Now when is AMD going to add a bunch of small slave CPUs? With limited 64-bit instruction set, few fast integer and FP execution units, with local SRAM, hooked up through DMA via HyperTransport?
IBM had a very proprietary attitude regarding busses (MicroChannel Architecture), networking (LUA / SNA), and probably others. My impression (and I worked at IBM for a while) was that IBM figured it could get away with designs that required end-to-end IBM'ness, because the big customers would buy ALL their kit from IBM anyway.
Well, IBM Got It at some point.
I used to work for DEC. Some Get It and some don't.
Problem with that is, as long as they aren't too expensive, there's no incentive to do that. As long as gas is subsidized and cheap (in the US anyway), conspicuous consumption will win over environmental consciousness every time.
Build a bike lane once in a while.
Next to the highway? Yuk. I'd rather breathe the AC'd air in my car.
Seriously, riding next to a highway upwind is tolerable. Downwind from it is really disgusting. Now if they could get the old gas guzzlers off the street and make Diesel trucks with soot filters, that might be a different story.
I'd love to commute the 18 miles to the office by bike and take a shower there. But I'd probably get Asthma pretty soon.
There are thousands of ways to reduce energy use. Many involve technology.
The interesting thing is, it has been shown that this actually improves economic performance. I don't recall the numbers, but it has been shown that the high energy prices in Germany and Denmark were beneficial for the economy overall, because they made some renewable energy sources like wind viable (after subsidies), which created new businesses and jobs. That's is why Germany and Denmark are now world leaders in wind technology.
We can consume what we do now, and watch the population grow so that the total amount of energy consumed increases.
That's what we're going to do, as long as we can afford the power to stay on top of the heap.
Total electricity (therefore coal/gas) usage declines.
And what are poor Enron, Exxon, Texaco etc going to do? Watch revenues drop? No way. Just hire more lobbyists.
Answering support questions all day is a PITA. You need to pay people to do that. Hacking code is fun, while supporting it isn't. So, don't expect [decent] support from FOSS developers - not going to happen.
*Paid* support is available everywhere though. Bottom line, except for the bare code, you get what you pay for.
Once, ABS saved my life, when a moron cut right in front of me on the Autobahn (I was doing about 190-200 km/h (120 mph for you guys who still use those obsolete units:) )
Once it scared the heck out of me when I went slowly down a snowy hill with crappy tires (in a rental car) and just couldn't stop. With locked tires I might have been able to stop due to the buildup in front of the tires. So I had to slalom around a few other cars. Fun, fun, fun... not! But that was with 10-20 km/h (10-ish mph), and I'll gladly trade this inconvenience against the safety improvement. Going off the road or hitting another car at that speed wouldn't have hurt me. And it was a rental car anyway (yes I took full insurance.)
On a slightly different topic, I wonder when, if ever, we will see storage alternatives you can actually use to make a full backup of a modern hard drive.
There is one: it's called tape. Only problem, you need to amortize the price of the drive across many media to enjoy the good price/capcity of the media. That's why it's only attractive for large systems.
This is slightly off-topic, but can someone please tell me my Intel continues to have so few registers?
Because you need to change the instruction set to address more registers, which sacrifices backwards compatibility. Once you go down that path, you might as well revamp the entire architecture and have a backward compatible execution mode - or so it seems. Intel tried that with Itanium and failed. If you want full performance for the old architecture, you can only devote a few transistors to the new one, which means it can't be very much different than the old one. That's what AMD got right. Small evolutionary steps, architecure-wise. Maybe we'll end up with CPUs that have half a dozen excution modes with slightly different instruction sets like in the minicomputer days. Or (shudder) loadable microcode - not just once before the boot like today, but during execution. Like Prime with an instruction set optimized for FORTRAN, another for COBOL, and another for C (which sucked because the hardware was bad at byte-wide memory accesses.)
Second of all I wonder how much real direction Bill offers Microsoft nowadays.
I had the same thought. If he really is the Chief Software Architect, he needs to fire his own sorry ass. If he is the Chief of the Software Architects, there's someone else he can fire (which he just did, apparently.)
Creatine clearly helps me focus and work longer/harder at my desk as well as at the gym... for a few weeks. Then adaptation sets in and I'll stop taking it for a week. There are no withdrawal symptoms, but I can feel the difference (losing weight and strength.)
No study has found any long term negative effects even after decades of FUD about creatine, and it's no wonder why - after all it occurs naturally in fish and meat in amounts comparable to supplementation doses.
The latest research even recommends creatine for endurance athletes, but there is a dilemma for runners: The usual doses lead to weight gain that cancels out the performance increase.
The only disadvantage: It's disgusting. The alternatives are several large tablets (5 grams is a lot of tablets) or a spoonful of nasty gritty, bitter powder. It's tolerable in a large glass of juice though.
But that's 7 (7!!!) keystrokes more than the short version. What's that going to do to my productivity?
And it's wimpy coding too. No risk, no fun!
I remember when I first wrote while(a=b) and the compiler complained about an unsafe assignment, I looked up the pragma that turned that warning off:)
Heh, I've been ranting for years how I love C and C++ and how Java and pretty much all other higher level languages suck. I think they are ment just for crybabies who can't handle pointers and get confused while tying their shoelaces.
Wimp. Just imagine how much fun this contest would be using assembler.:)
The good thing is, anything looks innocuous in assembler at first glance, because you can't understand assembler code in one glance. And if all else fails, write the code in hex. Just add a comment that the version of assembler used didn't have the mnemonics for the newfangled CPU.
There's some evidence that NPR has a conservative bias.
It is quite obvious... for anyone who's not on their right side.
Not being a right-winger, they don't sound all that liberal to me. Still, they try to be non-biased, deliver good information with background, and not the 30 second sound bites you hear otherwise.
I don't want to damage my attention span, and I don't mind listening to someone who has a different position than mine. As long as it's not Bill O'Reilly...
I thought cluster sizes were already 4KB for efficiency, and LBA for larger drive sizes. So how does changing the sector size change things?
Even if the file system allocates space only in multiples of the cluster size, the disk is still read and written in sectors. That is, any overhead (space on disk for interblock gaps, time on the interface for comamnds) is 8 times as much for 512-byte sectors as it is for 4k sectors. ECCs (error correcting codes) also get more efficient the larger the block is, but that relation is nonlinear.
Slashdot Mirror
Now when is AMD going to add a bunch of small slave CPUs? With limited 64-bit instruction set, few fast integer and FP execution units, with local SRAM, hooked up through DMA via HyperTransport?
Ooh, the idea makes me drool.
Millimeter waves is the stuff that lets you look through clothes.
Though it would work, somehow I think it won't make it as an airport security checking device.
IBM had a very proprietary attitude regarding busses (MicroChannel Architecture), networking (LUA / SNA), and probably others. My impression (and I worked at IBM for a while) was that IBM figured it could get away with designs that required end-to-end IBM'ness, because the big customers would buy ALL their kit from IBM anyway.
Well, IBM Got It at some point.
I used to work for DEC. Some Get It and some don't.
Bill Would Outlaw Digital Receiver Recorders
He sure would.
Stop buying vehicles that are wasteful.
Problem with that is, as long as they aren't too expensive, there's no incentive to do that. As long as gas is subsidized and cheap (in the US anyway), conspicuous consumption will win over environmental consciousness every time.
Build a bike lane once in a while.
Next to the highway? Yuk. I'd rather breathe the AC'd air in my car.
Seriously, riding next to a highway upwind is tolerable. Downwind from it is really disgusting. Now if they could get the old gas guzzlers off the street and make Diesel trucks with soot filters, that might be a different story.
I'd love to commute the 18 miles to the office by bike and take a shower there. But I'd probably get Asthma pretty soon.
There are thousands of ways to reduce energy use. Many involve technology.
The interesting thing is, it has been shown that this actually improves economic performance. I don't recall the numbers, but it has been shown that the high energy prices in Germany and Denmark were beneficial for the economy overall, because they made some renewable energy sources like wind viable (after subsidies), which created new businesses and jobs. That's is why Germany and Denmark are now world leaders in wind technology.
We can consume what we do now, and watch the population grow so that the total amount of energy consumed increases.
That's what we're going to do, as long as we can afford the power to stay on top of the heap.
Total electricity (therefore coal/gas) usage declines.
And what are poor Enron, Exxon, Texaco etc going to do? Watch revenues drop? No way. Just hire more lobbyists.
Actually, that's how per-species adaptation works. Some survive a problem, others don't. The DNA pool has 'adapted' to the issue.
Which is generally called evolution.
Or maybe the designer intervened?
ducks...
I hate to break it to you but many, MANY people have done this already.
Not that anybody here would know...
Answering support questions all day is a PITA. You need to pay people to do that. Hacking code is fun, while supporting it isn't. So, don't expect [decent] support from FOSS developers - not going to happen.
*Paid* support is available everywhere though. Bottom line, except for the bare code, you get what you pay for.
Microsoft will unleash an abundance of next-generation applications that will take everyone by surprise.
Yay! Vista. Word 12. Excel 12! PowerPoint 12!! FrontPage 12!!!~! OutRage 12!!!!!!
And all of them bundled as Office 2007!!!1!!!!!
I can't wait.
Once, ABS saved my life, when a moron cut right in front of me on the Autobahn (I was doing about 190-200 km/h (120 mph for you guys who still use those obsolete units :) )
Once it scared the heck out of me when I went slowly down a snowy hill with crappy tires (in a rental car) and just couldn't stop. With locked tires I might have been able to stop due to the buildup in front of the tires. So I had to slalom around a few other cars. Fun, fun, fun... not!
But that was with 10-20 km/h (10-ish mph), and I'll gladly trade this inconvenience against the safety improvement. Going off the road or hitting another car at that speed wouldn't have hurt me. And it was a rental car anyway (yes I took full insurance.)
While they prey? On what?
:)
Ooh, Halloween...
On a slightly different topic, I wonder when, if ever, we will see storage alternatives you can actually use to make a full backup of a modern hard drive.
There is one: it's called tape. Only problem, you need to amortize the price of the drive across many media to enjoy the good price/capcity of the media. That's why it's only attractive for large systems.
They already did, Venus Express launched on 2006-11-09, it arives at Veuns on Tuesday.
Now that's some good engineering!
Yeah. I want that flux compensator!
Embrace...
Extend...
SteveB shouts: Stop it! I can't stand this any longer! I have to fucking kill somebody! Why don't they have any chairs in here?
This is slightly off-topic, but can someone please tell me my Intel continues to have so few registers?
Because you need to change the instruction set to address more registers, which sacrifices backwards compatibility. Once you go down that path, you might as well revamp the entire architecture and have a backward compatible execution mode - or so it seems. Intel tried that with Itanium and failed. If you want full performance for the old architecture, you can only devote a few transistors to the new one, which means it can't be very much different than the old one. That's what AMD got right. Small evolutionary steps, architecure-wise. Maybe we'll end up with CPUs that have half a dozen excution modes with slightly different instruction sets like in the minicomputer days. Or (shudder) loadable microcode - not just once before the boot like today, but during execution. Like Prime with an instruction set optimized for FORTRAN, another for COBOL, and another for C (which sucked because the hardware was bad at byte-wide memory accesses.)
Do you think that when we open up a new Apple(TM), we will find a Core(TM)?
Yes. And a WORM, either the SuperDrive or the more basic Combo drive.
Second of all I wonder how much real direction Bill offers Microsoft nowadays.
I had the same thought. If he really is the Chief Software Architect, he needs to fire his own sorry ass. If he is the Chief of the Software Architects, there's someone else he can fire (which he just did, apparently.)
Taking my 34" inseam, 3.5 leg lengths/s would be 3.02 m/s or a 9-minute mile. Easy long run pace.
And, if you're into lifting, read this...
i n&btnG=Google+Search
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3145223.stm Creatine 'boosts brain power'
http://www.beachpsych.com/pages/cc75.html Creatine May Improve Memory & Intelligence
There are plenty more to be found: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=creatine+bra
Creatine clearly helps me focus and work longer/harder at my desk as well as at the gym... for a few weeks. Then adaptation sets in and I'll stop taking it for a week. There are no withdrawal symptoms, but I can feel the difference (losing weight and strength.)
No study has found any long term negative effects even after decades of FUD about creatine, and it's no wonder why - after all it occurs naturally in fish and meat in amounts comparable to supplementation doses.
The latest research even recommends creatine for endurance athletes, but there is a dilemma for runners: The usual doses lead to weight gain that cancels out the performance increase.
The only disadvantage: It's disgusting. The alternatives are several large tablets (5 grams is a lot of tablets) or a spoonful of nasty gritty, bitter powder. It's tolerable in a large glass of juice though.
Then where is the geek supposed to sleep?
In the hammock in the cube.
while ((a = b) != 0)
:)
But that's 7 (7!!!) keystrokes more than the short version. What's that going to do to my productivity?
And it's wimpy coding too. No risk, no fun!
I remember when I first wrote while(a=b) and the compiler complained about an unsafe assignment, I looked up the pragma that turned that warning off
Heh, I've been ranting for years how I love C and C++ and how Java and pretty much all other higher level languages suck. I think they are ment just for crybabies who can't handle pointers and get confused while tying their shoelaces.
:)
Wimp. Just imagine how much fun this contest would be using assembler.
The good thing is, anything looks innocuous in assembler at first glance, because you can't understand assembler code in one glance. And if all else fails, write the code in hex. Just add a comment that the version of assembler used didn't have the mnemonics for the newfangled CPU.
You failed.
At least write
system("c:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe");
Still, it's plain to see that you just launched the biggest Trojan around.
Re-read TFA: *innocent-looking*!
There's some evidence that NPR has a conservative bias.
It is quite obvious... for anyone who's not on their right side.
Not being a right-winger, they don't sound all that liberal to me. Still, they try to be non-biased, deliver good information with background, and not the 30 second sound bites you hear otherwise.
I don't want to damage my attention span, and I don't mind listening to someone who has a different position than mine. As long as it's not Bill O'Reilly...
I thought cluster sizes were already 4KB for efficiency, and LBA for larger drive sizes. So how does changing the sector size change things?
Even if the file system allocates space only in multiples of the cluster size, the disk is still read and written in sectors. That is, any overhead (space on disk for interblock gaps, time on the interface for comamnds) is 8 times as much for 512-byte sectors as it is for 4k sectors. ECCs (error correcting codes) also get more efficient the larger the block is, but that relation is nonlinear.