$118M in fines sounds like a lot of damages - in fact it sound like a lot more money that can conceivably have been incurred by UMG. So are these punitive damages then? Given that market sales continue to rocket up despite all the RIAA media spin that seems to give the impression that the arrival of MP3s is the end of the world as they know it and that they are already having to beg on street corners in order to pay for the Ferrari, I'm not sure where this figure has come from.
Given that MS gets fined $1M dollars for attempting to put a company out of business by pulling a bait-and-switch, doesn't look like the world is flat on a legal basis does it? The software industry easily pulls into the $100Billion dollar category so I can't believe the stakes are 100 times higher for UMG...
When faced with a set of patents like this, you have to hope that there is an 800lb gorilla out there who might take exception. Given that IBM's S/390 machines are just about as good as you can get in Virtual Machines either through VMs or LPIs, anything which seriously treads on the toes of IBMs patents in this field is likely to get short shrift in the legal arena. That said, this is already a heavily patented area - a quick search of the patent database pulls up 245 patents on this issue. Which is pretty scary given that these patents, as with so many patent applications, aim to be as broad as possible in their presentation.
So much for propelling innovation forward...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
We have a level playing field
on
Qt Going GPL
·
· Score: 5
At last KDE and Gnome can go completely head-to-head because they are now both totally grounded in GPL licensing. So what does the future now hold?
Corporate take-up? Don't knock it - this is a potentially huge environment. Companies like to know where they stand, and simplified licensing is a huge bonus. Gnome already as a level of corporate acceptance as embodied by the formation of the Gnome Foundation to further the GNOME project. KDE may soon see itself in a similar position.
Interoperability? Both KDE and Gnome are continuing to push their infrastructures forward and both desktop environments are likely to start eclipsing the competition sooner or later (already have eclipsed the competition in some areas). It's likely that Gnome programs will always talk most efficiently to other Gnome programs, and similarly for KDE to KDE, it would be nice to see the arrival of some bridge mechanism to allow the two camps to exchange and inter-embed each others applications across the divide.
Flamewars? Almost certainly:-) At least now there won't be any (meaningful) wars over licensing...
Once I get D3 for Linux, it's bye-bye Windows partition for me!
D3 is the last piece of software I've been keeping Windoze around
for. This will give me enough space to start playing around with
BeOS...
I'm pretty fed up with Windows gaming. Games which worked last year
are already rendered useless by DLL Hell killing or transmuting
essential libraries - Myth II is the most serious victim of this and
no longer works period, despite attempts to roll back to earlier
DirectX incarnations and the original card drivers. Deus Ex almost
tempted me into buying the Windows version, and then Loki announced
that they were porting Deus to Linux and my wallet awaits the release
date... Having installed XFree86 4.0.1 on my machine and got the
NVidia drivers up and running, 3D zips along on my machine, I get
better ping rates under Linux than Windows for some reason and my
Q3demo playing has reached new heights of fragging, so I really ought
to buy the full game:-)
I wonder is the level editor ported too...
Err... hello? Did you notice that Loki ported this one? If so, you
might also have noticed that nothing is safe once Loki gets on a
project and so yes the Descent 3 SDK for Linux is available here.
Actually major kudos to Loki for bug fixing the releases for Linux
over and above the Windows final releases, and for keeping the patches
coming as issues arise.
Don't use the drivers from Aureal in their raw form - they are buggy and don't comply with the OSS standard. A much better alternative is to go to the Aureal Sourceforge site and get the latest release or even CVS version of the aureal driver. I'm running the CVS drivers and I have OpenAL in all its glory, working sound with MAME and mp3s play happily in XMMS. No/dev/sequencer which is a shame but maybe something can be done about that, or you can use Timidity++ as a software alternative.
The patents that NVIDIA is suing boil down to methods for efficient I/O - in the words of Derek Perez of NVIDIA
3dfx infringes on at least 5 patents dating back as far as NV1. All 5 patents are essentially I/O patents relating to efficiency of the interaction between the graphics processor and the core logic, memory or CPU.
But like all patents, these are't easy reading. Trying to get to the essence of the method isn't easy. But here goes anyway:
Patent 6,092,124 can be sumarised as being very similar to a local cache - a DMA sits next to the I/O bus and acts as a buffer for passing information over the I/O bridge or back down to system memory depending on the value of pointers held in the DMA. To me this does not sound very original - it sounds like a primitive level 2 cache.
Pate nt 5,758,182
This one is an autonomous (of the OS) memory manager - it maps virtual addresses to physical ones. It uses pages to map memory and holds structures keeping tabs on that memory. Hardly mind blowing stuff. The main swansong of this patent is that it does this without the need for the OS to be involved, but I strongly suspect this is a commonly used technique and hardly worthy of patent protection - indeed for an autonomous device like a graphics card I think it would be difficult to avoid coming up with something like this regardless of your prior knowledge - you have to have something managing the memory on the card and it has to live with getting it's info from the application because most OS's won't necessarily be aware of the memory configuration on the board. In fact, the only work around for this patent as far as I can see is to expose the memory to the OS and let it use it as it sees fit. I have used one system where the VRAM could be used as system memory (Acorn RiscPC) but there was no hardware acceleration on that system. As soon as the GPU does any work on the memory at its fast IO busses to that graphics card RAM, there would have to be negotiation between the OS and the card to update the page tables on memory and that would hamstring a GPU card.
I could go on but there are other people here on Slashdot who can do a better hatchett job on these patents. But these patents strike me as being 'obvious'. And I'm an NVIDIA card owner too so I'm not some disgruntled 3dfx owner with an axe to grind.
I'm running Windows 2000 on a K6-2 with 64MB of RAM, and it runs a lot faster than Win 98 did.
Yes - because Windows 2000 has better page memory management on small memory systems. Shame that it is less fast for more memory systems - check MS's own benchmarks. 128MB is where you start to lose out and it gets worse above there relative to Win NT 4.0.
Question: Won't the RT's proximity to the east coast megalopolis suffer it interference problems: noise from jet traffic, radio, TV, etc.? I'm sure a certain amount of this can be filtered, but the less need for filtering the better, IMHO.
Noise can be a problem for radio telescopes, but there are tricks to filtering out unwanted signals, such as looking for signals which vary in position while looking at a constant direction on the skydome. The most important facet of noise reduction for the radio astronomy community though is that most of the important wavebands are protected - no tv, radio or mobile phone systems are allowed to use these frequencies. Examples of these frequencies are the 21cm hydrogen line, 1.1GHz, 5 GHz, 15GHz, 30 GHz and there are others. So mechanical noise, such as Johnson noise, are the main factors.
The ARM instruction set is great. It is a joy to program in ARM assembler. I especially like the possibility to add conditions to every instruction.
Yes - conditional execution is a major plus and probably helps the ARM assembler get such good code density.
Nitpick: it has 16 basic registers, all of which are interchangeable. Only R15 has specific semantics (program counter).
Major Nitpick: Two other registers are vulnerable - R14 is used as a link register for branches and I counted it out. It's also dangerous to fiddle with this when switching IRQ, FIQ or SVC modes as it changes - the same is true for R13. That is why I gave the 13 general purpose registers r0-r12 - I never used r13-r15 except in special cases:-) Really the ARM has more general purpose registers than 16 - there are 27 (ARM 2 and 3) or 31 (ARM6+) registers but you only see 16 at any one time - changes in processor mode can swap registers over.
RiscOS Ltd have been talking about supporting 32 bit for a year or two, but as far as I know nobody is actually working on it as they don't have the resources. Perhaps if they Open Sourced their OS they would have more than a couple of developers, but that doesn't seem too likely as the RiscOS world is very deeply entrenched in the world of closed source.
Isn't the RiscOS 4 release 32 bit? It doesn't run on anything prior to ARM 6 so it as removed the processors that were 26bit reliant. As you pointed out, full 32bit access of memory has been on the drawing board for a while but its status is unclear.
As for releasing the source to RiscOS, Risc OS Ltd can't open the souce because they only own the license not the product. Element 14 (formerly Acorn) own the rights necessary to make that move. That said, since much of the OS is in ARM assembler, it would make cross-platform moves extremely fiddly. RiscOS is fast because a lot of it is hand-optimized.
It definitely sounds nice... I can already see the river of drool coming from people who own Risc PCs (I almost refuse to call them Acorns since Acorn sold out their workstation division but I digress).
But seriously, have anyone considered that these are RISC processors ? Do they (Intel) plan to abandon their CISC processors for the private user ? Or is this simply Intel's way of saying "we want a bigger piece of the Business pie". I certainly think the latter is true. I seriously doubt that we could get along without the CISC, it would just cause to much incompatability, or the translation matrix would make the apparent speed increase gained from the CISC->RISC insignificant. This has no bearing on "us" the private users as I see it.
I think a small history lesson is in order. The ARM architecture is not a 'new' architecture - it dates back to the mid-eighties when Acorn, having decided to skip the 16bit generation, started working on a RISC 32bit processor. In 1987, the first Acorn Archimedes was born, running Arthur OS - a fairly primitive but useable GUI and OS. This was running an ARM 2 processor at 8MHz.
Later revisions took the processor design to ARM3 with improve level 1 cache. Note these machines had no level 2 cache - as clock speed increased, this would have throttled a x86 style processor, but the ARM has fairly light memory usage as it has 13 general purpose registers, a fairly orthogonal (and small) instruction set and a load/store architecture minimising the need to go to memory for information.
Then came the ARM6 and 7 cores which took speeds up to 40MHz. At this point the ARM chips were running market leading MIPS/watt ratings - no ARM machine I have ever had has needed a heat sink - but the clock speed was starting to lag the x86 line badly. After a joint project with Digital, the StrongARM was born, screaming along at 200MHz way before the Pentiums got there, and running at less than 1W. By this time ARM Ltd had been born out of Acorn to pursue its chip dreams - but not fabrication of chips. ARM Ltd is a purely design-orientated chip creator - other partners actually build these processors. A quick trip to the ARM website will quickly show you just how widespread the ARM processor line has become - ubiquity is an almost acheived goal:-)
But just as the ARM 7's had topped out around 40MHz for a while, the 200 MHz (sometimes oc'd to 287MHz) StrongARM has remained the fastest ARM chip for a good while. During this time, DIgital got into a patent/IP dispute with Intel and ended up having to sell the StrongARM team to Intel as part of the settlement. So this is the first news of a faster ARM processor for several years - I got my 200MHz RiscPC workstation a few years ago and it blew my socks off with it's slick performance. RiscOS which is the oft preferred OS for this processor when it is used in a workstation (rather than a PDA, router, or other electronic utility) is pretty quick, and a 5x boost will be fairly insane:-) And naturally there is a port of Linux for the ARM processor (but here on Slashdot we expect nothing less).
I just regret that my RiscPC is back in the UK and I'm here in Canada with an x86.:-(
Still it would almost certainly require a motherboard upgrade...
Friedman says. ''We hope to make no money off the software.''
It's a great statement. It runs so counter to the current software industry that I couldn't resist quoting it. But it is a sign of the changing world model for IT business. Even here at IBM, that amount of money made from software and hardware is starting to be dwarfed by the income generated by the Services sector, and that seems to be where Helix Gnome is heading.
I used to have the impression that there would be some sort of subscription service to use Helix Gnomes update features or some integrated help-desk type solution. Reading this article seems to suggest a different path - it looks like the revenue stream that Helixcode is aiming for (they are a company after all) is based around providing a convenient integration layer between the user and whatever business out there exists trying to sell the user something, be it technical support, event tickets, book sellers or whatever. Handled right, this could be a fairly amazing utility - imagine planning a holiday trip by selecting the dates in your calendar and then calling up a travel planner which integrates buying plane tickets for the right days, booking hotels in the destination cities using advance search tools and having all that information written back into your electronic diary, along with maybe even collating responding emails from booked events as links. Then click the "Print Itinery" and get the complete information at the touch of a button (working printer not withstanding:-) ).
Why is this important? This is the sort of integration that MS's.NET project dreams about - complete integration of the available technology to make handling information more integrated and easier to access. Having an alternative to this underway NOW strikes me as of critical importance as Linux works its way onto more and more people's computers in order to prevent the.NET integration turning the commercial internet into a closed-off MS-only zone. We already see the spread of IE-only sites - I don't want a balkanized internet.
And if you don't want all those services, Helix Codes' extremely well organised and structured Gnome distribution will still be for free, complete with source code. So we can have the best of both worlds.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Looks like buying the StrongARM team is paying off
on
2Ghz P4 Shown Off
·
· Score: 3
I wondered how long it would take the Intel engineers to work their way through the DEC purchases they made and start using that technology in other areas. Given that a 200MHz StrongARM processor maxes out power consumption way below 1W (I have a feeling the figure is around 700mW) the power consumption of the Pentium processors looks pretty silly. Still there is no easy way to go from a streamlined low power consumption RISC design like the StrongARM and plunk all that technology into the Pentium line which requires a whole lot more transistors.
What I do take issue with is this 850mW figure for a 500MHz PIII. Intel's low power consumption tricks up till now have involved idling the processor when there isn't much happening, and I strongly suspect that this 850mW figure has a lot of idling in its measurement time frame. That figure of 5.5W max looks far more likely to really reflect the power consumption of the low power PIII. That is not to say that having a processor having various power consumption modes is a bad thing - the Amulet project has a more interesting take on this one (variable asynchronous clock speeds) - but I do wish that Intel would be more 'honest' with its figures. As for the rest of the announcements, I just request that you don't hold your breath waiting for these to appear on the shelves.
Most modern torpedos are wire-guided, active-homing terminal. You steer it from the ship via commands down the wire until it picks up the target with its own active sonar, and then it homes in from there. Keeping a wire payed out without breaking at 200kts is quite the trick.
Isn't the cavitation going to play merry hell with using active sonar as an targeting mechanism? You are shoving a load of water off the torpedo and making a hell of a racket so that is going to require some impressive sonar signal strength to get a decent signal noise through the cavitation.
Saying that the explosion registered a 3 on the richter scale doesn't mean a whole to to me. Does anybody know a rough translation for this into some more common measure of explosive force (lbs of TNT perhaps)?
Richter scale 3 is equivalent to 29 tons of TNT going off. 3.5 is equivalent to 73 tons of TNT and 4.0 is around 1000 tons of TNT or a small nuclear device.
...just because they leave the office? Linus must think so, according to this: "Windows is still a no-brainer for most people," he said, adding it will take Linux "perhaps five or 10 years" to catch up, at least for home-computer users. But he said average business users might move to Linux sooner, perhaps by next year.
I don't quite understand how it can be as soon as next year, but then suddenly it will take at least 5 years. The users being discussed as *business* are the same people who go home at the end of the day. It would seem to me that it's more likely that if someone uses Linux at work that when they get home they will be familiar and proficient with it already and thus MORE likely to use it, not less. Naturally if they are more likely to use it, then they're more likely to use it *AT HOME* as well.
When Linus says 'perhaps 5 or 10 years... to catch up' to Windows, I read that as meaning parity in the market place. Maybe 45% Windows, 45% Linux and 6% Mac, with BeOS and others taking the rest. Parity is an amazing goal to be aiming for - the sheer number of users that 45% of the computing masses is enormous. It may well come true for the desktop - I get a feeling a lot of people are going to be using Linux without realising by this point - set-top boxes, PDA's, POS terminals and other devices running Linux under the covers.
Business use is slightly different. For developers like me, moving to Linux gives us an easier platform to work on and administer than say Windows NT, especially when working on multiplatform code. I can also see office environments switching to Linux for, say, Lotus Notes servers and other centralized services and maybe even rolling out common working environments on desktops sitting on top of Linux, maybe even based on Evolution. Exceed is a partial solution, especially when combined with CYGWIN, but why immitate when you can have the original?
I think Linus is way off with his numbers..
It's either going to happen in the next year, or not - take your pick.
I think next year is too early for a revolution to a Linux dominated world on the desktop. I think we will see continued high uptake of Linux as a viable alternative and this will set the wedge for future years of expansion. With some hope over the next year we will see an increase in support for Linux from hardware manufactures, a fully stabilized release of XFree86 4 and supporting 3D acceleration drivers getting there, OpenAL starting to make an impact as an open 3D sound system on many platforms, both KDE 2 and Gnome flowering into a comfortable desktop environment and peripherals finally slotting more easily into the Linux picture. At this point the playing field will look a little more level for Linux adoption for the average user.
The spectre of the failed CDE desktop has been bounced around a lot in the wake of the Gnome foundation announcement. The reasons for its appearance are obvious - commercial Unices have dipped their hands into the waters of a standard desktop before and then messed around with the concept without really going anywhere with it. I have access to CDE on the AIX systems I work with, and while it has some plus points, I opted to use FVWM instead as being a more customizable interface.
But why should we be tarring Gnome with the same brush as CDE? The motivations are different - Gnome has arrived as an already competent desktop object model. It is not perfect, not is it complete, but it covers enough now that it is fully capable of most tasks. It has been written by people who wanted a GPL'd desktop model and decided that the licensing issues with Qt were sufficient motivation to not develop KDE instead. And why do these commercial Unix vendors suddenly care about Gnome? Because it is eclipsing their own offerings in available scope and applications written for it. It makes perfect sense from their perspective that they should go with the flow and convert, support and maintain a widely used desktop system. I don't suddenly see this 'Big Brother Unix' appearing on the shoulder of Gnome and controlling its destiny. Rather I suspect that we will see bug fixes initially as these vendors get their paws on Gnome, followed by patches and new bonobo objects, new applications under the GPL or otherwise, and greater integration of Gnome into their own offerings.
All those who think that these commercial offerings will subvert Gnome into some corporate whipping boy have forgotten the Linux philosphy - choice. If we don't like it, we don't have to take it or use it. And that applies to piecemeal offerings and patches equally as to whole applications.
The first person shooter is taking over, yes. But variation on the FPS leaves us with RPG-FPS like UlitmaIX, and Everquest, Adventure-FPS like Deus Ex (if you haven't played Deus Ex yet, you are REALLY missing out)
Agreed - when I first looked at this game I thought 'another FPS'. But I load up the demo (both levels) to have a quick burn and quickly discover that this is a pretty well thought out game. The graphic technology may not include all the whizzy shaders of quake 3, but the mere existence of a plot and various hinted-at sub-plots is unusual in a game today. And even better, Loki Games is almost certainly working on a port of 'Deus Ex' for Linux - it was spotted at LinuxWorld in their booth on a Linux machine. Keep eyes peeled for announcements and don't buy that Windows version!
I've tried M9, M14,16 and a couple of other Mozillas. Hows about they actually deliver a product. At this rate Microsoft could take the IE5 code, audit it, scrap it and completely rewrite it for every one of the Unixes before Mozilla 1.0 sees the light of day.
Given that Mozilla has gone from Zero to M18 in the same time that MS goes from IE 5.0 to 5.5, I think that remark is way off target. And given enough memory, Mozilla runs very nicely - if it makes your system page to disc you are SOL anyway, and that is true for any system with 64MB or less. I have no complaints with M17 on Linux or M18 nightlies on Windows NT with both systems having 128MB of RAM. Hell even the Flash plugins work in Mozilla now. The memory requirements will drop after M19 when the optimization is done.
This may not be so bad. Personally, I like IE over Netscape. It's stable (on my system, at least) and it's more polished. I prefer to use IE when I'm in Windows over Netscape. I wonder how they can make an IE port to *nix stable though. What about all of the secret API code that's used in Windows? Once it's ported, does that mean the *nix version will have less functionality?
Ah. Someone who hasn't used IE on Solaris. Having sat on console on an UltraSparc and fired up IE out of curiosity (may trample me into the ground) and watched it chug and creak and roll around a little rendering a page, and seemingly slowing down the X server at the same time and using 95% of the machine, you can keep IE for Linux. Meanwhile I would recommend Mozilla M9 over it for speed and functionality:-)
Of course if you are interested in speed you'll use Mozilla M18 nightlies which are a lot faster than M17 already. IE on Linux will almost certainly run through some sort of porting library interface and will suffer because of it. MS won't care because the same machine with MS Windows and Linux will run IE nicely under Windows and like a dog on Linux, thus proving to the world at large what a wonderfully speedy system Windows is and how much Linux sucks. There is no mileage in a fast version of IE for Linux until MS gets split in two (and jumped up and down on, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry [Ed - we've had that], lost, found again, buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters):-)
I can't believe that someone thought it was insightful, informative, or underrated. It seems pretty clear to me that instead of attempting to post something insightful or informatice, he was looking for that elusive fist p0st. He did get #3, but I'm sure he'll be back another day for another try. The only explanation I can come up with to explain the moderation is some kind of conspiracy. I hope it gets corrected in M2.
Well, the weird moderation continues - current count is 9 moderations, with the current status at:
It's one thing to claim to be enterprise ready as a databse product. It is quite another to be one.
Before I get started, I should hasten to mention that I work on developing DB2 UDB and therefore anything I write is biased and should be viewed as such:-)
Enterprise-ready is one of those phrases which gets bounced around a lot. But what does it mean for relational databases? In my opinion, it at least includes the following:
Scales well to multiple processes - not just 2 or 4, but 32, 64 and up.
Scales well to multiple machines doing the processing (MPP) - look for performance to increase as a close-to-linear function of numbers of nodes
Is able to cope with 300GB+ databases - the modern data requirements are only going up and TB databases are now common.
Is able to keep the transaction time down to reasonable levels for thousands of users.
Has online backup facilities so the database can be backuped without down time.
Has proven data integrity
Has proven uptime - i.e. can look for >99.9% uptime.
Supports triggers, stored procedures and every access method you can think of (JDBC, ODBC, DRDA)
Full RDBMS support.
SQL '99 core compatability.
At this point, I don't know what the score is for PostgreSQL on the above. Any expert care to comment?
Running PPPoE on Sympatico HSE ADSL, I see pings to the most local Q3 demo servers in the range 30-50ms. Download speeds up to 102Kbytes/second, particularly to the Helixcode Akamai server, so I'm pretty happy with it. Performance under Linux is good and gets connected faster than on Windows when using the RP PPPoE client so I'm happy. Especially as the reason for getting the ADSL in the first place was VPN connectivity.
I mean, as the article says, sure, servers and stuff will definitely put good use to the increase in performance, but what about good ol' Joe Sixpack using Excel at his office? I mean, besides from cranking SETI@home units faster, is there really such a need for faster processors at home / office?
Definitely. It still takes longer to encode my CDs as MP3s than it does to pull them off the CD at 20X:-). Assuming the current rash of technologies hangs around, I think we'll see people sending each other video mails within a few years. And I'll still be looking to have that Linux kernel compile time down below 2 minutes among other things. As CPUs get faster, the things we do with them will be more complex.
There are enough OSses on 32-bit CPU's that can handle large files. NT and FreeBSD to name two.
It is unbelievable that Linux still hasn't fixed this.
It would be unbelievable if it hadn't been fixed, as almost any reasonable size database would run into the end of the line fairly quickly. If you pay attention to the available patches for the kernels you'd know that quite a while ago there were patches to the kernel to support larger files - I think the name was the Large File Summit or LFS (not to be confused with Log-structured File Systems). Ah - the patches are available here.
Slashdot Mirror
$118M in fines sounds like a lot of damages - in fact it sound like a lot more money that can conceivably have been incurred by UMG. So are these punitive damages then? Given that market sales continue to rocket up despite all the RIAA media spin that seems to give the impression that the arrival of MP3s is the end of the world as they know it and that they are already having to beg on street corners in order to pay for the Ferrari, I'm not sure where this figure has come from.
Given that MS gets fined $1M dollars for attempting to put a company out of business by pulling a bait-and-switch, doesn't look like the world is flat on a legal basis does it? The software industry easily pulls into the $100Billion dollar category so I can't believe the stakes are 100 times higher for UMG...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
When faced with a set of patents like this, you have to hope that there is an 800lb gorilla out there who might take exception. Given that IBM's S/390 machines are just about as good as you can get in Virtual Machines either through VMs or LPIs, anything which seriously treads on the toes of IBMs patents in this field is likely to get short shrift in the legal arena. That said, this is already a heavily patented area - a quick search of the patent database pulls up 245 patents on this issue. Which is pretty scary given that these patents, as with so many patent applications, aim to be as broad as possible in their presentation.
So much for propelling innovation forward...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
At last KDE and Gnome can go completely head-to-head because they are now both totally grounded in GPL licensing. So what does the future now hold?
Corporate take-up? Don't knock it - this is a potentially huge environment. Companies like to know where they stand, and simplified licensing is a huge bonus. Gnome already as a level of corporate acceptance as embodied by the formation of the Gnome Foundation to further the GNOME project. KDE may soon see itself in a similar position.
Interoperability? Both KDE and Gnome are continuing to push their infrastructures forward and both desktop environments are likely to start eclipsing the competition sooner or later (already have eclipsed the competition in some areas). It's likely that Gnome programs will always talk most efficiently to other Gnome programs, and similarly for KDE to KDE, it would be nice to see the arrival of some bridge mechanism to allow the two camps to exchange and inter-embed each others applications across the divide.
Flamewars? Almost certainly :-) At least now there won't be any (meaningful) wars over licensing ...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Once I get D3 for Linux, it's bye-bye Windows partition for me! D3 is the last piece of software I've been keeping Windoze around for. This will give me enough space to start playing around with BeOS...
I'm pretty fed up with Windows gaming. Games which worked last year are already rendered useless by DLL Hell killing or transmuting essential libraries - Myth II is the most serious victim of this and no longer works period, despite attempts to roll back to earlier DirectX incarnations and the original card drivers. Deus Ex almost tempted me into buying the Windows version, and then Loki announced that they were porting Deus to Linux and my wallet awaits the release date... Having installed XFree86 4.0.1 on my machine and got the NVidia drivers up and running, 3D zips along on my machine, I get better ping rates under Linux than Windows for some reason and my Q3demo playing has reached new heights of fragging, so I really ought to buy the full game :-)
I wonder is the level editor ported too...
Err... hello? Did you notice that Loki ported this one? If so, you might also have noticed that nothing is safe once Loki gets on a project and so yes the Descent 3 SDK for Linux is available here. Actually major kudos to Loki for bug fixing the releases for Linux over and above the Windows final releases, and for keeping the patches coming as issues arise.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Don't use the drivers from Aureal in their raw form - they are buggy and don't comply with the OSS standard. A much better alternative is to go to the Aureal Sourceforge site and get the latest release or even CVS version of the aureal driver. I'm running the CVS drivers and I have OpenAL in all its glory, working sound with MAME and mp3s play happily in XMMS. No /dev/sequencer which is a shame but maybe something can be done about that, or you can use Timidity++ as a software alternative.
The patents that NVIDIA is suing boil down to methods for efficient I/O - in the words of Derek Perez of NVIDIA
3dfx infringes on at least 5 patents dating back as far as NV1. All 5 patents are essentially I/O patents relating to efficiency of the interaction between the graphics processor and the core logic, memory or CPU.
But like all patents, these are't easy reading. Trying to get to the essence of the method isn't easy. But here goes anyway:
Patent 6,092,124 can be sumarised as being very similar to a local cache - a DMA sits next to the I/O bus and acts as a buffer for passing information over the I/O bridge or back down to system memory depending on the value of pointers held in the DMA. To me this does not sound very original - it sounds like a primitive level 2 cache.
Pate nt 5,758,182 This one is an autonomous (of the OS) memory manager - it maps virtual addresses to physical ones. It uses pages to map memory and holds structures keeping tabs on that memory. Hardly mind blowing stuff. The main swansong of this patent is that it does this without the need for the OS to be involved, but I strongly suspect this is a commonly used technique and hardly worthy of patent protection - indeed for an autonomous device like a graphics card I think it would be difficult to avoid coming up with something like this regardless of your prior knowledge - you have to have something managing the memory on the card and it has to live with getting it's info from the application because most OS's won't necessarily be aware of the memory configuration on the board. In fact, the only work around for this patent as far as I can see is to expose the memory to the OS and let it use it as it sees fit. I have used one system where the VRAM could be used as system memory (Acorn RiscPC) but there was no hardware acceleration on that system. As soon as the GPU does any work on the memory at its fast IO busses to that graphics card RAM, there would have to be negotiation between the OS and the card to update the page tables on memory and that would hamstring a GPU card.
I could go on but there are other people here on Slashdot who can do a better hatchett job on these patents. But these patents strike me as being 'obvious'. And I'm an NVIDIA card owner too so I'm not some disgruntled 3dfx owner with an axe to grind.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I'm running Windows 2000 on a K6-2 with 64MB of RAM, and it runs a lot faster than Win 98 did.
Yes - because Windows 2000 has better page memory management on small memory systems. Shame that it is less fast for more memory systems - check MS's own benchmarks. 128MB is where you start to lose out and it gets worse above there relative to Win NT 4.0.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Question: Won't the RT's proximity to the east coast megalopolis suffer it interference problems: noise from jet traffic, radio, TV, etc.? I'm sure a certain amount of this can be filtered, but the less need for filtering the better, IMHO.
Noise can be a problem for radio telescopes, but there are tricks to filtering out unwanted signals, such as looking for signals which vary in position while looking at a constant direction on the skydome. The most important facet of noise reduction for the radio astronomy community though is that most of the important wavebands are protected - no tv, radio or mobile phone systems are allowed to use these frequencies. Examples of these frequencies are the 21cm hydrogen line, 1.1GHz, 5 GHz, 15GHz, 30 GHz and there are others. So mechanical noise, such as Johnson noise, are the main factors.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The ARM instruction set is great. It is a joy to program in ARM assembler. I especially like the possibility to add conditions to every instruction.
Yes - conditional execution is a major plus and probably helps the ARM assembler get such good code density.
Nitpick: it has 16 basic registers, all of which are interchangeable. Only R15 has specific semantics (program counter).
Major Nitpick: Two other registers are vulnerable - R14 is used as a link register for branches and I counted it out. It's also dangerous to fiddle with this when switching IRQ, FIQ or SVC modes as it changes - the same is true for R13. That is why I gave the 13 general purpose registers r0-r12 - I never used r13-r15 except in special cases :-) Really the ARM has more general purpose registers than 16 - there are 27 (ARM 2 and 3) or 31 (ARM6+) registers but you only see 16 at any one time - changes in processor mode can swap registers over.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
RiscOS Ltd have been talking about supporting 32 bit for a year or two, but as far as I know nobody is actually working on it as they don't have the resources. Perhaps if they Open Sourced their OS they would have more than a couple of developers, but that doesn't seem too likely as the RiscOS world is very deeply entrenched in the world of closed source.
Isn't the RiscOS 4 release 32 bit? It doesn't run on anything prior to ARM 6 so it as removed the processors that were 26bit reliant. As you pointed out, full 32bit access of memory has been on the drawing board for a while but its status is unclear.
As for releasing the source to RiscOS, Risc OS Ltd can't open the souce because they only own the license not the product. Element 14 (formerly Acorn) own the rights necessary to make that move. That said, since much of the OS is in ARM assembler, it would make cross-platform moves extremely fiddly. RiscOS is fast because a lot of it is hand-optimized.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Sure it sounds nice... Doens't all new tech ?
It definitely sounds nice ... I can already see the river of drool coming from people who own Risc PCs (I almost refuse to call them Acorns since Acorn sold out their workstation division but I digress).
But seriously, have anyone considered that these are RISC processors ? Do they (Intel) plan to abandon their CISC processors for the private user ? Or is this simply Intel's way of saying "we want a bigger piece of the Business pie". I certainly think the latter is true. I seriously doubt that we could get along without the CISC, it would just cause to much incompatability, or the translation matrix would make the apparent speed increase gained from the CISC->RISC insignificant. This has no bearing on "us" the private users as I see it.
I think a small history lesson is in order. The ARM architecture is not a 'new' architecture - it dates back to the mid-eighties when Acorn, having decided to skip the 16bit generation, started working on a RISC 32bit processor. In 1987, the first Acorn Archimedes was born, running Arthur OS - a fairly primitive but useable GUI and OS. This was running an ARM 2 processor at 8MHz.
Later revisions took the processor design to ARM3 with improve level 1 cache. Note these machines had no level 2 cache - as clock speed increased, this would have throttled a x86 style processor, but the ARM has fairly light memory usage as it has 13 general purpose registers, a fairly orthogonal (and small) instruction set and a load/store architecture minimising the need to go to memory for information.
Then came the ARM6 and 7 cores which took speeds up to 40MHz. At this point the ARM chips were running market leading MIPS/watt ratings - no ARM machine I have ever had has needed a heat sink - but the clock speed was starting to lag the x86 line badly. After a joint project with Digital, the StrongARM was born, screaming along at 200MHz way before the Pentiums got there, and running at less than 1W. By this time ARM Ltd had been born out of Acorn to pursue its chip dreams - but not fabrication of chips. ARM Ltd is a purely design-orientated chip creator - other partners actually build these processors. A quick trip to the ARM website will quickly show you just how widespread the ARM processor line has become - ubiquity is an almost acheived goal :-)
But just as the ARM 7's had topped out around 40MHz for a while, the 200 MHz (sometimes oc'd to 287MHz) StrongARM has remained the fastest ARM chip for a good while. During this time, DIgital got into a patent/IP dispute with Intel and ended up having to sell the StrongARM team to Intel as part of the settlement. So this is the first news of a faster ARM processor for several years - I got my 200MHz RiscPC workstation a few years ago and it blew my socks off with it's slick performance. RiscOS which is the oft preferred OS for this processor when it is used in a workstation (rather than a PDA, router, or other electronic utility) is pretty quick, and a 5x boost will be fairly insane :-) And naturally there is a port of Linux for the ARM processor (but here on Slashdot we expect nothing less).
I just regret that my RiscPC is back in the UK and I'm here in Canada with an x86. :-(
Still it would almost certainly require a motherboard upgrade ...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Friedman says. ''We hope to make no money off the software.''
It's a great statement. It runs so counter to the current software industry that I couldn't resist quoting it. But it is a sign of the changing world model for IT business. Even here at IBM, that amount of money made from software and hardware is starting to be dwarfed by the income generated by the Services sector, and that seems to be where Helix Gnome is heading.
I used to have the impression that there would be some sort of subscription service to use Helix Gnomes update features or some integrated help-desk type solution. Reading this article seems to suggest a different path - it looks like the revenue stream that Helixcode is aiming for (they are a company after all) is based around providing a convenient integration layer between the user and whatever business out there exists trying to sell the user something, be it technical support, event tickets, book sellers or whatever. Handled right, this could be a fairly amazing utility - imagine planning a holiday trip by selecting the dates in your calendar and then calling up a travel planner which integrates buying plane tickets for the right days, booking hotels in the destination cities using advance search tools and having all that information written back into your electronic diary, along with maybe even collating responding emails from booked events as links. Then click the "Print Itinery" and get the complete information at the touch of a button (working printer not withstanding :-) ).
Why is this important? This is the sort of integration that MS's .NET project dreams about - complete integration of the available technology to make handling information more integrated and easier to access. Having an alternative to this underway NOW strikes me as of critical importance as Linux works its way onto more and more people's computers in order to prevent the .NET integration turning the commercial internet into a closed-off MS-only zone. We already see the spread of IE-only sites - I don't want a balkanized internet.
And if you don't want all those services, Helix Codes' extremely well organised and structured Gnome distribution will still be for free, complete with source code. So we can have the best of both worlds.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I wondered how long it would take the Intel engineers to work their way through the DEC purchases they made and start using that technology in other areas. Given that a 200MHz StrongARM processor maxes out power consumption way below 1W (I have a feeling the figure is around 700mW) the power consumption of the Pentium processors looks pretty silly. Still there is no easy way to go from a streamlined low power consumption RISC design like the StrongARM and plunk all that technology into the Pentium line which requires a whole lot more transistors.
What I do take issue with is this 850mW figure for a 500MHz PIII. Intel's low power consumption tricks up till now have involved idling the processor when there isn't much happening, and I strongly suspect that this 850mW figure has a lot of idling in its measurement time frame. That figure of 5.5W max looks far more likely to really reflect the power consumption of the low power PIII. That is not to say that having a processor having various power consumption modes is a bad thing - the Amulet project has a more interesting take on this one (variable asynchronous clock speeds) - but I do wish that Intel would be more 'honest' with its figures. As for the rest of the announcements, I just request that you don't hold your breath waiting for these to appear on the shelves.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Most modern torpedos are wire-guided, active-homing terminal. You steer it from the ship via commands down the wire until it picks up the target with its own active sonar, and then it homes in from there. Keeping a wire payed out without breaking at 200kts is quite the trick.
Isn't the cavitation going to play merry hell with using active sonar as an targeting mechanism? You are shoving a load of water off the torpedo and making a hell of a racket so that is going to require some impressive sonar signal strength to get a decent signal noise through the cavitation.
Confused,
Toby Haynes
Saying that the explosion registered a 3 on the richter scale doesn't mean a whole to to me. Does anybody know a rough translation for this into some more common measure of explosive force (lbs of TNT perhaps)?
Richter scale 3 is equivalent to 29 tons of TNT going off. 3.5 is equivalent to 73 tons of TNT and 4.0 is around 1000 tons of TNT or a small nuclear device.
That is a truely sobering statistic.
Toby Haynes
I don't quite understand how it can be as soon as next year, but then suddenly it will take at least 5 years. The users being discussed as *business* are the same people who go home at the end of the day. It would seem to me that it's more likely that if someone uses Linux at work that when they get home they will be familiar and proficient with it already and thus MORE likely to use it, not less. Naturally if they are more likely to use it, then they're more likely to use it *AT HOME* as well.
When Linus says 'perhaps 5 or 10 years ... to catch up' to Windows, I read that as meaning parity in the market place. Maybe 45% Windows, 45% Linux and 6% Mac, with BeOS and others taking the rest. Parity is an amazing goal to be aiming for - the sheer number of users that 45% of the computing masses is enormous. It may well come true for the desktop - I get a feeling a lot of people are going to be using Linux without realising by this point - set-top boxes, PDA's, POS terminals and other devices running Linux under the covers.
Business use is slightly different. For developers like me, moving to Linux gives us an easier platform to work on and administer than say Windows NT, especially when working on multiplatform code. I can also see office environments switching to Linux for, say, Lotus Notes servers and other centralized services and maybe even rolling out common working environments on desktops sitting on top of Linux, maybe even based on Evolution. Exceed is a partial solution, especially when combined with CYGWIN, but why immitate when you can have the original?
I think Linus is way off with his numbers.. It's either going to happen in the next year, or not - take your pick.
I think next year is too early for a revolution to a Linux dominated world on the desktop. I think we will see continued high uptake of Linux as a viable alternative and this will set the wedge for future years of expansion. With some hope over the next year we will see an increase in support for Linux from hardware manufactures, a fully stabilized release of XFree86 4 and supporting 3D acceleration drivers getting there, OpenAL starting to make an impact as an open 3D sound system on many platforms, both KDE 2 and Gnome flowering into a comfortable desktop environment and peripherals finally slotting more easily into the Linux picture. At this point the playing field will look a little more level for Linux adoption for the average user.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The spectre of the failed CDE desktop has been bounced around a lot in the wake of the Gnome foundation announcement. The reasons for its appearance are obvious - commercial Unices have dipped their hands into the waters of a standard desktop before and then messed around with the concept without really going anywhere with it. I have access to CDE on the AIX systems I work with, and while it has some plus points, I opted to use FVWM instead as being a more customizable interface.
But why should we be tarring Gnome with the same brush as CDE? The motivations are different - Gnome has arrived as an already competent desktop object model. It is not perfect, not is it complete, but it covers enough now that it is fully capable of most tasks. It has been written by people who wanted a GPL'd desktop model and decided that the licensing issues with Qt were sufficient motivation to not develop KDE instead. And why do these commercial Unix vendors suddenly care about Gnome? Because it is eclipsing their own offerings in available scope and applications written for it. It makes perfect sense from their perspective that they should go with the flow and convert, support and maintain a widely used desktop system. I don't suddenly see this 'Big Brother Unix' appearing on the shoulder of Gnome and controlling its destiny. Rather I suspect that we will see bug fixes initially as these vendors get their paws on Gnome, followed by patches and new bonobo objects, new applications under the GPL or otherwise, and greater integration of Gnome into their own offerings.
All those who think that these commercial offerings will subvert Gnome into some corporate whipping boy have forgotten the Linux philosphy - choice. If we don't like it, we don't have to take it or use it. And that applies to piecemeal offerings and patches equally as to whole applications.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The first person shooter is taking over, yes. But variation on the FPS leaves us with RPG-FPS like UlitmaIX, and Everquest, Adventure-FPS like Deus Ex (if you haven't played Deus Ex yet, you are REALLY missing out)
Agreed - when I first looked at this game I thought 'another FPS'. But I load up the demo (both levels) to have a quick burn and quickly discover that this is a pretty well thought out game. The graphic technology may not include all the whizzy shaders of quake 3, but the mere existence of a plot and various hinted-at sub-plots is unusual in a game today. And even better, Loki Games is almost certainly working on a port of 'Deus Ex' for Linux - it was spotted at LinuxWorld in their booth on a Linux machine. Keep eyes peeled for announcements and don't buy that Windows version!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I've tried M9, M14,16 and a couple of other Mozillas. Hows about they actually deliver a product. At this rate Microsoft could take the IE5 code, audit it, scrap it and completely rewrite it for every one of the Unixes before Mozilla 1.0 sees the light of day.
Given that Mozilla has gone from Zero to M18 in the same time that MS goes from IE 5.0 to 5.5, I think that remark is way off target. And given enough memory, Mozilla runs very nicely - if it makes your system page to disc you are SOL anyway, and that is true for any system with 64MB or less. I have no complaints with M17 on Linux or M18 nightlies on Windows NT with both systems having 128MB of RAM. Hell even the Flash plugins work in Mozilla now. The memory requirements will drop after M19 when the optimization is done.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
This may not be so bad. Personally, I like IE over Netscape. It's stable (on my system, at least) and it's more polished. I prefer to use IE when I'm in Windows over Netscape. I wonder how they can make an IE port to *nix stable though. What about all of the secret API code that's used in Windows? Once it's ported, does that mean the *nix version will have less functionality?
Ah. Someone who hasn't used IE on Solaris. Having sat on console on an UltraSparc and fired up IE out of curiosity (may trample me into the ground) and watched it chug and creak and roll around a little rendering a page, and seemingly slowing down the X server at the same time and using 95% of the machine, you can keep IE for Linux. Meanwhile I would recommend Mozilla M9 over it for speed and functionality :-)
Of course if you are interested in speed you'll use Mozilla M18 nightlies which are a lot faster than M17 already. IE on Linux will almost certainly run through some sort of porting library interface and will suffer because of it. MS won't care because the same machine with MS Windows and Linux will run IE nicely under Windows and like a dog on Linux, thus proving to the world at large what a wonderfully speedy system Windows is and how much Linux sucks. There is no mileage in a fast version of IE for Linux until MS gets split in two (and jumped up and down on, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry [Ed - we've had that], lost, found again, buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters) :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Apologies to D.Adams :-)
Let's have a rational discussion about this OK?
The parent post has to be one of the most pecularly moderated posts I have ever seen. Right now it's at:
Moderation Totals:Troll=1, Insightful=1, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=5.
I can't believe that someone thought it was insightful, informative, or underrated. It seems pretty clear to me that instead of attempting to post something insightful or informatice, he was looking for that elusive fist p0st. He did get #3, but I'm sure he'll be back another day for another try. The only explanation I can come up with to explain the moderation is some kind of conspiracy. I hope it gets corrected in M2.
Well, the weird moderation continues - current count is 9 moderations, with the current status at:
Moderation Totals:Troll=1, Insightful=2, Informative=1, Funny=1, Overrated=3, Underrated=1, Total=9.
Guess this one appealed to both sets of moderators :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It's one thing to claim to be enterprise ready as a databse product. It is quite another to be one.
Before I get started, I should hasten to mention that I work on developing DB2 UDB and therefore anything I write is biased and should be viewed as such :-)
Enterprise-ready is one of those phrases which gets bounced around a lot. But what does it mean for relational databases? In my opinion, it at least includes the following:
At this point, I don't know what the score is for PostgreSQL on the above. Any expert care to comment?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
And, @Home sucks. Is ADSL any better?
Running PPPoE on Sympatico HSE ADSL, I see pings to the most local Q3 demo servers in the range 30-50ms. Download speeds up to 102Kbytes/second, particularly to the Helixcode Akamai server, so I'm pretty happy with it. Performance under Linux is good and gets connected faster than on Windows when using the RP PPPoE client so I'm happy. Especially as the reason for getting the ADSL in the first place was VPN connectivity.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I mean, as the article says, sure, servers and stuff will definitely put good use to the increase in performance, but what about good ol' Joe Sixpack using Excel at his office? I mean, besides from cranking SETI@home units faster, is there really such a need for faster processors at home / office?
Definitely. It still takes longer to encode my CDs as MP3s than it does to pull them off the CD at 20X :-). Assuming the current rash of technologies hangs around, I think we'll see people sending each other video mails within a few years. And I'll still be looking to have that Linux kernel compile time down below 2 minutes among other things. As CPUs get faster, the things we do with them will be more complex.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
There are enough OSses on 32-bit CPU's that can handle large files. NT and FreeBSD to name two. It is unbelievable that Linux still hasn't fixed this.
It would be unbelievable if it hadn't been fixed, as almost any reasonable size database would run into the end of the line fairly quickly. If you pay attention to the available patches for the kernels you'd know that quite a while ago there were patches to the kernel to support larger files - I think the name was the Large File Summit or LFS (not to be confused with Log-structured File Systems). Ah - the patches are available here.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes