I believe advanced AI techniques like nueral nets will be the next "killer app" for MMOGs. Learning AI is not impractical for a single player stand alone game but it is not as "exciting" nor do single player system have enough computing power and "experience" to really put a nueral net through its paces.
--> Neural nets are less efective than expert systems based on inference rules. Nowdays the most intelligent engines are driven by real-time programmable expert systems, as flexible inference rules (propositional logic) are, by far, a very kind way for giving "near natural" acting-response modeling.
About your whole comment, I think that you want to argumentate a way for self learned tactics, improving the skills for rich acting and surpresive/imprevisible/autodidactic learning. But as in common life, despite how clever/intelligent you can be, you need a "well known model" to reach the optimum (see maths, physics, psicology, etc.), as you can't go too far without a base knowledge, the same way as a child learns how to become an adult.
My bet, non sense as any other, is that expert systems (propositional logic, inference) will continue on the top as new schemes are being added to its basis. Neural nets are, IMO, mostly marketting, as are just function interpolator/extrapolator (despite how complex could be your system), but often retrieved as the Holly Grial of the AI (the same goes for genetic computing... a way to get suboptimum results by being too much lazy for reading Floyd or Dijkstra).
Similarly all the talk about doing with cache and VM is bullshit. Instead of having each vector unit interfere with a shared cache as is done today, they've simply added smaller per ALU caches to the design, and complemented it with a device that is a souped up cache controller/MMU unit (the DMAC).
-> The DMAC it is not a "souped up cache controller/MMU unit", it is just a MMU with multiple data paths, does not apply caching; in fact, the PS2 uses a similar memory routing scheme.
...The 64 MB of high speed rambus memory, may be all that is required for a PS3, but in a workstation implementation that memory is L3 cache.
-> The PS3 it is not intended as a workstation, these 64MB, or more if they decide to increase it, as common sense points, it is just RAM, fast but tagged less RAM.
The beauty of Cell will be in proving the ALUs with a bit more autonomy (thought not much more, they are still basically vector units), and enabling the main CPU to keep doing useful work while a number of ALUs are cranking away. Other novel design features provide for communication and synchronization with other units via remote addressing and timing (that's what those realtime clock signals are all about).
-> PS2 vector units had his own program counter, being able to run in parallel or just as a DSP. For sure you'll have the Altivec instruction set, as the PS2-R5900 has a SIMD set, but these "other units" will be also programmable (i.e. will have a program counter and syncronization opcodes) in the PS3 scheme.
Yes, I saw the same article few years ago. I got the PS2 Linux devkit for a while, and in fact, it is hard to deal with the VUs (vector units, see the Ars Technica refered in the parent).
Here is a resume of why of that architecture:
- With a ~300MHz core the target is to achieve 6 GFLOPS (about the same as a P4 @3GHz).
- You can not afford easily to give 6 GFLOPS with a single CPU running at ~300MHz.
- Then, you have to choose a design with available technology.
- Use a quite common MIPS CPU (R5900 MIPS III, and near MIPS IV compliance).
- Add two vector units with massive FMAC throughput.
- Choose a good bus design for I/O.
- Choose a GPU.
- That is, you have a PS2, state of the art computer architecture.
Of course it is not as easy as to deal with a single and powerful CPU with a "intelligent" GPU attached, but it is quite optimal for a 300MHz core... could you have done it better?;-)
Well, I'm used to program the PS2 in my spare time, with such terrible tools (gcc for the R5900, vcl for the VU's), enjoying a lot with it.
There is no way you can write high performance software for the PS2 without knowing about the internal architecture specifics.
->Shouldn't that be the natural situation? If you want to optimize a solution for a given system, you should know a bit that system. One of the "bigger" problems of the PS2 has is that the main CPU has a few cache memory, forcing developers to avoid bus stall situations, etc. but not a computer architecture issue.
For finishing, if you're not teached about one system, learn first its essentials, before blaming about "how hard to program it is".
Sony's Playstation 2 had a similar archiecture (4 CPUs: R3000, R5900, 2xVU), paralelism is achieved by specializing each CPU for a concrete task. Then, you have no need for thinking how to parallelize one task, as no task are parallelizable, but to find a task set distributabe to the CPUs (thinking that each CPU has his "virtues" and his "defects", being ideal for some tasks and inneficient for other, etc.).
You're lucky. I live in Spain, having a computer science degree (5 years at the university), programming in C since I was 14 (from 12, what a casuality, as you, but in GW-BASIC). Well, I earn about 15 euro/hour, 10 after taxes, that gives $13/hr (US $). I'm used to program LynxOS and Linux embedded toll systems, time critical, real time, etc.
I'm near 30 year old, have to pay about $1000/month for the flat, leaving just $800/month for living. If you substract the VAT applied to consumer products, I have to live with less than $600/month. If you're a "software engineer", Spain it is not a great place for living, you'll earn here more money by repairing TV, George Foreman's grills or whatever.
The funniest thing is that here the outsourcing it is being as a real alternative, as India people have still a lower income.
The cost of RAM is low enough these days that VM is not really required anymore.
I can not agree with that point. Virtual memory is not only intended for running "out of physical RAM", but also for optimizing allocated but "unused for a long time" physical RAM. Modern CPU's MMU are capable of both segmentation and paging, with quite complex memory bound detection; by don't using it you're just wasting transistors: better for you to use Motorola Coldfire, ARM MMUless or any other cheap CPU clocked at 4GHz.
There is also other approach, as example, use about 50% of system memory as swapping area (packing the data when storing and retrieving); that idea isn't new, as was used by many "RAM doublers" with both few success or gloriam.
Anyway, you can disable swapping in many systems, I'm used to do that with Linux and LynxOS.
You're right, thank you for the appointment. Both Pentium M and the Centrino chipset have both excellent design and performance, despite Pentium's IV design fiasco.
In the winner side may be kind to name ARM, IBM, AMD and VIA designs; at the loser side, Intel, MIPS and Hitachi (CPU division) for being less paranoid than expected (that was the key secret for previous uP series: be paranoid in extremis to survive).
Clue: All signals are waves. (Fourier)
-> No, Fourier said that given a signal can be substituted/equaled with an infinite sum of sinusoidal signals.
Clue #2: All electrical signals are electromagnetic waves. (Ampere)
-> There is a relation, but not are the same (look at Wikipedia).
Clue #3: Electromagnetic waves are not contained in fields, they are the fields and the fact that that energy has formed a field means that it is no longer in the wire. (Faraday)
-> May be you're mixing concepts, in fact there is electromagnetic radiation from every conducting wire, but it is a collateral consequence, it doesn't mean that you'll be unable to receive targetet frequencies on the way. Do you have wired ethernet? Then, you know that you can receive and send de data despite electromagnetic radiation;-)
Clue #4: To keep these waves from forming fields of radiation, we can place an opposing (balanced) wave near it, twisting it occasionally (twisted pair), or we can place it in a faraday cage (coax).
-> With that action you do do not keep "these waves from forming fields of radiation", simply, you avoid to spread it and stop external interferences, keeping the noise inside the shield. By the way, twisting main target is intended to avoid capacitance problems. Sorry, my explanation it is still not enough, there is a lot of documentation about these two issues, don't take my words as a definitive argument, just as a rebate.
Clue #5: Neither of these methods are used with power lines.
-> If there is no need for spending money into a no necesary subject, don't spend it to increase profit margin (first rule of engineering).
Clue #6: How much interference is released can be calculated, or observed through experimentation.
-> I agree, quite tautological.
Clue #7: "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Feynman)
-> Well, this could be rebated too, I accept it as subjective argument, then absolutely correct for you.
My apologizes if sound arrogant, I had just informative meaning.
Please, re-read the specs. In fact it is near-PS2 quality. The PSP has two R5000-like CPUs @333MHz (max clock), while the PS2 have one @~294MHz, that means a higher integer performance (64 bit integer operations), the PSP is weaker on floating point performance, with poorest VU's (vector units) and [I]DCT units. Also GPU and buses are less efective on the PSP (as the PS2 has 10 high speed DMA channels). I think that, as average, the PSP is near the PS2, still it is well known that the PSP will not run at his higher clock due to the need for preservate battery life.
Probably, in few months or a year a new "super long life" battery could be availabe, as new games with higher performance targets need to explode the 330MHz clock rates for the chipset. Anyway, who cares, who want to play with tiny screens when you can play on tv? Or, really do you have time to play very much for spending so much money in that apparatus? The point, for me, is not to enjoying with the games but with the computer architecture of these gems/handhelds, it's amazing to see the PSP diagrams! Enjoy, at your option.
Yes, a bug at any kernel trap is a way to crash -or find a back door into- a system. The goal/idea is that the kernel -NT, BSD, Linux or whatever- should be trap call safe. Of course, an OS with high redundancy at his trap level (read Windows NT and derivates) has a higher risk level, as people who program kernels are humans, just like you and I. As example, "commercial and very expesive real time UNIXes" are not bug free, few weeks ago we found at the office that the 'execl' kernel trap did bad his work when the thread number for a process was going above the 80% of his limit; white papers guaranted the operation, but in fact there was no such security, giving system panics and so on, dramatic.
The OS itself should not be shout-down just by an user level privilege rights. If ie6 or any other application causes system crash under non-root privilege level, it is an OS fault, as the OS must guarant interprocess safetyness and security, etc.
Yes, sure. Still Flash RAM chips have built-in 8bit RISC microprocessors (at least Infineon's flash) to bump the low voltages until 20V needed to perform flash writing (capacitance cascade).
Apart from the obvious, I was on the "64 modern super cool high end processors on a chip" way. My apologizes if I wasn't enough concise.
I am sorry, was just a typographical error. By the way, you could be a bit polite avoiding using such unkind words (I looked for "mofo" at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mofo).
About my stily, I apologize, english is my third language, I write at my best, but far from being perfect, you insensitive cloud;-)
John Von Neumann's architecture was related to a single CPU and a single CPU-driven bus, and was warped in early 80's. In the x86 PC market, the Von Neumann approach was surpassed with the DMA controller in early 80's. Later, in 90's, MCA and PCI busses were introducing bus mastering "intelligent" cards which steals PCI-bus cycles for it's operating without CPU intervention, that was multiprocessing de facto.
Today's multiple processor designs are far away from Von Neumann's designs, of course, but just by complex synchronization tricks: cache coherency, multiple syncronized buses, and some other beauty tricks.
Corolarius: we want 64 or more processors on a die, with tons of busses and 0.01 micron 30 layer dies;-)
Hey, take it easy. The 'Korean' joke is just as the others (Russia, Japan, USA, -put any contry here-, etc.). It began few weeks ago with a news flash reporting that in Korea e-mail is being used mainly by old people, despite this, younger ones in Korea prefer to use SMS or instant messaging systems.
You're right, are based on the principle of induction, and are called "magnetic loops". Try to pass with a metal waste basket, and put in on;-) (not kidding).
Greetings to the people working in toll systems...used to deal and tune these peripheals (acts just like a digital input: on/off; still you can deal with many of them simultaneously). Magnetic loops are pretty reliable/durable.
Your argument seems to be demagogical for me, as you can argument A->B where A is the Infineon case, and B is "world big problems". And, sorry if I am too much hard, your argumentation it is absoluteny non-sense.
Industry business is, by design, greedy and competitive; hey, you're living into a heartless neoliberal capitalist society, are this kind of tactics arre new for you? Well, the world, unfortunately it is plenty of them.
International and local laws avaible to correct these unfair operations should be applied, harder every time the fault is repeated. By the way, related to the human poverty and misery, I hope that some thay will arrive new laws declaring human misery illegal. The easiest way of imposing a point of view is to smash the other. I hope the humanity will not take that way, still to be lazy it is the easiest, I still believe in common efforts to achieve a better world for every one, not just one world for every one. The ideal could be one world for each one, allowing freedom to look with the color that you like, being free de facto (not in the anarchic sense, but socialdemocrat one, respecting the others to be respected, etc).
Not just not suing, but promote peer to peer music distribution. Also, they can shut up as they did for >30 years with tapes, as they didn't get hurt in sales. History tends to be cyclic, why not this time too?
May be the developer target it is not if AMD or Intel is ahead on market share. From my point of view, the greatest advance for the developer it is not only the new wide of GPR (general purpose registers), but passing from 8 to 16. With 16 GPRs compilers can achieve a huge step in performance -this point is great for the final user too-, still the ISA (instruction set architecture) being "legacy respectuous".
It's sad to have to deal with such weird ISA ia32 and 64 bit extensions, but ISA compatibility with previous x86 implementations seems to be a market imperative. RISC ISAs are, often, quite more clear and well designed, and more "emulatorable" than x86 ones due to fixed instruction lenght and a priori instruction location alignment modulus(sizeof(opcode)).
You hit the correct key. If your code it is well designed, the only one source of bugs it is the OS. Anyway, every RT-OSes have lethal bugs: still ones ensuring priority inversion detection/correction almost always lie. I'm used to work with RTOSes, and you have to be both extremely paranoic in your desing and also doing a good test plan.
Another point is to be aware of working with the "latest and supercool -put your favourite RTOS name here- OS version", your life can turn into a nightmare. If there are lives or expensive parts related to the success of your software, try to be both accurate/professional and extremely meticulous (Bonaparte to Josephine: dress me slowly because I'm in a hurry).
I think that the parent comment was unfairly modded, at least for me it interesting and maybe insightful!
Before elections there was a huge attention to data analysis, that should be applied too to the final results in order to achieve a "peaceful" and harmonic/kind social situation.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe advanced AI techniques like nueral nets will be the next "killer app" for MMOGs. Learning AI is not impractical for a single player stand alone game but it is not as "exciting" nor do single player system have enough computing power and "experience" to really put a nueral net through its paces.
--> Neural nets are less efective than expert systems based on inference rules. Nowdays the most intelligent engines are driven by real-time programmable expert systems, as flexible inference rules (propositional logic) are, by far, a very kind way for giving "near natural" acting-response modeling.
About your whole comment, I think that you want to argumentate a way for self learned tactics, improving the skills for rich acting and surpresive/imprevisible/autodidactic learning. But as in common life, despite how clever/intelligent you can be, you need a "well known model" to reach the optimum (see maths, physics, psicology, etc.), as you can't go too far without a base knowledge, the same way as a child learns how to become an adult.
My bet, non sense as any other, is that expert systems (propositional logic, inference) will continue on the top as new schemes are being added to its basis. Neural nets are, IMO, mostly marketting, as are just function interpolator/extrapolator (despite how complex could be your system), but often retrieved as the Holly Grial of the AI (the same goes for genetic computing... a way to get suboptimum results by being too much lazy for reading Floyd or Dijkstra).
For a better explanation try "The ABC of Relativity" from Bertrand Russell.
Similarly all the talk about doing with cache and VM is bullshit. Instead of having each vector unit interfere with a shared cache as is done today, they've simply added smaller per ALU caches to the design, and complemented it with a device that is a souped up cache controller/MMU unit (the DMAC).
...The 64 MB of high speed rambus memory, may be all that is required for a PS3, but in a workstation implementation that memory is L3 cache.
-> The DMAC it is not a "souped up cache controller/MMU unit", it is just a MMU with multiple data paths, does not apply caching; in fact, the PS2 uses a similar memory routing scheme.
-> The PS3 it is not intended as a workstation, these 64MB, or more if they decide to increase it, as common sense points, it is just RAM, fast but tagged less RAM.
The beauty of Cell will be in proving the ALUs with a bit more autonomy (thought not much more, they are still basically vector units), and enabling the main CPU to keep doing useful work while a number of ALUs are cranking away. Other novel design features provide for communication and synchronization with other units via remote addressing and timing (that's what those realtime clock signals are all about).
-> PS2 vector units had his own program counter, being able to run in parallel or just as a DSP. For sure you'll have the Altivec instruction set, as the PS2-R5900 has a SIMD set, but these "other units" will be also programmable (i.e. will have a program counter and syncronization opcodes) in the PS3 scheme.
Yes, I saw the same article few years ago. I got the PS2 Linux devkit for a while, and in fact, it is hard to deal with the VUs (vector units, see the Ars Technica refered in the parent).
;-)
Here is a resume of why of that architecture:
- With a ~300MHz core the target is to achieve 6 GFLOPS (about the same as a P4 @3GHz).
- You can not afford easily to give 6 GFLOPS with a single CPU running at ~300MHz.
- Then, you have to choose a design with available technology.
- Use a quite common MIPS CPU (R5900 MIPS III, and near MIPS IV compliance).
- Add two vector units with massive FMAC throughput.
- Choose a good bus design for I/O.
- Choose a GPU.
- That is, you have a PS2, state of the art computer architecture.
Of course it is not as easy as to deal with a single and powerful CPU with a "intelligent" GPU attached, but it is quite optimal for a 300MHz core... could you have done it better?
Well, I'm used to program the PS2 in my spare time, with such terrible tools (gcc for the R5900, vcl for the VU's), enjoying a lot with it.
There is no way you can write high performance software for the PS2 without knowing about the internal architecture specifics.
->Shouldn't that be the natural situation? If you want to optimize a solution for a given system, you should know a bit that system. One of the "bigger" problems of the PS2 has is that the main CPU has a few cache memory, forcing developers to avoid bus stall situations, etc. but not a computer architecture issue.
For finishing, if you're not teached about one system, learn first its essentials, before blaming about "how hard to program it is".
Sony's Playstation 2 had a similar archiecture (4 CPUs: R3000, R5900, 2xVU), paralelism is achieved by specializing each CPU for a concrete task. Then, you have no need for thinking how to parallelize one task, as no task are parallelizable, but to find a task set distributabe to the CPUs (thinking that each CPU has his "virtues" and his "defects", being ideal for some tasks and inneficient for other, etc.).
You're lucky. I live in Spain, having a computer science degree (5 years at the university), programming in C since I was 14 (from 12, what a casuality, as you, but in GW-BASIC). Well, I earn about 15 euro/hour, 10 after taxes, that gives $13/hr (US $). I'm used to program LynxOS and Linux embedded toll systems, time critical, real time, etc.
I'm near 30 year old, have to pay about $1000/month for the flat, leaving just $800/month for living. If you substract the VAT applied to consumer products, I have to live with less than $600/month. If you're a "software engineer", Spain it is not a great place for living, you'll earn here more money by repairing TV, George Foreman's grills or whatever.
The funniest thing is that here the outsourcing it is being as a real alternative, as India people have still a lower income.
The cost of RAM is low enough these days that VM is not really required anymore.
I can not agree with that point. Virtual memory is not only intended for running "out of physical RAM", but also for optimizing allocated but "unused for a long time" physical RAM. Modern CPU's MMU are capable of both segmentation and paging, with quite complex memory bound detection; by don't using it you're just wasting transistors: better for you to use Motorola Coldfire, ARM MMUless or any other cheap CPU clocked at 4GHz.
There is also other approach, as example, use about 50% of system memory as swapping area (packing the data when storing and retrieving); that idea isn't new, as was used by many "RAM doublers" with both few success or gloriam.
Anyway, you can disable swapping in many systems, I'm used to do that with Linux and LynxOS.
You're right, thank you for the appointment. Both Pentium M and the Centrino chipset have both excellent design and performance, despite Pentium's IV design fiasco.
In the winner side may be kind to name ARM, IBM, AMD and VIA designs; at the loser side, Intel, MIPS and Hitachi (CPU division) for being less paranoid than expected (that was the key secret for previous uP series: be paranoid in extremis to survive).
Clue: All signals are waves. (Fourier)
;-)
-> No, Fourier said that given a signal can be substituted/equaled with an infinite sum of sinusoidal signals.
Clue #2: All electrical signals are electromagnetic waves. (Ampere)
-> There is a relation, but not are the same (look at Wikipedia).
Clue #3: Electromagnetic waves are not contained in fields, they are the fields and the fact that that energy has formed a field means that it is no longer in the wire. (Faraday)
-> May be you're mixing concepts, in fact there is electromagnetic radiation from every conducting wire, but it is a collateral consequence, it doesn't mean that you'll be unable to receive targetet frequencies on the way. Do you have wired ethernet? Then, you know that you can receive and send de data despite electromagnetic radiation
Clue #4: To keep these waves from forming fields of radiation, we can place an opposing (balanced) wave near it, twisting it occasionally (twisted pair), or we can place it in a faraday cage (coax).
-> With that action you do do not keep "these waves from forming fields of radiation", simply, you avoid to spread it and stop external interferences, keeping the noise inside the shield. By the way, twisting main target is intended to avoid capacitance problems. Sorry, my explanation it is still not enough, there is a lot of documentation about these two issues, don't take my words as a definitive argument, just as a rebate.
Clue #5: Neither of these methods are used with power lines. -> If there is no need for spending money into a no necesary subject, don't spend it to increase profit margin (first rule of engineering).
Clue #6: How much interference is released can be calculated, or observed through experimentation.
-> I agree, quite tautological.
Clue #7: "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Feynman)
-> Well, this could be rebated too, I accept it as subjective argument, then absolutely correct for you.
My apologizes if sound arrogant, I had just informative meaning.
Please, re-read the specs. In fact it is near-PS2 quality. The PSP has two R5000-like CPUs @333MHz (max clock), while the PS2 have one @~294MHz, that means a higher integer performance (64 bit integer operations), the PSP is weaker on floating point performance, with poorest VU's (vector units) and [I]DCT units. Also GPU and buses are less efective on the PSP (as the PS2 has 10 high speed DMA channels). I think that, as average, the PSP is near the PS2, still it is well known that the PSP will not run at his higher clock due to the need for preservate battery life.
Probably, in few months or a year a new "super long life" battery could be availabe, as new games with higher performance targets need to explode the 330MHz clock rates for the chipset. Anyway, who cares, who want to play with tiny screens when you can play on tv? Or, really do you have time to play very much for spending so much money in that apparatus? The point, for me, is not to enjoying with the games but with the computer architecture of these gems/handhelds, it's amazing to see the PSP diagrams! Enjoy, at your option.
Yes, a bug at any kernel trap is a way to crash -or find a back door into- a system. The goal/idea is that the kernel -NT, BSD, Linux or whatever- should be trap call safe. Of course, an OS with high redundancy at his trap level (read Windows NT and derivates) has a higher risk level, as people who program kernels are humans, just like you and I. As example, "commercial and very expesive real time UNIXes" are not bug free, few weeks ago we found at the office that the 'execl' kernel trap did bad his work when the thread number for a process was going above the 80% of his limit; white papers guaranted the operation, but in fact there was no such security, giving system panics and so on, dramatic.
The OS itself should not be shout-down just by an user level privilege rights. If ie6 or any other application causes system crash under non-root privilege level, it is an OS fault, as the OS must guarant interprocess safetyness and security, etc.
Yes, sure. Still Flash RAM chips have built-in 8bit RISC microprocessors (at least Infineon's flash) to bump the low voltages until 20V needed to perform flash writing (capacitance cascade).
Apart from the obvious, I was on the "64 modern super cool high end processors on a chip" way. My apologizes if I wasn't enough concise.
I am sorry, was just a typographical error. By the way, you could be a bit polite avoiding using such unkind words (I looked for "mofo" at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mofo). ;-)
About my stily, I apologize, english is my third language, I write at my best, but far from being perfect, you insensitive cloud
John Von Neumann's architecture was related to a single CPU and a single CPU-driven bus, and was warped in early 80's. In the x86 PC market, the Von Neumann approach was surpassed with the DMA controller in early 80's. Later, in 90's, MCA and PCI busses were introducing bus mastering "intelligent" cards which steals PCI-bus cycles for it's operating without CPU intervention, that was multiprocessing de facto.
;-)
Today's multiple processor designs are far away from Von Neumann's designs, of course, but just by complex synchronization tricks: cache coherency, multiple syncronized buses, and some other beauty tricks.
Corolarius: we want 64 or more processors on a die, with tons of busses and 0.01 micron 30 layer dies
Hey, take it easy. The 'Korean' joke is just as the others (Russia, Japan, USA, -put any contry here-, etc.). It began few weeks ago with a news flash reporting that in Korea e-mail is being used mainly by old people, despite this, younger ones in Korea prefer to use SMS or instant messaging systems.
Peace and good food for everyone.
You're right, are based on the principle of induction, and are called "magnetic loops". Try to pass with a metal waste basket, and put in on ;-) (not kidding).
...used to deal and tune these peripheals (acts just like a digital input: on/off; still you can deal with many of them simultaneously). Magnetic loops are pretty reliable/durable.
Greetings to the people working in toll systems
Your argument seems to be demagogical for me, as you can argument A->B where A is the Infineon case, and B is "world big problems". And, sorry if I am too much hard, your argumentation it is absoluteny non-sense.
Industry business is, by design, greedy and competitive; hey, you're living into a heartless neoliberal capitalist society, are this kind of tactics arre new for you? Well, the world, unfortunately it is plenty of them.
International and local laws avaible to correct these unfair operations should be applied, harder every time the fault is repeated. By the way, related to the human poverty and misery, I hope that some thay will arrive new laws declaring human misery illegal. The easiest way of imposing a point of view is to smash the other. I hope the humanity will not take that way, still to be lazy it is the easiest, I still believe in common efforts to achieve a better world for every one, not just one world for every one. The ideal could be one world for each one, allowing freedom to look with the color that you like, being free de facto (not in the anarchic sense, but socialdemocrat one, respecting the others to be respected, etc).
Not just not suing, but promote peer to peer music distribution. Also, they can shut up as they did for >30 years with tapes, as they didn't get hurt in sales. History tends to be cyclic, why not this time too?
If they have still more profits every year, why still fighting versus a **proven** -at least in the UK- industry healthy potential inocuous acts?
May be the developer target it is not if AMD or Intel is ahead on market share. From my point of view, the greatest advance for the developer it is not only the new wide of GPR (general purpose registers), but passing from 8 to 16. With 16 GPRs compilers can achieve a huge step in performance -this point is great for the final user too-, still the ISA (instruction set architecture) being "legacy respectuous".
It's sad to have to deal with such weird ISA ia32 and 64 bit extensions, but ISA compatibility with previous x86 implementations seems to be a market imperative. RISC ISAs are, often, quite more clear and well designed, and more "emulatorable" than x86 ones due to fixed instruction lenght and a priori instruction location alignment modulus(sizeof(opcode)).
You hit the correct key. If your code it is well designed, the only one source of bugs it is the OS. Anyway, every RT-OSes have lethal bugs: still ones ensuring priority inversion detection/correction almost always lie. I'm used to work with RTOSes, and you have to be both extremely paranoic in your desing and also doing a good test plan.
Another point is to be aware of working with the "latest and supercool -put your favourite RTOS name here- OS version", your life can turn into a nightmare. If there are lives or expensive parts related to the success of your software, try to be both accurate/professional and extremely meticulous (Bonaparte to Josephine: dress me slowly because I'm in a hurry).
I think that the parent comment was unfairly modded, at least for me it interesting and maybe insightful!
Before elections there was a huge attention to data analysis, that should be applied too to the final results in order to achieve a "peaceful" and harmonic/kind social situation.