I understand the theory--you simplify instructions, do things to speed up the processor so it can run faster, then optimize the processor to run as fast as you can.
In other words, you are designing your instruction set to your hardware.
Now, assuming that you are going to have close to infinite investment into speeding up the CPU, it seems that if you are going to fix an instruction set across that development time, you want the instruction set that is the smallest and most powerful you could get it.
That way for the same cycle instead of executing one simple instruction you are executing one powerful one (that does, say 5x more than the simple one)
Now at first the more powerful one will take more time than the simple one, but as the silicon becomes more powerful, The hardware designers are going to come up with a way to make it only take 2x as long as the simple one. Then less.
I guess I mean that you will get more relative benefit tweaking the performance of a hard instruction than an easy one.
Also, at some point the Memory to CPU channel will be the limit.
I'd kinda like to see Intel take on an instruction set designed for the compiler rather than the CPU (like Java Bytecode). Bytecode tends to be MUCH smaller--and a quad-core system that directly executes bytecode, once fully optimized, should blow away anything we have now in terms of overall speed.
Exactly. The story I was referring to had a version of Linux loaded in rom for instant-on browsing. Hence my suggestion of the addition of a "Console Mode" to the instant-on OS.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. Perhaps I should have referenced the other story (Still not gonna, it's played here a few times now)
Absolutely. I've been without my DVR for 4 months now, and I've gone from a few hours a day of TV to ZERO. The TV just sits there.
I download a show off TPB occasionally--have caught up on a few things (The Wire!), but it's annoying enough that I only watch a few 45-60 minute eps. a week.
Honestly it has nothing to do with commercials either. It's that I now know that I have the ability to watch a show when I want to watch it.
Well it has a LITTLE to do with commercials--I tried watching The Office with NBC's abomination of a web service and it was miserable.
They have these ticks on the thing where they are going to insert an ad, there are like 3 or 5 per show, and whenever you pass one, it forces you to watch the 2 ads. BUT they only seem to have 2 ads at once! So if the stream resets at the end, you drag the little bar to where you were and it plays 2 ads, 2 ads, 2 ads, 2 ads then resumes your show (or in my case, resumes it at the wrong place so I have to drag again.)
I ended up seeing the same 2 adds like 20+ times each (not exaggerating) in one show. If it hadn't be for that fustercluck I'd probably be watching on their site regularly--even with commercials.
Sorry, didn't mean to go there but I'm still pissed off. Maybe someone from NBC reads here... Hmph, guess not.
I don't know about the packaging system--I mean sure stuff could be improved but overall it'd be tough to beat Debian.
On the other hand, Init needs to be dragged behind the shed and shot--oh and while you are at it, get the entire X config system to come along to watch, then while it's back is turned quickly put it out of my misery as well.
If this were combined with the "Preloaded linux in rom for browsing" thing. Call it a "Console Mode" for PCs, where you can just boot up from the DVD and the game starts running instantly.
It could still load the DVDs to disk.
And the whole thing could be set up to run as a VM inside another OS if available--making games platform independent.
And there would be world peace...
(Might as well throw that in with the other pipe dreams)
They can help good programmers quite a bit, and they can help bad programmers become good programmers. In both cases it takes someone with a desire to learn and not just some 9-5 coder here for the chick-magnet status.
The other thing you may want to factor in is the language. Static Typing allows much more reliable static analysis than dynamic typing. A language can communicate to the tool--for instance, if you tell a language that a variable can't be null, either the language or a test-mode tool should be able to assert that easily.
Java has some really nice tools built in. Some have more. Hints like "This variable can't be null", or "This variable must be assigned by the time the constructor ends and can't be changed" really help if applied correctly.
For example. In java, this code will produce a compile error:
private String isFive(int i) {
String s;
if(i==5)
s="i was five!"; else if(i > 5)
s="i remember when i was 5";
return s; }
since there is a path through the code that allows s to be returned without having ever been assigned.
In this case, it's pretty obvious, but sometimes you have many paths through your code including exceptions, loops, and if statements--it's really handy to have it pop up a note saying that a variable was used before being assigned.
Because of this really helpful warning, it's a really bad idea in java to initialize variables to null:
String s=null;
Although sometimes it seems like it's the only way to "Eliminate" that warning, what you are really doing is defeating valuable static analysis tools. Aside from that, it's totally redundant.
In the above case, an else clause would fix it. Even: else
return null;
Note that the string isn't assigned, but since that path returns it is never used in that path, so the compiler is happy.
The warnings generated by the error analyzers in eclipse, when cranked up, are also amazingly helpful--but again, more helpful in some languages than others.
Every project should turn them up and possibly add additional error plugins, and then eliminate every single warning. You do this by looking at each error and making a deliberate decision to mask or fix. Sometimes you have to mask, but looking and deciding alone will fix bunches of potential bugs.
Also, never make the decision to mask based on verbosity. Errors should only be masked if there is just no way around it--although in some cases an entire class of errors have to be ignored because of a pattern that is just too pervasive or too hard to eliminate or doesn't match your deliberately chosen coding style (Some settings actually can enforce a coding style).
Sorry about the really long example. I just wanted to demonstrate the amount of thought that could go into a single detection mechanism--and this one is basic.
Why didn't it catch on before? It has never existed before.
"Touch" didn't catch on. The iPhone did.
Bill Gates demoed something different that might also be cool, but I have yet to see the technology available to me in any form.
Perhaps if he'd done something with it like, hmmm, make a consumer product? Well then maybe that product would have had a chance.
--mostly unrelated, had a dream last night that Apple was making a tablet almost identical to the iPhone but bigger (10 or 12" diagonal i think). And they were fairly cheap.
They tended to stack well and would be handed out in meetings preloaded with stuff, then used to interact during the meeting with each other and with the "whiteboard"
Not that I really believe in dreams or anything (or have any damn idea why I'm dreaming about non-existent apple products!) but it occurred to me while thinking about it later that if they were going in that direction, a first step might be to start developing a really thin computer first... Maybe still keep the fold-up form-factor for a while...
There are some very sane and easy ways to fight these things, and not a single entity (except perhaps tripwire which is out because of how hard it is to use/configure, and java which works pretty well in limited situations) even tries.
We need per-app permissions. This doesn't have to be obvious, but when you install an app, the system needs to pop up a box before a single line of code is run giving options that the software is asking for.
Net access, write to own directory, write to system directories, use APIs to interact with other program, take control of various devices such as the keyboard and screen, communicate over the internet to one host or to any host... The list could be quite long..
But the use would be simple--a box pops up and has checkboxes by the services it needs. I review this and possibly deselect some. It either installs or refuses because it can't run without the ones I deselect.
This seems obvious and not all that hard to implement (I mean, as in compared to as much work as going from XP to Vista, or creating OS X)...
The other thing that would fix a lot of these things--put a bounty on finding & solving new viruii and on hacking into systems.
If you were to "Register" people for these bounties, you could even include a clause that they can be monitored to ensure they aren't the ones creating a virus and that they don't do anything to hurt the public computers they are hacking.
Even something like finding a missing patch in a web server should be worth a few bucks--like a "Ticket". Charge the company $100, pass $50 on to the person finding it, use the other $50 to go towards virus bounties.
For a new flaw that gives access to a common, important device like a Cisco router, you charge the company $300,000 or so, give the finder $100,000, put 100k away and slap Cisco around for a while with the other $100k just for fun.
Another bounty for identifying and disassembling bot-nets. a $30 ticket for the botted computer (Just a warning, really), and a Major Award for the identity of the person running it. Then you take all the money that guy has on hand and split it between the fund and the finder.
This is no more extreme a concept than bounty hunters or the "Consultants" in Iraq...
The first people who have a problem with the electronic voting seem to be technology geeks (aka slashdot readers).
You'd think that would be of interest--new rule, if over 75% of the people who have a clue agree, and only 50% of the completely uninformed agree, the uninformed no longer are allowed a vote.
This rule can be applied to any upcoming global warming initiatives as well.
I saw that heading and thought the only logical possibility is that someone finally decided to block bots by taking them offline until their machines can be cleaned.
I never imagined they were actually proposing something THAT stupid.
I just don't have the imagination I used to.
Look, this is a democracy (at least in theory) right? In the constitution we GIVE them copyright to their creation for a LIMITED time, ONLY so that it spurs innovation and gets more "IP" into the public domain for us all, right?
Well, I'm done with this shit. I say we vote to eliminate copyright protection all-together, across the board. Let them deal with that. If they want to stop making music because of it, I'll live. I'd prefer to have my music made by people who would make it regardless of if they got paid or not.
If every single lab suddenly decides they can't make medicine any more because it's too expensive, others will pop up with better, less expensive techniques. Foundations will still do a lot of the research anyway (how much do we donate to cancer research each year? When they come up with something--who will reap the benefits of the medicine developed?)
Let's get rid of it! Maybe we can experiment with that for couple decades and see how it goes--if it fails, I'm totally up for trying something else.
Doesn't the US government already have monitoring at the choke-point of virtually every ISP? Equipment that undoubtedly has the ability to generate any number of packets, spoofing any source...
If you complain to Sprint, maybe they will do the same.
If not, I would think there would be some way to make them liable.
If you like text messages--on top of your data plan--I can't help you, I think it's an all or nothing thing.
by the way (o/t), I used some of my 100 free text messages on my iPhone for the first time the other day--worked amazingly well.. simple clear, like IMing. In fact, I wonder if that is why they don't have any IM clients built in--they are trying to get people to use fee-per-use IMing instead. (I doubt it, just a thought)
I think it's probably simplistic to simply distribute a load to all cores of a CPU evenly. Although asymmetrical might be tougher, I could see a system with one low-power always-on core to deal with system requests and organization (Maybe even low enough power to remain on during a suspend), One to handle all GUI threads and interact with the GPU on a private bus, a couple normal cores to handle typical user threading, one of which doesn't come on until the first is like 50% loaded, and one or two high-speed high-power cores that run all-out when the system is plugged in and needs them for intensive processing.
It would take some targeted software design to take advantage of this, but I think we could be looking at a moores law style increase in power...
Wow, after reading some of the posts on this system, I have to downgrade windows in my personal OS tracker.
It used to be more maintainable than Linux, less than OS/X, but now you really can't claim that it's any easier to maintain than Linux with the Vista problems we've had in the past year.
In fact, if you were to run Ubuntu and install every single update (there are plenty) I don't think you would have run into half the problems.
Also, I see a lot of Mac laptops around me. Since coming to Portland, I've seen more Macs than PCs (in Spokane WA it was like 2 macs for 5 PCs, here it is more like 6 macs for 5 pcs, and if you just count laptops it's more like two to three times as many.
The people you see with the laptops, these are the hard-core that are going to be helping their parents, friends and children to choose their next PC. It takes a while, but businesses are following too. When I walk from the max to work, as I glance into windows, I see quite a few offices running macs now.
Although you don't hear it from the media, maybe Windows is finally ambling towards the elephant graveyard looking for it's old friend PS/2.
I hate to hope, but between this and Obama, I may actually have to become slightly less pessimistic.
I'm used to hating corporations because of the constant movement away from things "Good" pushed by uninformed stockholders out for nothing but increasing their own profit.
Actually the story's point is that the shopkeeper would have spent the money on something else, which implies he wasn't one of the richer people in town.
My premise was that the only thing you can do wrong with money is not spend it...
This tends to happen only when you have large amounts of money collected in one area.
Banks are made, in part, to keep this money circulating. A wealthy person can place his money in the bank, and the bank will loan it out, it goes to buy something and the money keeps moving.
The one problem I've noticed is that when you trust the bank method, money only reaches down to a certain point. It cannot get to the homeless/jobless in any case. Also banks tend to keep a reserve (dead money) and make the rich richer (pointless, unhealthy, more chance of dead money).
The only difference between banks and taxes (from this point of view) is that taxes have the ability to redistribute the money to all levels. it filters back up through society either way.
I'm not trying to take this to any extremes--it's not always good to steal or destroy (or tax), it's just not always as bad as it seems--it's not an absolute either way.
It was a good story though--if you were to add that he was wealthy, so the money he spent was pulled from savings under his pillow and wouldn't have been spent for 40 years until his death otherwise, it shows the opposite point--how good it was for everyone involved. Heck, you could even point out that the shopkeeper's window was filthy and cracked and costing him business but he was too much of a cheap-ass to replace it.
Re:Blizzard may be my favorite company, but please
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Like I said, voiceprint, thumbprint, occasional re-checking while playing--I'd be fine with that. That was in my original post. Did you even read it, or is that just a standard defense that a botter puts up to make himself feel better.
Where do you get that stat about the only OS in space? I heard the space station had windows laptops since the late 90's (I may have the date wrong, but I definitely remember the OS--I was kind of horrified).
And also, Their space-suits, calculators, independent experiments, solar collectors, cameras, doors, lights, walls--hell I wouldn't be surprised if the air on the space-station had its own OS. Isn't everything computerized these days?
I'm guessing either you got the telling of the story slightly wrong (the only os to guide a rocket from the planet?) or you're just repeating some story you heard in the 80's...
And as far as I can tell, wasting money is one of the best things they can do with it.
In this case, it's going to computer programmers... How is that bad?
Or computer makers like Dell (Some of you probably work for them)...
And from there back into the economy.
I know there are a lot of ways to look at it, but government waste isn't all bad. It's only a real problem when it goes to bad contractors through under-the-table deals, even then the money quickly filters back into society at large.
Money is only valuable when it moves, so the only bad thing you can do with money (economy-wise) is not spend it. Taxing and re-cycling the money helps as far as I can tell. The more progressive the taxes, the more likely they are to pull money back into the economy.
Okay, it's o/t, but no moreso than the parent.
Re:Blizzard may be my favorite company, but please
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· Score: 1
I think they should just open 2 servers. Find ways to detect bots, and kick them to the second server. Let their bots fight it out.
People who want to actually play on a fair playing ground then have their own server without bots.
If bots owners are happy with their bots playing, they should be more than happy to play on a server dedicated to running nothing but bots. No checks at all, completely legal.
Those who chose not to run bots would be free to compete on a level playing ground.
Hell, this is one case where I'd even go for submitting a picture ID to get a unique account--or maybe a voice-print analyzer. Once you are labeled as running a BOT, you can never again get a non-bot account on any blizzard server, but still it's totally your choice to bot or not.
I also don't understand why they don't have better checks. They could easily detect patterns that are bot-like, then wait for you to hit a key and throw up a dialog that asks you an intelligent captcha-type question... If the user doesn't answer in 15 seconds, he's kicked to the bot server. He can even keep his character and all his stuff.
So how about instead of bitching I try to come up with some constructive criticism. How about the opposite, a little sticky-note printer that will spit out whatever is highlighted on your current screen and apply a little glue to the back side on the way out, ready for immediate deployment.
The form-factor should be such that it can fit into a hard-drive slot on your PC--and it can slide open like a CDROM for refilling consumables.
Or my version-- 1) Don't optimize, no really, don't. 2) If you absolutely have to, write it unoptimized, test it, write it optimized, then: 2a) If the first is anywhere in the ballpark, throw away the second, 2b) If the second has enough of a proven, documented speed gain to get you past some accept/no accept barrier, comment out the slower one, but keep it so the next guy can follow the "Good" code.
If you don't document exactly what you did in the code and why, I'm going to refactor it into something readable the second I see it.
Also--know how to program. Choosing a linked list instead of an array list for an insertion sort is just programming correctly. It's not an optimization.
-1 offtopic... Just wanted to help the parent out with his cow-orker.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand the theory--you simplify instructions, do things to speed up the processor so it can run faster, then optimize the processor to run as fast as you can.
In other words, you are designing your instruction set to your hardware.
Now, assuming that you are going to have close to infinite investment into speeding up the CPU, it seems that if you are going to fix an instruction set across that development time, you want the instruction set that is the smallest and most powerful you could get it.
That way for the same cycle instead of executing one simple instruction you are executing one powerful one (that does, say 5x more than the simple one)
Now at first the more powerful one will take more time than the simple one, but as the silicon becomes more powerful, The hardware designers are going to come up with a way to make it only take 2x as long as the simple one. Then less.
I guess I mean that you will get more relative benefit tweaking the performance of a hard instruction than an easy one.
Also, at some point the Memory to CPU channel will be the limit.
I'd kinda like to see Intel take on an instruction set designed for the compiler rather than the CPU (like Java Bytecode). Bytecode tends to be MUCH smaller--and a quad-core system that directly executes bytecode, once fully optimized, should blow away anything we have now in terms of overall speed.
Correct, hence the gaming platform hardware spec that is the point of this particular article to which we are replying.
Exactly. The story I was referring to had a version of Linux loaded in rom for instant-on browsing. Hence my suggestion of the addition of a "Console Mode" to the instant-on OS.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. Perhaps I should have referenced the other story (Still not gonna, it's played here a few times now)
Absolutely. I've been without my DVR for 4 months now, and I've gone from a few hours a day of TV to ZERO. The TV just sits there.
I download a show off TPB occasionally--have caught up on a few things (The Wire!), but it's annoying enough that I only watch a few 45-60 minute eps. a week.
Honestly it has nothing to do with commercials either. It's that I now know that I have the ability to watch a show when I want to watch it.
Well it has a LITTLE to do with commercials--I tried watching The Office with NBC's abomination of a web service and it was miserable.
They have these ticks on the thing where they are going to insert an ad, there are like 3 or 5 per show, and whenever you pass one, it forces you to watch the 2 ads. BUT they only seem to have 2 ads at once! So if the stream resets at the end, you drag the little bar to where you were and it plays 2 ads, 2 ads, 2 ads, 2 ads then resumes your show (or in my case, resumes it at the wrong place so I have to drag again.)
I ended up seeing the same 2 adds like 20+ times each (not exaggerating) in one show. If it hadn't be for that fustercluck I'd probably be watching on their site regularly--even with commercials.
Sorry, didn't mean to go there but I'm still pissed off. Maybe someone from NBC reads here... Hmph, guess not.
I don't know about the packaging system--I mean sure stuff could be improved but overall it'd be tough to beat Debian.
On the other hand, Init needs to be dragged behind the shed and shot--oh and while you are at it, get the entire X config system to come along to watch, then while it's back is turned quickly put it out of my misery as well.
If this were combined with the "Preloaded linux in rom for browsing" thing. Call it a "Console Mode" for PCs, where you can just boot up from the DVD and the game starts running instantly.
It could still load the DVDs to disk.
And the whole thing could be set up to run as a VM inside another OS if available--making games platform independent.
And there would be world peace...
(Might as well throw that in with the other pipe dreams)
They can help good programmers quite a bit, and they can help bad programmers become good programmers. In both cases it takes someone with a desire to learn and not just some 9-5 coder here for the chick-magnet status.
The other thing you may want to factor in is the language. Static Typing allows much more reliable static analysis than dynamic typing. A language can communicate to the tool--for instance, if you tell a language that a variable can't be null, either the language or a test-mode tool should be able to assert that easily.
Java has some really nice tools built in. Some have more. Hints like "This variable can't be null", or "This variable must be assigned by the time the constructor ends and can't be changed" really help if applied correctly.
For example. In java, this code will produce a compile error:
private String isFive(int i)
{
String s;
if(i==5)
s="i was five!";
else if(i > 5)
s="i remember when i was 5";
return s;
}
since there is a path through the code that allows s to be returned without having ever been assigned.
In this case, it's pretty obvious, but sometimes you have many paths through your code including exceptions, loops, and if statements--it's really handy to have it pop up a note saying that a variable was used before being assigned.
Because of this really helpful warning, it's a really bad idea in java to initialize variables to null:
String s=null;
Although sometimes it seems like it's the only way to "Eliminate" that warning, what you are really doing is defeating valuable static analysis tools. Aside from that, it's totally redundant.
In the above case, an else clause would fix it. Even:
else
return null;
Note that the string isn't assigned, but since that path returns it is never used in that path, so the compiler is happy.
The warnings generated by the error analyzers in eclipse, when cranked up, are also amazingly helpful--but again, more helpful in some languages than others.
Every project should turn them up and possibly add additional error plugins, and then eliminate every single warning. You do this by looking at each error and making a deliberate decision to mask or fix. Sometimes you have to mask, but looking and deciding alone will fix bunches of potential bugs.
Also, never make the decision to mask based on verbosity. Errors should only be masked if there is just no way around it--although in some cases an entire class of errors have to be ignored because of a pattern that is just too pervasive or too hard to eliminate or doesn't match your deliberately chosen coding style (Some settings actually can enforce a coding style).
Sorry about the really long example. I just wanted to demonstrate the amount of thought that could go into a single detection mechanism--and this one is basic.
Why didn't it catch on before? It has never existed before.
"Touch" didn't catch on. The iPhone did.
Bill Gates demoed something different that might also be cool, but I have yet to see the technology available to me in any form.
Perhaps if he'd done something with it like, hmmm, make a consumer product? Well then maybe that product would have had a chance.
--mostly unrelated, had a dream last night that Apple was making a tablet almost identical to the iPhone but bigger (10 or 12" diagonal i think). And they were fairly cheap.
They tended to stack well and would be handed out in meetings preloaded with stuff, then used to interact during the meeting with each other and with the "whiteboard"
Not that I really believe in dreams or anything (or have any damn idea why I'm dreaming about non-existent apple products!) but it occurred to me while thinking about it later that if they were going in that direction, a first step might be to start developing a really thin computer first... Maybe still keep the fold-up form-factor for a while...
Sorry, it's late.
There are some very sane and easy ways to fight these things, and not a single entity (except perhaps tripwire which is out because of how hard it is to use/configure, and java which works pretty well in limited situations) even tries.
We need per-app permissions. This doesn't have to be obvious, but when you install an app, the system needs to pop up a box before a single line of code is run giving options that the software is asking for.
Net access, write to own directory, write to system directories, use APIs to interact with other program, take control of various devices such as the keyboard and screen, communicate over the internet to one host or to any host... The list could be quite long..
But the use would be simple--a box pops up and has checkboxes by the services it needs. I review this and possibly deselect some. It either installs or refuses because it can't run without the ones I deselect.
This seems obvious and not all that hard to implement (I mean, as in compared to as much work as going from XP to Vista, or creating OS X)...
The other thing that would fix a lot of these things--put a bounty on finding & solving new viruii and on hacking into systems.
If you were to "Register" people for these bounties, you could even include a clause that they can be monitored to ensure they aren't the ones creating a virus and that they don't do anything to hurt the public computers they are hacking.
Even something like finding a missing patch in a web server should be worth a few bucks--like a "Ticket". Charge the company $100, pass $50 on to the person finding it, use the other $50 to go towards virus bounties.
For a new flaw that gives access to a common, important device like a Cisco router, you charge the company $300,000 or so, give the finder $100,000, put 100k away and slap Cisco around for a while with the other $100k just for fun.
Another bounty for identifying and disassembling bot-nets. a $30 ticket for the botted computer (Just a warning, really), and a Major Award for the identity of the person running it. Then you take all the money that guy has on hand and split it between the fund and the finder.
This is no more extreme a concept than bounty hunters or the "Consultants" in Iraq...
Moreover, you know what's funny?
The first people who have a problem with the electronic voting seem to be technology geeks (aka slashdot readers).
You'd think that would be of interest--new rule, if over 75% of the people who have a clue agree, and only 50% of the completely uninformed agree, the uninformed no longer are allowed a vote.
This rule can be applied to any upcoming global warming initiatives as well.
Is that more illegal than torture or less?
Already done--called addblock plus
I saw that heading and thought the only logical possibility is that someone finally decided to block bots by taking them offline until their machines can be cleaned.
I never imagined they were actually proposing something THAT stupid.
I just don't have the imagination I used to.
Look, this is a democracy (at least in theory) right? In the constitution we GIVE them copyright to their creation for a LIMITED time, ONLY so that it spurs innovation and gets more "IP" into the public domain for us all, right?
Well, I'm done with this shit. I say we vote to eliminate copyright protection all-together, across the board. Let them deal with that. If they want to stop making music because of it, I'll live. I'd prefer to have my music made by people who would make it regardless of if they got paid or not.
If every single lab suddenly decides they can't make medicine any more because it's too expensive, others will pop up with better, less expensive techniques. Foundations will still do a lot of the research anyway (how much do we donate to cancer research each year? When they come up with something--who will reap the benefits of the medicine developed?)
Let's get rid of it! Maybe we can experiment with that for couple decades and see how it goes--if it fails, I'm totally up for trying something else.
Doesn't the US government already have monitoring at the choke-point of virtually every ISP? Equipment that undoubtedly has the ability to generate any number of packets, spoofing any source...
Would that be enough?
AT&T allowed me to block all text messaging.
If you complain to Sprint, maybe they will do the same.
If not, I would think there would be some way to make them liable.
If you like text messages--on top of your data plan--I can't help you, I think it's an all or nothing thing.
by the way (o/t), I used some of my 100 free text messages on my iPhone for the first time the other day--worked amazingly well.. simple clear, like IMing. In fact, I wonder if that is why they don't have any IM clients built in--they are trying to get people to use fee-per-use IMing instead. (I doubt it, just a thought)
I think it's probably simplistic to simply distribute a load to all cores of a CPU evenly. Although asymmetrical might be tougher, I could see a system with one low-power always-on core to deal with system requests and organization (Maybe even low enough power to remain on during a suspend), One to handle all GUI threads and interact with the GPU on a private bus, a couple normal cores to handle typical user threading, one of which doesn't come on until the first is like 50% loaded, and one or two high-speed high-power cores that run all-out when the system is plugged in and needs them for intensive processing.
It would take some targeted software design to take advantage of this, but I think we could be looking at a moores law style increase in power...
Wow, after reading some of the posts on this system, I have to downgrade windows in my personal OS tracker.
It used to be more maintainable than Linux, less than OS/X, but now you really can't claim that it's any easier to maintain than Linux with the Vista problems we've had in the past year.
In fact, if you were to run Ubuntu and install every single update (there are plenty) I don't think you would have run into half the problems.
Also, I see a lot of Mac laptops around me. Since coming to Portland, I've seen more Macs than PCs (in Spokane WA it was like 2 macs for 5 PCs, here it is more like 6 macs for 5 pcs, and if you just count laptops it's more like two to three times as many.
The people you see with the laptops, these are the hard-core that are going to be helping their parents, friends and children to choose their next PC. It takes a while, but businesses are following too. When I walk from the max to work, as I glance into windows, I see quite a few offices running macs now.
Although you don't hear it from the media, maybe Windows is finally ambling towards the elephant graveyard looking for it's old friend PS/2.
I hate to hope, but between this and Obama, I may actually have to become slightly less pessimistic.
I'm used to hating corporations because of the constant movement away from things "Good" pushed by uninformed stockholders out for nothing but increasing their own profit.
This feels almost the opposite.
I have to go re-arrange my brain a little. ttyl
Actually the story's point is that the shopkeeper would have spent the money on something else, which implies he wasn't one of the richer people in town.
My premise was that the only thing you can do wrong with money is not spend it...
This tends to happen only when you have large amounts of money collected in one area.
Banks are made, in part, to keep this money circulating. A wealthy person can place his money in the bank, and the bank will loan it out, it goes to buy something and the money keeps moving.
The one problem I've noticed is that when you trust the bank method, money only reaches down to a certain point. It cannot get to the homeless/jobless in any case. Also banks tend to keep a reserve (dead money) and make the rich richer (pointless, unhealthy, more chance of dead money).
The only difference between banks and taxes (from this point of view) is that taxes have the ability to redistribute the money to all levels. it filters back up through society either way.
I'm not trying to take this to any extremes--it's not always good to steal or destroy (or tax), it's just not always as bad as it seems--it's not an absolute either way.
It was a good story though--if you were to add that he was wealthy, so the money he spent was pulled from savings under his pillow and wouldn't have been spent for 40 years until his death otherwise, it shows the opposite point--how good it was for everyone involved. Heck, you could even point out that the shopkeeper's window was filthy and cracked and costing him business but he was too much of a cheap-ass to replace it.
Like I said, voiceprint, thumbprint, occasional re-checking while playing--I'd be fine with that. That was in my original post. Did you even read it, or is that just a standard defense that a botter puts up to make himself feel better.
Where do you get that stat about the only OS in space? I heard the space station had windows laptops since the late 90's (I may have the date wrong, but I definitely remember the OS--I was kind of horrified).
And also, Their space-suits, calculators, independent experiments, solar collectors, cameras, doors, lights, walls--hell I wouldn't be surprised if the air on the space-station had its own OS. Isn't everything computerized these days?
I'm guessing either you got the telling of the story slightly wrong (the only os to guide a rocket from the planet?) or you're just repeating some story you heard in the 80's...
And as far as I can tell, wasting money is one of the best things they can do with it.
In this case, it's going to computer programmers... How is that bad?
Or computer makers like Dell (Some of you probably work for them)...
And from there back into the economy.
I know there are a lot of ways to look at it, but government waste isn't all bad. It's only a real problem when it goes to bad contractors through under-the-table deals, even then the money quickly filters back into society at large.
Money is only valuable when it moves, so the only bad thing you can do with money (economy-wise) is not spend it. Taxing and re-cycling the money helps as far as I can tell. The more progressive the taxes, the more likely they are to pull money back into the economy.
Okay, it's o/t, but no moreso than the parent.
I think they should just open 2 servers. Find ways to detect bots, and kick them to the second server. Let their bots fight it out.
People who want to actually play on a fair playing ground then have their own server without bots.
If bots owners are happy with their bots playing, they should be more than happy to play on a server dedicated to running nothing but bots. No checks at all, completely legal.
Those who chose not to run bots would be free to compete on a level playing ground.
Hell, this is one case where I'd even go for submitting a picture ID to get a unique account--or maybe a voice-print analyzer. Once you are labeled as running a BOT, you can never again get a non-bot account on any blizzard server, but still it's totally your choice to bot or not.
I also don't understand why they don't have better checks. They could easily detect patterns that are bot-like, then wait for you to hit a key and throw up a dialog that asks you an intelligent captcha-type question... If the user doesn't answer in 15 seconds, he's kicked to the bot server. He can even keep his character and all his stuff.
but everyone seems to have beaten me to it.
So how about instead of bitching I try to come up with some constructive criticism. How about the opposite, a little sticky-note printer that will spit out whatever is highlighted on your current screen and apply a little glue to the back side on the way out, ready for immediate deployment.
The form-factor should be such that it can fit into a hard-drive slot on your PC--and it can slide open like a CDROM for refilling consumables.
It should work both vertically and horizontally.
There, run with it and make your $millions.
Premature Optimization is the root of all evil.
I've never seen anything saying otherwise.
Follow any of these sets of rules:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RulesOfOptimization
http://schwern.org/~schwern/talks/What_Works/What_Works/slide016.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jch/java/rules.html
Or my version--
1) Don't optimize, no really, don't.
2) If you absolutely have to, write it unoptimized, test it, write it optimized, then:
2a) If the first is anywhere in the ballpark, throw away the second,
2b) If the second has enough of a proven, documented speed gain to get you past some accept/no accept barrier, comment out the slower one, but keep it so the next guy can follow the "Good" code.
If you don't document exactly what you did in the code and why, I'm going to refactor it into something readable the second I see it.
Also--know how to program. Choosing a linked list instead of an array list for an insertion sort is just programming correctly. It's not an optimization.
-1 offtopic... Just wanted to help the parent out with his cow-orker.