Well, the problem with law and what created legalese, is that you need to be painstakingly precise in defaining _exactly_ what is allowed and what isn't. Because otherwise someone _will_ use any inexactity to their own end, to shaft someone else. Natural language is vague, and lots of things that look clear when said or written in a blog, leave loopholes that you could drive a bus through.
That's really why legalese evolved, and why contracts and laws are so verbose and use funny jargon.
E.g., let's say I aggree to sell you a "Wii, original box" for your money. What if I only send you the cardboard box, without a Wii in it. There actually was an auction on ebay doing exactly that, albeit with a PS2 back when it was launched and there were massive shortages. Ok, so let's clarify that a bit as "Wii in its original packaging". Does it say it has to be a working Wii? It doesn't. Ok, let's clarify that too. Does it say in how much time I have to send it to you? I don't think so. So if you don't get it until 2018, hey, I still didn't break my word. So let's clarify that one too. Did I say I was going to include a wiimote and the cables and everything? Well, nope. If I'm an arsehole, I might send it to you without anything except the box, just so you pay more buying everything that's missing separately. Did we stipulate any penalties for breaking that contract? No? Well, then I might break it anyway, and what are you going to do about it? Did I say where it would be delivered? I'm delivering it to the top of Mt Everest then. Feel free to drop by and get it from there, any time you wish. Etc.
As a private person you don't actually have to worry about most of that, because someone made some laws against that. But that means, essentially: someone else wrote a ton of legalese, so you don't have to. But it's there.
But companies don't get that break, and neither do courts and lawmakers. There you really have to define _everything_ in painstaking detail.
If you just say "thou shalt not steal", you'll get people arguing that they only borrowed it without your knowledge. Or conversely, what happens if I lent you a book and you forgot to bring it back in time? Can I claim that you're a thief and throw you in jail? So you end up having to write many pages as to exactly what is a theft, what isn't, and what steps to take to distinguish between them.
There you go. For vague everyday use you have a very simple concept: "thou shalt not steal." It doesn't get any clearer. But for a law it doesn't even _start_ to be enough.
1. if it's something that one or more humans must do, you can't patent it. (I.e., no patenting "you show the ticket to the doorman".)
2. if the same process could realistically be done by a finite and small number of humans, and your programs/modules/robots/whatever just automate a human's role there, you can't patent it. (I.e., no patenting "you input your ticket's number to the program.")
3. If a nearly identical process -- i.e., serves the same practical purpose and the essential steps are the same, or minor variations of the same step -- is already in use with humans or in any other form or medium, you can't slap a "in software" or "with computers" on it and patent the same bloody thing _again_.
The above, btw, comes from someone who actually likes patents as a general idea. I'm all for rewarding people who research new stuff, create new technologies, and/or invent new products. By all means, we need more of that stuff, and it's only fair to reward the people who invested massive money and manpower into researching it. In fact, at the risk of allienating a good chunk of slashdotters, I'm even for more of that in software. If that's what it takes to get more people into researching brand new stuff, I'm all for it.
I _am_ however, dismayed by the joke that most patents actually end up being. I think it's time to revert to the original idea of rewarding technological progress, and weed out the chaff that doesn't do anything towards that end. Starting with the rehashes of an existing technique, only with "in software" or "with a computer" slapped upon it.
A) At the time they didn't have a modern science. The Aristotelian system was _the_ science, and explanation of the universe. So it's not at all like "teach the controversy". "Teach the controversy" is about rejecting established science and going into an already disproved direction, while asking for some evidence before they reject the Aristotelian system was merely sticking to the only science they already had.
B) That one had empirical evidence, well, that was a lot less relevant at the time than it seems now. The Aristotelian system actually rejected empirical evidence. It was more concerned about, well, symmetries and philosophical rules that apply across whole domains, so to speak with having an unified theory, than with checking whether reality is actually that way. Aristotle himself had postulated such things as that women have less teeth than men, when a quick "darling come here and open your mouth for a minute" was all he needed to disprove that.
It seems stupid nowadays, but back then it was all the rage to think of the universe as a neatly designed system like that.
C) More importantly, adopting the Aristotelian system had nothing to do with religion, so it's kinda silly to blame the pope for that or to compare it to todays' religiously-motivated "teach the controversy" nuts.
The whole thing had its roots in the Renaissance nihilism. The plagues had convinced the people that both modern science and the church are powerless, and turned a whole European culture depressive and self-despising. People suddenly went nostalgic for an idealized utopian image of ancient times, and rejected everything between that ideal moment and the present. You know, the "middle ages", which happened to be in the middle of those two.
People pretty much stated to worship the (pseudo)"science" of the ancient greeks, just because it originated in that imaginary golden age of humanity. And ridiculed everything discovered ever since.
But it was a _secular_ phenomenon, not a religious one. In fact, it was largely directed _against_ the church, even if not yet officially.
The church had no choice but to go with the flow there. The people had already chosen which science they want, and the church could at most nod and pretend it liked the same thing all along. Doing otherwise would have precipitated a conflict and weakened the church's power.
That was the real uphill battle that Galileo faced. It wasn't Christianity that had chosen that pseudo-science as right and above any questioning. He was simply going against the contemporary culture, not against the church. (Well, that is, until he flamed the Pope. _Then_ he had a religious problem too.)
It's even funnier than that. And in fact, so funny, that I propose to have Galileo sanctified as patron saint of nerds and OS zealots.
Well, as you correctly note: the Pope was actually a friend of Galileo's originally and was actually a pretty open minded guy. He actually listened to Galileo, and although he wasn't convinced about this radical departure from all existing science, actually encouraged him to write about it. All the pope did ask for, was that Galileo presents both points of view fairly -- his _and_ the Aristotelian one -- and, basically, explains exactly what his own system explains better than the old one. Which is IMHO very much in line even with the modern scientific method.
Galileo, however, reacted like your average run-of-the-mill self-righteous nerd. He was incensed that the pope didn't immediately see that he's right. The book he wrote, yes, presented both points of view. However the old system was distorted and ridiculed. But the real faux pas was: he distorted the Pope's words and put them in the mouth of a character called Simplicius. I.e., pretty much "The Stupid". This character was furthermore portrayed as, basically, a stupid simpleton who couldn't grasp even elementary logic, and got repeatedly caught up in his own errors. That was the defender of the Aristotelian view in Galileo's book. (Which incidentally also presented the Pope as the zealot of a dogma where he was actually very much neutral.)
In a nutshell, Galileo thoroughly flamed the Pope. In public. In some of the most annoying ways possible. If someone did that on Slashdot, he'd end up at -5 Flamebait in 5 minutes flat.
What followed, well, basically had nothing to do with science-vs-religion. It's at most a case of why totalitarian power is bad. The Pope was an absolute monarch in Rome, and Galileo flamed him on his own turf. People ended up with their head on a spike for _much_ lesser offenses towards secular kings just as well. By contrast, Galileo ended up only with house arrest.
The accusation of heresy was mostly just a heavy-handed abuse of the law, to make it fall under the Pope's own tribunals' jurisdiction. (Things which weren't of a religious nature, otherwise fell under the jurisdiction of the secular authorities.) But make no mistake, it wasn't about science _or_ heresy. It was simply that the Pope didn't take lightly to heavy-handed public ridicule.
And if I'm to be a supporter of science in the whole science-vs-religion circus, I'd actually say the opposite: Galileo there actually did science a disservice. He created a conflict with the church where one hadn't existed before. The pope (and popes) before couldn't care less what rotates around what. The pope only became opposed to heliocentrism all of a sudden, so he could prosecute Galileo for the thorough public flaming. The whole incident _created_ an official position and a precedent, where one didn't have to exist, and turned the church from a potential supporter of the whole thing to an (at least implied) enemy.
So, yeah, I propose Galileo for sanctification. It's about time we too had our patron saint;)
That's all rather irrelevant, though, since changing the internal scheduling doesn't need a different set of instructions, as seen from the outside. The exact same programs would still run on that machine, with or without SMT.
In fact, here's more food for thought there:
- the internal architecture of an x86 CPU already changed several times. Like, for example, when it replaced the thoroughly-CISC 8086 design with a rather RISC-like pipeline in the IIRC Pentium Pro and AMD K-5. (Or was it K6?) The architecture of a Core Duo or Athlon 64 nowadays doesn't even vaguely resemble that of an original 8086, but they still run the same programs.
- since it's already an extension of SMT, you may notice that Intel's adding SMT in the P4 didn't break existing programs. Whether it's one core, two cores, or two decoders on one core, the instruction set for the outside world is exactly the same.
But the even more damning detail is:
- the 64 bit extensions _already_ rewrote the whole freakin' instruction set, and nobody moaned about that. So, yes, someone came with some crazy new shit, and guess what? It wasn't the end of the world. Someone was already chump enough to double the number of general purpose registers, for example.
So, heh... what can I say? Try reading at least the wikipedia pages about how a CPU works before going into snarky answers about what's "crazy shit". The lost art about sarcasm and arrogance is that it generally helps if you're actually right. Being snarky just because you're too fucking stupid to understand the question, or what it's _real_ effects would be... is just stupid. Sorry. The only "crazy shit" there is between your ears.
Indeed, it's just an extension of SMT. Given that I used the "hyperthreading" term at least twice in the original message, yes, it's a safe bet that I've already heard about it;)
The performance so far hasn't been that great an improvement, because the SMT and non-SMT versions (cases #2 and #1 in my analogy) have the same resources at their disposal. My case #4 also has more pipelines at its disposal, so it's somewhat a different beast, but then it has to compete against #3, not against #1 or #2. I suppose, though, that if a core is that good at using all the pipelines at its disposal, a case could be made that sharing them also won't bring that much.
The point about complexity is well taken, though. I can see how that would require more circuitry than having two separate cores.
Well, yes, the thing about thread level parallelism vs instruction level parallelism is very insightful and true, but it only says why we're leaving case #1 behind. Cases #2, #3 and #4 all had thread level parallelism.
As for the languages, good question. I guess because it's cheaper to use existing skills and libraries than to port everything to Erlang? No real idea, though. I'm sure someone is better qualified than me to answer that.
Quick history lesson. Intel tried pawning off hyperthreading to the market. If you mean that AMD should have done hyperthreading, perhaps you should look at the reviews/benchmarks to see that it reduced performance in many cases. In the future, more software might by able to take advantage of increased thread parallelism, but that future is not now, at least in the x86 world.
While I'll concede the point that Intel's first implementation was flawed, you can't judge and damn a technology for all eternity just by its first implementation. In the meantime even Intel's competitors (e.g., Sun) are implementing it, so it can't be that horribly worse than nothing.
Plus, then by the same kind of historical reasoning we should have said goodbye a long time ago to such stuff as:
- any kind of computing or calculating machines. After all, Babbage tried pawning off that idea to the market, and his implementation was never even finished.
- heavier than air airplanes. The first attempts with kites and bird wings were an outright disaster. We should have buried that idea right there and then.
- using rockets for space travel. There was this medieval Chinese dude who tried it first, with completely disastrous results.
- breech loaded guns. The first attempts had _major_ problems with sealing the barrel, because of poor tolerances.
- cavalry. It just wasn't that horribly good before it successively also got a good saddle, horseshoes, stirrups, and specially bred horses. There's a reason why the Romans created their empire with elite infantry, and the cavalry was just some specialized auxiliary.
- in fact, even earlier, we shouldn't have had even chariots. I mean, until someone invented a harness that allowed horses to pull one, it was pretty much useless. We know that the Sumerians tried using oxen there, and it couldn't have been that horribly effective. Should have discarded that idea right there and then.
- agriculture. Until the right plants, irrigation and cats became available, it was very much a losing proposition wherever it was tried.
Well, first of all, thanks for the in depth answer.
Another solution is virtual cores, or HyperThreading. HTT uses instructions from another thread (assuming that one is available) to fill pipeline slots that would otherwise be unused. The problem with HTT is that you still need a substantial amount of decoding logic for the other thread, not to mention a more advanced register system (although modern CPUs already have a very advanced register system, particularly on register-starved architectures like x86) and other associated logic. In addition, if you want to get benefits from pipeline stalls (e.g like on the P4), you need even more logic. This means that HTT isn't particularly beneficial unless you have code that results in a large number of data dependencies or branch mispredicts, or if pipeline stalls are particularly expensive.
Well, yes, that's what I was getting at.
Sure, each HT pseudo-core still has a decoder. So does a separate core. So IMHO 2x cores with 2x decoders and 4x pipelines each, should really be roughly the same amount of silicon as 1x core with 4x decoders and 8x pipelines each. It's still a total of 4 decoders, 4 register files, and 8 pipelines, right? The question is whether we could make better use of those in other ways than splitting it down the middle.
Wait, though. If one thread is mostly using one set of pipelines, and one is mostly using the other, we can split the pipelines into two groups. Each will take one thread. This way, our register and cache systems are simpler (because we only have to keep track of one set of registers and one PC, again ignoring things like register renaming). We get nearly the same efficiency, but with a simpler design.
If one thread is mostly using one set of pipelines and the other is mostly using the other, yes. But IMHO:
A) "mostly" doesn't mean all the time. If only 5% of the time one core could use one extra pipeline, while the other is idle, you'd still see slightly better speed out of a shared design.
B) That's already assuming you'll know exactly how many pipelines will each thread ever need. Unless you're also writing all the software for that CPU, that seems a bit less clear.
Point in case, look at all the CPUs with 2 or 4 cores _and_ 2 decoders per core. Are you sure that the two decoders on core 1 combined will never ever need an extra pipeline, while core 2 has one that's currently stalling?
But, really, I'd buy the argument if they didn't also pack HT on those cores. Once they went that route, it tells me that they're already not entirely sure how that 1 decoder will always need exactly X pipelines. Never more, never less.
That said, though, ok, I'll concede the point about simplicity. I can see how a multi-core design would be simpler.
No, everything _you_ answered was irrelevant, because you don't even seem to understand the question. You just repeat the marketing line without even understanding what was asked.
Yes, we need to do more things in parallel. That much is clear, Captain Obvious. The question is how we do that the most efficiently, with the same amount of silicon.
The question was, yes, if other CPU architectures and designs could still do those background tasks, but make better use of the same number of transistors. Or does going in such details go so far over your head as to not even make sense?
So, heh, yeah. I'll answer with your own question: why are _you_ on Slashdot? I mean, seriously, if thinking deeper than repeating the marketing line isn't your thing, shouldn't you be more at home on some other sites?
Well, yes, obviously. But that's not what I was asking. My question was _not_ "why don't they stick to the MHz race?"
What I'm saying is: ok, so now they have to expand in width, so to speak, instead of in MHz. Fine. But why is (A) two separated sets of, say, 3 pipelines better (B) than a set of 6 with two execution units, allocated dynamically? It's still 8 pipelines, only the second one can be dynamically allocated with better results. If one particular thread could use 4 while another used only 2, solution A results in wasted cycles, solution B does not.
You know what I still don't get? Why's everyone acting like dividing a CPU into several separate cores is a good thing?
Let me compare it to, say, a construction company having a number of teams and a number of resources, e.g., vehicles:
1. One team, 4 vehicles. That's classic single core. Downside, at a given moment it might only need 2 or 3 of those vehicles. (E.g., once you're done digging the foundation, you have a lot less need of the bulldozer.)
2. Two teams, can pick what they need from a common pool of 4 vehicles. That's classic "hyperthreading". Downside, you're not getting twice the work done. Upside, you still paid only for 4 vehicles, and you're likely to get more out of them.
3. Two teams, each with 4 vehicles of its own. They can't borrow one from each other. This is "dual core." Downside, now any waste from point 1 is doubled.
But the one I don't see is, say,
4. Two teams with a common pool of 8 vehicles. It's got to be more efficient than number 3.
Basically #4 is the logical extension of hyperthreading, and it seems to me more efficient any way you want to slice it. Even if you add HT to dual-core design, you end up with twice #2 instead of #4 with 4 teams and a common pool. There is no reason why splitting the pool of resources (be it construction vehicles or execution pipelines) should be more efficient than having them all in a larger dynamically-allocated pool.
So why _are_ we doing that stupidity? Just because AMD at one point couldn't get hyperthreading right and had its marketers convince everyone that worse is better, and up is down?
Hey, it's been known to happen. I know I got to hang around two different girls in college (though not at the same time) for just doing their assignments.
Mind you, it went nowhere anyway, because I had no clue how or where to go from there. But, "come over to see if it does what your prof wants" seemed to work:P
Who knows, maybe _because_ it must have been blindingly obvious that there's no risk of anything more happening:P
Him: "Just make yourself comfortable. Lemme put this laptop down and I'll get you a coffee." (Puts the laptop bag next to the TV.) Her: "Aiiieee!" Him: "What? Oh, crap! I got tricked into clicking that goatse pic again. Seriously, it's not like I watch that for fun." (Takes the laptop bag hastily away, dumps it on a table, throws jacket on top of it, with the PSP in a pocket.) Female voice from the laptop: "Oooh, yesss... put it up my ass, baby. *moan* *squeal* Oh god... oh yess..." Him: "Aargh! I swear I don't know how that movie got on my PSP. Honestly. Must have been, uh, among those files I backed up on its stick when I, uh, formatted a co-worker's workstation." Her: "Maybe it's better if I leave now..." Him: "No, wait, it's an accident. Why don't you show me the cute rabbits you photographed in the park?" Her: "Umm, ok..." (She fumbles for the camera in her purse, turns on the little LCD display and he squeezes closer to see anything. A photo of a porn star with two cocks up her ass pops up.) Her: "Whaaa... I never had anything like that!" Him: "Hmm, weird... oh, wait, you're wearing that USB watch I gave you for your birthday. Maybe it picked it from there?" Her: "But I never had anything like that on there! I only used it once to get a wallpaper from home to work!" Him: "Oh fuck... we held hands on the way here, didn't we? Must have picked it from mine... err... from somewhere else... Wait, don't go!!"
Actually, much as I don't like some of USA's politics, they pretty much jump-started the whole Keynesian economics thing. Ever heard of the "New Deal"? That's how they got out of the Great Depression. That's literally just Keynesian economics applied.
Duly noted if you hear only the rich-guys' "think-tank" lobies, and the rabid libertarians on Slashdot, there's a lot of pining for the good ol' days of neo-classical liberalism and Austrian School economics. It's not what their government does, though.
The fact is, neo-classical liberalism stopped working in the Great Depression. Those good old theories are perfectly suited for an economy of scarcity, no doubt, but fail utterly in an over-production situation.
And you can see the result in the Great Depression. The countries which did overspend in a depression, be it USA with its New Deal, or Germany with its massive rearmament program, got out of it the fastest. The ones who stuck to good ol' neo-liberalism, got to enjoy it for a really long time. E.g., Canada enjoyed a jolly good depression until the 40's, when it was dragged into the war and had to spend some money on weapons.
So, well, what I'm saying, is that you'd notice if the USA went the way the libertarians preach. You'd notice the first recession spiraling down into an all-out crash.
I guess it's also easy to be mistaken about what the USA does, because it preaches the exact opposite to other countries. Pretty much to any developing or 3rd world country, it preaches neo-classical liberalism and doing in a crisis what Keynesian economics say will turn it into a depression. So basically if you want a loan, you have to agree to destroy your own economy. It doesn't mean that they do anything like that in their own country, though. What you see there is just the ugly face of the new imperialism.
As for that relationship between unemployment and inflation, well, I never said that that was the _whole_ of Keynesian economics (far from it), nor that it was Keynes that invented it (or it would be called the Keynes curve, not the Phillips curve.) I think Keynesian economics did do a lot to finally hammer it into people's heads, though.
Well, yes, excellent principle that, and more people should remember it. No doubt.
Except while maybe that would help in some situations, sound cards are not in that category. Create a sine wave that goes from 0 to 255 (or 0 to 65535 if you're doing a 16 bit sample) in whatever sound editing program you prefer, run it through, say, any Audigy or X-Fi card you prefer, and probably through any on-board one these days too, and plug an osciloscope into the output jack. There is no hard clipping. It's that simple.
It comes also from not actually _having_ a final stage amplifier (unless it has an external box for that). If you plugged some unpowered speakers into most sound cards' jacks these days, you'd barely hear anything whatsoever. The final stage is in the powered speakers for most people, and in the external amplifier for the rest.
So it's a solution that solves the wrong problem in the wrong place:
1. It's trying to fix clipping in the final power stage, on cards which don't actually have either a final power stage _or_ clipping.
2. Any extra harmonics it introduces are _before_ the final amplifier stage that actually drives the speakers. So they'll be amplified too. And any clipping that that final stage has, will come on top of it.
That's just the kind of hearing what's not there, and "fixing" it via something that doesn't even work that way, that makes some of us make fun of "audiophiles."
You sure it's intelligence? I can think of a more high-school scenario there. I mean, picture two fashionable grey-alien girls after a cow-tipping tour to Earth.
"Oh, like, those Sol guys are, like, soo nerdy, always with their, like, radio-teles-wossnames and their gizmos. And, like, God, they just can't take a hint when they're, like, not wanted. You'd think, like, after they got ignored a dozen times, they'd, like, quit trying to get our attention already. I mean, gah, gag me with a spoon, like I'd ever want to be seen talking to some geek who's, like, fiddling knobs all day. Those SETI guys should, like, so get a _life_. I mean, like, geesh, like they'll ever get laid if they're, like, fiddling with that telescope all day. And, geesh, what's with those _clothes_? Fer crying out loud, those suits are sooo, like, last _millenium_. And have you seen those haircuts? Like, gag me with a spoon. They should, like, take a hint from those guys from Rigel. Mmm, those are soo dreamy. 'Course, I bet they don't want to be seen, like, nursing a bunch of nerds either."
Actually, the thought did cross the minds of a few of us at the time too. We even thought of magnetic interference being picked by the sound card and other, you know, _sane_ explanations. He insisted repeatedly that that wasn't it, though. I'm also pretty sure that someone suggested trying with headphones, though I'd assume anyone that determined to hear the slightest differences would have done that in the first place.
The part that wouldn't match anyway is that for him WD sounded the best, and Seagate sounded the _worst_. So he took the Seagate back and got a WD for his MP3's. I mean, if it were the other way around, ok, Seagate and Samsung do have the saving grace of being engineered for silence, so I'd assume that it probably was your explanation anyway. But WD seeks at the time sounded like someone is hammering nails into a piece of metal, and I think they were also one of the last to go with fluid drive bearings. I'd say it's... well, nothing is impossible, but it's at least _improbable_ that, if HDD noise is the factor, a WD would be better in that aspect.
Well, yes, that's just the thing: loyalty was never supposed to be a one way street. It always cut both ways, and was _supposed_ to cut both ways.
E.g., a medieval vassal had an obligation to be loyal to his liege-lord, _but_ conversely the liege had a formal obligation to defend his vassal to the full extent of his possibilities too. E.g., a medieval knight was supposed to be loyal to his lord even in the face of death, but conversely he was assured of employment until death. You could take a knights land for treason or such, but otherwise you couldn't go "you're fired. I found a turk who'll do your job for less land." E.g., heck, even the serfs, in exchange for that being formally tied to their lord, could expect the lord's protection. (Though how seriously some lords took that obligation, that's a whole other story.) That's how the whole manorial system was formed in the wake of the crash of the Roman Empire. Etc.
So it's kinda funny to see people nowadays trying to turn it into a one ways street. See, you have a duty to be loyal to us, but we have a duty to not give a damn about you. It never worked that way, and it wasn't supposed to work that way.
Which is why I say they should choose which they want. Not both. Either it's all-out capitalism, they treat you like a replaceable commodity, but then accept that equally the theory is that they're a replaceable commodity too. Or the demand unconditional until-death-do-us-part loyalty, but then they're supposed to provide exactly the same loyalty in return.
I'm not even saying which they should use. Either could be argued for or against, and whole economic theories and apologies have been written about both. Pick one. I may disagree with one or the other on a theoretical level, but I can respect someone who actually is honest in picking one and living by what he/she preaches. Right or wrong, at least it's living by one's principles. I can respect that.
And, yes, just to agree with you some more, it does seem pretty clear which they chose. And they're just getting the other side of the coin they chose. The least they could do is stop moaning about it.
That's what the "audiophiles" claim, but that's not the way CDs are recorded.
Ah, the kinds of things that "audiophiles" claim...
Probably the funniest was one on the HardwareCentral forum, which insisted that MP3's sound differently off different hard drives, and of course his superior ear can easily tell the difference between a Maxtor and a Seagate. He actually went into a funny (in a village idiot kind of way) theory about how it's recorded magnetically like on cassettes, and we all know how different magnetic coatings (e.g., iron oxide vs chromium oxide) in cassettes behaved differently in different frequency ranges. So it stood to (his warped lack of) reason that the same would happen to hard drives. Some would have better bass, some would have a greater dynamic range, etc.
Sad to say, no amount of explaining that a 1 is a 1 is a 1 on a hard drive and the MP3 read will be identical on any brand, made any difference. He was sure that that's nonsense, the magnetic coating of a HDD platter has no reason to behave differently than that of a cassette, and most importantly he had convinced himself that he can hear the differences. (Without a double-blind test, though. Funny how many "audiophiles" resent those three words.)
Also in the funny stupidity category, I submit to you such gems as:
- $1000+ power cables, and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- specially-tuned wooden volume knobs (no, seriously), and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- audiophile motherboards with one vacuum tube at the end of an otherwise 100% digital chain, and again people swearing that their MP3's sound closer to the original with that (never mind that it's really just adding the tube's own soft-clipping kind and harmonics, to those that the digital chain already introduced),
Etc, etc, etc.
It's just the emperor's new clothes story. Except the original story got it wrong. If you tell someone that only some kind of superior beings can see those clothes, or hear the subtle sound differences, they'll actually convince themselves that they really see or hear that. They won't fake it, they'll actually be convinced that if they squint just right, they kinda see the fabulous clothes on the emperor.
And a kid shouting "the emperor is naked", actually won't make any difference. That's actually what they want to hear. Being better is relative. You have to be better than _someone_. For you to be better, someone else has to be worse. So once they got it into their head that they must be one of the geniuses that see the clothes, other people shouting "The emperor is naked!" just provides ample "proof" that yup, others aren't that good.
In fact, here's an even more depressing parting thought: the more blatantly absurd and provably wrong something is, the more vehemently its advocates will defend it.
Before I get started: I actually quite like the space program, and I do think that some advances were made for it. But the "it created jobs!!!" argument is IMHO still a fallacy.
There's a more subtle version or relative of the broken window there. The fallacy is assuming that those jobs wouldn't have been created by someone else, for another purpose.
The thing is, since we've been Keynesian all along, all the governments have known about the Phillips curve too. In fact, applied it.
The short and skinny is that there's an interdependency between inflation and unemployment. So for more than half a century what all governments did was try to stay at a point of their choosing on that curve. That's the reason the Federal Reserve tries to keep inflation at a given point, for example. Because too much inflation is bad by itself, but too little creates unemployment.
So in doing so, it fixes the employment where it wants it too.
Basically if those jobs hadn't been created by the space program, then they would have been created somewhere else. Not the same jobs, mind you, but a roughly equal number anyway.
The even more insidious part of the "but it created jobs!!!" sophistry is that it tries to imply that something was gained where nothing would have been created instead otherwise. People already nod and imagine that all the things those people achieved in those jobs, are surely better than nothing at all, because they wouldn't even be employed without a space program. Which just isn't so. Those people would have been employed, and would have produced _something_ in all this time, with or without a space program. Each job there, came at the expense of exactly one job somewhere else. Every 8 hours day spent reviewing why the shuttle's heat tiles broke, are 8 hours that weren't spent (by that guy or someone else) on some other project.
A point could still be made whether we benefited more from those jobs, than from the alternate history version without a space program. Unfortunately, none of us knows what would have really happened in an alternate history. Maybe all those jobs would have been cabbie and McDonalds jobs instead. In that case, sure, we're better off with them working (directly or indirectly) for NASA instead. But at least theoretically it's equally possible that they would have worked on some better project instead. Maybe in that parallel universe without a space program, all those smart people worked on fusion power instead and now have cheap energy everywhere and a bunch of innovative electronics trickled to other domains from _that_ research. We don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the problem with law and what created legalese, is that you need to be painstakingly precise in defaining _exactly_ what is allowed and what isn't. Because otherwise someone _will_ use any inexactity to their own end, to shaft someone else. Natural language is vague, and lots of things that look clear when said or written in a blog, leave loopholes that you could drive a bus through.
That's really why legalese evolved, and why contracts and laws are so verbose and use funny jargon.
E.g., let's say I aggree to sell you a "Wii, original box" for your money. What if I only send you the cardboard box, without a Wii in it. There actually was an auction on ebay doing exactly that, albeit with a PS2 back when it was launched and there were massive shortages. Ok, so let's clarify that a bit as "Wii in its original packaging". Does it say it has to be a working Wii? It doesn't. Ok, let's clarify that too. Does it say in how much time I have to send it to you? I don't think so. So if you don't get it until 2018, hey, I still didn't break my word. So let's clarify that one too. Did I say I was going to include a wiimote and the cables and everything? Well, nope. If I'm an arsehole, I might send it to you without anything except the box, just so you pay more buying everything that's missing separately. Did we stipulate any penalties for breaking that contract? No? Well, then I might break it anyway, and what are you going to do about it? Did I say where it would be delivered? I'm delivering it to the top of Mt Everest then. Feel free to drop by and get it from there, any time you wish. Etc.
As a private person you don't actually have to worry about most of that, because someone made some laws against that. But that means, essentially: someone else wrote a ton of legalese, so you don't have to. But it's there.
But companies don't get that break, and neither do courts and lawmakers. There you really have to define _everything_ in painstaking detail.
If you just say "thou shalt not steal", you'll get people arguing that they only borrowed it without your knowledge. Or conversely, what happens if I lent you a book and you forgot to bring it back in time? Can I claim that you're a thief and throw you in jail? So you end up having to write many pages as to exactly what is a theft, what isn't, and what steps to take to distinguish between them.
There you go. For vague everyday use you have a very simple concept: "thou shalt not steal." It doesn't get any clearer. But for a law it doesn't even _start_ to be enough.
Nah, I can think of far more entertaining stuff. Like programming one to give your least favourite luser/coworker/boss/etc a colonoscopy.
How about this, very pragmatical definition:
1. if it's something that one or more humans must do, you can't patent it. (I.e., no patenting "you show the ticket to the doorman".)
2. if the same process could realistically be done by a finite and small number of humans, and your programs/modules/robots/whatever just automate a human's role there, you can't patent it. (I.e., no patenting "you input your ticket's number to the program.")
3. If a nearly identical process -- i.e., serves the same practical purpose and the essential steps are the same, or minor variations of the same step -- is already in use with humans or in any other form or medium, you can't slap a "in software" or "with computers" on it and patent the same bloody thing _again_.
The above, btw, comes from someone who actually likes patents as a general idea. I'm all for rewarding people who research new stuff, create new technologies, and/or invent new products. By all means, we need more of that stuff, and it's only fair to reward the people who invested massive money and manpower into researching it. In fact, at the risk of allienating a good chunk of slashdotters, I'm even for more of that in software. If that's what it takes to get more people into researching brand new stuff, I'm all for it.
I _am_ however, dismayed by the joke that most patents actually end up being. I think it's time to revert to the original idea of rewarding technological progress, and weed out the chaff that doesn't do anything towards that end. Starting with the rehashes of an existing technique, only with "in software" or "with a computer" slapped upon it.
Dude, remember that:
A) At the time they didn't have a modern science. The Aristotelian system was _the_ science, and explanation of the universe. So it's not at all like "teach the controversy". "Teach the controversy" is about rejecting established science and going into an already disproved direction, while asking for some evidence before they reject the Aristotelian system was merely sticking to the only science they already had.
B) That one had empirical evidence, well, that was a lot less relevant at the time than it seems now. The Aristotelian system actually rejected empirical evidence. It was more concerned about, well, symmetries and philosophical rules that apply across whole domains, so to speak with having an unified theory, than with checking whether reality is actually that way. Aristotle himself had postulated such things as that women have less teeth than men, when a quick "darling come here and open your mouth for a minute" was all he needed to disprove that.
It seems stupid nowadays, but back then it was all the rage to think of the universe as a neatly designed system like that.
C) More importantly, adopting the Aristotelian system had nothing to do with religion, so it's kinda silly to blame the pope for that or to compare it to todays' religiously-motivated "teach the controversy" nuts.
The whole thing had its roots in the Renaissance nihilism. The plagues had convinced the people that both modern science and the church are powerless, and turned a whole European culture depressive and self-despising. People suddenly went nostalgic for an idealized utopian image of ancient times, and rejected everything between that ideal moment and the present. You know, the "middle ages", which happened to be in the middle of those two.
People pretty much stated to worship the (pseudo)"science" of the ancient greeks, just because it originated in that imaginary golden age of humanity. And ridiculed everything discovered ever since.
But it was a _secular_ phenomenon, not a religious one. In fact, it was largely directed _against_ the church, even if not yet officially.
The church had no choice but to go with the flow there. The people had already chosen which science they want, and the church could at most nod and pretend it liked the same thing all along. Doing otherwise would have precipitated a conflict and weakened the church's power.
That was the real uphill battle that Galileo faced. It wasn't Christianity that had chosen that pseudo-science as right and above any questioning. He was simply going against the contemporary culture, not against the church. (Well, that is, until he flamed the Pope. _Then_ he had a religious problem too.)
It's even funnier than that. And in fact, so funny, that I propose to have Galileo sanctified as patron saint of nerds and OS zealots.
;)
Well, as you correctly note: the Pope was actually a friend of Galileo's originally and was actually a pretty open minded guy. He actually listened to Galileo, and although he wasn't convinced about this radical departure from all existing science, actually encouraged him to write about it. All the pope did ask for, was that Galileo presents both points of view fairly -- his _and_ the Aristotelian one -- and, basically, explains exactly what his own system explains better than the old one. Which is IMHO very much in line even with the modern scientific method.
Galileo, however, reacted like your average run-of-the-mill self-righteous nerd. He was incensed that the pope didn't immediately see that he's right. The book he wrote, yes, presented both points of view. However the old system was distorted and ridiculed. But the real faux pas was: he distorted the Pope's words and put them in the mouth of a character called Simplicius. I.e., pretty much "The Stupid". This character was furthermore portrayed as, basically, a stupid simpleton who couldn't grasp even elementary logic, and got repeatedly caught up in his own errors. That was the defender of the Aristotelian view in Galileo's book. (Which incidentally also presented the Pope as the zealot of a dogma where he was actually very much neutral.)
In a nutshell, Galileo thoroughly flamed the Pope. In public. In some of the most annoying ways possible. If someone did that on Slashdot, he'd end up at -5 Flamebait in 5 minutes flat.
What followed, well, basically had nothing to do with science-vs-religion. It's at most a case of why totalitarian power is bad. The Pope was an absolute monarch in Rome, and Galileo flamed him on his own turf. People ended up with their head on a spike for _much_ lesser offenses towards secular kings just as well. By contrast, Galileo ended up only with house arrest.
The accusation of heresy was mostly just a heavy-handed abuse of the law, to make it fall under the Pope's own tribunals' jurisdiction. (Things which weren't of a religious nature, otherwise fell under the jurisdiction of the secular authorities.) But make no mistake, it wasn't about science _or_ heresy. It was simply that the Pope didn't take lightly to heavy-handed public ridicule.
And if I'm to be a supporter of science in the whole science-vs-religion circus, I'd actually say the opposite: Galileo there actually did science a disservice. He created a conflict with the church where one hadn't existed before. The pope (and popes) before couldn't care less what rotates around what. The pope only became opposed to heliocentrism all of a sudden, so he could prosecute Galileo for the thorough public flaming. The whole incident _created_ an official position and a precedent, where one didn't have to exist, and turned the church from a potential supporter of the whole thing to an (at least implied) enemy.
So, yeah, I propose Galileo for sanctification. It's about time we too had our patron saint
That's all rather irrelevant, though, since changing the internal scheduling doesn't need a different set of instructions, as seen from the outside. The exact same programs would still run on that machine, with or without SMT.
In fact, here's more food for thought there:
- the internal architecture of an x86 CPU already changed several times. Like, for example, when it replaced the thoroughly-CISC 8086 design with a rather RISC-like pipeline in the IIRC Pentium Pro and AMD K-5. (Or was it K6?) The architecture of a Core Duo or Athlon 64 nowadays doesn't even vaguely resemble that of an original 8086, but they still run the same programs.
- since it's already an extension of SMT, you may notice that Intel's adding SMT in the P4 didn't break existing programs. Whether it's one core, two cores, or two decoders on one core, the instruction set for the outside world is exactly the same.
But the even more damning detail is:
- the 64 bit extensions _already_ rewrote the whole freakin' instruction set, and nobody moaned about that. So, yes, someone came with some crazy new shit, and guess what? It wasn't the end of the world. Someone was already chump enough to double the number of general purpose registers, for example.
So, heh... what can I say? Try reading at least the wikipedia pages about how a CPU works before going into snarky answers about what's "crazy shit". The lost art about sarcasm and arrogance is that it generally helps if you're actually right. Being snarky just because you're too fucking stupid to understand the question, or what it's _real_ effects would be... is just stupid. Sorry. The only "crazy shit" there is between your ears.
Indeed, it's just an extension of SMT. Given that I used the "hyperthreading" term at least twice in the original message, yes, it's a safe bet that I've already heard about it ;)
The performance so far hasn't been that great an improvement, because the SMT and non-SMT versions (cases #2 and #1 in my analogy) have the same resources at their disposal. My case #4 also has more pipelines at its disposal, so it's somewhat a different beast, but then it has to compete against #3, not against #1 or #2. I suppose, though, that if a core is that good at using all the pipelines at its disposal, a case could be made that sharing them also won't bring that much.
The point about complexity is well taken, though. I can see how that would require more circuitry than having two separate cores.
Well, yes, the thing about thread level parallelism vs instruction level parallelism is very insightful and true, but it only says why we're leaving case #1 behind. Cases #2, #3 and #4 all had thread level parallelism.
As for the languages, good question. I guess because it's cheaper to use existing skills and libraries than to port everything to Erlang? No real idea, though. I'm sure someone is better qualified than me to answer that.
While I'll concede the point that Intel's first implementation was flawed, you can't judge and damn a technology for all eternity just by its first implementation. In the meantime even Intel's competitors (e.g., Sun) are implementing it, so it can't be that horribly worse than nothing.
Plus, then by the same kind of historical reasoning we should have said goodbye a long time ago to such stuff as:
- any kind of computing or calculating machines. After all, Babbage tried pawning off that idea to the market, and his implementation was never even finished.
- heavier than air airplanes. The first attempts with kites and bird wings were an outright disaster. We should have buried that idea right there and then.
- using rockets for space travel. There was this medieval Chinese dude who tried it first, with completely disastrous results.
- breech loaded guns. The first attempts had _major_ problems with sealing the barrel, because of poor tolerances.
- cavalry. It just wasn't that horribly good before it successively also got a good saddle, horseshoes, stirrups, and specially bred horses. There's a reason why the Romans created their empire with elite infantry, and the cavalry was just some specialized auxiliary.
- in fact, even earlier, we shouldn't have had even chariots. I mean, until someone invented a harness that allowed horses to pull one, it was pretty much useless. We know that the Sumerians tried using oxen there, and it couldn't have been that horribly effective. Should have discarded that idea right there and then.
- agriculture. Until the right plants, irrigation and cats became available, it was very much a losing proposition wherever it was tried.
Etc, etc, etc.
Well, yes, that's what I was getting at.
Sure, each HT pseudo-core still has a decoder. So does a separate core. So IMHO 2x cores with 2x decoders and 4x pipelines each, should really be roughly the same amount of silicon as 1x core with 4x decoders and 8x pipelines each. It's still a total of 4 decoders, 4 register files, and 8 pipelines, right? The question is whether we could make better use of those in other ways than splitting it down the middle.
If one thread is mostly using one set of pipelines and the other is mostly using the other, yes. But IMHO:
A) "mostly" doesn't mean all the time. If only 5% of the time one core could use one extra pipeline, while the other is idle, you'd still see slightly better speed out of a shared design.
B) That's already assuming you'll know exactly how many pipelines will each thread ever need. Unless you're also writing all the software for that CPU, that seems a bit less clear.
Point in case, look at all the CPUs with 2 or 4 cores _and_ 2 decoders per core. Are you sure that the two decoders on core 1 combined will never ever need an extra pipeline, while core 2 has one that's currently stalling?
But, really, I'd buy the argument if they didn't also pack HT on those cores. Once they went that route, it tells me that they're already not entirely sure how that 1 decoder will always need exactly X pipelines. Never more, never less.
That said, though, ok, I'll concede the point about simplicity. I can see how a multi-core design would be simpler.
No, everything _you_ answered was irrelevant, because you don't even seem to understand the question. You just repeat the marketing line without even understanding what was asked.
Yes, we need to do more things in parallel. That much is clear, Captain Obvious. The question is how we do that the most efficiently, with the same amount of silicon.
The question was, yes, if other CPU architectures and designs could still do those background tasks, but make better use of the same number of transistors. Or does going in such details go so far over your head as to not even make sense?
So, heh, yeah. I'll answer with your own question: why are _you_ on Slashdot? I mean, seriously, if thinking deeper than repeating the marketing line isn't your thing, shouldn't you be more at home on some other sites?
Well, yes, obviously. But that's not what I was asking. My question was _not_ "why don't they stick to the MHz race?"
What I'm saying is: ok, so now they have to expand in width, so to speak, instead of in MHz. Fine. But why is (A) two separated sets of, say, 3 pipelines better (B) than a set of 6 with two execution units, allocated dynamically? It's still 8 pipelines, only the second one can be dynamically allocated with better results. If one particular thread could use 4 while another used only 2, solution A results in wasted cycles, solution B does not.
AFAIK, in a few US states you'd go to jail even if she showed you a faked driver's license and a birth certificate that said she's 19.
You know what I still don't get? Why's everyone acting like dividing a CPU into several separate cores is a good thing?
Let me compare it to, say, a construction company having a number of teams and a number of resources, e.g., vehicles:
1. One team, 4 vehicles. That's classic single core. Downside, at a given moment it might only need 2 or 3 of those vehicles. (E.g., once you're done digging the foundation, you have a lot less need of the bulldozer.)
2. Two teams, can pick what they need from a common pool of 4 vehicles. That's classic "hyperthreading". Downside, you're not getting twice the work done. Upside, you still paid only for 4 vehicles, and you're likely to get more out of them.
3. Two teams, each with 4 vehicles of its own. They can't borrow one from each other. This is "dual core." Downside, now any waste from point 1 is doubled.
But the one I don't see is, say,
4. Two teams with a common pool of 8 vehicles. It's got to be more efficient than number 3.
Basically #4 is the logical extension of hyperthreading, and it seems to me more efficient any way you want to slice it. Even if you add HT to dual-core design, you end up with twice #2 instead of #4 with 4 teams and a common pool. There is no reason why splitting the pool of resources (be it construction vehicles or execution pipelines) should be more efficient than having them all in a larger dynamically-allocated pool.
So why _are_ we doing that stupidity? Just because AMD at one point couldn't get hyperthreading right and had its marketers convince everyone that worse is better, and up is down?
Hey, it's been known to happen. I know I got to hang around two different girls in college (though not at the same time) for just doing their assignments.
:P
:P
Mind you, it went nowhere anyway, because I had no clue how or where to go from there. But, "come over to see if it does what your prof wants" seemed to work
Who knows, maybe _because_ it must have been blindingly obvious that there's no risk of anything more happening
Automatically? Heh, I can just picture it.
Geek bringing home a girl...
Him: "Just make yourself comfortable. Lemme put this laptop down and I'll get you a coffee."
(Puts the laptop bag next to the TV.)
Her: "Aiiieee!"
Him: "What? Oh, crap! I got tricked into clicking that goatse pic again. Seriously, it's not like I watch that for fun."
(Takes the laptop bag hastily away, dumps it on a table, throws jacket on top of it, with the PSP in a pocket.)
Female voice from the laptop: "Oooh, yesss... put it up my ass, baby. *moan* *squeal* Oh god... oh yess..."
Him: "Aargh! I swear I don't know how that movie got on my PSP. Honestly. Must have been, uh, among those files I backed up on its stick when I, uh, formatted a co-worker's workstation."
Her: "Maybe it's better if I leave now..."
Him: "No, wait, it's an accident. Why don't you show me the cute rabbits you photographed in the park?"
Her: "Umm, ok..."
(She fumbles for the camera in her purse, turns on the little LCD display and he squeezes closer to see anything. A photo of a porn star with two cocks up her ass pops up.)
Her: "Whaaa... I never had anything like that!"
Him: "Hmm, weird... oh, wait, you're wearing that USB watch I gave you for your birthday. Maybe it picked it from there?"
Her: "But I never had anything like that on there! I only used it once to get a wallpaper from home to work!"
Him: "Oh fuck... we held hands on the way here, didn't we? Must have picked it from mine... err... from somewhere else... Wait, don't go!!"
Heh. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if that was for the benefit of some alien zoophilia site.
Actually, much as I don't like some of USA's politics, they pretty much jump-started the whole Keynesian economics thing. Ever heard of the "New Deal"? That's how they got out of the Great Depression. That's literally just Keynesian economics applied.
Duly noted if you hear only the rich-guys' "think-tank" lobies, and the rabid libertarians on Slashdot, there's a lot of pining for the good ol' days of neo-classical liberalism and Austrian School economics. It's not what their government does, though.
The fact is, neo-classical liberalism stopped working in the Great Depression. Those good old theories are perfectly suited for an economy of scarcity, no doubt, but fail utterly in an over-production situation.
And you can see the result in the Great Depression. The countries which did overspend in a depression, be it USA with its New Deal, or Germany with its massive rearmament program, got out of it the fastest. The ones who stuck to good ol' neo-liberalism, got to enjoy it for a really long time. E.g., Canada enjoyed a jolly good depression until the 40's, when it was dragged into the war and had to spend some money on weapons.
So, well, what I'm saying, is that you'd notice if the USA went the way the libertarians preach. You'd notice the first recession spiraling down into an all-out crash.
I guess it's also easy to be mistaken about what the USA does, because it preaches the exact opposite to other countries. Pretty much to any developing or 3rd world country, it preaches neo-classical liberalism and doing in a crisis what Keynesian economics say will turn it into a depression. So basically if you want a loan, you have to agree to destroy your own economy. It doesn't mean that they do anything like that in their own country, though. What you see there is just the ugly face of the new imperialism.
As for that relationship between unemployment and inflation, well, I never said that that was the _whole_ of Keynesian economics (far from it), nor that it was Keynes that invented it (or it would be called the Keynes curve, not the Phillips curve.) I think Keynesian economics did do a lot to finally hammer it into people's heads, though.
Well, yes, excellent principle that, and more people should remember it. No doubt.
Except while maybe that would help in some situations, sound cards are not in that category. Create a sine wave that goes from 0 to 255 (or 0 to 65535 if you're doing a 16 bit sample) in whatever sound editing program you prefer, run it through, say, any Audigy or X-Fi card you prefer, and probably through any on-board one these days too, and plug an osciloscope into the output jack. There is no hard clipping. It's that simple.
It comes also from not actually _having_ a final stage amplifier (unless it has an external box for that). If you plugged some unpowered speakers into most sound cards' jacks these days, you'd barely hear anything whatsoever. The final stage is in the powered speakers for most people, and in the external amplifier for the rest.
So it's a solution that solves the wrong problem in the wrong place:
1. It's trying to fix clipping in the final power stage, on cards which don't actually have either a final power stage _or_ clipping.
2. Any extra harmonics it introduces are _before_ the final amplifier stage that actually drives the speakers. So they'll be amplified too. And any clipping that that final stage has, will come on top of it.
That's just the kind of hearing what's not there, and "fixing" it via something that doesn't even work that way, that makes some of us make fun of "audiophiles."
You sure it's intelligence? I can think of a more high-school scenario there. I mean, picture two fashionable grey-alien girls after a cow-tipping tour to Earth.
;)
"Oh, like, those Sol guys are, like, soo nerdy, always with their, like, radio-teles-wossnames and their gizmos. And, like, God, they just can't take a hint when they're, like, not wanted. You'd think, like, after they got ignored a dozen times, they'd, like, quit trying to get our attention already. I mean, gah, gag me with a spoon, like I'd ever want to be seen talking to some geek who's, like, fiddling knobs all day. Those SETI guys should, like, so get a _life_. I mean, like, geesh, like they'll ever get laid if they're, like, fiddling with that telescope all day. And, geesh, what's with those _clothes_? Fer crying out loud, those suits are sooo, like, last _millenium_. And have you seen those haircuts? Like, gag me with a spoon. They should, like, take a hint from those guys from Rigel. Mmm, those are soo dreamy. 'Course, I bet they don't want to be seen, like, nursing a bunch of nerds either."
Well, it's a possibility
Actually, the thought did cross the minds of a few of us at the time too. We even thought of magnetic interference being picked by the sound card and other, you know, _sane_ explanations. He insisted repeatedly that that wasn't it, though. I'm also pretty sure that someone suggested trying with headphones, though I'd assume anyone that determined to hear the slightest differences would have done that in the first place.
The part that wouldn't match anyway is that for him WD sounded the best, and Seagate sounded the _worst_. So he took the Seagate back and got a WD for his MP3's. I mean, if it were the other way around, ok, Seagate and Samsung do have the saving grace of being engineered for silence, so I'd assume that it probably was your explanation anyway. But WD seeks at the time sounded like someone is hammering nails into a piece of metal, and I think they were also one of the last to go with fluid drive bearings. I'd say it's... well, nothing is impossible, but it's at least _improbable_ that, if HDD noise is the factor, a WD would be better in that aspect.
Sadly, yes, I didn't make that up. For example, at a quick googling: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/aopenax4btube/
Well, yes, that's just the thing: loyalty was never supposed to be a one way street. It always cut both ways, and was _supposed_ to cut both ways.
E.g., a medieval vassal had an obligation to be loyal to his liege-lord, _but_ conversely the liege had a formal obligation to defend his vassal to the full extent of his possibilities too. E.g., a medieval knight was supposed to be loyal to his lord even in the face of death, but conversely he was assured of employment until death. You could take a knights land for treason or such, but otherwise you couldn't go "you're fired. I found a turk who'll do your job for less land." E.g., heck, even the serfs, in exchange for that being formally tied to their lord, could expect the lord's protection. (Though how seriously some lords took that obligation, that's a whole other story.) That's how the whole manorial system was formed in the wake of the crash of the Roman Empire. Etc.
So it's kinda funny to see people nowadays trying to turn it into a one ways street. See, you have a duty to be loyal to us, but we have a duty to not give a damn about you. It never worked that way, and it wasn't supposed to work that way.
Which is why I say they should choose which they want. Not both. Either it's all-out capitalism, they treat you like a replaceable commodity, but then accept that equally the theory is that they're a replaceable commodity too. Or the demand unconditional until-death-do-us-part loyalty, but then they're supposed to provide exactly the same loyalty in return.
I'm not even saying which they should use. Either could be argued for or against, and whole economic theories and apologies have been written about both. Pick one. I may disagree with one or the other on a theoretical level, but I can respect someone who actually is honest in picking one and living by what he/she preaches. Right or wrong, at least it's living by one's principles. I can respect that.
And, yes, just to agree with you some more, it does seem pretty clear which they chose. And they're just getting the other side of the coin they chose. The least they could do is stop moaning about it.
Ah, the kinds of things that "audiophiles" claim...
Probably the funniest was one on the HardwareCentral forum, which insisted that MP3's sound differently off different hard drives, and of course his superior ear can easily tell the difference between a Maxtor and a Seagate. He actually went into a funny (in a village idiot kind of way) theory about how it's recorded magnetically like on cassettes, and we all know how different magnetic coatings (e.g., iron oxide vs chromium oxide) in cassettes behaved differently in different frequency ranges. So it stood to (his warped lack of) reason that the same would happen to hard drives. Some would have better bass, some would have a greater dynamic range, etc.
Sad to say, no amount of explaining that a 1 is a 1 is a 1 on a hard drive and the MP3 read will be identical on any brand, made any difference. He was sure that that's nonsense, the magnetic coating of a HDD platter has no reason to behave differently than that of a cassette, and most importantly he had convinced himself that he can hear the differences. (Without a double-blind test, though. Funny how many "audiophiles" resent those three words.)
Also in the funny stupidity category, I submit to you such gems as:
- $1000+ power cables, and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- specially-tuned wooden volume knobs (no, seriously), and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- audiophile motherboards with one vacuum tube at the end of an otherwise 100% digital chain, and again people swearing that their MP3's sound closer to the original with that (never mind that it's really just adding the tube's own soft-clipping kind and harmonics, to those that the digital chain already introduced),
Etc, etc, etc.
It's just the emperor's new clothes story. Except the original story got it wrong. If you tell someone that only some kind of superior beings can see those clothes, or hear the subtle sound differences, they'll actually convince themselves that they really see or hear that. They won't fake it, they'll actually be convinced that if they squint just right, they kinda see the fabulous clothes on the emperor.
And a kid shouting "the emperor is naked", actually won't make any difference. That's actually what they want to hear. Being better is relative. You have to be better than _someone_. For you to be better, someone else has to be worse. So once they got it into their head that they must be one of the geniuses that see the clothes, other people shouting "The emperor is naked!" just provides ample "proof" that yup, others aren't that good.
In fact, here's an even more depressing parting thought: the more blatantly absurd and provably wrong something is, the more vehemently its advocates will defend it.
Before I get started: I actually quite like the space program, and I do think that some advances were made for it. But the "it created jobs!!!" argument is IMHO still a fallacy.
There's a more subtle version or relative of the broken window there. The fallacy is assuming that those jobs wouldn't have been created by someone else, for another purpose.
The thing is, since we've been Keynesian all along, all the governments have known about the Phillips curve too. In fact, applied it.
The short and skinny is that there's an interdependency between inflation and unemployment. So for more than half a century what all governments did was try to stay at a point of their choosing on that curve. That's the reason the Federal Reserve tries to keep inflation at a given point, for example. Because too much inflation is bad by itself, but too little creates unemployment.
So in doing so, it fixes the employment where it wants it too.
Basically if those jobs hadn't been created by the space program, then they would have been created somewhere else. Not the same jobs, mind you, but a roughly equal number anyway.
The even more insidious part of the "but it created jobs!!!" sophistry is that it tries to imply that something was gained where nothing would have been created instead otherwise. People already nod and imagine that all the things those people achieved in those jobs, are surely better than nothing at all, because they wouldn't even be employed without a space program. Which just isn't so. Those people would have been employed, and would have produced _something_ in all this time, with or without a space program. Each job there, came at the expense of exactly one job somewhere else. Every 8 hours day spent reviewing why the shuttle's heat tiles broke, are 8 hours that weren't spent (by that guy or someone else) on some other project.
A point could still be made whether we benefited more from those jobs, than from the alternate history version without a space program. Unfortunately, none of us knows what would have really happened in an alternate history. Maybe all those jobs would have been cabbie and McDonalds jobs instead. In that case, sure, we're better off with them working (directly or indirectly) for NASA instead. But at least theoretically it's equally possible that they would have worked on some better project instead. Maybe in that parallel universe without a space program, all those smart people worked on fusion power instead and now have cheap energy everywhere and a bunch of innovative electronics trickled to other domains from _that_ research. We don't know.