Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
Or backwards compatibility?
By his own admission, these were new apps, so whatever they did was, by definition, the correct behaviour. Writing such things is, how shall I put it?, "substantially easier" than writing an app where the specification is "whatever the previous version did, and you'll have to reverse engineer that because this thing just kinda grewed and there never was a formal spec".
You've made the classic mistake of assuming that the objective is to reduce energy consumption. It isn't. The objective is to reduce CO2 emissions.
If you believe the IPCC then our failure to charge the fossil generators for the long-term effects of their technology is the biggest subsidy in the UK energy market by a quite colossal margin.
To a first approximation, it *does not matter* how thermodynamically efficient non-fossil generators are. All that matters for them is "cost per delivered kWh".
"But a flat tax like that - one which hits poorer people, to whom the electricity bill is a noticeable expense, disproportionately hard - would be politically difficult to implement, so the way it is kept off the government's books is particularly cunning."
Nah! The man responsible is the same one who used PFI to put just about all government spending "off the books". Hiding a flat-rate tax that hits his own electoral base hardest was just a stroll in the park for him.
He's also the guy who switched off the fuel escalator, which is the closest thing we've ever had to a pure carbon tax. I remain of the opinion that if you want to reduce CO2 emissions, then the simple but foolproof mechanism is to tax fossil fuels at source. There are only a few hundred mines and refineries that would need to be regulated and you are already measuring their output. You can multiply, can't you? What's the problem?
And if you think a flat-rate carbon tax is too awful to contemplate, then you clearly don't really want to reduce CO2 emissions that badly, so stop interfering with the energy market and let the various technologies compete on a level playing field and let your electorate enjoy some cheaper energy prices.
Either way, what the government is doing right now is moronic.
"If you have to write it down, it's failed anyway."
Hideously wrong. Please don't post such advice in a public place. Oh, hang on...
For any system that is internet facing, the number of potential bad guys is "several gazillion". The number of potential bad guys who can read a post-it note stuck to your monitor is "several". (Ironically, the latter group, despite having a much easier task, are generally less interested because they usually already have access to the protected system.) The smart approach is to *write down* a complex stem to defeat the former group, and then append something you can remember to defeat the latter.
Yawn. The CIA has a budget larger than most countries. They don't need a photo database. They can simply pick a picture at random and change the shape of your face until it fits.
"Ah, but how did they find me?" I hear you ask. Well not by trawling through vast oceans of mindless social networking drivel. That has been the promise of snake-oil merchants ever since the invention of the punched card. In practice, the noise is always too big for the signal and always will be. The noise outnumbers the signal millions to one AND the noise is trying to be a loud as possible whereas the signal is trying to keep a low profile. Real (successful, Mossad-style) intelligence uses old-fashioned information gathering. Similarly, real (El Al-style) airport security puts trained eyes in front of the passengers and waits to see who sweats.
What about people who want their internet to work properly but who also have children?
Funnily enough, this iBoss (amazingly, this appears to be a US company who haven't heard that Steve Jobs owns the letter "i") is exactly the "optional-but-universally-applied" filtering that an earlier poster suggested, tongue in cheek. To elaborate, just how long is the iBoss going to remain active once the parents discover that YouTube is blocked, or conversely, once the kids discover that it isn't.
"...how the implementation of an optional ISP level smut filter is undesirable in any way."
OK, since you ask...
1) It will cost the ISP money and they'll pass that cost onto you (and me), for reasons that are well known in business circles.
2) It won't work, for reasons that are well known in technical and legal circles.
3) Worse, it will encourage bad parents to take even less notice of what their offspring are doing on the web, for reasons well known in psychological circles.
Net effect: society pays more for a worse result.
Er, that would be because the list of sites to block are numbered in the thousands (I'm being generous here) and changes every day. Even asking ISPs to do this is stupid. Asking parents to do it is beyond belief.
The only practical way to achieve what he wants is to arrange for the internet address space to be sub-divided according to legal jurisdiction. Then, you can either drop the packets or you can sue the sender. (For IPv4, it's several decades too late to do this. The address space is totally balkanised. For IPv6 it is merely late, but renumbering is a core feature of the spec, so it would be possible to fix it.)
Amusingly enough, this is exactly how "real world" things like videos are regulated. Customs officers patrol the border to stop stuff coming in and police patrol the interior to catch those who get past customs (or who started off inside). It's not perfect, but if Cameron is willing to cite it as a proof of concept then he clearly believes it works well enough.
The ISPs cannot change how the internet works. Heads of government probably can, but not if they waste their time grand-standing and shouting at ISPs.
"I remember reading somewhere that the German's see a lot of English humour and subtleties as equal to lying"
That would have been a "magazine" article on the BBC web site a week or two back. The gist of it was that they don't use smalltalk and euphemism as a social lubricant the way that we do. Once you've figured out the rules of the game, however, German culture is as much fun for the Germans as British culture is for us. If you want a link to the article, try googling for "bleedin' obvious".
Er, no-one. If you RTFA you'll see that this hasn't been granted an 18 certificate. That was rather the point.
And as for who decided it was OK for one adult to say what another can't watch, the answer is pretty obviously Parliament. However, its remit only extends to the UK and they haven't banned foreign travel, so if you *really* want to see this film then I suggest you go take a running jump across the pond and watch it there.
"Netbooks were a promising new market until Apple clobbered them with the iPad."
I've just googled for iPad prices. They start at about twice the price of a netbook and go upwards. Amongst innumerate posers, that may count as "clobbering", but for the rest of us the iPad isn't even on the same page.
What clobbered netbooks was Microsoft turning round to the manufacturers and telling them that they'd lose their cheap OEM licences on the rest of their range if they didn't stop selling attractive devices that Windows was too bloated to run on.
Trading only stabilises markets if the frequency is below the limit at which information can flow around the market. Beyond that, it serves to de-stabilise. This shouldn't surprise any engineer.
Apparently the New York Stock Exchange allows certain companies (for a fee) to put their computers "in the building" and enjoy market data (and trades) before everyone else. In Europe, exactly the same sort of thing is banned by law and electronic trading systems even have random delays inserted so that it just isn't worth trying to beat the system. Guess which stock market went tits up in the last bubble?
One presumes that the legion of rocket scientists who engineered the NYSE system were well aware of the failure mode, but reasoned that either they'd get paid before it went pear-shaped or they'd get bailed out by frightened politicians, or both.
"whenever population outstripped food production, starvation would cull the numbers until the equation was restored"
You're a bit harsh on Malthus there. This balance has undoubtedly been the case for most of human history, and also happens to be flippin' obvious. (Just what do *you* expect to happen when there isn't enough food to go around?) Malthus was simply unfortunate in publishing the observation just after the Enlightenment kicked off the longest sustained improvement in productivity that history has yet seen.
Oxfam, however, have the benefit of two hundred years of hindsight and so have no such excuse. You are right to give *them* a good duffing up.
...is surely not Active Desktop but VB6.
Microsoft took an entire "platform" and dumped it in the nearest skip. VB6 developers were given the option of re-writing under .NET, which although the closest match at the time was still largely untested and not *that* close if you wanted a new release of a major application Real Soon Now. They got away with it because, like it or not (and many didn't) the brutal fact was that the company best placed to offer migration options away from VB6 was ... Microsoft.
It's called vendor lock-in, kids. If you weren't paying attention ten years ago, here's a second chance to learn the same lesson.
Looks like snake oil to me. They claim that they are over 5 million times more efficient than IIS in serving web pages, but also that they aren't bottlenecked on the CPU or network. Assuming a network pipe measured in Gigabits, that means that IIS cannot manage more than a few kilobits of network traffic under any circumstances.
I know this is IIS we're talking about, but that sounds a little harsh.
Aliasing. If I have a function...
void f(int* a, int* b) { ... }
then a C or C++ compiler has to assume that a and b might point to the same storage. (Or if they are arrays, that their ranges might overlap.) Therefore, whenever it has written through *a and subsequently needs the value of *b, it has to reload it from memory. That reduces opportunities for keeping values in registers, not just values of the function arguments, but anything numerical results that were computed from them.
In Fortran, the compiler is allowed by the rules of the language to assume that no overlap exists. If that is not true, you need to code the function differently. The advantage this gives is probably the main reason why Fortran still has the edge on numerical codes, and the motivation for "noalias" style pointer qualifiers added in more recent versions of C and C++.
I think the OP's smugness was directed against the proponents (fanbois, in register-speak) rather than the creators of these languages.
If that is the case, then I think his point stands. There has been very little fundamentally new in programming language design for several decades.
You clearly aren't one of the ten. Rather a lot of standardisation effort has gone into making the existing features more orthogonal. You'd be hard-pushed to find any non-orthogonality in the major features of the language now.
Oh, and in C++, if your class is an object type, you can prohibit copying with a single line in the declaration of your object base class. If it is a value type, deep copying is exactly what you want. This has been known for about half a century, ever since somebody managed to change the value of 1.0 in their (very early) Fortran program. C++ has no "mis-features" in this area. It merely gives you the tools to support more than one style of programming.
"I know C++ programmers who don't use compiler optimisations, because it would slow down their code. That's'because they have a deep understanding of the language architecture at the machine level."
Er no. That's because they are C programmers. The C++ standard library is made up of templates that are written to be as broadly applicable as is feasible. Consequently, they require function inlining, constant propogation and the removal of unreachable code to even get close to acceptable performance levels.
Even in pure C, it would be somewhat heroic to write code that was already as good as the optimiser can do for free, and vanishingly unlikely that you could beat a modern compiler on a large body of code. (Even where you can, it is *then* unlikely that you couldn't do better still by dropping down to assembly language for that hotspot.) Perhaps your friends made some measurements about 30 years ago and haven't revisited their assumptions since.
"I'd be willing to bet that the winning C++ verision was making heavy use of templates (template metaprogramming)"
The article linked to the paper which in turn gave a URL for the code. I suggest you check it out before accepting any bets.
The actual coding exercise under study was a graph algorithm or two. The C++ code used the collection classes in the standard library. These /are/ templates, but require no template meta-programming to use them.
The C++ code did not use a dedicated graph library, despite the fact that boost have one and it is almost certainly bug-free and tuned to within a gnat's arse of divinity. But even that wouldn't have required any meta-programming for this exercise.
Since templates are endemic in the standard library, it is almost impossible to write idiomatic C++ without using templates. OTOH, it is quite easy to write rather a lot of code without much meta-programming on your part. If you are simply averse to C++ syntax, then by all means avoid it, but don't assume that everyone else feels the same way.
Agreed, as long as you accept that *most* code needs to run faster than it does at the moment,
I'm fed up with people telling me that code speed no longer matters, when I can *still* out-type programs on a machine that is several orders of magnitude faster than the one I was using 20 years ago.
Google's paper is quite interesting. The raw results are that C++ is about 2.5 times faster than the best of the rest and the worst is about the same factor further behind. That's quite a big hit for the worst case (Go).
Furthermore...
When the sample programs were offered to Google employees to tune, a roughly similar improvement (3x) was seen in every case. For C++, there were easy pickings by replacing O(n) methods with O(1) methods in the standard library, and changing data structures to improve locality. I'd call these "low-hanging fruit" rather than "sophisticated". For Java and Scala, one could tune the garbage collection. For Scala, one could adopt a more functional programming style. I don't know how clever those changes were, because I don't use those languages, but let's assume they are *not* (in Google's words) "complicated and hard to tune".
The point is that we're talking about a factor of "several" performance improvement that is available with code reviews or a change of language, and probably an order of magnitude that is available if you do both. It would take Intel or AMD *years* to deliver the same performance improvement, and then you'd have to pay for the new hardware, so it is clearly worthwhile, but it doesn't happen for some reason.
Maybe the average programmer is just crap?
As I recall, it was at a time when IBM had more patents than the rest of the industry put together and were milking them to make up for not having an innovative products. Bill watched and learned. It was also just a few years after the USPTO changed their rules, so everyone was admiring the growing mountain of patents being granted but the negative consequences were only obvious to those with a clue.
But remember that most of this IP is *still* only technically valid in the US. The rest of the world is affected only because the major players still do so much business in the US and choose not to develop separate product lines for the rest of the world. That could change, particularly if the US players retreat from genuine product development and in consequence no longer have anything to offer the RotW.
"I'd highly doubt it, otherwise you could rip every technology off, ever made"
There's a distinction between inter-operability and cloning. In this case, one side would claim that the reverse engineering permitted inter-operability with Skype's network and the other side would claim that it cloned Skype's client software.
IANAL either, but I have "A Guidebook to Intellectual Property" here (ISBN 0-421-48730-5) published in 1993 (yeah, I know) and it says...
"Nor is it an infringment to convert a program from a high-level language to a low-level one (i.e., decompile it) [sic] or copy it by doing so, provided it is necessary to decompile it to create an independent program which can be operated with the existing one and the information is not used for any other purpose. Also, it is not an infringement to do things necessary to use the program such as correcting errors in programs unless that is specifically forbidden by contract. These exceptions derive from an EC directive and they were inserted into the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 by a statutory instrument made under the European Communities Act."
So unless those rights have been rolled back, it doesn't need to be a particularly clean room to produce a reverse engineered version. Of course, if you were to use the "compatible" version of the software to cheat Skype out of revenue, that might fall foul of the "not used for any other purpose" bit. As I said, IANAL and I've no idea how courts actually interpret these rights in a commercial setting.
'A US senator said in March that data raids had put America "on the losing end of what could be the largest illicit transfer of wealth in world history".'
This senator has presumably added up the "value for accounting purposes" of all the IP that has-or-might-have been pilfered. That's about as reasonable as the estimates of piracy losses trotted out by the RIAA, or indeed the accounts at Lehman's.
Hey guys, if you can't spend it, it isn't real money.
But is it a laptop? Microsoft can't impose restrictions on laptops (or desktops) without cutting off their own upgrade revenue. That would rather defeat the object of producing Windows 8 at all. A laptop with a touchscreen that you can flip around into a slate configuration sounds *very* much like some existing products, and also very much like a tablet. It's hard to see how MS can be anything other than annoyingly arbitrary in their definitions here.
"... the sticker on anything remotely naughty began in the states in the mid-80s, when Tipper Gore and the Parental Music Resource Centre realised what some of those rappers and heavy metallers were actually going on about."
The 60s songs about acid trips and the 70s punk songs about how the older generation had screwed up the whole world for all children everywhere, having passed by unnoticed because at that time Tipper and her friends *were* the children at risk. Meanwhile, prancing about pretending to be a semi-naked X-Factor contestant has entered the school curriculum as part of PE.
"I read this as a warning that if these companies go down this path, then there is a risk that the EU may attempt to prohibit transactions between the new non-European company, and Europeans"
The WTO might have an opinion on that. It is one thing to say "you have to play by our rules when you trade in our jurisdiction". It is quite another to say "we have a rule that you aren't allowed to be Seagate". The former is concerned with what you do. The latter is concerned with who you are.
The suggestion is that the EU should attempt to prohibit a business transaction between non-European companies, taking place outside its jurisdiction, in an industry that has no European player, and that (lacking any legal remedies) it should risk starting a trade war in order to do so.
Where's the John McEnroe icon?
"I'm posting it on Wikipedia and we'll let them tear it apart with your name attached"
Posting to wikipedia with someone else's name attached? How's that done then?
Come to think of it, last time I looked you couldn't even post to wikipedia with your own name attached. The articles themselves don't have author credits.
By putting money on a separate device (a card), I can keep that card zipped up in the depths of my pocket. If I kept my phone that secure, it wouldn't be so useful. The promoters of this idea clearly understand this, because the amount they let you put on the phone is far less than the amount they let you put on a card. Also, my credit card isn't network-connected or extensible, so I don't have to worry about undocumented "remote cash withdrawal" features in the comedy apps I download.
The kids will love it, though.
"And patents on living things are downright ridiculous. They should be illegal in any country."
Patents on *existing* living things are absurd. The spaghetti monster surely holds all the design rights for those, there are several billion years of prior art, and the manufacturing process is fucking obvious.
For *new* living things, the situation is less clear. The concept is obvious, but the the tools you use to create them might be patentable, and you might cover the products of those tools with copyright or some sort of design right.
Having said that, despite wild claims from some self-promoting researchers in the area, no-one has yet come close. "Close" in this context would be something that didn't start with a living organism or materials derived from one. For a historical equivalent, consider Wöhler's creation of urea from wholly inorganic precursors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_W%C3%B6hler)
Guess again: http://www.fs-driver.org/
NT was designed with installable file-systems in mind. The only obstacles are commercial ones. Obviously it suits Microsoft if everyone else pays a FAT sum to interface their storage to Windows boxes. Less obviously, it seems to suit everyone else, too.
Odd. Google seem happy to expend a load of effort pushing their toolbar onto the world, and loads of cash buying up codecs to give away, but apparently it has not (yet?) occurred to them that distributing an ext-n IFS for Windows would blow away one of Microsoft's longest-lived strangle-holds on the non-MS market.
Well, I'm picking on Google, but of course almost any hardware vendor could do this, with no more effort than is normally spent distributing dodgy device drivers and their "related" crud-ware apps. The majority of sheeple seem quite happy to install whatever is on the CD that comes with a new toy. If it contained an ext4 IFS, they'd never be the wiser, but their device would (it appears) be 5$ cheaper.
"This has been achieved by a combination of technology and manufacturing innovation, matched by a much tighter branding and segmentation strategy, he claimed."
Er, no. It's because the silicon components at the bottom end of the market can't fall any further. Half the price of the bottom-end netbooks is the screen. The other half is a mixture of the case, disk, power supply, commodity RAM and a dirt cheap CPU. None of them cost more than a few tens of pounds.
Moreover, most of them don't contribute to Intel's bottom line at all, so I'm not even sure that Intel are *in* this segment of the market to a meaningful extent. I suppose you could call that "branding" and "segmentation strategy" if you wanted. Others might call it losing, because if anyone ever comes up with a significantly cheaper display, prices will tumble again and Intel will wake up to discover that the only part of the PC business they are still in is "big iron".
IBM excepted, "big iron" is the market segment where old businesses go to die. The seven dwarves died there, killed by the UNIX vendors. The UNIX vendors died there, killed by Intel. And so the wheel turns...
There's no clear dividing line between parasites and symbionts. It depends on how you measure benefit. The average human being is a whole ecosystem that has evolved to tolerate its members, and even those that give nothing back are hogging a space that excludes something even more unpleasant, so are they parasites?
Even FOSS users who "give nothing back" are giving back credibility. Credibility is important, because it attracts others who might be able to give rather more back. Look how much effort Microsoft have expended over the years trying to paint Linux as lacking credibility.
Then there's FOSS users who "give very little back", such as the vast majority who contribute no code, but many of whom have answered a question on a support forum, or even just said "yes, that happens to me too" and unwittingly added an observation that led to a solution. The individual contribution goes below most analysts radar, but the collective benefit is undeniable. All of these helpers will have started as parasites, trawling those same forums for solutions to their own problems. Gradually, they have evolved into symbionts.
Ah, well there's the rub. As it happens, I've been using NT since the early 90s and can make a similar claim. I've seen perhaps half a dozen BSODs that were caused by dodgy third party drivers (fairly easily verfied) and one caused by a failure of the C: drive. Since I don't particularly want Microsoft to ban third-party drivers at ring 0 and I can understand it is quite hard to recover from a loss of your page file and system directory, I'm not going to blame MS for either.
On the other hand ... I can think of several people I trust on these matters who assure me that there most certainly were problems with all those versions of NT that were so faultless on my own machine. Therefore, forgive me if I don't extrapolate wildly from my one data point, like you did.
You may blame Nixon, but a quick look at the finances shows clearly that manned spaceflight is far more expensive than robot missions. The reason you haven't had the multiple landers on various moons is because the lion's share of the cash was spent "preparing" for that moonbase and Mars mission.
He said "one of" the buggiest. But since you've mentioned it, yes, sendmail had a poor reputation. Then people got fed up and started writing alternatives. They were better, and now sendmail is better too. That doesn't seem to have happened with BIND, which is odd, because DNS is *much* simpler than SMTP.
"we have to acknowledge that a proportion will be single"
I suspect that it is a high proportion and for perfectly innocent reasons. *If* you are single and willing to be on call 24/7 then there are employers who will pay over the odds for your services. There's nothing wrong with that deal being struck between consenting adults.
If some researcher then comes along and restricts their survey to that self-selecting group, I don't think the results count for much.
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