I'm wondering how much cell plans cost around the world. Are plans in other countries as cheap as they are in the USA? I know I see people complaining about how it's backwards in the USA that we get charged for receiving calls, but I don't really care, because I don't use nearly all of my minutes anyway.
Country: USA Price: $35 USD Minutes: 250 anytime, 2750 nights and weekends. Long distance included for calls anywhere in the lower 48 states.
Typically, I use less than 200 minutes per month. Most of my friends have similar plans... the most basic plan you can get (that I have found), is $20 USD per month for 20 minutes. I feel it's worth the extra $15 USD for all the minutes. Of course, the minutes came in handy when my girlfriend and I were apart for 3 months...
Before blaming Intel for going with an Arm 5 core with "slow" (slow being relative, as the benchmarks vary) Arm 4 emulation, remember that all they did was produce a CPU for the embedded market that can run on batteries. The MS Pocket PC market is just one market for these processors. They want them used in cell phones and powering all kinds of devices, just like the StrongArm did.
Obviously, they felt that the majority of their customers would want an Arm5 based device. Wait a few months, and you might see some pretty impressive cell phones or linux based devices that use Arm5.
The complaint against Intel is only legitimate if their Arm5 scores are terrible. Otherwise it is the fault of the device maker for using a chip that doesn't perform well for the task at hand, or MS for not optimising.
I wonder if it really means Sound Blaster PRO compatible... I used to have one of these cards, and it's 8 bit, rather than 16 bit like most generic, non-dsp sound cards now. This means that, for example, mp3s will sound absolutely horrible (kind of like listening to music on AM radio), if they'll play at all.
When I first heard about mp3's in early '97, I ripped a song and tried playing it on my 486 with a Pentium 83MHz overdrive chip, and a sound blaster pro. Sounded just awful. I knew then that for my next computer I'd need a 16 bit sound card...
This thing has nothing to do with the IMac. Gateway isn't, and wasn't, the first to use the "profile pc" design.
When I entered college in the fall of '97, my roommate has a machine like this from Compaq... it featured a Pentium 166 MMX processor, and a fairly crappy LCD.
I'm not sure that Compaq was the first to develop and sell one of these, but they've been around for a while.
I hate getting told that x has been made to copy y because y is popular, when x was really around for a long, long time before y gained any popularity. It reminds me of fashion trends in junior high...
It's certainly possible that they can compress video/audio data this much. There are types of compression available far greater than what are commonly used... the reason being that they demand way too much computing power to encode and decode. For example, neural networks have been used to compress data like pictures to tiny, tiny size. But if you've ever seen neural network algorithms, you know that there's a lot of computation going on.
That said, assuming they have the compression, nobody probably has a cpu for decoding it.
I remember when they were pushing IE 3 really hard just like this. Any MS programs that came out at the time forced you to install IE 3 for them to work whether they required it or not, and whether they had anything to do with the internet or not. They put a check on a dll that came with IE 3, and if you didn't have it, it wouldn't install.
The University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign has been using Java in the introductory CS class since the spring term of '98 (when I first took it... before that they had been using scheme). The first portion of the class (at least back then) dealt with basic programming syntax and how to do loops, etc. Then it moved on to the OOP philosophy and started dealing with classes.
The course homepage for CS125 is: http://www-courses.cs.uiuc.edu/~cs125/
The next class required of CS majors is CS225, which is a data structures class taught in C++. The first couple of days of the class are spent going over the difference between C++ and Java (most especially stuff on pointers), and then later they move in to data structures and algorithms.
The course homepage for CS225 is:
http://www-courses.cs.uiuc.edu/~cs225/
It seems many people do not understand what the AMD Hypertransport technology does. It is a high speed interconnect, meant to be used to hook different high speed, high bandwidth circuits or networks together. For example, look at this diagram of the Intel 820 chipset. The processor talks to the MCH (memory control hub), which itself talks to memory, graphics, and the ICH (I/O control hub). The ICH talks to all the various I/O devices. Hypertransport would not necessarily, and mostly not likely, try to replace PCI, but lets the motherboard designers use it to connect the MCH and ICH (or the equivalent on AMD and VIA chipsets), or connect the PCI bus to the ICH or MCH.
From an interview here with an AMD representative:
Arcadian asks: What are AMD's plans for LDT? Recently, there have been numerous press releases on AMD's success in getting various designers and developers to commit to LDT based designs in the next couple years. I want to know which applications AMD sees LDT competing in? In other words, what are some products where AMD sees LDT being implemented? Does AMD figure that LDT can compete as an alternative to the following technologies: I/O connections, chipset bridge communications, multiprocessor communications, or external communications?
AMD: Well, by the time you read this you should have heard about all of the great things we have been doing over the past year related to our HyperTransport technology (what was previously codenamed LDT). Our HyperTransport technology is not meant to replace I/O connections, or be a competitor with any external communications (PCI/PCI-X, Infiniband, etc). Essentially, HyperTransport can be used to increase internal chip-to-chip communications within a system, and is up to 20 times faster than other technologies currently available. HyperTransport technology is ideal for not only chipset bridge communications, multiprocessor communications, but also for chip-to-chip communications within telecom and networking devices that require large amounts of internal bandwidth like Internet routers.
In conclusion, Hypertransport is not an I/O standard for the end user, it's for board designers. As a consumer, it won't matter to you whether a board you buy has it or not, as it will be invisible to you.
Apple is the company that has always put their support behind getting their computers to be used in schools (elementary, middle, and high schools), and they've done a great job of that. Almost all schools have (or at least had) macs, and usually exclusively macs. So much so, in fact, that many college education programs (for students majoring in education to become teachers), teach hyperstudio and encourage its use for certain types of lessons. It has become a rather standard teaching tool. So are they going to leave teachers to start over and use something other than hypercards? If so, they'll probably have less and less support from teachers for schools buying those [ugl]iMacs.
In the heat of the browser wars, it was MS who pissed me off. The anti-trust case focuses on the integration of IE into win98, but let's go back a little bit. Before MS could get win98 and IE4 out there was a time when every single microsoft product would require you to install IE3. If you didn't install it, you couldn't install the program, even though the program didn't need IE and had nothing to do with the internet. I remember one case where a guy found that all you needed was one of the dlls from IE to be able to install Excel (if it wasn't Excel, it was some similar office program) and he got in trouble for distributing that dll so others could avoid installing IE3.
Forcing the consumer to install a program they may not want and generating artificial dependencies for other software on that program is NOT beneficial to the consumer. Especially since in these days lots of people didn't have an extra few megs harddrive space for some unwanted program.
The court issues may be with win98, but I think the real important, possibly illegal events were in the lead up to win98 and IE4. If we could go back and look closely at MS's distribution of IE, I think we'd see some pretty shady activities.
In Rock Island, IL (USA) my girlfriend has cable modem service through AT&T/@home and it's $19.99 per month, there was no set up fee, and no fee for the cable modem. Even more impressive was the fact the installation was scheduled in one day, and took about 2 minutes. Everything works perfectly, and it's nice and speedy. Most other people I know from other places and providers have had lots of trouble.
I've never seen anyone on slashdot, or heard anyone I know in real life say they'd vote for Bush. Everywhere I look I find the opinion that I have: Bush is an idiot, and the republican agenda is ridiculous. But, Bush is doing very well in polls, and has quite a good percentage even in this/. poll. So I was just wondering, who is voting Bush, and why?
Hmmm... I remember reading reports before that Mandrake was by far the most used linux distribution, at least in the US. Too bad I can't find the links. I hate surveys.
From what I understand of compression (and I'm no expert), it's easy to find supercompressive algorithms that work using various methods (wavelets, neural networks). The problem is that they're too computationally expensive. I'm sure someone can come up with an algorithm that can compress video even further... but will it even play at 1 frame/sec on a 1GHz system?
I got the Genica mp3 player (http://www.genica.com/MP3-CD.htm)a month ago... and this player looks exactly like and has the same exact features as the MPTrip, so I'm assuming that they're the same manufactured item being sold by different companies. I've had the opposite impression of the reviewer: I had no problems song navigation and not having track names (what do you expect for $100?), but sound quality is pretty bad. The best mode is normal (all the rest really are bad sounding), but even then the sound is extremely tinny. The only reason it doesn't bother me that much is because I use it in my car with one of those cassette adaptors and I can adjust my car's equalizer to even it out. But I wouldn't recommend it to those who are gonna use it with headphones.
The skip protection is terrible, both for audio cds and mp3s.
Finally, I have problems with it reading cdrws. The best part of having one of these is the ability to burn a cdrw, and when you're tired of those songs, just erase it and burn more. I have an HP cdburner and some high quality maxell cdrws, and a great deal of the time when I turn the thing it on it says it can't find any files, and then the times when it can find them it has trouble playing them. It'll play them with lots of skipping (not due to the player getting banged around, it just has trouble reading the files). It's really frustrating when you turn it on to listen to some music and it tells you it can't find the songs.
Here's a cnet review: http://electronics.cnet.com/cgi/crunch/FReview2.as p?ptable=MP3_Players&PID=1000063
Someone with the money to do it (like Bezos) should challenge the patent office: deliberately patent something that's not only obvious but also has prior art, and when it goes through, go back to the patent office and tell them what a poor job they did, and bring a lot of media attention to it. Things might start to get done if they come under public criticism and it's all their own fault... their obviously not in the mindset to make changes right now.
Itanium (Merced) will NOT be relevant right away..
on
News on Pentium IV
·
· Score: 1
When Itanium comes out, it is going to be an ULTRA high end processor used for massively parallel supercomputers (by SGI at least), and high end servers and workstations. It's going to cost big, big bucks, and it will be a number of years before the IA64 architecture has any significant impact on the home PC user. IA64 will be irrelevant to you and me, except for talking about, untill around 2005 I'd say.
SGI/Cray are definitely using MIPS... at least for the O2k line, which I think is currently their only line. You can probably find out for sure on sgi.com
I hate articles like this. In the first place theres the, "The new Top500 numbers are in, and your laptop has never looked so tragically slow." These supercomputers are all massively parallelized machines using regular microprocessors. The actual speed of the machine, like ASCI Red, is determined by the processors used, which in this case are just normal Intel processors. So you can go out and buy a machine that computes instructions just as fast as ASCI Red. The difference is that it can do more things at once because of all the processors involved. Does it make your laptop look slow? Hell no, because if you had ASCI Red, you wouldn't have any apps that take advantage of its parallelism to run on it anyway.
Secondly, Moore's Law is the following (from http://www.intel.com/intel/museum/25anniv/hof/moor e.htm): In 1965, Gordon Moore was preparing a speech and made a memorable observation. When he started to graph data about the growth in memory chip performance, he realized there was a striking trend. Each new chip contained roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor, and each chip was released within 18-24 months of the previous chip. If this trend continued, he reasoned, computing power would rise exponentially over relatively brief periods of time.
Moore's observation, now known as Moore's Law, described a trend that has continued and is still remarkably accurate. It is the basis for many planners' performance forecasts. In 26 years the number of transistors on a chip has increased more than 3,200 times, from 2,300 on the 4004 in 1971 to 7.5 million on the Pentium® II processor.
Since the CPUs in supercomputers use standard processors, and Moore's Law applies to these processors, his law is still intact. His law is about CPUs, not systems.
Well, I've never used Cadence, but I've been using Renoir with ModelSim (on Solaris using VHDL) for a few months now, and it seems to work pretty well. Granted, I haven't been doing any extremely large projects, but it does seem fairly easy to use renoir, and the simulator is pretty good. Only thing, is, from this press release I'm not sure if they've ported Renoir as well, or just the compiler/simulator. If so, that would kind of suck...
And I think the reason it's so expensive is because they can get it. People designing hardware have the money to get it, and they kind of need it... and I think the alternatives are just as pricey. Not that I don't wish it was cheaper...
Strung Out, No Use For A Name, Face To Face, Ten Foot Pole, Jughead's Revenge, The Ataris, Wizo, Blink 182, Pulley, Homegrown... energetic and keep me going all night.
I was just wondering if there are any people who just go throw and moderate comments (ie they have unlimited points). If not, I think we might need it, cuz lots of good comments when there are suddenly 300 comments on a story 2 hours after its been posted... if it was someone's job to moderate, this could be fixed... and to keep their moderation "fair" they should only be allowed to moderate a comment 1 point either way, so that they wouldn't have too much of an effect, but enough.
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I'm wondering how much cell plans cost around the world. Are plans in other countries as cheap as they are in the USA? I know I see people complaining about how it's backwards in the USA that we get charged for receiving calls, but I don't really care, because I don't use nearly all of my minutes anyway.
Country: USA
Price: $35 USD
Minutes: 250 anytime, 2750 nights and weekends. Long distance included for calls anywhere in the lower 48 states.
Typically, I use less than 200 minutes per month. Most of my friends have similar plans... the most basic plan you can get (that I have found), is $20 USD per month for 20 minutes. I feel it's worth the extra $15 USD for all the minutes. Of course, the minutes came in handy when my girlfriend and I were apart for 3 months...
Before blaming Intel for going with an Arm 5 core with "slow" (slow being relative, as the benchmarks vary) Arm 4 emulation, remember that all they did was produce a CPU for the embedded market that can run on batteries. The MS Pocket PC market is just one market for these processors. They want them used in cell phones and powering all kinds of devices, just like the StrongArm did.
Obviously, they felt that the majority of their customers would want an Arm5 based device. Wait a few months, and you might see some pretty impressive cell phones or linux based devices that use Arm5.
The complaint against Intel is only legitimate if their Arm5 scores are terrible. Otherwise it is the fault of the device maker for using a chip that doesn't perform well for the task at hand, or MS for not optimising.
I wonder if it really means Sound Blaster PRO compatible... I used to have one of these cards, and it's 8 bit, rather than 16 bit like most generic, non-dsp sound cards now. This means that, for example, mp3s will sound absolutely horrible (kind of like listening to music on AM radio), if they'll play at all.
When I first heard about mp3's in early '97, I ripped a song and tried playing it on my 486 with a Pentium 83MHz overdrive chip, and a sound blaster pro. Sounded just awful. I knew then that for my next computer I'd need a 16 bit sound card...
This thing has nothing to do with the IMac. Gateway isn't, and wasn't, the first to use the "profile pc" design.
When I entered college in the fall of '97, my roommate has a machine like this from Compaq... it featured a Pentium 166 MMX processor, and a fairly crappy LCD.
I'm not sure that Compaq was the first to develop and sell one of these, but they've been around for a while.
I hate getting told that x has been made to copy y because y is popular, when x was really around for a long, long time before y gained any popularity. It reminds me of fashion trends in junior high...
It's certainly possible that they can compress video/audio data this much. There are types of compression available far greater than what are commonly used... the reason being that they demand way too much computing power to encode and decode. For example, neural networks have been used to compress data like pictures to tiny, tiny size. But if you've ever seen neural network algorithms, you know that there's a lot of computation going on.
That said, assuming they have the compression, nobody probably has a cpu for decoding it.
I remember when they were pushing IE 3 really hard just like this. Any MS programs that came out at the time forced you to install IE 3 for them to work whether they required it or not, and whether they had anything to do with the internet or not. They put a check on a dll that came with IE 3, and if you didn't have it, it wouldn't install.
Actually she's a 34 C. Which is nice anyway.
The University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign has been using Java in the introductory CS class since the spring term of '98 (when I first took it... before that they had been using scheme). The first portion of the class (at least back then) dealt with basic programming syntax and how to do loops, etc. Then it moved on to the OOP philosophy and started dealing with classes.
The course homepage for CS125 is: http://www-courses.cs.uiuc.edu/~cs125/
The next class required of CS majors is CS225, which is a data structures class taught in C++. The first couple of days of the class are spent going over the difference between C++ and Java (most especially stuff on pointers), and then later they move in to data structures and algorithms.
The course homepage for CS225 is:
http://www-courses.cs.uiuc.edu/~cs225/
It seems many people do not understand what the AMD Hypertransport technology does. It is a high speed interconnect, meant to be used to hook different high speed, high bandwidth circuits or networks together. For example, look at this diagram of the Intel 820 chipset. The processor talks to the MCH (memory control hub), which itself talks to memory, graphics, and the ICH (I/O control hub). The ICH talks to all the various I/O devices. Hypertransport would not necessarily, and mostly not likely, try to replace PCI, but lets the motherboard designers use it to connect the MCH and ICH (or the equivalent on AMD and VIA chipsets), or connect the PCI bus to the ICH or MCH.
From an interview here with an AMD representative:
Arcadian asks: What are AMD's plans for LDT? Recently, there have been numerous press releases on AMD's success in getting various designers and developers to commit to LDT based designs in the next couple years. I want to know which applications AMD sees LDT competing in? In other words, what are some products where AMD sees LDT being implemented? Does AMD figure that LDT can compete as an alternative to the following technologies: I/O connections, chipset bridge communications, multiprocessor communications, or external communications?
AMD: Well, by the time you read this you should have heard about all of the great things we have been doing over the past year related to our HyperTransport technology (what was previously codenamed LDT). Our HyperTransport technology is not meant to replace I/O connections, or be a competitor with any external communications (PCI/PCI-X, Infiniband, etc). Essentially, HyperTransport can be used to increase internal chip-to-chip communications within a system, and is up to 20 times faster than other technologies currently available. HyperTransport technology is ideal for not only chipset bridge communications, multiprocessor communications, but also for chip-to-chip communications within telecom and networking devices that require large amounts of internal bandwidth like Internet routers.
In conclusion, Hypertransport is not an I/O standard for the end user, it's for board designers. As a consumer, it won't matter to you whether a board you buy has it or not, as it will be invisible to you.
Apple is the company that has always put their support behind getting their computers to be used in schools (elementary, middle, and high schools), and they've done a great job of that. Almost all schools have (or at least had) macs, and usually exclusively macs. So much so, in fact, that many college education programs (for students majoring in education to become teachers), teach hyperstudio and encourage its use for certain types of lessons. It has become a rather standard teaching tool. So are they going to leave teachers to start over and use something other than hypercards? If so, they'll probably have less and less support from teachers for schools buying those [ugl]iMacs.
In the heat of the browser wars, it was MS who pissed me off. The anti-trust case focuses on the integration of IE into win98, but let's go back a little bit. Before MS could get win98 and IE4 out there was a time when every single microsoft product would require you to install IE3. If you didn't install it, you couldn't install the program, even though the program didn't need IE and had nothing to do with the internet. I remember one case where a guy found that all you needed was one of the dlls from IE to be able to install Excel (if it wasn't Excel, it was some similar office program) and he got in trouble for distributing that dll so others could avoid installing IE3.
Forcing the consumer to install a program they may not want and generating artificial dependencies for other software on that program is NOT beneficial to the consumer. Especially since in these days lots of people didn't have an extra few megs harddrive space for some unwanted program.
The court issues may be with win98, but I think the real important, possibly illegal events were in the lead up to win98 and IE4. If we could go back and look closely at MS's distribution of IE, I think we'd see some pretty shady activities.
In Rock Island, IL (USA) my girlfriend has cable modem service through AT&T/@home and it's $19.99 per month, there was no set up fee, and no fee for the cable modem. Even more impressive was the fact the installation was scheduled in one day, and took about 2 minutes. Everything works perfectly, and it's nice and speedy. Most other people I know from other places and providers have had lots of trouble.
I've never seen anyone on slashdot, or heard anyone I know in real life say they'd vote for Bush. Everywhere I look I find the opinion that I have: Bush is an idiot, and the republican agenda is ridiculous. But, Bush is doing very well in polls, and has quite a good percentage even in this /. poll. So I was just wondering, who is voting Bush, and why?
Hmmm... I remember reading reports before that Mandrake was by far the most used linux distribution, at least in the US. Too bad I can't find the links. I hate surveys.
From what I understand of compression (and I'm no expert), it's easy to find supercompressive algorithms that work using various methods (wavelets, neural networks). The problem is that they're too computationally expensive. I'm sure someone can come up with an algorithm that can compress video even further... but will it even play at 1 frame/sec on a 1GHz system?
I got the Genica mp3 player (http://www.genica.com/MP3-CD.htm)a month ago... and this player looks exactly like and has the same exact features as the MPTrip, so I'm assuming that they're the same manufactured item being sold by different companies. I've had the opposite impression of the reviewer: I had no problems song navigation and not having track names (what do you expect for $100?), but sound quality is pretty bad. The best mode is normal (all the rest really are bad sounding), but even then the sound is extremely tinny. The only reason it doesn't bother me that much is because I use it in my car with one of those cassette adaptors and I can adjust my car's equalizer to even it out. But I wouldn't recommend it to those who are gonna use it with headphones.
s p?ptable=MP3_Players&PID=1000063
The skip protection is terrible, both for audio cds and mp3s.
Finally, I have problems with it reading cdrws. The best part of having one of these is the ability to burn a cdrw, and when you're tired of those songs, just erase it and burn more. I have an HP cdburner and some high quality maxell cdrws, and a great deal of the time when I turn the thing it on it says it can't find any files, and then the times when it can find them it has trouble playing them. It'll play them with lots of skipping (not due to the player getting banged around, it just has trouble reading the files). It's really frustrating when you turn it on to listen to some music and it tells you it can't find the songs.
Here's a cnet review: http://electronics.cnet.com/cgi/crunch/FReview2.a
Maybe I should try to return mine...
Someone with the money to do it (like Bezos) should challenge the patent office: deliberately patent something that's not only obvious but also has prior art, and when it goes through, go back to the patent office and tell them what a poor job they did, and bring a lot of media attention to it. Things might start to get done if they come under public criticism and it's all their own fault... their obviously not in the mindset to make changes right now.
When Itanium comes out, it is going to be an ULTRA high end processor used for massively parallel supercomputers (by SGI at least), and high end servers and workstations. It's going to cost big, big bucks, and it will be a number of years before the IA64 architecture has any significant impact on the home PC user. IA64 will be irrelevant to you and me, except for talking about, untill around 2005 I'd say.
Let's see...
Intel Itanium (instead of Merced)
AMD Athalon (instead of K7)
NVIDIA GeForce 256 (instead of NV10)
There are others, but I just can't think of 'em off the top of my head.
Yes, but do even those processors break Moore's Law?
SGI/Cray are definitely using MIPS... at least for the O2k line, which I think is currently their only line. You can probably find out for sure on sgi.com
I hate articles like this. In the first place theres the, "The new Top500 numbers are in, and your laptop has never looked so tragically slow." These supercomputers are all massively parallelized machines using regular microprocessors. The actual speed of the machine, like ASCI Red, is determined by the processors used, which in this case are just normal Intel processors. So you can go out and buy a machine that computes instructions just as fast as ASCI Red. The difference is that it can do more things at once because of all the processors involved. Does it make your laptop look slow? Hell no, because if you had ASCI Red, you wouldn't have any apps that take advantage of its parallelism to run on it anyway.
r e.htm):
Secondly, Moore's Law is the following (from http://www.intel.com/intel/museum/25anniv/hof/moo
In 1965, Gordon Moore was preparing a speech and made a
memorable observation. When he started to graph data about the
growth in memory chip performance, he realized there was a striking
trend. Each new chip contained roughly twice as much capacity as its
predecessor, and each chip was released within 18-24 months of the
previous chip. If this trend continued, he reasoned, computing power
would rise exponentially over relatively brief periods of time.
Moore's observation, now known as Moore's Law, described a trend
that has continued and is still remarkably accurate. It is the basis for
many planners' performance forecasts. In 26 years the number of
transistors on a chip has increased more than 3,200 times, from 2,300
on the 4004 in 1971 to 7.5 million on the Pentium® II processor.
Since the CPUs in supercomputers use standard processors, and Moore's Law applies to these processors, his law is still intact. His law is about CPUs, not systems.
Well, I've never used Cadence, but I've been using Renoir with ModelSim (on Solaris using VHDL) for a few months now, and it seems to work pretty well. Granted, I haven't been doing any extremely large projects, but it does seem fairly easy to use renoir, and the simulator is pretty good. Only thing, is, from this press release I'm not sure if they've ported Renoir as well, or just the compiler/simulator. If so, that would kind of suck...
And I think the reason it's so expensive is because they can get it. People designing hardware have the money to get it, and they kind of need it... and I think the alternatives are just as pricey. Not that I don't wish it was cheaper...
Strung Out, No Use For A Name, Face To Face, Ten Foot Pole, Jughead's Revenge, The Ataris, Wizo, Blink 182, Pulley, Homegrown... energetic and keep me going all night.
I was just wondering if there are any people who just go throw and moderate comments (ie they have unlimited points). If not, I think we might need it, cuz lots of good comments when there are suddenly 300 comments on a story 2 hours after its been posted... if it was someone's job to moderate, this could be fixed... and to keep their moderation "fair" they should only be allowed to moderate a comment 1 point either way, so that they wouldn't have too much of an effect, but enough.