Well, this Pentium 4 processor isn't for everyone.
I read (red) on Intel's web page that the Pentium 4 has expanded the 80-bit registers in the FPU to 128-bit. That's not something they would do for "compatibility." I think they want SSE2 to be used for ordinary precision levels, and the old FPU is now a "high-precision" calculation unit. I expect it takes a great deal more time to calculate things to that high degree of precision. I doubt they put a lot of extra hardware to it; they're probably relying on microcode. Most of that time is wasted in legacy apps because (a) legacy apps cannot turn the high accuracy off, even if an instruction to do so exists, and (b) even though I assume new instructions have been added to load and store 128-bit floats, no existing applications use those instructions. So the high accuracy is there waiting to be used, and in the meantime, it's burning up clock cycles on existing floating-point code.
Intel's 80-bit FPU was always something of an oddity. It allowed intermediate results to have more precision than the inputs and outputs. If you are aware of this, you can actually use it. Even though the Alpha can calculate much faster clock-for-clock, the old x86 is actually more accurate. Except for the old Pentiums with the FDIV flaw. And the Pentium 4 is (assuming no errata) more accurate still.
If your emphasis is on speed instead of precision, you'll be "forced" either to use SSE2 instructions -- or buy an Athlon. But if you're one of those rare people who actually need 128-bit precision floating-point, the Pentium 4 is the only chip that currently supports it in hardware.
What's even worse is when you send our military down there, imprison the dictators, disable their military, impose a democratic government, guarantee a fraud-free election, let the people vote... and they vote for the same damn dictators again.
<SARCASM>Well, it's simple, it's because the ET's aren't doing anything to feed our millions of hungry or develop the undeveloped world. I mean, there they are up there, building their intergalactic spaceships, for themselves, in an orgy of greed, without any concern for the rights of the space dust their ships blast aside, probably spending 17-figure sums on the things, while people are down here starving. Shame on them! If those ET's exist, they owe us!</SARCASM>
Epsilon Eridani, located at right ascension 3h33', declination -9 47', range roughtly 10.7 LY, which works out to sol-centered galactic-aligned cartesian coordinates (- 7.641i - 0.2749j - 7.485k) LY (over-precise), is spectral class K2, so this planet, at Earth's distance out, would be somewhat colder than Earth. There is hope that other, more useful planets are in the system, but I wonder if the gravitational influence of the gas giant would have swept that area clean...
I am inclined to agree -- but people will not stop producing IP out of some kind of spite. It will not be John Galt stepping boldly off the stage. It will be the story of somebody named Bob who works at the convenient store and composes symphonies by night. The symphonies are played for Presidents and Kings, but nobody knows Bob is writing them, and he doesn't get paid. So naturally he writes fewer symphonies than he would if he could quit his convenient store job and buy a piano, like he could if he got a royalty check.
The reason why IP is a value is that it allows people to make their living (i.e., dedicate their lives) to the creation of some kind of IP or other. For example, a person can concentrate on how to make movies, and get paid for doing nothing but making better and better movies. Without receiving royalties, he will certainly still try to make movies, but it will be relegated to a hobby that pays little or nothing, and he will have to do something else during the day to make enough money to eat, no matter how skilled he may become. Remember, Mozart died broke.
If we are looking at the end of IP, then we are looking at the end of programming, composing, writing, as careers, and we are turning them into permanent hobbies.
Not only that, but it doesn't work, in a capitalist society, for you to do A but make your money doing B. Suppose Alice is a composer and a performer. Suppose Bob is a performer who can't compose worth [censored], but plays slightly better than Alice. Without some kind of intellectual property protection, Bob would make all the money he wants playing Alice's work, and Alice would die broke.
Yes, but an exceptionally skilled cracker might be able to make it look like you are attacking a script-kiddie cracker's system, when you're really attacking one of his decoys. Feints within feints...
(Sorry about my hacker / cracker mixup previously.)
I'd say that hacking back was justice if you could be sure that the system you were hacking back was the hacker's. But you can't. It would be really terrible if (a) somebody started attacking your web site, (b) you found and attacked the source of the attacks, to make that machine cease operations, (c) it turned out that the machine you just blasted belonged to your good friends at Thyme magazine, and had itself been hacked... oops.
I started out with a Tandy Color Computer. It was the best choice at the time, because it had color and sound, and you could write programs that drew in color and that played sounds. I learned to program -- first in BASIC, then in raw assembly -- because I got more and more ambitious: I wanted more impressive graphics and better sound (and music). I watched movies like TRON and The Last Starfighter, which had computer-generated graphics and sound. I wanted to do some of that on my own. If all I'd ever had or seen was a black-and-white UNIX prompt with g++, I would not have been all that impressed with all the UNIX and c++ features.
Whatever you get them started working with should include lots of colorful graphics commands and lots of sound commands. (But leave them the ability to write their own!) If you're going to make a programming language into a child's toy, it need only be brightly colored.
Any particular programming language would be fine -- C, C++, Java, Scheme, Perl, Python, whatever -- if it has that simple ability. (I don't buy the idea that C++ or any language is "too complicated to learn as a first language." You have to teach it a little at a time. You have to subset it, and then gradually widen the subset until the whole thing is included.) And I think we humans never really grow out of that desire for sensory stimulation, as our propensity for digital movies and sound shows. And color syntax highlighting! Even adults wouldn't mind learning programming with graphical commands.
I would like to see a C++ library one day that supported easy generation of graphics and sound; that, combined with the rest of C++, would present an excellent learning tool which is also capable of cracking real problems. A kid could write a program with that and be proud. In the process he would learn algorithms, data structures, and the like. Later he could write programs without sound and graphics, because he would know how...
IANAL, but I think you can do whatever you want; the intent of zoning laws is not to quibble over what kind of wiring you have in your house, it's to keep you from turning your house into a shopping mall. Why, if we didn't have zoning laws, a city might have a house next to a factory next to a church next to a school next to a skyscraper next to an amusement park, and <SARCASM> we wouldn't want that, would we? Everything within walking distance, so that people wouldn't have to drive, and get stuck in the ever-increasing amounts of traffic? Hell, no! </SARCASM>
I just bought a condo and luckily it didn't come with internet access. It did come with a covenant that says the outsides of my curtains have to be white and that I can't run a business out of my home, although according to one of the two agreements I signed, I can have a home office. Can I run a web server out of my home? Is that a business? The other agreement says nothing about business one way or another. (I also can't own "exotic pets" such as an iguana or a peacock. Oh, well.)
My covenant really isn't so bad, or I wouldn't have signed it. But I know that covenants can decrease the value of a home. Ask anyone who's ever been unpopular with the homeowners' association.
Oooo, and they got us now. Next thing you know, when your house comes with internet access, you'll be signing a covenant that says that, for as long as you live there, you won't buy internet access from anybody else, and that you won't run a server, and that you won't download porn (porn being defined as anything your seller considers objectionable, such as ads for his competitors), or allow people to download WAV files that you recorded of your own music because they take up too much bandwidth, or... or... [shudder!]
In a country where the bill of rights probably wouldn't survive a constitutional convention (it never did when we had mock conventions in high school), what do you think happens when the people vote in homeowners' associations?
Make it an option for the owners of e-mail addresses to set and remove passwords on their e-mail boxes. Unless the sender has one of the passwords, his message simply never gets received.
If I posted on the Usenet I could post a temporary password. It would expire in a few days. If I joined a mailing list, I could give that list a unique permanent password -- and if I got spammed, I'd be able to see which password they used, and cancel that password, and warn people to stay away from the web page or mailing list that compromised it.
All those CD-ROMs full of e-mail addresses would be rendered worthless overnight.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this Pentium 4 processor isn't for everyone.
I read (red) on Intel's web page that the Pentium 4 has expanded the 80-bit registers in the FPU to 128-bit. That's not something they would do for "compatibility." I think they want SSE2 to be used for ordinary precision levels, and the old FPU is now a "high-precision" calculation unit. I expect it takes a great deal more time to calculate things to that high degree of precision. I doubt they put a lot of extra hardware to it; they're probably relying on microcode. Most of that time is wasted in legacy apps because (a) legacy apps cannot turn the high accuracy off, even if an instruction to do so exists, and (b) even though I assume new instructions have been added to load and store 128-bit floats, no existing applications use those instructions. So the high accuracy is there waiting to be used, and in the meantime, it's burning up clock cycles on existing floating-point code.
Intel's 80-bit FPU was always something of an oddity. It allowed intermediate results to have more precision than the inputs and outputs. If you are aware of this, you can actually use it. Even though the Alpha can calculate much faster clock-for-clock, the old x86 is actually more accurate. Except for the old Pentiums with the FDIV flaw. And the Pentium 4 is (assuming no errata) more accurate still.
If your emphasis is on speed instead of precision, you'll be "forced" either to use SSE2 instructions -- or buy an Athlon. But if you're one of those rare people who actually need 128-bit precision floating-point, the Pentium 4 is the only chip that currently supports it in hardware.
-- Sunlighter
Yeah, but if you don't fix the problem that let them in, they can just get in again.
-- Sunlighter
What's even worse is when you send our military down there, imprison the dictators, disable their military, impose a democratic government, guarantee a fraud-free election, let the people vote... and they vote for the same damn dictators again.
Some people never learn.
-- Sunlighter
<SARCASM>Well, it's simple, it's because the ET's aren't doing anything to feed our millions of hungry or develop the undeveloped world. I mean, there they are up there, building their intergalactic spaceships, for themselves, in an orgy of greed, without any concern for the rights of the space dust their ships blast aside, probably spending 17-figure sums on the things, while people are down here starving. Shame on them! If those ET's exist, they owe us!</SARCASM>
-- Sunlighter
Actually I had forgotten that... but yes, it's possible. Jovian bodies may indeed sweep the asteroids out and make life more possible on what's left.
-- Sunlighter
Epsilon Eridani, located at right ascension 3h33', declination -9 47', range roughtly 10.7 LY, which works out to sol-centered galactic-aligned cartesian coordinates (- 7.641i - 0.2749j - 7.485k) LY (over-precise), is spectral class K2, so this planet, at Earth's distance out, would be somewhat colder than Earth. There is hope that other, more useful planets are in the system, but I wonder if the gravitational influence of the gas giant would have swept that area clean...
-- Sunlighter
Ha ha ha.
-- Sunlighter
I am inclined to agree -- but people will not stop producing IP out of some kind of spite. It will not be John Galt stepping boldly off the stage. It will be the story of somebody named Bob who works at the convenient store and composes symphonies by night. The symphonies are played for Presidents and Kings, but nobody knows Bob is writing them, and he doesn't get paid. So naturally he writes fewer symphonies than he would if he could quit his convenient store job and buy a piano, like he could if he got a royalty check.
The reason why IP is a value is that it allows people to make their living (i.e., dedicate their lives) to the creation of some kind of IP or other. For example, a person can concentrate on how to make movies, and get paid for doing nothing but making better and better movies. Without receiving royalties, he will certainly still try to make movies, but it will be relegated to a hobby that pays little or nothing, and he will have to do something else during the day to make enough money to eat, no matter how skilled he may become. Remember, Mozart died broke.
If we are looking at the end of IP, then we are looking at the end of programming, composing, writing, as careers, and we are turning them into permanent hobbies.
Not only that, but it doesn't work, in a capitalist society, for you to do A but make your money doing B. Suppose Alice is a composer and a performer. Suppose Bob is a performer who can't compose worth [censored], but plays slightly better than Alice. Without some kind of intellectual property protection, Bob would make all the money he wants playing Alice's work, and Alice would die broke.
Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.
-- Sunlighter
Yes, but an exceptionally skilled cracker might be able to make it look like you are attacking a script-kiddie cracker's system, when you're really attacking one of his decoys. Feints within feints...
(Sorry about my hacker / cracker mixup previously.)
I'd say that hacking back was justice if you could be sure that the system you were hacking back was the hacker's. But you can't. It would be really terrible if (a) somebody started attacking your web site, (b) you found and attacked the source of the attacks, to make that machine cease operations, (c) it turned out that the machine you just blasted belonged to your good friends at Thyme magazine, and had itself been hacked... oops.
Gotta watch out for that friendly fire.
...try Tripping the Rift. It's MPEG format.
(Warning: it's for mature audiences, analogous to an R-rated movie. And it's five minutes long. You may break out in uncontrollable laughter.)
-- Sunlighter
I started out with a Tandy Color Computer. It was the best choice at the time, because it had color and sound, and you could write programs that drew in color and that played sounds. I learned to program -- first in BASIC, then in raw assembly -- because I got more and more ambitious: I wanted more impressive graphics and better sound (and music). I watched movies like TRON and The Last Starfighter, which had computer-generated graphics and sound. I wanted to do some of that on my own. If all I'd ever had or seen was a black-and-white UNIX prompt with g++, I would not have been all that impressed with all the UNIX and c++ features.
Whatever you get them started working with should include lots of colorful graphics commands and lots of sound commands. (But leave them the ability to write their own!) If you're going to make a programming language into a child's toy, it need only be brightly colored.
Any particular programming language would be fine -- C, C++, Java, Scheme, Perl, Python, whatever -- if it has that simple ability. (I don't buy the idea that C++ or any language is "too complicated to learn as a first language." You have to teach it a little at a time. You have to subset it, and then gradually widen the subset until the whole thing is included.) And I think we humans never really grow out of that desire for sensory stimulation, as our propensity for digital movies and sound shows. And color syntax highlighting! Even adults wouldn't mind learning programming with graphical commands.
I would like to see a C++ library one day that supported easy generation of graphics and sound; that, combined with the rest of C++, would present an excellent learning tool which is also capable of cracking real problems. A kid could write a program with that and be proud. In the process he would learn algorithms, data structures, and the like. Later he could write programs without sound and graphics, because he would know how...
Just my two cents.
-- Sunlighter
IANAL, but I think you can do whatever you want; the intent of zoning laws is not to quibble over what kind of wiring you have in your house, it's to keep you from turning your house into a shopping mall. Why, if we didn't have zoning laws, a city might have a house next to a factory next to a church next to a school next to a skyscraper next to an amusement park, and <SARCASM> we wouldn't want that, would we? Everything within walking distance, so that people wouldn't have to drive, and get stuck in the ever-increasing amounts of traffic? Hell, no! </SARCASM>
-- Sunlighter
I just bought a condo and luckily it didn't come with internet access. It did come with a covenant that says the outsides of my curtains have to be white and that I can't run a business out of my home, although according to one of the two agreements I signed, I can have a home office. Can I run a web server out of my home? Is that a business? The other agreement says nothing about business one way or another. (I also can't own "exotic pets" such as an iguana or a peacock. Oh, well.)
My covenant really isn't so bad, or I wouldn't have signed it. But I know that covenants can decrease the value of a home. Ask anyone who's ever been unpopular with the homeowners' association.
Oooo, and they got us now. Next thing you know, when your house comes with internet access, you'll be signing a covenant that says that, for as long as you live there, you won't buy internet access from anybody else, and that you won't run a server, and that you won't download porn (porn being defined as anything your seller considers objectionable, such as ads for his competitors), or allow people to download WAV files that you recorded of your own music because they take up too much bandwidth, or... or... [shudder!]
In a country where the bill of rights probably wouldn't survive a constitutional convention (it never did when we had mock conventions in high school), what do you think happens when the people vote in homeowners' associations?
You better read those covenants damned carefully!
Why not attempt a technical solution?
Make it an option for the owners of e-mail addresses to set and remove passwords on their e-mail boxes. Unless the sender has one of the passwords, his message simply never gets received.
If I posted on the Usenet I could post a temporary password. It would expire in a few days. If I joined a mailing list, I could give that list a unique permanent password -- and if I got spammed, I'd be able to see which password they used, and cancel that password, and warn people to stay away from the web page or mailing list that compromised it.
All those CD-ROMs full of e-mail addresses would be rendered worthless overnight.
Why not? Let's do it!
-- Sunlighter