so why not support GTK+ in it's various forms anyway. Don't see that a browser is the basis for a platform anymore (not since the Netscape hype a while back).
In any case, even MS is back peddling from the "browser as the ultimate UI" thing like crazy these days in case you haven't noticed. Smart (fat) clients seem to be the prevailing "cult".
If Business 2.0 is an Esther Dyson thing then I think the answer is go back to sleep people. Just the usual prattle....
a la Multics. MS made a big deal out of C2 certification and politely forgot to point out that the only way they got it was to pull the network connection. Hey, this is the real world. B0 and seriously radiation hardened secure stuff *still* means our old friend Multics. (Which I personally liked even though our university ticked off everybody by busting the budget with their dual processor Honeywell c.a. 1980). If you really want a laugh imagine the comments from the science depts when the CS dept burns *everything* on such a nice box (no fortran compiler? eh?). The truth was that even in those days the IT bimbos didn't grok the real (engineering) world...
Personally, I roll about the floor laughing every time MS tries to pretend it has a secure system. If they ripped it down to the basics and made it open source we'd actually *fix* their problems for them. (OK, this isn't a joke). Someone poke Steve B with an umbrella (any Bulgarians at MS?)
Sit down and think about it for a moment. Consider what the reaction would be if you decided to clean the Sphinx so it looked new, or redo some famous bridge in the latest hitech materials (let's say Clifton Suspension bridge in Bristol UK in *titanium* just so it lasted forever).
Somehow, you've *lost* the original both in spirit and implementation. Somehow, you've *lost* the historical context...
I could go on. But I won't bore you (have already he says chuckling).
Even though Movies are in some sense "thought stuff" where is the dividing line between preservation (of the original thought) and re-invention (feels like re-interpretation)?
Cleaning up stuff can look dreadfully like you're trivializing stuff that was in some sense important, (and remember that the bias of the person cleaning it will be the bias of someone 20-50 years downstream of the originator).
Leave well alone, and be very careful. You want the original "limits" that made magic to stay.
When the only "print" of Star Wars that is left is a 20 times reprocessed thing, can we say we understand the movie?
Eh? Who defines this stuff. BSDI? SCO? Novell? One of the perennial curses of what constitutes UNIX was the bitching betweeen the big guys.
Nowadays, we pretty much understand that UNIX is really FreeBSD + Linux +
Sorry SUN, IBM etc but this is the *real* world. We don't want to code for your flakey headers or bleed out because of your incompetence... We've got used to really quick bug fixes flashed across the planet in a way that you guys couldn't even dream of...
I think I screamed enough there. Mac OSX ought to be higher in most peoples estimation than it is, but the past is still in too many folks heads... Apple made a lot of wrong moves, and it will take time to heal those wounds...
If I'm really lucky I may have a mac osx machine here soon. I'm pounding on my colleagues head to get one.. Just so I can run Python on it...
(If I twist his arm enough, perhaps they'll let me keep one. I still like Mac's, and hot damn it, it's a more robust machine than any crummy windoze box ever will be, not to mention a lot sexier) (sidenote: the real reason it's sexier is that there's a higher probability that there'e a cute graphics designer lady I'm borrowing it from...)
We might be an unmarried 45 year old, but we do live here in the med, so we dream on...
I want to apologize to IBM right now, because they are not the demons they used to be. Jikes etc., are truly beautiful, and we appreciate IBM's contribution...
Who cares. If it walks like UNIX, quacks like UNIX, and doesn't have brain numbing header bugs like those from unix, then it's perhaps unix. Unless it's from microsoft in which case it's a foonix.
(not phoenix.)
But none of this confusion for the big guys would have happened if Richard Stallman hadn't been sufficiently pig headed to believe he could tilt at windmills. Yeah verily Richard, you rock!
Sadly, just like Arthur Clarke, he'll never make money out of that..
I think this bothers him, like totally obviously, it bothers him *NOT AT ALL*
I am equally unperturbed. There are more interesting things, like "are the collared doves as sentient as the feral pidgeons". So far, my research says no. (and one day I'll spell the birds designation accurately).
But they are nice people. With true stories to tell. Which is more than anyone from SCO can say...
(Quick observation which isn't in wikipedia - Collared doves have colour shifting plumage - they are not just boringly beige coloured. So, depending on the light, the colour you see changes. Second observation: most people (except those who spend time hand feeding them) don't know that they have a flash *orange* patch just on the nape of the neck).
No, I'm not in a sexual liasion with a collared dove...
...is not the Borland I remember. I knew this when they took too long to release a Pascal for Windows. Since it was their *core* product, clearly they weren't so bothered about capturing hearts and minds as they were in the old days.
OK. I can live with that. But trashing the C++/C community? Hmm. Why is it a problem to keep both streams (and gradually wean people across to C# builder?).
This is not the company we knew and loved years ago.
Nuff said. But there are tears in my eyes because they were well admired by almost all of us for the things they did in the past.
Anders is now working for those excellent and perhaps too much maligned folk at Redmond (don't spit H2SO4 at me, they are kool sometimes), and I'd guess since PK isn't there it isn't really the *same* company it was.
Just the name. But, on the other hand Novell is much to my delight proving that the name still matters.
I for one mourn the passing of a group of people that we all admired...
RIP Borland.
(But, Frank can come and drink a beer here in Athens any day of the week).
>Modern electronic computers are getting closer to >being optical in any case (gigahertz range).
Huh, last time I checked lasers were up there in the *TERA* hertz range.
So what is the punchline here? If the poster means we need faster interconnects, then yeah verily, but that isn't the problem for CPU design. Feeding the buggers is. Since the 386 we haven't had memory which could keep them without grumbly tummy syndrome. Intel tried to lie to everybody about this, but even they eventually caved in and started using caches of static ram. Even back in 386 days you needed 35ns memory (or thereabouts). Nothing has changed since. Memory technology *hasn't delivered*.
Modern "fine tuned" deep pipelined, superscalar up to the wazoo processors just don't scale anymore. Go watch *this* video reffed below for some insight. Suddenly you'll see why Intel has backed off from their MHz == Performance kick...
Hint: It's 90 minutes and well worth the laughs for the insights. I had to fight hard to see it in a whole day (two Cretans in one office makes for a really unproductive work environment...) (I really need to borrow some hardware from ESR...)
Stanford is where the infamous and rather splendid Don Knuth resides, and they have a 64 bit design I'd love to see (anyone want to give me one?) so I can play with a real CPU.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14310
(and thanks to whoever it was on slashdot for pointing me at it in an earlier post).
Seems improved then. I always hated that run from LS to Norwich (thorpe station), because the other bit (from Bristol Temple Meads to London) was a wizzy 125MPH (about 1.5 hours). Back in my student days (in Bristol, SW England), I always favoured the sedate Bus approach (Bristol->London (victoria)->Norwich). But someone clearly had a sense of humour in the numbering schemes for busses, because the "747" (cackles hysterically) used to run between the end points of Norwich and Bristol (and visited most of the (un)known universe in between). Still, it had the great taste to visit *both* cambridge and oxford, so if you were broke (most students always are) and not in a hurry was sort of fun...
(should point out that the 747 wasn't the fast via london bus, but the one most of us poor dumb idiots ending up using because it was a wee bit cheaper)..
Probably a combination of money (you only wanted a speccie if you were terminally broke) and the fact that "Uncle" Clive (Sir Clive Sinclair) was kind of famous in the UK. But, my first home computer was a VIC-20 (eventually when they were sort of dying I bought a QL, mainly because the guy sitting next to me did the UCSD p-system port for it:-;). Oh, and I had a pre-production 512K RAM card (somehow I forgot to return it when I left said company above (accidentally honest !)). (To those who know, adding the Sinclair RAM card made the machine 2x faster because it preferentially used the lower wait state memory you'd just added. For some benchmarks, the QL was about half of a Sage II (an 8MHz 68000 "super" micro)) with the added card. Without (bare 128K) it benchmarked like an ACT Apricot (Victor 9000ish to you US folk).
But, Heck, be aware folks that travelling to my (parents) home city of Norwich is *not* fun. Has anyone fixed up the east rail lines yet so it doesn't take godzillion hours...
(The M11/A11 is a well known death trap, although we used to have endless fun in the old days playing spot the Lotuses (in days gone by based at Hethel aerodrome) being road tested...
If you go there (Norwich) be sure to check out the neat norman castle keep which is the museum, stranger's hall, and the cathedral (spire roughly the same height as a Saturn V rocket). If there's an organ recital *go*. You won't regret it.
But look very closely. IIS 6 integrates part of itself in *kernel* mode (and I mean kernel mode). So god help us if it has such priviledged system access that ACL's etc al go out the window).
Yucky system. Not subject to peer review. Inherently flakey. A+ for effort, E- for implementation. Nuff said. The initial NT vision seemed good, but over time it seems to have grown a heck a lot of cruft...
UNIX in all it's variants is *well understood*, just like the latin alphabet, printing presses and other ancient obsolete technologies.
We move on people, and don't re-invent the letter "A" so Joe BimboHead (IQ: less than 3) can write it. Better to teach Joe, or just look after him somewhere...
Violating abstraction boundaries just for the hell of it implies no central point of architecture or vision which persists at MS. This is BAD. Hint: if you really are an architect, you have to stand by your (one chance) vision for 20-30 years. (See also posts re "Alvin" here on slashdot).
Oh no not again (crashing bowl of petunias time). I'm going to ROTFL because the innocent notion of requiring "Product Activation" has not so innocent consequences.
Here goes: Once upon a time there was a Greek company (yes, I'm the dumb programmer who had to do it) who thought that having a product *locked* to a machine was a good idea. They thought about Dongles (yuck) and other stuff, and eventually came up with a relatively innocous scheme.
So, they *required* product activation. Here's the bad news. Customers machines *break* and hence they trouble your support lines in lemming like droves. So, the more product you sell - the *LESS* money you make because you have to hire more zombies for the support dept. (So, in our case a $20 product ended up losing us $21... - or something like that).
AAARRGGHH!
One activation code - yes, and then forever more you allow *reactivation* on other machines. OK, that doesn't kill piracy, but you have to take the rough with the smooth here...
(and remember you don't know how much information is going back over the wire about your machine + environment. Get seriously FUDDED). Hell, just buy from another company. (Like the Coca Cola classic fiasco, if they want to sell it they'll have to listen).
OK, so it *isn't* really 40 years old. There can't be much except the outer shell which hasn't been replaced over the years. But, when it was made, it was made a little too small. You can't change that. Also, the new (competition) replacements can dive deeper and thus explore much more of that almost unknown world.
Most of the expertise and folklore (care and feeding if you will) needed to babysit it are pretty much locked up in extraordinary dedicated folk who have spent most of their *life* playing with this wondrous toy.
Don't look for an owners manual. There isn't one. Jokes about Buses aside, the competition is better, so it's time to move on.
(It would be *really* dangerous to hand this over to some other institution. Consider the ongoing problems with the decomissioned UK diesel subs and Canada - some poor scientist in XXX country could *die* if you just hand over Alvin without thought). Better to give it to the Smithsonian...
(But I think it's a safe guess the Wood's Hole folks will have a wake...).
No, not really. ARM was "Acorn RISC machines" in the old days. Acorn was the UK company who did the "BBC Micro" (which was c.a. 1982) the most innovative machine around for the home market in the UK (and the basis for a pioneering effort by the BBC "Making the most of the Micro" to educate people about the possibilities of "little machines" (phrase borrowed from Dr.Pournelle)).
(Ironically, it used a picture of an owl (Athena's Owl) and I'm living here in Athens GR these days)
Later, they developed the ARM processor for the "Archimedes" range of machines, which had some nice ideas, but sadly wasn't so successful (too expensive)).
(DEC had rights to the ARM, but didn't own the company). Sidepoint: ARM was RISC before most except the original IBM processor.
It was "droppable" into the corner of your design, so it got designed in all over the place (many places in embedded processing you wouldn't be aware of). You point this out, and I think it was well liked because (cough) the bugs were well known (I haven't played with it, but *having* bugs is much less important than having *unknown* bugs). I could mention a real *mother* of a floppy disk controller which was deaf to commands.
You're right about the design of x86. It sort of grew like a cancer. But it's well known that the 286 happened because Intel screwed up major league with their ambitious iAPX-432 (multi chip) project to replace the 8080. I've heard that it (the '286) was designed in a couple of weeks. I believe that. It sure looks that way. Nothing since has changed that.
A lot of the "baggage" Intel processors carry around is stuff from the ill fated (but much copied - even Unix copies some ideas) Multics project. Hence the rings and gates which are stuff I never expected to see on my desktop after banging on them at university. When Multics finally managed to deliver (and it started in the mid 60's and eventually delivered *something* usable in the late 70's!!!), the world had moved on... (For those who *like* Multics, I understand, but computers as power stations is *so* 1960's). Looking ahead, it might once again become an issue (Grid computing).
(Don't flame me if you're a Multics fan - I know about B0 etc...)
I pretty much shudder at the thought of what rules the vector processor on the NEC uses. You'll need a custom compiler *and* you'll have to follow whatever black art coding rules they tell you to do. Scratch any idea of clean coding if you want fast...
Maybe I'm wrong.
Serious wish territory: is it too much to ask for a processor like even ARM with hyperfast net interconnects a la Inmos Transputer, *and* fast cheap memory (the holy grail even in 386 days). (Ever since then, memory hasn't kept up with Moore's law). Oh, and obviously I want a *really* fast FPU.
Someone make me really *cheap* fast low latency memory. Pleeze. (Don't call me with DDR2 ok? or RAMBUS). Ok, so I want it all. But if you read the "386" manual from Intel, you'll see that the nightmare we are now stuck in is mostly the curse of molasses slow memory. Static memory was expensive then, and is *still* expensive. Anyone making *cheap* static memory could burn Intel...
(which would be deliciously ironic, since Intel's first product was er.. (prob wrong) a 256 bit RAM chip)).
Personally, I kind of sympathize with a ghost voice from the past who coded for the wonderful PDP-11. Now, even though I started during the '11's slow decline, I can *look* at assembly code for that machine and understand it (mainly because Motorola had the excellent taste to *steal* a lot of ideas when they made the 68000). (Except for the 11's middle-endianness. Bloody 1(A0) problem.)
I keep promising myself I'll hack up an '11 emulator so I can look at the ancient root of the OS I started my career porting (ok, you read slashdot, so you guess). Something about Pascal I'd guess. Poke me if you want an old-timer to *really* tell a story...
(yes I know there are a lot of them, but it's not the same...)
Not quite the same. Corner cases you see. When an engineer or programmer designs something they *try* to cover the cases where someone abuses things. Validating everything is kind of impossible, except for trivial engineering, and this led to nonsenses such as the "Viper" CPU which didn't have interrupts (non deterministic is evil you see (grins)). Needless to say that idea had the aerodynamic capability of the average porcine..
But truthfully, there is no software industry version of the infamous Underwriter's Lab (and I want to watch those guys *do* those hideous things from a safe distance).(what happens to your vacuum cleaner when you accidentally poke it into the tropical fish tank etc. etc.).
Often, at least when I started out, there was no guarantee that the hardware was even a good idea, let alone a good design. It just existed, and some fool in marketting had told a nother (grin) fool in management that we can make money doing some fool thing which nobody in their right mind would do. (Like port an operating system no fool in their right mind would use).
OK, you've just been pointed to. Nobody notices that said pointee *doesn't* know anything about the CPU's instruction set, has never done a serious programming project more than 1000 lines of basic (sorry, BASIC) and nobody in the company masochistic enough to take on the project can help. (It helps to remember that mutual help a la mutual assured destruction aka the "Internet" didn't exist).
So, what do you do. Er. You try hard to do the best engineering job you can (and feel foolish *all* of the time). Feeling dumb and dreaming of enlightenment is the Engineer's curse. Hence, the Buddhist jokes that circulate..
Understand. The people doing projects at NASA are stuck with this curse 120% of the time, *and* all the red-tape from hell.
I always wonder how they manage to do anything. Burt (Rutan) is set up pretty much as a "small" outfit. Hence, everyone is in a tight comm's loop and the usual small company "telepathy" kicks in.
If you've never risked your career in a small outfit then you've never risked living...
Bottom line: Bullets *do* kill.
Some one (perhaps the dog) did pull
the trigger.
But in the US you can get away with that. Even be praised for your courage. In Europe, and especially the UK, it's like you are a paedophile or psychopath... (The standard trick in the UK is to get your *wife* to be responsible for the next company, but most of us run out of wives pretty damn quickly...). Good luck. I just spent two years literally homeless here in Athens GR, and am scraping my life back together (looks good so far), so keep believing in yourself...
Hint: The doves or local friendly birds *always* believe in you if you feed them. That's great reinforcement. Not only that but if you work hard at it you might get enough material to write a book (which blows away the reason to muck around with computers to begin with...). (I did think about this and maybe I still will write something perhaps for the infamous gentleman from the Northeast US with the fun book covers...)
Oh right. OK. This is in in exact opposition to everything any serious engineer or (psuedo) engineer like those of us in software engineering are supposed to think. Hey? What's so difficult. Press the big pretty button, message "this is what you asked for? are you sure? wait for response, if yes, ok, the bimbo {of either sex} meant it.
(always confirm anything important even if it's annoying)
Yawn. That's an application? Don't I wish.
Perhaps someone should ask "how many chromosome pairs do you have" and *sterilize* you if you get it wrong. I bet Ronnie's co-star in many B-movies would have gotten it right...
The real problem with the DieCowardly (R) machines, and any other machines of their ilk (and people watch how the ATM's are creeping towards using Windows XP embedded to be really scared!)
is: Microsoft has no sense of social responsibility.
OK, I'll calm down now and go back to my nice comfortable padded cell...
(in the meantime I'll twitch just to annoy people) (Worms on voting machines could be serious so the homeland security folk's in many intel agencies ought to start mugging up on what CERT etc. are doing *yesterday* - why? You see even in places like the UK where voting is (rumoured) to be anonymous it isn't.
The kicker is when an organized gang can harvest this information. FUD on steroids, and serious trouble for democracy is the issue.
So, if anyone in the NSA/CIA/MIxx(uk)/Mossad etc. is listening listen clearly. This is the next terrorism.
I'll say it now, because later we'll all see it in the news every day.
Someone has to point this out now, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the first... Hope the bad guys aren't GNAA...
Tried both RealVNC and TightVNC and the "original" won at least in a LAN environment. But that was just a 15 minute test so I can't comment on performance over the crummy internet "nephos" aka cloud. (OK, friends in Greece, you know the other meaning - especially if like me you live in Athens...). I got the impression that TightVNC didn't understand mouse wheel events properly though, so if you use the mouse as if you're there maybe the orig is better.
The other guys will fix it if people scream, so there's a good chance that the answer you get from slashdot will be wrong *tomorrow* !!!
Oh, I wish they were, but sadly HP seems to have axed anything with Alpha. I wish Intel would take a good look in the mirror and buy the Alpha outright (FUD alert: if AMD does it first you are history guys...).
Given the beautiful clean design I wonder if a really die-shrinked version of Alpha would make a nice PDA processor...
Anyone out there have any clues? (sorry, but I just watched Bob Colwell's (ex intel chief architect) lecture to Stanford, so I'm in processor architecture mode right now...
The answer "Lieutenant" is that this stuff benefits you because the problems it tackles are not addressable by distributed computing apps like seti@home. This sort of iron deals with problems where each point you are fiddling with (on a lattice) affects everything adjacent, so communications with other processors has to happen a lot. Scratch the idea of doing that over the snoozi-net...
But even for Beowolf, you have to consider the running cost (which when you compute it isn't small beer - $20-$30/month per node given the power use. Multiply that by 256 and you could end up being the first individual to file for Chapter {whatever it is in the states}).
***** QUICK NOTE TO THE SLASHCODE AUTHOR **** In text mode, < and > should not get dumped in text mode. Yours, Angry Meta programmer ****** END RANT *****
These days Cray isn't the Cray of old, and you could perhaps roll your own Cray Clone. It isn't like you get to have the cachet of ECL logic processors with *seats* around them, but what the heck..
Beowolf class machines fill in some of the need for true crunch mode machines, but you can never have enough power, so watch Internet 2, and grid computing issues.
Someone will *still* complain even if you turned the whole goddammn universe into their personal computer. It's that difficult. Some problems are just too horrid, and some Professors just too impatient.
I don't expect Quantum computing devices to bail me out in a big hurry, but then again I might be wrong. (Real uncertain about this...).
which is based on that well proven design of ropes and pulleys in Apraphulia (see Sci Am a long time back), I wonder if they will have heat dissipation problems from the friction...
I've been lurking around most of the internet since the early 90's and the S/N has *always* been bad on USENET. So (with the exception of comp.risks(!!!)) when exactly was it good? (You are old Father Time...).
Slashdot Mirror
so why not support GTK+ in it's various forms anyway. Don't see that a browser is the basis for
a platform anymore (not since the Netscape hype a while back).
In any case, even MS is back peddling from the "browser as the ultimate UI" thing like crazy these days in case you haven't noticed. Smart (fat) clients seem to be the prevailing "cult".
If Business 2.0 is an Esther Dyson thing then I think the answer is go back to sleep people. Just the usual prattle....
a la Multics. MS made a big deal out of C2 certification and politely forgot to point out that the only way they got it was to pull the network connection. Hey, this is the real world. B0 and seriously radiation hardened secure stuff *still* means our old friend Multics. (Which I personally liked even though our university ticked off everybody by busting the budget with their dual processor Honeywell c.a. 1980). If you really want a laugh imagine the comments from the science depts when the CS dept burns *everything* on such a nice box (no fortran compiler? eh?). The truth
was that even in those days the IT bimbos didn't grok the real (engineering) world...
Personally, I roll about the floor laughing every time MS tries to pretend it has a secure system.
If they ripped it down to the basics and made it open source we'd actually *fix* their problems for them. (OK, this isn't a joke). Someone poke Steve B with an umbrella (any Bulgarians at MS?)
I have the horrid realisation that all of you are right in some sense. But I wish we could figure out which rightness is right for which thing...
Sigh. What platform are we talking about? Don't resurrect the dead (and tarnish the good name of FireFox , Moz and friends).
If we need a platform then support Miguel and Co. with their alternative to MS dotnet...
I question whether the poster has a secret agenda here....
Sit down and think about it for a moment. Consider what the reaction would be if you decided to clean the Sphinx so it looked new, or redo some famous bridge in the latest hitech materials (let's say
Clifton Suspension bridge in Bristol UK in *titanium* just so it lasted forever).
Somehow, you've *lost* the original both in spirit and implementation. Somehow, you've *lost* the historical context...
I could go on. But I won't bore you (have already he says chuckling).
Even though Movies are in some sense "thought stuff" where is the dividing line between preservation (of the original thought) and re-invention (feels like re-interpretation)?
Cleaning up stuff can look dreadfully like you're
trivializing stuff that was in some sense important, (and remember that the bias of the person cleaning it will be the bias of someone 20-50 years downstream of the originator).
Leave well alone, and be very careful. You want the original "limits" that made magic to stay.
When the only "print" of Star Wars that is left is
a 20 times reprocessed thing, can we say we understand the movie?
Eh? Who defines this stuff. BSDI? SCO? Novell? One of the perennial curses of what constitutes UNIX was
the bitching betweeen the big guys.
Nowadays, we pretty much understand that UNIX is really FreeBSD + Linux +
Sorry SUN, IBM etc but this is the *real* world. We don't want to code for your flakey headers or bleed out because of your incompetence... We've got used to really quick bug fixes flashed across the planet in a way that you guys couldn't even dream of...
I think I screamed enough there. Mac OSX ought to
be higher in most peoples estimation than it is, but the past is still in too many folks heads...
Apple made a lot of wrong moves, and it will take
time to heal those wounds...
If I'm really lucky I may have a mac osx machine here soon. I'm pounding on my colleagues head to get one.. Just so I can run Python on it...
(If I twist his arm enough, perhaps they'll let me
keep one. I still like Mac's, and hot damn it, it's a more robust machine than any crummy windoze box ever will be, not to mention a lot sexier)
(sidenote: the real reason it's sexier is that there's a higher probability that there'e a cute
graphics designer lady I'm borrowing it from...)
We might be an unmarried 45 year old, but we do live here in the med, so we dream on...
I want to apologize to IBM right now, because they
are not the demons they used to be. Jikes etc., are truly beautiful, and we appreciate IBM's contribution...
Who cares. If it walks like UNIX, quacks like UNIX, and doesn't have brain numbing header bugs like those from unix, then it's perhaps unix. Unless it's from microsoft in which case it's a foonix.
(not phoenix.)
But none of this confusion for the big guys would have happened if Richard Stallman hadn't been sufficiently pig headed to believe he could tilt at windmills. Yeah verily Richard, you rock!
Sadly, just like Arthur Clarke, he'll never make money out of that..
I think this bothers him, like totally obviously, it bothers him *NOT AT ALL*
I am equally unperturbed. There are more interesting things, like "are the collared doves as sentient as the feral pidgeons". So far, my research says no. (and one day I'll spell the birds designation accurately).
But they are nice people. With true stories to tell. Which is more than anyone from SCO can say...
(Quick observation which isn't in wikipedia - Collared doves have colour shifting plumage - they are not just boringly beige coloured. So, depending on the light, the colour you see changes.
Second observation: most people (except those who spend time hand feeding them) don't know that they have a flash *orange* patch just on the nape of the neck).
No, I'm not in a sexual liasion with a collared dove...
Cheers from Athens Greece.
...is not the Borland I remember. I knew this when
they took too long to release a Pascal for Windows.
Since it was their *core* product, clearly they weren't so bothered about capturing hearts and minds as they were in the old days.
OK. I can live with that. But trashing the C++/C community? Hmm. Why is it a problem to keep both streams (and gradually wean people across to C# builder?).
This is not the company we knew and loved years ago.
Nuff said. But there are tears in my eyes because
they were well admired by almost all of us for the things they did in the past.
Anders is now working for those excellent and perhaps too much maligned folk at Redmond (don't spit H2SO4 at me, they are kool sometimes), and I'd guess since PK isn't there it isn't really the
*same* company it was.
Just the name. But, on the other hand Novell is
much to my delight proving that the name still matters.
I for one mourn the passing of a group of people that we all admired...
RIP Borland.
(But, Frank can come and drink a beer here in Athens any day of the week).
>Modern electronic computers are getting closer to >being optical in any case (gigahertz range).
Huh, last time I checked lasers were up there in the *TERA* hertz range.
So what is the punchline here?
If the poster means we need faster interconnects, then yeah verily, but that isn't the problem for CPU
design. Feeding the buggers is. Since the 386 we haven't had memory which could keep them without grumbly tummy syndrome. Intel tried to lie to everybody about this, but even they eventually caved in and started using caches of static ram.
Even back in 386 days you needed 35ns memory (or thereabouts). Nothing has changed since. Memory
technology *hasn't delivered*.
Modern "fine tuned" deep pipelined, superscalar up to the wazoo processors just don't scale anymore. Go watch *this* video reffed below for some insight. Suddenly you'll see why Intel has
backed off from their MHz == Performance kick...
Hint: It's 90 minutes and well worth the laughs
for the insights. I had to fight hard to see it
in a whole day (two Cretans in one office makes
for a really unproductive work environment...)
(I really need to borrow some hardware from ESR...)
Stanford is where the infamous and rather splendid
Don Knuth resides, and they have a 64 bit design I'd love to see (anyone want to give me one?) so I
can play with a real CPU.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14310
(and thanks to whoever it was on slashdot for pointing me at it in an earlier post).
Seems improved then. I always hated that run from
LS to Norwich (thorpe station), because the other
bit (from Bristol Temple Meads to London) was a wizzy 125MPH (about 1.5 hours). Back in my student
days (in Bristol, SW England), I always favoured the
sedate Bus approach (Bristol->London (victoria)->Norwich). But someone clearly had a sense of humour in the numbering schemes for busses, because the "747" (cackles hysterically)
used to run between the end points of Norwich and Bristol (and visited most of the (un)known universe in between). Still, it had the great taste to visit *both* cambridge and oxford, so
if you were broke (most students always are) and
not in a hurry was sort of fun...
(should point out that the 747 wasn't the fast
via london bus, but the one most of us poor dumb
idiots ending up using because it was a wee bit
cheaper)..
Go kiss the singing postman for me (big grin)
Probably a combination of money (you only wanted a speccie if you were terminally broke) and the fact that "Uncle" Clive (Sir Clive Sinclair) was kind of famous in the UK. But, my first home computer was a VIC-20 (eventually when they were sort of dying I bought a QL, mainly because the guy sitting next to me did the UCSD p-system port for it :-;). Oh, and I had a pre-production 512K RAM
card (somehow I forgot to return it when I left
said company above (accidentally honest !)).
(To those who know, adding the Sinclair RAM card
made the machine 2x faster because it preferentially used the lower wait state memory you'd just added. For some benchmarks, the QL was about half of a Sage II (an 8MHz 68000 "super" micro)) with the added card. Without (bare 128K) it benchmarked like an ACT Apricot (Victor 9000ish to you US folk).
But, Heck, be aware folks that travelling to my (parents) home city of Norwich is *not* fun. Has anyone fixed up the east rail lines yet so it doesn't take godzillion hours...
(The M11/A11 is a well known death trap, although
we used to have endless fun in the old days playing spot the Lotuses (in days gone by based at Hethel aerodrome) being road tested...
If you go there (Norwich) be sure to check out the neat norman castle keep which is the museum, stranger's hall, and the cathedral (spire roughly the same height as a Saturn V rocket). If there's
an organ recital *go*. You won't regret it.
Cheers from (sunnier) Athens Greece.
But look very closely. IIS 6 integrates part of itself in *kernel* mode (and I mean kernel mode).
So god help us if it has such priviledged system access that ACL's etc al go out the window).
Yucky system. Not subject to peer review. Inherently flakey. A+ for effort, E- for implementation. Nuff said. The initial NT vision seemed good, but over time it seems to have grown a heck a lot of cruft...
UNIX in all it's variants is *well understood*, just like the latin alphabet, printing presses and other ancient obsolete technologies.
We move on people, and don't re-invent the letter "A" so Joe BimboHead (IQ: less than 3) can write it. Better to teach Joe, or just look after him somewhere...
Violating abstraction boundaries just for the hell of it implies no central point of architecture or vision which persists at MS. This is BAD. Hint: if you really are an architect, you have to stand by your (one chance) vision for 20-30 years. (See also posts re "Alvin" here on slashdot).
Watch out. You'll upset too many people if you burn
Ken Thompson. Anyway, I don't think he's awfully flammable anyway....
Necklacing Darl, now, there's an idea...
Oh no not again (crashing bowl of petunias time).
I'm going to ROTFL because the innocent notion of
requiring "Product Activation" has not so innocent
consequences.
Here goes:
Once upon a time there was a Greek company (yes, I'm the dumb programmer who had to do it) who thought that having a product *locked* to a machine was a good idea. They thought about Dongles (yuck) and other stuff, and eventually came up with a relatively innocous scheme.
So, they *required* product activation. Here's the bad news. Customers machines *break* and hence they trouble your support lines in lemming like droves. So, the more product you sell - the *LESS*
money you make because you have to hire more zombies for the support dept. (So, in our case a
$20 product ended up losing us $21... - or something like that).
AAARRGGHH!
One activation code - yes, and then forever more you allow *reactivation* on other machines. OK, that doesn't kill piracy, but you have to take the
rough with the smooth here...
(and remember you don't know how much information
is going back over the wire about your machine + environment. Get seriously FUDDED). Hell, just buy
from another company. (Like the Coca Cola classic
fiasco, if they want to sell it they'll have to listen).
OK, so it *isn't* really 40 years old. There can't be much except the outer shell which hasn't been
replaced over the years. But, when it was made, it was made a little too small. You can't change that. Also, the new (competition) replacements
can dive deeper and thus explore much more of
that almost unknown world.
Most of the expertise and folklore (care and feeding if you will) needed to babysit it are pretty
much locked up in extraordinary dedicated folk who have spent most of their *life* playing with this wondrous toy.
Don't look for an owners manual. There isn't one.
Jokes about Buses aside, the competition is better, so it's time to move on.
(It would be *really* dangerous to hand this over to some other institution. Consider the ongoing problems with the decomissioned UK diesel subs and
Canada - some poor scientist in XXX country could
*die* if you just hand over Alvin without thought). Better to give it to the Smithsonian...
(But I think it's a safe guess the Wood's Hole folks will have a wake...).
No, not really. ARM was "Acorn RISC machines" in the old days. Acorn was the UK company who did the "BBC Micro" (which was c.a. 1982) the most innovative machine around for the home market in the UK (and the basis for a pioneering effort by the BBC "Making the most of the Micro" to educate
people about the possibilities of "little machines" (phrase borrowed from Dr.Pournelle)).
(Ironically, it used a picture of an owl (Athena's
Owl) and I'm living here in Athens GR these days)
Later, they developed the ARM processor for the "Archimedes" range of machines, which had some nice
ideas, but sadly wasn't so successful (too expensive)).
(DEC had rights to the ARM, but didn't own the company). Sidepoint: ARM was RISC before most except the original IBM processor.
It was "droppable" into the corner of your design,
so it got designed in all over the place (many places in embedded processing you wouldn't be aware of). You point this out, and I think it was well liked because (cough) the bugs were well known (I haven't played with it, but *having* bugs
is much less important than having *unknown* bugs). I could mention a real *mother* of a
floppy disk controller which was deaf to commands.
You're right about the design of x86. It sort of
grew like a cancer. But it's well known that the 286 happened because Intel screwed up major league with their ambitious iAPX-432 (multi chip) project to replace the 8080. I've heard that
it (the '286) was designed in a couple of weeks. I believe that. It sure looks that way. Nothing since has changed that.
A lot of the "baggage" Intel processors carry around is stuff from the ill fated (but much
copied - even Unix copies some ideas) Multics project. Hence the rings and gates which are stuff
I never expected to see on my desktop after
banging on them at university. When Multics finally managed to deliver (and it started in the mid 60's and eventually delivered *something* usable in the late 70's!!!), the world had moved on... (For those who *like*
Multics, I understand, but computers as power stations is *so* 1960's). Looking ahead, it might
once again become an issue (Grid computing).
(Don't flame me if you're a Multics fan - I know
about B0 etc...)
I pretty much shudder at the thought of what rules the vector processor on the NEC uses. You'll need a custom compiler *and* you'll have to follow whatever black art coding rules they tell you to do. Scratch any idea of clean coding if you want fast...
Maybe I'm wrong.
Serious wish territory: is it too much to ask for
a processor like even ARM with hyperfast net interconnects a la Inmos Transputer, *and* fast cheap memory (the holy grail even in 386 days).
(Ever since then, memory hasn't kept up with Moore's law). Oh, and obviously I want a *really*
fast FPU.
Someone make me really *cheap* fast low latency memory. Pleeze. (Don't call me with DDR2 ok? or RAMBUS). Ok, so I want it all. But if you read
the "386" manual from Intel, you'll see that the
nightmare we are now stuck in is mostly the curse
of molasses slow memory. Static memory was expensive then, and is *still* expensive. Anyone
making *cheap* static memory could burn Intel...
(which would be deliciously ironic, since Intel's
first product was er.. (prob wrong) a 256 bit RAM chip)).
Personally, I kind of sympathize with a ghost voice from the past who coded for the wonderful
PDP-11. Now, even though I started during the '11's slow decline, I can *look* at assembly code
for that machine and understand it (mainly because
Motorola had the excellent taste to *steal* a lot of ideas when they made the 68000). (Except for
the 11's middle-endianness. Bloody 1(A0) problem.)
I keep promising myself I'll hack up an '11 emulator so I can look at the ancient root of
the OS I started my career porting (ok, you read slashdot, so you guess). Something about Pascal I'd guess. Poke me if you want an old-timer to *really* tell a story...
(yes I know there are a lot of them, but it's not the same...)
Time. She's a bitch.
Not quite the same. Corner cases you see. When an engineer or programmer designs something they *try* to cover the cases where someone abuses things. Validating everything is kind of impossible, except for trivial engineering, and
this led to nonsenses such as the "Viper" CPU which didn't have interrupts (non deterministic is
evil you see (grins)). Needless to say that idea
had the aerodynamic capability of the average
porcine..
But truthfully, there is no software industry version of
the infamous Underwriter's Lab (and I want to watch
those guys *do* those hideous things from a safe distance).(what happens to your vacuum cleaner when you accidentally poke it into the tropical fish tank etc. etc.).
Often, at least when I started out, there was no guarantee that the hardware was even a good idea, let alone a good design. It just existed, and
some fool in marketting had told a nother (grin)
fool in management that we can make money doing
some fool thing which nobody in their right mind
would do. (Like port an operating system no fool in their right mind would use).
OK, you've just been pointed to. Nobody notices that said pointee *doesn't* know anything about the CPU's instruction set, has never done a serious programming project more than 1000 lines of basic (sorry, BASIC) and nobody in the company
masochistic enough to take on the project can help. (It helps to remember that mutual help a la
mutual assured destruction aka the "Internet" didn't exist).
So, what do you do. Er. You try hard to do the best engineering job you can (and feel foolish *all* of the time). Feeling dumb and dreaming of
enlightenment is the Engineer's curse. Hence, the
Buddhist jokes that circulate..
Understand. The people doing projects at NASA are stuck with this curse 120% of the time, *and* all the red-tape from hell.
I always wonder how they manage to do anything.
Burt (Rutan) is set up pretty much as a "small" outfit. Hence, everyone is in a tight comm's loop and the usual small company "telepathy" kicks in.
If you've never risked your career in a small outfit then you've never risked living...
Bottom line: Bullets *do* kill.
Some one (perhaps the dog) did pull
the trigger.
It might have been the hamster (see Dave Barry)
But in the US you can get away with that. Even be praised for your courage. In Europe, and especially the UK, it's like you are a paedophile or psychopath... (The standard trick in the UK is to get your *wife* to be responsible for the next company, but most of us run out of wives pretty damn
quickly...).
Good luck. I just spent two years literally homeless here in Athens GR, and am scraping my life back together (looks good so far), so keep believing in yourself...
Hint: The doves or local friendly birds *always* believe in you if you feed them. That's great reinforcement. Not only that but if you work hard at it you might get enough material to write a book (which blows away the reason to muck around with computers to begin with...). (I did think about this and maybe I still will write something
perhaps for the infamous gentleman from the Northeast US with the fun book covers...)
Cheers,
Andy
Oh right. OK. This is in in exact opposition to everything any serious engineer or (psuedo) engineer
like those of us in software engineering are supposed to think. Hey? What's so difficult. Press
the big pretty button, message "this is what you asked for? are you sure? wait for response, if yes,
ok, the bimbo {of either sex} meant it.
(always confirm anything important even if it's annoying)
Yawn. That's an application? Don't I wish.
Perhaps someone should ask "how many chromosome pairs do you have" and *sterilize* you if you get it wrong. I bet Ronnie's co-star in many B-movies
would have gotten it right...
The real problem with the DieCowardly (R) machines, and any other machines of their ilk (and
people watch how the ATM's are creeping towards using Windows XP embedded to be really scared!)
is: Microsoft has no sense of social responsibility.
OK, I'll calm down now and go back to my nice comfortable padded cell...
(in the meantime I'll twitch just to annoy people)
(Worms on voting machines could be serious so
the homeland security folk's in many intel agencies ought to start mugging up on what CERT etc. are doing *yesterday* - why? You see even
in places like the UK where voting is (rumoured)
to be anonymous it isn't.
The kicker is when an organized gang can harvest
this information. FUD on steroids, and serious
trouble for democracy is the issue.
So, if anyone in the NSA/CIA/MIxx(uk)/Mossad etc.
is listening listen clearly. This is the next
terrorism.
I'll say it now, because later we'll all see it in
the news every day.
Someone has to point this out now, and I'm pretty
sure I'm not the first... Hope the bad guys aren't
GNAA...
Tried both RealVNC and TightVNC and the "original" won at least in a LAN environment. But that was just a 15 minute test so I can't comment on performance over the crummy internet "nephos" aka cloud. (OK, friends in Greece, you know the other meaning - especially if like me you live in Athens...). I got the impression that TightVNC didn't understand mouse wheel events properly though, so if you use the mouse as if you're there maybe the orig is better.
The other guys will fix it if people scream, so there's a good chance that the answer you get from
slashdot will be wrong *tomorrow* !!!
(entropy you see always roules )
Green Lantern right?
My favourite hero from DC comics (just because he wasn't the others...).
Oh, I wish they were, but sadly HP seems to have axed anything with Alpha. I wish Intel would
take a good look in the mirror and buy the Alpha
outright (FUD alert: if AMD does it first you are
history guys...).
Given the beautiful clean design I wonder if a really die-shrinked version of Alpha would make a nice PDA processor...
Anyone out there have any clues?
(sorry, but I just watched Bob Colwell's (ex intel chief architect) lecture to Stanford, so I'm in processor architecture mode right now...
The answer "Lieutenant" is that this stuff benefits you because the problems it tackles are
not addressable by distributed computing apps like seti@home. This sort of iron deals with problems where each point you are fiddling with (on a lattice) affects everything adjacent, so communications with other processors has to happen
a lot. Scratch the idea of doing that over the
snoozi-net...
But even for Beowolf, you have to consider the running cost (which when you compute it isn't small beer - $20-$30/month per node given the power use. Multiply that by 256 and you could end
up being the first individual to file for Chapter
{whatever it is in the states}).
***** QUICK NOTE TO THE SLASHCODE AUTHOR ****
In text mode, < and > should not get dumped
in text mode. Yours, Angry Meta programmer
****** END RANT *****
These days Cray isn't the Cray of old, and you could perhaps roll your own Cray Clone. It isn't like you get to have the cachet of ECL logic processors with *seats* around them, but what the heck..
Beowolf class machines fill in some of the need for true crunch mode machines, but you can never have enough power, so watch Internet 2, and grid computing issues.
Someone will *still* complain even if you turned the whole goddammn universe into their personal computer. It's that difficult. Some problems are just too horrid, and some Professors just too impatient.
I don't expect Quantum computing devices to bail me out in a big hurry, but then again I might be
wrong. (Real uncertain about this...).
which is based on that well proven design of ropes and pulleys in Apraphulia (see Sci Am a long time back), I wonder if they will have heat dissipation problems from the friction...
I've been lurking around most of the internet since
the early 90's and the S/N has *always* been bad on
USENET. So (with the exception of comp.risks(!!!))
when exactly was it good? (You are old Father Time...).
Thanks for that one. Why AC though? You didn't write the RFC did you?