nVidia, unlike 3DFX at the time, has a huge pile of cash sitting on their balance sheet.
Although its engineers need to learn to ignore their marketing dept. the management of nVidia is pretty good
expect them to regain the crown at the NV40 marker, ATI has indicated they'd be slowing their innovation cycles, whereas nVidia has made no such statement.
so I don't have to pay some ridiculous price in the Fall is a kin to the mentality that makes people edit arcane config files in Linux so they don't have to pay Bill Gates
"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for the lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essense of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms - greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge - has marked the upward surge of mankind, and greed - you mark my words - will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfuntioning corporation called the U.S.A."
yap, agree, point taken on the fpga-core swapping/not fitting in the design stuff from the article.
The thing that annoys me is that most people think its hard 'cause they haven't tried it and the whole deal has a certain "mystique" around it; when in actual fact, the things that happen in a hardware design, cause they're tied to "real things", are far more predictable and visualizable in your mind, compared to software, which is basically "made up from mid-air" without any real-life correspondance, especially at the low speeds FPGA's run (eg. clockskew not on-chip).
Finally, on a hobby level, there's nothing for example, seperating anyone from doing a well understood MC680x0 compatible processor, some internal hw. regs a la the ECS chipsets (i.e. blitter, copper, some driving logic), and a nice little sdram controller - et voila, you have yourself an authentic amiga!
Stuff like that *can* be done!! Tooling of today is *much* better than when they did the Amiga architecture in the early 80's). Anyway, that I would regard as complex, (though it pales in complexity with modern cpu architectures...) - but my point being that it is *far* simpler than re-writing WinUAE (ami emu.) from scratch in C - if some of the software Amiga-geeks were to wake up and realise this, we'd have ourselves a rogue amy (which is fun!, right!).
I've had the pleasure of doodling with an XSA-100 board for some time now, this has a nice little sdram (8mb) some flashram, a CPLD connected to your parallel port, plus, every geeks favorite, it has a vga-port connected to it with some simple two-bit/channel resistor based DA converter for your rgb. Add the free (beer) Xilinx Foundation kit, and you've got yourself a hip VHDL (=language) setup.
Hw vs. Sw - which is more difficult to "doodle" with?
Me also having a software background allowed me to relate to your story a little bit. However, our experiences have differed I think, cause in all honesty, judging from the *hobbying* I've done, software is *far* more complicated than hardware, reason being the volume of logic involved. As long as your ambitions are not to exceed the next Intel design, doing your own VHDL design is a fun, enjoyable, well overviewable and especially *rewarding* endeavour!
Designing stuff
In a hardware design, your design = your code (want a schematic, do it in a schematic! -- and not like UML 'roundtrip' engineering, no, the real thing), with software this is rarely the case. Furthermore, because a hardware design has a very focussed purpose, its more streamlined, software tends to need all bells and whistles you can throw at it to further complicate the design and thus introduce much more bugs - with hardware, things *typically* stay reasonably elegant since the way you like to think about it, is the way you'll be implementing it.
The only big problem I encountered with coding FPGA's is the *enormous* difficulty in Debugging your code. Many linuxers that are "printf" inclined to debug will have to learn that a bunch of leds is all you got when hobbying. (The "free" tools for signal simulation is just a royal pain -- I didn't get one to work due to the "free" license key I needed to install). This involved a _lot_ of theorizing on my end as to why it didn't work. (Eg. driving a vga signal, "why is my screen flickering" is the only info you've got (but hey, it's better info "why is my screen smoking?", right?)).
Anyway, Jolly good fun, I can recommend it to any software engineer - wouldn't call it the next best personal development step from Java but if you know your way around CPU's and can recognize Pascal type languages, VHDL ain't that hard.
Books
Some books I found useful in my endeavours:
VHDL for Designers, fun book, good read, introduces VHDL as a language and how to write your stuff. Also relates it to the various VHDL "compilers" so you know what works where.
ASIC Handbook, little book, handy overview of process / project management, if you're inclined to go the asic route.
Art of Electronics, you'll need to understand what happens on your circuit board, and be able to read diagrams.
and lots and lots of datasheets, but you can get those off the net!
Great fun, and not as hard as it sounds - buy a board, download the Foundation kit, and doodle!
Just a couple of things though. The villan's name is spelled El Guapo (I think so anyway, been a while since I've had spanish class.) it translates to the goodlooking or just, goodlooking/handsome...
Yep, "El Guapo" - that's correct. The Nick derives from how the German pilots pronounce the name! Thanks for the translation - I never did look it up... (the fact that he's an ugly frickin' bast'rd helps though!).
Quite basically the plot is there's this multiplayer immersive game called "Avalon" - players try to gain access to higher levels
Rumor is there's a hidden level, to access it, you need to kill a "ghost" while being accompanied by a level-10 "bishop" in your team - which only briefly appears as a little girl after you finish a level -- kill the girl and gain access, fail to kill the girl, and become a brain-fried zombie in the real world.
It's an excellent movie, way-ahead of the Matrix-thing before the Matrix did.
If you can get yourself to watch foreign movies - get this one! The final outcome - which I won't reveal - is absolutely terrific!
Lack of demagnification : we use electron beams to carve the mask at target resolution - the electron beam technology's main criticism is that, although it does the trick, the thing can't scale to higher volumes -- well waddya now! We don't want it to if it builds masks.
Perfect contact with material : pull a strong vacuum, put the two together, and we're done -- only thing is we need to have atomically flat surfaces to start with.
Things get problematic when you're trying to scrape your chip off the lens, given it'd be only a few atoms thick -- on the other hand, we might just scrape the lens off itself and not remove it.
Then there's the problem of how to do layers of lithography, but surely that can be fixed if it's the only little thing left standing. We might make a big fat waffle of a couple of hundred atoms wide with lens material in-between the layers, using a laser to carve it from the main slab of lens material.
Ok, so atomically flat surfaces, perfect vacuums and carving at a couple of hundred atoms aren't all that trivial, still, I say let's have a little optimism here - Moore is a goner I say!:-)
You're absolutely right, it's a great thing they will do this, and they're one of the few that can.
But, we're talking about Sun here, so it looses all credibility, the chances of this becoming a success are about as high as that "Network Computer" thing from a couple of years back.
So sad, can't they just go in a corner and die quietly Darwinian style while the rest of us get on with it?
(yeahyeahyeah, am on the edge of a troll, but had to be said).
Some may recall that S3 changed its name and strategy after newly hired CEO Ken Potashner came on board, who decided to dump S3's graphics into an alliance with Via, and make the recently acquired Diamond Multimedia the core business.
Now the Diamond part seems to have crapped out badly, does anyone know what is going to happen to the alliance?
(Some others will recall Potashner recently got kicked out of the company due to problems with enron-isms in his board. He was more of a ".com era" ceo I suppose).
Reason this doesn't work is due to templates working at compile time, and you specify use at linkage. The linker is fully template-ignorant and uses decorated names based on the template instantiation to match up templated code much like they were normal C-style functions.
So, in other words, while your compiler is chugging along on Foo.cpp - it treats your template functions as Declarations, and won't instantiate the code until it knows what this code should look like (and it won't know this until parameter T is defined!).
Depending on class T (in this case an int, but say it's something that overloads the assignment operator), the implementation will be made.
"Doesn't a.h cause bloat in instances of Foo for each.cpp that uses it?"
Putting this in the header file would cause bloat, but only in your.o/.obj files since the linker will only pick one instance of your templatized Foot and use that to link, the others are ignored
(much like you can override the library malloc (or any other function) with your own, should you be so inclined).
"So why don't linkers get smarter"
Because if you were to put templates in your linker, you're actually postponing compilation into the linker -- in other words, you're doing away your linker and building one compiler that treats everything as "sort of" an include file.
Still do-able, but problematic for larger projects of a couple of hundred/thousand files.
I would argue that, in large part, the reason the PS/2 has continued selling is because of the recent release of Vice City.
Because it was a PS/2 exclusive, all those people who only played GTA3 on the PC now had to buy a PS/2 to get to the sequel!
Example of this would be me, I forced my good brother to buy the PS/2 while I bought the game (two advantages : Reduces my expenses, and the machine is not "near" me so I won't be sucked out of a social life because of Vice City;-) )
Obviously, if they expect sales to continue because of upcoming GTA4 (what was it - 2004?), they'll have some tough negotiations with Rockstar ahead of them! Rockstar will be able to demand pretty much full-margin and some additional cash upfront, with Sony recouping that loss through their margin on sales of other games.
Great stuff for Rockstar, I hope GTA4 will live up to its promise!
It's annoying when posters get presumptious. The people complaining in the article are by all means elite programmers, proclaiming xml is okay because "programming *is* a hard task" is non-sense and in the same league as "HLL's are for wussies, real men code in assembly" and other crap.
The criticism on XML is accurate, correct, valid, if only for the simple reason that the code needed to interface with the libraries is 90% plumbing-work and 10% business-solution. That 90% plumbing-work leaves oppertunity for _a lot of bugs_ to be created and for any solution using XML to become a resource-hog.
Having a standard interchange format like XML is a fun-thing, and "good", as it allows standardized processing of these formats. However, the article identifies a clear gap in the tooling and that gap needs to be addressed for XML to become a widespread success, instead of another buzzword hype.
A regular portscan of your network ip address range would find this
Forgive me for saying so, but I think that's a tad naive, the point here is that this little thing can gain net-access. What actual packets I send across the network is up for the software to determine.
One step further - if I make something of similair dimensions as a pass-through, I can spoof any traffic that comes along and nothing would be detected from an ip-scan.
This and it's parent is utter-crud. I'm from the Netherlands, have worked in the US, am now working in Italy, and have an apartment in both NL and IT.
There is an anti-Bush sentiment in Europe, but definitely not an anti-American sentiment. Come here as an American, and you'll get more positive attention than you'd care for since much of the American culture has mingled with the European culture and so most Europeans will treat you with the dignity becoming of a fascinating alien species from another planet (the battlestar galactica post comes to mind).
Comment applies to both the Netherlands and Italy, though in the latter the people might have a hard time talking to you since they don't speak English all that well - but this language-barrier should not be mis-taken.
Key point has nothing to do with Nerds! RTFA!
on
Why Nerds Are Unpopular
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The key point is the comparison between Highschool and other groups of people lacking a shared goal that yields status.
We often falsely assume that, throughout history, all change equals progress.
Maybe by recognizing that social conditions for fulltime mothers, highschool kids and prisoners are very similair, and leading to these destructive popularity contests, that we can go about make some real improvements.
Ensure save game has easily exploitable buffer overflow
Everyone intending to run Linux will need a copy of your game to avoid copyright infringement! (As a cheap replacement for a mod-chip).
Before we all start siding with the underdog...
on
Phoenix To Change Name
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· Score: 5, Insightful
... might I remark that Phoenix in my ever so humble opinion is fully in it's right?
It outdates the browser by quite a bit, and has worked hard to built a reputable brand for itself. Everyone I know has at least heard of Phoenix bios, and it would be a huge disaster for them if the Phoenix name in association with computers would intuitively refer to a browser instead of their BIOS.
Bottomline is that they should have thought about this before they named their browser phoenix.
Can someone explain to me, why on earth people should be listening to this Bill?
I mean, what on earth has he truly contributed to the world?
Misguided vision of a language called "Java" which then grew into something it was absolutely not intended for
Spreading stupifyingly misinformed paranoia over artificial intelligence and the end of the world - at a point when AI is nowhere NEAR that level and we are infact no step further from when AI was first conceptually envisioned.
Founding a company whose desperate clenching to Java leaves it to flounder undifferentiated in the marketplace with second-rate servers, resulting in a plummeting stockprice.
Slashdot Mirror
Good move at the time, and a good move now as it will allow them to bridge the poor comparative performance of their graphics unit vs. ATI.
Although its engineers need to learn to ignore their marketing dept. the management of nVidia is pretty good
expect them to regain the crown at the NV40 marker, ATI has indicated they'd be slowing their innovation cycles, whereas nVidia has made no such statement.
"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for the lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essense of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms - greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge - has marked the upward surge of mankind, and greed - you mark my words - will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfuntioning corporation called the U.S.A."
(Gordon Gecko, is that you?)
The thing that annoys me is that most people think its hard 'cause they haven't tried it and the whole deal has a certain "mystique" around it; when in actual fact, the things that happen in a hardware design, cause they're tied to "real things", are far more predictable and visualizable in your mind, compared to software, which is basically "made up from mid-air" without any real-life correspondance, especially at the low speeds FPGA's run (eg. clockskew not on-chip).
Finally, on a hobby level, there's nothing for example, seperating anyone from doing a well understood MC680x0 compatible processor, some internal hw. regs a la the ECS chipsets (i.e. blitter, copper, some driving logic), and a nice little sdram controller - et voila, you have yourself an authentic amiga!
Stuff like that *can* be done!! Tooling of today is *much* better than when they did the Amiga architecture in the early 80's). Anyway, that I would regard as complex, (though it pales in complexity with modern cpu architectures...) - but my point being that it is *far* simpler than re-writing WinUAE (ami emu.) from scratch in C - if some of the software Amiga-geeks were to wake up and realise this, we'd have ourselves a rogue amy (which is fun!, right!).
(enjoyed reading your comments btw.)
Hw vs. Sw - which is more difficult to "doodle" with?
Me also having a software background allowed me to relate to your story a little bit. However, our experiences have differed I think, cause in all honesty, judging from the *hobbying* I've done, software is *far* more complicated than hardware, reason being the volume of logic involved. As long as your ambitions are not to exceed the next Intel design, doing your own VHDL design is a fun, enjoyable, well overviewable and especially *rewarding* endeavour!
Designing stuff
In a hardware design, your design = your code (want a schematic, do it in a schematic! -- and not like UML 'roundtrip' engineering, no, the real thing), with software this is rarely the case. Furthermore, because a hardware design has a very focussed purpose, its more streamlined, software tends to need all bells and whistles you can throw at it to further complicate the design and thus introduce much more bugs - with hardware, things *typically* stay reasonably elegant since the way you like to think about it, is the way you'll be implementing it.The only big problem I encountered with coding FPGA's is the *enormous* difficulty in Debugging your code. Many linuxers that are "printf" inclined to debug will have to learn that a bunch of leds is all you got when hobbying. (The "free" tools for signal simulation is just a royal pain -- I didn't get one to work due to the "free" license key I needed to install). This involved a _lot_ of theorizing on my end as to why it didn't work. (Eg. driving a vga signal, "why is my screen flickering" is the only info you've got (but hey, it's better info "why is my screen smoking?", right?)).
Anyway, Jolly good fun, I can recommend it to any software engineer - wouldn't call it the next best personal development step from Java but if you know your way around CPU's and can recognize Pascal type languages, VHDL ain't that hard.
Books Some books I found useful in my endeavours :
VHDL for Designers, fun book, good read, introduces VHDL as a language and how to write your stuff. Also relates it to the various VHDL "compilers" so you know what works where.
ASIC Handbook, little book, handy overview of process / project management, if you're inclined to go the asic route.
Art of Electronics, you'll need to understand what happens on your circuit board, and be able to read diagrams.
and lots and lots of datasheets, but you can get those off the net!
Great fun, and not as hard as it sounds - buy a board, download the Foundation kit, and doodle!
Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice. 1175 pages.
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, Tools. 796 pages.
Competitive Advantage. 557 pages
The whole D. Knuth series.
TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1,2,3
list goes on and on and on! I'd say the author of a large book is more ambitious, and thus more prone to fail, but all "true bibles" tend to be large.
Yep, "El Guapo" - that's correct. The Nick derives from how the German pilots pronounce the name! Thanks for the translation - I never did look it up... (the fact that he's an ugly frickin' bast'rd helps though!).
"You shot the invisible Knight!!"
This movie is what made me watch "Wallstreet" (Another excellent Douglas original)
Fantastic!
Quite basically the plot is there's this multiplayer immersive game called "Avalon" - players try to gain access to higher levels
Rumor is there's a hidden level, to access it, you need to kill a "ghost" while being accompanied by a level-10 "bishop" in your team - which only briefly appears as a little girl after you finish a level -- kill the girl and gain access, fail to kill the girl, and become a brain-fried zombie in the real world.
It's an excellent movie, way-ahead of the Matrix-thing before the Matrix did.
If you can get yourself to watch foreign movies - get this one! The final outcome - which I won't reveal - is absolutely terrific!
Lack of demagnification : we use electron beams to carve the mask at target resolution - the electron beam technology's main criticism is that, although it does the trick, the thing can't scale to higher volumes -- well waddya now! We don't want it to if it builds masks.
Perfect contact with material : pull a strong vacuum, put the two together, and we're done -- only thing is we need to have atomically flat surfaces to start with.
Things get problematic when you're trying to scrape your chip off the lens, given it'd be only a few atoms thick -- on the other hand, we might just scrape the lens off itself and not remove it.
Then there's the problem of how to do layers of lithography, but surely that can be fixed if it's the only little thing left standing. We might make a big fat waffle of a couple of hundred atoms wide with lens material in-between the layers, using a laser to carve it from the main slab of lens material.
Ok, so atomically flat surfaces, perfect vacuums and carving at a couple of hundred atoms aren't all that trivial, still, I say let's have a little optimism here - Moore is a goner I say! :-)
From your description it sounds like the big application here is chipwafer lithography!
But, we're talking about Sun here, so it looses all credibility, the chances of this becoming a success are about as high as that "Network Computer" thing from a couple of years back.
So sad, can't they just go in a corner and die quietly Darwinian style while the rest of us get on with it?
(yeahyeahyeah, am on the edge of a troll, but had to be said).
Now the Diamond part seems to have crapped out badly, does anyone know what is going to happen to the alliance?
(Some others will recall Potashner recently got kicked out of the company due to problems with enron-isms in his board. He was more of a ".com era" ceo I suppose).
So, in other words, while your compiler is chugging along on Foo.cpp - it treats your template functions as Declarations, and won't instantiate the code until it knows what this code should look like (and it won't know this until parameter T is defined!).
Depending on class T (in this case an int, but say it's something that overloads the assignment operator), the implementation will be made.
"Doesn't a .h cause bloat in instances of Foo for each .cpp that uses it?"
Putting this in the header file would cause bloat, but only in your .o/.obj files since the linker will only pick one instance of your templatized Foot and use that to link, the others are ignored
(much like you can override the library malloc (or any other function) with your own, should you be so inclined).
"So why don't linkers get smarter"
Because if you were to put templates in your linker, you're actually postponing compilation into the linker -- in other words, you're doing away your linker and building one compiler that treats everything as "sort of" an include file.
Still do-able, but problematic for larger projects of a couple of hundred/thousand files.
Hope that answers the question.
That's even better for Rockstar. (assuming a lot of people do it).
Because it was a PS/2 exclusive, all those people who only played GTA3 on the PC now had to buy a PS/2 to get to the sequel!
Example of this would be me, I forced my good brother to buy the PS/2 while I bought the game (two advantages : Reduces my expenses, and the machine is not "near" me so I won't be sucked out of a social life because of Vice City ;-) )
Obviously, if they expect sales to continue because of upcoming GTA4 (what was it - 2004?), they'll have some tough negotiations with Rockstar ahead of them! Rockstar will be able to demand pretty much full-margin and some additional cash upfront, with Sony recouping that loss through their margin on sales of other games.
Great stuff for Rockstar, I hope GTA4 will live up to its promise!
The criticism on XML is accurate, correct, valid, if only for the simple reason that the code needed to interface with the libraries is 90% plumbing-work and 10% business-solution. That 90% plumbing-work leaves oppertunity for _a lot of bugs_ to be created and for any solution using XML to become a resource-hog.
Having a standard interchange format like XML is a fun-thing, and "good", as it allows standardized processing of these formats. However, the article identifies a clear gap in the tooling and that gap needs to be addressed for XML to become a widespread success, instead of another buzzword hype.
Forgive me for saying so, but I think that's a tad naive, the point here is that this little thing can gain net-access. What actual packets I send across the network is up for the software to determine.
One step further - if I make something of similair dimensions as a pass-through, I can spoof any traffic that comes along and nothing would be detected from an ip-scan.
There is an anti-Bush sentiment in Europe, but definitely not an anti-American sentiment. Come here as an American, and you'll get more positive attention than you'd care for since much of the American culture has mingled with the European culture and so most Europeans will treat you with the dignity becoming of a fascinating alien species from another planet (the battlestar galactica post comes to mind).
Comment applies to both the Netherlands and Italy, though in the latter the people might have a hard time talking to you since they don't speak English all that well - but this language-barrier should not be mis-taken.
We often falsely assume that, throughout history, all change equals progress.
Maybe by recognizing that social conditions for fulltime mothers, highschool kids and prisoners are very similair, and leading to these destructive popularity contests, that we can go about make some real improvements.
Build simple game, "Pacman returns"
Sell game for $5 or $10
Ensure save game has easily exploitable buffer overflow
Everyone intending to run Linux will need a copy of your game to avoid copyright infringement! (As a cheap replacement for a mod-chip).
It outdates the browser by quite a bit, and has worked hard to built a reputable brand for itself. Everyone I know has at least heard of Phoenix bios, and it would be a huge disaster for them if the Phoenix name in association with computers would intuitively refer to a browser instead of their BIOS.
Bottomline is that they should have thought about this before they named their browser phoenix.
'nuff said.
I mean, what on earth has he truly contributed to the world?
Misguided vision of a language called "Java" which then grew into something it was absolutely not intended for
Spreading stupifyingly misinformed paranoia over artificial intelligence and the end of the world - at a point when AI is nowhere NEAR that level and we are infact no step further from when AI was first conceptually envisioned.
Founding a company whose desperate clenching to Java leaves it to flounder undifferentiated in the marketplace with second-rate servers, resulting in a plummeting stockprice.
I mean, WHY?
$3M / (25*3) = $40K a year. That's not even taking office expenses, equipment & simply running the project into account.
Remind me to never do anything scientific.