Slashdot Mirror

Here and here.

Here and here.

AMD have already hinted at multi-core cpu's that "look" like single core cpu's and i suspect that will be a killer feature that will rocket AMD back into the lead again, consider a cpu that has the power of 4 cpu's while allowing a single threaded application to take full advantage of it... that would be dam impressive

Implementing even this limited form of VRAM caching required facing up to the reality that VRAM won't always be able to hold cached copies of all of the backing stores. Worse, the amount of VRAM varies depending on the video card being used. To simplify the Quartz implementation, Jaguar needed some way to make VRAM look "limitless" even though it clearly isn't.

This problem has been solved before. The virtual memory system in a modern OS makes RAM look "limitless." Well, okay, it makes it appears as if it is 232 or 264 bits long, for 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs, respectively. But that's almost certainly larger than the amount of physical RAM installed (particularly in the 64-bit case).

Although the details are different, this is essentially what Jaguar did with VRAM. To the operating system, VRAM looks a lot larger than it actually is. Quartz handles the details of swapping data in and out of VRAM as needed, using a replacement algorithm tuned to keep the most frequently used pieces of data in VRAM as much as possible.

How can you support a company that sells its own DDR pads, yet sues a company making wireless controllers?

Actually, they're selling them for 98.75 cents through the Zune Marketplace. 98.75 is technically lower than 99.

Microsoft's Zune Marketplace will sell individual songs for 79 points, which translates to 99 (98.75) cents.

Yeah. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery huh? So Microsoft really likes Arlo Rose and Perry Clarke? Lest we forget that the Apple Widget Dashboard is a "total rip-off" of Konfabulator. Though there are dissenting views on this.

I used to feel bad for the Konfabulator team until they were bought by Yahoo- they finally got the attention they deserved.

It's not actually mine, it's my mum's (although I did pay for it, so I suppose it is mine in a way...), and since she lives a long way away, it's hard to just pull it apart at a whim :).

However, this, this and this would suggest it's not as nice as earlier ones - particularly since you have to go in through the front, past the screen, to get at the guts of the newer models.

And I still think they could have used a (replaceable) PCIe-slotted video card without changing the iMac form factor much...

I can see this as a possibility.

Interesting timing. Pricing article just popped up over at GameSpot and Ars Technice confirming the $60 pricing of PS3 games for pre-order at the Sony Style store.

There's also some speculation that MS will be reducing game prices for the 360 to offer a competitive edge over the PS3.

From the article:

"Paul Otellini, Intel's president and CEO, kicked off this season's IDF by coining the phrase "It's what's inside that counts", and spoke about why processing power matters again"

But then this in another article covering the same event:

"Otellini briefly responded to concerns that Intel's first quad-core packages are simply "glued-together" dual-core processors while AMD is working on a native, single-die quad-core chip. "So what?," said Otellini, adding, "The public doesn't care what's inside a processor."

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/09/26/intel_core_2_qua d_announcement/

In yet another article in Ars Technica we read that Intel is look to an 80 core chip. I like the Core 2 Duo a lot but I hope the Intel megahertz fixation isn't just going to become a "core" fixation .

  http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060926-7840 .html

Robert Moses built a lot of bridges and roads around New york hoping to relieve congestion but it had the counter-intuitive effect of creating more traffic. I hope all the increases in size and power of computers doesnt just bring more garbage. With all the legacy code bloat, and things like video cards that get hot as toasters and power supplies that waste energy (the Google thing) I think computing could use a few reductions instead of increases. In that regard it's nice to see the Core 2 Duo bring down the wattage.

Smart voice recognition? Anyone tried it lately? Anyone tried to write pretty standard letters with it? Desastrous.

Arstechnica tried it lately, and found it peachy. Perhaps you should try it too.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/speaking.ars

i was willing to cough up the $600 for your console because i really was looking forward to the new final fantasy games. i was willing to shell out for more controllers so that friends and i could play together. but between your (frankly ridiculous) up front costs and discovering that the new gran turismo is going to nickle and dime me to death (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060921-780 2.html) after already having raped my wallet (see above article), i think i'm going to give this round a miss --- i can't bring myself to buy an xbox (one of the more joyful moments this week has been discovering that i have prior art that will sink a number of ms patent applications) and there's really nothing on the wii that excites me. even just saying "wii" turns me off (i don't care what nintendo's marketing execs think: there's no way to make "i'm going to play with my wii" sound wholesome). it's a pity: i'd like to play, but you've priced yourself well beyond what i'm willing to pay.

In the aftermath of a problem-filled primary election caused by defective Diebold voting machines in Maryland, Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. insists that the state should return to paper ballots in order to ensure that the upcoming November election is valid and unhindered by technological failures. ... Maryland's Board of Elections administrator Linda H. Lamone characterized the Governor's suggestion as "crazy." Lamone telling the Washington Post she will "work around the clock" to resolve deficiencies and put pressure on Diebold in an effort to make the machines usable.

Diebold's voting technology has received a steady litany of bad press for the past two years. The state of California banned Diebold's products, and then sued the company for machine-related fraud in 2004. Security researchers have illuminated severe flaws in both the hardware and software, recently revealing that Diebold machines are vulnerable to self-propagating viruses capable of altering the outcome of a vote. Diebold voting technology drew sharp criticism in Alaska last month, where elections were also disrupted by the machines. ... Condemning Lamone and the General Assembly for "[setting] dangerous precedents that .. threaten the integrity of November's elections," Baltimore election director Gene Raynor chose to resign earlier this week rather than condone the use the faulty machines. Given the numerous election difficulties attributed to Diebold's products by members of both major political parties in several states, it is clear that these problems represent a pattern rather than a series of isolated incidents. The company continues to claim that its products function adequately when properly configured. In light of the significant risks associated with using Diebold products, Governor Ehrlich's concerns seem more than valid. With critical elections on the horizon, other states should reevaluate their electronic voting plans and consider using paper until they can acquire machines from a reliable vendor.

Now that you mention it, Apple's FairPlay has trouble not only in France, but in other E.U. countries as well: see, for example, this story about FairPlay in Scandinavia.

How the hell did this get modded 'redundant'?

Anyway, go here.

It looks like they may be doing just that.

It's nice to see this initiative, but it's going to be pretty worthless without digital support.

There's the FCC mandate (although the date keeps fluctuating) to replace all over-the-air signals with digital only. I don't know if this covers cable providers as well, but most of them are following suit regardless. Without support for ATSC, the digital format that replaces the analog NTSC here in the US, this device won't receive any signal, encrypted or not, within the next few years. Same thing with DVB support for those of you in Europe and the rest of the world.

That could potentially be fixed with a softmod up the road, though. The big killer is the lack of CableCard support. CableCard is the technology used so that you can plug an encrypted digital broadcast signal via cable into your home media device. Today these mostly just plug directly into CableCard-enabled TV's, but the idea is that you could plug it into a DVR as well. While technically you could receive ATSC transmissions that are unecrypted, do you think any cable provider in their right mind is going to leave their content unencrypted when the possibility exists to scramble it?

Unfortunately, you need to be "certified" by CableLabs in order to use CableCard - and recent trends indicate that there's a snowball's chance in hell of anybody running a linux platform getting buyoff from CableLabs.

And in case you felt like getting creative and plugging this into the firewire output of your cable company's receiver, think again - yet another FCC mandate requires them to disable these ports after July 2007.

Upshot: Without some major tweaking, the only thing this will be good for in a couple years is possibly getting over-the-air signals, and even then only if they provide decoding for ATSC. If not, it's a doorstop.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060920-7790 .html states:

"However, the Xbox 360 does not have an HDMI output, meaning that it will not be possible to view HD DVDs in 1080p. The highest resolution of both Blu-ray and HD DVD requires HDMI by design."

"Microsoft did not announce availability or pricing in the United States, but we expect a similar launch date in the US and a price of $199. This would make Microsoft's premium Xbox 360 package a $598 affair if you roll the HD DVD drive in, coming in at the same price as the top-of-the-line PS3 ($599)."

I'd say the HDMI output is easily worth $1 so I'm waiting for the PS3 to enjoy on my new Tru 1080p Mitsubishi 52" DLP HDTV :: http://www.mitsubishi-tv.com/j/i/18326/TelevisionD etails.html?cid=380

Peace!

The Pirate Party not only failed to score the 4 percent required for a seat in Sweden's Parliament, but appears to have missed the 1 percent that would have afforded the party state assistance with printing ballots and funding staff in the next election.

Yet again showing that those of us who care about this stuff are in an extreme minority. We delude ourselves every time we believe that our concerns are going to be taken up by the general populace. It makes me wonder. Will the Wii actually be successful, or is that just a small group of vocal fanboys? Will HP actually get anything other than a slap on the wrist? What about Net Neutrality? Oops.

I guess the question is, is it better to be in the minority that sees it coming, or in the majority that is blissfully unaware?

New chip to thwart DVD piracy is a long way off and faces considerable challenges

Under the agreement, YouTube users will have full access to videos from Warner artists.

This is in contrast to how Universal is handling the situation.

Ars has an item today about how this won't be the case for the Wii. I think it will also be region free, although I can't remember where I read that.

DCI is a full spectrum political consulting, PR, and telemarketing firm; while some of the work it has done certainly has been "astroturfing", a lot of it seems to be routine political consulting and marketing.

They sure are. As they put it themselves "Whatever the issue, whatever the target--elected officials, regulators or public opinion--you need reliable third party allies to advocate your cause. We can help you recruit credible coalition partners and engage them for maximum impact. It's what we do best." The services they provide include:

• Astroturfing (see links in story)
• Push-polling
• Telemarketing (as you mentioned)
• Grass-tops (their term, not mine, but I can guess)
• Fake blog and video production (see links in story)
• Journo-Lobbyists
• Spamming (see previous links)
• Junk mail (dead tree spam) (their original line)
• and employment services

What they don't seem to do is anything legitimate, or at least non-slimy. Got any examples you'd like to share?

--MarkusQ

as some have already pointed out lawsuits are against people selling pirate m$ software.

i was just reading on ars how with vista VLK versions of vista will have their own version of product activation... since a whole bunch of the pirating of XP was leaked VLK program keys... I wonder what this means?

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006 /9/12/5269

if anyone is interested....

Your evidence for this being what, exactly ? Tea leaves ?

NeXT didn't even *support* multiple processors until Apple's OS X reinvention, whereas NT was designed from the ground up with multi-CPU machines in mind and has supported them since its first release in 1993.

Not that NT can't handle them, but that OS X does a better job of dividing tasks sanely to more fully utilize the chips and from what I've heard is much more capable once you move past four.

Heard from who ? Apple zealots who think OS X isn't dog-slow to use and multitasks well because Expose still works when the machine is under load ?

As good old Ars describes, the multiprocessor support in OS X before 10.4 was only average, to say the least.

It's doubtful that the multiprocessor capabilities in OS X at the moment are even as mature as it was in Windows 2000.

That being the case, as multiple CPUs/cores become more commonplace, I think OS X will end up with the reputation of being the faster of the two.

Well, it's got a lot of work to do before it's faster than anything except earlier versions of OS X.

Speaking of which, I just read this article at ArsTechnica. Looks like one of the key features of buying a TiVo, at least for me, has been removed.

Bye-bye TivoToGo!

For bi-directional support you're talking about CableCARD 2.0, which Tivo Series 3 will support. Here's more of Ars' coverage of CableCARD 2.0

For bi-directional support you're talking about CableCARD 2.0, which Tivo Series 3 will support. Here's more of Ars' coverage of CableCARD 2.0

Is there anyway to ask a judge to throw out cases when the RIAA's lawsuits become unbelievably ridiculous?

I mean, who is going to chase after these lawsuits and counter sue? What repurcussions can a counter suit have on the RIAA? And, if they do successfully counter sue, how much does that slow down the RIAA?

When will this end? Could there be an epic counter suit that would make the RIAA stop with law suits?

I don't know whwther you have read this review and benchmark comparison of the Old and the new PowerMac/MacPro.

See, on one side we have the 3 years old Dual Single-Core G5 with 2,5GHz. On the other side we have the newest Dual DualCore Xeon with 2,66GHz. That is 3 years advance in technology and manufactoring process (even a geberation generation difference, the G5 is 90nm and the Xeon is 65nm), double the cores cores and a neglectable 1% advantage in Clock. Yet the speed advanatge barely scratches 50% in it's best tests, most of the time the advantage is only between 20% and 30%. And for benovelence they haven't even mentioned Performance/Watt. For comparison, this is somewhat like comparing a dual Pentium to a single i486 and only barely beating it. So why is that? It's the architecture. Those are the things the average user can see when he looks carefully.
The other thing is all the quircs and limitations (to name only a few: real mode, A20 gate, no execute flage etc, awkward paging mechanism, crufted, "baroque" instruction set) that an engineer has to work around to get it to work. That isn't immediately noticable to the end user. But what the end user notices is more glitches and unpredictable problems which are the results of not so clean designs. I'm only guessing, but I sort of have the impression that the well documented, but unheard of before problems with instability and and random shutdowns etc. are a result design not being so clean and managable as before.

"A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order.
Blogs often provide commentary or news and information on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries."

An Internet forum is a facility on the World Wide Web for holding discussions, or the web application software used to provide the facility. Web-based forums, which date from around 1995, perform a similar function as the dial-up bulletin boards and Internet newsgroups that were numerous in the 1980s and 1990s. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology, computer games, and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of different topics [1].

Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, discussion forums, discussion groups, bulletin boards (but see also dial-up bulletin boards), fora[2] (the Latin plural) or simply forums.

A little googling turns up the following info:

There's a really good Ars Technica article that breaks down the prices for the xbox360 and ps3.

xbox360: Xenon CPU $106, ATI GPU $141, total mfg cost $525 (the high end model)
ps3: Cell CPU $230, nVidia GPU $70, total mfg cost $800 (remember the debate? I think $350 for the BD-ROM is too high.)

Wii: there's no information out there on what components will cost. But the total price tag will be $250, and an educated guess says that only at most $125 of that can be the Broadway CPU and ATI GPU. Maybe Nintendo will sell the Wii as a loss leader, but they've never done that before.

Now, I'm going to use these specs which are unreliable, but speculation is all there is right now:

Total System Memory: 88 Mb RAM, 512 Mb Flash
Broadway CPU: 729 MHz
ATI GPU: 243 MHz

So the GPU probably has 32 Mb RAM or less. What this means is that it's equivalent to an ATI Radeon 9700, which fetches $30-$50 on eBay.

That leaves at most $95 for the CPU, and as little as $75. That's not a lot of money for a dual-core CPU. IBM's not going to make much money on Wii sales, and neither is Nintendo. On the other hand, Nintendo will probably make a killing when the economies of scale kick in and the prices come down. I could see the GPU dropping to $10, the CPU dropping to $50, etc.

Since this is just my speculating, I'd expect someone will reply with more info.

Does anyone know if the DRM/encryption in BD/HD has been cracked yet? Is DVD Jon working hard on this

http://nanocrew.net/2006/01/08/deaacscom/

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060116-5989 .html

After running beta 2 on my production box for +/- two months now I can say yes it is stable. It even runs Civ4 better than XP. I expect the same from RC1 when I install it later today.

The real issue is has M$ the fixed the things that needed fixing. For instance the "annoy-the-user-to-death" security model and the undocumented symlink thing that even as administrator gives you a unfixable security warning when you try to make changes or follow the link.

On arstechnica, in the thread http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f /174096756/m/298008880831?r=298008880831 segphault is your hero... (post Posted September 06, 2006 13:16)

http://www.cixar.com/~segphault/tmp/drafts/img/ -> contains PNG screenshots.

Bad idea. Motherboards the support both AGP and PCIe slots end up underperforming in both. I had an article explaining why, but I can't seem to find it. This one does a good job of explaining how PCIe works may mention AGP PCIe combo mobos. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/pc ie.ars

Artstechnica has a review (1 Sep 2006) on this. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060901-7646 .html

Don't really blame Microsoft (shock, horror - did I say that!) for what IMHO is stupidity, blame the Patent system.

Caution reading the patent will only give you a headache.

Why does everybody have the allusion that Apple releases small updates?

Bundling this cable makes no sense.

Yep, I entirely agree; bundling an HDMI cable makes no sense as those with HDMI capable screens either already have the appropriate cable or will have no problem dropping extra cash for it. Your average Joe shouldn't be forced to pay the extra $5 (Sony cost) to include it in the box when they're going to hook it up to their crummy NTSC set.

Take that one step further though... Bundling Blu-ray with the PS3 makes no sense either. This is a game machine that we are talking about. Anyone who wants Blu-ray won't mind dropping extra cash for that either.

Blu-ray certainly isn't going to make the game experience better enough to justify the cost of including it in the system over a standard DVD player. I bet that it's a lot more than a $5. Some people speculate that it's closer to $150 being passed on to the consumer.

Now that makes me not even care about paying extra for a silly HDMI cable.

In-game crime => in-game punishment by in-game law enforcement.

The problem with this thought is that there is no meaningful punishment for this crime in game. Apparently, the black market value of those isk is something like $170k - more than enough to open a few accounts. They may be able to get this guy by banning his account - and therefore his access to the money... but just as the real world has scams to help "theives" generate high amounts of revenue, they also have laundering techniques to hide that money. I suspect that the next time this happens, the money would just be shunted around to a few shill accounts (and that's assuming that it didn't happen in this case). Then, when the main account is shut down... the player just shifts over to backup account A and gets away with it.

The reason this laundering would work is that there needs to be no account details tieing the two accounts together. He could get a family member to register the second account for example, and in the system they'd be two completely seperate people (or even a guild-member accomplice). The only connection would be software related (such as IP Address), and I'm not sure that's enough evidence to ban an account (what if he had uninvolved roommates and they were all playing behind NAT?).

In all honesty, I don't think that anything can or should happen. It's all a game and the theft was within the rules of the game so the victims have to deal. It's just a setback in the game like any other. Granted, it's a massive setback... but it all comes down to risk vs. reward. These guys risked a lot in the hopes of gaining major rewards, and in this case, they lost.

Apple is apparently developing a multithreaded version of OpenGL. Does that count?

When was the last time your XP box crashed? Mine hasn't in months.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051230-5871 .html

Did you notice the green words "bullying witnesses into perjury" it was a link to the relevant article.

I would normally dismiss the Register, but Arstechnica has a similar story from June:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060609-7028 .html

"This sounds like bullshit to me" gets rated INSIGHTFUL??? Man, Slashdot has gone down the tubes.

Anyway, it's not bullshit. ArsTechnica had this article about it in June. The idea is to grab a 12-millisecond sample of audio and transform it into a 32-bit "fingerprint" using an algorithm on the client side, then send the fingerprint to a server that compares it against a database of fingerprints from known television audio. From that they can determine what program you are listening to. If the mike picks up 12ms of you talking on the phone, the generated fingerprint simply won't match anything.

This is far from eavesdropping in the 1984 sense, but is a hell of a POC for it, and it does amount to sensing information about you that you might or might not want someone to know. The folks at Google seem to have worked hard to come up with a technique that they don't think will bother people. I see this as a classic case of very smart geeks thinking up a very clever technical solution without seeing the forest for the trees.

Technology more acurately described here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060609-7028 .html

It's striking how different this proposal sounds to how the Mac startup chime works.

Scoble dances around giving a full description, and it sounds like things are still being fleshed out, but the clear implication is that the plan here is to play some kind of music at either the login screen or (presumably if auto-login is turned on) when the current user gets to a working desktop. Implicitly, this is going to take a while, so they encouraging you to go for a walk and come back when the chime plays.

With a Mac, on the other hand, you get a polyphonic startup chime right when the machine is turned on. This fills a couple of functions, including welcoming the user to start working on the computer soon, and proving that the machine passed POST tests. Next the hardware is initialized, and system services start loading. Up until 10.3/Panther, the user would be presented with a series of frequently-vaguely-understood system services one by one as they loaded, but with 10.4/Tiger, the whole startup process was re-thought and replaced with launchd , which in turn made it possible to boot the system boot much faster (don't load unneeded services, delay non-critical ones until later, run as many of the others in parallel, etc) so that now you just have a sham progress bar as the system boots as fast as possible up to the login screen or desktop.

What is the better use of resources: figuring out how to make the system boot so fast that you don't have time to get that cup of coffee, or hiring 70s rockers to compose a melody to play once you've finished brewing another pot? Hmm.....

And before you say that Microsoft doesn't have as much control over the hardware, that's baloney. Be didn't have control over the hardware, and they had a hell of a lot less resources than Microsoft, and yet they still figured out how to get BeOS to cold boot to a functional desktop in 15 seconds or so. No OS shipping today that I'm aware of -- Windows, OSX, Linux, etc -- manages to do that as well as BeOS did a decade ago, and the hardware has only gotten better in that time. Why not? It's obviously doable. Figuring out how to get computers to do that again would be wonderful.

After posting this I skipped over to Ars and what should I see but an article on free legal Mech Commander games. Even Mechcom 2 which was from the Redmond beast! It'll be a good weekend. Seriously more companies need to be taking note. Give your loyal fans something atleast.

Actually, I just thought about looking at Wikipedia, and I've found the information my other reply to my post was lacking. Seriously, Wikipedia is way better at finding information than Google now. Anyway... straight from Sony's website
Playstation 1 shipping figures
Playstation 2 shipping figures

Now, before anybody get's excited, I know that consoles shipped != consoles sold, but they are a pretty good indicator of sales anyway. And if you go to a store right now, you'll see both PS2s and 360s sitting on store shelves.

Sony started shipping PS2 on March 6, 2000. 10 months into the PS2 life span, they had shipped 6.4 million units. Microsft has shipped just north of 5 million consoles 10 months into their console life.

At the same time, Sony kept on shipping Playstation 1s. The number of console shipped from march 31 2000 to december 31rst 2000 went from 71.2 to 79.61. This means they actually shipped (thus more or less sold, face it, no stores like to keep too much unsold consoles in stock), 8.41 million consoles, while the shipped only 6.4 million PS2s.

After a year, Sony has shipped 10 million PS2 (interresting, since this is the figure Microsoft is shooting at for their first year with the 360). And shipped 9.31 million more PS1. So it nearly took a year for the PS2 to outsell the PS1.

Now, fast forward a couple of years to the 360's launch. On June 30th, Sony had shipped roughly 6.22 million consoles since the 360 came out. 21 days later, Microsoft accounced they had shipped 5 millions.

So where does that leave us. Yes, the 360 is selling less. Keep in mind that it's (360's retail at 400CAN$ and 500CAN$) between 3.1 and 3.8 times more costly than a PS2(129CAN$) and 4 to 5 times the price of a GameCube(100CAN$). On the other end, PS2(299US$) was 3 times PS1's price when it launched(99US$).

So all of this considered, I think Microsoft is doing a pretty good job.