Your problem is that you are understanding them literally. Try to understand the prediction and think about it for gods sake.
And predictions like 1984, Blade Runner (the movie not P.Dick's book), the Matrix and so on are indeed scary. And the problem is that some of them start to be likely to come true...
There are benchmarsk on Transmeta site. They are typical task benchmarks, not plain CPU blast and according to them the smaller of two chips is somewhere around 0.8 - 0.9 Pentium III 500 and the bigger one (due midyear) is equivalent or better.
I think you are thinking in 3 year old categories. Namely:
Typical desktop disk consumption at the moment is under 20 watt (for laptops there are some as low as 2.5 watt). For example desktop 3.5 inch IBM 4.3GB SCSI-II manufactured last year is 330 mA from 5V and 200 mA from 12V. This is 1.65 + 2.4 W = 4.05 W MAX.
CDROMs and DVDs are still a power hog but they hardly go over 20-30 watt. For a 40 speed SCSI-II Toshiba it is (unsure here;-) under 20.
LCD is also somewhere there (20-30 at most) as well.
Video is under 5 watt.
The biggest hogs at the moment are CPU. If intel it can go above 100watt + 3W fan and sound which can also be over 50 watt in some configurations. Thus, a transmeta chip will drop your average power consumption on a computer that does not have its speakers blasted 100% by 50%.
This will result in either weight decrease by as much as 30-40% or battery life increase by as much as 50%.
I would bet on the weight decrease. Because less batteries means not only less weight. It means as much as 20-50 dollars off the price (NiMH are bloody expensive).
Overall this price decrease barely compensates for the manufacturers price decrease due to less battery expenses. If intel wants to beat transmeta fairly they have to drop by further 20-30$. This drop will be enough to start FUD wars though because very few people remember to calculate the weight and the battery pricing in laptop comparisons.
Looks a little bit painful, though. There are no pain receptor in the brain itself. For the record, most brain surgery is done with only local anastetic. Thus, the surgeon can control exactly what he/she is doing;-)
AC always has problems expressing his visions
on
Childhood's End
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· Score: 1
AC always has problems expressing his visions.
This is one of the better books by Arthur C. Clarke. The reson being that it does not have a second and a third part;-)
There is a good joke running around about him. In one of his rama books he sais that the creators of rama have done everything three times. Well so does he;-). If he manages to express one of his visions well and write a really good book, that book always has a second and a third to followup until it is completely dry. 2001, 2010, 2061, 3001... Yeah right;-)
Overall, though definitely a visionary and definitely a remarcable sci-fi figure, he has never had the brilliance of Bradbury, Simak and from the newer ones P. Hamilton and Iain M. Banks.
I can think of only one of his books that falls out of this rule of thumb. This is the now well forgotten Fountains of Paradise. It is brilliant, has an idea and does not have a Fountains II, Fountains III (The retrun of Fountains) and Fountains 3001 - The final flow;-)
Apple used to have very big ROMs with lots of software (some of it quite obscure and undocumented) until the Power Mac (forgot which modle, I thinkg G3). These were too big for reverse engineering;-)
Nowadays, since Aplle switched to Open Firmware your only problem to build an Apple clone are the exclusive agreements between Apple/Motorolla/IBM. These agreements are now mostly dfropped: Since G4 IBM has decided to release a full MB design. As a result Apple clones are actually in the works.
This means that Apple (being thy small MS) will most likely once again start putting a few megs of software into a ROM so that the reverse engineering effort becomes formbiddingly expensive.
ON the subject matter - most of it is actually basic UNIX certification which is good (tm). It goes almost word for word with entry AIX system administration. Considering the sponsors that somehow does not amase me, but once again it is good (tm).
At first there are things that are considered computer crime in one country and are not in another. A typical example is reverse engineering which is treated differently in almost any country. There is no single rule of thumb about it.
Also, even for things that are considered to be crime everywhere, there is no real definition of computer crime usable for prosecution. If you cut out financial crime, copyright violation, p0rn, prostitution, etc there is only cracking and hacking left. These: 1. Are not subject to prosecution in many countries as a computer related offence (they are quite often handled as petty crime, destruction of property, etc). 2. Even in countries with explicit computer related laws the same case may be treated very differently.
So this utterly pointless exercise has:
1. Very small scope 2. Very small common ground and common interest to start with.
Its only common interest may be the attempt to gain cheap political divididends...
The reason is simple. IBM has very large support revenue. So bringing all systems under a single OS will drop the expenses and the revenue supposedly will stay the same. Which means profit.
Their balance sheet does not say how much did they get out of the support business last year but my wild guess is _A_LOT_... And deploying linux they will make that _A_LOT_ to be _EVEN_MORE_
They already tried to do this with OS2 but failed because they could not port it to all architectures. Now they are trying to do this with linux.
When I do get sound working the signal level is remarkably anemic. And no, Booting Linux from DOS to get the sound driver loaded is just not an option.
Common Problem with allmost all modern laptops other than Compaq. They use the Crystal Sound stuff which does not have a convention which mixer line is which. As a result the kernel driver does not assign these lines.
What actually has to be done is someone with more time to sit down and add them as params passed to the module at init (I know what to do but I have no time whatsoever).
It depends on the country trade mark law. Some countries have explicit provisions that international trademarks, patents and copyright prevail. Some (US and France are such examples methink) do not.
No. All device projects in this category are non Win based so far. The competitors (if I recall correctly) are: 1. Oracle - stripped linux 2. Sun - java 3. IBM - OS unknown 4. Compaq - 2 device projects (ARM and x86), stripped linux.
I may be wrong but this is what I recall...
This does not account potential use of Micorosft and Sony game consoles as web access devices. This usage is actually quite possible but nothing has been announced there so far and none of them is Intel based.
Number of hops in ipV4 is absoultely irrelevant to what you getr as reachability and bandwidth. It is relevant only in ipv6 where it replaces time to live.
A typical case when more hops is better is going from west coast to west coast between two providers with a public peering in MAE-West and a private peering somewhere else. If your packet goes via Mae West (lowest number of hops) it has a very good chance to get into congestion. So everyone is sending it via private peerings if available. And they may be on the other side of the US. Overall - more hops but faster and lower packet loss.
Overall, you are kind'a clueless... Read some books on routing architecture or the NANOG archives...
All this power is absolutely pointless if you end up displaying it on TV. You just DO NOT NEED these speeds for mere TV. You will need them if you try to do something on a 2048x1600 resolution or even higher. On approx 900x625 you will never ever use the video bus bandwidth.
Anyway if it does not have a video port compatible with a VGA standard it is a waste of a cool hardware anyway...
The interesting part will come if Sony will do a consumer device (say PC) on it;-)
Re:GOTTA be for the articles. There's better pr0n.
on
Playboy And...Linux?
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· Score: 1
Playboy does have really good interviews and very good political commentaries from time to time. And yes, people do buy for the articles (you can see the current month t... samples on the net, no need to buy), especially if their wife does not mind;-)
What is going to be your policy on: 1.(l)User data. 2. Advertisements: 2.1. Are you going to continue to handle advertisements yourself? 2.2. Are you going to allow companies like doubleclick to handle advertising on slashdot?
Re:"Long uptime is evil" or "gee isnt my system op
on
Server Uptimes Ranked
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· Score: 1
Who the hell marked this as insightful?!?
That is the difference between a U*x and a Windows. On a good unix you need to reboot only for the most crytical fixes. In other words you do not need to reboot unless it is: oh well, kernel change time again.
Unless you have thy one and only internet facing server in your company you quite often do not need to apply fixes for lots of the kernel stuff (you are already behind a firewall that can be kicked and rebooted any time). Than it comes to userland. Yes, there have been lots of fixes for userland since BSD 2.0 or Linux 2.0.18. If you know what are you doing you could have applied most off them without reboot and still run with linux 2.0.18 happily. Overall, on a Linux or BSD behind a proper firewall you should have been happy without a reboot for the last year or so...
In other words: 1. You are mistaking server uptime for a properly configured system on a properly designed network with the uptime of a device that faces the net directly. These should be different devices altogether. For example a linux based firewall booting via network into ramdisk costs under 300$ and usually boots from cold in less than 15 seconds. Skipping a device like that out of the spec for financiall or whatever other reason (if you are running a service of course) is sheer idiocy...
2. You may be right about the crack DB for a home machine (which is least likely to have such an uptime anyway). You are utterly wrong for a production system. A U*x admin that has managed to avoid reboot on a production system for so long most likely has not left any known or even supsected h0lez for R00ting...
A few good points: 1. These values have the value of a slashdot or CNN poll. 2. The article should of gone somewhere along the quickies line.
And a Bad Point: Dismissing outright any such poll is not a good idea. Yes the poll is not representative. Yes the poll did not deserve to make the status of an article. It is still some information. To be kept in mind;-) And take into account sometimes (more info on sysadmins than on systems actually;-)
I have a few debian-slinks upgraded to 2.2.7+ip-patch for Alpha and 2.2.13 for x86. They do not crash. Period. The uptime so far has been determined by power and hardware upgrades. In btw: they are usually loaded to above 1 loadavg (some of them above 3) and have insanities like a full Internet BGP routing table (more than 64K routes).
My recommendation - never run a stock kernel. Especially a kernel that has the bugfixes for bogus IDE controllers compiled in (unless you have bogus controllers;-). Some of these can really mess you up.If you clean up your hardware driver list to match your actual config your uptime will increase.
Slashdot Mirror
Your problem is that you are understanding them literally. Try to understand the prediction and think about it for gods sake.
And predictions like 1984, Blade Runner (the movie not P.Dick's book), the Matrix and so on are indeed scary. And the problem is that some of them start to be likely to come true...
There are benchmarsk on Transmeta site. They are typical task benchmarks, not plain CPU blast and according to them the smaller of two chips is somewhere around 0.8 - 0.9 Pentium III 500 and the bigger one (due midyear) is equivalent or better.
Have a look at them
I think you are thinking in 3 year old categories. Namely:
Typical desktop disk consumption at the moment is under 20 watt (for laptops there are some as low as 2.5 watt). For example desktop 3.5 inch IBM 4.3GB SCSI-II manufactured last year is 330 mA from 5V and 200 mA from 12V. This is 1.65 + 2.4 W = 4.05 W MAX.
CDROMs and DVDs are still a power hog but they hardly go over 20-30 watt. For a 40 speed SCSI-II Toshiba it is (unsure here ;-) under 20.
LCD is also somewhere there (20-30 at most) as well.
Video is under 5 watt.
The biggest hogs at the moment are CPU. If intel it can go above 100watt + 3W fan and sound which can also be over 50 watt in some configurations. Thus, a transmeta chip will drop your average power consumption on a computer that does not have its speakers blasted 100% by 50%.
This will result in either weight decrease by as much as 30-40% or battery life increase by as much as 50%.
I would bet on the weight decrease. Because less batteries means not only less weight. It means as much as 20-50 dollars off the price (NiMH are bloody expensive).
Overall this price decrease barely compensates for the manufacturers price decrease due to less battery expenses. If intel wants to beat transmeta fairly they have to drop by further 20-30$. This drop will be enough to start FUD wars though because very few people remember to calculate the weight and the battery pricing in laptop comparisons.
Looks a little bit painful, though. There are no pain receptor in the brain itself. For the record, most brain surgery is done with only local anastetic. Thus, the surgeon can control exactly what he/she is doing ;-)
AC always has problems expressing his visions.
;-)
;-). If he manages to express one of his visions well and write a really good book, that book always has a second and a third to followup until it is completely dry. 2001, 2010, 2061, 3001... Yeah right ;-)
;-)
This is one of the better books by Arthur C. Clarke. The reson being that it does not have a second and a third part
There is a good joke running around about him. In one of his rama books he sais that the creators of rama have done everything three times. Well so does he
Overall, though definitely a visionary and definitely a remarcable sci-fi figure, he has never had the brilliance of Bradbury, Simak and from the newer ones P. Hamilton and Iain M. Banks.
I can think of only one of his books that falls out of this rule of thumb. This is the now well forgotten Fountains of Paradise. It is brilliant, has an idea and does not have a Fountains II, Fountains III (The retrun of Fountains) and Fountains 3001 - The final flow
Well, opinion on books are personal so
#include
Apple used to have very big ROMs with lots of software (some of it quite obscure and undocumented) until the Power Mac (forgot which modle, I thinkg G3). These were too big for reverse engineering ;-)
Nowadays, since Aplle switched to Open Firmware your only problem to build an Apple clone are the exclusive agreements between Apple/Motorolla/IBM. These agreements are now mostly dfropped: Since G4 IBM has decided to release a full MB design. As a result Apple clones are actually in the works.
This means that Apple (being thy small MS) will most likely once again start putting a few megs of software into a ROM so that the reverse engineering effort becomes formbiddingly expensive.
ON the subject matter - most of it is actually basic UNIX certification which is good (tm). It goes almost word for word with entry AIX system administration. Considering the sponsors that somehow does not amase me, but once again it is good (tm).
At first there are things that are considered computer crime in one country and are not in another. A typical example is reverse engineering which is treated differently in almost any country. There is no single rule of thumb about it.
Also, even for things that are considered to be crime everywhere, there is no real definition of computer crime usable for prosecution. If you cut out financial crime, copyright violation, p0rn, prostitution, etc there is only cracking and hacking left.
These:
1. Are not subject to prosecution in many countries as a computer related offence (they are quite often handled as petty crime, destruction of property, etc).
2. Even in countries with explicit computer related laws the same case may be treated very differently.
So this utterly pointless exercise has:
1. Very small scope
2. Very small common ground and common interest to start with.
Its only common interest may be the attempt to gain cheap political divididends...
The reason is simple. IBM has very large support revenue. So bringing all systems under a single OS will drop the expenses and the revenue supposedly will stay the same. Which means profit.
Their balance sheet does not say how much did they get out of the support business last year but my wild guess is _A_LOT_... And deploying linux they will make that _A_LOT_ to be _EVEN_MORE_
They already tried to do this with OS2 but failed because they could not port it to all architectures. Now they are trying to do this with linux.
Common Problem with allmost all modern laptops other than Compaq. They use the Crystal Sound stuff which does not have a convention which mixer line is which. As a result the kernel driver does not assign these lines.
What actually has to be done is someone with more time to sit down and add them as params passed to the module at init (I know what to do but I have no time whatsoever).
It depends on the country trade mark law. Some countries have explicit provisions that international trademarks, patents and copyright prevail. Some (US and France are such examples methink) do not.
Why funny, I would say: very insightful...
Actually considering the numbner of obscure bugs in M12 this may be the only way for Mozilla to survive. Having some heavyweight put behind it.
No. All device projects in this category are non Win based so far. The competitors (if I recall correctly) are:
1. Oracle - stripped linux
2. Sun - java
3. IBM - OS unknown
4. Compaq - 2 device projects (ARM and x86), stripped linux.
I may be wrong but this is what I recall...
This does not account potential use of Micorosft and Sony game consoles as web access devices. This usage is actually quite possible but nothing has been announced there so far and none of them is Intel based.
Number of hops in ipV4 is absoultely irrelevant to what you getr as reachability and bandwidth. It is relevant only in ipv6 where it replaces time to live.
A typical case when more hops is better is going from west coast to west coast between two providers with a public peering in MAE-West and a private peering somewhere else. If your packet goes via Mae West (lowest number of hops) it has a very good chance to get into congestion. So everyone is sending it via private peerings if available. And they may be on the other side of the US. Overall - more hops but faster and lower packet loss.
Overall, you are kind'a clueless... Read some books on routing architecture or the NANOG archives...
This is what visio alows you to use. No point sticking to its conventions ;-) They are not bad but better notation may be used/invented.
All this power is absolutely pointless if you end up displaying it on TV. You just DO NOT NEED these speeds for mere TV. You will need them if you try to do something on a 2048x1600 resolution or even higher. On approx 900x625 you will never ever use the video bus bandwidth.
;-)
Anyway if it does not have a video port compatible with a VGA standard it is a waste of a cool hardware anyway...
The interesting part will come if Sony will do a consumer device (say PC) on it
Playboy does have really good interviews and very good political commentaries from time to time. And yes, people do buy for the articles (you can see the current month t... samples on the net, no need to buy), especially if their wife does not mind ;-)
What is going to be your policy on:
1.(l)User data.
2. Advertisements:
2.1. Are you going to continue to handle advertisements yourself?
2.2. Are you going to allow companies like doubleclick to handle advertising on slashdot?
This will spoil the game PG rating ;-)
Spell two words: make world ;-)
Who the hell marked this as insightful?!?
That is the difference between a U*x and a Windows. On a good unix you need to reboot only for the most crytical fixes. In other words you do not need to reboot unless it is: oh well, kernel change time again.
Unless you have thy one and only internet facing server in your company you quite often do not need to apply fixes for lots of the kernel stuff (you are already behind a firewall that can be kicked and rebooted any time). Than it comes to userland. Yes, there have been lots of fixes for userland since BSD 2.0 or Linux 2.0.18. If you know what are you doing you could have applied most off them without reboot and still run with linux 2.0.18 happily. Overall, on a Linux or BSD behind a proper firewall you should have been happy without a reboot for the last year or so...
In other words:
1. You are mistaking server uptime for a properly configured system on a properly designed network with the uptime of a device that faces the net directly. These should be different devices altogether. For example a linux based firewall booting via network into ramdisk costs under 300$ and usually boots from cold in less than 15 seconds. Skipping a device like that out of the spec for financiall or whatever other reason (if you are running a service of course) is sheer idiocy...
2. You may be right about the crack DB for a home machine (which is least likely to have such an uptime anyway). You are utterly wrong for a production system. A U*x admin that has managed to avoid reboot on a production system for so long most likely has not left any known or even supsected h0lez for R00ting...
A few good points:
;-) And take into account sometimes (more info on sysadmins than on systems actually ;-)
1. These values have the value of a slashdot or CNN poll.
2. The article should of gone somewhere along the quickies line.
And a Bad Point: Dismissing outright any such poll is not a good idea. Yes the poll is not representative. Yes the poll did not deserve to make the status of an article. It is still some information. To be kept in mind
I have a few debian-slinks upgraded to 2.2.7+ip-patch for Alpha and 2.2.13 for x86. They do not crash. Period. The uptime so far has been determined by power and hardware upgrades. In btw: they are usually loaded to above 1 loadavg (some of them above 3) and have insanities like a full Internet BGP routing table (more than 64K routes).
;-). Some of these can really mess you up.If you clean up your hardware driver list to match your actual config your uptime will increase.
My recommendation - never run a stock kernel. Especially a kernel that has the bugfixes for bogus IDE controllers compiled in (unless you have bogus controllers
Check the same article in debian weekly that has caused this discussion initially. Or check the linux journal when it is out (january issue).