Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

[Singha]

aha finally! a compiler guru...rarest of the rare jedi....wielders of the mythical 4 feet long jasmine katana fashioned by master craftsmen in kyoto ...long have I searched for that breed after giving up on it in late 90s.
* I still retain my yellowed copy of the dragon book for old times sake ... "believers" will know it for what it is.

[Raja Bose]

Actually one of those DEC Alpha injineers* is a good friend of mine (the fella is older than my dad ) - will ask him about for confirmation of the inside story on amd64 (in fact he was the source of the above assertion).

DEC is another company which used to the talk of the town in its heydays and the place to be in. And just like a lot of its compatriots it fell by the wayside, forgotten. History is a cruel teacher. The only two from that generation which soldiered on without suffering near death experiences are probably ChipZ and Mickey.

*Reminds me of an anecdote of involving him and DEC. This particular abdul is from up north (US border paar) and his 1st GHQ (decades before I was born) was this SDRE Gujju female living nearby. Apparently one day when our man visited his GHQ's home to take her out on a date, he found the father sitting in the living room, wearing a dirty kurta pyjama, scratching his jewels. Our man respectfully greets the old man and for a moment there is an awkward silence while they wait. Suddenly the old gujju pipes up and sternly asks, "What do you do for a living young man??". Our man puffs up his chest and proudly tells him, "I have a pee-chaddi from UBC and I work for DEC." (clearly demonstrating his upper hand in all matters). The old Gujju squints his eyes and thinks for a while. And then snarls he, "DEC?? You work for a company?? You don't have your own business?!@#@$#%$". While our man is reeling from the verbal assault, the old man continues, "I am sorry but my daughter cannot marry someone who works for somebody else. You may leave now.". And that was the last time the future DEC Alpha injineer ever saw his 1st love. In fact after that he winged it to the far east where worked for DEC for over a decade before, returning to massa where he was immediately moved in ChipZ after the breakup. ChipZ made him millions thru all sorts of stock grants and splits so now our man now lives next to one of Larry Page's homes in Palo Alto (down the road from the Mahdi's last earthly abode) and buys every iToy the day it is released.

[Vayutuvan]

RB and anjanullahs pliss to avoid RB-vina fireworks redux. Narayana narayana.

[Raja Bose]

^^^No worries there - I know Anujan-ullah IRL. Sorry to burst your betting pool.

[Anujan]

DEC might have died. But people who were in Digital went on to do great things!

A couple of them were Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat went on to build Mapreduce, Google File system (which has led to multibillion dollar industry based on Hadoop -- open source implementation of Mapreduce*), Bigtable and Spanner -- all of which has influenced comparable implementations in companies like FaceKitab. The exodus from Digital built the infrastructure of companies like Chacha, Takla co and Facekitab. It is amazing how much of the internet infrastructure we take for granted was built by DEC alums! Must have been a uber-geek-engineer types place to work for in its heydays.

Here is a nice profile of the two: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... -parc/all/ Digital engineers live on!

*One unintentional contribution was that abduls now put "Big Data" in their linked in profiles. After "Could Computing" and "Web 2.0", "Big Data" is on its way to become the most overused industry buzzword

[Singha]

The dcu ..digital employees credit union has also rendered yeoman service over the years to h1 mujahideen looking for unsecured loans to buy their first car in the usa based on just a existing member intro and payslip. Its still there.

During the great exodus of 2001 some mujahideen withdrawing back to tora bora left their cars at the airport with not even a courtesy call back to dcu about this abandonment.

[member_20292]

in ChipZ after the breakup. ChipZ made him millions thru all sorts of stock grants and splits so now our man now lives next to one of Larry Page's homes in Palo Alto (down the road from the Mahdi's last earthly abode) and buys every iToy the day it is released.

ChipZilla I believe is the main competitor to Advanced MD ?

[Suraj]

Anujanullah: you ended up interning in Yech Pee ? Many moons ago at desi madrassa, there was a talk by a Chipzilla IA-64 guy, who of course spoke great things about it (this was the late 1990s) . Yours truly was somewhere in the front benches asleep, but was struck by the fact that a) it would entail recompilation and b) writing for it would be hard. One of us (don't recall if it was me - I was sleeping, remember) asked him that, and and he brushed it aside as nanhas asking irrelevant kweschuns. I don't know if you were there then, but if you were, you might have run away screaming from the HP Itanium group

Singha: Dragon book is one of those must haves in a hardware/compiler guy's library. Still have mine too, though for grad level work there were others, like Muchnick.

[Singha]

Muchnik came up after i took vrs from the fauj. There as one by holub with a entire implementation to generating assembly code iirc. Must be out of print now.
Such books and the richard stevens books are hard to find these days..mostly mediocre books rule the roost probably oriented to job oriented skillset since most revered founder has proclaimed that most engg grads here are unemployable in his most revered trenches and need six months of boot camp.

[Anujan]

Yes interned at ech-pee during the last meet up we had still remember the Audi you drove, blue I vaguely remember.


Singha-ji: maybe you will find these modern computer science books to upgrade your skill set?

[Suraj]

Stevens is a fantastic reference for basic networking. Trivia: he and Dale Steyn lived in the same town in RSA

For real hardcore CS giri, one must read all volumes of TAOCP. I can't claim that - I had a nosebleed part of the way into the first volume I read

Anujanullah: Indeed it was Will get in touch with you soon - have been traveling and sidetracked by personal matters.

[member_20292]

Same thing happened with my montblanc. Someone borrowed it and conveniently lost it.

The best hack though is to place a montblanc rollerball refill inside a pilot Body. You have a $300 writing experience in $20 or so. Most websites ask you to use a G2 plastic body, I use a pilot pen with a heavier metal body but forget the model name.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/ ... azing-pen/

I have tried a wide variety of pens, and somehow, none come close to the old Reynolds 040 045 series.

Good thickness ...works well.

[ArmenT]

Stevens is a fantastic reference for basic networking. Trivia: he and Dale Steyn lived in the same town in RSA

For real hardcore CS giri, one must read all volumes of TAOCP. I can't claim that - I had a nosebleed part of the way into the first volume I read

Stevens was the man when it came to networking, both for understanding architecture and protocols, as well as for the programming side of things.

I think Bill Gates once said that if you have read TAOCP and understood it all, I have a job waiting for you. Third volume was the most useful to me, followed by first one.

By the way, I'll be giving a presentation in a month or so, a practical demonstration to implement a small interpreter in another language, for the local <programming language group>. I already banged out the code and have a working interpreter, so now for powerpoint-giri and it'll be ready to go

[Raja Bose]

All those gyaani abduls are formerly from DEC's system research center/WRL in Palo Alto. Luckily for them unlike the denizens of PARC, their talents did not go unappreciated/unpaid for. That building is right next to the downtown Palo Alto Caltrain station and now takla's A9 lives there. PARC is now a shell of its former self - even the Valley does not care for one of its pioneering institutions. Everybody is off running after the next Fb/Teetar/Instagram.

TAOCP is like The Brief History of Time. Everybody has it on their shelves and everybody claims they are gonna get down to reading it real soon.

[Singha]

^ true that. there is also a queueing theory text by leonard kleinrock that similarly graces many a shelf for show only - I wanted to keep it for show but lost it at some point. henessey & patterson comp architecture both the basic and advanced books are superb too...and not as imcomprehensible as TAOCP for mere mortals...useful to clear self-doubts and establish street cred as a high level munna

but all these books are > 10 yrs old.

can anyone list the good books in comp sci that got published in say the last 10 yrs

[Suraj]

TAOCP isn't just >10 years old. The first volume dates back from the 1960s, and is still very much relevant. H&P is pretty good, and they do a good job of keeping abreast with recent hardware design paradigms, some of which entailed collaboration with some folks I work with on an almost daily basis.

[Raja Bose]

H&P, Cormen-Rivest, Data Structures and Algos (by the dragon gang) are all staple text books. I doubt TAOCP was ever meant as a textbook except for Knuth's chosen jedis. I doubt anybody cashed Knuth's checks for finding errors.

Suraj mian, are you in the valley? Were you there in the BRF meet in 2010 (or was it 2011)?

[Suraj]

RB: Nope, I do live in the bay area, but last attended BRF meets in the mid/late 2000s in my pre-mod days; have met others here, including ramana. I assume you were in more recent meetings ? I also met Anujan around then along with a mutual friend of ours, outside of BR; back then I didn't know Anujan was Anujan, and he didn't know I was me

Wow, I didn't know DEC WRL was on University Ave in Palo Alto. I got the address off McFarling's branch pred paper and checked the building on street view - it's a Sunglass Hut now

TAOCP is a great book on fundamentals. It's just too profound to be easily teachable from - almost like a religious book that happened to be about CS. H&P, Dragon kitab etc are all more like the Resnick and Halliday of CS.

[Raja Bose]

The site of Shockley's lab in Mountain View is now Baraka Halal market!

[suryag]

conphused now taocp = ?

[chilarai]

I doubt TAOCP was ever meant as a textbook except for Knuth's chosen jedis. I doubt anybody cashed Knuth's checks for finding errors.

In one of the interviews of Knuth i read, apparently some guy in germany ( or some other european country ) regularly cashes the cheques .. seems he got quite a few of them.

Btw do folks here program in haskell ?

[Sriman]

conphused now taocp = ?

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html

[Raja Bose]

I doubt TAOCP was ever meant as a textbook except for Knuth's chosen jedis. I doubt anybody cashed Knuth's checks for finding errors.

In one of the interviews of Knuth i read, apparently some guy in germany ( or some other european country ) regularly cashes the cheques .. seems he got quite a few of them.

That's surprising coz I would think everybody would keep the cheques as a souvenir and not cash it.

[chilarai]

actually i was wrong . someone from california is cashing it regularly but the frankfurt guy has 1000$ worth

Question: You have been writing checks to people
who point out errors in your books. I have never
heard of anyone cashing these checks. Do you know
how much money you would be out of, if everyone
suddenly cashed the checks?
Knuth: There’s one man who lives near Frankfurt
who would probably have more than $1,000
if he cashed all the checks I’ve sent him. There’s a
man in Los Gatos, California, whom I’ve never met,
who cashes a check for $2.56 about once a month,
and that’s been going on for some years now.
Altogether I’ve written more than 2,000 checks
over the years, and the average amount exceeds
$8.00 per check. Even if everybody cashed their
checks, it would still be more than worth it to me
to know that my books are getting better.

from http://www.ams.org/notices/200203/fea-knuth.pdf

----
“ Intelligence: Finding an error in a Knuth text. Stupidity: Cashing that $2.56 check you got. ”

—Seen in a Slashdot signature, quoted by Edward O'Connor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check

[Singha]

Just to write books with the clarity of purpose and content like the h&p requires jedi level mind in organization and workflow not just knowledge. Very few seats in the high council and all seem occupied by luminaries and retired yodas now into their 60s and over.

Ae there new young anakin skywalker type talents who write books as well? Or are they too busy creating the next fb?

[ramana]

Suraj mian, are you in the valley? Were you there in the BRF meet in 2010 (or was it 2011)?

That wasn't a true BRF meet. it was a get together at my home to talk about things.

Suraj, Sorry had lost your phone contact by then(four phones later!)

Anujan, You had just moved to the area (one or two days only) and RB was not sure if you wanted to meet and greet!!!

And speaking of DEC don't forget the role of the PDP series(-8, 11 etc) in training the jedis.

[Raja Bose]

No no I was referring to the one in Milpitas (that was 2010 for sure now I remember) when D-mullah came visiting - whoever came up with the idea of the cup and executed on it was brilliant. I recall that was also when Chacha's turn-by-turn nav piously told me to turn left into a freeway exit ramp while it was raining - luckily I could make out headlights of an oncoming truck.

Computer History Museum in Mountain View has a working PDP-1 on display right in the main lobby. Recently donated 2 artifacts to them which has been on their curator's wishlist for a while - hope they get displayed one day.

------

For the watch wearing crowd here, afford this

Meanwhile Sir Ive is going to unveil dramatic changes to the iOS Calendar and Mail apps! Now you can use them to check up on your appointments and check e-mail on the go! Revolutionary!

[Anujan]

Most of my pee-chaddi was funded by money from ecch-pee and a significant part of my talib days time was spent working on the compiler. The compiler itself was brilliant and many madrassas use it for teaching and research, but the compiler + processor sucked!! The processor had all of the bad things expected and none of the good things promised.

I have my own technical and non technical opinion of what happened and will rant about it sometime. probably boring for bulk of this audience.

OTOH this post is for hating on Gartner.

Nobody had seen the chip, benchmarked its performance or power or had any real world data on how it performed in the field and gartner would write these research reports "Itanium will sell meeelllionn treellion beellion dollars!!!!". All these reports would unfailingly be forwarded to the unwashed abduls in the trenches. Having gulped the koolaid, we say "wah wah" and head back to work.

Look at this chart. If this isn't downhill skiing, I don't know what is.


This is the source of my rage about people who circulate "analyst reports"

[Suraj]

I haven't used Trimaran, but worked on IMPACT and SUIF in madrassa. Still work in the field, but from an influence compiler development and optimization perspective as opposed to being in the compiler group itself.

No reference to Itanic, sorry, Itanium, can be complete without Ashlee Vance's masterpiece in The Register:
Itanium sales fall $13.4bn shy of $14bn forecast

Another good article on the background:
Who sank Itanic

I didn't know Shockley's lab is the site of Baraka market now. Those who know his history would enjoy the sense of irony - if he came back to life and saw that, he'd probably attain samadhi all over again from the shock (no pun intended).

[Vayutuvan]

You are referring to his enthu for Eugenics?

[Raja Bose]

^^^One pious cannot live with another more-pious.

[Vayutuvan]

By the way, Knuth is very christian too, but not in a bad way. He is a very gentle and soft-spoken person is what I heard.

[Prasad]

Lol Itanium. Anujanullah, there are still quite a few people roaming around royally pissed about that clusterfu(k.

[ramana]

RB, Now I remember. Dileep had come on a visit and we all met. Yes the cup was good!

Anujan, Have you watched evolution of Silicon Valley episodes on PBS channel 9 afew months back?

[Mort Walker]

------

For the watch wearing crowd here, afford this

The Symmetricom package has its applications where space and weight is tight such as satellites, missiles, and aircraft. In addition to that it offers a magnitde better clock accuracy than an OCXO. This works out to 1 part in 10^10 accuracy when you need precise timing for mijjle flight (I know from experience) and for imaging a small object. I've bought stuff from Symmetricom before.

[Raja Bose]

^^^I knew Mortullah would be a potential customer!

[Mort Walker]

I buy expensive clocks. Paid $25K for one that had an OCXO reference. Some of my friends at NIST tried to sell me a laser timing device once.

[Raja Bose]

^^^Do these friends know you time your flights?

----

Looks like Nexus 7 sales numbers are not high as previously thought given they are now sold in pretty much all countries now. And someone tell me HTH is FruitCo showing a 65% YoY growth when they actually dropped 20% YoY in terms of marketshare (i.e. its shipments grew much slower than the market itself)?!#$%@# Its almost like anal-e-cysts will spin stats in any manner which shows FruitCo in a positive light. The Mahdi has really done a number on them. Sammy's numbers show how one can sell turds if one has a great sales and distribution channel. I guess that fundamental fact has not changed since the computer industry started and every VC hammers that into every nanha startup founder. Mickey needs to step up and sell its Surface warez in more countries - the current roll-out is too slow to make a big impact and might be related to Mickey trying to learn how to be its own ODM. Takla seems to be temporarily stymied while the cheap chipanda club (CCC) seems to be ruling the roost.


Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/01/idc- ... e-q1-2013/

[Mort Walker]

Saying HW is commoditized doesn't mean its easy to do - thinking so is a fallacy. It just means one's profit margins on selling HW onlee are much lower and that is pretty much true for everybody except FruitCo. Just do a calculation on how many units of phones Sammy needs to sell to make a million $ in profits (with capital costs amortized) vs someone selling units of SW like Mickey and you will get the answer. Value addition which results in customers ponying up more cash rarely happens at the HW level now hence, RoI is lower. Is mango abdul customer going to pay me $20.- more if my GPU does extra FLOPS or will he pay me more if my camera software can automatically push pics to Instagram? Add to this the high capital cost of doing HW R&D, development, tooling and not to mention the risk and its evident why being HW-onlee is not sustainable for anybody in the CE business. This is another reason why VCs in the valley shy away from investing in HW startups - too high risk, too low RoI.

This is what I was trying to get at earlier. We are already at a point where H/W development is done with S/W tools as we have FPGA, SoCs, NoCs, and S/W defined radio. However, the big differentiation in devices will not come from S/W alone, but by fundamental breakthroughs in the basic sciences. If we see materials with high dielectric constant, super capacitors, batteries with nano-tube structure that see a huge increase the surface area per volume - we'll have the next breakthrough for CE devices. This stuff is going on in the defense and aerospace industries, but it's economies of scale. There simply aren't enough of these devices to make it to the CE world yet. This is where unkil makes great strides by participating in the space race, the cold war or any wars!

[Singha]

^IBM continues to grab the headlines in basic physics this time with a movie made out of atoms..a stick figure skating on a surfboard.
swedes are selling a water based fuel cell for CE http://www.kth.se/en/forskning/pa-djupe ... n-1.381551