I don't recall any overly stupid "duplicate site" rules. "Geographic regions" were the worst for this sort of thing. You'd have people with sedona-arizona-hotels.com, sedona-arizona-trips.com, sedona-arizona-camping.com and they were all handwritten HTML with multicolor comic sans, and yeah, we didn't want to list all three because we're fricking human beings who can recognize your crappy family of websites. No doubt some well meaning people tried to codify that.
But yeah, that's way outdated. It's not like anyone's eyeballs are scrolling through the category any longer. Google basically killed that idea with shockingly good search results.
Every time I log in I am horrified at the enormous backlog of submissions.
The last time I logged in, apparently about 10 years ago, I was horrified at the enormous backlog of everything. And I could look at everything, because I was a metaeditor.
The last time there may have been any balance was when it was easy to become an editor and the site hadn't become a peer to Yahoo. Most editors weren't malicious, might add their own site if that's all they wanted to do, and buzz off. Of course they'd be keyword loaded crap, but there might be someone else around to fix it.
Those halcyon days may have ended somewhere in 1999. Once it became clear that sites needed to be in there for good SEO rankings, there was absolutely zero volunteer will or throughput to deal with that tsunami. And given that there was basically a dialtone on the other end when it came to submitting sites, people simply applied to become editors and *that* backlog became ridiculous and unresponsive too. Made worse by the fact that the solution to malicious editors getting in was for the meta-volunteers to insist amongst themselves that they spend tens of minutes on editor applications that we at one point reviewed in tens of seconds.
It's been interesting in the ensuing years to see sites like Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Reddit, and Quora deal with reputation and hierarchies, and anointing people with too much time on their hands.
I have to tell you, being blessed with superpowers is a lot more fun before they start bogging things down in process. I'm pretty sure I was the first root editor of "Business" and had what they called catmv permissions, so at that point I could just create and move categories based on 1-2 opinions. Having all the tools available to fix the problems that you identify, and simply being able to do it... nice. A few years later and not being able to do it without a forum thread... less nice.
I was mostly trying to point out the compounded error on the angry dude's part. All too common for people to think 30% stacking with 20% is 50% off when it's actually 44% off. Not a big deal at those values, but you would start to get very diminishing returns.
Reminds me of something that happened while I was waiting in line at a DIY store. Some guy had two coupons for 20%-off, two for 15%-off and he was demanding 70% off in total. Why didn't he just wait until he had two more 15%-off coupons? I swear to this actually happened; I didn't even spice it up.
1*.8*.8*.85*.85 =.4624, so even if they could stack, he'd be entitled to 53.76% off
.4624*.85*.85 =.334, so stacking two more 15% coupons would still not quite get him to 70% off.
So yeah, even if they stacked, do the math. Common error with combined discounts.
And herein lies a big chunk of the problem for IBM's hardware group and the rest of IBM after that group goes away. When there is a bid involving software and/or services together with servers, the servers get cut to the bone or sold at a loss to advance the welfare of software and services. This is due to a partially self-fulfilling prophecy that being in the hardware business is low margin and therefore should be screwed over to make room for the more successful parts of IBM. Part of IBM's hardware failings is because they make it fail because they think it is failing. Keeping in mind IBM continually wants to do this and executives force STG to take the hit for the sake of SWG and GTS, what happens when STG products are no longer under the same executive umbrella? Those suicidal discounts won't happen anymore because the external vendor doesn't answer to some executives that want to see IBM succeed at all costs.
YES.
I would guess their logic is that customers in the segments they divest don't actually care about the hardware, and if they do really want Thinkpads or IBM x86 hardware, they can pay a little more to get it from Lenovo. Hard to believe with Thinkpads being gone, but the strategy seems to be to keep the hardware that customers demand to the extent they're willing to pay.
Deal to lenovo is done:
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Armonk, New York - 23 Jan 2014: Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have entered into a definitive agreement in which Lenovo plans to acquire IBM’s x86 server business. This includes System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, x86-based Flex integrated systems, NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software, blade networking and maintenance operations. The purchase price is approximately US$2.3 billion, approximately two billion of which will be paid in cash and the balance in Lenovo stock.
IBM will retain its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, and PureApplication and PureData appliances.
I'm kind of curious what the PowerPoint jockeys think about this sale including *all* x86 servers. Blades?? "Enterprise" servers? They will draw a line somewhere that keeps some x86 server architectures in the IBM stable, I'd guess. Just like you can buy a glorified desktop from IBM as a "tower server" rather than having to go to Lenovo, a line will be drawn somewhere, and the "enterprise" servers will likely stick around IBM. At least until the margins suck on those, too.
If TSMC isn't keeping up with Moore's Law, that's not a problem with Moore's Law. It's a problem with TSMC.
>
Waaaay towards the end of TFA, it mentions that it's GlobalFoundries who inserted finFETs into the same BEOL (wiring) as their 22nm node and called 22nm+finFET "14nm." It's buried at the end, but it's what supports the whole argument that nodes are "just marketing."
To my knowledge, the node's name was based on the DRAM half pitch. But yeah, it's not that any longer. And in defense of GlobalFoundries, finFET does literally add an extra dimension to the calculation of FET geometries.
Your post reads like "How do they know some stars are planets anyways? What makes one sparkly thing in the sky different from all the rest? Unpossible to differentiate."
Yeah, it's basically another nonvolatile memory press release. Sounds close to phase-change memory.
The background would be that flash might not be scaling well, or might eventually stop scaling, so there are a lot of other types of nifty nonvolatile memory types that would aim to replace it. Magnetoresistive, ferroelectric, phase change, memristors, nanotubes, whatever. That's not to say that those sorts of things can't perhaps escape their niche and make create a whole new class of computing machines based on non-transistor switches, but yeah. First things first.
I think it's time for a crowdsourced patent challenge web site run by the USPTO where there would be a period of public comment for each patent about to be awarded in order to help underpaid (and I imagine under-resourced) examiners find Prior Art.
A lot fewer patents might be awarded, but ones that are would be genuinely new -- this might also save the world billions of dollars.
Can we please have an end to the stupid articles where someone intentionally mis-interprets the abstract or even just the title of a patent and pretends it's some simple thing that's been done for decades to try to drum up anti-patent sentiment? There seems to be one a week or so.
Unlikely.
Nonetheless, anti-patent sentiment is a good thing. Far too many people assume there's some sort of fairness or justice to the whole mess, and there isn't.
it's 2012, haven't intel or amd engineers developed algorithms to do the chip design for them?
The thing that I take to heart is that even the most simple digital design task-- factoring a sum-of-products boolean equation, the thing you get from your karnaugh map, into the most optimal logic implementation-- algorithms still can't guarantee that. And that task is just one bit of non-sequential static logic. If computers can't guarantee they're better at that, why assume they're better at synthesizing a pipelined, lookahead, out-of-order watchamacallit?
Can anyone supply a concise explanation of the differences and how it's all done? I'm guessing we're talking about people drawing circuits on acetate or similar and then it's scaled down photo-style to produce a mask for the actual chip?
CPU code is in RTL,verilog,VHDL, whatever-- it's in HDL. Usually these days a synthesis tool or compiler will create chip layout that implements that HDL description in standard cell logic. The standard cells are latches, NAND gates, buffers, SRAM, etc. A software tool will place and route standard cells to implement the HDL in silicon, and then iterate on timing to make sure it's fast enough. Humans don't directly do the placement of standard cells, or route wires between them. In terms of photolithography, the standard cells are the silicon transistors, and the first two levels of metal.
It looks like they're making a mountain out of the fact that the standard cells were placed by hand here, and some of the more regular and important wiring was perhaps done by hand, too. You can often take your human knowledge of where the likely performance chokepoints are and place those carefully, and you can also take your human knowledge of where the wiring congestion will be, and be careful there. You're also perhaps able to wire things a bit more creatively in that you can use wrong-way metal and perhaps less gridding. And then you can still probably tell the algorithms to take care of the rest.
In either case the standard cells themselves are often handcrafted in CAD tools, but sometimes different layout software will make them, too. It's just that with large logic chips, past that point humans are often only in the physical design loop to take care of problems the tools can't solve independently-- like massaging things that come out of synthesis too slow to meet the targeted performance, or mandating certain metal levels will be dedicated to a clock mesh. Sometimes that human intervention is just permitting the tool to suck up more power by using faster standard cells. Other times it would be revisiting the architecture in HDL, but then again throwing it over to a computer to place and route. The humans are not actually moving cells around the chip in a CAD tool.
I don't do the synthesis part of the process myself, so someone can clarify or correct me. The thing I wonder about is why the chipworks guys assume hand placement necessarily takes much longer? Looking at the layout, I'd assume the biggest tradeoff is the size of the core, not time spent on placement. It's routing a gazillion non-regular wires that is hard for humans, not placement. We can still place standard cells in a core without needing years of time, provided it doesn't need to be perfectly area-efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
But yeah, that's way outdated. It's not like anyone's eyeballs are scrolling through the category any longer. Google basically killed that idea with shockingly good search results.
Every time I log in I am horrified at the enormous backlog of submissions.
The last time I logged in, apparently about 10 years ago, I was horrified at the enormous backlog of everything. And I could look at everything, because I was a metaeditor.
The last time there may have been any balance was when it was easy to become an editor and the site hadn't become a peer to Yahoo. Most editors weren't malicious, might add their own site if that's all they wanted to do, and buzz off. Of course they'd be keyword loaded crap, but there might be someone else around to fix it.
Those halcyon days may have ended somewhere in 1999. Once it became clear that sites needed to be in there for good SEO rankings, there was absolutely zero volunteer will or throughput to deal with that tsunami. And given that there was basically a dialtone on the other end when it came to submitting sites, people simply applied to become editors and *that* backlog became ridiculous and unresponsive too. Made worse by the fact that the solution to malicious editors getting in was for the meta-volunteers to insist amongst themselves that they spend tens of minutes on editor applications that we at one point reviewed in tens of seconds.
It's been interesting in the ensuing years to see sites like Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Reddit, and Quora deal with reputation and hierarchies, and anointing people with too much time on their hands.
I have to tell you, being blessed with superpowers is a lot more fun before they start bogging things down in process. I'm pretty sure I was the first root editor of "Business" and had what they called catmv permissions, so at that point I could just create and move categories based on 1-2 opinions. Having all the tools available to fix the problems that you identify, and simply being able to do it... nice. A few years later and not being able to do it without a forum thread... less nice.
Likely zoned multifamily to encourage density.
It's what's intended with zoning, no doubt. This block must be zoned multifamily. Probably near transit or commerce or an arterial...
Great article on the Hanford cleanup. Doesn't strike me as B-Team stuff.
I was mostly trying to point out the compounded error on the angry dude's part. All too common for people to think 30% stacking with 20% is 50% off when it's actually 44% off. Not a big deal at those values, but you would start to get very diminishing returns.
Reminds me of something that happened while I was waiting in line at a DIY store. Some guy had two coupons for 20%-off, two for 15%-off and he was demanding 70% off in total. Why didn't he just wait until he had two more 15%-off coupons? I swear to this actually happened; I didn't even spice it up.
1*.8*.8*.85*.85 = .4624, so even if they could stack, he'd be entitled to 53.76% off
So yeah, even if they stacked, do the math. Common error with combined discounts.
I will be able to, no?
And herein lies a big chunk of the problem for IBM's hardware group and the rest of IBM after that group goes away. When there is a bid involving software and/or services together with servers, the servers get cut to the bone or sold at a loss to advance the welfare of software and services. This is due to a partially self-fulfilling prophecy that being in the hardware business is low margin and therefore should be screwed over to make room for the more successful parts of IBM. Part of IBM's hardware failings is because they make it fail because they think it is failing. Keeping in mind IBM continually wants to do this and executives force STG to take the hit for the sake of SWG and GTS, what happens when STG products are no longer under the same executive umbrella? Those suicidal discounts won't happen anymore because the external vendor doesn't answer to some executives that want to see IBM succeed at all costs.
YES.
I would guess their logic is that customers in the segments they divest don't actually care about the hardware, and if they do really want Thinkpads or IBM x86 hardware, they can pay a little more to get it from Lenovo. Hard to believe with Thinkpads being gone, but the strategy seems to be to keep the hardware that customers demand to the extent they're willing to pay.
Deal to lenovo is done:
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Armonk, New York - 23 Jan 2014: Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have entered into a definitive agreement in which Lenovo plans to acquire IBM’s x86 server business. This includes System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, x86-based Flex integrated systems, NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software, blade networking and maintenance operations. The purchase price is approximately US$2.3 billion, approximately two billion of which will be paid in cash and the balance in Lenovo stock. IBM will retain its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, and PureApplication and PureData appliances.
$2.3billion isn't much. Sheesh.
I'm kind of curious what the PowerPoint jockeys think about this sale including *all* x86 servers. Blades?? "Enterprise" servers? They will draw a line somewhere that keeps some x86 server architectures in the IBM stable, I'd guess. Just like you can buy a glorified desktop from IBM as a "tower server" rather than having to go to Lenovo, a line will be drawn somewhere, and the "enterprise" servers will likely stick around IBM. At least until the margins suck on those, too.
K-maps can't develop stateful logic?!? Inconceivable.
If TSMC isn't keeping up with Moore's Law, that's not a problem with Moore's Law. It's a problem with TSMC.
>
Waaaay towards the end of TFA, it mentions that it's GlobalFoundries who inserted finFETs into the same BEOL (wiring) as their 22nm node and called 22nm+finFET "14nm." It's buried at the end, but it's what supports the whole argument that nodes are "just marketing."
To my knowledge, the node's name was based on the DRAM half pitch. But yeah, it's not that any longer. And in defense of GlobalFoundries, finFET does literally add an extra dimension to the calculation of FET geometries.
Perfect for Windows 8 then?
I have a convertible Windows 8 laptop, and Firefox needs some work, like the rest of the OS. See, for instance, this bug.
Also, the frigging laptop keeps locking the screen upside down and I have to keep unconverting it and reconverting carefully. Totally awesome.
Your post reads like "How do they know some stars are planets anyways? What makes one sparkly thing in the sky different from all the rest? Unpossible to differentiate."
Yeah, it's basically another nonvolatile memory press release. Sounds close to phase-change memory.
The background would be that flash might not be scaling well, or might eventually stop scaling, so there are a lot of other types of nifty nonvolatile memory types that would aim to replace it. Magnetoresistive, ferroelectric, phase change, memristors, nanotubes, whatever. That's not to say that those sorts of things can't perhaps escape their niche and make create a whole new class of computing machines based on non-transistor switches, but yeah. First things first.
Yes, W500, big huge screen. Terrible screen otherwise.
The screen on my W500 sucks.
However, the MacBook Pro's screen was brighter, clearer,
The screen on my Thinkpad W500, after a few years, is TERRIBLE.
So where's the iOS version of firefox? Or firefox for the Kindle?
I think it's time for a crowdsourced patent challenge web site run by the USPTO where there would be a period of public comment for each patent about to be awarded in order to help underpaid (and I imagine under-resourced) examiners find Prior Art.
A lot fewer patents might be awarded, but ones that are would be genuinely new -- this might also save the world billions of dollars.
http://peertopatent.org/
and several million dollars later it gets sorted out by the courts
No, not really. Several million dollars later, someone capriciously wins, and then there are equally capricious rounds of appeals.
Can we please have an end to the stupid articles where someone intentionally mis-interprets the abstract or even just the title of a patent and pretends it's some simple thing that's been done for decades to try to drum up anti-patent sentiment? There seems to be one a week or so.
Unlikely. Nonetheless, anti-patent sentiment is a good thing. Far too many people assume there's some sort of fairness or justice to the whole mess, and there isn't.
it's 2012, haven't intel or amd engineers developed algorithms to do the chip design for them?
The thing that I take to heart is that even the most simple digital design task-- factoring a sum-of-products boolean equation, the thing you get from your karnaugh map, into the most optimal logic implementation-- algorithms still can't guarantee that. And that task is just one bit of non-sequential static logic. If computers can't guarantee they're better at that, why assume they're better at synthesizing a pipelined, lookahead, out-of-order watchamacallit?
What I'm talking about here is literally placing down a hundred thousand rectangles in a CAD tool
Well, when you have repetitive structures, 100,000 rectangles isn't really all that difficult.
Can anyone supply a concise explanation of the differences and how it's all done? I'm guessing we're talking about people drawing circuits on acetate or similar and then it's scaled down photo-style to produce a mask for the actual chip?
CPU code is in RTL,verilog,VHDL, whatever-- it's in HDL. Usually these days a synthesis tool or compiler will create chip layout that implements that HDL description in standard cell logic. The standard cells are latches, NAND gates, buffers, SRAM, etc. A software tool will place and route standard cells to implement the HDL in silicon, and then iterate on timing to make sure it's fast enough. Humans don't directly do the placement of standard cells, or route wires between them. In terms of photolithography, the standard cells are the silicon transistors, and the first two levels of metal.
It looks like they're making a mountain out of the fact that the standard cells were placed by hand here, and some of the more regular and important wiring was perhaps done by hand, too. You can often take your human knowledge of where the likely performance chokepoints are and place those carefully, and you can also take your human knowledge of where the wiring congestion will be, and be careful there. You're also perhaps able to wire things a bit more creatively in that you can use wrong-way metal and perhaps less gridding. And then you can still probably tell the algorithms to take care of the rest.
In either case the standard cells themselves are often handcrafted in CAD tools, but sometimes different layout software will make them, too. It's just that with large logic chips, past that point humans are often only in the physical design loop to take care of problems the tools can't solve independently-- like massaging things that come out of synthesis too slow to meet the targeted performance, or mandating certain metal levels will be dedicated to a clock mesh. Sometimes that human intervention is just permitting the tool to suck up more power by using faster standard cells. Other times it would be revisiting the architecture in HDL, but then again throwing it over to a computer to place and route. The humans are not actually moving cells around the chip in a CAD tool.
I don't do the synthesis part of the process myself, so someone can clarify or correct me. The thing I wonder about is why the chipworks guys assume hand placement necessarily takes much longer? Looking at the layout, I'd assume the biggest tradeoff is the size of the core, not time spent on placement. It's routing a gazillion non-regular wires that is hard for humans, not placement. We can still place standard cells in a core without needing years of time, provided it doesn't need to be perfectly area-efficient.