Sometimes I feel that majors in the humanities, in communication, literature, critical thinking, psychology, philosophy, linguists, and financial planning are better qualified as developers, because they understand what is most often to be coded these days: interfaces to information, with the ability manipulate, display, and interact with said information. That information has context.
Yeah, right.
While psychology, lingustics and financial planning are serious subjects and teach skills useful to programmers, they don't teach programming.
Communication, literature, "critical thinking", and almost all philosophy courses are pure fluff.
Give me an engineering graduate - civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical; I don't really care - any day. At least they understand maths and have learned that there is such a thing as a wrong answer. The concept of a wrong answer is anathema to most humanities students.
I'm sooo glad my job doesn't involve hiring programmers anymore.
That's true, but what happens if I move my application servers to India, process my data there using all the patented techniques I need and then send it back to US?
Depends on how much money the patent-holder has.
Having said that, wait ten or twenty years while India builds up its software industry, and then see what their stance on software patents is. I doubt the current decision is entirely selfless.
I think you are not fully taking the total interdependence of the global economic system into consideration. It is not to America's benefit in any way to see the economies of other nations collapse. Yes, it is in America's benefit to maintain it's leadership in innovation and wealth creation, but America is stronger, and in fact we all are stronger if there is more than one geo-economic center that is capable of taking up the slack when an economic slow down occurs.
Absolutely.
This is why the idea that we invaded Iraq to steal the oil (and sundry variations on this theme) is so absurd. We stand to make far more money by buying Iraqi oil than by just walking in and taking it.
With Iraq free, and prosperity growing, the Iraqis will do the work of pumping the oil. They sell it to us. We give them money. They spend the money. They buy Fords and Chevys and Dells and Levis and iPods. And we buy more oil. And they build factories, and start selling us denim and tyres and hard disk drives. And we sell them X-Box 2's and Caterpillar bulldozers and The Incredibles DVDs and Boeing 777's.
And round and round it goes. The whole point is, it's not a zero-sum game. Wealth isn't a pie you have to divide up among the people at the table. Wealth is a pie factory. The more effort you put in, the more pie there is to go around.
I work for a phone company here in Oz, and among other things we resell Telstra ADSL.
I've seen Telstra claim that a customer on a 512/128 line (512kb/s down, 128kb/s up) uploaded 4GB in 20 hours. When I pointed out that this was impossible, they suggested that maybe the user's computer had been infected by a virus - and insisted that I check this before they would investigate.
I then spent some time explaining the concept of arithmetic to the Telstra support desk...
The French overthrew their monarchy some years back.
Yeah, in 1792, but in a typically French fashion, they had to do it again in 1814, then in 1815, once more in 1830, and yet again in 1848 and then several times during the 1870's.
Then they tried to bring it back in 1946, but no-one could agree on who got to be King, so they ended up with President de Gaulle...
The problem is not the technology, the problem is that this type of behaviour is considered normal for nation states.
It isn't considered normal.
The problem is that the leadership of North Korea is completely insane, and always has been. They starve their own people to death in order to prop up their army as a threat to South Korea.
You said it yourself: People are willing to risk their lives to escape to China, which is hardly a paradise. That ought to tell you what a nightmare life in North Korea is.
And what about Nvidia? They're last product jump from 5900 to the 6800 was absolutely amazing. A very clear %100 increase in performance. I'd be very surprised to see Nvidia be able to match that leap sooner than 4Q 2006.
Maybe, maybe not.
Clock speeds of GPUs have been inching upwards just like those of CPUs, but the number of pipelines has been growing rapidly - from 8 to 16 in your example. They haven't hit a practical limit there yet, though power consumption is getting to be a worry. You might well see another 100% gain by 4Q '05 - but with a monster heatsink that blocks three slots.
Nuclear power produces highly toxic waste and byproducts.
Duh. These are produced in relatively small quantities, unlike coal-burning power stations.
Wind power, meanwhile, is localised and unreliable. You can't use it as your main energy source because you can't predict how much you'll get.
As for the atmosphere, wind power is neutral, at best. The energy extracted from the wind is promptly returned to the atmosphere as heat. Really, it's just indirect solar energy (like hydro).
If you want to actually cool the Earth down, your best bet is to dump megatons of dust in the upper atmosphere (cf. Krakatoa).
Compare, say, Dungeon Siege to FF X. Dungeon Siege looked good at first, but it was a pain to play (bloody donkeys!) and I doubt that anyone remembers the storyline.
The British Tory or Conservative party is roughly analogous to Republicans in the US in that it holds "traditional values", many of which conflict with the modern egalitarian ethic of the BBC.
The British Right-wing, led primarily by tabloid newspapers such as the Daily Mail (politically somewhere to the right of Genghis Kahn..), has been leading an anti-BBC campaign for some time now as they don't want to see a state-run broadcaster "supporting" rights that they wish to abolish or diminish, such as equality of gay and straight relationships before the law, or equal attention in schools for minority faiths.
Blah blah blah.
All of that is completely irrelevant - and would be even if it were true - because the Tories have nothing to do with this. They're not in power. Labour - the Liberal party - is currently in government in Britain.
You ain't gonna get higher clock speeds. Not any time soon.
You have a few options to make things run faster:
1. Higher clock speeds. 2. More instructions per cycle. 3. More operations per instruction. 4. More processors.
We're maxed out for the moment on 1. 2 requires a complete redesign of the processor. 3 only really works for multimedia apps, but expect to see more energy going into this with SSE4 or whatever.
That leaves us with more processors as the only viable upgrade path right now. And if you don't want to force everyone to buy expensive dual or multi-processor motherboards, multi-core CPUs are necessary.
Current games generally don't take advantage of multiple CPUs, but if game developers want more speed, they're going to have to fix that. They simply don't have any other options. (Even the Cell processor is effectively a multi-core chip; it just has two different types of core.)
A full feed of text groups, however, is probably only about 2 GB per day - a server that can provide 90-day retention of text groups is well within the (bandwidth and hardware cost) reach of the dedicated amateur who lays out $100-200 or so a month for his or her hobbies. That might even be a bit on the high side.
Back in 2001-2002, I was running a feed of all the English-language groups, and that was less than 1 GB a day.
A text-only server is easy enough to run these days. A full feed is pretty deadly though. In fact, here in Australia, no-one has a full feed.
Were Mapes and Rather lazy when they researched the TANG story? Yes! They had lots of valid evidence but they allowed it to be tainted by an obviously forged document. This document completely discredited the rest of the work they did.
Lazy? LAZY?
A crack-addled monkey could have told them those things were fake. Indeed, their hired experts told them exactly that. They were ignored.
They had no other evidence; they had nothing at all. So they went with fraud, and got their hides nailed to the wall by the blogosphere.
And now the pitiable Kossacks, consumed with jealous rage after this and numerous other injuries, go on a witch-hunt for some reporter no-one has ever heard of who had the temerity to throw a softball question at a press conference.
And they want to make this pathetic act out as some sort of new wave of open source and collaboration.
I call bullshit. I call great heaping stinking piles of bullshit.
It sucks to be on the losing side of history, but the Kossacks made that choice themselves, and I can't find it in myself to care about their irreversible slide into the political dustbin.
Back in the day, RISC was important because it allowed pipelining, the ability for a chip to be doing multiple things at once.
The Z80 was pipelined.
Like old MIPS chips used to have 8 parallel piplines that took 8 cycles to execute an instruction, giving an effective rate of one instruction per cycle.
No they didn't. No MIPS processor has ever been built with 8 parallel pipelines. Now, the R4000 family had one 8-stage pipeline, but that's completely different.
Couldn't do that with CISC.
Complete nonsense. CISC processors were pipelined long before designs like the Pentium Pro appeared.
No, when they go from 90nm to 65nm, the die size will drop to about 115 mm^2 - about half the size. (Remember, we're measuring area here, and the process size is a linear measure, so you have to square the ratio.)
65nm is the target process for the Cell. The 90nm chips will be for development workstations and such.
And yes, cost is a function of yield, but yield is largely a function of area. The smaller the chip, the less likely there will be a defect.
What I'm getting at is that _any_ SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instruction set is by definition _not_ RISC. Only if your definition is broken.
Does a multiply instruction make a processor not RISC? How about divide? How about having floating point at all, rather than having to emulate it?
Sorry, but you don't have the faintest notion of the beginning of a clue of what RISC is.
What does constitute a RISC computer? Take the block diagrams of a G5 and of, say, a Pentium 4 and educated me: exactly what's in a G5 that makes it a RISC, and obviously isn't there in a P4?
Addressing modes. And instruction encoding, though that doesn't matter much any more. It's not what's in the G5 that makes it a RISC, it's what's not in the G5. And that's (a) hideously complicated addressing modes and (b) a hideously complicated instruction decoder.
We have exactly the thing for you! It's called buying two drives.
Regards,
Seagate
Seriously, things like this have been proposed, and even implemented in the past. It's always turned out cheaper, simpler, and more reliable to just buy two standard drives.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I feel that majors in the humanities, in communication, literature, critical thinking, psychology, philosophy, linguists, and financial planning are better qualified as developers, because they understand what is most often to be coded these days: interfaces to information, with the ability manipulate, display, and interact with said information. That information has context.
Yeah, right.
While psychology, lingustics and financial planning are serious subjects and teach skills useful to programmers, they don't teach programming.
Communication, literature, "critical thinking", and almost all philosophy courses are pure fluff.
Give me an engineering graduate - civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical; I don't really care - any day. At least they understand maths and have learned that there is such a thing as a wrong answer. The concept of a wrong answer is anathema to most humanities students.
I'm sooo glad my job doesn't involve hiring programmers anymore.
That's true, but what happens if I move my application servers to India, process my data there using all the patented techniques I need and then send it back to US?
Depends on how much money the patent-holder has.
Having said that, wait ten or twenty years while India builds up its software industry, and then see what their stance on software patents is. I doubt the current decision is entirely selfless.
I think you are not fully taking the total interdependence of the global economic system into consideration. It is not to America's benefit in any way to see the economies of other nations collapse. Yes, it is in America's benefit to maintain it's leadership in innovation and wealth creation, but America is stronger, and in fact we all are stronger if there is more than one geo-economic center that is capable of taking up the slack when an economic slow down occurs.
Absolutely.
This is why the idea that we invaded Iraq to steal the oil (and sundry variations on this theme) is so absurd. We stand to make far more money by buying Iraqi oil than by just walking in and taking it.
With Iraq free, and prosperity growing, the Iraqis will do the work of pumping the oil. They sell it to us. We give them money. They spend the money. They buy Fords and Chevys and Dells and Levis and iPods. And we buy more oil. And they build factories, and start selling us denim and tyres and hard disk drives. And we sell them X-Box 2's and Caterpillar bulldozers and The Incredibles DVDs and Boeing 777's.
And round and round it goes. The whole point is, it's not a zero-sum game. Wealth isn't a pie you have to divide up among the people at the table. Wealth is a pie factory. The more effort you put in, the more pie there is to go around.
Mmm, pie.
And Slashdot is -1 Overrated.
I work for a phone company here in Oz, and among other things we resell Telstra ADSL.
I've seen Telstra claim that a customer on a 512/128 line (512kb/s down, 128kb/s up) uploaded 4GB in 20 hours. When I pointed out that this was impossible, they suggested that maybe the user's computer had been infected by a virus - and insisted that I check this before they would investigate.
I then spent some time explaining the concept of arithmetic to the Telstra support desk...
The French overthrew their monarchy some years back.
Yeah, in 1792, but in a typically French fashion, they had to do it again in 1814, then in 1815, once more in 1830, and yet again in 1848 and then several times during the 1870's.
Then they tried to bring it back in 1946, but no-one could agree on who got to be King, so they ended up with President de Gaulle...
The problem is not the technology, the problem is that this type of behaviour is considered normal for nation states.
It isn't considered normal.
The problem is that the leadership of North Korea is completely insane, and always has been. They starve their own people to death in order to prop up their army as a threat to South Korea.
You said it yourself: People are willing to risk their lives to escape to China, which is hardly a paradise. That ought to tell you what a nightmare life in North Korea is.
A theory, last I checked, was a set of statements closed under logical implication.
You checked the wrong book.
Mathematical theories are very different to scientific theories.
And what about Nvidia? They're last product jump from 5900 to the 6800 was absolutely amazing. A very clear %100 increase in performance. I'd be very surprised to see Nvidia be able to match that leap sooner than 4Q 2006.
Maybe, maybe not.
Clock speeds of GPUs have been inching upwards just like those of CPUs, but the number of pipelines has been growing rapidly - from 8 to 16 in your example. They haven't hit a practical limit there yet, though power consumption is getting to be a worry. You might well see another 100% gain by 4Q '05 - but with a monster heatsink that blocks three slots.
Or you could go SLI...
Right. Journalists are actually running third in the 2005 International Pond Scum Cup, after UN Delegates and Personal Injury Lawyers.
there has been no significant progress in over 30 years
That's what went wrong. Basically, it don't work.
Nuclear power produces highly toxic waste and byproducts.
Duh. These are produced in relatively small quantities, unlike coal-burning power stations.
Wind power, meanwhile, is localised and unreliable. You can't use it as your main energy source because you can't predict how much you'll get.
As for the atmosphere, wind power is neutral, at best. The energy extracted from the wind is promptly returned to the atmosphere as heat. Really, it's just indirect solar energy (like hydro).
If you want to actually cool the Earth down, your best bet is to dump megatons of dust in the upper atmosphere (cf. Krakatoa).
Nuclear.
Darn it, I was all set to post something snarky and sarcastic, and you go and point out that the article actually makes sense!
I don't think they'll ever manage it.
Compare, say, Dungeon Siege to FF X. Dungeon Siege looked good at first, but it was a pain to play (bloody donkeys!) and I doubt that anyone remembers the storyline.
FF X, now, there was a game.
The British Tory or Conservative party is roughly analogous to Republicans in the US in that it holds "traditional values", many of which conflict with the modern egalitarian ethic of the BBC.
The British Right-wing, led primarily by tabloid newspapers such as the Daily Mail (politically somewhere to the right of Genghis Kahn..), has been leading an anti-BBC campaign for some time now as they don't want to see a state-run broadcaster "supporting" rights that they wish to abolish or diminish, such as equality of gay and straight relationships before the law, or equal attention in schools for minority faiths.
Blah blah blah.
All of that is completely irrelevant - and would be even if it were true - because the Tories have nothing to do with this. They're not in power. Labour - the Liberal party - is currently in government in Britain.
The reason for the hype is simple.
You ain't gonna get higher clock speeds. Not any time soon.
You have a few options to make things run faster:
1. Higher clock speeds.
2. More instructions per cycle.
3. More operations per instruction.
4. More processors.
We're maxed out for the moment on 1. 2 requires a complete redesign of the processor. 3 only really works for multimedia apps, but expect to see more energy going into this with SSE4 or whatever.
That leaves us with more processors as the only viable upgrade path right now. And if you don't want to force everyone to buy expensive dual or multi-processor motherboards, multi-core CPUs are necessary.
Current games generally don't take advantage of multiple CPUs, but if game developers want more speed, they're going to have to fix that. They simply don't have any other options. (Even the Cell processor is effectively a multi-core chip; it just has two different types of core.)
Sure. Just remember to mount a scratch monkey when running diagnostics.
A full feed of text groups, however, is probably only about 2 GB per day - a server that can provide 90-day retention of text groups is well within the (bandwidth and hardware cost) reach of the dedicated amateur who lays out $100-200 or so a month for his or her hobbies.
That might even be a bit on the high side.
Back in 2001-2002, I was running a feed of all the English-language groups, and that was less than 1 GB a day.
A text-only server is easy enough to run these days. A full feed is pretty deadly though. In fact, here in Australia, no-one has a full feed.
Were Mapes and Rather lazy when they researched the TANG story? Yes! They had lots of valid evidence but they allowed it to be tainted by an obviously forged document. This document completely discredited the rest of the work they did.
Lazy? LAZY?
A crack-addled monkey could have told them those things were fake. Indeed, their hired experts told them exactly that. They were ignored.
They had no other evidence; they had nothing at all. So they went with fraud, and got their hides nailed to the wall by the blogosphere.
And now the pitiable Kossacks, consumed with jealous rage after this and numerous other injuries, go on a witch-hunt for some reporter no-one has ever heard of who had the temerity to throw a softball question at a press conference.
And they want to make this pathetic act out as some sort of new wave of open source and collaboration.
I call bullshit. I call great heaping stinking piles of bullshit.
It sucks to be on the losing side of history, but the Kossacks made that choice themselves, and I can't find it in myself to care about their irreversible slide into the political dustbin.
Back in the day, RISC was important because it allowed pipelining, the ability for a chip to be doing multiple things at once.
The Z80 was pipelined.
Like old MIPS chips used to have 8 parallel piplines that took 8 cycles to execute an instruction, giving an effective rate of one instruction per cycle.
No they didn't. No MIPS processor has ever been built with 8 parallel pipelines.
Now, the R4000 family had one 8-stage pipeline, but that's completely different.
Couldn't do that with CISC.
Complete nonsense. CISC processors were pipelined long before designs like the Pentium Pro appeared.
No, when they go from 90nm to 65nm, the die size will drop to about 115 mm^2 - about half the size. (Remember, we're measuring area here, and the process size is a linear measure, so you have to square the ratio.)
65nm is the target process for the Cell. The 90nm chips will be for development workstations and such.
And yes, cost is a function of yield, but yield is largely a function of area. The smaller the chip, the less likely there will be a defect.
What I'm getting at is that _any_ SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instruction set is by definition _not_ RISC.
Only if your definition is broken.
Does a multiply instruction make a processor not RISC? How about divide? How about having floating point at all, rather than having to emulate it?
Sorry, but you don't have the faintest notion of the beginning of a clue of what RISC is.
What does constitute a RISC computer? Take the block diagrams of a G5 and of, say, a Pentium 4 and educated me: exactly what's in a G5 that makes it a RISC, and obviously isn't there in a P4?
Addressing modes. And instruction encoding, though that doesn't matter much any more. It's not what's in the G5 that makes it a RISC, it's what's not in the G5. And that's (a) hideously complicated addressing modes and (b) a hideously complicated instruction decoder.
Dear Lawrence_Bird,
We have exactly the thing for you! It's called buying two drives.
Regards,
Seagate
Seriously, things like this have been proposed, and even implemented in the past. It's always turned out cheaper, simpler, and more reliable to just buy two standard drives.