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• Lots of universities are teaching Java, and there are many programmers who know it.
• Sun has delivered a very complete set of APIs for which we already know that they can be implemented on many different platforms; .NET/C# relies on a lot of Windows-specific APIs.
• There are already lots of open source libraries for Java.
• It looks like the embedded and handheld market has widely adopted Java already.
• There already is a gcc frontend for Java, allowing you to compile standalone applications.
• There are already several open source JIT compilers, including Kaffe, Intel's Open Runtime Platform, and OpenJIT (the latter isn't open source compliant, but maybe could become so).
• There are already Gnome bindings for Java.
• There are numerous Java implementations
• Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Sun's recent JDK's (1.3, 1.4) have excellent compilers and runtimes, rivaling C++ performance.

Also, while I think it would make sense for the Gnome project to use Java bindings to Gnome, I think Swing itself is getting a bad wrap. It's a well-designed toolkit that runs fine on reasonably fast machines. It's completely written in, and completely extensible in, Java. In a year or two, nobody will think twice about its speed. Most of the performance complaints about Swing are actually just the cost of the initial class loading and JIT compilation. Well-written Java programs structure that load process so that it doesn't bother users, but Sun is addressing these issues with each release.

There are no significant technical differences between Java and C# as languages. C# is neither harder nor easier to compile than Java. C# is not more expressive and it isn't less expressive. As languages, they are interchangeable. The question is: given these other considerations, which is the right choice? To me, the answer is pretty clearly Java, not C#.

The thing that bugs me about this is that there is already a quite good, open-source runtime out there. Intel has charged their Microprocessor Research Laboratory (MRL) with the creation of ORP, the Open Research Platform.

ORP is designed as a runtime platform that has a very clean separation between the core, the JIT, and the garbage collector. The idea is that, right now, it is difficult to compare various algorithms as to implement them often requires a different core runtime (which could ruin the accuracy of the data). Initially, it operates over Java byte codes, but it was designed to be much more than that. In every press release MRL has released, they have never called it a JVM.

Recently, at Java Grande 2001, some people from MRL gave a talk about their work on ORP and put their slides online at their SourceForge project. In this presentation, it is mentioned that they have are "considering adding support for CLI". CLI stands for "Comman Language Infrastructure", the core parts of .NET, for those people who aren't keeping up with the flurry of 3-letter acronyms that begin with "CL".

Having someone like Intel behind a project to create an open-source runtime would lend it credibility to both end-users and corporate decision makers. It would also give powerful support to the development of JITs for Intel platforms.

A while back I attempted to get some support for a project that would involve talking to Intel (that Miguel de Icaza from Ximian can even be seen on the mailing list for) but was unable to gather enough people to make approaching Intel sound useful (this was also before Java Grande). As of right now, I've all but given up on that project; especially seeing that having a large project like Mono around (which is under GPL, instead of the modified BSD license of ORP, which gathers more of the pure "free software"/GNU advocates) would discourage individual contributors and organizations (such as MRL) from commiting much of their efforts.

I have been thinking about approaching Apache or FreeBSD about trying to put together a project with Intel to work on this. If anyone is interested in this, has opinions, comments, questions, concerns, arguments, just plain wants to send me death threats (hey, I like e-mail), feel free to send them to saurik@saurik.com.

The thing that bugs me about this is that there is already a quite good, open-source runtime out there. Intel has charged their Microprocessor Research Laboratory (MRL) with the creation of ORP, the Open Research Platform.

ORP is designed as a runtime platform that has a very clean separation between the core, the JIT, and the garbage collector. The idea is that, right now, it is difficult to compare various algorithms as to implement them often requires a different core runtime (which could ruin the accuracy of the data). Initially, it operates over Java byte codes, but it was designed to be much more than that. In every press release MRL has released, they have never called it a JVM.

Recently, at Java Grande 2001, some people from MRL gave a talk about their work on ORP and put their slides online at their SourceForge project. In this presentation, it is mentioned that they have are "considering adding support for CLI". CLI stands for "Comman Language Infrastructure", the core parts of .NET, for those people who aren't keeping up with the flurry of 3-letter acronyms that begin with "CL".

Having someone like Intel behind a project to create an open-source runtime would lend it credibility to both end-users and corporate decision makers. It would also give powerful support to the development of JITs for Intel platforms.

A while back I attempted to get some support for a project that would involve talking to Intel (that Miguel de Icaza from Ximian can even be seen on the mailing list for) but was unable to gather enough people to make approaching Intel sound useful (this was also before Java Grande). As of right now, I've all but given up on that project; especially seeing that having a large project like Mono around (which is under GPL, instead of the modified BSD license of ORP, which gathers more of the pure "free software"/GNU advocates) would discourage individual contributors and organizations (such as MRL) from commiting much of their efforts.

I have been thinking about approaching Apache or FreeBSD about trying to put together a project with Intel to work on this. If anyone is interested in this, has opinions, comments, questions, concerns, arguments, just plain wants to send me death threats (hey, I like e-mail), feel free to send them to saurik@saurik.com.

It's important to note that Rhys' project is concentrating on building a light-weight interpreter for embedded systems, and has no real goal of constructing a full featured runtime for Unix. Really, he is most interested in selling compiler technology.

In a message to his mailing list yesterday he once again stressed his dedication to his compiler technology and even mentioned that, in order to diversify his company's offerings, he is likely to focus more on re-compiling .NET to work on the JVM.

I was working on an alternative project with the goal of using Intel's ORP to build a fully featured runtime, but due to lack of support I've all but dropped the project. One of my earlier project statements (which was posted to Rhys' mailing list) can be found at:

What I'm Planning: Alternative Project w/ Slightly Different Goals (was: Suggestions) [ http://lists.saurik.net/message.xsp?id=62 ]

A little Karma-whoring, swiped from intel's site
Compatible with Microsoft* Visual C++* and Visual Studio*, the Intel® C++ Compiler is designed from the silicon up to let developers easily take advantage of the performance and features of the latest Intel® architecture, including the Pentium® 4 processor.
Intel is committed to customer support. See www.intel.com/software/products/prodsupport.htm for further information on product support.

Windows*NT*/98/2000 Full Product Electronic Delivery $399.00
Windows*NT*/98/2000 Full Product CD Delivery $499.00
Windows*NT*/98/2000 Upgrade Product Electronic Delivery $175.00
Windows*NT*/98/2000 Upgrade Product CD Delivery $275.00
Intel® Compilers for Linux* Field Test Intel® Compilers for Linux, field test versions, are available for download only. No CDROM versions are available. Not all of the GNU C language extensions, including the GNU inline assembly format, are currently supported and, due to this, one cannot build the Linux kernel with the beta release of the Intel compilers and the initial product release. The C language implementation is compatible with the GNU C compiler, gcc, and one can link C language objects files built with gcc to build applications. However, the C++ implementation uses a different object model than the GNU C++ compiler, g++, and due to this, C++ applications cannot use C++ object files compiled by g++. For further details, see the FAQs on the support site. Before using the compiler, we recommend you read Optimizing Applications with the Intel® C++ and Fortran Compilers for Linux to learn about the appropriate optimization switches for your application. You should have received the invitation letter that explains how to get started using the Intel compilers for Linux. All support issues, compiler updates, FAQ's and support information will only be available when you register for an account on the Intel Premier Support site. Please register for a support account at http://support.intel.com/support/go/linux/compiler s.htm. To begin the process of downloading...
Click Here!

Intel's working on a Linux compiler with all of the P4 goodness. Although it's in beta right now, you can bet your sweet butt your going to pay for it once the program gets out of beta. Intel may have good compilers, but they don't give 'em away

In light of this, perhaps the following names could be "confusingly similar" to well-known tradmarks:

Wal*Fart compared to Wal*Mart
Sysco compared to Cisco
IBN compared to IBM
Wintel compared to Intel
Microslop compared to Microsoft

Oh, and any router with the word "gateway" in its hostname must be changed!

Granted, *most* of the sites mentioned are backed by big businesses with even bigger legal budgets so they can get away with it, but still....

(P.S.--It seems to me that "well-known" and "confusingly similar" are mutually exclusive)

So how does this differ from Intel's annoucement that they will reach 20GHz by 2007? Intel says their chip will be .2 micron, IBM says their chip will be 1 milliamp. Is IBM going to try to make end-user processors with this? Are we going to see any real numbers before they do anything real with the technology?

Compaq did it. It's no longer a rumor. Read the press release on Intel's web site: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20 010625corp.htm

• an Intel D810EMO mainboard.
• a Maxtor 531dx hard drive. (slim and durable)
• I am considering at this Elan Vital MF-1 case.

For those that are interested here are a few other links to small case manufacturers.
Case Manufacturer listing
Morex/ProCase
In Win
Yeong Yang

support.intel.com/design/PentiumIII/prodbref/

What idiot put the Submit button next to Preview button?

text

From the p3p FAQ:

30. Is P3P an American technology?
While many of the member companies that worked on P3P are based in the U.S., the specification itself is meant to be international. The P3P vocabulary, for instance, was created with the input of many people both in and outside of the U.S. Nearly half of the members of the working group that worked on the vocabulary were invited experts and staff from international data commissioners' offices, many of which were from Europe. In addition, there has been considerable input from Japan.

Some privacy advocates have argued that P3P distracts from efforts to develop privacy legislation in the U.S.

This initiative is a stake in the heart of the initiative for a Privacy Bill of Rights in the United States. Despite the light coverage of this topic in the FAQ, the widespread adoption and implementation will make it impossible to constrain the access of foreign web sites to the personal information of U.S. citizens. The technological barrier to a citizen's privacy will be in place long before we succeed in guaraunteeing the privassy rights of all Americans.

Don't let Microsoft doom our future. Fight for privacy. Don't use IE6.

I have to admit I read "Buy a share, get one free!" in disbelief a couple times before realizing what was meant. After all, annual reports are always free! (Download here or I'm sure they'll send you a hard copy for free.)

Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

Oh, really? Tell me, Jonny, from which orifice did you so casually pull that statement?

Allow me to present 78 examples of companies that are each dominating an even more enormous part of the country's economy at this very second.

...and this list doesn't even take historical cases into consideration.

...and, hey! I'll be damned. There are even a few tech companies on that list.

Of course, I realize that the Fortune 500 is not a foolproof, catch-all guide to measuring a company's worth. You'll understand, though, if I have a tad more faith in it than in baseless rantings...

blenderking sent in this Wall Street Journal story about
Microsoft's new "Smart Tags" - auto linking to Microsoft
websites in any web page you visit.

...This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, please contact the program vendor for resolution.
_____________________________________ _

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

That USB is a `B' type connector. In other words you can plug it into your host computer as a peripheral. You can not plug USB devices into it. It is not a simple wiring difference.

That will rule out all those nifty USB peripherals that you might want to plug into this device. So long to cameras, printers, audio devices, keyboards, controllers....

I suppose it could be useful for initial programming, but I suspect the only reason it is there is that it is on the SA1110 chipset (which is aimed at handhelds). I also recall that the USB implementation on the SA1110 has (or had) some sort of congenital problem. I believe you would find more in the LART archives. (Which is also available now, but at something like twice this price and no cool aluminium box, but a fully open sourced hardware design.)

(Ok, against all slashdot culture, I have done my own research and looked up the aforementioned USB problem. It is the SA1100 which could only be used as a slave, and it had to be the only device on the bus for it to work as documented in the errata. I don't know if the SA1110 has this problem or not. Intel app note here.)

Above is a link to the benchmarks posted on Intels web page.

Got benchmarks? http://www.intel.com/eBusiness/products/ia64/overv iew/bm012101.htm

Any code posted on their Publicsource site is open for all comers. For example, OpenPlay runs on Mac, Win, and various *nixes.

As for CDSA, a couple other people are already working on Windows and Linux implementations.

As cool as huge storage for MP3s is, I hope manufacturers don't continue to ignore the analog parts of their MP3 players. Most portable players have sound that just sucks. The Intel Pocket Concert is the only exception I've ever heard, and even it could use some improvement.

The point is, MP3s can sound really nice when you use a good DAC and headphone amplifier. Even highly integrated versions of these components can add a few bucks to a player -- but why not offer customers an option to step up the sound quality of all their MP3s, no matter what the bitrate?

-David.

Intel's Extensible Firmware Interface specification contains the spec for GPT. All systems incorporating EFI (currently, this is only IA-64 systems) need use GPT, for others it is optional.

I wrote the Linux IA-64 kernel GPT support, and it has been included in the IA-64 kernel port since September 2000. It allows use of either MBR-style or GPT-style partition records per disk. With minor tweaking, it could be used on Linux IA-32, but it is not currently.

Boot loaders such as LILO remain unaffected. LILO takes a file system location (i.e. /boot/vmlinuz), from which it asks the kernel for the physical location of that file on the disk (i.e. where in /dev/sda is the file?). The file location is entirely independent of the partitioning strategy, thus LILO works with both MBR-style and GPT-style partitioning. Linux IA-64 uses its own boot loader (elilo.efi) which again does not need to be aware of the partitioning strategy of a given disk.

Partitioning tools such as fdisk and GNU Parted need to become GPT-aware. I have created a patch for GNU Parted and have made it available to the IA-64 distributions. It could use a bit of cleanup, but is quite functional. I don't believe that anyone has written GPT support into fdisk, and would encourage anyone who wishes to please do so.

I've also written a new Linux IA-64 application "efibootmgr" which manages the EFI Boot Manager options (as defined in the EFI spec above). This tool is both MBR and GPT-aware, and allows for booting your OS off of any disk/partition in your system provided the partition contains a FAT-12,-16, or -32 file system. Additional work will go into EFI in the future to add ext2 file system awareness to avoid even this restriction.

All of these topics have been discussed on the Linux IA-64 developer mailing list. If you care to join the Linux IA-64 developer community, please see www.linuxia64.org.

Maybe I'm just a little dense, but I have no idea why this is "from the another-attempt-to-stifle-competition dept." If you can get the specification, how are they attempting to be incompatible?

What reasoning was behind the move to GPT?

Look here. More than 4 partitions without hacks like extended partitions..... Personally, I'm looking forward to this becoming mainstream.

--

Until we get mother boards that includes the new EFI approach, we will definetly see transition solutions to support GPT drives.

It will be great to have this technology - sure it will break a lot of the old systems, but then again sometimes when you go forward there are sacrifices to be made.

If MS has decided to limit the addition of GPT support for 64-bit XP, then this is probably because 64-bit motherboards would break most 32-bit OS anyhow, and thus they are unlikely to have people complaing that Windows 98 doesn't work on those machine.

For more info on EFi and GPT, check ou the following link: http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi/download .htm

Looking at the FAQ page linked to, I think this is a false alarm. Microsoft has several legitimate reasons for introducing this new partitioning scheme. It is an open standard; they link to the definition here.

It looks like a lot of the reason they are doing this is support for larger systems and disks. See these Q/As:

Q: If the disk is larger than the maximum size an MBR can report, will the entire disk contents be protected? A:The EE partition in the Protective MBR is specified to be the maximum size allowable in an MBR.

So the maximum size supported by the new format is greater than the old.

Q: Can the 32-bit version of Windows Whistler read, write, and boot from GPT disks?
A: No. The 32-bit version will see only the Protective MBR. The EE partition will not be mounted or otherwise exposed to application software.

This doesn't affect your current system at all. If you install Windows Whistler on your ia32 machine, it will use the old format.

Linux already has the support for many different partitioning schemes. I don't see this as different. There is no support for it now, but there will be when someone decides to develop it.

Non Photorealistic Rendering is very cool indeed.

Nvidia's website has some demos on how to do sketch rendering on their hardware. Intel have done some pretty cool research on sketch rendering and cartoon rendering.

This page has a lot of good links. Check any recent Siggraph set of proceedings as well.

Most current techniques seem to involve "thresholding" the Lambertian diffuse lighting equation, so banding the colours used, or using that as in index into a 1d texture map which contains the different shades used for a model.

Hmm. Check the websites above for a better explanation than that :)

Henry

The last paragraph highlights a comment from the president of Sega, Hideki Sato. The statment shows that the fault with their failure was not in the hardware or games, but in the lack of marketing. I have also seen other articles at The Register that confirm stories of arguing at executive levels. This bickering led to the lack of marketing, and hence the demise. And this demise is much to my dismay, as I am a avid Sega fan. NEED SOULCALIBUR! Any way...

Sega has done similar things in the past, as seen when they failed to market the Sega Nomad. The Nomad was essentially a portable Genesis, and it rocked. Information on it can be found here and here.

Sega has continually disappointed for years, making the same mistakes with several systems, including the Saturn, the Nomad, and the Dreamcast. I am at a loss for words at the mismanagement of this potentially groundbreaking company.

One thing I find interesting about this new console is the decision to use an 366 MHz Intel Celeron. I would assume that if Nokia wanted to really compete, they would use either a faster processor or at least the Pentium. I know that Linux would make excellent use of any CPU beyond a 486 (*grin*), but wouldn't the greater power be needed to compare to something like a 766Mhz Pentium 3? As Nokia has not released what kind of video processing/GPU/etc, we have little to compare to in the visual arena. Although looking good is not what determines how good a game is, it helps. So with what we currently know, I have some substantial doubts about this system.

The future remains uncertain....

Umm don't people run Linux on their Intel or non-Intel PCs??

That is 460W peak not average. We power tested our IDE drives here (5400RPM) and found that they use 10-15W during startup, but then only draw 1W average while running. I want to know what they where using for USB devices since the usb supply only provides a few hundred miliwatts. That power must have been a supply (not from the internal Power supply)

Another interesting thing to note though is how this board is going to be 1U ready.. (Notice the angled memory sockets, this is so that 'tall' memory can still fit within the 1U enclosure.) The 8 fan thing really isn't that impressive when you realize that they are designed to run small 1U style fans like the Intel ISP1100. This system uses lots of smaller 1U sized fans to move air through the case and out the back.

That is 460W peak not average. We power tested our IDE drives here (5400RPM) and found that they use 10-15W during startup, but then only draw 1W average while running. I want to know what they where using for USB devices since the usb supply only provides a few hundred miliwatts. That power must have been a supply (not from the internal Power supply)

Another interesting thing to note though is how this board is going to be 1U ready.. (Notice the angled memory sockets, this is so that 'tall' memory can still fit within the 1U enclosure.) The 8 fan thing really isn't that impressive when you realize that they are designed to run small 1U style fans like the Intel ISP1100. This system uses lots of smaller 1U sized fans to move air through the case and out the back.

RMBS shares should be trading at a discount now. If you consider that RDRAM has a better roadmap into the future than either SDRAM or DDR, RMBS still is a good investment.

Of course, you'd have to assume that Intel will remain true to its own roadmap to see Rambus's future clearly. That may be a bigger assumption now that the patents are somewhat freed up.

Dancin Santa

I have noticed in the recent past that there has been a lot of marketing whoring with regards to Ultra DMA and its various speeds.

I am most disappointed with IDE in general from a performance standpoint. I go through hardware all the time because of the nature of my job, and two things stick out as the sore thumb in bad system performance. The first is the availability of huge quantities of memory, the second being the hard drive.

As far as controllers go in the this area of performance, I tend not to care for anything that is not Intel or Promise, not that I have a fetish for Intel goods. I've yet to try any striping/parity striping controllers yet either. My observation of IDE thus far, regardless of bus 'speed' is somewhat negative. High CPU usage, bad multi-thrashability (e.g., hitting the disk with nasty requests in multiple ways all at once). I feel the hard disk holding me up, especially in Windows. I have found the following registry keys for Windows 2000 to enable DMA66+ operations, FYI:

From this site...

To activate the ATA/66 (UDMA/66) setting, you need to run Regedit (or Regedt32) and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\000 0

If using Regedt32 uncheck "Read Only Mode" in the Options menu. Note that the "0000" key above might show as "0001", "0002" or "0003" on your machine, depending on your particular hardware settings. Select the key appropriate to your case. Right-click to create a new DWORD [REG_DWORD] Value, call it "EnableUDMA66" (no quotes), and type 1 in the Decimal box to enable ATA/66 (UDMA/66) support. To disable it, change the Decimal value to 0, or delete the "EnableUDMA66" Value altogether. Reboot when done.

A MUST: To properly enable the UDMA/66 setting, you need to have your ATA/66 (or ATA/100) capable drive(s) hooked up to a different IDE channel than the one your older (E)IDE (even if UDMA/33 capable) drive(s) are connected to!

Another site has directions for NT 4.0 Sp5+ here.

Another useful site is here, BMDRIVERS.

Here and there you will see reports about reduced CPU usage. This is laughable. One place indicates that mass transfers were taking 90% CPU and with the new and improved drivers, a "mere 56%". Meanwhile all my SCSI drives never elevate the CPU at all.

Another alternative to using all these tweaks and hacks is to just download the Intel drivers (if you have an Intel chipset which you should for PCs, save the glorious Athlon).

I have noticed various anomalies with these drivers.

Sorry for giving so much attention to Windows, these operating systems tend to need the most attention. As far as unix goes, the hdparm suggestions I have seen so far seem correct, thanks for the input.

The SCSI paradigm is greatly suffering from the same pomp with festering numbers. My experience has been that Ultra 160 drives perform no better than Ultra 80. Open Magazine did a whole battery of benchmarks to illustrate its uselessness (unable to locate link).

I personally look for fast rotational speed, good platter density and fewer platters and a fast media rate, and lastly seek times.

IDE and its Ultra friends are great for huge drives to dump crap onto, and even mirror. Keep the OS and the swap file on a SCSI drive, and you can use your CPU for something else.

Raymond

First, of all, this has been hashed before on /.

Second, it's not that the P3/P4 is more sensitive to radition. It's that the i386 and i486 have been around long enough to have had the military and NASA pay for radition hardening, not to mention low power consumption which is just as important in space.

The tweakers.net article had it wrong. The Pentium 4 uses the i850 chipset, according to links I followed starting at Intel's front page, then to the Pentium 4 page, and finally to the chipset page.

The i860 and its successors were interesting chips. As I mentioned in a reply to a post underneath your original post, at the last company I worked for, we had old servers running an i860 as the CPU sitting next to modern servers with the much, much faster i960 chip running their network cards.

Of course, it was even funnier that my roommate at the time was still using a i386 PC with 8 Megs of RAM. Every day he worked with a network card that had much more processing horsepower and RAM than his PC! I used to tease him about that all the time.

I'm not quite sure about 3GIO, but I think a lot of us have been waiting for InfiniBand for quite some time. This used to be referred to as SysI/O. It promises in the first release 2.5Gb/sec using the switching/crossbar bus architecture you get in an SGI Origin-class system.

As far as replacing PCI, I think it will be capable of subsuming it much the way SGIs XIO has: each XIO slot/port is capable of hosting its own PCI bus, with the backbone aggregating the bandwidth of the individual buses.

Read page 23 of http://developer.intel.com/design/pentium4/guides/ 24920301.pdf

The PIII Systems Programming guide has a section on thermal control for the P6 core as well. Read chapter 12: System Management 12.14 Thermal Monitoring. On the P6, software can directly control the duty cycle or a default behavior can be programmed in to take affect when the system goes over a certain temperature. The on demand clock modulation can be a lot worse than 50%, the values range from 12.5% to 87.5%... Oh, BTW this stuff is almost always controlled by the BIOS so running linux won't change its behavior.

72 seems an odd age for mandatory retirement. Intel's mandatory retirement age is probably 70, but they let him slide a few years because he's a founder of the company.

Jonathan Weesner
Level D Flight Simulators using Linux at NLX Corp. That's my idea of FUN !!

This means that active communication can only occur between two AGP agents that reside on the interface ... Attaching more then two devices to the interface is not precluded, as long as there is only one active master and one active target

OK, let's go through this line by line, nice and slowly...

Warning... long comment ahead...

The world is abuzz - thanks to a huge spew of press releases - about a "philanthropic" effort to "cure cancer". Just download the screen saver, which will cheerfully suck up your spare cycles and get to work eliminating the evil scourge - actually, doing a brute-force chemical interaction model which is one teeny-tiny part of the overall effort to fight cancer.

"Depending on the results of this program, the time required to develop a new treatment and drugs could be cut from twelve years to as little as five years."

What they forgot to mention was that running the client primarily benefits a for-profit company in Austin, TX

(my emphasis)

http://members.ud.com/membership/howitworks/faq.ht m

Yes, they do get some benefit (and are upfront about it), but "primarily" is a very harsh assessment based on the information available.

which wants to sell your CPU cycles to the highest bidder in exchange for some nice beads.

and more importantly:

United Devices is running the effort. All you have to do is download their closed-source, restrictive-licensed client program and install it on your PC

Given that it currently only runs on Windows, it's targeted at people who are happy running closed-source restrictive-licensed software. Besides, the millions of current Setiathome users don't seem to have a problem with closed-source restrictive-licensed software, and Setiathome never got this kind of treatment from /.

(you also have to agree to their website license to even download the program, of course). You take all risks of installing the program

Show me one piece of software - free or otherwise - today that doesn't require the installer to take responsibility for all risks.

- if the program deletes every file on your computer, too bad. If it downloads some kiddie porn and emails fbi@fbi.gov confessing to the crime, too bad.

Exactly the same applies to every piece of software distributed in binary form. Why highlight it in this manner for this particular case ?

And I hope you don't pay for bandwidth by the byte, because their main commercial effort seems to be stress-testing websites for Exodus. You do read those license agreements, don't you?

"Members will always be told which applications (including commercial ones) are running on their computers. They also will have access to Web pages outlining which organizations are providing the applications and explaining projects that Member computers are working on."

"Members will be able to control how much of their system resources are used by United Devices. "

"Members will be given user preference options on a wide range of factors, including: whether the program runs as a screensaver or an application when computation and communication can be done whether connections should be made automatically which proxies and firewall settings to use"

Although the license agreement is pretty general, the above statements are very specific, and if they did not comply with them, then (IANAL but I have some in the family) it would look very much like false advertising.

Here's UD's business model in a nutshell: "Get people to give us computing power and bandwidth for free and sell it to other people."

My reading of the above would be "Get people to give us computing power and bandwidth for prizes and the chance to help people, then sell it or give it away (depending on user preferences) to other people."

A nice gig, if you can get it. UD's primary business is selling computing cycles to corporations. As it turns out, they were having a hard time with the first part of the business model, so they came up with a scheme to get people to install their client: we'll do philanthropic work! And what could be more philanthropic than curing cancer?

Yup, they're getting a lot of publicity from this. Big deal. As long as the client tells people what's going on (which it does, see above), what is the problem ?

Who else can we get on board? How about Intel? They're always willing to sponsor anything that promises to burn a lot of CPU cycles. In fact, they're willing to put up a disgusting website that totally misuses the term "peer-to-peer" to achieve an alliterative buzzphrase.

Dunno why Michael calls the Intel site "disgusting" maybe it's the colour scheme or something... but, yes, I'd agree that they are abusing the term "peer-to-peer" to mean its complete opposite. Mind you, you see idiocies like that daily on /. by both posters and editorial staff. I expect marketers to be idiots and not understand basic English. Journalists are generally expected to be at least reasonably literate.

So, the stage is set. Now, read through the site that UD set up for this effort. Try to find in it any mention of anything other than philanthropy and cancer curing. You won't be able to. Why, you might even start to believe all this client does is work on curing cancer. Now go back to UD's main web site and read through it, noting how your computer will be sold to any corporation willing to pay for it. The task your computer runs is determined by UD, not by you.

To repeat a quote given above:

"Members will always be told which applications (including commercial ones) are running on their computers. They also will have access to Web pages outlining which organizations are providing the applications and explaining projects that Member computers are working on."

Even the cancer research isn't philanthropic in the usual sense. Say that your machine discovers the drug that cures cancer. Who benefits? Well, Oxford University will patent it and sell the rights to produce it at some extortionate price the name-brand drug will be hideously expensive, and 20 years later when the patent expires, the world will be able to afford cancer cures - shame about all those people that died in the meantime.

"That is, the rights to the research results remain with non-profit organizations that are dedicated to cancer research."

So, if they do sell the rights (as Michael claims they intend to do, without any evidence) rather than give them away, the proceeds from these sales gets reinvested in more cancer research. And the problem with this is ... ?

That's "philanthropy" in the digital age - agreeing to a restrictive license and running a program which can do anything it wants with your computer system or network including destroying it or committing crimes with it or running up your phone bill, all the while doing free work for a for-profit corporation so that a drug company can get a patent on a life-saving drug and charge outrageous prices to pay back the "research costs".

A nice summary of Michael's accusations (or misinterpretations ... I believe firmly in the principle of "never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence." It's just a pity that I've had to waste an hour of my time doing his research for him so that this worthwhile project doesn't lose out on potential helpers.

I think I'll stick with xscreensaver.

Feel free. (There's no X client right now, anyway... hurry up UD, I've got another 6 CPUs ready for you when you get it done...)

As stated in a previous post, my younger brother died of cancer when he was 28. My girlfriend is at the hospital right now, as I'm typing this, with her father where he is having a biopsy to tell if he has prostate cancer or not. Two other members of my family have cancer. I know what it does to both the victims and their families.

If a couple of mouse-clicks can help take that pain away from just one family, it's worthwhile. Surely.

And if lazy journalism means that the cure arrives one day later than it could have, what is that worth ?

This is certainly an unfortunate editorial, mainly because it's being presented as news. The suspicions and accusations are quite unwarranted. At least now I know why my original submission of this news, with facts instead of rantings, was rejected this morning.

I'm not sure if Michael's bile is targeted at Intel (for their "disgusting" website?) or at United Devices. I doubt he's upset at Oxford University or the National Foundation for Cancer Research, he's certainly thrown them into the mix as well.

The UD/Intel project is a genuine, noble attempt to cure cancer, and to try to spin it as anything else is a misrepresentation of the facts.

If you download the UD agent from the Intel site, your cycles will only be used on the Think application. United Devices will not claim any cycles or bandwidth on your machine for any commercial tasks. Users may, at their option, choose to participate in United Devices commercial tasks, and in return they'll be elgible for whatever compensation and remuneration that commercial work brings with it. There are a variety of promotions at present, although none that I'm aware of involve beads. The way I see it, getting paid for a resource I'd otherwise waste is a good deal, no matter what the compensation. Sure beats the alternative.

The speculation about UD's motives for participating in this project are also quite sketchy. I would have hoped that the SETI@home and distributed.net heritage might have given United Devices the benefit of the doubt here, but in case that's not sufficient there are a number of plausible and compelling reasons why United Devices might wish to participate in finding the cure for cancer that don't involve the conspiracy and speculation offered by slashdot.

We anticipate this project quickly growing to become the largest distributed computing project ever. As wildly popular as SETI@home and distributed.net have been, the number of people whose lives have been affected by cancer is daunting. For United Devices, this represents an ideal proof of concept and validation of distributed computing technology.

Intel's arguable misuse of the phrase "peer-to-peer" is, while technically inaccurate, certainly with common usage. United Devices was present, along with all the other commercial distributed computing companies, at the recent O'Reilly Peer to Peer conference where CmdrTaco and Hemos spoke. The "P2P space" is broadly defined at present, mainly because nobody's quite sure how all these quasi-related technologies will take hold in the coming months. Bundled together with Napster, Mojo Nation, Freenet, and even the groove.net folks isn't all that bad a place to be. Regardless, calling this project "P2P" is certainly acceptable current usage of the term. I have no idea how it qualifies as "disgusting".

If you choose not to read the documentation, it's still quite safe to assume that "all this client does is work on curing cancer" because that's indeed what it does. We (at United Devices) hope that some people will choose to also work on other United Devices projects, commercial or not, but we benefit greatly regardless.

I can assure you, the United Devices agent will never download kiddie porn or get you in trouble with the FBI. I feel silly having to explain this, though. I mean, honestly. Is it possible that someone was genuinely worried that this might be the case? As for the rest, I'll let Oxford University's reputation as an honorable and worthy organization and the National Foundation for Cancer Research's endorsement speak for themselves. Oh, that and the fact that Oxford has stated that they'll be making the results of the research available to anyone who wants it.

What an embarassment for slashdot.

Ok, as none of the slashdot editors seem to be able to do any editing here are a couple of excerpts from various faqs and information services describing how this stuff work.

From http://members.ud.com/vypc/cancer/faq_proj.htm

Are you going to sell the results to large pharmaceutical companies?

--No. The results of this study are the intellectual property of the University of Oxford and the National Foundation for Cancer Research, who will make the scientific findings of this project available to the greater scientific community.

Are the results going to be made public?

Yes. Prof. Graham Richards' research group, the project coordinators, will publish the results. This group originally designed the project and is currently orchestrating the study. Scientific interpretation of the results from this study will take some time. Results and scientific findings will be published in the usual manner through a peer-reviewed process.

So the results are going to the National Foundation for Cancer Research and Oxford. The National Foundation for Cancer Research are not the type of body to charge for commercial development of this work

From http://members.ud.com/vypc/cancer/index.htm

The project software cannot detect or transfer anything on your machine but project-specific information. It just allows your computer to screen molecules that may be developed into drugs to fight cancer. Each individual computer analyzes a few molecules and then sends the results back over the Internet for further research.

So your computer is only allowed to scan molecules

From Intels criteria for Philantropic projectshttp://www.intel.com/cure/criteria.htm

A. 100% Philanthropic:
The programs and, more specifically, workloads should be 100% philanthropic. Being a 100% philanthropic program means that that the program(s) run non-profit projects all of the time. Programs that run commercial projects "from time to time" are NOT considered 100% philanthropic.

B. No Cost to the Public:
The program should be completely "free" to the public. This means that there should be no cost to the public to download any of the software applications needed to run the workloads.

C. Complete Disclosure to User:
The programs should allow complete disclosure of information to the user about the workloads running on the user's machine (including, but not limited to, the type of data being processed), without giving away proprietary information.

D. Complete Disclosure to the Public:
The programs should allow all results obtained from processed workloads to be completely disclosed to the public within approximately 12 months of receiving the results.

So thank you michael for allowing your cynicism and laziness in research to potentially take a lot of computing resources away from an important project. Yes it is getting attention for all the parties involved but it is not a cheap trick to steal our computer cycles for commercial interests, if you join for the cancer project then that is all you will work on

So when you go home to bed tonight make sure and think about how much extra suffering your lack of editorial integrity may have caused cancer sufferers due to lost computing resources for this project. When will the slashdot editors learn that they can't just post any old crap, slashdot is not a small site where a mistake has no affect, it has a huge readership and needs to start taking some responsibility for the integrity of the stories it posts.

Thank you, I expect to see the front page updated with a retraction of these false allegations soon to try and repair some of the damage your laziness has done. For the first time since I started posted here I have finally found something important enough to use my +1 bonus. I hope it is the last time this is needed.

Decado

It is nice to see it in Scientific American, but I think EUVL has been brought up in discussions of other NGLs here on /. The article does take a good broad perspective on the issues as they stand.

Intel has a paper on their website (if you can find it) that describes the process pretty straightforward as well (it might help the read to have a little bit of background).

Here is that and some other URLs:

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Sweeney.html

http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/q31998/a rticles/art_4.htm

http://lithonet.eecs.berkeley.edu/network/backgrou nd.html

http://lasers.llnl.gov/IST/euvl.html

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Research-Revie w/Highlights/1998/ALS_chips.html

http://chomsky.stanford.edu/~kevbert/neha_poster/s ld001.htm

http://www.cr.org/publications/MSM2000/html/W3202. html

http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=EUV% 20lithography

-nicole

Oddly, Intel took their main Bluetooth page down. The nearest thing I could find was their Personal Area Connectivity page, which mentions Bluetooth. I found this last week while researching links to build a page about Bluetooth with Linux implementations.

Computer Architecture : A Quantitative Approach by John Hennessy, John L. Hennessy, David Goldberg, David A. Patterson Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; ISBN: 1558603298

This is mainly intended for studies of computer architectures and instruction sets, but goes into a fair amount of detail with additional reading suggestions on the history of the computer. It covers from early computers all the way up to the most recent (Pentium series). It is primarily devoted to teaching computer architecture using the MIPS instruction set, but has rich information throughout on practical aspects of computing, evolution of Intel's dominance in the PC chip market, downfalls of some of the many forgotten companies that were early innovators (and computing giants for that matter), evaluation benchmarks, comparisons between Intel and Motorola processors. The list goes on and I have only read up to chapter 6. I highly recommend looking at this as part if you can find it in a library. Otherwise it is fairly pricey...but it keeps on giving. Pretty light on the culture side though.

Other than that, I don't think that this class would be complete without the introduction to Moore's law and its predictive assertions as to the future of computing. His original paper is a good start.

Cramming more components onto integrated circuits

Electronics, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965

Lastly, some mention of the current efforts being made to surpass the limitations observed by Moore's law in the fields of nanotechnology and molecular computing may be worthy.

It's an ugly looking thing.

It's innovation-- take your own question and apply it back to the original x86 architecture. Was Intel locking anyone into their products then? The answer is yes, but as everyone here on /. is aware, emulation isn't illegal and nobodies stopping AMD from making their own compatible version of IA-64 (the specs are all out there for the taking, check out developer.intel.com, and Intel will even ship, FOR FREE, IA-64 manuals to you that weigh in at over 1,000 pages!).

Wrong. You clearly aren't an assembly language programmer-- the biggest problem with x86 CPU's is the LACK OF GENERAL PURPOSE REGISTERS. IA-64 addresses this problem using these methods--

128 General Registers (64-bit)

128 Floating-point Registers (82-bit)

As you can see, compared to the number of registers available in the 386 through to the Pentium 4, this is a HUGE number. (FYI: The Pentium III has 4 32-bit general purpose registers, 6 if you count ESI and EDI, 7 if you can safely use EBP. There is also a similarly low number of FPU registers, again, Intel has addressed this with IA-64.) These registers would not go unused, and they are VERY necessary. The kind of optimizations this will open up are mind-boggling to an assembly programmer.

You're suggesting that Intel sticks with an admittedly broken and ancient architecture? Intel has stretched the x86 core as far as it's going to go, the only innovation that can occur now is with a changing of paradigms and a changing of actual instruction sequencing. IA-64 puts more of the burden on the compiler to figure out what code is trying to do, and puts less of the stress on the run-time architecture (not to belittle the IA-64's strong architecture, simply that it's taken a much more RISC approach than their x86 processors have).

All of your points about cost of innovation and so on are moot-- it wouldn't be innovation if Intel stuck with the status quo. AMD isn't innovating, AMD is copying and now trying to extend x86 to last a little longer. Intel wants to ditch the x86 architecture but still leave a migration path for older users (hence the 'IA-64 is just another mode of the processor' trick-- code can switch at will from IA-64 mode to protected mode to real mode and back, and real mode/protected mode code can take advantage of IA-64 if the mode exists without using an IA-64 OS). In the end, one is innovation and one is just an attempt to keep the x86 around that much longer.

I'm not anti-AMD, but to say that Intel isn't trying to innovate and is instead trying to force people to adopt some new hardware of theirs is just plain wrong. I don't think either company is trying to do that, or else we'd see a total dismissal of the x86 instruction sets-- but instead, we're seeing both AMD and Intel keep the x86 around in both their 64-bit implementations as legacy support.

For a successful Internet appliance, it needs to be wireless and able to share an existing ISP connection. I-Opener was doomed from the start. It relied on users subscribing to long-term ISP contracts, which many people would shy away from. Most people who would purchase a special-purpose Internet appliance already have an ISP. It does not make sense for someone to pay an additional $19.95/month for a service he already has.

One of the benefits of having an Internet appliance is to have convenient access to the Internet from anywhere in the house (or outside). A tethered appliance, such as the 3Com Audrey forces users to browse the Net within reach of a telephone jack. If users have DSL or Cable, they're out of luck. Devices like this are doomed to fail.

Truly wireless IA's have so far been nothing but vaporware. I think that it will take a large corporation like Intel with their Web Tablet to deliver a solution that meets these criteria, at a price affordable to people.
Until then, tethered, ISP contract bound Internet appliances will continue to fail.