Oh, please. When you connect a digital display to a digital computer, do you really want to convert the signal to analog and then back again? It's such an ass-backwards situation that I've written a somewhat longer rant about it.
BTW, your argument doesn't fly because copper and RCA connectors can be used for digital signals. Speaker cables are a different issue anyway, since at some point the signal will have to be analog for listening. But it's better to keep it in the original, digital form as far as possible.
Funny that you should mention a digital projector in particular, given that most netbooks come with a quaint old VGA connector, and no digital display output.
My favourite apps are written in Fortran, so it only takes a nice compiler to generate multiprocessor code from it. The first time I did something like that was in 2001, so the compilers have certainly been around for a while.
Many people couldn't care less about hardware or computers (if they would they would have their own netbook probably); they poke your screen, push the keys sometimes like you would push some broken elevator button, lift the device from a corner despite screeching noises and so on.
Good points, I've had similar experiences. For example, I've let people play some quick action games on my laptop (while I'm near, of course) and some of the rubbet feet came off as they ended up pushing the laptop around on the table. On another occasion, my supervisor pointed out some things on my laptop screen, using a ballpoint pen. Took me hours to clean it up, as I was careful not to scratch it further. And this was a pretty technically oriented person after all.
I find it appalling how careless most people are with electronics. Perhaps it's just a symptom of the wider throwaway culture. I hear people getting new laptops after a year or two, as the old one has become physically unusable. Whereas I sold my previous laptop after six years of usage in good condition. Another laptop I sold was nearing 15 years of age, and the collector who bought it paid me some unexpected extra for the nice condition.
Naturally, if you're a road warrior I might understand the wear and tear, but most people manage to ruin their machines in everyday home and office conditions. For example the rubber feet issue, which has led me to keep my laptop generally in one place, while at home. I do have mobile uses for it, but it doesn't mean I would like to bump it around every day.
Bah, that one seems to use bad old hovercraft technology. The hoverboards in the movie use a different principle, as they have much higher ground clearances, and they don't need a flat surface to push against. FWIW, I did my Master's thesis on a theoretical basis for such hoverboards.
At some point, backwards compatibility will have to go. Imagine if you buy the equivalent of a netbook in 2100, and it still has only VGA, because it had to be compatible with displays from 2095, which in turn were designed for 2090 computers or later...
...though I agree with all your points. I fucking hate it when you buy a laptop/netbook in 2009 and it comes with a stupid analogue port. Which you'll likely connect to a digital display.
When the 'legacy-free PCs' came out years go, it would have been great to label VGA as a legacy port as well, because that's what it is. In fact, perfectly working digital ports were replaced by new digital ports, but we still keep the analogue display port due to backwards compatibility.
I must admit I was confused at first. I remember that Rackable bought SGI, so "Rackable nee SGI" would be somewhat logical: The SGI from back then is now called Rackable. However, since Rackable then changed its name into SGI, we also have "SGI nee Rackable".
I always thought it said "CH" rather than "HD" on those floppies, and I associated it with the data persistence of a Swiss bank. Or perhaps with Swiss cheese...
Western culture has been about empowering the individual, about heroes.
Strangely, it seems that these heroes are usually called out to defend a Western nation as a whole, and strengthen the sense of collective. For example most superhero comics seem to be about America vs. communism.
When I choose to help, it's efficient.
When forced to help, there is an inefficiency; and usually someone making a parasitic living off of doing the forcing.
Funny, just the other day I was discussing the problems with the rigid job market here in Finland, and came up with a related analogy:
The work that people do with computers is notoriously inefficient. There are lots of moments when you would like more CPU power, but most of the time it is just sitting idle. If you find your CPU pegged at 100% by the real work for a long time, you usually get a faster machine. Which, in turn, will have lots of unused CPU capacity. It's incredibly hard to match your computing power exactly with your needs.
But you can also run a volunteer project like distributed.net on the side. It can utilize whatever CPU time is left.
(For those who question the value of volunteer computing projects: I do scientific computing for living. We spend taxpayer money on fast computers for number crunching. Maybe if we could use a bit of you unused machine time, we could either spend less money [unlikely though:] or get more work done.)
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see anything exciting about another x86 box that is hacked to run OS X86. A PowerPC machine, on the other hand, would be nice even without the Mac bit.
> The difference is that I can sit down and simply enter near algorithms of matrix math into Fortran, and the optimizer will go to town and give me near perfect code,
Ahhh: a breath of fresh air. As a programmer this is to me exactly how it should work. Not my language is better than your language but the programmer can get on with describing the solution, and leave the compiler to do the boring work !!
Seconded. This is why I like Fortran and Python, I'm interested in solving a higher-level problem, not learning the details of an architecture. Of course, these languages are not suitable for operating system kernels, but how many of us write them anyway, as opposed to userspace applications?
I agree completely. In fact my experiences also come from Fortran.
I have a particular issue with these auto-vectorizing compilers developed in recent years. The idea is to parallelize a sequential
C-style loop, which IMHO is completely backwards.
In such a case, the programmer usually knows which processes are independent, but the sequential language forces them to write them as a loop. Then the compiler does a lot of guesswork to reconstruct this parallel idea. A higher level language would have solved this much more elegantly, since the parallel construct could be there all the time.
Once you get things like branch prediction, speculative execution and pipelining into the picture, no, C isn't really any closer to how the processors operate. Making efficient use of a modern CPU involves detail at a much, much lower level than C exposes.
The problem at that level is that you'll be seriously bound to a specific architecture. Even C, which is often called a portable assembler, is designed after a certain kind of assembler.
The somewhat surprising result is that you can also improve performance (compared to plain C) with a higher level language. You need a higher-level perspective to tackle things like vector/parallel processing efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
What about Linux on PPC? It's not like this opensource OS is limited to x86.
Oh, please. When you connect a digital display to a digital computer, do you really want to convert the signal to analog and then back again? It's such an ass-backwards situation that I've written a somewhat longer rant about it.
BTW, your argument doesn't fly because copper and RCA connectors can be used for digital signals. Speaker cables are a different issue anyway, since at some point the signal will have to be analog for listening. But it's better to keep it in the original, digital form as far as possible.
Or is this more like an antisocial network?
Or is Microsoft finally catching up with the unix world?
Funny that you should mention a digital projector in particular, given that most netbooks come with a quaint old VGA connector, and no digital display output.
But.. but.. correlation is not causation!!! It's impossible to tell if the gender of these researchers had any causal effect.
My favourite apps are written in Fortran, so it only takes a nice compiler to generate multiprocessor code from it. The first time I did something like that was in 2001, so the compilers have certainly been around for a while.
Many people couldn't care less about hardware or computers (if they would they would have their own netbook probably); they poke your screen, push the keys sometimes like you would push some broken elevator button, lift the device from a corner despite screeching noises and so on.
Good points, I've had similar experiences. For example, I've let people play some quick action games on my laptop (while I'm near, of course) and some of the rubbet feet came off as they ended up pushing the laptop around on the table. On another occasion, my supervisor pointed out some things on my laptop screen, using a ballpoint pen. Took me hours to clean it up, as I was careful not to scratch it further. And this was a pretty technically oriented person after all.
I find it appalling how careless most people are with electronics. Perhaps it's just a symptom of the wider throwaway culture. I hear people getting new laptops after a year or two, as the old one has become physically unusable. Whereas I sold my previous laptop after six years of usage in good condition. Another laptop I sold was nearing 15 years of age, and the collector who bought it paid me some unexpected extra for the nice condition.
Naturally, if you're a road warrior I might understand the wear and tear, but most people manage to ruin their machines in everyday home and office conditions. For example the rubber feet issue, which has led me to keep my laptop generally in one place, while at home. I do have mobile uses for it, but it doesn't mean I would like to bump it around every day.
"it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program."
Reminds me of when I upgraded my disposable razor from one with 3 blades to 4 FREAKING BLADES!!!11!1
I get 33% more hot babes now.. FUCK YEAH
(Yeah, yeah, 33% of 0....)
And that's why they call it "machturbo".
Bah, that one seems to use bad old hovercraft technology. The hoverboards in the movie use a different principle, as they have much higher ground clearances, and they don't need a flat surface to push against. FWIW, I did my Master's thesis on a theoretical basis for such hoverboards.
http://iki.fi/teknohog/physics/levita.ps
At some point, backwards compatibility will have to go. Imagine if you buy the equivalent of a netbook in 2100, and it still has only VGA, because it had to be compatible with displays from 2095, which in turn were designed for 2090 computers or later...
Posting to undo a mistaken moderation...
When the 'legacy-free PCs' came out years go, it would have been great to label VGA as a legacy port as well, because that's what it is. In fact, perfectly working digital ports were replaced by new digital ports, but we still keep the analogue display port due to backwards compatibility.
I must admit I was confused at first. I remember that Rackable bought SGI, so "Rackable nee SGI" would be somewhat logical: The SGI from back then is now called Rackable. However, since Rackable then changed its name into SGI, we also have "SGI nee Rackable".
http://everything2.org/title/Penises%2520have%2520higher%2520bandwidth%2520than%2520cable%2520modems
We'll never advance the state of the art with that kind of saying!
I always thought it said "CH" rather than "HD" on those floppies, and I associated it with the data persistence of a Swiss bank. Or perhaps with Swiss cheese...
Western culture has been about empowering the individual, about heroes.
Strangely, it seems that these heroes are usually called out to defend a Western nation as a whole, and strengthen the sense of collective. For example most superhero comics seem to be about America vs. communism.
When I choose to help, it's efficient. When forced to help, there is an inefficiency; and usually someone making a parasitic living off of doing the forcing.
Funny, just the other day I was discussing the problems with the rigid job market here in Finland, and came up with a related analogy:
The work that people do with computers is notoriously inefficient. There are lots of moments when you would like more CPU power, but most of the time it is just sitting idle. If you find your CPU pegged at 100% by the real work for a long time, you usually get a faster machine. Which, in turn, will have lots of unused CPU capacity. It's incredibly hard to match your computing power exactly with your needs.
But you can also run a volunteer project like distributed.net on the side. It can utilize whatever CPU time is left.
(For those who question the value of volunteer computing projects: I do scientific computing for living. We spend taxpayer money on fast computers for number crunching. Maybe if we could use a bit of you unused machine time, we could either spend less money [unlikely though :] or get more work done.)
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see anything exciting about another x86 box that is hacked to run OS X86. A PowerPC machine, on the other hand, would be nice even without the Mac bit.
Dude, it's all about the magnetic tape-like medium that keeps your zeros nice and round. Especially the chromium dioxide ones.
Wait ... hammer's don't go "bang" ...
Maxwell's silver one does.
> The difference is that I can sit down and simply enter near algorithms of matrix math into Fortran, and the optimizer will go to town and give me near perfect code,
Ahhh: a breath of fresh air. As a programmer this is to me exactly how it should work. Not my language is better than your language but the programmer can get on with describing the solution, and leave the compiler to do the boring work !!
Seconded. This is why I like Fortran and Python, I'm interested in solving a higher-level problem, not learning the details of an architecture. Of course, these languages are not suitable for operating system kernels, but how many of us write them anyway, as opposed to userspace applications?
I agree completely. In fact my experiences also come from Fortran.
I have a particular issue with these auto-vectorizing compilers developed in recent years. The idea is to parallelize a sequential C-style loop, which IMHO is completely backwards.
In such a case, the programmer usually knows which processes are independent, but the sequential language forces them to write them as a loop. Then the compiler does a lot of guesswork to reconstruct this parallel idea. A higher level language would have solved this much more elegantly, since the parallel construct could be there all the time.
Once you get things like branch prediction, speculative execution and pipelining into the picture, no, C isn't really any closer to how the processors operate. Making efficient use of a modern CPU involves detail at a much, much lower level than C exposes.
The problem at that level is that you'll be seriously bound to a specific architecture. Even C, which is often called a portable assembler, is designed after a certain kind of assembler.
The somewhat surprising result is that you can also improve performance (compared to plain C) with a higher level language. You need a higher-level perspective to tackle things like vector/parallel processing efficiently.