In addition to the problems you wave your hands at (real problems), I'd add at least one more.
We are using tests the wrong way.
Tests are supposed to be part of the education process, not the end of it. (Nor the gateway to the end of it.)
Education is an on-going process. We have been seduced by the "beauty" of computerized testing processes to believe that the tests somehow exist external to the education process.
If a student can't look at the results of a test and tell what he needs to study next, the test is no good.
Employers/managers/administrators look at single grades from tests and try to use them meaningfully. The grade is not for the evaluator, it's supposed to be for the testee.
Only the person taking the test can really know what the score means, and it's harder to do that when the test is not designed for it, especially when the questions can't be reviewed, when the supposed correct answers are hidden away, etc.
The real problem is that we separate education from work and the rest of life. Then education becomes meaningless.
All the effort being made to protect the institution of testing from inroads by the new media is wasted because the institution has made itself irrelevant.
to simply go after cheaters is putting a band-aid over the real problem.
I disagree. Some portion of students will cheat as long as (in theory):
[benefit of higher grade] - [cost of honestly achieving higher grade] > {[benefit of cheating] - [cost of cheating]} * [ risk of getting caught cheating] * [value of punishment for cheating].
The real problem is that people are lazy and want to get the best return for the smallest investment. This cannot be fixed, it is human nature.
Nice try at a formula, but people aren't machines.
There will always be people who cheat.
Their reasons range from
laziness
to some inner desire to prove they can beat the system
to some inner desire for the attention gained in being caught
to some (generally externally induced and spurious) need to win/pass/beat-another-score
etc., that exceeds whatever risk of punishment mitigated by chance of getting away with it (or being caught in the case of attention-seekers).
So, no, the real problem is that the testing method being used is cheating. The people (who think they are) in charge of the system cannot be bothered to properly evaluate students' (entrants', candidates') abilities properly, so they use stupid tests instead.
And I do mean stupid, as in lacking the ability to yield meaningful results.
Tests are supposed to be part of the education process, not the end of it.
Until we get a good look at his/her face and understand who he/she is, blaming the wo/man behind the curtain is no better than blaming the puppet governments/presidents/dictators/editors/leakers/sources/etc.
Just who are all the people hiding behind the curtain thinking they are pulling the ropes? And are they, really?
I was thinking of the fig-FORTH I hand-loaded onto my micro-chroma 6800 prototyping kit back in '81. Im not sure I can still read the tapes, but I can get the listing off the web and type it back in by hand, which is the same way I loaded it in the first place.
I still have TRS80 Color Computer Color Basic files I saved to tape around '86, but that's a different thread, I think.
Anyway, Apollo and the phonautograms ediron mentions beat what I've got, hands down.
You look at the amount of energy consumed by the x86 terminals on the network and you have to wonder.
I've seen estimates on the network (together with the computers tens and hundreds of millions of people use to surf) consumes on the order of twenty percent of the energy budget these days. How much less would that be if the user's (terminal) computers were ARM or 68k/coldfire/mcore or the like? How much less would that be if all the huge server farms that use x86 were running sparc or POWER or something even more efficient?
Sure ATOM is a huge step in the right direction. It's also way late. Ten years late, at the least.
Yeah, INTEL is driving the innovation, but they are driving it on antique architectures with engineers stolen from architecture projects that were\are at least ten, in some cases, thirty years ahead of the x86 architecture at the time INTEL stole/borrowed/invited/tempted/whatever them (the engineers) away from those erstwhile cutting-edge projects.
Thats a lot of energy that could have been saved, and not just in operations, but in manufacturing and waste disposal, as well.
Continually building (and re-building and abandoning) state-of-the-art manufacturing plants to fuel one's own competitive position in the marketplace is not exactly ecology-minded business policy.
I mean, it's really bad when people can't even be bothered to learn how to use Apple's stuff. I know it happens, and I know some of the reasons why.
("Where's the START menu?")
Apple's stuff may not do it all, but what it does, it does well, and if you're just letting even just six of those boxes go unused, you're just cutting off your own noses to spite your face.
Pejudice. But if you don't need them send them my way. I know what to do with them, even though I'm not exactly a fan.
Why would you want the monopoly to pull this one out of the tank.
Intel has bought some good engineers. I'd rather see intel tank and have to unload those engineers to companies that wouldn't waste their talents supporting the x86 beast.
Most of the software that is unique to the x86 is ops spent trying to work around the cruft in the architecture. Transfering it to a decent CPU is more about cleaning out the cruft. And it is actually less work to transfer it to a decent CPU than it is to keep the x86 architecture relevant.
"It still runs!" is not a good argument when "runs" means kicking its legs while someone else pushes the wheelchair. It's time to let x86 sink back into the swamp from whence it came and leave a bad page of history behind.
My requests have been meeting deaf ears for years.
Unfortunately, the alternative ISPs are doing the same thing here. (But I should check again soon. I'm getting tired of these guys since the legacy monopoly here bought them out.)
I still think the best way to handle this would have been by high bit extension in each octet field.
Yeah, I know, the theoretical non-constant numeric address length would have been a serious pain to predict the hardware for back in the '80s, when (ergo, I wish) they might have had the foresight to reserve the high bits at each level for possible other uses.
But it would have been nice if an ISP could have, by definition, its own extendable address space to allocate out of, and any customer could further extend their own allocation, down to, say, 6 octets max in the '80s, 7 max in the '90s, 8 in the decade just completing.
I appreciate the fact that IPV6 should give us this ability, at least in a one- or two-shot way, but I think it's generally a mistake when the data structure itself limits a resource that is known to have a tendency to expand.
(And, yes, I consider the above to be funny in the sick humor sort of way.)
IANA report on the assignment of the North Korean TLD.
Click some links to clear up any misunderstandings you may have about whether the assignment (rather late) of the TLD automatically means that they have fiber lit and active into the DPRK. Especially, click on the link on the delegation record to the URL for registration services.
BTW, what the AC who talks about North Koreans residing in Japan (Zai-nichi kita chousen-jin) says is fairly accurate, if incomplete. Most of the Korean residents living in Japan are quite aware that supporting the current North Korean government is not in their own best interests.
Unfortunately, there are still many who are afraid to formally register as residents of Japan, and many who are afraid of what the DPRK government could do to their families.
In addition, much of the legitimate effort to send money and aid back to family in North Korea gets siphoned off to the DPRK government.
And, no, cynical as it all seems to say it, the DPRK government is not in any hurry to even have very much of their military connected to the outside world by the internet.
Uhm, yeah, you can put a thousand cores on a single die. (And, if we are talking about ARM cores, you can go for an order of magnitude more.)
You do understand that semiconductor fabs do not test every part that they produce, because of the costs such activities impose on the production processes? You do understand why? and how they get around the problems that spot-checking would seem to induce?
And you do understand that theory doesn't quite match reality?
You do understand the costs in selling a whole die in a package? Or even, say, a quarter die?
You do understand the additional costs imposed by having to test every core on the die? Or, as an alternative, having to build comprehensive self-test functions into the cores? (You don't want just one test circuit for the entire die, that doesn't buy you anything.)
And the power problems...
When you start talking about 1000 core processors, you are talking about building supercomputers in silicon, and I don't care how seriously confused you are about what a wonderful engieering tradeoff the x86 architecture was/is, if you are going to that kind of trouble, well,...
The reason you see quite a few x86 clusters in the top 500 list these days (aside from INTEL cheating at the benchmarks, which, yes, they are doing, and it will come around and bite them sooner or later) is that INTEL has captured all the "best" engineers and put patents (of dubious quality) on enough pieces of all the leading edge tech that they can force the rest of the industry to stay one generation behind them.
Oh, and, by the way, the x86 supercomputers are not really executing traditional x86 code, for the most part, any more, so it kind of doesn't make sense to call them x86 in the top 500, really.
That means that the current INTEL x86 are competing against a pack of other CPUs that are a generation behind them. And still failing.
If the rest of the CPUs were receiving the same amount of engineering resources that the x86 is, there would have been no reason for Apple to switch. (Pick up x86/64 as an an option for the Macintosh desktop, yes, along with setting Darwin up as a proper project where we could participate on equal terms with Apple, but that's another issue altogether.) The 3GHz barrier would be broken on the desktop, but not by x86.
One good thing that comes out of all this, Apple didn't try to put any of the trimmed-down PPCs in the iPod/Phone. The ARM architecture is getting the attention it deserves, even if the ColdFire (new68k) architecture is unfairly being mostly set aside.
I'd call it more of a testament to how much intel's fanatacism can induce them to waste all the benefits of Moore's law supporting baggage that was unnecessary when the x86 was "invented".
Just for the marketing department's black magic.
Instruction efficiency? Compact code? There are numerous processors that wax the floor with x86 in those departments, but marketing department's black magic killed the market.
Magic? It's all parlor tricks, you know, pay a researcher here to slip a little excess code in a tight loop on that 68k "benchmark", that sort of thing. The problem with the old saw about magic being indistinguishable from advanced tech is that magic is not about real results. Magic is about illusion. The confusing point is that illusion can be turned into reality with some effort.
In the x86 case, it was a huge lot of effort justified by a huge load of hubris and the needs of the black magic department, a vicious cycle.
x86 is a significant contributor to global warming (which is part of the reason some people want to deny the reality of human impact on the climate changes).
Still have compiler writers that don't understand that unrolling code is not usually a real win, overall.
And the Itanium was designed for exactly that kind of optimization, as if a compiler is always supposed to be able to predict execution path in real-time execution.
Kind of like the time I tried to write a user interface in CoBOL.
The article is talking about targeting 1000 cores per chip (in x86 made efficient by fancy translating filters that consume chip real estate worse faster than Hummers consume gas).
Man, you're insane.
And I guess you don't believe in dust. Or maybe you don't believe testing processors costs money.
While it's true that some of the real-world laws don't fit well, what is more important is that far too many people's minds just shut down when they think of stuff done in the "virtual world".
Part of the problem has been the hype about the virtual world.
But part of it is simply not being able to find someone able (and willing) to explain what is going on in the "cyber" realm, so that the existing laws can be properly applied.
We need more people willing to show how the "cyber" world and the "real" world are connected, for instance, how electronic or digital documents compare with paper documents, how wireless fraud on the internet compares to wireless fraud prior to the internet, etc. And we need more of that more than we need more laws.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to the problems you wave your hands at (real problems), I'd add at least one more.
We are using tests the wrong way.
Tests are supposed to be part of the education process, not the end of it. (Nor the gateway to the end of it.)
Education is an on-going process. We have been seduced by the "beauty" of computerized testing processes to believe that the tests somehow exist external to the education process.
If a student can't look at the results of a test and tell what he needs to study next, the test is no good.
Employers/managers/administrators look at single grades from tests and try to use them meaningfully. The grade is not for the evaluator, it's supposed to be for the testee.
Only the person taking the test can really know what the score means, and it's harder to do that when the test is not designed for it, especially when the questions can't be reviewed, when the supposed correct answers are hidden away, etc.
The real problem is that we separate education from work and the rest of life. Then education becomes meaningless.
All the effort being made to protect the institution of testing from inroads by the new media is wasted because the institution has made itself irrelevant.
I disagree. Some portion of students will cheat as long as (in theory): [benefit of higher grade] - [cost of honestly achieving higher grade] > {[benefit of cheating] - [cost of cheating]} * [ risk of getting caught cheating] * [value of punishment for cheating]. The real problem is that people are lazy and want to get the best return for the smallest investment. This cannot be fixed, it is human nature.
Nice try at a formula, but people aren't machines.
There will always be people who cheat.
Their reasons range from
etc., that exceeds whatever risk of punishment mitigated by chance of getting away with it (or being caught in the case of attention-seekers).
So, no, the real problem is that the testing method being used is cheating. The people (who think they are) in charge of the system cannot be bothered to properly evaluate students' (entrants', candidates') abilities properly, so they use stupid tests instead.
And I do mean stupid, as in lacking the ability to yield meaningful results.
Tests are supposed to be part of the education process, not the end of it.
Maybe the headline has logical problems to point out the logical problems of the article being referred to.
Just who is the (wo/)man behind the curtain?
Until we get a good look at his/her face and understand who he/she is, blaming the wo/man behind the curtain is no better than blaming the puppet governments/presidents/dictators/editors/leakers/sources/etc.
Just who are all the people hiding behind the curtain thinking they are pulling the ropes? And are they, really?
I was thinking of the fig-FORTH I hand-loaded onto my micro-chroma 6800 prototyping kit back in '81. Im not sure I can still read the tapes, but I can get the listing off the web and type it back in by hand, which is the same way I loaded it in the first place.
I still have TRS80 Color Computer Color Basic files I saved to tape around '86, but that's a different thread, I think.
Anyway, Apollo and the phonautograms ediron mentions beat what I've got, hands down.
I want to post.
You look at the amount of energy consumed by the x86 terminals on the network and you have to wonder.
I've seen estimates on the network (together with the computers tens and hundreds of millions of people use to surf) consumes on the order of twenty percent of the energy budget these days. How much less would that be if the user's (terminal) computers were ARM or 68k/coldfire/mcore or the like? How much less would that be if all the huge server farms that use x86 were running sparc or POWER or something even more efficient?
Sure ATOM is a huge step in the right direction. It's also way late. Ten years late, at the least.
Yeah, INTEL is driving the innovation, but they are driving it on antique architectures with engineers stolen from architecture projects that were\are at least ten, in some cases, thirty years ahead of the x86 architecture at the time INTEL stole/borrowed/invited/tempted/whatever them (the engineers) away from those erstwhile cutting-edge projects.
Thats a lot of energy that could have been saved, and not just in operations, but in manufacturing and waste disposal, as well.
Continually building (and re-building and abandoning) state-of-the-art manufacturing plants to fuel one's own competitive position in the marketplace is not exactly ecology-minded business policy.
Then you never bothered using them.
I mean, it's really bad when people can't even be bothered to learn how to use Apple's stuff. I know it happens, and I know some of the reasons why.
("Where's the START menu?")
Apple's stuff may not do it all, but what it does, it does well, and if you're just letting even just six of those boxes go unused, you're just cutting off your own noses to spite your face.
Pejudice. But if you don't need them send them my way. I know what to do with them, even though I'm not exactly a fan.
Why would you want the monopoly to pull this one out of the tank.
Intel has bought some good engineers. I'd rather see intel tank and have to unload those engineers to companies that wouldn't waste their talents supporting the x86 beast.
Most of the software that is unique to the x86 is ops spent trying to work around the cruft in the architecture. Transfering it to a decent CPU is more about cleaning out the cruft. And it is actually less work to transfer it to a decent CPU than it is to keep the x86 architecture relevant.
"It still runs!" is not a good argument when "runs" means kicking its legs while someone else pushes the wheelchair. It's time to let x86 sink back into the swamp from whence it came and leave a bad page of history behind.
Well, yeah, it would be a fun project, but it would also be a lot of redundant effort.
Redundant effort is not inherently bad, but you need to recognize that you're re-inventing the wheel and understand your reasons.
I assume your reasons would be something like wanting to manage your own files.
Absolutely!
Half of the purpose of doing genealogy is getting to know your living relatives.
The other half is getting to know the people whose culture, idealogy, genes, etc. you have inherited.
You really don't know much about yourself until you know where you came from.
My requests have been meeting deaf ears for years.
Unfortunately, the alternative ISPs are doing the same thing here. (But I should check again soon. I'm getting tired of these guys since the legacy monopoly here bought them out.)
The last time I contacted my ISP about this they told me (again) that they have no plans to implement IPv6.
This was just a few months ago.
I still think the best way to handle this would have been by high bit extension in each octet field.
Yeah, I know, the theoretical non-constant numeric address length would have been a serious pain to predict the hardware for back in the '80s, when (ergo, I wish) they might have had the foresight to reserve the high bits at each level for possible other uses.
But it would have been nice if an ISP could have, by definition, its own extendable address space to allocate out of, and any customer could further extend their own allocation, down to, say, 6 octets max in the '80s, 7 max in the '90s, 8 in the decade just completing.
I appreciate the fact that IPV6 should give us this ability, at least in a one- or two-shot way, but I think it's generally a mistake when the data structure itself limits a resource that is known to have a tendency to expand.
(And, yes, I consider the above to be funny in the sick humor sort of way.)
Start here:
"K section of ccTLDs in the IANA human readable database.
Human readable delegation record.
IANA report on the assignment of the North Korean TLD.
Click some links to clear up any misunderstandings you may have about whether the assignment (rather late) of the TLD automatically means that they have fiber lit and active into the DPRK. Especially, click on the link on the delegation record to the URL for registration services.
BTW, what the AC who talks about North Koreans residing in Japan (Zai-nichi kita chousen-jin) says is fairly accurate, if incomplete. Most of the Korean residents living in Japan are quite aware that supporting the current North Korean government is not in their own best interests.
Unfortunately, there are still many who are afraid to formally register as residents of Japan, and many who are afraid of what the DPRK government could do to their families.
In addition, much of the legitimate effort to send money and aid back to family in North Korea gets siphoned off to the DPRK government.
And, no, cynical as it all seems to say it, the DPRK government is not in any hurry to even have very much of their military connected to the outside world by the internet.
Uhm, yeah, you can put a thousand cores on a single die. (And, if we are talking about ARM cores, you can go for an order of magnitude more.)
You do understand that semiconductor fabs do not test every part that they produce, because of the costs such activities impose on the production processes? You do understand why? and how they get around the problems that spot-checking would seem to induce?
And you do understand that theory doesn't quite match reality?
You do understand the costs in selling a whole die in a package? Or even, say, a quarter die?
You do understand the additional costs imposed by having to test every core on the die? Or, as an alternative, having to build comprehensive self-test functions into the cores? (You don't want just one test circuit for the entire die, that doesn't buy you anything.)
And the power problems ...
When you start talking about 1000 core processors, you are talking about building supercomputers in silicon, and I don't care how seriously confused you are about what a wonderful engieering tradeoff the x86 architecture was/is, if you are going to that kind of trouble, well, ...
The reason you see quite a few x86 clusters in the top 500 list these days (aside from INTEL cheating at the benchmarks, which, yes, they are doing, and it will come around and bite them sooner or later) is that INTEL has captured all the "best" engineers and put patents (of dubious quality) on enough pieces of all the leading edge tech that they can force the rest of the industry to stay one generation behind them.
Oh, and, by the way, the x86 supercomputers are not really executing traditional x86 code, for the most part, any more, so it kind of doesn't make sense to call them x86 in the top 500, really.
That means that the current INTEL x86 are competing against a pack of other CPUs that are a generation behind them. And still failing.
If the rest of the CPUs were receiving the same amount of engineering resources that the x86 is, there would have been no reason for Apple to switch. (Pick up x86/64 as an an option for the Macintosh desktop, yes, along with setting Darwin up as a proper project where we could participate on equal terms with Apple, but that's another issue altogether.) The 3GHz barrier would be broken on the desktop, but not by x86.
One good thing that comes out of all this, Apple didn't try to put any of the trimmed-down PPCs in the iPod/Phone. The ARM architecture is getting the attention it deserves, even if the ColdFire (new68k) architecture is unfairly being mostly set aside.
I'd call it more of a testament to how much intel's fanatacism can induce them to waste all the benefits of Moore's law supporting baggage that was unnecessary when the x86 was "invented".
Just for the marketing department's black magic.
Instruction efficiency? Compact code? There are numerous processors that wax the floor with x86 in those departments, but marketing department's black magic killed the market.
Magic? It's all parlor tricks, you know, pay a researcher here to slip a little excess code in a tight loop on that 68k "benchmark", that sort of thing. The problem with the old saw about magic being indistinguishable from advanced tech is that magic is not about real results. Magic is about illusion. The confusing point is that illusion can be turned into reality with some effort.
In the x86 case, it was a huge lot of effort justified by a huge load of hubris and the needs of the black magic department, a vicious cycle.
x86 is a significant contributor to global warming (which is part of the reason some people want to deny the reality of human impact on the climate changes).
err, barking up the right tree.
But they are still barking.
x86!
Marketing magic will always prevail over reality!
(That's what Moore's law really said.)
Still have compiler writers that don't understand that unrolling code is not usually a real win, overall.
And the Itanium was designed for exactly that kind of optimization, as if a compiler is always supposed to be able to predict execution path in real-time execution.
Kind of like the time I tried to write a user interface in CoBOL.
The article is talking about targeting 1000 cores per chip (in x86 made efficient by fancy translating filters that consume chip real estate worse faster than Hummers consume gas).
Man, you're insane.
And I guess you don't believe in dust. Or maybe you don't believe testing processors costs money.
Bit by the markup.
I still think they should have solved this in the early '90s by switching to a byte-extensible addressing scheme.
Something like defining x.x.x.1-127 as four byte and x.x.x.128-250.y, y 128 as five byte, and so forth.
I'll agree with you if you will agree that Microsoft (and now Apple) are the primary abusers.
Bill Gates just couldn't leave another opportunity to rule the world alone long enough for the tech to mature enough for ordinary people to use it.
Well, while there is a certain amount of chance involved, rated at -40 doesn't necessarily mean it quits working below -40.
Hard on the mechanical stuff, yes. But the CPU isn't really going to be a limiting factor.
While it's true that some of the real-world laws don't fit well, what is more important is that far too many people's minds just shut down when they think of stuff done in the "virtual world".
Part of the problem has been the hype about the virtual world.
But part of it is simply not being able to find someone able (and willing) to explain what is going on in the "cyber" realm, so that the existing laws can be properly applied.
We need more people willing to show how the "cyber" world and the "real" world are connected, for instance, how electronic or digital documents compare with paper documents, how wireless fraud on the internet compares to wireless fraud prior to the internet, etc. And we need more of that more than we need more laws.