The bogus, idiotic, pseudo-scientific types opposing ID would say, "ooh! Here's an interesting finding that I can somehow stretch to attack ID," on the basis of a few off-hand remarks made by a few non-central ID advocates.
Replace the word ID with Evolution and you pretty much describe 100% of ID advocates.
They forgot the most important things -- the Levis blue jeans and Gap black turtleneck sponsorships.
FWIW, Steve Jobs does not shop at the GAP -- he normally wears Issey Miyake black turtlenecks. It's BIG $$$ designer wear that just happens to look like something you can much cheaper. And if you have the $$$, you can wear it without giving an air of pretension because only those in the know will have any idea that you spent that much on your clothes.
Issey Miyake is a fashion designer whose cologne for men (L'eau D'Issey) seems a lot more common (not to mention a lot more affordable) than his clothing.
Thus, evolutionary theory *is* testable, even in a lab -- you can take a fast-breeding species like the common fruit fly, apply artifical selective pressures, and watch the allelle frequencies[1] shift in real time compared to control groups. Dog breeding is another example; humans use a the natural mechanisms of evolution, but add in their own constraints in the selection and variation departments.
Dog breeding for specific traits is an example of Intelligent Design using evolution (specialization and variation) as the methodology and having Intelligent Designers (i.e. human breeders) guiding those traits. I don't have a problem with the idea of limited intelligent design. We as humans are doing it now with genetic engineering on plants and developing cloning techniques on animals.
There are at least two big problems with Intelligent Design as proposed by the religious right.
#1) The only currently scientifically observed "intelligent design" are the activities of human beings (breeding, genetic engineering),hardly GOD or supernatural beings -- although such techniques might seem supernatural to cavemen.
#2) When you try to use Intelligent Design as the origin of species you get into a recursive loop. The Intelligent Designer of man is was obviously too complex to occur naturally so he must have been created by an previous Intelligent Designer.... and so on. Like the argument that the world is a flat disc carried on a turtle... what is the turtle carried on? "IT'S TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN". Anyway. eventually you need the ORIGINAL-UNPROVEABLE-SUPER-DESIGNER (i.e. God) to explain things away.
I believe only in micro-ID (haha - kinda like ID's proposed "micro-evolution) which I currently see being carried out by man right now and quite possibly extended to what we'd currently consider "God-Like" in the future, but barring further evidend, I will not believe in full-blown ID as the origin of all species (macro-ID with a supernatural being) until someone shows me the bottom of the stack of turtles.
Obviously someone dumb enough to get caught figured out a way to reduce those particular costs (which they bore) to considerably less than that. I'm not saying that I think that your argument is in any way invalid except that you are obviously getting shafted by the packagers and distributors.
They didn't pay for custom media, they didn't pay for packaging, they didn't pay for distribution, and they certainly didn't pay anything towards the actual development. Of course it's going to be cheaper that way.
There are fixed disc reproduction costs for XBOX and PS2 if you want to run on legitimate systems and these are controlled by MS and Sony. There are distribution costs with big companies like Walmart, EB, etc. And of course, developers won't work for free (unless you count all the unpaid overtime).
If people actually want high quality titles on consoles, someone has to pay for them. If no one is willing to pay that price, then we can have a world where the only games are a glut of crap and Tux Racer.
The store owners didn't distribute the game media... i.e. Discs (CD or DVD's), manuals, colored packaging, etc. They merely copied the data onto a HD.
If they merely had to provide all the manuals, they wouldn't have been able to charge such a low price.
And it's always cheaper to sell something when you aren't paying for it. I'm sure car thieves in a chop shop can sell you replacement parts cheaper than the dealer can as well.
Were the game store owners 'stealing' from the game developers. No. No Way. The game developers should have made arrangements with the game sellers to have some form of compensation that would be a small percentage of the price that the game store received for selling the games.
As a game developer, I can honestly say you know absolutely nothing about the games industry from that statement alone.
Yes they were stealing from us developers. They took away sales that could have made hard earned money for dozens of team members who work 70 hour or longer weeks during months of crunch time. Under the current system with stores taking a cut, console manufacturers taking a cut, and costs for marketing and development, most (but not all) high quality titles have to sell close to 1 million units at $50 merely to break even.
Please don't raise moral, ethical, and legal arguments over what is just a pricing issue between people who never learned to haggle in a free marketplace.
Without moral, ethical, or legal boundaries, this world would be a pretty sad place. However, you're still wrong on the free marketplace argument.
There's no way you're going to get console games of any quality for 77 games at $265 in any sort of 'free market'. That's just over $3 each and is less than the media manufacturing and distribution costs alone.
It doesn't matter if ID is real or, if it is, who did the design. It really doesn't matter. What does matter is the question of "how could it be done".
Ironically, the people who believe MOST fervently that intelligent design created life as we know it also appear to be the LEAST likely to want to know "how it could be done."
They're quite strongly opposed to human beings developing ID capability ourselves: i.e. cloning, artificial reproduction, genetic modification, chimera research, stem cell manipulation, designer species, etc.
For a second there, I thought they were discontinuing ActivePerl and almost got angry.
FWIW, there is a perl package in cygwin. If ActivePerl went away, you'd still be able to run perl scripts under windows with a free (as in beer) tool. The cygwin stuff is also "Free" (as in speech) as well.
FWIW, the another NextGen game system:) has very similar problems with a different compiler since the simplified PPC cores are nearly identical. Complicated C++ code simply runs 2-10X slower on these simple pipelined chips. Straight "C" code runs nearly the same speed.
To see loss in the 2-10 range suggests to me that the Cell is blocking on memory loads far more often than it should be, which could be a compiler fault.
Here is a sequence that's hard to handle at the compiler level lacking OOO in hardware:
a = **p0;
b = **p1;
c = **p2;
If one of *p0, *p1, *p2 is an L1 cache miss, an OOO processor will still schedule two of **p0, **p1, **p2 while waiting for the cache miss to complete. This is impossible for a compiler to achieve on non-OOO hardware unless the compiler knows in advance which of those pointers will miss.
Actually, this isn't completely true. If a,b, and c are local variables that have no chance of aliasing (not references) to each other or p0,p1,& p2, *AND* p0,p1&p2 are not volatile, then the compiler can generate implicit intermediates ta=*p0, tb=*p1, tc=*p2. All three of these reads can proceed in interleaved fashion before the dependency reads of a=*ta, b=*tb, c=*tb. If any of the first three result in a L1 cache miss, then the processor should still be able proceed with the other reads under a "hit under miss" cache load. This shaves a couple clock cycles off the execution.
Compilers which perform loads like this also take into advantage the fact that a register which has just been loaded is often not available on the next clock cycle for another dependant load and thus the interleaved reading is faster.
If any of the first three loads stall on a cache miss, the other loads should continue with "hit under miss" loads until the dependant load happens somewhere in the second set of loads. Then the CPU will stall if it can't do OOO (Out-Of-Order) Execution. A CPU without OOO execution can still do out-of-order loads in this case. Usually to force in-order loads, you need to use either uncached addresses or some sort of sync instruction for loads.
Yes, you're correct... that was a typo on my part. I prefer SPE for the Cell Synergistic unit so it *DOESN'T* conflict with the current SPU term we use for the PS1/PS2 sound chips. And while the PS2 official name is SPU2, nearly all developers (i.e. at PS2 Devcon) simply refer to it as SPU when discussing PS2 (that extra "2" is annoying to say a hundred times in a speech.
Running Linux on one of these things is simply INSANE.
I almost feel drunk from the power I have at my hands
Here's some advice from someone who has access to a REAL CELL chip. I hate to disappoint you but aside from custom libraries specifically optimized for CELL, Linux ain't going to run fast on this machine. All the generic open source code targeted towards the general CPU is going to run faster on a Dual-Core Intel or Dual-Proc/Dual-Core Mac. The actual CPU's in this machine are simple pipelined (think Pentium I level of optimizations) vs current gen CPUs (P4 has out-of-order execution, speculative execution, register renaming, branch prediction, etc). While simple C code runs roughly the same speed, complicated C++ constructs are running 2-10X slower on CELL's simplified PowerPC core versus the G5's you'll find in a Mac.
Code needs to be rewritten specifically to take advantage of the actual SPE/SPU's (Synergistic Processing Engines/Units - I prefer SPE since Sony calls their PS1/PS2 sound chip the SPE). Until those Linux libraries appear, CELL isn't going to run anything faster. Not to mention that it will have to be custom code libraries that DON'T run on the MAIN CPU since the SPE's execute different machine code.
Let's say you're doing something trivial like searching a 4-dimensional array. Creating a separate function or adding the extra comparisons generates extra code and takes longer to write without adding *ANY* clarity to the code.
In this case, a "goto" would not only take less code but also be more readable.
Besides as far as letting the compiler inline and optimize everything for you, you'd be surprised what most compilers won't do for you on a regular basis.
Anyhow, goto is often used here because C/C++ is completely lacking in the "labelled break" construct that Java has that allows you to break out from multiple levels of nesting.
But aside from this trivial case, I've seen plenty of code where a "goto" made the code more readable and more stable. A common one is resource cleanup code for error conditions in straight C functions. Like any other code construct, it can be abused. Abusing "goto" can make your code look horrible. So can abusing STL, ?:, RTL propagation with comma operator, etc.
I love the article you linked to -- according to it, for-loops are bad as well, but he later says he'll allow using them for realism.
Let us now consider repetition clauses (like, while B repeat A or repeat A until B). Logically speaking, such clauses are now superfluous, because we can express repetition with the aid of recursive procedures.
There are "realistic" reasons to use goto as well. How else do you break out of a nested loop 4-levels deep without putting the loop in a separate function and using return or without coding a conditional at each level of the loop (which adds code and slows execution.
Jack Thompson, his brand of Christianity has as much to do with what they practice at the church down the street as McDonald's McFish sandwich does with the ocean
I resent that remark! The Filet-O-Fish is my favorite sandwich at McDonalds and is made from real fish. If you buy one, it probably comes out of the a little factory in Gloucester, Ma that also processes Gorton's premium fishsticks. It's a real fish product made here in the USA.
Besides, you never know what the "church down the street" might be saying. There are quite a few churches which have sermons against violence in video game. One of the biggest churches here in the Chicago burbs had a televised sermon against violence in movies and TV. Ironically, a couple months later they organized a group ticket sale for kids to see "The Passion" which is arguably the bloodiest most violent "snuff" flick I've ever seen (even if it was done in the style of a beautiful Italian art film).
Anyhow, the funniest thing about this whole Jack Thompson affair from my viewpoint (I work in video games and read TRST reports) is that usually when a game gets a lot of bad press for "ultra-realistic violence", the sales of the game actually go up.
Not knowing too much about the cell processor I read the wikipedia article. I came across this: "In other ways the Cell resembles a modern desktop computer on a single chip."
Why?
Actually each of the SPU's resemble a system-on-a-chip. They each have local memory, CPU and I/O. The Cell itself actually resembles a network-on-a-chip (or in slashdotology, a Beowulf-Cluster-on-a-Chip) if you consider main memory to be I/O storage.
Check out www.gotapex.com to see how to configure a Dell dual core for $679 with a 19" LCD. Intel dual core pricing has gotten so ridiculously low at Dell if you know the right deals that it's beginning to compete with their Celeron offerings.
Only they're not quite double the performance, because they share the memory bus. Any memory intensive application will hit contention between the 2 cores...
I realize that not all applications are 2X faster. For example, non-multithreaded apps see a benefit only when you're multitasking.
However, I *ONLY* mentioned 2X performance for MP3 and xVID / DivX. These are two extremely CPU intesive applications with much lower memory bandwidth (CPU is bottleneck, not RAM) and are two REAL-WORLD cases where the performance for dual-cores (even on Intel) is VERY close to 2X the speed of a single core.
That's not because of AMD's pricing, that's because of Dell's pricing. Dell's standard configuration templates are based on Intel chips, so subbing in another brand takes it out of the regular production line.
Um... no. Dell ONLY ships Intel. So I was comparing Dell with dual core Intel Chips vs others with other brands. You can get DellSB - Dimension 9100 Desktop with 2.8Ghz P4 820 Dual Core, 512MB DDR2 SDRAM, 80GB S-ATA, 48x CD-Rom, 128MB ATI Radeon X300 SE for $679 after Rebate including 19" LCD Monitor. Check out http://www.gotapex.com/ for details.
A quick check on www.mwave.com shows the cheapest AMD X2 to be nearly $350 and that's the recently released 3800+ X2. When I bought my computer, the cheapest one was the 4200+ X2 which is just shy of $500 range. That's for the BARE CPU. With the DELL, you get the whole computer and a 19" LCD.
Intel knows AMD Opteron Dual Cores are faster. That's why this generation dual cores (at least P4D's) from Intel are so cheap aside from the ridiculous "Extreme Editions".
I recently bought a Dell computer. I had a choice of getting a dual core for $50 more. Now I can rip a CD to MP3's using EAC/LAME in about 3 minutes when it used to take 15 on my old computer. I'm happy with my $50 doubling my performance for MP3's and xVID (DivX) creation.
I really wanted a higher-performance dual core AMD computer but when I was pricing those out, the price of the upgrade to a dual core AMD *ALONE* was around the price of my entire Dell computer.
The mask is like a "negative" for a film. You can think of the chip as the silicon equivalent to the paper used when projecting a film negative onto a photograph.
In this case, the mask was probably used as a starting point -- FPGA's (Field Programmable Gate Array) have switches that control gates for interconnects between logic units and PGA's have little fuses that control the interconnects. They minimally need to know the logic units used and how the interconnects connect them which they could reverse engineer from examination of the mask to determine the gates.
One way to do this is to start with the mask, and create an ASIC with interconnects already in place for the equivalent of a PGA (Programmable Gate Array) without the "P" part. This would still be a "Gate Array" logic part based on the design of the MASK they used but the interconnects would be fixed at the chip creation. This would be about as legal as copying the entire music to a song and replacing the words without paying the songwriter.
Another way to do this is to create the gates and interconnects as a logical entity (i.e. verilog or other definition language) from the reverse engineering of the mask, then fix variables in the logical entity as constants from the programming data and "simplify" or "reduce" the circuit prior to generation of a custom ASIC.
Vortex tubes have lower efficiency than traditional air conditioning equipment. They are commonly used for inexpensive spot cooling, when compressed air is available. Commercial models are designed for industrial applications to produce a temperature drop of about 80 F (45 C).
It doesn't sound like the best application for the third world. Get a modestly efficient wind turbine (remember you need a power source to compress air on his device anyhow) and a battery and you'll get not only ice but also TV, a radio, a microwave oven, etc. powered for the same input energy (wind, solar, or other device).
The article says that the device is 35 times less efficient than a normal freezer using a compressor and would have to be wind-turbine (or otherwise) powered. If you had a wind-turbine with at least 3% (1/35) efficiency in electricity generation from mechanical motion, you'd be better off using that and a normal freezer. Besides, his freezer requires moving air in and out of the freezer which means it must be constantly running as opposed to something with a good thermal insulation that can run in cycles.
Slashdot Mirror
The bogus, idiotic, pseudo-scientific types opposing ID would say, "ooh! Here's an interesting finding that I can somehow stretch to attack ID," on the basis of a few off-hand remarks made by a few non-central ID advocates.
Replace the word ID with Evolution and you pretty much describe 100% of ID advocates.
But sadly, it's not. It has a BALL in it you need to CLEAN because it picks up DUST?
Did you RTFA??? It's optical. Optical doesn't have a Ball. It's not the latest generation LASER but you won't be cleaning your balls.
FWIW, I own the Dell 24" LCD and mine has no dead or stuck pixels.
They forgot the most important things -- the Levis blue jeans and Gap black turtleneck sponsorships.
FWIW, Steve Jobs does not shop at the GAP -- he normally wears Issey Miyake black turtlenecks. It's BIG $$$ designer wear that just happens to look like something you can much cheaper. And if you have the $$$, you can wear it without giving an air of pretension because only those in the know will have any idea that you spent that much on your clothes.
Issey Miyake is a fashion designer whose cologne for men (L'eau D'Issey) seems a lot more common (not to mention a lot more affordable) than his clothing.
Thus, evolutionary theory *is* testable, even in a lab -- you can take a fast-breeding species like the common fruit fly, apply artifical selective pressures, and watch the allelle frequencies[1] shift in real time compared to control groups. Dog breeding is another example; humans use a the natural mechanisms of evolution, but add in their own constraints in the selection and variation departments.
Dog breeding for specific traits is an example of Intelligent Design using evolution (specialization and variation) as the methodology and having Intelligent Designers (i.e. human breeders) guiding those traits. I don't have a problem with the idea of limited intelligent design. We as humans are doing it now with genetic engineering on plants and developing cloning techniques on animals.
There are at least two big problems with Intelligent Design as proposed by the religious right.
#1) The only currently scientifically observed "intelligent design" are the activities of human beings (breeding, genetic engineering),hardly GOD or supernatural beings -- although such techniques might seem supernatural to cavemen.
#2) When you try to use Intelligent Design as the origin of species you get into a recursive loop. The Intelligent Designer of man is was obviously too complex to occur naturally so he must have been created by an previous Intelligent Designer.... and so on. Like the argument that the world is a flat disc carried on a turtle... what is the turtle carried on? "IT'S TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN". Anyway. eventually you need the ORIGINAL-UNPROVEABLE-SUPER-DESIGNER (i.e. God) to explain things away.
I believe only in micro-ID (haha - kinda like ID's proposed "micro-evolution) which I currently see being carried out by man right now and quite possibly extended to what we'd currently consider "God-Like" in the future, but barring further evidend, I will not believe in full-blown ID as the origin of all species (macro-ID with a supernatural being) until someone shows me the bottom of the stack of turtles.
Obviously someone dumb enough to get caught figured out a way to reduce those particular costs (which they bore) to considerably less than that. I'm not saying that I think that your argument is in any way invalid except that you are obviously getting shafted by the packagers and distributors.
They didn't pay for custom media, they didn't pay for packaging, they didn't pay for distribution, and they certainly didn't pay anything towards the actual development. Of course it's going to be cheaper that way.
There are fixed disc reproduction costs for XBOX and PS2 if you want to run on legitimate systems and these are controlled by MS and Sony. There are distribution costs with big companies like Walmart, EB, etc. And of course, developers won't work for free (unless you count all the unpaid overtime).
If people actually want high quality titles on consoles, someone has to pay for them. If no one is willing to pay that price, then we can have a world where the only games are a glut of crap and Tux Racer.
The store owners didn't distribute the game media... i.e. Discs (CD or DVD's), manuals, colored packaging, etc. They merely copied the data onto a HD.
If they merely had to provide all the manuals, they wouldn't have been able to charge such a low price.
And it's always cheaper to sell something when you aren't paying for it. I'm sure car thieves in a chop shop can sell you replacement parts cheaper than the dealer can as well.
Were the game store owners 'stealing' from the game developers. No. No Way. The game developers should have made arrangements with the game sellers to have some form of compensation that would be a small percentage of the price that the game store received for selling the games.
As a game developer, I can honestly say you know absolutely nothing about the games industry from that statement alone.
Yes they were stealing from us developers. They took away sales that could have made hard earned money for dozens of team members who work 70 hour or longer weeks during months of crunch time. Under the current system with stores taking a cut, console manufacturers taking a cut, and costs for marketing and development, most (but not all) high quality titles have to sell close to 1 million units at $50 merely to break even.
Please don't raise moral, ethical, and legal arguments over what is just a pricing issue between people who never learned to haggle in a free marketplace.
Without moral, ethical, or legal boundaries, this world would be a pretty sad place. However, you're still wrong on the free marketplace argument.
There's no way you're going to get console games of any quality for 77 games at $265 in any sort of 'free market'. That's just over $3 each and is less than the media manufacturing and distribution costs alone.
It doesn't matter if ID is real or, if it is, who did the design. It really doesn't matter. What does matter is the question of "how could it be done".
Ironically, the people who believe MOST fervently that intelligent design created life as we know it also appear to be the LEAST likely to want to know "how it could be done."
They're quite strongly opposed to human beings developing ID capability ourselves: i.e. cloning, artificial reproduction, genetic modification, chimera research, stem cell manipulation, designer species, etc.
For a second there, I thought they were discontinuing ActivePerl and almost got angry.
FWIW, there is a perl package in cygwin. If ActivePerl went away, you'd still be able to run perl scripts under windows with a free (as in beer) tool. The cygwin stuff is also "Free" (as in speech) as well.
FWIW, the another NextGen game system :) has very similar problems with a different compiler since the simplified PPC cores are nearly identical. Complicated C++ code simply runs 2-10X slower on these simple pipelined chips. Straight "C" code runs nearly the same speed.
To see loss in the 2-10 range suggests to me that the Cell is blocking on memory loads far more often than it should be, which could be a compiler fault.
Here is a sequence that's hard to handle at the compiler level lacking OOO in hardware:
a = **p0;
b = **p1;
c = **p2;
If one of *p0, *p1, *p2 is an L1 cache miss, an OOO processor will still schedule two of **p0, **p1, **p2 while waiting for the cache miss to complete. This is impossible for a compiler to achieve on non-OOO hardware unless the compiler knows in advance which of those pointers will miss.
Actually, this isn't completely true. If a,b, and c are local variables that have no chance of aliasing (not references) to each other or p0,p1,& p2, *AND* p0,p1&p2 are not volatile, then the compiler can generate implicit intermediates ta=*p0, tb=*p1, tc=*p2. All three of these reads can proceed in interleaved fashion before the dependency reads of a=*ta, b=*tb, c=*tb. If any of the first three result in a L1 cache miss, then the processor should still be able proceed with the other reads under a "hit under miss" cache load. This shaves a couple clock cycles off the execution.
Compilers which perform loads like this also take into advantage the fact that a register which has just been loaded is often not available on the next clock cycle for another dependant load and thus the interleaved reading is faster.
In pseudo assembler...
load t0,(p0)
load t1,(p1)
load t2,(p2)
load a,(t0)
load b,(t1)
load c,(t2)
If any of the first three loads stall on a cache miss, the other loads should continue with "hit under miss" loads until the dependant load happens somewhere in the second set of loads. Then the CPU will stall if it can't do OOO (Out-Of-Order) Execution. A CPU without OOO execution can still do out-of-order loads in this case. Usually to force in-order loads, you need to use either uncached addresses or some sort of sync instruction for loads.
Yes, you're correct... that was a typo on my part. I prefer SPE for the Cell Synergistic unit so it *DOESN'T* conflict with the current SPU term we use for the PS1/PS2 sound chips. And while the PS2 official name is SPU2, nearly all developers (i.e. at PS2 Devcon) simply refer to it as SPU when discussing PS2 (that extra "2" is annoying to say a hundred times in a speech.
Running Linux on one of these things is simply INSANE.
I almost feel drunk from the power I have at my hands
Here's some advice from someone who has access to a REAL CELL chip. I hate to disappoint you but aside from custom libraries specifically optimized for CELL, Linux ain't going to run fast on this machine. All the generic open source code targeted towards the general CPU is going to run faster on a Dual-Core Intel or Dual-Proc/Dual-Core Mac. The actual CPU's in this machine are simple pipelined (think Pentium I level of optimizations) vs current gen CPUs (P4 has out-of-order execution, speculative execution, register renaming, branch prediction, etc). While simple C code runs roughly the same speed, complicated C++ constructs are running 2-10X slower on CELL's simplified PowerPC core versus the G5's you'll find in a Mac.
Code needs to be rewritten specifically to take advantage of the actual SPE/SPU's (Synergistic Processing Engines/Units - I prefer SPE since Sony calls their PS1/PS2 sound chip the SPE). Until those Linux libraries appear, CELL isn't going to run anything faster. Not to mention that it will have to be custom code libraries that DON'T run on the MAIN CPU since the SPE's execute different machine code.
Let's say you're doing something trivial like searching a 4-dimensional array. Creating a separate function or adding the extra comparisons generates extra code and takes longer to write without adding *ANY* clarity to the code.
In this case, a "goto" would not only take less code but also be more readable.
Besides as far as letting the compiler inline and optimize everything for you, you'd be surprised what most compilers won't do for you on a regular basis.
Anyhow, goto is often used here because C/C++ is completely lacking in the "labelled break" construct that Java has that allows you to break out from multiple levels of nesting.
But aside from this trivial case, I've seen plenty of code where a "goto" made the code more readable and more stable. A common one is resource cleanup code for error conditions in straight C functions. Like any other code construct, it can be abused. Abusing "goto" can make your code look horrible. So can abusing STL, ?:, RTL propagation with comma operator, etc.
I love the article you linked to -- according to it, for-loops are bad as well, but he later says he'll allow using them for realism.
Let us now consider repetition clauses (like, while B repeat A or repeat A until B). Logically speaking, such clauses are now superfluous, because we can express repetition with the aid of recursive procedures.
There are "realistic" reasons to use goto as well. How else do you break out of a nested loop 4-levels deep without putting the loop in a separate function and using return or without coding a conditional at each level of the loop (which adds code and slows execution.
Jack Thompson, his brand of Christianity has as much to do with what they practice at the church down the street as McDonald's McFish sandwich does with the ocean
I resent that remark! The Filet-O-Fish is my favorite sandwich at McDonalds and is made from real fish. If you buy one, it probably comes out of the a little factory in Gloucester, Ma that also processes Gorton's premium fishsticks. It's a real fish product made here in the USA.
Besides, you never know what the "church down the street" might be saying. There are quite a few churches which have sermons against violence in video game. One of the biggest churches here in the Chicago burbs had a televised sermon against violence in movies and TV. Ironically, a couple months later they organized a group ticket sale for kids to see "The Passion" which is arguably the bloodiest most violent "snuff" flick I've ever seen (even if it was done in the style of a beautiful Italian art film).
Anyhow, the funniest thing about this whole Jack Thompson affair from my viewpoint (I work in video games and read TRST reports) is that usually when a game gets a lot of bad press for "ultra-realistic violence", the sales of the game actually go up.
Not knowing too much about the cell processor I read the wikipedia article. I came across this: "In other ways the Cell resembles a modern desktop computer on a single chip."
Why?
Actually each of the SPU's resemble a system-on-a-chip. They each have local memory, CPU and I/O. The Cell itself actually resembles a network-on-a-chip (or in slashdotology, a Beowulf-Cluster-on-a-Chip) if you consider main memory to be I/O storage.
http://picasa.google.com/index.html
It's free and easy to use and doesn't install any crap / spyware.
Check out www.gotapex.com to see how to configure a Dell dual core for $679 with a 19" LCD. Intel dual core pricing has gotten so ridiculously low at Dell if you know the right deals that it's beginning to compete with their Celeron offerings.
Only they're not quite double the performance, because they share the memory bus. Any memory intensive application will hit contention between the 2 cores...
I realize that not all applications are 2X faster. For example, non-multithreaded apps see a benefit only when you're multitasking.
However, I *ONLY* mentioned 2X performance for MP3 and xVID / DivX. These are two extremely CPU intesive applications with much lower memory bandwidth (CPU is bottleneck, not RAM) and are two REAL-WORLD cases where the performance for dual-cores (even on Intel) is VERY close to 2X the speed of a single core.
That's not because of AMD's pricing, that's because of Dell's pricing. Dell's standard configuration templates are based on Intel chips, so subbing in another brand takes it out of the regular production line.
Um... no. Dell ONLY ships Intel. So I was comparing Dell with dual core Intel Chips vs others with other brands. You can get DellSB - Dimension 9100 Desktop with 2.8Ghz P4 820 Dual Core, 512MB DDR2 SDRAM, 80GB S-ATA, 48x CD-Rom, 128MB ATI Radeon X300 SE for $679 after Rebate including 19" LCD Monitor. Check out http://www.gotapex.com/ for details.
A quick check on www.mwave.com shows the cheapest AMD X2 to be nearly $350 and that's the recently released 3800+ X2. When I bought my computer, the cheapest one was the 4200+ X2 which is just shy of $500 range. That's for the BARE CPU. With the DELL, you get the whole computer and a 19" LCD.
This is just about Intel Dual Core in general.
Intel knows AMD Opteron Dual Cores are faster. That's why this generation dual cores (at least P4D's) from Intel are so cheap aside from the ridiculous "Extreme Editions".
I recently bought a Dell computer. I had a choice of getting a dual core for $50 more. Now I can rip a CD to MP3's using EAC/LAME in about 3 minutes when it used to take 15 on my old computer. I'm happy with my $50 doubling my performance for MP3's and xVID (DivX) creation.
I really wanted a higher-performance dual core AMD computer but when I was pricing those out, the price of the upgrade to a dual core AMD *ALONE* was around the price of my entire Dell computer.
The mask is like a "negative" for a film. You can think of the chip as the silicon equivalent to the paper used when projecting a film negative onto a photograph.
In this case, the mask was probably used as a starting point -- FPGA's (Field Programmable Gate Array) have switches that control gates for interconnects between logic units and PGA's have little fuses that control the interconnects. They minimally need to know the logic units used and how the interconnects connect them which they could reverse engineer from examination of the mask to determine the gates.
One way to do this is to start with the mask, and create an ASIC with interconnects already in place for the equivalent of a PGA (Programmable Gate Array) without the "P" part. This would still be a "Gate Array" logic part based on the design of the MASK they used but the interconnects would be fixed at the chip creation. This would be about as legal as copying the entire music to a song and replacing the words without paying the songwriter.
Another way to do this is to create the gates and interconnects as a logical entity (i.e. verilog or other definition language) from the reverse engineering of the mask, then fix variables in the logical entity as constants from the programming data and "simplify" or "reduce" the circuit prior to generation of a custom ASIC.
FYI, from wikipedia...
Vortex tubes have lower efficiency than traditional air conditioning equipment. They are commonly used for inexpensive spot cooling, when compressed air is available. Commercial models are designed for industrial applications to produce a temperature drop of about 80 F (45 C).
It doesn't sound like the best application for the third world. Get a modestly efficient wind turbine (remember you need a power source to compress air on his device anyhow) and a battery and you'll get not only ice but also TV, a radio, a microwave oven, etc. powered for the same input energy (wind, solar, or other device).
The article says that the device is 35 times less efficient than a normal freezer using a compressor and would have to be wind-turbine (or otherwise) powered. If you had a wind-turbine with at least 3% (1/35) efficiency in electricity generation from mechanical motion, you'd be better off using that and a normal freezer. Besides, his freezer requires moving air in and out of the freezer which means it must be constantly running as opposed to something with a good thermal insulation that can run in cycles.