This makes me feel much much better - I think the suddeness of the anouncement (for those of us who don't know the behind-the-scenes goings-on)triggered my conspiracy alarm.
PS. guido@zope.com no longer works. Please use guido@python.org!
If he was leaving on good terms with Zope corp (ex digicool), then why the sudden switch in email adr? I know, big corps cut you off the second they can when you leave, but not even forwarding his mail smells fishy - like there was some kind of falling out or disagreement behind the scenes.
Yes, I'm a paranoid freak, but there is more potential evidence in his goodbye - he never thanks Zope corp for his time there and thier support. In fact, except for saying that the rest of the PythonLabs people are staying, he never mentions Zope corp (though he does mention Zope the project many times). This could just be due to limited time and his forward-looking nature, but it just reads oddly to me...
"can doom a fantastically complex and brilliant piece of machinery like the shuttle"
The more complex a system (the more moving parts, for example), the more susceptible to failure the system is. The complexity of the shuttle's systems (due to its design for reuse within a high-launch-number economy of scale that was never achieved by NASA) Lends itself to failure. No offense, but look at the Soyuz - its a reliable, simple design, and thus its suscuess rate is extreemly high. Of course, it is so simple because the USSR designed it as a nuclear launch vehicle, with low maintenence and launch-tech requirements. And its not reusable.
In the days following the Columbia disaster, I found a reference on CNN where NASA claimed the expected failure rate of a shuttle launch was 1 in 256. The article was pulled very quickly. Due to the pull, I can't dig to find out if they meant 1 in 256 for loss fo the vehicle and crew, or 1 in 256 for Something to go wrong.
Two things:
1) He claimed there were Pen, not pencil, bombs.
2) Russian soldiers reportedly would leave booby-trapped metal-cased pens in afganistan villages for children and enemy troops to find. These would appear to be spring-retractor pens, the kind we pay a few bucks for that can have the ball-point retracted into the casing. Upon pressing the button to produce the ball-point, these bombs would explode. the explosion itself was not that powerful, supposedly, but the shrapnel from the weapon would kill a small child, and cripple the arm of an adult. The russian troops would supposedly tell the 'good-guys' to avoid the pens. Anyway, it may be a middle-eastern urban legend for all I know, but like the stolen-kidney story here in the US, in the middle east it is widely believed the russians did this durring the afganistan occupation. Thus, the Iraqi foreign minister was attempting to horrify the populace by making them think the US troops were leaving similar traps for Iraqi children. Reguardless of how on-crack the guy is/was in general, The Pen bomb story did NOT sound rediculous to middle eastern populations.
I hold in my hand a 'CD' by Fischerspooner (an odd but entertaining band). Like most wide rlease cds, the back of the jewel case has many logos. Things to note:
The 'Compact Disc' logo we've come to expect is missing.
A 'enhanced CD' logo is present.
Reading the fine print, this Capitol Records release (released on march the 6th) says:
"Enhanced CD" is a certification mark of the RIAA
Need I mention that this CD cannot be burned in any of my machines? Ripping to mp3s is only possible via the line-in jack, and has horrible quality (compared with ripping from my cd-rom, that is).
This is not a santanna album, its from a much smaller, newer act. The RIAA has made more headway with promoting thier agenda then this article seems to imply: These CDs are already on the market, and have been since the begining of the month, at the least.
Please note: The RIAA site has the definition of the 'enchanced CD" 'standard' available here. The standard does not require any form of watermarking of copyright protection. However, as a copy-protected cd is technically NOT compliant with the original philips specifications, I find it very suspect that the RIAA made thier own standard. Especially since this standard serves no purpose other than to replace the ageing 'Compact Disc' logo.
Successful examples of this type of show include Buffy The Vampire Slayer (target market: Goths) and Xena, Warrior Princess (target market: Lesbians).
Waho... flamebait, eh? How did this get modded up?
Exscuse me, but I'm not a lesbian, and I liked Xena. In fact, the majority of viewers of Xena were Male, like myself.
Also, you're use of the term 'goth' has many problems (almost as many as your broad and incorrect market audience for Xena) - not the least of which being that no standard definition of 'Goth' exists to even market to! Do a search on google for 'goth definition' - every site will have its own. I know many people who watch buffy, and most of them would never want to be called 'Goth'. I know middleaged housewives who watch the show. How many people do you know who watch it? Apparently not many, since you seem to have written off its audience using a stereotype. Funny thing is, from the sort of things advertised durring Buffy, I'd have to say the average demographic is much different from your generalization.
Ireguardless of the quality of firefly, I find it disturbing that the moderators have 'modded up' a post containing such gross generalisms. I thought the slashdot crowd was better than this - or are we all label-users at hearts?
Re:What on earth are you talking about?
on
Cheap KVM Over IP?
·
· Score: 2, Flamebait
Ok, if its a non-issue, why don't you get into the bios of your machines remotely via VNC and change some settings, or view a POST screen to see what error is comming up on bootup... oh wait, VNC Can't Do Those Things...
A nueral network is just a self-adjusting system that is taught how to respond to stimuli via certain rules and some feedback (wether positive or negative) - thus, all a nueral net does is try different combinations of paterns and self-feedback until it find the 'best' solution to a problem. Thus, a nueral net is just software that in a way, writes software. The doctor states that it is the _software_ the brain is running that makes it what it is (for us) - intelligent. a _really_ big nueral net could, yes, find the equivilent patterns to mimic said software, but all the doctor is saying is that a nural net isn't _the_ software the brain runs. hrm, duno if I made sense, but the doctor isn't saying ALICE is _THE_ method for AI, just that its a usefull AI tool for language modeling and response modeling for a language, and that he think neural nets are the wrong way to go for general, true-brain simulation.
Re:No... a 64bit chip doesn't have to be 'slower'
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 2
"it takes 16 cycles reguardless fo whcih mode the processor is in." br.
Even with the typo left in, its fairly obvious my meaning here - a 64-bit add takes as many cycles as a 32-bit add in the 'hammer' design by AMD - the same Adders are used for each - just in one case (32 bits), half the bits involved are ignored.
No... a 64bit chip doesn't have to be 'slower'
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
A properly designed 64-bit CPU does not need to 'run slower' to run 32-bit apps. AMD came up with a simple solution to the 32-bit limitations of X86 code: they added a new 'mode' to the processor to run 64-bit binaries. when this mode bit is set (similar to the old Real and and Protected modes of X86 chips), the chip utilizies the full 64-bit-wide pathways for data and cacluations, when this bit is not set, only the lower (or is it upper? AMD isn't saying...) 32-bits of the pathways are used. The same exact logic units are used for all 32-bit and 64-bit calculations, only the bit-depth precision changes. Thus if it takes an ADD instruction 16 cycles to add two registers and store the results in a third register, it takes 16 cycles reguardless fo whcih mode the processor is in. Of course, AMD also added an extra 8 registers for use in 64-bit mode... very useful.
The itantium does not get the majority of it's speed from being 64-bit - this is a common mistake people make. It has a _very_ different design and instruction set - EPIC - which places the burden of parallel instruction determiniation on the compiler. Basicly, they used the oldest software refactoring trick in the book, but on the whole processor design: they examined the amount of time spent executing, and looked for the bigest runtime performance-hit that could be moved from a O(n) to a O(1) penalty by simply moving the calculation. In this case, modern processors spend a great deal of time trying to handle multiple instructions at once, which may or may not be parralellizable (is that a word?) - thus the processor has to figure out, on the fly (in a P4, for example), if it can execute the next four add instructions in parallel, or if they are interdependant and cannot... By placing the burden of parellelism determination and instruction scheduling on the compiler, intel made the compiler writer's job much harder, but at the benefit of increased performance.
Oh, and most PDA processors are much more traditional, and thus don't require complex compilers like the itanium, so actually porting a compiler (or an assembly-lang app) to a PDA from x86(32-bit) is easier than creating one for the EPIC architecture.
And yes, I know the above is an oversimplification, and Intel and AMD both did a lot more, in a lot more detail, on thier 64-bit chips.
Oh, and I think the next few iterations of itaniums _will_ beat the AMD 64-bit chip on bechmarks. But not by a landslide.... And with the differences in price (EPIC chips are Expensive... capital E) the AMD chips will win the hearts of many and be the performance-price ratio king. And who wants to pay 3 times as much for 20% more performance?
Re:The best part: sneaker net
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
When he's using the big screen, hes presenting to witnesses... I could imagine this would be one fo those cases where having the machine you're presenting evidence with be networked would cast the evidence into doubt due to the possibility of tampering...
These are the sites I order from: they all have very good prices, and carry just about everything. If you look on pricewatch, you may find individual parts cheaper, but you wont find all the parts you want at the best deals from a single vendor.
Thompsons computer warehouse -> they always contact me to verify my information, which delays ordering slightly, but they have great deals.
Pc Progress - this site used to be butt ugly, but has gotten better. Regardless, they have great deals.
Access Micro - they dont have the lowest prices, but they carry Everything.
DV Direct - Hard to navigate (click on 'Manufacturer focus at the bottom of the page to find products easily), and they look like they specialize in video hardware, but in actually they carry some high quality PC parts, such as 3ware IDE raid controllers, you'll be hard pressed to find elsewhere.
The article and statement I was responding to was about wether the OSS community could, if funded like microsoft, develop products as easy to use and as good as microsoft. The beauty of open source hurts it againt this goal alone: I am not saying that the competition is bad, just that it would hinder the one goal given.
I agree with the idea that if money was poured into open source software development it would be closer to Microsoft's software (in ease of use) - but it wouldn't get there without something else:
A Clear, unified vision.
Microsoft performs usability studies... they invest a lot fo time figuring out what feature are needed, what can help people - Yes, many times what they make can be annoying (paperclip, anyone?) - but unless we had a unified (no competing projects like KDE and Gnome) set of projects, goals for those projects, and clear and definable end-user documentation and online help, we would not get to the level microsoft has made thier software to be.
Yes - microsoft software can be 'buggy' - but its developers are Good. Microsoft understands that they can make the most money by making software that is Good Enough - making the best, bug free software possible won't make as much money, since it will give users less of an incentive to upgrade and buy the next version. Yes, this strategy stinks - it reeks of marketing, but it works.
I have no doubt that if funded like microsoft, the OS community would develop amazing systems - probably much much closer to bug-free than micrsoft's - however, the end user still wouldn't have the unified ease-of-use of a microsoft (or apple) OS. That comes with a unified vision... and a unified vision needs... A Leader.
We have Linus, but he leads kernel development and champions OS development in general. there is no one, or even any single group of people, in the 'Captain's Chair', defining what the end user experience should be. Even Red Hat just provides a Distribution of the core OS, and lots and lots of other Open Source software that happen to run on it - with thier own install and config utilities, of course.
I guess this turned into a rant about leadership - I guess we know Microsoft is lead by profitering businessmen, but Linux (as a platform, not the kernel... which I guess should really be called GNU/LINUX;P) doesn't have anyone defining where it should really go, or what the end-user should expect, let alone gets...
This lack of leadership wasn't by design - Linux was, as Linus will tell you, never expected to come as far as it did when he started it. We (the community) spontaneously sprang forth and Developed... and developed and developed...
But an analogy can be drawn to genetics here. Just as it took millions of years of evolution to produce a mouse, it only takes man (an intelligent outsider to the natural process fo evolution) years to effect enourmous changes to the gnome (and thus the phenotype) of Mice and other creatures. Couldn't nature, through random chance and lots of time, produce the same creations we can today from ordinary mice? Yes. Thus, The semi-random headless development community could produce amazing software meetings specific goals... if given enough time.
But just money won't do it... we either need the Money and Lots of Time, or we need the money and a very clear, defined direction...
Shouldn't the worst type of theft be something like, I dunno, stealing someone's SOUL?
Seriously though - wouldn't it make more sense for something like, oh, stealing food from a starving man, to be a 'worse' kind of theft than this? I seriously hope this is just a bad translation, and that the real meaning is more like 'one of the worst kinds of theft' - otherwise, those clerics need to go have a talk with thier drug dealer(s): because the stuff they're on has obviously gone bad.
6 months of 24/7 surveliance? I don't think so. thats 4 full time people making 29k+ a year, working 8 hour shifts and never missing a beat. and thats 29k a year Including health insurance, life insurance (not cheap to provide to law officers) and such, so really only 23k/year... where are you going to find someone qualified to trail a suspect without being caught who'll work for 27k a year when there is already a shortage of police officers, let alone the 4 you'd require?
keep in mind, also, the 56k figure includes the cost of paying someone to listen to the tapes from the tap and transcribe them...
Incorrect - motorola sells a lot of these to the embeded market for various uses. The apple versions usually have more cache and run at a higher speed, but motorola is making plenty of money on them.
A) its not fully rolled out yet. and B) its very limited in total capacity: they are marketing it towards the people who Can't get highspeed connections because cinci-bell doesn't have a CO in thier area, and whom can't get roadrunner.
You are wrong. The HDTV signal has more then 20Mbps available, and a compressed HDTV signal takes up less then the alooted amount: they only use the extra 'dead space' to send the data signal.
they don't use the whole HDTV signal.
simply put, HDTV provides X amount of bandwith per channel, but as it turns out, good quality can be sent with modern equipment at less than X amount of bandwith. They use the remainder (a significant amount, mind you) 'dead space' as the location for the downstream data.
Please do some research before making offhand comments like this chrisd...
If someone is playing solitaire, they obviously aren't doing work or using the cpu heavily - so why not build-in a distributed computing client to perform work on a cure for cancer or some such in the background of these games?
Games such as RTCW Scream for this much power... For example, I'm running a highly overclocked radeon 8500 (64Meg), equiv to a slow geforce 3 or fast geforce2:
with all the graphical settings turned up to thier max in the game (extra-high character texture detail, max everything else), and only 2xAA, I CANNOT PLAY THE GAME at 800x600 (the framerate falls to 4fps durring combat); If I turn things down some, I can get away with playing at 800x600. Even with weak settings though, 1024x768 is out of the question unless I turn AA completely off. The only way around this is to switch to vertext lighting (as opposed to lightmaps - which are wonderfully beautifull)...
Anyway, the point is, there is at least 1 game out Now, in which a card like this would be useful. Since games only get more and more complex, by the time a NV25 based card hit the market, many games would want/need this sort of speed.
You're missing the idea that multiple levels of classification here... take a look at my example for the detail on deciding about a manufacturer or body-type as the base class.
I have been struggling with these issues for awhile now, for various reasons. Why? Because I like Zope, but am, like most developers, more comfortable with relational data structures.
Zope uses an object database known as the ZODB. Some forms of many-to-many relationsships and such can be handled via the use of selection and multi-selection properties, which are designed to distinguish between a selected element and the list of available elements. The list of elements can be derived from a property on the current object, a property on a parent object, or be created via a method call - allowing for non-traditional (for OODBMS) cross-linking of objects. Of course, since this sort of thing is a workaround, no true relational links are created... 'Soft Relations' may be ok for MySQL, but in big application development, relationships must be enforced! Thus, the big-boys in RDBMS all enforce foreign keys (mysql does not)...
Of course, I've found that by careful creation of object heirarcies, very complex applications can be created on top of a OODBMS that are in fact more robust, in some ways, then the relational couterparts. The Bigest hurdle (Short-term) I see to OODBMS (including ones based upon XML [the ZODB can export objects as XML but they are stored differently internally]) is the lack of a true query and data manipulation language - like SQL. Sure, OQL exists, and is even technically a standard, but it A) sucks and B) is geared towards large java applications with huge amounts of active objects, not general purpose OODB queries. Thus, without such language, OODBMS are all disimilar in how one queries and creates/updates data, and in many cases, the only interface is a truely procedural one! Thus OODBMS are forced to use proprietary tools, and are locked into one system - not to mention speed of development (something normally associated with OO development and OODBMS in general) is hindered by the excessive amount of procedural calls one needs to simply query thier data...
Recently, an add-on to Zope addressed some of these issues. Called 'ZOQL' - it uses a SQL like syntax and allows for very discrete querying of the ZODB (something one had to do programatically using the 'ZCatalog' before) with all of the familar aggregate and comparison operators SQL users love... Of course, this _still_ doesn't address the issue of soft-relationships:
I think the bigest hurdle to OODBMS in the long term (tools like ZOQL are interfaces to existing systems, thus can be mplemented easily) is the lack of handling relationships. It seems that most RDBMS force a developer to think in Relational terms about the data, and most OODBMS force you to think in terms of objects... Most problems can be mapped to either of these domains, but you are forcing the data-model-type onto the problem. What is needed is a hybrid system, an 'Object-Relational' DBMS. This is to say that OODBMS system makers desist with the traditional OO idea that relations are of the following types:
Object A is a Object B
Object A Has a/many Object B(s)
What RDBMS systems excelled in (and thus fell into pupular use for) was ease of management and allowing common data to be moved and grouped. A 'Look-up Table' - for instance, which simply holds a list of common data (an enumerated list) and can be centrally maintained is a Boon in the RDBMS world. For example, you have a lookup table of car manufactureres, and one of them changes its name... Instead of updating all N Cars that are made by the manufacturer, you simply update the single record in lookup table. Since each car would have somehting akin to a 'Manuafactuer_ID' column linking it to the lookup table, the Cars belonging to the manufacturer are all taken care of.
How does one do this in a hierarchal system? Well, the easy answer would be that each manufacturer object contains all the cars that manufacturer makes. Simple, right? WRONG. Why?
Because each car also has a body-type (compact, sedan, SUV, truck, van, etc...) - which in a relational database would simple by another lookup table, but in an OODBMS poses data management issues. Do we put body-type higher then manufacturer? If so, then we have to maintain the list of manufacturers for each body type, causing headaches. Or do we put body-type below manufacturer, causing us to need to maintain a seperate list of body types for each manufacturer - these lists of course need to match exactly if we ever plan on being able to search or do reports based upon all cars of a specific body type. Sadly enough, this sort of seperate-enumeration-relationship isn't implemented (well) in any OODBMS I've found. Take the ZOBD for example, its selection and multiselection lists Try to handle this situation, but fail because relational integrety is not maintained! That is to say, behind the scenes it's not a true reference to a value in the enumerated list, but just a text entry representing a value in the list. If the value in the list changes, the selection-property does not update, leaving you with the equivilent of MySQL's bastard-children, the orphaned records. This sort of soft-relationship handling is Ugly and BAD for maintainaility, but OODBMS users are faced with two ugly choices each time they map such a relationship: Do I store this as a plain-text property and just update N records each time this changes, or do I map it into the hierarchy and deal with the headaches incurred by doing so...?
I don't think I've answered the question, but hopefully I've at least shed some light on the subject for members of both the OODBMS camps and RDBMS camps... Now if only a useful ORDBMS were to come along...
(Note that PostgreSQL and some other RDBMS actualy can be used in a semi-OO manner, but this is usually reserved for inheritable structures of data to be used for specific extensions to the data model - thus the SUV table inherits from the Cars table and adds some columns - but all other relationships SUV has will still be relational)
Slashdot Mirror
This makes me feel much much better - I think the suddeness of the anouncement (for those of us who don't know the behind-the-scenes goings-on)triggered my conspiracy alarm.
PS. guido@zope.com no longer works. Please use guido@python.org!
If he was leaving on good terms with Zope corp (ex digicool), then why the sudden switch in email adr? I know, big corps cut you off the second they can when you leave, but not even forwarding his mail smells fishy - like there was some kind of falling out or disagreement behind the scenes.
Yes, I'm a paranoid freak, but there is more potential evidence in his goodbye - he never thanks Zope corp for his time there and thier support. In fact, except for saying that the rest of the PythonLabs people are staying, he never mentions Zope corp (though he does mention Zope the project many times). This could just be due to limited time and his forward-looking nature, but it just reads oddly to me...
"can doom a fantastically complex and brilliant piece of machinery like the shuttle"
The more complex a system (the more moving parts, for example), the more susceptible to failure the system is. The complexity of the shuttle's systems (due to its design for reuse within a high-launch-number economy of scale that was never achieved by NASA) Lends itself to failure. No offense, but look at the Soyuz - its a reliable, simple design, and thus its suscuess rate is extreemly high. Of course, it is so simple because the USSR designed it as a nuclear launch vehicle, with low maintenence and launch-tech requirements. And its not reusable.
In the days following the Columbia disaster, I found a reference on CNN where NASA claimed the expected failure rate of a shuttle launch was 1 in 256. The article was pulled very quickly. Due to the pull, I can't dig to find out if they meant 1 in 256 for loss fo the vehicle and crew, or 1 in 256 for Something to go wrong.
Two things:
1) He claimed there were Pen, not pencil, bombs.
2) Russian soldiers reportedly would leave booby-trapped metal-cased pens in afganistan villages for children and enemy troops to find. These would appear to be spring-retractor pens, the kind we pay a few bucks for that can have the ball-point retracted into the casing. Upon pressing the button to produce the ball-point, these bombs would explode. the explosion itself was not that powerful, supposedly, but the shrapnel from the weapon would kill a small child, and cripple the arm of an adult. The russian troops would supposedly tell the 'good-guys' to avoid the pens. Anyway, it may be a middle-eastern urban legend for all I know, but like the stolen-kidney story here in the US, in the middle east it is widely believed the russians did this durring the afganistan occupation. Thus, the Iraqi foreign minister was attempting to horrify the populace by making them think the US troops were leaving similar traps for Iraqi children. Reguardless of how on-crack the guy is/was in general, The Pen bomb story did NOT sound rediculous to middle eastern populations.
Just food for thought.
I think slashdot's april fool this year is duplicates...
I hold in my hand a 'CD' by Fischerspooner (an odd but entertaining band). Like most wide rlease cds, the back of the jewel case has many logos. Things to note:
The 'Compact Disc' logo we've come to expect is missing.
A 'enhanced CD' logo is present.
Reading the fine print, this Capitol Records release (released on march the 6th) says:
"Enhanced CD" is a certification mark of the RIAA
Need I mention that this CD cannot be burned in any of my machines? Ripping to mp3s is only possible via the line-in jack, and has horrible quality (compared with ripping from my cd-rom, that is).
This is not a santanna album, its from a much smaller, newer act. The RIAA has made more headway with promoting thier agenda then this article seems to imply: These CDs are already on the market, and have been since the begining of the month, at the least.
Please note: The RIAA site has the definition of the 'enchanced CD" 'standard' available here. The standard does not require any form of watermarking of copyright protection. However, as a copy-protected cd is technically NOT compliant with the original philips specifications, I find it very suspect that the RIAA made thier own standard. Especially since this standard serves no purpose other than to replace the ageing 'Compact Disc' logo.
Successful examples of this type of show include Buffy The Vampire Slayer (target market: Goths) and Xena, Warrior Princess (target market: Lesbians).
Waho... flamebait, eh? How did this get modded up?
Exscuse me, but I'm not a lesbian, and I liked Xena. In fact, the majority of viewers of Xena were Male, like myself.
Also, you're use of the term 'goth' has many problems (almost as many as your broad and incorrect market audience for Xena) - not the least of which being that no standard definition of 'Goth' exists to even market to! Do a search on google for 'goth definition' - every site will have its own. I know many people who watch buffy, and most of them would never want to be called 'Goth'. I know middleaged housewives who watch the show. How many people do you know who watch it? Apparently not many, since you seem to have written off its audience using a stereotype. Funny thing is, from the sort of things advertised durring Buffy, I'd have to say the average demographic is much different from your generalization.
Ireguardless of the quality of firefly, I find it disturbing that the moderators have 'modded up' a post containing such gross generalisms. I thought the slashdot crowd was better than this - or are we all label-users at hearts?
Ok, if its a non-issue, why don't you get into the bios of your machines remotely via VNC and change some settings, or view a POST screen to see what error is comming up on bootup... oh wait, VNC Can't Do Those Things...
A nueral network is just a self-adjusting system that is taught how to respond to stimuli via certain rules and some feedback (wether positive or negative) - thus, all a nueral net does is try different combinations of paterns and self-feedback until it find the 'best' solution to a problem. Thus, a nueral net is just software that in a way, writes software. The doctor states that it is the _software_ the brain is running that makes it what it is (for us) - intelligent. a _really_ big nueral net could, yes, find the equivilent patterns to mimic said software, but all the doctor is saying is that a nural net isn't _the_ software the brain runs. hrm, duno if I made sense, but the doctor isn't saying ALICE is _THE_ method for AI, just that its a usefull AI tool for language modeling and response modeling for a language, and that he think neural nets are the wrong way to go for general, true-brain simulation.
"it takes 16 cycles reguardless fo whcih mode the processor is in."
br. Even with the typo left in, its fairly obvious my meaning here - a 64-bit add takes as many cycles as a 32-bit add in the 'hammer' design by AMD - the same Adders are used for each - just in one case (32 bits), half the bits involved are ignored.
A properly designed 64-bit CPU does not need to 'run slower' to run 32-bit apps. AMD came up with a simple solution to the 32-bit limitations of X86 code: they added a new 'mode' to the processor to run 64-bit binaries. when this mode bit is set (similar to the old Real and and Protected modes of X86 chips), the chip utilizies the full 64-bit-wide pathways for data and cacluations, when this bit is not set, only the lower (or is it upper? AMD isn't saying...) 32-bits of the pathways are used. The same exact logic units are used for all 32-bit and 64-bit calculations, only the bit-depth precision changes. Thus if it takes an ADD instruction 16 cycles to add two registers and store the results in a third register, it takes 16 cycles reguardless fo whcih mode the processor is in. Of course, AMD also added an extra 8 registers for use in 64-bit mode... very useful.
The itantium does not get the majority of it's speed from being 64-bit - this is a common mistake people make. It has a _very_ different design and instruction set - EPIC - which places the burden of parallel instruction determiniation on the compiler. Basicly, they used the oldest software refactoring trick in the book, but on the whole processor design: they examined the amount of time spent executing, and looked for the bigest runtime performance-hit that could be moved from a O(n) to a O(1) penalty by simply moving the calculation. In this case, modern processors spend a great deal of time trying to handle multiple instructions at once, which may or may not be parralellizable (is that a word?) - thus the processor has to figure out, on the fly (in a P4, for example), if it can execute the next four add instructions in parallel, or if they are interdependant and cannot... By placing the burden of parellelism determination and instruction scheduling on the compiler, intel made the compiler writer's job much harder, but at the benefit of increased performance.
Oh, and most PDA processors are much more traditional, and thus don't require complex compilers like the itanium, so actually porting a compiler (or an assembly-lang app) to a PDA from x86(32-bit) is easier than creating one for the EPIC architecture.
And yes, I know the above is an oversimplification, and Intel and AMD both did a lot more, in a lot more detail, on thier 64-bit chips.
Oh, and I think the next few iterations of itaniums _will_ beat the AMD 64-bit chip on bechmarks. But not by a landslide.... And with the differences in price (EPIC chips are Expensive... capital E) the AMD chips will win the hearts of many and be the performance-price ratio king. And who wants to pay 3 times as much for 20% more performance?
When he's using the big screen, hes presenting to witnesses... I could imagine this would be one fo those cases where having the machine you're presenting evidence with be networked would cast the evidence into doubt due to the possibility of tampering...
Let me clarify:
The article and statement I was responding to was about wether the OSS community could, if funded like microsoft, develop products as easy to use and as good as microsoft. The beauty of open source hurts it againt this goal alone: I am not saying that the competition is bad, just that it would hinder the one goal given.
I agree with the idea that if money was poured into open source software development it would be closer to Microsoft's software (in ease of use) - but it wouldn't get there without something else:
;P) doesn't have anyone defining where it should really go, or what the end-user should expect, let alone gets...
A Clear, unified vision.
Microsoft performs usability studies... they invest a lot fo time figuring out what feature are needed, what can help people - Yes, many times what they make can be annoying (paperclip, anyone?) - but unless we had a unified (no competing projects like KDE and Gnome) set of projects, goals for those projects, and clear and definable end-user documentation and online help, we would not get to the level microsoft has made thier software to be.
Yes - microsoft software can be 'buggy' - but its developers are Good. Microsoft understands that they can make the most money by making software that is Good Enough - making the best, bug free software possible won't make as much money, since it will give users less of an incentive to upgrade and buy the next version. Yes, this strategy stinks - it reeks of marketing, but it works.
I have no doubt that if funded like microsoft, the OS community would develop amazing systems - probably much much closer to bug-free than micrsoft's - however, the end user still wouldn't have the unified ease-of-use of a microsoft (or apple) OS. That comes with a unified vision... and a unified vision needs... A Leader.
We have Linus, but he leads kernel development and champions OS development in general. there is no one, or even any single group of people, in the 'Captain's Chair', defining what the end user experience should be. Even Red Hat just provides a Distribution of the core OS, and lots and lots of other Open Source software that happen to run on it - with thier own install and config utilities, of course.
I guess this turned into a rant about leadership - I guess we know Microsoft is lead by profitering businessmen, but Linux (as a platform, not the kernel... which I guess should really be called GNU/LINUX
This lack of leadership wasn't by design - Linux was, as Linus will tell you, never expected to come as far as it did when he started it. We (the community) spontaneously sprang forth and Developed... and developed and developed...
But an analogy can be drawn to genetics here. Just as it took millions of years of evolution to produce a mouse, it only takes man (an intelligent outsider to the natural process fo evolution) years to effect enourmous changes to the gnome (and thus the phenotype) of Mice and other creatures. Couldn't nature, through random chance and lots of time, produce the same creations we can today from ordinary mice? Yes. Thus, The semi-random headless development community could produce amazing software meetings specific goals... if given enough time.
But just money won't do it... we either need the Money and Lots of Time, or we need the money and a very clear, defined direction...
Shouldn't the worst type of theft be something like, I dunno, stealing someone's SOUL?
Seriously though - wouldn't it make more sense for something like, oh, stealing food from a starving man, to be a 'worse' kind of theft than this? I seriously hope this is just a bad translation, and that the real meaning is more like 'one of the worst kinds of theft' - otherwise, those clerics need to go have a talk with thier drug dealer(s): because the stuff they're on has obviously gone bad.
6 months of 24/7 surveliance? I don't think so. thats 4 full time people making 29k+ a year, working 8 hour shifts and never missing a beat. and thats 29k a year Including health insurance, life insurance (not cheap to provide to law officers) and such, so really only 23k/year... where are you going to find someone qualified to trail a suspect without being caught who'll work for 27k a year when there is already a shortage of police officers, let alone the 4 you'd require?
keep in mind, also, the 56k figure includes the cost of paying someone to listen to the tapes from the tap and transcribe them...
Incorrect - motorola sells a lot of these to the embeded market for various uses. The apple versions usually have more cache and run at a higher speed, but motorola is making plenty of money on them.
A) its not fully rolled out yet. and B) its very limited in total capacity: they are marketing it towards the people who Can't get highspeed connections because cinci-bell doesn't have a CO in thier area, and whom can't get roadrunner.
You are wrong. The HDTV signal has more then 20Mbps available, and a compressed HDTV signal takes up less then the alooted amount: they only use the extra 'dead space' to send the data signal.
they don't use the whole HDTV signal. simply put, HDTV provides X amount of bandwith per channel, but as it turns out, good quality can be sent with modern equipment at less than X amount of bandwith. They use the remainder (a significant amount, mind you) 'dead space' as the location for the downstream data. Please do some research before making offhand comments like this chrisd...
If someone is playing solitaire, they obviously aren't doing work or using the cpu heavily - so why not build-in a distributed computing client to perform work on a cure for cancer or some such in the background of these games?
http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html
Games such as RTCW Scream for this much power...
For example, I'm running a highly overclocked radeon 8500 (64Meg), equiv to a slow geforce 3 or fast geforce2:
with all the graphical settings turned up to thier max in the game (extra-high character texture detail, max everything else), and only 2xAA, I CANNOT PLAY THE GAME at 800x600 (the framerate falls to 4fps durring combat); If I turn things down some, I can get away with playing at 800x600. Even with weak settings though, 1024x768 is out of the question unless I turn AA completely off. The only way around this is to switch to vertext lighting (as opposed to lightmaps - which are wonderfully beautifull)...
Anyway, the point is, there is at least 1 game out Now, in which a card like this would be useful. Since games only get more and more complex, by the time a NV25 based card hit the market, many games would want/need this sort of speed.
You're missing the idea that multiple levels of classification here... take a look at my example for the detail on deciding about a manufacturer or body-type as the base class.
Zope uses an object database known as the ZODB. Some forms of many-to-many relationsships and such can be handled via the use of selection and multi-selection properties, which are designed to distinguish between a selected element and the list of available elements. The list of elements can be derived from a property on the current object, a property on a parent object, or be created via a method call - allowing for non-traditional (for OODBMS) cross-linking of objects. Of course, since this sort of thing is a workaround, no true relational links are created... 'Soft Relations' may be ok for MySQL, but in big application development, relationships must be enforced! Thus, the big-boys in RDBMS all enforce foreign keys (mysql does not)...
Of course, I've found that by careful creation of object heirarcies, very complex applications can be created on top of a OODBMS that are in fact more robust, in some ways, then the relational couterparts. The Bigest hurdle (Short-term) I see to OODBMS (including ones based upon XML [the ZODB can export objects as XML but they are stored differently internally]) is the lack of a true query and data manipulation language - like SQL. Sure, OQL exists, and is even technically a standard, but it A) sucks and B) is geared towards large java applications with huge amounts of active objects, not general purpose OODB queries. Thus, without such language, OODBMS are all disimilar in how one queries and creates/updates data, and in many cases, the only interface is a truely procedural one! Thus OODBMS are forced to use proprietary tools, and are locked into one system - not to mention speed of development (something normally associated with OO development and OODBMS in general) is hindered by the excessive amount of procedural calls one needs to simply query thier data...
Recently, an add-on to Zope addressed some of these issues. Called 'ZOQL' - it uses a SQL like syntax and allows for very discrete querying of the ZODB (something one had to do programatically using the 'ZCatalog' before) with all of the familar aggregate and comparison operators SQL users love... Of course, this _still_ doesn't address the issue of soft-relationships:
I think the bigest hurdle to OODBMS in the long term (tools like ZOQL are interfaces to existing systems, thus can be mplemented easily) is the lack of handling relationships. It seems that most RDBMS force a developer to think in Relational terms about the data, and most OODBMS force you to think in terms of objects... Most problems can be mapped to either of these domains, but you are forcing the data-model-type onto the problem. What is needed is a hybrid system, an 'Object-Relational' DBMS. This is to say that OODBMS system makers desist with the traditional OO idea that relations are of the following types:
- Object A is a Object B
- Object A Has a/many Object B(s)
What RDBMS systems excelled in (and thus fell into pupular use for) was ease of management and allowing common data to be moved and grouped. A 'Look-up Table' - for instance, which simply holds a list of common data (an enumerated list) and can be centrally maintained is a Boon in the RDBMS world. For example, you have a lookup table of car manufactureres, and one of them changes its name... Instead of updating all N Cars that are made by the manufacturer, you simply update the single record in lookup table. Since each car would have somehting akin to a 'Manuafactuer_ID' column linking it to the lookup table, the Cars belonging to the manufacturer are all taken care of.How does one do this in a hierarchal system? Well, the easy answer would be that each manufacturer object contains all the cars that manufacturer makes. Simple, right? WRONG. Why?
Because each car also has a body-type (compact, sedan, SUV, truck, van, etc...) - which in a relational database would simple by another lookup table, but in an OODBMS poses data management issues. Do we put body-type higher then manufacturer? If so, then we have to maintain the list of manufacturers for each body type, causing headaches. Or do we put body-type below manufacturer, causing us to need to maintain a seperate list of body types for each manufacturer - these lists of course need to match exactly if we ever plan on being able to search or do reports based upon all cars of a specific body type.
Sadly enough, this sort of seperate-enumeration-relationship isn't implemented (well) in any OODBMS I've found.
Take the ZOBD for example, its selection and multiselection lists Try to handle this situation, but fail because relational integrety is not maintained! That is to say, behind the scenes it's not a true reference to a value in the enumerated list, but just a text entry representing a value in the list. If the value in the list changes, the selection-property does not update, leaving you with the equivilent of MySQL's bastard-children, the orphaned records.
This sort of soft-relationship handling is Ugly and BAD for maintainaility, but OODBMS users are faced with two ugly choices each time they map such a relationship: Do I store this as a plain-text property and just update N records each time this changes, or do I map it into the hierarchy and deal with the headaches incurred by doing so...?
I don't think I've answered the question, but hopefully I've at least shed some light on the subject for members of both the OODBMS camps and RDBMS camps... Now if only a useful ORDBMS were to come along...
(Note that PostgreSQL and some other RDBMS actualy can be used in a semi-OO manner, but this is usually reserved for inheritable structures of data to be used for specific extensions to the data model - thus the SUV table inherits from the Cars table and adds some columns - but all other relationships SUV has will still be relational)