Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:half the Gflops, 64 cores, 80% lower cost, 5 wa (Score 1) 98

Erm. I beg to differ. Nvidia GPUs are "SIMT" (Single Instruction, Multiple Threads). There are "tricks" to avoid threads in a warp from waiting for other threads (basically, don't use if (condition) ... else ..., but if(condition) ... and if(!condition) ...). AMD GPUs are based on VLIW processors, and are closer to your assertion of SIMD, but it's not quite the same thing either.

Comment Re:Imagine that (Score 1) 333

I am against cheating, and ideally, only the better candidates should get in. But at the same time, I find it interesting that, in the end, someone slightly less good than his/her neighbor can end up graduating from the university he/she should not have been able to get into in the first place — possibly without even cheating once he/she got in.

Comment Re:Don't forget consoles! (Score 1) 1200

It's VLIW (very long instruction word) [wikipedia.org] architecture in case anyone wants to look it up

No it's not. There is a VLIW-like processor made by Intel, and it's the Itanium processor (well, Itanium 2 nowadays). It is not a "pure" VLIW processor though, as it is both VLIW and superscalar. VLIW instructions have a fixed size (in the case of the Itanium, each bundle/long word can feature as much as three instructions, although two is the average). On the other hand, x86 processors have really two parts: one which I would call a "front-end", which receives the CISC instruction. Its only purpose is to decode them, and decompose them into micro-operations/micro-instructions. The latter are the "RISC-like" instructions which are really executed and fill the pipeline.

Comment Re:Copyright is an arbitrary social convention (Score 1) 438

Copyright was a legal construct the printers (not the writers!) lobbied for in order to increase their profits

I know how the "copyright" equivalent was created in the late 1700s in France. Beaumarchais was tired of printers and publishers ripping him off. He created the "author's right" (which is slightly different from the copyright US and UK countries use) to be protected against publishers and printers who would sell his work without giving him a cut of the profits. When it came to public execution of his plays however, he had no problem, because he felt a play should be... well, played, and that it somehow belongs to the public.

Later on, this right given to authors to control how they want their work to be distributed became more and more distorted.

Comment Re:renting content (Score 1) 221

Quite simply, this is bullshit. Some of the greatest (sorry, "High value") music and film was produced in an era when there was no DRM. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Charlie Chaplin, B.B King, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Martin Scorcese, Stanley Kubrick, even Steven Spielberg created their work in a pre-DRM era and somehow managed to sell their work.
Disclaimer: I really think DRM stinks.
But even then, you can't compare an era when people just couldn't copy a record, and thus had to buy it, with ours where everyone can copy almost everything, as long as it exists digitally. DRM are needed not because of (lack of) talent from some artists; they are needed because without them, movie and record companies can't make more money. By having digital equipment, by being able to produce one's own music/film/whatever, the value of a work of art decreases, which is quite a problem when your job is to make money off it.

Slashdot Top Deals

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Working...