skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, there is a huge power advantage to parallel cores. This is definitely worth reading for some background on why Apple is doing what they are doing:

http://perilsofparallel.blogspot.com/2010/02/parallel-power-...

The comments on it are also really good.
I haven't read the fine article, but from what you and others have said, this is the distinction between envy and jealousy. E.g.:

Jealousy: your wife is beautiful, I'm going to kill you and take her.

Envy: your farm is very prosperous. I know I don't have the skills to run one that well, so I'm just going to destroy your's.

Envy is alive and very healthy, and as a result a whole lot of a whole lot of societies aren't so healthy.

We, as people who can do stuff others can't necessarily even conceive of, are prime targets of envy.
or you could watch it on a netbook
They saw it coming. They shorted the same subprime products they were selling. GS bankers are on tape saying they will murder the client on a specific deal related to these shorts.
My upcoming Microsoft internship is more than $5k a month. My summer NSF REU last year was $3k total.
This is a good example of how patents prevent the very innovation they're supposed to protect.
I claim your thesis has a critical corollary that goes beyond "competitors would take away part of USPS's marketshare if they were allowed to compete". Specifically that the competitors would cherry pick the most profitable business of the Post Office and force it out of business leaving much of the nation unserved, or into a business model we don't think would be good for our society (first class mail to Eagle Butte, SD costing, say, $10/oz).

There's also friction issues. If I'm going to send out every month a set of bills to my customers, I know the cost will be X customers * the rate I pay (which I can decrease by making things cheaper for the USPS),
So I think there is the following problem with the experiment as you propose: are these low performers simply deficit in attention management or broader faculties as well. If the former, there's decades of data indicating that clinical level difficulties with attention can indeed be treated (hint: it's called ADHD). That's because ADHD is often in large part a gap between intentionality and action (that gap being executive function, which in "that would be fun, but I should do this" scenario makes the this branch choice possible).

Do people actually use provigil off label to improve memory? That seems like a pretty iffy approach, sleeping wold probably work better!
Malka Weil, Dianne Derrick, Joseph Kocian, Robert Morgan, Carl Sjogreen...positive things are said about all of them in that range of the book. (None are relatives.)
Konqueror 3.0.3 on KDE 3.0.3 on SuSE 8.1

Well, you did ask, and I did warn you it was old ...
or (5) Find prior art.

One thing to note, though: I'd be careful posting claims like this with an alias that can be traced back to you. Should you go ahead, you have now admitted that you knowingly infringed on the patent. Some claim that this is an issue of the past, some not. I am not a lawyer.
The RISC/CISC things is a little simplified.
One reason RISC has never caught on in the desktop is memory speed hasn't kept up with CPU speed (and can't - with the laws of physics).
So if a RISC cpu takes 10 instructions to do what a CISC can do in 1, it loses any speed advantage if it takes 10x as long to get the next instruction from memory.

The principle reason people use ARM is low power, part of it's low power comes from the RISC design but it's not as simple as that. To reach the same overall performance as an x86 the RISC may have to use more power, simply because power increases faster than clock frequency.
It is dangerous to document, especially publicly, your discovery of a pre-existing patent on your project. You may open yourself up to treble damages. For this reason, it can be dangerous to research patents on your concept.

IANAL; however I did work as an engineer supporting the legal team in a patent infringement suit. Nasty stuff. In this case, my team was suing somebody else for infringement of our company's patent, and while the patent was at least innovative, the awarded damages seemed totally out of order to the value of the patent.

Anyhow...

The legally correct thing to do now would be retaining counsel to determine if you are infringing, and/or to find prior art that invalidates the patent.
Sure. Either way, you don’t have to buy the movie again.
Apple seem to be keeping a close eye on LLVM which would allow architecture-independent binaries with relatively little penalty.

I'm not an expert in the field, but I suspect that x86 will continue to offer the best value in terms of performance relative to cost, which is the most important factor to consider in desktop computing. However, having the option to run the same binaries on other architectures opens the door for using other architectures on handheld, low-powered, or small-form-factor devices, where factors other than performance matter and Apple may be able to compete favourably.
"Goldman colluded with Bush and Pelosi to rob America" is a very different claim than "Goldman tried to collect money that AIG owed them".

The former claim implies Goldman is evil (nearly as evil as Bush/Pelosi). The latter claim does not.
The most interesting thing in my opinion was the fact that 80% of the space was taken by two large batteries.

No wonder thae battery is irreplaceable.
In fact, it’s now a universally accepted truth that RISC is better than CISC!

Is that actually true? I'd like to see some actual numbers comparing RISC vs. CISC performance/power consumption.
From Step 15 (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/2):

Markings on the A4:

- N26CGM0T 1007 APL0398 33950084 YNL184A2 1004 K4X2G643GE

- Yes, the K4X2 is a Samsung DRAM part number!

- Decoding the part number shows there is 2Gb of memory inside. This translates into ~256MB of memory.

- This means the A4 processor is probably being manufactured by Samsung.

- The DRAM was stamped at the end of January, while the processor die was likely manufactured the third week of February.
I also did another post on the validity subject (woke up at 3 am and couldn't get back to sleep) - see http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/2010/04/patent-validity-the-c....

Usual disclaimers: Don't rely on this as legal advice, I'm not your lawyer, etc., etc.
" It's easier to write Haskell programs in Lisp than the converse."

You can write a compiler for one in the other (as you could do with any two Turing Complete programming languages), but other than that this seems to be a meaningless play on words.

But, ok let us take your claim that it is "easier to write Haskell programs in lisp than lisp programs in Haskell".

Care to point at some specific significant "haskell programs in lisp" that are "easier to write" than the corresponding "lisp programs in haskell" that are harder to write?
Just FWIW, that "Decoding the part number" bulletpoint wasn't there when I made my post :-) But.. hmm.. that sucks!
rather than just not offering internships?

And then, after a little while, it becomes impractical to insist on prior experience for entry-level positions.
Author here.

You'd be comparing apples and oranges. CPUs are optimized for specific use cases. There's always a tradeoff between the performance of each component, and current x86 CPUs are designed/built-for the desktop while current ARM/MIPS/etc. are made for embedded and mobile devices.

Atom comes close to being comparable to certain embedded devices, but not really. Because it's actually a desktop architecture (resembles older in-order execution x86 desktop PCs) scaled down and simplified to reduce power.

Within the field though, it's taken for fact. To me though, nothing says it clearer than that Intel internally converts CISC instructions to a series of RISC instructions, then enters them into the pipeline. If it weren't for compatibility issues, Intel would be RISC today.
Hence the advantages of a CISC frontend and a RISC backend, as x86 has evolved to. An x86 might pull one instruction from memory. translate it into 10 backend operations, and get the best of both worlds.
I thought about this more last night (when I was trying to sleep). I realized that 3D displays don't provide the same feeling of having a 3D object in front of you as the Pcubee does, because you can't change your perspective by simply moving your head. Your perspective is fixed to whatever is on the display.
You can talk to a patent attorney and obtain a so-called "non-infringement opinion". Patents are frequently rejected at their first iteration as being too broad and then they are "tighten up" by their submitters by adding very specific, narrow clauses. Ultimately your goal is to identify one of such clauses and then work around it. If you are working with an attorney, they have an access to full patent history and this really helps with the clause examination.

The attorney fees are in the range of few thousand dollars.

HOWEVER - if you proceed as is and if it can be proven in court that you knew about the patent, you are effectively committing a "willful patent infringement". In many jurisdictions this automatically triple damages should you be sued for the infringement. Be very, very careful with it.
The difference in RISC/CISC instruction count is closer to 2:1 than 10:1. (Unless you are using a VAX polynomial evaluation opcode, but that is an extreme.)

ARM ameliorates this by having multiple instruction sets. The Thumb instructions are a denser encoding, if somewhat slower. 90/10 rules apply.
Kind of, but not exactly.

The amount you'd need to increase the clock of a RISC CPU to get similar performance to desktop CISC CPUs is a lot less than the 2.4GHz your currently using.

The shorter pipelines and simpler cycles means that you don't need to make the CPU crazy-fast to boost performance as much as you would with CISC. Intel has improved that starting with the Core CPUs, but it's still not as good as RISC design. The really deep pipeline in the P4 series was a killer - the cores were churning 3.6GHz and still not getting much work done. The "density of work" in a RISC cycle is (was) much higher than in CISC, and that really does help keep the power consumption down to a minimum.
… at the expense of extra computation and power consumption. And I think the current CISC backends would better by called VLIW.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and people can talk all day about what to call each one.
Zim- a desktop wiki
> (5) Find prior art.

That's actually a good strategy. Should you ever be approached regarding a patent infringement, produce the prior art and say that you are going to challenge the patent (which is doable). I am going to guess that in many cases, especially in cases of patent trolls, they will back off as it makes more sense to keep the patent and harass other people than risk loosing the patent altogether.
Video is great whenever I want to learn and do something, but it's hard to skim a video to find a certain piece you need.
Near the end of the article, the author mentions Literate Haskell (.lhs). In my opinion, LHS is not at all literate -- it's nothing more than verbose commenting. \begin{code} and \end{code} are semantically equivalent to -} and {-. Anybody interested in literate programming with Haskell should look into NoWeb or Leo.
Does Software Development Have A Culture Of Rewarding Failure
Step 1: Don't make a public announcement that you have seen this patent and it "almost describe[s] my concept to a tee", unless you actually want to get hit up for triple damages if you do get sued and lose.
@Rantenki, retaining counsel is _a_ legally correct thing to do, but not necessarily the only correct thing.

In its 2007 _Seagate_ opinion, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit announced a sea change (pun intended) in its jurisprudence on willful infringement. See http://www.patentbaristas.com/archives/2007/08/24/is-the-tid... for a good write-up; the money quote is in bold about 40% of the way down.

Usual disclaimer: Don't rely on this as legal advice, I'm not your lawyer, etc., etc. (I think I'm going to do an AutoHotKey entry for the foregoing ....)
there are a lot of situations where you don't want to tag a photo of a friend, the way tags are implemented on facebook.

i generally wouldn't tag a friend in a picture where they look bad, and there are all kinds of social situations where a friend wouldn't want to be tagged in a particular photo -- because one girl would see them with another girl, for example.
If you were under the impression that social programs for the lower class (as opposed to middle class ones like SS and Medicare) were run for the benefit of the ostensible beneficiaries, just dig up some more figures like that and do the math. Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is also apropos.
Prior art is only useful if you have enough money to endure a lawsuit. Note that you probably won't get this money back even if you win.
failure is part of success.. check out Steve Jobs..
That doesn't actually tell you how easy it is it to hail a cab. Sure, there are lots of cabs at Grand Central at 9am, but that doesn't mean it's easy to hail one because there's tons of other people trying to hail them too.

Also, even if few cab trips originate from a certain point, that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of cabs passing by there that will be happy to pick you up. For example, I bet if you were 2 blocks away from Grand Central during the morning rush, it would be pretty easy to pick one off on its way to Grand Central, even if few trips originate from that spot because few people find themselves there at that time.
Absolutely. It's a real shame AMD beat Intel to the x64 punch, or we'd all be running Itanium today. VLIW nevermore....
This is silly... not only is the article inaccurate but the problem described is trivial to solve. As long as you know what encoding wchar_t uses and what encoding your data is stored in this is not a big problem, use one format internally and convert your data on the way in as appropriate. Trust me, I solved it with no prior knowledge, no formal education in less than a day, as a distraction during my day job... I did not have to re-write the entire library from scratch.
Didn't seem too hard to me at all. Maybe I'm just hardhearted, because I often get the same type of reaction as OP did, but to me OP's just explaining why it won't work.
Who ever said that there's going to, in the long run, be a difference between the iPad and laptops? A laptop is just an iPad with a keyboard.

That wasn't so hard now, was it?
> Would there be any advantage in making a desktop computer that ran on the ARM architecture (instead of x86)?

The MIPS people said that they had to have 10x on some dimension and as good as on all other dimensions just to get folks to consider switching ISAs.

Where's your 10x? (Note that Intel is already planning to play the "many cores" game.)

Note that CPUs aren't the only thing that use power in a computer.
Apple's iPad is the future. This is why
Tex-style .lhs isn't "classic" .lhs (Bird-style): http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Literate_programming#Bird...
Microcode isn't the same a RISC. With an actual instruction set you are bound to an architecture, microcode changes with the microarchitecture so it can contain optimizations that would break compatibility if used in a general way.

Intel tried to move away from CISC with EPIC (Itanium), which could be considered a kind of RISC, but it obviously didn't work out.
this is a really cool idea. I'm interested to see how this turns out.
Get a little further then consult an attorney.
So if a RISC cpu takes 10 instructions to do what a CISC can do in 1, it loses any speed advantage if it takes 10x as long to get the next instruction from memory.

99% of the time instructions come from the instruction cache, not from memory. And as jws said, it's not 10:1.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgCvDTyBjHdOdDFfMEN...
Try to do database web apps or whatever technology, for non-profit organizations in your area. It's a great experience, meeting different kinds of people, and you can often choose your technology. I've worked with blind and people with all kinds of disabilities, and for a women's shelter.
How do you compute an input profile? I thought this would be on the site you referenced, but I couldn't find it.
Yes, they just have to invest in all the scanning and storage costs and then go to the authors guild and ask for a license.

But there is no reason for the guild to give them a better deal than they gave to Google, or if Google offered enough there is no need for the guild to offer them a license at all.
I've had to do a phenomenal amount of tinkering to get my tc1100 tablet to a lovable level of slickness. (A 3lb slate form factor PC.) We're talking about weeks of research, trying out software, buying components off of eBay and one afternoon of disassembling the thing.

The iPad is just about as useful to me after just one hour or so of App Store downloading. It's a bit faster to write posts with, even typing one handed. I haven't been able to sync the Bluetooth with my Plantronics 510 headset, though.
What are you talking about it? It made perfect sense to me. Bathtub monkey sausage.
Didn't it? The Itanium is a great performer. Like I mention below in another comment, if only for AMD which beat Intel to the x64 punch with the hybrid x86_64 architecture, we'd be all on Intel's vision of true 64-bit computing: the Itanium.

All computer architecture PhDs I've spoken to have referred to the Itanium with an air of awe. It was built from the ground-up with all the optimizations and bottlenecks in mind, and can be statically optimized to do magic... except no one is ever going to use it since it requires all applications to be recompiled, and with x86_64 offering an easy way out, that's not going to happen.
Inaccurate in what way?

It may be trivial to solve, but it's certainly not an issue anyone should have to solve, if the C++ standards committee would have dictated size and encoding information along with the datatype.
Successful traders are also rare exceptions. In fact I suspect the odds are better for making money by creating wealth than by speculation, especially if you're willing to work in less sexy domains.
Guess we can own it?
Even when sharing good news, he does it in a way that his readers can find insightful.
Not sure if it is a bug or feature, but searching my domain with and without "www" produced different results. I expected actual website to be the first in both cases.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=news.az&v=
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=www.news.az&v=
New User Interface and Logo for Ubuntu 10.4
Yes and in practice ARM isn't really RISC and x86 isn't really CISC, with VLIW and pipelines and caches it's more complex.

But the original RISC research was in a time when neither CPU clocks nor memory bandwidth was anywhere near physical limits.

It's not the RISC(Apple) is clever and CISC(intel) is a dumb dinosaur - message the article is aiming at.
Wordpress Launch New iPhone and iPad Application That Seems a Little Pointless
Open the battery door of your phone and you'll see a similar phenomenon. Except that you can replace the battery.
My Catch 22: Dating Given Cancer
I wholeheartedly agree that the execution of the iPad is superior to other tablets.

I'm just not sure it's been demonstrated yet that tablet computing is a "good idea" (TM).
Healthy, cheap, or tasty: pick two. Right? :)
Hooray! One more person finds his way out of the darkness.
It's building the business case and the revenues that makes this whole processor design discussion interesting.

Not the microprocessor technology itself.

Competitive microprocessor designs (in terms of speed, power, cost, volume and particularly the applications the users care about) are feasible but are Not Cheap, and to get the costs down (and the revenues up means you need to build the production scale. And building scale means leapfrogging the existing players in one or more dimensions sufficiently to draw over applications that the end-users really care about.

You need to be significantly better here or sufficiently profligate with the application vendors and the resellers, or sufficiently compatible to overcome the inherent application inertia; you need to have enough "pull" (speed, power, cost, particularly applications) to build up a base. Without this, you're running a furnace with the contents of the corporate coffers.

You can't be a just little better with your processor designs, either. That won't draw enough folks over. Both the Alpha and MIPS microprocessors had Microsoft Windows NT, and that (and even with porting tools such as FX!32) wasn't enough to build up an installed base against the x86 designs.

Apple is playing the long game here.
> To me though, nothing says it clearer than that Intel internally converts CISC instructions to a series of RISC instructions, then enters them into the pipeline.

One problem with that argument is that RISC machines do the same thing.

Another problem is that there are different amounts of available/potential bandwidth at different points. For example, L2 accesses are far more expensive than what a decoder can produce.

There's always some benefit to reducing the number of control bits, but it is especially pronounced the further that you get from functional units.

BTW - "the pipeline" is misleading. Many implementations use multiple pipelines even for a single instruction stream.

> Within the field though, it's taken for fact.

There may be a theoretical advantage, but if so, it is small relative to many other factors.

I've actually helped define a commercial ISA (RISC FWIW).
I ran the numbers and found that whey protein was a little bit cheaper than milk on a protein/price basis. (And soy is even cheaper, if you prefer soy) I usually mix it up with a noncaloric sweetener now to overpower the strong taste.

For a dessert you can mix the powder, peanut butter, a banana, and some dark chocolate together...microwave or blend it. I haven't really perfected that recipe though, I use a cup of protein powder and it's too much relative to the other ingredients.
See my comment below to Rantenki at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1239021
The Shirky Principle
The keywords are "daily needs calculator" it's under tools on that site. The #s vary, but after researching I found their #s reasonable.
> That's actually a good strategy.
> I am going to guess that in many cases

Please us about your experiences and/or expertise.
Unless you're in a field where patents matter a lot, I wouldn't worry about it. Little startups are rarely sued for patent infringement, and if you become very successful you'll be sued for patent infringement no matter what your company does.
Can Linux use the (supposedly) expired font hinting patents?
Yeah, but other than some specialised tasks, most code will never be written to be massively multi-threaded. This is an incredibly difficult endeavour and for many tasks it may be downright impossible. This the Itanium thinking all over again -- lets make a CPU for which code is incredibly hard to write for, and the programmers will come because our CPU is so nifty.

I think Intel have learned their lessons and are now making CPUs according to code people are already writing and not according to something that may happen in the future. And it is usually worth it to spend a lot of silicon to speed up a single pipeline because programmers do not have time and resources for the incredibly difficult task of efficiently splitting their code into 100 threads.

As PG said, the most important resource to be optimised nowadays is not speed of execution, but programmer time.
>"Lisp, of course, and especially Common Lisp are my languages. Not since the 1960s have I programmed professionally in a language other than Lisp."

> With all due respect to Richard Gabriel, (and this probably blasphemy) perhaps he should? Haskell or Erlang or Factor are mind expanding in ways Common Lisp never was.

The fact that Gabriel hasn't "programmed professionally" in those languages does not imply that he doesn't know them.