"hairline crack in the solder connection on the audio codec"
This is what happens when you ban lead in solder. A slight miscalibration or unaccounted for solder shadowing and the joint will form brittle then pull itself apart.
This is good in the sense that it doesn't come remotely close to the kind of machine that maintains coherence across hundreds of bits that can mess up public key crypto.
I don't know, I consider it a bad thing. It would cause problems, but there would be huge benefits too, and the problems could be solved.
Which problems could be solved that would yield huge benefits when solved?
>this article here is a bit of a scientific popularization but gives a hint on what I'm talking about : >http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Computers.pdf
The 2X DWave machine does quantum annealing. This is good in the sense that it doesn't come remotely close to the kind of machine that maintains coherence across hundreds of bits that can mess up public key crypto. It managed 5 qbits for 20us if read the paper right.
The paper proudly points out it managed 9% error compared to 10.5% error rate of a classical computer doing simulated annealing. However this is not better than classical computer running a better distinguisher. Classical computers are not constrained to run only simulated annealing.
We have yet to reach the point where any quantum computer is faster than a classical computer at any task. This is a good thing. No one has really put anything in place to protect the cryptography of commerce from a hypothetical but largely impossible quantum computer running Shor's algorithm or Grover's algorithm. New hope, RWLE, hash based signatures etc are still the domain of IACR papers. You bank will not be using them any time soon. Lattice crypto just keep getting broken.
This is, by far, the weirdest nerd nitpick I've ever encountered in my 15 years on this site. Congrats to you, good sir.
Not really, I don't have a clue what MSM means in contexts other than methylsulfonylmethane. It's trotted out in stupid political writings, but never explained.
Training a pilot is expnesive. Losing an economy class passenger is cheap.
Changing building codes and zoning so that residential buildings are built close to workplaces in quantities the yield affordable housing is even cheaper.
>The article doesn't say who they'll deliver it to. >What exactly will it be useful for? Factoring 50-bit numbers? Any ideas? >$15 million seems an awful lot of money just for bragging rights. It'd better come in a really pretty box so people can put it in the lobby when they get bored with it.
If it's a general computer then yes. You could implement Shor's algorithm for factoring, Grover's algorithm for inverting mappings (to find keys). There are a handful of non crypto related algorithms for things like simulated annealing.
What no quantum computer to date has done and what a 50 bit quantum computer for $15,000,000 will not do is compute anything that can't be computed more cheaply or efficiently on a traditional computer.
I remain a skeptic that quantum computers can scale up to useful sizes. The rest of the universe wants to bring that low entropy state back into line with the rest of reality and it has succeeded every time so far.
In years past to use some web based software supplied by vendor you HAD to use IE or it wouldn't work.
Or the website nagged you to use IE, even though it worked fine in other browsers. Back then, to get the website to STFU, non-IE users arranged spoofing to make the website think they were using IE even though they were not.
Working in a big corporation I have noticed that there internal websites put up by more or less non technical departments. These are the ones that always come with arbitrary browser incompatibility problem. I can point to the main employee web page (the sort with the 'ra-ra aren't we great' articles and the links to things like the travel and paystub portals) which as of one week ago just returned "[this website] is incompatible with Chrome version 56 please use a different browser. ".
All the web sites from technical parts of the organization (that's most of them) have no problem whatsoever.
My best guess is that the natural tendency of a techy person faced with putting up a web site is to go and fetch one of the many cross platform frameworks that let you use one codebase across all browsers. The tendency of a non techy is to go to some vendor, usually Microsoft and look for something to make it easy to create webpages that integrate with the data they have in their Excel spreadsheets. This results in generated code that uses every quirk of the vendor's browser.
I'll just copy-paste the part of my post you completely ignored while you were breaking the VCS:
Nope. They're actually more relevant now that we have such abundance of portable devices. I use tabs for 2 main reasons: 1. user preference: I might like a tab to equal 4 spaces but my colleague might like 8 or 42 or 32767 or 0. I don't care what he uses and vice-versa because we both just use tabs and configure our editors to the tab width we like.
As a subset of this reason, I can configure different tab widths on different devices. So when I'm coding on a device with a small screen, which I do fairly often, I can configure a smaller tab width (I use 2 rather than my regular 4) to get better mileage out of my limited screen real estate. Now I can move the file back and forth between my desktop and my portable and the tab width automatically adjusts itself.
Working with hundreds of other engineers on the same body of code generally requires that you all choose the same thing. The 'same thing' when you use tabs also involves everyone choosing the same tab width. There is no such parameter you need to agree on if you just enforce the use of spaces. I've worked on multi engineer projects for 25 years and every last one of those projects mandated no tabs for exactly that reason. If you are working on small things, then have fun with it, but at some point you have to work with others.
hit tab key once vs hammer space bar, possibly missing a space.. I vote for the former.
There's nothing wrong with the tab key, it's the tab character in files that will lead to the destruction of polite society. I trust that you can tell the difference. Either way it looks bad. Either you didn't know, which is really bad, or you are pretending not to know in order to hold a contrary position which is worse.
After 33 years of working as a programmer, I think you're wrong. Junior devs just don't grok tabs. They interchange tabs and the wrong number of spaces and even worse, mix them. I gave-up long ago on tabs and just started using spaces. That's the only way you can work well with people not smart enough to understand tabs.
Spaces required by a coding standard are also easier to automate the checking of. Just look for tabs an tag the file as wrong if there are any. Tabs certainly saved a few bytes when saving a few bytes mattered, but these days they do not. Editors these days are mostly very good at making spaces behave like tabs when editing. The reasons for using tabs have gone away.
- Yields of working units are going down significantly as the die shrinks, and it's taking a lot longer to figure out how to bring yields back up.
In the end, every material has its limits, and we're starting to run into them with Silicon, and there isn't a material that 'stands out' as worth betting the business on.
So, Moore's Law is dead.
Moore law remains a remarkably correct prediction. However the prediction is concerning both feature size and cost and it predicts the costs rising in pretty much the fashion they have. It's exponential.
However in terms of computer power, the vast majority of the increases in computer power have been architectural, not from process improvements. If we stopped at 10nm and never went below that, computers would continue to get faster. I am aware of techniques that will continue to improve the processing speed of CPUs. They are not feature size improvements. They will come out in due course. But feature size is not limited by our ability to push feature size. It's limited by the cost of reducing it. Who's going to drop $100,000,000,000 on a fab in 5 years to get below 5nm? Other technique become more effective per unit dollar.
We push these things on all fronts. I've seen some pretty crazy schemes and I've seen some fail and some succeed.
My personal opinion as someone who works on these CPUs is that the recent (4-5 years) slowing of CPU power increase (note that improvement in instructions per Joule hasn't slowed) is going to change. New things will come down the line that will dramatically increase the speed of doing stuff. It's happened with specific workloads like graphics, or crypto or RNGs or disk I/O. Other things will continue to improve as attention is spent on improving them.
Notice how your CPU isn't awesome at DSP, but there are plenty of DSP oriented CPUs that blow any general purpose CPU out of the water on those tasks. There are datapath oriented architectures that can move data faster than any general purpose CPU sitting in big iron routers everywhere. As the demand for specific workloads change, the general purpose CPUs will follow.
...OTA TV transmission will be switched off and the spectrum sold to the highest bidder.
That'll be a sad day. Other than the on-screen "bugs", OTA is DRM-free. Nothing's stopping me recording, removing or skipping ads, and privately distributing the recordings. Much harder with streaming.
I didn't say it was a good thing. But the government doesn't study how many people are receiving OTA TV out of the goodness of their hearts. They will sell (sorry license) that spectrum just as soon as the viewer numbers are low enough.
Slashdot Mirror
"hairline crack in the solder connection on the audio codec"
This is what happens when you ban lead in solder.
A slight miscalibration or unaccounted for solder shadowing and the joint will form brittle then pull itself apart.
He speaks the truth. A person's desire to understand is often bounded by their willingness to accept a deep thought into their head.
This is good in the sense that it doesn't come remotely close to the kind of machine that maintains coherence across hundreds of bits that can mess up public key crypto.
I don't know, I consider it a bad thing. It would cause problems, but there would be huge benefits too, and the problems could be solved.
Which problems could be solved that would yield huge benefits when solved?
>this article here is a bit of a scientific popularization but gives a hint on what I'm talking about : >http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Computers.pdf
Yes. I read his book. He doesn't dumb it down.
The 2X DWave machine does quantum annealing. This is good in the sense that it doesn't come remotely close to the kind of machine that maintains coherence across hundreds of bits that can mess up public key crypto. It managed 5 qbits for 20us if read the paper right.
The paper proudly points out it managed 9% error compared to 10.5% error rate of a classical computer doing simulated annealing. However this is not better than classical computer running a better distinguisher. Classical computers are not constrained to run only simulated annealing.
We have yet to reach the point where any quantum computer is faster than a classical computer at any task. This is a good thing. No one has really put anything in place to protect the cryptography of commerce from a hypothetical but largely impossible quantum computer running Shor's algorithm or Grover's algorithm. New hope, RWLE, hash based signatures etc are still the domain of IACR papers. You bank will not be using them any time soon. Lattice crypto just keep getting broken.
Thank you. Now I know.
This is, by far, the weirdest nerd nitpick I've ever encountered in my 15 years on this site. Congrats to you, good sir.
Not really, I don't have a clue what MSM means in contexts other than methylsulfonylmethane. It's trotted out in stupid political writings, but never explained.
I'm keeping my day job.
>No, I'm not a fan.
Are you a turbine?
Training a pilot is expnesive. Losing an economy class passenger is cheap.
Changing building codes and zoning so that residential buildings are built close to workplaces in quantities the yield affordable housing is even cheaper.
You probably tip your fedora too much.
I downloaded it at no additional charge.
Also in each ISO there still has to be spinning generation to maintain voltage and VAR support.
No, it's just a file when it's an ISO. It doesn't start spinning until you burn it to the CD.
>The article doesn't say who they'll deliver it to.
>What exactly will it be useful for? Factoring 50-bit numbers? Any ideas?
>$15 million seems an awful lot of money just for bragging rights. It'd better come in a really pretty box so people can put it in the lobby when they get bored with it.
If it's a general computer then yes. You could implement Shor's algorithm for factoring, Grover's algorithm for inverting mappings (to find keys). There are a handful of non crypto related algorithms for things like simulated annealing.
What no quantum computer to date has done and what a 50 bit quantum computer for $15,000,000 will not do is compute anything that can't be computed more cheaply or efficiently on a traditional computer.
I remain a skeptic that quantum computers can scale up to useful sizes. The rest of the universe wants to bring that low entropy state back into line with the rest of reality and it has succeeded every time so far.
In years past to use some web based software supplied by vendor you HAD to use IE or it wouldn't work.
Or the website nagged you to use IE, even though it worked fine in other browsers. Back then, to get the website to STFU, non-IE users arranged spoofing to make the website think they were using IE even though they were not.
Working in a big corporation I have noticed that there internal websites put up by more or less non technical departments. These are the ones that always come with arbitrary browser incompatibility problem. I can point to the main employee web page (the sort with the 'ra-ra aren't we great' articles and the links to things like the travel and paystub portals) which as of one week ago just returned "[this website] is incompatible with Chrome version 56 please use a different browser. ".
All the web sites from technical parts of the organization (that's most of them) have no problem whatsoever.
My best guess is that the natural tendency of a techy person faced with putting up a web site is to go and fetch one of the many cross platform frameworks that let you use one codebase across all browsers. The tendency of a non techy is to go to some vendor, usually Microsoft and look for something to make it easy to create webpages that integrate with the data they have in their Excel spreadsheets. This results in generated code that uses every quirk of the vendor's browser.
This isn't a good situation.
I'll just copy-paste the part of my post you completely ignored while you were breaking the VCS:
Nope. They're actually more relevant now that we have such abundance of portable devices. I use tabs for 2 main reasons:
1. user preference: I might like a tab to equal 4 spaces but my colleague might like 8 or 42 or 32767 or 0. I don't care what he uses and vice-versa because we both just use tabs and configure our editors to the tab width we like.
As a subset of this reason, I can configure different tab widths on different devices. So when I'm coding on a device with a small screen, which I do fairly often, I can configure a smaller tab width (I use 2 rather than my regular 4) to get better mileage out of my limited screen real estate. Now I can move the file back and forth between my desktop and my portable and the tab width automatically adjusts itself.
Working with hundreds of other engineers on the same body of code generally requires that you all choose the same thing. The 'same thing' when you use tabs also involves everyone choosing the same tab width. There is no such parameter you need to agree on if you just enforce the use of spaces. I've worked on multi engineer projects for 25 years and every last one of those projects mandated no tabs for exactly that reason. If you are working on small things, then have fun with it, but at some point you have to work with others.
:set expandtab :retab
Problem over.
after going to japan where many of the major chains had at-table ordering device of some sort and no tips, i cant go back
You're eating at the wrong restaurants.
There you go again.
Play on love!
Many plays are on love. It's a popular subject.
define 'polite society'
One in which there are no more invisible indentation errors.
hit tab key once vs hammer space bar, possibly missing a space.. I vote for the former.
There's nothing wrong with the tab key, it's the tab character in files that will lead to the destruction of polite society. I trust that you can tell the difference. Either way it looks bad. Either you didn't know, which is really bad, or you are pretending not to know in order to hold a contrary position which is worse.
After 33 years of working as a programmer, I think you're wrong. Junior devs just don't grok tabs. They interchange tabs and the wrong number of spaces and even worse, mix them. I gave-up long ago on tabs and just started using spaces. That's the only way you can work well with people not smart enough to understand tabs.
Spaces required by a coding standard are also easier to automate the checking of. Just look for tabs an tag the file as wrong if there are any.
Tabs certainly saved a few bytes when saving a few bytes mattered, but these days they do not. Editors these days are mostly very good at making spaces behave like tabs when editing. The reasons for using tabs have gone away.
- Yields of working units are going down significantly as the die shrinks, and it's taking a lot longer to figure out how to bring yields back up.
In the end, every material has its limits, and we're starting to run into them with Silicon, and there isn't a material that 'stands out' as worth betting the business on.
So, Moore's Law is dead.
Moore law remains a remarkably correct prediction. However the prediction is concerning both feature size and cost and it predicts the costs rising in pretty much the fashion they have. It's exponential.
However in terms of computer power, the vast majority of the increases in computer power have been architectural, not from process improvements. If we stopped at 10nm and never went below that, computers would continue to get faster. I am aware of techniques that will continue to improve the processing speed of CPUs. They are not feature size improvements. They will come out in due course. But feature size is not limited by our ability to push feature size. It's limited by the cost of reducing it. Who's going to drop $100,000,000,000 on a fab in 5 years to get below 5nm? Other technique become more effective per unit dollar.
We push these things on all fronts. I've seen some pretty crazy schemes and I've seen some fail and some succeed.
My personal opinion as someone who works on these CPUs is that the recent (4-5 years) slowing of CPU power increase (note that improvement in instructions per Joule hasn't slowed) is going to change. New things will come down the line that will dramatically increase the speed of doing stuff. It's happened with specific workloads like graphics, or crypto or RNGs or disk I/O. Other things will continue to improve as attention is spent on improving them.
Notice how your CPU isn't awesome at DSP, but there are plenty of DSP oriented CPUs that blow any general purpose CPU out of the water on those tasks. There are datapath oriented architectures that can move data faster than any general purpose CPU sitting in big iron routers everywhere. As the demand for specific workloads change, the general purpose CPUs will follow.
...OTA TV transmission will be switched off and the spectrum sold to the highest bidder.
That'll be a sad day. Other than the on-screen "bugs", OTA is DRM-free. Nothing's stopping me recording, removing or skipping ads, and privately distributing the recordings. Much harder with streaming.
I didn't say it was a good thing. But the government doesn't study how many people are receiving OTA TV out of the goodness of their hearts. They will sell (sorry license) that spectrum just as soon as the viewer numbers are low enough.
Get rid of it. You'll feel better afterwards.