Back to the "cheap Core i7 clone from the HDL" though, I suspect Core i7 is, or at least was, a stretch for even Intel's fabs. There probably are other fabs in the world that could build it, but not that many. ARM is a much easier target - that's part of its strength. The new small core from AMD will be quite interesting, in that respect.
Yes, the world is going to end in 2012, we're all going to die. It's time to be concerned about your immortal soul, and I can help you with that, for a small fee.... (Don't even need to leave out any mystery steps here) PROFIT!!... (Vanish before Dec 23, 2012)
I wasn't so much talking about the detail gate layout as I was the high-level floorplanning. Certainly the design has logical partitioning, but there are occasions where a concise logical partitioning divides things one way, but good physical partitioning wants to be different. A good simplified example would be the classical bitslice. Logically you'd like to have an ALU, a shifter, a register file, and a mux. Physically it works out better to partition into bitslices, each with a 1 (or few) bit adder, a piece of shifter, register file, etc. (Obviously the (partial?) lookahead carry has to bolted in there somewhere, etc)
There are synthesizable cores sold - Phoronix just had an article about AMD coming out with a new one to compete with Atom. ARM has a whole business model based on them. I don't know whether they're blind pushbutton, or whether they come along with hints on how to guide place and route for best power/performance. Now that I think of it, I know a few people a few floors up that I can ask. I'm in a different part of the business, but not ignorant of that side.
I'm not saying that HDL source wouldn't be valuable, nor that someone couldn't use it to clone the Core i7. I was saying that you couldn't do a dirt-cheap knockoff using the HDL and practically no engineering, which was what the grandparent post sort-of implied. (Practically no engineering being part of what's needed to make the knockoff dirt-cheap.) Then we didn't even get into characterization and validation.
Thought about it again. You're right - single-poly self-aligned gate. Of course there would be no gate level visible in relief, because this was a mask shot, not a photo, and there was no visible gate mask level. I actually RTFA just a little, and there are bootstrap loads in there. Layout for bootstrap loads is a dead giveaway for the difference between self-aligned silicon-gate and metal-gate with a gate mask. Just bootstrap loads, though. No Mostek bootstrap drivers, but I'm not sure when those came in.
It looked like that to me, too. But then I remembered that I working with a metal gate technology later in the 70's, so I wasn't sure. I agree with the red being gate, blue metal, and green diffusion. I didn't take a lot of time looking at the contacts - now that I think a bit more, the metal-gate technology I was working with in the 70's of course had a gate mask, and I saw no such relief on those images. Doh!
I found that with mild (1.0 - 1.25 diopter) readers I'm quite happy with a 20" 1600x1200 display. I suspect that at least part of it is fine-tuning to match the hardening of my lenses. I also suspect that part of it is that my eyes have tuned themselves to this distance and circumstance. For distance, my bad eye is 20/20, it's just that I can't focus close any more, and the readers fix that. I still have young whipper-snappers stop by and complain about my micro-fonts. I happen to like having a lot of information on the screen at once. (mid-50's, by the way)
> If the Core i7 schematics were released, any old fab company could start making their own i7's for next to nothing.
Wrong.
Let's even imagine for the moment that you really meant that they'd release the verilog/vhdl, instead of schematics. There are still a few minor problems in the way:
1 - Intel really does have absolutely top-notch processing capability. Typically their top-end CPU pushes their top-end process for all it's worth, both in performance and capacity. (I'll add the caveat that "all it's worth" is a moving bar, which is why speed bumps and die shrinks come along as a process and design mature.) Chances are most fabs in the world simply won't be able to handle the Core i7 - not enough transistors.
2 - Let's pretend that you have a fab that can put out bigger-than-postage-stamp sized chips, and they can handle the sheer number of transistors. Most likely you still can't hand over such HDL, push a button, and have a layout come out, even bigger and slower. For one thing, a significant fraction of those transistors are in cache - probably SRAM. HDL doesn't build SRAM, it instantiates it. You need either a compiler or an SRAM design team(s) to get the cache(s) built, and they have to be specifically matched to the interface the HDL is expecting - these aren't garden-variety commodity SRAMs, by any means.
3 - So let's pretend we have SRAMs too, and that the design we had in our back pocket could be tweaked to meet the interface requirements of the Core i7. We have datapath/dataflow problems. In the first place, those datapaths are highly regular - kind of like bit-slices. A lot like bit slices, in fact. Most likely the design was carefully partitioned into functional blocks, and those functional blocks were further partitioned, etc. Then they were floorplanned with an eye to the final design. Far from the smallest concern was getting all of those bits from point-A to point-B to point-C. These things have some pretty big buses inside, and just about everything is high-performance.
In short, a schematic, even verilog/vhdl is a far cry from the whole picture. Even in today's push-button world, you don't push-button a thing like the Core i7, or even latest-generation AMD CPUs, to be fair. You need to have a talented, experienced physical design team, and there's as much work there, maybe more, than simply coming up with the logical design. Then again, frequently the logical and physical design may not be that separated - a really tight feedback loop between the two can work well.
So go back to your super-sized non-optimized chip done with push-button tools - oh and by the way, you may have a hard time finding such tools with enough capacity. The resulting chip won't be a little bigger and a little slower - it'll be a LOT bigger and a LOT slower.
Does anyone know what the technology was for the 4004? (Is that metal-gate, with double-metal, or polysilicon gate with single-poly, single-metal?)
> We have guaranteed, near-instantaneous communications built into all electrical systems ever built... It's called VOLTAGE.
We have another guaranteed, near instantaneous mechanism built into all electrical systems ever built that confounds VOLTAGE readout... It's called CAPACITANCE. Not necessarily capacitance as in those little tin cans that leak and destroy your motherboard, but (I'll call it) effective capacitance, that can include rotating stuff. In fact, elsewhere in this topic there have been numerous references to rotating storage.
I once spoke with a co-worker who did one of his co-ops in a steel mill. His descriptions of high-power management were fascinating to a chip designer. But the salient point to this thread was what happened when power was cut. They had so much moving mass in the place, that when the power was cut the motors turned into generators, and you could have gone minute+ without seeing the lights start to dim. His description of high-power circuit breakers was pretty neat, too.
In addition, there are other concerns like phase and power factor that are of critical importance, and can muck with a simple voltage measurment. Simple, it ain't.
Won't deny a thing you say about *our* grid and infrastructure, in fact I generally agree with you.
But what makes you think that *your* grid and infrastructure are in any better shape or state of maintenance?
Incidentally, a few years back I participated in a table-top exercise modeling a "potential cyber-incident". One of the people present was an IT guy who manages the job for *my* power grid. The guy knew his stuff, and the things he said made me feel really good about the command and control for *my* power grid. For one thing, there's no linkage between the internet and the command and control network. But he had some real horror stories regarding auditing some other power networks. In one place they recommended routing a network connection through a firewall machine. Later when viewing the results of their recommendations, they saw the ethernet cable go in one side of the firewall machine - and out the other. (physically, not electrically or logically)
I've been toying with some of the same ideas while driving the New York State Thruway over the past year or two. There are similar concerns to those mentioned here, along with a few others, and a few ideas to mitigate them. My working title for the idea, with due to Samuel L Jackson, has been "Snakes in a Lane."
One little variation worth mentioning... The density and length of such trains (or snakes) would have to be managed so that regular traffic could manouver around them. I would also suggest giving them a 5-10 mph speed boost, given that they're already getting a mileage boost from drag reduction, and to induce drivers to join a train. I suspect one very real requirement is a computerized vehicle health self-check, to make sure it's fit to participate.
I live in Vt also, and have also replied to that silly "Vermont really does get a lot of summer." comment. We get maybe, and that's only maybe, 2 months of what I would really call "summer," from somewhere in mid-June, through July, and into mid-August. This year we didn't even get that much summer - June was a complete loss, as well as the first part of July.
Incidentally, I live about 5 miles from Winooski. Just over the line north of Winooski on Rt 7 is "Libby's Blue Line Diner." Among their numerous pieces of hanging art are several artists' conceptions of Winooski's dome. Back in the late 70's when this first hit, the Vt Air Guard was passing out bumper stickers with standard slogan slightly tweaked to, "We Guard Winooski's Dome" (instead of "America's Skies") Just south of Libby's, inside Winooski, is "Tigan St." It always made me thing of one of Dr. Who #5's companions, but I guess now I know where the name really comes from. (RTFA)
You must get more sun than we do. (in Vermont) Last I heard, we were 49th in the nation for sunlight - one up from Oregon or Washington. I'll agree that Quebec can get colder, but I think we're more overcast.
> Why would we want to do that, when it'll occur naturally as a result of market forces? I say let > it happen when we're ready for it to happen.
If we really had free markets, I might concur.
We don't.
We have giant corporate oligarchies fighting to the death to keep making their money the same way they're used to making it. Normally the free market might be able to take care of that too, but in this case those oligarchies have gotten so big that they could cheat in the classic monopoly fashion, if needed, and they don't need to cheat (much) because they've bought the right legislation to keep them where they are.
I don't like what I'm seeing from health care legislation - but what I WOULD like to see is for Congress to repeal the "monopoly exception" that the health insurance industry currently enjoys. Now THAT's a little free-market reform. For that matter, nothing else in the medical industry acts like a marketplace, either. Try shopping for success rates or prices - though I understand such things can be found, neither is as readily available as... say, online reviews for computing hardware or purchase options and prices for same.
Also while we're talking about free-market and informed consumers, the favorite Republican trot-out is tort reform. I can see the value to it, but not yet. The statistic I once read was that 10-15% of doctors are responsible for 70% of malpractice payouts. Hospitals quietly shuttle them away - make them Somebody Else's Problem. When the information is generally available to the public so we can avoid the bad eggs - use the free-market to drive them into another line of employment - THEN I'll listen to the idea of tort reform.
Oh, and another fun one... In the year before California got it's new governor in a recall election, Enron (perhaps with help, don't know) manipulated the energy markets to create the California energy crunch that instigated the recall. That's right, economic manipulations by a corporation toppled the government of the 8th largest economy in the world.
Then we could talk about agriculture....
Free Market, my foot!
Now a Libertarian would say that these problems exist because of government tampering in the commercial sector, and to some extent I'll agree. Unfortunately at this point, I don't believe that removing government influence in the commercial sector would fix it, because bad things are already too baked in. To be honest, I don't know how to cure it, perhaps a combination of "getting out" along with a one-shot "correction" to fix what is. Of course with legislation being the piece of sausage that it is, the "getting out" legislation would grease right through and the "correction" legislation would be fine-tuned to make the problem worse.
I dunno. I got to be pretty decent at xorg.conf, too. I didn't like it either, at first. But recently on Gentoo they changed input handling from xorg.conf over to HAL, and that stuff is even worse. You fix problems by editing strings of XML that you get from experts in some forum or other. Those strings look like perfectly proper solutions in hindsight, but I generally have no idea whatsoever how to get there, not having seen the answer first.
"Just Works" is a great idea, as long as it just works. Too often when "Just Works" doesn't, it also fights your attempts to solve the problem yourself. I don't mind if xorg.conf can go away for the simple cases, I just like to have the capability around for when I really need it. Yes, I've had to use custom modelines, TV-out, multi-display, and those other oddities that at various times haven't been handled by the "Just Works" tools. To be sure, those tools are getting better, but they're still not 100%, and you'd still like to be able to fix a borked system from text mode.
I'd love to see X12 come along and clean everything up... as long as it has and X11 shim so I can run my old stuff that has no X12 version, yet.
Years back, I was participating in the OBERON2 discussions on Usenet. I had a very simple question: "How can I deal with legacy binary data in Oberon2?" In Modula2, or at least the variations of Modula2 that I used, there were facilities for picking apart bits and bytes, and I made good use of them. The answer from the Oberon2 people was laughable, "Tell your coworkers to quit using those legacy tools and start using Oberon2 versions." We all know how well that worked out.
X itself is undergoing incredible levels of development and improvement. Way back when, "The Open Group" tried to say that X was "complete" with X11R6, and no more development was needed, though somehow defects and omissions let numbers start creeping in after the decimal point. IIRC it got to somewhere in the X11R6.3-X11R6.5 range. Then XFree86 took over, ramping up some innovation, though still slower than many liked. After that X.Org took over, decided it was high time for X11R7, (They did X11R6.9 as a stage to get there.) and things started moving faster.
At this point, they're redrawing the lines (KMS, DRI/DRI2, DRM) between kernel and user space to (hopefully) get a better balance speed and stability/security. They've pretty much reworked the 2D acceleration (*XA) and are reworking the 3D acceleration (Gallium3D) which will also simplify driver development. The inteface has been reworked down near the protocol level (xcb) to improve speed and memory usage. One thing I've heard talk of is "inverting" the stack to put all primitives on top of the 3D hardware, since that's where most of the hardware performance work has been done.
The next 6-12 months will be very interesting for X-Windows, but then again, the past few years have been interesting, too.
No thanks. I use network transparency routinely at work and at home. I have no problem whatsoever with a fast-path, direct-rendering, or whatever for the console user, and applaud (and use) such efforts.
But network transparency is just too useful to get rid of. Think of the clouds!
The real problem is that if encryption became widespread, if not ubiquitous, than the next generation of cracks would be targeted at peoples' private keys. This is even worse than what we have today, because today it's common knowledge not to trust email, even though phishing still make a good catch. Widespread use of encryption would increase the apparent trust given to email, and a smaller number of people would be cognizant of the dangers of compromised keys.
The way I've always heard it, regular email is just like a postcard - anyone in the chain who touches it can read it. Maybe decisions like this one will get more people using encryption for their email. My pet concept is the job of key generation, trust, and management should be handled by banks. After all, we all trust the banks with our money already.
Of course another option would be to get common carrier status for the internet, at least within the US. Yet another step would be for the US Postal service to run (TLS encrypted and authenticated) mail services. Not that I'm enamored of the Post Office doing the job, but that's the easiest way to grant legal protection to the content.
Bob Denver was the driving talent behind the show, just like Tommy "the dumb one" Smothers is really the driving talent behind The Smothers Brothers.
But in the words of William Shatner, playing himself on Saturday Night Live, "It was just a TV show!" Also in the same skit, "Get a life!" Two or three weeks after that SNL episode, some out-of-town friends invited me to their place, to go to a Star Trek convention. They had "Get a life" and "It was just a TV show!" T-shirts on sale, that soon after the SNL skit.
Since it's just a TV sitcom, I don't *need* to understand anything.
They once interviewed Russell Johnson, and he had quite the succinct answer : "If you were trapped on a desert island with Ginger and Mary Ann, and your male competition was Gilligan and the Skipper, would you want to get rescued?"
Slashdot Mirror
Back to the "cheap Core i7 clone from the HDL" though, I suspect Core i7 is, or at least was, a stretch for even Intel's fabs. There probably are other fabs in the world that could build it, but not that many. ARM is a much easier target - that's part of its strength. The new small core from AMD will be quite interesting, in that respect.
Yes, the world is going to end in 2012, we're all going to die. ... (Don't even need to leave out any mystery steps here) ... (Vanish before Dec 23, 2012)
It's time to be concerned about your immortal soul, and I can help you with that, for a small fee.
PROFIT!!
I wasn't so much talking about the detail gate layout as I was the high-level floorplanning. Certainly the design has logical partitioning, but there are occasions where a concise logical partitioning divides things one way, but good physical partitioning wants to be different. A good simplified example would be the classical bitslice. Logically you'd like to have an ALU, a shifter, a register file, and a mux. Physically it works out better to partition into bitslices, each with a 1 (or few) bit adder, a piece of shifter, register file, etc. (Obviously the (partial?) lookahead carry has to bolted in there somewhere, etc)
There are synthesizable cores sold - Phoronix just had an article about AMD coming out with a new one to compete with Atom. ARM has a whole business model based on them. I don't know whether they're blind pushbutton, or whether they come along with hints on how to guide place and route for best power/performance. Now that I think of it, I know a few people a few floors up that I can ask. I'm in a different part of the business, but not ignorant of that side.
I'm not saying that HDL source wouldn't be valuable, nor that someone couldn't use it to clone the Core i7. I was saying that you couldn't do a dirt-cheap knockoff using the HDL and practically no engineering, which was what the grandparent post sort-of implied. (Practically no engineering being part of what's needed to make the knockoff dirt-cheap.) Then we didn't even get into characterization and validation.
Thought about it again. You're right - single-poly self-aligned gate. Of course there would be no gate level visible in relief, because this was a mask shot, not a photo, and there was no visible gate mask level. I actually RTFA just a little, and there are bootstrap loads in there. Layout for bootstrap loads is a dead giveaway for the difference between self-aligned silicon-gate and metal-gate with a gate mask. Just bootstrap loads, though. No Mostek bootstrap drivers, but I'm not sure when those came in.
It looked like that to me, too. But then I remembered that I working with a metal gate technology later in the 70's, so I wasn't sure. I agree with the red being gate, blue metal, and green diffusion. I didn't take a lot of time looking at the contacts - now that I think a bit more, the metal-gate technology I was working with in the 70's of course had a gate mask, and I saw no such relief on those images. Doh!
I found that with mild (1.0 - 1.25 diopter) readers I'm quite happy with a 20" 1600x1200 display. I suspect that at least part of it is fine-tuning to match the hardening of my lenses. I also suspect that part of it is that my eyes have tuned themselves to this distance and circumstance. For distance, my bad eye is 20/20, it's just that I can't focus close any more, and the readers fix that. I still have young whipper-snappers stop by and complain about my micro-fonts. I happen to like having a lot of information on the screen at once. (mid-50's, by the way)
> If the Core i7 schematics were released, any old fab company could start making their own i7's for next to nothing.
Wrong.
Let's even imagine for the moment that you really meant that they'd release the verilog/vhdl, instead of schematics. There are still a few minor problems in the way:
1 - Intel really does have absolutely top-notch processing capability. Typically their top-end CPU pushes their top-end process for all it's worth, both in performance and capacity. (I'll add the caveat that "all it's worth" is a moving bar, which is why speed bumps and die shrinks come along as a process and design mature.) Chances are most fabs in the world simply won't be able to handle the Core i7 - not enough transistors.
2 - Let's pretend that you have a fab that can put out bigger-than-postage-stamp sized chips, and they can handle the sheer number of transistors. Most likely you still can't hand over such HDL, push a button, and have a layout come out, even bigger and slower. For one thing, a significant fraction of those transistors are in cache - probably SRAM. HDL doesn't build SRAM, it instantiates it. You need either a compiler or an SRAM design team(s) to get the cache(s) built, and they have to be specifically matched to the interface the HDL is expecting - these aren't garden-variety commodity SRAMs, by any means.
3 - So let's pretend we have SRAMs too, and that the design we had in our back pocket could be tweaked to meet the interface requirements of the Core i7. We have datapath/dataflow problems. In the first place, those datapaths are highly regular - kind of like bit-slices. A lot like bit slices, in fact. Most likely the design was carefully partitioned into functional blocks, and those functional blocks were further partitioned, etc. Then they were floorplanned with an eye to the final design. Far from the smallest concern was getting all of those bits from point-A to point-B to point-C. These things have some pretty big buses inside, and just about everything is high-performance.
In short, a schematic, even verilog/vhdl is a far cry from the whole picture. Even in today's push-button world, you don't push-button a thing like the Core i7, or even latest-generation AMD CPUs, to be fair. You need to have a talented, experienced physical design team, and there's as much work there, maybe more, than simply coming up with the logical design. Then again, frequently the logical and physical design may not be that separated - a really tight feedback loop between the two can work well.
So go back to your super-sized non-optimized chip done with push-button tools - oh and by the way, you may have a hard time finding such tools with enough capacity. The resulting chip won't be a little bigger and a little slower - it'll be a LOT bigger and a LOT slower.
Does anyone know what the technology was for the 4004? (Is that metal-gate, with double-metal, or polysilicon gate with single-poly, single-metal?)
> P.S. The guy is an idiot.
That's clear... After all, he was one of the first ones cut when he was on "Dancing With the Stars."
(Skip the waivers, emoticons, warnings, etc.)
> We have guaranteed, near-instantaneous communications built into all electrical systems ever built... It's called VOLTAGE.
We have another guaranteed, near instantaneous mechanism built into all electrical systems ever built that confounds VOLTAGE readout... It's called CAPACITANCE. Not necessarily capacitance as in those little tin cans that leak and destroy your motherboard, but (I'll call it) effective capacitance, that can include rotating stuff. In fact, elsewhere in this topic there have been numerous references to rotating storage.
I once spoke with a co-worker who did one of his co-ops in a steel mill. His descriptions of high-power management were fascinating to a chip designer. But the salient point to this thread was what happened when power was cut. They had so much moving mass in the place, that when the power was cut the motors turned into generators, and you could have gone minute+ without seeing the lights start to dim. His description of high-power circuit breakers was pretty neat, too.
In addition, there are other concerns like phase and power factor that are of critical importance, and can muck with a simple voltage measurment. Simple, it ain't.
Won't deny a thing you say about *our* grid and infrastructure, in fact I generally agree with you.
But what makes you think that *your* grid and infrastructure are in any better shape or state of maintenance?
Incidentally, a few years back I participated in a table-top exercise modeling a "potential cyber-incident". One of the people present was an IT guy who manages the job for *my* power grid. The guy knew his stuff, and the things he said made me feel really good about the command and control for *my* power grid. For one thing, there's no linkage between the internet and the command and control network. But he had some real horror stories regarding auditing some other power networks. In one place they recommended routing a network connection through a firewall machine. Later when viewing the results of their recommendations, they saw the ethernet cable go in one side of the firewall machine - and out the other. (physically, not electrically or logically)
I've been toying with some of the same ideas while driving the New York State Thruway over the past year or two. There are similar concerns to those mentioned here, along with a few others, and a few ideas to mitigate them. My working title for the idea, with due to Samuel L Jackson, has been "Snakes in a Lane."
One little variation worth mentioning... The density and length of such trains (or snakes) would have to be managed so that regular traffic could manouver around them. I would also suggest giving them a 5-10 mph speed boost, given that they're already getting a mileage boost from drag reduction, and to induce drivers to join a train. I suspect one very real requirement is a computerized vehicle health self-check, to make sure it's fit to participate.
It's a fun idea to play with while driving.
I live in Vt also, and have also replied to that silly "Vermont really does get a lot of summer." comment. We get maybe, and that's only maybe, 2 months of what I would really call "summer," from somewhere in mid-June, through July, and into mid-August. This year we didn't even get that much summer - June was a complete loss, as well as the first part of July.
Incidentally, I live about 5 miles from Winooski. Just over the line north of Winooski on Rt 7 is "Libby's Blue Line Diner." Among their numerous pieces of hanging art are several artists' conceptions of Winooski's dome. Back in the late 70's when this first hit, the Vt Air Guard was passing out bumper stickers with standard slogan slightly tweaked to, "We Guard Winooski's Dome" (instead of "America's Skies") Just south of Libby's, inside Winooski, is "Tigan St." It always made me thing of one of Dr. Who #5's companions, but I guess now I know where the name really comes from. (RTFA)
> Why is solar in Vermont in the winter a joke?
You must get more sun than we do. (in Vermont) Last I heard, we were 49th in the nation for sunlight - one up from Oregon or Washington. I'll agree that Quebec can get colder, but I think we're more overcast.
> Why would we want to do that, when it'll occur naturally as a result of market forces? I say let
> it happen when we're ready for it to happen.
If we really had free markets, I might concur.
We don't.
We have giant corporate oligarchies fighting to the death to keep making their money the same way they're used to making it. Normally the free market might be able to take care of that too, but in this case those oligarchies have gotten so big that they could cheat in the classic monopoly fashion, if needed, and they don't need to cheat (much) because they've bought the right legislation to keep them where they are.
I don't like what I'm seeing from health care legislation - but what I WOULD like to see is for Congress to repeal the "monopoly exception" that the health insurance industry currently enjoys. Now THAT's a little free-market reform. For that matter, nothing else in the medical industry acts like a marketplace, either. Try shopping for success rates or prices - though I understand such things can be found, neither is as readily available as ... say, online reviews for computing hardware or purchase options and prices for same.
Also while we're talking about free-market and informed consumers, the favorite Republican trot-out is tort reform. I can see the value to it, but not yet. The statistic I once read was that 10-15% of doctors are responsible for 70% of malpractice payouts. Hospitals quietly shuttle them away - make them Somebody Else's Problem. When the information is generally available to the public so we can avoid the bad eggs - use the free-market to drive them into another line of employment - THEN I'll listen to the idea of tort reform.
Oh, and another fun one... In the year before California got it's new governor in a recall election, Enron (perhaps with help, don't know) manipulated the energy markets to create the California energy crunch that instigated the recall. That's right, economic manipulations by a corporation toppled the government of the 8th largest economy in the world.
Then we could talk about agriculture....
Free Market, my foot!
Now a Libertarian would say that these problems exist because of government tampering in the commercial sector, and to some extent I'll agree. Unfortunately at this point, I don't believe that removing government influence in the commercial sector would fix it, because bad things are already too baked in. To be honest, I don't know how to cure it, perhaps a combination of "getting out" along with a one-shot "correction" to fix what is. Of course with legislation being the piece of sausage that it is, the "getting out" legislation would grease right through and the "correction" legislation would be fine-tuned to make the problem worse.
I dunno. I got to be pretty decent at xorg.conf, too. I didn't like it either, at first. But recently on Gentoo they changed input handling from xorg.conf over to HAL, and that stuff is even worse. You fix problems by editing strings of XML that you get from experts in some forum or other. Those strings look like perfectly proper solutions in hindsight, but I generally have no idea whatsoever how to get there, not having seen the answer first.
"Just Works" is a great idea, as long as it just works. Too often when "Just Works" doesn't, it also fights your attempts to solve the problem yourself. I don't mind if xorg.conf can go away for the simple cases, I just like to have the capability around for when I really need it. Yes, I've had to use custom modelines, TV-out, multi-display, and those other oddities that at various times haven't been handled by the "Just Works" tools. To be sure, those tools are getting better, but they're still not 100%, and you'd still like to be able to fix a borked system from text mode.
Don't you still need X for network transparency? Isn't that then GLX?
Legacy problems.
I'd love to see X12 come along and clean everything up... as long as it has and X11 shim so I can run my old stuff that has no X12 version, yet.
Years back, I was participating in the OBERON2 discussions on Usenet. I had a very simple question: "How can I deal with legacy binary data in Oberon2?" In Modula2, or at least the variations of Modula2 that I used, there were facilities for picking apart bits and bytes, and I made good use of them. The answer from the Oberon2 people was laughable, "Tell your coworkers to quit using those legacy tools and start using Oberon2 versions." We all know how well that worked out.
X itself is undergoing incredible levels of development and improvement. Way back when, "The Open Group" tried to say that X was "complete" with X11R6, and no more development was needed, though somehow defects and omissions let numbers start creeping in after the decimal point. IIRC it got to somewhere in the X11R6.3-X11R6.5 range. Then XFree86 took over, ramping up some innovation, though still slower than many liked. After that X.Org took over, decided it was high time for X11R7, (They did X11R6.9 as a stage to get there.) and things started moving faster.
At this point, they're redrawing the lines (KMS, DRI/DRI2, DRM) between kernel and user space to (hopefully) get a better balance speed and stability/security. They've pretty much reworked the 2D acceleration (*XA) and are reworking the 3D acceleration (Gallium3D) which will also simplify driver development. The inteface has been reworked down near the protocol level (xcb) to improve speed and memory usage. One thing I've heard talk of is "inverting" the stack to put all primitives on top of the 3D hardware, since that's where most of the hardware performance work has been done.
The next 6-12 months will be very interesting for X-Windows, but then again, the past few years have been interesting, too.
No thanks. I use network transparency routinely at work and at home. I have no problem whatsoever with a fast-path, direct-rendering, or whatever for the console user, and applaud (and use) such efforts.
But network transparency is just too useful to get rid of. Think of the clouds!
The real problem is that if encryption became widespread, if not ubiquitous, than the next generation of cracks would be targeted at peoples' private keys. This is even worse than what we have today, because today it's common knowledge not to trust email, even though phishing still make a good catch. Widespread use of encryption would increase the apparent trust given to email, and a smaller number of people would be cognizant of the dangers of compromised keys.
Did you ever see "Free Enterprise"?
Shatner ... rapping ... Shakespeare
The way I've always heard it, regular email is just like a postcard - anyone in the chain who touches it can read it. Maybe decisions like this one will get more people using encryption for their email. My pet concept is the job of key generation, trust, and management should be handled by banks. After all, we all trust the banks with our money already.
Of course another option would be to get common carrier status for the internet, at least within the US.
Yet another step would be for the US Postal service to run (TLS encrypted and authenticated) mail services. Not that I'm enamored of the Post Office doing the job, but that's the easiest way to grant legal protection to the content.
Bob Denver was the driving talent behind the show, just like Tommy "the dumb one" Smothers is really the driving talent behind The Smothers Brothers.
But in the words of William Shatner, playing himself on Saturday Night Live, "It was just a TV show!" Also in the same skit, "Get a life!" Two or three weeks after that SNL episode, some out-of-town friends invited me to their place, to go to a Star Trek convention. They had "Get a life" and "It was just a TV show!" T-shirts on sale, that soon after the SNL skit.
Since it's just a TV sitcom, I don't *need* to understand anything.
I'm sure it'll be producing cheap, abundant power.... in about 20 years.
Just ignore the fact that we've been 20 years away from cheap, abundant fusion power for the last 50 years.
They once interviewed Russell Johnson, and he had quite the succinct answer : "If you were trapped on a desert island with Ginger and Mary Ann, and your male competition was Gilligan and the Skipper, would you want to get rescued?"