But holding the weight of the tower isn't unusual. For that matter, the weight of the tower isn't much. I have to say I'm going from what I remember before, because the article is slashdotted now. But I believe it is made up of aluminum sections with only slight cross bracing. A tower like this, it can't weigh much over 100 lbs.
And go look at lighting standards (towers) in parking lots near you. Many of the smaller of these sit on the bolts on their bases. If you think of it, the weight of the tower is miniscule next to the forces of the wind on the top. It might even reduce the total force on a bolt being stretched (on the upwind side) by its own weight. It does add to the lee bolt (the one being compressed), but steel is pretty good under compression.
Also, note since this tower is aluminum, "rust" isn't part of the issue. Although it can oxidize, aluminum when oxidizing makes a white coating for itself that inhibits further oxidization. I would have to imagine the biggest risk from the actualy reuse of the tower is metal fatigue, and even that's probably low.
Now, as a confirmed non-tower expert, I want to say the way a tower like this is usually attached to the ground in my experience is you bury the bottom section directly in the concrete. It comes apart in sections about 6-7 feet long, so you don't have to work with the whole tower while setting it. the advantage of this type of attachment is there is no additional math to do. If you've built a 60-foot tower before, then a 54-foot tower with six feet buried in concrete has no new concentrated stress points and no connections that receive more stress than in the 54-foot tower, so you know it will work exactly the same. All you have to do is know the max height you can safely build and you're off and running.
Okay, I have to admit I'm baffled. Why do tower geeks here feel like they have to convince everyone how dangerous towers are? Do they want erecting towers to become the kind of job that attracts groupies, like firemen?
With a simple spoon I can make a device (called a "hole") that can kill you without much fuss. With some twigs and leaves, I can make it so you can never see it coming. So why do tower enthusiasts act like towers are some kind of killing machine the likes of which have rarely been seen since the Great War?
I have sharp objects in my kitchen that make these towers look like playground jungle gyms. Hell, a jungle gym can take you out without much fuss and we encourage kids to play on them!
Good switching power supplies utilize both PWM mode and PFM mode (and PFM burst mode) to maximize. PFM mode is "Pulse Frequency Modulation", which is a bit of a misleading name. It really means that the width of the pulse remains constant and the time between them changes. This is used when power draw is very low compared to max output.
In your review of DC converters, I think you missed flying (or switched) capacitors? This system is also good only for very low current applications and only can step up, but is fairly efficient and requires no inductor. Nearly everyone owns a device that uses one of these (all their computers) because they are used to generate the voltage needed in an RS-232 serial port without +12 and -12 (or indeed any negative) supplies.
Not complaining with your argument overall. I think it would be efficient to have a DC distribution system in a house. It would have to be high voltage (like 50V) to overcome line losses, but it would make it possible to use an efficient full-wave rectifier for all your DC needs and save some number of components at each device location. I cannot really see using DC for traditional motor (any device that produces motion or does any serious amount of actual work) applications, AC is great for that.
It is sending out location updates as required by the network. These are done at full power. Your phone will also do this just before it rings with an incoming call.
GSM phones do it. CDMA doesn't, CDMA is greatly superior on the over the air stuff, and this is just one instance in which it shows.
Too bad Verizon are controlling bastards, Sprint sucks and the phone selection on CDMA sucks. Cause I'd love to get away from GSM.
(I've had Cingular, Verizon and Sprint in the last 3 years, 1 year of each. I switched in the first week number portability was available and again a year later.)
Not plagerism. And learn to express yourself with words that weren't fed to you by littlegreenfootballs while you're at it.
And in general, your understanding of who is a primary source is incorrect. When it comes from Reuters, it's "Reuters reports", not "NYT reports", at least it isn't done that way in journals with any kind of respectability.
But I don't expect you to really pay attention to anything I say because it contradicts your beliefs, at least it would seem from your idiotic vocabulary of buzzwords.
If you want to bitch about blog-linking, you can leave out the loaded words when complaining about it. Then some people might be able to take you seriously.
NTSC is an analog system. It has a number of lines (525), but there is no spec for the number of pixels across a line. In fact, NTSC doesn't even have pixels.
Additionally, note that DVDs are interlaced, not progressive. Your DVD player converts it from interlaced to progressive by gathering frames. So you end up with 24 progressive frames per second instead of 60 interlaces fields per second. But either way, the DVD never had double the temporal resolution versus TV on it, and it certainly wasn't reproduced (after conversion) with that temporal resolution.
DVDs can use their full resolution in 16:9, although in a stupid way. Horizontal resolution doesn't go up at all, even though the TV image is much wider than a 4:3 image.
ATSC does specify resolution, but it doesn't specify 720x480. All pixels in all ATSC modes are square, and the pixels on a DVD (720x480) are not.
On my HDTVs, DVDs look awful compared to HD. There's simply no comparison. I buy only about 4 DVDs a year now, I watch most of my movies off HBOHD and SHOHD.
Scaling doesn't excite me, you can make up all the fake info you want with your scaler, but you cannot create actual additional resolution. The information required to do so simply was never recorded on the DVD to start with, so no amount of technology can bring it back.
Do you think it's "Glengarry, Glen Ross"? Perhaps my favorite movie, but I watch it in mono on VHS and get everything out of it. It'd be great in black and white.
Sony's right, it's the visual titles that are most likely to be the "killer app". I dunno about Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, but still.
For DVD, the "killer title" was "The Matrix". I think BluRay will have to wait for a new must-have title to come out ot be the BluRay killer title, no rerelease will have enough punch (even LOTR).
To other poster, none of these titles were DVD launch titles. I don't see "Twister" here (which was one of only about 6 titles available when I bought my DVD player).
Anyway, they could make a car "clean" by adding a retrofit oxygen sensor to the exhaust, adjusting the carb to run lean, and adding an "enrichment" fuel injector into the throttle body.
The engine runs as it did before, but this added system adds the right amount of fuel at all times to keep it right at the best fuel/air ratio. It improves mpg and emissions on older cars. On some cars you could even add a catalytic converter to complete the job.
Given that California doesn't even have car inspections (unlike, say, the east coast), I don't know what you're complaining about. Get what you want and put it on. Who's going to even catch you?
What else is the CPU doing while loading things up from disc? Hopefully running the game. Let's not get trapped in the "please wait, loading" metaphor here. Jak 2 showed years ago that you can load while the game is running. So my assumption is that while the DVD is loading stuff, the game is still runnning and the CPU is not idle.
About your comments about only loading once at the beginning, well, I don't really believe that. Yeah, I can see it with some games, but not a lot of them. They'll load some specialized code level-by-level. I do hear you that you could do some more work in there, but personally, if the developer is going to take extra effort to figure out how to get some work done behind those time-wasting screens that it be real work that will save time later instead of make-work that just gets us back to no time deficit.
I do agree 100MB is a stretch. Windows does perhaps have that much code, but it isn't all loaded at once. If you count all the apps and all the different drivers, it might come out to that much code. But again, you don't load every driver and every app at once. I don't expect games to have that much code.
"A lot" of PS2 games didn't come on CD-ROM. All of them did for a year, but after that, it died out quickly. And given that the number of games for the platform in the first year was about the same as the number of games it gets in a month now, I wouldn't say "a lot" of PS2 games came on CD-ROM.
I do agree on PS3, I think all games will come on DVD-ROM for at least a year. I think that games will stay on DVD-ROM for PS3 longer than they stayed on CD-ROM for PS2 simply because many PS3 games will be 360 games also, and 360 is DVD-only. PS2's only contemporary at launch was Dreamcast, and it already had more storage than a CD-ROM, so developers could "break free" a little. And most of them ignored Dreamcast anyway, giving another reason they could break free.
Anyway, I still find your arguments uncompelling. Consoles have found little reason to change processors or such in the middle of a product cycle, woudln't they rather keep with the older one which certainly costs less anyway? A least until the new generation of machines comes out? Perhaps it would be good for long-term backward compatibility. But then again perhaps MIPS code is as good an intermediate distribution format as an arbitrary bytecode anyway.
Use of oxygenates was mandated by the Feds after some serious junk science from a single Winter trial of them in Seattla. It was not CARB's fault we used them.
Because of this, CARB worked for years for the ability to return to making fuel with no oxygenates at all, and finally won it from the Feds a couple weeks ago. The cut over date isn't set, but it's great news.
I dunno that MTBE was particularly expensive, nor is it the reason for the cost of fuels in California, since there are a dozen or something metropolitan areas in the country that are mandated to use oxygenates and MTBE was the one in popular use at the time.
Our fuel is more expensive mainly because they can get away wth it. Fuel is noticeably more expensive in Northern California (esp. 5 years ago) versus Southern California. And the fuel is the same.
This is slashdot, talking about linux. You're supposed to be talking about conspiracy theories or how everyone involved is just too stupid to realize how good linux is or how Windows is virus-ridden and insecure.
I used it exclusively. Well, until it changed to local.live.com and stopped working with Safari.
Microsoft, what the hell is wrong with you? Don't you want me to use your system? It's been months.
I started using Virtual Earth at first because mapblast (MS' directions site) is far better than mapquest or anything else for directions. Line drive maps 4 life.
Xbox 1 you could port games to and from it with ease. Using conventional programming.
360 requires multiple threads to use it well. Additionally, you have to do GPU programming (shader programming) to use it well. Those are huge increases in complexity from Xbox 1, which was quite straightforward to program for.
The 360 still has the unified memory architecture at least.
And perhaps you're even on the inside, since you know Sony tried to go without the NVidia chip.
I was around for last range of machines, HyperCubes and such that you speak of, and you're dead right as to why they were dumped. Most tasks couldn't be divided up well enough to use the hardware effectively.
I would add a little bit. First, using 8 (7) processors will be a lot easier than using the hundreds in those older machines. Second, given currently technology limitations, it isn't likely someone is going to match the potential Cell performance with a shared-memory design at the price Sony pays for Cell.
Additionally, if you read the article, IBM has a proposed compiler-based solution to the necessity of using 256KB pages. I have to say I'm more than a bit skeptical about this.
In RAM means you spend extra time recompiling every time. That makes no sense. That's not the same as using an intermediate format as a distribution format. You're essentially talking about using a dynamic recompiler. And they just wouldn't match up on performance to a native compiler due to having to recompile it each time you load the code.
As to your "Nope", a game can have 10MB of code without much difficulty. Yes, almost all the data on the disc is assets, but given that the disc can have 9.0GB, having 0.01GB worth of code would still mean almost all the data on the disc is assets, yet it still has 10MB of code. Even at 100MB of code it'd still be 99% assets. One hundred MB might be a stretch, but it is quite possible, given the ROM size and your system can't break down when someone uses the system in a way you didn't expect.
In addition, I said "Xbox 360 or PS3", and you responded with a comment about the PS2. Weak.
Apple uses gcc. Their OS isn't free. Sony uses gcc for PS2 and currently uses gcc for PS3, and nothing about their platform is free. And their dev kit is FAR from free.
I do agree, gcc is a good value for the money. But if you have a choice, you can get a lot better on performance than gcc. In many systems, it's worth the cost.
But if Sony comes up with the right dev tools and market share, it won't matter. Sega's problem was at least as much poor market share making it less profitable to write for their platform as much as it was being tough to program for.
And in Sony's defense, it isn't like 360 is easy to write for either, you have to write multi-threaded games, which isn't quite the norm.
It's a calculated risk Sony is taking. They had to take some kind of chance, you're not going to deliver the kind of performance it takes to match up to 360 by sticking with conventional design.
Interesting point on the intermediate code front. I think the hardware front ends in the chips that convert instructions into internal representations work very well and they are so small compared to the rest of the chip (even next to the cache) that saving that many transistors just doesn't amount to much.
Additionally, again on the embedded front, if you translate intermediate code, you may not have a place to put it. For example, Xbox 360 or PS3 can have tens or hundreds of megabytes of code on a ROM but no equivalent amount of R/W storage to put the translated code in.
I know that was the idea, but it wasn't true for any popular RISC architecture.
In the early days of RISC, integer multiplies typically took 3-5 cycles and divides took 33. Loads and stores of course have variable latencies too.
AMDs 29K architecture turned an integer divides into a 33 instruction sequence to get around this. It also make it impossible to optimize this on later chips in the family, when 17 cycle divides became commonplace (first popularized on Pentium).
With any modern architecture, RISC or CISC, the instruction scheduling restrictions are bestial. Which is another reason why it baffles me that people continue to use gcc as their compiler. It generates awful code.
Toshiba already announced the first HD-DVD drives sold will need an update for full capabilities. Why? Because AACS wasn't done yet. And you comment that BluRay could be in trouble due to a speculative report on the internet of a similar thing?
It baffles me where people come up with this stuff.
RISC has some good ideas, but a fair number of drawbacks too.
For small systems, uniform-sized instructions don't use memory effectively enough. Because of this ARM is abandoning RISC in favor of THUMB 2. For families of chips, the idea of exposing the hardware to the compiler turns out not to work because you cannot maintain many assumptions across individual incarnations in a family of processors. For example, look at MIPS. They eschewed interlocked pipeline stages, but had to put them in in their second processor in order to maintain binary compatibility with the first processor.
I don't get your last comment though. We're still getting tons of optimizations at compile time. That part hasn't changed. The article is all about compiler optimizations!
Anyway, yeah, strict RISC is dead. But many of the things we learned from RISC are still being employed.
I pay for it and like it. TurboTax was fractionally better, but after they disrespected their customers so badly with the copy protection stuff, I'm done with them.
Can you recommend a browser-based piece of software that is better? I have to admit I don't exactly explore all options each year, so maybe I'm just missing the better options.
Slashdot Mirror
But holding the weight of the tower isn't unusual. For that matter, the weight of the tower isn't much. I have to say I'm going from what I remember before, because the article is slashdotted now. But I believe it is made up of aluminum sections with only slight cross bracing. A tower like this, it can't weigh much over 100 lbs.
And go look at lighting standards (towers) in parking lots near you. Many of the smaller of these sit on the bolts on their bases. If you think of it, the weight of the tower is miniscule next to the forces of the wind on the top. It might even reduce the total force on a bolt being stretched (on the upwind side) by its own weight. It does add to the lee bolt (the one being compressed), but steel is pretty good under compression.
Also, note since this tower is aluminum, "rust" isn't part of the issue. Although it can oxidize, aluminum when oxidizing makes a white coating for itself that inhibits further oxidization. I would have to imagine the biggest risk from the actualy reuse of the tower is metal fatigue, and even that's probably low.
Now, as a confirmed non-tower expert, I want to say the way a tower like this is usually attached to the ground in my experience is you bury the bottom section directly in the concrete. It comes apart in sections about 6-7 feet long, so you don't have to work with the whole tower while setting it. the advantage of this type of attachment is there is no additional math to do. If you've built a 60-foot tower before, then a 54-foot tower with six feet buried in concrete has no new concentrated stress points and no connections that receive more stress than in the 54-foot tower, so you know it will work exactly the same. All you have to do is know the max height you can safely build and you're off and running.
Wow. Schools are very advanced now.
Okay, I have to admit I'm baffled. Why do tower geeks here feel like they have to convince everyone how dangerous towers are? Do they want erecting towers to become the kind of job that attracts groupies, like firemen?
With a simple spoon I can make a device (called a "hole") that can kill you without much fuss. With some twigs and leaves, I can make it so you can never see it coming. So why do tower enthusiasts act like towers are some kind of killing machine the likes of which have rarely been seen since the Great War?
I have sharp objects in my kitchen that make these towers look like playground jungle gyms. Hell, a jungle gym can take you out without much fuss and we encourage kids to play on them!
You're missing another kind of experience.
Learning how to communicate with others without acting like an asshole.
Good switching power supplies utilize both PWM mode and PFM mode (and PFM burst mode) to maximize. PFM mode is "Pulse Frequency Modulation", which is a bit of a misleading name. It really means that the width of the pulse remains constant and the time between them changes. This is used when power draw is very low compared to max output.
In your review of DC converters, I think you missed flying (or switched) capacitors? This system is also good only for very low current applications and only can step up, but is fairly efficient and requires no inductor. Nearly everyone owns a device that uses one of these (all their computers) because they are used to generate the voltage needed in an RS-232 serial port without +12 and -12 (or indeed any negative) supplies.
Not complaining with your argument overall. I think it would be efficient to have a DC distribution system in a house. It would have to be high voltage (like 50V) to overcome line losses, but it would make it possible to use an efficient full-wave rectifier for all your DC needs and save some number of components at each device location. I cannot really see using DC for traditional motor (any device that produces motion or does any serious amount of actual work) applications, AC is great for that.
GSM does this. In short, GSM sucks.
It is sending out location updates as required by the network. These are done at full power. Your phone will also do this just before it rings with an incoming call.
GSM phones do it. CDMA doesn't, CDMA is greatly superior on the over the air stuff, and this is just one instance in which it shows.
Too bad Verizon are controlling bastards, Sprint sucks and the phone selection on CDMA sucks. Cause I'd love to get away from GSM.
(I've had Cingular, Verizon and Sprint in the last 3 years, 1 year of each. I switched in the first week number portability was available and again a year later.)
Not plagerism. And learn to express yourself with words that weren't fed to you by littlegreenfootballs while you're at it.
And in general, your understanding of who is a primary source is incorrect. When it comes from Reuters, it's "Reuters reports", not "NYT reports", at least it isn't done that way in journals with any kind of respectability.
But I don't expect you to really pay attention to anything I say because it contradicts your beliefs, at least it would seem from your idiotic vocabulary of buzzwords.
If you want to bitch about blog-linking, you can leave out the loaded words when complaining about it. Then some people might be able to take you seriously.
NTSC is an analog system. It has a number of lines (525), but there is no spec for the number of pixels across a line. In fact, NTSC doesn't even have pixels.
Additionally, note that DVDs are interlaced, not progressive. Your DVD player converts it from interlaced to progressive by gathering frames. So you end up with 24 progressive frames per second instead of 60 interlaces fields per second. But either way, the DVD never had double the temporal resolution versus TV on it, and it certainly wasn't reproduced (after conversion) with that temporal resolution.
DVDs can use their full resolution in 16:9, although in a stupid way. Horizontal resolution doesn't go up at all, even though the TV image is much wider than a 4:3 image.
ATSC does specify resolution, but it doesn't specify 720x480. All pixels in all ATSC modes are square, and the pixels on a DVD (720x480) are not.
On my HDTVs, DVDs look awful compared to HD. There's simply no comparison. I buy only about 4 DVDs a year now, I watch most of my movies off HBOHD and SHOHD.
Scaling doesn't excite me, you can make up all the fake info you want with your scaler, but you cannot create actual additional resolution. The information required to do so simply was never recorded on the DVD to start with, so no amount of technology can bring it back.
Do you think it's "Glengarry, Glen Ross"? Perhaps my favorite movie, but I watch it in mono on VHS and get everything out of it. It'd be great in black and white.
Sony's right, it's the visual titles that are most likely to be the "killer app". I dunno about Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, but still.
For DVD, the "killer title" was "The Matrix". I think BluRay will have to wait for a new must-have title to come out ot be the BluRay killer title, no rerelease will have enough punch (even LOTR).
To other poster, none of these titles were DVD launch titles. I don't see "Twister" here (which was one of only about 6 titles available when I bought my DVD player).
They might have even been mandatory, I forget.
Anyway, they could make a car "clean" by adding a retrofit oxygen sensor to the exhaust, adjusting the carb to run lean, and adding an "enrichment" fuel injector into the throttle body.
The engine runs as it did before, but this added system adds the right amount of fuel at all times to keep it right at the best fuel/air ratio. It improves mpg and emissions on older cars. On some cars you could even add a catalytic converter to complete the job.
Given that California doesn't even have car inspections (unlike, say, the east coast), I don't know what you're complaining about. Get what you want and put it on. Who's going to even catch you?
What else is the CPU doing while loading things up from disc? Hopefully running the game. Let's not get trapped in the "please wait, loading" metaphor here. Jak 2 showed years ago that you can load while the game is running. So my assumption is that while the DVD is loading stuff, the game is still runnning and the CPU is not idle.
About your comments about only loading once at the beginning, well, I don't really believe that. Yeah, I can see it with some games, but not a lot of them. They'll load some specialized code level-by-level. I do hear you that you could do some more work in there, but personally, if the developer is going to take extra effort to figure out how to get some work done behind those time-wasting screens that it be real work that will save time later instead of make-work that just gets us back to no time deficit.
I do agree 100MB is a stretch. Windows does perhaps have that much code, but it isn't all loaded at once. If you count all the apps and all the different drivers, it might come out to that much code. But again, you don't load every driver and every app at once. I don't expect games to have that much code.
"A lot" of PS2 games didn't come on CD-ROM. All of them did for a year, but after that, it died out quickly. And given that the number of games for the platform in the first year was about the same as the number of games it gets in a month now, I wouldn't say "a lot" of PS2 games came on CD-ROM.
I do agree on PS3, I think all games will come on DVD-ROM for at least a year. I think that games will stay on DVD-ROM for PS3 longer than they stayed on CD-ROM for PS2 simply because many PS3 games will be 360 games also, and 360 is DVD-only. PS2's only contemporary at launch was Dreamcast, and it already had more storage than a CD-ROM, so developers could "break free" a little. And most of them ignored Dreamcast anyway, giving another reason they could break free.
Anyway, I still find your arguments uncompelling. Consoles have found little reason to change processors or such in the middle of a product cycle, woudln't they rather keep with the older one which certainly costs less anyway? A least until the new generation of machines comes out? Perhaps it would be good for long-term backward compatibility. But then again perhaps MIPS code is as good an intermediate distribution format as an arbitrary bytecode anyway.
Use of oxygenates was mandated by the Feds after some serious junk science from a single Winter trial of them in Seattla. It was not CARB's fault we used them.
e nate030905.htm
Ethanol sucks too, likely adding to pollution:
http://feinstein.senate.gov/05releases/r-epa-oxyg
(Please ignore that this link is from one of our idiot spendthrift Senators, I'm sure she just slapped her name at the bottom and had nothing to do with it.)
Because of this, CARB worked for years for the ability to return to making fuel with no oxygenates at all, and finally won it from the Feds a couple weeks ago. The cut over date isn't set, but it's great news.
I dunno that MTBE was particularly expensive, nor is it the reason for the cost of fuels in California, since there are a dozen or something metropolitan areas in the country that are mandated to use oxygenates and MTBE was the one in popular use at the time.
Our fuel is more expensive mainly because they can get away wth it. Fuel is noticeably more expensive in Northern California (esp. 5 years ago) versus Southern California. And the fuel is the same.
This is slashdot, talking about linux. You're supposed to be talking about conspiracy theories or how everyone involved is just too stupid to realize how good linux is or how Windows is virus-ridden and insecure.
I used it exclusively. Well, until it changed to local.live.com and stopped working with Safari.
Microsoft, what the hell is wrong with you? Don't you want me to use your system? It's been months.
I started using Virtual Earth at first because mapblast (MS' directions site) is far better than mapquest or anything else for directions. Line drive maps 4 life.
Xbox 1 you could port games to and from it with ease. Using conventional programming.
360 requires multiple threads to use it well. Additionally, you have to do GPU programming (shader programming) to use it well. Those are huge increases in complexity from Xbox 1, which was quite straightforward to program for.
The 360 still has the unified memory architecture at least.
And perhaps you're even on the inside, since you know Sony tried to go without the NVidia chip.
I was around for last range of machines, HyperCubes and such that you speak of, and you're dead right as to why they were dumped. Most tasks couldn't be divided up well enough to use the hardware effectively.
I would add a little bit. First, using 8 (7) processors will be a lot easier than using the hundreds in those older machines. Second, given currently technology limitations, it isn't likely someone is going to match the potential Cell performance with a shared-memory design at the price Sony pays for Cell.
Additionally, if you read the article, IBM has a proposed compiler-based solution to the necessity of using 256KB pages. I have to say I'm more than a bit skeptical about this.
In RAM means you spend extra time recompiling every time. That makes no sense. That's not the same as using an intermediate format as a distribution format. You're essentially talking about using a dynamic recompiler. And they just wouldn't match up on performance to a native compiler due to having to recompile it each time you load the code.
As to your "Nope", a game can have 10MB of code without much difficulty. Yes, almost all the data on the disc is assets, but given that the disc can have 9.0GB, having 0.01GB worth of code would still mean almost all the data on the disc is assets, yet it still has 10MB of code. Even at 100MB of code it'd still be 99% assets. One hundred MB might be a stretch, but it is quite possible, given the ROM size and your system can't break down when someone uses the system in a way you didn't expect.
In addition, I said "Xbox 360 or PS3", and you responded with a comment about the PS2. Weak.
Apple uses gcc. Their OS isn't free.
Sony uses gcc for PS2 and currently uses gcc for PS3, and nothing about their platform is free. And their dev kit is FAR from free.
I do agree, gcc is a good value for the money. But if you have a choice, you can get a lot better on performance than gcc. In many systems, it's worth the cost.
But if Sony comes up with the right dev tools and market share, it won't matter. Sega's problem was at least as much poor market share making it less profitable to write for their platform as much as it was being tough to program for.
And in Sony's defense, it isn't like 360 is easy to write for either, you have to write multi-threaded games, which isn't quite the norm.
It's a calculated risk Sony is taking. They had to take some kind of chance, you're not going to deliver the kind of performance it takes to match up to 360 by sticking with conventional design.
Cue Breughal and Mahler.
(Ob genius TV show reference - explanation mostly to make sure the bogofilter doesn't get me.)
Interesting point on the intermediate code front. I think the hardware front ends in the chips that convert instructions into internal representations work very well and they are so small compared to the rest of the chip (even next to the cache) that saving that many transistors just doesn't amount to much.
Additionally, again on the embedded front, if you translate intermediate code, you may not have a place to put it. For example, Xbox 360 or PS3 can have tens or hundreds of megabytes of code on a ROM but no equivalent amount of R/W storage to put the translated code in.
That's a special case of course.
I know that was the idea, but it wasn't true for any popular RISC architecture.
In the early days of RISC, integer multiplies typically took 3-5 cycles and divides took 33. Loads and stores of course have variable latencies too.
AMDs 29K architecture turned an integer divides into a 33 instruction sequence to get around this. It also make it impossible to optimize this on later chips in the family, when 17 cycle divides became commonplace (first popularized on Pentium).
With any modern architecture, RISC or CISC, the instruction scheduling restrictions are bestial. Which is another reason why it baffles me that people continue to use gcc as their compiler. It generates awful code.
Eliminating the mortgage deduction would severly crimp the housing market. Don't look for that to happen soon.
If you were to move to something like that, you'd have to phase it in VERY gradually.
Toshiba already announced the first HD-DVD drives sold will need an update for full capabilities. Why? Because AACS wasn't done yet. And you comment that BluRay could be in trouble due to a speculative report on the internet of a similar thing?
It baffles me where people come up with this stuff.
RISC is over.
RISC has some good ideas, but a fair number of drawbacks too.
For small systems, uniform-sized instructions don't use memory effectively enough. Because of this ARM is abandoning RISC in favor of THUMB 2.
For families of chips, the idea of exposing the hardware to the compiler turns out not to work because you cannot maintain many assumptions across individual incarnations in a family of processors. For example, look at MIPS. They eschewed interlocked pipeline stages, but had to put them in in their second processor in order to maintain binary compatibility with the first processor.
I don't get your last comment though. We're still getting tons of optimizations at compile time. That part hasn't changed. The article is all about compiler optimizations!
Anyway, yeah, strict RISC is dead. But many of the things we learned from RISC are still being employed.
I pay for it and like it. TurboTax was fractionally better, but after they disrespected their customers so badly with the copy protection stuff, I'm done with them.
Can you recommend a browser-based piece of software that is better? I have to admit I don't exactly explore all options each year, so maybe I'm just missing the better options.