Perl is a good development language. I especially appreciate the transparency of scripting languages - if something goes wrong I can examine the source immediately. But I think you underestimate the power of Java. CPAN is good, but the resources available to a Java developer are even more extensive, thanks to the combined efforts of the major software players and the open source community. Java-specific development tools are leaps ahead of most other languages. When a serious amount of effort is required to solve an problem then it makes sense to invest time in a tool that make complex systems easier to develop and troubleshoot.
This is a test to find out who is still in denial of their obvious addiction. Judging from the number of flippant replies and AC posts I would say quite a few people don't want to admit they have an internet "problem". Personally, I don't have a problem, as long as my broadband connection is up:)
I checked the FAQ to determine how they compile this list. They chuck every town that has a population over 300,000 and under 50,000. They also eliminate all cities that have absurdly high housing costs. This list ought to be called the "top 100 cities that are too small to have any real culture, too large to feel intimate, and too uninteresting to naturally attract attention."
Interesting... Oracle does the same thing. I guess when you have gotten fat charging obscene prices for cookie-cutter software you tend to lose focus on the little things, like helpful error messages. This is one of the main reasons I hate PL/SQL and T-SQL - debugging them is painful.
The basic fact is that "hardware enthusiasts" are neither good writers nor are they all that technically knowledgeable. Their saving grace is that they are willing to spend days on the drudgery of benchmarking. We are willing to forgive their artistic pretensions in exchange for a valuable service. You just have to read the reviews with your BS filter on.
It is true that this is not the first time that Intel has focused on IPC, that integrated memory controllers are not evil, and that few people fully understand the detailed workings of SSE (definitely not me). These are all instances of marketing BS. But they don't really mean anything. The benchmarks show that the Core architecture has much better IPC than the P4, regardless of whether this is due to the extra pipeline, shorter pipelines, better cache, lower memory latency, etc. And the benchmarks also show that the Core has better memory latency than P4 despite the external memory controller. And lastly Intel has drastically improved the floating point performance of the Core processor over its predecessor, the Pentium M, thanks to improvements in the SSE unit, whatever those improvements may be.
This is always going to happen when a journalistic organ is supported by sponsors from the industry it covers. The editors are obligated to include a bunch of marketing BS. You can get valuable information from these compromised sources, but you have to read between the lines.
It is true that all of these memory manufacturers are going to pass the cost of this to the consumer. But you won't see that cost directly, because only the telecom industry is allowed to misrepresent their prices so blatantly. Say you walk into Best Buy and see a stick of memory that costs $100. If they actually charged you $130 by including a dozen different taxes and surcharges then you could sue them for false advertising. Yet our telecommunications industry gets away with this behavior. It steams me every month when I pay $21 for a phone service that lists for $11.
The real question is how much work a a botnet with several thousand nodes is doing. I guess you'd have to measure it in SMS/S (Spam Messages Sent per Second) or DOSC (Denial of Service Capability). And I doubt many countries will want to take ownership of these systems.
I used to overclock my processor, and while I was doing that I was also reading the various hardware boards. One thing I learned is that overclocking is a false economy. Very few people get the results of THW, because when Joe Random buys a processor they don't get a hand-selected golden sample. The same goes for motherboards and memory. Modest overclocking gains are often wiped out by system freezes and reboots. And even the best overclockers end up spending a small fortune buying cooling systems and replacing burnt out components. Overclocking is a fun way to learn about your computer, but it is not a practical way to economically improve the performance of your computer.
I agree that there are good programmers and bad programmers, and that the amount of time spent on coding is just a small part of a well managed project. That said, the constraints of real software projects dictate that there is never enough time to code everything perfectly. This is why every non-trivial software system in the world has bugs. I don't see how this affects the productivity gains from using a VM language. Built-in memory management and extensive libraries mean that there is less code to write and debug.
This is the first time I've ever heard anyone claim debugging is more difficult in a VM language. My experience is with Java, which certainly has better built-in debugging features than C or C++. My guess is that you are more familiar with the debugging process for compiled languages.
Your argument is fine as long as there is a compiled alternative. But developing VM apps is almost always faster and easier than compiled apps. So it may come to the point where the compiled alternative is faster and uses less memory, but is also buggy and doesn't have all the functionality you desire. Or there may not be a compiled app available at all.
I agree that most people will continue to use compiled apps when they have a choice, but more and more developers are going to choose VM environments due to the ease of development. Improving VM designs and hardware specs will help mitigate the performance hit of the VM.
Titanium, steel and aluminum alloys are all used to make bicycle frames and parts. My understanding is that the commonly used alloys of all three elements have roughly the same stength-to-weight ratio. They do have different densities - titanium is about half as dense as steel, and aluminum is only a third as dense as steel. Steel gets used when cost or strength in a limited volume is an issue, or where a certain degree of flex is desirable. Titanium is an expensive upgrade for steel parts, since it has roughly similar mechanical properties. Aluminum gets used for everything else. It's the weakest of the three, but it is much less expensive than titanium, easier to work with, and you can engineer structures that take advantage of its low density (like large diameter tubes).
My first thought was that a drop in the price of titanium would have a significant effect on the high-end bicycle market. But aluminum and carbon fiber appear to be taking over as the materials of choice for bike parts, and even cheap titanium wouldn't make a significant dent. Only parts that are predominantly steel (chainrings, cassettes, bolts) would be affected.
Blu-Ray player manufacturers are still ramping up their production facilities. They are probably only producing players in very limited numbers. Given the limited supply they need to figure out a price that reduces demand to the point where they can keep up. Otherwise stores can't keep the players on their shelves. Prices will drop once manufacturers have the capacity to produce sufficient quantities to keep up with the larger demand for a unit at a lower price. If anyone is keeping their prices artificially high then they are going to end up with a lot of warehoused stock, which will have to be sold at a discount later anyway.
If you look at the absolute costs for consoles they list the NES at $200. IIRC only the version bundled with the robot cost that much. Almost everyone bought the much cheaper standalone console, which was more like $100.
That sounds good, and I hope it happens. But who is going to produce a phone that generates no revenue for the telcos? Don't forget that Nokia, Motorola, and the other big handset manufacturers also make a bundle selling infrastructure equipment to wireless carriers. Do you think they are going to shoot themselves in the foot by producing a device that is free to use?
You must not live in Nerdifornia, where it seems the major purpose of a wireless headset is to make you look like a remote controlled robot everywhere you go.
The point I got out of your little anecdote is "might makes right." Back in the day the UK was in a position to dictate terms to India, and could suppress traditional Indian values with their own. That is no longer the case.
The West does nothing more than complain about the woeful state of individual rights in China because they are not in a position to do anything about it. China can make or break most Western economies, and has a significant military as well. If our way of life is truly so wonderful then the Chinese people will eventually get to the point where they have the critical mass to change their nation. The fact that the Chinese economy is growing so much faster that that of the various Western nations isn't much of an incentive for change.
I think your analysis is mostly spot on, but I'm going to disagree with your specific choice of 3d chips. I don't recall that the Mystique was ever more than a bit player in the PC graphics card market. I think the instigator of the 3D revolution in PC graphics was the 3dfx Voodoo graphics chip. It was the best performing consumer level 3d chip when it was released, and it propelled 3dfx into a leadership position in the rapidly evolving PC graphic card market. It also proved that people were willing to spend hundreds of dollars just for added 3d performance, which gave chip designers incentive to produce better chips.
If I was going to hedge my bets with an alternative I would go with an Nvidia chip like the original Geforce. Nvidia produced top performing chips that did both 3D and desktop graphics well. These chips were used for both high end gaming cards and low cost professional graphics workstations. Nvidia was also the first to combine top 3D performance with stable, high quality drivers for both major APIs (OpenGL and DirectX) on all major Windows platforms. Nvidia still dominates due to these factors.
I would say that Matrox lost their leadership position in PC graphics due to cards like the Mystique. Matrox didn't take 3D graphics seriously until it was too late. Their early cards performed poorly, and by the time they produced competitive silicon their drivers weren't up to par.
Are you accusing The Register of biased reporting?!? I thought they were the gold standard of objectivity, but now I may need to reconsider my stance. I guess I'll just have to rely on The Inquirer for a fair and balanced look at the tech industry.
I recently read the Watchmen again. It nicely captured the sense of impending nuclear holocaust that was a staple of the Cold War era. The Cold War ended along with the Soviet Union back in '91.
In the Watchmen the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan and threatens Pakistan, which nearly provokes World War III. Nowadays we invade Afghanistan and Iran, and no one does anything except quietly complain about American imperialism. It just isn't the same without another nuclear superpower.
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Perl is a good development language. I especially appreciate the transparency of scripting languages - if something goes wrong I can examine the source immediately. But I think you underestimate the power of Java. CPAN is good, but the resources available to a Java developer are even more extensive, thanks to the combined efforts of the major software players and the open source community. Java-specific development tools are leaps ahead of most other languages. When a serious amount of effort is required to solve an problem then it makes sense to invest time in a tool that make complex systems easier to develop and troubleshoot.
Yes, but the downside is that our streets would be full of unemployed record company executives. Think of the poor execs!
This is a test to find out who is still in denial of their obvious addiction. Judging from the number of flippant replies and AC posts I would say quite a few people don't want to admit they have an internet "problem". Personally, I don't have a problem, as long as my broadband connection is up :)
I checked the FAQ to determine how they compile this list. They chuck every town that has a population over 300,000 and under 50,000. They also eliminate all cities that have absurdly high housing costs. This list ought to be called the "top 100 cities that are too small to have any real culture, too large to feel intimate, and too uninteresting to naturally attract attention."
I thought the Inquirer was the Enquirer of the IT world, and the Reg is more like the Weekly World News.
Interesting... Oracle does the same thing. I guess when you have gotten fat charging obscene prices for cookie-cutter software you tend to lose focus on the little things, like helpful error messages. This is one of the main reasons I hate PL/SQL and T-SQL - debugging them is painful.
You mean scientists and religious folks agree that people mostly fear snakes? There must be a god!
The basic fact is that "hardware enthusiasts" are neither good writers nor are they all that technically knowledgeable. Their saving grace is that they are willing to spend days on the drudgery of benchmarking. We are willing to forgive their artistic pretensions in exchange for a valuable service. You just have to read the reviews with your BS filter on.
It is true that this is not the first time that Intel has focused on IPC, that integrated memory controllers are not evil, and that few people fully understand the detailed workings of SSE (definitely not me). These are all instances of marketing BS. But they don't really mean anything. The benchmarks show that the Core architecture has much better IPC than the P4, regardless of whether this is due to the extra pipeline, shorter pipelines, better cache, lower memory latency, etc. And the benchmarks also show that the Core has better memory latency than P4 despite the external memory controller. And lastly Intel has drastically improved the floating point performance of the Core processor over its predecessor, the Pentium M, thanks to improvements in the SSE unit, whatever those improvements may be.
This is always going to happen when a journalistic organ is supported by sponsors from the industry it covers. The editors are obligated to include a bunch of marketing BS. You can get valuable information from these compromised sources, but you have to read between the lines.
It is true that all of these memory manufacturers are going to pass the cost of this to the consumer. But you won't see that cost directly, because only the telecom industry is allowed to misrepresent their prices so blatantly. Say you walk into Best Buy and see a stick of memory that costs $100. If they actually charged you $130 by including a dozen different taxes and surcharges then you could sue them for false advertising. Yet our telecommunications industry gets away with this behavior. It steams me every month when I pay $21 for a phone service that lists for $11.
The real question is how much work a a botnet with several thousand nodes is doing. I guess you'd have to measure it in SMS/S (Spam Messages Sent per Second) or DOSC (Denial of Service Capability). And I doubt many countries will want to take ownership of these systems.
I used to overclock my processor, and while I was doing that I was also reading the various hardware boards. One thing I learned is that overclocking is a false economy. Very few people get the results of THW, because when Joe Random buys a processor they don't get a hand-selected golden sample. The same goes for motherboards and memory. Modest overclocking gains are often wiped out by system freezes and reboots. And even the best overclockers end up spending a small fortune buying cooling systems and replacing burnt out components. Overclocking is a fun way to learn about your computer, but it is not a practical way to economically improve the performance of your computer.
I agree that there are good programmers and bad programmers, and that the amount of time spent on coding is just a small part of a well managed project. That said, the constraints of real software projects dictate that there is never enough time to code everything perfectly. This is why every non-trivial software system in the world has bugs. I don't see how this affects the productivity gains from using a VM language. Built-in memory management and extensive libraries mean that there is less code to write and debug.
This is the first time I've ever heard anyone claim debugging is more difficult in a VM language. My experience is with Java, which certainly has better built-in debugging features than C or C++. My guess is that you are more familiar with the debugging process for compiled languages.
Your argument is fine as long as there is a compiled alternative. But developing VM apps is almost always faster and easier than compiled apps. So it may come to the point where the compiled alternative is faster and uses less memory, but is also buggy and doesn't have all the functionality you desire. Or there may not be a compiled app available at all.
I agree that most people will continue to use compiled apps when they have a choice, but more and more developers are going to choose VM environments due to the ease of development. Improving VM designs and hardware specs will help mitigate the performance hit of the VM.
That's just sour grapes from over 700 million poor people. Why get hung up about our appropriation of the name of an Italian mapmaker?
Titanium, steel and aluminum alloys are all used to make bicycle frames and parts. My understanding is that the commonly used alloys of all three elements have roughly the same stength-to-weight ratio. They do have different densities - titanium is about half as dense as steel, and aluminum is only a third as dense as steel. Steel gets used when cost or strength in a limited volume is an issue, or where a certain degree of flex is desirable. Titanium is an expensive upgrade for steel parts, since it has roughly similar mechanical properties. Aluminum gets used for everything else. It's the weakest of the three, but it is much less expensive than titanium, easier to work with, and you can engineer structures that take advantage of its low density (like large diameter tubes).
My first thought was that a drop in the price of titanium would have a significant effect on the high-end bicycle market. But aluminum and carbon fiber appear to be taking over as the materials of choice for bike parts, and even cheap titanium wouldn't make a significant dent. Only parts that are predominantly steel (chainrings, cassettes, bolts) would be affected.
Blu-Ray player manufacturers are still ramping up their production facilities. They are probably only producing players in very limited numbers. Given the limited supply they need to figure out a price that reduces demand to the point where they can keep up. Otherwise stores can't keep the players on their shelves. Prices will drop once manufacturers have the capacity to produce sufficient quantities to keep up with the larger demand for a unit at a lower price. If anyone is keeping their prices artificially high then they are going to end up with a lot of warehoused stock, which will have to be sold at a discount later anyway.
If you look at the absolute costs for consoles they list the NES at $200. IIRC only the version bundled with the robot cost that much. Almost everyone bought the much cheaper standalone console, which was more like $100.
That sounds good, and I hope it happens. But who is going to produce a phone that generates no revenue for the telcos? Don't forget that Nokia, Motorola, and the other big handset manufacturers also make a bundle selling infrastructure equipment to wireless carriers. Do you think they are going to shoot themselves in the foot by producing a device that is free to use?
You must not live in Nerdifornia, where it seems the major purpose of a wireless headset is to make you look like a remote controlled robot everywhere you go.
Too bad the telecommunications industry is lobbying hard to ban local government based ISPs.
The point I got out of your little anecdote is "might makes right." Back in the day the UK was in a position to dictate terms to India, and could suppress traditional Indian values with their own. That is no longer the case.
The West does nothing more than complain about the woeful state of individual rights in China because they are not in a position to do anything about it. China can make or break most Western economies, and has a significant military as well. If our way of life is truly so wonderful then the Chinese people will eventually get to the point where they have the critical mass to change their nation. The fact that the Chinese economy is growing so much faster that that of the various Western nations isn't much of an incentive for change.
I think your analysis is mostly spot on, but I'm going to disagree with your specific choice of 3d chips. I don't recall that the Mystique was ever more than a bit player in the PC graphics card market. I think the instigator of the 3D revolution in PC graphics was the 3dfx Voodoo graphics chip. It was the best performing consumer level 3d chip when it was released, and it propelled 3dfx into a leadership position in the rapidly evolving PC graphic card market. It also proved that people were willing to spend hundreds of dollars just for added 3d performance, which gave chip designers incentive to produce better chips.
If I was going to hedge my bets with an alternative I would go with an Nvidia chip like the original Geforce. Nvidia produced top performing chips that did both 3D and desktop graphics well. These chips were used for both high end gaming cards and low cost professional graphics workstations. Nvidia was also the first to combine top 3D performance with stable, high quality drivers for both major APIs (OpenGL and DirectX) on all major Windows platforms. Nvidia still dominates due to these factors.
I would say that Matrox lost their leadership position in PC graphics due to cards like the Mystique. Matrox didn't take 3D graphics seriously until it was too late. Their early cards performed poorly, and by the time they produced competitive silicon their drivers weren't up to par.
Are you accusing The Register of biased reporting?!? I thought they were the gold standard of objectivity, but now I may need to reconsider my stance. I guess I'll just have to rely on The Inquirer for a fair and balanced look at the tech industry.
I recently read the Watchmen again. It nicely captured the sense of impending nuclear holocaust that was a staple of the Cold War era. The Cold War ended along with the Soviet Union back in '91.
In the Watchmen the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan and threatens Pakistan, which nearly provokes World War III. Nowadays we invade Afghanistan and Iran, and no one does anything except quietly complain about American imperialism. It just isn't the same without another nuclear superpower.