I still think that the Intel P4 is incomplete as it was released. My guess is that the marketing crowd wanted something to respond to the AMD devices and forced engineering to release a P4 more or less as it was.
It allowed Intel to release a high-clock CPU, and 'show off' the P4. Unfortunately, it kinda backfired, because people who run clocks that fast tend to care (and know) about actual performance VS numbers. The end resuult was a slow machine that gave the P4 a bad name.
I think that the P4 architecture actually has some hope --- if/when they ever release a full implementation. --
60cm would be just fine... Remember that it's 60 cm in either direction. This would mean that any gateway less than 120CM (4 feet) across would be sufficient to read it. (The security gateways at the exits of most stores are only about 3 feet across). If you could build a 1 chip that could be read at 60CM, you could do things like read the brands of all my clothes (and the IDs on my credit cards!) as I walk into a store, and tag me as a high-end purchaser, or a penny pinching commoner.
That is exactly what you would want to do. The primary legitimate purposes of these devices are for inventory
tracking from manufacture to purchase. At that point the tag should be burned out.
Except that, in the case of each unit having a unique ID, there's no need to burn it out. You can track EACH AND EVERY unit as it goes out and comes back in. Make sure that you're returning a unit to the same store you took it from, and make sure that it was actually purchased before they give you a refund.
I can definitely understand why SUN would like this, because the volume of data that something like this would generate is the sort of stuff that a nice, big SUN box is designed for.
When I look at the P4 debacle, and the state of the P4 relative to the promises about it, I'm not sure that the P4 is going to remain a dead duck.
What I see with the first release of the P4 is an incomplete processor pushed out the door by marketing 'droids. If the missing pieces of the P4 are ultimately implemented, it may actually turn out to be a decent processor with decent performance and expandability.
My jury is out on that one for the next year. When/if the "real" P4 comes out, we'll see if it can actually keep up with the Athlon.
If I need a kick-ass box before then, I expect that I'd buy an Athlon.
As for RDRAM and a P4 with optimized code beating SDRAM (on what processor?), I think that you should be comparing a P4 with optimized code on RDRAM vs SDRAM (both using properly optimized chipsets), to know that it's not dependant on something other than the RAM protocol. Until then, though it seems that for the current state of the art, RDRAM doesn't seem like a very good bet.
That having been said, the fact that they had to pretty much blackmail various manufacturers into use RDRAM doesn't bode well for the technical superiority of the technology either. --
Like all good scams, this has already paid off for the principles. The Execs of Rambus have been getting their $N00K/year for almost the last decade. The lawyers get their piece too.
When Rambus dies, they'll get handy severence cheques. After that, they'll sadly pack their porches and drive off into the sunset, looking for another sweet deal.
--
Because it's true. You describe lots of problems third world workers face, but what you don't mention
is that Nike didn't cause those problems.
There's no reason to blame Nike. It's part of the free market principle that you put your money into the things that you want to encourage. If people can make it financially adventageous for a high-profile company like Nike to ensure that the companies that they contract pay a decent non-slave wage to their workers, they will do it. Simple economics.
Nike is different than Fly-by-Night Chinese Clothing Corp who don't have any investment in your goodwill. Once Nike is convinced that it's cheaper to ensure that their (indirect) employees are reasonably treated by North American/ European standards, it could have a domino effect on the treatment of near-slave workers elsewhere in the third world.
If you don't care about human rights elsewhere in the world, you don't have to do anything about Nike. On the other hand, if you refuse to do anything to support somebody else's human rights, there's going to be that much less human rights karma available to help you when you (or your kids) get arrested for doing something like making their own DVD.
Just remember: The people most likely to be opressed by human right violations are generally at their weakest. If you ever have your rights violated, chances are that you're going to be needing the help of others to get out of the pickle.
That's the main reason why some people care about the human rights of others. We're setting up the principles for the defence of our own rights.
--
I would expect that the airbreather would have to average realtime. When you're at the lowest speeds, or the highest altitudes, it's going to be slower than realtime (my guess). at intermediate speeds and altitudes, I would expect that that's where you're going to do the best gathering.
Gathering while on the back of the 747 seems like it's going to cost you most of the advantages of collecting the oxygen in the air.
About the only reason I can see that this might actually work is that you can replace the weight of the 747's fuel with the oxygen while you're doing the gathering. On the other hand, I'd expect that more energy goes into the speed than the 5 mile altitude, so you're still going to need a lot of fuel to make it the rest of the way into orbit.
An effective 50-75% reduction in effective fuel volume could make for a big gain with realtime oxygen harvesting. (I don't have the math, but I'm sure that someone else could do it). --
Perhaps we could move to OpenSeSH? In a lot of ways, it's almost more descriptive, since the protocol, and the application allow Secure Sessions, more than simple secure shells (eg: scp and SSH-based X-sessions). The name would also point to the use of the SSH protocol (which is not trademarked -- only the application).
The concept of trademarking an application name so close to a standard protocl name is, at best, silly. On the other hand, I don't think that it's worth starting a big fight over. There are far better things to put our energy/ time/ money into. --
The missed insertion was because of (tada!) a couple of bugs. Apparently, when they went to do the first orbital insertion burn, a transient impulse from engine startup caused a safety routine to trip (the safe level was set too low). Bugs in the shutdown code caused the craft to use the wrong thruster set (too strong) for attitude correction. The result was that the craft ended up over-correcting. By the time the spacecraft recovered from the mess, the Gyros had overloaded, the craft had gone into bigtime low-battery mode (and lost most of it's stored telemetry from the outage), and dumped 27-30KG of fuel trying to get back into a safe attitude. (overloaded gyros are blamed for much of the excessive fuel use)
From the parts of the report that I read, they're not quite sure how it got into some of the states it did, nor -- given what they've reconstructed -- are they able to figure out how it recovered from some of the problems the bug induced.
In any case, the loss of 28KG of fuel represented almost 1/3 of the fuel being carried at that point, and left them with almost zero reserve for the mission. This may be part of the reason why they decided on a soft-crash... They really don't have the reserve fuel to do much in orbit after the planed mission end-date.
The lost fuel is probably also part of the reason why they don't have enough fuel to make it all the way back into orbit (much less back to earth).
FYI: I went back, and viewed the video today (Tuesday). I'm now getting a 34Kb stream (far better quality). I guess that the 12KB stream was because of heavy demand for the video (better a slow stream than no stream at all). --
This was actually another big F*** (flub) up on the part of NASA.
A little while ago, they found a bug in the sattelite programming that was going to result in a crash landing. Rather than face down another PR debacle like what happened on Mars, they decided to make it look like it was a planned event (rather like the FBI with the Carnivore namechange.).
From the Discovery channel page on the giant Crystals,
I found their Eros news item which
contains what seems to be a low-volume (12Kbit) 2 hour video
from NASA TV
on the NEAR landing (seems to be a well-prepared "live" show, with lots
of commentary. It appears to start with a random live feed (silent) from the control room, then it breaks into the more prepared show.
For those of you arguing about microgravity: A
tidbit from the video (I'm listening to/watching it, as I type this)
Gravity on Eros appears to be 1/1000th of earth Gravity. You might as well have some real stats. --
I think that going from a near demigod to an over-rich, nasty schmuck is a bringdown.
A 20 foot fall, and a 200 foot falls can both be considered "being brought down". This was a 20 foot fall (should have been jolting, and a warning of what may be to come, but Mr. Gates is a bit too well padded to notice anything more than some temporary discomfort).
The 200 foot fall may be on it's way -- A "bringing down" of another magnitude. --
Well, If I thought that Bill Gates was out to get me, I'd be worried about a lot more people than him, walking up to me and whacking me with a blackjack.
Half a billion dollars can buy an awful lot of treachery. For Mister G, it's just a really big cheque. --
GRR: an hour reading reading Marx's Communist Manifesto (available, more generally, through The Guttenberg project) to do up a reply and it gets shot down by the lameness filter.
The 'successful' model has been rather like the pre-galilean circles-within-circles model of the solar system. Lots of arbitrary constants come up with to explain what were otherwise strange anomalies.
BTW: This doesn't so much blow apart quantum physics as it does (hopefully) validate the supersymetry model of physics. Like said -- the people who do supersymetry are probably pretty happy about this.
From the article (for those who don't bother to read it):
By coincidence, Dr. Hughes studied under Isidor I. Rabi, the
Nobel Prize winner who uttered a memorable line when the
muon was a surprise discovery in the 1930's.
"Who ordered that?" Professor Rabi asked.
When asked for a corresponding reaction to the new
finding, Dr. Hughes thought for a moment and said, "The
people who do supersymmetry ordered it."
On second thought: This patent isn't quite what RCS/CVS systems do. It's rather like a cross between
RCS/CVS and the BSD Dump/Restore incremental backup/restore system.
You have multiple 'layers' of updates. Using the 'dump' analogy they would be equivalent to 'daily', 'weekly' and 'monthly' patch sets. To
do an update from the March 17 versions, you'd grab the dailies from March 17 to the
end of the week, the weeklys to the end of March and the monthlys to the
most recent month. You'd then get the last couple of weeklies and dailies
to get to today's version.
In my mind, the most 'interesting' aspect of this patent is the layering
mechanism. On the other hand, I don't know if there's enough unique ideas between
the RCS type stuff, incremental backups and this patent to make this into
a patentable improvement. Definitely, I don't see this as being anything
like the basic patent that they seem to be making it out to be.
--
This would be a patch file to update version 3.5 to 4.1 . This sort of update-series patches was one of the methods used to distribute changes to things like news readers, compilers, etc. (pre-CVS).
From what I can see, the biggest differences are:
It's automated
It seems to specify updates of only binary files.
It may include files describing precisely how the update occurs (This may have been just part of their example)
If you can sue an employer over harrassing you over fair (but unflattering) comments, could you do the same thing over them trying to get your web site pulled? In this case, I'm especially thinking of the overly broad "Cease and Desist" threats that sometimes result in "preventive site amputation". --
Servers are all about running faster, longer, harder. You think that it's gonna sell machines if you tell people that the box is going to run slower than it has to?
If it costs money to implement and it's not going to sell machines, it's not going to happen.
--
Why do you think places like Yahoo! and Hotmail use a filesystem instead of database?
Consider, as well: Lots of really intelligent people have put a lot of work into making filesystem operations as efficient as possible. You may be well off to take advantage of that research in the various advanced FSes.
Take a look at what sorts (and counts) of messages / files your users tend to have. Choose your mailstore / filesystem based on that. --
I ran the (MBOX) mail server for a medium sized (100K users) ISP. The worst user (internal!) had a 400MB mailbox. He checked it every few minutes. Because he was executive-level it took me a couple of weeks to convince him to use a different solution (this was his way of keeping an off-PC backup of his email). The worst external users had mailboxes over 300MB.
Despite a campaign to get rid of the worst {ab,}users (many had 'leave on server' accidently turned on), there were still many users with mailboxes over 50MB (In one case, a customer with dialup accounts had a friend that sent them a digitized home video (3 copies). They never managed to get their email after that because they kept on concluding that the connection had timed out.
In any case, I could notice the system load go up when a user with a large mailbox tried to POP their mail. Even with server mode turned on, mailboxes regularly got thrashed back and forth. Had I been free to do so (and understood qmail at the time), I would have definitely considered going to maildir format for performance reasons.
(we had customized the software to remove just about every other performance issue).
Problems that I can see with maildir:
On NFS, directory searches tend to be expensive if you have 'full' directories. (then again, there are problems with POP and NFS
You're going to eat more inodes (so reformat the drive already!)
You have to open a file for every message... but you only need to read the beginning of it to get a message list (RFS, here we come!)
The Mail(1) command won't work anymore (real nice for all sorts of customer support stuff).
It's gonna hurt you if users have lots of small messages (they way that email used to be).
On the other hand:
Regular file commands can be used for all sorts of mailbox work (pointed out by someone else).
you don't thrash files around whenever a user checks email, and/or deletes one or two messages (of hundreds)
You CAN use NFS, if you want -- without getting real paranoid.
I see MailDir format being the biggest winner when you have users with mailboxes full of big messages (15.DOC attachment anyone?)
I don't see how mailbox format can be a security consideration. I can see a specific program that uses that format having problems. Related, but different issues. --
And at only $87/user client access license (courtesy of Shopper.com), it's a STEAL...
GACK!
Let's see now: A medium-small ISP with 10,000 customers, at $87 each... that's almost $1M. (minus discounts). In that space, the cost of a dual PIII with 1MB ram and firewall is going to be trivial.
Bluntly put, that pricing is obscene..
Another thing: This is about mailbox formats, not software (though exchange would mandate their prefered format).
--
World war 1 got started, partly because of such of a technical approach to war. As one description goes, everybody had troops set up and ready to go at a moment's notice ("just in case"). The intent wasn't really to start a war. It was to respond to 'the other side' either starting one or escalating.
When things got going (with the assasination of the German chancellor, as I remember) , everybody reacted to everybody else's reaction (technical response only, of course) and -- by the time people realized what was going on -- a huge stack of troops was suddenly committed to battle/battlefield support.
By that point, logistical pressures made war almost inevitable. --
Slashdot Mirror
It allowed Intel to release a high-clock CPU, and 'show off' the P4. Unfortunately, it kinda backfired, because people who run clocks that fast tend to care (and know) about actual performance VS numbers. The end resuult was a slow machine that gave the P4 a bad name.
I think that the P4 architecture actually has some hope --- if/when they ever release a full implementation.
--
Then you'd know how to treat me.
--
I can definitely understand why SUN would like this, because the volume of data that something like this would generate is the sort of stuff that a nice, big SUN box is designed for.
Brother SUN, Sister Oracle.
--
What I see with the first release of the P4 is an incomplete processor pushed out the door by marketing 'droids. If the missing pieces of the P4 are ultimately implemented, it may actually turn out to be a decent processor with decent performance and expandability.
My jury is out on that one for the next year. When/if the "real" P4 comes out, we'll see if it can actually keep up with the Athlon. If I need a kick-ass box before then, I expect that I'd buy an Athlon.
As for RDRAM and a P4 with optimized code beating SDRAM (on what processor?), I think that you should be comparing a P4 with optimized code on RDRAM vs SDRAM (both using properly optimized chipsets), to know that it's not dependant on something other than the RAM protocol. Until then, though it seems that for the current state of the art, RDRAM doesn't seem like a very good bet.
That having been said, the fact that they had to pretty much blackmail various manufacturers into use RDRAM doesn't bode well for the technical superiority of the technology either.
--
When Rambus dies, they'll get handy severence cheques. After that, they'll sadly pack their porches and drive off into the sunset, looking for another sweet deal.
--
Nike is different than Fly-by-Night Chinese Clothing Corp who don't have any investment in your goodwill. Once Nike is convinced that it's cheaper to ensure that their (indirect) employees are reasonably treated by North American/ European standards, it could have a domino effect on the treatment of near-slave workers elsewhere in the third world.
If you don't care about human rights elsewhere in the world, you don't have to do anything about Nike. On the other hand, if you refuse to do anything to support somebody else's human rights, there's going to be that much less human rights karma available to help you when you (or your kids) get arrested for doing something like making their own DVD.
Just remember: The people most likely to be opressed by human right violations are generally at their weakest. If you ever have your rights violated, chances are that you're going to be needing the help of others to get out of the pickle.
That's the main reason why some people care about the human rights of others. We're setting up the principles for the defence of our own rights.
--
Gathering while on the back of the 747 seems like it's going to cost you most of the advantages of collecting the oxygen in the air. About the only reason I can see that this might actually work is that you can replace the weight of the 747's fuel with the oxygen while you're doing the gathering. On the other hand, I'd expect that more energy goes into the speed than the 5 mile altitude, so you're still going to need a lot of fuel to make it the rest of the way into orbit.
An effective 50-75% reduction in effective fuel volume could make for a big gain with realtime oxygen harvesting. (I don't have the math, but I'm sure that someone else could do it).
--
The concept of trademarking an application name so close to a standard protocl name is, at best, silly. On the other hand, I don't think that it's worth starting a big fight over. There are far better things to put our energy/ time/ money into.
--
From the parts of the report that I read, they're not quite sure how it got into some of the states it did, nor -- given what they've reconstructed -- are they able to figure out how it recovered from some of the problems the bug induced.
In any case, the loss of 28KG of fuel represented almost 1/3 of the fuel being carried at that point, and left them with almost zero reserve for the mission. This may be part of the reason why they decided on a soft-crash... They really don't have the reserve fuel to do much in orbit after the planed mission end-date.
The lost fuel is probably also part of the reason why they don't have enough fuel to make it all the way back into orbit (much less back to earth).
The complete report on the burn anomaly, as they call it, is available at http://near-mirror.boulder.swri.edu/anom/. ig'x 1MB. I've mirrored the report PDF on my home box. (I found the mirror site a bit overloaded).
--
FYI: I went back, and viewed the video today (Tuesday). I'm now getting a 34Kb stream (far better quality). I guess that the 12KB stream was because of heavy demand for the video (better a slow stream than no stream at all).
--
--
A little while ago, they found a bug in the sattelite programming that was going to result in a crash landing. Rather than face down another PR debacle like what happened on Mars, they decided to make it look like it was a planned event (rather like the FBI with the Carnivore namechange.).
That's right. We've all been duped!
Those that take me seriously ... deserve to.
--
For those of you arguing about microgravity: A tidbit from the video (I'm listening to /watching it, as I type this)
Gravity on Eros appears to be 1/1000th of earth Gravity. You might as well have some real stats.
--
A 20 foot fall, and a 200 foot falls can both be considered "being brought down". This was a 20 foot fall (should have been jolting, and a warning of what may be to come, but Mr. Gates is a bit too well padded to notice anything more than some temporary discomfort).
The 200 foot fall may be on it's way -- A "bringing down" of another magnitude.
--
Half a billion dollars can buy an awful lot of treachery. For Mister G, it's just a really big cheque.
--
You can find my reply at: my ISP's customer web site, or (my home machine. (exactly as I was going to submit it)
--
BTW: This doesn't so much blow apart quantum physics as it does (hopefully) validate the supersymetry model of physics. Like said -- the people who do supersymetry are probably pretty happy about this. From the article (for those who don't bother to read it):
--
In my mind, the most 'interesting' aspect of this patent is the layering mechanism. On the other hand, I don't know if there's enough unique ideas between the RCS type stuff, incremental backups and this patent to make this into a patentable improvement. Definitely, I don't see this as being anything like the basic patent that they seem to be making it out to be.
--
From what I can see, the biggest differences are:
--
If you can sue an employer over harrassing you over fair (but unflattering) comments, could you do the same thing over them trying to get your web site pulled? In this case, I'm especially thinking of the overly broad "Cease and Desist" threats that sometimes result in "preventive site amputation".
--
If it costs money to implement and it's not going to sell machines, it's not going to happen.
--
Take a look at what sorts (and counts) of messages / files your users tend to have. Choose your mailstore / filesystem based on that.
--
Despite a campaign to get rid of the worst {ab,}users (many had 'leave on server' accidently turned on), there were still many users with mailboxes over 50MB (In one case, a customer with dialup accounts had a friend that sent them a digitized home video (3 copies). They never managed to get their email after that because they kept on concluding that the connection had timed out.
In any case, I could notice the system load go up when a user with a large mailbox tried to POP their mail. Even with server mode turned on, mailboxes regularly got thrashed back and forth. Had I been free to do so (and understood qmail at the time), I would have definitely considered going to maildir format for performance reasons. (we had customized the software to remove just about every other performance issue).
Problems that I can see with maildir:
- On NFS, directory searches tend to be expensive if you have 'full' directories. (then again, there are problems with POP and NFS
- You're going to eat more inodes (so reformat the drive already!)
- You have to open a file for every message... but you only need to read the beginning of it to get a message list (RFS, here we come!)
- The Mail(1) command won't work anymore (real nice for all sorts of customer support stuff).
- It's gonna hurt you if users have lots of small messages (they way that email used to be).
- Regular file commands can be used for all sorts of mailbox work (pointed out by someone else).
- you don't thrash files around whenever a user checks email, and/or deletes one or two messages (of hundreds)
- You CAN use NFS, if you want -- without getting real paranoid.
-
I see MailDir format being the biggest winner when you have users with mailboxes full of big messages (15
.DOC attachment anyone?)
I don't see how mailbox format can be a security consideration. I can see a specific program that uses that format having problems. Related, but different issues.On the other hand:
--
Let's see now: A medium-small ISP with 10,000 customers, at $87 each... that's almost $1M. (minus discounts). In that space, the cost of a dual PIII with 1MB ram and firewall is going to be trivial.
Bluntly put, that pricing is obscene..
Another thing: This is about mailbox formats, not software (though exchange would mandate their prefered format).
--
When things got going (with the assasination of the German chancellor, as I remember) , everybody reacted to everybody else's reaction (technical response only, of course) and -- by the time people realized what was going on -- a huge stack of troops was suddenly committed to battle/battlefield support.
By that point, logistical pressures made war almost inevitable.
--