The idea of puting all the chips on one side and slots on the other, while it sounds easy is a real nightmare for HW designers. Many of these chips have 500+ pins (PGA) or 1000+ ball (BGA) these are all comming from a chip less than 2" on a side (PGA) and 1"+ for BGA and all those wires need to go somewhere, the PGA devices have to have holes in the board and can only get wires out from underneath, by going between pins and often only 2 wires fit so another wire has to use another layer. The problem is layers increase cost much faster than additional area, so the boards being bigger than they have to be saves money. There have been specialty technologies developed to get higer denisties, but these are majorly expensive and not realistic for consumer level products. The most impressive I've heard of is IBM super-computer technology, which used a 57 layer board, getting 8 layers to line up is expensive and there is a 30% scrap rate (IIRC) they had to make 100+ boards at 57 layers to get just a couple of working boards. The best way to make smaller machines is to go multi board and stack, the intel processor modules go along way in this direction as do the PCI adapter board that have one slot that you plug a board into that has multiple PCI slots. The heat is going to be the bigest problem no matter how hard you try, smaller means less air and as clock speeds increase less air isn't the right answer. Water cooling, or the electric coolers could help, but its always a how much do you want to pay to get small, fast etc...
Or could it be an intentional slip, nothing like free advirtising, (there is no such thing as bad publicity). They are going to show it tomorrow and we saw it 10hr early, but 300 people have posted in the last 2hrs and many more checked it out without posting (1000-3000 set 'o eyeballs). Hype machine is up and running at full speed ahead. Jobs isn't the marketing/hype leader by accident.
The only problem is, that while an observator on the far/darkside of the moon has a lot of benifits, we can't get there. While NASA could go to the moon in 1969, they don't have a single rocket to do the same now and radio telescopes are huge, less gravity will help, but you still need a huge capture area to hear signals from 100/1000/10000 lightyears away. The moon missions only required the transport of 3 people and life suport (and dune buggy), but the requirements of an serious observatory would be much greater requirements. The article doesn't mention if there is expected to be a support staff or if this would be purely robitic. There is a further problem in that they want it place it on the far/dark side of the moon, to avoid radio interference, (if this was built an optical telescope seems like a simple addition), so how do you get the information back to earth, the cabling required to get the signals back to the near/(bright?) side of the moon would be huge, or maybe you orbit a sattilite for relay purposes, but in anycase this is still a huge undertaking. Don't get me wrong I'd love to see this but this would cost Billions and Billions (said with carl sagan voice) and take 20-30 years, and as the US gov has canned SETI and they were make to look like fools in Contact I can't see them too keen on this.
I am originally a mechanical egngineer and have some expereince with finite element/finite difference work . The short answer is that no OO techniques, don't apply to many engineering tasks. I can remeber not that long ago that entering a bookstore or technical bookstore there would be three of so book cases covering 20-40 languages, now there is one bookcase of C/C++, one of java and half a bookcase of other which seems to mean scripting languages more that anything else like Perl,Tck, Ruby etc... . Those 20-40 languages each had a specialty
Fortran for math/engineering
C for systems programming
Prolog for expert systems
LISP for AI
Snobol for text processing
Cobol for business
Pascal for learning
Ada for formal systems
etc.....
Now the answer is always C/C++/Java, C is realitively general purpose, but C++ is generally 20% slower and larger than a equivalent C application. Java is easier, but I find it strange reasoning that garbage collection is prefered, isn't writing your application correctly a better solution than having the computer clean up after you, kinda like a teenager not putting thier dirty underwear in the hamper becasue Mum will do it eventually. Assembly is always going to be fastest, but the hardest to debug/maintain, the OO languages make life easier, but all the abstraction causes significant speed loss and code bloat. I keep on hearing poeple say that code size and effiency don't matter as thier machine is fast enough and memory is cheap, but Intel is selling faster processors because of inefficient code and people are always adding more memory. C++/Java are fine and are the best solution to some problems, just not all problems. The market is contracting to the point that non C++/Java compilers are rare, and the options will not exist. SW people seem to spend an inordinate amount of time debugging and this is the area that would have the biggest payoff, but heavily typed languages haven't seem much sucess in the market. I spent 6 years, working in Occam a parallel processing language, that have very tight rules and was a formal language, such that there was only one possible solution to given code. We always used to say that in 'C' code, if you got your code to compile you were 20% done, and required the next 80% for debug, while Occam compilation was more painful, getting it to compile you were 80% done, that sort of help makes you more productive than anything else. People hated the compiler complaining about seeming insignificant errors, but the compiler was finding mistakes and helping me rather than hoping that I knew what I was doing. This helped me build 80 processor sonar systems in 11 months, well before any beowolf cluster.
The patent law says that you must grant sub licenses at reasonable rates. Xerox has no benifit in stopping selling of the PalmOS, they on the other hand would be intereted in skimming a few bucks on the OS licensing fees. Xerox being in pretty bad shape could really use the cashm they don't really deserve the money as the single stroke isn't important the accuracy of the handwriting is what makes the system worth while, and thus where the value lies. Scumbag laywers, being scumbags see a chance to do a little skimming of there own, thus the case. My understanding is the Palm gets $8 for each device sold which seems like a lot, most embedded OS's only get $1-2 per use. So Palm may have to pay Xerox a few bucks and then pass that onto thier customers, $2 won't seem too much devices in the $150-$400 range. Handspring may get a pass with the new keyboard driven Treo, they have a Graffiti version but none of the ads or reviews have shown that version, kinda ironic after Mr Hawkins started Graffiti, which is now the problem.
Are things at American universities getting better or worse. 15 years ago when I was in college, when we wanted to have fun we went out and got beer, lots of beer and got drunk. Now in 2001 people have fun by turning poor harmless evergreens into web servers, wha-whooo!!!! They probably will feel better tomorrow than I felt the day after and this was probably an educational rather than brain cell drowning experience, but is this progress????
It all depends on what you want to do. Benchmarks are generally pretty useless and the power estimates even more so, what is the processor supposed to be running when the power estimate is taken. Small applications, running entirely out of cache will use less power than those that must use external memory, and then how do you decide if the power taken by the memory is part of the processor or not. The processor is driving the address lines and data lines when writing, but how do you issolate the power contribution between the two???? Chips like the Transmeta require support chips which adds a second number to the power contribution for the processor. As far as performance is you are doing floating point a processor with floating point will be better even if the clock speed is higher on an integer processor, inversely a simple processor that does only fixed point math is generally smaller and more power efficient. These processors each have different capabilities as far as peripherals, the StrongARM has a lot, the Transmeta relies of support chips, the Geode has some. Bench marks are only helpful in very general relative terms you really need to understand your application and match it to the processor to make a valid decision.
I have seen this in all forms of engineering and education, this idea that people have to specialize and put many years before they could possibly contribute, the old master and apprentice work idea.
My education is in Mechanical Engineering, which was a great education but about the worst degree to get a job with in the mid 80's so I moved to software, first mechanical simulations but eventually into signal processing, compared to EE's and CS majors I pick this stuff up easier than many of the others, and even spent a good portion of my time fixing other "real programmers" code. I got bored with software and moved to systems engineering and then hardware and now ASIC design, haven't been in a classroom in years just pick things up as I go. I am always suprised that what looked so complex at the start is really quite simple after a couple of weeks. I decided a while back that this is true, as nobody is really two times smarter than everyone else and at least one person has to understand the whole problem, so no solution can be more than lets say two weeks study. Maybe I pick things up easier than others but often the real ideas are hidden behind lots of proofs that don't matter to understanding the solution. My best example is a newish field of signal processing/mathamatics called wavelet, there are dozens of math books on the topic, I can't understand a single one of them, even after a few pages my eyes gloss over and I give up. But the concept of wavelets and how they are used and why they work is extremely simple and was explained to me in 5 minutes, and I can explain to others in 5 minutes. Now I can't derive the math behind the theory but I don't need to. But none of the avaiable books takes the time to explain the usage they only derive the theory, which needs to be done once, but once done the application is easy, but none of the books discussed the usage only the theory. It all seems to come down to the "cover your ass" idea, PhD's want to prove how smart they are rather than share knowledge, Guru's are often the same way. Experience is important and especially with computers there are often more work arrounds that real code, to get things working. Remeber that there are only 31 keywords in 'C' code, and Linux is build from 'C' so how hard can it possibly be.
Yes, NTSC has 480 lines, but this in interlaced analog signal at 30Hz frame (60 fields), if 480 was the simple answer VHS would look as good as DVD, it doesn't becasue the effective resolution is much lower. Something like 320 x240, different VHS tapes will have different effective resolutions, and the ability to define a digital resolution from an analog video is purely subjective. There are numerous tricks present in NTSC to reduce the data (bandwidth) required to get minimally acceptable video. The original RCA engineers working on the TV standard, decided on 24Hz video, to match the movie industry, then as geeks often try to do, showed thier new invention off to the women in the office who asked, why the image flicked so much. The male engineers, don't notice the flicker, but women have higher perception to flicker so the frame rate was bumped from 24 to 30Hz. Interlacing is abou the worst thing you can do image quality but it does trick the eye into beleiving the image is better than it really is. Effective resolution is performed on static images, but there has been much recent work on the brains ability to interpolate between, images to significantly bump up the perceived resolution and it has been shown that with jitter of the sensor, a 256x256 sensor can generate a 1Kx1K quality image through interpolation over multiple images, jitter by fractional pixels amounts. So there are 480 lines but that has nothing to do with resolution, your computer is digital so lines = resolution, and even more so with LCD, but in TV its all perception.
In video processin CIF ussually refers to the "Common Image Format" = 352 H x 288 Vertical, this is a CCITT standard, which is neither NTSC or PAL compatible, as ussual. VHS resolution is roughly 320x240 so this would be about as much data as you could support anyway, too small for desktop playback but this LCD is about that size. There is also 4CIF = 704 x 576 and QuarterCIF (QCIF) = 176 x 144.
$3000 is only half of a toliet seat at government prices!!! I think they're using chemical lasers and they are real big and complex, so $3000 for anything the government gets involved in is a pretty good price and if you can use it to save a HUMMV or M1A1 tank the saving would be great, even if you save only a single soldier per $3000 you're way ahead of the game, helps moral, keeps soldiers out of hospitals, saves having to train new soldiers, saves having to knock on parents door to tell them that Johnie isn't comming home. $3000 seems like the deal of the centrury, getting it to work is the only problem I see.
Does this make sense???
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 5, Funny
Electric Scooter $3000 or $600 Bike + $2400 Beer.
IT = 8MPH, Bike = 15MPH
IT = no excersize, Bike = 300+ Cal/hr
IT = No beer, Bike 2400 micro brew or 4800 Bud/MGD
IT = requires power, Bike = burn off beer gut (see above)
I've got Cox@Home, as I understand it Cox is using @Home as a backend does anyone know how the shutdown of Excite@Home effects the other @Home services. I think that a few of the cable service providers also have @Home and they had annonced that they weren't happy and that they felt free to walk away. So does this only apply to direct Excite@Home or do others of us have big problems as well????
How the hell do those chefs get anything done in such a short period of time (1Hr). They supposedly don't even know what the "secret" ingredient is before the show, although they immediately seem to know what their dishes are going to be and have special ingredients that they have brought with them to the show (certain type of flour, oil, spices etc...) that are key to the dishes that they didn't know they were going to make, so that seems a little fishy. But how the hell can they possibly get 5 gourmet dishes done in such a short period including masterful presentation. I can't seem to heat a can of soup in 1Hr and these guys are cooking lamb, making ice cream, making pasta from scratch, etc... . Just 1 dish would take me 2 hrs and they pull off 5 in half the time and they seem to have at least 5 servings, all perfectly arranged with garnish, sauces, real art works. I have trouble keeping the peas from rolling off the plate and they are creating masterpieces!!! The show does hide the fact that they have 3 or 4 helpers but still how the hell can they get that much done in 1 hr???? I realize that these guys are professional chefs and this is an every night sort of thing for them, but I still find this amazing and they never seem to accidentally added too much salt or overcooked something or made a bad guess in creating a new dish. Again I understand that they have much more experience than me and they probably couldn't write code to save thier lives, but it still blows my mind what they do. I do make one hell of a PB&J, but beyond that they got me beat by a mile (light year).
The Iron Chef is definately highly dependant on that energy and excitment. I love the show and watch as often as possible but 10pm Fri + Sat are difficult times to remeber or even be home. If you watch carefully you can notice that the dubbing adds alot that isn't there in the poeple's speech or movements. The editing/dubbing adds alot of that excitment and, jokes and the urgency (get it done within the time limit) that I don't see in the peoples actions. The editing definately makes the show that much more interesting. Its interesting that the dubbing has been done in a casual manner with people making bad guesses on what the dishes will be, bad jokes, and other mistakes in speaking too fast that make the show seem that much more real and lively. Not like Martha Stewart taking in that slow monotone drawl. They must be editing after the taping is over but they still have the commenators making bad guesses and speaking to fast etc... which could be cleaned up, but they insert all that and add some to make it really exciting and lively.
You could get a really really ugly watch for less than half the price. With a 102 x 64 screen you aren't going to get much usable info on the screen and the size and looks of the watch make it a poor choice. The Timex/MS watch from a couple of years ago looked a lot better and while only really scrolled a single line of text was usable. Some thing like the REX in my pocket and a normal watch seems like a much better deal than this. The REX 6000 from Xircom had a touch screen 512KB (IIRC) and very limited scroll to you get the letter you want input but it had a readable screen and multiple apps, if you could download apps it would have been killer, but only palm has seemed to figure that out. If the digital paper stuff from Digital Ink or Xerox ever gets out the door such that you could roll up the screen and the batteries , memory and processor fit inside a small module with the screen rapping arround I'd by one of those in a second probably as small or smaller than lipstick (or chapstick for the guys) would be really useful and probably could get 640x480, thats what I'm waiting for!!!!
But thats my point wouldn't the afore mentioned corrupt bank manger have many other easier ways to mess with the banks computers, or even the dead presidents themseleves. Encrption can't ever defend agaist internal attacks, its designed to keep outsiders outside and this hack only helps insiders that probably have more access anyway, this hack requires appropiate access, to insert keys, but a bank manager would have the access directlt to the money why even bother trying to break the encryption. My point was that this hack defeats the user interface not 3DES.
I didn't read everything, but as I understand it they are treating this IBM cryto card as a black box, sending it info and saving the results, which is reasonable, but they are using priveledged access to this card to get permission to send keys knowing old keys to get into the system. So this requires an insider who has access to the banks internal systems, those people have much easier ways to steal money, the systems are designed primarily to defeat external hackers, insiders and almost impossible to defeat. So the crack is totally dependent on having access both to the card to feed it data and access to priveldges to the banks computers so the person is already inside thier not really cracking 3DES, thier cracking the key storage mechanisms. While this is one way to steal money from a bank, there are realitively few people with this sort of access and I'd be pretty sure that the bank checks up on those poeple before giving them acces, so this is much more of a cleaver work arround that IBM needs to better design thier systems, they are not cracking 3DES, they are cracking the key storage, the encryption is secure, the key storage isn't. As always if you have access, it isn't hard to get in but without that access this hack is meaningless. I've read a few of these supposed hacks and they always make very unrealistic assumptions about having some level of access the crypto scheme is secure the impelmentation isn't (much like the DVD DeCSS, stuff, the security can't be hacked itself but poor impelementation leaves the doors wide open.
Why use a PC like architecture???
on
RLX Gets Denser
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· Score: 1
Why are these guys depending on a Transmeta emulation of an Intel processor, if you want to run NT/2K OS then maybe this is a good reason, but Linux/FreeBSD/??? are a better solution for a server farm especially with rlogin capabilities they would be that much easier to maintain. A StrongARM or other processor, maybe one of the newer Network processors, hopefully from one of those companies that hasn't died in the past few months that is a fast MIPS (doesn't have to be MIPS but networking folks seem to prefer or at least be used to the MIPS architecture). And build a server arround that. These Network processors include on-chip DRAM support (no northbridge/southbridge chips required), have on chip 10/100 support often atleast 2 ports, boot from ROM, have low power modes etc... everything that you want in a server that doesn't exist in the standard PC architecture. PC's are useful as commodity platforms, and that makes life easy, but that also brings alot of headaches and overhead that aren't appropiate to the dense sever market. PMC Sieria has a single chip device (RM9000x2) that has 2 count'em 2 MIPS cores running at 1GHz each, I think each is dual issue superscalar (IIRC) so something like 4 Billion instructions/sec and not the lame old x86 arcitecture, they support DDR SDRAM on chip, having L2 cache on chip so with not much more than a couple of DDR-DIMMs this chip, ethernet and a few other do-dads, you have kick-ass performance well beyond what Transmets could do, maybe even this single chip could replace the 6 Server boards, and still have better system performance and this solution would be considerably smaller than the PC compatible boards discussed here. If you want a dense server build a dense server, don't make small PCs and hope for the best. It seems incrediable to me that people seem to have rolled over and died and accepted the status quo of Wintel and don't seem interested in pushing the envelope even in competive markets with the economy down. The processor only uses about 5W and you could easily put 10 of them in a 1U chasis, the disk drives would take significantly more power anyway, which is one of the problems that I see with the Transmeta solution, they do have a great technology but in general the DRAM, Disk and backlighting (if a laptop) use more power each as compared to the CPU, so the end benifit is lost or not noticable, so you need to rethink the architecture and move away from the legacy PC to a streamlined solution.
I assume that as the TM processors can emulate a similar clock speed processor of another architecture, they must be pretty fast to both translate and execute and get nearly equal clock speed, they could run native code at a speed exceeding that of x86 processors. As I understood it, they were comming out with two processors (originally, I think more have been announced since), one with a more basic config and a second with higher clock speed, and extra cache to enhance x86 emulation performance. The slower smaller and one would assume cheaper processor was supposed to run Mobile Linux (IIRC), most of the news has covered x86/windows devices, but I've heard very little about native code on the TM processors. Intel has beat TM at laptop market by "borrowing" TM's technology (speedstep and low voltage). The Linux stuff was aimed at webpads and thin servers, both markets seemed to slow even more than the desktop market.
I kinda see as it as time for a revolution, Intel and M$ have dominated for quite a while and it seems like its time for a new paradigm, don't know what that might be (or else I could retire early, it sucks to still be working at 37). Technology needs to cycle every few years, and it ceratinly seems like time for something new. Processor emulation seemed like a looser to me from the start, maybe with someone other than Intel with thier overly deep pockets it will be really, really hard to compete (read impossible), running head on into a giant, never seemed like a good business plan. Thier code morphing tech is certainly impressive, but why emulate/copy when you can end run, with Intel moving to IA-64 if everone needs to change processors anyway, now seems the right time to introduce a competing technology. I actually see AMD as being the major x86 leader as people avoid IA-64. IA-64 seems like a pretty big risk and alot of x86 apps probably won't work or will require emulation anyway so another processor (with M$'s support of course) could emerge. TM should bag emulation and try to innovate mobile processors or extend the x86, I don't see much else working well.
Some people certainly have special needs, but as Intel has the cash they will push ahead while architectures like the Alpha, without the funding will fall further and further behind. The Ultra Sparc has a much better chance of being available in a year or two than the Alpha. The standard comparision is VHS vs BetaMax, there may be desirable benifits but the market pushes things more. As an engineer I hate this trend, as better technologies get pushed aside by lesser technologies and people like yourself who have outside of the norm reguirements find it harder and harder. There is clearly too much convergence in technologies Windows 90%, Intel 95% C/C++/Java dominate except for scripting languages. I remeber going to technical bookstores and there being 5 bookcases of books covering 30+ languages, FORTRAN for engineering, Snobol for text etc... now its C on 1 bookcase, Java on 2 and other on a single shelf collecting dust. In my mind its time for a revoloution and everything will change, I just wish I knew in which direction so I could invest before the jump.
Intel has boat loads of cash, current pentiums get thier speed with a 20 count'em 20 stage pipeline, while most risc processors are 4-8 stages. Pipelining is a great way to get speed, but very difficult to get working and stay working partiucally after branches and pipeline stalls/flushes with interrupt support being the messiest part. Intel takes something like 3 years to rev a 1.0GHz design into 1.2GHz and have multiple teams working a once, i.e. a team finishing 2.0GHz, 75% done for 2.2, 50% done for 2.5, 25% done for 2.7 and just getting started for 3.0. I don't know how may teams they have but they are not only pipelining the processor but also the developemnt teams, while others can afford only 1 design team Intel can afford 10 (a wild guess) and Intel knows that they will continue to dominate so the large engineering budget really isn't risky at all. Money talks. PowerPC, MIPS, ARM and Alpha are better technologies but money beats technology most of the time. (MS vs Linux)
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I'd love to have a beowulf cluster of burning satellite pieces!!! ;-)
USPS = unreliable
MS Windows = unreliable
Does unreliablity sum or go up as a geometric series???
USPS + M$ = unreliable x2
or
USPS * MS = unreliable ^2 ???
The controller in the harddisk is probably 10 times faster than the 2MHz 6502, so isn't this really an apple II emulator for an IDE drive/CF card???
The idea of puting all the chips on one side and slots on the other, while it sounds easy is a real nightmare for HW designers. Many of these chips have 500+ pins (PGA) or 1000+ ball (BGA) these are all comming from a chip less than 2" on a side (PGA) and 1"+ for BGA and all those wires need to go somewhere, the PGA devices have to have holes in the board and can only get wires out from underneath, by going between pins and often only 2 wires fit so another wire has to use another layer. The problem is layers increase cost much faster than additional area, so the boards being bigger than they have to be saves money. There have been specialty technologies developed to get higer denisties, but these are majorly expensive and not realistic for consumer level products. The most impressive I've heard of is IBM super-computer technology, which used a 57 layer board, getting 8 layers to line up is expensive and there is a 30% scrap rate (IIRC) they had to make 100+ boards at 57 layers to get just a couple of working boards. The best way to make smaller machines is to go multi board and stack, the intel processor modules go along way in this direction as do the PCI adapter board that have one slot that you plug a board into that has multiple PCI slots. The heat is going to be the bigest problem no matter how hard you try, smaller means less air and as clock speeds increase less air isn't the right answer. Water cooling, or the electric coolers could help, but its always a how much do you want to pay to get small, fast etc...
Or could it be an intentional slip, nothing like free advirtising, (there is no such thing as bad publicity). They are going to show it tomorrow and we saw it 10hr early, but 300 people have posted in the last 2hrs and many more checked it out without posting (1000-3000 set 'o eyeballs). Hype machine is up and running at full speed ahead. Jobs isn't the marketing/hype leader by accident.
The only problem is, that while an observator on the far/darkside of the moon has a lot of benifits, we can't get there. While NASA could go to the moon in 1969, they don't have a single rocket to do the same now and radio telescopes are huge, less gravity will help, but you still need a huge capture area to hear signals from 100/1000/10000 lightyears away. The moon missions only required the transport of 3 people and life suport (and dune buggy), but the requirements of an serious observatory would be much greater requirements. The article doesn't mention if there is expected to be a support staff or if this would be purely robitic. There is a further problem in that they want it place it on the far/dark side of the moon, to avoid radio interference, (if this was built an optical telescope seems like a simple addition), so how do you get the information back to earth, the cabling required to get the signals back to the near/(bright?) side of the moon would be huge, or maybe you orbit a sattilite for relay purposes, but in anycase this is still a huge undertaking. Don't get me wrong I'd love to see this but this would cost Billions and Billions (said with carl sagan voice) and take 20-30 years, and as the US gov has canned SETI and they were make to look like fools in Contact I can't see them too keen on this.
I am originally a mechanical egngineer and have some expereince with finite element/finite difference work . The short answer is that no OO techniques, don't apply to many engineering tasks. I can remeber not that long ago that entering a bookstore or technical bookstore there would be three of so book cases covering 20-40 languages, now there is one bookcase of C/C++, one of java and half a bookcase of other which seems to mean scripting languages more that anything else like Perl,Tck, Ruby etc... . Those 20-40 languages each had a specialty .....
Fortran for math/engineering
C for systems programming
Prolog for expert systems
LISP for AI
Snobol for text processing
Cobol for business
Pascal for learning
Ada for formal systems
etc
Now the answer is always C/C++/Java, C is realitively general purpose, but C++ is generally 20% slower and larger than a equivalent C application. Java is easier, but I find it strange reasoning that garbage collection is prefered, isn't writing your application correctly a better solution than having the computer clean up after you, kinda like a teenager not putting thier dirty underwear in the hamper becasue Mum will do it eventually. Assembly is always going to be fastest, but the hardest to debug/maintain, the OO languages make life easier, but all the abstraction causes significant speed loss and code bloat. I keep on hearing poeple say that code size and effiency don't matter as thier machine is fast enough and memory is cheap, but Intel is selling faster processors because of inefficient code and people are always adding more memory. C++/Java are fine and are the best solution to some problems, just not all problems. The market is contracting to the point that non C++/Java compilers are rare, and the options will not exist. SW people seem to spend an inordinate amount of time debugging and this is the area that would have the biggest payoff, but heavily typed languages haven't seem much sucess in the market. I spent 6 years, working in Occam a parallel processing language, that have very tight rules and was a formal language, such that there was only one possible solution to given code. We always used to say that in 'C' code, if you got your code to compile you were 20% done, and required the next 80% for debug, while Occam compilation was more painful, getting it to compile you were 80% done, that sort of help makes you more productive than anything else. People hated the compiler complaining about seeming insignificant errors, but the compiler was finding mistakes and helping me rather than hoping that I knew what I was doing. This helped me build 80 processor sonar systems in 11 months, well before any beowolf cluster.
The patent law says that you must grant sub licenses at reasonable rates. Xerox has no benifit in stopping selling of the PalmOS, they on the other hand would be intereted in skimming a few bucks on the OS licensing fees. Xerox being in pretty bad shape could really use the cashm they don't really deserve the money as the single stroke isn't important the accuracy of the handwriting is what makes the system worth while, and thus where the value lies. Scumbag laywers, being scumbags see a chance to do a little skimming of there own, thus the case. My understanding is the Palm gets $8 for each device sold which seems like a lot, most embedded OS's only get $1-2 per use. So Palm may have to pay Xerox a few bucks and then pass that onto thier customers, $2 won't seem too much devices in the $150-$400 range. Handspring may get a pass with the new keyboard driven Treo, they have a Graffiti version but none of the ads or reviews have shown that version, kinda ironic after Mr Hawkins started Graffiti, which is now the problem.
Are things at American universities getting better or worse. 15 years ago when I was in college, when we wanted to have fun we went out and got beer, lots of beer and got drunk. Now in 2001 people have fun by turning poor harmless evergreens into web servers, wha-whooo!!!! They probably will feel better tomorrow than I felt the day after and this was probably an educational rather than brain cell drowning experience, but is this progress????
It all depends on what you want to do. Benchmarks are generally pretty useless and the power estimates even more so, what is the processor supposed to be running when the power estimate is taken. Small applications, running entirely out of cache will use less power than those that must use external memory, and then how do you decide if the power taken by the memory is part of the processor or not. The processor is driving the address lines and data lines when writing, but how do you issolate the power contribution between the two???? Chips like the Transmeta require support chips which adds a second number to the power contribution for the processor. As far as performance is you are doing floating point a processor with floating point will be better even if the clock speed is higher on an integer processor, inversely a simple processor that does only fixed point math is generally smaller and more power efficient. These processors each have different capabilities as far as peripherals, the StrongARM has a lot, the Transmeta relies of support chips, the Geode has some. Bench marks are only helpful in very general relative terms you really need to understand your application and match it to the processor to make a valid decision.
I have seen this in all forms of engineering and education, this idea that people have to specialize and put many years before they could possibly contribute, the old master and apprentice work idea. My education is in Mechanical Engineering, which was a great education but about the worst degree to get a job with in the mid 80's so I moved to software, first mechanical simulations but eventually into signal processing, compared to EE's and CS majors I pick this stuff up easier than many of the others, and even spent a good portion of my time fixing other "real programmers" code. I got bored with software and moved to systems engineering and then hardware and now ASIC design, haven't been in a classroom in years just pick things up as I go. I am always suprised that what looked so complex at the start is really quite simple after a couple of weeks. I decided a while back that this is true, as nobody is really two times smarter than everyone else and at least one person has to understand the whole problem, so no solution can be more than lets say two weeks study. Maybe I pick things up easier than others but often the real ideas are hidden behind lots of proofs that don't matter to understanding the solution. My best example is a newish field of signal processing/mathamatics called wavelet, there are dozens of math books on the topic, I can't understand a single one of them, even after a few pages my eyes gloss over and I give up. But the concept of wavelets and how they are used and why they work is extremely simple and was explained to me in 5 minutes, and I can explain to others in 5 minutes. Now I can't derive the math behind the theory but I don't need to. But none of the avaiable books takes the time to explain the usage they only derive the theory, which needs to be done once, but once done the application is easy, but none of the books discussed the usage only the theory. It all seems to come down to the "cover your ass" idea, PhD's want to prove how smart they are rather than share knowledge, Guru's are often the same way. Experience is important and especially with computers there are often more work arrounds that real code, to get things working. Remeber that there are only 31 keywords in 'C' code, and Linux is build from 'C' so how hard can it possibly be.
Yes, NTSC has 480 lines, but this in interlaced analog signal at 30Hz frame (60 fields), if 480 was the simple answer VHS would look as good as DVD, it doesn't becasue the effective resolution is much lower. Something like 320 x240, different VHS tapes will have different effective resolutions, and the ability to define a digital resolution from an analog video is purely subjective. There are numerous tricks present in NTSC to reduce the data (bandwidth) required to get minimally acceptable video. The original RCA engineers working on the TV standard, decided on 24Hz video, to match the movie industry, then as geeks often try to do, showed thier new invention off to the women in the office who asked, why the image flicked so much. The male engineers, don't notice the flicker, but women have higher perception to flicker so the frame rate was bumped from 24 to 30Hz. Interlacing is abou the worst thing you can do image quality but it does trick the eye into beleiving the image is better than it really is. Effective resolution is performed on static images, but there has been much recent work on the brains ability to interpolate between, images to significantly bump up the perceived resolution and it has been shown that with jitter of the sensor, a 256x256 sensor can generate a 1Kx1K quality image through interpolation over multiple images, jitter by fractional pixels amounts. So there are 480 lines but that has nothing to do with resolution, your computer is digital so lines = resolution, and even more so with LCD, but in TV its all perception.
In video processin CIF ussually refers to the "Common Image Format" = 352 H x 288 Vertical, this is a CCITT standard, which is neither NTSC or PAL compatible, as ussual. VHS resolution is roughly 320x240 so this would be about as much data as you could support anyway, too small for desktop playback but this LCD is about that size. There is also 4CIF = 704 x 576 and QuarterCIF (QCIF) = 176 x 144.
$3000 is only half of a toliet seat at government prices!!! I think they're using chemical lasers and they are real big and complex, so $3000 for anything the government gets involved in is a pretty good price and if you can use it to save a HUMMV or M1A1 tank the saving would be great, even if you save only a single soldier per $3000 you're way ahead of the game, helps moral, keeps soldiers out of hospitals, saves having to train new soldiers, saves having to knock on parents door to tell them that Johnie isn't comming home. $3000 seems like the deal of the centrury, getting it to work is the only problem I see.
Electric Scooter $3000 or $600 Bike + $2400 Beer.
IT = 8MPH, Bike = 15MPH
IT = no excersize, Bike = 300+ Cal/hr
IT = No beer, Bike 2400 micro brew or 4800 Bud/MGD
IT = requires power, Bike = burn off beer gut (see above)
I've got Cox@Home, as I understand it Cox is using @Home as a backend does anyone know how the shutdown of Excite@Home effects the other @Home services. I think that a few of the cable service providers also have @Home and they had annonced that they weren't happy and that they felt free to walk away. So does this only apply to direct Excite@Home or do others of us have big problems as well????
How the hell do those chefs get anything done in such a short period of time (1Hr). They supposedly don't even know what the "secret" ingredient is before the show, although they immediately seem to know what their dishes are going to be and have special ingredients that they have brought with them to the show (certain type of flour, oil, spices etc ...) that are key to the dishes that they didn't know they were going to make, so that seems a little fishy. But how the hell can they possibly get 5 gourmet dishes done in such a short period including masterful presentation. I can't seem to heat a can of soup in 1Hr and these guys are cooking lamb, making ice cream, making pasta from scratch, etc... . Just 1 dish would take me 2 hrs and they pull off 5 in half the time and they seem to have at least 5 servings, all perfectly arranged with garnish, sauces, real art works. I have trouble keeping the peas from rolling off the plate and they are creating masterpieces!!! The show does hide the fact that they have 3 or 4 helpers but still how the hell can they get that much done in 1 hr???? I realize that these guys are professional chefs and this is an every night sort of thing for them, but I still find this amazing and they never seem to accidentally added too much salt or overcooked something or made a bad guess in creating a new dish. Again I understand that they have much more experience than me and they probably couldn't write code to save thier lives, but it still blows my mind what they do. I do make one hell of a PB&J, but beyond that they got me beat by a mile (light year).
The Iron Chef is definately highly dependant on that energy and excitment. I love the show and watch as often as possible but 10pm Fri + Sat are difficult times to remeber or even be home. If you watch carefully you can notice that the dubbing adds alot that isn't there in the poeple's speech or movements. The editing/dubbing adds alot of that excitment and, jokes and the urgency (get it done within the time limit) that I don't see in the peoples actions. The editing definately makes the show that much more interesting. Its interesting that the dubbing has been done in a casual manner with people making bad guesses on what the dishes will be, bad jokes, and other mistakes in speaking too fast that make the show seem that much more real and lively. Not like Martha Stewart taking in that slow monotone drawl. They must be editing after the taping is over but they still have the commenators making bad guesses and speaking to fast etc... which could be cleaned up, but they insert all that and add some to make it really exciting and lively.
You could get a really really ugly watch for less than half the price. With a 102 x 64 screen you aren't going to get much usable info on the screen and the size and looks of the watch make it a poor choice. The Timex/MS watch from a couple of years ago looked a lot better and while only really scrolled a single line of text was usable. Some thing like the REX in my pocket and a normal watch seems like a much better deal than this. The REX 6000 from Xircom had a touch screen 512KB (IIRC) and very limited scroll to you get the letter you want input but it had a readable screen and multiple apps, if you could download apps it would have been killer, but only palm has seemed to figure that out. If the digital paper stuff from Digital Ink or Xerox ever gets out the door such that you could roll up the screen and the batteries , memory and processor fit inside a small module with the screen rapping arround I'd by one of those in a second probably as small or smaller than lipstick (or chapstick for the guys) would be really useful and probably could get 640x480, thats what I'm waiting for!!!!
But thats my point wouldn't the afore mentioned corrupt bank manger have many other easier ways to mess with the banks computers, or even the dead presidents themseleves. Encrption can't ever defend agaist internal attacks, its designed to keep outsiders outside and this hack only helps insiders that probably have more access anyway, this hack requires appropiate access, to insert keys, but a bank manager would have the access directlt to the money why even bother trying to break the encryption. My point was that this hack defeats the user interface not 3DES.
I didn't read everything, but as I understand it they are treating this IBM cryto card as a black box, sending it info and saving the results, which is reasonable, but they are using priveledged access to this card to get permission to send keys knowing old keys to get into the system. So this requires an insider who has access to the banks internal systems, those people have much easier ways to steal money, the systems are designed primarily to defeat external hackers, insiders and almost impossible to defeat. So the crack is totally dependent on having access both to the card to feed it data and access to priveldges to the banks computers so the person is already inside thier not really cracking 3DES, thier cracking the key storage mechanisms. While this is one way to steal money from a bank, there are realitively few people with this sort of access and I'd be pretty sure that the bank checks up on those poeple before giving them acces, so this is much more of a cleaver work arround that IBM needs to better design thier systems, they are not cracking 3DES, they are cracking the key storage, the encryption is secure, the key storage isn't. As always if you have access, it isn't hard to get in but without that access this hack is meaningless. I've read a few of these supposed hacks and they always make very unrealistic assumptions about having some level of access the crypto scheme is secure the impelmentation isn't (much like the DVD DeCSS, stuff, the security can't be hacked itself but poor impelementation leaves the doors wide open.
Why are these guys depending on a Transmeta emulation of an Intel processor, if you want to run NT/2K OS then maybe this is a good reason, but Linux/FreeBSD/??? are a better solution for a server farm especially with rlogin capabilities they would be that much easier to maintain. A StrongARM or other processor, maybe one of the newer Network processors, hopefully from one of those companies that hasn't died in the past few months that is a fast MIPS (doesn't have to be MIPS but networking folks seem to prefer or at least be used to the MIPS architecture). And build a server arround that. These Network processors include on-chip DRAM support (no northbridge/southbridge chips required), have on chip 10/100 support often atleast 2 ports, boot from ROM, have low power modes etc... everything that you want in a server that doesn't exist in the standard PC architecture. PC's are useful as commodity platforms, and that makes life easy, but that also brings alot of headaches and overhead that aren't appropiate to the dense sever market. PMC Sieria has a single chip device (RM9000x2) that has 2 count'em 2 MIPS cores running at 1GHz each, I think each is dual issue superscalar (IIRC) so something like 4 Billion instructions/sec and not the lame old x86 arcitecture, they support DDR SDRAM on chip, having L2 cache on chip so with not much more than a couple of DDR-DIMMs this chip, ethernet and a few other do-dads, you have kick-ass performance well beyond what Transmets could do, maybe even this single chip could replace the 6 Server boards, and still have better system performance and this solution would be considerably smaller than the PC compatible boards discussed here. If you want a dense server build a dense server, don't make small PCs and hope for the best. It seems incrediable to me that people seem to have rolled over and died and accepted the status quo of Wintel and don't seem interested in pushing the envelope even in competive markets with the economy down. The processor only uses about 5W and you could easily put 10 of them in a 1U chasis, the disk drives would take significantly more power anyway, which is one of the problems that I see with the Transmeta solution, they do have a great technology but in general the DRAM, Disk and backlighting (if a laptop) use more power each as compared to the CPU, so the end benifit is lost or not noticable, so you need to rethink the architecture and move away from the legacy PC to a streamlined solution.
I assume that as the TM processors can emulate a similar clock speed processor of another architecture, they must be pretty fast to both translate and execute and get nearly equal clock speed, they could run native code at a speed exceeding that of x86 processors. As I understood it, they were comming out with two processors (originally, I think more have been announced since), one with a more basic config and a second with higher clock speed, and extra cache to enhance x86 emulation performance. The slower smaller and one would assume cheaper processor was supposed to run Mobile Linux (IIRC), most of the news has covered x86/windows devices, but I've heard very little about native code on the TM processors. Intel has beat TM at laptop market by "borrowing" TM's technology (speedstep and low voltage). The Linux stuff was aimed at webpads and thin servers, both markets seemed to slow even more than the desktop market. I kinda see as it as time for a revolution, Intel and M$ have dominated for quite a while and it seems like its time for a new paradigm, don't know what that might be (or else I could retire early, it sucks to still be working at 37). Technology needs to cycle every few years, and it ceratinly seems like time for something new. Processor emulation seemed like a looser to me from the start, maybe with someone other than Intel with thier overly deep pockets it will be really, really hard to compete (read impossible), running head on into a giant, never seemed like a good business plan. Thier code morphing tech is certainly impressive, but why emulate/copy when you can end run, with Intel moving to IA-64 if everone needs to change processors anyway, now seems the right time to introduce a competing technology. I actually see AMD as being the major x86 leader as people avoid IA-64. IA-64 seems like a pretty big risk and alot of x86 apps probably won't work or will require emulation anyway so another processor (with M$'s support of course) could emerge. TM should bag emulation and try to innovate mobile processors or extend the x86, I don't see much else working well.
Some people certainly have special needs, but as Intel has the cash they will push ahead while architectures like the Alpha, without the funding will fall further and further behind. The Ultra Sparc has a much better chance of being available in a year or two than the Alpha. The standard comparision is VHS vs BetaMax, there may be desirable benifits but the market pushes things more. As an engineer I hate this trend, as better technologies get pushed aside by lesser technologies and people like yourself who have outside of the norm reguirements find it harder and harder. There is clearly too much convergence in technologies Windows 90%, Intel 95% C/C++/Java dominate except for scripting languages. I remeber going to technical bookstores and there being 5 bookcases of books covering 30+ languages, FORTRAN for engineering, Snobol for text etc... now its C on 1 bookcase, Java on 2 and other on a single shelf collecting dust. In my mind its time for a revoloution and everything will change, I just wish I knew in which direction so I could invest before the jump.
Intel has boat loads of cash, current pentiums get thier speed with a 20 count'em 20 stage pipeline, while most risc processors are 4-8 stages. Pipelining is a great way to get speed, but very difficult to get working and stay working partiucally after branches and pipeline stalls/flushes with interrupt support being the messiest part. Intel takes something like 3 years to rev a 1.0GHz design into 1.2GHz and have multiple teams working a once, i.e. a team finishing 2.0GHz, 75% done for 2.2, 50% done for 2.5, 25% done for 2.7 and just getting started for 3.0. I don't know how may teams they have but they are not only pipelining the processor but also the developemnt teams, while others can afford only 1 design team Intel can afford 10 (a wild guess) and Intel knows that they will continue to dominate so the large engineering budget really isn't risky at all. Money talks. PowerPC, MIPS, ARM and Alpha are better technologies but money beats technology most of the time. (MS vs Linux)