*If* they were to break up Intel (which I don't think they need to do), Intel would probably be split along their product lines with CPUs, Motherboard Chipsets, Compilers, Flash Memory, and other products falling to one side of the company or another.
Of course, I *wish* that Microsoft had been split. If there was a separate company producing Microsoft Office (or even two competing Microsofts!) there's a good possibility that MS Office would be running on a lot more OSes today.
You should have mentioned the Mac angle. Even if she doesn't use a Mac, at least most people know and understand what it is and know that Windows software doesn't run on a Mac and vice versa.
At the time, Java software didn't run on Macs, either. The closest thing to a VM was the MRJ runtime which provided 1.1 compatibility in a world of Java 1.3 (and soon to be released 1.4) systems.
It seems at this point that OS X has been around for such a long time. The truth, however, is that it's still the new kid on the block.:-)
The reporter had probably already committed a lot of time to building the article, and was on a deadline. She didn't have the sense to talk to PR people, and the.NET guy probably parroted the stuff he read on Microsoft's website.
That was exactly what happened. She failed to do her research ahead of time, so she couldn't figure out how to use the information I gave her. (Or for that matter, even take a line of questioning that would have led her to more useful information.) The problem is that such an article never should have been given the go-ahead if the assigned journalist wasn't capable of covering it. After all, we're talking about a newspaper, not a tech magazine.
Had I been a little more experienced at the time, perhaps I could have put some more useful words in her mouth. (As happened with an Information Week article I was featured in a short time later.) Unfortunately, I lacked any sort of useful publishing/journalist experience, and ended up relying on the "explain the computers to the non-techie in simple terms" tack.:-/
What inspired the British Broadcasting Corporation to suddenly leap into the software programming foray? Are they hoping to build some sort of new service out of all of this, or is it just going to end up as a bunch of disconnected apps?
Q: What inspired Bell Labs to create Multics/Unix? A: Because they needed it.
BBC has been pushing more and more toward internet-based content. While they've been struggling with legal issues, it is becoming more and more clear that they are extremely serious about this and not just blowing smoke up everyone's hind quarters.
Put this stuff together:
1. A highly competitive streaming video codec. 2. A TV Listings lookup API. 3. A distributed/P2P sharing API.
While these could go together into a few different gizmos, it seems that they are all targetting the concept of showing television over the internet. Oh, that will be a happy day. I might even pay the British TV Tax just to get Dr. Who!;-)
Good Lord, there's enough stuff here to create a complete, high quality TIVO system with full network/P2P support! If this is any indication, BBC is taking the concept of Internet broadcasting *very* seriously.
A question for those who are in the know: How is Dirac's performance these days? i.e. Does anyone have any good comparisons to MPEG4 compression ratios, encoding times, etc.?
Even a journalist with the best intentions implants his/her viewpoint into a story. Usually it's not blatant. It's in where the opposing view appears in the article.
As an example, my opinion was once carried in a local San Francisco newspaper. The journalist (who struck me as having no experience what-so-ever) was attempting to craft a story on Java vs. the recently released.NET. On one hand she had a guy who was singing the praises of.NET up and down, but only used PCs. On the other hand she had me, who tried to explain to her that the world was bigger than the PC sitting on her desk.
Me: "We have 3 Sun E450 servers running our site."
Her: "What are those?"
Me: "They're like a more modern form of mainframe. They contain four CPUs each, gigabytes of memory, and can handles thousands of users each second."
Her: "Huh?"
In the final article, the.NET guy got his picture and 99% of the words. All I got one heavily mangled sentence saying something along the lines of "Java is the future." I don't talk to reporters any longer.:-/
Frankly I am not into the compiler world (I'm no C/Fortran programmer), so I didn't expect that programs compiled with the Intel compiler would even try to work on an AMD CPU.
That would be a perfectly acceptable answer, and the one that AMD would like. However, the Intel compiler is not just producing highly optimized code and leaving it at that. Highly optimized code would work fine on an AMD CPU, partly because AMD has a technology cross-licensing contract with Intel. (Which means that Intel could produce AMD64 CPUs if they wanted!)
The core of the issue is that the code generated by the Intel compiler uses the slowest code path available if the CPU is an AMD. That's a potential Anti-trust violation, and smacks of desperation on Intel's part. I've always been overall happy with Intel's handling of their monopoly, but Moore is no longer at the helm and I fear that Intel may be slipping.:-/
It is impossible to do almost anything without betraying some part of ones world view. This is true in every day life, doubly so in things that people create.
Arguably, the entire point of fine arts is to explore someone else's worldview. While Video Games may have a long way until they can be considered "fine arts", they are just as much about allowing you to explore the author's worldview as a book or movie. Perhaps even more-so, because the author must craft a universe that is entertaining to be in.
To do this he may have to create a caricature universe that enhances certain aspects while de-enhancing others. For example, if I'm playing a Sci-Fi video game I expect everything to be Sci-Fi-ish. All doors slide, everything hovers, metal and plastics everywhere, etc. This is despite the fact that a more reasonable look at the future would conclude that swinging doors and wheels aren't likely to disappear at all.
Creative works are creative works. If you want to complain about simulations, go complain about an F-22 Raptor sim allowing you to an impossible barrel roll.;-)
Isn't Prescott 32 stages nowadays? Silly Intel. Gotta have the bigger pipeline, huh?
Indeed. Only Crays and DSPs used to have pipelines that long. A single jump instruction, and you have to flush the entire pipeline! In super-computing and DSP, you almost never see a jump, so there's no concern. But in Intel's zeal to win the clock rate wars, they maxed out the pipeline to an absolutely ungodly length. And a 2.2 GHz AMD64 *still* outperforms a 3.2 GHz Pentium!
Seems that Intel's P4 design backfired on them. Of course, that may be due to Intel's belief that the Itanium would take the market by storm. They did learn from their iAPX 432 chip by at least producing a method for emulating x86, but they failed to take into account how deeply entrenched the x86 performance crowd was. Now AMD64 is eating Intel's lunch! (Oops!)
And as a person who's designed a simple (can't do too much in 10 weeks) 2-issue out of order machine, let me tell you, that's fun stuff. Really makes you appreciate how insanely complex real processors are. And don't even get me started on their branch prediction...
I hear you. Trying to cram a reasonable chip into an FPGA can be quite a challenge. If MicroCode hadn't been invented, it might not be possible to fit one in so few transistors. At least we can finally stop the CISC vs. RISC debate. The MicroCode designs provide CISC instructions on top of RISC cores just to confuse the heck out of both sides. Next up, writing a VI clone in LISP!;-)
Part of AMD's claims is outrageous. Why would AMD expect its competitor, Intel, to write software that supports AMD's own products? We would not expect IBM to modify AIX or any other IBM software package to run on SPARC, which is a poorly designed processor.
1. AMD's claim is that the Intel Compiler produces code that actively detects the AMD CPU, then intentionally runs slower code. That's not the same thing as Intel optimizing their compiler for the Pentium Architecture.
2. If you think the SPARC is a poorly designed processor, you need your head checked.
By restricting the GCC compilers to generating only a simple but fast subset of instructions, we could encourage both AMD and Intel to deprecate and, ultimately, eliminate the more complex x86 instructions. Linux and the bulk of open-source software use the GCC compilers and would provide a critical mass of support for a new streamlined transistor-count-reduced x86 chips. Here, I am thinking, "shockingly reduced in power due to using 1/3 of the transistors."
Wouldn't that make the x86 Platform act like one of those "Poorly Designed RISC Processors" you were just complaining about?
In any case, you won't see much of a transistor reduction. Most of the instructions you're trying to avoid are implemented in MicroCode and add no significant overhead to the chip. What *does* add all the transistors is the 20 stage pipeline, branch prediction, superscalar execution, Out Of Order instructions, etc, etc, etc.
Vey true. I myself considered the issue as a method for "cheaply" making antimatter in space. Such a concept, however, is better suited to "stationary" installations rather than individual ships. You don't want to be dragging all that mass around with you.;-)
I could be wrong about this, but I heard there was talk of Sun power actually existing in space, outside of Earth!
You have the solar power, but you're lacking the Earth sized solar collector. Obtaining 1.3kw/m^2 (the amount that hits the Earth) isn't very much energy when your panels are only a few meters square and have an efficiency rating of <20%.
Using the sun for direct propulsion (solar sails) is a viable concept, but the materials tech is still trying to produce high quality sails.
1. Nuclear Steam Ships can have a relatively high Isp (compared to chemical rockets) while using a fuel that's easily obtainable from a nearby body such as the moon.
2. Magnetoplasmadymanic thrusters are based on MHD theory, and have some of the HIGHEST Isp of any rocket engine. In addition, they have a relatively high thrust to weight ratio as well. (Very rare in engines with such a high Isp.)
Indeed. In space, you live and die by how much power you can generate. Here on Earth we have the Sun to power the whole planet, which can then be distilled down to more power dense forms. That doesn't exist in space.
What we need is to start using the nuclear fission powered engines that we KNOW work. Whether they be NERVA, Orion, or nuclear powered ION drives, nuclear fission is the best place to start.
As it is, it is a separate environment, and as far as I can tell you can't embed an Infopath document within a Word document.
That's really... strange. In PDF forms you have editable fields which can either be saved in the document, or (if you add a submit button to the document) submitted back to a server. You can also store the data in an FDF file which contains a link back to the PDF. When you open the FDF, Acrobat downloads the PDF and populates it with the FDF data.
The guy _is_ a troll, maybe non intentional, but if you follow his history, if you actually read his comments, you will se his is at least a flamer, and maybe even a troll.
Yeah, I found that out the hard way. The mods were right on this one, I'll give them that. This guy obviously has no idea what InfoPath is either, and is merely trying to get attention. I wish him luck with his trolling, because he's going to have a rather pathetic life.:-/
FYI, the FDF files are nothing more than a "patch" to the original PDF document. The idea is that you download an FDF, then Acrobat uses it to lookup, display, and prefill the original PDF document. As a result, the FDF only works online or when the user has a local copy of the file.
Those of us in need of a more robust solution use a library like PDFBox to dig through the pseudo-text "Object" structure and fillout the values for the forms. Oh, and we merge all your documents into one nice document structure while we're at it.
I have no idea what this means, and I suspect you don't, either.
Didn't I just admit that? I was only regurgiating the marketing materials. Here, you try:
InfoPath (previously code-named "XDocs"), is a new product in the Microsoft Office family. Using InfoPath helps to streamline the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms.
The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because InfoPath supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, InfoPath helps to connect you directly to organizational information and gives you the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact and productivity.
Say what? The words above are flowing, but the ideas are not.
I'm supposed to be a "troll" for asking if you actually had any clue
Mods, will you please fix that? It's very annoying when we're trying to have a discussion and you go around modding people into oblivion.
So, since a) you know what InfoPath is, b) neither the article or Microsoft are very helpful at defining it, how about sharing a useful definition of *what* it is?
Considering that I was trying to be funny (+4 Insightful? What the... ?), not a clue.:-)
What I do know about it is that it's a method for collecting data for XML documents automatically. The marketing buzz Microsoft has got going isn't much clearer than that.
Slashdot Mirror
*If* they were to break up Intel (which I don't think they need to do), Intel would probably be split along their product lines with CPUs, Motherboard Chipsets, Compilers, Flash Memory, and other products falling to one side of the company or another.
Of course, I *wish* that Microsoft had been split. If there was a separate company producing Microsoft Office (or even two competing Microsofts!) there's a good possibility that MS Office would be running on a lot more OSes today.
You should have mentioned the Mac angle. Even if she doesn't use a Mac, at least most people know and understand what it is and know that Windows software doesn't run on a Mac and vice versa.
:-)
At the time, Java software didn't run on Macs, either. The closest thing to a VM was the MRJ runtime which provided 1.1 compatibility in a world of Java 1.3 (and soon to be released 1.4) systems.
It seems at this point that OS X has been around for such a long time. The truth, however, is that it's still the new kid on the block.
The reporter had probably already committed a lot of time to building the article, and was on a deadline. She didn't have the sense to talk to PR people, and the .NET guy probably parroted the stuff he read on Microsoft's website.
:-/
That was exactly what happened. She failed to do her research ahead of time, so she couldn't figure out how to use the information I gave her. (Or for that matter, even take a line of questioning that would have led her to more useful information.) The problem is that such an article never should have been given the go-ahead if the assigned journalist wasn't capable of covering it. After all, we're talking about a newspaper, not a tech magazine.
Had I been a little more experienced at the time, perhaps I could have put some more useful words in her mouth. (As happened with an Information Week article I was featured in a short time later.) Unfortunately, I lacked any sort of useful publishing/journalist experience, and ended up relying on the "explain the computers to the non-techie in simple terms" tack.
What inspired the British Broadcasting Corporation to suddenly leap into the software programming foray? Are they hoping to build some sort of new service out of all of this, or is it just going to end up as a bunch of disconnected apps?
;-)
Q: What inspired Bell Labs to create Multics/Unix?
A: Because they needed it.
BBC has been pushing more and more toward internet-based content. While they've been struggling with legal issues, it is becoming more and more clear that they are extremely serious about this and not just blowing smoke up everyone's hind quarters.
Put this stuff together:
1. A highly competitive streaming video codec.
2. A TV Listings lookup API.
3. A distributed/P2P sharing API.
While these could go together into a few different gizmos, it seems that they are all targetting the concept of showing television over the internet. Oh, that will be a happy day. I might even pay the British TV Tax just to get Dr. Who!
Good Lord, there's enough stuff here to create a complete, high quality TIVO system with full network/P2P support! If this is any indication, BBC is taking the concept of Internet broadcasting *very* seriously.
A question for those who are in the know: How is Dirac's performance these days? i.e. Does anyone have any good comparisons to MPEG4 compression ratios, encoding times, etc.?
Even a journalist with the best intentions implants his/her viewpoint into a story. Usually it's not blatant. It's in where the opposing view appears in the article.
.NET. On one hand she had a guy who was singing the praises of .NET up and down, but only used PCs. On the other hand she had me, who tried to explain to her that the world was bigger than the PC sitting on her desk.
.NET guy got his picture and 99% of the words. All I got one heavily mangled sentence saying something along the lines of "Java is the future." I don't talk to reporters any longer. :-/
As an example, my opinion was once carried in a local San Francisco newspaper. The journalist (who struck me as having no experience what-so-ever) was attempting to craft a story on Java vs. the recently released
Me: "We have 3 Sun E450 servers running our site."
Her: "What are those?"
Me: "They're like a more modern form of mainframe. They contain four CPUs each, gigabytes of memory, and can handles thousands of users each second."
Her: "Huh?"
In the final article, the
A single jump instruction, and you have to flush the entire pipeline!
:-)
That's patently not true
Fair enough. A single mis-predicted jump will flush the entire pipeline.
Thanks for the correction.
Hi akaimbatman, we meet again ;)!
;-P
:-/
(rolls eyes) You again.
Frankly I am not into the compiler world (I'm no C/Fortran programmer), so I didn't expect that programs compiled with the Intel compiler would even try to work on an AMD CPU.
That would be a perfectly acceptable answer, and the one that AMD would like. However, the Intel compiler is not just producing highly optimized code and leaving it at that. Highly optimized code would work fine on an AMD CPU, partly because AMD has a technology cross-licensing contract with Intel. (Which means that Intel could produce AMD64 CPUs if they wanted!)
The core of the issue is that the code generated by the Intel compiler uses the slowest code path available if the CPU is an AMD. That's a potential Anti-trust violation, and smacks of desperation on Intel's part. I've always been overall happy with Intel's handling of their monopoly, but Moore is no longer at the helm and I fear that Intel may be slipping.
It is impossible to do almost anything without betraying some part of ones world view. This is true in every day life, doubly so in things that people create.
;-)
Arguably, the entire point of fine arts is to explore someone else's worldview. While Video Games may have a long way until they can be considered "fine arts", they are just as much about allowing you to explore the author's worldview as a book or movie. Perhaps even more-so, because the author must craft a universe that is entertaining to be in.
To do this he may have to create a caricature universe that enhances certain aspects while de-enhancing others. For example, if I'm playing a Sci-Fi video game I expect everything to be Sci-Fi-ish. All doors slide, everything hovers, metal and plastics everywhere, etc. This is despite the fact that a more reasonable look at the future would conclude that swinging doors and wheels aren't likely to disappear at all.
Creative works are creative works. If you want to complain about simulations, go complain about an F-22 Raptor sim allowing you to an impossible barrel roll.
Isn't Prescott 32 stages nowadays? Silly Intel. Gotta have the bigger pipeline, huh?
;-)
Indeed. Only Crays and DSPs used to have pipelines that long. A single jump instruction, and you have to flush the entire pipeline! In super-computing and DSP, you almost never see a jump, so there's no concern. But in Intel's zeal to win the clock rate wars, they maxed out the pipeline to an absolutely ungodly length. And a 2.2 GHz AMD64 *still* outperforms a 3.2 GHz Pentium!
Seems that Intel's P4 design backfired on them. Of course, that may be due to Intel's belief that the Itanium would take the market by storm. They did learn from their iAPX 432 chip by at least producing a method for emulating x86, but they failed to take into account how deeply entrenched the x86 performance crowd was. Now AMD64 is eating Intel's lunch! (Oops!)
And as a person who's designed a simple (can't do too much in 10 weeks) 2-issue out of order machine, let me tell you, that's fun stuff. Really makes you appreciate how insanely complex real processors are. And don't even get me started on their branch prediction...
I hear you. Trying to cram a reasonable chip into an FPGA can be quite a challenge. If MicroCode hadn't been invented, it might not be possible to fit one in so few transistors. At least we can finally stop the CISC vs. RISC debate. The MicroCode designs provide CISC instructions on top of RISC cores just to confuse the heck out of both sides. Next up, writing a VI clone in LISP!
Part of AMD's claims is outrageous. Why would AMD expect its competitor, Intel, to write software that supports AMD's own products? We would not expect IBM to modify AIX or any other IBM software package to run on SPARC, which is a poorly designed processor.
1. AMD's claim is that the Intel Compiler produces code that actively detects the AMD CPU, then intentionally runs slower code. That's not the same thing as Intel optimizing their compiler for the Pentium Architecture.
2. If you think the SPARC is a poorly designed processor, you need your head checked.
By restricting the GCC compilers to generating only a simple but fast subset of instructions, we could encourage both AMD and Intel to deprecate and, ultimately, eliminate the more complex x86 instructions. Linux and the bulk of open-source software use the GCC compilers and would provide a critical mass of support for a new streamlined transistor-count-reduced x86 chips. Here, I am thinking, "shockingly reduced in power due to using 1/3 of the transistors."
Wouldn't that make the x86 Platform act like one of those "Poorly Designed RISC Processors" you were just complaining about?
In any case, you won't see much of a transistor reduction. Most of the instructions you're trying to avoid are implemented in MicroCode and add no significant overhead to the chip. What *does* add all the transistors is the 20 stage pipeline, branch prediction, superscalar execution, Out Of Order instructions, etc, etc, etc.
It's been mentioned time and time again that Google does not cache images. If you want a backup, use the coral cache or Mirrordot
Vey true. I myself considered the issue as a method for "cheaply" making antimatter in space. Such a concept, however, is better suited to "stationary" installations rather than individual ships. You don't want to be dragging all that mass around with you. ;-)
I could be wrong about this, but I heard there was talk of Sun power actually existing in space, outside of Earth!
You have the solar power, but you're lacking the Earth sized solar collector. Obtaining 1.3kw/m^2 (the amount that hits the Earth) isn't very much energy when your panels are only a few meters square and have an efficiency rating of <20%.
Using the sun for direct propulsion (solar sails) is a viable concept, but the materials tech is still trying to produce high quality sails.
There are a couple of ways it could be useful:
1. Nuclear Steam Ships can have a relatively high Isp (compared to chemical rockets) while using a fuel that's easily obtainable from a nearby body such as the moon.
2. Magnetoplasmadymanic thrusters are based on MHD theory, and have some of the HIGHEST Isp of any rocket engine. In addition, they have a relatively high thrust to weight ratio as well. (Very rare in engines with such a high Isp.)
Indeed. In space, you live and die by how much power you can generate. Here on Earth we have the Sun to power the whole planet, which can then be distilled down to more power dense forms. That doesn't exist in space.
What we need is to start using the nuclear fission powered engines that we KNOW work. Whether they be NERVA, Orion, or nuclear powered ION drives, nuclear fission is the best place to start.
As it is, it is a separate environment, and as far as I can tell you can't embed an Infopath document within a Word document.
:-)
That's really... strange. In PDF forms you have editable fields which can either be saved in the document, or (if you add a submit button to the document) submitted back to a server. You can also store the data in an FDF file which contains a link back to the PDF. When you open the FDF, Acrobat downloads the PDF and populates it with the FDF data.
It sounds like Microsoft isn't even that far.
Thank you. :-)
Mods, how about a few points for this fellow?
So in effect, it sounds like Microsoft is trying to add the features of PDF documents to Office so as to push Adobe out of the market. Correct?
The guy _is_ a troll, maybe non intentional, but if you follow his history, if you actually read his comments, you will se his is at least a flamer, and maybe even a troll.
:-/
Yeah, I found that out the hard way. The mods were right on this one, I'll give them that. This guy obviously has no idea what InfoPath is either, and is merely trying to get attention. I wish him luck with his trolling, because he's going to have a rather pathetic life.
Hmmm... seems the mods were right on this one. You are just trolling. Forgive me for taking you seriously.
FYI, the FDF files are nothing more than a "patch" to the original PDF document. The idea is that you download an FDF, then Acrobat uses it to lookup, display, and prefill the original PDF document. As a result, the FDF only works online or when the user has a local copy of the file.
Those of us in need of a more robust solution use a library like PDFBox to dig through the pseudo-text "Object" structure and fillout the values for the forms. Oh, and we merge all your documents into one nice document structure while we're at it.
I have no idea what this means, and I suspect you don't, either.
Didn't I just admit that? I was only regurgiating the marketing materials. Here, you try:
InfoPath (previously code-named "XDocs"), is a new product in the Microsoft Office family. Using InfoPath helps to streamline the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms.
The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because InfoPath supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, InfoPath helps to connect you directly to organizational information and gives you the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact and productivity.
Say what? The words above are flowing, but the ideas are not.
I'm supposed to be a "troll" for asking if you actually had any clue
Mods, will you please fix that? It's very annoying when we're trying to have a discussion and you go around modding people into oblivion.
So, since a) you know what InfoPath is, b) neither the article or Microsoft are very helpful at defining it, how about sharing a useful definition of *what* it is?
Unless they port to Linux it's nothing special. How about it Bill? When are you and Stevie gonna bite the bullet and let your developers port it?
You want Office on Linux? Here's what you have to do:
Step 1: Create a Distro that captures more than 1% of the market share. (Shameless plug for that part.)
Step 2: Find some way in which Microsoft's anti-competitive practices are hurting your business, then sue.
Step 3: Settle out of court with the requirement that Microsoft produce a version of MS Office for your distro.
Then, voila! MS Office on Linux.
You don't know what InfoPath is, do you?
:-)
Considering that I was trying to be funny (+4 Insightful? What the... ?), not a clue.
What I do know about it is that it's a method for collecting data for XML documents automatically. The marketing buzz Microsoft has got going isn't much clearer than that.
A multi-billion dollar company places its best people on creating better office software and we get...
A reinvention of HTML Forms?
This is the 21st century! Where are my flying cars? I want flying cars, not "XML Form Things".