In what universe do you live in? Here in the real world, only the largest proprietary software development companies even pretend to listen to their customers. The overwhelming majority of vendors do not listen to their users any more than open source developers do, except maybe to accept bug reports. The difference with libre software is that you can try to find someone else to make the changes you want, if you are willing to pay them for it (or if they are willing to do it as a volunteer).
I would not use Google docs or OpenOffice to create a newspaper. I would look more at TeX or troff or something more oriented toward page layouts. Not that I am in the publishing business...
Besides, single-core chips have long been parallel.
Which has little to do with multithreading or writing parallel programs, so what exactly is your point? At best, this can be taken advantage of by programmers writing code that their processors are better at executing in parallel, which is more of a job for their compiler.
SSE is an example of parallel execution.
No, it is an example of vector math, which is related to parallel execution, but not quite the same. Programmers using SSE instructions are still writing programs as a single instruction stream. There is no locking or contention to deal with in vector math, there are guarantees about execution order (at least as far as the results of the execution are concerned), and so forth. Compilers have trouble making use of vector math instructions because it is difficult to tell when using those instructions is appropriate, at least with current compiler technology and algorithms.
Frankly, I doubt that you understand what you're talking about. Your earlier comment about unused x86 instructions kinda implies that.
Then you have never bothered to take a look at how many x86 instructions there are, and how many of those instructions are actually placed in the code generated by your compiler, or how many times the programs on your system actually use those instructions. Even the Intel compiler team has not figured out how best to use the x86 instruction set. Seriously, take a look at the situation before asserting that single core processors are at their limit.
So you are basing your argument on marketing? The parallel processing on graphics cards is only suitable for a few problems; general purpose programs do not gain much from the level of parallelism that graphics cards offer, and the style programming that is being pushed by Nvidia (CUDA) is not at all suitable for most computing tasks. Shared memory architectures have been tried many times in history, and hit very serious walls when issues like hot spots and coherency come about; creating a 64 core shared memory machine is right around the upper limit of usefulness even for tasks that lend themselves to parallel programming, and that has been the case for a long time now (it was the case long before the current physical problems with semiconductor clock speeds). The reason that boasting about megahertz rates has ended is mainly that the chip makers do not know how to increase clock speeds any further on silicon without creating problems with power density and cooling; other semiconductor materials which can overcome these problems are known but are not yet practical or economical.
People talk about parallel programming like it is some kind of silver bullet that is going to make everything happen faster, when the reality is that we really have no idea how to improve most programs by executing code in parallel. Even if we ignore the huge amount of IO-bound code out there and focus only on those programs that are CPU-intensive, there are plenty of tasks that have too many data dependencies or that wind up create hotspots, which kill performance in parallel programs.
Worse still is the fact that single core architectures are not even being used to their full potential. x86 has tons of instructions that are unused by most programs, even programs that could take advantage of those instructions, because compilers have a hard time figuring out how those instructions can be used. There are plenty of programs that could use the SSE instructions, even in cases where there is no vector math in the code, but compilers are generally unable to take advantage of the majority of instructions out there. Claiming that we have hit the limit of single core architectures, when we are not even using them to their full potential, is not very accurate.
The internet was designed for convenience and reliability, not security.
The logical conclusion should be, "disconnect security sensitive systems from the Internet, go back to the older ways of managing those systems and design more secure networks for those systems." Oh, sorry, I forgot that convenience is actually more important than anything else, so that will never happen.
There have been many discussion about multi-core processing being the way forward as we have already, more or less, reached the limit of what can be done with a single processor.
The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s called, and they want their predictions back. People have been saying that single core architectures have reached their limit for a long time now, so what makes you think it is definitely true now as opposed to a decade ago?
I think the idea behind renewable energy is that we will not have to worry about running out of it for a few billion years. You know, like how if we build a thorium power infrastructure, then eventually we will run out of thorium to derive our power from? Much in the same way that we will eventually run out of oil and coal?
The terrorists did quite a bit of their training, particularly the training in how to operate an airplane, in an oil producing nation with a history of invading other other producing nations; that same nation's government also gave specialized training to the people who organized the 9/11 attacks, including Osama Bin Laden himself! Why did we not invade that country?
Now now, we all know that personal liberties and the right to enjoy oneself have absolutely nothing to do with capitalism, and therefore have no place in our society. After all, how can a business possibly turn a profit if its employees are smokers or enjoy a few drinks after work?
Our university has a closed network where each person has a unique IP.
Here is where I would say the problem lies. Why do IP addresses need to be connected with students' names? There is no technical reason why a university needs to do things that way.
Of course, whenever I ask why colleges monitor student network access like this, I always get one of two answers: to prevent non-students from accessing the network, and to monitor "piracy." The first is not too convincing, given that there are colleges out there that allow "guest" access anyway, and the second reason amounts to "colleges do the job of the RIAA in tracking down copyright infringement." All of it basically amounts to, "We assume that anyone accessing our network must be up to no good."
My guess is that the students will switch to some generic encrypted protocols for swapping files -- SSH, maybe HTTPS, etc. It would be pretty hard for a school to claim that SSH needs to be blocked, even if it is clear that inbound SSH connections are being make to dorm rooms (plenty of people connect to their desktops).
Really though, the damage is done when schools have to spend increasing amounts of their budgets stopping their students from sharing, rather than spending that money on worthwhile, education related goals. If this is the solution that the copyright lobbyists want, the companies they represent should be paying for it.
More like the dumbed down version of science is generally wrong and easy to attack. Consider the theory of evolution -- the dumbed down version says that humans are the descendants of monkeys (the theory actually says that we share a common ancestor with monkeys), and creationists love to play up that imprecision in order to confuse people and weaken the position of scientists. The dumbed down version does not include details about the genetic evidence, and so we see creationists pointing to the fact that humans and other primates have different numbers of chromosomes (now we suddenly have to explain translocation to the public). The dumbed down version focuses on appearances, which are by no means the only thing that evolve, and I have seen creationists attack that (i.e. pointing to cro-magnon and saying, "looks human, so why do they call it a different species?").
Dumbing down science is not the solution. The solution is improving elementary education, so that people can read and understand what scientists publish, as well as making scientific journals available to the masses and encouraging people to read them...oh, sorry, I wandered into fantasy land there, where we are not driving everything by greed.
Can we please kill HDCP? Please? There is no technical reason why my monitor should not be able to be connected to an HDMI-capable entertainment device by means of an HDMI-DVI adapter.
Please do not say all companies cheat or use shells
I did not say all companies cheat or use shells. I said that major movie studios do, because they do. The author of Forrest Gump the novel was entitled to a share of the profits from Forrest Gump the movie. He should have been given a check for a very large sum of money, given the overwhelming commercial success of the movie, but he was never paid a dime -- the profits were converted into a net loss by the movie studio, by using the sorts of tactics I described. This is not the sort of business practice that "makes the world go round," it is deliberately reporting a loss despite the fact that a profit was turned, in order to deny someone the money they were legally entitled to under the current copyright system.
These same companies, of course, point to the suffering of the people they cheat whenever the issue of file sharing comes up.
Citizens are supposed to vote for politicians that represent them; however, those citizens rarely take more than 30 seconds to look at what those politicians are actually doing, and less than half of those citizens even bother voting
The two dominant political parties serve the interests of corporations. One of those parties is up front about it, the other pretends to serve the interests of the majority of the citizens while really pandering to corporations
Corporations send people to Congress to represent their interests, ensuring that even those politicians who are considering representing the interests of the average citizen will have a nonstop stream of communication with corporations; most citizens do not bother contacting their representatives (many are not even sure who represents them)
Anyone who dares question this system is immediately labeled as a "socialist," which is something you are supposed to be terrified of; most Americans cannot actually define what socialism is, but they "know" it is a bad thing
You do have a right to protest all of this; however, the government will tell you where to hold your protest, and if you try to hold it somewhere where it will be more effective (say, in front of a major stock exchange, instead of the park 3 miles away where nobody will notice), you will be arrested because you did not exercise your rights the way you were told to -- after all, we can't have protests that disrupt anything!
While you are here, do try to follow all our laws. Unfortunately, there are so many of them, that nobody is even sure what the exact number of those laws are, and most people wind up breaking them anyway, but you should at least try to follow them.
The answer is greed, pure and simple. Whether people actually hear the music is irrelevant, the point is that a copy is made in the most extreme technical sense, and the greedy folks from ASCAP 'n pals want to charge everyone for that.
Once the money involved in creating that content has been paid, copyright should automatically expire.
It sounds to me like you are unfamiliar with Hollywood Accounting. Have you ever wondered how the MPAA can claim that the companies it represents keep losing money, yet somehow those companies never seem to go out of business? The movie studios never post profits, because they deliberately spend money on nonexistence services -- they have contracts with shell companies that simply hold their money and use it to fund the next movie. The purpose here is to cheat actors out of their fair share of the profits. Any copyright system that maintained monopolies on works up to the break even point would only result in even more widespread use of these tactics.
Really, copyright terms should be shortened, reined back to 20 years, maybe even less. This would be a compromise that helps establish a strong public domain without eradicating copyrights entirely. Of course, that will never happen, since the copyright lobbyists have more power in congress than the rest of the population...
Unless your mistress has no idea whatsoever that you are married, I doubt it would be too much to ask her to take certain measures to keep things private. There are plenty of women willing to date married men, and willing to accept the need for secrecy in such a relationship.
Slashdot Mirror
Closed source takes feedback all the time.
In what universe do you live in? Here in the real world, only the largest proprietary software development companies even pretend to listen to their customers. The overwhelming majority of vendors do not listen to their users any more than open source developers do, except maybe to accept bug reports. The difference with libre software is that you can try to find someone else to make the changes you want, if you are willing to pay them for it (or if they are willing to do it as a volunteer).
I would not use Google docs or OpenOffice to create a newspaper. I would look more at TeX or troff or something more oriented toward page layouts. Not that I am in the publishing business...
It is? Well, it is missing a few features I would like, now where is the source code so that I can add those features?
Beer != free speech.
Besides, single-core chips have long been parallel.
Which has little to do with multithreading or writing parallel programs, so what exactly is your point? At best, this can be taken advantage of by programmers writing code that their processors are better at executing in parallel, which is more of a job for their compiler.
SSE is an example of parallel execution.
No, it is an example of vector math, which is related to parallel execution, but not quite the same. Programmers using SSE instructions are still writing programs as a single instruction stream. There is no locking or contention to deal with in vector math, there are guarantees about execution order (at least as far as the results of the execution are concerned), and so forth. Compilers have trouble making use of vector math instructions because it is difficult to tell when using those instructions is appropriate, at least with current compiler technology and algorithms.
Frankly, I doubt that you understand what you're talking about. Your earlier comment about unused x86 instructions kinda implies that.
Then you have never bothered to take a look at how many x86 instructions there are, and how many of those instructions are actually placed in the code generated by your compiler, or how many times the programs on your system actually use those instructions. Even the Intel compiler team has not figured out how best to use the x86 instruction set. Seriously, take a look at the situation before asserting that single core processors are at their limit.
So you are basing your argument on marketing? The parallel processing on graphics cards is only suitable for a few problems; general purpose programs do not gain much from the level of parallelism that graphics cards offer, and the style programming that is being pushed by Nvidia (CUDA) is not at all suitable for most computing tasks. Shared memory architectures have been tried many times in history, and hit very serious walls when issues like hot spots and coherency come about; creating a 64 core shared memory machine is right around the upper limit of usefulness even for tasks that lend themselves to parallel programming, and that has been the case for a long time now (it was the case long before the current physical problems with semiconductor clock speeds). The reason that boasting about megahertz rates has ended is mainly that the chip makers do not know how to increase clock speeds any further on silicon without creating problems with power density and cooling; other semiconductor materials which can overcome these problems are known but are not yet practical or economical.
People talk about parallel programming like it is some kind of silver bullet that is going to make everything happen faster, when the reality is that we really have no idea how to improve most programs by executing code in parallel. Even if we ignore the huge amount of IO-bound code out there and focus only on those programs that are CPU-intensive, there are plenty of tasks that have too many data dependencies or that wind up create hotspots, which kill performance in parallel programs.
Worse still is the fact that single core architectures are not even being used to their full potential. x86 has tons of instructions that are unused by most programs, even programs that could take advantage of those instructions, because compilers have a hard time figuring out how those instructions can be used. There are plenty of programs that could use the SSE instructions, even in cases where there is no vector math in the code, but compilers are generally unable to take advantage of the majority of instructions out there. Claiming that we have hit the limit of single core architectures, when we are not even using them to their full potential, is not very accurate.
The internet was designed for convenience and reliability, not security.
The logical conclusion should be, "disconnect security sensitive systems from the Internet, go back to the older ways of managing those systems and design more secure networks for those systems." Oh, sorry, I forgot that convenience is actually more important than anything else, so that will never happen.
There have been many discussion about multi-core processing being the way forward as we have already, more or less, reached the limit of what can be done with a single processor.
The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s called, and they want their predictions back. People have been saying that single core architectures have reached their limit for a long time now, so what makes you think it is definitely true now as opposed to a decade ago?
I think the idea behind renewable energy is that we will not have to worry about running out of it for a few billion years. You know, like how if we build a thorium power infrastructure, then eventually we will run out of thorium to derive our power from? Much in the same way that we will eventually run out of oil and coal?
The terrorists did quite a bit of their training, particularly the training in how to operate an airplane, in an oil producing nation with a history of invading other other producing nations; that same nation's government also gave specialized training to the people who organized the 9/11 attacks, including Osama Bin Laden himself! Why did we not invade that country?
Oh, wait, that nation was the USA.
Now now, we all know that personal liberties and the right to enjoy oneself have absolutely nothing to do with capitalism, and therefore have no place in our society. After all, how can a business possibly turn a profit if its employees are smokers or enjoy a few drinks after work?
Our university has a closed network where each person has a unique IP.
Here is where I would say the problem lies. Why do IP addresses need to be connected with students' names? There is no technical reason why a university needs to do things that way.
Of course, whenever I ask why colleges monitor student network access like this, I always get one of two answers: to prevent non-students from accessing the network, and to monitor "piracy." The first is not too convincing, given that there are colleges out there that allow "guest" access anyway, and the second reason amounts to "colleges do the job of the RIAA in tracking down copyright infringement." All of it basically amounts to, "We assume that anyone accessing our network must be up to no good."
My guess is that the students will switch to some generic encrypted protocols for swapping files -- SSH, maybe HTTPS, etc. It would be pretty hard for a school to claim that SSH needs to be blocked, even if it is clear that inbound SSH connections are being make to dorm rooms (plenty of people connect to their desktops).
Really though, the damage is done when schools have to spend increasing amounts of their budgets stopping their students from sharing, rather than spending that money on worthwhile, education related goals. If this is the solution that the copyright lobbyists want, the companies they represent should be paying for it.
I'll wait for 87539319.
Strictly speaking, you see speed, not velocity, on your dashboard (unless your car has a compass of some sort).
More like the dumbed down version of science is generally wrong and easy to attack. Consider the theory of evolution -- the dumbed down version says that humans are the descendants of monkeys (the theory actually says that we share a common ancestor with monkeys), and creationists love to play up that imprecision in order to confuse people and weaken the position of scientists. The dumbed down version does not include details about the genetic evidence, and so we see creationists pointing to the fact that humans and other primates have different numbers of chromosomes (now we suddenly have to explain translocation to the public). The dumbed down version focuses on appearances, which are by no means the only thing that evolve, and I have seen creationists attack that (i.e. pointing to cro-magnon and saying, "looks human, so why do they call it a different species?").
Dumbing down science is not the solution. The solution is improving elementary education, so that people can read and understand what scientists publish, as well as making scientific journals available to the masses and encouraging people to read them...oh, sorry, I wandered into fantasy land there, where we are not driving everything by greed.
Can we please kill HDCP? Please? There is no technical reason why my monitor should not be able to be connected to an HDMI-capable entertainment device by means of an HDMI-DVI adapter.
The idea behind the lawsuit is to remind Apple that marketing poorly designed or tested products is not acceptable. I think.
http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Final%20Fantasy%20Adventure/Images/img-8.PNG
http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Final Fantasy Adventure/Images/img-8.PNG
Please do not say all companies cheat or use shells
I did not say all companies cheat or use shells. I said that major movie studios do, because they do. The author of Forrest Gump the novel was entitled to a share of the profits from Forrest Gump the movie. He should have been given a check for a very large sum of money, given the overwhelming commercial success of the movie, but he was never paid a dime -- the profits were converted into a net loss by the movie studio, by using the sorts of tactics I described. This is not the sort of business practice that "makes the world go round," it is deliberately reporting a loss despite the fact that a profit was turned, in order to deny someone the money they were legally entitled to under the current copyright system.
These same companies, of course, point to the suffering of the people they cheat whenever the issue of file sharing comes up.
While you are here, do try to follow all our laws. Unfortunately, there are so many of them, that nobody is even sure what the exact number of those laws are, and most people wind up breaking them anyway, but you should at least try to follow them.
The answer is greed, pure and simple. Whether people actually hear the music is irrelevant, the point is that a copy is made in the most extreme technical sense, and the greedy folks from ASCAP 'n pals want to charge everyone for that.
Once the money involved in creating that content has been paid, copyright should automatically expire.
It sounds to me like you are unfamiliar with Hollywood Accounting. Have you ever wondered how the MPAA can claim that the companies it represents keep losing money, yet somehow those companies never seem to go out of business? The movie studios never post profits, because they deliberately spend money on nonexistence services -- they have contracts with shell companies that simply hold their money and use it to fund the next movie. The purpose here is to cheat actors out of their fair share of the profits. Any copyright system that maintained monopolies on works up to the break even point would only result in even more widespread use of these tactics.
Really, copyright terms should be shortened, reined back to 20 years, maybe even less. This would be a compromise that helps establish a strong public domain without eradicating copyrights entirely. Of course, that will never happen, since the copyright lobbyists have more power in congress than the rest of the population...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_wiles
Unless your mistress has no idea whatsoever that you are married, I doubt it would be too much to ask her to take certain measures to keep things private. There are plenty of women willing to date married men, and willing to accept the need for secrecy in such a relationship.