Cliff Click's Crash Course In Modern Hardware

Lord Straxus writes "In this presentation (video) from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click talks about why it's almost impossible to tell what an x86 chip is really doing to your code due to all of the crazy kung-fu and ninjitsu it does to your code while it's running. This talk is an excellent drill-down into the internals of the x86 chip, and it's a great way to get an understanding of what really goes on down at the hardware and why certain types of applications run so much faster than other types of applications. Dr. Cliff really knows his stuff!"

Comments

Another Imbecile incompetently running video

[rfc1394]

I am guessing that the site was slashdotted because the video never ran. Yet another example of some imbecile who designs their own video player and either can't run the material correctly or can't handle the load. I see this over and over, someone - or some site - decides to run their own video player and it's either inoperative or runs badly. I wrote about this on my blog in October 2008 how so many places try - and fail - to properly run video.

You know, running video correctly isn't rocket science, YouTube does it fine under loads that would slashdot Slashdot. But do these stupidos use YouTube to serve their video? Noooo, they'd prefer to use some incompetent who can't provide it properly, probably because they're under the impression they'd lose ad revenue or something, I guess. But I see this all the time. The New York Times provides video for some of their stories, But their video doesn't work, and stalls, but has no way to cache the video so that if it fails you can either get it to run smoothly or go back and run it again without having to download the entire video all over again after it's already been served. I guess they never thought about people having problems,

If these were streamed video like a live event, that would be one thing. But they do the exact same thing YouTube does, they feed stored video to a player written using Adobe Flash. So there's no excuse for their failures except pure incompetence and/or stupidity.