but personally I'm partial to the German/NZ systems where you get 2 votes - a party vote and a local electorate vote - you double up the existing electorates so the number of electorate seats falls to 1/2 then after the election you first add up the electorate votes and then use the national party totals to share out the other 1/2 of the seats to make the party totals come out right. I think both countries have minimum %s required (5%?) for a party to get representation.
Now the usual complaint about this sort of system (proportional systems in general) is that it encourages coalitions and compromise (I think that's a good thing in a political system) which results in deadlocks - however the US political system seems to be designed to encourage that sort of thing anyway (many in the US seem proud of this quality) so maybe it's a perfect fit.
I does rather look like they're pinning their future on deposing the existing order and are backing the Republicans. It might be worth spending some time perusing SEC filings over the next few months to follow the M$-bucks.
To be fair I think Billy-boy has enoiugh that he could buy both parties - and I bet he'll probably try
So you want a faster I/O bus? well then you have to do either (or both) of three things:
more pins (# bits/clock)
higher clock rates (greater bits/time)
move the bus on chip meaning you can't just plug in a new card
The first two mean more power - power being (very) roughly proportional to the number of pins and how fast they are waggling - and as a result hotter chips. The more pins solution breaks down pretty fast - you can double the bandwidth by doubling the bus width only so many times before running into packaging problems - remember at high frequencies you need 1 power/ground pin for every 3-4 signal pins - also plug-in card with >64 data pins are probably impractical Bumping the clock rate while keeping the bus narrow seems to be the way some parts of the industry's going (1394, RamBus, the new fast USB etc).
For most of the PC space the third option is probably going to be what you see - more integration - buses going away or being pushed on-chip meaning that the chances for plug-in high bandwidth goodies are virtually non-existant - instead you get what was chosen for you by the person who chose the chip when they put the motherboard together.
Anyway the thing to remember TANSTAAFL - everything is a compromise.
1 - the cynical response - Yeah, well of course they will. Why sell us 1 cinema ticket/video/DVD when they can sell us 3
Actually my 'cynical response' more goes like - "they better make the first episode a blockbuster or they'll never get the funding to finish the other 2"
2 - the enthusiastic response - Great! This should give about 7 hours of story! Plenty of time to fully explore the whole story!
yup - that's the real intention -this thing has basicly taken over the entire New Zealand film industry for a couple of years - friends tell me bizarre sets are popping up in disused quarrys and other strange places. This is probably a good thing - there must be a lot of extras with time on their hands now that Hercules and Xena have stopped filming
I've always wondered exactly who's genome is being sequenced.... I always assumed there ones one guy or gal somewhere that had been chosen and they were doing them first - I guess they do a feww more later to compare to get an idea about intra species variation.... then a few chimps and gorillas to help figure out what makes us human.....
But somewhere out there there's a person who's about to become the benchmark human that we're all going to be measured against.....
actually I wrote this from my personal experience doing mostly bleeding edge std cell design over the past 8 odd years - we used to put up with really simple wire models - basicly lumped capacitance (often just extracted with simple math from the net length) tossed onto the gate caps - now we need fully extracted models that take into account real RC delays along the wires as well as gate loading effects.
5 years ago this worked great - then we started to need really good models of long inter-block wires, now days we see RC effects starting to dominate on long or branching intra-block nets - the sorts of things that Synopsys models with fanout based wire loads - this sort of modelling used to work just great now it's become a liability forcing us to either synthesize smaller blocks or to over estimate the wire related delays in order to cover the slow tail on the bellcurve of routed net lengths - both of which leave performance on the table.
These process improvements help - I think more so as we head into smaller features (again because of edge effects capacitance is not scaling with area like everything else). More important is probably going to be CAD software I think the combined route/synthesis sort tools are going to have to replace thing liks Synopsys pretty soon if we are going actually use smaller feature sized processes really in anger
Remember how copper was a big deal about a year back.... well this is really the same thing - wire delays in chips are rapidly becoming the dominating factor in how fast they can go.
Basicly delay is proportional to R*C - the resistance of the wire times the capacitance of it. You can reduce the resistance by using a more conductive metal (like Cu rather than the more traditional Al). You can reduce the capacitance by:
reducing the wire's area (but 'edge effects' - proportional to the length of the wire don't scale in the same way as other features so this is becoming problematical)
moving the wire further away from other wires (but we're trying to make things smaller to fit more stuff in, not bigger)
use an insulator between the wires with a lower dieletric constant (what's happening here)
5 years ago we designers didn't care much about wire delays - they weren't what made our logic slow - now they're killing us.... this sort of stuff is great news!!
PS: Intel's 'coppermine' processers don't use copper wires - marketting is everything....
Ask the lawyers - a /. class action? :-)
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 2
It was on the local (San Jose) PBS station - channel 54 who produced it a few weeks back.
It did a great job of showing the crazyness around the whole process along with the Netscape/AOL stuff going on in the background (some of the engineer's comments about AOL just as it was announced are interesting:-).
It also follows what happend to various people as they burn out and leave
Turn in everyone you know and lots you don't - make sure every jock in sight is being investigated..... make up a few - have all your friends turn them in.
A system like this only works because some real person has to do the investigation and I bet they're not funded well enough to handle a real flood
The problems that SF is facing is of it's own making.
I think you're ignoring a lot of (not so recent) history and geography...
Internet companies didn't make it practially illegal to build new housing in SF. SF politicians did.
More like it has something to do with the fact that almost every square inch of SF has been developed for decades now - even out in the far avenues there are row after row of 2 story houses - if you want to build new housing you have to knock down housing that already has people living in it - that becomes a political problem
You could argue that the political corruption scandals that resulted in San Mateo county being broken off from SF county at the turn of the century were "of it's own making" - but no one involved is still alive to my knowledge
Internet companies didn't refuse to do anything about traffic or parking, and then complained about the resulting mayhem. SF politicians did.
Of maybe it has something to do with much of SF being built up before cars were in common uses - all those victorians with 4-6 apartments in them don't have garages for a reason - people didn't have cars when they were built - and there was good public transport - now each of those people living in those apartments want their own SUV and street parking is a nightmare. This is nothing new - I had the same problem when I lived in the Haight 15 years ago - in the end we ditched our car and used the buses - we usually got where we wanted faster anyway.
Internet companies didn't impose a state of war between renters and landlords through rent control. SF politicians did.
This has been going on for a couple of generations SF has a really big problem with spiralling rents for people on fixed incomes - the politicians are after all just representiung the voters. Rent control has been viciously fought over every 3-4 years for as long as I can remember
However, SF politicians didn't invent blaming all their problems on the nasty subhuman outsiders. That one is universal.
Actually SF politicos seem divided on this one - in fact it's a historical divide - between the ones who represent and suck up to downtown big-business and the more populist ones who try and represent the voters. Besides after a few years the 'outsiders' become locals and start griping about the latest batch of immigrants
I bought a cheapo e-machines box last week to use as a toss-it-in-the corner headless Linux server - it has "ebay", "amazon.com", "goto.com" and "US bancshares" keys - god knows what they do in X - probably not what the respective 'owners' expect when they paid for them - maybe I should call them up and complain they don't work:-) ask for my money back along with my M$ refund.... (oh wait they probably made my box cheaper.... I'd have to pay them).
I wonder what such a key costs? Maybe we could all chip in and buy one with a cute penguin.... press it and some time after midnight when you're not looking it wipes out the M$ crap and pulls a Linux distro in in its place:-)
I started telecommuting just before we started to have kids - so I'd have the freedom to rearrange my day to spend time with the kids - for me it worked well.
But this was primarily because my wife's job is mornings only - she's leave for work at 7 - I'd get the kids up, feed them and go out for a walk to a park and/or cafe - about 10:30 I'd come home and the kids would start their nap and I'd start work - my wife would come home about the time they'd wake and I'd work through to ~6. About the time they stopped needing a morning nap they were ready for preschool.
I've worked at home 3-4 days a week for 10 years now - the one most important thing I learened -get out of the house EVERY day - go hang out in a cafe for an hour, talk to real people etc etc otherwise you start getting really isolated.
The biggest downside for me is rather a mixed blessing - office politics - on one hand most of them sail over your head you don't have to get involved with the tacky trivia - the downside is that when they do matter you tend to lose out because you're not there. Make sure you have a manager you can trust to regularly keep you up to date with what's going on in the company.
I've worked at 2 companies this way now - the one common piece of experience was that things worked great for the first few years - but over time I find I tend to get disinterested managers and less interesting work than when I started - this may also related ton the size of the company - when they were small they were great - when they are larger it's easy to forget about the people who aren't there.
Oh yeah when it's free tee-shirt time you always end up with choosing from the leftovers - XXL:-(
So will there be an API for 2d drivers for common cards? (embedded systems seem to be using all the same chipsets...) will they use an existing one so that existing drivers can be used? what about 3d drivers?
don't build up an immune system (security, anti-viral programs)
Good things:
change often, adapt
everyone use different software (diversity of distributions, kernels, desktop environments is a VERY good thing)
security
actively hunt down stuff in your system that changes unexpectedly
stay away from those who seem to get infected a lot
You get the idea - M$'s world lives in a monoculture - just like a genetically engineered crop where everything is the same they are prey to that one viral mutation that can wipe out everyone
Well they started well..... by shifting to a decimal currency.... but bogged down after that....
Having lived thru a transition from imperial to metric units I know it's not that big a deal and made so much sense in retrospect. Then I moved to the US and had to change back - what a nightmare - you forget what a pain dealing in 1/12s and 1/16s and 1/64s and the like is!
The things I remember being most usefull to know during conversion were rulse of thumb, not exact conversion numbers - for the record - some simple things to remember:
1mm - ~the width of a saw cut
5x10 (cm) a '2x4'
a meter ~= 1 yard
1 inch ~= 2cm
1 kilogram ~= 2 lbs
1 litre ~= 1/2 pint (maybe not in the US where pints are different from the rest of the world)
3/30 mph/miles ~= 5/50 kph/km
5/50 mph/miles ~= 8/80 kph/km
6/60 mph/miles ~= 10/100 kph/km
Few things in every-day life require exact measurements - when you buy meat you don't want exactly 1 lb - you want roughly enough to feed the people who are at dinner tonight - 1/2 a kilo will probably do the job. When my dad's gardening book was released in a 'metric edition' some fool copyeditor changed all the stuff like "plant the seeds an inch apart" with "plant the seeds 2.54cm apart" - you get the idea.
Gee - I've got two kids - each with unique genetic codes... time for my wife and I to race down to the copyright office and register our creative works before someone else does
I wonder if we should get them tattooed with a "(c)..." just to make sure.
Of course we'll gift them with their own copyright when they hit 18 and they can do what they like with it.
I guess we have to send a sample of our works to the copyright office.... but I wonder if many voodoo practioners work there....
YUP - I bought one of these over the weekend - the TurboLinux disk contains SMC documentation and stuff too - I wouldn't be suprised if there actually was a Windows driver in there somewhere.
However mine had no instructions on the box or on an internal manual - I was doing an install on a headless system - no xwindows and all the docs were PDFs (grrrr).... took me forever to figure out which linux driver to build into the kernel (hint - ignore the SMC drivers and use the RT8139 instead - this is for an SMC 'ezcard' model 1211TX
My experience has been that the thing that programmers find hardest about kernel work is learning how to think about how things interact in time - ie non-sequentially - I spent 5 years unix kernel hacking for a living and even for the really experienced people I worked with this was something they had to think hard at to get right - it never seemed to become they just understood intuitively. Now after 10 years as a chip designer it's become 2nd nature.
Also make sure there's something to do with cache coherency - learning where the right places are to flush the cache (and not to do it too often) when 2 concurrent things are communicating (a dma controller with a driver for example) - this is something that requires a good detailed understanding of the hardware that's underlying the system
make sure you get a really good firewall.... the last thing you want to do is wake up some morning in some foreign country in a pool of vomit missing a kidney because some script kiddy got root and went on a joy ride, or you find yourself falling asleep on the freeway because the guy you just cut off is mounting a DOS attack....
Slashdot Mirror
I built Mac cards like this years ago - they were a dream to support.
There is a downside however - once you do this you freeze an API
Now the usual complaint about this sort of system (proportional systems in general) is that it encourages coalitions and compromise (I think that's a good thing in a political system) which results in deadlocks - however the US political system seems to be designed to encourage that sort of thing anyway (many in the US seem proud of this quality) so maybe it's a perfect fit.
To be fair I think Billy-boy has enoiugh that he could buy both parties - and I bet he'll probably try
Mind you it does seem that the minions of satan and those of heaven are teaming up .... might really signal the end of the world :-)
- more pins (# bits/clock)
- higher clock rates (greater bits/time)
- move the bus on chip meaning you can't just plug in a new card
The first two mean more power - power being (very) roughly proportional to the number of pins and how fast they are waggling - and as a result hotter chips. The more pins solution breaks down pretty fast - you can double the bandwidth by doubling the bus width only so many times before running into packaging problems - remember at high frequencies you need 1 power/ground pin for every 3-4 signal pins - also plug-in card with >64 data pins are probably impractical Bumping the clock rate while keeping the bus narrow seems to be the way some parts of the industry's going (1394, RamBus, the new fast USB etc).For most of the PC space the third option is probably going to be what you see - more integration - buses going away or being pushed on-chip meaning that the chances for plug-in high bandwidth goodies are virtually non-existant - instead you get what was chosen for you by the person who chose the chip when they put the motherboard together.
Anyway the thing to remember TANSTAAFL - everything is a compromise.
Actually my 'cynical response' more goes like - "they better make the first episode a blockbuster or they'll never get the funding to finish the other 2"
2 - the enthusiastic response - Great! This should give about 7 hours of story! Plenty of time to fully explore the whole story!
yup - that's the real intention -this thing has basicly taken over the entire New Zealand film industry for a couple of years - friends tell me bizarre sets are popping up in disused quarrys and other strange places. This is probably a good thing - there must be a lot of extras with time on their hands now that Hercules and Xena have stopped filming
They are making a trilogy .... 3 full length movies .... not 1
But somewhere out there there's a person who's about to become the benchmark human that we're all going to be measured against .....
5 years ago this worked great - then we started to need really good models of long inter-block wires, now days we see RC effects starting to dominate on long or branching intra-block nets - the sorts of things that Synopsys models with fanout based wire loads - this sort of modelling used to work just great now it's become a liability forcing us to either synthesize smaller blocks or to over estimate the wire related delays in order to cover the slow tail on the bellcurve of routed net lengths - both of which leave performance on the table.
These process improvements help - I think more so as we head into smaller features (again because of edge effects capacitance is not scaling with area like everything else). More important is probably going to be CAD software I think the combined route/synthesis sort tools are going to have to replace thing liks Synopsys pretty soon if we are going actually use smaller feature sized processes really in anger
Basicly delay is proportional to R*C - the resistance of the wire times the capacitance of it. You can reduce the resistance by using a more conductive metal (like Cu rather than the more traditional Al). You can reduce the capacitance by:
- reducing the wire's area (but 'edge effects' - proportional to the length of the wire don't scale in the same way as other features so this is becoming problematical)
- moving the wire further away from other wires (but we're trying to make things smaller to fit more stuff in, not bigger)
- use an insulator between the wires with a lower dieletric constant (what's happening here)
5 years ago we designers didn't care much about wire delays - they weren't what made our logic slow - now they're killing usPS: Intel's 'coppermine' processers don't use copper wires - marketting is everything ....
Time for a M$ 'refund-day' suit?
It did a great job of showing the crazyness around the whole process along with the Netscape/AOL stuff going on in the background (some of the engineer's comments about AOL just as it was announced are interesting :-).
It also follows what happend to various people as they burn out and leave
A system like this only works because some real person has to do the investigation and I bet they're not funded well enough to handle a real flood
I think you're ignoring a lot of (not so recent) history and geography ...
Internet companies didn't make it practially illegal to build new housing in SF. SF politicians did.
More like it has something to do with the fact that almost every square inch of SF has been developed for decades now - even out in the far avenues there are row after row of 2 story houses - if you want to build new housing you have to knock down housing that already has people living in it - that becomes a political problem
You could argue that the political corruption scandals that resulted in San Mateo county being broken off from SF county at the turn of the century were "of it's own making" - but no one involved is still alive to my knowledge
Internet companies didn't refuse to do anything about traffic or parking, and then complained about the resulting mayhem. SF politicians did.
Of maybe it has something to do with much of SF being built up before cars were in common uses - all those victorians with 4-6 apartments in them don't have garages for a reason - people didn't have cars when they were built - and there was good public transport - now each of those people living in those apartments want their own SUV and street parking is a nightmare. This is nothing new - I had the same problem when I lived in the Haight 15 years ago - in the end we ditched our car and used the buses - we usually got where we wanted faster anyway.
Internet companies didn't impose a state of war between renters and landlords through rent control. SF politicians did.
This has been going on for a couple of generations SF has a really big problem with spiralling rents for people on fixed incomes - the politicians are after all just representiung the voters. Rent control has been viciously fought over every 3-4 years for as long as I can remember
However, SF politicians didn't invent blaming all their problems on the nasty subhuman outsiders. That one is universal.
Actually SF politicos seem divided on this one - in fact it's a historical divide - between the ones who represent and suck up to downtown big-business and the more populist ones who try and represent the voters. Besides after a few years the 'outsiders' become locals and start griping about the latest batch of immigrants
I wonder what such a key costs? Maybe we could all chip in and buy one with a cute penguin .... press it and some time after midnight when you're not looking it wipes out the M$ crap and pulls a Linux distro in in its place :-)
But this was primarily because my wife's job is mornings only - she's leave for work at 7 - I'd get the kids up, feed them and go out for a walk to a park and/or cafe - about 10:30 I'd come home and the kids would start their nap and I'd start work - my wife would come home about the time they'd wake and I'd work through to ~6. About the time they stopped needing a morning nap they were ready for preschool.
The biggest downside for me is rather a mixed blessing - office politics - on one hand most of them sail over your head you don't have to get involved with the tacky trivia - the downside is that when they do matter you tend to lose out because you're not there. Make sure you have a manager you can trust to regularly keep you up to date with what's going on in the company.
I've worked at 2 companies this way now - the one common piece of experience was that things worked great for the first few years - but over time I find I tend to get disinterested managers and less interesting work than when I started - this may also related ton the size of the company - when they were small they were great - when they are larger it's easy to forget about the people who aren't there.
Oh yeah when it's free tee-shirt time you always end up with choosing from the leftovers - XXL :-(
So will there be an API for 2d drivers for common cards? (embedded systems seem to be using all the same chipsets ...) will they use an existing one so that existing drivers can be used? what about 3d drivers?
Bad things to do around visuses:
- Never change
- always use the same software
- encourage monopolies
- don't build up an immune system (security, anti-viral programs)
Good things:- change often, adapt
- everyone use different software (diversity of distributions, kernels, desktop environments is a VERY good thing)
- security
- actively hunt down stuff in your system that changes unexpectedly
- stay away from those who seem to get infected a lot
You get the idea - M$'s world lives in a monoculture - just like a genetically engineered crop where everything is the same they are prey to that one viral mutation that can wipe out everyoneHaving lived thru a transition from imperial to metric units I know it's not that big a deal and made so much sense in retrospect. Then I moved to the US and had to change back - what a nightmare - you forget what a pain dealing in 1/12s and 1/16s and 1/64s and the like is!
The things I remember being most usefull to know during conversion were rulse of thumb, not exact conversion numbers - for the record - some simple things to remember:
- 1mm - ~the width of a saw cut
- 5x10 (cm) a '2x4'
- a meter ~= 1 yard
- 1 inch ~= 2cm
- 1 kilogram ~= 2 lbs
- 1 litre ~= 1/2 pint (maybe not in the US where pints are different from the rest of the world)
- 3/30 mph/miles ~= 5/50 kph/km
- 5/50 mph/miles ~= 8/80 kph/km
- 6/60 mph/miles ~= 10/100 kph/km
Few things in every-day life require exact measurements - when you buy meat you don't want exactly 1 lb - you want roughly enough to feed the people who are at dinner tonight - 1/2 a kilo will probably do the job. When my dad's gardening book was released in a 'metric edition' some fool copyeditor changed all the stuff like "plant the seeds an inch apart" with "plant the seeds 2.54cm apart" - you get the idea.I wonder if we should get them tattooed with a "(c) ..." just to make sure.
Of course we'll gift them with their own copyright when they hit 18 and they can do what they like with it.
I guess we have to send a sample of our works to the copyright office .... but I wonder if many voodoo practioners work there ....
However mine had no instructions on the box or on an internal manual - I was doing an install on a headless system - no xwindows and all the docs were PDFs (grrrr) .... took me forever to figure out which linux driver to build into the kernel (hint - ignore the SMC drivers and use the RT8139 instead - this is for an SMC 'ezcard' model 1211TX
My experience has been that the thing that programmers find hardest about kernel work is learning how to think about how things interact in time - ie non-sequentially - I spent 5 years unix kernel hacking for a living and even for the really experienced people I worked with this was something they had to think hard at to get right - it never seemed to become they just understood intuitively. Now after 10 years as a chip designer it's become 2nd nature.
Also make sure there's something to do with cache coherency - learning where the right places are to flush the cache (and not to do it too often) when 2 concurrent things are communicating (a dma controller with a driver for example) - this is something that requires a good detailed understanding of the hardware that's underlying the system
make sure you get a really good firewall .... the last thing you want to do is wake up some morning in some foreign country in a pool of vomit missing a kidney because some script kiddy got root and went on a joy ride, or you find yourself falling asleep on the freeway because the guy you just cut off is mounting a DOS attack ....
better be carefull ..... leave your laptop out in the sun and it's magnetic CPU/memory gets hot and forgets all it's state ..... :-)