Re:Skynet, here we come
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Robot Wars
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· Score: 2
There are good and evil humans (I see the Bill Gates Borg icon as I type....)--what is it about AI that makes people think it will automatically be evil?
Interesting point. However I think it's more likely that AI (if was smart enough and objective enough) would think that humans are evil (because on the whole we are selfish, etc). Why should AIs value human life, especially if we refuse to value theirs?
How did this parent get modereated up? Three of Grabs posts are +4 or more, yet none of them are remotely correct! He didn't read the part about the catapult, (it catapults a water rocket, thus it doesn't need to achieve a very high velocity) and he ignores the simplicity of the design. V2's worked just fine without fancy control systems; it's just plain not necessary if your tragectory is simple.
I agree that math is a fundamentally important part of engineering, but some things work just fine by trial and error.
Fortran 77 is certainly not dead, I have a job as an undergraduate at Cornell University, paralellizing a magnetohydrodynamics code in F77 to work on Cornell's Velocity Cluster (it's been mentioned on slashdot before for other research conducted on it). F77 may be a horrid language, which is about as fun as VB to use, but it's still very useful, and it has everything my advisor and his russian astrophysicist collaborators really need - FILE I/O, matrices, and of course we can use MPI, the Message Passing Interface, a well known standard in parallel computing.
BTW, I hate F77 but even I have to admit that it's a better choice for them considering they are rather old and do not have time/will to learn anything new programming wise.
Isn't there some kind software authentication on the X Box that keeps just any x86 program from being executed on it (i.e. it only allows registered games to play)?
Compile-time branch prediction is not such a great idea. You must profile the program which some fixed data set. With hardware branch prediction, the prediction tables dynamically adjust based on the execution of the program. Branch prediction combined with speculative execution is often just as good as predicated execution (i believe you are referring to this).
Not necessarily, in fact many branches in programs are caused by loops (if you are looping from, say, 1 to 100, 99 times out of that 100 you WILL branch, and the compiler knows this). Also, if you use a language or language extension that lets you predict your own branches (versions of C++ do this, obviously assembly would do this), which, if you were in a tight loop you would probably want to do, then you'd be fine! And there's no reason you can't have an okay hardware branch prediction system that can be overridden by the program itself... simple branch prediction is very easy to implement in hardware, but it's not perfect.
If you don't do branch prediction, parallel instruction units, multiple issue/retire, etc, etc...what do you have??? You have a slow processor certainly suitable for embedded applications bot not for modern general-purpose computing.
Adding parallel instruction units is pretty trivial, scheduling them is not. But even if you can schedule them 50% efficiently (which is nowhere near as difficult as scheduling them 95% efficiently) and you can issue/retire multple instructions simultaneously, then you're still in the ball park, and in fact using a better ISA than x86, with things like predication, etc, could easily make up for some of that. Add to that that many many applications are limited by MEMORY SPEED and not processor speed, and you start to realize that your processor CAN be reasonably fast compared to an atholon with the same bus speed and io specs. In fact, putting the IO controller on your processor would shave a few cycles from your accesses, and wouldn't be super hard to do. Not only that, but there's no-one saying that you can't use nice standard external L3 caches to supplement your own.
And no, a bunch of guys with bachelors degrees and no experience can't build any decent general-purose processor. I'm not talking FPGA's because you can't use those to make a processor that is anywhere close to an Athlon. You need architects, logic designers, layout designers, packaging experts, fab experts, etc etc etc. Then there are so many subtle design issues such as precise exceptions, I/O, etc.
Not talking about FGPAs? That's what most of the artical was about, didn't you read it? I will definately agree that if you can't use FGPAs, it becomes a bit impractical (however students at the Rochester Institute of Technology, one of the places I applied for college, routinely cook up their own chips there, without being lpackaging experts or fab experts, etc...). That's not what the artical or the slashdot posting was really about anyways!
I don't think anyone seriously thinks they can do as well as hundreds of millions of dollars of development work, however doing reasonably good compared to them isn't really that impossible...
ISA's are mostly irrelevant in terms of performance potential (except for IA-64 which I will get to). Both AMD and Intel devote a (small) portion of their transistor budget to dynamically convert the CISC instructions into RISC-like "micro-ops". Thus the actual execution core of the AMD K7 and Intel P6 micro-architectures are very similar to say the MIPS R10000 core. Now if Intel and AMD had a decent ISA to begin with, they could devote those transistors (used to convert CISC to RISC) to things like bigger caches. Thus the performance penalty of using a lousy ISA is really not that much as evident by the success of Intel and AMD in raw computational power.
I don't know about that one... I've read much about various architectures, even some about the IA-64 architecture (I'm rather excited about it, because a group of scientists here used it to achieve a threefold increase in their finite-element simulation performance using Itanium processors). I would say that having a lousy ISA constricts what compile-time optimisations can be done dramatically. Look at things such as compile-time branch prediction/prefetch instruction, predication bits, register rotation (granted that need not be part of the ISA, however to take full advantage of it, you have to know it's going to be there), speculative loads, cache hints, etc... You just can't do most of that stuff if your ISA doesn't support it! Implicit paralellism is often not good enough for intense applications. Also you must balance this against design issues with things like multiple instruction lengths, and worst of all about the x86- lack of registers! I'm quite aware that modern x86 implementations have many more internal registers, however that CANNOT POSSIBLY BE AS GOOD as having more visible, usable registers.
Often times, it's the compiler (or the programmer) that knows best, it sees the big picture. Having an ISA that doesn't allow you to define parallism, that doesn't allow you to save cycles in critical parts of loops, preload things, and makes you do a lot of unecessary branching, that CERTAINLY has a lot to do with performance. And lets not forget about SIMD instructions, or vector-based register operations (okay I know that hasn't been popular for a long time, but when you have a really slow processor it's actually rather attractive).
Your comment about "RISC chips are really not all that complex" is extremely ignorant and uneducated.
I actually meant to say that "RISC chips do not really need to be all that complex." If you don't do branch prediction, or register renaming/rotation, if you don't do multiple parallel instruction units, they are actually not that bad. I argue that a bunch of guys with bachelors degrees from a decent school CAN design something reasonably modern, just not as fancy and overly complex as an x86 CPU. I don't think the point of rolling your own CPU is to make something better than what you can buy for $100 at a computer show, but rather to make explore something that's quite explorable.
Also notice I didn't mention Itanium anywhere... that would be a nightmare, trying to design something even remotely similar. There's nothing too bad about doing explicit parallelism, in fact I would think that it's actually easier than implicit parallism, however some of the features they include are just wacky!
Designing a modern microprocessor can not be done by amateurs or a group of people with a B.S. degrees in electrical engineering. Sure, many of us have taken undergraduate architecture classes and maybe have designed a simple pipelined microprocessor in Mentor Graphics or VHDL/Verilog. Some of us maybe even implemented it with FPGAs.
That's a very misleading statement, as you define MODERN as meaning something bloated and complex like AMD/Intel chips. The problem isn't that making a MODERN processor is very difficult, it's that implementing a poorly designed ISA is. If you insist on using x86 (I would *NEVER* make an x86 processor on my life) then of course you'll never get anywhere. I do not think, however, that it would be that difficult to make a full MIPS R2000 chip, ala Nintendo 64. Most MIPS instructions are very simple to implement, it becomes mostly an issue of pipeline control, and then caching/memory interfacing. I will grant that the designing of an FPU from scratch would be somewhat difficult (the MIPS processor I designed lacked an FPU, so I have not done that). MIPS, or heck even a PowerPC chip would not be prohibitively complex. There's no future in CISC, and I do not see why you choose to use that as your metric for determining feasability. RISC chips are really not all that complex (depends on how many execution units you want, etc) especially if you use a simple and well-thought-out ISA.
I don't think many people honestly WANT to implement x86, because it's so difficult to do, and it is difficult to add cool features to, whereas RISC ISAs are usually rather simple to extend in many ways.
Just because an ISA is not created by Intel does nto make it modern (in fact, the x86 ISA is the LEAST modern ISA still in wide use).
Just a thought. (disclaimer: I'm not a computer engineer, and never will be. I'm a CS/Physics major, and I've taken one class in computer architecture)
Slim, plastic LCDs sewn into fabric could display e-mail or text messages on your sleeve.'
Yeah, just what I've always wanted... now those dumb t-shirts that advertise for everything will be animated...
Seriously, will this technology end up being better and brighter than organic LEDs?
Just a thought...
Justin
Does anyone else just feel absolutely tiny when they find thousands of entire galaxies in a small patch of the sky? Galaxies contain billions of stars, and God knows how many planets... Kinda makes the silly things we argue about here on slashdot seem just that- silly.
I am an undergraduate at Cornell University, and I use the Velocity Cluster, the largest cluster of Windows boxes in the world. It's been mentioned on slashdot before, and the system there is actually pretty cool. Anyways, I had remembered seeing that Cornell, in partnership with several other universities, was doing something very similar to this.
The page about the Cornell Computational Materials Institute can be found here.
There's some pretty nifty stuff going on with that... crack propagation is an especially important problem in materials science, and it's nice to see that these large computers can be used to help solve it.
After reading the artical, I found a few things to be disturbing...
First of all, he showed very little of his actual data. This makes it difficult to tell if his interpretation is correct.
Thirdly, what the heck was this guy smoking when he came up with search phrases. Most of these phrases seem to be tangental to the main purpose of most web sitees on the internet.
Finally, Timothy, why didn't you put the foot icon by the story?:)
It seems to me that in a way, the web is like an organism, whose smaller constituents are constantly (or not so constantly, depending on the webmaster) renewing themselves. It's a truely adaptive medium, and thus drastic change in short times like this as interest shifts should be quite expected.
That said, this is one of the many ways in which Google is an invaluable tool for research. Not just finding information, but generating it. Thanks Google!
I guess I don't really see the point of breaking Microsoft up, (look at what happenned to the baby bells) however I think there are some great ways to keep them from being anticompetative:
1. Open up their APIs, etc... (Cool things like Lindows will be 100% legal then:))
2. Fix their pricing so that it is uniform to all OEMs (so that OEMs will not be persecuted individually for carrying a competing product, like Linux or Netscape)
3. Fine them for blatent lying in court (have they commited perjury?)
4. As reparations for breaking the law, force them to issue free copies of software to schools in poor neighborhoods, etc...
I just don't think that drastic solutions are going to work here... But in a way, I almost don't CARE about microsoft's monopoly, because it's almost a given that the desktop computer will lose its prevelance once Ubiquetous Computing (ala MIT's Oxygen, etc) becomes a reality. Just so long as they don't control *THAT*, I'm happy.
It is funny to see AMD on microsoft's side, since MS has been very pro-Intel for a long time.
Cheers,
Justin
No migration happens because photons have 0 rest mass, and therefore don't have intertia.
Ahh, yes... a very common mistake by the non-physicist. It seems to make sense that something that has zero rest mass cannot possibly have inertia. This is, however, completely wrong. The problem is that massless particals travel at the speed of light, which is where some interesting things happen in the equations. We start out with the general equation:
E^2 = m^2*c^4+p^2*c^2
Substituting 0 for m, we can solve for p = E/c. It's well known that photons carry energy, and thus they must carry momentum. (There are other methods of deriving this, however I will not get into them... pretty much all waves carry momentum, one way or another).
As for this being the primary reason that optronics are better than electronics, I'm not entirely sure... definately massless particals are in general better for things like this (where you want maximum information carried for a minimum amount of energy, in a minimum amount of time). Photons typically propagate faster than electronic signals, and optical circuits usually have a much higher bandwitdth due to frequency-level multiplexing.
Also, it is possible to use physical properties of photons to compute fast fourier transforms, which are especially important for digital signal processing. Not to mention the amazingly fast access times of ultra-huge holographic databases.
Dislaimer: I'm not a physicist, but I'm studying to become one.
First, we need to find an extra-solar system in which Earth-sized planets exist. It's now believed that these are fairly few and far between. The reason is that a vast majority of the gas giant systems we've discovered so far have their gas giants in either really close orbits to their stars, or are highly eliptical with passes close to their stars. In these situations, Earth-like planets would likely be tossed into their stars, or more likely, tossed into open space, by the gravitational effect of the giants.
Isn't this related to the gravitational method that we are using? I mean, isn't the dopplar shift signifigantly easier to detect in the case that the large planet is nearby the star, or that its orbit is eliptical? There's plenty of stars where we *HAVEN'T* found any planets, not because they do not exist there (though they very well may not) but that they are in a configuration that does not lend itself easily detected with this method. As far as I know, it would be very difficult to detect a system exactly like ours from any signifigant distance using current methods (the gas giants are very far out, and would probably require years of constant observation as it takes forever for Jupiter, Saturn, etc to go around the sun).
That's the biggest problems with basing any life-away-from-earth arguments on current exoplanetary data, it's very very very scewed because of the limitations of our current resources and methods. Perhaps when the Terrestrial Planet Finder comes along, we might be able to find some REAL answers about this.
(Note: I agree fully that the systems found thusfar would not be very good for habitable planets, with the exceptions of the planets being moons of the gas giants, which does present its own unique difficulties for life).
Interesting comment, however it doesnt' contain within it a single example, or any reasoning to back up your statements.
you obviously have not read enough history or cared enough to understand all the issues involved in any sort of religious proscription of science,
Well, I can't see how that's obvious, considering you didn't give examples of anything I said that was obviously wrong/naive. I'm a physics major, and an engineer, so I'm obviously not some luddite/technophobe (quite the opposite, I'm a total geek when it comes to technology, but that doesn't mean I think that all technology is a good idea).
i abhor your self-righteousness and petty,rambling morality.
example?
what you think is right is borrowed from some piece of history and a precedent made by individuals concerned with control and power for their own betterment and continued dominance. you are naive if you believe otherwise.
Perhaps you could clarify that statement, it's very ambiguous and I'm not altogether sure what you mean. Do you mean that my moral views are simply a product of the will of others who are trying to control the population? (religeous leaders?)
Anyways, you have made the error of responding to my post as a whole rather than individual statements/arguments within it, and did not manage to invalidate a single thing I said. You didn't give one example of anything I said which was flawed, but simply insulted my understanding of the subject (which, of course, you have no objective means of judging, nor do you attempt to point out the problems you perceive in my understanding).
You claim me to be self righteous, but do not demonstrate it. Rambling, perhaps by the length of the post, but if you are going to make insulting and/or strongly worded claims, you ought to at least back the statement up somehow, otherwise you're simply adding more hot air to the great hot air ballon that is slashdot.
It's these generic "what you said sucks" posts that really detract from the discussion environment here. If you don't agree witih what I say, feel free to demonstrate/prove that it was wrong. Insulting tone and nebulous, general statements do not serve the discussion, and really make you sound like an... inconsiderate individual, so to speak.
Feel free to expand on your post. If I'm being self-rigteous (which I was careful not to be, nowhere in my post did I advocate my moral standards, or even define them, or claim that I had a superior morality) then feel free to show me. Otherwise I'm sure there's plenty of other articles for you to troll.
to say "You May Not Persue That Knowledge" is a religeous argument, and nothing else.
Now come on, that's an obviously false statement. Often times technology can be dangerous. Sometimes its in blatent ways, like the development of weapons of mass destruction. Other times the technology is more subtily dangerous, dangerous to society as a whole by destabilizing it, desensitizing it, demoralizing it... etc. (that's demoralizing as in removing morale, not morals).
Cloning technology could cause a signifigant destabilization of our society. Clones may feel resentment against their "original", or may feel that they have to live up to their predicessor (especially in the case of famous people being cloned). Add to that the fact that it is almost trivial to get a sample of someone's DNA (handshake, hairbrush, possibly even a urine sample), and you have the makings for some rather bad possibilities indeed.
There are non-moral reasons to ban cloning, especially considering the people that could be upset at seeing serious defects in their clones, etc (it is not an easy thing, remember how many sheep died of horrible disfiguration before dolly).
And as for "legislating morality" in this respect, I applaud any politician that sticks up for what they think is right. That's the purpose of lawmakers, to do what they think is right/best, that's why they are elected. If you do not think that they will support your views, then DO NOT VOTE FOR THEM. Everyone gets a certain amount of say, and we all must live with that, and accept whatever the will of the rest of society is, for better or for worse. If you strongly disagree, organize political protests, promote someone who agrees with your views, and VOTE. If you don't do this, then you have no weight in complaining about it!
There are a lot of people out there that think that human life is something special, and that we ought not be screwing around with it. Politicians which take a stand on this issue probably feel that they will be supported in doing so, and I think that idea has merrit. If you don't like it, then too bad, there's plenty of countries in this world to live in, you can pick one, no one is forcing you to stay (I'm assuming you live in a democracy).
Maybe if they impose enough one size fits all regulations, it will finally wake everyone up to the evil of a strong central government.
Strong central government isn't such a bad thing... the more power given to the local government, the more local laws differ in important ways (thus making complying with said laws while travelling more difficult). It also allows for more abuse of local minorities.
As other posters have mentioned, this stuff is most effectively used when it draws a "line", so to speak, against the rioters that they do not cross. This serves to contain them, and those that attempt to cross this line, knowing that it will injure them, deserve their fate.
I think that so long as this stuff is not abused (and I suppose all technology is abused to some extent) signifigantly, it's a great thing. Much better than tear gas or beating people with sticks! And lets face it, not all political demonstrations are peaceful like Ghandi... sometimes the people get so mad, and get that mob mentality that they just start breaking things. No one wins in that situation, so anything nonlethal/non-harmful that can prevent that is a good thing in my book.
I would not approve of spraying this onto large stationary crowds except under extreme conditions.
Excellent response. I wish you would have said this originally, as it makes much more sense and is also much more reasonable.
Sure, I'll agree then that patents should be not be applied to digital representations, however I also feel that sufficiently complex algorithms or software concepts should be allowed to be patented. (No, I don't mean one-click buying, that's just common sense there, I'm talking about things like a codek or something). I think, of course, that such things need to have mechanisms to prevent their abuse (once again, look to one-click).
Anyways thanks again for the response, I appreciate the clarification.
This makes no sense. Taken to the extreme (as you appear to be doing...) it leads us to the idea that anything which can be mathematically described in discrete detail can be mapped to the integer space. Imagine, if you will, that any invention that can be created in our 3 dimensions has some representation in a computer (CAD design, verbal description, whatever). Now, that's digital information, and thus mapping directly to an absurdly (and incontemplatably) huge integer.
So that leads us to the idea that anything that can be described in a quantitative way with finite detail should not be patentable. Or, rather, the numbers themselves which contain the information (along with all suffiently similar numbers) should not be allowed to be patented. I think that every invention ever made falls in this catagory (unless you can come up with a USEFUL invention that requires infinite detail of some kind, or cannot be described by either math or language).
I really hate how the patent system is sometimes abused, and I agree that the whole issue of Intellectual Property needs to be debated and rethought, however, what you are saying is clearly rediculous, because you're abstracting away the notion of an idea to the point that it's simply a number which the idea is encoded in, and thus not patentable.
Nice math, poor reasoning.
(This is not an attack on you, however I have no idea how you got modded up to +4 insightful.)
The guy that wrote "78.000" appears to have been GERMAN (looking up the domain his web site is). I don't know *ANYONE* here in the US that uses the decimal point like that. Honestly, I think that commas in numbers are okay (Makes their order of magnitude so much easier to figure out at a glance). I don't see why there's anything wrong with using commas in such things. I had heard from someone that those were being phased out in the scientific community, however I honestly do not see the problem they present. Commas are different than decimal points.
Also, the AMERICAN way of doing things is not always backwards. Our unit system is from ENGLAND (my gosh, we didn't make most of it up) and yes, I hate it and wish we'd somehow gone to metric, but that does not mean to say that the way we write numbers "37,395,396" is bad. Also, I don't think that if I wrote 75,000 as "7.5e4" that that would necessarily be a good thing. Big numbers, small numbers, but totally medium size numbers, it's like overkill and complicates it (yeah, you save a digit, but at what price?
I have to disagree with you that the way americans do things is always backwards. Look at how much of the world's scientific and technological advancements come from the US. Everything from personal computers to software (GUI, hyperlinks, exokernel, C/C++/Java, etc... all invented here) and most importantly the internet (ARPANet). Also think OSes (Windows, UNIX, BSD, MacOS). I don't think we're entirely backwards.
Granted units of "feet" and "inches" and "miles" don't make a lot of sense, but neither does "seconds" or "hours" and people still use that!
Slashdot Mirror
There are good and evil humans (I see the Bill Gates Borg icon as I type....)--what is it about AI that makes people think it will automatically be evil?
Interesting point. However I think it's more likely that AI (if was smart enough and objective enough) would think that humans are evil (because on the whole we are selfish, etc). Why should AIs value human life, especially if we refuse to value theirs?
Just a thought.
How did this parent get modereated up? Three of Grabs posts are +4 or more, yet none of them are remotely correct! He didn't read the part about the catapult, (it catapults a water rocket, thus it doesn't need to achieve a very high velocity) and he ignores the simplicity of the design. V2's worked just fine without fancy control systems; it's just plain not necessary if your tragectory is simple.
I agree that math is a fundamentally important part of engineering, but some things work just fine by trial and error.
Fortran 77 is certainly not dead, I have a job as an undergraduate at Cornell University, paralellizing a magnetohydrodynamics code in F77 to work on Cornell's Velocity Cluster (it's been mentioned on slashdot before for other research conducted on it). F77 may be a horrid language, which is about as fun as VB to use, but it's still very useful, and it has everything my advisor and his russian astrophysicist collaborators really need - FILE I/O, matrices, and of course we can use MPI, the Message Passing Interface, a well known standard in parallel computing.
You can check out so me of our research at: www.astro.cornell.edu/us-rus/.
BTW, I hate F77 but even I have to admit that it's a better choice for them considering they are rather old and do not have time/will to learn anything new programming wise.
Isn't there some kind software authentication on the X Box that keeps just any x86 program from being executed on it (i.e. it only allows registered games to play)?
Might this not be a problem with porting?
Just a thought.
Compile-time branch prediction is not such a great idea. You must profile the program which some fixed data set. With hardware branch prediction, the prediction tables dynamically adjust based on the execution of the program. Branch prediction combined with speculative execution is often just as good as predicated execution (i believe you are referring to this).
Not necessarily, in fact many branches in programs are caused by loops (if you are looping from, say, 1 to 100, 99 times out of that 100 you WILL branch, and the compiler knows this). Also, if you use a language or language extension that lets you predict your own branches (versions of C++ do this, obviously assembly would do this), which, if you were in a tight loop you would probably want to do, then you'd be fine! And there's no reason you can't have an okay hardware branch prediction system that can be overridden by the program itself... simple branch prediction is very easy to implement in hardware, but it's not perfect.
If you don't do branch prediction, parallel instruction units, multiple issue/retire, etc, etc...what do you have??? You have a slow processor certainly suitable for embedded applications bot not for modern general-purpose computing.
Adding parallel instruction units is pretty trivial, scheduling them is not. But even if you can schedule them 50% efficiently (which is nowhere near as difficult as scheduling them 95% efficiently) and you can issue/retire multple instructions simultaneously, then you're still in the ball park, and in fact using a better ISA than x86, with things like predication, etc, could easily make up for some of that. Add to that that many many applications are limited by MEMORY SPEED and not processor speed, and you start to realize that your processor CAN be reasonably fast compared to an atholon with the same bus speed and io specs. In fact, putting the IO controller on your processor would shave a few cycles from your accesses, and wouldn't be super hard to do. Not only that, but there's no-one saying that you can't use nice standard external L3 caches to supplement your own.
And no, a bunch of guys with bachelors degrees and no experience can't build any decent general-purose processor. I'm not talking FPGA's because you can't use those to make a processor that is anywhere close to an Athlon. You need architects, logic designers, layout designers, packaging experts, fab experts, etc etc etc. Then there are so many subtle design issues such as precise exceptions, I/O, etc.
Not talking about FGPAs? That's what most of the artical was about, didn't you read it? I will definately agree that if you can't use FGPAs, it becomes a bit impractical (however students at the Rochester Institute of Technology, one of the places I applied for college, routinely cook up their own chips there, without being lpackaging experts or fab experts, etc...). That's not what the artical or the slashdot posting was really about anyways!
I don't think anyone seriously thinks they can do as well as hundreds of millions of dollars of development work, however doing reasonably good compared to them isn't really that impossible...
ISA's are mostly irrelevant in terms of performance potential (except for IA-64 which I will get to). Both AMD and Intel devote a (small) portion of their transistor budget to dynamically convert the CISC instructions into RISC-like "micro-ops". Thus the actual execution core of the AMD K7 and Intel P6 micro-architectures are very similar to say the MIPS R10000 core. Now if Intel and AMD had a decent ISA to begin with, they could devote those transistors (used to convert CISC to RISC) to things like bigger caches. Thus the performance penalty of using a lousy ISA is really not that much as evident by the success of Intel and AMD in raw computational power.
I don't know about that one... I've read much about various architectures, even some about the IA-64 architecture (I'm rather excited about it, because a group of scientists here used it to achieve a threefold increase in their finite-element simulation performance using Itanium processors). I would say that having a lousy ISA constricts what compile-time optimisations can be done dramatically. Look at things such as compile-time branch prediction/prefetch instruction, predication bits, register rotation (granted that need not be part of the ISA, however to take full advantage of it, you have to know it's going to be there), speculative loads, cache hints, etc... You just can't do most of that stuff if your ISA doesn't support it! Implicit paralellism is often not good enough for intense applications. Also you must balance this against design issues with things like multiple instruction lengths, and worst of all about the x86- lack of registers! I'm quite aware that modern x86 implementations have many more internal registers, however that CANNOT POSSIBLY BE AS GOOD as having more visible, usable registers.
Often times, it's the compiler (or the programmer) that knows best, it sees the big picture. Having an ISA that doesn't allow you to define parallism, that doesn't allow you to save cycles in critical parts of loops, preload things, and makes you do a lot of unecessary branching, that CERTAINLY has a lot to do with performance. And lets not forget about SIMD instructions, or vector-based register operations (okay I know that hasn't been popular for a long time, but when you have a really slow processor it's actually rather attractive).
Your comment about "RISC chips are really not all that complex" is extremely ignorant and uneducated.
I actually meant to say that "RISC chips do not really need to be all that complex." If you don't do branch prediction, or register renaming/rotation, if you don't do multiple parallel instruction units, they are actually not that bad. I argue that a bunch of guys with bachelors degrees from a decent school CAN design something reasonably modern, just not as fancy and overly complex as an x86 CPU. I don't think the point of rolling your own CPU is to make something better than what you can buy for $100 at a computer show, but rather to make explore something that's quite explorable.
Also notice I didn't mention Itanium anywhere... that would be a nightmare, trying to design something even remotely similar. There's nothing too bad about doing explicit parallelism, in fact I would think that it's actually easier than implicit parallism, however some of the features they include are just wacky!
Then again, what do I know?
Designing a modern microprocessor can not be done by amateurs or a group of people with a B.S. degrees in electrical engineering. Sure, many of us have taken undergraduate architecture classes and maybe have designed a simple pipelined microprocessor in Mentor Graphics or VHDL/Verilog. Some of us maybe even implemented it with FPGAs.
That's a very misleading statement, as you define MODERN as meaning something bloated and complex like AMD/Intel chips. The problem isn't that making a MODERN processor is very difficult, it's that implementing a poorly designed ISA is. If you insist on using x86 (I would *NEVER* make an x86 processor on my life) then of course you'll never get anywhere. I do not think, however, that it would be that difficult to make a full MIPS R2000 chip, ala Nintendo 64. Most MIPS instructions are very simple to implement, it becomes mostly an issue of pipeline control, and then caching/memory interfacing. I will grant that the designing of an FPU from scratch would be somewhat difficult (the MIPS processor I designed lacked an FPU, so I have not done that). MIPS, or heck even a PowerPC chip would not be prohibitively complex. There's no future in CISC, and I do not see why you choose to use that as your metric for determining feasability. RISC chips are really not all that complex (depends on how many execution units you want, etc) especially if you use a simple and well-thought-out ISA.
I don't think many people honestly WANT to implement x86, because it's so difficult to do, and it is difficult to add cool features to, whereas RISC ISAs are usually rather simple to extend in many ways.
Just because an ISA is not created by Intel does nto make it modern (in fact, the x86 ISA is the LEAST modern ISA still in wide use).
Just a thought. (disclaimer: I'm not a computer engineer, and never will be. I'm a CS/Physics major, and I've taken one class in computer architecture)
Needing a conference table, he created a Periodic Table
Then wood this be a meta-table?
*ducks*
Justin
I think we're about to slashdot the north pole for the first time in history!
Hope it doesn't make the ozone hole bigger...
Slim, plastic LCDs sewn into fabric could display e-mail or text messages on your sleeve.' Yeah, just what I've always wanted... now those dumb t-shirts that advertise for everything will be animated... Seriously, will this technology end up being better and brighter than organic LEDs? Just a thought... Justin
Does anyone else just feel absolutely tiny when they find thousands of entire galaxies in a small patch of the sky? Galaxies contain billions of stars, and God knows how many planets... Kinda makes the silly things we argue about here on slashdot seem just that- silly.
Just a thought.
I am an undergraduate at Cornell University, and I use the Velocity Cluster, the largest cluster of Windows boxes in the world. It's been mentioned on slashdot before, and the system there is actually pretty cool. Anyways, I had remembered seeing that Cornell, in partnership with several other universities, was doing something very similar to this.
The page about the Cornell Computational Materials Institute can be found here.
There's some pretty nifty stuff going on with that... crack propagation is an especially important problem in materials science, and it's nice to see that these large computers can be used to help solve it.
Okay that post didn't make much sense. I think it's because it's almost 5 oclock in the morning here and I haven't slept yet. Pardon my errors.
Justin
After reading the artical, I found a few things to be disturbing...
:)
First of all, he showed very little of his actual data. This makes it difficult to tell if his interpretation is correct.
Thirdly, what the heck was this guy smoking when he came up with search phrases. Most of these phrases seem to be tangental to the main purpose of most web sitees on the internet.
Finally, Timothy, why didn't you put the foot icon by the story?
It seems to me that in a way, the web is like an organism, whose smaller constituents are constantly (or not so constantly, depending on the webmaster) renewing themselves. It's a truely adaptive medium, and thus drastic change in short times like this as interest shifts should be quite expected.
That said, this is one of the many ways in which Google is an invaluable tool for research. Not just finding information, but generating it. Thanks Google!
I guess I don't really see the point of breaking Microsoft up, (look at what happenned to the baby bells) however I think there are some great ways to keep them from being anticompetative:
:))
1. Open up their APIs, etc... (Cool things like Lindows will be 100% legal then
2. Fix their pricing so that it is uniform to all OEMs (so that OEMs will not be persecuted individually for carrying a competing product, like Linux or Netscape)
3. Fine them for blatent lying in court (have they commited perjury?)
4. As reparations for breaking the law, force them to issue free copies of software to schools in poor neighborhoods, etc...
I just don't think that drastic solutions are going to work here... But in a way, I almost don't CARE about microsoft's monopoly, because it's almost a given that the desktop computer will lose its prevelance once Ubiquetous Computing (ala MIT's Oxygen, etc) becomes a reality. Just so long as they don't control *THAT*, I'm happy.
It is funny to see AMD on microsoft's side, since MS has been very pro-Intel for a long time.
Cheers,
Justin
No migration happens because photons have 0 rest mass, and therefore don't have intertia.
Ahh, yes... a very common mistake by the non-physicist. It seems to make sense that something that has zero rest mass cannot possibly have inertia. This is, however, completely wrong. The problem is that massless particals travel at the speed of light, which is where some interesting things happen in the equations. We start out with the general equation:
E^2 = m^2*c^4+p^2*c^2
Substituting 0 for m, we can solve for p = E/c. It's well known that photons carry energy, and thus they must carry momentum. (There are other methods of deriving this, however I will not get into them... pretty much all waves carry momentum, one way or another).
How else would projects like the Astronomical Society's Solar Sail function?
As for this being the primary reason that optronics are better than electronics, I'm not entirely sure... definately massless particals are in general better for things like this (where you want maximum information carried for a minimum amount of energy, in a minimum amount of time). Photons typically propagate faster than electronic signals, and optical circuits usually have a much higher bandwitdth due to frequency-level multiplexing.
Also, it is possible to use physical properties of photons to compute fast fourier transforms, which are especially important for digital signal processing. Not to mention the amazingly fast access times of ultra-huge holographic databases.
Dislaimer: I'm not a physicist, but I'm studying to become one.
-Justin
First, we need to find an extra-solar system in which Earth-sized planets exist. It's now believed that these are fairly few and far between. The reason is that a vast majority of the gas giant systems we've discovered so far have their gas giants in either really close orbits to their stars, or are highly eliptical with passes close to their stars. In these situations, Earth-like planets would likely be tossed into their stars, or more likely, tossed into open space, by the gravitational effect of the giants.
Isn't this related to the gravitational method that we are using? I mean, isn't the dopplar shift signifigantly easier to detect in the case that the large planet is nearby the star, or that its orbit is eliptical? There's plenty of stars where we *HAVEN'T* found any planets, not because they do not exist there (though they very well may not) but that they are in a configuration that does not lend itself easily detected with this method. As far as I know, it would be very difficult to detect a system exactly like ours from any signifigant distance using current methods (the gas giants are very far out, and would probably require years of constant observation as it takes forever for Jupiter, Saturn, etc to go around the sun).
That's the biggest problems with basing any life-away-from-earth arguments on current exoplanetary data, it's very very very scewed because of the limitations of our current resources and methods. Perhaps when the Terrestrial Planet Finder comes along, we might be able to find some REAL answers about this.
(Note: I agree fully that the systems found thusfar would not be very good for habitable planets, with the exceptions of the planets being moons of the gas giants, which does present its own unique difficulties for life).
I guess this is a case where life imitates art? ;)
Interesting comment, however it doesnt' contain within it a single example, or any reasoning to back up your statements.
you obviously have not read enough history or cared enough to understand all the issues involved in any sort of religious proscription of science,
Well, I can't see how that's obvious, considering you didn't give examples of anything I said that was obviously wrong/naive. I'm a physics major, and an engineer, so I'm obviously not some luddite/technophobe (quite the opposite, I'm a total geek when it comes to technology, but that doesn't mean I think that all technology is a good idea).
i abhor your self-righteousness and petty,rambling morality.
example?
what you think is right is borrowed from some piece of history and a precedent made by individuals concerned with control and power for their own betterment and continued dominance. you are naive if you believe otherwise.
Perhaps you could clarify that statement, it's very ambiguous and I'm not altogether sure what you mean. Do you mean that my moral views are simply a product of the will of others who are trying to control the population? (religeous leaders?)
Anyways, you have made the error of responding to my post as a whole rather than individual statements/arguments within it, and did not manage to invalidate a single thing I said. You didn't give one example of anything I said which was flawed, but simply insulted my understanding of the subject (which, of course, you have no objective means of judging, nor do you attempt to point out the problems you perceive in my understanding).
You claim me to be self righteous, but do not demonstrate it. Rambling, perhaps by the length of the post, but if you are going to make insulting and/or strongly worded claims, you ought to at least back the statement up somehow, otherwise you're simply adding more hot air to the great hot air ballon that is slashdot.
It's these generic "what you said sucks" posts that really detract from the discussion environment here. If you don't agree witih what I say, feel free to demonstrate/prove that it was wrong. Insulting tone and nebulous, general statements do not serve the discussion, and really make you sound like an... inconsiderate individual, so to speak.
Feel free to expand on your post. If I'm being self-rigteous (which I was careful not to be, nowhere in my post did I advocate my moral standards, or even define them, or claim that I had a superior morality) then feel free to show me. Otherwise I'm sure there's plenty of other articles for you to troll.
to say "You May Not Persue That Knowledge" is a religeous argument, and nothing else.
Now come on, that's an obviously false statement. Often times technology can be dangerous. Sometimes its in blatent ways, like the development of weapons of mass destruction. Other times the technology is more subtily dangerous, dangerous to society as a whole by destabilizing it, desensitizing it, demoralizing it... etc. (that's demoralizing as in removing morale, not morals).
Cloning technology could cause a signifigant destabilization of our society. Clones may feel resentment against their "original", or may feel that they have to live up to their predicessor (especially in the case of famous people being cloned). Add to that the fact that it is almost trivial to get a sample of someone's DNA (handshake, hairbrush, possibly even a urine sample), and you have the makings for some rather bad possibilities indeed.
There are non-moral reasons to ban cloning, especially considering the people that could be upset at seeing serious defects in their clones, etc (it is not an easy thing, remember how many sheep died of horrible disfiguration before dolly).
And as for "legislating morality" in this respect, I applaud any politician that sticks up for what they think is right. That's the purpose of lawmakers, to do what they think is right/best, that's why they are elected. If you do not think that they will support your views, then DO NOT VOTE FOR THEM. Everyone gets a certain amount of say, and we all must live with that, and accept whatever the will of the rest of society is, for better or for worse. If you strongly disagree, organize political protests, promote someone who agrees with your views, and VOTE. If you don't do this, then you have no weight in complaining about it!
There are a lot of people out there that think that human life is something special, and that we ought not be screwing around with it. Politicians which take a stand on this issue probably feel that they will be supported in doing so, and I think that idea has merrit. If you don't like it, then too bad, there's plenty of countries in this world to live in, you can pick one, no one is forcing you to stay (I'm assuming you live in a democracy).
Maybe if they impose enough one size fits all regulations, it will finally wake everyone up to the evil of a strong central government.
Strong central government isn't such a bad thing... the more power given to the local government, the more local laws differ in important ways (thus making complying with said laws while travelling more difficult). It also allows for more abuse of local minorities.
As other posters have mentioned, this stuff is most effectively used when it draws a "line", so to speak, against the rioters that they do not cross. This serves to contain them, and those that attempt to cross this line, knowing that it will injure them, deserve their fate.
I think that so long as this stuff is not abused (and I suppose all technology is abused to some extent) signifigantly, it's a great thing. Much better than tear gas or beating people with sticks! And lets face it, not all political demonstrations are peaceful like Ghandi... sometimes the people get so mad, and get that mob mentality that they just start breaking things. No one wins in that situation, so anything nonlethal/non-harmful that can prevent that is a good thing in my book.
I would not approve of spraying this onto large stationary crowds except under extreme conditions.
Excellent response. I wish you would have said this originally, as it makes much more sense and is also much more reasonable.
Sure, I'll agree then that patents should be not be applied to digital representations, however I also feel that sufficiently complex algorithms or software concepts should be allowed to be patented. (No, I don't mean one-click buying, that's just common sense there, I'm talking about things like a codek or something). I think, of course, that such things need to have mechanisms to prevent their abuse (once again, look to one-click).
Anyways thanks again for the response, I appreciate the clarification.
This makes no sense. Taken to the extreme (as you appear to be doing...) it leads us to the idea that anything which can be mathematically described in discrete detail can be mapped to the integer space. Imagine, if you will, that any invention that can be created in our 3 dimensions has some representation in a computer (CAD design, verbal description, whatever). Now, that's digital information, and thus mapping directly to an absurdly (and incontemplatably) huge integer.
So that leads us to the idea that anything that can be described in a quantitative way with finite detail should not be patentable. Or, rather, the numbers themselves which contain the information (along with all suffiently similar numbers) should not be allowed to be patented. I think that every invention ever made falls in this catagory (unless you can come up with a USEFUL invention that requires infinite detail of some kind, or cannot be described by either math or language).
I really hate how the patent system is sometimes abused, and I agree that the whole issue of Intellectual Property needs to be debated and rethought, however, what you are saying is clearly rediculous, because you're abstracting away the notion of an idea to the point that it's simply a number which the idea is encoded in, and thus not patentable.
Nice math, poor reasoning.
(This is not an attack on you, however I have no idea how you got modded up to +4 insightful.)
The guy that wrote "78.000" appears to have been GERMAN (looking up the domain his web site is). I don't know *ANYONE* here in the US that uses the decimal point like that. Honestly, I think that commas in numbers are okay (Makes their order of magnitude so much easier to figure out at a glance). I don't see why there's anything wrong with using commas in such things. I had heard from someone that those were being phased out in the scientific community, however I honestly do not see the problem they present. Commas are different than decimal points.
Also, the AMERICAN way of doing things is not always backwards. Our unit system is from ENGLAND (my gosh, we didn't make most of it up) and yes, I hate it and wish we'd somehow gone to metric, but that does not mean to say that the way we write numbers "37,395,396" is bad. Also, I don't think that if I wrote 75,000 as "7.5e4" that that would necessarily be a good thing. Big numbers, small numbers, but totally medium size numbers, it's like overkill and complicates it (yeah, you save a digit, but at what price?
I have to disagree with you that the way americans do things is always backwards. Look at how much of the world's scientific and technological advancements come from the US. Everything from personal computers to software (GUI, hyperlinks, exokernel, C/C++/Java, etc... all invented here) and most importantly the internet (ARPANet). Also think OSes (Windows, UNIX, BSD, MacOS). I don't think we're entirely backwards.
Granted units of "feet" and "inches" and "miles" don't make a lot of sense, but neither does "seconds" or "hours" and people still use that!