I'm as big of a linux fan as the next guy.. I own two Zaurus PDAs. But, I'm not sure why they are releasing this after so much time. I don't see anything about these PDAs that lead me to believe they will succeed.
- Linux OS - some of us find this a compelling feature. But, the Zaurus's have met that relatively small market already. - Form Factor - it looks rather thick, and not particularly small in any dimension. There are many small/lighter/thinner PDAs to choose from. - Performance - at 200MHz, it's not bad for a PDA, but there are many others out there that are faster and can do MPEG video. - Software - Yes, the linux command-line utilities are nice. But, for general PDA apps, there are many better choices than the Linux PDAs.
I think he is saying it's an attempt to obfuscate the source of the money by naming the building with their mothers' maiden names. So, they don't have to have a building saying "Bill Gates".
Obviously, the feelings of the free software community most likely did not play any role in the naming decision. It was probably requested by the donors, to honor their mothers.
Wasn't the group that was spun off as Lucent originally part of AT&T Labs? If so, that had to be a huge change when they went on their own. How did they decide what stayed in AT&T and what went to Lucent?
Good points.. I think they already have a successor to the P4 in development (whatever they call it). But, maybe a generation beyond that will combine PentiumX and PentiumM, as I think they see the heat/power as major problems going forward (although, they may even be more problematic on the server side with the small 1U or Blade servers).
You're right about the 64 bit thing. Realistically it's not that important for most users. But, I think it's a big risk to Intel anyway. They will battle the perception problem. Since they legitimized the technology in their Xeon line, they are open to it being marketed against them in the workstation line.
But, there are other architectural changes in x86-64, which could add to the value. In particular, the per-page memory permissions, which can be used to eliminate most buffer overflow exploits. With all the attention paid to security issues, this could become a big deal.
I wonder how long it will take Intel to move 64 bit technology into the P4 line?
By adding it in the Xeon, they legitimize the technology. But, they don't put it in the consumer chips. So, this makes the Athlon 64 a lot more attractive.. Compared to the Intel chips, the A64 has high end technology in a low cost chip.
If AMD ever completes their unfortunate socket shuffle, the A64 could really take off.
> Where have you been the past 10 years? The U.S. gov has strict export limits on machines that are deemed > "supercomputers." SGI, and more recently, SUN have been busted for selling certain configurations > to China and other countries. This is fact.
What the fuck are you talking about, moron?
The point is, you can buy a motherboard with a 2-3GHz CPU for a couple hundred bucks. That does not fall into the classification of "supercomputer". Even if it did, all the components are manufactured outside of the U.S., so the export restrictions don't apply. But, when you connect a couple thousand of those otherwise innocuous systems together, it becomes something more powerful.
Even if your dumbass claim was correct, there would still be no issue for Linux -- the hardware itself would be illegal regardless of the software running on it.
SCO has been mailing more BS to congressmen
on
SCO Aims For The Feds
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
At the end of the article, they mention letters that SCO sent to every congressman saying:
"Open-source software--available widely through the Internet--has the potential to provide our nation's enemies or potential enemies with computing capabilities that are restricted by U.S. law," McBride said. "A computer expert in North Korea who has a number of personal computers can download the latest version of Linux...and in short order build a virtual supercomputer."
Like most of their previous assertions, they don't let logic get in their way on this either.. As if Linux is the threat here.. By this same logic, you would need to outlow Solaris-x86, Windows, *BSD, and anything else running on x86's.. They key to these systems is not the OS, it's the price/performance of these commodity CPU's.
The U.S. digital TV system allows for "subchannels". So, a single station can carry multiple programs simultaneously. This service uses those subchannels to transmit encrypted programs that need to be decoded by their subscriber box. So they are using the free public spectrum for a pay service.
Of course, if a station is broadcasting HDTV, this is taking precious bandwidth away from the primary video channel. For 1080i broadcasts, this can really degrade the quality of the HD video. Particularly when showing fast moving sports, they really need the full available bandwidth to do a decent job.
So, this service encourages stations to not carry HD programs, and instead get a cut of the revenue on these pay stations.
In the end, I think the market will reject this.. there are too many drawbacks (extremely limited number of channels that can be offered (no CNN, no HBO.. they will only be able to carry 6-10 pay channels depending on local conditions), very minimal ability to offer HDTV programming (both cable and satellite are now positioning HDTV as a competitive issue, by the nature of this service they will not be able to support ESPN-HD, HBO-HD, Discovery-HD, etc.).
It seems to be just a very poor choice of units to quote (he was probably trying to dumb it down to something the interviewer would understand).
From the text of the article, it sounds like it's an improvement on TCP's congestion control performance (where it widens/narrows its transmission window to allow more packets to be outstanding between ACK's). Apparently they have some big improvements over current TCP, which allow it to fully utilize high bandwidth links. TCP takes time to expand the window and "fill the pipe". With the short-lived TCP sessions used for HTTP, this is not very efficient.
Of course, for a small fee, I'll let you use my super-duper protocol that offers virtually unlimited bandwidth - a buttzillion times faster than DSL.. it's called UDP. (UDP is very low overhead, no transmission windows, or ACK's -- or guarantees of being received.. You can stuff them onto a line as fast as it will take them.)
When will transmeta come out with a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX board with ther CPU on it? VIA has done very well at that with its C3 processors. They sell a lot to end-users, and sell a ton to embedded systems vendors. Transmeta could get a piece of that market.
Those server/embedded devices are a lot less demanding of CPU power. Any device, like a laptop, which has direct user GUI interfacing will always need a lot of horsepower.
The upcoming Nano-ITX boards should offer even more flexibility for this type of design.. It's smaller, takes less power, and runs cooler. It also takes DC power, so you don't need to mess with the ATX -> DC/DC converter stuff that the Mini-ITX requires (although, there is supposed to be a DC Mini-ITX board coming out).
The down-side is that these have been announced for several months, but are still not available for purchase.
Stock buyback programs are not uncommon.. But, they are usually done when the company has tons of cash and the stockholders are demanding they do something with it.
According to their last quarterly earnings information, SCO has $58M in cash, which dropped from 64M in the previous quarter. Their market capitalization is $140M, so $58 is a decent percentage of their total value. But, when you look at their operating expenses, profitability (they lost money last quarter), and their diminishing cash reserves, this doesn't make a lot of sense.
Can anyone with more of a financial background comment? Is there precedent for this?
Buy from the Dell Business site, rather than Dell Home, and you can get machines without an OS. There are some great bargains on the low end Poweredge 400SC servers.
I wonder what he has in mind for "a really high definition version with the best possible picture quality"??
The DVD format only supports 720x480 resolution.. Not exactly high definition. Even the "Superbit" DVD's offer really diminishing returns.
The HD-DVD standards are starting to take shape.. maybe he'll have one of the first HD DVD releases.
Or, he could do a D-VHS release. Yes, it's VHS tape based.. yes, that sucks.. But, it is by far the best quality movie source available today. Full 1920x1080i, at 28Mbps (broadcast HDTV max's out at 19Mbps).
I have held off on buying a D-VHS recorder because of the relatively small movie selection, and lack of firewire port on satellite receivers to allow recording. But, a release of the LOTR trilogy might be enough reason to pick one up.
After reading the examples in the article & on the memory champ's WWW site, the obvious question how well do they retain the memory over time?
In the competitions, there is a time component. They have a very limited amount of time to commit the information to memory. Then, they must regurgitate it within a short period of time. If they were asked a {day, week, month, year} later, what percentage would be retained?
Can their techniques be used to retain multiple unrelated data sets simultaneously?
Basically, the question is: Is this merely a good parlor trick, or a useful mechanism for real-world use?
This stuff is not just limited to broadcast TV (though it is even more obnoxious in broadcast TV, because it's OUR spectrum that they are using).
Check out this article which talks about changes that DirecTV is trying to implement. Here's a nice little nugget about controlling those damn Tivos:
News Corp. and Fox are striving to cushion their energetic embrace of personal video recorder technology in DirecTV's set-top boxes with limitations and standards that do not overly threaten the advertising revenue that is key to Fox's TV stations and broadcast network. They will include elimination of the 30-second skip button and place limits on the time allowed to download and store programs.
That's what you get when our wonderful FCC (the same guys that approved the broadcast flag) allowed a content producer - News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch's company, who also owns Fox), to buy a service provider. Don't you love our corporatist Bush administration?!? That sure was nice of Michael Powell's daddy, Colin Powell, to get him that job as the chairman of the FCC.
Will they have an ISO with x86-64 support for my Athlon 64? If I'm making the jump to kernel 2.6, it might also be a good time to jump to native 64 bit mode..
For autozone, the claim that IBM copied libraries from SCO Openserver, to allow their old apps to work in Linux. Okay, there is some logic there.. that could feasibly violate licensing terms.
But, they also claim that IBM violated their software licensing agreement with Sherwin Williams and Target, by inducing them to switch to Linux. What the hell kind of License do they have?? It forbids users from switching to competitive products? I kind of doubt it.
The hilarious part is that customers are fleeing from SCO as quickly as they can. And, SCO claims it is because of IBM's involvement - not the fact that SCO have abandoned any hopes of competing with their products and switched the whole company focus to litigation. You would have to think that any responsible organization currently using SCO is putting together plans or actively moving to another OS.
OE sounds like a good concept.. But, it may be a solution in search of a problem.
Securing communication with random parties is nice & all, but I don't really communicate anything worth securing with unknown parties.
For most people, what's at least as important is a strong authentication that the other side is really the guy I want to talk to. Then, once I know who it is, I want to secure the transaction.
This is not to say that FreeS/WAN can't accomplish strong authentication.. It supports certificate authentication. I just think they spent too much time on OE, without finding out if anyone wanted it first.
It doesn't seem like there is a huge market available for Windows options.. Even if they come up with some great leap in technology, how long will it take MS to "embrace and extend" it?
They need to go somewhere MS really doesn't want to.. like Linux. Make a cross-platform suite that works in Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Force MS to legitimize Linux on the desktop, or give the market to you.
In most areas, the digital TV stations are on the less used UHF band of the spectrum. UHF antennas are relatively small.
One of the most popular HDTV antennas is the tiny Silver Sensor. It's resold by Zenith and Terk at Sears, Best Buy, etc.
The last estimate I saw for HD availability was that around 95% of US citizens were able to receive HDTV. I receive no less than 20 digital tv broadcasts where I live. Even my parents, out in the middle of nowhere, receive 6 - including all the majors.
That may be feasible for low resolution, like current DVD's. But, at HD resolutions (1920x1080) you need a lot of horsepower to decode the video.. something on the order of a 3GHz P4.
This is why HD decoders use chips capable of MPEG2 decoding in hardware. They will need to do the same thing for HD-DVD players. It will be several years before the low-end embedded CPU's like the Crusoe have the horsepower for HD decoding.
Re:Floating point performance
on
Mini-ITX Clustering
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There are P4 Mini-ITX systems available: Pentium 4
But, most mini-itx systems are very small in size, and strive for quiet or silent operation. So, there are obvious problems with the P4's heat/power requirements. Perhaps a better solution is the Pentium-M in a mini-itx form factor. It has pretty good performance, at a low power/heat level: Pentium M. But, most of the Pentium-M boards are intended for industrial or OEM use, so they are hard to find in retail, and are pretty expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
VLC is what I used..
http://www.videolan.org/
I'm as big of a linux fan as the next guy.. I own two Zaurus PDAs. But, I'm not sure why they are releasing this after so much time. I don't see anything about these PDAs that lead me to believe they will succeed.
- Linux OS - some of us find this a compelling feature. But, the Zaurus's have met that relatively small market already.
- Form Factor - it looks rather thick, and not particularly small in any dimension. There are many small/lighter/thinner PDAs to choose from.
- Performance - at 200MHz, it's not bad for a PDA, but there are many others out there that are faster and can do MPEG video.
- Software - Yes, the linux command-line utilities are nice. But, for general PDA apps, there are many better choices than the Linux PDAs.
I think he is saying it's an attempt to obfuscate the source of the money by naming the building with their mothers' maiden names. So, they don't have to have a building saying "Bill Gates".
Obviously, the feelings of the free software community most likely did not play any role in the naming decision. It was probably requested by the donors, to honor their mothers.
Wasn't the group that was spun off as Lucent originally part of AT&T Labs? If so, that had to be a huge change when they went on their own. How did they decide what stayed in AT&T and what went to Lucent?
Good points.. I think they already have a successor to the P4 in development (whatever they call it). But, maybe a generation beyond that will combine PentiumX and PentiumM, as I think they see the heat/power as major problems going forward (although, they may even be more problematic on the server side with the small 1U or Blade servers).
You're right about the 64 bit thing. Realistically it's not that important for most users. But, I think it's a big risk to Intel anyway. They will battle the perception problem. Since they legitimized the technology in their Xeon line, they are open to it being marketed against them in the workstation line.
But, there are other architectural changes in x86-64, which could add to the value. In particular, the per-page memory permissions, which can be used to eliminate most buffer overflow exploits. With all the attention paid to security issues, this could become a big deal.
I wonder how long it will take Intel to move 64 bit technology into the P4 line?
By adding it in the Xeon, they legitimize the technology. But, they don't put it in the consumer chips. So, this makes the Athlon 64 a lot more attractive.. Compared to the Intel chips, the A64 has high end technology in a low cost chip.
If AMD ever completes their unfortunate socket shuffle, the A64 could really take off.
> Where have you been the past 10 years? The U.S. gov has strict export limits on machines that are deemed
> "supercomputers." SGI, and more recently, SUN have been busted for selling certain configurations
> to China and other countries. This is fact.
What the fuck are you talking about, moron?
The point is, you can buy a motherboard with a 2-3GHz CPU for a couple hundred bucks. That does not fall into the classification of "supercomputer". Even if it did, all the components are manufactured outside of the U.S., so the export restrictions don't apply. But, when you connect a couple thousand of those otherwise innocuous systems together, it becomes something more powerful.
Even if your dumbass claim was correct, there would still be no issue for Linux -- the hardware itself would be illegal regardless of the software running on it.
At the end of the article, they mention letters that SCO sent to every congressman saying:
"Open-source software--available widely through the Internet--has the potential to provide our nation's enemies or potential enemies with computing capabilities that are restricted by U.S. law," McBride said. "A computer expert in North Korea who has a number of personal computers can download the latest version of Linux...and in short order build a virtual supercomputer."
Like most of their previous assertions, they don't let logic get in their way on this either.. As if Linux is the threat here.. By this same logic, you would need to outlow Solaris-x86, Windows, *BSD, and anything else running on x86's.. They key to these systems is not the OS, it's the price/performance of these commodity CPU's.
The U.S. digital TV system allows for "subchannels". So, a single station can carry multiple programs simultaneously. This service uses those subchannels to transmit encrypted programs that need to be decoded by their subscriber box. So they are using the free public spectrum for a pay service.
Of course, if a station is broadcasting HDTV, this is taking precious bandwidth away from the primary video channel. For 1080i broadcasts, this can really degrade the quality of the HD video. Particularly when showing fast moving sports, they really need the full available bandwidth to do a decent job.
So, this service encourages stations to not carry HD programs, and instead get a cut of the revenue on these pay stations.
In the end, I think the market will reject this.. there are too many drawbacks (extremely limited number of channels that can be offered (no CNN, no HBO.. they will only be able to carry 6-10 pay channels depending on local conditions), very minimal ability to offer HDTV programming (both cable and satellite are now positioning HDTV as a competitive issue, by the nature of this service they will not be able to support ESPN-HD, HBO-HD, Discovery-HD, etc.).
It seems to be just a very poor choice of units to quote (he was probably trying to dumb it down to something the interviewer would understand).
From the text of the article, it sounds like it's an improvement on TCP's congestion control performance (where it widens/narrows its transmission window to allow more packets to be outstanding between ACK's). Apparently they have some big improvements over current TCP, which allow it to fully utilize high bandwidth links. TCP takes time to expand the window and "fill the pipe". With the short-lived TCP sessions used for HTTP, this is not very efficient.
Of course, for a small fee, I'll let you use my super-duper protocol that offers virtually unlimited bandwidth - a buttzillion times faster than DSL.. it's called UDP. (UDP is very low overhead, no transmission windows, or ACK's -- or guarantees of being received.. You can stuff them onto a line as fast as it will take them.)
When will transmeta come out with a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX board with ther CPU on it? VIA has done very well at that with its C3 processors. They sell a lot to end-users, and sell a ton to embedded systems vendors. Transmeta could get a piece of that market.
Those server/embedded devices are a lot less demanding of CPU power. Any device, like a laptop, which has direct user GUI interfacing will always need a lot of horsepower.
The upcoming Nano-ITX boards should offer even more flexibility for this type of design.. It's smaller, takes less power, and runs cooler. It also takes DC power, so you don't need to mess with the ATX -> DC/DC converter stuff that the Mini-ITX requires (although, there is supposed to be a DC Mini-ITX board coming out).
The down-side is that these have been announced for several months, but are still not available for purchase.
Asimov's "I, Robot" book was a collection of short stories. Does anyone know which story the movie is based on?
If I remember correctly, the movie "Millenium Man" was based on the story "Robbie", also from "I, Robot".
Stock buyback programs are not uncommon.. But, they are usually done when the company has tons of cash and the stockholders are demanding they do something with it.
According to their last quarterly earnings information, SCO has $58M in cash, which dropped from 64M in the previous quarter. Their market capitalization is $140M, so $58 is a decent percentage of their total value. But, when you look at their operating expenses, profitability (they lost money last quarter), and their diminishing cash reserves, this doesn't make a lot of sense.
Can anyone with more of a financial background comment? Is there precedent for this?
Buy from the Dell Business site, rather than Dell Home, and you can get machines without an OS. There are some great bargains on the low end Poweredge 400SC servers.
I wonder what he has in mind for "a really high definition version with the best possible picture quality"??
The DVD format only supports 720x480 resolution.. Not exactly high definition. Even the "Superbit" DVD's offer really diminishing returns.
The HD-DVD standards are starting to take shape.. maybe he'll have one of the first HD DVD releases.
Or, he could do a D-VHS release. Yes, it's VHS tape based.. yes, that sucks.. But, it is by far the best quality movie source available today. Full 1920x1080i, at 28Mbps (broadcast HDTV max's out at 19Mbps).
I have held off on buying a D-VHS recorder because of the relatively small movie selection, and lack of firewire port on satellite receivers to allow recording. But, a release of the LOTR trilogy might be enough reason to pick one up.
After reading the examples in the article & on the memory champ's WWW site, the obvious question how well do they retain the memory over time?
In the competitions, there is a time component. They have a very limited amount of time to commit the information to memory. Then, they must regurgitate it within a short period of time. If they were asked a {day, week, month, year} later, what percentage would be retained?
Can their techniques be used to retain multiple unrelated data sets simultaneously?
Basically, the question is: Is this merely a good parlor trick, or a useful mechanism for real-world use?
This stuff is not just limited to broadcast TV (though it is even more obnoxious in broadcast TV, because it's OUR spectrum that they are using).
Check out this article which talks about changes that DirecTV is trying to implement. Here's a nice little nugget about controlling those damn Tivos:
News Corp. and Fox are striving to cushion their energetic embrace of personal video recorder technology in DirecTV's set-top boxes with limitations and standards that do not overly threaten the advertising revenue that is key to Fox's TV stations and broadcast network. They will include elimination of the 30-second skip button and place limits on the time allowed to download and store programs.
That's what you get when our wonderful FCC (the same guys that approved the broadcast flag) allowed a content producer - News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch's company, who also owns Fox), to buy a service provider. Don't you love our corporatist Bush administration?!? That sure was nice of Michael Powell's daddy, Colin Powell, to get him that job as the chairman of the FCC.
Will they have an ISO with x86-64 support for my Athlon 64? If I'm making the jump to kernel 2.6, it might also be a good time to jump to native 64 bit mode..
That's hilarious..
For autozone, the claim that IBM copied libraries from SCO Openserver, to allow their old apps to work in Linux. Okay, there is some logic there.. that could feasibly violate licensing terms.
But, they also claim that IBM violated their software licensing agreement with Sherwin Williams and Target, by inducing them to switch to Linux. What the hell kind of License do they have?? It forbids users from switching to competitive products? I kind of doubt it.
The hilarious part is that customers are fleeing from SCO as quickly as they can. And, SCO claims it is because of IBM's involvement - not the fact that SCO have abandoned any hopes of competing with their products and switched the whole company focus to litigation. You would have to think that any responsible organization currently using SCO is putting together plans or actively moving to another OS.
OE sounds like a good concept.. But, it may be a solution in search of a problem.
Securing communication with random parties is nice & all, but I don't really communicate anything worth securing with unknown parties.
For most people, what's at least as important is a strong authentication that the other side is really the guy I want to talk to. Then, once I know who it is, I want to secure the transaction.
This is not to say that FreeS/WAN can't accomplish strong authentication.. It supports certificate authentication. I just think they spent too much time on OE, without finding out if anyone wanted it first.
It doesn't seem like there is a huge market available for Windows options.. Even if they come up with some great leap in technology, how long will it take MS to "embrace and extend" it?
They need to go somewhere MS really doesn't want to.. like Linux. Make a cross-platform suite that works in Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Force MS to legitimize Linux on the desktop, or give the market to you.
Not exactly...
In most areas, the digital TV stations are on the less used UHF band of the spectrum. UHF antennas are relatively small.
One of the most popular HDTV antennas is the tiny Silver Sensor. It's resold by Zenith and Terk at Sears, Best Buy, etc.
The last estimate I saw for HD availability was that around 95% of US citizens were able to receive HDTV. I receive no less than 20 digital tv broadcasts where I live. Even my parents, out in the middle of nowhere, receive 6 - including all the majors.
That may be feasible for low resolution, like current DVD's. But, at HD resolutions (1920x1080) you need a lot of horsepower to decode the video.. something on the order of a 3GHz P4.
t ent_provider/film/ContentShowcase.aspx See how well it displays on your system.
Check out some sample 1080P video from M$ at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/con
This is why HD decoders use chips capable of MPEG2 decoding in hardware. They will need to do the same thing for HD-DVD players. It will be several years before the low-end embedded CPU's like the Crusoe have the horsepower for HD decoding.
There are P4 Mini-ITX systems available: Pentium 4
But, most mini-itx systems are very small in size, and strive for quiet or silent operation. So, there are obvious problems with the P4's heat/power requirements. Perhaps a better solution is the Pentium-M in a mini-itx form factor. It has pretty good performance, at a low power/heat level: Pentium M. But, most of the Pentium-M boards are intended for industrial or OEM use, so they are hard to find in retail, and are pretty expensive.