What if key dialogue occrus during the "fountain of blood"? What if important things happen in the background, or foreground? What if the entirety of that death scene is a bloody mess, but it's crucial that the viewer be aware that this character has been killed for continuity reasons?
Like the man says, it's not easy.
Personally, I applaud them for putting so much effort into trying to keep the story and feel of the original while making it possible for the show to be shown on TV at all.
It's not even that they "aren't good enough", it's more a matter of inertia.
Currently all the training, design tools, verification tools, etc, are geared towards solving the particular problems that come up through synchronous design. Asynchronous design avoids some of those problems completely, but has others of it's own.
Major companies are unwilling to trade a known set of problems for an unknown set.
When some of the small start-ups that are currently pursuing asynchronous chips release product and show that those problems can be practically and regularly solved then the world will sit up and take notice, but until then we're just another 'technological curiosity'.
Re:Bad for marketing
on
Clockless Chips
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What *should* happen, is everyone should argee on a standardized benchmark, which is OS & architecture independent, that would become the single number comparsion between two chips. Although, I highly doubt everyone would argree to such a single benchmark....
The real problem, which (thankfully) is coming more and more out into the open, is that there is no way to meaningfully reduce today's complex general purpose CPUs to a single number, or even a small subset of numbers.
Real performance is far too application dependant (and in some cases data dependant), meaning that the only truly useful benchmark for any application is to actually run the application in question. We're pretty much on the way to this already... gaming sites benchmark equipment based on how well/fast it runs a variety of common games using a variety of settings for example.
Any quoted single number is reasonably meaningless.
More dangerous than decrypting any individual transaction would be decrypting the keys used to encode the transactions (which is what the article says they've done).
So, you make up your own set of transactions tranferring funds from one place to another, perhaps using the credit card and account numbers you collected along the way, encrypt them with the discovered keys, and send them off to be processed.
If you really prefer speed over bells, why don't you use something like fvwm?
As an administrator I found CDE to be overly complex, difficult to use and customize, and generally a pain in the ^@$@! Having Gnome availible on Solaris in a pre-packaged, official distribution is nice even if you don't use it as your desktop just for the included applications, which can be a pain to compile properly otherwise.
On my current desktop I'm using Gnome and sawfish and it's quite reasonable. On my Sun cluster (used solely for remote computation) I don't install CDE OR Gnome.
Just a thought, but most people can't install Windows (or MacOS, or BSD) themselves either... that's why most systems stay running the OS they came with from the reseller.
We, of course, aren't 'most people', but I'm usually pretty happy about it.
At work we have a mix of Win2K and RH7.1 desktops, and most people are happy with whichever they have. The problem that's getting me recently is that of some management insisting that their peers (and in some cases the engineers) use Visio, Project, and other MS-specific tools. Bleck.
The article is surprisingly accurate, for a change. Read it.
However, it seems to have spawned the usual problems here with misunderstanding and confusion. Practically a/. trademark by this point...
Whether you construct a processor using conventional or asynchronous logic makes no difference to the programmer. The programming paradigm can be completely independant from the underlying hardware. (Admittedly, if you want to squeeze the absolute most performance from a given hardware design, you need to program with it in mind, but there is no reason why an ix86, or PPC, or SPARC, or MIPS chip couldn't be implemented asynchronously.)
One of the most interesting advantages of asynchronous logic is that it allows the use of arbitrarily large die sizes. In synchronous logic, you're limited by the delays that arise from transmitting your clock pulses across the chip... at some point maintaining a global lock-step becomes infeasible.
One of the most marketable advantages of asynchronous logic is the power saved by not having to constantly drive the same clock circutry. Most chips support a 'sleep' or 'low power' mode where they turn off the clock or provide it to only a limited portion of the chip. The chip then has to go through a 'wake up' cycle to re-establish the clock throughout the chip before returning to normal operation. The power saved by asynchronous operation can be substantial, and the lack of a 'wake up' latency can be critical in certain applications.
The biggest problem right now is that the vast Layout and Design masses are used to solving the synchronous problems and not the asynchronous problems, ditto for the availible tools. Howver, with an asynchronous-savvy group, a given solution can be designed in less time than the equivalent synchronous solution (someone here was claiming otherwise...).
And this technology is -not- vaporware... it's real and it's here. And whether you believe it or not, it's at least one part of the future.
-YA
PS: BS in EE from Caltech. Working for a company mentioned in the article, although their opinions have no logical relation or tie to mine.
Just because a person has never had the desire to crack does not make them a dork. (Many would in fact argue exactly the opposite, that its those of you who need illegal activities to feel fufilled who are the 'dorks'!)
There are many, many hackers who expend their time and skill in constructive programming pursuits: making more efficient utilities, writing games, sending useful scripts to their friends...
Personally I'm relatively proficient in at least six programming languages, but have just never had the desire to crack or engage in cracking. Perhaps I'm too tied up in this, or really am more oddball than I believe, but I'll need to see some evidence before I accept that.
I'll agree pretty much wholesale with your last paragraph, but I don't see how that applies to the issue at hand, which is that a perfectly reasonable word denoting dedication and expertise is being corrupted with negative connotations, and we don't have a good replacement. The only options I see are: 1) create a new word without the negative connotations to replace the traditional use of 'hacker'. 2) fight these negative connotations as they are being established (what many here are trying (somewhat futilely) to do).
Well... In its usual context I tend to translate hacker as being a bit different than just a coder. It's really more of "slightly obsessed specialist in some computer-related area". (as in a sendmail hacker or a Perl hacker) Those people who might use the term hacker but want to emphasize expertise usually switch to 'guru', but what word could we use to emphasize the commitment of being a hacker while disassociating from the whole negative cracker confusion? 'coder' is clearly inadequate. Perhaps fanatic? acolyte? Perhaps the reasonable thing to do is to pervert the usual meaning of some other term... "I'm a Perl nerd"?
Slashdot Mirror
What if key dialogue occrus during the "fountain of blood"? What if important things happen in the background, or foreground? What if the entirety of that death scene is a bloody mess, but it's crucial that the viewer be aware that this character has been killed for continuity reasons?
Like the man says, it's not easy.
Personally, I applaud them for putting so much effort into trying to keep the story and feel of the original while making it possible for the show to be shown on TV at all.
It's not even that they "aren't good enough", it's more a matter of inertia.
Currently all the training, design tools, verification tools, etc, are geared towards solving the particular problems that come up through synchronous design. Asynchronous design avoids some of those problems completely, but has others of it's own.
Major companies are unwilling to trade a known set of problems for an unknown set.
When some of the small start-ups that are currently pursuing asynchronous chips release product and show that those problems can be practically and regularly solved then the world will sit up and take notice, but until then we're just another 'technological curiosity'.
What *should* happen, is everyone should argee on a standardized benchmark, which is OS & architecture independent, that would become the single number comparsion between two chips. Although, I highly doubt everyone would argree to such a single benchmark.... The real problem, which (thankfully) is coming more and more out into the open, is that there is no way to meaningfully reduce today's complex general purpose CPUs to a single number, or even a small subset of numbers. Real performance is far too application dependant (and in some cases data dependant), meaning that the only truly useful benchmark for any application is to actually run the application in question. We're pretty much on the way to this already... gaming sites benchmark equipment based on how well/fast it runs a variety of common games using a variety of settings for example.
Any quoted single number is reasonably meaningless.
Now what ?
More dangerous than decrypting any individual transaction would be decrypting the keys used to encode the transactions (which is what the article says they've done).
So, you make up your own set of transactions tranferring funds from one place to another, perhaps using the credit card and account numbers you collected along the way, encrypt them with the discovered keys, and send them off to be processed.
If you really prefer speed over bells, why don't you use something like fvwm?
As an administrator I found CDE to be overly complex, difficult to use and customize, and generally a pain in the ^@$@! Having Gnome availible on Solaris in a pre-packaged, official distribution is nice even if you don't use it as your desktop just for the included applications, which can be a pain to compile properly otherwise.
On my current desktop I'm using Gnome and sawfish and it's quite reasonable. On my Sun cluster (used solely for remote computation) I don't install CDE OR Gnome.
Just a thought, but most people can't install Windows (or MacOS, or BSD) themselves either... that's why most systems stay running the OS they came with from the reseller.
We, of course, aren't 'most people', but I'm usually pretty happy about it.
At work we have a mix of Win2K and RH7.1 desktops, and most people are happy with whichever they have. The problem that's getting me recently is that of some management insisting that their peers (and in some cases the engineers) use Visio, Project, and other MS-specific tools. Bleck.
The article is surprisingly accurate, for a change. Read it.
/. trademark by this point...
However, it seems to have spawned the usual problems here with misunderstanding and confusion. Practically a
Whether you construct a processor using conventional or asynchronous logic makes no difference to the programmer. The programming paradigm can be completely independant from the underlying hardware. (Admittedly, if you want to squeeze the absolute most performance from a given hardware design, you need to program with it in mind, but there is no reason why an ix86, or PPC, or SPARC, or MIPS chip couldn't be implemented asynchronously.)
One of the most interesting advantages of asynchronous logic is that it allows the use of arbitrarily large die sizes. In synchronous logic, you're limited by the delays that arise from transmitting your clock pulses across the chip... at some point maintaining a global lock-step becomes infeasible.
One of the most marketable advantages of asynchronous logic is the power saved by not having to constantly drive the same clock circutry. Most chips support a 'sleep' or 'low power' mode where they turn off the clock or provide it to only a limited portion of the chip. The chip then has to go through a 'wake up' cycle to re-establish the clock throughout the chip before returning to normal operation. The power saved by asynchronous operation can be substantial, and the lack of a 'wake up' latency can be critical in certain applications.
The biggest problem right now is that the vast Layout and Design masses are used to solving the synchronous problems and not the asynchronous problems, ditto for the availible tools. Howver, with an asynchronous-savvy group, a given solution can be designed in less time than the equivalent synchronous solution (someone here was claiming otherwise...).
And this technology is -not- vaporware... it's real and it's here. And whether you believe it or not, it's at least one part of the future.
-YA
PS: BS in EE from Caltech. Working for a company mentioned in the article, although their opinions have no logical relation or tie to mine.
Just because a person has never had the desire to crack does not make them a dork. (Many would in fact argue exactly the opposite, that its those of you who need illegal activities to feel fufilled who are the 'dorks'!)
There are many, many hackers who expend their time and skill in constructive programming pursuits: making more efficient utilities, writing games, sending useful scripts to their friends...
Personally I'm relatively proficient in at least six programming languages, but have just never had the desire to crack or engage in cracking. Perhaps I'm too tied up in this, or really am more oddball than I believe, but I'll need to see some evidence before I accept that.
I'll agree pretty much wholesale with your last paragraph, but I don't see how that applies to the issue at hand, which is that a perfectly reasonable word denoting dedication and expertise is being corrupted with negative connotations, and we don't have a good replacement. The only options I see are:
1) create a new word without the negative connotations to replace the traditional use of 'hacker'.
2) fight these negative connotations as they are being established (what many here are trying (somewhat futilely) to do).
Well... In its usual context I tend to translate hacker as being a bit different than just a coder. It's really more of "slightly obsessed specialist in some computer-related area". (as in a sendmail hacker or a Perl hacker) Those people who might use the term hacker but want to emphasize expertise usually switch to 'guru', but what word could we use to emphasize the commitment of being a hacker while disassociating from the whole negative cracker confusion? 'coder' is clearly inadequate. Perhaps fanatic? acolyte? Perhaps the reasonable thing to do is to pervert the usual meaning of some other term... "I'm a Perl nerd"?