With IBM shipping Opteron boxes, and now Sun
announcing, it seems the Opteron architecture
probably has legs. When HP announces, all
doubt will fade.
(If you never had doubts about Opteron's
ultimate prospects, consider Alpha.
It had more going for it than Opteron ever did,
and generations earlier. Current Alphas (EV7
and EV79) are fully competitive with current
Opteron and Itanium, even without a proper
engineering team for several years, yet the
Alpha is "dead".)
Intel could do a lot worse than to revive it.
It may need to, to stay competitive with
Opteron.
I found Lyons's previous article, about EFF
hitmen, to be tongue-in-cheek and quite funny.
All the direct quotes in that article made the EFF
principals seem like reasonable people. The
silly editorial remarks probably were meant
to appeal to Forbes editors, some of whom are
real whackos, hired by the Chief Whacko
himself, Steve Forbes, and the rest of whom
know they have to tread lightly around him.
Lyons is evidently more careful with his facts
than most of the reporters we like to count as
clueful. Still, it would have been better to
credit GNU to the FSF, and not just to Stallman
personally.
It says, "The Cornyn-Feinstein bill also creates another federal felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, for using 'an audiovisual recording device' in a movie theater to make a copy of a film and boosts civil penalties available to MPAA member companies when suing over prerelease movies placed on the Internet."
I wonder whether one person making an audio
recording, and another just recording video,
would each qualify for prosecution. Is making
a copy of a movie really worse than making a
copy of a concert performance, with no video?
Why does nobody who is looking for life on Mars
ever seem to consider putting a microscope on
board? If you were wondering whether something
was growing in your hummus, you would start by
sniffing it, but if 25M UKP was riding
on the answer, wouldn't you look at it under
a microscope?
They already have a steerable camera on board,
so all they needed else was a pair of lenses
at the ends of a tube, and a flash. That
would have fit within the 100g they had
left in their mass budget.
In fact, I have the predecessor to the K6, which
was called NexGen. It emulates a 386 but runs
at about 10% faster than an equivalently-clocked
Pentium, ~100MHz.
Nowadays the instruction decoder is such a small
part of the chip, you could easily afford to put
on two of them. Then, it would be easy to
transition customers to a better instruction set,
by supporting both simultaneously. A system based
on such a chip could run programs for both, but
the programs recompiled to the new instruction set
would be faster because they can make better use
of all the parts of the machine.
People building for that target would naturally
use the mode that produces the faster code.
Of course the OS would be compiled that way,
too. Only code for which speed doesn't matter
(i.e. most commercial programs) would still
be built to the old target.
The new instruction set could not be designed
entirely de novo, because it would retain
some details needed to get access to peculiarities
of the x86 machine. However, it could be very
much cleaner, and easier to generate and
optimize, than regular x86.
I can just imagine the insane grin
on the face of the guy who named
the K1. "Long after I've moved on,
they'll have to release generation nine
of this thing, and then I'll have my revenge!
Ha ha ha."
Clairvoyance, telepathy, and out-of-body travel
don't seem to help on standardized,
multiple-choice exams.
They should get some of the patients to pray
for the others, and see if the ones who
pray do better. Then, they should tell
some of the patients they're being prayed for,
and see if those do better than the ones they
don't tell.
This study could be valuable if it
provides a baseline set of procedures for
studying questions like this. That they
didn't find any difference suggests that their
methods are sound.
There was a psychologist
who spent an enormous amount of time running
rats in mazes and figuring out how to keep them
from being able to solve the maze by any means
except memory. It turned out to be really hard.
Later research has mostly ignored his methods,
and got mostly meaningless results, because rats
are good at using all kinds of clues to tell
where they are and where other rats have been.
Does no one see the sardonic humor in this article? The quotes are all straight up, revealing normal people speaking reasonably. The contrast with the narration is comical. I think the author is having fun with the idea, maybe playing a trick on his own editors.
The people making CG movies these days (Toy Story N,
Shrek, Bug's Life, etc.) should re-run their
rendering scripts with the "camera position"
set off a few inches, so they can release 3D
versions when the tech to watch it is widely
available.
Of course it ain't that easy. But it's got to
be a lot cheaper than making a whole bloody new
film. (I hope they archived the rendering
scripts!) For the older movies they should be
able to re-render in a small fraction of the
time spent on the original.
You might as well ask about Delphi, or Object-Pascal. Anybody interested in languages
feels the same way about them as about Java
and a host of other languages whose names
neither you nor I can even remember.
They're all proprietary languages that broke no new ground, and were promoted for a while by dying
companies, and will all soon be forgotten.
In five years we'll wonder why anybody even
mentioned Java.
Why doesn't the article note that Fred von Lohmann,
of the EFF, has vaulted from obscurity to 15th
place? He has edged out Eric Schmidt, Scott
McNealy, and Sergey Brin! (Never mind Don Knuth,
Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison.)
If it was ordinary matter, it ought to make
stars, or smash into other bits, and then
we'd see it. When they say "weakly interacting",
that includes gravity but not electromagnetics
or nuclear forces.
The assumption that these photons have anything to
do with dark matter, though, has more to do with
fashion and funding than actual science. It's
cool and helpful to have your new observation
associated with something everybody's already
keen on. What they do know, though, is that
whatever's producing the photons is distributed
like the galaxy's mass is, not like the visible
stars are.
That's still among my favorite books. I doubt
I'll ever buy the annotated edition, though.
I'd rather buy up copies of his "The Peace War"
to lend out to the deserving.
I have tried out lots of minimalist keyboards.
The Happy Hacking keyboard, like many, has
membrane keys, so its action is crap. Back
in the early 80s, Apple tried to ship Apple ][s
with keyboards like that and got most of them
back. Despite occasional lapses, Apple has a good
record for the quality of keyboards it ships.
I have been using a Goldtouch adjustable
keyboard for more than a year and am very happy
with it. The only serious annoyance is that they
put various locking keys too close to the shift
key, so I hit them accidentally.
Incidentally, it's bad for your wrists to put
up the little legs under the back corners of
most keyboards. You're better off to tilt it
away from you, if you can, or at least leave
it flat. When your wrists are straight, your
fingers curl under.
The original decision was based on a biased assumption that the original reverse-engineering and publication were illegal in Norway. At last report the Norwegian court had rejected that assertion. Norwegian law specifically forbids anti-reverse-engineering clauses in contracts. The confused or arm-twisted Norwegian prosecutors said they meant to ask for a re-trial. I haven't seen any news about results of that re-trial, if any.
The "knew or should have known" test should not have been applied to the original trade-secret violation case. It appears that not even Norway's prosecutor "knows", and its court certainly thinks not. How would some kid who's never been there be expected to "know"? The only outcome that would not embarrass California's courts any further would be to decide that there was no remaining trade secret at the time of the original filing.
There is no evidence whatsoever that aliens
from outer space are involved in the outages.
In other news, power companies are quoting
$10,000/kwh for emergency power, which NY state
will be obliged to pay under contracts signed
by the previous administration. This will
lead to a recall election for the governor.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel hired them.
(If you never had doubts about Opteron's ultimate prospects, consider Alpha. It had more going for it than Opteron ever did, and generations earlier. Current Alphas (EV7 and EV79) are fully competitive with current Opteron and Itanium, even without a proper engineering team for several years, yet the Alpha is "dead".)
Intel could do a lot worse than to revive it. It may need to, to stay competitive with Opteron.
Lyons is evidently more careful with his facts than most of the reporters we like to count as clueful. Still, it would have been better to credit GNU to the FSF, and not just to Stallman personally.
I wonder whether one person making an audio recording, and another just recording video, would each qualify for prosecution. Is making a copy of a movie really worse than making a copy of a concert performance, with no video?
They already have a steerable camera on board, so all they needed else was a pair of lenses at the ends of a tube, and a flash. That would have fit within the 100g they had left in their mass budget.
Next time, I guess.
I run GNU on my machines. I'm not picky about kernels.
Please tell us that it doesn't depend on Xerces-C++. That would make the whole thing useless.
Think how much faster it will be when they switch all the nodes over to Linux! :-)/2
I missed the Aurora Borealis from the last one because it was socked in around here. Now the sky is clear, I might get to see it this time.
In fact, I have the predecessor to the K6, which was called NexGen. It emulates a 386 but runs at about 10% faster than an equivalently-clocked Pentium, ~100MHz.
People building for that target would naturally use the mode that produces the faster code. Of course the OS would be compiled that way, too. Only code for which speed doesn't matter (i.e. most commercial programs) would still be built to the old target.
The new instruction set could not be designed entirely de novo, because it would retain some details needed to get access to peculiarities of the x86 machine. However, it could be very much cleaner, and easier to generate and optimize, than regular x86.
I can just imagine the insane grin on the face of the guy who named the K1. "Long after I've moved on, they'll have to release generation nine of this thing, and then I'll have my revenge! Ha ha ha."
Are there differences between the expected longevity of media for the different technologies?
They should get some of the patients to pray for the others, and see if the ones who pray do better. Then, they should tell some of the patients they're being prayed for, and see if those do better than the ones they don't tell.
This study could be valuable if it provides a baseline set of procedures for studying questions like this. That they didn't find any difference suggests that their methods are sound.
There was a psychologist who spent an enormous amount of time running rats in mazes and figuring out how to keep them from being able to solve the maze by any means except memory. It turned out to be really hard. Later research has mostly ignored his methods, and got mostly meaningless results, because rats are good at using all kinds of clues to tell where they are and where other rats have been.
It's funny. Laugh.
Of course it ain't that easy. But it's got to be a lot cheaper than making a whole bloody new film. (I hope they archived the rendering scripts!) For the older movies they should be able to re-render in a small fraction of the time spent on the original.
In five years we'll wonder why anybody even mentioned Java.
Go Fred!
The assumption that these photons have anything to do with dark matter, though, has more to do with fashion and funding than actual science. It's cool and helpful to have your new observation associated with something everybody's already keen on. What they do know, though, is that whatever's producing the photons is distributed like the galaxy's mass is, not like the visible stars are.
That's still among my favorite books. I doubt I'll ever buy the annotated edition, though. I'd rather buy up copies of his "The Peace War" to lend out to the deserving.
It might be a nice phone, and it might even be a nice PDA, but I will never, ever do business with Sprint again.
I have been using a Goldtouch adjustable keyboard for more than a year and am very happy with it. The only serious annoyance is that they put various locking keys too close to the shift key, so I hit them accidentally.
Incidentally, it's bad for your wrists to put up the little legs under the back corners of most keyboards. You're better off to tilt it away from you, if you can, or at least leave it flat. When your wrists are straight, your fingers curl under.
The "knew or should have known" test should not have been applied to the original trade-secret violation case. It appears that not even Norway's prosecutor "knows", and its court certainly thinks not. How would some kid who's never been there be expected to "know"? The only outcome that would not embarrass California's courts any further would be to decide that there was no remaining trade secret at the time of the original filing.
In other news, power companies are quoting $10,000/kwh for emergency power, which NY state will be obliged to pay under contracts signed by the previous administration. This will lead to a recall election for the governor.
It's clear that only shuttles whose names start with the letter "C" blow up. Have we run through them all yet? If so, it's clear sailing!