Slashdot Mirror

Except that the IBM paper was published first.

The september 2003 IBM paper linked above was published before the oreily.com link I gave, yes. However the oreily.com link I gave was merely third party documentation.

The "make-like" XML StartupItems system that the documentation describes, however, has been present in Mac OS X at least since the first available public beta, and the trivial improvement from there of launching nondependent system services in parallel has been present since OS X 10.2 in 2002 somewheres.

Number one, this is old, since the iPod firmware that did this, iPod Updater 2004-11-15, was released a month ago.

Number two, Apple is under no obligation to support ANYONE else's DRM, period.

Unprotected AAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3, etc., files from ANY source will play fine on ANY iPod. This is ONLY about Real reverse engineering FairPlay (more power to them) in order to allow their "Harmony" DRM-protected files to play on an iPod. They succeeded. And Apple is under NO obligation of any kind to allow it to continue. The iPod DOES NOT SUPPORT DRM files from ANY other source, so this isn't a matter of "doing what you want with something you bought". If you can personally get Real's songs to play on your iPod again, go for it. If Real re-engineers it such that the files work, great. Further, you are not forced to update the firmware. What's that? You'll eventually have to to get new features and bug fixes? Tough. Don't like it? Don't buy another iPod.

Apple is doing nothing legally, technically, ethically, morally or wrong.

Additionally, Apple does play with other vendors, such as Audible.com content, and Macrovision will have to be a FairPlay licensor to support some of its product claims (though more details aren't known), and Motorola phones will run a version of iTunes and support Apple's protected music. Apple can do whatever it wishes with its own products, and consumers may decide whether or not they would like to purchase them.

A while ago I found a site that had a USB 2.0 Thumb Drive set of benchmarks (Here, if interested) and on page 8 he does something VERY interesting - creates a RAID 0 array out of two similar drives and shows us the benchmarks of that array.

Scaled in almost linear fashion - not a surprise but definitely thought provoking. The problem is that he did it under OSX, not Windows. Crap, I was envisioning a six drive stripe under WindowsXP Pro but it doesn't seem to be cooperating and none of the people I have asked have figured out a way to change an external drive into a 'dynamic drive', which of course is the first step towards creating the stripe set / RAID array.

Anyone have any ideas about making this work?
I think a 6G RAID 0 array (six one gig USB 2.0 drives in a stripe) with zero latency and 50MB/s throughput would be a very cool toy indeed - if only I could get it to work.

A while ago I found a site that had a USB 2.0 Thumb Drive set of benchmarks (Here, if interested) and on page 8 he does something VERY interesting - creates a RAID 0 array out of two similar drives and shows us the benchmarks of that array.

Scaled in almost linear fashion - not a surprise but definitely thought provoking. The problem is that he did it under OSX, not Windows. Crap, I was envisioning a six drive stripe under WindowsXP Pro but it doesn't seem to be cooperating and none of the people I have asked have figured out a way to change an external drive into a 'dynamic drive', which of course is the first step towards creating the stripe set / RAID array.

Anyone have any ideas about making this work?
I think a 6G RAID 0 array (six one gig USB 2.0 drives in a stripe) with zero latency and 50MB/s throughput would be a very cool toy indeed - if only I could get it to work.

In the classic Finder, there is no abstraction between the actual file system and the view of the file system presented on screen. A folder is either open or closed. If it is open, it is represented on screen in its own window. The size, position, and viewing options for an open folder's window are always remembered, and are unrelated to the size, position, and viewing options of parent, sibling, or child folders. There is a clear, cohesive paradigm at work. An open folder is a window; a window is an open folder.

Here's some info:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium -1.ars/3
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/ppro_editorial.html

Here's some info:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium -1.ars/3
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/ppro_editorial.html

There's a great article at Arstechnica entitled Malware: what it is and how to prevent it . Good read, if not a little on the basic side. However, it did suggest a great anti-spyware app called SpywareBlaster which is seems effective at preventing spyware in the first place..

That, couple with the Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy, and I've had no problems whatsoever.

P.S. And it helps if you don't visit porn sites and download wares too ;^)

There's a great article at Arstechnica entitled Malware: what it is and how to prevent it . Good read, if not a little on the basic side. However, it did suggest a great anti-spyware app called SpywareBlaster which is seems effective at preventing spyware in the first place..

That, couple with the Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy, and I've had no problems whatsoever.

P.S. And it helps if you don't visit porn sites and download wares too ;^)

• Bookmarks, settings, and extensions will follow you wherever you go
• If the drive has a locking mechanism, can probably be used on insecure machines (I haven't actually tried this)

• Having to remember the USB stick :-)
• Slow startup
• Bookmark insertion, moving, deleting, etc. lag at some points (1-2 seconds on my disk)
• Waiting time after shutting down the applications before you can unplug the drive safely
• "Manual" installation of plug-ins and extensions

• Get a USB drive which is fast for writing small files
• To be able to create shortcuts to the drive, ensure that the drive letter doesn't change by going to Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management, right-click the drive and select "Change drive letter and paths", and set to "Z"
• It is possible to enable disk cache on another disk, but you have to purge it manually

GStreamer will one day be the world's greatest media Swiss-army-knife...

It just needs a few more revisions to get there.

The best overview of GSTreamer I have seen was by Arstechnica as part of their GNOME review. It's about halfway down the page here

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/gnome2.4.ars/4

Tapeworm

Minibosses surely like. They have a (very good) band that only plays video game classics. Check out their demos!

Thanks for Ars Technica for the info, from the Ars holiday gift guide

That's actually a fine question. When I have 6 Word windows open, I have no good way to get from window 1 to 5 without hitting cmd~ four times. Still, that solution is better, if not as elegant. It's the sort of question that might be better posted at the Ars Mac Forum, which is the best of its kind I've found. If you're having Mac troubles, it's probably the place you're most likely to find help.

You may want to check out Ars' Mac forum, the Ach. I bought my PowerBook a few months ago, and the advice given there was indispensable. I was "truly stunned at just how nice, and helpful, people in the "Apple Community" tend to be."

You may want to check out Ars' Mac forum, the Ach. I bought my PowerBook a few months ago, and the advice given there was indispensable. I was "truly stunned at just how nice, and helpful, people in the "Apple Community" tend to be."

I'd just like to add on to this that the reason the Athlons and P-M's don't need Hyperthreading is that HT is essentially a latency hiding method to make up for the obscenely long Netburst pipeline. Basically, keeping the 30-stage pipeline full is difficult with a single thread, so allowing the processor to address multiple threads at the same time helps keep the pipeline full. I'd suggest reading Hannibal's excellent articles at Ars Technica if you wish to learn more on the subject.

Essentially, I've always felt that HT is more of a marketing gimmick than it is some new revolution in computing. While it might help performance some, AMD's upcoming dual core chips will do far more to help performance as it actually *is* a multiprocessor system rather than faking it like HT. Remember, K8 was designed with multicore in mind from the start, with Netburst, it's been hacked in.

You mean the "rumors" aren't officially "news" until they appear on /.? Forget what we've been reading since Febuary on http://www.anandtech.com, http://www.tomshardware.com, http://www.theinquirer.net, http://www.arstechnica.com, http://www.hardocp.com, http://www.aceshardware.com, and of course http://www.intel.com, it's not true until it appears on /. ...

PSSST!!! I've heard the rumor that Apple is planning on ditching Motorola's chips for IBM processors in their upcoming Macintoshes. Has anyone elseo heard about something called a "G5"? Some say it might also be 64 bit? Heavens-to-Betsy, let's post it to /.'s FP.

The good folks at Delicious Monster have the Delicious Library where you can use your iSight or other camera to scan your DVD library barcodes for ease of use. Quite pornographic.

Clickety

While I don't agree with the OP's need for PDA functionality, I do lament the apparent lack of inclusion of the promised "wake from sleep" functionality, when a nearby DS is detected. I've posted extensively at Ars on the subject, and done some fairly in-depth testinfg to confirm the lack of such a feature.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s= 50009562&f=39309975&m=828003377631

As I've said in that linked thread, the lack of this functionality really does remove some of the organic emerging micro-networks that originally seemed possible with the DS, and despite having bought 2 and being a staunch Nintendo supporter, I'm rather dissapointed with the lack of this feature. The link "confirming" this feature can still be found at the official Australian Nintendo DS site, though the US site is somewhat less informative . That site is linked in the above Ars Thread, but also follows directly:

http://www.nintendo.com.au/ds/system/index.php (see Point 8)

Moreover, and in response to the point about consoles only doing "one thing at a time," I'd point to my Xbox as a counter-example. While playing NBA2K5, for example, somone can easily see my online status and send me an invite for Halo 2. I didn't exactly expect this functionality in the DS, but I do think Nintendo implied something of it's ilk.

ps. signed up for an account from which to post, sorry about the Annonymous Coward posting, but I got tired of waiting for the mailer to do it's thing...

The Pentium started life as a 60, 66 and 90MHz chip. There was later a 75MHz chip (with 50MHz front end: usually with a 486-style chipset), but those are as slow as it goes.

Reference

I still use Netscape 4 on a couple of machines (NT4 fileservers). Last time I used Netscape 3.x was on a Windows 3.1 computer dialing in via SLIP! :)

Yup. See Ars Technica's article on the Pentium M for more details: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium -m.ars

noah

The FCC disagrees with you on your ability to choose what you do with that content - that's exactly what the broadcast flag is all about. Ars Technica has a good summary . The gist of it is that the FCC wants to regulate the devices used for viewing programming as well as the actual broadcasts. They argue that we won't get high quality digital content until they protect the interests of broadcasters and content owners. Your interests aren't so high on that list, I would guess.

Sounds like IBM is working on essentially the same thing

One really has to wonder how long intel is going to stick with the itanium after its dissapointing sales figures and a move like this from the software giant is sure to really hurt. Maybe they will eventually drop their itanium line in favour of a AMD type X86-64 instruction set like they are using in their new P4's and new Xeons.

This is actually an exciting opertunity for AMD since they can increase their margin in the sever and business arena where the big money is. They should seize this opportunity and start pushing their server lines.

Actually, bluetooth's physical bandwidth is only 721kb. It's amazing what google will tell you if you ask it.

http://www.mobileinfo.com/Bluetooth/FAQ.htm#t5
http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1086977875.html

There should be a -1 (Don't know jack shit) mod option. On the other hand, I'm glad you've mastered your buzzwords.

Your key mistake here is your use of the word "needs". The data I've seen indicates that the G5 draws an equivalent amount of power as comparable Intel and AMD systems. Also, the G5's in the x-servs are air cooled. I think they mostly liquid cool the dual 2.5 Ghz G5 just to keep the noise down.

How do you raise prices over insane? The linked article named Best Buy as one of the wost buys out there. They cited a typical example of a nice camera Best Buy was selling for 850 that could be had for $650 on line and wondered what kind of "service" they were getting for the extra $250. Oh yeah, that's right, you start charging your suckers 15% restocking fees and adopt other methods from businesses that have very thin profit margins.

In my experience, you can get rid of good customers with a quick glance, but the bad customers you can't drive away with an axe.

Where did you work retail, Taco Hell?

Why doesn't Best Buy try that? Probably because most of their customers are the bad kind.

No, it must have been McDonald's or some other place that might have a "bad customer". No customer is bad, ever. They might not have time to look things up, that's your job. Some might not have manners, oh well. One or two might go out of their way to make you miserable because they have no life, but that's retail and you put up with it. If you are good, you can deal with it all without making a scene and driving off people who just want an honest deal.

"...and he notes that the problem is largely with C/C++ and mostly because of the buffer overflow problems."

Although it's a neat effort to explain some engineering & physics to the avg case modder running XP & windowblinds (;-)) there's an initial nasty mistake:

The new wafers are then taken and doped appropriately for the type of transistors that will be made out of them. Doping amounts to depositing other elements into the space between silicon atoms. This is what causes silicon to be the "semiconductor" that it is. Transistors today are made from "CMOS" technology, or Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductors. Complementary means the interaction of "n" and "p" MOS

No, no... doping is about getting impurities inside the Si lattice substituting some of the Si atoms. The whole concept is: electron energy levels of a single atom becoming thick bands for hoards of electrons to fly within; if the next band is empty & close enough to the last full band you have an "intrinsic" semic. Doping the crystal means to get other atoms (P) into the lattice so that their electrons are weakly tied and readily bumped into the conduction band (@ room temp); or you plug greedy B into the lattice so that it grabs an e- all for itself leaving some other Si without and a roaming Hole inside the last full band...Leaving doping atoms wedged inside the lattice without participating to the whole electron/lattice exchange doesn't do anything good, perhaps it just deforms the reticle creating all sorts of defects & a useless brick of solid sand

It's very similar to the DK games, apart from the world domination screen (which i thought felt like the gutted remains of a completely different game that was duct-taped onto the island management part). For a good DK-styled game i found Startopia was a great deal more fun (and as a budget title it's a really good buy now). But you never know, they still might be able to patch EG into a great game, instead of a good one.

I find it odd that people cite the MPAA figures for lost revenue. These figures assume that all of this media would have been purchased had they not been "stolen." IANAAccountant but I think that their figures could be reduced by a factor of a hundred to get closer to the actual losses.

If only it were that simple! Cache sizes, prediction facilities, execution units, register count, etc. all play a significant part in CPU performance and to reduce this to an argument about who's pipeline is bigger ignores many of the important issues.

Pipeline length has some impact on performance and until recently Intel has been able to perform well by jacking up the clock speed. Sure it ate tons of power, and heated your room but it didn't really matter provided Intel's chips could perform as well as the AMD, IBM, Motorola, etc. competition. Think of a trip to the drag strip: if my 5.7L corvette runs the quarter mile in 12.5 seconds and your 1.6L civic does it in 13 seconds I still win the race. In a race to be the fastest you can't lean out the window and yell "You won, but I was almost as quick and I did it with 75% less motor!": you'll look like a fool. The performance crown is about being the fastest. period.

For the last 9 months or so Intels small-block Corvettes have not only been losing the races, they're getting beaten by Subarus that produce more power, get twice the gas mileage, and cost less.

You might want to read some of the ARS Technica articles that cover CPU design and illustrate some of the differences between the various architectures:

• Pentium 4 and the G4e
• The future of Prescot
• An Architectural overview of the worlds most famous desktop processor
• An introduction to pipelining

If only it were that simple! Cache sizes, prediction facilities, execution units, register count, etc. all play a significant part in CPU performance and to reduce this to an argument about who's pipeline is bigger ignores many of the important issues.

Pipeline length has some impact on performance and until recently Intel has been able to perform well by jacking up the clock speed. Sure it ate tons of power, and heated your room but it didn't really matter provided Intel's chips could perform as well as the AMD, IBM, Motorola, etc. competition. Think of a trip to the drag strip: if my 5.7L corvette runs the quarter mile in 12.5 seconds and your 1.6L civic does it in 13 seconds I still win the race. In a race to be the fastest you can't lean out the window and yell "You won, but I was almost as quick and I did it with 75% less motor!": you'll look like a fool. The performance crown is about being the fastest. period.

For the last 9 months or so Intels small-block Corvettes have not only been losing the races, they're getting beaten by Subarus that produce more power, get twice the gas mileage, and cost less.

You might want to read some of the ARS Technica articles that cover CPU design and illustrate some of the differences between the various architectures:

• Pentium 4 and the G4e
• The future of Prescot
• An Architectural overview of the worlds most famous desktop processor
• An introduction to pipelining

If only it were that simple! Cache sizes, prediction facilities, execution units, register count, etc. all play a significant part in CPU performance and to reduce this to an argument about who's pipeline is bigger ignores many of the important issues.

Pipeline length has some impact on performance and until recently Intel has been able to perform well by jacking up the clock speed. Sure it ate tons of power, and heated your room but it didn't really matter provided Intel's chips could perform as well as the AMD, IBM, Motorola, etc. competition. Think of a trip to the drag strip: if my 5.7L corvette runs the quarter mile in 12.5 seconds and your 1.6L civic does it in 13 seconds I still win the race. In a race to be the fastest you can't lean out the window and yell "You won, but I was almost as quick and I did it with 75% less motor!": you'll look like a fool. The performance crown is about being the fastest. period.

For the last 9 months or so Intels small-block Corvettes have not only been losing the races, they're getting beaten by Subarus that produce more power, get twice the gas mileage, and cost less.

You might want to read some of the ARS Technica articles that cover CPU design and illustrate some of the differences between the various architectures:

• Pentium 4 and the G4e
• The future of Prescot
• An Architectural overview of the worlds most famous desktop processor
• An introduction to pipelining

If only it were that simple! Cache sizes, prediction facilities, execution units, register count, etc. all play a significant part in CPU performance and to reduce this to an argument about who's pipeline is bigger ignores many of the important issues.

Pipeline length has some impact on performance and until recently Intel has been able to perform well by jacking up the clock speed. Sure it ate tons of power, and heated your room but it didn't really matter provided Intel's chips could perform as well as the AMD, IBM, Motorola, etc. competition. Think of a trip to the drag strip: if my 5.7L corvette runs the quarter mile in 12.5 seconds and your 1.6L civic does it in 13 seconds I still win the race. In a race to be the fastest you can't lean out the window and yell "You won, but I was almost as quick and I did it with 75% less motor!": you'll look like a fool. The performance crown is about being the fastest. period.

For the last 9 months or so Intels small-block Corvettes have not only been losing the races, they're getting beaten by Subarus that produce more power, get twice the gas mileage, and cost less.

You might want to read some of the ARS Technica articles that cover CPU design and illustrate some of the differences between the various architectures:

• Pentium 4 and the G4e
• The future of Prescot
• An Architectural overview of the worlds most famous desktop processor
• An introduction to pipelining

Anandtech
Ars Technica
BBC Science/Nature
BBC Technology
CNET News
Nature Science Update
Slashdot
Space.com
SpaceWire
Wired News

Yahoo! Wants to Whack Google in Mobile Searching

I tried their new search http://mobile.yahoo.com/search and it asploded my Samsung A500. The first time I loaded the page, the web browser closed. The second time, the phone rebooted! I have reset my phone several times, same results.

Then I read the page in a real browser, and they SMS you a link. That link worked in my phone.

I was going to say that I thought that was translation, not emulation, but it turns out I was precisely incorrect.

That's a big RAID Array...

I don't see a mass-migration to the power platform because Windows doesn't run on it. End of story. Then again, I don't think IBM's Power goal is to take over the desktop world.

IBM's real strength comes from their SOI and other chip-making technology, which they've cross-licensed with AMD -- but not Intel. The parent poster may want to read Hannibal's CPU articles at Ars Technica. They go into some of the history behind the architectures and chips.

So the way that the Cell processor works is that there is a pool of 16 or so of these (probably not completely identical) RISC or SIMD/VLIW cores on a single die. The system will do its processing by drawing resources from this pool on a task-specific basis. For instance, the audio processing subsystem will consist of a set of software routines that request cycles from the pool for the purpose of processing 3D audio. The 3D engine will similarly request cycles from the same pool for rendering, and similarly with the game AI system, etc. The different processing cores will probably be grouped together dynamically by software into "teams" in order to complete specific tasks (i.e. 3D rendering, audio, etc.). Each team's size will scale dynamically to fit its current workload by either acquiring new cores from the pool or releasing unneeded cores back to the pool for use by other processes.

article on H.264
http://www.guidetohometheater.com/news/062804apple /

According to a few articles, Microsoft is endorsing HD-DVD for the adoption of WMV9 codec

here
here
here
here
then again, Paul Thurrot is to Microsoft as Rush Limbaugh to The Republicans

YIKES!!!!

-------

Bush's cybersecurity czar quit, abruptly, because he was unhappy with the way things were going.

That's very disturbing to me. One day's notice? Frustrated?

Are we ready for an attack? I don't think so, especially if the current administration is unwilling to listen to their own cybersecurity czar. I know when Kerry takes office, he'll listen to his people.

How about "as long as I'm not hurting anyone then it's cool, right?" It isn't about profits. It's about control. The music industry is losing that control as instant publishing and person to person communications evolve. They are fit to be tied because they see themselves being removed from the equation. They've gouged artists and fans long enough. Nobody will be sorry to see them go.

For AMD CPUs, the only thing in common between the two cores will be the HyperTransport link to the rest of the system, and the link from the memory controllers to the system RAM.

For Intel CPUs, there's even less in common.

AFAIK, neither company's system includes the two cores sharing functional units ala HyperThreading.

Source

Check out the VeriChip FAQ. Also, the ars technica story has some great Bruce Schneier material on the Bush administration's idea for RFID passports.

Every PC has a small amount of writable NVRAM...it's where my CMOS settings are stored. If you look at the Linux kernel configuration, there's an option to allow writing to this area of memory.

However, it goes away if your CMOS battery dies. (I believe it's SRAM based.)

I suspect you're thinking of FLASH memory, which isn't as fast as SRAM, or, generally, even DRAM.

Here's a good overview on DRAM and SRAM, if you're interested.

Nah, you're thinking of something else. There have been numerous aborted attempts at creating a next generation Mac OS under a variety of strange code names like Pink, Taligent and Copland.

Rhapsody was the name of the OS [strategy] developed under the leadership of Gil Amelio, it was heavily based on OpenStep (moreso than OS X), hence it's cross platform capabilities. Apple also had a version of the Rhapsody frameworks that ran in NT, which they inherited from NeXT. At that stage, the name for Cocoa was YellowBox, and the Classic environment was called BlueBox IIRC. There was no equivalent to the Carbon frameworks in those early days, which was the subject of much debate.

Steve Jobs became Interim CEO after Amelio's departure in 1997 and killed the cross platform versions of Rhapsody along with the Mac 'clone' industry. About a year later Apple announced the name change from Rhapsody to Mac OS X. They released Mac OS X Server in 1999, followed a year later by the almost unrecognisable OS X Public Beta.

Check out these screenshots, which (in order from top to bottom) show the gradual progression from NeXTstep's multi-column Browser to Mac OS X 10.3's Finder*.

NeXTstep
Rhapsody
Mac OS X server 1.x
Panther

*yes, I skipped the aqua Finder.

OS X is hardly unresponsive, but its not as snappy as running a GUI that was designed for pentium 1 pressors on a 4 GHZ Pentium 4.