Wrong and wrong. The x86 instruction is hardly compact with all its redundancy and roundabout inconsistent operations. ARM Thumb coding is superior in just about every way.
Short of 64 bitness, which it don't have (and AFAIK, even the new PAE-like mode for ARM don't exist in a real product yet)!
If you want a RISC, why not MIPS? It has "64 bit register" and "16 bit instruction" extensions, though I don't know if there are MIPS CPUs which have both extensions..
You forgot a little detail: normal driving don't happen in empty roads! Going fast on a road is only a small part of what human drivers have to do: they also have to monitor the other cars, the pedestrian, etc.
Their main 'competitor' Scala (in my mind) has both covariant and contravariant type system. So in the language comparison, they left out covariant and contravariant.. *Sigh*
> It is often considered geeky to be good at school, especially in the STEM subjects.
Mmmh, note that this is a USA-only social issue.. We don't have this issue in France (or to a very small level), or at least we didn't when I was a student 25 years ago.
And social issues are rarely solved by technological answers, so I don't see how e-learning would help here.
Well, I'm not sure that this is a technology question: IBM has made a 200 ppi screen (*) a long time ago, which was quite expensive as expected as it was a new technology, but the curious thing is that no other LCD maker tried to compete on resolution, so prices didn't go down!
I thought at first it was because Windows XP couldn't use correctly high resolution display, but Windows Vista and 7 are supposed to be able to use them and there's still no vendors trying to sell high resolution display for consumers.
I agree with most of the thing you said, but some are weird: >Flip a coin to make a decision as to who will do or get something and you're a gambler. So? Being a gambler is not *in itself* bad, only being addicted to gambling is an issue..
>Sugar is a drug by every definition of the word. No! When you don't eat sugar you don't suffer from withdrawal syndroms (or very mild one), same for caffeine, but you can't say this for cigarettes. This is a very important difference..
>Governments run lotteries. So? This doesn't make lotteries good! Goverments do many immoral things: lying to go to war, etc.
Interesting topic, I had always assumed that gmail access over https was blocked in China, nice to know that it isn't. So yes, using it seems simpler than steganography, especially since you can encrypt your email before sending them so that not even Google can read them: remember that even if you trust Google as a corporation to do the right thing, spying|bribbing could still be used to access your messages stored in Google's servers.
But the end of the topic is weird, it says basically that the simplest way is still to use proxy as they are not blocked, but if I was a dictator I would NOT block proxy, just list the IP address of those who access these proxy and monitor those users who helpfully have shown that they have something to hide!!
Sure, using a special purpose server doesn't work also for deniability, but that's why you need to use a popular server such as Facebook as a middle man for the exchange of those "steganography encoded messages".
Quite a few people have expressed the desire to have servers or laptop with ARM CPU, in both case more than 4GB memory is useful. Hence the ISA extension of ARM to 'PAE like' 40 bit, of course this is a kludge as each process cannot access more than 4GB..
Do you realize that ARM doesn't even have a 64 bit version of the ISA?? MIPS and PowerPC have them.
Also AFAIK it doesn't have a 'trap on integer overflow' mode like MIPS: very interesting for a language like Ada which has exception on integer overflow: on MIPS this feature could have zero performance impact during normal execution.
Frankly both your arguments and the GPs one are ridiculous: - say you buy your car and just after there is a new one which is 0.00001% more efficient, should you dump your car and buy the new one immediately? No! - say there's a new car which use only 1% of the normal car, should you keep using your old car, due to the energy cost of building this new car? No!
So there is a curve (X, Y)(X is the improvement of fuel consumption and Y is the energy needed to build the car) where it becomes more interesting to switch or not, it would be interesting to know these figures for realistic cases.. I don't know how to compute them, unfortunately!
>The cost of adding a translation unit is tiny, compared to the penalty of not being compatible with a vast majority of the software out there.
Sure, but it also use some power and is probably a good explanation why x86 use more power than RISCs: their ISA is better: more compiler visible register, fewer obsolete instructions == smaller 'translation engine' and less power used.
IMHO as you only know 'classical' programming language you should learn Object Orientation to understand what this 'new fad' is about. I recommend the book 'Object-oriented Software Construction' by Bertrand Meyer which is very clear about what OO is and why we use it. Note that the examples are in Eiffel which is a language rarely used, but it's still interesting.
Then 1) check the jobs offer to see which language gives interesting job. 2) learn the language (easy (unless it's C++ or Perl): read a book, maybe contribute to a project) and the tools used with it: IDE, debuggger, profiler. 3) learn the languages libraries: that's the hard/boring part and sorry I don't know how to help here.
I disagree: many thinks that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle are an aspect of 'reality', not a measurement limitation. My bet is that this paper has a flaw: remember that Einstein thought that quantum physics was incomplete due to the random nature of measurements and thought that the EPR paradox prooved this, but then experiments has shown that they agree with quantum physics and that the reality is non local..
>You know, you can buy on amazon for cheap excellent book on general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Excellent? No.. I taught myself GR and it was quite difficult as for GR, there are lots of *bad* books! Either very shallow books or 'too hard' books which doesn't teach correctly the math needed to learn GR (in effect requiring you to know the math before reading the book), I think that I read something like 10 books before finding one who explained correctly the math needed for GR.
> Sans encryption, nothing you do on the Internet is private.
Even with encryption, your ISP can log every IP address you access, I would hardly call this a private activity!
So I would correct: nothing you do on the Internet is private, only semi-private with encryption, except if you are using either
1) encryption + TOR or
2) steganography. And (1) is quite easy to detect for your ISP, so you would be "noticed": in some country this could be dangerous.. So the only really private communication you can have on the Internet is (2)..
> The emerging market is mobile computing, so what's the future for Intel?
Well, the PC market is not going anywhere, so it means that Intel will still make *huge* benefits with x86 and have the best fabs.
> Surely, they can't live on x86 forever, and Atom currently isn't competitive with ARM when it comes to battery life.
For now.. But having the best fabs, it's quite possible that Intel will be able to make x86 competitive in battery life, but this may be also too late: now software compatibility for smartphone is in favor of ARM and against x86!
I'll take your assertions with a (big) pinch of salt: remember Linus *created* a distributed version management tool (git) when he couldn't use anymore BitKeeper.. And the nice thing about DVCS is that anybody can have his own tree..
So yes, Linus is the ultimate authority about what goes in his own tree, but this is quite normal..
Not really: think about the oil used for building a car in the first place!
'self-driving car pooling' would allow using less cars to do the same kind of transport that we have now, except that it would be better because you don't have the need to find a packing place.
Of course it's not simple: in Paris we have 'bicycle pooling' and there are issues with vandalism, theft, etc, 'self-driving car pooling' would have the same issue (but worse as car are more expensive).
*Sigh*, and to think that the "plugins" were described as a big improvement: want to have 'flexible' software? Use plugins. But they don't even have 'fault isolation'(*) right!!
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, what good does it do to have the game engine supporting DirectX11/OpenGL4 features, when the drivers don't support those features?
AFAIK we don't have Linux's drivers with those features..
Wrong and wrong. The x86 instruction is hardly compact with all its redundancy and roundabout inconsistent operations. ARM Thumb coding is superior in just about every way.
Short of 64 bitness, which it don't have (and AFAIK, even the new PAE-like mode for ARM don't exist in a real product yet)!
If you want a RISC, why not MIPS? It has "64 bit register" and "16 bit instruction" extensions, though I don't know if there are MIPS CPUs which have both extensions..
You forgot a little detail: normal driving don't happen in empty roads!
Going fast on a road is only a small part of what human drivers have to do: they also have to monitor the other cars, the pedestrian, etc.
Their main 'competitor' Scala (in my mind) has both covariant and contravariant type system.
So in the language comparison, they left out covariant and contravariant..
*Sigh*
Making a joke which implicitly puts on the same level raping and "e-spying" is tasteless at best.
> It is often considered geeky to be good at school, especially in the STEM subjects.
Mmmh, note that this is a USA-only social issue..
We don't have this issue in France (or to a very small level), or at least we didn't when I was a student 25 years ago.
And social issues are rarely solved by technological answers, so I don't see how e-learning would help here.
Well, I'm not sure that this is a technology question: IBM has made a 200 ppi screen (*) a long time ago,
which was quite expensive as expected as it was a new technology, but the curious thing is that no other
LCD maker tried to compete on resolution, so prices didn't go down!
I thought at first it was because Windows XP couldn't use correctly high resolution display,
but Windows Vista and 7 are supposed to be able to use them and there's still no vendors trying to sell
high resolution display for consumers.
*: http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/roentgen/
I agree with most of the thing you said, but some are weird:
>Flip a coin to make a decision as to who will do or get something and you're a gambler.
So? Being a gambler is not *in itself* bad, only being addicted to gambling is an issue..
>Sugar is a drug by every definition of the word.
No! When you don't eat sugar you don't suffer from withdrawal syndroms (or very mild one), same for caffeine, but you can't say this for cigarettes.
This is a very important difference..
>Governments run lotteries.
So? This doesn't make lotteries good!
Goverments do many immoral things: lying to go to war, etc.
Interesting topic, I had always assumed that gmail access over https was blocked in China, nice to know that it isn't.
So yes, using it seems simpler than steganography, especially since you can encrypt your email before sending them so that not even Google can read them:
remember that even if you trust Google as a corporation to do the right thing, spying|bribbing could still be used to access your messages stored in Google's servers.
But the end of the topic is weird, it says basically that the simplest way is still to use proxy as they are not blocked, but if I was a dictator I would NOT block proxy, just list the IP address of those who access these proxy and monitor those users who helpfully have shown that they have something to hide!!
Sure, using a special purpose server doesn't work also for deniability, but that's why you need to use a popular server such as Facebook as a middle man for the exchange of those "steganography encoded messages".
>why would the ability to deal with more than 4GB of memory be any use?
Yeah, no use at all to ARM of course, hhmmmm, maybe you should read this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/25/arm_server_extensions/
Quite a few people have expressed the desire to have servers or laptop with ARM CPU, in both case more than 4GB memory is useful.
Hence the ISA extension of ARM to 'PAE like' 40 bit, of course this is a kludge as each process cannot access more than 4GB..
Do you realize that ARM doesn't even have a 64 bit version of the ISA??
MIPS and PowerPC have them.
Also AFAIK it doesn't have a 'trap on integer overflow' mode like MIPS:
very interesting for a language like Ada which has exception on integer overflow:
on MIPS this feature could have zero performance impact during normal execution.
Frankly both your arguments and the GPs one are ridiculous:
- say you buy your car and just after there is a new one which is 0.00001% more efficient, should you dump your car and buy the new one immediately? No!
- say there's a new car which use only 1% of the normal car, should you keep using your old car, due to the energy cost of building this new car? No!
So there is a curve (X, Y)(X is the improvement of fuel consumption and Y is the energy needed to build the car) where it becomes more interesting to switch or not,
it would be interesting to know these figures for realistic cases..
I don't know how to compute them, unfortunately!
>The cost of adding a translation unit is tiny, compared to the penalty of not being compatible with a vast majority of the software out there.
Sure, but it also use some power and is probably a good explanation why x86 use more power than RISCs: their ISA is better: more compiler visible register, fewer obsolete instructions == smaller 'translation engine' and less power used.
IMHO as you only know 'classical' programming language you should learn Object Orientation to understand what this 'new fad' is about.
I recommend the book 'Object-oriented Software Construction' by Bertrand Meyer which is very clear about what OO is and why we use it.
Note that the examples are in Eiffel which is a language rarely used, but it's still interesting.
Then 1) check the jobs offer to see which language gives interesting job.
2) learn the language (easy (unless it's C++ or Perl): read a book, maybe contribute to a project) and the tools used with it: IDE, debuggger, profiler.
3) learn the languages libraries: that's the hard/boring part and sorry I don't know how to help here.
You're ready!
I disagree: many thinks that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle are an aspect of 'reality', not a measurement limitation.
My bet is that this paper has a flaw: remember that Einstein thought that quantum physics was incomplete due to the random nature of measurements and thought that the
EPR paradox prooved this, but then experiments has shown that they agree with quantum physics and that the reality is non local..
>getting smaller every generation, so we're getting into the ballpark.
Getting in ballpark? Hardly!
There's quite a difference between writing 'IBM' with atoms (cool trick though) and building self-replicating factories.
>You know, you can buy on amazon for cheap excellent book on general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Excellent? No..
I taught myself GR and it was quite difficult as for GR, there are lots of *bad* books!
Either very shallow books or 'too hard' books which doesn't teach correctly the math needed to learn GR (in effect requiring you to know the math before reading the book), I think that I read something like 10 books before finding one who explained correctly the math needed for GR.
Well, *I*'m not paranoid, but I think that Chinese's users should be, and if you quit using Internet then censorship has won..
> Sans encryption, nothing you do on the Internet is private.
Even with encryption, your ISP can log every IP address you access, I would hardly call this a private activity!
So I would correct: nothing you do on the Internet is private, only semi-private with encryption, except if you are using either
1) encryption + TOR or
2) steganography.
And (1) is quite easy to detect for your ISP, so you would be "noticed": in some country this could be dangerous..
So the only really private communication you can have on the Internet is (2)..
> The emerging market is mobile computing, so what's the future for Intel?
Well, the PC market is not going anywhere, so it means that Intel will still make *huge* benefits with x86 and have the best fabs.
> Surely, they can't live on x86 forever, and Atom currently isn't competitive with ARM when it comes to battery life.
For now.. But having the best fabs, it's quite possible that Intel will be able to make x86 competitive in battery life,
but this may be also too late: now software compatibility for smartphone is in favor of ARM and against x86!
> Linux is his baby and he's a jealous parent.
I'll take your assertions with a (big) pinch of salt: remember Linus *created* a distributed version management tool (git) when he couldn't use anymore BitKeeper..
And the nice thing about DVCS is that anybody can have his own tree..
So yes, Linus is the ultimate authority about what goes in his own tree, but this is quite normal..
Not really: think about the oil used for building a car in the first place!
'self-driving car pooling' would allow using less cars to do the same kind of transport that we have now,
except that it would be better because you don't have the need to find a packing place.
Of course it's not simple: in Paris we have 'bicycle pooling' and there are issues with vandalism, theft, etc, 'self-driving car pooling' would have the same issue (but worse as car are more expensive).
>to design of the whole plugin concept.
*Sigh*, and to think that the "plugins" were described as a big improvement: want to have 'flexible' software? Use plugins.
But they don't even have 'fault isolation'(*) right!!
WTF?
* and resources management and security.
>If you allow it, kids/employees will just use one of the dozens of SSL proxy sites.
>
>And the nature of SSL is it's pretty much all-or-none.
I don't understand your point: even with SSL, the gateway is able to blacklist the IP address of those "SSL proxy sites", no?
Not really: their technology is used to make MLC as robust as SLC, so if it cost more than SLC's price, then it's useless..