One of the guys I work with does game design as a hobby. (Joe Huber, first published game Scream Machine by Jolly Roger Games) He buys poker decks in bulk from BJs and prints out stickers that cover the face of the cards. If the game uses a board, he usually just hand draws one on card stock. He's also purchased parts from the local science museum or used parts from widely available board games, i.e. money/markers from Monopoly, etc.
It should be noted that these are prototypes and he's usually not making more than one copy of these games.
Along with the comment below about these problems being moved to the compiler/assembler writers, I'd like to add that you can have a machine that is very much like a dataflow machine, but uses conventional instructions. It's been done at Sun labs and is called the CounterFlow Pipeline Processor (CFPP). The original paper that proposed it, coauthored my Sutherland, can be found here in PDF and PS formats. I did a presentation on this architecture for a class a few years ago. If you're interested, the slides for that presentation can be found here in PowerPoint format. There was also a research group at Oregon State, but their web page is MIA.
So, what is a CFPP? It is a processor with a pipeline where data and instructions flow in opposite directions, with the instructions usually thought of as moving "up" and data as moving "down". The functional units (FU) are attached as sidings to the main pipeline. Each FU launches from a single pipeline stage and writes its results to a different stage, further "up" the pipeline. The main goals of this architecture were to make the processor simple and regular enough to create a correctness proof and to achieve purely local control.
If Sun ever produces a processor that is asynchronous, it will likely look similar to this.
--
"You can put a man through school,
But you cannot make him think."
we participate in a representative republic. What's the difference? Well, here you go.
Democracy is: Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. (From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition)
A republic is: A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them. (From the same source.)
The differences between the two are summed up in two words: entitled and responsible. In a republic, the people voting are doing so because it is their right. It is something that they are entitled to do. This concept of having a right to vote is absent from the basic definition of a democracy. In a democracy, you are allowed to vote. The second difference is who the government is responsible to. In a republic, the elected officials are responsible to the citizens who elected them. This idea of responsibility to the voters, like the idea of a right to vote, is not present in a democracy, even if it is a representative one.
So, why is the government of the USA often called a democracy and who started calling it that? Beats me. If I was being cynical, I'd say it was some one who wanted to confuse the issue of where the powerlies, with the citizens or the government.
(That should be "People Lead" in my sig.)
--
"You can put a man through school,
But you cannot make him think."
Modern processors have all sorts of things to deal with latency. Branch prediction, multiple issue slots, out-of-order execution, etc. However, this hardware generally requiers a group of instructions to work on, the more the better. Keeping a large number of instructions around for the processor to use requires more bandwidth.
That being said, when you have adequate bandwidth, latency does become more of a problem. That's why chip multiprocessors (CMPs) and Simultaneous Multithreading Processors (SMTs) are becoming a large focus of current processor research.
--
"You can put a man through school,
But you cannot make him think."
I heared from a friend that Joy had written an open letter to the president about the ethics currently in use by those developing technology. In it, he...I guess suggests is the best word...suggests that we need to change the way technology is being taught in schools and the way it is developed. So, is this it? And if this isn't that "letter", is it available on the web somewhere?
To me, this is just a reaction by Amazon to the current thinking in e-business. This line of thinking uses the fact that, as a whole, people are lazy. They are more likely to stay on whatever site they happen to be using at the moment to do what they want to do next, than to go on the net searching for it. Why else do you think the portal sites were/are so successful? Sure, part of it is that they filter out a lot of the noise that the web generates, but most of it is because people are lazy.
I also see this as part of the disturbing (well, to me any way) trend today of the box/program/thing that does it all. Do people really want to surf the web on their TV? Or check e-mail/surf the web with their cell phone? Or be able to create web sites, documents and a spread sheet all from Word? Maybe it's just me, but I don't want a stereo that surfs the web, or a coffe maker I can tell to turn on by sending it e-mail, or...well, you should have the idea by now.
To my mind, the best products come from picking a relatively small set of features (with the size of small being determined by what you are designing) and making those features easy to use. But, maybe that's just the engineer in me.:)
Slashdot Mirror
One of the guys I work with does game design as a hobby. (Joe Huber, first published game Scream Machine by Jolly Roger Games) He buys poker decks in bulk from BJs and prints out stickers that cover the face of the cards. If the game uses a board, he usually just hand draws one on card stock. He's also purchased parts from the local science museum or used parts from widely available board games, i.e. money/markers from Monopoly, etc.
It should be noted that these are prototypes and he's usually not making more than one copy of these games.
So, what is a CFPP? It is a processor with a pipeline where data and instructions flow in opposite directions, with the instructions usually thought of as moving "up" and data as moving "down". The functional units (FU) are attached as sidings to the main pipeline. Each FU launches from a single pipeline stage and writes its results to a different stage, further "up" the pipeline. The main goals of this architecture were to make the processor simple and regular enough to create a correctness proof and to achieve purely local control.
If Sun ever produces a processor that is asynchronous, it will likely look similar to this.
--
"You can put a man through school,
But you cannot make him think."
It's just a single line on the front page, just above all the byte.com links.
--
"You can put a man through school,
But you cannot make him think."
Democracy is: Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. (From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition)
A republic is: A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them. (From the same source.)
The differences between the two are summed up in two words: entitled and responsible. In a republic, the people voting are doing so because it is their right. It is something that they are entitled to do. This concept of having a right to vote is absent from the basic definition of a democracy. In a democracy, you are allowed to vote. The second difference is who the government is responsible to. In a republic, the elected officials are responsible to the citizens who elected them. This idea of responsibility to the voters, like the idea of a right to vote, is not present in a democracy, even if it is a representative one.
So, why is the government of the USA often called a democracy and who started calling it that? Beats me. If I was being cynical, I'd say it was some one who wanted to confuse the issue of where the powerlies, with the citizens or the government.
(That should be "People Lead" in my sig.)
--
"You can put a man through school,
But you cannot make him think."
Modern processors have all sorts of things to deal with latency. Branch prediction, multiple issue slots, out-of-order execution, etc. However, this hardware generally requiers a group of instructions to work on, the more the better. Keeping a large number of instructions around for the processor to use requires more bandwidth.
That being said, when you have adequate bandwidth, latency does become more of a problem. That's why chip multiprocessors (CMPs) and Simultaneous Multithreading Processors (SMTs) are becoming a large focus of current processor research.
--
"You can put a man through school,
But you cannot make him think."
I heared from a friend that Joy had written an open letter to the president about the ethics currently in use by those developing technology. In it, he...I guess suggests is the best word...suggests that we need to change the way technology is being taught in schools and the way it is developed. So, is this it? And if this isn't that "letter", is it available on the web somewhere?
To me, this is just a reaction by Amazon to the current thinking in e-business. This line of thinking uses the fact that, as a whole, people are lazy. They are more likely to stay on whatever site they happen to be using at the moment to do what they want to do next, than to go on the net searching for it. Why else do you think the portal sites were/are so successful? Sure, part of it is that they filter out a lot of the noise that the web generates, but most of it is because people are lazy.
:)
I also see this as part of the disturbing (well, to me any way) trend today of the box/program/thing that does it all. Do people really want to surf the web on their TV? Or check e-mail/surf the web with their cell phone? Or be able to create web sites, documents and a spread sheet all from Word? Maybe it's just me, but I don't want a stereo that surfs the web, or a coffe maker I can tell to turn on by sending it e-mail, or...well, you should have the idea by now.
To my mind, the best products come from picking a relatively small set of features (with the size of small being determined by what you are designing) and making those features easy to use. But, maybe that's just the engineer in me.