> You ever tried to code in RISC assembler?? It aint quit the walk in the park that x86 assembler is by comparison!
Uh? It's a matter of taste: I prefer reading RISC assembler any time than reading 86 assembler.
As for reading the assembly output, I do it from time to time to see what the compiler has generated because I'm curious, but it is not the good way to optimise, first you should check where the time is spent before optimising.
Do a ls in/usr/bin,/usr/local/bin, have a coffee, come back and look at the result: a lots of tools isn't-it? Do you REALLY want to see all those tools in the menu? No, you don't..
>not even gonna attempt to do it with "tweaking files" ever Sorry but it's almost impossible to avoid tweaking files with Linux..
> Intel overcame the first two [ Too few registers AND Registers have special purposes, and are not generic enough ] by going to a hidden RISCy core with many more registers.
"Overcame" is too strong IMHO, the number of exposed register that the compiler can see is still ridiculously small. Using additional hidden register helps but still, sometimes the compiler has to add instructions to store registers in memory because he can't directly use those additional registers. So this work-around of the ugly 80x86 architecture has its limit..
PS: even though RISC CPU have much more exposed CPU they also use "hidden" additional registers for register renaming purpose, for example.
> Thus, contrary to what most people would feel > the thing that is holding AI up is hardware.
Uh? Not only the hardware! Let's suppose that you have a computer as powerfull as a brain: I give it to you and say now try to pass the Turing test, would you be able to do it?
No, because you would be missing: 1) the software 2) the database.
We have very little clue about how to do the software right now. And even if you had a software which could be interesting, you'd still have to build a HUGE database if you want to have an interesting result.. And the funny thing is that to really know if your software is interesting or not, first you have to invest a lot of time and money to build the database.. And if a computer is better than another (with the same hardware to simplify comparison) would it be because it has a better software or a better database?
Also I disagree with you that making a competition with the Turing test is only to give researchers bad name: human vs computer chess competitions existed also back when human beat computers without effort and nobody protested that it was giving AI researchers a bad name. Of course in the end, it seems that beating human has been made thanks to advance in computer power but caused very little progress in AI researches.
I hope that Go competitions between man and machine will be more interesting for AI researchers.
I don't see the PPC mentionned in the note from Linus. And the description of the PPC MMU seems quite normal to me. A page based MMU common which looks to me the same as any MMU for RISC-style CPU.
And do you know if the TLB of the PPC is tagged or not?
It is a shame that 80x86 uses non-tagged TLB, doing a cache-flush of the TLB each time you change to a new process must be quite costly..
Re:Don't know your history, do you?
on
Building the A380
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· Score: 1
> As for the US, its true that your presense probably > have saved us from a communist takeover. So thank > you US of A for that. Wether that is a good thing > or not is debatable.
Without the USA there also would have been much more German troops going against the USSR. It is likely but not sure at all that USSR would still have won.
As for "being saved from a communist takeover is a good thing or a bad thing": if you're trolling, it's NOT funny! We're not talking about a mild modern communist here, but about Stalline! This guy sent millions of people dying in Siberia camps, and you're wondering wether it is a good thing or a bad thing to be under his control???
No, the Western europe can thanks 1) the USSR dictator Stalline and its soldiers for defeating the German dictator Hitler 2) the USA for saving them from Stalline.
BTW I'm French and even though I despise what Busch is trying to do at the moment, I'm very thankfull for what the USA and the USSR have done during the second WW.
While I agree that hard work will improve your situation, this sentence maybe right for the USA and the Europe but it downplays the situation the majority of the people living in this planet where hard work is necessary to just be able to eat!
I hope that they could use several head in parallel at the same time to increase the reading speed and also (why not?) the writing speed.
If I remember well, a company has already done this for CD-ROM, it was reading several track at the same time, they had a commercial product but I don't know if it sold well.
I wonder why it hasn't be done with HDD?
Note that I'm not talking about multiple heads (too expensive), but using one head to read/write several tracks at the same time.
>>> I beleive that there is a God, because someone must have created the Universe! >> So who has created God then?
>Oh, come on. Surely you don't think this is a convincing argument? One obvious answer might be that God existed forever.
In that case, I can also say that the Universe has existed forever: no need of any creator..
The time 0 of the big-bang cannot be reached from our current scientific theories, neither the temperature of 0K, so it is a matter of notation if you think those unattainable value as 0 or as minus infinity..
> country where majority of the people were raised not to believe in God (e.g. Soviet Union). > There is now a large number of (educated, intelligent)people there who believe in God. So?
Good point, but it would be interesting to know if those who beleive in God now had religious parent? Religion was forbidden, yes, but it doesn't mean that people stopped beleiving in a religion and didn't taught secretely their children.
Also banning religion in some way helps those religion: they appear innocent victim, so when the ban disappear, religion has gained a lot of appeal..
As an historical counter-example, I could say France is a good example: it used to be a very religious country and now the church are mostly empty, Religion while still quite present is more and more some kinf of tradition, but is less and less active.
> What evidence do you have that all adults that believe in God only do so because of childhood teachings?
Well, 1) everyone I know who believes in a God has had some religious childhood teaching, or their parents beleived in God. 2) all the people I know who weren't raised religiously doesn't beleive in any God. 3) some people I know (my parents) who followed religious teaching doesn't believe in God.
It's not evidence but it is a pretty good corelation.
And when you ask someone who believes in God, why he believe in God, his evidence are usually not very convincing! > I beleive in God because I have the faith! That's a circular reasoning and why this God and not this other one? > I beleive that there is a God, because someone must have created the Universe! So who has created God then?
About your first point, you're right that in some case it matters, but those case are quite rare.
How often do you use distributed application? Me never: so the clean solution is really rarely needed.
About your second point: Second, if we're talking about freeing memory, you want to free it as soon as possible and not when the program ends.
Uh? He is talking about freeing memory upon a fatal exception: the memory will be freed soon! Except in embeded case, it won't matter much.
> He[a programer] shouldn't give a damn apple about how the underlying OS works. Uh? You're living in an ivory tower? Of course a programer has to make some asumptions about how the underlying OS work! The fewer asumption, the better I agree, but this particular asumption [OS frees memory of dead programs] is quite natural. Otherwise your OS would really by fragile as any "bad application" could easily crash the OS by using all the memory..
Re:Let's hope this means the end of veal
on
Lab-Grown Steak
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· Score: 2
No, in fact it's quite logical: those who have a large exposure to it, usually had this exposure very young: they see their parents killing animals that they eat later, so they are used to it and probably don't think very much about wether it's right or wrong to kill animals..
It's the same thing about religion: if a child is raised in a religious society, with a religious education and in a religious family he has 99% chances of becoming a religious believer , whereas if a child raised in a 'laissez faire' family and society without religious education has 99% chance of becoming atheist or agnostisc..
Re:Windows XP was great, except....
on
New Red Hat Beta
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· Score: 2
> My post was mostly a joke, but all of my points were true on some level.
I'm not serious too, still I disagree with some of your points.
About the installation of programs: most of the programs you install in Windows ask you where you want to put the programs, the menus and if you want to put an icon on the screen, etc..
This is way better than the instalation of programs on Linux when programs don't ask where they are going to put their menus and where modifying the menus is more difficult (on Mandrake at least) than in Windows..
As for the DMA mode: Windows XP misdetected my settings for my HDD for a year, then I found the solution: put all your IDE controler in PIO mode, reboot, put the HDD in 'DMA if detected' reboot it solved the problem but I lost many hours looking for a solution, trying weird stuff by modifying the registry, etc. I prefer the hdparm command! Still you're right it can be very annoying for beginners that DMA is not turned on for some of the devices.
UFO as 'I've been abducted by little green men', not UFO simply as Unknown Flying Objects, which do exist of course.
Should NASA help also to dismiss these myths? It's going to be hard: when you really look at it it is really a belief: it's the same thing as fighting against astrology or other stupid myth.
The only thing that can help fighting those myth is better teaching, trying to change the mind of adults is nearly impossible.
PS: I'm French but I'm not criticising the US, in France we have our own crackpot theories: - astrology is a huge marcket here - to apply to any jobs we have to write by hand a letter so that a specialist can check in our handwriting our qualities and default!
*Sigh* and I'm not even joking: it is sad but true.
I'm a foreigner (French), so of course my external POV is biased but I disagree on several points on the article: - point 3. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke.
Sorry, but this is very bad exemple, while I agree that in the US there are too many litigations, I also believe that tobacco companies do try to compel innocent people to smoke by running ads targetted to young teen. In France, after a long battle, the problem has been solved in a radical way: any advertisement for tobacco is forbidden in any media.
- point 12. Uh? I've always seen American people as being in general higly religious which apparently haven't prevented the US from being the richest nation. I don't really thinks that the nature of the religion is important wether it is catholicism, mysticim, or other things (except sects of course)
But I'm an atheist, so I'm not very knowledgeable into religions and I don't care, to be honest.
Also the article somehow insists too much on the technical side of the affair: US has not have the best student or best researchers for a long time, still the US is still the first nation on a big number of field, why? Because the transformation of new idea into industries which sells works very well in the US whereas in the other country usually it doesn't work so well.
And another thing: the article didn't list the patents as a highly dangourous thing: they could slow down inovation very much..
The lack of gravity in the ISS is not a bug: it's a feature! You can "reproduce" gravity by spinning the spaceship: while it would be more confortable for humans, one of the goal of being up there is to lear what happen to people and material in 0G environement..
Beside on the moon there is gravity, just 1/6 of Earth's gravity, so the effect on the bone/muscle should be much lower.
In his article he wrote: "No twentieth-century amateur could stand like Darwin in the front rank with Hubble and Einstein."
But calling Einstein a professional is not quite true: when he made his firsts famous publications (in 1906 if memory serves), he was employed as an expert in Berne's patent application office.
So at this time Einstein was an amateur..
Of course, when he discovered the general relativity, he was a professional, but calling Einstein a professional is a bit misleading: he could have keep his job as patent examiner for all his life, if he hadn't made all these groundbreaking discoveries when he was an amateur..
OK, I have the reverse story: my parents were teached with religious (catholic) education, and both of them are atheist now.
Me,my brother and sister were brought without any sort of religious education, my parents just telling us: we don't beleive that there is any god, if you want to beleive in one, that's fine with us.
Guess what? All of us are atheist.
And you found God, which one? There are some may gods out there: Buddha, Catholics's god, Zeus,... I'd like to know how you choose one, the one with the best superpower? (joking)
And if God created the Universe, what created God? For myself, my own answer for "what created the Universe?" is: I don't know.
If you answer "I don't know" to "what created God?", you just went a step further which gives you nothing..
Physics can be "supernatural": some physics experiments can produce condition which does not exists in the nature: for example, very low temperatures have been produced much lower than exists in the natural world.
The tablet form factor is very usefull for people working in a stand-up position: nurses, repair people, etc..
For all the other use, a laptop or a desktop is better. You can type better(less error) and faster with a keyboard than with writing with a pen, even with the best handwriting recognition software of tomorrow.
The PC industry is desesperately trying to find new ways to sell more PC, so they came up with the tablet PC, but let's not be fooled by the hype..
Some vendors are very clever: they put both a keyboard and a "tactile" screen into their tabletPC so you can have both input mode. But I think that the early "normal" users after realising that there using 99% of the time the keyboard instead of the pen will think that they are using these tablet PC as some kind of overpriced laptop and will come back to laptop..
Slashdot Mirror
> Since superscalar machines came in, loop unrolling can be a lose.
Uh? Loop unrolling can be a win especially for superscalar processor where you use the unrolling to fill the execution units.
Of course loop unrolling can also be a loss if you unroll too much or the loop is too big, because of cache problems as you said.
> You ever tried to code in RISC assembler?? It aint quit the walk in the park that x86 assembler is by comparison!
Uh? It's a matter of taste: I prefer reading RISC assembler any time than reading 86 assembler.
As for reading the assembly output, I do it from time to time to see what the compiler has generated because I'm curious, but it is not the good way to optimise, first you should check where the time is spent before optimising.
> I want the menu to be complete
/usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, have a coffee, come back and look at the result: a lots of tools isn't-it?
Do a ls in
Do you REALLY want to see all those tools in the menu? No, you don't..
>not even gonna attempt to do it with "tweaking files" ever
Sorry but it's almost impossible to avoid tweaking files with Linux..
> Intel overcame the first two [ Too few registers AND Registers have special purposes, and are not generic enough ] by going to a hidden RISCy core with many more registers.
"Overcame" is too strong IMHO, the number of exposed register that the compiler can see is still ridiculously small.
Using additional hidden register helps but still, sometimes the compiler has to add instructions to store registers in memory because he can't directly use those additional registers.
So this work-around of the ugly 80x86 architecture has its limit..
PS: even though RISC CPU have much more exposed CPU they also use "hidden" additional registers for register renaming purpose, for example.
> Thus, contrary to what most people would feel
> the thing that is holding AI up is hardware.
Uh? Not only the hardware!
Let's suppose that you have a computer as powerfull as a brain: I give it to you and say now try to pass the Turing test, would you be able to do it?
No, because you would be missing:
1) the software 2) the database.
We have very little clue about how to do the software right now.
And even if you had a software which could be interesting, you'd still have to build a HUGE database if you want to have an interesting result..
And the funny thing is that to really know if your software is interesting or not, first you have to invest a lot of time and money to build the database..
And if a computer is better than another (with the same hardware to simplify comparison) would it be because it has a better software or a better database?
Also I disagree with you that making a competition with the Turing test is only to give researchers bad name: human vs computer chess competitions existed also back when human beat computers without effort and nobody protested that it was giving AI researchers a bad name.
Of course in the end, it seems that beating human has been made thanks to advance in computer power but caused very little progress in AI researches.
I hope that Go competitions between man and machine will be more interesting for AI researchers.
Thanks a lot!
Linus is right this MMU seems strange!
I don't see the PPC mentionned in the note from Linus.
And the description of the PPC MMU seems quite normal to me.
A page based MMU common which looks to me the same as any MMU for RISC-style CPU.
Hello,
What is the problem with PPC MMU exactly?
And do you know if the TLB of the PPC is tagged or not?
It is a shame that 80x86 uses non-tagged TLB, doing a cache-flush of the TLB each time you change to a new process must be quite costly..
> As for the US, its true that your presense probably
> have saved us from a communist takeover. So thank
> you US of A for that. Wether that is a good thing
> or not is debatable.
Without the USA there also would have been much more German troops going against the USSR.
It is likely but not sure at all that USSR would still have won.
As for "being saved from a communist takeover is a good thing or a bad thing": if you're trolling, it's NOT funny!
We're not talking about a mild modern communist here, but about Stalline!
This guy sent millions of people dying in Siberia camps, and you're wondering wether it is a good thing or a bad thing to be under his control???
No, the Western europe can thanks
1) the USSR dictator Stalline and its soldiers for defeating the German dictator Hitler
2) the USA for saving them from Stalline.
BTW I'm French and even though I despise what Busch is trying to do at the moment, I'm very thankfull for what the USA and the USSR have done during the second WW.
While I agree that hard work will improve your situation, this sentence maybe right for the USA and the Europe but it downplays the situation the majority of the people living in this planet where hard work is necessary to just be able to eat!
I hope that they could use several head in parallel at the same time to increase the reading speed and also (why not?) the writing speed.
If I remember well, a company has already done this for CD-ROM, it was reading several track at the same time, they had a commercial product but I don't know if it sold well.
I wonder why it hasn't be done with HDD?
Note that I'm not talking about multiple heads (too expensive), but using one head to read/write several tracks at the same time.
>>> I beleive that there is a God, because someone must have created the Universe!
>> So who has created God then?
>Oh, come on. Surely you don't think this is a convincing argument? One obvious answer might be that God existed forever.
In that case, I can also say that the Universe has existed forever: no need of any creator..
The time 0 of the big-bang cannot be reached from our current scientific theories, neither the temperature of 0K, so it is a matter of notation if you think those unattainable value as 0 or as minus infinity..
> country where majority of the people were raised not to believe in God (e.g. Soviet Union).
> There is now a large number of (educated, intelligent)people there who believe in God. So?
Good point, but it would be interesting to know if those who beleive in God now had religious parent?
Religion was forbidden, yes, but it doesn't mean that people stopped beleiving in a religion and didn't taught secretely their children.
Also banning religion in some way helps those religion: they appear innocent victim, so when the ban disappear, religion has gained a lot of appeal..
As an historical counter-example, I could say France is a good example: it used to be a very religious country and now the church are mostly empty, Religion while still quite present is more and more some kinf of tradition, but is less and less active.
> What evidence do you have that all adults that believe in God only do so because of childhood teachings?
Well,
1) everyone I know who believes in a God has had some religious childhood teaching, or their parents beleived in God.
2) all the people I know who weren't raised religiously doesn't beleive in any God.
3) some people I know (my parents) who followed religious teaching doesn't believe in God.
It's not evidence but it is a pretty good corelation.
And when you ask someone who believes in God, why he believe in God, his evidence are usually not very convincing!
> I beleive in God because I have the faith!
That's a circular reasoning and why this God and not this other one?
> I beleive that there is a God, because someone must have created the Universe!
So who has created God then?
About your first point, you're right that in some case it matters, but those case are quite rare.
How often do you use distributed application?
Me never: so the clean solution is really rarely needed.
About your second point: Second, if we're talking about freeing memory, you want to free it as soon as possible and not when the program ends.
Uh? He is talking about freeing memory upon a fatal exception: the memory will be freed soon!
Except in embeded case, it won't matter much.
> He[a programer] shouldn't give a damn apple about how the underlying OS works.
Uh?
You're living in an ivory tower?
Of course a programer has to make some asumptions about how the underlying OS work!
The fewer asumption, the better I agree, but this particular asumption [OS frees memory of dead programs] is quite natural.
Otherwise your OS would really by fragile as any "bad application" could easily crash the OS by using all the memory..
No, in fact it's quite logical: those who have a large exposure to it, usually had this exposure very young:
they see their parents killing animals that they eat later, so they are used to it and probably don't think very much about wether it's right or wrong to kill animals..
It's the same thing about religion: if a child is raised in a religious society, with a religious education and in a religious family he has 99% chances of becoming a religious believer , whereas if a child raised in a 'laissez faire' family and society without religious education has 99% chance of becoming atheist or agnostisc..
> My post was mostly a joke, but all of my points were true on some level.
I'm not serious too, still I disagree with some of your points.
About the installation of programs: most of the programs you install in Windows ask you where you want to put the programs, the menus and if you want to put an icon on the screen, etc..
This is way better than the instalation of programs on Linux when programs don't ask where they are going to put their menus and where modifying the menus is more difficult (on Mandrake at least) than in Windows..
As for the DMA mode: Windows XP misdetected my settings for my HDD for a year, then I found the solution: put all your IDE controler in PIO mode, reboot, put the HDD in 'DMA if detected' reboot it solved the problem but I lost many hours looking for a solution, trying weird stuff by modifying the registry, etc.
I prefer the hdparm command! Still you're right it can be very annoying for beginners that DMA is not turned on for some of the devices.
When I find utterly annoying is when I spend 10 minutes filling a form, click enter and there is an error and now I have to retype all the form.
It happens way too often!
It is especially annoying when it is for job related purpose: I can't just swore and decide to ignore this website.
Is-it true that 50% of Americans believe in UFO ?
UFO as 'I've been abducted by little green men', not UFO simply as Unknown Flying Objects, which do exist of course.
Should NASA help also to dismiss these myths?
It's going to be hard: when you really look at it it is really a belief: it's the same thing as fighting against astrology or other stupid myth.
The only thing that can help fighting those myth is better teaching, trying to change the mind of adults is nearly impossible.
PS:
I'm French but I'm not criticising the US, in France we have our own crackpot theories:
- astrology is a huge marcket here
- to apply to any jobs we have to write by hand a letter so that a specialist can check in our handwriting our qualities and default!
*Sigh* and I'm not even joking: it is sad but true.
I'm a foreigner (French), so of course my external POV is biased but I disagree on several points on the article:
- point 3. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke.
Sorry, but this is very bad exemple, while I agree that in the US there are too many litigations, I also believe that tobacco companies do try to compel innocent people to smoke by running ads targetted to young teen.
In France, after a long battle, the problem has been solved in a radical way: any advertisement for tobacco is forbidden in any media.
- point 12. Uh? I've always seen American people as being in general higly religious which apparently haven't prevented the US from being the richest nation.
I don't really thinks that the nature of the religion is important wether it is catholicism, mysticim, or other things (except sects of course)
But I'm an atheist, so I'm not very knowledgeable into religions and I don't care, to be honest.
Also the article somehow insists too much on the technical side of the affair: US has not have the best student or best researchers for a long time, still the US is still the first nation on a big number of field, why?
Because the transformation of new idea into industries which sells works very well in the US whereas in the other country usually it doesn't work so well.
And another thing: the article didn't list the patents as a highly dangourous thing: they could slow down inovation very much..
The lack of gravity in the ISS is not a bug: it's a feature!
You can "reproduce" gravity by spinning the spaceship: while it would be more confortable for humans, one of the goal of being up there is to lear what happen to people and material in 0G environement..
Beside on the moon there is gravity, just 1/6 of Earth's gravity, so the effect on the bone/muscle should be much lower.
I think that P2P programs may set off the alarm a bit too easily, no?
In his article he wrote: "No twentieth-century amateur could stand like Darwin in the front rank with Hubble and Einstein."
But calling Einstein a professional is not quite true: when he made his firsts famous publications (in 1906 if memory serves), he was employed as an expert in Berne's patent application office.
So at this time Einstein was an amateur..
Of course, when he discovered the general relativity, he was a professional, but calling Einstein a professional is a bit misleading:
he could have keep his job as patent examiner for all his life, if he hadn't made all these groundbreaking discoveries when he was an amateur..
OK, I have the reverse story: my parents were teached with religious (catholic) education, and both of them are atheist now.
...
Me,my brother and sister were brought without any sort of religious education, my parents just telling us: we don't beleive that there is any god, if you want to beleive in one, that's fine with us.
Guess what? All of us are atheist.
And you found God, which one?
There are some may gods out there: Buddha, Catholics's god, Zeus,
I'd like to know how you choose one, the one with the best superpower? (joking)
And if God created the Universe, what created God?
For myself, my own answer for "what created the Universe?" is: I don't know.
If you answer "I don't know" to "what created God?", you just went a step further which gives you nothing..
Physics can be "supernatural": some physics experiments can produce condition which does not exists in the nature: for example, very low temperatures have been produced much lower than exists in the natural world.
The tablet form factor is very usefull for people working in a stand-up position: nurses, repair people, etc..
For all the other use, a laptop or a desktop is better.
You can type better(less error) and faster with a keyboard than with writing with a pen, even with the best handwriting recognition software of tomorrow.
The PC industry is desesperately trying to find new ways to sell more PC, so they came up with the tablet PC, but let's not be fooled by the hype..
Some vendors are very clever: they put both a keyboard and a "tactile" screen into their tabletPC so you can have both input mode.
But I think that the early "normal" users after realising that there using 99% of the time the keyboard instead of the pen will think that they are using these tablet PC as some kind of overpriced laptop and will come back to laptop..