I agree that the alternatives never delivered on their promises. That, more than anything else, is why we still use x86. The problem for the alternatives has always been that the liabilities of the x86 design were never as bad as people made them out to be. Certainly the x86 went sideways with the 286, but it returned to sanity again with the 386 and most of those worthless 286 protection modes are just a bit of wasted die area in the microcode array which gets smaller and smaller with each new shrink.
The old story "make is easy for the compilers" is vastly overstated. Modern compilers schedule non-orthogonal register sets extremely well. What is hard for the compilers is crazy amounts of loop unrolling involving asynchronous memory access patterns. Out-of-order execution actually makes life a lot *easier* for the compilers than more rigid approaches such as Itanium or Cell at the cost of extra heat production. Now that we are hitting the thermal wall, maybe it's time for the compilers to finally earn their keep. I've never understood the sentiment of making it easy for the compiler as opposed to, say, writing a very good compiler that implements the best algorithm available.
The key is to choose an aggressive target for what the compiler can reasonably contribute, and then ensure that the compiler achieves that target in a good way. Some of the VLIW efforts stand out in my mind as shining examples of asking the compiler to do a little more than could reasonably be expected. OTOH, I see no reason to simplify an instruction set to the point where a college student could implement the register scheduling algorithm over a long weekend.
Yes, a few things could have been done far better from the outset, such as a more uniform instruction length (though not necessarily as regimented as ARM), a register based floating point unit, and a treatment of the flag register with fewer partial updates. But really, how much else of what was conceived in the early eighties doesn't have greater flaws? We still use email, barely.
The time for debate over instruction sets has long passed. The future debate concerns the integration of heterogenous cores such as the IBM Cell and the future spawn of the AMD/ATI assimilation. I have no doubt someone is out there right now inventing an interconnect everyone will be wistfully lamenting twenty years from now. If only we had known and done something about it (other than this).
After twenty years, it's time to face the music: x86 is more ugly than bad.
Why do we wish to conduct this experiment? The money can't be raised by better alternatives? Has that been demonstrated? Will the sum of money exceed the invisible cost of the many Wikipedia participants worrying about the outcome? How do you propose to measure this? What about the effort invested in combatting the general perception sure to ensue from this that Wikipedia is all about the revenue stream? Or all the energy wasted arguing about the money raised should later be spent (surely that never causes grief in human affairs) or the fracturing of the community if the process goes sour? The thing I hate most about money is the wake of absurdist reductionism that inevitably follows along in the wake. It's preposterous to suggest that a trial to see how much effect placing advertisements on pages affects the rate at which those pages are edited accounts for more than the first half coefficient in the larger equation whose linearity and rate of convergence remain unknown.
Whatever it is used for it will represent money being spent on useful projects that would not otherwise take place or have money spent on them.
Ah yes, in the real world, there is this thing called the money tree, where a dollar earned by Wikipedia can also be spent as if Wikipedia had not earned it, so that every dollar spent by Wikipedia was in effect raked up fresh off the money lawn.
Money is not an intrinsic good, and not even economists delude themselves into thinking it is. There is no certainty whatsoever that the Wikimedia Foundation would prove to be any good at directing largish sums of money to beneficial causes. If they put up many millions of dollars to hire a bunch of really smart people who end up failing at the task put forward (consider all the good intentions of the IMF and the WHO or the rampant corruption of the IOC), then that represents an opportunity cost in the caliber of work those same individuals might have produced employed at better objectives.
Nor is it clear that if the Wikipedia Foundation reconfigured itself with money-righteous talent, that it wouldn't lose the magic that has brought it this far. Finally, it has never been demonstrated that advertising itself is not intrinsically a negative sum game, driving environmentally destructive consumption in a global orgy of trash the commons. But hey, if you show me your solution to the Nash equations convering all actions of all participants and the flow of all dollars, I could be persuaded that money is a socially progressive force--if that is what the equations decree.
I wasn't able to spot anywhere in the pictures the giant elastic band used to start this sucker. Exactly how does that work? Or does all fourteen crew assemble along the top and give a giant heave to fourteen lawn-mower pull cords in perfect unison?
For all those people worried about the fuel consumption level, a Wikipedia page states that a container ship can carry as much as $300 million in cargo. In our highly disposable society, you'd need to depreciate that figure by $100 million in the first year post-production.
Loaded to capacity, the goods conveyed could be depreciating on the open market by as much as $34,000 per hour in transit. $34,000/hour buys a lot of giddy-up.
I looked into this several years ago and concluded that the value in the protocol was forcing the subject to participate in an inquisition from a disadvantaged position. Beyond the intimidation factor of the equipment itself and the restrained physical posture, what I consider a more potent form of intimidation, is requiring the subject to answer in restricted forms, such as demanding "yes" / "no" responses. If you sit there and say "that's a really dumb-ass question" or "that's the third time you've asked the same dumb-ass question already" you end up graded as belligerent and non-compliant.
From what I've learned the electrodes don't bother me. However, I would never voluntarily submit to an interrogation protocol where the allowable answer forms excluded looking the interrogator straight in the eye and challenging a dumb question for what it is.
There is nothing inherent about GPGPU technology that's superior to Cell. They spring from a common origin. GPGPU is more application specific than Cell, which is why it outperforms Cell on select kernels. The 90nm Cell is rather crappy for supercomputing applications. It was configured for drooling toy boys. The 65nm Cell will be far better suited for the supercomputing niche, and I anticipate that the Cell architecture won't fully come into its own until the 45nm shrink. Remember, the first Pentium 60 was awful. It couldn't even beat a 486/100 for most purposes. Key for supercomputing is joules/flop and bandwidth management and those were both Cell design criteria right from the outset. Forward-looking archictures tend to enter this world underwhelming. Whether they grow into their promise is another matter. Cue Itanium.
What we can say for certain here is that there needs to be some kind of software convergence for the programming techniques required to exploit Cell and GPGPU style architectures, or neither goes much beyond posting impossible numbers in the quarter-mile tracker pull.
The supercomputing space differs from the gaming space: you don't just purchase Unreal engine from someone else who solved all the hard problems already. At the end of the day, the platform has to become more general than that, and in that respect Cell has a head start laying the foundation (not presently much loved). Much of the Cell technology remains hidden from view in its PS3 incarnation. There's a lot of information about the design of the EIB that IBM has not published yet, especially as it pertains to multi-processing configurations.
One needs to be a bit smarter than looking at a couple of outrageously fast kernels running on a GPGPU to draw conclusions. Otherwise, you come across like that dweeb from ZDnet. How about we dump the moderation system, and just plaster his face beside every slashdot comment that sounds like it was posted between two sips of eggnog: he can become the poster child of slashdot unthink, with more likenesses here than Mao or Stalin. Do you think we could get him to pose for "off topic" as well?
I'm sure SEO blackhats and right wing organisations are foaming at the mouth with excitement at this wonderful Christmas announcement.
The one thing we all learned post 9/11 is how it can be to tell the difference between foam and saliva. I'm coming to the opinion that foam is a just a glandular camoflage used to disguise malice as outrage.
Excellent. Just what we need, more hermetic negativism designed to throw the baby out with the bath water so that the earth can continue to spin on its present axis.
war on spam = Iraq war on botnets = Afghanistan
While we're at it, let's do one for the war on drugs and the war on terror for good measure. Let's do one for poverty in Africa, and dementia in the elderly. Let's do one for hieroglyphics, the alphabet, the digital number system, and man-made fire. Think of the untold failures and aggravation caused to the recidivists and disbelievers that could been spared with just a little more foresight and a handy questionairre.
Ya, sure, it might be if AMD wasn't charging more for this part than a spec-identical laptop equivalent (likely to be the same core bonded out to a different package). How many of these is AMD selling at this price point for this application? At present, only slightly more than the cold-fusion powered equivalent they accidentally left out of their last product catalog.
What is it with people thinking that because a manufacturer slaps a part number on a spec. sheet that these parts are automatically worthy targets of discussion/salivation? How many stupid benchmarks have I had to endure which included some hand-crafted astrobuck Intel part with a 300W TDP just to prove that, by some spare-no-fiberglass Formula One cost-benefit conceit, that Intel *still* had a bigger Jones?
I'm sure that the dunce cap originated to spare unwary villagers or strangers from burning blood over the guy who seems not to know how to avoid giving offense. They use a similar system in prisons with the psycho jersey. Well, the AMD 90nm SFF wears the silly cap, while almost every version of the Pentium 4 EE would be wearing the psycho jersey. If only we could make it stick to the point where this kind of sentiment was averted in the first place.
It some hit some kind of adolescent nerve that the big boys are holding back on the good stuff. We know the good stuff is out there, we can never get any. Why the male brain so slow to clue into the relationship between hot and high maintenance?
As these reviews go, this one was tolerable. I got quite annoyed at the point where they are (finally) computing watt-seconds (ever heard of my good friend Joules?) but then fail to note that major workloads, such as the ever-obscure gaming niche, are not task bound workloads with completion time based on rendering X number of frames. However, if I was running a CPU-bound web host dishing out complex pages rendered in PHP, I'd be looking at that number very closely. How many other scenarios are there were faster compute doesn't end up implying more idle? Searching for ET? I thought so.
Perhaps some of us need to add a line to our license blurb at the top of the source file (not the license itself) stating that: "The author of this code stands behind his/her work and will immediately publish any defect reported in this code" while others can place the line "The author of this code does *not* stand behind his/her work and will *not* publish any defect reported until a very long time after a solution is found, if the code can be fixed at all."
Have you ever heard of bait and switch? It's a deeply engrained trait in the human species. Under one set of conditions, such as not having much credibility to begin with, an organization will work very hard to establish the reputation of a product line. Then under another set of conditions--major stakeholders change chairs, new management team recruited, under a short-term cash-out-now incentive structure--all the expensive magic that made the original product good is discarded, and the newly watered down version of the reputable product continues to be marketed with no mention that it was changed at all.
Do you need that again in a short sentence? Brands suck. The brand is not the product.
I used to buy a lot of bottled pasta sauce under the Classico brand. No added corn sugar. Tasted like food. The tomatoes tasted like they were delivered to the factory on a flat-bed truck in the kinds of crates they picture on the front of the bottle. Then the situation turned evil. Some new brand manager decided to move the brand upscale. The best flavour of all, the plain onion and garlic, was replaced with a roast garlic that tasted like crap. Prices went up. The tomatoes began to take on the appearance of a puree. Now it is impossible to open a jar without thinking the tomatoes were delivered to the factory in a tanker trunk. The body of the sauce now conveys the impression "ultrasonically homogenized". All the bottles have fancier flavours and labels than ever before, and the price is higher for an inferior product.
This has nothing to do with experts whatsoever, and every to do with the human necessity of people needed to make themselves look good (e.g. in their role as the marketing director) at the expense of end result.
Brands exist to convey the message that you're still getting the good stuff long after the good stuff has taking the building with it, and the only left is debasement.
I've been involved in more threads than I wish to recall slinging mud at C++ and there is always a strong representation from the crowd who aren't willing to invest the time to understand the object they are criticizing. The criticism fundamentally boils down to: why should a language force me to think?
The fact of the matter is that the conceptual challenge of writing pointer-correct code is isomorphic to other forms of resource-correctness which one must still confront in whatever saintly language one employs. When I worked with microcontrollers (fairly hefty ones), in actual practice I never lost any sleep over pointer correctness. However, I did sweat bullets over real-time response in my nested interrupt handlers. Pointers were small potatoes compared to fundamental challenges posed by the design of the hardware we employed. A few small changes to the hardware design would have saved enormous challenges in the software layer. No language would have spared me that challenge.
Certainly overloading can be abused. Has it ever caused me a problem? Never. Excess delegation in an object-oriented framework? Nightmares.
Another post blames C++ for having an accretion-based design process. Oh, that stings. It was an explicit design approach to gain real-world understanding of one feature before designing the next. The two areas where the C++ design process got ahead of itself were multiple inheritance and templates. The former Stroustrup has confessed was perhaps a misguided priority. The later was caused by discovering that templates were an exceptionally fertile mechanism very late in the standardization process. C++ templates evaluate at compile time as a pure functional language. What makes templates difficult is that they are too much like other languages (e.g. Haskell) that the same people go around praising.
If one fully understands the cascade of implications of the original decision to take a relatively hard line on backwards compatibility with C, there isn't much in C++ that strikes me as "could have been vastly better". OTOH, I've come to the opinion that for someone who lacks that deep historical perspective, the overhead involved in mastering all the syntactic quirks that stemmed from that root is excessive. I don't regard C++ as a language that justifies the learning curve unless the person is suited to the kind of challenge involved in writing a real-time correct interrupt handler on a random piece of hardware that wasn't necessarily designed to make this easy.
Just the other day I commented out a section of PHP code in website skin (a language I use irregularly) to roughly this effect:
somefile.php executed regardless and emitted an HTML comment which closed my open comment in the first line above, leaving my closing comment exposed in the rendered document. Sigh.
At the end of the day, I find it extremely obnoxious the sentiment that some kind of pure language design can save us from this misery. There is no salvation to be found among programmers who brag mostly about thinking less.
The idea of having a national blacklist sends shivers down my spine. I'm a pessimist, I believe that any form of censorship will eventually be abused despite it's good intentions."
All eventualists believe this, because, being eventualists, they unable to not project their eventualism on the behaviours of others. Amazingly, there are creatures in this world who thrive on sloped landscapes without sliding inevitably down hill--at least not until they are dragged into the barren crag below by all the eventualists around them pointing fingers at each other.
The original studies are not so narrow in scope as you suggest. It's just the one selected for publication after all the negative results are burned that comes across as narrow.
Tom Peters did not admit to "faking the data" in any substantive way. He poked a sharp pin into self-importance of business consulting (and by implication their purportedly yet rarely-in-practice objective data-driven metholodogy) that the editor of Fast Company then spun for cheap thrills and effect. What we end up with here, at the end of the day, is a world where self-important people become to afraid to poke fun at their own self-importance, for fear that their remarks will become an eggregiously misconstrued sound-bite spun for cheap thrills and effect to pawn a second-rate parody twenty years later. We all snigger at this revelation, before heading off to the pub to complain about stuffed-shirts acting like stuffed-shirts, in a climate we ourselves have created through our ill-considered sniggers where it is too dangerous for a stuffed-shirt to risk the slightest statement of self-mockery. I have seen the enemy, and he is us.
[Clubs] are requiring patrons to give up their drivers licenses for a swipe through a card reader.
This sentence immediately brought to mind this article, We're all big babies which was listed at Aldaily not long ago, a second-class screed which is true enough nonetheless. We're such big babies that we can't postpone our gratification long enough to say no to any request no matter how intrusive. This sentiment has almost entered the food supply, as we see from the sentence above.
Clubs are not requiring patrons to give up their drivers licenses. That would be illegal. Clubs are requiring patrons to give up their drivers licenses as a condition of entry which was left unstated as if perhaps impossible. Big difference. The prospective patron, one who is not afflicted with the prevailing spirit of cultural infantilism, can say "not in this lifetime", turn around, and leave.
The same applies to DRM-afflicted media. Rights or gratification. Adult or baby. Choose.
Actually, in democratic society, guilt is determined by a court of law. By the second instance that the word criminal trips lovingly off your tongue, he's just an alleged miscreant who has directly harmed no person or property, who's sin against society is perhaps 50% greater than anyone who leaves a public restroom without washing their hands. On the other side of the coin, police on campus are permanently outnumbered by an I-think-I'm-clever hormone-fueled demongraphic just itching to stick it to authority. In the heat of the moment, sometimes the culturally engrained "show no sign of weakness" is carried an order of magnitude too far. Either way, the parent post displays no greater glee than making a bad situation worse, which is where the escalation begins in the first place.
Haven't we had enough already of the next great thing? The only point I see that we're all in agreement over is that Web >1.0 provides a lousy pipe for bubble blowing. From where I sit, that what we have now is crappy-enough-to-be-hype-resistant is more of an advantage than a liability. Whatever straw poll was taken where we all agreed, I was not in attendance.
The fundamental problem here is the credit reporting system itself. I suppose after being subjected to the education system for twelve to twenty years or so, that learned helplessness with respect to the contents of a report card or GPA is deeply engrained.
The contents of the average credit report amount to unsubstantiated slander. It's tremendously easy for smudges to accumulate, with little effective recourse. In any other life circumstance, the same poor, fragmentary, and unsubstantiated quality of information about a person's status and character would be open to action as libelous.
I think the credit reporting agencies should be made libel for reporting negative information about any person as a result of criminal credential fraud. Even our terminology is wrong: we are talking about the theft of credentials not personal identity. An identity can't be stolen. Only the credentials are subject to third party manipulation. The institutions who choose to accept credentials as evidence of an identity should be prepared to bear the cost of their own mistakes.
And the worst of it is that our existing credentials are designed by baboons. It's not humanly possible to protect credentials you hand to every teenage till monkey five times a day.
We all know the truism that when you hear one person criticize another, it says as much about the person making the criticism as it does about the person being criticized. Yet the credit reporting agencies are somehow given a free pass which I've never understood. Might it be that a bad credit report reflects bad credit reporting practice? I guess we're so overwhelmed by our powerlessness in that relationship (my god, even more powerful than Miss Wormwood) that you rarely hear it suggested that perhaps the credit agencies themselves are no better than ICANN or VeriSign.
Why do we give credence to what Joe-average expects nano to convey? The fact of the matter is that there is a huge domain of biological phenomena operating at the micro scale, and another huge domain of physical chemistry operating at the nano scale, neither of which should evoke gasps of "Oh, cool!"
It's a mugs game to invest energy in controlling the impressions/reactions of the non-thinking masses. Why was nano cool in the first place? Because you could eat a small machine? Oh, cool.
No matter how much I dislike the opposing camp, I try to listen for any germ of sanity as much as I can. Not wise to become glib about the historical weakness of your foe. From time to time, history rewrites itself. The road to oblivion is paved with those who laughed longest. On the other hand, of all the idiotic spokesmanship that comes out of Microsoft, Allchin is far and away the reigning champ of two-faced self-interest. I flipped the bozo-bit on Allchin a very long time ago. That said, it's not impossible to architect a software system to a fairly high default security level out of the box, sans firewire. Bear in mind this is the *first time* in Microsoft's corporate history that they have seriously bent themselves toward the task. However, the burden of their prior practice can not be overstated, so we are looking several service patches into the future, at least, before this initiative consolodates, for whatever it's ultimately worth.
Let's pause to reflect a moment on our fallen comrades who laughed longest:
Bloat: Microsoft operating systems will expand (forever) as a fast as disk storage technology.
Blue screen: Microsoft will never produce an OS that doesn't blue screen daily.
A number of posters have mentioned the geographic factor, but I didn't see any comments about the leapfrog factor: first movers can end up looking fairly lame toward the end of an infrastructure cycle. All the same, Canada and the US entered into the internet era at the same time facing mostly the same geographic challenges, and so far as I'm aware, Canadian cities have come out ahead on the whole.
I guess the main difference is that our Canadian monopolies form an orderly, bovine progression to the feed bucket, while American monopolies body-slam their way up to the porker trough.
This all begs the question: what is the psychology behind the three or four second user patience threshhold? My vote is that after half a dozen four second waits, the distract-me-from-life-by-buying-more-crap circuit begins to lose its grip, and a wee murmur of "what the heck am I doing wasting my life on this garbage" penentrates the dim folds of consciousness. This is not a case of humans engaged in rational activity. These are just shopaholics regulating their emotional state the same way most true geeks regulate their mental electrolytes through beverage consumption. You could do the same study on the coffee maker at work: fresh brew delay vs oh-screw-it-Starbucks-needs-my-money-more-than-I-d o.
I want to be able to cite the information in the Wikipedia, and that requires authors and accurate attribution.
I think you are suffering from a simmering all things to all people syndrome. The world already has a enormous body of emminently-citable published work amassed over a period of centuries. Should Wikipedia take on the mandate to refactor the whole of human knowledge? That doesn't sound prudent to me.
What the world lacked was an instant-gratification synopsis to the existing body of world knowledge. I don't think credentialism is required to deliver in that niche, and I would be more inclined to suspect that credentialism is toxic rather than complementary to what Wikipedia is trying to achieve.
I've given some thought to the origins of credentialism in human culture. In part, credentialism was a response to bandwidth constraits: rather than attempt to communication the entire process engendering the final result, only the final result is put forward, but with a seal-of-approval from the credentialed sect which serves to state this spinach is of good and proper origins.
Now that we have the technical instrument to convey all the history, all the time, to all the people, why would we fall back on credentialism again? Because we're used to it? Because those who invested in their credentials are determined to maximize their return-on-investment? At what point do those holding credentials work more in the sake of perpetuating their own interests than the interests of society at large?
I've always preferred a good question to a good answer. My feeling is that the Wikipedia is presently at the stage of posing some good questions. One of those questions concerns trust gradients. In the whole of the animal kingdom, if a creature comes across something that might possibly be edible, the creature first considers whether to put it in its mouth (usually by means of the instantaneous smell test).
Why is it that we presume the average person is incapable of conducting a simple smell test when encountering information on the Wikipedia? I think it stems from the pre-internet educational culture where everything written on the blackboard was reflexively ingested and regurgitated on demand.
For the post-internet generation I suspect this bias will prove far less strong. It's not possible (that I can fathom) to grow up from the age of primary school in the internet generation and not learn that the internet is full of information you don't put directly into your mouth without first a moment of thought. Wouldn't it be nice if this ultimately extended to the evening news (such as it survives)? Of any information source out there, it strikes me that the evening news deserves the most scrutiny of all.
The average Wikipedia article introduces the entire slate of keywords required to plumb google of 90% of the material available on the internet concerning the topic in question (the other 10% requires serious google-fu), plus the whole of the article's creation history, plus all the online debate about the merits of one account over another. And search will only improve over time.
I'm coming to the rather strong position that credibility is (or ought to be) an active process in the mind of the reader than a dull and comforting vestige in the identities of the authors. Before Wikipedia, this wasn't a practical approach, so what we are dealing with here concerning credentialism is proof by incumbency rather than passing any sensible smell test.
Big tobacco managed to delay the inevitable for several decades waging a war of credentialist propoganda. There's no level on the trust pyramid where you don't have to trust your nose and we shouldn't be conveying blind faith at any level of the process.
I can think of lots of stuff which would realistically count towards intelligence, but "compress knowledge" is the kind of thing that just sounds unbelievably stupid.
Apparently, sounds deceive. You might want to practice your hearing. A good start would be subtracting out the sound of your own voice droning on at the drop of a pin about subjects you haven't made an effort to fully appreciate.
Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity is the deepest theory going about the inter-relationship between compression and prediction. There used to be a great and highly readable account of omega and the math surrounding omega available online by Chaitin, but he appears to have removed the online version I used to enjoy and perhaps recycled it as a book.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the alternatives never delivered on their promises. That, more than anything else, is why we still use x86. The problem for the alternatives has always been that the liabilities of the x86 design were never as bad as people made them out to be. Certainly the x86 went sideways with the 286, but it returned to sanity again with the 386 and most of those worthless 286 protection modes are just a bit of wasted die area in the microcode array which gets smaller and smaller with each new shrink.
The old story "make is easy for the compilers" is vastly overstated. Modern compilers schedule non-orthogonal register sets extremely well. What is hard for the compilers is crazy amounts of loop unrolling involving asynchronous memory access patterns. Out-of-order execution actually makes life a lot *easier* for the compilers than more rigid approaches such as Itanium or Cell at the cost of extra heat production. Now that we are hitting the thermal wall, maybe it's time for the compilers to finally earn their keep. I've never understood the sentiment of making it easy for the compiler as opposed to, say, writing a very good compiler that implements the best algorithm available.
The key is to choose an aggressive target for what the compiler can reasonably contribute, and then ensure that the compiler achieves that target in a good way. Some of the VLIW efforts stand out in my mind as shining examples of asking the compiler to do a little more than could reasonably be expected. OTOH, I see no reason to simplify an instruction set to the point where a college student could implement the register scheduling algorithm over a long weekend.
Yes, a few things could have been done far better from the outset, such as a more uniform instruction length (though not necessarily as regimented as ARM), a register based floating point unit, and a treatment of the flag register with fewer partial updates. But really, how much else of what was conceived in the early eighties doesn't have greater flaws? We still use email, barely.
The time for debate over instruction sets has long passed. The future debate concerns the integration of heterogenous cores such as the IBM Cell and the future spawn of the AMD/ATI assimilation. I have no doubt someone is out there right now inventing an interconnect everyone will be wistfully lamenting twenty years from now. If only we had known and done something about it (other than this).
After twenty years, it's time to face the music: x86 is more ugly than bad.
Why do we wish to conduct this experiment? The money can't be raised by better alternatives? Has that been demonstrated? Will the sum of money exceed the invisible cost of the many Wikipedia participants worrying about the outcome? How do you propose to measure this? What about the effort invested in combatting the general perception sure to ensue from this that Wikipedia is all about the revenue stream? Or all the energy wasted arguing about the money raised should later be spent (surely that never causes grief in human affairs) or the fracturing of the community if the process goes sour? The thing I hate most about money is the wake of absurdist reductionism that inevitably follows along in the wake. It's preposterous to suggest that a trial to see how much effect placing advertisements on pages affects the rate at which those pages are edited accounts for more than the first half coefficient in the larger equation whose linearity and rate of convergence remain unknown.
Whatever it is used for it will represent money being spent on useful projects that would not otherwise take place or have money spent on them.
Ah yes, in the real world, there is this thing called the money tree, where a dollar earned by Wikipedia can also be spent as if Wikipedia had not earned it, so that every dollar spent by Wikipedia was in effect raked up fresh off the money lawn.
Money is not an intrinsic good, and not even economists delude themselves into thinking it is. There is no certainty whatsoever that the Wikimedia Foundation would prove to be any good at directing largish sums of money to beneficial causes. If they put up many millions of dollars to hire a bunch of really smart people who end up failing at the task put forward (consider all the good intentions of the IMF and the WHO or the rampant corruption of the IOC), then that represents an opportunity cost in the caliber of work those same individuals might have produced employed at better objectives.
Nor is it clear that if the Wikipedia Foundation reconfigured itself with money-righteous talent, that it wouldn't lose the magic that has brought it this far. Finally, it has never been demonstrated that advertising itself is not intrinsically a negative sum game, driving environmentally destructive consumption in a global orgy of trash the commons. But hey, if you show me your solution to the Nash equations convering all actions of all participants and the flow of all dollars, I could be persuaded that money is a socially progressive force--if that is what the equations decree.
I wasn't able to spot anywhere in the pictures the giant elastic band used to start this sucker. Exactly how does that work? Or does all fourteen crew assemble along the top and give a giant heave to fourteen lawn-mower pull cords in perfect unison?
+ million+times+hours%2Fyear
For all those people worried about the fuel consumption level, a Wikipedia page states that a container ship can carry as much as $300 million in cargo. In our highly disposable society, you'd need to depreciate that figure by $100 million in the first year post-production.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=three+hundred
Loaded to capacity, the goods conveyed could be depreciating on the open market by as much as $34,000 per hour in transit. $34,000/hour buys a lot of giddy-up.
I looked into this several years ago and concluded that the value in the protocol was forcing the subject to participate in an inquisition from a disadvantaged position. Beyond the intimidation factor of the equipment itself and the restrained physical posture, what I consider a more potent form of intimidation, is requiring the subject to answer in restricted forms, such as demanding "yes" / "no" responses. If you sit there and say "that's a really dumb-ass question" or "that's the third time you've asked the same dumb-ass question already" you end up graded as belligerent and non-compliant.
From what I've learned the electrodes don't bother me. However, I would never voluntarily submit to an interrogation protocol where the allowable answer forms excluded looking the interrogator straight in the eye and challenging a dumb question for what it is.
There is nothing inherent about GPGPU technology that's superior to Cell. They spring from a common origin. GPGPU is more application specific than Cell, which is why it outperforms Cell on select kernels. The 90nm Cell is rather crappy for supercomputing applications. It was configured for drooling toy boys. The 65nm Cell will be far better suited for the supercomputing niche, and I anticipate that the Cell architecture won't fully come into its own until the 45nm shrink. Remember, the first Pentium 60 was awful. It couldn't even beat a 486/100 for most purposes. Key for supercomputing is joules/flop and bandwidth management and those were both Cell design criteria right from the outset. Forward-looking archictures tend to enter this world underwhelming. Whether they grow into their promise is another matter. Cue Itanium.
What we can say for certain here is that there needs to be some kind of software convergence for the programming techniques required to exploit Cell and GPGPU style architectures, or neither goes much beyond posting impossible numbers in the quarter-mile tracker pull.
The supercomputing space differs from the gaming space: you don't just purchase Unreal engine from someone else who solved all the hard problems already. At the end of the day, the platform has to become more general than that, and in that respect Cell has a head start laying the foundation (not presently much loved). Much of the Cell technology remains hidden from view in its PS3 incarnation. There's a lot of information about the design of the EIB that IBM has not published yet, especially as it pertains to multi-processing configurations.
One needs to be a bit smarter than looking at a couple of outrageously fast kernels running on a GPGPU to draw conclusions. Otherwise, you come across like that dweeb from ZDnet. How about we dump the moderation system, and just plaster his face beside every slashdot comment that sounds like it was posted between two sips of eggnog: he can become the poster child of slashdot unthink, with more likenesses here than Mao or Stalin. Do you think we could get him to pose for "off topic" as well?
I'm sure SEO blackhats and right wing organisations are foaming at the mouth with excitement at this wonderful Christmas announcement.
The one thing we all learned post 9/11 is how it can be to tell the difference between foam and saliva. I'm coming to the opinion that foam is a just a glandular camoflage used to disguise malice as outrage.
Excellent. Just what we need, more hermetic negativism designed to throw the baby out with the bath water so that the earth can continue to spin on its present axis.
war on spam = Iraq
war on botnets = Afghanistan
While we're at it, let's do one for the war on drugs and the war on terror for good measure. Let's do one for poverty in Africa, and dementia in the elderly. Let's do one for hieroglyphics, the alphabet, the digital number system, and man-made fire. Think of the untold failures and aggravation caused to the recidivists and disbelievers that could been spared with just a little more foresight and a handy questionairre.
Ya, sure, it might be if AMD wasn't charging more for this part than a spec-identical laptop equivalent (likely to be the same core bonded out to a different package). How many of these is AMD selling at this price point for this application? At present, only slightly more than the cold-fusion powered equivalent they accidentally left out of their last product catalog.
What is it with people thinking that because a manufacturer slaps a part number on a spec. sheet that these parts are automatically worthy targets of discussion/salivation? How many stupid benchmarks have I had to endure which included some hand-crafted astrobuck Intel part with a 300W TDP just to prove that, by some spare-no-fiberglass Formula One cost-benefit conceit, that Intel *still* had a bigger Jones?
I'm sure that the dunce cap originated to spare unwary villagers or strangers from burning blood over the guy who seems not to know how to avoid giving offense. They use a similar system in prisons with the psycho jersey. Well, the AMD 90nm SFF wears the silly cap, while almost every version of the Pentium 4 EE would be wearing the psycho jersey. If only we could make it stick to the point where this kind of sentiment was averted in the first place.
It some hit some kind of adolescent nerve that the big boys are holding back on the good stuff. We know the good stuff is out there, we can never get any. Why the male brain so slow to clue into the relationship between hot and high maintenance?
As these reviews go, this one was tolerable. I got quite annoyed at the point where they are (finally) computing watt-seconds (ever heard of my good friend Joules?) but then fail to note that major workloads, such as the ever-obscure gaming niche, are not task bound workloads with completion time based on rendering X number of frames. However, if I was running a CPU-bound web host dishing out complex pages rendered in PHP, I'd be looking at that number very closely. How many other scenarios are there were faster compute doesn't end up implying more idle? Searching for ET? I thought so.
Perhaps some of us need to add a line to our license blurb at the top of the source file (not the license itself) stating that: "The author of this code stands behind his/her work and will immediately publish any defect reported in this code" while others can place the line "The author of this code does *not* stand behind his/her work and will *not* publish any defect reported until a very long time after a solution is found, if the code can be fixed at all."
Have you ever heard of bait and switch? It's a deeply engrained trait in the human species. Under one set of conditions, such as not having much credibility to begin with, an organization will work very hard to establish the reputation of a product line. Then under another set of conditions--major stakeholders change chairs, new management team recruited, under a short-term cash-out-now incentive structure--all the expensive magic that made the original product good is discarded, and the newly watered down version of the reputable product continues to be marketed with no mention that it was changed at all.
Do you need that again in a short sentence? Brands suck. The brand is not the product.
I used to buy a lot of bottled pasta sauce under the Classico brand. No added corn sugar. Tasted like food. The tomatoes tasted like they were delivered to the factory on a flat-bed truck in the kinds of crates they picture on the front of the bottle. Then the situation turned evil. Some new brand manager decided to move the brand upscale. The best flavour of all, the plain onion and garlic, was replaced with a roast garlic that tasted like crap. Prices went up. The tomatoes began to take on the appearance of a puree. Now it is impossible to open a jar without thinking the tomatoes were delivered to the factory in a tanker trunk. The body of the sauce now conveys the impression "ultrasonically homogenized". All the bottles have fancier flavours and labels than ever before, and the price is higher for an inferior product.
This has nothing to do with experts whatsoever, and every to do with the human necessity of people needed to make themselves look good (e.g. in their role as the marketing director) at the expense of end result.
Brands exist to convey the message that you're still getting the good stuff long after the good stuff has taking the building with it, and the only left is debasement.
I've been involved in more threads than I wish to recall slinging mud at C++ and there is always a strong representation from the crowd who aren't willing to invest the time to understand the object they are criticizing. The criticism fundamentally boils down to: why should a language force me to think?
... </markup> <?php require ("somefile.php"); ?> <markup> ... </markup>
The fact of the matter is that the conceptual challenge of writing pointer-correct code is isomorphic to other forms of resource-correctness which one must still confront in whatever saintly language one employs. When I worked with microcontrollers (fairly hefty ones), in actual practice I never lost any sleep over pointer correctness. However, I did sweat bullets over real-time response in my nested interrupt handlers. Pointers were small potatoes compared to fundamental challenges posed by the design of the hardware we employed. A few small changes to the hardware design would have saved enormous challenges in the software layer. No language would have spared me that challenge.
Certainly overloading can be abused. Has it ever caused me a problem? Never. Excess delegation in an object-oriented framework? Nightmares.
Another post blames C++ for having an accretion-based design process. Oh, that stings. It was an explicit design approach to gain real-world understanding of one feature before designing the next. The two areas where the C++ design process got ahead of itself were multiple inheritance and templates. The former Stroustrup has confessed was perhaps a misguided priority. The later was caused by discovering that templates were an exceptionally fertile mechanism very late in the standardization process. C++ templates evaluate at compile time as a pure functional language. What makes templates difficult is that they are too much like other languages (e.g. Haskell) that the same people go around praising.
If one fully understands the cascade of implications of the original decision to take a relatively hard line on backwards compatibility with C, there isn't much in C++ that strikes me as "could have been vastly better". OTOH, I've come to the opinion that for someone who lacks that deep historical perspective, the overhead involved in mastering all the syntactic quirks that stemmed from that root is excessive. I don't regard C++ as a language that justifies the learning curve unless the person is suited to the kind of challenge involved in writing a real-time correct interrupt handler on a random piece of hardware that wasn't necessarily designed to make this easy.
Just the other day I commented out a section of PHP code in website skin (a language I use irregularly) to roughly this effect:
<!--
<markup>
-->
somefile.php executed regardless and emitted an HTML comment which closed my open comment in the first line above, leaving my closing comment exposed in the rendered document. Sigh.
At the end of the day, I find it extremely obnoxious the sentiment that some kind of pure language design can save us from this misery. There is no salvation to be found among programmers who brag mostly about thinking less.
The idea of having a national blacklist sends shivers down my spine. I'm a pessimist, I believe that any form of censorship will eventually be abused despite it's good intentions."
All eventualists believe this, because, being eventualists, they unable to not project their eventualism on the behaviours of others. Amazingly, there are creatures in this world who thrive on sloped landscapes without sliding inevitably down hill--at least not until they are dragged into the barren crag below by all the eventualists around them pointing fingers at each other.
The original studies are not so narrow in scope as you suggest. It's just the one selected for publication after all the negative results are burned that comes across as narrow.
Tom Peters did not admit to "faking the data" in any substantive way. He poked a sharp pin into self-importance of business consulting (and by implication their purportedly yet rarely-in-practice objective data-driven metholodogy) that the editor of Fast Company then spun for cheap thrills and effect. What we end up with here, at the end of the day, is a world where self-important people become to afraid to poke fun at their own self-importance, for fear that their remarks will become an eggregiously misconstrued sound-bite spun for cheap thrills and effect to pawn a second-rate parody twenty years later. We all snigger at this revelation, before heading off to the pub to complain about stuffed-shirts acting like stuffed-shirts, in a climate we ourselves have created through our ill-considered sniggers where it is too dangerous for a stuffed-shirt to risk the slightest statement of self-mockery. I have seen the enemy, and he is us.
This sentence immediately brought to mind this article, We're all big babies which was listed at Aldaily not long ago, a second-class screed which is true enough nonetheless. We're such big babies that we can't postpone our gratification long enough to say no to any request no matter how intrusive. This sentiment has almost entered the food supply, as we see from the sentence above.
Clubs are not requiring patrons to give up their drivers licenses. That would be illegal. Clubs are requiring patrons to give up their drivers licenses as a condition of entry which was left unstated as if perhaps impossible. Big difference. The prospective patron, one who is not afflicted with the prevailing spirit of cultural infantilism, can say "not in this lifetime", turn around, and leave.
The same applies to DRM-afflicted media. Rights or gratification. Adult or baby. Choose.
Actually, in democratic society, guilt is determined by a court of law. By the second instance that the word criminal trips lovingly off your tongue, he's just an alleged miscreant who has directly harmed no person or property, who's sin against society is perhaps 50% greater than anyone who leaves a public restroom without washing their hands. On the other side of the coin, police on campus are permanently outnumbered by an I-think-I'm-clever hormone-fueled demongraphic just itching to stick it to authority. In the heat of the moment, sometimes the culturally engrained "show no sign of weakness" is carried an order of magnitude too far. Either way, the parent post displays no greater glee than making a bad situation worse, which is where the escalation begins in the first place.
Haven't we had enough already of the next great thing? The only point I see that we're all in agreement over is that Web >1.0 provides a lousy pipe for bubble blowing. From where I sit, that what we have now is crappy-enough-to-be-hype-resistant is more of an advantage than a liability. Whatever straw poll was taken where we all agreed, I was not in attendance.
The fundamental problem here is the credit reporting system itself. I suppose after being subjected to the education system for twelve to twenty years or so, that learned helplessness with respect to the contents of a report card or GPA is deeply engrained.
The contents of the average credit report amount to unsubstantiated slander. It's tremendously easy for smudges to accumulate, with little effective recourse. In any other life circumstance, the same poor, fragmentary, and unsubstantiated quality of information about a person's status and character would be open to action as libelous.
I think the credit reporting agencies should be made libel for reporting negative information about any person as a result of criminal credential fraud. Even our terminology is wrong: we are talking about the theft of credentials not personal identity. An identity can't be stolen. Only the credentials are subject to third party manipulation. The institutions who choose to accept credentials as evidence of an identity should be prepared to bear the cost of their own mistakes.
And the worst of it is that our existing credentials are designed by baboons. It's not humanly possible to protect credentials you hand to every teenage till monkey five times a day.
We all know the truism that when you hear one person criticize another, it says as much about the person making the criticism as it does about the person being criticized. Yet the credit reporting agencies are somehow given a free pass which I've never understood. Might it be that a bad credit report reflects bad credit reporting practice? I guess we're so overwhelmed by our powerlessness in that relationship (my god, even more powerful than Miss Wormwood) that you rarely hear it suggested that perhaps the credit agencies themselves are no better than ICANN or VeriSign.
Why do we give credence to what Joe-average expects nano to convey? The fact of the matter is that there is a huge domain of biological phenomena operating at the micro scale, and another huge domain of physical chemistry operating at the nano scale, neither of which should evoke gasps of "Oh, cool!"
It's a mugs game to invest energy in controlling the impressions/reactions of the non-thinking masses. Why was nano cool in the first place? Because you could eat a small machine? Oh, cool.
No matter how much I dislike the opposing camp, I try to listen for any germ of sanity as much as I can. Not wise to become glib about the historical weakness of your foe. From time to time, history rewrites itself. The road to oblivion is paved with those who laughed longest. On the other hand, of all the idiotic spokesmanship that comes out of Microsoft, Allchin is far and away the reigning champ of two-faced self-interest. I flipped the bozo-bit on Allchin a very long time ago. That said, it's not impossible to architect a software system to a fairly high default security level out of the box, sans firewire. Bear in mind this is the *first time* in Microsoft's corporate history that they have seriously bent themselves toward the task. However, the burden of their prior practice can not be overstated, so we are looking several service patches into the future, at least, before this initiative consolodates, for whatever it's ultimately worth.
Let's pause to reflect a moment on our fallen comrades who laughed longest:
Bloat: Microsoft operating systems will expand (forever) as a fast as disk storage technology.
Blue screen: Microsoft will never produce an OS that doesn't blue screen daily.
A number of posters have mentioned the geographic factor, but I didn't see any comments about the leapfrog factor: first movers can end up looking fairly lame toward the end of an infrastructure cycle. All the same, Canada and the US entered into the internet era at the same time facing mostly the same geographic challenges, and so far as I'm aware, Canadian cities have come out ahead on the whole.
I guess the main difference is that our Canadian monopolies form an orderly, bovine progression to the feed bucket, while American monopolies body-slam their way up to the porker trough.
This all begs the question: what is the psychology behind the three or four second user patience threshhold? My vote is that after half a dozen four second waits, the distract-me-from-life-by-buying-more-crap circuit begins to lose its grip, and a wee murmur of "what the heck am I doing wasting my life on this garbage" penentrates the dim folds of consciousness. This is not a case of humans engaged in rational activity. These are just shopaholics regulating their emotional state the same way most true geeks regulate their mental electrolytes through beverage consumption. You could do the same study on the coffee maker at work: fresh brew delay vs oh-screw-it-Starbucks-needs-my-money-more-than-I-
I think you are suffering from a simmering all things to all people syndrome. The world already has a enormous body of emminently-citable published work amassed over a period of centuries. Should Wikipedia take on the mandate to refactor the whole of human knowledge? That doesn't sound prudent to me.
What the world lacked was an instant-gratification synopsis to the existing body of world knowledge. I don't think credentialism is required to deliver in that niche, and I would be more inclined to suspect that credentialism is toxic rather than complementary to what Wikipedia is trying to achieve.
I've given some thought to the origins of credentialism in human culture. In part, credentialism was a response to bandwidth constraits: rather than attempt to communication the entire process engendering the final result, only the final result is put forward, but with a seal-of-approval from the credentialed sect which serves to state this spinach is of good and proper origins.
Now that we have the technical instrument to convey all the history, all the time, to all the people, why would we fall back on credentialism again? Because we're used to it? Because those who invested in their credentials are determined to maximize their return-on-investment? At what point do those holding credentials work more in the sake of perpetuating their own interests than the interests of society at large?
I've always preferred a good question to a good answer. My feeling is that the Wikipedia is presently at the stage of posing some good questions. One of those questions concerns trust gradients. In the whole of the animal kingdom, if a creature comes across something that might possibly be edible, the creature first considers whether to put it in its mouth (usually by means of the instantaneous smell test).
Why is it that we presume the average person is incapable of conducting a simple smell test when encountering information on the Wikipedia? I think it stems from the pre-internet educational culture where everything written on the blackboard was reflexively ingested and regurgitated on demand.
For the post-internet generation I suspect this bias will prove far less strong. It's not possible (that I can fathom) to grow up from the age of primary school in the internet generation and not learn that the internet is full of information you don't put directly into your mouth without first a moment of thought. Wouldn't it be nice if this ultimately extended to the evening news (such as it survives)? Of any information source out there, it strikes me that the evening news deserves the most scrutiny of all.
The average Wikipedia article introduces the entire slate of keywords required to plumb google of 90% of the material available on the internet concerning the topic in question (the other 10% requires serious google-fu), plus the whole of the article's creation history, plus all the online debate about the merits of one account over another. And search will only improve over time.
I'm coming to the rather strong position that credibility is (or ought to be) an active process in the mind of the reader than a dull and comforting vestige in the identities of the authors. Before Wikipedia, this wasn't a practical approach, so what we are dealing with here concerning credentialism is proof by incumbency rather than passing any sensible smell test.
Big tobacco managed to delay the inevitable for several decades waging a war of credentialist propoganda. There's no level on the trust pyramid where you don't have to trust your nose and we shouldn't be conveying blind faith at any level of the process.
Apparently, sounds deceive. You might want to practice your hearing. A good start would be subtracting out the sound of your own voice droning on at the drop of a pin about subjects you haven't made an effort to fully appreciate.
Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity is the deepest theory going about the inter-relationship between compression and prediction. There used to be a great and highly readable account of omega and the math surrounding omega available online by Chaitin, but he appears to have removed the online version I used to enjoy and perhaps recycled it as a book.