I've wished for Linux's kernel/stability with Microsoft's quality of development tools for a very long time now. Having VS.NET on top of Linux would be one of my dreams. I mean the fully Microsoft VS.NET or at least Mono having complete feature parity. The Mono guys are making good progress but the target is still moving a little fast for them to nail it down.
"Gameing" I can kind of forgive, but I can't overlook the statement of ddr3 having less "lag" than FB-DIMMs. Surely, he means latency, but latency isn't the end-all, be-all of memory benchmarks. Plus, if you only have one socket, even AMD's quad core chip only has one memory bus off the chip. It's only when you get into multiple socket configurations does AMD's architecture really show.
Especially if you choose your algorithms wisely, when you can. Tiling matrix algorithms for various operations, for example, can greatly reduce your memory bandwidth requirements over naive algorithms.
From your words (ones I didn't put into your mouth):
"Your honour, I did kill that women. However I am not killing women any more, so I should not be punished."
Note the "I am not killing women any more" part... Since you are using an analogy to demonstrate how you think Microsoft is pleading, your analogy indicates that you believe they are not "exerting illegal monopolistic practices any more". If this was not your intent, then you should practice writing analogies more. Another thing is description by analogy is usually not a good way to go because you're almost guaranteed someone will read something into it that you didn't intend but is otherwise true with respect to your analogy, probably exactly what happened in this case.
That's the point. Microsoft havn't "paid the penalty" for their conviction. All they have managed to do is drag the attempt out as long as possible.
Keep reading a little more of that line (the part in parenthesis) before you hit the reply button.
Not if the person who said that had already been tried and convicted and paid the penalty for the first offense (whether you agree or not if the penalty was "enough", it was sent through court and the courts have finished with it, including any applicable penalties). If Microsoft is practicing non-competitive monopolistic practices again, then that's a different story, but even your post seems to say that you don't think they are.
Yes... I guess you missed the word "anymore". Particularly with respect to the growing Linux/OSS movement around the world cutting into that market share. Unless, as I opted, we say that Linux/OSS (and OSX) has little/no impact on the market, thus giving Microsoft back their monopoly.
A "natural monopoly" is defined in economics as an industry where the fixed cost of the capital goods is so high that it is not profitable for a second firm to enter and compete. There is a "natural" reason for this industry being a monopoly, namely that the economies of scale require one, rather than several, firms. Small-scale ownership would be less efficient.
Basically, an electrical company, sewer, gas, and used to be cable and phone systems require so much capital investment in the power lines, sewer lines, gas lines, etc. that a second supplier would find it very difficult to place their own systems and compete. Think about how much money/time/permits/work it would require for another company to duplicate all the wiring/pipes under Manhattan and then try to compete with the companies there. Plus, the market is somewhat fixed (modulo new buildings and people moving in and out of the area) so growth is somewhat limited and there's little economy of scale (if the company wants to compete in another area, lots of infrastructure would have to be put into place there and infrastructure the company already has in other areas is almost entirely irrelevant to the new area).
Bzzt. You fail. There are laws governing natural monopolies like electric companies and the like. Microsoft does not have a monopoly anymore, or are you stating/admitting that Linux has no significant presence or impact in the world?
That's why the procedure for buying a Dell and you still want it to run Windows is boot an 'emergency' CD, run fdisk, run format, and then reboot with a Windows OS install CD/DVD.
I agree... proof or STFU AMD. I'd be more than happy with a faster processor, I don't care who makes it. But I'm not going to buy into the hype until I see some benchmarks done with it, even the kind Intel did with Conroe and Penryn where they provided machines and babysat the reviewers.
On the other hand, with this kind of hype they're putting out, they'd better deliver or they're sunk.
Including two laptops, my wife and I have seven between us (all of them running as we speak). This is down from nine because I scavanged parts from one of our SFFs a while back and gave another one of our SFFs to my mom. Granted, last week we only had six running (and for a long time before that) but last Tuesday, I set up another small Linux server for some specific tasks that I didn't want on my 'main' server.
As long as you are willing to fund the development efforts to support whatever browsers you want, you can have multi-browser support (we do). It's simply a matter of time and money, like most problems.
First, most/many customers don't necessarily lie as much as simply being ignorant of what may be going on. My mother, for example, wouldn't be able to tell you anything more than "when I click on this web page, it doesn't do what it used to do". It's the responsibility of the CSR to ask questions to lead the customer to the point of describing what's going on so that some clue might pop out to identify the problem.
Second, customer *do* lie... particularly when they're embarassed about either what they did to cause the problem or embarassed for not knowing what the problem actually is and having to call someone else to help fix it.
Third, you get some customers who are convinced they are right (they are "experts" in the field already) and their description of the problem will be influenced by their 'conclusion'.
They can make multi-speed cores on a single chip today. The problem with using them would be the OSs. The OSs would have to be modified to know about the different cores and such. That's not that big of a deal. What's more interesting is somehow classifying the programs/threads in such ways and supplying that to the OS (as well as runtime information that could be gathered from the cores by the OS) such that efficient scheduling is performed.
People hate throttling. Throttling is not marketable.
Odd because things like Cool-N-Quiet and SpeedStep are throttling mechanisms and most people go out of their way to use them. I had to download drivers, turn BIOS options on, and configure my OS in order to use Cool-n-Quiet, for example... and so did anyone else using the same board/OS/etc. If you get a machine with it turned on, you just go to the BIOS and disable it, but I don't know of a single person who has done that (maybe they didn't notice it was on).
Data partitioning is what defines whether or not something can be parallelized and to what degree. The reason why Fortran (which another poster mentions) has the 'ability' to make decisions about what can be parallelized is fairly strong. If you notice, they are mostly restrictions on functions (no memory aliasing) and hints (the data in this loop can all be worked on in parallel).
Even when you look at Message Passing, you'll notice that all the synchronization and methods are centered on data movement (availability to the node to be worked with). You'll also notice that many of the producer/consumer (master/slave, etc.) built-in algorithms require the programmer to structure the data in such a way as to packetize the blocks of data to fit certain qualifications so that the built-in algorithms have no data sharing violations.
Compilers and hardware figure out instruction streams that are parallelizable fairly well. OOOE and pipelines are all about this in hardware and autovectorization is easy provided there are hints that the compiler is allowed to use it (and strictures such as 'no aliasing allowed' are sort of hints). It's partitioning the data that's hard, and can be very much a runtime issue.
I work on a product that has a web front-end to it and a lot of stuff on the server side. The web side of stuff is just full of machinations to deal with incompatibilities of browsers and Javascript (and most browser based scripting languages) are crap to work with and debug. Luckily, all the back end stuff is written in languages that are much more sane.
I agree. The problem is that the presentors create horrible Powerpoint presentations. I'm like you when I create mine. If the venue is set up for it (number of attendees, places to pick up stuff, etc.), I make note copies to pass out (slide at the top, empty space with lines at the bottom) in case they want to take notes. I also make copies available via the web.
If you make the slides such that you're reading off them, then you're not making good slides. It also means that you probably don't know what you're talking about very well... Slides are notes just to make sure you stay on track and cover the important points and not leave anything out. They aren't to read to the audience.
Because there is such a massive amount of installed x86 software base that you'd be throwing away silicon. To be sure that software ran on the most systems possible, software would still be written for x86 and not the 'desired' architecture.
That being said, OSS tends to have good inroads in that you get all the source so can recompile to whatever architecture you want. However, since x86 is still the huge marketshare, other architectures get less attention. Also, all of the JIT languages (Java, C#, etc.) make transitioning easier IF you can get the frameworks ported to a stable environment on the 'desired' architecture.
The main problem is that there is *so* much legacy code in binary (EXE) format only (the source code for many of those has been literally lost) that can be directly tracked to money. There are systems that companies continue to use and have so much momentum that changing platforms would require extreme amounts of money to reverse engineer the current system - complete with quirks and oddities, rewrite, and (here is a big part that many people fail to add in) retest and revalidate, that many companies don't want to spend that kind of money to replace something that 'works'.
There's so much work/time/effort invested in x86 now that it's hard to jump off that train. AMD's x86-64 is a good approach in that you can run all the old stuff and develop on the new at the same time with few performance penalties. However, I don't know if we'll ever be able to shrug off the burden of x86.... at least not for a long time to come. It'd take something truly disruptive to divert from it (and what people are currently invisioning as quantum computing is not that disruption).
Well... I imagine Microsoft will announce a partnership with NetFlix or someone for streaming movies pretty soon. Plus, Microsoft may merge the XBox360 with the cable box and a DVR before long and, through various cable companies, offer that as a cable company provided box/service (much like now how you can get a 'regular' cable box, a digital one, and/or a DVR for a low monthly rate type deal).
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I've wished for Linux's kernel/stability with Microsoft's quality of development tools for a very long time now. Having VS.NET on top of Linux would be one of my dreams. I mean the fully Microsoft VS.NET or at least Mono having complete feature parity. The Mono guys are making good progress but the target is still moving a little fast for them to nail it down.
You mean Sony has actually sold 250,000 PS3s? ;) (I kid, I kid, notice the winking smiley, please don't flame me :()
Sorry, I meant DDR2 in the above post... been spending too much time dorking with video cards the last couple days.
"Gameing" I can kind of forgive, but I can't overlook the statement of ddr3 having less "lag" than FB-DIMMs. Surely, he means latency, but latency isn't the end-all, be-all of memory benchmarks. Plus, if you only have one socket, even AMD's quad core chip only has one memory bus off the chip. It's only when you get into multiple socket configurations does AMD's architecture really show.
Especially if you choose your algorithms wisely, when you can. Tiling matrix algorithms for various operations, for example, can greatly reduce your memory bandwidth requirements over naive algorithms.
From your words (ones I didn't put into your mouth):
Note the "I am not killing women any more" part... Since you are using an analogy to demonstrate how you think Microsoft is pleading, your analogy indicates that you believe they are not "exerting illegal monopolistic practices any more". If this was not your intent, then you should practice writing analogies more. Another thing is description by analogy is usually not a good way to go because you're almost guaranteed someone will read something into it that you didn't intend but is otherwise true with respect to your analogy, probably exactly what happened in this case.
Keep reading a little more of that line (the part in parenthesis) before you hit the reply button.
Not if the person who said that had already been tried and convicted and paid the penalty for the first offense (whether you agree or not if the penalty was "enough", it was sent through court and the courts have finished with it, including any applicable penalties). If Microsoft is practicing non-competitive monopolistic practices again, then that's a different story, but even your post seems to say that you don't think they are.
Yes... I guess you missed the word "anymore". Particularly with respect to the growing Linux/OSS movement around the world cutting into that market share. Unless, as I opted, we say that Linux/OSS (and OSX) has little/no impact on the market, thus giving Microsoft back their monopoly.
You can also find a definition at the Wiki
Basically, an electrical company, sewer, gas, and used to be cable and phone systems require so much capital investment in the power lines, sewer lines, gas lines, etc. that a second supplier would find it very difficult to place their own systems and compete. Think about how much money/time/permits/work it would require for another company to duplicate all the wiring/pipes under Manhattan and then try to compete with the companies there. Plus, the market is somewhat fixed (modulo new buildings and people moving in and out of the area) so growth is somewhat limited and there's little economy of scale (if the company wants to compete in another area, lots of infrastructure would have to be put into place there and infrastructure the company already has in other areas is almost entirely irrelevant to the new area).
Bzzt. You fail. There are laws governing natural monopolies like electric companies and the like. Microsoft does not have a monopoly anymore, or are you stating/admitting that Linux has no significant presence or impact in the world?
That's why the procedure for buying a Dell and you still want it to run Windows is boot an 'emergency' CD, run fdisk, run format, and then reboot with a Windows OS install CD/DVD.
I agree... proof or STFU AMD. I'd be more than happy with a faster processor, I don't care who makes it. But I'm not going to buy into the hype until I see some benchmarks done with it, even the kind Intel did with Conroe and Penryn where they provided machines and babysat the reviewers.
On the other hand, with this kind of hype they're putting out, they'd better deliver or they're sunk.
Including two laptops, my wife and I have seven between us (all of them running as we speak). This is down from nine because I scavanged parts from one of our SFFs a while back and gave another one of our SFFs to my mom. Granted, last week we only had six running (and for a long time before that) but last Tuesday, I set up another small Linux server for some specific tasks that I didn't want on my 'main' server.
As long as you are willing to fund the development efforts to support whatever browsers you want, you can have multi-browser support (we do). It's simply a matter of time and money, like most problems.
So... was the performance better or not? Why would it matter how that performance was gained? Is not 20% faster, well... 20% faster?
Damn! This computer is 20% faster because of X and not Y! I think I'll throw it away! Those bastards!
First, most/many customers don't necessarily lie as much as simply being ignorant of what may be going on. My mother, for example, wouldn't be able to tell you anything more than "when I click on this web page, it doesn't do what it used to do". It's the responsibility of the CSR to ask questions to lead the customer to the point of describing what's going on so that some clue might pop out to identify the problem.
Second, customer *do* lie... particularly when they're embarassed about either what they did to cause the problem or embarassed for not knowing what the problem actually is and having to call someone else to help fix it.
Third, you get some customers who are convinced they are right (they are "experts" in the field already) and their description of the problem will be influenced by their 'conclusion'.
Plus all of the existing applications that aren't threaded get the benefits on occassion (when the other core is idle).
They can make multi-speed cores on a single chip today. The problem with using them would be the OSs. The OSs would have to be modified to know about the different cores and such. That's not that big of a deal. What's more interesting is somehow classifying the programs/threads in such ways and supplying that to the OS (as well as runtime information that could be gathered from the cores by the OS) such that efficient scheduling is performed.
Odd because things like Cool-N-Quiet and SpeedStep are throttling mechanisms and most people go out of their way to use them. I had to download drivers, turn BIOS options on, and configure my OS in order to use Cool-n-Quiet, for example... and so did anyone else using the same board/OS/etc. If you get a machine with it turned on, you just go to the BIOS and disable it, but I don't know of a single person who has done that (maybe they didn't notice it was on).
Data partitioning is what defines whether or not something can be parallelized and to what degree. The reason why Fortran (which another poster mentions) has the 'ability' to make decisions about what can be parallelized is fairly strong. If you notice, they are mostly restrictions on functions (no memory aliasing) and hints (the data in this loop can all be worked on in parallel).
Even when you look at Message Passing, you'll notice that all the synchronization and methods are centered on data movement (availability to the node to be worked with). You'll also notice that many of the producer/consumer (master/slave, etc.) built-in algorithms require the programmer to structure the data in such a way as to packetize the blocks of data to fit certain qualifications so that the built-in algorithms have no data sharing violations.
Compilers and hardware figure out instruction streams that are parallelizable fairly well. OOOE and pipelines are all about this in hardware and autovectorization is easy provided there are hints that the compiler is allowed to use it (and strictures such as 'no aliasing allowed' are sort of hints). It's partitioning the data that's hard, and can be very much a runtime issue.
Or Cyclops.
I work on a product that has a web front-end to it and a lot of stuff on the server side. The web side of stuff is just full of machinations to deal with incompatibilities of browsers and Javascript (and most browser based scripting languages) are crap to work with and debug. Luckily, all the back end stuff is written in languages that are much more sane.
I agree. The problem is that the presentors create horrible Powerpoint presentations. I'm like you when I create mine. If the venue is set up for it (number of attendees, places to pick up stuff, etc.), I make note copies to pass out (slide at the top, empty space with lines at the bottom) in case they want to take notes. I also make copies available via the web.
If you make the slides such that you're reading off them, then you're not making good slides. It also means that you probably don't know what you're talking about very well... Slides are notes just to make sure you stay on track and cover the important points and not leave anything out. They aren't to read to the audience.
Already been done, didn't catch on (see Itanium).
Because there is such a massive amount of installed x86 software base that you'd be throwing away silicon. To be sure that software ran on the most systems possible, software would still be written for x86 and not the 'desired' architecture.
That being said, OSS tends to have good inroads in that you get all the source so can recompile to whatever architecture you want. However, since x86 is still the huge marketshare, other architectures get less attention. Also, all of the JIT languages (Java, C#, etc.) make transitioning easier IF you can get the frameworks ported to a stable environment on the 'desired' architecture.
The main problem is that there is *so* much legacy code in binary (EXE) format only (the source code for many of those has been literally lost) that can be directly tracked to money. There are systems that companies continue to use and have so much momentum that changing platforms would require extreme amounts of money to reverse engineer the current system - complete with quirks and oddities, rewrite, and (here is a big part that many people fail to add in) retest and revalidate, that many companies don't want to spend that kind of money to replace something that 'works'.
There's so much work/time/effort invested in x86 now that it's hard to jump off that train. AMD's x86-64 is a good approach in that you can run all the old stuff and develop on the new at the same time with few performance penalties. However, I don't know if we'll ever be able to shrug off the burden of x86.... at least not for a long time to come. It'd take something truly disruptive to divert from it (and what people are currently invisioning as quantum computing is not that disruption).
Well... I imagine Microsoft will announce a partnership with NetFlix or someone for streaming movies pretty soon. Plus, Microsoft may merge the XBox360 with the cable box and a DVR before long and, through various cable companies, offer that as a cable company provided box/service (much like now how you can get a 'regular' cable box, a digital one, and/or a DVR for a low monthly rate type deal).