I cant understand this - Can someone clarify ? According to this phrase "..... by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right...." doesnt the copyright law prohibit the grand-daughter of an inventor from having the exclusive right to the inventor's invention (since she is not the inventor and the law talks about providing the right to only the author or the inventor) ? What does the supreme court have to say about this ?
...skyscrapers could actually help wireless communication.'The more scatterers between the transmitters and receivers, the more channels that are available...
It took the physics guys this long to figure out that a beowulf cluster of skyscrappers works better ?
StartupCPL by Mike Lin is a very nifty utility with a gui to disable programs started by the registry. Its freeware. Also check out the software in his page which notifies you if any other application attempts to change the registry so that it gets automatically started up during booting.
Something doesnt have to have mass to have speed. Plonk a stone on a pond, you create waves. The waves have speed but dont have "mass" per se. Gravity in general relativity is similar. The entire universe is immersed in Space-time (kinda like water in a pond). Objects inside spacetime tend to "warp" spacetime. Like poking a finger into a stretched rubber sheet, creating a depression. So objects near them tend to tumble into the depression - bingo! this is gravity. This is what general relativity says. Now if this is true, warping in spacetime cannot occur instantaneously (no wave travels faster than light) as assumed in newtonian mechanics. This is what has been proved now. "Distortions in space-time does not propagate faster than light" or in other words "gravity does not travel faster than light". So no "mass" or "moving object" is involved per se.
Physics is nothing by a model
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 2
At this point, I would like to point out that physics is nothing by a model. Its a bunch of equations trying to create a model for what we observe so we can make predictions on the model. Now to explain an observation that is inconsistent with the model, we need to change the model. As it were - there are no "absolute thruths". Einstein's model and the theory based on it was astonishingly accurate and made amazing predictions. If our current observations are incosistent with the model - we need to revise it.
By the way are all the comment posters the one who answered "I would be reading slashdot" for what would be doing during the new year;)
You simply do not understand India or the times that you live in. So what does Microsoft really "own". Guess who is the biggest bigger - Coca Cola, FedEx or Microsoft ?
So what is the fastest growing industry now in India ? Software ? wrong - it is Biotech. So who are slated to be the largest H1B visa holders from India in 3 years time ? Software ? no Teachers. So what am I trying to say ? India simply doesnt have the time nor the resources for the old model of "build brick industries, sell stuff, wait for profit".
Indian middle class is 300 million strong - much more than the entire population of US combined. We have population, a HUGE middle class and highly skilled labor force that costs a pittance. So our model is export workforce to any, I repeat *ANY* sector that needs skilled people, rake in money and build highways with that money. Thats what is happening today and thats what will happen in the future.
Welcome to India. 40 paisa per minute (1.20 per 3 mins) is what will convince me to look at cell phones as a viable alternative to my fixed phone. You forget that an average middle class indian earns around 300 USD per month. The food, labor, electricity and stuff in dollar terms are CHEAP. So apart from an initial investment in infrastructure, Reliance operating cost with be a pittance in US terms.
Cell phones made their real entry into india about 3 years back and look at the rates now (airtel is one of the biggest cell phone operators now) remember that about 50 rupees = 1 USD. It is bound to go down further.
Reliance has it right (reliance is a HUGE company by indian terms and is equivalent of GE, Shell, MS put together). More over they offer WLL (wireless in local loop) for cell phone access within cities and more for roaming. So this cost is perfectly reasonable.
Philosophically, this statement is much more important. It is a thumb rule in cryptography (pun unintented) to "Never use something to authenticate that cannot be discarded". Passwords, if stolen can be discarded. Smartcards if stolen can be discarded. Finger prints stolen and you are screwed for life. Now you might wonder - "How the heck is someone going to steal my finger prints ?". Just one rouge finger print reader, record the signals - well then use your imagination. This system is scary.
Dracken.
Re:Proof of Elvis
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Elvis is alive.
If there is a proof proving elvis is alive, elvis can be accepted to be alive. This is the proof. So elvis is alive.
No its not like a solar engine with paddles that are shiny.
It has a cantilever, and radioactive material below it. When it gets charged due to the radioactive emissions, it bend and discharges. Then it flexes back. There was an earlier Slashdot article about this. The Cornell webpage is Here
Bah! Real men think big! In *my* university a bunch of grads got together and modded a motorcycle into a mouse for our super-duper beowulf cluster. Ofcourse the gas costs do rocket up when we play a game of doom......
In a related news, Senator Fritz Hollings proposed a bill in the congress extending the patent of the "gesture mouse" for 1000 years. A subclause of the bill states "Whomsoever drops the mouse and breaks it, should not look at the components. Failure to comply with this law violates the DMCA, amounts to reverse engineering and can lead to life imprisonment"
The MPAA is enthusiastically supporting this legislation. A spokesman declared "We are wrongly portrayed by the media as trying to protect only mickey mouse, In fact we love *all* mice"
A bunch of long haired geeks while protesting declared - "We will make our own mouse with a tincan, skateboard wheels,a flashlight bulb and a car battery. The specs will be free for download"
Meanwhile microsft is working on a "gesture mourse Driver Rights Management" software which will automatically notify the FBI if the mouse is dropped.
Re:My most anticipated feature
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Bah! all you geeks are struggling to make the first gen BSOD. Look at Cowboyneal's article last friday
Posted by Cowboyneal on Sunday October 20, @11:16AM
from the yippee-new-windows-features! dept.
In a surprise announcement today, Microsoft President Steve Ballmer revealed that the Redmond based company will allow computer resellers and end-users to customize the appearance of the Blue Screen of Death (abbreviated BSOD), the screen that displays when the Windows operating system crashes.
The move comes as the result of numerous focus groups and customer surveys done by Microsoft. Thousands of Microsoft customers were asked, "What do you spend the most time doing on your computer?" A surprising number of respondents said, "Staring at a Blue Screen of Death". At 54 percent, it was the top answer, beating the second place answer "Downloading Pornography" by an easy 12 points.
"We immediately recognized this as a great opportunity for ourselves, our channel partners, and especially our customers." explained the excited Ballmer to a room full of reporters.
Immense video displays were used to show images of the new customizable BSOD screen side-by-side with the older static version. Users can select from a collection of "BSOD Themes", allowing them to instead have a Mauve Screen of Death or even a Paisley Screen of Death. Graphics and multimedia content can now be incorporated into the screen, making the BSOD the perfect conduit for delivering product information and entertainment to Windows users.
The Blue Screen of Death is by far the most recognized feature of the Windows (tm) operating system, and as a result, Microsoft has historically insisted on total control over its look-and-feel. This recent departure from that policy reflects Microsoft's recognition of the Windows desktop itself as the "ultimate information portal." By default, the new BSOD will be configured to show a random selection of Microsoft product information whenever the system crashes. Microsoft channel partners can negotiate with Microsoft for the right to customize the BSOD on systems they ship.
Major computer resellers such as Compaq, Gateway, and Dell are already lining up for premier placement on the new and improved BSOD.
Ballmer concluded by getting a dig in against the Open Source community. "This just goes to show that Microsoft continues to innovate at a much faster pace than open source. I have yet to see any evidence that Linux even has a BSOD, let alone a customizable one."
Microsoft arent the government, they bought the government. Probably you didnt read this old slashdot article.
Microsoft buys US Government Posted by Cowboyneal on October 23, 1997
REDMOND, Wash. - 23 October 1997 -- In direct response to accusations made by the Department of Justice, the Microsoft Corp. announced today that it will be acquiring the federal government of the United States of America for an undisclosed sum.
"It's actually a logical extension of our planned growth", said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, "It really is going to be a positive arrangement for everyone". Microsoft representatives held a briefing in the oval office of the White House with US President Bill Clinton, and assured members of the press that changes will be "minimal".
The United States will be managed as a wholly owned division of Microsoft. An initial public offering is planned for July of next year, and the federal government is expected to be profitable by "Q4 1999 at latest", according to Microsoft president Steve Ballmer.
In a related announcement, Bill Clinton stated that he had "willingly and enthusiastically" accepted a position as a vice president with Microsoft, and will continue to manage the United States government, reporting directly to Bill Gates. When asked how it felt to give up the mantle of executive authority to Gates, Clinton smiled and referred to it as "a relief". He went on to say that Gates has a "proven track record", and that US citizens should offer Gates their "full support and confidence". Clinton will reportedly be earning several times the $200,000 annually he has earned as US president, in his new role at Microsoft.
Gates dismissed a suggestion that the US Capitol be moved to Redmond as "silly", though he did say that he would make executive decisions for the US government from his existing office at Microsoft headquarters. Gates went on to say that the House and Senate would "of course" be abolished. "Microsoft isn't a democracy", he observed, "and look how well we're doing". When asked if the rumored attendant acquisition of Canada was proceeding, Gates said, "We don't deny that discussions are taking place".
Microsoft representatives closed the conference by stating that United States citizens will be able to expect lower taxes, increases in government services and discounts on all Microsoft products.
About Microsoft: Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers and democratic government. The company offers a wide range of products and services for public, business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing and free society every day.
About the United States: Founded in 1789, the United States of America is the most successful nation in the history of the world, and has been a beacon of democracy and opportunity for over 200 years. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the United States is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.
Negative refractive index does not mean light is moving faster than C. According to Snell's law the refractive index of any material with respect to vacuum = velocity of light in vacuum / velocity of light in material.
So for dense thingies refractive index greater than 1. Eg glass. Now the refractive index of material A with respect to material B is Vel in B / Vel in A. So light travelling from Inside a glass slab to outside would think it encountered refractive index less than 1.
Now negative refractive index mean negative velocity ?? I dunno. Refractive index can also be calculated from Sine (incidence angle) / Sine (refracted angle). The only way to get negative refractive index is if Refracted angle greater than 180. (Remember high school trigonometry. Sine is negative only in the third and fourth quadrant). Now refracted angle greater than 180 would mean that light has suffered total internal reflection. So a negative refractive index material would behave like a mirror and not a lens. (hence giving negative velocity - velocity is a vector, has magnitude as well as direction). I smell a rat in the article.
I would also like to point out that a really smart method of making the radio telescopes more powerful is to use an array of small radio telescopes and put together a composite image using signal processing.
I had been to the GMRT in India one of the most powerful radio telescope arrays in the world. It has been designed with over 30 dishes of about 45m in diameter each. The array forms a "Y" shape. As the earth rotates, the telescopes sweep out a gigantic circle of about 25Km in diameter. Using a supercomputer and after hours of observation, they can put together a composite image equivalent to a telescope about 20Km in diameter.
More info about GMRT and cool photos of other radio telescopes are here .
Many publishers (notably Prentice hall, Addison Wesley, Morgan Kaufman) have Eastern Economy Editions that are 1/20 th of the price of the *same* book sold in the US. See Here (its about $5 ). Since most third world countries have neither the students nor the educational instituitions to afford costly books, this scheme works very well. (Nearly zero book piracy, people buy their own copies. Publishers atleast break even).
Software companies on the other hand dont even have the constraints that the book publishers have (almost zero cost of making copies, comparitively easier distributions etc etc). If they want to sell a copy of their software at the very same price that they sell in the US, they are *bound* to have problems of piracy in academia and governments turning a blind eye to it. They should take a clue from the book publishers.
I work on EPIC compilers and I concur on every one of your observations. The caveat is that every EPIC compiler optimizations is applicable to superscalar processors too. Hence the only reason why EPIC would beat superscalars is the reduced complexity of the processor itself which would (hopefully) make it cheap and fast.
In theory EPIC compilers should give amazing performance. In practice due to pointers, aliasing and lack of interprocedural optimzations they dont. It is interesting to note that Java, because of lack of pointers produces impressive code for EPIC processors and is highly amenable to optimizations targetting EPIC.
"There is only one company that has ever made a good VLIW compiler: TI, again."
Re:No... a 64bit chip doesn't have to be 'slower'
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 1
"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."
" I think the next few iterations of itaniums _will_ beat the AMD 64-bit chip on bechmarks"
These are highly debatable statements. I work on EPIC compilers and simulators. In theory EPIC compilers have a huge "window" into which they can look for parallelism when compared to superscalar processors whose hardware look at a small window for parallism. However in practice, usage of pointers, aliases, lack of interprocedural optimizations etc etc makes EPIC slower than Superscalar. Also all compiler tricks for EPIC are applicable to superscalar too.
The first generation of AMD-64 will beat itanium hands down. The reason Intel will eventually win is because EPIC processors are *way* to easy to design and implement than superscalar processors. That is the only reason Intel is shifting to EPIC.
Slashdot Mirror
I cant understand this - Can someone clarify ? According to this phrase "..... by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right...." doesnt the copyright law prohibit the grand-daughter of an inventor from having the exclusive right to the inventor's invention (since she is not the inventor and the law talks about providing the right to only the author or the inventor) ? What does the supreme court have to say about this ?
It took the physics guys this long to figure out that a beowulf cluster of skyscrappers works better ?
Ducks...;)
StartupCPL by Mike Lin is a very nifty utility with a gui to disable programs started by the registry. Its freeware. Also check out the software in his page which notifies you if any other application attempts to change the registry so that it gets automatically started up during booting.
Something doesnt have to have mass to have speed. Plonk a stone on a pond, you create waves. The waves have speed but dont have "mass" per se. Gravity in general relativity is similar. The entire universe is immersed in Space-time (kinda like water in a pond). Objects inside spacetime tend to "warp" spacetime. Like poking a finger into a stretched rubber sheet, creating a depression. So objects near them tend to tumble into the depression - bingo! this is gravity. This is what general relativity says. Now if this is true, warping in spacetime cannot occur instantaneously (no wave travels faster than light) as assumed in newtonian mechanics. This is what has been proved now. "Distortions in space-time does not propagate faster than light" or in other words "gravity does not travel faster than light". So no "mass" or "moving object" is involved per se.
At this point, I would like to point out that physics is nothing by a model. Its a bunch of equations trying to create a model for what we observe so we can make predictions on the model. Now to explain an observation that is inconsistent with the model, we need to change the model. As it were - there are no "absolute thruths". Einstein's model and the theory based on it was astonishingly accurate and made amazing predictions. If our current observations are incosistent with the model - we need to revise it.
;)
By the way are all the comment posters the one who answered "I would be reading slashdot" for what would be doing during the new year
You simply do not understand India or the times that you live in. So what does Microsoft really "own". Guess who is the biggest bigger - Coca Cola, FedEx or Microsoft ?
So what is the fastest growing industry now in India ? Software ? wrong - it is Biotech. So who are slated to be the largest H1B visa holders from India in 3 years time ? Software ? no Teachers. So what am I trying to say ? India simply doesnt have the time nor the resources for the old model of "build brick industries, sell stuff, wait for profit".
Indian middle class is 300 million strong - much more than the entire population of US combined. We have population, a HUGE middle class and highly skilled labor force that costs a pittance. So our model is export workforce to any, I repeat *ANY* sector that needs skilled people, rake in money and build highways with that money. Thats what is happening today and thats what will happen in the future.
Welcome to India. 40 paisa per minute (1.20 per 3 mins) is what will convince me to look at cell phones as a viable alternative to my fixed phone. You forget that an average middle class indian earns around 300 USD per month. The food, labor, electricity and stuff in dollar terms are CHEAP. So apart from an initial investment in infrastructure, Reliance operating cost with be a pittance in US terms.
Cell phones made their real entry into india about 3 years back and look at the rates now (airtel is one of the biggest cell phone operators now) remember that about 50 rupees = 1 USD. It is bound to go down further.
Reliance has it right (reliance is a HUGE company by indian terms and is equivalent of GE, Shell, MS put together). More over they offer WLL (wireless in local loop) for cell phone access within cities and more for roaming. So this cost is perfectly reasonable.
Philosophically, this statement is much more important. It is a thumb rule in cryptography (pun unintented) to "Never use something to authenticate that cannot be discarded". Passwords, if stolen can be discarded. Smartcards if stolen can be discarded. Finger prints stolen and you are screwed for life. Now you might wonder - "How the heck is someone going to steal my finger prints ?". Just one rouge finger print reader, record the signals - well then use your imagination. This system is scary.
Dracken.
Elvis is alive.
If there is a proof proving elvis is alive, elvis can be accepted to be alive. This is the proof. So elvis is alive.
1299 POUNDS ? Obviously I cant carry it around. I think my table cant stand the weight either. Count me out folks.
...from drawing an image as a collection of pixels ? Isnt the fact that 3D objects can be represented as collection of discrete pixels well known ?
You know that I cannot record it Dave ....
No its not like a solar engine with paddles that are shiny.
It has a cantilever, and radioactive material below it. When it gets charged due to the radioactive emissions, it bend and discharges. Then it flexes back. There was an earlier Slashdot article about this. The Cornell webpage is Here
"If they had come out with two separate devices but with some mechanical coupling"
You are a disgrace to all geeks! My $25 solution involves a laser pointer, an optical mouse and a roll of duct tape. I call it my "Enterprise"
-Dracken
1. Patent "A process to acquire brain damaged patents based on prior art and sue small web businesses for patent infringement"
2. Sue PanIP for a gazillion bucks for infringing on my patent
3. Profit.
Bah! Real men think big! In *my* university a bunch of grads got together and modded a motorcycle into a mouse for our super-duper beowulf cluster. Ofcourse the gas costs do rocket up when we play a game of doom......
In a related news, Senator Fritz Hollings proposed a bill in the congress extending the patent of the "gesture mouse" for 1000 years. A subclause of the bill states "Whomsoever drops the mouse and breaks it, should not look at the components. Failure to comply with this law violates the DMCA, amounts to reverse engineering and can lead to life imprisonment"
The MPAA is enthusiastically supporting this legislation. A spokesman declared "We are wrongly portrayed by the media as trying to protect only mickey mouse, In fact we love *all* mice"
A bunch of long haired geeks while protesting declared - "We will make our own mouse with a tincan, skateboard wheels,a flashlight bulb and a car battery. The specs will be free for download"
Meanwhile microsft is working on a "gesture mourse Driver Rights Management" software which will automatically notify the FBI if the mouse is dropped.
Bah! all you geeks are struggling to make the first gen BSOD. Look at Cowboyneal's article last friday
Posted by Cowboyneal on Sunday October 20, @11:16AM
from the yippee-new-windows-features! dept.
In a surprise announcement today, Microsoft President Steve Ballmer revealed that the Redmond based company will allow computer resellers and end-users to customize the appearance of the Blue Screen of Death (abbreviated BSOD), the screen that displays when the Windows operating system crashes.
The move comes as the result of numerous focus groups and customer surveys done by Microsoft. Thousands of Microsoft customers were asked, "What do you spend the most time doing on your computer?" A surprising number of respondents said, "Staring at a Blue Screen of Death". At 54 percent, it was the top answer, beating the second place answer "Downloading Pornography" by an easy 12 points.
"We immediately recognized this as a great opportunity for ourselves, our channel partners, and especially our customers." explained the excited Ballmer to a room full of reporters.
Immense video displays were used to show images of the new customizable BSOD screen side-by-side with the older static version. Users can select from a collection of "BSOD Themes", allowing them to instead have a Mauve Screen of Death or even a Paisley Screen of Death. Graphics and multimedia content can now be incorporated into the screen, making the BSOD the perfect conduit for delivering product information and entertainment to Windows users.
The Blue Screen of Death is by far the most recognized feature of the Windows (tm) operating system, and as a result, Microsoft has historically insisted on total control over its look-and-feel. This recent departure from that policy reflects Microsoft's recognition of the Windows desktop itself as the "ultimate information portal." By default, the new BSOD will be configured to show a random selection of Microsoft product information whenever the system crashes. Microsoft channel partners can negotiate with Microsoft for the right to customize the BSOD on systems they ship.
Major computer resellers such as Compaq, Gateway, and Dell are already lining up for premier placement on the new and improved BSOD.
Ballmer concluded by getting a dig in against the Open Source community. "This just goes to show that Microsoft continues to innovate at a much faster pace than open source. I have yet to see any evidence that Linux even has a BSOD, let alone a customizable one."
Microsoft arent the government, they bought the government. Probably you didnt read this old slashdot article.
Microsoft buys US Government
Posted by Cowboyneal on October 23, 1997
REDMOND, Wash. - 23 October 1997 -- In direct response to accusations made by the Department of Justice, the Microsoft Corp. announced today that it will be acquiring the federal government of the United States of America for an undisclosed sum.
"It's actually a logical extension of our planned growth", said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, "It really is going to be a positive arrangement for everyone". Microsoft representatives held a briefing in the oval office of the White House with US President Bill Clinton, and assured members of the press that changes will be "minimal".
The United States will be managed as a wholly owned division of Microsoft. An initial public offering is planned for July of next year, and the federal government is expected to be profitable by "Q4 1999 at latest", according to Microsoft president Steve Ballmer.
In a related announcement, Bill Clinton stated that he had "willingly and enthusiastically" accepted a position as a vice president with Microsoft, and will continue to manage the United States government, reporting directly to Bill Gates. When asked how it felt to give up the mantle of executive authority to Gates, Clinton smiled and referred to it as "a relief". He went on to say that Gates has a "proven track record", and that US citizens should offer Gates their "full support and confidence". Clinton will reportedly be earning several times the $200,000 annually he has earned as US president, in his new role at Microsoft.
Gates dismissed a suggestion that the US Capitol be moved to Redmond as "silly", though he did say that he would make executive decisions for the US government from his existing office at Microsoft headquarters. Gates went on to say that the House and Senate would "of course" be abolished. "Microsoft isn't a democracy", he observed, "and look how well we're doing". When asked if the rumored attendant acquisition of Canada was proceeding, Gates said, "We don't deny that discussions are taking place".
Microsoft representatives closed the conference by stating that United States citizens will be able to expect lower taxes, increases in government services and discounts on all Microsoft products.
About Microsoft: Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers and democratic government. The company offers a wide range of products and services for public, business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing and free society every day.
About the United States: Founded in 1789, the United States of America is the most successful nation in the history of the world, and has been a beacon of democracy and opportunity for over 200 years. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the United States is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.
This might be interpreted as slander, and just as this article pointed out
"Robert Novak is representing himself in this lawsuit, and thus it is effectively costing him nothing to persue this campaign of harassment."
Danger might persue a campaign of harrassment against you.
Negative refractive index does not mean light is moving faster than C. According to Snell's law the refractive index of any material with respect to vacuum = velocity of light in vacuum / velocity of light in material.
So for dense thingies refractive index greater than 1. Eg glass. Now the refractive index of material A with respect to material B is Vel in B / Vel in A. So light travelling from Inside a glass slab to outside would think it encountered refractive index less than 1.
Now negative refractive index mean negative velocity ?? I dunno. Refractive index can also be calculated from Sine (incidence angle) / Sine (refracted angle). The only way to get negative refractive index is if Refracted angle greater than 180. (Remember high school trigonometry. Sine is negative only in the third and fourth quadrant). Now refracted angle greater than 180 would mean that light has suffered total internal reflection. So a negative refractive index material would behave like a mirror and not a lens. (hence giving negative velocity - velocity is a vector, has magnitude as well as direction). I smell a rat in the article.
-Dracken
I would also like to point out that a really smart method of making the radio telescopes more powerful is to use an array of small radio telescopes and put together a composite image using signal processing.
I had been to the GMRT in India one of the most powerful radio telescope arrays in the world. It has been designed with over 30 dishes of about 45m in diameter each. The array forms a "Y" shape. As the earth rotates, the telescopes sweep out a gigantic circle of about 25Km in diameter. Using a supercomputer and after hours of observation, they can put together a composite image equivalent to a telescope about 20Km in diameter.
More info about GMRT and cool photos of other radio telescopes are here .
Many publishers (notably Prentice hall, Addison Wesley, Morgan Kaufman) have Eastern Economy Editions that are 1/20 th of the price of the *same* book sold in the US. See Here (its about $5 ). Since most third world countries have neither the students nor the educational instituitions to afford costly books, this scheme works very well. (Nearly zero book piracy, people buy their own copies. Publishers atleast break even).
Software companies on the other hand dont even have the constraints that the book publishers have (almost zero cost of making copies, comparitively easier distributions etc etc). If they want to sell a copy of their software at the very same price that they sell in the US, they are *bound* to have problems of piracy in academia and governments turning a blind eye to it. They should take a clue from the book publishers.
-Dracken
I work on EPIC compilers and I concur on every one of your observations. The caveat is that every EPIC compiler optimizations is applicable to superscalar processors too. Hence the only reason why EPIC would beat superscalars is the reduced complexity of the processor itself which would (hopefully) make it cheap and fast.
.
In theory EPIC compilers should give amazing performance. In practice due to pointers, aliasing and lack of interprocedural optimzations they dont. It is interesting to note that Java, because of lack of pointers produces impressive code for EPIC processors and is highly amenable to optimizations targetting EPIC.
"There is only one company that has ever made a good VLIW compiler: TI, again."
I would like to think TI and Us
"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."
.
" I think the next few iterations of itaniums _will_ beat the AMD 64-bit chip on bechmarks"
These are highly debatable statements. I work on EPIC compilers and simulators. In theory EPIC compilers have a huge "window" into which they can look for parallelism when compared to superscalar processors whose hardware look at a small window for parallism. However in practice, usage of pointers, aliases, lack of interprocedural optimizations etc etc makes EPIC slower than Superscalar. Also all compiler tricks for EPIC are applicable to superscalar too.
The first generation of AMD-64 will beat itanium hands down. The reason Intel will eventually win is because EPIC processors are *way* to easy to design and implement than superscalar processors. That is the only reason Intel is shifting to EPIC
-Dracken.