Sure, having "perfect" audio makes sense for musical performances, but for recording stuff like speeches and other oral (voice) presentations, the bitrate and memory on this device are more than enough. From the summary here on slash, I get a feeling that's the intended market anyway (broadcasters and journalists).
You should say "open source," because saying it isn't free is ambiguous even in your mind, and downright wrong in an accountant's mind. This isn't the show-stopper you seem to imply it is. People have been using and will continue to use closed-source compilers for many, many years. Take a look at the popularity of VC++, Watcom, Borland, etc. in spite of the free (as in open source and $$$) availablility of GCC on Windows.
No, they didn't compile kernels. They compiled (and tested) ON multiple kernels. Don't you feel silly now, contesting so loudly a point you misinterpreted? I happen to do a lot of engineering design and analysis, and work with people who would be quite interested in saving nearly 50% of their computation time when performing analysis, especially when some analyses take as much as 3 days of computation time. This translates directly to a very large and real cost savings for a company.
Well, perhaps it will allow the GCC compiler folks a glimps into some of the optimizations Intel managed (by studying the output produced), which will in turn allow the GCC writers to rethink GCC's optimization strategies. Those improvements would hopefully benefit more platforms than just Intel.
Next time the zealot in you decides to come raging out, take a deep breath and count to 10. Think about how this news might be good for the open-source community before you begin bashing wantonly.
I don't think Yahoo's going to reap any profits from this venture. After checking (haven't been there in a while) it looks like "pay for search" didn't turn out to be a very lucrative business model for NL.
The problem is that you have to pay someone to create all of the information that doesn't (and won't, because 90% of web developers use something like FrontPage and don't know what a meta-tag is) exist in the document. Also, you need to verify every entry's accuracy, or you'll end up with pr0n sites (or competitors) stealing all the meta-tags of legitimate businesses.
Yahoo! tries to do this. Every entry is Yahoo! is done by a human being. This is why you only get 1% of the businesses you're looking for (if it's that high) when you try to browse the directories.
They don't even go to the trouble of creating abstracts for each site, and it is still way too costly and slow for a large-scale search engine like Google.
Applying general-purpose programming tactics to HDL too often makes too many gates and highly inefficient chip and logic layouts.
Inefficient logic is the least of your worries. "Programmers" that are new to HDL's have a tendency to think linearly, which is a Bad Thing(tm). You end up linear dependencies (i.e. X must happen before Y), and sometimes even *loops* which are the worst thing you could possibly do in HDL. Since almost everything is happening in parallel in most code snippets, the code simply doesn't work properly in hardware. Some gates will initialize properly, others will be zero, and most everything else will be in a random state.
My microprocessor design professor used to mock CS students ("see...you have this *object*...) because of the poor code they produced. Don't be one of those people, but instead "think hardware" when you're writing HDL.
Actually, the white space is what tends to get the cheaters caught.
Hmm. Where I work we have codified (pun intended) standards for spacing (and naming, etc.) so all of the code is uniform and it's easy to adjust to someone else's code. Trailing spaces I guess we aren't as picky, so long as the line doesn't cause a wordwrap.
That is true, but I don't think you quite get my point, which is that there really isn't anyone at NASA actively developing an engine according to the "specifications" they are using.
Basically they just say "hmm...let's just assume it weighs X, delivers power Y, and has lifetime Z" and see what vehicle design is possible.
The folks I talked to basically flat-out said they (NASA) don't do much research into that kind of stuff, and they mostly leave it up to the universities and private industry to come up with the technology. Of course, NASA does shell out mucho $$$ every year to fund research, but they don't participate directly.
If you're interested in what kind of research NASA and other government agencies are funding, you can head over to FirstGov and do a search on SBIR. That doesn't cover ALL of the research or development projects, but there are plenty of cool ones in there (stuff like using mech-like tech to enhance human capabilities).
I was at MSFC on a business trip a while back, and talked to the guys working on Gen2, Gen3 and later RLV design. Basically what the lead engineer told me they do is "assume we have really cool technology that meets certain specifications" and work backward from there to figure out how the rest of the vehicle be designed.
While I'm sure there might be one or two people actually doing research into antimatter, most of the work they do is just assuming *someone* will come up with the necessary technology by the time they have to build something.
Thorng invented/pioneered OOOE ( out of order
execution)
NOTE: this is a cut+paste from my reply to another post somewhere else. I just wanted to set the record straight. BTW it's typically abbreviated OOE (the "of" doesn't get a letter).
Err no he didn't. Tomasulo invented the way we do OOE many, many years before there were "3 billion fucking transistors" on a processor (which is still a slight exaggeration even by today's standards). The first machine to employ OOE was the IBM 360/91. Here are some pictures of the first (that I know of) 360/91 in operation in 1968 at NASA. Even though the machine was (by 1968's standards) blazingly fast, the 360/91 failed miserably and only a few were actually produced. The reason this machine failed was because it was incapable of handling interrupts properly. The 360/91 only supported imprecise interrupts, which meant that instructions causing the interrupt as well as subsequent instructions could continue to execute if they were already in the pipeline. This is generally not a Good Thing(tm).
I don't know where all of the Cornell students seem to get the impression that Torng invented OOE. Hopefully this is not from Torng himself, as anyone who studies modern processor design can tell you the first thing you learn about with OOE is the Tomaluso algorithm, which although it was invented over 30 years ago is still used in modern processors largely unchanged from the original design. This is not to say that Torng had no role. He did in fact substantially facilitate OOE, by devising a system to allow mutliple instructions to issue simultaneously (as his patent claims). Torng himself pays homage to Tomasulo in the patent,
referencing his paper from 1967.
Err he did.Perhaps you are thinking of compilers optimizing the order of instructions? That is not what this is about, this is about the actual hardware taking the instructions and reordering them on the fly. If my memory serves, which it usually doesn't, it requires something on the order of 250,000 transistors, so if you are asking why no one thought of this before 1989, it's because we didn't have 3 fucking billion or whatever transistors on each chip back then, so it would have increased the number of transistors by an order of magnitude.
Err no he didn't. Tomasulo invented the way we do OOE many, many years before there were "3 billion fucking transistors" on a processor (which is still a slight exaggeration even by today's standards). The first machine to employ OOE was the IBM 360/91. Here are some pictures of the first (that I know of) 360/91 in operation in 1968 at NASA. Even though the machine was (by 1968's standards) blazingly fast, the 360/91 failed miserably and only a few were actually produced. The reason this machine failed was because it was incapable of handling interrupts properly. The 360/91 only supported imprecise interrupts, which meant that instructions causing the interrupt as well as subsequent instructions could continue to execute if they were already in the pipeline. This is generally not a Good Thing(tm).
I don't know where all of the Cornell students seem to get the impression that Torng invented OOE. Hopefully this is not from Torng himself, as anyone who studies modern processor design can tell you the first thing you learn about with OOE is the Tomaluso algorithm, which although it was invented over 30 years ago is still used in modern processors largely unchanged from the original design. This is not to say that Torng had no role. He did in fact substantially facilitate OOE, by devising a system to allow mutliple instructions to issue simultaneously (as his patent claims). Torng himself pays homage to Tomasulo in the patent,
referencing his paper from 1967.
It's the lack of competition that allows the companies to do this. Obviously if there was another software service you could buy from, you would, wouldn't you?
Even today there are a lot of small industries that buy software with these "expiration dates" in them because they have no where else to go, and can not afford to pay someone to write their own code
My company puts expiration dates in the licensing. It's more of a way to make sure that company is current with the newest versions for support and maintenence purposes, and that they have access to the newest feature set. We don't have the resources support something that's 3 years old, and most of the bug reports and feature requests we get about older products have already been addressed. We charge a maintenence fee each year after purchase, which covers support as well as automatic updates to the newest versions when they come out. If the company doesn't want to continue to pay maintenence (which is much cheaper than initial investment costs for buying our software, or a competitor's), we'll issue them a permanent license for the old version, but we won't support it.
That is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard on/.
How is it even POSSIBLE that hardware sales would lessen due to software piracy? If anything, DC sold (err...sells) *more* units because people knew it was easy to get pirated games for it.
It doesn't hurt to use your brain just a little bit before posting, honestly.
Me. In fact, my ultimate PDA would be a folded-up piece of paper that I could take out of my wallet, unfold and use like a laptop computer. The bottom portion of the paper would be a keyboard/drawing area, and the top part would be the display. All memory and storage would be contained within the paper, and it would connect to other devices wirelessly.
Levanon says the company's proprietary chemical combination -- so secretive that he calls them the "Coca-Cola formulas" -- results in battery materials that are like printer's ink.
I'll bet these are those guys that keep calling tech support saying they spilled coke in their printer again.
Regardless of what one thinks of MS' predatory behavior towards other software/hardware makers, it's in any company's interest to carefully think out and plan their consumer sales channel. MS' scheme looks pretty half-baked, indicating that it waqs not well-planned, and that nobody who actually works for the company has ever actually been a customer, and seen what it's like.
Considering that they ran out of extra licenses to sell (at least temporarily) it may not have been fully planned logistically, but from a sales perspective it doesn't sound like a bad idea. Imagine how quickly they would have run out if they'd sold it for $15 as you suggest. In this case, it still sounds like they're about at the sweet spot on the demand curve to maximize profits quite nicely, which is of course their main purpose.
Name me one nation the United States has annexed in the last 75 years.
Hawaii.
I'll bet you didn't realize that Hawaii wasn't even a U.S. state when Pearl Harbor was attacked, did you? I also bet you didn't know there happened to have been a ruling monarchy in Hawaii that was forcibly overthrown by the U.S. government. Oh...it was "democratic" in that they later had a vote to determine whether Hawaii should become a state, but there was no option on the ballot for Hawaii to remain a sovereign nation.
Have you ever written a piece of commercial software? The same principles apply. You try to keep the interface as simple as possible, because God knows some stupid luser will find a way to break it, and you want to limit the side effects. You build in all kinds of extra error handling and tolerances for bad input. You create ample instructions (readme, dialogs that pop up before the user can do anything, startup tips, help text, etc.) and people still ignore them.
Yes, sometimes programmers write bugs, and sometimes "hardware" engineers make errors in calculations too. Anyone remember the Mars pathfinder mission?
Errors tend to occur when the engineers are put under pressure to meet a particular deadline, and they aren't given enough time to complete the task. You want it done by Friday? Fine. If it crashes your system, don't say I didn't warn you. However, when Friday comes around, the work is handed over, and the system crashes it's the engineer who takes the blame for shoddy workmanship, and not the customer, manager, etc. who demands the product before it's ready.
If you or anyone else wants to complain about faulty software, feel free. Just don't complain when you have to wait twice as long for the new version, and it doesn't have many new bells and whistles.
Slashdot Mirror
D43R F0CKS:
1M 4 1337 81ZN355 3x3CU7iV3. PLZ D0N7 C4NC31 FU7UR4M4.
The article quoted is the one from EETimes, which is dated yesterday.
It should be obvious, but the main thrust of this story is the licensing scheme, not the technical specs and application of mpeg-4.
Sure, having "perfect" audio makes sense for musical performances, but for recording stuff like speeches and other oral (voice) presentations, the bitrate and memory on this device are more than enough. From the summary here on slash, I get a feeling that's the intended market anyway (broadcasters and journalists).
Next time the zealot in you decides to come raging out, take a deep breath and count to 10. Think about how this news might be good for the open-source community before you begin bashing wantonly.
I don't think Yahoo's going to reap any profits from this venture. After checking (haven't been there in a while) it looks like "pay for search" didn't turn out to be a very lucrative business model for NL.
Have you used gnutella?
Same thing.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
...to publish it as a pdf document instead of HTML?
Yahoo! tries to do this. Every entry is Yahoo! is done by a human being. This is why you only get 1% of the businesses you're looking for (if it's that high) when you try to browse the directories. They don't even go to the trouble of creating abstracts for each site, and it is still way too costly and slow for a large-scale search engine like Google.
Inefficient logic is the least of your worries. "Programmers" that are new to HDL's have a tendency to think linearly, which is a Bad Thing(tm). You end up linear dependencies (i.e. X must happen before Y), and sometimes even *loops* which are the worst thing you could possibly do in HDL. Since almost everything is happening in parallel in most code snippets, the code simply doesn't work properly in hardware. Some gates will initialize properly, others will be zero, and most everything else will be in a random state.
My microprocessor design professor used to mock CS students ("see...you have this *object*...) because of the poor code they produced. Don't be one of those people, but instead "think hardware" when you're writing HDL.
Hmm. Where I work we have codified (pun intended) standards for spacing (and naming, etc.) so all of the code is uniform and it's easy to adjust to someone else's code. Trailing spaces I guess we aren't as picky, so long as the line doesn't cause a wordwrap.
"Ok, I'll hold THIS end..."
Basically they just say "hmm...let's just assume it weighs X, delivers power Y, and has lifetime Z" and see what vehicle design is possible.
The folks I talked to basically flat-out said they (NASA) don't do much research into that kind of stuff, and they mostly leave it up to the universities and private industry to come up with the technology. Of course, NASA does shell out mucho $$$ every year to fund research, but they don't participate directly.
If you're interested in what kind of research NASA and other government agencies are funding, you can head over to FirstGov and do a search on SBIR. That doesn't cover ALL of the research or development projects, but there are plenty of cool ones in there (stuff like using mech-like tech to enhance human capabilities).
I was at MSFC on a business trip a while back, and talked to the guys working on Gen2, Gen3 and later RLV design. Basically what the lead engineer told me they do is "assume we have really cool technology that meets certain specifications" and work backward from there to figure out how the rest of the vehicle be designed.
While I'm sure there might be one or two people actually doing research into antimatter, most of the work they do is just assuming *someone* will come up with the necessary technology by the time they have to build something.
NOTE: this is a cut+paste from my reply to another post somewhere else. I just wanted to set the record straight. BTW it's typically abbreviated OOE (the "of" doesn't get a letter).
Err no he didn't. Tomasulo invented the way we do OOE many, many years before there were "3 billion fucking transistors" on a processor (which is still a slight exaggeration even by today's standards). The first machine to employ OOE was the IBM 360/91. Here are some pictures of the first (that I know of) 360/91 in operation in 1968 at NASA. Even though the machine was (by 1968's standards) blazingly fast, the 360/91 failed miserably and only a few were actually produced. The reason this machine failed was because it was incapable of handling interrupts properly. The 360/91 only supported imprecise interrupts, which meant that instructions causing the interrupt as well as subsequent instructions could continue to execute if they were already in the pipeline. This is generally not a Good Thing(tm).
I don't know where all of the Cornell students seem to get the impression that Torng invented OOE. Hopefully this is not from Torng himself, as anyone who studies modern processor design can tell you the first thing you learn about with OOE is the Tomaluso algorithm, which although it was invented over 30 years ago is still used in modern processors largely unchanged from the original design. This is not to say that Torng had no role. He did in fact substantially facilitate OOE, by devising a system to allow mutliple instructions to issue simultaneously (as his patent claims). Torng himself pays homage to Tomasulo in the patent, referencing his paper from 1967.
Err no he didn't. Tomasulo invented the way we do OOE many, many years before there were "3 billion fucking transistors" on a processor (which is still a slight exaggeration even by today's standards). The first machine to employ OOE was the IBM 360/91. Here are some pictures of the first (that I know of) 360/91 in operation in 1968 at NASA. Even though the machine was (by 1968's standards) blazingly fast, the 360/91 failed miserably and only a few were actually produced. The reason this machine failed was because it was incapable of handling interrupts properly. The 360/91 only supported imprecise interrupts, which meant that instructions causing the interrupt as well as subsequent instructions could continue to execute if they were already in the pipeline. This is generally not a Good Thing(tm).
I don't know where all of the Cornell students seem to get the impression that Torng invented OOE. Hopefully this is not from Torng himself, as anyone who studies modern processor design can tell you the first thing you learn about with OOE is the Tomaluso algorithm, which although it was invented over 30 years ago is still used in modern processors largely unchanged from the original design. This is not to say that Torng had no role. He did in fact substantially facilitate OOE, by devising a system to allow mutliple instructions to issue simultaneously (as his patent claims). Torng himself pays homage to Tomasulo in the patent, referencing his paper from 1967.
My company puts expiration dates in the licensing. It's more of a way to make sure that company is current with the newest versions for support and maintenence purposes, and that they have access to the newest feature set. We don't have the resources support something that's 3 years old, and most of the bug reports and feature requests we get about older products have already been addressed. We charge a maintenence fee each year after purchase, which covers support as well as automatic updates to the newest versions when they come out. If the company doesn't want to continue to pay maintenence (which is much cheaper than initial investment costs for buying our software, or a competitor's), we'll issue them a permanent license for the old version, but we won't support it.
That is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard on /.
How is it even POSSIBLE that hardware sales would lessen due to software piracy? If anything, DC sold (err...sells) *more* units because people knew it was easy to get pirated games for it.
It doesn't hurt to use your brain just a little bit before posting, honestly.
Me. In fact, my ultimate PDA would be a folded-up piece of paper that I could take out of my wallet, unfold and use like a laptop computer. The bottom portion of the paper would be a keyboard/drawing area, and the top part would be the display. All memory and storage would be contained within the paper, and it would connect to other devices wirelessly.
I'll bet these are those guys that keep calling tech support saying they spilled coke in their printer again.
Considering that they ran out of extra licenses to sell (at least temporarily) it may not have been fully planned logistically, but from a sales perspective it doesn't sound like a bad idea. Imagine how quickly they would have run out if they'd sold it for $15 as you suggest. In this case, it still sounds like they're about at the sweet spot on the demand curve to maximize profits quite nicely, which is of course their main purpose.
Hawaii. I'll bet you didn't realize that Hawaii wasn't even a U.S. state when Pearl Harbor was attacked, did you? I also bet you didn't know there happened to have been a ruling monarchy in Hawaii that was forcibly overthrown by the U.S. government. Oh...it was "democratic" in that they later had a vote to determine whether Hawaii should become a state, but there was no option on the ballot for Hawaii to remain a sovereign nation.
Yes, and if you need to wear eyeglasses to code, you shouldn't be a programmer.
/. readers agree with that)
(see how many
Have you ever written a piece of commercial software? The same principles apply. You try to keep the interface as simple as possible, because God knows some stupid luser will find a way to break it, and you want to limit the side effects. You build in all kinds of extra error handling and tolerances for bad input. You create ample instructions (readme, dialogs that pop up before the user can do anything, startup tips, help text, etc.) and people still ignore them.
Yes, sometimes programmers write bugs, and sometimes "hardware" engineers make errors in calculations too. Anyone remember the Mars pathfinder mission?
Errors tend to occur when the engineers are put under pressure to meet a particular deadline, and they aren't given enough time to complete the task. You want it done by Friday? Fine. If it crashes your system, don't say I didn't warn you. However, when Friday comes around, the work is handed over, and the system crashes it's the engineer who takes the blame for shoddy workmanship, and not the customer, manager, etc. who demands the product before it's ready.
If you or anyone else wants to complain about faulty software, feel free. Just don't complain when you have to wait twice as long for the new version, and it doesn't have many new bells and whistles.