Arn't all nuclear reactors in the US designed in such a way that when your coolant disappears that the reactor is no longer able to sustain a reaction? (ie: emptying the water from the tanks shuts down the reactor).
The chernoble reactor was designed the exact opposite way (ie: you take the graphite like stuff out of the reactor and it speeds up).
I can actually think of several legitimate uses (provided these "phones" don't work like phone cards [ie: "expire" on mm/dd/yyyy]).
Put one in all your cars in case of a break down. Alot cheaper than installing mobile phones in each car and paying for them. You lose less money if someone breaks into your car and steals it.
Give to your kids when they go out in case of an emergency. Cheaper than having several phones, loss due to breakage/left it on the bus/whatever is minimal.
If I really thought hard I'm sure I could come up with other uses... (and currently, I do not own a cell phone, mainly because I can't afford monthly fees right now [ie: college student]).
Giga in software terms is considered a power of two (because the computer works in base 2, or one's and zero's). It's easy for the computer to work with.
In most scientific fields, it is very inconvenient to work in base two, so people often use a number system called "base 10"; don't know where they came up with it (something to do with the number of toes a person has or something rediculous like that;).
As a result, MHz is a power of 10, GHz is a power of 10, KHz is a power of ten, etc. If you're really curious, I'd suggest getting an old physics book (the one you chucked out the 10th floor window after finally finishing that last required physics class) and look at what they define "mega" and "giga" as. It should also list what powers "nano" and "um" are as well, to give you a general idea of how really SMALL (yet, not small) the stuff inside your computer is.
The Matrix DVD isn't buggy, rather the players themselves arn't up to spec (ie: the manufacturers cut features to make a shipdate, because "who will ever use that overlay feature?").
If the disc were buggy all of the players would exibit the same problems. Seeing how one thing is broken on one player, while another is broken on another indicates (to me) the player is broken in these instances.
For what it's worth the Panasonic A-110 is one of the few players I've seen that play it properly.
I'm still impressed that they used every last byte that the disc could hold... all 4.3gigs:).
There arn't many fabs that can manufacture at.18um using copper interconnects. IBM is one of the few, and their fabs are tied up making PPC chips for motorolla.
The second reason is capacity. AMD's austin fab is a pretty decent sized plant, but it can't make chips fast enough. They want more capacity, so they made a plan that can fullfill that...
A third good reason is that they don't depend on third parties to make the chips. It'd really suck if, say, intel bought out the fab that was making AMD's chips for them...:)
The C=64 has something going for it PC's don't have -- a consistent hardware configuration.
When was the last time you opened a PC, saw the same cpu, same sound card, same I/O controller, same video card, same brand floppy drive, etc? When was the last time you looked at a hardware config and saw all of the same types of devices on the same IRQs?
You don't. In order to accomidate that sort of flexibility stuff needs to be "abstracted" out so it doesn't depend on the same hardware, but rather the same functionality.
For example, all sound cards can play a sound. Now, the process of getting a SB16 to play a sound and an A3d board to play a sound is very different, but if you have some sort of software abstraction layer that just says "play a sound" and will call some code that knows how to play sound (usually called a driver, ooh goodie). And sound is played if the driver doesn't suck ass.:).
I always see people complaining about code bloat (usually referring to microsoft products -- and I can NOT understand how Word got to be so frigging big).
These same people don't realize that you don't need to optimize 90% of the code in a product. You only need to optimize the parts the user waits on. Seriously, what's the point of optimizing a print routine (for example...)? All of your time is spent waiting on the printer...
These same people also don't realize that sometimes it's better to use the "slower" algorythm; not only is it easier to understand what the code is doing, but sometimes it's actually faster to use a bubblesort over a quicksort (try sorting mostly sorted list with a quicksort, then with a good bubblesort and tell me which one returns faster).
And to top that off, the process of optimization often leads to really wierd looking code (and it's amusing to watch someone try to figure out what the hell you were smoking when you wrote it) that's hard to debug/fix/modify.
...sorry, just one of my frustrating rants I guess...
Actually, I'd say the Celeron is the perfect example of a company rushing a product out the door to "fill" a need.
The first Celeron's released had no L2 cache. They were DIRT SLOW. It was nothing but a PII without a case nor the L2 cache on the processor slot. It was designed to compete with AMD and Cyrix at the low end. Which it didn't (not having an L2 cache really killed performance; not as bad for games, as those often have L2 misses anyway).
Months later, the intel guys re-released the celeron with 128k L2 cache running at chip speed. I don't think they even thought about the overclocking potential of the sucker, or think that it's performance would approach/beat that of their "cash crop" processor (the PII).
Intel didn't take it's time, it just threw something out the door hoping to put a rival out of business.
An interesting point brought out in one my courses here at school... When analyzing algorythms you're not supposed to "consider" the machine it will be running on. If you think about it, it makes sense.
A really fast machine running an n^2 algorythm will still be running an n^2 algorythm. When you reach a certain (often relatively small) set of data, you will SERIOUSLY notice how laggy the system is performing. Doubling the speed of the processor doesn't mean that you can double the amount of data you give to an n^2 sort before the time it takes is greater than before. It's a mere fraction of that.
People will continue to program the way they're used to. People will program in a manner to scale, if they need to scale! If they don't need to, then they won't (why bother wasting the extra time?). I don't know about most programmers, but for me programming is an ego trip. My goal is to get the slickest smallest fastest most bug free piece of code out there. Now, I realize that there are many coders out there that don't think like that but the thing is they'd code using the n^2 algorythm anyway.
...and another diversion: in some cases an n^3 algorythm will outperform an n^2 algorythm (other examples can be made); you also have to consider the data set you use. If KNOW you're going to use a data set smaller than "1" (one is a relative term, where the two functions intersect; it may be a rather large number if one algorythm is measured in minutes and the other seconds) then then n^3 would be the better choice.
I seriously doubt this will change the way code is written...
Dresden has never officially been "opened" by AMD. This is basically a statement (instead of a rumour) by AMD that yes they plan on producing wopping fast processors at this factory and if everything goes well we'll hit 1ghz in Q1 (as they've been saying all along).
It's pretty amazing to see them pull through all of the ramping they've been doing without a hitch -- contradicting all the naysayers that keep saying "they'll never be able to get anything out -- they'll botch the launch -- etc"
The rumour mill is feeding this post, so take it as you will.
AMD has been working on their Germany plant for quite some time (last couple of years). From the moment I've heard of it, it was always AMD's goal to produce chips in huge quantities using state of the art technology (being.18um and copper interconnects right now). They've been producing samples of K6-2/K6-3's using a.18um process using copper interconnects for the last few months.
Within the last few weeks, rumour had it that they had been producing sample K7's the Dresden plant and sent stuff back to Austin for "verification" (ie: look over each nanometer [or whatever they do] to make sure everything is good).
To me, this article seems to indicate that everything is looking good in the verification process, and they're confident enough to start ramping up to full production (or begin preparations to ramp up).
Word is soon after the 733mhz cuMine process is released AMD will drop prices (which I think they just did actually...) and release a 750 mhz version. This, incidentally, is still on the.25um process (I find it remarkable that they were able to get to 700 air cooled).
Kryotech has systems running at 900mhz using current.25um chips; it is VERY reasonable to expect AMD to be able to produce 1ghz chips soon after bringing Dresden online.
JC (at http://www.jc-news.com/pc/) made a good point on his page the other day about this, I'll quote it here...
"Register put up a very interesting bit here. It's about a surprise Willamette introduction in February of 2000 ("paper launch" in December, chip actually appearing two months later, according to the article). I passed this by despite the fact that a good ten percent (slight exaggeration, but you get the idea) of y'all emailed the URL to me. It just doesn't seem likely, considering the design, to our collective knowledge, hasn't taped out (and if it did, it was likely recently). Takes about a year from tapeout to production. You do the math. However, as I said, I wasn't going to put up a link to it, but I just realized something (thanks to Jocelyn Fournier, I think, for nudging me in this direction). The specint95 score of the P7-1100 shown at that register article is utter crap. If it is really the case that it is that slow, then Willamette will be pretty pathetic for servers, especially if you consider the 1MB on-die L2. The quoted score is 43 at 1100MHz. By my guesstimations (with the help of idiot from Ace's), an Athlon at 1100MHz would score between 50 and 55 (perhaps subtract a point or two for dropoff from linearity), depending on whether or not you optimize for prefetching. This means that Athlon pastes these alleged Willamette scores in specint. Actually, from the look of it, given Intel's Coppermine presentation at PF, it seems that Coppermine is also faster than Willamette in specint. I didn't check at all with the Winstone score, but as you can see, if Register's data is true, then it isn't really great news for Intel. I don't know about you, but I'll prefer to believe the more reasonable assumption that Willamette will come out in 2000 Q4 (or 2001 Q1) but will be totally rippin' in performance."
That still leaves the original idea however -- if the person who wrote the article receives no benefit whatsoever from a good or bad review, so what? They have no incentive to deceive.
These "$3000+" plus sets are all well over the 35" mark. That's a big freeking tube tv.
There is no point in making a HDTV set that's only 20" big -- the only people interested in getting them right now are filthy rich are need to be on the bleeding edge of A/V hardware (usually both:). You cater to the people you can sell stuff to...
One thing I've seen on another website is that they didn't "hide" the text, rather they made it the same color as the background -- this way you had to highlight the text to read it.
I thought it was a simple, clever solution to displaying spoiler information.
Yeah, everyone I've talked to that's ever owned one (old model or new one) has only had good things to say about the car... that's why I really Really REALLY want one:).
30k for a car is on the really high upper limit that I can spend. I won't be making loads of money -- hell I'll only be graduating a year from now (and I won't be buying a new car for at least 6 months after that)....and it'll beat the crap outta my '84 Ranger...(which runs better than alot of other vehicles out there, amazingly:)
There is a reason why I am not getting Viper;).
I have alot of things that matter to me about cars, but if I'm going to buy a "sports" car in my price range it's gotta be able to go through a pair of tires in a month (hehe), have a nice deep sound to it, look really mean, and handle well. Obviously when you can't afford to spend a ton of money you have to find a car that fits the right blend (dangit, why can't I get a job that pays 100k right out of college?:). In this case, I'll sacrafice a bit of performance that I'll rarely use for a cool look and a loan that won't put me in the poor house for 4 years.
Re: Camaro Bleh, can't stand the body style. It's right up there with the new mustang. They look nice sure, but they don't have the "mean, hungry" look that I like in cars:). The Trans Am doesn't really have that look either until you add the blower holes in the hood;).
Heh, personally I'm looking to get a Trans Am when I can afford one. It's got the "eat you for lunch" look the Viper's got for less than half the cost...:) (about 30k for a loaded car). Doesn't have the same power, but I ain't racing it either...
Slashdot Mirror
lol...
Apparently with a math minor I am able to understand:
What a fourier series does
What an Eigenvalue/vector is (which is prolly different than an Eigenform)
I do not know...
What a Modular form is
What a Hecke serires is
What an Eigenform is...
"under the"
Any person with a greater understanding care to explain what some of those things are?
or were the movie writers totally stupid?
Arn't all nuclear reactors in the US designed in such a way that when your coolant disappears that the reactor is no longer able to sustain a reaction? (ie: emptying the water from the tanks shuts down the reactor).
The chernoble reactor was designed the exact opposite way (ie: you take the graphite like stuff out of the reactor and it speeds up).
Or am I totally not remembering things right?
Strangly, it is much more difficult to shift you hand up or down a line... for some reason I still type the right letters :)
I can actually think of several legitimate uses (provided these "phones" don't work like phone cards [ie: "expire" on mm/dd/yyyy]).
Put one in all your cars in case of a break down. Alot cheaper than installing mobile phones in each car and paying for them. You lose less money if someone breaks into your car and steals it.
Give to your kids when they go out in case of an emergency. Cheaper than having several phones, loss due to breakage/left it on the bus/whatever is minimal.
If I really thought hard I'm sure I could come up with other uses... (and currently, I do not own a cell phone, mainly because I can't afford monthly fees right now [ie: college student]).
...and for what it's worth, Ghostscript can be used to view PDF's -- at least the ones I've thrown at it.
Whoops, my bad... 2x 4.3g
Giga in software terms is considered a power of two (because the computer works in base 2, or one's and zero's). It's easy for the computer to work with.
;).
In most scientific fields, it is very inconvenient to work in base two, so people often use a number system called "base 10"; don't know where they came up with it (something to do with the number of toes a person has or something rediculous like that
As a result, MHz is a power of 10, GHz is a power of 10, KHz is a power of ten, etc. If you're really curious, I'd suggest getting an old physics book (the one you chucked out the 10th floor window after finally finishing that last required physics class) and look at what they define "mega" and "giga" as. It should also list what powers "nano" and "um" are as well, to give you a general idea of how really SMALL (yet, not small) the stuff inside your computer is.
Actually, AMD has demoed K7's running at 1ghz at shows and such using Kyrotech.
I've got a "real" player hooked up to my entertainment system.
;).
No point in buying a DVD unless you're going to watch it properly, not on some dinky 15" monitor with crappy PC speakers
(yes, I know some people have ungodly sized monitors, and a rarer few have a good quality sound system hooked up to their puter...).
The Matrix DVD isn't buggy, rather the players themselves arn't up to spec (ie: the manufacturers cut features to make a shipdate, because "who will ever use that overlay feature?").
:).
If the disc were buggy all of the players would exibit the same problems. Seeing how one thing is broken on one player, while another is broken on another indicates (to me) the player is broken in these instances.
For what it's worth the Panasonic A-110 is one of the few players I've seen that play it properly.
I'm still impressed that they used every last byte that the disc could hold... all 4.3gigs
There arn't many fabs that can manufacture at .18um using copper interconnects. IBM is one of the few, and their fabs are tied up making PPC chips for motorolla.
The second reason is capacity. AMD's austin fab is a pretty decent sized plant, but it can't make chips fast enough. They want more capacity, so they made a plan that can fullfill that...
A third good reason is that they don't depend on third parties to make the chips. It'd really suck if, say, intel bought out the fab that was making AMD's chips for them...:)
The C=64 has something going for it PC's don't have -- a consistent hardware configuration.
:).
When was the last time you opened a PC, saw the same cpu, same sound card, same I/O controller, same video card, same brand floppy drive, etc? When was the last time you looked at a hardware config and saw all of the same types of devices on the same IRQs?
You don't. In order to accomidate that sort of flexibility stuff needs to be "abstracted" out so it doesn't depend on the same hardware, but rather the same functionality.
For example, all sound cards can play a sound. Now, the process of getting a SB16 to play a sound and an A3d board to play a sound is very different, but if you have some sort of software abstraction layer that just says "play a sound" and will call some code that knows how to play sound (usually called a driver, ooh goodie). And sound is played if the driver doesn't suck ass.
I always see people complaining about code bloat (usually referring to microsoft products -- and I can NOT understand how Word got to be so frigging big).
These same people don't realize that you don't need to optimize 90% of the code in a product. You only need to optimize the parts the user waits on. Seriously, what's the point of optimizing a print routine (for example...)? All of your time is spent waiting on the printer...
These same people also don't realize that sometimes it's better to use the "slower" algorythm; not only is it easier to understand what the code is doing, but sometimes it's actually faster to use a bubblesort over a quicksort (try sorting mostly sorted list with a quicksort, then with a good bubblesort and tell me which one returns faster).
And to top that off, the process of optimization often leads to really wierd looking code (and it's amusing to watch someone try to figure out what the hell you were smoking when you wrote it) that's hard to debug/fix/modify.
...sorry, just one of my frustrating rants I guess...
Actually, I'd say the Celeron is the perfect example of a company rushing a product out the door to "fill" a need.
The first Celeron's released had no L2 cache. They were DIRT SLOW. It was nothing but a PII without a case nor the L2 cache on the processor slot. It was designed to compete with AMD and Cyrix at the low end. Which it didn't (not having an L2 cache really killed performance; not as bad for games, as those often have L2 misses anyway).
Months later, the intel guys re-released the celeron with 128k L2 cache running at chip speed. I don't think they even thought about the overclocking potential of the sucker, or think that it's performance would approach/beat that of their "cash crop" processor (the PII).
Intel didn't take it's time, it just threw something out the door hoping to put a rival out of business.
An interesting point brought out in one my courses here at school... When analyzing algorythms you're not supposed to "consider" the machine it will be running on. If you think about it, it makes sense.
A really fast machine running an n^2 algorythm will still be running an n^2 algorythm. When you reach a certain (often relatively small) set of data, you will SERIOUSLY notice how laggy the system is performing. Doubling the speed of the processor doesn't mean that you can double the amount of data you give to an n^2 sort before the time it takes is greater than before. It's a mere fraction of that.
People will continue to program the way they're used to. People will program in a manner to scale, if they need to scale! If they don't need to, then they won't (why bother wasting the extra time?). I don't know about most programmers, but for me programming is an ego trip. My goal is to get the slickest smallest fastest most bug free piece of code out there. Now, I realize that there are many coders out there that don't think like that but the thing is they'd code using the n^2 algorythm anyway.
...and another diversion: in some cases an n^3 algorythm will outperform an n^2 algorythm (other examples can be made); you also have to consider the data set you use. If KNOW you're going to use a data set smaller than "1" (one is a relative term, where the two functions intersect; it may be a rather large number if one algorythm is measured in minutes and the other seconds) then then n^3 would be the better choice.
I seriously doubt this will change the way code is written...
Dresden has never officially been "opened" by AMD. This is basically a statement (instead of a rumour) by AMD that yes they plan on producing wopping fast processors at this factory and if everything goes well we'll hit 1ghz in Q1 (as they've been saying all along).
It's pretty amazing to see them pull through all of the ramping they've been doing without a hitch -- contradicting all the naysayers that keep saying "they'll never be able to get anything out -- they'll botch the launch -- etc"
The rumour mill is feeding this post, so take it as you will.
.18um and copper interconnects right now). They've been producing samples of K6-2/K6-3's using a .18um process using copper interconnects for the last few months.
.25um process (I find it remarkable that they were able to get to 700 air cooled).
.25um chips; it is VERY reasonable to expect AMD to be able to produce 1ghz chips soon after bringing Dresden online.
AMD has been working on their Germany plant for quite some time (last couple of years). From the moment I've heard of it, it was always AMD's goal to produce chips in huge quantities using state of the art technology (being
Within the last few weeks, rumour had it that they had been producing sample K7's the Dresden plant and sent stuff back to Austin for "verification" (ie: look over each nanometer [or whatever they do] to make sure everything is good).
To me, this article seems to indicate that everything is looking good in the verification process, and they're confident enough to start ramping up to full production (or begin preparations to ramp up).
Word is soon after the 733mhz cuMine process is released AMD will drop prices (which I think they just did actually...) and release a 750 mhz version. This, incidentally, is still on the
Kryotech has systems running at 900mhz using current
My 2c.
JC (at http://www.jc-news.com/pc/) made a good point on his page the other day about this, I'll quote it here...
"Register put up a very interesting bit here. It's about a surprise Willamette introduction in February of 2000 ("paper launch" in December, chip actually appearing two months later, according to the article). I passed this by despite the fact that a good ten percent (slight exaggeration, but you get the idea) of y'all emailed the URL to me. It just doesn't seem likely, considering the design, to our collective knowledge, hasn't taped out (and if it did, it was likely recently). Takes about a year from tapeout to production. You do the math. However, as I said, I wasn't going to put up a link to it, but I just realized something (thanks to Jocelyn Fournier, I think, for nudging me in this direction). The specint95 score of the P7-1100 shown at that register article is utter crap. If it is really the case that it is that slow, then Willamette will be pretty pathetic for servers, especially if you consider the 1MB on-die L2. The quoted score is 43 at 1100MHz. By my guesstimations (with the help of idiot from Ace's), an Athlon at 1100MHz would score between 50 and 55 (perhaps subtract a point or two for dropoff from linearity), depending on whether or not you optimize for prefetching. This means that Athlon pastes these alleged Willamette scores in specint. Actually, from the look of it, given Intel's Coppermine presentation at PF, it seems that Coppermine is also faster than Willamette in specint. I didn't check at all with the Winstone score, but as you can see, if Register's data is true, then it isn't really great news for Intel. I don't know about you, but I'll prefer to believe the more reasonable assumption that Willamette will come out in 2000 Q4 (or 2001 Q1) but will be totally rippin' in performance."
Give me 80 grand to spend on a Viper and I'll gladly purchase one... I don't have that kinda cash sitting around :/
That still leaves the original idea however -- if the person who wrote the article receives no benefit whatsoever from a good or bad review, so what? They have no incentive to deceive.
You are leaving out a few details here...
:). You cater to the people you can sell stuff to...
These "$3000+" plus sets are all well over the 35" mark. That's a big freeking tube tv.
There is no point in making a HDTV set that's only 20" big -- the only people interested in getting them right now are filthy rich are need to be on the bleeding edge of A/V hardware (usually both
One thing I've seen on another website is that they didn't "hide" the text, rather they made it the same color as the background -- this way you had to highlight the text to read it.
I thought it was a simple, clever solution to displaying spoiler information.
Yeah, everyone I've talked to that's ever owned one (old model or new one) has only had good things to say about the car... that's why I really Really REALLY want one :).
Cool, that's pretty much the way it worked when my dad reviewed stuff for magazines (this was ancient history, back in the Atari ST era).
In this case it's a simple matter of cost.
...and it'll beat the crap outta my '84 Ranger...(which runs better than alot of other vehicles out there, amazingly :)
;).
:). In this case, I'll sacrafice a bit of performance that I'll rarely use for a cool look and a loan that won't put me in the poor house for 4 years.
:). The Trans Am doesn't really have that look either until you add the blower holes in the hood ;).
30k for a car is on the really high upper limit that I can spend. I won't be making loads of money -- hell I'll only be graduating a year from now (and I won't be buying a new car for at least 6 months after that).
There is a reason why I am not getting Viper
I have alot of things that matter to me about cars, but if I'm going to buy a "sports" car in my price range it's gotta be able to go through a pair of tires in a month (hehe), have a nice deep sound to it, look really mean, and handle well. Obviously when you can't afford to spend a ton of money you have to find a car that fits the right blend (dangit, why can't I get a job that pays 100k right out of college?
Re: Camaro
Bleh, can't stand the body style. It's right up there with the new mustang. They look nice sure, but they don't have the "mean, hungry" look that I like in cars
This was kinda a ramble, sorry 'bout that...
Heh, personally I'm looking to get a Trans Am when I can afford one. It's got the "eat you for lunch" look the Viper's got for less than half the cost...:) (about 30k for a loaded car). Doesn't have the same power, but I ain't racing it either...