"Oh no!" is right. I think that's a pretty virulent meme you've come up with there. Good enough that by the end of the year it could infect large populations of "iJournalists".
When I was in college in the mid '80s, I had to miss class the old fashioned way, by playing RPGs and board games and pumping quarters into video games in the student lounge! And all we had during my first two years was a single 1200 baud dialup for the whole CS department!
If she's a single mother at age 30,how old is the kid? The kid could easily be 8-12 years old, and if the kid him/herself has some geeky tendencies, that might activate parental instincts in a geek. An older geek could easily be bored of only being able to divert his parental instincts to computers and collections.
True, there's no way she's going to find a nice, geeky guy (and not much chance of finding a "nice" guy in general) by going to singles bars. Furrfu.
And AOL isn't much better. All that adds to the mix is a bunch of 14-year old morons, and 41-year olds with the minds of 14 year olds.
The place where the real geeks hang out is user groups and fan clubs. There are usually single, possibly virgin, 30+ year old males to be found in fan clubs. (User groups tend to also attract the less geeky and more married.) And some of them have even matured mentally once they have gotten over the midlife shock of being terminally single at age 30.
What sort of fan clubs? Well, if she has the slightest interest in anything which could have a local fan club, like Star Trek, Star Wars, Japanese Animation, etc., and she's willing to get a bit caught up in such things, this is the place to be.
IMHO, geeks who want to make a "logical choice of a mate" (to paraphrase Spock's daddy), know to look for someone with common interests. So if she wants a geek, she has to get a bit geeky too. In this case, geeky does not necessarily mean computers.
Oh, and one more thing. If she smokes, that's probably like a -20 karma to a non-smoking geek.
How do I know all this about geeks over 30? Because I are one.
Recent? I think he's been like this for well over ten years now. Which is an amazingly long time for someone with ALS, aka Amyotrophic (sp?) Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gherig's Disease.
And he got it at a very young age, too. It was a little over 20 years ago (has it been that long already?) that my own father was diagnosed with it, and he was over fifty. The doctors gave him one year, and he lasted six. he refused the tracheotomy (sp?) that rendered Hawking mute, or he might have lasted longer. But without the nifty speech synthesizer that Hawking has, he wouldn't have had much of a life if he couldn't communicate.
It is worth noting that in the Larry King interview of Hawking that I saw a few weeks ago, he pointed out that he can use the speech box as efficiently as he does because he has just enough mobility in his hands for quick, if small, movements.
Anyhow, I made the most of those six years with my father, and I'm glad I did.
Even if the kernel is open source, the whole system probably won't be. And even if Apple makes the source easily available, unlike a few so-called "open source" projects are, it still won't be free, and it definitely won't be GPL or LGPL.
Remember, this is the same Apple that put a halt to the Mac cloning companies that they licensed.
"Apple pulled our license for speeding." -- Power Computing ad
The Japanese parody laws are much more lenient than those in the USA. In the USA, you have to defend trademarks or lose them. That includes trademarked cartoon and comic book characters.
In Japan, random people can publish parody comics, in particular "hentai" (putting the characters in sexual situations, even characters from kids shows), with no worries at all.
First of all, it's #64 (Kadabra, with one spoon), not #65 (Alakazam, with two spoons). The kana read YU-N-GE-RA-A. That's YU, pronounced like the English word "You", same as the "U" in Uri (pronounced Yuri).
And #63 (Abra) is KE-E-SHI as in Edgar Cayce. If someone can tell me WTF "FU-U-DI-N" (#65) is a reference to, I'd appreciate it.
What I find odd is that kids anywhere could recognize this guy on sight. He's been out of the publicity spotlight for well over a decade now. Maybe this is just a publicity stunt to get the spotlight back on him. What was he doing Xmas shopping in Tokyo anyhow?
And don't forget, there is no spoon.
Condition code registers and branch predicition
on
G4 vs. Athlon Review
·
· Score: 3
One important part of the PowerPC architecture which this article fails to mention, is the multiple condition code registers of the PPC. (These date back to the older Power architecture, BTW.)
Unlike all the other similar features mentioned in the article, these can not be retrofitted into the K7, because it is limited to the x86 instruction set, which does not have this concept.
Basically, any instruction which needs to check the result of an operation (such as a compare, or overflow from an arithmetic operation) has to use condition codes. But in a pipelined processor, the result of the operation usually has to wait until the instruction has finished going through the pipeline. Rather than wait this long to decide what to prefetch, branch prediction tries to guess whether or not the branch will be taken. The predictions are usually right, but not always. What if there is more than one such comparison close together, particularly if the result is not being used directly for a branch, but for a boolean expression?
What the PPC does is have multiple (7?) condition code registers. When an operation such as a compare is done, you select a condition code register to receive that result. In the same way that code can be optimized for RISC by interleaving multiple threads of operations such that the result of an operation isn't used until three or four instructions later, the condition code register usage can also be interleaved.
With out-of-order execution (OOO), the CPU automatically rearranges instructions to achieve this interleaved usage of registers. And thusly, the PPC will gain this advanatage with condition code register usage as well.
As for speed, RISC versus CISC aside, the Motorola/IBM designs have not shown the ability to drive the high clock speeds that Intel and AMD are playing with.
The PowerPC doesn't need the high clock speeds of the Intel/AMD chips. On average, it does about twice as much per clock cycle than the X86 chips do.
Comparing clock speeds without consideration of clock efficiency is like comparing the version numbers of the various Linux distributions.
The electoral college, particularly the "winner takes all in each state" rule, is why it is basically impossible for a third party candidate to win the election for president of the USA.
In order for a third party candidate to win, they would have to have the majority in many states. If a candidate is in second place with 49% of the vote in a given state, he still gets zero EC votes from that state. If a candidate gets first place with 34% of the vote, he gets 100% of the votes for that state. This has the potential to strongly skew close races.
It's not even the EC system that I have a problem with. If each district sent up an EC representative based on how that district voted, rather than the whole state, third parties would still have a chance.
The EC does one other thing that makes third parties difficult. In many other democratic nations, there are enough parties that no single party has a majority, and the bigger parties have to form coalitions with the smaller fringe parties in order to get the majority they need. In the USA, third parties tend to get ignored as a bunch of insignificant kooks.
Accounts differ, one version has it that Moto refused to license the design to a second source, which IBM wanted.
The word I've heard here at work (from someone who used to work for Moto) was that Moto refused to commit to have the 68K ready on the date that IBM wanted, but Intel was happy to commit to that date. Well, the 68K was ready before that date anyhow, but by then it was already too late.
And a related screwup is the 80286. Nice idea to have all those protection ring thingies, but it had two problems: 1) it enforced the 64K segment size limit of the 8086 when it was clear that linear address spaces larger than 64K were needed and 8086 (real-mode) code was doing arithmetic on segment registers to do this, and 2) there was no way to get back from protected mode (where you could access extended memory) to real mode (where you could run DOS programs) without resetting the CPU. Every 286 BIOS had to have code to set a CMOS flag, reset the CPU, then the reset code would check the CMOS flag to see if it should return to a caller.
The problem with the Hindenburg wasn't that it was filled with hydrogen, the problem is that to increase reflectivity to keep the insides from getting too warm, they coated it with powdered aluminum.
In other words, the thing was covered with thermite.
I don't know very much about DVD at all, but I could imagine that if I was given an audio CD that was encrypted, I could just read off a raw image and burn it to a fresh CD. Are DVD's somehow different?
Yes they are different. DVD recorders are (supposed to be) unable to record an important sector required for the decryption process. If you can't write this sector, you can't write a playable movie disc if the VOBs are encrypted. Whether this is enforced by the drive or the media, I don't know.
Of course, if you have access to professional DVD equipment and can get a back door deal with some Hong Kong pressing plant to press you a bunch of geuine DVD discs, then you are the type of pirate that Hollywood is really worried about, and this won't affect you.
Did you notice the irony there? The copy protection won't stop the real pirates, just the small-timers with DVD-R. The real purpose of CSS is to control who can make a DVD player. It doesn't even stop people from making VCDs, as a frame buffer playback can simply be re-digitized.
I think there would have to be an AWFUL LOT of Mac slaves to actually swamp a DS-3 connection. In fact, I bet it isn't even possible.
You mean a lot of MacOS 9.0 slaves. How old is 9.0 anyhow? Three months? There is already a low enough population of Macs on the live-connected Internet for this to be difficult to exploit, but they also have to be upgraded to a three-month old OS, too! "I don't think so, Tim."
This page presents evidence of a conspiracy to shut down Internet Connections. Zero-hour is probably New Years Eve, EST.
And how exactly is this more dangerous than trin00 / Tribe Flood Network? For those who haven't heard of trin00/TFN, it is networks of hundreds of r0043d machines on the Internet, each running daemons with the sole purpose of flooding any IP from widely scattered machines, all under the control of 5kr1p4 k1dd3z.
I suppose if the trin00/TFN code were updated to support this new kind of DoS as an option, it could be bad, but a bug like this can not be easily exploited to disrupt the internet itself, since Macs make up such a small population of the "live" Internet.
This is not to say that the DoS can't be launched against the MacOS 9.0 machines themselves, but the potential for widespread 1/1/2000 mischief is limited.
Don't forget to check out this virtual nerd's resume! Does it look familiar to any of you out there?:-)
His "activities" include "HTML Coders Association"... but of course! Isn't it a reqirement that you belong to some sort of HTML association before you can put up a crappy fan web site?
I tried over and over again to get XFree86 to work with a couple of Trident video cards I had lying around (3DImage 985 and TGUI 9680), and never could seem to get a "standard" sync rate out of the damn config programs. The 985 was a total loss so I used it in the Windoze machine I made for my brother and his family. And on a NEC MultiSync 4D, the best I could do with the 9680 was 1024x768 interlaced. Solaris 7, in spite of its poor video card support (as in don't bother if the card is less than a year or two old) got a proper 1024x768 out of it.
But when I put in an S3 card I got for $5 at a computer swap meet show, it worked perfectly the first time. So there was more involved than just getting the right mode line for the monitor. I still haven't quite yet figured out (even after reading ESR's HOWTO) where the clocks line comes from. (Other than "X -probeonly")
But what bugged me most was that I was at the mercy of the config programs to decide what sync rate to use with the monitor, rather than selecting resolution + refresh rate like NT 4.0 lets you do.
There's nothing wrong with being able to come up with your own modelines, but there should also be the option to select from at least the VESA standard sync rates.
But the main thing keeping me from switching away from MacOS as a desktop OS (I already love Linux as a server/cmdline OS) is the lack of a good newsreader. Basically, I hate paned newsreaders more than I hate frames in web pages. You have a choice between either seeing six messages at a time or six lines of a message at a time, because I've only seen them with a horizontally divided pane. What I really want is a newsreader which opens the messages in separate windows, like NewsWatcher, and can display Japanese text, too. (which is the only reason I don't use MT NewsWatcher)
But in trying to find one, of the first two I downloaded, one had a RPM and when I ran it, I found it unsatisfactory. The other one was just source code and I couldn't get it to compile because it wanted the header file to some library I couldn't find.
What I am trying to say is this: Linux also needs more binary software. The source code is nice to have for the tweaks and the geeks who have the time to waste. But a precompiled binary saves a lot of time to get something up and running quickly and painlessly.
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting part is they didn't log in.
I guess that means they're "open-source Anonymous Coward petrified grits" compliant?
"Oh no!" is right. I think that's a pretty virulent meme you've come up with there. Good enough that by the end of the year it could infect large populations of "iJournalists".
Well, I like it enough to pass it on at least.
When I was in college in the mid '80s, I had to miss class the old fashioned way, by playing RPGs and board games and pumping quarters into video games in the student lounge! And all we had during my first two years was a single 1200 baud dialup for the whole CS department!
:-)
Spoiled little k1dd13z. Furrfu.
P.S.:
If she's a single mother at age 30,how old is the kid? The kid could easily be 8-12 years old, and if the kid him/herself has some geeky tendencies, that might activate parental instincts in a geek. An older geek could easily be bored of only being able to divert his parental instincts to computers and collections.
True, there's no way she's going to find a nice, geeky guy (and not much chance of finding a "nice" guy in general) by going to singles bars. Furrfu.
And AOL isn't much better. All that adds to the mix is a bunch of 14-year old morons, and 41-year olds with the minds of 14 year olds.
The place where the real geeks hang out is user groups and fan clubs. There are usually single, possibly virgin, 30+ year old males to be found in fan clubs. (User groups tend to also attract the less geeky and more married.) And some of them have even matured mentally once they have gotten over the midlife shock of being terminally single at age 30.
What sort of fan clubs? Well, if she has the slightest interest in anything which could have a local fan club, like Star Trek, Star Wars, Japanese Animation, etc., and she's willing to get a bit caught up in such things, this is the place to be.
IMHO, geeks who want to make a "logical choice of a mate" (to paraphrase Spock's daddy), know to look for someone with common interests. So if she wants a geek, she has to get a bit geeky too. In this case, geeky does not necessarily mean computers.
Oh, and one more thing. If she smokes, that's probably like a -20 karma to a non-smoking geek.
How do I know all this about geeks over 30? Because I are one.
HAL must be reading at threshold 1 or he would wonder why people want to petrify Natalie Portman and pour open-source grits on her head.
Recent? I think he's been like this for well over ten years now. Which is an amazingly long time for someone with ALS, aka Amyotrophic (sp?) Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gherig's Disease.
And he got it at a very young age, too. It was a little over 20 years ago (has it been that long already?) that my own father was diagnosed with it, and he was over fifty. The doctors gave him one year, and he lasted six. he refused the tracheotomy (sp?) that rendered Hawking mute, or he might have lasted longer. But without the nifty speech synthesizer that Hawking has, he wouldn't have had much of a life if he couldn't communicate.
It is worth noting that in the Larry King interview of Hawking that I saw a few weeks ago, he pointed out that he can use the speech box as efficiently as he does because he has just enough mobility in his hands for quick, if small, movements.
Anyhow, I made the most of those six years with my father, and I'm glad I did.
I have heard that more often that not, "tar-like deposits on the beach" are caused by undersea oil deposits leaking naturally.
Instead of sweaters, perhaps they could try ponchos instead?
Even if the kernel is open source, the whole system probably won't be. And even if Apple makes the source easily available, unlike a few so-called "open source" projects are, it still won't be free, and it definitely won't be GPL or LGPL.
Remember, this is the same Apple that put a halt to the Mac cloning companies that they licensed.
"Apple pulled our license for speeding." -- Power Computing ad
The Japanese parody laws are much more lenient than those in the USA. In the USA, you have to defend trademarks or lose them. That includes trademarked cartoon and comic book characters.
In Japan, random people can publish parody comics, in particular "hentai" (putting the characters in sexual situations, even characters from kids shows), with no worries at all.
First of all, it's #64 (Kadabra, with one spoon), not #65 (Alakazam, with two spoons). The kana read YU-N-GE-RA-A. That's YU, pronounced like the English word "You", same as the "U" in Uri (pronounced Yuri).
And #63 (Abra) is KE-E-SHI as in Edgar Cayce. If someone can tell me WTF "FU-U-DI-N" (#65) is a reference to, I'd appreciate it.
What I find odd is that kids anywhere could recognize this guy on sight. He's been out of the publicity spotlight for well over a decade now. Maybe this is just a publicity stunt to get the spotlight back on him. What was he doing Xmas shopping in Tokyo anyhow?
And don't forget, there is no spoon.
One important part of the PowerPC architecture which this article fails to mention, is the multiple condition code registers of the PPC. (These date back to the older Power architecture, BTW.)
Unlike all the other similar features mentioned in the article, these can not be retrofitted into the K7, because it is limited to the x86 instruction set, which does not have this concept.
Basically, any instruction which needs to check the result of an operation (such as a compare, or overflow from an arithmetic operation) has to use condition codes. But in a pipelined processor, the result of the operation usually has to wait until the instruction has finished going through the pipeline. Rather than wait this long to decide what to prefetch, branch prediction tries to guess whether or not the branch will be taken. The predictions are usually right, but not always. What if there is more than one such comparison close together, particularly if the result is not being used directly for a branch, but for a boolean expression?
What the PPC does is have multiple (7?) condition code registers. When an operation such as a compare is done, you select a condition code register to receive that result. In the same way that code can be optimized for RISC by interleaving multiple threads of operations such that the result of an operation isn't used until three or four instructions later, the condition code register usage can also be interleaved.
With out-of-order execution (OOO), the CPU automatically rearranges instructions to achieve this interleaved usage of registers. And thusly, the PPC will gain this advanatage with condition code register usage as well.
As for speed, RISC versus CISC aside, the Motorola/IBM designs have not shown the ability to drive the high clock speeds that Intel and AMD are playing with.
The PowerPC doesn't need the high clock speeds of the Intel/AMD chips. On average, it does about twice as much per clock cycle than the X86 chips do.
Comparing clock speeds without consideration of clock efficiency is like comparing the version numbers of the various Linux distributions.
The electoral college, particularly the "winner takes all in each state" rule, is why it is basically impossible for a third party candidate to win the election for president of the USA.
In order for a third party candidate to win, they would have to have the majority in many states. If a candidate is in second place with 49% of the vote in a given state, he still gets zero EC votes from that state. If a candidate gets first place with 34% of the vote, he gets 100% of the votes for that state. This has the potential to strongly skew close races.
It's not even the EC system that I have a problem with. If each district sent up an EC representative based on how that district voted, rather than the whole state, third parties would still have a chance.
The EC does one other thing that makes third parties difficult. In many other democratic nations, there are enough parties that no single party has a majority, and the bigger parties have to form coalitions with the smaller fringe parties in order to get the majority they need. In the USA, third parties tend to get ignored as a bunch of insignificant kooks.
Accounts differ, one version has it that Moto refused to license the design to a second source, which IBM wanted.
The word I've heard here at work (from someone who used to work for Moto) was that Moto refused to commit to have the 68K ready on the date that IBM wanted, but Intel was happy to commit to that date. Well, the 68K was ready before that date anyhow, but by then it was already too late.
And a related screwup is the 80286. Nice idea to have all those protection ring thingies, but it had two problems:
1) it enforced the 64K segment size limit of the 8086 when it was clear that linear address spaces larger than 64K were needed and 8086 (real-mode) code was doing arithmetic on segment registers to do this, and
2) there was no way to get back from protected mode (where you could access extended memory) to real mode (where you could run DOS programs) without resetting the CPU. Every 286 BIOS had to have code to set a CMOS flag, reset the CPU, then the reset code would check the CMOS flag to see if it should return to a caller.
The problem with the Hindenburg wasn't that it was filled with hydrogen, the problem is that to increase reflectivity to keep the insides from getting too warm, they coated it with powdered aluminum.
In other words, the thing was covered with thermite.
I don't know very much about DVD at all, but I could imagine that if I was given an audio CD that was encrypted, I could just read off a raw image and burn it to a fresh CD. Are DVD's somehow different?
Yes they are different. DVD recorders are (supposed to be) unable to record an important sector required for the decryption process. If you can't write this sector, you can't write a playable movie disc if the VOBs are encrypted. Whether this is enforced by the drive or the media, I don't know.
Of course, if you have access to professional DVD equipment and can get a back door deal with some Hong Kong pressing plant to press you a bunch of geuine DVD discs, then you are the type of pirate that Hollywood is really worried about, and this won't affect you.
Did you notice the irony there? The copy protection won't stop the real pirates, just the small-timers with DVD-R. The real purpose of CSS is to control who can make a DVD player. It doesn't even stop people from making VCDs, as a frame buffer playback can simply be re-digitized.
I'll bet the real reason the kids threw rocks at him was he was trying to give them Windows 98 for Christmas.
[gd&r]
I think there would have to be an AWFUL LOT of Mac slaves to actually swamp a DS-3 connection. In fact, I bet it isn't even possible.
You mean a lot of MacOS 9.0 slaves. How old is 9.0 anyhow? Three months? There is already a low enough population of Macs on the live-connected Internet for this to be difficult to exploit, but they also have to be upgraded to a three-month old OS, too! "I don't think so, Tim."
This page presents evidence of a conspiracy to shut down Internet Connections. Zero-hour is probably New Years Eve, EST.
And how exactly is this more dangerous than trin00 / Tribe Flood Network? For those who haven't heard of trin00/TFN, it is networks of hundreds of r0043d machines on the Internet, each running daemons with the sole purpose of flooding any IP from widely scattered machines, all under the control of 5kr1p4 k1dd3z.
I suppose if the trin00/TFN code were updated to support this new kind of DoS as an option, it could be bad, but a bug like this can not be easily exploited to disrupt the internet itself, since Macs make up such a small population of the "live" Internet.
This is not to say that the DoS can't be launched against the MacOS 9.0 machines themselves, but the potential for widespread 1/1/2000 mischief is limited.
Don't forget to check out this virtual nerd's resume! Does it look familiar to any of you out there? :-)
His "activities" include "HTML Coders Association"... but of course! Isn't it a reqirement that you belong to some sort of HTML association before you can put up a crappy fan web site?
ISTR that NT isn't C2 either unless you run one of a couple of specific patch levels and have no network card installed.
Just because one particular almost useless configuration of NT received a C2 certification doesn't mean every NT installation is C2.
I tried over and over again to get XFree86 to work with a couple of Trident video cards I had lying around (3DImage 985 and TGUI 9680), and never could seem to get a "standard" sync rate out of the damn config programs. The 985 was a total loss so I used it in the Windoze machine I made for my brother and his family. And on a NEC MultiSync 4D, the best I could do with the 9680 was 1024x768 interlaced. Solaris 7, in spite of its poor video card support (as in don't bother if the card is less than a year or two old) got a proper 1024x768 out of it.
But when I put in an S3 card I got for $5 at a computer swap meet show, it worked perfectly the first time. So there was more involved than just getting the right mode line for the monitor. I still haven't quite yet figured out (even after reading ESR's HOWTO) where the clocks line comes from. (Other than "X -probeonly")
But what bugged me most was that I was at the mercy of the config programs to decide what sync rate to use with the monitor, rather than selecting resolution + refresh rate like NT 4.0 lets you do.
There's nothing wrong with being able to come up with your own modelines, but there should also be the option to select from at least the VESA standard sync rates.
But the main thing keeping me from switching away from MacOS as a desktop OS (I already love Linux as a server/cmdline OS) is the lack of a good newsreader. Basically, I hate paned newsreaders more than I hate frames in web pages. You have a choice between either seeing six messages at a time or six lines of a message at a time, because I've only seen them with a horizontally divided pane. What I really want is a newsreader which opens the messages in separate windows, like NewsWatcher, and can display Japanese text, too. (which is the only reason I don't use MT NewsWatcher)
But in trying to find one, of the first two I downloaded, one had a RPM and when I ran it, I found it unsatisfactory. The other one was just source code and I couldn't get it to compile because it wanted the header file to some library I couldn't find.
What I am trying to say is this: Linux also needs more binary software. The source code is nice to have for the tweaks and the geeks who have the time to waste. But a precompiled binary saves a lot of time to get something up and running quickly and painlessly.