I don't see how Lost In Stupid Parentheses needs to be brought up in a discussion on how to avoid cruft and verbose error handling. Unless you're trying to point out that academics void of any tangible goal ended up in the same place.

Except... the number of transistors in a CPU is irrelevant!

No, it's very relevant.

A CPU doesn't have the transistor density that really benefits much from Moore's Law - because the vast majority of the space on a chip is not taken up by transistors, but by wiring. In fact, the wiring density is what's limiting transistor density (a good thing - larger transistors can give you better performance because they can drive the longer wires quicker).

How much wiring happens on doped silicon? None. The vast majority of the chip is covered in transistors, with 6-10 levels of wires on top of them. There are some designs where the I/O count demands so many pins that's what dictates the size of the chip -- so cache is filled in underneath. Heck, if your power budget allows it, you're already blowing the silicon area anyway, might as well increase your cache size! Consider your recent Core derived designs. Take away half the cache. Do you think the die area would go down? Not hardly.

Most of the transistors used in a CPU actually goes towards the cache - when you're talking about 16+ MB of pure L1/L2/L3 cache, implemented as 6T SRAM cells, that's 100M transistors right there (and that doesn't include the cache line tag logic and CAM).

You did the math right, but the cache line tag logic and coupled CAM are negligible. Sure, they may add a few million or so, but not anywhere near 5% of 100M.

The thing with the highest transistor density (and thus the most benefit of Moore's Law) is actually memory structures - caches, DRAM, SRAM, flash memory, etc. This is where each transistor is vital to memory storage and packing them in close means more storage is available, in which case Moore's law states that RAM etc. will double in capacity or halve in cost every 18 months or so.

I realize it's vogue for people to revisit Moore's Law and rewrite it every few years, but he was not speaking specifically about memory arrays. In fact, the chips Moore had access to at the time had very little memory on them.

Smaller transistors do help CPUs consume a little less power, but double the number of transistors doesn't do a whole lot because there's a lot of empty space that the wiring forces to be transistor-free. (Non-memory parts of the CPU are effectively "random logic" where there's no rhyme or reason to the wiring). It's why the caches have the most transistors yet take the smallest areas.

Wiring never forces silicon area to be transistor-free, unless you're thinking of 1980 era chips. Not even late '80s had wiring on doped silicon. Certainly the kinds of chips Moore was talking about has had no significant wiring on doped silicon in 20 years, the exceptions being only when layout designers are getting lazy. I've done layout design, I've done circuit design, I've audited dozens of chip layouts and seen several technology manuals dating back to the 90s.

That random logic, by the way, is the subject of the most innovation in the field of chip layout and arguably in all of chip design. When your chip's entire goal is to funnel data through different units and do different things to it, you're dominated by buses. Automated tools often do split these buses up, but different algorithms can pull them together and make them more efficient. Caches are the smallest because they can be small. There's an entire periphery to them, including senseamps devoted to reading the baby FETs that can't make full rail to rail swings on the bitlines.

May I guess you're a student? Perhaps one who is learning from a professor who hasn't been in the industry since about 1985?

The claim is that it uses the same technology as the Power7 chip. It could very well be an overclocked triple core Wii chip made in 45nm SOI with eDRAM. Hint hint.

According to Wikipedia, it was released on September 24 1993 for Mac and PC. It's easy to think it was a Mac exclusive, reading that article, as it was programmed with Hypercard and Quicktime, on Quadras. I remember playing it at a friend's house (he actually had a CD-ROM drive), while I was a senior in high school (1993-1994) and his was a PC-only house.

Those were the days when Mac was easiest to use to write multimedia software, best for Photoshop and barely used by home users.

Disbelief in evolution is disbelief in antibiotic resistance in contagious and harmful bacteria (MRSA for example). Evolution explains how some bacteria are able to randomly survive exposure to antibiotics and produce offspring with similar resistance. With successive generations and successive random variations, additional resistances can be distilled.

Evolution explains how weeds can become Round-Up resistant. Genetically modified and manipulated plants are about as "intelligently designed" as you get, but there evolution is, randomly guiding plants to do successively better with each generation against this poison. If nothing else, this demonstrates that "intelligent design" and "evolution" have similar outcomes in similar time (I'll grant that intelligent design beat evolution by a decade, but I maintain that isn't a relevant time period).

Disobeying a law via action that can not lead to physical harm is equivalent to sitting at the front of a bus regardless of the colour of your skin.

If I torrent The Big Bang Theory, I am not the moral equivalent of Rosa Parks. Someone who sat at the front of the bus, despite the color of her skin was in fact risking that skin. There was a very large social structure invested in keeping the races segregated and people were beaten and/or killed for violating that.

Deciding that The Big Bang Theory is worth $0.25, not $1, per episode without commercials when the distributor doesn't need to pay distribution costs may be morally right. Stating that using copyright law (according to the U.S. Constitution, for the furthering of art and science) should not apply in the case of sharing King of Thrones because a lot of people would love to throw money at the copyright owners, but are unwilling or unable to pay for cable + HBO may be morally acceptable, but they are not the modern equivalent of Rosa Parks. Although the guy who tirelessly encodes the material and provides it to the group to seed is risking his freedom and financial well-being, he is not risking his life.

I read it differently. If Clinton were VP, and served under a President unable to serve his last 0-2 years, Clinton could fulfill those duties legally and Constitutionally. If the President were unable to serve more than 2 years, Clinton would be able to serve 2 years. At that point, I do not know if a special election would be necessary or if we would need to follow the standard order of succession, which means the Speaker of the House would become President.

They can't be told form the original-- and NEVER has a document not opened or looked funny.

You either have technologically incompetent people opening your documents who don't know complaining is an option or a very simple layout format. In a corporate environment with templates and data-heavy presentations, it's easy to come up with presentations that won't look right in anything other than Office or which Office won't render the same as its free competitors (and that's while trying to remain compatible).

Can we please stop with all the fucking political news stories now polluting slashdot? This use to be a great site that delt with technical stories

Are you referring to the long string of articles starting with Columbine?

Sorry to reply to myself, but I figured I should link to the easy to find copyright infringement.

I've never been to Funnyjunk before, but after this blew up, I decided I'd test out their claim about how easy it was to take down infringing images.

Naturally, these sites make it wicked easy to upload any image, taking down an obvious one would be just as simple, no? Well, in 5 minutes I found a Cyanide & Happiness comic (explosm.net). I hit the flag button and found "copyright infringement" very simple to find. "Great!" I thought, "So simple to fix this problem." Nope, that takes me to a DMCA page where I have to type in a real name, e-mail address, phone number and supporting information.

Wow.

If it's so easy to upload an image, shouldn't there be a responsibility to make it just as easy to take one down? Of course, there would be a manual review process and some countermeasures to prevent someone from flagging the whole site (which may be mostly original content, that's a separate discussion), but it should be a whole lot easier.

From what I've read, on CPU tasks it's between an i3 and an i5. An i3 is "fast enough" for most general use, so I think that's pretty good. On GPU tasks, it's significantly faster than Intel's integrated chipsets, knocking on the door of respectable gaming performance if not walking into the room.

If you're doing CPU tasks, you really want the i7. If you're doing hard core gaming, you're also going to want the latest generation video card, even if it's an entry model. If your budget is less than $700 and you still want to play video games, Trinity is a good compromise. I think it's perfect for college students.

5 monkeys. 10 minutes.

If the issue is important to you, take a day off and visit their office. They all have one, and it can't be all that far away if it's in-state.

Say you live in El Paso. For your US Senator, you can choose between John Cornyn, who lives in Austin, or Kay Bailey Hutchison, who lives in Dallas. This "take a day off and visit their office" could entail a 9-10 hour drive, each way. I'll concede that for many Americans, the situation is better, but "can't" is a strong word.