Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:embedded (Score 1) 492

64-bit arithmetic can be easily implemented on 8-bit devices. The problem will be upgrading the software on them, although it seems like it's doable in 25 years, even if that means going to some harder to reach place such as the North Pole.

Of course, that's a much bigger problem if you don't have the original sources and/or if you work with legacy technologies (think: COBOL) that are more difficult to maintain these days due to the lack of people that are competent in those areas. But that just means that the demand for such solutions will rise and someone will come with one or more ways to tackle it.

Comment Re:"800MHz 8-core version would"... (Score 1) 258

In fact games involve massively parallel tasks at the data level. It's why dedicated hardware for graphics use architectures with tens or hundreds of cores. IMHO games would benefit a lot from multiple lower-frequency CPU even for non-graphics tasks (think: simulating a unit in a some real-time strategy game using a thread).

Comment Re:battery life (Score 1) 97

it means the battery lasts longer - if you can twice the work in the same time, that means the same amount of work takes half the time - so you've cut your CPU usage by half.

Not necessarily. If the code you run results in usage of extra hardware, the cost of using that might result in a less efficient behaviour power-wise. What I'm saying is yes, Hurry Up and Get Idle is a good principle in theory, but it doesn't always work in practice because different instructions incur different power/time costs.

So the problem might be a tad trickier, there's other measures to be taken into account, such as how that affects lock contention, caches and so on. I personally can't make any statements until I see actual power usage results and comparisons.

Comment Re:The Department of Redundancy Department (Score 1) 628

Ok, so imagine you want to teach computer architectures. Which aren't quite electrical engineering but they aren't theoretical computer science either. Which department would you assign that to?

I'd also add that any good computer architect should be skilled in both hardware and software-related issues, in electronics, electrical engineering as well as some discrete math. I don't see how you can put all those together outside of a CS department.

Comment Re:Club of Rome (Score 1) 816

Actually things aren't that simple. I find the field of Game Theory to provide pretty good measures for such things as social and individual welfare. And from what I managed to understand, a non-centralized system (that is, where everyone is mainly interested in their own well-being) doesn't necessarily lead to a non-optimal social welfare. Reversely, a centralized system (where some entity makes decisions to try and satisfy everyone) doesn't guarantee optimal social welfare.

So while some social measures might be good (protecting children and disabled people for example), most of them can actually prove to have a bad effect on the society as a whole. And even though communism is pretty much the mother of all bad socially-oriented decisions, the idea of bad socialism has the chance to apply to any society, including the ones that are democratic in nature.

Comment Re:Great but... (Score 5, Insightful) 467

That sounds simple but it isn't. While you could theoretically do this from a virtual machine, the difference between visualising” it and testing it on real hardware is significant especially when it comes to device drivers, which are known to be the most common source of bugs in kernels.

Plus verifying a kernel or a compiler is a pretty hard problem, it's a miracle if you manage to do it in decent time, let alone manage to visualise it in any way.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell

Working...