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Slashback: Memory, Constancy, Triumph
Why not put 'em on Freenet while you're at it ... Imran Ghory writes: "Google has put out an appeal to get NetNews CDs (produced by Sterling Software and CD Publishing Corporation) which archived usenet between 1992 to 1995. Looks like Google is reviving Deja's idea of a total usenet archive."
This sounds like a worthy objective, worth rooting around for -- maybe they'll even give you a credit somewhere.
They know that of which they speak. Hot on the heels of the inexorable GCC project's 3.0.1 release, zealot (and a number of other people) wrote with the news that "Intel will release its latest compilers (the ones that optimize for P4 and can do some auto-vectorization of code) for Linux this Thursday. I'd love to see some performance numbers for compiled code on a P4 if anyone gets their hands on this ... maybe the autovectorization could help some gimp plugins speed up."
You cannot stop the chess updates Álvaro Begué writes: "Junior is the new World Micro Computer Chess Champion, Shredder won in the single processor category (five years in a row) and Goliath won the blitz tournament. Congratulations to all of them. Check out the official website."
Maybe the durned things will stick around forever. In addition to the IBM research on making ultra-slim CRT monitors, an Anonymous Coward points to another article on the future of CRTs: "This is a new technology that can integrate into existing production lines and can halve the depth of a CRT type tube. A TV normally 22 inches deep would be only 11 inches."
Crikey! Usenet archives going back even FURTHER? Great, now people will be able to trace me back to my great Usenet roots....
"My name is Dave Rhodes. In September 1988 my car was reposessed and the bill collectors were hounding me like you wouldn't believe"....
The topic is Slashback: Memory, Constancy, Triumph. Yet there isn't any mention about memory. Maybe they forgot. :)
The new corperate america, u would think Intel would be giving this away seeing how AMD is kicking their butts and without this optimization the P$ is a slug.
Now they want to charge to make their dog chip work right?
and no one else sees this?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Candescent Technologies has been working on this technology since 1991 and it looks like its about ready to go prime time with it. It has the same brightness, contrast, refresh time, and viewing angle that normal CRTs have but uses less power than LCDs in the same size package. Can't wait to hang one of these on the wall.
Science is the Real TRUTH!
Funny how everyone wants what they don't have:
"I hate this stupid CRT. I wish i had an LCD monitor. Cheapskate boss."
"I can't wait 'till i get this laptop back to the office so i can plug it into a CRT instead of having to squint at a stupid LCD."
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
NOOOOOOO! As a young, stupid college freshman in 1992, I discovered usenet and made a fool out of myself several times. I have been resting peacefully at night for the last decade, thinking that my past was safely hidden from the present, believing that nobody would be able to hold me responsible for the misdeeds of my youth. I guess I'm going to have to change my name now.
This is a new technology that can integrate into existing production lines and can halve the depth of a CRT type tube. A TV normally 22 inches deep would be only 11 inches
This is nothing new, but it's an incremental improvement. I'd like some technical info before I can decide whether or not this is just a marketing stunt or other dubious improvement.
When TV sets first came out in the 1940s, their CRTs more resembled oscilloscopes. They were long, and with small screens. Their deflection angles were about 25 degrees.
As the early 1950s dawned, TV sets started to feature electromagnetic deflection. New, horizontal and vertical ouput tubes were suddenly able to support the current requirements of deflecting the beam 45 degrees towards a new big-screen 17" display.
The 1960s saw the beginning of the embrace of color television. As there are three electron beams in color TV sets, the neck was bigger than in monochrome sets. More deflection current was required to drive a 17" color set than a 17" black and white. High-tech new beam power amplifier tubes were developed to deal with the loads - compactron tubes like the 6LU8 and 21GY5 replaced the venerable 6BQ6. The spillover was that the mass-produced new high-power deflection tubes could also be used to make tighter deflection angles on black and white sets; the 19DUP4 was a Philco B&W picture tube released in 1965. It had a whopping 110 degree deflection angle, making for a TV set that had a 19" display but was only a foot deep.
Solid state TV sets using high-power MOSFET transistors have been able to handle the bigger current to drive new tight-deflection 110 degree color tubes. So far, it's been incremental.
But there remains a problem. A TV set's deflection yoke has to be driven with a sawtooth wave. There's a slow ramp up in voltage, then it quickly snaps down to off. Then another slow ramp and another quick snap. This corresponds to the beam sweeping sideways across the screen and then resetting to the left hand side very quickly.
Because the output amplifiers are neither fully on nor fully off, they're running in linear mode. All the energy not actually used to drive the yoke during the ramp is simply wasted as heat. But that energy isn't free... won't these things be meant to deal with Energy Star and other certifications? Tighter deflection means more deflection current means more wasted power in the amplifiers... and if the EPA buckles by defining a new guideline for thin monitors like these will purport to be, they'll be in competition with LCD monitors.
LCD will win.
The CRT will always be with us, but its time in the mainstream is coming to an end. This sounds too much like a marketing ploy, and goes too far against physics to be anything else.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Not really. As the GCC folks readily admit, GCC is presently suboptimal at generating code for highly superscalar instruction sets. This isn't too much of a problem for P1->P4 (but gets progressivly stickier) which aren't very rich in that regard, but it gets to be a significant issue for LIW and VLIW architectures (including IA64).
This isn't a bad reflection on GCC or its developers, however - writing such a compiler (in particular, an instruction scheduler that keeps the various pipelines efficiently filled) is very hard, and this hitherto hasn't been an issue for the mainstream architectures at which GCC is targeted.
I remember reading somewhere that Philips spent more writing the compiler for its TriMedia VLIW chip (which is 5x5, as I recall) than they did actually designing the chip itself.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
The compiler crashed and burned. Their techical support site (which you get to by clicking on a creepy NDA) didn't contain much information. The links that did look interesting were broken
Eventually I found a document contained a list of known bugs. One of them was " was not included in the distribution. This will be fixed in the next update." Fantastic!
Has anyone out there successfully installed this compiler? My employers are very interested in using it (we want fast code for our intel machines), and I am very interested in trying it out.
The middle mind speaks!