Perhaps to overcome bit errors from radiation (natural or otherwise) we will end up with lots of error-correcting circuitry on chip. I believe that heavy-duty devices such as IBM's Power4 does.
So we might end up with several ALUs on chip and a majority vote for the correct answer?
Besides, the complexity of modern CPUs are already creating lots of problems which have to be solved today - eg: power and clock distribution. Both might be made easier with asynchronous logic but the only real investor/researcher in async is Sun Microsystems.
Doubtless there is a huge amount of pressure for more CPU/RAM/etc... The majority will need it to run the latest MSFT Windows/Office combo at a fast enough speed to cope with someone typing at 25WPM or more... So one way or another, this technology will find its way into production, perhaps within the next 8 years.
Actually, I think the original i8088 was spec to run at 6MHz.... It was only clocked at 4.77MHz on the original IBM model 5150 because of some issue to do with NTSC timing - CGA graphics was to work with American TV sets.
I was so stunned by this news... my arms fell off. Now all I'm worried about is how can I use my digital watch!
(AFAIK Douglas Adams did court Hollywood to make a film but then became unstuck with the BBC threatening legal action)
Another opportunity to say that Douglas Adams shall be missed, not only for his novels but for his insight (and occasional vitrolic criticism of Microsoft's products)
I can imagine DVD players having scene-selection and editing features so parents can edit movies to suit their childrens' sensibilities....
Such a player would probably sell well if it was easy to use and had decent security (smartcard?) to prevent children watching anything except what the parents deem fit for viewing.
IMO, more power for the parents... less powers for the megacorps. Maybe soceity can be fixed.
Scotty quadruples his repair estimates.... If he only doubled, people would think that he was just plain fast;)
Now begins the hardest part...
on
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Adoption.
Any piece of technology, no matter how open, free or innovative is useless unless adopted and widely used.
Microsoft uses Market Development Funds to "assist" adoption of their stuff... Such funds are usually in the form of paid holidays to some exotic location for some key executive/manager of companies.
Opensource usually cannot afford such gimmics and rely solely on the merits of the technology.
We can hope (and prey for the religeous among us) that the powers that be at the corporations like the BBC, CNN, ITN, News-Corp etc realise what is the best way to go and don't get their decisions bought by a company which is willing to spend millions of dollars on MDF.
Why should Apple be promoting Microsoft Office for MacOS-X?
If Microsoft really wants Office for MacOSX to sell, they should advertise it on TV, radio and print as they do for their other product offerings.
It's a bit like expecting Mercedes to promote a luxury backseat for their cars made by some Sweedish furniture company... Microsoft should try to promote their own product and not expect Apple to do it for them - unless they are explicitly contracted to do it.
I'm sure I read this idea in some Sci-Fi novel, either from Arthur C Clarke or Issac Asimov... But...
Have a viscous gel which is stable in a vacuumb (or near vacuumb) and contain it in some sac - probably made of synthetic silk. this sac is maintained in position by a collection of redundant independent thrusters attached to several point of the sac.
Debris would penetrate the sac and be immobolised in the gel. This sac and its contents can be disposed of (fire it to the moon?) oand a new sac attached to the thrusters.
Do you remember wishing for that 80387sx co-processor? At one point I was umming and ahhing between the IIT, AMD and Intel parts... No mag had a review over which one was better.
Who is going to be the baddie? The defender of the meek (Batman) or the defender of Humanity (Superman)?
Or are they thinking of making some supervillan which the both team uo to fight?
"Arrghhh, Kryptonite! Take over and save the world, Batman!"
Well - it's been a few years since they had used the tech (was it used in Gladiator and earlier in the last Bruce Lee film?), but it isn't so far fetched that they use a body/stunt double for Mr Reeves and put his face over the double's body.
Still - rumors are rumors.... I'm still waiting for the film adaptation of Red Dwarf with Patrick Stewart as the baddie.
I remember having great fun with POV years ago... It was also very good to poke around at to learn how a ray-tracer works. I'd also recommend the book "Tricks of the Graphics Gurus" for those who don't have it.
Perhaps they wanted a more "businesslike" logo rather than the cutesy FreeBSD Daemon that we all know. Linux has somewhat succeeded with it's penguin mascot...
What might be wanted is a logo which may be put on letterheads and correspondences - sans mascot. I am no graphic artist so I cannot submit a usuable entry but if all the hundred or so submissions featured the mascot, I might choose for no winner. The FreeBSD foundation can become a very important and serious entity and as such it deserves a serious logo.
All said, some of the "new and better" logos which many high profile companies have changed to lately strike me as silly and pointless...
See PriceWaterHouse ==> "MONDAY"
Or the obsurd new BP "Sunflower" logo.
The British Telecom logo... What was wrong with the old one?
Branding is an important issue and maybe the judges wanted a logo which could become a brand symbol which is recognised and respected.
Examples of brand logos which people recognise (and don't have sillyness in their logos, nor the company name) in no particular order
1. Chevron 2. Nike 3. Pepsi Cola 4. Apple Computer 5. Mitsubishi
It was often cheaper to buy an IBM PC with Windows on it and buy OS/2 seperately and then install it over Windows than it was to buy an IBM PC with OS/2 preloaded.
In both cases, you still had to install the video driver because it started with the generic VGA driver installed.
my wacky plan to get an army of 3-wheeled cars/vans (just like those ones you see in Italy so often, or those old Robin Reliants) and set them up to march across the world - as a menacing oversized version of Kev's Dwarfs.... Muh hah hah aha...
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Perhaps to overcome bit errors from radiation (natural or otherwise) we will end up with lots of error-correcting circuitry on chip. I believe that heavy-duty devices such as IBM's Power4 does.
So we might end up with several ALUs on chip and a majority vote for the correct answer?
Besides, the complexity of modern CPUs are already creating lots of problems which have to be solved today - eg: power and clock distribution. Both might be made easier with asynchronous logic but the only real investor/researcher in async is Sun Microsystems.
Doubtless there is a huge amount of pressure for more CPU/RAM/etc... The majority will need it to run the latest MSFT Windows/Office combo at a fast enough speed to cope with someone typing at 25WPM or more... So one way or another, this technology will find its way into production, perhaps within the next 8 years.
AFAIK, some of the the DLR in London are MagLev and have been for many years....
So MagLev carried it's first paying public customer ages ago.
Actually, that is probably one of their best products...
Yet another "bought in" product. No innovation.
Actually, I think the original i8088 was spec to run at 6MHz.... It was only clocked at 4.77MHz on the original IBM model 5150 because of some issue to do with NTSC timing - CGA graphics was to work with American TV sets.
I was so stunned by this news... my arms fell off.
Now all I'm worried about is how can I use my digital watch!
(AFAIK Douglas Adams did court Hollywood to make a film but then became unstuck with the BBC threatening legal action)
Another opportunity to say that Douglas Adams shall be missed, not only for his novels but for his insight (and occasional vitrolic criticism of Microsoft's products)
This product is not targeted at techies nor for photographers...
This is targeted at PHBs who need to show off their "cool" gear to other PHBs and to make a talking point at the next company party.
Move along people.... Nothing here...
I can imagine DVD players having scene-selection and editing features so parents can edit movies to suit their childrens' sensibilities....
Such a player would probably sell well if it was easy to use and had decent security (smartcard?) to prevent children watching anything except what the parents deem fit for viewing.
IMO, more power for the parents... less powers for the megacorps. Maybe soceity can be fixed.
blah!
I would like to get my hands on the source for Lotus Ami Pro 3... The 32bit OS/2 port would do nicely (which IBM gave away free anyways).
It did about everything I wanted in a Wordprocessor/DTP and it was fast.
IBM RS/6000 boxes have a 16x2 character LCD panel on the processor box...
Unfortunately, they only provide an API to display a 12/16bit hex string (3/4 characters) on it.
What a waste!
My mod_perl stuff usually works very fast when compared to the other stuff...
Guess I shall keep kludging in perl.
Well - it may be useful now but travel a few years down the line ... if it stagnates and goes into bitrot, it becomes useless.
This has happened to cool technology in the past - such as OpenDOC, CORBA (although it seems to be getting a revival with J2EE)...
Grrr - mind going blank at 2am. Oh well.
Scotty quadruples his repair estimates.... If he only doubled, people would think that he was just plain fast
Adoption.
Any piece of technology, no matter how open, free or innovative is useless unless adopted and widely used.
Microsoft uses Market Development Funds to "assist" adoption of their stuff... Such funds are usually in the form of paid holidays to some exotic location for some key executive/manager of companies.
Opensource usually cannot afford such gimmics and rely solely on the merits of the technology.
We can hope (and prey for the religeous among us) that the powers that be at the corporations like the BBC, CNN, ITN, News-Corp etc realise what is the best way to go and don't get their decisions bought by a company which is willing to spend millions of dollars on MDF.
Why should Apple be promoting Microsoft Office for MacOS-X?
If Microsoft really wants Office for MacOSX to sell, they should advertise it on TV, radio and print as they do for their other product offerings.
It's a bit like expecting Mercedes to promote a luxury backseat for their cars made by some Sweedish furniture company... Microsoft should try to promote their own product and not expect Apple to do it for them - unless they are explicitly contracted to do it.
I'm sure I read this idea in some Sci-Fi novel, either from Arthur C Clarke or Issac Asimov... But...
Have a viscous gel which is stable in a vacuumb (or near vacuumb) and contain it in some sac - probably made of synthetic silk. this sac is maintained in position by a collection of redundant independent thrusters attached to several point of the sac.
Debris would penetrate the sac and be immobolised in the gel. This sac and its contents can be disposed of (fire it to the moon?) oand a new sac attached to the thrusters.
Do you remember wishing for that 80387sx co-processor? At one point I was umming and ahhing between the IIT, AMD and Intel parts... No mag had a review over which one was better.
Who is going to be the baddie? The defender of the meek (Batman) or the defender of Humanity (Superman)?
Or are they thinking of making some supervillan which the both team uo to fight?
"Arrghhh, Kryptonite! Take over and save the world, Batman!"
Well - it's been a few years since they had used the tech (was it used in Gladiator and earlier in the last Bruce Lee film?), but it isn't so far fetched that they use a body/stunt double for Mr Reeves and put his face over the double's body.
Still - rumors are rumors.... I'm still waiting for the film adaptation of Red Dwarf with Patrick Stewart as the baddie.
I might have my synapses crossed...
I might have been thinking of "Revolutionary Bitmapped Graphics" which has a walk-through chapter on writing a simple ray-tracer.
I remember having great fun with POV years ago... It was also very good to poke around at to learn how a ray-tracer works. I'd also recommend the book "Tricks of the Graphics Gurus" for those who don't have it.
The more platforms supported, the merrier it will be.
Although, I don't expect to see FreeBSD on anywhere near the same number of platforms as NetBSD.
I'd like to see FreeBSD 5 running on RS/6000 hardware... That would be nice
It might be cool but its got security flaws as big as the ozone hole.
Perhaps they wanted a more "businesslike" logo rather than the cutesy FreeBSD Daemon that we all know. Linux has somewhat succeeded with it's penguin mascot...
What might be wanted is a logo which may be put on letterheads and correspondences - sans mascot.
I am no graphic artist so I cannot submit a usuable entry but if all the hundred or so submissions featured the mascot, I might choose for no winner. The FreeBSD foundation can become a very important and serious entity and as such it deserves a serious logo.
All said, some of the "new and better" logos which many high profile companies have changed to lately strike me as silly and pointless...
See PriceWaterHouse ==> "MONDAY"
Or the obsurd new BP "Sunflower" logo.
The British Telecom logo... What was wrong with the old one?
Branding is an important issue and maybe the judges wanted a logo which could become a brand symbol which is recognised and respected.
Examples of brand logos which people recognise (and don't have sillyness in their logos, nor the company name) in no particular order
1. Chevron
2. Nike
3. Pepsi Cola
4. Apple Computer
5. Mitsubishi
...
Hmm... Run out of things to say.
Yep
It was often cheaper to buy an IBM PC with Windows on it and buy OS/2 seperately and then install it over Windows than it was to buy an IBM PC with OS/2 preloaded.
In both cases, you still had to install the video driver because it started with the generic VGA driver installed.
And they called it "supporting OS/2"?
It was barely lip-service.
my wacky plan to get an army of 3-wheeled cars/vans (just like those ones you see in Italy so often, or those old Robin Reliants) and set them up to march across the world - as a menacing oversized version of Kev's Dwarfs.... Muh hah hah aha...
Okay... So it isn't that funny.
This is a fine example of where a lot of the meaning is lost in the conversion of a book to a film.
Read the book and all your answers would be answered (almost).