidth so that it works well for everyone. Once you start carving it up, those incentives disappear, and the incumbent monopolies will prevail.
What you refer to is not a real stylus, and will not give you the precision or pressure sensitivity of one. It is basically a crude artificial finger, which is not suitable for drawing or writing, much less finger painting.
Nor does Apple provide any means for a developer to replace or augment the input system.
That would be because you are implicitly qualifying that statement with "on crude devices for ascii text input".
Have you met any artists who hate stylus input? How about taking notes, drawing, or entering symbols not found on your keyboard, as with most non-latin languages including mathematics.
How about with alternative input systems like ShapeWriter or HexInput? Such technology has come a long way since the Palm Pilot...and yet has a long way to go.
Multitouch is great and also offers immense opportunity for innovation, yet that need not be mutually exclusive with stylus input. Rather, they complement each other, and would make a tablet a far more versatile device.
The market doesn't speak, but if it could, it wouldn't be saying what you think. All that can be inferred is that people didn't buy something, not why, and consideration for a tablet goes far beyond wether it has a stylus or not.
Even if the perfect device was available a decade ago, which it wasn't, it would be meaningless without the software to take advantage of those features. That isn't going to happen if the hardware doesn't exist though, so there has been little opportunity for innovation.
The only device that I know of which even has potential for an interested developer, would be the Lenovo X series tablets, but I don't know if the relevant documentation is even available. (Of course that isn't nearly in the size and price range that most people would consider for a tablet.)
The iPad may be a good start, but it is still very crude, and doesn't even scratch the surface of what a tablet could be. A tablet should at the very least also support stylus input, and allow people to explore/develop alternative input systems. (Of which there are already a number that are far superior to fixed on-screen qwerty keyboards, or even miniature physical keyboards.)
No one is going to get it right the first time, and selling locked-down featureless hardware, which is guaranteed to be forever crippled isn't a winning strategy. (This applies not only to Apple, but tivoized Android systems as well.)
While the defense budget is no doubt way out of control, this is not at all the sort of thing that worries me. It has no practical military value in the near term, and at least produced interesting results.
I'm more concerned about other high-tech anti-personel weapons or robots, that will inevitably be pointed at people, possible even at our own citizens before long.
Speaking of waste, and far more disturbing at that, take a look at what the anti-terrorism efforts have spawned. I really had no idea of the scale of it. Having this turned against our own citizens as the fascism ramps up is truly frightening.
That is what compilers are for. It is silly to suggest that there was no software for a Unix based system, especially at that time.
Availability of Windows based software would have helped, but was hardly necessary. The market didn't kill the Alpha, it was pure stupidity on the part of management.
The DEC Alpha was (and still is) a brilliant architecture. The designers took great care from the start to make sure that it would scale, both in clock and core count. It was simple, elegant and fast.
IIRC, the early chips were fast enough to emulate x86 code at a reasonable speed. If all you wanted to do was run emulated x86 code though, then maybe they were "useless". This was especially true before the BWX extension, which introduced a number of byte oriented instructions.
Native code, on the other hand, would leave you with no misconceptions about the speed of the Alpha; it was truly impressive. DECs compilers and math libraries were also excellent.
You have unintentionally exited the realm of physics, and entered the realm of math. The fact is, it is unknown wether matter is composed of waves or particles; requiring it to be both however, is absurd.
The Copenhagen interpretation of QM is a purely mathematical construct which bridges this fundamental dichotomy, without providing any insight into real physics. It is an abomination that has replaced the search for truth, with the proclamation of an unknowable reality, veiled behind statistics. In essence, replacing science with belief.
Why continue with the concept of name ownership at all? It should be technically impossible to own a name, in the same way that it should be impossible to monopolize ideas.
Let people and entities use whatever name they want; the remaining problem is to verify that you are talking to the right host, but you should need to do that anyway. Invariably, any sort of central authority can and will be subverted. What is necessary is some other means of conveying trust, wether that is a web of trust, or some other out of band option.
This is what I believe we should strive for. The distributed naming system and trust system are orthogonal problems, but need to integrate in a convenient way. So, it is still a hard problem, just not in the same way.
Wikipedia says: "Apple brought the concept of Light Peak, an interoperable standard which could handle large amounts of data and replace the multitudinous connector types with a single universal connector, to Intel in 2007 with the intention of Intel producing and developing the technology."
[citation needed]
However, I know that Slashdot is packed to the bring with suspiciously anonymous Apple-bashers these days and that they won't believe anything positive about Apple whatsoever. The only good company is Google.
None of Apple's business practices have anything to do with it? Apple, like most other large corporations, do not often behave in the public's interest, but are actively hostile to it.
I find it ironic that as Overly Critical Guy, you refuse to accept criticism of Apple, where deserved. Actually, on second thought, most of the Apple fanboys are highly hypocritical, so perhaps it balances out.
The consistency guarantees provided by the tested filesystems differ significantly. Most (all?) aside from ZFS only journal metadata by default. All data and metadata written to ZFS is always consistent on disk. You won't notice the difference until you crash, and even then you still might not, but it will certainly show up in the benchmarks.
ZFS is not a lightweight filesystem, that is a fact. The 128-bit addresses, 256-bit checksums, compression, and two or three way replicated metadata don't come for free. Also, another thing that may be working against ZFS on a Flash based SSD is the page size. By default, ZFS uses a minimum of 512 byte blocks for data, whereas most other filesystems use 4k which matches the SSD page size. It would be interesting to create the ZFS pool with a 4k asize and see how that affects the results.
The benchmarks aside, it is the feature set which really sells it. The performance is good, the administrative interface is excellent, and it does an fine job of returning your data in an error free state. At the end of the day, that is what really matters.
Even so, I look forward to more numbers when stable releases can be compared. It would also be nice to include DragonFlyBSDs HAMMER filesystem, to round out the modern set.
"Performance on this chip is not interesting," Mattson said. It uses a standard x86 instruction set.
How about developing a small efficient core, where the performance is interesting? Actually, don't even bother; just reuse the DEC Alpha instruction set that is collecting dust at Intel.
There is no point in tying these massively parallel architectures to some ancient ISA.
You are missing the point. No matter what convoluted reasoning you use, you can't just add together GPR + vector and say that amd64 has 39 registers. It doesn't matter if the registers exist if they can't be used together.
No matter how hard the compilers try, if the problem doesn't fit in register, it will spill. Sixteen registers is not exactly abundant, so this is not at all uncommon. One does need to account for the extra latency in the using memory operands, but this can often be done. (Though it is obnoxious when one has to do it by hand.)
It is also obnoxious that certain operations need to be done in certain registers, yet further increasing the amount of registers which must be shuffled around. (As if it weren't bad enough dealing with this and register spillage, the two-operand instructions also add to the problem.) I have to wonder just how much of the width of a modern x86 processor is wasted shuffling data around.
All modern (performant) RISC architectures have 32/32 gp/fp registers. (Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS,...) If ARM wants to compete in this space, that is what they should do. Where 64-bit code isn't necessary, there is no loss in continuing to run 32-bit. (Unlike the backwards x86 architecture, where amd64 brings many other crucial advancements.)
If you are going to throw in the vector registers, why not the FP stack; that can be used to do "integer operations" as well if you are careful. However, neither provide the same "integer operations" as the GPRs. Whether you spill to other registers, or memory, it is still an ugly mess.
There are still only 16 GPRs, and then the compiler resorts to memory operands. Maybe some masochistic programmer could cobble together some assembly that made use of the assortment of heterogeneous hardware available, but claiming that amd64 has more than 16 registers is disingenuous.
ARM already has 16 GPRs, so you can use them in pairs and have 8 registers for 64-bit operations. Not quite as many as x86-64, but four times as many as x86, so even that isn't much of an advantage. All of the other advantages that x86-64 has over x86, ARM has already.
The amd64 architecture gets away with so few registers only because it can operate on memory directly. With a load-store architecture, eight registers would be extremely constraining. If anything, ARM should expand the register set for 64-bit mode.
While your post adequately describes the accepted thinking, it defies rational thought. While we may lack the ability to measure something beyond a certain limit, that is not evidence that the underlying physics is indeterministic, or inherently unknowable.
By accepting that it was, we veered right out of the realm of science, and physics continues to be mired in probabilistic nonsense. You can calculate things, but the model provides no insight into the underlying reality. Seventy years later, and we are still no closer to bridging the fundamental divide in physics.
Pressure sensitivity would be nice, but even without it, it is a very welcome improvement over touch-only interfaces.
Stylus based input is a critical feature for many uses of a tablet. Without it, and the innovative features it enables, they hold no advantage over a notebook.
Even if it is "free" for personal use, beware. Unless you have an Oracle support contract, you are out of luck if you encounter problems. I'm not sure if outsiders can even file a bug report now, much less get an actual fix in a timely manner.
Gone are the days of helpful people on Sun's mailing lists who could supply a quick source fix when things go awry. This was a common occurrence on zfs-discuss, and now you will have no recourse whatsoever.
Solaris Express is a development release, and without the source, you are at the mercy of Oracle, regardless of how much you pay. That is not a good place to be...
Unless there is an impartial third party whose sole charter is to resell access to the lines, there is no such thing as separate. It is a fine idea, but it completely ignores reality.
What we need to do, is exactly what Australia is doing; appropriate Verizon's fiber, and build out a national fiber network, to be shared by all ISPs and content providers with the desire to compete. (Sure, they paid Telstra, but the billions upon billions in subsidies here should more than cover it.)
Given a fair and competitive market, let Comcast/TWC and their ilk wall off their own little sections of fail. Without it though, any attempt at "separate" will completely ruin the Internet.
*How is it broken? Let me count the ways. To start, there are enough sleazy certificate vendors that you don't get any real trust from the scheme. But setting up enterprise cert management is clumsy enough that few people really do it, hence client certs aren't use very often. And because of the combination of cost and clumsiness of issuing real certs, there are so many self-signed certs around the users are used to clicking through cert warnings anyway. Yuck.
I would just like to add: regardless, you are placing your trust in a central authority. That authority can be subverted with ease, when the will to do so emerges.
No, when SSDs fail, they are not readable. The electrons, (ie. your data), literally leak out of the device over time. With each new generation of flash, the longevity of stored data decreases dramatically. Currently it is measured in years, but it won't be long before it is measured in months.
What you are referring to is the write endurance, and that is a separate issue entirely. (Though quickly receding as well.) In any case, magnetic domains are a hell of a lot more stable over time.
I will wait for PRAM or MRAM before trusting data to an SSD, thanks.
What you are suggesting is clearly impossible. Maybe if we had millions or perhaps billions of people, they might often have overlapping ideas. However, in our world, so few people actually think, that strict enforcement of intellectual monopoly is the only way to secure a brighter future for us all. God bless our corporations for undertaking this burden.
More seriously, this is exactly why IP should be banned outright; it infringes on peoples' freedom of thought.
Slashdot Mirror
"Best effort" is what we had for years without a tiered Internet. Using that label for a second tier is seriously disingenuous. Before, effort was made to ensure that pipes had sufficient capacity, and that congestion was the exception, and not the rule--that is "best effort". No longer.
Relegating all second class traffic to a permanently congested and insufficient pipe can hardly be considered "best effort". There is no incentive for them to provide sufficient capacity for Internet services which compete with their own services. In fact, quite the opposite.
The reason that the Internet was such a powerful engine for innovation, is exactly because it had excess capacity, and the ability to support new applications. If all Internet traffic is now to be relegated to the scraps of bandwidth remaining from so called "managed services", it is dead for all practical purposes.
Sure, it will hobble along, but a tiered Internet can never provide the rich opportunities for innovation, or even competition with established services. That is why it is crucial that this not happen. Under a neutral Internet, there is every incentive to provide sufficient bandwidth so that it works well for everyone. Once you start carving it up, those incentives disappear, and the incumbent monopolies will prevail.
What you refer to is not a real stylus, and will not give you the precision or pressure sensitivity of one. It is basically a crude artificial finger, which is not suitable for drawing or writing, much less finger painting.
Nor does Apple provide any means for a developer to replace or augment the input system.
That would be because you are implicitly qualifying that statement with "on crude devices for ascii text input".
Have you met any artists who hate stylus input? How about taking notes, drawing, or entering symbols not found on your keyboard, as with most non-latin languages including mathematics.
How about with alternative input systems like ShapeWriter or HexInput? Such technology has come a long way since the Palm Pilot...and yet has a long way to go.
Multitouch is great and also offers immense opportunity for innovation, yet that need not be mutually exclusive with stylus input. Rather, they complement each other, and would make a tablet a far more versatile device.
The market doesn't speak, but if it could, it wouldn't be saying what you think. All that can be inferred is that people didn't buy something, not why, and consideration for a tablet goes far beyond wether it has a stylus or not.
Even if the perfect device was available a decade ago, which it wasn't, it would be meaningless without the software to take advantage of those features. That isn't going to happen if the hardware doesn't exist though, so there has been little opportunity for innovation.
The only device that I know of which even has potential for an interested developer, would be the Lenovo X series tablets, but I don't know if the relevant documentation is even available. (Of course that isn't nearly in the size and price range that most people would consider for a tablet.)
The iPad may be a good start, but it is still very crude, and doesn't even scratch the surface of what a tablet could be. A tablet should at the very least also support stylus input, and allow people to explore/develop alternative input systems. (Of which there are already a number that are far superior to fixed on-screen qwerty keyboards, or even miniature physical keyboards.)
No one is going to get it right the first time, and selling locked-down featureless hardware, which is guaranteed to be forever crippled isn't a winning strategy. (This applies not only to Apple, but tivoized Android systems as well.)
While the defense budget is no doubt way out of control, this is not at all the sort of thing that worries me. It has no practical military value in the near term, and at least produced interesting results.
I'm more concerned about other high-tech anti-personel weapons or robots, that will inevitably be pointed at people, possible even at our own citizens before long.
Speaking of waste, and far more disturbing at that, take a look at what the anti-terrorism efforts have spawned. I really had no idea of the scale of it. Having this turned against our own citizens as the fascism ramps up is truly frightening.
That is what compilers are for. It is silly to suggest that there was no software for a Unix based system, especially at that time.
Availability of Windows based software would have helped, but was hardly necessary. The market didn't kill the Alpha, it was pure stupidity on the part of management.
The DEC Alpha was (and still is) a brilliant architecture. The designers took great care from the start to make sure that it would scale, both in clock and core count. It was simple, elegant and fast.
IIRC, the early chips were fast enough to emulate x86 code at a reasonable speed. If all you wanted to do was run emulated x86 code though, then maybe they were "useless". This was especially true before the BWX extension, which introduced a number of byte oriented instructions.
Native code, on the other hand, would leave you with no misconceptions about the speed of the Alpha; it was truly impressive. DECs compilers and math libraries were also excellent.
You have unintentionally exited the realm of physics, and entered the realm of math. The fact is, it is unknown wether matter is composed of waves or particles; requiring it to be both however, is absurd.
The Copenhagen interpretation of QM is a purely mathematical construct which bridges this fundamental dichotomy, without providing any insight into real physics. It is an abomination that has replaced the search for truth, with the proclamation of an unknowable reality, veiled behind statistics. In essence, replacing science with belief.
Why continue with the concept of name ownership at all? It should be technically impossible to own a name, in the same way that it should be impossible to monopolize ideas.
Let people and entities use whatever name they want; the remaining problem is to verify that you are talking to the right host, but you should need to do that anyway. Invariably, any sort of central authority can and will be subverted. What is necessary is some other means of conveying trust, wether that is a web of trust, or some other out of band option.
This is what I believe we should strive for. The distributed naming system and trust system are orthogonal problems, but need to integrate in a convenient way. So, it is still a hard problem, just not in the same way.
Wikipedia says: "Apple brought the concept of Light Peak, an interoperable standard which could handle large amounts of data and replace the multitudinous connector types with a single universal connector, to Intel in 2007 with the intention of Intel producing and developing the technology."
[citation needed]
However, I know that Slashdot is packed to the bring with suspiciously anonymous Apple-bashers these days and that they won't believe anything positive about Apple whatsoever. The only good company is Google.
None of Apple's business practices have anything to do with it? Apple, like most other large corporations, do not often behave in the public's interest, but are actively hostile to it.
I find it ironic that as Overly Critical Guy, you refuse to accept criticism of Apple, where deserved. Actually, on second thought, most of the Apple fanboys are highly hypocritical, so perhaps it balances out.
The consistency guarantees provided by the tested filesystems differ significantly. Most (all?) aside from ZFS only journal metadata by default. All data and metadata written to ZFS is always consistent on disk. You won't notice the difference until you crash, and even then you still might not, but it will certainly show up in the benchmarks.
ZFS is not a lightweight filesystem, that is a fact. The 128-bit addresses, 256-bit checksums, compression, and two or three way replicated metadata don't come for free. Also, another thing that may be working against ZFS on a Flash based SSD is the page size. By default, ZFS uses a minimum of 512 byte blocks for data, whereas most other filesystems use 4k which matches the SSD page size. It would be interesting to create the ZFS pool with a 4k asize and see how that affects the results.
The benchmarks aside, it is the feature set which really sells it. The performance is good, the administrative interface is excellent, and it does an fine job of returning your data in an error free state. At the end of the day, that is what really matters.
Even so, I look forward to more numbers when stable releases can be compared. It would also be nice to include DragonFlyBSDs HAMMER filesystem, to round out the modern set.
It would also be "less objectionable" if we were not exposed to significant dose of ionizing radiation.
http://www.npr.org/assets/news/2010/05/17/concern.pdf
"Performance on this chip is not interesting," Mattson said. It uses a standard x86 instruction set.
How about developing a small efficient core, where the performance is interesting? Actually, don't even bother; just reuse the DEC Alpha instruction set that is collecting dust at Intel.
There is no point in tying these massively parallel architectures to some ancient ISA.
You are missing the point. No matter what convoluted reasoning you use, you can't just add together GPR + vector and say that amd64 has 39 registers. It doesn't matter if the registers exist if they can't be used together.
No matter how hard the compilers try, if the problem doesn't fit in register, it will spill. Sixteen registers is not exactly abundant, so this is not at all uncommon. One does need to account for the extra latency in the using memory operands, but this can often be done. (Though it is obnoxious when one has to do it by hand.)
It is also obnoxious that certain operations need to be done in certain registers, yet further increasing the amount of registers which must be shuffled around. (As if it weren't bad enough dealing with this and register spillage, the two-operand instructions also add to the problem.) I have to wonder just how much of the width of a modern x86 processor is wasted shuffling data around.
All modern (performant) RISC architectures have 32/32 gp/fp registers. (Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, ...) If ARM wants to compete in this space, that is what they should do. Where 64-bit code isn't necessary, there is no loss in continuing to run 32-bit. (Unlike the backwards x86 architecture, where amd64 brings many other crucial advancements.)
If you are going to throw in the vector registers, why not the FP stack; that can be used to do "integer operations" as well if you are careful. However, neither provide the same "integer operations" as the GPRs. Whether you spill to other registers, or memory, it is still an ugly mess.
There are still only 16 GPRs, and then the compiler resorts to memory operands. Maybe some masochistic programmer could cobble together some assembly that made use of the assortment of heterogeneous hardware available, but claiming that amd64 has more than 16 registers is disingenuous.
ARM already has 16 GPRs, so you can use them in pairs and have 8 registers for 64-bit operations. Not quite as many as x86-64, but four times as many as x86, so even that isn't much of an advantage. All of the other advantages that x86-64 has over x86, ARM has already.
The amd64 architecture gets away with so few registers only because it can operate on memory directly. With a load-store architecture, eight registers would be extremely constraining. If anything, ARM should expand the register set for 64-bit mode.
While your post adequately describes the accepted thinking, it defies rational thought. While we may lack the ability to measure something beyond a certain limit, that is not evidence that the underlying physics is indeterministic, or inherently unknowable.
By accepting that it was, we veered right out of the realm of science, and physics continues to be mired in probabilistic nonsense. You can calculate things, but the model provides no insight into the underlying reality. Seventy years later, and we are still no closer to bridging the fundamental divide in physics.
Pressure sensitivity would be nice, but even without it, it is a very welcome improvement over touch-only interfaces.
Stylus based input is a critical feature for many uses of a tablet. Without it, and the innovative features it enables, they hold no advantage over a notebook.
Even if it is "free" for personal use, beware. Unless you have an Oracle support contract, you are out of luck if you encounter problems. I'm not sure if outsiders can even file a bug report now, much less get an actual fix in a timely manner.
Gone are the days of helpful people on Sun's mailing lists who could supply a quick source fix when things go awry. This was a common occurrence on zfs-discuss, and now you will have no recourse whatsoever.
Solaris Express is a development release, and without the source, you are at the mercy of Oracle, regardless of how much you pay. That is not a good place to be...
Unless there is an impartial third party whose sole charter is to resell access to the lines, there is no such thing as separate. It is a fine idea, but it completely ignores reality.
What we need to do, is exactly what Australia is doing; appropriate Verizon's fiber, and build out a national fiber network, to be shared by all ISPs and content providers with the desire to compete. (Sure, they paid Telstra, but the billions upon billions in subsidies here should more than cover it.)
Given a fair and competitive market, let Comcast/TWC and their ilk wall off their own little sections of fail. Without it though, any attempt at "separate" will completely ruin the Internet.
*How is it broken? Let me count the ways. To start, there are enough sleazy certificate vendors that you don't get any real trust from the scheme. But setting up enterprise cert management is clumsy enough that few people really do it, hence client certs aren't use very often. And because of the combination of cost and clumsiness of issuing real certs, there are so many self-signed certs around the users are used to clicking through cert warnings anyway. Yuck.
I would just like to add: regardless, you are placing your trust in a central authority. That authority can be subverted with ease, when the will to do so emerges.
No, when SSDs fail, they are not readable. The electrons, (ie. your data), literally leak out of the device over time. With each new generation of flash, the longevity of stored data decreases dramatically. Currently it is measured in years, but it won't be long before it is measured in months.
What you are referring to is the write endurance, and that is a separate issue entirely. (Though quickly receding as well.) In any case, magnetic domains are a hell of a lot more stable over time.
I will wait for PRAM or MRAM before trusting data to an SSD, thanks.
What you are suggesting is clearly impossible. Maybe if we had millions or perhaps billions of people, they might often have overlapping ideas. However, in our world, so few people actually think, that strict enforcement of intellectual monopoly is the only way to secure a brighter future for us all. God bless our corporations for undertaking this burden.
More seriously, this is exactly why IP should be banned outright; it infringes on peoples' freedom of thought.