I just don't get it, which makes sense since I'm not a CPU designer or fab engineer. But RISC CPUs (like MIPS and Alpha) should be able to run at much faster clock speeds than the CISC-based x86 architectures.
RISC means Reduced Instruction Set. So, simpler and shorter processing pipelines, less transistor complexit, more cache, more registers, no microcode layer. This should allow much faster CPU clocks, like when the Alphas were running at 333 Mhz when x86s were toying with 100 MHz.
So WTF is with 700 Mhz and PPC chips barely cracking 1 Ghz? Is this simply because of a less sophisticated fab process? Anyone know the answer to this?
Riddle me this folks. Alpha's speed was partly because it was RISC, which meant it could be clocked higher due to the simpler instruction set => simpler pipelines => no microcode (I think RISC didn't need microcode...)
So why do PowerPC chips, really the only mass-market RISC alternative, lag behind the grossly complex x86 chips in clock speed? Mac chips just broke 1GHz, while intel is sitting at 3 GHz. Doing simplistic multiplication, the Alpha-Intel speed difference of yore means that PowerPCs should be scorching at 4-5Ghz, even if Intel has borrowed as many RISC tricks and sacrificed Mhz for good design. Anyone know why?
MVC aka
three-tier server aka
thin-client aka
dumb terminal - mainframeprogram - mainframedatabase
When will people stop reinventing everything with a goddamn new-fangled term?
Patterns are a nice abstraction, but the level to which people apply them is out of control. Once you've designed something, you can simplify the communication of the design by explaining its structure in patterns, but thumbing through a pattern book to find a design is just not the right way to approach things.
Here's a question: why the hell doesn't the ISS rotate to simulate gravity like every other hard-sci space station I've seen or heard of? You can still have zero-G areas, and it could easily be designed to still dock easily.
To me the ISS is nothing more than a glorified space-borne rat maze.
Java has a huge, standardized API and concept breadth, from Networking, I/O, JDBC, JNDI, JMS, RMI, Serialization, Threads, and 1.4 added a WHOLE LOT MORE. That's why there is a large number of books.
C# had 5 years to improve on Java, and really didn't, beyond some additional syntactic sugar. The language has a few twists that C/C++ don't have, but C++ is more complicated (and much less standardized) than Java and its APIs.
The article said something about months to fully understand. Months? This is a standard? ANyone remember XSL formatting language? Anyone use it? Nope, because it was huge. XSL-T was reasonably sized and it got used.
How anything in XML-land takes months to understand when XML docs are little more than glorified hyped text files is beyond me. The only time this should happen is understanding what human/cultural aspect XML is trying to represent, not a technology.
DOS will never die, as long as there are so many classic old games for it. Just like Apple ][ and C64 won't die for a few decades. I KNOW I'll be trying to run lode runner or Wizardry or Ultima in 2030...
Because the monopolies on broadband aren't expanding speed and capacity, processor-pushing broadband internet-based apps aren't developing, such as a videophone, MPEG-4 video encoding/decoding, RARing of large files, or stuff I can't even think of. Yep, napster probably pushed processors and hard drives, and we need video/CDROM pirating to do the same.
Why didn't you just grab the "print" version of Salon, which was just the article texts, every day?
I've done pods development in AvantGo 3.x and 4.x, and its a serious piece of junk.
In previous occurrences of magnetic pole shifting, there likely would have been a very wide variety of species of animals and plants throughout the world. The populations of these species would be quite large too.
These days the footprint of six billion humans plus the space devoted to specialized species of grains and grazing animals means that there aren't as many animals and plants in the food chain. I always considered this the true danger from global warming since we are combining it with species extinctions and that could threaten food heirarchies around the world
A magnetic pole reversal might be more catastrophic than significant global warming. And there probably isn't anything we could do.
Humans could paradoxically always move into space...
An advertised false positive rate of 0% is nice, but why not additional research into the spam, to attempt to categorize into blatant spam, probable spam, borderline, and non-spam, and see if false positives can be plopped into the borderline categories.
Also, from what I saw in the article, there will already be a next level that spam can take: image-based messages, misspellings of key words (klik, Clic, Clik, etc), using 0xfe0000 for almost-bright-red.
In college (circa 1994) my comp sci graphics prof talked about the research system he was working on:
1 processor/pixel
but heck I'll take 1 card/line. How far are we from good real-time raytracing with refraction effects and the like, anyway?
What bullshit. Commodore 64 as a market example? Apple beat Commmodore to the market for the first Personal Computers, although there are probably technicalities for various others, but Apple was the big first PC, then Commodore one-upped them, then IBM.
But increasing processor performance won't kill TiVo or open the door. Better hard disk space is a commodity advantage to TiVo and its competitors
Commodity PCs will kill TiVo. Slate, leave this to Salon for mass-market nontechie tech articles.
Why use SMT on a $500-1000 processor to effectively subdivide 3 GHz among processes when there should be motherboards that support four-eight $50 processors that run at 2Gh, and allow the subdivision of 8, 10, whatever gigahertz among processes?
Basically, Intel doesn't have a mass-market application for gigahertz processors. DiVX encoders may need it, but ma on IE doesn't. So they try to lump as much processing onto the CPU as possible, damned if it should be there. If they had their way, your NVIDIA 3D processing would be directly on the chip too (SSE, MMX, or AMD's 3DNow!). But they can't do that economically with what's needed.
Isn't this and example of the achilles heel of any CD-encryption/protection technology? The hardware reader has to decrypt it at some point, and then a program can just capture the unencrypted bits and reroute them as desired, for example to an unencrypted image.
If it's dedicated hardware, you just have to make friends with an Electical Engineer.
I used to work at a PDA dev shop that used 802.11a, and when people complain on various forums about the WAPs, the underlying problem isn't the WAP, it's the cards in your laptop/computer. Get ones based on the Orinoco, they may cost slightly more, but their range, performance, and speed were far superior to the, for example, Linksys PCMCIA cards.
If all the Magnetic RAM hype isn't all for naught (that was trendy last year, wasn't it) those are supposed to maintain state without power like SRAMs.
A little more reliable than battery-backed capacitor-based DRAMS.
I agree, this will just lead to people hacking the program installs thus encouraging the creation completely bypassed software versions.
If the write-protection is a minor bother, it will stop most casual users since the l00t haX0rs won't deign to crack it. If its like this, heck, that's just a gauntlet thrown down.
They will just be more likely to create easily distributed hack patches.
SGI must have done this in the late 80s or early 90s. Haven't they expired.
And his post is right strategically. If you don't know about it, you're not copying it, then you're doing "clean room" development, which I recall several companies doing to bypass active patents.
#1 sign of a good programmer: self-starter who reads documentation and uses example code to write in any language.
Face it, no programmer you hire knows the apis and features of the language you select and the architecture you construct 100%. A good programmer learns quickly, adapts programming examples (with code conservation).
Stupidest questions ever in interviews: Can you tell me how works? I.E. is Friendship inherited? Please. A good programmer RTFM when he needs to determine if friendship is needed and if its inherited.
In my paltry 7 years, I've found that I wear all three hats given the situation:
1) How well conceived it is in the first place. Boneheaded management pipe dreams don't warrant repeated high-speed tackling of brick walls by me
2) What's in it for me? In order to deserve effort above the institutional guy, I need rewards. I need an accurate evaluation process (something I've never seen consistently in any company) Or I better be on a fat contract already.
3) Is it interesting?
4) How long? It's hard to maintain top effort and quality for longer than a few months without a little downtime. Although I am a little ADD.
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I just don't get it, which makes sense since I'm not a CPU designer or fab engineer. But RISC CPUs (like MIPS and Alpha) should be able to run at much faster clock speeds than the CISC-based x86 architectures.
RISC means Reduced Instruction Set. So, simpler and shorter processing pipelines, less transistor complexit, more cache, more registers, no microcode layer. This should allow much faster CPU clocks, like when the Alphas were running at 333 Mhz when x86s were toying with 100 MHz.
So WTF is with 700 Mhz and PPC chips barely cracking 1 Ghz? Is this simply because of a less sophisticated fab process? Anyone know the answer to this?
MVC *is* a three-tier architecture: Model = Database Server (3rd tier) View = Client Software (1st tier) Controller = Application Server (2nd tier)
Riddle me this folks. Alpha's speed was partly because it was RISC, which meant it could be clocked higher due to the simpler instruction set => simpler pipelines => no microcode (I think RISC didn't need microcode...)
So why do PowerPC chips, really the only mass-market RISC alternative, lag behind the grossly complex x86 chips in clock speed? Mac chips just broke 1GHz, while intel is sitting at 3 GHz. Doing simplistic multiplication, the Alpha-Intel speed difference of yore means that PowerPCs should be scorching at 4-5Ghz, even if Intel has borrowed as many RISC tricks and sacrificed Mhz for good design. Anyone know why?
MVC aka three-tier server aka thin-client aka dumb terminal - mainframeprogram - mainframedatabase When will people stop reinventing everything with a goddamn new-fangled term? Patterns are a nice abstraction, but the level to which people apply them is out of control. Once you've designed something, you can simplify the communication of the design by explaining its structure in patterns, but thumbing through a pattern book to find a design is just not the right way to approach things.
Here's a question: why the hell doesn't the ISS rotate to simulate gravity like every other hard-sci space station I've seen or heard of? You can still have zero-G areas, and it could easily be designed to still dock easily.
To me the ISS is nothing more than a glorified space-borne rat maze.
Java has a huge, standardized API and concept breadth, from Networking, I/O, JDBC, JNDI, JMS, RMI, Serialization, Threads, and 1.4 added a WHOLE LOT MORE. That's why there is a large number of books.
C# had 5 years to improve on Java, and really didn't, beyond some additional syntactic sugar. The language has a few twists that C/C++ don't have, but C++ is more complicated (and much less standardized) than Java and its APIs.
The article said something about months to fully understand. Months? This is a standard? ANyone remember XSL formatting language? Anyone use it? Nope, because it was huge. XSL-T was reasonably sized and it got used.
How anything in XML-land takes months to understand when XML docs are little more than glorified hyped text files is beyond me. The only time this should happen is understanding what human/cultural aspect XML is trying to represent, not a technology.
DOS will never die, as long as there are so many classic old games for it. Just like Apple ][ and C64 won't die for a few decades. I KNOW I'll be trying to run lode runner or Wizardry or Ultima in 2030...
Because the monopolies on broadband aren't expanding speed and capacity, processor-pushing broadband internet-based apps aren't developing, such as a videophone, MPEG-4 video encoding/decoding, RARing of large files, or stuff I can't even think of. Yep, napster probably pushed processors and hard drives, and we need video/CDROM pirating to do the same.
Why didn't you just grab the "print" version of Salon, which was just the article texts, every day? I've done pods development in AvantGo 3.x and 4.x, and its a serious piece of junk.
In previous occurrences of magnetic pole shifting, there likely would have been a very wide variety of species of animals and plants throughout the world. The populations of these species would be quite large too.
These days the footprint of six billion humans plus the space devoted to specialized species of grains and grazing animals means that there aren't as many animals and plants in the food chain. I always considered this the true danger from global warming since we are combining it with species extinctions and that could threaten food heirarchies around the world
A magnetic pole reversal might be more catastrophic than significant global warming. And there probably isn't anything we could do.
Humans could paradoxically always move into space...
An advertised false positive rate of 0% is nice, but why not additional research into the spam, to attempt to categorize into blatant spam, probable spam, borderline, and non-spam, and see if false positives can be plopped into the borderline categories.
Also, from what I saw in the article, there will already be a next level that spam can take: image-based messages, misspellings of key words (klik, Clic, Clik, etc), using 0xfe0000 for almost-bright-red.
In college (circa 1994) my comp sci graphics prof talked about the research system he was working on: 1 processor/pixel but heck I'll take 1 card/line. How far are we from good real-time raytracing with refraction effects and the like, anyway?
What the hell do you need 4GB of RAM and a solid state drive for (which is almost RAM in its own right)?
What bullshit. Commodore 64 as a market example? Apple beat Commmodore to the market for the first Personal Computers, although there are probably technicalities for various others, but Apple was the big first PC, then Commodore one-upped them, then IBM.
But increasing processor performance won't kill TiVo or open the door. Better hard disk space is a commodity advantage to TiVo and its competitors
Commodity PCs will kill TiVo. Slate, leave this to Salon for mass-market nontechie tech articles.
here's a question:
Why use SMT on a $500-1000 processor to effectively subdivide 3 GHz among processes when there should be motherboards that support four-eight $50 processors that run at 2Gh, and allow the subdivision of 8, 10, whatever gigahertz among processes?
Basically, Intel doesn't have a mass-market application for gigahertz processors. DiVX encoders may need it, but ma on IE doesn't. So they try to lump as much processing onto the CPU as possible, damned if it should be there. If they had their way, your NVIDIA 3D processing would be directly on the chip too (SSE, MMX, or AMD's 3DNow!). But they can't do that economically with what's needed.
Isn't this and example of the achilles heel of any CD-encryption/protection technology? The hardware reader has to decrypt it at some point, and then a program can just capture the unencrypted bits and reroute them as desired, for example to an unencrypted image.
If it's dedicated hardware, you just have to make friends with an Electical Engineer.
Ulp, I mean 802.11B.
I used to work at a PDA dev shop that used 802.11a, and when people complain on various forums about the WAPs, the underlying problem isn't the WAP, it's the cards in your laptop/computer. Get ones based on the Orinoco, they may cost slightly more, but their range, performance, and speed were far superior to the, for example, Linksys PCMCIA cards.
If all the Magnetic RAM hype isn't all for naught (that was trendy last year, wasn't it) those are supposed to maintain state without power like SRAMs.
A little more reliable than battery-backed capacitor-based DRAMS.
I agree, this will just lead to people hacking the program installs thus encouraging the creation completely bypassed software versions.
If the write-protection is a minor bother, it will stop most casual users since the l00t haX0rs won't deign to crack it. If its like this, heck, that's just a gauntlet thrown down.
They will just be more likely to create easily distributed hack patches.
These patents must be expiring soon. How long has it been around? THey're probably squeezing the last of the profits they can.
SGI must have done this in the late 80s or early 90s. Haven't they expired.
And his post is right strategically. If you don't know about it, you're not copying it, then you're doing "clean room" development, which I recall several companies doing to bypass active patents.
#1 sign of a good programmer: self-starter who reads documentation and uses example code to write in any language. Face it, no programmer you hire knows the apis and features of the language you select and the architecture you construct 100%. A good programmer learns quickly, adapts programming examples (with code conservation). Stupidest questions ever in interviews: Can you tell me how works? I.E. is Friendship inherited? Please. A good programmer RTFM when he needs to determine if friendship is needed and if its inherited.
In my paltry 7 years, I've found that I wear all three hats given the situation: 1) How well conceived it is in the first place. Boneheaded management pipe dreams don't warrant repeated high-speed tackling of brick walls by me 2) What's in it for me? In order to deserve effort above the institutional guy, I need rewards. I need an accurate evaluation process (something I've never seen consistently in any company) Or I better be on a fat contract already. 3) Is it interesting? 4) How long? It's hard to maintain top effort and quality for longer than a few months without a little downtime. Although I am a little ADD.