In ten years, we'll be filing his quote in with Ken Olson's quote that there's a market for maybe a dozen computers worldwide, or the comment from the patent office clerk a century or so ago that said everything that can be invented already has been.
Of course, it's technically possible that Ellison is right. I wouldn't wager on it, myself, humankind has a history of doing things that can't be done-- walking on the moon, breaking the sound barrier...
...puts the burden of proof on AMD to prove that your upgrade was what caused the processor to die. I suspect they know this, and I also suspect if you raise enough of a ruckus you can get your processor replaced, as it's not worth going to court over. They're probably just betting most folks won't raise much cain about it.
I'll consider my Microdrive blown out of the water when this new thing fits in my Canon Powershot G1.
It sounds like they're two very different markets. This thing requires a proprietary interface; the Microdrive (and similar devices like the 5 or 10GB PCMCIA hard disks) use standard well-published and darned near ubiquitous interfaces. This new thing sounds like it could be built into something easily, but not as useful as removable storage. I get to thinking there's room for one of these in my car stereo, for example...
This past week, one of the first comments to be modded up as funny is someone claiming to be the Iraqi information minister.
Now, they could have said something like, "There are no holes in the BuzzCard system, and we have repelled the elitist satan dogs who have attempted to break its security!" and it would have finally been funny!
EA is, no doubt, the leader in the computer games industry. NVidia is into a head 2 head fight with ATI ( ATI is probably going to come out as the winner ), and such a deal will add points in its favor in this 'fight'. Imagine a series of games to comes with a 'NVidia' recommented stamp on the cover.
Sure, it's a great win in the marketing department.
Personally, though, I'd rather nVidia spent their time designing better video cards instead.
How about the News... oh wait he already owns FoxNews.
Well, it was kinda nice back in the day when I had three cable news channels to choose from...
In truth, I don't see CNN or MSNBC going away any time soon. They're too big and would cause too much of an uproar-- and frankly, they're still profitable to carry [0]. I can, however, see some of the smaller channels go away-- you don't need this Jefferson Pilot affiliate, because you've got Fox SportsSouth. Never mind that SportsSouth doesn't carry Georgia Tech football games...
[0] One might think that given how CNN tends to lean left and FoxNews tends to lean right that the folks who own FoxNews might want use this sort of market power to squash CNN so that people would get right-slanted news. Thing is, many of NewsCorp's news channels on Sky and the like lean left-- Rupert Murdoch isn't interested in brainwashing you to think like he does. He's interested in your money.
The legacy part that bothers me...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...is not the keyboard ports or RS-232 or floppy drives or BIOS or any of the other things he mentions in his article.
I want a saner interrupt system. We're still using the same 16 interrupts they introduced with the PC-AT, with a little bit of PnP gloss over them. And most systems seem to have certain IRQs reserved away for their respective devices, so you can't use them-- don't have a floppy drive? Well, it'd be nice to let the PnP stuff use that IRQ for something else, but on many systems, you can't. And in a world where ever processor has a math-coprocessor _built in_, what's the point of reserving IRQ 13 for it? (Yes, the current design of Pentiums and Athlons require it. But _why_?)
Building a completely legacy free PC is pretty unlikely at this juncture, because the underlying architecture simply hasn't changed...
In an Internet of comments like "country borders are speed bumps on the information superhighway" and such, when we speak of a global internet creating unity, what's the point of putting tags on things so we know where it's created? Isn't the point of ubiquitous communication that we don't have to care where people are any more if we do wish to speak to them?
-JDF Atlanta, GA, 30342
It's not a new idea...
on
Games on Demand
·
· Score: 2, Informative
To my knowledge, this is the first time an ISP offers this kind of service.
Well, for limited versions of "ISP", it's actually a pretty old idea. The Blue Sky Rangers' site notes PlayCable, a service for playing Intellivision games across your cable TV line.
How do they do 1080i if they only support monitors up to 1280x1024? They're short 56 rows, by my count. And given that the HD footage I've seen that's 1080 lines tall is 1920 pixels wide, it's even worse off that direction.
Come on, folks, for $400, how hard would it have been to support a reasonable resolution?
2. Export.vcr file to mpeg2 (ATI likes capturing in it's own format better).
You'll wind up with better output if you can capture in something that's not compressed in a lossy format (like, for example, ATI's VCR format.) huffyuv makes an excellent on-the-fly compressor, though of course ATI's software won't let you use it.
3. Run mpg file through FlaskMPEG to convert to DivX video with MP3 audio.
You'll wind up with even better output if you don't go from one lossy compressor to another lossy compressor to yet a third lossy compressor.
I've been using VirtualDub with my ATI All-in-wonder and things are coming up pretty well so far. You have to jump through a number of hoops to get there-- ATI ships with WDM, but VitualDub wants VFW, so you need a wrapper to get there...
There's usually no need to do that when you put your keyboard in the dishwasher. Just make sure the thing is completely dry before you plug it back in. It's about the only sane way to ever get all the Coke out of your keyboard...
The trusty Kenmore dishwasher is commonly used in a number of electronics firms to remove solder flux and other cruft from prototype boards.
Seems there are two sorts of common comments that show up when Slashdot mentions a laptop:
They're too heavy! Make them lighter!
Battery life sucks! Make the batteries bigger!
Well, hard disks aren't getting any lighter, CD-ROMs aren't getting much lighter, keyboards're probably at the ragged edge of weight/reliability, TFT screens only get so light, and so, what's left?
Batteries.
Why's laptop battery life suck? Because as batteries get better they use less of them to make the laptop lighter. Why are laptops so heavy? Because if the batteries were any lighter, they'd have even less power...
I want a nice thick ten or fifteen pound laptop that's got enough battery life to last all day and enough reinforcement under the hood that I can thump users upside the head with it. Lightweight's overrated.
I took a road trip across the southern US. I loaded up my pickup truck with a tent and a laptop in Atlanta and wound up in Alamogordo, NM before I turned around and headed home.
Every KOA campground (er, "kampground") I stayed at had a phone jack for plugging your laptop into in one of the public areas, usually the rec room (though in one it was the laundry facility.) Dialup may not be sufficient for, say, uploading the day's digital pictures to your webswerver, but it's enough to check email and at least do the text portion of a 'blog.
I dunno where you're planning on overnighting on your trip, but if campgrounds have phone lines, I'd guess darned near any hotel does, too. And if you're not crashing at a hotel or a campground, please, find somewhere to take a shower.:)
seriously though - was it like last week 9700PRO became available? what's up with this break-neck card-releasing? I didn't think it was christmas yet...
It's obviously not, since the new GeForce still isn't out yet, and it was supposed to ship before Christmas...
Seriously, though, the 9700 was released about five months ago. nVidia hasn't gotten around to releasing their competition to it (in their defense, they're releasing it this week), so yes, ATI is ahead of the game.
Given the number of nVidia fanatics running around, ATI needs to be doing it better and faster and more often, at least for a while. The best thing to happen for the video card industry is for ATI to kick nVidia's ass for a while, and then for nVidia to rise to ATI's new level. Competition is what we all should want to see.
We've seen phase one, now it's time for nVidia to collectively say "yikes!" and start competing.
Even if your database doesn't fit in affordable RAM today, it probably will in a few years. RAM prices fall faster than database sizes increase. Already a couple of gigabytes of storage is more than enough for a big class of applications
Well, yeah, but by then, my databases will have gotten bigger.:-/
Re:Am I the only geek who HATES Nethack?
on
Nethack 3.4.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I can see the Diablo comparison. They're both hack and slash games. The thing Diablo does not do to you, though, is leave you stranded and basically screwed at the beginning of the game.
This is actually one of the beauties of Nethack. If you play, for example, a Wizard, the early game is tough. Really tough. You can't melee, if you use spells too much you starve, you're just screwed at the beginning.
If you play, say, a caveman, you're pretty well off at the beginning-- you can melee anything you meet, and eat most of it once it's dead.
If you survived as a Wizard, the endgame is much easier. Give ol' Rodney the finger and he doesn't bother you so much.
If you played a caveman, the endgame is notably tougher. Your lack of spell-fu means you're pretty much forced to melee everything you meet, which gets old after a while.
Each character is balanced, and has a tougher or easier time in the beginning, middle, and end of the game.
Slashdot Mirror
In ten years, we'll be filing his quote in with Ken Olson's quote that there's a market for maybe a dozen computers worldwide, or the comment from the patent office clerk a century or so ago that said everything that can be invented already has been.
Of course, it's technically possible that Ellison is right. I wouldn't wager on it, myself, humankind has a history of doing things that can't be done-- walking on the moon, breaking the sound barrier...
The best thing about a 400 MHz FSB being available on an Athlon chip?
The 333 MHz FSB chips will drop in price!
...puts the burden of proof on AMD to prove that your upgrade was what caused the processor to die. I suspect they know this, and I also suspect if you raise enough of a ruckus you can get your processor replaced, as it's not worth going to court over. They're probably just betting most folks won't raise much cain about it.
it blows the smaller microdrive out of the water
I'll consider my Microdrive blown out of the water when this new thing fits in my Canon Powershot G1.
It sounds like they're two very different markets. This thing requires a proprietary interface; the Microdrive (and similar devices like the 5 or 10GB PCMCIA hard disks) use standard well-published and darned near ubiquitous interfaces. This new thing sounds like it could be built into something easily, but not as useful as removable storage. I get to thinking there's room for one of these in my car stereo, for example...
This past week, one of the first comments to be modded up as funny is someone claiming to be the Iraqi information minister.
Now, they could have said something like, "There are no holes in the BuzzCard system, and we have repelled the elitist satan dogs who have attempted to break its security!" and it would have finally been funny!
-JDF
This is what comes of marketting departments taking a technical term and redefining it.
Indeed. Everybody knows that a "broadband" is something like the Bangles or the Go-Gos.
EA is, no doubt, the leader in the computer games industry. NVidia is into a head 2 head fight with ATI ( ATI is probably going to come out as the winner ), and such a deal will add points in its favor in this 'fight'. Imagine a series of games to comes with a 'NVidia' recommented stamp on the cover.
Sure, it's a great win in the marketing department.
Personally, though, I'd rather nVidia spent their time designing better video cards instead.
How about the News... oh wait he already owns FoxNews.
Well, it was kinda nice back in the day when I had three cable news channels to choose from...
In truth, I don't see CNN or MSNBC going away any time soon. They're too big and would cause too much of an uproar-- and frankly, they're still profitable to carry [0]. I can, however, see some of the smaller channels go away-- you don't need this Jefferson Pilot affiliate, because you've got Fox SportsSouth. Never mind that SportsSouth doesn't carry Georgia Tech football games...
[0] One might think that given how CNN tends to lean left and FoxNews tends to lean right that the folks who own FoxNews might want use this sort of market power to squash CNN so that people would get right-slanted news. Thing is, many of NewsCorp's news channels on Sky and the like lean left-- Rupert Murdoch isn't interested in brainwashing you to think like he does. He's interested in your money.
...is not the keyboard ports or RS-232 or floppy drives or BIOS or any of the other things he mentions in his article.
I want a saner interrupt system. We're still using the same 16 interrupts they introduced with the PC-AT, with a little bit of PnP gloss over them. And most systems seem to have certain IRQs reserved away for their respective devices, so you can't use them-- don't have a floppy drive? Well, it'd be nice to let the PnP stuff use that IRQ for something else, but on many systems, you can't. And in a world where ever processor has a math-coprocessor _built in_, what's the point of reserving IRQ 13 for it? (Yes, the current design of Pentiums and Athlons require it. But _why_?)
Building a completely legacy free PC is pretty unlikely at this juncture, because the underlying architecture simply hasn't changed...
-JDF
Sure, the idea of a military weapon is to poke a hole in the other guy. Lasers are pretty good at hole-poking in lots of objects.
But wouldn't it be more effective to do so with a weapon that doesn't cauterize the wound as it makes it?
-JDF
In an Internet of comments like "country borders are speed bumps on the information superhighway" and such, when we speak of a global internet creating unity, what's the point of putting tags on things so we know where it's created? Isn't the point of ubiquitous communication that we don't have to care where people are any more if we do wish to speak to them?
-JDF
Atlanta, GA, 30342
To my knowledge, this is the first time an ISP offers this kind of service.
Well, for limited versions of "ISP", it's actually a pretty old idea. The Blue Sky Rangers' site notes PlayCable, a service for playing Intellivision games across your cable TV line.
Of course, no geek story about the PlayCable would be complete without noting the story of how the Intellivision's version of Bump 'n' Jump was developed.
How do they do 1080i if they only support monitors up to 1280x1024? They're short 56 rows, by my count. And given that the HD footage I've seen that's 1080 lines tall is 1920 pixels wide, it's even worse off that direction.
Come on, folks, for $400, how hard would it have been to support a reasonable resolution?
2. Export .vcr file to mpeg2 (ATI likes capturing in it's own format better).
You'll wind up with better output if you can capture in something that's not compressed in a lossy format (like, for example, ATI's VCR format.) huffyuv makes an excellent on-the-fly compressor, though of course ATI's software won't let you use it.
3. Run mpg file through FlaskMPEG to convert to DivX video with MP3 audio.
You'll wind up with even better output if you don't go from one lossy compressor to another lossy compressor to yet a third lossy compressor.
I've been using VirtualDub with my ATI All-in-wonder and things are coming up pretty well so far. You have to jump through a number of hoops to get there-- ATI ships with WDM, but VitualDub wants VFW, so you need a wrapper to get there...
Does slapping a fedex label on yourself and jumping in the nearest drop box count as "external communication"?
(just remember to remove the circuitry, m'kay?)
There's usually no need to do that when you put your keyboard in the dishwasher. Just make sure the thing is completely dry before you plug it back in. It's about the only sane way to ever get all the Coke out of your keyboard...
The trusty Kenmore dishwasher is commonly used in a number of electronics firms to remove solder flux and other cruft from prototype boards.
Well, hard disks aren't getting any lighter, CD-ROMs aren't getting much lighter, keyboards're probably at the ragged edge of weight/reliability, TFT screens only get so light, and so, what's left?
Batteries.
Why's laptop battery life suck? Because as batteries get better they use less of them to make the laptop lighter. Why are laptops so heavy? Because if the batteries were any lighter, they'd have even less power...
I want a nice thick ten or fifteen pound laptop that's got enough battery life to last all day and enough reinforcement under the hood that I can thump users upside the head with it. Lightweight's overrated.
Don't take any computers if you can, you enjoy the world better when it has your complete attention.
:)
But if you don't take any computers, what do you wire into the car stereo to play your mp3s?
Real geeks can't afford iPods anymore, you know.
-JDF
I took a road trip across the southern US. I loaded up my pickup truck with a tent and a laptop in Atlanta and wound up in Alamogordo, NM before I turned around and headed home.
:)
Every KOA campground (er, "kampground") I stayed at had a phone jack for plugging your laptop into in one of the public areas, usually the rec room (though in one it was the laundry facility.) Dialup may not be sufficient for, say, uploading the day's digital pictures to your webswerver, but it's enough to check email and at least do the text portion of a 'blog.
I dunno where you're planning on overnighting on your trip, but if campgrounds have phone lines, I'd guess darned near any hotel does, too. And if you're not crashing at a hotel or a campground, please, find somewhere to take a shower.
It doesn't mention in the article. I remember seeing a couple of times that some Debian stuff was sent for these types of experiements.
But in the absence of real evidence, I prefer to make things up.
They sent pr0n.
Obviously, it was SLACware.
It's obviously not, since the new GeForce still isn't out yet, and it was supposed to ship before Christmas...
Seriously, though, the 9700 was released about five months ago. nVidia hasn't gotten around to releasing their competition to it (in their defense, they're releasing it this week), so yes, ATI is ahead of the game.
Given the number of nVidia fanatics running around, ATI needs to be doing it better and faster and more often, at least for a while. The best thing to happen for the video card industry is for ATI to kick nVidia's ass for a while, and then for nVidia to rise to ATI's new level. Competition is what we all should want to see.
We've seen phase one, now it's time for nVidia to collectively say "yikes!" and start competing.
"Lost library book returns after 2,000 years."
I'd hate to see that late fee...
IMI. Y?
Even if your database doesn't fit in affordable RAM today, it probably will in a few years. RAM prices fall faster than database sizes increase. Already a couple of gigabytes of storage is more than enough for a big class of applications
:-/
Well, yeah, but by then, my databases will have gotten bigger.
I can see the Diablo comparison. They're both hack and slash games. The thing Diablo does not do to you, though, is leave you stranded and basically screwed at the beginning of the game.
This is actually one of the beauties of Nethack. If you play, for example, a Wizard, the early game is tough. Really tough. You can't melee, if you use spells too much you starve, you're just screwed at the beginning.
If you play, say, a caveman, you're pretty well off at the beginning-- you can melee anything you meet, and eat most of it once it's dead.
If you survived as a Wizard, the endgame is much easier. Give ol' Rodney the finger and he doesn't bother you so much.
If you played a caveman, the endgame is notably tougher. Your lack of spell-fu means you're pretty much forced to melee everything you meet, which gets old after a while.
Each character is balanced, and has a tougher or easier time in the beginning, middle, and end of the game.
-JDF