First off, Intel have never OWNED Rambus - they merely license their technology for use in their various products. Anyone saying otherwise is simply talking rubbish.
However, they DID have a fairly serious financial deal that enabled them to purchase lots of Rambus stock at knock down prices once they had met certain requirements - this indicates more than a passing interest in the wellbeing of the Rambus company.
Personally I'm still not convinced that Rambus ever had that much to offer on the technology front, so Intel's claim that they were solely in it for the technology strikes me as doubtful.
RDRAM has lots of extra bandwidth for sure, but when Intel forced the system on to the industry there was really no need for vast bandwidths such as these.
Moreover, RDRAM has really no electrical characterstics that are superior to those of SDRAM, and the gap in cost is considerable even today. Furthermore RDRAM isn't really any more 'future-proof' than SDRAM, especially when you consider the future potential of DDR.
So maybe Intel have finally just woken up and 'smelt the coffee', so to speak, realising that Rambus doesn't hold the answer to all the technical problems faced by the memory industry.
Quite apart from the technical problems CAUSED by Rambus - who remembers the i820 fiasco?
Lots of pro-Rambus zealots like to point at the success of the Playstation 2 (which employs RDRAM technology in favour of more traditional SDRAM or even SDRAM DDR technology) and intimate that this somehow relates to PCs and that Rambus is therefore "better". Saying that Rambus is "better" just because it is used in a certain product is ridiculous. Windows is fairly widely used but we all know that it's not necessarily better...
So to sum up:
1. Intel are wise to get out while they still can.
I like SCiTE/Scintilla, which is a very simple editor on top of a high-quality text editing control (which can I believe be used as a drop-in replacement for RichEdit on Win32, as well as working on GTK).
It fits in with my software philosophy - small, fast, works well, looks nice, EASILY configurable (contrast with [X]Emacs), cleanly implemented in a reasonably modern language (C++), no restrictive licencing (ie. not GPL).
I was interested to read on Boeing's page that the Truss (which they manufactured for NASA) will end up being the length of a football field. It's hard to imagine when you actually see the thing being delivered to NASA. This will be one awesome piece of kit!
The link to Boeing's page seems to be too long for Slash to let me post it without corrupting it with spaces (!) so here it is (minus the initial "http://"):
I admit to knowing little about the Alpha compiler, but it wouldn't be too hard to imagine a better compiler than gcc. It's reliable and free but it's hardly the most modern / efficient optimising compiler.
What do you mean "can we say"? What does this phrase mean?
If you mean "could we use one of these for a PCMCIA laptop battery" then the answer is obviously no - but you can't have meant this surely, as that would be too daft...
This article must have taken all of a minute
to write. As for invoking Freud, he must be
turning in his grave, being associated with
such a thinly-argued piece of drivel.
However, I must now confess I was being deliberately provocative with my original post. I don't REALLY think programming is applied maths, anymore than I REALLY think everyone should learn functional programming. In theory though both these things are attractive ideas.
Of course, the gulf between theory and practice is considerable.
`Agreed, the IO system requires/some/ knowledge of monads (but not necessarily a complete delve into the details). You could of course use stream-based IO...
Actually come to think of it monads aren't even that complicated. In some ways they'd be more intuitive to people coming from an imperative programming background than are, say, higher-order functions (folds and the like).
The type system is another thing you only have to know a subset of to be able to do useful/instructive things. I strongly disagree that beginner languages should be dynamically typed: type discipline is probably the FIRST thing a prospective programmer should learn, and the Haskell type system provides a beautiful environment in which to do it!
I will concede, however, that the Hindley-Milner algorithm used by the Haskell typechecker can give phenomenally unhelpful error messages. However, this is an active field of research.
There was a paper about beginners and the Haskell type system in the Journal of Functional Programming recently (March 2000? Can't remember). The authors proposed a graphical system to learn how the type system of the function subset of SML works. I thought it might be interesting to apply the same ideas to Haskell, and considered taking this on for my final-year project.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, Intel have never OWNED Rambus - they merely license their technology for use in their various products. Anyone saying otherwise is simply talking rubbish.
However, they DID have a fairly serious financial deal that enabled them to purchase lots of Rambus stock at knock down prices once they had met certain requirements - this indicates more than a passing interest in the wellbeing of the Rambus company.
Personally I'm still not convinced that Rambus ever had that much to offer on the technology front, so Intel's claim that they were solely in it for the technology strikes me as doubtful. RDRAM has lots of extra bandwidth for sure, but when Intel forced the system on to the industry there was really no need for vast bandwidths such as these.
Moreover, RDRAM has really no electrical characterstics that are superior to those of SDRAM, and the gap in cost is considerable even today. Furthermore RDRAM isn't really any more 'future-proof' than SDRAM, especially when you consider the future potential of DDR.
So maybe Intel have finally just woken up and 'smelt the coffee', so to speak, realising that Rambus doesn't hold the answer to all the technical problems faced by the memory industry.
Quite apart from the technical problems CAUSED by Rambus - who remembers the i820 fiasco?
Lots of pro-Rambus zealots like to point at the success of the Playstation 2 (which employs RDRAM technology in favour of more traditional SDRAM or even SDRAM DDR technology) and intimate that this somehow relates to PCs and that Rambus is therefore "better". Saying that Rambus is "better" just because it is used in a certain product is ridiculous. Windows is fairly widely used but we all know that it's not necessarily better...
So to sum up:
1. Intel are wise to get out while they still can.
The links seem to be broken for me.
Here are the correct ones:
NanoTechnology Magazine
Open Sourcing Nanotechnology Research and Development
HTH.
Hi there,
If this beast "the Nanowriter" pumps out electron beams of only a 5 nanometre diameter, now we can get a truly infinite resolution monitor!
It could happen.
I like SCiTE/Scintilla, which is a very simple editor on top of a high-quality text editing control (which can I believe be used as a drop-in replacement for RichEdit on Win32, as well as working on GTK).
It fits in with my software philosophy - small, fast, works well, looks nice, EASILY configurable (contrast with [X]Emacs), cleanly implemented in a reasonably modern language (C++), no restrictive licencing (ie. not GPL).
Take a look.
I was interested to read on Boeing's page that the Truss (which they manufactured for NASA) will end up being the length of a football field. It's hard to imagine when you actually see the thing being delivered to NASA. This will be one awesome piece of kit!
/ components_structure/integrated_truss.html
The link to Boeing's page seems to be too long for Slash to let me post it without corrupting it with spaces (!) so here it is (minus the initial "http://"):
www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/spacestation
There are plenty of photos of the Truss and other parts of the Shuttle payload at NASA's STS-92 homepage.
Play fair, we're not all trolls you know.
can be found here.
I bet you would.
Mozilla is like my arse - slow and full of shit.
Hmm, I'm not saying that GCHQ is the world's most ethical research institution, but to say it's the "precursor" to the NSA is ridiculous.
...least funny, except that is for Dilbert.
Slashdot is certainly on a humour strike today.
I admit to knowing little about the Alpha compiler, but it wouldn't be too hard to imagine a better compiler than gcc. It's reliable and free but it's hardly the most modern / efficient optimising compiler.
It's possibly the least funny thing I've ever read.
On the other hand, you could be joking - then maybe your message should "be posted in the humour section" (whatever that means).
Pardon?
What do you mean "can we say"? What does this phrase mean?
If you mean "could we use one of these for a PCMCIA laptop battery" then the answer is obviously no - but you can't have meant this surely, as that would be too daft...
That's right - and I'm sure Frued would have something to say about that...
This article must have taken all of a minute
to write. As for invoking Freud, he must be
turning in his grave, being associated with
such a thinly-argued piece of drivel.
Hurrah, someone else notices that Acorn's RISC OS was well ahead of the game on anti-aliasing.
The quality of anti-aliasing, even on my old ARM 2, beats anything I've seen on Windows.
And the `font blending' stuff from ~1997 was just the icing on the cake.
Shame it's dead, really. (and DIG that filer...)
Thanks for the advice.
:-)
However, I must now confess I was being deliberately provocative with my original post. I don't REALLY think programming is applied maths, anymore than I REALLY think everyone should learn functional programming. In theory though both these things are attractive ideas.
Of course, the gulf between theory and practice is considerable.
Can I be allowed to program again now?
It's still exceptionally irritating.
Maybe I should write myself a filter.
By the way, the automobile analogy is precisely the one I would have used to SUPPORT my point, had I remembered it... :-)
An intelligent post, but I don't agree with the first point.
:-)
Haskell is NOT useless to learn if you don't intend to `use it'. It's an excellent way of learning (i) type discipline and (ii) algorithm design.
As I said before, we learn Haskell first here at Oxford, and none of the graduates seem to have many problems getting jobs in the real world...
Obviously you've never seen functional programming. It gives you a new perspective.
There's no technical reason why you should have to deal with minutiae such as this.
Of course, no imperative language can ever hide all the messy details. But some hide more than others. C++ hides more than C (if it's used properly).
It's the same thing as saying "BASIC hides more details than assembler", which is true. It's just on a slightly higher level.
I'm neither, I'm a student of computation. :-)
;-)
Do you think I'd really be advocating using functional programming languages (see other thread) if I was a professional software engineer?
I'm not really interested in a flamewar either, and I don't feel I'm in one; call it a free exchange of views.
But you don't seem to understand the fundamental differences in attitude required by C and C++ programmers.
Anyway, hopefully you found some of my posts interesting.
`Agreed, the IO system requires /some/ knowledge of monads (but not necessarily a complete delve into the details). You could of course use stream-based IO...
Actually come to think of it monads aren't even that complicated. In some ways they'd be more intuitive to people coming from an imperative programming background than are, say, higher-order functions (folds and the like).
The type system is another thing you only have to know a subset of to be able to do useful/instructive things. I strongly disagree that beginner languages should be dynamically typed: type discipline is probably the FIRST thing a prospective programmer should learn, and the Haskell type system provides a beautiful environment in which to do it!
I will concede, however, that the Hindley-Milner algorithm used by the Haskell typechecker can give phenomenally unhelpful error messages. However, this is an active field of research.
There was a paper about beginners and the Haskell type system in the Journal of Functional Programming recently (March 2000? Can't remember). The authors proposed a graphical system to learn how the type system of the function subset of SML works. I thought it might be interesting to apply the same ideas to Haskell, and considered taking this on for my final-year project.
It's an interesting subject.