3. Battlestar Galactica (2003). The 70s show it was a "re-imagining" of was rather cheesy, like most TV and sci-fi stuff in the 70s. The 2003 mini-series was fantastic, and the follow-up TV show was great too, for about 2 seasons. Unfortunately, it jumped the shark after that, somewhere around season 3.
The original Battlestar Galactica was cheesy, but that was necessary. It was designed to be straightforward "stuff of legend" fare. It was an epic, an Odyssey. There were hugh holes in the plot -- why were the 12 colonies so close to each other, but the 13th randomly so far away? How did the Cylons keep catching up with a fleet that was heading at full speed in a straight line away? If they had the technology to do that, why not just get to Earth before the colonists and wait for them there, having subjugated the entire planet?
The flying-in-a-straight-line problem arose in both the remake and Star Trek Voyager and was essentially waved away, but the more serious the story, the harder it is to keep the holes hidden -- it's an uncanny valley for narrative plots.
Here's another interesting point. If it has zero value, and you watch it, you're saying that your time has no value, so you have no value. Honestly, if you're not interested enough to pay, why watch?
You forgot about the Jedi. The original trilogy was "twilight of the samurai" stuff -- the jedi were faded and forgotten. If the prequel trilogy had happened, people in the original trilogy wouldn't be as scornful and dismissive as they were. Remember, according to Leia, Obi-Wan's job title in the Clone Wars was "general". To the Republic, he was a soldier. I want a prequel trilogy where Obi-Wan is in his prime, fighting as an officer, and being mocked by his squad for his "superstitions", but slowly winning them over to the point where a young infantryman named Skywalker asks to be trained; perhaps he even takes on a second apprentice who gets killed (as is wont to happen in wartimes). Anyway, I want to see a soldier in uniform constructing his own lightsaber and seeing the horror of death around him, and trying to use his powers to stop the killing, and criticising Obi-Wan for not doing the same, but being dragged into a web of violence and anger. I want to see Obi-Wan using the Force primarily to heal and anaesthetise. I don't want people doing Jedi Knight-inspired "Force dashes".
Too bad George Lucas never made Star Wars 1, 2 and 3. I still never understood why Spielberg only made two Indiana Jones movies, Ark and Crusade. I also expected to see a third Die Hard, but that never happened.
Probably because they would have to have written a second Die Hard first. But it was the right decision -- Die Hard was an iconic standalone that would have been seriously tarnished by the existence of any pot-boiler sequels.
I find myself largely immune to the hustle and bustle of our open office plan. While most require noise-canceling headphones in order to get anything accomplished, it actually energizes me more than inhibits me.
As someone who went to middle school in one of the Open Classroom schools of the 1970s which had not yet moved to completely physical partitions between rooms, I hypothesize this may have a lot to do with it. I was trained for 4+ years on how to operate with many noise distractions.
I think the issue is that there are certain ways of thinking that come with difficulty in dealing with background noise. A feature of autism, for example, is difficulty filtering sensory input. This is not necessarily a negative feature -- filtering seems to have a blinkering effect, with people filtering out ideas that are not immediately seen as related to the task or problem at hand. However, if you don't filter, you see a lot of the bigger picture, and are more likely to think outside the box. Mixed metaphors aside, reduced filtering can result in increased creativity and innovation. A workplace that doesn't support people who have difficulty filtering is likely to miss out on a lot of good stuff.
Let's also not forget the 1366x768 resolution limit. Which ended up not really being much of a limitation anyway since low end craptop screens seemed to all regress down to that even if they are 15" units around the same time anyway.
Actually, I wonder if starter edition resolution limit didn't actually boost demand for that terrible resolution.
But if you had an external monitor that was a higher resolution it was a major limitation.
You obviously haven't tried it. It works even with the talking heads on TV yakking away on the news. It's easier than using the on-screen keyboard and gets rid of some of those auto-correct errors. Bunch of luddites, it's not 2010 any more.
Except the real-time speech-to-text on the news involves trained operators in a sound-proof room wearing headphones repeating everything that the people in the studio are saying into an expensive commercial voice-recognition rig that has been trained to their voice.
But the other side of the coin is that with openness you get interoperability - people can build their own applications interacting with your platform. The sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. The alternative is a lot of manual labor moving information between systems with the result that either the job isn't done or it's prone to error as well as being a lot slower.
...
However it didn't really take off until Linux came around where people discovered an OS that could be adapted to their solution with no heavy strings attached in the form of licensing, just navigation around the GPL constraints which aren't that cumbersome compared to Oracle or SAP licenses.
Here's where I like to bring up a metaphor -- I see two roles to software development: the first is to raise the ceiling -- innovate and create something better than anyone else before you, setting a new "maximum" that all software can aspire to; the other is to raise the floor -- set a new "minimum" that all software should be better than.
For instance, the existence of free implementations of quicksort, bubble sort etc raise the floor, because now everyone can write software that sorts data with the same efficiency. Meanwhile, a custom-coded adaptive sort for an accountancy system raises the ceiling, because competitors have to try to improve the performance of their sorts to be seen as being as good.
I mostly like the GPL, but the problem is that it rarely if ever raises the floor, because copyleft licenses are not completely open in the same way the C standard libraries are. Yet there are components within most GPL projects that could be used generically and could be part of the common floor, but it will never be part of the common floor until all contributors have been dead for 70 years, and given that many contributors are pseudonymous or have incredibly common names, there's no way of doing due diligence on that... not that it is likely to be relevant by that point.
Imagine if the GPL was replaced with a copyleft license that expired after 10 years -- imagine how big a common floor we'd have. All the code released would be so old that it wouldn't be of particular interest to big companies, but people would be able to revive long-dead projects as commercial packages or as labours of love. We could go back and build libraries out of the proprietary code of older projects. A higher floor.
If software was universally compatible and behaved the same way on all devices, it would be a security nightmare as it would have to implement all the security holes and other bugs of every platform to do so. So say Windows has a zero-day exploit in URL handling and Linux one for file handling. This universal code would have to reimplement the Windows bug in Linux and the Linux bug on Windows, or the two versions of the program would behave differently. If that isn't what you're talking about then you're talking about Java.
As usual, moderators bury the point because of a tangent. The grandparent is on topic, interesting, and answers the very question of this topic, pointing to a CPU architecture that is a huge leap forward.
You say that, but the GGP was actually modded up. Also, you seem to be implying that my post is off-topic, but I maintain that the biggest obstacle to CPU architecture is software. Maybe my conclusions beyond that are wrong, and you're free to disagree with them, but there's a difference between being wrong and being offtopic.
Legacy software needs to run, but heterogeneous x86 cores aren't enough. The memory model of the Mill is significantly different, making this impossible.
Which supports my suggestion that software is the problem, does it not?
In a way, process limitations are a welcome obstacle, that should motivate reflection on legacy decisions, and perhaps finally allow the x86 architecture to be put to rest. Many consider x86 "good enough", but the problems with legacy hardware run a lot deeper than performance, and are largely responsible for the horrific state of computer security today.
The main problem isn't legacy hardware, but legacy software. The x86 architecture is already dead, and most of what we see is a hardware translation of x86 to a CPU architecture that isn't accessible to the coder.
I believe that the only way out of this is for us to start making more heterogeneous parallel chips. At the moment, this only really exists in the form of packages of CPU+GPU on a single chip. But if we had (for example) ARM+x86+GPU, we'd be able to run an ARM-based Linux or Windows environment, but power up the x86 core as required to run any vital legacy apps. This would mean it would slowly become more and more economical to develop for ARM (or whatever your chosen architecture is) and we'd be able to start thinking about retiring x86 sooner. And hell, it's not like even Intel are really fans of x86 themselves -- they've already tried to ditch it once (remember Itanium?), and in the end it was AMD who extended the x86 architecture to 64-bit, not Intel. Intel wants away from x86, the market wants a better architecture, we just need a stepping stone that guarantees legacy software compatibility, and when so many multiple cores lie idle, I don't see why heterogeneous multicore isn't recognised as the solution.
Hmm, I drive a 1998 Toyota Tercel (subcompact). It's not fancy, but I love it, and I see no reason to get another car. I wonder what the billboard software would think of me, based on my car.
Two things: 1) low-value customer 2) auto repair and parts services
Mathematical imprecision still lives or dies on orders of magnitude, though. If the value you're passing through is 1, and the bit-flipping occurs on the most significant bit on a 64-bit architecture, that's not imprecision -- it's just plain wrong.
Then it was "the cloud", but the cloud doesn't really mean anything in particular. The cloud means the datacenter, or a collection (possibly global) of datacenters, or just a couple computers running virtual machines. Or you can use "cloud" for branding of the computer grid you're talking about.
The origin of the term "the cloud" really says it all. In network diagrams, the internet was represented by a cloud because you couldn't see what happened there -- the network topology was unknown and unknowable. The point of "cloud computing" was that the network is all made of computers, not dumb switches. The whole "cloud" idea as it originated was incompatible with the concept of due diligence, and even now I'm appalled about how much information about "cloud" services is withheld from customers. These days, our expectations of due diligence don't seem to go beyond chanting "in Big Cloud we trust."
While the "end effect" is true, it has nothing to do with laziness.
It's laziness at the base of the tree. If you're writing a framework that's going to be used on untold thousands of installations worldwide, you should take the time to make it compile-time customisable so that each app only carries the bits it needs in its installer.
Yes, but the inefficiency in the modern frameworks is the failure to prune unused code at compile-time, typically because the framework is delivered as a pre-compiled binary blob. If your stopwatch app includes an entire raytracing 3D engine that is capable of rendering massively detailed immersive worlds, and all you're using it for is to project a realistic shadow on the clock face from the hands, that's inefficient in terms of storage, even if it's efficient from the perspective of the labour required to produce it.
Maybe that's the way to go, since we know programmers can and do use sets - introduce a set-based general purpose language. To avoid leading programmers into temptation, the language should have no loop constructs. With no capability to run this:
foreach blah in group {
result[i++] = do_stuff(blah);
}
programmers will quickly learn to instead write:
results = do_stuff(group);
I agree, but I think you've taken it a step too far here. Look back at maths and how things like sigma summation and similar things like the product function work. Because of the mathematical properties of these, they are order independent, and inherently parallelisable.
Eliminating loops doesn't mean eliminating a "foreach" -- it just means treating each instance of the block as its own scope, and ensuring that no instance can access the variables of another instance. (Talking "instances" instead of "iterations" immediately says it's not a logical loop, even if the computer running it realises it as such simply due to lack of parallel capacity.)
The problem with this is that you then have to combine the results, so you either need to treat the whole block as an inline procedure and end with a return statement, or you treat the block as a function, and now we're into functional programming.
Basically, this sigma-style programming would be logically equivalent to carrying out a map followed by a reduce... and map-reduce has become such an important concept in server programming specifically because of this inherent parallelism. The thing is that current map-reduce renders code to the programmer in a totally different style to what they're used to. There are parallel programming environments that do render parallelised blocks in a C-inspired way, and surely that's the most obvious approach...?
Vague, but not meaningless. I'm perhaps overextending it to cover trade secrets here, which are only protected by the terms of a contract of employment.
In common parlance, "continent" in French means mainland
My arse it does.
OK, so why do people in Corsica always talk about going to "le continent" and people visiting Corsica always talk about being from "le continent"? "My arse it does." contains no information to refute my claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Can a good programmer program Fortran in Fortran? Is it self-hosting?
So, you're saying the middle is Michael Bay movies?
Orange and blue are very possible colours.
I want to know more about this spectrum. What's in the middle?
An impossible colour that induces violent stomach upset and vomiting.
3. Battlestar Galactica (2003). The 70s show it was a "re-imagining" of was rather cheesy, like most TV and sci-fi stuff in the 70s. The 2003 mini-series was fantastic, and the follow-up TV show was great too, for about 2 seasons. Unfortunately, it jumped the shark after that, somewhere around season 3.
The original Battlestar Galactica was cheesy, but that was necessary. It was designed to be straightforward "stuff of legend" fare. It was an epic, an Odyssey. There were hugh holes in the plot -- why were the 12 colonies so close to each other, but the 13th randomly so far away? How did the Cylons keep catching up with a fleet that was heading at full speed in a straight line away? If they had the technology to do that, why not just get to Earth before the colonists and wait for them there, having subjugated the entire planet?
The flying-in-a-straight-line problem arose in both the remake and Star Trek Voyager and was essentially waved away, but the more serious the story, the harder it is to keep the holes hidden -- it's an uncanny valley for narrative plots.
Here's another interesting point. If it has zero value, and you watch it, you're saying that your time has no value, so you have no value. Honestly, if you're not interested enough to pay, why watch?
You forgot about the Jedi. The original trilogy was "twilight of the samurai" stuff -- the jedi were faded and forgotten. If the prequel trilogy had happened, people in the original trilogy wouldn't be as scornful and dismissive as they were. Remember, according to Leia, Obi-Wan's job title in the Clone Wars was "general". To the Republic, he was a soldier. I want a prequel trilogy where Obi-Wan is in his prime, fighting as an officer, and being mocked by his squad for his "superstitions", but slowly winning them over to the point where a young infantryman named Skywalker asks to be trained; perhaps he even takes on a second apprentice who gets killed (as is wont to happen in wartimes). Anyway, I want to see a soldier in uniform constructing his own lightsaber and seeing the horror of death around him, and trying to use his powers to stop the killing, and criticising Obi-Wan for not doing the same, but being dragged into a web of violence and anger. I want to see Obi-Wan using the Force primarily to heal and anaesthetise. I don't want people doing Jedi Knight-inspired "Force dashes".
Too bad George Lucas never made Star Wars 1, 2 and 3. I still never understood why Spielberg only made two Indiana Jones movies, Ark and Crusade. I also expected to see a third Die Hard, but that never happened.
Probably because they would have to have written a second Die Hard first. But it was the right decision -- Die Hard was an iconic standalone that would have been seriously tarnished by the existence of any pot-boiler sequels.
I find myself largely immune to the hustle and bustle of our open office plan. While most require noise-canceling headphones in order to get anything accomplished, it actually energizes me more than inhibits me.
As someone who went to middle school in one of the Open Classroom schools of the 1970s which had not yet moved to completely physical partitions between rooms, I hypothesize this may have a lot to do with it. I was trained for 4+ years on how to operate with many noise distractions.
I think the issue is that there are certain ways of thinking that come with difficulty in dealing with background noise. A feature of autism, for example, is difficulty filtering sensory input. This is not necessarily a negative feature -- filtering seems to have a blinkering effect, with people filtering out ideas that are not immediately seen as related to the task or problem at hand. However, if you don't filter, you see a lot of the bigger picture, and are more likely to think outside the box. Mixed metaphors aside, reduced filtering can result in increased creativity and innovation. A workplace that doesn't support people who have difficulty filtering is likely to miss out on a lot of good stuff.
It's weird how it's a surprise that such an obviously terrible idea is discovered to be a terrible idea.
Surprise or not, it's the orthodoxy and it needs challenged.
Let's also not forget the 1366x768 resolution limit. Which ended up not really being much of a limitation anyway since low end craptop screens seemed to all regress down to that even if they are 15" units around the same time anyway.
Actually, I wonder if starter edition resolution limit didn't actually boost demand for that terrible resolution.
But if you had an external monitor that was a higher resolution it was a major limitation.
You obviously haven't tried it. It works even with the talking heads on TV yakking away on the news. It's easier than using the on-screen keyboard and gets rid of some of those auto-correct errors. Bunch of luddites, it's not 2010 any more.
Except the real-time speech-to-text on the news involves trained operators in a sound-proof room wearing headphones repeating everything that the people in the studio are saying into an expensive commercial voice-recognition rig that has been trained to their voice.
Which is why I specifically talked about copyleft licenses.
But the other side of the coin is that with openness you get interoperability - people can build their own applications interacting with your platform. The sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. The alternative is a lot of manual labor moving information between systems with the result that either the job isn't done or it's prone to error as well as being a lot slower.
However it didn't really take off until Linux came around where people discovered an OS that could be adapted to their solution with no heavy strings attached in the form of licensing, just navigation around the GPL constraints which aren't that cumbersome compared to Oracle or SAP licenses.
Here's where I like to bring up a metaphor -- I see two roles to software development: the first is to raise the ceiling -- innovate and create something better than anyone else before you, setting a new "maximum" that all software can aspire to; the other is to raise the floor -- set a new "minimum" that all software should be better than.
For instance, the existence of free implementations of quicksort, bubble sort etc raise the floor, because now everyone can write software that sorts data with the same efficiency. Meanwhile, a custom-coded adaptive sort for an accountancy system raises the ceiling, because competitors have to try to improve the performance of their sorts to be seen as being as good.
I mostly like the GPL, but the problem is that it rarely if ever raises the floor, because copyleft licenses are not completely open in the same way the C standard libraries are. Yet there are components within most GPL projects that could be used generically and could be part of the common floor, but it will never be part of the common floor until all contributors have been dead for 70 years, and given that many contributors are pseudonymous or have incredibly common names, there's no way of doing due diligence on that... not that it is likely to be relevant by that point.
Imagine if the GPL was replaced with a copyleft license that expired after 10 years -- imagine how big a common floor we'd have. All the code released would be so old that it wouldn't be of particular interest to big companies, but people would be able to revive long-dead projects as commercial packages or as labours of love. We could go back and build libraries out of the proprietary code of older projects. A higher floor.
If software was universally compatible and behaved the same way on all devices, it would be a security nightmare as it would have to implement all the security holes and other bugs of every platform to do so. So say Windows has a zero-day exploit in URL handling and Linux one for file handling. This universal code would have to reimplement the Windows bug in Linux and the Linux bug on Windows, or the two versions of the program would behave differently. If that isn't what you're talking about then you're talking about Java.
As usual, moderators bury the point because of a tangent. The grandparent is on topic, interesting, and answers the very question of this topic, pointing to a CPU architecture that is a huge leap forward.
You say that, but the GGP was actually modded up. Also, you seem to be implying that my post is off-topic, but I maintain that the biggest obstacle to CPU architecture is software. Maybe my conclusions beyond that are wrong, and you're free to disagree with them, but there's a difference between being wrong and being offtopic.
Legacy software needs to run, but heterogeneous x86 cores aren't enough. The memory model of the Mill is significantly different, making this impossible.
Which supports my suggestion that software is the problem, does it not?
In a way, process limitations are a welcome obstacle, that should motivate reflection on legacy decisions, and perhaps finally allow the x86 architecture to be put to rest. Many consider x86 "good enough", but the problems with legacy hardware run a lot deeper than performance, and are largely responsible for the horrific state of computer security today.
The main problem isn't legacy hardware, but legacy software. The x86 architecture is already dead, and most of what we see is a hardware translation of x86 to a CPU architecture that isn't accessible to the coder.
I believe that the only way out of this is for us to start making more heterogeneous parallel chips. At the moment, this only really exists in the form of packages of CPU+GPU on a single chip. But if we had (for example) ARM+x86+GPU, we'd be able to run an ARM-based Linux or Windows environment, but power up the x86 core as required to run any vital legacy apps. This would mean it would slowly become more and more economical to develop for ARM (or whatever your chosen architecture is) and we'd be able to start thinking about retiring x86 sooner. And hell, it's not like even Intel are really fans of x86 themselves -- they've already tried to ditch it once (remember Itanium?), and in the end it was AMD who extended the x86 architecture to 64-bit, not Intel. Intel wants away from x86, the market wants a better architecture, we just need a stepping stone that guarantees legacy software compatibility, and when so many multiple cores lie idle, I don't see why heterogeneous multicore isn't recognised as the solution.
Hmm, I drive a 1998 Toyota Tercel (subcompact). It's not fancy, but I love it, and I see no reason to get another car. I wonder what the billboard software would think of me, based on my car.
Two things: 1) low-value customer 2) auto repair and parts services
$$$ - If you jump from 50nm to 5nm you get paid well once. If you go 50nm to 45nm to 40nm - you get paid every single year.
Have you any idea how much it costs to build new fab plants? I don't think that what you propose is a particularly sensible business strategy.
Mathematical imprecision still lives or dies on orders of magnitude, though. If the value you're passing through is 1, and the bit-flipping occurs on the most significant bit on a 64-bit architecture, that's not imprecision -- it's just plain wrong.
Then it was "the cloud", but the cloud doesn't really mean anything in particular. The cloud means the datacenter, or a collection (possibly global) of datacenters, or just a couple computers running virtual machines. Or you can use "cloud" for branding of the computer grid you're talking about.
The origin of the term "the cloud" really says it all. In network diagrams, the internet was represented by a cloud because you couldn't see what happened there -- the network topology was unknown and unknowable. The point of "cloud computing" was that the network is all made of computers, not dumb switches. The whole "cloud" idea as it originated was incompatible with the concept of due diligence, and even now I'm appalled about how much information about "cloud" services is withheld from customers. These days, our expectations of due diligence don't seem to go beyond chanting "in Big Cloud we trust."
While the "end effect" is true, it has nothing to do with laziness.
It's laziness at the base of the tree. If you're writing a framework that's going to be used on untold thousands of installations worldwide, you should take the time to make it compile-time customisable so that each app only carries the bits it needs in its installer.
Yes, but the inefficiency in the modern frameworks is the failure to prune unused code at compile-time, typically because the framework is delivered as a pre-compiled binary blob. If your stopwatch app includes an entire raytracing 3D engine that is capable of rendering massively detailed immersive worlds, and all you're using it for is to project a realistic shadow on the clock face from the hands, that's inefficient in terms of storage, even if it's efficient from the perspective of the labour required to produce it.
Maybe that's the way to go, since we know programmers can and do use sets - introduce a set-based general purpose language. To avoid leading programmers into temptation, the language should have no loop constructs. With no capability to run this: foreach blah in group { result[i++] = do_stuff(blah); }
programmers will quickly learn to instead write: results = do_stuff(group);
I agree, but I think you've taken it a step too far here. Look back at maths and how things like sigma summation and similar things like the product function work. Because of the mathematical properties of these, they are order independent, and inherently parallelisable.
Eliminating loops doesn't mean eliminating a "foreach" -- it just means treating each instance of the block as its own scope, and ensuring that no instance can access the variables of another instance. (Talking "instances" instead of "iterations" immediately says it's not a logical loop, even if the computer running it realises it as such simply due to lack of parallel capacity.)
The problem with this is that you then have to combine the results, so you either need to treat the whole block as an inline procedure and end with a return statement, or you treat the block as a function, and now we're into functional programming.
Basically, this sigma-style programming would be logically equivalent to carrying out a map followed by a reduce... and map-reduce has become such an important concept in server programming specifically because of this inherent parallelism. The thing is that current map-reduce renders code to the programmer in a totally different style to what they're used to. There are parallel programming environments that do render parallelised blocks in a C-inspired way, and surely that's the most obvious approach...?
Vague, but not meaningless. I'm perhaps overextending it to cover trade secrets here, which are only protected by the terms of a contract of employment.
My arse it does.
OK, so why do people in Corsica always talk about going to "le continent" and people visiting Corsica always talk about being from "le continent"? "My arse it does." contains no information to refute my claims.