Now if the Pentagon would just invent some way to properly treat soldiers injured in our wars, like they say they do at Walter Reed Hospital.
Though I guess first some Republican thinktank will have to invent a way for honoring that commitment to our veterans to be as profitable to Bush cronies as some new battlefield toy that some medieval terrorist can disable for $0.49 and their life.
They don't disable one of the 8 SPEs deliberately. They just pick the Cells that come out of their manufacturing yield with 7 working and one dead from typical manufacturing defects, like any microchip production. The SPEs are redundant, so they can just test the chip for how many SPEs come out working, blow the fuses on the dead SPEs so they don't suck power, and ship those to Sony. It "increases manufacturing yields" by offering a use for chips with some defects.
And yes, one of the 7 SPEs in the PS3 is reserved, but not necessarily by the "PS3 OS". Even under Linux, there's only 6 SPEs available for apps. It's possible that the Sony Hypervisor under which Linux runs is locking up the 7th SPE, or it could be the chip itself (for distributing data to its elements), or both in combination.
Do developers really need.NET to be portable, when Mono lets C# run on Linux (and therefore get ported elsewhere)? Or has MS managed to stymie that way out? Or perhaps the Mono developers done the stymieing.
Has anyone shelled out the bucks and spent the time checking whether nVidia's CUDA dev env actually delivers the power of the 8800 for general purpose cpmputing (GPGPU), in easy procedural programming, as nVidia promised?
The intent is to allow high-performance machines to run complex online games and virtual worlds.
The intent is to make the high-end Cells (with all 8 SPEs working) cheap by selling millions of PS3s with lower-grade (6 SPEs) Cells, a scale economy that big machines ("mainframes") couldn't achieve on their own.
They're not going to be running "games" like VirtuaFighter on mainframes, especially not without the 9x as fast RSX video chip the PS3 includes. But they will be allowing us to run supercomputer-fast Monte Carlo simulations on PS3 under Linux.
So I guess if their marketdroids keep lying to us about making IBM mainframes into game consoles, it's worth it if they keep delivering the reverse, which is much more interesting.
I've already planted plenty of trees. And I've paid to have them planted. Me planting a tree isn't scalable, though the polluting email servers sure are.
I didn't just imply an infrastructure, I asked if it existed. It sounds like you didn't even read my post before replying to challenge me - talk about self gratification.
Is there a service which lets me click to plant a real tree somewhere on the real Earth?
I'd love to see a service which calculates the CO2 impact of, say, an email server (and its own operations), and orders trees planted to offset that CO2 by the amount trees consume during that time.
People could get periodic reports of their "email pollution" and the trees they've planted to balance it. With an offer to buy more trees to offset the rest of the Greenhouse pollution we generate, including writing and reading this message.
Excellent point. If true, it reveals a pressure point on a fault between legal and marketing. And since marketing drives the company, especially in the gamble of whether to expose HW to both XMB (game) and Linux OS'es, this is an important distinction. If Harrison will continue to tell developers like the Slashdot audience that "Sony wants to give developers everything we can", while developers specifically demand access to the RSX, then Harrison (and his marketing staff) can be used for his power inside Sony.
If Harrison had ignored the question, we wouldn't have his signal that he supports Linux development. Getting full access to the PS3 HW is the #1 issue for developers (not just gamers and technophiles) on Slashdot. So now we know where the allies might lie. Continued pressure just might get them to expose at least 2D APIs to RSX, if not everything needed for at least Beryl, if not Duke Nukem Forever (;), under Linux.
Until I saw your analysis, I thought Sony would never expose RSX to Linux, as that would be the little hole in their license royalty balloon. But if their marketing execs want it, then there is very much a chance. Even if they're just pretending they do to look cool for developers they're planning to leave cold, there's still a chance to campaign on their words to get them to help. It's worth doing. That RSX is 1.8TFLOPS of graphics power, dwarfing even the Cell's 0.2TFLOPS. With Beryl, we're talking about a superfast desktop like in a SF movie (hell, we're talking about a realtime rendered SF movie in full rez on the desktop). Let's get it!
4.) 'Homebrew Gaming' by Anonymous Coward, maynard, and flitty If someone manages to get homebrew games running on the PS3, will there be firmware updates to stop this kind of development, to protect your software developers, or is homebrew something you are planning on and even encouraging? Is there a chance that the policy of restricting access to PS3 graphics hardware (via the hypervisor) could be revised to encourage us homebrew developers? How does this strategy differ from your strategy with PSP homebrew? Has Sony considered offering kernel patches and an RSX optimized OpenGL library for PS3/Linux?
Phil Harrison: Now, let me first say that Homebrew is sometimes a misused term and so for the purposes of this answer I will exclude pirates and hackers with illegal intentions from the definition.
[... lots of nostalgia for hacking other's BASIC games on C64, nothing about RSX...]
I fully support the notion of game development at home using powerful tools available to anyone. Now having said all that, we still have to protect the investment and intellectual property rights of the industry so we will always seek the best ways to secure and protect our devices from piracy and unauthorized hacking that damages the business.
He didn't even answer the question about granting access to the RSX, which is the PS3 graphics chip (9x as fast as the really fast Cell CPU). Though he did pick the question as one of the few to "answer". Sony is not going to open access to the RSX for Linux developers, because then unlicensed Linux bootable CD/Blu-Ray games could compete with licensed Sony games. Sony makes all their money on those licenses: Sony sells PS3s at least $240 below production cost just to sell more consoles so they can sell more game licenses. This has nothing to do with piracy, but it certainly does have everything to do with "unauthorized hacking". Which is always the best kind, as anyone hacking C64 or other 6502 PCs in the 1980s knows in our hearts.
You might not like my post, but it's not "Offtopic". Especially when the summary includes this Bush "administration" official running away from responsibility for this breach by saying:
Officials at the Agriculture Department said Social Security numbers were included in the public database because doing so was the common practice years ago when the database was first created, before online identity theft was as well-known a threat as it is today.'
In other words, it's OK because they use "pre-9/11 thinking" about including SS#s.
TrollMods think the topic is "all the good news coming out of the Agriculture Department". It's really "Bush misadministration".
We've given these Bush "administration" jerks a blank check for years for security, after they barked "PRE-9/11 THINKING!!!" at anyone suggesting they were going too far, it wasn't worth the tradeoffs, or they were incompetent.
So they have taken all the power and money, and given us ZERO extra security, while routinely sending us into more and worse danger.
And if anyone had any doubts about how much this Bush regime thinks we're idiots, just watch a replay of their Attorney General shabbily lying and denying his way through even the most basic questions about how he runs the Justice Department. That's the guy in charge of the FBI.
This "patent indemnity" system is turning patent monopolies into patent cartels as protection rackets. They are all so clearly anticompetitive that they should not be allowed whatsoever.
I've been part of some negotiations to sell some new applications that include GPL software to some established service providers to be deployed in their networks. They're all freaked out about "patent indemnity": how will a little company offer patent indemnity along with the apps they deliver? When the little company tells them "we abide by the GPL, so we're safe from license problems, and we wrote the new code ourselves", that's not good enough. The big companies now love to say "what if something happens to you like how Verizon is shutting down Vonage on patents, how will we cope with losing your services?" Even though Vonage has deep pockets, and there's nothing GPL about their conflict with Verizon.
Not only are the patents monopolizing innovations, and way too broadly. The entire racket has big, risk-averse companies avoiding business with the source of most innovation and economic growth: little companies. We are heading for a total freezeup of real innovation and growth. And these bogus patents, used like a weapon, are killing it.
I like the idea of him leaving Congress. I don't like the idea of him running the Justice Department where he'd have even more power, and be even more stupid. We'd pay more attention because he'd do more damage.
Visual mass media, maybe. Their parents were raised immersed in radio, the original "live" mass medium.
Which was instrumental in galvanizing those parents' generation into fighting WWII. Not just those defending from fascists, but also galvanizing the fascists and the Communists themselves across Eurasia.
The mass media is instrumental in mass actions based on propaganda. But it's also been like that for at least 75 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if the Pentagon would just invent some way to properly treat soldiers injured in our wars, like they say they do at Walter Reed Hospital.
Though I guess first some Republican thinktank will have to invent a way for honoring that commitment to our veterans to be as profitable to Bush cronies as some new battlefield toy that some medieval terrorist can disable for $0.49 and their life.
They don't disable one of the 8 SPEs deliberately. They just pick the Cells that come out of their manufacturing yield with 7 working and one dead from typical manufacturing defects, like any microchip production. The SPEs are redundant, so they can just test the chip for how many SPEs come out working, blow the fuses on the dead SPEs so they don't suck power, and ship those to Sony. It "increases manufacturing yields" by offering a use for chips with some defects.
And yes, one of the 7 SPEs in the PS3 is reserved, but not necessarily by the "PS3 OS". Even under Linux, there's only 6 SPEs available for apps. It's possible that the Sony Hypervisor under which Linux runs is locking up the 7th SPE, or it could be the chip itself (for distributing data to its elements), or both in combination.
Do developers really need .NET to be portable, when Mono lets C# run on Linux (and therefore get ported elsewhere)? Or has MS managed to stymie that way out? Or perhaps the Mono developers done the stymieing.
Has anyone shelled out the bucks and spent the time checking whether nVidia's CUDA dev env actually delivers the power of the 8800 for general purpose cpmputing (GPGPU), in easy procedural programming, as nVidia promised?
The intent is to make the high-end Cells (with all 8 SPEs working) cheap by selling millions of PS3s with lower-grade (6 SPEs) Cells, a scale economy that big machines ("mainframes") couldn't achieve on their own.
They're not going to be running "games" like VirtuaFighter on mainframes, especially not without the 9x as fast RSX video chip the PS3 includes. But they will be allowing us to run supercomputer-fast Monte Carlo simulations on PS3 under Linux.
So I guess if their marketdroids keep lying to us about making IBM mainframes into game consoles, it's worth it if they keep delivering the reverse, which is much more interesting.
I've already planted plenty of trees. And I've paid to have them planted. Me planting a tree isn't scalable, though the polluting email servers sure are.
I didn't just imply an infrastructure, I asked if it existed. It sounds like you didn't even read my post before replying to challenge me - talk about self gratification.
Moderation -1
70% Flamebait
30% Underrated
Even just posting the Republicy mottos sets TrollMods into a frenzy, now that their favorite party stands for only lies, incompetence and disaster.
Is there a service which lets me click to plant a real tree somewhere on the real Earth?
I'd love to see a service which calculates the CO2 impact of, say, an email server (and its own operations), and orders trees planted to offset that CO2 by the amount trees consume during that time.
People could get periodic reports of their "email pollution" and the trees they've planted to balance it. With an offer to buy more trees to offset the rest of the Greenhouse pollution we generate, including writing and reading this message.
Anonymous fascist Coward's hardwired for "pinko" talk, the ultimate "pre-9/11 thinking". What a wanker.
Excellent point. If true, it reveals a pressure point on a fault between legal and marketing. And since marketing drives the company, especially in the gamble of whether to expose HW to both XMB (game) and Linux OS'es, this is an important distinction. If Harrison will continue to tell developers like the Slashdot audience that "Sony wants to give developers everything we can", while developers specifically demand access to the RSX, then Harrison (and his marketing staff) can be used for his power inside Sony.
If Harrison had ignored the question, we wouldn't have his signal that he supports Linux development. Getting full access to the PS3 HW is the #1 issue for developers (not just gamers and technophiles) on Slashdot. So now we know where the allies might lie. Continued pressure just might get them to expose at least 2D APIs to RSX, if not everything needed for at least Beryl, if not Duke Nukem Forever (;), under Linux.
Until I saw your analysis, I thought Sony would never expose RSX to Linux, as that would be the little hole in their license royalty balloon. But if their marketing execs want it, then there is very much a chance. Even if they're just pretending they do to look cool for developers they're planning to leave cold, there's still a chance to campaign on their words to get them to help. It's worth doing. That RSX is 1.8TFLOPS of graphics power, dwarfing even the Cell's 0.2TFLOPS. With Beryl, we're talking about a superfast desktop like in a SF movie (hell, we're talking about a realtime rendered SF movie in full rez on the desktop). Let's get it!
He didn't even answer the question about granting access to the RSX, which is the PS3 graphics chip (9x as fast as the really fast Cell CPU). Though he did pick the question as one of the few to "answer". Sony is not going to open access to the RSX for Linux developers, because then unlicensed Linux bootable CD/Blu-Ray games could compete with licensed Sony games. Sony makes all their money on those licenses: Sony sells PS3s at least $240 below production cost just to sell more consoles so they can sell more game licenses. This has nothing to do with piracy, but it certainly does have everything to do with "unauthorized hacking". Which is always the best kind, as anyone hacking C64 or other 6502 PCs in the 1980s knows in our hearts.
You might not like my post, but it's not "Offtopic". Especially when the summary includes this Bush "administration" official running away from responsibility for this breach by saying:
In other words, it's OK because they use "pre-9/11 thinking" about including SS#s.
TrollMods think the topic is "all the good news coming out of the Agriculture Department". It's really "Bush misadministration".
We've given these Bush "administration" jerks a blank check for years for security, after they barked "PRE-9/11 THINKING!!!" at anyone suggesting they were going too far, it wasn't worth the tradeoffs, or they were incompetent.
So they have taken all the power and money, and given us ZERO extra security, while routinely sending us into more and worse danger.
And if anyone had any doubts about how much this Bush regime thinks we're idiots, just watch a replay of their Attorney General shabbily lying and denying his way through even the most basic questions about how he runs the Justice Department. That's the guy in charge of the FBI.
Thanks, Republicans!
The current dist is Edgy, so I don't think the sources.list file will update from the Feisty material, unless it's changed.
It's not surprising. It's still unacceptable.
How do I use APT to upgrade from my Edgy install to Feisty?
This "patent indemnity" system is turning patent monopolies into patent cartels as protection rackets. They are all so clearly anticompetitive that they should not be allowed whatsoever.
I've been part of some negotiations to sell some new applications that include GPL software to some established service providers to be deployed in their networks. They're all freaked out about "patent indemnity": how will a little company offer patent indemnity along with the apps they deliver? When the little company tells them "we abide by the GPL, so we're safe from license problems, and we wrote the new code ourselves", that's not good enough. The big companies now love to say "what if something happens to you like how Verizon is shutting down Vonage on patents, how will we cope with losing your services?" Even though Vonage has deep pockets, and there's nothing GPL about their conflict with Verizon.
Not only are the patents monopolizing innovations, and way too broadly. The entire racket has big, risk-averse companies avoiding business with the source of most innovation and economic growth: little companies. We are heading for a total freezeup of real innovation and growth. And these bogus patents, used like a weapon, are killing it.
Republicans stand for smaller government and personal responsibility.
You might have heard nothing, but that's not because isn't a popular subject of conversation.
I wish the US were spending a $TRILLION owning the Moon we pioneered instead of wasting it and thousands of lives losing a war in Iraq to Iran.
I like the idea of him leaving Congress. I don't like the idea of him running the Justice Department where he'd have even more power, and be even more stupid. We'd pay more attention because he'd do more damage.
Hatch has been suggested over and again the past month or more to replace Gonzales.
He's also popular with Utahrds who keep voting him back into the Senate.
Utah senator Orrin Hatch ("the dumbest man in Congress") is the most popular choice to replace the shabby liar Attorney General Gonzales.
You're making it clear that you don't know anything about the Playstation, and that you didn't read my post.
The PS3 costs about $600 and falling, for a 3.2GHz G5 + 6 SPEs, a Blu-Ray drive, HDMI output, 7.1 audio, and Playstation gaming (including gamepad).
You claimed the PS3 would be good for only graphics gaming, so I gave an example of an early app that is no such thing.
I posted specifically to invite people to work on porting - I never made any claim that it was done, or that it would magically happen.
You're just an Anonymous troll Coward with no facts, just a bad attitude and obnoxious arguments. Goodbye.
Visual mass media, maybe. Their parents were raised immersed in radio, the original "live" mass medium.
Which was instrumental in galvanizing those parents' generation into fighting WWII. Not just those defending from fascists, but also galvanizing the fascists and the Communists themselves across Eurasia.
The mass media is instrumental in mass actions based on propaganda. But it's also been like that for at least 75 years.