I was unable to find descent pricing information. There's talk of a monthly subscription fee (5 euro's for 7 titles), but does that mean I'm only allowed to (legally) use the game for one month?
How much do I have to pay to download just one game?
Indeed. Compare that to the current situation where videocards are able to generate images in real time of about the same quality as Jurassic Park (which was obviously rendered off line). Mainstream (and relatively cheap) videocards more than caught up with state-of-the-art technology in a little over 11 years.
So, though the UNIVAC would currently be uninteresting from a practical point of view, it was far ahead of its time (at the time).
-- Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O.
Reading the article is not required; just skimming it reveals a diagram with 4 CPU's, each with its own cache connected by arrows to a large blob called "Snoop Control Unit".
If I recall correctly, chips prior to ARM6 had register 15 (ARM's PC) designed with the upper six bits reserved for status. Having a program address space of only 2^26 = 64 MB was a major obstacle, even for (successors of) Acorn's RiscPC, a desktop model. With that resolved in the ARM6 series, it is still unable to look beyond the 4GB boundary. In the 4 way SMP servermarket this is likely to become a major pain.
So either they found a nice way to add yet more MIPS per megaherz (or per watt) to serve a higher end embedded systems or they're targetting (very) low end servers.
It appears to be similar to other dual core technologies except developers need to worry less about threads accessing the same data. This is accomplished by cache snooping, which is a dated, but very fast way to avoid (L0) cache inconsistencies. That should take care of a major hurdle wrt. keeping SMP threads busy, especially if the clock speeds are relatively low.
Notice that SMP has been a dream to the ARM team from its early Acorn/Archimedes days on. It seems they finally got it working...
Yes it's a crappy website, which is a bad start for what could be the biggest movie in the coming years. Nevertheless, click here to skip the Flash intro and read the blog.
Although the website mentions "open source" a lot it only suppplies a link to a sourceforge page which does not seem to supply anything downloadable.
ALthough Mozdex appears to be of good will, notice that the GPL does not force them to distribute changes to GPLed code as long as they're the only ones using the code. THe GPL would only be effective if they would try to distribute changed binaries, but they do not distribute anything other than HTML web content. This could become a major headache with the GPL.
I'm not sure, but aren't FPGA like EPROMs in that they're hard to rewire? That is, you need UV light or electrical energy and a lot of time (relatively) to reset a given wiring. This Stretch thingy appears to be able to do on-the-fly rewiring, presumably just a bit more "expensive" as a context switch on a regular cpu.
>Come on, folks, self-censorship is not bad. [...] That's called self-control.
Indeed: that's called self-control; and it has very little to do with what people generally refer to with self-censorship.
Self censorship is believing you know how to say the right thing, but not airing your thoughs because that would have indirect repercussions from a major (political) power. So, in a sense, there is no difference between censorship and self-censorship: They are both enemies of free speech and thus of democracy and peace.
-- A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular -- Adlai Stevenson
Konquerer's integration into KDE does not lever KDE's monopoly as does IE in Windows simply cos KDE never was a monopoly. Meaning includes context; simple facts are worthless without a reasonable interpretation.
Nobel indeed created TNT, but that was not what he set out to do. His nitrogen-phosphorous-carbon research initially focussed on soil chemistry and creating artificial manure. His ideas on how soil improvement could save the world population from starvation are actually quite similar to Borlaug's. The again, he got rich producing explosives. Similarly, nuclear physisist have claimed that clean nuclear energy would be lead to prosperity and world peace. People have claimed the same about the internet.
In reality, new technologies rarely benefit world peace. If shocking enough, they lead to terrible wars. More modest "advances" often divide society rather than closing the gap between rich and poor; powerful and weak.
Borlaug meant well, as did Nobel & Einstein. But all of them created at least as many horrors as they solved.
-- I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones -- Albert Einstein, in retrospect
To Dr. Norman Borlaug it is indeed. That's exactly what makes him into the "mad scientist" stereotype. His "super" wheats created both the solution to startvation in total numbers AND increased the inbalance in distribution of food. And believe it or not, he thinks he did good and could have done better through better technologies... If only he would show a similar remorse to Alfred Nobel's after seeing the effects of his aggriculture & explosives chemistry.
Sad.
-- We learn from history that we learn nothing from history -- George Bernard Shaw
>The truth is that C/C++/C#/Java/VB/Perl/PHP are the most used.[...]>It has been like this for years.
Is that in itselve a good reason not to care about new stuff at the horizon? 'Guess not, but Without a backing of a huge corporation or a huge number of people, no new language would be used. OK. So which companies initially backed Perl, C++, PHP? None. And there were never a huge number of people waiting to volunteer on building a huge code base for these things (and not for others).
They became popular due to huge numbers of individuals that got over their childish "Who cares?" and judged after taking a good look. You should too. Then tell us about why this thing suck or is just not more of an improvement over existing stuff as is C# over Java.
Then again, better, smaller, faster, is no match for cheaper, more accessible, and well-marketed
Nice words about Holland & the Dutch, but Justice in the Netherlands indeed sucks when it comes down to extraditing Dutch citizens suspected of selling drugs to US citizens. The Dutch authorities do arrest people and they do send them to the US, even though they know their cases will never go to trial and even though they will get a much higher sentence in de US.
In short, Holland may rock, but (drug related) enforcement is definitely America's bitch.
-- A citizen of USA will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national elections
Leaving aside the point about being able to make a living with free software (thus going slightly off topic)...
I agree that (some) companies will pay for support, ease of uses although they'd rather have it more cheap. However this difference does not necessarily divide allong the border between proprietry and free (as beer) software. Many expensive packages have zero support and are not easy to use, whereas support is great on many free (libre) software products.
Moreover, the reason many companies (and individuals) prefer ie. Linux to Windows is not just the quality/cost ratio. Some studies have shown that RedHat deployment isn't that much cheaper than Windows, per PC and many claim they are on par wrt. Desktop use. So why don't they stick with Windows? Because it's not open source, and therefore you'll never know how long Microsoft is going to support your configuration. With open source, your last resort may be to fix bugs yourself, with Windows there's no last resort AT ALL.
-- In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand -- Paul Graham
First of all, IMHO it's not about the x86 architecture per se, but rather the concept of a (mini) PC. PCs appear to be attractive in any area simply because most of the hardware already exists, and there's a huge and relatively mature codebase available. In this light, embedding PCs is like making it do what you want and then rip-out anything you're not using.
Now what happens when you do not start out with a standard PC, but one with special hardware? For example: an x86 processor WITHOUT PCI or a PCI mainboard with an ARM or PowerPC cpu. You loose a major part of the benefits: your favorite PC development environmet no longer works out of the box, you may need a new compiler, new libraries... (This is where portability of OSS is a major benefit).
In any case, programming a PC is a different game as is programming embedded. With embedded you will worry less about (backward) compatibility and more about simplicity, performance/watt and - last but not least - support/documentation/tools available for the choosen hardware.
-- Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O.
True. The front page still has that bloated good ol' Yahoo look-and-feel that caused the exodus to Google in the first place. It does not seem to be more responsive or more accurate either. On top of that, did anyone notice they still seem to be using Google to retrieve images? At least, the result to searching for "$#@%" looks *very* familiar:
We didn't find any Web pages containing $#@%.
Suggestions:
- Check your spelling.
- Try more general words.
- Try different words that mean the same thing.
Also, you can visit the Yahoo! Search Help Center for more suggestions.
(I bet Google has those phrases trademarked, so they could sue Yahoo for providing useful clues...;-)
You don't pay tax over loss in earnings. That should make many managers and accountants *VERY* happy. Now how come you *NEVER* find even a rough estimate of the cost of virusses and worm attacks on the financial balance presentations of *ANY* corporations.
I mean, $48000-58000 for each attack is a lot on the balance of a healthy 400 employee company ($3,000,000 revenue, $100,000 EBITA).
-- I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour -- F. H. Wales (1936)
From the article: A Microsoft spokesman said Wednesday it is looking at offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the creator of the MyDoom worm. He added the company has not paid out its $250,000 rewards for the SoBig or MSBlast viruses.
Now I'm all against virusses, DDoS attack, SPAM and other forms of internet polution. But how do they think arresting a virus creator is going to help controlling or defuse the virus? Obviously, this is more of the "set-an-example" strategy than the "contain-or-do-something-about-the-problem" strategy.
With a few thousand script-kiddies remaining, the bounty strategy is more likely to bankrupt companies/institutions/govenrments than make the internet a better, cleaner or safer place. Bounties are always a sign of desparateness, but in the context of virusses -- when you think about it -- it's just silly.
I'm curious... I've always learnerd that with power comes money and vice versa. Now I guess I would agree that RMS&FSF are about power, but could you please point out to me where the money comes in for them? IMHO, the only reason why the free software foundation appears to be after power is to protect its ideals, which are more or less about freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
I was unable to find descent pricing information. There's talk of a monthly subscription fee (5 euro's for 7 titles), but does that mean I'm only allowed to (legally) use the game for one month?
How much do I have to pay to download just one game?
Indeed. Compare that to the current situation where videocards are able to generate images in real time of about the same quality as Jurassic Park (which was obviously rendered off line). Mainstream (and relatively cheap) videocards more than caught up with state-of-the-art technology in a little over 11 years.
So, though the UNIVAC would currently be uninteresting from a practical point of view, it was far ahead of its time (at the time).
--
Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O.
Ask these guys. They seem to know how to go about this business (or at least claim to do so)..
Reading the article is not required; just skimming it reveals a diagram with 4 CPU's, each with its own cache connected by arrows to a large blob called "Snoop Control Unit".
If I recall correctly, chips prior to ARM6 had register 15 (ARM's PC) designed with the upper six bits reserved for status. Having a program address space of only 2^26 = 64 MB was a major obstacle, even for (successors of) Acorn's RiscPC, a desktop model. With that resolved in the ARM6 series, it is still unable to look beyond the 4GB boundary. In the 4 way SMP servermarket this is likely to become a major pain.
So either they found a nice way to add yet more MIPS per megaherz (or per watt) to serve a higher end embedded systems or they're targetting (very) low end servers.
It appears to be similar to other dual core technologies except developers need to worry less about threads accessing the same data. This is accomplished by cache snooping, which is a dated, but very fast way to avoid (L0) cache inconsistencies. That should take care of a major hurdle wrt. keeping SMP threads busy, especially if the clock speeds are relatively low.
Notice that SMP has been a dream to the ARM team from its early Acorn/Archimedes days on. It seems they finally got it working...
Yes it's a crappy website, which is a bad start for what could be the biggest movie in the coming years. Nevertheless, click here to skip the Flash intro and read the blog.
Although the website mentions "open source" a lot it only suppplies a link to a sourceforge page which does not seem to supply anything downloadable.
ALthough Mozdex appears to be of good will, notice that the GPL does not force them to distribute changes to GPLed code as long as they're the only ones using the code. THe GPL would only be effective if they would try to distribute changed binaries, but they do not distribute anything other than HTML web content. This could become a major headache with the GPL.
I'm not sure, but aren't FPGA like EPROMs in that they're hard to rewire? That is, you need UV light or electrical energy and a lot of time (relatively) to reset a given wiring. This Stretch thingy appears to be able to do on-the-fly rewiring, presumably just a bit more "expensive" as a context switch on a regular cpu.
Details, anyone?
>Come on, folks, self-censorship is not bad. [...] That's called self-control.
Indeed: that's called self-control; and it has very little to do with what people generally refer to with self-censorship.
Self censorship is believing you know how to say the right thing, but not airing your thoughs because that would have indirect repercussions from a major (political) power. So, in a sense, there is no difference between censorship and self-censorship: They are both enemies of free speech and thus of democracy and peace.
--
A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular -- Adlai Stevenson
Konquerer's integration into KDE does not lever KDE's monopoly as does IE in Windows simply cos KDE never was a monopoly. Meaning includes context; simple facts are worthless without a reasonable interpretation.
And my favourite quote would be:
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it -- Andrew Young
Nobel indeed created TNT, but that was not what he set out to do. His nitrogen-phosphorous-carbon research initially focussed on soil chemistry and creating artificial manure. His ideas on how soil improvement could save the world population from starvation are actually quite similar to Borlaug's. The again, he got rich producing explosives. Similarly, nuclear physisist have claimed that clean nuclear energy would be lead to prosperity and world peace. People have claimed the same about the internet.
In reality, new technologies rarely benefit world peace. If shocking enough, they lead to terrible wars. More modest "advances" often divide society rather than closing the gap between rich and poor; powerful and weak.
Borlaug meant well, as did Nobel & Einstein. But all of them created at least as many horrors as they solved.
--
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones -- Albert Einstein, in retrospect
> Is this really a technological problem?
To Dr. Norman Borlaug it is indeed. That's exactly what makes him into the "mad scientist" stereotype. His "super" wheats created both the solution to startvation in total numbers AND increased the inbalance in distribution of food. And believe it or not, he thinks he did good and could have done better through better technologies... If only he would show a similar remorse to Alfred Nobel's after seeing the effects of his aggriculture & explosives chemistry.
Sad.
--
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history -- George Bernard Shaw
>The truth is that C/C++/C#/Java/VB/Perl/PHP are the most used.[...]>It has been like this for years.
Is that in itselve a good reason not to care about new stuff at the horizon? 'Guess not, but Without a backing of a huge corporation or a huge number of people, no new language would be used. OK. So which companies initially backed Perl, C++, PHP? None. And there were never a huge number of people waiting to volunteer on building a huge code base for these things (and not for others).
They became popular due to huge numbers of individuals that got over their childish "Who cares?" and judged after taking a good look. You should too. Then tell us about why this thing suck or is just not more of an improvement over existing stuff as is C# over Java.
Then again, better, smaller, faster, is no match for cheaper, more accessible, and well-marketed
Nice words about Holland & the Dutch, but Justice in the Netherlands indeed sucks when it comes down to extraditing Dutch citizens suspected of selling drugs to US citizens. The Dutch authorities do arrest people and they do send them to the US, even though they know their cases will never go to trial and even though they will get a much higher sentence in de US.
In short, Holland may rock, but (drug related) enforcement is definitely America's bitch.
--
A citizen of USA will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national elections
Indeed. ...And that's about -22% last week. Pretty soon even Microsoft will want to get rid of its shares.
Leaving aside the point about being able to make a living with free software (thus going slightly off topic)...
I agree that (some) companies will pay for support, ease of uses although they'd rather have it more cheap. However this difference does not necessarily divide allong the border between proprietry and free (as beer) software. Many expensive packages have zero support and are not easy to use, whereas support is great on many free (libre) software products.
Moreover, the reason many companies (and individuals) prefer ie. Linux to Windows is not just the quality/cost ratio. Some studies have shown that RedHat deployment isn't that much cheaper than Windows, per PC and many claim they are on par wrt. Desktop use. So why don't they stick with Windows? Because it's not open source, and therefore you'll never know how long Microsoft is going to support your configuration. With open source, your last resort may be to fix bugs yourself, with Windows there's no last resort AT ALL.
--
In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand -- Paul Graham
First of all, IMHO it's not about the x86 architecture per se, but rather the concept of a (mini) PC. PCs appear to be attractive in any area simply because most of the hardware already exists, and there's a huge and relatively mature codebase available. In this light, embedding PCs is like making it do what you want and then rip-out anything you're not using.
Now what happens when you do not start out with a standard PC, but one with special hardware? For example: an x86 processor WITHOUT PCI or a PCI mainboard with an ARM or PowerPC cpu. You loose a major part of the benefits: your favorite PC development environmet no longer works out of the box, you may need a new compiler, new libraries... (This is where portability of OSS is a major benefit).
In any case, programming a PC is a different game as is programming embedded. With embedded you will worry less about (backward) compatibility and more about simplicity, performance/watt and - last but not least - support/documentation/tools available for the choosen hardware.
--
Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O.
> When will there be anything new from Yahoo!?
;-)
True. The front page still has that bloated good ol' Yahoo look-and-feel that caused the exodus to Google in the first place. It does not seem to be more responsive or more accurate either.
On top of that, did anyone notice they still seem to be using Google to retrieve images? At least, the result to searching for "$#@%" looks *very* familiar:
We didn't find any Web pages containing $#@%.
Suggestions:
- Check your spelling.
- Try more general words.
- Try different words that mean the same thing.
Also, you can visit the Yahoo! Search Help Center for more suggestions.
(I bet Google has those phrases trademarked, so they could sue Yahoo for providing useful clues...
' Guess Lorne Greene will be revived / grown from cloned stem cells / computer-graphicsed to repeat his excellent ... skills!
--
"I don't believe in reincarnation, but I might come back as someone who does" -- Lorne Greene?
> A company with USD 7500 turnover per employee is by no definition healthy.
Yes, sorry. $30,000,000 revenue, $1,000,000 EBITA are more likely figures. Isn't it ironical I choose a sig regarding the need for multiplications?!?
You don't pay tax over loss in earnings. That should make many managers and accountants *VERY* happy. Now how come you *NEVER* find even a rough estimate of the cost of virusses and worm attacks on the financial balance presentations of *ANY* corporations.
I mean, $48000-58000 for each attack is a lot on the balance of a healthy 400 employee company ($3,000,000 revenue, $100,000 EBITA).
--
I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour -- F. H. Wales (1936)
From the article:
A Microsoft spokesman said Wednesday it is looking at offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the creator of the MyDoom worm. He added the company has not paid out its $250,000 rewards for the SoBig or MSBlast viruses.
Now I'm all against virusses, DDoS attack, SPAM and other forms of internet polution. But how do they think arresting a virus creator is going to help controlling or defuse the virus? Obviously, this is more of the "set-an-example" strategy than the "contain-or-do-something-about-the-problem" strategy.
With a few thousand script-kiddies remaining, the bounty strategy is more likely to bankrupt companies/institutions/govenrments than make the internet a better, cleaner or safer place. Bounties are always a sign of desparateness, but in the context of virusses -- when you think about it -- it's just silly.
--
You cannot wash away blood with blood
>"RMS and FSF are seeking power, not freedom."
I'm curious... I've always learnerd that with power comes money and vice versa. Now I guess I would agree that RMS&FSF are about power, but could you please point out to me where the money comes in for them? IMHO, the only reason why the free software foundation appears to be after power is to protect its ideals, which are more or less about freedom.
Care to comment on this?