PalmSource was at LinuxWorld last week demoing the new OS and development environment. You can run GTK apps natively, and legacy (i.e. 68K Garnet) applications in emulation as well. The OS development environment uses User Mode Linux and Scratchbox.
They also had reference hardware on display. It was an XScale board in a clear lucite box (about the size of a laptop) with a cable going up to a screen inset into a similarly large panel. So, not at all a miniaturization mock up or proof of concept (not really needed at this point), but a working PDA form factor with a big bunch of hardware hanging off of it.
The guy I spoke to said that they were going to be shipping in a month or two to handset manufacturers, and the dev tools would be available early next year.
So, it's real, and it's Linux, but it's not shipping, and you can't walk into a store and buy a phone that uses it just yet.
BTW, at another LinuxWorld session, one factor that a Motorola VP mentioned was that makes Linux attractive is that chipsets they want to use in phones tend to have Linux drivers very early. So, he said, using Linux on the phone means that their hardware/software integration time is shortened.
Also BTW, the guy I spoke to also said that Cobalt (the fancy PalmOS 6, which I think is based on BeOS) was basically rejected by handset makers. My impression is that PalmOS 6 has been done and available for quite a while but that there were no takers, so they did the Linux thing instead.
Yup. The vast numbers of people in the world (India, China, Africa...) who live by subsistence farming are essentially stuck at a Dark Ages level of education, technology and disposable income. They're not in a position to innovate jack squat. A trillion illiterate farmers in poor health with no money and no free time just aren't going to get much innovating done. (If there are a few among them with a bit of cash, who've done some reading and have some spare time, that's different.)
Just think about how long it took the Western world to develop the scientific method and produce Galileo, Newton, and the rest of the early scientists who could spend a minimal amount of money and still conduct meaningful experiments. That low-hanging fruit is gone.
While science and technology have advanced tremendously (exponentially?) over the last century compared to the rest of human history, the cost and difficulty of new discoveries may also be increasing tremendously.
The question is whether those curves cross each other - i.e. can a modern economy produce enough investors and inventors and scientists to keep up with the receding horizon of the unknown, or is it just too expensive to subsidize science education and hard science research when the discoveries are so few and far between and have such minimal gain (or have side effects we can't accept). It doesn't really matter if there's a whole other planet full of people not discovering anything and not participating in the economy that supports the leading-edge innovators.
OK, I take it back, I am a retard, your link looks almost exactly like another link that goes to the metafile. Please hurl bricks at my head. Thank you.
>I know the current software isn't perfect but you'll never have a completely safe system, so longer as the user operating it has system administrator privileges.
So don't give users root access. You don't need some sort of hardware DRM crap to do that.
>you'll never have a completely safe system...period. No need to add conditions to that.
Why would shifting more responsibility onto a vendor that's legendary for shipping buggy, insecure software make the system more secure?
>Isn't it ironic how the same democracy that gets installed in Afghanistan and Iraq by the Bush Administration fails miserably in almost all countries using it for a long period of time.
Yes, the democracy that the Bush administration went back in time to install in Germany after WWII clearly is a disaster. If only we could have the kind of democracy that Liberia enjoys instead of the kind that Western Europe and the US have to put up with. Japan also suffers in agony at the awful tyrrany of democracy.
We're all waiting to hear your brilliant solution to the fact that people are happy and don't want to mess things up too much.
People will pay for bandwidth, then spend time searching and downloading and burning to CD-R that which you broadcast for free.
Bottled water. Seriously. It's a business model. You don't have to sue people who drink from the tap to make it work, either.
I can think of quite a few shows that I'd pay a bit to see again, and maybe burn to CD. If I knew they'd be available at the same price essentially forever, I wouldn't even bother hoarding them.
The key here is that the victims are looking for a big award or settlement as a result of suing big corporations. The claim is cooked up in order to blame them since they're the ones who have the cash. It's as simple as that.
Obviously this kid is a fucknut. He should go to jail for a long long time, or the nuthouse, or the chair. Whatever. He did it and he should be punished extremely severely. His parents should get a moderate punishment too.
But Wal*Mart didn't shoot the policemen. Rockstar didn't shoot the policemen. One of the officers allowed a perp to take his gun. Who's getting sued for that? Why isn't everybody suing the police department for not training the officers to keep their guns away from perps, and/or for not using those biometric sidearms that don't work if they're not being held by the officer they're assigned to?
Answer: because the police department doesn't have deep pockets.
This is a classic frivolous lawsuit. The lawyers will say they're "sending a message" to those awful video game people. What they're really doing is trying to make their cut as large as possible.
Wal*Mart should be fined some small amount for letting a kid get two rated-M games while underage, if it can be proven that he didn't get someone to buy it for him who was of age.
>They're probably still chuckling about it at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville.
I like to picture more of a Dr. Evil "MUAHAHAHAHA... MUAHHAHAHAHA.... MUHAHAHAA.... HAHAHAH.... muhhaha... huh... *ehh*... hm... yyyeahh. Okeyyy." kind of laugh coming from WAL*MART HQ.
>If they take the 4 or 5 most significant bits across a song and perform (for example) an MD5 hash of them, then any encoding mechanism (MP3, OGG, etc.) would still result in the same hash. Same goes for video.
Are you suggesting that each mechanism that produces an uncompressed file is bit for bit compatible? Cuz... they aren't. Rip the same song on a Mac, a Windows PC, a Sun Ultra 5 running Linux... they ain't gonna be the same data, nor the same format. They probably won't be the same size within 1 kilobyte, or even the same number of seconds long when played back.
*Even if things did work that way* a trivial way to defeat this would be to crop the first/last frame of the song or movie, or to pad it, or to change the first or last frame to contain a single white dot in the lower right corner etc. etc. Anything like that would break an MD5 (or other hash) based comparison scheme.
More interesting is the idea that somehow every ISP would be required to run some appliance that had the ability to do real time fingerprint computation on all of their traffic, plus comparison of the fingerprints against a massive database of all known files that only naughty people are copying.
And then people would just start using crypto more, and the devices would have to crack that. Given that most people I know have way more CPU horsepower on the desktop than they need, it wouldn't be too hard to get people to adopt a crypto-heavy P2P client if it means free movies with no fear of a lawsuit.
This stuff is just painfully stupid and won't work, no matter how many congresspeople they bribe. It's sad; the only people who seem to be willing to try and cook up another dumb scheme like this are people without the ethics or knowledge to admit that it's just a losing battle.
The usual digital watermarking claim goes something like this:
1) The watermark is completely invisible to the human eye. 2) The watermark will survive any transcoding intact; i.e. if you photocopy a watermarked image or reencode a watermarked image/movie/audio file, the watermark is still there. 3) Removing the watermark is impossible without ruining the watermarked file.
Of course, 1 and 2 seem contradictory; 1 and 3 seem very contradictory. I guess the people who buy this stuff are either not very smart, or not critical thinkers, or both.
So yeah - chances are pretty good that a DVD ripper that applies a crop + noise reducer + blur set of filters and then re-encodes the video would get rid of the watermarking in the process.
More importantly, even if 1 and 2 are true, 3 can't be true at the same time, so it's just a matter of tacking on another filter (like the DeCSS front-end that'd already be in a DVD ripping app) to strip the watermark out as well.
Invent some source code static and dynamic analysis tools that help improve software quality as relates to security.
Passwords matter NOT AT ALL when you can just send a packet and get full admin access without any authentication step.
Who the hell else is better suited to innovate on security than Microsoft? We are to believe that they have 50,000 geniuses working there on groundbreaking amazing stuff... and the best thing they can come up with is a Java ripoff and a desktop search doodad? No. There are enough smart people there (or enough funds to create university research projects outside the softie-dome) to wow the world with some kickass new technology based on either genuinely new ideas, or old ideas that needed a lot of refinement to be usable on real code.
I suspect, though, that this is something they're unwilling to do because the design itself is inherently insecure, and securing it would mean breaking 99% of shipping apps. If that's true, it means that Bill's committment to security is just lip service. Please, Microsoft, break apps that use crappy backdoors. XP SP2 broke stuff to improve security, and that was the right decision. Apple had to do something similar with the Carbon transition (breaking old apps that correctly used well documented but ill-concieved APIs from the pre-OS X days). Microsoft could provide tools to help ISVs be compatible with a Longhorn "clean API" that doesn't let apps use deprecated, unsafe features from the bad old days of not caring about security.
>the very multi-platform nature of the code makes it harder to write an app that will work well.
That's kind of funny in itself - somewhere, Microsoft is agreeing with you. "Cross platform code sucks, it makes apps worse!"
Seriously, though... how does the fact that Firefox also runs on something other than Windows make it harder to exploit a vulnerability in Firefox x.y.z for Windows? If the vulnerability is there, it's there. Just because.0000001% of Firefox users run it on OpenBSD doesn't make an exploit not work on Windows.
It's been around for 32 years, so I don't think you can call it a fad.
>no one takes the time to produce correct bitmaps for specific font sizes.
Of course they do, and have for *years and years*. Arial (Windows) and Geneva (Mac) are fonts that were specifically designed and thoroughly tested for on-screen legibility at small sizes (9-12pt), and shipped with bitmap versions that were hand-tweaked to look good. When available, bitmapped fonts were/are used instead of an outline version for that point size.
These days I think they've been replaced by outline fonts with sufficient "hinting" embedded in the font file that the exact same bitmap will be reproduced from the outline + hints if antialiasing is turned off. Maybe there are teeny differences now between the original bitmaps and what you get from an outline, but I doubt they are major.
What you need to do is to RTFM. Turn antialiasing off for small point sizes, whatever that means to you. (For me that's 10pt and smaller - no antialiasing at those sizes.)
Download ProFont (free) and enjoy legibility at 8 and 9pt. Stop using shitty fonts - the built in ones that come with Windows and the Mac are actually quite high quality in terms of the "clumping" effect that you're complaining about.
BTW, there's a separate issue, and that is that the fonts that you get with a typical Linux distro *suck ass* and look bad at every size. This is a totally different problem from antialiasing and bitmap fonts. Crappy fonts look bad, news at 11. Go get some decent fonts.
Is it time for the DAN (display area network) to appear in the enterprise?:)
I don't think Firewire or SATA have the cable length for this sort of thing. Ethernet is cheap, though, and if the economics made sense, a server chassis with a 32-port gigabit switch or something similar wouldn't be technically too hard to put together.
I agree, though; the problem is that you'd need something like a $50 or $100, very small display endpoint (featuring ports for power, 10/100 Ethernet, SVGA out, and USB) to make it work. Some little embedded Linux running an X server, or better yet, a little x86 cigarette-pack-sized gizmo net booting would be enough. Hell, the whole thing could run Windows too, except that Microsoft would much rather sell you a Windows and Office license for every endpoint.
>BSG truely rocks, it feels real, you never know who is going to bite the bullet.
I really enjoy the new BSG series too. I think there are threee reasons: 1) The original story universe is inherently interesting, and tragically heroic. The good guys are losing big time, and any victory is both desperately needed, and temporary. Yay, we made it through another day without becoming extinct! Hug, cheer, OK back to running for our lives. The dramatic tension is part of the story universe itself, and it won't be neatly resolved by the end of the episode. 2) The writing and acting are really well done. Good stories, good dialogue, good actors. 3) Great special effects. The original series had great production design but the new series has the same visual effects folks that Firefly did. (Look for the same fake-hand-zoom CG camerawork, reasonably believable zero-g zero-atmo spaceflight, and silence in space! Same as Firefly.) It really adds to the horror of a huge space battle to have it be basically dead silent except for the soundtrack. (Kinda like the murder scene in 2001... silence can be really frightening.)
If only the Star Trek story universe had the benefit of a... huge library of novels that they could just pick and choose tidbits from, that'd make it so easy to maintain continuity. All they'd have to do is look at them, and extract an hour-long screenplay.
Or maybe if they had a bookshelf's worth of commercially available reference books containing detailed information on virtually every aspect of their story universe... that would make it so much easier.
Or... maybe they could recruit an elite force of fanboys who, for the sheer bragging rights alone, would be tasked with consistency checking any new story idea or script with the rest of the Star Trek universe.
I googled for this display and found the blueberry one first... I was like, WTF, this guy has horrible taste, that monitor is butt-ugly... damn.
No. Wrong one. The clear one looks pretty darn cool. Too bad it's only 17" and discontinued. I wish they had made a 20" one, I'd try and grab one off of eBay just for the hell of it.
>Larger cache necessarily increases the overhead for each memory instruction. Sure, cache isn't free. Maybe with multiple cores, each core gets 2MB. Whatever. This is just an example of something other than raw clock speed that I made up. Feel free to identify some more appropriate ways to improve CPU performance.
>Costs offset the benefits. Temporarily, yes. Costs go down, bottlenecks move, and trade-offs shift. Remember when RAM was so fast that desktop CPUs didn't have caches? Remember when desktop CPUs just had one level of cache? Remember when desktop processors didn't ship with FPUs or MMUs on board? These things change all the time.
>There is only so much parallelism to be found in a given computing task. That's Amdahl's Law *laugh* No it isn't, read it again. You have it exactly backwards. The amount of parallelism in a given computing task is an input to Amdahl's law. So, change the input (increase the fraction of the task that can be parallelized), and *gasp* parallelizing it is more effective.
>The fact is that existing pipelined architectures are already exploiting most of the parallelism available in most code that runs on PCs. That's because most code that runs on PCs sucks, in many many ways, including not limited to very poor use of concurrency.
Intel's brave/foolish approach with the Itanium of pushing the work up a layer of abstraction into the compiler isn't good enough. It's nice and cheap for the world at large to have CPU makers figure out new and incredibly sophisticated ways to run the same old crummy code 10x faster. There's an economy of scale there: when Intel ships a new CPU with a particular tweak, that tweak goes in every computer, and every app you run on those computers get that tweak for free, with no sofware update required. However, the gains are small when you're working many layers of abstraction away from the problem. Eventually you have to do something like adding SIMD features, or HT, or multiple cores. That just isn't going to magically make old code go faster, nor is a checkbox and a recompile going to help.
Developers have to actually do some work. This is not a tragedy. Source code optimizations yield improvements that are often orders of magnitude better than hardware changes. That's computer science 101.
Slashdot Mirror
The link in the /. story to debloat-testing should go here: git://git.infradead.org/debloat-testing.git.
git:gitinfradeadorgdebloat-testinggit is not a valid URL.
FYI the whole world is not in GMT.
Do you really not know where Mozilla HQ is?
Here's a graphic of where it is on the Martian globe:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/multimedia/ra1-gloabal.html
PalmSource was at LinuxWorld last week demoing the new OS and development environment. You can run GTK apps natively, and legacy (i.e. 68K Garnet) applications in emulation as well. The OS development environment uses User Mode Linux and Scratchbox.
They also had reference hardware on display. It was an XScale board in a clear lucite box (about the size of a laptop) with a cable going up to a screen inset into a similarly large panel. So, not at all a miniaturization mock up or proof of concept (not really needed at this point), but a working PDA form factor with a big bunch of hardware hanging off of it.
The guy I spoke to said that they were going to be shipping in a month or two to handset manufacturers, and the dev tools would be available early next year.
So, it's real, and it's Linux, but it's not shipping, and you can't walk into a store and buy a phone that uses it just yet.
BTW, at another LinuxWorld session, one factor that a Motorola VP mentioned was that makes Linux attractive is that chipsets they want to use in phones tend to have Linux drivers very early. So, he said, using Linux on the phone means that their hardware/software integration time is shortened.
Also BTW, the guy I spoke to also said that Cobalt (the fancy PalmOS 6, which I think is based on BeOS) was basically rejected by handset makers. My impression is that PalmOS 6 has been done and available for quite a while but that there were no takers, so they did the Linux thing instead.
Yup. The vast numbers of people in the world (India, China, Africa...) who live by subsistence farming are essentially stuck at a Dark Ages level of education, technology and disposable income. They're not in a position to innovate jack squat. A trillion illiterate farmers in poor health with no money and no free time just aren't going to get much innovating done. (If there are a few among them with a bit of cash, who've done some reading and have some spare time, that's different.)
Just think about how long it took the Western world to develop the scientific method and produce Galileo, Newton, and the rest of the early scientists who could spend a minimal amount of money and still conduct meaningful experiments. That low-hanging fruit is gone.
While science and technology have advanced tremendously (exponentially?) over the last century compared to the rest of human history, the cost and difficulty of new discoveries may also be increasing tremendously.
The question is whether those curves cross each other - i.e. can a modern economy produce enough investors and inventors and scientists to keep up with the receding horizon of the unknown, or is it just too expensive to subsidize science education and hard science research when the discoveries are so few and far between and have such minimal gain (or have side effects we can't accept). It doesn't really matter if there's a whole other planet full of people not discovering anything and not participating in the economy that supports the leading-edge innovators.
OK, I take it back, I am a retard, your link looks almost exactly like another link that goes to the metafile. Please hurl bricks at my head. Thank you.
*slinks away in shame*
>Get the actual video file [apple.com] for the large version of the trailer.
3 53816 for a 41MB downloadable version.
If by "actual video file" you mean a 248 byte file that starts streaming playback of the actual video file.
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=147453&cid=12
>The biggest difference I can tell you between dual 1.6GHz and single 3.2Ghz is that one process can not take over the processor.
Hmm, what if that process has two threads?
<troll>Oh yeah, FreeBSD doesn't have threads. Never mind.</troll>
>I know the current software isn't perfect but you'll never have a completely safe system, so longer as the user operating it has system administrator privileges.
...period. No need to add conditions to that.
So don't give users root access. You don't need some sort of hardware DRM crap to do that.
>you'll never have a completely safe system
Why would shifting more responsibility onto a vendor that's legendary for shipping buggy, insecure software make the system more secure?
>I love debate
Maybe people don't want to have the same argument again and again, except this time, with you instead of someone else.
Bummer for you that it pisses you off that people don't like conflict for conflict's sake.
>Isn't it ironic how the same democracy that gets installed in Afghanistan and Iraq by the Bush Administration fails miserably in almost all countries using it for a long period of time.
Yes, the democracy that the Bush administration went back in time to install in Germany after WWII clearly is a disaster. If only we could have the kind of democracy that Liberia enjoys instead of the kind that Western Europe and the US have to put up with. Japan also suffers in agony at the awful tyrrany of democracy.
We're all waiting to hear your brilliant solution to the fact that people are happy and don't want to mess things up too much.
People will pay for bandwidth, then spend time searching and downloading and burning to CD-R that which you broadcast for free.
Bottled water. Seriously. It's a business model. You don't have to sue people who drink from the tap to make it work, either.
I can think of quite a few shows that I'd pay a bit to see again, and maybe burn to CD. If I knew they'd be available at the same price essentially forever, I wouldn't even bother hoarding them.
The key here is that the victims are looking for a big award or settlement as a result of suing big corporations. The claim is cooked up in order to blame them since they're the ones who have the cash. It's as simple as that.
Obviously this kid is a fucknut. He should go to jail for a long long time, or the nuthouse, or the chair. Whatever. He did it and he should be punished extremely severely. His parents should get a moderate punishment too.
But Wal*Mart didn't shoot the policemen. Rockstar didn't shoot the policemen. One of the officers allowed a perp to take his gun. Who's getting sued for that? Why isn't everybody suing the police department for not training the officers to keep their guns away from perps, and/or for not using those biometric sidearms that don't work if they're not being held by the officer they're assigned to?
Answer: because the police department doesn't have deep pockets.
This is a classic frivolous lawsuit. The lawyers will say they're "sending a message" to those awful video game people. What they're really doing is trying to make their cut as large as possible.
Wal*Mart should be fined some small amount for letting a kid get two rated-M games while underage, if it can be proven that he didn't get someone to buy it for him who was of age.
>They're probably still chuckling about it at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville.
I like to picture more of a Dr. Evil "MUAHAHAHAHA... MUAHHAHAHAHA.... MUHAHAHAA.... HAHAHAH.... muhhaha... huh... *ehh*... hm... yyyeahh. Okeyyy." kind of laugh coming from WAL*MART HQ.
>If they take the 4 or 5 most significant bits across a song and perform (for example) an MD5 hash of them, then any encoding mechanism (MP3, OGG, etc.) would still result in the same hash. Same goes for video.
Are you suggesting that each mechanism that produces an uncompressed file is bit for bit compatible? Cuz... they aren't. Rip the same song on a Mac, a Windows PC, a Sun Ultra 5 running Linux... they ain't gonna be the same data, nor the same format. They probably won't be the same size within 1 kilobyte, or even the same number of seconds long when played back.
*Even if things did work that way* a trivial way to defeat this would be to crop the first/last frame of the song or movie, or to pad it, or to change the first or last frame to contain a single white dot in the lower right corner etc. etc. Anything like that would break an MD5 (or other hash) based comparison scheme.
More interesting is the idea that somehow every ISP would be required to run some appliance that had the ability to do real time fingerprint computation on all of their traffic, plus comparison of the fingerprints against a massive database of all known files that only naughty people are copying.
And then people would just start using crypto more, and the devices would have to crack that. Given that most people I know have way more CPU horsepower on the desktop than they need, it wouldn't be too hard to get people to adopt a crypto-heavy P2P client if it means free movies with no fear of a lawsuit.
This stuff is just painfully stupid and won't work, no matter how many congresspeople they bribe. It's sad; the only people who seem to be willing to try and cook up another dumb scheme like this are people without the ethics or knowledge to admit that it's just a losing battle.
The usual digital watermarking claim goes something like this:
1) The watermark is completely invisible to the human eye.
2) The watermark will survive any transcoding intact; i.e. if you photocopy a watermarked image or reencode a watermarked image/movie/audio file, the watermark is still there.
3) Removing the watermark is impossible without ruining the watermarked file.
Of course, 1 and 2 seem contradictory; 1 and 3 seem very contradictory. I guess the people who buy this stuff are either not very smart, or not critical thinkers, or both.
So yeah - chances are pretty good that a DVD ripper that applies a crop + noise reducer + blur set of filters and then re-encodes the video would get rid of the watermarking in the process.
More importantly, even if 1 and 2 are true, 3 can't be true at the same time, so it's just a matter of tacking on another filter (like the DeCSS front-end that'd already be in a DVD ripping app) to strip the watermark out as well.
Invent some source code static and dynamic analysis tools that help improve software quality as relates to security.
Passwords matter NOT AT ALL when you can just send a packet and get full admin access without any authentication step.
Who the hell else is better suited to innovate on security than Microsoft? We are to believe that they have 50,000 geniuses working there on groundbreaking amazing stuff... and the best thing they can come up with is a Java ripoff and a desktop search doodad? No. There are enough smart people there (or enough funds to create university research projects outside the softie-dome) to wow the world with some kickass new technology based on either genuinely new ideas, or old ideas that needed a lot of refinement to be usable on real code.
I suspect, though, that this is something they're unwilling to do because the design itself is inherently insecure, and securing it would mean breaking 99% of shipping apps. If that's true, it means that Bill's committment to security is just lip service. Please, Microsoft, break apps that use crappy backdoors. XP SP2 broke stuff to improve security, and that was the right decision. Apple had to do something similar with the Carbon transition (breaking old apps that correctly used well documented but ill-concieved APIs from the pre-OS X days). Microsoft could provide tools to help ISVs be compatible with a Longhorn "clean API" that doesn't let apps use deprecated, unsafe features from the bad old days of not caring about security.
Of course, they won't.
>the very multi-platform nature of the code makes it harder to write an app that will work well.
.0000001% of Firefox users run it on OpenBSD doesn't make an exploit not work on Windows.
That's kind of funny in itself - somewhere, Microsoft is agreeing with you. "Cross platform code sucks, it makes apps worse!"
Seriously, though... how does the fact that Firefox also runs on something other than Windows make it harder to exploit a vulnerability in Firefox x.y.z for Windows? If the vulnerability is there, it's there. Just because
Firefox running on my Mac with a Linux firewall will be targetted by virus and spyware authors, and will suddenly be infested and unusable.
Any day now.
Just as soon as Mac OS X has 97% market share, and Firefox has 90% market share, and Linux has 90% market share.
When that happens, I better watch out. Yessiree.
>It's this fad of antialiased fonts.
It's been around for 32 years, so I don't think you can call it a fad.
>no one takes the time to produce correct bitmaps for specific font sizes.
Of course they do, and have for *years and years*. Arial (Windows) and Geneva (Mac) are fonts that were specifically designed and thoroughly tested for on-screen legibility at small sizes (9-12pt), and shipped with bitmap versions that were hand-tweaked to look good. When available, bitmapped fonts were/are used instead of an outline version for that point size.
These days I think they've been replaced by outline fonts with sufficient "hinting" embedded in the font file that the exact same bitmap will be reproduced from the outline + hints if antialiasing is turned off. Maybe there are teeny differences now between the original bitmaps and what you get from an outline, but I doubt they are major.
What you need to do is to RTFM. Turn antialiasing off for small point sizes, whatever that means to you. (For me that's 10pt and smaller - no antialiasing at those sizes.)
Download ProFont (free) and enjoy legibility at 8 and 9pt. Stop using shitty fonts - the built in ones that come with Windows and the Mac are actually quite high quality in terms of the "clumping" effect that you're complaining about.
BTW, there's a separate issue, and that is that the fonts that you get with a typical Linux distro *suck ass* and look bad at every size. This is a totally different problem from antialiasing and bitmap fonts. Crappy fonts look bad, news at 11. Go get some decent fonts.
Is it time for the DAN (display area network) to appear in the enterprise? :)
I don't think Firewire or SATA have the cable length for this sort of thing. Ethernet is cheap, though, and if the economics made sense, a server chassis with a 32-port gigabit switch or something similar wouldn't be technically too hard to put together.
I agree, though; the problem is that you'd need something like a $50 or $100, very small display endpoint (featuring ports for power, 10/100 Ethernet, SVGA out, and USB) to make it work. Some little embedded Linux running an X server, or better yet, a little x86 cigarette-pack-sized gizmo net booting would be enough. Hell, the whole thing could run Windows too, except that Microsoft would much rather sell you a Windows and Office license for every endpoint.
>BSG truely rocks, it feels real, you never know who is going to bite the bullet.
I really enjoy the new BSG series too. I think there are threee reasons:
1) The original story universe is inherently interesting, and tragically heroic. The good guys are losing big time, and any victory is both desperately needed, and temporary. Yay, we made it through another day without becoming extinct! Hug, cheer, OK back to running for our lives. The dramatic tension is part of the story universe itself, and it won't be neatly resolved by the end of the episode.
2) The writing and acting are really well done. Good stories, good dialogue, good actors.
3) Great special effects. The original series had great production design but the new series has the same visual effects folks that Firefly did. (Look for the same fake-hand-zoom CG camerawork, reasonably believable zero-g zero-atmo spaceflight, and silence in space! Same as Firefly.) It really adds to the horror of a huge space battle to have it be basically dead silent except for the soundtrack. (Kinda like the murder scene in 2001... silence can be really frightening.)
If only the Star Trek story universe had the benefit of a... huge library of novels that they could just pick and choose tidbits from, that'd make it so easy to maintain continuity. All they'd have to do is look at them, and extract an hour-long screenplay.
Or maybe if they had a bookshelf's worth of commercially available reference books containing detailed information on virtually every aspect of their story universe... that would make it so much easier.
Or... maybe they could recruit an elite force of fanboys who, for the sheer bragging rights alone, would be tasked with consistency checking any new story idea or script with the rest of the Star Trek universe.
Oh well... *sigh*
I googled for this display and found the blueberry one first... I was like, WTF, this guy has horrible taste, that monitor is butt-ugly... damn.
No. Wrong one. The clear one looks pretty darn cool. Too bad it's only 17" and discontinued. I wish they had made a 20" one, I'd try and grab one off of eBay just for the hell of it.
>Larger cache necessarily increases the overhead for each memory instruction.
Sure, cache isn't free. Maybe with multiple cores, each core gets 2MB. Whatever. This is just an example of something other than raw clock speed that I made up. Feel free to identify some more appropriate ways to improve CPU performance.
>Costs offset the benefits.
Temporarily, yes. Costs go down, bottlenecks move, and trade-offs shift. Remember when RAM was so fast that desktop CPUs didn't have caches? Remember when desktop CPUs just had one level of cache? Remember when desktop processors didn't ship with FPUs or MMUs on board? These things change all the time.
>There is only so much parallelism to be found in a given computing task. That's Amdahl's Law
*laugh* No it isn't, read it again. You have it exactly backwards. The amount of parallelism in a given computing task is an input to Amdahl's law. So, change the input (increase the fraction of the task that can be parallelized), and *gasp* parallelizing it is more effective.
>The fact is that existing pipelined architectures are already exploiting most of the parallelism available in most code that runs on PCs.
That's because most code that runs on PCs sucks, in many many ways, including not limited to very poor use of concurrency.
Intel's brave/foolish approach with the Itanium of pushing the work up a layer of abstraction into the compiler isn't good enough. It's nice and cheap for the world at large to have CPU makers figure out new and incredibly sophisticated ways to run the same old crummy code 10x faster. There's an economy of scale there: when Intel ships a new CPU with a particular tweak, that tweak goes in every computer, and every app you run on those computers get that tweak for free, with no sofware update required. However, the gains are small when you're working many layers of abstraction away from the problem. Eventually you have to do something like adding SIMD features, or HT, or multiple cores. That just isn't going to magically make old code go faster, nor is a checkbox and a recompile going to help.
Developers have to actually do some work. This is not a tragedy. Source code optimizations yield improvements that are often orders of magnitude better than hardware changes. That's computer science 101.