I don't even make it onto their scoring chart, and yet somehow I doubt you'd find anyone who knows me that doesn't think I'm a geek.
The problem with being "geeky" is that geekiness involves specialization, and let's face it, I don't know anyone who specializes in the Infoworld direction.
I think the reason I'm tolerating Windows 7 on my new work laptop as well as I am (and XP before it) is that I was able to set them both to a "classic" theme that looks a lot like Win95's. First thing I did with XP and first thing I did with 7 was to shut off all the distracting glitz.
Oh, and when I was in college, every one from the most stoned out art major to the nerdiest computer science geek all hung out on our campus UNIX system, using old school "dmail" and UNIX "talk". Everyone knew how to work Kermit, everyone knew how to log in to the serial network, everyone knew how to do basic stuff in the shell. And then there were the kids on IRC and MUDs.
Someone else said "They'll only do it for pay." I disagree. They'll do it for play too.
Or was it the fact that WordPerfect was written entirely in assembly language, and stubbornly refused to embrace Windows for far too long? Even once they moved to Windows, you could tell it was window-dressing on a DOS program. (WP6 needs its own printer drivers under Windows? WTF? That's what GDI was invented for.) A similar fate befell Lotus 1-2-3.
People went to Windows for many reasons. WYSIWYG, cut/paste between applications, multitasking. But I never thought of Win16 apps as "pretty." It really fit the category of "Ugly, but does more."
Where I work, we had a custom in-house electronic mail system and electronic access to many "transactions" (scheduling time off, reading the corporate news, filing expenses) that all ran over TN3270. Ugly, ugly, UGLY as sin. But everyone from secretaries to engineers to HR was able to be productive with it. You spent a couple days learning how to use it, and then you used it. Simple enough.
Some days, I wish I could get that system back. There are some "transactions" (the time-off system, in particular) that got replaced some truly horrid web interface. But even so, we all learned how to make that work too, and then STFU and GBTW.
It all depends on your domain. When working in the embedded space, you often have to write fragments of assembly code, or write a truly bare bones linked list if you need to control where the cycles and/or memory are going.
Or sometimes you just have unique needs: For example, there's some code I've written for a DSP that needs to run both on the real thing, and a software simulation of the design (at the RTL level). The latter runs slooooow, on the order of 10s to 100s of cycles a second. So, blowing a million cycles on global constructors before reaching main might not phase me in the least on the real silicon, passing in under a millisecond. But in simulation, that expands to hours and hours and hours. (Had that happen to me once, declaring a global array of what I *thought* was a POD type, but it had a non-trivial constructor.) Sometimes, you just need the control offered by explicitly-written code.
In more general programming, though, you're right--let the libraries and such handle it. In C++, use STL's list<>, vector<> and map<> for goodness sake!
My job duties range from architecting caches and DSP structures, to coming up with clever ways to break systems, to automatically generating performance characterization suites, to analyzing the bulk quantities of data that result from them.
To do all these things, I write a fair bit of software to achieve these goals. But, in the end the software is a tool to reach some other end. It isn't an end in and of itself.
Therefore, while I program things (and program them well, IMHO), I don't consider myself a "programmer." My primary work output isn't programs. It's architectural decisions, performance analysis, etc. Programs are just a tool I use to get there. The fact that I fashioned my own tools just means I'm more likely to achieve my goals than someone who can't make their own tools when none exist that will give them the answer they need.
Now, if the primary output of my job was software, where others provided the requirements inputs, and I produced software to meet those requirements for someone else's consumption, then I might consider calling myself a programmer. But honestly, I have to believe a large quantity of software gets written to further some other immediate need, not as an end in and of itself.
Hmmm.... then maybe I'd be OK. I solve complex technical problems at work almost daily, sometimes mathematic, but most often logistical, or what you might call "heavily derived", where you have to pull details from several disciplines to make sense of everything. Maybe I'd be OK. Hmmm....
For this reason, I've thought about taking the PE and registering. (I live in Texas.) But, it's been 15 years since I graduated with my BSEE, so it'd take some serious studying to refresh myself on all the calculus and such that I don't use every day. (I still remember all my Calc I pretty well. Calc II, Calc III, DiffEq, Advanced Statistics... not so much.)
My business cards have never said "engineer" either. Where I work, the rule seems to be "Take whatever title you would have put engineer after, and just omit 'engineer'." So, back when I was considered a DSP software applications engineer, my business card simply said: "DSP Software Applications". These days, I get to use the title "Architect," which doesn't have the legal baggage. Yay me.
My problem with tabs vs. spaces is that too many people change the meaning of tab to match their preferred indentation amount, rather than leaving tabs at 8 spaces, and letting their editor opportunistically convert spaces to tabs. So, when I open a file, the formatting might be completely gonzo if I got it from someone who set their tab stops to 3, for example, especially if it's internixed with code that uses spaces.
The other problem is that even when everyone agrees on where the tab stops are, tabs and spaces look identical by default in most editors. And if you set your editor to provide a visual indication of tabs, it's no longer whitespace, now is it?
If only we could have left tab damage behind in USENET cascades....
I take it you've never built hardware at the "design circuit boards and get them assembled" level. It's capital intensive. For my simple projects, the difference in cost per board was about 5-10x between a run of 5 and a run of 500. Of course they're selling these, because if they sell enough, they're cheaper for everyone. If everyone had to build one from scratch, nobody would, because they'd cost about $1000 more. Looks like it's a 6 layer board. I don't think that's something you can etch in your bathroom sink with a copper clad board from your local Fry's.
And they're truly open source. It's all GPLv3 or CC BY-SA 3.0. They provide the VHDL, the board design files (and the resulting Gerbers), everything. And according to their FAQ, they're even working on a free toolchain to compile the FPGA code.
The problem is that it is coming to a choice: medical care for the poor or USGS. Housing for the poor or USGS. Investigation into the mating habits of obscure owls or USGS.
And I'd argue that (a) the facts (what time zone a given location was in on any given date) are a matter of public record, and (b) the presentation in a dead-tree atlas is a completely different presentation than an electronic database that's structured to make localtime() work for a given location for any date in the UNIX epoch (which is presumably why you need historicaltimezone data).
Well, for earthquakes near major infrastructure like, say, nuclear reactor, they could initiate a reactor shutdown before the earthquake starts. In places like California with the double-decker freeways, you may be able to get motorists at least off the bridges onto more solid land. You could have trains come to a halt, too. And, you could get emergency personnel paged and at the ready.
The reason I stuck with Firefox is that I kinda liked only upgrading my web browser, say, once every year or two. I don't really feel a need to stay on the knife's edge. Now, with their turbo update schedule and rapid version deprecation, coupled with add-on version checking issues, I have to deal with all that upgrade heartburn to something that otherwise seems to work.
I'd love to just get bug fixes occasionally, you know? For example, when I right-click and choose "open in tab", about 1/3rd the time it seems to open a previously visited link instead of the one I selected. This might be a Linux 64-bit bug only, but it's a bug. I started seeing it in 6.0, but 6.0.2 hasn't fixed it. Does 7? Or does 7 break something else?
A friend of mine who's a Mac user ran back to Safari because she was tired of the "Update Firefox!" dialogs. Safari works well enough for her. She doesn't need the constant pestering to close her eleventy billion open pages and reboot her browser, only to discover that all her GUI controls moved around, things work strangely differently, and there isn't any real measurable improvement so far as she can tell. I feel her pain.
No less than Donald Knuth complained about the "always improving system." A system that's continuously improving is unusable, because it's unstable. Go look up his interviews on "webofstories". In one interview segment, he recounts how he was glad that the operating system research group lost their funding, and as a result the department's computers became dramatically more usable because they stopped improving, and therefore were stable.
That's not to say that improvements are bad. Lack of any stability is bad.
It is more energy efficient, especially if you can fully power off in idle and avoid wasting energy on transistor leakage.
I'm just saying that the short term power consumption (measured in joules/second, aka. Watts), will be higher even if the total energy usage (total joules) is lower. If that "short term" is measured in 10s of seconds, then things still get hot enough to roast your chestnuts, so to speak.
Some math: Suppose the CPU has to do a total of N joules of work(say, computing checksums and compressing files) to complete the backup. It'll either do it in a bunch of short bursts as data arrives, or it could do it in one solid chunk if the data arrives fast enough. With a slow hard drive, suppose that backup takes 1000 seconds, and that with my shiny new SSD, it takes only 100 seconds. The CPU power consumption for the backup is 10x for the SSD (N/100 versus N/1000), but for 1/10th as long.
The extra CPU efficiency comes from is from saving leakage. Suppose the CPU leaks M joules per second when on, and nothing when off. You'll save M*900 joules CPU leakage using the SSD. Still, during the backup, the CPU will dissipate a nut-baking (N/100 + M) Watts for the SSD backup, versus the comparatively cooler (N/1000 + M) Watts for the HDD backup.
(Note, I'm not including the energy used by the SSD or the HDD. I'm only considering the CPU here.)
Don't confuse "power" with "energy". Power is energy consumed divided by the amount of time required to consume it. Power is in watts (joules/second), whereas energy is in straight joules. (Or other units that cancel out the time factor, such as kWh.)
For example, I've noticed since I installed an SSD in my laptop that my automated backups run way more efficiently. Previously, with an HDD, the whole machine would slow to a crawl, and the computer spent most of its time waiting for disk seeks. Now, the computer keeps chugging along and the backup completes quickly and quietly in the background.
This probably consumes less overall energy, thereby prolonging battery life. However, because the backups run so fast, the CPU now gets very, very warm during backups (70+ Celsius), because it's actually consuming more power during the backup. Before the SSD, the CPU would barely heat at all, since it spent all that time idling waiting for the HDD.
The net result? My laptop is more likely to burn my lap now than before, at least during backups, even though it is probably using less overall energy and providing a greater overall battery life. So, if this FeTRAM is even faster than the flash in my SSD, it could make the CPU's peak power consumption even worse, despite the whole system being more energy efficient overall.
Don't you think those of us working on these chips haven't thought of that? This problem was recognized back in the 1940s, for goodness sake. Quote:
Ideally one would desire an indefinitely large memory capacity such that any particular . . . word would be immediately available. . . . We are . . . forced to recognize the possibility of constructing a hierarchy of memories, each of which has greater capacity than the preceding but which is less quickly accessible.
--A. W. Burks, H. H. Goldstine, and J. von Neumann
Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument (1946)
There's a limit to how fast even the processor's own registers can go, such that some designs include "local register files" to individual ALUs, because the main processor registers are too slow.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. It seems like the value of lower latency would have a 1/x type of distribution, so the difference in relative value of connection A with latency 1/x vs. connection B with latency 1/(x - y) (where x > y, obviously) would be much larger for smaller x. So, if you're talking about a 6ms advantage relative to a base latency of, say 20ms-30ms, it's a much bigger deal than a 6ms advantage relative to a base latency of 64ms.
Sure, these schemes are playing on arbitrage opportunities, but the fact of the matter is that someone in New York that shaved his latency from 64ms to 58ms to London still has a pretty big disadvantage compared to someone already in London that has a latency that's probably a third of that or less.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even make it onto their scoring chart, and yet somehow I doubt you'd find anyone who knows me that doesn't think I'm a geek.
The problem with being "geeky" is that geekiness involves specialization, and let's face it, I don't know anyone who specializes in the Infoworld direction.
I think the reason I'm tolerating Windows 7 on my new work laptop as well as I am (and XP before it) is that I was able to set them both to a "classic" theme that looks a lot like Win95's. First thing I did with XP and first thing I did with 7 was to shut off all the distracting glitz.
Oh, and when I was in college, every one from the most stoned out art major to the nerdiest computer science geek all hung out on our campus UNIX system, using old school "dmail" and UNIX "talk". Everyone knew how to work Kermit, everyone knew how to log in to the serial network, everyone knew how to do basic stuff in the shell. And then there were the kids on IRC and MUDs.
Someone else said "They'll only do it for pay." I disagree. They'll do it for play too.
Ever try to make an international phone call on a phone card in the 80s?
Or was it the fact that WordPerfect was written entirely in assembly language, and stubbornly refused to embrace Windows for far too long? Even once they moved to Windows, you could tell it was window-dressing on a DOS program. (WP6 needs its own printer drivers under Windows? WTF? That's what GDI was invented for.) A similar fate befell Lotus 1-2-3.
People went to Windows for many reasons. WYSIWYG, cut/paste between applications, multitasking. But I never thought of Win16 apps as "pretty." It really fit the category of "Ugly, but does more."
Amen.
Where I work, we had a custom in-house electronic mail system and electronic access to many "transactions" (scheduling time off, reading the corporate news, filing expenses) that all ran over TN3270. Ugly, ugly, UGLY as sin. But everyone from secretaries to engineers to HR was able to be productive with it. You spent a couple days learning how to use it, and then you used it. Simple enough.
Some days, I wish I could get that system back. There are some "transactions" (the time-off system, in particular) that got replaced some truly horrid web interface. But even so, we all learned how to make that work too, and then STFU and GBTW.
That explains why I saw Firefox 11 yesterday, then.
It all depends on your domain. When working in the embedded space, you often have to write fragments of assembly code, or write a truly bare bones linked list if you need to control where the cycles and/or memory are going.
Or sometimes you just have unique needs: For example, there's some code I've written for a DSP that needs to run both on the real thing, and a software simulation of the design (at the RTL level). The latter runs slooooow, on the order of 10s to 100s of cycles a second. So, blowing a million cycles on global constructors before reaching main might not phase me in the least on the real silicon, passing in under a millisecond. But in simulation, that expands to hours and hours and hours. (Had that happen to me once, declaring a global array of what I *thought* was a POD type, but it had a non-trivial constructor.) Sometimes, you just need the control offered by explicitly-written code.
In more general programming, though, you're right--let the libraries and such handle it. In C++, use STL's list<>, vector<> and map<> for goodness sake!
My job duties range from architecting caches and DSP structures, to coming up with clever ways to break systems, to automatically generating performance characterization suites, to analyzing the bulk quantities of data that result from them.
To do all these things, I write a fair bit of software to achieve these goals. But, in the end the software is a tool to reach some other end. It isn't an end in and of itself.
Therefore, while I program things (and program them well, IMHO), I don't consider myself a "programmer." My primary work output isn't programs. It's architectural decisions, performance analysis, etc. Programs are just a tool I use to get there. The fact that I fashioned my own tools just means I'm more likely to achieve my goals than someone who can't make their own tools when none exist that will give them the answer they need.
Now, if the primary output of my job was software, where others provided the requirements inputs, and I produced software to meet those requirements for someone else's consumption, then I might consider calling myself a programmer. But honestly, I have to believe a large quantity of software gets written to further some other immediate need, not as an end in and of itself.
Hmmm.... then maybe I'd be OK. I solve complex technical problems at work almost daily, sometimes mathematic, but most often logistical, or what you might call "heavily derived", where you have to pull details from several disciplines to make sense of everything. Maybe I'd be OK. Hmmm....
For this reason, I've thought about taking the PE and registering. (I live in Texas.) But, it's been 15 years since I graduated with my BSEE, so it'd take some serious studying to refresh myself on all the calculus and such that I don't use every day. (I still remember all my Calc I pretty well. Calc II, Calc III, DiffEq, Advanced Statistics... not so much.)
My business cards have never said "engineer" either. Where I work, the rule seems to be "Take whatever title you would have put engineer after, and just omit 'engineer'." So, back when I was considered a DSP software applications engineer, my business card simply said: "DSP Software Applications". These days, I get to use the title "Architect," which doesn't have the legal baggage. Yay me.
All depends on the caliber of the comments, too. Comments like this:
i++; // add one to i
are just inane. It's as if the programmer worries that they won't understand the base language itself. Comments like this, though:
i++; // avoid fencepost error: step over separator
can be worth their weight in gold when diagnosing weird problems.
My problem with tabs vs. spaces is that too many people change the meaning of tab to match their preferred indentation amount, rather than leaving tabs at 8 spaces, and letting their editor opportunistically convert spaces to tabs. So, when I open a file, the formatting might be completely gonzo if I got it from someone who set their tab stops to 3, for example, especially if it's internixed with code that uses spaces.
The other problem is that even when everyone agrees on where the tab stops are, tabs and spaces look identical by default in most editors. And if you set your editor to provide a visual indication of tabs, it's no longer whitespace, now is it?
If only we could have left tab damage behind in USENET cascades....
I take it you've never built hardware at the "design circuit boards and get them assembled" level. It's capital intensive. For my simple projects, the difference in cost per board was about 5-10x between a run of 5 and a run of 500. Of course they're selling these, because if they sell enough, they're cheaper for everyone. If everyone had to build one from scratch, nobody would, because they'd cost about $1000 more. Looks like it's a 6 layer board. I don't think that's something you can etch in your bathroom sink with a copper clad board from your local Fry's.
And they're truly open source. It's all GPLv3 or CC BY-SA 3.0. They provide the VHDL, the board design files (and the resulting Gerbers), everything. And according to their FAQ, they're even working on a free toolchain to compile the FPGA code.
You forgot communications satellites, supersonic jets, atomic and nuclear bombs....
Congratulations, you're next in line to get a new sarcasm detector.
Is there an award for best example of false dichotomy?
And I'd argue that (a) the facts (what time zone a given location was in on any given date) are a matter of public record, and (b) the presentation in a dead-tree atlas is a completely different presentation than an electronic database that's structured to make localtime() work for a given location for any date in the UNIX epoch (which is presumably why you need historicaltimezone data).
Good to see those extra electrons aren't getting under your tinfoil hat....
Well, for earthquakes near major infrastructure like, say, nuclear reactor, they could initiate a reactor shutdown before the earthquake starts. In places like California with the double-decker freeways, you may be able to get motorists at least off the bridges onto more solid land. You could have trains come to a halt, too. And, you could get emergency personnel paged and at the ready.
The reason I stuck with Firefox is that I kinda liked only upgrading my web browser, say, once every year or two. I don't really feel a need to stay on the knife's edge. Now, with their turbo update schedule and rapid version deprecation, coupled with add-on version checking issues, I have to deal with all that upgrade heartburn to something that otherwise seems to work.
I'd love to just get bug fixes occasionally, you know? For example, when I right-click and choose "open in tab", about 1/3rd the time it seems to open a previously visited link instead of the one I selected. This might be a Linux 64-bit bug only, but it's a bug. I started seeing it in 6.0, but 6.0.2 hasn't fixed it. Does 7? Or does 7 break something else?
A friend of mine who's a Mac user ran back to Safari because she was tired of the "Update Firefox!" dialogs. Safari works well enough for her. She doesn't need the constant pestering to close her eleventy billion open pages and reboot her browser, only to discover that all her GUI controls moved around, things work strangely differently, and there isn't any real measurable improvement so far as she can tell. I feel her pain.
No less than Donald Knuth complained about the "always improving system." A system that's continuously improving is unusable, because it's unstable. Go look up his interviews on "webofstories". In one interview segment, he recounts how he was glad that the operating system research group lost their funding, and as a result the department's computers became dramatically more usable because they stopped improving, and therefore were stable.
That's not to say that improvements are bad. Lack of any stability is bad.
It is more energy efficient, especially if you can fully power off in idle and avoid wasting energy on transistor leakage.
I'm just saying that the short term power consumption (measured in joules/second, aka. Watts), will be higher even if the total energy usage (total joules) is lower. If that "short term" is measured in 10s of seconds, then things still get hot enough to roast your chestnuts, so to speak.
Some math: Suppose the CPU has to do a total of N joules of work(say, computing checksums and compressing files) to complete the backup. It'll either do it in a bunch of short bursts as data arrives, or it could do it in one solid chunk if the data arrives fast enough. With a slow hard drive, suppose that backup takes 1000 seconds, and that with my shiny new SSD, it takes only 100 seconds. The CPU power consumption for the backup is 10x for the SSD (N/100 versus N/1000), but for 1/10th as long.
The extra CPU efficiency comes from is from saving leakage. Suppose the CPU leaks M joules per second when on, and nothing when off. You'll save M*900 joules CPU leakage using the SSD. Still, during the backup, the CPU will dissipate a nut-baking (N/100 + M) Watts for the SSD backup, versus the comparatively cooler (N/1000 + M) Watts for the HDD backup.
(Note, I'm not including the energy used by the SSD or the HDD. I'm only considering the CPU here.)
Don't confuse "power" with "energy". Power is energy consumed divided by the amount of time required to consume it. Power is in watts (joules/second), whereas energy is in straight joules. (Or other units that cancel out the time factor, such as kWh.)
For example, I've noticed since I installed an SSD in my laptop that my automated backups run way more efficiently. Previously, with an HDD, the whole machine would slow to a crawl, and the computer spent most of its time waiting for disk seeks. Now, the computer keeps chugging along and the backup completes quickly and quietly in the background.
This probably consumes less overall energy, thereby prolonging battery life. However, because the backups run so fast, the CPU now gets very, very warm during backups (70+ Celsius), because it's actually consuming more power during the backup. Before the SSD, the CPU would barely heat at all, since it spent all that time idling waiting for the HDD.
The net result? My laptop is more likely to burn my lap now than before, at least during backups, even though it is probably using less overall energy and providing a greater overall battery life. So, if this FeTRAM is even faster than the flash in my SSD, it could make the CPU's peak power consumption even worse, despite the whole system being more energy efficient overall.
Don't you think those of us working on these chips haven't thought of that? This problem was recognized back in the 1940s , for goodness sake. Quote:
There's a limit to how fast even the processor's own registers can go, such that some designs include "local register files" to individual ALUs, because the main processor registers are too slow.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. It seems like the value of lower latency would have a 1/x type of distribution, so the difference in relative value of connection A with latency 1/x vs. connection B with latency 1/(x - y) (where x > y, obviously) would be much larger for smaller x. So, if you're talking about a 6ms advantage relative to a base latency of, say 20ms-30ms, it's a much bigger deal than a 6ms advantage relative to a base latency of 64ms.
Sure, these schemes are playing on arbitrage opportunities, but the fact of the matter is that someone in New York that shaved his latency from 64ms to 58ms to London still has a pretty big disadvantage compared to someone already in London that has a latency that's probably a third of that or less.