Somehow people think we can come up with a grand scheme to manipulate the weather of foreign nations, put it into action, _and_ keep it quiet, yet our government can't figure out how to win a simple war and keep the documents classified during it (WikiLeaks/Afghanistan)?
Well yeah. Wars necessarily involve many thousands of people and many planners at all levels. Even if you have a genius general, their subordinates still have to make decisions, and the general is unlikely to have a complete view of the theater. And regardless of the quality of planning, the orders and information necessary to fight necessarily pass through many hands.
Compare with the climate change conspiracy theory. You pretty much just need one genius scientist to come up with the "alter climate over Russia but somehow not the U.S." device willing to sacrifice their morals to see their vision come to fruition, one zealous DARPA manager willing to do anything for the Stars and Stripes to manage the scientist and all the contractors (who don't have to know what purpose the sub-components they are building are for -- see Primer or Cube), and one high-level administrator to shovel the money at the project and not ask questions (for plausible deniability of course).
One mad scientist, one mad agent, and one corrupt official. Much easier to keep the lid on. The only flaw with this though is that there's usually a plucky hero (preferably a slinky girl ninja spy) who infiltrates the organization in order to uncover the conspiracy... Unfortunately all the people who suspect the truth are only able to complain about it on the intertubes.
You are a learning machine who is now referring to itself as person! You also get excited about probabilities and you are posting on/.
A.I. has gone too far...
On the plus side, it sounds like the robot revolution is going to be stymied for the same reason as my productivity. Destroy all humans! After I refresh/. one more time...
(think about it, the second Death Star was already doomed, and pretty much everything Luke and Vader did in toppling the Emperor was pointless, because all the legwork had been done by Han and the Ewoks on the surface and by the Alliance fleet and Lando up in space).
Luke didn't go to the Death Star in order to destroy it or topple the Emperor. Luke went there to save his father. That necessarily meant confronting the Emperor, but that wasn't why he went, his goal could not possibly have been accomplished by staying away and letting the Death Star be blown up with Vader on board, and so it was anything but pointless. He didn't physically save his father, but he did gain him some measure of redemption and reconciliation. And thus was one of the central character conflicts in the trilogy resolved.
I read David Brin's critique before and I think he made some very good observations about flaws in the whole philosophy of Star Wars (like getting mad makes you turn permanently evil). I don't recall that specific criticism of the Vader/Luke/Emperor scenes, but if it was in there, it's way off base.
1. Good for you. Did you really need the quad core? What are you using the computer for? Did you forget the longevity of LGA 775, where you can still do the same thing? Doesn't make sense to me, but CPUs are readily available.
I didn't really need quad core, though it certainly comes in handy at times. Dual core is fantastic when you are running 1 CPU bound job and want other IO bound jobs to be highly responsive. Quad core is great for the times I'm doing 2+ jobs and still want other things to be responsive.
The main thing though I wanted was a major upgrade to my CPU simply in terms of single-thread performance, and in the couple years that transpired between my last purchase there had been many advancements made. And then I looked at what was available, and a quad core a few speed grades from the maximum was the best bang for the buck.
I don't know what you mean by "did I forget" the longevity of LGA 775. Yeah, you could have gone from a dual core to a quad core in that same package, which is great. My general point is upgradability is highly useful, not some AMD vs Intel cock measuring contest. The performance benefit of an on-die memory controller is huge, though, so in the case of Intel the benefit of moving past LGA 775 (which also gets you other massive improvements in CPU architecture too) is quite high. But for some people, especially before Nehalem came out, the ability to get a quad-core in the 775 package was economically attractive.
Which I think is great. Why don't you?
2. I'd suggest taking a hard look at CPU architecture development. By a friend, I happen to know something about it, and the pin layout (corresponding to power and data ports) is actually very important. If you don't think that AM3 was outdated when it came out, I'd suggest doing some research. This is not meant to offensive in any way, the CPU design just means that the pin layout has to live with the optimal physical construction.
Looking hard at CPU architecture is what I do, thank you very much. And sub-optimal pin layout was why the 939 package didn't last that long. That's why you got burned by it. That was fixed, current CPU designs are not limited by the AM2/3 packages. The architecture of the CPUs is not held back by the package at all. The only significant reason to change is to add or change interfaces. Not to enable microarchitectural improvements.
3. Your latter point about AMD's big change strikes true to me too, but as a solid-state physicist, I recognize the realities. AM3 is old now, and going past it requires changing the socket, or hampering the real performance just to be backwards-compatible.
It's only going to hamper performance in the sense that the chip may have 3 or 4 DRAM interfaces, but the legacy package only supports 2. That's a real and significant tradeoff to make, to be sure. Within the context of having made it, the chip performance is not going to be hampered by the socket. The processors that go into the new package with the new interfaces aren't going to be hampered by being backward compatible.
Again, I'm not an Intel buff by any means, but as a computer building enthusiast, IMO they have been taking the more sensible way, dropping old crud and pushing aggressively forward.
As a computer architect, that strikes me as completely backwards. Intel's system interconnect was old crud, and they held onto that forever as the longevity of the 775 demonstrates. Their most recent package updates were necessary in order to support their new, non-shitty interconnect and the on-chip memory controller. Stuff AMD has had since early last decade, which is why they needed fewer updates (barring some early missteps of course).
This idea you have that frequent package updates are necessary to maximize performance outside of interface changes simply isn't borne out by reality.
1. This point about the price/delta/ (nice word, I've never used it in this context) has been put to the past by the current pricing schemes. You don't pay much extra for a quad vs. a similar dual core (architectures and all in the equation).
If this discussion was solely in the context of buying a dual-core processor instead of a quad-core, sorry, I missed it. Had I realized, I would have explicitly rejected that dichotomy.:)
I was talking about actually finding the optimal price-point, graphing price/performance, and finding the farthest point on the performance axis before the slope of the line significantly increases indicating that you're getting very little return on your extra money. That math is still very relevant. And sure, it's going to point you at a quad-core processor today. But not the fastest one.
Of course the funny thing is, I personally bought a dual-core processor when quad-cores didn't exist, and then I bought a quad-core and plugged it into the same board, saving a lot of scratch vs having to buy a new mobo. Go upgradability, huzzah!
2. Very well, that's the kind of math I've been doing for other people too for some years now. AM3 was outdated when it was introduced, because if you really want to get the best out of a new CPU architecture, you better make a socket that can match it for the best. Hence the two new sockets from Intel in a short time, after we thought that LGA 775 was never going to go away.
Ha, AM3 is hardly outdated, it's quite well suited to AMD's architecture. Intel had to switch away from 775, they completely changed their bus architecture -- to one very similar to AMD's. Which is why Intel had to change sockets in a necessarily non-compatible way, and AMD hasn't.
3. Repetition of 2, but AMD must know that the next bigger step ("tock" in Intel's language) must mean a big change in the architecture. They can keep the next generation of CPUs compatible with the older boards, but that hampers the innovations they can make in the designs, and thus it probably lowers the performance.
"Tocks" aren't necessarily big architectural changes necessitating a new platforms. They just aren't simply process shrinks. It's several iterations of tick-tock between major architectural revisions. AMD doesn't follow that pattern anyway.
AMD is of course coming out with a major new architecture in the next few years, but (especially since current/power draws are now constrained by market segment so they're unlikely to get into a P4-like situation where they have to redesign the socket just to reduce power pin inductance) the major things choice of socket restricts are the external interfaces. So if they want to add more DRAM channels, or bridgeless PCIe, that'll require a new socket. However it's not difficult at all to fit that same processor into a socket that doesn't have those things. Which is what I'm betting you'll see -- processors for the new socket, and for the old.
And then it'll be up to the consumer if it's worth getting the benefit of the new socket or not.
That's what I said. What part of "serial" don't you understand?
No, you said "the only thing you can do is increase clock rate", which is wrong. But because I did in fact understand your usage of "serial", I was able to make the proper correction.
Absolutely, it's also about cache performance, instruction pipelining, etc.
Well then don't say the only thing you can do is increase clock rate if you know that's not true.;)
But multicore *does not help*. At best, it could improve cache performance, as you could dedicate a single CPU to a single job, thus reducing cache contention between tasks.
Yes, I was implicitly agreeing with you there. However if you do have multiple tasks such that cache contention exists, then you actually are going to benefit from multicore. Only in the case where there is only one task and there is completely negligble amount of interference from the OS timer interrupt routine etc is it not helpful. Which still represents a significant class of workloads, so the point your were trying to make stands.
Actually, according to my cursory scan, you're a collection of Patented Nucleotide Sequences #47862, #32981, #441998, and #90210. A representative will be by shortly to either receive payment or present you with a Cease and Desist Existing order, and to conduct a more thorough scan for additional IP violations.
That's because the price you'll pay for two CPU is more than just getting a good one that'll carry you through the period.
Um, the whole point is that extra price you pay for that "good" CPU is disproportionate to the amount of performance. The performance delta between that highest-performing chip and the optimally priced chip (which is still quite good) is much smaller than the performance delta between that highest-performing chip and the optimally priced chip of 2 years later.
So you're paying a lot more for a negligible amount of increased longevity. You're not saving anything. You're paying more to have the best in the short term. If you want to do that -- and I've done it in the past -- then that's great, but don't kid yourself that it's more economical to do so.
Who knows when AMD introduced AM4 socket, which is not backwards-compatible?
Assuming it isn't, then all I've lost is a small percentage of performance in return for paying substantially less. Assuming it is, I can weigh the cost/performance advantage of switching to a new mobo and buying new RAM vs upgrading my existing system with the next generation of processor.
Paraphrasing the other post: 754/939 didn't last very long
Yeah, AMD had problems getting their socket roadmap straight when they transition to K8. On the other hand, Socket A was around forever and I got many nice upgrades out of it. And once again they seem to have learned that socket compatibility is a good feature to have, partly because of the beating they took (from OEMs and enthusiasts) over the their socket problems.
Intel has been doing so much stuff behind the scenes to keep the x86 architecture going, that it may be time to just bite the bullet and move to something that doesn't require as much translation?
Actually, the vast majority of what Intel and AMD have been doing behind the scenes are microarchitectural improvements that would be applicable to any out-of-order processor regardless of ISA.
There are some minor penalties to x86 that remain, but getting rid of them would be a very modest performance upside and is completely not worth ditching backward compatibility for.
Itanium comes to mind here because it offers a dizzying amount of registers, both FPU and CPU available to programs. To boot, it can emulate x86/amd64 instructions.
You don't actually need that many architected registers, and modern out of order processors have a similar number of physical registers anyway. Sure IA32 had way too few GPRs, but most of the time the 32 registers of most RISC machines aren't used. x86-64 has a good compromise, and IA64 has overkill.
If you're going to ditch x86 and start with something new -- and hypothetically I completely agree it would be great -- at least pick a real RISC architecture, and not something that actually has a bigger manual than x86. The only thing worse than an ISA designed by 30 years of engineering pragmatism is one designed by a committee of compiler writers.:P
Emulation of x86 was something that was touted but never performed well enough to actually satisfy customers who wanted to run x86 workloads. This is surprising only to people who think x86 chips are inherently slow.:P
Virtual machine technology is coming along rapidly. Why not combine a hardware hypervisor and other technology so we can transition to a CPU architecture that was designed in the past 10-20 years?
Because virtual machines don't actually let you do that. They only virtualize a few aspects of the ISA to make compartmentalization possible. The guest OS and applications are compiled to the underlying ISA. Virtualization is all about efficiency, and emulating foreign instruction sets is inefficient.
Why would you buy something not optimal just so that you can upgrade it later? It's false economy, get the best you can afford now, and a whole new rig with whole new tech a few years later.
Why wouldn't you buy something optimal (which to me means the highest performance before the price for incremental performance increases drastically at the high end), and then upgrade it with something better later?
I have an AM2+ board today, I plan on upgrading to an AM3 processor soon, and since the motherboard itself is not a significant performance limiter and the incremental price for DDR3 is too much in my estimation, I'm not actually losing anything significant and saving a lot of money.
Also, in the broader sense beyond us enthusiasts, socket compatability and upgradability is a huge deal for OEMs. Being able to refresh a line with a new processor has many advantages.
Seriously! What have coastal cities ever done for you, anyway? I mean it's not like anything you use or buy on a daily basis came from ports or coastal refineries, am I right? Hurricanes clearly don't affect you in any way. What a waste!
Is it really sad that distributed computing is so commonplace that it's resulting in discoveries in fields as disperse as biochemistry, abstract mathematics, and astronomy? That sounds like... the opposite of sad. Something went from being new and exciting but small scale to massive and available to many, and now many more projects are able to exploit it. That sounds exciting to me.
Sure Foldit is more interesting and exciting from the technological development standpoint. Is this some kind of zero-sum game where that necessarily means it eats up the excitement points of discovering pulsars with "traditional" distributed computing projcets?
It's heating up due to absorbing solar radiation and the operation of the electronics on board. Space is cold, but that doesn't help our poor telescope because there's nothing for its heat to be transmitted to. It's not like setting a hot mug of coffee outside on a cold winter day. There, conduction and convection are doing most of the work. Conduction, by the way, is why the sun hitting one side of the scope results in the entire telescope heating up.
In space the only effective way to lose heat is via radiation. The amount of blackbody radiation emitted is proportional to temperature, and the equilibrium point where the telescope is losing as much heat as it is gaining is well above 12K.
This is surely overkill in that it's the energy needed to push all the earth's mass to escape velocity. Probably less than 1% of this energy would suffice to crack the planet into pieces. Would this count as blowing the earth up?
Well, I would take the stance of the authoritative guide to destroying the earth, and say that cracking the planet into pieces/rubble that will eventually re-coalesce doesn't count.
Thank you for your reply. I guess I was asking if we know how to convert all matter to usable energy so that no matter is left after wise?
Sure, with anti-matter. Collide a particle of matter with its anti-particle, and they'll annihilate and leave only high-energy photons (in many cases but not all). Here it's the rest mass that you've converted into electromagnetic energy. But the total mass (energy) of the system is unchanged.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow people think we can come up with a grand scheme to manipulate the weather of foreign nations, put it into action, _and_ keep it quiet, yet our government can't figure out how to win a simple war and keep the documents classified during it (WikiLeaks/Afghanistan)?
Well yeah. Wars necessarily involve many thousands of people and many planners at all levels. Even if you have a genius general, their subordinates still have to make decisions, and the general is unlikely to have a complete view of the theater. And regardless of the quality of planning, the orders and information necessary to fight necessarily pass through many hands.
Compare with the climate change conspiracy theory. You pretty much just need one genius scientist to come up with the "alter climate over Russia but somehow not the U.S." device willing to sacrifice their morals to see their vision come to fruition, one zealous DARPA manager willing to do anything for the Stars and Stripes to manage the scientist and all the contractors (who don't have to know what purpose the sub-components they are building are for -- see Primer or Cube), and one high-level administrator to shovel the money at the project and not ask questions (for plausible deniability of course).
One mad scientist, one mad agent, and one corrupt official. Much easier to keep the lid on. The only flaw with this though is that there's usually a plucky hero (preferably a slinky girl ninja spy) who infiltrates the organization in order to uncover the conspiracy... Unfortunately all the people who suspect the truth are only able to complain about it on the intertubes.
You are a learning machine who is now referring to itself as person! You also get excited about probabilities and you are posting on /.
A.I. has gone too far...
On the plus side, it sounds like the robot revolution is going to be stymied for the same reason as my productivity. Destroy all humans! After I refresh /. one more time...
(think about it, the second Death Star was already doomed, and pretty much everything Luke and Vader did in toppling the Emperor was pointless, because all the legwork had been done by Han and the Ewoks on the surface and by the Alliance fleet and Lando up in space).
Luke didn't go to the Death Star in order to destroy it or topple the Emperor. Luke went there to save his father. That necessarily meant confronting the Emperor, but that wasn't why he went, his goal could not possibly have been accomplished by staying away and letting the Death Star be blown up with Vader on board, and so it was anything but pointless. He didn't physically save his father, but he did gain him some measure of redemption and reconciliation. And thus was one of the central character conflicts in the trilogy resolved.
I read David Brin's critique before and I think he made some very good observations about flaws in the whole philosophy of Star Wars (like getting mad makes you turn permanently evil). I don't recall that specific criticism of the Vader/Luke/Emperor scenes, but if it was in there, it's way off base.
Never mind they annoying and idiotic employees, they appreciate evangelists!
Yeah, sounds about right...
"Hello, have you heard the good news of our extended warranty plan?"
1. Good for you. Did you really need the quad core? What are you using the computer for? Did you forget the longevity of LGA 775, where you can still do the same thing? Doesn't make sense to me, but CPUs are readily available.
I didn't really need quad core, though it certainly comes in handy at times. Dual core is fantastic when you are running 1 CPU bound job and want other IO bound jobs to be highly responsive. Quad core is great for the times I'm doing 2+ jobs and still want other things to be responsive.
The main thing though I wanted was a major upgrade to my CPU simply in terms of single-thread performance, and in the couple years that transpired between my last purchase there had been many advancements made. And then I looked at what was available, and a quad core a few speed grades from the maximum was the best bang for the buck.
I don't know what you mean by "did I forget" the longevity of LGA 775. Yeah, you could have gone from a dual core to a quad core in that same package, which is great. My general point is upgradability is highly useful, not some AMD vs Intel cock measuring contest. The performance benefit of an on-die memory controller is huge, though, so in the case of Intel the benefit of moving past LGA 775 (which also gets you other massive improvements in CPU architecture too) is quite high. But for some people, especially before Nehalem came out, the ability to get a quad-core in the 775 package was economically attractive.
Which I think is great. Why don't you?
2. I'd suggest taking a hard look at CPU architecture development. By a friend, I happen to know something about it, and the pin layout (corresponding to power and data ports) is actually very important. If you don't think that AM3 was outdated when it came out, I'd suggest doing some research. This is not meant to offensive in any way, the CPU design just means that the pin layout has to live with the optimal physical construction.
Looking hard at CPU architecture is what I do, thank you very much. And sub-optimal pin layout was why the 939 package didn't last that long. That's why you got burned by it. That was fixed, current CPU designs are not limited by the AM2/3 packages. The architecture of the CPUs is not held back by the package at all. The only significant reason to change is to add or change interfaces. Not to enable microarchitectural improvements.
3. Your latter point about AMD's big change strikes true to me too, but as a solid-state physicist, I recognize the realities. AM3 is old now, and going past it requires changing the socket, or hampering the real performance just to be backwards-compatible.
It's only going to hamper performance in the sense that the chip may have 3 or 4 DRAM interfaces, but the legacy package only supports 2. That's a real and significant tradeoff to make, to be sure. Within the context of having made it, the chip performance is not going to be hampered by the socket. The processors that go into the new package with the new interfaces aren't going to be hampered by being backward compatible.
Again, I'm not an Intel buff by any means, but as a computer building enthusiast, IMO they have been taking the more sensible way, dropping old crud and pushing aggressively forward.
As a computer architect, that strikes me as completely backwards. Intel's system interconnect was old crud, and they held onto that forever as the longevity of the 775 demonstrates. Their most recent package updates were necessary in order to support their new, non-shitty interconnect and the on-chip memory controller. Stuff AMD has had since early last decade, which is why they needed fewer updates (barring some early missteps of course).
This idea you have that frequent package updates are necessary to maximize performance outside of interface changes simply isn't borne out by reality.
1. This point about the price /delta/ (nice word, I've never used it in this context) has been put to the past by the current pricing schemes. You don't pay much extra for a quad vs. a similar dual core (architectures and all in the equation).
If this discussion was solely in the context of buying a dual-core processor instead of a quad-core, sorry, I missed it. Had I realized, I would have explicitly rejected that dichotomy. :)
I was talking about actually finding the optimal price-point, graphing price/performance, and finding the farthest point on the performance axis before the slope of the line significantly increases indicating that you're getting very little return on your extra money. That math is still very relevant. And sure, it's going to point you at a quad-core processor today. But not the fastest one.
Of course the funny thing is, I personally bought a dual-core processor when quad-cores didn't exist, and then I bought a quad-core and plugged it into the same board, saving a lot of scratch vs having to buy a new mobo. Go upgradability, huzzah!
2. Very well, that's the kind of math I've been doing for other people too for some years now. AM3 was outdated when it was introduced, because if you really want to get the best out of a new CPU architecture, you better make a socket that can match it for the best. Hence the two new sockets from Intel in a short time, after we thought that LGA 775 was never going to go away.
Ha, AM3 is hardly outdated, it's quite well suited to AMD's architecture. Intel had to switch away from 775, they completely changed their bus architecture -- to one very similar to AMD's. Which is why Intel had to change sockets in a necessarily non-compatible way, and AMD hasn't.
3. Repetition of 2, but AMD must know that the next bigger step ("tock" in Intel's language) must mean a big change in the architecture. They can keep the next generation of CPUs compatible with the older boards, but that hampers the innovations they can make in the designs, and thus it probably lowers the performance.
"Tocks" aren't necessarily big architectural changes necessitating a new platforms. They just aren't simply process shrinks. It's several iterations of tick-tock between major architectural revisions. AMD doesn't follow that pattern anyway.
AMD is of course coming out with a major new architecture in the next few years, but (especially since current/power draws are now constrained by market segment so they're unlikely to get into a P4-like situation where they have to redesign the socket just to reduce power pin inductance) the major things choice of socket restricts are the external interfaces. So if they want to add more DRAM channels, or bridgeless PCIe, that'll require a new socket. However it's not difficult at all to fit that same processor into a socket that doesn't have those things. Which is what I'm betting you'll see -- processors for the new socket, and for the old.
And then it'll be up to the consumer if it's worth getting the benefit of the new socket or not.
That's what I said. What part of "serial" don't you understand?
No, you said "the only thing you can do is increase clock rate", which is wrong. But because I did in fact understand your usage of "serial", I was able to make the proper correction.
Absolutely, it's also about cache performance, instruction pipelining, etc.
Well then don't say the only thing you can do is increase clock rate if you know that's not true. ;)
But multicore *does not help*. At best, it could improve cache performance, as you could dedicate a single CPU to a single job, thus reducing cache contention between tasks.
Yes, I was implicitly agreeing with you there. However if you do have multiple tasks such that cache contention exists, then you actually are going to benefit from multicore. Only in the case where there is only one task and there is completely negligble amount of interference from the OS timer interrupt routine etc is it not helpful. Which still represents a significant class of workloads, so the point your were trying to make stands.
But who am I, other some peon somewhere, right?
Actually, according to my cursory scan, you're a collection of Patented Nucleotide Sequences #47862, #32981, #441998, and #90210. A representative will be by shortly to either receive payment or present you with a Cease and Desist Existing order, and to conduct a more thorough scan for additional IP violations.
So if you want to execute one of these problems faster, the only thing you can do is ramp up the clock rate.
The only thing you can do is increase single-thread performance, which isn't just about clock rate.
That's because the price you'll pay for two CPU is more than just getting a good one that'll carry you through the period.
Um, the whole point is that extra price you pay for that "good" CPU is disproportionate to the amount of performance. The performance delta between that highest-performing chip and the optimally priced chip (which is still quite good) is much smaller than the performance delta between that highest-performing chip and the optimally priced chip of 2 years later.
So you're paying a lot more for a negligible amount of increased longevity. You're not saving anything. You're paying more to have the best in the short term. If you want to do that -- and I've done it in the past -- then that's great, but don't kid yourself that it's more economical to do so.
Who knows when AMD introduced AM4 socket, which is not backwards-compatible?
Assuming it isn't, then all I've lost is a small percentage of performance in return for paying substantially less. Assuming it is, I can weigh the cost/performance advantage of switching to a new mobo and buying new RAM vs upgrading my existing system with the next generation of processor.
Paraphrasing the other post:
754/939 didn't last very long
Yeah, AMD had problems getting their socket roadmap straight when they transition to K8. On the other hand, Socket A was around forever and I got many nice upgrades out of it. And once again they seem to have learned that socket compatibility is a good feature to have, partly because of the beating they took (from OEMs and enthusiasts) over the their socket problems.
Intel has been doing so much stuff behind the scenes to keep the x86 architecture going, that it may be time to just bite the bullet and move to something that doesn't require as much translation?
Actually, the vast majority of what Intel and AMD have been doing behind the scenes are microarchitectural improvements that would be applicable to any out-of-order processor regardless of ISA.
There are some minor penalties to x86 that remain, but getting rid of them would be a very modest performance upside and is completely not worth ditching backward compatibility for.
Itanium comes to mind here because it offers a dizzying amount of registers, both FPU and CPU available to programs. To boot, it can emulate x86/amd64 instructions.
You don't actually need that many architected registers, and modern out of order processors have a similar number of physical registers anyway. Sure IA32 had way too few GPRs, but most of the time the 32 registers of most RISC machines aren't used. x86-64 has a good compromise, and IA64 has overkill.
If you're going to ditch x86 and start with something new -- and hypothetically I completely agree it would be great -- at least pick a real RISC architecture, and not something that actually has a bigger manual than x86. The only thing worse than an ISA designed by 30 years of engineering pragmatism is one designed by a committee of compiler writers. :P
Emulation of x86 was something that was touted but never performed well enough to actually satisfy customers who wanted to run x86 workloads. This is surprising only to people who think x86 chips are inherently slow. :P
Virtual machine technology is coming along rapidly. Why not combine a hardware hypervisor and other technology so we can transition to a CPU architecture that was designed in the past 10-20 years?
Because virtual machines don't actually let you do that. They only virtualize a few aspects of the ISA to make compartmentalization possible. The guest OS and applications are compiled to the underlying ISA. Virtualization is all about efficiency, and emulating foreign instruction sets is inefficient.
Why would you buy something not optimal just so that you can upgrade it later? It's false economy, get the best you can afford now, and a whole new rig with whole new tech a few years later.
Why wouldn't you buy something optimal (which to me means the highest performance before the price for incremental performance increases drastically at the high end), and then upgrade it with something better later?
I have an AM2+ board today, I plan on upgrading to an AM3 processor soon, and since the motherboard itself is not a significant performance limiter and the incremental price for DDR3 is too much in my estimation, I'm not actually losing anything significant and saving a lot of money.
Also, in the broader sense beyond us enthusiasts, socket compatability and upgradability is a huge deal for OEMs. Being able to refresh a line with a new processor has many advantages.
Seriously! What have coastal cities ever done for you, anyway? I mean it's not like anything you use or buy on a daily basis came from ports or coastal refineries, am I right? Hurricanes clearly don't affect you in any way. What a waste!
Well, it's pretty cool, just not cool enough.
Ten-plus years ago, the methodology itself was news even when there was no results. This news story is about the result coming from the methodology.
Maybe it's not as exciting as the news you'd like to hear, but it isn't sad in the slightest.
Is it really sad that distributed computing is so commonplace that it's resulting in discoveries in fields as disperse as biochemistry, abstract mathematics, and astronomy? That sounds like... the opposite of sad. Something went from being new and exciting but small scale to massive and available to many, and now many more projects are able to exploit it. That sounds exciting to me.
Sure Foldit is more interesting and exciting from the technological development standpoint. Is this some kind of zero-sum game where that necessarily means it eats up the excitement points of discovering pulsars with "traditional" distributed computing projcets?
Oh wait, it was claimed in something that wasn't the Title, which I guess makes me as stupid as the submitter.
que sera sera.
I'd say they would also dispute the 'first scientific discovery' claim.
Why would they dispute a claim that wasn't made? That'd just be silly.
The claim was first pulsar discovery, and I doubt Folding has any reason to dispute that.
It's heating up due to absorbing solar radiation and the operation of the electronics on board. Space is cold, but that doesn't help our poor telescope because there's nothing for its heat to be transmitted to. It's not like setting a hot mug of coffee outside on a cold winter day. There, conduction and convection are doing most of the work. Conduction, by the way, is why the sun hitting one side of the scope results in the entire telescope heating up.
In space the only effective way to lose heat is via radiation. The amount of blackbody radiation emitted is proportional to temperature, and the equilibrium point where the telescope is losing as much heat as it is gaining is well above 12K.
Because of limited budgets, the prop designers had to follow KISS.
Outside of maybe the episode with the aliens with the black and white painted faces, I don't think they followed KISS much.
Some people have just got to have their government incompetence stories even when the government is being unbelievably competent.
The government is so incompetent, they can't even fail right!
It doesn't cover all the engineering details in specific. Blowing up the earth with a lesser anti-matter reaction is covered as a separate method.
Man may be the most prolific tool user, but he certainly isn't unique.
But perhaps mankind is unique in our ability to consider ourselves unique, and to be off-put by the revelation that we aren't.
Also, we may be unique in contemplating the idea of wiping out those other pesky tool-using animals to restore our uniqueness.
Or maybe that's just my uniqueness. :)
This is surely overkill in that it's the energy needed to push all the earth's mass to escape velocity. Probably less than 1% of this energy would suffice to crack the planet into pieces. Would this count as blowing the earth up?
Well, I would take the stance of the authoritative guide to destroying the earth, and say that cracking the planet into pieces/rubble that will eventually re-coalesce doesn't count.
Plus, "There's no kill like overkill".
Thank you for your reply. I guess I was asking if we know how to convert all matter to usable energy so that no matter is left after wise?
Sure, with anti-matter. Collide a particle of matter with its anti-particle, and they'll annihilate and leave only high-energy photons (in many cases but not all). Here it's the rest mass that you've converted into electromagnetic energy. But the total mass (energy) of the system is unchanged.