Come on, if FPGA CPUs catch on in a big way, I can start writing my own paychecks and stop designing these boring circuit boards, just concentrate on Logic design.
Furthermore, FPGA is embrassingly *slow* technology. ASIC is the real custom/screaming fast stuff. In embedded envrionment, you usually use FPGA for slow custom computational stuff, if you need 1-clock-cycle-latency or 6GB/s bandwith or anything like that, you need an ASIC. Just look at those motherboard chipsets, they're not FPGAs, no way..
From R&D point-of-view, FPGA is really nice to work with, tho. You can play around with it to your heart's content until you get it right and there's nothing to stop you from burning/flashing/uploading a new logic code every day if you want to. There are tools for FPGA-on-ASIC which gives you the capability to tape out that groovy logic design into mass-marked ASIC once you're sufficiently sure you got it right. Naturally, it's as slow as the FPGA would be, since otherwise it'd screw up your logic timings..
NT4 is quite nice for getting some (*gasp*) work done.
Unexciting, yeah, but it practically never pukes on you as long as you have good drivers. I have had lock ups in single digits with NT4 boxes I've used at work for 3+ years.. Every time switching full-screen with command line, which is not what I ever do for work-work.
So.. For getting my work done, W2k or XP offer practically nothing for me. Zilch.
CM rocks, even if I only play PBEM now & then, not for hours & hours.
The turn based approach with simultaneous execution completely bypasses the "lets suck up the opportunity fire!"-trick from turn based games and the "click click click clickety click!" "strategy" in RTS games.
Still, Combat mission is not a game of grand strategy, it's a battefield tactical game with battalion sized forces.
One true problem there is that the unit cost is based on "usefullness", it has nothing to do with how many ReichMarks you had to shell over for a Tiger vs Panther. (Hint, a Panther costs less than half)
Okay, but it would be rather boring game if the US player had tons of zippos in every battle and half of my panzers (at least) would be taken out by Tac air anyways. And there'd be hours of preparatory arty bombardment before engaging..
NiCad batteries are yesterday's technology. You really do want something like LiIon for this kind of duty. No memory, better charge/weight ratio, used in zillion cell phones, so it's cheap..
With the sad fact of battery life expectance, especially if they're used, you'd *have* to swap the batteries every other year or so. And you still would end up with fairly short battery life due to the power-hungry Dram which requires refresh etc. Esp if you make this a, say, 4GB proxy for 1GB/s fiber..
If nothing else, this makes one wonder about the validity of those open source software gospel stories we usually get in/... Maybe their facts are off by 20x, too?
The brain's a horribly inefficient jumble of neurons which gets away by throwing massive parallelism at any processing needs.
Remember, the only way neurons computate is by variating their firing rate. Granted, this gives you relatively analogue approach instead of a binary one.
However, much of especially "auxiliary" functions are actually boolean in nature, built from neural nets. For example, there *is* a function which recognizes a horisontal line and another for vertical ones. Neat part is, of course, that the end product of the two functions are combined in analogue manner so if you have something a little horizontal and a little bit more vertical, you have angle of the line.
Result? Brain's really good for motoric stuff and interacting with "real" world but very bad for logic and abstract thought. AI's strengths should be exactly reversed.
So likely our machine overlords would use humans as robotic shells and take over the cognitive functions by an API extension..
Look now, if the actual impact is above 120km/h or so, you're dead in any case. Cars are much safer in reasonable (80km/h and less) speeds, but once you put the pedal to the metal, you're just deceiving yourself.
However, with a bike you can be seriously hurt even in minor accidents that mainly would hurt your wallet with a car. In any case, doing 200km/h with a sports bike is an enormous rush, perhaps enough to die for.
There are great many pieces of small debris floating around in orbit after few decades of space program.That's why you have armor plating all over the place in ISS for example. 2mm piece of white paint can be a bitch if the Delta-V is several km/s.
Seeing how the Win95 UI is a look-a-like-hack of the OS/2 Workplace shell, but without really copying the really advanced ideas.. So it's a little silly to say Windows UI is "still" not more advanced.
It's basically the same old thing as it was in Win95, 6 years later! Isn't monopoly great? Everyone pat themselves on the back for bashing OS/2 now.
Well, there's hoping for a good Gnome/KDE rip-off from microsoft.
Oh, I think the damn thing would've really needed a new kernel. At least NT could always kill unresponsive apps.
Mentor Graphics ECAD/CAM tools have had "strokes" for a long time now.
It's such a good idea it probably would've been copied before now, but I have a bad feeling what'll happen to Opera once Mentor lawyers get a whiff of this.
If they've not patented this by now, someone else has.
I do not see anything wrong with selling the research results to some drug company.
However, I feel it's dubious to claim it will _not_ be sold while it will be.
If they'd like to get my CPU cycles for some free R&D horsepower, at the very least they ought to commit to selling the results to several drug companies instead of giving exclusive rights to just one.
That would drive the costs of end product down quickly.
The problem with this is that this isn't just a Well, Now It's Over And We Can All Get On With Our Lives type thing. If this were an isolated incident, "Move on" would be good advice indeed; however, Microsoft is developing a literal track record when it comes to security vulnerabilities. Security holes in MSIE, SERIOUS ones, seem to be cropping up on the order of once every couple of months;
The problem is that we cannot move on. There is no alternative. We have to use whatever Microsoft gives us and smile while they shaft us. IMHO that's what the anti-trust trial is really all about and not whether or not someone's ability to "innovate" is being stifled by goverment regulations. If their product was just so good that everyone chose it out of their free will, people would move on to competitors when something like this happens.
Netscape? Don't make me laugh. Mozilla? I like it, but it still crashes within 15 minutes.
You never ever need the math again after you graduate unless you want to.
About only jobs in digital hardware I can think of that actually NEED higher math are DSP-style filter design and some telecom jobs that deal with transmission pathways.
So when you get the degree you find out that all the blood and tears (yeah, PDEs will make a grown man cry) was just for the degree.
What you really NEEDED was those Mickey-Mousey logic design courses, low-level programming courses.. The kind of things you did with your left hand while trying to get blood out of a rock with the right to get the math assigments done.
I was an exchange student in Canada for a year and graduated in Finland and I can say:
Our math is a lot easier! Neener!
Everyone and their dog including the information wants to be free-crowd will disappear and you're left with a small-ish group of "hardcore" hobbyists.
Poof goes the bandwith problem, paid users get faster access and everyone else migrates to some freebie site (that'll run into trouble sooner or later)
<A href=http://www.combatsim.com>Combatsim</A&g t; did that and yeah, they did get lots of people saying their rip-off site will keel over in no time now.
When they did that exactly to drive away the mass of users that was killing the site.
Ok, in my opinion the payment scheme is flawed ($39.95 flat fee).. A better option would be usage-based fee deduced from your account. So if you really like some site and visit it every day, you might not mind paying a bit more for it..
But if you only check out a site every other week, you might not want to shell up $39.95 up front for it.
I'd pay something to read <a href=www.theregister.co.uk>The Register</a>, but cannot really think of another site that I'd pay for right now.
Slashdot Mirror
.. I feel this is a great idea!
Come on, if FPGA CPUs catch on in a big way, I can start writing my own paychecks and stop designing these boring circuit boards, just concentrate on Logic design.
Furthermore, FPGA is embrassingly *slow* technology. ASIC is the real custom/screaming fast stuff. In embedded envrionment, you usually use FPGA for slow custom computational stuff, if you need 1-clock-cycle-latency or 6GB/s bandwith or anything like that, you need an ASIC. Just look at those motherboard chipsets, they're not FPGAs, no way..
From R&D point-of-view, FPGA is really nice to work with, tho. You can play around with it to your heart's content until you get it right and there's nothing to stop you from burning/flashing/uploading a new logic code every day if you want to. There are tools for FPGA-on-ASIC which gives you the capability to tape out that groovy logic design into mass-marked ASIC once you're sufficiently sure you got it right. Naturally, it's as slow as the FPGA would be, since otherwise it'd screw up your logic timings..
NT4 is quite nice for getting some (*gasp*) work done.
.. For getting my work done, W2k or XP offer practically nothing for me. Zilch.
Unexciting, yeah, but it practically never pukes on you as long as you have good drivers. I have had lock ups in single digits with NT4 boxes I've used at work for 3+ years.. Every time switching full-screen with command line, which is not what I ever do for work-work.
So
CM rocks, even if I only play PBEM now & then, not for hours & hours.
The turn based approach with simultaneous execution completely bypasses the "lets suck up the opportunity fire!"-trick from turn based games and the "click click click clickety click!" "strategy" in RTS games.
Still, Combat mission is not a game of grand strategy, it's a battefield tactical game with battalion sized forces.
One true problem there is that the unit cost is based on "usefullness", it has nothing to do with how many ReichMarks you had to shell over for a Tiger vs Panther. (Hint, a Panther costs less than half)
Okay, but it would be rather boring game if the US player had tons of zippos in every battle and half of my panzers (at least) would be taken out by Tac air anyways. And there'd be hours of preparatory arty bombardment before engaging..
NiCad batteries are yesterday's technology. You really do want something like LiIon for this kind of duty. No memory, better charge/weight ratio, used in zillion cell phones, so it's cheap..
/. .. Maybe their facts are off by 20x, too?
With the sad fact of battery life expectance, especially if they're used, you'd *have* to swap the batteries every other year or so. And you still would end up with fairly short battery life due to the power-hungry Dram which requires refresh etc. Esp if you make this a, say, 4GB proxy for 1GB/s fiber..
If nothing else, this makes one wonder about the validity of those open source software gospel stories we usually get in
*cough* scientologists *cough*
The brain's a horribly inefficient jumble of neurons which gets away by throwing massive parallelism at any processing needs.
Remember, the only way neurons computate is by variating their firing rate. Granted, this gives you relatively analogue approach instead of a binary one.
However, much of especially "auxiliary" functions are actually boolean in nature, built from neural nets. For example, there *is* a function which recognizes a horisontal line and another for vertical ones. Neat part is, of course, that the end product of the two functions are combined in analogue manner so if you have something a little horizontal and a little bit more vertical, you have angle of the line.
Result? Brain's really good for motoric stuff and interacting with "real" world but very bad for logic and abstract thought. AI's strengths should be exactly reversed.
So likely our machine overlords would use humans as robotic shells and take over the cognitive functions by an API extension..
Besides, reproduction is *fun*!
4. And his brother owns an air conditioning fab and his aunt a construction agency.
Look now, if the actual impact is above 120km/h or so, you're dead in any case. Cars are much safer in reasonable (80km/h and less) speeds, but once you put the pedal to the metal, you're just deceiving yourself.
However, with a bike you can be seriously hurt even in minor accidents that mainly would hurt your wallet with a car. In any case, doing 200km/h with a sports bike is an enormous rush, perhaps enough to die for.
No geckos, but how about space debris?
There are great many pieces of small debris floating around in orbit after few decades of space program.That's why you have armor plating all over the place in ISS for example. 2mm piece of white paint can be a bitch if the Delta-V is several km/s.
So, yes, there will be wear and tear.
Seeing how the Win95 UI is a look-a-like-hack of the OS/2 Workplace shell, but without really copying the really advanced ideas.. So it's a little silly to say Windows UI is "still" not more advanced.
It's basically the same old thing as it was in Win95, 6 years later! Isn't monopoly great? Everyone pat themselves on the back for bashing OS/2 now.
Well, there's hoping for a good Gnome/KDE rip-off from microsoft.
Oh, I think the damn thing would've really needed a new kernel. At least NT could always kill unresponsive apps.
Mentor Graphics ECAD/CAM tools have had "strokes" for a long time now.
It's such a good idea it probably would've been copied before now, but I have a bad feeling what'll happen to Opera once Mentor lawyers get a whiff of this.
If they've not patented this by now, someone else has.
Capitalism is good.
I do not see anything wrong with selling the research results to some drug company.
However, I feel it's dubious to claim it will _not_ be sold while it will be.
If they'd like to get my CPU cycles for some free R&D horsepower, at the very least they ought to commit to selling the results to several drug companies instead of giving exclusive rights to just one.
That would drive the costs of end product down quickly.
.. Which is what the article says, too! And they even give you some basic advice how to get started!
The problem is that we cannot move on. There is no alternative. We have to use whatever Microsoft gives us and smile while they shaft us. IMHO that's what the anti-trust trial is really all about and not whether or not someone's ability to "innovate" is being stifled by goverment regulations. If their product was just so good that everyone chose it out of their free will, people would move on to competitors when something like this happens.
Netscape? Don't make me laugh. Mozilla? I like it, but it still crashes within 15 minutes.
There's one funny thing about CEng and math.
.. The kind of things you did with your left hand while trying to get blood out of a rock with the right to get the math assigments done.
..
You never ever need the math again after you graduate unless you want to.
About only jobs in digital hardware I can think of that actually NEED higher math are DSP-style filter design and some telecom jobs that deal with transmission pathways.
So when you get the degree you find out that all the blood and tears (yeah, PDEs will make a grown man cry) was just for the degree.
What you really NEEDED was those Mickey-Mousey logic design courses, low-level programming courses
I was an exchange student in Canada for a year and graduated in Finland and I can say:
Our math is a lot easier! Neener!
At least unless you specialize in EE
Option 5:
.. A better option would be usage-based fee deduced from your account. So if you really like some site and visit it every day, you might not mind paying a bit more for it..
Make it subscription based.
Everyone and their dog including the information wants to be free-crowd will disappear and you're left with a small-ish group of "hardcore" hobbyists.
Poof goes the bandwith problem, paid users get faster access and everyone else migrates to some freebie site (that'll run into trouble sooner or later)
<A href=http://www.combatsim.com>Combatsim</A&g t; did that and yeah, they did get lots of people saying their rip-off site will keel over in no time now.
When they did that exactly to drive away the mass of users that was killing the site.
Ok, in my opinion the payment scheme is flawed ($39.95 flat fee)
But if you only check out a site every other week, you might not want to shell up $39.95 up front for it.
I'd pay something to read <a href=www.theregister.co.uk>The Register</a>, but cannot really think of another site that I'd pay for right now.