From what I have been reading on Ars and other sources, the x86 emulation layer is actually very small now. All the current-gen "X86" chips aren't actually X86 anymore... internally, they are RISC. They have a conversion engine that converts the x86 instruction set into 'real' instructions, called micro-ops. They definitely have some overhead and difficulty from the register renaming and speculative execution stuff, which wouldn't be as hard with a cleaner architecture, but overall, to my understanding, it's not that much of the transistor budget.
Apple's chips haven't been going up very fast in Ghz anymore either, if you notice. They just now hit 2.5ghz. AMD is around 2.4ghz on their FX-53. Intel is quite a lot faster, up at 3.8ghz, but the less efficient architecture soaks up nearly all of the clock difference.
All the chip manufacturers seem to have hit a wall here, and I think it's entirely likely that we're nearly at the end of Moore's Law... from here on out, it's likely to be diminishing (rapidly diminishing?) returns. We can go multicore, sure, but desktops the way we're used to using them aren't going to benefit much past about four cores.
It had the 'interesting branch prediction' because it NEEDED it. That deep pipeline sucked. A missed branch was a catastrophe, so you can BET they spent a lot of transistors there.
My primary focus at that time was on servers; for pretty much any application you could name, a P3 just spanked a P4 for a long time. Intel even shipped a few 1.4ghz P3s with double-sized cache, but then stopped when folks realized that this chip significantly outperformed much "faster" P4s. Yes, there were some desktop apps that really benefited from the P4, like video encoding, but as general-purpose chips, the P4 was inferior for a long time. The double-cache, high clock speed P3, which was an EXCELLENT solution for many problems, interfered with the marketing message, and was killed.
Every prior generation of chip was a substantial step forward, particularly up to the Pentium. Every chip through the Pentium II roughly doubled the performance of the fastest chip of the previous generation. The P3 was a significant improvement, but was more like a 50% bump. The P4, on the other hand, was a step BACKWARDS; the fastest P4s were slower than the fastest P3s when it shipped, and remained so for quite some time. It wasn't until the front speed bus got to 533mhz and the main clockspeed got to about 2.2 gigahertz that the P4 finally, truly started to win on raw speed... and on value (price/performance), it took longer still. And I'm totally ignoring heat and power, which can be big issues in some circumstances.
It's no mistake that the Pentium M is so darn fast for its clockspeed; it is, essentially, the old P3 architecture with a number of enhancements for low power usage. And it is electrically compatible with the P4. All a motherboard would have to do, in order to support it as a desktop CPU, is provide a different socket. I have no idea why you can't buy desktop boards for the Pentium M, it would be trivial to do. I assume it is, once again, interference with the marketing message.
Had Intel not focused so much on clock speed to the exclusion of all else, they could just start selling Pentium-Ms instead: they're ideally suited for multi-core. But they didn't, and now they have two very large problems at once, both technical and marketing. They have to revamp their engineering approach and re-educate their customers simultaneously, undoing 10+ years of momentum in both areas, without destroying their existing business. Not easy.
What you're not getting here is that it is INTEL that has been behind the clock speed myth. They have spent untold millions (billions??) teaching people that the speed of a computer is best measured by the clock speed of its CPU. For the last decade, that and "Intel Inside" have been their ENTIRE marketing message. The consumers believe that clockspeed matters because Intel is the one that told them so.
Now, for a long time, this has worked really well for them. They pretty much destroyed Cyrix this way, and AMD has been struggling for many years. Cyrix came up with their PR-ratings to try to be competitive, but their chips weren't very good and didn't deliver on their promise, and they sank into obscurity. AMD did the exact same thing with their + ratings, but they were so conservative about them at first that people accepted them. (this gave them some weasel room later, as they have gotten very nearly deceptive with the ratings on some of their CPU lines, particularly the Sempron.) They had to do this because Intel had taught everyone that it was megahertz that counted: AMD couldn't deliver that, just performance. Basically, they got lucky. Had consumers not accepted those ratings as accurate, AMD would probably be gone now. Apple was in the same boat, as well. With a less rabid fan base, they'd be gone too.
Around the time of Rambus, the marketers took over Intel. They realized that the megahertz message was working fabulously well. It appears that they decreed that all future engineering efforts in the Pentium line would be oriented around cranking up the clockspeed. The engineers delivered what they were told to, a chip that could be scaled a very long way, by going to a hyperpipelined approach. I believe their first P4 was clocked somewhere around 1.2ghz, and it was HORRIBLY slow because of the pipelining; a 1ghz P3 absolutely destroyed the P4. In other words, the P4 was a big step BACKWARDS from the P3 in nearly every way.
But then they started to crank the megahertz, expecting to leap way out in front of AMD and, once again, dominate everything. (Nevermind that it wasn't until the P4 hit about 2.4ghz and got an 800mhz bus that it started to actually get good.) RAM speeds in particular had to do a lot of catching up. A hyperpipelined approach suffers terribly from a mispredicted branch. The CPU stalls completely until the pipeline can be refilled, which kills performance. You need the fastest possible RAM to refill the pipeline as quickly as possible. (and this, btw, is why AMD isn't as desperately dependent on fast memory; its pipeline is about half as long as the P4's, and thus it doesn't choke as badly if it guesses wrong about a branch.) [and thanks to Ars Technica for the knowledge to write this last paragraph:) ]
So all of a sudden, over the last year or so, Intel suddenly ran into a brick wall. Their entire chip design culture is clockspeed, not performance, and abruptly they can't crank clockspeed anymore. This is a BIG DEAL, because they're going to have to tear apart and rework EVERYTHING internally. This blunder is going to cost them billions, and if AMD keeps executing as well as they have recently, they could lose a great deal of marketshare. They are already losing mindshare, since AMD got to specify the instruction set for 64-bit X86.
Intel is in TROUBLE. The focus of their entire company, their raison d'etre, no longer exists. They forgot they were actually about performance. Many of their existing projects will have to be scrapped, and they'll have to reorient most of the company in very short order, while still maintaining morale.
If anything can save them, it's the Pentium-M, which is an extraordinary piece of technology out of their Israeli branch. In many respects, the M is the direction Intel should have gone five years ago.
Can they make up for this vast blunder? It's a good question, but I wouldn't count them out just yet. If the engineers
Since, after all, they included a sin() call. As everyone knows, it's not real math unless it includes a trigonometric function. And lots of parens. Gotta have lots of those.
Shame they didn't work in some of those cool Greek characters, though.
This is how most IT departments start, and it's a normal process of evolution.
In the beginning, there isn't much money available, so most places cobble together 'servers' from spare desktop components, and throw them up in a closet somewhere. That generally works okay, and the company realizes that they like having servers, so over time, the installation grows.
As it gets bigger, the lower reliability of desktop components will start to become apparent; servers will go down, hard drives will fail. It's just statistics; given enough samples, the lower quality of the cheaper components will start to make itself felt.
Gradually, as IT departments grow, they tend to migrate towards better and better hardware. The really big outfits tend to use Dell and Compaq. Compaq in particular sells very, very expensive machines, which are very well engineered and hardly ever break. But you pay through the NOSE for this kind of service.
So how do you know how much to spend on your servers? When you gain the ability to numerically measure how much it costs you when they fail. When your department and company mature to the point that you can accurately measure costs of downtime, then with management's decision on acceptable risk levels, you'll have a pretty good idea of what you should be spending on servers. Many big companies find that the cost of downtime is appalling, when they actually are able to measure it, and that the cost of even very expensive servers is minimal in comparison, so they buy the best stuff they can find.
But until you can measure it, IMO you're fine with desktop components, as long as you buy GOOD ONES. Don't skimp on your drives, and make sure you have good cooling for them. Buy server cases; you can get good ones for a couple hundred bucks that will hold a billion drives, and then make sure to buy good cooling; you may want the boxes that mount 3.5" disks in 5.25" slots, with fans and hotswappability. I usually buy PC Power and Cooling power supplies for servers; even the Silencers are fairly loud, but they are very robust and well-built. Many of them are dual supplies in one box, which improves reliability even more. That's a lot of fans in each machine, so you may want to pick up a spare or two with each machine you buy. (Tape them inside the case). And the noise level, particularly once you get a number of them, will be high... but think of it as the sound of reliability and you won't mind it too much. Also note that when you get past a few machines, or if you spend a lot of time in server rooms, you should wear ear protection. I have worked in big colo facilities that were absolutely deafening, to the point that things sounded muffled when I left. That kind of noise DOES DO DAMAGE, and you want earplugs.
Make sure you understand exactly what onboard network chipset you are buying: you most likely want an Nforce3 or an Intel, um, 865 or better, I think it is... where the network card is directly on the northbridge, so you can get the true gigabit speeds. When they are on the Southbridge, and look like they are PCI devices, you can't run gigabit full out. And never buy a motherboard that uses Realtek 8139 networking, they are garbage. They make the CPU work way too hard, and are NOT good for server machines.
What you will end up with is a whole room full of Frankenclones, but if you've been smart and spent your money on good stuff, it'll be almost as reliable as the Dell/HP/Compaq/IBM clusters for a tiny fraction of the price. And you'll be able to get replacement parts anywhere. But you probably WON'T have spare parts on hand to fix things, unless you've been unusually clever in your design, because each new generation of machines will be different than that last, and you won't be able to use the same replacement parts interchangeably.
Someday, when you find out what downtime costs you, the extra cost of the big label servers may suddenly look wonderful... or it may not. I have seen a couple of
If you offered to pay them to fix the bug, it would probably be a shade more consistent with your "I don't work for free" stance. Or is it just other people who should work for free?
You should read the article. They actually went and asked the Iraqis in question.
At a rocket facility in Iraq, they found something like 16,000 rockets that had been built with the exact same tubes that had been ordered. They questioned why the newer orders were at the higher tolerances; the response was that they were trying to improve the accuracy of their rockets without doing a complete redesign. And, in fact, they weren't to extraordinary tolerances anyway... *aluminum cans* are better built than the tubes Iraq wanted.
Further, intelligence analysts specifically warned Powell that it was untrue to claim the requested tolerances were excessive for rockets. Our own rockets (the Model 66, from memory) that are most closely similar, use the exact same material at very similar tolerances. Claiming that Iraq's request was not suitable for weapons use was grossly untrue: we did/do the same thing!
Further, the tubes were of anodized aluminum, which is not suitable for use in a centrifuge. (uranium gas, apparently, doesn't react well with anodization... and you really want to keep uranium gas under control) They also asked the rocket guys about this, and they said that they wanted to protect them from the weather. The inspectors went outside and looked, and saw that many of the existing tubes were badly corroded, so it was very sensible to order the anodization, if their real use was for rockets and they would, like the others, be stored outside.
The evidence that the tubes were for rockets is extremely compelling, from the dimensions to the weight to the material. The evidence that the tubes were for nukes is, essentially, a paranoid fantasy that is not related in any way to the truth. The tubes were the wrong size and shape, they were anodized, and they were a huge step backwards from the technology Iraq had been using in 1991.
In the words of one analyst, per the article.... if the tubes were meant for centrifuges, they were so poorly suited that we should have just given them all they wanted.
Linux and other free software does not depend on the destruction of Windows to survive. It is not driven by a profit motive and cannot be attacked on that front. Windows' market share is irrelevant. On an economic basis, free software is unkillable.
The only real threat is legislation and/or patents. Keep that under control, and free software will prosper.
So mamy people get into this 'Linux versus Windows' thing, and get emotionally invested in it... but really, it doesn't matter. What free software is doing is changing the nature of the game, so that Windows has to play on free software's turf, rather than the other way around.
Microsoft is a smart company. They have more money than God. Windows isn't going to go away EVER, at least not in our lifetimes. But, aside from legislation, there's nothing they could really do anymore to lock out free software; the hue and cry if they tried would be vast. People just aren't going to buy DRM-enabled hardware unless they control the keys. If they'd done this kind of thing five years ago, it might have worked, but at this point Linux et al are too entrenched, and cannot be killed at a system or hardware level.... any attempt to do so would be a commercial failure.
Microsoft has to adapt to a world with a lot of great free software, not the other way around.
He asked what the perfect online music store was. I told him my opinion.
And I don't use FLAC. I prefer Apple Lossless, which I use to archive my physical media. Allofmp3 doesn't support that, so I download with APE and re-rip. Apple Lossless is about as easy as it gets, and absolutely will work for Joe and Jane User. It may not compress quite as well as FLAC or APE, but it works just like an mp3 file would. Anyone that can handle MP3 can handle AL.
And as far as nothing I believe making a difference... Allofmp3 has, geeze, $75 or so from me that they wouldn't otherwise have, and they'll be getting a steady trickle from me over time. They got that money because they provided me with the product I want at a price that I find reasonable. And it would appear I'm not the only one. They don't show the stats anymore, but when I first started to use it, it generally had about 1700 users actively browsing/shopping at any given time.
So, we may be indeed be irrelevant and stupid, but some company in Russia is doing pretty well targeting the irrelevant and stupid market.
What I want is what I get on a CD: lossless music without DRM. (stupid attempts at copy protection notwithstanding.) At that point, your pricing is going to determine how much I'll buy. If you're at 99c per song/$10 per album, I'll buy some... if you're at $5/album, I'll buy a heck of a lot more.
For me, at least, $5 is about the sweet spot.... it's low enough that I'd buy four or five albums at a time, and I don't think I'd buy any more if they were cheaper, since you can only listen to so much stuff. At $10, I'd guess that my total dollar value of purchases would be much lower, because I'd have to think about each one a little. At $5, it's an impulse purchase... at $10, it's less so.
Even www.allofmp3.com isn't THAT cheap; lossless files from them usually run about a buck apiece. If they were cheaper, and their selection was broader, I'd buy a lot more, but I'm still pretty happy with them as it is.
www.allofmp3.com shows that the infrastructure can work. But it would be hard to duplicate here, because the record labels here want to charge a lot more for stuff. Somehow, I suspect they'd want to price it so that original CDs were actually cheaper; their perspective will probably be that lossless DRM-free files are 'more' than what they give you on the CD (since it's easy to copy). Unfortunately, almost any customer would think of electronic-only delivery as 'less', and wouldn't be willing to pay as much. I certainly wouldn't.
Overall, allofmp3.com is running about $10-11 for a lossless album, and I've bought a few of them. So I am a real potential customer. Get that price down to $5 or so, and I'd buy a boatload of music that I wouldn't otherwise.
So in the interest of speed, it's okay to take down remote sites?
Slashdot's refusal to cache sites is stupid. Their reasons to the contrary (it's too slow, ad revenue) are bogus. VERY few stories on Slashdot are all that time-critical. If they hold a story for a day or two to get permission, it's not like it's the end of the world. The stuff that actually IS urgent, like security patches, is practically always hosted on big sites that don't need caching. And the ad revenue doesn't matter if a site goes down.
Hey, I know.... why not just ASK the remote site if they think they can handle the load? It's not like hearing about an Xbox mod chip on Tuesday instead of Sunday is going to ruin anyone's lives.
The REAL reason, of course, is that figuring out a good caching policy would take thought and work, which don't seem in much supply for the last couple years.
And the advent of Coral takes care of all the infrastructure, leaving only the ad revenue as a possible problem. So here's an easy, albeit mildly unattractive solution: put the links in twice. Do it the normal way, then append Coral links at the end of the story, and make sure that Coral has it preloaded before posting. If the site stays up, most folks hit Link 1. If it goes down, Coral can take care of it. They get all the ad revenue they can handle, and we can still read the story.
With the advent of Coral, continuing to do things the way they have been doing them is essentially a deliberate DOS attack against small sites.
I have been a subscriber for seveal years, now. I am not going to give them any more money unless and until they fix this.
The Pentium-M is an incredibly good design, probably the single best piece of technology out of Intel since the original Pentium. And their numbering schemes would lend some plausibility to that; Pentium-Ms are 700-series, and P4s are 400-series. Bigger is obviously better.:-)
It's weird that you can't find Pentium-M motherboards. I looked a whole bunch, not too long ago... I wanted to set up a nearly silent PC in the front room, and figured a Pentium-M was the perfect choice. I only found one, and it was like $450, and impossible to order in singles. It's weird that so few manufacturers make motherboards for this chip... it's exceptionally powerful, and would be just about the best choice for a silent PC I can imagine. The Via Edens are good, but the Pentium-M is far more powerful and only dissipates a little bit more heat.
Definitely a good choice for a multicore CPU, but the marketroids have been in charge of Intel for a long time, and I'm not sure how the Pentium-M, as good as it is, fits into their 'message'.
Just a single CPU die with two CPUs on it. If the board can support it, it's like plugging two CPUs into one socket.
This is quite easy for AMD because of how bus logic works. The Athlon 64 series use an integrated memory controller, and normally, a second CPU uses the same connection to the system RAM that the first one does. (ie, one Hypertransport connection is shared, by design, between two CPUs.) So a dual-core CPU is trivially easy for them to implement, relatively speaking: they have space and heat issues, but all the architectural design work is done already.
Intel, on the other hand, hasn't designed this way. Instead, for years now, they have been totally focused around more and more clock speed. This has left AMD scrambling, becaus their chip designs get more work done per clock tick, so a 1600mhz AthlonXP will keep up quite nicely with a much higher-clocked P4. But consumers, thanks to Intel mostly, don't understand that, and so AMD came up with their numbering system instead. (they were lucky this worked, because at least one prior attempts at this, by Cyrix, failed utterly.)
Well, the worm is turning. Intel's aproach, that of "more megahertz, dammit!" is very rapidly running out of steam. They have been selling people for years on megahertz, and suddenly they're in the position where they can't increase megahertz easily anymore. This is a BIG deal for them; all those billions spent 'educating' consumers on something that wasn't true is coming back to bite them.
A dual-core Prescott will not be an easy thing, and will require substantial motherboard and chipset changes. And they have a fundamental bandwidth problem; P4s need very high memory bandwidth to really get good. The P4 didn't truly hit its stride until it went to a quad-pumped 200mhz bus... 800mhz effective RAM speed. At that point, the P4 architecture finally sits up and really starts singing. But doing a dual-core chip means that both CPUs have to share bandwidth, so to maintain performance, they'll have to go to a 1600mhz bus. That's not likely in the near future.
AMD is doing the exact same thing, but the A64 design is much less clockspeed- and bandwidth-intensive. It gets more work done per clock tick, doesn't hit the RAM as hard, and runs cooler. So it's a natural for dual-core. Forcing the P4 into that same mold, on the other hand, is a move of desperation by Intel. It won't work very well, but their crank-the-megahertz strategy suddenly isn't working AT ALL.
This isn't completely impossible, but they would have to be exceedingly smart, very probably inhumanly smart, to be able to run all binaries from all systems at good speed on any other. But there are some shortcuts they could potentially have taken that would bring it into the realm of 'very difficult, but possible.'
What most emulators do is to translate, instruction by instruction, the code stream for another processor into the instruction set of the current one. This takes, generally, anywhere from 10 to 20 native instructions per foreign one; in some cases, a lot more. Very clean architectures like the 68000 and PowerPC are easier to emulate, because their instruction sets are fairly uniform. The translation segment can be very fast, just a couple of table lookups and jumps. The x86 instruction set, on the other hand, is extremely snarly and nasty, with a whole slew of different instructions at different sizes. There are 8 bit, 16 bit, and 32-bit instructions, and several processor modes (8086, 80286, 80386). this makes the simple translation of an X86 instruction a potentially very complex process.
This emulator, on the other hand, claims to not be doing this. They claim that they are pre-translating the binaries to native code and running them that way. This would be enormously difficult, in essence extracting the 'sense of' a program from the compiled binary. This hasn't been done much, and there's a reason for it; it's hard to tell what side effects instructions are going to have ahead of time. The only way you can be CERTAIN of the state of an emulated PC is by emulating every step to get to that point. Just inspecting the code, and writing your own program to do the same thing, won't always give you a running program.
Now, they could be simplifying their X86 translation code a WHOLE lot by not emulating 8086 and 286 modes. Very little code, now, is 8- or 16-bit, so if they only support 32-bit code, their problem would be vastly simplified.
They may also be able to simplify their problem by sticking with 'ordinary' programs, ones that stay in userspace and just use system calls for their I/O. I believe that precompling a program that twiddles hardware bits directly would be exceptionally difficult. Transmeta's approach strikes me as the only likely one in this case; emulate it instruction by instruction, watch how it works, and then write yourself shortcuts to make it run faster next time.
But if they stick with 32-bit only, userspace programs, they could possibly get things running fairly quickly. Quake is a good demo for them. It's using OpenGL and is fairly predictable; the inputs and outputs are easily understood and quantified. (network, user input, results of opengl library calls). They're not getting any weird side effects from Quake hitting the hardware directly.
Upshot: it MAY work, but it's likely only going to work well for a subset of programs. It will likely never run operating systems. But, given those limits, it may actually run fairly well.
They mention using this tech to run XBOX1 stuff on XBOX2; if what I'm guessing is correct, that's likely to fail a great deal of the time. It's possible that XBox games may not hit the hardware directly; if they go through library calls for everything, they might be translatable in this way. But from what little I know of console programming, there probably is no class of program MORE likely to be twiddling the hardware. The recompilation technique strikes me as HIGHLY unlikely to work well in such cases.
I suppose they might be able to store special-purpose precompiled binaries on Live.. when you install Game Y for Xbox1, it could potentially go get a program binary from Live that would work. Might be better than nothing, but it would require a lot of engineering effort by Microsoft.
I should also note that I'm NOT claiming this is real. It could very easily be a scam. I'm just trying to point out that if they change the rules a little, they may be able to ship a product that works, without needing brains the size of Jupiter.
Back in around 1993, the Internet came to the place I was living at the time, in Northern California. My roommate and I were big BBS users, so we were all over that, and signed up the instant that CRL offered service.
What they offered was a dial-in, UNIX command prompt. You were only allowed to run one command at a time, and they didn't offer PPP or SLIP for years, perhaps never. And they didn't ship a manual of any type. You got a dialup number and a login, and you were left with the prompt:
crl>
So what now? We had no bloody CLUE what to do. So my roommate started typing each letter, by itself, one at a time:
a b c
Like that. One of the commands hung; I think it might have been b or c: I'm thinking that it was some sort of early calculator program. Suddenly we didn't have anything. I had a thought, and suggested control-Z, which is the EOF character for DOS. This actually worked, although by pure luck. It WAS waiting on our input, so I had the right idea, but control-Z is not the EOF character for Unix. (control-D is). By luck, control-Z suspends a Unix process. So we got our prompt back without understanding why.
My roommate kept up with the letters of the alphabet, which was completely useless until we got to "w". Suddenly, we got a list of people who were logged in and, most importantly, what commands they were running. We started taking notes and were soon off to the races, at least in a very basic way.
This is NOT how to encourage a newbie to start. Had it been just me, I'd have gone out to buy a book; fortunately, my roommate was both smart and stubborn. And Unix remained intimidating to me for a very long time; I was a complete wizard with the PCs of the time, but Unix was utterly alien and extremely difficult to pick up without other people around.
The single best way to learn Unix is to expose yourself to other Unix people. It is an extraordinarily powerful and deep system, and getting truly great at it will take years. You can accelerate this process enormously by having experienced people around you, so that you don't waste time going down blind alleys. They can also help you unlearn your bad habits from the brain-damaged prompts in DOS and Windows.
I have said for many years that you can very nearly bring about world peace from the Unix command line; it's that powerful.
But ye gods, is it ever intimidating when you're first starting.
Thanks very much for the pointer! The game is sort of a cross between Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital, with a spy theme. It looks to have just as much atmosphere as DK and DK2, seems as polished as Theme Hospital, and has much better graphics (all in true 3D) to boot. Short of Doom 3, this is the most promising game I've seen this year. I'm very impressed with the demo. Definitely going on the order list.:-)
Re:I see these +0.1 releases discussed often, but.
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Gnome 2.8 RC1 Released
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Basically, what you're saying is 'open source should be marketed better'. But keep in mind... that is explicitly not what open source projects are about; almost all of them are technology-, not marketing-driven. Most open source coders aren't writing code to extract cash from people's wallets, they're doing it because they love doing it, or because they're solving an issue.
And these point releases aren't meant for Average Joe anyway; they're bleeding-edge and unstable. Joe doesn't want this stuff.
This is where the distros step in; they take the results of the technically-driven development, and THEY market it.
The very last thing you want is for open source groups to 'start being more feature-focused'. We've seen what happens with that approach; bloated, unstable, unreliable software that costs a fortune.
The purpose of most of these groups is to write great software, and I submit to you that, by and large, they're doing a fantastic job. Let the distros do the marketing.
It's pretty much the same thing as, well, the government printing more notes. It devalues the existing currency.
I'd rather run that risk than the known evil of politicians using the money system to extract value, essentially by fraud, from the populace at large. Your worry is theoretical; mine happens every day.
Well, I grew up in California, and it was most emphatically not legal to refuse cash there. I didn't realize that was a State thing rather than a Federal one, and I appreciate the correction..... but what I said is true where I grew up.:-)
Note that that same page says we've been off the gold standard since 1933, but that's not true. We were on a gold standard system with other countries until 1971. 1933 makes it sound like ancient history... 1971 is a lot more recent and inflammatory. (the terrible economic times in the 1970s were, mostly, linked to that currency devaluation.)
That's why money is the most marketable commodity. The market determines its own value for things. And offhand, I'd say clothing, shelter, transportation, and energy all have a great deal of value.
As far as money being overprinted... note that it HAS dropped in relation to gold a great deal, from $285 to about $410 now. And there are very strong signs that the government is now manipulating both the stock and gold markets. Reagan instituted a Plunge Protection Team after Black Monday (I think that's the right day of the week) in 1987. In a free market, there would be more sign of inflation in the gold price -- but EVERYONE watches the gold price, so it's in the government's interest to try to hold it down if it can.
Look at the prices for gasoline or health insurance or platinum for a better gauge of inflation. Early warning signs.
And there's no need for more money as the economy grows. In the twenty or so years following 1945, the economy grew ENORMOUSLY... I forget the exact figure, but I think it was a couple hundred percent over that twenty years. And the money supply grew, over that entire period, by about 16%. The economists of the time were arguing because they didn't think the money supply was growing fast enough, but it sure didn't seem to do anyone any harm.
Money doesn't make an economy grow. A natural economy with solid money seems to be slowly deflationary; things get a little cheaper every year. Like I was saying in another post, you could have ONE OUNCE of gold be the medium of exchange for the whole country -- people would have bills denoting their fractional ownership of The Ounce. Now, that's probably too inflexible, and would cause prices to change too much, but it would work fine for exchange and as a store of value.
I'm NOT advocating that system, I'm just trying to point out that economic growth is not driven by money. It is driven by WEALTH, by savings and investment, which are entirely different things altogether.
See my other posts.... any commodity can work as money. The most marketable commodity becomes money, and as you observe, it can be anything.
But fiat currencies are imposed by force on a population, and they give the government enormous powers to abuse the money and tax the population without their knowledge. No sane person would choose to use green paper as 'money' without a great deal of preconditioning. What is holding the dollar together is the network effect... because it was ONCE worth something, and societies change slowly.
Fiat money can be invented, at the wave of a hand, in any quantity desired. Want to fight a war? No problem, just fire up the printing press. This devalues all the existing dollars and is a hidden tax on everyone, and they don't really understand it. There are other bad side effects as well... floating currencies have allowed a whole class of speculator to arise, which live on currency trading. This kind of trading is zero sum; if they make wealth, then other people lose it, by definition. The amounts of money being traded now are staggering, beyond imagination, and these speculators are extracting unbelievable amounts of wealth while providing NOTHING of value in exchange. They're just smart and playing by the rules, but our fiat-based world monetary system allows them to exist.
All I am arguing is that using a physical medium of exchange (or bills, as long as the bills really are treated like the real commodity) prevents the worst of the abuses, both by government and speculators. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best we've come up with. It leaves the control in OUR HANDS, where it belongs.
What drives the growth of an economy is savings and investment: not consuming all of what you make, and investing that profit back into your ability to produce. If you are a cobbler and must sell 15 sets of shoes per week to maintain your standard of living, then any amount you make over 15 is your savings. You can trade these shoes for other goods, like better tools, or hiring more workers, or what have you.... you invest back in your business to make it more efficient. If there was one ounce of gold in the whole world, this would still work, because you'd trade a hundred millionth of The Ounce for your new tool.
There was also a system in use during the middle ages, where they'd use short-term (90 day or less) notes among each other, and only at the end of every 90-day period would everything be settled up. At that point, some gold would actually move around, but this limited movement of gold or silver in no way constrained the economy.
The money supply doesn't limit that; however much wealth there is, exists. Fiat money is not wealth, it's not anyone's extra labor, it's just purely fictional.
What you may be referring to is fractional reserve banking, which allows banks to create money out of thin air. If they have, say, 100 real dollars, they can make many small loans far in excess of 100 dollars, because not everyone will want their money all at once. The fractional reserve system MAY increase economic growth, but that is questionable; there's pretty good evidence that it's the FRB system that causes the business cycle. It strikes me that the cycle of artificial boom/bust caused by expansion and contraction of a fake money supply probably does more damage than it helps; smooth and slow changes are best for wealth generation. The bankers are able to extract a great deal of wealth from the economy, and I am not at all sure that they are providing as much value as they are taking.
What FRB does is send a false signal into the economy; for a short time, everything is furiously overbuilt as money floods the system. Then the flood recedes, and many of the businesses that were built, fail, even ones that would have been viable without the artificial crunch. Eventually the debts are paid down, and the cycle of boom/bust starts again. Proponents of this system point to the percentage growth during the boom years.... but a slow and steady 5%/year is better, probably, than alternating years of 10 and 0.
And yes, you can have disruptions in the gold and silver supply, but economies are pretty resilient. It certainly can't be worse than the incredible abuse that the Fed has subjected us to since about '99. In the year 2000, as I recall, they grew the money supply by 18%! In a YEAR. There was a span of TWENTY YEARS (the late 40s, 50s, and early 60s) where in that whole 20 years we grew the money supply by something like 16%. We're really starting to see the inflation now, government misdirections be damned. It takes time for this stuff to percolate through an economy.
What you are arguing for, essentially, is false growth brought on by false money: it looks good on paper, but much of it is not stable. It's not healthy. And the ability of the politicians to abuse the system is too profound without any kind of check on their power.
Money, per Mises, is the most marketable commodity. If you know you can trade seashells for what you want, you will sell your goods for seashells. If enough people do that, seashells become money. (and past a certain point, a form of money is essentially inevitable, because of the network effect.) The network effect is powerful, and it would be likely to shore up a commodity that somehow lost some of its value, but if it lost enough value, then a new form of money would arise. Belief alone is probably not enough to hold money together.
Fiat money is a hijacking of that natural process to give the government a great deal more control over the economy and a nearly-infinite ability to tax, without approval or even KNOWLEDGE of the people being taxed. Past a certain point, this will destroy an economy, of course, and cause the failure of the government. And last I checked, central planning of an economy was not a very good idea; the more control goes into the hands of a few people, the less well things tend to run.
Money needs to be both a store of value and a medium of exhange. We're doing fine on the exchange part, but we're failing dismally on the store-of-value front. See my signature.
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From what I have been reading on Ars and other sources, the x86 emulation layer is actually very small now. All the current-gen "X86" chips aren't actually X86 anymore... internally, they are RISC. They have a conversion engine that converts the x86 instruction set into 'real' instructions, called micro-ops. They definitely have some overhead and difficulty from the register renaming and speculative execution stuff, which wouldn't be as hard with a cleaner architecture, but overall, to my understanding, it's not that much of the transistor budget.
Apple's chips haven't been going up very fast in Ghz anymore either, if you notice. They just now hit 2.5ghz. AMD is around 2.4ghz on their FX-53. Intel is quite a lot faster, up at 3.8ghz, but the less efficient architecture soaks up nearly all of the clock difference.
All the chip manufacturers seem to have hit a wall here, and I think it's entirely likely that we're nearly at the end of Moore's Law... from here on out, it's likely to be diminishing (rapidly diminishing?) returns. We can go multicore, sure, but desktops the way we're used to using them aren't going to benefit much past about four cores.
It had the 'interesting branch prediction' because it NEEDED it. That deep pipeline sucked. A missed branch was a catastrophe, so you can BET they spent a lot of transistors there.
My primary focus at that time was on servers; for pretty much any application you could name, a P3 just spanked a P4 for a long time. Intel even shipped a few 1.4ghz P3s with double-sized cache, but then stopped when folks realized that this chip significantly outperformed much "faster" P4s. Yes, there were some desktop apps that really benefited from the P4, like video encoding, but as general-purpose chips, the P4 was inferior for a long time. The double-cache, high clock speed P3, which was an EXCELLENT solution for many problems, interfered with the marketing message, and was killed.
Every prior generation of chip was a substantial step forward, particularly up to the Pentium. Every chip through the Pentium II roughly doubled the performance of the fastest chip of the previous generation. The P3 was a significant improvement, but was more like a 50% bump. The P4, on the other hand, was a step BACKWARDS; the fastest P4s were slower than the fastest P3s when it shipped, and remained so for quite some time. It wasn't until the front speed bus got to 533mhz and the main clockspeed got to about 2.2 gigahertz that the P4 finally, truly started to win on raw speed... and on value (price/performance), it took longer still. And I'm totally ignoring heat and power, which can be big issues in some circumstances.
It's no mistake that the Pentium M is so darn fast for its clockspeed; it is, essentially, the old P3 architecture with a number of enhancements for low power usage. And it is electrically compatible with the P4. All a motherboard would have to do, in order to support it as a desktop CPU, is provide a different socket. I have no idea why you can't buy desktop boards for the Pentium M, it would be trivial to do. I assume it is, once again, interference with the marketing message.
Had Intel not focused so much on clock speed to the exclusion of all else, they could just start selling Pentium-Ms instead: they're ideally suited for multi-core. But they didn't, and now they have two very large problems at once, both technical and marketing. They have to revamp their engineering approach and re-educate their customers simultaneously, undoing 10+ years of momentum in both areas, without destroying their existing business. Not easy.
You're kind of missing the point.
:) ]
What you're not getting here is that it is INTEL that has been behind the clock speed myth. They have spent untold millions (billions??) teaching people that the speed of a computer is best measured by the clock speed of its CPU. For the last decade, that and "Intel Inside" have been their ENTIRE marketing message. The consumers believe that clockspeed matters because Intel is the one that told them so.
Now, for a long time, this has worked really well for them. They pretty much destroyed Cyrix this way, and AMD has been struggling for many years. Cyrix came up with their PR-ratings to try to be competitive, but their chips weren't very good and didn't deliver on their promise, and they sank into obscurity. AMD did the exact same thing with their + ratings, but they were so conservative about them at first that people accepted them. (this gave them some weasel room later, as they have gotten very nearly deceptive with the ratings on some of their CPU lines, particularly the Sempron.) They had to do this because Intel had taught everyone that it was megahertz that counted: AMD couldn't deliver that, just performance. Basically, they got lucky. Had consumers not accepted those ratings as accurate, AMD would probably be gone now. Apple was in the same boat, as well. With a less rabid fan base, they'd be gone too.
Around the time of Rambus, the marketers took over Intel. They realized that the megahertz message was working fabulously well. It appears that they decreed that all future engineering efforts in the Pentium line would be oriented around cranking up the clockspeed. The engineers delivered what they were told to, a chip that could be scaled a very long way, by going to a hyperpipelined approach. I believe their first P4 was clocked somewhere around 1.2ghz, and it was HORRIBLY slow because of the pipelining; a 1ghz P3 absolutely destroyed the P4. In other words, the P4 was a big step BACKWARDS from the P3 in nearly every way.
But then they started to crank the megahertz, expecting to leap way out in front of AMD and, once again, dominate everything. (Nevermind that it wasn't until the P4 hit about 2.4ghz and got an 800mhz bus that it started to actually get good.) RAM speeds in particular had to do a lot of catching up. A hyperpipelined approach suffers terribly from a mispredicted branch. The CPU stalls completely until the pipeline can be refilled, which kills performance. You need the fastest possible RAM to refill the pipeline as quickly as possible. (and this, btw, is why AMD isn't as desperately dependent on fast memory; its pipeline is about half as long as the P4's, and thus it doesn't choke as badly if it guesses wrong about a branch.) [and thanks to Ars Technica for the knowledge to write this last paragraph
So all of a sudden, over the last year or so, Intel suddenly ran into a brick wall. Their entire chip design culture is clockspeed, not performance, and abruptly they can't crank clockspeed anymore. This is a BIG DEAL, because they're going to have to tear apart and rework EVERYTHING internally. This blunder is going to cost them billions, and if AMD keeps executing as well as they have recently, they could lose a great deal of marketshare. They are already losing mindshare, since AMD got to specify the instruction set for 64-bit X86.
Intel is in TROUBLE. The focus of their entire company, their raison d'etre, no longer exists. They forgot they were actually about performance. Many of their existing projects will have to be scrapped, and they'll have to reorient most of the company in very short order, while still maintaining morale.
If anything can save them, it's the Pentium-M, which is an extraordinary piece of technology out of their Israeli branch. In many respects, the M is the direction Intel should have gone five years ago.
Can they make up for this vast blunder? It's a good question, but I wouldn't count them out just yet. If the engineers
Since, after all, they included a sin() call. As everyone knows, it's not real math unless it includes a trigonometric function. And lots of parens. Gotta have lots of those.
Shame they didn't work in some of those cool Greek characters, though.
This is how most IT departments start, and it's a normal process of evolution.
... or it may not. I have seen a couple of
In the beginning, there isn't much money available, so most places cobble together 'servers' from spare desktop components, and throw them up in a closet somewhere. That generally works okay, and the company realizes that they like having servers, so over time, the installation grows.
As it gets bigger, the lower reliability of desktop components will start to become apparent; servers will go down, hard drives will fail. It's just statistics; given enough samples, the lower quality of the cheaper components will start to make itself felt.
Gradually, as IT departments grow, they tend to migrate towards better and better hardware. The really big outfits tend to use Dell and Compaq. Compaq in particular sells very, very expensive machines, which are very well engineered and hardly ever break. But you pay through the NOSE for this kind of service.
So how do you know how much to spend on your servers? When you gain the ability to numerically measure how much it costs you when they fail. When your department and company mature to the point that you can accurately measure costs of downtime, then with management's decision on acceptable risk levels, you'll have a pretty good idea of what you should be spending on servers. Many big companies find that the cost of downtime is appalling, when they actually are able to measure it, and that the cost of even very expensive servers is minimal in comparison, so they buy the best stuff they can find.
But until you can measure it, IMO you're fine with desktop components, as long as you buy GOOD ONES. Don't skimp on your drives, and make sure you have good cooling for them. Buy server cases; you can get good ones for a couple hundred bucks that will hold a billion drives, and then make sure to buy good cooling; you may want the boxes that mount 3.5" disks in 5.25" slots, with fans and hotswappability. I usually buy PC Power and Cooling power supplies for servers; even the Silencers are fairly loud, but they are very robust and well-built. Many of them are dual supplies in one box, which improves reliability even more. That's a lot of fans in each machine, so you may want to pick up a spare or two with each machine you buy. (Tape them inside the case). And the noise level, particularly once you get a number of them, will be high... but think of it as the sound of reliability and you won't mind it too much. Also note that when you get past a few machines, or if you spend a lot of time in server rooms, you should wear ear protection. I have worked in big colo facilities that were absolutely deafening, to the point that things sounded muffled when I left. That kind of noise DOES DO DAMAGE, and you want earplugs.
Make sure you understand exactly what onboard network chipset you are buying: you most likely want an Nforce3 or an Intel, um, 865 or better, I think it is... where the network card is directly on the northbridge, so you can get the true gigabit speeds. When they are on the Southbridge, and look like they are PCI devices, you can't run gigabit full out. And never buy a motherboard that uses Realtek 8139 networking, they are garbage. They make the CPU work way too hard, and are NOT good for server machines.
What you will end up with is a whole room full of Frankenclones, but if you've been smart and spent your money on good stuff, it'll be almost as reliable as the Dell/HP/Compaq/IBM clusters for a tiny fraction of the price. And you'll be able to get replacement parts anywhere. But you probably WON'T have spare parts on hand to fix things, unless you've been unusually clever in your design, because each new generation of machines will be different than that last, and you won't be able to use the same replacement parts interchangeably.
Someday, when you find out what downtime costs you, the extra cost of the big label servers may suddenly look wonderful
If you offered to pay them to fix the bug, it would probably be a shade more consistent with your "I don't work for free" stance. Or is it just other people who should work for free?
See my other comment, here. Basically, that's nonsense.
You should read the article. They actually went and asked the Iraqis in question.
At a rocket facility in Iraq, they found something like 16,000 rockets that had been built with the exact same tubes that had been ordered. They questioned why the newer orders were at the higher tolerances; the response was that they were trying to improve the accuracy of their rockets without doing a complete redesign. And, in fact, they weren't to extraordinary tolerances anyway... *aluminum cans* are better built than the tubes Iraq wanted.
Further, intelligence analysts specifically warned Powell that it was untrue to claim the requested tolerances were excessive for rockets. Our own rockets (the Model 66, from memory) that are most closely similar, use the exact same material at very similar tolerances. Claiming that Iraq's request was not suitable for weapons use was grossly untrue: we did/do the same thing!
Further, the tubes were of anodized aluminum, which is not suitable for use in a centrifuge. (uranium gas, apparently, doesn't react well with anodization... and you really want to keep uranium gas under control) They also asked the rocket guys about this, and they said that they wanted to protect them from the weather. The inspectors went outside and looked, and saw that many of the existing tubes were badly corroded, so it was very sensible to order the anodization, if their real use was for rockets and they would, like the others, be stored outside.
The evidence that the tubes were for rockets is extremely compelling, from the dimensions to the weight to the material. The evidence that the tubes were for nukes is, essentially, a paranoid fantasy that is not related in any way to the truth. The tubes were the wrong size and shape, they were anodized, and they were a huge step backwards from the technology Iraq had been using in 1991.
In the words of one analyst, per the article.... if the tubes were meant for centrifuges, they were so poorly suited that we should have just given them all they wanted.
By and large, it doesn't matter.
Linux and other free software does not depend on the destruction of Windows to survive. It is not driven by a profit motive and cannot be attacked on that front. Windows' market share is irrelevant. On an economic basis, free software is unkillable.
The only real threat is legislation and/or patents. Keep that under control, and free software will prosper.
So mamy people get into this 'Linux versus Windows' thing, and get emotionally invested in it... but really, it doesn't matter. What free software is doing is changing the nature of the game, so that Windows has to play on free software's turf, rather than the other way around.
Microsoft is a smart company. They have more money than God. Windows isn't going to go away EVER, at least not in our lifetimes. But, aside from legislation, there's nothing they could really do anymore to lock out free software; the hue and cry if they tried would be vast. People just aren't going to buy DRM-enabled hardware unless they control the keys. If they'd done this kind of thing five years ago, it might have worked, but at this point Linux et al are too entrenched, and cannot be killed at a system or hardware level.... any attempt to do so would be a commercial failure.
Microsoft has to adapt to a world with a lot of great free software, not the other way around.
He asked what the perfect online music store was. I told him my opinion.
And I don't use FLAC. I prefer Apple Lossless, which I use to archive my physical media. Allofmp3 doesn't support that, so I download with APE and re-rip. Apple Lossless is about as easy as it gets, and absolutely will work for Joe and Jane User. It may not compress quite as well as FLAC or APE, but it works just like an mp3 file would. Anyone that can handle MP3 can handle AL.
And as far as nothing I believe making a difference... Allofmp3 has, geeze, $75 or so from me that they wouldn't otherwise have, and they'll be getting a steady trickle from me over time. They got that money because they provided me with the product I want at a price that I find reasonable. And it would appear I'm not the only one. They don't show the stats anymore, but when I first started to use it, it generally had about 1700 users actively browsing/shopping at any given time.
So, we may be indeed be irrelevant and stupid, but some company in Russia is doing pretty well targeting the irrelevant and stupid market.
What I want is what I get on a CD: lossless music without DRM. (stupid attempts at copy protection notwithstanding.) At that point, your pricing is going to determine how much I'll buy. If you're at 99c per song/$10 per album, I'll buy some... if you're at $5/album, I'll buy a heck of a lot more.
For me, at least, $5 is about the sweet spot.... it's low enough that I'd buy four or five albums at a time, and I don't think I'd buy any more if they were cheaper, since you can only listen to so much stuff. At $10, I'd guess that my total dollar value of purchases would be much lower, because I'd have to think about each one a little. At $5, it's an impulse purchase... at $10, it's less so.
Even www.allofmp3.com isn't THAT cheap; lossless files from them usually run about a buck apiece. If they were cheaper, and their selection was broader, I'd buy a lot more, but I'm still pretty happy with them as it is.
www.allofmp3.com shows that the infrastructure can work. But it would be hard to duplicate here, because the record labels here want to charge a lot more for stuff. Somehow, I suspect they'd want to price it so that original CDs were actually cheaper; their perspective will probably be that lossless DRM-free files are 'more' than what they give you on the CD (since it's easy to copy). Unfortunately, almost any customer would think of electronic-only delivery as 'less', and wouldn't be willing to pay as much. I certainly wouldn't.
Overall, allofmp3.com is running about $10-11 for a lossless album, and I've bought a few of them. So I am a real potential customer. Get that price down to $5 or so, and I'd buy a boatload of music that I wouldn't otherwise.
So in the interest of speed, it's okay to take down remote sites?
Slashdot's refusal to cache sites is stupid. Their reasons to the contrary (it's too slow, ad revenue) are bogus. VERY few stories on Slashdot are all that time-critical. If they hold a story for a day or two to get permission, it's not like it's the end of the world. The stuff that actually IS urgent, like security patches, is practically always hosted on big sites that don't need caching. And the ad revenue doesn't matter if a site goes down.
Hey, I know.... why not just ASK the remote site if they think they can handle the load? It's not like hearing about an Xbox mod chip on Tuesday instead of Sunday is going to ruin anyone's lives.
The REAL reason, of course, is that figuring out a good caching policy would take thought and work, which don't seem in much supply for the last couple years.
And the advent of Coral takes care of all the infrastructure, leaving only the ad revenue as a possible problem. So here's an easy, albeit mildly unattractive solution: put the links in twice. Do it the normal way, then append Coral links at the end of the story, and make sure that Coral has it preloaded before posting. If the site stays up, most folks hit Link 1. If it goes down, Coral can take care of it. They get all the ad revenue they can handle, and we can still read the story.
With the advent of Coral, continuing to do things the way they have been doing them is essentially a deliberate DOS attack against small sites.
I have been a subscriber for seveal years, now. I am not going to give them any more money unless and until they fix this.
The Pentium-M is an incredibly good design, probably the single best piece of technology out of Intel since the original Pentium. And their numbering schemes would lend some plausibility to that; Pentium-Ms are 700-series, and P4s are 400-series. Bigger is obviously better. :-)
It's weird that you can't find Pentium-M motherboards. I looked a whole bunch, not too long ago... I wanted to set up a nearly silent PC in the front room, and figured a Pentium-M was the perfect choice. I only found one, and it was like $450, and impossible to order in singles. It's weird that so few manufacturers make motherboards for this chip... it's exceptionally powerful, and would be just about the best choice for a silent PC I can imagine. The Via Edens are good, but the Pentium-M is far more powerful and only dissipates a little bit more heat.
Definitely a good choice for a multicore CPU, but the marketroids have been in charge of Intel for a long time, and I'm not sure how the Pentium-M, as good as it is, fits into their 'message'.
Just a single CPU die with two CPUs on it. If the board can support it, it's like plugging two CPUs into one socket.
This is quite easy for AMD because of how bus logic works. The Athlon 64 series use an integrated memory controller, and normally, a second CPU uses the same connection to the system RAM that the first one does. (ie, one Hypertransport connection is shared, by design, between two CPUs.) So a dual-core CPU is trivially easy for them to implement, relatively speaking: they have space and heat issues, but all the architectural design work is done already.
Intel, on the other hand, hasn't designed this way. Instead, for years now, they have been totally focused around more and more clock speed. This has left AMD scrambling, becaus their chip designs get more work done per clock tick, so a 1600mhz AthlonXP will keep up quite nicely with a much higher-clocked P4. But consumers, thanks to Intel mostly, don't understand that, and so AMD came up with their numbering system instead. (they were lucky this worked, because at least one prior attempts at this, by Cyrix, failed utterly.)
Well, the worm is turning. Intel's aproach, that of "more megahertz, dammit!" is very rapidly running out of steam. They have been selling people for years on megahertz, and suddenly they're in the position where they can't increase megahertz easily anymore. This is a BIG deal for them; all those billions spent 'educating' consumers on something that wasn't true is coming back to bite them.
A dual-core Prescott will not be an easy thing, and will require substantial motherboard and chipset changes. And they have a fundamental bandwidth problem; P4s need very high memory bandwidth to really get good. The P4 didn't truly hit its stride until it went to a quad-pumped 200mhz bus... 800mhz effective RAM speed. At that point, the P4 architecture finally sits up and really starts singing. But doing a dual-core chip means that both CPUs have to share bandwidth, so to maintain performance, they'll have to go to a 1600mhz bus. That's not likely in the near future.
AMD is doing the exact same thing, but the A64 design is much less clockspeed- and bandwidth-intensive. It gets more work done per clock tick, doesn't hit the RAM as hard, and runs cooler. So it's a natural for dual-core. Forcing the P4 into that same mold, on the other hand, is a move of desperation by Intel. It won't work very well, but their crank-the-megahertz strategy suddenly isn't working AT ALL.
From what I can see, Intel is in trouble.
This isn't completely impossible, but they would have to be exceedingly smart, very probably inhumanly smart, to be able to run all binaries from all systems at good speed on any other. But there are some shortcuts they could potentially have taken that would bring it into the realm of 'very difficult, but possible.'
What most emulators do is to translate, instruction by instruction, the code stream for another processor into the instruction set of the current one. This takes, generally, anywhere from 10 to 20 native instructions per foreign one; in some cases, a lot more. Very clean architectures like the 68000 and PowerPC are easier to emulate, because their instruction sets are fairly uniform. The translation segment can be very fast, just a couple of table lookups and jumps. The x86 instruction set, on the other hand, is extremely snarly and nasty, with a whole slew of different instructions at different sizes. There are 8 bit, 16 bit, and 32-bit instructions, and several processor modes (8086, 80286, 80386). this makes the simple translation of an X86 instruction a potentially very complex process.
This emulator, on the other hand, claims to not be doing this. They claim that they are pre-translating the binaries to native code and running them that way. This would be enormously difficult, in essence extracting the 'sense of' a program from the compiled binary. This hasn't been done much, and there's a reason for it; it's hard to tell what side effects instructions are going to have ahead of time. The only way you can be CERTAIN of the state of an emulated PC is by emulating every step to get to that point. Just inspecting the code, and writing your own program to do the same thing, won't always give you a running program.
Now, they could be simplifying their X86 translation code a WHOLE lot by not emulating 8086 and 286 modes. Very little code, now, is 8- or 16-bit, so if they only support 32-bit code, their problem would be vastly simplified.
They may also be able to simplify their problem by sticking with 'ordinary' programs, ones that stay in userspace and just use system calls for their I/O. I believe that precompling a program that twiddles hardware bits directly would be exceptionally difficult. Transmeta's approach strikes me as the only likely one in this case; emulate it instruction by instruction, watch how it works, and then write yourself shortcuts to make it run faster next time.
But if they stick with 32-bit only, userspace programs, they could possibly get things running fairly quickly. Quake is a good demo for them. It's using OpenGL and is fairly predictable; the inputs and outputs are easily understood and quantified. (network, user input, results of opengl library calls). They're not getting any weird side effects from Quake hitting the hardware directly.
Upshot: it MAY work, but it's likely only going to work well for a subset of programs. It will likely never run operating systems. But, given those limits, it may actually run fairly well.
They mention using this tech to run XBOX1 stuff on XBOX2; if what I'm guessing is correct, that's likely to fail a great deal of the time. It's possible that XBox games may not hit the hardware directly; if they go through library calls for everything, they might be translatable in this way. But from what little I know of console programming, there probably is no class of program MORE likely to be twiddling the hardware. The recompilation technique strikes me as HIGHLY unlikely to work well in such cases.
I suppose they might be able to store special-purpose precompiled binaries on Live.. when you install Game Y for Xbox1, it could potentially go get a program binary from Live that would work. Might be better than nothing, but it would require a lot of engineering effort by Microsoft.
I should also note that I'm NOT claiming this is real. It could very easily be a scam. I'm just trying to point out that if they change the rules a little, they may be able to ship a product that works, without needing brains the size of Jupiter.
But what if you don't even know the commands?
Back in around 1993, the Internet came to the place I was living at the time, in Northern California. My roommate and I were big BBS users, so we were all over that, and signed up the instant that CRL offered service.
What they offered was a dial-in, UNIX command prompt. You were only allowed to run one command at a time, and they didn't offer PPP or SLIP for years, perhaps never. And they didn't ship a manual of any type. You got a dialup number and a login, and you were left with the prompt:
crl>
So what now? We had no bloody CLUE what to do. So my roommate started typing each letter, by itself, one at a time:
a
b
c
Like that. One of the commands hung; I think it might have been b or c: I'm thinking that it was some sort of early calculator program. Suddenly we didn't have anything. I had a thought, and suggested control-Z, which is the EOF character for DOS. This actually worked, although by pure luck. It WAS waiting on our input, so I had the right idea, but control-Z is not the EOF character for Unix. (control-D is). By luck, control-Z suspends a Unix process. So we got our prompt back without understanding why.
My roommate kept up with the letters of the alphabet, which was completely useless until we got to "w". Suddenly, we got a list of people who were logged in and, most importantly, what commands they were running. We started taking notes and were soon off to the races, at least in a very basic way.
This is NOT how to encourage a newbie to start. Had it been just me, I'd have gone out to buy a book; fortunately, my roommate was both smart and stubborn. And Unix remained intimidating to me for a very long time; I was a complete wizard with the PCs of the time, but Unix was utterly alien and extremely difficult to pick up without other people around.
The single best way to learn Unix is to expose yourself to other Unix people. It is an extraordinarily powerful and deep system, and getting truly great at it will take years. You can accelerate this process enormously by having experienced people around you, so that you don't waste time going down blind alleys. They can also help you unlearn your bad habits from the brain-damaged prompts in DOS and Windows.
I have said for many years that you can very nearly bring about world peace from the Unix command line; it's that powerful.
But ye gods, is it ever intimidating when you're first starting.
Thanks very much for the pointer! The game is sort of a cross between Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital, with a spy theme. It looks to have just as much atmosphere as DK and DK2, seems as polished as Theme Hospital, and has much better graphics (all in true 3D) to boot. Short of Doom 3, this is the most promising game I've seen this year. I'm very impressed with the demo. Definitely going on the order list. :-)
Basically, what you're saying is 'open source should be marketed better'. But keep in mind... that is explicitly not what open source projects are about; almost all of them are technology-, not marketing-driven. Most open source coders aren't writing code to extract cash from people's wallets, they're doing it because they love doing it, or because they're solving an issue.
And these point releases aren't meant for Average Joe anyway; they're bleeding-edge and unstable. Joe doesn't want this stuff.
This is where the distros step in; they take the results of the technically-driven development, and THEY market it.
The very last thing you want is for open source groups to 'start being more feature-focused'. We've seen what happens with that approach; bloated, unstable, unreliable software that costs a fortune.
The purpose of most of these groups is to write great software, and I submit to you that, by and large, they're doing a fantastic job. Let the distros do the marketing.
It's pretty much the same thing as, well, the government printing more notes. It devalues the existing currency.
I'd rather run that risk than the known evil of politicians using the money system to extract value, essentially by fraud, from the populace at large. Your worry is theoretical; mine happens every day.
Well, I grew up in California, and it was most emphatically not legal to refuse cash there. I didn't realize that was a State thing rather than a Federal one, and I appreciate the correction..... but what I said is true where I grew up. :-)
Note that that same page says we've been off the gold standard since 1933, but that's not true. We were on a gold standard system with other countries until 1971. 1933 makes it sound like ancient history... 1971 is a lot more recent and inflammatory. (the terrible economic times in the 1970s were, mostly, linked to that currency devaluation.)
That's why money is the most marketable commodity. The market determines its own value for things. And offhand, I'd say clothing, shelter, transportation, and energy all have a great deal of value.
As far as money being overprinted... note that it HAS dropped in relation to gold a great deal, from $285 to about $410 now. And there are very strong signs that the government is now manipulating both the stock and gold markets. Reagan instituted a Plunge Protection Team after Black Monday (I think that's the right day of the week) in 1987. In a free market, there would be more sign of inflation in the gold price -- but EVERYONE watches the gold price, so it's in the government's interest to try to hold it down if it can.
Look at the prices for gasoline or health insurance or platinum for a better gauge of inflation. Early warning signs.
And there's no need for more money as the economy grows. In the twenty or so years following 1945, the economy grew ENORMOUSLY... I forget the exact figure, but I think it was a couple hundred percent over that twenty years. And the money supply grew, over that entire period, by about 16%. The economists of the time were arguing because they didn't think the money supply was growing fast enough, but it sure didn't seem to do anyone any harm.
Money doesn't make an economy grow. A natural economy with solid money seems to be slowly deflationary; things get a little cheaper every year. Like I was saying in another post, you could have ONE OUNCE of gold be the medium of exchange for the whole country -- people would have bills denoting their fractional ownership of The Ounce. Now, that's probably too inflexible, and would cause prices to change too much, but it would work fine for exchange and as a store of value.
I'm NOT advocating that system, I'm just trying to point out that economic growth is not driven by money. It is driven by WEALTH, by savings and investment, which are entirely different things altogether.
See my other posts.... any commodity can work as money. The most marketable commodity becomes money, and as you observe, it can be anything.
But fiat currencies are imposed by force on a population, and they give the government enormous powers to abuse the money and tax the population without their knowledge. No sane person would choose to use green paper as 'money' without a great deal of preconditioning. What is holding the dollar together is the network effect... because it was ONCE worth something, and societies change slowly.
Fiat money can be invented, at the wave of a hand, in any quantity desired. Want to fight a war? No problem, just fire up the printing press. This devalues all the existing dollars and is a hidden tax on everyone, and they don't really understand it. There are other bad side effects as well... floating currencies have allowed a whole class of speculator to arise, which live on currency trading. This kind of trading is zero sum; if they make wealth, then other people lose it, by definition. The amounts of money being traded now are staggering, beyond imagination, and these speculators are extracting unbelievable amounts of wealth while providing NOTHING of value in exchange. They're just smart and playing by the rules, but our fiat-based world monetary system allows them to exist.
All I am arguing is that using a physical medium of exchange (or bills, as long as the bills really are treated like the real commodity) prevents the worst of the abuses, both by government and speculators. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best we've come up with. It leaves the control in OUR HANDS, where it belongs.
What drives the growth of an economy is savings and investment: not consuming all of what you make, and investing that profit back into your ability to produce. If you are a cobbler and must sell 15 sets of shoes per week to maintain your standard of living, then any amount you make over 15 is your savings. You can trade these shoes for other goods, like better tools, or hiring more workers, or what have you.... you invest back in your business to make it more efficient. If there was one ounce of gold in the whole world, this would still work, because you'd trade a hundred millionth of The Ounce for your new tool.
There was also a system in use during the middle ages, where they'd use short-term (90 day or less) notes among each other, and only at the end of every 90-day period would everything be settled up. At that point, some gold would actually move around, but this limited movement of gold or silver in no way constrained the economy.
The money supply doesn't limit that; however much wealth there is, exists. Fiat money is not wealth, it's not anyone's extra labor, it's just purely fictional.
What you may be referring to is fractional reserve banking, which allows banks to create money out of thin air. If they have, say, 100 real dollars, they can make many small loans far in excess of 100 dollars, because not everyone will want their money all at once. The fractional reserve system MAY increase economic growth, but that is questionable; there's pretty good evidence that it's the FRB system that causes the business cycle. It strikes me that the cycle of artificial boom/bust caused by expansion and contraction of a fake money supply probably does more damage than it helps; smooth and slow changes are best for wealth generation. The bankers are able to extract a great deal of wealth from the economy, and I am not at all sure that they are providing as much value as they are taking.
What FRB does is send a false signal into the economy; for a short time, everything is furiously overbuilt as money floods the system. Then the flood recedes, and many of the businesses that were built, fail, even ones that would have been viable without the artificial crunch. Eventually the debts are paid down, and the cycle of boom/bust starts again. Proponents of this system point to the percentage growth during the boom years.... but a slow and steady 5%/year is better, probably, than alternating years of 10 and 0.
And yes, you can have disruptions in the gold and silver supply, but economies are pretty resilient. It certainly can't be worse than the incredible abuse that the Fed has subjected us to since about '99. In the year 2000, as I recall, they grew the money supply by 18%! In a YEAR. There was a span of TWENTY YEARS (the late 40s, 50s, and early 60s) where in that whole 20 years we grew the money supply by something like 16%. We're really starting to see the inflation now, government misdirections be damned. It takes time for this stuff to percolate through an economy.
What you are arguing for, essentially, is false growth brought on by false money: it looks good on paper, but much of it is not stable. It's not healthy. And the ability of the politicians to abuse the system is too profound without any kind of check on their power.
I just remembered the name for taxation through debasement: segniorage. No wonder I couldn't think of it. Not a common word anymore.
Money, per Mises, is the most marketable commodity. If you know you can trade seashells for what you want, you will sell your goods for seashells. If enough people do that, seashells become money. (and past a certain point, a form of money is essentially inevitable, because of the network effect.) The network effect is powerful, and it would be likely to shore up a commodity that somehow lost some of its value, but if it lost enough value, then a new form of money would arise. Belief alone is probably not enough to hold money together.
Fiat money is a hijacking of that natural process to give the government a great deal more control over the economy and a nearly-infinite ability to tax, without approval or even KNOWLEDGE of the people being taxed. Past a certain point, this will destroy an economy, of course, and cause the failure of the government. And last I checked, central planning of an economy was not a very good idea; the more control goes into the hands of a few people, the less well things tend to run.
Money needs to be both a store of value and a medium of exhange. We're doing fine on the exchange part, but we're failing dismally on the store-of-value front. See my signature.