Malloc is slow. Per studies, 20-30% of CPU time wasted on memory management.
Interesting paper - thanks for the link.
However I find the conclusions given a bit dubious. For instance the claim that allocations are "free" is somewhat dubious - garbage collecting languages put all of the work on the back-end, giving the illusion of a free front-end (whereas non-GC languages put the hard work on the front-end). Yet for every object you create on the heap that is more work the heap walker has to do each GC to detect orphaned objects - a non-trivial task. It then has to free all of those objects, and because of the "free" allocation it has to move all of the objects and rebase every object pointer in the application. It doesn't take a genius to realize that is a signficiant task in an application of a real-world size.
I think the proof is in the empirical proof - how many high performance memory intensive Java applications are there?
There are amazing technologies like VPN and remote desktop that allow one to access their documents, and even a rich GUI, from anywhere. If I can access some online office service, then I can likely access my own machines just as easily.
Trying to create an office suite in a web browser with DHTML & "AJAX" would be ridiculous - the office suite will be the last thing overtaken by web apps, and by then the standards will have evolved such that it won't be HTML, but rather X Windows or RDP. Speaking of that - When is Google going to start offering rich X-type sessions to their apps? I'll bet it's sooner rather than later. Everything old is new again, everything under the sun.
Doesn't this start to become meaningless at a certain point? I mean, is 1,000,000:1 really any noticeably better than 100,000:1?
It's very meaningful from a technology accessibility perspective (the "trickle down" theory) - right now at the consumer level sets and computer monitors are offering with 400:1 to 600:1 contrast ratios. As they develop technologies at the extreme ends, it tends to push down prior accomplishments - this might be the sort of achievement that yields us economical 2000:1 displays.
Today I assumed most POS terminals run linux. I think this was first done ALMOST a decade ago
I presumed they ran QNX, or some other extremely lightweight, secure, embedded operating system. Terminals are generally single-application environments, and it could just as effectively be running "on" DOS. Windows sounds like brutal overkill, as does Linux (obviously both can be scaled down to a more minimal environment, but that's a backwards approach. Something like QNX is built to be scaled up from close to nothing). Alternately they could be running thin-clients booting from the BIOS, with no "OS" except for a simple thin-client shell.
The submission is pretty ridiculous - running a terminal at a grocery store has absolutely nothing to do with enterprise scale outs, any more than OS/2 running ATMs preceded its dominance of the industry.
They've already essentially shut down Napster, Kazaa, and Grokster; would you agree?
Well you could say that the copyright violators are the ones who shut those networks down. I know it's easier to blame the Goliath, it just seems rather simplistic. If the local video arcade is filled with 95% drug dealers (no I'm not equating sharing files with drug dealing - this is an analogy at a higher level), and the constant police presence and legal liability causes the arcade to close shop, who's to blame? The police?
This is the case peer-to-peer file sharers have been waiting for.
Is this really true? If you use P2P to share original works of art (nothing is stopping you from doing it) - for instance a personal flickr - or to share legitimate files like Linux distros, why would you really care about someone fighting the RIAA regarding copyright issues? This doesn't really seem like a P2P issue, but rather a copyright infringement issue.
Where do you get this stuff? A tiny minority outside the US? Do you happen to know fundamental...Islamic views on evolution?
Wow. Apparently the anti-evo's have mod points for this sort of nonsensical reply to be moderated up (while the parent and grandparent were moderated trolls or flamebait). You might have missed it, but we were talking specifically about Christianity, not about fundamentalist Islamist, or even Voodoo worshippers. Christianity. The reality, and let the anti-evo's feel comfortable moderating me down for saying the truth, is that the anti-evolution correlation with Christianity is almost an entirely US thing.
Uh, so you're questioning decades of work by people smarter than you?
History is littered with the overturning of decades of work by smarter people...who were all wrong. Even when you accept the foundation of carbon dating, it is remarkable how repeated testing on the same object can yield many magnitudes of time differences.
Of course this really is all sort of funny - Many Christians believe in evolution, and the Vatican even released a statement saying that Darwin's observations were consistent with the bible. The whole "6000 year" thing is figment of a particular brand of Christianity in the US, owing to a particularly literal interpretation not shared elsewhere.
No, your interpretation of my analogy is what was stupid. The advertisements on trains simply represent revenue to the service, hopefully offsetting subsidies. By diminishing the value of advertisements you effectively make taxpayers pay more.
And the subway wouldn't be getting a take from people using the guys map to travel on said subway?
Yeah, because without this guys map they just wouldn't use the subway. Riiiighhhttttt. Ignore the fact that there are countless other properly licensed renditions that users could use, probably indirectly funding the subway.
They guy should make his own map from scratch and tell those authorities to go to hell.
Google's has an extraordinary business sense, and a proven ability to completely redefine the market, however it is good that the ridiculous Google honeymoon is finally coming to an end. It is bizarre seeing some of the fawning and admiration for a company that shares a startling number of similarities to the widely reviled Doubleclick.
It's called "public trasit" because the public pays for it. If this is the cause in NY, then what they're basically doing is suing a member of the public for use of publc property.
Nonsense. So if you decided to tear down some of the ads in the subway, sticking up your own in their place, is that just a public use of public property? Of course it isn't.
While it is publicly funded, it isn't free reign to do what you want. For instance in this case it's pretty clear that the subway company licenses the map to users who add a value ad (e.g. tourism guides, etc), and in return those republishers return some of their take to the subway. The net result is the offsetting of some of the costs of us (the taxpayers - which is a group interest, not millions of individual interests. You can't take the seats home for your living room because that conflicts with the interest of the group), reducing the subsidization. If Joe User wants to republish the map in PDA form - make a business model, charge a token charge, and offset those taxes.
On the other hand, with a DVD, neither could XB360
Exactly! And that's the disadvantage that the xbox360 has that Microsoft wants to overcome - they'd rather that people aren't thinking "Boy, that xbox360 looks pretty nice, but there's the new DVD players coming out and if I get a PS3 that takes care of both...". They'd rather you think "Yeah that PS3 has some weirdo new drive that can only be used to play PS3 games".
Also, never ever underestimate the power of men (and boys) to sell to wives (and mothers) based upon the premise that it's "basically paying for itself because it's also a (next generation) DVD player!"
I'm not saying this. I'm saying that it's the perception the announcement is trying to ferment.
There's a very real argument to be made that the PS2 substantially increased the rate of adoption for DVD players.
The DVD was already pretty entrenched, and was already destined for universal adoption. However the opposite is definitely true - a lot of DVD slow-adopters could justify the purchase of a PS2 by claiming that it also filled their DVD player needs. Suddenly the PS2 seemed that much cheaper (e.g. "Well it's $X, but a DVD player is $Y, and we want one of those, so the PS2 is really $X-$Y").
That is exactly the sort of thinking that Microsoft is trying to undermine with their announcement.
Microsoft also has the luxury of having only to make an announcement about this, and nothing more.
Right on the money - literally. To Microsoft this is completely a freebie that means nothing to them, and limits them in absolutely no way. Microsoft is a software company, and ultimately on their end it's just a matter of drivers, if that, so really it doesn't matter what they think about the formats.
The bogusness of their "decision" is pretty clear consider that they pulled the "backwards compatibility" red herring out, as every commercial blu-ray player will offer full backwards compatibility.
The XBox360 has a normal DVD player in it (not an HD-DVD, or a Blu-ray).
What Microsoft may be doing is some pre-launch neutralization of Sony's Blu-ray advantage with their PS3 - e.g. if no one is going to go to Blu-ray, then who cares if the PS3 has it? It'll become an irrelevant difference, and it will help overcome that potential hang-up users (and reviewers) might have when comparing the two consoles. I wish this wasn't the case, but I can entirely see Microsoft making this "choice" based upon such a short term gain.
Or just because it's easier to do such things would make it easier to enforce DRM and security measures on users?
Of course they're making their big, benevolent public pronouncements based upon their own strategic interests. In Microsoft's case they're probably doing some short-term thinking about the xbox 360, and how they want to undermine the Bluray capabilities of the upcoming PS3. And who cares about what Intel thinks about DVD drives? Last I looked Intel had close to 0 influence or marketshare in that space. I suspect that someone at Microsoft called up Intel and called in a favour.
My revenue on google Adwords hasn't been all that great, so at least now if I desired, I could try a different option from a major provider. I like this and I'd hope to see more healthy competition between Google and Microsoft.
I used Adwords on my pages for a more cynical reason. It is a bit of a conflict of interest when Google is so heavily invested both in search, and in content. I would love to see that market segmented more.
In any case Adwords themselves weren't really innovative (like most Google services - there were people doing it before) - it's just an innovative business model. Allowing small blogs and microsites to get in on the advertisement game (outside of lame affiliate programs) is what really set Adsense apart.
If this sort of grid system gets implemented, it may be incentive for me and others to go ahead with local power generation systems so that we can share.
Perhaps I'm just totally misunderstanding the article (it seems to talk alternately about electricity, and then about heat, and then about electricity. While they can be converted back and forth with varying efficiency, it did seem confusing), but if you are generating more power than you use, in most areas (at least here in North America) you absolutely can push the power onto the grid (which is a lot of intermeshed small grids), getting paid for your generation (or alternately offsetting your consumption used when there is no wind/sun/uranium/whatever). Several jobs ago I worked at a shop that installed control software for generators, and several of the customers used them as mini-generating stations, pushing lots of power onto the neighbouring grid (and thus eliminating the transmission losses).
The pages says that 90% would put you around 65 wpm.
If you mean "90% towards the right", then sure, but of course actual distribution isn't even (from from it). Anyways, I guarantee you that nowhere near 10% of the general public can type over 65 wpm. Far, far from it. (Though of course people should learn how to type properly).
The drones are expensive remote controlled airplanes - they don't really qualify as a robot.
Why not? While one traditional definition is, err, "human like", another is quite simply a remote controlled or autonomous mechanical device. A remote controlled jet qualifies. Indeed last I heard some of those jets fly autonomous routes, triggering alerts for suspect objects, but it would just be a software change for it to start (Crazily) shooting stuff itself.
If equipped with an autoloader, I would imagine that equipping an M1A2 with remote control would be very much achievable as well. Surprized that hasn't been done already.
This seems reasonable, a way to have guaranteed revenue stream and a penalty for people who cancel early.
It sounds like the actions of a company that is fearful.
Obviously any company will try to have as many revenue guarantees as they can (it makes investors less edgy), but one has to wonder how Tivo got along until this point within requiring this? I suspect that they have some unfavourable changes coming down the pipe (we've already heard about a couple of unsavoury changes), and they simply want to put enough of a disincentive on telling them to go screw themselves that their customer base will just suck it up and live with it, to the point that the anger is gone and they've forgotten how all of their rights and technical capabilities have been usurped.
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Malloc is slow. Per studies, 20-30% of CPU time wasted on memory management.
Interesting paper - thanks for the link.
However I find the conclusions given a bit dubious. For instance the claim that allocations are "free" is somewhat dubious - garbage collecting languages put all of the work on the back-end, giving the illusion of a free front-end (whereas non-GC languages put the hard work on the front-end). Yet for every object you create on the heap that is more work the heap walker has to do each GC to detect orphaned objects - a non-trivial task. It then has to free all of those objects, and because of the "free" allocation it has to move all of the objects and rebase every object pointer in the application. It doesn't take a genius to realize that is a signficiant task in an application of a real-world size.
I think the proof is in the empirical proof - how many high performance memory intensive Java applications are there?
There are amazing technologies like VPN and remote desktop that allow one to access their documents, and even a rich GUI, from anywhere. If I can access some online office service, then I can likely access my own machines just as easily.
Trying to create an office suite in a web browser with DHTML & "AJAX" would be ridiculous - the office suite will be the last thing overtaken by web apps, and by then the standards will have evolved such that it won't be HTML, but rather X Windows or RDP. Speaking of that - When is Google going to start offering rich X-type sessions to their apps? I'll bet it's sooner rather than later. Everything old is new again, everything under the sun.
Doesn't this start to become meaningless at a certain point? I mean, is 1,000,000:1 really any noticeably better than 100,000:1?
It's very meaningful from a technology accessibility perspective (the "trickle down" theory) - right now at the consumer level sets and computer monitors are offering with 400:1 to 600:1 contrast ratios. As they develop technologies at the extreme ends, it tends to push down prior accomplishments - this might be the sort of achievement that yields us economical 2000:1 displays.
Today I assumed most POS terminals run linux. I think this was first done ALMOST a decade ago
I presumed they ran QNX, or some other extremely lightweight, secure, embedded operating system. Terminals are generally single-application environments, and it could just as effectively be running "on" DOS. Windows sounds like brutal overkill, as does Linux (obviously both can be scaled down to a more minimal environment, but that's a backwards approach. Something like QNX is built to be scaled up from close to nothing). Alternately they could be running thin-clients booting from the BIOS, with no "OS" except for a simple thin-client shell.
The submission is pretty ridiculous - running a terminal at a grocery store has absolutely nothing to do with enterprise scale outs, any more than OS/2 running ATMs preceded its dominance of the industry.
BTW: Paramount just backed Blu-Ray.
They've already essentially shut down Napster, Kazaa, and Grokster; would you agree?
Well you could say that the copyright violators are the ones who shut those networks down. I know it's easier to blame the Goliath, it just seems rather simplistic. If the local video arcade is filled with 95% drug dealers (no I'm not equating sharing files with drug dealing - this is an analogy at a higher level), and the constant police presence and legal liability causes the arcade to close shop, who's to blame? The police?
This is the case peer-to-peer file sharers have been waiting for.
Is this really true? If you use P2P to share original works of art (nothing is stopping you from doing it) - for instance a personal flickr - or to share legitimate files like Linux distros, why would you really care about someone fighting the RIAA regarding copyright issues? This doesn't really seem like a P2P issue, but rather a copyright infringement issue.
Where do you get this stuff? A tiny minority outside the US? Do you happen to know fundamental...Islamic views on evolution?
Wow. Apparently the anti-evo's have mod points for this sort of nonsensical reply to be moderated up (while the parent and grandparent were moderated trolls or flamebait). You might have missed it, but we were talking specifically about Christianity, not about fundamentalist Islamist, or even Voodoo worshippers. Christianity. The reality, and let the anti-evo's feel comfortable moderating me down for saying the truth, is that the anti-evolution correlation with Christianity is almost an entirely US thing.
Uh, so you're questioning decades of work by people smarter than you?
History is littered with the overturning of decades of work by smarter people...who were all wrong. Even when you accept the foundation of carbon dating, it is remarkable how repeated testing on the same object can yield many magnitudes of time differences.
Of course this really is all sort of funny - Many Christians believe in evolution, and the Vatican even released a statement saying that Darwin's observations were consistent with the bible. The whole "6000 year" thing is figment of a particular brand of Christianity in the US, owing to a particularly literal interpretation not shared elsewhere.
Your analogy is stupid
No, your interpretation of my analogy is what was stupid. The advertisements on trains simply represent revenue to the service, hopefully offsetting subsidies. By diminishing the value of advertisements you effectively make taxpayers pay more.
And the subway wouldn't be getting a take from people using the guys map to travel on said subway?
Yeah, because without this guys map they just wouldn't use the subway. Riiiighhhttttt. Ignore the fact that there are countless other properly licensed renditions that users could use, probably indirectly funding the subway.
They guy should make his own map from scratch and tell those authorities to go to hell.
NO SHIT. That's entirely the point.
Google's has an extraordinary business sense, and a proven ability to completely redefine the market, however it is good that the ridiculous Google honeymoon is finally coming to an end. It is bizarre seeing some of the fawning and admiration for a company that shares a startling number of similarities to the widely reviled Doubleclick.
It's called "public trasit" because the public pays for it. If this is the cause in NY, then what they're basically doing is suing a member of the public for use of publc property.
Nonsense. So if you decided to tear down some of the ads in the subway, sticking up your own in their place, is that just a public use of public property? Of course it isn't.
While it is publicly funded, it isn't free reign to do what you want. For instance in this case it's pretty clear that the subway company licenses the map to users who add a value ad (e.g. tourism guides, etc), and in return those republishers return some of their take to the subway. The net result is the offsetting of some of the costs of us (the taxpayers - which is a group interest, not millions of individual interests. You can't take the seats home for your living room because that conflicts with the interest of the group), reducing the subsidization. If Joe User wants to republish the map in PDA form - make a business model, charge a token charge, and offset those taxes.
I bet his wife gives away her books for free, too
The comment about cook books was pretty humorous regardless - look at http://www.altonbrown.com/pages/bookit.html. Look at the correction for page 238 (Pizza Dough)
Which I don't think differs too much from what I said.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ferment
On the other hand, with a DVD, neither could XB360
Exactly! And that's the disadvantage that the xbox360 has that Microsoft wants to overcome - they'd rather that people aren't thinking "Boy, that xbox360 looks pretty nice, but there's the new DVD players coming out and if I get a PS3 that takes care of both...". They'd rather you think "Yeah that PS3 has some weirdo new drive that can only be used to play PS3 games".
Also, never ever underestimate the power of men (and boys) to sell to wives (and mothers) based upon the premise that it's "basically paying for itself because it's also a (next generation) DVD player!"
To say no-one is going to buy Blu-Ray...
I'm not saying this. I'm saying that it's the perception the announcement is trying to ferment.
There's a very real argument to be made that the PS2 substantially increased the rate of adoption for DVD players.
The DVD was already pretty entrenched, and was already destined for universal adoption. However the opposite is definitely true - a lot of DVD slow-adopters could justify the purchase of a PS2 by claiming that it also filled their DVD player needs. Suddenly the PS2 seemed that much cheaper (e.g. "Well it's $X, but a DVD player is $Y, and we want one of those, so the PS2 is really $X-$Y").
That is exactly the sort of thinking that Microsoft is trying to undermine with their announcement.
Microsoft also has the luxury of having only to make an announcement about this, and nothing more.
Right on the money - literally. To Microsoft this is completely a freebie that means nothing to them, and limits them in absolutely no way. Microsoft is a software company, and ultimately on their end it's just a matter of drivers, if that, so really it doesn't matter what they think about the formats.
The bogusness of their "decision" is pretty clear consider that they pulled the "backwards compatibility" red herring out, as every commercial blu-ray player will offer full backwards compatibility.
One other area where Blu-Ray is taking hits is durability. Blu-Ray has a much thinner coating than HD-DVD and will therefor scratch much easier.
1 041_3-5455621.html
http://news.com.com/Try+scratching+this+DVD/2100-
Which will just make the PS3 all that much better
The XBox360 has a normal DVD player in it (not an HD-DVD, or a Blu-ray).
What Microsoft may be doing is some pre-launch neutralization of Sony's Blu-ray advantage with their PS3 - e.g. if no one is going to go to Blu-ray, then who cares if the PS3 has it? It'll become an irrelevant difference, and it will help overcome that potential hang-up users (and reviewers) might have when comparing the two consoles. I wish this wasn't the case, but I can entirely see Microsoft making this "choice" based upon such a short term gain.
Or just because it's easier to do such things would make it easier to enforce DRM and security measures on users?
Of course they're making their big, benevolent public pronouncements based upon their own strategic interests. In Microsoft's case they're probably doing some short-term thinking about the xbox 360, and how they want to undermine the Bluray capabilities of the upcoming PS3. And who cares about what Intel thinks about DVD drives? Last I looked Intel had close to 0 influence or marketshare in that space. I suspect that someone at Microsoft called up Intel and called in a favour.
My revenue on google Adwords hasn't been all that great, so at least now if I desired, I could try a different option from a major provider. I like this and I'd hope to see more healthy competition between Google and Microsoft.
I used Adwords on my pages for a more cynical reason. It is a bit of a conflict of interest when Google is so heavily invested both in search, and in content. I would love to see that market segmented more.
In any case Adwords themselves weren't really innovative (like most Google services - there were people doing it before) - it's just an innovative business model. Allowing small blogs and microsites to get in on the advertisement game (outside of lame affiliate programs) is what really set Adsense apart.
If this sort of grid system gets implemented, it may be incentive for me and others to go ahead with local power generation systems so that we can share.
Perhaps I'm just totally misunderstanding the article (it seems to talk alternately about electricity, and then about heat, and then about electricity. While they can be converted back and forth with varying efficiency, it did seem confusing), but if you are generating more power than you use, in most areas (at least here in North America) you absolutely can push the power onto the grid (which is a lot of intermeshed small grids), getting paid for your generation (or alternately offsetting your consumption used when there is no wind/sun/uranium/whatever). Several jobs ago I worked at a shop that installed control software for generators, and several of the customers used them as mini-generating stations, pushing lots of power onto the neighbouring grid (and thus eliminating the transmission losses).
The pages says that 90% would put you around 65 wpm.
If you mean "90% towards the right", then sure, but of course actual distribution isn't even (from from it). Anyways, I guarantee you that nowhere near 10% of the general public can type over 65 wpm. Far, far from it. (Though of course people should learn how to type properly).
The drones are expensive remote controlled airplanes - they don't really qualify as a robot.
Why not? While one traditional definition is, err, "human like", another is quite simply a remote controlled or autonomous mechanical device. A remote controlled jet qualifies. Indeed last I heard some of those jets fly autonomous routes, triggering alerts for suspect objects, but it would just be a software change for it to start (Crazily) shooting stuff itself.
If equipped with an autoloader, I would imagine that equipping an M1A2 with remote control would be very much achievable as well. Surprized that hasn't been done already.
This seems reasonable, a way to have guaranteed revenue stream and a penalty for people who cancel early.
It sounds like the actions of a company that is fearful.
Obviously any company will try to have as many revenue guarantees as they can (it makes investors less edgy), but one has to wonder how Tivo got along until this point within requiring this? I suspect that they have some unfavourable changes coming down the pipe (we've already heard about a couple of unsavoury changes), and they simply want to put enough of a disincentive on telling them to go screw themselves that their customer base will just suck it up and live with it, to the point that the anger is gone and they've forgotten how all of their rights and technical capabilities have been usurped.