I'm curious to see these results, because I believe it's cooked numbers.. Here's why:
Energy = Power * time
If you define efficiency as a greater transfer of energy, then you COULD define this through the use of extremely LOW power levels (e.g. extraction over a very long time).
Hell, by that standard, weak nuclear decay has higher efficiency energy emmission efficiency than gas.
Power = Work / time
Work = Force * distance
Force = mass * acceleration
Big trucks have heavy mass, so they need (indirectly) lots of power to do the same work. A hypothetical low powered fuel cell therefore would not be sufficient to manage a big truck.
On the other hand, a US citizen is spoiled and requires lots of acceleration - just look at the cars we purchase compared to the rest of the world.. The little honda motor-scooter with like 15HP is the worlds most popular vehicle, while the US needs 135 HP to get out of the parking lot. The whole US hybrid car thing pisses me off.. All it is is a way to gain Horse Power (and thereby the acceleration). They put a little 60HP motor in, and use battery assist to enhance horsepower during periods in which the driver slams his foot on the gas (which should NEVER happen with an environmentally respectiable driver). You wait for a merge gap before you merge, you wean the throttle from a red light, you maintain a constant speed with a LARGE 2 to 3 second gap between you and the car in front of you to avoid fuel-consuming speed fluxuations, etc.
But US citizens do not do this. (I say this as an OCD American)
So, as fuel cells hyopthetically achieve low acceleration levels, they would not suffice replacing the battery as the acceleration module. What they COULD do is replace the engine as a true low-horse-power machine.. A diesel-electric train uses high horse-power electric motors and a diesel generator to recharge the electric batteries (or provide direct current - I don't know which). Theoretically the same could apply here... A large electric battery would power the electric motor wheels and a fuel-cell could recharge the batteries. To compensate for the hypothetical low power levels (the long energy emmission times), you could add more fuel cells in parallel.. A train has enough fixed weight that the incremental weight of the fuel cell theoretically isn't a problem - thereby avoiding the energy-to-weight v.s. gas issue which exists smaller cars.
I just don't believe this "low cost" "high volume" statement.If not, then you are about the only one.
Well, I'm just saying, I wouldn't bet money on IBM coming out with their cell in a high volume enough way to provide ultra-low pricing as in the PowerPC or obviously x86 markets. History has shown time and time again, that innovation is not what is important, dominance is. Alpha had a superb chip but was in no way marketable. Apple has always had a better design in computer hardware, but will likely never achieve any respectable market presense.
My post is one of pessimism; that the PS3 will not be a sufficient vehicle to drive the cell processor to a volume of scale (where you could afford to make only a few pennys of gross profit per CPU). Certainly anything could happen. But I have yet to see a video graphics processor (in the 10 years I've watched GPU progression) break out of it's niche market (despite all these innovative ways of using their specialized mathmatical processing power).
This article was about the scientific community seeing a potential to use the cell for what it was meant, but in a different venue than still-frame graphics rendering. That's fine, but any architectural descision requries taking the whole project into account, and I simply don't see the cost effectiveness of cell processing until and unless it becomes ubiquitous.. Otherwise what you have is an original cray (prior to the opteron or even alpha chip): 100% custom. And you pay for it.
Basically it's slightly cheaper than designing the chip yourself.. But my argument is... Not by much.
An interesting point is that most consoles sell their hardware at a loss. At least the XBox does. This means that there is no guarantee that IBM is willing to sell their CPUs at the same price that one would believe they cost for the PS3.
Moreoever, the scientific community is very likely to push their cell+ architecture and I'm sure IBM would be more than happy to help... For a massive price.
So, when building an HPC system, you're likely to work around the best architecture (the more expensive cell+), and purchasers of the HPC will then have a cray-like proprietary system at enormous cost.
Not that this is a bad thing, I just don't believe this "low cost" "high volume" statement.
Your technical priesthood job is on the block, my friend, and it has nothing to do with "making ourselves less competitive" because there *is* no "us". As you yourself noted, companies don't give a shit about you, and they don't differentiate between you or your Bangalore doppelganger. You're doublethinking if you believe your "rugged individualism" and "personal responsibility" ethos logically meshes with your neo-nationalistic competitive "patriotism". You are the perfect tool for what is happening right now--a me-first isolated soul who waves the flag even as his government and the greedheads that own it mortgage any possibility of a decent future not just for "their people", but the world itself.
Ok, perhaps a history lesson is in order. Once upon a time, everyone was "mostly" self sufficient.. "Employment" was a personal issue.. You found food or money to buy food or you died. But everybody knew this.. The problem was protection. Tribes were great because you could fend off animals or other tribe-sized competetors. Inside the tribe, you had various needs that would be fullfilled by directly growing/hunting food or providing services that others would share their food/money for.
Ok, boring, so far. Well, eventually economies of scale, technology and competition entered the picture until tribes were no longer sufficient.. Kingships (which could organize massive armies) were needed for this protection.. Or the scarseness of farmable/huntable land was needed.. Obviously this didn't exist everywhere.. It only seemed to have affected the middle east and Europe. Africa, north-east Asia and Austrailia managed to maintain very healthy hunter-gatherer tribes up through today. The competition never required advancement, consolidation, specialization, 'technologization',...
Now with the king-subject situation, it was in the king's interest to keep everybody in the border.. You could be "fired" from the kingdom (exiled) mostly because there was land between kingdoms into which you COULD be exiled. But this was very rare. Further, it was in the king's interest to keep people employed - maning the armies, building the palaces, growing the food, etc. If people were lazy, they died.. Was pretty darwinistic.. But we hadn't really seen much of modern employment problems creep up yet, because the incentive structure didn't yet exist.
Later came fuedalism.. Smaller versions of king-ships.. Mostly focused around protection.. Because money was now a staple, not only did you farm/hunt for the food, but to pay your taxes and other "utilities" / "services".. We're much closer to modern day.. If you couldn't make ends meet (utilities were generally fixed, irregardless of your income level), then you became a debtor/slave. Now you were a ward of the state, BUT, much like older days, the smaller lords still have use for you... They could kill you whenever they didn't - but rarely did they exile you (wasn't enough people to fill the voids). The problem during this era is still stability and resource-starvation, not a lack of available work or "employers".
Finally came industrialization.. For the first time, we shift away from resources because we can manufacture new resources virtually anywhere. We also remove the primary focus away from security, as the "valueables" are no longer "your women", but the "goods" stored in the vaults.. Individual protection is no longer as important as the factory's protection.. BUT coincidently protect a single factory better than an entire village. So essentially protection is no longer the concern of each individual..
BUT, since we've now reshifted the focus away from the farms, away from the churches, away from the kings/lords.. We've focused them to the resource maker... The factory..
NOW, exhile takes on a whole new meaning.. There is a calculated fixed demand for workers for each factory, and a realisticly calculated fixed demand for regions with factories.. And moreover, there is a tradeoff between capital (money or fi
No it didn't.. MS took their J++ toolkit and java runtime/ JIT (which historically was the best out there) and refactored it as.NET.
Now the industry is HUGELY fragmented. Previously there were MS VB,C++ programmers, UNIX C,C++ programmers, web finatics including perl, python, lisp, php and various ASP. And finally you had EJB programmers (which could have been a combination of any of the above).
Now we are back to solid windows-only solutions (.NET) and UNIX only solutions (java). Yes there are still people that write enterprise-on-windows with Java, but most new projects of this sort are just going with.NET.
Squarely on the head of the New Orleans leadership.
Perhaps you missed that part of the video clip of Bush sitting there in his briefing of New Orleans.. Saying not a word...
Every major US incident has an identical depiction of Bush.. Completely inept.. Should the Chocalate mayor go? Sure.. Why not.. It's politics; you live and die with the winds of opportunity.
Should Bush stay in office? I'm too biased to even *cough* suggest..
But hey, some of the founding fathers believed in slavery, so it's a real shame our country has deteriorated so much as to let that wonderful institution be outlawed...
Now now now.. You're taking slavery out of context. Slavery had many facets to it.. One was a more desireable alternative to debtors prison. Another was what you did to conquested countries so that they couldn't provide guarilla warfare against you (you know, like the Romans did, until they stopped doing it and got taken over by those they didn't kill). Granted, it was so common place, that people felt that just because they could steal a couple natives, put them in a boat and ship them overseas, they had a commodity which was virtually identical to the other two points.. The consumers of this didn't ask questions - it was on it's surface legitimate and moral. Much like how we don't question tuna.. We don't question whether our house was built with 100% American labor (with SSN's to back it).. We look the other way because we feel that we couldn't know for sure that there WAS illicit elements to this thing we so love (cheaper products and better tasting fish).
Moreover, it's moral relativism.. Will capitalism be looked at as horrendously demonic 100 years from now.. Government sponsored oppression of the working and under class?? Communists tried and failed this route I guess.
Will the death penalty be viewed as horrific and inhuman?.. There are reports this past couple weeks about how much a death penalty person suffers (the supreme court case of a man questioning his method of death).
Will usurping our environment be considered morally defunct because we KNEW that we were killing our future? Ignorance or feeling that since-everyone-else does it is my moral escape clause??
Would McCain work for or against cleaning up the bribery
Look, I like McCain.. His "shtick" is integrity.. I'm just enough of a sucker to forgo Abortion, good fiscal management, strong international diplomacy, opportunistic policy, just to restore that word to the office.
But McCain is just swinging integrity just like Republicans are swinging $100 bribes to the poor, $1,000 bribes to middle class and $1,000,000 bribes to the wealthy. Or like Democrats are swinging "free gas and free drugs". These are all just political tools. And if you watch McCain enough, you can see it in him too. Believe me, I liked the guy enough to pay attention to every word.. And the politician in him definitely shows.
Though I will say, my favoite paraphrased quote from him was that he came to congress as a boy-scout.. And congress just has to eventually kill that in you.. Otherwise it just kills you.
There is no difference between the two major parties. They're both as stupid, evil, and greedy as the Republicans.
Yes, but (and forgive me if you are a lawyer), this is the logical conclusion of the system our fore-fathers have constructed. Is there a better system? I don't know.. The old boys were pretty stern about limiting the efficiency of government rule to prevent tyranny...
See, here's the trajady.. A good system (like good soil) will cause it's population to grow and grow until the pot can no longer contain the population. Diseconomies of scale will eventually occur.
Now through no credit of their own, the old boys established a loose central government.. Theoretically this would facilitate several pots, each capable of managing a smaller population.. But eventually scale hits them (just like big-O).
Every thing that is being done is to Science (as I'm sure most/. readers would agree). Every aspect of the generic commodity known as the public is studied, scrutinized and refined. There are natural innefficiencies and natural monopolies.. A single unit can not process ALL the information that is out there... Moreover the demand for information is it's own commodity. So by playing to the scarcity of information and the cost of information acquisition, you can manipulate the market.
It's all game-theory.
So, as part of gaming it out, you can't have a single party.. Then you'd always be to blame; you'd always be outed by the public.. You need at least two parties.. More might be nice, but at least two.
Now, once you have two parties, every possible "cause" (beit moral or immoral) has to find it's voice.. If you have 3 or more parties, then you run a huge risk of backing a losing horse.. So any good "cause" manager (yet another commodity manager) is looking for the best representation.. So they pick the strongest party.. But, some causes are mutually exclusive.. Can't have green-peace and oil-drilling in the same party - kind of hard for a politician to do it with a straight face. So there are natual sides that occur.
While I have not directly taken government studies classes, I've taken lots of economics classes which happen to also deal with government policy.. And in those classes there are wonderful 2D charts which show virtually every cause you could be interested in.. They are oriented in a classical "leftist" and "conservativistic" manner.. I don't recall with the second dimension was.. In such a simple layout, you can draw a straight line splitting all the causes in two.
Intelligent stuarts of a cause will solicit representatives that fall on one side or the other - as is appropriate for the dividing line.. So now you have your "base".. The rest is this slightly non-precise dividing line which can shift slightly in the various dimensional directions... This represents the coveted middle ground.
The final aspect is the commodity of "voters".. The science continues on to maximizes voters of your side while minimizing the voters of the other side.. Each action a politicians team makes might encourage their own base at the expense of riling up the opposing base.. So each marketing action (or political decision) must be carefully weighed against the information of the "political-elasticity" of this semi-voting public.
We probably have not perfected the art of to-vote or not-to-vote.. But we certainly have maximized political association of causes (and thereby campaign contributions).
Now, in a small enough community, communism works brilliantly.. I can't believe people thought it would actually work for millions of people. But I'd say the exact same thing about democracy - though arguably democracy works up to a much larger scale.
So, where are we currently? I think a combination of things are in order. 1'st we have no choice but to vote for the party not in power except for the RARE cases of presidents that actually do have honor, integrity, intelligence, and political clout. 2'nd we ne
Who else votes for the republicans? Mostly idiots who believe the republicans when they say they are for fiscal responsiblity and smaller govt despite the fact that the only presients who ever shrank the govt in my lifetime were democrats and even Carter ran the economy better then Bush.
I can't believe I'm going to defend a Republican congress.. Please believe me, I have no love for those currently in power (the people, not the party), but there is a subtle difference between the republican-led waste and the democrat-led waste.. The republicans are currently blatently spending all their money bribing the public.. Bribing with wars (to encourage patriotism), bribing with tax cuts (to bring on the middle and upper class STRONGLY to their side), bribing with pennys from heaven (hundred dollar rebates during election years) to bring the poor to their side. But, if you can look past that, they're trying to dismantle the entitlement society (which is slowly approaching Europe in terms of a stangnant upper-bound economy where you can't fire anyone, and 60% of your salary goes to pay for your medical drugs; with US-level medical addiction).
I'm ignoring the pure corruption of funneling money through to coffer projects as pork and riders that ALL congress people do.
The democrats push their "bribes" towards entitlements which have very serious long term consequences.. Now you may be of the opinion that we should have a semi-communist or at least a healthy socialist nation (nationalized oil, nationalized doctors, nationalized collage)... And if so, I can't say that you're wrong.. I just don't think that you're right. But the dollar amounts are comparable. If you don't believe me.. Social security was the single biggest permanent tax hike in US history. A full medical coverage of every man woman and child (which most democrats promote) would be the second largest permanent tax increase.
Currently the democrats are the "party of fiscal responsibility" ONLY because it's money being spent on projects that aren't their own.. I've yet to hear a single democrat say that they are for lowering spending.. THey merely comment on how badly the republican's are spending.. And when republicans call the democrats on it, they merely blandly dodge the topic saying "yes, but not for those purposes". Yes they'd raise taxes (permanently), yes they'd increase spending (permanently).. Arguably, the public would vote yes to those increases.. But if they could, the public would vote that their salary shouldn't go down as a result of it. Funny that...
This isn't liberal vs. conservative or any such thing, this is a matter of justice--you don't hang someone on fabricated evidence, even if they are a villain.
You are very wrong sir. There is no such thing as fact. And the media is not a court of law. If the media can not follow down "leads" that provide ill public impression of what is likely to be wrong-doing - to open the doors so that other reporters can eventually find more concrete associations of that wrong-doing, then what is their job? They are not police, they are not private investigators. It is wrong to say that the role of the media is to merely report on what private investigators and police and the government say. The role of the media is to draw public attention to things that are important for them [the public] to know.
If a reporter points out repeatedly that a particular CEO is likely selling off his stock (through indirect evidence), then (so long as it can not be shown that there is conflict of interest in the media company) the added attention brought will very likely bring about competing investigations until something very close to the truth is revealed..
Now what I assume you are alluding to is true slandor.. Making sh*t up to purposefully hurt somebody.. No, you are right.. The media shouldn't do that.. We should let the billions of campaign dollars do that instead (not sarchasm). Oh, but don't let the media try and investigate the sources of the money, because political parties will have very well hid all their sources; anything that was found would almost certainly have to have been acquired illegally.. Hmm. kind of reminds me of the DMCA.. The digital clue that says, "if you've gotten this far, you're already going to jail".
They fail to realize the technological marvel that it is, as they seem to take it for granted.
Careful there.. My dad would say the same about modern "non serviceable" car engines. Or how about electronic circuits all through our house. Or the complicated ins and outs of carpentry.
The point is that every industry has a specialization.. That's why you have master's and apprentices. Today we convolute this too much and have weak masters called teachers, and distracted apprentices called students. But in specializing in everything, you are good at nothing.
Either one of two things needs to happen: A) We dumb schools back down again.. Removing all these BS requirements of teaching a full compliment of US history, world history, social studients, math and science, and just present an overview of it all by end of high school.. Enough that when someone asks you about world war I, you'd remember that it involved war and the most of the world... or B) Allow specialized "tracks" of education.. Where a child is placed into one of several specialized school systems.. focusing on math/science, or arts, or fine-arts, or eventual business, or janitorial level work, etc.
Both options might sound appalling, but the belief that your child is so gifted that they'll be able to absorb the full knowledge being dumped on them AND still turn into a healthy adolescent is about as practical as believing that Jesus is your personal savior (not saying it's wrong.. Just saying it's a leap of unrealizeable faith).
Seriously, the complexity associated with modern development tools is way too steep a curve for your average 14 year old to wrap their heads around.
When I was 11 and wanting to "program", all I could do is grab TI-99 magazines and transcribe them onto the extended basic cartrage. I understood very little, but I could figure out the tiny bits.
Eventually my family upgraded to an IBM-PC clone which came with GW-Basic and more importantly the command manual..
I'd spend days trying to memorize the commands, and after each one, I'd write a little two line program that utilized it (kind of like how people say they remember human being names.. something I never fully caught on to).
One thing that I learned (and here's the point), I was never able to do much that could be considered useful. The closest I ever got was to write a program which stored historical lottory numbers to disk, and I used a primative (12-year-old's mentality) lottory number picker (which did better than commerical lottory tools.. probably because I didn't know anything about probability and had luck on my side). Other than that, I was alwasys frustrated that I couldn't produce anything near the quality of what I saw people using on a regular basis.
But I learned to deal with that fact, and just kept quietly happy with learning individual commands.
Even in later more traditional com-sci classes, all the "teaching" was on abstract algorithms and data-structures, and analytic tools... GUI's were almost never encouraged - it was a testable concept that was key, and these void-main programs were more than adaquate.
In the real world, it also took some time before I could write much more than tool-oriented scripts.. Front-ends were always daunting and some world away.
But here I am 15 years later and thankfully missed the GUI boat.. We now have something called web-services and intelligent clients, so I almost never have to construct much more than a few libraries which render complex HTML for me - yet I can construct elaborite financial transaction systems that merge cell phones credit cards email systems and traffic control systems. (never having learned well that seemingly elusive graphical component).
My point, re-iterated, is that graphical tools give a false sense of positive feedback to a would-be developer. If I can do something and make it beep, ping, draw a graphical animation in the first 15 minutes of my exposure to it, what is going to be my attention span? If I think "hey, this tool can be twiddled to do all sorts of cool 'canned' things".. Then I'll think to myself, if I ever want to do a 'canned' thing, then I'll consult the tool.. Then procrastination kicks in, and I never get around to it.. That about sums up VRML and most proprietary 3D CAD modeling tools I've ever fiddled with.
VB hides the programming experience and replaces it with nice graphical widgets that provide A) useful tools for business professionals B) a fun 15 minutes of dabbling in programming - never to be touched again.
To this point, I've installed VB, VC++ and J++ on various machines and was wowed, and mezmorized for all of a couple hours each.. But I've sat at a DOS or BASH prompt for almost all my life and have mastered just about every "challenging" tool there was. And that's the key.. Give them bells and whistles and they'll ding you about once or twice.. Give them a raw set of dry, and apply-effort-here tools, and a master's apprentice I will show you....
US has highest health care costs in the world, yet quality is not among the top 20 industrialized countries.
High for families that have baby's or who are sick. I've only spent $200 in the past 9 years on health care costs (ignoring over-the-counter pills). And that's the point.. In the US, you still have a choice.. It isn't mandated [yet] that we "choose" a health care plan, or worse-yet, have one imposed on us. And by the way, every time I've been to a dentist or physician, I haven't had any lines, nor have I had any problems getting the treatment I wanted; because I pay out-of-pocket.
If cars were treated the same way as people think we should treat them for health-care, we'd force the government or car insurance company to pay for our gas.. Then we'd bitch at the government because there isn't enough gas for us to commute our 80 miles to work every day and back in our super-stretched SUVs.
People should pay for what they use... Insurance is for the unexpected - and it's only required if you don't have the cash reserves to mitigate high expense operations.
US vacation time and real compensation have been shrinking since the 60s with a few temporary exceptions.
Except that our ability to enjoy time away from the office and IN the office has sored thanks to computers and the internet. You can argue wheather this time is spent well.. But I've spent some time at farms.. And believe me, my head wants to explode after two or three hours of watching grass grow (though I have to admit that the eating was good). I'd have to say we're better off.
Have you read a single article about the French riots? The issue centers on the fact that the revised labor laws basically allow the majority of young workers to basically be fired without cause up to age 27 anytime somebody younger (=cheaper) comes along.
Wasn't that the point? If you think someone else is a better fit for a job in the US, then you can usually lay the first person off (or make their position obsolete if you're clever enough) possibly paying some sort of severace package and go alone with the new person. That's why we have training periods.. So we can fire someone that doesn't seem like a good fit. If the government (empowered by the will of the people) says, give me guaranteed jobs no matter how good I am, because it is my right to work.. Then you foster incompetent workers. It's that simple. Everything else is just a degree of one extreme to another. Look at US teachers that get tenure.. They have to be willing to have sex with a minor to get fired from that job. That capability was a factor of union empowerment, not the government's will.
I don't understand the mentality that says working a bit less and enjoying more vacation and retirement are bad things. Do you really have that little meaning in your life outside of the office? I'm truly sorry if you do.
Other people have spoken about this at length (including me). But I'll just say that a) some people like their jobs, b) some people like what their jobs provide their lives, c) some people prefer instead to steal. There isn't a whole lot of "d)" I'll sit around the house and watch Opra instead of working today. But there is already a lot of "e)" I'll have to take time off without pay to bring my dog to the vet.
So all, in all, I think people are pretty smart and doing what's best for them.
Given rising productivity, it makes no sense to me to have individuals making More Stuff, when they could be making the same stuff in less time and spending the rest of that time at home doing Good Stuff.
My issue is with "being at home doing Good Stuff". I challenge you to demonstrate that people spend their home time wisely as it is. All of the people that I know either spend their home time either doing programming projects, playing video games, playing out hobbies that don't connect them to their families (like golf, sports, crafts). Sure a hobby can be great, especially when it involves other people.. But is this really a better way to spend your life? Perhaps. But I would argue that it is just as selfish as wanting/needing to work more for more money to buy more stuff. The stuff we buy are essentially the same hobbies; that boat, that computer, that pool-table... The "Good Stuff" to me would mean, spending more quality loving time with your spouse. Spending time engaging your children (NOT spending more time being their nanny/tutor, as a nanny/baby-sitter/tutor is equally qualified to fullfill that chore). If you can earn enough to pay a baby sitter + 1 dollar, you should work and pay a baby sitter. And when you come home, you should spend some of your time in personal pleasure, and the rest of that time engaging your child/spouse.
But I don't hear people defining that "Good Stuff" like this. So I have to assume it's just a generic description of personal hobbies and time away from life's stress. But there are more economicly viable ways of attaining the two; e.g. take a PSP and ride the BUS/metro.. That's 2 hours a day of game time. Take yoga and use it during your lunch break. Set up a quiet space in your home. Discipline your family to sleep and awake at regular hours. Eat a regular and healthy diet (even if it costs more, and is pre-cooked dinners).
The point of our modern growth is the technology and efficiencies have been determined through logical analysis of human life patterns. But the shame of it all is that we have been unable to encorporate the best-of-breed teachings into everyday life styles. Forget hatting your job, forget hating school so you don't wind up getting a good job, there is information out there (even if it means watching freaking Dr. Phil) that can improve the efficiency of your life independently of your stress level, compassion level, income level, etc.
True, but the existence of randomness would not move us from a deterministic-no-choice model to a freewill-choice-model. It would move us to a random-no-choice model.
I'd argue that 'random' as is being used in both contexts is incorrect, and instead probablistic should be used instead. Random with no qualitification at the very least brings about connotations of pure indeterminism. In particular random represents an unbounded outcome which could have been one of several (with no rhyme or reason). But more accurately, probabilities are the static equations with bounded outcomes for bounded inputs. Then many of the variables of the equation are replaced with such random outcomes.
So for example, the result of a coin flipping is a random outcome, but the way a person plays poker can be translated into a probability equation that will be much more accurate than the individual random events.
The difference is that if we say something is random, we're essentially stating that it represents an atomic unit which can not be more deeply analyzed. If, however, we say something acts with a certain probability, we're able to break the event down into more well understood constraints. We have the ability to engineer for those constraints (which is the basis for CPU transistor design).
Now the problem with the parent poster is the "identical atomic" structure of the two monkeys. Presumably this is to isolate a variable for the test case. The problem is that there are built-in deficiencies in our universe with respect to information mining. We can not acquire info beyond a certain resolution, and thus we are forced to do things the hard-way... To play with analysis from different directions and be not terribly certain about the results of each test. So the proposed test case is meaningless. And the intended direction (producing more pure test subjects) is misguided.
The best AMD could do would be to release a firmware patch/select which would let the AMD64 be operated as full 64bit RISC processors without any x86 legacy crap whatsoever. Break it once break it good and be done with it.
It's called Itanium, and we all see how well that worked out.
I'm not exactly sure what the advantage of using a prefixed assembly language was (given the alternate execution mode); how hard could it have been to write a multi-plexed instruction decoder? When in 64bit mode, use decoder64, when not, use decoder32. To my knowledge decoders don't take up a whole hell of a log of silicone.
Theoretically you can reuse 95% of your existing compiler logic.. But to write 64bit assembly, you have to adjust for the 64bit pointers anyway, so that's got to be non-trivial.
I think the real problem with rewriting the assembly is that there is too much temptation to make dramatic changes, and to write new functionality that supports the changes (again, Itanium).
I have to assume that since they wanted IA32 to run as fast as humanly possible (and to merely SUPPORT 64bit), that a lot of the out-of-order logic and what-have-you were specificly tied to the nuances of IA32, and thus the overhead of a prefix was the nothing compared to the advantages of using 100% identical assembly-base.
There has to be a "clock" in the system. What Asynchronous means is that the ability to do add, sub, mul, if, jump, next-instruction, etc are not key'd to the clock. They are instead keyed to command signals, and instead of implicitly completing their request at the end of X clocks, they have to also generate a "I'm complete" signal. The controller continuously monitors them and acts as a flow-control manager for each segment of the CPU. So sound modules, etc will be using a clock for only those things that require it.
But I might be assuming too much. He might have just heard someone that he respected mention it, and thus assumed that it was correct. Very similar to most religious people.
There are many compelling reasons to believe in the Big Bang. But as to the question of "time", most people are at a loss to define it. Sufficient to say that without |entropy|>0 there can be no time. And entropy only ever increases. I won't get into the philosophy of imaginary numbers here though.
Oh come on, I think it's likely that humans have killed more humans in wars this century than any other. The best among us get better, the worse get more efficient it seems.
Talk about old school thinking.. You're still using associating yourself with the 20th century.:)
Secondly, as a percentage of military deaths of one's own country, I don't think we compare to ancient times. "Ethnic" cleansing is an ancient tradition. Look at the Crusades, Roman wars, Alexander the great.
No, it's called vernacular. A large percentage of our vocabulary is built up based on historical precedence. There was a reason for a large portion of the population to use a new term/phrase. But what happens is that people become more and more removed from the source; but still recognize the basic connotation that the phrase presents.
Given that this is a forum of people that have historical roots in IRC AND are use to sending email and wanting to avoid filters, the vernacular is completely legitimate.
Education is the biggest problem...they need as much knowledge available as possible. And these laptops can help with that. They can help alot. These laptops are about giving people the tools they need to learn - not just to fish, but to fish, farm, hunt, gather, build, heal, and *live*.
I agree that education is a big part of the problem. There is the concept of a "knowledge economy".. But this mostly was related to post-communist countries who had a high degree of education, but now have nothing else that is marketable.. Thus the only exportable resource is cheap outsourceable labor.. Course you have to deal w/ reliability and corruption factors in such down-trodden societies.
But I'm not sure that you can take a country that has no natural resources, has no established base of eduction, has no trust-worthy/safe infrastructure, and turn it into a knowledge-based economy.
Finally, the real question I have is whether manufacturing and maintaining and power a series of laptops is going to be cheaper than buying a bunch of text books.. Both are expensive, but theoretically you can put 1,000 pirated books onto one laptop in PDF format thereby producing cost savings.
Of course, the minute you do that, MS and other's will cry bloody murder that you're stealing their IP, bla bla bla.
way overpriced, but the size of it is VERY advantageous.. I can take this puppy and read scanned or online purchased books all the time. And it's lighter than a single hard-back book.
However, when I LAME something I see that one of my intel's cores goes to 100% while the other does not, so I DO find that applications need to be written for multi core systems.
I use "grip" and it asks you how many CPUs you have; it will simultaneously schedule that many encodings in parallel.
Technically the fast fouier transform can be parallelized, but it only makes sense with very large datasets, and MP3s break the audio clips into 1/32 second bit-streams, not a whole hell of a lot to transform. I'm sure there are pieces that can be parallelized of the MP3 format.. For one, you could have the encoder simultaneously try two different paths to determine which is smaller w/ less loss of data. You wouldn't be able to just give one frame to one CPU and another frame to another because they are semi-dependent on the ordering and context that's stored in subsequent frames.
In general, I've found that the best multi-CPU loads are in fact separated units of work where there is zero recognition of peer threads (except for state-safe locking/synchronization). While you CAN eek extra performance by writing threaded code, it just costs too much, is TOO damn hard to debug and the majority of the market is still single CPU'd anyway.. Parallelized web / servlet tasks are excellent scaleable units of work. Other things like IO-tasks tend to suck compared to multiplexed IO streams like UNIX "select" and friends.
Except that all modern CPUs perform throttling and use power-down noops instructions. If you actually cared about a green PC, then you'd shut your screen-saver off, but 99% of people that I know (namely I'm the only one out of 100 people that I know) DON'T shut off their screen saver...
With throttling (especially on laptops) you literally run at a lower speed, and power consumption is quadraticly related to frequency (2x speed is x^2 the power).
Then there's stuff like the video card. I have no idea how power efficient these massive beasts are anymore; they come with their own power supply plug, high powered fan, etc. So unless you know you're never going to game and thus get a REALLY crappy video card, you're probably throwing away more power-heat in your video subsystem than in your CPU at idle and definitely at game time.
Laptops have the luxury of using completely crappy video subsystems (that don't even have their own memory)
But seriously, the best green PC is going to be a laptop, EXCEPT that you're definitely not saving money in that approach. (a $1,000 difference for a semi-comparable system)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious to see these results, because I believe it's cooked numbers.. Here's why:
Energy = Power * time
If you define efficiency as a greater transfer of energy, then you COULD define this through the use of extremely LOW power levels (e.g. extraction over a very long time).
Hell, by that standard, weak nuclear decay has higher efficiency energy emmission efficiency than gas.
Power = Work / time
Work = Force * distance
Force = mass * acceleration
Big trucks have heavy mass, so they need (indirectly) lots of power to do the same work. A hypothetical low powered fuel cell therefore would not be sufficient to manage a big truck.
On the other hand, a US citizen is spoiled and requires lots of acceleration - just look at the cars we purchase compared to the rest of the world.. The little honda motor-scooter with like 15HP is the worlds most popular vehicle, while the US needs 135 HP to get out of the parking lot. The whole US hybrid car thing pisses me off.. All it is is a way to gain Horse Power (and thereby the acceleration). They put a little 60HP motor in, and use battery assist to enhance horsepower during periods in which the driver slams his foot on the gas (which should NEVER happen with an environmentally respectiable driver). You wait for a merge gap before you merge, you wean the throttle from a red light, you maintain a constant speed with a LARGE 2 to 3 second gap between you and the car in front of you to avoid fuel-consuming speed fluxuations, etc.
But US citizens do not do this. (I say this as an OCD American)
So, as fuel cells hyopthetically achieve low acceleration levels, they would not suffice replacing the battery as the acceleration module. What they COULD do is replace the engine as a true low-horse-power machine.. A diesel-electric train uses high horse-power electric motors and a diesel generator to recharge the electric batteries (or provide direct current - I don't know which). Theoretically the same could apply here... A large electric battery would power the electric motor wheels and a fuel-cell could recharge the batteries. To compensate for the hypothetical low power levels (the long energy emmission times), you could add more fuel cells in parallel.. A train has enough fixed weight that the incremental weight of the fuel cell theoretically isn't a problem - thereby avoiding the energy-to-weight v.s. gas issue which exists smaller cars.
I just don't believe this "low cost" "high volume" statement.If not, then you are about the only one.
Well, I'm just saying, I wouldn't bet money on IBM coming out with their cell in a high volume enough way to provide ultra-low pricing as in the PowerPC or obviously x86 markets. History has shown time and time again, that innovation is not what is important, dominance is. Alpha had a superb chip but was in no way marketable. Apple has always had a better design in computer hardware, but will likely never achieve any respectable market presense.
My post is one of pessimism; that the PS3 will not be a sufficient vehicle to drive the cell processor to a volume of scale (where you could afford to make only a few pennys of gross profit per CPU). Certainly anything could happen. But I have yet to see a video graphics processor (in the 10 years I've watched GPU progression) break out of it's niche market (despite all these innovative ways of using their specialized mathmatical processing power).
This article was about the scientific community seeing a potential to use the cell for what it was meant, but in a different venue than still-frame graphics rendering. That's fine, but any architectural descision requries taking the whole project into account, and I simply don't see the cost effectiveness of cell processing until and unless it becomes ubiquitous.. Otherwise what you have is an original cray (prior to the opteron or even alpha chip): 100% custom. And you pay for it.
Basically it's slightly cheaper than designing the chip yourself.. But my argument is... Not by much.
An interesting point is that most consoles sell their hardware at a loss. At least the XBox does. This means that there is no guarantee that IBM is willing to sell their CPUs at the same price that one would believe they cost for the PS3.
Moreoever, the scientific community is very likely to push their cell+ architecture and I'm sure IBM would be more than happy to help... For a massive price.
So, when building an HPC system, you're likely to work around the best architecture (the more expensive cell+), and purchasers of the HPC will then have a cray-like proprietary system at enormous cost.
Not that this is a bad thing, I just don't believe this "low cost" "high volume" statement.
Your technical priesthood job is on the block, my friend, and it has nothing to do with "making ourselves less competitive" because there *is* no "us". As you yourself noted, companies don't give a shit about you, and they don't differentiate between you or your Bangalore doppelganger. You're doublethinking if you believe your "rugged individualism" and "personal responsibility" ethos logically meshes with your neo-nationalistic competitive "patriotism". You are the perfect tool for what is happening right now--a me-first isolated soul who waves the flag even as his government and the greedheads that own it mortgage any possibility of a decent future not just for "their people", but the world itself.
...
Ok, perhaps a history lesson is in order. Once upon a time, everyone was "mostly" self sufficient.. "Employment" was a personal issue.. You found food or money to buy food or you died. But everybody knew this.. The problem was protection. Tribes were great because you could fend off animals or other tribe-sized competetors. Inside the tribe, you had various needs that would be fullfilled by directly growing/hunting food or providing services that others would share their food/money for.
Ok, boring, so far. Well, eventually economies of scale, technology and competition entered the picture until tribes were no longer sufficient.. Kingships (which could organize massive armies) were needed for this protection.. Or the scarseness of farmable/huntable land was needed.. Obviously this didn't exist everywhere.. It only seemed to have affected the middle east and Europe. Africa, north-east Asia and Austrailia managed to maintain very healthy hunter-gatherer tribes up through today. The competition never required advancement, consolidation, specialization, 'technologization',
Now with the king-subject situation, it was in the king's interest to keep everybody in the border.. You could be "fired" from the kingdom (exiled) mostly because there was land between kingdoms into which you COULD be exiled. But this was very rare. Further, it was in the king's interest to keep people employed - maning the armies, building the palaces, growing the food, etc. If people were lazy, they died.. Was pretty darwinistic.. But we hadn't really seen much of modern employment problems creep up yet, because the incentive structure didn't yet exist.
Later came fuedalism.. Smaller versions of king-ships.. Mostly focused around protection.. Because money was now a staple, not only did you farm/hunt for the food, but to pay your taxes and other "utilities" / "services".. We're much closer to modern day.. If you couldn't make ends meet (utilities were generally fixed, irregardless of your income level), then you became a debtor/slave. Now you were a ward of the state, BUT, much like older days, the smaller lords still have use for you... They could kill you whenever they didn't - but rarely did they exile you (wasn't enough people to fill the voids). The problem during this era is still stability and resource-starvation, not a lack of available work or "employers".
Finally came industrialization.. For the first time, we shift away from resources because we can manufacture new resources virtually anywhere. We also remove the primary focus away from security, as the "valueables" are no longer "your women", but the "goods" stored in the vaults.. Individual protection is no longer as important as the factory's protection.. BUT coincidently protect a single factory better than an entire village. So essentially protection is no longer the concern of each individual..
BUT, since we've now reshifted the focus away from the farms, away from the churches, away from the kings/lords.. We've focused them to the resource maker... The factory..
NOW, exhile takes on a whole new meaning.. There is a calculated fixed demand for workers for each factory, and a realisticly calculated fixed demand for regions with factories.. And moreover, there is a tradeoff between capital (money or fi
It's worked on Microsoft.
.NET.
.NET.
No it didn't.. MS took their J++ toolkit and java runtime/ JIT (which historically was the best out there) and refactored it as
Now the industry is HUGELY fragmented. Previously there were MS VB,C++ programmers, UNIX C,C++ programmers, web finatics including perl, python, lisp, php and various ASP. And finally you had EJB programmers (which could have been a combination of any of the above).
Now we are back to solid windows-only solutions (.NET) and UNIX only solutions (java). Yes there are still people that write enterprise-on-windows with Java, but most new projects of this sort are just going with
Sounds pretty fragemented to me.
Squarely on the head of the New Orleans leadership.
Perhaps you missed that part of the video clip of Bush sitting there in his briefing of New Orleans.. Saying not a word...
Every major US incident has an identical depiction of Bush.. Completely inept.. Should the Chocalate mayor go? Sure.. Why not.. It's politics; you live and die with the winds of opportunity.
Should Bush stay in office? I'm too biased to even *cough* suggest..
But hey, some of the founding fathers believed in slavery, so it's a real shame our country has deteriorated so much as to let that wonderful institution be outlawed...
Now now now.. You're taking slavery out of context. Slavery had many facets to it.. One was a more desireable alternative to debtors prison. Another was what you did to conquested countries so that they couldn't provide guarilla warfare against you (you know, like the Romans did, until they stopped doing it and got taken over by those they didn't kill). Granted, it was so common place, that people felt that just because they could steal a couple natives, put them in a boat and ship them overseas, they had a commodity which was virtually identical to the other two points.. The consumers of this didn't ask questions - it was on it's surface legitimate and moral. Much like how we don't question tuna.. We don't question whether our house was built with 100% American labor (with SSN's to back it).. We look the other way because we feel that we couldn't know for sure that there WAS illicit elements to this thing we so love (cheaper products and better tasting fish).
Moreover, it's moral relativism.. Will capitalism be looked at as horrendously demonic 100 years from now.. Government sponsored oppression of the working and under class?? Communists tried and failed this route I guess.
Will the death penalty be viewed as horrific and inhuman?.. There are reports this past couple weeks about how much a death penalty person suffers (the supreme court case of a man questioning his method of death).
Will usurping our environment be considered morally defunct because we KNEW that we were killing our future? Ignorance or feeling that since-everyone-else does it is my moral escape clause??
Would McCain work for or against cleaning up the bribery
Look, I like McCain.. His "shtick" is integrity.. I'm just enough of a sucker to forgo Abortion, good fiscal management, strong international diplomacy, opportunistic policy, just to restore that word to the office.
But McCain is just swinging integrity just like Republicans are swinging $100 bribes to the poor, $1,000 bribes to middle class and $1,000,000 bribes to the wealthy. Or like Democrats are swinging "free gas and free drugs". These are all just political tools. And if you watch McCain enough, you can see it in him too. Believe me, I liked the guy enough to pay attention to every word.. And the politician in him definitely shows.
Though I will say, my favoite paraphrased quote from him was that he came to congress as a boy-scout.. And congress just has to eventually kill that in you.. Otherwise it just kills you.
There is no difference between the two major parties. They're both as stupid, evil, and greedy as the Republicans.
/. readers would agree). Every aspect of the generic commodity known as the public is studied, scrutinized and refined. There are natural innefficiencies and natural monopolies.. A single unit can not process ALL the information that is out there... Moreover the demand for information is it's own commodity. So by playing to the scarcity of information and the cost of information acquisition, you can manipulate the market.
Yes, but (and forgive me if you are a lawyer), this is the logical conclusion of the system our fore-fathers have constructed. Is there a better system? I don't know.. The old boys were pretty stern about limiting the efficiency of government rule to prevent tyranny...
See, here's the trajady.. A good system (like good soil) will cause it's population to grow and grow until the pot can no longer contain the population. Diseconomies of scale will eventually occur.
Now through no credit of their own, the old boys established a loose central government.. Theoretically this would facilitate several pots, each capable of managing a smaller population.. But eventually scale hits them (just like big-O).
Every thing that is being done is to Science (as I'm sure most
It's all game-theory.
So, as part of gaming it out, you can't have a single party.. Then you'd always be to blame; you'd always be outed by the public.. You need at least two parties.. More might be nice, but at least two.
Now, once you have two parties, every possible "cause" (beit moral or immoral) has to find it's voice.. If you have 3 or more parties, then you run a huge risk of backing a losing horse.. So any good "cause" manager (yet another commodity manager) is looking for the best representation.. So they pick the strongest party.. But, some causes are mutually exclusive.. Can't have green-peace and oil-drilling in the same party - kind of hard for a politician to do it with a straight face. So there are natual sides that occur.
While I have not directly taken government studies classes, I've taken lots of economics classes which happen to also deal with government policy.. And in those classes there are wonderful 2D charts which show virtually every cause you could be interested in.. They are oriented in a classical "leftist" and "conservativistic" manner.. I don't recall with the second dimension was.. In such a simple layout, you can draw a straight line splitting all the causes in two.
Intelligent stuarts of a cause will solicit representatives that fall on one side or the other - as is appropriate for the dividing line.. So now you have your "base".. The rest is this slightly non-precise dividing line which can shift slightly in the various dimensional directions... This represents the coveted middle ground.
The final aspect is the commodity of "voters".. The science continues on to maximizes voters of your side while minimizing the voters of the other side.. Each action a politicians team makes might encourage their own base at the expense of riling up the opposing base.. So each marketing action (or political decision) must be carefully weighed against the information of the "political-elasticity" of this semi-voting public.
We probably have not perfected the art of to-vote or not-to-vote.. But we certainly have maximized political association of causes (and thereby campaign contributions).
Now, in a small enough community, communism works brilliantly.. I can't believe people thought it would actually work for millions of people. But I'd say the exact same thing about democracy - though arguably democracy works up to a much larger scale.
So, where are we currently? I think a combination of things are in order. 1'st we have no choice but to vote for the party not in power except for the RARE cases of presidents that actually do have honor, integrity, intelligence, and political clout. 2'nd we ne
Who else votes for the republicans? Mostly idiots who believe the republicans when they say they are for fiscal responsiblity and smaller govt despite the fact that the only presients who ever shrank the govt in my lifetime were democrats and even Carter ran the economy better then Bush.
I can't believe I'm going to defend a Republican congress.. Please believe me, I have no love for those currently in power (the people, not the party), but there is a subtle difference between the republican-led waste and the democrat-led waste.. The republicans are currently blatently spending all their money bribing the public.. Bribing with wars (to encourage patriotism), bribing with tax cuts (to bring on the middle and upper class STRONGLY to their side), bribing with pennys from heaven (hundred dollar rebates during election years) to bring the poor to their side. But, if you can look past that, they're trying to dismantle the entitlement society (which is slowly approaching Europe in terms of a stangnant upper-bound economy where you can't fire anyone, and 60% of your salary goes to pay for your medical drugs; with US-level medical addiction).
I'm ignoring the pure corruption of funneling money through to coffer projects as pork and riders that ALL congress people do.
The democrats push their "bribes" towards entitlements which have very serious long term consequences.. Now you may be of the opinion that we should have a semi-communist or at least a healthy socialist nation (nationalized oil, nationalized doctors, nationalized collage)... And if so, I can't say that you're wrong.. I just don't think that you're right. But the dollar amounts are comparable. If you don't believe me.. Social security was the single biggest permanent tax hike in US history. A full medical coverage of every man woman and child (which most democrats promote) would be the second largest permanent tax increase.
Currently the democrats are the "party of fiscal responsibility" ONLY because it's money being spent on projects that aren't their own.. I've yet to hear a single democrat say that they are for lowering spending.. THey merely comment on how badly the republican's are spending.. And when republicans call the democrats on it, they merely blandly dodge the topic saying "yes, but not for those purposes". Yes they'd raise taxes (permanently), yes they'd increase spending (permanently).. Arguably, the public would vote yes to those increases.. But if they could, the public would vote that their salary shouldn't go down as a result of it. Funny that...
This isn't liberal vs. conservative or any such thing, this is a matter of justice--you don't hang someone on fabricated evidence, even if they are a villain.
You are very wrong sir. There is no such thing as fact. And the media is not a court of law. If the media can not follow down "leads" that provide ill public impression of what is likely to be wrong-doing - to open the doors so that other reporters can eventually find more concrete associations of that wrong-doing, then what is their job? They are not police, they are not private investigators. It is wrong to say that the role of the media is to merely report on what private investigators and police and the government say. The role of the media is to draw public attention to things that are important for them [the public] to know.
If a reporter points out repeatedly that a particular CEO is likely selling off his stock (through indirect evidence), then (so long as it can not be shown that there is conflict of interest in the media company) the added attention brought will very likely bring about competing investigations until something very close to the truth is revealed..
Now what I assume you are alluding to is true slandor.. Making sh*t up to purposefully hurt somebody.. No, you are right.. The media shouldn't do that.. We should let the billions of campaign dollars do that instead (not sarchasm). Oh, but don't let the media try and investigate the sources of the money, because political parties will have very well hid all their sources; anything that was found would almost certainly have to have been acquired illegally.. Hmm. kind of reminds me of the DMCA.. The digital clue that says, "if you've gotten this far, you're already going to jail".
Sorry, I don't believe in fascism...
They fail to realize the technological marvel that it is, as they seem to take it for granted.
Careful there.. My dad would say the same about modern "non serviceable" car engines. Or how about electronic circuits all through our house. Or the complicated ins and outs of carpentry.
The point is that every industry has a specialization.. That's why you have master's and apprentices. Today we convolute this too much and have weak masters called teachers, and distracted apprentices called students. But in specializing in everything, you are good at nothing.
Either one of two things needs to happen:
A) We dumb schools back down again.. Removing all these BS requirements of teaching a full compliment of US history, world history, social studients, math and science, and just present an overview of it all by end of high school.. Enough that when someone asks you about world war I, you'd remember that it involved war and the most of the world...
or
B) Allow specialized "tracks" of education.. Where a child is placed into one of several specialized school systems.. focusing on math/science, or arts, or fine-arts, or eventual business, or janitorial level work, etc.
Both options might sound appalling, but the belief that your child is so gifted that they'll be able to absorb the full knowledge being dumped on them AND still turn into a healthy adolescent is about as practical as believing that Jesus is your personal savior (not saying it's wrong.. Just saying it's a leap of unrealizeable faith).
Seriously, the complexity associated with modern development tools is way too steep a curve for your average 14 year old to wrap their heads around.
When I was 11 and wanting to "program", all I could do is grab TI-99 magazines and transcribe them onto the extended basic cartrage. I understood very little, but I could figure out the tiny bits.
Eventually my family upgraded to an IBM-PC clone which came with GW-Basic and more importantly the command manual..
I'd spend days trying to memorize the commands, and after each one, I'd write a little two line program that utilized it (kind of like how people say they remember human being names.. something I never fully caught on to).
One thing that I learned (and here's the point), I was never able to do much that could be considered useful. The closest I ever got was to write a program which stored historical lottory numbers to disk, and I used a primative (12-year-old's mentality) lottory number picker (which did better than commerical lottory tools.. probably because I didn't know anything about probability and had luck on my side). Other than that, I was alwasys frustrated that I couldn't produce anything near the quality of what I saw people using on a regular basis.
But I learned to deal with that fact, and just kept quietly happy with learning individual commands.
Even in later more traditional com-sci classes, all the "teaching" was on abstract algorithms and data-structures, and analytic tools... GUI's were almost never encouraged - it was a testable concept that was key, and these void-main programs were more than adaquate.
In the real world, it also took some time before I could write much more than tool-oriented scripts.. Front-ends were always daunting and some world away.
But here I am 15 years later and thankfully missed the GUI boat.. We now have something called web-services and intelligent clients, so I almost never have to construct much more than a few libraries which render complex HTML for me - yet I can construct elaborite financial transaction systems that merge cell phones credit cards email systems and traffic control systems. (never having learned well that seemingly elusive graphical component).
My point, re-iterated, is that graphical tools give a false sense of positive feedback to a would-be developer. If I can do something and make it beep, ping, draw a graphical animation in the first 15 minutes of my exposure to it, what is going to be my attention span? If I think "hey, this tool can be twiddled to do all sorts of cool 'canned' things".. Then I'll think to myself, if I ever want to do a 'canned' thing, then I'll consult the tool.. Then procrastination kicks in, and I never get around to it.. That about sums up VRML and most proprietary 3D CAD modeling tools I've ever fiddled with.
VB hides the programming experience and replaces it with nice graphical widgets that provide A) useful tools for business professionals B) a fun 15 minutes of dabbling in programming - never to be touched again.
To this point, I've installed VB, VC++ and J++ on various machines and was wowed, and mezmorized for all of a couple hours each.. But I've sat at a DOS or BASH prompt for almost all my life and have mastered just about every "challenging" tool there was. And that's the key.. Give them bells and whistles and they'll ding you about once or twice.. Give them a raw set of dry, and apply-effort-here tools, and a master's apprentice I will show you....
US has highest health care costs in the world, yet quality is not among the top 20 industrialized countries.
High for families that have baby's or who are sick. I've only spent $200 in the past 9 years on health care costs (ignoring over-the-counter pills). And that's the point.. In the US, you still have a choice.. It isn't mandated [yet] that we "choose" a health care plan, or worse-yet, have one imposed on us. And by the way, every time I've been to a dentist or physician, I haven't had any lines, nor have I had any problems getting the treatment I wanted; because I pay out-of-pocket.
If cars were treated the same way as people think we should treat them for health-care, we'd force the government or car insurance company to pay for our gas.. Then we'd bitch at the government because there isn't enough gas for us to commute our 80 miles to work every day and back in our super-stretched SUVs.
People should pay for what they use... Insurance is for the unexpected - and it's only required if you don't have the cash reserves to mitigate high expense operations.
US vacation time and real compensation have been shrinking since the 60s with a few temporary exceptions.
Except that our ability to enjoy time away from the office and IN the office has sored thanks to computers and the internet. You can argue wheather this time is spent well.. But I've spent some time at farms.. And believe me, my head wants to explode after two or three hours of watching grass grow (though I have to admit that the eating was good). I'd have to say we're better off.
Have you read a single article about the French riots? The issue centers on the fact that the revised labor laws basically allow the majority of young workers to basically be fired without cause up to age 27 anytime somebody younger (=cheaper) comes along.
Wasn't that the point? If you think someone else is a better fit for a job in the US, then you can usually lay the first person off (or make their position obsolete if you're clever enough) possibly paying some sort of severace package and go alone with the new person. That's why we have training periods.. So we can fire someone that doesn't seem like a good fit. If the government (empowered by the will of the people) says, give me guaranteed jobs no matter how good I am, because it is my right to work.. Then you foster incompetent workers. It's that simple. Everything else is just a degree of one extreme to another. Look at US teachers that get tenure.. They have to be willing to have sex with a minor to get fired from that job. That capability was a factor of union empowerment, not the government's will.
I don't understand the mentality that says working a bit less and enjoying more vacation and retirement are bad things. Do you really have that little meaning in your life outside of the office? I'm truly sorry if you do.
Other people have spoken about this at length (including me). But I'll just say that a) some people like their jobs, b) some people like what their jobs provide their lives, c) some people prefer instead to steal. There isn't a whole lot of "d)" I'll sit around the house and watch Opra instead of working today. But there is already a lot of "e)" I'll have to take time off without pay to bring my dog to the vet.
So all, in all, I think people are pretty smart and doing what's best for them.
Given rising productivity, it makes no sense to me to have individuals making More Stuff, when they could be making the same stuff in less time and spending the rest of that time at home doing Good Stuff.
My issue is with "being at home doing Good Stuff". I challenge you to demonstrate that people spend their home time wisely as it is. All of the people that I know either spend their home time either doing programming projects, playing video games, playing out hobbies that don't connect them to their families (like golf, sports, crafts). Sure a hobby can be great, especially when it involves other people.. But is this really a better way to spend your life? Perhaps. But I would argue that it is just as selfish as wanting/needing to work more for more money to buy more stuff. The stuff we buy are essentially the same hobbies; that boat, that computer, that pool-table... The "Good Stuff" to me would mean, spending more quality loving time with your spouse. Spending time engaging your children (NOT spending more time being their nanny/tutor, as a nanny/baby-sitter/tutor is equally qualified to fullfill that chore). If you can earn enough to pay a baby sitter + 1 dollar, you should work and pay a baby sitter. And when you come home, you should spend some of your time in personal pleasure, and the rest of that time engaging your child/spouse.
But I don't hear people defining that "Good Stuff" like this. So I have to assume it's just a generic description of personal hobbies and time away from life's stress. But there are more economicly viable ways of attaining the two; e.g. take a PSP and ride the BUS/metro.. That's 2 hours a day of game time. Take yoga and use it during your lunch break. Set up a quiet space in your home. Discipline your family to sleep and awake at regular hours. Eat a regular and healthy diet (even if it costs more, and is pre-cooked dinners).
The point of our modern growth is the technology and efficiencies have been determined through logical analysis of human life patterns. But the shame of it all is that we have been unable to encorporate the best-of-breed teachings into everyday life styles. Forget hatting your job, forget hating school so you don't wind up getting a good job, there is information out there (even if it means watching freaking Dr. Phil) that can improve the efficiency of your life independently of your stress level, compassion level, income level, etc.
True, but the existence of randomness would not move us from a deterministic-no-choice model to a freewill-choice-model. It would move us to a random-no-choice model.
I'd argue that 'random' as is being used in both contexts is incorrect, and instead probablistic should be used instead. Random with no qualitification at the very least brings about connotations of pure indeterminism. In particular random represents an unbounded outcome which could have been one of several (with no rhyme or reason). But more accurately, probabilities are the static equations with bounded outcomes for bounded inputs. Then many of the variables of the equation are replaced with such random outcomes.
So for example, the result of a coin flipping is a random outcome, but the way a person plays poker can be translated into a probability equation that will be much more accurate than the individual random events.
The difference is that if we say something is random, we're essentially stating that it represents an atomic unit which can not be more deeply analyzed. If, however, we say something acts with a certain probability, we're able to break the event down into more well understood constraints. We have the ability to engineer for those constraints (which is the basis for CPU transistor design).
Now the problem with the parent poster is the "identical atomic" structure of the two monkeys. Presumably this is to isolate a variable for the test case. The problem is that there are built-in deficiencies in our universe with respect to information mining. We can not acquire info beyond a certain resolution, and thus we are forced to do things the hard-way... To play with analysis from different directions and be not terribly certain about the results of each test. So the proposed test case is meaningless. And the intended direction (producing more pure test subjects) is misguided.
Well, when your options are a dush and a turd sandwhich, what do you want? American Idol?
The best AMD could do would be to release a firmware patch/select which would let the AMD64 be operated as full 64bit RISC processors without any x86 legacy crap whatsoever. Break it once break it good and be done with it.
It's called Itanium, and we all see how well that worked out.
I'm not exactly sure what the advantage of using a prefixed assembly language was (given the alternate execution mode); how hard could it have been to write a multi-plexed instruction decoder? When in 64bit mode, use decoder64, when not, use decoder32. To my knowledge decoders don't take up a whole hell of a log of silicone.
Theoretically you can reuse 95% of your existing compiler logic.. But to write 64bit assembly, you have to adjust for the 64bit pointers anyway, so that's got to be non-trivial.
I think the real problem with rewriting the assembly is that there is too much temptation to make dramatic changes, and to write new functionality that supports the changes (again, Itanium).
I have to assume that since they wanted IA32 to run as fast as humanly possible (and to merely SUPPORT 64bit), that a lot of the out-of-order logic and what-have-you were specificly tied to the nuances of IA32, and thus the overhead of a prefix was the nothing compared to the advantages of using 100% identical assembly-base.
There has to be a "clock" in the system. What Asynchronous means is that the ability to do add, sub, mul, if, jump, next-instruction, etc are not key'd to the clock. They are instead keyed to command signals, and instead of implicitly completing their request at the end of X clocks, they have to also generate a "I'm complete" signal. The controller continuously monitors them and acts as a flow-control manager for each segment of the CPU. So sound modules, etc will be using a clock for only those things that require it.
How do you know?
He looked it up.. Why don't you.
But I might be assuming too much. He might have just heard someone that he respected mention it, and thus assumed that it was correct. Very similar to most religious people.
There are many compelling reasons to believe in the Big Bang. But as to the question of "time", most people are at a loss to define it. Sufficient to say that without |entropy|>0 there can be no time. And entropy only ever increases. I won't get into the philosophy of imaginary numbers here though.
Oh come on, I think it's likely that humans have killed more humans in wars this century than any other. The best among us get better, the worse get more efficient it seems.
:)
Talk about old school thinking.. You're still using associating yourself with the 20th century.
Secondly, as a percentage of military deaths of one's own country, I don't think we compare to ancient times. "Ethnic" cleansing is an ancient tradition. Look at the Crusades, Roman wars, Alexander the great.
No, it's called vernacular.
A large percentage of our vocabulary is built up based on historical precedence. There was a reason for a large portion of the population to use a new term/phrase. But what happens is that people become more and more removed from the source; but still recognize the basic connotation that the phrase presents.
Given that this is a forum of people that have historical roots in IRC AND are use to sending email and wanting to avoid filters, the vernacular is completely legitimate.
Education is the biggest problem...they need as much knowledge available as possible. And these laptops can help with that. They can help alot. These laptops are about giving people the tools they need to learn - not just to fish, but to fish, farm, hunt, gather, build, heal, and *live*.
2 96429&seg=HHO/
I agree that education is a big part of the problem. There is the concept of a "knowledge economy".. But this mostly was related to post-communist countries who had a high degree of education, but now have nothing else that is marketable.. Thus the only exportable resource is cheap outsourceable labor.. Course you have to deal w/ reliability and corruption factors in such down-trodden societies.
But I'm not sure that you can take a country that has no natural resources, has no established base of eduction, has no trust-worthy/safe infrastructure, and turn it into a knowledge-based economy.
Finally, the real question I have is whether manufacturing and maintaining and power a series of laptops is going to be cheaper than buying a bunch of text books.. Both are expensive, but theoretically you can put 1,000 pirated books onto one laptop in PDF format thereby producing cost savings.
Of course, the minute you do that, MS and other's will cry bloody murder that you're stealing their IP, bla bla bla.
I personally have a libretto http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/pdet.to?poid=
way overpriced, but the size of it is VERY advantageous.. I can take this puppy and read scanned or online purchased books all the time. And it's lighter than a single hard-back book.
However, when I LAME something I see that one of my intel's cores goes to 100% while the other does not, so I DO find that applications need to be written for multi core systems.
I use "grip" and it asks you how many CPUs you have; it will simultaneously schedule that many encodings in parallel.
Technically the fast fouier transform can be parallelized, but it only makes sense with very large datasets, and MP3s break the audio clips into 1/32 second bit-streams, not a whole hell of a lot to transform. I'm sure there are pieces that can be parallelized of the MP3 format.. For one, you could have the encoder simultaneously try two different paths to determine which is smaller w/ less loss of data. You wouldn't be able to just give one frame to one CPU and another frame to another because they are semi-dependent on the ordering and context that's stored in subsequent frames.
In general, I've found that the best multi-CPU loads are in fact separated units of work where there is zero recognition of peer threads (except for state-safe locking/synchronization). While you CAN eek extra performance by writing threaded code, it just costs too much, is TOO damn hard to debug and the majority of the market is still single CPU'd anyway.. Parallelized web / servlet tasks are excellent scaleable units of work. Other things like IO-tasks tend to suck compared to multiplexed IO streams like UNIX "select" and friends.
Except that all modern CPUs perform throttling and use power-down noops instructions. If you actually cared about a green PC, then you'd shut your screen-saver off, but 99% of people that I know (namely I'm the only one out of 100 people that I know) DON'T shut off their screen saver...
With throttling (especially on laptops) you literally run at a lower speed, and power consumption is quadraticly related to frequency (2x speed is x^2 the power).
Then there's stuff like the video card. I have no idea how power efficient these massive beasts are anymore; they come with their own power supply plug, high powered fan, etc. So unless you know you're never going to game and thus get a REALLY crappy video card, you're probably throwing away more power-heat in your video subsystem than in your CPU at idle and definitely at game time.
Laptops have the luxury of using completely crappy video subsystems (that don't even have their own memory)
But seriously, the best green PC is going to be a laptop, EXCEPT that you're definitely not saving money in that approach. (a $1,000 difference for a semi-comparable system)