There are some true principles in your post but you haven't flushed them out, and your anti-MS emotions are driving you to predict non-existent conspiracies.
Intel faced this realization around the time of the Pentium Pro/PII/PIII. Many people said x86 could never compete with RISC. Guess what? Like you, they were dead wrong! Don't feel too bad, even *Intel* got this wrong with Itanium.
And the reason is this: the process and development effort advantages gained from having an unmatchable production volume of an x86 FAR EXCEED the minor, more elegant design tradeoffs of other processors.
Furthermore, while a human being perceives the RISC->CISC (actually, opcode->micro-op) decoding as a wasteful thing that must be purged to attain perfection, the reality is that it is NOT a factor in performance. If it was, then how could an Intel (or AMD) processor continually completely max out the capacity of its floating point units (2-6 FLOPS/clock depending on chip)? The answer is, because the overhead is unobservable because of a great deal of parallelism, pre-fetching, caching (instruction and data) and scheduling implemented in very fast, very optimized, and very parallel hardware.
You might then retreat to make the argument that while maybe the performance overhead is zero, all that circuitry is costing you electrical power. And the answer is, again, sure, but how much? When you realize that most of the gates on a modern chip are cache, you come to the realization that very, very little power is being spent on opcode decode.
About the only pro-RISC argument you might make anymore is that indeed, those chips are MUCH easier to design.
Now on to your 'MS code secrecy is why we have x86' - HOGWASH! x86 rules the roost - again - because of its volume! It's got the most developers, drivers (crucial), code, accessories and advertising. Did you forget, BTW, that there were Alpha versions of Windows NT? And there still is an Itanium version. And an X-Box 360 version is I'm sure on the way. As well as a 'Cell' based machine. If indeed a significantly faster architecture came out you can count on MS supporting it. The problem is, for any kind of competing architecture to gain critical mass it must be MUCH better in terms of performance or power consumption. And no one seems to be able to introduce anything for which they can maintain a gain over Intel for long.
So, unless you're a compiler writer, why complain (not that writing a RISC compiler can be much fun either)?!? If you're in scientific computing, your problem is likely memory performance, not CPU execution. If you're playing games, you're likely limited by graphics cards and PCI-EX bus bandwidth. If you're a 'normal' user, your CPU barely breaks a sweat. And while your laptop might have shorter battery life than you want, increasingly your screen and other things take up more and more of the power budget.
Is talking really less fatiguing than typing? And if everyone had to speak every word they entered into their computer the modern cubical workplace would be chaos.
Clearly voice recognition is extremely desirable in mobile situations such as with mobile phone commands and calling into phone centers.
For convenience and proper I use a Zojirushi hot water dispenser. With most models you can set and view the temperature. It quietly and conveniently keeps your water hot and ready all day for tea or coffee. Once you have one you will throw out your tea kettle and maybe your coffee maker.
When I look at nearly all the stumbling blocks I've conquered - algebra, writing skills, engineering school topics - I got over each and every one only after some serious one on one time with a real person.
In a similar sense, read multiple books on tough topics. Don't just grunt through the explanation from the one 'official' course book or lecture. Find 10! Eventually, one of the sources will have an explanation that fits you...someone who got stuck on the same mental snag as you. THEN go back and read the rest...it will fall into place.
Lastly, the best way to learn is to teach. Work in a study group - not to do less work - but to exercise your grasp of the subject. If you can teach it, you know it, and vice versa.
Make sure your conclusions are based on how the world works more than personal aversions to debt and a modern monetary system.
The economy won't grow without debt.
The US economy is not perfect but it is not teetering toward disaster. Read the Economist if you want to see the world the way it really is.
And while housing prices might drop substantially, the term 'bubble' doesn't make much sense. Houses will never be worth zero. Having lots of people overextended on something is bad, but a house is a good thing to be chained to. Owning a house is not going out of style - renting sucks. There isn't enough land near where people want to live - the coasts. Owning a house is the only real way for most people to keep up with inflation. In a sense owning a house is about as close as most people can get to owning the gold you wish we all traded with.
This doesn't belong on Slashdot. Take the argument somewhere else - there are plenty of places appropriate for it. This ain't news for nerds. This is blue vs. red. And red vs. blue stories are just as inapropos.
I ran one in Columbus Ohio during the 'Doom' craze. It's lots of fun to build a store, but a lot less fun to sit there and run it. I learned a lot, of course. And now with everyone having high-speed internet, why does anyone have to go to a brick and mortar store and pay?
> The ground's been good enough for farmland, manufacturing, missile silos, why not put your datacenter > and other things in here as well? Or is it that you're just too busy with writing offshoring loophole law?
I admire your patriotism, but this is just sour grapes. Look, I'm formerly from the midwest - now on the west coast, and the truth is that you simply can't attract young, active people with flat, land-locked ground covered with crappy weather. They'll pay extra to live where you can have fun living.
You also need a critical mass of opportunities that are interesting to young people. When I was in Chicago, my startup 'generously' offered me enough stock options to *maybe* equate to 1 year of pay if an IPO happened. And I had to search hard for this more technically interesting company after reams of boring business data processing jobs.
Yes, I'm *know* there are brilliant people in the 'silicon prairie', and companies will keep happening there, but not like they do out here, or even the northeast.
Unix died not because of its downfall but because of MS's rise.
And for Unix vendors, Unix software was not the problem. Unix hardware was the problem.
They gambled that Intel would always build 'toy' processors. But Intel had the volume and competitive security to allow it to become the processor $/performance (and eventually, just plain performance) champ.
MS gained critical mass from being funded by being un-pirateable and ubiquitous (OEMs tend to pay for those copies of MS/DOS and Windows). Awful as their software was, eventually everyone found that they had to learn it.
Eventually even the 'old guard' IT guys couldn't resist the price/performance of a MS/Intel NT box.
In other words, the extra "BS" costs incurred in dealing with a Wintel PC due to inflexibility and quality - though substantial - were less costly than the price/performance and universality aspects of the PC.
MS/Intel proved that indeed you *can* drive a 'toy' car on the freeway given time, money, and enough crashes and money to refine it.
Where Linux wins, it too has a better value proposition. It has just as cheap & fast of a hardware 'home base' as Windows, and its software cost savings out weigh its extra costs.
Everyone who wants a real job needs to understand makefiles.
Or how to work on a command-line *nix system.
Everyone should know gdb command line basics too - how to get a stack trace, how to set conditional breakpoints, etc.
And using crap like the old[Microsoft 'AppWizard' that defines classes and methods for you is a disservice to students.
BUT to me there still is a huge productivity advantage to using a MSVC-style debugger. You will debug things that you might normally give up on or write printf()s for, and that ain't the right way...
Then again kids don't learn to debug anyway. Which is fine by me because it means it's easy for me to keep earning good coin.
IANAL, but while this sounds like fun it's not a good idea.
D-Link did something stupid by hardcoding a known NTP server. It is easy to prove they did something stupid. But in court it would be hard to prove they did this with malicious intent. Malicious intent is the kind of thing that gets the big judgments and damages.
But, esp after this letter has gone public and people have suggested it, it would be *easy* to construe that Poul deliberately sabotaged their products with a known weakness - stupid weakness notwithstanding. *That* would be a lot easier to prosecute. *That* would sure seem like malicious intent. In an awful twist, if Poul did his *he* could likely end up paying damages to D-Link!
Now if Poul simply *turned off* the server (which he seems to not want to do) that's a different story. A court will be sympathetic to *discontinuing* an overloaded server.
Seems unfair but I'm pretty confident that this would play out like this.
There are lots of them - infinite, really. Think of the span between two numbers that the small hand traverses. For each position in that span there is one and only one position for the large hand to be in. When the small hand is halfway between 2 and 3, the big hand is at '6'. So, an impossible position would be, say, with the small hand pointing directly at '12' and the large hand pointing directly at '6'.
This is a very great idea, but I would recommend everyone take 5 minutes and compose their own version (as I just did), because a flood of thousands of identical email might just get filtered and thrown out.
Anytime I write code that does something even slightly tricky, I clean it up and throw it on a Wiki page on my server. That lets me access it from anywhere without having to dig through a bunch of cruft. It is amazing how much you forget, and how much more you can do when you have a ready example to get you over the hump.
Took a week or two to get used to it. The trickiest thing is that when you click, you are exerting force horizontally, not vertically like a normal mouse. With a normal mouse, the table resists the force. But with the vertical mouse, you have to train yourself to counter this force with your thumb. I don't even think about it now.
The software is also somewhat crunky and I suspect it was causing BSODs, but it works reasonably well with the standard Microsoft mouse stuff.
I'm glad I got it and I like using it. I was getting strain from most mice save the cheapo low profile Compaq one I had laying around. Mice are so thick these days, forcing you to arch your hands.
But it has not had anywhere near the impact on life that I got by switching to the Kinesis keyboard.
But Apple doesn't sell that many servers - which is where AMD shines. They care mostly about laptops, and that's where Intel shines. Plus, you can't get a better, more solid supplier than Intel - and supply was an issue that plagued them before.
So here is my challenge: State a theory of intelligent design that is testable and falsifiable. Do that, and I'll take you seriously.
Given an infinite lifespan, your reasoning makes sense. There would be no reason to waste time investigating God or communicating with him...you could wait as long as needed to see whether evolution or ID pan out to satisfy your scientific criteria. The risk of a post-death meeting with a disappointed maker who correspondingly chooses a less-than-ideal eternal disposition for your consciousness would be eliminated, and the reward would be a green light to live forever free of any spiritually-based rules or guilt in an elegant, eventually fully-understood universe. You would also have an unexpiring option to embrace God and hence, apart from the pesky possibility of Judgment Day prior to having it all figured out, you could have it all - eternity and Earthly certainty.
But a limited lifespan with a 100% chance of death changes things, especially since evolution inherently demands comparatively unimaginable amounts of time to witness and presumably simulate scientifically. Hence it would seem smart to assume God exists so as to secure a positive eternity. Even if you're wrong and God is a myth, it will be impossible to even regret it in your consciousness-free oblivion anyway.
So I say, rather than challenge God-believers to prove his incontrovertible existence via things like ID, why not instead just challenge God...if he can't make you believe no one can.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some true principles in your post but you haven't flushed them out, and your anti-MS emotions are driving you to predict non-existent conspiracies.
Intel faced this realization around the time of the Pentium Pro/PII/PIII. Many people said x86 could never compete with RISC. Guess what? Like you, they were dead wrong! Don't feel too bad, even *Intel* got this wrong with Itanium.
And the reason is this: the process and development effort advantages gained from having an unmatchable production volume of an x86 FAR EXCEED the minor, more elegant design tradeoffs of other processors.
Furthermore, while a human being perceives the RISC->CISC (actually, opcode->micro-op) decoding as a wasteful thing that must be purged to attain perfection, the reality is that it is NOT a factor in performance. If it was, then how could an Intel (or AMD) processor continually completely max out the capacity of its floating point units (2-6 FLOPS/clock depending on chip)? The answer is, because the overhead is unobservable because of a great deal of parallelism, pre-fetching, caching (instruction and data) and scheduling implemented in very fast, very optimized, and very parallel hardware.
You might then retreat to make the argument that while maybe the performance overhead is zero, all that circuitry is costing you electrical power. And the answer is, again, sure, but how much? When you realize that most of the gates on a modern chip are cache, you come to the realization that very, very little power is being spent on opcode decode.
About the only pro-RISC argument you might make anymore is that indeed, those chips are MUCH easier to design.
Now on to your 'MS code secrecy is why we have x86' - HOGWASH! x86 rules the roost - again - because of its volume! It's got the most developers, drivers (crucial), code, accessories and advertising. Did you forget, BTW, that there were Alpha versions of Windows NT? And there still is an Itanium version. And an X-Box 360 version is I'm sure on the way. As well as a 'Cell' based machine. If indeed a significantly faster architecture came out you can count on MS supporting it. The problem is, for any kind of competing architecture to gain critical mass it must be MUCH better in terms of performance or power consumption. And no one seems to be able to introduce anything for which they can maintain a gain over Intel for long.
So, unless you're a compiler writer, why complain (not that writing a RISC compiler can be much fun either)?!? If you're in scientific computing, your problem is likely memory performance, not CPU execution. If you're playing games, you're likely limited by graphics cards and PCI-EX bus bandwidth. If you're a 'normal' user, your CPU barely breaks a sweat. And while your laptop might have shorter battery life than you want, increasingly your screen and other things take up more and more of the power budget.
Is talking really less fatiguing than typing? And if everyone had to speak every word they entered into their computer the modern cubical workplace would be chaos.
Clearly voice recognition is extremely desirable in mobile situations such as with mobile phone commands and calling into phone centers.
For convenience and proper I use a Zojirushi hot water dispenser. With most models you can set and view the temperature. It quietly and conveniently keeps your water hot and ready all day for tea or coffee. Once you have one you will throw out your tea kettle and maybe your coffee maker.
Do you like coffee?
Also means less real estate is wasted having menus on each window.
On the other hand, on my 30" monitor I now find the menu is now often ridiculously far away from the window I'm working in.
When I look at nearly all the stumbling blocks I've conquered - algebra, writing skills, engineering school topics - I got over each and every one only after some serious one on one time with a real person.
In a similar sense, read multiple books on tough topics. Don't just grunt through the explanation from the one 'official' course book or lecture. Find 10! Eventually, one of the sources will have an explanation that fits you...someone who got stuck on the same mental snag as you. THEN go back and read the rest...it will fall into place.
Lastly, the best way to learn is to teach. Work in a study group - not to do less work - but to exercise your grasp of the subject. If you can teach it, you know it, and vice versa.
Make sure your conclusions are based on how the world works more than personal aversions to debt and a modern monetary system.
The economy won't grow without debt.
The US economy is not perfect but it is not teetering toward disaster. Read the Economist if you want to see the world the way it really is.
And while housing prices might drop substantially, the term 'bubble' doesn't make much sense. Houses will never be worth zero. Having lots of people overextended on something is bad, but a house is a good thing to be chained to. Owning a house is not going out of style - renting sucks. There isn't enough land near where people want to live - the coasts. Owning a house is the only real way for most people to keep up with inflation. In a sense owning a house is about as close as most people can get to owning the gold you wish we all traded with.
This doesn't belong on Slashdot. Take the argument somewhere else - there are plenty of places appropriate for it. This ain't news for nerds. This is blue vs. red. And red vs. blue stories are just as inapropos.
You're right! We need to stop! Let's all move into a commune.
I ran one in Columbus Ohio during the 'Doom' craze. It's lots of fun to build a store, but a lot less fun to sit there and run it. I learned a lot, of course. And now with everyone having high-speed internet, why does anyone have to go to a brick and mortar store and pay?
i rtualOverdrive
http://mattwalsh.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/?topic=V
> The ground's been good enough for farmland, manufacturing, missile silos, why not put your datacenter
> and other things in here as well? Or is it that you're just too busy with writing offshoring loophole law?
I admire your patriotism, but this is just sour grapes. Look, I'm formerly from the midwest - now on the west coast, and the truth is that you simply can't attract young, active people with flat, land-locked ground covered with crappy weather. They'll pay extra to live where you can have fun living.
You also need a critical mass of opportunities that are interesting to young people. When I was in Chicago, my startup 'generously' offered me enough stock options to *maybe* equate to 1 year of pay if an IPO happened. And I had to search hard for this more technically interesting company after reams of boring business data processing jobs.
Yes, I'm *know* there are brilliant people in the 'silicon prairie', and companies will keep happening there, but not like they do out here, or even the northeast.
Unix died not because of its downfall but because of MS's rise.
And for Unix vendors, Unix software was not the problem. Unix hardware was the problem.
They gambled that Intel would always build 'toy' processors. But Intel had the volume and competitive security to allow it to become the processor $/performance (and eventually, just plain performance) champ.
MS gained critical mass from being funded by being un-pirateable and ubiquitous (OEMs tend to pay for those copies of MS/DOS and Windows). Awful as their software was, eventually everyone found that they had to learn it.
Eventually even the 'old guard' IT guys couldn't resist the price/performance of a MS/Intel NT box.
In other words, the extra "BS" costs incurred in dealing with a Wintel PC due to inflexibility and quality - though substantial - were less costly than the price/performance and universality aspects of the PC.
MS/Intel proved that indeed you *can* drive a 'toy' car on the freeway given time, money, and enough crashes and money to refine it.
Where Linux wins, it too has a better value proposition. It has just as cheap & fast of a hardware 'home base' as Windows, and its software cost savings out weigh its extra costs.
Everyone who wants a real job needs to understand makefiles.
Or how to work on a command-line *nix system.
Everyone should know gdb command line basics too - how to get a stack trace, how to set conditional breakpoints, etc.
And using crap like the old[Microsoft 'AppWizard' that defines classes and methods for you is a disservice to students.
BUT to me there still is a huge productivity advantage to using a MSVC-style debugger. You will debug things that you might normally give up on or write printf()s for, and that ain't the right way...
Then again kids don't learn to debug anyway. Which is fine by me because it means it's easy for me to keep earning good coin.
Look at 12:30 on an analog clock. Where's the hour hand? It's not pointing directly at 12 and never will be on a working clock. Think! Stay in school!
IANAL, but while this sounds like fun it's not a good idea.
D-Link did something stupid by hardcoding a known NTP server. It is easy to prove they did something stupid. But in court it would be hard to prove they did this with malicious intent. Malicious intent is the kind of thing that gets the big judgments and damages.
But, esp after this letter has gone public and people have suggested it, it would be *easy* to construe that Poul deliberately sabotaged their products with a known weakness - stupid weakness notwithstanding. *That* would be a lot easier to prosecute. *That* would sure seem like malicious intent. In an awful twist, if Poul did his *he* could likely end up paying damages to D-Link!
Now if Poul simply *turned off* the server (which he seems to not want to do) that's a different story. A court will be sympathetic to *discontinuing* an overloaded server.
Seems unfair but I'm pretty confident that this would play out like this.
There are lots of them - infinite, really. Think of the span between two numbers that the small hand traverses. For each position in that span there is one and only one position for the large hand to be in. When the small hand is halfway between 2 and 3, the big hand is at '6'. So, an impossible position would be, say, with the small hand pointing directly at '12' and the large hand pointing directly at '6'.
In regards to item 1., if you aren't replying to packets, what's the problem? Is it the overhead/cost of receiving and dumping the packets?
This is a very great idea, but I would recommend everyone take 5 minutes and compose their own version (as I just did), because a flood of thousands of identical email might just get filtered and thrown out.
Anytime I write code that does something even slightly tricky, I clean it up and throw it on a Wiki page on my server. That lets me access it from anywhere without having to dig through a bunch of cruft. It is amazing how much you forget, and how much more you can do when you have a ready example to get you over the hump.
Took a week or two to get used to it. The trickiest thing is that when you click, you are exerting force horizontally, not vertically like a normal mouse. With a normal mouse, the table resists the force. But with the vertical mouse, you have to train yourself to counter this force with your thumb. I don't even think about it now.
The software is also somewhat crunky and I suspect it was causing BSODs, but it works reasonably well with the standard Microsoft mouse stuff.
I'm glad I got it and I like using it. I was getting strain from most mice save the cheapo low profile Compaq one I had laying around. Mice are so thick these days, forcing you to arch your hands.
But it has not had anywhere near the impact on life that I got by switching to the Kinesis keyboard.
Show me an instance when someone would want to use PAE (an ugly, slow hack to enable 40 bit addressing) on a laptop.
Your "Hyan-tai superturbo" characterization is one of the best things I've read on /. in a LONG time.
But Apple doesn't sell that many servers - which is where AMD shines. They care mostly about laptops, and that's where Intel shines. Plus, you can't get a better, more solid supplier than Intel - and supply was an issue that plagued them before.
So here is my challenge: State a theory of intelligent design that is testable and falsifiable. Do that, and I'll take you seriously.
Given an infinite lifespan, your reasoning makes sense. There would be no reason to waste time investigating God or communicating with him...you could wait as long as needed to see whether evolution or ID pan out to satisfy your scientific criteria. The risk of a post-death meeting with a disappointed maker who correspondingly chooses a less-than-ideal eternal disposition for your consciousness would be eliminated, and the reward would be a green light to live forever free of any spiritually-based rules or guilt in an elegant, eventually fully-understood universe. You would also have an unexpiring option to embrace God and hence, apart from the pesky possibility of Judgment Day prior to having it all figured out, you could have it all - eternity and Earthly certainty.
But a limited lifespan with a 100% chance of death changes things, especially since evolution inherently demands comparatively unimaginable amounts of time to witness and presumably simulate scientifically. Hence it would seem smart to assume God exists so as to secure a positive eternity. Even if you're wrong and God is a myth, it will be impossible to even regret it in your consciousness-free oblivion anyway.
So I say, rather than challenge God-believers to prove his incontrovertible existence via things like ID, why not instead just challenge God...if he can't make you believe no one can.
I hope *your* mother knows she failed at teaching you how to be polite and capitalize sentences.
Still, you're right.