Isn't this a lesson we should have learned by now?
They learned the lesson all right, but it wasn't the lesson you wanted. Chip and system vendors learned that products based on draft standards make money, especially if you release yours first. So for every future version of 802.11 there will be a race to the bottom to ship draft hardware as early as possible.
Cell can be manufactured in IBM or Sony/Toshiba fabs. The Xbox 360 processor is manufactured by IBM and Chartered. Broadway is manufactured only by IBM (AFAIK).
BTW, nVidia doesn't fab anything; I think it's all at TSMC. But you're sort of right; if MS owned the chip designs for Xbox they could have consolidated it onto one chip.
Core 2 Extreme (Conroe) is slower and more expensive than the Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest) that Apple uses. Also, Conroe uses Socket 775 and no Apple systems have Socket 775.
Software projcets which include code licensed only under the GPL and code licensed only under the MPL, on the other hand, are not allowed -- because due to the incompatibility between those licenses, such projects are illegal to distribute.
OK, this makes sense. I wish the Debian folks had included such a clear explanation in their announcement.
Do I read that message correctly as saying that MPL-like licenses are not allowed in Debian? If so, did Debian also not allow Mozilla back in the old days when it was MPL/NPL licensed, or is this a new decision?
all "political" ads like this just say "don't understand it, just be against it".
Unfortunately, geeks can be just as bad sometimes. Consider the We Are the Web video that purports to promote net neturality; if those freaks are the Internet, maybe I should just unplug. I doubt people watching the video are going to learn much from it. Or consider the much-lauded anti-trusted computing animation from a few years back that can be summarized as "The Man doesn't trust you, and The Man is going to hijack all your equipment not to trust you either". A pretty shallow analysis if you ask me. But what can you expect? TV commercials are for selling, not deliberating.
I don't think it's possible to make simple comparisons between the broadband market that uses flat-rate pricing and the energy spot market. But these questions are kind of interesting.
If the current Internet network infrastructure provided by the backbone providers and Internet service providers can currently support much higher speeds and data quantities to current customers, then is the act of packet filtering and setting arbitrary low speed and data caps also effectively providing an "idled" service?
If we look at broadband ISPs, their costs are mostly sunk or flat-rate and their customers pay flat-rate pricing, so it would seem that their incentive is to maximize use of their pipes (er, tubes). Static rate caps do not accomplish this because they are non-work-conserving. In theory, a work-conserving scheduling discipline (e.g. fair queueing) would make broadband customers happier at no extra cost to ISPs. (Of course, this is Slashdot, so I'm ignoring a whole host of considerations from technical to psycological.) So, yes, ISPs are idling capacity today, but they don't make any extra money from it, so I'm not going to complain.
Is a tiered Internet service, where content providers would be effectively competing on a similar market to the electricity "spot market", a market based entirely on artificial Scarcity?
I doubt that the "express tubes" in non-neutral networks would be auction-based (as spot markets are); I think it's more likely that ISPs would negotiate simple fixed per-customer-month (like cable channels) or per-bit fees with content/application providers. (This does raise an interesting question about what happens if I pay extra to send my data over the high-priority "express tube" and it's already full; do I get a refund? Or does the ISP say "too bad" (as in Paris Metro Pricing)? Hopefully this stuff will never be built so we will never find out.) But I suspect the essence of your question is: would ISPs degrade their regular service to force stuff onto the more-profitable "express tubes"? Would they idle capacity (non-minimal discrimination) to do so? I fear that the answer is yes; for example, my broadband service is so good (4-5Mbps all the time, from any site) that there's not much point for, say, YouTube to pay extra so their videos get to me faster. The only way to successfully extort money from the content providers is to first artificially slow down the network.
You're missing the marketing angle. If ISP A and ISP B have identical facilities, but A offers "128kbps+1GB burst" and B offers "up to 5Mbps" at the same price, then A will have no customers.
And personally I prefer fair queueing, since it's work-conserving.
But the PC does (support 1080p60), so it's only a matter of time before the players will too. Do you want to replace your $3000 HDTV at that point?
Not gonna happen; the HD DVD and Blu-ray resolutions are set in stone and will not be changed. (When was the last time the DVD spec was upgraded? Never.) I suspect HD will be replaced with something like 4K around 2017, but that will be one big jump, not an incremental step like 1080p60.
Anyway, the Westinghouse HDTVs available today support 1080p60, so I think they're a safe buy.
I'd rather wait for the price to drop on 1080p players. I know that a 60Hz 1080i can play a 24fps 1080p movie. But what if I want to watch a 60fps 1080p movie?
Blu-ray and HD DVD do not allow 1080p60; it would require the decoder chips to be twice as powerful.
This article points out that your computer will probably out-perform any DVD player you can buy
Not in HD, where PC playback is being held back by the DRM morass.
But if it's morally OK to buy from allofmp3 (where the artists get nothing), then isn't it equally OK to just download music from Gnutella/Kazaa/whatever (where the artists also get nothing)?
Flash Player 9 is not just a C program any more. It now has a JIT, and so they have to write a separate JIT backend for every architecture they want to support (although an interpreter might be a good stopgap). They haven't written the x86-64 JIT yet, and it's going to take time for them to do it. Sure, it might have been better if they delayed the release of Flash Player 9 until after they developed x86-64, PPC, ARM, IA-64, MIPS, and Alpha JITs, but it's too late now.
All it needs now is an "auto client" that you just give it the URL of the automatically created website and it will automatically download anything new that arrives (that's a lot of "auto" going on;-) That way I could go around to all of my families computers and set them up with the software and then just leave it alone. Every once in a while they can look in the "Home Videos" folder for new videos....
Slashdot Mirror
DirecTV doesn't even allow third-party-branded boxes any more; I doubt they would allow cable boxes to connect even if it was technically possible.
Isn't this a lesson we should have learned by now?
They learned the lesson all right, but it wasn't the lesson you wanted. Chip and system vendors learned that products based on draft standards make money, especially if you release yours first. So for every future version of 802.11 there will be a race to the bottom to ship draft hardware as early as possible.
You could probably easily emulate Wii on the others, but emulating PS3 on 360 or vice versa would be a nightmare due to the different architectures.
Cell can be manufactured in IBM or Sony/Toshiba fabs.
The Xbox 360 processor is manufactured by IBM and Chartered.
Broadway is manufactured only by IBM (AFAIK).
BTW, nVidia doesn't fab anything; I think it's all at TSMC. But you're sort of right; if MS owned the chip designs for Xbox they could have consolidated it onto one chip.
Most of these chipsets claim to be based on 802.11n draft 1.0, so in theory they should interoperate.
Core 2 Extreme (Conroe) is slower and more expensive than the Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest) that Apple uses. Also, Conroe uses Socket 775 and no Apple systems have Socket 775.
The 965GM chipset (remember, iMacs and minis use mobile parts) doesn't come out until 2007.
Software projcets which include code licensed only under the GPL and code licensed only under the MPL, on the other hand, are not allowed -- because due to the incompatibility between those licenses, such projects are illegal to distribute.
OK, this makes sense. I wish the Debian folks had included such a clear explanation in their announcement.
I understand that, but why is it grounds for a package to be removed from Debian?
If Sun releases their VM under CDDL, it will still be free software.
Do I read that message correctly as saying that MPL-like licenses are not allowed in Debian? If so, did Debian also not allow Mozilla back in the old days when it was MPL/NPL licensed, or is this a new decision?
all "political" ads like this just say "don't understand it, just be against it".
Unfortunately, geeks can be just as bad sometimes. Consider the We Are the Web video that purports to promote net neturality; if those freaks are the Internet, maybe I should just unplug. I doubt people watching the video are going to learn much from it. Or consider the much-lauded anti-trusted computing animation from a few years back that can be summarized as "The Man doesn't trust you, and The Man is going to hijack all your equipment not to trust you either". A pretty shallow analysis if you ask me. But what can you expect? TV commercials are for selling, not deliberating.
I don't think it's possible to make simple comparisons between the broadband market that uses flat-rate pricing and the energy spot market. But these questions are kind of interesting.
If the current Internet network infrastructure provided by the backbone providers and Internet service providers can currently support much higher speeds and data quantities to current customers, then is the act of packet filtering and setting arbitrary low speed and data caps also effectively providing an "idled" service?
If we look at broadband ISPs, their costs are mostly sunk or flat-rate and their customers pay flat-rate pricing, so it would seem that their incentive is to maximize use of their pipes (er, tubes). Static rate caps do not accomplish this because they are non-work-conserving. In theory, a work-conserving scheduling discipline (e.g. fair queueing) would make broadband customers happier at no extra cost to ISPs. (Of course, this is Slashdot, so I'm ignoring a whole host of considerations from technical to psycological.) So, yes, ISPs are idling capacity today, but they don't make any extra money from it, so I'm not going to complain.
Is a tiered Internet service, where content providers would be effectively competing on a similar market to the electricity "spot market", a market based entirely on artificial Scarcity?
I doubt that the "express tubes" in non-neutral networks would be auction-based (as spot markets are); I think it's more likely that ISPs would negotiate simple fixed per-customer-month (like cable channels) or per-bit fees with content/application providers. (This does raise an interesting question about what happens if I pay extra to send my data over the high-priority "express tube" and it's already full; do I get a refund? Or does the ISP say "too bad" (as in Paris Metro Pricing)? Hopefully this stuff will never be built so we will never find out.) But I suspect the essence of your question is: would ISPs degrade their regular service to force stuff onto the more-profitable "express tubes"? Would they idle capacity (non-minimal discrimination) to do so? I fear that the answer is yes; for example, my broadband service is so good (4-5Mbps all the time, from any site) that there's not much point for, say, YouTube to pay extra so their videos get to me faster. The only way to successfully extort money from the content providers is to first artificially slow down the network.
Instead of having idle cores drag the speeds down, maybe active cores should push the speeds up.
Exactly. Intel calls this EPI throttling in one of their recent papers.
You're missing the marketing angle. If ISP A and ISP B have identical facilities, but A offers "128kbps+1GB burst" and B offers "up to 5Mbps" at the same price, then A will have no customers.
And personally I prefer fair queueing, since it's work-conserving.
But the PC does (support 1080p60), so it's only a matter of time before the players will too. Do you want to replace your $3000 HDTV at that point?
Not gonna happen; the HD DVD and Blu-ray resolutions are set in stone and will not be changed. (When was the last time the DVD spec was upgraded? Never.) I suspect HD will be replaced with something like 4K around 2017, but that will be one big jump, not an incremental step like 1080p60.
Anyway, the Westinghouse HDTVs available today support 1080p60, so I think they're a safe buy.
I'd rather wait for the price to drop on 1080p players. I know that a 60Hz 1080i can play a 24fps 1080p movie. But what if I want to watch a 60fps 1080p movie?
Blu-ray and HD DVD do not allow 1080p60; it would require the decoder chips to be twice as powerful.
This article points out that your computer will probably out-perform any DVD player you can buy
Not in HD, where PC playback is being held back by the DRM morass.
But if it's morally OK to buy from allofmp3 (where the artists get nothing), then isn't it equally OK to just download music from Gnutella/Kazaa/whatever (where the artists also get nothing)?
Flash Player 9 is not just a C program any more. It now has a JIT, and so they have to write a separate JIT backend for every architecture they want to support (although an interpreter might be a good stopgap). They haven't written the x86-64 JIT yet, and it's going to take time for them to do it. Sure, it might have been better if they delayed the release of Flash Player 9 until after they developed x86-64, PPC, ARM, IA-64, MIPS, and Alpha JITs, but it's too late now.
Sure, everybody will link to the tool that cracks Windows Media DRM, but when it's time to crack FairPlay people start getting self-righteous.
That's called MAID: Massive Array of Idle Disks.
The nodes are hot-swap in a sense.
If you want to make this hardware into a single filesystem and you want scalable performance, Lustre is pretty much the only choice.
(Someone suggested ZFS, but that would require a single file server that would potentially become a performance bottleneck.)
All it needs now is an "auto client" that you just give it the URL of the automatically created website and it will automatically download anything new that arrives (that's a lot of "auto" going on ;-) That way I could go around to all of my families computers and set them up with the software and then just leave it alone. Every once in a while they can look in the "Home Videos" folder for new videos....
Sounds like Democracy player.
Coral is probably more useful for anti-Slashdotting of regular Web sites. People serving large files are probably already using BitTorrent.