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http://tinyurl.com/mepn4j
it has started already."
Um... wasn't parallel processing supposed to be "the next big thing" 20
years ago?
The long and short of it is, it's much harder to write non-sequential
software. (At least, using current techniques.) And then there's the
"minor problem" of memory bandwidth...
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> "Parallel programming is the next big thing for the world of computing ???
> it has started already."
> Um... wasn't parallel processing supposed to be "the next big thing" 20
> years ago?
You should understand marketing speech. Everything is new when the
market decides it's new.
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 (and fallen
mostly out of use by about the mid-90's).
--
- Warp
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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 (and fallen
> mostly out of use by about the mid-90's).
Ah yes, and that's the other thing. Computer technology seems to
progress in cycles.
Once upon a time, everybody used dumb terminals connected to a socking
great mainframe in the center. This was considered the ultimate way forward.
Then people decided that it was better to have powerful computers on
individual people's desks, so that the cost of the hardware could be
spread out as PCs are purchased one at a time, rather than having to
spend on one huge mainframe, all at once.
And then everybody started getting excited about "thin clients". Have
one central server that runs all the software; you only have to install
and configure it once. Then you give everybody cheap-arse PCs and let
them access the software remotely using VNC / HTTP / whatever.
In other words, dumb terminals.
I suspect what it comes down to is that both thin client and thick
client approaches have advantages, so the market will forever oscilate
between the two, continually deciding that whichever approach is
currently unpopular is the "new" and "revolutionary" one that everybody
should adopt, seeing its advantages and forgetting its disadvantages.
Until the cycle repeats.
Also... that was fairly poor sentence structure. :-/
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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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