Comment Re:Deep (Score 1) 225
What's worse is that they don't understand floating point.
They don't understand that in floating point you can totally have a situation where:
d = a + b + c != d= b + c + a
What's worse is that they don't understand floating point.
They don't understand that in floating point you can totally have a situation where:
d = a + b + c != d= b + c + a
Try finding out yourself. Ask some kids some simple questions to the new kids:
Try asking them:
What's the memory bandwidth of that x86 desktop or laptop roughly? Special points if they break out cache.
Ask them how many dhrystone MIPS (very roughly) that uP has.
Ask them the ratio of the main system memory bandwidth to MIPS.
Ask them the ratio of the main system memory bandwidth to the I/O storage they have.
They just never get exposed to this stuff. They just have no reference. Now ask them to compare them even to a regular 286 era ISA bus PC: I'll even give you some numbers.
286/16 ~ 4K dhrystone MIPS on a good day
Disk (40 MB IDE on ISA) ~ 400K/sec
It's great to see these things still around. They are really fun to read. I actually am a bit of an atari 8 bit fan with some 8 bits I still use occasionally for fun.
They weren't always. Some model 360's were pretty decent. The CDC 6600 while called a 'super computer' nowadays was really a 'Large Computer'. It was a mainframe. The problem with mainframes is the same problem with every computer out there. The latency wall. There were only a few companies that really pushed the physics. That stuff has stopped at the 'system' level to a large degree. You see a few companies playing with the interconnect topology but it's not really pushing the physics stuff.
If you take the ratio of compute to I/O of any typical modern server it's horrendously bad. To anyone out there who thinks their x86 rocks - a few simple questions:
1) What's the ratio of memory bandwidth at various levels to I/O bandwidth? Compare that to a Mainframe from the 60's.
2) How long on a typical server would it take to swap out all of memory? You can use SSD if you want.
Hint) You will find 2) is many seconds to minutes for a decent sized x86 server even with SSD's. That IBM mainframe could maybe swap out all its memory in less than a second or a second or two.
Take someones description of their cloud computing service and compare it to the concept of the computing utility - like the MULTICS people talked about, it's pretty damn similar.
Some idiots will claim it's not - that they can get to their data! Which is total garbage because while technically they might be able to get to their data, it sucks to empty a swimming pool via a straw which is what the bandwidth of an internet connection is like when there's a tonne of data in the cloud.
So then they will say 'run your queries in the cloud', well that's awesome until the problems don't map efficiently to the topology the cloud vendor went for.
It's rarely required, until it is.
Back in the earlier days of micros it was loads of fun. BYTE was a great read. People wrote their own stuff on their own hardware. There were really fascinating choices in CPU's. Initially there were people using 2650's 8080's, 6502's, 6800's, LSI-11's, 1802's, 9900's. .
I can't remember the last time when someone actually said something outrageous like 'What architecture would be ideal'. Nowadays it's 'What software layer (implicitly running on x86 Linux boxes) should we use?'
The performance numbers people talk about are terrible too. Kids who just graduated think 100K interrupts per second is 'good!' on a multi Ghz multicore processor. They just have no context and don't understand how absolutely crappy that is and that even on an 8031 running at 11 Mhz with a
Right and there are some big differences:
Mainframe CPU's tend to have far more error detection and correction. They have safeguards against errors in data shuffling and computation inside the CPU itself. Mainframes tend to offer robust job control, by the time you add decent job control of the level that mainframes offer your network of workstations/servers starts getting complicated
Mainframes tend to offer decent encryption and security.
Can you do all these things on a pile of VM's? Sure. Is it cheaper - maybe. Is it fun to manage - not particularly.
For the point about giving everyone access to all your stuff? Let's see the author prove his point by posting all his personal details, address age, credit card numbers, ssn, medical records, tax returns and let's see how that works out for them..
That's total garbage. It's not about free software. Before you blow a gasket let me say I like free software and use it constantly for my job but making statements like that is just ridiculous.
There are piles of people who use proprietary software every day. Be honest and think about it.
There are bunches of people doing serious things that use non-free software, and folks doing less serious things using non-free software every day. How many people use Excel every day? Autocad? Photoshop? How many airline tickets are from systems running non-free OS's running a non-free DB like Oracle? Do you think most TV Stations use free software?
I'm not saying 'could use free software' I'm saying DO use free software.
Let alone really important things like run a chemical plant or nuclear reactor. For all you know they are running VMS which definitely isn't free and is stable and has worked and absolutely must work or people die.
Marketing, producing products your users want do matter. Part of that is convincing your users they want to do that... There's a much more fundamental thing going on here. It's the same force that killed the dominance of the Mainframe, and the Mini.
Machines are fast enough now to do everything most consumers want to do with them.
Let's extrapolate what that really means:
1) Surf the web - Fine on 5 year old hardware (Even with stuff like Flash)
2) Watch video - Fine on a 5 year old box
3) Write something - Fine on a 5 year old box
4) Compute something - For most users fine on a 5 year old box.
Do you see the pattern here? The average user can do everything they want to do. Which gets to the crux of it. The real problem is that their isn't some new killer application that causes such a stir most users want to upgrade. The same thing happened to the mainframe and the mini. Once mini's were fast enough people used them to do many things (not all things) mainframes did. When the killer micros were fast enough users used them to do many things that mini's did.
What's going on is that we lived through a period where there were tangible benefits in upgrading. The truth as much as some might argue about it is that users bought into needing multitasking, they could see that editing some document or image (or video) was tangibly better on a faster machine.
What did that? Think about the mid 80's to 90's and even early 00's. There was the GUI. 90's we had the Web. Do you remember how insanely saturated EVERYTHING was with the web? It was www this and www that and web this and web that. In the 00's there was video. Hey you can watch video on your machine over broadband.
The machine running Windows 95 really was better for surfing the web than their WFWG 3.11 machine. The windows XP really was more reliable than the Windows 98 machine if you wanted to install random crap.
What's happened is that there's no real new apps that the average consumer cares about.
Now, if someone comes out with a killer app that needs a machine of PC levels of capability and piles of consumers are convinced they need it then the PC will take off. Microsoft has made Windows 8 look like a tablet OS to the average consumer, who based on sales figures is not convinced at all that they really want a tablet OS on their PC.
The PC won't die, just like the Mainframe didn't die and yes we still run piles of Mini's (Servers). It's just that your PC may be the size of a raspberry pi. For some people it will be the size of a regular PC or Laptop. Guess what - if you have to stick a decent sized screen on it and a keyboard it's going to be at least some size. That's until you either wear VR style glasses (No need for a big screen) and don't have motion estimation stuff so good and cheap you can just waggle your fingers in the air like you are typing on a virtual keyboard.
I haven't run Win 8 and lots of folksI know haven't either. We aren't MS haters - we're pragmatists and pretty much comprise a group of users who have used every MS OS (OK Nobody ran ME) since DOS. If a company can produce a product so crappy that it does that it really makes you wonder what the hell is wrong with management.
The $64000 question is what does MS do now? The best I can think of is make the Win 8 'Aqua' style interface better - hell throw the Windows 7 UI in there. That way they could keep working on the tile based stuff but not alienate everyone.
Unfortunately they've pretty much managed to alienate a huge number of users.
I use Linux entirely for work, and Win 7 on my machines at home when I'm not running Linux. I'm thinking about a new laptop for home but don't want Windows 8. I think I'm actually going to just do Linux on that laptop now steam is available for Linux. If I need Windows I'll run it in a VM. I'm curious who else has come to the same conclusion. Windows in a VM and Linux as your main OS because Win 8 seems so crappy.
I agree... and the interplay of Avon with the other Characters made that show. He was the bastard who is right most often, and the only one who could be talk to ORAC sanely..
Let's stick these folks who believe in this verification technique underneath the robot as the first patients.
Just do some pointless surgery, open em up, and stitch them back up.
If they survive then trials on other people can start.
Instead of all the pictures... I'd have shown the first game - Rescue On Fractalus, and had the Jaggi smash the cockpit window.
That would have been more fitting.
If they wanted to have some fun with it, change the jaggi into mickey mouse.
I mean seriously. This is like:
>Hey there new programmer
Err, Hello?
>Weren't you supposed to be here at 9:30 ?
Umm, yes but I couldn't come up the elevator.
> Why not?
Well I didn't know which floor.
> Isn't the floor written on that big board near the elevator?
Oh ah, well I suppose it could have been
> So how did you get here?
I just walked up the stairs and stopped on each floor to see if I saw the company name
> But we are on the 32nd floor?
Yes, it did seem to take a while, especially the knocking
> The knocking?
Well, yes, some of the doors were locked, so I had to knock to ask someone if this was 'AX7121 Systems'
> But, didn't it occur to you when they said NO, to ask them if they knew which floor AX7121 Systems was on?
Ah, yes I did, that caused me to go back down to the 7th floor three times.
>What?
I went back down to the 7th floor three times
>What?
Well someone said you were on the 7th floor, in total I went to the 7th floor 4 times, the 9th floor 3 times, and the 13th floor twice
>But if you had checked the 7th floor on the way up didn't it occur to you that we probably couldn't suddenly move in and appear there so you didn't need to recheck it?
Uh, well now you mention it, but I wanted to use a SAFE algorithm
> Hang on a minute I read your resume, you said you have a 4 year degree in computer science
Yes, I do, I graduated from #blah blah# last summer
> Did you guys ever cover elevator seeking problems?
Oh yes, we did - lots of work on that, it's related to reflection in Java, I know all about that!
> How is it related to reflection in Java?
I could reflect from my Elevator instance to find out what kind of elevator it is, and then I could call the
> How would that have helped?
Well, I could have ridden the elevator instead of using the stairs, which would have sped things up lots and made the algorithm more efficient
> Are you joking?
Why would you ask that? It would definitely speed up the algorithm a little bit don't you think?
> I have a terrible pain in the side of my head, by the way, what is your name?
Clouseau
"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him." -Arthur C. Clarke
