Well, there are sources for this stuff on many mobos. The randomness is confined to the last couple of bits, so you'd have to take several of these together to get anything useful.
The sources I'm referring to are the CPU and ambient temperature sensors and the fan RPM sensors. Now, once a system has been running for a while these numbers will tend to stabilize around a specific value for a given system and configuration (your fan speed and CPU temp shouldn't be fluctuating wildly!), but the last couple of bits ought to fluctuate some. (Depending on specific hardware and the driver that reads it.)
Those are undoubtedly good reasons to switch -- but they are based on the premise that what one has doesn't work (well) or no longer works well.
While that may be true for some folks, my sites are relatively low volume, run on Unix (well, Linux), and don't yet need the Module Enhancements (although I ought to take a closer look at what's available), that doesn't really apply in my case. (OTOH, I'm about to download Tomcat 4.1 for my JSPs.)
Not very anxiously, mind, but I started playing around with Tomcat 3.x a while back to develop some internal apps, figured with 4.1 coming up I'd wait on it to upgrade.
Apache 1.3 works just fine for lots of basic website needs. Why upgrade just for the sake of upgrading? That's proprietary software's game.
Yeah, one of these days I'll upgrade my webservers, (probably when I decide to do a full install of the latest version of a distro that includes it) but there's no particular rush at the moment.
Re:MS *makes* money on every XBox they sell.
on
XBox Linux HOWTOs
·
· Score: 2
You were the one that brought up "customers" first. I guess you meant those game developers and publishers -- not traditionally an industry that knows squat about electronics hardware manufacturing.
And sure it's a mistake to apply the same standards as for PCs to consoles -- traditionally, more specialized and limited function hardware is cheaper to manufacture in large quantities than PCs. The PC field changes too fast to set up lines for a multi-year production run, so startup costs have to be amortized over fewer units.
As for "believe analysts and insiders when they say that MS doesn't [make money on every unit they sell]" -- show me an analyst report in this fiscal year (not last year when MSFT wrote off the startup costs) that actually says that, rather than saying weasel words like "rumor has it that..".
I've done system engineering and electronics manufacturing. I've been following the consumer electronics and computer industries for a lot of years, my wife's an industrial engineer and some of our best friends are production engineers.
I haven't seen Microsoft's specific numbers, but for what they're selling at the volume they're making them, with the purchasing clout they have, if they are losing money on each unit then they've got some pretty stupid people in their manufacturing and purchasing divisions. Not impossible, I suppose, but hardly the way to bet.
Heck, not only do the frames not need to communicate with any other frame to be rendered, the same is also true for most of the pixels. (Absolutely so for classic ray tracing, less so for other rendering techniques.)
On the other hand, however, many of the modelling techniques used to generate/animate the scenes to be rendered are memory bandwidth intensive as they basically amount to physics simulations in themselves. (Think particle systems, water effects (fluid dynamics), motion of things like hair and fabric, etc.)
Since the encoding techniques for both OGG and MP3 take advantage of psychoacoustic phenomenon unique to human hearing (well, maybe other primates too, but they can't tell us), a program to "objectively" determine the quality is a non-option.
You don't feed compressed images or video to machine vision systems either, for similar reasons.
Re:MS *makes* money on every XBox they sell.
on
XBox Linux HOWTOs
·
· Score: 2
Ever take one of those things apart and see just how simple the design really is from a manufacturing perspective?
Anyway, you can believe what you want. If you want to believe rumors of what customers think the costs are, go right ahead.
But for a realistic perspective, you might want to talk to some industrial or manufacturing engineers.
Re:MS *makes* money on every XBox they sell.
on
XBox Linux HOWTOs
·
· Score: 2
Chips are cheap, once the production line is ramped up. A DVD drive only costs a couple more dollars (at the manufacturing end) than a CD drive. A game controller and TV adapter wholesale for a buck or so apiece.
Remember, you've got to look at manufacturer's production cost, not what they sell it to OEMs for, not what the OEMs wholesale it for, and not what the retailer sells it for. You can bet that with Microsoft's clout, that's the price they're looking at.
Also remember that it's in Microsoft's interests for everyone (except maybe the shareholders who seriously look at such details, ie not many of them) to think that the box costs more to make than it does -- that way they think they're getting a better deal or snookering Microsoft.
The industry is littered with the corpses of companies who thought they were snookering Microsoft.
The thing is really powered by a "Mr. Fusion" in the trunk.
Re:MS *makes* money on every XBox they sell.
on
XBox Linux HOWTOs
·
· Score: 2
Walmart sells a Microtel PC -- 800 MHz CPU, 128 MB 133MHz RAM, 10 GB hard drive, etc, etc -- for $199.86. You know they're not taking a loss on that. Take out the keyboard, speakers, heavy duty case, power supply, PCI slots, serial and parallel ports, and use that money to upgrade the CD to a DVD and put better video in, and you (especially if you're buying in the kind of volume and can make the kind of sweetheart deals that Microsoft can ("gee, it'd be a real shame if the next version of Windows didn't have a driver for this piece of hardware that you sell")) probably have a bit of profit margin left over.
Re:Why are we trying to do this at all?
on
XBox Linux HOWTOs
·
· Score: 2
Absolutely. Glad to see there are a few people here that get it.
A bit more on the pricing: that XBox doesn't include a keyboard or the modchip you'll need to let it run Linux. And there's also the risk you'll take in frying the thing when you mod it.
Meanwhile you can get a pretty good preassembled PC for $199. Walmart.com is showing an 800 MHz, 128MB RAM, 10GB disk, 10/100 ethernet with machine with Linux preinstalled (okay, Lindows, but hey), keyboard and wheel mouse for $199.86.
Shop the mom'n'pop whitebox stores you can probably find something equivalent (quick check of local ads shows pretty decent kits in that price range, with the low-end on preassembled going for about twice that price with twice the CPU speed, twice the memory and four times the disk space.)
MS *makes* money on every XBox they sell.
on
XBox Linux HOWTOs
·
· Score: 2
I keep reading MS is losing money on every single xbox they sell
Ancient history. This has been gone over before from time to time on/. when someone brings it up. It's no longer true -- but Microsoft would love to have you believe it. (Makes you think you're getting a good deal, for one.)
Yeah, the first year, they had to write down R&D costs, pay start-up costs like for molds for the housing, circuit board design and low-volume prototypes, etc, etc. On a per-unit basis that first year, yeah, they probably took a hit. They wrote that off against taxes.
All that stuff is now paid for. Incremental costs for case, circuit boards, etc is as low as you'd expect of anything else with that kind of production run. Hardware costs (chips, memory, drive, etc.) are lower now than a year ago. Et cetera, et cetera.
Margins may be thin with the lowered price, but they're not negative.
Besides which, every XBox they sell is one more they can point to when talking to game designers, trying to convince them to develop games for the XBox exclusively or at least before any other platform.
There's also no way that a vinyl LP has anything like a 90dB dynamic range. More like low-to-mid 50s, maybe approaching 60dB with a virgin pressing on high-quality vinyl. That's a factor of 1000 to 10,000 right there -- bringing the lower limit into the 5 micron range.
Furthermore, the spacing between grooves (or rather, successive revolutions on the same spiral groove, to be pedantic) isn't uniform. The grooves are spaced closer together during quiet portions, and further apart during loud parts, to give more space to larger-amplitude waves. (The second photo in the article gives a great example of this.)
This can cause problems with really loud recordings. I know of at least one recording of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" (the one with the cannons) that came with a warning about setting the tracking force appropriately lest the wild excursions during the finale cause the needle to jump the track. (It also had a warning about making sure your speakers had overload protection.)
I seem to recall in the last days of turntables and vinyl records, when CDs were starting to take over, that some company came out with a no-contact record pick-up that bounced light off the grooves. This is sort of a variation on that idea, except you don't need to spin the record.
how do you move from the speed of light without accelleration?
Magic. Or rather, "it's just created that way". Consider an electron changing energy levels and emitting a photon. That photon does not accelerate from whatever speed the electron has up to the speed of light, it's created going at the speed of light. A hypothetical tachyon is created going faster than light. Such a tachyon also has an imaginary rest mass, but it's never at rest.
Actually that's an excellent use for a digital camera. Take pictures of every step of disassembly -- that way you not only know which pieces go together, but in what order. Use something like a Sony Mavica (or transfer the images to computer and burn a CD) and you can just keep the disc with the disassembled equipment. It's saved me a few headaches.
(The idea isn't new -- Polaroid pushed this for a while as a use for their instant pictures -- but at about a dollar a picture, that's too expensive for most things complicated enough to need it. Custom machinery might be an exception.)
Jabber-based client application will do something like
[jabber steps omitted]
What I'm trying to figure out is how this is easier, more robust, or otherwise superior to
[tcp socket steps omitted]
It looks to me like pretty much the same set of steps. I'm honestly confused about what the Jabber layer adds, other than xml buzzword compliance. Anyone?
The XML buzzword compliance is actually pretty significant -- not so much for the message content (as you point out, you can send XML with plain old TCP), as for the wrapper. Routing of TCP packets is done at a level way below what most applications can or want to handle; routing of Jabber's XML packets is handled at the application level, and there are standard ways to tell Jabber "routers" (servers) where (what user or service) the packet is to go to. Further, Jabber messages can be stored and forwarded if the destination address isn't currently available. (More like email in this sense).
I think that may be the step you're missing -- the point of Jabber isn't for the client to talk to the server, it's to route through the server to another client (or group of clients).
Because it's XML-based, it is extensible in well-understood ways that any given Jabber-enabled program can safely ignore if it doesn't understand the extension. (But a human might be able to figure out by inspection.)
Protocols are about making it easy for different developers to create programs that will cooperate with each other. Sure, you could create an email system (for example) that used raw RPC calls between client and server, but nobody else would be able to talk to it, at least not without using that same RPC API, which constrains the design. A standard protocol (eg SMTP in this case) simplifies things greatly -- heck, I can send email via telnet to port 25 if I want.
Beyond that (eg your questions about why XML-RPC), well, sure, some of it is just fad or using what tools you already know vs learning a new one. (The "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" syndrome.) On the other hand I've seen pretty fair arguments that XML is just an exotic dialect of LISP, so why not?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there are sources for this stuff on many mobos. The randomness is confined to the last couple of bits, so you'd have to take several of these together to get anything useful.
The sources I'm referring to are the CPU and ambient temperature sensors and the fan RPM sensors. Now, once a system has been running for a while these numbers will tend to stabilize around a specific value for a given system and configuration (your fan speed and CPU temp shouldn't be fluctuating wildly!), but the last couple of bits ought to fluctuate some. (Depending on specific hardware and the driver that reads it.)
> units
1378 units, 57 prefixes
You have: gigabits/hectare
You want: bits/square/micron
Unknown unit 'square'.
You want: bits/micron^2
* 1e-07
/ 10000000
Quick, somebody add both of those to the units(1) database.
You have: libraryofcongress/strandofhair
You want: bits/micron^2
Those are undoubtedly good reasons to switch -- but they are based on the premise that what one has doesn't work (well) or no longer works well.
While that may be true for some folks, my sites are relatively low volume, run on Unix (well, Linux), and don't yet need the Module Enhancements (although I ought to take a closer look at what's available), that doesn't really apply in my case.
(OTOH, I'm about to download Tomcat 4.1 for my JSPs.)
Not very anxiously, mind, but I started playing around with Tomcat 3.x a while back to develop some internal apps, figured with 4.1 coming up I'd wait on it to upgrade.
;)
Guess I know what I'll be doing tomorrow.
(Oh boy, new toys
Apache 1.3 works just fine for lots of basic website needs. Why upgrade just for the sake of upgrading? That's proprietary software's game.
Yeah, one of these days I'll upgrade my webservers, (probably when I decide to do a full install of the latest version of a distro that includes it) but there's no particular rush at the moment.
You were the one that brought up "customers" first. I guess you meant those game developers and publishers -- not traditionally an industry that knows squat about electronics hardware manufacturing.
And sure it's a mistake to apply the same standards as for PCs to consoles -- traditionally, more specialized and limited function hardware is cheaper to manufacture in large quantities than PCs. The PC field changes too fast to set up lines for a multi-year production run, so startup costs have to be amortized over fewer units.
As for "believe analysts and insiders when they say that MS doesn't [make money on every unit they sell]" -- show me an analyst report in this fiscal year (not last year when MSFT wrote off the startup costs) that actually says that, rather than saying weasel words like "rumor has it that..".
I've done system engineering and electronics manufacturing. I've been following the consumer electronics and computer industries for a lot of years, my wife's an industrial engineer and some of our best friends are production engineers.
I haven't seen Microsoft's specific numbers, but for what they're selling at the volume they're making them, with the purchasing clout they have, if they are losing money on each unit then they've got some pretty stupid people in their manufacturing and purchasing divisions. Not impossible, I suppose, but hardly the way to bet.
Heck, not only do the frames not need to communicate with any other frame to be rendered, the same is also true for most of the pixels. (Absolutely so for classic ray tracing, less so for other rendering techniques.)
On the other hand, however, many of the modelling techniques used to generate/animate the scenes to be rendered are memory bandwidth intensive as they basically amount to physics simulations in themselves. (Think particle systems, water effects (fluid dynamics), motion of things like hair and fabric, etc.)
Since the encoding techniques for both OGG and MP3 take advantage of psychoacoustic phenomenon unique to human hearing (well, maybe other primates too, but they can't tell us), a program to "objectively" determine the quality is a non-option.
You don't feed compressed images or video to machine vision systems either, for similar reasons.
Ever take one of those things apart and see just how simple the design really is from a manufacturing perspective?
Anyway, you can believe what you want. If you want to believe rumors of what customers think the costs are, go right ahead.
But for a realistic perspective, you might want to talk to some industrial or manufacturing engineers.
Chips are cheap, once the production line is ramped up. A DVD drive only costs a couple more dollars (at the manufacturing end) than a CD drive. A game controller and TV adapter wholesale for a buck or so apiece.
Remember, you've got to look at manufacturer's production cost, not what they sell it to OEMs for, not what the OEMs wholesale it for, and not what the retailer sells it for. You can bet that with Microsoft's clout, that's the price they're looking at.
Also remember that it's in Microsoft's interests for everyone (except maybe the shareholders who seriously look at such details, ie not many of them) to think that the box costs more to make than it does -- that way they think they're getting a better deal or snookering Microsoft.
The industry is littered with the corpses of companies who thought they were snookering Microsoft.
The thing is really powered by a "Mr. Fusion" in the trunk.
Walmart sells a Microtel PC -- 800 MHz CPU, 128 MB 133MHz RAM, 10 GB hard drive, etc, etc -- for $199.86. You know they're not taking a loss on that. Take out the keyboard, speakers, heavy duty case, power supply, PCI slots, serial and parallel ports, and use that money to upgrade the CD to a DVD and put better video in, and you (especially if you're buying in the kind of volume and can make the kind of sweetheart deals that Microsoft can ("gee, it'd be a real shame if the next version of Windows didn't have a driver for this piece of hardware that you sell")) probably have a bit of profit margin left over.
Absolutely. Glad to see there are a few people here that get it.
A bit more on the pricing: that XBox doesn't include a keyboard or the modchip you'll need to let it run Linux. And there's also the risk you'll take in frying the thing when you mod it.
Meanwhile you can get a pretty good preassembled PC for $199. Walmart.com is showing an 800 MHz, 128MB RAM, 10GB disk, 10/100 ethernet with machine with Linux preinstalled (okay, Lindows, but hey), keyboard and wheel mouse for $199.86.
Shop the mom'n'pop whitebox stores you can probably find something equivalent (quick check of local ads shows pretty decent kits in that price range, with the low-end on preassembled going for about twice that price with twice the CPU speed, twice the memory and four times the disk space.)
I keep reading MS is losing money on every single xbox they sell
/. when someone brings it up. It's no longer true -- but Microsoft would love to have you believe it. (Makes you think you're getting a good deal, for one.)
Ancient history. This has been gone over before from time to time on
Yeah, the first year, they had to write down R&D costs, pay start-up costs like for molds for the housing, circuit board design and low-volume prototypes, etc, etc. On a per-unit basis that first year, yeah, they probably took a hit. They wrote that off against taxes.
All that stuff is now paid for. Incremental costs for case, circuit boards, etc is as low as you'd expect of anything else with that kind of production run. Hardware costs (chips, memory, drive, etc.) are lower now than a year ago. Et cetera, et cetera.
Margins may be thin with the lowered price, but they're not negative.
Besides which, every XBox they sell is one more they can point to when talking to game designers, trying to convince them to develop games for the XBox exclusively or at least before any other platform.
unless you find a way to digitally encrypt my eardrum
Two words: "cochlear implant".
There's also no way that a vinyl LP has anything like a 90dB dynamic range. More like low-to-mid 50s, maybe approaching 60dB with a virgin pressing on high-quality vinyl. That's a factor of 1000 to 10,000 right there -- bringing the lower limit into the 5 micron range.
Furthermore, the spacing between grooves (or rather, successive revolutions on the same spiral groove, to be pedantic) isn't uniform. The grooves are spaced closer together during quiet portions, and further apart during loud parts, to give more space to larger-amplitude waves. (The second photo in the article gives a great example of this.)
This can cause problems with really loud recordings. I know of at least one recording of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" (the one with the cannons) that came with a warning about setting the tracking force appropriately lest the wild excursions during the finale cause the needle to jump the track. (It also had a warning about making sure your speakers had overload protection.)
I take it back. I don't think it's a cool hack, I think it's a cool hoax. WHBT.
Pretty funny write-up, actually, but I'll believe he actually did it when I see the code.
But yeah, it's a cool hack.
I seem to recall in the last days of turntables and vinyl records, when CDs were starting to take over, that some company came out with a no-contact record pick-up that bounced light off the grooves. This is sort of a variation on that idea, except you don't need to spin the record.
how do you move from the speed of light without accelleration?
Magic. Or rather, "it's just created that way". Consider an electron changing energy levels and emitting a photon. That photon does not accelerate from whatever speed the electron has up to the speed of light, it's created going at the speed of light. A hypothetical tachyon is created going faster than light. Such a tachyon also has an imaginary rest mass, but it's never at rest.
Coming soon: rolls of sod with embedded chips that keep chirping "green side up!".
Actually that's an excellent use for a digital camera. Take pictures of every step of disassembly -- that way you not only know which pieces go together, but in what order. Use something like a Sony Mavica (or transfer the images to computer and burn a CD) and you can just keep the disc with the disassembled equipment. It's saved me a few headaches.
(The idea isn't new -- Polaroid pushed this for a while as a use for their instant pictures -- but at about a dollar a picture, that's too expensive for most things complicated enough to need it. Custom machinery might be an exception.)
That certainly isn't what Microsoft had in mind as its raison d'etre, was it?
.Net ecosystem (as Microsoft no doubt would put it), they don't justify .Net of itself.
Rotor and Mono are merely opportunistic parasites in the
Jabber-based client application will do something like
[jabber steps omitted]
What I'm trying to figure out is how this is easier, more robust, or otherwise superior to
[tcp socket steps omitted]
It looks to me like pretty much the same set of steps. I'm honestly confused about what the Jabber layer adds, other than xml buzzword compliance. Anyone?
The XML buzzword compliance is actually pretty significant -- not so much for the message content (as you point out, you can send XML with plain old TCP), as for the wrapper. Routing of TCP packets is done at a level way below what most applications can or want to handle; routing of Jabber's XML packets is handled at the application level, and there are standard ways to tell Jabber "routers" (servers) where (what user or service) the packet is to go to. Further, Jabber messages can be stored and forwarded if the destination address isn't currently available. (More like email in this sense).
I think that may be the step you're missing -- the point of Jabber isn't for the client to talk to the server, it's to route through the server to another client (or group of clients).
Because it's XML-based, it is extensible in well-understood ways that any given Jabber-enabled program can safely ignore if it doesn't understand the extension. (But a human might be able to figure out by inspection.)
Protocols are about making it easy for different developers to create programs that will cooperate with each other. Sure, you could create an email system (for example) that used raw RPC calls between client and server, but nobody else would be able to talk to it, at least not without using that same RPC API, which constrains the design. A standard protocol (eg SMTP in this case) simplifies things greatly -- heck, I can send email via telnet to port 25 if I want.
Beyond that (eg your questions about why XML-RPC), well, sure, some of it is just fad or using what tools you already know vs learning a new one. (The "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" syndrome.) On the other hand I've seen pretty fair arguments that XML is just an exotic dialect of LISP, so why not?
And since it only runs on Windows, hence x86, I need to produce bytecode why?