But you've hit the nail on the head. In the fifty year span that the author considers (taking liberties with certain invention dates to improve his point) he ignores communication technologies.
The phone (fixed-line) gets a mention as part of his grandmother's lifespan, but mobile phones? Didn't happen. The Internet? Didn't happen.
Those two inventions alone are signs of huge progress. I'm not sure how they could be labelled as "incremental evolutions" of the phone and the computer. One meant that people stayed in contact with each other regardless of location, and the other meant that we automate communication tasks. Both complete revolutions that have changed our lifes completely.
(yes, in the space of 50 years. If you look at 20 then for early adopters of these techs it would look more like a flat plateau).
The irony is that his claims will have been read casually by millions using these technologies, where-as 50 years ago they would have been printed and distributed to a few locations.
Does this apply to harddisks with parked heads, or just those in use? The macbook has had accelerometers for years to autopark the heads if you drop it. I expect that they've made it onto windows machines now as well. Does this change the problem, or or does the deceleration still kill the disk?
And it has the latest in HCI research - an interaction device that allows tactile feedback on the edges of different controls. It should overcome one of the main limitations in the iPhone touchscreen...
So it is somewhat obvious that your mood is low today. The interesting question is whether you think the same way about trading places when you're high?
If somebody sharing a file on a network is breaking the law then why not pursue them within the law? For any other crime the approach would be to obtain evidence, and then prosecute them. I can't see why the "special status" of file-sharing means that the law should be circumvented in this case to allow punishment (disconnection) without any sort of due process.
I don't think that they are. There is quite a good comparison on the wiki page. The main difference that springs to mind is that duck typing in Python is dynamic (resolved at runtime), where-as the type system in C++ is static (resolved at compile-time). That makes them very different beasts.
Err... kind of my point. Just to clear it up I *disagree* that the Welfare State created chavs, that we had no underclass prior to its formation, and that the breakdown in social cohesion that we see amongst those on Welfare is unique amongst societies living in poverty.
Wow a real Tory alive and living in England. Are you too young to remember the eighties?
It's nice that you "remind" people that the Welfare state created this problem. And ironic given the 1984-slant on this story. I'm sure that as someone who lives in Britain you are well aware that the Sunday Express is a gutter-rag on par with the National Enquirer and so this story probably has no basis in reality.
When you "remind" people about how the Welfare State created chavs do you also remind them that we have never had an underclass at any point in history before the 1940s? Do you also point out that the breakdown in social cohesion that we attribute to chavs living in sink-hole estates has never before been associated with poverty?
Finally I hope that you "remember" to point out that the Welfare State "created" this problem by fixing other related problems - such as injury or loss of work forcing entire families out to starve to death in the streets.
Actually it does matter how the Challenger failed. It matters because the issue being discussed is whether or not sitting a crew on top of a SSB passes the safety standard that NASA is using. The GGP claimed the Challenger disaster was due to a SSB failure, and the GP corrected him.
If you read the GP again you'll see that he is pointing out that while SSBs have terrible failure modes, the probability of reaching those modes is lower. In any risk analysis it is important to quantify the probability of a complete failure, as well as the impact.
Give than an SSB is essentially a giant firework, which once lit the only thing to do is either a) retreat to a safe distance (ground staff) or b) pray (crew), it is saying something that the overall safety could be higher than the shuttle. But the shuttle takes the same dangerous SSBs and adds millions of complex parts with non-zero probabilities of failure.
While you have a point about redesigning the rocket until the escape system does work, and for a commercial transport system this would be essential, you seem to be missing something vital. Launch vehicles like this are at the limit of our current technology and engineering skills. We may have to settle for making them work at all, rather than extra niceties such as safety. Given the huge amounts of energy required to reach space, and that currently the only options that we have are detonating vast quantities of explosives slowly... there is a limit to how safe we can make this.
There are too many small-minded people, in my opinion, who can't see the forest for the trees.
Err, very true. Do you know the meaning of irony?
I notice that in the middle of your huge rant against social welfare in the form of annecdotes you forgot to "back up" your claim that the NHS in the UK was shit. I've used it. A lot. And it provides very good care.
Good point. I took the summary at face value rather than clicking through to the blog. This would require a person to look at the image and decide whether or not it contained non-image data. I assumed that they were hiding the file in low-order colour bits with a program that detected a signature and then extracted the data. Maybe that will be next month's story...
Here we go with another technological arms race. How many image hosting sites will run the converter on all uploaded images and automatically reject those that contain an embedded file? Or just remove the steg and retain the basic image...
So the next step will be some sort of keyed steg, with the keys distributed on some sort of centralised webserver.... oh no, actually that might break. But luckily keys are quite small and can be widely distributed as long as the image sites don't get a hold of them. It's going to be an interesting few years...
If the truck acts as a Faraday cage why would it block GPS but let through cellphone traffic? They are both just radio on different frequencies after all.
Tough problem... I think you should try and get this in as a poll. I'm leaning towards B although that could just be an aspect of my two-dimensional perspective and A is also a strong candidate...
What you say is true for inlining low-level assembly optimisations. But that wasn't actually my point. I'm not writing code in a "high" level language like C with inline fragments - I'm writing a code generator for a compiler. So everything that you say about the compiler knowing the architecture better than the programmer applies. But I'm checking those assumptions to tune how the backend generates code.
The example that I mentioned comes up when writing multi-precision multiplication routines like the low-level code in GMP. I was investigating how to restructure the code to speed up the low-level multiply-and-accumulate that occurs over the partial products. Oddly enough this can be sped up by doing more "dumb" work that the processor can schedule faster. In that case fissioning the MAC loop into separate phases and re-scheduling the phase that generates the partial products by "paging" in and out of extra registers speeds up the overall computation.
This is absolutely and completely wrong. The dependencies between the shifts and adds mean that you get absolutely no benefit from pipelining; each one has to complete before the next can be issued. Worse, you cause a pipeline stall because you've just filled up the CPU's re-order buffer with shifts and adds and so you don't get any benefit from out-of-order execution either.
You've misunderstood what I said - there is a benefit from independent shifts being pipelined. So consider the case where I want to compute x*10: this is split into a shift by 3 and a shift by one. If I use a movl to copy the value into a second register then these two shifts can both be executed in parallel as they have independent operands. Unlike most ALU instructions on the Core2-duo you cannot execute a third in parallel because of a pipeline restriction on the shift. But you can observe a 0.5 cycle throughput. So the cost of two shift instructions and a single add to merge the results is 2 cycles total. This is no more expensive in terms of cache or registers than the multiply and can be a win in many contexts. As the maximum throughput of the multiply unit is 4 cycles and this can only be achieved by swapping values in and out of eax/edx to force renaming there are a lot of places where the shift sequence is still more efficient.
I'm not just reading numbers from the reference. I'm in the process of writing a paper on high precision code profiling, and the machine that I'm working on has a Core2-duo processor.
Slashdot Mirror
But you've hit the nail on the head. In the fifty year span that the author considers (taking liberties with certain invention dates to improve his point) he ignores communication technologies.
The phone (fixed-line) gets a mention as part of his grandmother's lifespan, but mobile phones? Didn't happen. The Internet? Didn't happen.
Those two inventions alone are signs of huge progress. I'm not sure how they could be labelled as "incremental evolutions" of the phone and the computer. One meant that people stayed in contact with each other regardless of location, and the other meant that we automate communication tasks. Both complete revolutions that have changed our lifes completely.
(yes, in the space of 50 years. If you look at 20 then for early adopters of these techs it would look more like a flat plateau).
The irony is that his claims will have been read casually by millions using these technologies, where-as 50 years ago they would have been printed and distributed to a few locations.
Does this apply to harddisks with parked heads, or just those in use? The macbook has had accelerometers for years to autopark the heads if you drop it. I expect that they've made it onto windows machines now as well. Does this change the problem, or or does the deceleration still kill the disk?
And it has the latest in HCI research - an interaction device that allows tactile feedback on the edges of different controls. It should overcome one of the main limitations in the iPhone touchscreen...
So it is somewhat obvious that your mood is low today. The interesting question is whether you think the same way about trading places when you're high?
If somebody sharing a file on a network is breaking the law then why not pursue them within the law? For any other crime the approach would be to obtain evidence, and then prosecute them. I can't see why the "special status" of file-sharing means that the law should be circumvented in this case to allow punishment (disconnection) without any sort of due process.
Try flipping the switch from "magic" to "more magic". It's not safe to leave it in the wrong position.
Ziggy computes a 98.3% chance that is the correct definition for Quantum Computing.
I don't think that they are. There is quite a good comparison on the wiki page. The main difference that springs to mind is that duck typing in Python is dynamic (resolved at runtime), where-as the type system in C++ is static (resolved at compile-time). That makes them very different beasts.
Jesus, not another one. Didn't you read the other replies? Don't you understand sarcasm?
Err... kind of my point. Just to clear it up I *disagree* that the Welfare State created chavs, that we had no underclass prior to its formation, and that the breakdown in social cohesion that we see amongst those on Welfare is unique amongst societies living in poverty.
I thought that the sarcasm was pretty clear...
Ok, so what would you give them instead of money?
Wow a real Tory alive and living in England. Are you too young to remember the eighties?
It's nice that you "remind" people that the Welfare state created this problem. And ironic given the 1984-slant on this story. I'm sure that as someone who lives in Britain you are well aware that the Sunday Express is a gutter-rag on par with the National Enquirer and so this story probably has no basis in reality.
When you "remind" people about how the Welfare State created chavs do you also remind them that we have never had an underclass at any point in history before the 1940s? Do you also point out that the breakdown in social cohesion that we attribute to chavs living in sink-hole estates has never before been associated with poverty?
Finally I hope that you "remember" to point out that the Welfare State "created" this problem by fixing other related problems - such as injury or loss of work forcing entire families out to starve to death in the streets.
Actually it does matter how the Challenger failed. It matters because the issue being discussed is whether or not sitting a crew on top of a SSB passes the safety standard that NASA is using. The GGP claimed the Challenger disaster was due to a SSB failure, and the GP corrected him.
If you read the GP again you'll see that he is pointing out that while SSBs have terrible failure modes, the probability of reaching those modes is lower. In any risk analysis it is important to quantify the probability of a complete failure, as well as the impact.
Give than an SSB is essentially a giant firework, which once lit the only thing to do is either a) retreat to a safe distance (ground staff) or b) pray (crew), it is saying something that the overall safety could be higher than the shuttle. But the shuttle takes the same dangerous SSBs and adds millions of complex parts with non-zero probabilities of failure.
While you have a point about redesigning the rocket until the escape system does work, and for a commercial transport system this would be essential, you seem to be missing something vital. Launch vehicles like this are at the limit of our current technology and engineering skills. We may have to settle for making them work at all, rather than extra niceties such as safety. Given the huge amounts of energy required to reach space, and that currently the only options that we have are detonating vast quantities of explosives slowly... there is a limit to how safe we can make this.
Mods have no sense of humour today.
So when did Tom Cruise do something creative? I must have missed that patch, perhaps it was between Mission Impossible 2 and 3?
Err, very true. Do you know the meaning of irony?
I notice that in the middle of your huge rant against social welfare in the form of annecdotes you forgot to "back up" your claim that the NHS in the UK was shit. I've used it. A lot. And it provides very good care.
Noise.
It's a good place to bury the signal.
Good point. I took the summary at face value rather than clicking through to the blog. This would require a person to look at the image and decide whether or not it contained non-image data. I assumed that they were hiding the file in low-order colour bits with a program that detected a signature and then extracted the data. Maybe that will be next month's story...
Here we go with another technological arms race. How many image hosting sites will run the converter on all uploaded images and automatically reject those that contain an embedded file? Or just remove the steg and retain the basic image...
So the next step will be some sort of keyed steg, with the keys distributed on some sort of centralised webserver.... oh no, actually that might break. But luckily keys are quite small and can be widely distributed as long as the image sites don't get a hold of them. It's going to be an interesting few years...
If the truck acts as a Faraday cage why would it block GPS but let through cellphone traffic? They are both just radio on different frequencies after all.
Tough problem... I think you should try and get this in as a poll. I'm leaning towards B although that could just be an aspect of my two-dimensional perspective and A is also a strong candidate...
You are such a bitch.... now I have to clean milk and cereal out of a macbook keyboard and keep a smile on my face and a can do attitute... :)
No, he is claiming to be average, and you fail at reading comp.
What you say is true for inlining low-level assembly optimisations. But that wasn't actually my point. I'm not writing code in a "high" level language like C with inline fragments - I'm writing a code generator for a compiler. So everything that you say about the compiler knowing the architecture better than the programmer applies. But I'm checking those assumptions to tune how the backend generates code.
The example that I mentioned comes up when writing multi-precision multiplication routines like the low-level code in GMP. I was investigating how to restructure the code to speed up the low-level multiply-and-accumulate that occurs over the partial products. Oddly enough this can be sped up by doing more "dumb" work that the processor can schedule faster. In that case fissioning the MAC loop into separate phases and re-scheduling the phase that generates the partial products by "paging" in and out of extra registers speeds up the overall computation.
And yes: premature optimisation is evil ;)
You've misunderstood what I said - there is a benefit from independent shifts being pipelined. So consider the case where I want to compute x*10: this is split into a shift by 3 and a shift by one. If I use a movl to copy the value into a second register then these two shifts can both be executed in parallel as they have independent operands. Unlike most ALU instructions on the Core2-duo you cannot execute a third in parallel because of a pipeline restriction on the shift. But you can observe a 0.5 cycle throughput. So the cost of two shift instructions and a single add to merge the results is 2 cycles total. This is no more expensive in terms of cache or registers than the multiply and can be a win in many contexts. As the maximum throughput of the multiply unit is 4 cycles and this can only be achieved by swapping values in and out of eax/edx to force renaming there are a lot of places where the shift sequence is still more efficient.
I'm not just reading numbers from the reference. I'm in the process of writing a paper on high precision code profiling, and the machine that I'm working on has a Core2-duo processor.