Except that a stock option is not really a "cost"; it does not deplete the company's assets to issue them. If any dilution occurs, it is when shares are issued and/or set aside for the purpose of issuing stock options
Not true. At the risk of repeating myself from my other post. Compare two cases. Company share price is $100 dollars a share
Case 1 : Company issues 100 extra shares at $100 (total $10,000), gives $5,000 cash bonus to employees, keeps other $5,000
Case 2 : Company gives 100 share options to employee with a strike price of $50. Employee
pays $5,000, then sells shares for $10,000
In both cases 100 extra shares are issued, the company gets $5,000 and the employee gets $5,000. Yet the accounting treatment is completely different. In case 1 they have to make a note that they have issed 100 new shares, and take a hit of $5,000 additional expenses. Under the previous rules all they had to do was make a note that they had issued 100 extra shares.
The company IS losing money as they are not getting full value for the extra shares issued. The real loser are the other share holders. with the diluted value of their holding.
Say a company has 100 shares outstanding share price $100. The company is worth $10,000. I own 10 shares, value $1,000. Now they give the share options above out. The company is now worth
$15,000, the value before plus the $5,000 extra cash they made. But I have only 5% of the company,
not the 10% I had before. So my shareholding is now only worth $750. Clearly in the real world the numbers are different, and it can take a while for the market value to converge with the "real" value, but the principle applies.
Giving out share options is an expense, they should be treated as such. Clearly accuratly costing these things is damn hard (there are rather a lot of books on how much share options should be worth). But it is only real money going out when the option is exercised so it *should* all come out in the wash. There are lots of things that are hard to put a price on in accounting, where they just guess until they know the real number, so there is no real problem with that.
Yeah all you used to have to do is make a note in your accounts about the number of shares you have issued. I.e. do nothing.
It also allowed a fun little scam in that the tax man allowed you to expense your stock options and subtract it from your profits before paying tax. This is why MS and others spent several years not paying tax. What they were actually doing is NOT MAKING MONEY. All their profits were going straight to the employees, and noone noticed as it was coming back in as they were issuing extra shares. A lot of MS' cash pile came from selling shares.
Basically there were two very different ways of acocunting for the same thing. If you pay your employees in cash, then issue extra shares to have the money to pay for it, it comes off your bottom line as it should. But give them cheap shares instead and it doesn't. The end result is the same, x extra shares issued, y extra money to empoyees, but one means you are in trouble, the other is a sign of a really healthy company. Until now. It is a good change.
The ID Register will hold data as specified in schedule 1 of the draft bill. This is: personal information - names, date and place of birth, gender, address; identifying information - photograph, fingerprint, other biometric information; residential status - nationality, entitlement to remain, terms and conditions of that entitlement; personal reference numbers - National Identity Registration Number and other government issued numbers, and validity periods of related documents; record history - historical information previously recorded, audit trail of changes and date of death; registration history - dates of application, changes to information, dates of confirmation, information regarding other ID cards already issued, details of counter-signatures; validation information - information provided by any application, modification, confirmation or issue and other steps taken in connection with an application or entry, details of any requirement to surrender; security information - personal identification numbers, password or other codes, and questions and answers that could be used to identify a person seeking access; access records - the audit trail of accesses to the entry.
So you have a national database of everyones name, address, fingerprints and probably iris scan and face scan. Plus an unique ID number- Plus whatever else they want to add a later date
An ID card equivilent to the passport, I could more or less live with. I do not want to be on this database, to be honest I think there is some chance I will "lose" my passport before the deadline and get a new paper one, which would give me enough time to become a citezen of a saner country. It is insane.
Basically, if you use it you line up all of your life in front of nearly all of the most disgusting marketing and data mining lowlife in the UK. 1984 and Blunkett ideas are pale by comparison.
You really think that a NATIONAL database of everyones fingerprints, iris scans and some face encoding (not sure how the face stuff works) is better than everyone knowing what you buy?
It is not the ID card that is the problem, it is the enormous database they are making. They claim they will only use the database to fight terrorism, but I have heard that before.
The only thing itanic has going for it is high SPEC FP scores. On everything else it is either poor or mediocre.
I have to second that. My feeling on it is when they had a meeting with a blank piece of paper to design this chip they only invited hardware people. All the tough stuff has been moved into software.
I think the lack of out of order execution really hirts them. If you don't do an amazing job with the compiler then the processor moves like a slug.
In the supercomputer centre I used to use they "upgraded" their 512 processor MIPS machine by adding a 400 processor (or so) Itanic box. For a lot of things without extra optimization of the source code (i.e. just compìling the thing, assuming you could get it to compile, but that is another story) the Itaniums were SLOWER than the 3 year old MIPS processors. It takes a lot of tweaking to get anything like peak performance
There are 3 FPU pipleines that you have to fill at compile time to get maximum performace out of the thing. Identifying THREE parallel instructions at compile time, ALL THE TIME, is damn hard, and normally the compilers fail. Hence slow.
It is just too hard to get anything like the theoretical peak performance out of the thing for stuff other than benchmarks.
SGI are pretty much commited to moving everyone to Itanic, they are only selling MIPS stuff to people who REALLY REALLY want backward compatability. MIPS chips are not going to get much faster, they are not going to bring out a proper new generation, most of the improvements are going to be from shrinking the gates on the chips.
Making a chip costs a stupidly big amount of money, and MIPS does not have the volume to justify it.
If Itanic sinks (really sorry) then SGI will eventually be bought up by IBM for their shared memory tech, and customer roladex.
In my experience the simplest way to tell if someone is from canada is to see if they have a canadian flag attached to some part of their clotehs or belongings. I guess they do get fed up of being confused with USians too.
I find the accents very hard to distinguish. You can normally tell by volume rather than accents.
There is a simple rule though, if in doubt ask if they are canadian, rather than the other way around. It causes less offense...
But, we should get receipts showing how we voted for our own records.
The problem with that one is then it becomes too easy to buy or intimidate voters. Something you can take home with you that PROVES how you have voted can be abused far too easily.
It seems that no one really wants to come forward and raise this as a serious concern for this election, despite the fact that it's entirely plausible.
Yeah, that worries me a bit too. A wrinkle is the fact that all the early exit polls pointed to a Kerry victory, the republicans were depressed, the democrats estatic. Then when the real results started coming in the situation was reversed.
Especially when you have the president of Diebold a very strong Repubican.
There is probabally nothing in it, and for whatever reason the exit polls were wrong. Normally they are pretty accurate though.
It is probably for the best to try to forget about it, and make sure that these stuff is fixed for the next election.
The other huge problem is the amount of gerrymandering that goes on. You really need to get the partisan officials OUT of the redistricting. The house of representitives elections are becoming insane, with a lot of stupidly safe seats. only something like 10% of house seats are competetive, and that is really really bad for democracy. If the only way you can lose your seat is if you get deselected by the party faithful, then it polaizes the politics, and noone moves to the centre, and it becomes a real mess.
Welcome to the wonderful world of free trade. Not only does free trade totally destroy 3rd world countries, it harms 1st world one's too.
That is fundementally not true.
For the 3rd world countries it is the ONLY way they are going to get out of povety. If everyone had in the 3rd world had a job paying US salarys there would be little povety there.
To get a US style salary they have to sell their labour TOO the US. Free trade is the only way they can do that. At the moment they have to sell their goods and services to the only people who have money. Free trade is the only way they will be able to do that.
Now the 1st world. We get our goods and services cheaper becuase of this. So if you have a job then you are better off.
That is the catch though isn't it? I totally agree. But you have to find something you can do better than these places and then sell them your stuff. The simple fact is that there are no jobs for unskilled workers in the west any more. Deal with it. Get a skill they don't have in india or get ready to work for indian wages. The west does not have a divine right to the well paying jobs.
I guess you are talking about quantum entanglement.
The idea of quantum entanglement is that you join (entangle) two electrons in combined state. In the combined state one is for example spin up and one spin down. BUT you don't know which is which.
Then you measure the spin of one, and the other is automatically in the other spin state however far apart they are.
This is a hot topic, but I really don't like it. Firstly there is no transfer of information. You know what the spin state the other electron is, but how does that transfer information?
The second problem is the system itself is flawed. One of the great unanswered questions of quantum mechanics is WHAT IS IT ABOUT MEASURING THAT BREAKS THE ENTANGLED STATE? Noone really knows. Solving that one will win someone a Nobel prize.
How can you make sure that the system is not "measured" by some other effect/interaction before you are ready to do it yourself if you don't know what measuring in this context is?
There is a lot of BS around about this stuff unfortunately.
There is some interesting stuff on quantum gravity that is problably towards the right answer, but this one will be around for a while.
Yeah IBM do some really good stuff. The IBM research has taken over from bell labs as being
one of the best research labs around. It is such a shame bell labs went from being amazing to depressing but that is a different story.
At IBM they have invented copper interconnects (seen in a lot of CPUs these days). They invented Silicon on Insulator transistors (seen in a lot of modern CPUs as well). They have done some nice work on carbon nanotubes (those have a long way to go though), and now spintronics (this has a really long way to go as well).
They do a lot of really good stuff at IBM.
Simply no
If you have two electrons then the lowest energy state is going to be one up and one down. But add some energy and you get get other states.
In this case we are talking about in effect a ingle electron anyway, so the point is moot.
Really, if I as company X spend some time customizing an application to by business, what harm does it do to release the code? None, other than it may save someone else time and money in the long run. God forbid it be a compeditor - but what if it saved a non-profit like World Vision millions of dollars??? Isn't that worth it? Are you really that greedy of a copany, that the chance that it may help a competitor outweights the chance that you could be saving people's lives? (Sze note: from the behaviour of most companies, the answer is a resounding yes.)
Actually it is even better than this. For most businesses (virtually everyone apart from MS) software is a cost not a revenue stream. If you release the software then it is very likely someone else who uses it will make it better. Then they have a choice, release the improvements or keep them secret. If they release the improvements you get better software for free. If they don't they are eventually going to screw themselves as assuming you can get some momentum beheind your project they are going to have to backport all of their changes every time a new improved version comes along.
So if your custom software is a cost not a revenue, open source it.
The second patch was "released to secureROM" ages ago. The list of things fixed by that patch was virtually none anyway. Maybe 5% of the fairly long buglist was fixed.
I spent some time playing with the bugs when the call went out for a list when the second patch was on the srawing board. The number I found in a few hours of playing around with it was staggering.
There is a chance that the patch is delayed because they are fixing more of the mountain of bugs before releasing what is probably the final patch. But considering Atari refused to pay for the work on the second patch (the lead developer started doing it in his spare time).
IF there is a second patch I doubt it will be soon.
But to go back to the eariler point the reason the TOEE is so bad is absolutely NOTHING to do with the D&D engine (which is by far the best bit). And all to do with the complete lack of story. On my first game I got to the second dungeon level, and I really had no idea of why I was there, or what I should do next apart from clear the monsters out from the next room.
Even now I would like to see a new game using this engine (without the bugs of course).Something with the story of Fallout/PS:Torment and so on with this engine would be a VERY good game. Assuming they fixed all the bugs of course.
Yes ToEE has problems, but most of the problems are due to the fact that the game was never finished and was rushed out of the door. Nothing to do with the fact that they use D&D rules.
This sort of stuipid protectionism has been around for a while.
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) wrote a similar (satirical) one, "The Candlemaker's Petition"
www.mises.org Bastiat was a genius at explaining all these economic principles and outcomes by the use of satire and parables, the most famous of which is "The Candlemaker's Petition," which "requested" a law to mandate "the covering of all windows and skylights and other openings, holes, and cracks through which the light of the sun is able to enter houses. This free sunlight is hurting the business of us deserving manufacturers of candles."
Is this speedup per processor or overall on your application? In any case, any time you move to a new system, you may have to do some tuning of your software for the new machine. For example, the Sun E10K+ has memory latencies very similar across the system. You can write code that works fine there, but when you move to a NUMA machine it may run very poorly because of memory access patterns and memory locality to the processor. You'll need to tune your software to make it run better.
The speedup I quoted is per processor speedup, but AFTER they had done some tuning. After you just port but before the optimization it seems quite normal to get slower code rather than faster... but from what you said that is fairly common.
I am not sure it should be so expected going from one NUMA MIPS machine to a NUMA Itanium2 machine.
Apart from the fact that the Itaniums are not very well balanced..
I do think they will get it right eventually, but it is still bleeding edge stuff unfortunately.
Note this is what the computer people at the computer centre told me not my personal code. The current state of my personal code is that it runs at 1/4 of the per processor speed on the new computer, (i.e it is running about about 1/10 to 1/20 of the speed you would expect) and gives the wrong answer... Clearly those things could be related... but I am destinctly underwhelmed at the moment.
So... since it's "easy" to be done in hardware and "hard" to be done in software, hardware engineers are better at software optimization than software guys?;)
No that is not quite what I meant. The best way has to be some combination of the two IMNSHO. In the Itanium they started with a blank piece of paper, and asked the hardware guys what they wanted. Like normal engineers they made the tough stuff (the optimisation) someone elses problem.
All the itaniums do is do exactly what the compiler tells them to do. So the compiler has to work very very hard to get optimsed code, and you always have more information at runtime than you do at compile time.
What we are seeing from this is exactly what you would expect, something with a VERY good peak performance that performs well on some benchmarks, but royaly sucks for real world applications..
Buggy compilers are always a pain, but ignoring that, there's no reason why
the compilers can't get better over time to produce better code. I know that doesn't help you right now though:)
I am sure they will get better... Intel are patching their compiler about every month, and have a huge number of people working on it. Whether the whole EPIC idea will work on the other hand I don't know.... They are going to struggle very hard to get anything like the peak numbers out of it for normal applications..
The technology is fantastic. It will be even more fantastic when it works:-(.
At the moment you have to be nuts to buy one of these, as they are complete bleeding edge technology.
In Amsterdam they "upgraded" from a 1000 processor mips machine to a 416 processor Altix/Itanium2 machine.
On paper an itanium processors should be 5 times faster than the old mpis processors. At the moment we are lucky to see 2 or 3 speedup. And that is AFTER you have tuned the damn things for itaniums.
It seems to be quite normal for code to run slower on the new machine than the old... So you have a tough porting job to do...
The problem with the itaniums is that all the hard optimisation stuff has been moved from the hardware to the compiler.
Plus the compiler is buggy as hell at the moment... I am currently trying to track down why my code fails on the new machine when I turn the optimization on.. My money is on a compiler bug to go with the many other compiler bugs we have seen before.
I am sure they will be a nice machine eventually, but if you buy one now you are nuts.
I don't think there is a problem with the scaling.. or they are fixing it anyway.
The problem would be the NUMA
Does the 2.6 kernal support NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access)?
For NUMA to work efficiently you need to get the data and the processors close together. Most (if not all) previous the time Linux is used it does not matter if you shuttle the processes from processor to processor. In dual etc processor systems the memory acess time is the same.
At the moment SGI have build a module ontop of linux to do this. They cannot do it in the kernal as they need to use a standard linux distribution.
(you cannot get support from people like SAP (who make payroll software etc) if you are running a custom version of linux. Not important for you or me, but rather important for big business.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that a stock option is not really a "cost"; it does not deplete the company's assets to issue them. If any dilution occurs, it is when shares are issued and/or set aside for the purpose of issuing stock options
Not true. At the risk of repeating myself from my other post. Compare two cases. Company share price is $100 dollars a share
Case 1 : Company issues 100 extra shares at $100 (total $10,000), gives $5,000 cash bonus to employees, keeps other $5,000
Case 2 : Company gives 100 share options to employee with a strike price of $50. Employee pays $5,000, then sells shares for $10,000
In both cases 100 extra shares are issued, the company gets $5,000 and the employee gets $5,000. Yet the accounting treatment is completely different. In case 1 they have to make a note that they have issed 100 new shares, and take a hit of $5,000 additional expenses. Under the previous rules all they had to do was make a note that they had issued 100 extra shares. The company IS losing money as they are not getting full value for the extra shares issued. The real loser are the other share holders. with the diluted value of their holding. Say a company has 100 shares outstanding share price $100. The company is worth $10,000. I own 10 shares, value $1,000. Now they give the share options above out. The company is now worth $15,000, the value before plus the $5,000 extra cash they made. But I have only 5% of the company, not the 10% I had before. So my shareholding is now only worth $750. Clearly in the real world the numbers are different, and it can take a while for the market value to converge with the "real" value, but the principle applies. Giving out share options is an expense, they should be treated as such. Clearly accuratly costing these things is damn hard (there are rather a lot of books on how much share options should be worth). But it is only real money going out when the option is exercised so it *should* all come out in the wash. There are lots of things that are hard to put a price on in accounting, where they just guess until they know the real number, so there is no real problem with that.
Yeah all you used to have to do is make a note in your accounts about the number of shares you have issued. I.e. do nothing.
It also allowed a fun little scam in that the tax man allowed you to expense your stock options and subtract it from your profits before paying tax. This is why MS and others spent several years not paying tax. What they were actually doing is NOT MAKING MONEY. All their profits were going straight to the employees, and noone noticed as it was coming back in as they were issuing extra shares. A lot of MS' cash pile came from selling shares.
Basically there were two very different ways of acocunting for the same thing. If you pay your employees in cash, then issue extra shares to have the money to pay for it, it comes off your bottom line as it should. But give them cheap shares instead and it doesn't. The end result is the same, x extra shares issued, y extra money to empoyees, but one means you are in trouble, the other is a sign of a really healthy company. Until now. It is a good change.
What it does not say is what orbit these things will be in. Spy satelites normally are in polar orbit so they cover the whole earth as it rotates.
Putting these things in geostationary orbit so that they stay in the same place as the earth rotates is probably too high for this sort of thing.
Hence I guess that these things can spy on the rest of the world, not just China. Or am I missing something?
As he said it is not the card, it is the database From the The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/05/complete_i dcard_guide/page3.html
The ID Register will hold data as specified in schedule 1 of the draft bill. This is: personal information - names, date and place of birth, gender, address; identifying information - photograph, fingerprint, other biometric information; residential status - nationality, entitlement to remain, terms and conditions of that entitlement; personal reference numbers - National Identity Registration Number and other government issued numbers, and validity periods of related documents; record history - historical information previously recorded, audit trail of changes and date of death; registration history - dates of application, changes to information, dates of confirmation, information regarding other ID cards already issued, details of counter-signatures; validation information - information provided by any application, modification, confirmation or issue and other steps taken in connection with an application or entry, details of any requirement to surrender; security information - personal identification numbers, password or other codes, and questions and answers that could be used to identify a person seeking access; access records - the audit trail of accesses to the entry.
So you have a national database of everyones name, address, fingerprints and probably iris scan and face scan. Plus an unique ID number- Plus whatever else they want to add a later date
An ID card equivilent to the passport, I could more or less live with. I do not want to be on this database, to be honest I think there is some chance I will "lose" my passport before the deadline and get a new paper one, which would give me enough time to become a citezen of a saner country. It is insane.
Basically, if you use it you line up all of your life in front of nearly all of the most disgusting marketing and data mining lowlife in the UK. 1984 and Blunkett ideas are pale by comparison.
You really think that a NATIONAL database of everyones fingerprints, iris scans and some face encoding (not sure how the face stuff works) is better than everyone knowing what you buy?
It is not the ID card that is the problem, it is the enormous database they are making. They claim they will only use the database to fight terrorism, but I have heard that before.
The only thing itanic has going for it is high SPEC FP scores. On everything else it is either poor or mediocre.
I have to second that. My feeling on it is when they had a meeting with a blank piece of paper to design this chip they only invited hardware people. All the tough stuff has been moved into software.
I think the lack of out of order execution really hirts them. If you don't do an amazing job with the compiler then the processor moves like a slug. In the supercomputer centre I used to use they "upgraded" their 512 processor MIPS machine by adding a 400 processor (or so) Itanic box. For a lot of things without extra optimization of the source code (i.e. just compìling the thing, assuming you could get it to compile, but that is another story) the Itaniums were SLOWER than the 3 year old MIPS processors. It takes a lot of tweaking to get anything like peak performance
There are 3 FPU pipleines that you have to fill at compile time to get maximum performace out of the thing. Identifying THREE parallel instructions at compile time, ALL THE TIME, is damn hard, and normally the compilers fail. Hence slow.
It is just too hard to get anything like the theoretical peak performance out of the thing for stuff other than benchmarks.
MIPS is dead.
SGI are pretty much commited to moving everyone to Itanic, they are only selling MIPS stuff to people who REALLY REALLY want backward compatability. MIPS chips are not going to get much faster, they are not going to bring out a proper new generation, most of the improvements are going to be from shrinking the gates on the chips.
Making a chip costs a stupidly big amount of money, and MIPS does not have the volume to justify it.
If Itanic sinks (really sorry) then SGI will eventually be bought up by IBM for their shared memory tech, and customer roladex.
SGI have bet the company on Itanic
apparently killing a classroom full of children isn't nearly as bad as making people stand naked.
Thank you for that sraw man. Blowing up childeren his wrong, torturing people is wrong.
Terrorists do horrible things, that is why we have the moral authority to hunt them down and kill them.
Moral relativism is very very dangerous, are you seariously suggesting that we should not expect americans to behave better than Chechen terrorists?
In my experience the simplest way to tell if someone is from canada is to see if they have a canadian flag attached to some part of their clotehs or belongings. I guess they do get fed up of being confused with USians too.
I find the accents very hard to distinguish. You can normally tell by volume rather than accents.
There is a simple rule though, if in doubt ask if they are canadian, rather than the other way around. It causes less offense...
But, we should get receipts showing how we voted for our own records.
The problem with that one is then it becomes too easy to buy or intimidate voters. Something you can take home with you that PROVES how you have voted can be abused far too easily.
It seems that no one really wants to come forward and raise this as a serious concern for this election, despite the fact that it's entirely plausible. Yeah, that worries me a bit too. A wrinkle is the fact that all the early exit polls pointed to a Kerry victory, the republicans were depressed, the democrats estatic. Then when the real results started coming in the situation was reversed. Especially when you have the president of Diebold a very strong Repubican. There is probabally nothing in it, and for whatever reason the exit polls were wrong. Normally they are pretty accurate though. It is probably for the best to try to forget about it, and make sure that these stuff is fixed for the next election. The other huge problem is the amount of gerrymandering that goes on. You really need to get the partisan officials OUT of the redistricting. The house of representitives elections are becoming insane, with a lot of stupidly safe seats. only something like 10% of house seats are competetive, and that is really really bad for democracy. If the only way you can lose your seat is if you get deselected by the party faithful, then it polaizes the politics, and noone moves to the centre, and it becomes a real mess.
Most wireless mikes I have seen on TV involve a small microphone connected to a much larger powerpack/tranmitter which is cliped to the body somehow.
So it is pretty easy to whirl one of those if you keep hold of the box bit
Welcome to the wonderful world of free trade. Not only does free trade totally destroy 3rd world countries, it harms 1st world one's too.
That is fundementally not true.
For the 3rd world countries it is the ONLY way they are going to get out of povety. If everyone had in the 3rd world had a job paying US salarys there would be little povety there.
To get a US style salary they have to sell their labour TOO the US. Free trade is the only way they can do that. At the moment they have to sell their goods and services to the only people who have money. Free trade is the only way they will be able to do that.
Now the 1st world. We get our goods and services cheaper becuase of this. So if you have a job then you are better off.
That is the catch though isn't it? I totally agree. But you have to find something you can do better than these places and then sell them your stuff. The simple fact is that there are no jobs for unskilled workers in the west any more. Deal with it. Get a skill they don't have in india or get ready to work for indian wages. The west does not have a divine right to the well paying jobs.
It is called the PHANTOM console. What more clues do you need?
I guess you are talking about quantum entanglement.
The idea of quantum entanglement is that you join (entangle) two electrons in combined state. In the combined state one is for example spin up and one spin down. BUT you don't know which is which.
Then you measure the spin of one, and the other is automatically in the other spin state however far apart they are.
This is a hot topic, but I really don't like it. Firstly there is no transfer of information. You know what the spin state the other electron is, but how does that transfer information?
The second problem is the system itself is flawed. One of the great unanswered questions of quantum mechanics is WHAT IS IT ABOUT MEASURING THAT BREAKS THE ENTANGLED STATE? Noone really knows. Solving that one will win someone a Nobel prize. How can you make sure that the system is not "measured" by some other effect/interaction before you are ready to do it yourself if you don't know what measuring in this context is?
There is a lot of BS around about this stuff unfortunately.
There is some interesting stuff on quantum gravity that is problably towards the right answer, but this one will be around for a while.
Yeah IBM do some really good stuff. The IBM research has taken over from bell labs as being one of the best research labs around. It is such a shame bell labs went from being amazing to depressing but that is a different story. At IBM they have invented copper interconnects (seen in a lot of CPUs these days). They invented Silicon on Insulator transistors (seen in a lot of modern CPUs as well). They have done some nice work on carbon nanotubes (those have a long way to go though), and now spintronics (this has a really long way to go as well). They do a lot of really good stuff at IBM.
Simply no If you have two electrons then the lowest energy state is going to be one up and one down. But add some energy and you get get other states. In this case we are talking about in effect a ingle electron anyway, so the point is moot.
Really, if I as company X spend some time customizing an application to by business, what harm does it do to release the code? None, other than it may save someone else time and money in the long run. God forbid it be a compeditor - but what if it saved a non-profit like World Vision millions of dollars??? Isn't that worth it? Are you really that greedy of a copany, that the chance that it may help a competitor outweights the chance that you could be saving people's lives? (Sze note: from the behaviour of most companies, the answer is a resounding yes.)
Actually it is even better than this. For most businesses (virtually everyone apart from MS) software is a cost not a revenue stream. If you release the software then it is very likely someone else who uses it will make it better. Then they have a choice, release the improvements or keep them secret. If they release the improvements you get better software for free. If they don't they are eventually going to screw themselves as assuming you can get some momentum beheind your project they are going to have to backport all of their changes every time a new improved version comes along.
So if your custom software is a cost not a revenue, open source it.
The second patch was "released to secureROM" ages ago. The list of things fixed by that patch was virtually none anyway. Maybe 5% of the fairly long buglist was fixed. I spent some time playing with the bugs when the call went out for a list when the second patch was on the srawing board. The number I found in a few hours of playing around with it was staggering. There is a chance that the patch is delayed because they are fixing more of the mountain of bugs before releasing what is probably the final patch. But considering Atari refused to pay for the work on the second patch (the lead developer started doing it in his spare time). IF there is a second patch I doubt it will be soon. But to go back to the eariler point the reason the TOEE is so bad is absolutely NOTHING to do with the D&D engine (which is by far the best bit). And all to do with the complete lack of story. On my first game I got to the second dungeon level, and I really had no idea of why I was there, or what I should do next apart from clear the monsters out from the next room. Even now I would like to see a new game using this engine (without the bugs of course).Something with the story of Fallout/PS:Torment and so on with this engine would be a VERY good game. Assuming they fixed all the bugs of course. Yes ToEE has problems, but most of the problems are due to the fact that the game was never finished and was rushed out of the door. Nothing to do with the fact that they use D&D rules.
I would guess that it is to do with the cost, and weight of the high resolution camera.
They can get much higher resolution in grayscale, so they get better pictures but slower, with cheaper and lighter kit.
I would guess the bandwidth is the same, or almost the same.
It is always the way, you post, then you find a better link. The Candlemakers Petition
This sort of stuipid protectionism has been around for a while.
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) wrote a similar (satirical) one, "The Candlemaker's Petition" www.mises.org
Bastiat was a genius at explaining all these economic principles and outcomes by the use of satire and parables, the most famous of which is "The Candlemaker's Petition," which "requested" a law to mandate "the covering of all windows and skylights and other openings, holes, and cracks through which the light of the sun is able to enter houses. This free sunlight is hurting the business of us deserving manufacturers of candles."
The speedup I quoted is per processor speedup, but AFTER they had done some tuning. After you just port but before the optimization it seems quite normal to get slower code rather than faster... but from what you said that is fairly common. I am not sure it should be so expected going from one NUMA MIPS machine to a NUMA Itanium2 machine. Apart from the fact that the Itaniums are not very well balanced..
I do think they will get it right eventually, but it is still bleeding edge stuff unfortunately.
Note this is what the computer people at the computer centre told me not my personal code. The current state of my personal code is that it runs at 1/4 of the per processor speed on the new computer, (i.e it is running about about 1/10 to 1/20 of the speed you would expect) and gives the wrong answer... Clearly those things could be related... but I am destinctly underwhelmed at the moment.
So... since it's "easy" to be done in hardware and "hard" to be done in software, hardware engineers are better at software optimization than software guys? ;)
No that is not quite what I meant. The best way has to be some combination of the two IMNSHO. In the Itanium they started with a blank piece of paper, and asked the hardware guys what they wanted. Like normal engineers they made the tough stuff (the optimisation) someone elses problem. All the itaniums do is do exactly what the compiler tells them to do. So the compiler has to work very very hard to get optimsed code, and you always have more information at runtime than you do at compile time.
What we are seeing from this is exactly what you would expect, something with a VERY good peak performance that performs well on some benchmarks, but royaly sucks for real world applications..
Buggy compilers are always a pain, but ignoring that, there's no reason why the compilers can't get better over time to produce better code. I know that doesn't help you right now though :)
I am sure they will get better... Intel are patching their compiler about every month, and have a huge number of people working on it. Whether the whole EPIC idea will work on the other hand I don't know.... They are going to struggle very hard to get anything like the peak numbers out of it for normal applications..
It seems to be quite normal for code to run slower on the new machine than the old... So you have a tough porting job to do...
The problem with the itaniums is that all the hard optimisation stuff has been moved from the hardware to the compiler. Plus the compiler is buggy as hell at the moment... I am currently trying to track down why my code fails on the new machine when I turn the optimization on.. My money is on a compiler bug to go with the many other compiler bugs we have seen before.
I am sure they will be a nice machine eventually, but if you buy one now you are nuts.
I don't think there is a problem with the scaling.. or they are fixing it anyway.
The problem would be the NUMA Does the 2.6 kernal support NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access)?
For NUMA to work efficiently you need to get the data and the processors close together. Most (if not all) previous the time Linux is used it does not matter if you shuttle the processes from processor to processor. In dual etc processor systems the memory acess time is the same. At the moment SGI have build a module ontop of linux to do this. They cannot do it in the kernal as they need to use a standard linux distribution. (you cannot get support from people like SAP (who make payroll software etc) if you are running a custom version of linux. Not important for you or me, but rather important for big business.