Likewise, book use can "Sexy Yvette's quest for true love" or "A practical guide to nuclear engineering." TV use can be "Fear Factor," or "Nova." This is a complete non-article. It could be improved by clarifying to the point of, "Non academic activities don't help in school."
No, no objections. I can't really claim credit for the idea. I'm sure it's been bouncing around for millenia. Oh, BTW, reasonable donations are accepted if you find me quotable!
Okay, first off, the bus isn't really germaine to a discussion of the architecture. Further, what bus do PPC's like the 440 series use? Hint, Motorola didn't design it. 486's and Pentiums are the same architecture but they use a different bus...
Second, while the wikipedia article is interesting, I'd like to refer you to http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/power/about.h tml https://www-03.ibm.com/chips/products/powerpc / I think they have some familiarity with the subject. The first URL lists a bunch of PowerPC documents under "Power Architecture resources"
From the second URL, the quote, "As members of the IBM Power family of products that power everything from handhelds to mainframes, enterprise class servers to video game consoles, IBM PowerPC products deliver high performance, power optimization, and excellent value."
So, IBM sure seems to think that PowerPC stuff is a member of the POWER family. You better let them know that they goofed up.
Well, yeah... They build in lots of anti-cheats. That's part of the job. But, nothing is 100% perfect, and sometimes somebody else finds your bug before you do. I'm still confused about what exactly you want them to do.
"Hey, Fred, the magic 8 ball seems to think that evil hackers are going to find a bug on line 278 in menu.c - better fix it right away!"
In this context, the only reasonable definition of being proactive with regard to cheaters means keeping an eye out foir them, rather than waiting to hear complaints. Fixing bugs in the code will go on regardless of any concern about cheating.
More specifically, the plot was "Demons on Mars." They are leaving out the demons and the Mars... So, yeah, given that the only actual remaining tie to the game is "On," I think it's fair to say they abandoned the game's plot pretty effectively.:( Jeezus, how the heck do you manage to be so inept as to be unable to make a movie with as much plot as Doom!?!
So, you are saying that anybody who might hack at some point in the future should have their account banned before they do anything? Cuz... That's everybody.
Actually, on one of the really old consoles like an Atari 2600, there was no frame buffer, so the console *had* to draw every single pixel every field. And, it had to draw it in sync with the TV's raster scan.
That said, regarding the grandparent : one of the main reasons that hidden surface removal is such an important part of 3D graphics is that actually calculating the lighting and shading at a point is very slow. Switching to a voxel display where you shade every single point in the view volume would *not* be a speedup! Of course, the march of progress will indeed solve the problem of shading massive scenes quickly.:)
Secondly, I would like to point out that stellar evolution is absolutely impossible. This may sound crazy, but I am willing to back up my statement. In order to create a star (according to evolution), gas must be compressed enough for fusion to take place. The problem with this theory is that gas just can't be compressed that much by anything except (possibly) a bunch of stars blowing up at the same time near each other. Obviously, if you have to loose a bunch of stars to gain a new one, pretty soon, you won't have any stars!
Ummm, care to share your calculations about how it's impossible for a could of Hydrogen gas to begin fusion due to gravitational compression? Seriously, if you have a gas cloud the size of the sun, it will eventually be attracted to itself, due to gravity, and form into a smaller and smaller cloud, until eventually it is the size of a star. A gas cloud the size and mass of a star means that the center of that cloud is as compressed as the core of a star, and so it is a place where fusion will start happening. No explosions needed, though they can certainly impact the process.
What *exactly* do you suppose prevents gravity from compressing the gas cloud, making a stellar birth "impossible?"
Finally, I would like to point out that, by your own definition, evolution is a complete dogma.
In order to explain the creation of the universe, they have imagined something called the "big bang". By their own definition (read any modern public school textbook), the big bang was caused by the explosion of a dot which either 1 - always existed (the dot is basically god) or 2 - somehow created itself out of nothing (the dot is basically god). I belive that I have proved my point: evolution is a dogma, and will always be a dogma because it is impossible to escape the fact that there is a God! The only reason for coming to the illogical conclusion that the dot is god is that you cannot accept the fact that God is God!
I can't imagine what would cause one to suppose that thinking a very hot dense gas cloud can start fusion somehow precludes the existence of God. The two questions are quite independant. Frankly, I think there are a lot of cosmologists that have no personal problem with the idea that God created that which went bang in the big bang. It doesn't effect the cosmology in any way.
My own supposition is that God was sitting around one day, and he wondered to himself, "I wonder if I can microwave a burrito so hot that even I couldn't eat it..." Lacking an answer to this question, God went into an infinite loop, and he exploded from thinking too hard.
My supposition fits the available evidence as well as supposing that god created the universe, or that there is no God. None of those answers about what was around before the universe effect the laws of physics in any way, because nobody has ever come up with a test or experiment that could demonstrably be effected by what came before the universe.
While stellar evolution is a Dogma, and it is possible that God created the universe 500 years ago, and just made it look really really old, that's no reason to abandon cosmology.
BTW, what created God? Isn't it actually simpler to suppose that a point singularity sprang into being one day? God is an extremely complex entity. I find it more difficult to believe that God sprang into being intact and whole and infinitely wise. If anything, God sounds like he requires the "theory of intelligent design" moreso than the universe.:)
I agree that it's entirely possible large mechanical walkers might get made, if only for show. The USSR used to constantly have military parades with tanks and rockets. A few medium Mechs would look good walking alongside your tanks if you are trying to impress your own population.
The other big advantage, of course is mobility. If large mechs ever do get built, I'd suppose they are likely to be civilian construction vehicles, and the like, where mobility is more interesting than survivability under RPG fire.
Quick, somebody post the userfriendly strip. You know the one.
Well, science starts with one major assumption. We hope that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. That's not a guarantee, because we have never been outside our solar system, but we have no reason to suspect otherwise.
So, here on earth, we can do all sorts of laboratory tests. We can figure out under what conditions Hydrogen fuses. We can test the strength of gravity. We can test the way various elements react at various tempuratures and pressures. So, while there isn't a 100% guarantee that we have a good handle on how stellar evolution works in another galaxy, we can be pretty confident that we have a very good handle on it. Accurate to many decimal places.
Based on what we know about how the elements, we can make some calculations about stellar evolution in general. We can figure out how far away nearby stars are by using parallax while the earth goes around the sun. The nearby stars are the ones we can use to best test our theories, because we can be very very sure how far away they are. Because we know how far away they are, and how bright they appear, we can figure out how bright they actually are (as if they were all the same distance). We can also use spectrography to figure out what elements are giving off the starlight (which we can double check by heating up the elements in a lab and using the same spectroscope). Thankfully, our mathematical models of how bright a star should be with a certain element mixture line up perfectly with what we actually see, so we can safely apply our models to stars so far away that we can't use parallax to measure the brightness.
So, if you are still with me... We can look at a star, analyse the spectra emitted, and plug it into our mathematical models of stellar evolution. It seems like crazy guessing, and there is certainly some guessing involved, but the theories we use on distant stars have been tested in laboratories, and on nearby stars, with everything being double checked for crazy shit as the tests get farther out.
Given that this galaxy is so unusual, it is possible that somewhere along the line, we may need to update our models. It's possible our models are just giving us a wrong answer. It's wildly unlikely. But, science is the unending quest for a less-wrong answer. That's the difference between dogma and science. Science will freely admit it is wrong, but it usually turns out to be only slightly so. Dogma just finds ways to explain away new information in terms of the existing dogma, or dismisses it entirely.
Even less googling turns up wardevil.com Unfortunately, the site seems to be acting screwy, so I guess I'm not the first person to think that probably should have been mentioned in the write-up. Thanks to the site being funky, I still haven't even figured out what *type* of game it is... Or, do we just assume FPS these days?
Well, what exactly would they have reverse engineered before the arch. manual was published? There wasn't any silicon to reverse engineer until long after the manual was published...
How can television stand a chance? Easy, offer.torrents of standard, DRM-free MPEG's or similar. Treat "the internet" as a distinct advertising market. Charge so much for advertising on the torrents that it makes the advertiser's anus bleed.
It's a really obvious gold mine.
-Make torrents available, so you have negligible bandwidth costs. No station to build, negligible staff, it's basically free money.
-Use standard MPEG, or similar, so there aren't crazy licensing fees associated with some of the fancier codecs with DRM and such. Also, almost everybody on the planet can play MPEG, so you have a low effort solution for your customers.
-Since torrents are downloaded rather than streamed, your viewers will be automatically archiving a copy of your program. You can use this as a big sticking point with your advertisers, as people will likely watch the adverts over and over again.
-step 3: Profit.
If the ads are not overwhelmingly plentiful, and the quality is good (using a professional engineer to encode you shows off of the original masters, rather than a 12 year old witrh rabbit ears trying to figure it out), people will prefer using the legit service with ads to pirating. Having one convenient website with an RSS feed, which you know won't get shut down by feds next week... That's nice.
What exactly was so special about Itanium? I mean, I hate X86 legacy as much as the next guy. I feel fairly qualified to say that, as I've actually tinkered with things like bootloaders in X86 assembly. It ain't pretty, I much prefer my RISC boxen, but the end user never has to deal with architectural cruft, so it isn't really relevant.
Itanium was an ugly dog. It required insane amounts of work to get code to run efficiently, and the architecture was designed not to accomodate things like out-of-order execution in a misguided attempt at design optimisation. The explicit parallelism just didn't fly in real life.
X86, on the other hand, has a very dense (ugly) instruction set, which means that due to better code density, you don't burn as much memory bandwidth on instruction fetching. With AMD64, you also get 16 GPR's, eliminating the (often overloudly raised) argument that X86 needs more registers.
Right now, my desktop at work has 512 MB of RAM. Many systems are shipping with 2GB of RAM. We need 64 bits *right now.* 32 bit Operating systems generally like to have 2 GB of address space for the kernel, 2 GB of address space for the end-user Apps. (That's an oversimplification, but it is not completely incorrect, so I'll run with it, because I'm lazy.) So, basically, a current high-end system with 2 GB of RAM is about as far as you really want to go with a 32 bit system. When you leave enough address space for all your PCI stuff, and all that, a standard 32 bit PC running windows or Linux just really doesn't run as well as it could if you try and stuff 4 GB of RAM in there. You need to start doing annoying shit like running multiple processes to use the RAM, and using memory segmentation like in the "good old days." Video editors, big multimedia people, film guys, all need lots of RAM.
Sure, there are many many people who won't need a 64 bit system for years, but that isn't to say that there isn't anybody who needs it now, or anybody that could easily use it now.
And, 4 GB of RAM can be had for like $500 these days, so it isn't that exorbitant!
Well,, I've heard a lot of things about marijuana, though I've never used it myself. All the people I know who have smoked pot consider it pleasant, and not that big a deal, and generally never moved on the more dangerous drugs, and are quite successful. All the people who tell me that pot is bad, and will ruin my life, say they have never used it. Who am I going to trust? Which information seems more valid?
I have met some people who used herion. They speak very poorly of their time with the drug. I trust them, because they have a very personal point of reference. I have no opposition to using pot, but I would never consider using heroin.
That said... Yes, laughing at zealots is fun. I dunno about effective, but fun!
"I don't know," is never a good answer, but it is often the right answer.
Time and time again, I've seen management make weird ass technical decisions which every techinical person disagreed with. It's a bad thing. If the majority of your programmers say that Ruby is the right language for teh job, they may be right. Sometimes you do have to steam-roll over people with legit ideas in order to get anything done, but don't do it arbitrarily, just because you have the power to.
As a little example, we did a team-building thing today at work. I have been with the company for two weeks, and I had one of the biggest bosses on my team. I wound up getting the instructions, so I started reading what we had to do, and coordinating. Some bosses would have started by taking the paper and running everything themselves. Instead, everybody just went with the flow, and because there weren't any squabbles about who got to write down the answers, we won. Also, I now have a deeper respect for the boss, because I know that he is more concerned with getting the job done, than being in charge.
The complete architecture reference manual was available for free, including shipping, by requesting it from AMD's website. I doubt they needed to do much reverse engineering.
If they do it really campy, they could do a fun joke ripoff of the infamous upside-down spiderman kiss, where he still has his shiny helmet mostly on... That might be amusing, if the director camps the whole movie up enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Likewise, book use can "Sexy Yvette's quest for true love" or "A practical guide to nuclear engineering." TV use can be "Fear Factor," or "Nova." This is a complete non-article. It could be improved by clarifying to the point of, "Non academic activities don't help in school."
No, no objections. I can't really claim credit for the idea. I'm sure it's been bouncing around for millenia. Oh, BTW, reasonable donations are accepted if you find me quotable!
Okay, first off, the bus isn't really germaine to a discussion of the architecture. Further, what bus do PPC's like the 440 series use? Hint, Motorola didn't design it. 486's and Pentiums are the same architecture but they use a different bus...
h tmlc /
s g/ 2a09c59094e16205
Second, while the wikipedia article is interesting, I'd like to refer you to
http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/power/about.
https://www-03.ibm.com/chips/products/powerp
I think they have some familiarity with the subject. The first URL lists a bunch of PowerPC documents under "Power Architecture resources"
From the second URL, the quote, "As members of the IBM Power family of products that power everything from handhelds to mainframes, enterprise class servers to video game consoles, IBM PowerPC products deliver high performance, power optimization, and excellent value."
So, IBM sure seems to think that PowerPC stuff is a member of the POWER family. You better let them know that they goofed up.
Now, just to make things perfectly clear:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.arch/m
(hopefully deep linking is working right on the new groups - that should be a post by Mr. McCalpin himself from Oct 19 2002)
To quote : "POWER4 is an implementation of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture.
PowerPC 970 is an implementation of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture."
He worked on the POWER4, so I'd trust him.
twit.
Just so we are clear, Power4 is a PowerPC chip, so I'm not sure exactly what distinction you are making...
Well, yeah... They build in lots of anti-cheats. That's part of the job. But, nothing is 100% perfect, and sometimes somebody else finds your bug before you do. I'm still confused about what exactly you want them to do.
"Hey, Fred, the magic 8 ball seems to think that evil hackers are going to find a bug on line 278 in menu.c - better fix it right away!"
In this context, the only reasonable definition of being proactive with regard to cheaters means keeping an eye out foir them, rather than waiting to hear complaints. Fixing bugs in the code will go on regardless of any concern about cheating.
More specifically, the plot was "Demons on Mars." They are leaving out the demons and the Mars... So, yeah, given that the only actual remaining tie to the game is "On," I think it's fair to say they abandoned the game's plot pretty effectively. :( Jeezus, how the heck do you manage to be so inept as to be unable to make a movie with as much plot as Doom!?!
So, you are saying that anybody who might hack at some point in the future should have their account banned before they do anything? Cuz... That's everybody.
Actually, on one of the really old consoles like an Atari 2600, there was no frame buffer, so the console *had* to draw every single pixel every field. And, it had to draw it in sync with the TV's raster scan.
:)
That said, regarding the grandparent : one of the main reasons that hidden surface removal is such an important part of 3D graphics is that actually calculating the lighting and shading at a point is very slow. Switching to a voxel display where you shade every single point in the view volume would *not* be a speedup! Of course, the march of progress will indeed solve the problem of shading massive scenes quickly.
Ummm, care to share your calculations about how it's impossible for a could of Hydrogen gas to begin fusion due to gravitational compression? Seriously, if you have a gas cloud the size of the sun, it will eventually be attracted to itself, due to gravity, and form into a smaller and smaller cloud, until eventually it is the size of a star. A gas cloud the size and mass of a star means that the center of that cloud is as compressed as the core of a star, and so it is a place where fusion will start happening. No explosions needed, though they can certainly impact the process.
What *exactly* do you suppose prevents gravity from compressing the gas cloud, making a stellar birth "impossible?"
I can't imagine what would cause one to suppose that thinking a very hot dense gas cloud can start fusion somehow precludes the existence of God. The two questions are quite independant. Frankly, I think there are a lot of cosmologists that have no personal problem with the idea that God created that which went bang in the big bang. It doesn't effect the cosmology in any way.
:)
My own supposition is that God was sitting around one day, and he wondered to himself, "I wonder if I can microwave a burrito so hot that even I couldn't eat it..." Lacking an answer to this question, God went into an infinite loop, and he exploded from thinking too hard.
My supposition fits the available evidence as well as supposing that god created the universe, or that there is no God. None of those answers about what was around before the universe effect the laws of physics in any way, because nobody has ever come up with a test or experiment that could demonstrably be effected by what came before the universe.
While stellar evolution is a Dogma, and it is possible that God created the universe 500 years ago, and just made it look really really old, that's no reason to abandon cosmology.
BTW, what created God? Isn't it actually simpler to suppose that a point singularity sprang into being one day? God is an extremely complex entity. I find it more difficult to believe that God sprang into being intact and whole and infinitely wise. If anything, God sounds like he requires the "theory of intelligent design" moreso than the universe.
I agree that it's entirely possible large mechanical walkers might get made, if only for show. The USSR used to constantly have military parades with tanks and rockets. A few medium Mechs would look good walking alongside your tanks if you are trying to impress your own population.
The other big advantage, of course is mobility. If large mechs ever do get built, I'd suppose they are likely to be civilian construction vehicles, and the like, where mobility is more interesting than survivability under RPG fire.
Quick, somebody post the userfriendly strip. You know the one.
Well, science starts with one major assumption. We hope that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. That's not a guarantee, because we have never been outside our solar system, but we have no reason to suspect otherwise.
So, here on earth, we can do all sorts of laboratory tests. We can figure out under what conditions Hydrogen fuses. We can test the strength of gravity. We can test the way various elements react at various tempuratures and pressures. So, while there isn't a 100% guarantee that we have a good handle on how stellar evolution works in another galaxy, we can be pretty confident that we have a very good handle on it. Accurate to many decimal places.
Based on what we know about how the elements, we can make some calculations about stellar evolution in general. We can figure out how far away nearby stars are by using parallax while the earth goes around the sun. The nearby stars are the ones we can use to best test our theories, because we can be very very sure how far away they are. Because we know how far away they are, and how bright they appear, we can figure out how bright they actually are (as if they were all the same distance). We can also use spectrography to figure out what elements are giving off the starlight (which we can double check by heating up the elements in a lab and using the same spectroscope). Thankfully, our mathematical models of how bright a star should be with a certain element mixture line up perfectly with what we actually see, so we can safely apply our models to stars so far away that we can't use parallax to measure the brightness.
So, if you are still with me... We can look at a star, analyse the spectra emitted, and plug it into our mathematical models of stellar evolution. It seems like crazy guessing, and there is certainly some guessing involved, but the theories we use on distant stars have been tested in laboratories, and on nearby stars, with everything being double checked for crazy shit as the tests get farther out.
Given that this galaxy is so unusual, it is possible that somewhere along the line, we may need to update our models. It's possible our models are just giving us a wrong answer. It's wildly unlikely. But, science is the unending quest for a less-wrong answer. That's the difference between dogma and science. Science will freely admit it is wrong, but it usually turns out to be only slightly so. Dogma just finds ways to explain away new information in terms of the existing dogma, or dismisses it entirely.
Even less googling turns up wardevil.com Unfortunately, the site seems to be acting screwy, so I guess I'm not the first person to think that probably should have been mentioned in the write-up. Thanks to the site being funky, I still haven't even figured out what *type* of game it is... Or, do we just assume FPS these days?
Well, yeah, I meant *metric* decivolkswagons, if anybody didn't understand!
What I want to know is how does it feel to be asked for a third slashdot interview.
Just in case anybody wants to know, the international measure for a bathtub is:
1 bathtub = 3.4 decivolkwagons
Well, what exactly would they have reverse engineered before the arch. manual was published? There wasn't any silicon to reverse engineer until long after the manual was published...
How can television stand a chance? Easy, offer .torrents of standard, DRM-free MPEG's or similar. Treat "the internet" as a distinct advertising market. Charge so much for advertising on the torrents that it makes the advertiser's anus bleed.
It's a really obvious gold mine.
-Make torrents available, so you have negligible bandwidth costs. No station to build, negligible staff, it's basically free money.
-Use standard MPEG, or similar, so there aren't crazy licensing fees associated with some of the fancier codecs with DRM and such. Also, almost everybody on the planet can play MPEG, so you have a low effort solution for your customers.
-Since torrents are downloaded rather than streamed, your viewers will be automatically archiving a copy of your program. You can use this as a big sticking point with your advertisers, as people will likely watch the adverts over and over again.
-step 3: Profit.
If the ads are not overwhelmingly plentiful, and the quality is good (using a professional engineer to encode you shows off of the original masters, rather than a 12 year old witrh rabbit ears trying to figure it out), people will prefer using the legit service with ads to pirating. Having one convenient website with an RSS feed, which you know won't get shut down by feds next week... That's nice.
What exactly was so special about Itanium? I mean, I hate X86 legacy as much as the next guy. I feel fairly qualified to say that, as I've actually tinkered with things like bootloaders in X86 assembly. It ain't pretty, I much prefer my RISC boxen, but the end user never has to deal with architectural cruft, so it isn't really relevant.
Itanium was an ugly dog. It required insane amounts of work to get code to run efficiently, and the architecture was designed not to accomodate things like out-of-order execution in a misguided attempt at design optimisation. The explicit parallelism just didn't fly in real life.
X86, on the other hand, has a very dense (ugly) instruction set, which means that due to better code density, you don't burn as much memory bandwidth on instruction fetching. With AMD64, you also get 16 GPR's, eliminating the (often overloudly raised) argument that X86 needs more registers.
Right now, my desktop at work has 512 MB of RAM. Many systems are shipping with 2GB of RAM. We need 64 bits *right now.* 32 bit Operating systems generally like to have 2 GB of address space for the kernel, 2 GB of address space for the end-user Apps. (That's an oversimplification, but it is not completely incorrect, so I'll run with it, because I'm lazy.) So, basically, a current high-end system with 2 GB of RAM is about as far as you really want to go with a 32 bit system. When you leave enough address space for all your PCI stuff, and all that, a standard 32 bit PC running windows or Linux just really doesn't run as well as it could if you try and stuff 4 GB of RAM in there. You need to start doing annoying shit like running multiple processes to use the RAM, and using memory segmentation like in the "good old days." Video editors, big multimedia people, film guys, all need lots of RAM.
Sure, there are many many people who won't need a 64 bit system for years, but that isn't to say that there isn't anybody who needs it now, or anybody that could easily use it now.
And, 4 GB of RAM can be had for like $500 these days, so it isn't that exorbitant!
Well,, I've heard a lot of things about marijuana, though I've never used it myself. All the people I know who have smoked pot consider it pleasant, and not that big a deal, and generally never moved on the more dangerous drugs, and are quite successful. All the people who tell me that pot is bad, and will ruin my life, say they have never used it. Who am I going to trust? Which information seems more valid?
I have met some people who used herion. They speak very poorly of their time with the drug. I trust them, because they have a very personal point of reference. I have no opposition to using pot, but I would never consider using heroin.
That said... Yes, laughing at zealots is fun. I dunno about effective, but fun!
My daddy always used to say:
"I don't know," is never a good answer, but it is often the right answer.
Time and time again, I've seen management make weird ass technical decisions which every techinical person disagreed with. It's a bad thing. If the majority of your programmers say that Ruby is the right language for teh job, they may be right. Sometimes you do have to steam-roll over people with legit ideas in order to get anything done, but don't do it arbitrarily, just because you have the power to.
As a little example, we did a team-building thing today at work. I have been with the company for two weeks, and I had one of the biggest bosses on my team. I wound up getting the instructions, so I started reading what we had to do, and coordinating. Some bosses would have started by taking the paper and running everything themselves. Instead, everybody just went with the flow, and because there weren't any squabbles about who got to write down the answers, we won. Also, I now have a deeper respect for the boss, because I know that he is more concerned with getting the job done, than being in charge.
The complete architecture reference manual was available for free, including shipping, by requesting it from AMD's website. I doubt they needed to do much reverse engineering.
Nit picking is how they show their love. It only looks like an argument to an outsider.
How exactly is that ironic? Judge upholds precident. Wow, that's an unexpected turn!
Or, make the union international. Convince Bush to invade any country with non-union dev shops.
If they do it really campy, they could do a fun joke ripoff of the infamous upside-down spiderman kiss, where he still has his shiny helmet mostly on... That might be amusing, if the director camps the whole movie up enough.