Seisint, the Florida Lexis/Nexis subsidiary that these jerks stole access to, was started by Hank Asher, the Iran/Contra cocaine smuggler. Just remember that those criminals have access to all that personal data, even if they do pay for it legally.
Optical has much higher bandwidth - consider the telco backbones, for example. Its latency is the lowest, at the speed of light (minus small delays at the codecs), compared to the low electron velocity at low voltages (low acceleration). Buses don't use 1.5m fibers, but interchip distances are more and more often talked about as targets for optical interconnects. 1.5m makes optical look even better.
Optical has been overkill for audio electronics, but just barely. Its widespread deployment was forward looking, but of course justifiable economically by the low-margin, highly successful electronics industry.
All those comparative advantages are even more pronounced at the data and distance specs between PC and display.
The monks were not the masses. The Church fought translating the bible from Latin for centuries. The Church hasn't sent people to all corners to teach "literacy", but slavish devotion to the Church.
The last few centuries the Church has begrudgingly taught reading and writing to keep up with the masses learning it elsewhere. To keep them coming back for the rest of the package - the brainwash of the catechism.
What you mean is that you're willing to overlook all that because you love the Church. That's not my problem.
Actually, both the video and audio compartmentaliztion you mention are mainly the result of momentum and evolutionary design, defined by backwards compatibility. People don't spend much money on speakers, even though that's where the sound value lies, either in stereo equipment or PC audio. Onboard audio electronics are cheap because their development cost has been amortized, including the cost of designing them into new PCs. Likewise with displays.
But displays do have enthusiasts, so there is a bigger niche for better display than for better audio. (FWIW, USB is not a great audio interface, dealing poorly with interrupts in its realtime data, and FireWire etc is a more expensive extra.)
The architecture I propose sends high-level graphics symbols, like OpenGL, from the CPU to the GPU. An optical cable is plenty to load textures.
I worked with a team in 1990 to produce hirez (1-64Mpxls) digital cameras with such a cabled interconnect - though not even optical. That team had just produced a dual-CPU RISC workstation, with one RISC dedicated to rendering graphics from apps running on the other RISC. 20 years later, those architectures can make flexible, economical, high-performance displays.
I like the idea of the renderer tightly coupled to the display. The notebook reviewed in the story we're discussing is a good example. Why carry something that can drive a display much heavier-duty than the onboard LCD? If you've got dual monitors, you're using a dual monitor card, which isn't necessary for the much more common single monitor, and therefore much more expensive in small production quantities. Instead, each monitor could have a much cheaper card, driven by its instructions over the cable. In other words, distributed GPU provides the same economics and efficiencies as distributed networks of host computers. There's no reason those benefits can't apply to GPUs, except that the old way is "good enough" not to invest in the "new paradigm". The same reason many minicomputer companies continued to make and sell so many units, even through the late 1990s, and even today. But that doesn't make them better, except in some remaining specific massive applications that are best supported by massive centralized HW.
I've designed for custom HW for over a decade. HW isn't as stuck in the mud as you imply.
Optical is high bandwidth, low latency, and low power. That's one reason it's long been considered for interchip buses, and even for buses across a chip. Interconnecting whole boxes actually reaches the economic scales where optical is better, as demonstrated by consumer/pro electronics that use it.
Where are you getting your certainty about your design principles?
The computer doesn't send 4GB:s to the graphics card, it sends high-level instructions. Especially in the case of the OpenGL I mentioned, the bandwidth to the GPU can be very small. Digital optics have more than enough bandwidth, even for 4GB:s if that were actually necessary. There is no need of the GPU to have high bandwidth access to main memory.
In fact, all your complaints are a bigger problem with the GPU sitting across a cable from the monitor, like VGA - which is fatter than an optical cable would need to be.
Why don't monitors include graphics cards tweaked for exactly their performance specs? Self-powered speakers offer better performance and flexibility for upgrading the "processor" and "UI" components that drive them. Notebooks would include LCD cards, but not have to drive external monitors/projectors directly. That would make the notebooks smaller, lighter, cooler, cheaper, and the external display higher quality.
Give me an optical digital display output instead of VGA.
I could put that display output into a breakout box to any number of different displays, including multihead where I have them, without and extra HW. The differences could be entirely in software. Outputting OpenGL for display would let even simple HW and relatively simple SW exploit practically any display environment. Including the long-anticipated immersive goggles, or better.
Dell's BIOS seems to go a single step in the right direction. When will we sprint down the path?
Of course it's not a troll. I posted my experience with the system they're complaining about, with pointers to solving their problem. Facts and logic included, politely.
The fact that Microsoft TrollMods are a predictable response to any comparison of Linux and Windows doesn't make any such comparison merely "designed for nothing but predictable responses". In fact, your message was among the design goals. Another was responses saying why Windows performance is now as good as, or better than, Linux, in those specific cases.
Also predictable, but still disappointing, is the total absence of those responses. Windows zealots would rather TrollMod to suppress competition than actually compare and compete.
Stomping the fascists combines defending my community (the province of heroes), kicking bully ass (as we're trained by Hollywood), besting the machine (the geek's true hunger) and pure, uncut vindication (my favorite drug).
I'm not quite a "libertarian" because I'm a realist. It's clear to me that 1/3 BILLION Americans (to say nothing of 6 BILLION humans) are unable to communicate among ourselves adequately without the structures of constitutional republican democracy. I'd love to see us ready to drop at least one of those words, eventually able to describe our governance as "liberty". Or better yet, evolved enough that a single syllable, like "free", could describe us. Maybe we'd be anarcho-syndicalists. Meanwhile, we need government to protect ourselves from ourselves and from others.
Libertarians, even merely philosophical (not the poser political party), don't acknowledge the distortion of mutual freedom that technology brings to mere humans. Expression tech like publishing requires some moderate limits (like "truth in advertising"), transport requires more (like educated drivers), weapons even more (like competence and law respect). Real libertarianism doens't recognize how rights differ from those privileges, but libertism does.
Pussy is afraid to come to NYC to get his bitch ass kicked. This ain't Xbox, bitch - this is reality, where you show off your pussy ass in public while you're too scared to get whipped by a man. Now that you've backed down, shut the fuck up. Or say something else you can't earn with your guts, just like a bitch.
Topic is "speeding up FireWire transfers". I have done that by using Linux instead of Windows. I told my experience in detail, including how to switch.
Just because you are gay, Anonymous homophobe Coward, and you recommend Linux, that doesn't make it a "fag's OS". It does make you a repressed "fag" cruising Slashdot for humiliation, regardless of your OS choices.
Just like a bitch to be amazed at complete sentences. Proper spelling must really blow your little mind, too.
You want to see people "concerned about terrorism"? Come over here to NYC and say something stupid like that near the WTC crater, and I'll volunteer to show you why New Yorkers define the times. By kicking your ass and dumping it in the sea, so it can eventually wash up in whatever rotten little armpit spawned you. Whiny bitch.
Wipe the old XP PC and install Linux v2.6.x, then use it as your fileserver. A faster upgrade would have been merely installing a new IDE drive in the Windows PC, moving your files to it, installing Linux over the Windows boot drive, then moving your files back across the IDE bus - or just leaving them on the Windows filesystem, but running under Linux.
Seriously, every network protocol, including ethernet, FireWire, USB I've ever used has been much faster on Linux than on Windows, on the same HW. Older HW especially seemed to benefit the most, especially if you don't install X on Linux (no GUI is not an option on Windows).
I'm not really "liberal". I'm a libertian - a libertarian who stands for a popular government protecting people's liberty. A libertarian who doesn't just want to get away with shooting someone.
I'm from the Hunter Thompson "Freak Party" school - again, without the gun fetish. Though I'm a crack shot since the Boy Scouts taught me survival in paramilitary camp.
I get off on frying fascists and other robots who dare say something stupid against me. In person, I enjoy persuasion when it works: concilliation, common ground, acceptance of disagreement. But even in person, slamming counterattacks before a live audience wins more converts to think for themselves than just "inclusion". Including the rapist gets you raped, and I'm not available for that dance. I'm up for the downstroke in any good "stomp the fascist" party, though. Keeps my humor coursing my veins like a greased snake.
I don't get it. What's invalid about that DKos story from the Senate floor? They're not "hardliners", they're actual moderate Democrats. Hardliners are people like Al Sharpton. DKos might look farther left than "midleft", because politicians have swung so far to the "right": their corporate sponsor agenda. You want to see hardline Democrat blogging? Check out BuzzFlash. If the mass media covered the actual hard left as much as they cover the hard right (without denoting their bias), these distinctions would be much easier to spot.
We're not that far offtopic, considering that I replied to the story with a prediction that Republicans will use the "Internet attack on god" as cover to stop Internet coverage of politics and corporate activity. The people aren't split on simple party lines, but the Net Neutrality amendment defeat on strict party lines shows that politicians surely are. Which means they're disconnected from the people.
There was of course a lot more in that post that you're not qualified to understand. Because such a post looks to you like "blah blah blah. republicans suck, blah blah blah, terror, blah blah blah" the same way my talking to a dog sounds like "mwmw mwmw mwmw mwmw Fido mwmw mwmw out mwmw mwmw". "Republicans suck" and "terror" are the only words left in your vocabulary you can even understand.
So yeah, after reading your retarded, obnoxious post, itself devoid (that means "empty") of any content but "duh?", I'm perfectly qualified to judge your primitive "intellect". Now, FETCH!
I read it, and I read the analysis and discussion to which I linked, among others.
Of course the president is a total douche. If it's law, he has to execute it, regardless of his bogus "executive order". If he doesn't, someone damaged by his inaction can sue him, and the court must find that he must act. That's how our balance/separation of powers system works.
If he weren't a total douche, he would get his Republican Congress to change or create a law supporting whatever policy that roundabout order actually says. Or just saying that the government cannot confiscate private property without a compelling emergency, no possible other alternative, and providing overcompensation. The basic law that every reasonable American thinks is in control, that everyone actually watching that order would like it to mean. Instead, it's just grandstanding to the actual conservatives who prioritize property rights and are fleeing Bush's voter alliance. And also building a constituency of people who prefer the power of executive order to our balanced/separated powers system.
You know, "tyranny". The preferred government of our total douche president.
The Republican Party is the theocrat party. The free Internet is already under Republican attack. As soon as they realize they can cover their corporate takeover with a "religious protection" figleaf, they'll leap on it.
Learn to read, addled fool. And write, before you post.
I know the Church has never been big on literacy for the masses, but you should take advantage of the common luxuries we've got since we scrambled out of the Dark Ages. Shouting your expertise in babbling incoherence just shows how much there's left to do.
How Republican of you, Anonymous Republican Coward, to think that merely denying that the Republican Party is a threat to Freedom will either make it so, or even fool any of us any more.
Karl Rove, is that you? Roger Ailes? Sean Hannity? Rush Limbaugh...
Slashdot Mirror
Seisint, the Florida Lexis/Nexis subsidiary that these jerks stole access to, was started by Hank Asher, the Iran/Contra cocaine smuggler. Just remember that those criminals have access to all that personal data, even if they do pay for it legally.
Optical has much higher bandwidth - consider the telco backbones, for example. Its latency is the lowest, at the speed of light (minus small delays at the codecs), compared to the low electron velocity at low voltages (low acceleration). Buses don't use 1.5m fibers, but interchip distances are more and more often talked about as targets for optical interconnects. 1.5m makes optical look even better.
Optical has been overkill for audio electronics, but just barely. Its widespread deployment was forward looking, but of course justifiable economically by the low-margin, highly successful electronics industry.
All those comparative advantages are even more pronounced at the data and distance specs between PC and display.
The monks were not the masses. The Church fought translating the bible from Latin for centuries. The Church hasn't sent people to all corners to teach "literacy", but slavish devotion to the Church.
The last few centuries the Church has begrudgingly taught reading and writing to keep up with the masses learning it elsewhere. To keep them coming back for the rest of the package - the brainwash of the catechism.
What you mean is that you're willing to overlook all that because you love the Church. That's not my problem.
Actually, both the video and audio compartmentaliztion you mention are mainly the result of momentum and evolutionary design, defined by backwards compatibility. People don't spend much money on speakers, even though that's where the sound value lies, either in stereo equipment or PC audio. Onboard audio electronics are cheap because their development cost has been amortized, including the cost of designing them into new PCs. Likewise with displays.
But displays do have enthusiasts, so there is a bigger niche for better display than for better audio. (FWIW, USB is not a great audio interface, dealing poorly with interrupts in its realtime data, and FireWire etc is a more expensive extra.)
The architecture I propose sends high-level graphics symbols, like OpenGL, from the CPU to the GPU. An optical cable is plenty to load textures.
I worked with a team in 1990 to produce hirez (1-64Mpxls) digital cameras with such a cabled interconnect - though not even optical. That team had just produced a dual-CPU RISC workstation, with one RISC dedicated to rendering graphics from apps running on the other RISC. 20 years later, those architectures can make flexible, economical, high-performance displays.
I like the idea of the renderer tightly coupled to the display. The notebook reviewed in the story we're discussing is a good example. Why carry something that can drive a display much heavier-duty than the onboard LCD? If you've got dual monitors, you're using a dual monitor card, which isn't necessary for the much more common single monitor, and therefore much more expensive in small production quantities. Instead, each monitor could have a much cheaper card, driven by its instructions over the cable. In other words, distributed GPU provides the same economics and efficiencies as distributed networks of host computers. There's no reason those benefits can't apply to GPUs, except that the old way is "good enough" not to invest in the "new paradigm". The same reason many minicomputer companies continued to make and sell so many units, even through the late 1990s, and even today. But that doesn't make them better, except in some remaining specific massive applications that are best supported by massive centralized HW.
I've designed for custom HW for over a decade. HW isn't as stuck in the mud as you imply.
Optical is high bandwidth, low latency, and low power. That's one reason it's long been considered for interchip buses, and even for buses across a chip. Interconnecting whole boxes actually reaches the economic scales where optical is better, as demonstrated by consumer/pro electronics that use it.
An optical link like I mentioned would be fast enough.
Where are you getting your certainty about your design principles?
The computer doesn't send 4GB:s to the graphics card, it sends high-level instructions. Especially in the case of the OpenGL I mentioned, the bandwidth to the GPU can be very small. Digital optics have more than enough bandwidth, even for 4GB:s if that were actually necessary. There is no need of the GPU to have high bandwidth access to main memory.
In fact, all your complaints are a bigger problem with the GPU sitting across a cable from the monitor, like VGA - which is fatter than an optical cable would need to be.
Why couldn't you upgrade a plugin monitor graphics card the way you upgrade a PC card? And what's wrong with the digital optical out I mentioned?
Why don't monitors include graphics cards tweaked for exactly their performance specs? Self-powered speakers offer better performance and flexibility for upgrading the "processor" and "UI" components that drive them. Notebooks would include LCD cards, but not have to drive external monitors/projectors directly. That would make the notebooks smaller, lighter, cooler, cheaper, and the external display higher quality.
Give me an optical digital display output instead of VGA.
I could put that display output into a breakout box to any number of different displays, including multihead where I have them, without and extra HW. The differences could be entirely in software. Outputting OpenGL for display would let even simple HW and relatively simple SW exploit practically any display environment. Including the long-anticipated immersive goggles, or better.
Dell's BIOS seems to go a single step in the right direction. When will we sprint down the path?
Of course it's not a troll. I posted my experience with the system they're complaining about, with pointers to solving their problem. Facts and logic included, politely.
The fact that Microsoft TrollMods are a predictable response to any comparison of Linux and Windows doesn't make any such comparison merely "designed for nothing but predictable responses". In fact, your message was among the design goals. Another was responses saying why Windows performance is now as good as, or better than, Linux, in those specific cases.
Also predictable, but still disappointing, is the total absence of those responses. Windows zealots would rather TrollMod to suppress competition than actually compare and compete.
Stomping the fascists combines defending my community (the province of heroes), kicking bully ass (as we're trained by Hollywood), besting the machine (the geek's true hunger) and pure, uncut vindication (my favorite drug).
I'm not quite a "libertarian" because I'm a realist. It's clear to me that 1/3 BILLION Americans (to say nothing of 6 BILLION humans) are unable to communicate among ourselves adequately without the structures of constitutional republican democracy. I'd love to see us ready to drop at least one of those words, eventually able to describe our governance as "liberty". Or better yet, evolved enough that a single syllable, like "free", could describe us. Maybe we'd be anarcho-syndicalists. Meanwhile, we need government to protect ourselves from ourselves and from others.
Libertarians, even merely philosophical (not the poser political party), don't acknowledge the distortion of mutual freedom that technology brings to mere humans. Expression tech like publishing requires some moderate limits (like "truth in advertising"), transport requires more (like educated drivers), weapons even more (like competence and law respect). Real libertarianism doens't recognize how rights differ from those privileges, but libertism does.
Pussy is afraid to come to NYC to get his bitch ass kicked. This ain't Xbox, bitch - this is reality, where you show off your pussy ass in public while you're too scared to get whipped by a man. Now that you've backed down, shut the fuck up. Or say something else you can't earn with your guts, just like a bitch.
Moderation -2
50% Troll
50% Offtopic
Topic is "speeding up FireWire transfers". I have done that by using Linux instead of Windows. I told my experience in detail, including how to switch.
TrollMods love Windows, or maybe just going slow.
Just because you are gay, Anonymous homophobe Coward, and you recommend Linux, that doesn't make it a "fag's OS". It does make you a repressed "fag" cruising Slashdot for humiliation, regardless of your OS choices.
Just like a bitch to be amazed at complete sentences. Proper spelling must really blow your little mind, too.
You want to see people "concerned about terrorism"? Come over here to NYC and say something stupid like that near the WTC crater, and I'll volunteer to show you why New Yorkers define the times. By kicking your ass and dumping it in the sea, so it can eventually wash up in whatever rotten little armpit spawned you. Whiny bitch.
Wipe the old XP PC and install Linux v2.6.x, then use it as your fileserver. A faster upgrade would have been merely installing a new IDE drive in the Windows PC, moving your files to it, installing Linux over the Windows boot drive, then moving your files back across the IDE bus - or just leaving them on the Windows filesystem, but running under Linux.
Seriously, every network protocol, including ethernet, FireWire, USB I've ever used has been much faster on Linux than on Windows, on the same HW. Older HW especially seemed to benefit the most, especially if you don't install X on Linux (no GUI is not an option on Windows).
I'm not really "liberal". I'm a libertian - a libertarian who stands for a popular government protecting people's liberty. A libertarian who doesn't just want to get away with shooting someone.
I'm from the Hunter Thompson "Freak Party" school - again, without the gun fetish. Though I'm a crack shot since the Boy Scouts taught me survival in paramilitary camp.
I get off on frying fascists and other robots who dare say something stupid against me. In person, I enjoy persuasion when it works: concilliation, common ground, acceptance of disagreement. But even in person, slamming counterattacks before a live audience wins more converts to think for themselves than just "inclusion". Including the rapist gets you raped, and I'm not available for that dance. I'm up for the downstroke in any good "stomp the fascist" party, though. Keeps my humor coursing my veins like a greased snake.
Moderation -1
100% Redundant
No one mentioned Lorca, or Spain's fascist history, before I posted. Fascist TrollMods hate poetry.
I don't get it. What's invalid about that DKos story from the Senate floor? They're not "hardliners", they're actual moderate Democrats. Hardliners are people like Al Sharpton. DKos might look farther left than "midleft", because politicians have swung so far to the "right": their corporate sponsor agenda. You want to see hardline Democrat blogging? Check out BuzzFlash. If the mass media covered the actual hard left as much as they cover the hard right (without denoting their bias), these distinctions would be much easier to spot.
We're not that far offtopic, considering that I replied to the story with a prediction that Republicans will use the "Internet attack on god" as cover to stop Internet coverage of politics and corporate activity. The people aren't split on simple party lines, but the Net Neutrality amendment defeat on strict party lines shows that politicians surely are. Which means they're disconnected from the people.
There was of course a lot more in that post that you're not qualified to understand. Because such a post looks to you like "blah blah blah. republicans suck, blah blah blah, terror, blah blah blah" the same way my talking to a dog sounds like "mwmw mwmw mwmw mwmw Fido mwmw mwmw out mwmw mwmw". "Republicans suck" and "terror" are the only words left in your vocabulary you can even understand.
So yeah, after reading your retarded, obnoxious post, itself devoid (that means "empty") of any content but "duh?", I'm perfectly qualified to judge your primitive "intellect". Now, FETCH!
I read it, and I read the analysis and discussion to which I linked, among others.
Of course the president is a total douche. If it's law, he has to execute it, regardless of his bogus "executive order". If he doesn't, someone damaged by his inaction can sue him, and the court must find that he must act. That's how our balance/separation of powers system works.
If he weren't a total douche, he would get his Republican Congress to change or create a law supporting whatever policy that roundabout order actually says. Or just saying that the government cannot confiscate private property without a compelling emergency, no possible other alternative, and providing overcompensation. The basic law that every reasonable American thinks is in control, that everyone actually watching that order would like it to mean. Instead, it's just grandstanding to the actual conservatives who prioritize property rights and are fleeing Bush's voter alliance. And also building a constituency of people who prefer the power of executive order to our balanced/separated powers system.
You know, "tyranny". The preferred government of our total douche president.
The Republican Party is the theocrat party. The free Internet is already under Republican attack. As soon as they realize they can cover their corporate takeover with a "religious protection" figleaf, they'll leap on it.
Moderation 0
50% Flamebait
50% Funny
TrollMod Cathedral vs freethinker Bazaar.
Learn to read, addled fool. And write, before you post.
I know the Church has never been big on literacy for the masses, but you should take advantage of the common luxuries we've got since we scrambled out of the Dark Ages. Shouting your expertise in babbling incoherence just shows how much there's left to do.
How Republican of you, Anonymous Republican Coward, to think that merely denying that the Republican Party is a threat to Freedom will either make it so, or even fool any of us any more.
Karl Rove, is that you? Roger Ailes? Sean Hannity? Rush Limbaugh...