Exactly, what is weird is how often folks chose to ignore this.
And frankly, sticking things behind a nat works out really well for a lot of devices. Either you provide a firewall for your printers etc, or you nat them and you avoid the question of routability on the internet. Frankly, I like having a lot of stuff on private ips, and there are plenty of those to go around for many organizations.
Not that you shouldn't still firewall, but for households, small business, dumb devices, nat works very well.
Thanks for that post, much more interesting and detailed then what I have seen, but I think matching my general gut feelings about this latest NASA program. It does reek of politics.
The system is insanely complicated for an insanely expensive program to go to MARS! Are you kidding me? They should pull the plug on the entire NASA program, and fund John Carmack and Richard Branson with the money.
The international space station is basically a big ego stroking excercise. For anyone following the actual science being conducted up there over the billions being spent, you'll instantly realize about 100x more space science could be done by others for the same cost. Seriously, someone needs to do a cost / benefit equation on NASA.
Realize that this whole put people on Mars system is the BEST program, the best idea that our BILLIONS of dollars being spent on NASA can come up. It's like they watched an old video of the plans to go to the moon, and unable to come up with any of their own ideas said/s/moon/mars.
The folks actually doing real space work have it right. NASA is the dead end for space for America. While they dream up this BS, they are cutting actual science programs by the bucket load.
- They already ARE making lots of functional type robots. Toyotas factories have these all over the place. - The world as it is is designed for bipedals. If you can model a humans' movement, you can operate much of the human world potentially (climb ladders, etc) - There is a potential market for the humanoid concept. I think the market is validated in some ways by the amount of coverage they are getting for these things.
Critically for SCO however, the expression of the idea must be in code form. The computer does not run on comments.
So even if they are chasing expressions, they do need to point to actual code that implements the expression of the idea they are claiming was stolen, and then prove a bunch of other things. They seem to have had a very very hard time doing this.
By most accounts, and despite the hype of their claims that code was literally copied and that they have copyright claims on millions of lines of code, this part of the case looks very weak. This is actually an IBM counterclaim, as SCO dropped most of their copyright claims, but IBM said, wait a minute, we actually want to finish litigating this.
"ext4 conversely will not be completely backwards compatible"
Backwards compatibility will be maintained. The ext4 team has made that crystal clear.
We are talking about forward compatibility here. I think you have your terms confused as well. Forward compatibility is difficult to maintain.
I'm talking about tradeoffs. If ext4 is a simple upgrade from ext3 (no dump and reload) and ext4 drivers are relatively easy to obtain for older systems, and ext4 provides some improvements, and it is clear (by the names alone) that they are different file systems, then for most practical needs (not the I only restore systems using a 2.2 kernel variety, or I only use 2.4 kernels, but refuse to load the ext4 drivers) ext4 is going to be fine.
Forward compatibility usually matters most if older tools cannot be updated to deal with new datastructures etc. The real physical world has more of these situations then the it world, but both exist. However, in the case of the ext4 filesystem, in common use that is not the case. And even if you are stuck using a 2.4 kernel for some reason, I was pointing out that it is likely (if ext4 follows the ext3 model) that someone will post ext4 patches against the 2.4 series as well.
Anyways, save your cute signoffs like "thanks for playing" or "if you had a clue" for someone else. Seriously, resist the urge for that junk.
Re:There is a moral to this tale...
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 1
That there is always another project... and she knew that after living with you for 8 years!
It is not as easy as ext3->ext2 granted, but you can still remove extents I believe if you want to get your file system into ext3 shape. Probably would involve copying them all over themselves though! Blah.
But unless we want to keep essentially ext2 forever, at some point the forward compat is going to be broken. And while ext3 is ext2 is cool, ext3 is itself available, at one time all the way back to the 2.2 series of kernels. My suspicion is that ext4 will be available for older kernel series such as 2.4 in one form or another.
In other words, a tradeoff, but not an unexpected one given a full version change.
The article says "On the downside, the new ext4 filesystem will offer only limited backward compatibility with ext3-aware Linux kernels."
Ext4 is going to be the MOST compatible with Ext3, relative to ANY other option out there.
Upgrading to Ext4 is NOT going to involve a dump and restore from Ext3, likely a tunefs -j or similar command, just as the ext2 -> ext3 migration worked. Ext4 will be able to mount ext3.
If older versions of software could use the new format, you wouldn't need the new format. Yes, upgrading to Ext4 means your 120 petabyte raid array will not be compatible with your old "ext3 aware kernel". But it is PRECISELY because such an array is not possible under ext3 that ext4 is going to be introduced.
And does this submitter think other fancy new filesystems magically work on old kernels? Of course not. Does the submitter know if ext4 will be backported and made available to older releases? It doesn't look like they gave that much thought either.
Please read this for a more detailed description of what is happening.
In these situations things just keep on coming and coming.
Judges and the judicial system are set up so that court orders can be enforced. Usually against reluctant subjects, so dealing with whiners is not new to them.
Even in civil cases you can get a cop with a gun to go into a business and help you settle things up if the judge orders it. Unless anti-spam people think tucows is going to arm its US office and start shooting people, they are going to comply with this order.
Spamhaus had an easy out, make a special appearance and talk about jurisdiction. Or they could have moved it to federal and fought it on the merits, which would have likely established a positive precedent in the US for voluntary opt-in to these types of published opinion blacklists. Instead they try to game the legal system in the US. That's fine, but they are likely to lose their ability to work within the US by doing so.
I've read the entire bug. I've read the email thread. This is important to have the full context of this this on the record. The claim you state as a fact, that "Debian had permission from Mozilla to use the Firefox branding the way they were using it" is disputed. In fact, a careful read of the bug and associated email threads will show that it is a very weak claim.
Here is a quote from an email from Mozilla that captures this nicely:
At no time was any irrevocable and/or condition-free usage of the trademark granted. Nor do I see anything about just using the name and not the artwork... One of the last things I see in the June thread was this quote:
"So I believe my best option is to ignore the trademark policy altogether and have the Mozilla Foundation tell us when they want us to stop using their marks. Now I originally said we shouldn't do this, but it does have certain advantages. First of all, I think we can ignore the trademark policy because it is only a policy, is not distributed with the software (although having said that, that might change) and it is my understanding that in most jurisdictions the trademark holder has to police use of their trademark anyway."
In that light, you should consider this, as I previously said, notice that your usage of the trademark is not permitted in this way, and we are expecting a resolution. If your choice is to cease usage of the trademark rather than bend the DFSG a little, that is your decision to make.
A couple things are important here. First, does that look like things were agreed to on a license grant? I read this as debian deciding to ignore the policy. Second, does debian have the right to sublicense their supposed grant to avoid the artwork and change the packages to other groups who want to use firefox? I doubt it, even under the debian interpretation of a grant. So you've broken the DFSG with the community who would use debian, and is going to be stuck tearing out references to firefox by hand now if they want to create works based on debian.
The choices here seem pretty clear. Fight a legal fight (that despite your "fact" you are likely to loose becuase you expressely state you are going to ignore the policy), or make a small and simple change that will avoid the whole issue together.
This is a losing debate I think for debian, because regardless of what legal technicalities you try and hang your hat on, you are going to find little support for your actions, because almost EVERY open source project actively discourages your type of activity, which is striping visual identity, changing packages, but keeping a trademarked name. I suspect debian would take the SAME position with others creating versions of debian and calling them debian.
Why then fight so hard to do something that you would make a stink about elsewhere, even if you think you can get away with it, especially given how very weak the case is to someone who has actually read the entire bug and entire email thread.
It seems time could be better spent on other things.
Firefox had a build switch that allowed folks to build it without branding (and do whatever they wanted to it) or build it with branding (and follow Mozilla's rules to create a consistent user experience).
Debain dev's took that build switch and broke it, so that everyone wanting to modify or adjust the debian firefox packages would have to go through and hand edit out firefox if they wanted to remove branding. They then packaged this broken thing up, and still called it firefox.
Mozilla said that was bogus, and they were right. Having that build switch makes it easier for folks to make changes to the package without worrying about branding. Redhat and others do exactly this with artwork/branding packages. We are ALL better off if such easy build time switches are available.
I've been around a while, but the debian developers are way out of line here.... You can't create some crazy messed up debian distro and call it debian, you can't create a crazy redhat distro and call it redhat, why is firefox getting all this heat? The amount of fuss they are creating is bogus and dissapointing. I read through the snide commentary and it really is depressing. Even Mozilla Foundation suggests that a non-branded version of firefox would work better for them.
So true. If the lexus of the space can't afford your product (and apple is the lexus of the mp3 space in terms of amount of money to burn) I'd say it's not going to be too popular with anyone else.
Granted, this isn't PR speak, but people wondering why in the world someone would use the product. Of course, as an investor, this is probably the first thing you are tracking, how good is their product relative to their competitiors. I'm just excited Apple has moved off them. Likely means we'll be seeing some good battery times.
RIM made lots and lots of noise about their own IP, and have gone after lots of people before finding themselves on the other side of the ball.
"RIM is alleging that Good is infringing on its patents, according to the suit. The first is "for a method and apparatus to remotely control gateway functions in a wireless data communications network." The second "relates to a method and system for loading an application program on a device." The third "relates to a method and system for transmitting data files between computers in a wireless data communications environment."
or this one
"Ontario, Canada-based RIM charges in a suit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Delaware that Glenayre Technologies violates a patent granted last month to RIM protecting the way the BlackBerry redirects e-mail from a computer or server to a handheld using a single e-mail address." - http://news.com.com/RIM+wins+patent%2C+sues+rival/ 2100-1040_3-257801.html?tag=st.ref.goo
Anyways, my point is that RIM really loved patents when they could shut out their competition with them, but disliked them when someone heard them making lots of noise about their IP and said, wait a minute, we have patents in the same area. Despite extrodinarily preferential treatment by the USPTO (ie, no one else will get patents they context reviewed that fast ever), they still were unable to prevail.
Something def needs to be fixed on the patent side, but there is something interesting also about RIM getting some of its own medicine. I wonder if someone has a more complete history on their annoucements on monetizing their IP portfolio.
It appears to make very good sense. Redhat supports a community distribution almost as well as many other players. I didn't like how little community involvement there was initially (especially without extras to start) but it's coming along, albeit a bit slowly.
And bottom line, redhat has so far played well with the community.
These sites run like a dog, even though they presumably have access to all the latest high tech VMWare stuff, and the funds to support the highest performance forum software. Not very inspiring.
Fair point. It'll be interesting to see how the power envelopes develop (both are chasing that) and how the cost is going (the FX series is one generation behind process wise, which if they've got it really ramped up might help keep costs lower).
That said, good points. Given that AMD is not bandwidth starved, I can see them going the multi-core route, and so far I like the multi-core solutions a bit better then Intels. Next step would obviously be a quad core. Be interesting to see when their next process move is scheduled.
Some important things (AKA garbage article)
on
The Near Future of Intel
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There seems to be agreement this article is a bit weak. Some very important things to note.
"By a series of their products' massive performance improvements, Intel hit the ball back into AMD's court."
These are products that are not out yet. Benchmarks look good, but you are comparing a product on the shelves (that's been there a while) with one that is not OK.
And by the time they come out, AMD will likely have moved on to. This is a fast paced space, so 6 month time gaps matter when doing comparisons. Product matchups in the actual market are what matter.
AMD's M2 platform looks good. The performance / watt issue matters a lot, and it will be interesting to see how that develops. Both companies are clearly chasing the power/watt area, so should be a lot of fun. The notebook space especially which is currently dominated by intel will be fun.
"Intel showed how they have the higher performing solution." This should read intel MAY have a higher performing solution sometime in the future.
I'm tired of the big announcements of victory on non-shipping parts. ATI with crossfire (lunched twice). The hype around the P4 "netburst" architecture. The itanium hype of course. PS2 movie like visuals (still a nice platform, but please).
I like this idea. Perhaps do it with similar priced chips from AMD/Intel, but also check if the highest performance AMD chips can handle 10 clients, and what the performance is.
Skype made a lot of noise in their press release saying that the 10-way feature was "optimized" for Intel chips. This was picked up by the media of course as well as evidence of AMD's poor performance.
I'm having trouble understanding what this optimization that used the special features of Intel chips (presumably their high power) was. It looks from the patch that they just check who the manufacturer is, and if it is not AMD, they pretend your computer doesn't have the power to host 10 participants.
What's also interesting is that folks likely signed up for SkypeOut and other paid products not realizing that they would be treated differently depending on what chipsets they happen to use, especially as that choice matters almost no where else. They should give more warning about this to paid users.
This focus on locking software into specific vendor chips seems a dangerous one. No longer will it be the best chip that will win, but the focus goes to competing on locking up software applications. The proprietary unix'es went down that path, and it would be sad if Intel managed to get that to happen here.
For those of you following NASA, there has been a flood of earth science recently.
It's interesting stuff, hopefully more data will continue to help refine and quanitify our understanding of how the earth works.
And guide developers to their next beachfront property:) No joke, but some property like sea terminals are going to get more valuable if things warm up.
Someone else who has followed this case from the beginning:) Yep, the patent system is messed up, and some of us remember a lot of RIM claims to litigate others out the market with a similar sets of bogus patents (not even the small keyboard ones).
I think their early IP talk actually popped them up on NTP's radar initially, they were making a lot of noise about it.
They got exactly what they deserved, but the system could still use a fixing, badly.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, what is weird is how often folks chose to ignore this.
And frankly, sticking things behind a nat works out really well for a lot of devices. Either you provide a firewall for your printers etc, or you nat them and you avoid the question of routability on the internet. Frankly, I like having a lot of stuff on private ips, and there are plenty of those to go around for many organizations.
Not that you shouldn't still firewall, but for households, small business, dumb devices, nat works very well.
Thanks for that post, much more interesting and detailed then what I have seen, but I think matching my general gut feelings about this latest NASA program. It does reek of politics.
This is nuts on so many levels.
/s/moon/mars.
The system is insanely complicated for an insanely expensive program to go to MARS! Are you kidding me? They should pull the plug on the entire NASA program, and fund John Carmack and Richard Branson with the money.
The international space station is basically a big ego stroking excercise. For anyone following the actual science being conducted up there over the billions being spent, you'll instantly realize about 100x more space science could be done by others for the same cost. Seriously, someone needs to do a cost / benefit equation on NASA.
Realize that this whole put people on Mars system is the BEST program, the best idea that our BILLIONS of dollars being spent on NASA can come up. It's like they watched an old video of the plans to go to the moon, and unable to come up with any of their own ideas said
The folks actually doing real space work have it right. NASA is the dead end for space for America. While they dream up this BS, they are cutting actual science programs by the bucket load.
Imagine having a clean and clear desktop. Make things a little bigger for your mother. Make them a little smaller for the numbers nerd.
When you buy that ridiculously high resolution dell laptop, all the icons and text doesn't shrink to the size of warnings for health meds.
A couple of reasons:
- They already ARE making lots of functional type robots. Toyotas factories have these all over the place.
- The world as it is is designed for bipedals. If you can model a humans' movement, you can operate much of the human world potentially (climb ladders, etc)
- There is a potential market for the humanoid concept. I think the market is validated in some ways by the amount of coverage they are getting for these things.
Critically for SCO however, the expression of the idea must be in code form. The computer does not run on comments.
So even if they are chasing expressions, they do need to point to actual code that implements the expression of the idea they are claiming was stolen, and then prove a bunch of other things. They seem to have had a very very hard time doing this.
By most accounts, and despite the hype of their claims that code was literally copied and that they have copyright claims on millions of lines of code, this part of the case looks very weak. This is actually an IBM counterclaim, as SCO dropped most of their copyright claims, but IBM said, wait a minute, we actually want to finish litigating this.
"ext4 conversely will not be completely backwards compatible"
Backwards compatibility will be maintained. The ext4 team has made that crystal clear.
We are talking about forward compatibility here. I think you have your terms confused as well. Forward compatibility is difficult to maintain.
I'm talking about tradeoffs. If ext4 is a simple upgrade from ext3 (no dump and reload) and ext4 drivers are relatively easy to obtain for older systems, and ext4 provides some improvements, and it is clear (by the names alone) that they are different file systems, then for most practical needs (not the I only restore systems using a 2.2 kernel variety, or I only use 2.4 kernels, but refuse to load the ext4 drivers) ext4 is going to be fine.
Forward compatibility usually matters most if older tools cannot be updated to deal with new datastructures etc. The real physical world has more of these situations then the it world, but both exist. However, in the case of the ext4 filesystem, in common use that is not the case. And even if you are stuck using a 2.4 kernel for some reason, I was pointing out that it is likely (if ext4 follows the ext3 model) that someone will post ext4 patches against the 2.4 series as well.
Anyways, save your cute signoffs like "thanks for playing" or "if you had a clue" for someone else. Seriously, resist the urge for that junk.
That there is always another project... and she knew that after living with you for 8 years!
It is not as easy as ext3->ext2 granted, but you can still remove extents I believe if you want to get your file system into ext3 shape. Probably would involve copying them all over themselves though! Blah.
But unless we want to keep essentially ext2 forever, at some point the forward compat is going to be broken. And while ext3 is ext2 is cool, ext3 is itself available, at one time all the way back to the 2.2 series of kernels. My suspicion is that ext4 will be available for older kernel series such as 2.4 in one form or another.
In other words, a tradeoff, but not an unexpected one given a full version change.
The article says "On the downside, the new ext4 filesystem will offer only limited backward compatibility with ext3-aware Linux kernels."
Ext4 is going to be the MOST compatible with Ext3, relative to ANY other option out there.
Upgrading to Ext4 is NOT going to involve a dump and restore from Ext3, likely a tunefs -j or similar command, just as the ext2 -> ext3 migration worked. Ext4 will be able to mount ext3.
If older versions of software could use the new format, you wouldn't need the new format. Yes, upgrading to Ext4 means your 120 petabyte raid array will not be compatible with your old "ext3 aware kernel". But it is PRECISELY because such an array is not possible under ext3 that ext4 is going to be introduced.
And does this submitter think other fancy new filesystems magically work on old kernels? Of course not. Does the submitter know if ext4 will be backported and made available to older releases? It doesn't look like they gave that much thought either.
Please read this for a more detailed description of what is happening.
Slashdot's always good for a smile.
Just an FYI.
In these situations things just keep on coming and coming.
Judges and the judicial system are set up so that court orders can be enforced. Usually against reluctant subjects, so dealing with whiners is not new to them.
Even in civil cases you can get a cop with a gun to go into a business and help you settle things up if the judge orders it. Unless anti-spam people think tucows is going to arm its US office and start shooting people, they are going to comply with this order.
Spamhaus had an easy out, make a special appearance and talk about jurisdiction. Or they could have moved it to federal and fought it on the merits, which would have likely established a positive precedent in the US for voluntary opt-in to these types of published opinion blacklists. Instead they try to game the legal system in the US. That's fine, but they are likely to lose their ability to work within the US by doing so.
Here is a quote from an email from Mozilla that captures this nicely:
A couple things are important here. First, does that look like things were agreed to on a license grant? I read this as debian deciding to ignore the policy. Second, does debian have the right to sublicense their supposed grant to avoid the artwork and change the packages to other groups who want to use firefox? I doubt it, even under the debian interpretation of a grant. So you've broken the DFSG with the community who would use debian, and is going to be stuck tearing out references to firefox by hand now if they want to create works based on debian.
The choices here seem pretty clear. Fight a legal fight (that despite your "fact" you are likely to loose becuase you expressely state you are going to ignore the policy), or make a small and simple change that will avoid the whole issue together.
This is a losing debate I think for debian, because regardless of what legal technicalities you try and hang your hat on, you are going to find little support for your actions, because almost EVERY open source project actively discourages your type of activity, which is striping visual identity, changing packages, but keeping a trademarked name. I suspect debian would take the SAME position with others creating versions of debian and calling them debian.
Why then fight so hard to do something that you would make a stink about elsewhere, even if you think you can get away with it, especially given how very weak the case is to someone who has actually read the entire bug and entire email thread.
It seems time could be better spent on other things.
To be clear:
Firefox had a build switch that allowed folks to build it without branding (and do whatever they wanted to it) or build it with branding (and follow Mozilla's rules to create a consistent user experience).
Debain dev's took that build switch and broke it, so that everyone wanting to modify or adjust the debian firefox packages would have to go through and hand edit out firefox if they wanted to remove branding. They then packaged this broken thing up, and still called it firefox.
Mozilla said that was bogus, and they were right. Having that build switch makes it easier for folks to make changes to the package without worrying about branding. Redhat and others do exactly this with artwork/branding packages. We are ALL better off if such easy build time switches are available.
I've been around a while, but the debian developers are way out of line here.... You can't create some crazy messed up debian distro and call it debian, you can't create a crazy redhat distro and call it redhat, why is firefox getting all this heat? The amount of fuss they are creating is bogus and dissapointing. I read through the snide commentary and it really is depressing. Even Mozilla Foundation suggests that a non-branded version of firefox would work better for them.
Here a phase of a 500kv transmission line arcing at perhaps 100 amps.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Uun3ooPaNFU
Fun to watch. Also I'm curious of the weight on this size capacitor? Powering a car 500 miles is gonna take a fair bit of energy.
Was funny the first time, but that moo can thing got old FAST for me :)
So true. If the lexus of the space can't afford your product (and apple is the lexus of the mp3 space in terms of amount of money to burn) I'd say it's not going to be too popular with anyone else.
Search for portalplayer here: http://www.rockbox.org/irc/rockbox-20040811.txt
Granted, this isn't PR speak, but people wondering why in the world someone would use the product. Of course, as an investor, this is probably the first thing you are tracking, how good is their product relative to their competitiors. I'm just excited Apple has moved off them. Likely means we'll be seeing some good battery times.
As a point of references, some history is useful.
/ 2100-1040_3-257801.html?tag=st.ref.goo
RIM made lots and lots of noise about their own IP, and have gone after lots of people before finding themselves on the other side of the ball.
"RIM is alleging that Good is infringing on its patents, according to the suit. The first is "for a method and apparatus to remotely control gateway functions in a wireless data communications network." The second "relates to a method and system for loading an application program on a device." The third "relates to a method and system for transmitting data files between computers in a wireless data communications environment."
or this one
"Ontario, Canada-based RIM charges in a suit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Delaware that Glenayre Technologies violates a patent granted last month to RIM protecting the way the BlackBerry redirects e-mail from a computer or server to a handheld using a single e-mail address." - http://news.com.com/RIM+wins+patent%2C+sues+rival
Anyways, my point is that RIM really loved patents when they could shut out their competition with them, but disliked them when someone heard them making lots of noise about their IP and said, wait a minute, we have patents in the same area. Despite extrodinarily preferential treatment by the USPTO (ie, no one else will get patents they context reviewed that fast ever), they still were unable to prevail.
Something def needs to be fixed on the patent side, but there is something interesting also about RIM getting some of its own medicine. I wonder if someone has a more complete history on their annoucements on monetizing their IP portfolio.
It appears to make very good sense. Redhat supports a community distribution almost as well as many other players. I didn't like how little community involvement there was initially (especially without extras to start) but it's coming along, albeit a bit slowly.
And bottom line, redhat has so far played well with the community.
For a company that sells a product with bullet point after bulletpoint on their capacity, expandability, robustness etc, try going to their forums at
D =219
http://www.vmware.com/community/ or http://www.vmware.com/community/forum.jspa?forumI
These sites run like a dog, even though they presumably have access to all the latest high tech VMWare stuff, and the funds to support the highest performance forum software. Not very inspiring.
Fair point. It'll be interesting to see how the power envelopes develop (both are chasing that) and how the cost is going (the FX series is one generation behind process wise, which if they've got it really ramped up might help keep costs lower).
That said, good points. Given that AMD is not bandwidth starved, I can see them going the multi-core route, and so far I like the multi-core solutions a bit better then Intels. Next step would obviously be a quad core. Be interesting to see when their next process move is scheduled.
There seems to be agreement this article is a bit weak. Some very important things to note.
"By a series of their products' massive performance improvements, Intel hit the ball back into AMD's court."
These are products that are not out yet. Benchmarks look good, but you are comparing a product on the shelves (that's been there a while) with one that is not OK.
And by the time they come out, AMD will likely have moved on to. This is a fast paced space, so 6 month time gaps matter when doing comparisons. Product matchups in the actual market are what matter.
AMD's M2 platform looks good. The performance / watt issue matters a lot, and it will be interesting to see how that develops. Both companies are clearly chasing the power/watt area, so should be a lot of fun. The notebook space especially which is currently dominated by intel will be fun.
"Intel showed how they have the higher performing solution." This should read intel MAY have a higher performing solution sometime in the future.
I'm tired of the big announcements of victory on non-shipping parts. ATI with crossfire (lunched twice). The hype around the P4 "netburst" architecture. The itanium hype of course. PS2 movie like visuals (still a nice platform, but please).
Fun to watch, great it's a great race.
I like this idea. Perhaps do it with similar priced chips from AMD/Intel, but also check if the highest performance AMD chips can handle 10 clients, and what the performance is.
Skype made a lot of noise in their press release saying that the 10-way feature was "optimized" for Intel chips. This was picked up by the media of course as well as evidence of AMD's poor performance.
I'm having trouble understanding what this optimization that used the special features of Intel chips (presumably their high power) was. It looks from the patch that they just check who the manufacturer is, and if it is not AMD, they pretend your computer doesn't have the power to host 10 participants.
What's also interesting is that folks likely signed up for SkypeOut and other paid products not realizing that they would be treated differently depending on what chipsets they happen to use, especially as that choice matters almost no where else. They should give more warning about this to paid users.
This focus on locking software into specific vendor chips seems a dangerous one. No longer will it be the best chip that will win, but the focus goes to competing on locking up software applications. The proprietary unix'es went down that path, and it would be sad if Intel managed to get that to happen here.
For those of you following NASA, there has been a flood of earth science recently.
:) No joke, but some property like sea terminals are going to get more valuable if things warm up.
It's interesting stuff, hopefully more data will continue to help refine and quanitify our understanding of how the earth works.
And guide developers to their next beachfront property
Hey Faedle,
:) Yep, the patent system is messed up, and some of us remember a lot of RIM claims to litigate others out the market with a similar sets of bogus patents (not even the small keyboard ones).
Someone else who has followed this case from the beginning
I think their early IP talk actually popped them up on NTP's radar initially, they were making a lot of noise about it.
They got exactly what they deserved, but the system could still use a fixing, badly.