Well... Most users aren't even pushing the limits of a 32 bit world... I mean, yes, we have 64 and 128 bit wide databuses. Those shuffle the bits around in larger chunks. But that's not what a 64 bit world would entail... It'll enable much larger address spaces. How many slashdotters have a machine with > 2GB RAM?
That's one of the main advantages to 64 bit designs, as far as I've heard. But that does nothing to help someone running Linux or Windows on a laptop with 64 or 128 Megs of memory.
Intel's been targetting the high end of the market with Merced. Everyone here's been saying that they'll have one, because demand will merit that they get it into the low end of the market quickly. But there really is no demand from end users. The demand comes from network admins, database admins for starters. There may be a few graphic artists in the batch, too... You can never have too much RAM when working with broadcast and film quality video. But the rest of the world really won't see a need for 64 bit chips until their machines start coming stock with 1 - 1.5 Gigs or RAM and Windows has bloated so much that that's not even enough.
They have the one thing that Intel's been lusting after - a reliable, speedy way to run x86 apps on a VLIW architecture chip, that's done all in software. For a long time, it's been looking like intel would have to dedicated die space for x86 compatibility.
So that's one.
For two, I'm not certain how much, but a lot of transmeta's work is protected by patents. Intel's not going to stand for a little company telling them they can't implement software compatibility on their new chip that lets them mimic THEIR OWN INSTRUCTION SET.
And then there's #3. Intel's not blind to transmeta. They've been acutely aware of competition ever since AMD rolled out the K6-II. Look what their ignorance of AMD got them: the Athlon. They're certainly not going to ignore then new Transmeta development...
I'd almost bet that Intel buys them out before they ever go public.
I don't think that supercomputers are built to be efficient at ANYTHING but calculations. The organizations buying those things don't care if they need to spend $50,000 a month on electricity, or if they have to cool the thing with liquid nitrogen. All they want are more calculations per second. For that purpse, Crusoe is ill suited compared to Alpha's, G4's, Athlon's, and Pentiums.
They target completely different markets. Crusoe is made with portable computing in mind... They went over that time and time again in Transemta's briefing. Supercomputer buyers are going to scoff at the idea of spending $15,000 less per month in electricity, but having to wait an extra 2 months for their calculations to be accomplished.
On the same vein, Crusoe's virtual machine design (i don't know how else to put it... the software that monitor's how much CPU performance a given program needs) also would not come into play in the supercomputer arena. They just run at top speed or no speed... No processor in a Cray for instance is going to go only 30% utilized, unless there just isn't anything for it to do, in which case why not just shut the whole thing down?
This is in agreement... Let's step past ZD for a sec. How do you feel about pro-MS / anti-DOJ articles on Slate? Because that's essentially what Slashdot will looklike.
I just opened Slate's site right now, and at least now they prominently state that their affiliated with Microsoft/MSN. Will VA have the integrity to at least do the same for Slashdot? Or will new visitors a few months from now be given no clue that the site they're visiting is owned by VA Linux?
Re:Why not just use the Crusoe as a G4?
on
Darwin on Crusoe?
·
· Score: 2
Thanks for coming to my rescue! I knew I'd seend these number referenced before - not at this site, but somewhere...
I couldn't for the life of me find anything on either Intels or AMD's sites aside from press releases, so i didn't even bother with IBM or Motorolla.
Those are pretty far cries from the Pentium III's usages. I don't recall Transmeta mentioning these lower numbers in their conference. It's almost like they were comparing their absolute best case against Intels absolute worst case... My hopes are definetly NOT that up about getting a Crusoe system, at this point.
But that wouldn't be a Mac. It'd be a bastardized Mac-like implentation. No matter how much you try to justify it, it they just no longer would be the Mac's that we've known. A lot of the Mac OS' ease of use comes from it's closeness to the hardware. Things like Plug and Play (which apple never bothered to name as such) work much better on every iteration of mac compared to PC's. They also do USB much better than PC's. That's not just beacuse of a couple extensions to the Mac OS. It's beacause Apple knows EXACTLY what chips to expect in each Mac system, as well as tolerances of things like motherboards and cables. Microsoft can have pretty much no assurances that vendor A's USB implentation is anything like vendor B's (especially so the smaller the vendor is)... they may even use the same chipset, but place them at different distances from the PCI brideg chips, messing up the timing...
Look. No one's won or lost. The judge just decided that there could be a plausible liklely hood that the DVD industry's argument has merit in his ears. If their argument does have merit, he reckons, then the continued availability of DeCSS could cause irreparable harm.
If the defense can present a plausible argument, then it gets dropped, life goes back to normal.
If the defense is inept and can't present their side of the case in a believable manor, well then, they just messed up, the DVD industry wins, and life goes back to normal.
Please repost your comment with a link to the story you're referenceing...
I'd tend to think, without being able to read it, that FreeMac was looking for some sort of credit line from apple, which of course they're not going to give, because how in the world would FreeMac pay apple back?
2nd. Yes, apple makes oney from their hardware. And it is their main revenue stream. Those two are granted. However, Apple would lose 1/2 their advantage by porting their OS to x86... Users would have to deal with IRQ's... slews of unsupported hardware...etc. No one would ever pat apple on the back for making some of the best hardware anymore... And lots of people post here that they LOVE Mac hardware, they just don't like the OS on it.
Re:Why not just use the Crusoe as a G4?
on
Darwin on Crusoe?
·
· Score: 2
What? If Apple was trully considering switching to Crusoe, they'ed rank among Transmeta's largest customers and could certainly be able to suggest changes to processors, as they've always done with Motorolla and IBM.
Besides, it's not like they'ed need to modify the die or anything like that. Just make a riser card like those ones that converted socketed celerons into slot one CPU's and connected the missing pins to enable SMP.
Transmeta seems to want to bend over backwards in order to stay compatible with the current market, so if it would enable them to ship an additional million chips per quarter, why would they want to say no?
And what have I been told it will do soon? I've read nary a word about transmeta porting more instruction sets to their processors. They've actually gone and said that they will not release the native instruction sets. The talk of an ultra-high performance chip that can run multiple instruction sets is basically a rumor that's been propogated by slashdot and every other news site that was speculating on what transmeta was up to.
Is there anything else that I "consciously blocked out?" Oh, the lowitude of the power needed? Well, that's all fine and dandy for Intel users, but you know, Mac users are already used to the merit's of lower power use, being that G3's only use 3-6 watts (I THINK... regardless, it's much lower than x86 chips)...
Re:Why not just use the Crusoe as a G4?
on
Darwin on Crusoe?
·
· Score: 4
I would think that's what they're talking about, being that otherwise it could just be said that Apple's considering porting their software to run on x86 processors. That says nothing about all the support chips. Apple will never have their OS run on BX motherboards, as it would significantly detract from the users experience of "trouble-free hardware".
IF they could just modify the pinouts of the Crusoe to conform with their sockets... They'ed have a pretty cool setup.
They'ed also probably want to emulate a G3 rather than G4...Somehow I doubt that Crusoe could emulate AltiVec very well... Or maybe there is real magic to Crusoe.
Anyways, it'd be exciting to see Crusoe emulate ANYTHING but x86... Right now it just seems like it's a low power x86 processor. Not very exciting.
From now on, Slashdot, which has been actively covering every twist and turn with Redhat's and VA Linux's stock (which I personally got rather sick of) may need to stop and VA story when it comes time to announce earnings?
This is BAD BAD BAD! Why can't many people see that?
You get angry when AOL buys time/warner because they'll monoplize consumer content on the internet, and rejoice when ANDN takes over most of the good site and then gets bought by VA Linux, who will now oww 50%+ of the real Linux related sites.
Mergers tend to drive up the price of the company being acquired, but hammer the price of the company doing the buying... I haven't looked in the last half hour, but ANDN was doing A LOT better than LNUX so far today...
Why?
VA Said that they are giving ANDN holders.4 someodd shares of LNUX for each share of ANDN they own. So long each share of ANDN is worth less than 40% of the share price of LNUX, Andover's a great buy for people trying to make a quick buck.
BUT, if you buy Andover at 40, and people sell off LNUX until it hit's, say 80, then you've just done a magnificent job at losing money....
ANDN shareholders are probably happy right now. LNUX ones should tread carefully, unless they're in it for the long-haul.
So you actually enjoy the idea that the "biggest network of opensource/linux advocacy sites" is going to be owned by the largest sole distributor of Linux systems?
Talk about slanting the tables a little!
If Microsoft tried to buy ZDNET, everyone here would cry foul.
If Apple tried to buy MacWeek and MacWorld from ZDnet, again, everyone would cry foul.
If Sun went and bought performance computer, AGAIN, everyone would cry foul.
But, if VA Linux buys Andover.net, it's a *good thing*?!?
I believe the reason that Amazon continues to lose money is that they write all their acquisitions off as purchases.
Why not? If you're not expected to make money, as the current mindset of the stock market seems to hold, then why make money when you just have to pay more taxes on it?
Call it whatever you want... It doesn't matter to us. Just to VA's accountants.
Well... "clueless newbies" don't have connections aside from AOL, so this wouldn't affect them.
It's the "semi-seasoned users" that this got, because they were savy enough to have AOL and an ISP, but still, they agreed to let AOL reassociate files on them.
In all my years i've never done an default install - if nothing else, i'd just click all the items a default install would install, just so i'd know what my ooptions would have been. And never give anything permission to reconfigure anything on your system uneless you know exactly what you're getting into.
The worst case if you do that is that you'll have to launch the app first an then open whatever file you wanted to open. If you're sure everything is going okay, you can reassocaite the file type yourself.
"Yay! Windows talk on/.! If only there'd be a good mac conversation...:)"
I don't know... I installed it twice on the same machine (for two completely different accounts - different billing info and everything). One had been upgraded from 3.0 to 4.0 to 5.0 and connected via an ISP. The other was a 1st time install of 5.0 and set to dial up through AOL. Both accounts work fine. No problems. Maybe it's just that people just hit "easy install" or whatever and then wonder what in the world just happened to their machines.
Is it just access to the source code, or is it the fact that they're not Microsoft, that makes the "release early, release often" mantra a good thing?
Seriously.
Microsoft goes through a HUGE public beta and all that happens is that they get completely ragged on. Corel does the same and it's a *good* thing. Don't bash me as being a Microsoft employee or anything, i'm genuinely curious.
Agreed. For one, the merger isn't even approved yet. For two, no credible news/media organization is not going to report negative press about their parent company. That in and of itself would destroy their credibility. And that would destroy anyone's faith in the idea that the merger might actually raise the value of their shares.
But besides. They're report the FACTS. They're just saying that AOL's getting sued for one reason or another.
They already have with Win2000. But so long as developers are targetting 9x, those apps should run fine. Is there a single app in existance that refuses to run under Windows 95 yet runs fine on Windows 98? I mean, once IE4 has been installed. And the next consumer windows will still be based on the Win 9x codebase, so the current incarnation of WINE should have quite a bit of life left to it.
why do you doubt everyone's motives that helps linux, unless they're a pure linux company?
Corel's been moped around quite a bit by Microsoft. Since Linux looks like it could actually be a viable alternative to Windows, it's not at all suprising that Corel helping it all it can to erase the definciense that Linux has on the desktop.
It's just that rather than becoming a separate entity, the PC morphed into it, while still retaining it's own properties.
Browswer based apps are already here. They're still wimpy, but in a few years consumers and regular office workers will be able to accomplish everything they do now via a computer with a web browser.
The NC's not dead. It's just the PC became the NC.
You're forgetting the "how much did it cost to do the R&D necessary to build the card in the first place?", "how many developer hours were spent getting it right?", and "how many people do they have on staff to support the cards?"
Not to mention that everyone needs to make a bit of money for their efforts. If you disagree, let it be known, I'm sure lots of people would love to give you a job paying peanuts.
Wireless technology is still in it's infancy. It costs more because it's rarer. It costs more because the past R&D is still amortized. It costs more because it's not good enough, meaning money needs to be budgeted to future versions of the product that can go 10x or 100x faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Well... Most users aren't even pushing the limits of a 32 bit world... I mean, yes, we have 64 and 128 bit wide databuses. Those shuffle the bits around in larger chunks. But that's not what a 64 bit world would entail... It'll enable much larger address spaces. How many slashdotters have a machine with > 2GB RAM?
That's one of the main advantages to 64 bit designs, as far as I've heard. But that does nothing to help someone running Linux or Windows on a laptop with 64 or 128 Megs of memory.
Intel's been targetting the high end of the market with Merced. Everyone here's been saying that they'll have one, because demand will merit that they get it into the low end of the market quickly. But there really is no demand from end users. The demand comes from network admins, database admins for starters. There may be a few graphic artists in the batch, too... You can never have too much RAM when working with broadcast and film quality video. But the rest of the world really won't see a need for 64 bit chips until their machines start coming stock with 1 - 1.5 Gigs or RAM and Windows has bloated so much that that's not even enough.
They have the one thing that Intel's been lusting after - a reliable, speedy way to run x86 apps on a VLIW architecture chip, that's done all in software. For a long time, it's been looking like intel would have to dedicated die space for x86 compatibility.
So that's one.
For two, I'm not certain how much, but a lot of transmeta's work is protected by patents. Intel's not going to stand for a little company telling them they can't implement software compatibility on their new chip that lets them mimic THEIR OWN INSTRUCTION SET.
And then there's #3. Intel's not blind to transmeta. They've been acutely aware of competition ever since AMD rolled out the K6-II. Look what their ignorance of AMD got them: the Athlon. They're certainly not going to ignore then new Transmeta development...
I'd almost bet that Intel buys them out before they ever go public.
I don't think that supercomputers are built to be efficient at ANYTHING but calculations. The organizations buying those things don't care if they need to spend $50,000 a month on electricity, or if they have to cool the thing with liquid nitrogen. All they want are more calculations per second. For that purpse, Crusoe is ill suited compared to Alpha's, G4's, Athlon's, and Pentiums.
They target completely different markets. Crusoe is made with portable computing in mind... They went over that time and time again in Transemta's briefing. Supercomputer buyers are going to scoff at the idea of spending $15,000 less per month in electricity, but having to wait an extra 2 months for their calculations to be accomplished.
On the same vein, Crusoe's virtual machine design (i don't know how else to put it... the software that monitor's how much CPU performance a given program needs) also would not come into play in the supercomputer arena. They just run at top speed or no speed... No processor in a Cray for instance is going to go only 30% utilized, unless there just isn't anything for it to do, in which case why not just shut the whole thing down?
This is in agreement... Let's step past ZD for a sec. How do you feel about pro-MS / anti-DOJ articles on Slate? Because that's essentially what Slashdot will looklike.
I just opened Slate's site right now, and at least now they prominently state that their affiliated with Microsoft/MSN. Will VA have the integrity to at least do the same for Slashdot? Or will new visitors a few months from now be given no clue that the site they're visiting is owned by VA Linux?
Thanks for coming to my rescue! I knew I'd seend these number referenced before - not at this site, but somewhere...
I couldn't for the life of me find anything on either Intels or AMD's sites aside from press releases, so i didn't even bother with IBM or Motorolla.
However, according to the press releases:
Mobile Celeron-266 uses 5.8w
Mobile Celeron-333 uses 6w
Mobile AMD-K6-III-P uses 12w
Those are pretty far cries from the Pentium III's usages. I don't recall Transmeta mentioning these lower numbers in their conference. It's almost like they were comparing their absolute best case against Intels absolute worst case... My hopes are definetly NOT that up about getting a Crusoe system, at this point.
But that wouldn't be a Mac. It'd be a bastardized Mac-like implentation. No matter how much you try to justify it, it they just no longer would be the Mac's that we've known. A lot of the Mac OS' ease of use comes from it's closeness to the hardware. Things like Plug and Play (which apple never bothered to name as such) work much better on every iteration of mac compared to PC's. They also do USB much better than PC's. That's not just beacuse of a couple extensions to the Mac OS. It's beacause Apple knows EXACTLY what chips to expect in each Mac system, as well as tolerances of things like motherboards and cables. Microsoft can have pretty much no assurances that vendor A's USB implentation is anything like vendor B's (especially so the smaller the vendor is)... they may even use the same chipset, but place them at different distances from the PCI brideg chips, messing up the timing...
Look. No one's won or lost. The judge just decided that there could be a plausible liklely hood that the DVD industry's argument has merit in his ears. If their argument does have merit, he reckons, then the continued availability of DeCSS could cause irreparable harm.
If the defense can present a plausible argument, then it gets dropped, life goes back to normal.
If the defense is inept and can't present their side of the case in a believable manor, well then, they just messed up, the DVD industry wins, and life goes back to normal.
Please repost your comment with a link to the story you're referenceing...
I'd tend to think, without being able to read it, that FreeMac was looking for some sort of credit line from apple, which of course they're not going to give, because how in the world would FreeMac pay apple back?
2nd. Yes, apple makes oney from their hardware. And it is their main revenue stream. Those two are granted. However, Apple would lose 1/2 their advantage by porting their OS to x86... Users would have to deal with IRQ's... slews of unsupported hardware...etc. No one would ever pat apple on the back for making some of the best hardware anymore... And lots of people post here that they LOVE Mac hardware, they just don't like the OS on it.
What? If Apple was trully considering switching to Crusoe, they'ed rank among Transmeta's largest customers and could certainly be able to suggest changes to processors, as they've always done with Motorolla and IBM.
Besides, it's not like they'ed need to modify the die or anything like that. Just make a riser card like those ones that converted socketed celerons into slot one CPU's and connected the missing pins to enable SMP.
Transmeta seems to want to bend over backwards in order to stay compatible with the current market, so if it would enable them to ship an additional million chips per quarter, why would they want to say no?
And what have I been told it will do soon? I've read nary a word about transmeta porting more instruction sets to their processors. They've actually gone and said that they will not release the native instruction sets. The talk of an ultra-high performance chip that can run multiple instruction sets is basically a rumor that's been propogated by slashdot and every other news site that was speculating on what transmeta was up to.
Is there anything else that I "consciously blocked out?" Oh, the lowitude of the power needed? Well, that's all fine and dandy for Intel users, but you know, Mac users are already used to the merit's of lower power use, being that G3's only use 3-6 watts (I THINK... regardless, it's much lower than x86 chips)...
I would think that's what they're talking about, being that otherwise it could just be said that Apple's considering porting their software to run on x86 processors. That says nothing about all the support chips. Apple will never have their OS run on BX motherboards, as it would significantly detract from the users experience of "trouble-free hardware".
IF they could just modify the pinouts of the Crusoe to conform with their sockets... They'ed have a pretty cool setup.
They'ed also probably want to emulate a G3 rather than G4...Somehow I doubt that Crusoe could emulate AltiVec very well... Or maybe there is real magic to Crusoe.
Anyways, it'd be exciting to see Crusoe emulate ANYTHING but x86... Right now it just seems like it's a low power x86 processor. Not very exciting.
Mac OS Rumors is just that... Rumors. Of course you should take what they say as being a bit less than fact.
That's GOOD?!?
From now on, Slashdot, which has been actively covering every twist and turn with Redhat's and VA Linux's stock (which I personally got rather sick of) may need to stop and VA story when it comes time to announce earnings?
This is BAD BAD BAD! Why can't many people see that?
You get angry when AOL buys time/warner because they'll monoplize consumer content on the internet, and rejoice when ANDN takes over most of the good site and then gets bought by VA Linux, who will now oww 50%+ of the real Linux related sites.
Short sited.
Mergers tend to drive up the price of the company being acquired, but hammer the price of the company doing the buying... I haven't looked in the last half hour, but ANDN was doing A LOT better than LNUX so far today...
.4 someodd shares of LNUX for each share of ANDN they own. So long each share of ANDN is worth less than 40% of the share price of LNUX, Andover's a great buy for people trying to make a quick buck.
Why?
VA Said that they are giving ANDN holders
BUT, if you buy Andover at 40, and people sell off LNUX until it hit's, say 80, then you've just done a magnificent job at losing money....
ANDN shareholders are probably happy right now. LNUX ones should tread carefully, unless they're in it for the long-haul.
So you actually enjoy the idea that the "biggest network of opensource/linux advocacy sites" is going to be owned by the largest sole distributor of Linux systems?
Talk about slanting the tables a little!
If Microsoft tried to buy ZDNET, everyone here would cry foul.
If Apple tried to buy MacWeek and MacWorld from ZDnet, again, everyone would cry foul.
If Sun went and bought performance computer, AGAIN, everyone would cry foul.
But, if VA Linux buys Andover.net, it's a *good thing*?!?
Wake up, guys!
I believe the reason that Amazon continues to lose money is that they write all their acquisitions off as purchases.
Why not? If you're not expected to make money, as the current mindset of the stock market seems to hold, then why make money when you just have to pay more taxes on it?
Call it whatever you want... It doesn't matter to us. Just to VA's accountants.
I'm not 64, but I don't read CERT advisories, except when i see them posted on slashdot.
No... the user agreed to the license prior to installing the software. So, basically it's their fault for agreeing with AOL. Bill the users.
Well... "clueless newbies" don't have connections aside from AOL, so this wouldn't affect them.
/.! If only there'd be a good mac conversation... :)"
It's the "semi-seasoned users" that this got, because they were savy enough to have AOL and an ISP, but still, they agreed to let AOL reassociate files on them.
In all my years i've never done an default install - if nothing else, i'd just click all the items a default install would install, just so i'd know what my ooptions would have been. And never give anything permission to reconfigure anything on your system uneless you know exactly what you're getting into.
The worst case if you do that is that you'll have to launch the app first an then open whatever file you wanted to open. If you're sure everything is going okay, you can reassocaite the file type yourself.
"Yay! Windows talk on
I don't know... I installed it twice on the same machine (for two completely different accounts - different billing info and everything). One had been upgraded from 3.0 to 4.0 to 5.0 and connected via an ISP. The other was a 1st time install of 5.0 and set to dial up through AOL. Both accounts work fine. No problems. Maybe it's just that people just hit "easy install" or whatever and then wonder what in the world just happened to their machines.
Is it just access to the source code, or is it the fact that they're not Microsoft, that makes the "release early, release often" mantra a good thing?
Seriously.
Microsoft goes through a HUGE public beta and all that happens is that they get completely ragged on. Corel does the same and it's a *good* thing. Don't bash me as being a Microsoft employee or anything, i'm genuinely curious.
Agreed. For one, the merger isn't even approved yet. For two, no credible news/media organization is not going to report negative press about their parent company. That in and of itself would destroy their credibility. And that would destroy anyone's faith in the idea that the merger might actually raise the value of their shares.
But besides. They're report the FACTS. They're just saying that AOL's getting sued for one reason or another.
It's news.
They already have with Win2000. But so long as developers are targetting 9x, those apps should run fine. Is there a single app in existance that refuses to run under Windows 95 yet runs fine on Windows 98? I mean, once IE4 has been installed. And the next consumer windows will still be based on the Win 9x codebase, so the current incarnation of WINE should have quite a bit of life left to it.
why do you doubt everyone's motives that helps linux, unless they're a pure linux company?
Corel's been moped around quite a bit by Microsoft. Since Linux looks like it could actually be a viable alternative to Windows, it's not at all suprising that Corel helping it all it can to erase the definciense that Linux has on the desktop.
It's just that rather than becoming a separate entity, the PC morphed into it, while still retaining it's own properties.
Browswer based apps are already here. They're still wimpy, but in a few years consumers and regular office workers will be able to accomplish everything they do now via a computer with a web browser.
The NC's not dead. It's just the PC became the NC.
You're forgetting the "how much did it cost to do the R&D necessary to build the card in the first place?", "how many developer hours were spent getting it right?", and "how many people do they have on staff to support the cards?"
Not to mention that everyone needs to make a bit of money for their efforts. If you disagree, let it be known, I'm sure lots of people would love to give you a job paying peanuts.
Wireless technology is still in it's infancy. It costs more because it's rarer. It costs more because the past R&D is still amortized. It costs more because it's not good enough, meaning money needs to be budgeted to future versions of the product that can go 10x or 100x faster.