Anyway at least in the UK i doubt you would find many people in their mid 40's who didn't have a spectrum a c64 or other 8 bit computer in their teens
Seriously? I think you should look at the sales numbers for these machines. They didn't sell anything like enough for that to be true. You really think that every child in the UK in the '70s-'80s had a computer? I was born in the '80s, and only about 20% of the people I knew (in a fairly affluent middle class neighbourhood) had a computer at home, even counting things like the NES.
Most geeks probably had some kind of computer at home growing up, but most people? Absolutely not. If you went to school in the '80s, then you probably used a computer at school, but when I was seven my school with 100 pupils had four computers - you hardly grew up with them unless you actively tried to spend time using them.
According to the maths posted by someone else, we'd have expected the neutrino burst over three years before the light arrived. Did anyone see an unexplained neutrino burst on their detector some time in 1984?
Just nit-picking here, but he did not actually mention "home computers" or "personal computers"; he just said "computers".
Access to other computers is even rarer. Schools typically didn't have them at all, universities did but access was limited to a science and engineering students. If you didn't encounter a computer until you arrived at university, then you can hardly be said to grow up with them.
I'm in my 50s, and I have used computers since my teens
I'm in my 20s and can dance argentine tango, but neither of these facts lets you extrapolate to the general population. A few people in their '40s and '50s grew up using computers, but most did not.
Nope, for the whole of America replace the page with a short notice saying that US politicians are attempting to pass laws making it easy to censor the Internet and making this kind of downtime common and provide a list of telephone numbers for the offices of all of the denizens of congress. Let the congressional switchboard be jammed with constituents' complaints for an hour or so...
If you are 40 then computers were a part of your childhood
Nonsense. If you are 40 then you were born in 1970. Home computing started to appear in the very late '70s, but didn't become common until the '90s. I'm just under 30, and at least half of the people I knew growing up didn't have a home computer. When I came to university, a lot of my friends didn't have their own computer (well, all of my geek friends did). I bought the computer I took to university with money from a summer job, and it cost about as much as four months rent in student accommodation. People who had to work a part-time job to afford the rent certainly couldn't afford one.
It would be more accurate to say 'if you are 40, middle class, and from a family with a technical background who thought computers were important, then computers were a part of your childhood'. If you were poor, they were not. If your parents didn't think computers were important, they were not.
I should also add that Intel has a history of designing chips that are a complete bitch to write compilers for and for having hardware and software teams that never talk to each other. The most famous example was the iAPX, which was designed for object oriented programming but without talking to any compiler writers, so it ended up requiring a 200-instruction sequence to do one of the most common operations in an object-oriented language. The Itanium is legendary for being impossible to target. The hardware guys thought it would be great to make all of the difficult bits into software problems. It didn't work. Even today a moderately competent assembly programmer can run rings around the best Itanium compilers. And that's ignoring mess that is x87 - one of the main reasons why 64-bit code is much faster on x86 is that 64-bit implies the presence of SSE so you can pretend x87 doesn't exist and generate SSE code for all floating point operations.
If Intel designed a new architecture now, I'd expect Intel's compiler to have it outperforming a microVAX some time around 2020.
Re:Unfortunate
on
Occupy Flash?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Maybe I missed something, I was under the impression that they were protesting against the concentration of wealth into the hands of a small percentage of the population, most of whom did nothing to create that wealth. What they lack is a good solution to this problem - part of the point of the protests is to draw attention to the problem in the hope that someone will solve it.
What I would like to see is Intel creating a SoC and softcore suite
They did that, what, 18 months ago now? Total number of people who licensed it: zero. Why? Because x86 absolutely sucks for low power.
Lots of experience in chip design. I don't see why they can't create an ARM-Core competitor
Ah yes, all those massive commercial success stories that Intel has had when it tried to produce a non-x86 chip, like the iAPX, the i860, the Itanium. The closest they came was XScale, and they sold the team responsible for that to Marvell.
They can start from scratch. Unlike ARM there is no need to legacy support or backward compatibility.
Intel has two advantages over their competition: superior process technology and x86 compatibility. Your plan is that they should give up one of those?
They have produced great x86 compilers for years, so producing a new compiler for a new chip shouldn't be too difficult since they are already experienced with x86 and Itanium
Hahahaha! Spoken like someone who has never been involved with compiler design or spoken to any compiler writers. Tuning a compiler for a new architecture is not a trivial problem.
It is. The difference between an x86 and ARM core is around an order of magnitude at the moment for the same performance. But the difference between an x86 core and the display is another order of magnitude, so for devices that you mainly use with the screen on there isn't much difference between x86 and ARM in terms of overall power consumption. The difference in battery life between an ARM core at 200mW and an Intel core at 2W is very small when the display is using 10-20W. There are a few display technologies that are supposed to be hitting the market Real Soon Now that ought to make the difference between x86 and ARM a lot more apparent.
What kind of scumbag would be willing to murder the entire world (including their child), in order to 'save' their child?
No one. But most people would accept a small risk of lots of people they don't know dying to save someone they do know. It's part of the pack / tribe mentality shared with a lot of other mammals.
In a rainbow and unicorns world there would be a chain of command for authorizing a launch, the possibility for someone sane to do not follow order would be greater.
There was in the USSR, and when the equipment malfunction ordered the launch he refused to fire and probably saved the life of a significant proportion of the world population. His reward? Early retirement and a lifelong holiday in Siberia.
North Korea also has China as an ally. Invading North Korea would effectively mean declaring war on China (just as invading Poland prevented the UK from remaining neutral in the second world war). That's far more important than the nukes that NK claims to have (as I recall, they only had one test, which was underground and didn't appear to cause any detectable increase in radioactivity - I was in the USA at the time, and it was amusing that the test was front page news, but when the lack of radioactivity was discovered it was on the BBC but completely absent from the US news sources that had been trumpeting the test).
It was a bloody winfall for AMD, but they didn't capitalize on it in time
Yes they did. This was the Athlon vs P4. Clock for clock, the Athlon was faster. Comparing equal cost processors, the Althon was faster on most workloads. And RAMBUS meant that for the same cost you could get the AMD system with twice as much RAM. This was when most of the big OEMs (Dell being the exception) ditched their exclusive contracts with Intel and started offering AMD systems.
For ADSL, that works quite well: "BT" (retail) talk to BT Wholesale in the same way that other ADSL providers do, allowing competition
Except that BT wholesale won't offer naked ADSL, so you need to pay £10/month to BT retail for a telephone line to be allowed to use one of BT retail's competitors for ADSL. This makes it very difficult for them to compete with Virgin, who can offer decent Internet-only packages that cost as little as the cheapest package that competing ISPs offer if you include the BT line rental.
Didn't we call them dot-com millionaires before Apple's second coming? And home game developers in the bubble before that? And garage entrepreneurs in the bubble before that (although, to be fair, that one was at least 50% hardware engineers). In each tech bubble a few people got very rich and a few more got quite rich - I don't remember any of them making programming (or circuit / IC design) cool though, especially not after the bubble ended.
William Bilodeau and Michael Songy discovered this technique in October 1998, and presented the technique at Creativity, a Creative Labs developer's conference, in 1999.[2] Sim Dietrich presented this technique at a Creative Labs developer's forum in 1999.
So, it was presented at a conference a year before Carmack invented it. That said, it looks like a fairly straightforward and relatively obvious modification of an existing algorithm. If the patent office required patents to be reviewed by domain experts, it would have been rejected.
Not too far wrong. Jobs' salary was tiny, but he got a lot of share options. When Apple's value increased by 8,000%, Jobs made an enormous pile of money. If Apple's value had gone down, he'd have made $1/year (or lost money, depending on whether he exercised his options). Ideally, you'd pay your CEO something close to minimum wage (enough to live on, because you don't want only independently rich people to be qualified, but not enough to make them rich, or even particularly comfortably off), but then you'd link all of the rest of their income to the company's performance. Even more ideally, you'd set up their share options so that they couldn't sell the majority until five years after they left, so if they didn't choose a competent successor and leave the company in a long-term manageable state they'd lose too. With share options set up the way they currently are, it's typically a good strategy for a CEO to make massive cuts to R&D, wait for the share price to increase as the short-term profits double from not investing anything in growth, and then quit the company, sell the shares, and find another company to break.
Exactly. In this case, Microsoft's incentives line up with the general public's, so there's a good chance that their standard will do what we actually want. FireFox and Chrome get most of their funding from Google, so they've got an incentive to appear to be acting in consumers' favour without actually making tracking too difficult. Apple probably just doesn't care - Safari isn't a profit centre for them.
It's more telling when you add GOOG and AAPL to the same graph...
In 2000, Google was a startup in an established market. It went on to do very well, but in 2000 it looked about as promising as a dozen other companies all of which have since failed.
Apple had articles in the mainstream press about its immanent demise appearing about once a month.
Both were high-risk stocks which became high-return stocks. Microsoft was a low-risk, low-return stock. Comparing the two makes little sense unless you also factor in all of the companies with the same level of risk as Google or Apple that went bankrupt in the same period.
The increased return with Apple also includes an increased risk. In 2001, lots of commentators were predicting the immanent demise of Apple. No one was predicting that Microsoft would go bankrupt. Investing in Apple in 2001 was a fairly risky proposition because it looked like there was a good chance that you'd lose all of your money in a couple of years. The iMac was doing okay, but early versions of OS X had significant performance problems and Apple was struggling to persuade companies like Microsoft and Adobe to port their software to the new system. Their new CEO was still described as an interim CEO, yet with no succession path in site, and his track record at NeXT was not great - good products but few sales.
You know, I don't think I'd mind not being able to find a new job after a $20m golden parachute. I could live quite comfortably on the interest from that without touching the capital...
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway at least in the UK i doubt you would find many people in their mid 40's who didn't have a spectrum a c64 or other 8 bit computer in their teens
Seriously? I think you should look at the sales numbers for these machines. They didn't sell anything like enough for that to be true. You really think that every child in the UK in the '70s-'80s had a computer? I was born in the '80s, and only about 20% of the people I knew (in a fairly affluent middle class neighbourhood) had a computer at home, even counting things like the NES.
Most geeks probably had some kind of computer at home growing up, but most people? Absolutely not. If you went to school in the '80s, then you probably used a computer at school, but when I was seven my school with 100 pupils had four computers - you hardly grew up with them unless you actively tried to spend time using them.
According to the maths posted by someone else, we'd have expected the neutrino burst over three years before the light arrived. Did anyone see an unexplained neutrino burst on their detector some time in 1984?
Just nit-picking here, but he did not actually mention "home computers" or "personal computers"; he just said "computers".
Access to other computers is even rarer. Schools typically didn't have them at all, universities did but access was limited to a science and engineering students. If you didn't encounter a computer until you arrived at university, then you can hardly be said to grow up with them.
I'm in my 50s, and I have used computers since my teens
I'm in my 20s and can dance argentine tango, but neither of these facts lets you extrapolate to the general population. A few people in their '40s and '50s grew up using computers, but most did not.
Nope, for the whole of America replace the page with a short notice saying that US politicians are attempting to pass laws making it easy to censor the Internet and making this kind of downtime common and provide a list of telephone numbers for the offices of all of the denizens of congress. Let the congressional switchboard be jammed with constituents' complaints for an hour or so...
If you are 40 then computers were a part of your childhood
Nonsense. If you are 40 then you were born in 1970. Home computing started to appear in the very late '70s, but didn't become common until the '90s. I'm just under 30, and at least half of the people I knew growing up didn't have a home computer. When I came to university, a lot of my friends didn't have their own computer (well, all of my geek friends did). I bought the computer I took to university with money from a summer job, and it cost about as much as four months rent in student accommodation. People who had to work a part-time job to afford the rent certainly couldn't afford one.
It would be more accurate to say 'if you are 40, middle class, and from a family with a technical background who thought computers were important, then computers were a part of your childhood'. If you were poor, they were not. If your parents didn't think computers were important, they were not.
I should also add that Intel has a history of designing chips that are a complete bitch to write compilers for and for having hardware and software teams that never talk to each other. The most famous example was the iAPX, which was designed for object oriented programming but without talking to any compiler writers, so it ended up requiring a 200-instruction sequence to do one of the most common operations in an object-oriented language. The Itanium is legendary for being impossible to target. The hardware guys thought it would be great to make all of the difficult bits into software problems. It didn't work. Even today a moderately competent assembly programmer can run rings around the best Itanium compilers. And that's ignoring mess that is x87 - one of the main reasons why 64-bit code is much faster on x86 is that 64-bit implies the presence of SSE so you can pretend x87 doesn't exist and generate SSE code for all floating point operations.
If Intel designed a new architecture now, I'd expect Intel's compiler to have it outperforming a microVAX some time around 2020.
Maybe I missed something, I was under the impression that they were protesting against the concentration of wealth into the hands of a small percentage of the population, most of whom did nothing to create that wealth. What they lack is a good solution to this problem - part of the point of the protests is to draw attention to the problem in the hope that someone will solve it.
What I would like to see is Intel creating a SoC and softcore suite
They did that, what, 18 months ago now? Total number of people who licensed it: zero. Why? Because x86 absolutely sucks for low power.
Lots of experience in chip design. I don't see why they can't create an ARM-Core competitor
Ah yes, all those massive commercial success stories that Intel has had when it tried to produce a non-x86 chip, like the iAPX, the i860, the Itanium. The closest they came was XScale, and they sold the team responsible for that to Marvell.
They can start from scratch. Unlike ARM there is no need to legacy support or backward compatibility.
Intel has two advantages over their competition: superior process technology and x86 compatibility. Your plan is that they should give up one of those?
They have produced great x86 compilers for years, so producing a new compiler for a new chip shouldn't be too difficult since they are already experienced with x86 and Itanium
Hahahaha! Spoken like someone who has never been involved with compiler design or spoken to any compiler writers. Tuning a compiler for a new architecture is not a trivial problem.
It is. The difference between an x86 and ARM core is around an order of magnitude at the moment for the same performance. But the difference between an x86 core and the display is another order of magnitude, so for devices that you mainly use with the screen on there isn't much difference between x86 and ARM in terms of overall power consumption. The difference in battery life between an ARM core at 200mW and an Intel core at 2W is very small when the display is using 10-20W. There are a few display technologies that are supposed to be hitting the market Real Soon Now that ought to make the difference between x86 and ARM a lot more apparent.
What kind of scumbag would be willing to murder the entire world (including their child), in order to 'save' their child?
No one. But most people would accept a small risk of lots of people they don't know dying to save someone they do know. It's part of the pack / tribe mentality shared with a lot of other mammals.
In a rainbow and unicorns world there would be a chain of command for authorizing a launch, the possibility for someone sane to do not follow order would be greater.
There was in the USSR, and when the equipment malfunction ordered the launch he refused to fire and probably saved the life of a significant proportion of the world population. His reward? Early retirement and a lifelong holiday in Siberia.
North Korea also has China as an ally. Invading North Korea would effectively mean declaring war on China (just as invading Poland prevented the UK from remaining neutral in the second world war). That's far more important than the nukes that NK claims to have (as I recall, they only had one test, which was underground and didn't appear to cause any detectable increase in radioactivity - I was in the USA at the time, and it was amusing that the test was front page news, but when the lack of radioactivity was discovered it was on the BBC but completely absent from the US news sources that had been trumpeting the test).
It was a bloody winfall for AMD, but they didn't capitalize on it in time
Yes they did. This was the Athlon vs P4. Clock for clock, the Athlon was faster. Comparing equal cost processors, the Althon was faster on most workloads. And RAMBUS meant that for the same cost you could get the AMD system with twice as much RAM. This was when most of the big OEMs (Dell being the exception) ditched their exclusive contracts with Intel and started offering AMD systems.
For ADSL, that works quite well: "BT" (retail) talk to BT Wholesale in the same way that other ADSL providers do, allowing competition
Except that BT wholesale won't offer naked ADSL, so you need to pay £10/month to BT retail for a telephone line to be allowed to use one of BT retail's competitors for ADSL. This makes it very difficult for them to compete with Virgin, who can offer decent Internet-only packages that cost as little as the cheapest package that competing ISPs offer if you include the BT line rental.
Didn't we call them dot-com millionaires before Apple's second coming? And home game developers in the bubble before that? And garage entrepreneurs in the bubble before that (although, to be fair, that one was at least 50% hardware engineers). In each tech bubble a few people got very rich and a few more got quite rich - I don't remember any of them making programming (or circuit / IC design) cool though, especially not after the bubble ended.
I think you're confusing non-geeks with idiots. There are lots of people in the world who are neither geeks nor idiots...
William Bilodeau and Michael Songy discovered this technique in October 1998, and presented the technique at Creativity, a Creative Labs developer's conference, in 1999.[2] Sim Dietrich presented this technique at a Creative Labs developer's forum in 1999.
So, it was presented at a conference a year before Carmack invented it. That said, it looks like a fairly straightforward and relatively obvious modification of an existing algorithm. If the patent office required patents to be reviewed by domain experts, it would have been rejected.
By making tracking illegal under something like the EU's data protection directive.
Not too far wrong. Jobs' salary was tiny, but he got a lot of share options. When Apple's value increased by 8,000%, Jobs made an enormous pile of money. If Apple's value had gone down, he'd have made $1/year (or lost money, depending on whether he exercised his options). Ideally, you'd pay your CEO something close to minimum wage (enough to live on, because you don't want only independently rich people to be qualified, but not enough to make them rich, or even particularly comfortably off), but then you'd link all of the rest of their income to the company's performance. Even more ideally, you'd set up their share options so that they couldn't sell the majority until five years after they left, so if they didn't choose a competent successor and leave the company in a long-term manageable state they'd lose too. With share options set up the way they currently are, it's typically a good strategy for a CEO to make massive cuts to R&D, wait for the share price to increase as the short-term profits double from not investing anything in growth, and then quit the company, sell the shares, and find another company to break.
A reversed map, also known as an Upside-Down map
I think it's pretty clear that everyone knows you're drawing the map upside down...
Exactly. In this case, Microsoft's incentives line up with the general public's, so there's a good chance that their standard will do what we actually want. FireFox and Chrome get most of their funding from Google, so they've got an incentive to appear to be acting in consumers' favour without actually making tracking too difficult. Apple probably just doesn't care - Safari isn't a profit centre for them.
So you prosecute and fine the companies that do it until the losses from the fines exceed the profits from the tracking.
It's more telling when you add GOOG and AAPL to the same graph...
In 2000, Google was a startup in an established market. It went on to do very well, but in 2000 it looked about as promising as a dozen other companies all of which have since failed.
Apple had articles in the mainstream press about its immanent demise appearing about once a month.
Both were high-risk stocks which became high-return stocks. Microsoft was a low-risk, low-return stock. Comparing the two makes little sense unless you also factor in all of the companies with the same level of risk as Google or Apple that went bankrupt in the same period.
The increased return with Apple also includes an increased risk. In 2001, lots of commentators were predicting the immanent demise of Apple. No one was predicting that Microsoft would go bankrupt. Investing in Apple in 2001 was a fairly risky proposition because it looked like there was a good chance that you'd lose all of your money in a couple of years. The iMac was doing okay, but early versions of OS X had significant performance problems and Apple was struggling to persuade companies like Microsoft and Adobe to port their software to the new system. Their new CEO was still described as an interim CEO, yet with no succession path in site, and his track record at NeXT was not great - good products but few sales.
You know, I don't think I'd mind not being able to find a new job after a $20m golden parachute. I could live quite comfortably on the interest from that without touching the capital...