In other words, isn't the amount of memory I have more important than how fast it is?
I think this is probably true.
However, as you point out, the price difference between RAMBUS and SDRAM is now very small. According to Sharky Extreme the difference between 512 MB of SDRAM and RDRAM is about $80, and DDR RAM (PC2100) is actually more expensive than RDRAM! So if you plan to put 2GB in your machine, SDRAM is appreciably cheaper, but if you plan to do that, you probably plan on some serious hardware as well, so you'll probably spend $3000+ (probably coulnd't get a motherboard that would take 2GB SDRAM anyway...).
My point is that both SDRAM, DDR RAM and RDRAM have come down in price dramatically in the past year (although memory prices seem to be on the rise again). The price difference is very small when compared to the total price of the machine, so why bother? I have nothing against DDR RAM, but it'll have to win on technical merit nowadays.
As an example, I had to specify and buy a PC for my job some weeks ago. Now, this PC will be running a very specialized application, and nothing else. No CD burning, MPEG/MP3 encoding, no image processing, and no games. I like a cool machine as much as the next guy, but I simply could not justify putting more than 512 MB in this machine. Same for the hard drive, 40GB should be more than enough. A decent monitor was a requirement however. So why save $80 on memory when we're spending $700+ on the monitor alone?
Summarizing: if 512 MB is enough for you, why bother? If it isn't enough, you'll likely spend a lot of dough anyway, so again, why bother?
I don't think there is anything that will satisfy each and every item on your laundry list. No offense, but it seems like a lot of buzzwords linked together. If your boss has any idea about the technologies available, he would not have put this list together. Looks like someone read too many "IT for managers" articles.
Seriously, how do you know you will need multiple inheritance? Or garbage collection? You have to do a very thorough analysis of your problem before you can come to these requirements.
It's the sharing of the "perfect digital copies" that the industry fears.
Err, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't these PVRs use MPEG-2 compression? And isn't that a 'lossy' format? So, maybe you can't see any quality difference while viewing, you might still argue that the copy is not 'perfect'.
Then again, MP3s aren't 'perfect' copies either. Maybe it's the fact that the copies, once created, can be distributed infinitely without quality loss.
The most disturbing part of the story is that they claim deleting commercials is violating the copyright.
So, here's my prediction (guess I shouldn't be handing them ideas, but someone's bound to come up with it someday anyway, or probably someone has already):
In the future, we will have TV shows where you are forced to watch commercials. Something like: to view the second segment of "Friends", you have to enter the code flashing on the screen during the Pepsi ad that was aired after segment 1.
This should be perfectly feasible (technically), especially once everyone has a PVR.
Sure, just because a company is big does not mean it will fail. I was just trying to point out that being big does not guarantee that you won't go bust.
Having said that, some big companies do have a hidden protection (by governments) against bankrupcy. To name two examples, Airbus is essentially subsidized by the European Union, and Boeing is essentially subsidized by the US government through military and space contracts. Why? Because they produce a strategic resource (commercial airliners). Neither Europe nor the US can afford to be in the situation where they have to rely on a single foreign source for commercial airplanes.
I'm not disputing that, I was just trying to point out that just because a company is large does not mean it can't fail. K-mart would be another example.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not too charmed by the idea of anyone registering my purchase patterns, but wouldn't a system like this drown in useless data?
Sure, they can find out that I buy bread, tomato soup, and beer, and whatnot. So will 250 million other people. What meaningful pattern is anyone going to find here? According to the article, the system could collect information about 2.7*10^12 purchases, or something ridiculous. Only very strange patterns would result in a very small amount of meaningful data. Am I missing something here?
Another thing: what if I pay cash? Can I still buy food as an Anonymous Coward? Or are we going to have mandatory retinal scans when entering a supermarket?
Well, I don't know the guy, but I've read a lot of what he has written (see here ). It appears to me that his manner is a bit rough around the edges (I've wanted to send him flame mail myself on some occasions), but he hardly seems to be a bastard or a jerk. There's this story about how he paid MIT students their tuition money (for one class) back, out of his own pocket . Amounted to more than $2000, if my calculations were correct. How many people would do that? Also, he seemed genuinely devastated by the death of his dog. People who are that civilized are usually 'good' people in my experience.
Just think, when you have to decide whether to grow or not, that there are substantial good reasons for staying small. Don't ignore the numbers, if the numbers are telling you that growth is killing you.
Yes. Capitalism teaches that growth=good, and this is rarely questioned. However, there have been many solid companies that were growing too fast, the original founders got bought out or left out of frustration (Apple Computer and Steve Jobs comes to mind), and the company eventually crashed and burned. Growth is often a good thing, but not always. And big companies can make a big fall (Enron).
No, us old geezers don't need as much sleep as you young folk. Why do you think babies sleep so much? All these new impressions need to be processed in dreams. We've seen most of it, not so many new impressions => less sleep.
Bwah, if that was enough to put you off, I doubt if you were really passionate about it in the first place.
Seriously, life has not gotten any better in that respect. Buggy software, patches that break everything, computers crashing for no reason (yeah, I know Linux is Much Better), broken URLs, slashdotted servers, viruses, whatever. How come that does not put you off?
Yet Microsoft ensured the technology of the IBM PC would survive.
I think it was more the other way around: IBM's PC technology made sure Microsoft survived. There were alternatives to DOS in the old days (CP/M 86, and another one which I can't remember). The fact that IBM's PC-DOS was virtually identical to MS-DOS ( because they bought it from MS, of course) sure helped MS in those days.
I second that. Only we had only 2 runs per day. Sure made you careful about your syntax, though. One typo and half a day was wasted. I still don't make a lot of typo's, must be because of that.
I have also seen a few incidents where people dropped their 1000 line progam. Took them quite some time to fix it. Fortunately the line was printed on the card.
Another thing: these machines punched the holes as you typed. No backspace possible (it couldn't patch the holes it had already punched:-).
One nifty feature was that you could enter the coordinates of where a hole should be punched. I spent hours making a punched card that showed my name in the hole pattern.
One alternative was to fill out a form and submit it to the ladies in the punchcard room. They could make these things a lot faster than I, and they actually corrected my Pascal syntax (missing parentheses, semicolons and all that...). Of course, I spent hours filling out the silly form.
Guess what? Until a few months ago I was working on a project at Boeing, getting all this legacy data into a monster of a database. They still have these drawings on these punched cards (not all drawings, obviously, but there's still a lot of cards that have not been scanned yet).
Well, that's wonderful. But why is this news? Does he really need Linux to do this? I bet a Sinclair ZX 80 could do the job as well. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux and all, but this story hardly seems a prime example of why Linux is better than anything else. Just my $0.02.
So, your point is that Dawkins' example does not prove that evolution is true. Fine. I think he just used it as an example to make the whole stuff more accessible to laymen, I don't think he contends that a simple computer program constitutes proof for one of the most important scientific discoveries ever.
If I draw an analogy between a computer and the human brain, just to clarify something, does that make me a fraud? The analogy is clearly not perfect, as with Dawkins' example, but I think it's a bit strong to label that as fraudulous.
Oh well.
Fair enough. It seems like your application has some pretty tough performance requirements. I can't judge it of course, but it does seem you have no alternative but to use C.
Most of the time when I am writing in C it is because nothing else is fast enough for the task at hand
Interesting. By the time this discussion on Slashdot has died down, hardware will have gotten so much faster that just about any language will be fast enough for the task at hand.
OK, that was exaggerated...
You still can't beat C for speed
Hand-optimized assembly language!
I can process a text file at least 100 times faster in C than I can with a scripted language.
Don't know what scripted language you mean, but anyway, you must be doing some pretty fancy processing if the disk is not the bottleneck. So, if that is not the case, and the disk is the bottleneck, then you can do disk access 100 times faster in C than any scripted language? Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical...
Blindly selecting C because it is (supposedly) faster boils down to premature optimization. Hopefully I don't have to quote Donald Knuth to point out that that is a bad thing...
No, but in a nutshell, the problem is that humans are too much used to interacting with other humens. If I formulate something in an unclear manner (like in this post...), I can rely on the recipient to either interpret my intention correctly, or ask for clarification. A computer does exactly what you tell it to do, not what you intend it to do.
I write in C, and it is just too easy for buffer overflows and such like to slip through, even if you are thinking about them as you program.
I'll probably be flamed for this, but C is inherently unsafe. The basic problem is that memory management is the programmer's responsibility in C, and that's just too hard for mere mortals.
In the end, it was not that hard for me to batten down the hatches in my code, but it was a small program, and I had no time pressure.
Are you absolutely, 100% certain that you found and fixed every single flaw? I have been programming for over 20 years, I consider myself a pretty smart person, and still I'm humbled every time by the fact that proper testing reveals bugs in my code. Quality code requires discipline, discipline, discipline, and testing, testing, and testing. And still, you cannot be 100% certain that you have fixed every problem (it's proving a negative).
It seems to me that we need a new approach to designing code - an approach where things like checks for buffer overflows are automatic in the program design.
Many languages/compilers can check for bounds overflow or memory violations (Turbo Pascal did it a long time ago, Java does it nowadays). The insistence on using unsafe languages like C/C++ are a big part of the problem. Even C/C++ compilers can do a lot of checking, if it were not for the hubris of programmers ("I know what I'm doing, I don't need these silly warnings, let's switch them off").
As applications become more and more complicated, it seems to me that some very clever person needs to rethink the whole way in which we designed programs. Possibly a very creative breakthrough approach is required.
And a lot of very clever people have done a lot of thinking about this. The problem is that the schedule/money driven nature of most software development programs stands in the way of adopting good programming practices.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, isn't the amount of memory I have more important than how fast it is?
I think this is probably true.
However, as you point out, the price difference between RAMBUS and SDRAM is now very small. According to Sharky Extreme the difference between 512 MB of SDRAM and RDRAM is about $80, and DDR RAM (PC2100) is actually more expensive than RDRAM! So if you plan to put 2GB in your machine, SDRAM is appreciably cheaper, but if you plan to do that, you probably plan on some serious hardware as well, so you'll probably spend $3000+ (probably coulnd't get a motherboard that would take 2GB SDRAM anyway...).
My point is that both SDRAM, DDR RAM and RDRAM have come down in price dramatically in the past year (although memory prices seem to be on the rise again). The price difference is very small when compared to the total price of the machine, so why bother? I have nothing against DDR RAM, but it'll have to win on technical merit nowadays.
As an example, I had to specify and buy a PC for my job some weeks ago. Now, this PC will be running a very specialized application, and nothing else. No CD burning, MPEG/MP3 encoding, no image processing, and no games. I like a cool machine as much as the next guy, but I simply could not justify putting more than 512 MB in this machine. Same for the hard drive, 40GB should be more than enough. A decent monitor was a requirement however. So why save $80 on memory when we're spending $700+ on the monitor alone?
Summarizing: if 512 MB is enough for you, why bother? If it isn't enough, you'll likely spend a lot of dough anyway, so again, why bother?
Delphi is great. As far as I know, Object Pascal is single inheritance, so that would fail the list of requirements.
Of course, the thing that Delphi has going against it is that it's not C++ or Java. That's why Borland released C++ Builder and JBuilder...
I don't think there is anything that will satisfy each and every item on your laundry list. No offense, but it seems like a lot of buzzwords linked together. If your boss has any idea about the technologies available, he would not have put this list together. Looks like someone read too many "IT for managers" articles.
Seriously, how do you know you will need multiple inheritance? Or garbage collection? You have to do a very thorough analysis of your problem before you can come to these requirements.
It's the sharing of the "perfect digital copies" that the industry fears.
Err, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't these PVRs use MPEG-2 compression? And isn't that a 'lossy' format? So, maybe you can't see any quality difference while viewing, you might still argue that the copy is not 'perfect'.
Then again, MP3s aren't 'perfect' copies either. Maybe it's the fact that the copies, once created, can be distributed infinitely without quality loss.
The most disturbing part of the story is that they claim deleting commercials is violating the copyright.
So, here's my prediction (guess I shouldn't be handing them ideas, but someone's bound to come up with it someday anyway, or probably someone has already):
In the future, we will have TV shows where you are forced to watch commercials. Something like: to view the second segment of "Friends", you have to enter the code flashing on the screen during the Pepsi ad that was aired after segment 1.
This should be perfectly feasible (technically), especially once everyone has a PVR.
I guess I should patent this idea...
Sure, just because a company is big does not mean it will fail. I was just trying to point out that being big does not guarantee that you won't go bust.
Having said that, some big companies do have a hidden protection (by governments) against bankrupcy. To name two examples, Airbus is essentially subsidized by the European Union, and Boeing is essentially subsidized by the US government through military and space contracts. Why? Because they produce a strategic resource (commercial airliners). Neither Europe nor the US can afford to be in the situation where they have to rely on a single foreign source for commercial airplanes.
I'm not disputing that, I was just trying to point out that just because a company is large does not mean it can't fail. K-mart would be another example.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not too charmed by the idea of anyone registering my purchase patterns, but wouldn't a system like this drown in useless data?
Sure, they can find out that I buy bread, tomato soup, and beer, and whatnot. So will 250 million other people. What meaningful pattern is anyone going to find here? According to the article, the system could collect information about 2.7*10^12 purchases, or something ridiculous. Only very strange patterns would result in a very small amount of meaningful data. Am I missing something here?
Another thing: what if I pay cash? Can I still buy food as an Anonymous Coward? Or are we going to have mandatory retinal scans when entering a supermarket?
Or put them in your fridge. It should be a pretty effective Faraday's cage. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
...Phil was widely known to be a bastard ...
Well, I don't know the guy, but I've read a lot of what he has written (see here ). It appears to me that his manner is a bit rough around the edges (I've wanted to send him flame mail myself on some occasions), but he hardly seems to be a bastard or a jerk. There's this story about how he paid MIT students their tuition money (for one class) back, out of his own pocket . Amounted to more than $2000, if my calculations were correct. How many people would do that? Also, he seemed genuinely devastated by the death of his dog. People who are that civilized are usually 'good' people in my experience.
Just think, when you have to decide whether to grow or not, that there are substantial good reasons for staying small. Don't ignore the numbers, if the numbers are telling you that growth is killing you.
Yes. Capitalism teaches that growth=good, and this is rarely questioned. However, there have been many solid companies that were growing too fast, the original founders got bought out or left out of frustration (Apple Computer and Steve Jobs comes to mind), and the company eventually crashed and burned. Growth is often a good thing, but not always. And big companies can make a big fall (Enron).
Probably a typo. There's more at the end of her story: February 7 2001 where it should be 2002 (I think).
No, us old geezers don't need as much sleep as you young folk. Why do you think babies sleep so much? All these new impressions need to be processed in dreams. We've seen most of it, not so many new impressions => less sleep.
Bwah, if that was enough to put you off, I doubt if you were really passionate about it in the first place.
Seriously, life has not gotten any better in that respect. Buggy software, patches that break everything, computers crashing for no reason (yeah, I know Linux is Much Better), broken URLs, slashdotted servers, viruses, whatever. How come that does not put you off?
That's brilliant! Never did that, wish I had thought of it!
Interesting post. Only one comment:
Yet Microsoft ensured the technology of the IBM PC would survive.
I think it was more the other way around: IBM's PC technology made sure Microsoft survived. There were alternatives to DOS in the old days (CP/M 86, and another one which I can't remember). The fact that IBM's PC-DOS was virtually identical to MS-DOS ( because they bought it from MS, of course) sure helped MS in those days.
I second that. Only we had only 2 runs per day. Sure made you careful about your syntax, though. One typo and half a day was wasted. I still don't make a lot of typo's, must be because of that.
:-).
I have also seen a few incidents where people dropped their 1000 line progam. Took them quite some time to fix it. Fortunately the line was printed on the card.
Another thing: these machines punched the holes as you typed. No backspace possible (it couldn't patch the holes it had already punched
One nifty feature was that you could enter the coordinates of where a hole should be punched. I spent hours making a punched card that showed my name in the hole pattern.
One alternative was to fill out a form and submit it to the ladies in the punchcard room. They could make these things a lot faster than I, and they actually corrected my Pascal syntax (missing parentheses, semicolons and all that...). Of course, I spent hours filling out the silly form.
Oh, those good old days...
Guess what? Until a few months ago I was working on a project at Boeing, getting all this legacy data into a monster of a database. They still have these drawings on these punched cards (not all drawings, obviously, but there's still a lot of cards that have not been scanned yet).
Well, that's wonderful. But why is this news? Does he really need Linux to do this? I bet a Sinclair ZX 80 could do the job as well. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux and all, but this story hardly seems a prime example of why Linux is better than anything else. Just my $0.02.
So, your point is that Dawkins' example does not prove that evolution is true. Fine. I think he just used it as an example to make the whole stuff more accessible to laymen, I don't think he contends that a simple computer program constitutes proof for one of the most important scientific discoveries ever.
If I draw an analogy between a computer and the human brain, just to clarify something, does that make me a fraud? The analogy is clearly not perfect, as with Dawkins' example, but I think it's a bit strong to label that as fraudulous.
Oh well.
Fair enough. It seems like your application has some pretty tough performance requirements. I can't judge it of course, but it does seem you have no alternative but to use C.
I can't resist...
Most of the time when I am writing in C it is because nothing else is fast enough for the task at hand
Interesting. By the time this discussion on Slashdot has died down, hardware will have gotten so much faster that just about any language will be fast enough for the task at hand.
OK, that was exaggerated...
You still can't beat C for speed
Hand-optimized assembly language!
I can process a text file at least 100 times faster in C than I can with a scripted language.
Don't know what scripted language you mean, but anyway, you must be doing some pretty fancy processing if the disk is not the bottleneck. So, if that is not the case, and the disk is the bottleneck, then you can do disk access 100 times faster in C than any scripted language? Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical...
Blindly selecting C because it is (supposedly) faster boils down to premature optimization. Hopefully I don't have to quote Donald Knuth to point out that that is a bad thing...
Actually, coding is not inherently insecure...
No, but in a nutshell, the problem is that humans are too much used to interacting with other humens. If I formulate something in an unclear manner (like in this post...), I can rely on the recipient to either interpret my intention correctly, or ask for clarification. A computer does exactly what you tell it to do, not what you intend it to do.
I write in C, and it is just too easy for buffer overflows and such like to slip through, even if you are thinking about them as you program.
I'll probably be flamed for this, but C is inherently unsafe. The basic problem is that memory management is the programmer's responsibility in C, and that's just too hard for mere mortals.
In the end, it was not that hard for me to batten down the hatches in my code, but it was a small program, and I had no time pressure.
Are you absolutely, 100% certain that you found and fixed every single flaw? I have been programming for over 20 years, I consider myself a pretty smart person, and still I'm humbled every time by the fact that proper testing reveals bugs in my code. Quality code requires discipline, discipline, discipline, and testing, testing, and testing. And still, you cannot be 100% certain that you have fixed every problem (it's proving a negative).
It seems to me that we need a new approach to designing code - an approach where things like checks for buffer overflows are automatic in the program design.
Many languages/compilers can check for bounds overflow or memory violations (Turbo Pascal did it a long time ago, Java does it nowadays). The insistence on using unsafe languages like C/C++ are a big part of the problem. Even C/C++ compilers can do a lot of checking, if it were not for the hubris of programmers ("I know what I'm doing, I don't need these silly warnings, let's switch them off").
As applications become more and more complicated, it seems to me that some very clever person needs to rethink the whole way in which we designed programs. Possibly a very creative breakthrough approach is required.
And a lot of very clever people have done a lot of thinking about this. The problem is that the schedule/money driven nature of most software development programs stands in the way of adopting good programming practices.
Doesn'y matter where it comes from, fact is that the strains are far more resistant to antibiotics than before.