That's the great thing about DARPA, they can always find a plausible sounding military application for any Mad Science idea as an excuse for throwing money at it.
They started from HPPA which was a competent Risc chip and made it VLIW. The reasoning was that superscalar and out of order Risc would not scale to very wide machines and it would be better to have dumber hardware and let the compiler mark which instructions would be executed in parallel. The dumber hardware would run at a faster clock speed, i.e. they would out Risc Risc.
In retrospect they were right that superscalar doesn't scale to wide machines, the trend now is to more cores not wider ones. Unfortunately they were wrong about compilers being able to do a better job than hardware. And Itaniums have actually ended up running at slower clock speeds than x86 chips.
I think it was slow clock speeds that killed Itanium. And they were probably caused by making a dumb architecture that in the end wasn't that dumb. IA64 is horribly complicated, worse than x86. That complication ended up being worse for clock speed that superscalar and OOE.
I think if IA-64 ever achieved the kind of volume the x86 market has, it would end up being a fine processor with lots of room for improvement still. It never really stood a chance: it was marketed as a server processor and Microsoft offerer only a half-assed support for it (it's their best interest to keep computers a commodity and they will fight any attempt to differentiate in that space). In addition, by the time it could be a viable high-power desktop workstation for developers or data-crunchers (a space it shines in) there was no Fedora or Ubuntu for it.
Instead, AMD came out with a set of extensions to the crufty x86 and that is what we use today. We would be much better if we started from a clean sheet.
And much, much better, if binary compatibility to x86 wasn't such a big issue.
None of that is true. Microsoft ported NT based kernels to Itanium (and spent vast amounts of time doing so because there are some subtle issues). Still since it was made by Intel it was pretty much guaranteed to get Windows support.
An Opteron 246 had about the same SpecInt as an Itanium 2 even when both were running native code.
Microsoft Windows and major Linux versions include IA-32 EL. The emulation layer is considerably slower than a modern Xeon however: A 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processor runs emulated x86 instructions at about the same speed as a 1.5GHz Xeon processor, according to Intel.
At that point the fastest Xeon was much faster than 1.5Ghz
Basically Itanium was a chance for a company with vast resources to start from scratch and it wasn't faster than x86. The Risc chips that NT supported actually had a better performance advantage, at one point up to 2x the SpecInt. And that wasn't enough to get people to bear the pain of switching over.
The fact is you can't judge computer architecture by aesthetic principles. x86 and x64 may look ugly but that is subjective. The thing that counts is performance and x86 has been beating competing architectures on SpecInt for ages.
Amd64 vs Ia64 was particularly dramatic. Intel had a huge financial advantage and at one point desktop Athlon 64s were the fastest processor in the world, beating far more expensive Ia64 server processors. It's the same now with Nehalem -
It's easy to say that it would be easy to start from a clean sheet, but Intel has tried that, poured money into it got the entire industry (including Microsoft) to announce transition plans from x86 to Ia64 and it still failed. Hell Ia64 isn't even that aesthetically pleasing, the more you look at it the more crufty it is.
What about cable modems or even DSL where the backbone capacity is limited? Actually in general there isn't an unlimited amount of capacity and a few people torrenting hard can slow things down. Now you could argue that the telcos should buy more backbone capacity and you'd have a point, but that doesn't alter the fact that right now for most people there are capacity limits. If you run bitorrent unlimited you're using more than your fair share of that limited capacity.
What scares me is that AMD might decline into a purely budget CPU house like Cyrix did and then leave the market together.
Now think back to the Itanium fiasco. If AMD hadn't have been around or hadn't been making high end chips Intel could have made the high end IA64 and gradually migrate the whole market to it. So now we'd be running underpowered and overpriced IA64 chips. In a sense the thing that prevented that was that chips were dual sourced so Intel couldn't force a transition to an inferior successor like Microsoft did with XP to Vista. And IA64 was likely so patented that no one else would be ever be able to make compatible chips.
Of course with AMD around Intel was forced to adopt x64 and produce the excellent Core, Core2 and now Core i7 microarchitectures and do it very quickly. Just imagine what would have happened if they hadn't been. Recently I've heard AMD they will go fabless for example. TSMC and other commodity fabs don't have technology to match Intel, so AMD will lag behind. For low end stuff it doesn't matter much, but it really does for the high end. Mind you Intel is kicking ass in the netbook market too. It really makes you wonder how long AMD will be around. And if AMD go under so would ATI since they bought it. I actually prefer Intel and NVidia in this generation but I'm not sure they would be much good if there was no competition.
I dunno, my experience of it is that WGA works if Windows is activated. I have had one known pirated machine that WGA fails on and a bunch of genuine ones that it succeeds.
Are there any users who won't have to activate their copies of Windows XP? Yes: 1. If you purchase a new computer with Windows XP pre-installed, it will most likely come pre-activated. The only problem then is if you attempt a major upgrade. 2. The version of Windows XP Professional sold with a large corporate site-license doesn't contain the activation code. If you're using that version, you'll never have to activate it.
I.e. corporate users don't need to activate, neither do people that buy machines with XP preinstalled. The only people who need to activate are people that install it themselves.
TCP Window Scaling is implemented in Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista operating systems. Vista has enabled it by default, while the other operating systems implement it as an option. Because many routers and firewalls do not properly implement TCP Window Scaling, it can cause a user's Internet connection to malfunction intermittently for a few minutes, then appear to start working again for no reason. If "diagnose problem" is selected in Vista, an error message will be displayed "cannot communicate with primary DNS server."
I.e. it's been around since Win2k but not enabled for the excellent reason that routers and firewalls don't support it. In the absence of Window scaling the TCP window size is limited to 64K which will be a bottleneck on fast connections with a high RTT. That sounds like a good description of a bitorrent connection to a peer on the other side of the world.
Mind you bitorrent is notorious for gobbling all the available bandwidth unless you limit it, I'm not sure that it learning to bypass this bottleneck is a good thing for people with selfish neighbours.
I dunno, some dude in that is probably so comfortable enough with his own hetereosexuality that he could get out and fuck you in the ass for laughing at his gay looking car without worrying about it much afterwards.
There's another one I can find now where if you look at the headlights there's a smiley face. It's more subtle than the Miata, in fact you don't notice until someone points it out.
Which makes you wonder if the machines will exploit this sort of this thing when they take over, e.g. by making Terminators look non threatening.
I had a laptop with pirated XP on it which didn't pass Genuine Advantage. It worked fine for years, there were hacks to install Service Packs. Microsoft even documented how to change the license key from the leaked Corporate one to another. I actually had a spare OEM copy of XP but I used a keygen just to see if I could keep it working and see how Microsoft supported it.
The keygenned key let me install service packs but it stopped passing Genuine Advantage. There were cracks for that, but I never needed to use them. Apart from not being allowed to download stuff that needed GA from the Microsoft site I never really had an issue with it. And if you really have genuine copies, why not call Microsoft and get them to activate them for you, which they will certainly do if you have proof of purchase? Or read up on the latest cracks?
Whining about it on slashdot is just karma whoring.
I don't know why people complain about Genuine Advantage. If you buy the software it is unlocked. If you pirate it it will still work, even though it knows it is pirated, but it won't work 100%. I.e. pirate copies are partially locked.
Genuine Advantage would be better if they had a sense of humour about it. Like instead of black screening pirate copies they could shrink the desktop slowly surrounded it by a dirty border and have photorealistic DirectX 10 cockroaches in the border. When you unlocked the workstation they'd scatter, but you still see the odd leg or antenna poking out from the edge of the monitor. Every so often one would run across the screen when you were hard at work. Hell, maybe you'd let people crush them with the mouse pointer but it would leave a nasty yellow blob on the screen. The longer you held out against buying a license, the more bold the roaches would become, and the more hit points they would have.
Essentially Microsoft discovered a way to make people RAGE! by accident with Clippy. They should put that knowledge to use annoying pirates and making everyone else laugh at them. Most people have a fear of being mocked for being cheap, they should put that fear to use.
He'd catch the terrorists first, worry about paperwork and suspensions afterwards.
I think that's a lesson for all you Fourth Amendment Nazis.
Re:Lower wattage bulbs, like Cory Doctorow?
on
Censorship By Glut
·
· Score: 1
Bashing Cory is always fun. Did you know this self proclaimed nerd dropped out of three degree programmes and named his daughter Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow.
Still like Ann Coulter he's good at telling his audience what they want to hear, so they tend to overlook his obvious bogosity.
It should worry you that someone called Adolf Hitroll with First Post! actually makes a worrying amount of sense.
This story reminds me of those horrid company newsletters that always headline with similar silver lining type stories about how the company's favoured technology is taking the world by storm, regardless of whether there is a bust, depression, global thermonuclear war or the return of The Old Ones to consume the world.
"Company (NASDAQ:COMP) salesdrone Mr Smith reports that Lord Cthulhu's (NASDAQ: N/A) return has upside. Company RFIDs are being implanted in babbling mad civillians in a fallout shelter miles beneath ruined Washington DC. As other cities are consumed, upto 0.0003% of the population will survive in gibbering insanity for weeks before they starve or asphyxiate and will require an RFID for tracking. Company sales representatives have also been dispatched to visit R'lyeh to discuss possible synergies between the company's other product lines and Lord Cthulhu's takeover of this planet and possibly universe, but have not so far reported back. They did report in via email, but those emails have not so far been deciphered."
Slashdot Mirror
That's the great thing about DARPA, they can always find a plausible sounding military application for any Mad Science idea as an excuse for throwing money at it.
It would be ok if you had net access.
Nope, God uses a Microsoft derived OS.
They started from HPPA which was a competent Risc chip and made it VLIW. The reasoning was that superscalar and out of order Risc would not scale to very wide machines and it would be better to have dumber hardware and let the compiler mark which instructions would be executed in parallel. The dumber hardware would run at a faster clock speed, i.e. they would out Risc Risc.
In retrospect they were right that superscalar doesn't scale to wide machines, the trend now is to more cores not wider ones. Unfortunately they were wrong about compilers being able to do a better job than hardware. And Itaniums have actually ended up running at slower clock speeds than x86 chips.
I think it was slow clock speeds that killed Itanium. And they were probably caused by making a dumb architecture that in the end wasn't that dumb. IA64 is horribly complicated, worse than x86. That complication ended up being worse for clock speed that superscalar and OOE.
Risc chips had more performance back when it was 386 vs Mips, but that advantage disappeared over time
http://www-vlsi.stanford.edu/group/chart/SpecInt2000.pdf
It seems rtorrent is run in a terminal? I do actually have a display adapter, so I might as well use it.
I think if IA-64 ever achieved the kind of volume the x86 market has, it would end up being a fine processor with lots of room for improvement still. It never really stood a chance: it was marketed as a server processor and Microsoft offerer only a half-assed support for it (it's their best interest to keep computers a commodity and they will fight any attempt to differentiate in that space). In addition, by the time it could be a viable high-power desktop workstation for developers or data-crunchers (a space it shines in) there was no Fedora or Ubuntu for it.
Instead, AMD came out with a set of extensions to the crufty x86 and that is what we use today. We would be much better if we started from a clean sheet.
And much, much better, if binary compatibility to x86 wasn't such a big issue.
None of that is true. Microsoft ported NT based kernels to Itanium (and spent vast amounts of time doing so because there are some subtle issues). Still since it was made by Intel it was pretty much guaranteed to get Windows support.
An Opteron 246 had about the same SpecInt as an Itanium 2 even when both were running native code.
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/11/05/amd-benchmarks-opteron-against--itanium-xeons-piiis
An Itanium was much slower running x86 binaries. Even the second generation run x86 binaries slowly
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Itanium-loses-x86-hardware-support/0,339028227,339230300,00.htm
Microsoft Windows and major Linux versions include IA-32 EL. The emulation layer is considerably slower than a modern Xeon however: A 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processor runs emulated x86 instructions at about the same speed as a 1.5GHz Xeon processor, according to Intel.
At that point the fastest Xeon was much faster than 1.5Ghz
Opteron systems were much cheaper
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/57718-28-opteron-kill-itanium
and they tended to win on real world benchmarks
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/30FE64linux_3.html
Basically Itanium was a chance for a company with vast resources to start from scratch and it wasn't faster than x86. The Risc chips that NT supported actually had a better performance advantage, at one point up to 2x the SpecInt. And that wasn't enough to get people to bear the pain of switching over.
The fact is you can't judge computer architecture by aesthetic principles. x86 and x64 may look ugly but that is subjective. The thing that counts is performance and x86 has been beating competing architectures on SpecInt for ages.
Amd64 vs Ia64 was particularly dramatic. Intel had a huge financial advantage and at one point desktop Athlon 64s were the fastest processor in the world, beating far more expensive Ia64 server processors. It's the same now with Nehalem -
http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-i.html
it beats far more expensive non x86 chips, including ones from Intel.
Actually it wins on FP now, which is something that non x86 chips tended to do well at
http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-f.html
It's easy to say that it would be easy to start from a clean sheet, but Intel has tried that, poured money into it got the entire industry (including Microsoft) to announce transition plans from x86 to Ia64 and it still failed. Hell Ia64 isn't even that aesthetically pleasing, the more you look at it the more crufty it is.
What about cable modems or even DSL where the backbone capacity is limited? Actually in general there isn't an unlimited amount of capacity and a few people torrenting hard can slow things down. Now you could argue that the telcos should buy more backbone capacity and you'd have a point, but that doesn't alter the fact that right now for most people there are capacity limits. If you run bitorrent unlimited you're using more than your fair share of that limited capacity.
What scares me is that AMD might decline into a purely budget CPU house like Cyrix did and then leave the market together.
Now think back to the Itanium fiasco. If AMD hadn't have been around or hadn't been making high end chips Intel could have made the high end IA64 and gradually migrate the whole market to it. So now we'd be running underpowered and overpriced IA64 chips. In a sense the thing that prevented that was that chips were dual sourced so Intel couldn't force a transition to an inferior successor like Microsoft did with XP to Vista. And IA64 was likely so patented that no one else would be ever be able to make compatible chips.
Of course with AMD around Intel was forced to adopt x64 and produce the excellent Core, Core2 and now Core i7 microarchitectures and do it very quickly. Just imagine what would have happened if they hadn't been. Recently I've heard AMD they will go fabless for example. TSMC and other commodity fabs don't have technology to match Intel, so AMD will lag behind. For low end stuff it doesn't matter much, but it really does for the high end. Mind you Intel is kicking ass in the netbook market too. It really makes you wonder how long AMD will be around. And if AMD go under so would ATI since they bought it. I actually prefer Intel and NVidia in this generation but I'm not sure they would be much good if there was no competition.
Not a very comforting thought is it?
I dunno, my experience of it is that WGA works if Windows is activated. I have had one known pirated machine that WGA fails on and a bunch of genuine ones that it succeeds.
It is selfish if you run BitTorrent with settings that causes everyone else in the neighbourhood's network connection to crawl.
E.g.
http://www.forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=73101
Hmm,
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-200
Are there any users who won't have to activate their copies of Windows XP?
Yes:
1. If you purchase a new computer with Windows XP pre-installed, it will most likely come pre-activated. The only problem then is if you attempt a major upgrade.
2. The version of Windows XP Professional sold with a large corporate site-license doesn't contain the activation code. If you're using that version, you'll never have to activate it.
I.e. corporate users don't need to activate, neither do people that buy machines with XP preinstalled. The only people who need to activate are people that install it themselves.
Dave Cutler said "UNIX as a 'junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_window_scale_option#Windows
TCP Window Scaling is implemented in Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista operating systems. Vista has enabled it by default, while the other operating systems implement it as an option. Because many routers and firewalls do not properly implement TCP Window Scaling, it can cause a user's Internet connection to malfunction intermittently for a few minutes, then appear to start working again for no reason. If "diagnose problem" is selected in Vista, an error message will be displayed "cannot communicate with primary DNS server."
I.e. it's been around since Win2k but not enabled for the excellent reason that routers and firewalls don't support it. In the absence of Window scaling the TCP window size is limited to 64K which will be a bottleneck on fast connections with a high RTT. That sounds like a good description of a bitorrent connection to a peer on the other side of the world.
Mind you bitorrent is notorious for gobbling all the available bandwidth unless you limit it, I'm not sure that it learning to bypass this bottleneck is a good thing for people with selfish neighbours.
I dunno, some dude in that is probably so comfortable enough with his own hetereosexuality that he could get out and fuck you in the ass for laughing at his gay looking car without worrying about it much afterwards.
Japanese cars seem to go for this. The most blatant example is the Miata.
http://www.pinkmiata.com/images/miata_face.jpg
There's another one I can find now where if you look at the headlights there's a smiley face. It's more subtle than the Miata, in fact you don't notice until someone points it out.
Which makes you wonder if the machines will exploit this sort of this thing when they take over, e.g. by making Terminators look non threatening.
I had a laptop with pirated XP on it which didn't pass Genuine Advantage. It worked fine for years, there were hacks to install Service Packs. Microsoft even documented how to change the license key from the leaked Corporate one to another. I actually had a spare OEM copy of XP but I used a keygen just to see if I could keep it working and see how Microsoft supported it.
The keygenned key let me install service packs but it stopped passing Genuine Advantage. There were cracks for that, but I never needed to use them. Apart from not being allowed to download stuff that needed GA from the Microsoft site I never really had an issue with it. And if you really have genuine copies, why not call Microsoft and get them to activate them for you, which they will certainly do if you have proof of purchase? Or read up on the latest cracks?
Whining about it on slashdot is just karma whoring.
I don't know why people complain about Genuine Advantage. If you buy the software it is unlocked. If you pirate it it will still work, even though it knows it is pirated, but it won't work 100%. I.e. pirate copies are partially locked.
Genuine Advantage would be better if they had a sense of humour about it. Like instead of black screening pirate copies they could shrink the desktop slowly surrounded it by a dirty border and have photorealistic DirectX 10 cockroaches in the border. When you unlocked the workstation they'd scatter, but you still see the odd leg or antenna poking out from the edge of the monitor. Every so often one would run across the screen when you were hard at work. Hell, maybe you'd let people crush them with the mouse pointer but it would leave a nasty yellow blob on the screen. The longer you held out against buying a license, the more bold the roaches would become, and the more hit points they would have.
Essentially Microsoft discovered a way to make people RAGE! by accident with Clippy. They should put that knowledge to use annoying pirates and making everyone else laugh at them. Most people have a fear of being mocked for being cheap, they should put that fear to use.
Yet, his childhood "pal" Osama Bin Laden is still free.
John McClane is not a pal of some Iraqi terrorist asshole.
He'd catch the terrorists first, worry about paperwork and suspensions afterwards.
I think that's a lesson for all you Fourth Amendment Nazis.
Bashing Cory is always fun. Did you know this self proclaimed nerd dropped out of three degree programmes and named his daughter Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow.
Still like Ann Coulter he's good at telling his audience what they want to hear, so they tend to overlook his obvious bogosity.
What version of MAC do you use?
It should worry you that someone called Adolf Hitroll with First Post! actually makes a worrying amount of sense.
This story reminds me of those horrid company newsletters that always headline with similar silver lining type stories about how the company's favoured technology is taking the world by storm, regardless of whether there is a bust, depression, global thermonuclear war or the return of The Old Ones to consume the world.
"Company (NASDAQ:COMP) salesdrone Mr Smith reports that Lord Cthulhu's (NASDAQ: N/A) return has upside. Company RFIDs are being implanted in babbling mad civillians in a fallout shelter miles beneath ruined Washington DC. As other cities are consumed, upto 0.0003% of the population will survive in gibbering insanity for weeks before they starve or asphyxiate and will require an RFID for tracking. Company sales representatives have also been dispatched to visit R'lyeh to discuss possible synergies between the company's other product lines and Lord Cthulhu's takeover of this planet and possibly universe, but have not so far reported back. They did report in via email, but those emails have not so far been deciphered."
...Squirrels seen reading books on logistics.
I don't have a Linux machine to test on anymore so I can't test it but I think
dd 0x02b8, 0xeb80cd00, 0xf7
should do the trick here's the original .lst file
Here's the one with the dd's
So I think this will work
echo -e 'dd 0x02b8, 0xeb80cd00, 0xf7\n' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I worry a bit that dd's will end up in the data section unless I override though.