What I'm wondering is whether a "real world" economy and a virtual economy are strongly coupled. So, if the virtual economy collapsed, would it affect GDP of real countries? In this case, no, because the amounts we're talking about are tiny. But if the "Entropia" project mentioned towards the end of the report were to succeed in its aims, perhaps it would.
Would economic trends in the real world influence the virtual one? In this case yes, to some degree; if people can't pay their subscriptions, they can't exist in the virtual world and production will fall. Consider this quote:
> It is important to stress that the external
> market for Norrathian goods is
> underground. Sony has stated that Norrathian
> items are its intellectual property
> (Sandoval, 2001). Trading these items for US
> currency is considered theft. Nonetheless,
> trade goes on.
Scary, no? Enforcing such a law would be equivalent to forcing the devaluation of the virtual currency. So, the virtual world economy would continue to function, but with its ties to the real world (partially) severed.
Does that bode well for Entropia? If the virtual items and currencies are the (intellectual) property of one individual, or corporation, or government, then can virtual economies be any use at all?
Or, to turn that on its head, can EverQuest be used as a model for the distribution of intellectual assets in the real world?
Having read that last sentence, I'm sure I've had too much coffee.:)
I recompiled Qt from source on my four-year-old machine the other day, and it took six hours. I'm not recompiling every bit of software on my machine... it would take weeks. I doubt I could even fit all the source code on my HDD. But then it's a seriously retro setup so I'm probably making a fuss about nothing.
Where I think this would come into its own is on a site, like a university or large company, where there are (a) hundreds of identical machines with exactly the same specification (down to the position of the sticker on the case), and (b) people who know what they're doing (ha ha) in charge. You could amortize the time taken to create the optimised system over the savings once you've installed it on every PC.
I wonder if they support using a compile farm to perform the rebuild? That would be sweet.
The same applies to national defence, roads, hospitals, fire stations, and everything else which most individuals can't afford on their own, but which benefit everyone (or many people) indiscriminately of who pays.
> Here the game asks you to punish the
> uncooperative player with costs now, but the
> punishment might make them more likely to
> contribute in future rounds of the game.
> Interesting.
Yes it is. But strangely in the article, it seems to suggest that the "societies" under test were constantly being changed so that people could not learn the trustworthiness or investment habits of others in the group. That seems counter-intuitive because as you say above, the benefits of the system are reaped only after several iterations.
I also think that the headline poster was wrong about the potential implications of this:
1) Open Source software development is by definition a producer/consumer system. The point is that freeloading is allowed - in fact, necessary! What would be the point in a load of hackers writing the Linux kernel if loads of people didn't download it? End users don't have to contribute back to the pool; that's why they are so called.
2) Peer to peer networks, on the other hand, do not necessarily have a means of production in the first place. You might be able to ease bandwidth troubles etc. by punishing those who do more "clienting" than serving, but there's no sense in punishing those who download more than they upload. I'd say it's almost inevitable that that will be the case for most file-sharing systems.
In the case of online music distribution (for example), what's needed is a way to punish those who take but don't create. The current system (at least, pre-copy-protected-CDs) of "you don't pay, you don't listen" has at least the merits of logic and fairness.
> If your suggestion wins, you will receive three
> custom-made T-shirts with the message 'I named
> the MySQL Dolphin' as well as a Palm IIIC with
> Camera. Three T-shirts, because when one shirt
> is in the laundry, you still have two other
> shirts to wear!
This kinda presupposes that the sort of people who hack MySQL actually *do* any laundry:)
Re:IDG article is apparently original source
on
No Solaris 9 for x86
·
· Score: 2
> But is this good, encouraging the curious to
> move to free OSes when exploring beyond
> Windows, or bad, removing a great way of
> finding out about an OS that is easier to
> convince your boss to have installed?
I think that not only is it good, but Sun *knows* it's good. One of the problems facing them at the moment is that companies whose products traditionally ran on UNIX (e.g. high end CAD) are producing WinNT versions too, because lots of companies are blinkered into the "everything on Windows" mentality.
One way out of that is if people coming into (for example) engineering industries know that there is life outside Windows. SO what if people switch towards Linux in an academic environment, where Sun sell (sold?) a lot of stuff at heavily discounted rates? If it teaches them that 'doze isn't always the right tool for the job, then there may well be revenue coming their way when today's undergraduates become tomorrow's IT decision-makers.
So we all known the score. The established position is that any "information" product you buy, like a book, video, magazine, LP, CD or whatever, is sold to you on the condition that you do not reproduce it in any way. This wasn't so bad, because reproduction was expensive anyway. Time for a ramble through my thoughts...
If I buy a book, I know what I'm getting; a physical object which I can read (in one place at a time). I can re-read it any number of times without paying any extra money to the author/publisher. I can give it away to someone else, and they can read it too. The people who write and produce books are obviously happy that this does not erode their profits, or they would have tried to outlaw second-hand bookshops and libraries long ago.
So if it's possible to make money on print media in that environment, why is it so hard for those selling music? After all, they have extra revenue channels which have no equivalent in the print world, such as live performances. And that's before you consider the merchandising opportunities, which are just as possible for authors (J.K. Rowling, anyone?), musicians, artists...
More reflections - original works of art are traditionally extremely expensive because a "copy" or reprint is inferior to the master. Studio production of music is very different; the artist can slave for months over one recorded track until it's finally ready... but the perfect copies cost nothing.
Are people used to "getting stuff for free"? Sure they are, they listen to the radio. Who cares what deals happen behind the scenes to ensure airplay? The music is free! In what way is recording something off the radio and listening to it again "offline" any different from re-reading a book, or for that matter, Napster?
So say the music industry collapsed in the face of widespread "piracy", or sharing, or whatever you want to call it. What happens to the creative impulses which were responsible for the great music in the first place? Do they just die off in the absence of money? Hell no. Music and art have existed long before the RIAA, Disney, the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism or even currency.
If all musicians were just in it for the money, then the charts would be full of lowest-common-denominator bland whiney teenage well-groomed all-style-no-substance pap.
> Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do
> not think that you can build it, as though it
> were a public construction project
One word - DARPA.
(OK, that was five words. Sue me.)
> We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-
> interest, and the commonweal, our governance
> will emerge.
Has this guy ever *read* Slashdot?:)
> The global conveyance of thought no longer
> requires your factories to accomplish.
Yup, I can certainly manufacture and repair my own Pentium4, graphics card, telephone, generate my own electricity, connect cities thousands of miles apart with fibre-optic cable...
Give us a break. I think I agree with the sentiment, but let's have a cohesive argument for a change?
...that you don't have to read further than the second paragraph before coming across the word "Terrorism".:-(
Still, from a networks point of view, it seems that geographical barring as described would always have to take place at a high protocol layer (e.g. HTTP). Anyone who *truly* wants to break the law will just go "underground" by inventing their own protocol, using an older version of an existing one, or subverting the geographically secure one by some redirection method or other.
And of course, if you start the blanket blocking of all IP traffic between two countries, the net would fall apart. Any CS monkey knows that one of the key design criteria for reliable and usable networks is location transparency.
Take a look at BLITZ++, then tell me OOP is not useful for scientists and engineers.:-)
I think the safest thing to say is that whatever your programming needs, whether you're doing pure matrix/BLAS number crunching or writing complex simulations/models, you should think twice before using FORTRAN. Well-written code in, say, C++ will be more maintainable and accessible to other people you work with (and who have to touch your code in future).
The only thing which keeps people using FORTAN that I've seen is that the optimising compiler support is fantastic compared with the equivalent offerings in C/C++ compilers. But that's not much of an excuse for general day to day problem-solving.
> Perhaps your 486 MB was the first of its kind,
> but modern motherboards with integrated devices
> have the ability to disable them so that can be
> replaced by cards in slots.
True, but that presupposes the existence of spare slots;-)
I hear what you're saying about trashable chips, but I think the real phenomenon is the "trashable board". Think about it - if your mobo dies and your warrantee has run out, you go buy a replacement and ditch the old board. If it happens still to be under its manufacturer's warrantee, most likely you just take it back to the shop and swap it for a working one. What happens to the old one? Most likely, they throw it away. The cost of postage, packing, an engineer's time to find the problem, repairs, parts... it's more than the damn thing retails for anyway.
I think this is missing the point anyway. The integration idea goes like this: with today's technology, you could put the equivalent of an early Pentium processor, plus hard disk and graphics controllers, BIOS chipset, etc. onto a single piece of silicon. Pretty much all you'd be left with off-chip would be (a) RAM and (b) I/O circuitry, because they're both harder to integrate. So your computer is about four or five chips. This is approximately the case in palm-tops now.
The point is that you've lost all ability to choose your own components. That graphics block/macrocell has probably been chosen by the manufacturer becuase it was the best value for money (i.e. the cheapest they could find). If you're lucky, they will give you expansion ports so you can plug your own stuff in. But that costs money, and if they think you'll pay for the lesser product then they'll make that instead.
Does it matter? Probably not to the average user. But I think it would matter to the industry. The whole point of having standard architectures like PCI, SCSI, EIDE (and before them, ISA et al.) is that many vendors can compete to produce compatible products, which drives innovation and generally provides a good deal for the consumer.
But if the minimisation continues and the busses become subsumed into the very chips themselves, then the chances are the manufacturers will cut corners. They won't wait for the not-quite-standard-yet SuperBus2005 architecture... they'll design their own and make you buy their proprietary upgrades. Again, the economics work out such that you the consumer probably get a good deal. But trading off good deals today against innovation tomorrow is dangerous.
So, it would be much better to keep all those busses outside the individual components, right? But that's exactly what is keeping the PC architecture slow at the moment (which was the point of my previous post. I think.).
Impressive though 64-bit processors might be, I'm not convinced that the performance improvement is going to be as big as people are expecting.
Remember that the components in any digital system - and I'm not just talking about your windoze desktop PC, but servers, mainframes and embedded systems too - have to talk to each other in order to do anything remotely useful. Last time I looked, most PCI devices din't utilise the provision for 64-bit data bus operation.
There's a perfectly good reason for this, of course... in order to attach a chip to a circuit board, you need an array of pins (or solder balls) that are macroscopic, so they can be soldered and handled without too much risk of accidental damage. Additionally, PCB tracks can only go so small (and so close together) without undesirable electrical effects and again, an inability to work with it in a production environment.
The "more bits" phenomenon has been sustained by improvements in VLSI and the advent of true System-on-a-chip design, but this too has its limits. If you compare a P4 motherboard with, say, a 386 mobo circa 1995, you'll see the chip count is drastically reduced. But fewer interconnected components means less repairability, upgradability, and interoperability. My old 486 had a VLB EIDE hard disk controller, which I swapped in after the last one failed. If my controller failed today, I couldn't do that; I'd either need to buy a new mobo or start replacing chips on the old one (which is just as expensive).
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for progress! And I expect we'll see more and more 64/128-bit chips springing up inside custom devices (e.g. 3D cards, routers) where the local interconnect can be made as fat as necessary. But the PC will remained shackled by slow frontside busses for a while yet, I reckon.
>do you have any idea what you're paying for SRAM?
Personally I don't, although I'm sure I could find out if I tried. As you can imagine, we don't have much choice in the matter; the data rates we deal with are pretty high and the arbitration is already a nightmare, without throwing dynamic refresh into the equation. Hell, sometimes our DSPs' internal data RAM isn't fast enough for us!:)
Also, the quantities we use are pretty low (maybe 32MBytes per board, if that). And our teams are split between the UK and Japan, so I don't know where the purchasing actually happens.
> I'm having a hard time understanding what you've written!
<re-reads own post> hmm... so am I:-) Lack of coffee, I think.
I don't think I meant it was "hard to understand", I think I meant it was more fickle and quite unlike a lot of other silicon markets. Most chips and circuit boards are never sold directly to the general public; they're designed, manufactured and purchased by the various companies who manufacture hardware for end-users. Thus, applying the same analysis that you might use when considering, say, high speed digital-to-analogue converters, might yield some phoney results.
The PC (and related components) market is different from the washing machine market, because people expect the product they buy to be obsolete within a year, and worthless within three. That's not because it will break down, but because of the speed at which the technological developments are progressing. I guess that was true when the washing machine was first invented, too.
All I was saying was that for some reason, a lot of investors and analysts have assumed without any solid justification that the growth curve in sales of DRAM/mobile phones/PCs/etc. can be extrapolated skywards without any consideration of external factors.
Because the market trends are not quite the same as that for any other products, I think there were lots of mistakes ready to be made. If only 64KB *had* been enough for everyone:-)
DRAM is a funny product. Market analysis is harder because the demand for it is not governed by your "ordinary" factors. For a start, it doesn't wear out half as fast as you might expect (particularly if you compare its failure rate to the average lifetime of a home PC). Demand in recent years has been similar to that for mobile handsets - the technology matures and people want it... until they *have* it, then they don't need any more.
If you imagine that every household didn't have an electric jug kettle, and someone suddenly invented it and sold it at an affordable price... well you get the idea.
DRAM is in over-supply because it's one of the only silicon products which has a huge domestic market. My company makes telecoms base-station hardware, and we have next to no DRAM on our boards - it's all SRAM and fast DPRAM embedded in ASICs. The demand for *those* is easier to analyse because the market is steadier and less "faddy".
Shame they couldn't put the plants they're closing to better use though... it's not like there aren't more exciting designs around the corner waiting to be spun...
Before the flame wars start...
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
My suggestion - try them out.
Come up with a few small use cases and let your developers loose on everything you can get your hands on. Both Qt and GTK+ are freely available enough for that to be a useful exercise.
You might find that, while Qt has nicer abstractions, and provides a familiar set of classes which are (IMO) far superior to MFC... perhaps GTK has a slight edge for lower level work (which it sounds like you might get involved in). Also, see which interface builder tools your team feels most comfortable with.
The problem with this question is that the replies are likely to degenerate quickly into a C vs. C++ rant-a-thon. Yes, GTK is entirely written in C. But it *is* object oriented. It seems strange to everyone at first, but just because a language doesn't support particular features, doesn't mean that you can't use a particular programming style. OO methodology is just as relevant to C programmers as to C++ or Java programmers.
If your programmers are good, they'll write good code whatever the toolkit. Just make sure everyone thinks that they got a say in the decision.;-)
In other news, the US government have decided to restrict the sale of bar magnets. "It has come to our attention that the DeCSS DVD-piracy-enabling software could be written onto a hard disk using these devices." The use, design of, trafficking in and discussion of bar magnets is now a federal offence.
I'm sitting at my desk, doing my job (being a productive engineer) to the benefit of my company and my country's economy. Society benefits greatly through technological progress made by the thousands of people like me all around the world. Let's have a look at what "Interactive Digital Devices" I'm using, which I might soon be unable to use.
1. My PC, on which I'm writing this. It has a variety of uses which we're all familiar with. It runs a variety of software -- free, proprietary, open source, closed course, stuff I've written myself too. Without it, my job would be impossible.
2. My telephone. This is quite high-tech for a phone. I interact with it, and it's full of digital circuitry.
3. The development platform which I'm working on. This contains digital signal processors, FPGAs, CPLDs, PROMS, RAM, glue logic, and various buttons, switches, LED readouts and so on. It's really a cut-down version of a product which my company ships. Interacting with one of these is the only way to get any work done round here. It connects to my PC via a JTAG in-circuit emulation box, which is also mildly interactive.
4. A small "performance monitor" board, which I've been developing and testing. This connects to my development platform, and produces analogue outputs based on digital inputs. (I'm trying not to give too much away here.:-))
5. A digital oscilloscope. This is displaying traces from the hardware on my desk. Often, I screen-grab these traces onto a disk (in a standard graphics format).
6. A data transmission analyser. This box outputs digital test patterns, and monitors its inputs for the purposes of bit error rate measurement. I can set it up to do a variety of things, to verify the design of the hardware I'm helping to create.
If the UK were to pass a law like the SSSCA, it would put my company out of business for two reasons - the engineers would be unable to work because their tools would be illegal, and in any case the product we create (wireless telecoms equipment, UMTS Node-B) would also be illegal until the 3GPP mandated spread-spectrum radio standards were updated to include this copy protection/DRM/PITA standard.
I rest my case. Passing the SSSCA would, I think, bring the digital revolution to an ugly and unceremonious end.
Re:Nostalgia isn't what it used to be..
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 2
Ah, but this is/. and they didn't call it a spectrum in the US, it was the TIMEX (IIRC).:)
Your TIMEX - it's crap! (in a funky skillo sort of way).
Doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Still, wouldn't have stopped me wasting my youth playing Dark Star / Mission Omega / Southern Belle / How to be a Complete Bastard / and so on.
(a) DirectFB is a thin abstraction layer over graphics hardware; ideal for blindingly fast games, video rendering, etc. Sure, that could be useful.
(b) The X window system is a network-transparent graphical desktop environment based around the client-server paradigm. Sure, that could be useful.
You can't really have it both ways. It would probably be true to say, though, that the need for (b) is dying out, and the need for (a) is growing. But that's not what the headline was saying.
When you buy a CD (music or data) in the UK, nine times out of ten it will have been manufactured in Germany, or somewhere else in Europe. We have import costs very similar to those of the US, yet it's still cheaper for foreign companies (like US-based record labels!) to have their manufacturing offshore - even when they're selling to a completely different country.
I suspect that it's just easier for Mandrakesoft to get someone else organising their North American manufacturing and distribution all at once, rather than managing the supply chain from Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
What a great pity... I'm sure I'm not the only one who was looking forward to voting for CowboyNeal. :)
What I'm wondering is whether a "real world" economy and a virtual economy are strongly coupled. So, if the virtual economy collapsed, would it affect GDP of real countries? In this case, no, because the amounts we're talking about are tiny. But if the "Entropia" project mentioned towards the end of the report were to succeed in its aims, perhaps it would.
:)
Would economic trends in the real world influence the virtual one? In this case yes, to some degree; if people can't pay their subscriptions, they can't exist in the virtual world and production will fall. Consider this quote:
> It is important to stress that the external
> market for Norrathian goods is
> underground. Sony has stated that Norrathian
> items are its intellectual property
> (Sandoval, 2001). Trading these items for US
> currency is considered theft. Nonetheless,
> trade goes on.
Scary, no? Enforcing such a law would be equivalent to forcing the devaluation of the virtual currency. So, the virtual world economy would continue to function, but with its ties to the real world (partially) severed.
Does that bode well for Entropia? If the virtual items and currencies are the (intellectual) property of one individual, or corporation, or government, then can virtual economies be any use at all?
Or, to turn that on its head, can EverQuest be used as a model for the distribution of intellectual assets in the real world?
Having read that last sentence, I'm sure I've had too much coffee.
Apparently, it runs a...
> Hardened & ruggedized Linux based UNIX kernel
?
Could someone from marketing please tell me what that means?
I recompiled Qt from source on my four-year-old machine the other day, and it took six hours. I'm not recompiling every bit of software on my machine... it would take weeks. I doubt I could even fit all the source code on my HDD. But then it's a seriously retro setup so I'm probably making a fuss about nothing.
Where I think this would come into its own is on a site, like a university or large company, where there are (a) hundreds of identical machines with exactly the same specification (down to the position of the sticker on the case), and (b) people who know what they're doing (ha ha) in charge. You could amortize the time taken to create the optimised system over the savings once you've installed it on every PC.
I wonder if they support using a compile farm to perform the rebuild? That would be sweet.
"Public good" is the phrase you're looking for.
:)
The same applies to national defence, roads, hospitals, fire stations, and everything else which most individuals can't afford on their own, but which benefit everyone (or many people) indiscriminately of who pays.
Hence... taxation.
> Here the game asks you to punish the
:-)
> uncooperative player with costs now, but the
> punishment might make them more likely to
> contribute in future rounds of the game.
> Interesting.
Yes it is. But strangely in the article, it seems to suggest that the "societies" under test were constantly being changed so that people could not learn the trustworthiness or investment habits of others in the group. That seems counter-intuitive because as you say above, the benefits of the system are reaped only after several iterations.
I also think that the headline poster was wrong about the potential implications of this:
1) Open Source software development is by definition a producer/consumer system. The point is that freeloading is allowed - in fact, necessary! What would be the point in a load of hackers writing the Linux kernel if loads of people didn't download it? End users don't have to contribute back to the pool; that's why they are so called.
2) Peer to peer networks, on the other hand, do not necessarily have a means of production in the first place. You might be able to ease bandwidth troubles etc. by punishing those who do more "clienting" than serving, but there's no sense in punishing those who download more than they upload. I'd say it's almost inevitable that that will be the case for most file-sharing systems.
In the case of online music distribution (for example), what's needed is a way to punish those who take but don't create. The current system (at least, pre-copy-protected-CDs) of "you don't pay, you don't listen" has at least the merits of logic and fairness.
Still states the obvious tho'.
From the competition website:
:)
> If your suggestion wins, you will receive three
> custom-made T-shirts with the message 'I named
> the MySQL Dolphin' as well as a Palm IIIC with
> Camera. Three T-shirts, because when one shirt
> is in the laundry, you still have two other
> shirts to wear!
This kinda presupposes that the sort of people who hack MySQL actually *do* any laundry
...a Beowulf cluster of These!
> But is this good, encouraging the curious to
> move to free OSes when exploring beyond
> Windows, or bad, removing a great way of
> finding out about an OS that is easier to
> convince your boss to have installed?
I think that not only is it good, but Sun *knows* it's good. One of the problems facing them at the moment is that companies whose products traditionally ran on UNIX (e.g. high end CAD) are producing WinNT versions too, because lots of companies are blinkered into the "everything on Windows" mentality.
One way out of that is if people coming into (for example) engineering industries know that there is life outside Windows. SO what if people switch towards Linux in an academic environment, where Sun sell (sold?) a lot of stuff at heavily discounted rates? If it teaches them that 'doze isn't always the right tool for the job, then there may well be revenue coming their way when today's undergraduates become tomorrow's IT decision-makers.
So we all known the score. The established position is that any "information" product you buy, like a book, video, magazine, LP, CD or whatever, is sold to you on the condition that you do not reproduce it in any way. This wasn't so bad, because reproduction was expensive anyway. Time for a ramble through my thoughts...
If I buy a book, I know what I'm getting; a physical object which I can read (in one place at a time). I can re-read it any number of times without paying any extra money to the author/publisher. I can give it away to someone else, and they can read it too. The people who write and produce books are obviously happy that this does not erode their profits, or they would have tried to outlaw second-hand bookshops and libraries long ago.
So if it's possible to make money on print media in that environment, why is it so hard for those selling music? After all, they have extra revenue channels which have no equivalent in the print world, such as live performances. And that's before you consider the merchandising opportunities, which are just as possible for authors (J.K. Rowling, anyone?), musicians, artists...
More reflections - original works of art are traditionally extremely expensive because a "copy" or reprint is inferior to the master. Studio production of music is very different; the artist can slave for months over one recorded track until it's finally ready... but the perfect copies cost nothing.
Are people used to "getting stuff for free"? Sure they are, they listen to the radio. Who cares what deals happen behind the scenes to ensure airplay? The music is free! In what way is recording something off the radio and listening to it again "offline" any different from re-reading a book, or for that matter, Napster?
So say the music industry collapsed in the face of widespread "piracy", or sharing, or whatever you want to call it. What happens to the creative impulses which were responsible for the great music in the first place? Do they just die off in the absence of money? Hell no. Music and art have existed long before the RIAA, Disney, the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism or even currency.
If all musicians were just in it for the money, then the charts would be full of lowest-common-denominator bland whiney teenage well-groomed all-style-no-substance pap.
Ah.
> Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do
:)
> not think that you can build it, as though it
> were a public construction project
One word - DARPA.
(OK, that was five words. Sue me.)
> We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-
> interest, and the commonweal, our governance
> will emerge.
Has this guy ever *read* Slashdot?
> The global conveyance of thought no longer
> requires your factories to accomplish.
Yup, I can certainly manufacture and repair my own Pentium4, graphics card, telephone, generate my own electricity, connect cities thousands of miles apart with fibre-optic cable...
Give us a break. I think I agree with the sentiment, but let's have a cohesive argument for a change?
...that you don't have to read further than the second paragraph before coming across the word "Terrorism". :-(
Still, from a networks point of view, it seems that geographical barring as described would always have to take place at a high protocol layer (e.g. HTTP). Anyone who *truly* wants to break the law will just go "underground" by inventing their own protocol, using an older version of an existing one, or subverting the geographically secure one by some redirection method or other.
And of course, if you start the blanket blocking of all IP traffic between two countries, the net would fall apart. Any CS monkey knows that one of the key design criteria for reliable and usable networks is location transparency.
Ho hum.
Take a look at BLITZ++, then tell me OOP is not useful for scientists and engineers. :-)
I think the safest thing to say is that whatever your programming needs, whether you're doing pure matrix/BLAS number crunching or writing complex simulations/models, you should think twice before using FORTRAN. Well-written code in, say, C++ will be more maintainable and accessible to other people you work with (and who have to touch your code in future).
The only thing which keeps people using FORTAN that I've seen is that the optimising compiler support is fantastic compared with the equivalent offerings in C/C++ compilers. But that's not much of an excuse for general day to day problem-solving.
Just my 2p.
> Perhaps your 486 MB was the first of its kind,
;-)
> but modern motherboards with integrated devices
> have the ability to disable them so that can be
> replaced by cards in slots.
True, but that presupposes the existence of spare slots
I hear what you're saying about trashable chips, but I think the real phenomenon is the "trashable board". Think about it - if your mobo dies and your warrantee has run out, you go buy a replacement and ditch the old board. If it happens still to be under its manufacturer's warrantee, most likely you just take it back to the shop and swap it for a working one. What happens to the old one? Most likely, they throw it away. The cost of postage, packing, an engineer's time to find the problem, repairs, parts... it's more than the damn thing retails for anyway.
I think this is missing the point anyway. The integration idea goes like this: with today's technology, you could put the equivalent of an early Pentium processor, plus hard disk and graphics controllers, BIOS chipset, etc. onto a single piece of silicon. Pretty much all you'd be left with off-chip would be (a) RAM and (b) I/O circuitry, because they're both harder to integrate. So your computer is about four or five chips. This is approximately the case in palm-tops now.
The point is that you've lost all ability to choose your own components. That graphics block/macrocell has probably been chosen by the manufacturer becuase it was the best value for money (i.e. the cheapest they could find). If you're lucky, they will give you expansion ports so you can plug your own stuff in. But that costs money, and if they think you'll pay for the lesser product then they'll make that instead.
Does it matter? Probably not to the average user. But I think it would matter to the industry. The whole point of having standard architectures like PCI, SCSI, EIDE (and before them, ISA et al.) is that many vendors can compete to produce compatible products, which drives innovation and generally provides a good deal for the consumer.
But if the minimisation continues and the busses become subsumed into the very chips themselves, then the chances are the manufacturers will cut corners. They won't wait for the not-quite-standard-yet SuperBus2005 architecture... they'll design their own and make you buy their proprietary upgrades. Again, the economics work out such that you the consumer probably get a good deal. But trading off good deals today against innovation tomorrow is dangerous.
So, it would be much better to keep all those busses outside the individual components, right? But that's exactly what is keeping the PC architecture slow at the moment (which was the point of my previous post. I think.).
I could go on and on... <looks up> oh, wait...
Impressive though 64-bit processors might be, I'm not convinced that the performance improvement is going to be as big as people are expecting.
Remember that the components in any digital system - and I'm not just talking about your windoze desktop PC, but servers, mainframes and embedded systems too - have to talk to each other in order to do anything remotely useful. Last time I looked, most PCI devices din't utilise the provision for 64-bit data bus operation.
There's a perfectly good reason for this, of course... in order to attach a chip to a circuit board, you need an array of pins (or solder balls) that are macroscopic, so they can be soldered and handled without too much risk of accidental damage. Additionally, PCB tracks can only go so small (and so close together) without undesirable electrical effects and again, an inability to work with it in a production environment.
The "more bits" phenomenon has been sustained by improvements in VLSI and the advent of true System-on-a-chip design, but this too has its limits. If you compare a P4 motherboard with, say, a 386 mobo circa 1995, you'll see the chip count is drastically reduced. But fewer interconnected components means less repairability, upgradability, and interoperability. My old 486 had a VLB EIDE hard disk controller, which I swapped in after the last one failed. If my controller failed today, I couldn't do that; I'd either need to buy a new mobo or start replacing chips on the old one (which is just as expensive).
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for progress! And I expect we'll see more and more 64/128-bit chips springing up inside custom devices (e.g. 3D cards, routers) where the local interconnect can be made as fat as necessary. But the PC will remained shackled by slow frontside busses for a while yet, I reckon.
>do you have any idea what you're paying for SRAM?
:)
Personally I don't, although I'm sure I could find out if I tried. As you can imagine, we don't have much choice in the matter; the data rates we deal with are pretty high and the arbitration is already a nightmare, without throwing dynamic refresh into the equation. Hell, sometimes our DSPs' internal data RAM isn't fast enough for us!
Also, the quantities we use are pretty low (maybe 32MBytes per board, if that). And our teams are split between the UK and Japan, so I don't know where the purchasing actually happens.
> I'm having a hard time understanding what you've written!
:-) Lack of coffee, I think.
:-)
<re-reads own post> hmm... so am I
I don't think I meant it was "hard to understand", I think I meant it was more fickle and quite unlike a lot of other silicon markets. Most chips and circuit boards are never sold directly to the general public; they're designed, manufactured and purchased by the various companies who manufacture hardware for end-users. Thus, applying the same analysis that you might use when considering, say, high speed digital-to-analogue converters, might yield some phoney results.
The PC (and related components) market is different from the washing machine market, because people expect the product they buy to be obsolete within a year, and worthless within three. That's not because it will break down, but because of the speed at which the technological developments are progressing. I guess that was true when the washing machine was first invented, too.
All I was saying was that for some reason, a lot of investors and analysts have assumed without any solid justification that the growth curve in sales of DRAM/mobile phones/PCs/etc. can be extrapolated skywards without any consideration of external factors.
Because the market trends are not quite the same as that for any other products, I think there were lots of mistakes ready to be made. If only 64KB *had* been enough for everyone
DRAM is a funny product. Market analysis is harder because the demand for it is not governed by your "ordinary" factors. For a start, it doesn't wear out half as fast as you might expect (particularly if you compare its failure rate to the average lifetime of a home PC). Demand in recent years has been similar to that for mobile handsets - the technology matures and people want it... until they *have* it, then they don't need any more.
If you imagine that every household didn't have an electric jug kettle, and someone suddenly invented it and sold it at an affordable price... well you get the idea.
DRAM is in over-supply because it's one of the only silicon products which has a huge domestic market. My company makes telecoms base-station hardware, and we have next to no DRAM on our boards - it's all SRAM and fast DPRAM embedded in ASICs. The demand for *those* is easier to analyse because the market is steadier and less "faddy".
Shame they couldn't put the plants they're closing to better use though... it's not like there aren't more exciting designs around the corner waiting to be spun...
This previous story from a couple of days ago on...
Slashdot...?
Oh well. :-\
My suggestion - try them out.
;-)
Come up with a few small use cases and let your developers loose on everything you can get your hands on. Both Qt and GTK+ are freely available enough for that to be a useful exercise.
You might find that, while Qt has nicer abstractions, and provides a familiar set of classes which are (IMO) far superior to MFC... perhaps GTK has a slight edge for lower level work (which it sounds like you might get involved in). Also, see which interface builder tools your team feels most comfortable with.
The problem with this question is that the replies are likely to degenerate quickly into a C vs. C++ rant-a-thon. Yes, GTK is entirely written in C. But it *is* object oriented. It seems strange to everyone at first, but just because a language doesn't support particular features, doesn't mean that you can't use a particular programming style. OO methodology is just as relevant to C programmers as to C++ or Java programmers.
If your programmers are good, they'll write good code whatever the toolkit. Just make sure everyone thinks that they got a say in the decision.
LOL
In other news, the US government have decided to restrict the sale of bar magnets. "It has come to our attention that the DeCSS DVD-piracy-enabling software could be written onto a hard disk using these devices." The use, design of, trafficking in and discussion of bar magnets is now a federal offence.
Even big companies know this bill is stupid.
:-))
I'm sitting at my desk, doing my job (being a productive engineer) to the benefit of my company and my country's economy. Society benefits greatly through technological progress made by the thousands of people like me all around the world. Let's have a look at what "Interactive Digital Devices" I'm using, which I might soon be unable to use.
1. My PC, on which I'm writing this. It has a variety of uses which we're all familiar with. It runs a variety of software -- free, proprietary, open source, closed course, stuff I've written myself too. Without it, my job would be impossible.
2. My telephone. This is quite high-tech for a phone. I interact with it, and it's full of digital circuitry.
3. The development platform which I'm working on. This contains digital signal processors, FPGAs, CPLDs, PROMS, RAM, glue logic, and various buttons, switches, LED readouts and so on. It's really a cut-down version of a product which my company ships. Interacting with one of these is the only way to get any work done round here. It connects to my PC via a JTAG in-circuit emulation box, which is also mildly interactive.
4. A small "performance monitor" board, which I've been developing and testing. This connects to my development platform, and produces analogue outputs based on digital inputs. (I'm trying not to give too much away here.
5. A digital oscilloscope. This is displaying traces from the hardware on my desk. Often, I screen-grab these traces onto a disk (in a standard graphics format).
6. A data transmission analyser. This box outputs digital test patterns, and monitors its inputs for the purposes of bit error rate measurement. I can set it up to do a variety of things, to verify the design of the hardware I'm helping to create.
If the UK were to pass a law like the SSSCA, it would put my company out of business for two reasons - the engineers would be unable to work because their tools would be illegal, and in any case the product we create (wireless telecoms equipment, UMTS Node-B) would also be illegal until the 3GPP mandated spread-spectrum radio standards were updated to include this copy protection/DRM/PITA standard.
I rest my case. Passing the SSSCA would, I think, bring the digital revolution to an ugly and unceremonious end.
Ah, but this is /. and they didn't call it a spectrum in the US, it was the TIMEX (IIRC). :)
Your TIMEX - it's crap! (in a funky skillo sort of way).
Doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Still, wouldn't have stopped me wasting my youth playing Dark Star / Mission Omega / Southern Belle / How to be a Complete Bastard / and so on.
*sigh*
(a) DirectFB is a thin abstraction layer over graphics hardware; ideal for blindingly fast games, video rendering, etc. Sure, that could be useful.
(b) The X window system is a network-transparent graphical desktop environment based around the client-server paradigm. Sure, that could be useful.
You can't really have it both ways. It would probably be true to say, though, that the need for (b) is dying out, and the need for (a) is growing. But that's not what the headline was saying.
When you buy a CD (music or data) in the UK, nine times out of ten it will have been manufactured in Germany, or somewhere else in Europe. We have import costs very similar to those of the US, yet it's still cheaper for foreign companies (like US-based record labels!) to have their manufacturing offshore - even when they're selling to a completely different country.
I suspect that it's just easier for Mandrakesoft to get someone else organising their North American manufacturing and distribution all at once, rather than managing the supply chain from Europe.