the thing to remember is that the cells themselves are not the sort of thing you would normally run *nix on - more likely it would run on the PPC core and provide services that would allow you to load and run code in the attached cells.
In many ways it's much more like a CPU with a bunch of attached DSPs than a traditional CPU or multi-CPU chip
read it more carefully - they don't eliminate the instruction window - they set it to 2. They can decode exactly 2 instructions/clock (provided they meet some simple dependency rules between the instructions) makes for easy decode trees, fast cycle times.
This isn't even a general purpose processor (no MMUs on the cells either in the traditional sense) nor have they gone superscalar - they have enough registers to keep the thing busy, software can figure that out - this isn't even that new an idea, a cell looks a lot like one of the media processors that was being sold 5-6 years ago
You're right it's not designed to be a scientific processor - but then high precision scientific processing is a tiny market these days - way more people want to pay for fast gaming platforms than want to do fluid dynamics or what have you
the problem is that a multiplier's size is proportional to roughly the square of the things being multiplied - assuming the 64 fp's mantissa is twice the size of a 32-bit one it's going to take 4 times the area (or twice the area of a pair of them) and of course it will eat into your cycle time (both in gates and in wire delay)
yup you're right - I used the slot car transformer in salt water technique to make H2 as a kid... my mother made me stop because of the Cl2 that came off the other end (mostly disolved in the water - I'd guess he's making something like FeCl3/NaOH (in solution) - it probably turns a dirty yellow
it's not a signal quality issue - your downstream DSL (or rather the one they'll use for this service) will support enough bandwidth for 3+1 - this means there's a switch somewhere at the phone company and your 'settop' box communicates with it to tell it which 3+1 channels to stream down your wire (might just be IP multicast with some smarts for PPV etc) - it will be encrypted in some form so you wont be able to just snarf the packets from the home router to get a copy of the latest movices
This has been happening for a while... I've always likened it to the scene in T2 where the bad robot is dropped in liquid nitrogen and shatters.... then slowly we see all the drops start to flow together to remake the evil robot again....
Who wants the bad publicity of being the first camera to be virus infected?.... you're way too late - I was unloading a friend's camera while travelling in India a while back when the darn thing tried to infect my lattop.... he'd picked it up in a i-cafe. Not quite a firmware virus as you describe but a camera virus never-the-less
Geez... the US education system continues to amaze me... do you even have any idea WHO Stalin was? WHAT he did? HOW MANY he killed? anything about his policies - he ran a country with as strong a hand as Hitler ran Germany, killed millions - he was an authoritarian dictator - for that reason you could argue that EVERY major US publication is "to the left of Stalin"... he also nominally ran the largest communist country so you could equally argue that every major US publication is "to the right of Stalin". In short your rhetoric is rubbish
Those how do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it
will people deliberately upload stuff with embedded windows DRM viruses designed to only target the MPAA/RIAA? seems to me these guys are leaving themselves wide open and just asking for trouble
in some sense I agree - he didn;t learnbh the same stuff that she did (and having watched his little sister this morning wants to do the same)...
But he was really happy and excited building his (linux) PC (note I didn't do it - he did) - and did learn a lot - we worked through issues of CPUs, memory, buying stuff within a budget, trade offs (well you can't afford a fast graphics card AND a DVD writer.. what will you do? how much disk space do you think you will need? etc etc) - while he didn't learn how to solder he did learn how to make something and learned a lot about computers - yes he did build it - not from scratch - but with not that fewer components than my daughter used in her project this morning. She wants to build a computer too (next xmas).... but we have to work through the 'I want to build a Mac' issue:-)
Their dad however does build chips (no I don't run a fab but I do have 10 years experience doing VLSI logic design...)
My daughter? not unless you're ~11 years old, living south of the 45S parallel and she doesn't go something like 'ooh yuck boys icky' at the sight of you
I just spent 2 hours this morning with my daughter teaching her how to solder and watching her build her first electronics kit - she's been bursting with pride at her accomplishment all day and can't wait to build another. It's the same reason my son and I built him a PC for xmas (he got a stocking full of boards, cpu, case, memory, etc),
You build stuff for yourself to learn and because it's satisfying to make stuff... the same reason other people work in wood or in wool or whatever... I think we forget this sort of stuff in our modern mass produced world.
And to your point - if it breaks you don't have to take it back... you can fix it yourself.
Seeing Ada's article today was particularly usefull because I could show it to my daughter - her response was 'cool can I make one?', (she already has an MP3 player... so it is the making not the having that's important here), being able to say I could say I vaguely knew Ada (from the long ago xenu-wars) was great too... now my daughter want to go to MIT:-)
It sais: "Klik no longer totally depends on kde. Where previously klik could only be used with konqueror, now you can also use firefox and elinks, and where previously kdialog was required, now any of dialog|Xdialog|kdialog should work."
Of course I remember the "good old days" when line printers were men and a chain break could embed it in the wall across the room...
Seriously though what you describe was called a 'paper throw' and probably ment the operators had set the thing up wrong... basicly those old line printers had a control tape - a short length of paper tape with a bunch of holes in it, each time the page advanced a line the tape did too - the tape was the same length as a page (every time the printer had moved to a new page the tape had gone around once) - when the printer got a line to print it looked at the first character on the line (think fortran CC) and if it was a number N look at the Nth column in the tape and skip forward until it finds a hole in the tape in that column. So for example when you print labels you throw on a special tape with holes that match where the labels start etc etc and by convention '1' skips to the start of the next page because column 1 always has exactly one hole punched in it that lines up with the start of the page - you get the idea.
So what's a 'paper throw'? well if the operators ever put on a tape that has a column M that has no holes punched in it anywhere and someone prints a line that sais 'skip to column M' the tape spins forever without printing anything and paper streams (horizontally) out of the printer missing the basket that's supposed to catch it....
In most other countries tax is (often required by law) INCLUDED when people quote prices for things - the US is the one that's different in this respect.
The petition appears to simply be doing the right thing and be taking that into account so that they are comparing err um 'apples and apples'
And anyway what does 'reliable' mean - probably you should factor in accidental discharges as well as misfires... perhaps the right thing to try and figure out is something like 'would the owner be more likely or less likely to be hurt owning this weapon over some reasonable weapon lifetime'
well that won't be happening - I bet one of those sensors gives skin temperature (to stop the movie-eyeball trick.... so that evil criminal masterminds can't get away with chopping off a hand in order to use the gun....)
"More components mean more points of potential failure. "
That's only true if the new components have the same reliablility as the ones that they replace - if they are more reliable the whole might be more reliable....
Besides - in this case we're talking about a gun that doesn't even have firing pins, hammers or cartridges - for all we know it has FEWER parts than a traditional gun.
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In many ways it's much more like a CPU with a bunch of attached DSPs than a traditional CPU or multi-CPU chip
This isn't even a general purpose processor (no MMUs on the cells either in the traditional sense) nor have they gone superscalar - they have enough registers to keep the thing busy, software can figure that out - this isn't even that new an idea, a cell looks a lot like one of the media processors that was being sold 5-6 years ago
You're right it's not designed to be a scientific processor - but then high precision scientific processing is a tiny market these days - way more people want to pay for fast gaming platforms than want to do fluid dynamics or what have you
the problem is that a multiplier's size is proportional to roughly the square of the things being multiplied - assuming the 64 fp's mantissa is twice the size of a 32-bit one it's going to take 4 times the area (or twice the area of a pair of them) and of course it will eat into your cycle time (both in gates and in wire delay)
but rather more encouraging: A police employee who used the police computer to check progress of an investigation into his drug dealing has been jailed for three years
yeah that was going to be my comment too - (I have a soft spot for Algol68 having once written a compiler for it)
yup you're right - I used the slot car transformer in salt water technique to make H2 as a kid ... my mother made me stop because of the Cl2 that came off the other end (mostly disolved in the water - I'd guess he's making something like FeCl3/NaOH (in solution) - it probably turns a dirty yellow
it's not a signal quality issue - your downstream DSL (or rather the one they'll use for this service) will support enough bandwidth for 3+1 - this means there's a switch somewhere at the phone company and your 'settop' box communicates with it to tell it which 3+1 channels to stream down your wire (might just be IP multicast with some smarts for PPV etc) - it will be encrypted in some form so you wont be able to just snarf the packets from the home router to get a copy of the latest movices
This has been happening for a while ... I've always likened it to the scene in T2 where the bad robot is dropped in liquid nitrogen and shatters .... then slowly we see all the drops start to flow together to remake the evil robot again ....
What's amazing about this is how fast they are moving away from their source ... not the absolute speed which as the parent sais doesn't mean a lot
Who wants the bad publicity of being the first camera to be virus infected? .... you're way too late - I was unloading a friend's camera while travelling in India a while back when the darn thing tried to infect my lattop .... he'd picked it up in a i-cafe. Not quite a firmware virus as you describe but a camera virus never-the-less
Those how do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it
will people deliberately upload stuff with embedded windows DRM viruses designed to only target the MPAA/RIAA? seems to me these guys are leaving themselves wide open and just asking for trouble
But he was really happy and excited building his (linux) PC (note I didn't do it - he did) - and did learn a lot - we worked through issues of CPUs, memory, buying stuff within a budget, trade offs (well you can't afford a fast graphics card AND a DVD writer .. what will you do? how much disk space do you think you will need? etc etc) - while he didn't learn how to solder he did learn how to make something and learned a lot about computers - yes he did build it - not from scratch - but with not that fewer components than my daughter used in her project this morning. She wants to build a computer too (next xmas) .... but we have to work through the 'I want to build a Mac' issue :-)
Their dad however does build chips (no I don't run a fab but I do have 10 years experience doing VLSI logic design ...)
My daughter? not unless you're ~11 years old, living south of the 45S parallel and she doesn't go something like 'ooh yuck boys icky' at the sight of you
You build stuff for yourself to learn and because it's satisfying to make stuff ... the same reason other people work in wood or in wool or whatever ... I think we forget this sort of stuff in our modern mass produced world.
And to your point - if it breaks you don't have to take it back ... you can fix it yourself.
Seeing Ada's article today was particularly usefull because I could show it to my daughter - her response was 'cool can I make one?', (she already has an MP3 player ... so it is the making not the having that's important here), being able to say I could say I vaguely knew Ada (from the long ago xenu-wars) was great too ... now my daughter want to go to MIT :-)
It sais: "Klik no longer totally depends on kde. Where previously klik could only be used with konqueror, now you can also use firefox and elinks, and where previously kdialog was required, now any of dialog|Xdialog|kdialog should work."
Seriously though what you describe was called a 'paper throw' and probably ment the operators had set the thing up wrong ... basicly those old line printers had a control tape - a short length of paper tape with a bunch of holes in it, each time the page advanced a line the tape did too - the tape was the same length as a page (every time the printer had moved to a new page the tape had gone around once) - when the printer got a line to print it looked at the first character on the line (think fortran CC) and if it was a number N look at the Nth column in the tape and skip forward until it finds a hole in the tape in that column. So for example when you print labels you throw on a special tape with holes that match where the labels start etc etc and by convention '1' skips to the start of the next page because column 1 always has exactly one hole punched in it that lines up with the start of the page - you get the idea.
So what's a 'paper throw'? well if the operators ever put on a tape that has a column M that has no holes punched in it anywhere and someone prints a line that sais 'skip to column M' the tape spins forever without printing anything and paper streams (horizontally) out of the printer missing the basket that's supposed to catch it ....
or maybe "not moving"?
The petition appears to simply be doing the right thing and be taking that into account so that they are comparing err um 'apples and apples'
And anyway what does 'reliable' mean - probably you should factor in accidental discharges as well as misfires ... perhaps the right thing to try and figure out is something like 'would the owner be more likely or less likely to be hurt owning this weapon over some reasonable weapon lifetime'
wont this leave the streets full of exhaust (ice) in the middle of winter ...?
well that won't be happening - I bet one of those sensors gives skin temperature (to stop the movie-eyeball trick .... so that evil criminal masterminds can't get away with chopping off a hand in order to use the gun ....)
I should add - you are however SOL if the battery goes flat ....
That's only true if the new components have the same reliablility as the ones that they replace - if they are more reliable the whole might be more reliable ....
Besides - in this case we're talking about a gun that doesn't even have firing pins, hammers or cartridges - for all we know it has FEWER parts than a traditional gun.
I did the same thing on an old-style mini maybe 20 years back ... except in my case it was "shit we don't have a radio ...."