Way back, in the early-to-mid 90's, Alpha was marketed as a commodity processor and a competitor to Intel. The project was started with this specific goal, and that's why FAB6 was built. It made sense, right? Alpha had 2x-3x the performance of the Pentium, was smaller (thus, cheaper to manufacture), and could run Windows NT. In the EV4 era, DEC marketed PC's with Alpha's running Windows NT (the DECpc, the Mutlia, and othered). For a long period, Linux on Alpha was considered to be a very serious threat to the Microsoft/Intel duo. Samsung, Compaq, and Microsoft (!) formed Alpha Processor, Inc. with the intention to manufacture Alpha in volume. Of course, EV5 and especially EV6 took Alpha completely out of the PC game.
But now Alpha is essentially dead, and any kind of commodity potential for it died long ago. The only customers which really depend on it are VMS customers, since it is the only architecture which that OS runs on (ironically, VMS is also one of the least performance sensitive markets in the world, with a majority of the customers still running VAX). (Tru64 has been ported to IA-64, right? Did Tandem ever switch to Alpha?)
Since Intel's and AMD's core competency is manufacturing high volume processors, I don't see why either would be interested in Alpha. Frankly, I don't see why anyone would be interested in Alpha. Its performance is reasonable, but it still outshined on most SPEC benchmarks by the Pentium 4, for 1/10 the cost. Furthermore, it has absurd power requirements. It has a long way to go before it can compete with IA-32 (or IA-64).
First of all, I am a graduate from UIUC's CS program. The department is staunchly against student collaboration, and I think that's really the point here. Most instructors I had would give a zero for the first instance of cheating, and failure for the course on the second instance. Practically every MP (UIUC-speak for "programming assignment") was an individual assignment, except for about one or two small group assignments in my entire college career. Most instructors enforce the no collaboration quite strongly, and they have fairly sophisticated methods to detect collaboration.
The thing is, this goes straight in the face of the GPL, which is all about collaboration, and sharing. The two cultures are entirely incompatible. Sharing does not really make sense in basic undergrad CS education; your goal is really to weed out non-hackers, and make sure those who do stay are competent enough to do the work on their own.
Finally, little undergrad coursework is at all interesting to the outside world. When I took CS125 the only interesting MP was for a traffic simulation program, and the most inetersting MP's of my college career were data compression tools and file system implemtation. Of course, none of the stuff compares to existing software. I don't see how GPL'ing any of that stuff would benefit anybody.
Possibly the only really useful thing you could do is GPL the reference solutions after the asignment deadline. This has the potential to help off-campus students who are interested in learning the material without taking the course. But I certainly don't see how GPL'ing freshman's CS125 assignments will in any way make the world a better place.
But given the fact that there were quite many very experienced technical people looking for working during even the peak, tells me that the difficulty in finding good people was not as a result of there being a lack of numbers.
Although that's true, anybody who has trouble finding a job right now would have a much tougher time if the industry were not centered in the US, or even if non-American companies built signficant share. Now we just have to worry about competing amongst ourselves (including immigrants) for jobs, but if foreign tech powerhouses emerge, we also have to worry if our nation's industry is the strongest.
To the extent to which immigrants do compete with American-born workers for jobs, it does make the whole American workforce that much more skilled and productive, and better prepared to withstand foreign competition. On that account alone, I believe we should continue to expand immigration even during an economic downturn. I believe there is a very strong chance that relatively unskilled IT jobs such as web design and system adminstration will be outsourced to countries such as India in the next few decades. This is good for the US economy, because it frees up native talent to do jobs which require more skills.
Right now you'd be absolutely insane to start a CPU design company, or a software company (e.g. OS or application development), anywhere but the US. Let's keep the skilled workers here, and bring the best foreign workers, so the jobs stay in the US!
I don't believe it was. Perhaps they evetually came to realize that the supposed IT worker shortage was a big fraud manufacturered to force techies to accept lower pay.
The IT worker shortage was definitely not a fraud. We were hiring up until a couple of months ago, and it was still extremely difficult to find people who actually have real skills (even though the job market was quite weak at that time).
If we do not have more H1B's, the most skilled workers from countries such as India, China, and Pakistan will form their own companies and compete with US companies, which means that US companies will be hurt. This is bad for the workers of these companies also, because their jobs will be in jeopardy if the company goes down. With nice H1B allotments, the US has a virtual monopoly on the best worldwide IT workers which is VERY good for the country.
Do you want the US computer industry to end up like the US auto industry in the 80's, where it was unable to compete with Japanese companies? That's what is going to happen if we don't aggressively hire the best foreign workers.
First of all, educating yourself is the best investment you can make during a recession. The opportunity cost is much lower now, than it was two years, because you aren't foregoing a $100k/year job that you could have had (most likely, you couldn't find a very good job right now).
Second, chances are that the American economy will not collapse, and that the computer industry will not collapse either. The fundamentals are still there, and I think that the industry will continue to be strong, and that the US will be the leader, for the foreseeable future. Even if technology does collapse, your degree will you man you're more qualified for that grocery store clerk job than the average joe on the street.:-)
It is said that less than 2% of teenagers want to persue a high-tech career since all the layoffs. What does this mean? This means that teens like me who still want to do it will be in high demand in a few years.
Please do not think this way.
Although it is easy to feel threatened by entering a competitive industry, competing with your industry-mates will make you, and the industry, better in the long-run. As the industry grows, and as your career grows, you be that much further away from the lowest jobs in the industry; you will get to do the work you want to do. As long as there is an IT worker shortage, you will be forced to do less interesting work, because real work can't get done before the dirty work is completed.
Think about it: skills such as web design and system administration (the two big "janitorial" IT jobs) are very commonplace. But they have to be because they are in demand. If system administration was an elite skill, then companies would have a hard time hiring system administrators, so they would be less hardware, less software, offer fewer services, and generally get less work done.
The more people who are more skilled means the industry will be that much stronger and more exciting. If you hope that people don't enter IT, you're hoping that less technology gets developed. More players in the industry means more competition, and better products, shorter development cycles, and lower prices. If there were more competent software developers in the world, Microsoft would have a lot more competition, and that would benefit everybody.
If you are competent and committed, then you will rise to the top in the industry. If the industry is big, you are that much more important. Do you want to be a big fish in a small sea, or a big fish in a big sea? But you do have to realize that in the IT industry, although your education is pretty easy (compared to law or medicine), you have to work very hard during you career and stay on top of everything.
Another facet of this is immigration: for the same reason, don't fear immigrants taking your job. As long as you have real skills (i.e. more than just coding, web design, system administration, etc.) then you will rise to the top, and the rest in the industry will be there to do your dirty work.
Only the cookbook dotcomers are being laid off right now. You know the ones I mean. The ones when asked why they're reading a book on Java or HTML coding say "Oh, becasue I wanna buy an SUV" or "Cause I need to move to a better neighborhood." Give me a break.
What's really remarkable is just how few skills any of these people had to begin with. I've seen resumes on web sites of sobbing, laid-off dotcommers, and many of them have nothing more than HTML, JavaScript, Perl, and maybe a little PHP. Probably one of the main things which happened is market saturation of workers with this knowledge (since it is so easy to learn).
Garth Brooks is the third best selling artist of all time and only about 1% behind #2. The fact that he's number 21 on your list shows more that's there something wrong with your methodology. All three of the top artists had relatively short recording careers (about 10 years each). The difference is that Brooks reached that position without the benefit of a second generation of fans (since he's too modern), and without the benefit of a sales resurgence due to CD re-issues (since he started recording after transition to CD's was well underway).
If you normalize the sales to the time since the artist began recording, Brooks would be #1 of artists at least ten years in the making. You need to account for the fact that he started recording 20-30 years after #1 and #2 did, so will have less sales on that account. The danger is this is that an artist who sold a lot in a very short period (such as Britney Spears who sold 22 million in two years) would outrank anybody; however, I think Brooks has proven he has the longevity to survive.
BTW, some other modern artists who rank very high on all time career charts are Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. Carey started recording only in 1990, but ranks very high in all-time album sales. I don't think she's on the road to slowing down, and she's still young, so she could well be a candidate to reach #1. As for artists who started since the mid-90's, it is way too early to tell who will emerge as the biggest sellers.
Will Brooks be as remembered as the Beatles are today? He was unqiestionably the most influential artist of the 90's. The decade before, country music was nothing, and by the late 90's had become the #1 genre (in sales) in the country. Since his music appeals to such a broad audience (as opposed to, for example, teen phenoms), I think he will have a strong core audience for quite some time.
The CPU maintains state (registers and flags etc.) for each thread and can execute instructions from each thread simultaneously down different pipes.
No, the whole point is to put them through the same execution units. If you duplicated all of the execution units, there is no advantage since you have just duplicated the whole chip. The only thing you need to duplicate (or partition) for SMT are things such as register allocation tables, store forwarding buffers, TLB's, etc. which are unique to each thread, and then tag each operation as it goes through so it knows where to get its data. Almost everything in the processor is shared. It thus requires very little additional die space, but for some applications it offers substantial performance improvement.
You must be inexperienced with SPEC benchmarks. The P4 wins @ the base benchmarks, and the others win with peak benchmarks. The baseline benchmarks are for using standard optimization, which is what ISV's do when developing software. The peak number means that you are allowed to use several different optimizations throughout the suite, but nobody does that in real life. So, the P4 wins at the ones which are reflective of real software.
The this is this: Floating point is used very seldomly in modern applications, and the intensive application of it is in extremely rare scientific apps (which the vast majority of us don't run), or games.
Are you new to computers? Engineers and scientists spend many tens of billions of dollars per year on technical computing, a market which is driven mostly by FP performance and memory bandwidth. The fact that a $1500 Pentium 4 PC made from commodity parts outperforms the fastest $20,000 Alpha's and HP's on these types of applications is a very big deal.
They are still benchmarks, though. If you look at a broad range of benchmarks, the pattern is exactly what you would expect, considering the technology.
SPEC benchmarks are based on real applications. The integer suite consists of real applications such as GZIP, GCC, etc. As does the FP suite, which consists of real kernels.
In broad-looped, unpredictable, or multi-tasking situations, that deep pipeline and RDRAM prove lethal as the processor burns off an insane number of CPU cycles getting its act back together after each misprediction.
For starters, P4 performance is by no means affected by the number of pipeline stages. To say so is quite a pedestrian claim. Although the branch misprediction penalty measured in cycles is higher than other processors, the P4 burns through cycles so much faster than other processors that it all evens out.
Second, Rambus is the reason why it is so good, particularly at getting the fastest floating point performance in the world. The P4 has a faster bus than any CPU on earth (at 3.2 GB/s it is faster than 266 MHz Athlon at only 2.1 GB/s and 200 MHz Alpha at 1.6 Gb/s). The FP benchmarks are mainly driven by memory bandwidth which P4 excels (thanks to Rambus). DDR-SDRAM is considerably slower, and would not be able to saturate the P4 bus. Athlon systems only show a 4% bandwidth increase due to DDR, while P4/Rambus shows a 300-400% increase over Athlon/DDR. Whether that is Athlon's problem or DDR's problem, I'm not sure.
The lead vehicle for a new process (in this case 860) is always a tried-and-true CPU instead of something brand new. So, of course PIII will have a shrink before P4 because it's better understood how to shrink it. The P4 shrink is only a couple of months behind it. Remember the transition to 854 when the fast MMX Pentium's came out way before Klamath? This is the same deal all over again.
Of course, the speedup from Northwood over Willamette will be substantially higher than the speedup from Tualatin over Coppermine. The P4 microarchicture is a lot more scalable; for example, the bus is triple the bandwidth of PIII/Athlon, so it can scale that much more without memory being a problem.
Sounds to me that Tom is just making a big fuss since he got Tualatin samples instead of Northwood's.:-)
The Pentium 4 is MUCH faster than Athlon on FP. The 1.7 GHz P4 scores a SPECfp of 598 and the 1.4 GHz Athlon scores a laughable 426. FYI, the P4 scores higher than Alpha, PA-RISC, and every other processor, making it the fastest CPU in the world. It also is #1 on SPECint, scoring 575 vs. 495 for Athlon. SPEC benchmarks are considered to be considerably more scientific and reliable than the toy-type unsophisticated benchmarks you see on peecee hardware review sites.
Every one of the bands mentioned in it are still major label bands, with the same giant corporations behind them as bubblegum, substance-less stuff like Brittany Spears.
You mean like Autechre? The very definition of banal, soulless, corporate, electronic music.
Of course, "If it sounds good, it is good" - Duke Ellington. Britney Spears connects with a heck of a lot more people than Built to Spill does. What's the problem? Of course, if Built to Spill some day rivalled Britney Spears in popularity, you argument would reverse - since you believe that everything mainstream is by definition bad, and everything obscure is by definition good.
Whenever most people here on/. say something regarding music, it's the same story. It boggles the mind how people could use such different software than the mainstream, and listen to the same junk
One of the most popular musics among educated geeks is classical music. The music is popular, because it's good. Probably a considerably higher percentage of mainstream music is good, than the percentage of obscure music which is good. Beethoven's music has passed the BS meter of about eight generations of humanity and enjoys a larger audience now than at any point before.
Since UMBC is a big geeky school, the radio station computers run on Linux, and WMBC has more computer functionality than your typical station. We keep track of our CDs using a database written in PHP and MySQL.
Sounds to me like you're much more interested in fighting the power and being different, than you are in looking at the real merits of things. That's OK. You're haven't even graduated college yet; you have a lot of time to grow up.
The parallels between radio and Napster are extremely striking. Jaime in his reply mentioned the fact that radio stations and record companies were in a war over copyright issues, and many of the arguments were almost identical to the ones used today (on both sides).
The other interesting parallel is that shortly after the advent of radio, there was the Great Depression and the record industry lost serious financial ground. There year over year profits at one point went down something like 90%, and the entire industry almost went out of business. This is typically attributed not to just the Depression, but also radio; since people had access to "free music" they stopped paying for it. It wasn't until much later, I think after WWII, that the music industry recovered. We're not in a depression now (though ex dot-commers may think so:-), but we're in a downturn and as expected the "free music" movement is gaining at the expense of the entertainment industry.
This era in the early 30's was one of the darkest era's in recorded music history. There was a ton of good music in the early through mid/late 20's, and the late 30's, but the early 30's was a musical black hole due to the bad economy. The mid/late 70's were also bad for the same reason.
I don't think Jaime's point was how much changes in the face of the technology of the _production_ of music, but because of technology in the _distribution_ of music.
My favorite example of this historically is Phil Spector whose goal was to make music sound good on teenager's transitor radios - to make little jewels of pop (which was a step back from the 'hi-fi' era of the 1950's). You can watch music change between the LP and the CD eras even though the fundamental recording process was the same (the only part which changed was analog to digital). The change to uninterrupted play, longer tracks, and random accessibility brought real change to how much was composed by the best artists in the height of the CD era.
With electronic distribution, there are too big changes to music: (1) the possible length of music and (2) the prominence of singles.
1. Broadband is only at something like 10% of Internet users, so if electronic distribution takes off, you can be sure the suppliers aren't going to leave out the vast majority of computer users. This means that files are going to be limited to a few megabytes each. You can guarantee that anybody who wants a hit is going to shave off any extra fluff of every song to keep it accessible.
2. When organizing collections of music, it is much easier to deal with individuals tracks instead of albums. Albums for the last thirty five years have been quite distinct from merely a "collection of songs". They have themes, they are unified, and the music could not be conveyed as just songs. But with online delivery, doing albums becomes difficult.
IMHO, neither of these two changes makes music better...
An interesting read, about how records change music and how we perceive it, is The Recording Angel by Evan Eisenberg, which should be required reading for anybody involved in the aesthetics of music as far as the Napster debate goes.
To be sure, but yet Intel has been the one (along with AMD) that has been pushing the "MegaHurts Wars" full speed.
Only on desktop. Itanium runs at a mere 800 MHz (and yet has the fastest FP performance in the world).
Itanium is actually a pretty good argument against the sheer cluelessness of people who insist on doing performance-per-clock comparisons. It is manufactured in P858, the same process as the Pentium 4, yet runs at less than half the clock speed. It uses much more power, has much lower integer performance, has higher FP performance, has lower memory performance, and is more scalable for multiprocessing. What sort of generalization are you going to derive from THAT?
For what may be hoped to be introduced in the near future, a 1 GHz PPC chip should outperform a 1.1 Intel and have some other potential redeeming characteristics.
This is meaningless. For starters, Intel has a 1.7 GHz processor out now, so it doesn't make sense to compare it to a 1.1 GHz processor (or various vapor PPC products). Second, by the time a 1 GHz PPC is finally shipping, Intel will have something a lot faster. Third, you are assuming that performance scales linearly with clock speed, which is a horrible assumption (clue: the memory performance is not affected by clock speed changes).
Having the long pipeline so you can scale past 2 GHz is not all that its cracked up to be in the real-world. Mis-predicts cause too many pipeline flushes with other bad potential side effects. For some stuff its fine, for many things it ain't. The PPC runs with a very short pipe.
It doesn't matter. If you have two computers, one with double the pipeline length, and the other with half the cycle time, the misprediction penalty will be identical. One will have to recover double the number of stages, but since each stage takes half as long, it's the same.
In my (repeatedly-expressed, I know) opinion, the fans' & artists' interests DO NOT coincide anymore with the huge corporations. Courtney Love, who is now suing her label, has written about this, as have others. Apparently, for that $15 CD, the band gets a very small slice of the pie (less than a buck in the end, I hear, though I'm far from the music business). The rest goes for things like "trips to Scores," to use Courtney's terms. (Scores is a NYC area strip clup.)
Dude, have you ever watched MTV's Cribs? Well, every artist who makes music which a lot of people is living very large. Basically, the idea that musicians are starving because of the record industry is bunk. The artists who do not connect with a lot of people aren't making as much money but why should they?
The solution, IMNSHO, is a tipjar model.
Whatever. Here's a clue: musicans need the record industry to make records, since the cost of high quality recording is expensive. If you elimiate the record industry, the only people who would record are rich kids, and punk bands (whose music costs peanuts to record).
The fact is, we live in a purely capitalistic economy, and any musician who was crazy enough to believe that the tipjar idea was a good way of achieving their interests would do it. Actually, there are some who do, and they're called street musicians. Generally, only musicians with limited appeal perform on the street for tips.
Definitely not. The best corporate logo ever is the old |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| logo. The best was the very latest: white letters over deep burgundy blocks, with that gorgeous font. Unfortunately, it went on to be replaced by perhaps the ugliest - that supid red Compaq logo. Intel's royal blue logo gets my vote as second best. Sun and SGI's logo's are pretty bland IMHO.
Not only does IA-32 give you MORE than 32 bits of address space, but X86-64 gives you LESS than 64 bits of address space.
In IA-32, physical addresses are 36 bit, and linear addresses are 32 bit.
In X86-64, physical addresses are 40 bit, and linear addresses are 48 bit. X86-64 does not support 64 bit addresses by any measure - I'm not quite sure why people are going around claiming that it does.
Although a 64 bit processor has 2^32 times more virtual address space than a 32 bit processor, x86-64 is not a 64 bit architecture, and IA-32 is not a 32 bit architecture.
X86-64's linear addresses are 48 bits (not 64 bits), and its physical addresses are 40 bits (again, not 64 bits), and IA-32's linear addresses are 32 bits, and its physical addresses are 36 bits.
So in reality, X86-64 can address 2^16 (65,536) times more virtual space than IA-32, and 2^4 (16) times more physical space than IA-32. Both are a far cry from 4 billion (or 4, for that matter).
The reason Aimster is being sued is because they are a service. The reason Aimster is being sued, and the reason they are almost certainly going to be found liable for facilitation of copyright infringement, is because they run a service which helps people illegally trade copyrighted materials. The reason Cisco and Microsoft will not be found liable is because they sell products, which are out of the control of the manufacturer after the customers get them (as opposed to Napster and Aimster which require constant maintenance and supervision to operate). The analogy is that Cisco and Microsoft are gun manufacturers, but Aimster and Napster are professional hit men. It is actually quite a black and white distinction, and there is little legal ambiguity about it.
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OpenVMS will be ported to Itanium (along with Tru64 and NSK).
Way back, in the early-to-mid 90's, Alpha was marketed as a commodity processor and a competitor to Intel. The project was started with this specific goal, and that's why FAB6 was built. It made sense, right? Alpha had 2x-3x the performance of the Pentium, was smaller (thus, cheaper to manufacture), and could run Windows NT. In the EV4 era, DEC marketed PC's with Alpha's running Windows NT (the DECpc, the Mutlia, and othered). For a long period, Linux on Alpha was considered to be a very serious threat to the Microsoft/Intel duo. Samsung, Compaq, and Microsoft (!) formed Alpha Processor, Inc. with the intention to manufacture Alpha in volume. Of course, EV5 and especially EV6 took Alpha completely out of the PC game.
But now Alpha is essentially dead, and any kind of commodity potential for it died long ago. The only customers which really depend on it are VMS customers, since it is the only architecture which that OS runs on (ironically, VMS is also one of the least performance sensitive markets in the world, with a majority of the customers still running VAX). (Tru64 has been ported to IA-64, right? Did Tandem ever switch to Alpha?)
Since Intel's and AMD's core competency is manufacturing high volume processors, I don't see why either would be interested in Alpha. Frankly, I don't see why anyone would be interested in Alpha. Its performance is reasonable, but it still outshined on most SPEC benchmarks by the Pentium 4, for 1/10 the cost. Furthermore, it has absurd power requirements. It has a long way to go before it can compete with IA-32 (or IA-64).
First of all, I am a graduate from UIUC's CS program. The department is staunchly against student collaboration, and I think that's really the point here. Most instructors I had would give a zero for the first instance of cheating, and failure for the course on the second instance. Practically every MP (UIUC-speak for "programming assignment") was an individual assignment, except for about one or two small group assignments in my entire college career. Most instructors enforce the no collaboration quite strongly, and they have fairly sophisticated methods to detect collaboration.
The thing is, this goes straight in the face of the GPL, which is all about collaboration, and sharing. The two cultures are entirely incompatible. Sharing does not really make sense in basic undergrad CS education; your goal is really to weed out non-hackers, and make sure those who do stay are competent enough to do the work on their own.
Finally, little undergrad coursework is at all interesting to the outside world. When I took CS125 the only interesting MP was for a traffic simulation program, and the most inetersting MP's of my college career were data compression tools and file system implemtation. Of course, none of the stuff compares to existing software. I don't see how GPL'ing any of that stuff would benefit anybody.
Possibly the only really useful thing you could do is GPL the reference solutions after the asignment deadline. This has the potential to help off-campus students who are interested in learning the material without taking the course. But I certainly don't see how GPL'ing freshman's CS125 assignments will in any way make the world a better place.
But given the fact that there were quite many very experienced technical people looking for working during even the peak, tells me that the difficulty in finding good people was not as a result of there being a lack of numbers.
Although that's true, anybody who has trouble finding a job right now would have a much tougher time if the industry were not centered in the US, or even if non-American companies built signficant share. Now we just have to worry about competing amongst ourselves (including immigrants) for jobs, but if foreign tech powerhouses emerge, we also have to worry if our nation's industry is the strongest.
To the extent to which immigrants do compete with American-born workers for jobs, it does make the whole American workforce that much more skilled and productive, and better prepared to withstand foreign competition. On that account alone, I believe we should continue to expand immigration even during an economic downturn. I believe there is a very strong chance that relatively unskilled IT jobs such as web design and system adminstration will be outsourced to countries such as India in the next few decades. This is good for the US economy, because it frees up native talent to do jobs which require more skills.
Right now you'd be absolutely insane to start a CPU design company, or a software company (e.g. OS or application development), anywhere but the US. Let's keep the skilled workers here, and bring the best foreign workers, so the jobs stay in the US!
I don't believe it was. Perhaps they evetually came to realize that the supposed IT worker shortage was a big fraud manufacturered to force techies to accept lower pay.
The IT worker shortage was definitely not a fraud. We were hiring up until a couple of months ago, and it was still extremely difficult to find people who actually have real skills (even though the job market was quite weak at that time).
If we do not have more H1B's, the most skilled workers from countries such as India, China, and Pakistan will form their own companies and compete with US companies, which means that US companies will be hurt. This is bad for the workers of these companies also, because their jobs will be in jeopardy if the company goes down. With nice H1B allotments, the US has a virtual monopoly on the best worldwide IT workers which is VERY good for the country.
Do you want the US computer industry to end up like the US auto industry in the 80's, where it was unable to compete with Japanese companies? That's what is going to happen if we don't aggressively hire the best foreign workers.
First of all, educating yourself is the best investment you can make during a recession. The opportunity cost is much lower now, than it was two years, because you aren't foregoing a $100k/year job that you could have had (most likely, you couldn't find a very good job right now).
:-)
Second, chances are that the American economy will not collapse, and that the computer industry will not collapse either. The fundamentals are still there, and I think that the industry will continue to be strong, and that the US will be the leader, for the foreseeable future. Even if technology does collapse, your degree will you man you're more qualified for that grocery store clerk job than the average joe on the street.
It is said that less than 2% of teenagers want to persue a high-tech career since all the layoffs. What does this mean? This means that teens like me who still want to do it will be in high demand in a few years.
Please do not think this way.
Although it is easy to feel threatened by entering a competitive industry, competing with your industry-mates will make you, and the industry, better in the long-run. As the industry grows, and as your career grows, you be that much further away from the lowest jobs in the industry; you will get to do the work you want to do. As long as there is an IT worker shortage, you will be forced to do less interesting work, because real work can't get done before the dirty work is completed.
Think about it: skills such as web design and system administration (the two big "janitorial" IT jobs) are very commonplace. But they have to be because they are in demand. If system administration was an elite skill, then companies would have a hard time hiring system administrators, so they would be less hardware, less software, offer fewer services, and generally get less work done.
The more people who are more skilled means the industry will be that much stronger and more exciting. If you hope that people don't enter IT, you're hoping that less technology gets developed. More players in the industry means more competition, and better products, shorter development cycles, and lower prices. If there were more competent software developers in the world, Microsoft would have a lot more competition, and that would benefit everybody.
If you are competent and committed, then you will rise to the top in the industry. If the industry is big, you are that much more important. Do you want to be a big fish in a small sea, or a big fish in a big sea? But you do have to realize that in the IT industry, although your education is pretty easy (compared to law or medicine), you have to work very hard during you career and stay on top of everything.
Another facet of this is immigration: for the same reason, don't fear immigrants taking your job. As long as you have real skills (i.e. more than just coding, web design, system administration, etc.) then you will rise to the top, and the rest in the industry will be there to do your dirty work.
Only the cookbook dotcomers are being laid off right now. You know the ones I mean. The ones when asked why they're reading a book on Java or HTML coding say "Oh, becasue I wanna buy an SUV" or "Cause I need to move to a better neighborhood." Give me a break.
What's really remarkable is just how few skills any of these people had to begin with. I've seen resumes on web sites of sobbing, laid-off dotcommers, and many of them have nothing more than HTML, JavaScript, Perl, and maybe a little PHP. Probably one of the main things which happened is market saturation of workers with this knowledge (since it is so easy to learn).
Garth Brooks is the third best selling artist of all time and only about 1% behind #2. The fact that he's number 21 on your list shows more that's there something wrong with your methodology. All three of the top artists had relatively short recording careers (about 10 years each). The difference is that Brooks reached that position without the benefit of a second generation of fans (since he's too modern), and without the benefit of a sales resurgence due to CD re-issues (since he started recording after transition to CD's was well underway).
If you normalize the sales to the time since the artist began recording, Brooks would be #1 of artists at least ten years in the making. You need to account for the fact that he started recording 20-30 years after #1 and #2 did, so will have less sales on that account. The danger is this is that an artist who sold a lot in a very short period (such as Britney Spears who sold 22 million in two years) would outrank anybody; however, I think Brooks has proven he has the longevity to survive.
BTW, some other modern artists who rank very high on all time career charts are Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. Carey started recording only in 1990, but ranks very high in all-time album sales. I don't think she's on the road to slowing down, and she's still young, so she could well be a candidate to reach #1. As for artists who started since the mid-90's, it is way too early to tell who will emerge as the biggest sellers.
Will Brooks be as remembered as the Beatles are today? He was unqiestionably the most influential artist of the 90's. The decade before, country music was nothing, and by the late 90's had become the #1 genre (in sales) in the country. Since his music appeals to such a broad audience (as opposed to, for example, teen phenoms), I think he will have a strong core audience for quite some time.
The CPU maintains state (registers and flags etc.) for each thread and can execute instructions from each thread simultaneously down different pipes.
No, the whole point is to put them through the same execution units. If you duplicated all of the execution units, there is no advantage since you have just duplicated the whole chip. The only thing you need to duplicate (or partition) for SMT are things such as register allocation tables, store forwarding buffers, TLB's, etc. which are unique to each thread, and then tag each operation as it goes through so it knows where to get its data. Almost everything in the processor is shared. It thus requires very little additional die space, but for some applications it offers substantial performance improvement.
You must be inexperienced with SPEC benchmarks. The P4 wins @ the base benchmarks, and the others win with peak benchmarks. The baseline benchmarks are for using standard optimization, which is what ISV's do when developing software. The peak number means that you are allowed to use several different optimizations throughout the suite, but nobody does that in real life. So, the P4 wins at the ones which are reflective of real software.
Why the hell would you want to compare performance vs. frequency, when one part is avaiilable at a substantially higher frequency?
The this is this: Floating point is used very seldomly in modern applications, and the intensive application of it is in extremely rare scientific apps (which the vast majority of us don't run), or games.
Are you new to computers? Engineers and scientists spend many tens of billions of dollars per year on technical computing, a market which is driven mostly by FP performance and memory bandwidth. The fact that a $1500 Pentium 4 PC made from commodity parts outperforms the fastest $20,000 Alpha's and HP's on these types of applications is a very big deal.
They are still benchmarks, though. If you look at a broad range of benchmarks, the pattern is exactly what you would expect, considering the technology.
SPEC benchmarks are based on real applications. The integer suite consists of real applications such as GZIP, GCC, etc. As does the FP suite, which consists of real kernels.
In broad-looped, unpredictable, or multi-tasking situations, that deep pipeline and RDRAM prove lethal as the processor burns off an insane number of CPU cycles getting its act back together after each misprediction.
For starters, P4 performance is by no means affected by the number of pipeline stages. To say so is quite a pedestrian claim. Although the branch misprediction penalty measured in cycles is higher than other processors, the P4 burns through cycles so much faster than other processors that it all evens out.
Second, Rambus is the reason why it is so good, particularly at getting the fastest floating point performance in the world. The P4 has a faster bus than any CPU on earth (at 3.2 GB/s it is faster than 266 MHz Athlon at only 2.1 GB/s and 200 MHz Alpha at 1.6 Gb/s). The FP benchmarks are mainly driven by memory bandwidth which P4 excels (thanks to Rambus). DDR-SDRAM is considerably slower, and would not be able to saturate the P4 bus. Athlon systems only show a 4% bandwidth increase due to DDR, while P4/Rambus shows a 300-400% increase over Athlon/DDR. Whether that is Athlon's problem or DDR's problem, I'm not sure.
The lead vehicle for a new process (in this case 860) is always a tried-and-true CPU instead of something brand new. So, of course PIII will have a shrink before P4 because it's better understood how to shrink it. The P4 shrink is only a couple of months behind it. Remember the transition to 854 when the fast MMX Pentium's came out way before Klamath? This is the same deal all over again.
:-)
Of course, the speedup from Northwood over Willamette will be substantially higher than the speedup from Tualatin over Coppermine. The P4 microarchicture is a lot more scalable; for example, the bus is triple the bandwidth of PIII/Athlon, so it can scale that much more without memory being a problem.
Sounds to me that Tom is just making a big fuss since he got Tualatin samples instead of Northwood's.
The Pentium 4 is MUCH faster than Athlon on FP. The 1.7 GHz P4 scores a SPECfp of 598 and the 1.4 GHz Athlon scores a laughable 426. FYI, the P4 scores higher than Alpha, PA-RISC, and every other processor, making it the fastest CPU in the world. It also is #1 on SPECint, scoring 575 vs. 495 for Athlon. SPEC benchmarks are considered to be considerably more scientific and reliable than the toy-type unsophisticated benchmarks you see on peecee hardware review sites.
Every one of the bands mentioned in it are still major label bands, with the same giant corporations behind them as bubblegum, substance-less stuff like Brittany Spears.
/. say something regarding music, it's the same story. It boggles the mind how people could use such different software than the mainstream, and listen to the same junk
You mean like Autechre? The very definition of banal, soulless, corporate, electronic music.
Of course, "If it sounds good, it is good" - Duke Ellington. Britney Spears connects with a heck of a lot more people than Built to Spill does. What's the problem? Of course, if Built to Spill some day rivalled Britney Spears in popularity, you argument would reverse - since you believe that everything mainstream is by definition bad, and everything obscure is by definition good.
Whenever most people here on
One of the most popular musics among educated geeks is classical music. The music is popular, because it's good. Probably a considerably higher percentage of mainstream music is good, than the percentage of obscure music which is good. Beethoven's music has passed the BS meter of about eight generations of humanity and enjoys a larger audience now than at any point before.
Since UMBC is a big geeky school, the radio station computers run on Linux, and WMBC has more computer functionality than your typical station. We keep track of our CDs using a database written in PHP and MySQL.
Sounds to me like you're much more interested in fighting the power and being different, than you are in looking at the real merits of things. That's OK. You're haven't even graduated college yet; you have a lot of time to grow up.
The parallels between radio and Napster are extremely striking. Jaime in his reply mentioned the fact that radio stations and record companies were in a war over copyright issues, and many of the arguments were almost identical to the ones used today (on both sides).
:-), but we're in a downturn and as expected the "free music" movement is gaining at the expense of the entertainment industry.
The other interesting parallel is that shortly after the advent of radio, there was the Great Depression and the record industry lost serious financial ground. There year over year profits at one point went down something like 90%, and the entire industry almost went out of business. This is typically attributed not to just the Depression, but also radio; since people had access to "free music" they stopped paying for it. It wasn't until much later, I think after WWII, that the music industry recovered. We're not in a depression now (though ex dot-commers may think so
This era in the early 30's was one of the darkest era's in recorded music history. There was a ton of good music in the early through mid/late 20's, and the late 30's, but the early 30's was a musical black hole due to the bad economy. The mid/late 70's were also bad for the same reason.
I don't think Jaime's point was how much changes in the face of the technology of the _production_ of music, but because of technology in the _distribution_ of music.
My favorite example of this historically is Phil Spector whose goal was to make music sound good on teenager's transitor radios - to make little jewels of pop (which was a step back from the 'hi-fi' era of the 1950's). You can watch music change between the LP and the CD eras even though the fundamental recording process was the same (the only part which changed was analog to digital). The change to uninterrupted play, longer tracks, and random accessibility brought real change to how much was composed by the best artists in the height of the CD era.
With electronic distribution, there are too big changes to music: (1) the possible length of music and (2) the prominence of singles.
1. Broadband is only at something like 10% of Internet users, so if electronic distribution takes off, you can be sure the suppliers aren't going to leave out the vast majority of computer users. This means that files are going to be limited to a few megabytes each. You can guarantee that anybody who wants a hit is going to shave off any extra fluff of every song to keep it accessible.
2. When organizing collections of music, it is much easier to deal with individuals tracks instead of albums. Albums for the last thirty five years have been quite distinct from merely a "collection of songs". They have themes, they are unified, and the music could not be conveyed as just songs. But with online delivery, doing albums becomes difficult.
IMHO, neither of these two changes makes music better...
An interesting read, about how records change music and how we perceive it, is The Recording Angel by Evan Eisenberg, which should be required reading for anybody involved in the aesthetics of music as far as the Napster debate goes.
To be sure, but yet Intel has been the one (along with AMD) that has been pushing the "MegaHurts Wars" full speed.
Only on desktop. Itanium runs at a mere 800 MHz (and yet has the fastest FP performance in the world).
Itanium is actually a pretty good argument against the sheer cluelessness of people who insist on doing performance-per-clock comparisons. It is manufactured in P858, the same process as the Pentium 4, yet runs at less than half the clock speed. It uses much more power, has much lower integer performance, has higher FP performance, has lower memory performance, and is more scalable for multiprocessing. What sort of generalization are you going to derive from THAT?
For what may be hoped to be introduced in the near future, a 1 GHz PPC chip should outperform a 1.1 Intel and have some other potential redeeming characteristics.
This is meaningless. For starters, Intel has a 1.7 GHz processor out now, so it doesn't make sense to compare it to a 1.1 GHz processor (or various vapor PPC products). Second, by the time a 1 GHz PPC is finally shipping, Intel will have something a lot faster. Third, you are assuming that performance scales linearly with clock speed, which is a horrible assumption (clue: the memory performance is not affected by clock speed changes).
Having the long pipeline so you can scale past 2 GHz is not all that its cracked up to be in the real-world. Mis-predicts cause too many pipeline flushes with other bad potential side effects. For some stuff its fine, for many things it ain't. The PPC runs with a very short pipe.
It doesn't matter. If you have two computers, one with double the pipeline length, and the other with half the cycle time, the misprediction penalty will be identical. One will have to recover double the number of stages, but since each stage takes half as long, it's the same.
In my (repeatedly-expressed, I know) opinion, the fans' & artists' interests DO NOT coincide anymore with the huge corporations. Courtney Love, who is now suing her label, has written about this, as have others. Apparently, for that $15 CD, the band gets a very small slice of the pie (less than a buck in the end, I hear, though I'm far from the music business). The rest goes for things like "trips to Scores," to use Courtney's terms. (Scores is a NYC area strip clup.)
Dude, have you ever watched MTV's Cribs? Well, every artist who makes music which a lot of people is living very large. Basically, the idea that musicians are starving because of the record industry is bunk. The artists who do not connect with a lot of people aren't making as much money but why should they?
The solution, IMNSHO, is a tipjar model.
Whatever. Here's a clue: musicans need the record industry to make records, since the cost of high quality recording is expensive. If you elimiate the record industry, the only people who would record are rich kids, and punk bands (whose music costs peanuts to record).
The fact is, we live in a purely capitalistic economy, and any musician who was crazy enough to believe that the tipjar idea was a good way of achieving their interests would do it. Actually, there are some who do, and they're called street musicians. Generally, only musicians with limited appeal perform on the street for tips.
Definitely not. The best corporate logo ever is the old |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| logo. The best was the very latest: white letters over deep burgundy blocks, with that gorgeous font. Unfortunately, it went on to be replaced by perhaps the ugliest - that supid red Compaq logo. Intel's royal blue logo gets my vote as second best. Sun and SGI's logo's are pretty bland IMHO.
Not only does IA-32 give you MORE than 32 bits of address space, but X86-64 gives you LESS than 64 bits of address space.
In IA-32, physical addresses are 36 bit, and linear addresses are 32 bit.
In X86-64, physical addresses are 40 bit, and linear addresses are 48 bit. X86-64 does not support 64 bit addresses by any measure - I'm not quite sure why people are going around claiming that it does.
Actually this is not strictly true.
Although a 64 bit processor has 2^32 times more virtual address space than a 32 bit processor, x86-64 is not a 64 bit architecture, and IA-32 is not a 32 bit architecture.
X86-64's linear addresses are 48 bits (not 64 bits), and its physical addresses are 40 bits (again, not 64 bits), and IA-32's linear addresses are 32 bits, and its physical addresses are 36 bits.
So in reality, X86-64 can address 2^16 (65,536) times more virtual space than IA-32, and 2^4 (16) times more physical space than IA-32. Both are a far cry from 4 billion (or 4, for that matter).
There is definitely some confusion here.
The reason Aimster is being sued is because they are a service. The reason Aimster is being sued, and the reason they are almost certainly going to be found liable for facilitation of copyright infringement, is because they run a service which helps people illegally trade copyrighted materials. The reason Cisco and Microsoft will not be found liable is because they sell products, which are out of the control of the manufacturer after the customers get them (as opposed to Napster and Aimster which require constant maintenance and supervision to operate). The analogy is that Cisco and Microsoft are gun manufacturers, but Aimster and Napster are professional hit men. It is actually quite a black and white distinction, and there is little legal ambiguity about it.