I think its time Apple start calling anything based on the power PC architecture twice its clock speed, and anyhting thats both powerPC and 64 bits at 4 times its clock speed. After all, the processor does twice as much as a 32 bit processor in a given clock.
No it does not. Do you think bits are some sort of speed measurement? Like, "bits per second"? 64-bit means the chip has 64-bit registers. Basically what that means is it can work with larger numbers and - more importantly - larger memory addresses. It will take exactly the same time as a 32-bit chip to do a specific operation (ex., add two bytes, jump to a new address in a program, etc.). The speed at which operations are done depends on the chip's design and clock speed.
So calling this new PowerPC that runs at "1.8GHz" a "7.4GHz PowerPC" is just as legitimate as Intel calling their pentiums 2.8GHz, etc. (Cause they don't really actually run at 2.8GHz. That's just one clock rate that exists at some point on the processor. Processor clocking is far more complicated than that.)
What? Of course they run at 2.8 GHz. That's the clock speed; they can't help but run at 2.8 GHz. Even if they have absolutely nothing to do, they still go through 2.8 billion cycles each second. There are clockless chips (that work at a variable speed), but the P4 is not one of them.
The Opteron is probably still a long way off. The first chips based on the Hammer will be called Athlon Something and will have a single core (even the Opteron is likely to have a single core, although there is talk of a dual-core design). The "rating" of the first 64-bit Athlons will probably be around 3400+, running at a little over 2 GHz.
Seeing the number of times the Hammer (and the Itanic) were delayed, I wonder when this new IBM chip will actually see the light of day...
The Athlon XP uses 12% more power than the P4, and hence produces 12% more heat. The problem with Athlons is that (unlike the P4) they don't include an integrated head spreader, so all heat is concentrated on a much smaller area. The Hammer / Opteron does have an IHS, and will probably dissipate between 60 and 80 Watts of heat. That is quite good for a 2.5 GHz, 64-bit chip (compare with 135 Watts for Intel's Itanium 2).
If the difference always points in the same direction, it is significant, even if it's not very big (and it is reasonably big, although some testing methods are rather dubious). In the majority of cases, women's brains show more activity in the language centres and men's brains show more activity in the spatial perception centres. And this matches real-world observations. Just look at the way children develop (girls usually learn to read faster - and this is even before the hormones kick in), or at the way men and women navigate (men use spatial models, women use landmarks). Are you going to tell me that boys are encouraged to not learn to read, or that women are taught by society to use landmarks instead of abstract spatial relationships?
I really don't get those people who keep saying "we are all the same". We are not, and that's part of the fun. Brain damage in certain areas causes fairly specific and consistent changes in personality and ability. So why is it so amazing that a difference in brain structure and brain activity should also have an influence on people's abilities and personalities? Men are different from women. Their bodies are different (most men don't have breasts, have you noticed?), their chemistry is different (most wome produce very little testosterone, you know?), their brains are different.
Why do some people have such a hard time accepting that the brain is as subject to genetic differences as the size of the jaw or the amount of chest hair?
Yes, some women have chest hair, and some men have a short jaw. But if you see someone with a chin like Bruce Campbell and more chest hair than Sean Connery, you will probably assume it's a man.
It's like the gay gene. Oh no, no way a gene could determine that! After all, genes are just our blueprint. They can determine the colour of my eyes, how tall I am, the health problems I'll have when I'm 70, but no way they could have any sort of influence over whether I'm gay or straight. Well, the margin of error of most studies on that subject was less than.01%. There is a gay gene.
Of course, you don't have to do what your genes tell you, just like you don't have to do what your mother or your army superior tell you. Education and experience play an important role, too. But it's kind of hard to say they have no influence at all, or that their influence is irrelevant. And the (consistent) genetic difference between men and women is much bigger than the (consistent) genetic difference between straight and gay men.
Most games nowadays are made by teams of more than twenty people. And a lot of teams include women, but they're not usually designers or programmers. They're artists, producers, etc..
I studied IT / software engineering in college, and in over 1000 students, there were about 20 women. I'm sure this is partly a social thing, but I think most women don't like programming as much as men. They get bored. Just like most men get bored teaching young children or dealing with people over a phone. And again, I'm pretty sure there are biological factors here. Women prefer more social activities; men prefer to work alone, or in very small teams.
That doesn't mean women can't be great game designers, though (and that's what really matters here). But I don't think most women would design "these games"; they would design different games. If I'm not mistaken, at least one of The Sims' lead designers is a woman (possibly two, I'm not sure).
So I think the mistake here is thinking that, because Lara is a female character, the game should appeal to girls. It won't, even if you make her boobs smaller, or if you replace her with a semi-nude man that keeps turning back to the camera and saying charming one-liners. What matters is the gameplay, and this sort of game (exploring, jumping, shooting) doesn't appeal to women as much as it does to men.
I think the perfect female game would be "Shoe Shop Tycoon".;-)
Yes they can, read the studies. There are differences in the actual brain tissue, and they're there even in babies. Men have better connections within each brain hemisphere and women have better connections between the two hemispheres. Most boys learn to move faster than girls, and most girls use complex speech before boys. Regardless of culture or race (there are also some racial differences, but they're almost irrelevant compared to the difference between men and women, and social differences only kick in later).
A difference between male and female brains is common in other species as well, and has been observerd in animals raised in laboratories, with no social interaction.
Let me put this in terms that a Slashdot reader can understand: Athlons and Pentiums are both x86 CPUs, but Athlons have a better FPU and Pentiums have better hardware prefetch. They do the same tasks, but they're wired differently.
I know lots of women (and girls) who play computer games. But as I said, it's usually the kind of game where you're not actually in the game (board games, card games, puzzle games, some management games, etc.). And they play for hours; much longer than I could play without getting bored.
There was an article on Slashdot a couple of days ago about a man who died after playing some game for 86 hours. That's nothing. I know a secretary that apparently has been playing Awalé non-stop for six years.:-)
I saw a documentary about it on BBC a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I can't remember the title. They gave two groups (men and women) a series of tasks and compared the results. Most women were much better at reading other people's faces and body language, they had better visual memory and they were able to do more tasks at the same time without getting confused. Most men were better at orientation (going through mazes, reading maps, moving around with their eyes closed) and abstraction (using machines and tools without having to concentrate so much on what they were doing). Brains scans also showed that the actual brain tissue is different between both sexes.
One of the funniest tests was when they asked the men and women to draw a bicycle, from memory. Most women drew the right parts, but in the wrong places (ie, the bikes wouldn't work). In men's drawings, all the parts were in the right places. Basically this shows that most women tend to keep visual mental images (ie, they are remembering a specific bicycle) while most men have functional, or conceptual mental images (ie, they are remembering the characteristics that make a bike work, and creating the image from that).
A quick search on Google produced a few interesting pages such as this one, this one or this one.
Because Lara has big tits? So what? Duke Nukem has huge muscles. Is it the clothes? Should Lara wear an evening dress, then? And doesn't Duke walk around with a bare chest for most of the time? So what? Does anyone really buy the games to look at Lara's tits or Duke's biceps?
If anything, Tomb Raider managed to make some male gamers play a female character for the first time in their lives. I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing, now that I think about it.
Anyway, back to the subject: why is it so hard to find women to play Tomb Raider games?
Simple: women and men think in different ways (okay, it hasn't been cientifically proven that women think at all, but let's admit they do).
When women play the game, they're playing a game. When men play the game, they're in the game.
This became clear to me one day when I was playing Tomb Raider and my mother walked by. I showed her a few of Lara's moves and I said "see, I can also jump backwards like this". And she said "you? it's not you, it's her, on the screen". I've seen other women react the same way to similar games. Men never have a problem placing themselves in the game, even if the character is a woman, or a robot, or a mutant slug.
Women find it much harder to picture themselves inside the game world, as opposed to sitting on a chair, playing the game. That's why women prefer games like Solitaire and SimCity and The Sims and other games where the player is clearly "on the outside". Games where they move the pieces but are not one of the pieces.
This has been shown again and again by psychological studies, and is also the reason why most men drive more naturally (ie, without having to concentrate on what they're doing) than most women; men become the car while women try to control the car.
Of course, some women can drive instinctively, and some women play Tomb Raider and Counter-Strike and hate solitaire. But I can't say I've ever met one personally, and I do go out sometimes.
You can't make exact copies of protected audio "CDs" (the ones that use Cactus Data Shield), for example. You can read them and copy them (using the marker / tape trick), but the copy won't include the protection, so it's not an exact copy.
Now imagine you have a disc that has a similar "protection ring" but instead of being on the edge, it's in a random place on the disc. The actual program on the disc knows exactly where it is, and simply skips over it (by reading the disc sectors explicitly). But any program that actually tries to read it will basically "freeze" (which is what happens when you try to read a protected audio CD without doing the marker trick). To copy it, you would need to know exactly which sectors are covered by the protection. Eventually it could be determined, but since each disc could have the protection in a different place, it would mean everybody would have to waste time trying to determine those sectors for their disc.
This is just a thought; I don't know if this is how it actually works. Either way, as soon as someone cracks the protection code (ie, a "no-CD patch"), you can simply copy the files to a regular CD and make as many copies as you want. So, as usual, this is a complete waste of money that benefits no-one except SecuROM itself.
If the protection is tied to some physical detail of the disc, then you will probably not be able to create working ISOs or CD copies. But most piracy is not based on CD images anyway; it's based on ripped and cracked version of the games, that are patched to completely ignore the presence of the disc. So software pirates couldn't care less.
As usual, the only people who will profit from this are SecuROM themselves. Software publishers (who just never learn) will have to pay a license, so they lose, and most users won't be able to backup their media, so they lose too.
I have a rule when buying software which is: the legit version has to be at least as good as the pirate version. When you look at games like Neverwinter Nights, and all the problems caused by the copy protection, you definitely start to wonder whether you should pay 50 for something that may or many not work, or simply download the cracked version that you know will work.
In the end I bougth the original, and it worked fine on my system. It did turn out to be a crap game, and I wish I'd tried the "shareware" version first (which was out about 2 days after the game), but I can't say the problem was in the copy protection.
Interestingly, Neverwinter Night's latest patch removed the disc check completely. How much money would they have saved (both in licensing and user support) if they hadn't used it in the first place? And how many customers did they lose because of it?
You may not be aware of this, because They tried to cover it up, but I once wrote the world's most powerful chess program.
My approach was simple: to compute every possible move in every possible game, and come up with the perfect sequence. It took 14 years to do, on a 700-CPU supercluster, but finally we 'solved' chess. The database was huge. The program was unbeatable.
Unfortunately it was also rather boring. The human would make the first move and, invariably, the computer would spend 4 hours sorting through the database and finally declared:
Technically, you can use a pint mug to drink champagne. But most people prefer to use a champagne glass or a flute.
Personally, I prefer to simply hit "delete" to move files to a preset temporary directory (which can also remember where those files originally were, and restore them with a couple of clicks) than to have to manually drag them to a directory I created.
If this kind of "commodity" seems pointless to you, then you probably program by writing machine code with a text editor.;-)
RMN ~~~
At 135 watts per chip...
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 5, Funny
...can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
In fact, I know from a reliable source that tomorrow the president of the USA is going to reveal that the Iraqi army has managed to get hold of 2000 Itanium chips and is threatening to turn them all on and melt the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case they should also include an 8-bit chip, because the vast majority of values processed by any CPU is 8 bits long.
RMN
~~~
I think its time Apple start calling anything based on the power PC architecture twice its clock speed, and anyhting thats both powerPC and 64 bits at 4 times its clock speed. After all, the processor does twice as much as a 32 bit processor in a given clock.
No it does not. Do you think bits are some sort of speed measurement? Like, "bits per second"? 64-bit means the chip has 64-bit registers. Basically what that means is it can work with larger numbers and - more importantly - larger memory addresses. It will take exactly the same time as a 32-bit chip to do a specific operation (ex., add two bytes, jump to a new address in a program, etc.). The speed at which operations are done depends on the chip's design and clock speed.
So calling this new PowerPC that runs at "1.8GHz" a "7.4GHz PowerPC" is just as legitimate as Intel calling their pentiums 2.8GHz, etc. (Cause they don't really actually run at 2.8GHz. That's just one clock rate that exists at some point on the processor. Processor clocking is far more complicated than that.)
What? Of course they run at 2.8 GHz. That's the clock speed; they can't help but run at 2.8 GHz. Even if they have absolutely nothing to do, they still go through 2.8 billion cycles each second. There are clockless chips (that work at a variable speed), but the P4 is not one of them.
RMN
~~~
The Opteron is probably still a long way off. The first chips based on the Hammer will be called Athlon Something and will have a single core (even the Opteron is likely to have a single core, although there is talk of a dual-core design). The "rating" of the first 64-bit Athlons will probably be around 3400+, running at a little over 2 GHz.
Seeing the number of times the Hammer (and the Itanic) were delayed, I wonder when this new IBM chip will actually see the light of day...
RMN
~~~
The melting point of steel is about 1500C.
The Athlon XP uses 12% more power than the P4, and hence produces 12% more heat. The problem with Athlons is that (unlike the P4) they don't include an integrated head spreader, so all heat is concentrated on a much smaller area. The Hammer / Opteron does have an IHS, and will probably dissipate between 60 and 80 Watts of heat. That is quite good for a 2.5 GHz, 64-bit chip (compare with 135 Watts for Intel's Itanium 2).
On the contrary. This is simply enabling the Xbox to do something that the PS2 already does. If anything, it should increase Xbox sales.
RMN
~~~
If the difference always points in the same direction, it is significant, even if it's not very big (and it is reasonably big, although some testing methods are rather dubious). In the majority of cases, women's brains show more activity in the language centres and men's brains show more activity in the spatial perception centres. And this matches real-world observations. Just look at the way children develop (girls usually learn to read faster - and this is even before the hormones kick in), or at the way men and women navigate (men use spatial models, women use landmarks). Are you going to tell me that boys are encouraged to not learn to read, or that women are taught by society to use landmarks instead of abstract spatial relationships?
.01%. There is a gay gene.
I really don't get those people who keep saying "we are all the same". We are not, and that's part of the fun. Brain damage in certain areas causes fairly specific and consistent changes in personality and ability. So why is it so amazing that a difference in brain structure and brain activity should also have an influence on people's abilities and personalities? Men are different from women. Their bodies are different (most men don't have breasts, have you noticed?), their chemistry is different (most wome produce very little testosterone, you know?), their brains are different.
Why do some people have such a hard time accepting that the brain is as subject to genetic differences as the size of the jaw or the amount of chest hair?
Yes, some women have chest hair, and some men have a short jaw. But if you see someone with a chin like Bruce Campbell and more chest hair than Sean Connery, you will probably assume it's a man.
It's like the gay gene. Oh no, no way a gene could determine that! After all, genes are just our blueprint. They can determine the colour of my eyes, how tall I am, the health problems I'll have when I'm 70, but no way they could have any sort of influence over whether I'm gay or straight. Well, the margin of error of most studies on that subject was less than
Of course, you don't have to do what your genes tell you, just like you don't have to do what your mother or your army superior tell you. Education and experience play an important role, too. But it's kind of hard to say they have no influence at all, or that their influence is irrelevant. And the (consistent) genetic difference between men and women is much bigger than the (consistent) genetic difference between straight and gay men.
RMN
~~~
Most games nowadays are made by teams of more than twenty people. And a lot of teams include women, but they're not usually designers or programmers. They're artists, producers, etc..
;-)
I studied IT / software engineering in college, and in over 1000 students, there were about 20 women. I'm sure this is partly a social thing, but I think most women don't like programming as much as men. They get bored. Just like most men get bored teaching young children or dealing with people over a phone. And again, I'm pretty sure there are biological factors here. Women prefer more social activities; men prefer to work alone, or in very small teams.
That doesn't mean women can't be great game designers, though (and that's what really matters here). But I don't think most women would design "these games"; they would design different games. If I'm not mistaken, at least one of The Sims' lead designers is a woman (possibly two, I'm not sure).
So I think the mistake here is thinking that, because Lara is a female character, the game should appeal to girls. It won't, even if you make her boobs smaller, or if you replace her with a semi-nude man that keeps turning back to the camera and saying charming one-liners. What matters is the gameplay, and this sort of game (exploring, jumping, shooting) doesn't appeal to women as much as it does to men.
I think the perfect female game would be "Shoe Shop Tycoon".
RMN
~~~
Yes they can, read the studies. There are differences in the actual brain tissue, and they're there even in babies. Men have better connections within each brain hemisphere and women have better connections between the two hemispheres. Most boys learn to move faster than girls, and most girls use complex speech before boys. Regardless of culture or race (there are also some racial differences, but they're almost irrelevant compared to the difference between men and women, and social differences only kick in later).
A difference between male and female brains is common in other species as well, and has been observerd in animals raised in laboratories, with no social interaction.
Let me put this in terms that a Slashdot reader can understand: Athlons and Pentiums are both x86 CPUs, but Athlons have a better FPU and Pentiums have better hardware prefetch. They do the same tasks, but they're wired differently.
RMN
~~~
I know lots of women (and girls) who play computer games. But as I said, it's usually the kind of game where you're not actually in the game (board games, card games, puzzle games, some management games, etc.). And they play for hours; much longer than I could play without getting bored.
:-)
There was an article on Slashdot a couple of days ago about a man who died after playing some game for 86 hours. That's nothing. I know a secretary that apparently has been playing Awalé non-stop for six years.
RMN
~~~
I saw a documentary about it on BBC a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I can't remember the title. They gave two groups (men and women) a series of tasks and compared the results. Most women were much better at reading other people's faces and body language, they had better visual memory and they were able to do more tasks at the same time without getting confused. Most men were better at orientation (going through mazes, reading maps, moving around with their eyes closed) and abstraction (using machines and tools without having to concentrate so much on what they were doing). Brains scans also showed that the actual brain tissue is different between both sexes.
One of the funniest tests was when they asked the men and women to draw a bicycle, from memory. Most women drew the right parts, but in the wrong places (ie, the bikes wouldn't work). In men's drawings, all the parts were in the right places. Basically this shows that most women tend to keep visual mental images (ie, they are remembering a specific bicycle) while most men have functional, or conceptual mental images (ie, they are remembering the characteristics that make a bike work, and creating the image from that).
A quick search on Google produced a few interesting pages such as this one, this one or this one.
RMN
~~~
Because Lara has big tits? So what? Duke Nukem has huge muscles. Is it the clothes? Should Lara wear an evening dress, then? And doesn't Duke walk around with a bare chest for most of the time? So what? Does anyone really buy the games to look at Lara's tits or Duke's biceps?
If anything, Tomb Raider managed to make some male gamers play a female character for the first time in their lives. I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing, now that I think about it.
Anyway, back to the subject: why is it so hard to find women to play Tomb Raider games?
Simple: women and men think in different ways (okay, it hasn't been cientifically proven that women think at all, but let's admit they do).
When women play the game, they're playing a game. When men play the game, they're in the game.
This became clear to me one day when I was playing Tomb Raider and my mother walked by. I showed her a few of Lara's moves and I said "see, I can also jump backwards like this". And she said "you? it's not you, it's her, on the screen". I've seen other women react the same way to similar games. Men never have a problem placing themselves in the game, even if the character is a woman, or a robot, or a mutant slug.
Women find it much harder to picture themselves inside the game world, as opposed to sitting on a chair, playing the game. That's why women prefer games like Solitaire and SimCity and The Sims and other games where the player is clearly "on the outside". Games where they move the pieces but are not one of the pieces.
This has been shown again and again by psychological studies, and is also the reason why most men drive more naturally (ie, without having to concentrate on what they're doing) than most women; men become the car while women try to control the car.
Of course, some women can drive instinctively, and some women play Tomb Raider and Counter-Strike and hate solitaire. But I can't say I've ever met one personally, and I do go out sometimes.
RMN
~~~
You can't make exact copies of protected audio "CDs" (the ones that use Cactus Data Shield), for example. You can read them and copy them (using the marker / tape trick), but the copy won't include the protection, so it's not an exact copy.
Now imagine you have a disc that has a similar "protection ring" but instead of being on the edge, it's in a random place on the disc. The actual program on the disc knows exactly where it is, and simply skips over it (by reading the disc sectors explicitly). But any program that actually tries to read it will basically "freeze" (which is what happens when you try to read a protected audio CD without doing the marker trick). To copy it, you would need to know exactly which sectors are covered by the protection. Eventually it could be determined, but since each disc could have the protection in a different place, it would mean everybody would have to waste time trying to determine those sectors for their disc.
This is just a thought; I don't know if this is how it actually works. Either way, as soon as someone cracks the protection code (ie, a "no-CD patch"), you can simply copy the files to a regular CD and make as many copies as you want. So, as usual, this is a complete waste of money that benefits no-one except SecuROM itself.
RMN
~~~
If the protection is tied to some physical detail of the disc, then you will probably not be able to create working ISOs or CD copies. But most piracy is not based on CD images anyway; it's based on ripped and cracked version of the games, that are patched to completely ignore the presence of the disc. So software pirates couldn't care less.
As usual, the only people who will profit from this are SecuROM themselves. Software publishers (who just never learn) will have to pay a license, so they lose, and most users won't be able to backup their media, so they lose too.
I have a rule when buying software which is: the legit version has to be at least as good as the pirate version. When you look at games like Neverwinter Nights, and all the problems caused by the copy protection, you definitely start to wonder whether you should pay 50 for something that may or many not work, or simply download the cracked version that you know will work.
In the end I bougth the original, and it worked fine on my system. It did turn out to be a crap game, and I wish I'd tried the "shareware" version first (which was out about 2 days after the game), but I can't say the problem was in the copy protection.
Interestingly, Neverwinter Night's latest patch removed the disc check completely. How much money would they have saved (both in licensing and user support) if they hadn't used it in the first place? And how many customers did they lose because of it?
RMN
~~~
Yes but, depending on the game, he may have to wait for everyone else to die. That could take some time.
RMN
~~~
That's a tournament / match rule. It's not a game rule.
RMN
~~~
No it's not. There's no limit to the number of moves in a game of chess; you can spend all eternity moving pieces back and forth if you like.
RMN
~~~
Because that would be cheating. ;-)
BTW, I didn't really do that. I don't even particularly like chess. I can never remember how the little horse-shaped ones move.
RMN
~~~
You may not be aware of this, because They tried to cover it up, but I once wrote the world's most powerful chess program.
My approach was simple: to compute every possible move in every possible game, and come up with the perfect sequence. It took 14 years to do, on a 700-CPU supercluster, but finally we 'solved' chess. The database was huge. The program was unbeatable.
Unfortunately it was also rather boring. The human would make the first move and, invariably, the computer would spend 4 hours sorting through the database and finally declared:
Checkmate in 14705 moves. I win.
RMN
~~~
matches between Kramnik and Fritz will take place every other day, be adjourned after 60 moves, and Fritz will not be reprogrammed between matches.
;-)
Sounds fair. As long as Kramnik isn't reprogrammed either.
RMN
~~~
..actually use them on... er... human bei... hm... nevermind.
RMN
~~~
Well, no. Real men have a sex life. ;-)
RMN
~~~
Technically, you can use a pint mug to drink champagne. But most people prefer to use a champagne glass or a flute.
;-)
Personally, I prefer to simply hit "delete" to move files to a preset temporary directory (which can also remember where those files originally were, and restore them with a couple of clicks) than to have to manually drag them to a directory I created.
If this kind of "commodity" seems pointless to you, then you probably program by writing machine code with a text editor.
RMN
~~~
...can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
In fact, I know from a reliable source that tomorrow the president of the USA is going to reveal that the Iraqi army has managed to get hold of 2000 Itanium chips and is threatening to turn them all on and melt the Earth.
RMN
~~~
I don't think most people use datacentres to play Doom, you know...?
The Itanium is not meant to be a desktop chip. The problem is, it can't seem to cut it as server chip either (too expensive, too power-hungry).
You say there's no demand for 64-bit chips? I wonder why Sun and IBM are still in business, then...
RMN
~~~
...or does anyone else find the sentence "flat 3D screen" a bit funny?
RMN
~~~