If I remember correctly, our eyes see at ~430 FPS so we still are talking about a long way to go to make a "realistic" image where the eyes physically are slower in refresh compared to the video.
I hardly think our realism barrier consists mainly of faster-than-TV refresh rates. If that was the case, I could get out my CGI-pong video game and run it up to 1,000fps.
Hidden surface removal is only really a factor when the card can't handle the current volume. It scales with the complexity of the scene. Plus there are technologies such as ATI's (and now nVida) that help reduce the effect considerably.
FSAA is largely irrelevant when you achieve high enough resolutions. Results may vary though.
Stereo has never been a major factor, nor do I think it'll really catch on; especially on a console, unless you split the output signal.
Still there are plenty of other common sence arguments promoting the continued bleeding edge development. Not least of which is the fact that the intro's are still rendered seperately.
I think the real push should start moving away from higher polygon rates and more towards greater visualization enhancements for each polygon. We're already dealing with cool things such as environmental bump mapping. I'm still waiting for the fully featured ray-tracing engine. I'd be perfectly happy with a scene that was only 30fps, 800x600, average number of polygons if I could just feel the glimmer of living light.
Anymore, I'm not impressed with making the numbers of yesterday's technology bigger. Perhaps with this on-board memory, Sony could venture into some real of high-bandwidth calculations. Not being well enough versed in the industry, I can't venture to make guesses though (voxels or better shading techniques maybe?)
A library allowing the re-reading of a book or magazine is akin to going to a used-book store and picking up a cheaper copy. The publisher doesn't get a penny of that resale, and potentially loses a new sale.
Granted, book reselling isn't the biggest industry in the world... But it sounds to me that corporate greed (The inability to reconsile the fact that diminishing increases in profit hurts stock value, or even, gasp, that profits some times go down) is going to undermine freedom, since the new economic aristocracy (which sadly includes the middle class investors) demands tithing from us all. Like a virus, lack of growth means death in this ever consolidating society - The black hole of evolution (once critical mass is achieved, everything gets pulled in until you are left lifeless).
It is only now that I'm realizing the genious of old-school American regional segregation laws, such as with banking. Encourage the mom-pop stores, since they're not dependant on growth - just consistency. Sure it meant random qualities of service; but before mass travel you wouldn't even know you were getting lousy service.
The irony, however, was that it is the starved poets and artists / musicians that find themselves in that position (of course along with general dead-beats or an occasional handi-capped person).
The issue that I was presenting was that some idealize the arts today at the expense of the sciences. The question I hated most in high school was "when am I ever going to use this stuff?" Especially by those that had it figured out - "I'm going to be a model", etc.
People at my work kid around with me because I have 20+ windows terminals open at any given time.. Half of them are man pages, some have perl-debugger windows (to test out concepts), and many just sit in the proper directories so I don't have to cd back and forth.
I'll have 10 emacs frames open so I can compare and contrast sections of code.
I've arranged all the windows so as to maximize parallel viewing..
The reason? I can't remember all the little fragments. "0xFFE08 is the search key.. Ok, what was it again? Oh hell, let me copy and paste." "I just used this function like 10 times, but I forget what the parameter order is. Let me look it up again."
Not too long ago, I memorized pie and "e" to 50 digits as a mental exercize.. I had no problem doing so (simple repetitious exercize), but I still haven't memorized my second-phone-line, even though I look it up like twice a day for the pizza guy.. I never remember a new person's name. I scoff when someone gives me a phone number to remember, assuming I'll remember it (I politely do that when they give me a name). I can't remember the IP address that I regularly ftp to manually (I look it up every time).
I don't carry around a PDA, but my work-station serves just as well. I carry around a date-book with all my phone numbers (which essentially plays the role of a PDA). I use to carry around a pocket notepad and pen to jot down reminders, but that got to be too combersome; I just carry my book-bag around everywhere.
With things like cut-and paste, and high information over-load, I've trained my mind not to even try and remember.. Even the important stuff like equations I can always reference within 5 seconds.
My friends all joke about my lack of memory, and my girlfriends have often been frustrated by it. But not a one of them would characterize me as stupid, as this article seems to imply I should be.
I honestly believe that if I had never seen a computer in my life my memory would be many times greater than it is today. Also if I'd continued to use my bench-press, my arms would be many times their current diameter. I don't feel a loss for either of them. My mind is very tuned. I read a lot; I philosophize a lot.. I learn new computer languages regularly and can analyze with the best of them. I'm an engineer by trade, and can talk physics until the sun comes up.. Just don't ask me what your name is.
You've got balls man (course you're going in as the coward). I'd almost want to see this marked up as funny; almost.
Though I think there is a modicum of legitimacy to your argument. I'd like to point out one thing.. Women tend to do better in high school.
The "agressive" males are usually too busy being the class clown, the jocks, or just dissidents (frustrated with their mal-adjustment to society). Women have better "spot memory" as I call it. Men are more prone towards mental visualization of the abstract. But the general maturity level still gives the edge to women.
I don't see how mainstream History, Chemistry, English, Physics, Biology, or most definately Math has changed for the femanine. All I see are attempts at multi-culturalizm, with emphases on the emotion of the children. That doesn't make it any more boring for the aspiring student (no matter the gender).
At my school, at least, we had 4 difficulty levels.. Remedial, general, college prep and honors/AP. There was plenty there to challenge you. (If they weren't enough, you'd often go to a school upstate).
To quote my high school football coach (no I didn't play): "Our team can't even hold the ball, let alone do any fancy passes."
The trick is time management. Less and less of a given day is available for a given subject.. I've watched as my high school periods shrunk from an hour per class to 40 minutes. Skill and drill works very well in the military where they can't make any assumptions about your competence. They've found a system that keeps their soldiers alive, so they're going to burn it into their heads like little dogs (at least for the enlisted).
For those that could care less about school, and for the school where the teachers are most worried about keeping the kids quiet and paying attention, getting them to complete their times tables might be enough (or equivalently, being able to spell conscience).
Cal-tech isn't for your average high-school graduate, and it assumes a certain level of personal discipline.
There's an alterior approach known as montasori(sp?). Which is a hands on method. It's a great motivational tool, but as I've seen from it's graduates, they tend to be behind in the amount of material they cover. A quote from a graduate, "It's a fun school, not a science school."
In short, different methods work for different people. Those that feel confined by "skill and drill" are more than welcome to seek out more sophisticated approaches.
Not everybody can be a poet, novelist, painter, or philospher. But we sure as heck could use a few more McDonalds attendants that can add or read the captions of the little pictures of a hamburger.
As a "damn, I already hit submit" follow-up. I hear superficial comments about the amount of energy in various products.. Please, someone correct me where and when I'm wrong, but here goes: Traditional unleaded gas has very little actual energy; just a lot of explosive kick. Desil fuel has a slower burn and transmits a lot more energy (I'm led to believe that this is why they're preferred for trucks). Jet fuel is a hybrid, fast burning, high energy (I guess as we'd view nitro). Next in ideality, you wouldn't even ignite the fuel, but just burn it off slowly and collect the entirety of the heat (steam is the traditional collector). The idea is to get a complete burn; jet-fuel leaves a lot un-burned; as does gas. And finally we get into biology: You directly convert the chemical bonds into a useful form (such as ATP). From this, every ounce of energy is extracted, and you have clean recyclable emmitions to boot.. I _believe_ fuel cells provide some sort of chemical conversion of fuel to electricity, so I would be inclined to believe it to be the most efficient.
Maybe in another 50 to 100 years we'll be able to convert nuclear raditation into liquid fuel (through processes adapted from nature) which is then decomposed by a mini biological reactor that produces electric voltage and current. Safe, clean (well sort of, depending on the feasibility of clean fusion), easy to transport / store, decentralized (ideally no need for the power grid). Let me know if any of you want to help me make this open source.;)
We have a professor that works at a local power company.. As he describes it, jet turbines are used when the max power demand is exceeded. A sort of emergency power to keep the grid going. However, this occurs at enormous costs.
So in answer to your question, as it turns out, they're just not as efficient.
Perhaps there are more efficient engines out there, but I've never heard of Jet's being referred to as efficient; just powerful.
Is the AMD chipset rambus capable? I could check, but it's not important.. What I'd like to see are similarly configured systems with both Rambus and DDR, to see how well RDRAM handles dual proc heavy loads like compilation. I know that Intel's PIII uses out of order memory pre-fetching to maximize memory requests, and that can quickly saturate the DRAM controller (and memory, which I think can only interleave 2 requests). I'm wondering if latency can be over-come in such memory depedant operations..
This of course requires that enough memory is used to fully cache the disk and alleviate disk-IO latency.
You mean two processes (jobs as make calls it).:) AFAIK make is not multi-threaded. And even though Linux makes little distinction, MT is faster than MP due to a reduced cachable memory foot-print. But most of that is moot since make has extremely little overhead, all the caching gest thrown away due to the fact that make makes hundreds (thousands even) of exec-calls.
That reminds me.. When is someone going to add make and gcc libraries to Perl? I want to be able to use Perl as the "process-glue" between all these steps so that building does not require forking / reparsing of all those damn.h files (something that at my project at work literally takes 4 hours.. 1 minute for each.cc file (even if it's only a couple lines long)). If someone experienced enough with those libraries wants to work with me, I can handle the perl-xs.:)
I did a similar test using a 466 Dual Celeron system with 128Meg of memory on Red Hat 6.x (With that special Abit board).
In order to be scientific, you need a control.. I was sorry to say that this reviewer did no such thing. You point out that the -j helps even for single-CPU's, and this definately was the case with my test results (I can go dig them up if anybody is interested). BUT, there is a limit to the performance enhancement of -jxxx, since a single task running at full throttle is much faster than 2 or 10 tasks switching back and forth. So what I did was for both single and dual CPU modes, I ran with the bare make, then -j 2, then -j 3, -j 4, and finally -j 5 (where performance was being hurt).
I don't recall, but I believe beyond -j 4 I was swapping to disk (though I know I achieved that phenonmena at a sufficiently large number).
Another problem with the experiment was that the slower method was run first.. There is the issue of disk-cashing - namely that the second test stood the chance of having key libraries and possibly most source code still in cache during launch which would dramatically reduce the IO latency. An ideal test of CPU performance would be to put half a gig of memory in there, run it through once, "reboot", then run it for the other.. This is precisely what I did, and I do believe there were several seconds shaved off for cached recompiles.
Personally, I like dual proc's just so I can watch xosview's dual-CPU meters flop back and forth.:) Additionally it's great for compiling / MP3ing in the background.. Almost zero lag is noticed (not to mention the almost 100% increase in MP3 encoding performance. I believe that was mostly CPU bound.
So if there are Aliens (and we can't really know for sure either way), are they animals or soul-bearers?
Personally I either belive there is no such thing as soul, or that all life shares the lineage of a soul.
What happens when we put human gene's in germs? Obviously you'd argue that because they're not a whole human, they're soul-less. But some argue that human life and soul begins at conception.. And there's scarcely much different between a budding cell with human genes and a germ.
haha. You seem to be my polar opposite (as far as everything you've said at least).
First to avoid repeating myself, I'll reference what I recently wrote.
There is a difference between an unborn unique individual manifest in its entiriety and creating particular organs from an individual's dna.
Forest from the tree's man.. A cell is a cell is a cell is a cell. The fact that we're engineered (through what-ever means) to have all our cells work in tandem is irrelevant. The fact that your cells in a slightly different arrangement with a different electrical state produces a different human being is also irrelevant. You're cells are just doing what they're told - they could care less who's "essence" they make up. Each cell has a life-time significantly less than that of the organizm (just like the tree's in a forest). So the fact that certain key cells/trees that die cause an avalance for the rest of the cells is really only circumstantial.
That sex-cells are lacking in some areas is irrelevant. Some disadvantaged people are incapable of being upstanding citizens and can't be all that they can be. They still serve a role in the process of life. They still are "alive".
War is murder. So Condem all waring ants. They all deserve to burn in hell. (sic) Hey, Humanity has learned by looking at nature - seeing how it works and what it is - and tried to mimic it. Sure Humans have a certain ability to transcend nature, but we're also smart enough to not throw away billions of years of experience. From this, something reproduced from nature is surely not "unnatural", and it is up for grabs as to whether our higher reasoning deems it "immoral".
To me there is no ethically justifiable killing, even in self-defense. You be sure to tell that to the charging tiger, hell bent on making a meal out of you. Obviously from your point of view you wouldn't have dared taken a gun along, since it could only possibly have been used for "murder". My reguards to your wife and children.
I don't mean to be offensive, but as in my attached commentary, there is a subjective threshold between right and wrong, and you can't make definative generic declarations since you can't possibly know all the circumstances that one can get involved with. That's why ledgislatures reserve the right to ammend laws.
one always has the ability to choose not to kill
Yes, and nature has a funny way of "selecting" them for extinction when the environment is right. A civilization totally filled with such benevolence and peace could never survive in our history (or today).. It would totally be conquored in time. They wouldn't stand for 3'rd party military protection either, since it would be "immoral" to ask someone to kill/be killed for them.
Nature is harsh and cruel. The painting it over with gloss and flowers so that even a child would smile at it is a phenomina that, in time, slowly de-evolves you to a point of weakness... And ultimately extinction.
Thankfully it takes an entire society to act like this for any real danger to occur.. So while you sit on a moral high ground, our "dirty and immoral" forces will still give their lives to keep you there. I hope you at least can honor them in public.
To my mind, murder is defined as depriving a sentient being (or proto- or post-sentient being) of its sentience.
Thank you for stating it as your own opinion because I've never seen that definition before. Still it's a provocative description. From this, it seems difficult to distinguish murder from plain vanilla killing. You _could_ say that killing is the simpler case of taking an entity's life.. But It's hard to be a non-sentient life-form (having no "senses".. even a plant senses light).
I've always been of the opinion that in all things there is death, and thereby killing. You must kill to survive - a fact of life. I was going to say that only humans maintain a threshold labeled as immoral, but even a dog has some sence of when it's done something wrong, or when it's pact has been wronged. I personally choose the word murder for those acts of killing that go beyond the moral threshold. It is a purely subjective condition - it varies from situation to situation, and even from person to person (kind of like a chad:)
My conscious does not believe it to be murder to kill in self defense - Which includes defending wars. Of course they grey area becomes when you take retroactive defensive measures (like freeing your countrymen from oppression, which of course requires an aggressive attack). Thus a soldier is not the murderer (since they'll most likely be kept blind as to the actual intentions of their cause), but it is the leaders that walk the fine line of moral engagement that are presented with the moral dillemas.
So from this, I would argue that intent alone does not make murder. It is immoral intent. I intend to kill you and make sure you're dead, because my value is survival without fear of you comming back and shooting while I wasn't looking. You could say that my _real_ intent was to survive. But then I could use those words and say, the teenager's real intent was to live a happy unfettered life - without the burden of being a parent. Somewhere in between is a situation such as health-risk child-births. The intent is similar to self defence, but the primary intention of action is the killing of the unborn child. And how about rape-based pregnancy? You could argue that the child could always be given up for adoption, but then why should the mother be burdened with undo torture of carrying the unwanted baby to term? The intention here is ending the pain of a wrong-doing.
Then as to the issue of when life begins. I laugh whenever I hear this because life began thousands, millions or even billions of years ago (depending on what you believe). There was no break in the chain of life from one independant organizim to the next.. Our sperm and overies are fully functional living units (albeit not independent). They're just in a different form, as larva is to a fly (though there's obviosly caveats to that analogy). The whole spoiled human concept that we're somehow special is the reason for this [alleged] deception. Note that this doesn't mean humans or dogs don't have souls.. Just that if they did, that essence would be carried from generation to generation, just like rose-vines..
So finally onto the question of human factories. It won't be allowed, not because it's wrong, but because it's too disgusting.. Some people are disturbed by the idea that their Chicken McNuggets or veal cutlets came about through brutal means. They're fine as long as the details are hidden and painted over. How are they to accept that their heart came from the headless horseman, since it's sure to be plastered over the TV as any animal right's activist would try and do for the cow.
I don't personally think that there is anything immoral about bringing a body - in part or whole - to term, since each organ present is fully functional. No mistreatment occurs (until the final operation). Still, the more we make the bodies look like chicken McNuggets, the better acceptance there will be. Face it, we're not going to be able to produce a heart purely in a vat.. There's going to have to be some external organic life-supporting system that will have to be discarded when it comes time for the transplant. It's denial to believe that one is truely less "moral" than the other. Just like killing a great oak is any less moral than killing a whale. Of course, we as humans value the significance of a whale more than say, a shark. And that's fine, but to call one murder and the other hunting for food is deluded.
the life spans that would probably be extended would be those of the "developed" world, where productivity is higher
Though possible, without a case study, I'd have to dissagree. People "like" to retire early when given the chance.. We're naturally lazy (it's part of the reason why we were pushed to invent cars and airplanes and the adjustable bed and so on). A person isn't going to say they want to live a longer life so that they can "work harder and longer". I don't know what the statistic is, but the number of people actually happy with their jobs isn't the most satisfying of numbers. Though there are defintaely some - such as people in office, who are forced into retirement because of concerns of their health - CEO's etc.
Quite possibly, what we'd see is that people would save up their whole life to be able to afford the work-over operation that would rejuvinate their bodies.. Just in time for retirement.. Thus they'd be able to live their life of 60 times two (theoretically).. We'd see large numbers of people breeching the 100-year barrier. What does this mean? Massive numbers of retirement homes. That's got to do the 3'rd world wonders.
The next issue is that if cloned organs becomes prolific and the general population and health is dramatically increased in 1'st world countries, then we won't necessarily have increased productivity, but we will definately have a shortage of employment. Economics is cyclical from recession to boom and back again... Larger numbers of people biding for employment makes recessions much more dramatic.
In short, I see zero social benifit to the increase in numbers or longevity of life-span.. It is a purely personal thing. Much like the proliferation of luxury SUV's which are safe for the driver - does the rest of society little good.
No, the real danger is that those with lots of money and power will never die.
I do not believe this will ever be the case. There is still the issue of telemere degeneration. Cells in the body are just going to kick the bucket in accordance with a bell-shaped distribution curve over time.
Beyond that, How do you reconsile the transplanting of one's defunct brain? Do it sectionally???
The biggest issue, however is that our general unhealthy lifestyle will catch up with us no matter how many transplants we utilitize? Are we to do a full-body capillary root-canal?
I see this as a sort of "second chance" on life.. A person in their 20's won't necessarily live a healthy life, and they, of course, pay for it in the 40's and beyond.. It might be possible to correct "some" of their geneticial defects and unspectacular life-style.
Beyond this, the growth of blood could be an enormous life-saver at hospitals.. Just think.. I'm not donating blood, but the DNA for the synthesis of blood (since the telemere's wouldn't allow an unlimited supply of blood to be synthesized from the same sample indefinately).
The language you choose is irrelevant, the OS providing a.NET service is irrelevant.
I'll have to dissagree with you here. The chosen language and OS are monumental choices. You have to get past the hyped burger dots. Depending on what you're building, the development platform lends itself very closely to the language(s) you choose.. Beyond that, I've never seen a language that was truely OS egnostic. C is a joke, Java STILL isn't stable or fast in Linux for the complete feature set. Perl is STILL being ported to Windows. And _anything_ MS developed is going to be advantageous to windows in one manner or another. Sure C# is supposed to be open and we'll soon see Linux / Solaris VM's.. But will they be as robust / fast as the one on Windows? Not if Java's history repeats itself. Will.NET be condusive to non Windows platforms? Excuse me while I snicker for a moment or two..
Basically C# and.NET are wonderful new technologies for Windows programmers. Anything else is vapor-technology until we see something real.
Do you not see the fundamental advantage of being able to make _function calls_ across HTTP ?
You're serious right? Yes HTTP is a widely accepted protol which lends itself nicely to random data-types, a-la inquiries on supported Content-Types and the general use of XML. But take note that we're extending the technology beyond it's initial intent - read as "warning sign". HTTP and XML have quite a bit of over-head, which is lost in large data-transmittions.. But what of simple function calls? Let's say I want to know what time it is on a master server (with extended resolution).. I can make a SOAP call to do this for me; No problem.. But now, let's say I want to use this timer in a logging function (that get's called some 50- 1,000 times a second during debug mode for example). Imagine the over-head of resorting to generic HTTP and XML. Any good profiler would take a look at this and try and find some hack to send the raw data with as little IO and filtering as possible. Of course you won't _design_ function calls that have such heavy overhead.. But what happens when the component you build starts getting used in such a way that these connection channels become unforeseen bottle-necks? You're stuck. The only way out is to break the protocol and make hacks for efficiency.
I'm sure a similar argument could be made about COM / DCOM, CORBA or even RMI. But I'm convinced that those component-model protocols are much better suited to performance related issues. GNORBA (though still in it's infancy) touts shared-memory and in-process operation where possible. Maybe SOAP can handle this as well, but given that the data-type is XML, I can't imagine you can alleviate all the issues.
Note that I'm not saying SOAP or the underlying building blocks of.NET are bad. They definately have a cool-factor to them. But a good design should allow you to get under the covers and optimize where necessary.. Java and Perl allow C-extensions along with raw sockets / shared memory. The issue that I see is that.NET won't allow transparent communication through any other means than this high level one. Or maybe I'm mistaken, and DCOM still lives.
I'm guessing if AMD actually does have any real plans to buy Transmeta, it's largest concern is Transmeta's supposed lower power consumption.
Don't get me wrong... I think that the power consumption of the Transmeta chips would be great for something like the Athlon...
Ok, let's get something straight. The crusoe was designed from the beginning with power-consumption in mind.. This shaped the sort of trade-offs made.. Namely number of functional units, or ports on registers. Obviously the use of VLIW was key, so on and so forth. The Athlon was designed with features such as maximal redundancy to reduce latency (such as stalls for lack of execution units). I'm much more up-to-speed on the design of the Athlon than the crusoe so I won't continue the comparison.
From what I remember, the crueso's sort of truely novel features (as opposed to design trade-offs) had to do with MHZ ramping and possibly choice of transistor design (which again probably trades speed for efficiency). Since Transmeta didn't actually fab the chips themselves, I'm doubting that they actually innovated with the fabrication process.. Sooo the only thing crusoe technology could bring to the [mobile] Athlon are things like MHZ ramping. And I doubt the specifics of this are worth $3.4B.
Future designs, on the other hand as referenced in my other comment, might provide interest - though mainly through IP, which would probably be cheaper to lease than outright own.
Incidently, I love all this hype about OS transparent code-morphing.. I don't understand why a big server couldn't just require something like Alpha's Fx32. I'm sure it needs to tie directly into the OS, but wouldn't a server want it's OS to be natively compiled? Transparency isn't always the answer.
I don't believe purchasing greater FAB capacity is in AMD's best interset right now. AMD wants to produce at or just behind the peek. That way there is just the right amount of demand that keeps prices happy, AND avoids over-stocking.. The big no-no. We're in a demand shortage right now, so enhancing productivity will give you hardly any returns on investment.
Now one thing that _could_ do well for the future is dumping lots of resources into fab technology, but I'm sure they're already allocating as much as they think is wise. Excess too has diminishing marginal returns, as well as possibly being counter-productive.
What AMD needs (and they know this) is to break into different markets, such as that of the server. They've already got their business strategy, but here's an interseting point of view.. Their next x86-64 design tentatively will be a dual core. If this succeeds, then one thing will be clear from the outset - heat will be a _massive_ issue. Not to mention suceptibility to defects. If the chip is slated for the server market, then they have an interseting possibility. Focus on UNIX platforms where the code can all be garunteed to be recompiled for the new architecture. Then remove much of the compatibility hardware in each core and potentially resort to software emulation... Getting closer and closer to RISC at each juncture. In a server with Gig's of memory, we can afford to take the crusoe approach of segmented processor memory. The main advantage of such an emulated approach is that code isn't required to be recompiled (a la 32bit emulation mode), and the hit hopefully wouldn't be as bad as what the Italium seems to make it. Additionally, I speculate as to how much CPU surface area can be reduced. In the situation of specialized 128-node NUMA super-computers, the savings MIGHT be noticable.
Essentially this is an argument for AMD's futher path. It doesn't really suggest that a purchase of Transmeta today would be wise - what does their crusoe archetecture really do for AMD? My guess is that the personelle themselves might be of value.. Again, pure speculation.
But I don't agree with your critics: first dump vi use vim instead, then if emacs (or vim) doesn't treat the same way {} and begin/end, this is a "misfeature" of the editor, it is not a fault of the language..
I used vile for the longest time, but I've become spoiled with emacs. There is literally only one thing I miss from viXX, and that is the "." repetition feature. Anyway, the issue with "begin/end" is that rubdy DOESN"T maintain consistent use of "begin".. Things either fit on a line, or continue (with an optional "then") until the "end" directive.. It seems that the only time you see the word "begin" is in a try-block. AS the try block.. It boggles my mind why they didn't stick with the traditional keyword "try". I'm sure you could write parsers the color and match properly for begin/end, but it's definately more complicated to achieve.
About your critics about the speed: frankly interpreted languages (all of them) are not used for their speed..
Not so. Perl can be significantly faster than servlets in a CGI / mod_perl environment. Every ounce of speed is essential in that realm.. It's simply a matter of not wanting to give up extremely rapid development time (and freedom from worries of core dumps or memory leaks)
Ideally the language of choice is highly convinient AND fast.. Perl has a really optimized and speedy engine underneath.. And through proper use of profiling, you can tune your app to be nearly as fast as C. Granted you can do this with Ruby/Python as well, but I think it's easier to do with perl without resorting to C-code.
Perls (too easy to make an error which is ignored unless you use -w).
But you _do_ use "-w" don't you?:) And 'use strict'.. The only time I'd advocate the lack of their usage is in single-use scripts.
As for $xxx as an easy way to find variable xxx, don't forget that you can also use ${xxx} (I do it inside strings) so just searching for $xxx is not good enough.
I prefer Ruby sparse use of @ and $, it is less verbose than Python (self. everywhere) and more readable than the cluttered Perl $%@ usage..
Yes, it's definately not fool-proof. But of all the languages I've had to "find stuff in", perl's historically been the easiest. It's another reason I like emacs.. The default operation is case insensative search-as-you-type operation. But don't let me get into a viewer war.. I use both vi and emacs interchangably.
I agree that to the casual user, there's less line noise with Python or ruby's flat-variable names. But I'm still partial towards the shell/perl method of variable names. I definately like the method variables over $self->{..} or self.xxx. Maybe it's not too late to make suggestions to the Perl RFC process.. Allow over-riding method variables as 'my' would over-ride 'our'.
Could you explain more precisely the Pythons problems: poor use of anonymous functions, couldn't find a way to functionalize 'use strict' ?
Well, anonymous functions in python are more like 'lambda', which are single line functions, not fully supported functions. In Tk design, it's often nice to write really complex anonymous call-back functions in the middle of the function call.. To my knowledge you can't do that in Python, since you can only have a single non-complex statement in a lambda function. It seems that you have greater freedom with ruby at least.. Though the { |var,list| statements } takes some getting use to.
I haven't completely delved into either Ruby or Python, but I can't find a way in either to require pre-declarations of variables (as perl uses 'use vars qw( $x $y )' or 'our ($x,$y);' or 'my ( $x, $y );' or 'use fields qw( x y);' I've found that invaluable to avoid situations such as $filename, $file_name, $fileName. Now coding standards help greatly in such situations, but what about $login or $login_name? Having a single place to declare all these names helps to visually catch such errors. Granted "-w" should alleviate most of the activity. Ruby won't let you use unassigned variables as far as I understand (which takes care of much of the -w functionality)
I'm not that impressed with Perl's CPAN, maybe I'm too difficult..
I can't imagine what you do that hasn't allowed CPAN to help you. I have over 50 modules that I use regularly from CPAN.. DBI alone is monumental. Ruby seems to have copied many of them. Hell, if you've ever performed a "use XXX", you're using a module that at one point in time or another needed to be downloaded from CPAN.. As they developed greater fan-fair, they were incorportated into the standard distribution. I have a top-level book-mark to CPAN since I visit it almost weekly. But that's just me.
I don't have anything against Ruby.. Every language I've ever used has something that pisses me off; Perl definately being among them. If you're just looking for something to do personal work with, then Ruby should suite you fine (my guess is that it'll be more fun than Python). But if you're looking to do serious work outside of Japan, you're going to have some time before you'll have much support if you leave the mainstream C / C++ / Java / Perl.
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If I remember correctly, our eyes see at ~430 FPS so we still are talking about a long way to go to make a "realistic" image where the eyes physically are slower in refresh compared to the video.
I hardly think our realism barrier consists mainly of faster-than-TV refresh rates. If that was the case, I could get out my CGI-pong video game and run it up to 1,000fps.
Better yet, net hack!!!
-Michael
Though I agree with you, just wanted to nit-pick:
Hidden surface removal is only really a factor when the card can't handle the current volume. It scales with the complexity of the scene. Plus there are technologies such as ATI's (and now nVida) that help reduce the effect considerably.
FSAA is largely irrelevant when you achieve high enough resolutions. Results may vary though.
Stereo has never been a major factor, nor do I think it'll really catch on; especially on a console, unless you split the output signal.
Still there are plenty of other common sence arguments promoting the continued bleeding edge development. Not least of which is the fact that the intro's are still rendered seperately.
-Michael
I think the real push should start moving away from higher polygon rates and more towards greater visualization enhancements for each polygon. We're already dealing with cool things such as environmental bump mapping. I'm still waiting for the fully featured ray-tracing engine. I'd be perfectly happy with a scene that was only 30fps, 800x600, average number of polygons if I could just feel the glimmer of living light.
Anymore, I'm not impressed with making the numbers of yesterday's technology bigger. Perhaps with this on-board memory, Sony could venture into some real of high-bandwidth calculations. Not being well enough versed in the industry, I can't venture to make guesses though (voxels or better shading techniques maybe?)
-Michael
Possibly, but the "i" means that you only have to do half the refresh rate. Substantially reducing demand
-Michael
A library allowing the re-reading of a book or magazine is akin to going to a used-book store and picking up a cheaper copy. The publisher doesn't get a penny of that resale, and potentially loses a new sale.
Granted, book reselling isn't the biggest industry in the world... But it sounds to me that corporate greed (The inability to reconsile the fact that diminishing increases in profit hurts stock value, or even, gasp, that profits some times go down) is going to undermine freedom, since the new economic aristocracy (which sadly includes the middle class investors) demands tithing from us all. Like a virus, lack of growth means death in this ever consolidating society - The black hole of evolution (once critical mass is achieved, everything gets pulled in until you are left lifeless).
It is only now that I'm realizing the genious of old-school American regional segregation laws, such as with banking. Encourage the mom-pop stores, since they're not dependant on growth - just consistency. Sure it meant random qualities of service; but before mass travel you wouldn't even know you were getting lousy service.
-Michael
The irony, however, was that it is the starved poets and artists / musicians that find themselves in that position (of course along with general dead-beats or an occasional handi-capped person).
The issue that I was presenting was that some idealize the arts today at the expense of the sciences. The question I hated most in high school was "when am I ever going to use this stuff?" Especially by those that had it figured out - "I'm going to be a model", etc.
-Michael
People at my work kid around with me because I have 20+ windows terminals open at any given time.. Half of them are man pages, some have perl-debugger windows (to test out concepts), and many just sit in the proper directories so I don't have to cd back and forth.
I'll have 10 emacs frames open so I can compare and contrast sections of code.
I've arranged all the windows so as to maximize parallel viewing..
The reason? I can't remember all the little fragments. "0xFFE08 is the search key.. Ok, what was it again? Oh hell, let me copy and paste." "I just used this function like 10 times, but I forget what the parameter order is. Let me look it up again."
Not too long ago, I memorized pie and "e" to 50 digits as a mental exercize.. I had no problem doing so (simple repetitious exercize), but I still haven't memorized my second-phone-line, even though I look it up like twice a day for the pizza guy.. I never remember a new person's name. I scoff when someone gives me a phone number to remember, assuming I'll remember it (I politely do that when they give me a name). I can't remember the IP address that I regularly ftp to manually (I look it up every time).
I don't carry around a PDA, but my work-station serves just as well. I carry around a date-book with all my phone numbers (which essentially plays the role of a PDA). I use to carry around a pocket notepad and pen to jot down reminders, but that got to be too combersome; I just carry my book-bag around everywhere.
With things like cut-and paste, and high information over-load, I've trained my mind not to even try and remember.. Even the important stuff like equations I can always reference within 5 seconds.
My friends all joke about my lack of memory, and my girlfriends have often been frustrated by it. But not a one of them would characterize me as stupid, as this article seems to imply I should be.
I honestly believe that if I had never seen a computer in my life my memory would be many times greater than it is today. Also if I'd continued to use my bench-press, my arms would be many times their current diameter. I don't feel a loss for either of them. My mind is very tuned. I read a lot; I philosophize a lot.. I learn new computer languages regularly and can analyze with the best of them. I'm an engineer by trade, and can talk physics until the sun comes up.. Just don't ask me what your name is.
-Michael (something or other)
You've got balls man (course you're going in as the coward). I'd almost want to see this marked up as funny; almost.
Though I think there is a modicum of legitimacy to your argument. I'd like to point out one thing.. Women tend to do better in high school.
The "agressive" males are usually too busy being the class clown, the jocks, or just dissidents (frustrated with their mal-adjustment to society). Women have better "spot memory" as I call it. Men are more prone towards mental visualization of the abstract. But the general maturity level still gives the edge to women.
I don't see how mainstream History, Chemistry, English, Physics, Biology, or most definately Math has changed for the femanine. All I see are attempts at multi-culturalizm, with emphases on the emotion of the children. That doesn't make it any more boring for the aspiring student (no matter the gender).
At my school, at least, we had 4 difficulty levels.. Remedial, general, college prep and honors/AP. There was plenty there to challenge you. (If they weren't enough, you'd often go to a school upstate).
-Michael
To quote my high school football coach (no I didn't play): "Our team can't even hold the ball, let alone do any fancy passes."
The trick is time management. Less and less of a given day is available for a given subject.. I've watched as my high school periods shrunk from an hour per class to 40 minutes. Skill and drill works very well in the military where they can't make any assumptions about your competence. They've found a system that keeps their soldiers alive, so they're going to burn it into their heads like little dogs (at least for the enlisted).
For those that could care less about school, and for the school where the teachers are most worried about keeping the kids quiet and paying attention, getting them to complete their times tables might be enough (or equivalently, being able to spell conscience).
Cal-tech isn't for your average high-school graduate, and it assumes a certain level of personal discipline.
There's an alterior approach known as montasori(sp?). Which is a hands on method. It's a great motivational tool, but as I've seen from it's graduates, they tend to be behind in the amount of material they cover. A quote from a graduate, "It's a fun school, not a science school."
In short, different methods work for different people. Those that feel confined by "skill and drill" are more than welcome to seek out more sophisticated approaches.
-Michael
Not everybody can be a poet, novelist, painter, or philospher. But we sure as heck could use a few more McDonalds attendants that can add or read the captions of the little pictures of a hamburger.
Need I say more?
-Michael
As a "damn, I already hit submit" follow-up. I hear superficial comments about the amount of energy in various products.. Please, someone correct me where and when I'm wrong, but here goes: Traditional unleaded gas has very little actual energy; just a lot of explosive kick. Desil fuel has a slower burn and transmits a lot more energy (I'm led to believe that this is why they're preferred for trucks). Jet fuel is a hybrid, fast burning, high energy (I guess as we'd view nitro). Next in ideality, you wouldn't even ignite the fuel, but just burn it off slowly and collect the entirety of the heat (steam is the traditional collector). The idea is to get a complete burn; jet-fuel leaves a lot un-burned; as does gas. And finally we get into biology: You directly convert the chemical bonds into a useful form (such as ATP). From this, every ounce of energy is extracted, and you have clean recyclable emmitions to boot.. I _believe_ fuel cells provide some sort of chemical conversion of fuel to electricity, so I would be inclined to believe it to be the most efficient.
;)
Maybe in another 50 to 100 years we'll be able to convert nuclear raditation into liquid fuel (through processes adapted from nature) which is then decomposed by a mini biological reactor that produces electric voltage and current. Safe, clean (well sort of, depending on the feasibility of clean fusion), easy to transport / store, decentralized (ideally no need for the power grid). Let me know if any of you want to help me make this open source.
-Michael
We have a professor that works at a local power company.. As he describes it, jet turbines are used when the max power demand is exceeded. A sort of emergency power to keep the grid going. However, this occurs at enormous costs.
So in answer to your question, as it turns out, they're just not as efficient.
Perhaps there are more efficient engines out there, but I've never heard of Jet's being referred to as efficient; just powerful.
-Michael
Is the AMD chipset rambus capable? I could check, but it's not important.. What I'd like to see are similarly configured systems with both Rambus and DDR, to see how well RDRAM handles dual proc heavy loads like compilation. I know that Intel's PIII uses out of order memory pre-fetching to maximize memory requests, and that can quickly saturate the DRAM controller (and memory, which I think can only interleave 2 requests). I'm wondering if latency can be over-come in such memory depedant operations..
This of course requires that enough memory is used to fully cache the disk and alleviate disk-IO latency.
-Michael
Two threads on one processor:
:) AFAIK make is not multi-threaded. And even though Linux makes little distinction, MT is faster than MP due to a reduced cachable memory foot-print. But most of that is moot since make has extremely little overhead, all the caching gest thrown away due to the fact that make makes hundreds (thousands even) of exec-calls.
.h files (something that at my project at work literally takes 4 hours.. 1 minute for each .cc file (even if it's only a couple lines long)). If someone experienced enough with those libraries wants to work with me, I can handle the perl-xs. :)
You mean two processes (jobs as make calls it).
That reminds me.. When is someone going to add make and gcc libraries to Perl? I want to be able to use Perl as the "process-glue" between all these steps so that building does not require forking / reparsing of all those damn
-Michael
I did a similar test using a 466 Dual Celeron system with 128Meg of memory on Red Hat 6.x (With that special Abit board).
:) Additionally it's great for compiling / MP3ing in the background.. Almost zero lag is noticed (not to mention the almost 100% increase in MP3 encoding performance. I believe that was mostly CPU bound.
In order to be scientific, you need a control.. I was sorry to say that this reviewer did no such thing. You point out that the -j helps even for single-CPU's, and this definately was the case with my test results (I can go dig them up if anybody is interested). BUT, there is a limit to the performance enhancement of -jxxx, since a single task running at full throttle is much faster than 2 or 10 tasks switching back and forth. So what I did was for both single and dual CPU modes, I ran with the bare make, then -j 2, then -j 3, -j 4, and finally -j 5 (where performance was being hurt).
I don't recall, but I believe beyond -j 4 I was swapping to disk (though I know I achieved that phenonmena at a sufficiently large number).
Another problem with the experiment was that the slower method was run first.. There is the issue of disk-cashing - namely that the second test stood the chance of having key libraries and possibly most source code still in cache during launch which would dramatically reduce the IO latency. An ideal test of CPU performance would be to put half a gig of memory in there, run it through once, "reboot", then run it for the other.. This is precisely what I did, and I do believe there were several seconds shaved off for cached recompiles.
Personally, I like dual proc's just so I can watch xosview's dual-CPU meters flop back and forth.
-Michael
Mind or brain? Philosophers still debate about whether or not there's a distinction. :)
Just being a pain the arce.
-Michael
So if there are Aliens (and we can't really know for sure either way), are they animals or soul-bearers?
Personally I either belive there is no such thing as soul, or that all life shares the lineage of a soul.
What happens when we put human gene's in germs? Obviously you'd argue that because they're not a whole human, they're soul-less. But some argue that human life and soul begins at conception.. And there's scarcely much different between a budding cell with human genes and a germ.
-Michael
First to avoid repeating myself, I'll reference what I recently wrote.
There is a difference between an unborn unique individual manifest in its entiriety and creating particular organs from an individual's dna.
Forest from the tree's man.. A cell is a cell is a cell is a cell. The fact that we're engineered (through what-ever means) to have all our cells work in tandem is irrelevant. The fact that your cells in a slightly different arrangement with a different electrical state produces a different human being is also irrelevant. You're cells are just doing what they're told - they could care less who's "essence" they make up. Each cell has a life-time significantly less than that of the organizm (just like the tree's in a forest). So the fact that certain key cells/trees that die cause an avalance for the rest of the cells is really only circumstantial.
That sex-cells are lacking in some areas is irrelevant. Some disadvantaged people are incapable of being upstanding citizens and can't be all that they can be. They still serve a role in the process of life. They still are "alive".
War is murder. So Condem all waring ants. They all deserve to burn in hell. (sic) Hey, Humanity has learned by looking at nature - seeing how it works and what it is - and tried to mimic it. Sure Humans have a certain ability to transcend nature, but we're also smart enough to not throw away billions of years of experience. From this, something reproduced from nature is surely not "unnatural", and it is up for grabs as to whether our higher reasoning deems it "immoral".
To me there is no ethically justifiable killing, even in self-defense. You be sure to tell that to the charging tiger, hell bent on making a meal out of you. Obviously from your point of view you wouldn't have dared taken a gun along, since it could only possibly have been used for "murder". My reguards to your wife and children.
I don't mean to be offensive, but as in my attached commentary, there is a subjective threshold between right and wrong, and you can't make definative generic declarations since you can't possibly know all the circumstances that one can get involved with. That's why ledgislatures reserve the right to ammend laws.
one always has the ability to choose not to kill
Yes, and nature has a funny way of "selecting" them for extinction when the environment is right. A civilization totally filled with such benevolence and peace could never survive in our history (or today).. It would totally be conquored in time. They wouldn't stand for 3'rd party military protection either, since it would be "immoral" to ask someone to kill/be killed for them.
Nature is harsh and cruel. The painting it over with gloss and flowers so that even a child would smile at it is a phenomina that, in time, slowly de-evolves you to a point of weakness... And ultimately extinction.
Thankfully it takes an entire society to act like this for any real danger to occur.. So while you sit on a moral high ground, our "dirty and immoral" forces will still give their lives to keep you there. I hope you at least can honor them in public.
-Michael
To my mind, murder is defined as depriving a sentient being (or proto- or post-sentient being) of its sentience.
:)
Thank you for stating it as your own opinion because I've never seen that definition before. Still it's a provocative description. From this, it seems difficult to distinguish murder from plain vanilla killing. You _could_ say that killing is the simpler case of taking an entity's life.. But It's hard to be a non-sentient life-form (having no "senses".. even a plant senses light).
I've always been of the opinion that in all things there is death, and thereby killing. You must kill to survive - a fact of life. I was going to say that only humans maintain a threshold labeled as immoral, but even a dog has some sence of when it's done something wrong, or when it's pact has been wronged. I personally choose the word murder for those acts of killing that go beyond the moral threshold. It is a purely subjective condition - it varies from situation to situation, and even from person to person (kind of like a chad
My conscious does not believe it to be murder to kill in self defense - Which includes defending wars. Of course they grey area becomes when you take retroactive defensive measures (like freeing your countrymen from oppression, which of course requires an aggressive attack). Thus a soldier is not the murderer (since they'll most likely be kept blind as to the actual intentions of their cause), but it is the leaders that walk the fine line of moral engagement that are presented with the moral dillemas.
So from this, I would argue that intent alone does not make murder. It is immoral intent. I intend to kill you and make sure you're dead, because my value is survival without fear of you comming back and shooting while I wasn't looking. You could say that my _real_ intent was to survive. But then I could use those words and say, the teenager's real intent was to live a happy unfettered life - without the burden of being a parent. Somewhere in between is a situation such as health-risk child-births. The intent is similar to self defence, but the primary intention of action is the killing of the unborn child. And how about rape-based pregnancy? You could argue that the child could always be given up for adoption, but then why should the mother be burdened with undo torture of carrying the unwanted baby to term? The intention here is ending the pain of a wrong-doing.
Then as to the issue of when life begins. I laugh whenever I hear this because life began thousands, millions or even billions of years ago (depending on what you believe). There was no break in the chain of life from one independant organizim to the next.. Our sperm and overies are fully functional living units (albeit not independent). They're just in a different form, as larva is to a fly (though there's obviosly caveats to that analogy). The whole spoiled human concept that we're somehow special is the reason for this [alleged] deception. Note that this doesn't mean humans or dogs don't have souls.. Just that if they did, that essence would be carried from generation to generation, just like rose-vines..
So finally onto the question of human factories. It won't be allowed, not because it's wrong, but because it's too disgusting.. Some people are disturbed by the idea that their Chicken McNuggets or veal cutlets came about through brutal means. They're fine as long as the details are hidden and painted over. How are they to accept that their heart came from the headless horseman, since it's sure to be plastered over the TV as any animal right's activist would try and do for the cow.
I don't personally think that there is anything immoral about bringing a body - in part or whole - to term, since each organ present is fully functional. No mistreatment occurs (until the final operation). Still, the more we make the bodies look like chicken McNuggets, the better acceptance there will be. Face it, we're not going to be able to produce a heart purely in a vat.. There's going to have to be some external organic life-supporting system that will have to be discarded when it comes time for the transplant. It's denial to believe that one is truely less "moral" than the other. Just like killing a great oak is any less moral than killing a whale. Of course, we as humans value the significance of a whale more than say, a shark. And that's fine, but to call one murder and the other hunting for food is deluded.
I appologize for the length.
-Michael
the life spans that would probably be extended would be those of the "developed" world, where productivity is higher
Though possible, without a case study, I'd have to dissagree. People "like" to retire early when given the chance.. We're naturally lazy (it's part of the reason why we were pushed to invent cars and airplanes and the adjustable bed and so on). A person isn't going to say they want to live a longer life so that they can "work harder and longer". I don't know what the statistic is, but the number of people actually happy with their jobs isn't the most satisfying of numbers. Though there are defintaely some - such as people in office, who are forced into retirement because of concerns of their health - CEO's etc.
Quite possibly, what we'd see is that people would save up their whole life to be able to afford the work-over operation that would rejuvinate their bodies.. Just in time for retirement.. Thus they'd be able to live their life of 60 times two (theoretically).. We'd see large numbers of people breeching the 100-year barrier. What does this mean? Massive numbers of retirement homes. That's got to do the 3'rd world wonders.
The next issue is that if cloned organs becomes prolific and the general population and health is dramatically increased in 1'st world countries, then we won't necessarily have increased productivity, but we will definately have a shortage of employment. Economics is cyclical from recession to boom and back again... Larger numbers of people biding for employment makes recessions much more dramatic.
In short, I see zero social benifit to the increase in numbers or longevity of life-span.. It is a purely personal thing. Much like the proliferation of luxury SUV's which are safe for the driver - does the rest of society little good.
-Michael
No, the real danger is that those with lots of money and power will never die.
I do not believe this will ever be the case. There is still the issue of telemere degeneration. Cells in the body are just going to kick the bucket in accordance with a bell-shaped distribution curve over time.
Beyond that, How do you reconsile the transplanting of one's defunct brain? Do it sectionally???
The biggest issue, however is that our general unhealthy lifestyle will catch up with us no matter how many transplants we utilitize? Are we to do a full-body capillary root-canal?
I see this as a sort of "second chance" on life.. A person in their 20's won't necessarily live a healthy life, and they, of course, pay for it in the 40's and beyond.. It might be possible to correct "some" of their geneticial defects and unspectacular life-style.
Beyond this, the growth of blood could be an enormous life-saver at hospitals.. Just think.. I'm not donating blood, but the DNA for the synthesis of blood (since the telemere's wouldn't allow an unlimited supply of blood to be synthesized from the same sample indefinately).
-Michael
The language you choose is irrelevant, the OS providing a .NET service is irrelevant.
.NET be condusive to non Windows platforms? Excuse me while I snicker for a moment or two..
.NET are wonderful new technologies for Windows programmers. Anything else is vapor-technology until we see something real.
.NET are bad. They definately have a cool-factor to them. But a good design should allow you to get under the covers and optimize where necessary.. Java and Perl allow C-extensions along with raw sockets / shared memory. The issue that I see is that .NET won't allow transparent communication through any other means than this high level one. Or maybe I'm mistaken, and DCOM still lives.
I'll have to dissagree with you here. The chosen language and OS are monumental choices. You have to get past the hyped burger dots. Depending on what you're building, the development platform lends itself very closely to the language(s) you choose.. Beyond that, I've never seen a language that was truely OS egnostic. C is a joke, Java STILL isn't stable or fast in Linux for the complete feature set. Perl is STILL being ported to Windows. And _anything_ MS developed is going to be advantageous to windows in one manner or another. Sure C# is supposed to be open and we'll soon see Linux / Solaris VM's.. But will they be as robust / fast as the one on Windows? Not if Java's history repeats itself. Will
Basically C# and
Do you not see the fundamental advantage of being able to make _function calls_ across HTTP ?
You're serious right? Yes HTTP is a widely accepted protol which lends itself nicely to random data-types, a-la inquiries on supported Content-Types and the general use of XML. But take note that we're extending the technology beyond it's initial intent - read as "warning sign". HTTP and XML have quite a bit of over-head, which is lost in large data-transmittions.. But what of simple function calls? Let's say I want to know what time it is on a master server (with extended resolution).. I can make a SOAP call to do this for me; No problem.. But now, let's say I want to use this timer in a logging function (that get's called some 50- 1,000 times a second during debug mode for example). Imagine the over-head of resorting to generic HTTP and XML. Any good profiler would take a look at this and try and find some hack to send the raw data with as little IO and filtering as possible. Of course you won't _design_ function calls that have such heavy overhead.. But what happens when the component you build starts getting used in such a way that these connection channels become unforeseen bottle-necks? You're stuck. The only way out is to break the protocol and make hacks for efficiency.
I'm sure a similar argument could be made about COM / DCOM, CORBA or even RMI. But I'm convinced that those component-model protocols are much better suited to performance related issues. GNORBA (though still in it's infancy) touts shared-memory and in-process operation where possible. Maybe SOAP can handle this as well, but given that the data-type is XML, I can't imagine you can alleviate all the issues.
Note that I'm not saying SOAP or the underlying building blocks of
Don't get me wrong... I think that the power consumption of the Transmeta chips would be great for something like the Athlon...
Ok, let's get something straight. The crusoe was designed from the beginning with power-consumption in mind.. This shaped the sort of trade-offs made.. Namely number of functional units, or ports on registers. Obviously the use of VLIW was key, so on and so forth. The Athlon was designed with features such as maximal redundancy to reduce latency (such as stalls for lack of execution units). I'm much more up-to-speed on the design of the Athlon than the crusoe so I won't continue the comparison.
From what I remember, the crueso's sort of truely novel features (as opposed to design trade-offs) had to do with MHZ ramping and possibly choice of transistor design (which again probably trades speed for efficiency). Since Transmeta didn't actually fab the chips themselves, I'm doubting that they actually innovated with the fabrication process.. Sooo the only thing crusoe technology could bring to the [mobile] Athlon are things like MHZ ramping. And I doubt the specifics of this are worth $3.4B.
Future designs, on the other hand as referenced in my other comment, might provide interest - though mainly through IP, which would probably be cheaper to lease than outright own.
Incidently, I love all this hype about OS transparent code-morphing.. I don't understand why a big server couldn't just require something like Alpha's Fx32. I'm sure it needs to tie directly into the OS, but wouldn't a server want it's OS to be natively compiled? Transparency isn't always the answer.
-Michael
I don't believe purchasing greater FAB capacity is in AMD's best interset right now. AMD wants to produce at or just behind the peek. That way there is just the right amount of demand that keeps prices happy, AND avoids over-stocking.. The big no-no. We're in a demand shortage right now, so enhancing productivity will give you hardly any returns on investment.
Now one thing that _could_ do well for the future is dumping lots of resources into fab technology, but I'm sure they're already allocating as much as they think is wise. Excess too has diminishing marginal returns, as well as possibly being counter-productive.
What AMD needs (and they know this) is to break into different markets, such as that of the server. They've already got their business strategy, but here's an interseting point of view.. Their next x86-64 design tentatively will be a dual core. If this succeeds, then one thing will be clear from the outset - heat will be a _massive_ issue. Not to mention suceptibility to defects. If the chip is slated for the server market, then they have an interseting possibility. Focus on UNIX platforms where the code can all be garunteed to be recompiled for the new architecture. Then remove much of the compatibility hardware in each core and potentially resort to software emulation... Getting closer and closer to RISC at each juncture. In a server with Gig's of memory, we can afford to take the crusoe approach of segmented processor memory. The main advantage of such an emulated approach is that code isn't required to be recompiled (a la 32bit emulation mode), and the hit hopefully wouldn't be as bad as what the Italium seems to make it. Additionally, I speculate as to how much CPU surface area can be reduced. In the situation of specialized 128-node NUMA super-computers, the savings MIGHT be noticable.
Essentially this is an argument for AMD's futher path. It doesn't really suggest that a purchase of Transmeta today would be wise - what does their crusoe archetecture really do for AMD? My guess is that the personelle themselves might be of value.. Again, pure speculation.
-Michael
But I don't agree with your critics: first dump vi use vim instead, then if emacs (or vim) doesn't treat the same way {} and begin/end, this is a "misfeature" of the editor, it is not a fault of the language..
:) And 'use strict'.. The only time I'd advocate the lack of their usage is in single-use scripts.
I used vile for the longest time, but I've become spoiled with emacs. There is literally only one thing I miss from viXX, and that is the "." repetition feature. Anyway, the issue with "begin/end" is that rubdy DOESN"T maintain consistent use of "begin".. Things either fit on a line, or continue (with an optional "then") until the "end" directive.. It seems that the only time you see the word "begin" is in a try-block. AS the try block.. It boggles my mind why they didn't stick with the traditional keyword "try". I'm sure you could write parsers the color and match properly for begin/end, but it's definately more complicated to achieve.
About your critics about the speed: frankly interpreted languages (all of them) are not used for their speed..
Not so. Perl can be significantly faster than servlets in a CGI / mod_perl environment. Every ounce of speed is essential in that realm.. It's simply a matter of not wanting to give up extremely rapid development time (and freedom from worries of core dumps or memory leaks)
Ideally the language of choice is highly convinient AND fast.. Perl has a really optimized and speedy engine underneath.. And through proper use of profiling, you can tune your app to be nearly as fast as C. Granted you can do this with Ruby/Python as well, but I think it's easier to do with perl without resorting to C-code.
Perls (too easy to make an error which is ignored unless you use -w).
But you _do_ use "-w" don't you?
As for $xxx as an easy way to find variable xxx, don't forget that you can also use ${xxx} (I do it inside strings) so just searching for $xxx is not good enough.
I prefer Ruby sparse use of @ and $, it is less verbose than Python (self. everywhere) and more readable than the cluttered Perl $%@ usage..
Yes, it's definately not fool-proof. But of all the languages I've had to "find stuff in", perl's historically been the easiest. It's another reason I like emacs.. The default operation is case insensative search-as-you-type operation. But don't let me get into a viewer war.. I use both vi and emacs interchangably.
I agree that to the casual user, there's less line noise with Python or ruby's flat-variable names. But I'm still partial towards the shell/perl method of variable names. I definately like the method variables over $self->{..} or self.xxx. Maybe it's not too late to make suggestions to the Perl RFC process.. Allow over-riding method variables as 'my' would over-ride 'our'.
Could you explain more precisely the Pythons problems: poor use of anonymous functions, couldn't find a way to functionalize 'use strict' ?
Well, anonymous functions in python are more like 'lambda', which are single line functions, not fully supported functions. In Tk design, it's often nice to write really complex anonymous call-back functions in the middle of the function call.. To my knowledge you can't do that in Python, since you can only have a single non-complex statement in a lambda function. It seems that you have greater freedom with ruby at least.. Though the { |var,list| statements } takes some getting use to.
I haven't completely delved into either Ruby or Python, but I can't find a way in either to require pre-declarations of variables (as perl uses 'use vars qw( $x $y )' or 'our ($x,$y);' or 'my ( $x, $y );' or 'use fields qw( x y);' I've found that invaluable to avoid situations such as $filename, $file_name, $fileName. Now coding standards help greatly in such situations, but what about $login or $login_name? Having a single place to declare all these names helps to visually catch such errors. Granted "-w" should alleviate most of the activity. Ruby won't let you use unassigned variables as far as I understand (which takes care of much of the -w functionality)
I'm not that impressed with Perl's CPAN, maybe I'm too difficult..
I can't imagine what you do that hasn't allowed CPAN to help you. I have over 50 modules that I use regularly from CPAN.. DBI alone is monumental. Ruby seems to have copied many of them. Hell, if you've ever performed a "use XXX", you're using a module that at one point in time or another needed to be downloaded from CPAN.. As they developed greater fan-fair, they were incorportated into the standard distribution. I have a top-level book-mark to CPAN since I visit it almost weekly. But that's just me.
I don't have anything against Ruby.. Every language I've ever used has something that pisses me off; Perl definately being among them. If you're just looking for something to do personal work with, then Ruby should suite you fine (my guess is that it'll be more fun than Python). But if you're looking to do serious work outside of Japan, you're going to have some time before you'll have much support if you leave the mainstream C / C++ / Java / Perl.
-Michael