Is it like the rock band the Who or like Mr McGoo?
Doctor Who was a popular television show that ran in Belgium between 1972-1974. In it's day it was one of the most popular shows in Belgium
and it starred Larry Lamb and John Craven (who went on to star in Hollywood movies such as Terminator and Total Recall).
No episodes exist of this classic TV show, but we can relive the episodes thanks to Steve Roberts who has reconstructed them from Crayon
drawings and dialogue from episodes of Eldorado.
The show was axed in 1974 after allegations that it was just a big hoax designed to extract money from the Belgium TV service. These allegations
were denied by the production company, Grabitandrun.
There is another Doctor Who series as well, but by all accounts it was
some obscure rubbish that is long since dead.
Who is Alan Turing? No no no, honestly, I don't know! Should I?
You should. Alan Turing is considered by some to be the father of modern
Artificial Intelligence. A troubled soul whose contributions to the world
included The Turing Test (to measure whether a program is artificially
intelligent or not) and cracking the German Enigma cypher code during the
war.http://www.math.sfu.ca/histmath/Europe/20thCen turyAD/Turing.html for more
info.
Wow, great. Does a name really have to do that? I have no problem remembering that "Excel" is a spreadsheet application for Windows by Microsoft corporation or "Jabber" is a client-server application for interacting with different IM protocols. I find your need for a description of the product in place of the actual name absurd.
Why not just have original names? Licq? Gaim? Kmail? sheesh. At least I can give them credit for Konqueror.
Re: "HyperThreading" in IA-64 by 2002
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Hyperthreading, as implemented, exists in the Pentium 4 line.
Right. And there's no indication that something similar will appear in IA64
until at least 2006 (which is the *earliest* that the Alpha team could
likely add it to that complex - or if you prefer messy - an architecture if
the hooks for it weren't already built in).
It's a weak second to SMT. With HT, as I understood it, if a processor happens to have a floating point op and an integer op on hand at the same time, it can run both of 'em at once, instead of sequentially. That's the limit to the HT magic. It can't do two FP or integer ops at once.
Well, real-world server applications could be
sped up by 30%, which would mean that HT could execute multiple *non*-FP
instructions at once (and the article doesn't say it can't, just that it
can't execute two FP ops at once).
It actually seems to look quite a bit like EV8's SMT, except that we don't
know if it currently adds more execution units to the P4 architecture and
whether all execution units can be applied to service a single thread if
multiple threads aren't present. And, of course, it only supports two
concurrent threads rather than four.
Intel stole and then implemented Alpha
technologies for its Pentium, and only much later did it negotiate with
Digital to get the official right to use that stuff.
No: I'm assessing the situation, unlike your propensity for drawing
conclusions based on vague speculation and no data.
IA64 has to all appearances been developed with zero attention paid to
things like out-of-order execution (in fact, it was developed explicitly to
*avoid* out-of-order execution). OOO and SMT are intimately intertwined in
EV8's SMT design, and apparently also in HT's. There's no indication that
Intel has until now given any thought toward incorporating SMT/HT technology
in EPIC, and every indication that it will thus take at least close to 5
years before such IA64 technology hits the street (especially as
incorporating it into EPIC will almost certainly involve radically different
internal approaches than those used to incorporate it into EV8 and P4).
The worldofwarcraft.com domain was registered on August 11, 1999, a full two years ago. But then again, the game has been in development since 1999, so...
Well, that's the best I can do. Can you do any better in disproving me, or is your case just rampant speculation?
There is more and more feedback from users of DoCoMo's 3G trial here in
Japan.
The problems appear to be numerous and major. Mostly, 3G handsets and handset
software are reported bug ridden and failing or bad in design.
Visibility of screens, battery life, and user interface features are often
coming up as major issues.
However, there is also feedback about the services. In particular video calls
and data service. Some users, who have never before experienced more than
9.6K or 14.4K data speed on a mobile phone are generally pleased with the up
to 64K transfer speed of 3G (at present that's the maximum), while users who
have been using other 2.5G based services with 64K are less impressed and
users who have been using data on PHS (up to 128K) are often disappointed by
3G.
On the video call side, there appears to be consensus that video telephony is
initially nice to play with but once its novelty factor has worn off it
becomes a useless service nobody would want to use, especially as video calls
are almost twice the cost of voice-only calls, which makes sense because they
use more resources.
"The big draw of Organic EL is its low power consumption, but the N2001V
still
ran out of battery power within a day." [about NEC's Organic EL screen]
"Also NEC has a serious problem making the screens in mass quantities.
Sources
tell me they can make about 4 a day."
"Same issue with voice connections. About half of the call attempts (to
other
cell phones, other FOMA phones, and to land lines) don't connect for whatever
reason. Once connected, voice quality varies from great to terrible."
"Calling between two FOMA handsets the voice quality is much better than
between two 50x handsets -- the underwatery echo is greatly reduced and
sounds generally crisper, though it's still not as good as a standard GSM
call between to cell phones in Europe."
"It's bulky and heavy like phones were 5 years ago" [about Panasonic's
multimedia 3G phone]
"But watching a Planet of The Apes trailer on my cell phone was pretty damn
cool. Battery died after watching about 5 minutes of video, though."
"Managing to successfully make video calls about 5 out of 100
attempts."
"The real problem with mobile video phoning is: once you wave at the other
person and show then the room you're in, there's not much advantage over
holding the up to your head and talking. The Cool Wow factor wears off pretty
quickly, and at 1.8 times the price of a regular cell phone call, who's going
to pay for this service?"
"...human voice ring tones like "wake up!" in Osaka dialect. Very
cool."
Again, it looks to me that the whole 3G thing is not only overhyped, it's
hyper-overhyped. Of course this is a trial and a trial has the purpose to
iron out the problems, but remember, they originally intended to launch in
May 2001.
Then, again, DoCoMo's network is a very simple undertaking compared to what
3G
networks in Europe intend to roll-out. As there is no GSM in Japan, DoCoMo's
network is and will be a single-mode network. In Europe it is intended to
have multi-mode networks for transition and to serve early 3G users on 2G
networks when out of 3G coverage.
At the same time WLAN is being deployed all over the place and it's cheap.
When I use my iBook (with Airport Wireless LAN interface) in Tokyo outdoors,
many times I see one or two networks showing up. Sure, they are not public,
but it shows how rapidly WLAN is being rolled out.
By the time 3G will be available to the ordinary man on the street with
reasonable coverage and stability, there may well be an alternative already
up and running: the much cheaper and much faster WLAN.
And here in Japan, there is no reason to go 3G any time soon anyway, because
PHS is cheaper, faster, stable, available, with good coverage. Spectrum
efficiency of Japan's PHS network is about 10 times that of European GSM
networks (due to pico-cell infrastructure and dynamic channel allocation
accross operators, so capacity should not be a problem.
Will 3G become the Betamax of cellular phone technology ?
Will 3G become the Iridium of the land based cellular industry ?
Will 3G become the Mega Ponzi scheme of the 21st century ?
As for reliabilty, let's not forget that most PC reliability is based on Redmond's spooky OSes
I don't know. I have a Matrox Millenium II that only just started
working reliably as of Solaris 8 (or Solaris 7 with patches). It seems
that when you do a certain thing to the card, the card stands about a
50% chance of getting confused and hanging the entire PCI bus.
Also inside the same case, I have two Western Digital IDE hard drives
that won't both talk on the same bus if you set one of them to master
and one to slave. It seems to only work if exactly *one* of them is
set to cable select.
I also have an Intel motherboard (which is sitting in a drawer right
now) that only allows me to use 64 MB of RAM. I bought that system in
1997. Sun's very first desktop SPARC system (the SPARCstation 1) could
expand to 64 MB of RAM, and that was in 1990.
Also in the drawer, I have a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra whose fan has
decided to make loud scraping noises. Diamond refused to sell me a
replacement part, so I have an approximate match replacement part that
I will install when I feel like getting out the soldering iron.
The system that had the Intel motherboard originally came with a
Toshiba XM-6102B CD-ROM drive. When I first installed Solaris on that
thing, I was afraid the driver was confused, because it was reporting
all kinds of errors even though Windows didn't seem to have a problem
with the drive at all. As time went on, the drive got worse and worse
and eventually reached the point where it took 3 or 4 tries for it to
recognize a CD.
All of these experiences with dodgy PC hardware are with *name* *brand*
PC hardware that I've taken good care of. And, it's not like I've run
through hundreds of systems, either. The amount of PC hardware I have
ever owned in my life is not enough to build two working systems.
Basically, my experience with PC hardware is that it's cheaply made,
and any given piece of hardware will probably be somewhere between
limping along and working almost right but not quite. (Some hardware
will just outright break, and some of it will be trouble-free for years
and years, too.) Overall, I think this is a symptom of the fact that
most PC consumers don't know to expect better, and also the pressure to
make things as cheap as possible.
There is a lot of stuff out there that is just crap, and there is a lot
of stuff out that there sort of works and sort of doesn't. Yes, you
can get high quality PC parts, but the fact is that you have to be
pretty choosy about it. Which brings me to my next point...
And let's not forget that practically everything in a Blade 100 is off-the-shelf PC parts, so that theory goes out the window.
I tend to think that the Blade 100 is going to be better built than a
system you'd buy from some PC vendor, because Sun's attitude is
different. Few manufacturers of any complex product like a computer
actually make most of the stuff themselves. The reason Sun systems are
reliable is that they select good parts, and test the system together
as a whole. They have never controlled the whole process, but they do
control more of the process for their machines than PC manufacturers
do. I think this is what's going to lead to better quality.
(Part of the reason I think that is that it's my belief that one of the
reasons PC hardware and software is so unreliable is the size of the
market. It's prohibitively expensive to test everything with
everything, and not only that, but it's also just very chaotic. It's
difficult to make a system work well under those conditions. Sun
doesn't suffer from that problem as much because their market is
smaller and not only that but simpler.)
The "text" "Welcome to Apple" at the top is not really text - it is part
of a graphic that uses color and grayscale. The characters appear
smoother than regular Mac or PC text. Note where it says "What's Hot".
It looks much smoother than the regular html text in the headline below
it, even though it is about the same size. Note also that anti-aliasing
can make text look fuzzy or out of focus.
It is kinda like using interpolation to smooth out a graph.
The higher DPI (dots per inch), the more possible it would be to use this to make better looking text. However, on some systems, this would require new fonts and a complete rewrite of the "engine" that controls writing to the screen. GTK is low-level enough that something like this is able to make all your GTK text anti-aliased.
Anti-aliasing will really show it's merrits in the Web browswer (such as Mozilla that supports anti-aliasing on some platforms) and in
graphics, and even some small games.
Wrongo. Blizzard North is working on World of Warcraft, Blizzard (EOT, no "South") is working on Warcraft 3, and has been for a long time. That's why the rumors of SC2 were squelched, because the Starcraft team (Blizzard) was working on Warcraft 3 (Blizzard), while the Diablo II team had just finished LoD at Blizzard North.
For those of you who want to build your own arcade cabs, just like the Sbox, you may want to check the Arcade@Home site at http://www.arcadeathome.com.
In addition to the MAME front-end of the same name, the site features a nice
collection of pics and links to converted and custom-built cabinets. IIRC,
the Plastic Cactus site linked from this page has a set of measured drawings
that might be useful, and there are probably others too.
Both of these sites are geared toward creating cabinets for use with
emulation, but if that's not what you're after I'm sure they could be
adapted for true arcade hardware. I've been thinking of building something like an Sbox myself, someday when I magically become competent with power tools.;-)
Personnaly I don't like to see every two days in my mailbox those "where is the Desktop?", "it was better before!", "Companies need professional Scheduling management tools!" postings.
My biggest concern (having implemented Star Schedule server for 30
people so far in a 50-employee company) is that no regard at all has
been given to the groupware functionality in OpenOffice. I have very few
gripes with Star Schedule, but will need to explain why the newest
verions of Star Office cannot be used with the Schedule Server.
If someone were to start a project to make a newer better groupware tool
for open office (or some other open-source cross-platform tool), I would
find a way to contribute (as I think quite a few others would).
Maybe if someone took action and said "All groupware discussions will
take place on groupware@openoffice.org" or similar, then at least it
wouldn't appear on discuss.
Does Sun not care that there are customers of their software who will be
left stranded with data in an obsolete server and egg on their face. I
hope not.
Let's see, if a guy on Oak Street was selling popsicles for 25 cents a a
stick and another guy on Elm Street had the exact same popsicles for free,
where would you go? The simple fact of the matter is that consumers will
always make the most logical choice when acquiring what they want. In the
field of digital music, it is readily available for free via many
different routes on the internet. Hence, in setting up membership fees for
service, MP3.com will be nailing it's own coffin shut. Undoubtedly,
millions will abandon the service for something else out there that is
equally as resourceful and above all free (Morpheus come immedialty to mind).
For these companies, MP3.com ludicrous decision is a golden opportunity.
If MP3.com wants money, then fuck MP3.com. As a company, all they are is
a popular conduit for digital music tansfer - big deal. They've done
nothing to achieve loyalty in me as a consumer. If they are banking on the
fact that the majority of MP3.com users are capatilistic moral crusaders
who believe that paying for thier service is the noble thing to do - then
they are banking on bullshit. Furthermore, even if I did feel that way,
why should MP3.com be making any money? Nobody at MP3.com wrote the music.
They don't give a fuck about the artists, they just want money, like any
other company under the sun. Morpheus here I come, so long MP3.com.
You should hear our embedded systems engineers laughing or crying about "Real Time Windows CE" depending on whether they chortling at it's response times, or miserable about being forced to use it respectively.
Your laughter is borne out of ignorance. Everybody publishes OS times for
their OS when running in kernel mode only (which offers zero protection from
processes run amok). But CE and EPOC don't run in that mode--you can't on
these platforms since they're open and could be running malicious code.
For protected systems using the MMU, it seems all the big players don't
publish numbers. Why? Because this is a tough environment and the numbers
look like shit. QNX offers nothing on their site about their Neutrino
product performance. Neither do Mentor or Wind River.
Even the RT Linux folks are flaky here.
http://www.zentropix.com/support/document/helpdox/ rtai.pdf claims they can
deliver a 4 uS average interrupt response time with 13 uS of jitter,
resulting in 17 uS worst case interrupt response time. This is on a 233 MHz
Pentium II.
Clearly, CE is probably on par with the QNX/PSOS/VRTX crowd.
So, until Symbian actually publish some numbers on their interrupt
performance, we can assume that, like code size, they are merely FUD'ing the
industry.
As for the topic at hand, however, it's wonderful to see something like QNX running on iPac, maybe make one worth getting after all;)
It's sure to give both Bluetooth, which was gasping for breath, and HomeRF, which was on a respirator, renewed leases on life. If the powerline networking gear arrives by year end and works as advertised, it will probably win the battle.
Not really...
802.11b is seeing high adoption rates in corporate networks. For
better or worse, impenetrable security is not usually at the top of
the list when choosing a network component. (ahem)
By starting with a halfway decent basestation that allows for only
registered MAC addresses to attach to it, then running some simple
Vlan software (with or without WEP) you have an RF network that is as
secure as most people *really* need it to be.
As for Bluetooth, it's reaally not here yet, and it's intended for
short-range devices that will most likely require lower throughput's
than what 802.11b offers. HomeRF is a sort-of direct competitor, but
it also has issues of it's own.
With the right tools, and some dedication almost any simple network
can be cracked. I remember when most people didn't know what
"promiscuous mode drivers" were for, and many corporate LANs on simple
10M hubs were easily cracked by patching into an unsecured jack.
802.11b is gaining a lot of press, and thus attracts more hacker
efforts. I can almost guarantee that if HomeRF were the predominant
wireless standard, we would be seeing the same hacker tools for it.
That document contains a fair number of bibliographical references
which you might find interesting.
The principal problem I've found with wireless security is that lots
of people deploy it poorly - effectively allowing anyone nearby to
"plug" into their network. Most of the news articles about hacking
wireless networking are about this kind of insecurity. The implication
is that when you set up a wireless network you need to use WEP to
encrypt the connection.
Some of the more alarming articles suggest that WEP is weak, and so
can't really be relied upon. If this is correct, then it means one
must use encryption at a higher level - which is not a trivial
undertaking. If you can't deploy IPSEC thoughout your network, you'll
have to put your wireless access points outside of your firewall and
use VPNs to get in.
I am a high school student working on a little project about the commercialization of the Internet. It seems that a the recent rush of commercial organizations onto the net has increased the overall load. The backbone I believe is currently university supported.
Nope. It was never university supported. It was run by various
organizations funded by the government.
I would like to accumulate a variety of viewpoints on this issue as well as your opinion on what should be done by the U.S. government.
(For those interested, I am actually working on a bill for Model Congress)
I was thinking that something along the lines of some type of tax on companies using the internet for commercial purposes. The revenue collected could be used in some sort of program to expand and upgrade the backbone of the net.
No way. Any government run system will be inefficient and poorly
run. Let the private sector run it.
As an example, I worked for years at a Navy facility that was
connected to the Milnet (part of the original Internet). The
Milnet was built on 56K leased lines, and became over loaded
long ago. The organization that ran the Milnet was so
over bloated that they were trying to charge our facility
somethine like $25K per month for the right to use their
56K network. We replaced our Milnet connection with a T1 line
from a non-goverment source. The T1 line (which is 24 times
the size of a 56K line), cost less than $25K / year and worked
a hell of a lot better.
The governement is needed to help motivate us to "do the right thing"
and as a social tool for determining what "the right thing" is. But
trying to use it to speed up development of a new technology is
foolish. The best way to help the Intenet is to get the goverment
as far away from it as possible.
A corporate Tax is not free money. If you tax a company, then they are
just forced to rase their rates to pay the tax. So, instead of
getting an internet account for $20/mo, I might end up paying $25/mo.
So, in the end, the money comes out of my pocket, one way or another.
And if my money is going to be spent on the Intenet, I want to choose
who and when I spend it. I don't want some goverment agency "investing"
it for me.
I would appreciate any type of comments, esp. if I am factually misguided either by e-mail and/or follow up post. Thanks.
The porn problem on the net is an interesting problem to try and
solve. Try to figure out how the goverment might be able to help
with that. Any law that trys to ban some use of the net will
fail - but laws that lean more towards forcing industry to
create a solution to a problem might work.
And this whole issue of cryptology and export controls is something
that needs to be "fixed" by goverment. It's an example where
current laws are tying the hands of industry (preventing the export
of strong cryptology), which is slowing down the development
of the net. Research these laws and try to find some alternative
that helps the Internet grow, but still maintains some type
of national security.
If there is something that both the FSF and I agree upon, it is that the production of software needs to be justified in terms of benefit to society. This presents a certain amount of difficulty. Benefit to society is a slippery concept and not an easily measurable quantity -- unlike tractor production. In addition, since Adam Smith, the best means of deriving that benefit are not necessarily direct. Which brings me to the subject of economics.
Before starting any discussion of economics, I need to pin down what I mean by ``benefit to society''. Underlying the attitude of this essay is the belief that a computer is just a machine, and the benefit of a machine is derived from its use to do things. From this point of view, the main benefit to society that software brings is that it allows users to run programs to do things that they regard as useful or entertaining. There is a clear economic component to this attitude: benefit to society can be regarded as the production of programs that users want to use. This benefit is hedged about usual common-sense provisions, of course; it's hard to argue that virus production is of benefit to anyone other than security experts.
An alternate view regards computers as ends in themselves. I'm someone who enjoys theoretical computer science and also enjoys tinkering with my systems for the pure love of it. So this view is something that I espouse in deed, if not in word. This point of view is of benefit to society in the same way that science, art or literature is; it expands our horizons and makes us mentally richer and more cultured human beings. This view is perfectly reasonable -- I also think that it is a view underlying many of the attitudes of the FSF. However, in terms of wider benefit to society, it is likely to be eclipsed by the purely utilitarian considerations of the economic viewpoint.
"...elections in Australia are held under a system which does
not allow you to freely express your will because you are required, by law,
to attend a polling booth on election day and have your name marked off
the electoral roll. There is no compulsory voting in Australia as you do not
need to mark the ballot paper. You can put it, unmarked, into the ballot
box. However, the fact that the parliament demands that you be
somewhere on a chosen election day, under threat of fine or jail,
demonstrates that they demand your obedience with menaces. That is
not freedom that is dictatorship."
--http://www.ozscan.net.au/mandate/
1) "...you are required, by law, to attend a polling booth on election day
and have your name marked off the electoral roll."
Getting your name marked off the electoral roll is not only so the AEC can
find out who voted and who didn't so it can fine the latter. It is also:
a) to discourage electors from voting more than once; and
b) to ensure that those who do vote in a particular electorate are
qualified to do so
(Without that precaution you might end up with the sort of stacking that
goes on in the ALP. For example, busloads of the party faithful being
whizzed in from outside a crucial marginal electorate to vote.)
2) I'm not sure quite what you mean when you claim that being "required,
by law, to attend a polling booth on election day" does "not allow you to
freely express your will".
In what way does requiring you to attend a polling booth inhibits you
"freely express[ing] your will"?
After all, the purpose of holding an election (or a referendum, for that
matter) is to allow electors to cast a vote. That is where the "will" of
the electorate is expressed. Compulsory attendance plays no roll in how
that will is expressed.
You are not required to vote for a particualr candidate or to reveal who
you voted for.
What exactly do you mean?
3) "...the fact that the parliament demands that you be somewhere on a
chosen election day, under threat of fine or jail, demonstrates that they
demand your obedience with menaces. That is not freedom that is
dictatorship."
Define "freedom" and "dictatorship".
Kids within a certain age bracket have to attend school or face getting
dragged there willy-nilly by the local truant officer. Why is that
different from grownups being required to attend a polling booth?
If you earn over a certain income threshold you are required to pay income
tax. You might be able to reduce the amount you pay by making use of
various deductions, tax shelters, and so forth, but if the tax office
issues you with an assessment which requires you to pay a tax bill you
have to pay that bill or risk court action--not to mention fines which are
a good deal heftier and more onerous than the $20 fine you get from the
AEC for not voting.
4) "...under threat of fine or jail..."
AFAIK there are no gaol terms for not attending.
You might, of course, get tossed in gaol for contempt of court or being a
repeat offender (ie you keep staying away, they keep fining you, and you
keep not paying), but the same thing would happen if you treated speeding
tickets, parking fines, or a bill from the tax office in a similarly
cavalier fashion.
BTW, the fine for not voting in federal elections is $20 ($50 if you get
taken to court). If the threat of a $20 fine makes Australia a
"dictatorship" you clearly have no idea what a real dictatorship is!:)
Google Groups just tonight launched Message ID threading, so you can now view all usenet posts in a thread-like fashion, just like Deja let you do. Perform a search or browse for a thread, and take a look at the brand spanking new left frame showing the message navigation, complete with threads, a long time in the making.
I doubt it. Blizzard doesn't use a specific graphics library for their games, but rather a library called Storm, which is basically a wrapper for all sorts of GDI calls, as well as file handling routines for their data libraries (MPQs). Blizzard has ported their Storm library to the Macintosh as well as Windows, and almost all recent Blizzard games utilize this library, including Starcraft and Diablo II. So while it wouldn't be quite as impossible to port a Blizzard game to Linux as, say, a DirectX-specific game, viewing Loki's latest failures, there isn't an incentive at all for Blizzard to make a port.
Slashdot Mirror
Doctor Who was a popular television show that ran in Belgium between 1972-1974. In it's day it was one of the most popular shows in Belgium and it starred Larry Lamb and John Craven (who went on to star in Hollywood movies such as Terminator and Total Recall).
No episodes exist of this classic TV show, but we can relive the episodes thanks to Steve Roberts who has reconstructed them from Crayon drawings and dialogue from episodes of Eldorado. The show was axed in 1974 after allegations that it was just a big hoax designed to extract money from the Belgium TV service. These allegations were denied by the production company, Grabitandrun.
There is another Doctor Who series as well, but by all accounts it was some obscure rubbish that is long since dead.
You should. Alan Turing is considered by some to be the father of modern Artificial Intelligence. A troubled soul whose contributions to the world included The Turing Test (to measure whether a program is artificially intelligent or not) and cracking the German Enigma cypher code during the war.http://www.math.sfu.ca/histmath/Europe/20thCen turyAD/Turing.html for more
info.
Wow, great. Does a name really have to do that? I have no problem remembering that "Excel" is a spreadsheet application for Windows by Microsoft corporation or "Jabber" is a client-server application for interacting with different IM protocols. I find your need for a description of the product in place of the actual name absurd.
Why not just have original names? Licq? Gaim? Kmail? sheesh. At least I can give them credit for Konqueror.
Right. And there's no indication that something similar will appear in IA64 until at least 2006 (which is the *earliest* that the Alpha team could likely add it to that complex - or if you prefer messy - an architecture if the hooks for it weren't already built in).
It's a weak second to SMT. With HT, as I understood it, if a processor happens to have a floating point op and an integer op on hand at the same time, it can run both of 'em at once, instead of sequentially. That's the limit to the HT magic. It can't do two FP or integer ops at once.
Well, real-world server applications could be sped up by 30%, which would mean that HT could execute multiple *non*-FP instructions at once (and the article doesn't say it can't, just that it can't execute two FP ops at once).
It actually seems to look quite a bit like EV8's SMT, except that we don't know if it currently adds more execution units to the P4 architecture and whether all execution units can be applied to service a single thread if multiple threads aren't present. And, of course, it only supports two concurrent threads rather than four.
Intel stole and then implemented Alpha technologies for its Pentium, and only much later did it negotiate with Digital to get the official right to use that stuff.
No: I'm assessing the situation, unlike your propensity for drawing conclusions based on vague speculation and no data.
IA64 has to all appearances been developed with zero attention paid to things like out-of-order execution (in fact, it was developed explicitly to *avoid* out-of-order execution). OOO and SMT are intimately intertwined in EV8's SMT design, and apparently also in HT's. There's no indication that Intel has until now given any thought toward incorporating SMT/HT technology in EPIC, and every indication that it will thus take at least close to 5 years before such IA64 technology hits the street (especially as incorporating it into EPIC will almost certainly involve radically different internal approaches than those used to incorporate it into EV8 and P4).
The worldofwarcraft.com domain was registered on August 11, 1999, a full two years ago. But then again, the game has been in development since 1999, so...
Well, that's the best I can do. Can you do any better in disproving me, or is your case just rampant speculation?
Visibility of screens, battery life, and user interface features are often coming up as major issues.
However, there is also feedback about the services. In particular video calls and data service. Some users, who have never before experienced more than 9.6K or 14.4K data speed on a mobile phone are generally pleased with the up to 64K transfer speed of 3G (at present that's the maximum), while users who have been using other 2.5G based services with 64K are less impressed and users who have been using data on PHS (up to 128K) are often disappointed by 3G.
On the video call side, there appears to be consensus that video telephony is initially nice to play with but once its novelty factor has worn off it becomes a useless service nobody would want to use, especially as video calls are almost twice the cost of voice-only calls, which makes sense because they use more resources.
One detailed account can be found at http://renfield.net/foma_impressions.html
Particularly interesting are ...
"The big draw of Organic EL is its low power consumption, but the N2001V still ran out of battery power within a day." [about NEC's Organic EL screen]
"Also NEC has a serious problem making the screens in mass quantities. Sources tell me they can make about 4 a day."
"Same issue with voice connections. About half of the call attempts (to other cell phones, other FOMA phones, and to land lines) don't connect for whatever reason. Once connected, voice quality varies from great to terrible."
"Calling between two FOMA handsets the voice quality is much better than between two 50x handsets -- the underwatery echo is greatly reduced and sounds generally crisper, though it's still not as good as a standard GSM call between to cell phones in Europe."
"It's bulky and heavy like phones were 5 years ago" [about Panasonic's multimedia 3G phone]
"But watching a Planet of The Apes trailer on my cell phone was pretty damn cool. Battery died after watching about 5 minutes of video, though."
"Managing to successfully make video calls about 5 out of 100 attempts."
"The real problem with mobile video phoning is: once you wave at the other person and show then the room you're in, there's not much advantage over holding the up to your head and talking. The Cool Wow factor wears off pretty quickly, and at 1.8 times the price of a regular cell phone call, who's going to pay for this service?"
"...human voice ring tones like "wake up!" in Osaka dialect. Very cool."
Again, it looks to me that the whole 3G thing is not only overhyped, it's hyper-overhyped. Of course this is a trial and a trial has the purpose to iron out the problems, but remember, they originally intended to launch in May 2001.
Then, again, DoCoMo's network is a very simple undertaking compared to what 3G networks in Europe intend to roll-out. As there is no GSM in Japan, DoCoMo's network is and will be a single-mode network. In Europe it is intended to have multi-mode networks for transition and to serve early 3G users on 2G networks when out of 3G coverage.
At the same time WLAN is being deployed all over the place and it's cheap. When I use my iBook (with Airport Wireless LAN interface) in Tokyo outdoors, many times I see one or two networks showing up. Sure, they are not public, but it shows how rapidly WLAN is being rolled out.
By the time 3G will be available to the ordinary man on the street with reasonable coverage and stability, there may well be an alternative already up and running: the much cheaper and much faster WLAN.
And here in Japan, there is no reason to go 3G any time soon anyway, because PHS is cheaper, faster, stable, available, with good coverage. Spectrum efficiency of Japan's PHS network is about 10 times that of European GSM networks (due to pico-cell infrastructure and dynamic channel allocation accross operators, so capacity should not be a problem.
Will 3G become the Betamax of cellular phone technology ?
Will 3G become the Iridium of the land based cellular industry ?
Will 3G become the Mega Ponzi scheme of the 21st century ?
Looks more and more like it.
rgds
benjk
I don't know. I have a Matrox Millenium II that only just started working reliably as of Solaris 8 (or Solaris 7 with patches). It seems that when you do a certain thing to the card, the card stands about a 50% chance of getting confused and hanging the entire PCI bus.
Also inside the same case, I have two Western Digital IDE hard drives that won't both talk on the same bus if you set one of them to master and one to slave. It seems to only work if exactly *one* of them is set to cable select.
I also have an Intel motherboard (which is sitting in a drawer right now) that only allows me to use 64 MB of RAM. I bought that system in 1997. Sun's very first desktop SPARC system (the SPARCstation 1) could expand to 64 MB of RAM, and that was in 1990.
Also in the drawer, I have a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra whose fan has decided to make loud scraping noises. Diamond refused to sell me a replacement part, so I have an approximate match replacement part that I will install when I feel like getting out the soldering iron.
The system that had the Intel motherboard originally came with a Toshiba XM-6102B CD-ROM drive. When I first installed Solaris on that thing, I was afraid the driver was confused, because it was reporting all kinds of errors even though Windows didn't seem to have a problem with the drive at all. As time went on, the drive got worse and worse and eventually reached the point where it took 3 or 4 tries for it to recognize a CD.
All of these experiences with dodgy PC hardware are with *name* *brand* PC hardware that I've taken good care of. And, it's not like I've run through hundreds of systems, either. The amount of PC hardware I have ever owned in my life is not enough to build two working systems.
Basically, my experience with PC hardware is that it's cheaply made, and any given piece of hardware will probably be somewhere between limping along and working almost right but not quite. (Some hardware will just outright break, and some of it will be trouble-free for years and years, too.) Overall, I think this is a symptom of the fact that most PC consumers don't know to expect better, and also the pressure to make things as cheap as possible.
There is a lot of stuff out there that is just crap, and there is a lot of stuff out that there sort of works and sort of doesn't. Yes, you can get high quality PC parts, but the fact is that you have to be pretty choosy about it. Which brings me to my next point...
And let's not forget that practically everything in a Blade 100 is off-the-shelf PC parts, so that theory goes out the window.
I tend to think that the Blade 100 is going to be better built than a system you'd buy from some PC vendor, because Sun's attitude is different. Few manufacturers of any complex product like a computer actually make most of the stuff themselves. The reason Sun systems are reliable is that they select good parts, and test the system together as a whole. They have never controlled the whole process, but they do control more of the process for their machines than PC manufacturers do. I think this is what's going to lead to better quality.
(Part of the reason I think that is that it's my belief that one of the reasons PC hardware and software is so unreliable is the size of the market. It's prohibitively expensive to test everything with everything, and not only that, but it's also just very chaotic. It's difficult to make a system work well under those conditions. Sun doesn't suffer from that problem as much because their market is smaller and not only that but simpler.)
akamai is banned there? What censorware do you use? I hadn't seen one actually block all of akamai yet, I'd be interested in knowing which one did.
Basically anti-aliasing (in this case) means the use of grayscale to make better looking text (or graphics).
By using gray pixels around the edge of text, the "jaggyness" of text can be made to appear to be less.
For an illustration look at the top of Apple's home page, http://www.apple.com.
The "text" "Welcome to Apple" at the top is not really text - it is part of a graphic that uses color and grayscale. The characters appear smoother than regular Mac or PC text. Note where it says "What's Hot". It looks much smoother than the regular html text in the headline below it, even though it is about the same size. Note also that anti-aliasing can make text look fuzzy or out of focus.
It is kinda like using interpolation to smooth out a graph.
The higher DPI (dots per inch), the more possible it would be to use this to make better looking text. However, on some systems, this would require new fonts and a complete rewrite of the "engine" that controls writing to the screen. GTK is low-level enough that something like this is able to make all your GTK text anti-aliased.
Anti-aliasing will really show it's merrits in the Web browswer (such as Mozilla that supports anti-aliasing on some platforms) and in graphics, and even some small games.
Wrongo. Blizzard North is working on World of Warcraft, Blizzard (EOT, no "South") is working on Warcraft 3, and has been for a long time. That's why the rumors of SC2 were squelched, because the Starcraft team (Blizzard) was working on Warcraft 3 (Blizzard), while the Diablo II team had just finished LoD at Blizzard North.
Blizzard has been working on World of Warcraft since 1999. Check the whois database on worldofwarcraft.com for proof.
In addition to the MAME front-end of the same name, the site features a nice collection of pics and links to converted and custom-built cabinets. IIRC, the Plastic Cactus site linked from this page has a set of measured drawings that might be useful, and there are probably others too.
There's also the very nice Build Your Own Arcade Machine site: http://plaza.powersurfr.com/kevin/arcade/
Both of these sites are geared toward creating cabinets for use with emulation, but if that's not what you're after I'm sure they could be adapted for true arcade hardware. I've been thinking of building something like an Sbox myself, someday when I magically become competent with power tools. ;-)
My biggest concern (having implemented Star Schedule server for 30 people so far in a 50-employee company) is that no regard at all has been given to the groupware functionality in OpenOffice. I have very few gripes with Star Schedule, but will need to explain why the newest verions of Star Office cannot be used with the Schedule Server.
If someone were to start a project to make a newer better groupware tool for open office (or some other open-source cross-platform tool), I would find a way to contribute (as I think quite a few others would).
Unfortunately it seems as if ogsproject has died.
Maybe if someone took action and said "All groupware discussions will take place on groupware@openoffice.org" or similar, then at least it wouldn't appear on discuss.
Does Sun not care that there are customers of their software who will be left stranded with data in an obsolete server and egg on their face. I hope not.
Let's see, if a guy on Oak Street was selling popsicles for 25 cents a a
stick and another guy on Elm Street had the exact same popsicles for free,
where would you go? The simple fact of the matter is that consumers will
always make the most logical choice when acquiring what they want. In the
field of digital music, it is readily available for free via many
different routes on the internet. Hence, in setting up membership fees for
service, MP3.com will be nailing it's own coffin shut. Undoubtedly,
millions will abandon the service for something else out there that is
equally as resourceful and above all free (Morpheus come immedialty to mind).
For these companies, MP3.com ludicrous decision is a golden opportunity.
If MP3.com wants money, then fuck MP3.com. As a company, all they are is
a popular conduit for digital music tansfer - big deal. They've done
nothing to achieve loyalty in me as a consumer. If they are banking on the
fact that the majority of MP3.com users are capatilistic moral crusaders
who believe that paying for thier service is the noble thing to do - then
they are banking on bullshit. Furthermore, even if I did feel that way,
why should MP3.com be making any money? Nobody at MP3.com wrote the music.
They don't give a fuck about the artists, they just want money, like any
other company under the sun. Morpheus here I come, so long MP3.com.
Your laughter is borne out of ignorance. Everybody publishes OS times for their OS when running in kernel mode only (which offers zero protection from processes run amok). But CE and EPOC don't run in that mode--you can't on these platforms since they're open and could be running malicious code.
To wit, look at QNX (http://www.qnx.com/products/os/qnxrtos.html#Perfo rmance) and On Time
(http://www.on-time.com/index.html?page=rtk45.htm) . Great numbers, but only
for kernel mode operation.
For protected systems using the MMU, it seems all the big players don't publish numbers. Why? Because this is a tough environment and the numbers look like shit. QNX offers nothing on their site about their Neutrino product performance. Neither do Mentor or Wind River.
Even the RT Linux folks are flaky here. http://www.zentropix.com/support/document/helpdox/ rtai.pdf claims they can
deliver a 4 uS average interrupt response time with 13 uS of jitter,
resulting in 17 uS worst case interrupt response time. This is on a 233 MHz
Pentium II.
Microsoft are claiming 7.5 uS worst case ISR latency on a 90 MHz Pentium II for CE (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/real_pe rf.htm). We're
seeing similar numbers on a StrongARM platform at a similar clock.
Clearly, CE is probably on par with the QNX/PSOS/VRTX crowd.
So, until Symbian actually publish some numbers on their interrupt performance, we can assume that, like code size, they are merely FUD'ing the industry.
As for the topic at hand, however, it's wonderful to see something like QNX running on iPac, maybe make one worth getting after all ;)
Not really...
802.11b is seeing high adoption rates in corporate networks. For better or worse, impenetrable security is not usually at the top of the list when choosing a network component. (ahem)
By starting with a halfway decent basestation that allows for only registered MAC addresses to attach to it, then running some simple Vlan software (with or without WEP) you have an RF network that is as secure as most people *really* need it to be.
As for Bluetooth, it's reaally not here yet, and it's intended for short-range devices that will most likely require lower throughput's than what 802.11b offers. HomeRF is a sort-of direct competitor, but it also has issues of it's own.
With the right tools, and some dedication almost any simple network can be cracked. I remember when most people didn't know what "promiscuous mode drivers" were for, and many corporate LANs on simple 10M hubs were easily cracked by patching into an unsecured jack.
802.11b is gaining a lot of press, and thus attracts more hacker efforts. I can almost guarantee that if HomeRF were the predominant wireless standard, we would be seeing the same hacker tools for it.
The real details are not too hard to find...30 seconds with a search
engine came up with quite a few references, including:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~waa/wireless.pdf
That document contains a fair number of bibliographical references
which you might find interesting.
The principal problem I've found with wireless security is that lots
of people deploy it poorly - effectively allowing anyone nearby to
"plug" into their network. Most of the news articles about hacking
wireless networking are about this kind of insecurity. The implication
is that when you set up a wireless network you need to use WEP to
encrypt the connection.
Some of the more alarming articles suggest that WEP is weak, and so
can't really be relied upon. If this is correct, then it means one
must use encryption at a higher level - which is not a trivial
undertaking. If you can't deploy IPSEC thoughout your network, you'll
have to put your wireless access points outside of your firewall and
use VPNs to get in.
Nope. It was never university supported. It was run by various organizations funded by the government.
I would like to accumulate a variety of viewpoints on this issue as well as your opinion on what should be done by the U.S. government.
(For those interested, I am actually working on a bill for Model Congress)
I was thinking that something along the lines of some type of tax on companies using the internet for commercial purposes. The revenue collected could be used in some sort of program to expand and upgrade the backbone of the net.
No way. Any government run system will be inefficient and poorly run. Let the private sector run it.
As an example, I worked for years at a Navy facility that was connected to the Milnet (part of the original Internet). The Milnet was built on 56K leased lines, and became over loaded long ago. The organization that ran the Milnet was so over bloated that they were trying to charge our facility somethine like $25K per month for the right to use their 56K network. We replaced our Milnet connection with a T1 line from a non-goverment source. The T1 line (which is 24 times the size of a 56K line), cost less than $25K / year and worked a hell of a lot better.
The governement is needed to help motivate us to "do the right thing" and as a social tool for determining what "the right thing" is. But trying to use it to speed up development of a new technology is foolish. The best way to help the Intenet is to get the goverment as far away from it as possible.
A corporate Tax is not free money. If you tax a company, then they are just forced to rase their rates to pay the tax. So, instead of getting an internet account for $20/mo, I might end up paying $25/mo. So, in the end, the money comes out of my pocket, one way or another. And if my money is going to be spent on the Intenet, I want to choose who and when I spend it. I don't want some goverment agency "investing" it for me.
I would appreciate any type of comments, esp. if I am factually misguided either by e-mail and/or follow up post. Thanks.
The porn problem on the net is an interesting problem to try and solve. Try to figure out how the goverment might be able to help with that. Any law that trys to ban some use of the net will fail - but laws that lean more towards forcing industry to create a solution to a problem might work.
And this whole issue of cryptology and export controls is something that needs to be "fixed" by goverment. It's an example where current laws are tying the hands of industry (preventing the export of strong cryptology), which is slowing down the development of the net. Research these laws and try to find some alternative that helps the Internet grow, but still maintains some type of national security.
If there is something that both the FSF and I agree upon, it is that the production of software needs to be justified in terms of benefit to society. This presents a certain amount of difficulty. Benefit to society is a slippery concept and not an easily measurable quantity -- unlike tractor production. In addition, since Adam Smith, the best means of deriving that benefit are not necessarily direct. Which brings me to the subject of economics.
Before starting any discussion of economics, I need to pin down what I mean by ``benefit to society''. Underlying the attitude of this essay is the belief that a computer is just a machine, and the benefit of a machine is derived from its use to do things. From this point of view, the main benefit to society that software brings is that it allows users to run programs to do things that they regard as useful or entertaining. There is a clear economic component to this attitude: benefit to society can be regarded as the production of programs that users want to use. This benefit is hedged about usual common-sense provisions, of course; it's hard to argue that virus production is of benefit to anyone other than security experts.
An alternate view regards computers as ends in themselves. I'm someone who enjoys theoretical computer science and also enjoys tinkering with my systems for the pure love of it. So this view is something that I espouse in deed, if not in word. This point of view is of benefit to society in the same way that science, art or literature is; it expands our horizons and makes us mentally richer and more cultured human beings. This view is perfectly reasonable -- I also think that it is a view underlying many of the attitudes of the FSF. However, in terms of wider benefit to society, it is likely to be eclipsed by the purely utilitarian considerations of the economic viewpoint.
The following is a quote from that site:
:)
"...elections in Australia are held under a system which does
not allow you to freely express your will because you are required, by law,
to attend a polling booth on election day and have your name marked off
the electoral roll. There is no compulsory voting in Australia as you do not
need to mark the ballot paper. You can put it, unmarked, into the ballot
box. However, the fact that the parliament demands that you be
somewhere on a chosen election day, under threat of fine or jail,
demonstrates that they demand your obedience with menaces. That is
not freedom that is dictatorship."
--http://www.ozscan.net.au/mandate/
1) "...you are required, by law, to attend a polling booth on election day
and have your name marked off the electoral roll."
Getting your name marked off the electoral roll is not only so the AEC can
find out who voted and who didn't so it can fine the latter. It is also:
a) to discourage electors from voting more than once; and
b) to ensure that those who do vote in a particular electorate are
qualified to do so
(Without that precaution you might end up with the sort of stacking that
goes on in the ALP. For example, busloads of the party faithful being
whizzed in from outside a crucial marginal electorate to vote.)
2) I'm not sure quite what you mean when you claim that being "required,
by law, to attend a polling booth on election day" does "not allow you to
freely express your will".
In what way does requiring you to attend a polling booth inhibits you
"freely express[ing] your will"?
After all, the purpose of holding an election (or a referendum, for that
matter) is to allow electors to cast a vote. That is where the "will" of
the electorate is expressed. Compulsory attendance plays no roll in how
that will is expressed.
You are not required to vote for a particualr candidate or to reveal who
you voted for.
What exactly do you mean?
3) "...the fact that the parliament demands that you be somewhere on a
chosen election day, under threat of fine or jail, demonstrates that they
demand your obedience with menaces. That is not freedom that is
dictatorship."
Define "freedom" and "dictatorship".
Kids within a certain age bracket have to attend school or face getting
dragged there willy-nilly by the local truant officer. Why is that
different from grownups being required to attend a polling booth?
If you earn over a certain income threshold you are required to pay income
tax. You might be able to reduce the amount you pay by making use of
various deductions, tax shelters, and so forth, but if the tax office
issues you with an assessment which requires you to pay a tax bill you
have to pay that bill or risk court action--not to mention fines which are
a good deal heftier and more onerous than the $20 fine you get from the
AEC for not voting.
4) "...under threat of fine or jail..."
AFAIK there are no gaol terms for not attending.
You might, of course, get tossed in gaol for contempt of court or being a
repeat offender (ie you keep staying away, they keep fining you, and you
keep not paying), but the same thing would happen if you treated speeding
tickets, parking fines, or a bill from the tax office in a similarly
cavalier fashion.
BTW, the fine for not voting in federal elections is $20 ($50 if you get
taken to court). If the threat of a $20 fine makes Australia a
"dictatorship" you clearly have no idea what a real dictatorship is!
Google Groups just tonight launched Message ID threading, so you can now view all usenet posts in a thread-like fashion, just like Deja let you do. Perform a search or browse for a thread, and take a look at the brand spanking new left frame showing the message navigation, complete with threads, a long time in the making.
It's just in order of how it was moderated. The most recent moderation of that comment was Troll.
I doubt it. Blizzard doesn't use a specific graphics library for their games, but rather a library called Storm, which is basically a wrapper for all sorts of GDI calls, as well as file handling routines for their data libraries (MPQs). Blizzard has ported their Storm library to the Macintosh as well as Windows, and almost all recent Blizzard games utilize this library, including Starcraft and Diablo II. So while it wouldn't be quite as impossible to port a Blizzard game to Linux as, say, a DirectX-specific game, viewing Loki's latest failures, there isn't an incentive at all for Blizzard to make a port.
scbackstab.com