How come people seem to be suprised that an ILEC is trying to shoot down a competitor by whatever means necessary? They were required to open up their offices for outside companies to come in and hook up DSLAMs. If your boss told you one day that your competitors were going to be renting office space from your company whilst trying to undecut you. Yeah that's going to go over really well. I think reality is finally catching up with the DSL. Growth was rampant as long as companies could fudge numbers and only keep books with a 3 year outlook. Now the DSL.coms have to live with the reality of ILEC, a very unprofitable reality. The ones holding the lines (pun intended) at the end will be the winners while everyone else, including customers, will be the losers.
Uh...this was in Wired a couple issues ago. The PS3 in its current state is 16 PS2 boards on top of a high bandwidth crossbar. They want to keep the number of individual CPUs but don't want to have 16 PCBs in a single box. IBM as far as I know is the only company right now that has the ability to get four or more processor cores on a single die. From the stuff I've read I think the PS3 will really be a techno wonder, much moreso than even the PS2. The little game consoles we've been buying for the past couple years have been rendering engines primarily and thinking machines secondly. When you've got 16 processors on a high bandwidth crossbar you've got huge potential for not only media but also for logic and physics. Rendering millions of textured polys is a nice but its even nicer when those millions of polys make up a realistic looking cloth swaying, feathers of a bird buffeting in the wind, or gravel realistically being kicked up behind a car.
No one really cares that you won't use.NET. However you're making a jackass of yourself by somehow equating thin clients with ASPs. For the past decade business schools have been preaching like some kinda jerks about out sourcing services and trimming out the middle tiers of your company's pyramid. The aspects of a company not related to actual production of your product are black holes which you have to throw money into. So the outsourcing model was envisioned, you hire a company to provide service for you and be your infrastructure. ASPs are the next step in that concept by being your contracted high tech grunt workers. Ergo they've got nothing at all to do with thin clients. It's about out sourcing a service you need for a much lower price than it would cost you to build your own department to provide said service. It's up to you as a business person to have a good contract with your ASP which will make sure your data will be protected if the ASP ends up out of business. I don't feel sorry for people who should have known better in the first place.
No. It's called haveus corpus (have the body, presumably dead) which means in order for you to be prosecuted of a felony charge those prosecuting you need to not only have intent but the actual evidense of your illegal action. A murder case without a body is not a murder case. Because your volumes have specific names doesn't mean crap in court. However if you're running around trading said encrypted volumes with other people and you're suspected of commiting a crime you can be arrested and the encryption keys may be subpoenaed in order for the prosecutors to see if you're guilty of the crime they're charging you with. This itself in unlikely because authorities need a warrant to monitor your communications and make anything they find admisible in court. If all they have is an encrypted volume named kiddie porn with no other evidense to show a judge they're most likely not going to be able to get a warrant. Getting charges to stick when dealing with evidence collected in secret is very tricky for any group of law enforcement. Thats why you always hire an attourney with a good pre-trial record. A good one can get a majority of evidense thrown out of court which destroys the prosecution's case.
Stealth technology is nothing compared to the George Washington project. New US currency has a small magnetic strip embedded in the paper, when thousands or hundreds of thousands of these bills are dropped over a battlefield they act as paper maché radar chaff. The system was actually designed during the 1950s but deemed not expensive enough for development. The US attack bombers of the 21st century will fly hidden behind a screen of paper currency. Go America!
So...I need to get about 75 feet of wire to patch my desktop into my TV? Right. For some fucking reason the local paper here has decided to put CueCat barcodes in the paper now as well as charge me 50 fucking cents for the daily edition. They must be itching for money. So I have to drag the paper over to my PC and fumble around with a CueCat to try to scan a barcode? When will DigitalConvergence get the fucking clue that the keyboard and mouse are pretty decent ways to interact with a computer from meatspace. Another damn dumb gimmick. If you want people to visit your website after seeing your commercial put subliminal hypnotic suggestions in it.
Wait a tick, how many stupid people can you think of that wield alot of power? I can name several off the top of my head. I was pointing out the fact so many fools do read slashdot (or have their mom's read it to their illiterate asses) means the previous post was poorly thought out. Slashdot ends up causing alot of email floods, especially when they post something inflamatory due to Hemos and timothy never checking out the shit they post. Which is why I brought up the UK site article. I can't believe that got fucking posted. There was practically no editorial at all. If it had been "Linux users jump the gun, again" and linked to the article it might have been a little more apropo. I think what slashdot needs most is a hooked on phonics slashbox for those that have trouble.
Uh...what about the article a little bit ago about the UK site requiring IE and Windows? Only like 10 people actually went to the site and even fewer went to the articles linked to about the site by the slashdot post. Everyone started bitching about Microsoft and IE. What the fuck. Do you not read slashdot or something?
How come you fucking jackasses are whining about things in the article's fucking disclaimer? C|Net decided to do a fun little test with a very macroscopic scope and of source slashdot whines either one way or the other. Not everything requires SPEC benchmarks and extensive testing. What do most people really care about anyways? It isn't minute differences in a fucking floating point benchmark, or whether you can use some 5$ soundcard under Windows 2000. Fuck the 5$ soud card in fact I hope it blows out your fucking speakers. News for nerds indeed. I'm going to get back to SPEC benching my Furbies against my Intellivision and Apple][e so I can post the results for slashdot to bitch about.
I think John's pretty much hit the concept on the head of dial-up. People here are often the ones in the.0001% of people with decent broadband connections so you can apt-get and feel like a l33t hax0r d00d. Slashdot is far from being represenative of anything but slashdot. AOL has roughly 20% of the online eyes in America and most of those eyes are looking at the internet through John's 34Kbps goggles. The other top dogs in the ISP space are also serving users with slow fucking connections. People have been pointing out that the broadband user base is growing and dial-up ISPs have gone out of business or been bought out. Well ISPs get bought out real quick because large ISPs can afford it and want the hardware and user base. Broadband is increasing because availability is increasing. People have been waiting months of years for broadband access and are finally getting it. We are NOT in the boardband era and John's correct in saying 34Kbps ought to be considered a standard connection rate.
Okay I see your point then. It's a shame SETI hasn't taken a que from d.net and done a better job handling multi-processor boxes. A majority of the clients they have running are Win32 (which usually means Win9x/Me) but if they launched a number cruncher for every processor or ran two crunchers on the same WU the bigger boxes some people run S@H on would benefit alot.
Yeah, there are lots of ways you can "benchmark" a particular processor or operating system. The problem is not all OSes or processors are made the same. I'm not defending Apple or Intel or AMD either. If this was an AMD/Intel benchmark the fact a 733 was headed against a 1200 would get tons of people's panties in an uproar. Secondly, you know marketing is bullshit. How many PC makers tout their boxes as the fastest PC you can buy or some shit. Even between individual chips, Intel claims they're the fastest and so does AMD. Benchmarks are not magic bullets, they're merely magic bullet theories.
This benchmark in particular is bullshit. What should be looked at is peak work done per clock and total price per clock if you want a price comparrison test. Or work per watt or maybe even cool facter per work/clock. PPC chips have an advantage of not needed an instruction decoder and a larger register space. You can do a bunch of LOAD operations on the same clock so more operations are running on the next clock than with x86 based systems. On the otherhand x86 processors have the advantage of a higher clock speed which begins to negate the lower register space. In general, anything you compile with gcc is going to suck ass. Do you REALLY think Apple uses gcc? Goddamn they use Motorola's compiler! They give you gcc because they don't want to pay the licensing fees on the fucking thing for every copy of OS X they sell. Motorola's compiler is oodles better than gcc ever will be, ever. In the benchmark's preamble he says "well I don't use Photoshop" well goddammit the Apple statement just became invalid as did his entire premise. Since he wasn't benchmarking Photoshop 6 he ought to have been using a 450MHz P3 and Athlon rather than shit that is OBVIOUSLY going to be faster in mere clock speed. If you can't tell from the tests the compilations have alot to do with moving data between the processor and memory. The G3 in the iMac and G4 are already at a disadvantage due to their bus speeds while the Athlon gets to chug along on its EV6 derivitive bus. Testing the processor ought to involve shit that can be held entirely in the chip's cache (which can be considered part of the chip because it afterall it's memory cache). Then the chip's FSB speed and register space size become important. You can then get a good measure of how much the processor is doing on every clock and how many clocks it needs to get a particular job done. At this point you've got a real test. Work done per clock or per second or watts used per work cycle or something. Here is where you say X processor is more better than Y processor. This is why SPEC tests cost so much money. They have LOTS of different tests that test things in different ways and they still don't show a true measure of real world performance.
In the real work you might be running Final Cut Pro or Photoshop 6 in which case you damn well better have a system they are optimized on (yes I'm aware FCP is only available on Macs). If your real world workload involves compiling go with the system that works best for your particular task at hand. This dude did a compiling benchmark test, he has benchmarked COMPILERS compiling binaries for whatever. Everyone here's been arguing "well such and such is faster than such and such" fuck that. This is not a x86 vs. PPC test or something. This is somebody feeling righteous because they keep getting reeled in by marketing quotes and feel like they've been lied to. Use what works not what a marketing department says works.
A dual P2-450 running SETI doesn't get you crap because SETI doesn't launch a number cruncher for each processor like d.net does. Unless you're running two different SETI clients in different directories or something your second processor is running idle. I average 10 hours/WU on my dual P3-500 which only half of the processing power gets used. With d.net on the other hand I get 100 utilization.
So the only way for slashdot weenies not to whine and cry and bitch is for people to make degrogotory statements about Microsoft/Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer? If Tito would have said "NASA sure does give their astronauts the monkey jobs up on the ISS, oh yeah Linux rules!" everyone here would be applauding him. Everyone is defending NASA on the grounds that the ISS isn't finished or that he has a grduge. You've missed the point. Tito is 100% correct. We spend 10,000 dollars a pound to send people into space (on the shuttle, and yes I realize a Titan or Atlas rocket is cheaper, fuck you) and have them press buttons and practice their radio lingo. The question I haven't seen posed or answered is why do we do that.
What was the point of the Gemini project? To learn how to operate in space because we were heading to the moon. The Gemini astronauts learned how to dock with stuff and live for a couple days in a space capsule. They collected enough information to allow the Apollo engineers to devise a program that would get a couple of guys from sea level on Earth to the Sea of Tranquility on the moon. After Apollo everyone figured we'd be living on the moon by now with plans to head to Mars. Then Skylab ended up crashing into Australia and then almost a decade later Challenger turned into a fireball. A space platform where we're supposed to learn to live in space and a method for getting us into space cheaply both end up back on Earth. NASA has had to start all over.
Freedom (the original ISS idea without the international aspect) was supposed to be our Mars/Moon testbed. It would be coupled with a shuttle replacement and be a nice local platform to attach experiment modules to before we started any harcore progra mto get o Mars. Then for political reasons NASA has to get buddy buddy with the rest of the space faring community and join in the the ISS. Now most of our efforts human exploration efforts are being retarded because the ISS is costing way too much fucking money and too many aspects of it are being controlled by outside interests.
Alright well OLEDs consume very little power. Normal LEDs consume very little power even for increadibly bright ones. An entire OLED display (lets say 1024x768 pixels) would consume about a quarter of the wattage as a backlit LCD display of the same size. OLEDs can operate on a very low voltage and have natural capatance which the LCD polarizing switches in LCD displays don't have. And since you're combining several display elements into a single electrical component (a single OLED colour element of a pixel) you've just saved 75% of your production cost not to mention the fact OLEDs can be deposited on the glass (or plastic) surface very easily means they're going to be even cheaper. I don't doubt we'll see 120+ DPI OLED displays in the next two or three years. IBM's 200 DPI LCD screens they made for LLNL will be given a serious technological run for their money. It isn't too much to hope to see OLED displays with print quality resolutions within five years.
Jesus fucking Christ man are you completely daft? Organic Light Emitting Diode. Hmm I wonder what in the world THAT PHRASE COULD POSSIBLY FUCKING MEAN? Maybe it is a diode made out of organic material (carbon containing, don't be a jackass and construe organic as living tissue). Well yeah I think that's it. Think of a more resolution versions of those traveling LED signs you see at airports or used as stock tickers. OLED displays are basically the same as those except they have three LEDs per pixel and alot more pixels per inch. This means no backlighting for these displays.
ICANN will remain legitimate as long as the Dept. of Commerce lets them stay legitimate.
It's fairly easy to see we need some sort of central body or group to designate and dispense internet namespaces. The e-economy worth billions now and is supposed to be worth more billions in years to come wouldn't exactly work if amazon.com only pointed to the correct IP address on some but not all NS roots. But how exactly do you go about that? ICANN is fucking up because they're charging for TLD proposals and letting the proposers run said proposals. This means registrarX is fucked if registrarY gets control of.whatever and everyone wants a.whatever address. We're sort of fucked as long as the DoC keeps rolling over to the whims of ICANN (which they created anyways). In a nutshell blame the DoC, they're letting this turn into a huge mess and it's going to shove a giant stick up the ass of all internet related commerce in the future.
You dont have to have a Windows or Mac machine, you need a browser that supports the shit the site uses. If your browser doesn't support Equifax you can't use Equifax dipshit. The site worked fine for me with several browsers.
So what exactly doesn't work when trying to go to this site? It's working just great on OmniPage 4 on MacOS X. It seems like if you read the damn page it tells you what you need in order to use the fucking page. You need a relatively modern browser with support for 128bit SSL and the ability to use cookies. Goddamn jackasses got their panties in a tiff because they're illiterate fuckos. The part that doesn't work with some browsers is if you want to use ChamberSign or Equifax certificates to log onto the website. Anyone with a working browser can register and enter their name and PIN to log on. God damn it how did this get posted unmodified? Did nobody go and check if this was even true? At least one guy did (I don't remember the CID) and he even found spoofing iCab to report itself as IE got the site to work just fine. I bet 99% of the posts didn't even try going to the site.
Stop crying about antimatter for chrissakes. It would take beaucoup amounts of it to turn into some sort of continent destroying weapon. And a funny thing about particle annihilations is THE VAST AMOUNT OF GAMMA RADIATION RELEASED which basically ionizes just about everything. High energy gamma rays can cause stuff to start transmuting, one caveat of antimatter ractions setting off lithium hydride fuel pellets is the lead shielding slowly starts transmuting into gold after a while and you also end up with fucked up equipment do to the Cherenkov effect. So anyways, antimatter bombs would cost upwards of a hundred billion dollars to produce just one. Even if AM production increased tenfold the price wouldn't drop too much. So a hundred billion dollars for a 40Mt bomb thats not quite as useful as a clean fusion bomb? Yeah right.
Aside from it not being used as a bomb, antimatter is a very good idea for use in spacecraft. It is the only way to get the energy you need for really long distance travel. And of fucking course any long term exploration projects will have AM production facilities in orbit, not because they're afraid of blowing themselves up but because its more efficient to not have to drag a heavy AM containment bottle up through the atmosphere. I think this will probably take around 50 years even if you account for increased levels of technology. The transition manned orbital stations to high tech production facilities on an extra terrestrial body is very large and requires a good deal of infrastructure to be built up. Before you have regular lunar travel you need craft capable of cheap hypersonic flight; this is the first step which gets alot of mass out of the signifigant part of the atmosphere. Once we're regularly scheduling flights from New York to Tokyo that take under two hours we'll have the capability to start building permenant and industrialized lunar bases. This is still 15 to 20 years off. We're well on our way but it will take time because there is little driving need to enter space in any hardcore fashion; political pressure got us to the moon. In an era of cooperation in space we'll be hard pressed to launch any crash space development projects in the near future. By the way a Saturn-V rocket carries no typical propellent, merely a pressurized container filled with hot air collected from the general hubub caused over the soviets beating the Americans into space.
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It's called time dialation jackass. The closer something gets to the speed of light the more ship relative time dialates compared to Earth relative time. If you were traveling at 99.99999%c to someplace. It would seem to you only a couple years went by but to somebody on Earth LOTS of years would have gone by. Fast clocks run slow.
While some of Rob's analogies are a bit...off, I actually sort of agree with him. If you're going to download a distro's ISO image off their servers you ought to think about passing a few bucks their way. Yes they are corporations but no it isn't like Ford or Chevy asking for donations to improve safety. They are companies developing software they MUST give away. They're also companies you might particularly want to see survive a period of cutbacks and a tough market. Chip in when you download an ISO if you've got an extra ten bucks.
Voyager wasn't such a bad concept, it had the potential to REALLY open up the Star Trek universe by showing a part of the galaxy that had never been explorered by the protagonists. The trouble was in the writing. TNG started off pretty weak, most of the stories felt like rehashes of ideas from the original series. THen season three hits and they've got a much larger budget, cooler looking uniforms and you've got Mike Piller and Ron Moore busting off some badass sci-fi. The end of season three/beginning of season four was some well written sci-fi drama, one of the most often acclaimed. Same with seasons 4/5. DS9 had Ira Steven Behr who practically single handedly fleshed out some of the most memorable characters from the series namely Quark and the Grand Nagus. Voyager started strong with some good writing by Piller but slowly Bannon Braga seemed to end up doing alot of writing and Rick Berman just sat back and let teleplays cross his desk that involved little character development or plot. There was no analog for Best of Both Worlds or Redemption in all the years Voyager aired. It was pretty sad because they had had some excellent writing, Braga was the co-writer of All Good Things for chrissakes. I was disappointed that Voyager couldn't seem to retain decent writing but I think alot of that had to do with Rick Berman being in charge of it all. He just let crap get produced. Then again maybe he was as odds with Paramount because they were shelling out beacoup dollars for a show that didn't really compete against any of the other networks offerings. Anyways, I hope Paramount follows the Fox gameplan and releases the series' seasons on DVD (as been done with x-files).
Slashdot Mirror
How come people seem to be suprised that an ILEC is trying to shoot down a competitor by whatever means necessary? They were required to open up their offices for outside companies to come in and hook up DSLAMs. If your boss told you one day that your competitors were going to be renting office space from your company whilst trying to undecut you. Yeah that's going to go over really well. I think reality is finally catching up with the DSL. Growth was rampant as long as companies could fudge numbers and only keep books with a 3 year outlook. Now the DSL .coms have to live with the reality of ILEC, a very unprofitable reality. The ones holding the lines (pun intended) at the end will be the winners while everyone else, including customers, will be the losers.
Uh...this was in Wired a couple issues ago. The PS3 in its current state is 16 PS2 boards on top of a high bandwidth crossbar. They want to keep the number of individual CPUs but don't want to have 16 PCBs in a single box. IBM as far as I know is the only company right now that has the ability to get four or more processor cores on a single die. From the stuff I've read I think the PS3 will really be a techno wonder, much moreso than even the PS2. The little game consoles we've been buying for the past couple years have been rendering engines primarily and thinking machines secondly. When you've got 16 processors on a high bandwidth crossbar you've got huge potential for not only media but also for logic and physics. Rendering millions of textured polys is a nice but its even nicer when those millions of polys make up a realistic looking cloth swaying, feathers of a bird buffeting in the wind, or gravel realistically being kicked up behind a car.
No one really cares that you won't use .NET. However you're making a jackass of yourself by somehow equating thin clients with ASPs. For the past decade business schools have been preaching like some kinda jerks about out sourcing services and trimming out the middle tiers of your company's pyramid. The aspects of a company not related to actual production of your product are black holes which you have to throw money into. So the outsourcing model was envisioned, you hire a company to provide service for you and be your infrastructure. ASPs are the next step in that concept by being your contracted high tech grunt workers. Ergo they've got nothing at all to do with thin clients. It's about out sourcing a service you need for a much lower price than it would cost you to build your own department to provide said service. It's up to you as a business person to have a good contract with your ASP which will make sure your data will be protected if the ASP ends up out of business. I don't feel sorry for people who should have known better in the first place.
No. It's called haveus corpus (have the body, presumably dead) which means in order for you to be prosecuted of a felony charge those prosecuting you need to not only have intent but the actual evidense of your illegal action. A murder case without a body is not a murder case. Because your volumes have specific names doesn't mean crap in court. However if you're running around trading said encrypted volumes with other people and you're suspected of commiting a crime you can be arrested and the encryption keys may be subpoenaed in order for the prosecutors to see if you're guilty of the crime they're charging you with. This itself in unlikely because authorities need a warrant to monitor your communications and make anything they find admisible in court. If all they have is an encrypted volume named kiddie porn with no other evidense to show a judge they're most likely not going to be able to get a warrant. Getting charges to stick when dealing with evidence collected in secret is very tricky for any group of law enforcement. Thats why you always hire an attourney with a good pre-trial record. A good one can get a majority of evidense thrown out of court which destroys the prosecution's case.
Stealth technology is nothing compared to the George Washington project. New US currency has a small magnetic strip embedded in the paper, when thousands or hundreds of thousands of these bills are dropped over a battlefield they act as paper maché radar chaff. The system was actually designed during the 1950s but deemed not expensive enough for development. The US attack bombers of the 21st century will fly hidden behind a screen of paper currency. Go America!
So...I need to get about 75 feet of wire to patch my desktop into my TV? Right. For some fucking reason the local paper here has decided to put CueCat barcodes in the paper now as well as charge me 50 fucking cents for the daily edition. They must be itching for money. So I have to drag the paper over to my PC and fumble around with a CueCat to try to scan a barcode? When will DigitalConvergence get the fucking clue that the keyboard and mouse are pretty decent ways to interact with a computer from meatspace. Another damn dumb gimmick. If you want people to visit your website after seeing your commercial put subliminal hypnotic suggestions in it.
Son/daughter's asses.
Wait a tick, how many stupid people can you think of that wield alot of power? I can name several off the top of my head. I was pointing out the fact so many fools do read slashdot (or have their mom's read it to their illiterate asses) means the previous post was poorly thought out. Slashdot ends up causing alot of email floods, especially when they post something inflamatory due to Hemos and timothy never checking out the shit they post. Which is why I brought up the UK site article. I can't believe that got fucking posted. There was practically no editorial at all. If it had been "Linux users jump the gun, again" and linked to the article it might have been a little more apropo. I think what slashdot needs most is a hooked on phonics slashbox for those that have trouble.
Uh...what about the article a little bit ago about the UK site requiring IE and Windows? Only like 10 people actually went to the site and even fewer went to the articles linked to about the site by the slashdot post. Everyone started bitching about Microsoft and IE. What the fuck. Do you not read slashdot or something?
How come you fucking jackasses are whining about things in the article's fucking disclaimer? C|Net decided to do a fun little test with a very macroscopic scope and of source slashdot whines either one way or the other. Not everything requires SPEC benchmarks and extensive testing. What do most people really care about anyways? It isn't minute differences in a fucking floating point benchmark, or whether you can use some 5$ soundcard under Windows 2000. Fuck the 5$ soud card in fact I hope it blows out your fucking speakers. News for nerds indeed. I'm going to get back to SPEC benching my Furbies against my Intellivision and Apple][e so I can post the results for slashdot to bitch about.
I think John's pretty much hit the concept on the head of dial-up. People here are often the ones in the .0001% of people with decent broadband connections so you can apt-get and feel like a l33t hax0r d00d. Slashdot is far from being represenative of anything but slashdot. AOL has roughly 20% of the online eyes in America and most of those eyes are looking at the internet through John's 34Kbps goggles. The other top dogs in the ISP space are also serving users with slow fucking connections. People have been pointing out that the broadband user base is growing and dial-up ISPs have gone out of business or been bought out. Well ISPs get bought out real quick because large ISPs can afford it and want the hardware and user base. Broadband is increasing because availability is increasing. People have been waiting months of years for broadband access and are finally getting it. We are NOT in the boardband era and John's correct in saying 34Kbps ought to be considered a standard connection rate.
Okay I see your point then. It's a shame SETI hasn't taken a que from d.net and done a better job handling multi-processor boxes. A majority of the clients they have running are Win32 (which usually means Win9x/Me) but if they launched a number cruncher for every processor or ran two crunchers on the same WU the bigger boxes some people run S@H on would benefit alot.
Yeah, there are lots of ways you can "benchmark" a particular processor or operating system. The problem is not all OSes or processors are made the same. I'm not defending Apple or Intel or AMD either. If this was an AMD/Intel benchmark the fact a 733 was headed against a 1200 would get tons of people's panties in an uproar. Secondly, you know marketing is bullshit. How many PC makers tout their boxes as the fastest PC you can buy or some shit. Even between individual chips, Intel claims they're the fastest and so does AMD. Benchmarks are not magic bullets, they're merely magic bullet theories.
This benchmark in particular is bullshit. What should be looked at is peak work done per clock and total price per clock if you want a price comparrison test. Or work per watt or maybe even cool facter per work/clock. PPC chips have an advantage of not needed an instruction decoder and a larger register space. You can do a bunch of LOAD operations on the same clock so more operations are running on the next clock than with x86 based systems. On the otherhand x86 processors have the advantage of a higher clock speed which begins to negate the lower register space. In general, anything you compile with gcc is going to suck ass. Do you REALLY think Apple uses gcc? Goddamn they use Motorola's compiler! They give you gcc because they don't want to pay the licensing fees on the fucking thing for every copy of OS X they sell. Motorola's compiler is oodles better than gcc ever will be, ever. In the benchmark's preamble he says "well I don't use Photoshop" well goddammit the Apple statement just became invalid as did his entire premise. Since he wasn't benchmarking Photoshop 6 he ought to have been using a 450MHz P3 and Athlon rather than shit that is OBVIOUSLY going to be faster in mere clock speed. If you can't tell from the tests the compilations have alot to do with moving data between the processor and memory. The G3 in the iMac and G4 are already at a disadvantage due to their bus speeds while the Athlon gets to chug along on its EV6 derivitive bus. Testing the processor ought to involve shit that can be held entirely in the chip's cache (which can be considered part of the chip because it afterall it's memory cache). Then the chip's FSB speed and register space size become important. You can then get a good measure of how much the processor is doing on every clock and how many clocks it needs to get a particular job done. At this point you've got a real test. Work done per clock or per second or watts used per work cycle or something. Here is where you say X processor is more better than Y processor. This is why SPEC tests cost so much money. They have LOTS of different tests that test things in different ways and they still don't show a true measure of real world performance.
In the real work you might be running Final Cut Pro or Photoshop 6 in which case you damn well better have a system they are optimized on (yes I'm aware FCP is only available on Macs). If your real world workload involves compiling go with the system that works best for your particular task at hand. This dude did a compiling benchmark test, he has benchmarked COMPILERS compiling binaries for whatever. Everyone here's been arguing "well such and such is faster than such and such" fuck that. This is not a x86 vs. PPC test or something. This is somebody feeling righteous because they keep getting reeled in by marketing quotes and feel like they've been lied to. Use what works not what a marketing department says works.
A dual P2-450 running SETI doesn't get you crap because SETI doesn't launch a number cruncher for each processor like d.net does. Unless you're running two different SETI clients in different directories or something your second processor is running idle. I average 10 hours/WU on my dual P3-500 which only half of the processing power gets used. With d.net on the other hand I get 100 utilization.
So the only way for slashdot weenies not to whine and cry and bitch is for people to make degrogotory statements about Microsoft/Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer? If Tito would have said "NASA sure does give their astronauts the monkey jobs up on the ISS, oh yeah Linux rules!" everyone here would be applauding him. Everyone is defending NASA on the grounds that the ISS isn't finished or that he has a grduge. You've missed the point. Tito is 100% correct. We spend 10,000 dollars a pound to send people into space (on the shuttle, and yes I realize a Titan or Atlas rocket is cheaper, fuck you) and have them press buttons and practice their radio lingo. The question I haven't seen posed or answered is why do we do that.
What was the point of the Gemini project? To learn how to operate in space because we were heading to the moon. The Gemini astronauts learned how to dock with stuff and live for a couple days in a space capsule. They collected enough information to allow the Apollo engineers to devise a program that would get a couple of guys from sea level on Earth to the Sea of Tranquility on the moon. After Apollo everyone figured we'd be living on the moon by now with plans to head to Mars. Then Skylab ended up crashing into Australia and then almost a decade later Challenger turned into a fireball. A space platform where we're supposed to learn to live in space and a method for getting us into space cheaply both end up back on Earth. NASA has had to start all over.
Freedom (the original ISS idea without the international aspect) was supposed to be our Mars/Moon testbed. It would be coupled with a shuttle replacement and be a nice local platform to attach experiment modules to before we started any harcore progra mto get o Mars. Then for political reasons NASA has to get buddy buddy with the rest of the space faring community and join in the the ISS. Now most of our efforts human exploration efforts are being retarded because the ISS is costing way too much fucking money and too many aspects of it are being controlled by outside interests.
Alright well OLEDs consume very little power. Normal LEDs consume very little power even for increadibly bright ones. An entire OLED display (lets say 1024x768 pixels) would consume about a quarter of the wattage as a backlit LCD display of the same size. OLEDs can operate on a very low voltage and have natural capatance which the LCD polarizing switches in LCD displays don't have. And since you're combining several display elements into a single electrical component (a single OLED colour element of a pixel) you've just saved 75% of your production cost not to mention the fact OLEDs can be deposited on the glass (or plastic) surface very easily means they're going to be even cheaper. I don't doubt we'll see 120+ DPI OLED displays in the next two or three years. IBM's 200 DPI LCD screens they made for LLNL will be given a serious technological run for their money. It isn't too much to hope to see OLED displays with print quality resolutions within five years.
Jesus fucking Christ man are you completely daft? Organic Light Emitting Diode. Hmm I wonder what in the world THAT PHRASE COULD POSSIBLY FUCKING MEAN? Maybe it is a diode made out of organic material (carbon containing, don't be a jackass and construe organic as living tissue). Well yeah I think that's it. Think of a more resolution versions of those traveling LED signs you see at airports or used as stock tickers. OLED displays are basically the same as those except they have three LEDs per pixel and alot more pixels per inch. This means no backlighting for these displays.
ICANN will remain legitimate as long as the Dept. of Commerce lets them stay legitimate. .whatever and everyone wants a .whatever address. We're sort of fucked as long as the DoC keeps rolling over to the whims of ICANN (which they created anyways). In a nutshell blame the DoC, they're letting this turn into a huge mess and it's going to shove a giant stick up the ass of all internet related commerce in the future.
It's fairly easy to see we need some sort of central body or group to designate and dispense internet namespaces. The e-economy worth billions now and is supposed to be worth more billions in years to come wouldn't exactly work if amazon.com only pointed to the correct IP address on some but not all NS roots. But how exactly do you go about that? ICANN is fucking up because they're charging for TLD proposals and letting the proposers run said proposals. This means registrarX is fucked if registrarY gets control of
Ever use Gnutella before the advent of the new routing system? Thats exactly why.
You dont have to have a Windows or Mac machine, you need a browser that supports the shit the site uses. If your browser doesn't support Equifax you can't use Equifax dipshit. The site worked fine for me with several browsers.
So what exactly doesn't work when trying to go to this site? It's working just great on OmniPage 4 on MacOS X. It seems like if you read the damn page it tells you what you need in order to use the fucking page. You need a relatively modern browser with support for 128bit SSL and the ability to use cookies. Goddamn jackasses got their panties in a tiff because they're illiterate fuckos. The part that doesn't work with some browsers is if you want to use ChamberSign or Equifax certificates to log onto the website. Anyone with a working browser can register and enter their name and PIN to log on. God damn it how did this get posted unmodified? Did nobody go and check if this was even true? At least one guy did (I don't remember the CID) and he even found spoofing iCab to report itself as IE got the site to work just fine. I bet 99% of the posts didn't even try going to the site.
Stop crying about antimatter for chrissakes. It would take beaucoup amounts of it to turn into some sort of continent destroying weapon. And a funny thing about particle annihilations is THE VAST AMOUNT OF GAMMA RADIATION RELEASED which basically ionizes just about everything. High energy gamma rays can cause stuff to start transmuting, one caveat of antimatter ractions setting off lithium hydride fuel pellets is the lead shielding slowly starts transmuting into gold after a while and you also end up with fucked up equipment do to the Cherenkov effect. So anyways, antimatter bombs would cost upwards of a hundred billion dollars to produce just one. Even if AM production increased tenfold the price wouldn't drop too much. So a hundred billion dollars for a 40Mt bomb thats not quite as useful as a clean fusion bomb? Yeah right.
Aside from it not being used as a bomb, antimatter is a very good idea for use in spacecraft. It is the only way to get the energy you need for really long distance travel. And of fucking course any long term exploration projects will have AM production facilities in orbit, not because they're afraid of blowing themselves up but because its more efficient to not have to drag a heavy AM containment bottle up through the atmosphere. I think this will probably take around 50 years even if you account for increased levels of technology. The transition manned orbital stations to high tech production facilities on an extra terrestrial body is very large and requires a good deal of infrastructure to be built up. Before you have regular lunar travel you need craft capable of cheap hypersonic flight; this is the first step which gets alot of mass out of the signifigant part of the atmosphere. Once we're regularly scheduling flights from New York to Tokyo that take under two hours we'll have the capability to start building permenant and industrialized lunar bases. This is still 15 to 20 years off. We're well on our way but it will take time because there is little driving need to enter space in any hardcore fashion; political pressure got us to the moon. In an era of cooperation in space we'll be hard pressed to launch any crash space development projects in the near future. By the way a Saturn-V rocket carries no typical propellent, merely a pressurized container filled with hot air collected from the general hubub caused over the soviets beating the Americans into space.
It's called time dialation jackass. The closer something gets to the speed of light the more ship relative time dialates compared to Earth relative time. If you were traveling at 99.99999%c to someplace. It would seem to you only a couple years went by but to somebody on Earth LOTS of years would have gone by. Fast clocks run slow.
While some of Rob's analogies are a bit...off, I actually sort of agree with him. If you're going to download a distro's ISO image off their servers you ought to think about passing a few bucks their way. Yes they are corporations but no it isn't like Ford or Chevy asking for donations to improve safety. They are companies developing software they MUST give away. They're also companies you might particularly want to see survive a period of cutbacks and a tough market. Chip in when you download an ISO if you've got an extra ten bucks.
Voyager wasn't such a bad concept, it had the potential to REALLY open up the Star Trek universe by showing a part of the galaxy that had never been explorered by the protagonists. The trouble was in the writing. TNG started off pretty weak, most of the stories felt like rehashes of ideas from the original series. THen season three hits and they've got a much larger budget, cooler looking uniforms and you've got Mike Piller and Ron Moore busting off some badass sci-fi. The end of season three/beginning of season four was some well written sci-fi drama, one of the most often acclaimed. Same with seasons 4/5. DS9 had Ira Steven Behr who practically single handedly fleshed out some of the most memorable characters from the series namely Quark and the Grand Nagus. Voyager started strong with some good writing by Piller but slowly Bannon Braga seemed to end up doing alot of writing and Rick Berman just sat back and let teleplays cross his desk that involved little character development or plot. There was no analog for Best of Both Worlds or Redemption in all the years Voyager aired. It was pretty sad because they had had some excellent writing, Braga was the co-writer of All Good Things for chrissakes. I was disappointed that Voyager couldn't seem to retain decent writing but I think alot of that had to do with Rick Berman being in charge of it all. He just let crap get produced. Then again maybe he was as odds with Paramount because they were shelling out beacoup dollars for a show that didn't really compete against any of the other networks offerings. Anyways, I hope Paramount follows the Fox gameplan and releases the series' seasons on DVD (as been done with x-files).