IIRC, the target speed for the next generation, the POWER4, is in excess of 1 GHz (but I haven't seen the production schedule -- "real soon now", I think.
Does anyone have any comparisons of Alpha vs other processors at equivalent clocks? I remember comparing processors 3 years ago...
The Alpha 21164 you tested three years ago was designed purely as a "speed demon" processor -- in particular, it did only "in-order" instruction execution, and only for the right kind of problems did it execute close to peak speed (four-times-unrolled Linpack was good for it, and generated enough non-data-dependent work to keep the processor running at full speed in the inner loops -- 930 MFLOPS in a 500MHz system!) but "random" codes averaged about 1.4 instructions per clock.
The (current) 21264's are aggressively out-of-order speculative-execution CPU's, and on typical "random" codes will execute more than twice as many instructions per clock tick as the '164 does.
I called my usual alpha dealer (it's been a while since I have had to talk alphas) to get prices for a mobo+cpu+ atx rackmount case, and was told that compaq had decreed an end to ATX form factor systems
...The reality is that anonymity has, until the Internet, been essentially a mythical thing. The "real world" certainly doesn't have any anonymity at all...
Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. See generally J. S. Mill, On Liberty, in On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government 1, 3-4 (R. McCallum ed. 1947). It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation--and their ideas from suppression--at the hand of an intolerant society. The right to remain anonymous may be abused when it shields fraudulent conduct. But political speech by its nature will sometimes have unpalatable consequences, and, in general, our society accords greater weight to the value of free speech than to the dangers of its misuse. See Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630-31 (1919) (Holmes, J., dissenting). Ohio has not shown that its interest in preventing the misuse of anonymous election related speech justifies a prohibition of all uses of that speech. The State may, and does, punish fraud directly. But it cannot seek to punish fraud indirectly by indiscriminately outlawing a category of speech, based on its content, with no necessary relationship to the danger sought to be prevented. One would be hard pressed to think of a better example of the pitfalls of Ohio's blunderbuss approach than the facts of the case before us.
The judgment of the Ohio Supreme Court is reversed.
Since the principal use of zipped archives is compression not concealment/protection, and since there are numberous third-party decompressors such as WinZip, the DMCA's crypto-breaking provisions do not apply.
For the same reason, Microsoft cannot be said to have used "due diligence" in protecting what it claims are trade secrets, when it puts those "secrets" on its web-site in zipped-archive form. That should be grounds for summary judgement in any trade secret action.
If Microsoft takes action, I hope you are considering the option of counter-suing for barratry (the use of frivolous lawsuits for intimidation). Note also that barratry is consider an ethics offense for attorneys, so you might also seek the disbarment of the MS attorneys, along with the counter-suit.
For all the idiocies involved, ntfs was a 64-bit file-system (with a 64-bit-supporting API) from the word go. Evidently one piece of wisdom BillG did have was to think about the implications of multimedia for file size...
There's other thing you missed: easy implementation and use of large file systems. Since in the standard C interface, the file-system lseek() call for moving around in a file takes a long as the displacement, 32-bit systems (with their 32-bit long datatype) make it really difficult to have functional use of files larger than 2 GB. Those of us in supercomputing have had to deal with this problem for a long time; multimedia will soon make it a necessity for everyone (think how big a 2-hour digital movie is, even MPEG-compressed, when its uncompressed data takes maybe 4 MB per frame, at 24 frames per second or faster (1 minute uncompressed is 5.7 GB). Sound isn't quite as bad... 2 GB of (compressed) MP3 is a very few hours.
Perhaps the question of when would be more relevant if Linux had better SMP support...
The 2.4 kernels have much better support. Furthermore, several organizations are committed to improving Linux SMP performance for high-end parallel systems (e.g., SGI has announced exactly that intention, along with the intent to use Linux for their high-end IA-64 systems).
BTW, did you notice that SGI is open-sourcing their Linux IA-64 compiler suite under the GPL? See URL http://oss.sgi.com/projects/Pro64/
Again, you clearly do not have any idea what you're talking about. Each individual CPU has it's own L1 and L2 cache.
You don't know what you're talking about.
SMP machines such as Compaq 2xxx, 4xxx, 8xxxWildfire, SGI Origin, IBM Winterhawk, and Sun E10K maintain coherent caches so that all processors have the same view of memory. Because of the way the caches are organized, it is quite possible for different threads (running on different processors) to "fight" over memory locations that are referenced through more than one cache. According to SGI's Parallel Performance Tuning Tutorial, in the worst cases this can cause a code running in parallel on 8 processors to execute at just 1% of the speed of the code running on one processor! The same effects happen on other systems, too -- trust me; I do parallel performance engineering for environmental modeling as my "day job".
Some AC's don't have any idea what they're talking about, and insist on trying to spread their ignorance!
How will Konqueror handle bookmarks -- is there any chance of compatibility there (or transfer utilities to/from) Netscape bookmarks?
I have a couple of thousand bookmarks, nested in places 5 levels of folder deep...
Will Konqueror let me zoom
text
images
on a frame-by-frame or image-by-image basis?
Already the pixel-oriented specs of HTML are downright annoying if you have a good monitor displaying at high resolution. Most web-sites aren't oriented to today's high-end 110-DPI monitors (and tomorrow's monitors will have much higher resolution than that!), and for whatever reason don't mind offending their ostensibly-best-heeled customers. Admittedly, such stupidity should never be allowed to reproduce, but...
There are times when you really need the paper manuals (I still keep a copy of the Great Gray Wall for the times I need it--Digital used to do wonderful documentation).
Really well-indexed HTML is great, too.
PDF is obnoxious: its pretend-paper output and its enforcement of author-misunderstanding of what my eyes need, on an intrinsically-electronic medium do me a great disservice. The only way I am willing to deal with PDF is after I've already printed it out on dead trees -- and then I'll hate you for forcing me to go through that extra step.
I've just finished reading it, and I think Cluetrain paints the rosy, optimistic side of the Internet, provided that the Internet continues as we now know it (and as many of "us" would like it to continue to be). But as reported here about a week ago, Lawrence Lessig suggests that there may be problems (in http://www.prospect.org/a rchives/V11-10/lessig-l.html, "Innovation, Regulation, and The Internet ",
This is Washington's version of the Internet. There isn't a problem so long as the big guys can buy access... Our political culture would in time transform the Internet into the shape of everything else.
Cluetrain gives us another reason to be scared of the media establishment, and of Washington.
Anybody who has an orchestra can perform Vivaldi...
My copy of Vivaldi/s Gloria says, "Copyright 1968 Walton Publishing Co. All Rights Reserved." The publisher makes some specious claim about the type-setting job as a work of art or some such... This is pervasive throughout the music-publishing business.
IMNHO, fraudulent claims of copyright should carry penalties at least equal to the penalties for ocpyright infringement.
I once read that once a movie or song becomes 50 years old, it automatically turns public domain.
Read the article. This ain't so anymore! Corporate copyrights went from 75 to 95, and personal ones went from "life+50" to "life+70".
Most *good* web designers (including myself) build their pages to look acceptable at any width...
What about at any dot-pitch? Lots of stuff only looks good at 72dpi, but high-end CRT screens are already 110 dpi, and most of the image-heavy web-content stinks on those!
You'd think all those people writing commercial web-crap would know better than to go out of their way to offend their most affluent potential customers!
BTW, top-end LCDs from both IBM and Sony are 150 dpi. IMNHO, there will be a "sweet spot" in the compromise between eye-friendly and technology-overkill somewhere between 200dpi and 300dpi.
One can display two browser windows side by side... and two emacs frames, or maybe two terminal windows. Can anyone need anything else?
Well, I like my 2K x 1.5K virtual screen that lets me put 3 80x80 xterms or browsers or edit windows side-by-side while still using a readable font, and still have enough room left over.
Five years ago, I published my wish-list for a 3:1 aspect ratio 72" x 24" 200dpi screen, wrapped around the form of a quarter-cylinder. The compute power and bandwidth required for maintaining such a system is still a bit beyond current state of the desktop art, though;-(
IANAL: Most companies have a clause in their employment contracts saying that any work developed whilst working for the company in company time is owned by the company....
And the Copyright Act says (in Title 17 Section 101 of the US Code, available at URL http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/101.text.htm l ):
A "work made for hire" is -
a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire.
IANAL either. However, the law clearly says that these clauses are illegal. If the work was a "free-lance" effort (as Wired says), then it fits neither of the Copyright Act criteria and the work belongs to the actual individuals who created it. AOL is full of BS.
...Aren't things posted publically public domain unless stated so?...
No, IANAL, but:
Works are automatically copyright to their authors as soon as they are "fixed in tangible form", unless
the author is the government; or
there is an explicit and written declaration that they are in the public domain.
The author is the "obvious" one (the person composing the work), unless it is a "work for hire", which means that either
it was specifically commissioned in writing; or
its creation was part of one's normal work-tasks for one's employer.
For further info, you can read the Copyright Act (as well as the entire US Code and lots of other stuff) at Cornell's Legal Information Institute, URL http://fatty.law.cornell.edu/.
META: Why is the link getting stripped out? Has something changed, or am I doing something wrong here?
Not to mention those of us who don't load images. The recent poll here says that even being the geeks that we are, a good chunk are still using modems. Probably a lot don't load images by default.
I use a DSL line at home (768K), and am on multiple-OC3 at the office. I still leave images turned off. Partly, that's because the other end probably still has a slow connect...
Currently there aren't any real long time (500 years for example) preservation solutions for digital information.
Colin Smith notes,
Man - stone tablets are the way to go!
Only guaranteed storage mechanism! Good for thousands of years. Capacity: 2Kb/tablet I/O: 1 byte/hr...
Have a look at http://www.norsam.com/rom.html for digital archiving and http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.html for analog archival storage. The basic technology is to use particle beams to write very high resolution to silicon wafers ("high-performance rock":-), which are extremely durable as long as you don't go after them with a sledgehammer or something.
...impervious to electromagnetic disturbances and has the ability, where needed, to store data on materials that are extremely durable and resistant to abrasion, atmospheric contamination, heat and other types of physical deterioration.
The digital version stores 200 GB on a side of a 5 1/4 inch platter (with 10-disk and 300-disk jukeboxes, making possible a "petabyte machine room"), with very high speed (30 MB/s) write rate and reasonable (3 MB/s) read-rate. The analog version you can think of as "super-microfiche", writing analog page-images to the wafer (at something like the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on one wafer); it is readable by even such lo-tech methods as a good microscope (so it shouldn't suffer from reader-obsolescence).
Norsam is partially funded by IBM venture capital, by the way.
The way it seems to me, the DVD CSS is a conspiracy to establish an abusive monopoly on replay devices for digital video, and acting in a fraudulent manner to deny rights established under the Copyright Act. Furthermore, their initial suit is based upon a fraudulent premise inasmuch as a DVD copy must also copy the encryption in order to work properly with a DVD player. As such, they should be conter-sued under (among other things) the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which calls for triple damages, attorneys fees, and potentially the dissolution of the offending enterprise.
At any rate, it seems to me that the only real purpose of further legal proceedings will be to 'punish' the 'miscreants' as a warning to others...
What about a countersuit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act? The motives and actions of the MPAA certainly seem to me to be aimed at subverting "fair use," a right protected by the Copyright Act. They also present a formidable barrier to entry for recording artists, for anyone except their own cronies. It's my understanding that the RIAA has had to settle at least a couple of RIAA lawsuits already; why shouldn't the MPAA be similarly vulnerable? (Note that losing a RICO suit opens you up so much to further ones, and has such serious penalties, that it is the litigator's equivalent to the UDP (except that it lasts forever!) Use the legal system to stick it right back to them!
Having read their claims, it seems to me that, given the technology represented by the "Open Interface" technology of what used to be Neuron Data (now Blaze Software, http://www.blazesoft.com/), they do not actually have a claim for anything not obvious to a competent practioner in interface architecture. The patent is not novel and should be invalidated because of this fact.
Here in the Ohio valley, weather is unpredictable enough, but winter weather is especially bizarre. It would be nice if the local forcasters had higher quality data and had to rely on their "gut feeling" less. It really sucks to wake up to a 1/2 inch of sleet frozen to the road when the forecaster assured the city we would only see light flurries!
Three problems:
ice microphysics: It is really hard to simulate "freezing", given the usual pattern of super-cooled water droplets that suddenly decide (in a chaotic, nonlinear way) just when they are going to freeze.
land surface: the present models don't do a sophisticated-enough job of this, and the resulting transformation of input solar radiation (etc.) into driving forces for the weather is not modeled well enough.
spatial resolution: and the computational cost goes up inversely with the fourth power of the grid-cell size.
Slashdot Mirror
The (current) 21264's are aggressively out-of-order speculative-execution CPU's, and on typical "random" codes will execute more than twice as many instructions per clock tick as the '164 does.
Otoh, they support linux but not Tru64 (no Tru64 PALcode)...
- Since the principal use of zipped archives is compression not concealment/protection, and since there are numberous third-party decompressors such as WinZip, the DMCA's crypto-breaking provisions do not apply.
- For the same reason, Microsoft cannot be said to have used "due diligence" in protecting what it claims are trade secrets, when it puts those "secrets" on its web-site in zipped-archive form. That should be grounds for summary judgement in any trade secret action.
If Microsoft takes action, I hope you are considering the option of counter-suing for barratry (the use of frivolous lawsuits for intimidation). Note also that barratry is consider an ethics offense for attorneys, so you might also seek the disbarment of the MS attorneys, along with the counter-suit.BTW, did you notice that SGI is open-sourcing their Linux IA-64 compiler suite under the GPL? See URL http://oss.sgi.com/projects/Pro64/
You don't know what you're talking about.
SMP machines such as Compaq 2xxx, 4xxx, 8xxxWildfire, SGI Origin, IBM Winterhawk, and Sun E10K maintain coherent caches so that all processors have the same view of memory. Because of the way the caches are organized, it is quite possible for different threads (running on different processors) to "fight" over memory locations that are referenced through more than one cache. According to SGI's Parallel Performance Tuning Tutorial, in the worst cases this can cause a code running in parallel on 8 processors to execute at just 1% of the speed of the code running on one processor! The same effects happen on other systems, too -- trust me; I do parallel performance engineering for environmental modeling as my "day job".
Some AC's don't have any idea what they're talking about, and insist on trying to spread their ignorance!
I have a couple of thousand bookmarks, nested in places 5 levels of folder deep...
- text
- images
on a frame-by-frame or image-by-image basis?Already the pixel-oriented specs of HTML are downright annoying if you have a good monitor displaying at high resolution. Most web-sites aren't oriented to today's high-end 110-DPI monitors (and tomorrow's monitors will have much higher resolution than that!), and for whatever reason don't mind offending their ostensibly-best-heeled customers. Admittedly, such stupidity should never be allowed to reproduce, but...
Really well-indexed HTML is great, too.
PDF is obnoxious: its pretend-paper output and its enforcement of author-misunderstanding of what my eyes need, on an intrinsically-electronic medium do me a great disservice. The only way I am willing to deal with PDF is after I've already printed it out on dead trees -- and then I'll hate you for forcing me to go through that extra step.
IMNHO, fraudulent claims of copyright should carry penalties at least equal to the penalties for ocpyright infringement.
Read the article. This ain't so anymore! Corporate copyrights went from 75 to 95, and personal ones went from "life+50" to "life+70".You'd think all those people writing commercial web-crap would know better than to go out of their way to offend their most affluent potential customers!
BTW, top-end LCDs from both IBM and Sony are 150 dpi. IMNHO, there will be a "sweet spot" in the compromise between eye-friendly and technology-overkill somewhere between 200dpi and 300dpi.
fwiw
Five years ago, I published my wish-list for a 3:1 aspect ratio 72" x 24" 200dpi screen, wrapped around the form of a quarter-cylinder. The compute power and bandwidth required for maintaining such a system is still a bit beyond current state of the desktop art, though ;-(
Works are automatically copyright to their authors as soon as they are "fixed in tangible form", unless
The author is the "obvious" one (the person composing the work), unless it is a "work for hire", which means that either
For further info, you can read the Copyright Act (as well as the entire US Code and lots of other stuff) at Cornell's Legal Information Institute, URL http://fatty.law.cornell.edu/ .
META: Why is the link getting stripped out? Has something changed, or am I doing something wrong here?
Colin Smith notes,
Have a look at http://www.norsam.com/rom.html for digital archiving and http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.html for analog archival storage. The basic technology is to use particle beams to write very high resolution to silicon wafers ("high-performance rock" :-), which are extremely durable as long as you don't go after them with a sledgehammer or something.
The digital version stores 200 GB on a side of a 5 1/4 inch platter (with 10-disk and 300-disk jukeboxes, making possible a "petabyte machine room"), with very high speed (30 MB/s) write rate and reasonable (3 MB/s) read-rate. The analog version you can think of as "super-microfiche", writing analog page-images to the wafer (at something like the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on one wafer); it is readable by even such lo-tech methods as a good microscope (so it shouldn't suffer from reader-obsolescence).Norsam is partially funded by IBM venture capital, by the way.