An early example of getting it wrong was the City & South London Railway, the first
deep-level underground rail line in London. The designers of the rolling stock didn't bother with windows because there
was, supposedly, nothing to see. Passengers hated the "padded cells". Even if all you see is tunnel walls
rushing by, people need to see outside.
I could see the utility of an airliner with no windows but cameras and viewing screens - it would solve
some engineering problems - but for a car, the simplest is still the best. Windows.
I see lots of announcements - not just this one - shouting about their new microarchitectures, how cool they
are, the amazing benefits, and so on. But documentation of exactly
what the new microarchitecture is, exactly what it does, seems thin-to-non-existent. Maybe I'm
not looking in the right place.
All "big" processors nowadays have fancy pipelines, out-of-order execution, branch prediction,
multiple cores,
and so on. Fine. But how is Zen different from past microarchitectures? What makes it revolutionary?
It's always fun to look up what else people have been in. One that caught
my eye was Ms Whitney as an uncredited band member in
the still brilliantly goofy
Some Like It Hot.
In Canada we have an intermediate step between untowered uncontrolled airports and
controlled airports with towers, Mandatory Frequency airports. They have a ground station
with whom you must communicate for arrival and departure. They dispense information
and coordinate activities, but do not give clearances. As pilot
you make those decisions.
An example MF airport I've flown to is Kamloops, BC (CYKA). On initial contact the ground station told me the wind, altimeter
setting and active runway, but also advised me of skydiving activity north of the airport. Since this might conflict on the
usual left-hand circuit pattern, they suggested I fly a right hand circuit on approach. I did, and landed. This wasn't binding on me - the
decision and responsibility were mine - but it was a good idea.
Thanks. A lot of these sound like "don't cares" in the instruction decoding logic. Reminds
me of an undergrad course in logic design with lots of Karnaugh maps and stuff.
I wouldn't have minded seeing an example of one of those illegal opcodes and how what it did was useful.
Brooks called such things "curios". Side-effects of invalid
operations that people had started to use, and that had to be considered part of the specification.
My policy (seconded by my boss) is that I do not document such things. If a hack is documented
people start to use it, then we have to support and maintain it.
Top Gear was enormous fun at first, but it's gotten stale. It's lost its way.
Maybe it is time for a re-think.
Like just about everybody, my picks for a new co-host include Sabine Schmitz and Vicki Butler-Henderson. But
they have to look very carefully at the show and decide if its worth continuing first. I'm not convinced
it is.
The original Top Gear production morphed in to Fifth Gear, which is
definitely jazzed up fro the old Top Gear it started as.
I lost 160 pounds a few years ago, and I too did it the hard way. Count calories, exercise.
If you're not eating that much you have to eat well, and I'm now so healthy it's slightly
stupid. I like it.
I didn't gain it overnight, and I couldn't expect to lose it overnight. It took a year and a half.
No major skin sagging issues except for a residual flab roll, eliminated with a tummy tuck.
People often ask me what my secret was, and I tell them it's motivation: you have to
have a reason. For me it was wanting to learn to fly, but I couldn't
get the seatbelt around me.
In the noughties my employers set out to develop similar technology. We had GPS-based units that would record
where a vehicle was and could be programmed to tell on you if you drove too fast, stopped for too long, went to
somewhere you weren't supposed to go, and so on. They communicated over a 2 way paging network.
The technology worked. I did the mobile device programming and put together a test unit that used differential GPS.
Instead of telling you which street you were on, it could tell you which lane you were in.:-)
The marketing, on the other hand, didn't work.:-(
I live in an apartment and a couple of years ago my neighbours bought Guitar Hero or something similar. They played
with it for about two days. Then they stopped (and sold the hardware) when the building management gave them an ultimatum
over the number of noise complaints they had received.
As a child in the late 1960s I was inspired to my present technical life and career by two major influences:
Project Apollo and Star Trek. I thought Spock had the coolest job
in the universe. He played with techie stuff and figured stuff out. I wanted that sort of job too. And I got it.
In another job interview I was asked to write a program to generate prime numbers. I clarified a couple of requirements ("is memory
usage an issue?"), and implemented the Sieve of Eratosthenes. It works, you know why it works, any idiot can read
the code and understand it, and if testing
shows you need something better (in some sense), you know where to start.
Regardless of the final implementation, there are problems where
the simplest, clearest solution is a recursive one. You type it in to the computer as fast
as you can type, it compiles and runs correctly the first time, and then, if you need to change
it, you have a place to start.
On a job interview some years ago I was asked to write C code to reverse a string.
I wrote it recursively: interchange the first and last elements, then reverse what's inside.
There is strong encryption, and there is unbreakable encryption. They are not necessarily the
same thing.
Strong encryption is theoretically breakable, but it is not computationally feasible to do so. What is
computationally feasible changes with time. Look at how key-length standards for RSA
have changed, for example.
One-time pad encryption, on the other hand, is not breakable. It doesn't matter how much computer
power you throw at it: if you don't have the key, you can't read the message.
If progressives don't work, don't use them. They're not for everybody.
I bit the bullet last time I got new glasses and got progressives. My requirement was well-defined: I'm near-sighted,
wear glasses when I need them (driving, flying) but with age I
was experiencing eyestrain trying to read charts during flights, particularly at night. At first I found I was
moving my head around a lot to find the sweet spot, but now that I've figured that out, I'm fine.
I don't use glasses for computer stuff. Set the monitor distance and resolution right, and wipe the nose
prints off every now and then.:-)
The airlines exploit their customers with stupidly complicated fare structures and somebody finds a way
for customers to exploit the airlines. This is a problem?
You don't need computers or web sites for this. Some years ago I moved from B.C. to Ontario. The travel agent (yes,
it was a few
years ago...) sold me a round-trip ticket from Vancouver to Toronto at a fraction of the cost of a one-way ticket.
I didn't use the return leg. Is Air Canada going to sue me?
I live in Antigua, 17N, we just did a star gazing night out and all the stars mentioned in the article are quite visible.
I've observed from Costa Rica, at 10 degrees north, and the bulk of the southern hemisphere goodies are indeed observable. By a pleasant coincidence, the prime observing season for the Centaurus/Carina Milky Way (February to April) coincides with the dry season in much of the country.
The Large Magellanic Cloud, however, is down in the murk from Costa Rica. The Small Magellanic Cloud and 47 Tucanae are worse. If you want to really
observe the Magellanic Clouds you need a southern hemisphere location.
Many equatorial telescope mounts don't like being in the tropics either. I've played with the leg lengths on my G-11, and once tried putting a fork mount (an old 8" Celestron SCT) together backwards, in effect aligning it for -10 degrees south instead of 10 degrees north. It almost worked...
Heading south is a very good thing for astronomers to do. It's like visiting another planet: lots of new
stars and stuff, and the familiar constellations are all upside down.
I've observed from Australia, New Zealand and the Cook Islands. My first view of the Eta Carinae region
was from St. Kilda Beach in Melbourne. My first view of the Magellanic Clouds was from a highway rest area
just south of Echuca, Victoria. One night at a motel in Forbes, NSW, I needed the bathroom in the wee hours
and padded out to have a look. I knew the Sagittarius Milky Way would be out at that time of the night, but I couldn't find
it at first. It was directly overhead.
Of course I went to
Parkes. A nerd's gotta do what a nerd's gotta do.:-)
I'm watching Top Gear in Patagonia, and while Argentina has better scenery, Australia has better weather. And
much better roads.
I live in a port city and see lots of ships, but I'm not sure this baby could even enter the harbour here.
It's far bigger than what the Panama Canal can handle
(maximum 290 meters long), as well as the
Saint Lawrence Seaway
(225 meters). The Panama Canal was designed for the largest ships of the day,
RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they do.
An early example of getting it wrong was the City & South London Railway, the first deep-level underground rail line in London. The designers of the rolling stock didn't bother with windows because there was, supposedly, nothing to see. Passengers hated the "padded cells". Even if all you see is tunnel walls rushing by, people need to see outside.
I could see the utility of an airliner with no windows but cameras and viewing screens - it would solve some engineering problems - but for a car, the simplest is still the best. Windows.
...laura
I see lots of announcements - not just this one - shouting about their new microarchitectures, how cool they are, the amazing benefits, and so on. But documentation of exactly what the new microarchitecture is, exactly what it does, seems thin-to-non-existent. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place.
All "big" processors nowadays have fancy pipelines, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, multiple cores, and so on. Fine. But how is Zen different from past microarchitectures? What makes it revolutionary?
Details, please.
...laura
It's always fun to look up what else people have been in. One that caught my eye was Ms Whitney as an uncredited band member in the still brilliantly goofy Some Like It Hot.
...laura.
In Canada we have an intermediate step between untowered uncontrolled airports and controlled airports with towers, Mandatory Frequency airports. They have a ground station with whom you must communicate for arrival and departure. They dispense information and coordinate activities, but do not give clearances. As pilot you make those decisions.
An example MF airport I've flown to is Kamloops, BC (CYKA). On initial contact the ground station told me the wind, altimeter setting and active runway, but also advised me of skydiving activity north of the airport. Since this might conflict on the usual left-hand circuit pattern, they suggested I fly a right hand circuit on approach. I did, and landed. This wasn't binding on me - the decision and responsibility were mine - but it was a good idea.
...laura
If you feed it a -m command line switch, one of my applications informs you that Martian Mode is not yet implemented.
Lame, huh?
...laura
Thanks. A lot of these sound like "don't cares" in the instruction decoding logic. Reminds me of an undergrad course in logic design with lots of Karnaugh maps and stuff.
...laura
I wouldn't have minded seeing an example of one of those illegal opcodes and how what it did was useful.
Brooks called such things "curios". Side-effects of invalid operations that people had started to use, and that had to be considered part of the specification.
My policy (seconded by my boss) is that I do not document such things. If a hack is documented people start to use it, then we have to support and maintain it.
...laura
Top Gear was enormous fun at first, but it's gotten stale. It's lost its way. Maybe it is time for a re-think.
Like just about everybody, my picks for a new co-host include Sabine Schmitz and Vicki Butler-Henderson. But they have to look very carefully at the show and decide if its worth continuing first. I'm not convinced it is.
The original Top Gear production morphed in to Fifth Gear, which is definitely jazzed up fro the old Top Gear it started as.
...laura
I lost 160 pounds a few years ago, and I too did it the hard way. Count calories, exercise. If you're not eating that much you have to eat well, and I'm now so healthy it's slightly stupid. I like it.
I didn't gain it overnight, and I couldn't expect to lose it overnight. It took a year and a half. No major skin sagging issues except for a residual flab roll, eliminated with a tummy tuck.
People often ask me what my secret was, and I tell them it's motivation: you have to have a reason. For me it was wanting to learn to fly, but I couldn't get the seatbelt around me.
...laura
In the noughties my employers set out to develop similar technology. We had GPS-based units that would record where a vehicle was and could be programmed to tell on you if you drove too fast, stopped for too long, went to somewhere you weren't supposed to go, and so on. They communicated over a 2 way paging network.
The technology worked. I did the mobile device programming and put together a test unit that used differential GPS. Instead of telling you which street you were on, it could tell you which lane you were in. :-)
The marketing, on the other hand, didn't work. :-(
...laura
If it's too clean, too clinical, people lose sight of the barbaric atrocity that execution is.
They also start to think that because it's clean, there's no reason to stop it. It should frighten (and gross out) any sane person.
...laura
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is an interesting, thoughtful story.
Hollywood doesn't do interesting and thoughtful.
QED
I'd be much more confident if this was being done in England or Scandinavia (cf Real Humans).
...laura
I live in an apartment and a couple of years ago my neighbours bought Guitar Hero or something similar. They played with it for about two days. Then they stopped (and sold the hardware) when the building management gave them an ultimatum over the number of noise complaints they had received.
...laura
The Bangles video Going Down To Liverpool.
Most illogical, these female humans...
...laura
This one hits close to home.
As a child in the late 1960s I was inspired to my present technical life and career by two major influences: Project Apollo and Star Trek. I thought Spock had the coolest job in the universe. He played with techie stuff and figured stuff out. I wanted that sort of job too. And I got it.
...laura
My use of goto sounds like everybody else's: if(something_bad_has_happened) goto code_to_fix_it;
In highly modular code with lots of procedures the "goto" may end up as a longjmp(). So be it.
...laura
Yes, they did.
In another job interview I was asked to write a program to generate prime numbers. I clarified a couple of requirements ("is memory usage an issue?"), and implemented the Sieve of Eratosthenes. It works, you know why it works, any idiot can read the code and understand it, and if testing shows you need something better (in some sense), you know where to start.
...laura
Regardless of the final implementation, there are problems where the simplest, clearest solution is a recursive one. You type it in to the computer as fast as you can type, it compiles and runs correctly the first time, and then, if you need to change it, you have a place to start.
On a job interview some years ago I was asked to write C code to reverse a string. I wrote it recursively: interchange the first and last elements, then reverse what's inside.
They liked my creativity. I got the job. :-)
...laura
There is strong encryption, and there is unbreakable encryption. They are not necessarily the same thing.
Strong encryption is theoretically breakable, but it is not computationally feasible to do so. What is computationally feasible changes with time. Look at how key-length standards for RSA have changed, for example.
One-time pad encryption, on the other hand, is not breakable. It doesn't matter how much computer power you throw at it: if you don't have the key, you can't read the message.
...laura
I want to get rid of my belly fat and I want to learn French.
...laura
If progressives don't work, don't use them. They're not for everybody.
I bit the bullet last time I got new glasses and got progressives. My requirement was well-defined: I'm near-sighted, wear glasses when I need them (driving, flying) but with age I was experiencing eyestrain trying to read charts during flights, particularly at night. At first I found I was moving my head around a lot to find the sweet spot, but now that I've figured that out, I'm fine.
I don't use glasses for computer stuff. Set the monitor distance and resolution right, and wipe the nose prints off every now and then. :-)
...laura
The airlines exploit their customers with stupidly complicated fare structures and somebody finds a way for customers to exploit the airlines. This is a problem?
You don't need computers or web sites for this. Some years ago I moved from B.C. to Ontario. The travel agent (yes, it was a few years ago...) sold me a round-trip ticket from Vancouver to Toronto at a fraction of the cost of a one-way ticket. I didn't use the return leg. Is Air Canada going to sue me?
...laura
I live in Antigua, 17N, we just did a star gazing night out and all the stars mentioned in the article are quite visible.
I've observed from Costa Rica, at 10 degrees north, and the bulk of the southern hemisphere goodies are indeed observable. By a pleasant coincidence, the prime observing season for the Centaurus/Carina Milky Way (February to April) coincides with the dry season in much of the country. The Large Magellanic Cloud, however, is down in the murk from Costa Rica. The Small Magellanic Cloud and 47 Tucanae are worse. If you want to really observe the Magellanic Clouds you need a southern hemisphere location.
Many equatorial telescope mounts don't like being in the tropics either. I've played with the leg lengths on my G-11, and once tried putting a fork mount (an old 8" Celestron SCT) together backwards, in effect aligning it for -10 degrees south instead of 10 degrees north. It almost worked...
...laura
Heading south is a very good thing for astronomers to do. It's like visiting another planet: lots of new stars and stuff, and the familiar constellations are all upside down.
I've observed from Australia, New Zealand and the Cook Islands. My first view of the Eta Carinae region was from St. Kilda Beach in Melbourne. My first view of the Magellanic Clouds was from a highway rest area just south of Echuca, Victoria. One night at a motel in Forbes, NSW, I needed the bathroom in the wee hours and padded out to have a look. I knew the Sagittarius Milky Way would be out at that time of the night, but I couldn't find it at first. It was directly overhead.
Of course I went to Parkes. A nerd's gotta do what a nerd's gotta do. :-)
I'm watching Top Gear in Patagonia, and while Argentina has better scenery, Australia has better weather. And much better roads.
...laura
I live in a port city and see lots of ships, but I'm not sure this baby could even enter the harbour here.
It's far bigger than what the Panama Canal can handle (maximum 290 meters long), as well as the Saint Lawrence Seaway (225 meters). The Panama Canal was designed for the largest ships of the day, RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic.
...laura