In the original thread there were posts about the advantages of LISP and related languages citing garbage collection as one of the pillars of post-C language design.
Now, I find this amazing. Apparently, functional languages can solve every real world problem with ease except keeping track of what resources have been allocated and their necessary life scope. Why do such potent language frameworks punt this problem to a simplifying heuristic? Are problems that arise in the implementation domain of a fundamentally greater complexity than problems that arise anywhere else?
For this reason, many in the field of artificial intelligence consider Go to be a better measure of a computer's capacity for thought than chess.
Of course, in the history of human civilization in every case we've resolved simpler problems before more complex problems. Human success order is an absolute metric on problem complexity.
The human brain distorts inclines, especially when faced with the prospect of humping upward. Hills near me rated as a ten percent grade appear to my eye as a 30 percent grade. My opinion is that this is the brain's attempt to project visual 3-space onto a manifold of equal effort. It's a huge energy mistake to take the direct route to a food source over a rise in the terrain rather than taking a longer path that partially skirts around the rise. Not only does it cost energy, it can leave you feeling sweaty and cold on the downslope.
I think when the moon drops close to the horizon it triggers the "how hard would I have to hump to get there" reflex. The side effect of the moon's engorgement is that the apparent difference in grade from the bottom rim to the top rim is perceptually magnified, which is exactly what you'd need to take into minute account if you setting out on happy trails.
How much brain glucose did you expend while reading this trying to figure out if I was talking about something else? On the basis of six words.
Intelligence reports that the Deathstar beam required 8000 Sol-years of energy to make Alderaan light and flakey. Those agency types don't understand physics. You can't pack that much energy into a beam, not even a beam that interacts with vacua states and causes empty space to radiate in visible light. I suspect it was a GASER beam: gravitino anomaly by special effects rework. IMHO the beam tributaries give this away.
How can people take copyright law seriously when it's completely obvious that the laws in these areas are formed by negotiation among white collar crooks? This notion is deeply embedded in popular culture.
Spoiler Alert
Raising the question of what Tony does for a living, Meadow asks bluntly, "Are you in the Mafia?" Tony replies that some of his money comes from illegal gambling, and probes, "How does that make you feel?" Meadow replies, "Sometimes I wish you were like other dads. Like Mr. Scangarelo, for example. An advertising executive for big tobacco."
If you can handle the sex, violence, copulatory interjections, and (most difficult) the moral ambivalence, rent the episodes and pay attention. It might haved saved the poster of this topic from his career in gormhood.
Today's "fastest growing" is journalismo for yesterday's bit player.
Points at dark clouds at the horizon
Quoyle: Horizon Fills With Dark Clouds? Billy: Imminent Storm Threatens Village. Quoyle: But what if no storm comes? Billy: Village Spared From Deadly Storm.
The easiest way to engineer a population of the willing is to sell the idea that the system functions as a democracy. Just because the display of power is less overt doesn't mean it isn't government. Maintaining the appearance of inefficiency also works to calm the citizenry.
Power is most efficient when it isn't being watched.
Now that's an interesting proposition: does the Foundation Series "suck worse than Star Wars to an adult"?
I read the Foundation series as a teenager in copies that already smelled musty in 1980. I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I liked the premise more than its execution.
Around that age I fled a high school of the caliber you might expect to find in a Sand People settlement in a Podunk crevice on planet Tatooine. I ended up being interviewed by a rather pompous headmaster who asked me about my reading interests and I claimed to have recently enjoyed Clark and Heinlein. He told me "You need to read Asimov." My response was not so political. What's Asimov to me? I won't know if I'll like the guy until I read him.
What I find reading Asimov is that the pool table is rigged for one trick shot after another. And then the major theme of Foundation is "what would happen if just one important ball couldn't be controlled?" He was writing about his own writing process. Could the outcome of Asimov's narrative be determined by a set of equations? Yes. Was there any chance a joker would turn his narrative in a direction he hadn't indended from the outset? No chance that I detected.
Asimov was a voracious reader and he knew a lot of history. Yet when I reread a large chunk of the first Foundation novel a few months ago, it contains some of the most politically naive and stilted dialog I've willed myself to suffer through. Fortunately, he never a wrote a love scene between Padme and Anakin. But he could have if he'd wanted to and not improved matters one whit.
Star Wars sucks in such a different dimension its hard to begin comparing the two. Why do they call it space opera? Because of the Hillbilly factor where it turns out everyone is related to everyone else? That was fine while The Force still existed. The universe is being guided by an invisible script that conspires against dullness. OK, I get it. But then... the midichlorians whose primary gift is the ability to drive too fast in close quarters or dismantle large armies who politely shoot in single file while their dread adversary lunges around with a bright "I'm over here" stick.
And there's the Empire hard at work building a Death Star (and its replacement) when all they really needed was a Tommy Gun.
Star Wars sucks less because it's less rational. You stop to say "this is stupid" but then you linger over "just how stupid is this" and it becomes kind of fun again. Whereas with the Foundation series I find it sterile, manipulated, obsessing over a vantage point rather than the real thing, equally implausible, and lacking in comic potential.
I have an odd metabolism where my body prefers long nights and long days (my cycle can range between 26 and 40 hours). If I'm well rested, I rarely witness a loss of productivity until 22 hours of wakefulness. Rarely at my best first thing in the day. I'm still gaining speed twelve hours later. For some reason, I go down like a rock after 28 hours of wakefulness and this has always been true. I've gone from near normal to "legally drunk" in the space of twenty minutes. I have far more problems with my body not being designed to sit in a chair for that length of time than I have with my mind falling apart. Unlike most people, I rarely allow myself to operate in a sleep-deprived state. Everything that article says about extended wakefulness is suspect because the studies didn't differentiate "rested" from "well rested" relative to how much sleep the body really wants as opposed to cultural norms (most people think that eight hours is luxury, and in the Army they expect to function on six hours routinely). There's plenty of research that shows that up to ten hours is needed to achieve the "well rested" state. Measure those people for task decay. You'll get entirely different numbers.
For the graph problemm it takes O(log N) steps to clock out the log N bit address to access your ziggabit memory device. It's a stupid method of counting to begin with. A ziggabit-1 memory cells sit idle, yet it gets accounted as one operation.
O notation has but one great virtue: it helps to detect those among us who are quickest to depart from common sense.
The part where he says he's going to make OS/X free as in "free beer" because his cold little heart bleeds when he reads that BSD is dying.
People put way too much importance on visibility. I don't know if Linux was ever destined to count itself among the most visible of all platforms. Linux doesn't need that kind of one-on-one attention to fill important niches. I'd be quite happy to see a three way tie take shape: MS for the corporate drones, OS/X for the insecure, and Linux/BSD for those of us who merely want to get from point A to point B without the hype and fanfare.
It takes a certain amount of insecurity to wonder about this prospect in the first place.
I have my AMD Shuttle mildly underclocked to keep the fan at its lowest speed. However, this allowed me to tweak the memory timings up, so I didn't sacrifice any memory bandwidth in the process. Without controlling for memory bandwidth, this underclocking exercise is completely worthless. And he also didn't control for ambient. The expected temp. drop is a fraction of the temp. rise above ambient.
When you underclock a processor while holding memory bandwidth constant, there is a net efficiency gain, since more real work is accomplished with fewer processor cycles (many fewer misused cycles spent waiting on the memory interface).
I can't believe this topic made it on Slashdot, while the long article linked from Inq^Reg about reflow pipelines on the Netburst article didn't. Or maybe I can believe it and I don't want to.
How about pursuing a solution actually meant to address this problem: the newly announced Via C7 with crypto acceleration that outperforms either AMD or Intel by a ballpark factor of 100:1 in work accomplished / energy consumed. As far as can tell, Via has not yet published the Padlock documents online on Monty mult or the SHA extensions. That would be worth reading. This topic is crap at 37 degrees ambient.
Face it, the guy goofed up. There should have been at least another full row of light elements in the periodic table with lesser atomic density and greater electronegativity. Really, the guy set back portable technology by several centuries. Those Russians, they never did understand capitalism.
The only point I fully agreed with is that Debian took on more platforms than they could cope with. I've always thought Debian should release on a couple of major platforms (x86, AMD64, PPC) and follow that up with a portability release for historical/quirky platforms as soon as they could pull it together.
The only case where I'd be tempted to drop a minority platform is where it lacks a crucial feature, such as proper atomic operations. If it were possible, I'd drop all platforms lacking NX protection (which should have existed ten years ago), but perhaps that's not practical just yet.
For the remainder of the differences, clean code goes a long way.
# Use a clear subject that encapsulates your message for the benefit of the all the RTFA-impaired lamers, but fill your post full of drivel anyway to satisfy the lameness filter
When it comes to the "trash heap of history" Dvorak can claim more than his fair share of expertise. He's "seen worse on TV" and that's supposed to represent the affairs of the "sane"? No community deserves to be tarred with a single brush. That would pretty much mandate astroturfing by hostile parties.
Yes, but try try try to arrange your first two major flops for *after* you've released a system that fully supports both upper and lower case letters and 80 column text if you wish to hold any stake in the business market whatsoever. When Apple finally did make their first dent in the business market, it wasn't even driven by a computer, it was driven by a laser printer.
You've got that backwards. Every 18 months the diamonds will be twice as good at half their former size. Soon your girlfriend will need a microscope to show off her priceless gem. And when she's done, she can use her microscope for that other project.
And every person who buys (or proudly displays) a natural diamond (either first hand or bargain bin) helps to maintain this social order, in much the same way that the use of illicit drugs consolidates a certain kind of social order in the countries who provide those drugs.
I'd be the last person to claim that a person who buys a diamond is responsible for the crimes of those involved in the diamond production chain. Nevertheless, my personal ethics are that I'll have nothing to do with natural diamond gemstones.
I haven't purchased a Hallmark card in twenty years either. Which leaves me with a lot more time to post on slashdot. If the average slashdot post were about 100 times better, it might have been a fair trade.
Dude, proof only exists within closed formal systems. The universe does not come with an end-user-license promising that any observation *ever* can be repeated, e.g. that the sun comes up tomorrow, or that protons don't decay into Mars Bars.
What we've learned about the universe is that physical observation is highly (some say unrealistically) compressible. We write down a small set of rules (quantum electrodynamics is the best example) and then we find that trillions of physical measurements taken from just about any situation we can think up are *consistent* with the small set of rules we've written down. This doesn't mean the set of rules we've written down it the smallest set of rules consistent with the universe. With each "unification" (e.g. electricity with magnetism) the set of rules becomes more compact relative to how much of the universe it consistently describes. It's important to note that we usually know ahead of time that our system of rules can't possibly be consistent with everything (general relatively and quantum mechanics are inconsistent in their present forms). From the point of view of proof, we knew from the outset that both of these theories are false. Yet each of these theories describes an incredible range of phenomena, and for the most part, the two theories don't much overlap in what they describe. If they did overlap more, it would be far easier to concoct experiments to resolve the known inconsistencies.
I'm quite depressed at how few people are familiar with the work of Kolmogorov and Chaitin. Most physicists fail to fully appreciate these results. The bottom line is that algorithmic compressibility is all we've got, and truth itself is a gossamer filigree we can at best approximate.
This is most likely the case, that it is a timing attack. In an OOO design one can gain a lot of information about which instructions schedule in what order based on the availability of different execution units. An early-out divider is especially vulnerable to leak data about input arguments in timing effects. I've forgotten most of the math I once knew about RSA. If the modulus computation involves the use of the hardware divider (not just the bit shifter), you could leak a lot of information about key bits in a big hurry.
Slashdot Mirror
In the original thread there were posts about the advantages of LISP and related languages citing garbage collection as one of the pillars of post-C language design.
Now, I find this amazing. Apparently, functional languages can solve every real world problem with ease except keeping track of what resources have been allocated and their necessary life scope. Why do such potent language frameworks punt this problem to a simplifying heuristic? Are problems that arise in the implementation domain of a fundamentally greater complexity than problems that arise anywhere else?
For this reason, many in the field of artificial intelligence consider Go to be a better measure of a computer's capacity for thought than chess.
Of course, in the history of human civilization in every case we've resolved simpler problems before more complex problems. Human success order is an absolute metric on problem complexity.
The human brain distorts inclines, especially when faced with the prospect of humping upward. Hills near me rated as a ten percent grade appear to my eye as a 30 percent grade. My opinion is that this is the brain's attempt to project visual 3-space onto a manifold of equal effort. It's a huge energy mistake to take the direct route to a food source over a rise in the terrain rather than taking a longer path that partially skirts around the rise. Not only does it cost energy, it can leave you feeling sweaty and cold on the downslope.
I think when the moon drops close to the horizon it triggers the "how hard would I have to hump to get there" reflex. The side effect of the moon's engorgement is that the apparent difference in grade from the bottom rim to the top rim is perceptually magnified, which is exactly what you'd need to take into minute account if you setting out on happy trails.
How much brain glucose did you expend while reading this trying to figure out if I was talking about something else? On the basis of six words.
Intelligence reports that the Deathstar beam required 8000 Sol-years of energy to make Alderaan light and flakey. Those agency types don't understand physics. You can't pack that much energy into a beam, not even a beam that interacts with vacua states and causes empty space to radiate in visible light. I suspect it was a GASER beam: gravitino anomaly by special effects rework. IMHO the beam tributaries give this away.
How can people take copyright law seriously when it's completely obvious that the laws in these areas are formed by negotiation among white collar crooks? This notion is deeply embedded in popular culture.
Spoiler Alert
Raising the question of what Tony does for a living, Meadow asks bluntly, "Are you in the Mafia?" Tony replies that some of his money comes from illegal gambling, and probes, "How does that make you feel?" Meadow replies, "Sometimes I wish you were like other dads. Like Mr. Scangarelo, for example. An advertising executive for big tobacco."
If you can handle the sex, violence, copulatory interjections, and (most difficult) the moral ambivalence, rent the episodes and pay attention. It might haved saved the poster of this topic from his career in gormhood.
Because some Roman astrogeek bureaucrat was afraid to introduce any months with less than 31 days named after that fat ass politician Julius Augustus.
People, grab a brain. "Slick looks and ease of use" is the mistress not the wife.
Today's "fastest growing" is journalismo for yesterday's bit player.
Points at dark clouds at the horizon
Quoyle: Horizon Fills With Dark Clouds?
Billy: Imminent Storm Threatens Village.
Quoyle: But what if no storm comes?
Billy: Village Spared From Deadly Storm.
The easiest way to engineer a population of the willing is to sell the idea that the system functions as a democracy. Just because the display of power is less overt doesn't mean it isn't government. Maintaining the appearance of inefficiency also works to calm the citizenry.
Power is most efficient when it isn't being watched.
Now that's an interesting proposition: does the Foundation Series "suck worse than Star Wars to an adult"?
... the midichlorians whose primary gift is the ability to drive too fast in close quarters or dismantle large armies who politely shoot in single file while their dread adversary lunges around with a bright "I'm over here" stick.
I read the Foundation series as a teenager in copies that already smelled musty in 1980. I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I liked the premise more than its execution.
Around that age I fled a high school of the caliber you might expect to find in a Sand People settlement in a Podunk crevice on planet Tatooine. I ended up being interviewed by a rather pompous headmaster who asked me about my reading interests and I claimed to have recently enjoyed Clark and Heinlein. He told me "You need to read Asimov." My response was not so political. What's Asimov to me? I won't know if I'll like the guy until I read him.
What I find reading Asimov is that the pool table is rigged for one trick shot after another. And then the major theme of Foundation is "what would happen if just one important ball couldn't be controlled?" He was writing about his own writing process. Could the outcome of Asimov's narrative be determined by a set of equations? Yes. Was there any chance a joker would turn his narrative in a direction he hadn't indended from the outset? No chance that I detected.
Asimov was a voracious reader and he knew a lot of history. Yet when I reread a large chunk of the first Foundation novel a few months ago, it contains some of the most politically naive and stilted dialog I've willed myself to suffer through. Fortunately, he never a wrote a love scene between Padme and Anakin. But he could have if he'd wanted to and not improved matters one whit.
Star Wars sucks in such a different dimension its hard to begin comparing the two. Why do they call it space opera? Because of the Hillbilly factor where it turns out everyone is related to everyone else? That was fine while The Force still existed. The universe is being guided by an invisible script that conspires against dullness. OK, I get it. But then
And there's the Empire hard at work building a Death Star (and its replacement) when all they really needed was a Tommy Gun.
Star Wars sucks less because it's less rational. You stop to say "this is stupid" but then you linger over "just how stupid is this" and it becomes kind of fun again. Whereas with the Foundation series I find it sterile, manipulated, obsessing over a vantage point rather than the real thing, equally implausible, and lacking in comic potential.
I thought "efficacy" was related to the root "effective", but apparently it's a sibling to Papacy.
I have an odd metabolism where my body prefers long nights and long days (my cycle can range between 26 and 40 hours). If I'm well rested, I rarely witness a loss of productivity until 22 hours of wakefulness. Rarely at my best first thing in the day. I'm still gaining speed twelve hours later. For some reason, I go down like a rock after 28 hours of wakefulness and this has always been true. I've gone from near normal to "legally drunk" in the space of twenty minutes. I have far more problems with my body not being designed to sit in a chair for that length of time than I have with my mind falling apart. Unlike most people, I rarely allow myself to operate in a sleep-deprived state. Everything that article says about extended wakefulness is suspect because the studies didn't differentiate "rested" from "well rested" relative to how much sleep the body really wants as opposed to cultural norms (most people think that eight hours is luxury, and in the Army they expect to function on six hours routinely). There's plenty of research that shows that up to ten hours is needed to achieve the "well rested" state. Measure those people for task decay. You'll get entirely different numbers.
For the graph problemm it takes O(log N) steps to clock out the log N bit address to access your ziggabit memory device. It's a stupid method of counting to begin with. A ziggabit-1 memory cells sit idle, yet it gets accounted as one operation.
O notation has but one great virtue: it helps to detect those among us who are quickest to depart from common sense.
The part where he says he's going to make OS/X free as in "free beer" because his cold little heart bleeds when he reads that BSD is dying.
People put way too much importance on visibility. I don't know if Linux was ever destined to count itself among the most visible of all platforms. Linux doesn't need that kind of one-on-one attention to fill important niches. I'd be quite happy to see a three way tie take shape: MS for the corporate drones, OS/X for the insecure, and Linux/BSD for those of us who merely want to get from point A to point B without the hype and fanfare.
It takes a certain amount of insecurity to wonder about this prospect in the first place.
I have my AMD Shuttle mildly underclocked to keep the fan at its lowest speed. However, this allowed me to tweak the memory timings up, so I didn't sacrifice any memory bandwidth in the process. Without controlling for memory bandwidth, this underclocking exercise is completely worthless. And he also didn't control for ambient. The expected temp. drop is a fraction of the temp. rise above ambient.
When you underclock a processor while holding memory bandwidth constant, there is a net efficiency gain, since more real work is accomplished with fewer processor cycles (many fewer misused cycles spent waiting on the memory interface).
I can't believe this topic made it on Slashdot, while the long article linked from Inq^Reg about reflow pipelines on the Netburst article didn't. Or maybe I can believe it and I don't want to.
How about pursuing a solution actually meant to address this problem: the newly announced Via C7 with crypto acceleration that outperforms either AMD or Intel by a ballpark factor of 100:1 in work accomplished / energy consumed. As far as can tell, Via has not yet published the Padlock documents online on Monty mult or the SHA extensions. That would be worth reading. This topic is crap at 37 degrees ambient.
Face it, the guy goofed up. There should have been at least another full row of light elements in the periodic table with lesser atomic density and greater electronegativity. Really, the guy set back portable technology by several centuries. Those Russians, they never did understand capitalism.
The only point I fully agreed with is that Debian took on more platforms than they could cope with. I've always thought Debian should release on a couple of major platforms (x86, AMD64, PPC) and follow that up with a portability release for historical/quirky platforms as soon as they could pull it together.
The only case where I'd be tempted to drop a minority platform is where it lacks a crucial feature, such as proper atomic operations. If it were possible, I'd drop all platforms lacking NX protection (which should have existed ten years ago), but perhaps that's not practical just yet.
For the remainder of the differences, clean code goes a long way.
Let me read that back for you: oh-pee-ess-off
# Use a clear subject that encapsulates your message for the benefit of the all the RTFA-impaired lamers, but fill your post full of drivel anyway to satisfy the lameness filter
When it comes to the "trash heap of history" Dvorak can claim more than his fair share of expertise. He's "seen worse on TV" and that's supposed to represent the affairs of the "sane"? No community deserves to be tarred with a single brush. That would pretty much mandate astroturfing by hostile parties.
Yes, but try try try to arrange your first two major flops for *after* you've released a system that fully supports both upper and lower case letters and 80 column text if you wish to hold any stake in the business market whatsoever. When Apple finally did make their first dent in the business market, it wasn't even driven by a computer, it was driven by a laser printer.
You've got that backwards. Every 18 months the diamonds will be twice as good at half their former size. Soon your girlfriend will need a microscope to show off her priceless gem. And when she's done, she can use her microscope for that other project.
And every person who buys (or proudly displays) a natural diamond (either first hand or bargain bin) helps to maintain this social order, in much the same way that the use of illicit drugs consolidates a certain kind of social order in the countries who provide those drugs.
I'd be the last person to claim that a person who buys a diamond is responsible for the crimes of those involved in the diamond production chain. Nevertheless, my personal ethics are that I'll have nothing to do with natural diamond gemstones.
I haven't purchased a Hallmark card in twenty years either. Which leaves me with a lot more time to post on slashdot. If the average slashdot post were about 100 times better, it might have been a fair trade.
Dude, proof only exists within closed formal systems. The universe does not come with an end-user-license promising that any observation *ever* can be repeated, e.g. that the sun comes up tomorrow, or that protons don't decay into Mars Bars.
What we've learned about the universe is that physical observation is highly (some say unrealistically) compressible. We write down a small set of rules (quantum electrodynamics is the best example) and then we find that trillions of physical measurements taken from just about any situation we can think up are *consistent* with the small set of rules we've written down. This doesn't mean the set of rules we've written down it the smallest set of rules consistent with the universe. With each "unification" (e.g. electricity with magnetism) the set of rules becomes more compact relative to how much of the universe it consistently describes. It's important to note that we usually know ahead of time that our system of rules can't possibly be consistent with everything (general relatively and quantum mechanics are inconsistent in their present forms). From the point of view of proof, we knew from the outset that both of these theories are false. Yet each of these theories describes an incredible range of phenomena, and for the most part, the two theories don't much overlap in what they describe. If they did overlap more, it would be far easier to concoct experiments to resolve the known inconsistencies.
I'm quite depressed at how few people are familiar with the work of Kolmogorov and Chaitin. Most physicists fail to fully appreciate these results. The bottom line is that algorithmic compressibility is all we've got, and truth itself is a gossamer filigree we can at best approximate.
This is most likely the case, that it is a timing attack. In an OOO design one can gain a lot of information about which instructions schedule in what order based on the availability of different execution units. An early-out divider is especially vulnerable to leak data about input arguments in timing effects. I've forgotten most of the math I once knew about RSA. If the modulus computation involves the use of the hardware divider (not just the bit shifter), you could leak a lot of information about key bits in a big hurry.