As the clock speed goes up, and as the other processors find their limitations and drop out of the race, the Itanium will look better and better. There is, however, a large investment in time and software that must be made before it becomes truly useful. It is unlikely that MS is going to support more than one architecture simultaneously for the desktop or server as it tried to do for x86/alpha.
That was said about every other rival architecture to x86 - and every single one of them has either been marginalized or killed off.
The brute fact of the matter is that a chip's ISA just isn't that important to its performance. When the limitations of an x86 chip's microarchitecture become too great, its designers are free to create a new one and slap on a (now cheap) x86 decoder. If they need a few more instructions, they add them.
Because we tend to classify microprocessor hardware by its ISA, it's easy to lapse (perhaps even subconsciously) into believing that chips of a common ISA must necessarily share some deep hardware heredity. But they don't have to, and history teaches that microprocessor hardware innovations are largely orthagonal to ISA. Most of the improvements to IA-64 chips will probably benefit regular CPUs as well (for an interesting parallel, consider Linus's comments re: Monolithic vs. Micro kernels). And with the absurd amount of money pushing x86 development, such improvements won't take long to trickle down either.
Marxist Hacker eh? Well, I feel rather confident in saying that by the designs of its architects, America was never meant to embrace anything like pre-communist socialism, that's for damned sure (and if you don't accept Marx's model of the evolution of the state, then you're no Marxist - that was precisely the point of departure between Marx and the anarchists).
Yeah, I'm sure Jefferson would've been a HUGE fan of the USSR.
How is any other nation different, except possibly "new world" ones that are emerging? Japan and Europe have had telephones for just as long as the US. Jeez, there are still morse-code telegraph lines hooking up England to the US east coast! You aren't unique in that way at all.
Because the landline phone system in many (probably most) countries absolutely SUCKS, even today. Hence the added appeal of wireless telephones in those markets.
So I take it that you've never, say, broken a rock in half?
The comet is an inanimate object meandering through space - it has no more of an ethical status than any of the ancient, storied rocks used in the creation of your house. The information gleaned from this test, however, is of potentially great consequence to our understanding of the universe.
I might also add that there are PLENTY more comets where that one came from in the Ort Cloud.
Actually, interestingly enough the trend is entirely in the other direction worldwide - that is, explosive growth in traditional or even fundamentalist strains of Christianity in Latin America, Africa, China, and to a lesser extent in North America.
Right now, everyone is focused on the rise of Muslim fundamentalism, and most seem to regard it as little more than a reactionary anomaly. However, this couldn't be further from the truth; what is happening in the Middle East is only one facet of a much more complicated emerging geo-religious geometry. For better or worse, secular humanists who take religion to be a dying anachronism are about to have a very rude awakening over the next 50 years. The '04 election is just the beginning...
Er, the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases was exempted from the Kyoto Protocol? That alone sounds like an excellent reason not to ratify it to me, on a number of levels.
That's what gives the Suicide Girl photos the ambience that they are mocking male sexuality as opposed to the standard porn approach of manipulating male sexuality for profit.
A silly troll, of course, but even allowing the premise I would sooner choose a system which throughout the western world has created in spite of itself a level of technological sophistication and general prosperity never before seen on earth than one well-intended but with only a horrifying record of blood soaked social ruination to its credit (any true brand of socialism).
The problem isn't capitalism, the problem is people - and there is no institutional cure for that problem (as the total unmitigated failure of socialism has proven decisively). So, rather than adopting a system that could only work if everyone were either an angel or a mindless ant (socialism), you adopt one that basically just works, capitalism, and do your part as a decent human being to fight the good fight. If everyone were perfect, capitalism would work perfectly too - that's not its virtue. Its virtue is that it works fairly well given people as they are, not only as they might be.
There's one of these freaking posts every single time, it never fails...
Who is this "we" of whom you speak? Unless you're suffering under a dictatorship, I would imagine that *you* have considerable liberty to improve the plight of the downtrodden. So, if this is indeed a serious concern of yours, then by all means cooperate with the *millions of like-minded individuals already working on this problem*, or secure government funding and go at it yourself!
*We* aren't a collective, we're a *collection* of individuals. Beyond government programs funded through the compulsatory progressive taxes already levied in most modern democracies, there is, and ought to be, only the vast territory of personal choice. A certain group of scientists at MIT have elected to exercise their personal liberty in this persuit, and as I see it are accountable only to their own sense of propriety in doing so. If you feel that one should do otherwise, then *you* ought to get at it!
Those counterexamples cited are only socialist in a decidedly nominal sense, as they allow both private property and capital. They are mixed economy countries, fundementally no different from the US.
There is no extant "capital-S" Socialist country that anyone in their right mind would hold up as a shining example of a well-functioning state.
Money held in banks is being used at the very least to make loans. Banks are hardly economically comparable to saver matresses by any reasonably assessment.
Their thought is much more strategic and their reflexes much better than us. I once saw women playing Tetris, and it was scary.
Actually, this is probably wrong on both counts. First, I don't believe that there's much of a statistically significant difference in "strategic thinking" one way or the other between male and female gamers, and, as to your second contention regarding reflexes, I'm quite positive that it's totally wrong, indeed 180 degrees from the fact of the matter. In the psychometric tests that I'm aware of, men have always scored better in reflex response and spatial coordination than women.
Ugh. I have to say that all of this genuinely irks me. One of the reasons that I enjoy having an alternative virtual life is that it can provide some measure of distance from all of the petty "Us versus Them" contentiousness that suffuses so much of day to day existance. The idea of people deliberately reintroducing that dynamic by actively discriminating against female players is just infuriating. With all of the vile baloney that the media is constantly pumping out about gamers, one would think that the community would WELCOME some gender diversity.
But, after all, I suppose that the people behaving this way are just the same sort that create such tensions in the real world, eh?
A word to the wise for all of you l33t Counter-Strike wankers: God knows that you poor bastards need every opportunity that you can get to earn the affection of the ladies, and, given that your CS habit probably precludes the development of most other skills/redeeming qualities, I would not be so quick to squander the good will of prospective female gamers were I in your position.
This is a textbook case of "RTFA" dispelling the pretense of the introduction.
First, the article actually states that only 25%, a marked MINORITY of said "geniuses," have made their last significant contribution within 5 years of having been married. This is a far cry from the sweeping claim of the introduction.
Second, it's a reasonably well known fact that historically most major thinkers, whether ultimately married or not, have produced their greatest work before the age of 35.
This article is really nothing more than a confirmation of what we've all known for years:
A) that among scientists and their ilk there exists a certain unfortunate subgroup of obsessive/compulsives who simply cannot manage the demands of work and an actual life simultaneously.
B) that at least 25% of slashdot articles, within 5 hours of being posted, will be utterly debunked.
Wonderful. So, in essence, Unicast is attempting to bring the lovely porn site advertising model to the entire internet.
Except that there is just one tiny problem... porn sites have a carrot that can entice their prospective patrons into looking past such distractions: PORN. Most web sites don't offer anything that has such a powerful and nearly universal appeal.;)
I predict that this new advertising paradigm will have a half life measurable in weeks...
You pay like 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bucks for a laptop with a 1 inch screen and a 1 button mouse.
Holy... and just how, praytell, did you manage a sweet discount like that on premo Apple hardware? Oh, I get it... you have inside connections, don't you?
Well, it's not like you have to go around bragging about it...
...and I mean that quite literally: by churning out his monthly doses of pseudo-controversial pabulum, Dvorak assures PC magazine a minimum number of readers, comprising the hapless dolts who (God help them) take this sort of crap seriously and those who, out of morbid curiosity, can't help but wonder what the shyster will say next.
It truly saddens me to see Dvorak stoop to this level of prostitution - it wasn't always this way. Although the man has never exactly been what one would call a visionary, during the eighties he was at least a respectable commentator. In fact, during his heyday, Dvorak was one of the industry's most influential columnists. Today, he rarely makes anyone's list of major industry pundits, and the reason is simple: Dvorak has become a professional troll.
Today, Dvorak's columns come in three principle flavors: banal, inane, and inflammatory. Whether the specific content that appears in his articles is determined by Dvorak's own fancy or the ebb and flow of PC magazine's monthly sales is uncertain, but what is clear is that Dvorak's writing has now sunk to a level such that it maintains only grammatical superiority to the output of the average slashdot troll. Although I must add that with his latest contribution, I feel I may be doing our resident troll population a disservice.
Is Dvorak even a commentator any longer? Frankly, it's becoming rather hard to tell; the man's headlines could just as easily be the titles of random crank bbs posts. "Apple should discontinue the Macintosh," "IBM is a doomed company," and now the almost incomparably über-trite "Apple to switch to x86!" I wonder, was his postulation of Itanium as Apple's choice CPU a tacit acknowledgement of the comical premise of the whole piece? After all, God knows that Apple has tons of headroom in Macintosh pricing at this point, so absorbing the obscene cost of Itanium hardware should be a piece of cake. Heck, who wouldn't go for an $8,000 iMac, right? Even Dvorak's bullshit threshold should've been tripped on that one, especially after the PPC 970 announcement. All of this is just further illustration of the extent to which Dvorak has decayed as an industry columnist. What's next, "BSD is dying?"
I'm sure that I speak for more than a few people when I say that I now read Dvorak for the same reason that one might read the Star or the Enquirer - purely for the entertainment value. It's been a very long time since I've read his work for anything else. But then again, I'm beginning to suspect that keeping us reading is the only point after all. Perhaps it's time to apply that classic Internet admonition to Dvorak's writing as well: don't feed the trolls.
It's also nostalgia. Some of the games that you pick up on Atari and Nintendo are really good, and still fun if you get past the lack of graphics that we've gotten used to with today's games. But you know what a vast majority of them are? Absolute crud.
Indeed. Although I am sympathetic with the original author's position, three words alone should suffice to draw doubt to the claim that the old school was invariably the better school: "Drown Baby Moses"
Slashdot Mirror
As the clock speed goes up, and as the other processors find their limitations and drop out of the race, the Itanium will look better and better. There is, however, a large investment in time and software that must be made before it becomes truly useful. It is unlikely that MS is going to support more than one architecture simultaneously for the desktop or server as it tried to do for x86/alpha.
That was said about every other rival architecture to x86 - and every single one of them has either been marginalized or killed off.
The brute fact of the matter is that a chip's ISA just isn't that important to its performance. When the limitations of an x86 chip's microarchitecture become too great, its designers are free to create a new one and slap on a (now cheap) x86 decoder. If they need a few more instructions, they add them.
Because we tend to classify microprocessor hardware by its ISA, it's easy to lapse (perhaps even subconsciously) into believing that chips of a common ISA must necessarily share some deep hardware heredity. But they don't have to, and history teaches that microprocessor hardware innovations are largely orthagonal to ISA. Most of the improvements to IA-64 chips will probably benefit regular CPUs as well (for an interesting parallel, consider Linus's comments re: Monolithic vs. Micro kernels). And with the absurd amount of money pushing x86 development, such improvements won't take long to trickle down either.
Marxist Hacker eh? Well, I feel rather confident in saying that by the designs of its architects, America was never meant to embrace anything like pre-communist socialism, that's for damned sure (and if you don't accept Marx's model of the evolution of the state, then you're no Marxist - that was precisely the point of departure between Marx and the anarchists).
Yeah, I'm sure Jefferson would've been a HUGE fan of the USSR.
How is any other nation different, except possibly "new world" ones that are emerging? Japan and Europe have had telephones for just as long as the US. Jeez, there are still morse-code telegraph lines hooking up England to the US east coast! You aren't unique in that way at all.
Because the landline phone system in many (probably most) countries absolutely SUCKS, even today. Hence the added appeal of wireless telephones in those markets.
So I take it that you've never, say, broken a rock in half?
The comet is an inanimate object meandering through space - it has no more of an ethical status than any of the ancient, storied rocks used in the creation of your house. The information gleaned from this test, however, is of potentially great consequence to our understanding of the universe.
I might also add that there are PLENTY more comets where that one came from in the Ort Cloud.
Actually, interestingly enough the trend is entirely in the other direction worldwide - that is, explosive growth in traditional or even fundamentalist strains of Christianity in Latin America, Africa, China, and to a lesser extent in North America.
Right now, everyone is focused on the rise of Muslim fundamentalism, and most seem to regard it as little more than a reactionary anomaly. However, this couldn't be further from the truth; what is happening in the Middle East is only one facet of a much more complicated emerging geo-religious geometry. For better or worse, secular humanists who take religion to be a dying anachronism are about to have a very rude awakening over the next 50 years. The '04 election is just the beginning...
If this guy has some staying power, he could become the Derek Smart of the Linux community!
Er, the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases was exempted from the Kyoto Protocol? That alone sounds like an excellent reason not to ratify it to me, on a number of levels.
That's what gives the Suicide Girl photos the ambience that they are mocking male sexuality as opposed to the standard porn approach of manipulating male sexuality for profit.
Well that's comforting.
A silly troll, of course, but even allowing the premise I would sooner choose a system which throughout the western world has created in spite of itself a level of technological sophistication and general prosperity never before seen on earth than one well-intended but with only a horrifying record of blood soaked social ruination to its credit (any true brand of socialism).
The problem isn't capitalism, the problem is people - and there is no institutional cure for that problem (as the total unmitigated failure of socialism has proven decisively). So, rather than adopting a system that could only work if everyone were either an angel or a mindless ant (socialism), you adopt one that basically just works, capitalism, and do your part as a decent human being to fight the good fight. If everyone were perfect, capitalism would work perfectly too - that's not its virtue. Its virtue is that it works fairly well given people as they are, not only as they might be.
There's one of these freaking posts every single time, it never fails...
Who is this "we" of whom you speak? Unless you're suffering under a dictatorship, I would imagine that *you* have considerable liberty to improve the plight of the downtrodden. So, if this is indeed a serious concern of yours, then by all means cooperate with the *millions of like-minded individuals already working on this problem*, or secure government funding and go at it yourself!
*We* aren't a collective, we're a *collection* of individuals. Beyond government programs funded through the compulsatory progressive taxes already levied in most modern democracies, there is, and ought to be, only the vast territory of personal choice. A certain group of scientists at MIT have elected to exercise their personal liberty in this persuit, and as I see it are accountable only to their own sense of propriety in doing so. If you feel that one should do otherwise, then *you* ought to get at it!
Well, regardless of whether it has or not, one thing is certain: it won't be passed on to Canada. ;)
Those counterexamples cited are only socialist in a decidedly nominal sense, as they allow both private property and capital. They are mixed economy countries, fundementally no different from the US. There is no extant "capital-S" Socialist country that anyone in their right mind would hold up as a shining example of a well-functioning state.
straight up, no. french is the most spoken second language. and did you ever notice that the english translation comes second at the olympics?
This is grossly factually inaccurate and it's hard to imagine where you ever came up with such an idea.
Money held in banks is being used at the very least to make loans. Banks are hardly economically comparable to saver matresses by any reasonably assessment.
...is undoubtedly getting so many people to actually give a damn about him.
As a phenomenon within the hacker community, it nearly defies understanding.
Their thought is much more strategic and their reflexes much better than us. I once saw women playing Tetris, and it was scary.
Actually, this is probably wrong on both counts. First, I don't believe that there's much of a statistically significant difference in "strategic thinking" one way or the other between male and female gamers, and, as to your second contention regarding reflexes, I'm quite positive that it's totally wrong, indeed 180 degrees from the fact of the matter. In the psychometric tests that I'm aware of, men have always scored better in reflex response and spatial coordination than women.
Ugh. I have to say that all of this genuinely irks me. One of the reasons that I enjoy having an alternative virtual life is that it can provide some measure of distance from all of the petty "Us versus Them" contentiousness that suffuses so much of day to day existance. The idea of people deliberately reintroducing that dynamic by actively discriminating against female players is just infuriating. With all of the vile baloney that the media is constantly pumping out about gamers, one would think that the community would WELCOME some gender diversity.
But, after all, I suppose that the people behaving this way are just the same sort that create such tensions in the real world, eh?
A word to the wise for all of you l33t Counter-Strike wankers: God knows that you poor bastards need every opportunity that you can get to earn the affection of the ladies, and, given that your CS habit probably precludes the development of most other skills/redeeming qualities, I would not be so quick to squander the good will of prospective female gamers were I in your position.
I'm afraid that I don't follow you...
This is a textbook case of "RTFA" dispelling the pretense of the introduction.
First, the article actually states that only 25%, a marked MINORITY of said "geniuses," have made their last significant contribution within 5 years of having been married. This is a far cry from the sweeping claim of the introduction.
Second, it's a reasonably well known fact that historically most major thinkers, whether ultimately married or not, have produced their greatest work before the age of 35.
This article is really nothing more than a confirmation of what we've all known for years:
A) that among scientists and their ilk there exists a certain unfortunate subgroup of obsessive/compulsives who simply cannot manage the demands of work and an actual life simultaneously.
B) that at least 25% of slashdot articles, within 5 hours of being posted, will be utterly debunked.
Wonderful. So, in essence, Unicast is attempting to bring the lovely porn site advertising model to the entire internet.
;)
Except that there is just one tiny problem... porn sites have a carrot that can entice their prospective patrons into looking past such distractions: PORN. Most web sites don't offer anything that has such a powerful and nearly universal appeal.
I predict that this new advertising paradigm will have a half life measurable in weeks...
You pay like 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bucks for a laptop with a 1 inch screen and a 1 button mouse.
Holy... and just how, praytell, did you manage a sweet discount like that on premo Apple hardware? Oh, I get it... you have inside connections, don't you?
Well, it's not like you have to go around bragging about it...
::looks around at the sudden deluge of crap::
...or, is troll nappy time simply over?
Well, I suppose that somethingawful.com's readers were bound to make it back to slashdot sooner or later, eh?
"CmdrTaco, it's 12 o'clock... do you know where your trolls are?"
...so you mean to say that we may have 2,000 years left to wait?
Argh!
The wheels of justice turn slowly indeed...
...and I mean that quite literally: by churning out his monthly doses of pseudo-controversial pabulum, Dvorak assures PC magazine a minimum number of readers, comprising the hapless dolts who (God help them) take this sort of crap seriously and those who, out of morbid curiosity, can't help but wonder what the shyster will say next.
It truly saddens me to see Dvorak stoop to this level of prostitution - it wasn't always this way. Although the man has never exactly been what one would call a visionary, during the eighties he was at least a respectable commentator. In fact, during his heyday, Dvorak was one of the industry's most influential columnists. Today, he rarely makes anyone's list of major industry pundits, and the reason is simple: Dvorak has become a professional troll.
Today, Dvorak's columns come in three principle flavors: banal, inane, and inflammatory. Whether the specific content that appears in his articles is determined by Dvorak's own fancy or the ebb and flow of PC magazine's monthly sales is uncertain, but what is clear is that Dvorak's writing has now sunk to a level such that it maintains only grammatical superiority to the output of the average slashdot troll. Although I must add that with his latest contribution, I feel I may be doing our resident troll population a disservice.
Is Dvorak even a commentator any longer? Frankly, it's becoming rather hard to tell; the man's headlines could just as easily be the titles of random crank bbs posts. "Apple should discontinue the Macintosh," "IBM is a doomed company," and now the almost incomparably über-trite "Apple to switch to x86!" I wonder, was his postulation of Itanium as Apple's choice CPU a tacit acknowledgement of the comical premise of the whole piece? After all, God knows that Apple has tons of headroom in Macintosh pricing at this point, so absorbing the obscene cost of Itanium hardware should be a piece of cake. Heck, who wouldn't go for an $8,000 iMac, right? Even Dvorak's bullshit threshold should've been tripped on that one, especially after the PPC 970 announcement. All of this is just further illustration of the extent to which Dvorak has decayed as an industry columnist. What's next, "BSD is dying?"
I'm sure that I speak for more than a few people when I say that I now read Dvorak for the same reason that one might read the Star or the Enquirer - purely for the entertainment value. It's been a very long time since I've read his work for anything else. But then again, I'm beginning to suspect that keeping us reading is the only point after all. Perhaps it's time to apply that classic Internet admonition to Dvorak's writing as well: don't feed the trolls.
It's also nostalgia. Some of the games that you pick up on Atari and Nintendo are really good, and still fun if you get past the lack of graphics that we've gotten used to with today's games. But you know what a vast majority of them are? Absolute crud.
Indeed. Although I am sympathetic with the original author's position, three words alone should suffice to draw doubt to the claim that the old school was invariably the better school: "Drown Baby Moses"