Why do you write software?
-Because I need the money.
Why do you need money?
-To support my family.
Why should you support your family?
-Because I love them and I want them to be happy.
Why do you love them? Why should they be happy?
Etc. Every "why" question either induces an infinite chain of questioning (or circular argument), or ends with a subjective value proposition. You might answer that love/happiness/freedom/money/programming is subjectively important/enjoyable to you, and there's no way around it for machines to understand. Some chains might also end with "god did it" or "laws of physics" which are kinds of value proposition, in case you don't want to admit "I don't know".
Most coins don't work like Bitcoin. They have no "mining".
I'm really disappointed to see this is actually true, as seen at Coinmarketcap (specifically, the "not mineable" marker). However, legitimacy is rather subjective here. With Ethereum for example, it's relatively easy to set up your own system of tokens that piggyback on another blockchain. So the number of useless coins is easily inflated to skew the statistics.
Of course, it's likewise possible to fork Bitcoin into yet another useless but technically legitimate altcoin. But with Ethereum it's doubly questionable because the primary blockchain is known to have the occasional rollback/bailout.
In my book, a legitimate cryptocurrency must be fully open source and decentralized, while a lot of coins out there are neither. In practice, decentralization means some kind of mining, though it doesn't have to be power-hungry proof-of-work as in Bitcoin. Check out Peercoin, for example.
I'm sure everyone here has done some kind of physical work, such as moving furniture, and a lot of people have been involved in things like building a house. So it should be quite obvious how different the physical actions are compared to exercise for health and fitness. There are high static loads in uncomfortable positions, vs. smooth repetitions of smaller weights you might do at the gym. There's usually very little aerobic exercise, though you generally need some level of aerobic fitness to cope with the work.
With exercise, you can forget about getting $project done, and focus on your body. It's a very different goal so obviously you'll do things differently.
There's only one reason manufacturers use glass backs on their phones, and that's to try to get you to buy more phones when you can't hold on to your existing one because it's so slippery you drop it and inevitably shatter the back of the phone.
Another reason is that the main purpose of "smart"phones is to show off your shiny slab. So by making both sides equally shiny and slabby, the utility is instantly doubled. Besides, what's the point of all those hardware specs if you can't rice it up with Gentoo?
My next phone will probably be relatively dumb, with good network support and a WLAN hotspot. There aren't many like these around, but Nokia has one coming up this month, so I can maintain my brand loyalty;)
A "smart"phone is a nice idea if you have control over the software, and the software will have updates for the years to come. As I haven't seen that happening, I prefer the phone to be a dumb modem, and keep the smarts on my free-software laptop.
There have been a few nice attempts from the free software crowd, and the Gemini for instance looks promising, but it's more like a PDA/netbook than a phone. I prefer something small as I don't have to be online all the time. The N900 shows you could have a small, pocketable phone with a real computer, but it's starting to show its age, and apparently there's not enough demand for a similar device today.
Or as someone on/. put it: why is it called "touch screen" if you cannot touch type on it?
I used to wonder why phones lost their keyboards in a time when people started using them more for text than talk. The best answer I could think of was the importance of following the shiny slab trend from Apple. I guess more technical/functional reasons include the need for a big screen in this overly visual era; a touchscreen also makes more sense for non-verbal stuff in this era of declining literacy.
Designing a 14nm tech process in the 70's/80's was impossible because it has taken billions of dollars of investments and new technologies (some of which weren't invented at Intel) to get there. Also, considering that they've rehashed their 14nm tech process twice and their first 10nm part is a castrated 2core CPU minus iGPU, it surely looks like 10nm is extremely difficult/costly to get right.
Well, that's exactly what they want you to believe. When they say "R&D expedinture", they really mean "R&R expedinture".
i5 is ok, but if you're compiling code you can peg things out fast. Not everybody is a web or cloud developer or admin. I've got an i7 Macbook pro, and I peg it out a lot with the fan going full aggro.
There are much bigger differences between Intel CPUs than the i[357] designation. In the same year's releases, you can easily find an i5 that runs circles around an i7. I assume you're talking about two CPUs within the same market segment, such as ultrabook or mobile workstation.
Of course, within the same series the i[357] differentiation does have some meaning, but in my experience it's not that big a difference. To me, i3 is crippled in some obvious way, but i7 doesn't offer that much over an i5.
I use a "gaming" laptop for my live shows of algorithmic art. I can do basic stuff on Intel integrated GPUs, but for decent resolutions and smooth framerates I need a real GPU. For a short while I lugged around a Mini-ITX machine, partly because I was worried about cooling and noise.
In fact, while the Oryx Pro looks like a dream machine on paper (I obviously use Linux), I would still be worried about cooling. The "business" laptops I've used so far don't have enough cooling for all their CPU and GPU power, and they end up throttling the clocks in high loads over more than a few minutes.
Also, the 400 MHz AMD CPU was unlikely to be any better than the 233 MHz G3, and it was probably more power-hungry.
(I also had a 400 MHz AMD machine around the time. I still have an iMac rev. B somewhere I should fire up again -- I found it in a garbage pile some years ago, turned it into a headless machine with a PicoPSU, and I still use the outer case as a ceiling lamp.)
Half of internet users are idiots that cannot understand how a browser works. To them, it is perfectly normal to type in the name of a website and click on the first link in Google.
We should make a name server that resolves arbitrary strings into their first Google hits. In time, this could become another level in the DNS hierarchy.
What ever happened to, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"? Diversity is irrelevant when you only know people by their email addresses! Just because I'm using the name of an old white philosopher doesn't mean I'm not a young black instagram model!
Funny you should mention Instagram. I've also wondered why the popular kids of the 80s and 90s who used to make fun of us geeks, now embrace our precious technology as the best way to show off their superficiality. And why the biggest online business is advertising, with a little belfie sharing on the side.
Are we sure that the stable genius in the Whitehouse didn't just watch an episode of Silicon Valley and think it was a documentary/news? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've been using this wonderful technology called "computer" for a while. I recently came up with a neat application for it, and I'm going to call it "calculator" -- they might as well be synonyms, since most people will never use any other applications on it.
google for "RNDIS", get yourself a machine with an OTG USB port and you're off to the races
It seems the GP is talking about two regular, host-side USB ports, and your solution needs extra hardware. AFAIK, USB always needs one "host" and one "device" to make a connection. I remember seeing USB host-to-host networking cables many years ago, but they have a dongle in the middle, so it appears as a networking device to both hosts.
Nyquist isn't the whole story about digital audio, though in practice it's a major argument. When you look at the math of the Nyquist limit, it assumes a few things that don't hold precisely in real life. One of the real-life issues is quantization error, which is kind of obvious: higher bit depth per sample is better. If you use 1-bit sampling at 44.1 kHz, it'll probably sound horrible.
The subtler issue about quantization error is that it's not a random error. So adding a bit of analog noise at levels under the sampling limit can help reduce these issues (it's basically dithering). Though in practice I guess you'll get that noise from various sources anyway.
Higher sampling frequencies can also help reduce the quantization noise. In some cases this is taken to the extreme with 1-bit systems. Effectively, you get 1 extra bit of sampling depth by doubling the frequency. Which is not much, so it's a lot easier to find hardware for something like 44.1 kHz at 24 bits.
A subtler issue about sampling is that Nyquist assumes point-like sampling in time. In practice, you need to integrate the signal for a while to get a meaningful measurement. I'm not sure if this makes much difference in practice, but it's something to remember if you're gonna quote Nyquist.
Disclaimer: I'm a physicist from a Nordic country, so at least I know how to pronounce "Nyquist" correctly;)
Gee, if only there were some way to connect storage devices to a computer, which didn't offer the ability to infect and destroy the system.
USB wasn't intended for storage devices to begin with. It was meant for relatively simple/stupid peripherals like keyboards, mice and sound cards. If it only had stayed that way instead of trying to emulate real interfaces like Firewire, things would be perfectly safe. Sure, you could whip up a stick that acts as a keyboard, perhaps with its own remote control. But in that perfect world with no USB storage sticks, who would try and use it? Naah, real men would plug in keyboards they find lying on the parking lot.
Getting rid of spectre would require the return to in order execution at a MASSIVE performance penalty, more than 50% and probably closer to 75% drop in compute power.
Probably some dumb questions, but anyway:
(1) Does out-of-order necessarily imply speculative execution?
(2) Is in-order really that bad, considering all the other advances in processor design?
(3) What about efficiency? If in-order means the CPU is doing less work in a given time, is it also consuming less power? I.e. is the 50%..75% reduction in absolute computing power, or also efficiency?
(2) is related to some anecdotal experience that hyperthreading works well on in-order Atom processors. In my understanding, HT helps keep the pipeline full, so if it's half empty due to in-order design, the relative improvement would be better compared to OOO processors. (3) is also about pipeline utilization.
Did I mention I like the lack of these vulnerabilities on my Atom server?;)
I don't know of any coin with any traction that uses CPUs, Bitcoin Lite Coin Dash etc are all ASIC mined and the Ethereum clones use GPU's.
Monero is #12 at Coinmarketcap, and it remains mine-worthy on CPUs. GPUs might be marginally more efficient, but they are within the same order of magnitude.
I'm not exactly vouching for Monero, as it's heavy and slow to use, even compared to its Cryptonote siblings, but it seems to have a lot of backing from the big boys. Also recently, ASICs suitable for Monero were released, and the Monero team reacted in a whack-a-mole fashion by changing some parameters in the proof-of-work algo. So not very professional, but as we know, the smartest tech doesn't always win the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you write software?
-Because I need the money.
Why do you need money?
-To support my family.
Why should you support your family?
-Because I love them and I want them to be happy.
Why do you love them? Why should they be happy?
Etc. Every "why" question either induces an infinite chain of questioning (or circular argument), or ends with a subjective value proposition. You might answer that love/happiness/freedom/money/programming is subjectively important/enjoyable to you, and there's no way around it for machines to understand. Some chains might also end with "god did it" or "laws of physics" which are kinds of value proposition, in case you don't want to admit "I don't know".
Most coins don't work like Bitcoin. They have no "mining".
I'm really disappointed to see this is actually true, as seen at Coinmarketcap (specifically, the "not mineable" marker). However, legitimacy is rather subjective here. With Ethereum for example, it's relatively easy to set up your own system of tokens that piggyback on another blockchain. So the number of useless coins is easily inflated to skew the statistics.
Of course, it's likewise possible to fork Bitcoin into yet another useless but technically legitimate altcoin. But with Ethereum it's doubly questionable because the primary blockchain is known to have the occasional rollback/bailout.
In my book, a legitimate cryptocurrency must be fully open source and decentralized, while a lot of coins out there are neither. In practice, decentralization means some kind of mining, though it doesn't have to be power-hungry proof-of-work as in Bitcoin. Check out Peercoin, for example.
I'm sure everyone here has done some kind of physical work, such as moving furniture, and a lot of people have been involved in things like building a house. So it should be quite obvious how different the physical actions are compared to exercise for health and fitness. There are high static loads in uncomfortable positions, vs. smooth repetitions of smaller weights you might do at the gym. There's usually very little aerobic exercise, though you generally need some level of aerobic fitness to cope with the work.
With exercise, you can forget about getting $project done, and focus on your body. It's a very different goal so obviously you'll do things differently.
There's only one reason manufacturers use glass backs on their phones, and that's to try to get you to buy more phones when you can't hold on to your existing one because it's so slippery you drop it and inevitably shatter the back of the phone.
Another reason is that the main purpose of "smart"phones is to show off your shiny slab. So by making both sides equally shiny and slabby, the utility is instantly doubled. Besides, what's the point of all those hardware specs if you can't rice it up with Gentoo?
What do those things have to do with the lack of wireless charging?
It's a reference to a /. classic "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Seriously, where's the machine with remotely similar specs, plus some kind of a keyboard and software freedom?
Film at 11.
My next phone will probably be relatively dumb, with good network support and a WLAN hotspot. There aren't many like these around, but Nokia has one coming up this month, so I can maintain my brand loyalty ;)
A "smart"phone is a nice idea if you have control over the software, and the software will have updates for the years to come. As I haven't seen that happening, I prefer the phone to be a dumb modem, and keep the smarts on my free-software laptop.
There have been a few nice attempts from the free software crowd, and the Gemini for instance looks promising, but it's more like a PDA/netbook than a phone. I prefer something small as I don't have to be online all the time. The N900 shows you could have a small, pocketable phone with a real computer, but it's starting to show its age, and apparently there's not enough demand for a similar device today.
Or as someone on /. put it: why is it called "touch screen" if you cannot touch type on it?
I used to wonder why phones lost their keyboards in a time when people started using them more for text than talk. The best answer I could think of was the importance of following the shiny slab trend from Apple. I guess more technical/functional reasons include the need for a big screen in this overly visual era; a touchscreen also makes more sense for non-verbal stuff in this era of declining literacy.
The worst thing is that young children now have a harder time learning their first language:
http://time.com/4769571/smartp...
https://www.cps.ca/en/document...
Have you seen their R&D expenditures?
Designing a 14nm tech process in the 70's/80's was impossible because it has taken billions of dollars of investments and new technologies (some of which weren't invented at Intel) to get there. Also, considering that they've rehashed their 14nm tech process twice and their first 10nm part is a castrated 2core CPU minus iGPU, it surely looks like 10nm is extremely difficult/costly to get right.
Well, that's exactly what they want you to believe. When they say "R&D expedinture", they really mean "R&R expedinture".
This! It's hard enough to find a decent desktop keyboard without it. http://iki.fi/teknohog/rants/k...
i5 is ok, but if you're compiling code you can peg things out fast. Not everybody is a web or cloud developer or admin. I've got an i7 Macbook pro, and I peg it out a lot with the fan going full aggro.
There are much bigger differences between Intel CPUs than the i[357] designation. In the same year's releases, you can easily find an i5 that runs circles around an i7. I assume you're talking about two CPUs within the same market segment, such as ultrabook or mobile workstation.
Of course, within the same series the i[357] differentiation does have some meaning, but in my experience it's not that big a difference. To me, i3 is crippled in some obvious way, but i7 doesn't offer that much over an i5.
I use a "gaming" laptop for my live shows of algorithmic art. I can do basic stuff on Intel integrated GPUs, but for decent resolutions and smooth framerates I need a real GPU. For a short while I lugged around a Mini-ITX machine, partly because I was worried about cooling and noise.
In fact, while the Oryx Pro looks like a dream machine on paper (I obviously use Linux), I would still be worried about cooling. The "business" laptops I've used so far don't have enough cooling for all their CPU and GPU power, and they end up throttling the clocks in high loads over more than a few minutes.
Shaving your head is a bald style choice.
FTFY.
Also, the 400 MHz AMD CPU was unlikely to be any better than the 233 MHz G3, and it was probably more power-hungry.
(I also had a 400 MHz AMD machine around the time. I still have an iMac rev. B somewhere I should fire up again -- I found it in a garbage pile some years ago, turned it into a headless machine with a PicoPSU, and I still use the outer case as a ceiling lamp.)
Half of internet users are idiots that cannot understand how a browser works. To them, it is perfectly normal to type in the name of a website and click on the first link in Google.
We should make a name server that resolves arbitrary strings into their first Google hits. In time, this could become another level in the DNS hierarchy.
What ever happened to, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"? Diversity is irrelevant when you only know people by their email addresses! Just because I'm using the name of an old white philosopher doesn't mean I'm not a young black instagram model!
Funny you should mention Instagram. I've also wondered why the popular kids of the 80s and 90s who used to make fun of us geeks, now embrace our precious technology as the best way to show off their superficiality. And why the biggest online business is advertising, with a little belfie sharing on the side.
Pfft. Once you install Linux, you won't need any of those.
Are we sure that the stable genius in the Whitehouse didn't just watch an episode of Silicon Valley and think it was a documentary/news? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
<voice type="laconic Asian">yes</voice>
I've been using this wonderful technology called "computer" for a while. I recently came up with a neat application for it, and I'm going to call it "calculator" -- they might as well be synonyms, since most people will never use any other applications on it.
google for "RNDIS", get yourself a machine with an OTG USB port and you're off to the races
It seems the GP is talking about two regular, host-side USB ports, and your solution needs extra hardware. AFAIK, USB always needs one "host" and one "device" to make a connection. I remember seeing USB host-to-host networking cables many years ago, but they have a dongle in the middle, so it appears as a networking device to both hosts.
Nyquist isn't the whole story about digital audio, though in practice it's a major argument. When you look at the math of the Nyquist limit, it assumes a few things that don't hold precisely in real life. One of the real-life issues is quantization error, which is kind of obvious: higher bit depth per sample is better. If you use 1-bit sampling at 44.1 kHz, it'll probably sound horrible.
The subtler issue about quantization error is that it's not a random error. So adding a bit of analog noise at levels under the sampling limit can help reduce these issues (it's basically dithering). Though in practice I guess you'll get that noise from various sources anyway.
Higher sampling frequencies can also help reduce the quantization noise. In some cases this is taken to the extreme with 1-bit systems. Effectively, you get 1 extra bit of sampling depth by doubling the frequency. Which is not much, so it's a lot easier to find hardware for something like 44.1 kHz at 24 bits.
A subtler issue about sampling is that Nyquist assumes point-like sampling in time. In practice, you need to integrate the signal for a while to get a meaningful measurement. I'm not sure if this makes much difference in practice, but it's something to remember if you're gonna quote Nyquist.
Disclaimer: I'm a physicist from a Nordic country, so at least I know how to pronounce "Nyquist" correctly ;)
Gee, if only there were some way to connect storage devices to a computer, which didn't offer the ability to infect and destroy the system.
USB wasn't intended for storage devices to begin with. It was meant for relatively simple/stupid peripherals like keyboards, mice and sound cards. If it only had stayed that way instead of trying to emulate real interfaces like Firewire, things would be perfectly safe. Sure, you could whip up a stick that acts as a keyboard, perhaps with its own remote control. But in that perfect world with no USB storage sticks, who would try and use it? Naah, real men would plug in keyboards they find lying on the parking lot.
Getting rid of spectre would require the return to in order execution at a MASSIVE performance penalty, more than 50% and probably closer to 75% drop in compute power.
Probably some dumb questions, but anyway:
(1) Does out-of-order necessarily imply speculative execution?
(2) Is in-order really that bad, considering all the other advances in processor design?
(3) What about efficiency? If in-order means the CPU is doing less work in a given time, is it also consuming less power? I.e. is the 50%..75% reduction in absolute computing power, or also efficiency?
(2) is related to some anecdotal experience that hyperthreading works well on in-order Atom processors. In my understanding, HT helps keep the pipeline full, so if it's half empty due to in-order design, the relative improvement would be better compared to OOO processors. (3) is also about pipeline utilization.
Did I mention I like the lack of these vulnerabilities on my Atom server? ;)
I don't know of any coin with any traction that uses CPUs, Bitcoin Lite Coin Dash etc are all ASIC mined and the Ethereum clones use GPU's.
Monero is #12 at Coinmarketcap, and it remains mine-worthy on CPUs. GPUs might be marginally more efficient, but they are within the same order of magnitude.
I'm not exactly vouching for Monero, as it's heavy and slow to use, even compared to its Cryptonote siblings, but it seems to have a lot of backing from the big boys. Also recently, ASICs suitable for Monero were released, and the Monero team reacted in a whack-a-mole fashion by changing some parameters in the proof-of-work algo. So not very professional, but as we know, the smartest tech doesn't always win the market.