Code morphing with only one target implemented (Intel), offers nothing above buying an actual Intel chip. And as mentioned, the power savings advantage is something others have jumped on very quickly, so there's little to differentiate it. (Although laptops using TransMeta still seem to have battery life ratings beyond the competition.)
Have they ever stated any intention to implement another target for the code morphing? Being able to have the same computer be a Mac or a PC (or a Sparc) would be far more compelling, and is what I had hoped the original story was all about. Is that just not lucrative? Do they not have the resources to pull it off? Was the TransMeta designed too much with Intel in mind, so that a PPC or Sparc emulation isn't possible???
It's biggest advantage seems to have gone completely by the wayside.
Suck had a great article on "Scare quotes". They almost seem amateurish these days.
Rather pathetic to see them in an article like this; seriously, we expect Microsoft to do sneaky and scary things with their software, and everyone's on the watch for it. If we find something, there are no repercussions on them at all, it seems.
If the *government* were to be caught doing something sneaky on people's PC's, there would be a *huge* stink, heads would roll, etc.. Unlike Microsoft, they *are* accountable to the public,j especially with something as obvious as this. They're not stupid enough to put spyware or backdoors in stuff. With the slashdot crowd out there, they'd be caught in a second.
Anyone who's really worried about this has watched too many x-files episodes. Go out for a walk, get some fresh air, dudes.
Here's some examples from http://www.urbanlegends.com/death/falling_terminal _velocity.html
This is what the Guinness Book of Records has to say:
It is estimated that the human body reaches 99% of its low-level terminal velocity after falling 573m 1880ft which takes 13-14 sec. This is 117-125mph at normal atmospheric pressure and in a random posture.
(At the 1100 ft Emley Moor TV mast near me they reckon that you would reach terminal velocity (great term) well before hitting the ground)
Longest fall without a parachute:
World: Vesna Vulovic (Yugoslavia, wherever that is now), stewardess in a DC-9 which blew up at 10160m 33330ft over Serbska Kamenice, Czechoslovakia, 26 Jan 1972.
UK: Flt-Sgt Nicholas Steven Alkemade (d. 22 Jun 1987) from a blazing Lancaster bomber at 5485m 18000ft over Germany (near Oberkuerchen) on 23 Mar 1944.
On a mathematical note, the acceleration force is always constant, whereas the drag increases as the square of the speed. The line reaches an asymptote at about 125mph. Interestingly though, it is actually the 0mph bit at the end which actually kills you.
I have a small Radio Shack voice record; it does it's job exceedingly well. I can record, skip around messages, organize them into four folders, and so on, without looking at the display on it. Very handy for driving. While a PDA is technically capable of this, the voice recorder feature (WinCE's) isn't that natural for tactile-only handling of messages (while driving).
Similarly, you can get clunky digital-camera add-ons for your PDA. And cell phone add-ons. And GPS add ons. And so on. These things which have the *potential* of lowering the "device count" that I like to carry around with me, but they don't do these features well enough for me to eliminate my other devices.
When they start doing these jobs as well as the indendant devices, that's when I'll start getting excited. And when they start eliminating the need to buy or carry these other devices, more and more people will buy them.
Oh yeah, and some kick-ass battery live to go along with it would be needed as well. Give me a nice little fuel cell, and better integration with cell/camera/voice-memo/etc., and I'll be in heaven.
Oh yeah, and it shouldn't be much bigger than a matchbook, using one of those retinal projection chip thingies to give me a big screen display.:-)
I have a 2.4 ghz IEEE 802.11 wireless network in our house. Works great. (All Lucent cards.)
We have a 2.4 ghz phone, with also works great, but when we're on the phone, the throughput on the wireless lan goes down, and similarly, if there's a lot of wireless lan traffic, the phone gets interference. Tried different channels.
Tried out a wireless video relay from Radio Shack which uses 2.4 ghz. The wireless lan (even idle) causes regular noise on the screen, making it unusable. It went back.
Most annoying of all, when our microwave is on, the wireless lan loses most packets, and is almost unusable in the kitchen (and some other places).
The frequency hopping and co-existence in this band doesn't seem to work out as well in practice as it does in theory, unfortunately.
I strongly believe working habits can make a *huge* difference, and be most of the problem or solution.
A few times in the past couple of years, I've worked with the keyboard in an odd orientation (off to one side, because I had other work front and center, or raised or lowered for other reasons), and it very quickly caused pain.
It's pretty simple to prove to yourself; just set your keyboard off to a 30 degree angle to your side, and work for an hour of intensive typing. You'll feel it:-)
So let me guess, Microsoft is deciding to "embrace and replace", errr, I mean, "embrace and entend" and do this this themselves. Yet another competitor/partner made redundant by the monolith. Sigh.
One (public) class per file. This especially bugs me with small interfaces.
But requiring the one public class to match up with the filename makes tracking down the source for a class *so* much easier. You know it has to be in that file. If you could throw a bunch of public classes in one source file, you'd lose this advantage.
Such a waste of screen space and disk space (each file takes up 4k on the file system)...
Ummmm, what decade are you living in? A 120G drive, which would hold about 31 million of those 4K source files. Each million source files costs you about 15c. You must be one hell of a prolific programmer!:-)
Ohhhh, wait a minute, you're probably buying your disk drives from Sun, where it's $1400 for a 36G drive. I guess at 18x the price, that would make a difference:-)
If the BSA comes knocking at your door, you face a relatively minor penalty for that license, but then you have to pay for your legal counsel, their legal counsel, damages, the auditors, etc. The BSA knows this, and they use it to their advantage.
IANAL, but as I understand it, here in Canada we have a great solution to frivolous lawsuits and bullying through threats of groundless lawsuits. The defendant in a lawsuit can receive (or perhaps counter-sue for?) legal fees from the agressor, when such a groundless case is lost.
Knowing that a judge will make you pay for the defense in such a bullying lawsuit, can put a pretty quick stop to this type of unethical behaviour. And if you know you're clearly in the right and will likely win, it's worthwhile to float the legal fees until the buggers lose.
Forget Acme Rent-A-Car in Connecticut - get ready to have your insurance company jack your rates for going over 65mph
Give me a break. It's silly editorial comments like that make me wonder why I read slashdot, at times.:-)
Are the blockboxes on airplanes to infringe upon the pilot's rights? Of course not, they're to analyze in the case of an accident, to help understand the problem, and improve safety for all. There are many undoubtedly many, many, many car accidents that could be prevented, by better crash analysis.
If folks are so paranoid about being recorded, they should go live in a cabin on a mountaintop. Keeping a record of goings on is an aspect of society which is a good thing, and more of it is better, providing more safety and security. If you don't like it, go join another society. If you're *really* got that much to hide, the cabin on the mountaintop is probably best.
Anybody who does use any such data for other uses will be "outed" so quick it will make your head spin; look at the rent-a-car fiasco.
Perl would kick Java's ass as a cross-platform app development language if it did
Seems a bit trollish, but I'll bite. I wanted to make a large maintainable and updatable cross-platform app, with lots of time I'd choose Java. If I needed a cross-platform app that needed to be up in little time, and was never gonna be changed, I might chose your PERL with GUI Abstraction.
I don't think it's trollish at all. If you're realling talking cross platform (more than just Windows and Solaris or Linux), than you need to do one little bit of homework: generate a list of all the platforms upon Java runs well (which is different from just having a port available), and a list of platforms upon which Perl runs well. Perl is far more portable (or at least ported) than Java.
If you want multiple gigabit ports, you are looking at more than $600 for the bottom rung products.
Hey, don't knock it. Two years ago a gigabit switch would run you $5000-$1000! Things are definitely getting more reasonable. Maybe not for the average (non-geek:-) home, but for business, it's getting very accessible.
the board you picked up with no ports and ribbion options. where did you get whats its name and how much
It was actually sold as an upgrade card by PowerLeap, but it's an upgrade card that requires you disconnect power from your motherboard; the motherboard becomes just a holder for the new single board computer, in effect.
So their reasoning for having the jumpered-out ports is a little different; so you can plumb in the upgrade card to an old PC. But the effect is good for those who choose to use it as a single board computer:-)
The unit is pretty amazing; it has 3D graphics, sound, up to 1G memory, 1ghz procsesor, sound, game port, three serial, parallel, PS/2 mouse & keyboard, *four* USB, dual IDE, and probably some other goodies I'm forgetting. All on a PCI card sized unit.
The pricing was very good; check out powerleap's store for details. (Mine was the 370S.)
(Mine actually came with a broken CPU fan, but they assure me a new one is en-route.) I'll probably do up a review for/. once I get Linux fired up on it (and make a new newsworthy custom case for it; let's see, maybe popsicle sticks...)
Can anyone guess how successful a Linux installation would be on such a motherboard? (Without even a PS/2 keyboard port, I'm wondering if the RedHat installer would even talk to you, without a lot of hacking and customization.)
Removing all legacy ports seems a bit silly, to me; it takes so little to provide serial and parallel ports, they're usually integrated into some other multi-purpose I/O chip these days anyway. Sure, don't bother to have the full port on the mother board (just hook up a ribbon cable to some pins, if you need to break out the port), and allow people to disable it. But completely removing it would limit it's utility to some folks. I picked up a little motherboard recently which had no ports mounted, but everything (VGA, serial, parallel, game, sound, etc.) could be hooked up via ribbon cable to a little breakout connector. Saved a lot of space on the motherboard, but still gave you the functionality you might need.
(In fact, a lot of the same folks who would get excited about the built-in raid, are the same folks who still need serial ports to talk to routers and switches and stuff.)
You will need to sell a lot of pills to make back the money you have invested. As a distributor, you will have spent at least $240 in materials to get started, and you are probably anxious to get that money back in sales. If you are a Supervisor, you have an easier road, but it is a lot longer, because you are trying to make up for buying that initial $2,000 in product.
So, $240 to start, and $2000 for Supervisor. How much will it cost me to get to OT3?
One of the biggest problems in DOS attacks, is that you just can't get the attention of major ISP's or backbones to trace and solve the problem.
We had major DOS attacks on our site for ages. But when the customer of a major national ISP is the source of it, try getting ahold of someone at that company to track the problem. They just won't respond to these things, in our experience.
I think that for any company to provide internet service, they should be *required* by law, to cooperate in tracking and stopping DOS attacks from their customers. There needs to be a consistent, predictable, and workable national policy for this.
If someone calls me with threatening phone calls, I *know* it's possible to get the phone company to cooperate, track, and isolate the problem, even if it originates with another phone company. The same should be true with ISP's.
Re:Wireless Monitor? Not happening...
on
Wireless Monitors?
·
· Score: 2
"The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical. It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF bandwidth and/or power required to do it would either kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you implement it."
But couldn't it be done reasonably over short distances? I have a little radioshack video relay thing which sends a few hundred feet, reasonably well No cooked intestines or cancer yet.
You'd think that if you kept the distances small, you could get fairly high quality wireless monitors, with low RF emissions. (I'm mainly interested in a couple of feet, from the PC to the monitor, not hundreds of feet.)
The announcement was pretty thin on technical details. What exactly is meant by "Solid State Disk." Are there spinning platters? That title implies not, to me. Exactly what technology allows 224G of storage in non-platter form? Is this an actual commercial implementation of the crystal holography gunk and other amazing "future" stuff?
It sure would be interesting to know if this is a real advance, or just a big disk.
While it looks like quite an amazing feat regardless, there are some pictures of that special vehicle floating in water; if it is amphibious, it kind of streteches the definition of "driving" across. If at times you're floating, it is sort of like taking a boat when necessary.
Its a fine line, but basically MS is saying "no GPL for you" because they dont want people to be forced into giving away source/object code for the implementation. Just use a BSD license and pretend in your head its GPL instead.
While in general I am a huge fan of the BSD License, and don't like the GPL, I can see why MS is doing this. With BSD licenses, they are free to use any code that's out there under that license, and incorporate it into their product (as they have done in the past, with networking code). So if the Samba team were forced into FreeBSD licensing because of this, and did some things better or more efficient, MS could use Samba's code to improve their product.
And, being a BSD License fan, I don't have anything against this, if it weren't for the fact that MS were a conficted predatory monopolist; any problem I have with them doing anything like this is solely due to pathetic lack of punishment or reasonable sactions by the government, in trying to make them play fair.
The GPL isn't the solution to this problem, proper enforcement of antitrust law is. -me
Slashdot Mirror
Code morphing with only one target implemented (Intel), offers nothing above buying an actual Intel chip. And as mentioned, the power savings advantage is something others have jumped on very quickly, so there's little to differentiate it. (Although laptops using TransMeta still seem to have battery life ratings beyond the competition.)
Have they ever stated any intention to implement another target for the code morphing? Being able to have the same computer be a Mac or a PC (or a Sparc) would be far more compelling, and is what I had hoped the original story was all about. Is that just not lucrative? Do they not have the resources to pull it off? Was the TransMeta designed too much with Intel in mind, so that a PPC or Sparc emulation isn't possible???
It's biggest advantage seems to have gone completely by the wayside.
Suck had a great article on "Scare quotes". They almost seem amateurish these days.
Rather pathetic to see them in an article like this; seriously, we expect Microsoft to do sneaky and scary things with their software, and everyone's on the watch for it. If we find something, there are no repercussions on them at all, it seems.
If the *government* were to be caught doing something sneaky on people's PC's, there would be a *huge* stink, heads would roll, etc.. Unlike Microsoft, they *are* accountable to the public,j especially with something as obvious as this. They're not stupid enough to put spyware or backdoors in stuff. With the slashdot crowd out there, they'd be caught in a second.
Anyone who's really worried about this has watched too many x-files episodes. Go out for a walk, get some fresh air, dudes.
Here's some examples from http://www.urbanlegends.com/death/falling_terminal _velocity.html
This is what the Guinness Book of Records has to say:
It is estimated that the human body reaches 99% of its low-level terminal velocity after falling 573m 1880ft which takes 13-14 sec. This is 117-125mph at normal atmospheric pressure and in a
random posture.
(At the 1100 ft Emley Moor TV mast near me they reckon that you would reach terminal velocity (great term) well before hitting the ground)
Longest fall without a parachute:
World: Vesna Vulovic (Yugoslavia, wherever that is now), stewardess in a DC-9 which blew up at 10160m 33330ft over Serbska Kamenice, Czechoslovakia, 26 Jan 1972.
UK: Flt-Sgt Nicholas Steven Alkemade (d. 22 Jun 1987) from a blazing Lancaster bomber at 5485m 18000ft over Germany (near Oberkuerchen) on 23 Mar 1944.
On a mathematical note, the acceleration force is always constant, whereas the drag increases as the square of the speed. The line reaches an asymptote at about 125mph. Interestingly though,
it is actually the 0mph bit at the end which actually kills you.
Even modern pilots and astronauts are not immune, first those drunken pilots, and even worse:
Crack found on space shuttle
I have a small Radio Shack voice record; it does it's job exceedingly well. I can record, skip around messages, organize them into four folders, and so on, without looking at the display on it. Very handy for driving. While a PDA is technically capable of this, the voice recorder feature (WinCE's) isn't that natural for tactile-only handling of messages (while driving).
:-)
Similarly, you can get clunky digital-camera add-ons for your PDA. And cell phone add-ons. And GPS add ons. And so on. These things which have the *potential* of lowering the "device count" that I like to carry around with me, but they don't do these features well enough for me to eliminate my other devices.
When they start doing these jobs as well as the indendant devices, that's when I'll start getting excited. And when they start eliminating the need to buy or carry these other devices, more and more people will buy them.
Oh yeah, and some kick-ass battery live to go along with it would be needed as well. Give me a nice little fuel cell, and better integration with cell/camera/voice-memo/etc., and I'll be in heaven.
Oh yeah, and it shouldn't be much bigger than a matchbook, using one of those retinal projection chip thingies to give me a big screen display.
-me
I have a 2.4 ghz IEEE 802.11 wireless network in our house. Works great. (All Lucent cards.)
We have a 2.4 ghz phone, with also works great, but when we're on the phone, the throughput on the wireless lan goes down, and similarly, if there's a lot of wireless lan traffic, the phone gets interference. Tried different channels.
Tried out a wireless video relay from Radio Shack which uses 2.4 ghz. The wireless lan (even idle) causes regular noise on the screen, making it unusable. It went back.
Most annoying of all, when our microwave is on, the wireless lan loses most packets, and is almost unusable in the kitchen (and some other places).
The frequency hopping and co-existence in this band doesn't seem to work out as well in practice as it does in theory, unfortunately.
-me
I strongly believe working habits can make a *huge* difference, and be most of the problem or solution.
:-)
A few times in the past couple of years, I've worked with the keyboard in an odd orientation (off to one side, because I had other work front and center, or raised or lowered for other reasons), and it very quickly caused pain.
It's pretty simple to prove to yourself; just set your keyboard off to a 30 degree angle to your side, and work for an hour of intensive typing. You'll feel it
So let me guess, Microsoft is deciding to "embrace and replace", errr, I mean, "embrace and entend" and do this this themselves. Yet another competitor/partner made redundant by the monolith. Sigh.
Ummmm, what decade are you living in? A 120G drive, which would hold about 31 million of those 4K source files. Each million source files costs you about 15c. You must be one hell of a prolific programmer!
Ohhhh, wait a minute, you're probably buying your disk drives from Sun, where it's $1400 for a 36G drive. I guess at 18x the price, that would make a difference
Knowing that a judge will make you pay for the defense in such a bullying lawsuit, can put a pretty quick stop to this type of unethical behaviour. And if you know you're clearly in the right and will likely win, it's worthwhile to float the legal fees until the buggers lose.
Are the blockboxes on airplanes to infringe upon the pilot's rights? Of course not, they're to analyze in the case of an accident, to help understand the problem, and improve safety for all. There are many undoubtedly many, many, many car accidents that could be prevented, by better crash analysis.
If folks are so paranoid about being recorded, they should go live in a cabin on a mountaintop. Keeping a record of goings on is an aspect of society which is a good thing, and more of it is better, providing more safety and security. If you don't like it, go join another society. If you're *really* got that much to hide, the cabin on the mountaintop is probably best.
Anybody who does use any such data for other uses will be "outed" so quick it will make your head spin; look at the rent-a-car fiasco.
In related news, Cern is reporting that "File, Open" is generally considered a huge security risk in all versions of IE.
So their reasoning for having the jumpered-out ports is a little different; so you can plumb in the upgrade card to an old PC. But the effect is good for those who choose to use it as a single board computer
The unit is pretty amazing; it has 3D graphics, sound, up to 1G memory, 1ghz procsesor, sound, game port, three serial, parallel, PS/2 mouse & keyboard, *four* USB, dual IDE, and probably some other goodies I'm forgetting. All on a PCI card sized unit.
The pricing was very good; check out powerleap's store for details. (Mine was the 370S.)
(Mine actually came with a broken CPU fan, but they assure me a new one is en-route.) I'll probably do up a review for
Can anyone guess how successful a Linux installation would be on such a motherboard? (Without even a PS/2 keyboard port, I'm wondering if the RedHat installer would even talk to you, without a lot of hacking and customization.)
Removing all legacy ports seems a bit silly, to me; it takes so little to provide serial and parallel ports, they're usually integrated into some other multi-purpose I/O chip these days anyway. Sure, don't bother to have the full port on the mother board (just hook up a ribbon cable to some pins, if you need to break out the port), and allow people to disable it. But completely removing it would limit it's utility to some folks. I picked up a little motherboard recently which had no ports mounted, but everything (VGA, serial, parallel, game, sound, etc.) could be hooked up via ribbon cable to a little breakout connector. Saved a lot of space on the motherboard, but still gave you the functionality you might need.
(In fact, a lot of the same folks who would get excited about the built-in raid, are the same folks who still need serial ports to talk to routers and switches and stuff.)
-me
One of the biggest problems in DOS attacks, is that you just can't get the attention of major ISP's or backbones to trace and solve the problem.
We had major DOS attacks on our site for ages. But when the customer of a major national ISP is the source of it, try getting ahold of someone at that company to track the problem. They just won't respond to these things, in our experience.
I think that for any company to provide internet service, they should be *required* by law, to cooperate in tracking and stopping DOS attacks from their customers. There needs to be a consistent, predictable, and workable national policy for this.
If someone calls me with threatening phone calls, I *know* it's possible to get the phone company to cooperate, track, and isolate the problem, even if it originates with another phone company. The same should be true with ISP's.
You'd think that if you kept the distances small, you could get fairly high quality wireless monitors, with low RF emissions. (I'm mainly interested in a couple of feet, from the PC to the monitor, not hundreds of feet.)
If my employer ever publicly said anything like that, I'd run for the exits.
Wonder if the chants are part of the brainwashing process.
Developers, developers, developers, developers.
Developers, developers, developers, developers.
Developers, developers, developers, developers.
The announcement was pretty thin on technical details. What exactly is meant by "Solid State Disk." Are there spinning platters? That title implies not, to me. Exactly what technology allows 224G of storage in non-platter form? Is this an actual commercial implementation of the crystal holography gunk and other amazing "future" stuff?
It sure would be interesting to know if this is a real advance, or just a big disk.
-me
While it looks like quite an amazing feat regardless, there are some pictures of that special vehicle floating in water; if it is amphibious, it kind of streteches the definition of "driving" across. If at times you're floating, it is sort of like taking a boat when necessary.
If it doesn't have a Casino and a Health Club on board, I don't want it.
-me
And, being a BSD License fan, I don't have anything against this, if it weren't for the fact that MS were a conficted predatory monopolist; any problem I have with them doing anything like this is solely due to pathetic lack of punishment or reasonable sactions by the government, in trying to make them play fair.
The GPL isn't the solution to this problem, proper enforcement of antitrust law is.
-me