If you were designing a CPU, how hard would it be to allow the entire state of a core to be duplicated to another core?
My thought is, if on a branch prediction, another core on the chip is idle; copy the state of the current core to the idle one, and each core follows one branch of the code, with one of them being discarded when the branch is resolved. In the case of a resource conflict (FPU, cache memory, or whatever resources are shared between cores) the core running the most likely path gets priority, or in the case of a entirely different thread running at 100% probability, it would get priority over any speculative thread. (but I could imagine that leading to a deadlock, if the 100% thread is waiting for a signal from the braching thread; which is being excluded from the resource by the 100% thread, so perhaps some form of weighted rotation could be used for resource allocation.)
In the case of a long pipeline, a second brach could use up to 4 cores, a third branch 8, and so on, as long as no other threads are utilizing the cores.
If possible, this would add quite a bit of transistors to link the cores together, and manage the states. The advantage would be that single intense threads would be accelerated, because with enough cores, branch prediction failure would drop to near zero (exception being if too many branches need the same scarce resource) while code designed to be multi-threaded would be able to use the extra cores in the ordinary way. The best part is, it would run existing code faster.
If Everything gets patented now, in 20 years, nothing will remain to be patented. So in the medium future you'll be able to build and sell dang near anything.
I always enjoyed mastering a game, the first one I recall was Ghouls and Ghosts, in the arcade, started out seeing how far I could get with $2 in quarters, getting farther and farther; then seeing how few quarters it could take; finally beating the entire game with a single play.
You don't appear to be disagreeing with me, just misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that this would have happened, I'm saying that this could be a scenario that would be considered unacceptable to those currently in power, and they would take measures to prevent it.
I don't think highly of Bush, and I think invading Iraq may not have been the morally perfect thing to do, but no option was perfect.
I don't think Oil alone was the reason, but it sure didn't stop us.
I can think of a plausible justification for invading Iraq when we did.
as an Iraqi refuge told me well before 9-11, Saddam and Bin Laden were not allies, Al Queda wants a government based on Islam, Saddam wanted a government based on Saddam.
Saddam's power base was slowly weakening, the well trained and fed troops that he had in the prior conflict were getting older, and being replaced by children who grew up undernourished, and undereducated during the Sanctions.
With Al Queda being crushed in Afghanistan, many of it's members fled into Iraq, which had the convenient situation of no being helpful to the US, while Saddam was rapidly losing control.
Consider if Saddams government collapsed without American intervention; who would be there to grab the reins of power? Islamic Extremists, backed by Al Queda, ready to bomb, murder, and terrorize anyone who wanted an actual representitive government, just as they are doing now.
The U.S. wouldn't have an excuse to intervene after the revolution, because Saddam would have been deposed, the new government would claim to represent the people, and by claiming a basis in Islam, any attack would be claimed an attack against Islam.
So, if that scenario were about to come to pass, the time to begin an occupation of Iraq would be before the revolution not after.
There is no way the U.S. government would describe their intercession as preventing the formation of a self-described 'Islamic State' as doing so would incur the wrath of far more groups than having a stated reason of "deposing a tyrant", "protecting the region", "WMD's", "Terrorists", etc.
So these other reasons were made up, and used interchangably. In case one of them proved invalid, the other reasons would still justify going to war.
The biggest surprise to me was that some covert group didn't plant WMD components in Iraq to be 'Discovered', I thought it was almost certian we would find WMD's if they existed or not.
We still fall back on the idea of pre-emptive war, and if it's wrong to kill tens of thousands of people over a 'what if'; but it sure looks like there are a lot of terrorist bomber types hanging out in Iraq that don't need Saddam to tell them to kill and terrorise people.
Fortunetly, radical Islam is dying: Terrorism is like the kid who knocks over the game board when he's losing, the philosophy of "If I can't win, then nobody wins." and the 9/11 attacks were like punching a hornets nest because you're allergic to hornets. Osama, to me, seems like a spoiled brat; rich parents, thinking he's the center of the world, he's right, everyone else is wrong, and all. If he actually had the support of the Islamic people, Al Queda would have an Army, not a few guys with boxcutters and makeshift bombs.
Someone on IRC noticed a blur on google maps, a single house in Florida.
By tracing the map to figure out the city and street, and googling on that, I was able to figure that it was probably a Senatorial candidates house.
I can't imagine why they would blur it out, it just induces curiosity, and I can't imagine what use anything they blurred out could have been, unless Bush's daughter was nude sunbathing at the time or something.
You don't have the right to close and tear up streets, and endanger existing emergency services to dig fresh trenches for a redundant wire system. then the next guy to dig will cut your wires, as they called the real phone co, water co, power co, gas co cable co to check, and they all said it was clear.
You don't even have the right to used unlicensed radio frequences to cover large areas.
The telephone compainies are a government granted monopoly for a very good reason, and thats also why they need to be strictly regulated.
(How people managed to reason that those laws should apply to Microsoft, I don't quite get. I honestly think that all the people who 'complained' that Microsoft was the only real choice in the market actually hurt the competion; Why would someone invest/work-for/expect-support-from a company that people were saying was destined for failure?)
If Microsoft made Windows completly immune to viruses, spyware, and the like, they would be immediatly sued by every dying for-profit anti-virus company, just like Netscape did.
Hyping non-existant products hurts sales of your current products.
Nintendo knows when to keep it's mouth shut.
Think about Intels hype for it's new processors, helping to kill the market for competing architectures (Alpha, PPC, etc.) Never believe the competitions announced plans.
Heck, with the influence that such announcements can have, perhaps it should be considered a type of fraud to overstate planned product specs, if your companies lies get people to buy your stock...
Imagine if Microsoft announced that Lornhorn/Vista/Whatever server performance was planned to be 2-3 times better than Linux servers, causing a slowdown in Linux migration while everyone waited to see if it was true, y'all would be pissed.
" UbiquiTel is the exclusive provider of Sprint digital wireless mobility communications network products and services under the Sprint brand name to midsize markets in the Western and Midwestern United States that include a population of approximately 10 million residents and cover portions of California, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Indiana and Kentucky. "
As I live in Washington, I was dealing with UbiquiTel. Or whoever UbiquiTel outsources their customer support to.
So perhaps were you are, Sprint does it themselves, but not here, and UbiquiTel is damaging Sprints name.
I have dust allergies, and try to keep the air in my home well filtered, and not with an ionic cleaner, as I read that those can be damaging to hardware.
From what I read while helping to build a case to defend a former customer from their bullying collection tactics (You shouldn't cash peoples checks, and not provide service.. then try to charge termination fees, when you were the one that turned off the customers phones even when the bills were paid.)
Sprint PCS is a DBA name for Ubiqicom (sp?), apperently they licensed the Sprint name from the 'real' Sprint.
Kinda like that "Lawnmower Man" movie, based on "The Story by Stephen King", which sucked so bad.
My playstations have frequently magically stopped working.
I've had 3 Playstation 1's and 2 Playstation 2's die on me so far, while an origional NES still chuggs merrily along (with an occaisional cleaning)
Sony VCR? dead. Samsung VCR that was used even more? Still working.
Sony TV? dead. RCA TV I bought before it needed a repair once, but still works.
add to that how badly Sony screwed up Everquest (Raising prices AND reducing customer support, on a product that should have gotten cheaper to provide with decreasing hardware/bandwidth costs AND higher customer volume...)
and add to that the whole Betamax/Minidisk/Memory Stick incompatibilities...
at this point I'm avoiding Sony products as much as I can.
but seriously, my hobbies include random number generation, data compression, and encryption, as well as large number series (Pi, fibonucci, etc.); I have many very large files of apperently random data. But I also have sensitive data belonging to other people; I've worked for various laywers, a government agency, and a couple small businesses as a basic security advisor (among other jobs) not all the data I have is my own, and I don't know what all of it is (for the lawyers, my home is their off-site backup location, and I have copies of client paperwork that would send them to jail for a few hundred years, if it were all added up, but that is under attourny/client privelidge)
I guess I'm in a similar situation with ISP's; there should be a burden of proof that the key exists in the defendants possession in the first place.
Some of my hobby research includes 2/3rd's keys:
say the real key is '10100101'
generate a random number '00110111'
xor them '10010010'
then break it up into 3 sections
AB BC CA
A and B each have half the real key, so they can get in.
A and C have the first half, and can rebuild the second
B and C have the second half, and can rebuild the first
the problem is that A and B each have half the real key, square-rooting the brute force time.
I've been thinking about generating multiple sets of random numbers, and the result of xor'ing the key by each of them...
key: 01011010 rd1: 10100101 rd2: 00011100 rd3: 10110010 xr1: 11111111 (hmm, tried to be random, got the exact inverse...) xr2: 01000110 xr3: 11101000
noone gets the root key, and they rotate which random/xor number they get, A gets rd1 and xr2, B gets rd2 and xr3, and C gets rd3 and xr1.
so A and B can get the key by rebuilding xr2 and rd2, B and C can get the key by rebuilding xr3 and rd3, and C and A can get the key by rebuilding xr1 and rd1.
if any one user is captured or turns traitor, their key alone will be of no help to cracking the master key; while the other two remaining users may be able to get together and re-key the data to a newly selected third user, effectivly excluding the old, captured key.
well, it's the same reason Intel switched from numbers (80486) to words (Pentium) you can't trademark a number; and OS just stands for "Operating System"...
Probably why Apple went to 'OS X' instead of 'OS 10'
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If you were designing a CPU, how hard would it be to allow the entire state of a core to be duplicated to another core?
My thought is, if on a branch prediction, another core on the chip is idle; copy the state of the current core to the idle one, and each core follows one branch of the code, with one of them being discarded when the branch is resolved. In the case of a resource conflict (FPU, cache memory, or whatever resources are shared between cores) the core running the most likely path gets priority, or in the case of a entirely different thread running at 100% probability, it would get priority over any speculative thread. (but I could imagine that leading to a deadlock, if the 100% thread is waiting for a signal from the braching thread; which is being excluded from the resource by the 100% thread, so perhaps some form of weighted rotation could be used for resource allocation.)
In the case of a long pipeline, a second brach could use up to 4 cores, a third branch 8, and so on, as long as no other threads are utilizing the cores.
If possible, this would add quite a bit of transistors to link the cores together, and manage the states. The advantage would be that single intense threads would be accelerated, because with enough cores, branch prediction failure would drop to near zero (exception being if too many branches need the same scarce resource) while code designed to be multi-threaded would be able to use the extra cores in the ordinary way. The best part is, it would run existing code faster.
If Everything gets patented now, in 20 years, nothing will remain to be patented. So in the medium future you'll be able to build and sell dang near anything.
I always enjoyed mastering a game, the first one I recall was Ghouls and Ghosts, in the arcade, started out seeing how far I could get with $2 in quarters, getting farther and farther; then seeing how few quarters it could take; finally beating the entire game with a single play.
Good Times.
Ever been billed for an extra hour of online time 'cause you were on on spring forward night?
I also recall the story of a fellow with a timer in his car that went off an hour early, due to a time zone differance.
Fortunetly, the clock was hooked to a car bomb, and so he got blown up miles away from the target in the middle of nowhere.
Clearly, this change is intended to protect us from terrorists.
You don't appear to be disagreeing with me, just misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that this would have happened, I'm saying that this could be a scenario that would be considered unacceptable to those currently in power, and they would take measures to prevent it.
I don't think highly of Bush, and I think invading Iraq may not have been the morally perfect thing to do, but no option was perfect.
I don't think Oil alone was the reason, but it sure didn't stop us.
I can think of a plausible justification for invading Iraq when we did.
as an Iraqi refuge told me well before 9-11, Saddam and Bin Laden were not allies, Al Queda wants a government based on Islam, Saddam wanted a government based on Saddam.
Saddam's power base was slowly weakening, the well trained and fed troops that he had in the prior conflict were getting older, and being replaced by children who grew up undernourished, and undereducated during the Sanctions.
With Al Queda being crushed in Afghanistan, many of it's members fled into Iraq, which had the convenient situation of no being helpful to the US, while Saddam was rapidly losing control.
Consider if Saddams government collapsed without American intervention; who would be there to grab the reins of power? Islamic Extremists, backed by Al Queda, ready to bomb, murder, and terrorize anyone who wanted an actual representitive government, just as they are doing now.
The U.S. wouldn't have an excuse to intervene after the revolution, because Saddam would have been deposed, the new government would claim to represent the people, and by claiming a basis in Islam, any attack would be claimed an attack against Islam.
So, if that scenario were about to come to pass, the time to begin an occupation of Iraq would be before the revolution not after.
There is no way the U.S. government would describe their intercession as preventing the formation of a self-described 'Islamic State' as doing so would incur the wrath of far more groups than having a stated reason of "deposing a tyrant", "protecting the region", "WMD's", "Terrorists", etc.
So these other reasons were made up, and used interchangably. In case one of them proved invalid, the other reasons would still justify going to war.
The biggest surprise to me was that some covert group didn't plant WMD components in Iraq to be 'Discovered', I thought it was almost certian we would find WMD's if they existed or not.
We still fall back on the idea of pre-emptive war, and if it's wrong to kill tens of thousands of people over a 'what if'; but it sure looks like there are a lot of terrorist bomber types hanging out in Iraq that don't need Saddam to tell them to kill and terrorise people.
Fortunetly, radical Islam is dying: Terrorism is like the kid who knocks over the game board when he's losing, the philosophy of "If I can't win, then nobody wins." and the 9/11 attacks were like punching a hornets nest because you're allergic to hornets. Osama, to me, seems like a spoiled brat; rich parents, thinking he's the center of the world, he's right, everyone else is wrong, and all. If he actually had the support of the Islamic people, Al Queda would have an Army, not a few guys with boxcutters and makeshift bombs.
Someone on IRC noticed a blur on google maps, a single house in Florida.
By tracing the map to figure out the city and street, and googling on that, I was able to figure that it was probably a Senatorial candidates house.
I can't imagine why they would blur it out, it just induces curiosity, and I can't imagine what use anything they blurred out could have been, unless Bush's daughter was nude sunbathing at the time or something.
uhhh, no.
You don't have the right to close and tear up streets, and endanger existing emergency services to dig fresh trenches for a redundant wire system. then the next guy to dig will cut your wires, as they called the real phone co, water co, power co, gas co cable co to check, and they all said it was clear.
You don't even have the right to used unlicensed radio frequences to cover large areas.
The telephone compainies are a government granted monopoly for a very good reason, and thats also why they need to be strictly regulated.
(How people managed to reason that those laws should apply to Microsoft, I don't quite get. I honestly think that all the people who 'complained' that Microsoft was the only real choice in the market actually hurt the competion; Why would someone invest/work-for/expect-support-from a company that people were saying was destined for failure?)
large Goverments are not so much 'evil' as stupid.
I have a saying I like to use:
"Never attribute to Malice that which can be adequitly explained by Ignorance."
with the addendum:
"Intentional Ignorance is just as bad as Malice."
"Thought Crime" is alive and well.
Hate Crime laws are stupid.
Jack Thompson is naked under his clothes.
Jack Thompson keeps talking about sex.
Jack Thompson has a poorly defined, but detectible penis.
ban Jack Thompson!
I have a friend who lives in Fremont, he's down to just a 13 inch TV and a Gameboy.
He lives in one of the mental institutions there (but they don't keep him locked in).
If Microsoft made Windows completly immune to viruses, spyware, and the like, they would be immediatly sued by every dying for-profit anti-virus company, just like Netscape did.
My brother is NOT buying an X-Box.
Why?, because the new X-Box is coming out 'soon'
Hyping non-existant products hurts sales of your current products.
Nintendo knows when to keep it's mouth shut.
Think about Intels hype for it's new processors, helping to kill the market for competing architectures (Alpha, PPC, etc.) Never believe the competitions announced plans.
Heck, with the influence that such announcements can have, perhaps it should be considered a type of fraud to overstate planned product specs, if your companies lies get people to buy your stock...
Imagine if Microsoft announced that Lornhorn/Vista/Whatever server performance was planned to be 2-3 times better than Linux servers, causing a slowdown in Linux migration while everyone waited to see if it was true, y'all would be pissed.
That's basically what Sony is doing.
Hopefully all the males 18-35 won't be drafted for the Iran invasion in 2007, that might put a crimp in the market.
From http://www.ubiquitelpcs.com/about/
" UbiquiTel is the exclusive provider of Sprint digital wireless mobility communications network products and services under the Sprint brand name to midsize markets in the Western and Midwestern United States that include a population of approximately 10 million residents and cover portions of California, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Indiana and Kentucky. "
As I live in Washington, I was dealing with UbiquiTel. Or whoever UbiquiTel outsources their customer support to.
So perhaps were you are, Sprint does it themselves, but not here, and UbiquiTel is damaging Sprints name.
I have dust allergies, and try to keep the air in my home well filtered, and not with an ionic cleaner, as I read that those can be damaging to hardware.
From what I read while helping to build a case to defend a former customer from their bullying collection tactics (You shouldn't cash peoples checks, and not provide service.. then try to charge termination fees, when you were the one that turned off the customers phones even when the bills were paid.)
Sprint PCS is a DBA name for Ubiqicom (sp?), apperently they licensed the Sprint name from the 'real' Sprint.
Kinda like that "Lawnmower Man" movie, based on "The Story by Stephen King", which sucked so bad.
Careful who you let use your business name.
My playstations have frequently magically stopped working.
I've had 3 Playstation 1's and 2 Playstation 2's die on me so far, while an origional NES still chuggs merrily along (with an occaisional cleaning)
Sony VCR? dead. Samsung VCR that was used even more? Still working.
Sony TV? dead. RCA TV I bought before it needed a repair once, but still works.
add to that how badly Sony screwed up Everquest (Raising prices AND reducing customer support, on a product that should have gotten cheaper to provide with decreasing hardware/bandwidth costs AND higher customer volume...)
and add to that the whole Betamax/Minidisk/Memory Stick incompatibilities...
at this point I'm avoiding Sony products as much as I can.
In a fantasy RPG, you generally want your character to be important to the world, doing things noone else can, etc. etc.
when 2000+ people are like that in the same world, you lose your virtual uniquiness.
My encrypted drive password is "I Forgot It"
but seriously, my hobbies include random number generation, data compression, and encryption, as well as large number series (Pi, fibonucci, etc.); I have many very large files of apperently random data. But I also have sensitive data belonging to other people; I've worked for various laywers, a government agency, and a couple small businesses as a basic security advisor (among other jobs) not all the data I have is my own, and I don't know what all of it is (for the lawyers, my home is their off-site backup location, and I have copies of client paperwork that would send them to jail for a few hundred years, if it were all added up, but that is under attourny/client privelidge)
I guess I'm in a similar situation with ISP's; there should be a burden of proof that the key exists in the defendants possession in the first place.
Some of my hobby research includes 2/3rd's keys:
say the real key is '10100101'
generate a random number '00110111'
xor them '10010010'
then break it up into 3 sections
AB
BC
CA
A and B each have half the real key, so they can get in.
A and C have the first half, and can rebuild the second
B and C have the second half, and can rebuild the first
the problem is that A and B each have half the real key, square-rooting the brute force time.
I've been thinking about generating multiple sets of random numbers, and the result of xor'ing the key by each of them...
key: 01011010
rd1: 10100101
rd2: 00011100
rd3: 10110010
xr1: 11111111 (hmm, tried to be random, got the exact inverse...)
xr2: 01000110
xr3: 11101000
noone gets the root key, and they rotate which random/xor number they get, A gets rd1 and xr2, B gets rd2 and xr3, and C gets rd3 and xr1.
so A and B can get the key by rebuilding xr2 and rd2, B and C can get the key by rebuilding xr3 and rd3, and C and A can get the key by rebuilding xr1 and rd1.
if any one user is captured or turns traitor, their key alone will be of no help to cracking the master key; while the other two remaining users may be able to get together and re-key the data to a newly selected third user, effectivly excluding the old, captured key.
The sad thing is, I can read that. =/
I never carry any peice of technology on me that anyone would consider killing me to possess/sell for crack.
I could go around sueing everyone for everything, but ya know if ya bother the wrong person, you might end up with a bad case of lead poisoning.
I may not be rich, but I don't think anyone wants me dead.
well, it's the same reason Intel switched from numbers (80486) to words (Pentium) you can't trademark a number; and OS just stands for "Operating System"...
Probably why Apple went to 'OS X' instead of 'OS 10'