...I've seen C and C++ programmers come up with the most amazingly fucked up atrocities to get around the strongly-typed nature of those languages, to solve a problem that could have been clearly and elegantly solved with a dynamically-typed language.
The problem with being unspecific is that one often fails to realise the assumptions that become invalid when other people read/compile/execute in different environments. Sometimes this is harmless. Sometimes the assumptions are critical and will cause the whole thing to fail.
Do all C and C++ programmers always create "amazingly fucked up atrocities" to deal with strong typing?
Do only some C and C++ programmers always create "amazingly fucked up atrocities" to deal with strong typing?
Do all C and C++ programmers sometimes create "amazingly fucked up atrocities" to deal with strong typing?
Do only some C and C++ programmers sometimes create "amazingly fucked up atrocities" to deal with strong typing?
To correct the problem of atrocious code, I am unsure of whether you suggest a weak or strong relationship between the coder and the atrocity or a weak or strong relationship between the language and the atrocity. All I know if I trust what you said is that at least once, you saw some C or C++ written by either a C or C++ programmer to get around the strong typing requirements of C or C++ (respectively).
At face value, it is a problem with some programmers some of the time. To that I suggest weak type languages prevent atrocity in the same way that strong type languages like C and C++ cause atrocity. The atrocity is probably just as much a style issue as a language issue.
I have to admit, this is even better Lorem than the "son of Lorem."
Does anyone want to explain the theory behind how these generators work?
The aphorism: In a bad drought, texan ranchers will burn the needles off the cactus once the grass and other foliage has been razed by the starving cattle. The cactus provides no nutrition, but the cattle don't seem to suffer their empty stomachs. This keeps them from trying to emigrate in the mean time. It's interesting how a banal thing can be an instrument of slavery.
It is garbage, originally derived from an ancient latin text, but now generated by clever programs to approximate the look and feel of english text for formatters and page rendering. The idea is that you can't actually read it, so your monkey-mind won't get sucked into the content when you are supposed to be meditating on the layout/rendering.
The artists who sign bad contracts *do* share the responsibility for their resulting misfortune. However, when a person goes to a used car dealer and plunks down hard-earned cash for a shiny lemon car, that person is about as responsible for the car as the artist is for what the record companies do with the music.
So it goes that we have laws. There's a grey area between legitimately "bundled" goods and services and violating the Sherman Act by leveraging dominance in one service market to exert pressures on other services.
It is getting *CHEAP* to produce your own CD. Then you have to promote and distribute it. The Internet is making that cheaper too. Before the Internet, the only way to reach a wide audience with your music was through the big labels and their payola networks. Best Buy hasn't made things any better. Soon, people will re-learn how to reach the record boutiques. This time it won't take a big label to do it.
Which brings me to my point: labels control access to the artists and the audiences. If they lose control of access to either, then their price-controlling ability goes *poof*, and so goes their business. Only small labels will survive (or big ones that begin to behave like small ones).
In the mean time, I still talk to people who think that *the* music business *could* make them filthy stinking rich. People are amused by the idea of a comfortable (but not obscenely rich) life working and releasing new material, and playing to audiences, and building up a catalog, and slowly building residual income from older releases. I always get raised eyebrows from musicians when I tell them to stick to it because they are lucky to pay the rent without needing a "day job."
Now whose fault is it that they think they need to sign that contract? Why does it seem like the choice is between bad contract and floundering between music and a crappy day-job? You simply cannot assume that the "mutually beneficial" crap is a given condition. Really ask yourself where the image of selling one's soul to the devil by signing a record contract would come from.
The problem with this attitude is that you seem to imply that the renters aren't to blame for not paying their bills, for not providing forwarding information to people they owe money to etc. People need to be responsible for their own actions (or lack of action in this case).
When I was in college, I had collectors hound me because they couldn't find the previous thenants to collect an outstanding debt on the phone line at the apartment I moved into. The phone company tried to say they couldn't establish service unless they I furnished proof the other people didn't live there any more. When my name got established at the address in the phone company's database, the collectors linked my name with the address of the previous delinquent account.
When I moved out of that apartment, I gave the phone company a forwarding address, and told them to disconnect on the date my lease was terminated. Actually, I told them that I would not (and could not) be responsible for the phone line usage after that date. I also filed a mail forwarding request with the USPS. I didn't get the bill for a while, but got phone service established at my new apartment, and I assumed the charges would show up on the new bill at the end of a billing cycle or something. To make a long story short, I didn't get my final bill until two months late, (mangled by the USPS) and it had charges on it past the end of my lease.
2 Days later, after I had negotiated and paid the phone company, a collection agency called me with a rude warning that I owed an amount that was more than the old tenant's bill plus my last month, and the extra charges past the end of my lease. I told them outright that their records were not in order, and that I had paid the phone company what I owed them. They tried to get me to pay them anyway. I said I had no business with them, and their client has no claim against me. I told them that If I recieved any further contact from anyone in their company regarding this matter that I would pursue criminal harassment charges and this call would count as damages. I also told them that if they had anything else to say to me it was "on the record" as in I would record them.
In college, people move from year to year. This incident wasn't the first of its kind, just the worst. My point is that these people don't keep records with your interests in mind. If you don't use the laws and threaten to use them in defense, then they will run you over with a garbage truck. They don't care if it was you who racked up the bill or not. Collectors are often little more than telemarketers without a product to sell. They don't care about you, they have to get their quota.
You have to go far beyond just being a responsible consumer. You have to do a lot of research to protect yourself. You have to cover your assets, and you have to threaten to recover damages legally if people threaten to abuse you. I don't have a problem with fiscal responsibility, but the system is more like guilty until proven innocent than I am comfortable with.
Interrupt. Latency. Copy data (64 bits of it) from hardware IO buffer (disk device?) to a 64bit data register. Latency. Copy the data from the register to OS buffer vector in main memory. Latency.
It's like how much work did you actually get done in how much time?
How much penalty did your latency inflict on the rest of the system?
Sun hardware is designed to maximise the first clock-cycle-by-clock-cycle. Sun hardware is designed to minimize the latter, clock cycle by clock cycle.
A finer point that might be missed here is the extra logic in there to make sure you can do multiple concurrent IO requests. 8 CPUs in the Sun V880 can all do 8 IOs on 8 disks with negligible effect on each other.
The PC might be able to do small jobs faster, but it doesn't scale. Clustering just puts the burden of coordinating resources on slower buses outside the box (gigabit ethernet) and forces programs to preschedule execution units with larger granularity to achieve any kind of scalability.
People who say it's cheaper to scale that way are either naive about the effort it takes to scale a parallel system or they already have their stuff tooled for massively parallel computing which makes it trivial.
If it truly *were* trivial, this whole "grid computing" thing would have taken off before the jargon mills got ahold of it.
I believe the Sun Fire V880 dominates the computing *scale* that it was designed for.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. This is turning into a really good discussion.
Now, I'm not sure if you're talking about Itanium 2 systems or just Pentiums. I don't know about those, but I can tell for sure on sparcv9 architecture that a 64bit native app can move twice the bulk data with half the same CPU cycles as a 32bit one. That means when a disk controller interrupts "Order up!", the system picks it up 64bits at a time.
Cache on the disk or array means that you can burst up to the cache size (assuming you have a 100 percent cache hit) plus whatever you can fetch from the disks during that burst, at wire speed. FCAL does 1Gbps or 2Gbps. No spindles (even 10KRPM ones) can keep up with that rate given the seek time to change cylinders. Load up all of that data in the disk array's cache, and voila! There's no seek delay in RAM.
This means the same CPU can load an RDBMS table from disk, and do the sort in order to resort for an index, pretty much on the fly. I agree that system RAM is more cost effective, but in my case, the storage is an EMC Symmetrix with more storage than can be housed in a little array.
This all sort of refers to what you were saying about the money Sun puts into reliability features (like hot-swapping CPUs and other board-level components) without bringing the system down. People who buy the Sun hardware really should have need for that kind of thing. In fact, uptimes, like you said, can be better on the PC. Uptimes are affected more by sysadmin screwups or sloppy deployment methods (ie no QA, change backout, etc.). Good unix admins are also more expensive than NT admins.
These issues all add up to a big fat list of parameters in the Total Cost of Ownership function. It is complicated. Other factors creep in like what OS are you running? Microsoft is nasty stuff. Plenty of people still make a living off of it, but when I got the opportunity to 'root' unix boxes as opposed to 'Administrator' NT boxes I never looked back. I never blinked. I'm biased in the costs that never show up on the balance sheet: my grief. I'd feel more comfortable comparing Linux on IA64 to Solaris on sparcv9.
Also, spending $1M on hardware isn't always a great idea. I'm going to hypothesize that your employer's largest competitor could have bought PC hardware instead, and your employer STILL would have spanked them. They could have easily bought the WRONG servers for the job, despite which makes and models they bought.
I leave you with this: if Sun *wanted* to compete with intel servers at PC prices, they could. They're in a different niche, and I don't think PCs can edge into it very far.
BTW: why do people think that one technology has to "win" against the others? The way software interoperability is headed, we should want a lot of options to match our needs with. "Who will win the 64bit computing contest" sounds a little asinine to me.
I say, if you need 64 bit processors, you have FreeBSD or Linux on IA64 and Solaris on UltrasparcIII to choose from. Oh, you could also do NT (*puke*).
Let's all make sure we're talking about the same thing.
The IO on a server is rarely going to run through an AGP port. That's because you're not going to use a V880 to pump textures to a GPU card for playing games. A V880 is designed to kick any PC's ass up and down the street as an entry-level fast fileserver and database server.
The V880 has several PCI busses for all of its PCI slots (count em).
Some of the PCI slots are 66MHz 64 bit wide PCI slots. How many of those do you have in your PC? (clue: AGP doesn't count).
What kinds of PCs can you get that can have 64GB RAM? And 8 way concurrency on access to that RAM? (Clue: do your homework on Intel SMP limitations).
How can you possibly saturate that 533MHz FSB on the PC? You do it swapping textures across the AGP port! Try loading up your PC with FCAL adapters, hooking them to smart disk arrays with gigs of write-through cache and see how much IO you can get.
Why should EU force artists into US dominated Mkt?
on
Finland Drops EUCD For Now
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The DMCA was written to protect the interests of data distributors. The whole idea is to prevent the cost-negating distribution network called the Internet from affecting the cost of distributing data which has enjoyed high cost (fat profit margin) CD[ incl. CDROM] and DVD distribution. The cost of CD and DVD distribution is paid to an industry of distributors. They are middlemen whose economic niche has been proven obsolete by the Internet. Since artists and producers do not need them for distribution, they are playing their other card: revenue agregators. That function serves the artist/producer end of the data economy.
Admittedly, a revenue model which pays the artists and producers for their work without involving the traditional distributors hasn't emerged. The distributors are not so confident, so they are seeking protection like tariffs. This is an age old issue rearing its ugly head in a new place, and we will eventually solve it the way we always do: the middlemen buy their policymakers and get their policy.
In the US, the distributors dominate the world market for movies, music, and any other software. In the EU, the distributors and the artists and producers from which they distribute software are worldwide underdogs by sheer revenue. Neither the distributors nor the artists and producers in the EU will gain if they support a scheme that allows the gargantuan US companies to dictate the terms of their business.The DMCA could give US media distributors the leverage they need to control the EU market.
What the US distributors fear is that the next Beatles will emigrate from the US to the EU where the DMCA allows the artists to dictate more of the business, and gives them access to more of the end-consumer's money...if such an economy were to pop up in the EU...
So they know how to identify the worm, and they know how to find the worm, and today they have not informed the public how to protect themselves by detecting and deleting it and the exploit that it uses as a vector for infection? They keep it a secret? What could they possibly gain by keeping it a secret? Is it not their duty as trustees of the public welfare that they do whatever is in their power (like email the details to CERT) to protect the taxpaying (heh) public from the scourges of crime?
Trust your mechanic to mend your holes; trust him to make more somewhere else! Trust your mechanic; he'll always come through--and RIP YOU OFF! --Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys: "Trust Your Mechanic" from the album "Plastic Surgery Disasters", a must-have piece of historic music)
Like the other posts complained: they are trying to whip up some cyber-crime paranoia and good-ol Dragnet style cops-and-robbers drama because THEY GET PAID. Also there are some fantastic perks arising out of the Law Enforcement legal power known as DISCRETION. Just get laws passed that are obviously too strict, and then say "leave it up to the cops' discretion. They know where to enforce the laws. We're better off for giving them the tools to fight crime." Then we get stuff like racial profiling and wiretap abuse. They can also bring organised crime in a cyber-tenderloin-district. Look up the etymology of that old cliche: Tenderloin District. Can anyone provide relevant links?
The powers we grant to the Authorities will first and foremost impact the personal interests and lifestyles of the Authorities.
I am truly sorry you even had to post this message, but someone had to. If you're going to forward packets, you should decide whether, not just whither to retransmit them!
When the distribution is expensive, then you filter the crap before the distribution. However, these filters always cost an unknown quantity more than their operating cost: they have false-positives in their crap-detectors and false-negatives in their goodsuff-detectors. I think its just a corollary of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (entropy), but The law of Leaky Abstractions (discussion)
applies here also. In other words: Bayesian filters aren't much better than a bunch of publishers. Any publisher's experience of a work must be abstracted, and that abstraction is a function of that publisher's genetics and environment. It leaks at the "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" point, and thus some crap will be suffered by the consumers, and some priceless work will be lost forever because it is mistaken for crap. A lot of other stuff in between can end up in the wrong pile as the publishers sort things out.
Publishers are weak, unreliable (even at their best) arbiters of quality, which is why we need a lot of them. Some might say, the more the better. In a world where all authors can be publishers, and some non-authors can be publishers, the number of publishers can exceed the number of works being published at one time. That doesn't solve the problem, but it DOES keep it from getting completely out of hand to the point where consumers' opinions (crap vs. not-crap) are insignificant. If publishing is cheap, then the hidden costs are the big cost factor!
You know the REAL QUESTION here isn't whether it's a good idea to do something or not.
In America the subtext of any political discussion is "who's gonna get paid" and "who's gonna pay?"
You see, GTA set themselves apart from the other games, and made too much money. All the middlemen are jealous and want a piece. How are they going to make an exception of this GTA game?
Bottom line is that bad parenting is going to screw some kids of bad destiny into a life of crime with or without GTA. What's wrong here is people can't admit they're saying "I don't want anyone's kids playing this game because I have different ethics." Do you have any kids? No? Then your proper avenue of influence over other people's kids is through the parents. Why do you feel the need to involve the government or the industry? Trying to exert a little more influence over other people's children (private domain)? Want a little more than your share of power? Think that your ethical high-ground justifies it?
Remember that one person's rights extend infinitely, as they are basically free so long as we live in a free society. Their rights are limited only as far as they would infringe upon another's rights. This is the fundamental principle of a free society. Do you want to live in one one or not?
It's much easier to mod me down than to post an intelligent reply.
That's true only if the opportunities to mod or post are equal. That seems to be true only around 8:30 CST/CDT. Mod and post on the same discussion are prohibited. The opportunity to mod is a rare thing, and it gives the moderator more influence (although with the all-too-easy click-click convenience) than a poster (who can affect the visibility of the thread only at +2 when sufficient karma has been earned).
I believe the choice to moderate is an important one, and while I agree with your sentiment (I think...) that people who moderate without without knowing what they are doing should think harder about things, I don't think that differentiates moderation from posting replies.
Oh, which brings me to my point: it's easier to suggest that someone else make(or find) a chart instead of doing it yourself...
Note: the Slashdot "lameness filter" didn't like my ASCII art, but it apparently ignores journal entries...
is in my journal. Furthermore, Slashdot doesn't like hrefs from comments to a person's journal. The rules to this Slashdot game are neither simple nor obvious!
Fractals have "similar" structures at different scales. There is no real pattern, because the structures are different everywhere in the fractal. There is only almost-repetition. It is critical to distinguish between self-identity and self-simlarity. No two parts of a fractal will ever match regardless of how you scale them. However, the self-similarity, and also the minute structural differences continue to express themselves within infinitessimal portions of the fractal, scaled to infinity (so we can see them), at least as far as we know...
Not all iApps are Cocoa. Look at iTunes, iDVD and iMovie. All three are Carbon.
I use iTunes every day and iCal and iSync very frequently. These are some of the best apps that I've ever used.
They actually make a lot of third party apps seem useless!
Thanks for pointing that out. I really should have said "proof-of-concept Carbon and Cocoa applications.
To elaborate my point: iCal, iTunes, and iSync nicely fill niches that for other operating systems are filled sketchily. The fact that you feel they are "some of the best apps [you've] ever used" really supports my third point--iApps set the bar.
I agree that iApps blow most of the 3rd party stuff away. iApps ensure the Mac developer community has high standards to live up to.
Stopgaps: you know, they fill a need. They aren't supposed to be all things to all people (or to anyone). They are supposed to fill specific gaps in the OS X application market: the basic things people do with their computers like email, photos, (raising the bar to) home-movies.
Set the bar: you know, nobody will be able to sell software that isn't at least *as* good as the iApps. They'll have to try harder to please Mac users! The end result is that the top Mac titles meet or exceed some very high standards.
Then again, I shouldn't have to explain this to you. You will still enjoy the benefits even if you don't understand it, which is another tenet in the Mac credo. If you feel like a gullible guinea pig (an experimental subject?), and you were surprised by this, just what kind of experiment were you duped into?
That would imply they lured you in with a "free updates forever" and then tried to get you to buy the "updates will cost you extra."
That makes no sense. The iApps aren't meant to be long-term user apps anyways. They are:
1) proof-of-concept Cocoa applications. 2) stopgaps for the "why should I use the new OS which has no Apps, why should I write Apps for the OS with no users" conundrum. 3) setting the bar for 3rd party App quality
If you want free updates forever, then I suggest you look into supporting the GNU projects on OS-X. Things like GTKAqua will bring the gamut of GTK apps from the FreeBSD ports collection to OS-X. This includes GIMP, and forthcoming GIMP-Film.
"Waaaaah... If I have to pay, I might as well pay Microsoft" will get you diddly squat. Oh, and the best portables: TiBooks don't run Windows. They run OS-X (Darwin). You just don't know what your options are.
This is why you vote Democrat, and then write your senator with "I'll be keeping my gun, thank you." The change in "government" policy is simply the difference between the Clinton and GWBush administrations' respective foreign policy philosophies.
The Clinton era policy was based on "engagement." I'm not sure where the GWBush people are coming from. The idea of engagement is that international politico-economy is improved, and so is the global politico-economic position of the US, when we get *more* involved with foreign economies. Macroeconomists talk about "growing the pie." Engagement is like growing the global pie so the US piece gets bigger too.
GWBush policy people seem to think "we're doing just fine thank you, and we don't want you doing any better, so we're taking our ball and going home." Oh, and try to get all the arabs against Saddam Hussein (Iraq has no oil, just Mecca) because it's like destabilising islamic international relationships to destabilise OPEC strength, so that Texan and Alaskan oil barons can get invited to the price-of-energy (price-of-everything) control meetings. "If OPEC isn't about arabs, it's just about oil barons, and aren't we all in the same boat? So let's stop giving money to the blow-yourself-up mad-at-the-world poor muslim martyr-wannabes and get back to making ourselves rich and locking-in the status-quo! See: this is how WE maintain the status-quo..." </rant>
The problem with this kind of research is controlling for the other pressures on the school system. Say new teachers are leaving the profession forever at 70% after only three years on the job, if that has adverse effects on the general quality of education, would it be a good hypothesis to suggest it also has adverse effects on the way schools use computer resources?
We want to be careful not to blame the technology: it's a poor craftsman who blames his tools for the quality of his work. If you had learned in High School, for example, how to program your own integral solver, then you might have been able to breeze through the same exam *with* all of the intermediate calculator "leaps" documented in adequate detail to score the grade your answers demanded.
Computers *complicate* life, but trading for the additional burden of complexity gains insight which saves wasted effort in dead-end mistakes! If you feel the computer is simplifying your life, it is because you are not appreciating the insights properly: maybe someone else is? Are you dangerously and irresponsibly giving up control?
There's the real issue. Stop bashing computers in the classroom, and get to the real curriculum and pedagogy issue!
Just in case you were working on something to solve a shell problem, just stop, because you can't compete. I mean, this is Microsoft, and nobody will believe that you can put out something that works better than theirs.
Even if you do actually accomplish that feat. Even still, Microsoft will trace the API calls your shell makes and pull the rug out from underneath you in the next automated.NET framework service-pack.
Then, they'll link their knowledgebase to promos of their product so when your customers search for a solution to why your shell started behaving badly (just after the ServicePack was applied), they will see "use the Microsoft shell". Next, your boss will get a letter explaining that Microsoft is attempting to purchase the rights to your project, and all your boss has to do is kill your project to collect more money than they've ever paid you (and prolly some killer seats at _insert_big_sports_event_here_).
Next, you'll probably end up contributing code to some consulting firm that agreed to make the Microsoft shell do what yours already did. It'll cost 20 times as much, and it'll be 1 year past the delivery date you would have made, and by then you'll be sick of dealing with the problems your shell intended to solve.
You'll try to move on to something else, but every where you go, no matter what you try to get into, the same old shell scripting problems will stymie you because NOBODY solved the problems that Microsoft promised their shell would solve. It will haunt you until you completely switch fields or commit suicide, or some other depressing and too-boring-to-enumerate possibility.
There is no monopoly in Unix implementation. Stick to Unix if you don't want to hire (or be) a staff of service-retarting, server-rebooting, reinstalling monkeys to do boring repetitive click-and-drool tasks at the console of a server , in what was *supposed* to be a lights-out data center, checking blanks on the left margin of of a mainframe-era "run book" as they (you) go.
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The problem with being unspecific is that one often fails to realise the assumptions that become invalid when other people read/compile/execute in different environments. Sometimes this is harmless. Sometimes the assumptions are critical and will cause the whole thing to fail.
Do all C and C++ programmers always create "amazingly fucked up atrocities" to deal with strong typing?
Do only some C and C++ programmers always create "amazingly fucked up atrocities" to deal with strong typing?
Do all C and C++ programmers sometimes create "amazingly fucked up atrocities" to deal with strong typing?
Do only some C and C++ programmers sometimes create "amazingly fucked up atrocities" to deal with strong typing?
To correct the problem of atrocious code, I am unsure of whether you suggest a weak or strong relationship between the coder and the atrocity or a weak or strong relationship between the language and the atrocity. All I know if I trust what you said is that at least once, you saw some C or C++ written by either a C or C++ programmer to get around the strong typing requirements of C or C++ (respectively).
At face value, it is a problem with some programmers some of the time. To that I suggest weak type languages prevent atrocity in the same way that strong type languages like C and C++ cause atrocity. The atrocity is probably just as much a style issue as a language issue.
I have to admit, this is even better Lorem than the "son of Lorem."
Does anyone want to explain the theory behind how these generators work?
The aphorism: In a bad drought, texan ranchers will burn the needles off the cactus once the grass and other foliage has been razed by the starving cattle. The cactus provides no nutrition, but the cattle don't seem to suffer their empty stomachs. This keeps them from trying to emigrate in the mean time. It's interesting how a banal thing can be an instrument of slavery.
It is garbage, originally derived from an ancient latin text, but now generated by clever programs to approximate the look and feel of english text for formatters and page rendering. The idea is that you can't actually read it, so your monkey-mind won't get sucked into the content when you are supposed to be meditating on the layout/rendering.
A more authoritative (seeming) answer for the bayesian filter people.
You're somewhat on, but you're also somewhat off
The artists who sign bad contracts *do* share the responsibility for their resulting misfortune. However, when a person goes to a used car dealer and plunks down hard-earned cash for a shiny lemon car, that person is about as responsible for the car as the artist is for what the record companies do with the music.
So it goes that we have laws. There's a grey area between legitimately "bundled" goods and services and violating the Sherman Act by leveraging dominance in one service market to exert pressures on other services.
It is getting *CHEAP* to produce your own CD. Then you have to promote and distribute it. The Internet is making that cheaper too. Before the Internet, the only way to reach a wide audience with your music was through the big labels and their payola networks. Best Buy hasn't made things any better. Soon, people will re-learn how to reach the record boutiques. This time it won't take a big label to do it.
Which brings me to my point: labels control access to the artists and the audiences. If they lose control of access to either, then their price-controlling ability goes *poof*, and so goes their business. Only small labels will survive (or big ones that begin to behave like small ones).
In the mean time, I still talk to people who think that *the* music business *could* make them filthy stinking rich. People are amused by the idea of a comfortable (but not obscenely rich) life working and releasing new material, and playing to audiences, and building up a catalog, and slowly building residual income from older releases. I always get raised eyebrows from musicians when I tell them to stick to it because they are lucky to pay the rent without needing a "day job."
Now whose fault is it that they think they need to sign that contract? Why does it seem like the choice is between bad contract and floundering between music and a crappy day-job? You simply cannot assume that the "mutually beneficial" crap is a given condition. Really ask yourself where the image of selling one's soul to the devil by signing a record contract would come from.
If you want to know how CGI can be made real fast, then lookee here: CGI-lib
When I was in college, I had collectors hound me because they couldn't find the previous thenants to collect an outstanding debt on the phone line at the apartment I moved into. The phone company tried to say they couldn't establish service unless they I furnished proof the other people didn't live there any more. When my name got established at the address in the phone company's database, the collectors linked my name with the address of the previous delinquent account.
When I moved out of that apartment, I gave the phone company a forwarding address, and told them to disconnect on the date my lease was terminated. Actually, I told them that I would not (and could not) be responsible for the phone line usage after that date. I also filed a mail forwarding request with the USPS. I didn't get the bill for a while, but got phone service established at my new apartment, and I assumed the charges would show up on the new bill at the end of a billing cycle or something. To make a long story short, I didn't get my final bill until two months late, (mangled by the USPS) and it had charges on it past the end of my lease.
2 Days later, after I had negotiated and paid the phone company, a collection agency called me with a rude warning that I owed an amount that was more than the old tenant's bill plus my last month, and the extra charges past the end of my lease. I told them outright that their records were not in order, and that I had paid the phone company what I owed them. They tried to get me to pay them anyway. I said I had no business with them, and their client has no claim against me. I told them that If I recieved any further contact from anyone in their company regarding this matter that I would pursue criminal harassment charges and this call would count as damages. I also told them that if they had anything else to say to me it was "on the record" as in I would record them.
In college, people move from year to year. This incident wasn't the first of its kind, just the worst. My point is that these people don't keep records with your interests in mind. If you don't use the laws and threaten to use them in defense, then they will run you over with a garbage truck. They don't care if it was you who racked up the bill or not. Collectors are often little more than telemarketers without a product to sell. They don't care about you, they have to get their quota.
You have to go far beyond just being a responsible consumer. You have to do a lot of research to protect yourself. You have to cover your assets, and you have to threaten to recover damages legally if people threaten to abuse you. I don't have a problem with fiscal responsibility, but the system is more like guilty until proven innocent than I am comfortable with.
The CPU does memcopies in 64 bit increments.
Interrupt.
Latency.
Copy data (64 bits of it) from hardware IO buffer (disk device?) to a 64bit data register.
Latency.
Copy the data from the register to OS buffer vector in main memory.
Latency.
It's like how much work did you actually get done in how much time?
How much penalty did your latency inflict on the rest of the system?
Sun hardware is designed to maximise the first clock-cycle-by-clock-cycle. Sun hardware is designed to minimize the latter, clock cycle by clock cycle.
A finer point that might be missed here is the extra logic in there to make sure you can do multiple concurrent IO requests. 8 CPUs in the Sun V880 can all do 8 IOs on 8 disks with negligible effect on each other.
The PC might be able to do small jobs faster, but it doesn't scale. Clustering just puts the burden of coordinating resources on slower buses outside the box (gigabit ethernet) and forces programs to preschedule execution units with larger granularity to achieve any kind of scalability.
People who say it's cheaper to scale that way are either naive about the effort it takes to scale a parallel system or they already have their stuff tooled for massively parallel computing which makes it trivial.
If it truly *were* trivial, this whole "grid computing" thing would have taken off before the jargon mills got ahold of it.
I believe the Sun Fire V880 dominates the computing *scale* that it was designed for.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. This is turning into a really good discussion.
Now, I'm not sure if you're talking about Itanium 2 systems or just Pentiums. I don't know about those, but I can tell for sure on sparcv9 architecture that a 64bit native app can move twice the bulk data with half the same CPU cycles as a 32bit one. That means when a disk controller interrupts "Order up!", the system picks it up 64bits at a time.
Cache on the disk or array means that you can burst up to the cache size (assuming you have a 100 percent cache hit) plus whatever you can fetch from the disks during that burst, at wire speed. FCAL does 1Gbps or 2Gbps. No spindles (even 10KRPM ones) can keep up with that rate given the seek time to change cylinders. Load up all of that data in the disk array's cache, and voila! There's no seek delay in RAM.
This means the same CPU can load an RDBMS table from disk, and do the sort in order to resort for an index, pretty much on the fly. I agree that system RAM is more cost effective, but in my case, the storage is an EMC Symmetrix with more storage than can be housed in a little array.
This all sort of refers to what you were saying about the money Sun puts into reliability features (like hot-swapping CPUs and other board-level components) without bringing the system down. People who buy the Sun hardware really should have need for that kind of thing. In fact, uptimes, like you said, can be better on the PC. Uptimes are affected more by sysadmin screwups or sloppy deployment methods (ie no QA, change backout, etc.). Good unix admins are also more expensive than NT admins.
These issues all add up to a big fat list of parameters in the Total Cost of Ownership function. It is complicated. Other factors creep in like what OS are you running? Microsoft is nasty stuff. Plenty of people still make a living off of it, but when I got the opportunity to 'root' unix boxes as opposed to 'Administrator' NT boxes I never looked back. I never blinked. I'm biased in the costs that never show up on the balance sheet: my grief. I'd feel more comfortable comparing Linux on IA64 to Solaris on sparcv9.
Also, spending $1M on hardware isn't always a great idea. I'm going to hypothesize that your employer's largest competitor could have bought PC hardware instead, and your employer STILL would have spanked them. They could have easily bought the WRONG servers for the job, despite which makes and models they bought.
I leave you with this: if Sun *wanted* to compete with intel servers at PC prices, they could. They're in a different niche, and I don't think PCs can edge into it very far.
BTW: why do people think that one technology has to "win" against the others? The way software interoperability is headed, we should want a lot of options to match our needs with. "Who will win the 64bit computing contest" sounds a little asinine to me.
I say, if you need 64 bit processors, you have FreeBSD or Linux on IA64 and Solaris on UltrasparcIII to choose from. Oh, you could also do NT (*puke*).
http://www.sun.com/servers/workgroup/880/
Let's all make sure we're talking about the same thing.
The IO on a server is rarely going to run through an AGP port. That's because you're not going to use a V880 to pump textures to a GPU card for playing games. A V880 is designed to kick any PC's ass up and down the street as an entry-level fast fileserver and database server.
The V880 has several PCI busses for all of its PCI slots (count em).
Some of the PCI slots are 66MHz 64 bit wide PCI slots. How many of those do you have in your PC? (clue: AGP doesn't count).
What kinds of PCs can you get that can have 64GB RAM? And 8 way concurrency on access to that RAM? (Clue: do your homework on Intel SMP limitations).
How can you possibly saturate that 533MHz FSB on the PC? You do it swapping textures across the AGP port! Try loading up your PC with FCAL adapters, hooking them to smart disk arrays with gigs of write-through cache and see how much IO you can get.
The DMCA was written to protect the interests of data distributors. The whole idea is to prevent the cost-negating distribution network called the Internet from affecting the cost of distributing data which has enjoyed high cost (fat profit margin) CD[ incl. CDROM] and DVD distribution. The cost of CD and DVD distribution is paid to an industry of distributors. They are middlemen whose economic niche has been proven obsolete by the Internet. Since artists and producers do not need them for distribution, they are playing their other card: revenue agregators. That function serves the artist/producer end of the data economy.
Admittedly, a revenue model which pays the artists and producers for their work without involving the traditional distributors hasn't emerged. The distributors are not so confident, so they are seeking protection like tariffs. This is an age old issue rearing its ugly head in a new place, and we will eventually solve it the way we always do: the middlemen buy their policymakers and get their policy.
In the US, the distributors dominate the world market for movies, music, and any other software. In the EU, the distributors and the artists and producers from which they distribute software are worldwide underdogs by sheer revenue. Neither the distributors nor the artists and producers in the EU will gain if they support a scheme that allows the gargantuan US companies to dictate the terms of their business.The DMCA could give US media distributors the leverage they need to control the EU market.
What the US distributors fear is that the next Beatles will emigrate from the US to the EU where the DMCA allows the artists to dictate more of the business, and gives them access to more of the end-consumer's money...if such an economy were to pop up in the EU...
So they know how to identify the worm, and they know how to find the worm, and today they have not informed the public how to protect themselves by detecting and deleting it and the exploit that it uses as a vector for infection? They keep it a secret? What could they possibly gain by keeping it a secret? Is it not their duty as trustees of the public welfare that they do whatever is in their power (like email the details to CERT) to protect the taxpaying (heh) public from the scourges of crime?
Like the other posts complained: they are trying to whip up some cyber-crime paranoia and good-ol Dragnet style cops-and-robbers drama because THEY GET PAID. Also there are some fantastic perks arising out of the Law Enforcement legal power known as DISCRETION. Just get laws passed that are obviously too strict, and then say "leave it up to the cops' discretion. They know where to enforce the laws. We're better off for giving them the tools to fight crime." Then we get stuff like racial profiling and wiretap abuse. They can also bring organised crime in a cyber-tenderloin-district. Look up the etymology of that old cliche: Tenderloin District. Can anyone provide relevant links?
The powers we grant to the Authorities will first and foremost impact the personal interests and lifestyles of the Authorities.
I am truly sorry you even had to post this message, but someone had to. If you're going to forward packets, you should decide whether, not just whither to retransmit them!
When the distribution is expensive, then you filter the crap before the distribution. However, these filters always cost an unknown quantity more than their operating cost: they have false-positives in their crap-detectors and false-negatives in their goodsuff-detectors. I think its just a corollary of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (entropy), but The law of Leaky Abstractions (discussion) applies here also. In other words: Bayesian filters aren't much better than a bunch of publishers. Any publisher's experience of a work must be abstracted, and that abstraction is a function of that publisher's genetics and environment. It leaks at the "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" point, and thus some crap will be suffered by the consumers, and some priceless work will be lost forever because it is mistaken for crap. A lot of other stuff in between can end up in the wrong pile as the publishers sort things out.
Publishers are weak, unreliable (even at their best) arbiters of quality, which is why we need a lot of them. Some might say, the more the better. In a world where all authors can be publishers, and some non-authors can be publishers, the number of publishers can exceed the number of works being published at one time. That doesn't solve the problem, but it DOES keep it from getting completely out of hand to the point where consumers' opinions (crap vs. not-crap) are insignificant. If publishing is cheap, then the hidden costs are the big cost factor!
*grin*
BUT WHAT DO YOU THINK OF MY CHART????
(it took me about 20 minutes straight...)
You know the REAL QUESTION here isn't whether it's a good idea to do something or not.
In America the subtext of any political discussion is "who's gonna get paid" and "who's gonna pay?"
You see, GTA set themselves apart from the other games, and made too much money. All the middlemen are jealous and want a piece. How are they going to make an exception of this GTA game?
Bottom line is that bad parenting is going to screw some kids of bad destiny into a life of crime with or without GTA. What's wrong here is people can't admit they're saying "I don't want anyone's kids playing this game because I have different ethics." Do you have any kids? No? Then your proper avenue of influence over other people's kids is through the parents. Why do you feel the need to involve the government or the industry? Trying to exert a little more influence over other people's children (private domain)? Want a little more than your share of power? Think that your ethical high-ground justifies it?
Remember that one person's rights extend infinitely, as they are basically free so long as we live in a free society. Their rights are limited only as far as they would infringe upon another's rights. This is the fundamental principle of a free society. Do you want to live in one one or not?
Your sig:
That's true only if the opportunities to mod or post are equal. That seems to be true only around 8:30 CST/CDT. Mod and post on the same discussion are prohibited. The opportunity to mod is a rare thing, and it gives the moderator more influence (although with the all-too-easy click-click convenience) than a poster (who can affect the visibility of the thread only at +2 when sufficient karma has been earned).I believe the choice to moderate is an important one, and while I agree with your sentiment (I think...) that people who moderate without without knowing what they are doing should think harder about things, I don't think that differentiates moderation from posting replies.
Oh, which brings me to my point: it's easier to suggest that someone else make(or find) a chart instead of doing it yourself...
Note: the Slashdot "lameness filter" didn't like my ASCII art, but it apparently ignores journal entries...
is in my journal. Furthermore, Slashdot doesn't like hrefs from comments to a person's journal. The rules to this Slashdot game are neither simple nor obvious!Fractals have "similar" structures at different scales. There is no real pattern, because the structures are different everywhere in the fractal. There is only almost-repetition. It is critical to distinguish between self-identity and self-simlarity. No two parts of a fractal will ever match regardless of how you scale them. However, the self-similarity, and also the minute structural differences continue to express themselves within infinitessimal portions of the fractal, scaled to infinity (so we can see them), at least as far as we know...
Stopgaps: you know, they fill a need. They aren't supposed to be all things to all people (or to anyone). They are supposed to fill specific gaps in the OS X application market: the basic things people do with their computers like email, photos, (raising the bar to) home-movies.
Set the bar: you know, nobody will be able to sell software that isn't at least *as* good as the iApps. They'll have to try harder to please Mac users! The end result is that the top Mac titles meet or exceed some very high standards.
Then again, I shouldn't have to explain this to you. You will still enjoy the benefits even if you don't understand it, which is another tenet in the Mac credo. If you feel like a gullible guinea pig (an experimental subject?), and you were surprised by this, just what kind of experiment were you duped into?
Thanks man.
I was a raving lunatic. I needed a little water splashed on me. I've got some bitrot in my database, and that makes for some pretty stupid ranting.
Good reply. "I don't care what they say. You're one of the good ones..."
Still: you have to wonder exactly why the f*ck it is in our National Interest to wage war on Iraq.
That would imply they lured you in with a "free updates forever" and then tried to get you to buy the "updates will cost you extra."
That makes no sense. The iApps aren't meant to be long-term user apps anyways. They are:
1) proof-of-concept Cocoa applications.
2) stopgaps for the "why should I use the new OS which has no Apps, why should I write Apps for the OS with no users" conundrum.
3) setting the bar for 3rd party App quality
If you want free updates forever, then I suggest you look into supporting the GNU projects on OS-X. Things like GTKAqua will bring the gamut of GTK apps from the FreeBSD ports collection to OS-X. This includes GIMP, and forthcoming GIMP-Film.
"Waaaaah... If I have to pay, I might as well pay Microsoft" will get you diddly squat. Oh, and the best portables: TiBooks don't run Windows. They run OS-X (Darwin). You just don't know what your options are.
This is why you vote Democrat, and then write your senator with "I'll be keeping my gun, thank you." The change in "government" policy is simply the difference between the Clinton and GWBush administrations' respective foreign policy philosophies.
The Clinton era policy was based on "engagement." I'm not sure where the GWBush people are coming from. The idea of engagement is that international politico-economy is improved, and so is the global politico-economic position of the US, when we get *more* involved with foreign economies. Macroeconomists talk about "growing the pie." Engagement is like growing the global pie so the US piece gets bigger too.
GWBush policy people seem to think "we're doing just fine thank you, and we don't want you doing any better, so we're taking our ball and going home." Oh, and try to get all the arabs against Saddam Hussein (Iraq has no oil, just Mecca) because it's like destabilising islamic international relationships to destabilise OPEC strength, so that Texan and Alaskan oil barons can get invited to the price-of-energy (price-of-everything) control meetings. "If OPEC isn't about arabs, it's just about oil barons, and aren't we all in the same boat? So let's stop giving money to the blow-yourself-up mad-at-the-world poor muslim martyr-wannabes and get back to making ourselves rich and locking-in the status-quo! See: this is how WE maintain the status-quo..."
</rant>
The problem with this kind of research is controlling for the other pressures on the school system. Say new teachers are leaving the profession forever at 70% after only three years on the job, if that has adverse effects on the general quality of education, would it be a good hypothesis to suggest it also has adverse effects on the way schools use computer resources?
We want to be careful not to blame the technology: it's a poor craftsman who blames his tools for the quality of his work. If you had learned in High School, for example, how to program your own integral solver, then you might have been able to breeze through the same exam *with* all of the intermediate calculator "leaps" documented in adequate detail to score the grade your answers demanded.
Computers *complicate* life, but trading for the additional burden of complexity gains insight which saves wasted effort in dead-end mistakes! If you feel the computer is simplifying your life, it is because you are not appreciating the insights properly: maybe someone else is? Are you dangerously and irresponsibly giving up control?
There's the real issue. Stop bashing computers in the classroom, and get to the real curriculum and pedagogy issue!
Ha, ha: only serious...
Just in case you were working on something to solve a shell problem, just stop, because you can't compete. I mean, this is Microsoft, and nobody will believe that you can put out something that works better than theirs.
Even if you do actually accomplish that feat. Even still, Microsoft will trace the API calls your shell makes and pull the rug out from underneath you in the next automated .NET framework service-pack.
Then, they'll link their knowledgebase to promos of their product so when your customers search for a solution to why your shell started behaving badly (just after the ServicePack was applied), they will see "use the Microsoft shell". Next, your boss will get a letter explaining that Microsoft is attempting to purchase the rights to your project, and all your boss has to do is kill your project to collect more money than they've ever paid you (and prolly some killer seats at _insert_big_sports_event_here_).
Next, you'll probably end up contributing code to some consulting firm that agreed to make the Microsoft shell do what yours already did. It'll cost 20 times as much, and it'll be 1 year past the delivery date you would have made, and by then you'll be sick of dealing with the problems your shell intended to solve.
You'll try to move on to something else, but every where you go, no matter what you try to get into, the same old shell scripting problems will stymie you because NOBODY solved the problems that Microsoft promised their shell would solve. It will haunt you until you completely switch fields or commit suicide, or some other depressing and too-boring-to-enumerate possibility.
There is no monopoly in Unix implementation. Stick to Unix if you don't want to hire (or be) a staff of service-retarting, server-rebooting, reinstalling monkeys to do boring repetitive click-and-drool tasks at the console of a server , in what was *supposed* to be a lights-out data center, checking blanks on the left margin of of a mainframe-era "run book" as they (you) go.
Happy new year!