Quad core processors will primarily provide better battery life. Most designs will feature cores of mixed processing power allowing most of the chip to be fully powered down when idle or just doing baseband event handling.
When there is real work required firing up the rest of the chip will allow for tasks to be completed very quickly. Once complete the processor can again be ramped back down to a low power state.
The 770 is a stunning Linux device, hell i'm using it to compose this response. Add in the recent release 2 of the internet tablet OS (available now from http://maemo.org/) and it is very hard to justify the 'Nokia doesn't do Linux' statement. This software release even does VOIP with google talk.
Yes, Nokia does Linux and is a hell of a lot more open with the platform in comparison to its competitors.
Nintendo is obviously on this 'Wii play together' vibe, it would make sense to enable more than one person to play with the standard retail package. Also if the 'i' is supposed to resembile the controler, surely there should be two bundled given the two 'i' characters in the name.
It's great to know that you have a mobile device with the horsepower to give you a secure and robust solution where you can rely that the software on your PocketPC is the only entity which is processing the data you receive.
That's all well and good if you have a device capable of running in this way but this article is about proxy services and if you trust the company running the service with your private data.
Opera provides a service (an excelent service IMO) unfortunately in order to make this service work all of your sensitive data is logged on the opera servers. It is the ultimate man in the middle attack. Opera is clear on the issue of how it will use this data but people may not be aware of this. Personally I would be much happier if this was fully disclosed on their site before you downloaded the midlet. Indeed any program that works in this way should have a clear policy on the data they collect and hold.
The question as posed in the article is one of trust.
Having never used Abidia or MiniXM i can only comment on a service i have used that falls into the same category. Do these services have a clear privacy statement? Do you trust the companies that run these services?
Opera does and still i wouldn't trust them as far as i could throw them and only use opera mini to google the odd thing because it is fast and pretty:-) This is not a comment on Opera or any other company but my own paranoia which makes me very twitchy about giving out sensitive data.
This is a wonderful tool, possably the best web browser availabe for the j2me platform but has a hefty EULA which is well worth reading.
Opera mini works through a proxy which will crunch down web pages to make them more palatable for a mobile device, however you now have a proxy which has full access to every page you navigate and will store all of your passwords.
This is all clearly noted in the EULA but if, as most people will, you just accept without thinking you may not be aware of this. I had a brief trawl of the opera website looking to see if i could find the EULA to post an example but could not find the text of this agreement. This worries me as the only time i have found you can view this agreement is on the hanset the first time you connect to the service (yes opera now have detail of your handset before you agree to the EULA).
Opera makes all the right noises are made about privacy and to be honest this browser is just too good not to use but there is no way in hell i'd use it for anything that requires an iota of security.
Given the size of this beast it may well be that there is practically no air gap inside the box. This would enable Nintendo to use the whole surface area of the box as a heatsink. If this is designed correctly you could make convection currents work for you and turn the whole room into your air space. Aside from that it does sound like the big N is going for user experience inplace of raw power. Lets assume that it is a small cute box that will provide maybe twice the performance of the current GameCube (unlike the order of magnitude promised by the xbox 360 and PS3), can be sold at rock bottom prices, say $150, on launch day and acts as a centeral hub for mad multiplayer DS parties.
If we are to assume the standard spinning disk model is still used what is the third dimension?
I find it hard to believe that drive heads will be able to move through the solid substrate of the disk which rules out a spatial dimension. Time based seems a little extreme.
Do they mean magnetic field strength? This could be interesting but how do you know your value is the result of a write and not the loss of magnetic field over time?
I have used this case to build a system and would warn potential buyers to check their components very carefully, this is a very small case and you will need to make sure things will fit. I had problems with my CDROM drive, the cable bundle comming out of the power supply fouls the audio and power cables. You have about 8cm of space for heatsink and fan on the processor. I have had to under-clock the processor to compensate for the poor cooling. Make sure your motherboard has the power connector on the right of the processor otherwise you will be blocking the PSU fan.
It is a cute little case and i have been impressed with the build quality but it really does require too many compromises for my taste.
Pre Xbox launch there was a Microsoft exec quoted as saying that they wanted to get the console retailing for $99 as quickly as possible. This price was probably not possible, regardless of Microsoft's deep pockets, with the first hardware but over time costs come down.
(no i don't have a source for that quote, i believe i read it on the register)
In real terms 11.1 MP in a full size 35mm sensor is going to be just as good as any 35mm film camera. If you are shooting with a medium format camera it is a whole new ball game, but guess what, CCD sensors (or CMOS in the Canon case) have just reached parity with film in terms of resolution. The funny thing is that there is still plenty of headroom to increase the resolution in future sensors, to do the same in film you will have to drop silver and start using platinum.
But heck, most people are happy with dinky APS point and shoots which barely have the same resolution of a 5MP digicam.
Add a line to your hosts files that aliases the nntp server name to a specific IP address.
Oh and make sure your resolve.conf file specifies that it cheks the hosts file before DNS.
And yes this even works under windows but i can't recall the name MS gave to there hosts file, it does lurk in the windows directory...
Re:PS2 manufacturing cost.
on
PS2 As PC
·
· Score: 1
First off Sony sell the PS2 linux kit of consider this little metric:
PS2 cost to Sony (manufaturing + advertising + support) = PS2_C
PS2 end user price = PS2_S
PS2 Linux kit cost to sony = PS2_LC
PS2 Linux kit end user price = PS2_LS
Assuming:
PS2_C > PS2_S
And:
PS2_LC < PS2_LS
then maybe someone at Sony came up with the idea that:
PS2_LS = PS2_LC + (PS2_C - PS2_S)
And what do you know, Sony does not have to worry about losing money on the PS2 if someone runs Linux.
To Sony Linux will just be another game for the PS2, a big expensive game that comes with extra hardware but as with standard games Sony will use profit from its sale to recoupe the cost of the console.
Yes you will get PS2 Linux CDs in the wild and standard off the shelf hardware can be adapted but that won't have Sony's cool branding that will match the console so more people will buy the Kit from Sony than go through the hassle of ripping them off...
The whole point of RAMBUS is that it has a much lower track count to impliment in comparison to SDRAM. This means that you _can_ have multiple channels on a motherboard at a much lower cost. Idealy RAMBUS based systems should be designed with 2 or more channels to take advantage of this.
RAMBUS memory solves a lot of problems when it comes manufacturing and when used correctly (ie. the Playstation 2 with 4 channels) it can be devestatingly effective.
Unfortunately it is not easy to work with, good chipset support is very difficult. Couple this to cost and the fact that the stuff is so patent overloaded the only real reference comes from RAMBUS its self. You do not get many companies wanting to create better platforms.
Rambus type technology will have its place in future computers but it is only going to take off long after Rambus the company is dead.
IIRC the AMD code names are based on classic cars. The current Athlon chips were called Thunderbird during their development cycle and Durons were identified as Spitfire.
There was a bit of a fuss not long ago when AMD had to change the name of their future mobile Athlon/ Duron processors to Morgan (a hand-built british car with wooden chassis) and Palomino because Chevrolet moaned about the use of Corvette and Camaro.
The names marketing uses to sell these chips (Athlon, Duron) are products of pure fantasy so that they can be trademarked.
It does seem very unlikely that there would be liquid CO2 on Mars but that does not mean that CO2 is not the cause of these features.
If you take a bed of sand and blow air through it then you can often cause the sand to behave as a fluid. The air acts as a solvent providing the sand with enough lubrication to flow. IIRC the last big buzz about Mars was how NASA had spotted errosion features that looked like they could have been caused by springs or out flows from the sides of canyons. On earth you would normlly associate these features with water and that is what was touted by the media. This research could point to the features being caused by large releases of CO2 gas moving the Mars soil in place of water.
This document is dated the 30th of March this year (Probably available to the world on the 1st of April!) and claims that the technology would be presented on the 4th of April in Japan with actual products becoming available in October this year...
If this is as big as it sounds the whole world would be raving about it, no i think this is a April fools joke.
OK so at first this looks like a bad thing but *gasp* could there be a positive aspect?
The real reasion we have NAT at the moment is due to the limits of IPv4 addresses which causes many people, including many companies, to masqurade their private networks. If all of a sudden people have to pay vast sums of money to do this there will be an incredable amount of pressure to move to IPv6.
IMHO anything that speeds the uptake of IPv6 is a very good thing.
Just a thought on how a company could make a lot of money selling emulation software on the X-Box.
(This assumes that all X-Boxes will be hooked up to the net using broadband access and will have a nice big hard drive.)
Company writes emulator for console "foo".
Company licences a whole bunch of titles from the company that produces console "foo" under a rental agreement.
Company sells emulator to the masses which might include a fully legal (licenced) title from console "foo" as a hook.
The masses then insert CD/DVD into the X-Box and is taken to a website where they register. They can now play the game on the CD they purchased or download another game for $$$ which will give them the right to play that game for the next N days.
Company sits back, pays its royalties to comsole company "foo" and takes its cut.
This should be quite leagal, ROM images downloaded would be crippled to run only with that specific enulator. I would imagine that the X-Box harddrive will not be accessable as you would find in a PC, files could be locked so that they can only be accessed with the emulator. Add auto deletetion once the rental has expired (although i would imagine that the user would be prompted to renew the rental (for more $$$) so that they do not have to download the game image again.) and you have a nice locked system.
This would work well for older systems, small rom images etc. but for a large full CD game then the download will be longer than most people would endure.
Sure people would hack the system, but more will just keep forking over the cash.
Rental is the way Microsoft is heading and they have the infrastructure. If it is not them another company will fill this market.
After reading stuff about the user space Linux additions to the kernel it struck me that this could be the one very interesting way forward to use this kind of technology. IANA(Kernel Hacker) (just an interested on-looker), what i have read about user space Linux is that it works to provide a fully virtalized Linux environment. This means that you can host various virtual machines on a single box, each of which is isolated from eachother and the base system (yeah, just like Linux on the S/390). This is great for preventing hackers getting into your machine as the best they can do is crash a virtual environment not the base system. Anyway that is my take on user space Linux.
Now just imagine if user space Linux could be extended to use cards like this one to provide extra processing power. If you can abstract the hardware to a level where the virtual Linux machine looks just like your everyday Linux server but any processes running would automatically take advantage of the extra processing power then you hve a real winner! Beats the pants off just using this card as a seti@home or d.net number cruncher.
Ok this has problems, how do you get programs to run on both x86 (or whatever your host system is) and PPC processors? not easy.
This kind of concept could change the way we think about computers in a big way... Still Tao (the makers of the new Amiga OS) are already there, just waiting for recognition.
Slashdot Mirror
Quad core processors will primarily provide better battery life. Most designs will feature cores of mixed processing power allowing most of the chip to be fully powered down when idle or just doing baseband event handling.
When there is real work required firing up the rest of the chip will allow for tasks to be completed very quickly. Once complete the processor can again be ramped back down to a low power state.
solve x in:
4+3+2 = x+2
Use of braces to signify a missing number is alien to me too.
Another one to check of the list:
google gears
The 770 is a stunning Linux device, hell i'm using it to compose this response. Add in the recent release 2 of the internet tablet OS (available now from http://maemo.org/) and it is very hard to justify the 'Nokia doesn't do Linux' statement. This software release even does VOIP with google talk.
Yes, Nokia does Linux and is a hell of a lot more open with the platform in comparison to its competitors.
Will there be two controlers included in the box?
Nintendo is obviously on this 'Wii play together' vibe, it would make sense to enable more than one person to play with the standard retail package. Also if the 'i' is supposed to resembile the controler, surely there should be two bundled given the two 'i' characters in the name.
It's great to know that you have a mobile device with the horsepower to give you a secure and robust solution where you can rely that the software on your PocketPC is the only entity which is processing the data you receive.
:-)
That's all well and good if you have a device capable of running in this way but this article is about proxy services and if you trust the company running the service with your private data.
Opera provides a service (an excelent service IMO) unfortunately in order to make this service work all of your sensitive data is logged on the opera servers. It is the ultimate man in the middle attack. Opera is clear on the issue of how it will use this data but people may not be aware of this. Personally I would be much happier if this was fully disclosed on their site before you downloaded the midlet. Indeed any program that works in this way should have a clear policy on the data they collect and hold.
The question as posed in the article is one of trust.
Having never used Abidia or MiniXM i can only comment on a service i have used that falls into the same category. Do these services have a clear privacy statement? Do you trust the companies that run these services?
Opera does and still i wouldn't trust them as far as i could throw them and only use opera mini to google the odd thing because it is fast and pretty
This is not a comment on Opera or any other company but my own paranoia which makes me very twitchy about giving out sensitive data.
This is a wonderful tool, possably the best web browser availabe for the j2me platform but has a hefty EULA which is well worth reading.
Opera mini works through a proxy which will crunch down web pages to make them more palatable for a mobile device, however you now have a proxy which has full access to every page you navigate and will store all of your passwords.
This is all clearly noted in the EULA but if, as most people will, you just accept without thinking you may not be aware of this. I had a brief trawl of the opera website looking to see if i could find the EULA to post an example but could not find the text of this agreement. This worries me as the only time i have found you can view this agreement is on the hanset the first time you connect to the service (yes opera now have detail of your handset before you agree to the EULA).
Opera makes all the right noises are made about privacy and to be honest this browser is just too good not to use but there is no way in hell i'd use it for anything that requires an iota of security.
Given the size of this beast it may well be that there is practically no air gap inside the box. This would enable Nintendo to use the whole surface area of the box as a heatsink.
If this is designed correctly you could make convection currents work for you and turn the whole room into your air space.
Aside from that it does sound like the big N is going for user experience inplace of raw power. Lets assume that it is a small cute box that will provide maybe twice the performance of the current GameCube (unlike the order of magnitude promised by the xbox 360 and PS3), can be sold at rock bottom prices, say $150, on launch day and acts as a centeral hub for mad multiplayer DS parties.
I'd say thats a winner.
If we are to assume the standard spinning disk model is still used what is the third dimension?
I find it hard to believe that drive heads will be able to move through the solid substrate of the disk which rules out a spatial dimension. Time based seems a little extreme.
Do they mean magnetic field strength? This could be interesting but how do you know your value is the result of a write and not the loss of magnetic field over time?
Other companies offering ARM based computers include Ionix and MicroDigital. If you have the cash anything is possible...
I have used this case to build a system and would warn potential buyers to check their components very carefully, this is a very small case and you will need to make sure things will fit. I had problems with my CDROM drive, the cable bundle comming out of the power supply fouls the audio and power cables. You have about 8cm of space for heatsink and fan on the processor. I have had to under-clock the processor to compensate for the poor cooling. Make sure your motherboard has the power connector on the right of the processor otherwise you will be blocking the PSU fan.
:)
It is a cute little case and i have been impressed with the build quality but it really does require too many compromises for my taste.
YMMV of course
Pre Xbox launch there was a Microsoft exec quoted as saying that they wanted to get the console retailing for $99 as quickly as possible. This price was probably not possible, regardless of Microsoft's deep pockets, with the first hardware but over time costs come down.
(no i don't have a source for that quote, i believe i read it on the register)
Sinar 22 megapixel digital back
In real terms 11.1 MP in a full size 35mm sensor is going to be just as good as any 35mm film camera. If you are shooting with a medium format camera it is a whole new ball game, but guess what, CCD sensors (or CMOS in the Canon case) have just reached parity with film in terms of resolution. The funny thing is that there is still plenty of headroom to increase the resolution in future sensors, to do the same in film you will have to drop silver and start using platinum.
But heck, most people are happy with dinky APS point and shoots which barely have the same resolution of a 5MP digicam.
Add a line to your hosts files that aliases the nntp server name to a specific IP address.
Oh and make sure your resolve.conf file specifies that it cheks the hosts file before DNS.
And yes this even works under windows but i can't recall the name MS gave to there hosts file, it does lurk in the windows directory...
First off Sony sell the PS2 linux kit of consider this little metric:
PS2 cost to Sony (manufaturing + advertising + support) = PS2_C
PS2 end user price = PS2_S
PS2 Linux kit cost to sony = PS2_LC
PS2 Linux kit end user price = PS2_LS
Assuming:
PS2_C > PS2_S
And:
PS2_LC < PS2_LS
then maybe someone at Sony came up with the idea that:
PS2_LS = PS2_LC + (PS2_C - PS2_S)
And what do you know, Sony does not have to worry about losing money on the PS2 if someone runs Linux.
To Sony Linux will just be another game for the PS2, a big expensive game that comes with extra hardware but as with standard games Sony will use profit from its sale to recoupe the cost of the console.
Yes you will get PS2 Linux CDs in the wild and standard off the shelf hardware can be adapted but that won't have Sony's cool branding that will match the console so more people will buy the Kit from Sony than go through the hassle of ripping them off...
The dream of being able to send leathal voltages back down the data line and fry the Script Kiddie's Machine as they tap at your ports is here!
The whole point of RAMBUS is that it has a much lower track count to impliment in comparison to SDRAM. This means that you _can_ have multiple channels on a motherboard at a much lower cost. Idealy RAMBUS based systems should be designed with 2 or more channels to take advantage of this.
RAMBUS memory solves a lot of problems when it comes manufacturing and when used correctly (ie. the Playstation 2 with 4 channels) it can be devestatingly effective.
Unfortunately it is not easy to work with, good chipset support is very difficult. Couple this to cost and the fact that the stuff is so patent overloaded the only real reference comes from RAMBUS its self. You do not get many companies wanting to create better platforms.
Rambus type technology will have its place in future computers but it is only going to take off long after Rambus the company is dead.
IIRC the AMD code names are based on classic cars. The current Athlon chips were called Thunderbird during their development cycle and Durons were identified as Spitfire.
There was a bit of a fuss not long ago when AMD had to change the name of their future mobile Athlon/ Duron processors to Morgan (a hand-built british car with wooden chassis) and Palomino because Chevrolet moaned about the use of Corvette and Camaro.
The names marketing uses to sell these chips (Athlon, Duron) are products of pure fantasy so that they can be trademarked.
It does seem very unlikely that there would be liquid CO2 on Mars but that does not mean that CO2 is not the cause of these features.
If you take a bed of sand and blow air through it then you can often cause the sand to behave as a fluid. The air acts as a solvent providing the sand with enough lubrication to flow. IIRC the last big buzz about Mars was how NASA had spotted errosion features that looked like they could have been caused by springs or out flows from the sides of canyons. On earth you would normlly associate these features with water and that is what was touted by the media. This research could point to the features being caused by large releases of CO2 gas moving the Mars soil in place of water.
A reality check guys,
This document is dated the 30th of March this year (Probably available to the world on the 1st of April!) and claims that the technology would be presented on the 4th of April in Japan with actual products becoming available in October this year...
If this is as big as it sounds the whole world would be raving about it, no i think this is a April fools joke.
Damm shame.... *sigh*
OK so at first this looks like a bad thing but *gasp* could there be a positive aspect?
The real reasion we have NAT at the moment is due to the limits of IPv4 addresses which causes many people, including many companies, to masqurade their private networks. If all of a sudden people have to pay vast sums of money to do this there will be an incredable amount of pressure to move to IPv6.
IMHO anything that speeds the uptake of IPv6 is a very good thing.
Linux Today has this sory and provides the URL http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2000/07/13/asia/wires/japan_w g/
(This assumes that all X-Boxes will be hooked up to the net using broadband access and will have a nice big hard drive.)
This should be quite leagal, ROM images downloaded would be crippled to run only with that specific enulator. I would imagine that the X-Box harddrive will not be accessable as you would find in a PC, files could be locked so that they can only be accessed with the emulator. Add auto deletetion once the rental has expired (although i would imagine that the user would be prompted to renew the rental (for more $$$) so that they do not have to download the game image again.) and you have a nice locked system.
This would work well for older systems, small rom images etc. but for a large full CD game then the download will be longer than most people would endure.
Sure people would hack the system, but more will just keep forking over the cash.
Rental is the way Microsoft is heading and they have the infrastructure. If it is not them another company will fill this market.
Ok i'm probably way off the mark with this one...
After reading stuff about the user space Linux additions to the kernel it struck me that this could be the one very interesting way forward to use this kind of technology. IANA(Kernel Hacker) (just an interested on-looker), what i have read about user space Linux is that it works to provide a fully virtalized Linux environment. This means that you can host various virtual machines on a single box, each of which is isolated from eachother and the base system (yeah, just like Linux on the S/390). This is great for preventing hackers getting into your machine as the best they can do is crash a virtual environment not the base system. Anyway that is my take on user space Linux.
Now just imagine if user space Linux could be extended to use cards like this one to provide extra processing power. If you can abstract the hardware to a level where the virtual Linux machine looks just like your everyday Linux server but any processes running would automatically take advantage of the extra processing power then you hve a real winner! Beats the pants off just using this card as a seti@home or d.net number cruncher.
Ok this has problems, how do you get programs to run on both x86 (or whatever your host system is) and PPC processors? not easy.
This kind of concept could change the way we think about computers in a big way... Still Tao (the makers of the new Amiga OS) are already there, just waiting for recognition.
Bring on the future!
Hey do you have a book or author reference for that?
:)
I love old sci-fi stuff.
hmmm, collecting all those nanotubes in orbit would be interesting