The Rage Pro "Turbo" driver was designed to give a %40 increase in Winbench, and it did. But the problem with that driver was it killed performance in games, and the driver's actual performance was revealed by Tom Pabst and the gang.
Quack was a similar situation, except it simply forced the user's OpenGL settings to lower quality without notifying the user. Thus, no other games took a performance hit, and that's the reason the issue too so long to uncover.
This situation is quite different. The latest 3dmark tests actually stress a memory and T&L subsystem much more than Quake 3 can.
So, as we all expected, the higher horsepower Nvidia core can paint more pixels than the 9700, but when stressing the card's best features ( features used by every game released this year ), the Radeon pulls out in front.
You can pick up somewhere around 4-6" color LCD display for that price (~150), most of which use composite input ( designed to go in those car or portable DVD players ).
Use TV-out and MultiMon to drive the output. Instant custom stats screen thats bigger and more colorful than the VFD.
Hey, I can remember Atari cramp, and even Nintendo cramp. I built up some pretty thick callouses on my thumbs playing hours-on-end.
But it's nice to be able to experience the same thing even today. I remember when I bought BF1942 the week it came out, I stayed connected to servers for over 12 hours on the first weekends I spent with that monster. Even with breaks, I was left with a sore wrist, sore elbow and locked knees from sitting up in the chair for 3 hours.
Now the evil joystick has simply been replaced by the evil mouse and computer chair. Luckily, you don't need an old system to experience the pain/pleasure of the past, just a non-ergonomic workstation!
This is why places like www.newegg.com have wishlists. Finally, a wishlist as easy to use as Amazon, but with the selection and prices a geek can appreciate.
Just make sure you don't have those type of givers who think they can get the same thing 10 bucks cheaper and buy it locally. Instead of that shiny Radeon 9700, they'll end up buying you a fancy "Jaton 3D Force IIIV Pro Plus 8MB" from Best Buy.
(ahem, Enterprise, it may look 'sexy', but Vulcan chicks don't like to get semi-nude rubdowns, even if it's for "decontamination"...).
You know, it's widely established through the series and books that Vulcans are not fond of touching or being touched due to the psychic turmoil of an unshielded mind.
And thats only the beginning of their trespasses.
But oh well, raitings must go on!
Don't worry folks, it can only get worse from here.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
·
· Score: 1
Rama II was terrible because of Gentry LEee, who IMHO was far too inexperienced at the time to be co-writing something so massive. Previously, he had worked with Clarke on Cradle, but that was a far simpler work. Rama II was necessary, both as set-up for the epic story ahead and as a starting point for Gentry Lee.
The end result to Lee getting his feet wet was The Garden of Rama, which was an outstanding view into human nature. Even Rama Revealed was worth waiting for, although it got very strange in the end.
As for Gentry Leee, he'll never be a GREAT SciFi writer, but he's released some acceptable work ( read: not great, but very readable ) like Bright Messengers and The Tranquility Wars. But it's obvious from his personal works where the best elements in Rama came from - Clarke.
It's debatable, but the general public will agree - Even good, odd bad.
Although I would like to add this: ST: The Motion Picture is much like 2001: A Space Odyssey ( but not quite as great ). Unless you sit through the whole thing, you really can't appreciate it. Sure, they could have made it shorter, but in either movie, a shorter timespan would have felt rushed.
On all other counts I agree with the theory.
STIII - was a terrible story to begin with, and entire chapter bent on ressurecting ST's #2 character. Christopher Lloyd should never do serious roles, he's far more suited to playing eccentrics.
STV - ahhh, pretend you didn't see that Johnny, it was all a bad dream.
STIIV - okay, a bridge. But the production values weren't any better than a series episode ( by the last season, they had gotten pretty impressive ), and the acton sequences were badly spaced out between a stupid story. Still, I was impressed with the last 20 minutes,and even I applauded when Shattner took the dive.
STIX - hopefully the cycle is broken? I'm not gonna trust a handfull of reviews. Gonna have to see this one for myself.
Most modern C++ compilers will already make this optimization.
And you are making an assumption that this core is optimized for bit shifting. Who knows, it may not even have the hardware for it. This is a synthesized core written in VHDL, there are no assumptions.
Personally, I think this sounds like a lot of fun. I tried to convince my professors to allow myself and a partner construct a fully-functional MIPS core on FPGA for my EE senior project, but sadly they had other ideas. It's nice to see some folks having fun out there...it's COLLEGE, you're SUPPOSED to have fun! Not care about super optimization.
And if you're really clever, you would take advantage of the fact that levels of greyscale are easily discernable. Leave a seperation space on all sides of each dot ( so they're more easily decoded ) to form a grid system. Yes, your storage capacity will drop by a factor of 4, but you can easily encode 8 bits ( a factor of 256 ) into the dot.
Most laserprinters can do 8-bit greyscale.
But for redundancy:
- Make two dots for each 8-bit piece of data, the 8-bits and it's complement. This is only good at error detection, although theoretically you could add error correction at a capacity cost.
- Add 256 calibration dots every few inches to make up for aging of the ink and media. We can assume that the cameras will have much higher resolution than the printer, so they can tell the difference even if the levels have faded together.
You could pack a whole lot of data on paper if you put your mind to it.
Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; int y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
You would think initially that float * float would yield a float result, and it does, so the answer should be ( int ) ( 1.57... ), which would ultimately be 1 after trunication.
But your human brain has made an association that a compiler never could, believing that 1/2 is actually 0.5. The compiler sees it as an integer divide operation with more precedence than the multiply.
This is the second post of yours I've seen today with this format:
...blah blah blah bad thing... ... ... write your congressman
Is this a hobby of yours?
You do realize that Congressmen could care less what you have to say ( whether it be bandwidth bitching or music distribution woes ). On top of the fact that big business has alreay $voted$, the opinion of small factions like the technically inclined matters little. They care what Joe Blow thinks, and Joe Blow thinks his AOL internet is just super, as long as it works.
The Trident '3DImage' hasn't had Direct3D drivers since Windows 95.
So I've got a "3D" card that's limited to DirectDraw. Not that I'd want to ( it runs DX5 games at about 10fps ). Obviously, a 3D core this slow was not worth perpetuation.
But I will say one thing for Trident: although their older ISA cards were sluggish, I've found their later cards ( 3DImage and Blade3D ) to have clear and responsive 2D. So maybe they can eventually figure this whole 3D Accelerator thing out...
You know, this isn't anything close to the theories that have been tossed about in the past few decades concerning Mars.
But you have to admit it's a well throught-out viewpoint, and contains no more hols than any of the other upproven Martian theories
Point is people, we all need to take this in stride. Start favoring one theory with no rational evidence, and suddenly you become religion. I personally don't care, I'd rather hear what scientests have to say WHEN they land on Mars ( hopefully within my lifetime ). Until then, all we've got is pictures and a handful of samples.
Funny thing you mention that, I went on a trip to Canada and visted this museum about 8 years ago. It wasn't anything spactacular, very much reminiscent of the Kennedy Space Center in Houston. Of course, there is much more to Ottawa than this, so it's worth a trip.
That's not true, I really don't understand why the parent is modded up. PNP would detect the new chipset and alter your hardware profile ( I've done this dozens of times with computers ranging from Win95 to 2k ). If it doesn't find compatible IDE drivers after prompting you, it will install the default drivers. PNP hasn't stood for "Plug and Pray" since Win95B, you should try it sometime.
If PNP craps out for some strange reason ( rare ), then there's always safe mode. Jump in, quick uninstall, and you're back in business.
I wonder, do you think your sh!t smells better than the lowly plebes too?
The two-second rule is a blanket concept, just like a speed limit is a blanket concept. Unlike yourself, most human beings do not drive like a robot, and instead tend to take driving conditions into consideration.
The two-second rule is all about giving yourself an extra safety net in the case of poor brakes or driver distraction, and can be an excellent rule to follow on single-lane streets with no medians, especially streets with parked cars.
The two-second rule will have absolutely no effect in any other case, including being cutoff by a driver who doesnt see you, and being rear-ended. Although there is a danger of causing a domino effect if you are hit from behind, usually a reaer-end hit at high speeds will make you lose control and swerve rather than plow forward. You are actually more likely to cause a domino-effect when rear-ended at a complete stop, and that's one situation where the 2-second rule is completely overlooked.
In the case of catastrophic brake failure, The two-second rule makes a false assumption - it assumes the driver is blind, and cannot observe traffic 5 or 10 cars ahead. By observing traffic ahead, the driver can brake preemptively, and SIMULATE a 150 meter gap. Brake lights on the car 10 up from you means the car directly in front of you will match speed in about 2 seconds.
A good driver taps the brakes in this situation, then waits for the car directly in front of him to slow before firmly applying the brakes and slowing in tandem. The brake tap not only warns drivers 20 or 30 cars back, who are too far back to see the original hard-braking vehicle, but it also confirms for the driver that the brakes are in-fact working well before he has to depend on them. That gives the driver plenty of time to react and look for an exit, even if he's floundered in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
You may not like it, but believe me, there are less accidents caused by close following than those caused by poor merging practices. Until you can get all these crazy drivers around me to use their mirrors AND look, you can forget about the 2-second rule.
Re:Michael's just an idiot
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 1
I think you people need to stop being reactionary and start READING.
Do you know what I thought of when I read the last sentence of the above editorial comment?
He's commenting that alternative fuels are not available at gas stations.
By inference, he is stating that Diesel, the fuel used by this new car, IS widely available at most gas stations. He's inferring that we should take our heads out of the alternative-fuel clouds, and concentrate on more real-world fuel economy and emmissions advances.
Does he need to spell it out for you, like the articles in USA Today?
Unlike the rest of the world, the Master System caught on heavily in Brazil, kinda like VCD in China. 3rd-party games were made and marked in Brazil well after the Master System died in other countries.
This company in Brazil bought rights to manufacture the hardware after Sega stopped selling it. Hence the reason the page is in Portuguese. I somehow doubt that the system would be offered in English, let alone sold to other countries. I think they only have the rights to sell those in Brazil.
You don't understand. This is not a Ferrari. This a case of "same chassis, same engine, different body" syndrome.
This is just another case of "Same stuff, new package". HEY, LETS CHARGE MORE! Hey, it worked when they ORIGINALLY moved us to CDs from tapes, so why not do it again?
Honestly, this is more lke a Lexus ES300 You might see a good car, but all I see is a souped-up Toyota Camry --- and a big pit with 10k buried in it.
So long as programming REQUIRES GREAT SKILL, it will take many hours and many inefficient projectes to train programmers properly. No matter how many books you've read, no matter how many pet projects you have on the side, it's rare to get any REAL programming experience until you're in the trenches, fighting requirements and deadlines.
Nobody seems to get upset that it takes you a year to walk, and another year to get good at it. Unril programming is as natural and predictable as a heartbeat, it will still suffer from the human failing.
That said, how long until machines program themselves?
I know how to emulate FP subtraction. Don't patronize me because your Basic interpreter has left you feeling 1337.
The point is you're comparing apples to oranges. I don't care what your modern processor can do. A 4MHZ Z80 didn't even approach.5 MIPs. YES, thats LESS THAN 500,000 IPS. They didn't have fancy things like barrel shifters or fast ALUs. Your basic instruction took multiple cycles.
Then, when you actually come down off your cloud and THINK, you realize how a 8-bit processor can easily choke on 32-bit emulated FP. Remember, if you're faced with irrational numbers ( like the example above ), it's going to cost you a lot more cycles using shifts and adds to take it out to the full 24 bits of precision.
All those "easy" shifts and adds take multiple clock cycles each. Tens of thousands of cycles with the overhead from a BASIC interpreter is easy to imagine. Add that to the OS overhead, and suddenly it takes the OS almost a second to parse, caluculate, and cough up the answer ( the hundreds of thousands comment I made ). Sounds small, but it's realy a huge chunk of that 500k IPS.
This operation contains floating-point arithmetic. On just about all computers of the day, FP units were emulated.
Now, think about how many dozens of cycles a FP divide STILL takes us today with pipelined FP units. Now, consider that these processors run at 1/10000 the processing power of today's chips, and FP numbers have to be emulated by the ALU.
We're talking TENS OF THOUSANDS if not HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cycles for a single FP divide.
The FP multiplications also take a sizeable amount of time, but nowhere near the time the divide takes. All the addition/subtraction also require emulated FP. Considering a speed of only 4MHz, the above would definitely take a noticable chunk of a second, maybe even more than a second if my efficiency guesses are much worse.
You know, if the UK is what you're referring to in this post, then you've got a seriously detached view of the world.
The only reason cell service has done so well in the UK is because of private enterprise. BT has a monopoly on terrestrial service, and I believe ever call is toll. Couple that with the incredibly small size of the country and the decent population density, and suddenly it's not so hard to build a network that provides good coverage and competitive rates.
The US has two barriers against cellular networks:
1: The classical view of US phone service. The US phone service is always-on, and cities have no-toll calling within their area. This is subsidized by long distance tolls. How are cellular companies supposed to convince older generations that these are things worth paying extra for?
2: The US is very big, but the population density is pitifully small on %75 of the land area. How much of it should cellular companies be required to cover? Can we honestly justify getting pissed off about a few holes in downtown Chicago when you can get clear digital service in the middle of Iowa? Or out in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay for that matter ( yes, done that ).
What the hell do you want folks? A cellular service that costs $15 a month and works on every square meter of US soil? Forget it. You want celluarsrvice that works EVERYWHERE? Then move to a state with the population density of the UK or Japan, like New Jersey.
PS: I bet you'd love BT's monopoly on DSL service. Their delays look more shameful than US HDTV.
Psst. The book isn't about predicting the future, it's one big joke that Orwell sets us up for.
Just look at one passage later in the book:
-The Proles cannot spark revolt until they are enlightened. -The Proles cannot be unlightened until they spark revolt.
It's simply an entirely different take on the whole Catch-22 concept. The Party is subject to the same restraint.
The party claims that all "well-meaning" regimes have crumbled because they don't recognize the human quest for power.
However, the party says that in the past, even the most power-for-power's sake minded regimes failed because of the frailty of humanity in each of us.
So basically Orwell is saying that neither Utopia nor perfect power-for-power's sake are possible, becuase no human could ever create, let alone SUSTAIN them. Only a perfect being could beget either.
So don't worry. Businesses may take over countries and fight endless wars in the future, but they will never excise the humanity in us.
Now, as for the robot armies, well, thats another discussion entirely:)
Slashdot Mirror
The Rage Pro "Turbo" driver was designed to give a %40 increase in Winbench, and it did. But the problem with that driver was it killed performance in games, and the driver's actual performance was revealed by Tom Pabst and the gang.
Quack was a similar situation, except it simply forced the user's OpenGL settings to lower quality without notifying the user. Thus, no other games took a performance hit, and that's the reason the issue too so long to uncover.
This situation is quite different. The latest 3dmark tests actually stress a memory and T&L subsystem much more than Quake 3 can.
So, as we all expected, the higher horsepower Nvidia core can paint more pixels than the 9700, but when stressing the card's best features ( features used by every game released this year ), the Radeon pulls out in front.
You can pick up somewhere around 4-6" color LCD display for that price (~150), most of which use composite input ( designed to go in those car or portable DVD players ).
Use TV-out and MultiMon to drive the output. Instant custom stats screen thats bigger and more colorful than the VFD.
Hey, I can remember Atari cramp, and even Nintendo cramp. I built up some pretty thick callouses on my thumbs playing hours-on-end.
But it's nice to be able to experience the same thing even today. I remember when I bought BF1942 the week it came out, I stayed connected to servers for over 12 hours on the first weekends I spent with that monster. Even with breaks, I was left with a sore wrist, sore elbow and locked knees from sitting up in the chair for 3 hours.
Now the evil joystick has simply been replaced by the evil mouse and computer chair. Luckily, you don't need an old system to experience the pain/pleasure of the past, just a non-ergonomic workstation!
John Boone: "Well, here we are."
Thanks for all the fish, Kim Stanley Robinson.
This is why places like www.newegg.com have wishlists. Finally, a wishlist as easy to use as Amazon, but with the selection and prices a geek can appreciate.
Just make sure you don't have those type of givers who think they can get the same thing 10 bucks cheaper and buy it locally. Instead of that shiny Radeon 9700, they'll end up buying you a fancy "Jaton 3D Force IIIV Pro Plus 8MB" from Best Buy.
(ahem, Enterprise, it may look 'sexy', but Vulcan chicks don't like to get semi-nude rubdowns, even if it's for "decontamination"...).
You know, it's widely established through the series and books that Vulcans are not fond of touching or being touched due to the psychic turmoil of an unshielded mind.
And thats only the beginning of their trespasses.
But oh well, raitings must go on!
Don't worry folks, it can only get worse from here.
Rama II was terrible because of Gentry LEee, who IMHO was far too inexperienced at the time to be co-writing something so massive. Previously, he had worked with Clarke on Cradle, but that was a far simpler work. Rama II was necessary, both as set-up for the epic story ahead and as a starting point for Gentry Lee.
The end result to Lee getting his feet wet was The Garden of Rama, which was an outstanding view into human nature. Even Rama Revealed was worth waiting for, although it got very strange in the end.
As for Gentry Leee, he'll never be a GREAT SciFi writer, but he's released some acceptable work ( read: not great, but very readable ) like Bright Messengers and The Tranquility Wars. But it's obvious from his personal works where the best elements in Rama came from - Clarke.
It's debatable, but the general public will agree - Even good, odd bad.
Although I would like to add this: ST: The Motion Picture is much like 2001: A Space Odyssey ( but not quite as great ). Unless you sit through the whole thing, you really can't appreciate it. Sure, they could have made it shorter, but in either movie, a shorter timespan would have felt rushed.
On all other counts I agree with the theory.
STIII - was a terrible story to begin with, and entire chapter bent on ressurecting ST's #2 character. Christopher Lloyd should never do serious roles, he's far more suited to playing eccentrics.
STV - ahhh, pretend you didn't see that Johnny, it was all a bad dream.
STIIV - okay, a bridge. But the production values weren't any better than a series episode ( by the last season, they had gotten pretty impressive ), and the acton sequences were badly spaced out between a stupid story. Still, I was impressed with the last 20 minutes,and even I applauded when Shattner took the dive.
STIX - hopefully the cycle is broken? I'm not gonna trust a handfull of reviews. Gonna have to see this one for myself.
Most modern C++ compilers will already make this optimization.
And you are making an assumption that this core is optimized for bit shifting. Who knows, it may not even have the hardware for it. This is a synthesized core written in VHDL, there are no assumptions.
Personally, I think this sounds like a lot of fun. I tried to convince my professors to allow myself and a partner construct a fully-functional MIPS core on FPGA for my EE senior project, but sadly they had other ideas. It's nice to see some folks having fun out there...it's COLLEGE, you're SUPPOSED to have fun! Not care about super optimization.
And if you're really clever, you would take advantage of the fact that levels of greyscale are easily discernable. Leave a seperation space on all sides of each dot ( so they're more easily decoded ) to form a grid system. Yes, your storage capacity will drop by a factor of 4, but you can easily encode 8 bits ( a factor of 256 ) into the dot.
Most laserprinters can do 8-bit greyscale.
But for redundancy:
- Make two dots for each 8-bit piece of data, the 8-bits and it's complement. This is only good at error detection, although theoretically you could add error correction at a capacity cost.
- Add 256 calibration dots every few inches to make up for aging of the ink and media. We can assume that the cameras will have much higher resolution than the printer, so they can tell the difference even if the levels have faded together.
You could pack a whole lot of data on paper if you put your mind to it.
Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; int y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
You would think initially that float * float would yield a float result, and it does, so the answer should be ( int ) ( 1.57... ), which would ultimately be 1 after trunication.
But your human brain has made an association that a compiler never could, believing that 1/2 is actually 0.5. The compiler sees it as an integer divide operation with more precedence than the multiply.
( int ) ( 1/2 ) = 0
0 * 3.14 = 0
The way to a nonzero solution:
Y = ( 1 / 2.0 ) * X;
Yea off-topic post!
This is the second post of yours I've seen today with this format:
...blah blah blah bad thing...
...
... write your congressman
Is this a hobby of yours?
You do realize that Congressmen could care less what you have to say ( whether it be bandwidth bitching or music distribution woes ). On top of the fact that big business has alreay $voted$, the opinion of small factions like the technically inclined matters little. They care what Joe Blow thinks, and Joe Blow thinks his AOL internet is just super, as long as it works.
I can do better. I have the ultimate Oxymoron:
The Trident '3DImage' hasn't had Direct3D drivers since Windows 95.
So I've got a "3D" card that's limited to DirectDraw. Not that I'd want to ( it runs DX5 games at about 10fps ). Obviously, a 3D core this slow was not worth perpetuation.
But I will say one thing for Trident: although their older ISA cards were sluggish, I've found their later cards ( 3DImage and Blade3D ) to have clear and responsive 2D. So maybe they can eventually figure this whole 3D Accelerator thing out...
You know, this isn't anything close to the theories that have been tossed about in the past few decades concerning Mars.
But you have to admit it's a well throught-out viewpoint, and contains no more hols than any of the other upproven Martian theories
Point is people, we all need to take this in stride. Start favoring one theory with no rational evidence, and suddenly you become religion. I personally don't care, I'd rather hear what scientests have to say WHEN they land on Mars ( hopefully within my lifetime ). Until then, all we've got is pictures and a handful of samples.
Funny thing you mention that, I went on a trip to Canada and visted this museum about 8 years ago. It wasn't anything spactacular, very much reminiscent of the Kennedy Space Center in Houston. Of course, there is much more to Ottawa than this, so it's worth a trip.
That's not true, I really don't understand why the parent is modded up. PNP would detect the new chipset and alter your hardware profile ( I've done this dozens of times with computers ranging from Win95 to 2k ). If it doesn't find compatible IDE drivers after prompting you, it will install the default drivers. PNP hasn't stood for "Plug and Pray" since Win95B, you should try it sometime.
If PNP craps out for some strange reason ( rare ), then there's always safe mode. Jump in, quick uninstall, and you're back in business.
I wonder, do you think your sh!t smells better than the lowly plebes too?
The two-second rule is a blanket concept, just like a speed limit is a blanket concept. Unlike yourself, most human beings do not drive like a robot, and instead tend to take driving conditions into consideration.
The two-second rule is all about giving yourself an extra safety net in the case of poor brakes or driver distraction, and can be an excellent rule to follow on single-lane streets with no medians, especially streets with parked cars.
The two-second rule will have absolutely no effect in any other case, including being cutoff by a driver who doesnt see you, and being rear-ended. Although there is a danger of causing a domino effect if you are hit from behind, usually a reaer-end hit at high speeds will make you lose control and swerve rather than plow forward. You are actually more likely to cause a domino-effect when rear-ended at a complete stop, and that's one situation where the 2-second rule is completely overlooked.
In the case of catastrophic brake failure, The two-second rule makes a false assumption - it assumes the driver is blind, and cannot observe traffic 5 or 10 cars ahead. By observing traffic ahead, the driver can brake preemptively, and SIMULATE a 150 meter gap. Brake lights on the car 10 up from you means the car directly in front of you will match speed in about 2 seconds.
A good driver taps the brakes in this situation, then waits for the car directly in front of him to slow before firmly applying the brakes and slowing in tandem. The brake tap not only warns drivers 20 or 30 cars back, who are too far back to see the original hard-braking vehicle, but it also confirms for the driver that the brakes are in-fact working well before he has to depend on them. That gives the driver plenty of time to react and look for an exit, even if he's floundered in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
You may not like it, but believe me, there are less accidents caused by close following than those caused by poor merging practices. Until you can get all these crazy drivers around me to use their mirrors AND look, you can forget about the 2-second rule.
I think you people need to stop being reactionary and start READING.
Do you know what I thought of when I read the last sentence of the above editorial comment?
He's commenting that alternative fuels are not available at gas stations.
By inference, he is stating that Diesel, the fuel used by this new car, IS widely available at most gas stations. He's inferring that we should take our heads out of the alternative-fuel clouds, and concentrate on more real-world fuel economy and emmissions advances.
Does he need to spell it out for you, like the articles in USA Today?
Forgot to include this in my post above.
Unlike the rest of the world, the Master System caught on heavily in Brazil, kinda like VCD in China. 3rd-party games were made and marked in Brazil well after the Master System died in other countries.
This company in Brazil bought rights to manufacture the hardware after Sega stopped selling it. Hence the reason the page is in Portuguese. I somehow doubt that the system would be offered in English, let alone sold to other countries. I think they only have the rights to sell those in Brazil.
You don't understand. This is not a Ferrari. This a case of "same chassis, same engine, different body" syndrome.
This is just another case of "Same stuff, new package". HEY, LETS CHARGE MORE! Hey, it worked when they ORIGINALLY moved us to CDs from tapes, so why not do it again?
Honestly, this is more lke a Lexus ES300 You might see a good car, but all I see is a souped-up Toyota Camry --- and a big pit with 10k buried in it.
Unfortunately, this is a pipe dream.
A Catch-22, if you will.
So long as programming REQUIRES GREAT SKILL, it will take many hours and many inefficient projectes to train programmers properly. No matter how many books you've read, no matter how many pet projects you have on the side, it's rare to get any REAL programming experience until you're in the trenches, fighting requirements and deadlines.
Nobody seems to get upset that it takes you a year to walk, and another year to get good at it. Unril programming is as natural and predictable as a heartbeat, it will still suffer from the human failing.
That said, how long until machines program themselves?
I know how to emulate FP subtraction. Don't patronize me because your Basic interpreter has left you feeling 1337.
.5 MIPs. YES, thats LESS THAN 500,000 IPS. They didn't have fancy things like barrel shifters or fast ALUs. Your basic instruction took multiple cycles.
The point is you're comparing apples to oranges. I don't care what your modern processor can do. A 4MHZ Z80 didn't even approach
Then, when you actually come down off your cloud and THINK, you realize how a 8-bit processor can easily choke on 32-bit emulated FP. Remember, if you're faced with irrational numbers ( like the example above ), it's going to cost you a lot more cycles using shifts and adds to take it out to the full 24 bits of precision.
All those "easy" shifts and adds take multiple clock cycles each. Tens of thousands of cycles with the overhead from a BASIC interpreter is easy to imagine. Add that to the OS overhead, and suddenly it takes the OS almost a second to parse, caluculate, and cough up the answer ( the hundreds of thousands comment I made ). Sounds small, but it's realy a huge chunk of that 500k IPS.
You're making a false assertion.
This operation contains floating-point arithmetic. On just about all computers of the day, FP units were emulated.
Now, think about how many dozens of cycles a FP divide STILL takes us today with pipelined FP units. Now, consider that these processors run at 1/10000 the processing power of today's chips, and FP numbers have to be emulated by the ALU.
We're talking TENS OF THOUSANDS if not HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cycles for a single FP divide.
The FP multiplications also take a sizeable amount of time, but nowhere near the time the divide takes. All the addition/subtraction also require emulated FP. Considering a speed of only 4MHz, the above would definitely take a noticable chunk of a second, maybe even more than a second if my efficiency guesses are much worse.
You know, if the UK is what you're referring to in this post, then you've got a seriously detached view of the world.
The only reason cell service has done so well in the UK is because of private enterprise. BT has a monopoly on terrestrial service, and I believe ever call is toll. Couple that with the incredibly small size of the country and the decent population density, and suddenly it's not so hard to build a network that provides good coverage and competitive rates.
The US has two barriers against cellular networks:
1: The classical view of US phone service. The US phone service is always-on, and cities have no-toll calling within their area. This is subsidized by long distance tolls. How are cellular companies supposed to convince older generations that these are things worth paying extra for?
2: The US is very big, but the population density is pitifully small on %75 of the land area. How much of it should cellular companies be required to cover? Can we honestly justify getting pissed off about a few holes in downtown Chicago when you can get clear digital service in the middle of Iowa? Or out in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay for that matter ( yes, done that ).
What the hell do you want folks? A cellular service that costs $15 a month and works on every square meter of US soil? Forget it. You want celluarsrvice that works EVERYWHERE? Then move to a state with the population density of the UK or Japan, like New Jersey.
PS: I bet you'd love BT's monopoly on DSL service. Their delays look more shameful than US HDTV.
Psst. The book isn't about predicting the future, it's one big joke that Orwell sets us up for.
:)
Just look at one passage later in the book:
-The Proles cannot spark revolt until they are enlightened.
-The Proles cannot be unlightened until they spark revolt.
It's simply an entirely different take on the whole Catch-22 concept. The Party is subject to the same restraint.
The party claims that all "well-meaning" regimes have crumbled because they don't recognize the human quest for power.
However, the party says that in the past, even the most power-for-power's sake minded regimes failed because of the frailty of humanity in each of us.
So basically Orwell is saying that neither Utopia nor perfect power-for-power's sake are possible, becuase no human could ever create, let alone SUSTAIN them. Only a perfect being could beget either.
So don't worry. Businesses may take over countries and fight endless wars in the future, but they will never excise the humanity in us.
Now, as for the robot armies, well, thats another discussion entirely