The other was the use of cheap laptop chips in rack servers.
Indeed. In the mid-90s, I often heard about the need for "big iron" in servers and data centers. Many people assumed that servers needed expensive high-powered CPUs and lots of memory, and this would be a lucrative market.
I realized this was bullcrap when I visited Hotmail in 1996 (a year before they were acquired by Microsoft). I expected to see a few slick looking million dollar servers, each filling a rack from floor to ceiling. Nope. Instead there was some cheap metal shelving from home depot, covered with cardboard from some old boxes cut up into squares. On each square of cardboard was a cheap commodity motherboard running FreeBSD, and a $2 SLA battery. The cooling was some cheap clip-on desk fans from Walmart. No wonder they were able to provide email for free.
That night I thought about what I had seen. If Hotmail could do it that way, anyone could. The next day I shorted Sun's stock.
Myself I have always mourned that Motorola never could increase the frequency of the MC680x0 beyond 66Mhz and keep up with Intel because that architecture was a real beauty to program in assembler.
The features that made the 68k so nice for assembly programming, like addressing multiple unaligned memory locations in a single instruction, are precisely what made it so difficult to speed up.
Imagine that you are a chip designer. You are implementing the silicon for "movl @a1, @a2". So you access the first byte at the address stored in a1, but you get a page fault. You trigger an interrupt, the OS swaps in the page, and then returns from the interrupt. Now, you must restart the instruction and fetch the other 3 bytes, but since the address is not aligned, they can be on a different page, so now you trigger another interrupt. The OS returns, and you can now fetch the 3 bytes. But wait a sec, what about the 1st byte? You can either go back and fetch it again, which might trigger yet another interrupt since that page may no longer be in memory, or you can have some extra "hidden" registers to hold that intermediate value (which can be one, two, or three bytes). So you deal with all that. FINALLY you have all 4 bytes. Whew. Now you need to do the SAME thing for the second operand, but that is even more complicated, because if the address straddles a page boundary you may end up with corrupted memory if one byte of the target is modified but the other bytes are not.
A single instruction can generate up to 4 pages faults (not including double faults). Now how do you deal with cache coherency on a multi-core system when a single operand can be partially read from or written to memory? Can you imagine all the silicon required to handle that?
Eliminating complex instructions like this is precisely what makes RISC fast. A RISC instruction can load from memory, or store in memory, but never both, and unaligned addresses are usually a fatal error. There is never any dangling state to deal with.
Instruction sets should be designed for compilers, not humans.
Does anyone remember the reasoning for dropping native support for i386 when these processors debuted?
There was a belief by some that emulation would be "good enough" since the IA-64 would be so blazingly fast, and emulation would only be needed for a few years during the expected phase-out of x86. Meanwhile, new applications and upgrades would be issued as "dual binaries" that could run natively on either platform.
Two things went wrong with this plan: 1. The IA-64 turned out to not be as blazingly fast as Intel hoped. 2. AMD offered a good alternative at lower cost and far less hassle.
Although Intel's plan may appear unrealistic in hindsight, it actually could have worked. Apple managed a similar transition from 68k to x86 a few years later using the same strategy.
So, what you're saying is they are too reliant on escrows as trust.
No. I said they rely on escrow. I did not say they are "too reliant". Escrow payments work well, and I think they are superior in many ways to the trust based system of "Net-30" payments, credit bureaus, and D&B ratings, that exist in America. Ask an American business owner how much it costs to manage accounts payable, accounts receivable, and how much money is spent on collections, and lost on delinquent accounts.
I think many American businesses would prefer that we adopted a Chinese style payment system based on 3rd-party guarantees rather than "just trust us".
What I should start a legitimate escrow company in China (run it at a loss or whatever), build up a decent amount of business, then exit scam ala silk road.
Escrow companies are regulated and have connections to state owned financial institutions. Your chance of going to China and starting one is roughly zero.
They don't mind telecom companies screwing customers
Your outrage is misplaced and uninformed. Sprint has spoken out in favor of Network Neutrality, and said NN benefits both customers and smaller ISPs. The bigger carriers like AT&T and Verizon are opposed, but they are opposed to these price caps as well. There is no hypocrisy here.
As opposed to where exactly? Every place on earth is like this.
No they aren't. The level of shady business behavior in China is way beyond what you experience in America.
That's why lawyers have jobs.
Per capita, America has 20 times as many lawyers of China. In China, the courts are not effective at enforcing contracts, so lawyers aren't much help.
There are plenty of stories about naive foreign companies trying to do business in China, but my favorite is when BAT (British American Tobacco) first entered the Chinese market. At first, they were surprised to see sales higher than expected. Sales continued to grow for several months, and they ramped up production. Then, after six months, sales plummeted to zero, and never recovered. They took huge losses on infrastructure and unsold merchandise. It took them a long time to figure out what happened. Their sales were high because their products were being purchased by their competitors, and stored in damp warehouses, where they grew stale and moldy. Then after six months, all the accumulated rotten cigarettes were dumped onto the wholesale market, crashing the price, and destroying BAT's reputation for quality.
Dealing with China is worse. First you sign the contract, then they start the negotiations.
You are doing it wrong. Chinese courts are so biased and dysfunctional that written contracts are basically unenforceable. They are a waste of time. Instead have a written agreement in English, and put the money in an escrow account under American jurisdiction. When they deliver the product, and it meets the spec, you release the escrow funds. If they don't deliver as agreed, then their only option is to sue you in America to get their money. If they won't agree to these terms, then go back to Alibaba and spend 5 minutes finding an alternative supplier.
Chinese don't even trust each other, so escrow payments are common, and every significant supplier is familiar with how they work.
When deciding whether or not to invest in a country, any reasonable company would consider not just current law, but likely future restrictions and attitudes as well.
According to Trump: 1. If American companies create jobs elsewhere, that is bad for America and good for foreigners. 2. If foreign companies create jobs in America, that is also bad for America and good for foreigners.
On a global market, cheap telemarketers are around 50 cents per cal
Whoa. Your math is way off. These are ROBO-calls. Maybe 1-2% of the people called "Press 1 to speak to an operator". So most of these calls cost them nothing.
Important note: You should ALWAYS press "1" when you get a robo-call. Then put the phone on hold, or, even better, spend a few minutes pretending to be interested, and then put them on hold while you "go get your credit card". If every call goes to a human their business model no longer works.
$15 an hour ($30k per year). Maybe $35k-$45k per year.
Most of the telemarketers I talk to have distinct South Asian or Filipino accents. I sometimes ask where they are located, and occasionally they open up and talk about that. Most are from southern India. The Filipinos are usually in or near Manila.
I doubt if they are making anywhere close to $15 per hour.
The standard unit of "value" in the world is the USD. TFA is from FastCompany, an American magazine. Slashdot is an American website. The ICO fine is in GBPs, but this story is being directed at an international audience, so stating the value in USD is normal and expected.
Yes and no. Germany exports peak power to other countries during the day. At night, Germany imports base load power from French nukes. The price is higher during the day, so even if Germany imports and exports the same amount of kw-hrs, they still make money.
Sure, I will. Electric power in Germany is more than twice as expensive as it is in America. That is because the costs of all the subsidies are pushed onto the consumer in what is effectively a regressive tax. Maybe what they are doing has some long term benefits, but considering that more than half of every electric bill goes to subsidise the renewables and the politically driven nuke closures, by many criteria it is "not working".
So what are they getting at such an enormous cost? This "85%" figure is a statistical fluke. Most days Germany gets 45% of their electric generation from coal, and 26% from lignite or "brown coal", the world's filthiest fuel. Overall, Germany's electricity generation produces nearly as much CO2 per kw-hr as America. There was no good reason to shut down their nukes, as they were already running and already fueled. Nearly all the cost of a nuke is in the construction, and while building new nukes is economically questionable, it is silly to shut down a stable running plant. If those plants are kept in operation, they could offset nearly all the lignite. Instead they are installing solar panels in the world's second cloudiest location (the Bering Sea is first).
It is even worse than that. It is a survey course for non-majors. It is a bunch of liberal arts majors taking "Computers for Dummies" in the hope that it may help them get a job when they graduate since they will know Excel.
it has survived numerous challenges. Maybe it is as good as it gets
It is likely as good as it gets for the schools. The traditional lecture to a small class maximizes profit. They see any technological change or improvement in efficiency as a threat. The schools are not going to improve things from within. Change will be forced on them from the outside.
They're always whining about how they can't get jobs and have huge student loans to pay off their useless, private liberal arts college degrees.
You seem to be confused about what a teenager is. Let me help you:
1. A "teenager" is someone whose age is in the "teens", 13 to 19. 2. Most teenagers are students, don't have jobs, and aren't looking for one. 3. Approximately 0% of teenagers have liberal arts degrees (or any other degree). 4. Very very few teenagers are trying to pay off their student loans.
Have you seen the people that run big business and government around the world today?
Today? You seem to be implying that things were better during some past golden age, when governments were all efficient and businessmen were altruistic. There is no evidence that corruption is worse today, and some evidence that things are getting better. Also, the public's perception of corruption tends to get worse during the times when corruption is falling the fastest, since tightening ethics often leads to more exposure and prosecutions that put corruption in the news.
I doubt you can put much acceleration on the frame
Once a craft is in orbit, you don't need much acceleration to go places. You can attach some ion thrusters, and power them with the solar arrays. Even an acceleration of 0.001g applied continuously will get you to Mars far quicker than any chemical rocket could.
Race can be narrowed down indefinitely. Those people on the other side of the road seems a bit suspicious . ..
True, but it can also become more inclusive, and historically that is what has happened. A century ago, few people considered Jews to be "white people". Before that, Americans worried that the Irish and Italians were corrupting the gene pool. In the aftermath of the Rising of 1745 there were serious editorials in British newspapers expressing doubts about whether sub-human vermin like the Scots could ever be properly civilized.
but what debugging mode in an audio driver would require logging keystrokes?
One reason would be to replay a sequence of keystrokes to verify that a bug has been fixed.
My company has an internal app that logs input (keystrokes, mouse movements). If the program crashes, the keylog is emailed along with the stack trace to the responsible programming team. This has been a wonderful help for debugging and is WAY more useful than user descriptions of what they were doing. We can see what caused the fault, and after fixing the problem we can replay the input to verify that it is fixed. However, it only records input when this app has the focus, and users are informed that their input is being recorded.
Parkinson's has some connections to the gut. For instance, it is correlated with constipation. Also people who drink a lot of coffee or tea are less likely to be afflicted. But I don't think it is cause by bacteria, because there is no cure. If gut bacteria caused the disease, some people would be cured inadvertently when they take high doses of antibiotics for other reasons, and that doesn't happen.
You are never going to get any jurisdiction to keep a database of road markers up to date to real time, it just won't happen.
It doesn't work that way. As an SDC drives down a street, it recognizes road signs, mileage markers, etc. If these differ from what it is expecting, the change is reported back to the mothership. They don't wait on the jurisdiction's bureaucracy for updates. It is an automated process.
Slashdot Mirror
The other was the use of cheap laptop chips in rack servers.
Indeed. In the mid-90s, I often heard about the need for "big iron" in servers and data centers. Many people assumed that servers needed expensive high-powered CPUs and lots of memory, and this would be a lucrative market.
I realized this was bullcrap when I visited Hotmail in 1996 (a year before they were acquired by Microsoft). I expected to see a few slick looking million dollar servers, each filling a rack from floor to ceiling. Nope. Instead there was some cheap metal shelving from home depot, covered with cardboard from some old boxes cut up into squares. On each square of cardboard was a cheap commodity motherboard running FreeBSD, and a $2 SLA battery. The cooling was some cheap clip-on desk fans from Walmart. No wonder they were able to provide email for free.
That night I thought about what I had seen. If Hotmail could do it that way, anyone could. The next day I shorted Sun's stock.
Myself I have always mourned that Motorola never could increase the frequency of the MC680x0 beyond 66Mhz and keep up with Intel because that architecture was a real beauty to program in assembler.
The features that made the 68k so nice for assembly programming, like addressing multiple unaligned memory locations in a single instruction, are precisely what made it so difficult to speed up.
Imagine that you are a chip designer. You are implementing the silicon for "movl @a1, @a2". So you access the first byte at the address stored in a1, but you get a page fault. You trigger an interrupt, the OS swaps in the page, and then returns from the interrupt. Now, you must restart the instruction and fetch the other 3 bytes, but since the address is not aligned, they can be on a different page, so now you trigger another interrupt. The OS returns, and you can now fetch the 3 bytes. But wait a sec, what about the 1st byte? You can either go back and fetch it again, which might trigger yet another interrupt since that page may no longer be in memory, or you can have some extra "hidden" registers to hold that intermediate value (which can be one, two, or three bytes). So you deal with all that. FINALLY you have all 4 bytes. Whew. Now you need to do the SAME thing for the second operand, but that is even more complicated, because if the address straddles a page boundary you may end up with corrupted memory if one byte of the target is modified but the other bytes are not.
A single instruction can generate up to 4 pages faults (not including double faults). Now how do you deal with cache coherency on a multi-core system when a single operand can be partially read from or written to memory? Can you imagine all the silicon required to handle that?
Eliminating complex instructions like this is precisely what makes RISC fast. A RISC instruction can load from memory, or store in memory, but never both, and unaligned addresses are usually a fatal error. There is never any dangling state to deal with.
Instruction sets should be designed for compilers, not humans.
Does anyone remember the reasoning for dropping native support for i386 when these processors debuted?
There was a belief by some that emulation would be "good enough" since the IA-64 would be so blazingly fast, and emulation would only be needed for a few years during the expected phase-out of x86. Meanwhile, new applications and upgrades would be issued as "dual binaries" that could run natively on either platform.
Two things went wrong with this plan:
1. The IA-64 turned out to not be as blazingly fast as Intel hoped.
2. AMD offered a good alternative at lower cost and far less hassle.
Although Intel's plan may appear unrealistic in hindsight, it actually could have worked. Apple managed a similar transition from 68k to x86 a few years later using the same strategy.
So, what you're saying is they are too reliant on escrows as trust.
No. I said they rely on escrow. I did not say they are "too reliant". Escrow payments work well, and I think they are superior in many ways to the trust based system of "Net-30" payments, credit bureaus, and D&B ratings, that exist in America. Ask an American business owner how much it costs to manage accounts payable, accounts receivable, and how much money is spent on collections, and lost on delinquent accounts.
I think many American businesses would prefer that we adopted a Chinese style payment system based on 3rd-party guarantees rather than "just trust us".
What I should start a legitimate escrow company in China (run it at a loss or whatever), build up a decent amount of business, then exit scam ala silk road.
Escrow companies are regulated and have connections to state owned financial institutions. Your chance of going to China and starting one is roughly zero.
They don't mind telecom companies screwing customers
Your outrage is misplaced and uninformed. Sprint has spoken out in favor of Network Neutrality, and said NN benefits both customers and smaller ISPs. The bigger carriers like AT&T and Verizon are opposed, but they are opposed to these price caps as well. There is no hypocrisy here.
As opposed to where exactly? Every place on earth is like this.
No they aren't. The level of shady business behavior in China is way beyond what you experience in America.
That's why lawyers have jobs.
Per capita, America has 20 times as many lawyers of China. In China, the courts are not effective at enforcing contracts, so lawyers aren't much help.
There are plenty of stories about naive foreign companies trying to do business in China, but my favorite is when BAT (British American Tobacco) first entered the Chinese market. At first, they were surprised to see sales higher than expected. Sales continued to grow for several months, and they ramped up production. Then, after six months, sales plummeted to zero, and never recovered. They took huge losses on infrastructure and unsold merchandise. It took them a long time to figure out what happened. Their sales were high because their products were being purchased by their competitors, and stored in damp warehouses, where they grew stale and moldy. Then after six months, all the accumulated rotten cigarettes were dumped onto the wholesale market, crashing the price, and destroying BAT's reputation for quality.
Dealing with China is worse. First you sign the contract, then they start the negotiations.
You are doing it wrong. Chinese courts are so biased and dysfunctional that written contracts are basically unenforceable. They are a waste of time. Instead have a written agreement in English, and put the money in an escrow account under American jurisdiction. When they deliver the product, and it meets the spec, you release the escrow funds. If they don't deliver as agreed, then their only option is to sue you in America to get their money. If they won't agree to these terms, then go back to Alibaba and spend 5 minutes finding an alternative supplier.
Chinese don't even trust each other, so escrow payments are common, and every significant supplier is familiar with how they work.
When deciding whether or not to invest in a country, any reasonable company would consider not just current law, but likely future restrictions and attitudes as well.
According to Trump:
1. If American companies create jobs elsewhere, that is bad for America and good for foreigners.
2. If foreign companies create jobs in America, that is also bad for America and good for foreigners.
On a global market, cheap telemarketers are around 50 cents per cal
Whoa. Your math is way off. These are ROBO-calls. Maybe 1-2% of the people called "Press 1 to speak to an operator". So most of these calls cost them nothing.
Important note: You should ALWAYS press "1" when you get a robo-call. Then put the phone on hold, or, even better, spend a few minutes pretending to be interested, and then put them on hold while you "go get your credit card". If every call goes to a human their business model no longer works.
$15 an hour ($30k per year). Maybe $35k-$45k per year.
Most of the telemarketers I talk to have distinct South Asian or Filipino accents. I sometimes ask where they are located, and occasionally they open up and talk about that. Most are from southern India. The Filipinos are usually in or near Manila.
I doubt if they are making anywhere close to $15 per hour.
Why in the world is the figure given in dollars?
The standard unit of "value" in the world is the USD. TFA is from FastCompany, an American magazine. Slashdot is an American website. The ICO fine is in GBPs, but this story is being directed at an international audience, so stating the value in USD is normal and expected.
Germany imports its power.
Yes and no. Germany exports peak power to other countries during the day. At night, Germany imports base load power from French nukes. The price is higher during the day, so even if Germany imports and exports the same amount of kw-hrs, they still make money.
Anyone want to complain how it's not working ?
Sure, I will. Electric power in Germany is more than twice as expensive as it is in America. That is because the costs of all the subsidies are pushed onto the consumer in what is effectively a regressive tax. Maybe what they are doing has some long term benefits, but considering that more than half of every electric bill goes to subsidise the renewables and the politically driven nuke closures, by many criteria it is "not working".
So what are they getting at such an enormous cost? This "85%" figure is a statistical fluke. Most days Germany gets 45% of their electric generation from coal, and 26% from lignite or "brown coal", the world's filthiest fuel. Overall, Germany's electricity generation produces nearly as much CO2 per kw-hr as America. There was no good reason to shut down their nukes, as they were already running and already fueled. Nearly all the cost of a nuke is in the construction, and while building new nukes is economically questionable, it is silly to shut down a stable running plant. If those plants are kept in operation, they could offset nearly all the lignite. Instead they are installing solar panels in the world's second cloudiest location (the Bering Sea is first).
CS 50 is a beginner level course.
It is even worse than that. It is a survey course for non-majors. It is a bunch of liberal arts majors taking "Computers for Dummies" in the hope that it may help them get a job when they graduate since they will know Excel.
My class size was 300-500 students.
That was before they quadrupled tuition.
it has survived numerous challenges. Maybe it is as good as it gets
It is likely as good as it gets for the schools. The traditional lecture to a small class maximizes profit. They see any technological change or improvement in efficiency as a threat. The schools are not going to improve things from within. Change will be forced on them from the outside.
They're always whining about how they can't get jobs and have huge student loans to pay off their useless, private liberal arts college degrees.
You seem to be confused about what a teenager is.
Let me help you:
1. A "teenager" is someone whose age is in the "teens", 13 to 19.
2. Most teenagers are students, don't have jobs, and aren't looking for one.
3. Approximately 0% of teenagers have liberal arts degrees (or any other degree).
4. Very very few teenagers are trying to pay off their student loans.
So just using an account you are not authorized for is now hacking?
He didn't just "access" the account. He stole money and vandalized files.
It doesn't require circumvention or bypass of technical systems
I can steal the mail out of your mailbox without bypassing any technical systems. That doesn't make it legal.
Have you seen the people that run big business and government around the world today?
Today? You seem to be implying that things were better during some past golden age, when governments were all efficient and businessmen were altruistic. There is no evidence that corruption is worse today, and some evidence that things are getting better. Also, the public's perception of corruption tends to get worse during the times when corruption is falling the fastest, since tightening ethics often leads to more exposure and prosecutions that put corruption in the news.
Or the leak was part of a disinformation campaign to make OpFor think we have something when we actually don't.
I doubt you can put much acceleration on the frame
Once a craft is in orbit, you don't need much acceleration to go places. You can attach some ion thrusters, and power them with the solar arrays. Even an acceleration of 0.001g applied continuously will get you to Mars far quicker than any chemical rocket could.
Race can be narrowed down indefinitely. Those people on the other side of the road seems a bit suspicious . . .
True, but it can also become more inclusive, and historically that is what has happened. A century ago, few people considered Jews to be "white people". Before that, Americans worried that the Irish and Italians were corrupting the gene pool. In the aftermath of the Rising of 1745 there were serious editorials in British newspapers expressing doubts about whether sub-human vermin like the Scots could ever be properly civilized.
but what debugging mode in an audio driver would require logging keystrokes?
One reason would be to replay a sequence of keystrokes to verify that a bug has been fixed.
My company has an internal app that logs input (keystrokes, mouse movements). If the program crashes, the keylog is emailed along with the stack trace to the responsible programming team. This has been a wonderful help for debugging and is WAY more useful than user descriptions of what they were doing. We can see what caused the fault, and after fixing the problem we can replay the input to verify that it is fixed. However, it only records input when this app has the focus, and users are informed that their input is being recorded.
Parkinson's has some connections to the gut. For instance, it is correlated with constipation. Also people who drink a lot of coffee or tea are less likely to be afflicted. But I don't think it is cause by bacteria, because there is no cure. If gut bacteria caused the disease, some people would be cured inadvertently when they take high doses of antibiotics for other reasons, and that doesn't happen.
You are never going to get any jurisdiction to keep a database of road markers up to date to real time, it just won't happen.
It doesn't work that way. As an SDC drives down a street, it recognizes road signs, mileage markers, etc. If these differ from what it is expecting, the change is reported back to the mothership. They don't wait on the jurisdiction's bureaucracy for updates. It is an automated process.