Comment Re:damnit (Score 1) 163
I misread it as "MIT Student Gets Arrested With LED Art" which is of course very exciting as it suggests LED Art is now illegal in Mass.
No, that really did happen. Seriously.
No, that really did happen. Seriously.
Submission + - An Overview of Parallelism
Mortimer.CA writes: Hello,
Tim Bray points out a recently released report from Berkley entitled "The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley".
Generally they conclude that the 'evolutionary approach to parallel hardware and software may work from 2 or 8 processor systems, but is likely to face diminishing returns as 16 and 32 processor systems are realized, just as returns fell with greater instruction-level parallelism.' This assumes things stay "evolutionary" and that programming stays more or less how it has done in previous years (though languages like Erlang can probably help to change this view).
Some of the 'conventional wisdowms', and their replacements, that they list are:
Tim Bray points out a recently released report from Berkley entitled "The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley".
Generally they conclude that the 'evolutionary approach to parallel hardware and software may work from 2 or 8 processor systems, but is likely to face diminishing returns as 16 and 32 processor systems are realized, just as returns fell with greater instruction-level parallelism.' This assumes things stay "evolutionary" and that programming stays more or less how it has done in previous years (though languages like Erlang can probably help to change this view).
Some of the 'conventional wisdowms', and their replacements, that they list are:
-
- Old CW: Power is free, but transistors are expensive.
- New CW is the "Power wall": Power is expensive, but transistors are "free". That is, we can put more transistors on a chip than we have the power to turn on.
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- Old CW: Monolithic uniprocessors in silicon are reliable internally, with errors occurring only at the pins.
- New CW: As chips drop below 65 nm feature sizes, they will have high soft and hard error rates.
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- Old CW: Multiply is slow, but load and store is fast.
- New CW is the "Memory wall" [Wulf and McKee 1995]: Load and store is slow, but multiply is fast. [...]
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- Old CW: Don't bother parallelizing your application, as you can just wait a little while and run it on a much faster sequential computer.
- New CW: It will be a very long wait for a faster sequential computer (see above).
Submission + - Custom Built Computers
the eric conspiracy writes: For several years I've been buying custom barebones systems from Monarch Computer based on a recommendation I found on slashdot, and have been happy with the result. However in 2006 they really went downhill, and now appear to be out of business. So I am looking for suppliers whom I can go to for a computer where I can specify the motherboard, case, power supply, memory on a piece by piece basis, get feedback from the supplier as to whether these items would be a reliable combination, and have the supplier assemble the custom system and test it. The system may just be a motherboard and CPU, or it might be all the way to a complete package.
Any suggestions?
Submission + - The future of Open Source Java
An anonymous reader writes: Thanks largely to the open sourcing of the JDK, 2007 promises to be the most exciting year in Java programming. With the developer community in the driver's seat, expect to see Java programming propelled forward, backward, and sideways, probably all at once. This article takes a look at what's ahead for Java in Open Source and predicts what is coming for the Java platform.
Journal Journal: No legal relief from spammers spoofing my domain name? 3
For a few years, spammers have been sending out spam pretending to be from my personal, vanity domain. I haven't seen many complaints recently, but it now costs me a considerable amount of time daily to delete hundreds of bounces from mail servers that don't recognized forged headers, etc. The recipients' mail filters are probably also down-rating my domain name as a result, too, further degrading the value of my domain name if I ever want to use it for a commercial venture. I am also concern
