I mean come on. If you don't use the exact same hardware then this benchmark is even more useless.
Course even if you do everything just right benchmarks are usually useless anyway. I have seen benchmarks that tried to prove that a z80 running cpm was better than w2k on a pIII. Ever notice that most benchmarks show how fast a computer can run games or work as a web server? Do computers have any other uses here people?
Why are most mice sold these days backwards? Everyone knows that the correct hand to use a mouse (or to do most things) is the left hand. I guess in the political correct times the companies are catering to those funky backwards right handed people.
Maybe it is me, but I never trusted those strange right handed people. How can you trust someone who does everything backwards? Writing with your right hand -- it is just strange man!
Uhh, you guys did realize that AM and FM are not spectra. AM and FM are modulation type -- ways of encoding information on a carrier frequency. While it is true that the US governemt set aside spectra for use of AM and FM radio there is no reason why one couldn't transmit an AM singal in the FM band.
In fact I beileve that when Armstrong invented FM the FCC gave him bandwidth at much lower frequencies. However Sarnoff and others had invested so much money in AM that they wanted to hurt FM (which was a much better way of sending music -- and not just because in the US FM stations mostly transmit in stereo.) They forced the FM to move their bandwidth. Those old AM stations remind me of M$. It is because of them that FM didn't take off until the 70's even though FM has been around since the 1930's or so.
Well, google is my favorite search engine, and I am glad to see it do well. However, yahoo used to be the one I used when google didn't give me what I needed.
Google Lists the results based on how many times that page was linked by another page. Sometimes that is good -- you see the most popular page based on those names. Sometimes this is bad. Yahoo used to have the results indexed by a human. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad. Depending on what I am looking for I find yahoo would give me better results and sometimes google did.
Now will google and yahoo give the exact same results? Or will they use Google's index but still be sorted differently? If yahoo will equal google (I seem to remember back in 94 or 95 when I used yahoo mostly as a search engine now yahoo is an everything page and it get's it's search engine from someone else) maybe I will have to find something to replace yahoo.
I was making holograms in my undergraduate physics courses. And there are explanations of them in even basic optics books. But since this is/. and you don't need to take even basic physics to be a coder I guess most/.er haven't heard much about them. BTW they knew about holograms before the laser was invented. Altough noone could make it work until the laser did come along.
Anyway, I am surprised they didn't mention the coolest thing about holograms. You can physically break a hologram in two and you will have two copies of the same hologram (although there will be a lose in quality.) Photographs store information about the image -- holograms store information (phase and intensity) about the light that bounces off the image. Cool huh? even if they aren't useful everyone must agree that they are seriously cool!
Yes, but according to the article some of the software will block gnutella as well. It probably isn't your fault for not being able to read the article, it is slashdotted badly! I had to read the article through lynx (which wasn't easy because of the millions of frames on the page.)
Maybe if M$ products weren't so bloated, people wouldn't need as much ram. This ram shortage would therefore not have happened (although there might still be an lcd shortage.) Course in the long run M$ bloatware has lowered the price of ram and made it possible for us to built computers with real operating systems sporting TONS of ram.
Ever notice that the average users uses his PC to do spread sheets, word processing, and surfing the net. In the mid 90's the average pc buyer used his (or her) pc to do the same thing. Could they still use their 486 to do what they do now on their pentium III (average pc users don't buy AMD?) Ok the programs now have many more bells and whistles but how many people actually use them on a regular basis?
If it weren't for games and Bill gates sending out ever more bloated bloatware (which people buy even though they don't need it in order to "keep up with the latest technology") PC sales would probably drop. Just some food for thought.
If you are going to go through all that trouble, wouldn't it just be much easier to nuke the city of your choice? It would take years and billions of dollars to send the asteriode to the city. Chances are that once the thing reaches the city the country will no longer be pissed off; or the country in question will figure out a way to stop the asteroid.
It would be MUCH easier just to strap a nuke on the back of some mad man and smuggle him into the country.
You can't rule out the fact that the rulers of the saddestic country are human. I hope morality would oppose them causing distruction on such a scale (I believe this is what kept the cold war cold.) If the morality of the leader isn't enough, I doubt any group of citizenship (not even Iraq) would stand for mass distruction on such a scale. When you talk about killing millions of people the pety arguements of a couple of countries just doesn't seem important anymore.
If you do the math -- and find the theoretical limit to the efficiency of an internal combustion engine (or any heat engine) you will be shocked. A carnot engine (the most efficient heat engine possible) depends on the differnce in temperature between the heated chamber (the gas blowing up in the cylinders) and the temperature of the cool chamber (the radiator.)
We would be much better off if we found a complete replacment for the internal combustion engine. Even an electronic engine (which just feed it's power off of a power plant which is also a heat engine) is better because in a power plant you can get a much hotter heated chamber.
I am glad that their evolution program works. But let's face it a randomized algorithm that finds a miximum (or a minimum) based on processes that happen in nature is not exactly new. See simulated annealing or nueral nets. These techniques, although they work, are kind of wishy washy. In practice I find you use them when all else fails and then you end up playing with your program a lot (let's change this and see what the hell happens.)
Why would you spend $190 and up for an mp3 player when apex dvd players are under $180?
You remember apex AD-600A DVD player? The one that let you play illegal DVDs. Well, they took that feature out but it still plays cd's full of mp3's -- plus it has a built in DVD player:) Goes great in your home stereo rack as well.
Try going on google.com and typing "virtual boy emulator." That is how I got this link: http://www.emuunlim.com/VirtualE/ among others.
Again the number and quality of the emulators has as much to do with the popularity of the system as anything else. Sega sold far more saturns than nintendo did virtual boys -- this means there won't be that many people who really care.
Note that as far as consoles that flops go the saturn did very well. It did sell over a million units in the US. This sales mark used to signify when a console has made it to the main stream. But after they sold a million saturns they decided to raise that marker:) The dreamcast had to sell a couple of million in less than a year before people admitted that it went main stream.
The Saturn was quite a powerful little beast. Although it was designed at first just to do 2d stuff (and it does 2d stuff almost as well as the dreamcast -- import x-men vs street fighter looks great and blows the psx version out of the water) it was so powerful that by brute force it could handle 3d stuff. It could probably do anything the playstation could and more. The problem was that it was so hard to program for that games with a certain cool effect always came out for the playstation first. Playstation fans would say stuff like, "the saturn was maxed out with virtual fighter 2," "it will never be able to handle croc" or "it will never be able to handle water and fire as well as the psx." One by one the SS did come out with games with those effects but since the psx version came out first no one cared.
If sony isn't careful the same thing might happen to the ps2. It is supposed to be even harder to program for than the saturn. It will be interesting to see what happens in gaming during the next couple of years.
Note there are saturn emulators (though most aren't very mature.) The number and quality of the emulator has as much to do with the popularity of the console as it does with the difficulty in making the emulator. Note that there aren't that many jaguar emulators but there are tons of great nes and gameboy emulators! There will be more psx emulators simply because it was more popular.
Yeah, and the Earth is flat! After all, if it were round we would fall off. Constellations do change though quite slowly (when compared to the length of human life.)
As the star collapses, if one side is less dense than the other gravity will cause the density gradient to increase. This insures that when it expels matter more matter is expelled on one side than the other. I guess it would be possible to have a star that's density is so balanced that no gravitational gradiant will be produced, but the odds of this happening is so insanely low that stars ALWAYS get a density gradient and therefore always get a kick when they are formed.
Understanding the mechanics of the universe is important because it increases our knowledge of science in general. It may not be clear right now how understanding something that happens thousands of light years away (and therefore took place thousands of years ago) may be useful. But one day it will be useful. After all at first studying the planets didn't seem that useful but Newton used planetary motion when he was fathering classical physics.
Ever notice that quake 3 seems to be the ultimate test of a system according to many of these sites? Am I the only one who uses his system for more than just games? I bought my dreamcast for games, my pc is for real work. How long does it take matlab to do a matrix multiplication? Or how long does it take to compile linux 2.4.0-pre1? That is what I really want to know.
Actually, most assemblers write to the ISA as well. The only way to write directly to the back end of an athlon would be if AMD were nice enough to put in instructions which skip the ISA. I am not sure if they did this. If you could write an assembler to go to the bare metal of an athlon then there is no reason why gcc couldn't as well. You would have to write the compiler to optimize the code in this way. The only advantge assembly has over gcc is that a human can sometimes write more efficient code than a combiler.
What do you think gcc outputs? Binary code which can be line for line translated into assembly. If you can do it in assembly a good compiler should be able to do it in gcc (although in practice this isn't always the case.) I think you are confused on what an assembler actually does -- it outputs to the ISA just like the compiler.
Why would YOU have to recombile all your applications? Do you realize how many athlons were sold? It would be worth it for SuSE or REDHAT to compile a new version for the athlon. There you go, buy (or download) the optimized version and you are good to go!
And no, I don't see why it would be expensive to have 30 versions of quake. These days most applications are written in c. You would need 30 different c compilers but assuming they are all compatible (different versions of gcc?) having 30 versions of quake 3 would be trivial:
Can you shove you hard drive into a dell machine and then install windows on it. After it is installed can you simply yank the hd and stick it into a non-dell system? Just try not to loose the hard drive behind a copier machine in the mean time. Does it check the bios when it installs or each time it boots? The article implied it only checks when it is installing. Am I missing something here?
If this works, you must use this trick for good and not evil:)
This is from the m68k faq http://archive.comlab.ox.ac.uk/cards/m68kfaq.html
"1) Motorola 16/32 Bit Product Line: ===================================== Motorola introduced its first microprocessor in 1974: the 8 bit MC6800 with an extensive line of support peripherals soon available. The MC68000 was introduced in 1979 and was soon followed by a host of 16 bit peripheral chips. The 6800 and 68000 families soon became very popular due to their straightforward architecture and simple and easy to use bus connections.
The first member of the 68K family - the MC68000, is not software compatible with the 8 bit 6800 series which includes the 68HC11 series. The 68K family itself is upwards software compatible."
So it seems that big blue had more options in 1980 or so than just the z80 and 8088. The story about bill gates talking big blue into a 16-but chip and ibm choosing the 8086 (and then later the 8088 there were a few very expensive xt's based on the 8086 although they are rare) is from Bob Cringley's book "Accidental Empires." This is a little bit before my time so everything I know about this came from reading books like that.
Ok, these two questions poped into my head when I was reading this:
If all your programs are GPLed does having an open standard ISA really matter? Each time there is a new design you could just recompile (assuming the compiler and things like assembly part of the OS were re-written.)
Is there anyway to write code for the athlon or any newer chip that skips the front end decoder and goes straight to the back end? Would there aver be a reason when this would be a good idea? (ultra optimized athlon code.)
Oh wait, zilog still sells a lot of those little buggers for embeded systems etc. With so much code written for the z80, and the z80 in so many system I guess it will be a while before it dies.
If the z80 is still kicking around after all these years, imagine how long it will take to get ride of the 68k or X86? Face it the X86 ISA in one form or another is here to stay! How many mission critical apps are written for it? I guess if you read the article that was the author's point!
I heard that one of the reasons why big blue took the x86 was because they were worried about pc's competing with their main frames. IBM at first wanted an 8 bit chip but Bill gates managed to talk them into a 16 bit chip. The obvious choose would have been the 68k but instead IBM went with the 8086 (and later the cheaper 8088.)
It doesn't look like this will happen but..
on
Akopia Buys Minivend
·
· Score: 1
Can someone buy a GPL program and then change the license agreement? Could someone close an open source project? Obviously the older source would be out, but can someone refuse to submit the newer stuff? Just wondering.
Ok, so what is Robert X Cringely's (name on his book) real name? Or were you just jumping on my typo of switching the "e" with the "l" -- I am a bit dyslexic what do you want from me? If you want a web page that never makes typos than you have come to the wrong place buddy!
And how was he wrong? Could you point to some reference that documents how he is wrong? So what was the first PC and what do you have to document your claim. Or are you just trolling?
Slashdot Mirror
I mean come on. If you don't use the exact same hardware then this benchmark is even more useless.
Course even if you do everything just right benchmarks are usually useless anyway. I have seen benchmarks that tried to prove that a z80 running cpm was better than w2k on a pIII. Ever notice that most benchmarks show how fast a computer can run games or work as a web server? Do computers have any other uses here people?
Car thieves have proved that if you use your car in an anti-competitive fashion (or some other legal mombo jumbo) you can loose the title.
Why are most mice sold these days backwards? Everyone knows that the correct hand to use a mouse (or to do most things) is the left hand. I guess in the political correct times the companies are catering to those funky backwards right handed people.
Maybe it is me, but I never trusted those strange right handed people. How can you trust someone who does everything backwards? Writing with your right hand -- it is just strange man!
Uhh, you guys did realize that AM and FM are not spectra. AM and FM are modulation type -- ways of encoding information on a carrier frequency. While it is true that the US governemt set aside spectra for use of AM and FM radio there is no reason why one couldn't transmit an AM singal in the FM band.
In fact I beileve that when Armstrong invented FM the FCC gave him bandwidth at much lower frequencies. However Sarnoff and others had invested so much money in AM that they wanted to hurt FM (which was a much better way of sending music -- and not just because in the US FM stations mostly transmit in stereo.) They forced the FM to move their bandwidth. Those old AM stations remind me of M$. It is because of them that FM didn't take off until the 70's even though FM has been around since the 1930's or so.
Well, google is my favorite search engine, and I am glad to see it do well. However, yahoo used to be the one I used when google didn't give me what I needed.
Google Lists the results based on how many times that page was linked by another page. Sometimes that is good -- you see the most popular page based on those names. Sometimes this is bad. Yahoo used to have the results indexed by a human. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad. Depending on what I am looking for I find yahoo would give me better results and sometimes google did.
Now will google and yahoo give the exact same results? Or will they use Google's index but still be sorted differently? If yahoo will equal google (I seem to remember back in 94 or 95 when I used yahoo mostly as a search engine now yahoo is an everything page and it get's it's search engine from someone else) maybe I will have to find something to replace yahoo.
I was making holograms in my undergraduate physics /. and /.er haven't heard much
courses. And there are explanations of them in
even basic optics books. But since this is
you don't need to take even basic physics to be
a coder I guess most
about them. BTW they knew about holograms before the laser was invented. Altough noone could make it work until the laser did come along.
Anyway, I am surprised they didn't mention the coolest
thing about holograms. You can physically break a hologram
in two and you will have two copies of the same
hologram (although there will be a lose in quality.)
Photographs store information about the image --
holograms store information (phase and intensity)
about the light that bounces off the image. Cool
huh? even if they aren't useful everyone must agree
that they are seriously cool!
Yes, but according to the article some of the software will block gnutella as well. It probably isn't your fault for not being able to read the article, it is slashdotted badly! I had to read the article through lynx (which wasn't easy because of the millions of frames on the page.)
Maybe if M$ products weren't so bloated, people wouldn't need as much ram. This ram shortage would therefore not have happened (although there might still be an lcd shortage.) Course in the long run M$ bloatware has lowered the price of ram and made it possible for us to built computers with real operating systems sporting TONS of ram.
Ever notice that the average users uses his PC to do spread sheets, word processing, and surfing the net. In the mid 90's the average pc buyer used his (or her) pc to do the same thing. Could they still use their 486 to do what they do now on their pentium III (average pc users don't buy AMD?) Ok the programs now have many more bells and whistles but how many people actually use them on a regular basis?
If it weren't for games and Bill gates sending out ever more bloated bloatware (which people buy even though they don't need it in order to "keep up with the latest technology") PC sales would probably drop. Just some food for thought.
Ok, I will stop ranting for now.
If you are going to go through all that trouble, wouldn't it just be much easier to nuke the city of your choice? It would take years and billions of dollars to send the asteriode to the city. Chances are that once the thing reaches the city the country will no longer be pissed off; or the country in question will figure out a way to stop the asteroid.
It would be MUCH easier just to strap a nuke on the back of some mad man and smuggle him into the country.
You can't rule out the fact that the rulers of the saddestic country are human. I hope morality would oppose them causing distruction on such a scale (I believe this is what kept the cold war cold.) If the morality of the leader isn't enough, I doubt any group of citizenship (not even Iraq) would stand for mass distruction on such a scale. When you talk about killing millions of people the pety arguements of a couple of countries just doesn't seem important anymore.
If you do the math -- and find the theoretical limit to the efficiency of an internal combustion engine (or any heat engine) you will be shocked. A carnot engine (the most efficient heat engine possible) depends on the differnce in temperature between the heated chamber (the gas blowing up in the cylinders) and the temperature of the cool chamber (the radiator.)
We would be much better off if we found a complete replacment for the internal combustion engine. Even an electronic engine (which just feed it's power off of a power plant which is also a heat engine) is better because in a power plant you can get a much hotter heated chamber.
I am glad that their evolution program works. But let's face it a randomized algorithm that finds a miximum (or a minimum) based on processes that happen in nature is not exactly new. See simulated annealing or nueral nets. These techniques, although they work, are kind of wishy washy. In practice I find you use them when all else fails and then you end up playing with your program a lot (let's change this and see what the hell happens.)
Why would you spend $190 and up for an mp3 player when apex dvd players are under $180?
:) Goes great in your home stereo rack as well.
You remember apex AD-600A DVD player? The one that let you play illegal DVDs. Well, they took that feature out but it still plays cd's full of mp3's -- plus it has a built in DVD player
Try going on google.com and typing "virtual boy emulator." That is how I got this link: http://www.emuunlim.com/VirtualE/ among others.
:) The dreamcast had to sell a couple of million in less than a year before people admitted that it went main stream.
Again the number and quality of the emulators has as much to do with the popularity of the system as anything else. Sega sold far more saturns than nintendo did virtual boys -- this means there won't be that many people who really care.
Note that as far as consoles that flops go the saturn did very well. It did sell over a million units in the US. This sales mark used to signify when a console has made it to the main stream. But after they sold a million saturns they decided to raise that marker
The Saturn was quite a powerful little beast. Although it was designed at first just to do 2d stuff (and it does 2d stuff almost as well as the dreamcast -- import x-men vs street fighter looks great and blows the psx version out of the water) it was so powerful that by brute force it could handle 3d stuff. It could probably do anything the playstation could and more. The problem was that it was so hard to program for that games with a certain cool effect always came out for the playstation first. Playstation fans would say stuff like, "the saturn was maxed out with virtual fighter 2," "it will never be able to handle croc" or "it will never be able to handle water and fire as well as the psx." One by one the SS did come out with games with those effects but since the psx version came out first no one cared.
If sony isn't careful the same thing might happen to the ps2. It is supposed to be even harder to program for than the saturn. It will be interesting to see what happens in gaming during the next couple of years.
Note there are saturn emulators (though most aren't very mature.) The number and quality of the emulator has as much to do with the popularity of the console as it does with the difficulty in making the emulator. Note that there aren't that many jaguar emulators but there are tons of great nes and gameboy emulators! There will be more psx emulators simply because it was more popular.
Yeah, and the Earth is flat! After all, if it were round we would fall off. Constellations do change though quite slowly (when compared to the length of human life.)
I've got an idea: here is a book -- read it!
As the star collapses, if one side is less dense than the other gravity will cause the density gradient to increase. This insures that when it expels matter more matter is expelled on one side than the other. I guess it would be possible to have a star that's density is so balanced that no gravitational gradiant will be produced, but the odds of this happening is so insanely low that stars ALWAYS get a density gradient and therefore always get a kick when they are formed.
Understanding the mechanics of the universe is important because it increases our knowledge of science in general. It may not be clear right now how understanding something that happens thousands of light years away (and therefore took place thousands of years ago) may be useful. But one day it will be useful. After all at first studying the planets didn't seem that useful but Newton used planetary motion when he was fathering classical physics.
Ever notice that quake 3 seems to be the ultimate test of a system according to many of these sites? Am I the only one who uses his system for more than just games? I bought my dreamcast for games, my pc is for real work. How long does it take matlab to do a matrix multiplication? Or how long does it take to compile linux 2.4.0-pre1? That is what I really want to know.
Actually, most assemblers write to the ISA as well. The only way to write directly to the back end of an athlon would be if AMD were nice enough to put in instructions which skip the ISA. I am not sure if they did this. If you could write an assembler to go to the bare metal of an athlon then there is no reason why gcc couldn't as well. You would have to write the compiler to optimize the code in this way. The only advantge assembly has over gcc is that a human can sometimes write more efficient code than a combiler.
What do you think gcc outputs? Binary code which can be line for line translated into assembly. If you can do it in assembly a good compiler should be able to do it in gcc (although in practice this isn't always the case.) I think you are confused on what an assembler actually does -- it outputs to the ISA just like the compiler.
Why would YOU have to recombile all your applications? Do you realize how many athlons were sold? It would be worth it for SuSE or REDHAT to compile a new version for the athlon. There you go, buy (or download) the optimized version and you are good to go!
And no, I don't see why it would be expensive to have 30 versions of quake. These days most applications are written in c. You would need 30 different c compilers but assuming they are all compatible (different versions of gcc?) having 30 versions of quake 3 would be trivial:
./configure
and then
make
do that 30 time. How tough is that?
We would have avoided half of the posts to this story that say stuff like,
:)
"DVD rulls DivX sucks!"
Is there a reason why they chose the name DIVX? Maybe they should call it Matt instead
Can you shove you hard drive into a dell machine and then install windows on it. After it is installed can you simply yank the hd and stick it into a non-dell system? Just try not to loose the hard drive behind a copier machine in the mean time. Does it check the bios when it installs or each time it boots? The article implied it only checks when it is installing. Am I missing something here?
:)
If this works, you must use this trick for good and not evil
This is from the m68k faq http://archive.comlab.ox.ac.uk/cards/m68kfaq.html
"1) Motorola 16/32 Bit Product Line:
=====================================
Motorola introduced its first microprocessor in 1974: the 8 bit MC6800 with
an extensive line of support peripherals soon available. The MC68000 was
introduced in 1979 and was soon followed by a host of 16 bit peripheral
chips. The 6800 and 68000 families soon became very popular due to their
straightforward architecture and simple and easy to use bus connections.
The first member of the 68K family - the MC68000, is not software
compatible with the 8 bit 6800 series which includes the 68HC11 series.
The 68K family itself is upwards software compatible."
So it seems that big blue had more options in 1980 or so than just the z80 and 8088. The story about bill gates talking big blue into a 16-but chip and ibm choosing the 8086 (and then later the 8088 there were a few very expensive xt's based on the 8086 although they are rare) is from Bob Cringley's book "Accidental Empires." This is a little bit before my time so everything I know about this came from reading books like that.
Ok, these two questions poped into my head when I was reading this:
If all your programs are GPLed does having an open standard ISA really matter? Each time there is a new design you could just recompile (assuming the compiler and things like assembly part of the OS were re-written.)
Is there anyway to write code for the athlon or any newer chip that skips the front end decoder and goes straight to the back end? Would there aver be a reason when this would be a good idea? (ultra optimized athlon code.)
Just wondering.
Oh wait, zilog still sells a lot of those little buggers for embeded systems etc. With so much code written for the z80, and the z80 in so many system I guess it will be a while before it dies.
If the z80 is still kicking around after all these years, imagine how long it will take to get ride of the 68k or X86? Face it the X86 ISA in one form or another is here to stay! How many mission critical apps are written for it? I guess if you read the article that was the author's point!
I heard that one of the reasons why big blue took the x86 was because they were worried about pc's competing with their main frames. IBM at first wanted an 8 bit chip but Bill gates managed to talk them into a 16 bit chip. The obvious choose would have been the 68k but instead IBM went with the 8086 (and later the cheaper 8088.)
Can someone buy a GPL program and then change the license agreement? Could someone close an open source project? Obviously the older source would be out, but can someone refuse to submit the newer stuff? Just wondering.
Ok, so what is Robert X Cringely's (name on his book) real name? Or were you just jumping on my typo of switching the "e" with the "l" -- I am a bit dyslexic what do you want from me? If you want a web page that never makes typos than you have come to the wrong place buddy!
And how was he wrong? Could you point to some reference that documents how he is wrong? So what was the first PC and what do you have to document your claim. Or are you just trolling?