The bitterness of the submitted story--and the majority of the responses--astounds me. Is the average Slashdot reader a 70 year old who hates everything that isn't what he grew up with? This is astounding for what should be a group of people with bright and bold minds.
All too many Slashdot stories have this kind of annoying angle on them, the "Hey lookit how dumb this new thing is!" angle. How pointless and negative.
just because they're publicly own company does NOT mean that they have to act in a certain way and be assholes with something like this... what's the chances that think secret even knows the guy who leaked the info?
You're missing the point. They're not acting like assholes, they're just trying to prevent information from leaking that could affect the stock price. This is a big deal. There could even be people inside Apple leaking the info, just to get publicity. If you've ever worked for a publicly traded company, you know you have to be careful about what you say to who.
Let's say Think Secret gets some incorrect information, possibly from a disgruntled employee, and that information is very negative ("Apple engineers say there will never be a G5 Powerbook!"). That would be very bad to print. And in order to deal with that kind of story, Apple has to take steps ahead of time. Kinda sucks, but also understandable.
They have to defend their patents and copyrights, and, most significantly, they're a publicly-traded company. Just because they make good products that geeks love doesn't mean that they can all of a sudden act like a privately-owned bedroom company.
No, Intel is pressing software designers to embrace Intel's 64 bit architecture. Nobody needs any pressing with regards to AMD64, because lots of software is already taking advantage of it
Is it? I haven't noticed any kind of rush to support AMD64 at all, other. Could you elaborate on "lots"?
One thing that has bugged me a long time about a lot of games (this has particular relevence to multi-player games, but also single player games to some extent) is the 'game loading' screen.
Really, what you want here is for game developers to use asynchronous I/O. Rather than saying "load this big file while I sit here and wait," you say "load this file and tell me when you're done." That's all. No multithreading needed.
This is par for the course on console games. In games like Grand Theft Auto, the entire world doesn't fit into memory at once, it's seamlessly is loaded and unloaded in the backround, via asynchronous I/O calls. Then you have games like Half-Life 2 with super long load times and no asynchronous I/O at all.
Why? Because I use software that only runs under Windows and there are no acceptable free alternatives for other OSes. This isn't a personal preference, but simply because I need this software to do my job. End of story.
With providing such a large premier issue, does anyone think they will be able to provide as much content in future editions?
Oooh, classic Slashdot negativity there! There are thousands and thousands of possible DIY projects out there. The Make team doesn't have to come up with new stuff, just track down what other people have already done.
Memory - speed trade off? Hockey pucks. Because cache memory is so much faster than going to ram, programs these days are optimized for speed BY optimizing for size!
For some small kinds of problems, yes, but the classic tradeoffs still apply in a huge way. There are so many examples of this that it seems silly to even give 'em. Let's say you're writing a 3D physics package. Which is faster: (1) compute the convex hull of each object on the fly for each potential collision, or (2) precompute the convex hulls and store them in memory? There's no way the former is going to be faster for more than trivial models, but it sure is lighter on the memory. And so on and so on.
until we can get that kind of low power consumption on desktop chips? is there something inherent in desktop applications that prevent some chip maker from making a really low-power, high-performance (~1GHz) processor?
Super low power consumption and ultra high speed are inherently at odds with each other. It's like the memory/speed tradeoff that programmers have to deal with. (Crusoe is up around 1GHz, but they're already at twice the wattage of these chips.)
Remember, all CPUs had this kind of power consumption back in the day. You never saw heatsinks on CPUs until the mid 1990s. And processors in 8-bit home computers used milliwatts of power.
I see what you're trying to say, but I don't know whether you can call this newfound popularity due to open source. When I think of firefox, It doesn't even occur to me at first that its open source.
Yes, same here. Imagine if the Opera people had decided to make their browser free as in beer without any ads and whatnot. Then it very well could have been as popular as Firefox.
"Free as in beer" is a big deal in this case. There's no market for browsers you have to pay for.
It bothers me that this blog was "snagged" and made public. The whole benefit of having an internal weblog is to be frank and keep communication open. This is so much better than occasional and cold company emails or memos. Kudos to Mr. Otellini for trying this. Except now all his frank communication has been snagged and made public, and I don't see much of a reason for other executives to follow his example, lest their own comments get posted on Slashdot.
The 5200 wasn't third generation. It was a repackaging of 3-4 year old computer technology as a new game system. It was the Atari 800 without a keyboard.
Additionally, the 5200 did so-so in the market. It was not a major hit by any means.
NES, SNES, *trip* N64
The N64 didn't hit NES and SNES numbers, no, but it was a well-respected platform. Mario 64 and the first 3D Zelda were milestones of game design, for example. And while it didn't put a dent in the PlayStation, it handily defeat the Dreamcast and was a strong contender for several years.
Nothing concrete there, just musings. Personally, I think Microsoft is in top form at the moment. Windows XP is stable and popular. They've gotten proactive and responsive about patches. The Xbox is now the console of choice for gamers. The.net platform is generall well thought of among programmers. They've started giving away programming tools. Really, the only place Microsoft has fallen down a bit is in terms of maintaining IE.
Now, in terms of future plans, I think Microsoft's are hazy and I expect to see a lot of revision. No one seems to really want Longhorn. The original plan for it was geared toward late 1990s-style CPU advancement. If nothing else, super high requirements for Longhorn, and needing a high-end video card, is out of line with more and more people using notebooks as their primary PCs. But watch Microsoft tone Longhorn down to just Windows XP+ and it become the new standard.
Tiger, the next OS release from Apple, will take care of vector optimization automatically [apple.com] in their version of gcc 4.0. I guess this will make it into the public gcc too.
For the record, this has been in Intel's C compiler for years now. It's also in the current release of the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler, including the free download version.
I go to the local coffeeshop and there are cute girls and middle-aged women using notebooks running Windows. 4-10 people at any given time, maybe 1-2 of which have iBooks or PowerBooks. Most of the others have notebooks from Dell. I go to the local college campus and *everyone* has a notebook PC. About 25% of these are Macs, the vast majority of the rest are Dells.
PCs and their operating systems are ubiquitous these days. They're not geek toys, they're tools for everyone. And except for the smallest handful of people, they're all running Windows or OS X. Come to think of it, I'm in the habit at peeking at what people are doing on their notebooks and I have yet to see anyone running Linux or another minority OS.
Truthfully, the average PC user is getting worried about virii and spyware. And more and more of them are running Firefox as a result. This doesn't mean they're attempting to ditch every product Microsoft makes, not by a long shot.
This is yet another extrapolation from Sony's patent of a few years ago. There's no new information, other than a lot of guessing about competition and marketshare and all that. Tech-wise, all of this is exactly the same information that's been used to write other articles...and there are are the same massive, glaring holes.
VMS keeps coming back, and appearing on Slashdot like a bad penny.
To be perfectly honest, the same can be said of UNIX. UNIX (and a variety of UNIXalikes) was in steep decline in the early 1990s. In quite a few techie circles it was looked at as outdated, awkward technology. And now of course all UNIX-like operating systems are completely dead.
Amen. The Mac Mini is a damn nice piece of hardware, even for techies and developers. You get a robust UNIX-like OS with a slick interface. You get nice developer tools. You get a graphics card good enough for most things, including all but the most hardcore of games. And it's a very small form factor, something you pay a premium for in the PC world. Really, really nice.
IIRC, what diferentiated the Amigas was that you could not only mix multiple resolutions onscreen, but multiple resolutions with different bit depths, palettes, and even mouse cursors, which were drawn by hardware
Just like the Atari 800 hardware! You could put a high-resolution monochrome mode at the top, a chunky character mode below it, a higher-res character mode below that, and then a 4 color bitmapped mode at the bottom. This was trivial. you simply built a list of display commands for the graphics coprocessor. There were 15 possible display modes to choose from, and they could be mixed and matched at will. Note that you could only do this mixing vertically, not horizontally.
Additionally, in the interest of completeness, you assign any of the areas to any part of memory, so you could remap the screen any way you wanted. You could enable vertical and horizontal scrolling for each instruction, independently. And you could have an interrupt occur on any instruction, allowing you to swap palettes, character sets, remap sprites, and so on. You could also have blank areas of the screen, so the couple of scan lines between the score display and main game playfield didn't require memory (for example).
As someone else pointed out, yes, the Atari graphics hardware was designed by Jay Miner.
Mmm, no. Commodore was the first to really do this. The original Amiga had native graphics capabilties that still aren't available (like multiple resolutions onscreen) in PC hardware.
In the interest of historical accuracy, the Atari 400 and 800, first publicly available in 1979 (six years before the Amiga), allowed mixing multiple resolutions on screen. You built a display list of modes and the hardware interpreted them. You could mix text, graphics, and various resolutions of each. You could also trigger interrupts to occur on a specific display list command.
I never saw it when it came out. I played the games, but never saw the movie. I finally watched it a few years ago, and, wow, was it awful. Almost unwatchable. It's not the tech that dates it; the tech has a pleasnt retro-feel ot it. But the movie itself is horrendous: disjointed, simplistic, wooden acting, random plot, too much faux techno-babble. Ugh.
Still wondering if these cores will support something that many supercomputing chips have for a long time. That is the ability for both cores to run the exact same instructions, thus eliminating overhead in error checks as the error check is the comparison between the two cores.
Do you know what kind of error checking a typical CPU does and how much the overhead is?
Dual core chips is the next iteration. However, we aren't really going to see any huge performance improvements again until we ditch x86 architecture.
I used to think that, now I'm not so sure. The ultra-clean PowerPC camp is having exactly the same troubles as Intel. MIPS was similarly clean, and it has fallen by the wayside. Ditto for the SHx series. What's left in terms of high-end CPUs? UltraSPARC? AMD's 64-bit architecture?
The x86 ISA is ugly and convoluted, but behind the scenes x86 CPUs are essentially RISC. So are you talking about some all new architecture that doesn't currently exist?
Slashdot Mirror
The bitterness of the submitted story--and the majority of the responses--astounds me. Is the average Slashdot reader a 70 year old who hates everything that isn't what he grew up with? This is astounding for what should be a group of people with bright and bold minds.
All too many Slashdot stories have this kind of annoying angle on them, the "Hey lookit how dumb this new thing is!" angle. How pointless and negative.
just because they're publicly own company does NOT mean that they have to act in a certain way and be assholes with something like this... what's the chances that think secret even knows the guy who leaked the info?
You're missing the point. They're not acting like assholes, they're just trying to prevent information from leaking that could affect the stock price. This is a big deal. There could even be people inside Apple leaking the info, just to get publicity. If you've ever worked for a publicly traded company, you know you have to be careful about what you say to who.
Let's say Think Secret gets some incorrect information, possibly from a disgruntled employee, and that information is very negative ("Apple engineers say there will never be a G5 Powerbook!"). That would be very bad to print. And in order to deal with that kind of story, Apple has to take steps ahead of time. Kinda sucks, but also understandable.
They have to defend their patents and copyrights, and, most significantly, they're a publicly-traded company. Just because they make good products that geeks love doesn't mean that they can all of a sudden act like a privately-owned bedroom company.
No, Intel is pressing software designers to embrace Intel's 64 bit architecture. Nobody needs any pressing with regards to AMD64, because lots of software is already taking advantage of it
Is it? I haven't noticed any kind of rush to support AMD64 at all, other. Could you elaborate on "lots"?
Isn't it rough on the video card to have it 3D rendering at any point the the OS is loaded?
Isn't this what video cards or for? You might as well ask if it's rough on the CPU.
One thing that has bugged me a long time about a lot of games (this has particular relevence to multi-player games, but also single player games to some extent) is the 'game loading' screen.
Really, what you want here is for game developers to use asynchronous I/O. Rather than saying "load this big file while I sit here and wait," you say "load this file and tell me when you're done." That's all. No multithreading needed.
This is par for the course on console games. In games like Grand Theft Auto, the entire world doesn't fit into memory at once, it's seamlessly is loaded and unloaded in the backround, via asynchronous I/O calls. Then you have games like Half-Life 2 with super long load times and no asynchronous I/O at all.
Why? Because I use software that only runs under Windows and there are no acceptable free alternatives for other OSes. This isn't a personal preference, but simply because I need this software to do my job. End of story.
With providing such a large premier issue, does anyone think they will be able to provide as much content in future editions?
Oooh, classic Slashdot negativity there! There are thousands and thousands of possible DIY projects out there. The Make team doesn't have to come up with new stuff, just track down what other people have already done.
Memory - speed trade off? Hockey pucks. Because cache memory is so much faster than going to ram, programs these days are optimized for speed BY optimizing for size!
For some small kinds of problems, yes, but the classic tradeoffs still apply in a huge way. There are so many examples of this that it seems silly to even give 'em. Let's say you're writing a 3D physics package. Which is faster: (1) compute the convex hull of each object on the fly for each potential collision, or (2) precompute the convex hulls and store them in memory? There's no way the former is going to be faster for more than trivial models, but it sure is lighter on the memory. And so on and so on.
until we can get that kind of low power consumption on desktop chips? is there something inherent in desktop applications that prevent some chip maker from making a really low-power, high-performance (~1GHz) processor?
Super low power consumption and ultra high speed are inherently at odds with each other. It's like the memory/speed tradeoff that programmers have to deal with. (Crusoe is up around 1GHz, but they're already at twice the wattage of these chips.)
Remember, all CPUs had this kind of power consumption back in the day. You never saw heatsinks on CPUs until the mid 1990s. And processors in 8-bit home computers used milliwatts of power.
I see what you're trying to say, but I don't know whether you can call this newfound popularity due to open source. When I think of firefox, It doesn't even occur to me at first that its open source.
Yes, same here. Imagine if the Opera people had decided to make their browser free as in beer without any ads and whatnot. Then it very well could have been as popular as Firefox.
"Free as in beer" is a big deal in this case. There's no market for browsers you have to pay for.
It bothers me that this blog was "snagged" and made public. The whole benefit of having an internal weblog is to be frank and keep communication open. This is so much better than occasional and cold company emails or memos. Kudos to Mr. Otellini for trying this. Except now all his frank communication has been snagged and made public, and I don't see much of a reason for other executives to follow his example, lest their own comments get posted on Slashdot.
Atari 2600, Atari 5200, *trip* Atari 7800
The 5200 wasn't third generation. It was a repackaging of 3-4 year old computer technology as a new game system. It was the Atari 800 without a keyboard.
Additionally, the 5200 did so-so in the market. It was not a major hit by any means.
NES, SNES, *trip* N64
The N64 didn't hit NES and SNES numbers, no, but it was a well-respected platform. Mario 64 and the first 3D Zelda were milestones of game design, for example. And while it didn't put a dent in the PlayStation, it handily defeat the Dreamcast and was a strong contender for several years.
Nothing concrete there, just musings. Personally, I think Microsoft is in top form at the moment. Windows XP is stable and popular. They've gotten proactive and responsive about patches. The Xbox is now the console of choice for gamers. The .net platform is generall well thought of among programmers. They've started giving away programming tools. Really, the only place Microsoft has fallen down a bit is in terms of maintaining IE.
Now, in terms of future plans, I think Microsoft's are hazy and I expect to see a lot of revision. No one seems to really want Longhorn. The original plan for it was geared toward late 1990s-style CPU advancement. If nothing else, super high requirements for Longhorn, and needing a high-end video card, is out of line with more and more people using notebooks as their primary PCs. But watch Microsoft tone Longhorn down to just Windows XP+ and it become the new standard.
Tiger, the next OS release from Apple, will take care of vector optimization automatically [apple.com] in their version of gcc 4.0. I guess this will make it into the public gcc too.
For the record, this has been in Intel's C compiler for years now. It's also in the current release of the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler, including the free download version.
I go to the local coffeeshop and there are cute girls and middle-aged women using notebooks running Windows. 4-10 people at any given time, maybe 1-2 of which have iBooks or PowerBooks. Most of the others have notebooks from Dell. I go to the local college campus and *everyone* has a notebook PC. About 25% of these are Macs, the vast majority of the rest are Dells.
PCs and their operating systems are ubiquitous these days. They're not geek toys, they're tools for everyone. And except for the smallest handful of people, they're all running Windows or OS X. Come to think of it, I'm in the habit at peeking at what people are doing on their notebooks and I have yet to see anyone running Linux or another minority OS.
Truthfully, the average PC user is getting worried about virii and spyware. And more and more of them are running Firefox as a result. This doesn't mean they're attempting to ditch every product Microsoft makes, not by a long shot.
This is yet another extrapolation from Sony's patent of a few years ago. There's no new information, other than a lot of guessing about competition and marketshare and all that. Tech-wise, all of this is exactly the same information that's been used to write other articles...and there are are the same massive, glaring holes.
VMS keeps coming back, and appearing on Slashdot like a bad penny.
To be perfectly honest, the same can be said of UNIX. UNIX (and a variety of UNIXalikes) was in steep decline in the early 1990s. In quite a few techie circles it was looked at as outdated, awkward technology. And now of course all UNIX-like operating systems are completely dead.
Yes, this article would have been relevant in 1997 or 1998. Not now.
Amen. The Mac Mini is a damn nice piece of hardware, even for techies and developers. You get a robust UNIX-like OS with a slick interface. You get nice developer tools. You get a graphics card good enough for most things, including all but the most hardcore of games. And it's a very small form factor, something you pay a premium for in the PC world. Really, really nice.
IIRC, what diferentiated the Amigas was that you could not only mix multiple resolutions onscreen, but multiple resolutions with different bit depths, palettes, and even mouse cursors, which were drawn by hardware
Just like the Atari 800 hardware! You could put a high-resolution monochrome mode at the top, a chunky character mode below it, a higher-res character mode below that, and then a 4 color bitmapped mode at the bottom. This was trivial. you simply built a list of display commands for the graphics coprocessor. There were 15 possible display modes to choose from, and they could be mixed and matched at will. Note that you could only do this mixing vertically, not horizontally.
Additionally, in the interest of completeness, you assign any of the areas to any part of memory, so you could remap the screen any way you wanted. You could enable vertical and horizontal scrolling for each instruction, independently. And you could have an interrupt occur on any instruction, allowing you to swap palettes, character sets, remap sprites, and so on. You could also have blank areas of the screen, so the couple of scan lines between the score display and main game playfield didn't require memory (for example).
As someone else pointed out, yes, the Atari graphics hardware was designed by Jay Miner.
Mmm, no. Commodore was the first to really do this. The original Amiga had native graphics capabilties that still aren't available (like multiple resolutions onscreen) in PC hardware.
In the interest of historical accuracy, the Atari 400 and 800, first publicly available in 1979 (six years before the Amiga), allowed mixing multiple resolutions on screen. You built a display list of modes and the hardware interpreted them. You could mix text, graphics, and various resolutions of each. You could also trigger interrupts to occur on a specific display list command.
I never saw it when it came out. I played the games, but never saw the movie. I finally watched it a few years ago, and, wow, was it awful. Almost unwatchable. It's not the tech that dates it; the tech has a pleasnt retro-feel ot it. But the movie itself is horrendous: disjointed, simplistic, wooden acting, random plot, too much faux techno-babble. Ugh.
Still wondering if these cores will support something that many supercomputing chips have for a long time. That is the ability for both cores to run the exact same instructions, thus eliminating overhead in error checks as the error check is the comparison between the two cores.
Do you know what kind of error checking a typical CPU does and how much the overhead is?
Dual core chips is the next iteration. However, we aren't really going to see any huge performance improvements again until we ditch x86 architecture.
I used to think that, now I'm not so sure. The ultra-clean PowerPC camp is having exactly the same troubles as Intel. MIPS was similarly clean, and it has fallen by the wayside. Ditto for the SHx series. What's left in terms of high-end CPUs? UltraSPARC? AMD's 64-bit architecture?
The x86 ISA is ugly and convoluted, but behind the scenes x86 CPUs are essentially RISC. So are you talking about some all new architecture that doesn't currently exist?