>>What gives you the sick idea she was sexually exploited? >How about the sick sexual pose that this naked 10-year old child is in?
That's a sexual pose for you, but not for her, for her it's just being naked. Linking nakedness to sex is what adults do in our culture, not children.
So the 'sick sexual' part is in your mind only.. And do remember that the link from nudity to sex is just a cultural thing: nudist don't have sex all day, there are African tribes where they are naked all the time (except their ankle which are taboos), etc.
And surprise, surprise, the taboos in the 70s were different than they are nowadays.. How shameful;-)
Re:Stalled window bug dealt with yet?
on
Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Bah, Firefox has a poor design: 1) it's not multithreaded correctly, so you can have one tab freezing which freeze the whole browser (this is may be linked to its user interface being coded in XUL). 2) by default, a crash of Flash will bring down the browser, it should put its plugin in a different process, to avoid this.
I've switched to Opera for these reasons.. The only remaining problem with Opera is that sometime, it can use 100% CPU, and there's no way to know which tab cause this (multiple tab is nice, but it create a *lot* of issue that weren't present with multiple windows.)
Do not forget that selling to 1st countries means discussing with distribution chain, retail vendors, etc.
Those middle men would probably have driven the cost of the OLPC up a little, but yes the volume sold would have reduced the price for the buyers of bulk quantity for the education program.
I would say that the other bad decisions were also: - reinventing the GUI: a *very* time consuming process, wouldn't this time have been better spent on more useful goals? - too little focus on e-manuals installed on the OLPC, either they didn't advertise this part of the project or they don't care but constructionism doesn't do everything, manuals are useful too, so they should take the oportunity of the OLPC to include e-manuals..
Yes I know, but GNU C++ is from 1987.. 8 years is a *very long time* in computer history.
Granted GCC is not the only compiler but my memory is that Ada's compiler were expensive whereas C++'s compilers less so which explain (partly) why Ada is much less widespread than C++ nowadays.
IMHO, the DOD should have invested in making a Free Ada compiler to create a community of Ada users in order to ensure that Ada would become widespread, to secure his investment in Ada's code.
I think that the main reason why Ada has 'lost' to C++ is that some time ago, C++ compiler were either cheap or free whereas Ada compiler were expensive.
Too bad since Ada is 'by default' a language which is more secure than C++..
Unfortunately even though religions and their idea of God are indeed a 'childish ideas', the impact on society is far from childish, sometimes for good but also many, many times will consequences: prejudice against homosexuals, women, abortion, unwanted pregnancies, etc.
While I found this part interesting, I'm quite surprised that it focused only on deployment. Deployment is hard sure, but what about maintenance, feedback??
>the software has ended up pretty meh
And what about the *data*, constructionism is nice and all but there should also be electronic manuals on the OLPCs..
>Huh? You called this meeting on improvements to PHP, and all you can ask for is a *change* in concatenation and accessor operators?
You shouldn't underestimate the power of syntax.. A language's syntax is like the color/appearance of a GUI: people are hugely sensitive about it, even if in theory it shouldn't matter, it does in practice!
>I'm with FSF about this one. The "open source" term made it all less clear what this whole movement is all about.
(sarcasm)Yeah right, because 'free software' with its confusion between 'libre' and 'gratuit' is sooo clear..(/sarcasm) Maybe, this show that you're a bit biased, no?
I already answered to the technology part: you can invest directly in technology development no need to take the exploration of Mars as a reason.
And yes landing on the Moon was morale-boosting yes, but I don't see at all landing on Mars having an effect of the same magnitude..
Especially as people will remember the Moon exploration: a few trip, nobody cares anymore and the project is stopped due to its high cost, so they'll expect something similar.
Space's importance in national security mostly end with upper satelite orbits, what importance did landing on the Moon have on USA national security compared to sending satelites in upper orbit? None, so why should landing on Mars be considered differently?
As for the technology benefits, sure investing to invent/refine new technology is important, but this doesn't mean investing for Mars exploration..
For email? Sure, even though the spam could be annoying if the provider doesn't have a good filter..
For web browsing, it must be a real pain in the ass though: I switched to broadband around 2000 and it was already a big relief back then and now the average web page size has tripled since 2003!
I agree with you for the dish, it doesn't have to be on the house, it could be setup at the back of the garden on a pole, that said I've heard that webbrowsing with satelite sucks due to the latency (big RTT) and I don't know if it's possible to have the uplink in dialup and the downlink through the satelite..
> Atom is about 10-100 times the power consumption per MHz of current mobile ARMs. It's orders of magnitude short.
That's because Intel didn't target the same power envelope for the Atom as the ARM does: Atom target the OLPC, EEE: ultra mobile PCs not phones, that's all.. BUT Intel has announced that they're going to build a CPU which will be in the same 'power envelope' as ARM, this will be the real competition to ARM, not the Atom.
As you said the embedded industry is not linked to a given architecture, they'll choose what has the best performance/power (depending on price also of course) so if Intel's lead in fab produce the best CPU (which isn't of course automatic, it could be another lemon like the P4), even if it has an x86 ISA they'll use that..
As for the desktop, Apple has switched from PPC to x86, so it's not a good example!
>Nobody in their right mind picks x86.
For now sure, much like x86 weren't competitive with RISC at one time, in the future, we'll see.
>The problem with page flipping isn't updating the pixels, it's getting the page cleared.
Uh, could you explain to me how 'clearing a page' is different from updating all the pixels (pixel=picture element) of the page set to white?? So yes, updating 16 pixels at at a time instead of one should clear AND update the page significantly faster than what is done currently.
>>Sure for movies 16FPS sucks, we're talking about a book replacement device here.. >My paper book easily gives me 60 fps for flipping through the pages, and I expect the same from a replacement device.
(sarcasm) Sure, I spend all my time flipping through the page of my book when I'm reading.. Next you'll be saying that e-reader cannot replace books because they don't have the same smell? (/sarcasm)
>And many LCDs are very good under direct sunlight.
Perhaps, but there's still the power usage, like I wrote I would gladly exchange color reprodction for lower power usage, you're free to prefer color display of course.
Nobody has said that the replacement of ARM by x86 would be done in one day, but still Intel has a huge investment in fabs, remember how Intel beat RISCs in PC/servers?
By putting more transistors in the x86 CPUs (which gave adequate performance) at a lower price than the competitors.
Sure using more transistors means consuming more power usually which is a disavandage in the embedded market, but if Intel can come with a better low-power process than the competitors then it's possible that x86 would beat the ARM CPUs even with the burden of the complex x86 decoder to have.. So in fact x86 vs ARM is a competition between Intel fab and TSMC fab (and the other) and usually Intel has better process, enough to beat ARM? I don't know..
>x86 processosr aren't x86 processors, and haven't been for many years. They all decode the x86 instruction set to microops which they execute internally.
Wrong, even the early x86 processors were microcoded, so all the x86 CPUs have these decoding phase just with a varying amount of instruction decoded to microops or executed directly. All these CPU are x86 CPU, because they're *designed* to run the x86 instructions *efficiently* whatever the implementation details are, so a 80286 or Core2 Duo are both x86 CPUs but an Abacus or an Alpha aren't..
That said I wonder how much the braindead x86 ISA design costs in terms of performance instead of a reasonable ISA like say the ARM (with the Thumb2 ISA extension it can get code density close to the x86), of course it depends on the code but I remember that the change from 8 to 16 integer registers in the migration from x86 to x86-64 could bring up to 20% improvement which is huge!
Of course there's also design cost: the x86 ISA is so bizarre, that it's quite difficult to implement, but the payoff is huge given that x86 are nearly everwhere.. And yes I agree with the article that it could become a serious competitor to ARM in the future (but not with the Atom).
Sufficent for what? For GUIs, it is said that anything under 0.1s of latency is 'good enough' as users cannot feel the difference, if this controler really updates 16pixel in parallel instead of 1, it could theoretically have a ~0.07s of latency which is good enough.
Sure for movies 16FPS sucks, we're talking about a book replacement device here..
>With an LCD or OLED, we're talking more than 100x faster, in full color and comparable resolutions.
Apple and Oranges, they don't have the same usage! I don't know about OLEDs but many LCDs are awful when you're trying to look at them under a bright sunlight.. So for a book replacement, eInk still have many advantages, and I would add that I'd prefer that my smartphone used eInk (with the fast refresh time) instead of a LCD because I couldn't care less about 'full color' on my phone but I do care about power usage and being able to read the screen in the daylight.
Maybe, the use case is correct, but this doesn't mean that the implementation issue are solved: the usual issue with starting with a plane and making it drivable like a car is that it is very difficult to add a car suspension to a plane without burdening it with too much weight..
Re:It's as if a thousands hands screamed out in pa
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
You're right of course, when you talked about upgrading the computer I thought about the computer's internal components (which to a first approximation noone upgrade) not about the screen.. Sorry about that.
Note though that more and more people use laptops in their home, so they do change the screen when they upgrade the computer, so I still find it a bit strange to single out iMacs..
>We have spoken about China's shoot down of their weather sats (which is different than our shooting down a crippled sat that was coming down)
Different?? Only if you believe US governement explanations which were seen as lies by many! The only difference between China and US sats shoot down in my book was that China started first, otherwise both are a demonstration of military power..
Re:It's as if a thousands hands screamed out in pa
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
>The second was the Throw out and Replace mentality it pushed on consumers.
*cough* bullshit: most consumers *never* upgrade their computers, so it's quite sensible for Apple to make an 'all in one' computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, but in the hand of incompetent programmers everything can be the cause of an issue.
As an aside, the original code should have explained better what it was doing to avoid this, so it's not only a maintenance issue.
>>What gives you the sick idea she was sexually exploited?
;-)
>How about the sick sexual pose that this naked 10-year old child is in?
That's a sexual pose for you, but not for her, for her it's just being naked.
Linking nakedness to sex is what adults do in our culture, not children.
So the 'sick sexual' part is in your mind only.. And do remember that the link from nudity to sex is just a cultural thing: nudist don't have sex all day, there are African tribes where they are naked all the time (except their ankle which are taboos), etc.
And surprise, surprise, the taboos in the 70s were different than they are nowadays..
How shameful
Bah, Firefox has a poor design:
1) it's not multithreaded correctly, so you can have one tab freezing which freeze the whole browser (this is may be linked to its user interface being coded in XUL).
2) by default, a crash of Flash will bring down the browser, it should put its plugin in a different process, to avoid this.
I've switched to Opera for these reasons..
The only remaining problem with Opera is that sometime, it can use 100% CPU, and there's no way to know which tab cause this (multiple tab is nice, but it create a *lot* of issue that weren't present with multiple windows.)
Do not forget that selling to 1st countries means discussing with distribution chain, retail vendors, etc.
Those middle men would probably have driven the cost of the OLPC up a little, but yes the volume sold would have reduced the price for the buyers of bulk quantity for the education program.
I would say that the other bad decisions were also:
- reinventing the GUI: a *very* time consuming process, wouldn't this time have been better spent on more useful goals?
- too little focus on e-manuals installed on the OLPC, either they didn't advertise this part of the project or they don't care but constructionism doesn't do everything, manuals are useful too, so they should take the oportunity of the OLPC to include e-manuals..
Yes I know, but GNU C++ is from 1987..
8 years is a *very long time* in computer history.
Granted GCC is not the only compiler but my memory is that Ada's compiler were expensive whereas C++'s compilers less so which explain (partly) why Ada is much less widespread than C++ nowadays.
IMHO, the DOD should have invested in making a Free Ada compiler to create a community of Ada users in order to ensure that Ada would become widespread, to secure his investment in Ada's code.
I think that the main reason why Ada has 'lost' to C++ is that some time ago, C++ compiler were either cheap or free whereas Ada compiler were expensive.
Too bad since Ada is 'by default' a language which is more secure than C++..
Unfortunately even though religions and their idea of God are indeed a 'childish ideas', the impact on society is far from childish, sometimes for good but also many, many times will consequences: prejudice against homosexuals, women, abortion, unwanted pregnancies, etc.
While I found this part interesting, I'm quite surprised that it focused only on deployment.
Deployment is hard sure, but what about maintenance, feedback??
>the software has ended up pretty meh
And what about the *data*, constructionism is nice and all but there should also be electronic manuals on the OLPCs..
>Huh? You called this meeting on improvements to PHP, and all you can ask for is a *change* in concatenation and accessor operators?
You shouldn't underestimate the power of syntax..
A language's syntax is like the color/appearance of a GUI: people are hugely sensitive about it, even if in theory it shouldn't matter, it does in practice!
>>Change . (string concat) to +
>Nooooooo. That makes code confusing to read IMO.
In D, concatenation (of string, list..) is made with ~ which is nice I think.
>I'm with FSF about this one. The "open source" term made it all less clear what this whole movement is all about.
(sarcasm)Yeah right, because 'free software' with its confusion between 'libre' and 'gratuit' is sooo clear..(/sarcasm)
Maybe, this show that you're a bit biased, no?
I already answered to the technology part: you can invest directly in technology development no need to take the exploration of Mars as a reason.
And yes landing on the Moon was morale-boosting yes, but I don't see at all landing on Mars having an effect of the same magnitude..
Especially as people will remember the Moon exploration: a few trip, nobody cares anymore and the project is stopped due to its high cost, so they'll expect something similar.
> Space's importance in national security.
Space's importance in national security mostly end with upper satelite orbits, what importance did landing on the Moon have on USA national security compared to sending satelites in upper orbit?
None, so why should landing on Mars be considered differently?
As for the technology benefits, sure investing to invent/refine new technology is important, but this doesn't mean investing for Mars exploration..
For email? Sure, even though the spam could be annoying if the provider doesn't have a good filter..
For web browsing, it must be a real pain in the ass though: I switched to broadband around 2000 and it was already a big relief back then and now the average web page size has tripled since 2003!
I agree with you for the dish, it doesn't have to be on the house, it could be setup at the back of the garden on a pole, that said I've heard that webbrowsing with satelite sucks due to the latency (big RTT) and I don't know if it's possible to have the uplink in dialup and the downlink through the satelite..
>large directories
Large as in with more than 25 files, so no not so large.
As written above, Samba had reported the issue in 2005, but apparently it wasn't handled properly..
> Atom is about 10-100 times the power consumption per MHz of current mobile ARMs. It's orders of magnitude short.
That's because Intel didn't target the same power envelope for the Atom as the ARM does:
Atom target the OLPC, EEE: ultra mobile PCs not phones, that's all..
BUT Intel has announced that they're going to build a CPU which will be in the same 'power envelope' as ARM, this will be the real competition to ARM, not the Atom.
As you said the embedded industry is not linked to a given architecture, they'll choose what has the best performance/power (depending on price also of course) so if Intel's lead in fab produce the best CPU (which isn't of course automatic, it could be another lemon like the P4), even if it has an x86 ISA they'll use that..
As for the desktop, Apple has switched from PPC to x86, so it's not a good example!
>Nobody in their right mind picks x86.
For now sure, much like x86 weren't competitive with RISC at one time, in the future, we'll see.
>The problem with page flipping isn't updating the pixels, it's getting the page cleared.
Uh, could you explain to me how 'clearing a page' is different from updating all the pixels (pixel=picture element) of the page set to white??
So yes, updating 16 pixels at at a time instead of one should clear AND update the page significantly faster than what is done currently.
>>Sure for movies 16FPS sucks, we're talking about a book replacement device here..
>My paper book easily gives me 60 fps for flipping through the pages, and I expect the same from a replacement device.
(sarcasm) Sure, I spend all my time flipping through the page of my book when I'm reading.. Next you'll be saying that e-reader cannot replace books because they don't have the same smell? (/sarcasm)
>And many LCDs are very good under direct sunlight.
Perhaps, but there's still the power usage, like I wrote I would gladly exchange color reprodction for lower power usage, you're free to prefer color display of course.
Nobody has said that the replacement of ARM by x86 would be done in one day, but still Intel has a huge investment in fabs, remember how Intel beat RISCs in PC/servers?
By putting more transistors in the x86 CPUs (which gave adequate performance) at a lower price than the competitors.
Sure using more transistors means consuming more power usually which is a disavandage in the embedded market, but if Intel can come with a better low-power process than the competitors then it's possible that x86 would beat the ARM CPUs even with the burden of the complex x86 decoder to have..
So in fact x86 vs ARM is a competition between Intel fab and TSMC fab (and the other) and usually Intel has better process, enough to beat ARM? I don't know..
>x86 processosr aren't x86 processors, and haven't been for many years. They all decode the x86 instruction set to microops which they execute internally.
Wrong, even the early x86 processors were microcoded, so all the x86 CPUs have these decoding phase just with a varying amount of instruction decoded to microops or executed directly.
All these CPU are x86 CPU, because they're *designed* to run the x86 instructions *efficiently* whatever the implementation details are, so a 80286 or Core2 Duo are both x86 CPUs but an Abacus or an Alpha aren't..
That said I wonder how much the braindead x86 ISA design costs in terms of performance instead of a reasonable ISA like say the ARM (with the Thumb2 ISA extension it can get code density close to the x86), of course it depends on the code but I remember that the change from 8 to 16 integer registers in the migration from x86 to x86-64 could bring up to 20% improvement which is huge!
Of course there's also design cost: the x86 ISA is so bizarre, that it's quite difficult to implement, but the payoff is huge given that x86 are nearly everwhere..
And yes I agree with the article that it could become a serious competitor to ARM in the future (but not with the Atom).
Sufficent for what?
For GUIs, it is said that anything under 0.1s of latency is 'good enough' as users cannot feel the difference, if this controler really updates 16pixel in parallel instead of 1, it could theoretically have a ~0.07s of latency which is good enough.
Sure for movies 16FPS sucks, we're talking about a book replacement device here..
>With an LCD or OLED, we're talking more than 100x faster, in full color and comparable resolutions.
Apple and Oranges, they don't have the same usage! I don't know about OLEDs but many LCDs are awful when you're trying to look at them under a bright sunlight..
So for a book replacement, eInk still have many advantages, and I would add that I'd prefer that my smartphone used eInk (with the fast refresh time) instead of a LCD because I couldn't care less about 'full color' on my phone but I do care about power usage and being able to read the screen in the daylight.
>The problem is that these devices are horrible for flipping around.
Only for now, I've read about a new e-Ink controler which updates 16pixel in parallel making the display quite smooth.
But AFAIK there's no device which use such controler currently.
Maybe, the use case is correct, but this doesn't mean that the implementation issue are solved: the usual issue with starting with a plane and making it drivable like a car is that it is very difficult to add a car suspension to a plane without burdening it with too much weight..
You're right of course, when you talked about upgrading the computer I thought about the computer's internal components (which to a first approximation noone upgrade) not about the screen..
Sorry about that.
Note though that more and more people use laptops in their home, so they do change the screen when they upgrade the computer, so I still find it a bit strange to single out iMacs..
>We have spoken about China's shoot down of their weather sats (which is different than our shooting down a crippled sat that was coming down)
Different??
Only if you believe US governement explanations which were seen as lies by many!
The only difference between China and US sats shoot down in my book was that China started first, otherwise both are a demonstration of military power..
>The second was the Throw out and Replace mentality it pushed on consumers.
*cough* bullshit: most consumers *never* upgrade their computers, so it's quite sensible for Apple to make an 'all in one' computer.