From memory J.A. Wheeler made some calculations some time ago that show that it is possible for species to continue to live forever in a universe that also cools and expands forever. The key is to hibernate at regular interval (that keep getting longer) and accumulate energy while doing so.
Recently though some people seem to have observed the universe's expansion to accelerate. If this is indeed the case and not an illusion, it might put a spanner in Wheeler's work, depending on the rate of acceleration.
Anyway, we're talking about billions of billions of years from now. The Sun will be history before this is an issue and the original poster is right. If humanity's descendants want to live forever at some point they'll have to move out.
We don't have to solve that problem right away, though.
On a cycle per cycle basis, the 286 is *faster* than the 386. I remember it well, when 16MHz 286 came out they were faster than the 20MHz 386 for DOS applications (and that's all there was at the time).
The 486 is also slightly faster than the pentium I at the same clock speed for some instructions at least (see the bogomips ratings, they are better for the 486). In general you wouldn't expect a 2x speedup.
also a P-IV is famously much slower than a P-III at the same clock speed, which is itself comparable to a P-II.
This is ignoring the new SIMD instructions (MMX, etc) which do change the picture for some applications (multimedia).
I don't have access to a 8086 anymore, but from the CPU speed graph I have in front of me, an Athlon XP 1700 is "only" about 30 times faster than a pentium 100.
My guess would be that a 4.77GHz P-IV would only be 4-8000 faster than a 4.77MHz 8088. The picture would be skewed somewhat because the entire 8088 application and data would fit in the P-IV cache.
With SIMD instructions in the picture, which do result in a 8 times speed up on some application you can hope to see your 64,000 factor, but not in general.
My 1982 HP33c lasted just over a year, enough to get over the warranty period, In spite of HP's reputation for quality, TLC, etc. And that was a replacement model after the first failed after 6 months. Less than impressive.
My 1999 Palm is still going strong despite being handled carelessly every day.
Manufacturers still know how to make things well, but you have to research the good products these days.
I didn't read the book, just glanced at the back of it, and read the last few pages. It seems extraordinarily simplistic from the few paragraphs I read.
Rather than discussing the book (I clearly can't) I wonder what other slashdotters think about the `dangers' of nanotechology.
There was the incredibly poorly informed article by Bill Joy in Wired. It seems that this book might be exploiting the same vein. Of course if we could create (1) nano-machines capable of (2) self-reproduction, which (3) lived off sunlight and (4) were programmed for destruction we might have a problem.
It seems to me that we haven't the slightest clue as to how to go about fullfilling any of those 4 goals.
(1) is barely at the demonstration stage (look, a tiny motor! I swear it works!)
(2) is not even in sight. don't the demonstration project in (1) require a fully-fledged silicon fab unit?
(3) suffers from the same problem. Sure we can build macroscopic solar cells, but do they scale down?
(4) is basically AI. I think we can agree we are not there yet.
To me these nanobots really are science fiction. I'm more worried about gene manipulations in bacteria myself.
There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: ``Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?''
``An operating system,'' replied the programmer.
The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. ``Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system,'' he said.
``Not so,'' said the programmer, ``when designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design.''
The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. ``That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?''
Beware, `vcr' has not been updated in a year, and if you try to compile it today you are in for a ride (hint: it uses a very old version of avifile, and is not written in ISO C++. Lots of editing...)
Despite this I have been unable to find a replacement for it. What do people use to record shows to DivX these days?
Alfred Hitchcock, the filmmakers, said in his interview with Truffaut that he used to have a dream about the most perfect story for a film. Unfortunately he would never remember it the next morning.
His wife suggested he tried to wake up and write down the thrust of the dream in the middle of the night. Hitchcock did just that, woke up the next morning in the same frustrated state, then saw his scribbling on the notepad next to the bed:
I don't want to insult you, your point is very interesting. At the same time however, you exemplify in one fell swoop why Mac people are sometimes ridiculed and seen as unbearably elitist people.
You see, you are abusing the `creative' word. Design/graphics tools are not the only `creative' tools. A compiler is a creative tool, even just an editor. A typewriter is an amazingly creative tool. What did you think Hemingway used? a Mac?
People can be using pen an paper and be very creative. Did you think Einstein had a Mac?
Please stop thinking that the only creative thing that are done are in your own field.
OK, the O/S on IPC/IPX range is Solaris 1.x. I don't think you can put 2.x on them at all. This is SunOS 4.x which is the old BSD-based version.
The O/S on more modern hardware from the 50MHz Sparc 10 to the Ultra III belongs to the Solaris 2.x series. Solaris 7,8 and 9 are really Solaris 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9 respectively.
I don't think Solaris 9 support the Sparc 10/20 series anymore.
> I don't think civil engineering or, say, > aeronautics have such a abysmal track record.
Aeronautics certainly had an appalling record in the first few decades of its existence. At least we're not killing ourselves when our programs dies on an unhandled exception.
Let's get some perspective. It's perfectly natural that software engineering is as crappy as it is now: our society can afford it to be that way, and it's the path of minimum local cost.
Now if we took a 100 year perspective on the matter it might be different, but who can afford to do that?
This is utterly false. The best I've seen (and I've been programming on Alphas since 1994) is in the order of 50% faster. That was way back when gcc didn't have the support it got when Linux was ported to Alpha.
So now the situation is almost exactly the opposite. Since gcc has had access to the _very_ nice libm from DEC/Compaq, the library that implement all the math functions, gcc is faster and more ISO compliant than cxx.
What you describe is however true for FORTRAN. The DEC Fortran compiler does produce very very fast code, and g77 is appallingly slow, even today.
> Putting a pleasing, intuitive UI on a product is > the equivalent to looking nice for a job interview
No, it's a lot harder than that. In fact even Microsoft with untold number of developers, huge financial resources and the best HCI research money can buy doesn't always get it right (to put it mildly).
As the Tao says, it is easier to write and O/S from scratch than an accounting package (but which is easier to debug?).
Why is it that people keep bashing gcc's speed? it is a *little bit* slower than icc on x86, I'll give you that, and on some rare applications significantly slower, but on average gcc does a splendid job.
Don't belive me, try it for yourself, or read:
http://www.coyotegulch.com/reviews/intel_comp/in te l_gcc_bench2.html
(I hope they update their review for gcc 3.2.x and icc 7.0)
Slashdot Mirror
From memory J.A. Wheeler made some calculations some time ago that show that it is possible for species to continue to live forever in a universe that also cools and expands forever. The key is to hibernate at regular interval (that keep getting longer) and accumulate energy while doing so.
Recently though some people seem to have observed the universe's expansion to accelerate. If this is indeed the case and not an illusion, it might put a spanner in Wheeler's work, depending on the rate of acceleration.
Anyway, we're talking about billions of billions of years from now. The Sun will be history before this is an issue and the original poster is right. If humanity's descendants want to live forever at some point they'll have to move out.
We don't have to solve that problem right away, though.
Your assumption is a bit optimistic.
On a cycle per cycle basis, the 286 is *faster* than the 386. I remember it well, when 16MHz 286 came out they were faster than the 20MHz 386 for DOS applications (and that's all there was at the time).
The 486 is also slightly faster than the pentium I at the same clock speed for some instructions at least (see the bogomips ratings, they are better for the 486). In general you wouldn't expect a 2x speedup.
also a P-IV is famously much slower than a P-III at the same clock speed, which is itself comparable to a P-II.
This is ignoring the new SIMD instructions (MMX, etc) which do change the picture for some applications (multimedia).
I don't have access to a 8086 anymore, but from the CPU speed graph I have in front of me, an Athlon XP 1700 is "only" about 30 times faster than a pentium 100.
My guess would be that a 4.77GHz P-IV would only be 4-8000 faster than a 4.77MHz 8088. The picture would be skewed somewhat because the entire 8088 application and data would fit in the P-IV cache.
With SIMD instructions in the picture, which do result in a 8 times speed up on some application you can hope to see your 64,000 factor, but not in general.
My 1982 HP33c lasted just over a year, enough to get over the warranty period, In spite of HP's reputation for quality, TLC, etc. And that was a replacement model after the first failed after 6 months. Less than impressive.
My 1999 Palm is still going strong despite being handled carelessly every day.
Manufacturers still know how to make things well, but you have to research the good products these days.
Look it up earlier in the thread.
It turns out that crime went down everywhere in the US during the period, probably as a result of less unemployment.
Now the interesting part: it turns out that in states without concealed weapons law, crime went down *even faster*.
Did you have a look at the murder and rape rates from the police statistics?
The rate in the US is 10x that of the UK's.
I didn't read the book, just glanced at the back of it, and read the last few pages. It seems extraordinarily simplistic from the few paragraphs I read.
Rather than discussing the book (I clearly can't) I wonder what other slashdotters think about the `dangers' of nanotechology.
There was the incredibly poorly informed article by Bill Joy in Wired. It seems that this book might be exploiting the same vein. Of course if we could create (1) nano-machines capable of (2) self-reproduction, which (3) lived off sunlight and (4) were programmed for destruction we might have a problem.
It seems to me that we haven't the slightest clue as to how to go about fullfilling any of those 4 goals.
(1) is barely at the demonstration stage (look, a tiny motor! I swear it works!)
(2) is not even in sight. don't the demonstration project in (1) require a fully-fledged silicon fab unit?
(3) suffers from the same problem. Sure we can build macroscopic solar cells, but do they scale down?
(4) is basically AI. I think we can agree we are not there yet.
To me these nanobots really are science fiction. I'm more worried about gene manipulations in bacteria myself.
> at a time when most pocket calcs thought that
> doing square roots was a high end feature.
Not to detract from the HPs, but as far as I can remember, even those 1970s clunky calculators with red or green LEDs were doing square roots.
This is not a new argument or problem, and it is not limited to open-source software. Usability is HARD.
For the whole thing read The Tao of Programming
There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: ``Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?''
``An operating system,'' replied the programmer.
The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. ``Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system,'' he said.
``Not so,'' said the programmer, ``when designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design.''
The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. ``That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?''
The programmer made no reply.
From memory (haven't worked there in a while), direct taxation is quite low in Europe, at least in France. My tax bill was about 8% of my income.
VAT is not the whole story.
Go read the GNU FAQ sometime.
This design is only a VGA -> SCART adaptor, which means it's only useable in Europe.
Beware, `vcr' has not been updated in a year, and if you try to compile it today you are in for a ride (hint: it uses a very old version of avifile, and is not written in ISO C++. Lots of editing...)
Despite this I have been unable to find a replacement for it. What do people use to record shows to DivX these days?
Alfred Hitchcock, the filmmakers, said in his interview with Truffaut that he used to have a dream about the most perfect story for a film. Unfortunately he would never remember it the next morning.
His wife suggested he tried to wake up and write down the thrust of the dream in the middle of the night. Hitchcock did just that, woke up the next morning in the same frustrated state, then saw his scribbling on the notepad next to the bed:
`Boy meets girl'
That was the end of the dreams.
Microsoft is still not shipping the server versions of XP either on ia64 or x86. We're still at the release candidate stage.
I'm curious, why would open-source developers need to sign an NDA? Isn't their work the ultimate disclosure?
I don't want to insult you, your point is very interesting. At the same time however, you exemplify in one fell swoop why Mac people are sometimes ridiculed and seen as unbearably elitist people.
You see, you are abusing the `creative' word. Design/graphics tools are not the only `creative' tools. A compiler is a creative tool, even just an editor. A typewriter is an amazingly creative tool. What did you think Hemingway used? a Mac?
People can be using pen an paper and be very creative. Did you think Einstein had a Mac?
Please stop thinking that the only creative thing that are done are in your own field.
All the best
With all due respect (and I never liked the old macs), try comparing the original macintosh and the IBM PC/AT. Both came out at the same time.
Which one had the better kernel, again?
OK, the O/S on IPC/IPX range is Solaris 1.x. I don't think you can put 2.x on them at all. This is SunOS 4.x which is the old BSD-based version.
The O/S on more modern hardware from the 50MHz Sparc 10 to the Ultra III belongs to the Solaris 2.x series. Solaris 7,8 and 9 are really Solaris 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9 respectively.
I don't think Solaris 9 support the Sparc 10/20 series anymore.
It is still rather scalable, as you say.
> I don't think civil engineering or, say,
> aeronautics have such a abysmal track record.
Aeronautics certainly had an appalling record in the first few decades of its existence. At least we're not killing ourselves when our programs dies on an unhandled exception.
Let's get some perspective. It's perfectly natural that software engineering is as crappy as it is now: our society can afford it to be that way, and it's the path of minimum local cost.
Now if we took a 100 year perspective on the matter it might be different, but who can afford to do that?
If you know a student who has written a complete ANSI C++ compiler I want to know about it.
This is utterly false. The best I've seen (and I've been programming on Alphas since 1994) is in the order of 50% faster. That was way back when gcc didn't have the support it got when Linux was ported to Alpha.
So now the situation is almost exactly the opposite. Since gcc has had access to the _very_ nice libm from DEC/Compaq, the library that implement all the math functions, gcc is faster and more ISO compliant than cxx.
What you describe is however true for FORTRAN. The DEC Fortran compiler does produce very very fast code, and g77 is appallingly slow, even today.
With the VTK you can already do real-time high-quality volume rendering on desktop machines without any accelerated 3D hardware at all.
I'm struggling to see the interest of this technique.
http://public.kitware.com/VTK/
> Putting a pleasing, intuitive UI on a product is
> the equivalent to looking nice for a job interview
No, it's a lot harder than that. In fact even Microsoft with untold number of developers, huge financial resources and the best HCI research money can buy doesn't always get it right (to put it mildly).
As the Tao says, it is easier to write and O/S from scratch than an accounting package (but which is easier to debug?).
Hi,
n te l_gcc_bench2.html
> and code generated is 30%-50% faster.
Yeah, right. Only if you compile with gcc -O0
Why is it that people keep bashing gcc's speed? it is a *little bit* slower than icc on x86, I'll give you that, and on some rare applications significantly slower, but on average gcc does a splendid job.
Don't belive me, try it for yourself, or read:
http://www.coyotegulch.com/reviews/intel_comp/i
(I hope they update their review for gcc 3.2.x and icc 7.0)
> I've seen X bring down a system too many times to > just dismiss the parent as somebody who doesnt
> understand whats is going on.
As in kernel panic, or as in display frozen?
In the second case you can still telnet to the machine and restart the X server.