A broad, five-yard wide road led up to the tomb

The broad's name is Xena.

It's called fair queuing. Serve all active customers equally.

That's what my solution would have been, as well. And I wondered why they didn't. Why did they set caps on particular users, rather than just split it equially on a moment-by-moment basis?

But then, a few years back, I was put on a team designing the hardware accellerators that handle bandwidth division in big router packet processors.

Turns out that doing real fair queueing, when you've got a sea of processors and co-processors trying to hot-potato all the packets, is NOT easy. It involves information sharing among ALL the streams, simultaneously, packet by packet, across coprocessors, processors, chips, even boards. This is both N-square and doesn't parallelize well. So a typical implementation works by setting per-user or per-category-within-a-user limits (only havng to access one, private, data structure per stream), assigning limits to each and counting each's usage without reference to the current usage of others.

That means that, to avoid dead backhaul time while customers are throttled below what's available, you have to give them oversize quotas. But that means the "flight is overbooked" and the heavy users, with more packets in flight, get more than their share of "seats", squeezing out the lighter users. To get back to moment-to-moment fair, with only the quota "hammer" for a tool, you have to throttle them back. Tweaking their quotas even on a minute-by-minute basis, let alone milisecond-by-milisecond, would swamp the control plane, and you couldn't easily share the storage for the rapidly-adjusting limits by classes, but would have to store them, as well as usage, per stream (or at least have many subclasses to switch them among). Oops!

I had some inkling that might be fixable. But the company downsized, and I was laid off, before I could examine it deeply enough to see if it could be done efficiently. That was a processor generation or two ago, and I've been doing other stuff since. Good luck, telecom equipment makers!

The FAA regulations are the biggest factor.

The next is liability litigation. Try to run a company when one suit from one crash (even if it's not your fault) might drain your entire investment and bankrupt you. Try to get insurance in the same situation.

Either alone might make it hard. Both together have essentially frozen designs for private aircraft for over half a century and nearly destroyed civil aviation.

11.91% of the population vs. 9% of the workforce. That says 32% fewer jobs per capita in the manufacturing sector.

Make that "24.4% fewer" or "other states have 32% more" jobs per capita.

Oops: Got output and jobs merged:

11.91% of the population vs 11.7% of the total output. A bit behind in value added. (Horrible, since the value added in, say, computers is hysterically high.)

11.91% of the population vs. 9% of the workforce. That says 32% fewer jobs per capita in the manufacturing sector. Doesn't sound like the "number one state for manufacturing jobs" to me.

California is by far the number one state for manufacturing jobs, firms and output â" accounting for 11.7 percent of the total output, and employing 9 percent of the workforce.

I'd love to see that in per-capita or per-acre terms.

It's also the largest state in population, with 11.91% as of the 2010 census. That's half again as many as Texas, a pinch under twice as many as New York or Florida, almost three times that of Illinois or Pennsylvania, and by then you've used up more than a third of them.

11.7% of the output jobs vs. 11.91% of the population says the AVERAGE of the rest of the states has it beat. Some of the others are REALLY depressed, so the best of them beat it into the ground.

Similarly, it's the third largest state in area - with the largest amount of COMFY area.

It has resources, the best ports for trade with Asia, decent roads and railroads to the rest of the continent, etc. And it's got some capital-intensive industries and lots of access TO capital. It SHOULD be a nova to the rest of the country's furnaces. So why isn't it?

It would have been nice if TFA had told us what chips were affected, or how to determine that, rather than saying "haswell" and expecting everybody reading it to do their own research.

I just spent ten minutes looking around the web, trying to determine if the processor in my laptop is one of those affected - preperatory to perhaps trying to figure out, if it is, how to apply the "disable the broken feature" fix - without installing windows - to avoid the memory corruption bogyman if somebody distributes software that uses, or abuses the feature.

No joy. The documentation seems to say that:
  - Core i7 is Haswell
  - TSX is NOT supported on versions up to somethng BEFORE the processor version in my laptop (i7-4700MQ)
  - But the descriptions of that processor I've found so far don't say, one way or another, whether it does or doesn't have TSX. B-b

The "flags" field in /proc/cpuinfo doesn't include a "tsx". But would it?

Can anyone tell us a simple way to check?

RMS invented the GPL because of copyright issues, and before software patents became a problem.

As I understand it: It was a (brilliant) workaround for two problems with putting software in the public domain, which releases ALL rights:

  - Derived works: Somebody makes a modified version and copyrights that. They do a bugfix or enhancement and even the original author is locked out of his own software's future. He can't do the same bugfix or a similar enhancement without violating the new copyright. Similarly with other users of the software.

  - Compilation copyrights: If somebody combines several public domain works into a combined work, they can copyright THAT, claiming violation if somebody uses excerpts from it - such as some of the original public-domain components or excerpts from them. In book publishing this covers publishers of collections and anthologies. In software, including a public-domained module in a library or distribution would let the distributors of that lock up the rights to the components. Again the original author and other users can get locked out of the author's own work. (For instance, nobody else could include it in a similar library or distribution.)

Stallman's trick solution was to keep the original work under copyright, but license it under terms that require derived works to also be licensed under the same terms and source to be included with obect. Expiration of the copyright might cause a problem - but with companies like Disney on the job lobbying congress, that's probably not going to happen in the US as long as there IS a US. Alternatively, eliminating copyrightability of software would also eliminate the need for the GPL.

My experience reaches back to the toggle-and-punch cards days and I don't want want to bore anyone with stories about that.

But one thing I have noticed in all those years a I cannot recall a single year where it wasn't proclaimed by someone that software engineering would be dead as a career path within a few years.

I go back that far, as well.

And the proliferation of languages, each with advocates claiming it to be the be-all and end-all, was well established by the early '60s.

(I recall the cover of the January 1961 Communications of the ACM, which had artwork showing the Tower of Babel, with various bricks labeled with a different programming language name. There were well over seventy of them.)

I'm struggling to understand the point of this article.

It's Infoworld.

The point of the article is twofold:
  - To convince Pointy Haired Bosses that they understand what's going on and are riding the cutting edge.
  - To sell them new products, implementing new buzzwords, which they can then inflict on their hapless subordinates, making their life hell as they try to get the stuff working and into production.

That's the first two lines of the four-line Slashdot meme. The remaining two are:

(3. Bill the advertisers.)
(4. Profit!)

There is zero difference in talent. The difference is one of leadership and money. The money is already there, so there is where people go.

Actually, the big difference is a little-known aspect of California intellectual property law:

If you, as an employee, invent something, on your own time and not using your employer's resources, and it doesn't fit into the employer's current or foreseeable future product line, you own it. If the patent assignment agreement in your employment contract says otherwise, it's void.

This means that, if you invent something neat and your employer doesn't want to productize it, you (and a couple of your friends) can rent a garage across the street and found a new company to develop and sell it.

Employees in California can NOT be ripped off the way Westinghouse ripped off Nikola Tesla.

The result is that companies in silicon valley have "budded off" more companies, like yeast budding off new cells. And once this environment got started, thousands of techies have migrated to the area, so there are plenty of them available with the will and talent to be the "couple of your friends" with the skills you need to fill out the team in your garage.

Lots of other states have tried to set up their own high-tech areas on Silicon Valley's model. But they always seem to miss this one point. They need to clone that law to have a chance at replacing or recreating the phenomenon. Result: They might get a company to set up a shop, but they don't get a comparable tech community to build up. Research parks of several companies, generally focused on some aspect of tech, might form, but you don't get the generalist explosion.

Of course, like any network, the longer it accumulates, the more valuable it is to be connected to this one, rather than another that is otherwise equivalent. (This is what the parent poster already alluded to.) Thus there's only one Silicon Valley in California, with the resources concentrated within driving distance, though the law is statewide. Even with the law change, and a couple decades to let the results grow, other states might have a tough time overcoming California's first-mover advantage.

But California keeps fouling things up for techies and entrepreneurs in other ways. So if some other state would TRY this, they might become a go-to place when groups of people in Silicon Valley get fed up and decide to go-forth.

undoubtedly, you've read about the tempest in San Francisco recently, where urban activists are decrying the influx of highly paid tech professionals, who they argue are displacing residents suddenly unable to keep up with skyrocketing rents.

That was decades-old news in Silicon Valley when I moved here in the late '80s. (A couple who'd gone there for the same project a few years earlier had bought, rather than rented, had the price of their mortgaged house skyrocket over a couple years, and bailed out of High Tech to start a new career as landlords.)

I thought Hi Tek had been doing the same to Berkeley and (to a lesser extent) SF since before then, as well. SF prices have always been high - though perhaps not as high as mid-peninsula around the Stanford tek-lek.

So what's new? Did Hi Tek start buying spaces in the slums and drive the prices further up than SF's already astronomical highs? Did public assistance not rise to track the new rents?

This is SO last millenium...

Doubly so on this one, where everyone claims theirs is a foot long.