What you really want is to vectorize in pipeline order, doing all the operations you plan to on each data point once and for all so that you can take advantage of your processor's nice, fast cache. Nobody has (to my knowledge) figured out a way to do that, that is robust enough for an interactive/JIT language, so just writing it in "C" and getting the loops nested in the right order can speed you up by a factor of more than 10 on a modern AMD or Intel CPU.
Well, it's been done in C++, and in a way that gives at least some hope that interpreted languages are capable of it. Nifty template metaprogramming tricks allow the compiler to inline function calls and reduce operations to one iteration. I TA'd a graduate programming language course at UT (EE380L), and this was one of the assignments; unfortunately, my course page has been butchered by my graduation, but after you understand the concepts it's actually quite a useful (if ugly and unreadable) trick. Because of all the inlining, it's actually occasionally faster than C versions. (Modulo Icache effects of inlining, etc.)
This type of heavy inlining of (generally virtual) functions in interpreted languages isn't possible for all languages and situations, but I wouldn't say it's impossible. Maybe somebody wants to make it a research project?
That said, there are groups of people who DO help these cats. The USM Feral Cat Society did this for a while when USM had a ton of feral cats. They had an agreement with a local vet who helped them spay and neuter a few thousand cats. Today, the feral cat population is down, no cats were killed, and mice on campus are relatively rare.
Yes, that's exactly what this bill says. If you download music to your computer from iTunes, that's the first license. Want to actually put it on your iPod? Whoops, there's another 99 cents. How about your husband/wife's iPod? Another 99 cents.
This is what needs to be publicized about this bill. Who cares about SIRA bill 107 or whatever?
This is the iPod Killer Bill. Start the meme and use the phrase when discussing it.
Used to work for Intense 3D (on the WildCat series...). My 2 cents:
A long time ago, a lot. Early offerings from 3Dfx and NVidia were focused on gaming; if your graphics card only had 32MB of RAM, you're either sacrificing framerate, geometry memory, or texture memory. If your rendering pipes lacked precision, those precision problems made it to the screen. At 60fps you can't tell, but when you're doing 3d modeling of the monster in the next big movie you do. Or if you're designing game models and you're interested in getting it to look right before trying to shave the number of vertices down.
Now? Who knows, I'm a few years rusty. But their focus is different: professional cards assume you're going to render whatever you're working on to a solid object, while game cards assume you're fine with what's onscreen. It's a slightly different market with slightly different tradeoffs in quality vs. framerate, etc.
That's one way it could work - the problem is: testers are expensive, and tester time is precious. Post-fab testing of chips is a traditional bottleneck for chip designers -- you've got X million transistors in there. It's much quicker to run the chips through a "pass/no pass" test procedure than to debug "failures" to see that the failures are in, say, a pixel shader unit.
I'm not saying it's not done; I'm just saying it's a business decision, and it depends on the value of tester time at a point in a chip's lifetime.
That's sad -- it looked like decent hardware. A Geforce 3d accelerator and a reasonably powerful ARM processor. If they'd gone the GP2X open-source route they'd have sold three times the consoles. Even if they are ugly as sin.
I'm a lot more worried about the damage caused by the "Tiered Internet" proposals currently being bandied about. All network admins know that the damage caused by attackers is insignificant compared to the damage caused by upper management and government meddling.
Not every car has a rev limiter, but I have yet to see a car where you can't turn the ignition off without locking the wheel.
Well, it's an odd corner case, isn't it. But I have seen it once -- I was test-driving a Camaro in 1994, and the salesdude was driving it to show it off. For one of his "demo moves", he takes it up to 70 on one of the longer, less-busy roads and turns the car off. I don't think it was in accessory, as the radio shut off, but he proceeded to demonstrate how well the steering and brakes worked in case the Camaro lost power.
Sadly enough, after buying one, I realized why that was a good demonstration -- my car died 3 times in 6 years from driving through less than three inches of water. Crappy electrical system. But I digress -- I've seen it done.
I agree with you in principle, but it's far too easy for charging for QoS to turn into a mob-style protection racket. "Ya wouldn't want anything happenin ta yer packets, would ya?"
I'm going to give my money to whoever gives me the best deal. I read about this last week, and I responded by giving SBC the boot and calling up the cable guy. If the cable company follows suit, I'll go back, or to someone else. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be too many choices: choosing between the least bad of two candidates reminds me entirely too much of politics.
I tried Symantec for a while -- Task Manager almost always reports it as the highest memory-using program on my computer, beating out Thunderbird, Mozilla, Excel, and X-Win32. The only programs that regularly consume more memory are Civ4 and Second Life.
While not necessarily your first image of a plant, algae do a much better job. They're mostly oil, and they don't muck about with growing pretty flowers or trying to grow to compete for sunlight.
That just confirms the conspiracy theory that Einstein didn't actually come up with the Theory of Relativity himself, but was given it by aliens. I mean, c'mon, he was a patent clerk! That's like Bob from Accounting proving Fermat's Last Theorem.
The aliens gave him the theory -- including the cosmological constant. Unfortunately, there wasn't actually a justification for it. Thinking quickly, Einstein ad-libbed that it without it, the universe would be expanding, "and, uhh, we all know that's not true, right, fellas?", sacrificing the chance to be the first one to "predict" this. He copied the answer from the back of the book and got busted for not showing all the work. C'mon, who hasn't that happened to?
Well, yeah -- this is a "get out of contract free" card for artists. If you believe that this software violates laws, and you're an artist whose picture is all over this CD, you'd definitely have a reasonable argument in refusing to work with the label in the future because the label installed illegal software on your work. If a company used my picture to try to promote knowingly defective, say, toothbrushes that would break off and jab you in the gums, then I'd certainly have the right to refuse to do the other two commercials I'd signed with, on the grounds that I didn't know about the last offense, but I'd be knowingly culpable the next time around.
Then educate them. Predictably, large media outlets are also sitting on the story. The non-slashdot version, leaving out all the words a non-geek wouldn't know, would probably read: "Sony installed a virus on CDs that infects your computer when you try to play the CD. They did it on purpose to keep people from putting it on their MP3 players."
How much more basic can you get? But the story isn't out. Suing people for downloading music is only fair if we can prosecute Sony for attempting to hax0r everyone's computer. Do I believe it'll happen? I don't think I have that much faith left in the fairness of our system.
Ok -- I thought about getting one of these, and I was wondering if anybody could comment on my plan.
I live in Texas, and as anybody who's lived here in August can tell you, one thing we don't lack is sunshine. Since my daily commute consists of about ten miles in and ten miles out, I generally bike it in, but when it gets incredibly hot it nearly kills me. So, what about a solar panel on top? Cover it with lexan to protect it from birds. I'm assuming that sitting all day in the parking lot under a fierce Texan sun could do a bit to charge the batteries for the drive home. Anyone have any thoughts on feasibility and effectiveness?
Have you seen your local university's CS, EE, and Physics departments? Our country educates some of the finest students in the world. How are you going to keep that research within our borders, keep them from going home on holiday vacation? I'm sure that'll go over REALLY well.
Hi! I'm actually TA'ing for one of Walden University's NTU classes -- NEEP6221, the graduate digital design class. I've had 4 years of experience doing digital design professionally and I'm in my 4th year of grad school at the University of Texas, where I'm TA'ing a brick-and-mortar class too.
Online classes can be good if they're taken seriously by the students and the faculty and support staff. I spend a bit more time on my BnM class than my online class, mostly because it has 3x the number of students. I hold office hours -- there's an online discussion board, and on several occasions my students and I will send things back and forth (I bought a copy/fax/scan printer just for this class, so things go from engineering paper to pdf and over email or online doc sharing.) I'm not in any position to say whether the online degrees count for graduate school or for getting a job. In the quality of education department, it's like everything else, but moreso: you get out what you put in. I certainly won't assign passing grades to shoddy work. I take pride in my teaching, whether online or face-to-face, so if you can find an online institution with an entire degree full of that, you'll definitely get an education.
There's another problem with general-purpose FPGAs. (order of magnitude comparison only): Athlon 64 4000 (from pricewatch): $330 Xilinx 2.4Million gate design (from digikey): $2100-$5000.
The computing world would look a lot different if there were good $100 high-speed, high-capacity FPGAs. Now, I wouldn't argue with a good ASIC or highspeed DSP implementation for some algorithms...
That's fine for simple components. But if you're not talking about the analog hole -- if you're talking about rolling your own large system -- the price will kill you. Check out digikey or mouser's pricing on Xilinx or Altera FPGA's. Sure, you could build your own stuff, but if video cards give you sticker shock then I suggest sitting down before pricing a decent-sized one of these.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of the analogy, I'd be wary about applying it. Many modifications render vehicles "non-streetlegal". Several of the more aggressive sportscar modifications are not classified as legal for public highways for safety-related reasons.
Methinks you're liable to get trapped in your own analogy.
While I enjoy the illusion of public participation in government as much as the next guy, if you're going to submit a comment to this thing, PLEASE make it a consise, well-written comment. Run it by a few friends or post it as a reply here; we're all about the open-source, many eyes make all bugs shallow philosophy, right? Our legislature is typically motivated more by gift certificates to Dennys than the letters of its constituents, but if we are going to be heard, I'd rather our message not be represented by "n00b, j00 sux0r."
Ok, since everybody's throwing out suggestions of their favorite audiobooks, I guess I'll toss out mine. The Hitchhiker's Guide series read by Douglas Adams is absolutely amazing -- it's pretty awesome to listen to DNA's take on what the characters should sound like, and his sense of comic timing in print is enhanced by his sense of comic timing in audio.
The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett are great in audio -- especially the "We Free Men" series, in which reading the mangled Nac-Mac-Feegle semi-Scots dialect can get tiresome. (The narrator's handling of it is masterful and sounds exactly like what I'd think a smurf raised on Highlander episodes and Braveheart would sound like.)
Finally, my library has a ton of stuff from "The Modern Scholar" and "The Teaching Company" -- and some of these are amazing. TTC's "History of Science" series is really compelling, and I'm going through a set of lectures on The Enlightenment at the moment. I'm your typical computer geek, so I probably wouldn't have broadened my horizons like this if it weren't for a chance encounter at the library.
I was introduced to this in high school at the MS Governor's School camp (hi everybody!) under the name "Polar Bears." The rhyme is: Polar Bears They Come In Pairs They sit around a hole [1] in the ice Like petals on a flower.
The game was great and swept the camp even though the hints are stronger in this version, newly promoted "BearMasters" are then given the question: "Now, how many fish?"
It's sad how strong that memory is. [1] MSGS'ers say it with me: "hoooooooooooole in the ice"/Was the guitarist for the band in the talent show.
Slashdot Mirror
What you really want is to vectorize in pipeline order, doing all the operations you plan to on each data point once and for all so that you can take advantage of your processor's nice, fast cache. Nobody has (to my knowledge) figured out a way to do that, that is robust enough for an interactive/JIT language, so just writing it in "C" and getting the loops nested in the right order can speed you up by a factor of more than 10 on a modern AMD or Intel CPU.
Well, it's been done in C++, and in a way that gives at least some hope that interpreted languages are capable of it. Nifty template metaprogramming tricks allow the compiler to inline function calls and reduce operations to one iteration. I TA'd a graduate programming language course at UT (EE380L), and this was one of the assignments; unfortunately, my course page has been butchered by my graduation, but after you understand the concepts it's actually quite a useful (if ugly and unreadable) trick. Because of all the inlining, it's actually occasionally faster than C versions. (Modulo Icache effects of inlining, etc.)
This type of heavy inlining of (generally virtual) functions in interpreted languages isn't possible for all languages and situations, but I wouldn't say it's impossible. Maybe somebody wants to make it a research project?
That sucks.
That said, there are groups of people who DO help these cats. The USM Feral Cat Society did this for a while when USM had a ton of feral cats. They had an agreement with a local vet who helped them spay and neuter a few thousand cats. Today, the feral cat population is down, no cats were killed, and mice on campus are relatively rare.
Yes, that's exactly what this bill says. If you download music to your computer from iTunes, that's the first license. Want to actually put it on your iPod? Whoops, there's another 99 cents. How about your husband/wife's iPod? Another 99 cents.
This is what needs to be publicized about this bill. Who cares about SIRA bill 107 or whatever?
This is the iPod Killer Bill. Start the meme and use the phrase when discussing it.
Used to work for Intense 3D (on the WildCat series...). My 2 cents:
A long time ago, a lot. Early offerings from 3Dfx and NVidia were focused on gaming; if your graphics card only had 32MB of RAM, you're either sacrificing framerate, geometry memory, or texture memory. If your rendering pipes lacked precision, those precision problems made it to the screen. At 60fps you can't tell, but when you're doing 3d modeling of the monster in the next big movie you do. Or if you're designing game models and you're interested in getting it to look right before trying to shave the number of vertices down.
Now? Who knows, I'm a few years rusty. But their focus is different: professional cards assume you're going to render whatever you're working on to a solid object, while game cards assume you're fine with what's onscreen. It's a slightly different market with slightly different tradeoffs in quality vs. framerate, etc.
That's one way it could work - the problem is: testers are expensive, and tester time is precious. Post-fab testing of chips is a traditional bottleneck for chip designers -- you've got X million transistors in there. It's much quicker to run the chips through a "pass/no pass" test procedure than to debug "failures" to see that the failures are in, say, a pixel shader unit.
I'm not saying it's not done; I'm just saying it's a business decision, and it depends on the value of tester time at a point in a chip's lifetime.
That's sad -- it looked like decent hardware. A Geforce 3d accelerator and a reasonably powerful ARM processor. If they'd gone the GP2X open-source route they'd have sold three times the consoles. Even if they are ugly as sin.
Pardon me if I remember incorrectly, but don't Bell and its children owe their very existance to one of the largest federal subsidies ever given?
The American people gave you a lemonade stand and an orchard of free lemons and you have the nerve to bitch about all the damn thirsty people. Idiots.
I'm a lot more worried about the damage caused by the "Tiered Internet" proposals currently being bandied about. All network admins know that the damage caused by attackers is insignificant compared to the damage caused by upper management and government meddling.
Not every car has a rev limiter, but I have yet to see a car where you can't turn the ignition off without locking the wheel.
Well, it's an odd corner case, isn't it. But I have seen it once -- I was test-driving a Camaro in 1994, and the salesdude was driving it to show it off. For one of his "demo moves", he takes it up to 70 on one of the longer, less-busy roads and turns the car off. I don't think it was in accessory, as the radio shut off, but he proceeded to demonstrate how well the steering and brakes worked in case the Camaro lost power.
Sadly enough, after buying one, I realized why that was a good demonstration -- my car died 3 times in 6 years from driving through less than three inches of water. Crappy electrical system. But I digress -- I've seen it done.
I agree with you in principle, but it's far too easy for charging for QoS to turn into a mob-style protection racket. "Ya wouldn't want anything happenin ta yer packets, would ya?"
I'm going to give my money to whoever gives me the best deal. I read about this last week, and I responded by giving SBC the boot and calling up the cable guy. If the cable company follows suit, I'll go back, or to someone else. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be too many choices: choosing between the least bad of two candidates reminds me entirely too much of politics.
I tried Symantec for a while -- Task Manager almost always reports it as the highest memory-using program on my computer, beating out Thunderbird, Mozilla, Excel, and X-Win32. The only programs that regularly consume more memory are Civ4 and Second Life.
While not necessarily your first image of a plant, algae do a much better job. They're mostly oil, and they don't muck about with growing pretty flowers or trying to grow to compete for sunlight.
There's a good link from UNH:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
The aliens gave him the theory -- including the cosmological constant. Unfortunately, there wasn't actually a justification for it. Thinking quickly, Einstein ad-libbed that it without it, the universe would be expanding, "and, uhh, we all know that's not true, right, fellas?", sacrificing the chance to be the first one to "predict" this. He copied the answer from the back of the book and got busted for not showing all the work. C'mon, who hasn't that happened to?
Well, yeah -- this is a "get out of contract free" card for artists. If you believe that this software violates laws, and you're an artist whose picture is all over this CD, you'd definitely have a reasonable argument in refusing to work with the label in the future because the label installed illegal software on your work. If a company used my picture to try to promote knowingly defective, say, toothbrushes that would break off and jab you in the gums, then I'd certainly have the right to refuse to do the other two commercials I'd signed with, on the grounds that I didn't know about the last offense, but I'd be knowingly culpable the next time around.
Then educate them. Predictably, large media outlets are also sitting on the story. The non-slashdot version, leaving out all the words a non-geek wouldn't know, would probably read: "Sony installed a virus on CDs that infects your computer when you try to play the CD. They did it on purpose to keep people from putting it on their MP3 players."
How much more basic can you get? But the story isn't out. Suing people for downloading music is only fair if we can prosecute Sony for attempting to hax0r everyone's computer. Do I believe it'll happen? I don't think I have that much faith left in the fairness of our system.
Ok -- I thought about getting one of these, and I was wondering if anybody could comment on my plan.
I live in Texas, and as anybody who's lived here in August can tell you, one thing we don't lack is sunshine. Since my daily commute consists of about ten miles in and ten miles out, I generally bike it in, but when it gets incredibly hot it nearly kills me. So, what about a solar panel on top? Cover it with lexan to protect it from birds. I'm assuming that sitting all day in the parking lot under a fierce Texan sun could do a bit to charge the batteries for the drive home. Anyone have any thoughts on feasibility and effectiveness?
Have you seen your local university's CS, EE, and Physics departments? Our country educates some of the finest students in the world. How are you going to keep that research within our borders, keep them from going home on holiday vacation? I'm sure that'll go over REALLY well.
Hi! I'm actually TA'ing for one of Walden University's NTU classes -- NEEP6221, the graduate digital design class. I've had 4 years of experience doing digital design professionally and I'm in my 4th year of grad school at the University of Texas, where I'm TA'ing a brick-and-mortar class too.
Online classes can be good if they're taken seriously by the students and the faculty and support staff. I spend a bit more time on my BnM class than my online class, mostly because it has 3x the number of students. I hold office hours -- there's an online discussion board, and on several occasions my students and I will send things back and forth (I bought a copy/fax/scan printer just for this class, so things go from engineering paper to pdf and over email or online doc sharing.) I'm not in any position to say whether the online degrees count for graduate school or for getting a job. In the quality of education department, it's like everything else, but moreso: you get out what you put in. I certainly won't assign passing grades to shoddy work. I take pride in my teaching, whether online or face-to-face, so if you can find an online institution with an entire degree full of that, you'll definitely get an education.
There's another problem with general-purpose FPGAs.
(order of magnitude comparison only):
Athlon 64 4000 (from pricewatch): $330
Xilinx 2.4Million gate design (from digikey): $2100-$5000.
The computing world would look a lot different if there were good $100 high-speed, high-capacity FPGAs. Now, I wouldn't argue with a good ASIC or highspeed DSP implementation for some algorithms...
That's fine for simple components. But if you're not talking about the analog hole -- if you're talking about rolling your own large system -- the price will kill you. Check out digikey or mouser's pricing on Xilinx or Altera FPGA's. Sure, you could build your own stuff, but if video cards give you sticker shock then I suggest sitting down before pricing a decent-sized one of these.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of the analogy, I'd be wary about applying it. Many modifications render vehicles "non-streetlegal". Several of the more aggressive sportscar modifications are not classified as legal for public highways for safety-related reasons.
Methinks you're liable to get trapped in your own analogy.
I just now heard about this.
Is it too late to block this merger?
While I enjoy the illusion of public participation in government as much as the next guy, if you're going to submit a comment to this thing, PLEASE make it a consise, well-written comment. Run it by a few friends or post it as a reply here; we're all about the open-source, many eyes make all bugs shallow philosophy, right? Our legislature is typically motivated more by gift certificates to Dennys than the letters of its constituents, but if we are going to be heard, I'd rather our message not be represented by "n00b, j00 sux0r."
Ok, since everybody's throwing out suggestions of their favorite audiobooks, I guess I'll toss out mine. The Hitchhiker's Guide series read by Douglas Adams is absolutely amazing -- it's pretty awesome to listen to DNA's take on what the characters should sound like, and his sense of comic timing in print is enhanced by his sense of comic timing in audio.
The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett are great in audio -- especially the "We Free Men" series, in which reading the mangled Nac-Mac-Feegle semi-Scots dialect can get tiresome. (The narrator's handling of it is masterful and sounds exactly like what I'd think a smurf raised on Highlander episodes and Braveheart would sound like.)
Finally, my library has a ton of stuff from "The Modern Scholar" and "The Teaching Company" -- and some of these are amazing. TTC's "History of Science" series is really compelling, and I'm going through a set of lectures on The Enlightenment at the moment. I'm your typical computer geek, so I probably wouldn't have broadened my horizons like this if it weren't for a chance encounter at the library.
I was introduced to this in high school at the MS Governor's School camp (hi everybody!) under the name "Polar Bears." The rhyme is:
/Was the guitarist for the band in the talent show.
Polar Bears
They Come In Pairs
They sit around a hole [1] in the ice
Like petals on a flower.
The game was great and swept the camp even though the hints are stronger in this version, newly promoted "BearMasters" are then given the question:
"Now, how many fish?"
It's sad how strong that memory is.
[1] MSGS'ers say it with me: "hoooooooooooole in the ice"