My calculus courses heavily involved calculators, as part of a "reformed" curriculum (in my case, the Harvard Project -- I was at an inexpensive state university, though =-). I was also a tutor and grader for these courses, and am now a Ph.D. student in math. Here's what I saw:
1) lazy teachers don't like new books because they have to (at least should) redesign their lectures.
2) lazy teachers don't like redesigning their assignments and tests around calculators, either.
3) good teachers aren't lazy.
The teachers (professors, of course) who adjusted to the new books and calculators were fabulous and we loved them. Even though they made us work *very* hard. Exam questions were rewritten to make the calculator's strengths irrelevant. When this couldn't be done (take for example some simple skills work that had to be done at least once), the profs didn't find it difficult to defeat TI's numerical algorithms (think about ill-conditioned matrices, for instance). Symbolic solvers can be defeated, too, as anyone who has logged enough time with Mathematica or Maple can tell you (and probably give an example if they worked on such systems recently =-).
In the end, math==thinking and the rest is accounting. Although some profs were slow to agree, everyone eventually admitted that the skills work is important only up to the point that you'll actually use those skills. Long division is an algorithm worth knowing and understanding, but doing it quickly and accurately by hand is a skill that is largely useless today. Graphing real-valued functions with one or two dimensional domains gives very valuable insight into the methods of elementary calculus ("problems which can be seen are problems which can be solved"); but doing it repeatedly once you've mastered the technique is a waste of time.
Once you've identified the appropriate backgroundskillset (some of which might include mastering calculator use as well as computer programming), you can put your time into the most important skill in math: critical thinking.
I'm still waiting for it to take hold *inside* crowded urban areas. I expect this is what the original poster was getting at. Mass transit doesn't make much sense anywhere else, because the "mass" is lacking.
Thanks for the tip! Thanks also for the very nice complement.
Komarek is a slavic name, and my father's family came from Czechoslovakia (back when it was one country). I do not know if the "komarek" was used as a name anywhere else, but it has a literal meaning in most slavic languages I've asked about. komar==mosquito, and "-ek" is a diminuative ending (i.e. implying "cute" and maybe "small", like -ito in Spanish).
Yes, for music where you have a choice between performances. Music in the "popular" catagory usually does not give that choice. Any person who wants to enjoy "classical music" recordings must pay at least a little attention to the label.
Most "budget" labels have really poor sound quality. When you're recording an electric guitar with distortion (inevitably to be played with really muddy, loud bass in a car driving by my house), this probably doesn't matter as much as for a recording of a piccolo (though you may not want a good recording of a piccolo;-) Some budget lines can be pretty good. Sony's budget label "Essential Classics" comes to mind, but is hit and miss. You have to go so far as learn which recording engineer is which to guess how it will sound. On the other hand, just about any Deutsche Gramaphone "4D" recording is likely to kick serious ass, recording-wise. It helps that DG is unlikely to put the effort of a "4D" recording (mic anything that's supposed to make noise, and then mix and mix and mix) for a sucky performance.
However, the performance is more important than the recording quality, and really the label just helps guess at recording quality (and make a tiny inference about the performance). I'd gladly take a hissing, monaural recording of Glenn Gould over a high-quality recording of Philippe Entremont.
Is the MC68000 considered to be a RISC cpu? If so, I'm surprised about this difference in word size. Is it targetted at some market besides gneeral purpose computing?
If only. I think my memories of the "good 'old' days" makes me a little sour sometimes.
"Considering what passes for funny on slashdot, I'd have to agree with you."
Rob Malda pointed out to me yesterday that there is a way to do this. Under preferences->comments, there is a section that allows you to assign bonuses or penalties for the various moderation tags. Rob's suggestion was to assign -3 to the funny tag, which means that +5 funny shows up as +2. Since I browse at >= +2, I only see the +5 funny stuff. Since I browse with Highest Scores First, the funny stuff will never bet at the top of the comments page.
On RISC cpus things are supposed to be simple (by definition). They have a word size which is also the address size and integer size. When someone says "32 bit cpu", they're probably talking about the word size of a RISC cpu. The lab group I work in is mostly interested in large memory attached to a single cpu, hence our desire for a 64 bit address space. I recently needed 64 bit integers for exact arithmetic, but that is the first time that happened for anyone in my lab group.
And a word of caution. A 32 bit RISC cpu has 32 bit memory addresses, but that doesn't mean one can address 2^32 bytes of ram. Modern operating systems use "virtual memory" for a variety of reasons, and one of the side effects is that the virtual memory system "steals" some of those 2^32 addresses, and hence not all 2^32 addresses are available for mapping to physical RAM. There are many other things that "steal" addresses from the address space. In the "simplest" scenario (in some sense), you can only have half as much physical RAM as you have addresses. Thus only 2^31 bytes worth on a 32 bit RISC cpu (2GB).
The folks using the IBM Stretch in the 1960s (thanks to tri44id for his post about this) probably weren't really concerened with having lots of RAM. They were probably more interested in making calculations concerning nuclear tests more accurate. Furthermore, RISC cpus (on the market) didn't show up until the mid 1980s, and saying that the Stretch was a 64 bit computer would be very misleading. Parts of the cpu handled 64 bits "simultaneoulsy", but which parts? You'd have to do some research to find out.
If you're interested in computer history as much or more than computer architecture, I recommend "A History of Modern Computing" by Ceruzzi (curator of the Smithonian's Air & Space Museum). I recommend only glancing at the Introduction, as it is isn't nearly as good as the rest of the book. Overall, I love this book.
Since you're the first person I've read tonight that is confused AND honest about being confused, I'm happy to take a stab at answering some of your questions. I am not a Crusoe expert, and my field isn't microprocessors. Just a warning.
1) What's a "true" 1024 bit processor?
You have to make assumptions to answer this question. Probably the most useful "bit"ness to know for a particular processor is the number of bits it can use for a "normal" memory address. For Athlons, that is 32 bits, and the same for the Intel P4. Some Intel chips have a 4 bit extension, but it's a pain to use and should be ignored (and mostly is). There are a handful of mass produced cpus with 64 bit addressing; the DEC^H^H^HCompaq^H^H^HIntel Alpha, some version of the Sparc lineup, and certain varieties of IBM's POWER family come to mind. Since memory addresses on typical cpus refers to one byte, having 32 bit addresses allows you to uniquely reference 2^32 (~= 4 billion) bytes with a single memory address. How much of that "address space" you can map to physical ram is an entirely different issue. Being "64 bit" typically also means you can represent every integer between 0 and 2^64-1 exactly.
In my experience (I do scientific computing, not enterprise stuff), the ability to address tons of ram from a single cpu is what really counts 99.99% of the time. We have a machine, a Compaq ES40 Model II, with 1 cpu and 14GB of ram. It can grow to 32GB of ram -- and the new version goes up to 64GB of ram (and the machine's a steal at $20K with educational discount -- I'm being serious, but things will change with AMD's 64bit x86 "Hammer" stuff at the end of this year). You can't do that in any sensible way on a 32 bit cpu.
2) From what I understand from the other posts, this transmeta proc is not 256 bits in the same sense that Intel's current chips are 32 bits
True. The "instruction word" on most modern (RISC) cpus == "word" size == integer size == memory address size. In fact, this was one of the big simplifications propounded in the RISC paradigm. Note that modern x86 cpus are RISC based, even though their instruction set is CISC (you can look up CISC and RISC and the web; note that CISC was the right thing to do under certain conditions). The Transmeta Crusoe is *not* a RISC cpu. In some ways it is simpler. However, it requires *very complicated* software support, unlike RISC cpus (take this with a grain of salt). So when someone says that the Crusoe instruction word is 256 bits, you shouldn't make any assumptions about integer or memory address sizes (I don't know, but I assume these are 32 bits on the Crusoe -- 64 bit would be silly for the Crusoe's target applications). A single "instruction" for a Crusoe will (evidently) be 256 bits in the future. However, it will (evidently) be guaranteed that this 256 bits will be broken down into 8 smaller 32 bit instructions by the cpu. That is, 256 bits are fetched from memory (don't ask which memory) at once, which the cpu will interpret as 8 different things to do at the same time.
I'm not mentioning a lot of stuff, like variable width instruction encoding in the x86 instruction set, or how software converts files full of x86 instructions into files full of 256 bit Crusoe instructions, and certain efficiencies and inefficiencies of 64 bit cpus versus 32 bit cpus. My main point is that you shouldn't get hung up on the "bit"ness of a cpu unless you are writing software for that cpu. FWIW, 64 bit cpus is nothing new. I talked to a 70 year-old who claimed to work on experimental 64 bit machines in the 1960s or 70s for the military (I don't recall which military =-).
Since 2^64 is a *really* big number (where are those stupid "number of atoms in the universe" figures when you need them?), it's unlikely that we'll need memory spaces larger than 2^64 anytime soon. Same goes for integer sizes. Improved floating point precision from wider floating point types would be much appreciated by folks like me who are tired of working with crappy 64 bit doubles and can't afford to take the performance hit of wider fp types on 32 bit architectures.
As far as optimal width for instructions, I have no idea. If you want to make a big fat instruction, you better have a lot of good stuff to do at once. And that depends not only on the compiler that converts C (or whatever) into the cpu's instruction set, but also how the human chose to use C (or whatever) to implement her idea.
Computer history is full of people wanting to do something, computers catching up by removing performance bottlenecks, humans adjusting to the new machines, and then the whole thing repeats. Heck, at one time it wasn't clear whether digital computers were really a better idea than analog computers (however, I think this argument is over for general purpose computing), and analog computers don't have any "bits" at all.
Like I said, don't take anything I wrote above (at 5am while waiting for some code to produce output) as fact without double checking somewhere else. If you really want to get your head screwed on right, take an architecture course or (if you're really disciplined) work your way through something like Hennessy and Patterson's "Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach". You can get a lot of good info from 'popular' texts like "The Indispensable PC Hardware Book". A big warning about that book, though -- when the author writes "PC", he almost always means "PC when used with MS-DOS or Windows" -- often this is subtle, for instance when discussing the boot process or how memory is organized.
I haven't read Parkinson, just the "bikeshed" summary. At any rate, I wasn't trying to summarize the bikeshed post, I was trying to credit it by describing my idea as a corollary (I study math, and that's how I think). My take on the the bikeshed post is that people will try to ask important-sounding questions when they can, and not ask any questions when they don't know what the hell is going on. If this is nowhere near what Parkinson was saying, then please let me know. I remember how embarassingly far off I was about "A Clockwork Orange" after seeing Kubrik's movie.
At any rate, my coroallary was that many slashdot posters see GNU HURD and think they can write an important-sounding comment about their opinion on RMS. That's where my corollary ends (not much of a corollary =-). I guess I might go so far as to say many slashdot posters are looking for anything about which they can make an important-sounding post -- the GNU HURD is just one of the victims.
My complaint is that the few posts about the HURD disappear entirely in this noise. My statement about what a disaster the comments would be if we *were* discussing nuclear reactors is wrong w/r/t the bikeshed argument. If nuclear reactors were the topic, nobody would say anything at all.
If this is a serious question, I'll answer it once the "conflict" is nailed down -- do you mean the fact that I'm not free to choose the software license for graduate work funded by CMU?
I didn't realize that WinNT started with a microkernel. I guess I'm really wondering if microkernels have any chance at all. I would assume that the embedded and high-security markets would be the biggest proponents of microkernel design, because of the ability to remove unneeded stuff -- is this a reasonable assumption?
IF YOU AREN'T INTERESTED IN THE HURD, THEN SHUT UP.
Can slashdot posters quit talking out of their rear-ends for even one article?
A long-running project in the open source world just made an announcement. The/. editors decided to carry the story. The comments are filled with jokes about how stupid RMS and the HURD are. I dearly wish there was a "strip all comments labeled "Funny" button.
I'm very interested in how the HURD is progressing, and in TECHNICAL OPINIONS on the HURD. Where are the technical opinions among the comments? Damn few and far between. This is the sort of nonsense that makes slashdot look worse than USA Today (hell, slashdot doesn't even have color barcharts on the front page!).
At one time, I learned a lot about computers and socioeconomic factors surrounding computing by reading slashdot comments. Several years ago, comments included information from computer scientists, sysadmins, and knowledgable hobbyists. Eventually there was a problem where you couldn't find those comments in between the 50 copies of "First Post!". Moderation came, and I could usually find the good posts again.
The comments on this article, however, demonstrate just how stupid the slashdot population has become. My theory is that the huge popularity of slashdot in the US has attracted a readership which closely mirrors the average intelligence of the general US population -- you know, the same population that elected GW Bush for president (motto: "What we need is a clear policy in the Middle East"). The moderation system that once worked well is failing miserably because almost all moderators are as stupid as the posters.
As anyone can tell, I'm pretty pissed that a bunch of whiney losers in diapers, who couldn't spell "algorithm" if they had a copy of CLR on their desk, or explain why CISC was a natural choice for microprocessors in the 1960s, have drowned out any hope of interesting discussion on a technical topic. The comments attached to this article provide some sort of slashdot corrolary to the bikeshed axiom: Since a moron reading slashdot feels compelled to make authoritative posts on every article (to increase their karma?), they will post about the bikeshed color if they have nothing to say about the bikeshed. God help us when the discussion turns to nuclear power plants.
Beyond technical comments, why does everyone feel a need to deride RMS and the GNU project all the time? It seems natural to have some social discussion of RMS and the GNU project attached to any article about the HURD. I can understand why RMS is unpopular. I can understand why some people dislike RMS' campaign to use the name "GNU/Linux" when discussing operating systems which use the GNU foundation but replace the GNU kernel (I guess my feeling on this is clear). What I can't understand is why people put so damn much energy into making RMS a laughing stock.
At this point, it no longer matters what RMS does or says; the slashdot readership seems hell-bent on destroying RMS just because they heard that he was unpopular in some circles. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd suggest that Microsoft had a pool of RMS-trolls trying to change public opinion of RMS, GNU, and Free Software via slashdot comments.
I'd like to encourage everyone reading this to do the following:
1) Think for yourself 2) Listen careefully to what people say, in comments and otherwise 3) If you don't have anything useful to contribute, then keep your mouth closed. 4) Be careful with the "funny" moderation tag -- we all need humor, but there's more (or should be) to slashdot than (rightly or wrongly) smacking people down
If we follow those rules, then maybe we'll be able to learn stuff from slashdot comments again. For instance, comments on this article about a new HURD release might include:
1) discussions of microkernel history, strengths, and weaknesses, 2) which microkernels are still in use 3) how the Darwin kernel design differs from the HURD design 4) a reasonable, well-thought-out debate about whether the long term benefits of the HURD justify the current HURD effort in the Free Software community 5) how changes in hardware might affect the expected future value of the HURD, given the HURD's extremely slow development 6) alternatives to monolithic and microkernel designs in principle and practice (I'm not aware of any, but surely someone has something in-between, if not totally different) 7) whether the Free Software and Open Source communities should really be involved with basic software research, or lower its ambitions and simply copy existing, working software
Maybe this post can at least spawn an intelligent discussion of whether it violates the rules it proposes (it probably does, but I'm not going to fix it because I'm still seeing red).
Here's something I learned after moving to a new town to start grad school: DO NOT, UNDER ANY CONDITION, GIVE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS TO A NEW COLLEGE STUDENT YOU CARE ABOUT:
1) Nintendo GameCube 2) Sony PS/2 3) Nintendo N64 4) Sony PSOne
Don't worry about the XBox. Once they finish Halo, they put the XBox in the closet and forget about it.
In case you have even the tiniest bit of sympathy for people living within 1 city block of the new college student, DO NOT, UNDER ANY CONDITION, GIVE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS TO A NEW COLLEGE STUDENT:
1) Stereo capable of driving floor-standing speakers 1) Power amplifier stereo 3) Extra fuses for stereo 3) CDs of animal noises and/or other sound effects 4) Kris-Kross CD ("pump it up, Kris!")
I think I better revisit my shrink now. That second set of memories is far too strong. The good news is that finding a Kris-Kross CD is probably very hard these days. At least, I really, really hope that is true. The farmyard noises weren't so bad, but the "jet aircraft landing" got old fast.
How do you license a key? I don't think one can patent the key itself. You could claim copyright or trademark over it, I suppose, but I doubt that would have much real effect anyway -- how would you tell the difference between a copy of a key and a reverse-engineered key?
"So it'll actually run even faster than the benchmarks let on once out of beta."
Bullshit. You don't know this, and Intel's history with new processor development suggests otherwise. Maybe this means that they finally have the heat issue under control, and can *finally* reach the clockrates they want to advertise. Maybe it means clock distribution is reducing chip performance to the point that heat isn't an issue. Maybe it means that you work for Intel marketing, and think you are repeating something you heard an Intel engineer saying at a party.
I had no real problems with finding *decent* soundcards for a professional pianist two years ago. In the end, we chose the Midiman M-Audio Delta-66 (and had the machine custom built by Microway -- we'd probably build it ourselves this time). Other nice cards from RME (like the Hammerfall and Digi96 series) were also available. Between the cards supported by 4Front and ALSA, there is really no shortage. This was less true two years ago, but we had no troubles. I guess the M-Audio isn't really high-end, but it is clearly *decent*. We were on a budget for the machine, so going over $600 for the soundcard wasn't really an option.
The M-Audio Delta series are pretty nice. The analog inputs and outputs are contained in a separate breakout box, which makes connections easier and helps reduce electrical noise. The pianist has found the noise levels acceptable for mastering with a good headphone amp and headphones. Ambiant fan noise, on the other hand, is something we never really solved (and hence the headphones), but at least that's not a linux problem.;-)
The pianist had never used linux before, and by now is something of a zealot. =-) He's been using snd for waveform manipulation (but doesn't use any of the lisp extension capabilities, and I can't blame him for that;-), and has expressed some frustration at the software available. That said, he hasn't updated his software for 2 years, and thus I have no good information about the current state of affairs.
Possibly unfortunately, the human subjects of Nazi research didn't necessarily die because of the research. At any rate, my believe is that you can't die well or die in vain. One can only live well or throw one's life away. Those people violated by Nazi "research" atrocities are still harmed, regardless of what we do with the knowledge gained.
Since those people are still harmed, one might argue that we might as well do something with the knowledge gained. My belief is that using that knowledge *rewards* the researcher and the research. The research gets a citation, which is a big deal in scientifc work. The researcher is simulatneously cited. But that isn't the end of things.
As a researcher, there is nothing I want more than to make a difference with my work. I face spectacularly bad odds, as most all research is crap. Even good research is 100% evolution, not revolution (the set of revolutionary research has zero measure, but please don't take me too literally on this =-). Thus the highest reward I can be given is evidence that someone is using my work. From this I concluded that using the Nazi research not only produces citations for the research and the researcher, but it encourages the researcher, those that facilitated the research, and those that envy the researher's success to continue their methods of research.
I don't feel I'm stretching anything to make this argument. Many people fake research, hoping to get some good press (even if necessarily short-lived). People kill themselves because of failed research (plenty of examples of this). There are businesses, and even economies, built on scientific research (not to mention huge military budgets). My conclusion is that there are people who would repeat the Nazi research if they thought they could see their name in lights. Any lights. Think of the miserable researcher Dr. Seed.
In summary, I think that some researchers can be compared to children when it comes to attention. Suppose a child discovers that the only way to get his or her parents' attention is to misbehave. No matter how negative the attention he or she receives, that attention is better than none at all. As an afterthought, I don't know why I'm making that last statement specific to children and some researchers, since it's probably true for all humans who can't get the attention they need.
I think the main flaw in nuclear power is the lack of discipline in power plant construction and operation. Coming from a state with a lousy history of both (Washington), I can say first hand that the principle problem with nuclear power is the involvement of weak humans.
Slashdot Mirror
My calculus courses heavily involved calculators, as part of a "reformed" curriculum (in my case, the Harvard Project -- I was at an inexpensive state university, though =-). I was also a tutor and grader for these courses, and am now a Ph.D. student in math. Here's what I saw:
1) lazy teachers don't like new books because they have to (at least should) redesign their lectures.
2) lazy teachers don't like redesigning their assignments and tests around calculators, either.
3) good teachers aren't lazy.
The teachers (professors, of course) who adjusted to the new books and calculators were fabulous and we loved them. Even though they made us work *very* hard. Exam questions were rewritten to make the calculator's strengths irrelevant. When this couldn't be done (take for example some simple skills work that had to be done at least once), the profs didn't find it difficult to defeat TI's numerical algorithms (think about ill-conditioned matrices, for instance). Symbolic solvers can be defeated, too, as anyone who has logged enough time with Mathematica or Maple can tell you (and probably give an example if they worked on such systems recently =-).
In the end, math==thinking and the rest is accounting. Although some profs were slow to agree, everyone eventually admitted that the skills work is important only up to the point that you'll actually use those skills. Long division is an algorithm worth knowing and understanding, but doing it quickly and accurately by hand is a skill that is largely useless today. Graphing real-valued functions with one or two dimensional domains gives very valuable insight into the methods of elementary calculus ("problems which can be seen are problems which can be solved"); but doing it repeatedly once you've mastered the technique is a waste of time.
Once you've identified the appropriate backgroundskillset (some of which might include mastering calculator use as well as computer programming), you can put your time into the most important skill in math: critical thinking.
-Paul Komarek
If he took lessons on "how not to be seen" from Monty Python, I expect he'd be quite dead by now (like all the others).
-Paul Komarek
I'm still waiting for it to take hold *inside* crowded urban areas. I expect this is what the original poster was getting at. Mass transit doesn't make much sense anywhere else, because the "mass" is lacking.
-Paul Komarek
Thanks for the tip! Thanks also for the very nice complement.
Komarek is a slavic name, and my father's family came from Czechoslovakia (back when it was one country). I do not know if the "komarek" was used as a name anywhere else, but it has a literal meaning in most slavic languages I've asked about. komar==mosquito, and "-ek" is a diminuative ending (i.e. implying "cute" and maybe "small", like -ito in Spanish).
-Paul Komarek
Yes, for music where you have a choice between performances. Music in the "popular" catagory usually does not give that choice. Any person who wants to enjoy "classical music" recordings must pay at least a little attention to the label.
;-) Some budget lines can be pretty good. Sony's budget label "Essential Classics" comes to mind, but is hit and miss. You have to go so far as learn which recording engineer is which to guess how it will sound. On the other hand, just about any Deutsche Gramaphone "4D" recording is likely to kick serious ass, recording-wise. It helps that DG is unlikely to put the effort of a "4D" recording (mic anything that's supposed to make noise, and then mix and mix and mix) for a sucky performance.
Most "budget" labels have really poor sound quality. When you're recording an electric guitar with distortion (inevitably to be played with really muddy, loud bass in a car driving by my house), this probably doesn't matter as much as for a recording of a piccolo (though you may not want a good recording of a piccolo
However, the performance is more important than the recording quality, and really the label just helps guess at recording quality (and make a tiny inference about the performance). I'd gladly take a hissing, monaural recording of Glenn Gould over a high-quality recording of Philippe Entremont.
-Paul Komarek
Is the MC68000 considered to be a RISC cpu? If so, I'm surprised about this difference in word size. Is it targetted at some market besides gneeral purpose computing?
-Paul Komarek
And what is next? BSA Audits? You are right that companies are familiar with per seat licensing. I don't think they *like* it, though.
-Paul Komarek
I guess I've been poisened by the "big" (formfactor) embedded folks using Linux (the kernel) and stripping stuff out.
-Paul Komarek
"No. You're new here aren't you?"
If only. I think my memories of the "good 'old' days" makes me a little sour sometimes.
"Considering what passes for funny on slashdot, I'd have to agree with you."
Rob Malda pointed out to me yesterday that there is a way to do this. Under preferences->comments, there is a section that allows you to assign bonuses or penalties for the various moderation tags. Rob's suggestion was to assign -3 to the funny tag, which means that +5 funny shows up as +2. Since I browse at >= +2, I only see the +5 funny stuff. Since I browse with Highest Scores First, the funny stuff will never bet at the top of the comments page.
-Paul Komarek
Heh. My TI 99-4/A would have had some mixed-up numbers, too. As would the 8086 cpu from Intel.
The problem here is that we're not talking about RISC cpus, where a word is a word is a word.
-Paul Komarek
Yes and no.
On RISC cpus things are supposed to be simple (by definition). They have a word size which is also the address size and integer size. When someone says "32 bit cpu", they're probably talking about the word size of a RISC cpu. The lab group I work in is mostly interested in large memory attached to a single cpu, hence our desire for a 64 bit address space. I recently needed 64 bit integers for exact arithmetic, but that is the first time that happened for anyone in my lab group.
And a word of caution. A 32 bit RISC cpu has 32 bit memory addresses, but that doesn't mean one can address 2^32 bytes of ram. Modern operating systems use "virtual memory" for a variety of reasons, and one of the side effects is that the virtual memory system "steals" some of those 2^32 addresses, and hence not all 2^32 addresses are available for mapping to physical RAM. There are many other things that "steal" addresses from the address space. In the "simplest" scenario (in some sense), you can only have half as much physical RAM as you have addresses. Thus only 2^31 bytes worth on a 32 bit RISC cpu (2GB).
The folks using the IBM Stretch in the 1960s (thanks to tri44id for his post about this) probably weren't really concerened with having lots of RAM. They were probably more interested in making calculations concerning nuclear tests more accurate. Furthermore, RISC cpus (on the market) didn't show up until the mid 1980s, and saying that the Stretch was a 64 bit computer would be very misleading. Parts of the cpu handled 64 bits "simultaneoulsy", but which parts? You'd have to do some research to find out.
If you're interested in computer history as much or more than computer architecture, I recommend "A History of Modern Computing" by Ceruzzi (curator of the Smithonian's Air & Space Museum). I recommend only glancing at the Introduction, as it is isn't nearly as good as the rest of the book. Overall, I love this book.
-Paul Komarek
Since you're the first person I've read tonight that is confused AND honest about being confused, I'm happy to take a stab at answering some of your questions. I am not a Crusoe expert, and my field isn't microprocessors. Just a warning.
1) What's a "true" 1024 bit processor?
You have to make assumptions to answer this question. Probably the most useful "bit"ness to know for a particular processor is the number of bits it can use for a "normal" memory address. For Athlons, that is 32 bits, and the same for the Intel P4. Some Intel chips have a 4 bit extension, but it's a pain to use and should be ignored (and mostly is). There are a handful of mass produced cpus with 64 bit addressing; the DEC^H^H^HCompaq^H^H^HIntel Alpha, some version of the Sparc lineup, and certain varieties of IBM's POWER family come to mind. Since memory addresses on typical cpus refers to one byte, having 32 bit addresses allows you to uniquely reference 2^32 (~= 4 billion) bytes with a single memory address. How much of that "address space" you can map to physical ram is an entirely different issue. Being "64 bit" typically also means you can represent every integer between 0 and 2^64-1 exactly.
In my experience (I do scientific computing, not enterprise stuff), the ability to address tons of ram from a single cpu is what really counts 99.99% of the time. We have a machine, a Compaq ES40 Model II, with 1 cpu and 14GB of ram. It can grow to 32GB of ram -- and the new version goes up to 64GB of ram (and the machine's a steal at $20K with educational discount -- I'm being serious, but things will change with AMD's 64bit x86 "Hammer" stuff at the end of this year). You can't do that in any sensible way on a 32 bit cpu.
2) From what I understand from the other posts, this transmeta proc is not 256 bits in the same sense that Intel's current chips are 32 bits
True. The "instruction word" on most modern (RISC) cpus == "word" size == integer size == memory address size. In fact, this was one of the big simplifications propounded in the RISC paradigm. Note that modern x86 cpus are RISC based, even though their instruction set is CISC (you can look up CISC and RISC and the web; note that CISC was the right thing to do under certain conditions). The Transmeta Crusoe is *not* a RISC cpu. In some ways it is simpler. However, it requires *very complicated* software support, unlike RISC cpus (take this with a grain of salt). So when someone says that the Crusoe instruction word is 256 bits, you shouldn't make any assumptions about integer or memory address sizes (I don't know, but I assume these are 32 bits on the Crusoe -- 64 bit would be silly for the Crusoe's target applications). A single "instruction" for a Crusoe will (evidently) be 256 bits in the future. However, it will (evidently) be guaranteed that this 256 bits will be broken down into 8 smaller 32 bit instructions by the cpu. That is, 256 bits are fetched from memory (don't ask which memory) at once, which the cpu will interpret as 8 different things to do at the same time.
I'm not mentioning a lot of stuff, like variable width instruction encoding in the x86 instruction set, or how software converts files full of x86 instructions into files full of 256 bit Crusoe instructions, and certain efficiencies and inefficiencies of 64 bit cpus versus 32 bit cpus. My main point is that you shouldn't get hung up on the "bit"ness of a cpu unless you are writing software for that cpu. FWIW, 64 bit cpus is nothing new. I talked to a 70 year-old who claimed to work on experimental 64 bit machines in the 1960s or 70s for the military (I don't recall which military =-).
Since 2^64 is a *really* big number (where are those stupid "number of atoms in the universe" figures when you need them?), it's unlikely that we'll need memory spaces larger than 2^64 anytime soon. Same goes for integer sizes. Improved floating point precision from wider floating point types would be much appreciated by folks like me who are tired of working with crappy 64 bit doubles and can't afford to take the performance hit of wider fp types on 32 bit architectures.
As far as optimal width for instructions, I have no idea. If you want to make a big fat instruction, you better have a lot of good stuff to do at once. And that depends not only on the compiler that converts C (or whatever) into the cpu's instruction set, but also how the human chose to use C (or whatever) to implement her idea.
Computer history is full of people wanting to do something, computers catching up by removing performance bottlenecks, humans adjusting to the new machines, and then the whole thing repeats. Heck, at one time it wasn't clear whether digital computers were really a better idea than analog computers (however, I think this argument is over for general purpose computing), and analog computers don't have any "bits" at all.
Like I said, don't take anything I wrote above (at 5am while waiting for some code to produce output) as fact without double checking somewhere else. If you really want to get your head screwed on right, take an architecture course or (if you're really disciplined) work your way through something like Hennessy and Patterson's "Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach". You can get a lot of good info from 'popular' texts like "The Indispensable PC Hardware Book". A big warning about that book, though -- when the author writes "PC", he almost always means "PC when used with MS-DOS or Windows" -- often this is subtle, for instance when discussing the boot process or how memory is organized.
-Paul Komarek
That, on the other hand, should be moderated up as funny!
-Paul Komarek
I haven't read Parkinson, just the "bikeshed" summary. At any rate, I wasn't trying to summarize the bikeshed post, I was trying to credit it by describing my idea as a corollary (I study math, and that's how I think). My take on the the bikeshed post is that people will try to ask important-sounding questions when they can, and not ask any questions when they don't know what the hell is going on. If this is nowhere near what Parkinson was saying, then please let me know. I remember how embarassingly far off I was about "A Clockwork Orange" after seeing Kubrik's movie.
At any rate, my coroallary was that many slashdot posters see GNU HURD and think they can write an important-sounding comment about their opinion on RMS. That's where my corollary ends (not much of a corollary =-). I guess I might go so far as to say many slashdot posters are looking for anything about which they can make an important-sounding post -- the GNU HURD is just one of the victims.
My complaint is that the few posts about the HURD disappear entirely in this noise. My statement about what a disaster the comments would be if we *were* discussing nuclear reactors is wrong w/r/t the bikeshed argument. If nuclear reactors were the topic, nobody would say anything at all.
-Paul Komarek
If this is a serious question, I'll answer it once the "conflict" is nailed down -- do you mean the fact that I'm not free to choose the software license for graduate work funded by CMU?
-Paul Komarek
I didn't realize that WinNT started with a microkernel. I guess I'm really wondering if microkernels have any chance at all. I would assume that the embedded and high-security markets would be the biggest proponents of microkernel design, because of the ability to remove unneeded stuff -- is this a reasonable assumption?
-Paul Komarek
IF YOU AREN'T INTERESTED IN THE HURD, THEN SHUT UP.
/. editors decided to carry the story. The comments are filled with jokes about how stupid RMS and the HURD are. I dearly wish there was a "strip all comments labeled "Funny" button.
Can slashdot posters quit talking out of their rear-ends for even one article?
A long-running project in the open source world just made an announcement. The
I'm very interested in how the HURD is progressing, and in TECHNICAL OPINIONS on the HURD. Where are the technical opinions among the comments? Damn few and far between. This is the sort of nonsense that makes slashdot look worse than USA Today (hell, slashdot doesn't even have color barcharts on the front page!).
At one time, I learned a lot about computers and socioeconomic factors surrounding computing by reading slashdot comments. Several years ago, comments included information from computer scientists, sysadmins, and knowledgable hobbyists. Eventually there was a problem where you couldn't find those comments in between the 50 copies of "First Post!". Moderation came, and I could usually find the good posts again.
The comments on this article, however, demonstrate just how stupid the slashdot population has become. My theory is that the huge popularity of slashdot in the US has attracted a readership which closely mirrors the average intelligence of the general US population -- you know, the same population that elected GW Bush for president (motto: "What we need is a clear policy in the Middle East"). The moderation system that once worked well is failing miserably because almost all moderators are as stupid as the posters.
As anyone can tell, I'm pretty pissed that a bunch of whiney losers in diapers, who couldn't spell "algorithm" if they had a copy of CLR on their desk, or explain why CISC was a natural choice for microprocessors in the 1960s, have drowned out any hope of interesting discussion on a technical topic. The comments attached to this article provide some sort of slashdot corrolary to the bikeshed axiom: Since a moron reading slashdot feels compelled to make authoritative posts on every article (to increase their karma?), they will post about the bikeshed color if they have nothing to say about the bikeshed. God help us when the discussion turns to nuclear power plants.
Beyond technical comments, why does everyone feel a need to deride RMS and the GNU project all the time? It seems natural to have some social discussion of RMS and the GNU project attached to any article about the HURD. I can understand why RMS is unpopular. I can understand why some people dislike RMS' campaign to use the name "GNU/Linux" when discussing operating systems which use the GNU foundation but replace the GNU kernel (I guess my feeling on this is clear). What I can't understand is why people put so damn much energy into making RMS a laughing stock.
At this point, it no longer matters what RMS does or says; the slashdot readership seems hell-bent on destroying RMS just because they heard that he was unpopular in some circles. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd suggest that Microsoft had a pool of RMS-trolls trying to change public opinion of RMS, GNU, and Free Software via slashdot comments.
I'd like to encourage everyone reading this to do the following:
1) Think for yourself
2) Listen careefully to what people say, in comments and otherwise
3) If you don't have anything useful to contribute, then keep your mouth closed.
4) Be careful with the "funny" moderation tag -- we all need humor, but there's more (or should be) to slashdot than (rightly or wrongly) smacking people down
If we follow those rules, then maybe we'll be able to learn stuff from slashdot comments again. For instance, comments on this article about a new HURD release might include:
1) discussions of microkernel history, strengths, and weaknesses,
2) which microkernels are still in use
3) how the Darwin kernel design differs from the HURD design
4) a reasonable, well-thought-out debate about whether the long term benefits of the HURD justify the current HURD effort in the Free Software community
5) how changes in hardware might affect the expected future value of the HURD, given the HURD's extremely slow development
6) alternatives to monolithic and microkernel designs in principle and practice (I'm not aware of any, but surely someone has something in-between, if not totally different)
7) whether the Free Software and Open Source communities should really be involved with basic software research, or lower its ambitions and simply copy existing, working software
Maybe this post can at least spawn an intelligent discussion of whether it violates the rules it proposes (it probably does, but I'm not going to fix it because I'm still seeing red).
-Paul Komarek
Here's something I learned after moving to a new town to start grad school: DO NOT, UNDER ANY CONDITION, GIVE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS TO A NEW COLLEGE STUDENT YOU CARE ABOUT:
1) Nintendo GameCube
2) Sony PS/2
3) Nintendo N64
4) Sony PSOne
Don't worry about the XBox. Once they finish Halo, they put the XBox in the closet and forget about it.
In case you have even the tiniest bit of sympathy for people living within 1 city block of the new college student, DO NOT, UNDER ANY CONDITION, GIVE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS TO A NEW COLLEGE STUDENT:
1) Stereo capable of driving floor-standing speakers
1) Power amplifier stereo
3) Extra fuses for stereo
3) CDs of animal noises and/or other sound effects
4) Kris-Kross CD ("pump it up, Kris!")
I think I better revisit my shrink now. That second set of memories is far too strong. The good news is that finding a Kris-Kross CD is probably very hard these days. At least, I really, really hope that is true. The farmyard noises weren't so bad, but the "jet aircraft landing" got old fast.
-Paul Komarek
How do you license a key? I don't think one can patent the key itself. You could claim copyright or trademark over it, I suppose, but I doubt that would have much real effect anyway -- how would you tell the difference between a copy of a key and a reverse-engineered key?
-Paul Komarek
"So it'll actually run even faster than the benchmarks let on once out of beta."
Bullshit. You don't know this, and Intel's history with new processor development suggests otherwise. Maybe this means that they finally have the heat issue under control, and can *finally* reach the clockrates they want to advertise. Maybe it means clock distribution is reducing chip performance to the point that heat isn't an issue. Maybe it means that you work for Intel marketing, and think you are repeating something you heard an Intel engineer saying at a party.
-Paul Komarek
I had no real problems with finding *decent* soundcards for a professional pianist two years ago. In the end, we chose the Midiman M-Audio Delta-66 (and had the machine custom built by Microway -- we'd probably build it ourselves this time). Other nice cards from RME (like the Hammerfall and Digi96 series) were also available. Between the cards supported by 4Front and ALSA, there is really no shortage. This was less true two years ago, but we had no troubles. I guess the M-Audio isn't really high-end, but it is clearly *decent*. We were on a budget for the machine, so going over $600 for the soundcard wasn't really an option.
;-)
;-), and has expressed some frustration at the software available. That said, he hasn't updated his software for 2 years, and thus I have no good information about the current state of affairs.
The M-Audio Delta series are pretty nice. The analog inputs and outputs are contained in a separate breakout box, which makes connections easier and helps reduce electrical noise. The pianist has found the noise levels acceptable for mastering with a good headphone amp and headphones. Ambiant fan noise, on the other hand, is something we never really solved (and hence the headphones), but at least that's not a linux problem.
The pianist had never used linux before, and by now is something of a zealot. =-) He's been using snd for waveform manipulation (but doesn't use any of the lisp extension capabilities, and I can't blame him for that
-Paul Komarek
Heh, looks like we have a Free Software vs. Open Source Software split going... =-)
-Paul Komarek
Well, here's my take on the Nazi research.
Possibly unfortunately, the human subjects of Nazi research didn't necessarily die because of the research. At any rate, my believe is that you can't die well or die in vain. One can only live well or throw one's life away. Those people violated by Nazi "research" atrocities are still harmed, regardless of what we do with the knowledge gained.
Since those people are still harmed, one might argue that we might as well do something with the knowledge gained. My belief is that using that knowledge *rewards* the researcher and the research. The research gets a citation, which is a big deal in scientifc work. The researcher is simulatneously cited. But that isn't the end of things.
As a researcher, there is nothing I want more than to make a difference with my work. I face spectacularly bad odds, as most all research is crap. Even good research is 100% evolution, not revolution (the set of revolutionary research has zero measure, but please don't take me too literally on this =-). Thus the highest reward I can be given is evidence that someone is using my work. From this I concluded that using the Nazi research not only produces citations for the research and the researcher, but it encourages the researcher, those that facilitated the research, and those that envy the researher's success to continue their methods of research.
I don't feel I'm stretching anything to make this argument. Many people fake research, hoping to get some good press (even if necessarily short-lived). People kill themselves because of failed research (plenty of examples of this). There are businesses, and even economies, built on scientific research (not to mention huge military budgets). My conclusion is that there are people who would repeat the Nazi research if they thought they could see their name in lights. Any lights. Think of the miserable researcher Dr. Seed.
In summary, I think that some researchers can be compared to children when it comes to attention. Suppose a child discovers that the only way to get his or her parents' attention is to misbehave. No matter how negative the attention he or she receives, that attention is better than none at all. As an afterthought, I don't know why I'm making that last statement specific to children and some researchers, since it's probably true for all humans who can't get the attention they need.
-Paul Komarek
"People are funny about the term nuclear."
;-)
People are even funnier about the term "nuculer".
-Paul Komarek
I think the main flaw in nuclear power is the lack of discipline in power plant construction and operation. Coming from a state with a lousy history of both (Washington), I can say first hand that the principle problem with nuclear power is the involvement of weak humans.
-Paul Komarek