I'll disagree with you on a couple points, for starters Transmeta isn't exactly a brand new start-up as I think you are implying. They have been around Silicon Valley for about 5-6 years. Second of all I think you're wrong about no one knowing about the Crusoe, the day it was released I saw half a dozen news reports about it and tons of stuff all over ZDTV. ZDTV does have quite a few viewers all over the country and they all talk to their friends about things they see on the network so I would imagine by now plenty of people realize there is something other than Intel in the chip market. Alot more people now are finding themselves keeping up with technostuff. While this adds a whole bunch of new "Me too!" type users it also lends to increasing mindshare of technostuff.
While I commend the engineers who designed the ISS i truely feel bad about the blueprints needing a political stamp on them. Some of the reasons for building the ISS is as a stepping stone to the moon and Mars. This is nice in theory but remember the ISS will be orbiting a few hundred scant miles while the moon is a couple hundred thousand miles and Mars is half an AU. In relative terms the ISS is not a stepping stone, rather a pepple displaced by your foot. Besides not being very effective as a stepping stone to the solar system it also has too low of an orbit to get really useful information about longterm spaceflight. Namely the station orbits under the Van Allen radiation belts which would provide a good training area for both design engineers and the crew of the station. High energy particles are indeed dangerous but they can be worked around. If the station were put into a geosynchronous orbit it would require alot of energy to get it up there but the power to keep it up there would be negligible whereas the low orbit needs almost constant correction. A geosynchronous orbit IIRC is in the realm of 12000 or so miles which would bring it just that much closer to the moon. I figure the station can be built in low orbit which requires smaller amounts of energy to reach and then boosted into a much higher orbit using ion propulsion or some such means. The shuttle might even be equiped with ion thrusters of its own to use once it reaches low orbit to get up to the station. Another benefit of a geosynchronous orbit would be the ability to fit the ISS with measurement and communication gear so it could doubly serve as a space platform and communication/weahter satillite. NASA could make some extra revenue by renting out a spare pylon to rent out as an independant commsat or such. The real problem with the ISS in my estimation is it is trying to spread itself too thin, I personally think a handful of smaller stations ought to have been built a la Skylab to perform a specific function. One for 0g medical research, one for industrial research (both in mid-level orbits) and then a proof of concept "deep space" research station in a higher orbit to test design and crew stresses in more hostile parts of space. Dedicated task stations would have the ability to be upgraded but wouldn't need to cram everything together giving the crew much more living space so they didn't end up going crazy like the people on Mir.
I'm so sick of seeing everyone carp about Macs not being upgradable. Ohhh you built your own PC you must be a technical genius...oh yeah you plugged some hardware together and stuck in a boot floppy, big damn whoop. One of the beauties of the entire Power Macintosh line was its PCI bus rather than the older and less cool NuBus. Besides the PCI bus which was compliant to all PCI standards was the face that the system critical stuff resided on a piece of silicon called the logic board. Something companies like Newer and Sonnet have done is make what they call "upgrade cards". In a real simple operation one can take an aging Power Mac and turn it into a pretty fast G3 or G4 system just be replacing the old logic board with a new one. The enhanced systems use the old memory stuff but the speeds are comparable to newer systems. For a total of about 800$ you can buy an older 9600 Power Mac on ebay and install a brand new G3/4 board on it. Most of the other parts are replacable since they use a SCSI or ATA bus. I can even put USB ports in said 9600 system. I used to think Macs weren't upgradable until I actually looked into it. Hell I could get said 9600 system to run Windows 98, 2000, or even x86 Linux. This post is a bit off topic but so are the "I'll never touch a Mac" people. I think the Appleseed project gives alot of credibility to the claims Apple and Motorola have made about the G4. Next they should make one of these clusters using iBooks, a room full of those buggers would be eerie.
An UltraSPARC workstation is by definition NOT a PC. PC stands for personal computer, an inexpensive low power system, any UltraSPARC is automatically not low price or underpowered. As for Macs, the entire Power Mac family is basically PC compatible. The main different between a Compaq PC and a Mac is the difference in the chipset. Current Macs use IDE, SDRAM, PCI, AGP and several dozen other acronyms. It is true that before the Power Mac Apple used NuBus and such proprietary periphrial connections but not anymore and even then its hard drives and CD-ROMs were SCSI. I don't know how much more open Apple could be on its systems. A PCI card will work in both a Mac and PC if you have the appropriate drivers for the device. Its similar to the complain many Linux users have about vendors, they only support Windows. Older Power Macs even had an entire PC subsystem in them so you could run Windows from within MacOS, namely the Power Mac 7300/180 PC compatible which had a Pentium 166 along with its PPC 604e. It could run PC apps on the native x86 ISA inside MacOS. You can still buy PCI add-in cards with an x86 subsystem for running Virtual PC. Read up before you say Macs are 100% proprietary.
Electronic toys are cool until you start to see them proliferate. Take pagers for example. They used to be owned by drug dealers and doctors, not 10 year olds get them from their parents. Every time I hear someone's pager go off I want to take it off their pocket and stomp it to pieces. Nothing personal of course, I'm just tired of everyone's day being interupted by someone else's pager. If it's on vibrate I don't give a crap since it bothers no one else. If everyone has a PDA or cell phone or what have you no one will ever relax again. All these new wireless technologies are what I like to call DistractoWare. You have to give a large portion of your attention to these sorts of devices and by doing so distracting yourself from doing anything else. I can drive and listen to the radio or a CD but can I drive and watch TV or read my email? I doubt you'd like to be near me on the road if I was trying. People are surrounded at work and at home with electronics and now want to have them everywhere. What do all the PDAs and cell phones really do for people? It's leading to a society ruled by the transistor rather than by the people living in the society.
Ever heard of Jini? You sound like our friend Scott. Personally I wouldn't want my programs on some globally distributed network thats completely unsecure. Why should I have to buy dozens of digital toys just to have a powerful computer in my house? In such a world where every device is part of the system an operating system as we know it would be a major kludge so creating a "powerful open source operating system" would just serve to slow down my cell phone.
The author gets it right when he says we need a new business model if we're going to distribute "intellectual property". I'm suprised record companies havent devised some sort of NDA on their recording media that says you won't make copies of the product. The kicker with intellectual property is that it's physical production costs are insanely low due to our culture's industrialization. A CD which stores digital copies of a dozen songs only costs 2$ at the very most to produce. This is about the same for a DVD, a book, software program, ad infinitum. The problem with these media is that they are heavy and bulky and require gasoline, jet fuel, manpower, paper, plastic, ad infinitum to transfer to your convienience which adds to the cost of these things. The second drawback from a distrobution point of view is the fact they are physical object which take up space. Digital media on the otherhand is all virtual, it takes up space per se but seeing as a fully stocked library can fit onto a DVD disc the space restrictions aren't quite as restrictive. Lets try a little equation real quick. Say a CD costs $13.95 and has 14 songs on it for a total of 570 megabytes of music. The CD obviously costs $13.95, not including the price of gas to drive to buy it. Now lets calculate how much it would cost to download this album in MP3 format. 570 megabytes at 10:1 compression equals 57 megabytes. Current hard drives go for about 2 per megabyte which is roughly $1.14 worth of storage space. Now lets say you use a DSL connection to download this album. Your DSL service is from your phone company so it costs you about $39 per month and you can download at 512Kbps on average. Thats roughly 52KBps depending how you calculate it. SOme fancy arithmatic gets me about 18 minutes to download the album. Thats not even one penny (monthly connection fee devided by minutes in a month) worth of bandwidth on your DSL. So at most an album costs you $2 to download and keep. Why are recording companies so pissed off over MP3s? It isn't the piracy excuse, they are afraid of people having their own cheap distribution method of music that the record companies don't own. Every CD you buy gives a record company a chunk of chanrge, one larger than the artist gets for their troubles. New CDs are sold at sale prices, but older albums cost you a healthy bit more, giving the record company a larger chunk of change for something they stamped out months of years prior. I like the one guy's idea about people bidding in escrow for someone to release software, music, movies and such and then have them freely avilable. Another idea that would work fine is record companies offering really high speed distrobution channels that are fee-based. What a coincidence, HDTV is on the way in America which will offer nice sized data pipes into many people's houses. What if record and movie companies invested along with traditional cable companies to develop these networks. Your monthly payment would go in part to the record/movie companies to download high quality music and video for use in all sorts of consumer devices and on your trusty desktop computer. What makes this enticing to companies? The data pipe downstream is huge but the upstream pipe is tiny. People can share files if they want but it won't be nearly as fast as getting it strait from the fibre/coax/dish/radio.
Apple change processors now and waste money "porting" Darwin to other chips? Mr.AlternaOS programmer can download the source and port it to his favourite ISA. I can't see Apple developing on more than one ISA at a time, just like the other software+hardware vendors like Sun, IBM, and SGI (does SGI count anymore?). If you're having wet dreams about OS X on x86 just look back before the Mac was released, the Apple camp was divided between the Mac developers and the guys working on the older Apple stuff and caused alot of problems within the company, shortly thereafter Jobs got handed a pink slip. I don't put very much faith into the Mac rumours sites, most of their rumours are started by people that WISH something would happen and it picks up from there. Ford doesn't make Chevys, why would Apple make PCs?
is a neat toy but is basically a rework of the engine inside Canoma (produced by MetaCreations). It takes what would be a 2D image and interpolates the dimensions by calculating shadows and lightpaths and such. You can use Canoma to make a 3D rendering of your living room from a photograph. I think they made it a little cooler by taking multiple pictures of something and combining all of them to do real good modeling. I'm sure a printer could be developed to print images holographically but I'm not sure if this is really viable for 3D apps until a good 3D display is developed.
the 6.2Gflops is not every day program operations, it's specialty float instructions like AltiVec and stuff. I can't tout the speed of 3DNow!, MMX, AltiVec and claim those speeds as speeds of the processor. I would suspect this huge number of operations with the PSX2 is do to using 32 and 64 bit instructions on 128bit chips getting twice to four times the number of operations they could get using 128bit instructions. I'm not saying this is a bad thing either, it's a very good idea and efficient use of the processor. I do however remain skeptical the PSX@ will replace the PC. We are definitely moving in the direction of thinner systems that use a single application (the browser) to do multiple jobs by using plugins and Java applets but I don't think Sony understands the PC industry yet. Processing power might grab some eyeballs but it probably won't grab developers and SOHO users. This is due to SOHO people wanting to work quickly and not have to mess with the hardware, Gateway and Dell cater to this desire well. I don't think a serious SOHO user is going to use a box with all of the hardware connected using FireWire connections, the fact wireless networking devices are becoming popular are a testament to this. Will the Sony web browser get the same kind of support that IE and Netscape have had? Just look at AOL's browser, for a number of years you wouldn't view jack shoes with it. In general I don't think America is really set up for thin computers in the mainstream. The main thing is storage, Jonny User likes to download his mp3s and porn and keep them on his 34GB hard drive, I think he might be really bothered if he tried to keep these sorts of files on a networked drive for privacy/legal/personal reasons. Sure he can buy a 4GB FireWire drive to save all his stuff on but the added cost of periphrials is inversely related to your savings from not buying a fully loaded PC. Until it is common to see a networked RAID with a 1Mb+ connection to the internet sitting in the closet with a dozen little wireless devices networked to it in people's homes you probably won't see many thin computer systems raiding the market.
The development system is WinCE, not Linux. A Linux port is conceivable but probably not very likely until someone comes up with a much better GUI et all than X. Your Dreamcast Linux distro would need lots of customized tools considering you don't have a good deal of internal hardware like AnyOld PC would.
Conservation may or may not work inside a sigularity or it may be transmitted to another point in this usniverse or another one. Since (luckily) we don't have any close singularities we haven't been able to study what happens inside them. It's very possible these photons are slowed down to an almost absolute stand-still (like in a Bose-Einstein condensate) and are actually accepted into the singularity as more mass. The energy of the photon increasing the energy of the singularity but the increased mass of the singularity counterbalances the energy inserted into the singularity. That would make it theoretically possible for conservation to work within a singularity. Singularities don't suck in light like a vacuum, they warp space-time and bend the path of the light into infinite vortexes. Light whose path isn't bent 100% would be sent off in on a tangent of the event horizon if it didn't smack through the matter swirling in the event horizon.
Where does this general theory that all corporate managers are morons? Just because corporate != IT doesn't mean they don't understand the law. If one IT guy tells his bossman that this legistlation will enable a separate corporation to have control of the company's infrastructure the bossman will have a piss attack. Large companies that aren't computer centric will oppose this bill if they think it has the chance of passing. If the company is large enough to have a legal department it probably has already lobbied against it.
Redhat and other Linux distros charge money for their software package yet it is open source AND freely available for download. Last I checked Redhat was doing pretty well in the market. You need to go to business school.
The kernel is Mach-ish as in based on the 2.5 Mach kernel with some modifications. The BSD comes in where they added BSD API calls to the kernel so you could write and run BSD apps on the Darwin kernel.
I could afford wireless networking cards for all my boxes. *looks under his desk at all the cat-5 waiting to get tangled in the wheels of his chair* Oh boy don't I. I've wired half my house with cat-5. Wireless networking would be really cool especially since I could hang out on the back padio on my laptop reading/. but it is way too expensive for me. Enough cat-5 to wire my house and 4 NICs == 50$. One wireless networking card == 50$. It would be kinda nice having an AirPort hooked to my cable with all my other comps hooked wirelessly to it. So-called broadband available to the you and mes of America wouldn't max out 802.11a's bandwidth so it would be great for my house.
about the vector animations of windows and such and then I remembered what systems OS X would work on, the G3s. Well I surmise (hope) that the vectors will be handled by the graphic subsystem on said Mac. This would be really efficient considering the graphic subsystems on most computers are idle unless you're doing 3D work. Maybe that is why Quartz is grouped together with Quicktime and OpenGL in the layers diagram. Using the video card seems like a really good idea to me since you wouldn't be wasting CPU cycles on vector translations. IIRC all G3 models have a 3D graphics card but previous 604e models didn't necassarily have them. This also might explain why Apple had said OS X simply will not work on pre-G3 systems. Someone who knows of a 604e based system (the 9600s maybe?) with a dedicated graphics board can correct me.
to play would with 4.0, I've been toying with FBSD since 2.something and I really like it. I am disappointed in the people saying FreeBSD is dying and such things because they don't get the same publicity that Linux has been getting. Just because it isn't on ZD-TV every other day doesn't mean anything. It seems to me at least Linux gets the attention because it is invading the desktop which is traditionally Microsoft territory. FreeBSD chugs along on servers in the background doing what it does well. You can sell Linux to make a million dollars or you can USE FreeBSD to make a million dollars.
made a good point in this DeCSS corporate clusterfuck. The big deal here isn't millions of people pirating DVDs robbing the poor MPAA of their precious money. The big deal is the MPAA can no longer rape DVD decoder manufacturers on licensing fees. A handful of kids in a dorm pirating movies on their T3 isn't nearly as damaging as a handful of kids in a dorm room building a DVD player that costs 100$ and the MPAA not seeing a dime of that 100. Besides that all the companies that paid the insane licencing fees for decrypt keys are wasting their money, they can now build boxes with no MPAA royalties if they so chose. This is the same thing with the RIAA, piracy is their media facade but their real interest is getting royalties off CD sales. The RIAA doesn't care about current CDs being pirated, they want to get rid of MP3 because it means CDs could end up going the way of the cassette. This is a battle of corporations who are using a facade of piracy to blame some quite innocent programmers for their woes.
Re:Gas Core Nuclear Rocket
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 2
One of the problems of the Orion and the GCNR is you're getting all of your thrust at one time. Humans can only withstand so many Gs of acceleration before they pop. Polluting space with nuclear waste in pretty much a non-issue, take a relaxing flight through the Van Allen belts if you're worried about polluting space with radiation.
why not use a modified version of MPEG-2 for streaming with Linux. MPEG is good because surrent video cards have hardware support for the format and more of those card vendors are opening specs on their cards. Not only that but the compression is great, it would beat the pants off.rm and.asf movies for streaming purposes. It could be coupled with a streaming server and software encoder available in any flavour you wanted. Such a project would convince big name websites to produce their content in the format so everyone could watch it. Remember, the content people are in it for the eyeballs, not the codecs.
Instead of begging Apple to spend their money giving out source code for the Quicktime binaries, why not offer to BUY it from them. See companies who fail to see the glory of Stallman work in an economy called capitalism. You PAY for things and receive them. I paid 30$ for the pro version of Quicktime and I didn't end up in the poor house. If you want a Linux port (for the various ISAs) ask Apple if you can pay them to make it for you. Corporations work on the concept called profit, it is not very profitable to spend millions of dollars over ten years developing a multimedia suite only to give out the source code to it because people signed a petition. It would be more profitable if a company like Red Hat or SuSE asked Apple nicely if they could develop a Quicktime 4 compatible player under an NDA. That would be profitable for Apple and for Linux users.
Unless you were at Berkeley way back when programming the original kernel you probably haven't helped Apple much with their system. BSD != open source.
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I'll disagree with you on a couple points, for starters Transmeta isn't exactly a brand new start-up as I think you are implying. They have been around Silicon Valley for about 5-6 years. Second of all I think you're wrong about no one knowing about the Crusoe, the day it was released I saw half a dozen news reports about it and tons of stuff all over ZDTV. ZDTV does have quite a few viewers all over the country and they all talk to their friends about things they see on the network so I would imagine by now plenty of people realize there is something other than Intel in the chip market. Alot more people now are finding themselves keeping up with technostuff. While this adds a whole bunch of new "Me too!" type users it also lends to increasing mindshare of technostuff.
Oops that was supposed to be 22000 miles for a geosynchronous orbit.
While I commend the engineers who designed the ISS i truely feel bad about the blueprints needing a political stamp on them. Some of the reasons for building the ISS is as a stepping stone to the moon and Mars. This is nice in theory but remember the ISS will be orbiting a few hundred scant miles while the moon is a couple hundred thousand miles and Mars is half an AU. In relative terms the ISS is not a stepping stone, rather a pepple displaced by your foot. Besides not being very effective as a stepping stone to the solar system it also has too low of an orbit to get really useful information about longterm spaceflight. Namely the station orbits under the Van Allen radiation belts which would provide a good training area for both design engineers and the crew of the station. High energy particles are indeed dangerous but they can be worked around. If the station were put into a geosynchronous orbit it would require alot of energy to get it up there but the power to keep it up there would be negligible whereas the low orbit needs almost constant correction. A geosynchronous orbit IIRC is in the realm of 12000 or so miles which would bring it just that much closer to the moon. I figure the station can be built in low orbit which requires smaller amounts of energy to reach and then boosted into a much higher orbit using ion propulsion or some such means. The shuttle might even be equiped with ion thrusters of its own to use once it reaches low orbit to get up to the station. Another benefit of a geosynchronous orbit would be the ability to fit the ISS with measurement and communication gear so it could doubly serve as a space platform and communication/weahter satillite. NASA could make some extra revenue by renting out a spare pylon to rent out as an independant commsat or such. The real problem with the ISS in my estimation is it is trying to spread itself too thin, I personally think a handful of smaller stations ought to have been built a la Skylab to perform a specific function. One for 0g medical research, one for industrial research (both in mid-level orbits) and then a proof of concept "deep space" research station in a higher orbit to test design and crew stresses in more hostile parts of space. Dedicated task stations would have the ability to be upgraded but wouldn't need to cram everything together giving the crew much more living space so they didn't end up going crazy like the people on Mir.
I'm so sick of seeing everyone carp about Macs not being upgradable. Ohhh you built your own PC you must be a technical genius...oh yeah you plugged some hardware together and stuck in a boot floppy, big damn whoop. One of the beauties of the entire Power Macintosh line was its PCI bus rather than the older and less cool NuBus. Besides the PCI bus which was compliant to all PCI standards was the face that the system critical stuff resided on a piece of silicon called the logic board. Something companies like Newer and Sonnet have done is make what they call "upgrade cards". In a real simple operation one can take an aging Power Mac and turn it into a pretty fast G3 or G4 system just be replacing the old logic board with a new one. The enhanced systems use the old memory stuff but the speeds are comparable to newer systems. For a total of about 800$ you can buy an older 9600 Power Mac on ebay and install a brand new G3/4 board on it. Most of the other parts are replacable since they use a SCSI or ATA bus. I can even put USB ports in said 9600 system. I used to think Macs weren't upgradable until I actually looked into it. Hell I could get said 9600 system to run Windows 98, 2000, or even x86 Linux. This post is a bit off topic but so are the "I'll never touch a Mac" people. I think the Appleseed project gives alot of credibility to the claims Apple and Motorola have made about the G4. Next they should make one of these clusters using iBooks, a room full of those buggers would be eerie.
An UltraSPARC workstation is by definition NOT a PC. PC stands for personal computer, an inexpensive low power system, any UltraSPARC is automatically not low price or underpowered. As for Macs, the entire Power Mac family is basically PC compatible. The main different between a Compaq PC and a Mac is the difference in the chipset. Current Macs use IDE, SDRAM, PCI, AGP and several dozen other acronyms. It is true that before the Power Mac Apple used NuBus and such proprietary periphrial connections but not anymore and even then its hard drives and CD-ROMs were SCSI. I don't know how much more open Apple could be on its systems. A PCI card will work in both a Mac and PC if you have the appropriate drivers for the device. Its similar to the complain many Linux users have about vendors, they only support Windows. Older Power Macs even had an entire PC subsystem in them so you could run Windows from within MacOS, namely the Power Mac 7300/180 PC compatible which had a Pentium 166 along with its PPC 604e. It could run PC apps on the native x86 ISA inside MacOS. You can still buy PCI add-in cards with an x86 subsystem for running Virtual PC. Read up before you say Macs are 100% proprietary.
Electronic toys are cool until you start to see them proliferate. Take pagers for example. They used to be owned by drug dealers and doctors, not 10 year olds get them from their parents. Every time I hear someone's pager go off I want to take it off their pocket and stomp it to pieces. Nothing personal of course, I'm just tired of everyone's day being interupted by someone else's pager. If it's on vibrate I don't give a crap since it bothers no one else. If everyone has a PDA or cell phone or what have you no one will ever relax again. All these new wireless technologies are what I like to call DistractoWare. You have to give a large portion of your attention to these sorts of devices and by doing so distracting yourself from doing anything else. I can drive and listen to the radio or a CD but can I drive and watch TV or read my email? I doubt you'd like to be near me on the road if I was trying. People are surrounded at work and at home with electronics and now want to have them everywhere. What do all the PDAs and cell phones really do for people? It's leading to a society ruled by the transistor rather than by the people living in the society.
The "dark" side of the moon isn't dark at all, we just don't see it from here. Any besides why criminal tools and weapons advance there?
Ever heard of Jini? You sound like our friend Scott. Personally I wouldn't want my programs on some globally distributed network thats completely unsecure. Why should I have to buy dozens of digital toys just to have a powerful computer in my house? In such a world where every device is part of the system an operating system as we know it would be a major kludge so creating a "powerful open source operating system" would just serve to slow down my cell phone.
The author gets it right when he says we need a new business model if we're going to distribute "intellectual property". I'm suprised record companies havent devised some sort of NDA on their recording media that says you won't make copies of the product. The kicker with intellectual property is that it's physical production costs are insanely low due to our culture's industrialization. A CD which stores digital copies of a dozen songs only costs 2$ at the very most to produce. This is about the same for a DVD, a book, software program, ad infinitum. The problem with these media is that they are heavy and bulky and require gasoline, jet fuel, manpower, paper, plastic, ad infinitum to transfer to your convienience which adds to the cost of these things. The second drawback from a distrobution point of view is the fact they are physical object which take up space. Digital media on the otherhand is all virtual, it takes up space per se but seeing as a fully stocked library can fit onto a DVD disc the space restrictions aren't quite as restrictive. Lets try a little equation real quick. Say a CD costs $13.95 and has 14 songs on it for a total of 570 megabytes of music. The CD obviously costs $13.95, not including the price of gas to drive to buy it. Now lets calculate how much it would cost to download this album in MP3 format. 570 megabytes at 10:1 compression equals 57 megabytes. Current hard drives go for about 2 per megabyte which is roughly $1.14 worth of storage space. Now lets say you use a DSL connection to download this album. Your DSL service is from your phone company so it costs you about $39 per month and you can download at 512Kbps on average. Thats roughly 52KBps depending how you calculate it. SOme fancy arithmatic gets me about 18 minutes to download the album. Thats not even one penny (monthly connection fee devided by minutes in a month) worth of bandwidth on your DSL. So at most an album costs you $2 to download and keep. Why are recording companies so pissed off over MP3s? It isn't the piracy excuse, they are afraid of people having their own cheap distribution method of music that the record companies don't own. Every CD you buy gives a record company a chunk of chanrge, one larger than the artist gets for their troubles. New CDs are sold at sale prices, but older albums cost you a healthy bit more, giving the record company a larger chunk of change for something they stamped out months of years prior.
I like the one guy's idea about people bidding in escrow for someone to release software, music, movies and such and then have them freely avilable. Another idea that would work fine is record companies offering really high speed distrobution channels that are fee-based. What a coincidence, HDTV is on the way in America which will offer nice sized data pipes into many people's houses. What if record and movie companies invested along with traditional cable companies to develop these networks. Your monthly payment would go in part to the record/movie companies to download high quality music and video for use in all sorts of consumer devices and on your trusty desktop computer. What makes this enticing to companies? The data pipe downstream is huge but the upstream pipe is tiny. People can share files if they want but it won't be nearly as fast as getting it strait from the fibre/coax/dish/radio.
Apple change processors now and waste money "porting" Darwin to other chips? Mr.AlternaOS programmer can download the source and port it to his favourite ISA. I can't see Apple developing on more than one ISA at a time, just like the other software+hardware vendors like Sun, IBM, and SGI (does SGI count anymore?). If you're having wet dreams about OS X on x86 just look back before the Mac was released, the Apple camp was divided between the Mac developers and the guys working on the older Apple stuff and caused alot of problems within the company, shortly thereafter Jobs got handed a pink slip. I don't put very much faith into the Mac rumours sites, most of their rumours are started by people that WISH something would happen and it picks up from there. Ford doesn't make Chevys, why would Apple make PCs?
is a neat toy but is basically a rework of the engine inside Canoma (produced by MetaCreations). It takes what would be a 2D image and interpolates the dimensions by calculating shadows and lightpaths and such. You can use Canoma to make a 3D rendering of your living room from a photograph. I think they made it a little cooler by taking multiple pictures of something and combining all of them to do real good modeling. I'm sure a printer could be developed to print images holographically but I'm not sure if this is really viable for 3D apps until a good 3D display is developed.
the 6.2Gflops is not every day program operations, it's specialty float instructions like AltiVec and stuff. I can't tout the speed of 3DNow!, MMX, AltiVec and claim those speeds as speeds of the processor. I would suspect this huge number of operations with the PSX2 is do to using 32 and 64 bit instructions on 128bit chips getting twice to four times the number of operations they could get using 128bit instructions. I'm not saying this is a bad thing either, it's a very good idea and efficient use of the processor. I do however remain skeptical the PSX@ will replace the PC. We are definitely moving in the direction of thinner systems that use a single application (the browser) to do multiple jobs by using plugins and Java applets but I don't think Sony understands the PC industry yet. Processing power might grab some eyeballs but it probably won't grab developers and SOHO users. This is due to SOHO people wanting to work quickly and not have to mess with the hardware, Gateway and Dell cater to this desire well. I don't think a serious SOHO user is going to use a box with all of the hardware connected using FireWire connections, the fact wireless networking devices are becoming popular are a testament to this. Will the Sony web browser get the same kind of support that IE and Netscape have had? Just look at AOL's browser, for a number of years you wouldn't view jack shoes with it. In general I don't think America is really set up for thin computers in the mainstream. The main thing is storage, Jonny User likes to download his mp3s and porn and keep them on his 34GB hard drive, I think he might be really bothered if he tried to keep these sorts of files on a networked drive for privacy/legal/personal reasons. Sure he can buy a 4GB FireWire drive to save all his stuff on but the added cost of periphrials is inversely related to your savings from not buying a fully loaded PC. Until it is common to see a networked RAID with a 1Mb+ connection to the internet sitting in the closet with a dozen little wireless devices networked to it in people's homes you probably won't see many thin computer systems raiding the market.
The development system is WinCE, not Linux. A Linux port is conceivable but probably not very likely until someone comes up with a much better GUI et all than X. Your Dreamcast Linux distro would need lots of customized tools considering you don't have a good deal of internal hardware like AnyOld PC would.
Conservation may or may not work inside a sigularity or it may be transmitted to another point in this usniverse or another one. Since (luckily) we don't have any close singularities we haven't been able to study what happens inside them. It's very possible these photons are slowed down to an almost absolute stand-still (like in a Bose-Einstein condensate) and are actually accepted into the singularity as more mass. The energy of the photon increasing the energy of the singularity but the increased mass of the singularity counterbalances the energy inserted into the singularity. That would make it theoretically possible for conservation to work within a singularity. Singularities don't suck in light like a vacuum, they warp space-time and bend the path of the light into infinite vortexes. Light whose path isn't bent 100% would be sent off in on a tangent of the event horizon if it didn't smack through the matter swirling in the event horizon.
Where does this general theory that all corporate managers are morons? Just because corporate != IT doesn't mean they don't understand the law. If one IT guy tells his bossman that this legistlation will enable a separate corporation to have control of the company's infrastructure the bossman will have a piss attack. Large companies that aren't computer centric will oppose this bill if they think it has the chance of passing. If the company is large enough to have a legal department it probably has already lobbied against it.
Redhat and other Linux distros charge money for their software package yet it is open source AND freely available for download. Last I checked Redhat was doing pretty well in the market. You need to go to business school.
The kernel is Mach-ish as in based on the 2.5 Mach kernel with some modifications. The BSD comes in where they added BSD API calls to the kernel so you could write and run BSD apps on the Darwin kernel.
I could afford wireless networking cards for all my boxes. *looks under his desk at all the cat-5 waiting to get tangled in the wheels of his chair* Oh boy don't I. I've wired half my house with cat-5. Wireless networking would be really cool especially since I could hang out on the back padio on my laptop reading /. but it is way too expensive for me. Enough cat-5 to wire my house and 4 NICs == 50$. One wireless networking card == 50$. It would be kinda nice having an AirPort hooked to my cable with all my other comps hooked wirelessly to it. So-called broadband available to the you and mes of America wouldn't max out 802.11a's bandwidth so it would be great for my house.
about the vector animations of windows and such and then I remembered what systems OS X would work on, the G3s. Well I surmise (hope) that the vectors will be handled by the graphic subsystem on said Mac. This would be really efficient considering the graphic subsystems on most computers are idle unless you're doing 3D work. Maybe that is why Quartz is grouped together with Quicktime and OpenGL in the layers diagram. Using the video card seems like a really good idea to me since you wouldn't be wasting CPU cycles on vector translations. IIRC all G3 models have a 3D graphics card but previous 604e models didn't necassarily have them. This also might explain why Apple had said OS X simply will not work on pre-G3 systems. Someone who knows of a 604e based system (the 9600s maybe?) with a dedicated graphics board can correct me.
to play would with 4.0, I've been toying with FBSD since 2.something and I really like it. I am disappointed in the people saying FreeBSD is dying and such things because they don't get the same publicity that Linux has been getting. Just because it isn't on ZD-TV every other day doesn't mean anything. It seems to me at least Linux gets the attention because it is invading the desktop which is traditionally Microsoft territory. FreeBSD chugs along on servers in the background doing what it does well. You can sell Linux to make a million dollars or you can USE FreeBSD to make a million dollars.
made a good point in this DeCSS corporate clusterfuck. The big deal here isn't millions of people pirating DVDs robbing the poor MPAA of their precious money. The big deal is the MPAA can no longer rape DVD decoder manufacturers on licensing fees. A handful of kids in a dorm pirating movies on their T3 isn't nearly as damaging as a handful of kids in a dorm room building a DVD player that costs 100$ and the MPAA not seeing a dime of that 100. Besides that all the companies that paid the insane licencing fees for decrypt keys are wasting their money, they can now build boxes with no MPAA royalties if they so chose. This is the same thing with the RIAA, piracy is their media facade but their real interest is getting royalties off CD sales. The RIAA doesn't care about current CDs being pirated, they want to get rid of MP3 because it means CDs could end up going the way of the cassette. This is a battle of corporations who are using a facade of piracy to blame some quite innocent programmers for their woes.
One of the problems of the Orion and the GCNR is you're getting all of your thrust at one time. Humans can only withstand so many Gs of acceleration before they pop. Polluting space with nuclear waste in pretty much a non-issue, take a relaxing flight through the Van Allen belts if you're worried about polluting space with radiation.
why not use a modified version of MPEG-2 for streaming with Linux. MPEG is good because surrent video cards have hardware support for the format and more of those card vendors are opening specs on their cards. Not only that but the compression is great, it would beat the pants off .rm and .asf movies for streaming purposes. It could be coupled with a streaming server and software encoder available in any flavour you wanted. Such a project would convince big name websites to produce their content in the format so everyone could watch it. Remember, the content people are in it for the eyeballs, not the codecs.
Instead of begging Apple to spend their money giving out source code for the Quicktime binaries, why not offer to BUY it from them. See companies who fail to see the glory of Stallman work in an economy called capitalism. You PAY for things and receive them. I paid 30$ for the pro version of Quicktime and I didn't end up in the poor house. If you want a Linux port (for the various ISAs) ask Apple if you can pay them to make it for you. Corporations work on the concept called profit, it is not very profitable to spend millions of dollars over ten years developing a multimedia suite only to give out the source code to it because people signed a petition. It would be more profitable if a company like Red Hat or SuSE asked Apple nicely if they could develop a Quicktime 4 compatible player under an NDA. That would be profitable for Apple and for Linux users.
Unless you were at Berkeley way back when programming the original kernel you probably haven't helped Apple much with their system. BSD != open source.