Yeah, I gotta agree. I read this statement and was thinking, "Duh, that's the whole point." Of course, slashdot will argue they're lying bastards....
If it's news to anyone that open source practices conflict with best IP practices, they must be still stuck on the "open source means it won't cost us anything" bandwagon.
"...but the company did say it would not launch any new services until all existing one supported Firefox"
No, they didn't say that. They said they wouldn't launch any new services until making sure they worked with Firefox. They don't have a timeline for when they get all existing services supported on Firefox and, not surprisingly, don't want to hold off on launching new services for an arbitrary period of time.
The people who, not to put too fine a point on it, know considerably more about writing complex 3D games than you do?
It's true, I know very little about complex 3D games. I mostly work on real-world stuff.
I have no doubt that the NovodeX SDK is a great SDK for developing software, and the Epic folks have been quite happy with it. Good physics models aren't that easy to come by, so that alone is a big deal.
They have also probably had access to some real information about the hardware behind this PPU, which is what would be really interesting to see. Without it, everything just looks like a lot of smoke and mirrors. It's hard to discern the benefit relative to just having another processor (or more processors). It'd make a lot more sense for Slashdot to post this story if there were some actual details.
You know, this kind of screams of snake oil, and I'm kind of surprised Slashdot posted it. As far as I can tell, there is no technical information on the actual product.
I grabbed the whitepaper, and was disappointed to see nothing about the "PPU's" design. Here's the thing: managing a physics model basically involves a lot of floating point math, which CPU's do fairly well already. It can be parallelized a fair bit, if you know what you're doing, so you could build a processor which can execute more floating point instructions at once (something like what's in the Itanium or the new Cell processor). However, it's worth noting that this is an area that the CPU folks work very hard to excel at. It's hard to imagine that these guys have some kind of breakthrough that allows them to compete, particularly since they seem to avoid discussing it at all. If nothing else, economies of scale heavily favor the CPU guys.
The second thing is that the way this works makes it seem like it could actually end up being slower. Keep in mind that the interaction model is CPU -> PPU -> CPU. So, the PPU is going to have overhead of communication both to and from the CPU. To make this work they'll either have to have a huge level of abstraction (which will limit applicability) or the PPU will have to be dramatically faster than the CPU to make up for the latencies from the hand offs.
Well, if you look at the surveys out there with higher sample rates, Yahoo's market share is actually very close to Google's, and recently has been growing while Google's has been shrinking.
Maybe Yahoo figures if they build a better product, they can get the users. Based on your own statements, it sounds like that is starting to happen.
I find it really amusing that this story has been so completely turned on it's head. If you take a look at Jobs' history, his technical skills are weak at best. His real tallent is on the marketing side of things.
Scully on the hand, while he clearly has skills on the marketing side of things (and was indeed selling "sugar-water" at Pepsi when Jobs was trying to hire him), actually started of on the engineering side of things and has demonstrable skills in that area. This is the guy who as a *kid* filed a patent on some color CRT techniques just one day after Sony beat him to the punch.
It's also worth noting that during the Sculley years, Apple's market share was impressive and grew quite well. While he made a mess of things in a lot of ways, Macintosh computers haven't achieved the market share they had under Sculley either before or since.
I'm trying to find the hidden meaning here, but all I can come up with is, "you're too dumb to notice the difference between a whisper and volume knob being down on the boob tube."
That was not my intent, and I apologise if that's how it came across. I just meant that I've always been able to hear the whispering just fine, and that maybe your volume was turned down too low.
Now I grok the "Cylon in my head" comment. Yeah, that can get annoying. I wish they'd start using variations on it.
Honestly, I never noticed the whispering. Maybe you need to turn up the volume on your TV. A lot of shows (like a lot of pop music) and ads tend to keep their volume high the whole way, but good shows (like good music) tend to use an extended range of volumes. Perhaps you've got your TV's volume tuned for the "always loud" shows.
The jerky camera style is deliberate, and I think very effective. I know it annoys some people and I sympathise with them, but I would hate it if it changed.
The "Cylon in my head" theme isn't about you "getting it". It's a plot device that allows for a very interesting dramatic exploration.
The irony of the posts I'm reading here make me laugh. I'm reading posts talking about poor analysis and bias written by people who are critiquing a study before it even comes out.
Folks, it's hard to maintain credibility if you heap praise on one study that agrees with you and then critique another sight unseen.
Wait for the study to be published, examine its assumptions, and try to reproduce it. I know it's not as exciting, but that's the only way anyone is going to get to the truth.
I thought the best line was: "Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the U.S. Department of Defense."
Of course, he's twisting the meaning of things as much as Gates has, but of course that's the point.
Why won't Yahoo say the toolbar also works on Linux? We'd help them iron out the bugs if any.
According to them, they have known, significant bugs that show up on Linux. They don't want you to get pissed at them, so their giving you fair warning. If you want to help iron the bugs out, download and install it anyway like I did. They sure aren't going to stop you.
This is one of the nice things about Yahoo's toolbar actually being supported by Yahoo, instead of being a 3rd part effort. It actually has all the features of the Windows one.
is a likely reason enough for Yahoo! to release an inferior search toolbar.
Umm. It's not a search toolbar. You could already search on Yahoo! using Firefox.
Yes, you can search from this toolbar, but it's actually tied in to their My Yahoo! service, for which their is no Google equivalent. It's actually quite useful.
That being said, I agree that enither one wants to be the one with less features.
Note that this is the second extension that Yahoo! has released for Firefox in like a week (Y!Q). I think the evidence suggests that Yahoo! seems to think Firefox is important.
There is no "intel isa". They ship processors with a variety of different ISA's. History has taught us that ISA's in the end don't make nearly as much of a difference as other, far more important factors.
We shouldn't need to dumb down processors just for people to use word processors.
Again, you aren't making any sense. Are you suggesting somehow that existing CPU's are "dumbed down" because the designers are concerned about how well they'll run word processors?
So, theoretically, couldn't each unit be setup to provide a subset of those "many operations" and then be used on a small data set?
This already happens today inside of a CPU. There are limits to what you can do because of depedencies and branching. The Itanium pushes this at least as far as anything I've seen about the cell processor.
Yes, you could use the cell as a co-processor for graphics and other operations. You may recall that IBM made a DSP called the MWave a while ago that worked like this. In the end, it didn't turn out to be that big a win over using specialised chips.
Just because you are using a "co-processor" instead of a "GPU" doesn't change the bandwidth bottenecks in the system. In fact, current GPU's basically never saturate their AGP or PCI express interfaces, but instead saturate internal limits which the graphics card makers do their best to alleviate. The GPU guys work really hard to maximize the performance of these systems, and it's a very competitive market. The cell might be somewhat more efficient at this, but the architecture isn't going to wipe out the competition. The only thing that might make the cell really different are economies of scale.
I'm not sure that this makes for the "extreme goodness" that people are envisioning. It should be truly awesome for SIMD type operations, such as video encoding/decoding and 3D rendering. But I don't see much of a break through here in more general compute tasks. If you've worked with an Itanium, you know the parallelism limits you hit with VLIW instruction sets and having a bunch of VLIW processing units is just going to make it worse.
All in all, this thing strikes me as more of a next-generation DSP rather than a next-generation CPU, with a lot of hype thrown in (btw, the are apparently now called "synergistic processor elements" instead of "attached processing units";-).
Frankly, I think people forget how comparatively slow machines used to be. Simple operations like opening up new windows or launching new programs that used to take many seconds execute in a quarter the time (or even less) than they used to less than a decade ago. Does anyone remember how long it took for Windows NT to present a login box after you pressed Cntrl-Alt-Delete?
The thing is, it's been a gradual process, and we're talking about a difference of a few seconds. Sure, you have to do *everything* 4x faster to go from 4 seconds to 1 second, but the perceived performance difference is only a few seconds, so you tend not to see it as a big deal.
Here here! I wish at least those summarizing the article would bother to read it!
Heck, the "ordered the destruction" bit was pretty misleading as well. The product wasn't ordered destroyed, just existing stocks of the product. The company still has the product, and I'm sure if they win an appeal or if they change their product's help system, they can put the product back on the shelves.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I gotta agree. I read this statement and was thinking, "Duh, that's the whole point." Of course, slashdot will argue they're lying bastards....
If it's news to anyone that open source practices conflict with best IP practices, they must be still stuck on the "open source means it won't cost us anything" bandwagon.
Fair enough then. I'll restate: I'm surprised that no comment about Yahoo being immune was modded up high enough for me to see it. ;-)
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that Yahoo has already closed the 302 hole.
"...but the company did say it would not launch any new services until all existing one supported Firefox"
No, they didn't say that. They said they wouldn't launch any new services until making sure they worked with Firefox. They don't have a timeline for when they get all existing services supported on Firefox and, not surprisingly, don't want to hold off on launching new services for an arbitrary period of time.
The people who, not to put too fine a point on it, know considerably more about writing complex 3D games than you do?
It's true, I know very little about complex 3D games. I mostly work on real-world stuff.
I have no doubt that the NovodeX SDK is a great SDK for developing software, and the Epic folks have been quite happy with it. Good physics models aren't that easy to come by, so that alone is a big deal.
They have also probably had access to some real information about the hardware behind this PPU, which is what would be really interesting to see. Without it, everything just looks like a lot of smoke and mirrors. It's hard to discern the benefit relative to just having another processor (or more processors). It'd make a lot more sense for Slashdot to post this story if there were some actual details.
You know, this kind of screams of snake oil, and I'm kind of surprised Slashdot posted it. As far as I can tell, there is no technical information on the actual product.
I grabbed the whitepaper, and was disappointed to see nothing about the "PPU's" design. Here's the thing: managing a physics model basically involves a lot of floating point math, which CPU's do fairly well already. It can be parallelized a fair bit, if you know what you're doing, so you could build a processor which can execute more floating point instructions at once (something like what's in the Itanium or the new Cell processor). However, it's worth noting that this is an area that the CPU folks work very hard to excel at. It's hard to imagine that these guys have some kind of breakthrough that allows them to compete, particularly since they seem to avoid discussing it at all. If nothing else, economies of scale heavily favor the CPU guys.
The second thing is that the way this works makes it seem like it could actually end up being slower. Keep in mind that the interaction model is CPU -> PPU -> CPU. So, the PPU is going to have overhead of communication both to and from the CPU. To make this work they'll either have to have a huge level of abstraction (which will limit applicability) or the PPU will have to be dramatically faster than the CPU to make up for the latencies from the hand offs.
Well, if you look at the surveys out there with higher sample rates, Yahoo's market share is actually very close to Google's, and recently has been growing while Google's has been shrinking.
Maybe Yahoo figures if they build a better product, they can get the users. Based on your own statements, it sounds like that is starting to happen.
I find it really amusing that this story has been so completely turned on it's head. If you take a look at Jobs' history, his technical skills are weak at best. His real tallent is on the marketing side of things.
Scully on the hand, while he clearly has skills on the marketing side of things (and was indeed selling "sugar-water" at Pepsi when Jobs was trying to hire him), actually started of on the engineering side of things and has demonstrable skills in that area. This is the guy who as a *kid* filed a patent on some color CRT techniques just one day after Sony beat him to the punch.
It's also worth noting that during the Sculley years, Apple's market share was impressive and grew quite well. While he made a mess of things in a lot of ways, Macintosh computers haven't achieved the market share they had under Sculley either before or since.
I'm trying to find the hidden meaning here, but all I can come up with is, "you're too dumb to notice the difference between a whisper and volume knob being down on the boob tube."
That was not my intent, and I apologise if that's how it came across. I just meant that I've always been able to hear the whispering just fine, and that maybe your volume was turned down too low.
Now I grok the "Cylon in my head" comment. Yeah, that can get annoying. I wish they'd start using variations on it.
Honestly, I never noticed the whispering. Maybe you need to turn up the volume on your TV. A lot of shows (like a lot of pop music) and ads tend to keep their volume high the whole way, but good shows (like good music) tend to use an extended range of volumes. Perhaps you've got your TV's volume tuned for the "always loud" shows.
The jerky camera style is deliberate, and I think very effective. I know it annoys some people and I sympathise with them, but I would hate it if it changed.
The "Cylon in my head" theme isn't about you "getting it". It's a plot device that allows for a very interesting dramatic exploration.
I'm working on a RHEL4 machine that I setup to use LDAP during the install. It was very easy, all done through a simple GUI. Worked great.
The irony of the posts I'm reading here make me laugh. I'm reading posts talking about poor analysis and bias written by people who are critiquing a study before it even comes out.
Folks, it's hard to maintain credibility if you heap praise on one study that agrees with you and then critique another sight unseen.
Wait for the study to be published, examine its assumptions, and try to reproduce it. I know it's not as exciting, but that's the only way anyone is going to get to the truth.
I thought the best line was: "Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the U.S. Department of Defense."
Of course, he's twisting the meaning of things as much as Gates has, but of course that's the point.
Why won't Yahoo say the toolbar also works on Linux? We'd help them iron out the bugs if any.
According to them, they have known, significant bugs that show up on Linux. They don't want you to get pissed at them, so their giving you fair warning. If you want to help iron the bugs out, download and install it anyway like I did. They sure aren't going to stop you.
See subject
This is one of the nice things about Yahoo's toolbar actually being supported by Yahoo, instead of being a 3rd part effort. It actually has all the features of the Windows one.
is a likely reason enough for Yahoo! to release an inferior search toolbar.
Umm. It's not a search toolbar. You could already search on Yahoo! using Firefox.
Yes, you can search from this toolbar, but it's actually tied in to their My Yahoo! service, for which their is no Google equivalent. It's actually quite useful.
That being said, I agree that enither one wants to be the one with less features.
Note that this is the second extension that Yahoo! has released for Firefox in like a week (Y!Q). I think the evidence suggests that Yahoo! seems to think Firefox is important.
Like previous posters have said it really adds no functionality to Firefox
Sigh. It appears you, "like previous posters", have failed to RTFA. Gotta love Slashdot.
more usage = better compilers
Eh?
We need to get away from the intel isa
There is no "intel isa". They ship processors with a variety of different ISA's. History has taught us that ISA's in the end don't make nearly as much of a difference as other, far more important factors.
We shouldn't need to dumb down processors just for people to use word processors.
Again, you aren't making any sense. Are you suggesting somehow that existing CPU's are "dumbed down" because the designers are concerned about how well they'll run word processors?
So, theoretically, couldn't each unit be setup to provide a subset of those "many operations" and then be used on a small data set?
This already happens today inside of a CPU. There are limits to what you can do because of depedencies and branching. The Itanium pushes this at least as far as anything I've seen about the cell processor.
Yes, you could use the cell as a co-processor for graphics and other operations. You may recall that IBM made a DSP called the MWave a while ago that worked like this. In the end, it didn't turn out to be that big a win over using specialised chips.
Just because you are using a "co-processor" instead of a "GPU" doesn't change the bandwidth bottenecks in the system. In fact, current GPU's basically never saturate their AGP or PCI express interfaces, but instead saturate internal limits which the graphics card makers do their best to alleviate. The GPU guys work really hard to maximize the performance of these systems, and it's a very competitive market. The cell might be somewhat more efficient at this, but the architecture isn't going to wipe out the competition. The only thing that might make the cell really different are economies of scale.
I'm not sure that this makes for the "extreme goodness" that people are envisioning. It should be truly awesome for SIMD type operations, such as video encoding/decoding and 3D rendering. But I don't see much of a break through here in more general compute tasks. If you've worked with an Itanium, you know the parallelism limits you hit with VLIW instruction sets and having a bunch of VLIW processing units is just going to make it worse.
;-).
All in all, this thing strikes me as more of a next-generation DSP rather than a next-generation CPU, with a lot of hype thrown in (btw, the are apparently now called "synergistic processor elements" instead of "attached processing units"
Frankly, I think people forget how comparatively slow machines used to be. Simple operations like opening up new windows or launching new programs that used to take many seconds execute in a quarter the time (or even less) than they used to less than a decade ago. Does anyone remember how long it took for Windows NT to present a login box after you pressed Cntrl-Alt-Delete?
The thing is, it's been a gradual process, and we're talking about a difference of a few seconds. Sure, you have to do *everything* 4x faster to go from 4 seconds to 1 second, but the perceived performance difference is only a few seconds, so you tend not to see it as a big deal.
A brilliant point... except that a) the real problem isn't the JNI code messing with the VM, and b) you can do the same thing with .NET.
Here here! I wish at least those summarizing the article would bother to read it!
Heck, the "ordered the destruction" bit was pretty misleading as well. The product wasn't ordered destroyed, just existing stocks of the product. The company still has the product, and I'm sure if they win an appeal or if they change their product's help system, they can put the product back on the shelves.