Hackers could never shut their mouths properly. They do all kinds of variously clever stuff, but it all has to be "shared" with all and everybody, including people who don't give a shit.
To paraphrase here, "The greatest hack the Devil ever pulled is convincing the Internet he don't exist."
What about Europe? We don't have software patents here. And Jon Lech Johansen, with whom I have had to share the country of occupation (before he moved to France, and then to the U.S. of A. AFAIK), walked free after he was tried by the Norwegian court when he was indicted by some folks that were assembled to represent the RIAA and MPAA. They accused him of illegal action circumventing the CSS copy scrambler apparently by writing the much known DeCSS. So basically, in Europe we are allowed to decrypt our own DVDs (and copy them) without fearing legal action? Is that so.
And by the way, even though I do not know much about software patents, I will have to disagree with you strongly with your last paragraph. You are gravely mistaken comparing the situation to "anarchocommunists who don't believe in intellectual property".
We are talking about a proprietary technology limiting and binding EVERYONE (the WHOLE WORLD) to a certain paying subculture that can afford to implement DVD players, however bad. Essentially proprietary too. Think about it. All your home theater equipment built on a puny merit of developing black boxes, and not only that, preventing you from changing any piece of these blackboxes. If the fact that you patched your DVD player for region-free op comes out, you may be liable for prosecution by the same law, as the patched firmware may be based on a DVD decoder that is not licensed. This is a really really bad judgement from the supporterts of such patents, it limits the entire society, where customers are treated like slaves. This is essentially what it looks like. It may be OK to patent a technology, but if you put information on a bunch of aluminium disks, you cannot expect the whole world to go by the rule that if they want to know what is on the disk they bought, they have to pay a whole lot of licences first, even if they want to play the video on the disc they own in their own house. This is capitalism at its worst, IMO. And capitalism does have its benefits, so it us shame someone alwas pushes it past the good edge.
Operating systems need to stop being argued like a religion, I'm getting tired of it.
They may be called "operating" systems but they are certainly not inter-operating. Not to a degree the majority would call for in their common sense. We just got to the point where one can save a Microsoft Office document on Windows Vista to the default binary Office format (which pretty much everybody does, coz ignorance is bliss) and hope to open it in Linux, without it looking like something recovered from lost+found. And that draws from the benefit of diversity that we would otherwise enjoy, as we enjoy diversity everywhere else.
It is seemingly in interest of any corporation to develop and promote proprietary formats, for reasons one may deduce as valid pretty quickly. Unfortunately people have always suffered from lack of true foresight, and even more so in areas of IT and economy. As much as some suits hidden in some corporate building love to think that proprietary formats is a god given gift to a great IT company, such is a prime example of short-term gain and long-term disaster. This is like a kid who loves candy so much he would munch on it in blissful ignorance until all of his teeth shatter and fall out. They say a good business is one that satisfies its clients? What if there are two groups of clients - one that finds the service to be severly limiting their choice, and another one that is led to believe the first group does not exist, is a vocal minority or pure fact fabrication?
I still cannot figure out what the whole fuss is all about, so I will try to Ask Slashdot here and now, in the form of ehm..asking it by my post:
Is it like you HAVE to have some proprietary software to play a DVD? Why? Can't someone write a FOSS MPEG decoder software? I am not good at this, the software patents, and what exactly is forbidden. Here where we live, we don't have software patents.
Yes I agree with you on all but one important point - We CAN split the CPU somehow, by taking the cores out for instance and giving each its own cache and memory controller. This is what multiprocessor systems do as opposed to multicore systems. It is essentially the same as a GPU plugged in a PCIx slot. I basically reacted on you saying that "we can't because". That is misinformation, because we can and we will have opportunity to do so many times in the future. Unless the whole system is put onto a single die, which will present us with essential monopoly over parts we can choose for our systems, the motherboard remains relevant, and various bits of the system will be put outside a die, also parts that can be put into a CPU. I hope this clarifies my opinion, and exactly where it differs from yours. I did not mean to be offensive for the sake of it;-) I also expressed my opinion so it is known that it is fully possible and relevant to make a generic GPU (which will be more like a G'eneric'PU then) and put it BESIDE the CPU on the motherboard, not inside it. For most application, given its own cache and memory access facility, it will do just fine and the rest of the system will do too.
About your first paragraph: I am not sure what does it have to do with anything? So yes, FPU merged with CPU with 486DX in '89, and HT was introduced in 2001. Defective FPUs sold as 486SX processors. So? What does it have to do with anything?
Yes, it is a known fact that inside a silicon die, latencies are substantially lower and speeds are substantially higher. It does not mean you should not distribute multiple CPUs with their own memory controller and cache across a motherboard. They do not have to talk to each other all that often, this is what parallel processing is about among other things - being able to perform a task independently from counterparts.
HyperTransport IS designed to interconnect things on the motherboard. Read on it again. I never said it does it "with the speeds and latencies that are available on the CPU die itself", you misquoted me. It does not need to for what it is used.
And I never said a GPU will stay a GPU if integrated on-die with the CPU.
No he and the man who is quoted on the page he links to is very correct. If desired, a much more capable FPU then we already have may be implemented pretty soon that will put the triple-scalar AMD FPUs found in Ahtlons and whatever FPU designs are put to use in Intel CPUs all to shame. This is exactly the point of the quote. Intel only does not make a faster FPU because they do not need to (they only need to have it marginally faster each time to remain competitive) unless it becomes very important, which it will when GPU functionality is migrated back to CPU.If you consider that a dedicated modern GPU has FPU performance orders of magnitude faster than the CPU FPU, it would make perfect sense for NVidia and ATI to produce add-on FPU cards. But these are graphics companies and their chips call for more than a FPU unit, they make profits by keeping the users convinced that you need a separate chip to not only do FPU stuff, but draw triangles with textures. Perhaps it is because NVidia and ATI know that they would never be able to compete with Intel if a marked for dedicated FPUs would present itself, given the fact that Intel has been designing PUs since like 60s. They try to play it like we need dedicated graphics hardware, and they know it is not Intels horse, and with all the knowledge they have accumulated since it all started with GPUs, they are at the exact place they would like to be. They just want to play it like a board game, one dice throw at a time. But it is still a matter of demand. If Barack Obama decides we need to find aliens pretty damn soon because we're lonely and a law is written where every American is paid 10$ for every piece of processed data packet they send to SETI via the SETI@Home software, I assure you a dedicated FPU that shows what dedicated off-die hardware can do will be on the market very soon after. But a reasonable demand has to be there. It will be easier than before with HyperTransport, QuickPath and all. Before it was propriatary slots for each add-on for the system and an ISA bus. It was a special slot for the FPU f.e. I am not sure why they would not make ISA cards with FPUs THEN (though I am sure they did that too), but today, even if PCIx would not do, I am sure it is doable with some other existing means without reinventing whole motherboards.
Yes but FPU functionality is a very desirable generic functionality that almost every application may need, because the FPU unlike the CPU is made to work with REAL numbers, the numbers real world uses. It is not like FPU is hardwired to operate some highly specialized pipeline and that only, the way modern GPUs are. Modern GPUs are like lollipop factories, churning out wrapped candy by billions, about as fast as you could ever do that with a machine, but that's all they can do as factories. An FPU is a calculator, and calculators are a pretty generic tool that is used in all natural sciences. An FPU is a necessity for any modern computer, because it is among the very few examples of GENERAL PURPOSE DEDICATED hardware.
I like the last sentence of your post. That is exactly how I feel, having done some hobby graphics programming before, reading Michael Abrashs weird but highly functional perky algorithms.
Also it seems that a common dedicated GPUs value per dollar ratio is much lower than for a CPU, given the fact it sits idle most of the time when you don't use DirectX or OpenGL, and even if it does something "useful" again it's only DirectX or OpenGL which are hardly considered usable for general purpose computing for the masses. Except for gamers, any buy like that is a waste of money. All those billions of transistors and horsepower that could put CPUs to shame, but it comes with a peekhole size programming potential.
HyperTransport from AMD, and QuickPath from Intel are designed among other things to interconnect different facilities on the motherboard with more than adequate speeds and latencies. Did you take that into account when writing what you wrote about "us not being able to break CPUs into pieces"?
GPU not talking to CPU to the extent programmer wants is one of the very problems that obviously trouble Sweeney as he advocates for a more generic approach to graphics programming. The whole interview and his answers revolve around being able to free ourselves from being "force fed those triangles down that pipeline" approach so to speak.
Sweeney is right IMO. It is also one of the more important interviews and I recommend it to all that are currently doing computer graphics. This is essentially a RISC vs CISC debate again, and it shares all the common arguments with it. Given most of the industry today is a RISC design abstracted to a CISC interface, I agree with Sweeney and think that the true maturing will happen when the CPU and GPU will merge. Intels battleplan is many core approach. Specialized hardware is always faster clock for clock, but programmers appreciate generics everywhere, and since we do not pay for our GPUs per computation result they produce, an idle GPU is a waste. And it is idle half the time, being specialized as it is. Except of all the folks who play WOW 24-7.
Apparently you do not read very well. He put emphasis on generic computing as opposed to specialized hardware. It is not about cramming it all in one silicon package. For all Sweeney cares you can distribute silicon chips all over inside a computer case, as long as they do not limit programmers ability to eh.. program them.
Two polar opposites, if simplified
on
Tech Vs. Business?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think the situation is quite natural. Business is about reality, tech is about perfection. The two groups have quite different interests and goals. The art is to unite the two for a good result.
Businessmen everywhere are about as close you can get to jungle law, they live to maximize profit, seek out new enterprises (to maximize profit), and their gadgets are mediocre at best, because frankly they could not care less as long as GSM works, and it looks presentable. Presentability is very important for them, so they wear expensive effective wristwatches.
Tech people sacrifice pretty much anything to perfect the technology they work on. They look like their mother dresses them, do not pay as much attention (as others) to their appearance and most of their energy is spent on the thought process and its application.
Of course the described above is extreme examples, but such polarization between the two groups is quite common, and that is what IMO gives rise to the perception.
When you put the two together, if the two must cooperate for common good, like a chemical reaction they start productive fighting over the balance between the real delivered product sacrificing anything else but sell-value (which the businessman decides alone what is) and a pure concept and its development as the tech person sees fit. Since business is what seemingly runs the company, since it is all kinds of businessmen, project managers included, who run and shake hands at meetings, tech people are ignored most of the time as labour ants, however in all my experience this is the most common and gravest mistake the suits ever make. They take themselves far too serious and important to understand that the very platform they are trying to sell is made by anyone else but themselves. Businessman without a developer is like a conman on the street that sells you all kinds of promises and service you do not immediately see, only they do it with flashy and impressive Powerpoint presentations (albeit really lame). A developer without a seller (businessman) is equally useless, however inspiring it may seem, because with all the bright ideas and started development, unless he has some financial support elsewhere and is backed up, needs such financial interest and investing from someone, otherwise it all ends up like helicopters Leonardo Da Vinci drafted in his sketchbooks (albeit pretty well drafted).
I will suffice to reply with the quote from "Contact" by Carl Sagan:
"You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an "airplane," you know you get people to go in, and fly around like birds, it's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right? Look, all I'm asking, is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history... of history."
Or to put it with my dry tongue: The books concerning undisputable physics laws did exist when Leonardo Da Vinci lived too, and they were as thick if not thicker and as numerous as books on physics today, and just as then today skepticism is the first barrier when expanding the understanding of reality. The problem I have with your thinking is, unlike scientist who refute theories based on analytic approach and cross-referencing laws, you seem to accept the skepticism as a god-given tool and universal law that allows anybody and anyone today to say things like "faster than light travel is impossible. This guy X proved it and experiments were done. Refer to the book Y, where Z is explained and which completely and irrevocably denies your concept application.".
But the Carl Sagan wrote it much better. Now, I did not say everything is possible, but it seems as we are sitting here saying "I did not say everything is possible", more and more things pop up that make us wonder what the fuck is Universe all about. It is HIGHLY improbable that a guy living in 1940s however smart he is, unless he is a prophet of a true God if he exists, can pinpoint a law of the Universe that is ABSOLUTE. Please. We do build our technology on these laws, but as it is said about Zodiac, they are not 'meant to limit what can happen but merely show what is possible.'
I am just as a realist as you are, but you are fantasizing. Your fantasy revolves around believing in the future that is already cemented, but this fantasy is not reality. Reality in fact shows us again and again that our understanding of laws of nature is flawed to a formidable degree. I do believe it is possible to precisely describe such laws, but it would be as much effort as describing what happens in one corner of a dirty swimming pool filled with tree leafs when you poke the water on the other end. Under heavy rain.
If you go out in the ocean, in your immediate vicinity (and our archaic space probes can only do no better) there is just ocean. Granted ocean is a good deal richer ecosystem than the cold space is ever, but for comparision that will do. Now, it does not mean there are no islands around you, but you have to extend the observable space. It's the same with outer space. For the percentage of the space we actually do explore, its just rocks and craters, but most of space is. Somewhere there is lush life, but it is not in our solar system, with a possible exception of the ocean under the surface of Europa. In science fiction we are put in the center of a alien civilization, but in reality, in SOL we are the only civilization to write about. It does not mean however that there are no others. Space is so big such a small cluster of it that our SOL is does not make it any statistical variable either way. If you had sweeped through the entire Milky Way galaxy throughly and not found any sign of life at all, then it would perhaps be an argument against "universe teaming with life", and even then the search would not be over, provided there are billions of galaxies out there.
Good point on 'buying out of confusion'. Right on. Noticed this many times myself. Ordering the computer, and then the person asks "Is it like, Windows or whatever, and stuff?". People could not care less, and frankly they should not. This is what standards compliance and interoperable technologies all try to accomplish, working against corporate bullying that is going on.
You misquoted me. The sentence you misquoted ends with "..any more than tweaking a copy of Linux to run on each model they have..." Also Window licenses do not cost all that much, so some price increase (justified by the fact that you buy from a manufacturer that wishes to acknowledge undesired MS monopoly) will not be very noticeable, especially if you consider the fact that people shop for laptops, not for operating systems, when they shop laptops.
Tell me honestly if you decided to buy a Thinkpad, and you see the model you want and you see 1100$ instead of 1000$ because Windows license cost went up for Lenovo, do you go and buy a Dell instead? As far as I have observed people choose their laptops quite carefully, because of construction, screen real estate, screen quality, input ergonomics and port selection, not because it comes with only Windows XP or Vista, or because the Vista license for a Dell computer is 100$ cheaper than for a Thinkpad. Hell, even if Lenovo had to buy a single user OEM license for each machine it sells (as opposed to the discount it gets from MS for selling volumes of Windows copies installed) it still sells a Thinkpad more than very well. You are trying to sell a cheap argument. In fact if any company, Lenovo can actually afford to sell Thinkpads without any OS at all, given that many of their customers are business clients that use MSDN subscription licenses and reinstall Vista to their custom setup. The next client base is enthusiasts that know a good laptop, and they tweak Linux to run on their TP, cost almost what it may. And China may be bribe-infested crono-capitalism, but Lenovo is a registered trademark in USA too, and Lenovo CEO is an American by the name of William Amelio, also a philantrope.
She did not have a clue, did she. Though a fan and owner of a Thinkpad (have the T61 meself), this kind of attitude sometimes makes me want to throw all this dirty hardware outta window and go live on a Thai beach or something.
I heard the Kraken botnet is very consumer friendly. It is like, connects all those Windows systems together to form possibly worlds largest and most potent supercomputer, and all that without even bothering the people who use these systems. They don't even know it, imagine!
Slashdot is actually pretty loaded with proponents of the corporate business style with all its smells and flavours. They like to justify and explain sometimes why Microsoft NEEDS to behave the way it does, and what would happen to it if it didn't, and how some people just want to have a 'puter they can type their pretty little office documents on without knowing what a 'software repository' is.
Actually I did not say that it is a automatic process, where manufacturers just install vanilla Ubuntu. I said it is not the worlds hardest job. And if you count in the savings of royalties they otherwise pay to MS, it is is very cheap to maintain Linux.
I am well aware Linux does not behave nicely either, given I have a Thinkpad T61, half of which functionality I had to tweak to work properly.
Still, even in the short run Linux does pay off. Also, people can choose Windows still, nobody forces them to run Linux like they are currently forced to run Windows.
In Windows even after all the tweaking and custom drivers, stuff breaks and issues arise. And in these cases its all finger pointing.
Slashdot Mirror
Hackers could never shut their mouths properly. They do all kinds of variously clever stuff, but it all has to be "shared" with all and everybody, including people who don't give a shit.
To paraphrase here,
"The greatest hack the Devil ever pulled is convincing the Internet he don't exist."
What about Europe? We don't have software patents here. And Jon Lech Johansen, with whom I have had to share the country of occupation (before he moved to France, and then to the U.S. of A. AFAIK), walked free after he was tried by the Norwegian court when he was indicted by some folks that were assembled to represent the RIAA and MPAA. They accused him of illegal action circumventing the CSS copy scrambler apparently by writing the much known DeCSS. So basically, in Europe we are allowed to decrypt our own DVDs (and copy them) without fearing legal action? Is that so.
And by the way, even though I do not know much about software patents, I will have to disagree with you strongly with your last paragraph. You are gravely mistaken comparing the situation to "anarchocommunists who don't believe in intellectual property".
We are talking about a proprietary technology limiting and binding EVERYONE (the WHOLE WORLD) to a certain paying subculture that can afford to implement DVD players, however bad. Essentially proprietary too. Think about it. All your home theater equipment built on a puny merit of developing black boxes, and not only that, preventing you from changing any piece of these blackboxes. If the fact that you patched your DVD player for region-free op comes out, you may be liable for prosecution by the same law, as the patched firmware may be based on a DVD decoder that is not licensed. This is a really really bad judgement from the supporterts of such patents, it limits the entire society, where customers are treated like slaves. This is essentially what it looks like. It may be OK to patent a technology, but if you put information on a bunch of aluminium disks, you cannot expect the whole world to go by the rule that if they want to know what is on the disk they bought, they have to pay a whole lot of licences first, even if they want to play the video on the disc they own in their own house. This is capitalism at its worst, IMO. And capitalism does have its benefits, so it us shame someone alwas pushes it past the good edge.
Operating systems need to stop being argued like a religion, I'm getting tired of it.
They may be called "operating" systems but they are certainly not inter-operating. Not to a degree the majority would call for in their common sense. We just got to the point where one can save a Microsoft Office document on Windows Vista to the default binary Office format (which pretty much everybody does, coz ignorance is bliss) and hope to open it in Linux, without it looking like something recovered from lost+found. And that draws from the benefit of diversity that we would otherwise enjoy, as we enjoy diversity everywhere else.
It is seemingly in interest of any corporation to develop and promote proprietary formats, for reasons one may deduce as valid pretty quickly. Unfortunately people have always suffered from lack of true foresight, and even more so in areas of IT and economy. As much as some suits hidden in some corporate building love to think that proprietary formats is a god given gift to a great IT company, such is a prime example of short-term gain and long-term disaster. This is like a kid who loves candy so much he would munch on it in blissful ignorance until all of his teeth shatter and fall out. They say a good business is one that satisfies its clients? What if there are two groups of clients - one that finds the service to be severly limiting their choice, and another one that is led to believe the first group does not exist, is a vocal minority or pure fact fabrication?
My question exactly. Can someone enlighten us?
I still cannot figure out what the whole fuss is all about, so I will try to Ask Slashdot here and now, in the form of ehm..asking it by my post:
Is it like you HAVE to have some proprietary software to play a DVD? Why? Can't someone write a FOSS MPEG decoder software? I am not good at this, the software patents, and what exactly is forbidden. Here where we live, we don't have software patents.
Yes I agree with you on all but one important point - We CAN split the CPU somehow, by taking the cores out for instance and giving each its own cache and memory controller. This is what multiprocessor systems do as opposed to multicore systems. It is essentially the same as a GPU plugged in a PCIx slot. I basically reacted on you saying that "we can't because". That is misinformation, because we can and we will have opportunity to do so many times in the future. Unless the whole system is put onto a single die, which will present us with essential monopoly over parts we can choose for our systems, the motherboard remains relevant, and various bits of the system will be put outside a die, also parts that can be put into a CPU. I hope this clarifies my opinion, and exactly where it differs from yours. I did not mean to be offensive for the sake of it ;-) I also expressed my opinion so it is known that it is fully possible and relevant to make a generic GPU (which will be more like a G'eneric'PU then) and put it BESIDE the CPU on the motherboard, not inside it. For most application, given its own cache and memory access facility, it will do just fine and the rest of the system will do too.
About your first paragraph: I am not sure what does it have to do with anything? So yes, FPU merged with CPU with 486DX in '89, and HT was introduced in 2001. Defective FPUs sold as 486SX processors. So? What does it have to do with anything?
Yes, it is a known fact that inside a silicon die, latencies are substantially lower and speeds are substantially higher. It does not mean you should not distribute multiple CPUs with their own memory controller and cache across a motherboard. They do not have to talk to each other all that often, this is what parallel processing is about among other things - being able to perform a task independently from counterparts.
HyperTransport IS designed to interconnect things on the motherboard. Read on it again. I never said it does it "with the speeds and latencies that are available on the CPU die itself", you misquoted me. It does not need to for what it is used.
And I never said a GPU will stay a GPU if integrated on-die with the CPU.
No he and the man who is quoted on the page he links to is very correct. If desired, a much more capable FPU then we already have may be implemented pretty soon that will put the triple-scalar AMD FPUs found in Ahtlons and whatever FPU designs are put to use in Intel CPUs all to shame. This is exactly the point of the quote. Intel only does not make a faster FPU because they do not need to (they only need to have it marginally faster each time to remain competitive) unless it becomes very important, which it will when GPU functionality is migrated back to CPU.If you consider that a dedicated modern GPU has FPU performance orders of magnitude faster than the CPU FPU, it would make perfect sense for NVidia and ATI to produce add-on FPU cards. But these are graphics companies and their chips call for more than a FPU unit, they make profits by keeping the users convinced that you need a separate chip to not only do FPU stuff, but draw triangles with textures. Perhaps it is because NVidia and ATI know that they would never be able to compete with Intel if a marked for dedicated FPUs would present itself, given the fact that Intel has been designing PUs since like 60s. They try to play it like we need dedicated graphics hardware, and they know it is not Intels horse, and with all the knowledge they have accumulated since it all started with GPUs, they are at the exact place they would like to be. They just want to play it like a board game, one dice throw at a time. But it is still a matter of demand. If Barack Obama decides we need to find aliens pretty damn soon because we're lonely and a law is written where every American is paid 10$ for every piece of processed data packet they send to SETI via the SETI@Home software, I assure you a dedicated FPU that shows what dedicated off-die hardware can do will be on the market very soon after. But a reasonable demand has to be there. It will be easier than before with HyperTransport, QuickPath and all. Before it was propriatary slots for each add-on for the system and an ISA bus. It was a special slot for the FPU f.e. I am not sure why they would not make ISA cards with FPUs THEN (though I am sure they did that too), but today, even if PCIx would not do, I am sure it is doable with some other existing means without reinventing whole motherboards.
Yes but FPU functionality is a very desirable generic functionality that almost every application may need, because the FPU unlike the CPU is made to work with REAL numbers, the numbers real world uses. It is not like FPU is hardwired to operate some highly specialized pipeline and that only, the way modern GPUs are. Modern GPUs are like lollipop factories, churning out wrapped candy by billions, about as fast as you could ever do that with a machine, but that's all they can do as factories. An FPU is a calculator, and calculators are a pretty generic tool that is used in all natural sciences. An FPU is a necessity for any modern computer, because it is among the very few examples of GENERAL PURPOSE DEDICATED hardware.
I like the last sentence of your post. That is exactly how I feel, having done some hobby graphics programming before, reading Michael Abrashs weird but highly functional perky algorithms.
Also it seems that a common dedicated GPUs value per dollar ratio is much lower than for a CPU, given the fact it sits idle most of the time when you don't use DirectX or OpenGL, and even if it does something "useful" again it's only DirectX or OpenGL which are hardly considered usable for general purpose computing for the masses. Except for gamers, any buy like that is a waste of money. All those billions of transistors and horsepower that could put CPUs to shame, but it comes with a peekhole size programming potential.
HyperTransport from AMD, and QuickPath from Intel are designed among other things to interconnect different facilities on the motherboard with more than adequate speeds and latencies. Did you take that into account when writing what you wrote about "us not being able to break CPUs into pieces"?
GPU not talking to CPU to the extent programmer wants is one of the very problems that obviously trouble Sweeney as he advocates for a more generic approach to graphics programming. The whole interview and his answers revolve around being able to free ourselves from being "force fed those triangles down that pipeline" approach so to speak.
Sweeney is right IMO. It is also one of the more important interviews and I recommend it to all that are currently doing computer graphics. This is essentially a RISC vs CISC debate again, and it shares all the common arguments with it. Given most of the industry today is a RISC design abstracted to a CISC interface, I agree with Sweeney and think that the true maturing will happen when the CPU and GPU will merge. Intels battleplan is many core approach. Specialized hardware is always faster clock for clock, but programmers appreciate generics everywhere, and since we do not pay for our GPUs per computation result they produce, an idle GPU is a waste. And it is idle half the time, being specialized as it is. Except of all the folks who play WOW 24-7.
Apparently you do not read very well. He put emphasis on generic computing as opposed to specialized hardware. It is not about cramming it all in one silicon package. For all Sweeney cares you can distribute silicon chips all over inside a computer case, as long as they do not limit programmers ability to eh.. program them.
I think the situation is quite natural. Business is about reality, tech is about perfection. The two groups have quite different interests and goals. The art is to unite the two for a good result.
Businessmen everywhere are about as close you can get to jungle law, they live to maximize profit, seek out new enterprises (to maximize profit), and their gadgets are mediocre at best, because frankly they could not care less as long as GSM works, and it looks presentable. Presentability is very important for them, so they wear expensive effective wristwatches.
Tech people sacrifice pretty much anything to perfect the technology they work on. They look like their mother dresses them, do not pay as much attention (as others) to their appearance and most of their energy is spent on the thought process and its application.
Of course the described above is extreme examples, but such polarization between the two groups is quite common, and that is what IMO gives rise to the perception.
When you put the two together, if the two must cooperate for common good, like a chemical reaction they start productive fighting over the balance between the real delivered product sacrificing anything else but sell-value (which the businessman decides alone what is) and a pure concept and its development as the tech person sees fit. Since business is what seemingly runs the company, since it is all kinds of businessmen, project managers included, who run and shake hands at meetings, tech people are ignored most of the time as labour ants, however in all my experience this is the most common and gravest mistake the suits ever make. They take themselves far too serious and important to understand that the very platform they are trying to sell is made by anyone else but themselves. Businessman without a developer is like a conman on the street that sells you all kinds of promises and service you do not immediately see, only they do it with flashy and impressive Powerpoint presentations (albeit really lame). A developer without a seller (businessman) is equally useless, however inspiring it may seem, because with all the bright ideas and started development, unless he has some financial support elsewhere and is backed up, needs such financial interest and investing from someone, otherwise it all ends up like helicopters Leonardo Da Vinci drafted in his sketchbooks (albeit pretty well drafted).
I will suffice to reply with the quote from "Contact" by Carl Sagan:
"You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an "airplane," you know you get people to go in, and fly around like birds, it's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right? Look, all I'm asking, is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history... of history."
Or to put it with my dry tongue: The books concerning undisputable physics laws did exist when Leonardo Da Vinci lived too, and they were as thick if not thicker and as numerous as books on physics today, and just as then today skepticism is the first barrier when expanding the understanding of reality. The problem I have with your thinking is, unlike scientist who refute theories based on analytic approach and cross-referencing laws, you seem to accept the skepticism as a god-given tool and universal law that allows anybody and anyone today to say things like "faster than light travel is impossible. This guy X proved it and experiments were done. Refer to the book Y, where Z is explained and which completely and irrevocably denies your concept application.".
But the Carl Sagan wrote it much better. Now, I did not say everything is possible, but it seems as we are sitting here saying "I did not say everything is possible", more and more things pop up that make us wonder what the fuck is Universe all about. It is HIGHLY improbable that a guy living in 1940s however smart he is, unless he is a prophet of a true God if he exists, can pinpoint a law of the Universe that is ABSOLUTE. Please. We do build our technology on these laws, but as it is said about Zodiac, they are not 'meant to limit what can happen but merely show what is possible.'
I am just as a realist as you are, but you are fantasizing. Your fantasy revolves around believing in the future that is already cemented, but this fantasy is not reality. Reality in fact shows us again and again that our understanding of laws of nature is flawed to a formidable degree. I do believe it is possible to precisely describe such laws, but it would be as much effort as describing what happens in one corner of a dirty swimming pool filled with tree leafs when you poke the water on the other end. Under heavy rain.
Yes, sir, no sir, of course sir. What should I call it sir, sir?
If you go out in the ocean, in your immediate vicinity (and our archaic space probes can only do no better) there is just ocean. Granted ocean is a good deal richer ecosystem than the cold space is ever, but for comparision that will do. Now, it does not mean there are no islands around you, but you have to extend the observable space. It's the same with outer space. For the percentage of the space we actually do explore, its just rocks and craters, but most of space is. Somewhere there is lush life, but it is not in our solar system, with a possible exception of the ocean under the surface of Europa. In science fiction we are put in the center of a alien civilization, but in reality, in SOL we are the only civilization to write about. It does not mean however that there are no others. Space is so big such a small cluster of it that our SOL is does not make it any statistical variable either way. If you had sweeped through the entire Milky Way galaxy throughly and not found any sign of life at all, then it would perhaps be an argument against "universe teaming with life", and even then the search would not be over, provided there are billions of galaxies out there.
Good point on 'buying out of confusion'. Right on. Noticed this many times myself. Ordering the computer, and then the person asks "Is it like, Windows or whatever, and stuff?". People could not care less, and frankly they should not. This is what standards compliance and interoperable technologies all try to accomplish, working against corporate bullying that is going on.
You misquoted me. The sentence you misquoted ends with "..any more than tweaking a copy of Linux to run on each model they have..." Also Window licenses do not cost all that much, so some price increase (justified by the fact that you buy from a manufacturer that wishes to acknowledge undesired MS monopoly) will not be very noticeable, especially if you consider the fact that people shop for laptops, not for operating systems, when they shop laptops.
Tell me honestly if you decided to buy a Thinkpad, and you see the model you want and you see 1100$ instead of 1000$ because Windows license cost went up for Lenovo, do you go and buy a Dell instead? As far as I have observed people choose their laptops quite carefully, because of construction, screen real estate, screen quality, input ergonomics and port selection, not because it comes with only Windows XP or Vista, or because the Vista license for a Dell computer is 100$ cheaper than for a Thinkpad. Hell, even if Lenovo had to buy a single user OEM license for each machine it sells (as opposed to the discount it gets from MS for selling volumes of Windows copies installed) it still sells a Thinkpad more than very well. You are trying to sell a cheap argument. In fact if any company, Lenovo can actually afford to sell Thinkpads without any OS at all, given that many of their customers are business clients that use MSDN subscription licenses and reinstall Vista to their custom setup. The next client base is enthusiasts that know a good laptop, and they tweak Linux to run on their TP, cost almost what it may. And China may be bribe-infested crono-capitalism, but Lenovo is a registered trademark in USA too, and Lenovo CEO is an American by the name of William Amelio, also a philantrope.
Adobe has donated the Flash player code to Mozilla, did you know that?
She did not have a clue, did she. Though a fan and owner of a Thinkpad (have the T61 meself), this kind of attitude sometimes makes me want to throw all this dirty hardware outta window and go live on a Thai beach or something.
I heard the Kraken botnet is very consumer friendly. It is like, connects all those Windows systems together to form possibly worlds largest and most potent supercomputer, and all that without even bothering the people who use these systems. They don't even know it, imagine!
Hmm, care to tell more of this Lenovo rep story? Got me intrigued.
Slashdot is actually pretty loaded with proponents of the corporate business style with all its smells and flavours. They like to justify and explain sometimes why Microsoft NEEDS to behave the way it does, and what would happen to it if it didn't, and how some people just want to have a 'puter they can type their pretty little office documents on without knowing what a 'software repository' is.
Actually I did not say that it is a automatic process, where manufacturers just install vanilla Ubuntu. I said it is not the worlds hardest job. And if you count in the savings of royalties they otherwise pay to MS, it is is very cheap to maintain Linux.
I am well aware Linux does not behave nicely either, given I have a Thinkpad T61, half of which functionality I had to tweak to work properly.
Still, even in the short run Linux does pay off. Also, people can choose Windows still, nobody forces them to run Linux like they are currently forced to run Windows.
In Windows even after all the tweaking and custom drivers, stuff breaks and issues arise. And in these cases its all finger pointing.