The first season of the simpsons was a low budget affair produced in a mad rush. It isn't fair to lay blame for its quality on Groening's shoulders.
Futurama is different. First, it is well funded, which means Groening is starting out with the assistance of skilled writers. In addition, he has what, 10 years of experience now.
Microsoft does stuff like this every few years, at least.
I suppose it is possible that MS is trying to arrange things a little better for an eventual breakup, but I really doubt it. Even if they loose this round they have years worth of appeals to go through.
Microsoft wouldn't necessarily operate these things. I don't see how this poses much more risk to privacy invasion by MS than storing your files on any MS OS machine does now.
On the other hand, providing ubiquitos access to ones data from "any device" would require a much better understanding or encryption and security than MS has demonstraighted to this point.
Man, I really dislike Gore, but I think CmdrTaco's snide remarks devalue other peoples contributions to the Internet.
The Internet is about more than routers and protocols. There were a lot of policy decisions and initiatives which brought us to where we are today. In some cases, technical people were instrumental in progress in this area but pols, bureacrats, educators, and later, business people all helped move things along.
Personally, I don't think we would be where we are today if someone(s) hadn't decided to charter NSFnet (remember them) to provide access to students at all US colleges and universites. It was this initiative that really opened up the net (some would say killed it). It moved it beyond the grasp of graduate students and faculty in computer science and high energy physics and into the hands of students in faculty in other sciences and even lowly undergraduate art majors.
Among other things, this demostraited broad appeal of the Internet and proved the value of freindlier interfaces to internet information such as HTML pages. Such a clear market led us to commercialization of the backbone.
Without this exposure I don't want to think about where we would be, but it would probably look like some ugly combination of MSN & AOL, circa 1995 with intractive television mixed in somewhere along with some lame network of local BBSs.
Redhat has domstraited a willingness to support open source software and principals.
They pay for development of Open Source software that benefits the community and they use their reputation and position to garner Linux support from other companies. This may not pay off in terms of open source code immediately, but often, it will in time.
The way I see it, a rising tide floats all boats. There will be more options in Linux and open source software with Redhat, or someone like them, than there will be without them.
Neat but not really. A cluster of PCs connected over fast ethernet is not as flexible as a Cray. On the other hand, a Cray is a waste of money for rendering.
Intel packaged the celeron so as to disable SMP in order to protect their mid-range PIIs, but they deliberately left the core as unchanged as possible to avoid validating the new design.
You miss the point. Whether or not it is that much more powerful that a top of the line gaming PC isn't really the issue.
A top of the line gaming PC costs what, $2000.
A playstation 2 will probably run $200.
A top of the line gaming PC offers all sorts of opportunities for failure. A playstation2 offers few opportunities for failure. Little can be done to it, short of physical abuse, that can't be fixed by a fast reboot.
Yeah, right. A game console is an appliance, you plug it in and it goes. There is little you can do to make it not go that a power cycle won't fix. A PC, any PC, whether it is running linux, windows or whatnot is not in the same league.
If you can not see the difference between the two, or its value, then I think you are either horribly naive.
Rather than seeing the console riding off into the sunset in the face of $399/pcs, I see the low end of the PC market, or at least the bulk of it, going to multifunction computing appliances which provide some combination of game console, Internet access, DVD player, Satelite/Digital Cable decoder and perhaps even video recorder functionality.
There is a great deal of overlap in the componentry needed for each of these tasks.
A game console will likely support DVD media. The graphics subsystem of a console will likely support DVD decoding. DVD decoding has a lot in common with Digital TV decoding. Support for Internet access makes sense in a game console anyway, if only for gaming and support for web browsing and e-mail isn't particularly demanding.
These will be supplimented by various mobile computing devices and various home server devices.
There will still be a place for general purpose computing, and it is inevitable that prices will continue to drop in this space.
I thought the only way to get these things to run in an SMP configuration was to eliminate the L2 cache, the very thing that makes these things so fast.
I have no real opinion on B&B, other than that it didn't suck like I expected it to. King of the Hill, on the other hand, is one of the few brilliant half hours of television in modern times. Fat kid's funny!
A small subset of these SIMD instructions are useful in what you might consider the kernel, or the core libraries for packet handling and copying blocks of memory. Don't write them off completely.
Slashdot Mirror
The first season of the simpsons was a low budget affair produced in a mad rush. It isn't fair to lay blame for its quality on Groening's shoulders.
Futurama is different. First, it is well funded, which means Groening is starting out with the assistance of skilled writers. In addition, he has what, 10 years of experience now.
Huh?
Samsug makes most Alpha chips and Alpha motherboards are available to anyone who wants to pay for them.
You condem Tom for political bullshit, why not condem the FSF for revisionism in trying to claim credit for the work of others.
On the other hand, if nobody tries to commercialize digital projection, digital projection systems will never come down in price.
None of the things you list are all that expensive, except robbing old ladies, which can take years away from your life once you are caught.
Microsoft does stuff like this every few years, at least.
I suppose it is possible that MS is trying to arrange things a little better for an eventual breakup, but I really doubt it. Even if they loose this round they have years worth of appeals to go through.
Microsoft wouldn't necessarily operate these things. I don't see how this poses much more risk to privacy invasion by MS than storing your files on any MS OS machine does now.
On the other hand, providing ubiquitos access to ones data from "any device" would require a much better understanding or encryption and security than MS has demonstraighted to this point.
AC wrote:
There is something on your nose there buddy.
How can you tell from your vantage point?
If you read my post as an endorsement of Al Gore then I have to conclude that you are a seriously psychotic individual
Man, I really dislike Gore, but I think CmdrTaco's snide remarks devalue other peoples contributions to the Internet.
The Internet is about more than routers and protocols. There were a lot of policy decisions and initiatives which brought us to where we are today. In some cases, technical people were instrumental in progress in this area but pols, bureacrats, educators, and later, business people all helped move things along.
Personally, I don't think we would be where we are today if someone(s) hadn't decided to charter NSFnet (remember them) to provide access to students at all US colleges and universites. It was this initiative that really opened up the net (some would say killed it). It moved it beyond the grasp of graduate students and faculty in computer science and high energy physics and into the hands of students in faculty in other sciences and even lowly undergraduate art majors.
Among other things, this demostraited broad appeal of the Internet and proved the value of freindlier interfaces to internet information such as HTML pages. Such a clear market led us to commercialization of the backbone.
Without this exposure I don't want to think about where we would be, but it would probably look like some ugly combination of MSN & AOL, circa 1995 with intractive television mixed in somewhere along with some lame network of local BBSs.
I tend to think that you are an idiot.
Redhat has domstraited a willingness to support open source software and principals.
They pay for development of Open Source software that benefits the community and they use their reputation and position to garner Linux support from other companies. This may not pay off in terms of open source code immediately, but often, it will in time.
The way I see it, a rising tide floats all boats. There will be more options in Linux and open source software with Redhat, or someone like them, than there will be without them.
Bogus:
Neat but not really. A cluster of PCs connected over fast ethernet is not as flexible as a Cray. On the other hand, a Cray is a waste of money for rendering.
The graceful failover is a red herring to me. It was ascribed to IBMs "X architecture" but it sounded more like an application level adaptation.
Sorry to say this, but you are wrong!
Intel packaged the celeron so as to disable SMP in order to protect their mid-range PIIs, but they deliberately left the core as unchanged as possible to avoid validating the new design.
Man, y'all just sound like the sort of guys the ladies go for.
What makes you think someone won't?
Why would you expect to?
I believe they use a free standing executable to post-process the object files into a playstation ready executable format.
You miss the point. Whether or not it is that much more powerful that a top of the line gaming PC isn't really the issue.
A top of the line gaming PC costs what, $2000.
A playstation 2 will probably run $200.
A top of the line gaming PC offers all sorts of opportunities for failure. A playstation2 offers few opportunities for failure. Little can be done to it, short of physical abuse, that can't be fixed by a fast reboot.
I found that it was nearly impossible to find support infomation on the old RedHat site.
Either what I was looking for wasn't there, or I couldn't find it. I find the new site is a big improvement in this regard.
What about solid state disks. Flash isn't that expensive. It isn't particularly fast, but it might be fine.
Yeah, right. A game console is an appliance, you plug it in and it goes. There is little you can do to make it not go that a power cycle won't fix. A PC, any PC, whether it is running linux, windows or whatnot is not in the same league.
If you can not see the difference between the two, or its value, then I think you are either horribly naive.
Rather than seeing the console riding off into the sunset in the face of $399/pcs, I see the low end of the PC market, or at least the bulk of it, going to multifunction computing appliances which provide some combination of game console, Internet access, DVD player, Satelite/Digital Cable decoder and perhaps even video recorder functionality.
There is a great deal of overlap in the componentry needed for each of these tasks.
A game console will likely support DVD media.
The graphics subsystem of a console will likely support DVD decoding.
DVD decoding has a lot in common with Digital TV decoding.
Support for Internet access makes sense in a game console anyway, if only for gaming and support for web browsing and e-mail isn't particularly demanding.
These will be supplimented by various mobile computing devices and various home server devices.
There will still be a place for general purpose computing, and it is inevitable that prices will continue to drop in this space.
I thought the only way to get these things to run in an SMP configuration was to eliminate the L2 cache, the very thing that makes these things so fast.
Forget your roommate.
I have no real opinion on B&B, other than that it didn't suck like I expected it to. King of the Hill, on the other hand, is one of the few brilliant half hours of television in modern times. Fat kid's funny!
Rushmore is a better film, I think, but office space is really funny.
My only problem with officespace is the end, which was so lame as to erode much of the good will I had towards the movie.
A small subset of these SIMD instructions are useful in what you might consider the kernel, or the core libraries for packet handling and copying blocks of memory. Don't write them off completely.
Microsoft designs its own hardware. I don't know who makes it, but I am sure they farm it out.