The real art is whatever you happen to be working on. This is as opposed to the digressio, which is the wasting of creative energy on things like what color your menu bar should be.
I wish I could post and mod the same thread. Yours seems to be the most enlightened post on this subject that I've ever read.
Linux zealots need to understand that commerce is not evil, that proprietary IP is not wrong, and they are not going to change the world. Once they accept these facts, they can make judgments about technology based on technology rather than on whacked-out hippie politics.
Well, let's see. I can print to my Bluetooth HP printer from my Bluetooth Palm. They just see each other and start printing, basically. (For obvious reasons of security, you have to explicitly pair the two devices as part of a one-time setup.)
What else? My laptop automatically sees my Bluetooth T68, and makes it available to me for lots of things, not the least of which is dialing out to the Internet over the T68 like you would a modem.
And, while I don't own this gear myself, my friend from Australia has a Sony video camera with Bluetooth, and he says he can print stills from it on his Bluetooth-equipped printer. Again, I don't own that stuff, so I won't swear to it. But he says it's neat.
It'd be easier and cheaper to just plug 'em in.
Cheaper, definitely. Bluetooth-equipped stuff is expensive, at least right now. But easier? No way. I haven't carried a cable with me, except the FireWire cable for my iPod and the power adapter for my laptop, in months. No more USB cables for printers or my Palm or my digital camera or any of that crap. It all just works.
Most of you will never buy a Mac, or switch to a Linux desktop, no matter what, because Windows is all you know, and all you care to know.
Ironically, it seems that a slightly different set of circumstances is actually prevailing. The Windows users out there are willing to try a Mac, and most of them prefer the Mac once they try it. It's the Linux zealots (and I use that word quite deliberately) who will never, ever even consider trying a Mac. Their objections, which usually are of the form "Mac OS X is proprietary," have little to do with the technical, ergonomic, or aesthetic merits of the Mac, which means they reject the Mac without even considering it.
Apple, of course, couldn't care less. Some people will never buy your product. Trying to cater to them is a going-out-of-business plan.
Have you ever heard the expression that evolution is done with you once you have kids? It's used to explain things like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer that typically affect people in middle or late-middle age, after they've had children. Because these diseases don't affect people's ability to reproduce, they're irrelevant in terms of natural selection. By the time you hit 45 or so, natural selection doesn't care about you.
Dude, Apple doesn't care about you. You claim not to like the Aqua interface-- which is distinctly a minority opinion, by the way. You say you don't own a Mac. You say you will never buy a Mac. You know what? Apple doesn't care. If you were a customer or a potential customer, Apple might care. But since you aren't, neither Apple nor natural selection (in the economic sense) have any use for you.
Yes, but this is the same company looking to make itself accessable to artist, etc, who want to display their creativity. Now they are going to lock it down so that everyone's Apple looks the same?
I know a lot of artists; I sort of move in a circle of friends who are all artists of one kind or another. Know how many of them like tweaking their Macs? None.
See, to the creative person, a Mac is just a tool. It's like a paintbrush or a typewriter or a videotape deck. Nobody wastes time and energy rearranging the buttons on their tape deck, or changing the way their pencil works. It's a tool, and you use it so you can get the real art done.
The tool should be effective, simple, and reliable, in that order.
Sometimes wireless stuff is just a pain in the ass.
Only if you're not using the right operating system. With OS X, wireless ethernet and Bluetooth both work pretty darned near perfectly. Wireless ethernet requires no set-up at all, and Bluetooth only requires "pairing" your devices (or whatever it's called; I don't have my Bluetooth gear in front of me right now).
Wireless stuff is not a pain in the ass. Some wireless implementations are a pain in the ass. Don't confuse the two.
They'll just use the money you spend on this movie to try to take away computers.
I'll happily donate my $7.50 if I can be assured that your computer will be among the first to go.
Nitwit.
Re:The thing I don't get about VLIW is this...
on
Itanium Problems
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· Score: 2
Even simple iterative algorithms can often be parallelized if your compiler is good enough. I remember using Power FORTRAN on an SGI Challenge L with-- I think-- 12 CPUs. Even when running simple code that just iterated over an array in memory, the compiler could unravel my inner loops for me and organize them in a way that would make the program run in parallel across all 12 CPUs.
Of course, there are certainly situations in which code can't be paralleized-- computing the Fibonacci sequence is a good example, because the value of F(n) depends on the value of F(n-1). But these are relatively rare.
Most non-trivial mathematical algorithms can either be calculated piecewise-- which gives you the advantages of out-of-order execution-- or in parallel.
Re:The thing I don't get about VLIW is this...
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 2
What? Any well parallelized code can scale linearly. Rendering with Renderman on IRIX scales linearly. (Don't know about Renderman on other OSs.) FEA with NASTRAN scales linearly. Hell, even compiling a big source tree scales linearly.
In many cases, doubling the number of processors will absolutely make it go twice as fast.
talk to Microsoft about licensing it, as they purchased Pacific Microsonics....
Okay, I know this is dumb, but at first I read this as, "the purchased Pacific Histrionics, which seems very much like the sort of company Microsoft would want to purchase.
Well, it amused me, anyway.
Re:The thing I don't get about VLIW is this...
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 2
When you can only use 1 or 2 of the 4 available execution units for most tasks, then you are throwing too much silicon at a problem that is better suited to more, smaller processors.
Are you, perhaps, discounting out-of-order execution? IANAEE, but it seems to me that it should be possible to keep the execution units busy almost all the time by using out-of-order techniques.
Note: this comment may have been blindingly stupid. I'm approaching the limits of my knowledge, here, and it shows.
Re:The thing I don't get about VLIW is this...
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 2
Why not just work on n-way SMP
Because SMP has already been done. It's possible, using non-uniform memory access technology and some clever cache management algorithms, to scale from a single CPU to 1,024 very easily; this is done every day with computers you can buy commercially. If there were a serious demand for it, we could scale even further using the same basic technology. Eventually you reach a limit where the different in latency between local memory and remote memory is too great, but dense fabrics and fast memory controllers mean that limit is pretty far off.
So you've got a machine with (say) 512 processors in it. To make it go twice as fast, you can either add 512 more processors-- and all of the infrastructure required to support them, which is considerable-- or you can replace them with 512 processors that are twice as fast. Or, for that matter, with 128 processors that are 8 times faster.
Even though we can parallelize, faster CPUs are a good thing.
Re:itanium is a solid chip from what I've seen...
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 4, Informative
In the future I envision every IT department having its own trash can sized nuclear reactor. No need for UPS.
I know this was a joke, but a lot of people won't understand how silly this comment is. A nuclear reactor can really be quite small... but all it will do for you is get hot.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that a nuclear reactor is really just a fancy steam generator. The nuclear pile gets hot (heat-- after neutrons-- is the primary by-product of a fission reaction) and that heat is used to boil water. Steam drives a generator which creates electricity from the kinetic energy of motion.
So a trashcan-sized nuclear reactor isn't such a fanciful idea. But the enormous closed-loop steam turbine generator attached to it may be somewhat unwieldy.
Now, if you want to talk super-high-efficiency fuel cells, you've got my attention.
Releasing your source under the BSD license means just that: that you're releasing your source. It means giving anyone and everyone the freedom to do whatever they want with your source.
If you don't want people to have that freedom, don't release the source under the BSD license. Release it under a license that restricts people's freedom to use your source. There are lots of licenses to choose from: the GPL, the Apple public source license, the Microsoft shared-source license, and others. These licenses are all essentially the same. They all say, "You can only use this code in limited ways."
There is a time and a place for a free license, and a time and place for a non-free license. The only trouble arises when people try-- deliberately, unfortunately-- to describe a non-free license as a free license through obfuscation, loose interpretation, and linguistic sleight-of-hand.
One aircraft, with pilot, is worth considerably more than one tango. Pilots in the US armed forces are trained to bring themselves and their aircraft home intact, even if it means breaking off an engagement to do so. He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another... and so on.
Um. No. The range of the AIM-120B and AIM-120C is at least 30 miles. That's the unclassified specification. The P3I will further increase that range substantially through the use of improved propulsion systems.
I've worked on some flight simulator code that described the capabilities and in-flight characteristics of the AIM-120B. That code is classified Secret, but I can tell you that the actual specs of the missile describe a range somewhat in excess of 30 miles.
But the most important thing about AMRAAM is its size. The AIM-54 can only be deployed on the F-14, while the AIM-120 can be carried by the F-15, F-16, F-18, F-22, and F-35. (C variant only on F-22 and F-35 internal carriages.)
So let's get this straight: this thing kills enemy fighters by delivering 100 KW of heat.
Probably not. Missiles like the AIM-120 are better for this. Especially when you couple the range of the AMRAAM (classified, but really far) with the power of the radar systems on the F-35, you have a first look, first shot, first kill system. In other words, the enemy aircraft is dead before he can even see you on his radar.
This weapon will be better suited to killing ground targets, like radar installations, and possibly to killing inbound AA or SA missiles. It doesn't take that much power, in the absolute sense, to kill either of those type of targets.
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The real art is whatever you happen to be working on. This is as opposed to the digressio, which is the wasting of creative energy on things like what color your menu bar should be.
I wish I could post and mod the same thread. Yours seems to be the most enlightened post on this subject that I've ever read.
Linux zealots need to understand that commerce is not evil, that proprietary IP is not wrong, and they are not going to change the world. Once they accept these facts, they can make judgments about technology based on technology rather than on whacked-out hippie politics.
Well, let's see. I can print to my Bluetooth HP printer from my Bluetooth Palm. They just see each other and start printing, basically. (For obvious reasons of security, you have to explicitly pair the two devices as part of a one-time setup.)
What else? My laptop automatically sees my Bluetooth T68, and makes it available to me for lots of things, not the least of which is dialing out to the Internet over the T68 like you would a modem.
And, while I don't own this gear myself, my friend from Australia has a Sony video camera with Bluetooth, and he says he can print stills from it on his Bluetooth-equipped printer. Again, I don't own that stuff, so I won't swear to it. But he says it's neat.
It'd be easier and cheaper to just plug 'em in.
Cheaper, definitely. Bluetooth-equipped stuff is expensive, at least right now. But easier? No way. I haven't carried a cable with me, except the FireWire cable for my iPod and the power adapter for my laptop, in months. No more USB cables for printers or my Palm or my digital camera or any of that crap. It all just works.
Most of you will never buy a Mac, or switch to a Linux desktop, no matter what, because Windows is all you know, and all you care to know.
Ironically, it seems that a slightly different set of circumstances is actually prevailing. The Windows users out there are willing to try a Mac, and most of them prefer the Mac once they try it. It's the Linux zealots (and I use that word quite deliberately) who will never, ever even consider trying a Mac. Their objections, which usually are of the form "Mac OS X is proprietary," have little to do with the technical, ergonomic, or aesthetic merits of the Mac, which means they reject the Mac without even considering it.
Apple, of course, couldn't care less. Some people will never buy your product. Trying to cater to them is a going-out-of-business plan.
Have you ever heard the expression that evolution is done with you once you have kids? It's used to explain things like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer that typically affect people in middle or late-middle age, after they've had children. Because these diseases don't affect people's ability to reproduce, they're irrelevant in terms of natural selection. By the time you hit 45 or so, natural selection doesn't care about you.
Dude, Apple doesn't care about you. You claim not to like the Aqua interface-- which is distinctly a minority opinion, by the way. You say you don't own a Mac. You say you will never buy a Mac. You know what? Apple doesn't care. If you were a customer or a potential customer, Apple might care. But since you aren't, neither Apple nor natural selection (in the economic sense) have any use for you.
You could sell your Mac on eBay, too. That would eliminate the problem of being unable to "customize" it.
A Mac without Mac OS (9, X, whichever) isn't a Mac. It's a PC with a Motorola CPU and a really nice case.
I have GNU/Linux installed on my Powerbook, and G4 at home and they both work better than Mac OS X!
Yeah, I'm sure Linux is great for running applications like MS Office, Toast, Photoshop, and VirtualPC.
Your lies make baby Jesus cry.
Can somebody tell me the difference between Apple and Microsoft other than the fact that Apple has less market share?
Apple has taste.
(Apologies to Steve J.)
Yes, but this is the same company looking to make itself accessable to artist, etc, who want to display their creativity. Now they are going to lock it down so that everyone's Apple looks the same?
I know a lot of artists; I sort of move in a circle of friends who are all artists of one kind or another. Know how many of them like tweaking their Macs? None.
See, to the creative person, a Mac is just a tool. It's like a paintbrush or a typewriter or a videotape deck. Nobody wastes time and energy rearranging the buttons on their tape deck, or changing the way their pencil works. It's a tool, and you use it so you can get the real art done.
The tool should be effective, simple, and reliable, in that order.
Hardware tweaks are very difficult though - no conventional changable BIOS. How are hardware upgrades done on Macs?
They're tough. You have to do a really complex installation process known in Mac circles as "plugging the fucking thing in."
Sometimes wireless stuff is just a pain in the ass.
Only if you're not using the right operating system. With OS X, wireless ethernet and Bluetooth both work pretty darned near perfectly. Wireless ethernet requires no set-up at all, and Bluetooth only requires "pairing" your devices (or whatever it's called; I don't have my Bluetooth gear in front of me right now).
Wireless stuff is not a pain in the ass. Some wireless implementations are a pain in the ass. Don't confuse the two.
Actually, I'm clearing 6 figures, thankyouverymuch.
Get fucked, thankyouverymuch. Nobody likes a braggart.
They'll just use the money you spend on this movie to try to take away computers.
I'll happily donate my $7.50 if I can be assured that your computer will be among the first to go.
Nitwit.
Even simple iterative algorithms can often be parallelized if your compiler is good enough. I remember using Power FORTRAN on an SGI Challenge L with-- I think-- 12 CPUs. Even when running simple code that just iterated over an array in memory, the compiler could unravel my inner loops for me and organize them in a way that would make the program run in parallel across all 12 CPUs.
Of course, there are certainly situations in which code can't be paralleized-- computing the Fibonacci sequence is a good example, because the value of F(n) depends on the value of F(n-1). But these are relatively rare.
Most non-trivial mathematical algorithms can either be calculated piecewise-- which gives you the advantages of out-of-order execution-- or in parallel.
What? Any well parallelized code can scale linearly. Rendering with Renderman on IRIX scales linearly. (Don't know about Renderman on other OSs.) FEA with NASTRAN scales linearly. Hell, even compiling a big source tree scales linearly.
In many cases, doubling the number of processors will absolutely make it go twice as fast.
talk to Microsoft about licensing it, as they purchased Pacific Microsonics....
Okay, I know this is dumb, but at first I read this as, "the purchased Pacific Histrionics, which seems very much like the sort of company Microsoft would want to purchase.
Well, it amused me, anyway.
When you can only use 1 or 2 of the 4 available execution units for most tasks, then you are throwing too much silicon at a problem that is better suited to more, smaller processors.
Are you, perhaps, discounting out-of-order execution? IANAEE, but it seems to me that it should be possible to keep the execution units busy almost all the time by using out-of-order techniques.
Note: this comment may have been blindingly stupid. I'm approaching the limits of my knowledge, here, and it shows.
FreeBSD isn't Linux....
Which is one of the very best things about it.
Why not just work on n-way SMP
Because SMP has already been done. It's possible, using non-uniform memory access technology and some clever cache management algorithms, to scale from a single CPU to 1,024 very easily; this is done every day with computers you can buy commercially. If there were a serious demand for it, we could scale even further using the same basic technology. Eventually you reach a limit where the different in latency between local memory and remote memory is too great, but dense fabrics and fast memory controllers mean that limit is pretty far off.
So you've got a machine with (say) 512 processors in it. To make it go twice as fast, you can either add 512 more processors-- and all of the infrastructure required to support them, which is considerable-- or you can replace them with 512 processors that are twice as fast. Or, for that matter, with 128 processors that are 8 times faster.
Even though we can parallelize, faster CPUs are a good thing.
In the future I envision every IT department having its own trash can sized nuclear reactor. No need for UPS.
I know this was a joke, but a lot of people won't understand how silly this comment is. A nuclear reactor can really be quite small... but all it will do for you is get hot.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that a nuclear reactor is really just a fancy steam generator. The nuclear pile gets hot (heat-- after neutrons-- is the primary by-product of a fission reaction) and that heat is used to boil water. Steam drives a generator which creates electricity from the kinetic energy of motion.
So a trashcan-sized nuclear reactor isn't such a fanciful idea. But the enormous closed-loop steam turbine generator attached to it may be somewhat unwieldy.
Now, if you want to talk super-high-efficiency fuel cells, you've got my attention.
Releasing your source under the BSD license means just that: that you're releasing your source. It means giving anyone and everyone the freedom to do whatever they want with your source.
If you don't want people to have that freedom, don't release the source under the BSD license. Release it under a license that restricts people's freedom to use your source. There are lots of licenses to choose from: the GPL, the Apple public source license, the Microsoft shared-source license, and others. These licenses are all essentially the same. They all say, "You can only use this code in limited ways."
There is a time and a place for a free license, and a time and place for a non-free license. The only trouble arises when people try-- deliberately, unfortunately-- to describe a non-free license as a free license through obfuscation, loose interpretation, and linguistic sleight-of-hand.
One aircraft, with pilot, is worth considerably more than one tango. Pilots in the US armed forces are trained to bring themselves and their aircraft home intact, even if it means breaking off an engagement to do so. He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another... and so on.
Um. No. The range of the AIM-120B and AIM-120C is at least 30 miles. That's the unclassified specification. The P3I will further increase that range substantially through the use of improved propulsion systems.
I've worked on some flight simulator code that described the capabilities and in-flight characteristics of the AIM-120B. That code is classified Secret, but I can tell you that the actual specs of the missile describe a range somewhat in excess of 30 miles.
But the most important thing about AMRAAM is its size. The AIM-54 can only be deployed on the F-14, while the AIM-120 can be carried by the F-15, F-16, F-18, F-22, and F-35. (C variant only on F-22 and F-35 internal carriages.)
So let's get this straight: this thing kills enemy fighters by delivering 100 KW of heat.
Probably not. Missiles like the AIM-120 are better for this. Especially when you couple the range of the AMRAAM (classified, but really far) with the power of the radar systems on the F-35, you have a first look, first shot, first kill system. In other words, the enemy aircraft is dead before he can even see you on his radar.
This weapon will be better suited to killing ground targets, like radar installations, and possibly to killing inbound AA or SA missiles. It doesn't take that much power, in the absolute sense, to kill either of those type of targets.
Because water is heavy. Planes are best when light.
Guilt. These weapons are used to kill the guilty. Try to remember that, okay?