Where can you get 2Mbps no contention in the US for 40 dollars a month? I'd like to know, because we're using a T1 at work at a cost of $1000/month and DSL which is unreliable and only available to people within a kilometer of the exchange is 256kbps for $40/month.
This sounds like BS, but I'd love to be proven wrong!
You're leaving the UK because of a bad DSL connection? Wow, man, you really are a geek;)
Wait until you get over here - phone lines are atrocious; once BT have their bugs stamped out I expect UK DSL to be an order of magnitude more reliable than it is here in the US.
Point of advice: when looking for an apartment, get one as close as possible ( 500m) from the Telco's exchange.
The reason consoles use RDRAM is because the price/performance ratio is great. For consoles.
See, RDRAM has large latency (approx. 28 cycles @ 400MHz for a random access = 70ns) but for sequential accesses it spews the data out very very fast indeed (a 16-bit-channel RDRAM setup at 400MHz can spew out 16 bytes in 4 cycles = 10ns; a 32-bit-channel dual-chip setup - only found in consoles - can double this to 32 bytes in 10ns).
This is great for consoles, where you have lots of DMA going concurrently with semi-random CPU cacheline refills. For this application, RDRAM is much, much cheaper than the alternative (which would be 128-bit-wide, 100MHz synchronous RAM of some flavor). RDRAM also wins hands down on simplicity of system design since its data bus is only 16 bits, or 32 bits in dual-chip setups, plus only 8 more bits for addressing. It provides superb theoretical bandwidth, which can be approached quite closely in a well-designed console (er... can someone build a well-designed console for me?;)
However, for PCs, the case is much less clear cut. DMA seems to be far less important these days, and you certainly won't see half a dozen concurrent DMA channels going over a 200MHz FSB anytime soon. Even building a 200MHz FSB would be practically impossible in a modular system such as the desktop PC. Consoles are so non-modular, the current crop are internally dense as hell with heatsinks and EMI shielding, and the primary internal busses are no more than half an inch long.
To make RDRAM work great with a desktop PC would take, in my estimation, far, far better RDRAM controllers than are currently available, and integrated much more tightly with the CPU, and communicating over a synchronous bus of at least 128 bits.
RDRAM definitely wins on bandwidth, but its latency is so atrocious that you need a good prediction of what data is needed next... easy to do on a dozen DMA channels but when the primary channel is the CPU it's near-impossible.
In summary, RDRAM is too application-specific to be suitable for desktop PCs, and the controllers are not yet mature enough to get anything like full speed from it in Real World PC applications.
Not to mention the fact that it's proprietary, so it intrinsically costs more to manufacture than other RAM designs.
Personally I use my computer to remember my employer's phone number and my best friend's email address. Christ knows I'd be lost if I had to memorize 10,000 laws as well.
Seems like a reasonable idea - use an expert system to deal with trivial offences. I hope that this means the answer is either "let them off" or "proceed with human judgement".
But if it's an expert system coded in VB on portables, why do they need to send judges out to use it? Surely the whole point is to limit the amount of time judges have to deal with trivial cases? Now they have to run out to the SOC and question everybody.
Maybe I'm just to unfamiliar with Brazilian law... do judges regularly go out and judge on the streets down there?
Yeah, every "software engineering" company I've worked at has had the same issue with free software (although interestingly GCC was considered well supported enough to run with).
This is a huge deal in the future of open-source software. It sort-of completes the business model:
Write software
Give it away free
Charge an arm and a leg to corporations who want support
This could be how open-source software goes mainstream, and (more importantly) how the practioners can start seeing real money. The money issue affects all sorts of things, but most notably licensing costs and the weird personnel-intensive testing stuff that people do to make decent UIs.
Ah, but that's the whole point of the StrongARM. You can run the 200MHz StrongARM on a pair of AA batteries for 8 hours. ISTR it consumes approx. 0.25 Watts.
And it's made by DEC, not ARM, BTW. ARM own the ISA but DEC made it into a kick-ass low-power, high-speed CPU.
Re:Another government screw up!!!
on
Hubble Turns 10
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· Score: 1
Well, if you ask me, the NASA problems lately are a result of too little beauracracy, not too much.
NASA's operations are military in nature - I don't mean they are about killing people, I mean they require military precision - and this precision can only be had by wrapping the whole process up in yards and yards of red tape, process and protocol.
If they did it right, there never would be an "oops" of the magnitude found in early Hubble and recent Mars landers. The beauracracy just isn't doing it's job - that's the problem, and you don't solve it by getting rid of beauracracy altogether!
I agree too. The Transmeta chip is just Yet Another possibility in the tradeoff between speed and wattage.
It's not the coolest (least-powered) solution as that is to be had with a pure software emulator running on a 0.1MHz Z80.
It's not the fastest either - a real P-III with the same clock frequency kicks Transmeta's butt.
It's just... midrange. Boring midrange power & speed for people with boring midrange tastes for power & speed.
The only (IMHO) vaguely interesting thing about Transmeta is the architecture, but as their press releases and documentation make clear, the architecture is hidden (security through obscurity - future compatibility is guaranteed by hiding the underlying emulation layer). So even that interesting thing is a no-show.
Which leaves the "Transmeta are all alone against Intel" thing. Unless you consider AMD, of course.
Which finally only leaves "Linus works there" as Transmeta's saving grace.
What did you mean about "can't even host your own DNS" though? That point totally passed me by (I can see it, it's a couple of miles off by now;). As things are *now*, isn't it possible to just tap into the backbone by paying one of the *real big* ISPs to host a router for you (like Pipex in the UK and I-don't-know-who in the US)? And viz-a-viz the DNS situation, isn't it possible that a whole underground DNS system could be created bypassing all this.com bullshit entirely? Or am I missing the point entirely?;)
Eventually every major power will have these laws, and as a result every website will be hosted on computers based in some tax haven somewhere and the net result will be a huge loss in tax revenue by the governments involved.
That'll be good. Maybe one day a tiny African country will be cancelling the USA's national debt
In fact, I find this quite amusing. The Amazon thing is just something called commercial reality, as is the price. Something like this just doesn't have a huge market (unlike, say, the latest Star Wars novel) hence the price. Nothing compared to what I just paid for a book about FPGA design, and that was about the same number of pages. I'm surprised there are still/. readers who don't understand the economics of book publishing, given that we all buy expensive books. They're not overpriced, it's not like people make a fortune from books (unless they *are* the latest Star Wars novel), it's just economies of scale in reverse (er, diseconomies of a lack of scale, I guess;)
As for the Amazon thing, well I'm not boycotting Amazon, I think Amazon are great as do most of the book's potential audience. I may not agree with their business practices but I am quite prepared to accept the Bezos argument that - once again - revolves around commercial reality rather than the principles and dogma of supposed "thinking" people. Not allowing Amazon to sell this would be like releasing a video game and not allowing Elecronics Boutique to stock it. If the book is *only* being sold through Amazon, this is probably just another sign of the restricted audience the book would have.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised it's being printed at all, but given that someone's agreed to back the project the price and seller are hardly are surprise.
So what's changed between Windows CE flopping heinously and Pocket PC? Windows CE didn't fail because of the name, it failed because it's desktop OS shoe-horned into a PDA. Doesn't look like much has changed except the name.
And it crashes, or so the report says. Who has time for a PDA which crashes? Microsoft really needs to learn that the Golden Rule of embedded systems is that they don't crash.
I can see why they want to get into these lucrative markets, but essentially they're trying to get money for old rope. If M$ really want to corner the embedded OS market I'm sure they could, provided they make a new product for it - but they're not going to conquer the PDA market (or, for that matter, the games console market) with the latest version of DOS.
Re:One of the important concepts of modern life?
on
The Code Book
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· Score: 1
Yeah, but cryptography is *nothing like* as important as these things. You could apply this argument to almost any piece of technology which just happened to be ubiquitous. The frame buffer. The keyboard and mouse. The infrared remote control.
Cryptography is a means to encode data to make it difficult for other people to decode. The Von Neumann architecture enabled the information revolution. You can't compare the two! You might as well say that "call waiting" is one of the most important concepts of modern life, and compare it to the invention of the telephone.
Actually, I think GTE do this already
(Ooh, by the way, it's nice to see impartial moderators at work. At least I know I can raise my karma by just agreeing with everything the editors say.)
My bet is that they'll never switch the old transmitters off. Too many poor/unemployed/old/uninterested people are not going to upgrade to digital. Why bother? Coronation Street in grainy black & white is good enough for most people.
Just for the record, patents.ibm.com is a patent repository. There are a lot of patents there. The repository is run by IBM. The patents within the repository are not owned by IBM, IBM runs the repository.
The repository, which is owned by IBM, contains patents, some but not all of which are owned by IBM.
It is IBM's repository, but they are not exclusively IBM's patents. Like a library, where the librarian did not write all the books, it is such a library, and the librarian is IBM, whereas the books are the patents, and IBM did not write all the patents.
So IBM didn't invent a dick blender - it was indeed an Alston L. Levesque, although ISTR a comedy film based around this very concept a few years ago. Anyone remember which film?
From the article on Altavista about Metallica, quote from Lars Ulrich (drummer): "It's sickening to know that our art is being traded as a commodity rather than the art that it is." Art?! Metallica once made art for thousands of fans, now they churn out utter dross to their millions. Jesus, as if Load wasn't bad enough, they named the sequel Reload, containing the track "The Unforgiven II" (after a track on the black album). Ooh, Metallica, you are so original and cool... not! I think the limit was the pseudo-country-and-western song on Load. That did it for me. Metallica officially suck.
I'll stick with Cradle of Filth now, at least they still have an anti-establishment attitude, instead of running into court at the first opportunity.
That's not what they're trying to pull at all. The capability is there, but 99% of games will still be standalone.
The modem is for internet connectivity alone - there is NO NEED AT ALL for an Ethernet connection, that's just dumb. If you have internet connectivity seperately you don't need the PS2 to connect to the phone line, so just forget the feature. Remember Sony are trying to sell 100 million of these - they are trying to make it a ubiquitous appliance that *everyone* has. To do this, they need to sell it to non-gamers, hence the extra features (and I predict that video editing will be a future feature of the console too, given it has an iLink interface).
Trust me, the PS2 is going to rock. It's *not* just a games console.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like BS, but I'd love to be proven wrong!
There are excellent economic reasons for this, but I'm not going to waste my time talking about real world economics on Slashdot.
Wait until you get over here - phone lines are atrocious; once BT have their bugs stamped out I expect UK DSL to be an order of magnitude more reliable than it is here in the US.
Point of advice: when looking for an apartment, get one as close as possible ( 500m) from the Telco's exchange.
Yeah, and 256k upstream / 256k downstream doesn't seem very asymmetric to me.
See, RDRAM has large latency (approx. 28 cycles @ 400MHz for a random access = 70ns) but for sequential accesses it spews the data out very very fast indeed (a 16-bit-channel RDRAM setup at 400MHz can spew out 16 bytes in 4 cycles = 10ns; a 32-bit-channel dual-chip setup - only found in consoles - can double this to 32 bytes in 10ns).
This is great for consoles, where you have lots of DMA going concurrently with semi-random CPU cacheline refills. For this application, RDRAM is much, much cheaper than the alternative (which would be 128-bit-wide, 100MHz synchronous RAM of some flavor). RDRAM also wins hands down on simplicity of system design since its data bus is only 16 bits, or 32 bits in dual-chip setups, plus only 8 more bits for addressing. It provides superb theoretical bandwidth, which can be approached quite closely in a well-designed console (er ... can someone build a well-designed console for me? ;)
However, for PCs, the case is much less clear cut. DMA seems to be far less important these days, and you certainly won't see half a dozen concurrent DMA channels going over a 200MHz FSB anytime soon. Even building a 200MHz FSB would be practically impossible in a modular system such as the desktop PC. Consoles are so non-modular, the current crop are internally dense as hell with heatsinks and EMI shielding, and the primary internal busses are no more than half an inch long.
To make RDRAM work great with a desktop PC would take, in my estimation, far, far better RDRAM controllers than are currently available, and integrated much more tightly with the CPU, and communicating over a synchronous bus of at least 128 bits.
RDRAM definitely wins on bandwidth, but its latency is so atrocious that you need a good prediction of what data is needed next ... easy to do on a dozen DMA channels but when the primary channel is the CPU it's near-impossible.
In summary, RDRAM is too application-specific to be suitable for desktop PCs, and the controllers are not yet mature enough to get anything like full speed from it in Real World PC applications.
Not to mention the fact that it's proprietary, so it intrinsically costs more to manufacture than other RAM designs.
Personally I use my computer to remember my employer's phone number and my best friend's email address. Christ knows I'd be lost if I had to memorize 10,000 laws as well.
But if it's an expert system coded in VB on portables, why do they need to send judges out to use it? Surely the whole point is to limit the amount of time judges have to deal with trivial cases? Now they have to run out to the SOC and question everybody.
Maybe I'm just to unfamiliar with Brazilian law ... do judges regularly go out and judge on the streets down there?
This is a huge deal in the future of open-source software. It sort-of completes the business model:
Write software
Give it away free
Charge an arm and a leg to corporations who want support
This could be how open-source software goes mainstream, and (more importantly) how the practioners can start seeing real money. The money issue affects all sorts of things, but most notably licensing costs and the weird personnel-intensive testing stuff that people do to make decent UIs.
And it's made by DEC, not ARM, BTW. ARM own the ISA but DEC made it into a kick-ass low-power, high-speed CPU.
NASA's operations are military in nature - I don't mean they are about killing people, I mean they require military precision - and this precision can only be had by wrapping the whole process up in yards and yards of red tape, process and protocol.
If they did it right, there never would be an "oops" of the magnitude found in early Hubble and recent Mars landers. The beauracracy just isn't doing it's job - that's the problem, and you don't solve it by getting rid of beauracracy altogether!
It's not the coolest (least-powered) solution as that is to be had with a pure software emulator running on a 0.1MHz Z80.
It's not the fastest either - a real P-III with the same clock frequency kicks Transmeta's butt.
It's just ... midrange. Boring midrange power & speed for people with boring midrange tastes for power & speed.
The only (IMHO) vaguely interesting thing about Transmeta is the architecture, but as their press releases and documentation make clear, the architecture is hidden (security through obscurity - future compatibility is guaranteed by hiding the underlying emulation layer). So even that interesting thing is a no-show.
Which leaves the "Transmeta are all alone against Intel" thing. Unless you consider AMD, of course.
Which finally only leaves "Linus works there" as Transmeta's saving grace.
Big, fat, hairy deal.
Ed xxx
This article was a well-thought out and intelligent piece. Whoever moderated this down is an idiot.
Ed xxx
What did you mean about "can't even host your own DNS" though? That point totally passed me by (I can see it, it's a couple of miles off by now ;). As things are *now*, isn't it possible to just tap into the backbone by paying one of the *real big* ISPs to host a router for you (like Pipex in the UK and I-don't-know-who in the US)? And viz-a-viz the DNS situation, isn't it possible that a whole underground DNS system could be created bypassing all this .com bullshit entirely? Or am I missing the point entirely? ;)
Ed xxx
That'll be good. Maybe one day a tiny African country will be cancelling the USA's national debt
In fact, I find this quite amusing. The Amazon thing is just something called commercial reality, as is the price. Something like this just doesn't have a huge market (unlike, say, the latest Star Wars novel) hence the price. Nothing compared to what I just paid for a book about FPGA design, and that was about the same number of pages. I'm surprised there are still /. readers who don't understand the economics of book publishing, given that we all buy expensive books. They're not overpriced, it's not like people make a fortune from books (unless they *are* the latest Star Wars novel), it's just economies of scale in reverse (er, diseconomies of a lack of scale, I guess ;)
As for the Amazon thing, well I'm not boycotting Amazon, I think Amazon are great as do most of the book's potential audience. I may not agree with their business practices but I am quite prepared to accept the Bezos argument that - once again - revolves around commercial reality rather than the principles and dogma of supposed "thinking" people. Not allowing Amazon to sell this would be like releasing a video game and not allowing Elecronics Boutique to stock it. If the book is *only* being sold through Amazon, this is probably just another sign of the restricted audience the book would have.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised it's being printed at all, but given that someone's agreed to back the project the price and seller are hardly are surprise.
Just my $0.02
Ed xxx
Q-DOS, like the (ancient) disk operating system (the name of *that* was a joke, of course)
And it crashes, or so the report says. Who has time for a PDA which crashes? Microsoft really needs to learn that the Golden Rule of embedded systems is that they don't crash.
I can see why they want to get into these lucrative markets, but essentially they're trying to get money for old rope. If M$ really want to corner the embedded OS market I'm sure they could, provided they make a new product for it - but they're not going to conquer the PDA market (or, for that matter, the games console market) with the latest version of DOS.
Cryptography is a means to encode data to make it difficult for other people to decode. The Von Neumann architecture enabled the information revolution. You can't compare the two! You might as well say that "call waiting" is one of the most important concepts of modern life, and compare it to the invention of the telephone.
Actually, I think GTE do this already
(Ooh, by the way, it's nice to see impartial moderators at work. At least I know I can raise my karma by just agreeing with everything the editors say.)
I hate it when people pronounce it "koodos".
Ed xxx
The repository, which is owned by IBM, contains patents, some but not all of which are owned by IBM.
It is IBM's repository, but they are not exclusively IBM's patents. Like a library, where the librarian did not write all the books, it is such a library, and the librarian is IBM, whereas the books are the patents, and IBM did not write all the patents.
So IBM didn't invent a dick blender - it was indeed an Alston L. Levesque, although ISTR a comedy film based around this very concept a few years ago. Anyone remember which film?
Ed xxx
Napster is a product with a bona-fide purpose (heh heh) so shouldn't be held accountable for what people do with their software.
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you say, I just don't think Napster should be made the scapegoats.
Ed xxx
I'll stick with Cradle of Filth now, at least they still have an anti-establishment attitude, instead of running into court at the first opportunity.
James Hetfield, suck my dick.
Love, an ex-Metallica fan
The modem is for internet connectivity alone - there is NO NEED AT ALL for an Ethernet connection, that's just dumb. If you have internet connectivity seperately you don't need the PS2 to connect to the phone line, so just forget the feature. Remember Sony are trying to sell 100 million of these - they are trying to make it a ubiquitous appliance that *everyone* has. To do this, they need to sell it to non-gamers, hence the extra features (and I predict that video editing will be a future feature of the console too, given it has an iLink interface).
Trust me, the PS2 is going to rock. It's *not* just a games console.
Ed xxx [PS2 developer]