Surely for the the issue isn't assembly vs everything else it's demonstrating the ability to use a range of language philosophies, There are lots of languages under the sun and certainly I'd be worried about someone who always had garbage collection at their beck and call if I was trying to implement any system with real time requirements or involved lots of heavy lifting of data. However isn't there a worry someone can get too stuck in the nuts and bots. I've seen so many examples of code where someone has done something in hundreds of lines of C for something that would take 5 lines of perl, (and before you say the implementation they used would make the C slower)
So if a CV turned up for someone who had no assembly experience but had experience in C, Perl, Ruby, Occam, Lisp. I'm fairly sure if they would have a grasp of the fundamentals, much more than someone who just had x86 assembler and C++.
How many people today can function without a compiler? How many welders can function without a foundry to produce the iron for them? How many people can function without farms to grow their food for them. How many farms these days can function without computers and iron tools?
It's called civilisation, we build on top of the work of others and do ever greater things. If everyone in all of life had to know how to do everything we wouldn;t get very much done.
You're making a classic mistake there. When matter gets converted into energy gravitation doesn't care. It cares about the total mass-energy. Which doesn't change. So while the emitted photons do not have mass they do have energy which of course has a mass equivalent. In a closed system* even if there are nuclear reactions taking place the mass-energy of the system does not change. *to actually do this you'd have to contain all the mass and photons and neutrinos, which we don't know how to do, but the point stands...
Why is it so hard to imagine that there is a particle that interacts with gravity but not electromagnetically? That's really what this comes down to. Remember you only touch that key on the keyboard because of photon interactions. Are you happy with the existence of Neutrinos? These particles that barely interact with normal matter or do you think they are purely there to balance formulas too? (okay that's why they were originally there but not anymore)
Not to disagree with your point, but at least WebMD would tell you that you need drugs rather than the faith healer down the road. That might then get you to do something to get those drugs (either go to the next town for them, or try and get social changes so that you have better access to them for the next time). As things stand without the knowledge they may go to that faith healer and then blame the failure on God's will instead of things they might be able to change in their society. Knowledge is always the first step.
Why? Speaking as a citizen/subject of a western democracy, things are pretty good at the moment. Most laws work, most things work, it's the new stuff they keep proposing that sucks. The problem is that we have governments with that majority you like the idea of and they keep changing the laws and are making things worse. If they spent more time arguing with each other so that only the really really good laws made it while all the stupid laws got tied up in knots then i believe things woiuld get even better. Or you go the other extreme and have a dictator who at least gets things done and has a clear vision removing inefficiencies. But let's not go there because I might be one of those inefficiencies (s)he wants removed.
Not to mention the fact that a time travelling immortal would eventually become every person in the universe, then compose all mass of the universe then...
Many WLAN chipsets today use SDR(software defined radio), so most of the design is just a big DSP - so more clock speed = more complex algos. Alternatively since you'd likely have multiple channels in operation each of which probably has its own DSP by going faster you could put multiple channels onto a single DSP so save silicon area. Or if you had hardened part of the algos into custom logic you could ease the memory latency requirements/move the hardened parts into DSP to save area. Or move parts of the design that had to use onboard memories to use external memory to save area.
Lots of options and that's without me knowing the details of the design in question. As a general rule your 3 limits in a design like this are process speed, available area and external memory bandwidth; you're always at the limit for all 3 in any design, if you're not then you're wasting money
No, the clock signal needs to time between two connecting flip flops nothing more. It's extremely common (i.e. it's about 5% of my job) to have to change the design in order to achieve this local clocking requirement. That's without having multiple asynchronous clocks on a single chip. Or asynchronous logic
Even when you need to do very long paths it's called a clock tree for a reason you can have a 1GHz clock that takes several ns to get from its source PLL to its destination flop because the delay through the tree to all the leaf nodes is matched. that is a 1ns period clock can take 4ns to get from the source to the destination, and that's all fine because as long as it's the same 4ns...
Now things get harder when different bits of the chip have silicon that runs at different speeds so you can't balance the tree like you'd like to, but that's what makes this job interesting;-)
"And garbage collection has no place on a mobile device." I would change and say that garbage collection has no place on an real time application, and I believe a mobile device should run an RTOS, even though no modern ones do. Garbage collection is a great tool if you have sufficient memory and no real time requirements. GC can help make programs more readable and programs should be written for humans to read and only incidentally for machines to execute. However in the many situations where it is not appropriate we shouldn't be using it and UIs are one of those.
But isn't this the way it should be, you knock up a prototype in the most convenient language for the job, then profile it, then improve it where it needs improving?
Unless that is what makes the John Hurt doctor not a doctor, because he hurt someone else to save himself. It would explain all the comments made by the doctor in the last episode!
So the theory is that Paul McGann ages and becomes John Hurt? Either way I'd buy it as long as he doesn't start going on about being Half human again...
When 1 changed into 2 it was called rejuvenated. 2 into 3 was a punishment by the timelords 3 into 4 was "a trick" (can't remember if the monk called it regeneration) 4 into 5 it onwards definitely called regeneration.
Like mobile phones are opt in. Like the internet is opt in. Like submitting your CV to recruitment agencies in MS Word or even PDF format is opt in. It may get to the point where to be a functioning member of society you "have" to wear them. Hopefully by that stage competition has stepped in and given us other less evil options, but maybe not.
So let me get this straight. Rather than saying "I bought the second hand Fiat because it was cheaper than the Ford" you say "I bought the second hand Fiat that is actually on its third owner not including the garage and distributor and Fiat themselves because even though it has significantly higher maintenance costs given the likely probability of breakdown and usage patterns for a typical but not necessary same demographic as myself; when you factor in the expected costs of depreciation on a new model and the relevant tax, servicing and inflationary costs together with the differences in insurance and fuel economy for predicted driving conditions for by planned lifestyle as anticipated for a car like the Ford it would have proved to be more expensive than the predicted benefits would merit"
I bet you're a lot of fun at social events. Normal sane discussion allows one party to assume verbal shorthands. If you forbid their use as you are trying to do with me then sensible discussion is impossible. I knew that equipment costs included more than the simple BOM. You knew that too. Where is the problem and why are you trying to dismiss the rest of my argument because of this pointless semantic squabbling?
Can you explain this please, I don't get your argument. I was referring to:
For example, the way fuels have been priced for the last decade or so (since the first runup after 9/11), you pay for the energy you get out of the fuel, not the fuel itself.
As far as I am aware finding the price of something by it's value to society is a good thing. How would you rather it worked? The alternative I can see is that some things are socially or politically favoured and so are forced down our throats whether it's a good idea or not. As long as all costs* are taken into account then what's the problem? *As a counter example I know not all costs of coal are taken into account, and they should be and this is a failing of capitalism but that's not related to the paying for the energy content of something which was the point of the OP.
Perhaps it will also help if I mention i was also considering another use of this effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy Which might explain better some of the comments on efficiency and "free" source of energy
And costs are more than "equipment to handle fluids"... There's the capital costs of the land, structure, equipment, and infrastructure.
Which is part of the equipment costs. Whether I use one cubic meter of water or a million doesn't matter because it is the equipment along with the implied land(if it exists, these could be floating platforms) and costs associated with that equipment that we are concerned about not the actual source of said energy that the equipment is using.
I am not in the slightest "blithely unaware" of these costs because they are irrelevant to the argument about efficiency vs equipment costs except that of course they are part of equipment costs. Unless you think that every discussion would be improved by listing every detail to the quantum level that impacts the outcome? Since this is a discussion about efficiency do you not know what efficiency is? Efficiency is a measure of useful work extracted from input energy. It has nothing whatsoever to do with that list you gave. Now as I said " if spending 1% more on the plant to improve efficiency gets you 10% more energy then that's a fine thing to do" acknowledging that by spending more money to improve thermal efficiency could result in a net gain, but what gave you the impression that in my plant costs I wasn't referring to the total plant costs? My only explanation here is that either you are confusing thermal efficiency with some sort of economic efficiency concept or you just didn't try and comprehend what I wrote. So let me try a different tack for the sake of this discussion. What is important is that such a plant is economically efficient. Thermal efficiency must serve that goal. Thermal efficiency should be increased to the point where it improves the profitability but no further. I would argue that for a coal plant while technically the same argument applies (because you have to pay for the fuel not just collecting it, burning it, disposing of end products and the equipment and associated costs with all of that); that because of the costs to the environment it and other plants like it have a duty of care to ensure they are as efficient as reasonably feasible.
Unless you want to nitpick terms like reasonably feasible...
Another way of saying it is that capitalism sort of works. Or at least the laws of supply and demand do. Product A is cheaper than product B. Demand for Product A increases. Price of Product A increases as price of product B decreases. Per unit of usefulness they end up costing the same. To get back on topic though in this case energy costs are fixed by supply and demand. At the moment ARM cores are in server terms a niche product so you don't get the benefits of bulk supply. Those efficiencies can be improved on though, cost of energy less so.
Thermocouples isn't the way to do it. Stirling engines are. Efficiency is not a serious concern when your energy source is cost free. The costs of this problem are all in your equipment to handle the fluids, there is no fuel as such so efficiency doesn't directly matter. What is important is how much your plant costs you to generate X watts. Of course if spending 1% more on the plant to improve efficiency gets you 10% more energy then that's a fine thing to do, but i see no problem with running these plants at 1% efficiency as long as they are cost effective. The worst case scenario is you pull more cold water to the surface Not granted doing that on an infinitely large scale and without some management would doubtless cause problems but we're a _long_ way off that. Not forgetting though that the cold water will be very nutrient rich which is the limiting factor in most ocean ecosystems. Certainly if we did this stuff in the deep ocean there's massive potential here. And I'd certainly rather they did this with low efficiency than burn any more fossils...
I completely agree but: It makes sense form a network perspective to have local caches of data that are likely to be both large and accessed by many. e.g. I believe many sites like youtube and iPlayer effectively have regional datacentres co-located with ISPs to provide this. I assume you wouldn't argue against this? It's a very short step from these kind of local media services to the case where you have some sort of media box that they push popular programs/data to when it is good for the network. i.e. they know 10% of people will watch the latest episode of Mad Man when it becomes available and they know who 90% of those will be, so why not send the data during off peak times? Once you do that how are you to the user any different to the cable service they already have? The ISP being innovative and bandwidth efficient has run afoul of your no content delivery rule...
It's not a device for extracting momentum from the relativistic differences between the group and phase velocity of resonating microwaves. It's a device for extracting money from people who don't understand physics. I would call this device a total success so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely for the the issue isn't assembly vs everything else it's demonstrating the ability to use a range of language philosophies, There are lots of languages under the sun and certainly I'd be worried about someone who always had garbage collection at their beck and call if I was trying to implement any system with real time requirements or involved lots of heavy lifting of data. However isn't there a worry someone can get too stuck in the nuts and bots. I've seen so many examples of code where someone has done something in hundreds of lines of C for something that would take 5 lines of perl, (and before you say the implementation they used would make the C slower)
So if a CV turned up for someone who had no assembly experience but had experience in C, Perl, Ruby, Occam, Lisp. I'm fairly sure if they would have a grasp of the fundamentals, much more than someone who just had x86 assembler and C++.
How many people today can function without a compiler?
How many welders can function without a foundry to produce the iron for them?
How many people can function without farms to grow their food for them.
How many farms these days can function without computers and iron tools?
It's called civilisation, we build on top of the work of others and do ever greater things. If everyone in all of life had to know how to do everything we wouldn;t get very much done.
The UK economy crumbles due to the loss of Cheddar [and} Somerset Cider
Don't be silly, that would imply the UK actually made something these days, These days we offer services
Glastonbury hippies doing face-painting
That's the thing, and "silicon roundabout" and "financial services".
(disclaimer) I work as an engineer in the UK so no need to shout at me
You're making a classic mistake there. When matter gets converted into energy gravitation doesn't care. It cares about the total mass-energy. Which doesn't change. So while the emitted photons do not have mass they do have energy which of course has a mass equivalent.
In a closed system* even if there are nuclear reactions taking place the mass-energy of the system does not change.
*to actually do this you'd have to contain all the mass and photons and neutrinos, which we don't know how to do, but the point stands...
Why is it so hard to imagine that there is a particle that interacts with gravity but not electromagnetically? That's really what this comes down to.
Remember you only touch that key on the keyboard because of photon interactions.
Are you happy with the existence of Neutrinos? These particles that barely interact with normal matter or do you think they are purely there to balance formulas too? (okay that's why they were originally there but not anymore)
Not to disagree with your point, but at least WebMD would tell you that you need drugs rather than the faith healer down the road. That might then get you to do something to get those drugs (either go to the next town for them, or try and get social changes so that you have better access to them for the next time). As things stand without the knowledge they may go to that faith healer and then blame the failure on God's will instead of things they might be able to change in their society.
Knowledge is always the first step.
Why?
Speaking as a citizen/subject of a western democracy, things are pretty good at the moment. Most laws work, most things work, it's the new stuff they keep proposing that sucks.
The problem is that we have governments with that majority you like the idea of and they keep changing the laws and are making things worse. If they spent more time arguing with each other so that only the really really good laws made it while all the stupid laws got tied up in knots then i believe things woiuld get even better.
Or you go the other extreme and have a dictator who at least gets things done and has a clear vision removing inefficiencies. But let's not go there because I might be one of those inefficiencies (s)he wants removed.
Not to mention the fact that a time travelling immortal would eventually become every person in the universe, then compose all mass of the universe then...
He has to die some time!
Many WLAN chipsets today use SDR(software defined radio), so most of the design is just a big DSP - so more clock speed = more complex algos. Alternatively since you'd likely have multiple channels in operation each of which probably has its own DSP by going faster you could put multiple channels onto a single DSP so save silicon area.
Or if you had hardened part of the algos into custom logic you could ease the memory latency requirements/move the hardened parts into DSP to save area.
Or move parts of the design that had to use onboard memories to use external memory to save area.
Lots of options and that's without me knowing the details of the design in question. As a general rule your 3 limits in a design like this are process speed, available area and external memory bandwidth; you're always at the limit for all 3 in any design, if you're not then you're wasting money
No, the clock signal needs to time between two connecting flip flops nothing more. It's extremely common (i.e. it's about 5% of my job) to have to change the design in order to achieve this local clocking requirement.
That's without having multiple asynchronous clocks on a single chip.
Or asynchronous logic
Even when you need to do very long paths it's called a clock tree for a reason you can have a 1GHz clock that takes several ns to get from its source PLL to its destination flop because the delay through the tree to all the leaf nodes is matched. that is a 1ns period clock can take 4ns to get from the source to the destination, and that's all fine because as long as it's the same 4ns... ;-)
Now things get harder when different bits of the chip have silicon that runs at different speeds so you can't balance the tree like you'd like to, but that's what makes this job interesting
"And garbage collection has no place on a mobile device."
I would change and say that garbage collection has no place on an real time application, and I believe a mobile device should run an RTOS, even though no modern ones do.
Garbage collection is a great tool if you have sufficient memory and no real time requirements.
GC can help make programs more readable and programs should be written for humans to read and only incidentally for machines to execute. However in the many situations where it is not appropriate we shouldn't be using it and UIs are one of those.
But isn't this the way it should be, you knock up a prototype in the most convenient language for the job, then profile it, then improve it where it needs improving?
Unless that is what makes the John Hurt doctor not a doctor, because he hurt someone else to save himself.
It would explain all the comments made by the doctor in the last episode!
Well it would explain the capabilities of the sonic screwdriver. they could just call it a wand and be done with it
So the theory is that Paul McGann ages and becomes John Hurt?
Either way I'd buy it as long as he doesn't start going on about being Half human again...
When 1 changed into 2 it was called rejuvenated.
2 into 3 was a punishment by the timelords
3 into 4 was "a trick" (can't remember if the monk called it regeneration)
4 into 5 it onwards definitely called regeneration.
Like mobile phones are opt in. Like the internet is opt in. Like submitting your CV to recruitment agencies in MS Word or even PDF format is opt in.
It may get to the point where to be a functioning member of society you "have" to wear them.
Hopefully by that stage competition has stepped in and given us other less evil options, but maybe not.
So let me get this straight.
Rather than saying "I bought the second hand Fiat because it was cheaper than the Ford" you say "I bought the second hand Fiat that is actually on its third owner not including the garage and distributor and Fiat themselves because even though it has significantly higher maintenance costs given the likely probability of breakdown and usage patterns for a typical but not necessary same demographic as myself; when you factor in the expected costs of depreciation on a new model and the relevant tax, servicing and inflationary costs together with the differences in insurance and fuel economy for predicted driving conditions for by planned lifestyle as anticipated for a car like the Ford it would have proved to be more expensive than the predicted benefits would merit"
I bet you're a lot of fun at social events.
Normal sane discussion allows one party to assume verbal shorthands. If you forbid their use as you are trying to do with me then sensible discussion is impossible.
I knew that equipment costs included more than the simple BOM. You knew that too. Where is the problem and why are you trying to dismiss the rest of my argument because of this pointless semantic squabbling?
Can you explain this please, I don't get your argument.
I was referring to:
For example, the way fuels have been priced for the last decade or so (since the first runup after 9/11), you pay for the energy you get out of the fuel, not the fuel itself.
As far as I am aware finding the price of something by it's value to society is a good thing. How would you rather it worked?
The alternative I can see is that some things are socially or politically favoured and so are forced down our throats whether it's a good idea or not. As long as all costs* are taken into account then what's the problem?
*As a counter example I know not all costs of coal are taken into account, and they should be and this is a failing of capitalism but that's not related to the paying for the energy content of something which was the point of the OP.
Perhaps it will also help if I mention i was also considering another use of this effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy
Which might explain better some of the comments on efficiency and "free" source of energy
And costs are more than "equipment to handle fluids"... There's the capital costs of the land, structure, equipment, and infrastructure.
Which is part of the equipment costs. Whether I use one cubic meter of water or a million doesn't matter because it is the equipment along with the implied land(if it exists, these could be floating platforms) and costs associated with that equipment that we are concerned about not the actual source of said energy that the equipment is using.
I am not in the slightest "blithely unaware" of these costs because they are irrelevant to the argument about efficiency vs equipment costs except that of course they are part of equipment costs. Unless you think that every discussion would be improved by listing every detail to the quantum level that impacts the outcome? Since this is a discussion about efficiency do you not know what efficiency is?
Efficiency is a measure of useful work extracted from input energy. It has nothing whatsoever to do with that list you gave.
Now as I said " if spending 1% more on the plant to improve efficiency gets you 10% more energy then that's a fine thing to do" acknowledging that by spending more money to improve thermal efficiency could result in a net gain, but what gave you the impression that in my plant costs I wasn't referring to the total plant costs?
My only explanation here is that either you are confusing thermal efficiency with some sort of economic efficiency concept or you just didn't try and comprehend what I wrote.
So let me try a different tack for the sake of this discussion. What is important is that such a plant is economically efficient. Thermal efficiency must serve that goal. Thermal efficiency should be increased to the point where it improves the profitability but no further.
I would argue that for a coal plant while technically the same argument applies (because you have to pay for the fuel not just collecting it, burning it, disposing of end products and the equipment and associated costs with all of that); that because of the costs to the environment it and other plants like it have a duty of care to ensure they are as efficient as reasonably feasible.
Unless you want to nitpick terms like reasonably feasible...
Another way of saying it is that capitalism sort of works. Or at least the laws of supply and demand do.
Product A is cheaper than product B. Demand for Product A increases. Price of Product A increases as price of product B decreases. Per unit of usefulness they end up costing the same.
To get back on topic though in this case energy costs are fixed by supply and demand. At the moment ARM cores are in server terms a niche product so you don't get the benefits of bulk supply. Those efficiencies can be improved on though, cost of energy less so.
Thermocouples isn't the way to do it. Stirling engines are.
Efficiency is not a serious concern when your energy source is cost free.
The costs of this problem are all in your equipment to handle the fluids, there is no fuel as such so efficiency doesn't directly matter. What is important is how much your plant costs you to generate X watts. Of course if spending 1% more on the plant to improve efficiency gets you 10% more energy then that's a fine thing to do, but i see no problem with running these plants at 1% efficiency as long as they are cost effective. The worst case scenario is you pull more cold water to the surface
Not granted doing that on an infinitely large scale and without some management would doubtless cause problems but we're a _long_ way off that. Not forgetting though that the cold water will be very nutrient rich which is the limiting factor in most ocean ecosystems. Certainly if we did this stuff in the deep ocean there's massive potential here.
And I'd certainly rather they did this with low efficiency than burn any more fossils...
I completely agree but:
It makes sense form a network perspective to have local caches of data that are likely to be both large and accessed by many. e.g. I believe many sites like youtube and iPlayer effectively have regional datacentres co-located with ISPs to provide this. I assume you wouldn't argue against this? It's a very short step from these kind of local media services to the case where you have some sort of media box that they push popular programs/data to when it is good for the network. i.e. they know 10% of people will watch the latest episode of Mad Man when it becomes available and they know who 90% of those will be, so why not send the data during off peak times?
Once you do that how are you to the user any different to the cable service they already have? The ISP being innovative and bandwidth efficient has run afoul of your no content delivery rule...
You mean the one they fired 3 years ago to pay for their bonus?
Got you.
It's not a device for extracting momentum from the relativistic differences between the group and phase velocity of resonating microwaves.
It's a device for extracting money from people who don't understand physics.
I would call this device a total success so far.