Perl 6 is a step forward from a language design perspective. A big step forward. Such a big step that, if you're going to change, you may as well go to Python and dump the Perl uglyness.
The real problem with Perl is that it's a good language for small programs, but 10,000 lines of Perl is a mess unless you're a very disciplined programmer. The "there's more than one way to do it" is hell on maintenance programmers, because they have to know everything in the language to read code. Nor is reading Perl easy. I used to need three different Perl books when doing maintenance programming, because no one book, including Larry Wall's, covered everything in the language.
Perl made the Web happen in the same way that Basic made the PC happen. We're grateful to Larry for giving us this tool. Now it's time to retire it and look at the pictures of the grandkids. Thanks.
If you're just mixing down prerecorded clips already in digital form, then delivering them to another location in digital form, your sound card doesn't matter. The content isn't going through it. What does matter is the software you're using to assemble the show.
I know; I've seen those sideways-mounted PCI boards. But as more stuff goes on the motherboard, that seems to be on the way out. I hope; they're a headache.
You already have one.
Take a look at a dual Opteron motherboard. See those toroids and capacitors and big heatsinks near the CPU socket? You're looking at a DC-DC converter, rated for about 80 amps at 1.4 volts. In fact, two of them, one for each CPU chip. They're running off the +12V supply.
PCI slots need +5V or +3.3V. But a 1U server usually doesn't have PCI slots, at least not with anything in them. Despite this, 1U servers and their motherboards normally come with a power supply with outputs for +5V DC, +12V DC, -5V DC, -12V DC, and +3.3V DC. The +12VDC supply is doing almost all the work, powering the CPU and the disk drives. The other outputs are mostly idling. So one can see why Google, which is basically a big collection of 1U servers, is annoyed about having all those useless power supplies in their server farm.
This is just another document DRM system. Microsoft has been shipping this in Office since 2003.
They call it "Trustworthy Messaging. It includes 128-bit encryption and "content expiration", as Microsoft puts it.
The Connection Machine was a SIMD machine - Single Instruction, Multiple Datastream, which means that all the processors execute the same instruction at the same time, but on different data. Each processor had 4K of memory. There's a small class of problems for which this is useful, mostly big but localized problems like fluid dynamics and finite-element analysis. That class of problems was not big enough to support a market for the things.
Today's massively parallel machines are typically graphics processors. They have some resemblance to the Connection Machine, with all those shader units running the same tiny programs. But even they aren't SIMD machines; each little shader unit can potentially be running a different program.
Giant SIMD lockstep engines seem to be unnecessarily inflexible today.
Most of the postings so far have it all wrong. Google is not proposing 12VDC into a desktop PC or 12VDC distribution within the data center. What they're proposing is that the only DC voltage distributed around a computer case should be 12VDC. Any other voltages needed would be converted on the board that needed it.
It's been a long time since CPUs ran directly from the +5 supply. There's already point of load conversion on the motherboard near the CPU. Google just wants to make that work off the +12 supply, and get rid of the current +5/-5/+12/-12 output set.
The big question is how these processors interconnect. Cached shared memory probably won't scale up that high. An SGI study years ago indicated that 20 CPUs was roughly the upper limit before
the cache synchronization load became the bottleneck. That number changes somewhat with the hardware technology, but a workable 80-way shared-memory machine seems unlikely.
There are many alternatives to shared memory, and most of them, historically, are duds. The usual idea is to provide some kind of memory copy function between processors. The IBM Cell is the latest incarnation of this idea, but it has a long and disappointing history, going back to the nCube, the BBN Butterfly, and even the ILLIAC IV from the 1960s. Most of these, including the Cell, suffered from not having enough memory per processor.
Historically, shared-memory multiprocessors work, and loosely coupled network based clusters work. But nothing in between has ever been notably successful.
One big problem has typically been that the protection hardware in non-shared-memory multiprocessors hasn't been well worked out. The Infiniband people are starting to think about this. They have a system for setting up one way queues between machines in such a way that appliations can queue data for another machine without going through the OS, yet while retaining memory protection. That's a good idea. It's not well integrated into the CPU architecture, because it's an add-on as an I/O device. But it's a start.
You need two basic facilities in a non-shared memory multiprocessor - the ability to make a synchronous call (like a subroutine call) to another processor, and the ability to queue bulk data in a one-way fashion. (Yes, you can build one from the other, but there's a major performance hit if you do. You need good support for both.) These are the same facilities one has for interprocess communication in operating systems that support it well. (QNX probably leads in this; Minix 3 could get there. If you have to implement this, look at how QNX does it, and learn why it was so slow in Mach.)
It's amusing to realize that the "Lincoln never let the world forget" line on the Turnitin site is copied from the Kid's Section on the White House web site.
One real problem is that if you're assigned a paper on Shakespeare or Lincoln or Hemingway, there probably isn't much original that you can say. Those subjects have been done to death. If some service has a few million papers on Hemingway on file, the odds are fairly good that some false hits will show up.
The example of plagarism TurnItIn gives on their web site (try the "plagarism tour") is "Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue." vs. "Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War was part of an even bigger issue". How many different ways can you cover that concept? TurnItIn might accumulate tens of thousands of basic essays on Lincoln in a single year. If any clash at that level is considered plagarism, it's going to be really hard to write anything unique on common subjects.
Perhaps in future book reports will have to be assigned on books with an Amazon PageRank worse than 5000, to provent false collisions. Essays will have to be assigned on obscure subjects. Of course, this means the teachers must do more reading.
Just point out that the entire article is entirely about additional costs imposed by Vista. There's no mention of benefits in that article. None. It's all about additional costs and planned obsolescence.
Mention that when talking to your local EU politicians.
I did that at Stanford. My Masters programming project went in with "ILLEGAL COPY IF NOT IN RED" stamped on every page. I required the professor to sign an NDA. The program, the first raster to vector program for PCs, went on sale at COMDEX in 1984.
There was some grumbling, but I made it clear that I didn't really care what the CS department at Stanford thought; I had no obligation to give them rights to the software, and if they gave me grief about getting a degree, I'd go to court.
I had the advantage of going back to school in mid-career, I wasn't an employee of Stanford, and I had enough money that litigation was a realistic option.
So I have the degree, the product was a modest success, and I got stock in the little company that sold it. Autodesk.
Here's a moderately technical explaination of failure modes in lithium and lithium-ion batteries. There are unexpected hazards; for example, charging a lithium-ion battery at very low temperatures can cause
damage which will later cause a fire.
Notice the line in the article "Ebay from where I bought the battery haven't replied to the information I sent them." He bought a battery on Ebay? From whom? Who made this battery?
Did it have UL approval?
They put up an article on the battery explosion and didn't say that. Not useful.
The FAA has already banned bulk shipments of non-rechargeable lithium batteries by air on passenger-carrying aircraft. "RSPA and FAA, working with fire-safety experts at the FAA's Technical Center in Atlantic City, NJ, found that if a shipment of non-rechargeable lithium batteries caught fire in flight, current aircraft cargo fire-suppression systems would not be able to extinguish the fire. A single non-rechargeable lithium battery on fire within a cargo shipment would likely cause all surrounding batteries to catch fire and burn until the entire shipment is consumed."
Lithium-ion rechargeables are apparently less hazardous - they don't start a fire strong enough to ignite adjacent batteries. (Note that in Cox's laptop, one battery blew up, but the others did not ignite.)
For now, the FAA has decided not to ban laptops. They don't see such small fires as a serious threat to the aircraft. However, they're worried about future fuel cell powered devices.
There are plenty of people in their 20s that go...and thank god that they do.
Not like it used to be, though. About half as many people go to exercise classes in the US as did in the 1980s.
You see, back in the 1980s, not only could fat chicks not get laid, they couldn't even get in the door at better nightclubs. And guys had to keep up with the aerobics girls when they went out dancing. Rent "Perfect".
Get out of that broker now. Move all your assets to another broker.
You don't want to have assets with a broker in trouble.
I've been through a broker bankruptcy, and it's a huge hassle. Yes, you eventually get the assets back, but you may be trapped in a position and unable to trade out of it.
I've been after my gym to get something like this. For a while, they had some of the cardio machines equipped with Internet access, but the gear was from a dot-com that went bust. They have TV, but that's boring, and working out usually doesn't align with the TV schedule.
There was an arcade game called "Sky Cycle" about ten years ago, with a stationary bicycle. If you pedaled harder, you gained altitude. But all you could do was pedal along a canned route and pop balloons. Something like that, but more aggressive, would be fun as a piece of gym equipment. Tie it into a game like "Crimson Skies". Offer multiplayer mode, so you can have dogfights at the gym. Even in single player, though, Crimson Skies is fun. Now that would liven up cardio machines, which are, let's face it, boring.
Who goes to gyms? Middle-aged people, now. Thirty years ago, the average age at gyms was 18-23. Now it's 46. It's the same people working out. That's part of why we're seeing teenage "wide loads". We need more fusions of gaming and gym equipment.
That looks like something in the Inland Empire area west of LA. That's a mountain range in what used to be a waterway, with the area below sea level silted up, so there are craggy hills sticking out of flat ground. The "face" is probably a similar formation - a small piece of a buried mountain range.
The Internet Archive, which is a nonprofit, is also in the free video archiving business. Their main concern has been storage, of which they now have petabytes. Making the system friendly to the casual user has been a lower priority, and the Archive has a tiny staff. But you can get an Archive account and upload your video right now.
If you have anything of historical significance, please do so.
The Archive has had some problems with bandwidth, but they just moved to a new data center, and that's improving. Last year, they obtained an archive of Greatful Dead recordings, which can be played out as streaming audio. The Deadheads, with their short-term memory loss problems, would play the same stuff over and over again. This was sucking up most of the outgoing bandwidth and interfering with video playback.
The embarassing thing is that the F-14's replacement, the F-18 series, dates from 1978. It's been upgraded through several generations, but it's still an old design.
The next step is supposed to be the F-35, which is supposed to replace the F-16, the A-10, and the Harrier. That's scary; those are very different airplanes with very different missions and very different design criteria.
Not only has this been around for a while, it was written up on Slashdot. "Get Your iPod Fix From a Vending Machine" back in May covered the same vending machine, but loaded up with iPods instead of cell phones.
I can't understand why Nvidia would drop a unique feature like hardware TCP/IP acceleration.
Because unless you're running a server with gigabit Ethernet at high utilization, it won't noticeably help performance. For an "enthusiast PC" out on a DSL line, you'll never notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Perl 6 is a step forward from a language design perspective. A big step forward. Such a big step that, if you're going to change, you may as well go to Python and dump the Perl uglyness.
The real problem with Perl is that it's a good language for small programs, but 10,000 lines of Perl is a mess unless you're a very disciplined programmer. The "there's more than one way to do it" is hell on maintenance programmers, because they have to know everything in the language to read code. Nor is reading Perl easy. I used to need three different Perl books when doing maintenance programming, because no one book, including Larry Wall's, covered everything in the language.
Perl made the Web happen in the same way that Basic made the PC happen. We're grateful to Larry for giving us this tool. Now it's time to retire it and look at the pictures of the grandkids. Thanks.
If you're just mixing down prerecorded clips already in digital form, then delivering them to another location in digital form, your sound card doesn't matter. The content isn't going through it. What does matter is the software you're using to assemble the show.
Rock and roll used to evoke similar hostility. But that's changed, as rock moved from rebellion to senility and lost its political connection.
It's suprising how little hostility hip-hop and rap evoked, considering that much of '90s rap was about killing people. ("Devil, to gangbanging there's a positive side and the positive side is this--sooner than later the brothers will come to Islam, and they will be the soldiers for the war; what war, you ask; Armageddon; ha, ha, ha, ha, ha" -- "Armageddon"; RBX, The RBX Files, 1995, Premeditated Records, © Warner Brother Records, Time Warner, USA.) But hip-hop and rap switched from guns to "bling", thereby encouraging shopping. "According to American Brandstand, a Web site that tracks brand names on the Billboard top singles chart, of the 111 songs that made the Billboard Top 20 in 2003, 43 mentioned a product; 84 different brands were named."
So we can expect that as in-game advertising becomes more pervasive, media criticism of games will become muted.
I know; I've seen those sideways-mounted PCI boards. But as more stuff goes on the motherboard, that seems to be on the way out. I hope; they're a headache.
You already have one. Take a look at a dual Opteron motherboard. See those toroids and capacitors and big heatsinks near the CPU socket? You're looking at a DC-DC converter, rated for about 80 amps at 1.4 volts. In fact, two of them, one for each CPU chip. They're running off the +12V supply.
PCI slots need +5V or +3.3V. But a 1U server usually doesn't have PCI slots, at least not with anything in them. Despite this, 1U servers and their motherboards normally come with a power supply with outputs for +5V DC, +12V DC, -5V DC, -12V DC, and +3.3V DC. The +12VDC supply is doing almost all the work, powering the CPU and the disk drives. The other outputs are mostly idling. So one can see why Google, which is basically a big collection of 1U servers, is annoyed about having all those useless power supplies in their server farm.
This is just another document DRM system. Microsoft has been shipping this in Office since 2003. They call it "Trustworthy Messaging. It includes 128-bit encryption and "content expiration", as Microsoft puts it.
Nothing new here.
The capacitor bank described in the patent is 31 farads at 3.5KV, storing 52KWh and weighing 336 pounds. That's a truly impressive capacitor bank.
Unfortunately, that's the energy storage equivalent of only a gallon of gasoline.
The Connection Machine was a SIMD machine - Single Instruction, Multiple Datastream, which means that all the processors execute the same instruction at the same time, but on different data. Each processor had 4K of memory. There's a small class of problems for which this is useful, mostly big but localized problems like fluid dynamics and finite-element analysis. That class of problems was not big enough to support a market for the things.
Today's massively parallel machines are typically graphics processors. They have some resemblance to the Connection Machine, with all those shader units running the same tiny programs. But even they aren't SIMD machines; each little shader unit can potentially be running a different program. Giant SIMD lockstep engines seem to be unnecessarily inflexible today.
Most of the postings so far have it all wrong. Google is not proposing 12VDC into a desktop PC or 12VDC distribution within the data center. What they're proposing is that the only DC voltage distributed around a computer case should be 12VDC. Any other voltages needed would be converted on the board that needed it.
This is called "point of load conversion", and involves small switching regulators near each load. Here's a tutorial on point of load power conversion.
It's been a long time since CPUs ran directly from the +5 supply. There's already point of load conversion on the motherboard near the CPU. Google just wants to make that work off the +12 supply, and get rid of the current +5/-5/+12/-12 output set.
The big question is how these processors interconnect. Cached shared memory probably won't scale up that high. An SGI study years ago indicated that 20 CPUs was roughly the upper limit before the cache synchronization load became the bottleneck. That number changes somewhat with the hardware technology, but a workable 80-way shared-memory machine seems unlikely.
There are many alternatives to shared memory, and most of them, historically, are duds. The usual idea is to provide some kind of memory copy function between processors. The IBM Cell is the latest incarnation of this idea, but it has a long and disappointing history, going back to the nCube, the BBN Butterfly, and even the ILLIAC IV from the 1960s. Most of these, including the Cell, suffered from not having enough memory per processor.
Historically, shared-memory multiprocessors work, and loosely coupled network based clusters work. But nothing in between has ever been notably successful.
One big problem has typically been that the protection hardware in non-shared-memory multiprocessors hasn't been well worked out. The Infiniband people are starting to think about this. They have a system for setting up one way queues between machines in such a way that appliations can queue data for another machine without going through the OS, yet while retaining memory protection. That's a good idea. It's not well integrated into the CPU architecture, because it's an add-on as an I/O device. But it's a start.
You need two basic facilities in a non-shared memory multiprocessor - the ability to make a synchronous call (like a subroutine call) to another processor, and the ability to queue bulk data in a one-way fashion. (Yes, you can build one from the other, but there's a major performance hit if you do. You need good support for both.) These are the same facilities one has for interprocess communication in operating systems that support it well. (QNX probably leads in this; Minix 3 could get there. If you have to implement this, look at how QNX does it, and learn why it was so slow in Mach.)
It's amusing to realize that the "Lincoln never let the world forget" line on the Turnitin site is copied from the Kid's Section on the White House web site.
One real problem is that if you're assigned a paper on Shakespeare or Lincoln or Hemingway, there probably isn't much original that you can say. Those subjects have been done to death. If some service has a few million papers on Hemingway on file, the odds are fairly good that some false hits will show up.
The example of plagarism TurnItIn gives on their web site (try the "plagarism tour") is "Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue." vs. "Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War was part of an even bigger issue". How many different ways can you cover that concept? TurnItIn might accumulate tens of thousands of basic essays on Lincoln in a single year. If any clash at that level is considered plagarism, it's going to be really hard to write anything unique on common subjects.
Perhaps in future book reports will have to be assigned on books with an Amazon PageRank worse than 5000, to provent false collisions. Essays will have to be assigned on obscure subjects. Of course, this means the teachers must do more reading.
Just point out that the entire article is entirely about additional costs imposed by Vista. There's no mention of benefits in that article. None. It's all about additional costs and planned obsolescence.
Mention that when talking to your local EU politicians.
I did that at Stanford. My Masters programming project went in with "ILLEGAL COPY IF NOT IN RED" stamped on every page. I required the professor to sign an NDA. The program, the first raster to vector program for PCs, went on sale at COMDEX in 1984.
There was some grumbling, but I made it clear that I didn't really care what the CS department at Stanford thought; I had no obligation to give them rights to the software, and if they gave me grief about getting a degree, I'd go to court.
I had the advantage of going back to school in mid-career, I wasn't an employee of Stanford, and I had enough money that litigation was a realistic option.
So I have the degree, the product was a modest success, and I got stock in the little company that sold it. Autodesk.
Here's a moderately technical explaination of failure modes in lithium and lithium-ion batteries. There are unexpected hazards; for example, charging a lithium-ion battery at very low temperatures can cause damage which will later cause a fire.
Notice the line in the article "Ebay from where I bought the battery haven't replied to the information I sent them." He bought a battery on Ebay? From whom? Who made this battery? Did it have UL approval? They put up an article on the battery explosion and didn't say that. Not useful.
The FAA has already banned bulk shipments of non-rechargeable lithium batteries by air on passenger-carrying aircraft. "RSPA and FAA, working with fire-safety experts at the FAA's Technical Center in Atlantic City, NJ, found that if a shipment of non-rechargeable lithium batteries caught fire in flight, current aircraft cargo fire-suppression systems would not be able to extinguish the fire. A single non-rechargeable lithium battery on fire within a cargo shipment would likely cause all surrounding batteries to catch fire and burn until the entire shipment is consumed."
Lithium-ion rechargeables are apparently less hazardous - they don't start a fire strong enough to ignite adjacent batteries. (Note that in Cox's laptop, one battery blew up, but the others did not ignite.)
For now, the FAA has decided not to ban laptops. They don't see such small fires as a serious threat to the aircraft. However, they're worried about future fuel cell powered devices.
There are plenty of people in their 20s that go...and thank god that they do.
Not like it used to be, though. About half as many people go to exercise classes in the US as did in the 1980s.
You see, back in the 1980s, not only could fat chicks not get laid, they couldn't even get in the door at better nightclubs. And guys had to keep up with the aerobics girls when they went out dancing. Rent "Perfect".
Get out of that broker now. Move all your assets to another broker. You don't want to have assets with a broker in trouble.
I've been through a broker bankruptcy, and it's a huge hassle. Yes, you eventually get the assets back, but you may be trapped in a position and unable to trade out of it.
The PS2 is still outselling the XBox 360.
The PS2 is $129. That helps. A lot.
Remember, to most of the buyers, who are parents, these things are toys.
I've been after my gym to get something like this. For a while, they had some of the cardio machines equipped with Internet access, but the gear was from a dot-com that went bust. They have TV, but that's boring, and working out usually doesn't align with the TV schedule.
There was an arcade game called "Sky Cycle" about ten years ago, with a stationary bicycle. If you pedaled harder, you gained altitude. But all you could do was pedal along a canned route and pop balloons. Something like that, but more aggressive, would be fun as a piece of gym equipment. Tie it into a game like "Crimson Skies". Offer multiplayer mode, so you can have dogfights at the gym. Even in single player, though, Crimson Skies is fun. Now that would liven up cardio machines, which are, let's face it, boring.
Who goes to gyms? Middle-aged people, now. Thirty years ago, the average age at gyms was 18-23. Now it's 46. It's the same people working out. That's part of why we're seeing teenage "wide loads". We need more fusions of gaming and gym equipment.
That looks like something in the Inland Empire area west of LA. That's a mountain range in what used to be a waterway, with the area below sea level silted up, so there are craggy hills sticking out of flat ground. The "face" is probably a similar formation - a small piece of a buried mountain range.
The Internet Archive, which is a nonprofit, is also in the free video archiving business. Their main concern has been storage, of which they now have petabytes. Making the system friendly to the casual user has been a lower priority, and the Archive has a tiny staff. But you can get an Archive account and upload your video right now. If you have anything of historical significance, please do so.
The Archive has had some problems with bandwidth, but they just moved to a new data center, and that's improving. Last year, they obtained an archive of Greatful Dead recordings, which can be played out as streaming audio. The Deadheads, with their short-term memory loss problems, would play the same stuff over and over again. This was sucking up most of the outgoing bandwidth and interfering with video playback.
The Archive will probably be around long after YouTube is gone. Among other things, there's a duplicate of the Internet Archive in Egypt.
The embarassing thing is that the F-14's replacement, the F-18 series, dates from 1978. It's been upgraded through several generations, but it's still an old design.
The next step is supposed to be the F-35, which is supposed to replace the F-16, the A-10, and the Harrier. That's scary; those are very different airplanes with very different missions and very different design criteria.
Not only has this been around for a while, it was written up on Slashdot. "Get Your iPod Fix From a Vending Machine" back in May covered the same vending machine, but loaded up with iPods instead of cell phones.
I can't understand why Nvidia would drop a unique feature like hardware TCP/IP acceleration.
Because unless you're running a server with gigabit Ethernet at high utilization, it won't noticeably help performance. For an "enthusiast PC" out on a DSL line, you'll never notice.