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On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:30:18 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> Um... wasn't parallel processing supposed to be "the next big thing" 20
> years ago?
Welcome to the true world of technology. Innovation rarely happens, most
of the things hailed as innovation tend to be reimplementations of older
ideas on faster hardware.
Thin client or fat client? Look at the history, and you'll see that
we've just gone in circles. The new thing is "cloud computing", which to
me seems to be a reimplementation of previous thin client technologies,
but instead of connecting to one system, you're connecting to several and
an application could be on any of them (the load distribution stuff is
something that looks pretty new to me, so there may be an actual
innovation there).
Jim
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Warp wrote:
> You should understand marketing speech. Everything is new when the
> market decides it's new.
Well, parallel processing *did* take off 20 years ago. Except that each
process served one transaction. :-) (Think Google, Amazon, etc.)
> I laughed some years ago when they introduced a really revolutionary and
> innovative new concept: Dumb terminals. Of course the marketing speech didn't
> say that dumb terminals have existed for something like 30 years
30? What's a card punch other than a dumb terminal? :-) Dumb terminals have
been around *way* longer than 30 years. Dumb *graphics* terminals 30 years
ago, perhaps. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Understanding the structure of the universe
via religion is like understanding the
structure of computers via Tron.
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> Welcome to the true world of technology. Innovation rarely happens, most
> of the things hailed as innovation tend to be reimplementations of older
> ideas on faster hardware.
>
> Thin client or fat client? Look at the history, and you'll see that
> we've just gone in circles.
Functional programming? That'd be based on the lambda calculus then,
which predates computer hardware just like the Turing machine that most
current programming languages are based on. The FP guys are getting all
excited because FP makes it inherantly easiER to write multithreaded
code, but... FP languages have been around for decades, and never gone
anywhere. (Hell, when Prolog was invented, people thought that HAL was
just around the corner!)
Oh, and self-programming computers? Unlikely ever to happen. :-P
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:54:30 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>
>> Welcome to the true world of technology. Innovation rarely happens,
>> most of the things hailed as innovation tend to be reimplementations of
>> older ideas on faster hardware.
>>
>> Thin client or fat client? Look at the history, and you'll see that
>> we've just gone in circles.
>
> Functional programming? That'd be based on the lambda calculus then,
> which predates computer hardware just like the Turing machine that most
> current programming languages are based on. The FP guys are getting all
> excited because FP makes it inherantly easiER to write multithreaded
> code, but... FP languages have been around for decades, and never gone
> anywhere. (Hell, when Prolog was invented, people thought that HAL was
> just around the corner!)
>
> Oh, and self-programming computers? Unlikely ever to happen. :-P
You'll note that I said "rarely", not "never". :-P
Jim
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Darren New escreveu:
> Warp wrote:
>> I laughed some years ago when they introduced a really revolutionary
>> and
>> innovative new concept: Dumb terminals. Of course the marketing speech
>> didn't
>> say that dumb terminals have existed for something like 30 years
>
> 30? What's a card punch other than a dumb terminal? :-) Dumb terminals
> have been around *way* longer than 30 years. Dumb *graphics* terminals
> 30 years ago, perhaps. :-)
BTW, there are some crazy gaming companies around pushing for
centralized rendering for games: you render the games in your servers
and then push the graphics and sounds onto users' screens, this way
actually subdisizing the hardware and making it irrelevant so that users
can play in any event. I wonder about the latency and fail whales...
--
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9
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nemesis wrote:
> BTW, there are some crazy gaming companies around pushing for
> centralized rendering for games:
I saw that. It was likely a scam.
Now, maybe in an arcade setting or something, where you can run fiber to a
bunch of machines, but then why not just have multiple VDUs on one graphics
card?
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Understanding the structure of the universe
via religion is like understanding the
structure of computers via Tron.
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Orchid XP v8 escreveu:
> FP languages have been around for decades, and never gone
> anywhere.
Never had a chance in a heavily imperative mindset built around
sequential Turing machines.
But now multicore processors got true parallel processing into an
everyday reality for millions of desktop PCs. An oportunity is open for
FPLs to show the value of abstracting away and reducing the use of
side-effects in order to achieve easy parallelism through out-of-order
evaluation as well as doing away with locks in STM...
--
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9
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nemesis wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 escreveu:
>> FP languages have been around for decades, and never gone anywhere.
>
> Never had a chance in a heavily imperative mindset built around
> sequential Turing machines.
I don't think it was the mindset as much as it was the hardware.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Understanding the structure of the universe
via religion is like understanding the
structure of computers via Tron.
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>>> FP languages have been around for decades, and never gone anywhere.
>>
>> Never had a chance in a heavily imperative mindset built around
>> sequential Turing machines.
>
> I don't think it was the mindset as much as it was the hardware.
Indeed. A Turning machine is a *machine*. It's readily obvious how you'd
implement it, or something resembling it.
The Lambda calculus isn't a machine. It's a vague mathematical
abstraction. It's not at all obvious how you'd use it in the real world.
It's a language, not a machine for running a language.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Indeed. A Turning machine is a *machine*. It's readily obvious how you'd implement
it, or something resembling it.
Kind of vice versa, really.
> It's a language, not a machine for running a language.
Well, you could imagine a machine to do it. Just hard to figure out how
you'd build such a thing.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Understanding the structure of the universe
via religion is like understanding the
structure of computers via Tron.
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