Slashdot Mirror

Johnath writes: "This just happens to be a great time to be a hardware junkie. For those interested in learning more about the metal under their PC's hood, Tom's Hardware has a great intro to PCB manufacturing, Ars Technica has recently written an architectural study of the P4, and ExtremeTech has a decent look at the South Bridge." The circuit board article is really good - explains it better than the textbooks I've seen.

A reader writes "Saintsong, our favorite manufacturer of tiny PC's (see here and here) is at it again. They've released the TX2 version of the Cappuccino PC everyone drooled over not to long ago. It's designed by Gingko corp., the same folks who designed the iMac. The new unit includes 2 Firewire ports and an additional 2 USB ports over it's predecessor, the Cappuccino GX1. Unfortunately it appears that Saintsong is only distributing it in kit form, so you'll have to supply your own socket 370 processor, RAM, hdd, etc. No prices are listed, but it's still a slick looking toy."

PeterP writes: "ARSTechnica has an interesting editorial today. It advocates altering the discussion of intellectual property laws to be one of structures, as opposed to rights. Kind of a breath of fresh air from the dogmatic, kneejerk debates this topic usually brings up. An interesting read, too." I second that. Definitely one to read and think about.

PeterP writes: "ARSTechnica has an interesting editorial today. It advocates altering the discussion of intellectual property laws to be one of structures, as opposed to rights. Kind of a breath of fresh air from the dogmatic, kneejerk debates this topic usually brings up. An interesting read, too." I second that. Definitely one to read and think about.

Wuhao writes: "Ars Technica managed to snag an interview with some of Square's 3D artists to discuss the Final Fantasy movie. It is filled with graphics jargon, but there's quite a few juicy bits that even I could understand."

Wuhao writes: "Ars Technica managed to snag an interview with some of Square's 3D artists to discuss the Final Fantasy movie. It is filled with graphics jargon, but there's quite a few juicy bits that even I could understand."

homerJAYsimpson writes: "This article is a great refernce of the differences in the architecture of the P4 and the G4. What is nice is that it is not a holy war of who is better but an explaination of why Intel made its choices and uses the G4 as a point of reference. It has just tons of info on uPs, useful for everyone." Not for the techie novice, but its a well written piece if you're reasonably technical and want to understand more about two of the most important chips on the market.

Qui-Gon writes: "Found an interesting article about the 'The Ultimate Limits of Computers' over at Ars Technica. This article is very heavy on the physics of computing, not for the faint-hearted." Somewhere between practical reality and sheer Gedankenexperiment, the exploration here keeps getting more relevant as shrinking die sizes and improving nanotech wear away at previously impassable barriers. The article is based on a paper discussing the absolute limits of computational power.

Qui-Gon writes: "Found an interesting article about the 'The Ultimate Limits of Computers' over at Ars Technica. This article is very heavy on the physics of computing, not for the faint-hearted." Somewhere between practical reality and sheer Gedankenexperiment, the exploration here keeps getting more relevant as shrinking die sizes and improving nanotech wear away at previously impassable barriers. The article is based on a paper discussing the absolute limits of computational power.

Michael Cook writes: "Ars Technica has just posted a follow up to the review of the original Espresso PC (Slashdotted here(1), and here(2)), a review of the new and much-improved Cappuccino PC! It finally has ethernet and now it's truly possible to have a server farm in a bread box!" This is a slightly off-the-wall review of this promising machine, considering (among other things) that the review unit was stolen, but it sure sounds like a worthy non-toy toy.

Michael Cook writes: "Ars Technica has just posted a follow up to the review of the original Espresso PC (Slashdotted here(1), and here(2)), a review of the new and much-improved Cappuccino PC! It finally has ethernet and now it's truly possible to have a server farm in a bread box!" This is a slightly off-the-wall review of this promising machine, considering (among other things) that the review unit was stolen, but it sure sounds like a worthy non-toy toy.

Michael Cook writes: "Ars Technica has just posted a follow up to the review of the original Espresso PC (Slashdotted here(1), and here(2)), a review of the new and much-improved Cappuccino PC! It finally has ethernet and now it's truly possible to have a server farm in a bread box!" This is a slightly off-the-wall review of this promising machine, considering (among other things) that the review unit was stolen, but it sure sounds like a worthy non-toy toy.

So, now that OS X has been out a few days and people have had a chance to put it though its paces, let's take a look at it. Upside.com wonders if the new OS was released half-baked. Ars Technica puts it through its paces with a very thorough review. O'Reilly plans to release tech books covering OS X, so if your bookshelf isn't full yet, you can add a few more. Certain major software projects are already being tried on OS X - look out Adobe. And finally, we know it's not April 1, but we thought the picture of OS X on a Visor was cute. Any other good links to reviews? Post them below.

ObligatoryUserName asks: "Recently, a gaggle of Amazon Honor System, and PayPal logos (or cheeky text equivalents) have been proliferating on a number of great, beloved and/or famous/infamous web sites. While still other sites are turning to membership programs. The advertising model seems to have failed (or is in the process of failing) and according to yesterday's great interview, micropayments aren't going to work out either. So, I was wondering, how can we save these sites? Is the major cost bandwidth? (Sites with bandwidth sponsors seem, so far, less likely to ask for micropayments.) Is most of the money going to the salaries of content creators? If some non-profit organization or the government (as per PBS) were to pay for bandwidth for exceptional/popular sites, how much would it help?" It's a decent question, and one that I keep bringing up because a workable solution has yet to present itself. Before, the chorus was micropayments (as the minor chord chimes in with the yet-to-be-tested Street Performer's Protocol). With micropayments in doubt, what other routes can sites follow for the funding they need to exist?

jmoo writes: "Ars Technica has an article on startup company looking to produce holographic storage for commercial sale. The company, InPhase, supposedly is backed by Lucent and is predicting storage densities of 300 gigabits per square inch." "Backed by Lucent" certainly sounds a lot less sketchy than the repeated but never confirmed claims of extremely dense storage using multi-layer CD-ROMs.

Kyobu writes: "Ars linked to Put a Dime in the Heavenly Jukebox, a proposal for making information free as in speech without preventing producers from receiving money, by charging ISPs based on the number of tagged files they transferred, and then transferring the charge to users in the aggregate. Although maybe not perfect, it's a pretty interesting idea, and well-argued." There's several really good points in here, and while it probably isn't going to say anything you haven't thought of (and in many cases, rejected long ago as impractical), it's worth your time. Something is going to have to change -- the question is, will it be better or worse.

SuperRob writes "Ars Technica posted a story called "Laws that Don't Suck", outlining the new Telemarketing laws enacted or amended for 2001. Be sure to find out what your rights are, if Telemarketers piss you off as much as they piss off me."

scout.finch writes: "John Siracusa has just written a review of the new Mac OS X Public Beta over on Ars Technica. His thorough and unflinching reviews of previous developer releases have been the most accurate source of information on Mac OS X thus far, and this installation is no exception."

scout.finch writes: "John Siracusa has just written a review of the new Mac OS X Public Beta over on Ars Technica. His thorough and unflinching reviews of previous developer releases have been the most accurate source of information on Mac OS X thus far, and this installation is no exception."

Bingo Foo asks: "Many moons ago, I saw an article on some pretty neato sounding PowerPC daughterboards made to work with Intel Linux. To this day, I have yet to see a review of them (Say it ain't so, Ars...), or even a reasonably detailed explanation of how the cross-compiling and job execution work. In a somewhat exhaustive Web search, I found more questions and speculation than answers. All of the specific applications mentioned are rendering and other 'dumb' SIMD processes. It's difficult to tell just how versatile these boards might be. Has anyone shelled out the $6k for one of these things and are they willing to share their experiences with the rest of the world? In particular, I wonder if this might come in handy for some Monte Carlo codes that we run where I work, where raw flops are more important than communication or memory, and the parallelism is MIMD."

"Just an explanation of the programming/compiling/execution process would be nice, and inquiries sent to the manufacturer have resulted in sales-type replies which weren't technically helpful."

beekman1 writes: "Stanford has up their first edition of Making the Macintosh. Where many articles deal with the political aspects of this period (Steve Jobs taking over, etc.) this one has the technical details like the evolution of the mouse from lab testing to production device. Link aquired from ArsTechnica"

jerkychew writes "Hannibal over at Ars Technica has written part 3 of his RAM guide,, this time focusing on the technical details of Rambus and DDR RAM. As always, a good (if compliacted)technical read. " If you're not scared of pin counts and parity, then this is a cool article.

jerkychew writes "Hannibal over at Ars Technica has written part 3 of his RAM guide,, this time focusing on the technical details of Rambus and DDR RAM. As always, a good (if compliacted)technical read. " If you're not scared of pin counts and parity, then this is a cool article.

stevarooski writes "I saw this over at Ars. Apparently a judge ruled in a lawsuit about the alleged illegal transfer of the domain name 'sex.com' that URLs do not qualify as property, at least under current law. They are instead a "designation for a service -- akin to a phone number." I dont know if I buy that. . .People very much treat domain names as property--buying and selling them on the web all the time. (Examples from Ebay and Yahoo.)"

G. Waters writes: "Ars Technica writes that "3DLabs and Real Time Visualization have teamed up to design an accelerator that accelerates both voxels and polygons in the same scene." A link to the announcement can be found here. Perhaps voxels will become more mainstream with similar developments." I'm still waiting for the cards with accelerated bezier patches, but this is cool too. *grin*

jregel writes: "Ars Technica has a link to an old Newsweek article that was written when Steve Jobs was about to unveil the NeXT computer. It's an interesting read, with some amusing pictures of industry characters including Scott McNealy and Bill Gates. Although most of us have probably never had the opportunity to play with a NeXT computer or use Nextstep, both the hardware and software were revolutionary and represent one of the biggest missed opportunities in the industry." Then again, how much of this is parallel to the MacOS X stuff? Maybe the photographs will convince people once and for all that I don't look like Steve Jobs.

[Dilbert] writes "I saw this first on ArsTechnica. The machine is a 486SX, fully SVGA compatible, 16 meg of ram, 2 16550A serial ports, hda = 16 meg flash, hdb = 340 meg IBM microdrive. Oh yeah, also built-in 10T ethernet, a floppy header, and parallel port. Granted, most of the ports are brought off the main unit via a 68-pin scsi-style cable to a little port board, but the meat of the machine is still tiny. The manufacturer is Tiqit Computers." Don't lose it in your couch ;)

GeekLife.com writes "Ars Technica has posted another of their indepth reviews, this time of the Honda Insight (that gas-electric hybrid). Not just a normal Honda Insight, though, this one's been tricked up with LCD screens replacing the side mirrors, and a *portable windmill* that can recharge the battery. Not the prettiest of devices, but with gas prices continuing up, it's definitely starting to look a bit more attractive."

Segfault 11 writes: "Ars Technica has Part 1 of their RAM series, which discusses the way that static and dynamic RAM work, in addition to covering memory modules. To get started, click here to learn more."

Segfault 11 writes: "Ars Technica has Part 1 of their RAM series, which discusses the way that static and dynamic RAM work, in addition to covering memory modules. To get started, click here to learn more."

levendis writes: "Ars Technica has an excellent article up on the future of the x86 architecture. It touches on new idea from Transmeta, Intel, HP's Dynamo, and a bunch of other technology that keeps the 20+ year old architecture alive and kicking." As always, the Ars take on this (specifically, Hannibal's) is lucid and thoughtful, and grounded in some interesting history.

levendis writes: "Ars Technica has an excellent article up on the future of the x86 architecture. It touches on new idea from Transmeta, Intel, HP's Dynamo, and a bunch of other technology that keeps the 20+ year old architecture alive and kicking." As always, the Ars take on this (specifically, Hannibal's) is lucid and thoughtful, and grounded in some interesting history.

coj writes: "In a move that seems like a response to Sony's recent announcements, ZDNet is reporting that Sega is in talks to license the Dreamcast technology to other companies. Maybe the U.S. consumer is finally ready for an all-in-one set-top box ... or maybe the console manufacturers are making the same mistakes 3D0 did. Should be interesting."

Mad Browser writes: "Ars Technica has posted a review of the recently released-to-developers MacOS X DP4. Check it out." Rather than concentrating on Aqua, this article is typical Ars -- it gets beneath the surface to consider the mechanisms for printing, screen display and more. As the writer points out, DP4 is not itself OS X, but only a snapshot of OS X as it matures.

a9db0 writes: "Ars Technica is running an article on TCP stack research done by Stefan Savage at the University of Washington. Stefan presented one interesting tool and a couple of ingenious hacks. The tool measures response time more accurately between nodes without additional software on the server. The hacks are TCP modifications, one of which could help defeat DDoS attacks. "

a9db0 writes: "Ars Technica is running an article on TCP stack research done by Stefan Savage at the University of Washington. Stefan presented one interesting tool and a couple of ingenious hacks. The tool measures response time more accurately between nodes without additional software on the server. The hacks are TCP modifications, one of which could help defeat DDoS attacks. "

Hannibal from ArsTechnica gave the head's-up of their review of the Espresso PC. We had an article on this super-sweet little machine recently. This little machine weighs .99 pounds, has USB, Celeron, 3D Sound, built in touchpad - and Hannibal covers putting Linux on the puppy as well. /me wants.

There's been some interesting article published lately in the realm of DNA computing and software breeding models - kinda the land where 1s and 0s and Darwin meet. ArtsTechnica has got a primer on DNA computing which goes over the high points of DNA computing, and is accessible to anyone who remembers high school bio. Feed Magazine has got an article that examines breeding software and what that means.

OscarMeier writes "ArsTechnica has posted an article about the Espresso PC. 0.5kg light, it is a fully featured i810e Celeron or PIII system including everything and the kitchen sink (VGA out, NTSC out, USB, PS/2, 12 GB Hard Drive, up to 256 MB RAM, docking 24X CD w/ floppy). " must... resist... temptation... if only it had a battery.Check out the manufacturer's site for more information.

maniack writes: "According to NTBugtraq, the latest reports say that there is no back door in IIS 4.0. As ArsTechnica points out, the story has apparently been blown out of proportion by the press and no security hole exists. " So - anyone know what's /really/ the case? We've got reports from both sides, but it sounds like it's not true now.

Basil writes: "Here's an in-depth article on the Playstation 2 Emotion Engine at Ars[Technica] that you really shouldn't miss. The article goes a long way in explaining the intricacies of the overall design, relating the performance of the MIPS III core to their somewhat odd implementation of two vector processing units."

Alex Bischoff asks: "I will likely be buying a cell phone within the next six months. And, while there seem to be half a million sites reviewing hardware, I can't find even one that does reviews of cell phones! Now, I've tried Google, of course, but all I can find are cell phone service providers and reviews on "super cell phones" -- that is, cell phones with built-in PDAs and such. I already have a Palm Pilot, so all I want is a "regular" cell phone. Can anyone recommend any sites that review cell phones, or offer his/her opinions on brands to buy and features to look for? "

sysboy writes "ArsTechnica have a very interesting piece about HP's Dynamo. " Interesting stuff about their run-time optimization stuff. They compare it to Transmeta's code morphing technology.

Gr1nderX writes, "Ars just posted a large Mac OS X DP3 technical article that talks about the structure and functioning of OS X's (UNIX) filesystem, and how that impacts the Aqua GUI. IMHO, the most fascinating part of the article concerns the extensive use of XML that Apple makes in managing application resources, file meta-information, service configuration and startup options, etc. The XML parser that's built into the core OS basically gives you the ability to use either the GUI or a text editor to completely control and configure every aspect of the OS. " Lot of good stuff in this one: if only powerbooks weren't so expensive...

h0rus writes, "One of the guys from Ars went to Cyrix's unveiling of their new x86 chip, the Cyrix III (codenamed "Joshua"), and wrote up a summary of what was announced. The chip looks like a pretty sweet budget/mobile x86 option: 64K L1, 256K L2, dual-pipelined FPU, Socket 370 compatible, and not clock-locked. Maybe Cyrix can redeem their name with this one. "

Gilmoure writes "John Siracusa has written an excellent article on the technology (Quartz) behind Aqua and its possible impact on GUI industry. " The continued evolution of OS/X has been interesting, even simply from the marketing perspectives. John's take is a good one to read if you haven't followed OSX very much.

redmist writes "Ars Technica has a great, in depth article about the new Crusoe chips. Enjoy." This one will answer most of the questions I've heard about Crusoe's guts, and how it differs from other microprocessors. "Must" reading for all hardware junkies!

redmist writes "Ars Technica has a great, in depth article about the new Crusoe chips. Enjoy." This one will answer most of the questions I've heard about Crusoe's guts, and how it differs from other microprocessors. "Must" reading for all hardware junkies!

Doll Part writes "Ars' year-end Arswards are up, and they look back at geek life this past year and talk about things that have really made a difference. Linus is Person of the Year (predictable), but most their other entries are technologically provocative, and they try to remember the whole year, rather than just December. There's a really interesting bit about the start of the AOL madness, too. " One of the things that I particularly enjoy about the Arsawards is that you don't have to have released in 1999 - you just need to have made your impact in that year, like in the case of...oh. That'd be telling, wouldn't it?

heatseeka writes "There is a great article at Ars Technica comparing the Motorola G4 and the AMD Athlon. They discuss every detail of the design of the CPU's, and give credit where credit is due. " Hannibal does a great job dissecting the different chips, as well as explaining the background behind each chip.