But you cared enough to reply. I'm touched.

What if there were an ongoing crime and results were dumped before it was known that data was needed? What constitutes a "hit list"?

Methodology is different from what is collected. Methodology is "every police vehicle has a model ZRX-9000 plate scanner which is always in operation with results sent in real time to a central server where the data is held for 30 days unless a court orders it to be held longer as part of an ongoing investigation/trial". We should absolutely have that information. But just like I don't need to see your tax records, I don't need to see where you've been for the past week.

Fine, have an independent oversight board review the records without making them public while keeping the details secret.

"What are you collecting" is different from "What did you collect" and "What privacy should be applied to what is collected".

EFF/ACLU is asking for B which is the wrong question. A and C are far more important without knowing exactly what is collected.

Here's a scenario:

You're interviewing for a new job. You drive to the company to interview on site. While you're on your way, the police tag your car in various spots along your trip including the parking lot of the site. Now under normal circumstances, that data would be private and not released without court order (yes, fantasy land, but bear with me) so your trip remains private and after some period of time those records are expunged.

Now say that the EFF and ACLU get their way and have all that data released. All your movements are now considered public record available for review by anyone. Do you want your boss pouring through your movements?

No idea. I don't know if the instructions for computing PC-relative addresses in an ISA without an architectural PC are patentable. They also exist in RISC V (not sure which came first), so if they do then it's going to be a problem for Kriste et al. Nothing else in there is especially novel: like ARMv8, it's a nicely designed compilation target, but it doesn't do anything that's especially exciting.

I didn't look at the floating point stuff in much detail, so there may be something there, although the biggest changes in recent versions of the MIPS specs have been that they're more closely aligned with the IEEE floating point standards, so it's hard to imagine anything there.

The biggest difference between MIPS64r6 and ARMv8 is that the MIPS spec explicitly reserves some of the opcode space for vendor-specific extensions (we use this space, although our core predates the current spec - it's largely codifying existing opcode use). This allows, for example, Cavium to add custom instructions that are useful for network switches but not very useful for other things. ARMv8, in contrast, expects that any non-standard extensions are in the form of accelerator cores with a completely different ISA. This means that any code compiled for one ARMv8 core should run on any ARMv8 implementation, which is a big advantage. With MIPS, anything compiled for the core ISA should run everywhere, but people using custom variants (e.g. Cisco and Juniper, who use the Cavium parts in some of their products) will ship code that won't run on another vendors' chips.

Historically, this has been a problem for the MIPS ecosystem because each MIPS vendor has forked GCC and GNU binutils, hacked it up to support their extensions, but done so in a way that makes it impossible to merge the code upstream (because they've broken every other MIPS chip in the process) and left their customers with an ageing toolchain to deal with. I've been working with the Imagination guys to try to make sure that the code in LLVM is arranged in such a way that it's relatively easy to add vendor-specific extensions without breaking everything else.

Imagination doesn't currently have any 64-bit cores to license, but I expect that they will quite soon...

Assuming that your code doesn't do anything that is vaguely MIPS specific. If it is, then there is little benefit in using MIPS32r2 now - ARMv7 is likely to be closer than MIPS32r2 to MIPS32r6 in terms of compatibility with C (or higher-level language) source code compatibility.

Basically, because the MIPS ISA sucks as a compiler target. Delay slots are annoying and provide little benefit with modern microarchitectures. The only way to do PC-relative addressing is an ugly hack in the ABI, requiring that every call uses jalr with $t9 in the call, which means that you can't use bal for short calls. The lwl / lwr instructions for unaligned loads are just horrible and introduce nasty pipeline dependencies. The branch likely instructions are almost always misused, but as they're the only way of doing a branch without a delay slot there's often no alternative.

Information about the collection techniques (what gets captured, how long are they held, when and how are they destroyed, etc.) is fine. The actual videos themselves may contain enough information to track vehicles over a period of time. We don't really like it when cops do it, why should we let everyone else have this data?

I don't necessarily like knowing cops have this information but so long as there's rules over the collection (see above) I'm okay with this. If the EFF and ACLU (whom I normally support) wants the actual data, they can get their own OCR license plate cameras and drive around.

There's no price yet because they're giving away the first production run to people who are going to do interesting things with them. Unfortunately, this is a really bad time to do anything MIPS related (and I say this as someone who hacks on a MIPS IV compatible softcore and the LLVM MIPS back end). Imagination has just released the MIPS64r6 and MIPS32r6 specs. These are the biggest revisions to the MIPS ISA since MIPS III, which introduced 64-bit support. They've removed a load of legacy crap like the lwr and lwl instructions and the branch-likely instruction family and added things like compact (no delay slot) branch instructions, the requirement that hardware supports unaligned loads and stores (or, at least, that the OS traps and emulates them), and added much better support for PC-relative addressing. The result is a nice ISA, which is not backwards compatible with MIPS32r2 or MIPS64r2, the ISA that these boards use. Any investment in software for MIPS now is going to be wasted when products with the new ISA come out.

For building big C++ projects, as long as the disk (yay SSDs!) can keep up, you can throw as many cores as you can get at the compile step and get a speedup, then sit dependent on single-thread performance for the linking. I got a huge speedup going from a Core 2 Duo to a Sandy Bridge quad i7, then another noticeable speedup going to a Haswell i7 in my laptop. The laptop is now sufficiently fast that I do a lot more locally - previously I'd mostly work on a remote server with 32 cores, 256GB of RAM (and a 3TB mirrored ZFS array with a 512GB SSD for ZIL and L2ARC), but now the laptop is only about a factor of 2 slower in terms of build times, so for developing individual components (e.g. LLVM+Clang) I'll use the laptop and only build the complete system on the server.

There are several nice features of a landline, but they can't (in the UK, at least) compete on price. The line rental alone for a landline costs more than I spend on calls on my mobile (pre-pay, no contract, no monthly fees). Calls from my mobile are 3p/minute, a landline is £16/month. I'd need to spend almost 9 hours on the phone each month before I spent as much on my mobile as a landline would cost me before I even made any calls. And then, for the kicker, the calls from the landline cost 9p/min (+15p setup) for calls to other landlines or 12p/min (+15p setup) for calls to mobiles. There's no possible justification for calls from the landline costing 3-4 times as much as calls from the mobile on top of the extortionate line rental. If I wanted to pay BT even more, for another £3 I could get free evening and weekend calls to landlines, but calls to mobiles would still be the same price. For £7.50 on top of the line rental, I'd get free calls to landlines, and calls to mobiles would only be twice the cost of my mobile. Almost everyone I call has a mobile though, so in exchange for paying BT an amount equivalent to about 12 hours of calls on my mobile per month, I could then pay double per minute what I pay for calls on my mobile with no line rental.

I enjoyed that article, but it's worth noting that vi actually is standard.

C'mon. Victoria Neuland, dummy. Appointed under Hillary. You don't think of Hillary as a "neo-con" - but there she is! Appointing the Wife of Robert Kagan and former foreign policy advisor of... Dick Cheney! To the role of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.

Or you don't remember her little phone call? "Fuck the EU!"

Neo-con rim job. You don't see it, because the distortion field that Cheney described is in full-effect. You believe that an evil, Russian potentate wants to slowly steal your freedoms - not that a gang of pirates took over the former Russian state of Ukraine - using actual NAZIS to do it.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actorsand you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

The original capital of the Rus, in the foundation of the state around 100 AD, was Kiev. No entity "Ukraine" existed. I figure even IF the Russians were agressive, they have a better claim on that land than the so-called Hebrews do on Palestine.

In computer technology, there is ALWAYS something new next year. Yes, there'll be a 14nm shrink next year (or maybe later this year)... but then just a year away will be a technology update, a new core design that is more capable, and of course they'll have more experience on the 14nm process and it'll be better... however only like a year after that 10nm will be online and that'll be more efficient.

And so on and so forth.

With computers, you buy what you need when you need it. Playing the "Oh something better is coming," game is stupid because it is always happening, generally very quickly.

So if you want a 6 or 8 core system, this is what to buy (it's cheaper than their Xeon setups). Will there be a better ones later? For sure. However sitting in neutral waiting for "the next big thing" is silly. Get a system, keep it as long as it is useful, get a new one when you need a new one.

Also hating on this for being enthusiast is silly. Ya it is expensive. So don't get it if you don't need it. However for what it does, it isn't bad. Maybe you need that kind of power. Maybe you need more. Not long ago we had a faculty member purchase workstation with 2x 12 core CPUs. These things cost about $2600 PER CPU, never mind the other hardware to support it. System was over $10,000. However, for the simulations he was doing, it was worth it. I'd never buy that for home, my workloads are much lighter, but I'm not going to hate on him needing it.

Same shit here. Do most users need this? No. Heck most users don't need a quad core. But there are uses for it.

(citation needed)

I have never seen RAM as cheap as it is now. When you can buy a 16GB ECC DIMM for less than $200, it is rather wonderful. Our researchers that use big amounts of memory are extremely happy with how much memory they can stuff in desktops and servers for a reasonably price.

Now I'll admit, I don't have a chart of RAM prices, so I suppose I could be wrong, but then I've worked in IT for the last, oh, 20ish years on a continuous basis and spec'ing and buying hardware is a fairly common part of my job.

So please, show me some evidence from two years ago when RAM was half its current price. Right now I see a 16GB 1600MHz 2R ECC DIMM as running about $170, and a 4x4GB 1600MHz unbuffered set running about $150. So please show me some proof that two years ago I could get those for about $70-90 each.