Some CPUs (all UltraSPARCs for sure, at least some models
from Intel and AMD, probably Power) have counters that increment
on assorted low-level events: instruction issue or retirement,
branch prediction failure, various kinds of cache misses, and so
on.  Exactly what gets counted and how you get access to the
count(s) is highly model-dependent, but it's certainly not out of
the question to find out how many instructions a thread executed
during its time on a CPU.

    ... but that still doesn't tell you what you want, which is
the thread's rate of "progress."  For example, a thread spinning
on a spin-lock is executing instructions at a pretty good clip
(excellent locality in both the instruction and data streams), but
is making no "progress" whatsoever.

    A slightly different but related (and possibly apocryphal)
story tells of a computer company that did a lot of instruction
tracing on their machines.  Then they designed a new chip to
run the traced instruction sequences just as fast as possible --
but despite all this optimization, the new chip seemed to be no
faster (maybe a touch slower) than the old one.  Then it dawned:
A CPU spends the huge majority of its time in the idle loop, which
their new chip executed at breathtaking speed ...

    Instruction execution need not equate to "progress."

On Aug 3, 10:02 pm, Arne Vajh?j <a...@vajhoej.dk> wrote:

If by that you mean "a thin margin on top of parts, labour, shipping,
and handling" then fine. Keep in mind that the "labour" already
included is where all the salaries come from. A tough, competitive
market should keep any of those from being out of whack (such as the
CEO's) ideally as well.

public final post EricRebuttal007 {

[snip]

Are you intentionally missing the point? My point is that when there
is open competition in the marketplace, prices are driven down to
costs plus thin margins, rather than being hugely inflated above
costs. And therefore that if anyone is charging highly inflated prices
and not either going out of business or being forced to lower them by
market forces (their choice), the market is therefore failing to work
properly and furnish sufficient competition in that space. I want bugs
like that fixed. :P

[and a bunch more stuff about obfuscation]

What the f.ck did you think that was, proprietary source code?

It was a usenet posting. The object of the game is to communicate
clearly and meaningfully. Intentional obfuscation is clearly a losing
strategy.

Then again, maybe I have misunderstood usenet. Sometimes it sure does
seem as if the object of the game is to aggravate, flame, and
generally disagree with everyone else without regard to reason or
logic, and particularly without any consideration of those pesky
things called facts. :P

That the very fact that you are making the terms of your deal so
onerous proves that there is no alternative to walk away to.

Also, that you're violating copyright law, particularly the doctrine
of first sale, by attempting to tell me what I can and cannot do with
a copy after I've purchased it already. That's as illegal as if I were
to infringe the copyright by making and selling copies without your
permission.

On Aug 7, 2:58 pm, Roedy Green <see_webs...@mindprod.com.invalid>
wrote:

You also omit to mention that capitalist theory says that in a
competitive market you won't be able to raise it very much above your
marginal costs.

You also omit to mention that capitalist theory says that an
uncompetitive market is a Bad Thing(tm).

You neglect to note that doing so is underhanded and dishonest.
Advocating discriminatory pricing? Shame on you! How consumer-hostile.
And again a properly competitive market won't let you get away with
sh.t like that. If you offer the same thing to B at a lower price B
can turn right around and sell it to A for a penny more, turn a
profit, and you quit being able to sell to A at a high price as he
buys from B instead of from you. Of course, you have to raise the
price for B somewhat to make up for this, but instead of charging $50
to B and $150 to A you charge $100 to everyone, more-or-less exactly
as it should be modulo the other effects that should apply to your
pricing.

The only way you can stop this is by doing something truly dirty, like
using legal bludgeons or gratuitous technical "features" to make the
thing you sell to B non-transferrable to A.

But capitalist theory says that owning one's private property,
including being able to resell it or otherwise dispose of it as one
sees fit, is a good thing.

So what you're contemplating is bad. Naughty, naughty Roedy!

It will never fly unless you force it somehow, because customers will
always pay less in the long run by buying a copy than by renting a
copy, and will pay even less by using a FOSS program instead of paying
anyone anything.

So you would have to outlaw FOSS and ownership of copies of software
in order to get your way. So much for being a capitalist; a capitalist
must accept the existence of such competition, including competition
that undercuts your price, or sells people an eternally functional
copy of some software that does the same thing you'd charge them
monthly to do.

Too bad, so sad.

You cannot be allowed to have your way or it is the end of the 21st
century "knowledge economy"; people like you, given the chance, would
strangle it in the cradle to ensure their own profits at everyone
else's expense. Make all my software much buggier and more expensive
will you?! Over my dead body! You can have my personally-owned and
eternally functional software when you pry it from my cold, dead
fingers! Plentiful, cheap, commodity software is a feature, not a bug!

Until the market applies corrections to prices. Your get-rich-quick
scheme hinges on it not doing so, and therefore on some pretty nasty
coercion. May you fail spectacularly.

Then why do you suggest the schemes that make the creator the same
amount of money as before**, make the customers saddest*, and gets the
programs least used** then?

* Because you steal their software and rent it back to them, and they
must pay lots more for the same benefits, and must give up some of
their software because the costs have shot up so dramatically, plus
you hold their data hostage, and they have lost more of their property
rights in their things.
** Because people have a certain total budget for spending on
software. The more expensive it is on average, the less it gets sold.
So in fact software makers don't make any more money than before. They
make that same amount, only they do so while providing less software.
OK maybe their costs go down so they do show a small profit relative
to before, but it won't actually work to get rich quick; sorry to
burst your bubble there. And software will be much less used. In fact,
if usage is metered people will severely ration their usage.

Your suggestion makes the whole world poorer. The whole world! Even
YOU!
Customers are poorer because they must pay more for the same stuff,
and since they only have so much money they actually have to pay the
same amount for less stuff. So they have less stuff.
Worse, stuff they could just pay for and then own they now are forced
to pay over and over again for. Would you like it if your household
furniture could not, through some legal artifice, be yours, and had to
be rented by law? You couldn't buy chairs or tables or a desk; you had
to rent them. After a while the rental adds up to much more than the
price of buying one and still you have to keep paying or they
repossess your chairs and tables and desk. I don't think you'd like
that would you?
Plus there's the intrusive and gratuitous enforcement scheme. Given
it's designed to prevent the software from working some of the times,
this DRM will make the software especially prone to the worst category
of bugs, showstopper bugs. Also there's an incentive to hold the
user's data hostage to force them to keep paying you for the privilege
of being able to access it; this you'll spin as an "anti-piracy"
measure to stop people cracking the software for indefinite use, while
neglecting to point out how it also creates a lock-in that will let
you jack up prices until you bleed everyone dry. And even then there's
really only so much money to go around, and the end result is you end
up no richer and everyone else ends up poorer.
Oh yeah, and you also end up poorer. First, because of all the
software YOU use whose costs have shot through the roof, both directly
in price-tag terms and in terms of showstopper bugs introduced by all
that evil DRM. Second, because the whole WORLD ends up poorer, and the
sinking tide drops all boats, including yours.

I wish you bad luck with this scheme, I really do.