Plus it's a really lousy name. What were they thinking ?
"Spim" is "MIPS" spelled backward..
This is actually a rediculously appropriate name, since the MIPS architecture comes in both little-endian and big-endian versions, and the Spim people, rather than choosing to represent this in their emulator or offer some sort of switch or option, simply decided that the Spim program would blindly follow whatever the endianness convention is of the computer it is being run on at any given moment.
In other words, if you take a Spim assembly program you wrote on the Sparc Solaris server, and you download it to an x86 Windows machine and run it in Spim there, "MIPS spelled backward" is EXACTLY what you will get...
Maybe they could put DVD-like things on there - special features, commentary, 5.1 surround sound. It might actually make buying these things worthwhile.
I noticed that when, for awhile, they tried to do this exact same thing under the name "Enhanced CD-ROM", it was more or less a commercial flop..
You can register to be an election monitor. If you do this you get to sit there and watch the entire process. If they throw stuff in the trash, you see it.
You could register to sit there by the e-vote server and watch the audit printout scroll by you, if you wanted. But you could not physically look inside the computer and see if someone between that piece of paper and the voter is somehow tampering with the incoming bits. You can't look at the hard drive and know that the election executable is the same executable that was certified. You can run a checksummer on the executable, perhaps, but how do you trust the checksummer?
There are perhaps situations under which electronic voting could be a good thing. But it is fundamentally incompatible with the sort of openness that is vital to a healthy election system.
And before you say "oh, but that isn't an assistant": I clearly remember multiple mac programs that behaved as the paperclip did before MSWord had it, only in a useful manner. I can't remember either of the names. One was a kind of helper / personal assistant / reminder app halfway between the paper clip and talking moose; the default avatar was named "Phil" but I can't remember the product's name. There was also a product shortly after that that was supposed to be some kind of "productivity" product that watched your actions over time, and "learned" certain things. If it noticed that every single time you dragged a file from your "documents" folder to the trash and the trash was empty, it would eventually point this out to you and ask if in future it could do the trash-emptying step for you automatically. That's a bad example, but it was that sort of thing.
The paperclip was nothing interesting or new. I doubt anyone would have even talked about it if it hadn't been installed by default and set to come up much more often than anyone could concievably need or want it to.
Seriously, this is an important question to be asked. Enter the Matrix had some of the most pre-release excitement for a game in recent memory, but once it was actually released it became probably the most universally loathed game of the year. I have not played this game, but the reports from everyone who has have been remarkably consistent.
What they say is that the game was little more than an excuse. That the cinematic portions and plot were rather cool, but that the game.. well, just wasn't there. Apparently the developers realized they didn't have to put any effort into the game for people to still buy it, and so they did the absolute minimum required in order for this to still be called "a game". The result was a lackluster, uncreative, boring, unplayable Max Payne lookalike.
Is the same developer from Enter the Matrix releasing this? Is this actualy going to be worthwhile as a game, or are we going to get another phoned-in, unplayable mess with no positive qualities except for those which stem wholly from the franchise the game is based in? Enter the Matrix was still a relative success-- probably because the developer banned reviews of the game before it was released, and so many people bought it blind-- but an MMORPG requires customer retention to succeed..
The thing is that Google's problems are solely because of their success. The problems all come from the fact that it has become advantageous for various groups to pollute Google's results.
If MS actually succeeds in getting anywhere, they will neatly trash Google's main problem, as it will no longer make quite as much sense to base entire business plans around tricking PageRank.
Moreover: Yeah, Google's having problems. However, Google's goal at this point is solely based around trying to circumvent cheaters. They have lots of time and energy to focus on that. They don't really have anything else to focus on. MS's goal is just to catch up with Google. And once they do that, do you honestly think that they will not have people creating huge numbers of sites just to trick their search engine too?
Any advantage MS would have due to Google abuse would be rediculously short lived. Now, given, this would still allow MS to get a pretty strong beachhead and a strong start, which could be helpful, but MS is historically not good at strong starts. What they're good at is weak starts, a few failed versions, a version 3 that is "good enough", and a version 4 which actually finally starts to cause big problems for their enemies. The abuse&bitrot problems would start to set in for MS-Search at about the time of that firstly-acceptable version 3..
AAC is open and free to implement, but Apple has a patent on the DRM stuff they added on top.
Actually, no they don't, they licensed the DRM wrapper whole from a company called VeriDisc. Veridisc would be the one who still owns the technology.
So that won't be free and they aren't licensing it to anybody.
What makes you so sure about that? You're very possibly right, but has anyone tried to license the iTunes Fairplay drm features for use in a non-iPod mp3 player? If not, how do you know Apple is unwilling?
Quite right. I was using the definition of "Console" that excludes handhelds, though. The definition doesn't make much sense to me-- it's all just dedicated game systems, isn't it? But defining "console" as "it plugs into a television and has detatchable controllers" seems to be common these days, and I wound up using it without thinking. Sorry:)
A news site, by definition, deals with change and things that people don't already know. There is no reason for slashdot to report on positive or negative aspects of America, unless these things are changing.
The positive things about America cannot be denied. The inevitable person in every China-related story who says "yeah, well the U.S. is even worse!" is an idiot. However, it also is very hard to argue that the majority of political/economic changes in America right at this exact instant right now are positive.
So you see a large number of negative stories to reflect news which, in Slashdot's editorial eyes, are negative. "American lack of governmental censorship in cinema still operating in the same totally acceptable manner which it has for the last couple of decades!" See? That really doesn't work as a news story.
Yes, this entire process leads to an undue amount of pessimism. But it has its positive side-effects. After all, look at it from an editor's perspective. If they fail to run a story about something bad happening in america, someone who might have in some small way have helped to hinder the bad thing might miss it, preventing the bad thing from getting better. If they fail to run a story about something good happening in america, they marginally increase the amount of pessimism in the world. Which of these is more detrimental?
So is IBM "Designing and building" the x-box 2 CPU, or is Microsoft "licensing technology" from them? That's a pretty big friggin difference. And it looks like it's the latter.
Seeing as IBM does so much research these days, it seems that "licensing technology" could possibly mean something really minor. Well, it could mean almost anything.
Personally, I predict that the GC2 will be the first Nintendo console to feature backward compatibility, and will also feature an IBM chip. Which would make it really wierd if IBM made the x-box chip as well. But what do I know..
If in generating the average they could discount the extremes.
Some of us go through a truly silly amount of data. There's a nontrivial number of people reading this discussion who exhaust their dorm's 1 GB bandwidth cap every day.
On the other hand there's somewhere a barefoot palestinian refugee child for whom not so much as a piece of paperwork was generated since he was born.
These two extremes would probably tend to distort things. It would be interesting to find out if the study was based on usage of storage data as it appears and these extremes were included in the study, or if they just (being Americans) couldn't be bothered when compiling their study to talk to geeks and starving african children. If the former, i'd be curious how their results would change if they could somehow just like chop off the ends of the bell curve.
What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?
Then the GNU people will freak out, do some soul-searching to determine what it is that makes MSH possible (probably in the process throwing themselves at ReiserFS), and, seeing the writing on the wall, finally critically examine the flaws in the UNIX shell and create something new and even better than MSH.
Competition is awesome.
What if Longhorn does indeed provide more security, not only in default settings, but more inherently in the OpenSource?
What if MS suddenly decides to sell off all its assets tomorrow, open-source everything, and use all the now-liquid funds to distribute candy to children? Microsoft's horrible approach to and record with security has not changed for YEARS, despite multiple wake-up calls and multiple "okay, we mean it this time" pr campaigns where Microsoft claims a "new focus" on security. It is possible for Microsoft to get better. However, they have to take steps to do so in order for that to happen; and there is no incentive for them to, since their security stance is not hurting THEM, only their customers. As is, I see nothing happening, and I will not address the whole "maybe MS' security will improve" thing as even remotely realistic until I am given some reason to do so.
Step 3 is "Bury the massive losses suffered from step 2 with the extra revenue from the wildly lucrative Windows and Office divisions, and justify this to the stockholders by pretending this is just all part of some long-term plan they have whereby the NEXT version of your media player and software will actually make money. Or maybe the version after that."
My first thought was that they were holding off on releasing it until the release of the X-box 2.
My second thought, and the one I finally settled on, is that this supposed portable music player will BE the x-box 2.
-----
"So we were sitting around at meeting, and someone said, hey, you know, that handheld gaming market is really heating up, what with the GBA2 and the Sony PCP coming out next year. We really ought to throw something in so that we've got a presence in that market too. So we were sitting there trying to figure out what the hypothetical R&D costs would be, but then Rob, you remember Rob, he designed the X-Box controller, he says, "hey, we're doing prototyping, and the X-Box 2 only weighs 6 pounds. that's less than a two-year-old child. Why don't we just do some rebranding, slap some buttons on the side, and release the X-box 2 as a portable game system?" And we got to thinking about it, and we realized, hey, that's a really great idea. Because look at all the things the X-Box 2 can do that the other handhelds can't. You can watch DVDs on it. You can record TV shows on it. You can do LAN play against other X-Box 2s. You can use it as a wireless way to browse the net and use MSN messenger with your friends [aslongasyouareatthemoment pluggedintoabroadbandconnection byanethernetcable]. But the kicker was when we realized, hey, you can use it as a WMA player. That's a broadside RIGHT AT the iPod. I tell you, when we release this baby, Apple's going to be running scared."
David Goldsmith was, most likely, not talking to the person within Apple who has the actual authority to decide whether a 10.2 patch will be issued or not. (He might have been. But we don't know.)
Goldsmith's comments indicate Apple will not be fixing the problems, and they are worrying. However it is a massive stretch to call them confirmation.
On the other hand, we still probably want to yell bloody murder about this, because lots of public complaining is probably the best way to convince Apple to change things..
I think Mr. Limo was being facetious. The article seems to be written all the way through as if it were not *meant* to be taken seriously, but rather to be interpreted as anti-american satire.
IBM downloads the full linux kernel from SCO's website.
By giving IBM said kernel, SCO has just licensed Linux to IBM under the GPL. This can no longer be argued to be mistake, or something accidentally left around on the website. IBM is now not only someone who has grabbed a file off SCO's website-- which is all that you need for the GPL license to be extended-- they are now a paying customer.
All the code IBM ever put into linux now falls into two categories.
Code which IBM had the right to put into linux because they own it.
Code which IBM has the right to put into linux because SCO has granted them an unfettered license to do so by distributing said code to IBM under the GPL in step 3.
Thus, SCO's lawsuit against IBM-- in which they allege IBM put code into linux which by right of contract is the property of SCO-- is no longer valid, since whether said code is IBM's or SCO's property, IBM now has the right to distribute it under the GPL anyway. The suit can be thrown out.
Yes, I realize the above is utterly rediculous. I'm pointing this out just to elaborate how rediculous SCO's position is. As if it weren't already obvious to all.
$200 million in exchange for which they get to rule the computer industry and do absolutely anything they like, and the government bodies that are supposed to periodically stop in and enforce anti-trust laws will look the other way, because Microsoft's already had its "punishment".
For $200 million? That sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me.
Especially when you have the amount of money in the bank MS does. I mean, hell, $200 million is what they spent on keeping the x-box disaster afloat in just the first quarter of this year alone.
Would you like a bag of ice for that wrist there, Microsoft?
Those were the last of the bits of the U.S. government holding out on actually holding MS accountable instead of just settling with them, right? Is the EU still going forward with anything?
To me, after the last shuttle disaster is: Will this cause america to wake up, realize the problems its space program is having, put serious effort into understanding what the direction of the program should be and what the problems it has at the moment, and work toward solving these problems and revitalizing our space program into something useful, meaningful, and forward-looking?
Or will we just get skittish and just dump the program entirely, looking the other way because it bothers us, cutting what precious little it has to worth with and letting it sink from its current mediocrity to just being a pathetic, bare shell?
Slashdot Mirror
Plus it's a really lousy name. What were they thinking ?
"Spim" is "MIPS" spelled backward..
This is actually a rediculously appropriate name, since the MIPS architecture comes in both little-endian and big-endian versions, and the Spim people, rather than choosing to represent this in their emulator or offer some sort of switch or option, simply decided that the Spim program would blindly follow whatever the endianness convention is of the computer it is being run on at any given moment.
In other words, if you take a Spim assembly program you wrote on the Sparc Solaris server, and you download it to an x86 Windows machine and run it in Spim there, "MIPS spelled backward" is EXACTLY what you will get...
Maybe they could put DVD-like things on there - special features, commentary, 5.1 surround sound. It might actually make buying these things worthwhile.
I noticed that when, for awhile, they tried to do this exact same thing under the name "Enhanced CD-ROM", it was more or less a commercial flop..
next there will be trouble in Russia
I think we can have that starting any minute now.
(URL taken from this not-yet-frontpage article)
You can register to be an election monitor. If you do this you get to sit there and watch the entire process. If they throw stuff in the trash, you see it.
You could register to sit there by the e-vote server and watch the audit printout scroll by you, if you wanted. But you could not physically look inside the computer and see if someone between that piece of paper and the voter is somehow tampering with the incoming bits. You can't look at the hard drive and know that the election executable is the same executable that was certified. You can run a checksummer on the executable, perhaps, but how do you trust the checksummer?
There are perhaps situations under which electronic voting could be a good thing. But it is fundamentally incompatible with the sort of openness that is vital to a healthy election system.
It's been done.
And before you say "oh, but that isn't an assistant": I clearly remember multiple mac programs that behaved as the paperclip did before MSWord had it, only in a useful manner. I can't remember either of the names. One was a kind of helper / personal assistant / reminder app halfway between the paper clip and talking moose; the default avatar was named "Phil" but I can't remember the product's name. There was also a product shortly after that that was supposed to be some kind of "productivity" product that watched your actions over time, and "learned" certain things. If it noticed that every single time you dragged a file from your "documents" folder to the trash and the trash was empty, it would eventually point this out to you and ask if in future it could do the trash-emptying step for you automatically. That's a bad example, but it was that sort of thing.
The paperclip was nothing interesting or new. I doubt anyone would have even talked about it if it hadn't been installed by default and set to come up much more often than anyone could concievably need or want it to.
At last, after all this time and all this wondering, we finally have an answer to the question "What is .NET";
It's a comprehensive set of tools for fixing things that aren't broken.
Will it suck as hard as Enter the Matrix?
Seriously, this is an important question to be asked. Enter the Matrix had some of the most pre-release excitement for a game in recent memory, but once it was actually released it became probably the most universally loathed game of the year. I have not played this game, but the reports from everyone who has have been remarkably consistent.
What they say is that the game was little more than an excuse. That the cinematic portions and plot were rather cool, but that the game.. well, just wasn't there. Apparently the developers realized they didn't have to put any effort into the game for people to still buy it, and so they did the absolute minimum required in order for this to still be called "a game". The result was a lackluster, uncreative, boring, unplayable Max Payne lookalike.
Is the same developer from Enter the Matrix releasing this? Is this actualy going to be worthwhile as a game, or are we going to get another phoned-in, unplayable mess with no positive qualities except for those which stem wholly from the franchise the game is based in? Enter the Matrix was still a relative success-- probably because the developer banned reviews of the game before it was released, and so many people bought it blind-- but an MMORPG requires customer retention to succeed..
That actually sounds fantastic. Who makes this particular election product, do you know? What county/state is this?
The thing is that Google's problems are solely because of their success. The problems all come from the fact that it has become advantageous for various groups to pollute Google's results.
If MS actually succeeds in getting anywhere, they will neatly trash Google's main problem, as it will no longer make quite as much sense to base entire business plans around tricking PageRank.
Moreover: Yeah, Google's having problems. However, Google's goal at this point is solely based around trying to circumvent cheaters. They have lots of time and energy to focus on that. They don't really have anything else to focus on. MS's goal is just to catch up with Google. And once they do that, do you honestly think that they will not have people creating huge numbers of sites just to trick their search engine too?
Any advantage MS would have due to Google abuse would be rediculously short lived. Now, given, this would still allow MS to get a pretty strong beachhead and a strong start, which could be helpful, but MS is historically not good at strong starts. What they're good at is weak starts, a few failed versions, a version 3 that is "good enough", and a version 4 which actually finally starts to cause big problems for their enemies. The abuse&bitrot problems would start to set in for MS-Search at about the time of that firstly-acceptable version 3..
We still need Microsoft Linux, so we'll be safe for a while.
What, isn't this close enough???
(Of course, that's still just a rumor founded in unsubstantiated conjecture based on a vague press release, but you NEVER KNOW...)
AAC is open and free to implement, but Apple has a patent on the DRM stuff they added on top.
Actually, no they don't, they licensed the DRM wrapper whole from a company called VeriDisc. Veridisc would be the one who still owns the technology.
So that won't be free and they aren't licensing it to anybody.
What makes you so sure about that? You're very possibly right, but has anyone tried to license the iTunes Fairplay drm features for use in a non-iPod mp3 player? If not, how do you know Apple is unwilling?
Quite right. I was using the definition of "Console" that excludes handhelds, though. The definition doesn't make much sense to me-- it's all just dedicated game systems, isn't it? But defining "console" as "it plugs into a television and has detatchable controllers" seems to be common these days, and I wound up using it without thinking. Sorry :)
Slashdot is a news site.
A news site, by definition, deals with change and things that people don't already know. There is no reason for slashdot to report on positive or negative aspects of America, unless these things are changing.
The positive things about America cannot be denied. The inevitable person in every China-related story who says "yeah, well the U.S. is even worse!" is an idiot. However, it also is very hard to argue that the majority of political/economic changes in America right at this exact instant right now are positive.
So you see a large number of negative stories to reflect news which, in Slashdot's editorial eyes, are negative. "American lack of governmental censorship in cinema still operating in the same totally acceptable manner which it has for the last couple of decades!" See? That really doesn't work as a news story.
Yes, this entire process leads to an undue amount of pessimism. But it has its positive side-effects. After all, look at it from an editor's perspective. If they fail to run a story about something bad happening in america, someone who might have in some small way have helped to hinder the bad thing might miss it, preventing the bad thing from getting better. If they fail to run a story about something good happening in america, they marginally increase the amount of pessimism in the world. Which of these is more detrimental?
So is IBM "Designing and building" the x-box 2 CPU, or is Microsoft "licensing technology" from them? That's a pretty big friggin difference. And it looks like it's the latter.
Seeing as IBM does so much research these days, it seems that "licensing technology" could possibly mean something really minor. Well, it could mean almost anything.
Personally, I predict that the GC2 will be the first Nintendo console to feature backward compatibility, and will also feature an IBM chip. Which would make it really wierd if IBM made the x-box chip as well. But what do I know..
By definition a bell curve is a normal distribution and is symmetric.
:) Sorry.
Oops. Me == uninformed
Please pretend that in the place I said "bell curve", I instead said "distribution curve".
You could even have a personal Google on your computer.
Sure. Assuming that your computer is a 10,000 machine cluster and you have exabytes of storage space.
If in generating the average they could discount the extremes.
Some of us go through a truly silly amount of data. There's a nontrivial number of people reading this discussion who exhaust their dorm's 1 GB bandwidth cap every day.
On the other hand there's somewhere a barefoot palestinian refugee child for whom not so much as a piece of paperwork was generated since he was born.
These two extremes would probably tend to distort things. It would be interesting to find out if the study was based on usage of storage data as it appears and these extremes were included in the study, or if they just (being Americans) couldn't be bothered when compiling their study to talk to geeks and starving african children. If the former, i'd be curious how their results would change if they could somehow just like chop off the ends of the bell curve.
What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?
Then the GNU people will freak out, do some soul-searching to determine what it is that makes MSH possible (probably in the process throwing themselves at ReiserFS), and, seeing the writing on the wall, finally critically examine the flaws in the UNIX shell and create something new and even better than MSH.
Competition is awesome.
What if Longhorn does indeed provide more security, not only in default settings, but more inherently in the OpenSource?
What if MS suddenly decides to sell off all its assets tomorrow, open-source everything, and use all the now-liquid funds to distribute candy to children? Microsoft's horrible approach to and record with security has not changed for YEARS, despite multiple wake-up calls and multiple "okay, we mean it this time" pr campaigns where Microsoft claims a "new focus" on security. It is possible for Microsoft to get better. However, they have to take steps to do so in order for that to happen; and there is no incentive for them to, since their security stance is not hurting THEM, only their customers. As is, I see nothing happening, and I will not address the whole "maybe MS' security will improve" thing as even remotely realistic until I am given some reason to do so.
Step 3 is "Bury the massive losses suffered from step 2 with the extra revenue from the wildly lucrative Windows and Office divisions, and justify this to the stockholders by pretending this is just all part of some long-term plan they have whereby the NEXT version of your media player and software will actually make money. Or maybe the version after that."
Just like it was for the X-Box.
My first thought was that they were holding off on releasing it until the release of the X-box 2.
My second thought, and the one I finally settled on, is that this supposed portable music player will BE the x-box 2.
-----
"So we were sitting around at meeting, and someone said, hey, you know, that handheld gaming market is really heating up, what with the GBA2 and the Sony PCP coming out next year. We really ought to throw something in so that we've got a presence in that market too. So we were sitting there trying to figure out what the hypothetical R&D costs would be, but then Rob, you remember Rob, he designed the X-Box controller, he says, "hey, we're doing prototyping, and the X-Box 2 only weighs 6 pounds. that's less than a two-year-old child. Why don't we just do some rebranding, slap some buttons on the side, and release the X-box 2 as a portable game system?" And we got to thinking about it, and we realized, hey, that's a really great idea. Because look at all the things the X-Box 2 can do that the other handhelds can't. You can watch DVDs on it. You can record TV shows on it. You can do LAN play against other X-Box 2s. You can use it as a wireless way to browse the net and use MSN messenger with your friends [aslongasyouareatthemoment pluggedintoabroadbandconnection byanethernetcable]. But the kicker was when we realized, hey, you can use it as a WMA player. That's a broadside RIGHT AT the iPod. I tell you, when we release this baby, Apple's going to be running scared."
David Goldsmith is not a representative of Apple.
David Goldsmith was, most likely, not talking to the person within Apple who has the actual authority to decide whether a 10.2 patch will be issued or not. (He might have been. But we don't know.)
Goldsmith's comments indicate Apple will not be fixing the problems, and they are worrying. However it is a massive stretch to call them confirmation.
On the other hand, we still probably want to yell bloody murder about this, because lots of public complaining is probably the best way to convince Apple to change things..
I think Mr. Limo was being facetious. The article seems to be written all the way through as if it were not *meant* to be taken seriously, but rather to be interpreted as anti-american satire.
In other words:
YHBT.
- November 1 comes.
- IBM buys one (1) SCO UNIX license.
- IBM downloads the full linux kernel from SCO's website.
- By giving IBM said kernel, SCO has just licensed Linux to IBM under the GPL. This can no longer be argued to be mistake, or something accidentally left around on the website. IBM is now not only someone who has grabbed a file off SCO's website-- which is all that you need for the GPL license to be extended-- they are now a paying customer.
- All the code IBM ever put into linux now falls into two categories.
- Code which IBM had the right to put into linux because they own it.
- Code which IBM has the right to put into linux because SCO has granted them an unfettered license to do so by distributing said code to IBM under the GPL in step 3.
- Thus, SCO's lawsuit against IBM-- in which they allege IBM put code into linux which by right of contract is the property of SCO-- is no longer valid, since whether said code is IBM's or SCO's property, IBM now has the right to distribute it under the GPL anyway. The suit can be thrown out.
Yes, I realize the above is utterly rediculous. I'm pointing this out just to elaborate how rediculous SCO's position is. As if it weren't already obvious to all.$200 million in exchange for which they get to rule the computer industry and do absolutely anything they like, and the government bodies that are supposed to periodically stop in and enforce anti-trust laws will look the other way, because Microsoft's already had its "punishment".
For $200 million? That sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me.
Especially when you have the amount of money in the bank MS does. I mean, hell, $200 million is what they spent on keeping the x-box disaster afloat in just the first quarter of this year alone.
Would you like a bag of ice for that wrist there, Microsoft?
Those were the last of the bits of the U.S. government holding out on actually holding MS accountable instead of just settling with them, right? Is the EU still going forward with anything?
To me, after the last shuttle disaster is: Will this cause america to wake up, realize the problems its space program is having, put serious effort into understanding what the direction of the program should be and what the problems it has at the moment, and work toward solving these problems and revitalizing our space program into something useful, meaningful, and forward-looking?
Or will we just get skittish and just dump the program entirely, looking the other way because it bothers us, cutting what precious little it has to worth with and letting it sink from its current mediocrity to just being a pathetic, bare shell?
Looks like we've gone for option 2.