That works if you have unencoded source material. He has DVDs that are already encoded at MPEG2. Encoding again with a lossy codec is just going to lose more quality, no matter what the possible encoding quality is.
And the broken 1.x link and the differently broken, but still redundant 2.0 alpha link... wow, you'd think you might actually try links out before you publish something. Oh right, I'm reading/. Who was I kidding?
Why should I "Check those URLs!" when slashdot editors (and/or "ninejaguar") don't know how to? Second graders do a better job of proofreading...
Um, it would seem a little silly that if AT&T didn't license Microsoft patent rights when they licensed Unix to them to create Xenix. And equally as silly if the same didn't happen from Microsoft to SCO when SCO was founded.
Nice article, which showed up as the first item on Google
All of this was easily found with a Google search that garned 24,000 hits.
Of course, that means you need to remember her name. Our maligner would have found it had he done a slashdot search for "Irish crypt", but since he didn't even do enough to find the old article, that's probably beyond him...
Are you kidding me? The general public may not care about it, but CIOs and other people who make purchasing decisions will. You don't that every sales guy at IBM, Sun, HP/Compaq (the non-MS sides), RedHat, and anyone else who competes with MSFT in the enterprise space isn't going to end their presentations with, "And if you don't believe me about Microsoft security, believe Microsoft" ?
I've also worked in that office (Folsom and New Montgomery for the curious), though only for a week back in April as a contractor for a consulting company helping with Sun's web presence as well.
Part of that office is "hotelling", part of it is permanent space, some of it two person offices, some of it more open plan space. In this part of the building, things were business as usual... one of the web team had quite an array of office decorations and a bunch of machines, Slowlaris, Macs and PCs. Apparently the lack of office decorations and not letting people use their own tools didn't apply to him.
It was definitely mostly empty, except one day when there was a press event in the building, in which case there were a bunch of marketing flacks who parked there. (One slept, one yakked on the phone all afternoon setting up meetings, but not actually doing anything, one got seriously miffed that we had been in those spots for two days, but she was apparently able to book the spots, despite another one being right across the way.)
One of the silly things was the networking setups. Each four port had one phone jack, one port for the SunRay, one 10BaseT jack and one other port I never found out what it was for. We all had Winblows craptops, so we used the 10BaseT ports. But we wanted to all camp in one conference room to allow us to minimize our impact on the office as well as making it easier to collaborate. Except there were only three ports in that conference room and more than three of us. When we brought in a hub, the network ports shut down! We were told it was because it was using "too much bandwidth". A bunch of crap. So we had to spread out and squat in some of the hotelling space. We tried to reserve our spots, but it didn't take (see miffed woman above).
So long and short, interesting concept, works for some folks, doesn't work for other folks, not quite sure why she had the problems she did given what I saw in the permanent space.
If you want proof of concept, go to your closest major university station (UCLA[emphasis added], NYU, UT, whatever) with your latest album and try to get it on the playlist
Umm, before you start generalizing, you may want to check things out. UCLA's radio station used to not even have enough power to be heard in their own studio.
Yep. Apple's famed trademark and copyright lawyers screwed up on letting this one through. There's no way that ichat is not going to get confused with iChat. ichat was the first instant messaging program I ever used. It's more focused for corporate uses, but unless Apple paid them off (and I'd be willing to bet that they didn't since there is no mention of of ichat on the web page or the press release), there's going to be some amount of backtracking on Apple's part.
It's an interesting reversal (and one not noted in the article since it was written in 1997) that the "freshly inked rubber stamp"ing Jackson, who's made out to be in MS' pocket compared to the quixotic Judge Sporkin ends up in pretty much the same straits as his predecessor: exposing Microsoft for who they are, but then being marginalized by an eager Justice Department and Administration. I wonder what Judge Kollar-Kotelly's opinion will be in a few years.
The initial hearing is on April 1st. Does that mean that if the judge does something stupid, such as rule like all the other DMCA judges have so far, that we can ignore it as folly?
"When you use the compact disc in a CD ROM drive, the technology launches an audio player (the "Player"), and plays compressed audio files (the "Content")."
You could also complain about hearing the difference between the MP3 files and the normal audio. "It sounds different on my computer than it does on my CD player."
The ACM arguably represents software professionals more than the IEEE. They were a part of this effort until it became too fanatical about certification, so it's not like it's a NIH situation.
I would have added the link myself, but Mr. McBreen got to it first.
Re:SMT is really the reaction to the death of PC's
on
Emergence of SMT
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· Score: 1
The fact that Intel's last processor release was a "mobile processor", Intel's future x86 vapormap includes pure SMT chips, and Compaq's future vapormap includes an SMT alpha shows how important that size reduction is.
SMT on EV8 has been on the Alpha "vapormap" for at least three years, probably considerably longer than that. July 1998 was when I first saw it and I'm not a DEC person. Don't think it has anything to do with embedded stuff. Don't think you'll find Alpha's in very many embedded situations either, not compare to PowerPC or the real embedded archiectures...
Re:CISC, RISC, and VLIW. It's very simple.
on
Emergence of SMT
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· Score: 2
The BOTTLENECK is the memory bus.
OK.
That's why CISC lasted so long in the first place, and is still with us today.
No way. CISC (i.e. x86) lasted so long because of duopoly action and backward compatibility. In fact, like you said, CISC is dead because even since Pentiums, x86 chips have been RISC on the inside and CISC to the outside world (to varying degrees).
The fixed length instructions of RISC can be executed 2 at a time because you don't have to decode the first one to see where the second one starts.
Or n at a time. Any OOO RISC processor these days worth its snot decodes 4 ops/clock, some are at 6 or 8. (If it can't retire that fast, it doesn't really matter...)
Alpha haven't displaced Intel because the real bottleneck is the memory bus
Really? For scientific computing, which is where you have reallybig datasets and memory bandwidth is key? I don't think you see x86 there very much. You see DEC, IBM, Sun and HP. Who are all, surprise, surprise, RISC-based hardware vendors. Many RISC chips (Alpha, POWER, PowerPC) have long since passed x86 in sheer performance, especially on FP. Intel has defintely won in price/performance, but I would argue that's more due to volume than anything else.
This multi-threading stuff is just a way to keep the extra VLIW execution cores from being fed NOPs.
Umm, Alpha EV8 uses SMT. Not VLIW. Itanium is VLIW-like. Doesn't use SMT. Example no worky.
Not saying that the concept is wrong, that SMT as a concept might alleviate some of the performance issues with superfluous instructions in a VLIW instruction stream. But that's sort of the point of VLIW, to let the compiler, rather than OOO hardware, figure out how to best use the available functional units as much as possible. It puts NOPs in to keep the instruction stream balanced so the decoder can work in a predictable way just like in RISC.
Multi-core CPUs like IBM's are SMP-on-a-chip, which is not the same as SMT by any stretch.
SMT, because more of the functional units on the chip are staying active at one time, increases heat and power consumption just about as much as SMP-on-a-chip, though it may be marginally better because the core-level overhead won't be present.
"SMP-aware" applications? Yeah, you need something like that with the Mac and its cooperative multitasking and wacky thread model. However, with any normal preemptive multitasking, thread supporting OS, introducing threading into a program makes it "SMP-aware" by default (though you may find new/different bugs on an SMT or SMP system).
The only thing I can think of that would be an "SMT optimization" at the application programming level would be threading any floating point calculations separately from integer calculations, thus allowing the FP units to be running independently from the rest of the application.
Methinks Vince needs to bone up at little...
Some more links:
Universiity of Washington SMT info, this is also linked to from the UMass link previously posted
Look at some more Alpha specifics from the source
I believe these Real World guys were quoted in the last Slashdot SMT reference (and look, Hemos posted that one too... you'd think they'd read the links...>
Disclaimer: I worked for Compaq (though not the DEC side) on porting an OS to Alpha a couple years ago and having to be aware of SMT in EV8 coming down the pike.
It was supposed to be the first mass-market VLIW chip, though Transmeta beat them to it.
You're correct that the article doesn't give HP its credit for really being where many of IA-64's ideas came from. However, HP's work was with the Playdoh project, which wasn't really connected to the PA-RISC architecture. It started there, but quickly evolved differently.
It is a new architecture. Predication, a register stack engine, the number of features designed for parallelism, certainly haven't been seen together or in a "mass-market" processor. Certainly the process technology isn't going to be special, given its size and clock speed.
Also, the code the compilers is going to compile is still going to be in source form. It's not "CISC legacy". The x86 compatibility is done by an on-chip unit, not software.
Stan Kawczynski is the Company's Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer. He also serves as Vice President of Investments for Birchtree Financial Services, Inc., a member NASD/SIPC and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Block Financial Corporation, with offices in Sunnyvale and San Rafael, California and Kansas City, Missouri. From 1993 to 1995, he was Vice President of Government Affairs, as well as the Director and Chairman of the Board of Trilogy Systems, Inc., a new business opportunities incubator company.
Birchtree Financial Services, Vice President - Investments
Curious that an elected government official would be engaging in this kind of activity. True, there's nothing illegal here. But it sure smells funny...
For those of you who don't know, Sunnyvale is the "heart of Silicon Valley"[tm] (their words, not mine)
...That the GEM optimizer is easily integrated into gcc. This is the biggest one. When that optimizer isn't written in C/C++, it makes it a tad harder to work with. Even ignoring bootstrapping, running on other platforms, etc.
...That Compaq/Digital has the ability to release it as source. Maybe there is some third party code as part of the optimizer that they do not have the ability to distribute.
... That the team working on this has the bandwidth to clean this up right away. They are understaffed and overworked as it is...
Do I need to continue? Better start chowing down...
Disclaimer: I'm a Compaq employee who (indirectly) works with GEM. But I do not speak for anyone but myself.
Except that there wasn't any reason to be anonymous for this. Unless there were well-phrased questions of the form "Why does Linux suck?" (and I don't know if that could be done), there wasn't anything political going on. Certainly in this discussion there could be unpopular views that someone doesn't want reveal an identity. But not asking a question.
Do you think Alan Cox would personally respond to a question from a random anonymous email address? If no, then this is a moot point. If yes, then you may have a point, but I still can't see what you would want to ask anonymously.
Comments ought to be scoredsoley and entirely on the basis of their content - not extraneous factors like whether you logged in or not.
We already know this isn't the case. Logged-in posters start with 1, ACs with 0. Those are the rules of this game, Don't like it, take your ball and go home. The prejudice is already there. You knew this going in.
People need anonymity for a few reasons.
Posting a message that will bring harm to them. I don't think there's ever this on/., except if insiders are posting infomation that will get themselves fired or cut off from the information.
Posting an unpopular view. If you don't want to deal with flames, you may post devil's advocate stuff. This is probably the majority of legitimate/. anonymity.
Posting a view contrary to their established positions. If someone (like a political candidate) has to be "tough on drugs", but they're a closet pot smoker, anonymity gives them some leeway between their public and private lives. (Doesn't solve the hypocrisy, but maybe that's not the battle to fight at that particular time.) I wouldn't be surprised if this happened sometimes (e.g. a Linux supporter thinks one particular thing is stupid, but doesn't want to "taint" his rep)
Someone who doesn't want to be tracked. In this case, they would also don't trust the/. maintainers to keep their real (off-Slashdot) identity secret.
Those are all legitimate reasons, but again, I can't see how they apply to asking pertinent questions to an interview subject.
The downside of anonymity, you get people who post drivel like "ALAN COX SUX" with, of course, no reasons why. (Not even a whining "he didn't answer my question"...) I'm willing to put up with that because there are times you need anonymous voices.
Like this discussion. I could totally see someone posting what you did as an AC, because it threatens the established (Taco, Hemos, et al.) authority.
Asking Alan a question wasn't one of those times though... Unless you can come up with a legitimate reason...
Slashdot Mirror
That works if you have unencoded source material. He has DVDs that are already encoded at MPEG2. Encoding again with a lossy codec is just going to lose more quality, no matter what the possible encoding quality is.
And the broken 1.x link and the differently broken, but still redundant 2.0 alpha link... wow, you'd think you might actually try links out before you publish something. Oh right, I'm reading
Why should I "Check those URLs!" when slashdot editors (and/or "ninejaguar") don't know how to? Second graders do a better job of proofreading...
Um, it would seem a little silly that if AT&T didn't license Microsoft patent rights when they licensed Unix to them to create Xenix. And equally as silly if the same didn't happen from Microsoft to SCO when SCO was founded.
Nice article, which showed up as the first item on Google
All of this was easily found with a Google search that garned 24,000 hits.
Of course, that means you need to remember her name. Our maligner would have found it had he done a slashdot search for "Irish crypt", but since he didn't even do enough to find the old article, that's probably beyond him...
Since MS took the page down, take a look at Google's cache here
Are you kidding me? The general public may not care about it, but CIOs and other people who make purchasing decisions will. You don't that every sales guy at IBM, Sun, HP/Compaq (the non-MS sides), RedHat, and anyone else who competes with MSFT in the enterprise space isn't going to end their presentations with, "And if you don't believe me about Microsoft security, believe Microsoft" ?
I've also worked in that office (Folsom and New Montgomery for the curious), though only for a week back in April as a contractor for a consulting company helping with Sun's web presence as well.
Part of that office is "hotelling", part of it is permanent space, some of it two person offices, some of it more open plan space. In this part of the building, things were business as usual... one of the web team had quite an array of office decorations and a bunch of machines, Slowlaris, Macs and PCs. Apparently the lack of office decorations and not letting people use their own tools didn't apply to him.
It was definitely mostly empty, except one day when there was a press event in the building, in which case there were a bunch of marketing flacks who parked there. (One slept, one yakked on the phone all afternoon setting up meetings, but not actually doing anything, one got seriously miffed that we had been in those spots for two days, but she was apparently able to book the spots, despite another one being right across the way.)
One of the silly things was the networking setups. Each four port had one phone jack, one port for the SunRay, one 10BaseT jack and one other port I never found out what it was for. We all had Winblows craptops, so we used the 10BaseT ports. But we wanted to all camp in one conference room to allow us to minimize our impact on the office as well as making it easier to collaborate. Except there were only three ports in that conference room and more than three of us. When we brought in a hub, the network ports shut down! We were told it was because it was using "too much bandwidth". A bunch of crap. So we had to spread out and squat in some of the hotelling space. We tried to reserve our spots, but it didn't take (see miffed woman above).
So long and short, interesting concept, works for some folks, doesn't work for other folks, not quite sure why she had the problems she did given what I saw in the permanent space.
If you want proof of concept, go to your closest major university station (UCLA[emphasis added], NYU, UT, whatever) with your latest album and try to get it on the playlist
Umm, before you start generalizing, you may want to check things out. UCLA's radio station used to not even have enough power to be heard in their own studio.
Jason, who happens to be wearing a KLA T-shirt
Yep. Apple's famed trademark and copyright lawyers screwed up on letting this one through. There's no way that ichat is not going to get confused with iChat. ichat was the first instant messaging program I ever used. It's more focused for corporate uses, but unless Apple paid them off (and I'd be willing to bet that they didn't since there is no mention of of ichat on the web page or the press release), there's going to be some amount of backtracking on Apple's part.
It's an interesting reversal (and one not noted in the article since it was written in 1997) that the "freshly inked rubber stamp"ing Jackson, who's made out to be in MS' pocket compared to the quixotic Judge Sporkin ends up in pretty much the same straits as his predecessor: exposing Microsoft for who they are, but then being marginalized by an eager Justice Department and Administration. I wonder what Judge Kollar-Kotelly's opinion will be in a few years.
Except if you actually followed GCC development on Altivec, you would notice that an inordinate number of Altivec posts on the gcc mailing list come from one Aldy Hernandez whose address I won't repeat here but ends with a "redhat.com", which would lead me to believe that they are actually doing some of the work.
[slightly offtopic]
If they don't want any more resumes, they should stop posting listings on job sites...
The initial hearing is on April 1st. Does that mean that if the judge does something stupid, such as rule like all the other DMCA judges have so far, that we can ignore it as folly?
"When you use the compact disc in a CD ROM drive, the technology launches an audio player (the "Player"), and plays compressed audio files (the "Content")."
You could also complain about hearing the difference between the MP3 files and the normal audio. "It sounds different on my computer than it does on my CD player."
While we're at it, let's give anti-kudos to jrp2 who submitted this fine repeat. Where's the friend/foe button so I can ding him too?
How about...
I Still Know What You Did Last Last Last Last Last Last Last Last Last Final Fantasy
The ACM arguably represents software professionals more than the IEEE. They were a part of this effort until it became too fanatical about certification, so it's not like it's a NIH situation.
I would have added the link myself, but Mr. McBreen got to it first.
The fact that Intel's last processor release was a "mobile processor", Intel's future x86 vapormap includes pure SMT chips, and Compaq's future vapormap includes an SMT alpha shows how important that size reduction is.
SMT on EV8 has been on the Alpha "vapormap" for at least three years, probably considerably longer than that. July 1998 was when I first saw it and I'm not a DEC person. Don't think it has anything to do with embedded stuff. Don't think you'll find Alpha's in very many embedded situations either, not compare to PowerPC or the real embedded archiectures...
The BOTTLENECK is the memory bus.
OK.
That's why CISC lasted so long in the first place, and is still with us today.
No way. CISC (i.e. x86) lasted so long because of duopoly action and backward compatibility. In fact, like you said, CISC is dead because even since Pentiums, x86 chips have been RISC on the inside and CISC to the outside world (to varying degrees).
The fixed length instructions of RISC can be executed 2 at a time because you don't have to decode the first one to see where the second one starts.
Or n at a time. Any OOO RISC processor these days worth its snot decodes 4 ops/clock, some are at 6 or 8. (If it can't retire that fast, it doesn't really matter...)
Alpha haven't displaced Intel because the real bottleneck is the memory bus
Really? For scientific computing, which is where you have really big datasets and memory bandwidth is key? I don't think you see x86 there very much. You see DEC, IBM, Sun and HP. Who are all, surprise, surprise, RISC-based hardware vendors. Many RISC chips (Alpha, POWER, PowerPC) have long since passed x86 in sheer performance, especially on FP. Intel has defintely won in price/performance, but I would argue that's more due to volume than anything else.
This multi-threading stuff is just a way to keep the extra VLIW execution cores from being fed NOPs.
Umm, Alpha EV8 uses SMT. Not VLIW. Itanium is VLIW-like. Doesn't use SMT. Example no worky.
Not saying that the concept is wrong, that SMT as a concept might alleviate some of the performance issues with superfluous instructions in a VLIW instruction stream. But that's sort of the point of VLIW, to let the compiler, rather than OOO hardware, figure out how to best use the available functional units as much as possible. It puts NOPs in to keep the instruction stream balanced so the decoder can work in a predictable way just like in RISC.
Well, where do we start...
Multi-core CPUs like IBM's are SMP-on-a-chip, which is not the same as SMT by any stretch.
SMT, because more of the functional units on the chip are staying active at one time, increases heat and power consumption just about as much as SMP-on-a-chip, though it may be marginally better because the core-level overhead won't be present.
"SMP-aware" applications? Yeah, you need something like that with the Mac and its cooperative multitasking and wacky thread model. However, with any normal preemptive multitasking, thread supporting OS, introducing threading into a program makes it "SMP-aware" by default (though you may find new/different bugs on an SMT or SMP system).
The only thing I can think of that would be an "SMT optimization" at the application programming level would be threading any floating point calculations separately from integer calculations, thus allowing the FP units to be running independently from the rest of the application.
Methinks Vince needs to bone up at little...
Some more links:
Universiity of Washington SMT info, this is also linked to from the UMass link previously posted
Look at some more Alpha specifics from the source
I believe these Real World guys were quoted in the last Slashdot SMT reference (and look, Hemos posted that one too... you'd think they'd read the links...>
Disclaimer: I worked for Compaq (though not the DEC side) on porting an OS to Alpha a couple years ago and having to be aware of SMT in EV8 coming down the pike.
Whatever. Whatever is right.
It was supposed to be the first mass-market VLIW chip, though Transmeta beat them to it.
You're correct that the article doesn't give HP its credit for really being where many of IA-64's ideas came from. However, HP's work was with the Playdoh project, which wasn't really connected to the PA-RISC architecture. It started there, but quickly evolved differently.
It is a new architecture. Predication, a register stack engine, the number of features designed for parallelism, certainly haven't been seen together or in a "mass-market" processor. Certainly the process technology isn't going to be special, given its size and clock speed.
Also, the code the compilers is going to compile is still going to be in source form. It's not "CISC legacy". The x86 compatibility is done by an on-chip unit, not software.
So nobody except the founder -- not even the CFO -- is giving up his day job for this ...
And as I noted earlier, the CFO is a Sunnyvale City Councilman... very strange indeed...
Jason
Go click on the About LinuxOne on the cheesy website.
Now go visit the Sunnyvale City Council webpage and a certain one Mr. Stan Kawczynski's bio
Curious that an elected government official would be engaging in this kind of activity. True, there's nothing illegal here. But it sure smells funny...
For those of you who don't know, Sunnyvale is the "heart of Silicon Valley"[tm] (their words, not mine)
Jason "former Sunnyvale resident" Untulis...That the GEM optimizer is easily integrated into gcc. This is the biggest one. When that optimizer isn't written in C/C++, it makes it a tad harder to work with. Even ignoring bootstrapping, running on other platforms, etc.
...That Compaq/Digital has the ability to release it as source. Maybe there is some third party code as part of the optimizer that they do not have the ability to distribute.
... That the team working on this has the bandwidth to clean this up right away. They are understaffed and overworked as it is...
Do I need to continue? Better start chowing down...
Disclaimer: I'm a Compaq employee who (indirectly) works with GEM. But I do not speak for anyone but myself.
Except that there wasn't any reason to be anonymous for this. Unless there were well-phrased questions of the form "Why does Linux suck?" (and I don't know if that could be done), there wasn't anything political going on. Certainly in this discussion there could be unpopular views that someone doesn't want reveal an identity. But not asking a question.
Do you think Alan Cox would personally respond to a question from a random anonymous email address? If no, then this is a moot point. If yes, then you may have a point, but I still can't see what you would want to ask anonymously.
Comments ought to be scoredsoley and entirely on the basis of their content - not extraneous factors like whether you logged in or not.
We already know this isn't the case. Logged-in posters start with 1, ACs with 0. Those are the rules of this game, Don't like it, take your ball and go home. The prejudice is already there. You knew this going in.
People need anonymity for a few reasons.
Posting a message that will bring harm to them. I don't think there's ever this on /., except if insiders are posting infomation that will get themselves fired or cut off from the information.
Posting an unpopular view. If you don't want to deal with flames, you may post devil's advocate stuff. This is probably the majority of legitimate /. anonymity.
Posting a view contrary to their established positions. If someone (like a political candidate) has to be "tough on drugs", but they're a closet pot smoker, anonymity gives them some leeway between their public and private lives. (Doesn't solve the hypocrisy, but maybe that's not the battle to fight at that particular time.) I wouldn't be surprised if this happened sometimes (e.g. a Linux supporter thinks one particular thing is stupid, but doesn't want to "taint" his rep)
Someone who doesn't want to be tracked. In this case, they would also don't trust the /. maintainers to keep their real (off-Slashdot) identity secret.
Those are all legitimate reasons, but again, I can't see how they apply to asking pertinent questions to an interview subject.
The downside of anonymity, you get people who post drivel like "ALAN COX SUX" with, of course, no reasons why. (Not even a whining "he didn't answer my question"...) I'm willing to put up with that because there are times you need anonymous voices.
Like this discussion. I could totally see someone posting what you did as an AC, because it threatens the established (Taco, Hemos, et al.) authority.
Asking Alan a question wasn't one of those times though... Unless you can come up with a legitimate reason...