You make so many assumptions about how the chip operates and what it is *intended* to be used for that your argument is virtually meaningless.
While the article mentions random errors, it doesn't specifically say that the chip relies on noise or how these random errors are generated and used. Until we know this, any reasoning about bits such as your comment is (at best) speculation of limited meaning.
It's incredible the number of comments for this story that make kneejerk assumptions about these things when the original article doesn't say enough to infer them. And anyone with some common sense would assume that the people who designed the chip *might* have had some idea what they were doing and had considered the obvious flaws which every random basement-dwelling Slashdotter takes great delight in pointing out and seems to think they missed. (Despite the article not providing us with enough information to reach this conclusion).
Then they should only use the processor in places where its limitations are not an issue. I certainly wouldn't suggest that it was appropriate for every purpose.
complete mathematical analysis of even a small algorithm may be too difficult (or too expensive, or too lengthy.
Or impossible, if the Halting Problem is anything to go by?- or does that only apply to analysis by a Turing Machine?
The discussion is about a processer being less accurate.
Not exactly, the discussion was about trading off accuracy for speed and efficiency. And my comment was specifically a reply to what Girlintraining said.
And I don't think that *anyone* was suggesting that this processor would be suitable for all possible computer uses.
The example I gave was hypothetical and pulled out of my backside- and wasn't meant to be anything more than that.
Back to your example, you can't "know" you are within 3% if you have not accurately calculated the problem first.
You could use mathematical/statistical means to prove that in (from my original example) 99.9% of situations the answer returned would be within 3% of the most efficient answer. I can't say more than that because it was a hypothetical algorithm(!)
However, the fact is that although many problems in computer science can be proven to be horribly slow to get the optimal answer, there often exist far more efficient algorithms which will provably return a solution that's within a small percentage of the optimum one.
That's not using probabilistic methods, IIRC- a probabilistic algorithm would, I assume, only be able to be proven to work in a statistical (high) percentage of a very large number of runs. But that would probably be acceptable for non-life-threatening uses.
There's no guarantee that a "low power" chip will only mess up the low-order bits of a number.
Yeah- you spotted the obvious issue that those guys never *ever* would have taken into account before starting work on their design. I hereby nominate you for the Nobel prize.
The article really doesn't make clear how the chip works, what the probabilities are, etc. so if you're able to come to that conclusion you either know more about it than me, or you're just sitting typing pat answers into Slashdot.
Oh, and if you want to be pedantic there's no *guarantee* that *any* computer will work correctly- it could get bombarded by enough cosmic rays to generate uncorrectable memory errors.
Funny you should mention that; as far as I'm aware some graphics cards *do* tolerate these sorts of minor glitches. IIRC, I heard this in connection with a/. article that discussed using GFX chips as general-use processors.
NEWS FLASH: People use computers for calculations with more than single-digit binary results.
"probablistic computing" is another way of saying "sloppy engineering".
No- insisting on excessive precision where an "almost certainly right to within +/- x%" solution would be more than good enough and much simpler to obtain is known as overengineering.
I suspect that the financial examples chosen didn't illustrate the point as well as intended (financial companies generally don't like *any* inaccuracy), but that doesn't change the general principle.
Would you prefer a routing algorithm that gobbled up power and took ages to run for a guaranteed shortest route or one that was far more efficient and 99.9% certain to give a route that was within 3% of the shortest possible distance?
um there has been massive amounts of changes to the x86 design line over the last 20 years too.
To the point where they are almost superficially x86.
If nothing else, from the Pentium Pro and Pentium II onwards, Intel's x86 line changed architecture radically to a RISC-based core and hardware translation of x86 instructions to native RISC ones- all inside the CPU.
And while it has been in progress for over 10 years, digital converters are just now, barely commodity items.
I'm not US-based, so I can't comment on the fine details of the market, but I understand that they've been at commodity level for a few months now. And while that's not long, it's still long enough before the switchover.
Can you blame people for not wanting to be early adopters?
Eh? False dichotomy. It wasn't a choice between waiting until it was too late or buying a box ten years ago when they were $2000 or whatever.
Can you blame people for the government's choice of timing, square in the middle of the biggest recession in American history?
Well the date was set years ago- you can't blame the US government for their choice of timing being smack in the middle of the current recession like it was intentional!
If people are *really* having trouble affording the boxes, fair enough. But I suspect that the majority are just indifferent and don't (or can't be bothered) understanding until the signal is switched off.
As I said, they should have a message on all major networks' analogue transmissions letting people know that they'll be going off-air soon.
mark poster as redundant [..] you must work in some kind of public service office pushing paper to think a form is a good way to express an opinion.
On the contrary. The fact that someone's argument can be criticised and/or refuted via such standardised means (*) shows that it fails in one or more now well-defined areas that previous "solutions" have exhibited and should have been considered this time round. And/or that this is merely an inadvertant repackaging of an older idea.
The slightly tongue-in-cheek form makes the point well, and far from being longwinded is shorthand compared to having a tedious and pointless rehash of previous discussions.
(*) As another poster mentioned, this "form" has been around for ages.
keyed what would later become Linux 0.0.01 into the front panel of an IMSAI 8080 with 1K of RAM
Well, the unexpanded ZX81 had 1K of RAM as well (no, really!), but I had to trade that off against the chance to get the infamous RAM pack wobble in there.:)
I started out with Slackware in late 1994 on a 486DX33 with 8MB of RAM. It was amazing. 40 floppies to install it since I had no CDROM drive.
That's nothing. I ran Linux 0.03 on my Sinclair ZX81 in early 1982. It were stored on 300 C90 cassettes, took 18 days to load and I had to hold the RAM pack to stop it wobbling.
And you try and tell the young people of today that..... they won't believe you.
They'll blame the government for turning off their TV programmes of course- and complain that they weren't given enough time or warning or something like that.
Like I said, this won't be justified, but those people will blame the government rather than themselves anyway.
Personally, I think that the US should have required that major networks' analogue transmissions be overlaid by a permanent (and increasingly prominent) message in the final months before the switchover, complete with a countdown (e.g. "you have 17 days to switch to digital"). Come to think of it, they should do that here in the UK as well, even though our dates are staggered across different regions with some already having switched.
I have a harmonizer that I bought back before this guy supposedly invented this process
Incidentally, how do harmonizers work? IIRC I've heard that they've been around since the mid-1970s, but surely that was years before digital processing was possible- so how did they do it?
And who ever discovered analogue distortion by maxing the signal probably thought no one in their right mind would use that either. They were wrong.
First time I heard "Revolution" by The Beatles I thought there was something wrong with the recording or the amplifier- I didn't realise it was *meant* to sound like that. I remember coming across a review of the song from when it first came out which described it as a "fuzzy mess".
George Orwell had no idea Joe Blow would be so willing to invite Big Brother so quickly into his home.
The TV sets in Nineteen Eighty-Four were *two way*- existing TVs only display incoming pictures, they don't return information which is the part most people are thinking of when they invoke the spectre of Big Brother. For all the valid criticism of TV that you make above, that one missed the mark.
Ironically for all the idealism spoken when it rose to prominence in the 1990s, the Internet provides a *far* more effective way to spy on people's behaviour via various means.
I suppose it could make an argument for convincing the government to postpone it some more, but even there it seems to me like "the people don't actually want it" _ought_ to be enough of a reason by itself.
A large proportion of US OTA-viewers probably *don't* "want" digital TV per se- analogue does them fine, thank you.
Yeah, you and I both know that this misses the point, that they'll need a digibox to continue watching *any* OTA TV, full stop.
However, the difference between you and the US government is that *they* know that- regardless of whether it's those people's fault for missing the point, ignoring the advice and not getting a box- there are a significant number of them and they'll be mighty pissed off and blame the government when they can't watch TV *at all*.
Works wonders and if they basically tell you to "Sod Off Sucker" then simply forward their reply to the appropriate authorities and prepare to inudate them with a federal/eu investigation.
Then they'll either learn to fob you off or craft a reply that lets them off the hook (or doesn't commit them) legally but contains an implicit "fuck you" anyway.
if a refresh doesn't help, i click on my huge bigass Ctrl+W and never come back in such cases.
A cynical, but perfectly plausible guess might be that the people who run profit-making, advertising-driven websites probably wouldn't care- and may be glad if bandwidth is a non-negligible proportion of the cost. It's the flipside of "I never click on ads so why bother showing them to me / there's nothing wrong with blocking them anyway" and "it's not my job to support their broken business model".
The site owners may reasonably agree that they're not going to make any money off such people and say "good riddance".
I'm sure it's cheaper to leave trash lying around rather than picking it up and taking it to the dump, too. It'll save money!
You missed the thrust of the guy's argument. He wasn't saying it was responsible or laudable behaviour, merely that those people's aim is to make money and if it's clear that their behaviour makes them money then it's incorrect (or retarded!) to call it "retarded", whether or not you like it.
If your site doesn't work with JavaScript turned off, your site is broken. Period, end of chapter.
That's a matter of opinion, not of fact, no matter how strongly you may suggest otherwise. Implying that there's no legroom for concession on this point is pretty silly when you immediately contradict yourself:-
(AJAX-heavy sites complicate this only slightly --
As you concede, some sites use and rely on AJAX so heavily that to omit it (or implement the same functionality by "plain vanilla" means) would render it meaningless and/or unusable.
Of course, I agree that it's pretty brain damaged to *require* Javascript for things like links if it's not essential for anything else anyway. It's still quite feasible to retain plain <a> link behaviour for non-JS users while retaining the "enhanced" behaviour for those who *do* have it turned on.
you should clearly explain what's not working and why
That depends on what you'd consider "what's not working and why". If the functionality of the site is built around AJAX, then it's quite reasonable to say "we're sorry, but this site requires Javascript". The vast majority of people wouldn't want or need any more than that.
Many have said that the same may happen to Vista. Were it not for the release of Windows 7 I'd agree, since it looks like Windows 7 is meant to supplant Vista, thus rendering it permanenly maligned.
Well, the fact that Vista is so maligned is probably why it's not being marketed under that name anyway. Let's face it- Windows 7 isn't a radical new OS, it's just Vista fixed. But I guess they want to distance themselves from the negative associations.
I hate the Fisher Price interface too, but you can switch it back to classic (it's the first thing I do).
The default blue-and-other-primary-colours version of Luna is IMHO the one that earned it its "Fisher Price" tag- and quite deservedly so in that case. It's awful, and the familiarity of years hasn't improved my opinion of it.
However, the silver version is liveable if a bit shiny, and I have to confess that I actually quite like the olive green version. I find it amazing that hardly anyone seems to bother changing the default and tolerates (or likes?!) the default Fisher Price vileness.
Copy & paste is a different matter, but even there you are not forward thinking...
What is that supposed to mean? It's a vague, nebulous criticism that seems to want to have its cake and eat it.
You seem to be attacking him for not thinking in some loose way of what *might* happen in the future and/or not coming up with some better alternative. I don't see *you* coming up with any ideas if they're so obvious!
And more importantly- we're not living in the future; we're living in the present. It's perfectly reasonable to want research into a more effective alternative to cut and paste. However, unless there's something practical ready or imminent, it's just as reasonable to criticise Apple for not including the next best thing in the meantime.
Slashdot Mirror
You make so many assumptions about how the chip operates and what it is *intended* to be used for that your argument is virtually meaningless.
While the article mentions random errors, it doesn't specifically say that the chip relies on noise or how these random errors are generated and used. Until we know this, any reasoning about bits such as your comment is (at best) speculation of limited meaning.
It's incredible the number of comments for this story that make kneejerk assumptions about these things when the original article doesn't say enough to infer them. And anyone with some common sense would assume that the people who designed the chip *might* have had some idea what they were doing and had considered the obvious flaws which every random basement-dwelling Slashdotter takes great delight in pointing out and seems to think they missed. (Despite the article not providing us with enough information to reach this conclusion).
complete mathematical analysis of even a small algorithm may be too difficult (or too expensive, or too lengthy.
Or impossible, if the Halting Problem is anything to go by?- or does that only apply to analysis by a Turing Machine?
The discussion is about a processer being less accurate.
Not exactly, the discussion was about trading off accuracy for speed and efficiency. And my comment was specifically a reply to what Girlintraining said.
And I don't think that *anyone* was suggesting that this processor would be suitable for all possible computer uses.
The example I gave was hypothetical and pulled out of my backside- and wasn't meant to be anything more than that.
Back to your example, you can't "know" you are within 3% if you have not accurately calculated the problem first.
You could use mathematical/statistical means to prove that in (from my original example) 99.9% of situations the answer returned would be within 3% of the most efficient answer. I can't say more than that because it was a hypothetical algorithm(!)
However, the fact is that although many problems in computer science can be proven to be horribly slow to get the optimal answer, there often exist far more efficient algorithms which will provably return a solution that's within a small percentage of the optimum one.
That's not using probabilistic methods, IIRC- a probabilistic algorithm would, I assume, only be able to be proven to work in a statistical (high) percentage of a very large number of runs. But that would probably be acceptable for non-life-threatening uses.
There's no guarantee that a "low power" chip will only mess up the low-order bits of a number.
Yeah- you spotted the obvious issue that those guys never *ever* would have taken into account before starting work on their design. I hereby nominate you for the Nobel prize.
The article really doesn't make clear how the chip works, what the probabilities are, etc. so if you're able to come to that conclusion you either know more about it than me, or you're just sitting typing pat answers into Slashdot.
Oh, and if you want to be pedantic there's no *guarantee* that *any* computer will work correctly- it could get bombarded by enough cosmic rays to generate uncorrectable memory errors.
Funny you should mention that; as far as I'm aware some graphics cards *do* tolerate these sorts of minor glitches. IIRC, I heard this in connection with a /. article that discussed using GFX chips as general-use processors.
NEWS FLASH: Binary consists of 1 and 0.
NEWS FLASH: People use computers for calculations with more than single-digit binary results.
"probablistic computing" is another way of saying "sloppy engineering".
No- insisting on excessive precision where an "almost certainly right to within +/- x%" solution would be more than good enough and much simpler to obtain is known as overengineering.
I suspect that the financial examples chosen didn't illustrate the point as well as intended (financial companies generally don't like *any* inaccuracy), but that doesn't change the general principle.
Would you prefer a routing algorithm that gobbled up power and took ages to run for a guaranteed shortest route or one that was far more efficient and 99.9% certain to give a route that was within 3% of the shortest possible distance?
um there has been massive amounts of changes to the x86 design line over the last 20 years too. To the point where they are almost superficially x86.
If nothing else, from the Pentium Pro and Pentium II onwards, Intel's x86 line changed architecture radically to a RISC-based core and hardware translation of x86 instructions to native RISC ones- all inside the CPU.
Solar faces the same problem. The sun isn't always up and even when it is, it isn't always out.
It is- somewhere in the world. Whether that's a solution to your issue is debatable.
And while it has been in progress for over 10 years, digital converters are just now, barely commodity items.
I'm not US-based, so I can't comment on the fine details of the market, but I understand that they've been at commodity level for a few months now. And while that's not long, it's still long enough before the switchover.
Can you blame people for not wanting to be early adopters?
Eh? False dichotomy. It wasn't a choice between waiting until it was too late or buying a box ten years ago when they were $2000 or whatever.
Can you blame people for the government's choice of timing, square in the middle of the biggest recession in American history?
Well the date was set years ago- you can't blame the US government for their choice of timing being smack in the middle of the current recession like it was intentional!
If people are *really* having trouble affording the boxes, fair enough. But I suspect that the majority are just indifferent and don't (or can't be bothered) understanding until the signal is switched off.
As I said, they should have a message on all major networks' analogue transmissions letting people know that they'll be going off-air soon.
mark poster as redundant [..] you must work in some kind of public service office pushing paper to think a form is a good way to express an opinion.
On the contrary. The fact that someone's argument can be criticised and/or refuted via such standardised means (*) shows that it fails in one or more now well-defined areas that previous "solutions" have exhibited and should have been considered this time round. And/or that this is merely an inadvertant repackaging of an older idea.
The slightly tongue-in-cheek form makes the point well, and far from being longwinded is shorthand compared to having a tedious and pointless rehash of previous discussions.
(*) As another poster mentioned, this "form" has been around for ages.
keyed what would later become Linux 0.0.01 into the front panel of an IMSAI 8080 with 1K of RAM
Well, the unexpanded ZX81 had 1K of RAM as well (no, really!), but I had to trade that off against the chance to get the infamous RAM pack wobble in there. :)
I started out with Slackware in late 1994 on a 486DX33 with 8MB of RAM. It was amazing. 40 floppies to install it since I had no CDROM drive.
That's nothing. I ran Linux 0.03 on my Sinclair ZX81 in early 1982. It were stored on 300 C90 cassettes, took 18 days to load and I had to hold the RAM pack to stop it wobbling.
..... they won't believe you.
And you try and tell the young people of today that
Blame the government for what?
They'll blame the government for turning off their TV programmes of course- and complain that they weren't given enough time or warning or something like that.
Like I said, this won't be justified, but those people will blame the government rather than themselves anyway.
Personally, I think that the US should have required that major networks' analogue transmissions be overlaid by a permanent (and increasingly prominent) message in the final months before the switchover, complete with a countdown (e.g. "you have 17 days to switch to digital"). Come to think of it, they should do that here in the UK as well, even though our dates are staggered across different regions with some already having switched.
I have a harmonizer that I bought back before this guy supposedly invented this process
Incidentally, how do harmonizers work? IIRC I've heard that they've been around since the mid-1970s, but surely that was years before digital processing was possible- so how did they do it?
And who ever discovered analogue distortion by maxing the signal probably thought no one in their right mind would use that either. They were wrong.
First time I heard "Revolution" by The Beatles I thought there was something wrong with the recording or the amplifier- I didn't realise it was *meant* to sound like that. I remember coming across a review of the song from when it first came out which described it as a "fuzzy mess".
George Orwell had no idea Joe Blow would be so willing to invite Big Brother so quickly into his home.
The TV sets in Nineteen Eighty-Four were *two way*- existing TVs only display incoming pictures, they don't return information which is the part most people are thinking of when they invoke the spectre of Big Brother. For all the valid criticism of TV that you make above, that one missed the mark.
Ironically for all the idealism spoken when it rose to prominence in the 1990s, the Internet provides a *far* more effective way to spy on people's behaviour via various means.
I suppose it could make an argument for convincing the government to postpone it some more, but even there it seems to me like "the people don't actually want it" _ought_ to be enough of a reason by itself.
A large proportion of US OTA-viewers probably *don't* "want" digital TV per se- analogue does them fine, thank you.
Yeah, you and I both know that this misses the point, that they'll need a digibox to continue watching *any* OTA TV, full stop.
However, the difference between you and the US government is that *they* know that- regardless of whether it's those people's fault for missing the point, ignoring the advice and not getting a box- there are a significant number of them and they'll be mighty pissed off and blame the government when they can't watch TV *at all*.
Works wonders and if they basically tell you to "Sod Off Sucker" then simply forward their reply to the appropriate authorities and prepare to inudate them with a federal/eu investigation.
Then they'll either learn to fob you off or craft a reply that lets them off the hook (or doesn't commit them) legally but contains an implicit "fuck you" anyway.
if a refresh doesn't help, i click on my huge bigass Ctrl+W and never come back in such cases.
A cynical, but perfectly plausible guess might be that the people who run profit-making, advertising-driven websites probably wouldn't care- and may be glad if bandwidth is a non-negligible proportion of the cost. It's the flipside of "I never click on ads so why bother showing them to me / there's nothing wrong with blocking them anyway" and "it's not my job to support their broken business model".
The site owners may reasonably agree that they're not going to make any money off such people and say "good riddance".
I'm sure it's cheaper to leave trash lying around rather than picking it up and taking it to the dump, too. It'll save money!
You missed the thrust of the guy's argument. He wasn't saying it was responsible or laudable behaviour, merely that those people's aim is to make money and if it's clear that their behaviour makes them money then it's incorrect (or retarded!) to call it "retarded", whether or not you like it.
If your site doesn't work with JavaScript turned off, your site is broken. Period, end of chapter.
That's a matter of opinion, not of fact, no matter how strongly you may suggest otherwise. Implying that there's no legroom for concession on this point is pretty silly when you immediately contradict yourself:-
(AJAX-heavy sites complicate this only slightly --
As you concede, some sites use and rely on AJAX so heavily that to omit it (or implement the same functionality by "plain vanilla" means) would render it meaningless and/or unusable.
Of course, I agree that it's pretty brain damaged to *require* Javascript for things like links if it's not essential for anything else anyway. It's still quite feasible to retain plain <a> link behaviour for non-JS users while retaining the "enhanced" behaviour for those who *do* have it turned on.
you should clearly explain what's not working and why
That depends on what you'd consider "what's not working and why". If the functionality of the site is built around AJAX, then it's quite reasonable to say "we're sorry, but this site requires Javascript". The vast majority of people wouldn't want or need any more than that.
Many have said that the same may happen to Vista. Were it not for the release of Windows 7 I'd agree, since it looks like Windows 7 is meant to supplant Vista, thus rendering it permanenly maligned.
Well, the fact that Vista is so maligned is probably why it's not being marketed under that name anyway. Let's face it- Windows 7 isn't a radical new OS, it's just Vista fixed. But I guess they want to distance themselves from the negative associations.
I hate the Fisher Price interface too, but you can switch it back to classic (it's the first thing I do).
The default blue-and-other-primary-colours version of Luna is IMHO the one that earned it its "Fisher Price" tag- and quite deservedly so in that case. It's awful, and the familiarity of years hasn't improved my opinion of it.
However, the silver version is liveable if a bit shiny, and I have to confess that I actually quite like the olive green version. I find it amazing that hardly anyone seems to bother changing the default and tolerates (or likes?!) the default Fisher Price vileness.
it was clearly Ebaumsworld.com
No, Ebaumsworld just got hold of a copy of the report where the original hacker claimed credit and replaced his name with theirs.
Copy & paste is a different matter, but even there you are not forward thinking...
What is that supposed to mean? It's a vague, nebulous criticism that seems to want to have its cake and eat it.
You seem to be attacking him for not thinking in some loose way of what *might* happen in the future and/or not coming up with some better alternative. I don't see *you* coming up with any ideas if they're so obvious!
And more importantly- we're not living in the future; we're living in the present. It's perfectly reasonable to want research into a more effective alternative to cut and paste. However, unless there's something practical ready or imminent, it's just as reasonable to criticise Apple for not including the next best thing in the meantime.