I dream of a CPU that fast.:) When developing our new CPUs we run them in RTL-simulators. At a realtime speed of about 100Hz. Yes, no Kilo and no Mega. Herz is what we got. Linux takes about a month to boot to init at that speed. After removing the (at 100Hz) almost eternal bogomips loop that is... Needless to say Linux is a useless ancient behemoth at that speed so we write our own OS for running in simulator.
>And considering an intern could port a complete OS port in a mere 12 weeks, shows how portable it is.
Yeah. It's called unix. As long as you have the proper C-compiler for your cpu it's not hard to port a unix-like OS to another CPU. We did this fifteen years ago for one of our CPUs. Actually was an intern who did that to. It's kind of compile, look-at-compile-error, fix, redo and finally when you got it running fix the CPU config errors and the few low-level stack handling errors you've done. Apart from the do-it-once configuration of MMUs, caches, etc it's not really that much magic to a CPU from on OS point of view.
>Anything even moderately complex would require driver code, not just descriptive data.
Our chips with 3K pages of documentation and no driver code disagrees. And they run linux in millions of products. It really depends on the quality of the documentation. Which is generally pretty bad for mosts chips I have looked at.
>But they should standardise. There's no advantage to the user, >the OEM, or the OS developers in having so many different SoCs.
So you don't want any technical development? Or you think that ARM in a monopoly situation will still develop the core functionality at the same pace as all other chip design companies?
Man, it is tiring to have to explain this to the slashdot drones every time one of these stupid patent stories comes up.
THE PATENT ONLY PATENTS WHAT IS WRITTEN IN THE _CLAIMS_ IN THE PATENT. NOT THE TITLE OF THE PATENT. NOT THE ABSTRACT. NOT THE DESCRIPTION. NOT THE STUPID SLASHDOT STORY. ONLY THE CLAIMS.
For this patent that means if you implement this ideas EXACTLY AS IN THE 39 CLAIMS except for, for example '7. The method as recited in claim 6, wherein the pixel offset includes a range of 1 to 16 pixels.' and your pixel offset is 17, you are cool. You are fucking golden. Gedit? So quit your whining about previous art until you find something that follows THE CLAIMS. OK? THE FUCKING CLAIMS!!!!!!!
> The point isn't "we can't afford stuff! stuff should be free! WAAAH!", it's about rights, personal integrity and in extension safeguarding a free and democratic society.
And it's a coincidence that they actually want copyrighted stuff for free?
>anyway, googletroopers, expect them to have home-brew equipment which might seem slightly crude, but is actually miles ahead of modern day military hardware,
Also expect it to read the minds of the troopers and gather statistics of how to best show them commercials directly in their brains, for the benefit of the soap and tootphaste companies.
>After a new technology is introduced to the market, there is usually a predictable decrease in price as it becomes more common.
Not to defend the broadband providers in any way, but electronics get cheaper because of Moore's law on transistors and lower cost if you produce big volumes. This does not apply to ditches and cables.
The biggest reason that you don't get cheaper broadband in USA is of course that you have elected senators that are bribed by the companies.
>How is this 'funny'? That's how I've archived 15 years worth of email. Really.
I don't understand the funny mod either. Even though I think I might be even more lo-tech. All outgoing mail for the last 15 years are concateneted to a plain text file (cause that's what rmail in emacs does) and old incoming mail is in a emacs rmail file (also plain text). With less, grep and some shell or perl oneliners I can search 2GB faster than all the gui-clickers.
>Can't even imagine writing in assembly code for this monster. I miss dinking around with a nice 6502 system.
To each his own. I kinda agree though. I also grew up on hand coding machine code on the 6502 and it sure was fun, and educational. But now working on designing 32-bit embedded chips I feel really comfortable with a couple of hundreds of instructions instead of ~60. And I sure wouldn't want to do anyhing more complex with the limited addressing modes on the 6502. And you will never see Linux on a 6502...
Btw we actually designed a 6502 once and it used a couple of thousand gates, compared with a couple of billion in a high end CPU. Hard not to be impressed by the oldschool designs.
>Super interesting Wikipedia article! You would think that if they were so good at it (the french judges) they could at least tell the difference between >American and French grapes (even if they secretly found the American taste "Better")...
The varieties of grapes in those wines where, and are, the same regardless of in which country they are made.
>All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.
Funny. Personally I generate 3000 pages of technical documentation for our chips in about 20 seconds with latex. Secretaries and salesdrones can play with the wysiwyg toys, while we who need serious results for serious work use serious tools. Having spent the last week reading a lot of scientific papers it amazes even me that close to 100% of them are done in latex.
How about realising that it doesn't have to be either or? We have both well-educated aces and selftought aces at our company. Of course here in sweden the latter are much more rare as almost all intelligent people with interests in technology get a higher education, but they certainly do exist and it is a real shame if your company doesn't use them.
I totally agree. Having recycled my old Byte magazines I have gone to the University library and read through all issues of Byte. Twice. You get the entire computer history from the microcomputer onwards. And I swear there is magic in them there pages.
This reminds me of a long time ago when each issue of Byte had a card where you could fill in all the ads you were interested in and send in to Byte. They then forwarded this to all the companies and you actually got a boatload of brochures and stuff from them, often printed on really nice, thick, expensive luxuriant paper. They really wanted to do business with you. To bad for them I only was a twelve year old in Sweden who thought it would be fun with some brochures. No surprise they stopped doing that...
If chiropractice is bogus or not of course depends on what they say they cure. I haven't checked every chiropractor here in sweden but generally they are definitely serious and fix real problems when for example discs in your back are out of alignment and nerves become pinched. They are part of the medical establishment. And as someone from a family with serious back problems I say thank good for swedish chiropractors. It's either bed-ridden with maximum dosage of morphine or going to a chiropractor to fix it.
Always funny to read how americans complain about how fundraising wrecks your democracy. Don't know if you know this over there in the USA, but in the civilized world (in my case sweden) it is not called fundraising, it is called bribery and is illegal. You understand? No company, private person or organization is allowed to give money or things or services to any politician. Nada. Zip. Because they are elected by the people and allowing bribery naturally wrecks the whole concept of democracy. Don't know why you put up with your trainwreck of political system, but nevermind, I'm sure there's some good on the telly between the commercials.
You are all a bunch of limp wristed weaklings with your god damn new yuppie fonts. Use '-misc-fixed-medium-*-*-*-14-*-*-*-c-*-*-*' and view your code as emacs and X11 intended it with hard, cold gloriously pixelated simplicity.
>running a pretty stable system, so it may be days or weeks
Jesus, I hope you are running windos or something if you consider weekly reboots stable. For the record, my Linux system practically never goes down. It's the power outages that takes it down perhaps once a year. Desktop machine that is. And I use a window manager that only manages windows (ctwm) and not the entire system, which I suspect is the reason it never dies. The servers are on UPS and are usually up for a couple of years before we upgrade redhat on them or upgrade hardware.
I'll second that, from Sweden. We, friends and collegues in programming in true IT companies, don't recognize all the problems you seem to have in the US with both being continously fucked by the companies and you all seem to have incompetent middle management.
If you are a skilled programmer working here (at my work) you usually work 38-40 hours a week. Every second of voluntary overtime is paid (if you feel like working another hour on a current problem). Ordered overtime, where my boss ASKS me if I could work a little extra on something (happens perhaps once a year and I can usually just say no) pays double. And if our boss or project manager isn't good enough we'll make sure upper management knows about it and he'll be moved to something else. Everyone gets 25 to 35 days days paid vacation, straight out of school. Sickdays are paid by the government, though not in full, and my company goes in and pays a little extra to get to almost 100% paid sick leave. Note though that this is in the high-end IT field. We who do this do not grow on trees and the companies know this.
Perhaps it's time to pull your heads out of where ever you have put them in the US and do something about your situation?
>Why do entertainment providers think that huge budgets are going to impress us? Or is it, as I suppose, a matter of them looking to excuse their having to keep raising prices and using draconian copyright protection measures?
Sitting on your throne of 'good taste' most be lonely when the rest of the world is busy going to the huge budget films you don't seem to like.
US all time box office hits:
1. Titanic (1997) $600,779,824 2. The Dark Knight (2008) $533,316,061 3. Star Wars (1977) $460,935,665 4. Shrek 2 (2004) $436,471,036 5. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) $434,949,459 6. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) $431,065,444 7. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) $423,032,628 8. Spider-Man (2002) $403,706,375 9. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) $380,262,555 10. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Only big budget movies in the top 100 and absolutely no 'indie' films. You were saying?
As always when discussing patents most people get one small vital detail wrong. It is not the fluffy stuff in the patent abstract that is patented, it is the things enumerated in the claims that specify the patent. For example, in this case the claims say that the patent is for a system where you view two pictures of a person where they have changed one single thing and you then vote for the best picture. So any existing system which instead uses one picture is NOT prior art. Neither is any system with two pictures where two items of clothes changed prior art. A system with two pictures of a person with a single thing changed between the pictures but where you give a rating for the pictures is not prior art.
Please, please remember this so we will not have to endure any more stories about patents with prior art. Yes the patents are often trivial and should absolutely not be approved but they often don't have prior art since the claims normally are very specific.
Slashdot Mirror
I dream of a CPU that fast. :) When developing our new CPUs we run them in RTL-simulators. At a realtime speed of about 100Hz. Yes, no Kilo and no Mega. Herz is what we got. Linux takes about a month to boot to init at that speed. After removing the (at 100Hz) almost eternal bogomips loop that is... Needless to say Linux is a useless ancient behemoth at that speed so we write our own OS for running in simulator.
>And considering an intern could port a complete OS port in a mere 12 weeks, shows how portable it is.
Yeah. It's called unix. As long as you have the proper C-compiler for your cpu it's not hard to port a unix-like OS to another CPU. We did this fifteen years ago for one of our CPUs. Actually was an intern who did that to. It's kind of compile, look-at-compile-error, fix, redo and finally when you got it running fix the CPU config errors and the few low-level stack handling errors you've done. Apart from the do-it-once configuration of MMUs, caches, etc it's not really that much magic to a CPU from on OS point of view.
>Anything even moderately complex would require driver code, not just descriptive data.
Our chips with 3K pages of documentation and no driver code disagrees. And they run linux in millions of products. It really depends on the quality of the documentation. Which is generally pretty bad for mosts chips I have looked at.
>But they should standardise. There's no advantage to the user, >the OEM, or the OS developers in having so many different SoCs.
So you don't want any technical development? Or you think that ARM in a monopoly situation will still develop the core functionality at the same pace as all other chip design companies?
Man, it is tiring to have to explain this to the slashdot drones every time one of these stupid patent stories comes up.
THE PATENT ONLY PATENTS WHAT IS WRITTEN IN THE _CLAIMS_ IN THE PATENT. NOT THE TITLE OF THE PATENT. NOT THE ABSTRACT. NOT THE DESCRIPTION. NOT THE STUPID SLASHDOT STORY. ONLY THE CLAIMS.
For this patent that means if you implement this ideas EXACTLY AS IN THE 39 CLAIMS except for, for example '7. The method as recited in claim 6, wherein the pixel offset includes a range of 1 to 16 pixels.' and your pixel offset is 17, you are cool. You are fucking golden. Gedit? So quit your whining about previous art until you find something that follows THE CLAIMS. OK? THE FUCKING CLAIMS!!!!!!!
>And Google knows better.
Apparently not.
> The point isn't "we can't afford stuff! stuff should be free! WAAAH!", it's about rights, personal integrity and in extension safeguarding a free and democratic society.
And it's a coincidence that they actually want copyrighted stuff for free?
>anyway, googletroopers, expect them to have home-brew equipment which might seem slightly crude, but is actually miles ahead of modern day military hardware,
Also expect it to read the minds of the troopers and gather statistics of how to best show them commercials directly in their brains, for the benefit of the soap and tootphaste companies.
>After a new technology is introduced to the market, there is usually a predictable decrease in price as it becomes more common. Not to defend the broadband providers in any way, but electronics get cheaper because of Moore's law on transistors and lower cost if you produce big volumes. This does not apply to ditches and cables. The biggest reason that you don't get cheaper broadband in USA is of course that you have elected senators that are bribed by the companies.
>How is this 'funny'? That's how I've archived 15 years worth of email. Really.
I don't understand the funny mod either. Even though I think I might be even more lo-tech. All outgoing mail for the last 15 years are concateneted to a plain text file (cause that's what rmail in emacs does) and old incoming mail is in a emacs rmail file (also plain text). With less, grep and some shell or perl oneliners I can search 2GB faster than all the gui-clickers.
>Can't even imagine writing in assembly code for this monster. I miss dinking around with a nice 6502 system. To each his own. I kinda agree though. I also grew up on hand coding machine code on the 6502 and it sure was fun, and educational. But now working on designing 32-bit embedded chips I feel really comfortable with a couple of hundreds of instructions instead of ~60. And I sure wouldn't want to do anyhing more complex with the limited addressing modes on the 6502. And you will never see Linux on a 6502... Btw we actually designed a 6502 once and it used a couple of thousand gates, compared with a couple of billion in a high end CPU. Hard not to be impressed by the oldschool designs.
>Super interesting Wikipedia article! You would think that if they were so good at it (the french judges) they could at least tell the difference between >American and French grapes (even if they secretly found the American taste "Better")...
The varieties of grapes in those wines where, and are, the same regardless of in which country they are made.
>If there is a more gullible group of people than audiophiles, I haven't met them.
Religious people?
>+++ No Carrier
I think the problem might be that you are tunneling your call over the modem...
>All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.
Funny. Personally I generate 3000 pages of technical documentation for our chips in about 20 seconds with latex. Secretaries and salesdrones can play with the wysiwyg toys, while we who need serious results for serious work use serious tools. Having spent the last week reading a lot of scientific papers it amazes even me that close to 100% of them are done in latex.
How about realising that it doesn't have to be either or? We have both well-educated aces and selftought aces at our company. Of course here in sweden the latter are much more rare as almost all intelligent people with interests in technology get a higher education, but they certainly do exist and it is a real shame if your company doesn't use them.
>I really miss Byte :(
I totally agree. Having recycled my old Byte magazines I have gone to the University library and read through all issues of Byte. Twice. You get the entire computer history from the microcomputer onwards. And I swear there is magic in them there pages.
This reminds me of a long time ago when each issue of Byte had a card where you could fill in all the ads you were interested in and send in to Byte. They then forwarded this to all the companies and you actually got a boatload of brochures and stuff from them, often printed on really nice, thick, expensive luxuriant paper. They really wanted to do business with you. To bad for them I only was a twelve year old in Sweden who thought it would be fun with some brochures. No surprise they stopped doing that...
If chiropractice is bogus or not of course depends on what they say they cure. I haven't checked every chiropractor here in sweden but generally they are definitely serious and fix real problems when for example discs in your back are out of alignment and nerves become pinched. They are part of the medical establishment. And as someone from a family with serious back problems I say thank good for swedish chiropractors. It's either bed-ridden with maximum dosage of morphine or going to a chiropractor to fix it.
Always funny to read how americans complain about how fundraising wrecks your democracy. Don't know if you know this over there in the USA, but in the civilized world (in my case sweden) it is not called fundraising, it is called bribery and is illegal. You understand? No company, private person or organization is allowed to give money or things or services to any politician. Nada. Zip. Because they are elected by the people and allowing bribery naturally wrecks the whole concept of democracy. Don't know why you put up with your trainwreck of political system, but nevermind, I'm sure there's some good on the telly between the commercials.
You are all a bunch of limp wristed weaklings with your god damn new yuppie fonts. Use '-misc-fixed-medium-*-*-*-14-*-*-*-c-*-*-*' and view your code as emacs and X11 intended it with hard, cold gloriously pixelated simplicity.
>running a pretty stable system, so it may be days or weeks
Jesus, I hope you are running windos or something if you consider weekly reboots stable. For the record, my Linux system practically never goes down. It's the power outages that takes it down perhaps once a year. Desktop machine that is. And I use a window manager that only manages windows (ctwm) and not the entire system, which I suspect is the reason it never dies. The servers are on UPS and are usually up for a couple of years before we upgrade redhat on them or upgrade hardware.
I'll second that, from Sweden. We, friends and collegues in programming in true IT companies, don't recognize all the problems you seem to have in the US with both being continously fucked by the companies and you all seem to have incompetent middle management.
If you are a skilled programmer working here (at my work) you usually work 38-40 hours a week. Every second of voluntary overtime is paid (if you feel like working another hour on a current problem). Ordered overtime, where my boss ASKS me if I could work a little extra on something (happens perhaps once a year and I can usually just say no) pays double. And if our boss or project manager isn't good enough we'll make sure upper management knows about it and he'll be moved to something else. Everyone gets 25 to 35 days days paid vacation, straight out of school. Sickdays are paid by the government, though not in full, and my company goes in and pays a little extra to get to almost 100% paid sick leave. Note though that this is in the high-end IT field. We who do this do not grow on trees and the companies know this.
Perhaps it's time to pull your heads out of where ever you have put them in the US and do something about your situation?
>Reducing it to a penis-measuring contest is hardly edifying.
Unless you are the winner of said contest.
>Dude, necrophilia is wrong.
Tell that to the windows users.
>Why do entertainment providers think that huge budgets are going to impress us? Or is it, as I suppose, a matter of them looking to excuse their having to keep raising prices and using draconian copyright protection measures?
Sitting on your throne of 'good taste' most be lonely when the rest of the world is busy going to the huge budget films you don't seem to like.
US all time box office hits:
1. Titanic (1997) $600,779,824
2. The Dark Knight (2008) $533,316,061
3. Star Wars (1977) $460,935,665
4. Shrek 2 (2004) $436,471,036
5. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) $434,949,459
6. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) $431,065,444
7. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) $423,032,628
8. Spider-Man (2002) $403,706,375
9. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) $380,262,555
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Only big budget movies in the top 100 and absolutely no 'indie' films. You were saying?
As always when discussing patents most people get one small vital detail wrong. It is not the fluffy stuff in the patent abstract that is patented, it is the things enumerated in the claims that specify the patent. For example, in this case the claims say that the patent is for a system where you view two pictures of a person where they have changed one single thing and you then vote for the best picture. So any existing system which instead uses one picture is NOT prior art. Neither is any system with two pictures where two items of clothes changed prior art. A system with two pictures of a person with a single thing changed between the pictures but where you give a rating for the pictures is not prior art.
Please, please remember this so we will not have to endure any more stories about patents with prior art. Yes the patents are often trivial and should absolutely not be approved but they often don't have prior art since the claims normally are very specific.