I wasn't downtown, but, near as I can tell, most of the rioting is due to a bunch of dickheads, few, if any of them have a political agenda. They just joined the crowd and, when the actions of the organized protesters succeeded in shutting down traffic and delaying the WTO meetings, they saw an opportunity to break and burn things.
I am relatively pleased that the local media, who are generally horrbile and frequently sensationalistic, while often referring to the looters as "protesters" are also trying to make the point that the looters don't seem very political and that most of the protesters have been peaceful.
I am also pleased that our police are far from the edge and don't seem likely to beat anyone to death for any reason.
Some people have called bullshit on all of this, claiming that nothing can be done.
Smarter people have suggested that there is room to improve ping times by better buffer management and shorter latencies in the transmission pipeline.
One thing I don't think has been mentioned (but I may have missed it) is that one way to acheive better buffer management is to make the modem smart enough to look for an end of frame signature. If it detects one, it should imediately compress the data in its buffer and forward it over the line, rather than waiting for the buffer to fill if data is still coming in or a timer to expire if it is not.
What akwards-bassed thinking. We live in a connected world, man, where everything is interconnected, baby. You can take you and your antisocial little dream palmtop out in the woods, man.
That and you could actually try a Palm and see how it is so much more than an overclocked digital rolodex.
Let me get this straight, you find it notable that a spec for something that is not shipping, is faster than the spec of something that is shipping? Then why don't you point out that specs for higher speed versions of firewire were out long before the spec for USB2
"The NT kernel comes formt the UNIX family...microsoft just took the kernel developed it to there own means...in fact winnt is posix compatible..."
Huh? NTs design is influenced by a number of things, including early versions of OS/2, VMS and Mach, but it really isn't any of those things, and it certainly isn't a monolithic kernel.
The POSIX API support you mention is separate from the OS core, so, for that matter, is the Win32 API.
Also, we don't require things like cops and metal detectors in our schools.
One thing about Utahns, they continue to beleive that they are immune from the problems that afflict the rest of society, while the truth is, for the most part, their violent crime rate is quite similar to metropolitan areas of similar size.
On the other hand, the permissive business environment among "members" means the state has been home to some major fraud outbreaks, not that this level of trust is necessarily a bad thing.
On the other hand, there have been some notable child welfare problems in utah which result, in part, because of gaping failures of the social system.
I know for my part that when I was in school in the early 80's all the Salt Lake City high schools had cops on the staff, along with some private goons. We had people bringing guns & knives to school. A fair number of suicides, frequent outbreaks of violence and intimidation. Date rapes by nice mormon boys, lots of drunken driving by those same nice mormon boys. Teenaged pregnancies (a state seanator's daughter). And this was in one of the good schools.
It wasn't just SLC though. The number of teenaged pregnancies among underaged Mormon girls in smaller, rural, predominantly Mormon communities suggests that Utah is not immune.
In otherwords, I call bullshit on your representation of Utah schools.
Re:Mormons make good neighbors.
on
911 Calls Linux
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· Score: 1
I don't think it was very neighborly of them to exclude me from my friend's birthday parties. These were people we were otherwise on friendly terms with.
For the most part, as individuals, I don't really think that the Mormon's are worse or better than anyone else, but growing up non-mormon in Utah, I have certain issues with them and their politics.
Re:Maybe we should all move to utah
on
911 Calls Linux
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· Score: 1
I grew up in Utah, and I never heard of a dry county. When I got older, I never had trouble buying beer on Sunday. Mormon attitudes towards alcohol are restrictive, but not like they are in the bible belt.
You could find whole roased coffee beans in Utah in the 80s if not before.
Utah also had a microbrewery in the early '80s, before sam adams "launched the microbrew revolution" (what a load of shit!). It was in Park City though, which some people say is "in Utah, but not of it."
Utah is pretty conservative, but it isn't quite as provincial as many expect, at least not in Salt Lake City.
I think the Mormons represent an intersting factor in the future of linux.
As a group, they are socialist at the core. The west was won not by gun toting loaners, but by communities of settlers, many of them mormon, who had the social cohesion needed to create the irrigation projects needed to establish an agricultural community in the arid west. Their choice of the beehive as the state symbol of Utah is founded on this spirit.
At the same time, they have long been motivated by the profit margin. If it weren't for their profitable business selling provisions and supplies to california goldrushers which developed a year or two after their own arrival in the Salt Lake valley, they would never have been able to fund the founding of new communities throughout the west.
Where does this tie in to the future of Linux? Two ways. First, I think that the communitarian aspects of Open Source software intersect nicely with some Mormon social ideals.
This is reinforced strongly by Mormon business practices, and interaction with the enterprises of Elder Ray Noorda, formerly of Novell and the major backer behind Caldera. Linux helps Novell, by weekening their old enemy, Microsoft and also strengthens Caldera. Ultimately, both of these things are good for the mormon business community and as such, have the potential to influence purchasing decisious inside and outside the state of Utah.
Of course, this dynamic isn't infailable, it wasn't enough to sustain something on the scale of Word Perfect of Novell, but it could play a role in boosting Linux further.
Corporations already enjoy too many priviledges of personhood and citizenship, so, while I am strongly in favor of privacy, I am less concerned about a corporations precious secrets leaking out and am opposed to any governement intervention or lawsuits attacking this policy.
On the other hand, I think the old policy was just bad business. By not allowing corporations, or individuals which make up those corporations, to opt out of these circles, amazon is giving corporations, who will clearly want to maintain some secrecy, only one way of doing so: halting all business with amazon.
In the late 80s Intel released two RISC designs. Neither of them gained significant traction in their intended market segments. They failed for a variety of reasons, only some of which were technological. The biggest reason was that no body wanted to buy a faster cheaper chip from Intel unless it could run x86 code.
This was good and bad for Intel. It was bad because Intel was stuck selling a chip which, for a given production volume, would never offer the same price performance as a RISC chip at the same production volume.
It was good for Intel because they had something that everyone wanted and they could churn out so many of them, and sell them at such fat margins that the bad part didn't look quite so bad.
Of course, ultimately, Intel was going to have to lay the x86 design to rest, but, as time went on, and competitors in the x86 market got better, it became even more difficult to make an abrupt transition.
They needed a guaranteed customer base, and they found that in HP. HP had been producing their own RISC chips, and had begun design work on a radically new chip architecture, but they had pretty small sales volumes and bringing out a new chip family is really, really expensive.
So, Intel and HP struck a bargain. Intel would make use of HPs design resources, but they would shoulder the multibillion dollar costs of actually putting a finished design into production. HP would buy the chips (at a discount, I imagine) and sell systems using them, guaranteeing Intel a substantial customer and they would avoid a lot of outlays to bring their own chip to market.
Indeed, Intel has ridden the dead horse that is the x86 to far more victories than anyone could have imagined in the late 80's. This, I think, deserves some respect.
I think it is precisely this ability that has caused them to fail in their attempts to replace it. Nobody wanted a RISC chip from Intel, they wanted a faster x86 that was compatible with their old code and Intel gave it to them.
If they didn't, and tried to force the issue by stopping x86 development, they would have suffered badly because AMD would have eventually filled the void.
They face a similar problem with the transition to Merced or McKinley. It is very likely that in the next few years Intel will permenantly resign from the race for the fastest x86 chip. They are a bit better off now than they have been though, to make this transition. If their x86 business dries up, they could loose some serious revenue, but the P7s should be able to emulate the x86 fast enough, so, if they price them agressively enough, they can still continue to milk a significant portion of the x86 market until the p7 picks up.
The current x86 ISA is an extension of a 25 year old design. PA-RISC is what, 10 years or less.
Compairing the two to reach the conclusion you want us to reach is like showing us a 3 month old baby and a 75 year old man and expecting us to conclude that the parents of the baby are somehow superior to the parents of the 75 year old because the baby has nicer skin!
Actually, McKinley may be ahead because of HP
on
Merced vs McKinley
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· Score: 1
Months ago, when Intel announced a big slip in the Merced, one of the Microprocessor report dudes predicted that it would continue slipping to the point where it was irrelevant. It would be irrelevant because its release would be too close to McKinley's, whose release date would not slip as fast as Merceds. McKinley's ship date would not slip as fast as Merced's because McKinley had a largely HP design team and the HP design methodology, using a small design team was much better suited for developing an all new processor than intel's approach of throwing 1 jillion engineers at it.
You seem to be suggesting that redhat will go down and SGI will go up. I would suggest that the two are only somewhat related. Though, given the way SGI has thrown itself behind linux, its future sucess may be tied more closely to the success of redhat than either of us are giving credit for.
AOL and MSN are as much ISPs as a lot of the little mom and pop shops we are using. They certainly as much an ISP as someone like Earthnet, who mostly resells service from other providers.
Besides that I beleive that AOL has a backbone, or at least they used to.
I think an amiga set top box is an appropriate legacy for the Amiga.
The amiga was as much about enabling the viewing of effects heavy media as it was about creating it. This may offend its geek devotees, but we wouldn't be having this conversation if the Amiga caught on as intended as a platform to produce and develop for, instead of on.
A successful Amiga information appliance would provide a large audience for interactive media. The amiga's real-time abilites weren't taken full advantage when they were used to produce a linear, non-interactive, media stream like video tape.
I actually thought their NT move was a good one. They were a hardware company, not an OS company and so offloading that to someone else made a lot of sense to me.
By the same token, I think their move to Linux is a good one. They can continue to make the development investment needed to support their hardware while garnering good press from giving back to the Linux community and leveraging the growing Linux installed base, which gives them economies not offered by maintaing their own OS. At the same time, they gain more autonomy than they had under NT, since Linux gives them a bit more room to innovate than creating extentions to NT.
gigabit ethernet increaces bandwidth, which has a minimal impact on latency because much network latency is the result of processing overhead, with a notable contribution from context switching as the data moves from hardware driver to network stack to usermode process. Cutting out these middlemen will help a lot.
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I wasn't downtown, but, near as I can tell, most of the rioting is due to a bunch of dickheads, few, if any of them have a political agenda. They just joined the crowd and, when the actions of the organized protesters succeeded in shutting down traffic and delaying the WTO meetings, they saw an opportunity to break and burn things.
I am relatively pleased that the local media, who are generally horrbile and frequently sensationalistic, while often referring to the looters as "protesters" are also trying to make the point that the looters don't seem very political and that most of the protesters have been peaceful.
I am also pleased that our police are far from the edge and don't seem likely to beat anyone to death for any reason.
Some people have called bullshit on all of this, claiming that nothing can be done.
Smarter people have suggested that there is room to improve ping times by better buffer management and shorter latencies in the transmission pipeline.
One thing I don't think has been mentioned (but I may have missed it) is that one way to acheive better buffer management is to make the modem smart enough to look for an end of frame signature. If it detects one, it should imediately compress the data in its buffer and forward it over the line, rather than waiting for the buffer to fill if data is still coming in or a timer to expire if it is not.
Do you actually have a symbol ppt1500 or 1800, or are you just trying to sound cool?
What akwards-bassed thinking. We live in a connected world, man, where everything is interconnected, baby. You can take you and your antisocial little dream palmtop out in the woods, man.
That and you could actually try a Palm and see how it is so much more than an overclocked digital rolodex.
Let me get this straight, you find it notable that a spec for something that is not shipping, is faster than the spec of something that is shipping? Then why don't you point out that specs for higher speed versions of firewire were out long before the spec for USB2
"The NT kernel comes formt the UNIX family...microsoft just took the kernel developed it to there own means...in fact winnt is posix compatible..."
Huh? NTs design is influenced by a number of things, including early versions of OS/2, VMS and Mach, but it really isn't any of those things, and it certainly isn't a monolithic kernel.
The POSIX API support you mention is separate from the OS core, so, for that matter, is the Win32 API.
Also, we don't require things like
cops and metal detectors in our schools.
One thing about Utahns, they continue to beleive that they are immune from the problems that afflict the rest of society, while the truth is, for the most part, their violent crime rate is quite similar to metropolitan areas of similar size.
On the other hand, the permissive business environment among "members" means the state has been home to some major fraud outbreaks, not that this level of trust is necessarily a bad thing.
On the other hand, there have been some notable child welfare problems in utah which result, in part, because of gaping failures of the social system.
I know for my part that when I was in school in the early 80's all the Salt Lake City high schools had cops on the staff, along with some private goons. We had people bringing guns & knives to school. A fair number of suicides, frequent outbreaks of violence and intimidation. Date rapes by nice mormon boys, lots of drunken driving by those same nice mormon boys. Teenaged pregnancies (a state seanator's daughter). And this was in one of the good schools.
It wasn't just SLC though. The number of teenaged pregnancies among underaged Mormon girls in smaller, rural, predominantly Mormon communities suggests that Utah is not immune.
In otherwords, I call bullshit on your representation of Utah schools.
I don't think it was very neighborly of them to exclude me from my friend's birthday parties. These were people we were otherwise on friendly terms with.
For the most part, as individuals, I don't really think that the Mormon's are worse or better than anyone else, but growing up non-mormon in Utah, I have certain issues with them and their politics.
I grew up in Utah, and I never heard of a dry county. When I got older, I never had trouble buying beer on Sunday. Mormon attitudes towards alcohol are restrictive, but not like they are in the bible belt.
You could find whole roased coffee beans in Utah in the 80s if not before.
Utah also had a microbrewery in the early '80s, before sam adams "launched the microbrew revolution" (what a load of shit!). It was in Park City though, which some people say is "in Utah, but not of it."
Utah is pretty conservative, but it isn't quite as provincial as many expect, at least not in Salt Lake City.
I think the Mormons represent an intersting factor in the future of linux.
As a group, they are socialist at the core. The west was won not by gun toting loaners, but by communities of settlers, many of them mormon, who had the social cohesion needed to create the irrigation projects needed to establish an agricultural community in the arid west. Their choice of the beehive as the state symbol of Utah is founded on this spirit.
At the same time, they have long been motivated by the profit margin. If it weren't for their profitable business selling provisions and supplies to california goldrushers which developed a year or two after their own arrival in the Salt Lake valley, they would never have been able to fund the founding of new communities throughout the west.
Where does this tie in to the future of Linux? Two ways. First, I think that the communitarian aspects of Open Source software intersect nicely with some Mormon social ideals.
This is reinforced strongly by Mormon business practices, and interaction with the enterprises of Elder Ray Noorda, formerly of Novell and the major backer behind Caldera. Linux helps Novell, by weekening their old enemy, Microsoft and also strengthens Caldera. Ultimately, both of these things are good for the mormon business community and as such, have the potential to influence purchasing decisious inside and outside the state of Utah.
Of course, this dynamic isn't infailable, it wasn't enough to sustain something on the scale of Word Perfect of Novell, but it could play a role in boosting Linux further.
Corporations already enjoy too many priviledges of personhood and citizenship, so, while I am strongly in favor of privacy, I am less concerned about a corporations precious secrets leaking out and am opposed to any governement intervention or lawsuits attacking this policy.
On the other hand, I think the old policy was just bad business. By not allowing corporations, or individuals which make up those corporations, to opt out of these circles, amazon is giving corporations, who will clearly want to maintain some secrecy, only one way of doing so: halting all business with amazon.
I think your brain is getting a bit spongy. Need proof, just look at the choices that you use to illustrate your point. The ABA? The NFL?
Interesting. On the other hand, couldn't it theoretically stuff more useful data into a given bitrate.
In the late 80s Intel released two RISC designs. Neither of them gained significant traction in their intended market segments. They failed for a variety of reasons, only some of which were technological. The biggest reason was that no body wanted to buy a faster cheaper chip from Intel unless it could run x86 code.
This was good and bad for Intel. It was bad because Intel was stuck selling a chip which, for a given production volume, would never offer the same price performance as a RISC chip at the same production volume.
It was good for Intel because they had something that everyone wanted and they could churn out so many of them, and sell them at such fat margins that the bad part didn't look quite so bad.
Of course, ultimately, Intel was going to have to lay the x86 design to rest, but, as time went on, and competitors in the x86 market got better, it became even more difficult to make an abrupt transition.
They needed a guaranteed customer base, and they found that in HP. HP had been producing their own RISC chips, and had begun design work on a radically new chip architecture, but they had pretty small sales volumes and bringing out a new chip family is really, really expensive.
So, Intel and HP struck a bargain. Intel would make use of HPs design resources, but they would shoulder the multibillion dollar costs of actually putting a finished design into production. HP would buy the chips (at a discount, I imagine) and sell systems using them, guaranteeing Intel a substantial customer and they would avoid a lot of outlays to bring their own chip to market.
Indeed, Intel has ridden the dead horse that is the x86 to far more victories than anyone could have imagined in the late 80's. This, I think, deserves some respect.
I think it is precisely this ability that has caused them to fail in their attempts to replace it. Nobody wanted a RISC chip from Intel, they wanted a faster x86 that was compatible with their old code and Intel gave it to them.
If they didn't, and tried to force the issue by stopping x86 development, they would have suffered badly because AMD would have eventually filled the void.
They face a similar problem with the transition to Merced or McKinley. It is very likely that in the next few years Intel will permenantly resign from the race for the fastest x86 chip. They are a bit better off now than they have been though, to make this transition. If their x86 business dries up, they could loose some serious revenue, but the P7s should be able to emulate the x86 fast enough, so, if they price them agressively enough, they can still continue to milk a significant portion of the x86 market until the p7 picks up.
The current x86 ISA is an extension of a 25 year old design. PA-RISC is what, 10 years or less.
Compairing the two to reach the conclusion you want us to reach is like showing us a 3 month old baby and a 75 year old man and expecting us to conclude that the parents of the baby are somehow superior to the parents of the 75 year old because the baby has nicer skin!
Months ago, when Intel announced a big slip in the Merced, one of the Microprocessor report dudes predicted that it would continue slipping to the point where it was irrelevant. It would be irrelevant because its release would be too close to McKinley's, whose release date would not slip as fast as Merceds. McKinley's ship date would not slip as fast as Merced's because McKinley had a largely HP design team and the HP design methodology, using a small design team was much better suited for developing an all new processor than intel's approach of throwing 1 jillion engineers at it.
Too bad that dreamcast has been a big turkey in Japan!
Than one with a past.
You seem to be suggesting that redhat will go down and SGI will go up. I would suggest that the two are only somewhat related. Though, given the way SGI has thrown itself behind linux, its future sucess may be tied more closely to the success of redhat than either of us are giving credit for.
AOL and MSN are as much ISPs as a lot of the little mom and pop shops we are using. They certainly as much an ISP as someone like Earthnet, who mostly resells service from other providers.
Besides that I beleive that AOL has a backbone, or at least they used to.
I think an amiga set top box is an appropriate legacy for the Amiga.
The amiga was as much about enabling the viewing of effects heavy media as it was about creating it. This may offend its geek devotees, but we wouldn't be having this conversation if the Amiga caught on as intended as a platform to produce and develop for, instead of on.
A successful Amiga information appliance would provide a large audience for interactive media. The amiga's real-time abilites weren't taken full advantage when they were used to produce a linear, non-interactive, media stream like video tape.
Because humans don't find chips very attractive and vice-versa.
I actually thought their NT move was a good one. They were a hardware company, not an OS company and so offloading that to someone else made a lot of sense to me.
By the same token, I think their move to Linux is a good one. They can continue to make the development investment needed to support their hardware while garnering good press from giving back to the Linux community and leveraging the growing Linux installed base, which gives them economies not offered by maintaing their own OS. At the same time, they gain more autonomy than they had under NT, since Linux gives them a bit more room to innovate than creating extentions to NT.
gigabit ethernet increaces bandwidth, which has a minimal impact on latency because much network latency is the result of processing overhead, with a notable contribution from context switching as the data moves from hardware driver to network stack to usermode process. Cutting out these middlemen will help a lot.