ARM is a really neat instruction set, and the architecture is very efficient, but there are/were some weaknesses.
The main one was that the cache was on the wrong side of the MMU and ran at a very low clock frequency. Have they fixed this yet?
The other one, as you mention in your post, is the lack of floating-point. Are there any main-stream ARM implementations with hardware floating-point nowadays?
That must have been one heck of a see-saw if the space shuttle descending on one end was enough to get him all the way to the space station. Shall he have but a penny a day? Can he not work any faster?
in probably 50 years, and most certainly 100 years, the word Microsoft will sound just like the word EDSEL sounds today....it won't matter whether today's storage format is ASCII or proprietary, there won't be a machine in the universe to read any of it.
Yes there will. Everything is on the network now. Data gets gradually transferred from system to system and formats get converted as new software comes out.
Additionally, open standards are making a comeback, such as ODF.
The real problem nowadays is that children are being brought up who won't write by hand. Everything has to be "on the computer." Simple note taking is something they won't do. That's OK if you're near a machine all the time, and it isn't broken...
You can't beat a pencil and a piece of pulped, rolled dead tree for quick writing. Want to make it electronic? Run it through the scanner.
All of the old software I used in the 80s on 8-bit micros has appeared on the Internet now and there are emulators for all the machines I'm interested in. Even some pretty niche stuff has been resurrected - Skywave FORTH for the ZX81.
I have systems of various architectures that all speak to each other in this house: x86, x86-64, UltraSPARC, Linux, Solaris and Mrs Turgid has a Windows laptop. I edit files on OpenOffice.org that she can edit in Word and Excel. I rip all of our new CDs using cdparanoia on Linux and encode them to flac and mp3.
The real problem is not data formats per se. It's the fact that everything is electronic and without a sophisticated infrastructure of power and networking, and computer manufacturing, we can't use any of the data.
When there is a power cut, I can still read my books, magazines and program listings. I can still write code and do maths with a pencil and paper. I can to trig without a calculator to reasonable approximations. I know how to do calculus, logs, all that stuff. I can write without a computer and get some of the spelling right.
I really must read Pepys' diary one of these days...
As a Brit, I really can't understand why anyone over the age of 7 years would want to read about or watch super hero stories. That was the age I started to find Batman and Superman cheesy.
Can someone please explain. Is it only Americans who like this sort of thing?
I saw the Tim Burton Batman when it came out, and the X-Men with Patrick Stewart and found them very pathetic. What am I missing?
The only reason IBM has been funding and supporting Linux development so strongly is to compete with Solaris, since AIX is so dreadful.
You can bet your bottom dollar, that when IBM gets its filthy mitts on Solaris, it will drop its Linux development like a hot potato.
Sun has frittered away all its advantages over the last decade, and despite its genuine commitment to Open Source in general, the PHBs really don't get "community." This is a shame. And why can't they make processors? Fujitsu have always made better SPARCs than Sun. Sun should have bought AMD when the Opteron came out in 2003.
An IBM buy-out of Sun would be bad for Sun technology, and bad for the market in general. Sun could really do with some strong leadership and proper organisation in touch with reality.
I don't want to get into a language flame war here, but I would like to make a few points.
C is still very important in OS kernels and embedded systems. It is the Lingua Franca of such things and will probably be so for another 30 years.
There are those who know C++ to an intermediate level who think that as a consequence they also know C. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are completely different languages, but they share a common heritage.
C++ is object orientation, applied to C, done wrong.
That's not to say that C++ isn't important. It is, because of its widespread adoption. It is baroque, however.
Java takes a lot from Objective-C, although it has more of a C++ style syntax.
Learn C well. It is a small language, portable, ubiquitous and in demand. If you know C well, it will be easier to learn C++, Objective-C and Java.
FORTRAN is a bit different. If you learned BASIC on an early 80's 8-bit micro, FORTRAN will make sense, otherwise be prepared for a nervous breakdown.
You really should look at some of the Pascal family of languages (MODULA-2 for instance) to see some good ideas from the past and then Scheme to program in colour.
While you are expanding your mind you might also like to listen to musing on the Bohlen-Pierce scale. See my sig for details.
How convenient is that. You give your main competitor dodgy magnets, shutting them down for months, then you proceed to make all the important discoveries.
Why, oh why, didn't the CERN people make their own magnets?
And since heat exchangers never leak, there's no problem putting them in the data center with all the electrical devices...
Apparently not. We've managed with air conditioners for 40+ years, with drip trays and drains. My old Nucular(TM) power station used to have them in the Temperature Monitoring Room to keep the PDP-11s cool.
That would work great until the moisture buildup from the water kills all the electronic equipment in the room.;)
Dad, is that you?
Blimey, people are so negative. Someone once said that if you have a good idea, don't worry about people trying to steal it: you'll have to ram it down their throats.
And once your cold water reaches the same temperature as the data center, what then?
You heat it up more to become hot water.
The water you want to be cold, you don't pipe through the data centre.
Water has a very high specific heat capacity compared to air. You don't need a lot of it to absorb a lot of heat energy. That equates to a cooler data centre.
Buildings provide hot water for washing hands etc. Cold water comes in from outside and is heated using electricity or gas to make hot water which costs money and energy.
Pipe the cold water (which is usually somewhere between 0 and 20 degrees C) through heat exchangers in the hot data centre before heating it up to working temperature with gas or electricity.
That way, you reduce the data centre's temperature to more like 20-25C, and you heat the water up by 10C (say) saving on gas or electricity bills since there is less of a temperature difference to get it up to the required temperature.
So, if the AMD cross-licensing agreement goes away and there isn't serious competition for Intel in the x86 world, I'd expect Microsoft to start supporting alternatives.
Windows already ships by the million on PowerPC hardware: XBox 360.
Before the XBox 360 came out, the development environment that Microsoft was supplying was Windows ported to Power Mac hardware (G5 I believe).
AMD x86 processors aren't going away, though. This is intel just flexing its muscles, spreading FUD to get AMD's share price down and to scare consumers away from its chips.
All of these big technology companies have patent cross-licensing deals with each other. You'd better believe that intel can't survive without AMD's patents, and AMD can't survive without intel's, or Sun's, HP's, Microsoft's, TI's, FreeScale's... and so on.
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ARM is a really neat instruction set, and the architecture is very efficient, but there are/were some weaknesses.
The main one was that the cache was on the wrong side of the MMU and ran at a very low clock frequency. Have they fixed this yet?
The other one, as you mention in your post, is the lack of floating-point. Are there any main-stream ARM implementations with hardware floating-point nowadays?
That must have been one heck of a see-saw if the space shuttle descending on one end was enough to get him all the way to the space station. Shall he have but a penny a day? Can he not work any faster?
in probably 50 years, and most certainly 100 years, the word Microsoft will sound just like the word EDSEL sounds today....it won't matter whether today's storage format is ASCII or proprietary, there won't be a machine in the universe to read any of it.
Yes there will. Everything is on the network now. Data gets gradually transferred from system to system and formats get converted as new software comes out.
Additionally, open standards are making a comeback, such as ODF.
The real problem nowadays is that children are being brought up who won't write by hand. Everything has to be "on the computer." Simple note taking is something they won't do. That's OK if you're near a machine all the time, and it isn't broken...
You can't beat a pencil and a piece of pulped, rolled dead tree for quick writing. Want to make it electronic? Run it through the scanner.
All of the old software I used in the 80s on 8-bit micros has appeared on the Internet now and there are emulators for all the machines I'm interested in. Even some pretty niche stuff has been resurrected - Skywave FORTH for the ZX81.
I have systems of various architectures that all speak to each other in this house: x86, x86-64, UltraSPARC, Linux, Solaris and Mrs Turgid has a Windows laptop. I edit files on OpenOffice.org that she can edit in Word and Excel. I rip all of our new CDs using cdparanoia on Linux and encode them to flac and mp3.
The real problem is not data formats per se. It's the fact that everything is electronic and without a sophisticated infrastructure of power and networking, and computer manufacturing, we can't use any of the data.
When there is a power cut, I can still read my books, magazines and program listings. I can still write code and do maths with a pencil and paper. I can to trig without a calculator to reasonable approximations. I know how to do calculus, logs, all that stuff. I can write without a computer and get some of the spelling right.
I really must read Pepys' diary one of these days...
As a Brit, I really can't understand why anyone over the age of 7 years would want to read about or watch super hero stories. That was the age I started to find Batman and Superman cheesy.
Can someone please explain. Is it only Americans who like this sort of thing?
I saw the Tim Burton Batman when it came out, and the X-Men with Patrick Stewart and found them very pathetic. What am I missing?
The only reason IBM has been funding and supporting Linux development so strongly is to compete with Solaris, since AIX is so dreadful.
You can bet your bottom dollar, that when IBM gets its filthy mitts on Solaris, it will drop its Linux development like a hot potato.
Sun has frittered away all its advantages over the last decade, and despite its genuine commitment to Open Source in general, the PHBs really don't get "community." This is a shame. And why can't they make processors? Fujitsu have always made better SPARCs than Sun. Sun should have bought AMD when the Opteron came out in 2003.
An IBM buy-out of Sun would be bad for Sun technology, and bad for the market in general. Sun could really do with some strong leadership and proper organisation in touch with reality.
Microsoft used to be pretty "open" at the start too.
Honestly - telling people to inspect their neighbour's rubbish for bomb-making materials?
What, like empty bags of chapati flour?
Kaboom!
Yeah. The poster telling you to report anyone looking at CCTV cameras is particularly entertaining. For now... : /
But! I always wave at CCTV cameras to brighten the days of the police men and women watching them. It must be a really boring job.
My goodness. Sounds like the Socialist Workers Party. Thinly-disguised single-party authoritarian rule. Joseph Stalin, anyone?
Google Apps and "the Cloud" (sounds like a seventies pop group) is where Google becomes the new Microsoft.
The Great Unwashed will flock to move over to Google Apps and before they know it, they'll be locked in. They'll be beholden to Google.
You mark my words...
It's been trendy in the last 20 years to do C++.
I don't want to get into a language flame war here, but I would like to make a few points.
C is still very important in OS kernels and embedded systems. It is the Lingua Franca of such things and will probably be so for another 30 years.
There are those who know C++ to an intermediate level who think that as a consequence they also know C. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are completely different languages, but they share a common heritage.
C++ is object orientation, applied to C, done wrong.
That's not to say that C++ isn't important. It is, because of its widespread adoption. It is baroque, however.
Java takes a lot from Objective-C, although it has more of a C++ style syntax.
Learn C well. It is a small language, portable, ubiquitous and in demand. If you know C well, it will be easier to learn C++, Objective-C and Java.
FORTRAN is a bit different. If you learned BASIC on an early 80's 8-bit micro, FORTRAN will make sense, otherwise be prepared for a nervous breakdown.
You really should look at some of the Pascal family of languages (MODULA-2 for instance) to see some good ideas from the past and then Scheme to program in colour.
While you are expanding your mind you might also like to listen to musing on the Bohlen-Pierce scale. See my sig for details.
Fermilab stitched up CERN good and proper. Remember children, never outsource your customer satisfaction.
How convenient is that. You give your main competitor dodgy magnets, shutting them down for months, then you proceed to make all the important discoveries.
Why, oh why, didn't the CERN people make their own magnets?
Learning from the mistakes of others is a good practice no matter what direction you're going in.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is usually the best way to make progress.
And since heat exchangers never leak, there's no problem putting them in the data center with all the electrical devices...
Apparently not. We've managed with air conditioners for 40+ years, with drip trays and drains. My old Nucular(TM) power station used to have them in the Temperature Monitoring Room to keep the PDP-11s cool.
So if no one is washing their hands in the office, the water will not flow and the servers will overheat...
So you radiate it away.
That would work great until the moisture buildup from the water kills all the electronic equipment in the room. ;)
Dad, is that you?
Blimey, people are so negative. Someone once said that if you have a good idea, don't worry about people trying to steal it: you'll have to ram it down their throats.
And once your cold water reaches the same temperature as the data center, what then?
You heat it up more to become hot water.
The water you want to be cold, you don't pipe through the data centre.
Water has a very high specific heat capacity compared to air. You don't need a lot of it to absorb a lot of heat energy. That equates to a cooler data centre.
Buildings provide hot water for washing hands etc. Cold water comes in from outside and is heated using electricity or gas to make hot water which costs money and energy.
Pipe the cold water (which is usually somewhere between 0 and 20 degrees C) through heat exchangers in the hot data centre before heating it up to working temperature with gas or electricity.
That way, you reduce the data centre's temperature to more like 20-25C, and you heat the water up by 10C (say) saving on gas or electricity bills since there is less of a temperature difference to get it up to the required temperature.
I eagerly await my Nobel Prize for Common Sense.
So, if the AMD cross-licensing agreement goes away and there isn't serious competition for Intel in the x86 world, I'd expect Microsoft to start supporting alternatives.
Windows already ships by the million on PowerPC hardware: XBox 360.
Before the XBox 360 came out, the development environment that Microsoft was supplying was Windows ported to Power Mac hardware (G5 I believe).
AMD x86 processors aren't going away, though. This is intel just flexing its muscles, spreading FUD to get AMD's share price down and to scare consumers away from its chips.
All of these big technology companies have patent cross-licensing deals with each other. You'd better believe that intel can't survive without AMD's patents, and AMD can't survive without intel's, or Sun's, HP's, Microsoft's, TI's, FreeScale's... and so on.
Do they smoke astroturf in space, Bowie?
Eh? Where did that come from?
They could always "leverage" Open Source. WINE and qemu should do the job :-)
Except they won't be saving the money, it's going to go to some other crazy project.
What, like educating children, feeding the poor, healing the sick and looking after the elderly and infirm?
I'm not the BBCs biggest fan, I consider them Labour-biased.
Have you ever listened to Today on Radio 4?