But honestly, there are some markets Intel should attack w/ this CPU. For starters, supercomputers. The platform from Cray discussed yesterday - that one looks just perfect for a whole bunch of these. There are quite a few supercomputer projects in a number of countries, and Intel should target the Itanium at all of them. That alone would have a bunch of them flying off the shelves.
Er, no. Itanic is just an over-grown, over-engineered DSP. The GPUs that they use as co-processors in supercomputers these days do a much better job (orders of magnitude faster, cooler, cheaper and supported by standard - and open source - software libraries).
Were you the guy who explained why the conditional instructions of 32-bit ARM were no longer an advantage, hence the lack of them in 64-bit ARM? I forgot the explanation and can't find it, and would be grateful if you point me to it.
...let me be the first to say that these young whipper-snappers can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. They don't know the difference between C and C++, they've never heard of FORTH and they can't write makefiles. And they think a 2GHz CPU is slow!
I've worked for a few very large companies who have made huge redundancies amongst engineering staff just as soon as projects are completed and ready to ship.
The logic is pretty simple: there are great new products ready to go and the cost base can be instantly reduced by letting go thousands of staff making profits might higher as a proportion of the cost base in the very short term (next 1 to 4 quarters).
The trouble is, you have to skate to where the puck is going, i.e. you have to be constantly developing new and better stuff to come out in a year to 18 month's time. If you don't have the R&D staff, you are in a tricky situation.
I suppose the logic is that you can hire people back when you're out of the economic hole, but I've never seen that happen. What does happen is a continuation of the company's decline until it eventually gets bought out.
Many of the people can't be hired back anyway, because they've moved on with their lives (retired, retrained, got new jobs). Do CEOs think that us little people sit around on our backsides all day worshipping their corporations and doing nothing except waiting for them to offer us jobs?
When you let your institutional knowledge leave the building, it goes for good. MBAs don't understand this.
there is no point in trying to become more "agile" (i.e., risk-accepting) except making your job easier.
Agile is not about being more accepting of risk: it's about engineering risk out, reducing the scope for human error, testing early and often (with as much automation as possible) to catch bugs and other errors before they become expensive, being confident of not breaking things when things change and, above all, having as much confidence in the product as possible that it works.
It does indeed sound very reasonable, and this is in fact precisely what Google does with Dart - they have a Dart-to-JS compiler, but they're also working on native support for Dart directly in Chrome, which will be better and faster. I'll be eagerly waiting for your post debunking their attempt to "embrace, extend and extinguish".
I'm not a google apologist either, so sorry to disappoint you.
Why do Microsoft devs put up with MS's disain of standards and conventions?
...because they're completely locked into the Microsoft ecosystem where standards don't matter and the Outside World is irrelevant.
It's a combination of arrogance, laziness, ignorance, brainwashing and the Stockholm Syndrome.
(I realise it was a rhetorical question, but there's a shill about here who is being deliberately obtuse.)
I recently experienced someone deciding to write a remote GUI client application for an embedded system (running on Linux and various other OSs) in C# on Windows. We suggested Java, C++, Ruby, you name it, for portability, but he's reasoning was, "It doesn't need to be portable just now." It will never be portable because it uses Windows Forms.
What you do is introduce this new "free" and "open" language that compiles down to another ubiquitous language. The new language is convenient and saves people a lot of time.
Then people get to thinking, "Why bother compiling to another language when you can directly target the virtual machine and runtime environment that that language runs on?" Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?
Now, I'm not a web developer (thank $DEITY), but there are many (slightly incompatible) implementations of JavaScript, and they are all implemented differently, i.e. they all have different bytecode interpreters/JITs and so forth. Now supposing you were the author of this particular language and the author of a certain very popular web browser, you could do this quite easily for your particular web browser, and none of the competing ones. You would thus make your browser (probably) the most fast and efficient one at running this particular language.
People like to have "the fastest" whether they need it or not, and due to human nature, speed usually trumps other considerations like compatibility and reliability, so you've just made your platform more popular. People are now hooked.
Once you have people hooked and your market share is increasing, you can start making proprietary "enhancements" to your implementation of the language and run-time deliberately incompatible with everyone elses'. Note that your implementation of the language was originally distributed under a license (Apache) which doesn't require you to distribute source code with any changes, so you can choose to keep "enhancements" secret and proprietary any time you like, and you can throw in the odd patent or two for good measure for those enhancements.
I've been around since IBM was the Evil Empire. I saw them fall to Microsoft, and I've seen all of Microsoft's dirty tricks. I switched to Linux when Windows 95 came out.
Someone needs to make a film, and call it, day, "The Life of Mustafa."
You see, he's not the Holy Prophet (Peace be Upon Him) - he's a very naughty boy.
It could start off with him being woken from his slumbers (together with his young wives) by his mum knocking on his door.
All through the film he could be followed by mindless morons worshiping him by mistake, while the real Holy Prophet (Peace be Upon Him) ascends directly to Heaven on his horse in a brilliant shaft of white light. Note that we never see the real Holy Prophet's (Peace be Upon Him) face so there will be no need for riots and murders.
I won't charge any would-be film makers for the use of this idea.
Also, I don't think most people here get what atheism is in the first place, I mean, I have heard such things as "... we must protect Pakistan from the atheist jewish conspiracy!!!111"
There are many similarly-minded people in the USA, I've heard, ("Atheists know there is a god not to believe in him, right?") and some here in Blighty.
It really saddens me that, in this day and age, large sections of the Human Race are willfully ignorant of objective reality and revel in their own dogmatic adherence to superstition and myth while simultaneously criticising (and threatening) others who are also zealously adherent to superstition and myth (albeit of a different variety).
Pots and kettles and all that.
And why must entire countries be threatened and their citizens murdered and assaulted for the acts of others (even though those acts were pretty trivial an non-violent)?
The Puritans made life pretty miserable for everyone in England at around the time of the English Civil War. People soon got fed up with them and they had to flee to America...
Maybe the Islamic "Puritans" will be forced to flee soon, and leave everyone else in peace? (Where will they flee too, though?).
Scotland's enlightenment began in the 1700s, when the religious zealots finally started to lose their grip and rationality, science and engineering began to emerge.
I believe the Middle East used to be a great region of learning and scientific enquiry about 1000 years ago before the fundamentalists took hold. What went wrong?
Someone here (I forget who) has a brilliant sig along the lines of, "Science flies us to the stars. Religion flies us into buildings."
Slashdot Mirror
And what about a rag on a stick for personal hygiene?
...aren't bad, but I prefer My Lidl Pony
Thank you, fans.
No, we have repeat offenders because the punishment is an insufficient deterrent.
Hang 'em. It's the only way to be sure.
What's so wrong with having a life before work and outside work when you are all grown up?
What's so wrong with enjoying yourself in the company of friends?
What's so wrong with having a few drinks and maybe even dancing in a silly fashion for a laugh every once in a while?
What a miserable world this is turning into.
But honestly, there are some markets Intel should attack w/ this CPU. For starters, supercomputers. The platform from Cray discussed yesterday - that one looks just perfect for a whole bunch of these. There are quite a few supercomputer projects in a number of countries, and Intel should target the Itanium at all of them. That alone would have a bunch of them flying off the shelves.
Er, no. Itanic is just an over-grown, over-engineered DSP. The GPUs that they use as co-processors in supercomputers these days do a much better job (orders of magnitude faster, cooler, cheaper and supported by standard - and open source - software libraries).
If OOOE is out-of-order execution, itanium does oooe fine. It just expects compiler to tell more about it.
They have clairvoyant compilers now, do they?
Sounds like the itanic all right.
They had one at LinuxExpo once, back in the day, allegedly running DeadRat, but we couldn't see it because it had overheated and they took it away.
Were you the guy who explained why the conditional instructions of 32-bit ARM were no longer an advantage, hence the lack of them in 64-bit ARM? I forgot the explanation and can't find it, and would be grateful if you point me to it.
That is so cool... but I'm stuck on level 24.
With software flow control
...let me be the first to say that these young whipper-snappers can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. They don't know the difference between C and C++, they've never heard of FORTH and they can't write makefiles. And they think a 2GHz CPU is slow!
coding used to feel like freedom because of all the possibilities, and now it feels like chains because of all the same old hurdles..
I'm starting to have fun finding cunning ways of working around the hurdles now that I didn't have the experience to make work in the past.
I try to make time to try out my own ideas and to explore away from work. I find it keeps me refreshed and interested.
I've worked for a few very large companies who have made huge redundancies amongst engineering staff just as soon as projects are completed and ready to ship.
The logic is pretty simple: there are great new products ready to go and the cost base can be instantly reduced by letting go thousands of staff making profits might higher as a proportion of the cost base in the very short term (next 1 to 4 quarters).
The trouble is, you have to skate to where the puck is going, i.e. you have to be constantly developing new and better stuff to come out in a year to 18 month's time. If you don't have the R&D staff, you are in a tricky situation.
I suppose the logic is that you can hire people back when you're out of the economic hole, but I've never seen that happen. What does happen is a continuation of the company's decline until it eventually gets bought out.
Many of the people can't be hired back anyway, because they've moved on with their lives (retired, retrained, got new jobs). Do CEOs think that us little people sit around on our backsides all day worshipping their corporations and doing nothing except waiting for them to offer us jobs?
When you let your institutional knowledge leave the building, it goes for good. MBAs don't understand this.
+1 Insightful. (Just wasted mod points on another thread....)
Thanks.
See Ida/Dactyl.
What a miserable world to live in.
there is no point in trying to become more "agile" (i.e., risk-accepting) except making your job easier.
Agile is not about being more accepting of risk: it's about engineering risk out, reducing the scope for human error, testing early and often (with as much automation as possible) to catch bugs and other errors before they become expensive, being confident of not breaking things when things change and, above all, having as much confidence in the product as possible that it works.
Everything else is a very nice side effect.
It does indeed sound very reasonable, and this is in fact precisely what Google does with Dart - they have a Dart-to-JS compiler, but they're also working on native support for Dart directly in Chrome, which will be better and faster. I'll be eagerly waiting for your post debunking their attempt to "embrace, extend and extinguish".
I'm not a google apologist either, so sorry to disappoint you.
Why do Microsoft devs put up with MS's disain of standards and conventions?
...because they're completely locked into the Microsoft ecosystem where standards don't matter and the Outside World is irrelevant.
It's a combination of arrogance, laziness, ignorance, brainwashing and the Stockholm Syndrome.
(I realise it was a rhetorical question, but there's a shill about here who is being deliberately obtuse.)
I recently experienced someone deciding to write a remote GUI client application for an embedded system (running on Linux and various other OSs) in C# on Windows. We suggested Java, C++, Ruby, you name it, for portability, but he's reasoning was, "It doesn't need to be portable just now." It will never be portable because it uses Windows Forms.
What you do is introduce this new "free" and "open" language that compiles down to another ubiquitous language. The new language is convenient and saves people a lot of time.
Then people get to thinking, "Why bother compiling to another language when you can directly target the virtual machine and runtime environment that that language runs on?" Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?
Now, I'm not a web developer (thank $DEITY), but there are many (slightly incompatible) implementations of JavaScript, and they are all implemented differently, i.e. they all have different bytecode interpreters/JITs and so forth. Now supposing you were the author of this particular language and the author of a certain very popular web browser, you could do this quite easily for your particular web browser, and none of the competing ones. You would thus make your browser (probably) the most fast and efficient one at running this particular language.
People like to have "the fastest" whether they need it or not, and due to human nature, speed usually trumps other considerations like compatibility and reliability, so you've just made your platform more popular. People are now hooked.
Once you have people hooked and your market share is increasing, you can start making proprietary "enhancements" to your implementation of the language and run-time deliberately incompatible with everyone elses'. Note that your implementation of the language was originally distributed under a license (Apache) which doesn't require you to distribute source code with any changes, so you can choose to keep "enhancements" secret and proprietary any time you like, and you can throw in the odd patent or two for good measure for those enhancements.
I've been around since IBM was the Evil Empire. I saw them fall to Microsoft, and I've seen all of Microsoft's dirty tricks. I switched to Linux when Windows 95 came out.
JavaScript programs are TypeScript programs.
'Nuff said.
and it isn't good for C# developers who now have confirmation that Ander Hejlsberg is looking elsewhere for his future.
It's C++ all the way down!
What's the view of the night sky like on planet Xarg? :-)
Someone needs to make a film, and call it, day, "The Life of Mustafa."
You see, he's not the Holy Prophet (Peace be Upon Him) - he's a very naughty boy.
It could start off with him being woken from his slumbers (together with his young wives) by his mum knocking on his door.
All through the film he could be followed by mindless morons worshiping him by mistake, while the real Holy Prophet (Peace be Upon Him) ascends directly to Heaven on his horse in a brilliant shaft of white light. Note that we never see the real Holy Prophet's (Peace be Upon Him) face so there will be no need for riots and murders.
I won't charge any would-be film makers for the use of this idea.
Also, I don't think most people here get what atheism is in the first place, I mean, I have heard such things as "... we must protect Pakistan from the atheist jewish conspiracy!!!111"
There are many similarly-minded people in the USA, I've heard, ("Atheists know there is a god not to believe in him, right?") and some here in Blighty.
It really saddens me that, in this day and age, large sections of the Human Race are willfully ignorant of objective reality and revel in their own dogmatic adherence to superstition and myth while simultaneously criticising (and threatening) others who are also zealously adherent to superstition and myth (albeit of a different variety).
Pots and kettles and all that.
And why must entire countries be threatened and their citizens murdered and assaulted for the acts of others (even though those acts were pretty trivial an non-violent)?
The Puritans made life pretty miserable for everyone in England at around the time of the English Civil War. People soon got fed up with them and they had to flee to America...
Maybe the Islamic "Puritans" will be forced to flee soon, and leave everyone else in peace? (Where will they flee too, though?).
Scotland's enlightenment began in the 1700s, when the religious zealots finally started to lose their grip and rationality, science and engineering began to emerge.
I believe the Middle East used to be a great region of learning and scientific enquiry about 1000 years ago before the fundamentalists took hold. What went wrong?
Someone here (I forget who) has a brilliant sig along the lines of, "Science flies us to the stars. Religion flies us into buildings."