On closer examination of the specs, this laptop isn't a Cell CPU at all. It's Toshiba's "Spurs" coprocessor, which is like a Cell but with the central PPC core stripped out and only half the Cell's 4 SPE DSPs, hooked up to a Pentium Core 2 Duo instead. That might be an interesting platform for experimenting with Linux and DSP, but it's not a Cell, and has practically no relation to any Cell/Linux project, nor Ubuntu in particular.
Both the Slashdot story and the actual article lie about the CPU being a "Cell". How stupid.
I hope the appearance of the Cell in actual PCs, not just the RAM-hardwired and GPU-lockedout (and no PCI) PS3 will reignite official support of Cell Ubuntu. Until last year, Ubuntu was officially supporting the PPC-based Cell version of their distro. Now it's just a community effort that needs your help. Ubuntu is working, with some bugs (right now mainly the installer, and beta bugs in the Cell SPE video driver). If there were more diverse Cell PC HW, and a larger, more diverse developer community coming with it, there might be better Ubuntu. Since both the PS3 and this notebook are primarily useful as workstations and media stations, Ubuntu really is the best flavor out there that also keeps up with the other Linux desktop productivity apps.
They should go all the way, and make it simply like I said.
Funny how everyone screeching that this approach is impossible and useless doesn't even know that it's shipping right now. I guess some of the screechers are inside Microsoft, or it would just work the simple and open way that I described.
The fact that you're complaining without any specific details or other qualifications means that I'm not reading any more of your posts. I've become far more advanced in the past decade.
Maybe so. But instead of your purely theoretical abstractions, I actually described a security system that is what I personally designed for Northern Telecom and Microsoft almost a decade ago, before Windows Update copied the convenience features but not the closed system that's secure by default. We actually deployed our system in hundreds of public access terminals across Canada. So when I say that it would work for Microsoft, and what they'd have to do to make it work, it's because I spent a lot more than 5 minutes designing it (though we did use our share of napkins).
Compare that actual security analysis to the under 5 minutes you spent, without even a napkin, complaining about it without any factual or analytical basis.
Congratulations! You win the unacceptably bad status quo.
Well, that was when Ubuntu was still a lot less mature. The reason Ubuntu is so popular now is because those kinds of bugs are mostly gone (which is the best that anyone can say about any OS, including MacOSX). And of course since it's so much more popular, there are more people and bug reports making it better, faster.
In fact, I'm trying to figure out what to do with an iBook G4 (PPC) running MacOSX Jaguar, because the iPod I just plugged into it is demanding v10.4.8 or later. Apple seems to insist that I buy a v10.5.2 upgrade for the privilege of using the iPod I bought with the Mac I'd already bought. If I can't find a way to drag my CDs onto that iPod on that Mac without paying for the OS upgrade, then I'm thinking about installing Linux on it, if Linux will support that iPod use without buying extra SW. And I'm thinking that Linux will be Ubuntu, because Ubuntu has generally the easiest and most complete support for peripherals (like the iPod). And because I use Ubuntu on my other machines, so I have the simplicity of using a single distro for similar tasks rather than special cases on different machines for the same task.
The system that restricts connections to other sites is the firewall. Exploits of that are already underway. What I describes doesn't add any new vulnerabilities. It only reduces them. That's how security decisions work. They don't work by throwing up your hands and saying that any change, even one that just reduces access, increases vulnerability. And saying that the status quo is better than the improvement, when the status quo is unacceptable, isn't a legitimate security analysis either.
A justification lamefest hurts nothing, and probably helps, while making the lamefest hideable by default, but available as data for metamods. So even there it's worth trying.
The "SlashStalker" pattern recognition is another good idea to reduce mod abuse.
Metamods could use more info when they metamod. These justifications would do that, even on top of their deterrent effect on people who won't do them (and who then can't downmod).
The memory can't be upgraded, which limits its use for some apps. But not for media playback apps, especially streaming media. It's a great media console in the making.
The memory can be worked around with Flash drives mapped as swap, which is an adequate compromise to add general purpose tasks to its media player strengths. And there's probably a way to use a SATA-RAM device to actually add real RAM, though not anywhere full speed (but as fast as lots of PC memory). And real Cell processing on real datasets is only as fast as the SATA or Gb-e can deliver streams of data, so it's a barely adequate platform for real computation apps.
But all that leaves the PS3 a very interesting machine both for research and for real use for media. Which is why I would like to see Ubuntu installers work properly on it, so the rest of the projects don't get halted at that essential enabling stage. Even though there's a kernel and distro team working on that, their work would be even more productive if they could start with a working system, instead of spending time catching up to square one.
Just the extra effort would probably weed out the worst TrollMods. And those lame "justifications" would make it trivial for metamodders to disqualify a lame mod. The point is not to force empty justifications into the regular conversation (they could be hidden by default), but rather to make explicit the difference between downmods with justification and downmods with none. Which is a better model of the actual discussion, which therefore will show the resulting benefits of a more reasonable discussion. Even if only in degrees.
Those justifications would also address the catch-22 that prohibits posting in a thread in which one moderates (or vice versa). When people want to both disagree and downmod, they have to pick one. Downmodding is easier and more powerful than disagreeing, so people are encouraged to do so. Even when their opposition, expressed as either downmodding or a posted disagreement, is really flimsy or worse. Especially in that case. So the lamest oppositions wind up as the most powerful downmods. Letting people post their opposition, even requiring them to, when downmodding, would also make them more likely to just post their opposition rather than post it and downmod, since the downmodding part is also extra effort. So again the revision to the downmodding system would encourage debate, even if crappy, rather than the even worse anonymous and silent crappy downmodding, while making the crappy downmodding easier to metamoderate correctly.
When I view moderation details by clicking the "Score:N" link next to the comment's Subject, the page of moderation types and totals is often blocked by a banner ad at the top. The banner blocks the "close X" at the top right of the details, so clicking there is clicking on the banner's link, not the "X" that closes the details and returns to the basic view of the comment.
Instead I have to go back a page, and then forward a page to return to the basic view of the comment. It's a pain in the ass, especially if I accidentally click the banner to "close", and then have to come back from some ad page that's tricked me into visiting.
A sneaky way for Slashdot to increase its banner clicks, while making us hate the advertisers and Slashdot.
The biggest problem with Slashdot is that anonymous downmodding is used to suppress comments instead of posting something disagreeing with them.
If someone modding down a comment was required to post their reason, exactly like a reply comment, that could be viewed by both regular readers and metamoderators alike (and made hideable by default in preferences), that would probably cut back a lot of the frivolous downmods, and convert them to explicit disagreements instead. Since that feature is so similar to the regular comment system, it should be quick to develop, debug and deliver.
Like any "Ubuntu failing", that's just a task for the community to fill, which is why I posted in public. Where people can see it and join the community. Rather than just whine about whose "fault" it might be. WHich is about as useful as saying someone shouldn't really be using Linux in the first place, when Linux is perfectly useful on these machines, including the PS3. As IBM's support on powerhouse machines amply demonstrates. And which shows how useful a Linux PS3 can be as an entry level, since the PS3's Cell is a powerhouse in its own right, much more than merely a PPC, even if the rest of the HW is too small for more than entry level work.
People have to start somewhere. Starting by upgrading a working Linux distro on a $400 working multimedia PC is a great place to start, even if it never leads to development on "powerhouse" machines like fully-equipped POWER or Cell machines.
If Microsoft set every fresh Windows install to connect to only Microsoft.com on the Internet until either Microsoft.com, or the console, or some other specific named/numbered host said that Windows is "safely* patched", then this race condition would not be a problem. They could allow the "patch lock" on network access to be released by the installing operator at the console, or that operator could set a pointer to some other machines allowed access, or Microsoft.com's patch servers could send a list of servers. All other network access would be locked out until someone authorized said the machine was ready to connect to the general network/Internet access.
Such a revision should take a couple of Microsoft programmers a week or so to implement and test. Of course, if Windows were OSS, then anyone in the Microsoft developer community could patch Windows to work right. And anyone could inspect that patch to ensure that it worked right, before trusting it not to be just another security hole.
But of course, Microsoft is so far from anything approaching real openness or modern security practices that its fundamental insecurity in an Internet environment is one of its basic features. Its most prized feature on the hundreds of millions of machines compromised worldwide, many the first time they're connected to the Internet, among the bad guys out there who love Microsoft's closed and counterproductive "security" practices even more than Microsoft loves them.
(* OK, Windows is never "safely patched", but it's a start.)
And what's stopping you from being part of the community support for PPC Linux on Cell? Just because neither Sony nor Ubuntu.com itself maintains Ubuntu for the PS3 doesn't really mean much. Most PC vendors (with any CPU) don't support Linux themselves. And lots of distro teams don't directly support all the architectures their distros are run on or get ported to. The whole point of Linux as FOSS is that people can do with it what they want without "official" support. There is indeed a community of kernel developers and distro packagers, as well as a larger community of "bleeding edge users" who all just want Ubuntu running well on their PS3, and aren't just looking to tag along with someone else's "official" development. There's nothing magic about Sony or Ubuntu.com development.
Ubuntu on PS3 runs pretty well already. Including running Java applets and Flash in a browser, and practically all the other workstation apps. And with the SPE video drivers I can already watch HD movies direct to my giant TV over the HDMI cable. Ubuntu/PS3 is nearly the best media station for my home network, and it's still only in beta.
With a few more good developers more interested in results than in being "official", Ubuntu on PS3 will be the platform of choice for people who want their media to "just play". If they don't wait for "official" support, which they don't need, that time will come soon enough.
Yes, the Cell's PPE is slower than a POWER4-7, but it's not a POWER4-7, so I don't expect it to be as fast as that. It is, however, just as fast as a PowerPC running at the same 3.2GHz, including the AltiVec FPU.
Running the graphics on the SPEs does not make them unavailable for other tasks - it just uses some of their cycles. They're plenty fast enough to do lots of other tasks. The Cell's PPE + SPEs are still much faster than a PPC, or a Pentium4, plus a VGA card. The best use of a PS3 is to develop parallel processing techniques that efficiently share the SPEs as an on-demand resource. There's plenty of crunching power to go around. In fact, one simple way to use them is to compartmentalize each of the 6 SPEs to a single task, so there's six little screamers, five of which wouldn't be consumed by the graphics load if only one is dedicated to it.
Oh, and the Cell's main architectural advantage is its on-chip bus between PPE, SPEs, and RAM (including the framebufer, even the offchip VRAM) that is so fast and coherent that it's effectively "invisible", without slowing those fast SPEs down.
If you want to "play" with a Cell, the $400 PS3 is a lot easier to "bung in" than any of the dedicated Cell workstations that cost $10,000 or more.
Linix on PS3 is so cheap and easy to get started with that just reading articles about it is no substitute before people just go on posting about it as if they know what it's about.
No, actually, Ubuntu has problems running its installer in the current version, 8.04.
I really wish people who just read old articles and half-read my posts would stay in "read-only" mode until they actually knew what they're talking about. It's distracting.
Well, I'd rather see the solutions that YDL develops make it into Ubuntu, which is overall a superior "Desktop" distro. Especially for media playing. And with its Debian-derived APT, it's overall a much easier system to maintain.
Slashdot Mirror
"YAOSoft". Has a distinctly Chinese ring to it. Like a good media monopoly should.
On closer examination of the specs, this laptop isn't a Cell CPU at all. It's Toshiba's "Spurs" coprocessor, which is like a Cell but with the central PPC core stripped out and only half the Cell's 4 SPE DSPs, hooked up to a Pentium Core 2 Duo instead. That might be an interesting platform for experimenting with Linux and DSP, but it's not a Cell, and has practically no relation to any Cell/Linux project, nor Ubuntu in particular.
Both the Slashdot story and the actual article lie about the CPU being a "Cell". How stupid.
I hope the appearance of the Cell in actual PCs, not just the RAM-hardwired and GPU-lockedout (and no PCI) PS3 will reignite official support of Cell Ubuntu. Until last year, Ubuntu was officially supporting the PPC-based Cell version of their distro. Now it's just a community effort that needs your help. Ubuntu is working, with some bugs (right now mainly the installer, and beta bugs in the Cell SPE video driver). If there were more diverse Cell PC HW, and a larger, more diverse developer community coming with it, there might be better Ubuntu. Since both the PS3 and this notebook are primarily useful as workstations and media stations, Ubuntu really is the best flavor out there that also keeps up with the other Linux desktop productivity apps.
They should go all the way, and make it simply like I said.
Funny how everyone screeching that this approach is impossible and useless doesn't even know that it's shipping right now. I guess some of the screechers are inside Microsoft, or it would just work the simple and open way that I described.
That is why I said that the operator could control the access lockout from the console while running the installer.
I totally agree. +1 :).
. (stupid redundancy filter)
The fact that you're complaining without any specific details or other qualifications means that I'm not reading any more of your posts. I've become far more advanced in the past decade.
Maybe so. But instead of your purely theoretical abstractions, I actually described a security system that is what I personally designed for Northern Telecom and Microsoft almost a decade ago, before Windows Update copied the convenience features but not the closed system that's secure by default. We actually deployed our system in hundreds of public access terminals across Canada. So when I say that it would work for Microsoft, and what they'd have to do to make it work, it's because I spent a lot more than 5 minutes designing it (though we did use our share of napkins).
Compare that actual security analysis to the under 5 minutes you spent, without even a napkin, complaining about it without any factual or analytical basis.
Congratulations! You win the unacceptably bad status quo.
Well, that was when Ubuntu was still a lot less mature. The reason Ubuntu is so popular now is because those kinds of bugs are mostly gone (which is the best that anyone can say about any OS, including MacOSX). And of course since it's so much more popular, there are more people and bug reports making it better, faster.
In fact, I'm trying to figure out what to do with an iBook G4 (PPC) running MacOSX Jaguar, because the iPod I just plugged into it is demanding v10.4.8 or later. Apple seems to insist that I buy a v10.5.2 upgrade for the privilege of using the iPod I bought with the Mac I'd already bought. If I can't find a way to drag my CDs onto that iPod on that Mac without paying for the OS upgrade, then I'm thinking about installing Linux on it, if Linux will support that iPod use without buying extra SW. And I'm thinking that Linux will be Ubuntu, because Ubuntu has generally the easiest and most complete support for peripherals (like the iPod). And because I use Ubuntu on my other machines, so I have the simplicity of using a single distro for similar tasks rather than special cases on different machines for the same task.
The system that restricts connections to other sites is the firewall. Exploits of that are already underway. What I describes doesn't add any new vulnerabilities. It only reduces them. That's how security decisions work. They don't work by throwing up your hands and saying that any change, even one that just reduces access, increases vulnerability. And saying that the status quo is better than the improvement, when the status quo is unacceptable, isn't a legitimate security analysis either.
A justification lamefest hurts nothing, and probably helps, while making the lamefest hideable by default, but available as data for metamods. So even there it's worth trying.
The "SlashStalker" pattern recognition is another good idea to reduce mod abuse.
That's another good one. The cost:benefit of downmodding should discourage "free abuse".
Metamods could use more info when they metamod. These justifications would do that, even on top of their deterrent effect on people who won't do them (and who then can't downmod).
The memory can't be upgraded, which limits its use for some apps. But not for media playback apps, especially streaming media. It's a great media console in the making.
The memory can be worked around with Flash drives mapped as swap, which is an adequate compromise to add general purpose tasks to its media player strengths. And there's probably a way to use a SATA-RAM device to actually add real RAM, though not anywhere full speed (but as fast as lots of PC memory). And real Cell processing on real datasets is only as fast as the SATA or Gb-e can deliver streams of data, so it's a barely adequate platform for real computation apps.
But all that leaves the PS3 a very interesting machine both for research and for real use for media. Which is why I would like to see Ubuntu installers work properly on it, so the rest of the projects don't get halted at that essential enabling stage. Even though there's a kernel and distro team working on that, their work would be even more productive if they could start with a working system, instead of spending time catching up to square one.
I totally agree. +1 :).
Just the extra effort would probably weed out the worst TrollMods. And those lame "justifications" would make it trivial for metamodders to disqualify a lame mod. The point is not to force empty justifications into the regular conversation (they could be hidden by default), but rather to make explicit the difference between downmods with justification and downmods with none. Which is a better model of the actual discussion, which therefore will show the resulting benefits of a more reasonable discussion. Even if only in degrees.
Those justifications would also address the catch-22 that prohibits posting in a thread in which one moderates (or vice versa). When people want to both disagree and downmod, they have to pick one. Downmodding is easier and more powerful than disagreeing, so people are encouraged to do so. Even when their opposition, expressed as either downmodding or a posted disagreement, is really flimsy or worse. Especially in that case. So the lamest oppositions wind up as the most powerful downmods. Letting people post their opposition, even requiring them to, when downmodding, would also make them more likely to just post their opposition rather than post it and downmod, since the downmodding part is also extra effort. So again the revision to the downmodding system would encourage debate, even if crappy, rather than the even worse anonymous and silent crappy downmodding, while making the crappy downmodding easier to metamoderate correctly.
FWIW, I'm using Firefox v3.0 on an up-to-date Ubuntu 8.04 x86 PC.
When I view moderation details by clicking the "Score:N" link next to the comment's Subject, the page of moderation types and totals is often blocked by a banner ad at the top. The banner blocks the "close X" at the top right of the details, so clicking there is clicking on the banner's link, not the "X" that closes the details and returns to the basic view of the comment.
Instead I have to go back a page, and then forward a page to return to the basic view of the comment. It's a pain in the ass, especially if I accidentally click the banner to "close", and then have to come back from some ad page that's tricked me into visiting.
A sneaky way for Slashdot to increase its banner clicks, while making us hate the advertisers and Slashdot.
The biggest problem with Slashdot is that anonymous downmodding is used to suppress comments instead of posting something disagreeing with them.
If someone modding down a comment was required to post their reason, exactly like a reply comment, that could be viewed by both regular readers and metamoderators alike (and made hideable by default in preferences), that would probably cut back a lot of the frivolous downmods, and convert them to explicit disagreements instead. Since that feature is so similar to the regular comment system, it should be quick to develop, debug and deliver.
Like any "Ubuntu failing", that's just a task for the community to fill, which is why I posted in public. Where people can see it and join the community. Rather than just whine about whose "fault" it might be. WHich is about as useful as saying someone shouldn't really be using Linux in the first place, when Linux is perfectly useful on these machines, including the PS3. As IBM's support on powerhouse machines amply demonstrates. And which shows how useful a Linux PS3 can be as an entry level, since the PS3's Cell is a powerhouse in its own right, much more than merely a PPC, even if the rest of the HW is too small for more than entry level work.
People have to start somewhere. Starting by upgrading a working Linux distro on a $400 working multimedia PC is a great place to start, even if it never leads to development on "powerhouse" machines like fully-equipped POWER or Cell machines.
If Microsoft set every fresh Windows install to connect to only Microsoft.com on the Internet until either Microsoft.com, or the console, or some other specific named/numbered host said that Windows is "safely* patched", then this race condition would not be a problem. They could allow the "patch lock" on network access to be released by the installing operator at the console, or that operator could set a pointer to some other machines allowed access, or Microsoft.com's patch servers could send a list of servers. All other network access would be locked out until someone authorized said the machine was ready to connect to the general network/Internet access.
Such a revision should take a couple of Microsoft programmers a week or so to implement and test. Of course, if Windows were OSS, then anyone in the Microsoft developer community could patch Windows to work right. And anyone could inspect that patch to ensure that it worked right, before trusting it not to be just another security hole.
But of course, Microsoft is so far from anything approaching real openness or modern security practices that its fundamental insecurity in an Internet environment is one of its basic features. Its most prized feature on the hundreds of millions of machines compromised worldwide, many the first time they're connected to the Internet, among the bad guys out there who love Microsoft's closed and counterproductive "security" practices even more than Microsoft loves them.
(* OK, Windows is never "safely patched", but it's a start.)
No one said "evil Sony" until you did.
And what's stopping you from being part of the community support for PPC Linux on Cell? Just because neither Sony nor Ubuntu.com itself maintains Ubuntu for the PS3 doesn't really mean much. Most PC vendors (with any CPU) don't support Linux themselves. And lots of distro teams don't directly support all the architectures their distros are run on or get ported to. The whole point of Linux as FOSS is that people can do with it what they want without "official" support. There is indeed a community of kernel developers and distro packagers, as well as a larger community of "bleeding edge users" who all just want Ubuntu running well on their PS3, and aren't just looking to tag along with someone else's "official" development. There's nothing magic about Sony or Ubuntu.com development.
Ubuntu on PS3 runs pretty well already. Including running Java applets and Flash in a browser, and practically all the other workstation apps. And with the SPE video drivers I can already watch HD movies direct to my giant TV over the HDMI cable. Ubuntu/PS3 is nearly the best media station for my home network, and it's still only in beta.
With a few more good developers more interested in results than in being "official", Ubuntu on PS3 will be the platform of choice for people who want their media to "just play". If they don't wait for "official" support, which they don't need, that time will come soon enough.
Yes, the Cell's PPE is slower than a POWER4-7, but it's not a POWER4-7, so I don't expect it to be as fast as that. It is, however, just as fast as a PowerPC running at the same 3.2GHz, including the AltiVec FPU.
Running the graphics on the SPEs does not make them unavailable for other tasks - it just uses some of their cycles. They're plenty fast enough to do lots of other tasks. The Cell's PPE + SPEs are still much faster than a PPC, or a Pentium4, plus a VGA card. The best use of a PS3 is to develop parallel processing techniques that efficiently share the SPEs as an on-demand resource. There's plenty of crunching power to go around. In fact, one simple way to use them is to compartmentalize each of the 6 SPEs to a single task, so there's six little screamers, five of which wouldn't be consumed by the graphics load if only one is dedicated to it.
Oh, and the Cell's main architectural advantage is its on-chip bus between PPE, SPEs, and RAM (including the framebufer, even the offchip VRAM) that is so fast and coherent that it's effectively "invisible", without slowing those fast SPEs down.
If you want to "play" with a Cell, the $400 PS3 is a lot easier to "bung in" than any of the dedicated Cell workstations that cost $10,000 or more.
Linix on PS3 is so cheap and easy to get started with that just reading articles about it is no substitute before people just go on posting about it as if they know what it's about.
No, actually, Ubuntu has problems running its installer in the current version, 8.04.
I really wish people who just read old articles and half-read my posts would stay in "read-only" mode until they actually knew what they're talking about. It's distracting.
Well, I'd rather see the solutions that YDL develops make it into Ubuntu, which is overall a superior "Desktop" distro. Especially for media playing. And with its Debian-derived APT, it's overall a much easier system to maintain.