If the software industry had the same stringent standards as other industries, 99% of software would not exist
Ah, but the 1% that did would be quality stuff. The interesting question is, would we be better off with a smaller quantity of software, with higher quality?
I think so. I know I don't need 1e6 features in my word processor, or web browser, or [insert application here]. Most people don't, and I'm sure a lot of people would trade unused features for stability.
I also think that if some companies would start creating software with stringent quality control, avoiding feature-bloat and the accompanying bugs, they could make a name for themselves (with the appropriate marketing, of course). Thinking of buying M$ Bloatware 3000? Buy our app instead. It has all the features you actually use in the MS product, but ours actually works!
The simple fact of the matter is that religion is not at all a polite topic for general conversation
I disagree. I would say instead that religion is not a topic for those who cannot converse politely. But when topics such as evolution and religion have appeared on/., I have seen not only the requisite flames, but also quite a bit of intelligent, informative, and thought-provoking conversation. And with the moderation, the flames are rarely seen unless you read *everything*, and the good stuff usually rises to the top quickly. The good stuff is more than worth having the occasional ignorant flamebait post.
you know damn well that you're going to spark a series of spirited posts
"Spirited posts" are usually the most interesting. Passion is one of the things that is fundamental to human nature, whether it be passion about religion, politics, Linux, or any of a million other topics. If you take away any topic that stimulates passionate responses in people, you will have nothing left. I could use your very argument to say that Slashdot shouldn't bring up the topic of operating systems, because it will inevitably spark a series of spirited posts from the Linux advocates, and those will spark posts from *BSD folks, etc etc. The whole point of having discussion threads is to allow the community to carry on spirited discussions about things they have an interest in.
And while I agree with you that one's religious beliefs are a very personal thing, I do not believe that this in any way implies that we cannot (or should not) discuss them. It is not necessary for the brain to cease functioning the moment the topic of religion comes up (and while it happens in some cases, in many it does not). If nothing else the discussion might help some people gain a broader understanding of other people's beliefs, which is no bad thing:-) And (oh the horror!) it might make people start to think about their own beliefs and why they believe what they do. I see this as A Good Thing (tm).
Or maybe I'm just not cynical enough to believe that there is no point to discussing controversial topics. I don't know. I just feel that a Slashdot without real discussion would be a Slashdot that isn't worth visiting.
If you look at the article closely, you will see a statement from Compaq:
Compaq and Intel have confidently determined that the 'bug' is confined to the Intel Sabre motherboard and there have been no problems with respect to the Compaq design.
So the flaw is not in the actual CPU but Intel's motherboard. This is why Intel can (and is) still shipping the CPUs, and expects a negligible effect on earnings. (Unlike the whole Pentium bug, where they ate almost $500 million by recalling the faulty chips). So if you don't want to deal with the bug, use a non-Intel mobo (such as Compaq's).
Well, yes. What Transmeta is essentially doing is an emulation of multiple foreign instructions sets running on top of their native instruction set. Thing is, by doing it the way they are, they may have been able to get the hardware sufficiently faster to more than make up for it. See my previous post.
OK, these are just a few other bits of interest I picked out of the patent:
In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the morph host is a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor which is designed with a plurality of processing channels.
I'm not going to go into huge detail about VLIW machines (particularly since I don't know all that much about them:-). Suffice it to say that traditional VLIW CPUs fetch multiple instructions at once, and rely on the compiler to ensure that there are no dependencies between instructions in a fetch group (if the compiler can't find x number of independents, it will pad the holes with non-operations, or NOPs). Looking at Transmeta's patent, it appears that rather than a compiler doing this checking, their code-translation software will be doing it on the fly. RISC/CISC machines, on the other hand, typically do this checking in hardware. But Transmeta's reasoning seems to be that doing it in hardware adds complexity, hence lower clock rates, and also doesn't make multiple instruction sets very feasible.
Regarding the instruction translation and subsequent caching I mentioned in my previous post, a quote from the patent illuminates the matter a little more:
The code morphing software of the microprocessor...includes a translator portion which decodes the instructions of the target application, converts those target instructions to the primitive host instructions capable of execution by the morph host, optimizes the operations required by the target instructions, reorders and schedules the primitive instructions into VLIW instructions (a translation) for the morph host, and executes the host VLIW instructions.
When the particular target instruction sequence is next encountered in running the application, the host translation will then be found in the translation buffer and immediately executed without the necessity of translating, optimizing, reordering, or rescheduling. Using the advanced techniques described below, it has been estimated that the translation for a target instruction (once completely translated) will be found in the translation buffer all but once for each one million or so executions of the translation. Consequently, after a first translation, all of the steps required for translation such as decoding, fetching primitive instructions, optimizing the primitive instructions, rescheduling into a host translation, and storing in the translation buffer may be eliminated from the processing required. Since the processor for which the target instructions were written must decode, fetch, reorder, and reschedule each instruction each time the instruction is executed, this drastically reduces the work required for executing the target instructions and increases the speed of the microprocessor of the present invention.
Transmeta seems to have an excellent idea here. They're caching optimized translations of the incoming instructions, so rather than have to translate and optimize over and over each time you see that bit of code, you do it once and then just grab it from the cache. Due to the spatial and temporal locality of programs (ie the fact that your accesses to instructions are not random, but are localized in loops, etc), this cache ("translation buffer") will only fail to have a translation present once every million instructions. So you're doing *one* translation every million cycles, rather than a million translations like current processors would have to do. Interestingly enough, a scheme like this was brought up as a discussion item in my Superscalar Processor Design class a couple of weeks ago, though my professor used the example of an specialized Alpha decoding/translating x86 and caching the results. One might even write the translations back out to disk as an attachment to the original executable, so that the next time you run the program that's fewer translations you have to do, and eventually you'll have a fully translated version on your hard disk for optimal speed. I guess we'll just have to wait to see if Transmeta does something similar.
One embodiment of the enhanced hardware includes sixty-four working registers in the integer unit and thirty-two working registers in the floating point unit. The embodiment also includes an enhanced set of target registers which include all of the frequently changed registers of the target processor necessary to provide the state of that processor; these include condition control registers and other registers necessary for control of the simulated system.
It seems this new chip is going to have a lot of registers. As Cartman would say, sweeeeeet!
The patent also provides some sample C code, the corresponding x86 assembly, and some sample optimizations the Transmeta system may perform. It's a little more than half way down the page, if you want to look, just scroll until you see code:-)
Some notes for those who may want a more in-detail explanation:
The beginning of the patent ("claims") is essentially just a list of things that all modern, superscalar, out-of-order processors do, and saying "hey we do this too".
Basically, out-of-order machines execute instructions out of their program order (hence the name:). This means that if your code sequence is A,B,C; the CPU may actually execute it such that B is done executing before A. But B's results cannot be written to system memory or the architected registers ("machine state")until you know that instruction A didn't generate an exception. That's so that you can provide precise exception handling, ie that the OS can service A's exception and then resume exection with B. If you don't wait to do your memory store, then you'll end up executing B twice, which you didn't intend. So that's what all the talk in the beginning of the patent about memory stores, etc, is about.
If you get past all the uninteresting stuff like that in the beginning, you'll find the following:
"The present invention overcomes the problems of the prior art and provides a microprocessor which is faster than microprocessors of the prior art, is capable of running all of the software for all of the operating systems which may be run by a large number of families of prior art microprocessors, yet is less expensive than prior art microprocessors. "
The idea it seems is that rather than making complex hardware to execute the instructions and perform speed enhancements, they're doing speed optimizations in software. Which in turn allows very simple hardware(which in turn should translate to really high clock speeds). It seems that Transmeta's bet with this is that the penalty incurred by doing software rather than hardware optimizations is offset by the increase in clock speed and decrease in hardware cost.
Using such an approach should also make running multiple instruction sets a much easier task. Currently processors do their instruction decoding in hardware. But if Transmeta has managed to do this decoding (fast) in software, then they can just add a little more software to allow multiple instruction sets. They also seem to be caching the translations of non-native to native instructions in a memory structure of some sort, so that they minimize the redundant emulation computations.
Actually, to address gupg's comment, it also seems that they should not need *any* special compiler support, because they can run stuff that was compiled for any of the various instruction sets they choose to support. So they themselves should not need to do compiler work. I would guess that the reason they're hiring all sorts of compiler folks is that they need people to do the afore-mentioned software instruction translation, and the people best suited for that are compiler people since they work on the instruction level all the time. Most other programmers don't have to deal with anything other than high-level languages, and so would not be particularly well suited to doing what Transmeta is doing.
Anyway, hopefully this explained things a bit more to everyone. My reading and explanation of the patent was pretty quick since I have to go to class in a few minutes. I'll finish reading the patent afterwards and add anything else I think you might like to know.
most of the more egregious abuses were the result of corrupt associations between lesser church officials and secular authority.
Agreed.
Blaming the Pope is just not fair
Well, putting the entire blame on the Pope would certainly be unfair. As you mentioned, many of the worst abuses were not due directly to the Pope's actions but were committed by lesser officials. However, the environment created by the Pope's position contributed to the abuse, and in that sense I think there is a certain amount of blame that should be laid at his feet.
His point was that, while individual popes might be corrupt, the church as a whole was not.
I may have misinterpreted his post, thank you for the clarification. However, if we use your interpretation, then I would ask this: at what point do we consider the "church as a whole" to be corrupt? If that would require every clergyman to be corrupt, well then I doubt we could ever consider the Church as a whole to be corrupt. But what if 60% were corrupt at some point? Is the institution considered corrupt, or not?
I tend to view corruption as a disease. The Church has been infected by it at various points in history to various degrees. Has it ever succumbed totally? No. But it has been sick, and that was simply what I wished to point out, as it seemed to me that he had been saying that the church had remained uncontaminated throughout history.
Well, I need to get to class, so I'll wrap this up. Hopefully I clarified my position.
where will you find artists and musicians to work [for free] on an open source game?
You could also say, "where will you find programmers to work [for free] on an open source game?" I think you might very well get artists doing some stuff in their spare time just as you get people coding OSS in their spare time. For the same reasons.
Actually, the non-opened-minded folks here on/. seem to fall into 2 categories:
1.) Apple bad, Linux good (the majority) 2.) Apple good, Linux bad (a minority)
I should also note that the skit wasn't really bashing Apple so much as Steve Jobs (at least, that's how it seemed to me). And Jobs isn't exactly Mr. Innocent, from all accounts he's an ass. Great marketer/"interim" CEO, certainly, but on a personal level he seems to act like a real ass at times. And so there are those who dislike Jobs for that reason (I admit to being among that group). There are also those who feel Apple is extremely misleading in its advertising, and who dislike Apple for that (yep, that's me too). And then there are those who feel that the OS, on a technical level, "sucks" (me again, though that very well may change if/when I get a chance to play with OS X). And then there are those who just like to bash Apple 'cause they think it's the cool thing to do (not me).
My point here is mainly that having a dislike for Apple and/or Mr. Jobs does not make one closed-minded. I personally can see some good things about Apple systems, as well as areas where they could improve. I wouldn't take the Apple jokes too seriously, most companies in the spotlight get them (witness the plethora of M$ jokes, those about Slowlaris, etc)
He did his research. The fact is that the Rage 128 Pro (that which is in the G3/G4) is a very mediocre video card these days. Nothing near what you'd get with a TNT2 based card, or even a Voodoo3.
You'd think Apple would get a deal going with nVidia or 3dfx to get something better. This is one area where Apple could definitely improve their offerings.
Well, maybe they would if such a thing existed:-) Problem is, there isn't any such thing as a TNT3 Ultra. Or any TNT3 for that matter...there are TNT2 Ultras (the best consumer cards out there right now), and the next thing from nVidia is called the GeForce 256 (cards based on it are coming this fall).
And no Pope has ever been able to sway to evil the beliefs of the Church
What then should we consider the Inquisition to be? I'd say it qualifies as evil, and certainly was created and sanctioned by the Pope.
And corruption has long existed within the Church, (particularly in the times leading up to the Protestant Reformation). Granted, I suspect that it is less today (due to reform efforts as well as the loss of secular power of the Church), but I'd say it's a stretch to claim that evil has *no* power in the Church.
but religion without structure is like a night out drinking without structure. Beer after liquor never sicker, liquor after beer your in the clear!
Structured religion does not necessarily mean religion organized in the context of the Church. Christianity has structure, but one need not be a member of the Church to be a Christian. The Church is an organization built on top of the religion, it is not the religion itself. If the Church disappeared tomorrow, Christianity would still exist.
ah...comparisons between religion and beer. Being a Christian and being drunk. This is the sort of thing to drive certain Christian fanatics up the wall. Fun:-)
BTW, I'm a Christian, so don't think I'm dissing Jesus or strong beliefs here:) I'm just envisioning a certain fanatical Christian girl from back home who was always preaching at everyone, and who I'd send into fits by questioning her (often ridiculous) claims:-) I find making fun of the mindlessly fanatical can be highly entertaining. At least for a while, until you realize that there is no hope of actually getting them to *think* about the beliefs they have. Sigh.
but if that's what the majority or any movement degenerates to, then that (in my eyes) IS the movement
This brings up the interesting question of, does the Church (and by this I assume we're speaking of the Roman Catholic Church, which was the organization that persecuted Galileo) truly make up or represent the majority of Christians? Does the Church truly "dominate" public and cultural life?
And if it does include the majority, do the "members" of the RCC actually agree with the "official" beliefs of the Church? (This actually applies to me in particular, being a Christian who is technically a Roman Catholic, yet disagrees with many of the silly proclamations coming out of the Vatican. Which is why I typically refer to myself as Christian rather than Catholic.) It is quite possible that the majority of Christians do not believe the "official" Church dogma. For example, there was a study involving Roman Catholics a while back, and they found that 50% of them were pro-choice, while the other half were anti-abortion. Yet the Church's position has been unequivocally anti-abortion. Makes you wonder in what other areas the membership disagrees with the organized religion's leadership.
Something to keep in mind about organized religion, at least in the RCC, is that the leadership does NOT necessarily represent the 'masses'. It's not a democracy, the membership does not elect the leadership. I can't go to church and vote for who the next pope should be. And often the membership ignores the leadership. So while the Pope and company may say one thing, don't assume that it is representative of the beliefs of the majority of Christians.
Besides, if you look at the history of organized Chrisitanity, it usually has nothing or little to do with the teachings of Jesus. The Crusades were a prime example of this. True Christians, those who actually try to follow the path Jesus set, would not do such a thing, IMHO (and yes, I see a certain irony in stating what things "true Christians" would do, but my point is that Christianity != Church)
Actually, I *think* he meant that he thought the question marks were some Windows created thing, so that if viewing on a Windows platform it would look correct. I think we all realize that NT is Windows:-)
It's not really a Windows problem, it's a problem with whatever Katz uses to write these things (probably Word). I've written plenty of things using Windows applications (though not Word) and have not had this ? problem.
what software is there on macintosh that doesn't exist or there isn't a very similar replacement for on windows or something else?
Well, I'm not quite the expert in this either:) But, knowing a lot of ppl involved in music-related pursuits (such as recording/editing), the software for sound editing and such things are supposedly better/more plentiful on the Mac. I personally cannot attest to whether this is true or not; it could be the music types are just used to their Macs so haven't experimented as much with other platforms. Or they could be right. But such is their claim, FWIW.
I think the idea is that eventually, the system is supposed to be able to determine the position/heading of a missile based on radar stations and/or satellites around the world, and then that data is used to launch an interceptor missile. The military obviously doesn't think that the launch site will be announced. And certainly, the ICBM in question could be launched from a submarine somewhere, so the attacker is not necessarily known. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have a method for destroying the incoming ICBM before it hits a city.
One thing to consider is that even if the "big nuclear powers" committed themselves to disarmament, that doesn't mean that rogue states like North Korea and Iraq would. So then, the big powers are leaving themselves vulnerable to such nations. At least if you have nukes too, there's always the threat of mutually assured destruction. Granted, MAD may not be enough if you have some lunatic in power in a rogue state, but it's a deterrent in many cases. And I personally feel a bit better knowing that if some country decides to try to nuke us, that A) we're not ignoring the threat, and may have a defense ready in a few years, and B) that since we have nukes, if they tried anything like that we have retained the capabilities to respond in kind.
You're also making the assumption that if the gov't didn't spend the money on defense, they'd spend it on something more worthy. However, it's more likely it'd be spent on some congressman's pet pork barrel project than anything beneficial to the nation.
How can there ever be peace as long as there are so many people working on destruction?
Well, I doubt you're ever going to get rid of the destructive side of human nature, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for peace to materialize. However, if we get to the point where the defenses are sufficient to prevent/remove the ability of nations to successfully attack each other militarily, at that point we'll probably be the closest to peace we're going to get.
I would point out that one need not raid the military budget in order to have money to pay for helping the poor. In fact, the military, having suffered massive cuts these last several years, has planes literally falling apart because of a lack of parts. The military was stretched so thin handling two minor regional conflicts (Kosovo and the no-fly zones of Iraq) that to deal with Kosovo a good many forces were actually diverted from Iraq to Kosovo. The military needs the funds it has been allocated.
However, there are lots of pork barrel projects that could be eliminated in favor of increased spending for the poor. For example, Congress allocated a bunch of extra C-130 cargo planes for the Pentagon, despite the fact that the Pentagon *said it didn't want*. Why? Because the planes are made in the home states of a couple of influential senators. Don't trim the military budget, but don't add on unneeded things either! You can take a lot of the "pet projects" of congressmen and axe them, and have more than enough money for useful social programs.
I really don't see how you believe that affirmative action is a logical and fair practice.
For one thing, it is hypocritical. We are supposed to be an enlightened society that does not believe in racial discrimination. Hence the laws to that effect. And I totally agree that we should not discriminate on the basis of race (or gender/creed/all the other conditions those laws cover). How then do we justify affirmative action, which is a policy of racial discrimination by its very nature? Changing who becomes the victim of the discrimination does not make it any less of an evil. We're preaching one thing, but practicing the opposite.
For another, affirmative action doesn't help with the problem of racial/sexual inequalities in the workplace. Studies have shown that by far the primary beneficiaries of such programs are middle class blacks. Who aren't the ones who need the help! The ones who need help are the people in the lower economic class. Middle class people can afford college. Poor people can't.
Just because whites don't openly harass blacks on the street everyday, and just because we've got some legislation, doesn't mean the problems gone away.
No, it doesn't mean the problems have gone away (though I think there is certainly far less racism today than in the past). There are plenty of ignorant racist jerks out there, of all races. And, not to be overly cynical, there quite likely will always be some. You get any large group of people, and you're bound to find a few assholes in the group. None of this changes the fact that affirmative action does not decrease the racism in this country! If anything, it promotes an attitude that minorities are inherently incapable of succeeding without special help. We should be trying to tear down such stereotypes, not create them.
Furthermore, affirmative action does not address the underlying problems of why many minority groups are under-represented in many areas. Affirmative action is trying to treat the symptoms, rather than find the cure.
Blacks (just one of many possible examples) are not under-represented among Fortune 500 CEOs because they're black; it is because of the economic and social situation that the majority of blacks find themselves in:
Socially: To get a good-paying job, one usually needs a college education. To get a good college education, you usually need to have good grades in high school. To get good grades in high school, you generally need a desire to get good grades. This is hindered by an attitude that doing well in school is "acting white". Equating whiteness with scholarship is ridiculous, of course, but try telling this to a lot of black teenagers whose friends keep ragging on them about being "white". Add to this the lack of blacks in certain areas (ie Fortune 500 CEOs), which means few black role models in these positions. There is a strong social affect on young black people away from doing well in academic pursuits; this needs to be addressed before we'll see any *real* progress.
There are similar situations with other minority groups in this country. For example, many of the minorities in this country have immigrated from non-English speaking countries, and as such are at a disadvantage economically if they can't communicate in English. Sadly, even many native born Americans whose parents are American, etc, can't speak decent English.
Economically:
Getting a good job these days usually requires a college degree. However, the economic situation of many minorities makes them unable to afford higher education. And the lack of higher education prevents the funds...in a nasty cycle.
If we really want to promote equality, we should do away with racially-based preferences, and instead do the following: 1. Increase forms of financial aid to the financially diadvantaged so that those who wish to attend college can afford it. There are a lot of people out there this could benefit, of all races; though it would help minorities more (due to the economic situation of most minorities being worse than the average white situation) 2. Increase programs that tackle the social aspect of things. Make sure that minorities feel that they can go into any field of work, that it's not "being white". Increase English literacy programs. Having a mastery of English is a huge help in acquiring and keeping a good job. 3. Improve elementary through high school education. I can't stress the need for this enough. A good grade school education is the foundation upon which all future learning is going to be built. Hold all students to high standards. We're graduating students who can barely read. If they can't do that there's no way in hell they're gonna get a good job and bring themselves to a higher standard of living.
Oh, and in regards to your comment: 1/4 of all black males in the US are felons and no longer have the right to vote
I really don't see how that has anything to do with affirmative action. The solution to this is for black males to stop committing felonies. This is a case of a significant subset of the black population shooting themselves in the foot, so to speak. It's their choice, not something forced upon them.
I very much agree that moderators need to moderate where needed, not just randomly. This is why the moderation system works, because the moderators have judgment in what needs to be moderated. Removing or reducing the ability to exercise that judgment will merely make the moderation system less effective.
If moderators promoting personal agendas is seen as a problem, the following should fix that:
1) meta-moderation, which Slashdot is already doing.
2) increasing the number of moderators/decreasing the moderation points per moderator.
Say you normally get your comments moderated up to, say, 3. Pretty good. But then suppose you just want to provide a little bit of information, or a brief comment; something that wouldn't warrant a 3. It would get the 3 anyway; which might also trigger the Highlight Threshold for some people (depending on individuals' settings for this).
One perhaps better way would be to take the average of past comments and create a separate variable, maybe call it AverageScore. Then give users a choice in their prefs whether to add the AverageScore to the Score, or add a fraction of the AverageScore to the Score (I envision 1/2 or 1/3 of AverageScore, rounded to an integer), or do nothing with AverageScore.
Another consideration with such a system is that Slashdot would have to find the AverageScore of every user who posted on a given page, do manipulations based on the viewer's prefs, and use that in the dynamic generation of the page. This could be more load on the server than any value we might get out of it.
Personally, I don't see a need to have a historical score influencing a present score. The moderation works pretty well at bringing out the good stuff and eliminating the crap. Adding a predictor value like AverageScore seems redundant at the least, and it could interfere in an undesirable way with the moderation process.
Slashdot Mirror
If the software industry had the same stringent standards as other industries, 99% of software would not exist
Ah, but the 1% that did would be quality stuff. The interesting question is, would we be better off with a smaller quantity of software, with higher quality?
I think so. I know I don't need 1e6 features in my word processor, or web browser, or [insert application here]. Most people don't, and I'm sure a lot of people would trade unused features for stability.
I also think that if some companies would start creating software with stringent quality control, avoiding feature-bloat and the accompanying bugs, they could make a name for themselves (with the appropriate marketing, of course). Thinking of buying M$ Bloatware 3000? Buy our app instead. It has all the features you actually use in the MS product, but ours actually works!
The simple fact of the matter is that religion is not at all a polite topic for general conversation
/., I have seen not only the requisite flames, but also quite a bit of intelligent, informative, and thought-provoking conversation. And with the moderation, the flames are rarely seen unless you read *everything*, and the good stuff usually rises to the top quickly. The good stuff is more than worth having the occasional ignorant flamebait post.
:-) And (oh the horror!) it might make people start to think about their own beliefs and why they believe what they do. I see this as A Good Thing (tm).
I disagree. I would say instead that religion is not a topic for those who cannot converse politely. But when topics such as evolution and religion have appeared on
you know damn well that you're going to spark a series of spirited posts
"Spirited posts" are usually the most interesting. Passion is one of the things that is fundamental to human nature, whether it be passion about religion, politics, Linux, or any of a million other topics. If you take away any topic that stimulates passionate responses in people, you will have nothing left. I could use your very argument to say that Slashdot shouldn't bring up the topic of operating systems, because it will inevitably spark a series of spirited posts from the Linux advocates, and those will spark posts from *BSD folks, etc etc. The whole point of having discussion threads is to allow the community to carry on spirited discussions about things they have an interest in.
And while I agree with you that one's religious beliefs are a very personal thing, I do not believe that this in any way implies that we cannot (or should not) discuss them. It is not necessary for the brain to cease functioning the moment the topic of religion comes up (and while it happens in some cases, in many it does not). If nothing else the discussion might help some people gain a broader understanding of other people's beliefs, which is no bad thing
Or maybe I'm just not cynical enough to believe that there is no point to discussing controversial topics. I don't know. I just feel that a Slashdot without real discussion would be a Slashdot that isn't worth visiting.
If you look at the article closely, you will see a statement from Compaq:
Compaq and Intel have confidently determined that the 'bug' is confined to the Intel Sabre motherboard and there have been no problems with respect to the Compaq design.
So the flaw is not in the actual CPU but Intel's motherboard. This is why Intel can (and is) still shipping the CPUs, and expects a negligible effect on earnings. (Unlike the whole Pentium bug, where they ate almost $500 million by recalling the faulty chips). So if you don't want to deal with the bug, use a non-Intel mobo (such as Compaq's).
>Wouldn't you incur some sort of performance hit
Well, yes. What Transmeta is essentially doing is an emulation of multiple foreign instructions sets running on top of their native instruction set. Thing is, by doing it the way they are, they may have been able to get the hardware sufficiently faster to more than make up for it. See my previous post.
OK, these are just a few other bits of interest I picked out of the patent:
:-). Suffice it to say that traditional VLIW CPUs fetch multiple instructions at once, and rely on the compiler to ensure that there are no dependencies between instructions in a fetch group (if the compiler can't find x number of independents, it will pad the holes with non-operations, or NOPs). Looking at Transmeta's patent, it appears that rather than a compiler doing this checking, their code-translation software will be doing it on the fly. RISC/CISC machines, on the other hand, typically do this checking in hardware. But Transmeta's reasoning seems to be that doing it in hardware adds complexity, hence lower clock rates, and also doesn't make multiple instruction sets very feasible.
:-)
In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the morph host is a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor which is designed with a plurality of processing channels.
I'm not going to go into huge detail about VLIW machines (particularly since I don't know all that much about them
Regarding the instruction translation and subsequent caching I mentioned in my previous post, a quote from the patent illuminates the matter a little more:
The code morphing software of the microprocessor...includes a translator portion which decodes the instructions of the target application, converts those target instructions to the primitive host instructions capable of execution by the morph host, optimizes the operations required by the target instructions, reorders and schedules the primitive instructions into VLIW instructions (a translation) for the morph host, and executes the host VLIW instructions.
When the particular target instruction sequence is next encountered in running the application, the host translation will then be found in the translation buffer and immediately executed without the necessity of translating, optimizing, reordering, or rescheduling. Using the advanced techniques described below, it has been estimated that the translation for a target instruction (once completely translated) will be found in the translation buffer all but once for each one million or so executions of the translation. Consequently, after a first translation, all of the steps required for translation such as decoding, fetching primitive instructions, optimizing the primitive instructions, rescheduling into a host translation, and storing in the translation buffer may be eliminated from the processing required. Since the processor for which the target instructions were written must decode, fetch, reorder, and reschedule each instruction each time the instruction is executed, this drastically reduces the work required for executing the target instructions and increases the speed of the microprocessor of the present invention.
Transmeta seems to have an excellent idea here. They're caching optimized translations of the incoming instructions, so rather than have to translate and optimize over and over each time you see that bit of code, you do it once and then just grab it from the cache. Due to the spatial and temporal locality of programs (ie the fact that your accesses to instructions are not random, but are localized in loops, etc), this cache ("translation buffer") will only fail to have a translation present once every million instructions. So you're doing *one* translation every million cycles, rather than a million translations like current processors would have to do. Interestingly enough, a scheme like this was brought up as a discussion item in my Superscalar Processor Design class a couple of weeks ago, though my professor used the example of an specialized Alpha decoding/translating x86 and caching the results. One might even write the translations back out to disk as an attachment to the original executable, so that the next time you run the program that's fewer translations you have to do, and eventually you'll have a fully translated version on your hard disk for optimal speed. I guess we'll just have to wait to see if Transmeta does something similar.
One embodiment of the enhanced hardware includes sixty-four working registers in the integer unit and thirty-two working registers in the floating point unit. The embodiment also includes an enhanced set of target registers which include all of the frequently changed registers of the target processor necessary to provide the state of that processor; these include condition control registers and other registers necessary for control of the simulated system.
It seems this new chip is going to have a lot of registers. As Cartman would say, sweeeeeet!
The patent also provides some sample C code, the corresponding x86 assembly, and some sample optimizations the Transmeta system may perform. It's a little more than half way down the page, if you want to look, just scroll until you see code
Some notes for those who may want a more in-detail explanation:
:). This means that if your code sequence is A,B,C; the CPU may actually execute it such that B is done executing before A. But B's results cannot be written to system memory or the architected registers ("machine state")until you know that instruction A didn't generate an exception. That's so that you can provide precise exception handling, ie that the OS can service A's exception and then resume exection with B. If you don't wait to do your memory store, then you'll end up executing B twice, which you didn't intend. So that's what all the talk in the beginning of the patent about memory stores, etc, is about.
The beginning of the patent ("claims") is essentially just a list of things that all modern, superscalar, out-of-order processors do, and saying "hey we do this too".
Basically, out-of-order machines execute instructions out of their program order (hence the name
If you get past all the uninteresting stuff like that in the beginning, you'll find the following:
"The present invention overcomes the problems of the prior art and provides a microprocessor which is faster than microprocessors of the prior art, is capable of running all of the software for all of the operating systems which may be run by a large number of families of prior art microprocessors, yet is less expensive than prior art microprocessors. "
The idea it seems is that rather than making complex hardware to execute the instructions and perform speed enhancements, they're doing speed optimizations in software. Which in turn allows very simple hardware(which in turn should translate to really high clock speeds). It seems that Transmeta's bet with this is that the penalty incurred by doing software rather than hardware optimizations is offset by the increase in clock speed and decrease in hardware cost.
Using such an approach should also make running multiple instruction sets a much easier task. Currently processors do their instruction decoding in hardware. But if Transmeta has managed to do this decoding (fast) in software, then they can just add a little more software to allow multiple instruction sets. They also seem to be caching the translations of non-native to native instructions in a memory structure of some sort, so that they minimize the redundant emulation computations.
Actually, to address gupg's comment, it also seems that they should not need *any* special compiler support, because they can run stuff that was compiled for any of the various instruction sets they choose to support. So they themselves should not need to do compiler work. I would guess that the reason they're hiring all sorts of compiler folks is that they need people to do the afore-mentioned software instruction translation, and the people best suited for that are compiler people since they work on the instruction level all the time. Most other programmers don't have to deal with anything other than high-level languages, and so would not be particularly well suited to doing what Transmeta is doing.
Anyway, hopefully this explained things a bit more to everyone. My reading and explanation of the patent was pretty quick since I have to go to class in a few minutes. I'll finish reading the patent afterwards and add anything else I think you might like to know.
Cheers,
Stradivarius
most of the more egregious abuses were the result of corrupt associations between lesser church officials and secular authority.
Agreed.
Blaming the Pope is just not fair
Well, putting the entire blame on the Pope would certainly be unfair. As you mentioned, many of the worst abuses were not due directly to the Pope's actions but were committed by lesser officials. However, the environment created by the Pope's position contributed to the abuse, and in that sense I think there is a certain amount of blame that should be laid at his feet.
His point was that, while individual popes might be corrupt, the church as a whole was not.
I may have misinterpreted his post, thank you for the clarification. However, if we use your interpretation, then I would ask this: at what point do we consider the "church as a whole" to be corrupt? If that would require every clergyman to be corrupt, well then I doubt we could ever consider the Church as a whole to be corrupt. But what if 60% were corrupt at some point? Is the institution considered corrupt, or not?
I tend to view corruption as a disease. The Church has been infected by it at various points in history to various degrees. Has it ever succumbed totally? No. But it has been sick, and that was simply what I wished to point out, as it seemed to me that he had been saying that the church had remained uncontaminated throughout history.
Well, I need to get to class, so I'll wrap this up. Hopefully I clarified my position.
--Stradivarius
where will you find artists and musicians to work [for free] on an open source game?
You could also say, "where will you find programmers to work [for free] on an open source game?" I think you might very well get artists doing some stuff in their spare time just as you get people coding OSS in their spare time. For the same reasons.
Actually, the non-opened-minded folks here on /. seem to fall into 2 categories:
1.) Apple bad, Linux good (the majority)
2.) Apple good, Linux bad (a minority)
I should also note that the skit wasn't really bashing Apple so much as Steve Jobs (at least, that's how it seemed to me). And Jobs isn't exactly Mr. Innocent, from all accounts he's an ass. Great marketer/"interim" CEO, certainly, but on a personal level he seems to act like a real ass at times. And so there are those who dislike Jobs for that reason (I admit to being among that group). There are also those who feel Apple is extremely misleading in its advertising, and who dislike Apple for that (yep, that's me too). And then there are those who feel that the OS, on a technical level, "sucks" (me again, though that very well may change if/when I get a chance to play with OS X). And then there are those who just like to bash Apple 'cause they think it's the cool thing to do (not me).
My point here is mainly that having a dislike for Apple and/or Mr. Jobs does not make one closed-minded. I personally can see some good things about Apple systems, as well as areas where they could improve. I wouldn't take the Apple jokes too seriously, most companies in the spotlight get them (witness the plethora of M$ jokes, those about Slowlaris, etc)
my PC has rounded corners :-p
:)
And I really don't much resemblance between the lean looking Enterprise and the squat iMac.
Hmm...an iMac with a built-in urinal. Nifty idea. :-)
He did his research. The fact is that the Rage 128 Pro (that which is in the G3/G4) is a very mediocre video card these days. Nothing near what you'd get with a TNT2 based card, or even a Voodoo3.
You'd think Apple would get a deal going with nVidia or 3dfx to get something better. This is one area where Apple could definitely improve their offerings.
Well, maybe they would if such a thing existed :-) Problem is, there isn't any such thing as a TNT3 Ultra. Or any TNT3 for that matter...there are TNT2 Ultras (the best consumer cards out there right now), and the next thing from nVidia is called the GeForce 256 (cards based on it are coming this fall).
And no Pope has ever been able to sway to evil the beliefs of the Church
What then should we consider the Inquisition to be? I'd say it qualifies as evil, and certainly was created and sanctioned by the Pope.
And corruption has long existed within the Church, (particularly in the times leading up to the Protestant Reformation). Granted, I suspect that it is less today (due to reform efforts as well as the loss of secular power of the Church), but I'd say it's a stretch to claim that evil has *no* power in the Church.
but religion without structure is like a night out drinking without structure. Beer after liquor never sicker, liquor after beer your in the clear!
Structured religion does not necessarily mean religion organized in the context of the Church. Christianity has structure, but one need not be a member of the Church to be a Christian. The Church is an organization built on top of the religion, it is not the religion itself. If the Church disappeared tomorrow, Christianity would still exist.
ah...comparisons between religion and beer. Being a Christian and being drunk. This is the sort of thing to drive certain Christian fanatics up the wall. Fun :-)
:) I'm just envisioning a certain fanatical Christian girl from back home who was always preaching at everyone, and who I'd send into fits by questioning her (often ridiculous) claims :-) I find making fun of the mindlessly fanatical can be highly entertaining. At least for a while, until you realize that there is no hope of actually getting them to *think* about the beliefs they have. Sigh.
BTW, I'm a Christian, so don't think I'm dissing Jesus or strong beliefs here
but if that's what the majority or any movement degenerates to, then that (in my eyes) IS the movement
This brings up the interesting question of, does the Church (and by this I assume we're speaking of the Roman Catholic Church, which was the organization that persecuted Galileo) truly make up or represent the majority of Christians? Does the Church truly "dominate" public and cultural life?
And if it does include the majority, do the "members" of the RCC actually agree with the "official" beliefs of the Church? (This actually applies to me in particular, being a Christian who is technically a Roman Catholic, yet disagrees with many of the silly proclamations coming out of the Vatican. Which is why I typically refer to myself as Christian rather than Catholic.) It is quite possible that the majority of Christians do not believe the "official" Church dogma. For example, there was a study involving Roman Catholics a while back, and they found that 50% of them were pro-choice, while the other half were anti-abortion. Yet the Church's position has been unequivocally anti-abortion. Makes you wonder in what other areas the membership disagrees with the organized religion's leadership.
Something to keep in mind about organized religion, at least in the RCC, is that the leadership does NOT necessarily represent the 'masses'. It's not a democracy, the membership does not elect the leadership. I can't go to church and vote for who the next pope should be. And often the membership ignores the leadership. So while the Pope and company may say one thing, don't assume that it is representative of the beliefs of the majority of Christians.
Besides, if you look at the history of organized Chrisitanity, it usually has nothing or little to do with the teachings of Jesus. The Crusades were a prime example of this. True Christians, those who actually try to follow the path Jesus set, would not do such a thing, IMHO (and yes, I see a certain irony in stating what things "true Christians" would do, but my point is that Christianity != Church)
Actually, I *think* he meant that he thought the question marks were some Windows created thing, so that if viewing on a Windows platform it would look correct. I think we all realize that NT is Windows :-)
It's not really a Windows problem, it's a problem with whatever Katz uses to write these things (probably Word). I've written plenty of things using Windows applications (though not Word) and have not had this ? problem.
what software is there on macintosh that doesn't exist or there isn't a very similar replacement for on windows or something else?
:) But, knowing a lot of ppl involved in music-related pursuits (such as recording/editing), the software for sound editing and such things are supposedly better/more plentiful on the Mac. I personally cannot attest to whether this is true or not; it could be the music types are just used to their Macs so haven't experimented as much with other platforms. Or they could be right. But such is their claim, FWIW.
Well, I'm not quite the expert in this either
I think the idea is that eventually, the system is supposed to be able to determine the position/heading of a missile based on radar stations and/or satellites around the world, and then that data is used to launch an interceptor missile. The military obviously doesn't think that the launch site will be announced. And certainly, the ICBM in question could be launched from a submarine somewhere, so the attacker is not necessarily known. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have a method for destroying the incoming ICBM before it hits a city.
One thing to consider is that even if the "big nuclear powers" committed themselves to disarmament, that doesn't mean that rogue states like North Korea and Iraq would. So then, the big powers are leaving themselves vulnerable to such nations. At least if you have nukes too, there's always the threat of mutually assured destruction. Granted, MAD may not be enough if you have some lunatic in power in a rogue state, but it's a deterrent in many cases. And I personally feel a bit better knowing that if some country decides to try to nuke us, that A) we're not ignoring the threat, and may have a defense ready in a few years, and B) that since we have nukes, if they tried anything like that we have retained the capabilities to respond in kind.
You're also making the assumption that if the gov't didn't spend the money on defense, they'd spend it on something more worthy. However, it's more likely it'd be spent on some congressman's pet pork barrel project than anything beneficial to the nation.
How can there ever be peace as long as there are so many people working on destruction?
Well, I doubt you're ever going to get rid of the destructive side of human nature, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for peace to materialize. However, if we get to the point where the defenses are sufficient to prevent/remove the ability of nations to successfully attack each other militarily, at that point we'll probably be the closest to peace we're going to get.
So wear a transparent backpack, with an opaque container of some sort inside :)
I would point out that one need not raid the military budget in order to have money to pay for helping the poor. In fact, the military, having suffered massive cuts these last several years, has planes literally falling apart because of a lack of parts. The military was stretched so thin handling two minor regional conflicts (Kosovo and the no-fly zones of Iraq) that to deal with Kosovo a good many forces were actually diverted from Iraq to Kosovo. The military needs the funds it has been allocated.
However, there are lots of pork barrel projects that could be eliminated in favor of increased spending for the poor. For example, Congress allocated a bunch of extra C-130 cargo planes for the Pentagon, despite the fact that the Pentagon *said it didn't want*. Why? Because the planes are made in the home states of a couple of influential senators. Don't trim the military budget, but don't add on unneeded things either! You can take a lot of the "pet projects" of congressmen and axe them, and have more than enough money for useful social programs.
I really don't see how you believe that affirmative action is a logical and fair practice.
For one thing, it is hypocritical. We are supposed to be an enlightened society that does not believe in racial discrimination. Hence the laws to that effect. And I totally agree that we should not discriminate on the basis of race (or gender/creed/all the other conditions those laws cover). How then do we justify affirmative action, which is a policy of racial discrimination by its very nature? Changing who becomes the victim of the discrimination does not make it any less of an evil. We're preaching one thing, but practicing the opposite.
For another, affirmative action doesn't help with the problem of racial/sexual inequalities in the workplace. Studies have shown that by far the primary beneficiaries of such programs are middle class blacks. Who aren't the ones who need the help! The ones who need help are the people in the lower economic class. Middle class people can afford college. Poor people can't.
Just because whites don't openly harass blacks on the street everyday, and just because we've got some legislation, doesn't mean the problems gone away.
No, it doesn't mean the problems have gone away (though I think there is certainly far less racism today than in the past). There are plenty of ignorant racist jerks out there, of all races. And, not to be overly cynical, there quite likely will always be some. You get any large group of people, and you're bound to find a few assholes in the group. None of this changes the fact that affirmative action does not decrease the racism in this country! If anything, it promotes an attitude that minorities are inherently incapable of succeeding without special help. We should be trying to tear down such stereotypes, not create them.
Furthermore, affirmative action does not address the underlying problems of why many minority groups are under-represented in many areas. Affirmative action is trying to treat the symptoms, rather than find the cure.
Blacks (just one of many possible examples) are not under-represented among Fortune 500 CEOs because they're black; it is because of the economic and social situation that the majority of blacks find themselves in:
Socially:
To get a good-paying job, one usually needs a college education. To get a good college education, you usually need to have good grades in high school. To get good grades in high school, you generally need a desire to get good grades. This is hindered by an attitude that doing well in school is "acting white". Equating whiteness with scholarship is ridiculous, of course, but try telling this to a lot of black teenagers whose friends keep ragging on them about being "white". Add to this the lack of blacks in certain areas (ie Fortune 500 CEOs), which means few black role models in these positions. There is a strong social affect on young black people away from doing well in academic pursuits; this needs to be addressed before we'll see any *real* progress.
There are similar situations with other minority groups in this country. For example, many of the minorities in this country have immigrated from non-English speaking countries, and as such are at a disadvantage economically if they can't communicate in English. Sadly, even many native born Americans whose parents are American, etc, can't speak decent English.
Economically:
Getting a good job these days usually requires a college degree. However, the economic situation of many minorities makes them unable to afford higher education. And the lack of higher education prevents the funds...in a nasty cycle.
If we really want to promote equality, we should do away with racially-based preferences, and instead do the following:
1. Increase forms of financial aid to the financially diadvantaged so that those who wish to attend college can afford it. There are a lot of people out there this could benefit, of all races; though it would help minorities more (due to the economic situation of most minorities being worse than the average white situation)
2. Increase programs that tackle the social aspect of things. Make sure that minorities feel that they can go into any field of work, that it's not "being white". Increase English literacy programs. Having a mastery of English is a huge help in acquiring and keeping a good job.
3. Improve elementary through high school education. I can't stress the need for this enough. A good grade school education is the foundation upon which all future learning is going to be built. Hold all students to high standards. We're graduating students who can barely read. If they can't do that there's no way in hell they're gonna get a good job and bring themselves to a higher standard of living.
Oh, and in regards to your comment:
1/4 of all black males in the US are felons and no longer have the right to vote
I really don't see how that has anything to do with affirmative action. The solution to this is for black males to stop committing felonies. This is a case of a significant subset of the black population shooting themselves in the foot, so to speak. It's their choice, not something forced upon them.
I very much agree that moderators need to moderate where needed, not just randomly. This is why the moderation system works, because the moderators have judgment in what needs to be moderated. Removing or reducing the ability to exercise that judgment will merely make the moderation system less effective.
If moderators promoting personal agendas is seen as a problem, the following should fix that:
1) meta-moderation, which Slashdot is already doing.
2) increasing the number of moderators/decreasing the moderation points per moderator.
Say you normally get your comments moderated up to, say, 3. Pretty good. But then suppose you just want to provide a little bit of information, or a brief comment; something that wouldn't warrant a 3. It would get the 3 anyway; which might also trigger the Highlight Threshold for some people (depending on individuals' settings for this).
One perhaps better way would be to take the average of past comments and create a separate variable, maybe call it AverageScore. Then give users a choice in their prefs whether to add the AverageScore to the Score, or add a fraction of the AverageScore to the Score (I envision 1/2 or 1/3 of AverageScore, rounded to an integer), or do nothing with AverageScore.
Another consideration with such a system is that Slashdot would have to find the AverageScore of every user who posted on a given page, do manipulations based on the viewer's prefs, and use that in the dynamic generation of the page. This could be more load on the server than any value we might get out of it.
Personally, I don't see a need to have a historical score influencing a present score. The moderation works pretty well at bringing out the good stuff and eliminating the crap. Adding a predictor value like AverageScore seems redundant at the least, and it could interfere in an undesirable way with the moderation process.