"great catches" aren't found. They aren't caught, either.
(I was about to say they are made, but, no, not that, either. Heaven help me, what was I thinking?)
Now that you have me started --
Good relationships are built with mutual effort. That means initially awkward people learning how to relate with each other.
I learned a lot of my social skills on the internet. I learned a lot of my problem solving skills playing video games. I learned a lot of self-control figuring out how to avoid getting sucked into porn.
I still have a long ways to go on all fronts, before I'm perfect.
My wife is jealous of the computer. She has reason to be, I think. She has a right to be. When she demands that right, it is self-destructive, near as I can tell. But I'm trying to learn when I should give and when I should stand my ground, and when I should show a deaf ear (while secretly listening, to be on the safe side, although that bugs her more than my not listening at all). You have to have good defenses, and you have to have the sense to figure out when not to use your defenses.
There are a lot of individual choices involved. Building requires keeping a good attitude, and it also requires a bit of letting the tearing-down and rebuilding happen.
I think the fear here is that the current new generation's current new thing gets in the way of growing up the old way, and the previous generation tends not to realize, now that they think they have things figured out, that the world has changed. Their kids don't have the same set of problems to solve.
Funny how grandparents seem to have patience with both the kids and the grandkids.
I'm trying to dig up the current information on the C standard, but the C90 ANSI standard only required 10 decimal digits for double. Ergo, gnucc on 8086 or power or ARM was probably okay, but not guaranteed to be portably okay.
That aside, think about computing interest on Apple's budget.
Think about computations on Apple's budget relative to the US budget.
15 significant decimal digits is not enough headroom to work on those kinds of numbers.
Was initially responding to my memories of past attempts in the direction of non-exact processing.
Having read the friendly article now, the research on power reduction in general may be useful. From the summary, I can't be sure, but it looks possible.
But, if I'm going to screw up the floating point for power, I'd just as soon go to fixed point or mixed fractions on a real low power CPU with known behavior.
Patents and copyrights did not violate the Constitution before the invention of "intellectual property".
These were temporary liens on the market commons relative to creative works.
Now they are title to other people's thoughts, because of a semantic shift in the application of law.
Reality and the law are way out of sync. If the RIAA and MPAA and patent trolls don't quit, patents are going to be replaced with the GPL, and copyrights are going to be reduced to five years, no extension, when the backlash is finished.
That would assume the rental agency didn't have the car from the time the thief took it to the time it was returned.
Let's try a different analogy. Person A visits your rental lot and and checks out the driver's seat of a car. Let's say he rips the seatcover somehow. Whether there was intent or not, is the damage to the seatcover going to exceed the cost of the car? Should the law allow your lawyer to send letters threatening you with a bankrupting suit unless you're willing to cough up the price of a hundred days' rental?
It's still not a good fit, and begs huge questions about the nature of damages and the amount of control the "exclusive rights for a limited time" was intended to give, but it's a bit closer to the best face the RIAA can put on their activities.
Look it up. Nowhere in the US Constitution is the phrase "exclusive control" used.
Temporary "exclusive right" to a work, yes.
Right to a house involves being able to use it for shelter when you want to. Allows you demand another person to leave.
Does not involve using it to manufacture nerve gas with the windows open, for instance.
Right to a song? Given the pre-amble and various elements of the Constitution itself, rights to a song should not include the right to extort huge sums of money from an individual who was adolescent enough to post it where lots of other people could copy it. Particularly, when the theory of damages assumes, contrary to fact, an ecquivalence between copying and would-have-purchased-but-didn't.
We know that copying converts to purchase at about the rate that listening to songs on the radio used to.
The royalty system with the radio stations was based on the radio stations getting some commercial value, so the argument that there is no such system with personal sharing doesn't transfer well.
We know for a fact that never hearing a song converts to effectively zero sales (except for extremely popular "musicians", whose case is so different from the usual case as to be absolutely not the case on which to base law.
Having been "punished" according to the law, Tenenbaum now has standing to make the real argument, that the extortion being engaged in is a serious harm to individuals and community, and that the law which allows it is therefore wrong.
You go to the friendly article, and one of the places they are trying to sell this is India, where the OLPC is too expensive, takes too much power.
You also get a good look at how far off the "MPEG-4" conversion is going to be. It's not pretty.
The power-reduction techniques are interesting, I'll grant that. But I think everyone trying to do a one-size-fits-all capture of India should just take a step back and give it a second thought. A graphing calculator running netBSD would go a long way as in intermediate step towards the goal without having to subject an entire country's lower classes to enforced inaccuracy.
And I have to imagine the floating point errors would impinge the encryption.
I don't think they are talking about variable fudging.
They are talking about altering the geometries of the circuits -- transistors, gates, and some whole logic sections removed. You're not going to be putting those back in at run-time.
I'm not a fan of fixed-width floating-point, but the current floating point stuff is fairly well characterized.
This is going to introduce a new kind of bias to the errors, and the bias always adds up. Sure, we don't need more than 6 digits for a lot of stuff, but the way we generally do fractional math, we use extra accuracy to buffer the result from the cumulative bias.
These chips are going to bring new bias profiles, and it will likely take a while to get a clear picture of the profiles, and then you have to start programming against (yet another) profile.
Analyzing the power use in digital ICs is very useful.
The CPU they are trying to sell is a boondoggle. Shame to see the Indian government treating it seriously.
Case of engineers not understanding what they are working on, getting all focused on the initial target, not recognizing the far greater value in the tools they built trying to get to a wrong target.
Getting all sorts of details wrong and ending with the right conclusion.
If you want low power DSP, we have low power DSP. If you want a graphing calculator with an OS, we can do it now with a cold fire or ARM integrated CPU running on ordinary batteries, if we are willing to do the work.
While the power use analysis work is definitely going to be useful, the CPU they are trying to sell is a boondoggle.
We already have plenty of cheap, way-low-power solutions for all of these.
Fifteen years ago, in fact, this idea was not new, and the options available then were way better on price, power, speed, debuggability, everything that counted.
This idea was innovative about once, back in the mid-eighties, when TI and Motorola (among others) first started producing signal processors.
I have dim memories of intel touting research in this area about fifteen years ago (plus or minus a couple). And of thinking it wasn't new back then. And it didn't get very far then (in spite of people saying, "Monte Carlo!").
Now we have even more better solutions for when accuracy doesn't count.
I know that the 8087 was culturally more significant because of the relative penatration of the 8086 and the 68000, as well as the perception gap between the two. Also, the 68882 was not the only other math coprocessor, just like the 68K was not the only option to the 8086.
(Hmm. The current wikipedia article on math coprocessors has some problems, as can be seen in the fact that "math coprocessors" re-directs to "Floating-point Unit".)
I would hate to see the younger generation losing opportuniites to understand that there were plenty of valid options to the 8086.
I can write a FORTH in the old Motorola M6800 assembler. Once I have the FORTH, it's not that far to a rudimentary web browser, although the address space limitations will prove a source of frustration.
Implementing FORTH on the 6809 is a bit more fun. High level constructs, more registers, access to the stack that does not have to tunnel through arcane sequences of pushes/pops/swaps.
Implementing FORTH on the 68000 is much more interesting, because it has enough registers to access parameters/locals, persistent allocation areas, thread locals and globals, etc. It's not just syntactic sugar when you don't have to waste half of your code fighting the botlenecks.
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I agree with a part of what you say, except that
"great catches" aren't found. They aren't caught, either.
(I was about to say they are made, but, no, not that, either. Heaven help me, what was I thinking?)
Now that you have me started --
Good relationships are built with mutual effort. That means initially awkward people learning how to relate with each other.
I learned a lot of my social skills on the internet. I learned a lot of my problem solving skills playing video games. I learned a lot of self-control figuring out how to avoid getting sucked into porn.
I still have a long ways to go on all fronts, before I'm perfect.
My wife is jealous of the computer. She has reason to be, I think. She has a right to be. When she demands that right, it is self-destructive, near as I can tell. But I'm trying to learn when I should give and when I should stand my ground, and when I should show a deaf ear (while secretly listening, to be on the safe side, although that bugs her more than my not listening at all). You have to have good defenses, and you have to have the sense to figure out when not to use your defenses.
There are a lot of individual choices involved. Building requires keeping a good attitude, and it also requires a bit of letting the tearing-down and rebuilding happen.
I think the fear here is that the current new generation's current new thing gets in the way of growing up the old way, and the previous generation tends not to realize, now that they think they have things figured out, that the world has changed. Their kids don't have the same set of problems to solve.
Funny how grandparents seem to have patience with both the kids and the grandkids.
Maybe what I want to say is, ...
are you two sure you haven't met each other?
I mean, like, you aren't engaged to each other or anything?
[...]
I'm trying to figure out if there's a hidden message here, ...
I learned a good part of my communication skills on the internet.
I learned a good part of my problem solving skills playing video games.
I think there's something called individual choices being made here.
Way before. Back to that garden (whether real or metaphor).
Maybe before that, even.
I'm trying to dig up the current information on the C standard, but the C90 ANSI standard only required 10 decimal digits for double. Ergo, gnucc on 8086 or power or ARM was probably okay, but not guaranteed to be portably okay.
That aside, think about computing interest on Apple's budget.
Think about computations on Apple's budget relative to the US budget.
15 significant decimal digits is not enough headroom to work on those kinds of numbers.
Was initially responding to my memories of past attempts in the direction of non-exact processing.
Having read the friendly article now, the research on power reduction in general may be useful. From the summary, I can't be sure, but it looks possible.
But, if I'm going to screw up the floating point for power, I'd just as soon go to fixed point or mixed fractions on a real low power CPU with known behavior.
That's part of the problem.
Patents and copyrights did not violate the Constitution before the invention of "intellectual property".
These were temporary liens on the market commons relative to creative works.
Now they are title to other people's thoughts, because of a semantic shift in the application of law.
Reality and the law are way out of sync. If the RIAA and MPAA and patent trolls don't quit, patents are going to be replaced with the GPL, and copyrights are going to be reduced to five years, no extension, when the backlash is finished.
That would assume the rental agency didn't have the car from the time the thief took it to the time it was returned.
Let's try a different analogy. Person A visits your rental lot and and checks out the driver's seat of a car. Let's say he rips the seatcover somehow. Whether there was intent or not, is the damage to the seatcover going to exceed the cost of the car? Should the law allow your lawyer to send letters threatening you with a bankrupting suit unless you're willing to cough up the price of a hundred days' rental?
It's still not a good fit, and begs huge questions about the nature of damages and the amount of control the "exclusive rights for a limited time" was intended to give, but it's a bit closer to the best face the RIAA can put on their activities.
Look it up. Nowhere in the US Constitution is the phrase "exclusive control" used.
Temporary "exclusive right" to a work, yes.
Right to a house involves being able to use it for shelter when you want to. Allows you demand another person to leave.
Does not involve using it to manufacture nerve gas with the windows open, for instance.
Right to a song? Given the pre-amble and various elements of the Constitution itself, rights to a song should not include the right to extort huge sums of money from an individual who was adolescent enough to post it where lots of other people could copy it. Particularly, when the theory of damages assumes, contrary to fact, an ecquivalence between copying and would-have-purchased-but-didn't.
We know that copying converts to purchase at about the rate that listening to songs on the radio used to.
The royalty system with the radio stations was based on the radio stations getting some commercial value, so the argument that there is no such system with personal sharing doesn't transfer well.
We know for a fact that never hearing a song converts to effectively zero sales (except for extremely popular "musicians", whose case is so different from the usual case as to be absolutely not the case on which to base law.
Having been "punished" according to the law, Tenenbaum now has standing to make the real argument, that the extortion being engaged in is a serious harm to individuals and community, and that the law which allows it is therefore wrong.
You want to be the next test case?
You go to the friendly article, and one of the places they are trying to sell this is India, where the OLPC is too expensive, takes too much power.
You also get a good look at how far off the "MPEG-4" conversion is going to be. It's not pretty.
The power-reduction techniques are interesting, I'll grant that. But I think everyone trying to do a one-size-fits-all capture of India should just take a step back and give it a second thought. A graphing calculator running netBSD would go a long way as in intermediate step towards the goal without having to subject an entire country's lower classes to enforced inaccuracy.
And I have to imagine the floating point errors would impinge the encryption.
I don't think they are talking about variable fudging.
They are talking about altering the geometries of the circuits -- transistors, gates, and some whole logic sections removed. You're not going to be putting those back in at run-time.
I'm not a fan of fixed-width floating-point, but the current floating point stuff is fairly well characterized.
This is going to introduce a new kind of bias to the errors, and the bias always adds up. Sure, we don't need more than 6 digits for a lot of stuff, but the way we generally do fractional math, we use extra accuracy to buffer the result from the cumulative bias.
These chips are going to bring new bias profiles, and it will likely take a while to get a clear picture of the profiles, and then you have to start programming against (yet another) profile.
Try to fit Apple's budget in a C double float.
Or Microsoft, Facewhatever, Google, etc.
Analyzing the power use in digital ICs is very useful.
The CPU they are trying to sell is a boondoggle. Shame to see the Indian government treating it seriously.
Case of engineers not understanding what they are working on, getting all focused on the initial target, not recognizing the far greater value in the tools they built trying to get to a wrong target.
Getting all sorts of details wrong and ending with the right conclusion.
If you want low power DSP, we have low power DSP. If you want a graphing calculator with an OS, we can do it now with a cold fire or ARM integrated CPU running on ordinary batteries, if we are willing to do the work.
While the power use analysis work is definitely going to be useful, the CPU they are trying to sell is a boondoggle.
But, yes, since back before the '60s. And microcontrollers doing DSP since the '70s.
We already have plenty of cheap, way-low-power solutions for all of these.
Fifteen years ago, in fact, this idea was not new, and the options available then were way better on price, power, speed, debuggability, everything that counted.
This idea was innovative about once, back in the mid-eighties, when TI and Motorola (among others) first started producing signal processors.
I have dim memories of intel touting research in this area about fifteen years ago (plus or minus a couple). And of thinking it wasn't new back then. And it didn't get very far then (in spite of people saying, "Monte Carlo!").
Now we have even more better solutions for when accuracy doesn't count.
Games, well, games are always okay with inaccuracy. Vocal codecs? I suppose you could force it to work.
But other solutions already exist, are cheaper, use less power, and behave more predictably.
Speaking of intel, they tried this same path about fifteen or so years ago, and I'm not talking about the FPU errors that have already been mentioned.
So medical applications on tablets and phones give wrong answers. Okay?
And how about some idiot thinking a phone number will fit nicely into a double float?
If I want low power at the sacrifice of accuracy, I'll use something like an S08 or a FORTH processor, and fixed point math.
Fixed point math, you can at least control.
I know that the 8087 was culturally more significant because of the relative penatration of the 8086 and the 68000, as well as the perception gap between the two. Also, the 68882 was not the only other math coprocessor, just like the 68K was not the only option to the 8086.
(Hmm. The current wikipedia article on math coprocessors has some problems, as can be seen in the fact that "math coprocessors" re-directs to "Floating-point Unit".)
I would hate to see the younger generation losing opportuniites to understand that there were plenty of valid options to the 8086.
First, it you, not your boss, especially not your boss's boss.
Second, you don't have co-workers and other people oogling your carrots and sticks.
Third, what constitutes privacy depends a the person
I can write a FORTH in the old Motorola M6800 assembler. Once I have the FORTH, it's not that far to a rudimentary web browser, although the address space limitations will prove a source of frustration.
Implementing FORTH on the 6809 is a bit more fun. High level constructs, more registers, access to the stack that does not have to tunnel through arcane sequences of pushes/pops/swaps.
Implementing FORTH on the 68000 is much more interesting, because it has enough registers to access parameters/locals, persistent allocation areas, thread locals and globals, etc. It's not just syntactic sugar when you don't have to waste half of your code fighting the botlenecks.
Goto is not enough.