This is an interesting architecture, but I don't think you'll see it in a personal computer any time soon. It appears from the bits of technical information that I looked over on their web page that you have to program the reconfigurable part of the chip differently from the rest of the chip. What this means is that you can't just take a C program and create a new compiler backend to dump out a program for this beast; or if you can, it will take some SERIOUS work by the compiler people.
I am currently involved in some research where we are trying to solve the same problem, roughly. However, we are trying to make the change as transparent to users (i.e. compiler writers & assembly code writers) as possible by making small tweaks to the standard RISC concept that will allow our chip to extract large amounts of parallelism. It is clear that with these reconfiguration based architectures it is possible to have huge performance gains at the expense of programming complexity. Hopefully our architecture will be to these reconfigurable systems what superscalar was to VLIW. VLIW has been around for a long time, but it wasn't popularized until architects came up with ways of making a VLIW core look like a scalar processor to the outside world.
I completely agee with your point about many programmers not recognizing the difference between programming and computer science. The third level computer science course here at Carnegie Mellon is taught in ML. While ML is considered by many computer scientists to be a wonderful language, there is little call for it in any industry. On the second day of class the professor defended the department's choice of ML by pointing out that the pupose of the class was not to train us to be better programmers, but to give us a deeper understanding of computation and functional thinking. It surprised me that some students were angry that they were learning something that didn't directly translate into earning a big salary at some company; that simply wasn't the point of the course (and shouldn't be, in my opinion).
If you want to be a world class hacker and/or earn a lot of money, then I don't see any need for what college offers. If you want to gain a deeper understanding of computers and possibly have your name go down in the CS history books, there is no other way.
I believe Karl Marx was the first to write about the "magical" nature of consumerism. It's deeply entangled with advertising - at least in Marx's view. The system makes people think things like, "wow, I get to choose between Coke and Pepsi, or Nike and Reebok, or McDonalds and Burger King" instead of something like, "maybe I'll learn to sew and make my own clothes". Most of the creative power in the day to day operation of society is removed from people and put in some mystical realm of the advertising and media world.
Just in case anyone is curious I definitely do not consider myself a Marxist. I think capitalism has a lot of positive traits. However, there are also many less than attractive features of it and we need to be wary of them. The homogenization of all people to "consumers" is one of those features. When people see themselves (consciously or unconsciously) primarily as the end point of producer's product chains, then the hard core capitalists have won.
In my opinion, the world is really about art, science, technology, health, family, etc. Money is just something we use to facilitate the rest of our lives. Too many people (especially in America) have been convinced that money and consuming goods are reasonable primary goals in life. Anyone who cares about culture should be fighting this tooth and nail. My latest attempt is to convince some friends of mine in a very good band that they should try out the street performer protocol. I think it has a lot of potential for putting the focus of artistic ventures back where it should be.
Many people I know here at CMU found ML tough to wrap their heads around. I think it is a wonderful language, and I plan on using it for as many projects as I can in the future.
I agree completely. Freshman year of high school I bought a TI-82, because the math department recommended it to all the upper level math students. I used it for a few years and became reasonably proficient with it. However, at some point I lost it and was forced to think a little more about the math I was doing. Since I did all my calculations by hand, I was quite motivated to simplify probelms as much as possible before plugging in numbers and getting an answer. I really think this is the way math (and chemistry and physics) should be taught. Learning how to use a fancy calculator can be useful, but in my experience, learning math with a fancy calculator just makes one lazy and reduces the depth of insight one gains into the underlying principles.
Has anyone else noticed this post before? I feel like I've read it at least once and maybe two or three times, attached to stories that were equally unrelated to Linux networking. Does anyone know why this is?
It seems a lot of people are suggesting very advanced things for a student's first computer science class. I'm sure there are many here who were bored to tears by their high school CS class because they had been programming for years, but you can't assume that everyone is at that level. Give students the option of doing more advanced projects on their own as a way of getting out of the regular assignments, but don't assume all your students are going to be prepared to execute a big complex project.
I also think it's very important to strongly establish the important fundamental pinciples of CS in a student's first class. You should emphsize the importance of things like recursion, separation of abstraction and implementation, good style, thinking before coding (i.e. writing specs and pseudo-code), objects, etc. It would probably be beneficial to demonstrate these concepts in a few different kinds of languages: Imperative (i.e. C or Pascal), functional (i.e. Lisp or ML), and object oriented (i.e. C++ or Java). I very much agree with the posters who suggested finding programming challenges on the web and using those. However, I think it's important to emphasize the thinking that needs to go into solving problems, as opposed to emphasizing good hacking. Students have plenty of time to learn the tricks that make a good programmer, in their first CS class they should learn the fundamentals of computer science.
America is moving at breakneck speed trying to homogenize opportunities for its citizens, far more than the rest of the world.
Do you use large doses of strong drugs or do you base you opinions of the world outside of America on American sitcoms? I can't think of two social institutions more important to giving people opportunity in life than health and education. Compared to the rest of the rich world, quality of health care and education are so heterogeneous in American, it's absurd. From the June 24th issue of the economist:
And while America's health-care system is deemed the most responsive, it does badly when it comes to measures that reflect general population health, coming 24th in the DALE ranking and 54th, alongside Fiji, in how fairly the financial burden of health care is distributed.
This is based on a recent survey of national health care systems by the World Health Organization. I don't have a similar quote about eduation, but I am fairly confident that quality and cost are as unevenly distributed there.
It's too bad that so many people show so little concern for inequality of opportunity in life. I guess it's an ugly side-effect of the extreme individualism that has developed in America and some other places. It's really not a bad thing to care about fellow human beings. Really, it's not.
Where can I truly be an individual? Certainly not slashdot,
Are you saying that you would like someone to set up an environment for you where you can be yourself? Why can't you "express that Open Source is good in some areas, but in others some Closed Source software is better" on slashdot, or anywhere else? I'm pretty sure you don't have to worry about someone coming to your house and beating you up for talking trash about Open Source on slashdot. I bet they wouldn't even pull your post. Heck, this post of yours was even moderated up to 5. If you're not willing to endure a few negative responses on an internet message board to "be an individual", then you have a pretty stange idea of what it means to be an individual.
From the very brief description in the article, the genetic algorithm seems to function very much like a simulated annealing algorithm. Can anybody comment on the differences between genetic algorithms like the one used in this case and simulated annealing algorithms? Are there any features to a design problem that would make it more amenable to one or the other?
For those unfamiliar with simulated annealing, here is a quick description: Simulated annealing algorithms need some parameters for defining a design and a function for evaluating the quality of a design with a particular set of parameters. The algorithm keeps some sense of temperature which starts high and steadily decreases through the running of the algorithm. The main loop of the algorithm perturbs the design slightly (changes the parameters) and either accepts or rolls back the change with some probability, based on the change in quality caused by the change in the design, and the current temperature.
Ben
What does this have to do with Linux?
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
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· Score: 1
There's a difference between posting a story about a specific company's IPO and posting a story about the general vagaries of the stock market. I'm not sure exactly how big that difference is, but it definitely exists. I haven't taken a look at the numbers myself, but from the few snippets of news reports I have read and seen, Linux related stocks didn't fall much more or less than the rest of the market. So while this is a big story, there are really no special Linux, tech, or geek issues going on here at all.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The Constitution makes it very clear that the right of the people to keep and bear arms is granted because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State. So when gun control advocates claim that owning uzi's to hunt deer isn't protected by the Constitution, they actually have some pretty firm ground to stand on. The constitution does NOT say that the right to bear arms is unconditionally granted to all people for all purposes. The Economist has an excellent essay on the history of guns in America; I suggest anyone who is interested in the subject take a look. Go to www.economist.com and click on "The Best of The Economist". Scroll down to Guns in America.
I once heard that IBM mathematically proved that some program of theirs (maybe AIX) wouldn't crash under normal hardware conditions. Doesn anyone know if this or anything like it is true?
The large unwashed masses who just want to take money from the good hard working people is largely an invention by the media and politicians who like to feed upon people's hate and fear. Every welfare recipient who I have ever talked to would love to get a job that can support their families, but there aren't jobs for everyone right now. The ironic part of it is that capitalism as it exists in America right now actually works to maintain a large group of uneducated poor people. I love free enterprise and many of the ideals of capitalism, but be careful when you bring your weapons of fear and hatered to bear on those disgusting people who just want to leach off of you; you may find you do as much damage to your own humanity as anything else.
While you are probably right that most people think of money whenever things economic or trade related are mentioned, you are not entirely right that music can be lumped in with Ferraris or any other good. Perhaps that's the way you think about it when you buy a CD or download an MP3 (you're obtaining a good), but some people like to think about music as art, which from the artist's perspective lies 100% outside the economic realm. I think the great thing about MP3s and any other format that allows artist to get their work out without big companies is the freedom it gives musicians to create what they want. I don't particularly care that you or I can download a song for free that the artist should be getting something for.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an interesting architecture, but I don't think you'll see it in a personal computer any time soon. It appears from the bits of technical information that I looked over on their web page that you have to program the reconfigurable part of the chip differently from the rest of the chip. What this means is that you can't just take a C program and create a new compiler backend to dump out a program for this beast; or if you can, it will take some SERIOUS work by the compiler people.
I am currently involved in some research where we are trying to solve the same problem, roughly. However, we are trying to make the change as transparent to users (i.e. compiler writers & assembly code writers) as possible by making small tweaks to the standard RISC concept that will allow our chip to extract large amounts of parallelism. It is clear that with these reconfiguration based architectures it is possible to have huge performance gains at the expense of programming complexity. Hopefully our architecture will be to these reconfigurable systems what superscalar was to VLIW. VLIW has been around for a long time, but it wasn't popularized until architects came up with ways of making a VLIW core look like a scalar processor to the outside world.
We'll see.
Ben
I completely agee with your point about many programmers not recognizing the difference between programming and computer science. The third level computer science course here at Carnegie Mellon is taught in ML. While ML is considered by many computer scientists to be a wonderful language, there is little call for it in any industry. On the second day of class the professor defended the department's choice of ML by pointing out that the pupose of the class was not to train us to be better programmers, but to give us a deeper understanding of computation and functional thinking. It surprised me that some students were angry that they were learning something that didn't directly translate into earning a big salary at some company; that simply wasn't the point of the course (and shouldn't be, in my opinion).
If you want to be a world class hacker and/or earn a lot of money, then I don't see any need for what college offers. If you want to gain a deeper understanding of computers and possibly have your name go down in the CS history books, there is no other way.
Ben
I believe Karl Marx was the first to write about the "magical" nature of consumerism. It's deeply entangled with advertising - at least in Marx's view. The system makes people think things like, "wow, I get to choose between Coke and Pepsi, or Nike and Reebok, or McDonalds and Burger King" instead of something like, "maybe I'll learn to sew and make my own clothes". Most of the creative power in the day to day operation of society is removed from people and put in some mystical realm of the advertising and media world.
Just in case anyone is curious I definitely do not consider myself a Marxist. I think capitalism has a lot of positive traits. However, there are also many less than attractive features of it and we need to be wary of them. The homogenization of all people to "consumers" is one of those features. When people see themselves (consciously or unconsciously) primarily as the end point of producer's product chains, then the hard core capitalists have won.
In my opinion, the world is really about art, science, technology, health, family, etc. Money is just something we use to facilitate the rest of our lives. Too many people (especially in America) have been convinced that money and consuming goods are reasonable primary goals in life. Anyone who cares about culture should be fighting this tooth and nail. My latest attempt is to convince some friends of mine in a very good band that they should try out the street performer protocol. I think it has a lot of potential for putting the focus of artistic ventures back where it should be.
Ben
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/smlnj/
Many people I know here at CMU found ML tough to wrap their heads around. I think it is a wonderful language, and I plan on using it for as many projects as I can in the future.
Ben
I agree completely. Freshman year of high school I bought a TI-82, because the math department recommended it to all the upper level math students. I used it for a few years and became reasonably proficient with it. However, at some point I lost it and was forced to think a little more about the math I was doing. Since I did all my calculations by hand, I was quite motivated to simplify probelms as much as possible before plugging in numbers and getting an answer. I really think this is the way math (and chemistry and physics) should be taught. Learning how to use a fancy calculator can be useful, but in my experience, learning math with a fancy calculator just makes one lazy and reduces the depth of insight one gains into the underlying principles.
cheers,
Ben
Has anyone else noticed this post before? I feel like I've read it at least once and maybe two or three times, attached to stories that were equally unrelated to Linux networking. Does anyone know why this is?
Ben
It seems a lot of people are suggesting very advanced things for a student's first computer science class. I'm sure there are many here who were bored to tears by their high school CS class because they had been programming for years, but you can't assume that everyone is at that level. Give students the option of doing more advanced projects on their own as a way of getting out of the regular assignments, but don't assume all your students are going to be prepared to execute a big complex project.
I also think it's very important to strongly establish the important fundamental pinciples of CS in a student's first class. You should emphsize the importance of things like recursion, separation of abstraction and implementation, good style, thinking before coding (i.e. writing specs and pseudo-code), objects, etc. It would probably be beneficial to demonstrate these concepts in a few different kinds of languages: Imperative (i.e. C or Pascal), functional (i.e. Lisp or ML), and object oriented (i.e. C++ or Java). I very much agree with the posters who suggested finding programming challenges on the web and using those. However, I think it's important to emphasize the thinking that needs to go into solving problems, as opposed to emphasizing good hacking. Students have plenty of time to learn the tricks that make a good programmer, in their first CS class they should learn the fundamentals of computer science.
cheers,
Ben
Do you use large doses of strong drugs or do you base you opinions of the world outside of America on American sitcoms? I can't think of two social institutions more important to giving people opportunity in life than health and education. Compared to the rest of the rich world, quality of health care and education are so heterogeneous in American, it's absurd. From the June 24th issue of the economist:
And while America's health-care system is deemed the most responsive, it does badly when it comes to measures that reflect general population health, coming 24th in the DALE ranking and 54th, alongside Fiji, in how fairly the financial burden of health care is distributed.
This is based on a recent survey of national health care systems by the World Health Organization. I don't have a similar quote about eduation, but I am fairly confident that quality and cost are as unevenly distributed there.
It's too bad that so many people show so little concern for inequality of opportunity in life. I guess it's an ugly side-effect of the extreme individualism that has developed in America and some other places. It's really not a bad thing to care about fellow human beings. Really, it's not.
Ben
Are you saying that you would like someone to set up an environment for you where you can be yourself? Why can't you "express that Open Source is good in some areas, but in others some Closed Source software is better" on slashdot, or anywhere else? I'm pretty sure you don't have to worry about someone coming to your house and beating you up for talking trash about Open Source on slashdot. I bet they wouldn't even pull your post. Heck, this post of yours was even moderated up to 5. If you're not willing to endure a few negative responses on an internet message board to "be an individual", then you have a pretty stange idea of what it means to be an individual.
Ben
From the very brief description in the article, the genetic algorithm seems to function very much like a simulated annealing algorithm. Can anybody comment on the differences between genetic algorithms like the one used in this case and simulated annealing algorithms? Are there any features to a design problem that would make it more amenable to one or the other?
For those unfamiliar with simulated annealing, here is a quick description: Simulated annealing algorithms need some parameters for defining a design and a function for evaluating the quality of a design with a particular set of parameters. The algorithm keeps some sense of temperature which starts high and steadily decreases through the running of the algorithm. The main loop of the algorithm perturbs the design slightly (changes the parameters) and either accepts or rolls back the change with some probability, based on the change in quality caused by the change in the design, and the current temperature.
Ben
There's a difference between posting a story about a specific company's IPO and posting a story about the general vagaries of the stock market. I'm not sure exactly how big that difference is, but it definitely exists. I haven't taken a look at the numbers myself, but from the few snippets of news reports I have read and seen, Linux related stocks didn't fall much more or less than the rest of the market. So while this is a big story, there are really no special Linux, tech, or geek issues going on here at all.
As always, please correct me if I am wrong.
Article the fourth [Amendment II]
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The Constitution makes it very clear that the right of the people to keep and bear arms is granted because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State. So when gun control advocates claim that owning uzi's to hunt deer isn't protected by the Constitution, they actually have some pretty firm ground to stand on. The constitution does NOT say that the right to bear arms is unconditionally granted to all people for all purposes. The Economist has an excellent essay on the history of guns in America; I suggest anyone who is interested in the subject take a look. Go to www.economist.com and click on "The Best of The Economist". Scroll down to Guns in America.
I once heard that IBM mathematically proved that some program of theirs (maybe AIX) wouldn't crash under normal hardware conditions. Doesn anyone know if this or anything like it is true?
Ben
The large unwashed masses who just want to take money from the good hard working people is largely an invention by the media and politicians who like to feed upon people's hate and fear. Every welfare recipient who I have ever talked to would love to get a job that can support their families, but there aren't jobs for everyone right now. The ironic part of it is that capitalism as it exists in America right now actually works to maintain a large group of uneducated poor people. I love free enterprise and many of the ideals of capitalism, but be careful when you bring your weapons of fear and hatered to bear on those disgusting people who just want to leach off of you; you may find you do as much damage to your own humanity as anything else.
Cheers,
Ben
While you are probably right that most people think of money whenever things economic or trade related are mentioned, you are not entirely right that music can be lumped in with Ferraris or any other good. Perhaps that's the way you think about it when you buy a CD or download an MP3 (you're obtaining a good), but some people like to think about music as art, which from the artist's perspective lies 100% outside the economic realm. I think the great thing about MP3s and any other format that allows artist to get their work out without big companies is the freedom it gives musicians to create what they want. I don't particularly care that you or I can download a song for free that the artist should be getting something for.
Ben