To do this would require a very large memory buffer -- probably at least 4 MB. And more software (and thus more ROM) for encoding MP3s. That can significantly raise the cost of producing a unit.
If you just want to prevent skipping a smaller, read ahead buffer should be sufficient.
If you want to listen to one track over and over again . . . why would anyone want to listen to the same track over and over again? I can't imagine that this is a very common request from anyone over 6 years old who isn't a big Barney the Purple Dinosaur fan. I don't think I've ever used the single track repeat option on my stereo or on WinAmp.
My gut reaction is that you're right, and that this is evil. But I like to drive fast. I really like to drive fast. But when I think about it I wonder if perhaps this isn't such a Bad Thing. If it was implemented well (unlikely) it might be quite effective.
Frees up traffic cops to worry about the issues you mentioned. If speeding is no longer an issue then the police will have more time and resources to monitor other hazards like dangerous drivers. (And they'll have to if they want to maintain revenue from tickets.)
Dynamic speed limits would be pretty cool. Imagine if the system could dynamically lower the speed limit when it's icy or foggy, or when there's an obstruction on the road ahead. Additionally, it could raise the limit when conditions are good.
Theft prevention. If I report my car stolen the speed limiter won't let it restart the next time it's stopped.
Sure, this technology can be misused, but it also has some positive uses. Perhaps, instead of making the regulator madatory, it could be made optional. The advantage of having the equipment would be lower insurance premiums and immunity from speeding tickets. I bet a lot of people would go for that.
The Register appears to have a bit of a problem displaying today's date. The first article of the new millennium (millenium as per yesterday's suggestion?) doesn't use quite enough zeros in the date:
BBC Radio One hit by Y2K bug... Updated Mother Shipton fired by Register Posted 01/01/0 9:08am
I think that it's particularly funny that it's an article making fun of other people's web pages. Maybe it's subtle humour?
Unless you're capable of bending I-beams with your bare hands then you have a feeble body. Indeed I did imply that you have a feeble body. But I painted the entire human race with this brush. We've all got feeble bodies!
All that I ask is that if you call me or anybody else "sick" because we've got tattoos, piercings or other mods you provide some argument for your accusation. It doesn't bother me that you're un-modded. Don't let my body bother you.
No, you'll have programmers who understand the whole system. Where I work we shift responsibilities around fairly frequently (although not daily). This means that everyone understands how every part of the project works. And if you know that you're handing your code off to someone else in a few weeks or months you'll write maintainable code. The biggest incentive to write maintainable code is the knowledge that if you don't you're going to piss off your co-worker who takes it over from you.
I have to remind myself that this kind of juvenile, intolerant attitude isn't typical of the geek community. In general we're a very open minded group of people.
So what makes this just SO wrong? Because Eric doesn't look like you? Because he doesn't fit one of your preconceptions about what people are supposed to look like? Is all cosmetic surgery wrong, or just surgery which doesn't make you look more "normal"? What makes the ear piercings done by some untrained, unsanitary teenager in a mall with a reusable(!) piercing gun less wrong than Eric's large gage tunnels?
Eric's part of a vanguard of pre-cyborgs who have taken control of their own bodies and aren't constrained by the feeble bodies evolution has given us. Admittedly the mods are mostly cosmetic at this point, but, at least in my opinion, it's one of the first steps to a bionic body.
It would be particularly cool if you didn't seal up all of the holes, and let some birds share the house with your computer. I'm sure some feathered family would appreciate a bird house with central heating.
This problem is not nearly as severe as the fdiv bug. That bug gave you incorrect results. This one means that sometimes you have to push the power button twice. Not a big deal.
I agree that first-to-file is inherently unfair, but I don't that basing it on invention date is entirely fair, either. If two individuals or companies apply for patents on the same invention within a short time period neither of them deserves the patent.
In this situation the governemt arbitrarily picks one of the inventors as the sole beneficiary of the invention. Regardless of how the winner is chosen, it is inherently unfair. One of the goals of the patent system is to encourage inventors to publish their techniques so that the benefits of the invention can be shared by the whole world after a time. But in this case there is no need since it would have already been demonstrated that the invention can be independently reproduced.
If you're rally serious about shipping a product, then your company must have legal counsel, right? You've dealt with contracts and leases and other legal documents in the past, right? Presumably it would be your lawyer's job to read and interpret the GPL and give your company competent LEGAL ADVICE about the licensing issues involved.
Please remember that Slashdot does not carry malpractice insurance and any advice you get from Slashdot readers (myself included) should be highly suspect, since most of us ARE NOT LAWYERS.
I obviously expressed myself somewhat unclearly. Alphas are some of the slowest chips when you compare them to other CPUs running at the same clockspeed. What I meant to say was that Alphas have usually had the fastest clocks among the mainstream CPUs.
But it looks like x86s are overtaking them. This is quite an accomplishment since an x86 can do quite a bit more work per cycle than an Alpha.
Yeah, I know. That was one of the biggest mistakes with the 386. Intel knew that FPU performance was important, and they were redesigning the FPU anyway (AFAIK, the 387 was incompatible with the 287). They should have abandoned the stack based FPU at that point.
People always talk about how great Intel's FPU speeds are, but that's only relative to other x86 chips. And now they're not even top there.
It used to be that, MHz for MHz, the Alpha was always the fastest chip on the block. It was basically designed to run at insane clock speeds. So what's happening with it? What are Alphas running at now?
A Computer is only as fast as it's slowest component.
<sarcasm>My god! You're right! I just plugged my old 1200 baud modem into my Athlon 550, and the whole thing slowed to a crawl.</sarcasm>
If a computer were only as fast as its (sp) slowest component, then we wouldn't have any need for L1 or L2 or disk cache, would we? Engineers have been working for years to ensure that computers aren't brought to their digital knees by their slowest components.
Sure, it would be nice if everything was as fast as the CPU, but that ain't gonna happen. That's why we have caches, pipelining, etc.
/peter
Note 1: aargh! why does HTML preview change by < to a <???
Note 2: what does pipelining have to do with it? Pipelining lets the CPU (conceptually) run faster than its logic gates allow by doing more than one thing at a time.
Err, umm, once upon a time, mainframes were one of the few sorts of "normal computers" around.
Of course you're right. By 'normal' I really meant 'commodity'. Mainframes are quite dissimilar from the desktops or workstations that most of us are used to.
Perhaps porting the X server code would make no sense (although there do exist graphical terminals for mainframes - I think they're still used for engineering and scientific work), but the X client code might be useful.
Indeed. But the only really interesting part about porting X would be the server side. The server side has to interface with graphics devices. I haven't looked at the XFree codebase, but I presume that there's very little platform specific code in the client.
As far as I know, "SMP", meaning "symmetrical multi-processing"
I believe that this was a term introduced by Intel, and I don't think that other multi-CPU architectures are described with this acronym, but I could very well be wrong. I also believe that the 390 architecture is massively parallel but not really symmetrical. As another poster mentioned that the 390 can have various CPU modules which might not even run the same instruction sets.
They're mainframes. These are not normal computers. They may not even have conventional CPUs at all. That's why most mainframe programs are written for the VM which hides the actual hardware from the programmer.
As for your list of problems:
glibc: this is mostly written in C already. The platform specific parts can't be that hard to port, especially since IBM already has (at least one) C library for 390s.
gcc: again, mostly written in C, and it's already been ported to the 390
binutils: ditto
Xfree86: you're kidding, right? Mainframes don't usually have graphics consoles, and even if they did, what do you think the 86 stands for?
SMP: this is really an Intel thing, but I assume you mean multi-processors. I've never heard of a mainframe with less than 4 processors, so they'll probably want to get this going. Alternatively, you could just run multiple instances of the kernel, each in its own VM.
Does this require significant modifications to existing fab lines, or worse, entirely new ones?
My understanding of fabs is that they're generally completely replaced every few years, anyway, as process size shrinks and other parts of the manufacturing process improve.
Besides, it's not like you're going to see Athlons using this technology before Christmas. It's going to be many years (if ever) before this is actually feasible for mass production, and I'm sure the manufacturers will have plenty of time to build new fabs.
Transmeta's servers are going to be under an incredible load 1/19/00
Only if they've got power and a working phone line:) I plan to hone my abacus skills for January.
/peter
Re:The idea is not art by focus groups
on
Focus Group Art
·
· Score: 2
I think that there are different, contradictory points that you can draw from this. The 'most wanted' paintings are pretty bad, IMHO, but I thought that the least wanted ones were much more interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm a guest in your name space, can I have my registration fee back, please?
/peter
Not the most illogical, but close.
To do this would require a very large memory buffer -- probably at least 4 MB. And more software (and thus more ROM) for encoding MP3s. That can significantly raise the cost of producing a unit.
If you just want to prevent skipping a smaller, read ahead buffer should be sufficient.
If you want to listen to one track over and over again . . . why would anyone want to listen to the same track over and over again? I can't imagine that this is a very common request from anyone over 6 years old who isn't a big Barney the Purple Dinosaur fan. I don't think I've ever used the single track repeat option on my stereo or on WinAmp.
/peter
Frees up traffic cops to worry about the issues you mentioned. If speeding is no longer an issue then the police will have more time and resources to monitor other hazards like dangerous drivers. (And they'll have to if they want to maintain revenue from tickets.)
Dynamic speed limits would be pretty cool. Imagine if the system could dynamically lower the speed limit when it's icy or foggy, or when there's an obstruction on the road ahead. Additionally, it could raise the limit when conditions are good.
Theft prevention. If I report my car stolen the speed limiter won't let it restart the next time it's stopped.
Sure, this technology can be misused, but it also has some positive uses. Perhaps, instead of making the regulator madatory, it could be made optional. The advantage of having the equipment would be lower insurance premiums and immunity from speeding tickets. I bet a lot of people would go for that.
BBC Radio One hit by
Y2K bug...
Updated Mother Shipton
fired by Register
Posted 01/01/0 9:08am
I think that it's particularly funny that it's an article making fun of other people's web pages. Maybe it's subtle humour?
Unless you're capable of bending I-beams with your bare hands then you have a feeble body. Indeed I did imply that you have a feeble body. But I painted the entire human race with this brush. We've all got feeble bodies!
All that I ask is that if you call me or anybody else "sick" because we've got tattoos, piercings or other mods you provide some argument for your accusation. It doesn't bother me that you're un-modded. Don't let my body bother you.
/peter
No, you'll have programmers who understand the whole system. Where I work we shift responsibilities around fairly frequently (although not daily). This means that everyone understands how every part of the project works. And if you know that you're handing your code off to someone else in a few weeks or months you'll write maintainable code. The biggest incentive to write maintainable code is the knowledge that if you don't you're going to piss off your co-worker who takes it over from you.
/peter
So what makes this just SO wrong? Because Eric doesn't look like you? Because he doesn't fit one of your preconceptions about what people are supposed to look like? Is all cosmetic surgery wrong, or just surgery which doesn't make you look more "normal"? What makes the ear piercings done by some untrained, unsanitary teenager in a mall with a reusable(!) piercing gun less wrong than Eric's large gage tunnels?
Eric's part of a vanguard of pre-cyborgs who have taken control of their own bodies and aren't constrained by the feeble bodies evolution has given us. Admittedly the mods are mostly cosmetic at this point, but, at least in my opinion, it's one of the first steps to a bionic body.
It would be particularly cool if you didn't seal up all of the holes, and let some birds share the house with your computer. I'm sure some feathered family would appreciate a bird house with central heating.
/peter
This problem is not nearly as severe as the fdiv bug. That bug gave you incorrect results. This one means that sometimes you have to push the power button twice. Not a big deal.
/peter
In this situation the governemt arbitrarily picks one of the inventors as the sole beneficiary of the invention. Regardless of how the winner is chosen, it is inherently unfair. One of the goals of the patent system is to encourage inventors to publish their techniques so that the benefits of the invention can be shared by the whole world after a time. But in this case there is no need since it would have already been demonstrated that the invention can be independently reproduced.
Ladas & Parry
World Intellectual Property Organization
SUMMARY OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY & LICENSING LAWS
Copyright Law FAQ
If you're rally serious about shipping a product, then your company must have legal counsel, right? You've dealt with contracts and leases and other legal documents in the past, right? Presumably it would be your lawyer's job to read and interpret the GPL and give your company competent LEGAL ADVICE about the licensing issues involved.
Please remember that Slashdot does not carry malpractice insurance and any advice you get from Slashdot readers (myself included) should be highly suspect, since most of us ARE NOT LAWYERS.
/peter
I obviously expressed myself somewhat unclearly. Alphas are some of the slowest chips when you compare them to other CPUs running at the same clockspeed. What I meant to say was that Alphas have usually had the fastest clocks among the mainstream CPUs.
But it looks like x86s are overtaking them. This is quite an accomplishment since an x86 can do quite a bit more work per cycle than an Alpha.
/peter
Yeah, I know. That was one of the biggest mistakes with the 386. Intel knew that FPU performance was important, and they were redesigning the FPU anyway (AFAIK, the 387 was incompatible with the 287). They should have abandoned the stack based FPU at that point.
People always talk about how great Intel's FPU speeds are, but that's only relative to other x86 chips. And now they're not even top there.
/peter
It used to be that, MHz for MHz, the Alpha was always the fastest chip on the block. It was basically designed to run at insane clock speeds. So what's happening with it? What are Alphas running at now?
/peter
<sarcasm>My god! You're right! I just plugged my old 1200 baud modem into my Athlon 550, and the whole thing slowed to a crawl.</sarcasm>
If a computer were only as fast as its (sp) slowest component, then we wouldn't have any need for L1 or L2 or disk cache, would we? Engineers have been working for years to ensure that computers aren't brought to their digital knees by their slowest components.
Sure, it would be nice if everything was as fast as the CPU, but that ain't gonna happen. That's why we have caches, pipelining, etc.
Note 1: aargh! why does HTML preview change by < to a <???
Note 2: what does pipelining have to do with it? Pipelining lets the CPU (conceptually) run faster than its logic gates allow by doing more than one thing at a time.
Of course you're right. By 'normal' I really meant 'commodity'. Mainframes are quite dissimilar from the desktops or workstations that most of us are used to.
Perhaps porting the X server code would make no sense (although there do exist graphical terminals for mainframes - I think they're still used for engineering and scientific work), but the X client code might be useful.
Indeed. But the only really interesting part about porting X would be the server side. The server side has to interface with graphics devices. I haven't looked at the XFree codebase, but I presume that there's very little platform specific code in the client.
As far as I know, "SMP", meaning "symmetrical multi-processing"
I believe that this was a term introduced by Intel, and I don't think that other multi-CPU architectures are described with this acronym, but I could very well be wrong. I also believe that the 390 architecture is massively parallel but not really symmetrical. As another poster mentioned that the 390 can have various CPU modules which might not even run the same instruction sets.
As for your list of problems:
My understanding of fabs is that they're generally completely replaced every few years, anyway, as process size shrinks and other parts of the manufacturing process improve.
Besides, it's not like you're going to see Athlons using this technology before Christmas. It's going to be many years (if ever) before this is actually feasible for mass production, and I'm sure the manufacturers will have plenty of time to build new fabs.
I don't know what you're smoking, but that doesn't just look like it isn't code: it isn't code.
At least it's not C code.
You can't declare variables inside of a for statement, and even if you could, I've no idea what i--> is supposed to parse as.
/peter
main(){main(fork());}
Only if they've got power and a working phone line :) I plan to hone my abacus skills for January.
I think that there are different, contradictory points that you can draw from this. The 'most wanted' paintings are pretty bad, IMHO, but I thought that the least wanted ones were much more interesting.
/peter
Oops, you're right. The short one's still valid though. That's the one I was most proud of :)
/peter
main(){main(fork());}
I can beat it by one character:
main(){main(fork());}
(I found several ways to tie yours, but this was the only one that could beat it.)
main(){fork();fork();}
main(){fork();main();}
main(){for(;;)fork();}
main()(while(fork());}
/peter