Slashdot Mirror

Here is another article or post that has a relatively long lists of the improvements in Barcelona.

Well, if they can get people arrested for writing down prices to compare them to competitors, imagine what kind of grief you'd get for refusing a bag search. Especially since some jurisdictions have shoplifting laws that allow merchants to detain people briefly on suspicion of theft.

The "High Tech Broadband Coalition" has published their "Policy Position on Municipal Broadband". Briefly, they support municipal efforts to ensure universal broadband access, even if the city has to provide broadband itself. Consisting of the BSA, CEA, NAM, SIA, ITI, and TLA, the position is important, if not completely surprising. But the TIA, which represents telcos who compete with these municipal efforts, is very surprising as a member of the coalition. TIA members are busy buying legislators to keep municipal competition out, while their trade org is promoting keeping city governments in. Are Mark Cuban's complaints about the RIAA misrepresenting his content corp starting to sound familiar?

Well, in fact it was 1999, but WiFi did exist in 1997, which is when the 802.11 spec was released.

Next time check your facts before you spout off-- both of you.

Enron is actually an excellent example.

Better yet, look closely at the penny stock market. I learned (the hard way) about pump and dump schemes up front and close - enough to earn the t-shirt "I sold my company for $10 million and all I got was this crummy t-shirt." SCO's gameplaying is quite impressive, compared to the dozens of schisters I've met in the penny stock market, but the strategy is the same.

1. Obtain control of an essentially worthless publically trading shell or company.

2. Issue major amounts of stock to your group. This can be done through acquisitions of worthless private corporations your friends own (XYZ Corp acquired by EmptyShell, terms not disclosed - kind of thing), through issuing of warrents/options, etc. Lots of ways to load up.

3. Start the PR spin on why EmptyShell is going to be the next big thing. This often is done with acquisition, though increasingly it's done with the threat of litigation. Look at Leftbid and its bogus claim of owning patent rights to the technology used by Ebay. The Leftbid organization was an empty shell, run by an individual who controlled over a half dozen such shells. While Leftbid and all the other shells are dead (and over $100 million in creditor claims ignored from all the companies this fellow has run), this fellow pocketed over $30 million in less than ten years.

4. Pump releases to PR Newswire, BusinessWire, etc.

5. Dump shares as the stock moves up.

6. Reload/repeat until the shell is worthless, creditors are closing in, investigations going, etc.

7. Dump any assets the company has, illegally if necessary. Creditors will go away if there is nothing to collect. (The funniest trick here is to find a shill within one of the operating companies to put everything in their names. Have them sign the checks, list them on the payrolll filings as manager, and even give them a big promotion as you're wiring all the money to that Bermuda account. When the investigators come, guess who they'll pin the payroll tax liability and other matters on? Not you! Best of all, it'll take these pour fools countless thousands of legal bills to fight off the IRS while you're sailing on your 25 meter ship)

8. Ignore courts, lawsuits, and investigators. Stall, lie, claim you were just another investor who "lost millions" and was taken like all the rest. Claim all the company documentation got lost in a fire or sent to a warehouse and nobody knows where it went. Laugh at the Enron fools who didn't burn the documentation fast enough.

9. Brag at the local country club that the FBI, IRS and SEC can't touch you. (Being on the other side of this, I'm afraid it's right. We were repeatedly told by SEC officials that we should complain to our congressperson because the SEC was underfunded and couldn't investigate all these smaller guys. FBI's response was "we're not a response agency. IRS asmusingly went after the small fry it could intimidate and weren't smart enough to obtain legal representation, in spite of piles of documentation provided that pointed to the crooks. Path of least resistance).

Promises are made that SCO will be buried and that McBride will find himself in prison, yet they are still there and McBride is still in charge.

And this will not change. Don't be fooled by McBride's tech stupidity. He's paid his dues to the system by hiring David Boies, and Boies has already greased the political skids. When David makes money, the pols make money. Surprised that Hatch's name comes up? Why else do you think they hired Boies, if not for his party connectedness (and don't assume for a second that either party has a monopoly on this game).

The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools

This was the hardest thing to learn: there are a large amount of folks who know the game being played. Their greed drives them to pile on to the game, hoping they'

Getting anything onto a handset takes a very close relationship with the handset maker. That real estate is extremely limited and every bit is accounted for. I'd bet that MS is subsidizing their phone OS to gain traction and that's a dangerous gift for the handset makers to fall for. If MS does manage to capture a majority of the handset market, handset makers can expect them to raise prices and eat into their profit margins.

That said, Nokia is the big fish to contend with in handsets. Due to Symbian, MS won't get Nokia to buy in unless they can get everybody else to buy in first. MS has gotten Samsung, Siemens and now Motorola to at least try their OS. They've even gotten Ericsson to dabble in portions of it. Although they've yet to make quantifiable inroads, the relationships required to turn up the heat are well established and cannot be taken lightly by the remaining of the Big 8, namely Nokia, LGE, Panasonic, and NEC. Keep you eye on the Japanese handset market, they (not Europe or the Americas) dictate the direction of the handset market. If the Embedded Linux Consortium holds together, it could pose the single most significant barrier to the MS Smartphone ever gaining traction.

SGI laughed at the unassuming threat of the video chipsets, thinking that they would never be as fast as brute force. Even Pixar thought the same. Boy, were they wrong though. You can set up a cheap-ass render farm for about $250k, taking up minimal space that can do the same job as a SGI render farm that costs a cool $2 million (Shuttle SFF PC w/ 3 gig CPU + ATI 9700). Of course, there's still the software side.

The Nvidia's GeForceFX and ATI's Radeon 9800 both contain features that even through the marketing-hype has some real value to programmers out there. Just look at Doom 3. It will run well on some computers that are just 6 months old. Now, imagine taking 250 of them, as a Beowulf cluster!!1

More shaders, More pixel pipelines, More memory bandwidth... whoopee...

When the hell are they going to ditch the antiquated scanline rendering method and go work on some tile based rendering methods?

Probably never, and for very good reason. Tile-based rendering is a very efficient architecture whose time has already come and gone.

For those who don't know, tile-based rendering divides an image up into a number of smaller squares ("tiles") and renders them independently, as opposed to the traditional method ("immediate-mode rendering") of rendering an image one polygon at a time. The major benefits claimed for tile-based renderers are that the process is more parallelizable (no risk of two chips rendering to the same area if they are working on different tiles) and that it is an easy modification to check each polygon's z-buffer (its distance from the camera) as you add it to the poly-list for its tile, and then to only texturize those polygons which are not occluded (i.e. actually visible). This is in contrast to the traditional immediate-mode rendering algorithm, where polygons are textured more or less in random order, leading to situations where a polygon will go through the entire process of being textured and rendered, only to later be completely covered up by a later poly--a situation which wastes a lot of (especially) memory bandwidth, fetching all those useless textures and such.

Cool! Sounds great! Let's hear it for tile-based rendering! Too bad ATI and NVIDIA have clearly never ever heard of this miracle technique! After all, it's not like they would ever make (gasp!) an informed choice not to use it!

Well...not so fast. Basically what we've seen is that tile-based rendering offers two potential benefits: it eliminates *some* of the complexity of enabling multi-GPU implmentations, and it uses quite a bit less memory bandwidth in the base case. The problem is that both of these supposed benefits really buy you very little when designing a consumer-level graphics card today.

First, the problem of "dividing up the work" isn't really what's preventing multi-chip graphics cards these days. Indeed, it's really a rather easy problem. Here's a clue: have alternate chips render alternate frames. Gee...that wasn't so tough, now was it? Well, no. But the other problems of implementing a multi-chip card for the consumer market sure are. For example, we have our choice of implementing an (expensive, performance gating) point-to-point bus to handle memory traffic (and have memory bandwidth/chip cut in half anyways), or of completely mirroring the memory, using twice as much for the same capacity (expensive). Then there's the cost of a second chip (expensive), the cost of packaging the second chip and connecting it to memory (expensive), and the cost of the extra power and cooling, the cost of trying to squeeze it all onto one card (results in a bigger, more expensive card; may gate clockability). And this is without mentioning the extra development and debugging time that goes into getting a multi-chip solution to work correctly. (In general this is one of the most difficult issues design engineers face.) Golly, it's almost enough to make you remember how when 3dfx tried to make a multi-chip product it was 6 months late, the single-chip card was far too slow, the double-chip (and cancelled quad-chip) card too expensive, and, due to the release delay, no longer competitive. (OTOH John C has hinted that a scalable multi-chip architecture might be on the way from one of the major players. Tie that in with the fact that Anand reports the GF4 will be the last to use the GF name, and that NVIDIA owns the remnants of 3dfx, and I start scratching my head...)

Second, the problem of memory bandwidth. Or rather, the former problem of memory bandwidth. Yes, the traditional rendering pipeline is very inefficient with memory bandwidth. Thing is, the prices on high-speed DDR have been coming down so fast that it hardly matters. You can find a Radeon 7500 with 64MB of 128-bit-wide DDR running at 2x230 MHz (i.e. 7.4GB/s bandwidth) for as low as $85 on pricewatch.com. (Actually there's one for $79 but it may be mislabeled.) The memory is probably less than $30 of the cost. Or maybe even less--the 64MB and 32MB GF2Pros (6.4GB/s bandwidth) only differ by $6. And the new GF4 MX460 hits the street with 64MB of 2x275 MHz DDR (8.8GB/s) for $179, list, on a brand new card.

As for the price premium of using relatively high-speed DDR instead of the same amount of SDRAM, it's pretty neglibible. Even for the highest speed DDR it's not such a big deal. Sure NVIDIA charges an extra $100 for another 25MHz on the GPU and an extra 1.6GB/s from the memroy (GF4 Ti4600 vs. Ti4400), but that doesn't mean it costs them anywhere near that much. (depending on GPU yields) It just means they like to bilk those in the $400-for-a-video-card crowd for the full $400. So how much does the stuff cost? Well...Hynix recently announced samples and volume production of 2x375 MHz x32 DDR selling at $10 for 128Mbit chips. That means $40 for 64MB of 128-bit-wide DDR with 12GB/s bandwidth. Not too shabby.

Ok, ok...so maybe the benefits of tile-based rendering don't really mean all that much in today's consumer GPU market. But better is better: why wouldn't ATI and NVIDIA use tile-based architectures for the benfits it does provide. After all, it's not like there might be some (gasp!) downsides to tile-based rendering!

Well, actually, there are. For one thing, it's more difficult to design a tile-based GPU and get it running at high speeds. For another both NVIDIA and ATI have years and years of research and experience with implementation techniques and algorithms for immediate-mode renderers, much of which wouldn't apply to tile-based designs.

For another, neither ATI nor NVIDIA really uses traditional immediate-mode rendering anymore. Instead they use modified immediate-mode rendering, with lots of algorithmic tricks and tweaks to lessen the memory bandwidth inefficiencies of traditional immediate-mode rendering. Things like lossless z-buffer compression and various early polygon-culling algorithms. No they aren't quite as effective in reducing overdraw as tile-based rendering, but they provide quite a significant benefit. Indeed, the GF4 Ti4600 has more or less caught up with the (tile-based) KyroII in Kyro's own villagemark benchmark, which is contrived entirely to test massive overdraw of the sort which is never encountered in a game. The KyroII is only 8 months old. Sure it's much much cheaper than a Ti4600, but if Kyro can barely keep the lead in the one benchmark specially designed to make the case for tile-based rendering then something is wrong here.

Meanwhile there are very serious issues with the ability of tile-based rendering to scale to meet future challenges. In particular, the tile-based rendering algorithm works very naturally so long as there are no polygons which find themselves spread into more than one tile, and so long as you don't use transparent or translucent textures. Of course it's not that tile-based chips can't handle these situations--the KyroII is here and works just fine, after all--but just that they require complicated workarounds which are more inefficient than for immediate-mode rendering, which handles these cases naturally.

The problem is that both cases are going to be more and more likely as graphics continue to improve. As tile-based rendering tries to scale with increasing scene polygon counts and resolutions, you get more tiles per scene and many more polygons crossing tile boundries. And as graphical effects get more realistic, the alpha channel (i.e. transparency) starts coming into play more and more. Indeed much of the recent research in non-real-time computer graphics has focused on adding translucent "subsurface" reflections to the ray-tracing algorithm. This (and approximations of it) is the sort of thing that future pixel shaders are going to be called on to do, and tile-based rendering is a bad match for it.

Indeed, most of the recent advances in graphics are pointing towards a world in which the assumptions which tile-based rendering is based on no longer hold. How, for example, does tile-based rendering handle cubic environment mapping across tile boundries, or cast dynamic shadows across tile boundries? What happens if a dot3 bump map extends a texture from one tile into another? I'm sure clever solutions can be found to these and all the other dozens and dozens of issues that will arise when you try to mix DX8-style effects and tile boundries, but the main point is that tile-based rendering was an algorithm developed under two assumptions which increasingly do not hold:

1) If one polygon occludes another, the other's texture will never be visible to the camera;

2) Objects in one section in the screen can be rendered without reference to any other parts of the screen.

Of course, we may never know the difficulties of trying to make a DX8-compliant tile-based renderer; after all, the KyroII hasn't even made it to DX7, since it is still missing integrated T&L. I have no idea whether this is because of any difficulties integrating T&L with a tile-based rendering pipeline (can't think of why it would be a problem, but it may be), or just because the Kyro doesn't have the money or manpower behind it to keep up with 3 year old technology, but this lack is already preventing the KyroII from competing effectively with the cheaper GF2MX on modern high-poly games. I am pretty sure that integrating a programmable pixel shader into a tile-based architecture would be pretty tough, if not pretty impossible.

Which brings me to the main point: you started out writing "More shaders, More pixel pipelines, More memory bandwidth... whoopee..." and in a sense, this is the right attitude. To which we should very quickly add "tile-based screen division...deferred rendering algorithm...whoopee..." All these technical details only mean something insofar as they give us the capability for more realistic graphics--this means high FPS, high color depth, higher resolutions, lack of aliasing problems, high-quality mip-mapping/anisotropic filtering, realistic--or even dynamic--lighting and shadows, realistic and/or impressive pixel effects, high polygon counts, useful and realistic vertex effects, etc.--for a reasonable price. It is pretty damn hard to argue that the last few years, under NVIDIA's leadership (and ATI's pursuit) have not resulted in huge improvements on these measures. Again, the new GF4 Ti4600 may be ridiculously expensive and may not change your experience with today's games very much (besides enabling 1600x1200x32 with 4xAA at playable framerates), but when the new Doom game comes out, a card with similar specs and selling for ~$100 will bring you decent performance on an engine which offers a totally new level of graphical realism. Same thing when Unreal Warfare, Unreal 2, Deus Ex 2, and all the other Unreal 2-engine games start coming out. Believe me, a GF4 caliber card will improve the experience of playing those and later games significantly over a GF3 and especially a non-DX8 compliant card like a GF2 (and, sadly, a GF4MX). And, believe me, those games are going to provide significantly more realistic graphical experiences than those of today.

Immediate-mode rendering is doing just fine, and the GF4 marks an evolutionary but very significant improvement to the state-of-the-art. A switch to tile-based would require significant retreading to reach the same level, and might form a poorer basis for future improvements. But, if I'm wrong, then ATI and NVIDIA will make the switch. Believe me, they know all about tile-based rendering, and NVIDIA even owns Gigapixel (via 3dfx) and their tile-based rendering engine. I think they'll stick to modifications of immediate-based rendering, but no matter what they do it will be whatever they think offers the best graphics performance at the lowest cost to them.

And now to correct some minor misconceptions in your post:

Hell, the reason why the Geforce line has to keep doubling its fill rates every generation is because its architechture is so god damn ineffecient. Look at the memory bandwidth requirements for the cards!

The reason the GeForce line increases its texel fill rates continually is because consumers want to run new games which have higher multi-texturing requirements (Carmack has said Doom3 will have something like ~8 textures/pixel), and to run existing games in higher resolutions and at higher FPS.

The memory bandwidth "requirements" for the cards don't matter, only the prices. If a recent card with 7.4GB/s only costs $85 (Radeon 7500) and a brand new card with 8.8GB/s lists for $179, then the costs of increasing memory bandwidth are obviously not so terrible. Today's $400 card is next year's $80 card. Similarly, immediate-mode rendering's inefficiencies need to be measured according to their dollar costs, not their bandwidth costs.

Instead of using the relatively limited bandwidth of AGP for streaming textures from main memory (where it should god damn be) to the texture cache, the card is busy wasting bandwidth on the damn Z-buffer (which would be eliminated if they implemented hidden surface removal like the PowerVR chipsets).

???

First off, textures most certainly should not "god damn be" in main memory! The AGP bus is there to stream vertex data from the CPU (pre- or post-transformation, it's the same amount of data). That's all it's there to do, and good thing, too, because today's high-poly games can already generate enough vertex data to make AGP 2x a bottleneck, and those of a couple years will do the same to AGP 4x. (Which is why AGP 8x is on the horizon.) Increasing the bandwidth of a bus from the northbridge across the motherboard through a slot to an add-on card is a whole lot harder than increasing the bandwidth from soldered DDR to a soldered GPU a few centimeters away. AGP should only carry the data which it absolutely is forced to--namely initial vertex data from the game's engine running on the CPU.

Z-buffer lookups only waste bandwidth between the GPU and the on-card memory. Technically, you don't eliminate z-buffer lookups with a tile-based architecture; you eliminate texture lookups (and texture application) on occluded polygons. However, by dealing with a small tile at a time, you can read all the z-buffer data for the tile in from memory all at once, and store it in an on-chip cache until you're done with that tile. (This is essentially why higher poly-count games mean smaller and smaller tiles.)

And last, they do implement hidden surface removal techniques, like I pointed out before, even though they are less effective than with a tile-based architecture.

I think a pretty good example of this is Silicon Investor. Anyone can browse around, but only paid members get to post. Also, paid members can pass notes to each other in private. You can set your own bookmarks for other subscribers so that you can check what so-and-so posted today. Also, on SI, threads last forever. You can choose to show only threads with recent activity or you can dig around in -- and post to -- antique threads that haven't seen activity for years. You also can in effect set up a kill file -- every post has a little hyperlink "Ingore this person". @siliconinvestor.com email is available. They have deals set up with brokerage houses and various other information sources. For example, you can get a free premium membership sponsered by National Discount Brokers if you want to set up an account there. Premium members also get access to an advanced search engine.

It seems to me that /. could create such premium content and services to justify a subscription fee. I should think that the private message passing would be quite popular -- you can contact a poster in private without knowing thier real email. The "Ignore this person" links would be quite useful. There could be premium slashboxen with various functions; e.g. stock tickers, auto-refresh (or perhaps streaming video) Jennicam :-), /. member-only "blue light specials" at Computer Geeks, registration-free links to the New York Times, better searching and filtering, member-only ftp sites for the latest distribution ISOs, mozilla builds, etc.

But I really don't think that I'd pay just to get rid of ads. Also, I serioiusly think that there should be free lifetime memberships for charter subscribers -- say, anyone with a UID lower than maybe 100 or so ;-)

VA Linux - LNUX
Red Hat Linux - RHAT

I know stock prices aren't everything, but take a look at the 52 week highs on both of these. Giants indeed. Look up MSFT if you're feeling particularly self depreciating.... sigh.... An army of Visigoths needs to sac Redmond.

This has been another useless post from....

VA Linux - LNUX
Red Hat Linux - RHAT

I know stock prices aren't everything, but take a look at the 52 week highs on both of these. Giants indeed. Look up MSFT if you're feeling particularly self depreciating.... sigh.... An army of Visigoths needs to sac Redmond.

This has been another useless post from....

Is this a case of sour grapes after the metoric rise and subsequent fall of RHAT?

Is this a case of sour grapes after the metoric rise and subsequent fall of RHAT?

Is this a case of sour grapes after the metoric rise and subsequent fall of RHAT?

I think I read on the Contrarian Rap that even though a manager was screaming to hedge the low cost of oil (back when oil was ralitively cheap) he was told 'no'.

According to this a dual board for the AMD T-bird may be out in Q1 from Tyan. Given that the following ZDNET commentary basically states that the 1.5 Willy stinks in Windoze, it may be that AMD is going to be able to penetrate big time in the high end market. Since Intel, has really ceeded the low end market to AMD, AMD may be in a nice position for the next several quarters.

Dr. Acronym wrote:
YOU too can make hundreds of millions of dollars in days by starting a company and going IPO without even shipping a product!

The Dr.'s comment was modded funny, but it's true. Observe this discussion list for overvalued stocks. T$ will be on there...several months before it tanks.

Here is a concrete suggestion to accomplish this made in a letter to AMD.

Ohmigosh - Can this be a voice of reason in this ocean of chaos?

While I am not as experienced in the stock market as rlarson, I agree that this topic has been thorougly covered elsewhere, is not really /. material, and while worth concern and interest is NO cause for panic (unless promoting panic sells papers, ads, or click-throughs)

During the Oct 87 'crash", I distinctly remember my boss wearing his "cat AFTER it got the canary look" and chortling how he could finally pick up GE at a great price. He didn't panic and did rather well on that transaction. of course he wasn't over-extended to start with.

One one hand, there's been plenty of (mis)coverage of the market. To the point of it being beaten to death. /. cannot hope to match the coverage in depth, quality (or lack of), or quantity. If people want a /.-like discussion of the market, I suggest The Motley Fool or Silicon Investor as sites that are not too overrun by touts, day traders, and ponzi scheme promoters.

On the other hand, the stock market *is* relevant to many on /. - public companies, vc firms, and "angel" investors have been using market-based assets to fund new tech ventures and expand existing ones. They hire us, buy our employer's products and services. Some of us hope to wind up reasonably well-off (as oppossed to a Stepehnsonian "f-u wealthy") after a few years (not months!) of working for these businesses.

And on the gripping hand (to borrow from Jerry Pournelle), as publisher/editor/lord of the manor, Cmdr Taco can decide to publish/ignore whatever stories he wishes to. Just like any other media publisher.

In the US and Canada, most of us have access at best to ONE daily newspaper, six TV news outlets (that tend to have the same talking heads saying the same thing about the same stories), and similar lack of options for radio news.

On the web, we have choices (at least until AOL/TW/MS/The Illuminati/... acquire everything - oh I forgot, their stock got hammered, too, so they can't afford it either!)

There are apparently a *lot* of lemming investors out there. priceline.com (PCLN) lost 6.99/share and has a P/E ration of 0 still. They're still building their business by leveraging their ridiculous "reverse auction" patents so their not making a profit yet is not that alarming. I wonder what's going to happen when a competitor challenges their patents? That's really all they have is their "intellectual" property. Has the motley fool done a writeup on PCLN? I'd be interested in their thoughts.

Priceline.com stock quote

I'd have to agree--software industry has lots of vapor-ware--stock market has even more "vapor-share" ;-)

-core

Seems to be rising. Anyone with other numbers?

I added a link on siliconInvestor.com Maybe we can help the poor smucks out there SiliconInvesto r

And if anybody's going to go first, it's going to
be the weak companies that don't have their s
together.

Compaq, HP, and Dell are all in trouble, their
earnings just aren't growing the way they used
to. They have succeeded in "managing expectations" on their earnings, but this
can't last forever. You guys should read Bill Fleckenstein and his concept of "nuclear winter".

Fleck's column