In order to refund things, it often has to be something else then "consumable goods". I think anything below like $100 is "consumable goods", you buy it on your own risk, and it is hardly worth the trouble to return it.
Legally I don't think price enters into it. Would a $5 paperback missing a few pages be worth returning to the store? Maybe, if you really wanted to read those pages, or the store is on your way to someplace.
The book Bad Software had a pretty good description of how to return bad software. Unfortunately I think the UCITA may have made it obsolete, at least in places like VA that signed the dread thing into law. It had good advice on how to return things that had a shrinkwrap license, or things like DVDs or CDs to best buy where they have a policy of not allowing refunds, only exchanges on things like that.
It relies on UCC case law, and UCC regulations about things like the consumer having a short time to test the item. If you can't play a CD you can't test it...Same for software. If you return it right away (say the same day, or the day after) there pretty much isn't anything legal they can do (er, except the UCITA can or could change that). It's time consuming to find someone in Best Buy who will stand still while you quote law, but they do give in. For me, it ain't worth it for low cost items, unless they are just so bad that I can't stand the though of the makers getting any money for the item.
Re:*BSD is dying -- Kevin, give it a rest!
on
FreeBSD on DVD
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· Score: 2
No one is calling and cancelling orders because of your anonymous messages on Slashdot.
Not only that, but "BSD is dying posts on slashdot up 75%" was listed as a growth point at the FreeBSD BOF last night, much to the amusement of the gathered masses (other points were x% more commiters, N more platforms, y% more drivers...)
I've only heard of a few software titles that are released on DVD. And I don't even know what they are.
Well not only are DVD-ROM drives somewhat more rare then CD-ROMs, but the media is more expensive too. I don't know what a mass pressing CD costs, but if one-offs are $0.10 for the media, I don't imagine mass pressing would be more then $0.25 (including pressing costs in quantity). A mass pressed duel layer DVD is about $3 each.
So you don't break even until you go over 12 CDs! Well, assuming packaging is free. Even with (cheep!) packaging you should be able to have a fair number of CDs before it would have been cheaper to do a single DVD...
Actually they plan on doing two DVD sets, including a CVS source tree, and all the tarballs for the ports (neither seems to be on the existing DVD, I checked).
To start selling PowerPC processors without AltiVec now would be pretty confusing (not that they've never confused anybody before -- witness their recent hardware naming conventions).
Consumers won't really care if a machine is fast because it has AltiVec, or because it is clocked fast, or because it uses a temproal distortion field to speed up time inside the case.
They just care that the thing is fast. So if a POWER4 Mac ran faster then a G4 Mac (including AltiVec optmised code) they will be happy. If it runs some stuff faster, and other stuff slower, well, I would expect them to be quite unhappy, esp. given how costly the POWER4 is likely to be.
It might also cause big problems for all those software vendors (possibly Apple included) porting software with the "if it's a G4 it's got AltiVec" rule in mind.
I doubt it. For one the POWER4 isn't a G4. IBM already makes G4s, so this would have to be a G5 or something. Second the method Motorola recomends is looking at bit 6 of the MSR, if set AltiVec is supported, if clear there is no AltiVec. Apple doesn't seem to promote a method (or it takes more then 5 minutes to find it), however if your application uses bundles it can be set up to runtime link with it's own altivec or non-altivec libs depending on whether the CPU supports AltiVec or not (there are other machine dependent runtime link things it can do).
I would be shocked if IBM set bit six of the MSR wrong.
IBM *has* commented on Altivec, and they don't like it
Let me clarify, they haven't commented on AltiVec for the POWER4. One could assume that because they commented negatively about AltiVec in the past that they wouldn't put it in the new CPU, but that's still not the same as hearing them say it isn't in the new CPU.
They haven't given out a lot of information on the POWER4, so it isn't surprising they haven't said anything about AltiVec on the POWER4.
I think you are probably right, there is a pretty big chance there is no AltiVec in the POWER4, but I do think there is a non-trivial chance that it does have AltiVec. After all they have a huge transistor budget, and it would for sure make the market for the POWER4 bigger (the RS/6000, and AS/400 markets are quite small, even compared to the Macintosh market, maybe even compared to the high end Mac market)
Actually a few more google searches, and I found IBM has licensed AltiVec, no news on whether they are going to put it in the POWER4 though.
Multiple-core technology is fantastic and i can't imagine why motorola isn't using it yet.
It requires a huge transistor budget (like double for two cores), and provides less gain then SMT. It is way simpler to design (and I assume debug) then SMT. FYI, the POWER4 may be both multi core and SMT, some MPR reports implied that it was, nothing explicitly stated it though, an nothing later denied it. It will be interesting to find out about both SMT and AltiVec. And real speed numbers.
apple really needs altivec (because if you are going to be rendering the entire screen in PDF then having a powerful SIMD vector processing unit becomes really really helpful..)
Probably not as useful as running at about twice the clock speed, and having 8 CPUs on the module (two per IC, 4 ICs in the module). Plus the PDF render isn't that slow on a (no altivec) G3. I mean it's not stunningly fast or anything, but it isn't painfully slow...
Does IBM just kind of keep doing its thing with the POWER line
FYI the POWER4 is a PowerPC, it implements all the PPC opcodes (like all the single precision FP that is optional in the POWER ISA). That doesn't mean the POWER4 does altivec though. IBM hasn't commented on way or the other on AltiVec.
I expect if the POWER4 has altivec Apple would be insane to not use it in at least their high end "server" level Mac. Even without altivec, it would seem to be a good idea to use it anyway... even if the price is so high few are sold it would still let Apple have one machine that beats many or all Intel CPUs out there. Right now, they could use that.
Eh? $10,000? I admit it has been almost ten years since I worked for a CoinOp company, but $10,000?
In 1992 most CoinOps were about $1000, a tad bit under. MP Games (where I worked) was doing pretty poorly because we made the early 3D games (well, the early solid 3D games, others did vector ones, I doubt anyone did one before Atari's Red Baron). Our system cost about $1000 to build, and we had to sell it for more like $3000. That was a pretty tough fight.
I expect prices to have gone up a bit, but $10,000?
And what makes you think the machine is really dedicated? MP did 3 released games on the same platform (different controllers, and cabinet art). Plus 5 or so internal ones that didn't get completed. Sega has done maybe half a dozen or more games on an arcade platform that is almost identical to the Dreamcast - about twice the RAM, a ton more ROM, and no CD ROM...
Even in the "old days" most machines had at least one conversion kit to turn it into another game, that normally includes new decals for the machine, and new ROMs. Normally the same controllers though. Tempest had Major Havoc. I forget what the other Street Fighter game was, but it sucked, SF was the conversion, and it was far far more popular then the original. Good deal for people too, because the conversion kits were about $200, and the old game was around $500, so for $700 you could get a box that did $400 to $1200 a week depending on the traffic in the area...
Unbeatable playing experience. I'm sorry, but no PS2/Xbox driving game with a gamepad (or even a force-feedback wheel clipped on a desk)
That's for sure. Game console controls all seem to be cheep, sized for kids, and flimsy. The dreamcast's arcade controller was at least kind of nice (metal joystick!), but the contacts do wear out.
Even the PC controllers aren't as nice as they could be (driving rigs still tend to be small for example), but at least there the force feedback is good. Maybe as the arcades close up good controllers will at long last come home.
Also I think the Xbox has real USB connectors so you can buy good controllers, at least if they make them (and the PC controllers seem nicer then consoles, even if they are nowhere near as nice as CoinOp controllers).
I was always curious as to why the IBM PC/AT designers decided to cascade they way they did. I would have had the first PIC (Programmable Interrupt Controller) used as a first-stage cascader. I.e. there are no 1st-level interrupts.
I would assume they did it to save $27.38 or whatever another PIC and more board traces would have cost. Much like the reason they did the A20 address rollover hack with the keyboard controller.
FYI this problem is "fixed" on systems that have and use the IO APIC, but they still have to emulate the old two level PIC design so they can run "old" OSes and drivers. (I think the APIC may predate the P-I, but it wasn't integrated on all P-II or even PPro CPUs, and I don't know if Intel clones have them or not...)
My understanding is that AMD's 64bit CPUs will run old code beautifully. This may be the deciding factor against Intel's Itanium, which by all the accounts I've seen, runs 32 bit code terribly slow.
Sure, unless the deciding factor turns out to be how slow the 64 bit code is...
(not it isn't painfully slow, but it isn't as fast as some of the already shipping RISC machines! It's not called the iTanic for nothing...)
Transmeta, which has a soft architecture, ought to be able to convert their code morpher to process the AMD 64-bit instruction set, which is basically x86 with longer words. This would be useful mostly as a test environment until AMD gets the real machine out the door.
I believe they (I assume with AMDs help) did this last year. For exactly the reasons you state. I expect they skipped actually supporting more then 4G of physical RAM (or whatever the normal TM chips support) because they would have required real hardware work. I also expect any of the 64 bit instructions are actually kind of slow, but hay probably a lot faster then the pure software emulator (as it is a mostly software emulator with modest hardware assist).
You might try a google search on comp.arch for more info.
Once more, in case someone missed: Tux does serve dynamic content. (People seem to be thinking of kttpd... khttpd, the thing that comes with the kernel, serves only static pages.)
I didn't say it didn't. I said the benchmark didn't, I quote from the article:
The 60.7MB of static Web content was small enough to easily fit into RAM,
That said, no, I didn't know that Tux can't do dynamic content, but I'm also not foolish enough to make sweeping statements about things I don't know about.
How does Tux do dynamic content? Does it pass it up to a userland web server on the same box? On another box?
If you do you are a major hypocrite, like most of the Libertarians I know...
One is a hypocrite for wanting to change from a involuntary system to a voluntary one? As far as I know most libertarians (they prefer little l) don't claim to currently be living the live they want too (i.e. are not a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion). They would like to privately fund schools, highways, and most want to fund national defense with excise taxes (I think). They aren't going and claiming that they are doing it, or otherwise falsely asserting that they are currently are not benefiting from the taxes of others.
It would be rather hard to not do so since there is no alternate method set up to account for everyone's use of government services and pay for them.
I don't think the often quoted libertarian idea of almost no government is attainable. But I do want one radically smaller then the existing one. At least on the federal level. At the state level my feeling are much more mixed. I know that would increase the local state taxes quite a bit because a lot of the funding for state works comes from the feds, but it would also increase the likelihood of being able to find a state that offers roughly the services you want for roughly the taxes you are willing to pay. Currently it is all but impossible because so many services are actually payed out of your federal taxes...
A benchmark is inherently flawed if it isn't made by an impartial entity.
No, it is inherently suspect. If it includes enough information to reproduce the results, and they are reproducible odds that it is useful go up. If they lose odds go up more. If it is simple enough that you can see if it merely played to the strengths of that software or if it is a real test of how it might be used...well that helps too.
After all SPEC benchmarks are run by the venders (on programs and data sets that a group of venders all agreed on).
Yesterday's Tux benchmark wasn't worthless (at least not if you serve static content).
Most benchmarks are not done by impartial entities. Many are run by magazines that get advertising money from only some of the products. Some are run by the potential users that have a vested interest in picking the cheapest one.
How does this work financially? I assume no one would "buy" a computer with disbaled processors or HDs. Are these systems being leased?
There are some computers you buy with disabled CPUs (IBM does it, and I remember Sun making a press release about it, but I don't know if they do it).
CPUs have two real costs. One is the cost to fab (build) the CPU, this is a large percent of the low end embedded CPUs and the Celoron type CPUs were cost is a major issue (you can count the cost of the fab plant here). The other cost is the design cost of the CPU. The more CPUs of a given design you sell, the less you have to pay per CPU for this. High volume CPUs like the x86 have very very little design cost per CPU. Low volume CPUs like the POWER3 and UltraSPARC have a much higher per-CPU design cost.
So IBM and Sun may charge well over $1000 for a CPU that costs them only $100 to build (in real life part of that $1000 is also profit). They can charge $100 for a CPU and not lose money on building it, but if they don't somehow get more money then that they won't manage to design the next CPU.
They can put extra CPUs in a box for $100 each, and "just" charge you the other $900 (or $1500, or whatever) if you want to use them. Given the price of large IBM and Sun machines a few extra $100 won't be noticed (the small Sun machines are about $1000, so that can't do that!).
Sun/IBM wins because there is a larger chance that you will buy the extra CPUs given the fast "shipping time". The customers win if they ever need another CPU in a hurry, because it can be "shipped" to them quite quickly. There was some talk that Sun would let you just turn them on and pay on the honer system. I don't know if that happened. If they never use the extra CPUs then they payed a extra few $100 on a multiple $10,000 box, which isn't helping them, but it isn't all that bad for them either.
It isn't likely to happen to x86 CPUs because the design cost is a much lower part of hte final cost. The profit margins are also lower now that there are two real supplyers (AMD and Intel), so a CPU that sells for $200 can't be thrown in for $20 without someone taking a loss...
This is probably the biggest reason why Classic Mac OS crashes less than Win9x.
I used MacOS9 for about two weeks, it crashed far far more often then Win95 and Win98 did for me. Then I got the OSX public beta, and only had two crashes in as many months. Then the OSX release, which I think has had two crashes in 3(?) months, but has refused to unsuspend maybe three times (which may not be a crash, but is about as bad -- I can ssh in, but I don't really know what to kill to fix it, I can do a clean reboot though).
One of the OSX PB crashes was from me doing a 'umount -f' which shouldn't cause a panic. Doesn't cause a panic in any of the BSDs I've used. One of the OSX full releases was me retesting that.
In my (short!) experience OS 9 is less stable then Win9x. Mac OSX is far more stable, but still not as stable as a "real" Unix:-)
Which is not to say all those merrily heartless libertarian extremists turned out to be hypocrites- I am sure there are a lot of them sleeping in their cars because by God they're not taking charity! Better to die alone than to bow to others!
FYI it isn't against libertarian beliefs to give or receive (or ask for) charity. It is against libertarian beliefs to force someone to give "charity" (quoted here because it isn't really charity if it is taken by force). So giving $5 to a homeless guy on the street is fine. Running a soup kitchen is fine. Going to one is fine. Taking 26% of someone's wages and using it to fund all manner of things including aid to the homeless is not so fine. Not because of the things funded by that money, but because it is taken, not offered up freely.
Likewise asking someone for $5 so you can eat is OK. Telling someone to give you $5 so you can eat, or you will stab them in the eye is not OK.
I think the real problem is that you didn't know good code when you saw it. The best people were not the ones who looped over the string to find the length, but the ones who called strlen(). As the AC just said, strlen() is optimized, written in assembler.
No, when I said "one pass" I didn't mean it had to be their loop, calling strlen is "one pass". As far as this question goes yes calling strlen is better then doing it oneself, for pretty much every possible reason (maybe faster, far more readable, and less likely to get the call wrong). However I normally don't count off for doing it with a loop.
If I had asked for it to be as fast as possible, or asked for something where work can be combined with the length calculation, then I might have cared.
I do tend to ask why someone made a choice, and not so much care if they make the same one I do, just if they have a good reason. Well, except if the choice is "mallocing something and not freeing it" or other things that are ever so clearly bugs.
After all surprisingly few people manage to get the bloody thing right. If it works, and doesn't leak memory, the answers to the other questions tend to be more important (esp. the two sort questions, and the trick regex question...).
One of the sort questions is "in any language you like", and the other just requires a description of the algo.
Otherwise, you've got what seem to me to be good ideas about interviewing.
Thanks, it seems to be the only thing I have produced at my new job -- three interviews in my second week.
But you've made what seems a dangerous assumption to me - that there's one correct solution to the problem, and it's that one. I would say some of those people had better solutions, though I would still consider your way acceptable.
Nah, I'm more lax on what is correct then you think. Normally I'm pretty happy to get O(...) right. In this case I'm slightly more strict then O(N), I want to see O(2N) -- which I know is technically the same as O(N), but I don't know the right notation.
I'm sure they did, but I didn't take any english classes, or even the full set of CS classes before I left for the work force.
The real reason I can't spell? I'm dyslexic. So I mostly leave it to the spell checker. The plus side of being dyslexic is I have a pretty good error correction filter (since everything comes in with errors), and I'm really good at the word unscrambling exercises.
Of corse a disproportionate number of mathematical geniuses are dyslexic, but I apparently didn't get that lucky.
If you put your list of books on a web page, your friends will be less likely to buy duplicates for your birthday or christmas. Same with DVDs. Of corse it also means if I want a out of print DVD or book badly enough I might stop by in the middle of the night....
A friend has a list on his PDA, so when we are out at dinner and trying to decide if we should go to a theater for a movie or off to someone's house he can offer specific movies...
A good catalogue is useful for insurance though, if the catalogue doesn't get destroyed in the fire at least.
Isn't there something wrong with a resume that boasts of 6-7 years of experience, but the person has only been out of school for 3 years?
I had three years of experience before entering collage. It may have been mostly CS and QA, but it was still technical.
I've dropped all of my pre-collage experience and some of the stuff from collage in order to keep my resume to two pages. I hadn't realized it would keep me from being falsely branded a liar as well!
I got laid off, was laid off for well over a month (ya I know not long), before I took a pay cut and generally bent over to take it up the arse so to speak just to get a job. (Try having about 20% of my salary held as a completion bonus/aka we'll screw you if you can't meet our insane deadlines).
Either you are in a bad area for jobs, don't interview well, or arn't as good as you think. Like I said I was unemployed for three months, that was basically through the end of May...
You try saving up 4 months of income, lets see how well you do at it, sure you won't be tempted to work on that car loan with that money will you?
I have about two years income saved. I would like to save enough to live on by the time I reach retirment (I don't think the social security I'm forced to pay will do much for me). My car and my wife's are payed for.
I'm a programmer, and you'd be amased what a pain it is to get a decent job, they send you into technical tests made by some idiot with a book that has syntax errors in the questions and no right answers because the test is wrong. (I know I took the same test at 2 different companies and 6 of the questions were wrong, and 1 was completely irrelevant -- Who was the original author of Perl?).
If you aren't interviewing with your coworkers it doesn't sound like it is a job I would be aiming for. If that's the best in the area maybe you should think about moving? If you don't want to move maybe you should think about what it's costing you. I know what my refusal to move costs me (it's humid here, cost of living is high, traffic is bad).
It's rough to cut income/expenses, I cut as far as I could go, you say move out of that expensive place, does the word LEASE mean anything to you? If I move out it costs me more with the lawsuit insuing my abondoning on the property.
Your writing a reply to someone else. I didn't say move in my last message. Of corse I did in this message...but this would be a planned leaving, not right in the middle of a lease. Later at the end of the lease, or when you get hired some place that will pay the fee to break the lease as part of moving expenses...
Sell that expensive car? Hrmm great when I paid $22k for a 2000 Cougar last June, I owe $3250 on it (tanked spare money into it), and I could sell it for about $10k today, that'll do me a lot of good, net me maybe $6500 to buy another wreak? Great idea there.
Again, even though you clicked "reply to" on my message, you are quoting someone else.
You could sell that car, I use to drive a $700 car, it sucked, but was livable. Today's junk mail shows a used Saturn for $5000, if that is the cheapest car you can find swapping it for your car and $1000 may not be a good idea because you know your car is in pretty good shape, and reapirs should be both rare and free.
Why can't we CLOSE THE BORDERS!!!!!
Well it would be rather cruel to the rest of the world, plus we can't produce enough oil and other things for domestic use. Plus we make a fair amount of exports that we would lose. Closing the borders would make the current economic downturn look like the golden age, you know back when we all had food...
Or did you mean why can't we just protect jobs in your field, and keep screwing everyone else?
What is wrong with returning a pointer that you used malloc to allocate??
as long as you remember to free it later.
When you are asked to do the modification in line the caller isn't going to free a return'ed buffer. In fact it may not look at the return value at all.
How many programs would break if strcat started returning a malloc'ed buffer?
P.S. send me your name, I'll make sure you don't get an interview:-)
(yeah, it was a joke, I expect you would pay more attention during a real interview, plus there are other questions)
Take a job at the big megacorp or a small company that's been around for 10+ years (before the dotcom craze). These people at these places are not getting the axe.
Wrong.
Worldcom is over ten years old. It is a really big company. It is the number two US long distance carrier. It is not only the largest ISP, but it is larger then the next twelve ISPs combined.
It also layed off a ton of people about three months ago. Nice severance packages though.
The megacorps will not (for the most part) go bust, but they will lay people off as part of their strategy to not go bankrupt.
Polorid is more then ten years old. It may be 100 years old. They announced layoffs last week (I think).
Kodak is over 100 years old. They may not have had layoffs yet (I think they have though), but looking at their annual reports, they will.
1. Why didn't they put any money away for a rainy day? If they bought their own hype, expected to live off stock options, and didn't put any savings away, then they deserve to suffer for their own lack of foresight.
A fine idea. One not followed often enough in the USA (if you believe government statistics almost nobody has more then two months savings, few even have one months!)
Why aren't they staying with friends or family who are still employed? If they don't have any in the valley, why don't they move away
A lot of people have friends pretty much only in the same industry (mostly at the same company). Chances are they were mostly all layed off together.
and to my mind it's far less injurous to your dignity than mooching off government handouts
Note that in many places the government handouts came directly out of your pay check (or very close to it), and you can't get out more then you payed in. In fact you can't even get as much as you payed in back (in VA you can get the last 18 months back, then your screwed). Also note that unless you are taking these handouts you aren't unemployed (that is you don't count that was in the government statistics).
Even if you have saved up, it is pretty foolish not to march off and get your handout while looking for work. Or at least it's foolish not to find out for real what is involved. In VA it is about an hour and a half to set it up, and one brief phone call per week (assuming you are approved to do "resume searches").
You can get a dog that's just as cute and friendly at the SPCA for under $100
Or at least not a whole lot over. I beleve my mutt was $130, closer to $200 with shots and all. Much smarter then the (~$300) purebreed I had as a kid too.
"3.2 percent unemployment rate"? Poor frigging babies! Go over to France, where they have all sorts of welfare and unemployment benefits. And, directly related to same, unemployment around 15%.
Be sure those numbers were calculated the same way. Fifteen of my friends have no jobs. Ten of my friends have no jobs, and are looking. Only four of them are unemployed. How is the 15% number for the french calculated?
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Legally I don't think price enters into it. Would a $5 paperback missing a few pages be worth returning to the store? Maybe, if you really wanted to read those pages, or the store is on your way to someplace.
The book Bad Software had a pretty good description of how to return bad software. Unfortunately I think the UCITA may have made it obsolete, at least in places like VA that signed the dread thing into law. It had good advice on how to return things that had a shrinkwrap license, or things like DVDs or CDs to best buy where they have a policy of not allowing refunds, only exchanges on things like that.
It relies on UCC case law, and UCC regulations about things like the consumer having a short time to test the item. If you can't play a CD you can't test it...Same for software. If you return it right away (say the same day, or the day after) there pretty much isn't anything legal they can do (er, except the UCITA can or could change that). It's time consuming to find someone in Best Buy who will stand still while you quote law, but they do give in. For me, it ain't worth it for low cost items, unless they are just so bad that I can't stand the though of the makers getting any money for the item.
Not only that, but "BSD is dying posts on slashdot up 75%" was listed as a growth point at the FreeBSD BOF last night, much to the amusement of the gathered masses (other points were x% more commiters, N more platforms, y% more drivers...)
Well not only are DVD-ROM drives somewhat more rare then CD-ROMs, but the media is more expensive too. I don't know what a mass pressing CD costs, but if one-offs are $0.10 for the media, I don't imagine mass pressing would be more then $0.25 (including pressing costs in quantity). A mass pressed duel layer DVD is about $3 each.
So you don't break even until you go over 12 CDs! Well, assuming packaging is free. Even with (cheep!) packaging you should be able to have a fair number of CDs before it would have been cheaper to do a single DVD...
Actually they plan on doing two DVD sets, including a CVS source tree, and all the tarballs for the ports (neither seems to be on the existing DVD, I checked).
So surely Linux would need more then two DVDs :-)
Consumers won't really care if a machine is fast because it has AltiVec, or because it is clocked fast, or because it uses a temproal distortion field to speed up time inside the case.
They just care that the thing is fast. So if a POWER4 Mac ran faster then a G4 Mac (including AltiVec optmised code) they will be happy. If it runs some stuff faster, and other stuff slower, well, I would expect them to be quite unhappy, esp. given how costly the POWER4 is likely to be.
I doubt it. For one the POWER4 isn't a G4. IBM already makes G4s, so this would have to be a G5 or something. Second the method Motorola recomends is looking at bit 6 of the MSR, if set AltiVec is supported, if clear there is no AltiVec. Apple doesn't seem to promote a method (or it takes more then 5 minutes to find it), however if your application uses bundles it can be set up to runtime link with it's own altivec or non-altivec libs depending on whether the CPU supports AltiVec or not (there are other machine dependent runtime link things it can do).
I would be shocked if IBM set bit six of the MSR wrong.
Let me clarify, they haven't commented on AltiVec for the POWER4. One could assume that because they commented negatively about AltiVec in the past that they wouldn't put it in the new CPU, but that's still not the same as hearing them say it isn't in the new CPU.
They haven't given out a lot of information on the POWER4, so it isn't surprising they haven't said anything about AltiVec on the POWER4.
I think you are probably right, there is a pretty big chance there is no AltiVec in the POWER4, but I do think there is a non-trivial chance that it does have AltiVec. After all they have a huge transistor budget, and it would for sure make the market for the POWER4 bigger (the RS/6000, and AS/400 markets are quite small, even compared to the Macintosh market, maybe even compared to the high end Mac market)
Actually a few more google searches, and I found IBM has licensed AltiVec, no news on whether they are going to put it in the POWER4 though.
It requires a huge transistor budget (like double for two cores), and provides less gain then SMT. It is way simpler to design (and I assume debug) then SMT. FYI, the POWER4 may be both multi core and SMT, some MPR reports implied that it was, nothing explicitly stated it though, an nothing later denied it. It will be interesting to find out about both SMT and AltiVec. And real speed numbers.
Probably not as useful as running at about twice the clock speed, and having 8 CPUs on the module (two per IC, 4 ICs in the module). Plus the PDF render isn't that slow on a (no altivec) G3. I mean it's not stunningly fast or anything, but it isn't painfully slow...
FYI the POWER4 is a PowerPC, it implements all the PPC opcodes (like all the single precision FP that is optional in the POWER ISA). That doesn't mean the POWER4 does altivec though. IBM hasn't commented on way or the other on AltiVec.
I expect if the POWER4 has altivec Apple would be insane to not use it in at least their high end "server" level Mac. Even without altivec, it would seem to be a good idea to use it anyway... even if the price is so high few are sold it would still let Apple have one machine that beats many or all Intel CPUs out there. Right now, they could use that.
Eh? $10,000? I admit it has been almost ten years since I worked for a CoinOp company, but $10,000?
In 1992 most CoinOps were about $1000, a tad bit under. MP Games (where I worked) was doing pretty poorly because we made the early 3D games (well, the early solid 3D games, others did vector ones, I doubt anyone did one before Atari's Red Baron). Our system cost about $1000 to build, and we had to sell it for more like $3000. That was a pretty tough fight.
I expect prices to have gone up a bit, but $10,000?
And what makes you think the machine is really dedicated? MP did 3 released games on the same platform (different controllers, and cabinet art). Plus 5 or so internal ones that didn't get completed. Sega has done maybe half a dozen or more games on an arcade platform that is almost identical to the Dreamcast - about twice the RAM, a ton more ROM, and no CD ROM...
Even in the "old days" most machines had at least one conversion kit to turn it into another game, that normally includes new decals for the machine, and new ROMs. Normally the same controllers though. Tempest had Major Havoc. I forget what the other Street Fighter game was, but it sucked, SF was the conversion, and it was far far more popular then the original. Good deal for people too, because the conversion kits were about $200, and the old game was around $500, so for $700 you could get a box that did $400 to $1200 a week depending on the traffic in the area...
That's for sure. Game console controls all seem to be cheep, sized for kids, and flimsy. The dreamcast's arcade controller was at least kind of nice (metal joystick!), but the contacts do wear out.
Even the PC controllers aren't as nice as they could be (driving rigs still tend to be small for example), but at least there the force feedback is good. Maybe as the arcades close up good controllers will at long last come home.
Also I think the Xbox has real USB connectors so you can buy good controllers, at least if they make them (and the PC controllers seem nicer then consoles, even if they are nowhere near as nice as CoinOp controllers).
I would assume they did it to save $27.38 or whatever another PIC and more board traces would have cost. Much like the reason they did the A20 address rollover hack with the keyboard controller.
FYI this problem is "fixed" on systems that have and use the IO APIC, but they still have to emulate the old two level PIC design so they can run "old" OSes and drivers. (I think the APIC may predate the P-I, but it wasn't integrated on all P-II or even PPro CPUs, and I don't know if Intel clones have them or not...)
Sure, unless the deciding factor turns out to be how slow the 64 bit code is...
(not it isn't painfully slow, but it isn't as fast as some of the already shipping RISC machines! It's not called the iTanic for nothing...)
I believe they (I assume with AMDs help) did this last year. For exactly the reasons you state. I expect they skipped actually supporting more then 4G of physical RAM (or whatever the normal TM chips support) because they would have required real hardware work. I also expect any of the 64 bit instructions are actually kind of slow, but hay probably a lot faster then the pure software emulator (as it is a mostly software emulator with modest hardware assist).
You might try a google search on comp.arch for more info.
I didn't say it didn't. I said the benchmark didn't, I quote from the article:
That said, no, I didn't know that Tux can't do dynamic content, but I'm also not foolish enough to make sweeping statements about things I don't know about.
How does Tux do dynamic content? Does it pass it up to a userland web server on the same box? On another box?
One is a hypocrite for wanting to change from a involuntary system to a voluntary one? As far as I know most libertarians (they prefer little l) don't claim to currently be living the live they want too (i.e. are not a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion). They would like to privately fund schools, highways, and most want to fund national defense with excise taxes (I think). They aren't going and claiming that they are doing it, or otherwise falsely asserting that they are currently are not benefiting from the taxes of others.
It would be rather hard to not do so since there is no alternate method set up to account for everyone's use of government services and pay for them.
I don't think the often quoted libertarian idea of almost no government is attainable. But I do want one radically smaller then the existing one. At least on the federal level. At the state level my feeling are much more mixed. I know that would increase the local state taxes quite a bit because a lot of the funding for state works comes from the feds, but it would also increase the likelihood of being able to find a state that offers roughly the services you want for roughly the taxes you are willing to pay. Currently it is all but impossible because so many services are actually payed out of your federal taxes...
No, it is inherently suspect. If it includes enough information to reproduce the results, and they are reproducible odds that it is useful go up. If they lose odds go up more. If it is simple enough that you can see if it merely played to the strengths of that software or if it is a real test of how it might be used...well that helps too.
After all SPEC benchmarks are run by the venders (on programs and data sets that a group of venders all agreed on).
Yesterday's Tux benchmark wasn't worthless (at least not if you serve static content).
Most benchmarks are not done by impartial entities. Many are run by magazines that get advertising money from only some of the products. Some are run by the potential users that have a vested interest in picking the cheapest one.
There are some computers you buy with disabled CPUs (IBM does it, and I remember Sun making a press release about it, but I don't know if they do it).
CPUs have two real costs. One is the cost to fab (build) the CPU, this is a large percent of the low end embedded CPUs and the Celoron type CPUs were cost is a major issue (you can count the cost of the fab plant here). The other cost is the design cost of the CPU. The more CPUs of a given design you sell, the less you have to pay per CPU for this. High volume CPUs like the x86 have very very little design cost per CPU. Low volume CPUs like the POWER3 and UltraSPARC have a much higher per-CPU design cost.
So IBM and Sun may charge well over $1000 for a CPU that costs them only $100 to build (in real life part of that $1000 is also profit). They can charge $100 for a CPU and not lose money on building it, but if they don't somehow get more money then that they won't manage to design the next CPU.
They can put extra CPUs in a box for $100 each, and "just" charge you the other $900 (or $1500, or whatever) if you want to use them. Given the price of large IBM and Sun machines a few extra $100 won't be noticed (the small Sun machines are about $1000, so that can't do that!).
Sun/IBM wins because there is a larger chance that you will buy the extra CPUs given the fast "shipping time". The customers win if they ever need another CPU in a hurry, because it can be "shipped" to them quite quickly. There was some talk that Sun would let you just turn them on and pay on the honer system. I don't know if that happened. If they never use the extra CPUs then they payed a extra few $100 on a multiple $10,000 box, which isn't helping them, but it isn't all that bad for them either.
It isn't likely to happen to x86 CPUs because the design cost is a much lower part of hte final cost. The profit margins are also lower now that there are two real supplyers (AMD and Intel), so a CPU that sells for $200 can't be thrown in for $20 without someone taking a loss...
I used MacOS9 for about two weeks, it crashed far far more often then Win95 and Win98 did for me. Then I got the OSX public beta, and only had two crashes in as many months. Then the OSX release, which I think has had two crashes in 3(?) months, but has refused to unsuspend maybe three times (which may not be a crash, but is about as bad -- I can ssh in, but I don't really know what to kill to fix it, I can do a clean reboot though).
One of the OSX PB crashes was from me doing a 'umount -f' which shouldn't cause a panic. Doesn't cause a panic in any of the BSDs I've used. One of the OSX full releases was me retesting that.
In my (short!) experience OS 9 is less stable then Win9x. Mac OSX is far more stable, but still not as stable as a "real" Unix :-)
FYI it isn't against libertarian beliefs to give or receive (or ask for) charity. It is against libertarian beliefs to force someone to give "charity" (quoted here because it isn't really charity if it is taken by force). So giving $5 to a homeless guy on the street is fine. Running a soup kitchen is fine. Going to one is fine. Taking 26% of someone's wages and using it to fund all manner of things including aid to the homeless is not so fine. Not because of the things funded by that money, but because it is taken, not offered up freely.
Likewise asking someone for $5 so you can eat is OK. Telling someone to give you $5 so you can eat, or you will stab them in the eye is not OK.
No, when I said "one pass" I didn't mean it had to be their loop, calling strlen is "one pass". As far as this question goes yes calling strlen is better then doing it oneself, for pretty much every possible reason (maybe faster, far more readable, and less likely to get the call wrong). However I normally don't count off for doing it with a loop.
If I had asked for it to be as fast as possible, or asked for something where work can be combined with the length calculation, then I might have cared.
I do tend to ask why someone made a choice, and not so much care if they make the same one I do, just if they have a good reason. Well, except if the choice is "mallocing something and not freeing it" or other things that are ever so clearly bugs.
After all surprisingly few people manage to get the bloody thing right. If it works, and doesn't leak memory, the answers to the other questions tend to be more important (esp. the two sort questions, and the trick regex question...).
One of the sort questions is "in any language you like", and the other just requires a description of the algo.
Thanks, it seems to be the only thing I have produced at my new job -- three interviews in my second week.
Nah, I'm more lax on what is correct then you think. Normally I'm pretty happy to get O(...) right. In this case I'm slightly more strict then O(N), I want to see O(2N) -- which I know is technically the same as O(N), but I don't know the right notation.
I'm sure they did, but I didn't take any english classes, or even the full set of CS classes before I left for the work force.
The real reason I can't spell? I'm dyslexic. So I mostly leave it to the spell checker. The plus side of being dyslexic is I have a pretty good error correction filter (since everything comes in with errors), and I'm really good at the word unscrambling exercises.
Of corse a disproportionate number of mathematical geniuses are dyslexic, but I apparently didn't get that lucky.
If you put your list of books on a web page, your friends will be less likely to buy duplicates for your birthday or christmas. Same with DVDs. Of corse it also means if I want a out of print DVD or book badly enough I might stop by in the middle of the night....
A friend has a list on his PDA, so when we are out at dinner and trying to decide if we should go to a theater for a movie or off to someone's house he can offer specific movies...
A good catalogue is useful for insurance though, if the catalogue doesn't get destroyed in the fire at least.
I had three years of experience before entering collage. It may have been mostly CS and QA, but it was still technical.
I've dropped all of my pre-collage experience and some of the stuff from collage in order to keep my resume to two pages. I hadn't realized it would keep me from being falsely branded a liar as well!
Either you are in a bad area for jobs, don't interview well, or arn't as good as you think. Like I said I was unemployed for three months, that was basically through the end of May...
I have about two years income saved. I would like to save enough to live on by the time I reach retirment (I don't think the social security I'm forced to pay will do much for me). My car and my wife's are payed for.
If you aren't interviewing with your coworkers it doesn't sound like it is a job I would be aiming for. If that's the best in the area maybe you should think about moving? If you don't want to move maybe you should think about what it's costing you. I know what my refusal to move costs me (it's humid here, cost of living is high, traffic is bad).
Your writing a reply to someone else. I didn't say move in my last message. Of corse I did in this message...but this would be a planned leaving, not right in the middle of a lease. Later at the end of the lease, or when you get hired some place that will pay the fee to break the lease as part of moving expenses...
Again, even though you clicked "reply to" on my message, you are quoting someone else.
You could sell that car, I use to drive a $700 car, it sucked, but was livable. Today's junk mail shows a used Saturn for $5000, if that is the cheapest car you can find swapping it for your car and $1000 may not be a good idea because you know your car is in pretty good shape, and reapirs should be both rare and free.
Well it would be rather cruel to the rest of the world, plus we can't produce enough oil and other things for domestic use. Plus we make a fair amount of exports that we would lose. Closing the borders would make the current economic downturn look like the golden age, you know back when we all had food...
Or did you mean why can't we just protect jobs in your field, and keep screwing everyone else?
When you are asked to do the modification in line the caller isn't going to free a return'ed buffer. In fact it may not look at the return value at all.
How many programs would break if strcat started returning a malloc'ed buffer?
P.S. send me your name, I'll make sure you don't get an interview :-)
(yeah, it was a joke, I expect you would pay more attention during a real interview, plus there are other questions)
Wrong.
Worldcom is over ten years old. It is a really big company. It is the number two US long distance carrier. It is not only the largest ISP, but it is larger then the next twelve ISPs combined.
It also layed off a ton of people about three months ago. Nice severance packages though.
The megacorps will not (for the most part) go bust, but they will lay people off as part of their strategy to not go bankrupt.
Polorid is more then ten years old. It may be 100 years old. They announced layoffs last week (I think).
Kodak is over 100 years old. They may not have had layoffs yet (I think they have though), but looking at their annual reports, they will.
A fine idea. One not followed often enough in the USA (if you believe government statistics almost nobody has more then two months savings, few even have one months!)
A lot of people have friends pretty much only in the same industry (mostly at the same company). Chances are they were mostly all layed off together.
Note that in many places the government handouts came directly out of your pay check (or very close to it), and you can't get out more then you payed in. In fact you can't even get as much as you payed in back (in VA you can get the last 18 months back, then your screwed). Also note that unless you are taking these handouts you aren't unemployed (that is you don't count that was in the government statistics).
Even if you have saved up, it is pretty foolish not to march off and get your handout while looking for work. Or at least it's foolish not to find out for real what is involved. In VA it is about an hour and a half to set it up, and one brief phone call per week (assuming you are approved to do "resume searches").
Or at least not a whole lot over. I beleve my mutt was $130, closer to $200 with shots and all. Much smarter then the (~$300) purebreed I had as a kid too.
Be sure those numbers were calculated the same way. Fifteen of my friends have no jobs. Ten of my friends have no jobs, and are looking. Only four of them are unemployed. How is the 15% number for the french calculated?