The fact that we're stuck with x86 isn't Intel's fault. At the time, CISC was considered a good idea, and as for endianness.... I won't even go there.
Intel has tried to move away from x86: look at the Itanium and Itanium II. Intel gambled that they could find enough ILP with their compiler, and lost, but at least they moved off of x86, right?
The fact is, because x86 was so wildly successful, and because so much software was written for it, Intel had to ensure that future processors were compatible with the x86 instruction set. Doing otherwise would have been deliberately alienating a large part of their market share. It could be argued that x86 compatibility (or lack thereof, more specifically) is one of the major reasons why IA-64 was unsuccessful. Completely moving off of x86 would be devastating to the company, and irresponsible in the eyes of their shareholders/employees.
I can't believe that any engineer in his right mind would actually want to stick with IA-32 in the face of its glaring defects, they're very bright people, and if you need proof of that, just look at the Core. But if you want to sell consumer chips, you don't have any other choice.
> The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
> William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part II, act 4, scene 2
The next thing to do, of course, is to abolish this absurd idea of "innocent until proven guilty". After all, why should the innocent be brought to trial? It's unfair.
Lawyers hardly have a monopoly on morally questionable behavior.
Theres a project like this in Iceland called DeCODE. They've been given a lot of power over the data collected, enough to make some people wary. It's a fair assumption that this project will face similar problems, although the measures governing DeCODE seem to protect the company much more than the individual. It will be interesting to see how Biobank handles this.
I think you meant "and free up a few more dollars for the government to blow on something else".
There's nothing wrong with volunteer organizations, they do wonderful work, but let's not delude ourselves. The government wont pass the savings along, they'll spend it on something else. Even if we do get tax cuts, they wont cut spending proportionally, so our children will have to pay for it.
Absolutely. Why compile gAIM and XChat from source? They spend 99% of their time waiting for user input anyway. Pacman installs tools like that for me in half a minute. When I want to compile something from source, like MySQL, not for speed but for security reasons (protection against pre-rolled buffer overflow attacks), ABS makes that easy too. Add "-custom" to the name, point it at the current source tarball, and when security fixes get rolled out in the new version, just run makepkg again. It's a wonderful package manager, and the base install is tiny. Like Slack for i686.
If you don't like the administration, then get out.
I didn't vote for Bush in 2000 or 2004. Should I pack up and leave my friends, family, and job and get mired down immigrating to a country that probably doesn't want to employ me anyway? Should I hope that those who stayed behind make better choices when voting in 2008 so that I can move back to my home?
I will say what I want about "Americans" as a whole because by the very founding notions of your country, your government is representative of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Our government is not representative of the people, it is representative of the majority, whether that majority is a significant percentage, or 51% as in recent years. You admit this, but choose to ignore the ramifications, instead offering an impossible solution.
I could say some very choice things about "Canadians" as a whole, but that would be just as racist as your statements, and your country might fine me, my ISP, and Slashdot.
Actually, you can only retrieve ~35% (iirc) of energy dissapated as heat (remember entropy?). Efficiency is determined by the range of operating temperatures.
Although now that I think about it, Xeons might run hot enough to make a heat engine worthwhile:D
...with the series on the decline (i.e., most of the original cast is gone) and the orignal storyline finished, I wonder if Stargate will last past the ninth or tenth season.
My friend at OSU did a similar thing, he was studying in the hall before his sociology midterm after pulling an all-nighter, and fell asleep. The rest of the class in the hall went in and left him sleeping in the hall.
I woke up at 8:02am for my 8am physics final... I have one of those 7-day alarm clocks and accidentally set the alarm for 7:30 Wednesday instead of 7:30 Tuesday. I had the lowest possible A in the class, another 1/10th of a percentage point would have given me a B, so I had to make at least a 180/200 on the final. I was pretty pissed off by the time I got there...
I ran into my TA two days later and asked him how I had done. After I gave him my name he frowned and said something like, "Oh.. I remember your exam... you missed alot of points," He pulled my paper out and showed it to me, "See, you missed a point here and a point here." I got a 99%.
I was really happy with my grade, considering how hopeless I am at rotational dynamics.
Re:Virus writer is a Free Software fanatic
on
Sober Code Cracked
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· Score: 1
As an undergrad in both Computer Science and Computer Engineering (considering getting an EE degree too... my current workload is too easy:D), I wholeheartedly degree. Computer Science should be taught like engineering (and at UK, it's even in the Engineering department). The only reason my CS classes are so easy is because I've done so much work on my own: the classes are useless.
Seriously, we have some really good programs. Hank Dietz, Bill Dieter, and Tim Mattox have some exceptional results in parallel computing. Until recently, their $40,000 home-made cluster beat UK's million dollar HP Superdome cluster in Linpack ratings. The $40k even factors in the cost of student labor (in the form of pizza) to wire the cluster.
I just wish I could say the same for our CS department... It's been getting steadily better since the College of Engineering adopted it, but they switched to M$ Visual Studio.NET this year, and that really worries me... program internals shouldn't be hidden from the student at lower levels of computer science.
Actually, languages like Latin and Greek are more suited to this type of puzzle than English. Because informal Latin and Greek have no enforced word order, you can use whatever words you like as long as they are in the correct cases and still form a sentence. Most languages now have deprecated their noun declinsions, or augmented them with a word order system (like German).
Because in some places, there isn't enough space for everyone to have a 3 bedroom house with a backyard and two car garage. The only place to go is up (or down, which would be better in terms of thermal characteristics too, but apparently people have something against living underground all the time).
As for the Windows dig, I can't see how Linux would result in less interference.
I think that the Windows reference was to dissuade someone from mentioning, for example, a gumstix wrapped in a roll of tinfoil (which was my first thought).
... the ads can sometimes be distracting to the plot. My girlfriend had CSI: New York on last night, and as one of the characters was walking across the street to a suspects apartment, his girlfriend calls him and his blackberry starts ringing with Coldplay's "Talk".
I didn't know what was going on until it cut to commercial and the first ad was "Buy Coldplay's 'Talk' ringtone, as advertised on CSI: New York!". I personally find this kind of ad distracting, it felt like the whole 30 second scene was inserted purely to generate advertising revenue.
Compare this to the Cingular billboard in the Spiderman movie. The scene had to be in the movie, spiderman has to swing around the city in big panoramic shots. To me, this is the difference between a coke logo on the wall in a game, and the character having to collect a scattered 12pack of coke in order to bribe a guard/script kiddie.
The first system I built was an Athlon64 3400+ Clawhammer with a gig of RAM. I've not had a problem with it to this day. The second was a 3200+ Venice core, and the third was a Sempron64 budget computer. The two Athlon systems were around $1200-1300 and are still VERY respectable gaming machines. The budget Sempron64 obsolutely flies on the desktop, and it will play most games, although graphics heavy FPS give it problems because it uses integrated video.
Some important things I've learned along the way:
CPU: Don't buy Intel right now. Please. P4's and Xeons get their asses handed to them in everything but video rendering by Athlon64's, and people still insist on buying them. If you want Intel, wait for the new desktop cores to come out next year, or buy an Asus Socket 478 board, a Socket 479 adapter, and Pentium M. The high end Sonoma cores beat the P4's quite handily in almost every task. There was a/. post a while back to this effect. The high end chips, the 760 and 765 even beat out some Athlon FX's in benchmarks. On the low end, Sempron64's are amazing. Most of the power of an Athlon64 for $70-90.
Motherboard: Asus, Abit, MSI. Go with a big name brand board. For Athlons, the K8T890 series was good this past summer. Make sure Athlon boards support PC3200 DDR-RAM. This is the most important component in your whole system, resist the urge to save $10-20 on the motherboard, you'll pay for it for the whole life of your computer.
RAM: DDR for Athlons, DDR2 for Intels. DDR2 is more expensive. If your budget is tight, go with 2x256mb if the board supports dual channel, 1x512mb if not. Otherwise, get at least 2x512mb, 2x1gb is ideal. Needless to say, this is a dual channel configuration. If your board doesn't support dual channel, go back and reread the part about motherboards. There is no reason not to have dual channel unless the budget is tight. You should be budgetting a computer within your means, not trying to build an awesome gaming rig with offbrand hardware.
Video Card: For a budget machine, plan to use onboard video. If you can afford it, buy a cheap geforce card and free up some system memory. On an expensive machine, you're buying top of the line anyway, which right now is the Geforce 7800. In between, the Geforce 6800's are extremely good buys right now, as I write this there is a PCIe 6800 with 256mb of RAM for about $200 on newegg. If you are a hardcore ATi fan, wait for the $150-$250 x1600's. On paper these look really good, most of the power of a x1800 without the premium top-of-the-line price. Though the geforce cards beat the ATI cards right now, ATI doesn't usually get their sh*t together for a couple driver revisions, and the M5 chips look really promising.
HDD: On a budget: 7200rpm IDE, or sata150 if the board supports it. If not, it won't make that big of a difference. Otherwise: go SATA. Get a Raptor or Seagate 10K rpm drive for the operating system and games, and a big 7200rpm for your pirated media and porn. If it's really good porn, consider a RAID array. It's hard to tell what makes a bigger difference, drive speed, NCQ, or data transfer rate. Look at average seek times and latencies. For 7200rpm drives, there are alot more options: get a SATA2 drive with NCQ if you can swing it. SATA150 is alright, but SATA2 is twice is fast, and most of the drives have NCQ. Don't buy Maxtor anything, Western Digital is alright, I've had good experiences with Western Digital and Hitachi, though.
Optical drive(s): A 16x DVD+/-RW costs about $40. Buy Plextor or Nec or Sony, its not that much more expensive ($5-10).
Floppy: you need one if you're installing windows on a SATA drive. It costs $10.
Case: I love Lian-Li. I love Full Towers. Don't buy one with a Power supply, do buy one with lots of fan mounts, you don't have to fill them all. You case isn't that important, as long as you don't buy dirt cheap all plastic ones. I love aluminum, but its a bit expensive. As long as it has enough room
As I understand it, 16 bit code can only address 64k of flat address space. I suppose this would be a performance hit.
Also, wouldn't it waste space in a 32 bit register to hold a 16 bit integer? If so, half of your register space is wasted... I'm not sure about this though. If anyone knows better, please correct me
I used to use sessionsaver like that, but sometimes if you open a page in firefox that opens a popup window and you close the popup after the main window, you loose all your saved sessions, replaced by the popup. That's why I stopped using it, I got really sick of losing my dozen or more open pages. However, it is awfully nice to be able to close it, firefox doesn't seem to survive my laptop's hibernate very well.
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The fact that we're stuck with x86 isn't Intel's fault. At the time, CISC was considered a good idea, and as for endianness.... I won't even go there.
Intel has tried to move away from x86: look at the Itanium and Itanium II. Intel gambled that they could find enough ILP with their compiler, and lost, but at least they moved off of x86, right?
The fact is, because x86 was so wildly successful, and because so much software was written for it, Intel had to ensure that future processors were compatible with the x86 instruction set. Doing otherwise would have been deliberately alienating a large part of their market share. It could be argued that x86 compatibility (or lack thereof, more specifically) is one of the major reasons why IA-64 was unsuccessful. Completely moving off of x86 would be devastating to the company, and irresponsible in the eyes of their shareholders/employees.
I can't believe that any engineer in his right mind would actually want to stick with IA-32 in the face of its glaring defects, they're very bright people, and if you need proof of that, just look at the Core. But if you want to sell consumer chips, you don't have any other choice.
> The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. > William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part II, act 4, scene 2 The next thing to do, of course, is to abolish this absurd idea of "innocent until proven guilty". After all, why should the innocent be brought to trial? It's unfair. Lawyers hardly have a monopoly on morally questionable behavior.
Theres a project like this in Iceland called DeCODE. They've been given a lot of power over the data collected, enough to make some people wary. It's a fair assumption that this project will face similar problems, although the measures governing DeCODE seem to protect the company much more than the individual. It will be interesting to see how Biobank handles this.
and you save yourself a few dollars in taxes
I think you meant "and free up a few more dollars for the government to blow on something else".
There's nothing wrong with volunteer organizations, they do wonderful work, but let's not delude ourselves. The government wont pass the savings along, they'll spend it on something else. Even if we do get tax cuts, they wont cut spending proportionally, so our children will have to pay for it.
Absolutely. Why compile gAIM and XChat from source? They spend 99% of their time waiting for user input anyway. Pacman installs tools like that for me in half a minute. When I want to compile something from source, like MySQL, not for speed but for security reasons (protection against pre-rolled buffer overflow attacks), ABS makes that easy too. Add "-custom" to the name, point it at the current source tarball, and when security fixes get rolled out in the new version, just run makepkg again. It's a wonderful package manager, and the base install is tiny. Like Slack for i686.
If you don't like the administration, then get out.
I didn't vote for Bush in 2000 or 2004. Should I pack up and leave my friends, family, and job and get mired down immigrating to a country that probably doesn't want to employ me anyway? Should I hope that those who stayed behind make better choices when voting in 2008 so that I can move back to my home?
I will say what I want about "Americans" as a whole because by the very founding notions of your country, your government is representative of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Our government is not representative of the people, it is representative of the majority, whether that majority is a significant percentage, or 51% as in recent years. You admit this, but choose to ignore the ramifications, instead offering an impossible solution.
I could say some very choice things about "Canadians" as a whole, but that would be just as racist as your statements, and your country might fine me, my ISP, and Slashdot.
When the Meroms come out, the price on the current gen of Centrinos will fall. Snatch up a nice Thinkpad for $1000.
Actually, you can only retrieve ~35% (iirc) of energy dissapated as heat (remember entropy?). Efficiency is determined by the range of operating temperatures.
Although now that I think about it, Xeons might run hot enough to make a heat engine worthwhile :D
...with the series on the decline (i.e., most of the original cast is gone) and the orignal storyline finished, I wonder if Stargate will last past the ninth or tenth season.
My friend at OSU did a similar thing, he was studying in the hall before his sociology midterm after pulling an all-nighter, and fell asleep. The rest of the class in the hall went in and left him sleeping in the hall.
I woke up at 8:02am for my 8am physics final... I have one of those 7-day alarm clocks and accidentally set the alarm for 7:30 Wednesday instead of 7:30 Tuesday. I had the lowest possible A in the class, another 1/10th of a percentage point would have given me a B, so I had to make at least a 180/200 on the final. I was pretty pissed off by the time I got there...
I ran into my TA two days later and asked him how I had done. After I gave him my name he frowned and said something like, "Oh.. I remember your exam... you missed alot of points," He pulled my paper out and showed it to me, "See, you missed a point here and a point here." I got a 99%.
I was really happy with my grade, considering how hopeless I am at rotational dynamics.
parent is modded funny for a reason...
As an undergrad in both Computer Science and Computer Engineering (considering getting an EE degree too... my current workload is too easy :D), I wholeheartedly degree. Computer Science should be taught like engineering (and at UK, it's even in the Engineering department). The only reason my CS classes are so easy is because I've done so much work on my own: the classes are useless.
Cool... what department are you in?
Seriously, we have some really good programs. Hank Dietz, Bill Dieter, and Tim Mattox have some exceptional results in parallel computing. Until recently, their $40,000 home-made cluster beat UK's million dollar HP Superdome cluster in Linpack ratings. The $40k even factors in the cost of student labor (in the form of pizza) to wire the cluster.
I just wish I could say the same for our CS department... It's been getting steadily better since the College of Engineering adopted it, but they switched to M$ Visual Studio .NET this year, and that really worries me... program internals shouldn't be hidden from the student at lower levels of computer science.
I hope I didn't /. aggregate.org too badly...
Actually, languages like Latin and Greek are more suited to this type of puzzle than English. Because informal Latin and Greek have no enforced word order, you can use whatever words you like as long as they are in the correct cases and still form a sentence. Most languages now have deprecated their noun declinsions, or augmented them with a word order system (like German).
Because in some places, there isn't enough space for everyone to have a 3 bedroom house with a backyard and two car garage. The only place to go is up (or down, which would be better in terms of thermal characteristics too, but apparently people have something against living underground all the time).
As for the Windows dig, I can't see how Linux would result in less interference.
I think that the Windows reference was to dissuade someone from mentioning, for example, a gumstix wrapped in a roll of tinfoil (which was my first thought).
... the ads can sometimes be distracting to the plot. My girlfriend had CSI: New York on last night, and as one of the characters was walking across the street to a suspects apartment, his girlfriend calls him and his blackberry starts ringing with Coldplay's "Talk".
I didn't know what was going on until it cut to commercial and the first ad was "Buy Coldplay's 'Talk' ringtone, as advertised on CSI: New York!". I personally find this kind of ad distracting, it felt like the whole 30 second scene was inserted purely to generate advertising revenue.
Compare this to the Cingular billboard in the Spiderman movie. The scene had to be in the movie, spiderman has to swing around the city in big panoramic shots. To me, this is the difference between a coke logo on the wall in a game, and the character having to collect a scattered 12pack of coke in order to bribe a guard/script kiddie.
The first system I built was an Athlon64 3400+ Clawhammer with a gig of RAM. I've not had a problem with it to this day. The second was a 3200+ Venice core, and the third was a Sempron64 budget computer. The two Athlon systems were around $1200-1300 and are still VERY respectable gaming machines. The budget Sempron64 obsolutely flies on the desktop, and it will play most games, although graphics heavy FPS give it problems because it uses integrated video.
Some important things I've learned along the way:
hmmm... The only difference is that I'm running a 3400+ on an Asus K8T800 Deluxe, any idea why there's such a large discrepency?
Whats your setup? My 3400+ does it in 77sec.
As I understand it, 16 bit code can only address 64k of flat address space. I suppose this would be a performance hit.
Also, wouldn't it waste space in a 32 bit register to hold a 16 bit integer? If so, half of your register space is wasted... I'm not sure about this though. If anyone knows better, please correct me
I used to use sessionsaver like that, but sometimes if you open a page in firefox that opens a popup window and you close the popup after the main window, you loose all your saved sessions, replaced by the popup. That's why I stopped using it, I got really sick of losing my dozen or more open pages. However, it is awfully nice to be able to close it, firefox doesn't seem to survive my laptop's hibernate very well.
actually, a lot of new cars don't come with ashtrays, its a $100+ "feature"