On the "true SMP type multi-threading", that would be multi-threading where the cores work on any thread, rather than assigning processes/threads to specific CPUs. This means that task1's work could occur in work units across any of the existing cores. This has a direct performance impact where task1 could run on core 1 with cache 1, then run on core 'x' with cache 'x', with the cache having most likely to be updated each time a task is run.
This is more related to how a task is run within the system than how you program your code.
I agree with your final point about faster machines eventually being needed. I see "agents" in the future that will parse your email etc for you, and act almost like a real assistant, perhaps eventually they will be a "real" assistant. But that's a while off, and for now, the CPUs are adequate. It'll be a year or two before quad cores will be "needed" for a game, not that they won't increase the experience, but they won't be needed. Much like the G-80 isn't needed to play Oblivion, but it increases the gameplay to the maximum possible.
updates? Whatever for? If you're blocking egress, you're certainly blocking incoming, and you're probably only running the MS OS with all non MS software on top of it.
How do you propose to perform your test? If others "skilled in the art" already know that there is a solution, then you are injecting hindsight into the equation, and EVERYTHING is obvious once you have hindsight.
Here's how I'd propose it, get a small group of practitioners skilled in the art, and pose the problem to them. Give them a maximum of 60m to brainstorm. If the proposed patent pops out, it's obvious. (Note, obvious ideas will probably take less than 5m to pop out, and will need a "group" of 1)
Would that work for you? There are truly patentable ideas out there, but I think I'll have to go with most that software by and large is not, and should not be, patentable. As an side, genes should not be patentable either. Software by and large takes time to develop. By the time someone has a product and ships/announces it, they have an advantage over everyone else because of the dev time it takes for them to develop it.
1) I'd buy a Core 2 today if I needed a performance part. No "fanboi" here. Note my comment was about competition and what's good for consumers.
2) The increases seen from dropping mask scale haven't been that great over the past few drops. Certainly not in the frequency bump arena. Since 65 can do 3.6 or more, I wouldn't be shocked if they can eek 4GHz out of 45nm, finally, only about 4 years late.
3) Intel's architecture has already shown problems with the FSB limitations with Woodcrest in Apple benchmarks. True SMP type multi-threading causes degraded performance, especially when heavy large-scale memory access occurs that exceeds the cache capacity. I can't imagine this will get better @ 45nm, except that the cache might grow. 16MB L2 cache anyone? 32MB? 64MB? Heck, why not just go for a GB? Who needs system memory anyway? -- that's a joke btw
Lastly, the group of people that need the best CPU on the market is rapidly shrinking. CPUs have gotten to the poitn currently where second and even third tier CPUs are good enough for most. Even the most punishing games today are GPU bound, not CPU bound. The only place that CPUs still matter is with businesses, and there power and scalability are more important. AMD still holds the crown there on both counts.
But, this is a first release, and what's important is the strengths shown. Notably, that 2 AMD 64 processors (granted, the 1207 pin versions) scale up to Intel's brand new Core 2 QX series best (itself 2 CPUs slapped together). It will be interesting when AMD releases their true quad core CPUs on 65nm in 2007. It looks like they'll be on par with Intel at worst.
A long time ago, myself and a couple of immorts on a mud considered, and actually designed, quite a bit of this system. We stopped because at the time, our system couldn't handle the additional load. Nowadays, that's no longer a problem.
Dynamic content isn't as hard to create for a MMOG as you think, it merely requires some minor attention to detail and a proper concept of story. My major issue with MMOGs is the grind, especially the EQ kind, along with the forced grouping beyond about level 30, unless you were one or two very specific classes. The greatest challenge in those games is to solo yourself to max level, as a normally "unsoloable" class. It can be done, but will slow you down to the point that the game will most likely cease to be fun.
Then there's this stupidity (IMHO) of equalizing the classes. Give me a break. For instance, a level 60 wizard should be able to kill just about anything in single combat, unless it kills him in the first blow or two. Now, what happens after that with the victims friends is a different story.... Warriors can deal damage and protect. Clerics heal wounds/keep a party alive and deal medium damage, depending upon your particular interpretation. Thieves sneak around allowing your party to surprise others, possibly take out suprised single opponents, and hopefully detect those traps. In other words, the strengths of the classes should complement each other, not be equalized. This was the basis of the original D&D.
Lastly, most MMOGs are all about leveling, and very little about content or fun. It's basically I'm (or my guild is) bigger/better/have better stuff/can kill x than you, and very little fun.
yes, but what if they've moved on to a new communications medium and that bubble is only a couple of hundred years wide? Once that band passes you, you cannot detect those emissions anymore.
Then consider that we're still discovering things like quasars, which emit incredible amounts of radiation in continuous pulses, and the detection of alien emissions makes finding a needle in all the hay ever grown look simple.
We invented radio. We discovered that part of the EM spectrum that comprises radio waves.
As for radio transmissions, they're intended for a rather small area of receivership. Move out a few million light years and with the strength diminishing as the square of distance, that signal is going to be miniscule if you can even detect it against the background radiation. (That's not to mention that someone would have to be out there to detect it, which implies faster than light travel, but let's not let physics bother us...)
Right now - we have at least a 134 light year diameter sphere of radio transimissions that theoretically could be detected, with generic noise (ie, not structured broadcasts) forming a larger sphere roughly 185 light years in diameter. That's still much smaller than the Milky Way. If we were to move away from broadcast to wired signals within 15 years, we could conceivably have a spherical band 200 light years across that would theoretically be detectable. You'd have to be within that shell to detect it, and on the scope of the cosmos, that's infinitesimally small.
Well, with billions upon billions upon billions of stars out there, even a 1 in a billion chance will result in billions of chances... so I'd hazard a guess that the odds are pretty good. Now, what are the odds that 2 sentient races will arise within the same time span and actually meet? Not so good - there's that speed of light problem we still have to solve.
Re:Context switching, aka, incompetence
on
You Call This Agile?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's a difference between fixing a system and coding, or at least coding at the level we're talking about. We're not talking about a 30m script to do something, we're talking man-years of effort generally on really large hard systems. The difference between fixing that DB and writing the DB software in the first place. To say that those are orders of magnitude difference in effort would be minimizing the differences.
That's not to say that sysadmins don't have a lot on their plate. However, would you rather bug a programmer to load paper, or a sysadmin? I'd say neither, get the help desk tech to do it, much better use of all their time.
Mine actually came from the II or III contract and was similar to a retarded 8088. They certainly weren't 486s... Matter of fact, the machines spec'd on the IV contract were so horribly spec'd and overpriced, you could buy one from the store that was twice as fast for less. (The reason why? The IV contract required a special non-standard slot for some never used item that I've forgotten now) Do remember that when this machine was bought, thick net was just waning, and thin net was "in".
I think we're going to be seeing more of this with multi-core CPUs. There's no reason to have a special physics chip when that could just be an addition to a core. Imagine a multi-core gaming CPU with a physics and graphics core built in, along with the RAM cache to go with the graphics core, for the price of a video card alone.
This would probably come out of a genesis of cheap graphics/CPU systems built for business.
Couple this with a Flash based card or other persistent memory technology which plugs into device, and you'll have uncopyable and relatively unhackable media that doesn't even need to install.
How, you ask? Boot off the game card itself. Include the entire OS since you only need a small part including drivers, which come down to about 4 companies at this point which all have unified drivers: AMD/ATI, nVidia, Creative, and Broadcom based network chips - heck, have the reader device provide audio and network connectivity, and you can eliminate 2 sources of uncertainty. Doesn't seem too hard. You could even have a small boot section that decrypts the rest of the OS. That would create a console out of your PC.
You must be remembering a different Z80 than me. We actually used Zenith computers, and I was a the lucky recipient of an old Zenith for fortunately a very short period of time. If you doubt me on that, from wiki:
Zenith Data Systems lost a lot of money as a result of the US Air Force contract Desktop IV. In order to meet the price point for the contract, ZDS made very cheap computers with motherboards which frequently were defective out of the box and required on-site service...
I had one that came out of one of those contracts, so maybe it was also the cheap parts causing problems. Who knows. All I know is that while running software the machine frequently crashed.
I had both. I've used far more calculus than statistics over the past 20 years. But what I've used most is linear algebra.
I suppose it depends upon what you do as to what you'll need. Since what I do now is radically different than what I'd thought I'd be doing when I graduated, I'd say requiring a basic set of math skills (algebra, calculus, statistics) is appropriate.
Yes, big cities have enclaves of ethnic or socio-economic groupings or both. You also have this stratification along many other lines, including education, jobs, incomes, etc, even in smaller cities. Something about like attracting like, or seeking out like, comes to mind.
In short, I'm probably not your target. I lived overseas in multiple countries and immigrated with my folks. I worked for a year in the country of my birth as an adult and I've traveled extensively (in mostly western countries).
Given all that and with your points, I've noticed that many tourists like things the way they're used to them, which fall into group #2. These folks are inflexible, spoiled, and generally have a miserable time when in "lower class" accomodations or have to deal with service they think is sub-par. They do not understand the phrase "when in Rome, do as the Romans do".
In some cases, people really are different. This is true even within a single country. The farmers/hunters/live off the land folks (we do have them here) have little in common with the large urban city folk, who sometimes have little in common with the suburban sprawl inhabitants.
Regarding american politics and the 2 parties, this is a self-perpetuating trap that's occurred. To get anything done, independents must align themselves with 1 of the 2 major parties, and those national parties tend to take in everyone they can to keep themselves in power. It's almost impossible not to. What's interesting is that the Republicans may have created a large enough rift within their party that a third party may form.
XP is a guaranteed nightmare down the road for maintenance....
Precisely why?
I suppose someone was going to ask that. For anything other than small projects, XP generates generally unmaintainable code unless it's coupled with strict architectural design guidelines. Something not done in those 'XP' projects I've witnessed. Indeed, the XP advocates generally reject anything having to do with formal design architectures. Ergo, true XP as defined by the advocates generates unmaintainable code as projects scale. Hell, all large projects generate unmaintainable code unless architectural guidelines and designs are adhered to.
If you require meetings, the team lead should summarize, and then call on anyone needing to supply deeper info, otherwise a small open session for questions, and off to work you go.
Hm, sort of like an XP meeting then. Hm.
and they never happen like that in my experience. Matter of fact, my experience jibes with that of everyone I know that's tried the XP bandwagon.
Note that I don't dismiss XP as inherently bad. It does support some good points. But as a design/project/management philosophy for large projects that have extended maintenance windows with code and requirements changes, XP will lead you quickly down the never-ending chasing your tail code-breakage nightmare. At least for any project I've been associated with. XP won't make good coders out of bad coders, or allow bad or moderate coders to generate "good" projects, despite what they want you to believe.
I got to use the Bose set on a long flight once. They were great, cancelled out the stewardesses just fine. I could still hear some of the engine noise, but it went from the standard can't ignore level that interfered with listening to music at moderate levels to almost non-existent. I've been thinking about getting a set for work, but just haven't gotten around to it yet.
The ear-canal phones are another nice solution, except the pressure on the inside of the ear annoys me after a while.
Slashdot Mirror
On the "true SMP type multi-threading", that would be multi-threading where the cores work on any thread, rather than assigning processes/threads to specific CPUs. This means that task1's work could occur in work units across any of the existing cores. This has a direct performance impact where task1 could run on core 1 with cache 1, then run on core 'x' with cache 'x', with the cache having most likely to be updated each time a task is run.
This is more related to how a task is run within the system than how you program your code.
I agree with your final point about faster machines eventually being needed. I see "agents" in the future that will parse your email etc for you, and act almost like a real assistant, perhaps eventually they will be a "real" assistant. But that's a while off, and for now, the CPUs are adequate. It'll be a year or two before quad cores will be "needed" for a game, not that they won't increase the experience, but they won't be needed. Much like the G-80 isn't needed to play Oblivion, but it increases the gameplay to the maximum possible.
updates? Whatever for? If you're blocking egress, you're certainly blocking incoming, and you're probably only running the MS OS with all non MS software on top of it.
Here's how I'd propose it, get a small group of practitioners skilled in the art, and pose the problem to them. Give them a maximum of 60m to brainstorm. If the proposed patent pops out, it's obvious. (Note, obvious ideas will probably take less than 5m to pop out, and will need a "group" of 1)
Would that work for you? There are truly patentable ideas out there, but I think I'll have to go with most that software by and large is not, and should not be, patentable. As an side, genes should not be patentable either. Software by and large takes time to develop. By the time someone has a product and ships/announces it, they have an advantage over everyone else because of the dev time it takes for them to develop it.
Pentium 4
Pentium D
Pentium M
You're right - crap is not good for consumers!
1) I'd buy a Core 2 today if I needed a performance part. No "fanboi" here. Note my comment was about competition and what's good for consumers.
2) The increases seen from dropping mask scale haven't been that great over the past few drops. Certainly not in the frequency bump arena. Since 65 can do 3.6 or more, I wouldn't be shocked if they can eek 4GHz out of 45nm, finally, only about 4 years late.
3) Intel's architecture has already shown problems with the FSB limitations with Woodcrest in Apple benchmarks. True SMP type multi-threading causes degraded performance, especially when heavy large-scale memory access occurs that exceeds the cache capacity. I can't imagine this will get better @ 45nm, except that the cache might grow. 16MB L2 cache anyone? 32MB? 64MB? Heck, why not just go for a GB? Who needs system memory anyway? -- that's a joke btw
Lastly, the group of people that need the best CPU on the market is rapidly shrinking. CPUs have gotten to the poitn currently where second and even third tier CPUs are good enough for most. Even the most punishing games today are GPU bound, not CPU bound. The only place that CPUs still matter is with businesses, and there power and scalability are more important. AMD still holds the crown there on both counts.
yep, it's a power hog. 400W @ idle? Youch!
But, this is a first release, and what's important is the strengths shown. Notably, that 2 AMD 64 processors (granted, the 1207 pin versions) scale up to Intel's brand new Core 2 QX series best (itself 2 CPUs slapped together). It will be interesting when AMD releases their true quad core CPUs on 65nm in 2007. It looks like they'll be on par with Intel at worst.
This is only good news for us consumers!
I hear tell that the pixel artists are so hard to find that that's causing the delay....
A long time ago, myself and a couple of immorts on a mud considered, and actually designed, quite a bit of this system. We stopped because at the time, our system couldn't handle the additional load. Nowadays, that's no longer a problem.
Dynamic content isn't as hard to create for a MMOG as you think, it merely requires some minor attention to detail and a proper concept of story. My major issue with MMOGs is the grind, especially the EQ kind, along with the forced grouping beyond about level 30, unless you were one or two very specific classes. The greatest challenge in those games is to solo yourself to max level, as a normally "unsoloable" class. It can be done, but will slow you down to the point that the game will most likely cease to be fun.
Then there's this stupidity (IMHO) of equalizing the classes. Give me a break. For instance, a level 60 wizard should be able to kill just about anything in single combat, unless it kills him in the first blow or two. Now, what happens after that with the victims friends is a different story.... Warriors can deal damage and protect. Clerics heal wounds/keep a party alive and deal medium damage, depending upon your particular interpretation. Thieves sneak around allowing your party to surprise others, possibly take out suprised single opponents, and hopefully detect those traps. In other words, the strengths of the classes should complement each other, not be equalized. This was the basis of the original D&D.
Lastly, most MMOGs are all about leveling, and very little about content or fun. It's basically I'm (or my guild is) bigger/better/have better stuff/can kill x than you, and very little fun.
yes, but what if they've moved on to a new communications medium and that bubble is only a couple of hundred years wide? Once that band passes you, you cannot detect those emissions anymore.
Then consider that we're still discovering things like quasars, which emit incredible amounts of radiation in continuous pulses, and the detection of alien emissions makes finding a needle in all the hay ever grown look simple.
We invented radio. We discovered that part of the EM spectrum that comprises radio waves.
As for radio transmissions, they're intended for a rather small area of receivership. Move out a few million light years and with the strength diminishing as the square of distance, that signal is going to be miniscule if you can even detect it against the background radiation. (That's not to mention that someone would have to be out there to detect it, which implies faster than light travel, but let's not let physics bother us...)
Right now - we have at least a 134 light year diameter sphere of radio transimissions that theoretically could be detected, with generic noise (ie, not structured broadcasts) forming a larger sphere roughly 185 light years in diameter. That's still much smaller than the Milky Way. If we were to move away from broadcast to wired signals within 15 years, we could conceivably have a spherical band 200 light years across that would theoretically be detectable. You'd have to be within that shell to detect it, and on the scope of the cosmos, that's infinitesimally small.
Well, with billions upon billions upon billions of stars out there, even a 1 in a billion chance will result in billions of chances... so I'd hazard a guess that the odds are pretty good. Now, what are the odds that 2 sentient races will arise within the same time span and actually meet? Not so good - there's that speed of light problem we still have to solve.
There's a difference between fixing a system and coding, or at least coding at the level we're talking about. We're not talking about a 30m script to do something, we're talking man-years of effort generally on really large hard systems. The difference between fixing that DB and writing the DB software in the first place. To say that those are orders of magnitude difference in effort would be minimizing the differences.
That's not to say that sysadmins don't have a lot on their plate. However, would you rather bug a programmer to load paper, or a sysadmin? I'd say neither, get the help desk tech to do it, much better use of all their time.
OK, so I had to go back and do some research (I'll be banned for sure from the geek club now!)
They were Z-100 machines, from Zenith. Not Z80s (my mistake) and they were terrible. The Desktop IV contract machines were even worse.
Mine actually came from the II or III contract and was similar to a retarded 8088. They certainly weren't 486s... Matter of fact, the machines spec'd on the IV contract were so horribly spec'd and overpriced, you could buy one from the store that was twice as fast for less. (The reason why? The IV contract required a special non-standard slot for some never used item that I've forgotten now) Do remember that when this machine was bought, thick net was just waning, and thin net was "in".
I think we're going to be seeing more of this with multi-core CPUs. There's no reason to have a special physics chip when that could just be an addition to a core. Imagine a multi-core gaming CPU with a physics and graphics core built in, along with the RAM cache to go with the graphics core, for the price of a video card alone.
This would probably come out of a genesis of cheap graphics/CPU systems built for business.
Couple this with a Flash based card or other persistent memory technology which plugs into device, and you'll have uncopyable and relatively unhackable media that doesn't even need to install.
How, you ask? Boot off the game card itself. Include the entire OS since you only need a small part including drivers, which come down to about 4 companies at this point which all have unified drivers: AMD/ATI, nVidia, Creative, and Broadcom based network chips - heck, have the reader device provide audio and network connectivity, and you can eliminate 2 sources of uncertainty. Doesn't seem too hard. You could even have a small boot section that decrypts the rest of the OS. That would create a console out of your PC.
I had one that came out of one of those contracts, so maybe it was also the cheap parts causing problems. Who knows. All I know is that while running software the machine frequently crashed.
Egads!!! The Z80 processor. Nightmares ensue! What a POS that was. It was "almost" compatible. The memories....
Wow, next you'll dredge up thoughts of running off a cassette, or having to switch 360K floppies in a TRS-80 while playing Wizardry or something.
You have that wrong. It's when will IE's capabilities (automation and otherwise) catch up with FireFox.
I had both. I've used far more calculus than statistics over the past 20 years. But what I've used most is linear algebra.
I suppose it depends upon what you do as to what you'll need. Since what I do now is radically different than what I'd thought I'd be doing when I graduated, I'd say requiring a basic set of math skills (algebra, calculus, statistics) is appropriate.
Yes, big cities have enclaves of ethnic or socio-economic groupings or both. You also have this stratification along many other lines, including education, jobs, incomes, etc, even in smaller cities. Something about like attracting like, or seeking out like, comes to mind.
Isn't that pretty much what the situation is now? I don't recall Darwin being closed, last time I checked.
In short, I'm probably not your target. I lived overseas in multiple countries and immigrated with my folks. I worked for a year in the country of my birth as an adult and I've traveled extensively (in mostly western countries).
Given all that and with your points, I've noticed that many tourists like things the way they're used to them, which fall into group #2. These folks are inflexible, spoiled, and generally have a miserable time when in "lower class" accomodations or have to deal with service they think is sub-par. They do not understand the phrase "when in Rome, do as the Romans do".
In some cases, people really are different. This is true even within a single country. The farmers/hunters/live off the land folks (we do have them here) have little in common with the large urban city folk, who sometimes have little in common with the suburban sprawl inhabitants.
Regarding american politics and the 2 parties, this is a self-perpetuating trap that's occurred. To get anything done, independents must align themselves with 1 of the 2 major parties, and those national parties tend to take in everyone they can to keep themselves in power. It's almost impossible not to. What's interesting is that the Republicans may have created a large enough rift within their party that a third party may form.
I suppose someone was going to ask that. For anything other than small projects, XP generates generally unmaintainable code unless it's coupled with strict architectural design guidelines. Something not done in those 'XP' projects I've witnessed. Indeed, the XP advocates generally reject anything having to do with formal design architectures. Ergo, true XP as defined by the advocates generates unmaintainable code as projects scale. Hell, all large projects generate unmaintainable code unless architectural guidelines and designs are adhered to.
and they never happen like that in my experience. Matter of fact, my experience jibes with that of everyone I know that's tried the XP bandwagon.
Note that I don't dismiss XP as inherently bad. It does support some good points. But as a design/project/management philosophy for large projects that have extended maintenance windows with code and requirements changes, XP will lead you quickly down the never-ending chasing your tail code-breakage nightmare. At least for any project I've been associated with. XP won't make good coders out of bad coders, or allow bad or moderate coders to generate "good" projects, despite what they want you to believe.
But if everybody did that...
I got to use the Bose set on a long flight once. They were great, cancelled out the stewardesses just fine. I could still hear some of the engine noise, but it went from the standard can't ignore level that interfered with listening to music at moderate levels to almost non-existent. I've been thinking about getting a set for work, but just haven't gotten around to it yet.
The ear-canal phones are another nice solution, except the pressure on the inside of the ear annoys me after a while.