Maybe 5% of the books I own, and none of the machine-readable documents, came from Amazon. Just as very few of my music files came from iTunes. How'd you like it if you had to email.MP3s to Apple to get them onto your iPod? Genius?
1. You create a Walkman account when you get a Walkman. This is tied to 2 Walkman email addresses...
2. Sending MP3s is simple: email them to the standard account which will push it out to your Walkman directly after converting the file to ATRAC (cost: $.10),or the free one that converts it and sits in your Walkman account on Sony.com.
3. If you opted for free, you download the ATRAC file to your PC, plug your Walkman in, and transfer it. Gee, that was TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE WHEN SONY DID IT.
What I'm waiting for is a color e-ink reader, with a roughly 8.5x11 screen (or at least the same aspect ratio), and the capacity to natively display PDF documents. I imagine something the size/weight of a laptop screen, with a touch screen and a few nav buttons at the edges.
Exactly; this is something you immediately realize would rock, the minute you pick up an iPhone. Just scale the thing up to 8.5x11, lose the phone, add some serious battery capacity, and I'll pitch a tent in the mall to buy one.
Not to denigrate the achievements of the Phoenix lander, but this is exactly why the people who advocate robotic planetary missions over manned ones are wrong.
We didn't detect this water using Phoenix's million-dollar spectrometer designed to detect hydroxy compounds, or whatever. We detected it by adding a $20 digital camera that happened to be capable of pointing at some metal struts.
If you want to discover new stuff, you want to leave room for serendipity. Unfortunately, because Phoenix is a purpose-designed robotic platform, we can't ask any more questions about what the condensing substance is, or what else is in it. No matter how advanced they become, we can only tease ourselves with robots. To really check the place out, we have to go in person.
Correct, I didn't phrase it very well. I'm basically saying, once Moore's Law has tanked once and for all due to physical limitations, what's the die going to look like? Nothing but configurable gate arrays, a few massive general-purpose cores, lots of smaller cores, or some combination of the above? There's going to be a limit as to how fast a given computing task is going to execute on a given amount of die area. Chips like Cell and Larrabee suggest that we'll eventually see hybrid approaches everywhere, but there's still a lot of room to argue about core count, core complexity, and interconnect fabric. What doesn't appear likely is that non-von Neumann architectures are going to stage a comeback anytime soon. If you're not doing wacky architecture experiments, DSP work, or otherwise spending most of your time in highly-parallel code, you probably don't want to deal with FPGAs.
At least that's what they're teaching us at DeVry.:-P
What the hell does MIPS have to do with an FPGA? MIPS is an ISA, not a large-scale programmable embedded device/chip.
Sorry, to clarify (with an </i> even!): MIPS is not an "ISA," whatever that is. MIPS is a rather generic term for computational throughput (millions of instructions per second). A million cores running at one instruction per second generates 1 MIPS, so does a single core running at a million instructions per second.
You will use less die real estate and less power with a general-purpose processor designed for the second case than you will with an FPGA that implements the first case... so unless you're lucky enough to be working on one of a few specific parallel problems, you probably do not want to treat FPGAs as the religion you seem to think they are. Most general-purpose computational tasks don't parallelize to the extent that an FPGA is the right way to run them.
If you wanted to perform IDCTs for a video codec all day, a programmable gate array is fine. But if you want to write the rest of a video player, from its file system to its UI, you'd be nuts to do it in an HDL.
What the hell does MIPS have to do with an FPGA? MIPS is an ISA, not a large-scale programmable embedded device/chip.
It has everything to do with getting computational tasks done.
This "fundamental" natural limit... did you learn this at ITT Tech or something? I think and really hope you understand that when a transistor is shrunk in size, its power consumption during switches drops as well?
Just curious, since you seem rather knowledgeable. Why wasn't your PC made by Thinking Machines?
Interestingly, though, while FPGAs are cheap, they're still not as cheap as MIPS on a modern, mass-market Intel or AMD chip.
There's a fundamental natural limit -- some kind of physical constant that nobody has named yet -- that governs how much computing work can be done on a given amount of silicon, using a given amount of power. It's far from clear that massive parallelism is the way to get closest to that limit.
The demise of Moore's Law tells us that at least some parallelism will have to be involved, but going all the way to FPGA-level RTL coding is probably not going to be necessary. (I hope.)
(And you really don't want people questioning whether a meaningful solution can actually be attained)
That's exactly what you do want. If there's a more important question in science I don't know what it would be.
One comment above refers to a failed attempt to observe Faraday rotation as a "laser experiment gone wrong." He explained what he expected to occur, why he was skeptical that it would happen, what actually happenened when the test was conducted, and the outcome of further research into what (didn't) happen. In my book, that was a good example of a laser experiment gone right.
Where the hell are you people getting these comments? Stong's Amateur Scientist columns would be banned in 38 states and the European Union if it were published today. That CD describes projects from rocket motors to X-ray machines and linear accelerators.
Scientific American was not always whatever you think it is today.
like it or not, when all of you geeks become parents, either you will spend 95% of your time manually filtering your child's on-line access, buy closed-source software from some "very dependable" company or be a very bad parent.
Why does no one ever demand actual evidence of harm from people like you? You claim that all of these dire consequences will arise from allowing your children unfettered access to information, and that we, as a society, will have to accommodate your beliefs. We've heard it before, over and over, for a large part of a generation now.
If you actually had to cite concrete, peer-reviewed, reproducible studies demonstrating the societal benefits of draconian ISP-level censorship before your position was taken seriously, it'd be amusing. Because such a requirement would leave you gasping and sputtering and waving your hands, unable to point to any evidence that children are actually harmed by media content. Yet, for some reason, people with your opinion are exempt from such requirements.
My parents didn't try to censor my reading material. I respect them to this day for that, even though I didn't really need to read Mario Puzo at age eleven.
Again, a fine rant, as long as the end result actually is better performance. With Cell, it wasn't. PS3 programming is all pain, no gain; your best-case outcome is a code base that runs as well on the PS3 as it does on the Xbox 360's heterogeneous multicore implementation.
My whole point is that if you are going to smash the dominant paradigm and all that, there had better be a good reason. Anything limited to a 256K working set is a dead horse from the word 'go.' Cell was an engineering atrocity, and you can't judge Larrabee by any superficial similarities it might exhibit, as some people in this thread are doing.
Which they should do. Judges interpret laws. They are not supposed to write laws.
True, but they're supposed to interpret laws using the Constitution as a guide. It would be quite reasonable for the justices to come to the obvious conclusion that the "progress of the useful Arts and Sciences" is not being served by the current patent system... but again, they won't, because that would require them to take a stand on something.
The whole "cell is too hard to program for" bullshit was just a symptom of a larger industry-wide problem: education simply doesn't cover multi-threaded resource sharing nearly as well as it needs to.
It's not a matter of education. The problem with Cell is that game developers don't have the time to rearchitect systems they've used successfully for years every time an ivory-tower chipmaker gets a bright idea about the Way Things are Supposed To Work(tm). If you break with established development and coding practices as radically as Cell does, there had better be one hell of an upside.
most people here believe the earth evolved by chance which requires much worse odds than what you've described here....but I digress...(gonna get modded down for that surely haha)
No downmodding, just a question: Why do you hold your high-school biology book to one standard of proof, and the Bible to another?
Is it because the authors of the biology book didn't include enough threats and unaccountable promises to suit you?
All available precedent, as well as the conventional interpretation of the amendment itself, has supported the theory that the 2nd amendment gives a collective right to gun ownership.
The reason such precedents and interpretations are wrong can be easily understood by studying what the framers actually believed at the time they wrote the Second Amendment. If you had even suggested such an idea as a "collective right" to the authors of the Constitution, they would have laughed in your face, and then called a bailiff to toss you in the drunk tank for a weekend to sober up.
They had just fought a war with personally-owned weapons.
Don't like the Second? Then work to repeal it. Don't piss on the whole Bill of Rights by trying to subvert it.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe 5% of the books I own, and none of the machine-readable documents, came from Amazon. Just as very few of my music files came from iTunes. How'd you like it if you had to email .MP3s to Apple to get them onto your iPod? Genius?
1. You create a Walkman account when you get a Walkman. This is tied to 2 Walkman email addresses...
2. Sending MP3s is simple: email them to the standard account which will push it out to your Walkman directly after converting the file to ATRAC (cost: $.10),or the free one that converts it and sits in your Walkman account on Sony.com.
3. If you opted for free, you download the ATRAC file to your PC, plug your Walkman in, and transfer it. Gee, that was TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE WHEN SONY DID IT.
FTFY, no charge this time, drive through...
What I'm waiting for is a color e-ink reader, with a roughly 8.5x11 screen (or at least the same aspect ratio), and the capacity to natively display PDF documents. I imagine something the size/weight of a laptop screen, with a touch screen and a few nav buttons at the edges.
Exactly; this is something you immediately realize would rock, the minute you pick up an iPhone. Just scale the thing up to 8.5x11, lose the phone, add some serious battery capacity, and I'll pitch a tent in the mall to buy one.
I didn't know Google had a network of paid reporters and their affiliates.
The expenses to maintain such a network could be sandwiched in between petty cash and espresso-machine refills on Google's financial statement.
The AP is bringing a water gun to a knife fight.
That condensed on the metal parts of the rover
Not to denigrate the achievements of the Phoenix lander, but this is exactly why the people who advocate robotic planetary missions over manned ones are wrong.
We didn't detect this water using Phoenix's million-dollar spectrometer designed to detect hydroxy compounds, or whatever. We detected it by adding a $20 digital camera that happened to be capable of pointing at some metal struts.
If you want to discover new stuff, you want to leave room for serendipity. Unfortunately, because Phoenix is a purpose-designed robotic platform, we can't ask any more questions about what the condensing substance is, or what else is in it. No matter how advanced they become, we can only tease ourselves with robots. To really check the place out, we have to go in person.
For chrissakes, sales volume is not about quality
The athletic department just called, and they sounded pretty pissed. They want you to put the goalposts back right where you found them.
Nobody should be worried about cameras on every corner unless they are a criminal worried about being caught in the act.
If you live in the US, you're subject to about 40,000 pages of Federal, state, and local law.
Trust me. You're a criminal, as am I.
Correct, I didn't phrase it very well. I'm basically saying, once Moore's Law has tanked once and for all due to physical limitations, what's the die going to look like? Nothing but configurable gate arrays, a few massive general-purpose cores, lots of smaller cores, or some combination of the above? There's going to be a limit as to how fast a given computing task is going to execute on a given amount of die area. Chips like Cell and Larrabee suggest that we'll eventually see hybrid approaches everywhere, but there's still a lot of room to argue about core count, core complexity, and interconnect fabric. What doesn't appear likely is that non-von Neumann architectures are going to stage a comeback anytime soon. If you're not doing wacky architecture experiments, DSP work, or otherwise spending most of your time in highly-parallel code, you probably don't want to deal with FPGAs.
At least that's what they're teaching us at DeVry. :-P
What the hell does MIPS have to do with an FPGA? MIPS is an ISA, not a large-scale programmable embedded device/chip.
Sorry, to clarify (with an </i> even!): MIPS is not an "ISA," whatever that is. MIPS is a rather generic term for computational throughput (millions of instructions per second). A million cores running at one instruction per second generates 1 MIPS, so does a single core running at a million instructions per second.
You will use less die real estate and less power with a general-purpose processor designed for the second case than you will with an FPGA that implements the first case... so unless you're lucky enough to be working on one of a few specific parallel problems, you probably do not want to treat FPGAs as the religion you seem to think they are. Most general-purpose computational tasks don't parallelize to the extent that an FPGA is the right way to run them.
If you wanted to perform IDCTs for a video codec all day, a programmable gate array is fine. But if you want to write the rest of a video player, from its file system to its UI, you'd be nuts to do it in an HDL.
What the hell does MIPS have to do with an FPGA? MIPS is an ISA, not a large-scale programmable embedded device/chip.
It has everything to do with getting computational tasks done.
This "fundamental" natural limit... did you learn this at ITT Tech or something? I think and really hope you understand that when a transistor is shrunk in size, its power consumption during switches drops as well?
Just curious, since you seem rather knowledgeable. Why wasn't your PC made by Thinking Machines?
Interestingly, though, while FPGAs are cheap, they're still not as cheap as MIPS on a modern, mass-market Intel or AMD chip.
There's a fundamental natural limit -- some kind of physical constant that nobody has named yet -- that governs how much computing work can be done on a given amount of silicon, using a given amount of power. It's far from clear that massive parallelism is the way to get closest to that limit.
The demise of Moore's Law tells us that at least some parallelism will have to be involved, but going all the way to FPGA-level RTL coding is probably not going to be necessary. (I hope.)
http://xkcd.com/397/
WTF? It sure as hell doesn't affect pirates. DRM affects legitimate users only.
(And you really don't want people questioning whether a meaningful solution can actually be attained)
That's exactly what you do want. If there's a more important question in science I don't know what it would be.
One comment above refers to a failed attempt to observe Faraday rotation as a "laser experiment gone wrong." He explained what he expected to occur, why he was skeptical that it would happen, what actually happenened when the test was conducted, and the outcome of further research into what (didn't) happen. In my book, that was a good example of a laser experiment gone right.
Where the hell are you people getting these comments? Stong's Amateur Scientist columns would be banned in 38 states and the European Union if it were published today. That CD describes projects from rocket motors to X-ray machines and linear accelerators.
Scientific American was not always whatever you think it is today.
I seriously doubt the FTC would let them sell computers. They'd undercut everybody on the planet.
like it or not, when all of you geeks become parents, either you will spend 95% of your time manually filtering your child's on-line access, buy closed-source software from some "very dependable" company or be a very bad parent.
Why does no one ever demand actual evidence of harm from people like you? You claim that all of these dire consequences will arise from allowing your children unfettered access to information, and that we, as a society, will have to accommodate your beliefs. We've heard it before, over and over, for a large part of a generation now.
If you actually had to cite concrete, peer-reviewed, reproducible studies demonstrating the societal benefits of draconian ISP-level censorship before your position was taken seriously, it'd be amusing. Because such a requirement would leave you gasping and sputtering and waving your hands, unable to point to any evidence that children are actually harmed by media content. Yet, for some reason, people with your opinion are exempt from such requirements.
So... let's see that evidence, shall we?
Why not just make ESRB ratings enforcible by law to the same degree as alcohol sale and consumption?
Um, because alcohol abuse causes intoxication and addiction, and games don't?
My parents didn't try to censor my reading material. I respect them to this day for that, even though I didn't really need to read Mario Puzo at age eleven.
Again, a fine rant, as long as the end result actually is better performance. With Cell, it wasn't. PS3 programming is all pain, no gain; your best-case outcome is a code base that runs as well on the PS3 as it does on the Xbox 360's heterogeneous multicore implementation.
My whole point is that if you are going to smash the dominant paradigm and all that, there had better be a good reason. Anything limited to a 256K working set is a dead horse from the word 'go.' Cell was an engineering atrocity, and you can't judge Larrabee by any superficial similarities it might exhibit, as some people in this thread are doing.
Which they should do. Judges interpret laws. They are not supposed to write laws.
True, but they're supposed to interpret laws using the Constitution as a guide. It would be quite reasonable for the justices to come to the obvious conclusion that the "progress of the useful Arts and Sciences" is not being served by the current patent system... but again, they won't, because that would require them to take a stand on something.
The whole "cell is too hard to program for" bullshit was just a symptom of a larger industry-wide problem: education simply doesn't cover multi-threaded resource sharing nearly as well as it needs to.
It's not a matter of education. The problem with Cell is that game developers don't have the time to rearchitect systems they've used successfully for years every time an ivory-tower chipmaker gets a bright idea about the Way Things are Supposed To Work(tm). If you break with established development and coding practices as radically as Cell does, there had better be one hell of an upside.
But in Cell's case, there wasn't.
Oops.
If they touch it at all, they'll punt it back to Congress, like they do with everything else of any real importance.
most people here believe the earth evolved by chance which requires much worse odds than what you've described here....but I digress...(gonna get modded down for that surely haha)
No downmodding, just a question: Why do you hold your high-school biology book to one standard of proof, and the Bible to another?
Is it because the authors of the biology book didn't include enough threats and unaccountable promises to suit you?
All available precedent, as well as the conventional interpretation of the amendment itself, has supported the theory that the 2nd amendment gives a collective right to gun ownership.
The reason such precedents and interpretations are wrong can be easily understood by studying what the framers actually believed at the time they wrote the Second Amendment. If you had even suggested such an idea as a "collective right" to the authors of the Constitution, they would have laughed in your face, and then called a bailiff to toss you in the drunk tank for a weekend to sober up.
They had just fought a war with personally-owned weapons.
Don't like the Second? Then work to repeal it. Don't piss on the whole Bill of Rights by trying to subvert it.