Slashdot Mirror

With the weekend comes many stories about the upcoming election. First, Herger sent us an article by Liberatarian Neal Boortz which is fairly humorous, and makes several good points, along with talking about Harry Browne. cmpgn sent in transcripts from a panel discussion on how GWB would govern. James Hills sent us Rolling Stone's Interview with Gore. Yohahn sent us filmmaker Michael Moore's article after being on the road with Nader. Finally, a few links of a more general nature: Duncan W. McQueen sent us a page that tries to match up your beliefs to a candidate, and LizJ sent us a site trying to be impartial and track the candidates' stance on the issues.

Still getting lopsided story submissions. We're trying to give links to several different candidates each time, but Gore and Nader are the only candidates that we're getting good submissions for. I'm voting for Quimby anyway ;)

TBC writes "Etrade's IPO center is now accepting indications of interest for anyone with an E-Trade account. They will probably continue accepting indications of interest until 5:00pm CDT. Get it while you can... " Today is apparently the deadline for the last round of folks trying to get in before the public. A lot of people got theirs. A lot more didn't. If nothing else, this has been a learning experience for a lot of people. And a pretty profitable one for E*Trade too I bet. Update: 08/04 10:20 by CT : A few people noted that the times up.

Yohahn wrote in with some news on the DVD for Linux effort. A company has developed a prototype DVD decoder board that does the decryption in hardware, versus software, meaning the that the drivers could be released under the GPL. However, because the board is only a prototype, investors need to be convinced - head over to LinuxTv.org and vote in the poll to show support for this. Please-I'd like to fully use my laptop, and this is one of those areas Linux needs assistance in.

Clive Turvey has continued his investigation into KNI, and has documented the instructions he has found so far. MMX coders will be happy to see that KNI contains a 1-cycle shuffle instruction, like Altivec does, but unlike MMX. As expected it has some instructions specifically for 3D (1/x and 1/sqrt(x)). Update: 02/24 12:11 by S : As reader Christopher Thomas points out, Intel has released a manual that includes a functional description of KNI. But I can't find any instruction timings in it. It weighs a hefty 5.5Mb.

Yohahn writes "The Source for the drivers for the broadway MPEG capture board, have been released under the GNU license. Given, it's in VC, but hopefully sombody can fit this into a driver for linux. I think it's cool to see toys releasing their drivers for free. "

Some new information has emerged about Katmai's new instructions (aka MMX2). Apparently, the details of Clive Turvey's KNI page are essentially correct. Moreover the KNI instructions will allow the use of 4 (versus 2 for 3DNow!) 32 single precision FP numbers. Since 128 bit registers will not fit into the 80 bit space allocated for saving the FP registers, OS's will have to be updated for them to switch between 2 KNI tasks, but a doubling of the FP bandwidth makes that very worthwhile. (Ok... I goofed confusing it with integer 16bit stuff, so I updated the article. Thanks for pointing that out.)

Windows Sources reports that Intel's Deschutes processors (only the 333MHz Pentium II at this time) have two MMX2 instructions in the microcode. Besides going into the technical details, the page mentions that a virtual device driver (VXD) in Windows 98 uses these functions. I guess it's sort of interesting Windows is the only operating system to use (I wouldn't say "take advantage") of these new instructions.