I thought myself, "what the fuck, why am I paying 32 euro for a couple of razor blades!" and I bought the cheap generic brand 2 blade stuff.
OUCH! Not saying it cut my face, it didn't but there really is a HUGE difference between the "quality" 5 blade razors and the cheap 2 blade kind. It is a smooth shave versus having the hair torn from your face.
I had the exact same experience when I tried to buy cheap generic 2-blade razors to replace my expensive name brand 2-blade razors. Because it's about the quality of the individual razors, not the quantity of them. You can buy crappy 5-blade razors that will also feel like you're shaving with 60 grit sandpaper.
Frankly having used 2, 3, 4 and 5 blade quality razors I think about the only difference is that more razors means less pressure with the same amount of force so you're less likely to nick yourself when you wake up late and have to shave in 2 minutes before having any coffee. Otherwise, the extra blades seem practically worthless... if the first 3 blades didn't cut the hair, then it's too low for the last two to cut either. The blade that's right behind the allegedly-hair-raising rubber bumper thingie is where all the action is (and will cause you to replace the blade when it, not the 5th, blade wears out).
I guess you get a slightly cleaner shave in one pass, so if speed is of the essence... why aren't you using an electric? Anyway, two passes of a two-blade razor gets me a better shave than one pass of a 5-blade, so I'm pretty satisfied.
Supposedly, the protagonist suffers from a number of serious genetic defects, his heart condition being the worst.
Actually, if you listen carefully, you'll note that he is only diagnosed as having a high probability of various genetic disorders, and based merely on that chance he was ostracized from "valid" society. Since he outlives his predicted life span, it's safe to say he dodged at least some of those bullets, though he definitely has poor vision and a heart that is significantly weaker than the person he is imitating, though not so weak that it kills him.
The protagonist completes, without undue effort, highly rigorous physical and mental training
What you call 'without undue effort' I call 'with non-stop single-minded determination and dedication'.
(with a single heart palpitation to add dramatic tension)
How many heart palpitations have to occur on-screen for you to get the idea that running for twenty minutes straight was anything but easy for him?
By contrast, the fellow he is impersonating is impulsive, depressive, and suicidal(all traits with genetic components, but he has them and the protagonist doesn't, despite being engineered).
I'm pretty sure 'propensity for depression' wasn't listed as one of his genetic failings so I don't know why it bothers you that he didn't have it. And while yes there's a genetic component, unless you intend to take an extremely polarized (and I'd say indefensible) stance on the nature-vs-nurture debate on human psychology, why is it so implausible that the donor develops depression? You think you can eliminate depression and suicide with genetic selection?
The protagonist's brother is similarly unaffected by his supposedly superior genes.
Not sure what you mean here... He repeatedly kicks his brother's ass in swimming. The two times he lost, both were due to self-doubt caused by not kicking his brother's ass as handily as his genes said he should. I guess you're thinking the self-doubt gene should have been eliminated?
The movie constantly downplays, in practice, the effect of genes on phenotype(and completely ignores the potential for psychology to be affected by genetics, in favor of a fuzzy "triumph of the human spirit" subplot) while making it a major plot point.
It doesn't ignore it, it just doesn't consider it to be determinate as you do.
Part of the "human spirit" theme which pervades the movie is that a person's spirit/will/consciousness/whatever can allow a person to exceed, or fail to meet, the expectations put forth by their genetics.
The whole reason that the donor/roommate became depressed and suicidal was because he did not achieve what his genes said he should. His genes said he should be the best while his silver medal said that in practice he wasn't. I can see having that fundamental assumption of superiority knocked out from under him as being an impetus for depression.
It's kinda funny to me how the movie presents a society who assumes genetics are 100% determinant of a person's potential, is repeatedly shown to be wrong, and your issue with the movie is that they are shown to be wrong instead of right. Even though the scientists in the movie accurately attribute probabilistic risk factors to certain genes, not necessarily guarantees.
rather than the much more interesting(but considerably darker and less comfortable) story of "adequate guy, whose inescapable limitations doom him to a life of frustration and inferiority"
You mean the story of every other "invalid" in the movie? Yeah, I'm not seeing what's so interesting about "guy's genes say he won't succeed, turn out to be right". I'm sure you could craft a good story around one of them, but the premise by itself isn't interesting. Anyway, they decided to focus on somebody who was exceptional. I don't see what the big crime is here.
"Bold, self-absorbed, narcissist bluffs his way onto a mission whe
There are people in the world who are just boring and unimaginitive. People who aren't stupid, but just don't think of interesting things to do, and aren't interested in doing them anyway, even if someone else thinks of them and invites them along.
Apparently, the space program has become so routine that such people have found their way there. I've no idea how that's even possible (if you're that dull, what would possess you to apply for astronaut training?)
Uh-huh. Yeah, it's that these astronauts are just boring, mundane, unimaginative people.
Either that, or it's that these astronauts have spent weeks up to their necks in a combination of Awesome, Challenge, and Danger as they float around in fucking OUTER SPACE, fixing an incredible yet delicate scientific instrument that both expands our scientific horizons and blows our minds with crazy images, with their clunky suits and a tether to their space ship being the only thing keeping them alive as they work, and their office view consisting of the little blue globe they call home and the vastness of space.
These peoples' bowel movements are more amazing than anything you do here on earth, and your example of something "interesting" is an attraction at Chuck-E-Cheese?
I mean would you seriously tell an experimental jet test pilot (which many astronauts were before they decided to do something even cooler) who after flying around at supersonic speeds all day pushing both their body and mind to the limit constantly decides that when they land back at base to spend the rest of the day chilling in the rec room watching American Idol, that they're dull?
Maybe, just maybe, after two weeks of being responsible for one of the most complicated machines ever made (which in case I haven't mentioned is a fucking space ship) where every action has the potential to be a matter of life and death on the boundaries of human adaptability, "dull" has a certain appeal, you know, as a change of pace.
Here's my example of unimaginative: Someone who thinks an astronaut has to play "space-tag" to make their life exciting and interesting.
Just so that I can cost the bastards some money by demanding a Windows Refund on it.
Mmm-hmm... So which do you think costs them more money?
Them manufacturing an EEE PC, selling it to you, but then having to refund the cost of windows? They surely have thin margins, so this might push their net on that machine into the red...
Or them manufacturing an EEE PC, and not selling it and thus going in the red to the tune of the full cost of manufacturing?
Yeah this is just not a viable strategy. If you want this model of EEE PC with Linux on it, buy one, install Linux and demand your Windows Tax refund to make a statement/cost them some money for being dumb about not giving you Linux to begin with. But don't do it for the sake of punishing them, it's not going to work.
Hm, stupid question, but what's an e-cache? Oh wait, external as in off-chip. That makes sense in context. You'd use parity-only for on-chip caches to save bits, but for a separate cache chip it'd be silly to save a small percent of space and lose correctability/multi-bit error detection.
Sparc is odd. I don't know all that much about it, but the more I learn the more I think so. Thanks.:)
The original Opteron had L1 ECC, it just wasn't correctable if encountered on a read or write (there was a scrubber that would find and correct ECC errors, but if it didn't reach the line in question before the program accessed the cache line, then it would detect the error and machine check fault). The ill-fated Barcelona (Phenom) added on-the-fly correctability. Phenom 2 of course has it too.
I was pretty sure Intel had it in their L1s too. Kinda surprised to hear SPARC doesn't.
P.S. I know The Inquirer decided it was the K10, but it isn't. They're still all K8s.
I mean, copying a single book was sometimes a monk's entire life's work, that's a big investment.
An important point that a lot of people (including myself) forget in this modern age where copying things is trivial, and even the printing press is centuries old technology. Copying books used to be very hard work!
All you had to do to "suppress" knowledge was to not make it an extremely high priority to preserve.
Hell, I dunno how most of revelations didn't get thrown out as well, it's pretty whack too.
Are you kidding me? I love Revelations! How could you turn away a story about insane eyeball creatures singing the Lord's praises for eternity, seven-headed dragons coming from the ocean to conquer the world, a giant demon whore, and the embodiment of aspects of human suffering on horseback*?
Religious fervor + lengthy imprisonment + shrooms = Awesome.
The council was simply recognizing this fact.
Anyhow, if you're going to be mad at the church for losing books, be mad at them for those, not the useless apocrypha bullshit.
You're just saying that to suppress the truth of the Book of Xenu!
* Speaking of suffering on horseback, there was originally a 5th Horseman, Piles.
You're worried about nighttime light pollution from white roofs reflecting more sunlight? (I doubt moonlight would be significant enough to be a factor.)
The moon already ruins amateur astronomy (unless it's your subject of course). Stargazers gaze at stars on moonless nights as a rule.
But yeah, I doubt the extra reflected moonlight would make a difference anyway.
There we have it, boys and girls. "I didn't fuck up my life, the doctor told me so."
One great way for a person with a mental illness to fuck up their life is to ignore the very real negative effects it has on their lives.
If a friend of yours ever blames their PTSD (or whatever mental illness) for their last relationship ending badly, try considering the possibility that there are in fact factors outside their control and recommend they get counseling to help them. Or say what you just said, do more harm than good, and be a giant douchebag.
"They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, the psychiatrist who put a name to how the world works.
Yep. I'm angry because I'm now classified as mentally ill, and I'm apparently helpless to prevent this expansion of mental illness diagnoses.
And Nehalem is an all in-order design, so they can scale out to very large numbers of cores or register-and-decoder sets on a single chip. That helps offset the huge bottleneck of trying to go to molasses-slow main memory on every cache miss, by allowing another thread to run. Mind you, I'd want enough cores to host 128 threads in order to at least match the new SPARCs, but that can come along later (;-))
You must be thinking of Atom, because Nehalem is definitely an out-of-order processor and not particularly small either. It does use SMT (and a big instruction window) to hide memory latency (and to keep its 4-wide execution engine busy), but that's having multiple threads running on the same core.
Frankly while Niagra is a very interesting approach that I think will only become more popular in the future (and Atom is theoretically capable of doing the same thing though right now it's just embedded stuff), for now there are many server apps where single-thread performance still matters greatly and for that out-of-order is the way to go (as Intel found out the hard way by trying every trick in the book to make an in-order machine fast enough).
x86 is slow and under performing architecture, and I am surprise that Intel is bolting error correction on top of it.
Hogwash. There's nothing inherently slow about x86. The ISA is nothing but an interface. Internally, the CISC instructions are decoded into simple micro-ops, so all the predictions about how x86 would fall behind because it wouldn't be able to have out of order execution etc were proven wrong. It's not easy to make x86 chips, but the difficult performance problems have been solved.
So don't be surprised, it's just another step in the plain obvious trend that has been going on for over a decade now. With no performance disadvantage, and a big price advantage, x86 has been moving into the server market in a big way. The only thing holding it back is the lack of RAS features, which are just as easy to "bolt on" to x86 as any other instruction set. It's just there was no reason to add these features for desktop or low-end servers.
The Intel instruction set is so complicated that often times a single bit being flipped means it is still a very much valid opcode which when executed will do something completely different from what you expect it to do.
The same is true of RISC, flip a bit in the opcode field and there's a good chance it's still a valid opcode. Not that it matters one whit; flipped bits in the instruction stream are detected via ECC in the instruction cache, not by praying the decoders see it as an invalid instruction.
This seems to be nothing short of a stopgap measure for not losing more customers to the big iron manufacturers like Sun and IBM who both have their own CPU's that were built with stability in mind.
FUD like this is nothing but a stopgap measure for the RISC vendors to lose customers a little more slowly to x86 than they already are. Of course rather than just losing customers, Sun and IBM (and other former RISC vendors) sell solutions that use x86. It's only a matter of time before this trend hits even the "big iron". As x86 erodes their margins from beneath, for how long will it make sense to spend the money to develop the RISC chips for an ever-decreasing slice of the pie? Eventually it makes more sense to just demand that Intel add whatever RAS features it lacks compared to the RISC chip it'll be replacing, which is exactly what is happening here (only in this case it's EPIC that's on the chopping block).
Apple being able to transition from PowerPC to x86 is quite a feat, but x86 transitioning to the next big thing is going to be impossible without at least backwards compatibility in the form of x86 emulation, and boy is the x86 instruction set fun to emulate!
Well you certainly got that right. The only real disadvantage of x86 itself is that it is a huge pain in the ass to make work properly, and a lot of the magic isn't in the ISA docs but rather in the institutional knowledge of the two remaining firms that make the chips. x86 raises the already incredibly high barrier to entry for new chip manufacturers. That, not performance or (potential) reliability, is the reason x86 sucks.
Sweet. Now all those high-end server applications running on x86s that need great uptime can finally join the big boys. [rolls eyes].
Is the demand for x86 Server chips that high? I thought anyone requiring 5 nines (or anything close to it) would never consider using x86?
The story of the server market for the last 10+ years is simple: x86 has been eating everyone else's market share from the bottom up. Commodity pricing > perceived advantages of the proprietary RISC vendors. To the extent that there are real necessary features x86 lacked, it has acquired them as necessary.
There's been correctable ECC on x86 server chips for years. x86 has long since moved up-market past the point where basic RAS features (like ECC) are mandatory. Intel's Xeon has had these features for a long time. AMD Barcelona core was the first to have correctable ECC in the L1 caches -- before it could detect errors but couldn't fix them.
Basically the only new feature here is the ability to notify the OS about uncorrectable errors so that the OS can try to fix the problem by nuking the affected app, reloading a code page from disk or whatever else is appropriate so that a system reboot isn't always necessary on uncorrectable errors.
Yeah this is something the "big boys" already had, fat consolation that will be now that x86 is poised to eat their lunch. Not even Intel themselves could reverse the trend when they tried. They could use features like this to differentiate Itanium all they want, at the end of the day the customer says "yeah that's great, but can you do it in an x86 chip?" This is just them bowing to the demands of the market (in order to make mega $$).
My congrats go to the DoD for coming up with a solution that costs a couple million per soldier, when I just handed them a solution that costs a few dollars per soldier and took me less than a minute to think up. Way to innovate.
Look, this is a DARPA funded project. So it might seem like they are stupid for not thinking of obvious solutions like yours, but they're simply not allowed to under DoD rules. The AR in DARPA stands for Advanced Research. DFORPA is the DoD agency you're looking for (the O stands for Obvious). They don't give much in the way of grants, so you may be smarter than the DoD, but those Harvard and Tufts researchers are the real geniuses here.:)
Seriously? We're just abandoning any pretense that these are news summaries now and just outright turning them into ads for products? We're now outright trying to sell things? Weak. Very weak indeed.
Yeah and when the summary notes that a NYT link requires registration, they're trying to get you to register at NYT. Or was that warn you? I guess you could view it either way...
There are two links to free articles with the usual amount of information and details that we get in any tech-related article on Slashdot. People always complain about this, and wonder where they can get more detailed information. Well, here they tell you where you can get it, but it happens to cost $30 to get the technical information if you aren't already subscribed to the journal.
If they had just left it at the linked articles, would that have made you happier? Is it mentioning the extra information that costs money, or the fact that it costs money (which is certainly outside of/.s and presumably the submitters control)? What is gained by not mentioning this? Maybe you or someone else is at a college with an engineering/science library that carries the Nano Letters journal and can get it for free, if only they knew to look for it.
If you're going to complain about commercialization, why not complain about the fact that this is an article about what will certainly be a non-free commercial technology that you have to pay money for, and if anything the article is vastly more oriented towards making you excited about and anticipate purchasing the technology in question? But that's "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".
Beware: domicile contains lead and all visitors to this domicile accept the risk they may be injured, maimed, or even killed by lead vapor, or the actual lead bullet.
"Domicile contains substances known by the state of California to kill your sorry ass with extreme prejudice."
There's already a precedent in the slug-eating robot. I don't see any articles later than 2001. My guess is it turned out that making a robot that plucks slugs from your garden without destroying your garden vegetables in the process was harder than it seemed. Obviously the human-eating robot wouldn't have that problem.
I gotta say I'm glad this seemed to go nowhere, and I hope it wasn't picked up by DARPA or something. The guys making Asimo could crack jokes about how it'll become the Terminator and not sound like insane fools since Asimo is unlikely to decide it must destroy humanity. But to actually design a robot that consumes organic matter, which is only a step away from craves, is just 50s-sci-fi-scientist crazy.
Season 2 was more or less a great 13 episode season, spread out over 22 episodes.
Perfect way to put it.
I still enjoyed the ride, but I'm curious as to why they didn't try and write episodes that could help people "catch up" with the plot, as opposed to requiring your audience to have seen every single episode.
Indeed, and they really made it hard to follow. I mean I watched most episodes, and I'm usually pretty good at piecing together things from episodes I missed based on the contextual clues in the current episode... But I missed one episode in the middle of season 2, and I was confused as heck. It really didn't help when there would be exchanges like.
"Hey John if you want to talk about..." "I don't want to talk about it." "It was big and important, you should talk about it." "I'm fine!" "Okay, well if you change your mind... until then I won't even vaguely describe what it is we're talking about."
So, what else was the series going to tell us? What else are the new movies going to tell us?
For one, how that whiny little bitch John Conner could plausibly become the leader of the resistance. T3 utterly failed to do so; its John was more of a whiny bitch than the T2 John who at least had the excuse of being a teenager in foster care who didn't know his dad and thought his mom was a loon, and he didn't change much over the movie.
The show managed to at least accomplish that. He becomes brave, and begins to see how he both inspires and endangers those around him and starts to act somewhat like a leader who you can really see in a few years being ready to do what he has to do.
Plus the two-factions-of-machines plot was beginning to get interesting.
Of course much of that story could have been compressed. That certainly was the show's biggest failing. That funeral episode was a truly painful way to get like one or two minor revelations. If the Season 2 finale had been the Season 1 finale, then the show might be ending at its actual end and it'd be remembered fondly.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought myself, "what the fuck, why am I paying 32 euro for a couple of razor blades!" and I bought the cheap generic brand 2 blade stuff.
OUCH! Not saying it cut my face, it didn't but there really is a HUGE difference between the "quality" 5 blade razors and the cheap 2 blade kind. It is a smooth shave versus having the hair torn from your face.
I had the exact same experience when I tried to buy cheap generic 2-blade razors to replace my expensive name brand 2-blade razors. Because it's about the quality of the individual razors, not the quantity of them. You can buy crappy 5-blade razors that will also feel like you're shaving with 60 grit sandpaper.
Frankly having used 2, 3, 4 and 5 blade quality razors I think about the only difference is that more razors means less pressure with the same amount of force so you're less likely to nick yourself when you wake up late and have to shave in 2 minutes before having any coffee. Otherwise, the extra blades seem practically worthless... if the first 3 blades didn't cut the hair, then it's too low for the last two to cut either. The blade that's right behind the allegedly-hair-raising rubber bumper thingie is where all the action is (and will cause you to replace the blade when it, not the 5th, blade wears out).
I guess you get a slightly cleaner shave in one pass, so if speed is of the essence... why aren't you using an electric? Anyway, two passes of a two-blade razor gets me a better shave than one pass of a 5-blade, so I'm pretty satisfied.
Getting to choose between serious incompetence and outright malice is always fun.
Forget the lost demo, I have to make that choice every time I interact with SAP.
Though frankly I think it's a combination of both -- the incompetence being when SAP actually does work.
Supposedly, the protagonist suffers from a number of serious genetic defects, his heart condition being the worst.
Actually, if you listen carefully, you'll note that he is only diagnosed as having a high probability of various genetic disorders, and based merely on that chance he was ostracized from "valid" society. Since he outlives his predicted life span, it's safe to say he dodged at least some of those bullets, though he definitely has poor vision and a heart that is significantly weaker than the person he is imitating, though not so weak that it kills him.
The protagonist completes, without undue effort, highly rigorous physical and mental training
What you call 'without undue effort' I call 'with non-stop single-minded determination and dedication'.
(with a single heart palpitation to add dramatic tension)
How many heart palpitations have to occur on-screen for you to get the idea that running for twenty minutes straight was anything but easy for him?
By contrast, the fellow he is impersonating is impulsive, depressive, and suicidal(all traits with genetic components, but he has them and the protagonist doesn't, despite being engineered).
I'm pretty sure 'propensity for depression' wasn't listed as one of his genetic failings so I don't know why it bothers you that he didn't have it. And while yes there's a genetic component, unless you intend to take an extremely polarized (and I'd say indefensible) stance on the nature-vs-nurture debate on human psychology, why is it so implausible that the donor develops depression? You think you can eliminate depression and suicide with genetic selection?
The protagonist's brother is similarly unaffected by his supposedly superior genes.
Not sure what you mean here... He repeatedly kicks his brother's ass in swimming. The two times he lost, both were due to self-doubt caused by not kicking his brother's ass as handily as his genes said he should. I guess you're thinking the self-doubt gene should have been eliminated?
The movie constantly downplays, in practice, the effect of genes on phenotype(and completely ignores the potential for psychology to be affected by genetics, in favor of a fuzzy "triumph of the human spirit" subplot) while making it a major plot point.
It doesn't ignore it, it just doesn't consider it to be determinate as you do.
Part of the "human spirit" theme which pervades the movie is that a person's spirit/will/consciousness/whatever can allow a person to exceed, or fail to meet, the expectations put forth by their genetics.
The whole reason that the donor/roommate became depressed and suicidal was because he did not achieve what his genes said he should. His genes said he should be the best while his silver medal said that in practice he wasn't. I can see having that fundamental assumption of superiority knocked out from under him as being an impetus for depression.
It's kinda funny to me how the movie presents a society who assumes genetics are 100% determinant of a person's potential, is repeatedly shown to be wrong, and your issue with the movie is that they are shown to be wrong instead of right. Even though the scientists in the movie accurately attribute probabilistic risk factors to certain genes, not necessarily guarantees.
rather than the much more interesting(but considerably darker and less comfortable) story of "adequate guy, whose inescapable limitations doom him to a life of frustration and inferiority"
You mean the story of every other "invalid" in the movie? Yeah, I'm not seeing what's so interesting about "guy's genes say he won't succeed, turn out to be right". I'm sure you could craft a good story around one of them, but the premise by itself isn't interesting. Anyway, they decided to focus on somebody who was exceptional. I don't see what the big crime is here.
"Bold, self-absorbed, narcissist bluffs his way onto a mission whe
There are people in the world who are just boring and unimaginitive. People who aren't stupid, but just don't think of interesting things to do, and aren't interested in doing them anyway, even if someone else thinks of them and invites them along.
Apparently, the space program has become so routine that such people have found their way there. I've no idea how that's even possible (if you're that dull, what would possess you to apply for astronaut training?)
Uh-huh. Yeah, it's that these astronauts are just boring, mundane, unimaginative people.
Either that, or it's that these astronauts have spent weeks up to their necks in a combination of Awesome, Challenge, and Danger as they float around in fucking OUTER SPACE, fixing an incredible yet delicate scientific instrument that both expands our scientific horizons and blows our minds with crazy images, with their clunky suits and a tether to their space ship being the only thing keeping them alive as they work, and their office view consisting of the little blue globe they call home and the vastness of space.
These peoples' bowel movements are more amazing than anything you do here on earth, and your example of something "interesting" is an attraction at Chuck-E-Cheese?
I mean would you seriously tell an experimental jet test pilot (which many astronauts were before they decided to do something even cooler) who after flying around at supersonic speeds all day pushing both their body and mind to the limit constantly decides that when they land back at base to spend the rest of the day chilling in the rec room watching American Idol, that they're dull?
Maybe, just maybe, after two weeks of being responsible for one of the most complicated machines ever made (which in case I haven't mentioned is a fucking space ship) where every action has the potential to be a matter of life and death on the boundaries of human adaptability, "dull" has a certain appeal, you know, as a change of pace.
Here's my example of unimaginative: Someone who thinks an astronaut has to play "space-tag" to make their life exciting and interesting.
Just so that I can cost the bastards some money by demanding a Windows Refund on it.
Mmm-hmm... So which do you think costs them more money?
Them manufacturing an EEE PC, selling it to you, but then having to refund the cost of windows? They surely have thin margins, so this might push their net on that machine into the red...
Or them manufacturing an EEE PC, and not selling it and thus going in the red to the tune of the full cost of manufacturing?
Yeah this is just not a viable strategy. If you want this model of EEE PC with Linux on it, buy one, install Linux and demand your Windows Tax refund to make a statement/cost them some money for being dumb about not giving you Linux to begin with. But don't do it for the sake of punishing them, it's not going to work.
Hm, stupid question, but what's an e-cache? Oh wait, external as in off-chip. That makes sense in context. You'd use parity-only for on-chip caches to save bits, but for a separate cache chip it'd be silly to save a small percent of space and lose correctability/multi-bit error detection.
Sparc is odd. I don't know all that much about it, but the more I learn the more I think so. Thanks. :)
The original Opteron had L1 ECC, it just wasn't correctable if encountered on a read or write (there was a scrubber that would find and correct ECC errors, but if it didn't reach the line in question before the program accessed the cache line, then it would detect the error and machine check fault). The ill-fated Barcelona (Phenom) added on-the-fly correctability. Phenom 2 of course has it too.
I was pretty sure Intel had it in their L1s too. Kinda surprised to hear SPARC doesn't.
P.S. I know The Inquirer decided it was the K10, but it isn't. They're still all K8s.
I mean, copying a single book was sometimes a monk's entire life's work, that's a big investment.
An important point that a lot of people (including myself) forget in this modern age where copying things is trivial, and even the printing press is centuries old technology. Copying books used to be very hard work!
All you had to do to "suppress" knowledge was to not make it an extremely high priority to preserve.
Hell, I dunno how most of revelations didn't get thrown out as well, it's pretty whack too.
Are you kidding me? I love Revelations! How could you turn away a story about insane eyeball creatures singing the Lord's praises for eternity, seven-headed dragons coming from the ocean to conquer the world, a giant demon whore, and the embodiment of aspects of human suffering on horseback*?
Religious fervor + lengthy imprisonment + shrooms = Awesome.
The council was simply recognizing this fact.
Anyhow, if you're going to be mad at the church for losing books, be mad at them for those, not the useless apocrypha bullshit.
You're just saying that to suppress the truth of the Book of Xenu!
* Speaking of suffering on horseback, there was originally a 5th Horseman, Piles.
You're worried about nighttime light pollution from white roofs reflecting more sunlight? (I doubt moonlight would be significant enough to be a factor.)
The moon already ruins amateur astronomy (unless it's your subject of course). Stargazers gaze at stars on moonless nights as a rule.
But yeah, I doubt the extra reflected moonlight would make a difference anyway.
There we have it, boys and girls. "I didn't fuck up my life, the doctor told me so."
One great way for a person with a mental illness to fuck up their life is to ignore the very real negative effects it has on their lives.
If a friend of yours ever blames their PTSD (or whatever mental illness) for their last relationship ending badly, try considering the possibility that there are in fact factors outside their control and recommend they get counseling to help them. Or say what you just said, do more harm than good, and be a giant douchebag.
"They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, the psychiatrist who put a name to how the world works.
Yep. I'm angry because I'm now classified as mentally ill, and I'm apparently helpless to prevent this expansion of mental illness diagnoses.
Ha ha, just kidding about the "now" part.
Parity will be needed for protecting caches (possibly ECC will be used in the future).
Just fyi, they all have ECC for caches already.
And Nehalem is an all in-order design, so they can scale out to very large numbers of cores or register-and-decoder sets on a single chip. That helps offset the huge bottleneck of trying to go to molasses-slow main memory on every cache miss, by allowing another thread to run. Mind you, I'd want enough cores to host 128 threads in order to at least match the new SPARCs, but that can come along later (;-))
You must be thinking of Atom, because Nehalem is definitely an out-of-order processor and not particularly small either. It does use SMT (and a big instruction window) to hide memory latency (and to keep its 4-wide execution engine busy), but that's having multiple threads running on the same core.
Frankly while Niagra is a very interesting approach that I think will only become more popular in the future (and Atom is theoretically capable of doing the same thing though right now it's just embedded stuff), for now there are many server apps where single-thread performance still matters greatly and for that out-of-order is the way to go (as Intel found out the hard way by trying every trick in the book to make an in-order machine fast enough).
x86 is slow and under performing architecture, and I am surprise that Intel is bolting error correction on top of it.
Hogwash. There's nothing inherently slow about x86. The ISA is nothing but an interface. Internally, the CISC instructions are decoded into simple micro-ops, so all the predictions about how x86 would fall behind because it wouldn't be able to have out of order execution etc were proven wrong. It's not easy to make x86 chips, but the difficult performance problems have been solved.
So don't be surprised, it's just another step in the plain obvious trend that has been going on for over a decade now. With no performance disadvantage, and a big price advantage, x86 has been moving into the server market in a big way. The only thing holding it back is the lack of RAS features, which are just as easy to "bolt on" to x86 as any other instruction set. It's just there was no reason to add these features for desktop or low-end servers.
The Intel instruction set is so complicated that often times a single bit being flipped means it is still a very much valid opcode which when executed will do something completely different from what you expect it to do.
The same is true of RISC, flip a bit in the opcode field and there's a good chance it's still a valid opcode. Not that it matters one whit; flipped bits in the instruction stream are detected via ECC in the instruction cache, not by praying the decoders see it as an invalid instruction.
This seems to be nothing short of a stopgap measure for not losing more customers to the big iron manufacturers like Sun and IBM who both have their own CPU's that were built with stability in mind.
FUD like this is nothing but a stopgap measure for the RISC vendors to lose customers a little more slowly to x86 than they already are. Of course rather than just losing customers, Sun and IBM (and other former RISC vendors) sell solutions that use x86. It's only a matter of time before this trend hits even the "big iron". As x86 erodes their margins from beneath, for how long will it make sense to spend the money to develop the RISC chips for an ever-decreasing slice of the pie? Eventually it makes more sense to just demand that Intel add whatever RAS features it lacks compared to the RISC chip it'll be replacing, which is exactly what is happening here (only in this case it's EPIC that's on the chopping block).
Apple being able to transition from PowerPC to x86 is quite a feat, but x86 transitioning to the next big thing is going to be impossible without at least backwards compatibility in the form of x86 emulation, and boy is the x86 instruction set fun to emulate!
Well you certainly got that right. The only real disadvantage of x86 itself is that it is a huge pain in the ass to make work properly, and a lot of the magic isn't in the ISA docs but rather in the institutional knowledge of the two remaining firms that make the chips. x86 raises the already incredibly high barrier to entry for new chip manufacturers. That, not performance or (potential) reliability, is the reason x86 sucks.
Error correction on an x86 chip?
Sweet. Now all those high-end server applications running on x86s that need great uptime can finally join the big boys. [rolls eyes].
Is the demand for x86 Server chips that high? I thought anyone requiring 5 nines (or anything close to it) would never consider using x86?
The story of the server market for the last 10+ years is simple: x86 has been eating everyone else's market share from the bottom up. Commodity pricing > perceived advantages of the proprietary RISC vendors. To the extent that there are real necessary features x86 lacked, it has acquired them as necessary.
There's been correctable ECC on x86 server chips for years. x86 has long since moved up-market past the point where basic RAS features (like ECC) are mandatory. Intel's Xeon has had these features for a long time. AMD Barcelona core was the first to have correctable ECC in the L1 caches -- before it could detect errors but couldn't fix them.
Basically the only new feature here is the ability to notify the OS about uncorrectable errors so that the OS can try to fix the problem by nuking the affected app, reloading a code page from disk or whatever else is appropriate so that a system reboot isn't always necessary on uncorrectable errors.
Yeah this is something the "big boys" already had, fat consolation that will be now that x86 is poised to eat their lunch. Not even Intel themselves could reverse the trend when they tried. They could use features like this to differentiate Itanium all they want, at the end of the day the customer says "yeah that's great, but can you do it in an x86 chip?" This is just them bowing to the demands of the market (in order to make mega $$).
My congrats go to the DoD for coming up with a solution that costs a couple million per soldier, when I just handed them a solution that costs a few dollars per soldier and took me less than a minute to think up. Way to innovate.
Look, this is a DARPA funded project. So it might seem like they are stupid for not thinking of obvious solutions like yours, but they're simply not allowed to under DoD rules. The AR in DARPA stands for Advanced Research. DFORPA is the DoD agency you're looking for (the O stands for Obvious). They don't give much in the way of grants, so you may be smarter than the DoD, but those Harvard and Tufts researchers are the real geniuses here. :)
This just in, people use buzzwords to sound smart, get funding.
Shit, you can use buzzwords to get funding too? I never thought of that! I guess that's the downside of only sounding smart.
Seriously? We're just abandoning any pretense that these are news summaries now and just outright turning them into ads for products? We're now outright trying to sell things? Weak. Very weak indeed.
Yeah and when the summary notes that a NYT link requires registration, they're trying to get you to register at NYT. Or was that warn you? I guess you could view it either way...
There are two links to free articles with the usual amount of information and details that we get in any tech-related article on Slashdot. People always complain about this, and wonder where they can get more detailed information. Well, here they tell you where you can get it, but it happens to cost $30 to get the technical information if you aren't already subscribed to the journal.
If they had just left it at the linked articles, would that have made you happier? Is it mentioning the extra information that costs money, or the fact that it costs money (which is certainly outside of /.s and presumably the submitters control)? What is gained by not mentioning this? Maybe you or someone else is at a college with an engineering/science library that carries the Nano Letters journal and can get it for free, if only they knew to look for it.
If you're going to complain about commercialization, why not complain about the fact that this is an article about what will certainly be a non-free commercial technology that you have to pay money for, and if anything the article is vastly more oriented towards making you excited about and anticipate purchasing the technology in question? But that's "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".
He's not one for nuance, but I like Bazooka Joe.
Beware: domicile contains lead and all visitors to this domicile accept the risk they may be injured, maimed, or even killed by lead vapor, or the actual lead bullet.
"Domicile contains substances known by the state of California to kill your sorry ass with extreme prejudice."
They made a version like that, but found it less satisfying.
There's already a precedent in the slug-eating robot. I don't see any articles later than 2001. My guess is it turned out that making a robot that plucks slugs from your garden without destroying your garden vegetables in the process was harder than it seemed. Obviously the human-eating robot wouldn't have that problem.
I gotta say I'm glad this seemed to go nowhere, and I hope it wasn't picked up by DARPA or something. The guys making Asimo could crack jokes about how it'll become the Terminator and not sound like insane fools since Asimo is unlikely to decide it must destroy humanity. But to actually design a robot that consumes organic matter, which is only a step away from craves, is just 50s-sci-fi-scientist crazy.
First robot to intentionally kill a human.
First robot to kill a hundred humans.
First robot to single handedly wipe out an entire city of humans.
First robot to kill a human while fueled entirely by the corpses of previous humans it killed.
The list goes on and on!
Season 2 was more or less a great 13 episode season, spread out over 22 episodes.
Perfect way to put it.
I still enjoyed the ride, but I'm curious as to why they didn't try and write episodes that could help people "catch up" with the plot, as opposed to requiring your audience to have seen every single episode.
Indeed, and they really made it hard to follow. I mean I watched most episodes, and I'm usually pretty good at piecing together things from episodes I missed based on the contextual clues in the current episode... But I missed one episode in the middle of season 2, and I was confused as heck. It really didn't help when there would be exchanges like.
"Hey John if you want to talk about..."
"I don't want to talk about it."
"It was big and important, you should talk about it."
"I'm fine!"
"Okay, well if you change your mind... until then I won't even vaguely describe what it is we're talking about."
So, what else was the series going to tell us? What else are the new movies going to tell us?
For one, how that whiny little bitch John Conner could plausibly become the leader of the resistance. T3 utterly failed to do so; its John was more of a whiny bitch than the T2 John who at least had the excuse of being a teenager in foster care who didn't know his dad and thought his mom was a loon, and he didn't change much over the movie.
The show managed to at least accomplish that. He becomes brave, and begins to see how he both inspires and endangers those around him and starts to act somewhat like a leader who you can really see in a few years being ready to do what he has to do.
Plus the two-factions-of-machines plot was beginning to get interesting.
Of course much of that story could have been compressed. That certainly was the show's biggest failing. That funeral episode was a truly painful way to get like one or two minor revelations. If the Season 2 finale had been the Season 1 finale, then the show might be ending at its actual end and it'd be remembered fondly.