Blogging (truthfully) about something your company is doing might go completely against what a lot of people in the company are hired to hide.
Accountants, marketing and HR are all responsible for bending the truth in such a way to put a positive spin on something that might not be so rosey.
A prime example is Paul Otellini's (Intels CEO) interal blog which has been leaked at least once. I can't find the link to the original article where I read about it (help appreciated) which stated that he quite openly admitted that they had a lot of work to do to catch up with AMDs Opteron architecture.
If you are to take a step back and think about it, he's openness makes perfect sense to anyone who's been following processor trends for more than a year or so. The only problem is the accountants and marketing folks are trying to tell the opposite story - "AMD, no, ours is better".
I personally would prefer to hear my leader tell the truth and not simply try to keep the stock market happy. The only reason why the stock market gets upset by comments like this is because they aren't said often enough.
Not wanting to appear to side the RIAA and the MPAA but with the amounts of money involved its not surprising that the law is after these sites.
But you can be sure it's not because of terrorism.
How much of California's income comes from the film industry and the industry that services it.
At this stage, the movie studios are nearly nothing more than specialised banks (do I get credit for quoting Neal Stephenson !) - and with the vast sums of money involved, its not surprising that the law appears to re-act quicker.
But the law folks need a semi-genuine excuse to pursue these cases without alienating the public.
For example, if their line was "Yeah, well we need to help the movie industry backers get richer" - how many people would be taken to their cause. As a matter of spite, people would swing the other way - anything to go "get the system".
In Britain, before the motto for pursuing these sites and pirates was "to fight terrorism" it was "to fight organised crime".
In the end, it's all down to money, and in the movie business there's loads of it floating around.
Every wonder how dangerous driving in some countries can only incur a penalty of a few hundred dollars/euros (if you are really unlucky) while recording a film in a cinema (which I don't condone) can incur an _unlimited_ penalty where I come from.
Is something going on behind the scenes ?
on
Open source Java?
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· Score: 1
Has Sun donated to the Apache foundation before (XML parsers ??)
If they were trying to release source code as a seperate effort wouldn't the Apache group be a likely outlet ?
The bandwidth and size of these films are probably not trivial - so if someone was even thinking of ripping the sat streams you'd better take a few things into consideration:
PAL is 720x576 (normal TV size in Europe). If you were to take an hour of video from a DV tape (even with a high end DV camera) you'll get 20GB worth of data. And this is at crappy TV resolution. Cinemas will need resolutions much much higher than this (I hope anyway).
Before I get blown away with people screaming about compression - DV is slightly compressed, but its intended to be be as closs to uncompressed quality as possible. The quality of the end result (if encoding multiple times) is always going to be directly related to the quality of the original footage.
This really gives the cinemas two options - (1)lots of storage (I'm thinking at least 1 or 2 TB here) - which when you think about it, isn't that expensive and (2) major compression.
It will all come down in the end to marketing - do the cinemas think they'll get away with a lower grade product (i.e. crappy quality) - I don't know.
I'm guessing that the projector technology is probably only now getting cost effective.
If you look at most consumer grade projectors, they usually support 1024x768, or if you go for really expensive ones, maybe the next size up. I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that its currently considered at production level to edit films at 4K pixels (not sure if thats horizontal or vertical, but guessing 4K pixels vertically) so as you can see a consumer projector (which can normall costs thousands to begin with) just wouldn't cut it.
As the technology moves to LTPS (low temperature poly-silicon) - which it has already is the Asian market, the resolution will go up.
Just think of it practically: if I pixel is 0.5mm x 0.5mm on the projector, how big is that pixel going to be on the "big screen".
From a cost perspective this was probably only a matter of time, regardless of the country.
I hope the cinemas and the studios also take this opportunity (since distributing films worldwide will now be alot easier, and cheaper!) to start releasing films at the same time rather than their current practice (well, mostly) of delaying releases in different countries.
As an afterthought - where do I get me one of those projectors, a 4K film projector would be pretty nice for the living room!
There are some significant differences between hyperthreading and Suns approach.
Tiny amount of background:
Hardest part when trying to run things in parallel is figuring out what you can run in parallel. Example: two operations (pseudocode): c=a+b and d+c+e. These two cannot be run in parallel, since you need to result of a+b before you can start c+e.
With modern operating systems there are many programs running at one time, and they may contain seperate threads. One assumption of threading is that threads can run asynchronously to one another - you will not get a situtation like that above (okay, okay, I'm simplying!).
With Hyperthreading, Intel gets the CPU to pretend to the OS that there are actually two of them. They duplicate the fetch and decode units, but only use one execute unit - which probably has several FPUs and Integer units. They rely on an FPU or an Integer unit being available to be able to get a performance benefit.
So Intel (up til now) have duplicated the fetch and decode, but still had the same execute unit.
Suns approach is to replicate the whole pipeline - fetch, decode, execute. Intel can't really scale hyperthreading beyond two "processors", whereas Sun are aiming to try and execute 8, 16 or even more at one time.
Because of Intels architecture they can't really scale hyperthreading in this way - for lots of reasons. I'm sure other people can add them.
This really won't be of huge benefit to your Doom3 FPS, but for business apps (think J2EE) or message queues or science applications it will allow compute servers to scale better at heavy loads (i.e. when lots of threads are doing something that isn't IO bound, at the same time).
Re:Break only affects carefully constructed messag
on
More on Newly Broken SHA-1
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Totally agree, however in the crypto community (which I cannot claim to be part of) the consensus is generally that if a weakness if found in an algorithm then it begs the question - "what other weaknesses are there".
Once an algorithms strength is in doubt by the presence of even one weakness people feel very reluctant to trust it.
Its probably up to everyone to see how this affects their own circumstances. Crypto is always about Knowing your enemy (the paranoia has now kicked in !). When picking a scheme one always makes a number of assumptions - Who are you keeping the information hidden from, what resources do they have, how badly do they want it.
No crypto is powerful, or clever enough (yet!) to be completely unbreakable so its all down to making assumptions:
1) Would someone be willing to pay $38 million (assuming this is correct) to get my credit card number - probably not.
2) Would someone be willing to pay $38 million to get insider info on a merger between two banks - each worth over $10 billion.
What unsettles people is that their previous assumptions on SHA-1 are now invalid.
Why doesn't microsoft generate hashes (longish ones would be nice) of all the files it publishes and then offer them as a reference for anyone who has to clean up their system.
The second thing they could do is try and stop people (read: software developers, and themselves) from dumping anything into the SYSTEM32 directory. Its just poor organisation. Nothing to do with technical problems - Does windows have the equivolent of ldconfig or LD_LIBRARY_PATH ?
Everytime something like this comes up its amazing how many people jump straight in and start attacking and counter-attacking.
I definetly believe that people are very entitled to voice their opinion on any matter, but it might be nicer for everyone if people adopted a more civil approach. It might actually encourage debate rather than activate peoples "fight-mode". And on the plus side if the agrument is presented in more neutral language even the zealots might read it !!!
After all, if the point is useful then people will take it on board (well, except for the die-hards, who aren't going to listen to you anyway !).
In addition to that, most people seem to be fearful of Microsoft (generally a good approach). It might be more useful to check out what Miguel (and others) have already said about Patents/Licensing at: http://www.mono-project.com/about/licensing.html and then get back and highlight what they think is missing, incorrect or maybe plain wrong.
A more interest point from the figures is why RHEL 3 had 34 patches and SuSe had 78 !
Does that make RHEL 3 two times more secure than SuSe (I doubt it !).
This is like comparing the performance of sports cars by how often you get a flat tyre.
I can't believe that people like this still get the press they don't deserve.
At this stage I'm nearly thinking - it might nearly be better if people were to believe these little gems. When they get burned later on we can always just say two things to them - (1) told you so and (2) go get a linux distro.
Even PBHs have some amount of intelligence - they won't stick with something that doesn't work UNLESS people give them a reason.
If you oppose their stance (for example: "Don't adopt Windows, its rubbish. We'll pay dearly in the long run.") it only gives a reason not to switch back. They don't want to look like idiots (which they will) and will be determined to try and prove you wrong by saying things like "Well, it produces all these nice graphs for me".
By taking a more neutral stance (but still making sure that your own rear is covered) they'll learn this all for themselves -
"Project came in 1 week late. Of which we had two weeks of downtime because IT spent the time fixing the Exchange servers (again)."
I'm sure the accounts department will do the sums and let them know that they need to "fix this".
One of the most vital part of any platforms eco-systems are the developers for your platform. Two of the more popular enterprise level platforms currently for show are probably.NET and Java.
With the current fight for brain-share among developers with these two platforms, the main focus appear to be on easy of use/integration (where Visual Studio currently leads) and maturity (where I think Java has a head-start).
How do you convince (1) the developers and (2) managers to put their faith in Windows and the.NET platform ahead of Java (with Linux/Solaris/whatever).
How do you plan to convince potential customers to use your.NET implementation and not an implementation (that would run on Linux) by a third party ?
The way forward is turning the CPU (of a traditional) architecture into a Nanny for a range of various dedicated processing units. IBM saw this years ago, and thus began the whole Cell architecture - but I suspect that their job was much easier. The software that would run on the platform they are designing is fairly specific - games & multimedia which usually lend themselves well to vectorization.
The real challenge for architects (in my humble opinion) is translating will be applying the same technique to other system bottlenecks.
AMD's (and now Intel's) approach of crambing more and more processing cores onto an IC might pay off in the short term, but like the "free lunch" of clock speed, will hit a roadblock when issues like memory bandwidth and caching schemes just have too much work to do with 4 or 8 processing cores hacking at it all the time.
I think its becoming very clear that centralised torrent distribution isn't going to work.
If you are going to host a popular torrent site then you are going to need bandwidth (for the site alone, no mention of trackers yet). Most bandwidth providers (a.k.a ISPs) are getting very paranoid about letters like these arriving. In fact I'm guessing that most ISPs have terms and conditions stating that they can switch you off faster than a light-bulb if they get such a letter.
The problem with these ISPs is that they need things like credit card details for payment, etc. etc. etc. This trail will eventually lead to a physical person who paid for the hosting - and thus someone the MPAA can put the rap on.
Lets just rewind here a sec. First there was FTP/HTTP for downloading "stuff". This worked while demand was average, and no one was paying much attention. The head came on, people (read: lawyers) took notice. Letters were sent, people abandoned FTP/HTTP for P2P networks.
Everything was good so far until it came to delivering large content (read: Movies, Apps, whatever). The P2P networks simply scale well to delivering this content well. But they still provided a reasonable amount of privacy.
Next (roughly speaking) came BitTorrent - it fixed the P2P bottle necks of gnutella & co. But it now depended on a centralised infrastructure for informing people on where to find the Trackers.
More experienced hands at BitTorrent and Gnutella might be able to help out here:
What if the.torrents were put on a P2P network ? The files are no longer very big so the scaling issues are not that important. If people are worried that the MPAA are going to go after people who store.torrents, why not encrypt them, or spread them between two/three "buddy" hosts, for example: host (A) stores the first 1/3 of the file, host (B) the next 1/3 and so on. It could even be stored redundantly in case one or more are offline.
This could be taken to the next level then - if the content is coming from multipe sources, and if individually the "copyright" material does not arrive from a single source - what can you prosecute the individual sources for - serving up a fragment ? If the data is interleaved between 10 hosts and every 10th byte is stored on one host, it would be very difficult to prove that the host contains the material.
Gecko# (gecko-sharp) is part of the mono (http://www.mono-project.com/) project to implement C# and the.NET CIL.
Mayne the example I have for ActiveX was a bit misleading - I was trying to get across that what is needed is a platform independant way of embedding the browser. Gecko# is a binding for C# (using GTK# - the GTK bindings for C#). In theory it should work on any platform that MS.NET / Mono supports (i.e. Windows/Intel for MS.NET, a whole bunch more for Mono).
This then takes people away from being worried about which OS your developing for and just worrying about the application your developing.
If there is a well documented, straight forward method for embedding a browser and you have a choice between a non-portable MS IE browser and a portable Gecko browser - which one are you going to pick. I'm well aware that it will depend somewhat on the application, but a lot of people will pick the portable way. Especially if the market their aiming for is even flirting with Linux/MacOS.
With a version 1.0 of Firefox do we now have the proof that the Gecko engine can be embedded in applications outside of the Mozilla suite.
Shouldn't it be more important to try and develop an embeddable browser (already done) and its supporting infrastructure (not as complete) - like documentation, languge bindings, etc, etc.
This is something that Gecko# has started in a way, but I'm sure a lot of projects (both open source and commercial) would benefit from being able to embed gecko.
In the Windows world, developers can just embed the IE browser using an ActiveX control. I'll bet that a lot of commercial developers would have no problem dropping the IE control in exchange for a Gecko control - less operating system (assuming one buys into the idea that IE is comingled with the OS) level dependancies.
With a well supported embedded component, Walmart could have their own browser.
The power is probably quite large, but manageable. Remember, the first standard (802.16-2004) is a fixed solution - they are not targeting laptop users with the first edition which is quite wise.
In chip/system design if time is a problem things like power consumption can get overlooked (i.e. its was a miracle the thing worked in the first place, we'll fix power with the next release). Implemented the fixed solutions will give the equipment makers a chance to optimize for mobile. Taking smaller progressive steps is much safer than one huge step.
Its interesting about the head aches - WiFi is currently operating over 2.4Ghz (the resonant frequency of water, which is a signifcant component of humans). Most regulators seem to specify a tx/rx power limit of 100mW (except countries like the US where it is 1W) to try and reduce risks as much as possible.
I would be much more concerned about the Radar station (power ~ MW) at the airport than a Wifi party (power ~ W).
Software projects seem to be primarily constrained by time/money which is usually controlled by management (read: boss)
If one wants to test software properly then you will need lots of the constraints (i.e. time and/or money). Just before a coder is testing his block, he/she will generally say something like:
"I'm finished the block, just need to test it a bit more"
Generally that is not what management will hear, they hear:
"I'm finished"
So they think "its ready". I've seen several first generation projects get hit by this problem (in commercial environments). In the IC design world (where its not generally possible to just flash the firmware to fix a bug) its accepted that at this point - i.e. primary design is finished you are only 50% of the way through. We spend at least half the time verifying the blocks. Management in IC design have accepted that this just as important as the implementation and so don't go off making wild assumptions.
So rather than just pawn off the blame onto your boss, it really is (partially anyway) your fault as well for not highlighting the fact that your block is not as tested as you would like it to be.
The philosophy of open source seems to limit the "its ready" effect to a good degree and hence the better code quality perception. When main stream commercial coding picks up the slack, it should get better as well. But generally a lot of these messes can be attributed to communication (person to person) failure rather than coder/boss failures.
To the best of my knowledge, its more complicated than that !!
The new version (aka Tiger) is officially (from memory, its on suns site somewhere):
Java 2 SE (Standard Edition) 5.0
The previous version was:
Java 2 SE (Standard Edition) 1.4.2
Why we always need to know that this is Java 2 - I don't know. Surely if they've added new language constructs then it would have been better to increment to 2.
Yes, I would have to agree - fragmentation is mostly hype. But there is one difference. Support. Fine, your latest XYZ product might run on Redhat and Debian but more than likely when you ring up tech. support with a problem on your Debian system you'll probably get a "not supported" reply.
Which is possibly fine, imagine the costs a ISV would have to incur if they had to support every single OS/distribution out there. In one way, they are probably happy with the MS monopoly.
On the other hand, this is more less the product of their thinking and business model for recent history. If tech. support people actually knew something about computers instead of just reading scripts then maybe supporting many platforms wouldn't be a hasstle. If programs were written using proper Software Engineering skills (no, VB does not count) then maybe applications would be portable in the first place.
From what I can see, the only thing that distinguishes linux platforms would be the libc implementation or for hardware related software the version of kernel. If I missed something, let it rip, but more or less everything else can be provided as a shared object or compiled static as part of the install process.
Slashdot Mirror
Blogging (truthfully) about something your company is doing might go completely against what a lot of people in the company are hired to hide.
Accountants, marketing and HR are all responsible for bending the truth in such a way to put a positive spin on something that might not be so rosey.
A prime example is Paul Otellini's (Intels CEO) interal blog which has been leaked at least once. I can't find the link to the original article where I read about it (help appreciated) which stated that he quite openly admitted that they had a lot of work to do to catch up with AMDs Opteron architecture.
If you are to take a step back and think about it, he's openness makes perfect sense to anyone who's been following processor trends for more than a year or so. The only problem is the accountants and marketing folks are trying to tell the opposite story - "AMD, no, ours is better".
I personally would prefer to hear my leader tell the truth and not simply try to keep the stock market happy. The only reason why the stock market gets upset by comments like this is because they aren't said often enough.
Not wanting to appear to side the RIAA and the MPAA but with the amounts of money involved its not surprising that the law is after these sites.
But you can be sure it's not because of terrorism.
How much of California's income comes from the film industry and the industry that services it.
At this stage, the movie studios are nearly nothing more than specialised banks (do I get credit for quoting Neal Stephenson !) - and with the vast sums of money involved, its not surprising that the law appears to re-act quicker.
But the law folks need a semi-genuine excuse to pursue these cases without alienating the public.
For example, if their line was "Yeah, well we need to help the movie industry backers get richer" - how many people would be taken to their cause. As a matter of spite, people would swing the other way - anything to go "get the system".
In Britain, before the motto for pursuing these sites and pirates was "to fight terrorism" it was "to fight organised crime".
In the end, it's all down to money, and in the movie business there's loads of it floating around.
Every wonder how dangerous driving in some countries can only incur a penalty of a few hundred dollars/euros (if you are really unlucky) while recording a film in a cinema (which I don't condone) can incur an _unlimited_ penalty where I come from.
Has Sun donated to the Apache foundation before (XML parsers ??)
If they were trying to release source code as a seperate effort wouldn't the Apache group be a likely outlet ?
(Stolen shamelessly from someone else...)
A Product can be:
1) On time
2) On budget
3) Feature complete.
Pick any two.
Totally agree.
The bandwidth and size of these films are probably not trivial - so if someone was even thinking of ripping the sat streams you'd better take a few things into consideration:
PAL is 720x576 (normal TV size in Europe). If you were to take an hour of video from a DV tape (even with a high end DV camera) you'll get 20GB worth of data. And this is at crappy TV resolution. Cinemas will need resolutions much much higher than this (I hope anyway).
Before I get blown away with people screaming about compression - DV is slightly compressed, but its intended to be be as closs to uncompressed quality as possible. The quality of the end result (if encoding multiple times) is always going to be directly related to the quality of the original footage.
This really gives the cinemas two options - (1)lots of storage (I'm thinking at least 1 or 2 TB here) - which when you think about it, isn't that expensive and (2) major compression.
It will all come down in the end to marketing - do the cinemas think they'll get away with a lower grade product (i.e. crappy quality) - I don't know.
I'm guessing that the projector technology is probably only now getting cost effective.
If you look at most consumer grade projectors, they usually support 1024x768, or if you go for really expensive ones, maybe the next size up. I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that its currently considered at production level to edit films at 4K pixels (not sure if thats horizontal or vertical, but guessing 4K pixels vertically) so as you can see a consumer projector (which can normall costs thousands to begin with) just wouldn't cut it.
As the technology moves to LTPS (low temperature poly-silicon) - which it has already is the Asian market, the resolution will go up.
Just think of it practically: if I pixel is 0.5mm x 0.5mm on the projector, how big is that pixel going to be on the "big screen".
From a cost perspective this was probably only a matter of time, regardless of the country.
I hope the cinemas and the studios also take this opportunity (since distributing films worldwide will now be alot easier, and cheaper!) to start releasing films at the same time rather than their current practice (well, mostly) of delaying releases in different countries.
As an afterthought - where do I get me one of those projectors, a 4K film projector would be pretty nice for the living room!
There are some significant differences between hyperthreading and Suns approach.
Tiny amount of background:
Hardest part when trying to run things in parallel is figuring out what you can run in parallel. Example: two operations (pseudocode): c=a+b and d+c+e. These two cannot be run in parallel, since you need to result of a+b before you can start c+e.
With modern operating systems there are many programs running at one time, and they may contain seperate threads. One assumption of threading is that threads can run asynchronously to one another - you will not get a situtation like that above (okay, okay, I'm simplying!).
With Hyperthreading, Intel gets the CPU to pretend to the OS that there are actually two of them. They duplicate the fetch and decode units, but only use one execute unit - which probably has several FPUs and Integer units. They rely on an FPU or an Integer unit being available to be able to get a performance benefit.
So Intel (up til now) have duplicated the fetch and decode, but still had the same execute unit.
Suns approach is to replicate the whole pipeline - fetch, decode, execute. Intel can't really scale hyperthreading beyond two "processors", whereas Sun are aiming to try and execute 8, 16 or even more at one time.
Because of Intels architecture they can't really scale hyperthreading in this way - for lots of reasons. I'm sure other people can add them.
This really won't be of huge benefit to your Doom3 FPS, but for business apps (think J2EE) or message queues or science applications it will allow compute servers to scale better at heavy loads (i.e. when lots of threads are doing something that isn't IO bound, at the same time).
Totally agree, however in the crypto community (which I cannot claim to be part of) the consensus is generally that if a weakness if found in an algorithm then it begs the question - "what other weaknesses are there".
Once an algorithms strength is in doubt by the presence of even one weakness people feel very reluctant to trust it.
Its probably up to everyone to see how this affects their own circumstances. Crypto is always about Knowing your enemy (the paranoia has now kicked in !). When picking a scheme one always makes a number of assumptions - Who are you keeping the information hidden from, what resources do they have, how badly do they want it.
No crypto is powerful, or clever enough (yet!) to be completely unbreakable so its all down to making assumptions:
1)
Would someone be willing to pay $38 million (assuming this is correct) to get my credit card number - probably not.
2)
Would someone be willing to pay $38 million to get insider info on a merger between two banks - each worth over $10 billion.
What unsettles people is that their previous assumptions on SHA-1 are now invalid.
Why doesn't microsoft generate hashes (longish ones would be nice) of all the files it publishes and then offer them as a reference for anyone who has to clean up their system.
The second thing they could do is try and stop people (read: software developers, and themselves) from dumping anything into the SYSTEM32 directory. Its just poor organisation. Nothing to do with technical problems - Does windows have the equivolent of ldconfig or LD_LIBRARY_PATH ?
Everytime something like this comes up its amazing how many people jump straight in and start attacking and counter-attacking.
I definetly believe that people are very entitled to voice their opinion on any matter, but it might be nicer for everyone if people adopted a more civil approach. It might actually encourage debate rather than activate peoples "fight-mode". And on the plus side if the agrument is presented in more neutral language even the zealots might read it !!!
After all, if the point is useful then people will take it on board (well, except for the die-hards, who aren't going to listen to you anyway !).
In addition to that, most people seem to be fearful of Microsoft (generally a good approach). It might be more useful to check out what Miguel (and others) have already said about Patents/Licensing at: http://www.mono-project.com/about/licensing.html and then get back and highlight what they think is missing, incorrect or maybe plain wrong.
Ahhh Amiga,
I spent most of the 80's watching day-time TV.
I'm still trying to figure out which was the better option (TV or Computers).
A more interest point from the figures is why RHEL 3 had 34 patches and SuSe had 78 !
Does that make RHEL 3 two times more secure than SuSe (I doubt it !).
This is like comparing the performance of sports cars by how often you get a flat tyre.
I can't believe that people like this still get the press they don't deserve.
At this stage I'm nearly thinking - it might nearly be better if people were to believe these little gems. When they get burned later on we can always just say two things to them - (1) told you so and (2) go get a linux distro.
Even PBHs have some amount of intelligence - they won't stick with something that doesn't work UNLESS people give them a reason.
If you oppose their stance (for example: "Don't adopt Windows, its rubbish. We'll pay dearly in the long run.") it only gives a reason not to switch back. They don't want to look like idiots (which they will) and will be determined to try and prove you wrong by saying things like "Well, it produces all these nice graphs for me".
By taking a more neutral stance (but still making sure that your own rear is covered) they'll learn this all for themselves -
"Project came in 1 week late. Of which we had two weeks of downtime because IT spent the time fixing the Exchange servers (again)."
I'm sure the accounts department will do the sums and let them know that they need to "fix this".
One of the most vital part of any platforms eco-systems are the developers for your platform. Two of the more popular enterprise level platforms currently for show are probably
With the current fight for brain-share among developers with these two platforms, the main focus appear to be on easy of use/integration (where Visual Studio currently leads) and maturity (where I think Java has a head-start).
How do you convince (1) the developers and (2) managers to put their faith in Windows and the
How do you plan to convince potential customers to use your
Surely people can now start to see where the future lies - from a performance viewpoint. We've reached the end of the clocking "free lunch" (see http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.ht m/).
The way forward is turning the CPU (of a traditional) architecture into a Nanny for a range of various dedicated processing units. IBM saw this years ago, and thus began the whole Cell architecture - but I suspect that their job was much easier. The software that would run on the platform they are designing is fairly specific - games & multimedia which usually lend themselves well to vectorization.
The real challenge for architects (in my humble opinion) is translating will be applying the same technique to other system bottlenecks.
AMD's (and now Intel's) approach of crambing more and more processing cores onto an IC might pay off in the short term, but like the "free lunch" of clock speed, will hit a roadblock when issues like memory bandwidth and caching schemes just have too much work to do with 4 or 8 processing cores hacking at it all the time.
I think its becoming very clear that centralised torrent distribution isn't going to work.
If you are going to host a popular torrent site then you are going to need bandwidth (for the site alone, no mention of trackers yet). Most bandwidth providers (a.k.a ISPs) are getting very paranoid about letters like these arriving. In fact I'm guessing that most ISPs have terms and conditions stating that they can switch you off faster than a light-bulb if they get such a letter.
The problem with these ISPs is that they need things like credit card details for payment, etc. etc. etc. This trail will eventually lead to a physical person who paid for the hosting - and thus someone the MPAA can put the rap on.
Lets just rewind here a sec. First there was FTP/HTTP for downloading "stuff". This worked while demand was average, and no one was paying much attention. The head came on, people (read: lawyers) took notice. Letters were sent, people abandoned FTP/HTTP for P2P networks.
Everything was good so far until it came to delivering large content (read: Movies, Apps, whatever). The P2P networks simply scale well to delivering this content well. But they still provided a reasonable amount of privacy.
Next (roughly speaking) came BitTorrent - it fixed the P2P bottle necks of gnutella & co. But it now depended on a centralised infrastructure for informing people on where to find the Trackers.
More experienced hands at BitTorrent and Gnutella might be able to help out here:
What if the
This could be taken to the next level then - if the content is coming from multipe sources, and if individually the "copyright" material does not arrive from a single source - what can you prosecute the individual sources for - serving up a fragment ? If the data is interleaved between 10 hosts and every 10th byte is stored on one host, it would be very difficult to prove that the host contains the material.
Just my $0.02
I think this tries to highlight another reason why allowing a third party review your code is a good thing
Generally, the most cost effective way can be an open source model.(there are others !)
Gecko# (gecko-sharp) is part of the mono (http://www.mono-project.com/) project to implement C# and the .NET CIL.
.NET / Mono supports (i.e. Windows/Intel for MS .NET, a whole bunch more for Mono).
Mayne the example I have for ActiveX was a bit misleading - I was trying to get across that what is needed is a platform independant way of embedding the browser. Gecko# is a binding for C# (using GTK# - the GTK bindings for C#). In theory it should work on any platform that MS
This then takes people away from being worried about which OS your developing for and just worrying about the application your developing.
If there is a well documented, straight forward method for embedding a browser and you have a choice between a non-portable MS IE browser and a portable Gecko browser - which one are you going to pick. I'm well aware that it will depend somewhat on the application, but a lot of people will pick the portable way. Especially if the market their aiming for is even flirting with Linux/MacOS.
With a version 1.0 of Firefox do we now have the proof that the Gecko engine can be embedded in applications outside of the Mozilla suite.
Shouldn't it be more important to try and develop an embeddable browser (already done) and its supporting infrastructure (not as complete) - like documentation, languge bindings, etc, etc.
This is something that Gecko# has started in a way, but I'm sure a lot of projects (both open source and commercial) would benefit from being able to embed gecko.
In the Windows world, developers can just embed the IE browser using an ActiveX control. I'll bet that a lot of commercial developers would have no problem dropping the IE control in exchange for a Gecko control - less operating system (assuming one buys into the idea that IE is comingled with the OS) level dependancies.
With a well supported embedded component, Walmart could have their own browser.
Give anyone who falls for one a Darwin award.
Hmmm, In a way I'm happy this was placed under "IT" instead of "Developers".
The power is probably quite large, but manageable. Remember, the first standard (802.16-2004) is a fixed solution - they are not targeting laptop users with the first edition which is quite wise.
In chip/system design if time is a problem things like power consumption can get overlooked (i.e. its was a miracle the thing worked in the first place, we'll fix power with the next release). Implemented the fixed solutions will give the equipment makers a chance to optimize for mobile. Taking smaller progressive steps is much safer than one huge step.
Its interesting about the head aches - WiFi is currently operating over 2.4Ghz (the resonant frequency of water, which is a signifcant component of humans). Most regulators seem to specify a tx/rx power limit of 100mW (except countries like the US where it is 1W) to try and reduce risks as much as possible.
I would be much more concerned about the Radar station (power ~ MW) at the airport than a Wifi party (power ~ W).
I beg to differ slightly.
Software projects seem to be primarily constrained by time/money which is usually controlled by management (read: boss)
If one wants to test software properly then you will need lots of the constraints (i.e. time and/or money). Just before a coder is testing his block, he/she will generally say something like:
"I'm finished the block, just need to test it a bit more"
Generally that is not what management will hear, they hear:
"I'm finished"
So they think "its ready". I've seen several first generation projects get hit by this problem (in commercial environments). In the IC design world (where its not generally possible to just flash the firmware to fix a bug) its accepted that at this point - i.e. primary design is finished you are only 50% of the way through. We spend at least half the time verifying the blocks. Management in IC design have accepted that this just as important as the implementation and so don't go off making wild assumptions.
So rather than just pawn off the blame onto your boss, it really is (partially anyway) your fault as well for not highlighting the fact that your block is not as tested as you would like it to be.
The philosophy of open source seems to limit the "its ready" effect to a good degree and hence the better code quality perception. When main stream commercial coding picks up the slack, it should get better as well. But generally a lot of these messes can be attributed to communication (person to person) failure rather than coder/boss failures.
To the best of my knowledge, its more complicated than that !!
The new version (aka Tiger) is officially (from memory, its on suns site somewhere):
Java 2 SE (Standard Edition) 5.0
The previous version was:
Java 2 SE (Standard Edition) 1.4.2
Why we always need to know that this is Java 2 - I don't know. Surely if they've added new language constructs then it would have been better to increment to 2.
Yes, I would have to agree - fragmentation is mostly hype. But there is one difference. Support. Fine, your latest XYZ product might run on Redhat and Debian but more than likely when you ring up tech. support with a problem on your Debian system you'll probably get a "not supported" reply.
Which is possibly fine, imagine the costs a ISV would have to incur if they had to support every single OS/distribution out there. In one way, they are probably happy with the MS monopoly.
On the other hand, this is more less the product of their thinking and business model for recent history. If tech. support people actually knew something about computers instead of just reading scripts then maybe supporting many platforms wouldn't be a hasstle. If programs were written using proper Software Engineering skills (no, VB does not count) then maybe applications would be portable in the first place.
From what I can see, the only thing that distinguishes linux platforms would be the libc implementation or for hardware related software the version of kernel. If I missed something, let it rip, but more or less everything else can be provided as a shared object or compiled static as part of the install process.