I have a UPS that I use, not for the PC, but for the router, cordless phone base, and my Vonage adapter. My laptop with it's 4 hour battery was sufficient to meet our emergency requirements. We had about 16 hours of UPS power, enough time for the power to be restored. (We had a winter storm outage of 6 hrs).
In Montreal, BELL payphones are at 50 cents per call. At the public library, Bell's competitor has them at 25cents per call. The 25cents per call results in the bank of phones being used fully. A nice revenue stream for Telus. When the price was 50 cents, people borrowed cellphones to make a call. This way they were able to call and talk with full confidentiality away from their peers.
Older workers want more pay, don't want to work all nighters every other thursday, don't want mandatory 90 hour weeks, don't want to mess with all these new fangled thingies that will be obsolete or irrelevant in 1.7 years, etc etc
I am 72, I program and do C++ (qt gui), C, and in Linux . I dont do websites, so whats the deal? Think we can't do event responsive programming? Think we can't do multitasking or numerical algorthms? Think again, we old farts have knowledge, experience, and have experienced all the problems that you kids haven't as yet encountered.
In my lifetime, I don't recall a single industry that that has started a successful union in the U.S. (not in ANY field). All the unions that still have any real power are the ones still around from the Roosevelt New Deal and postwar days (the Teamsters, UAW, etc.).
So it's hardly fair to single out developers. There are very few fields that are significantly unionized anymore, and most of the ones that are are represented by older unions that go way back. When you look around and see that there are no unions with any real power that have been founded in your lifetime, it's pretty easy to be skeptical and pretty hard to volunteer to be the sacrificial lamb (by being the first voice in your field supporting a union) and endanger your career in the process.
It probably also doesn't help that political support for unions, even among many Democrats, pretty much dried up a long time ago.
To create a union you first start with a Certification program, a la ACM or IEEE. Then when the ranks swell, you ask them if they are interested in the organization transitioning to a union. As a union, you have purchasing and spending and negotiating power. Eventually, your Association transitions fully to a union.
Unions are both a plus and a minus for careers. I would stay as an organization level, were I forming a collective group.
Everyone I know who voted for him is dissapointed in him. He should be relatively easy to throw out of office.
After the 1972 election, film critic Pauline Kael allegedly said that she couldn't believe that Nixon had won, since no one she knew voted for him. Though that quote is apparently apocryphal, it does accurately depict the hazard of judging a presidential contest on the basis of personal anecdotes rather than polls.
Watching Congress (republican house) play the I am going to immunize that guy; his legislation is not going to reduce my take home pay. If he wants to raise taxes, do it to the masses, not to the one percent who rule.
Agreed - "on offer" - but I wonder if Obama was all like, "I'm gonna come to Washington and kick. some. ass!" and then he found out that reality is different from idealism. Maybe it'll be different the second time around, and he'll actually deliver on the "change" promise, now that he doesn't have to worry about re-election. One can hope.
If congress understands that business and job creation can only occur if you have customers. Customers demand products, and that creates sales. Sales spur jobs. The goal that Obama must have is to create domestic China proof non-exportable jobs.
I disagree - if more corporations were playing the game honestly, and actually shouldering their share of the tax burden, the overall tax rates could be lower, and regular citizens who can't escape tax as easily, could pay less. Therefore, with lower tax rates, there would be a lower marginal reward per tax payer for dodging the system.
The problem is, right now, the biggest and richest corporations and individuals can escape a large chunk of the tax that they are supposed to be paying, so more has to be paid by middle and lower level tax payers to make up the shortfall.
=== You forgot the likes of Bain Capital, that created jobs off shore, (creating the 47% who he does not care about), paying only 13% tax on 20 million revenue, and for the jobs moved off-shore, put the former employees onto unemployment. Now we have lies about job creation? To create jobs you need to create customers with money. But the Rich one percent have all the money. So, job creation is going to be a very very slow process. Even your offshore or out of state customers are not certain about the future. The USA financial situation is very precarious, and because of that, I can't trust the 13% man who constantly change his mind to suit the audience.
I've been programming since 1977, and I'm still doing it, although my job description hasn't had "programmer" in it since 1984:
(My first job out of university was writing digital signal analysis sw for a research institute, I did that from 1981 to 84.)
During the last few years I've been involved with crypto (AES) and graphics optimization, multicore computing as well as a few programming competitions: I suspect that I'm probably 20 years older than most of the other quarter/semi-finalists at the two Facebook Hacker Challenges.
The main/only/sufficient reason is of course that I love doing it!
Solving puzzles is something I would pay to do, so getting paid is a great deal imho.
(My official job these days is to be the in-house IT troubleshooter for a very large Norwegian IT company, I manage to sneak in some programming here as well, often some Perl to analyze network trace/log files.)
Terje
===== It is great to know that you love programming. I call programming architecture and implementation. I program in C and have been doing Assembly, Cobol, C and some C++ ever since graduation some 40 years ago. I am 72 and just completed 8 separate applications in with Des / Des3 encryption.
This is a Canadian Broadcast that covers a lot of territory. It has some positive and negative feedback about American situations, as reported by American reporters, and former Governors.
Its about several topics, including Romney in Mass. Voter Fraud, Hurricane Sandy, and what should be of great interest to Americans, the elections in two days from now.
The program is similar to what you might hear on PBS
So, the H1-B worker, by your calculation, lives of donuts he steals in the break room and sleeps on a park bench?
*fweeeet!*
Reductio ad absurdum, five-yard penalty!
What he is saying is actually rather common, though definitely not to the 'sleeps on a park bench' level.
It is very common for immigrants (legal or illegal) to spend only on what is necessary, and send every spare penny back home to family. After a few years, a sum is saved up which would be considered moderate here (say, saving off $50-$75k in aggregate from a middle-class job). After a few years, the immigrant returns to his/her country of origin, and either lives off the saved money for life, or uses it to start a business. The cost-of-living differential is high enough to return home a fairly prosperous person, and none of that money does anything in the local economy.
Renting a house? No problem - In an H1-B holder's shoes, I can rent a cheap 2-bd apartment with four of my friends, bunk two to a room, and pay a mere $200/month for that. Buy a car? No problem - a cheap-but running POS off of Craigslist cost what, $1000 at the most? Groceries? A minimal expense if you know where to shop, and don't get too picky on what you're eating. Given those low expenses, in three years as a DBA @ a (way low for the job!) wage of $80k here in the Pacific Northwest, I could eke out a semi-comfy cheap-assed living, and send home at least $100k to use for when I get back to my family. After all, it's no problem to live like a pauper in some strange land, especially when I know that in just a couple of years I will live like a deity in my own home neighborhood.
If they are willing to do it, why not, and why not you. Do it for 3-4 years, have a nest egg, and use it to buy a house, or return to school. An employee occasionally has to sacrifice lifestyle to have something for the future.
I'm pretty sure that's not unique to CS students. If you think arrogance is a trait only CS majors have, head over to a 500-level philosophy class sometime and talk to some of those majors. Hell, go to pretty much *any* high level class in *any* major.
The problem isn't the major, the problem is the combination of youth and a little knowledge. Most 21-year-olds are just knowledgeable enough to be cocky, but not knowledgeable enough to appreciate the fact that they really don't know shit. I believe Socrates observed this phenomenon even in his time, and commented on it. "Stop being such cocky pricks! You don't even appreciate how dumb a bunch of shits you are yet, you little fuckers!" he would tell his students (I paraphrase the Greek).
No worries, though. Ultimately, life will fix the problem.
Want to get rid of your arrogance. Live in Europe for a year, and in Latin America for a year. You will quickly learn that you do not have exclusivity on intelligence or even generosity. You will learn to tolerate other languages and cultures. Travel will be your best teacher
But, but, how will the international observers comply to these demand? They don't know how much 100 feet is!
There should be further restraints. For example. Should they be canvasing the exiting voters to determine for whom they voted, and should the west coast (California) know before the polls close, how NY state voters were doing? Some people want to be amongst the winners for their own ego and for satisfaction to their friends. The reporting of exiting voters could take place, but results only presented when the polls close in California or Hawaii.
A vote for Obama continues to be a vote for plutocracy.
Yeah, we should cut out the middle-man, and elect an actual plutocrat instead!
We Canadians are following the elections with great interest. We see you with two options. Another George Bush, or a second term with an intelligent leader who is, with the constraints and road blocks that congress put before him (sticks in the wheels), etc, trying hard to bring a country out of recession. It is so funny to read how the owner of Bain Capital sent jobs offshore and then says he will create jobs. Do you need a minimum wage position?
In a recent survey, 21 of 22 countries believe Obama will do a substantially better job than Romney. The one dissenter was Pakistan. Canada, Australia, Latin America, (Chavez included), Mexico and the European community, China included were in the 21.
I just hope they take the company owners, strap them to chairs, and force them to watch nothings adverts/infomercials, and while they sleep force them to hear robocall recordings. Do it 24/7/365, a' la A Clockwork Orange.
What they do with "Rachael" is not my concern. >:(
Not having a public number, who is Rachael, and does she date?
You don't see the difference between Apple's abuse of the patent system by attempting to prove someone copied trivial things that already existed like rounded corners, and Google's FRAND patents that *every* manufacturer *including* Apple agrees are valid? Patents that actually cover meaningful technologies that "have to do with how every smartphone in existence connects to WiFi and cellular networks"?
Are you kidding me?
As for the doing or not doing evil, whatever, maybe. But to equate Apple and Google's patent activity is just absurdly wrong.
Our local Best Buy stores have Apple stuff priced about double that of MS windows. It is beginning to look that the nice guy on the street, next to Shuttleworth is Microsoft.
Thus far, I have stayed away from smart phones. My two sons, daughter and son-in-law each have one. I use a basic cellphone, to do the occasional texting, to send and receive telephone calls, and to set alarms to remind me to pick up the milk on the way home. I do have a netbook, a laptop, and 5 other desktop computers (linux, Windows 7, XP). While wife watches X-Factor, or similar program, I do my email corresponding and web browsing. If I lose the cellphone, I buy another for $40.00. What if you lose your smartphone, will your insurance cover the loss?
Let's put a 48-core processor on a desktop or laptop before we talk about tablets or phones...
==== Adding cores rarely translates into increased throughput.
Think of this idea from queuing theory. Which is more efficient, one server running at 2x speed, or two servers running at x speed? Equate cpu and server as one.
If the two servers are contending for a common serialized resource (disk, ssd, etc) , then they lock each other out until the serialized task is completed. Queuing theory suggests that they trip over each other and this results in less throughput than with the one server running twice as fast. When things are slow, many servers sits idle. This is true for a 48 server situation. There is also a large overhead that is required to manage the active servers from the 48 server.
For large numbers of cores, the scheduling algorthms have to change. My view is that there will be a queue of available cpus, and a task dispatcher that selects the first cpu from the queue. When that CPU based task is finished, the cpu goes back into the queue. There will be rules to indicate affinity to cpu or group, requiring a task to run only on a specific cpu, or independence and freedom of choice. We hardly handle quad cores well, I wait to think of the design and Q/A tasks leadingup to a generalized task scheduler for large core systems.
If all servers are identical, one can return it to the back of the line. If it is a faster server, it would go closer to the front. Naturally, one hopes that resource contention concerns can be handled by the dispatcher-scheduler.
My thoughts about the above are mine. I don't have task manager design experience, but I only have my years of experience to go on.
Your country is not the one putting this forth. The current set of "leaders" is. Vote them out next Tuesday.
2008 called, they want their optimism back
=== I was rather impressed with the leader of the libertarian party, a former Republican. He said that the Republicans have lost their soul. He was for increased taxing of the rich, a true universal medical system, spending cuts for physical wars that are not better done economically. His high priority item is the deficit, which can topple the USA if it is not curtailed very very soon.
Fine, I'll take it any time. Not only do I hate getting the flu, when the deadly avian flu desaster strikes some day, I'd finally like to put all the doomsday scenario survival skills I've practised in video games for years to a test.:-)
==== I believe flu vaccines work. It worked for me or I was very lucky. Here is the scenario. I own what we Montreal'ers call a duplex. My wife and I share the building with my son-in-law, daughter and three grandchildren and in another connected apartment of the building, my son lives with his significant girlfriend.
I had the flu shot, my daughter convinced everyone else to not get it because of what she researched (googled) and read. Well, the building houses 9, and the other 8 did get the flu, and the fever that accompanied it. I was the one who asked why they ridiculed me. I guess I missed out on the pain and the fever. Get the shot is my recommendation.
Exactly. Look at what the pharma industry did with smallpox, polio and rinderpest. They spent millions of dollars and decades of research to come up with something which would permanently take care of these issues and look at the money which is flowing into them now that they've done so.
Just think how much more they could have made had they come up with something that needs to be administered year after year. The amounts would be staggering.
These pharma folks must be idiots to come up with a vaccine that prevents something once and for all rather than just doling out temporary fixes.
==== You forgot to mention all the chickens whose egg whites are used to incubate the vaccine. Thousands of eggs will be saved.
Actually, 2560x1920 would be better. But apparently more people use their laptops to watch videos than to do work.
========== I would like the option to flip the screen to 1920x2560, In this way, I can see a full legal sized text document on screen without scrolling. But, with increased pixal density, does that not increase power consumption. I have a tiny netbook, running Fedora. The display is not bright enough for bright daylight, but at almost 5 hours of battery life, I have no complaints. Perhaps the solution is to also provide larger capacity batteries. My netbook battery is about 5 hours, my new Samsung dual core I3 laptop with battery is about 30 to 40 minutes. I have no idea why such poor performance.
Boost the battery capacity and in order to boost the pixals. Allow me to physically rotate the laptop to have the image automaticlly switch, to enable me to read a long (legal sized) document without scrolling.
I already use a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard to avoid carpal tunnel problems due to laptop keyboard layouts. Layouts meant to conform to the space space available as opposed to fingertip space relationships.
Yes, those are all good moves, because the voters are so stupid and gullible that they're easily swayed by campaign ads. My whole point here is that the voters' gullibility does not absolve them of the responsibility for the outcome caused by their votes, as so many responders here seem to think it does. It doesn't matter if a bunch of PACs convince people to vote against their own best interests: the voters are still responsible for that, and for whatever their chosen leaders do. Moves like the ones you list are designed to limit this effect, but if the people weren't so dumb, these measures wouldn't be necessary.
I agree with you, but many voters are only with high school or less education.
I guess you do not know what "level the playing field means". In Canada we are moving to ban all political advertisements by third parties, and to limit donations to $100 max per person. For every dollar given to a registered person running for election, the government will provide $200. This means that elections will be on issues, and the small guy also gets a fair chance. It also blocks corruption. I would say that cash under the table, golf trips, quiet home renovations, etc. Airline flights paid, are the norm in the USA. Here, a corp is officially allowed to give a dozen golf balls, if the items have the donator's logo. Giving a rental car or free credit card is not allowed.
On the one hand, we have the US and the insanity over copyright who randomly takes a small number of domains off line with no due process.
and...
On the other hand we have the rest of the world, who, to a greater or lesser extent take a large number of domains off line with no due process because of various censorship requirements.
I'm not American, but keeping the internet under the control of the US is far better than the alternative.
If you disagree, tell me one country which would do a better job. And then tell me how much influence they'd have over the ITU.
======= Question? If control of the net remains with the USA, how long before it is commercialized to where there will no longer be free access? Today, via my ISP I otherwise have free access.
With ITU, monopolies will have to present their ideas to scrutiny. With the ITU, I am pretty sure that my only connection fee will be to my ISP. Am I wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
I have a UPS that I use, not for the PC, but for the router, cordless phone base, and my Vonage adapter. My laptop with it's 4 hour battery was sufficient to meet our emergency requirements.
We had about 16 hours of UPS power, enough time for the power to be restored. (We had a winter storm outage of 6 hrs).
In Montreal, BELL payphones are at 50 cents per call.
At the public library, Bell's competitor has them at 25cents per call. The 25cents per call results in the bank of phones being used fully. A nice revenue stream for Telus. When the price was 50 cents, people borrowed cellphones to make a call.
This way they were able to call and talk with full confidentiality away from their peers.
Older workers want more pay, don't want to work all nighters every other thursday, don't want mandatory 90 hour weeks, don't want to mess with all these new fangled thingies that will be obsolete or irrelevant in 1.7 years, etc etc
I am 72, I program and do C++ (qt gui), C, and in Linux . I dont do websites, so whats the deal? Think we can't do event responsive programming? Think we can't do multitasking or numerical algorthms? Think again, we old farts have knowledge, experience, and have experienced all the problems that you kids haven't as yet encountered.
In my lifetime, I don't recall a single industry that that has started a successful union in the U.S. (not in ANY field). All the unions that still have any real power are the ones still around from the Roosevelt New Deal and postwar days (the Teamsters, UAW, etc.).
So it's hardly fair to single out developers. There are very few fields that are significantly unionized anymore, and most of the ones that are are represented by older unions that go way back. When you look around and see that there are no unions with any real power that have been founded in your lifetime, it's pretty easy to be skeptical and pretty hard to volunteer to be the sacrificial lamb (by being the first voice in your field supporting a union) and endanger your career in the process.
It probably also doesn't help that political support for unions, even among many Democrats, pretty much dried up a long time ago.
To create a union you first start with a Certification program, a la ACM or IEEE. Then when the ranks swell, you ask them if they are interested in the organization transitioning to a union. As a union, you have purchasing and spending and negotiating power.
Eventually, your Association transitions fully to a union.
Unions are both a plus and a minus for careers. I would stay as an organization level, were I forming a collective group.
Everyone I know who voted for him is dissapointed in him. He should be relatively easy to throw out of office.
After the 1972 election, film critic Pauline Kael allegedly said that she couldn't believe that Nixon had won, since no one she knew voted for him. Though that quote is apparently apocryphal, it does accurately depict the hazard of judging a presidential contest on the basis of personal anecdotes rather than polls.
Watching Congress (republican house) play the I am going to immunize that guy; his legislation is not going to reduce my take home pay. If he wants to raise taxes, do it to the masses, not to the one percent who rule.
Agreed - "on offer" - but I wonder if Obama was all like, "I'm gonna come to Washington and kick. some. ass!" and then he found out that reality is different from idealism. Maybe it'll be different the second time around, and he'll actually deliver on the "change" promise, now that he doesn't have to worry about re-election. One can hope.
If congress understands that business and job creation can only occur if you have customers. Customers demand products, and that creates sales. Sales spur jobs. The goal that Obama must have is to create domestic China proof non-exportable jobs.
I disagree - if more corporations were playing the game honestly, and actually shouldering their share of the tax burden, the overall tax rates could be lower, and regular citizens who can't escape tax as easily, could pay less. Therefore, with lower tax rates, there would be a lower marginal reward per tax payer for dodging the system.
The problem is, right now, the biggest and richest corporations and individuals can escape a large chunk of the tax that they are supposed to be paying, so more has to be paid by middle and lower level tax payers to make up the shortfall.
===
You forgot the likes of Bain Capital, that created jobs off shore, (creating the 47% who he does not care about), paying only 13% tax on 20 million revenue, and for the jobs moved off-shore, put the former employees onto unemployment.
Now we have lies about job creation? To create jobs you need to create customers with money. But the Rich one percent have all the money. So, job creation is going to be a very very slow process. Even your offshore or out of state customers are not certain about the future. The USA financial situation is very precarious, and because of that, I can't trust the 13% man who constantly change his mind to suit the audience.
I've been programming since 1977, and I'm still doing it, although my job description hasn't had "programmer" in it since 1984:
(My first job out of university was writing digital signal analysis sw for a research institute, I did that from 1981 to 84.)
During the last few years I've been involved with crypto (AES) and graphics optimization, multicore computing as well as a few programming competitions:
I suspect that I'm probably 20 years older than most of the other quarter/semi-finalists at the two Facebook Hacker Challenges.
The main/only/sufficient reason is of course that I love doing it!
Solving puzzles is something I would pay to do, so getting paid is a great deal imho.
(My official job these days is to be the in-house IT troubleshooter for a very large Norwegian IT company, I manage to sneak in some programming here as well, often some Perl to analyze network trace/log files.)
Terje
=====
It is great to know that you love programming. I call programming architecture and implementation.
I program in C and have been doing Assembly, Cobol, C and some C++ ever since graduation some 40 years ago.
I am 72 and just completed 8 separate applications in with Des / Des3 encryption.
Will Fedex and Amazon Merge?
http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/day6_20121103_38032.mp3
This is a Canadian Broadcast that covers a lot of territory. It has some positive and negative feedback about American situations, as reported by American reporters, and former Governors.
Its about several topics, including Romney in Mass. Voter Fraud, Hurricane Sandy, and what should be of great interest to Americans, the elections in two days from now.
The program is similar to what you might hear on PBS
So, the H1-B worker, by your calculation, lives of donuts he steals in the break room and sleeps on a park bench?
*fweeeet!*
Reductio ad absurdum, five-yard penalty!
What he is saying is actually rather common, though definitely not to the 'sleeps on a park bench' level.
It is very common for immigrants (legal or illegal) to spend only on what is necessary, and send every spare penny back home to family. After a few years, a sum is saved up which would be considered moderate here (say, saving off $50-$75k in aggregate from a middle-class job). After a few years, the immigrant returns to his/her country of origin, and either lives off the saved money for life, or uses it to start a business. The cost-of-living differential is high enough to return home a fairly prosperous person, and none of that money does anything in the local economy.
Renting a house? No problem - In an H1-B holder's shoes, I can rent a cheap 2-bd apartment with four of my friends, bunk two to a room, and pay a mere $200/month for that. Buy a car? No problem - a cheap-but running POS off of Craigslist cost what, $1000 at the most? Groceries? A minimal expense if you know where to shop, and don't get too picky on what you're eating. Given those low expenses, in three years as a DBA @ a (way low for the job!) wage of $80k here in the Pacific Northwest, I could eke out a semi-comfy cheap-assed living, and send home at least $100k to use for when I get back to my family. After all, it's no problem to live like a pauper in some strange land, especially when I know that in just a couple of years I will live like a deity in my own home neighborhood.
If they are willing to do it, why not, and why not you. Do it for 3-4 years, have a nest egg, and use it to buy a house, or return to school. An employee occasionally has to sacrifice lifestyle to have something for the future.
I'm pretty sure that's not unique to CS students. If you think arrogance is a trait only CS majors have, head over to a 500-level philosophy class sometime and talk to some of those majors. Hell, go to pretty much *any* high level class in *any* major.
The problem isn't the major, the problem is the combination of youth and a little knowledge. Most 21-year-olds are just knowledgeable enough to be cocky, but not knowledgeable enough to appreciate the fact that they really don't know shit. I believe Socrates observed this phenomenon even in his time, and commented on it. "Stop being such cocky pricks! You don't even appreciate how dumb a bunch of shits you are yet, you little fuckers!" he would tell his students (I paraphrase the Greek).
No worries, though. Ultimately, life will fix the problem.
Want to get rid of your arrogance. Live in Europe for a year, and in Latin America for a year. You will quickly learn that you do not have exclusivity on intelligence or even generosity. You will learn to tolerate other languages and cultures.
Travel will be your best teacher
But, but, how will the international observers comply to these demand? They don't know how much 100 feet is!
There should be further restraints. For example. Should they be canvasing the exiting voters to determine for whom they voted, and should the west coast (California) know before the polls close, how NY state voters were doing?
Some people want to be amongst the winners for their own ego and for satisfaction to their friends.
The reporting of exiting voters could take place, but results only presented when the polls close in California or Hawaii.
A vote for Obama continues to be a vote for plutocracy.
Yeah, we should cut out the middle-man, and elect an actual plutocrat instead!
We Canadians are following the elections with great interest. We see you with two options.
Another George Bush, or a second term with an intelligent leader who is, with the constraints and road blocks that congress put before him (sticks in the wheels), etc, trying hard to bring a country out of recession.
It is so funny to read how the owner of Bain Capital sent jobs offshore and then says he will create jobs. Do you need a minimum wage position?
In a recent survey, 21 of 22 countries believe Obama will do a substantially better job than Romney. The one dissenter was Pakistan. Canada, Australia, Latin America, (Chavez included), Mexico and the European community, China included were in the 21.
I just hope they take the company owners, strap them to chairs, and force them to watch nothings adverts/infomercials, and while they sleep force them to hear robocall recordings. Do it 24/7/365, a' la A Clockwork Orange.
What they do with "Rachael" is not my concern. >:(
Not having a public number, who is Rachael, and does she date?
Seriously?
You don't see the difference between Apple's abuse of the patent system by attempting to prove someone copied trivial things that already existed like rounded corners, and Google's FRAND patents that *every* manufacturer *including* Apple agrees are valid? Patents that actually cover meaningful technologies that "have to do with how every smartphone in existence connects to WiFi and cellular networks"?
Are you kidding me?
As for the doing or not doing evil, whatever, maybe. But to equate Apple and Google's patent activity is just absurdly wrong.
Our local Best Buy stores have Apple stuff priced about double that of MS windows. It is beginning to look that the nice guy on the street, next to Shuttleworth is Microsoft.
Thus far, I have stayed away from smart phones. My two sons, daughter and son-in-law each have one. I use a basic cellphone, to do the occasional texting, to send and receive telephone calls, and to set alarms to remind me to pick up the milk on the way home.
I do have a netbook, a laptop, and 5 other desktop computers (linux, Windows 7, XP). While wife watches X-Factor, or similar program, I do my email corresponding and web browsing. If I lose the cellphone, I buy another for $40.00. What if you lose your smartphone, will your insurance cover the loss?
Let's put a 48-core processor on a desktop or laptop before we talk about tablets or phones...
====
Adding cores rarely translates into increased throughput.
Think of this idea from queuing theory. Which is more efficient, one server running at 2x speed, or two servers running at x speed? Equate cpu and server as one.
If the two servers are contending for a common serialized resource (disk, ssd, etc) , then they lock each other out until the serialized task is completed. Queuing theory suggests that they trip over each other and this results in less throughput than with the one server running twice as fast. When things are slow, many servers sits idle. This is true for a 48 server situation.
There is also a large overhead that is required to manage the active servers from the 48 server.
For large numbers of cores, the scheduling algorthms have to change. My view is that there will be a queue of available cpus, and a task dispatcher that selects the first cpu from the queue. When that CPU based task is finished, the cpu goes back into the queue. There will be rules to indicate affinity to cpu or group, requiring a task to run only on a specific cpu, or independence and freedom of choice. We hardly handle quad cores well, I wait to think of the design and Q/A tasks leadingup to a generalized task scheduler for large core systems.
If all servers are identical, one can return it to the back of the line. If it is a faster server, it would go closer to the front.
Naturally, one hopes that resource contention concerns can be handled by the dispatcher-scheduler.
My thoughts about the above are mine. I don't have task manager design experience, but I only have my years of experience to go on.
Thanks for the read.
Your country is not the one putting this forth. The current set of "leaders" is. Vote them out next Tuesday.
2008 called, they want their optimism back
===
I was rather impressed with the leader of the libertarian party, a former Republican. He said that the Republicans have lost their soul. He was for increased taxing of the rich, a true universal medical system, spending cuts for physical wars that are not better done economically.
His high priority item is the deficit, which can topple the USA if it is not curtailed very very soon.
Fine, I'll take it any time. Not only do I hate getting the flu, when the deadly avian flu desaster strikes some day, I'd finally like to put all the doomsday scenario survival skills I've practised in video games for years to a test. :-)
====
I believe flu vaccines work. It worked for me or I was very lucky. Here is the scenario.
I own what we Montreal'ers call a duplex. My wife and I share the building with my son-in-law, daughter and three grandchildren and in another connected apartment of the building, my son lives with his significant girlfriend.
I had the flu shot, my daughter convinced everyone else to not get it because of what she researched (googled) and read.
Well, the building houses 9, and the other 8 did get the flu, and the fever that accompanied it. I was the one who asked why they ridiculed me. I guess I missed out on the pain and the fever. Get the shot is my recommendation.
Exactly. Look at what the pharma industry did with smallpox, polio and rinderpest. They spent millions of dollars and decades of research to come up with something which would permanently take care of these issues and look at the money which is flowing into them now that they've done so.
Just think how much more they could have made had they come up with something that needs to be administered year after year. The amounts would be staggering.
These pharma folks must be idiots to come up with a vaccine that prevents something once and for all rather than just doling out temporary fixes.
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You forgot to mention all the chickens whose egg whites are used to incubate the vaccine. Thousands of eggs will be saved.
Actually, 2560x1920 would be better. But apparently more people use their laptops to watch videos than to do work.
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I would like the option to flip the screen to 1920x2560, In this way, I can see a full legal sized text document on screen without scrolling.
But, with increased pixal density, does that not increase power consumption. I have a tiny netbook, running Fedora. The display is not bright enough for bright daylight, but at almost 5 hours of battery life, I have no complaints. Perhaps the solution is to also provide larger capacity batteries. My netbook battery is about 5 hours, my new Samsung dual core I3 laptop with battery is about 30 to 40 minutes. I have no idea why such poor performance.
Boost the battery capacity and in order to boost the pixals. Allow me to physically rotate the laptop to have the image automaticlly switch, to enable me to read a long (legal sized) document without scrolling.
I already use a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard to avoid carpal tunnel problems due to laptop keyboard layouts. Layouts meant to conform to the space space available as opposed to fingertip space relationships.
Yes, those are all good moves, because the voters are so stupid and gullible that they're easily swayed by campaign ads. My whole point here is that the voters' gullibility does not absolve them of the responsibility for the outcome caused by their votes, as so many responders here seem to think it does. It doesn't matter if a bunch of PACs convince people to vote against their own best interests: the voters are still responsible for that, and for whatever their chosen leaders do. Moves like the ones you list are designed to limit this effect, but if the people weren't so dumb, these measures wouldn't be necessary.
I agree with you, but many voters are only with high school or less education.
I guess you do not know what "level the playing field means". In Canada we are moving to ban all political advertisements by third parties, and to limit donations to $100 max per person. For every dollar given to a registered person running for election, the government will provide $200.
This means that elections will be on issues, and the small guy also gets a fair chance. It also blocks corruption. I would say that cash under the table, golf trips, quiet home renovations, etc. Airline flights paid, are the norm in the USA.
Here, a corp is officially allowed to give a dozen golf balls, if the items have the donator's logo. Giving a rental car or free credit card is not allowed.
On the one hand, we have the US and the insanity over copyright who randomly takes a small number of domains off line with no due process.
and...
On the other hand we have the rest of the world, who, to a greater or lesser extent take a large number of domains off line with no due process because of various censorship requirements.
I'm not American, but keeping the internet under the control of the US is far better than the alternative.
If you disagree, tell me one country which would do a better job. And then tell me how much influence they'd have over the ITU.
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Question? If control of the net remains with the USA, how long before it is commercialized to where there will no longer be free access? Today, via my ISP I otherwise have free access.
With ITU, monopolies will have to present their ideas to scrutiny. With the ITU, I am pretty sure that my only connection fee will be to my ISP. Am I wrong?