Re:Fermi's Paradox is bunk.
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 2
If the human race survives without interference* we will certainly develop machine intelligence within 1000 years. Probably a lot less. Just look at the progress of the last 50 years, both in improving computers and in understanding the human brain.
[* In fact I'm a Christian and I expect a) humanity on its own would not survive but b) God will interfere. But that's a digression...]
Once you have a machine intelligence, making it practically immortal is easy. Making as many of them as you need is easy. Suspending them during boring interstellar travel is easy. They can easily travel to other stars using fairly conventional propulsion. IIRC, the Milky Way is O(100K) light years across, so even at 0.001c the estimated time to colonize the galaxy is only 100 million years. (Intergalactic travel is feasible too but we'll ignore that for now.)
Also note that once immortal interstellar-voyaging intelligences exist, there is no danger of them being exterminated by themselves or anything else**. The self-destruction risk disappears.
[** Unless there is some physics which we are totally unaware of which would allow the construction of, say, a bomb which would destroy all intelligence in the galaxy but leave it otherwise unaffected.]
Conclusion: if there is any intelligent life in this galaxy with a desire to colonize, then it must be younger than 100 million years.
If there is such life out there right now, younger than 100 million years, it would be unlikely to have arisen at just the same time we did. Therefore it probably isn't out there.
Some people believe that intelligent life is common, it just destroys itself every time. I doubt that. In an intelligent species there's a technological race between a) building machine intelligence and sending it to the stars and b) building and using weapons which can wipe out the species. Whoever wins the race wins the game, and I see no reason why b) should always win.
So either there is plenty of intelligent life and it ALWAYS is disinterested in overt colonization, or intelligent life is incredibly rare. It's pretty hard to reason about the former proposition but so far it seems that if we knew how to build a machine intelligence and send it off to reproduce, at least one of us would do it. So I suspect that intelligent life is incredibly rare.
They could conceivably do whatever they want in their closed-source Netscape branch. But anything that deliberately breaks standards compliance will never be accepted into the Mozilla core. Mozilla has a strong policy of standards support and there are non-AOL people in groups like drivers@mozilla.org who have the power to enforce that policy, by vetoing checkins or even backing out checkins that have already been made. (I'm one of them.)
No matter how evil AOL is, it's hard for them to abuse Mozilla. Mozilla is open source. Mozilla is committed to supporting W3C standards, and there are a number of high-profile non-Netscape contributors committed to keeping it that way.
Even if you hate AOL so much that you won't even download your own Mozilla source and build it, this is still good news for you. If AOL does start using Gecko, it would be the BEST NEWS EVER for Konqueror and Opera. A lot of broken Web sites would need to clean up their act, which helps everyone who want to see standards compliant sites.
As far as I can tell, most of the people who have made significant contributions to Mozilla, who weren't already a Netscape employee, whose contributions were high quality and who appeared to be a reasonable person has eventually at least been offered a job interview at Netscape, and many of those people are now working there. (It's one big reason why Mozilla doesn't have as many "non-Netscape" contributors as you might expect.)
If you think about it, it's a no-brainer from Netscape's point of view. They get a chance to hire people who are pretty much known quantities, who already know most of the codebase they'll be working with, and who for whatever reason are interested and motivated to work on Mozilla.
Things might change if Mozilla gets flooded with "wannajob" people of course... hasn't happened yet.
Microsoft supporters have put about this idea that unless a company executes its strategy perfectly, it has no right to complain about unfair or illegal competition. That is obviously ridiculous, because no company EVER executes its strategy perfectly.
> MS went the other way and said that once we > have the end user mind share, we can take the > back end.
Sure. With billions of dollars in cash and guaranteed income from its monopolies, Microsoft can afford to lose money in other segments for years if it makes strategic sense (e.g., it's driving its competitors out of business by giving stuff away). OTOH, companies like Netscape need actual revenue to survive and can't take losses indefinitely.
The latest Everquest recommends 512MB of RAM. I think we're at most 3 years away from desktop applications (games) feeling constrained by having only 2 GB of addressable memory.
Re: Bold and Italics, what's the point?
on
Inside the Itanium
·
· Score: 2
> Furthermore nobody and I mean nobody is
> developing anything for AMD's 64bit systems.
It doesn't matter. AMD will sell plenty of Hammer chips in their usual markets, who will just use it as a faster 32bit x86 chip. (Just like the 386 was used as a faster 16bit chip when it came out.)
BUT one day someone will wake up and realize that Hammer makes for fast, cheap, cool and backwards compatible servers. And then Intel will release their secret x86-64-compatible CPU, and IA64 will be cancelled.
> Like a cast in Java, declaring code as "unsafe" is
> equivalent to saying to the VM, "Hey, I know what
> I'm doing."
This is wrong. A Java downcast is dynamically checked and cannot compromise the integrity of the virtual machine. It is not "unsafe" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Re:Yes, but is Itanium going anywhere?
on
Intel's Big Chip
·
· Score: 2
Technically, the architecture is terrible. Intel bet that they could eliminate on-chip support for out-of-order execution and designed an architecture around that assumption, hoping that compilers would be able to compensate. They lost the bet. So Itanium is good for regular workloads, especially those with predictable memory accesses, but sucks hard for workloads with irregular memory access (like, say, programs that spend a lot of time traversing complex data structures).
Re:Nothing new here - take a look at the hp-pa 880
on
Intel's Big Chip
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The question with an L1 cache of that size is how many cycles it takes to access the cache. It's easy to make a huge L1 cache, you just pay in increased access time. It's not impressive until we know the latency numbers as well as the size.
Re:Less Logic, More Cache?
on
Intel's Big Chip
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The cache miss penalty is huge in IA64 because it can't reorder stalled instructions. That's one reason its performance is terrible on irregular memory-intensive applications (i.e., most server workloads). Anything that reduces the cache miss rate has got to help.
Re:Itanium at 1.6 GHz in 2003 ?
on
Intel's Big Chip
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> There's nothing on any recent Intel roadmaps that
> will have Itanic replacing x86 on the desktop.
Which is really going to hurt them. The latest version of Everquest recommends 512MB of RAM. High-end gamers are going to need 64-bit addressing in a few years. AMD will be able to supply cheap 64-bit chips, Intel will be playing catch-up at best.
From your URL: "details of this chip are scant." In other words, all we know about Mckinley is what HP and Intel's marketing people tell us. You may trust them; I don't.
Actually I do believe that the IA64 people are competent enough that the architecture will scale through a few generations. But the whole point of "E"PIC is that lots of architectural features are "Explicit", which inevitably means it's going to be harder to evolve implementations and maintain binary compatibility with high performance. Let's see how things stand after 10 years of technology evolution.
Actually I suspect that in 10 years, IA64 will have been cancelled 7 years ago:-).
> Eventually, CPUs needs to move to better
> architecture.
Maybe so, but IA64 is not a better architecture. It's a crap architecture. Performance is terrible (except maybe for FP-heavy workloads like games), the chips are huge, hot, and expensive, and everything is so hard-wired it's going to be really hard to scale through generations without recompiling.
x86-64 on the other hand, as well as being backwards compatible, is actually much nicer when running in 64-bit mode. You get more registers, more regularity in the way registers are used, a lot of the stupid x86 instructions are disabled, more useful (but still simple) addressing modes, nice simple flat memory model, and if you want you can even have relatively sane floating point using SSE2.
Microsoft is a monopoly because they dominate several related markets. That is actually OK.
What is not OK, according to the Federal courts, is that they have abused their monopoly by illegally using it to reinforce itself, and (I believe) by illegally using it to obtain new monopolies in other markets.
No doubt Microsoft will collapse eventually. But that is little comfort given the damage they're doing now.
Here are two little-known Microsoft actions that, as a computer scientist, I deplore:
-- A DEC research lab (SRC) was developing new software and hardware for "network computers". A senior DEC executive got a memo from Microsoft saying that they'd heard about the project, thought it might threaten Office revenues, and wanted the research canned. Microsoft used their OS monopoly, threatening DEC's Windows license. DEC folded.
-- HP had software that made it easier to use their PCs, a sort of shell that came up after the machine was started. Microsoft insisted on total control of the startup experience and ordered HP to remove the software. Again they used their OS monopoly and threatened HP's Windows license. HP folded, even though their users ended up with a worse experience.
These kinds of actions are not good for users, nor innovation, nor the industry, or anyone except Microsoft. Waiting for years in the hope that some competitor will materialize or that Microsoft will implode is simply not acceptable.
What has hurt Intel are two massive blunders, namely:
-- tying themselves to RDRAM
-- betting the company on the wrong 64-bit CPU architecture
Futhermore, Intel is not as skilled at abusing its monopoly as Microsoft is. Over the years Microsoft has mastered the art of leveraging dominance in one market into dominance of other markets: from operating systems into office suites, development tools, and Web browsing, and now working their way into servers, ISPs, gaming consoles and the media. Intel has tried to do something similar, moving into network chips, graphics chips, motherboards, and even software, but they haven't been able to sucessfully diversify. I think the main reason is that the interfaces between pieces of software are very complex and easy to change at a rapid pace, whereas the interfaces between hardware components are not as complex and change more slowly, so it's easier for competitors to make compatible stuff. Also, way back at the dawn of the PC, Microsoft was the sole source for the operating system but IBM insisted on having multiple sources for hardware. This is in fact how AMD first got the right to produce x86-compatible hardware.
Ah, I detect a standard pro-monopoly libertarian argument: corporations can't "force" you to do anything.
Consider this: governments can't force you to do anything either! The customer --- er, citizen --- decides on his/her own to live in the country. If you don't like the laws that come bundled with the country, you can look around for another one.
On another tack, sure, no-one's forcing anyone to buy a PC, or to drive a car, or read a newspaper, or buy groceries. But it sure would be tough to live if monopoly corporations controlled each of these markets and you tried to exercise your freedom not to deal with them.
This is the really strange thing. If AOL shares the SSSCA agenda, and they want to push development of their own OS, why would they choose Linux as a starting point? The GPL makes it really hard to implement watertight DMCA/SSSCA-like controls. Surely they'd choose FreeBSD or something else with a non-viral license.
Personally I suspect the people making these decisions at AOL are not that interested in the DMCA/SSSCA stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
If the human race survives without interference* we will certainly develop machine intelligence within 1000 years. Probably a lot less. Just look at the progress of the last 50 years, both in improving computers and in understanding the human brain.
[* In fact I'm a Christian and I expect a) humanity on its own would not survive but b) God will interfere. But that's a digression...]
Once you have a machine intelligence, making it practically immortal is easy. Making as many of them as you need is easy. Suspending them during boring interstellar travel is easy. They can easily travel to other stars using fairly conventional propulsion. IIRC, the Milky Way is O(100K) light years across, so even at 0.001c the estimated time to colonize the galaxy is only 100 million years. (Intergalactic travel is feasible too but we'll ignore that for now.)
Also note that once immortal interstellar-voyaging intelligences exist, there is no danger of them being exterminated by themselves or anything else**. The self-destruction risk disappears.
[** Unless there is some physics which we are totally unaware of which would allow the construction of, say, a bomb which would destroy all intelligence in the galaxy but leave it otherwise unaffected.]
Conclusion: if there is any intelligent life in this galaxy with a desire to colonize, then it must be younger than 100 million years.
If there is such life out there right now, younger than 100 million years, it would be unlikely to have arisen at just the same time we did. Therefore it probably isn't out there.
Some people believe that intelligent life is common, it just destroys itself every time. I doubt that. In an intelligent species there's a technological race between a) building machine intelligence and sending it to the stars and b) building and using weapons which can wipe out the species. Whoever wins the race wins the game, and I see no reason why b) should always win.
So either there is plenty of intelligent life and it ALWAYS is disinterested in overt colonization, or intelligent life is incredibly rare. It's pretty hard to reason about the former proposition but so far it seems that if we knew how to build a machine intelligence and send it off to reproduce, at least one of us would do it. So I suspect that intelligent life is incredibly rare.
XUL is implemented by Gecko.
> If we ended up with a Web largely dependent on .NET applets, it's essentially game-over for non
>
> Microsoft browsers.
No, then we just embed Mono into Mozilla (on *nix, anyway).
They could conceivably do whatever they want in their closed-source Netscape branch. But anything that deliberately breaks standards compliance will never be accepted into the Mozilla core. Mozilla has a strong policy of standards support and there are non-AOL people in groups like drivers@mozilla.org who have the power to enforce that policy, by vetoing checkins or even backing out checkins that have already been made. (I'm one of them.)
No matter how evil AOL is, it's hard for them to abuse Mozilla. Mozilla is open source. Mozilla is committed to supporting W3C standards, and there are a number of high-profile non-Netscape contributors committed to keeping it that way.
Even if you hate AOL so much that you won't even download your own Mozilla source and build it, this is still good news for you. If AOL does start using Gecko, it would be the BEST NEWS EVER for Konqueror and Opera. A lot of broken Web sites would need to clean up their act, which helps everyone who want to see standards compliant sites.
Opera's problem is that it doesn't support DHTML, in particular the full W3C DOM1 and DOM2 standards.
Mozilla is very picky, but it (and IE) support a number of W3C standards that Opera doesn't.
As far as I can tell, most of the people who have made significant contributions to Mozilla, who weren't already a Netscape employee, whose contributions were high quality and who appeared to be a reasonable person has eventually at least been offered a job interview at Netscape, and many of those people are now working there. (It's one big reason why Mozilla doesn't have as many "non-Netscape" contributors as you might expect.)
If you think about it, it's a no-brainer from Netscape's point of view. They get a chance to hire people who are pretty much known quantities, who already know most of the codebase they'll be working with, and who for whatever reason are interested and motivated to work on Mozilla.
Things might change if Mozilla gets flooded with "wannajob" people of course... hasn't happened yet.
Microsoft supporters have put about this idea that unless a company executes its strategy perfectly, it has no right to complain about unfair or illegal competition. That is obviously ridiculous, because no company EVER executes its strategy perfectly.
> MS went the other way and said that once we
> have the end user mind share, we can take the
> back end.
Sure. With billions of dollars in cash and guaranteed income from its monopolies, Microsoft can afford to lose money in other segments for years if it makes strategic sense (e.g., it's driving its competitors out of business by giving stuff away). OTOH, companies like Netscape need actual revenue to survive and can't take losses indefinitely.
The latest Everquest recommends 512MB of RAM. I think we're at most 3 years away from desktop applications (games) feeling constrained by having only 2 GB of addressable memory.
> Furthermore nobody and I mean nobody is
> developing anything for AMD's 64bit systems.
It doesn't matter. AMD will sell plenty of Hammer chips in their usual markets, who will just use it as a faster 32bit x86 chip. (Just like the 386 was used as a faster 16bit chip when it came out.)
BUT one day someone will wake up and realize that Hammer makes for fast, cheap, cool and backwards compatible servers. And then Intel will release their secret x86-64-compatible CPU, and IA64 will be cancelled.
> Does anyone eve notice code bloat anymore?
Your instruction cache does.
> Like a cast in Java, declaring code as "unsafe" is
> equivalent to saying to the VM, "Hey, I know what
> I'm doing."
This is wrong. A Java downcast is dynamically checked and cannot compromise the integrity of the virtual machine. It is not "unsafe" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Technically, the architecture is terrible. Intel bet that they could eliminate on-chip support for out-of-order execution and designed an architecture around that assumption, hoping that compilers would be able to compensate. They lost the bet. So Itanium is good for regular workloads, especially those with predictable memory accesses, but sucks hard for workloads with irregular memory access (like, say, programs that spend a lot of time traversing complex data structures).
The question with an L1 cache of that size is how many cycles it takes to access the cache. It's easy to make a huge L1 cache, you just pay in increased access time. It's not impressive until we know the latency numbers as well as the size.
The cache miss penalty is huge in IA64 because it can't reorder stalled instructions. That's one reason its performance is terrible on irregular memory-intensive applications (i.e., most server workloads). Anything that reduces the cache miss rate has got to help.
> There's nothing on any recent Intel roadmaps that
> will have Itanic replacing x86 on the desktop.
Which is really going to hurt them. The latest version of Everquest recommends 512MB of RAM. High-end gamers are going to need 64-bit addressing in a few years. AMD will be able to supply cheap 64-bit chips, Intel will be playing catch-up at best.
From your URL: "details of this chip are scant." In other words, all we know about Mckinley is what HP and Intel's marketing people tell us. You may trust them; I don't.
:-).
Actually I do believe that the IA64 people are competent enough that the architecture will scale through a few generations. But the whole point of "E"PIC is that lots of architectural features are "Explicit", which inevitably means it's going to be harder to evolve implementations and maintain binary compatibility with high performance. Let's see how things stand after 10 years of technology evolution.
Actually I suspect that in 10 years, IA64 will have been cancelled 7 years ago
> And Intel dosent see that market exists YET
They should. The latest version of Everquest recommends 512MB of RAM. Only 2 address bits left!
> Eventually, CPUs needs to move to better
> architecture.
Maybe so, but IA64 is not a better architecture. It's a crap architecture. Performance is terrible (except maybe for FP-heavy workloads like games), the chips are huge, hot, and expensive, and everything is so hard-wired it's going to be really hard to scale through generations without recompiling.
x86-64 on the other hand, as well as being backwards compatible, is actually much nicer when running in 64-bit mode. You get more registers, more regularity in the way registers are used, a lot of the stupid x86 instructions are disabled, more useful (but still simple) addressing modes, nice simple flat memory model, and if you want you can even have relatively sane floating point using SSE2.
Microsoft is a monopoly because they dominate several related markets. That is actually OK.
What is not OK, according to the Federal courts, is that they have abused their monopoly by illegally using it to reinforce itself, and (I believe) by illegally using it to obtain new monopolies in other markets.
No doubt Microsoft will collapse eventually. But that is little comfort given the damage they're doing now.
Here are two little-known Microsoft actions that, as a computer scientist, I deplore:
-- A DEC research lab (SRC) was developing new software and hardware for "network computers". A senior DEC executive got a memo from Microsoft saying that they'd heard about the project, thought it might threaten Office revenues, and wanted the research canned. Microsoft used their OS monopoly, threatening DEC's Windows license. DEC folded.
-- HP had software that made it easier to use their PCs, a sort of shell that came up after the machine was started. Microsoft insisted on total control of the startup experience and ordered HP to remove the software. Again they used their OS monopoly and threatened HP's Windows license. HP folded, even though their users ended up with a worse experience.
These kinds of actions are not good for users, nor innovation, nor the industry, or anyone except Microsoft. Waiting for years in the hope that some competitor will materialize or that Microsoft will implode is simply not acceptable.
What has hurt Intel are two massive blunders, namely:
-- tying themselves to RDRAM
-- betting the company on the wrong 64-bit CPU architecture
Futhermore, Intel is not as skilled at abusing its monopoly as Microsoft is. Over the years Microsoft has mastered the art of leveraging dominance in one market into dominance of other markets: from operating systems into office suites, development tools, and Web browsing, and now working their way into servers, ISPs, gaming consoles and the media. Intel has tried to do something similar, moving into network chips, graphics chips, motherboards, and even software, but they haven't been able to sucessfully diversify. I think the main reason is that the interfaces between pieces of software are very complex and easy to change at a rapid pace, whereas the interfaces between hardware components are not as complex and change more slowly, so it's easier for competitors to make compatible stuff. Also, way back at the dawn of the PC, Microsoft was the sole source for the operating system but IBM insisted on having multiple sources for hardware. This is in fact how AMD first got the right to produce x86-compatible hardware.
It would be really interesting to analyze user's browser patterns and see how many pages people use frequently don't work correctly in Mozilla.
I hope AOL is doing this.
Ah, I detect a standard pro-monopoly libertarian argument: corporations can't "force" you to do anything.
Consider this: governments can't force you to do anything either! The customer --- er, citizen --- decides on his/her own to live in the country. If you don't like the laws that come bundled with the country, you can look around for another one.
On another tack, sure, no-one's forcing anyone to buy a PC, or to drive a car, or read a newspaper, or buy groceries. But it sure would be tough to live if monopoly corporations controlled each of these markets and you tried to exercise your freedom not to deal with them.
A patch was just checked in that speeds up Mac page loading by 20%. Mac Mozilla 0.9.8 should be significantly improved.
This is the really strange thing. If AOL shares the SSSCA agenda, and they want to push development of their own OS, why would they choose Linux as a starting point? The GPL makes it really hard to implement watertight DMCA/SSSCA-like controls. Surely they'd choose FreeBSD or something else with a non-viral license.
Personally I suspect the people making these decisions at AOL are not that interested in the DMCA/SSSCA stuff.