You bring up an interesting point. I thought for a while that since conditions like blindness and deafness and inability to use legs are no longer critical for survival, we will se them more and more as our species "evolves".
I think it is important to realize however, that evolution can never stop. Those who have the best chance of surviving (and best chance of reproducing a lot) will always have the favorable characteristics. Whether or not they are favorable in the historical sense is irrelevant.
He is famous, and everything famous people say is worth more than what non-famous people say.
I thought that was obvious.
Honestly though nothing makes his opinion of biology and evolution worth more than your grandmothers (except maybe the fact that he spends all his time in acadamia and has access to more information than most people), I would still like the idea even if your grandmother had presented it.
Of course, you are right, there are many restrictions, ethical implications, and scientific facts that need exploration before we get to this realm. The point is just that it is plausible and even desirable to control our own evolution.
Despite the fact that there is no "strong" gene or "smart" gene doesn't mean there isn't a particular combination that safely encourages smarter people. Of course I would argue that environment, not genes, is the most important factor in things like intelligence or strength but it is reasonable to imagine that we could at somepoint design people who have photographic memories. This is all far far away but smaller changes aren't.
Certain diseases and conditions can be linked to individual genes and it is easy to forsee our altering of these genes to prevent these diseases in children.
It is very important that as a society we increase our wisdom. We have had lots of improvements in intelligence, but people are often miserable, and our interaction with other people is often bad. I think we will see this coming regardless.
As far as owning our own genetic evolution, increasing intelligence, length of life, and improving our ability to survive, would all be considered worth-while (at least in my eyes). I don't know if there is a way to make people kinder and more emotionally healthy (probably not). Those problems strike me as cultural problems and somewhat seperate from genetics.
My point is just that it is easy to imagine a future where we can control our own genetic makeup and make whatever improvements we want in ourselves.
..which I find very appealing at least, if not also completely agree with.
In one of his lectures he talks about the future of our society, especially that related to genetic engineering and how the future of science will effect our evolution.
Evolution up to know, has proceeded slowly, about one bit of DNA changes every year. If we take it into our own hands (ignoring the moral implications and side effects) we could alter our own DNA at a far greater rate. Add that with the ability to predict what the changes will do, we can evolve at a far greater rate.
Our children will be better, faster, and stronger. I mean who initially would say no to "Sir, would you like me to remove the possibility of Downs Syndrome from your child"? Now replace Downs Syndrome with Diabetes or with Weak Minded or with Scrawny. You can see that it isn't that unreasonable or that far away.
Of course, when you put yourself in Stephen Hawking's shoes, a man who biology abandoned a long time ago, it makes perfect sense to imagine that intelligent humans can prevent the types of conditions that completely disable a person without the aid of a machine.
This is a review of a Smart Display, not a Tablet PC.
It isn't that hard to tell the difference. Smart Displays are essentially wireless monitors while Tablet PCs are just laptops.
From what I have seen noone uses Smart Displays and Tablet PCs are being received quite well.
Re:REPEAT AFTER ME: XML IS NOT A FILE FORMAT
on
Office 2003 and XML
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· Score: 1
Because there exist tools that know how to parse XML already and XML is industry defined, not MS proprietary.
Re:REPEAT AFTER ME: XML IS NOT A FILE FORMAT
on
Office 2003 and XML
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· Score: 1
I think you missed the point when you quoted this,
"If Microsoft used a standard XML format for their documents then anyone could read them".
I think what they are trying to say is... If Microsoft had a standard, published, accessible format (that happens to be XML compliant) then other 3rd party non-MS apps could open and manipulate them.
I don't consider Rambus to be a mistake really, maybe a marketing blunder in getting people to accept it. ramping PIII? there was one missed release date, but they ramped it as far as they wanted to.
I do agree though, they make a lot of mistakes, but they still make money and do lots of things right.
Alpha? Sparc? MIPS? All of them topped the performance charts when they were first introduced
True, they did look much better when they came out, however as processors advance further and further, trying to tweak out every last bit of performance, the gains provided by a new architecture will be smaller. Sure Itanium made some mistakes but with further revisions it gets better and better. It is showing drastic performance increases from iteration to iteration mostly because Intel is learning from some mistakes it made early on.
"the hand of god" techniques
I don't know exactly what you are referring to, however I don't know why compiler technology shouldn't be expected to advance just like processors are.
control speculation,
More commonly referred to as "branch prediction".
Control speculation isn't really branch prediction, it is executing an instruction before its dependency (on and if statment) is resolved. Then if wrong, the result is simply discarded, so there is no branch prediction.
predication,
Conditional moves -- yawn.
Itanium takes predication a step further, it allows for two potential branches to be run in parallel and the speculation prevents a branch, that would otherwise be run. Thus it's predication prevents branches and dreaded branch mispredictions.
rotating register files,
As opposed to the more general "renamed registers"
Almost all of the registers in the Itanium can be easily rotated for stack access (including floating point registers). General renaming logic requires time and more die space.
Has it occurred to you that perhaps it *cannot* get good enough?
I think this is a naive view. Compilers can get as good as we want them to. I think it is an easy out to say that the cannot get any better. Sure the idea has occured to me, and it may be true. However, I do think you are right in that it shouldn't be claimed that Itanium's performance problems are the compiler's fault. The compiler shouldn't be the scapegoat either way, but the technology should continue to improve.
Good post, you bring up good points, I don't know why you got moderated as Troll.
Transmetta makes a lot of... oops there I go again.
Intel is a company that time and time again proves it knows how to make money. It may not always support the crowds it should (like/. readers and superusers) but they are still making money.
Sure there are lots of difficulties going to a new ISA. Especially at the server level. And yes Itanium has had some performance problems, especially in its first revision, but then again when was the last time you saw a company produce a 1st generation microprocessor and have it do well?
IA64 offers tons of advanced ILP concepts and OS concepts that, when correctly implemented, can increase performance drastically. (if your looking for examples, data speculation, control speculation, predication, registers with kernel access only, rotating register files, a much larger register set, etc).
The problem may be, it puts a lot of complexity into the Compilers, and compiler technology isn't good enough for Itanium yet.
But then again, what do I know, Linus has made more money than I have. I just like arguing the other side while everyone else screams about how the Itanium will die.
Well, backward time travel, faster than the speed of light kind of stuff happens at a particle level. Some particles are thought to travel backwards in time and theoretically I don't believe time travel has been ruled out on a Macro scale.
As far as modular AI, I think it is fairly realistic to assume there may be hard and fast standards for a human-like AI. If you don't assert some sort of Asimov like rules then you get AI's with very different ethical rules and that can cause problems.
I agree with you that the hard and fast rules he programs in are very... limited... but I didn't realize that until I read the novel. Better rules could definetly be formulated but I don't see why you say "trying to impose ethically standardised behavioural restratints on something like that sounds pretty far fetched", what is far fetched about it?
I am not accustomed to reading books with "disturbing sexual encounters", but this novel certainly has them.
However, I would like to say that the sci-fi aspects of the novel are extremely well written and even plausible!
The book comes off a little bi-polar, with a ethical death and pain aspect and then an artificial intelligence, how should robots and designed intelligences react. There are a few instances where the engineer in me was saying "wait, that can't happen". But only a couple, for the most part it was great. The gory and shocking scenes, it could be argued, are essential for the novel. Because it illustrates what life would be like without the normal consequences we are used to. The novel does a fairly good job of showing what real humanity is, mostly by taking it away.
I think the review leaves out the point that the artificial intelligence designed by one of the main characters, becomes so smart (book smarts), that it learns how to manipulate all matter through a very interesting method. I won't give too much away here but it was very interesting in the least. The programming and engineering aspects are very realistic and very well done (the author obviously has some experience in this).
So for my review, I give it a 9 out of 10, I liked it very much but I just wasn't prepared for some of the other stuff.:)
Actually Centrino, which has been posted about in slashdot already, is not a new chip.
The Centrino Brand is a combination of three main things.
The new Banias processor
The Montara 852/855 Chipset
Integrated 802.11b
This means that mobile computer makers can make new lighter, faster, cheaper, and colder laptops.
Centrino computers are designed for Mobile features, which doesn't always neccesarily mean speed. Banias runs colder than comparable processors from Intel, it has a host of new features to support all the crazy things laptops want to do (Better power management, bus control, hotkey support, more feature rich graphics etc...)
Intel is trying to jump on the new Mobile computing pattern. There is less and less of a focus on the absolute fastest processor and more of a focus on different ways (espeically easier ways) of using your computer. I mean who really uses all of their cpu cycles on a 3Ghz P4 with HT anyway (some people but not most)?
When wireless really picks up and people have reliable, quick, super lightweight laptops that can easily fit in a backpack or briefcase sales might pickup like Intel hopes.
for legal fee's, court costs, and wasted employee time for knowingly trying to copywright things that they didn't create and prior art clearly exists for.
It is ILLEGAL to steal money and to cause monetary damage to other companies (*ahem*hacking,sharing mp3s,violating DMCA*ahem*) and this is no different. They should be held responsible for their actions.
Re:But what if Moores law is too slow?
on
Forget Moore's Law?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I read an article a while back about the theoretical limits of computers.
Contrary to what some people think, quantum physics and thermodynamics define the limits of what a computer can do.
For example, you can't send data faster than the speed of light, and you can't have two memory blocks closer together than one plank's constant. Likewise you cannot store more information than the total amount of information in the universe etc. etc.
According to physics as it is today, there are dead ends for computers where they cannot get any faster, bigger, or more powerfull. We may never reach those limits, but they still exist.
Panning mode on Desktop/Mobile systems
on
Peephole Displays
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· Score: 1
This has existed for a while as "Panning" on mobile platforms. Sometimes a small LCD cannot see all of a big picture / game / resolution and the graphics driver will let you pan around the larger image by dragging the mouse to the edge of the screen, like this "peephole".
it's funny how intel says "epic is simple, no ooo complexity" but doesn't mention the all rediculous crap like rotating register files, etc, etc
Rotating register files and lots of the other features that Itanium has, aren't inherent in their ISA. There is nothing in EPIC that says you need rotating registers. These are just things that Intel thought would be really useful and people haven't started exploiting yet.
I think they had a good idea when they designed the ISA, but botched it a little bit on the cpu architecture. However, as compiler technology advances and software starts taking advantage of the "feature bloat" I think we will see a drastic improvement in Itanium performance.
I am very confused on why HP says "We fully support Itanium" and then releases EV7? This architecture is so fundamentally sound that it can beat Itanium 2 on core floating point performance.
In my mind HP should either go one way or the other, not release a processor most people would claim to be better than Itanium. Why didn't Intel just buy the Alpha architecture and continue it?
I know that AMD and Intel have both dissected the EV8 planned processor, and used parts of it for themselves. EV8 was going to be 4-way SMT (Intel uses that now as HyperThreading) and have integrated Northbridge on die (same as Hammer chips).
Its a sad state of affairs when the superior architecture gets cut up and sold to different companies to produce two slightly inferior chips.
I would guess that the Icache should be able to keep up with non-branching code as fast as the processor can execute it. If there are no branches then the Icache will benefit from locality of reference and always fetch the next few instructions with the current one.
Maybe the I-cache will get overwhelmed, but I don't see how this would make it slower than looping code.
If your looking to optimize every last processor cycle, sure its faster.
However if you want cleaner, more compact, and easier to alter code the loop would be better. Sure you add some branching and calculating, but the branch prediction should handle the loop near perfectly and simple arithmatic instructions are nothing, the limiting factor is memory access.
Okay, my comment "Extra mass on the outer fringe of a galaxy could not contribute to this lack of gravity" is wrong.
There is very little information out there on how far out this "Halo" needs to be, or how massive, or how far out our ring of stars is comparitavely.
MACHO's are Halo objects around the galaxy, but they are suspected to be much more massive than normal stars. Black holes and brown dwarfs making up much of the Halo would help. Regardless, the amount of mass measured does not end our search for dark matter.
Itaniums are marketed toward high-end servers only. Generally not available to, and too expensive for, the general public (if that is what you mean by regular consumer).
In Intel's mind, the Itanium doesn't compete with the Opteron. Opteron will be at Xeon's throat, trying to tear up some of the 95% market share that xeon has in corporate and other mid-range servers.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is important to realize however, that evolution can never stop. Those who have the best chance of surviving (and best chance of reproducing a lot) will always have the favorable characteristics. Whether or not they are favorable in the historical sense is irrelevant.
I thought that was obvious.
Honestly though nothing makes his opinion of biology and evolution worth more than your grandmothers (except maybe the fact that he spends all his time in acadamia and has access to more information than most people), I would still like the idea even if your grandmother had presented it.
Despite the fact that there is no "strong" gene or "smart" gene doesn't mean there isn't a particular combination that safely encourages smarter people. Of course I would argue that environment, not genes, is the most important factor in things like intelligence or strength but it is reasonable to imagine that we could at somepoint design people who have photographic memories. This is all far far away but smaller changes aren't.
Certain diseases and conditions can be linked to individual genes and it is easy to forsee our altering of these genes to prevent these diseases in children.
It is very important that as a society we increase our wisdom. We have had lots of improvements in intelligence, but people are often miserable, and our interaction with other people is often bad. I think we will see this coming regardless.
As far as owning our own genetic evolution, increasing intelligence, length of life, and improving our ability to survive, would all be considered worth-while (at least in my eyes). I don't know if there is a way to make people kinder and more emotionally healthy (probably not). Those problems strike me as cultural problems and somewhat seperate from genetics.
My point is just that it is easy to imagine a future where we can control our own genetic makeup and make whatever improvements we want in ourselves.
In one of his lectures he talks about the future of our society, especially that related to genetic engineering and how the future of science will effect our evolution.
Evolution up to know, has proceeded slowly, about one bit of DNA changes every year. If we take it into our own hands (ignoring the moral implications and side effects) we could alter our own DNA at a far greater rate. Add that with the ability to predict what the changes will do, we can evolve at a far greater rate.
Our children will be better, faster, and stronger. I mean who initially would say no to "Sir, would you like me to remove the possibility of Downs Syndrome from your child"? Now replace Downs Syndrome with Diabetes or with Weak Minded or with Scrawny. You can see that it isn't that unreasonable or that far away.
Of course, when you put yourself in Stephen Hawking's shoes, a man who biology abandoned a long time ago, it makes perfect sense to imagine that intelligent humans can prevent the types of conditions that completely disable a person without the aid of a machine.
It isn't that hard to tell the difference. Smart Displays are essentially wireless monitors while Tablet PCs are just laptops.
From what I have seen noone uses Smart Displays and Tablet PCs are being received quite well.
Because there exist tools that know how to parse XML already and XML is industry defined, not MS proprietary.
I think what they are trying to say is... If Microsoft had a standard, published, accessible format (that happens to be XML compliant) then other 3rd party non-MS apps could open and manipulate them.
I do agree though, they make a lot of mistakes, but they still make money and do lots of things right.
True, they did look much better when they came out, however as processors advance further and further, trying to tweak out every last bit of performance, the gains provided by a new architecture will be smaller. Sure Itanium made some mistakes but with further revisions it gets better and better. It is showing drastic performance increases from iteration to iteration mostly because Intel is learning from some mistakes it made early on.
"the hand of god" techniques
I don't know exactly what you are referring to, however I don't know why compiler technology shouldn't be expected to advance just like processors are.
control speculation, More commonly referred to as "branch prediction".
Control speculation isn't really branch prediction, it is executing an instruction before its dependency (on and if statment) is resolved. Then if wrong, the result is simply discarded, so there is no branch prediction.
predication, Conditional moves -- yawn.
Itanium takes predication a step further, it allows for two potential branches to be run in parallel and the speculation prevents a branch, that would otherwise be run. Thus it's predication prevents branches and dreaded branch mispredictions.
rotating register files, As opposed to the more general "renamed registers"
Almost all of the registers in the Itanium can be easily rotated for stack access (including floating point registers). General renaming logic requires time and more die space.
Has it occurred to you that perhaps it *cannot* get good enough?
I think this is a naive view. Compilers can get as good as we want them to. I think it is an easy out to say that the cannot get any better. Sure the idea has occured to me, and it may be true. However, I do think you are right in that it shouldn't be claimed that Itanium's performance problems are the compiler's fault. The compiler shouldn't be the scapegoat either way, but the technology should continue to improve.
Good post, you bring up good points, I don't know why you got moderated as Troll.
Linux made him ... oh wait nevermind.
Transmetta makes a lot of ... oops there I go again.
Intel is a company that time and time again proves it knows how to make money. It may not always support the crowds it should (like /. readers and superusers) but they are still making money.
Sure there are lots of difficulties going to a new ISA. Especially at the server level. And yes Itanium has had some performance problems, especially in its first revision, but then again when was the last time you saw a company produce a 1st generation microprocessor and have it do well?
IA64 offers tons of advanced ILP concepts and OS concepts that, when correctly implemented, can increase performance drastically. (if your looking for examples, data speculation, control speculation, predication, registers with kernel access only, rotating register files, a much larger register set, etc).
The problem may be, it puts a lot of complexity into the Compilers, and compiler technology isn't good enough for Itanium yet.
But then again, what do I know, Linus has made more money than I have. I just like arguing the other side while everyone else screams about how the Itanium will die.
As far as modular AI, I think it is fairly realistic to assume there may be hard and fast standards for a human-like AI. If you don't assert some sort of Asimov like rules then you get AI's with very different ethical rules and that can cause problems.
I agree with you that the hard and fast rules he programs in are very ... limited... but I didn't realize that until I read the novel. Better rules could definetly be formulated but I don't see why you say "trying to impose ethically standardised behavioural restratints on something like that sounds pretty far fetched", what is far fetched about it?
However, I would like to say that the sci-fi aspects of the novel are extremely well written and even plausible!
The book comes off a little bi-polar, with a ethical death and pain aspect and then an artificial intelligence, how should robots and designed intelligences react. There are a few instances where the engineer in me was saying "wait, that can't happen". But only a couple, for the most part it was great. The gory and shocking scenes, it could be argued, are essential for the novel. Because it illustrates what life would be like without the normal consequences we are used to. The novel does a fairly good job of showing what real humanity is, mostly by taking it away.
I think the review leaves out the point that the artificial intelligence designed by one of the main characters, becomes so smart (book smarts), that it learns how to manipulate all matter through a very interesting method. I won't give too much away here but it was very interesting in the least. The programming and engineering aspects are very realistic and very well done (the author obviously has some experience in this).
So for my review, I give it a 9 out of 10, I liked it very much but I just wasn't prepared for some of the other stuff. :)
The *processor* is called Pentium-M, the chipset, processor, mainboard combo from Intel is called Centrino.
I agree with you though, they look really cool, and this is really old news.
The Centrino Brand is a combination of three main things.
- The new Banias processor
- The Montara 852/855 Chipset
- Integrated 802.11b
This means that mobile computer makers can make new lighter, faster, cheaper, and colder laptops.Centrino computers are designed for Mobile features, which doesn't always neccesarily mean speed. Banias runs colder than comparable processors from Intel, it has a host of new features to support all the crazy things laptops want to do (Better power management, bus control, hotkey support, more feature rich graphics etc...)
Intel is trying to jump on the new Mobile computing pattern. There is less and less of a focus on the absolute fastest processor and more of a focus on different ways (espeically easier ways) of using your computer. I mean who really uses all of their cpu cycles on a 3Ghz P4 with HT anyway (some people but not most)?
When wireless really picks up and people have reliable, quick, super lightweight laptops that can easily fit in a backpack or briefcase sales might pickup like Intel hopes.
It is ILLEGAL to steal money and to cause monetary damage to other companies (*ahem*hacking,sharing mp3s,violating DMCA*ahem*) and this is no different. They should be held responsible for their actions.
Contrary to what some people think, quantum physics and thermodynamics define the limits of what a computer can do.
For example, you can't send data faster than the speed of light, and you can't have two memory blocks closer together than one plank's constant. Likewise you cannot store more information than the total amount of information in the universe etc. etc.
According to physics as it is today, there are dead ends for computers where they cannot get any faster, bigger, or more powerfull. We may never reach those limits, but they still exist.
write code.
This has existed for a while as "Panning" on mobile platforms. Sometimes a small LCD cannot see all of a big picture / game / resolution and the graphics driver will let you pan around the larger image by dragging the mouse to the edge of the screen, like this "peephole".
Rotating register files and lots of the other features that Itanium has, aren't inherent in their ISA. There is nothing in EPIC that says you need rotating registers. These are just things that Intel thought would be really useful and people haven't started exploiting yet.
I think they had a good idea when they designed the ISA, but botched it a little bit on the cpu architecture. However, as compiler technology advances and software starts taking advantage of the "feature bloat" I think we will see a drastic improvement in Itanium performance.
In my mind HP should either go one way or the other, not release a processor most people would claim to be better than Itanium. Why didn't Intel just buy the Alpha architecture and continue it?
I know that AMD and Intel have both dissected the EV8 planned processor, and used parts of it for themselves. EV8 was going to be 4-way SMT (Intel uses that now as HyperThreading) and have integrated Northbridge on die (same as Hammer chips).
Its a sad state of affairs when the superior architecture gets cut up and sold to different companies to produce two slightly inferior chips.
Maybe the I-cache will get overwhelmed, but I don't see how this would make it slower than looping code.
However if you want cleaner, more compact, and easier to alter code the loop would be better. Sure you add some branching and calculating, but the branch prediction should handle the loop near perfectly and simple arithmatic instructions are nothing, the limiting factor is memory access.
There is very little information out there on how far out this "Halo" needs to be, or how massive, or how far out our ring of stars is comparitavely.
MACHO's are Halo objects around the galaxy, but they are suspected to be much more massive than normal stars. Black holes and brown dwarfs making up much of the Halo would help. Regardless, the amount of mass measured does not end our search for dark matter.
In Intel's mind, the Itanium doesn't compete with the Opteron. Opteron will be at Xeon's throat, trying to tear up some of the 95% market share that xeon has in corporate and other mid-range servers.