The paper's contribution is to propose a new cache coherence scheme which they claim has scalability advantages over existing schemes.
Somehow this was obvious to me even from the press release. I've never yet seen details of an ordering model laid bare where it wasn't the core novelty. Ordering models are inherently substantive. Ordering models beget theorems. Cute little Internets drool and coo.
At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?
Why does a dog lick his balls?
Something like this would be a nice coating for:
- Windshields
- glasses
- solar panels
Unless, of course, it attracts grease...
At least for now, we're keeping up with them
Over the commercial lifespan of 2000/XP, the cost of gene sequencing went down by five orders of magnitude (100,000 x) and there's still one more order of magnitude crumbling in full swing ($1b per human genome to $1000 per per human genome).
We're not merely drinking their milkshake, we're reading their source code, and it's gone from the Manhattan project garage to hamburgers served in the length of time it takes for a helpless human baby to mature into a helpless head case with little recourse to perspective or logic.
After we invented the steam engine, the Amazon wasn't the first forest we cut down. The Amazon is full of piranha and poisonous snakes and many other protective life forms.
Yet somehow you wish to depict the interval in human history between the invention of the steam engine as the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest as a race the forest can win?
Sure can, if the entire human race dies off in the next World Wide Crusade at some point in the next fifty-odd years.
Penicillin was an inspired one-off. Gene sequencing is the devil's root kit.
But maybe I'm wrong, and I severely underestimate microbial evolution. Twenty years from now we'll wake up one day to discover hostile bacteria with no chemical genome at all: it's all hidden behind some bitcoin quantum process we are unable to sequence, that mutates in nature faster than we can puzzle it out, and we'll all be left scratching our chins and wondering how that happened.
"There will always be a need for car dealerships,..."
But everyone knows what that conveys, even the dealers themselves:
We've been printing money for a long time by bilking our customers for costly extras, and even though they often know this and resent it deeply, until now there hasn't been a credible alternative, so they just squeal to silently to themselves, then come back for more. With recent developments, that's going to change real darn fast if we don't (A) somehow force the competition out of business, or (B) do a prompt about-face in our shifty business practices, or (C) both at the same time with the intent of achieving the first option ASAP.
Of course, this divides ranks with the dealership community itself, as the old guys close to retirement are going to continuing milking their cash cow by any means available, as the younger guys start to worry about their long term futures when the backlash strikes, which the old guys are doing nothing whatsoever to abate sooner rather than later.
They say that society is "only" three square meals from anarchy. That's a lot, actually. I estimate that the fraternal order of the car dealership is only two snifters of brandy and one Cuban cigar's worth of suggested forbearance away from king-sized flop house crossfire.
Do you really think the problem in 1984 was the telescreens?
Telescreens are "an enabling technology". I see no reason to leave them, and thus any hypothetical government-or-other spy, enabled in my personal space.
I think most of us geeks grew up terrified of the very idea of the Orwellian Telescreen. However, it's not the technology that's evil (many of us have plenty of devices with a camera integrated with a display), but the threat of its use without consent.
My latest laptop came with a built-in, user-facing camera.
I immediately put a piece of opaque electrica tape over it - even before swapping out the hard disk for a fresh one and installing Linux.
The tape isn't coming off until I have a removable shutter to take its place.
if you bring back the passenger pigeon in some sort of wildlife preserve and they outgrow their food supply, how are you going to get the flock out of there?
You DO know that they fly, don't you?
Like in flocks of millions over continental distances?
Back in ny early days as a lab techie I was running the optical processor that did the image-making post-processing for what I believe was the first "flyby" / "rotating target" synthetic aperture radar. (No significant intellectual contributions: I was running the machinery, rather than contributing to its design. Adjusting lenses, exposing and developing film, etc.)
Back in those days the computers weren't up to the amount of crunch needed. (This technique is essentially a two-dimensional fourrier transform with tweaks.) So we used laser light and lenses for the fourier transform, and photographic film for the input modulation and output capture. The original data was captured using a one-dimensional CRT with a solid row of fiber-optic light-pipes built into the faceplate. This was in actual contact with the recording film, transferrig the light from the phosphor inside the CRT without geometric distortions from lenses and such. The film was about four inches wide, and the servo capstain that advanced it was a critical component for accurate signal processing, as was the circuitry that linearized the sweep of the beam. The input plane of the optic processor held the film in a xylene solution between two optical flats, to eliminate phase distortion from roughness of the film's surface.
The nice thing about synthetic aperture radar is that the resolution is related to the radar frequencies and the relative motion of the antenna(s) and target, and is not dependent on the beam width of the antenna. (Well, wider beam width means you illuminate the target from a larger virtual antenna, sharpening the image.) Except for deltas, distance doesn't matter, either. You get the same resolution at tens of feet or interplanetary distances. Distance only comes into the pricture in terms of keeping the oscillators from drifting during the transit time of the beam, so you don't introduce varyimg phase errors when down-converting successive returned chirps.
I'm presently reading Assholes: A Theory by Aaron James, a surfer-dude professor of philosophy from Harvard University trying to cash in on the On Bullshit surge, which sold surprisingly well for what it is. I don't totally agree with Mr James, but there are some great passages. We'll see after I finish the book.
That just screams "Ruby is dog slow".
Sorry, that screams asshole entitlement—but maybe just because I was reading that book yesterday evening, and having a shiny new book is a lot like having a shiny new toy.
At least we have a new snowclone: Three-word-cliche The-Shit three-word-cliche. Interesting, both "just screams" and "dog slow" are high on the list of the asshole lexicon. We all know it when we hear it.
Many scripting languages appear to be almost as fast as C not because it came easily (it never does with a scripting language) but because immense amounts of talent and clever optimizations were poured into the brew behind the scenes to perfect this illusion.
This isn't so different that the story of x86 vs ARM. x86 is reviled for having one of the worst instruction sets of all time, and after thirty-five years it's still holding its own. How many technologies born in a gutter manage that? True, Intel has poured more ingenuity behind the scenes to enable this illusion than any sane person wishes to contemplate. If Borges were an engineer, he wouldn't have written El inmortal, he would have just killed himself.
Nevertheless, bottom line, x86 is NOT dog slow. Aren't you happy they care? Is your little world complete now? I personally don't think the standard for inventing a useful scripting language ought to be Nelson Mandela's eighteen-year term breaking rocks in a rock quarry so that some entitled asshole enjoys the perfect crunch on the flower paths of his estate garden. Why should it be, when it's a simple matter to just call out to C or Boost when the need arises? No wait, that's what you hate most. That's the dog that cries slow in the night.
Awwooooooooooooooooo.
My how that sound chills the soul.
I first posed the question to my elementary school science teacher circa 1973 whether the dinosaurs weren't in some way usefully self-warming. I didn't have the vocabulary about homeostasis or mesotherms at that age.
***
So, young man, you're suggesting that the dinosaurs might have been mesotherms?
"Meso", everyone, means "in between" or "intermediate". So the idea here is that dinosaurs would be warmer than modern reptiles but not as warm as modern mammals—whales and cats and dogs and humans and horses—who maintain a fixed body temperature. By "fixed" temperature we mean within a narrow range, subject to regulation, or control. Among the regulatory abilities in humans are sweating when we get too hot, and shivering when we get too cold. (Does anyone know if whales shiver? Someone try to find that out for class tomorrow.) When our body temperature regulation fails we experience fever or chills. Chills are known to doctors as hypothermia, "hypo" meaning reduced and "thermia" meaning temperature; hypothermia means "reduced temperature". Fever and hypothermia are dangerous conditions that require prompt medical attention.
It's different when a lizard gets cold. For the lizard it's not an immediately dangerous condition; it just becomes sluggish until its environment warms up again. Now our lizard might be subject to predation—being eaten by a predator like an eagle or a snake—if it becomes sluggish at the wrong time or in the wrong place.
Mammals are the opposite in both ways: our temperature remains fairly constant regardless of our environment, and when our body temperature—not in our arms and legs and hands and feet, but inside our skull, our chest, or our belly—when this internal temperature changes, that's a big thing to worry about.
A mesotherm would be an intermediate creature, one who is able to generate enough body heat to remain active in a cold environment, which helps to avoid predation (remember that means being eaten), but isn't directly threatened by having a cold body temperature, if the food supply does not support maintaining a high activity level.
Something science has learned is that any organism that goes too long without food ceases to generate warmth internally. Now a large pile of dead plant matter—yard waste—can become much warmer than the surrounding environment, but this is due to smaller organisms with the plant matter which are busy eating the plant matter. It is also true that rotting meat will generate warmth from the small organisms inside the meat causing the meat to rot. Whatever the situation, if heat is being generated in a biological system, somewhere in that system there is some form of digestion taking place.
Now let's go back to the excellent question about dinosaurs could have been mesotherms. As young scientists, you are probably all wondering what is the evidence that dinosaurs were cold blooded or not. That's a very good question, everyone.
As a scientist, I wondered this myself. As a scientist we are trained to ask these questions whenever possible and seek as hard as we can to obtain the answers. Over my summer holidays—can you believe that?—I scoured all the science textbooks available to this school district, and I can't find a single sentence in any book explaining why dinosaurs are believed to be cold blooded, apart from their having a distant kinship with modern reptiles.
But then, think about this yourself. We know modern reptiles are much smaller than dinosaurs, who were waaaaay bigger than elephants. Large creatures often generate more heat than they want to have, which is why elephants have those giant, thin ears. All that extra skin helps them to transfer unwanted heat into their environment.
We'll be talking more about the relationship between heat and temperature in future classes. This is an important concept which is central to life as well as to modern machinery, which is why we eat regular meals and our cars visit gas stations. Heat and temperature are both connected to the concept of energy. That's a very important concept you'll be visiting year after year in your school education.
Unfortunately, it appears that all your textbooks—all the way until you leave school when you are much older—we written by the same idiot, who isn't a proper scientist at all. So we're all going to have to work hard to figure out our own answers to these important questions by thinking carefully in our own minds and challenging each other to support our opinions.
Does that sound like a good idea? Yeah, it does, doesn't it.
[Intercom buzzes.]
Well, my young students, I suspect that would be the principal's office summoning me to the guillotine for my immediate beheading.
I love you all, and I'll miss you so much. Good-bye everyone. It was worth it.
Can you imagine what he'll be like at 18? Or 28?
An open invitation to extrapolate? Whoa daddy that. Fasten your air-bags, ladies and gentlemen.
Will the clever little rug rat grow up to become the William James of maker-space or William James Sidis of faker-disgrace?
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
