The main thing that I pulled from this article is that Intel wants to sell Linux, but with some proprietary software on it. What will this lead to? Many different distributions, all with different commands, different functionality, different user interfaces?
I really don't want to go around naysaying and predicting the fall of Linux, but I think the last thing Linux needs is the kind of fracturing within itself that is similar to what happened to UNIX. With so many distributions, some proprietary, some not, it's going to start to confuse and frustrate consumers. "I have Linux at home, but when I use it at work it has none of the things I usually use at home."
The solution? I don't know. Try to keep up with Intel features in open source? That may be difficult, and not feasible when other compnies do this. Suggestions?
Fred Moody is the mouth puppet for the Global Dominition Force who are paving the way for the Xian invasion. Stephen Reucroft and John Swain are paid apologists for the RHIC project but what they don't know is that RHIC is funded out of the CIA drug slush-fund by The World Government for the exact purposes of researching and developing a black hole doomsday device that can be used against the encroaching Xian fleet. We need these black holes to form a parabola shaped lattice that will be used as a net on the Xians. To spread the fear Fred Moody supports is basically yelling to the sky "I want a third arm so I can be a better worker in your intergalatic slave catering business!" We know RHIC will make black holes. We just don't know if it it will be enough.
While manufacturers have plants that are currently for making current chips, they often build new plants from scratch to make newer technology. According to a guy from Intel who gave a talk at my work, it is cheeper to make a new billion dollar plant than to refit an old plant. Since Intel will make a new $1 billion manufacturing site every year at least (according to the press releases on their website), they have quite an advantage over a garage chip maker. That's not to say they a patent on the new technology wouldn't make things hard for them, but my estimation gives Intel the advantage.
Higher processor speed, IMHO, has does wonders for code quality. With higher speed, garbage collectors become feasable. Garbage collectors go on to make it a lot easier to design robust systems becuase you end up have no leakage (given it is a good algorithm) and no accidental freeing of memory that is in use.
In addition, more speed has allowed us to make modular and OO designs that were traditionally "too slow". It's not that OO is necessarily sower than non-OO (there are too many benchmarks showing either camp is faster to know what is really going on), but good design often has overhead. I make speed sacrifices to maintainability all the time with the justification that computers are fast enough. And, IMLE, they are.
Because of this, I can see the exact opposite happening: when computers reach a limit to their speed increases, quality in code will go down. As more features are added to a program, more and more sacrifices to good design will be made for the necessary speed.
When a word processor pops up in a second, that is fast enough for word processing. But word processing is not the be all and end all of comsumer apps. I can see a very big future in voice recognition which requires more processing ower than we have on the desktop right now (or different hardware, like that used in the recent./ article on the neural net that recognizes speech better than humans). After that, who knows what we'll "need" because we have the power to do it. When I was a lot younger I made a prediction that people would be using 3 dimensional UI systems rather than the 2D ones we have now. The basic point is that we are no where near the level yet where we can go "oh these machines are good enough" because, quite frankly, they aren't. While we can all make do with what we have, we can also make do without the machines at all. But a machine with voice rec will be better than one without and so people will use the one with, and so they'll need a faster computer. And when we finally have full integration between our minds and the computer, then maybe it will be good enough. But I doubt it.
I don't think that that is all that unreasonable. I find that I am faster at typing when I look at the keyboard vs when I don't (~40 wpm when I don't, 65 when I do). I do actually know where the keys are but looking helps in a more than marginal way. I should note that I have only been forcing myself not to look for about a year and a half and before that I would mostly look (I've been seriously typing since my BBS days over 10 years ago). When I need speed (like when I am documenting) I will look just to get it over with. When I don't need speed (when I program I spend more time thinking than typing), I don't look (this helps me keep my eye on the code).
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The main thing that I pulled from this article is that Intel wants to sell Linux, but with some proprietary software on it. What will this lead to? Many different distributions, all with different commands, different functionality, different user interfaces?
I really don't want to go around naysaying and predicting the fall of Linux, but I think the last thing Linux needs is the kind of fracturing within itself that is similar to what happened to UNIX. With so many distributions, some proprietary, some not, it's going to start to confuse and frustrate consumers. "I have Linux at home, but when I use it at work it has none of the things I usually use at home."
The solution? I don't know. Try to keep up with Intel features in open source? That may be difficult, and not feasible when other compnies do this. Suggestions?
Or maybe it all means nothing. JALD.
Fred Moody is the mouth puppet for the Global Dominition Force who are paving the way for the Xian invasion. Stephen Reucroft and John Swain are paid apologists for the RHIC project but what they don't know is that RHIC is funded out of the CIA drug slush-fund by The World Government for the exact purposes of researching and developing a black hole doomsday device that can be used against the encroaching Xian fleet. We need these black holes to form a parabola shaped lattice that will be used as a net on the Xians. To spread the fear Fred Moody supports is basically yelling to the sky "I want a third arm so I can be a better worker in your intergalatic slave catering business!" We know RHIC will make black holes. We just don't know if it it will be enough.
While manufacturers have plants that are currently for making current chips, they often build new plants from scratch to make newer technology. According to a guy from Intel who gave a talk at my work, it is cheeper to make a new billion dollar plant than to refit an old plant. Since Intel will make a new $1 billion manufacturing site every year at least (according to the press releases on their website), they have quite an advantage over a garage chip maker. That's not to say they a patent on the new technology wouldn't make things hard for them, but my estimation gives Intel the advantage.
Higher processor speed, IMHO, has does wonders for code quality. With higher speed, garbage collectors become feasable. Garbage collectors go on to make it a lot easier to design robust systems becuase you end up have no leakage (given it is a good algorithm) and no accidental freeing of memory that is in use.
In addition, more speed has allowed us to make modular and OO designs that were traditionally "too slow". It's not that OO is necessarily sower than non-OO (there are too many benchmarks showing either camp is faster to know what is really going on), but good design often has overhead. I make speed sacrifices to maintainability all the time with the justification that computers are fast enough. And, IMLE, they are.
Because of this, I can see the exact opposite happening: when computers reach a limit to their speed increases, quality in code will go down. As more features are added to a program, more and more sacrifices to good design will be made for the necessary speed.
When a word processor pops up in a second, that is fast enough for word processing. But word processing is not the be all and end all of comsumer apps. I can see a very big future in voice recognition which requires more processing ower than we have on the desktop right now (or different hardware, like that used in the recent ./ article on the neural net that recognizes speech better than humans). After that, who knows what we'll "need" because we have the power to do it. When I was a lot younger I made a prediction that people would be using 3 dimensional UI systems rather than the 2D ones we have now. The basic point is that we are no where near the level yet where we can go "oh these machines are good enough" because, quite frankly, they aren't. While we can all make do with what we have, we can also make do without the machines at all. But a machine with voice rec will be better than one without and so people will use the one with, and so they'll need a faster computer. And when we finally have full integration between our minds and the computer, then maybe it will be good enough. But I doubt it.
I don't think that that is all that unreasonable. I find that I am faster at typing when I look at the keyboard vs when I don't (~40 wpm when I don't, 65 when I do). I do actually know where the keys are but looking helps in a more than marginal way. I should note that I have only been forcing myself not to look for about a year and a half and before that I would mostly look (I've been seriously typing since my BBS days over 10 years ago). When I need speed (like when I am documenting) I will look just to get it over with. When I don't need speed (when I program I spend more time thinking than typing), I don't look (this helps me keep my eye on the code).