God is suing, well, everybody, for violating his patent on cellular mitosis. Many people are using the 'my cells do it on thier own, I don't even know what that
word means' defence, but the judge involved does not buy that. He says 'As soon as you realized that you weren't dead, you should have started paying the
royalties, scumass.'
I've heard that God's patent expired and any old idiot can procreate these days.
We're kind of straying off topic here, but NANDs are often preferred because the p-channel transistors are in parallel. N-channel transistors switch faster than
p-channel ones, and thus don't suffer as much from being placed in series.
In practice, the NOR is typically twice (or more) as large as a NAND in CMOS. You're (practically) right about the N-channel switching faster than P-channel ones (due to electron/hole mobility), but out here, we double or triple the size of P-channel transistors, AKA PMOSFETs AKA PFETs so they perform much closer to the NFETs. Increasing the size of those PFETs increases the internal capacitance, which adds up, and can slow the circuit down when compared to a NAND configuration. Increased capacitance increases power dissipation.
There's no space or cost benefit of a NAND over a NOR - they're both 2N transistors for N inputs.
There is either no space or (almost) no speed benefit over a NOR. Either way, speed, space and power count into cost, so I need to disagree there.
It has 4 buttons, but under X the top two act exactly like the bottom 2. Setting buttons=4 in my XF86Config didn't help. Has anyone had luck making these buttons do something useful?
I think the count of people that use S/390 is far less inportant than the importance of those people. S/390 has no peer in its class as a mainfraim. Sun's starfire
comes close.
Sun's Starfire, aka Enterprise 10000, comes as close to competing with the S/390 as a Cessna does to an SR-71. They both fly, burn stuff to get from point a to point b and get their jobs done, but they cater to different people entirely.
Please allow me to consult Google and present you with this 13 September, 1999 InformationWeek story. "The RS/6000 S80 symmetric multiprocessing server will be available next week with between six and 24 450-MHz PowerPC RS64 III chips based on copper technology for enhanced performance. IBM says a 24-way S80 outperforms Sun's 64-way Enterprise 10000 server. Though Independent Transaction Processing Council benchmark results aren't final, industry analyst Brad Day of Giga Information Group confirms IBM's claim. Pricing for the S80 starts at $290,000 for a six-way server. The vendor says high-end versions of the server will cost 50% less than Sun's high-end versions of the Enterprise 10000. "
Since then, the RS6k has continued to grow in speed. The S/390, on the other hand, does not specialize in massively parallel jobs like that. The S/390 is awesome at high volume data processing.
I'm not sure who you insulted more-- the S80 for forgetting about it or the S/390 for not knowing what it did.
I changed my major before starting my first day of class.
I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in May 1998 with a BS in Computer and Systems Engineering and again in May 1999, but with a Masters of Engineering in the same major.
At RPI, Elecrtical Engineering is basically analog electronics. Transistors, resistors, capacitors and inductors. Computer Science is programming-- C, C++, Java, it continues. Computer and Systems Engineering boils down to Electrical Engineering with a digital skew to it and a concentration in Computer Science (primarily transistors, boolean logic and a little C/C++ and assembler).
I applied as Computer Science because I didn't know any better. Before school started, I had talked to actual students and knew I wanted to transfer from the School of Science to the School of Engineering, and CSYS I became. Check with the current students at your school-- your TAs or fraternity brothers/sorority sisters and ask for their opinions.
Incidentally, I am now happily employed at a large company doing embedded SRAM design.
Hey, can we interview a www.cnn.com admin and grill him on current events?
Howabout a Microsoft network technician and grill him on the future Microsoft operating systems?
Maybe we/.'ers need to go back to the They Might Be Giants interview
and gain some perspective.
There used to be this product on the marked called 'wire'. I don't think it was trademarked. Anyway, they used 'wire' to make 'cables' (many wires packaged as one). If your product had the ability to plug in a 'wire' or even a 'cable', it didn't matter what orientation your phone or PDA had.
It's easiest to think of it as ethernet but much slower.
I've heard that you can still get some vintage PDAs and cell phones that accept the technology. The downside is that these 'cables' are one more thing to carry. The upside is the always on characteristic that they have.
I signed a non-compete when I started working here. Now, I'm a professional SRAM designer. I am not thinking about leaving the company, but we've seen a few leave over the years. Non-compete only makes sense for us if we leave to design SRAMS for another company. Our skillsets are more flexible, so we can leave and do circuit design or anything else that does not involve actual array work without violating the clause.
Keep the scope of the clause in mind before ignoring it.
"Myst" ends the game without destruction.
"Civilization"-esque games teach both creation of value through trade and alliances and destruction through war. If you want to embody the real world, war/destruction should be a possibility.
"Creatures" is a game for the sake of entertainment, as is "Aquazone".
The first person shooter has its place, though.
Let's see. Build a better operating system, but emulate the bad one just long enough to get the critical user base. Here's a lesson you should have learned when you made that decision for OS/2 when you worked in the marketing department there: Companies will cut costs and only develop for the operating system you emulate because it'll work in two environments with the effort of one.
The picture you paint is perhaps overly optimistic. "The MRAM doesn't require the refresh of a DRAM, and has the nonvolatility of a EEPROM, but has reliability superior to
the EEPROM. So, an MRAM may be able to replace DRAM's, SRAM's. amd EEPROM's, without involving any major
compromise or tradeoff. " You're not an engineer, are you? An engineer knows that there are ALWAYS compromises and tradeoffs. The word "yield" has not been spoken. Need I? Chances are that if you see no reason not to do something, you're missing a detail. Your "may" didn't have enough emphasis and your picture was too rosy for my taste.
SRAMS are high speed devices. Their density is not beyond reproach, but their speeds are. MRAM is not currently being touted to replace SRAM for speed applications. The highest cycle time I saw was 10ns. A 3d video card needs closer to half that!
The last MRAM I heard about, which may rely on a different technology than this one (but it sounds the same) had a hurdle to overcome-- how do you sense a non-changing magnetic field? The way they overcame it was by running current past it, writing it to a known state and then running current past it again. If they are the same, then the stored bit is the same as the known state. If the currents are different, then they are different states. What does all that crap mean? Well, it's non-volatile-- you don't need to give it power to keep its state. It does, however, require refresh in the sense that every read must be re-written back.
If, on the other hand, it truly has the strengths of all of those types of memory and none of the weaknesses, it will indeed be a great day. I'm not saying it's impossible-- I'm just encouraging realism. Dense, non volatile, high speed and high yield?!
So end the rants of an SRAM designer.
That's probably right in academia, where MOSIS is actually used, but don't even think about saying that in the real world where using integer multiples of lambda will not have enough resolution. Let me guess. You're a junior, right?
Speaking as a professional VLSI engineer,.18 microns refers to a gate length. The longer this is, the more resistance there is in a FET; this brings us to the traditional viewpoint of how to speed up FETs by making them smaller-- higher current. Capacitance is becoming a large factor, but it's the current that has been the largest in the past.
I did a quick browse at level 1 and didn't see this already pointed out. Not only were free operating systems left out (Linux, *BSD, FreeDOS, etc), but so were less free (BeOS, not considered "Free" to purists) and not at all free, like OS/2 or SCO.
Perhaps it would be useful to remember those that Microsoft have already mostly eliminated through tactics similar to this one.
Like all such simulations of evolution, the program can't really create something novel that the programmer hadn't already thought of -- just combinations of
preprogrammed parts. What makes biological evolution interesting and powerful is that new parts arise without a pre-conceived design.
True enough. Life must obey certain fundamental rules. Interesting to note that digital beasts may end up evolving through soft error rate. One could argue that the radiation that changes our DNA over the ages could be analogous to minor instruction changes, most of which are garbage, but a few of which do not cause segmentation violations and fewer yet actually do something useful to the program.
Somebody needs to remember to have his cup of coffee before posting to Slashdot...
Strike 1: "IBM Memory eXpansion Technology" BiCapitalization is the first sign of bad tech - it means the marketing people got to it before engineering could get it out the door.
What with all the neat stuff we've seen IBM do lately, why do you assume that marketing got to it before the engineers were at least positive it was feasible? With their reputation, I think it's safe to say that marketing got their numbers from the engineers.
Strike 2: fake numbers. "as memory comprises 40 to 70 percent of the cost of most NT-based server configurations" Er, gee, not only is that an absurdly large error margin, but most servers cost, oh, we'll say $2000 and up. 40% of is $800. $800 of PC133 right now is about 640MB of RAM. Most systems in that price range have 256-384. Oops.
This is IBM. Big Blue. When they talk cost, they talk cost to them. Your estimated memory cost is a bit different than theirs. You know-- they're the people who advertise on prime time TV to sell SERVICES.
Strike 3: Stating the obvious "and millions of tiny transistors" Oh, and how else would you do it? An analog circuit, perhaps?!
Some people actually need the obvious stated, and there can be no room for assumptions.
Hate to break it to you, but do you think that your pretty 1GHz Pentium IV is purely digital? Those FETs are going from purely on to purely off the entire ride? Sorry. The DC component of those circuits are part of why x86 architecture processors act as space heaters. You can save all sorts of time if you don't wait for a rail to rail voltage swing.
Strike 4: Not promising: "The new technology is seamless to the end-user because the compressed data can be uncompressed in nanoseconds when needed." Call me a pessimist, but memory right now is around 6ns for PC133. Now, assuming a very conservative 2ns to decode the data, that's 8ns, which is a 25% performance hit. How many admins do you know that would take a 25% hit on performance on their servers to save a couple hundred bucks? In short, this new tech is gonna tank.
I'm willing to assume for a moment, that you know what you're talking about, and that such simple algorithms as compression DO actually take 2ns to work (which is utter BS because we're talking about on-chip logic which happens to be just before the latches to permit the data on the bus-- somehow this logic counts as a whole THIRD the worst case path to actually get to the memory cell), and point out that, if you do actually see the 50% compression that most people see (remember even Stacker saw that), you just moved TWICE the amount of data in your 8ns than someone who moved in 6ns. Higher latency, yes, for the first word. Remember-- we're probably going to be moving another word after that.
If you're going to criticize, stick to the OS implications.
Apple's Firewire "tax" is because they own patents in this area. They are not the only people who charge a quarter per port, as they're not the only people who own patents REQUIRED for an IEEE1394 compliant implementation.
Wine Is Not an Emulator. It actually implements the Windows APIs in Linux, last time I checked. M$ can still change their APIs, but they'll lose some compatibility.
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on 11:36 Monday 02 April 2001 EST you wrote:
> d00d! N0w t43y kin 4iN8 l33t wAr3z!
God is suing, well, everybody, for violating his patent on cellular mitosis. Many people are using the 'my cells do it on thier own, I don't even know what that word means' defence, but the judge involved does not buy that. He says 'As soon as you realized that you weren't dead, you should have started paying the royalties, scumass.' I've heard that God's patent expired and any old idiot can procreate these days.
We're kind of straying off topic here, but NANDs are often preferred because the p-channel transistors are in parallel. N-channel transistors switch faster than p-channel ones, and thus don't suffer as much from being placed in series. In practice, the NOR is typically twice (or more) as large as a NAND in CMOS. You're (practically) right about the N-channel switching faster than P-channel ones (due to electron/hole mobility), but out here, we double or triple the size of P-channel transistors, AKA PMOSFETs AKA PFETs so they perform much closer to the NFETs. Increasing the size of those PFETs increases the internal capacitance, which adds up, and can slow the circuit down when compared to a NAND configuration. Increased capacitance increases power dissipation. There's no space or cost benefit of a NAND over a NOR - they're both 2N transistors for N inputs. There is either no space or (almost) no speed benefit over a NOR. Either way, speed, space and power count into cost, so I need to disagree there.
Trees dont think. Fungi don't think. Alive these things are, are they not? When 900 years old you reach, speak english so well you will not, eh?
They must be talking about a file in the current directory and not a hidden entry in the root.
It has 4 buttons, but under X the top two act exactly like the bottom 2. Setting buttons=4 in my XF86Config didn't help. Has anyone had luck making these buttons do something useful?
I think the count of people that use S/390 is far less inportant than the importance of those people. S/390 has no peer in its class as a mainfraim. Sun's starfire comes close. Sun's Starfire, aka Enterprise 10000, comes as close to competing with the S/390 as a Cessna does to an SR-71. They both fly, burn stuff to get from point a to point b and get their jobs done, but they cater to different people entirely. Please allow me to consult Google and present you with this 13 September, 1999 InformationWeek story. "The RS/6000 S80 symmetric multiprocessing server will be available next week with between six and 24 450-MHz PowerPC RS64 III chips based on copper technology for enhanced performance. IBM says a 24-way S80 outperforms Sun's 64-way Enterprise 10000 server. Though Independent Transaction Processing Council benchmark results aren't final, industry analyst Brad Day of Giga Information Group confirms IBM's claim. Pricing for the S80 starts at $290,000 for a six-way server. The vendor says high-end versions of the server will cost 50% less than Sun's high-end versions of the Enterprise 10000. " Since then, the RS6k has continued to grow in speed. The S/390, on the other hand, does not specialize in massively parallel jobs like that. The S/390 is awesome at high volume data processing. I'm not sure who you insulted more-- the S80 for forgetting about it or the S/390 for not knowing what it did.
I changed my major before starting my first day of class. I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in May 1998 with a BS in Computer and Systems Engineering and again in May 1999, but with a Masters of Engineering in the same major. At RPI, Elecrtical Engineering is basically analog electronics. Transistors, resistors, capacitors and inductors. Computer Science is programming-- C, C++, Java, it continues. Computer and Systems Engineering boils down to Electrical Engineering with a digital skew to it and a concentration in Computer Science (primarily transistors, boolean logic and a little C/C++ and assembler). I applied as Computer Science because I didn't know any better. Before school started, I had talked to actual students and knew I wanted to transfer from the School of Science to the School of Engineering, and CSYS I became. Check with the current students at your school-- your TAs or fraternity brothers/sorority sisters and ask for their opinions. Incidentally, I am now happily employed at a large company doing embedded SRAM design.
Hey, can we interview a www.cnn.com admin and grill him on current events? Howabout a Microsoft network technician and grill him on the future Microsoft operating systems? Maybe we /.'ers need to go back to the They Might Be Giants interview
and gain some perspective.
There used to be this product on the marked called 'wire'. I don't think it was trademarked. Anyway, they used 'wire' to make 'cables' (many wires packaged as one). If your product had the ability to plug in a 'wire' or even a 'cable', it didn't matter what orientation your phone or PDA had.
It's easiest to think of it as ethernet but much slower.
I've heard that you can still get some vintage PDAs and cell phones that accept the technology. The downside is that these 'cables' are one more thing to carry. The upside is the always on characteristic that they have.
I signed a non-compete when I started working here. Now, I'm a professional SRAM designer. I am not thinking about leaving the company, but we've seen a few leave over the years. Non-compete only makes sense for us if we leave to design SRAMS for another company. Our skillsets are more flexible, so we can leave and do circuit design or anything else that does not involve actual array work without violating the clause.
Keep the scope of the clause in mind before ignoring it.
"Myst" ends the game without destruction. "Civilization"-esque games teach both creation of value through trade and alliances and destruction through war. If you want to embody the real world, war/destruction should be a possibility. "Creatures" is a game for the sake of entertainment, as is "Aquazone". The first person shooter has its place, though.
Let's see. Build a better operating system, but emulate the bad one just long enough to get the critical user base. Here's a lesson you should have learned when you made that decision for OS/2 when you worked in the marketing department there: Companies will cut costs and only develop for the operating system you emulate because it'll work in two environments with the effort of one.
If the head admin for Microsoft ran *NIX, would (s)he be considered the root of all evil?
The picture you paint is perhaps overly optimistic. "The MRAM doesn't require the refresh of a DRAM, and has the nonvolatility of a EEPROM, but has reliability superior to the EEPROM. So, an MRAM may be able to replace DRAM's, SRAM's. amd EEPROM's, without involving any major compromise or tradeoff. " You're not an engineer, are you? An engineer knows that there are ALWAYS compromises and tradeoffs. The word "yield" has not been spoken. Need I? Chances are that if you see no reason not to do something, you're missing a detail. Your "may" didn't have enough emphasis and your picture was too rosy for my taste. SRAMS are high speed devices. Their density is not beyond reproach, but their speeds are. MRAM is not currently being touted to replace SRAM for speed applications. The highest cycle time I saw was 10ns. A 3d video card needs closer to half that! The last MRAM I heard about, which may rely on a different technology than this one (but it sounds the same) had a hurdle to overcome-- how do you sense a non-changing magnetic field? The way they overcame it was by running current past it, writing it to a known state and then running current past it again. If they are the same, then the stored bit is the same as the known state. If the currents are different, then they are different states. What does all that crap mean? Well, it's non-volatile-- you don't need to give it power to keep its state. It does, however, require refresh in the sense that every read must be re-written back. If, on the other hand, it truly has the strengths of all of those types of memory and none of the weaknesses, it will indeed be a great day. I'm not saying it's impossible-- I'm just encouraging realism. Dense, non volatile, high speed and high yield?! So end the rants of an SRAM designer.
That's probably right in academia, where MOSIS is actually used, but don't even think about saying that in the real world where using integer multiples of lambda will not have enough resolution. Let me guess. You're a junior, right?
Speaking as a professional VLSI engineer, .18 microns refers to a gate length. The longer this is, the more resistance there is in a FET; this brings us to the traditional viewpoint of how to speed up FETs by making them smaller-- higher current. Capacitance is becoming a large factor, but it's the current that has been the largest in the past.
I did a quick browse at level 1 and didn't see this already pointed out. Not only were free operating systems left out (Linux, *BSD, FreeDOS, etc), but so were less free (BeOS, not considered "Free" to purists) and not at all free, like OS/2 or SCO. Perhaps it would be useful to remember those that Microsoft have already mostly eliminated through tactics similar to this one.
True enough. Life must obey certain fundamental rules. Interesting to note that digital beasts may end up evolving through soft error rate. One could argue that the radiation that changes our DNA over the ages could be analogous to minor instruction changes, most of which are garbage, but a few of which do not cause segmentation violations and fewer yet actually do something useful to the program.
Strike 1: "IBM Memory eXpansion Technology" BiCapitalization is the first sign of bad tech - it means the marketing people got to it before engineering could get it out the door.
What with all the neat stuff we've seen IBM do lately, why do you assume that marketing got to it before the engineers were at least positive it was feasible? With their reputation, I think it's safe to say that marketing got their numbers from the engineers.
Strike 2: fake numbers. "as memory comprises 40 to 70 percent of the cost of most NT-based server configurations" Er, gee, not only is that an absurdly large error margin, but most servers cost, oh, we'll say $2000 and up. 40% of is $800. $800 of PC133 right now is about 640MB of RAM. Most systems in that price range have 256-384. Oops.
This is IBM. Big Blue. When they talk cost, they talk cost to them. Your estimated memory cost is a bit different than theirs. You know-- they're the people who advertise on prime time TV to sell SERVICES.
Strike 3: Stating the obvious "and millions of tiny transistors" Oh, and how else would you do it? An analog circuit, perhaps?!
Some people actually need the obvious stated, and there can be no room for assumptions.
Hate to break it to you, but do you think that your pretty 1GHz Pentium IV is purely digital? Those FETs are going from purely on to purely off the entire ride? Sorry. The DC component of those circuits are part of why x86 architecture processors act as space heaters. You can save all sorts of time if you don't wait for a rail to rail voltage swing.
Strike 4: Not promising: "The new technology is seamless to the end-user because the compressed data can be uncompressed in nanoseconds when needed." Call me a pessimist, but memory right now is around 6ns for PC133. Now, assuming a very conservative 2ns to decode the data, that's 8ns, which is a 25% performance hit. How many admins do you know that would take a 25% hit on performance on their servers to save a couple hundred bucks? In short, this new tech is gonna tank.
I'm willing to assume for a moment, that you know what you're talking about, and that such simple algorithms as compression DO actually take 2ns to work (which is utter BS because we're talking about on-chip logic which happens to be just before the latches to permit the data on the bus-- somehow this logic counts as a whole THIRD the worst case path to actually get to the memory cell), and point out that, if you do actually see the 50% compression that most people see (remember even Stacker saw that), you just moved TWICE the amount of data in your 8ns than someone who moved in 6ns. Higher latency, yes, for the first word. Remember-- we're probably going to be moving another word after that.
If you're going to criticize, stick to the OS implications.
How did you get 20 Hydrogen atoms into one molecule?
Apple's Firewire "tax" is because they own patents in this area. They are not the only people who charge a quarter per port, as they're not the only people who own patents REQUIRED for an IEEE1394 compliant implementation.
10,000 geeks at 100 hours. Open source my ass. Open (Brute) Force. Distributed.net as it applies to law.
Wine Is Not an Emulator. It actually implements the Windows APIs in Linux, last time I checked. M$ can still change their APIs, but they'll lose some compatibility.