I think this could have ramifications in the US as well, since software rental is illegal (at least in Virginia). Obviously, an Australian court ruling doesn't directly affect the US; however, it would give studios a big enough woody to try something like that here...
internal storage
[definition] 40 GB IDE Ultra DMA drive
CDRW write speed
up to 8X
minimum system requirements
connection to stereo system with a receiver/amplifier via standard audio jacks, TV with composite video or S-video input|connection to internet service, router and appropriate cables for broadband connection
internet connectivity
dial-up: 56K V.90 modem
processor
Intel Pentium® II 566MHz Celeron
music library
create up to 99 play lists
internet radio
listen to worldwide internet radio stations
music storage
stores 750 CDs, 9000 tracks, 635 hours of music
--
Seems pretty cool, but at almost $1k, that seems pretty pricey for consumer electronics. And, I don't quite like how it's limited to 99 playlists. Also, a basic network interface which would grab a DHCP address (or automatically use something like 10.0.0.1) seems like it would be MUCH more useful than a modem.
With Linux, customers "end up being in the operating systems business," managing software updates and security patches while making sure the multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other," Miller said. "That's the job of a software vendor like Microsoft."
Isn't that the job of whomever maintains your software distribution (RedHat, Mandrake, Caldera, Corel, Debian, etc)?
Re:No difficulties in Implementation
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 1
Yes, and the standard RS-232C serial bus is slooooooow!
I'm not sure about the engineering difficulties in allowing both negative and positive voltage through the same logic gates - after all, you wouldn't want to double the number of wires to gain both positive and negative voltages, since you'd double the number of wires, but only increase the number of bits by 50%.
Difficulties in Implementation
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I vaguely remember discussing this in a Computer Science class on circuit design four or five years back. While this might be possible for some sort of non-copper processor, I imagine the difficulty would be in rapidly distinguishing correct voltages for each bit on today's technology.
In simplistic terms, presently, if you have two bits, at a clock cycle, the electrical current is either 0 (0 volts) or 1 (3.3 volts). Theoretically, you could have an infinite number of bits, provided you had infinite voltage precision. Thus, 0=0v, 1=.1v, 2=.2v,..., 33-3.3v - a 34-bit computer.
However, your processor is probably designed with a tolerance in mind, thus 3.1 volts is probably a 1, and.2 volts is probably a 0. I really don't knwo the specs, but you might even presume 0-1.65v=0 and 1.66-3.3v=1. The amount of effort required and the reduction in speed required to slow the clock cycle down to ensure that.5v is ACTUALLY.5v and not.6v would probably impact performance too greatly.
I'm sure there's a PhD EE somewhere in this crowd that can explain this even better, but my point is that I don't think anything but binary computers are useful with current electrical technology. Presently, there's a reason we use two bits - because it's easy and *fast* to check "on or off" without having to determine how "on" is "on". Now, if one was able to use fiber and send colors along with the pulses, then you might have something...
You can't depend on it. You can't even depend on one camera being identical in specs to another.
Very true. Both my father and I purchased identical Umax scanners a few years back. Same model, same interface. Yet, the color quality on mine was far superior - his pictures always scanned with a bluish tint. He was able to color correct them using the software provided, but the tolerances were obviously very different despite being the same equipment.
I would wager that a $1000 HP scanner would have much tighter tolerances than a $50 Umax. Just a thought.
(PS, your post should really have been modded as redundant, but who cares as Slashdot is owned by VA Linux - the home of redundancies)
Yes, well, I, like many, keep my moderation very high, as to block most of the noise, so occasionally I miss a good point which hasn't been fully modded up.
Kinda the reason I mentioned "pardon me if this has been noted before, but..."
I'm not certain at what point and time this article was researched. So I'm going to ignore the glaring price descrepancy for the hardware... specifically the Dell GX150 which they list at $1200, but I can get for $900 from Dell's website.
I would *assume* that when this individual wrote the paper, the hardware was more expensive. Since this was written for LinuxWorld, it was probably written several months ago. Hardware DOES depreciate, you know.
Forgive me if any of this is mentioned inother responses, but...
First of all, the tests need to be Reiser, XFS, and *Ext3*. Journalling has an impact on performance, even if you're only jounalling the metadata.
Second of all, you should be testing the latest version of all of these against the latest kernels. 2.4.10 or new.
Third of all, one test doesn't show any real benchmarks. You need to test reads and writes of small and large files in differing directory structures. Also, testing should focus on the specific performance gains of each, as well as some real world tests. I believe Reiser does dynamic block allocation while ext generally relies on 4kb blocks (I can already see a number of tests on things like sparse files). Partially fragmented filesystem simulation would be beneficial, too (think "news server"). Yes, I know all the filesystems don't easily fragment, but if you fill a filesystem, then start removing some files and adding others, (especially removing small files and adding large ones), you _will_ get a chance to test it.
Finally, you should consider other filesystems. I think a very good comparison would be ext3, JFS, XFS, and Reiser vs. ext2. That would give you a valid baseline comparison. In addition, testing something like VFAT support under Linux might be interesting:-)
I think this is a valiant effort, but there's a lot more which needs to be put into it to show any useful results.
The last thing we need is a quarter-sized CD. Can anyone imagine trying to plig through a book of those while driving in the car? Or dropping one and not being able to find it? Or inadvertently depositing the newest "Cake" CD in the vending machine at work?
Instead of a SMALLER format, how about massively increasing the capacity of current CD technology? Oh wait, that's already been done - DVD!
Give me a home and car DVD players which will play CD, CDR, CDRW, DVD-RAM with MP3 abilities and I'll upgrade
No sure, but I believe any case. I'm *sure* it applies to criminal cases - you may invoke your right to a citizens arrest at any time (although I imagine most criminals would probably "put a cap in yo' ass" before they'd be arrested - so the usefulness of that law in modern times is somewhat flawed). That doesn't mean you necessarily have the right to *charge* someone with a crime (to do that you need to be a party to the crime or a lawyer), but you can arrest them and drag their sorry butt down to the local police station.
What if something that you do now is legal, but becomes illegal, and the go after people retroactivly?(something ashcroft wants to do)
You know, I hear this quite often. Can someone please explain to me how the government can decide to make a law retroactive and charge people under it? I thought part of our legal system was that no individual could be charge by a crime ex post facto - you can't create a new law and then charge someone with it who broke it when it wasn't a law?!?!?
I was recently screwed on ebay as well - the highest bidder kept telling me he'd pay "this afternoon", but had yet to do it. 30 days and 5 e-mails later, still nothing.
What if e-bay did some sort of verification of accounts (like sending you a letter to your home address and forcing you to send it back)? Then, if they changed their system so that sellers could "only allow verified buyers" to bid, those buyers would be less likely to disappear - especially since e-bay would have more than just a hotmail or yahoo address to go on.
Hey, if the RIAA is downloading files from themselves, does that mean they should be arresting and prosecuting themselves for downloading their pirated music?
I've got a better answer - since every American has the right to invoke a citizens arrest, we all need to invoke that right on the RIAA when they pirate their own music in this manner.
Come on. Software has bugs. What irks these CIOs the same as the rest of us is that they're OBVIOUS bugs - things which should've been caught if the companies were doing real testing before their release cycles. Changing a document margin should NOT core dump a program! And bugs should be fixed FREE - you shouldn't be forced to upgrade to fix problems. The problem is that corporate America actually believes that the "upgrade to fix your problems" mentality is valid!
When you're working on a 10,000,000 line project, there are going to be bugs. I can say for certain that several of the projects I've done don't have any code-related bugs - because they're all less than 5000 lines! When you start putting multiple people on a project, you start to run into problems interfacing between modules - or just in design.
And let's not even look at things like compiler bugs. Sure, you can write flawless code - but if there's a bug in your version of gcc, your software may be buggy - and you might not even know it.
No program is debugged until the last user is dead!
Does anyone know what the channel seperation is on the 5 GHz band? On the 2.4 GHz band, you can combine channels 1, 6, and 11 (since they require 5 channels of seperation) with three wavelan adapters and a combiner/decombiner on each end of a point-to-point link. At 2.4 GHz, you can max out at 33 Mbps/sec by doing this - at 5 GHz, combining two channels would get you 108 Mbps - or more if there are more channels to work with.
Functionally, you're going to be limited to about 20 miles using a pair of 36" parabolic grid antennas and 10db amps. The total will give you about 34 db gain (less 3-5 db for cable & n-connectors). That's about the FCC limit.
You can, however, find someone along the way and repeat off another location. Essentially, you aim the antennas and go 15 or 20 miles, then have two more antennas on the other side, plus a computer with two NICs, and just route between the antennas. Since you're boosting gain each time, you can repeat essentially forever.
However, you will find weather can be a limiting factor. Also, you must have line of sight (NO obstructions, including trees, buildings, etc), and the 2.4GHz range is prone to interference by things like leaky microwave ovens and cordless phones.
You might check out http://uslinux.net/wireless/ for some more info. A good company to buy equipment from is http://www.hyperlinktech.com
Assuming you didn't have to pay for relays (eg, you could relay off a home or office building for free), the equipment cost is probably somewhere around $15,000. Then you still need to deal with bandwidth considerations. You may find it cheaper in your case to get a T-1. At least in the DC metro area, you could get a T-1 circuit of 45 miles for about $1300/month, including bandwidth.
Somehow this worries me. Anyone remember the last couple NASA screwups (doing measurements in SAE instead of Metric or losing a satellite)?
Sure, we mess with the orbit of the Earth. It in turn throws off everything in the universe, causing much more damage than anyone would have ever thought. Do we trust a couple people to do the calculations that could cause that much unforseen destruction?
I used to play Scorched Earth (the BEST multiplayer game ever) back in high school, and I remember the game allowing you to play with a free market economy. You still had to beat your enemies to win cash, but the more certain items were purchased, the more expensive they got. Similarly, the less something was purchased, the cheaper it became. Let's face it, capitalism drives most of the free world, but most games don't take that into account
According to Apple, it won't happen
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
I was at an overview at one of Apple's offices in Northern Virginia in February/March of 2000 and asked that very question. My point was simple:
It's tough to convince people to spend 25-50% more for hardware, even if it is twice as fast, if they can't slowly migrate away from their current applications. If you want to get people to use G4's, you need to convince people to use OS X. To do so, you need to port OS X to x86 architectures to hook current Windows users, and then convince them that you have better hardware after people begin using them, and companies begin developing G4 apps. Very few people will buy non-x86 hardware because _it won't run Windows_ and that's what they're familiar with. Maybe as Linux continues to take off, PPC hardware sales will too, and then OS X - but that seems so counterintuitive.
It took me about a year to move from a Linux/Windows multi-boot to Linux-only. Why? Because I wasn't comfortable with Linux apps - there was a lot of stuff I couldn't do in Linux at the time (a couple years ago). Even stuff that I could do took a while to set up the first time.
The response of _all_ the salesmen at the meeting was that they do not ever intend to port OS X to x86. They wouldn't care if someone else did it, but they wanted to be a hardware provider - not a software provider - and didn't want to support x86 OS X.
Sounds like Sun to me. Get people to buy your hardware, and write an OS that works only on your hardware (except Sun finally got smart and released an x86 version of Solaris).
Will Apple ever port OS X to x86? Probably not. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't have a great business model, which is really a pity, because they build amazing hardware (mmmmm... Titanium Powerbook...)
The more important question is: Will OS X support a 2 button more:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I think this could have ramifications in the US as well, since software rental is illegal (at least in Virginia). Obviously, an Australian court ruling doesn't directly affect the US; however, it would give studios a big enough woody to try something like that here...
* Remote control
* LCD display
Yes, you could build something cheaper, but most home users would never BUILD something like this.
Cost needs to come down to the sub $200 level to really reach a consumer market, however.
internal storage
[definition] 40 GB IDE Ultra DMA drive
CDRW write speed
up to 8X
minimum system requirements
connection to stereo system with a receiver/amplifier via standard audio jacks, TV with composite video or S-video input|connection to internet service, router and appropriate cables for broadband connection
internet connectivity
dial-up: 56K V.90 modem
processor
Intel Pentium® II 566MHz Celeron
music library
create up to 99 play lists
internet radio
listen to worldwide internet radio stations
music storage
stores 750 CDs, 9000 tracks, 635 hours of music
--
Seems pretty cool, but at almost $1k, that seems pretty pricey for consumer electronics. And, I don't quite like how it's limited to 99 playlists. Also, a basic network interface which would grab a DHCP address (or automatically use something like 10.0.0.1) seems like it would be MUCH more useful than a modem.
Hacking time, anyone?
Yeah, I'd like to volunteer google's bandwidth... oh wait
Isn't that the job of whomever maintains your software distribution (RedHat, Mandrake, Caldera, Corel, Debian, etc)?
Yes, and the standard RS-232C serial bus is slooooooow!
I'm not sure about the engineering difficulties in allowing both negative and positive voltage through the same logic gates - after all, you wouldn't want to double the number of wires to gain both positive and negative voltages, since you'd double the number of wires, but only increase the number of bits by 50%.
I vaguely remember discussing this in a Computer Science class on circuit design four or five years back. While this might be possible for some sort of non-copper processor, I imagine the difficulty would be in rapidly distinguishing correct voltages for each bit on today's technology.
In simplistic terms, presently, if you have two bits, at a clock cycle, the electrical current is either 0 (0 volts) or 1 (3.3 volts). Theoretically, you could have an infinite number of bits, provided you had infinite voltage precision. Thus, 0=0v, 1=.1v, 2=.2v,
However, your processor is probably designed with a tolerance in mind, thus 3.1 volts is probably a 1, and
I'm sure there's a PhD EE somewhere in this crowd that can explain this even better, but my point is that I don't think anything but binary computers are useful with current electrical technology. Presently, there's a reason we use two bits - because it's easy and *fast* to check "on or off" without having to determine how "on" is "on". Now, if one was able to use fiber and send colors along with the pulses, then you might have something...
Very true. Both my father and I purchased identical Umax scanners a few years back. Same model, same interface. Yet, the color quality on mine was far superior - his pictures always scanned with a bluish tint. He was able to color correct them using the software provided, but the tolerances were obviously very different despite being the same equipment.
I would wager that a $1000 HP scanner would have much tighter tolerances than a $50 Umax. Just a thought.
Yes, well, I, like many, keep my moderation very high, as to block most of the noise, so occasionally I miss a good point which hasn't been fully modded up.
Kinda the reason I mentioned "pardon me if this has been noted before, but..."
I would *assume* that when this individual wrote the paper, the hardware was more expensive. Since this was written for LinuxWorld, it was probably written several months ago. Hardware DOES depreciate, you know.
Forgive me if any of this is mentioned inother responses, but...
First of all, the tests need to be Reiser, XFS, and *Ext3*. Journalling has an impact on performance, even if you're only jounalling the metadata.
Second of all, you should be testing the latest version of all of these against the latest kernels. 2.4.10 or new.
Third of all, one test doesn't show any real benchmarks. You need to test reads and writes of small and large files in differing directory structures. Also, testing should focus on the specific performance gains of each, as well as some real world tests. I believe Reiser does dynamic block allocation while ext generally relies on 4kb blocks (I can already see a number of tests on things like sparse files). Partially fragmented filesystem simulation would be beneficial, too (think "news server"). Yes, I know all the filesystems don't easily fragment, but if you fill a filesystem, then start removing some files and adding others, (especially removing small files and adding large ones), you _will_ get a chance to test it.
Finally, you should consider other filesystems. I think a very good comparison would be ext3, JFS, XFS, and Reiser vs. ext2. That would give you a valid baseline comparison. In addition, testing something like VFAT support under Linux might be interesting
I think this is a valiant effort, but there's a lot more which needs to be put into it to show any useful results.
The last thing we need is a quarter-sized CD. Can anyone imagine trying to plig through a book of those while driving in the car? Or dropping one and not being able to find it? Or inadvertently depositing the newest "Cake" CD in the vending machine at work?
Instead of a SMALLER format, how about massively increasing the capacity of current CD technology? Oh wait, that's already been done - DVD!
Give me a home and car DVD players which will play CD, CDR, CDRW, DVD-RAM with MP3 abilities and I'll upgrade
No sure, but I believe any case. I'm *sure* it applies to criminal cases - you may invoke your right to a citizens arrest at any time (although I imagine most criminals would probably "put a cap in yo' ass" before they'd be arrested - so the usefulness of that law in modern times is somewhat flawed). That doesn't mean you necessarily have the right to *charge* someone with a crime (to do that you need to be a party to the crime or a lawyer), but you can arrest them and drag their sorry butt down to the local police station.
You know, I hear this quite often. Can someone please explain to me how the government can decide to make a law retroactive and charge people under it? I thought part of our legal system was that no individual could be charge by a crime ex post facto - you can't create a new law and then charge someone with it who broke it when it wasn't a law?!?!?
What if e-bay did some sort of verification of accounts (like sending you a letter to your home address and forcing you to send it back)? Then, if they changed their system so that sellers could "only allow verified buyers" to bid, those buyers would be less likely to disappear - especially since e-bay would have more than just a hotmail or yahoo address to go on.
How about probes of your anus?
Hey, if the RIAA is downloading files from themselves, does that mean they should be arresting and prosecuting themselves for downloading their pirated music?
I've got a better answer - since every American has the right to invoke a citizens arrest, we all need to invoke that right on the RIAA when they pirate their own music in this manner.
Sfotware Bugs? Noe Bughz en this poast.
Come on. Software has bugs. What irks these CIOs the same as the rest of us is that they're OBVIOUS bugs - things which should've been caught if the companies were doing real testing before their release cycles. Changing a document margin should NOT core dump a program! And bugs should be fixed FREE - you shouldn't be forced to upgrade to fix problems. The problem is that corporate America actually believes that the "upgrade to fix your problems" mentality is valid!
When you're working on a 10,000,000 line project, there are going to be bugs. I can say for certain that several of the projects I've done don't have any code-related bugs - because they're all less than 5000 lines! When you start putting multiple people on a project, you start to run into problems interfacing between modules - or just in design.
And let's not even look at things like compiler bugs. Sure, you can write flawless code - but if there's a bug in your version of gcc, your software may be buggy - and you might not even know it.
No program is debugged until the last user is dead!
Does anyone know what the channel seperation is on the 5 GHz band? On the 2.4 GHz band, you can combine channels 1, 6, and 11 (since they require 5 channels of seperation) with three wavelan adapters and a combiner/decombiner on each end of a point-to-point link. At 2.4 GHz, you can max out at 33 Mbps/sec by doing this - at 5 GHz, combining two channels would get you 108 Mbps - or more if there are more channels to work with.
Functionally, you're going to be limited to about 20 miles using a pair of 36" parabolic grid antennas and 10db amps. The total will give you about 34 db gain (less 3-5 db for cable & n-connectors). That's about the FCC limit.
You can, however, find someone along the way and repeat off another location. Essentially, you aim the antennas and go 15 or 20 miles, then have two more antennas on the other side, plus a computer with two NICs, and just route between the antennas. Since you're boosting gain each time, you can repeat essentially forever.
However, you will find weather can be a limiting factor. Also, you must have line of sight (NO obstructions, including trees, buildings, etc), and the 2.4GHz range is prone to interference by things like leaky microwave ovens and cordless phones.
You might check out http://uslinux.net/wireless/ for some more info. A good company to buy equipment from is http://www.hyperlinktech.com
Assuming you didn't have to pay for relays (eg, you could relay off a home or office building for free), the equipment cost is probably somewhere around $15,000. Then you still need to deal with bandwidth considerations. You may find it cheaper in your case to get a T-1. At least in the DC metro area, you could get a T-1 circuit of 45 miles for about $1300/month, including bandwidth.
2.4.11: shortest release ever (must be said in the voice of that fat comic book guy on the Simpsons)
now don't slack off on that OpenLDAP development 8^)
Somehow this worries me. Anyone remember the last couple NASA screwups (doing measurements in SAE instead of Metric or losing a satellite)?
Sure, we mess with the orbit of the Earth. It in turn throws off everything in the universe, causing much more damage than anyone would have ever thought. Do we trust a couple people to do the calculations that could cause that much unforseen destruction?
I used to play Scorched Earth (the BEST multiplayer game ever) back in high school, and I remember the game allowing you to play with a free market economy. You still had to beat your enemies to win cash, but the more certain items were purchased, the more expensive they got. Similarly, the less something was purchased, the cheaper it became. Let's face it, capitalism drives most of the free world, but most games don't take that into account
I was at an overview at one of Apple's offices in Northern Virginia in February/March of 2000 and asked that very question. My point was simple:
:-)
It's tough to convince people to spend 25-50% more for hardware, even if it is twice as fast, if they can't slowly migrate away from their current applications. If you want to get people to use G4's, you need to convince people to use OS X. To do so, you need to port OS X to x86 architectures to hook current Windows users, and then convince them that you have better hardware after people begin using them, and companies begin developing G4 apps. Very few people will buy non-x86 hardware because _it won't run Windows_ and that's what they're familiar with. Maybe as Linux continues to take off, PPC hardware sales will too, and then OS X - but that seems so counterintuitive.
It took me about a year to move from a Linux/Windows multi-boot to Linux-only. Why? Because I wasn't comfortable with Linux apps - there was a lot of stuff I couldn't do in Linux at the time (a couple years ago). Even stuff that I could do took a while to set up the first time.
The response of _all_ the salesmen at the meeting was that they do not ever intend to port OS X to x86. They wouldn't care if someone else did it, but they wanted to be a hardware provider - not a software provider - and didn't want to support x86 OS X.
Sounds like Sun to me. Get people to buy your hardware, and write an OS that works only on your hardware (except Sun finally got smart and released an x86 version of Solaris).
Will Apple ever port OS X to x86? Probably not. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't have a great business model, which is really a pity, because they build amazing hardware (mmmmm... Titanium Powerbook...)
The more important question is: Will OS X support a 2 button more