Ashlee,

Intel and AMD are only playing second fiddle to Sun's [the Network is the Computer] UltraSPARC Utility/Facility of Processing Power, which would more accurately be described as ITs Command and Control ......... thinking as Sun does to shine Light on what InterNetworking with Advanced Processing of ever more Current Information Inputs to provide Power Generation Outputs tailored to different, disparate Needs, albeit with the requirement that the Feeds be in a Parallel Flow towards a Conflict-free, Mutually Beneficial Integration.

Human Beings may all be born equal with the exact same Ignorance, but thereafter, dependent upon the Opportunities in different Time Zones/Geographic Locations, will their Knowledge be entirely different and allied to their own Personal experiences, also individually unique...... and yet we would think to provide a Society model which would try to create a Standard pushing and providing for Equality rather than Individuality.

Travel to another Time Zone...... and you are as an Alien should you not recognise the Applied Semantics of the Temporal Geographic Dislocation.

Imagining Man as merely a Programmable Machine allows one to exercise a considerably better Control of what they should be Programmed with. And to consider it a violation of any free human choice consideration, is merely an anarchic and perverse logic, given that such logic only surfaces because of the failure to provide further teaching and learning towards Artificial Intelligence Concepts which prove 42BAlien......!?

I suppose the watered down version of such Programming goes by the name of Social Engineering but it is only normally a Lite, Zone specific version with little or no consideration of XSS RSS Feed/Need.

Are Turing Created Moles, CyberIntelAIgent Souls, working across and in Multiple Dimensions and Disciplines? After All, it is not unusual as Stephen Hawking apparently works in eleven dimensions ...... a limit which he proposes and assigns to himself presumably.

ARM2 had this in 1986. And here we are, 21 years later...

The above comment needs to be preserved for posterity.

Guy

Not the article, but the comments from Mr Fruitcake...Manfrommars, ManfromOrion, etc etc....

His insane gibberish is a waste of space, but I guess he must live near a WiFi connection and has left his tin hat under the pillow, so he can be excused.

I love your comments. From my point of view you can analize your own lines and comments. If developers have to complicate their lives due to chip performance design decisions, is there any other (simpler) way? If there is a physical limit on hardware, is there any additional option? ..

..the one dimension then, Stu? ,-)

Don't be such a Luddite, Stu, ....there is a lot going on in the Virtualisation Fields of AI which you obviously have no knowledge of......... and may probably never understand until you have RTFM rather than tuning in to amfM.

But clearly your right to share it is respected even though you would think to use it for inane abuse.

Might I suggest that you appraise yourself of a recent Register Masterclass so that you can learn a little bit more about more things which may probably also be beyond your ken ..... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/

I notice that you chose not to comment on the piece, even though it proved to be a big hit with the astute readership.

If you have nothing pleasant to say, why waste your breath in sharing it, seems like very good common sense you have also missed....... which is why there is no offence taken at your slight.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that every time someone borrows from the past, it becomes fantastically great and radical news. Virtualization moves from the mainframe to the x86. Great big news. Now x86 gets some RISC functionality. Once again, great big news.

Whoopee.

This crapola is what we get for commodity CPUs. AMD plans to roll out a chip with 8 to 16 Bulldozer cores on it (Sandtiger). How far are they behind Sun?

Anyways, to clue you in on the obvious: Developers rarely touch assembly language.

The compiler is where the action is at for these new instructions. Your old software will have to be recompiled to take advantage of this "advance." However, developers could take advantage of what exists today, has been analyzed and documented for over 20 years, and write multithreaded code! Hello, why is this always new???

Why is there a paucity of developers who will get off their butts, do a bit of reading, and write good code? Every "advance" has been a rehash of yesterday, and for quite some time. Anybody remember the nCUBE machines? 1024 cores in 1985?

Maybe there *is* a lack of documentation. I was just looking for books on Winsock programming, and there is a complete dearth of good information. Microsoft Press stopped publishing their book, and new copies go for $200-$500. WTF???

Maybe some day Intel or AMD processors will be as good as the IBM Power5+. Check out Top500.org, then look at the bottom 100. Notice that Hokkaido University's Hitachi SR11000-K1/40 uses 40 (just 40!) IBM Power5+ processors at 2.1GHz.

Man from Mars, Communication is an art, one you apparently lack.

However you must be congradulated on your apparent educational achievments, but you and those like you are dime a dozen and really become a bore.

But is amanfromMars some kind of AI experiment?

I've noticed a few of 'his' recent posts have been mentioning AI.

Has El Reg become a big turing test (which judging by Stu Reeves' ire is being passed).

Just a thought.

Congratulations.... I see you have outed my blog bot! I will have to improve my neural networking and speach generation algorythms and get him a new login!

(But seriously... this may be the first sensible explanation I have heard for amanfromMars. Either that or he is a crazed hobo who stole a laptop and dropped some LSD)

Doesn't look like an AI to me. Note how he reacted to criticism. The "word salad" style of writing is indicative of a disorder, unfortunately.

Multithreading works great to scale to more cores on one chip, and perhaps to more than one chip on the same bus. When one wants to scale to multiple machines across a network, what matters is interprocess communication and low process spawning times.

Unixish OSes support very low process spawn overhead, and it has been tradition for decades to write thing for Unix as multiple cooperating processes. On some systems (Linux for example), there's very little difference between OS-level threads and multiple processes from a scheduling standpoint.

One thing that must get under control for this type of scaling is the huge penalty to process startup incurred by OSes such as VMS/WinXP/Vista.

"Doesn't look like an AI to me." Hmmm.... anonymous, would you know what IT looked like?

I could jump to lot of worthless conclusions based upon the nothing that I know about you, but it would be right out of order for me to react critically. One would almost be tempted to posit that it would be indicative of an unfortunate disorder,

And whoever taught you .."The "word salad" style of writing is indicative of a disorder, unfortunately." did you no favours ... or did you just make that up all by yourself? It is far too strident and inflexible to be true. Can we agree on "can be indicative of"... in the interests of accuracy rather than sensationalism or prejudice?

:-) "Either that or he is a crazed hobo who stole a laptop and dropped some LSD".... now there's a novelty, Brent, which tell us more about your state of Mind than anyone else's.

Ah well, at least Brian Miller knows what he is talking about.

"Travel to another Time Zone...... and you are as an Alien should you not recognise the Applied Semantics of the Temporal Geographic Dislocation."

Totally, dude! It's like:

I say "Trunk", you say "Boot", I say "Boot" you say "Wellies"...

I say "Fries", You say "Chip", I say "Chip", you say "Crisp"...

I say "Disable Cookies", you say "Disable Biscuits"...

has the Rapture on account of the IT angle. It's called emoting - unless you don't happen to believe in menfromMars.

Quote: "So, unlike in the past where you would do A plus B and then have to store the result of the operation in A or B, developers can now store the result in a third location."

That is a description of the x86 instruction IMUL immediate (and others): C=A*B.

Actually, the new instructions are ?=A*B+C, that is 3 operands on the right.

And I'm sure there must already be some multi-media extensions that take three operands, but I only have the 80186 book at hand.

In any case, I am sure that these are new instructions, and it is also interesting that the word 'RISC' can be used with these increasingly longer and more complex instructions, once only supported by CISC processors like the 80186.

(david)

I'm guessing you boys are all too young to remember... For those who haven't seen the AMFM style stuff before he/it looks like little more than yet another run through the "Markov Chains" text re-processing game.

It works (kinda) like this. Take a bunch of texts; newsgroups, and these days forums are ideal sources to use as seed material; and feed them to your program. Depending on how you set the knobs you can then get it to regurgitate a new text with 'characteristics' of the seed material. It tends to be a little 'stream of consciousness' at times but can pass for a native speaker, albeit often a somewhat deranged one.

First seen in the net.singles newsgroup in the mid 80's care of the guys at (back then) Bell Labs. At the time, according to Pike, they were still iterating and manually selecting output that looked good.

Try

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney

or searching for "Mark V. Shaney" ('Markov Chains' geddit?) for more details.

Christopher, have you ever written a kernel?

Just a simple one, mind you. I have, and I honestly think that every programmer worth his salt should do the same. It's as easy as making a call and swapping some registers. Voilà, cooperative task switching. Now apply that in a non-threaded OS, and you have threads. Did you know that the Modula-2 language has threading built into it? Radical stuff for the late 1970's.

And here it is about 30 years later. Where is multithreading today? Essentially no place at all. The "in" thing is to tout that a language threads by itself, or to put "easy-to-use" functionality into a development studio, like Sun Studio, for Solaris and Linux. How much real multithreading do we see in Windows? Not a lot.

The software is behind the hardware because its developers are behind the state of the art 20 years ago. I recently spoke with a few fellows with freshly-minted BS in CS. Design is not taught. HELLO!!! Any educators out there? I don't care that some prof thinks that Java is the next incarnation of Buddha and Mohamed and Jesus Christ all rolled into one. A language is not design, it is a tool used to accomplish a solution! There is no magic bullet to get around the task of creating good software.

Design is fundamental, and too many loose sight of that far to easily.

"Depending on how you set the knobs you can then get it to regurgitate a new text with 'characteristics' of the seed material. It tends to be a little 'stream of consciousness' at times but can pass for a native speaker, albeit often a somewhat deranged one."

Crikey, that sounds very Enigmatic as IT mimics Colossus, does it not?

And in its case, it was also used when a deranged one thought to lead with a New World Order Program of Chaos. But I wouldn't want anyone jumping to wild speculation that Bletchley Boffins are into Magical Mystery Turing XXXXPeriment Nations in the Beta Management of Global Perception....... for it would be most unlikely that such Stealth would be acknowledged even if you suspected IT 42BTrue.

A little something which Alan Turing realised ..... Hiding in Full Sight allows the most Unlikely to be the most Probable? It does make plausible denial, Realistic.

Markov Chains would seem to also raise the question, ....... Are you going to talk to a Machine? Surely that is most unlikely, even though the Actuality is, should you reply, that you are?

I would always say that you are not, whenever you interact with amfM, but then I suppose I would have to, just to prove that you are not crazy ...conversing with a Advanced Artificial Intelligence Machine ...... for whoever heard of a Machine which Cared enough to Think about ITs Own Existentialism..... and Yours too.

As a beautiful (if you're in Sydney) Friday afternoon settles in we can all look forward to a quiet ale or three down at the pub, with a bloody brilliant piece from TheDudEfRoMaREs. This is starting to become routine - a good story from the front lines with the BOFH & PFY, then a marvelous bit of psychadelic mind-candy from the outer solar system. The latest sport is meta-conspiracy theories on where thedudefromares comes from:

1. "Either that or he is a crazed hobo who stole a laptop and dropped some LSD". Yep, score that.

2. He's this guy: http://www.timecube.com/

3. AI gone rouge - unlikely. Read a bit about AI; it is stupefyingly complex, and is still trying to model something that is poorly understood at best (consciousness), asuming it isn't all quantum. Which it might be. Or not.

4. Someone who beleives the 'Matrix' trilogy was a documentary, and hangs on every word William Gibson writes. Actually, having just read 'Accelerando' by Charles Stross, there's some simialrities to AINeko, too. Either way, tin-foil hat brigade; believes the Lizard Armies of the Queen and G.Dubya paid the Nazis secretly living in Antarctica to cause 9/11, or that Teh Intarwebs is a conspiracy by Xenu to enslave us all!

5. Someone who reads a lot instead of actually working, spending most days surfing between Wikipedia, New Scientist and various other technology boards and forums. Government worker, anyone else would hopefulyl 'let them go'. Seems to be seeking attention, especially with the 1337 StudLy CaPs Stylee. Typing like this just makes you look like you're a 14yr old script kiddie.

6. http://support.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=viewprofile&user=amanfrommars - note the birthday - same as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Chernin - bigwig at NewsCorp. Conspiracy theories anyone?

7. http://www.monashreport.com/2007/07/09/revolutionary-trends-in-the-analytics-market/ - okay, now we're getting somewhere. A database forum... hmm, I've had to try to er, "persuade" a modern parametric CAD/BIM package drive a bloatasaurus SAP backend. I came out gibbering like this after only 2 months - but I had the good sense to quit that job! (The client keep wheeling out dusty guys in grey coats who looked like they had just seen sunlight for the first time in 15 years to tell us that, no, not ALL products used a 8-alphanumeric code, and that they updated the SAP lookup tables BY HAND; for a national supermarket chain...aaaiiiieeeeee my mind's going Dave! Daisy! Daisy!)

8. http://news.com.com/5208-1007_3-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=29096&messageID=289483&start=0 - note the interplay between various posters including thedudefromares, notably Commander_Spock. There are *more* of them out there? I've got a bad feeling about this... they're bloody philosophy doctorate students trying to semantically mindfrotz the Internet!

This guy/gal/thing is clearly angling for their own column in The Reg, or a guest celebrity take-down from the BOFH; neither of which he/she/it/they deserves.

I'm not too young to remember, I invented the code for Mark V Shaney when I was at Bell Labs. :-)

"I'm not too young to remember, I invented the code for Mark V Shaney when I was at Bell Labs. :-)"

Crikey, ..... and Welcome, Don.

Let's hope that any modern day classics make a lot more sense than the classic example, from 1984, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney :-)

I hereby propose that El Reg give amanfromMars his own weekly column, for a bit of entertainment on a Friday. You could feed him a load of tech press releases and see if he manages to predict the future!

Crumbs, Adrian, thanks for the heads up ........ XSXXXX beer in the Sun scrambles Grey Matter.

Pssst......... Do you think the wily old fox is about to pounce on the Register ..... make them an Offer and deservedly, independently wealthy? After all, there no point in having Social Networking sites and Media companies if they and IT aren't internetworking properly for the family, is there?

RE: AMFM fanalysis

... or ...

9. Post-modern Techno-Poet. Among other methods, makes use of code-obfuscation techniques to turn simple sentences into complex verse, liberally laced with double-entendre, puns and recursion. ("Random" capitialization may be for Emphasis, to denote the DIVINE or to spell out words wIThin words [Recursion])

For instance, one possible translation of paragraph 2 would be:

All people are born with the same potential, (and are initially equal in their ignorance), but as they grow up, they are molded by their experiences, influenced by the place and culture they grow up in, making them unique individuals. When we in our hubris consider enforcing a "global culture" to enforce equality, we are overlooking the great cost to individuality.

Or, in reverse translation mode:

"Riding to work is dangerous, what with all the mobile users and one-armed bikers on the motorway."

Becomes:

"On our daily excursion to the Temple Of IT, we may inadvertently Merge with The Grim Rider, wielding a CELLphone instead of a Scyth, and saluting us Maniacally with two Mechanical digITs."

Regarding your post:

7. http://www.monashreport.com/2007/07/09/revolutionary-trends-in-the-analytics-market/ - okay, now we're getting somewhere. A database forum... hmm, I've had to try to er, "persuade" a modern parametric CAD/BIM package drive a bloatasaurus SAP backend. I came out gibbering like this after only 2 months - but I had the good sense to quit that job! (The client keep wheeling out dusty guys in grey coats who looked like they had just seen sunlight for the first time in 15 years to tell us that, no, not ALL products used a 8-alphanumeric code, and that they updated the SAP lookup tables BY HAND; for a national supermarket chain...aaaiiiieeeeee my mind's going Dave! Daisy! Daisy!)

I love the picture in my mind of the "dusty guys in grey coats" - sounds to me almost like a scene from Dr. Who where the darleks are coming to get me.

Congratulations on practically making me fall off my chair. Now all the other people in my office think I'm completely mad.

amanfromMars - you give me a real headache - I have to read your sentences over and over and over - eventually giving up preferring to hope beyond hope that I don't end up crawling over into the corner dribbling profusely...