The issues that I think would be there with SMP would involve synchronizing locks etc. They are trying to do a lot of out of order operations, falling back on careful code when their optimizations fail. That keeps their pipeline full. But to get to a safe lock they need to flush that to get to a state where they can. Which will lose performance.
They don't see an upper MHz limit for Crusoe. The aim is to go for a simple architecture which produces little heat for the performance, and then up the performance. If they stay in business, Moore should be on their side. Right now they cannot get the performance they want though.
I think SMP would be hard. But I could be wrong.
They can do other instruction sets. Eventually they would like to do multiple instruction sets in parallel. (Think moving the JVM into the machine.) However they will likely have a harder time squeezing performance out of RISC than CISC.
I don't know the status of 64-bit. Internally their chip is 128 bit though, so it should be doable. But I think they prefer AMD's approach. (I think that Microsoft will discover the hard way that AMD left them an upgrade path they can live with while Intel did not - the barrier to entry that Microsoft erected is working against IA64 now.)
I believe that Transmeta will do something extreme. If they can hang on, they have enormous potential. But if they cannot survive this critical period, they will leave a hole in the ground.
Oh, the one technical detail everyone seems to ignore. There have been many micro-controller architectures. But x86 was not intended to be one and is rather difficult to emulate. They claim to have real breakthroughs and I believe them.
They found a bug that would crash old versions of Netscape's email reader consistently.
I had to upgrade Netscape because my wife got tired of certain people's emails doing that. It turns out that they also broke a bunch of production jobs for a friend because the header was not properly separated from the body. (Which is possibly why Netscape crapped out.)
Oh, you didn't hear about it so this is a lie? No. First of all I understood the politics on Microsoft's part so I didn't bother to complain to them. And I know the people who were running it don't actually understand enough about how computers work to know why this was a bad thing, or why Microsoft wouldn't care. So I explained to my wife, got a more recent version of Netscape, and forgot about it.
This is the "extend" part of Microsoft's embrace, extend, extinguish pattern.
This week I noticed that Perl had two BSD copyrights with the advertising clause. (Take a look at the C code SDBM_File is based on.) Until July 1999 when that was dropped, Perl was in violation.
Section 5 of the GPL makes it clear to me that it is a copyright statement that may be read as an offered agreement. The GPL would therefore depend for enforcement upon copyright law.
I am interested in this because I am in the process drafting a proposed new Artistic license that has a similar structure. (Albeit more clearly separated out.) The current license is...well let us not discuss that in public.:-)
They cannot raise venture capital, cannot raise bonds, and have bonds due in a few months. Without a miracle (eg being bought out by Borders) they are toast. IIRC by Christmas.
Then Barnes and Noble will be able to raise prices and actually start making a healthy profit online. Which will let them get back to wiping out Borders...
Perl has been doing this for many years with GPL and Artistic, easy to do, no possible problems.
You offer the code under a choice of licenses, refuse all patches that don't fit both licenses, and call it a day. If you wish to use Perl with some drivers or some packages, you may need to use the Artistic license. If you need to use it in others you may need to accept the GPL. Most people don't ever bother deciding...
It sickens me to see people complaining about immigrants labour and unwilling to think about the factors that make it so economical.
When I look at people like Linus Torvalds and Abigail (Perl programmer) I am reminded that what built the USA was the willingness to accept the best and brightest from everywhere else.
Now here is my proposal:
No or few limits on how many may work on immigrant visas.
The original sponsor must be put up a bond up front for all immigration fees for the sponsoring period, regardless of whether the immigrant is still working for them.
Immigrants once in this country should be free to seek any job they want.
Before people say I am crazy, think about it. Under this plan hiring an immigrant costs more. You have to pay a salary that competes with other employers, and you have to pay immigration fees as well as a sunk cost.
Your willingness to pay is sufficient proof that the person is good and you truly cannot be fill it with an American. As long as jobs go begging, the US is willing to skim the cream of the crop. Very little bureaucracy required. It just works...
As you say, whenever their football team beats Harvard, donations go up. (They make more in donations than tuition, and that is saying something.) The education provided is quite good, but behind the scenes people are aware which side the bread is buttered on.
Of course they are not very open about it. I understand that a lot of schools who are really known for their football teams are truly a lot worse. But coming from a Canadian school the contrast struck me.
To encourage people to make public their inventions so that they eventually enter the public domain.
You were allowed to look at it. You were supposed to look at it. But you were not supposed to use it without paying RSA until the patent expires or they say you can.
The roadmap chosen is to have 5.7.0 come out, and then take out the risky bits and call the result 5.6.1. So that should be arriving, probably within the month.
At the moment here are recent releases in terms of my trust for them:
5.005_03
5.7.0
5.6.0
Why?
Because there are a number of significant bugs in 5.6.0 that are fixed in 5.7.0. The worst of which IMO is this:
For instance the quality of many online magazines is dropping sharply because of it.
There is no shortage of content online. In fact there is rather too much of it. Some of it good, much bad, but it is out there. (From the point of view of the person who is trying to make money providing it that is. Clearly not from the point of the view who wants content that does not yet exist.)
However until content appears in a digestable form, it is not information. Which is why sites which provide some sort of searching and indexing of content (search engines,/., etc) do so well. They provide little valuable content of their own, but turn existing content into information. This is actually more valuable in an online world than trying to produce good content.
Which sucks if you want to produce some content of your own.
If other intelligent, mechanically capable life exists in the universe, then why don't we see them?
Forseeable advances in technology include self-reproducing machines. (Call Von Neumann machines after this argument.) Other forseeable advances include our sending these machines into space to colonize other environments. At current rates within the century, probably within decades.
Even given the speed of light problem, within a few million years our machines likely will have colonized all corners of our galaxy.
The odds of intelligent life achieving technology twice at essentially the same moment are pretty low. Given what we expect ourselves to do, it is a pretty safe bet that if we locate extra-terrestrial intelligence it won't be in our galaxy, it will be in another.
Perl supports full closures and anonymous functions. It may not be a "real" functional language, but it isn't officially anything other than darned handy to have around...
You can certainly program Perl in a functional style.
BTW sales of Win2K have been abysmal. A fact you don't hear much about, but which lies behind some of Microsoft's actions. (Trying to squeeze more revenue from existing streams.) Go out and look for yourself for some links on that (unfortunately not well enough publicized) story.
They got a different certification (IIRC from England) that they called C2-equivalent. Well their opinion on the equivalence is irrelevant, it wasn't C2 which is what they tried to make it look like.
Lies? Microsoft? Whodathunkit?
Images not allowed here so visit our usual sign elsewhere...
Else Microsoft would be jumping up and down screaming about how they were really certified. Instead they play BS word games and nobody calls them on it.:-(
I know Karsten from the same online forums that we both knew Ed Curry from. Microsoft did a ton of stuff to him. Some of which simply cannot be sustantiated. For instance after his company was destroyed, at one point he got a job, then his boss' boss got a phone call from Microsoft, and his boss was ordered to fire him. Which kinda sucks when you are supporting a wife and kid.
As for the current location of that online community, follow my.sig.
BTW a question you probably have right now is whether or not we can be believed. Well we both have sufficient credibility to be automatic +2's on this site, and in fact were among the first batch of moderators selected here. You could also do a Google search for either of us. Or look for Ed Curry.
Yeah, what happened to him is pretty astounding. The lack of press reporting on it is pathetic. But I assure you that the basic story is true.
As Andrew Schulman conclusively proved in Unauthorized Windows 95 that the 32-bit system had to constantly make calls to the 16-bit system, and therefore a single rogue 16-bit application could very easily hold hostage both the OS and all 32-bit applications.
Windows 95 is still built on top of DOS. The 32-bit parts of the OS are pre-emptively multi-tasked. However they have to go through a 16-bit cooperatively multi-tasked core.
Therefore you can run a whole lot of 32-bit apps and it looks pre-emptive. But run a single 16-bit application from Win 3.1 days in the mix, and the illusion evaporates.
A few pages. Some good statistics. A sample calculation showing that at the time and place he was writing hiring a new developer vs getting a better office space was no contest in bang for the buck. Over a factor of a hundred different.
A couple of references. Including IBM's paper describing their design considerations for the Santa Teresa complex back in the 70's.
Cheers,
Ben
PS In case it isn't obvious, this is a recommendation.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
One of the biggest barriers everyone is facing right now is having the chip melt. It is a constant battle.
Transmeta is not facing that particular barrier. Plus their chip is simpler hence easier to iterate through generations.
Therefore over time the performance gap should narrow and reverse, if only they can stay alive.
Cheers,
Ben
PS This opinion is based on a co-worker's conversation with some key people at Transmeta last Feb.
The issues that I think would be there with SMP would involve synchronizing locks etc. They are trying to do a lot of out of order operations, falling back on careful code when their optimizations fail. That keeps their pipeline full. But to get to a safe lock they need to flush that to get to a state where they can. Which will lose performance.
Cheers,
Ben
They don't see an upper MHz limit for Crusoe. The aim is to go for a simple architecture which produces little heat for the performance, and then up the performance. If they stay in business, Moore should be on their side. Right now they cannot get the performance they want though.
I think SMP would be hard. But I could be wrong.
They can do other instruction sets. Eventually they would like to do multiple instruction sets in parallel. (Think moving the JVM into the machine.) However they will likely have a harder time squeezing performance out of RISC than CISC.
I don't know the status of 64-bit. Internally their chip is 128 bit though, so it should be doable. But I think they prefer AMD's approach. (I think that Microsoft will discover the hard way that AMD left them an upgrade path they can live with while Intel did not - the barrier to entry that Microsoft erected is working against IA64 now.)
I believe that Transmeta will do something extreme. If they can hang on, they have enormous potential. But if they cannot survive this critical period, they will leave a hole in the ground.
Oh, the one technical detail everyone seems to ignore. There have been many micro-controller architectures. But x86 was not intended to be one and is rather difficult to emulate. They claim to have real breakthroughs and I believe them.
Cheers,
Ben
They found a bug that would crash old versions of Netscape's email reader consistently.
I had to upgrade Netscape because my wife got tired of certain people's emails doing that. It turns out that they also broke a bunch of production jobs for a friend because the header was not properly separated from the body. (Which is possibly why Netscape crapped out.)
Oh, you didn't hear about it so this is a lie? No. First of all I understood the politics on Microsoft's part so I didn't bother to complain to them. And I know the people who were running it don't actually understand enough about how computers work to know why this was a bad thing, or why Microsoft wouldn't care. So I explained to my wife, got a more recent version of Netscape, and forgot about it.
This is the "extend" part of Microsoft's embrace, extend, extinguish pattern.
Regards,
Ben
This week I noticed that Perl had two BSD copyrights with the advertising clause. (Take a look at the C code SDBM_File is based on.) Until July 1999 when that was dropped, Perl was in violation.
Accidents happen.
Cheers,
Ben
Section 5 of the GPL makes it clear to me that it is a copyright statement that may be read as an offered agreement. The GPL would therefore depend for enforcement upon copyright law.
:-)
I am interested in this because I am in the process drafting a proposed new Artistic license that has a similar structure. (Albeit more clearly separated out.) The current license is...well let us not discuss that in public.
Thanks,
Ben
They cannot raise venture capital, cannot raise bonds, and have bonds due in a few months. Without a miracle (eg being bought out by Borders) they are toast. IIRC by Christmas.
Then Barnes and Noble will be able to raise prices and actually start making a healthy profit online. Which will let them get back to wiping out Borders...
Cheers,
Ben
Perl has been doing this for many years with GPL and Artistic, easy to do, no possible problems.
You offer the code under a choice of licenses, refuse all patches that don't fit both licenses, and call it a day. If you wish to use Perl with some drivers or some packages, you may need to use the Artistic license. If you need to use it in others you may need to accept the GPL. Most people don't ever bother deciding...
Cheers,
Ben
When I look at people like Linus Torvalds and Abigail (Perl programmer) I am reminded that what built the USA was the willingness to accept the best and brightest from everywhere else.
Now here is my proposal:
Before people say I am crazy, think about it. Under this plan hiring an immigrant costs more. You have to pay a salary that competes with other employers, and you have to pay immigration fees as well as a sunk cost.
Your willingness to pay is sufficient proof that the person is good and you truly cannot be fill it with an American. As long as jobs go begging, the US is willing to skim the cream of the crop. Very little bureaucracy required. It just works...
Cheers,
Ben
Dartmouth College.
I went to grad school there.
As you say, whenever their football team beats Harvard, donations go up. (They make more in donations than tuition, and that is saying something.) The education provided is quite good, but behind the scenes people are aware which side the bread is buttered on.
Of course they are not very open about it. I understand that a lot of schools who are really known for their football teams are truly a lot worse. But coming from a Canadian school the contrast struck me.
Cheers,
Ben
To encourage people to make public their inventions so that they eventually enter the public domain.
You were allowed to look at it. You were supposed to look at it. But you were not supposed to use it without paying RSA until the patent expires or they say you can.
They just said you can.
Cheers,
Ben
The roadmap chosen is to have 5.7.0 come out, and then take out the risky bits and call the result 5.6.1. So that should be arriving, probably within the month.
At the moment here are recent releases in terms of my trust for them:
5.005_03
5.7.0
5.6.0
Why?
Because there are a number of significant bugs in 5.6.0 that are fixed in 5.7.0. The worst of which IMO is this:
perl -e 'my $x = 10; $x = "2" . $x; print $x + 0'
(In 5.6.0 prints "10".)
Cheers,
Ben
For instance the quality of many online magazines is dropping sharply because of it.
/., etc) do so well. They provide little valuable content of their own, but turn existing content into information. This is actually more valuable in an online world than trying to produce good content.
There is no shortage of content online. In fact there is rather too much of it. Some of it good, much bad, but it is out there. (From the point of view of the person who is trying to make money providing it that is. Clearly not from the point of the view who wants content that does not yet exist.)
However until content appears in a digestable form, it is not information. Which is why sites which provide some sort of searching and indexing of content (search engines,
Which sucks if you want to produce some content of your own.
Cheers,
Ben
If other intelligent, mechanically capable life exists in the universe, then why don't we see them?
Forseeable advances in technology include self-reproducing machines. (Call Von Neumann machines after this argument.) Other forseeable advances include our sending these machines into space to colonize other environments. At current rates within the century, probably within decades.
Even given the speed of light problem, within a few million years our machines likely will have colonized all corners of our galaxy.
The odds of intelligent life achieving technology twice at essentially the same moment are pretty low. Given what we expect ourselves to do, it is a pretty safe bet that if we locate extra-terrestrial intelligence it won't be in our galaxy, it will be in another.
:-)
Cheers,
Ben
Perl supports full closures and anonymous functions. It may not be a "real" functional language, but it isn't officially anything other than darned handy to have around...
You can certainly program Perl in a functional style.
Cheers,
Ben
An old one.
An older one.
Some old benchmarks.
BTW sales of Win2K have been abysmal. A fact you don't hear much about, but which lies behind some of Microsoft's actions. (Trying to squeeze more revenue from existing streams.) Go out and look for yourself for some links on that (unfortunately not well enough publicized) story.
Cheers,
Ben
Actually that was another lie.
They got a different certification (IIRC from England) that they called C2-equivalent. Well their opinion on the equivalence is irrelevant, it wasn't C2 which is what they tried to make it look like.
Lies? Microsoft? Whodathunkit?
Images not allowed here so visit our usual sign elsewhere...
Cheers,
Ben
Else Microsoft would be jumping up and down screaming about how they were really certified. Instead they play BS word games and nobody calls them on it. :-(
Regards,
Ben
I know Karsten from the same online forums that we both knew Ed Curry from. Microsoft did a ton of stuff to him. Some of which simply cannot be sustantiated. For instance after his company was destroyed, at one point he got a job, then his boss' boss got a phone call from Microsoft, and his boss was ordered to fire him. Which kinda sucks when you are supporting a wife and kid.
.sig.
As for the current location of that online community, follow my
BTW a question you probably have right now is whether or not we can be believed. Well we both have sufficient credibility to be automatic +2's on this site, and in fact were among the first batch of moderators selected here. You could also do a Google search for either of us. Or look for Ed Curry.
Yeah, what happened to him is pretty astounding. The lack of press reporting on it is pathetic. But I assure you that the basic story is true.
Regards,
Ben
As Andrew Schulman conclusively proved in Unauthorized Windows 95 that the 32-bit system had to constantly make calls to the 16-bit system, and therefore a single rogue 16-bit application could very easily hold hostage both the OS and all 32-bit applications.
Microsoft's lies to the contrary notwithstanding.
Cheers,
Ben
Windows 95 is still built on top of DOS. The 32-bit parts of the OS are pre-emptively multi-tasked. However they have to go through a 16-bit cooperatively multi-tasked core.
Therefore you can run a whole lot of 32-bit apps and it looks pre-emptive. But run a single 16-bit application from Win 3.1 days in the mix, and the illusion evaporates.
Cheers,
Ben
In Rapid Development. Chapter 30.
:-)
A few pages. Some good statistics. A sample calculation showing that at the time and place he was writing hiring a new developer vs getting a better office space was no contest in bang for the buck. Over a factor of a hundred different.
A couple of references. Including IBM's paper describing their design considerations for the Santa Teresa complex back in the 70's.
Cheers,
Ben
PS In case it isn't obvious, this is a recommendation.
SCO had a lot of VAR contacts. VAR is a big part of Caldera's strategy.
:-)
Note that with all of the bad blood SCO had in the Linux community there is no way that SCO could push Linux to that channel. Caldera can.
Cheers,
Ben
If so then you have a ton of major problems in your code and just don't know it yet. I wish I was kidding. :-(
:-)
A site I think does a pretty good job of helping Perl newbies learn is Perl Monks. OTOH I like to answer questions there so I am biased.
Cheers,
Ben
then you simply don't understand what the theory of evolution says.
'nuff said.
Ben