This is true, and I think the main point is that such a parallel bus is made possible with the new serial technology. You will still need to sync up each bus, but it can be done at a higher granular level than individual bits as it was done in traditional parallel buses. For example, you can transmit packets of data through the serial bus, containing information to help the receiving end piece together the larger block of data. This isn't possible with single wires since a single bit can't hold this type of information;)
I somewhat disagree with this. Maybe these days, finding more information about your interest is easier because of the internet. But back when I was growing up, I really liked programming, but did not find any friends sharing the same interest nor older folks that could give me direction. School made those things accessible to me.
There is a reason that the industry have been trending towards serial and away from parallel buses.
It's been a while since I've done an transmission line and bus design work. Let me see if I can explain this in 'lay' terms:
To implement a parallel bus, you have to have each and every wire be within a certain variance. Your driving and receiving chips also need to be able to send and receive the data within a certain variance. This is because you typically send your data, say a 32-bit word over a 32 wire bus, across the bus at the same time. If the wires (and drivers and receivers) do not match up, your data will be scrambled on the other end of the bus.
The larger your chips (because you need all the drivers and receivers to send the parallel signals) or the more wires you have, the variance between the parts becomes harder and harder to control because of manufacturing limits. The trick is to design your entire system to tolerate the variances of each individual parts so that they will still work together.
But at the same time, you want to increase the speed of the bus (because having 20,000 wires is just not so practical). This is a force in conflict with what you're trying to achieve because an increase in speed translates to less tolerance in the system for parts variance.
At some point between increasing parallelness and higher and higher speed, the increase in variance will exceed the system's tolerance, and the parallel bus becomes impossible to implement or unreliable.
This is why bus designers have been trending towards serial interfaces, because that at least takes most of these variances out of the equation (it's still there but less influential).
The other trend is clock encoding. Instead of sending bits synchronously, or sending a strobe (a separate clock) signal along with the data. Now we 'encode' the clock into the data, using encoding such as the 8B/10B encoding. The receiving circuit can then 'retrieve' the clock from the data signal (it basically allow you to identify each set of data from each clock cycle, and detect problems). Serial interfaces are also usually accompanied by training sequences at start up (may be software implemented) to adjust various parameters to make the data transmission ideal for the environment.
In other words, there's value in the ability to produce energy at a constant rate, rather than in bursts. Because when it's produced in bursts, you will have to find a way to store it, which means a loss in efficiency.
I work on HP's high end servers that also contains millions lines of firmware.
I've heard of accounts where customers simply refuse to take new firmware because of their prior experience of "bricking" the boxes, and causing days of outage waiting for new blades to be shipped to them. But those usually turn out to be cases of real bad HW defects that the newer firmware has found. But they still insist on running years old firmware that contains tons of nasty bugs.
We all know that software has bugs, and we fix hundreds of them every month. This is not as mission critical as firmware in a car, but it's the same thing. Take the update dammit!
Seriously... if there is a lack of documentation, then you just have to start reading the source code, starting at main(). Then look at each object and read its constructors.
And start documenting it. Add comments in the code, create inheritance diagrams and sequence diagrams.
It will be tedious but you will come out of it a better programmer.
1. A super genious (rare) 2. A senior person that just finished all their training 3. A super rich dude that's been in school (middle-aged)
Unless you're rich and/or don't have to worry about paying your bills, you can't really afford to put in the time and money to be trained in multiple disciplines. And if you're rich, why would you bother unless you're really curious.
> It is not our place to decide what experiences or life circumstances will or will not lead to a meaningful and fulfilling life, albeit different from our own.
I agree with you 100% here, but somehow I come to a different conclusion and consider myself pro-life. I do like the idea that people have a choice, and dislike having the government think for you. Unfortunately, not everyone make these decisions lightly and even abort perfectly healthy fetuses because they had an 'accident'.
Therefore I believe that it is better to err on the side of life than death.
This is definitely not a black and white issue, I do believe that abortion should be a choice in special circumstances like when a mother's life is threatened. But most people do not face these special situations, and therefore the choice should not be readily available.
You can't say you'd fight for the human rights of the rest of us when you can't even protect the weakest group of humans out there: The unborn fetuses which cannot even fight for themselves.
The rest of us? We can mostly fend for ourselves. Even most of the poorest of the poor in this country are not facing death like the unborn fetuses being aborted.
So why is this group so important you may ask? Well.. why is the economy, or global warming, or energy, or foreign policies important? It's for securing our quality of life in the future generations. If the next generation are aborted, then all of those issues won't matter much.
If your parents were the only child in your family, and you are their only child... that means when it's time for you to support your parents and your grandparents, you've got 6 people to support on your one income. Or 12 people to support on you and your wife's income. That's is going to be a big problem soon.
25 years of coding in prison might yield some significant product. You can put him away physically, but I think we should still let his brilliant mind to continue to benefit the society.
Your anecdotes are typical and similar to my experiences. However, one must note that these CJK international students are a self selective group (or even government selected). They are usually top students in their country. So comparing them to a typical American (and even Asian American) domestic students (even in a top selective school) is not comparing apples to apples.
As for Americans being shut out of education. Some are for sure. And I think that is more due to 1. culture (as you said) and 2. our own education system. And there are probably more reasons. I'd just like to elaborate on these two:
1. American pop culture generally looks down on good students. If you do well in school, you're labeled a nerd or geek, and generally shunned by other kids in school. Unless you have other skills (namely athletics) you're usually not popular. This is not true in general in other cultures. In many other cultures around the world you are respected in school if you are smart. The American culture gives no incentive to do well in school. This is hard for adolescents that are academically inclined (but maybe not socially).
The international students coming in to college either have no idea that such a anti-academic culture exist in the general American population or they are not affected by it since they are not brought up here.
Our culture is turning up generations and generations of people who are not interested (or are afraid to be interested) in math and science.
2. Our college educational system is one of the best in the world. That's why students across the world are flocking here. When there is something good, there will be competition for it. If our high schools and primary schools do a better job of educating our kids to raise their competitiveness then American students can better compete for the seats in college. There will always be top students that will be competitive, but we need to raise the bar for everyone and turn out quality students (and people) in quantity. Of course more schools and cheaper schools won't hurt.
Because there's actually this thing called economics...
If you charge $600 for 1 product, you might get 10 customers total. Total revenue: $6000.
But if you sell the two models at $600 and a crippled one at $300, a few customers that originally was willing to pay $600 may decide to buy the crippled model instead, but you might actually gain more customers for the crippled model to make up for the loss. Say 5 x $600, and 20 x $300 for a total revenue of $9000.
I am obviously making up the numbers to prove my point, but remember that one axis of the supply and demand curve is price, and any sane company would be pricing their product(s) to maximize their revenue and/or profit based on that curve.
My commodore 64 turned brown when I took it out of the box. They must have gotten the mixture really wrong and it oxidized right away after it came in contact with the air at home...
Remember, a large percentage of the time the entire system - including CPUs, chipsets, memory, disks, etc., are just pushing data around without performing any calculations. We could all gain from better performance of these operations as well.
I just made up the negative amount. But if you were going to account for all the other stuff, why not account for what these OLPC laptops were designed to do. And if it does work (big IF), by helping to educate the poor and let them help themselves out of poverty, we will potentially save X amount of aid to those countries.
And what makes you think all technical support has to come from the west or the government? A quick learning smart kid could grasp the ins and outs of this laptop in say 6 months, and can start supporting his/her neighbors.. possibly free of charge. Or if he/she does charge for it, you are igniting a potential industry and economic activity that doesn't exist prior to these laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true, and I think the main point is that such a parallel bus is made possible with the new serial technology. You will still need to sync up each bus, but it can be done at a higher granular level than individual bits as it was done in traditional parallel buses. For example, you can transmit packets of data through the serial bus, containing information to help the receiving end piece together the larger block of data. This isn't possible with single wires since a single bit can't hold this type of information ;)
I somewhat disagree with this. Maybe these days, finding more information about your interest is easier because of the internet. But back when I was growing up, I really liked programming, but did not find any friends sharing the same interest nor older folks that could give me direction. School made those things accessible to me.
There is a reason that the industry have been trending towards serial and away from parallel buses.
It's been a while since I've done an transmission line and bus design work. Let me see if I can explain this in 'lay' terms:
To implement a parallel bus, you have to have each and every wire be within a certain variance. Your driving and receiving chips also need to be able to send and receive the data within a certain variance. This is because you typically send your data, say a 32-bit word over a 32 wire bus, across the bus at the same time. If the wires (and drivers and receivers) do not match up, your data will be scrambled on the other end of the bus.
The larger your chips (because you need all the drivers and receivers to send the parallel signals) or the more wires you have, the variance between the parts becomes harder and harder to control because of manufacturing limits. The trick is to design your entire system to tolerate the variances of each individual parts so that they will still work together.
But at the same time, you want to increase the speed of the bus (because having 20,000 wires is just not so practical). This is a force in conflict with what you're trying to achieve because an increase in speed translates to less tolerance in the system for parts variance.
At some point between increasing parallelness and higher and higher speed, the increase in variance will exceed the system's tolerance, and the parallel bus becomes impossible to implement or unreliable.
This is why bus designers have been trending towards serial interfaces, because that at least takes most of these variances out of the equation (it's still there but less influential).
The other trend is clock encoding. Instead of sending bits synchronously, or sending a strobe (a separate clock) signal along with the data. Now we 'encode' the clock into the data, using encoding such as the 8B/10B encoding. The receiving circuit can then 'retrieve' the clock from the data signal (it basically allow you to identify each set of data from each clock cycle, and detect problems). Serial interfaces are also usually accompanied by training sequences at start up (may be software implemented) to adjust various parameters to make the data transmission ideal for the environment.
In other words, there's value in the ability to produce energy at a constant rate, rather than in bursts. Because when it's produced in bursts, you will have to find a way to store it, which means a loss in efficiency.
I work on HP's high end servers that also contains millions lines of firmware.
I've heard of accounts where customers simply refuse to take new firmware because of their prior experience of "bricking" the boxes, and causing days of outage waiting for new blades to be shipped to them. But those usually turn out to be cases of real bad HW defects that the newer firmware has found. But they still insist on running years old firmware that contains tons of nasty bugs.
We all know that software has bugs, and we fix hundreds of them every month. This is not as mission critical as firmware in a car, but it's the same thing. Take the update dammit!
It floats... they all float down here...
Seriously... if there is a lack of documentation, then you just have to start reading the source code, starting at main(). Then look at each object and read its constructors.
And start documenting it. Add comments in the code, create inheritance diagrams and sequence diagrams.
It will be tedious but you will come out of it a better programmer.
Thanks for making strawberry perl, Adam!
Solved... put photovoltaic cells under the green house. More efficient in land use than either one alone.
The person that the OP is describing is either:
1. A super genious (rare)
2. A senior person that just finished all their training
3. A super rich dude that's been in school (middle-aged)
Unless you're rich and/or don't have to worry about paying your bills, you can't really afford to put in the time and money to be trained in multiple disciplines. And if you're rich, why would you bother unless you're really curious.
You must be talking about Ç++
My favorite one is Universalschraubenschlüssel.
> It is not our place to decide what experiences or life circumstances will or will not lead to a meaningful and fulfilling life, albeit different from our own.
I agree with you 100% here, but somehow I come to a different conclusion and consider myself pro-life. I do like the idea that people have a choice, and dislike having the government think for you. Unfortunately, not everyone make these decisions lightly and even abort perfectly healthy fetuses because they had an 'accident'.
Therefore I believe that it is better to err on the side of life than death.
This is definitely not a black and white issue, I do believe that abortion should be a choice in special circumstances like when a mother's life is threatened. But most people do not face these special situations, and therefore the choice should not be readily available.
What else matters more?
You can't say you'd fight for the human rights of the rest of us when you can't even protect the weakest group of humans out there: The unborn fetuses which cannot even fight for themselves.
The rest of us? We can mostly fend for ourselves. Even most of the poorest of the poor in this country are not facing death like the unborn fetuses being aborted.
So why is this group so important you may ask? Well.. why is the economy, or global warming, or energy, or foreign policies important? It's for securing our quality of life in the future generations. If the next generation are aborted, then all of those issues won't matter much.
If your parents were the only child in your family, and you are their only child... that means when it's time for you to support your parents and your grandparents, you've got 6 people to support on your one income. Or 12 people to support on you and your wife's income. That's is going to be a big problem soon.
25 years of coding in prison might yield some significant product. You can put him away physically, but I think we should still let his brilliant mind to continue to benefit the society.
Your anecdotes are typical and similar to my experiences. However, one must note that these CJK international students are a self selective group (or even government selected). They are usually top students in their country. So comparing them to a typical American (and even Asian American) domestic students (even in a top selective school) is not comparing apples to apples.
As for Americans being shut out of education. Some are for sure. And I think that is more due to 1. culture (as you said) and 2. our own education system. And there are probably more reasons. I'd just like to elaborate on these two:
1. American pop culture generally looks down on good students. If you do well in school, you're labeled a nerd or geek, and generally shunned by other kids in school. Unless you have other skills (namely athletics) you're usually not popular. This is not true in general in other cultures. In many other cultures around the world you are respected in school if you are smart. The American culture gives no incentive to do well in school. This is hard for adolescents that are academically inclined (but maybe not socially).
The international students coming in to college either have no idea that such a anti-academic culture exist in the general American population or they are not affected by it since they are not brought up here.
Our culture is turning up generations and generations of people who are not interested (or are afraid to be interested) in math and science.
2. Our college educational system is one of the best in the world. That's why students across the world are flocking here. When there is something good, there will be competition for it. If our high schools and primary schools do a better job of educating our kids to raise their competitiveness then American students can better compete for the seats in college. There will always be top students that will be competitive, but we need to raise the bar for everyone and turn out quality students (and people) in quantity. Of course more schools and cheaper schools won't hurt.
I'm glad too... more meat for me. :)
As if the FDA doesn't control veggies...
Besides, clones are not restricted to animals. In the world of plants more freaky genetic things happen.
Because there's actually this thing called economics...
If you charge $600 for 1 product, you might get 10 customers total. Total revenue: $6000.
But if you sell the two models at $600 and a crippled one at $300, a few customers that originally was willing to pay $600 may decide to buy the crippled model instead, but you might actually gain more customers for the crippled model to make up for the loss. Say 5 x $600, and 20 x $300 for a total revenue of $9000.
I am obviously making up the numbers to prove my point, but remember that one axis of the supply and demand curve is price, and any sane company would be pricing their product(s) to maximize their revenue and/or profit based on that curve.
Not if you are on your way to confront your ex-lover's new girlfriend and is wearing a diaper. :P
before broadband was invented?
My commodore 64 turned brown when I took it out of the box. They must have gotten the mixture really wrong and it oxidized right away after it came in contact with the air at home...
Remember, a large percentage of the time the entire system - including CPUs, chipsets, memory, disks, etc., are just pushing data around without performing any calculations. We could all gain from better performance of these operations as well.
Anyone that knowingly pays 100 times the value for anything is an idiot!
I just made up the negative amount. But if you were going to account for all the other stuff, why not account for what these OLPC laptops were designed to do. And if it does work (big IF), by helping to educate the poor and let them help themselves out of poverty, we will potentially save X amount of aid to those countries.
And what makes you think all technical support has to come from the west or the government? A quick learning smart kid could grasp the ins and outs of this laptop in say 6 months, and can start supporting his/her neighbors.. possibly free of charge. Or if he/she does charge for it, you are igniting a potential industry and economic activity that doesn't exist prior to these laptops.