peter.scully

Comment Threads

• scentofviolets commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  The window in which an N-state logical base could be a reasonable contender was very small. It took a bit longer for designers to stop fiddling with word length and adopt the 8-bit byte. You can no doubt supply your own examples of technology lock-in. Waitaminute, you're sneaking in the assumption that trinary implementations are essentially no better than binary. Yeah, I'll grant you that the development 50 Hz vs 60 Hz networks demonstrates strong path dependencies -- because at the end of the day there are no strong reasons to prefer one over the other. And that's most definitely...
• fatal.error commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  "gets you 256 terabytes. Just loading that much data from disk at 1000Mbit/sec would take almost a month. " i did that last night, so no, it doesn't. Why would you load it at 1000Mb/sec? Of course my system is a distributed cluster, but HP just announced this http://rt.com/news/166680-hp-silicon-photonics-computer/...
• alan.braggins commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  "All pointers are the same" is a faulty assumption of many C programmers, not of C, just as "bytes are octets" is. (I've used a machine where it wasn't true, with char* being larger than int*; many programmers have had to deal with near and far pointers, though that's not standard C.) cf. "everything is a VAX", "everything is a Sun", "everything is an x86", "everything is a 32 bit machine" etc.. http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html C++ may be reducing the prevalence of this, as C++ programmers are generally aware that "pointer to function" and "pointer to member function" are not interchangeable....
• Nojay commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  One serious problem with trinary is that it doesn't scale downwards very well. The difference between a plus and a zero and a minus voltage signal is easy to determine when the voltages are significant but as voltage levels drop to reduce power dissipation and increase switching speeds the guard bands around the various levels get eaten away. The time required to swing a signal line from + through 0 to - or vice-versa is another problem to be dealt with, in classical binary circuitry the time to switch between the only two legal states remains almost constant in either...
• dmytryl commented on YAPC::NA 2014 keynote: Programming Perl in 2034
  One thing about decreasing costs and power consumption - if such a thing happens - is that the personal computers and such that cost the same will be able to pack more processing power than they do now, exactly the same as if Moore's law continued. What I suspect is going to happen, though, that once Moore's law - presently the cheapest way to add more computing power - dies out, the decrease in costs of computation (both the capital costs and the power costs) is going to hit rapidly diminishing returns. There's a certain feedback here - now that...