Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Grids, Netscape, AMD
And Campbell's puts glass marbles in their soup pictures. Roland Piquepaille writes "We saw several grid computing announcements in the last couple of days.Of course, Gateway stole the show. In 'Gateway makes store PCs work overtime,' you can read that 'Gateway's network of 8,000 PCs can deliver 14 teraflops.' This is plain wrong. You all know that this number of 14 teraflops is meaningless. It's just the addition of the peak speed of all the PCs -- never reached anyway on individual PCs. You need specialized software to work efficiently with a grid. And two companies are releasing new products to power grids. Avaki rolled out what it believes is the first Java-based data grid software for enterprise-class IT environments. Kontiki, for its part, on Monday released a grid server that brings its content delivery system into the server realm, whereas previously it was only available for PCs. Check this column for a summary, or this article for more details."
Why aren't those things called 'stick-up' ads, anyhow? Internet Ninja writes "Netscape today released version 7.01 of Netscape based on Mozilla 1.0.2. Back in is popup blocking which they got a lashing for in 7.0 as well as tabs as home pages just like Mozilla. Release notes here and there's a couple articles on Netscape devedge which may be of interest to developers."
And they will continue to have produced my Athlon, too. schnoz writes "And you thought AMD was quitting the PC chip market? Then check out this article on Business Week. Not only are they releasing new chips and plan to continue to do so, they're also still very active research wise, working on new transistor making techniques such as the double gate design as well as metal-rather-than-silicon design. Keep going at it AMD!!"
with one pertaining to gateway, and this little lite relief at the bottom of the page:
Two heads are better than one. -- John Heywood
Coincidence?
they built the beowulf cluster we have been talking about for YEARS on /.
Crap, now that they did it, what next? A cluster of clusters, clustering?
It might interest some to know that physicists are thinking a lot about grid computing, especially those who use computation heavily, such as numerical relativists and fluid dynamicists. An interesting article appeared last year in Physics Today. Let's hope that the academic community's tradition of openness takes root in the Grid.
i confirmed it on my 3.6 ghtz athlon system (dual 1.8 MPs)...
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It's called The Globus Toolkit.
Wow, the fastest netscape I've used to date is (IIRC) Netscape 3.x. All subsequent versions have been progressively slower.
Except this one, apparently.
I wonder how they got it so fast? They must have geavily modified the Mozilla 1.0.2 code because, compared to NS 3.x, it runs like a dog with no legs.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I was starting to worry when I heard that AMD wasn't going to compete anymore in the CPU market. They are going to have to try very hard to keep up with the new hyperthreading technologies from Intel, but who really needs a 3 GHZ CPU. Poor college students like me want something that is the most bang for the buck, and I haven't had any problems playing my games (battlefield 1942, UT2003) on my Athlon 1700 yet!!!!
Keep on chuggin' AMD. College students are behind you!
"And you thought AMD was quittingthe PC chip market?"
I didn't think they were quitting the PC Chip market. I actually read the article.
...at least not yet.
Maybe you're thinking of the Mozilla derivative (soon to have a new name) Phoenix?
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
Flamebait if I ever saw it..
The rambus technology is unique in that it was designed to co-operate with the P4 "netburst" architecture. That is, delivering very quick transfer of data, but the latency wasn't very good, and still isn't extremely good even though it is at 533mhz.
DDR is both cheaper and has better potential for the future. Do you ever see video cards (such as NV30 and ATI R300+) use rambus?
That and DDR2 is just around the corner. Basically, AMD has always followed the cheaper and faster route, and DDR is a lot cheaper than DDR.
My 2c.
I bet the next version of IE will have a popup blocking feature.
Sex - Find It
"Wow, the fastest netscape I've used to date is (IIRC) Netscape 3.x. All subsequent versions have been progressively slower."
No no no, you see everybody had Pentiums running at 120 mhz when Netscape 3.0 was out. So technically they're right!
here: SGE
its a good piece of software at that.
i have had some experience with it.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Like, there's one where the mom is home alone with her little kid, and everyone knows that women are only motivated to actually cook when there's a hunky man around. So she's about to make the kid a FROZEN PIZZA when the kid holds up a drawing from school and says "Look, Mommy, I drawded you a pitcher!" and Mom oohs over it and to reward the kid she puts away the frozen pizza and instead the kid gets A BOWL OF CAMPBELL'S SOLID PINK "TOMATO" SOUP for lunch. This is love in the same sense that this is nutrition. Lumpless flesh-colored soup. Remember how Campbell's tried to use the slogan "Soup Is Good Food" for a few months until enough dieticians complained that that was an outright lie in the case of Campbell's watery slime? Remember how they got busted for always showing pictures of soup with the few measly pathetic little veggie bits standing on the surface of the soup because the bowls were always filled with GLASS MARBLES to hold up the little fragments of orange-gray carrots and caved-in peas?
What do you think is going to happen once everyone starts using a pop-up blocking web browser? Something even more annoying like those fullscreen flash ads that appear from nowhere...soon they will be everywhere! I say keep pop-up blocking in Mozilla only, so that the niche that uses it benefits while the mainstream continues to get screwed...
2k3:
2k and 3
2000 and 3
2003
For the year 2300:
2k and 300
2k3c or 2k300
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
DDR is a dead end, folks.
What does dance, dance revolution have to do with any of this?
It sure wouldn't suprise me if they did include some form of popup blocking, or for that matter tabbed browsing. Microsoft will proclaim their wonderful "innovations" and how they will change the internet. Which is what they have done consistantly...
I would imagine we will start to see a IE 6.5 beta hit the net shortly, possibly incorporating the popup blocking, but my guess is that IE 7 will be the version to really grab mozilla(and opera for that matter) innovations.
Same old, same old
Alright, I guess if thats what you really want. Personally, I think it'd hurt but thats just me.
i sure hope not. i don't want the average joe to be blocking pop-ups. once pop-up blocking becomes mainstream then the advertisers are going to switch to a format that is harder to deal with. i like using mozilla and blocking pop-ups, but if the advertisers change their format to a harder to block type, then i'll be seeing ads again.
I'll bet you also have an extensive collection of Betamax tapes as well right?
Grid computing is definied as super-efficient, superfast clustering... provided you use any languaged BESIDES Java to impliment your algorithms
Yes, yes, imagine a beowulf cluster of these and then imagine the incredible total overhead wasted by hundreds or thousands of instances of any given JVM.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Wow, the fastest netscape I've used to date is (IIRC) Netscape 3.x. All subsequent versions have been progressively slower.
Yes well I'm sure I could write a browser that really kicks ass, if, like NS3 it ignores all stylesheets, screws up tables and frames and only parses a handful of tags.
Actually the slowest version of NS I've used was the first effort at V6 - I almost gave up on them when I saw just how bad it was. Mozilla has really come along though - it's very close to IE with dynamic content now - I'm sure it'll pass IE7 for speed, as IE has been getting bigger and slower since V5...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Or this guy. (Warning: many megs, but worth it if you have the bandwidth.)
working on new transistor making techniques such as the double gate design as well as metal-rather-than-silicon design.
This reminds me of one of my favorite IBM stories told to me by an ex-IBMer professor a few years back.
It would appear that some time in the 70s (it's been a few years since I heard this story), IBM was having problems with boules* falling over and breaking, costing a great deal of money. IBM being what it was, put out a solicitation for employee suggestions on how to remedy the problem.
One technician was very disappointed to hear that the boules were made of silicon and suggested using a stronger material. It was his wager that a stainless steel boule would be much more resistant to breaking. So, he suggested replacing all the silicon boules with stainless steel.
True story.
* Boules are very tall cylinders of monocrystalline silicon. They are sliced up into fairly thin, circular wafers. These wafers are then processed through the steps that make chips and lastly diced into the silicon chips we commonly see put on plastic or ceramic packages.
"and the surgery to implant the chip at the base of your skull is so painless it's no wonder I'm number one." -the wwwyzzerdd.
Master shake is the same as my grandpaw when it comes to pop up ads. He's always calling me saying "I got an error message... Alert, your computer is too slow. Click here to fix. What should I do?"
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
I took a long shower when I got home and scrubbed vigorously.
Note that it was just announced that Netscape is laying off people:
a ol _layoffs/
http://money.cnn.com/2002/12/10/news/companies/
Was this release of 7.01 just for spin, to try and keep the positve in the news more than the negative?
I hate marketing.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
The SRV record can be used to tell a client what server and port to go to for a named service.
Rather than using hostnames (www.foo.baz)
use a SRV record to send http traffic to a host:port pair, frp traffic to a different host:port pair, and on and on::
; SRV priority weight port target
_http._tcp IN SRV 0 0 8080 heuey.foo.baz.
_http._tcp IN SRV 0 0 8080 deuey.foo.baz.
_ftp._tcp.ftp IN SRV 0 0 21 louie.foo.baz.
No more do you need to include non-standard ports for http. (8080, 81, etc) just make the app SRV aware and update DNS. done.
This would allow for much simpler Server configs too!!
comment directly in my journal
Now that Netscape has re-introduced popup blocking, Microsoft may soon follow suit. However, I did see an article on /. a while back about a group of advertisers that claimed any kind of blockage on their advertisements was theft (they claimed being able to see a site without having to see the ads constituted theft of bandwidth). If all future browsers incorporate popup blocking, where is the future of online advertising headed?
HOWTO: How to avoid flash ads (in any browser)
Step 1. Don't install flash plugin.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit? err... not with flash ads.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Rather than having window.open() return a null handle, have it return a real handle, but simply don't create the window. Better yet, have it optionally load the contents of the window, so the remote site never even knows that the window simply was never popped up.
Yes well I'm sure I could write a browser that really kicks ass, if, like NS3 it ignores all stylesheets, screws up tables and frames and only parses a handful of tags.
Don't bother, someone else already has. It's a GTK-based browser called Dillo.
And it does kick ass.
I believe what you meant to say was "imagine the incredible total overhead wasted by hundreds or thousands of instances on a reference-implementation-quality JVM."
IBM has a cluster VM just for this occasion.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Webwasher. Live it, Love it, Use it. Install it on your parents computer and show them you love them.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
He must have been referring to former east Germany, which was referred to as DDR ("Deutsche Democratic Republic" or something?)
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Actually Microsoft is great at leaving the value added innovations to their clients. Try looking at "Crazy Browzer". It only takes a few nights coding to add tabs to IE. If MS added tabs they'd be using their monopoly power to stomp the small value added companies, and if they don't include them , they are being dimwitted trogglodites. Well which is it?
There are entire companies that make their living providing value added enhancements to windows that match and frequently beat the OSS offerings on Linux. (Object Desktop beats the hell out of any customizable desktop solution I've seen anywhere elase) They have to be careful about what gets included because any single feature at this point will have some segment of people FREAKING OUT about it.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Hmmmm.
Double click on a mail message no longer opens the message in a separate window
right click - "open message in new window" no longer opens the message in a separate window
Don't tell me to get another mail client - Netscape has done the job for me so far.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Except for supporting the ethically bankrupt attempt of the Rambus company to subvert the industry standard. Playing by competition is one thing. Playing by courting Intel and having Intel twist everyones' arms is worse. Rambus went way beyond that.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Yes well I'm sure I could write a browser that really kicks ass, if, like NS3 it ignores all stylesheets, screws up tables and frames and only parses a handful of tags.
Not that I actually use or even like earlier versions of Netscape; I just thought it was a very bold claim. Modern browsers seem to be superior in every way, except for speed and memory footprint.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm not so sure how good it's gonna be once ad-blocking browsers become popular with mainstream internet users. Marketing companies are just gonna end up replacing pop-ups with some other more invasive, more annoying, and more ridiculous ads.
I'm now using Phoenix 0.5, which came out just recently, and it's quite toasty - I think it's ready to replace Mozilla as my main browser. The main plugins work (I'd had trouble getting them installed on 0.3 and 0.4) and it's very very fast, especially since I set the startup delay to 0 (default is 1200ms, which lets it recover from slow-loading graphics that would otherwise force redraws.) The Google-search-bar extension is really convenient, though I gather than newer Mozillas also have it. I'm normally no fan of themes (why clutter up the GUI at the cost of making it larger and slower?), but the "LittlePhoenix 1.3" theme has icons that are enough smaller that I can reclaim significant screen space, and the "Linky" extension has been a good way to handle pages with lots of links (e.g. letting you leech all the pictures into a separate window or tab, or examine a page by grabbing all the URLs on it into a tab, which can be cleaner than View Source for some ugly web pages.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
AMD is also not quiting it's "True Performance Initiative" Read an update at the Tech Report.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
As a long time C coder, I'm normally the last one to come to the aid of Java, but there are some things you should understand before making statements like that.
First, Java is a language. A language cannot be fast or slow. However, the implementation of the Java interpreter can be described as fast or slow.
Secondly, just because the memory heavy, CPU intensive Sun Java VM that you load on your linux or windows or solaris box is slow, doesn't mean that all other implementations are slow.
Thirdly, consider that a Java program that is written poorly will perform poorly. This is the case with any language. If you haven't carefully audited the source code to make sure it is making optimal use of your CPU's time, you can't say for sure that the program isn't at fault.
"I bet the next version of IE will have a popup blocking feature."
HAH! More like "The next version of MSN will have a pop-up blocking feature." Why put it in for free when Microsoft can get away with selling it to you instead?
> No no no, you see everybody had Pentiums running at 120 mhz
> when Netscape 3.0 was out.
Err, no, Pentiums didn't run that fast until a year or two later --
at least not the ones anyone could afford to actually buy. A
486 DX4/100 was still considered competitive as a new system even
when Netscape 4.0 came out. (Which, incidentally, tells you how
*old* Netscape 4.x is. Considering that Netscape 6 was really
ony of beta quality, we can be quite thankful that the long wait
is over and Netscape has a decent browser out again (since 7.0PR1,
which "Preview" or not made 6.2.anything look like junk).) This
new Netscape release, from what I've seen of it so far (admittedly,
not extensive use) seems to be quite solid, though of course it
lacks the majority of the features added during the 1.1 and 1.2
milestones. Which is fine; 1.1 lacked stability, and 1.2 is new
enough that it's hard to say (though I'm using 1.2.1 and it seems
very solid to me so far); Netscape is right to go with 1.0.2 for
now. I'm thinking they'll stick with that 1.0.x branch through
several minor releases and go back to the trunk for a new stable
branch around 1.4 or 1.6 or so. (This is not inside information,
just a prediction based on the pattern I've observed in their
behavior over the last couple of years.) By then, the branch
they are using will feel really obsolete to people who have been
testing the Mozilla builds, but that means that when users upgrade
to the next branch they'll notice a sudden influx of features.
That branch could be 7.5, but I'm predicting it will be 8.0
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Is something other than pop-up ads.
We all know the "If we can't do it the way we're doing it now, it won't get done at all" argument, and we all know that it's BS. If a product or service has value, people will find a way to deliver it.
Outlawing supermarkets wouldn't stop people from eating.
paintball
I guess I can kind of understand the attraction of being able to use the grid across various architectures, but you're throwing away (at least) 90% of your computing power.
huh? Where'd that 90% come from? Are you talking about the JRE? As I understand it, Java bytecode gets compiled at runtime, so for computational stuff where you're only launching the app once and letting it run for awhile, it should be pretty fast.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I went to a presentation yesterday by Platform (the guys that make LSF) who talked about grid computing. Each person that spoke gave a different definition of what 'grid computing' is: It's clusters of clusters, it's clusters plus processing on individual machines, etc.
The upside is that such processing using PCs is already taking place, in the form of distributed.net, folding@home and seti@home among many others. If gateway wants to use its spare cycles to create a supercomputer capable of many teraflops, then go for it.
On the other hand, apps that are well suited to such distributed computing are those that require little I/O and more number crunching. That is, you don't want to use BLAST (comparing gene sequences) as the data sets are on the order of GB. But simple number crunching, like the examples already given, do not require sending much data to the clients for processing.
BTW, LSF has software to do the same thing with desktop boxes.
Yes, you can run a standard x86 RedHat. That's the attractive thing about the Hammer/Athlon64/Opteron/Whatever. They can run 32- or 64-bit code. In fact, they can run BOTH at the same time. One of the demos that AMD showed was a dual-monitor Opteron, with two spinning 3D objects. One was running as a 32-bit app, the other as a 64-bit app - on the same machine.
However, I believe that RedHat IS going to have a release for the Hammer. Considering that some packages (like Apache) are having a good amount of work done to make them really take advantage of the 64-bit environment, I'm not sure how much of a difference the special distro will make, but there's plenty of time for that.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Well, ever since the new version of AOL did away with pop-up ads, it only makes sense. I don't know if AOL/TW properties have popups (I use Mozilla myself so I never see them), but if they do now, that will change soon as well. If AOL doesn't derive any revenus from popup advertising, why would it support it?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
As far as new ad formats, right on devedge page linked from the artice, you are seeing the future of web advertising.
Instead of popup windows (which are *SO* 90's), we will have popup div layers, positioned to cover the page. Look at Netscape's own popup detection example. They show you how to detect a popup blocker, and open up a fixed position DIV to give visitor a "warning". How long do you think it will take an ad network programmer to figure out that instead of the warning, this DIV can actually be used to show the ad itself?
Better yet, if the window failed to open, you can open the div with an IFRAME in it that points to the same URL. And no popups. :)
Welcome to the future. Doesn't it look a lot like the past?
Are you on drug(s)?!! Why not?
It's also a complete bear to install.
You needed 6 MB for it to really perform well.
(I haven't used OS/2 since 2.1, so I don't know about later versions, and nobody really seemed to use the pre 2.0 versions :) )
First, Java is a language. [...] doesn't mean that all other implementations are slow.
Java is an environment as well as a language. Unless this Java grid is planning to throw away the JVM, I think it's fair to say that it's probably using that standard Java environment. I'm not ruling out that a "magic" JVM might come along that somehow overcomes all the baggage of how Java is designed, but so far we've not seen this. Given the current state of technology, it seems foolish to me to throw away all that performance.
Based on my own experience, Java is on the average about 1/10th the speed of an equivalent C program, although clearly it depends on what you're doing. Where Java is particularly bad is very data intensive work, such as string manipulation. Where I was particularly appalled at Java's performance was XML parsing.
Java works best when it's a "glue" mechanism to pass communication between systems. Where it is not appropriate IMO is very computationally intensive applications, which presumably would be what you would use a grid for.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
To answer your question, yes, you'll need a OS specifically built for the chip, and a new motherboard. There is some tentative support for x86-64 from a few companies (I believe SuSE).
But this raises the question of, why would you want to? The Alpha is an elegant architecture. x86-64 is a sin against nature.
AMD stopping competition with Intel was utter BS in the first place. If you've followed their roadmap at all, they've got the Barton core comming out in a couple of months closely followed by ClawHammer and SledgeHammer. They have new cores on the horizon and are researching new technologies. They aren't going anywhere. Forbes is going on my "Company with Idiot Writers List." They're there along with CNet and some other ZD Net and Internet.com companies.
I'm skeptical about your definition.
I attended a colloquim and seminar by Ian Foster, one of the authors of the Globus Toolkit, who was visiting down from Argonne Nat'l Labs. From what I gathered, grid computing is more about having the right kind of network negotiation and protocols between resources. Supper-efficient and superfast are second order derivatives; that is, they are a bonus and nice touch, but I don't think that is exactly what grid computing is about.
Specifically, as I understand it, its about global resource management, across distributed, world-wide systems. Joe, who runs a Particle Collider in Europe, can share information and network resources with Jane, who runs a MRI in America, who can share info and resources with Charlie, who runs a radio telescope in Antartica. I may be mistaken, but I understood grid computing to be sort-of the opposite of clustering.
Now, don't get me wrong... I'm not trying to start any kind of crusade. However, I do know a number of people who swear by Java, and I think that Java may actually be the protocol of choice for a lot of Grid Computing applications (such as sharing of astronomical data, genomic data, and magnetic resonance imaging data). These kinds of applications can greatly benefit by the sandbox architecture, garbage collection, security infrastructure, and virtual machines which Java supports. Sure it adds overhead, but I think that there are millions of programmers and scientists around the world who would gladly take the overhead costs, if it means that they can concentrate on chemistry, astronomy, genetics, or whatever, rather than having to worry about memory pointers, memory leaks, hardware support, and so forth.
But I only attended a couple of lectures by one of the authors of the Globus Toolkit. I'm not an expert or anything, so I could certainly be mistaken.
So I loaded up the new NS 7.1 on Mac OS X. It feels a lot like Mozilla now. Not as quick as Chimera/Navigator, but quite pleasant.
The popup filter sounds a system alert when it blocks something. Takes some getting used to, since it's the same noise by default as the new mail sound.
I was amused to see that popup blocking didn't work on Netscape's portal. The popup preferences warn that blocking might be defeated by sites using "other methods" to raise windows. Guess Netscape is using those Black Arts to do just that.
With the mail spellcheck and all the default plugins, this is a great mom-and-pop browser. Will probably load it on the family's machines. Nice to see decent Netscape product again.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I heard IE 7 will come with popup blocking but will be default to OFF for keeping relations with AD-Companies good.
... anyway, lets see :)
;-)
Keep this in mind, I guess they will somehow make it passport
I am a registered Opera 7 user, I'd care less
you are right; game consoles do use RDRAM. But in the end, RDRAM is not killed because it's bad technology, but because othere stuff.
first on the tech. (REALLY quick brief)
1) RDRAM has a faster interface (duh)
2) and it has a much more narrow bus
3) but to make chips drive at such a high frequency ON THE CIRCUIT BOARD, the bus interface for RDRAM is totally wacky
explanation: RDRAM is serially connected, *kinda* like... SCSI, or COAX ethernet back in the days. and it's heavily terminated. and because the signal goes so damn fast (remember, circuit board made of FR4 here - not cache->CPU interconnects), the routing of the signal traces, while sparse (something they tout - and it's true, DDR has like 2-4 time the wire density as RDRAM on the board), has very small tolerance for length difference. furthermore because the high speed, the chips must have a very strict output impedance (which is why mem-makers got shitty yields at the beginning and the RDRAM price were so high).
performance wise / practically speaking, since it's the signal routing / RIMM detection and delay adjustment (remember no trace length differences etc) that's difficult and causes trouble - in game consoles where you will never add memory, RDRAM is actually better (easier to work with / better performance - better perf because you don't incur additional delays in the trace by adding more modules, everything is fixed). Same time on PCs, when you do it right, RDRAM still offers better bandwidth than DDR; DDR-2 i am not so sure, but that won't be in massive production for a while so don't wait for it yet. depending on architecture (P4 is, have to say, on the side of "optimized for RDRAM"), you would get better performance out of RDRAM for a little while longer.
now the non-tech side:
RAMBUS charges royalty. 2% i think? now - memory business is not high-margin business (or else there won't be only like 4-5 memory makers left!), so when 2% is actually like 40% from the margin - if you can do away with RAMBUS (even at a performance hit), it would enable you to survive, or make more money - depending on the company.
so... the moral of the story? RDRAM is not bad technology (i.e. has its uses - like in consoles), but it's not GREAT technology, and certainly not good enough to warrent the margin cut and the headaches in engineering (output impedence - and these days they are going to 32/64 bit so the sparse signal lines is less and less of a advertisable benefit). But I expect that it will maintain it's little niche and won't just die off suddenly one day. i mean, heck - even if they only supplied for the game consoles, (especially with the large chunck of change intel gave to RAMBUS) they can survive for quite a while. RAMBUS as a company I think will eventually fail if they continue this path of IP-only, though - for other reasons. but this is getting long already.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
You should have kept quite and popped down the patent office, either you'd be rich or have the power to stop advertisers using this method.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
> Actually Microsoft is great at leaving the value added innovations
> to their clients. Try looking at "Crazy Browzer". It only takes a
> few nights coding to add tabs to IE.
This is right, but it is only half the story. Microsoft is great at
leaving the innovations to ISVs and then buying or cloning the ones
that prove to be successful or useful. Think back...
DOSEDIT comes out, and people in-the-know declare that they can't
live without it. Microsoft produces DOSKEY for 5.0. Stacker is
successful. Microsoft produces DoubleSpace for the next version of
DOS. Desqview gets rave reviews, and customers say they want
windows like Macintosh has. Microsoft produces Windows. Central
Point and Norton produce useful disk defragmentation utilities;
Microsoft contracts for a defrag utility to include with DOS.
Third-party full-screen editors are all the rage; Microsoft drops
edlin and produces edit.com, leveraging the IDE editor that they
already developed for QuickBasic (and, in the process, including
a stripped-down QBasic to avoid the need to extract the editor
from it; apparently it was too interwoven to separate before 5.0
shipped; later they did separate it out (or rewrite it) for Win
95). On and on the list goes.
Will the next IE include tabbed browsing? Maybe, but if it
doesn't, the version after will. Will the next IE include popup
blocking? Maybe, but if it doesn't, more people will use Netscape
than already do, and Microsoft knows it; which does Microsoft
value more, strong dominance in the browser market (not mere
majority, but the kind of overwhelming majority only achieved
after IE5 came out), or the support of popup advertisers?
Actually, Microsoft could weasel a way to get both: ship IE with
popup blocking, but place "select partners" on a whitelist, and
make it prohibitively difficult for casual users to remove sites
from the whitelist. (HINT: involve regedit.) On the whole, this
would be mostly good for user experience, since it would greatly
reduce the sheer overwhelming quantity of popups. Microsoft could
claim that "the competitive market" (Netscape) forced them to
include popup blocking, elicit sympathy, use it as one more argument
in any antitrust procedings (oh, you thought we'd seen the last of
those?), and then turn around and tell strategic advertisers that
it means less competition from nobody advertisers who didn't make
the whitelist -- and use it as a negotiation point: doubleclick
would probably bend over backwards and kiss strategic parts of
Microsoft's corporate anatomy to be on the whitelist.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft just _bought_ CrazyBrowser.
OTOH, popup blocking is not the hardest thing in the universe to
implement, and they could just do it from scratch. CrazyBrowser
would then have to offer more innovations or become irrelevant.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I don't mind advertisements in general; I do mind popups. If popup
blocking goes mainstream, all it means to me is legacy sites that
require it for obscure reasons will be forced to be fixed or become
irrelevant. Then I can happily leave popups disabled *all* the time
and browse totally in one window (with multiple tabs if desired).
If advertisers load banners into pages to compensate for the lost
popups, that's fine with me.
So yes, I _do_ want IE to ship with popup blocking. On by default,
if possible. Not because I use IE, but because IE exerts pressure
on website authors.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I said this in another discussion, but here goes....
It seems inevitable that this will lead to a technology arms race.
The advertisers get more obnoxious. Browsers and proxies get better at screening out ads. More features will appear to help the end user. And those features will become more sophisticated.
Here is a hypothetical example. [Disclaimer: this example is purely hypothetical. I have not done this myself, and am not trying to induce browser authors to commit a crime. Remember, a web site has to make money, and not watching ads is stealing!] Anyway, that said, suppose a browser (or proxy?) went through all the motions of running the ad. Executed the ad code, scripts, flash animations, etc. Dutifully simulated the popup windows, and executed their code. Dutifully requested all of the graphics, flash animations, and other inline content for the popup windows. This way the server really thinks that you see the ad. After all, your browser requested a flash that is only embedded in the popup. So you must not be a thief, because you are seeing the ad. The problem is, the authors of this browser or proxy have induced their users into stealing because the browser or proxy doesn't actually display the ads or popup windows. It still consumes the bandwidth, but these evil crooks (i.e. users) don't care.
This technique will prevent the advertisers from knowing that you've seen the ad. From their perspective, your browser has executed all the right code and requested all the right content from the server that should be associated with viewing this page.
Seen from the perspective I've described it here (advertiser friendly, and users as thieves) could the above hypothetical example be construed as a circumvention device? "Our content is protected by Anti-Leech, and these evil hackers have circumvented it. That's as bad as spray painting ad billboards!"
In the end, we'll have heads up displays in cars, with ad billboards constantly popping up in our face while driving. This will be seen as enormously beneficial in eliminating the visual clutter of billboards on buildings and roadways.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Not everyone has a high-speed link.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
RDRAM is not a bad idea in theory, though -- it's the same idea as replacing 1284 and SCSI with USB and Firewire. After a certain point it's not worth the trouble trying to maintain a wide paralell link -- the modern interconnect busses are serial (including SATA, which I'm still a bit skeptical of), and Rambus has only a 16-bit pipe with some mighty fast bit bang going on.
/Brian
That said, all indications are it's a bear to work with, and perhaps narrow memory busses aren't the Right Thing? (Don't forget -- Intel RDRAM chipsets, with the exception of i820, all operate on dual-channel RDRAM, which means a 32-bit bus instead of 16... says something rather interesting about the limitations of serialized memory. On the flipside, I wouldn't want to be the engineer trying to root out crosstalk problems on a dual-DDR mobo design either... that's got to be even more of a nightmare.)
Netscape 1.1 or 1.2 (whatever the final 1.x was) was the latest stable version when I got my Pentium 75. I remember downloading the 2.0 betas about 6 months after I got that system. 100mhz Pentiums had just come out then.
I remember the 2.0 -> 3.0 timeframe being shorter than 3.0 -> 4.0 was. Even so, I really doubt 3.0 came out before Intel managed to get to 120mhz.
I went to both sites with Mozilla 1.2b and got no ads like the ones you described.
This is a "me too" post, damn I can't believe how long I lived with such a configuration.. from 1996 to mid-2000. I think I used IE though, it was faster than Netscape. I did get 32 MB and 8.4 GB upgrade in 1999, but in August 2000 upgraded to an Athlon 650, and then my brother got that, and now I have a Duron 900. Wow, I miss my old computer. :)
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
As somebody else replied, this level of memory bloat is pretty recent - for most kinds of software, you shouldn't be designing it to require a latest-model desktop power box, but a two-year-old laptop, which has a lot less spare resources. That way it will run well for everybody and really rock on high-end machines. Some applications are obvious exceptions, like games, and scientific/engineering numbercrunching.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Coz lots of website use reallyAnnoyingUIMethod on their website instead of just plain "a hrefs".
I surf the web with javascript and activeX turned off and I don't get any pop ups at all.
But there are many annoying websites where what should be just a simple "a href" link, just doesn't work unless javascript is on.
Sure javascript can be useful (invert check box selection for 500 items etc), but I get suspicious when web designers start using javascript where plain HTML will do.
Then they have "one big shockwave" sites.
Maybe they do work for the banner ad companies too.
Perhaps I'm a neo-luddite but you can have new windows opened whether you have javascript on or off. My webapps do that - if you have javascript on, the window is a nice small size, with javascript off, you get a whole new window which you may have to resize (I use it for stuff like monitoring for new messages).
Yeah, I think you're right on the years.
Netscape 2.0 right at the end of 95 or the very beginning of 96. 3.0 betas came out 6 months later.
I'm amazed at how low end the technology you saw was. I had a P75 at the start of high school, and a bunch of people had P90's or faster. Around 97 a lot of people had Pentium 2's.