You appear to be confusing the CPU's clock with a real-time clock interrupt. They are fundamentally not the same thing.
The clock being dispensed with is the one that causes the registers inside the CPU to latch the new values that have been computed for them. At 3GHz, this happens every 333ps. The reason this clock exists is basically because it makes everything in a digital system much, much easier to think about, design, simulate, manufacture, test and re-use. But, it's not an absolute requirement that it be present, if you're clever. (Too clever by half, in fact.)
The other clock, which you were referring to, fires off an interrupt with a period on the order of milliseconds, to facilitate time-slicing. If your application requires such a feature, you can have one, regardless of whether your CPU is synchronous or asynchronous internally. It's a completely separate issue.
...I understand that the ESA-developed component of the mission -- the lander -- is due to touch down on Titan on Christmas day this year. Hmmm, sounds familiar. Wonder how that'll go.
Will they never learn?
OK so I guess they'd've had to be quite foresighted to guess the events of Dec 25th 2003 seven years ago when they launched the thing.:)
> If something is an open standard, everybody > is free to use it
Right. Except that not all standards are open.:(
> If any company has a patent on any part of a > technology, it is usually a proprietary solution > and not an official specification, right?
Wrong. And yes, I was horrified when I discovered this too. But it's really common for an industry standard to contain patented technologies. For example, many emerging communications standards are employing Turbo codes (which have been mentioned on Slashdot before, with various degrees of cluefulness). Now these were invented quite recently, by some French researchers, and they perform incredibly well. But in order to implement these standards, you (or your supplier, or their supplier) have to pay royalties.
The approval committees never actually infringe any patents, so they aren't a sensible target for litigation. They are, however, a sensible target for loud and persistent complaints about patents-in-standards. Most of them have vested interests in the big companies who implement the standards anyway, so don't hold your breath for a change of heart which might actually encourage competition in those markets.:-\
> Who cares that it may have cost millions of > dollars of risk and investment to devise, refine > and perfect OFDM and the related technologies
Yeah, right.
The concept of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing is old. Way old. Like, 1960s old. The mathematics behind it could easily be grasped by anyone who knows what a sine wave is. These people certainly didn't devise it. And they admit it, for example in this white-paper:
www.wi-lan.com/library/whitepaper_wofdm_technica l. pdf
If you look at what they're *actually* claiming to own, this W-OFDM technology is really just a bunch of pre-existing technologies - modulation scheme, channel coding, FFTs, embedded pilot channels - which they've lumped together, given a name and patented. If you look at their block diagrams, you'll see little more than an undergraduate textbook on modern communications systems design would show you.
> we just want them to be free for all of us to use, > so we definitely should bust their patents.
No... we just want unfettered competition to bring us the benefits of the free market, without being bogged down by people claiming to have "invented" things that aren't actually novel in any way.
Now I don't know enough about Everquest et al. to make this thought coherent, but I'll try. Presumably there are organisations (guilds?) made up of co-operating players. These have assets, generate revenue, trade, etc.
So, they should be able to issue stock! Seriously, why not?
In fact, I expect it would be easier and more natural for a derivatives market to emerge (e.g. players trading futures contracts for in-game commodities, etc).
I wouldn't be surprised if that sort of thing doesn't already happen informally, of course. But if one could buy into an investment fund / unit trust which dealt in virtual equities... definitely at the "high-risk" end of the spectrum though!
If you think about some of the business models of public companies whose shares you can invest in via the conventional stock market (ahem SCO ahem), might you actually be better off putting your money into Everquest equities?
Lindalf: Alas! A Darlrog. And I am already weary. (to others) Fly! Over the bridge! This is a foe beyond any of you. I must hold the narrow way. (to Darlrog) You cannot pass! I am a servant of the secret fire, wielder of the Flame of
Finlandssvenskar. The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Utah. Go back to the shadow!
You cannot pass.
So, how long before they add wireless networking support? The studio techs could just sit behind the desk tweaking away... cool....until some kid in the audience h4XX0rs the lead guitarist mid-solo, I suppose.:)
Hang on. If European engineering can produce something that will survive 150 years in Essex, landing a buggy on Mars should be peanuts in comparison. What went wrong?
I have an idea. Well, I kinda stole it from something I read at Operation Clambake. Many of Scientology's "secret" documents are now available to anyone for free, because they have been subpoenaed during a lawsuit.
So... perhaps one could run a filesharing operation based on the fact that documents presented as evidence in court become a matter of public record? Just get the files you were allegedly sharing to be part of the discovery, and bingo! Anyone in the world can download them!
This of course has the advantage that the courts can't shut it down or even declare it illegal...:)
I am writing to complain about the story entitled "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty" which appeared recently on your website. I have selected to file my comment under "Complaints", rather than "Factual Errors", because this article contains much more insinuation, speculation and hearsay than it does facts.
Your reporter writes of the MyDoom virus, "It is also looks like [sic] a new front in a war waged by those who want to preserve the open-source Linux operating system". Well, appearances can be deceptive. A list of "those who wish to preserve Linux" would include companies like IBM, Novell, HP, and Motorola; universities like MIT, Stanford, Oxford, and Imperial College London; plus governments, businesses, schools and individuals all around the world. To imply that all these people are somehow complicit in the dissemination of a computer virus is insulting and dangerous, let alone downright ridiculous.
He goes on to mention the "dark psyches" of the "run-of-the-mill geeks who wreak damage on the unsuspecting computer user". I have known many self-confessed geeks, most of them run-of-the-mill, and never met one who didn't despise the writers of viruses. You should note that a virus is usually the work of a very few people -- often, just one -- and not of a "community". Nevertheless, your reporter insists on smearing the name of the Open Source movement by insinuating that they are common criminals to a man, comparing them to "vandals" and "arsonists". No source is provided for this allegation, and no effort is made to solicit the opinions of the members of the community who are being accused of supporting this attack.
So, the one-sidedness continues. We are told that "If anyone's anger has no measure, it is the wrath of internet zealots who believe that code should be free to all". This statement is pure tabloid journalism. It paints a picture of Linux users which, in my extensive experience of them, could not be further from the truth. As for readers who have not met a Linux user before, are they supposed to take it on trust that they are all angry, irrational people who will unleash (with the fervour of Islamic fundamentalists) terrifying cyber-attacks on anyone who disagrees with their philosophy? What a careless figure of speech!
The nonsense continues. "... it seems likely that the perpetrators of the MyDoom virus and its variants are internet vandals with a specific grudge", he writes, starting to give up on the pretence that his "story" is in fact no more than a rough guess fleshed out with a few hundred words of opinionated drivel.
He goes on, "SCO is the big, bad company that violates one of their sacred principles, as they would see it". This man should be writing propoganda speeches, not reporting on business news! He invokes the childish "Big Bad Wolf" image which, as the subjunctive "would see" then implies, the poor deluded open source community must be imagining.
Aha! "There's no proof, of course" gets sneaked in underneath the standard "but it must be one of the theories" get-out clause. I cringe when I see trumped-up speculation like this in The Daily Mail; please don't let the BBC start inflicting it on me as well.
In fact, from this entire article, I found just one paragraph with which I could almost agree. It read:
"There seems little doubt that SCO was targeted - illegally and unacceptably, lest anyone be in any doubt - because it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system."
How your reporter made the jump between this fact -- that SCO's current unpopularity was the likely to be the reason they were targetted in preference to, say, Logica -- and his conclusion that the Open Source community is a hive of scum and villainy, I may never know. Ah, who knows what lurks Deep in the Darkness of the Psyche...
I have always trusted the BBC to bring me interesting, well-researched news and impartial, educated comment. This article, with its fact-light, speculative content, its one-sided, simplistic argument and its sensationalist, cliche-ridden style, disappointed me more than anything I have ever read or heard from the BBC.
...whether certain recent high-profile disputes over code ownership might have changed a few people's attitudes to the importance of attribution?
That is, if every file has a mandatory 75-line list of copyrights, would it be harder to accuse it of being stolen?
Now in reality, the Linux kernel source code has a fair bit of copyright information plastered all over the headers, so in practice the litigious bastards such as those I alluded to above wouldn't pay any attention to details like that. But different people think differently.
Well, I'm no PC expert so don't take my word for it...
If it's possible for the cache controller to be configured to "direct map" the cache into the CPU's memory space, then I'd say the answer was yes, although you might indeed get some raised eyebrows from your mobo.
Trouble is, I don't think PC processors are ever expected to operate like that. (I've worked with embedded processors whose on-board memory can be configured as RAM, I-cache, D-cache or some combination of the three, but it's another world.)
I can imagine some kind of hardware hack which fools the processor into thinking that there is memory behind the cache. Providing that it's operating in write-back mode, and you configure everything just right and don't try accessing outside a particular range of addresses, then you might just be able to use your cache as if it were just RAM. (Very fast RAM, at that!)
Could be a fun project if you don't mind getting your hands dirty...
(Is this a troll? I can't quite tell. Meh, what the hell.)
What keeps these countries "down in the hole" are the repressive regimes that spend billions on their own comfort while the masses go barefoot. It's the crippling multi-trillion dollar debts that make it impossible for them to invest in schools, houses and hospitals.
There is no such constant flow of money to patent holders, or if there is, it's a trickle compared to loan repayments. The third world doesn't have very many drugs manufacturing plants because their economies are too immature. In many places there is no running water, let alone high-technology industry.
It's true that strict patent enforcement doesn't help, but it's more that it causes millions of deaths from preventable diseases, than because it hurts third world economies.
Slashdot Mirror
So, when he writes to lawmakers asking them to consider his point of view, it's called "lobbying".
How come when I do it, it's called "muddying debate"?
Sheesh...
You appear to be confusing the CPU's clock with a real-time clock interrupt. They are fundamentally not the same thing.
The clock being dispensed with is the one that causes the registers inside the CPU to latch the new values that have been computed for them. At 3GHz, this happens every 333ps. The reason this clock exists is basically because it makes everything in a digital system much, much easier to think about, design, simulate, manufacture, test and re-use. But, it's not an absolute requirement that it be present, if you're clever. (Too clever by half, in fact.)
The other clock, which you were referring to, fires off an interrupt with a period on the order of milliseconds, to facilitate time-slicing. If your application requires such a feature, you can have one, regardless of whether your CPU is synchronous or asynchronous internally. It's a completely separate issue.
Didn't see the actual report, but I hope it's better than this incredibly inaccurate article!
:)
> The Micorsoft
erm, Microsoft?
> Windows application
Which one? Oh, you mean the Microsoft Windows "Operating System".
> is more secure than you think,
What do I think? Go on, what? Tell me!
> and Mac OS X is worse than you ever imagined
So what exactly did I imagine, dear writer?
Amateurs.
...I understand that the ESA-developed component of the mission -- the lander -- is due to touch down on Titan on Christmas day this year. Hmmm, sounds familiar. Wonder how that'll go.
:)
Will they never learn?
OK so I guess they'd've had to be quite foresighted to guess the events of Dec 25th 2003 seven years ago when they launched the thing.
> If something is an open standard, everybody
:(
:-\
> is free to use it
Right. Except that not all standards are open.
> If any company has a patent on any part of a
> technology, it is usually a proprietary solution
> and not an official specification, right?
Wrong. And yes, I was horrified when I discovered this too. But it's really common for an industry standard to contain patented technologies. For example, many emerging communications standards are employing Turbo codes (which have been mentioned on Slashdot before, with various degrees of cluefulness). Now these were invented quite recently, by some French researchers, and they perform incredibly well. But in order to implement these standards, you (or your supplier, or their supplier) have to pay royalties.
The approval committees never actually infringe any patents, so they aren't a sensible target for litigation. They are, however, a sensible target for loud and persistent complaints about patents-in-standards. Most of them have vested interests in the big companies who implement the standards anyway, so don't hold your breath for a change of heart which might actually encourage competition in those markets.
> Who cares that it may have cost millions of
a l. pdf
> dollars of risk and investment to devise, refine
> and perfect OFDM and the related technologies
Yeah, right.
The concept of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing is old. Way old. Like, 1960s old. The mathematics behind it could easily be grasped by anyone who knows what a sine wave is. These people certainly didn't devise it. And they admit it, for example in this white-paper:
www.wi-lan.com/library/whitepaper_wofdm_technic
If you look at what they're *actually* claiming to own, this W-OFDM technology is really just a bunch of pre-existing technologies - modulation scheme, channel coding, FFTs, embedded pilot channels - which they've lumped together, given a name and patented. If you look at their block diagrams, you'll see little more than an undergraduate textbook on modern communications systems design would show you.
> we just want them to be free for all of us to use,
> so we definitely should bust their patents.
No... we just want unfettered competition to bring us the benefits of the free market, without being bogged down by people claiming to have "invented" things that aren't actually novel in any way.
Now I don't know enough about Everquest et al. to make this thought coherent, but I'll try. Presumably there are organisations (guilds?) made up of co-operating players. These have assets, generate revenue, trade, etc.
:)
So, they should be able to issue stock! Seriously, why not?
In fact, I expect it would be easier and more natural for a derivatives market to emerge (e.g. players trading futures contracts for in-game commodities, etc).
I wouldn't be surprised if that sort of thing doesn't already happen informally, of course. But if one could buy into an investment fund / unit trust which dealt in virtual equities... definitely at the "high-risk" end of the spectrum though!
If you think about some of the business models of public companies whose shares you can invest in via the conventional stock market (ahem SCO ahem), might you actually be better off putting your money into Everquest equities?
Just a thought.
...please, PLEASE let there be a CowboyNeal option...
Legolas: Ai! Ai! A Darlrog! A Darlrog is come!
Gimli: Calderin's Bane! (hides face)
Lindalf: Alas! A Darlrog. And I am already weary.
(to others) Fly! Over the bridge! This is a foe beyond any of you. I must hold the narrow way.
(to Darlrog) You cannot pass! I am a servant of the secret fire, wielder of the Flame of Finlandssvenskar. The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Utah. Go back to the shadow! You cannot pass.
Orwellian? In what way?
I'd have said Kafka-esque, perhaps.
3... 2... 1... Trademark infringement lawsuit from The Open Group!
Quickly followed by a name change to "Y-windash".
While we're at it, can we have a device which detects whether slashdot readers are on crack and refuses to give them mod points if they are?
So, how long before they add wireless networking support? The studio techs could just sit behind the desk tweaking away... cool. ...until some kid in the audience h4XX0rs the lead guitarist mid-solo, I suppose. :)
Hang on. If European engineering can produce something that will survive 150 years in Essex, landing a buggy on Mars should be peanuts in comparison. What went wrong?
I have condensed this entire discussion into something that will comfortably fit on a single powerpoint slide.
...?
:))
1. Install Open Source Software
2.
3. PROFIT!
(Unfortunately, this joke is getting rather old...
I have an idea. Well, I kinda stole it from something I read at Operation Clambake. Many of Scientology's "secret" documents are now available to anyone for free, because they have been subpoenaed during a lawsuit.
:)
So... perhaps one could run a filesharing operation based on the fact that documents presented as evidence in court become a matter of public record? Just get the files you were allegedly sharing to be part of the discovery, and bingo! Anyone in the world can download them!
This of course has the advantage that the courts can't shut it down or even declare it illegal...
...whether certain recent high-profile disputes over code ownership might have changed a few people's attitudes to the importance of attribution?
That is, if every file has a mandatory 75-line list of copyrights, would it be harder to accuse it of being stolen?
Now in reality, the Linux kernel source code has a fair bit of copyright information plastered all over the headers, so in practice the litigious bastards such as those I alluded to above wouldn't pay any attention to details like that. But different people think differently.
Unlikely, but, you know.
I'm off to swap some illegally acquired content on XMPPster.
Er, how do you pronounce that again?
Why risk using the Web at all? Just e-mail the webmaster and ask him to fax the webpages to you!
> For those who've sold their GPL soul
;))
My soul is proprietary, thank-you-very-much. (Under an exclusive license, at that.
Well, I'm no PC expert so don't take my word for it...
If it's possible for the cache controller to be configured to "direct map" the cache into the CPU's memory space, then I'd say the answer was yes, although you might indeed get some raised eyebrows from your mobo.
Trouble is, I don't think PC processors are ever expected to operate like that. (I've worked with embedded processors whose on-board memory can be configured as RAM, I-cache, D-cache or some combination of the three, but it's another world.)
I can imagine some kind of hardware hack which fools the processor into thinking that there is memory behind the cache. Providing that it's operating in write-back mode, and you configure everything just right and don't try accessing outside a particular range of addresses, then you might just be able to use your cache as if it were just RAM. (Very fast RAM, at that!)
Could be a fun project if you don't mind getting your hands dirty...
> Does a 20mhz processor really need 128mb of ram?
A processor of any speed doesn't need RAM of any size.
The application you want to run needs both processing power and memory. How much of each? Depends on the application.
(Is this a troll? I can't quite tell. Meh, what the hell.)
What keeps these countries "down in the hole" are the repressive regimes that spend billions on their own comfort while the masses go barefoot. It's the crippling multi-trillion dollar debts that make it impossible for them to invest in schools, houses and hospitals.
There is no such constant flow of money to patent holders, or if there is, it's a trickle compared to loan repayments. The third world doesn't have very many drugs manufacturing plants because their economies are too immature. In many places there is no running water, let alone high-technology industry.
It's true that strict patent enforcement doesn't help, but it's more that it causes millions of deaths from preventable diseases, than because it hurts third world economies.
I'm sure there's a "Slacksware" joke in here somewhere, but I'm not quite awake enough to make it. :)