Calling the Win32 API from.NET is not a problem. There will be a native version of this on ARM. The problem is if you call some x86 DLL that you distribute, not if you call into the system libraries.
I did GCSE computing in 1998, and my coursework was a programming task (modelling the 3-body problem). At my school, however, I'd been taught to program aged 7. If I'd started programming aged 14, I'd have found it a lot harder. The government should be making programming a primary school activity, not leaving it to an optional course later on. Ideally, programming should be the first thing children are taught to do with computers at school - it was for me, and after that everything else is easy.
The first calculator I used had a handle on the side that you turned. Addition and subtraction were fine, but multiplication could get really tiring... It did help teach me about logarithms though. Also about gearing when I took it apart.
I very much doubt that that is legal. And, if it is, Sony will have to either turn up at the small claims court to contest their jurisdiction, or appeal later.
No problem. Waive your right to a class action suit, and everyone who has been affected next time they do something can take them to the small claims court. I'm sure Sony will be happy to send legal representatives to a few hundred thousand courts around the world. Or lose by default if they don't...
Not really. You can delete iexplore.exe on Windows without breaking much. You can delete Safari.app on OS X without breaking much. But if you delete mshtml.dll or WebKit.framework on Windows or OS X then lots of stuff will break.
The difference is timing. Apple shipped a web browser when a web browser was a required feature for any modern OS. Microsoft shipped a web browser for free when there were no free web browsers (Netscape was only free for noncommercial use, Mosaic and Opera both cost money), and bundled it with their OS so that everyone had a web browser installed and it was practically impossible for any of the existing browser companies to sell one.
Shipping a browser wasn't really what got Microsoft into trouble, it was using their dominant market position in one area (desktop operating systems) to try to force their way into a new market (web browsers). The fact that IE has only recently dropped below 50% market share shows that they succeeded.
I was beginning to think the vast majority of people couldn't care less and tens of millions of these suckers were going to be sold every year
Tens of millions, worldwide, is a tiny number of sales compared to mobile phones or computers. El Reg published some statistics the week showing that something like 3% of the population of the UK had an iPad. I'd certainly be happy if 3% of the UK population gave me £1 each - and Apple's profit margin is a lot more than £1 per device - but it's still nowhere near a majority. It's about 73% of the tablet market, but it's a tiny fraction of the personal computing device market.
How usable is Windows XP RTM edition? Not very - full of known security holes and missing some new APIs. Service Pack 3 was the last major release of XP, and it is only 3 years old.
User available overrides with scary warnings should keep the average user safe and still allow power users to do what they want.
Yup, that's true. After all, it worked perfectly for ActiveX - don't run anything that isn't signed by a Microsoft-signed certificate unless the user clicks past the scary unsafe code warning.
The problem is the constraints. The cheap cluster in my old department cost £100k. £4k does not buy you a lot of hardware. You will probably find a lot more lying around in the undergrad labs. For some of my work as a PhD student, that's exactly what I used - each lab had 40 machines on a GigE network and closed overnight, and for work that wasn't that latency sensitive, I could distribute it across the machines there and run it at night without anyone minding.
If you're serious about needing a cluster, then you need to spend a lot more than £4K. If you only need a cluster for a short time, then £4K can buy you a chunk of time on someone else's hardware. Since this is the UK, they should contact the Manchester Supercomputing Centre, which provides this kind of service to UK universities at quite a reasonable price (and will also lend you people who are good at optimising code for their systems). If the university doesn't already have some clusters lying around, then you should get in contact with a few other research groups. £4K won't go very far, but if half a dozen research groups each put in £4K then that gives you enough for a reasonable cluster to share between the various users.
Doesn't matter. They've benefitted from it already, and without that pesky regulation stuff. The sold a big chunk of (massively overvalued) shares to Goldman Sachs, who then sold shares in a fund backed by Facebook shares. Because GS was the only shareholder, they didn't pass the threshold required to go public (and so have to publish accounts). Facebook got a big chunk of capital, GS got a new to you play their hype-and-dump games with, a load of rich people got to buy in early and enjoy the bubble, and a load of other people will get left holding the hot potato when they eventually revalue the fund to be based on something sane.
You probably don't want to do AES on NEON if you've got an OMAP. The C64x DSP that most OMAP chips include will be much faster. The problem with the Marvell chips is that they don't include a DSP or an FPU. Oh, I think the OMAP also includes vFP, which is largely going away but still has a couple of advantages over NEON in some situations.
Wine provides a better solution today for running Windows apps in Linux
This makes as much sense as saying X.org presents a better solution today for running UNIX apps in Linux. WINE provides an implementation of the win32 APIs. ReactOS provides an implementation of the Windows NT kernel. ReactOS includes WINE's implementation of the high-level APIs. Using WINE on Linux does not, for example, let you use a typical piece of Windows scanner software, which includes hooks into a driver. Using ReactOS does. You can typically use Windows drivers as-is: both Windows and ReactOS implement the same API and ABI for drivers.
Marvell is the only ARM manufacturer who is still under the impression that a chip with no FPU is competitive. Deluded people keep buying computers with their chips and wondering why they're so slow...
No, Tegras are pretty slow on the CPU side. As the other poster said, they're basically stock Cortex A9 parts without the vector unit. Tegras speed comes entirely from the GPU, so if you have something that's compute-bound and doesn't run on the GPU then they'll be slow.
As to overall performance, my Cortex A8 machine compiles code about as fast per clock as my Core 2 Duo machine. That's a very unscientific benchmark, since they run different operating systems, but it's a rough ballpark. The A9 is supposed to be a bit faster per clock, so it's probably close, although still a lot worse for things that are floating point intensive. The fastest multicore Tegras are probably just about competitive with the slowest i3 in terms of performance. They won't come close to touching an i7.
For smartphones, that's not an issue, but it will be a little while before Apple will be able to seriously consider replacing Intel with ARM in the MacBook Pro, for example.
The boot time for an SGI Altix is about 6 hours (I was at a fun talk by the guy at SGI doing the Xen port - he'd boot half a dozen machines so that he had one to work on when he'd crashed the last one). If you power a machine like this down when it's idle, the you're basically making it unavailable for a large category of jobs. If you can do the work in 6 hours on your computer or 10 minutes on the supercomputer, it's faster to do it on your computer because the supercomputer will still be booting up when you're finishing.
No way in hell a project that big gets approved without a rationale.
I wish that were true. The Welsh Assembly Government recently approved £40m of funding for two supercomputer centres with the rationale basically being 'with big-fast computers we can do loads of science! And industry! And it will make loads of money!' The facility is meant to be shared between industry and academia, but no one involved has the slightest clue what the possible industrial uses are for a (not yet designed or deployed) supercomputing facility.
So, it's a depressing question but, sadly, quite a plausible one.
True, but they are still in competition. If you come up with a cure for a disease that you also treat and don't market it, then you risk your competitors coming up with a cure and then destroying your market for the treatment or the cure. Given the FDA approval lead time, if you can get your cure to market as soon as you develop it, then you probably have a good three years when you're selling the cure and your competitor isn't selling the treatment (because it's obsolete) or their cure (because it isn't ready to market). In this time, you're raking in the money and your competitor is having to fund their research from their reserves, while you're funding yours from your income.
Hiding cures makes for good conspiracy theories, but not for very good economics.
Exactly what I was going to post. I'd much rather hear from someone who has undergone the treatment and talked to the doctors than read a press release. Please submit a Slashdot story!
Of course they will. 90% of all worthwhile research fails to produce anything of use. If you know that the result will be useful, then it's development, not research.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling the Win32 API from .NET is not a problem. There will be a native version of this on ARM. The problem is if you call some x86 DLL that you distribute, not if you call into the system libraries.
I did GCSE computing in 1998, and my coursework was a programming task (modelling the 3-body problem). At my school, however, I'd been taught to program aged 7. If I'd started programming aged 14, I'd have found it a lot harder. The government should be making programming a primary school activity, not leaving it to an optional course later on. Ideally, programming should be the first thing children are taught to do with computers at school - it was for me, and after that everything else is easy.
The first calculator I used had a handle on the side that you turned. Addition and subtraction were fine, but multiplication could get really tiring... It did help teach me about logarithms though. Also about gearing when I took it apart.
On the other hand, the wayback machine's version does have working images. And it doesn't use your page view to harvest information about you.
I very much doubt that that is legal. And, if it is, Sony will have to either turn up at the small claims court to contest their jurisdiction, or appeal later.
No problem. Waive your right to a class action suit, and everyone who has been affected next time they do something can take them to the small claims court. I'm sure Sony will be happy to send legal representatives to a few hundred thousand courts around the world. Or lose by default if they don't...
Which is completely irrelevant, from an antitrust perspective.
Not really. You can delete iexplore.exe on Windows without breaking much. You can delete Safari.app on OS X without breaking much. But if you delete mshtml.dll or WebKit.framework on Windows or OS X then lots of stuff will break.
The difference is timing. Apple shipped a web browser when a web browser was a required feature for any modern OS. Microsoft shipped a web browser for free when there were no free web browsers (Netscape was only free for noncommercial use, Mosaic and Opera both cost money), and bundled it with their OS so that everyone had a web browser installed and it was practically impossible for any of the existing browser companies to sell one.
Shipping a browser wasn't really what got Microsoft into trouble, it was using their dominant market position in one area (desktop operating systems) to try to force their way into a new market (web browsers). The fact that IE has only recently dropped below 50% market share shows that they succeeded.
I was beginning to think the vast majority of people couldn't care less and tens of millions of these suckers were going to be sold every year
Tens of millions, worldwide, is a tiny number of sales compared to mobile phones or computers. El Reg published some statistics the week showing that something like 3% of the population of the UK had an iPad. I'd certainly be happy if 3% of the UK population gave me £1 each - and Apple's profit margin is a lot more than £1 per device - but it's still nowhere near a majority. It's about 73% of the tablet market, but it's a tiny fraction of the personal computing device market.
How usable is Windows XP RTM edition? Not very - full of known security holes and missing some new APIs. Service Pack 3 was the last major release of XP, and it is only 3 years old.
User available overrides with scary warnings should keep the average user safe and still allow power users to do what they want.
Yup, that's true. After all, it worked perfectly for ActiveX - don't run anything that isn't signed by a Microsoft-signed certificate unless the user clicks past the scary unsafe code warning.
Sounds great! Open source program? Don't allow. New program from a competitor? Don't allow. In-house software? Charge a fee to allow.
The problem is the constraints. The cheap cluster in my old department cost £100k. £4k does not buy you a lot of hardware. You will probably find a lot more lying around in the undergrad labs. For some of my work as a PhD student, that's exactly what I used - each lab had 40 machines on a GigE network and closed overnight, and for work that wasn't that latency sensitive, I could distribute it across the machines there and run it at night without anyone minding.
If you're serious about needing a cluster, then you need to spend a lot more than £4K. If you only need a cluster for a short time, then £4K can buy you a chunk of time on someone else's hardware. Since this is the UK, they should contact the Manchester Supercomputing Centre, which provides this kind of service to UK universities at quite a reasonable price (and will also lend you people who are good at optimising code for their systems). If the university doesn't already have some clusters lying around, then you should get in contact with a few other research groups. £4K won't go very far, but if half a dozen research groups each put in £4K then that gives you enough for a reasonable cluster to share between the various users.
Doesn't matter. They've benefitted from it already, and without that pesky regulation stuff. The sold a big chunk of (massively overvalued) shares to Goldman Sachs, who then sold shares in a fund backed by Facebook shares. Because GS was the only shareholder, they didn't pass the threshold required to go public (and so have to publish accounts). Facebook got a big chunk of capital, GS got a new to you play their hype-and-dump games with, a load of rich people got to buy in early and enjoy the bubble, and a load of other people will get left holding the hot potato when they eventually revalue the fund to be based on something sane.
Mod parent up! Best troll I've read for a long time, even better than Dr Bob.
You probably don't want to do AES on NEON if you've got an OMAP. The C64x DSP that most OMAP chips include will be much faster. The problem with the Marvell chips is that they don't include a DSP or an FPU. Oh, I think the OMAP also includes vFP, which is largely going away but still has a couple of advantages over NEON in some situations.
Wine provides a better solution today for running Windows apps in Linux
This makes as much sense as saying X.org presents a better solution today for running UNIX apps in Linux. WINE provides an implementation of the win32 APIs. ReactOS provides an implementation of the Windows NT kernel. ReactOS includes WINE's implementation of the high-level APIs. Using WINE on Linux does not, for example, let you use a typical piece of Windows scanner software, which includes hooks into a driver. Using ReactOS does. You can typically use Windows drivers as-is: both Windows and ReactOS implement the same API and ABI for drivers.
Marvell is the only ARM manufacturer who is still under the impression that a chip with no FPU is competitive. Deluded people keep buying computers with their chips and wondering why they're so slow...
No, Tegras are pretty slow on the CPU side. As the other poster said, they're basically stock Cortex A9 parts without the vector unit. Tegras speed comes entirely from the GPU, so if you have something that's compute-bound and doesn't run on the GPU then they'll be slow.
As to overall performance, my Cortex A8 machine compiles code about as fast per clock as my Core 2 Duo machine. That's a very unscientific benchmark, since they run different operating systems, but it's a rough ballpark. The A9 is supposed to be a bit faster per clock, so it's probably close, although still a lot worse for things that are floating point intensive. The fastest multicore Tegras are probably just about competitive with the slowest i3 in terms of performance. They won't come close to touching an i7.
For smartphones, that's not an issue, but it will be a little while before Apple will be able to seriously consider replacing Intel with ARM in the MacBook Pro, for example.
What's wrong with Go's syntax? Aside from forcing a brace style on you, it's pretty clean and consistent.
The boot time for an SGI Altix is about 6 hours (I was at a fun talk by the guy at SGI doing the Xen port - he'd boot half a dozen machines so that he had one to work on when he'd crashed the last one). If you power a machine like this down when it's idle, the you're basically making it unavailable for a large category of jobs. If you can do the work in 6 hours on your computer or 10 minutes on the supercomputer, it's faster to do it on your computer because the supercomputer will still be booting up when you're finishing.
No way in hell a project that big gets approved without a rationale.
I wish that were true. The Welsh Assembly Government recently approved £40m of funding for two supercomputer centres with the rationale basically being 'with big-fast computers we can do loads of science! And industry! And it will make loads of money!' The facility is meant to be shared between industry and academia, but no one involved has the slightest clue what the possible industrial uses are for a (not yet designed or deployed) supercomputing facility.
So, it's a depressing question but, sadly, quite a plausible one.
True, but they are still in competition. If you come up with a cure for a disease that you also treat and don't market it, then you risk your competitors coming up with a cure and then destroying your market for the treatment or the cure. Given the FDA approval lead time, if you can get your cure to market as soon as you develop it, then you probably have a good three years when you're selling the cure and your competitor isn't selling the treatment (because it's obsolete) or their cure (because it isn't ready to market). In this time, you're raking in the money and your competitor is having to fund their research from their reserves, while you're funding yours from your income.
Hiding cures makes for good conspiracy theories, but not for very good economics.
Exactly what I was going to post. I'd much rather hear from someone who has undergone the treatment and talked to the doctors than read a press release. Please submit a Slashdot story!
Of course they will. 90% of all worthwhile research fails to produce anything of use. If you know that the result will be useful, then it's development, not research.