Yet, when it comes to source code, we wring our hands and postulate about how we can convince the source's owner that the code should be opened. Why? Shouldn't we take the same track as we did with the music? Isn't it their falut that the code is closed and isn't it our obligation to steal the source and distribute it far and wide?
Ugh, there's a vast difference between distributing bit patterns you have on your computer and breaking into someone else's computer to steal bit patterns you don't have.
If the driver is open source then far more developers will be able to help track down the problems, and even solve them. The problem for drivers is that Linux is undergoing constant, massive development. Even the stable kernels have large numbers of point releases (just less than 40 for 2.0 and about to be 17 so far for 2.2, compare WinNT4 with it's 6 servicepacks). For each of those point releases the drivers need to be tested. That means more resources are required to maintain drivers for Linux than for (say) Windows. This is not a bad thing. It results in a far better quality kernel than closed source development has so far managed.
We have a perfect right to blast Microsoft over this. They promised time and time again to comply to the standards and they haven't. They can't even claim it's not possible because IE5 for the Mac does comply. It's a fairly obvious case where because they no longer have to compete fairly on the Windows platform they are able to apply embrace and extend to lock in the monopoly.
I realise that CNET only just noticed this but it's hardly news. The Web Standards Project made their statements on the 10th of April - 4 months ago. I think/. even covered it before.
My guess it's something to do with the network subsystem. Linux has (or at least had) a problem with multiple network cards, especially in SMP systems. Check out this page, which summarises a number of benchmarking attempts and mentions this problem.
It points out some of the things to look out for in this sort of benchmark that can skew the results towards Linux or NT. In particular Linux performs better in the case of the dataset not fitting in RAM whereas NT does better if the data can all be fit into RAM. I'm not sure what the story is with ServerBench.
Did you even read the article? It's not "a new technology which allows it to print out a video screen onto paper" at all. It's a new type of video monitor. Sheesh.
There is also an issue with the size of the screen. Currently they've only managed a 6.5cm (2.5inch) model. All this inkjet talk has made people think in terms of what is currently done with paper (books, newspapers, billboards). Don't forget that they're printing onto silcon substrate. So far there's little to indicate they'll be able to make these screen any larger than they can make LCD screens.
I don't know about durable. These things currently have a life of 1000 hours. That's probably less than a year for usage in a real computing device (or even a WAP mobile phone).
Of course, if it's cheap enough that might not matter - replacable/upgradable screens would be cool.
The commentary by timothy reads like an astroturf advertisment for Intel. It's bad enough when luser posters don't bother reading an article and go off half-cocked. It's inexcusable when the editors do it.
Wait a minute. It was "krautt"'s submission that sounded like Intel propaganda, not timothy's comments. Here correctly pointed out that the article states that the CPU itself is probably not a fault.
In Oz the government has threatened action against any company which raises prices by more than the increased costs to that company. In the case of RAM that means no price rise. Of course I doubt the government really will do anything.
I am used to it, too. I come from New Zealand and over there GST has been around for at least 10 years.
As for SDRAM and RDRAM, I read Toms Hardware, Anandtech and Sharky Extreme. Yes, there have been benchmarks that showed SDRAM in the lead, but I have ALSO seen benchmarks by them that say the opposite. I really don't feel like digging it up, you can either take my word for it, or go research it yourself. I'm sure their articles are well marked. I'd be curious to learn of your findings.
Check out Real World Tech (www.realworldtech.com). These guys really know their stuff and are very professional in their approach. There is a particularly unbiased appraisal of RDRAM here.
The fact is that even if the performance of RDRAM is better than SDRAM (and it hasn't generally lived up to expectations) there are still plenty of things to not like about RDRAM such as the heat and cost issues. Infact, just about the only thing RDRAM has going for it (in a desktop machine) is the high bandwidth and that advantage is more than nullified by DDR SDRAM.
But VIA already did just that. Intel stopped supporting SDRAM and VIA didn't. Intel then had to reverse their decision and put SDRAM support back into the product line up (due mainly to problems with their RDRAM products). VIA have also announced support for DDR SDRAM while Intel have not.
The dual Athlon situation is quite different. The issue there is a combination of perceived lack of demand for the product and the larger degree of redesigning needed for a dual EV6 bus chipset. Unlike the Pentium family multiprocessor Athlon (and Alpha) systems have a dedicated bus to the north bridge for each processor. That means that chipset manufacturers can't leverage their existing designs to create a dual CPU chipset. The motherboard manufacturers are not the problem here - it is the lack of a chipset from either AMD or VIA which has held the market back. Both of those companies have announced that they will have dual EV6 chipsets available this year.
If Intel are able to ship enough chipsets supporting RDRAM then Rambus must hand over 20% of their company. Since they will get more cash from their SDRAM & DDR patents then I expect even Rambus wants RDRAM to fade away.
That's a big leap, and based on incorrect info. Intel get one million shares, Rambus currently have 96 million outstanding. So Intel stand to get slightly more than 1% of Rambus, not 20%.
You're also assuming that apart from the fees everything else is equal with regards to licensing SDRAM v licensing RDRAM. That is not true - the SDRAM IP claimed by Rambus is much weaker than in the RDRAM case.
So you explain to me why they will now want RDRAM to win.
I will - it's quite simple. Rambus want RDRAM to win because their control over RDRAM is much more assured. These SDRAM licenses are not likely to be industry wide (both Micron or Intel have vowed to hold out), and most likely will end up in protacted court battles. In particular the patents being used as the big stick in the SDRAM cases are much weaker than the RDRAM patents.
As for Intel getting "a huge chunk of their company" - that's exactly the sort of exageration you're accusing this other guy of. Intel get less than 10%.
RAM prices here in Australia should drop with the GST - the current 22% (hidden) sales tax is being replaced with a 10% one.
IMO, if Rambus does try to force price up in the SDRAM market it would be something else for the government to look at. This sort of behaviour is completely contrary to the ideals of a free market economy (from the consumer's point of view, probably not from Rambus' stockholders').
I expect the result of this will be for the RAM manufacturers to work out a new memory type that avoids the need for licenses with Rambus. If that can't be done then I expect those patents are invalid.
With Gnutella (at least) you can operate behind a firewall and use an IP address from the private address pool (RFC1918). How are they gonna track you down when the reported IP address is 192.168.0.2?
Also, what does this mean for a film such as Titan A.E., which is technically not a film either, since it was digitally transmitted to theaters?
A couple of people have brought this up already. Read the stories, people! It clearly says that the movies must be screened in a theater first. That's all. It doesn't say anything about how the film is distributed to the theaters.
Exactly. It's a consistent move. Frankly I can't see why anyone would be upset about this. Why should a filmmaker care if the Academy refuses to look at their film? It's not like they award Oscars on merit anyway.
Becuase the NT command line is an unimportant accessory in NT while the GUI tools are central to it.
I wouldn't go that far. There are still things you must do through an MSDOS shell. Viewing routing tables for example. Sending winpopup messages. Sure, there are gui versions of these tools but they don't come with NT.
My major problem with developing under windows is that MFC is badly designed. I haven't done enough development with gui toolkits under Linux to comment on them, but Java's Swing and AWT are both significantly better thought out than MFC.
It's not in the search engines because it's too new. The original story is dated as the 24 of May. The mirror at http://premier.cluelessfucks.com/ was taken down less than 2 days ago.
It takes a while before there is enough linking to it for the search engine's web crawlers to find. For example Google last grabbed/. on the 4th of April.
Slashdot Mirror
If the driver is open source then far more developers will be able to help track down the problems, and even solve them. The problem for drivers is that Linux is undergoing constant, massive development. Even the stable kernels have large numbers of point releases (just less than 40 for 2.0 and about to be 17 so far for 2.2, compare WinNT4 with it's 6 servicepacks). For each of those point releases the drivers need to be tested. That means more resources are required to maintain drivers for Linux than for (say) Windows. This is not a bad thing. It results in a far better quality kernel than closed source development has so far managed.
We have a perfect right to blast Microsoft over this. They promised time and time again to comply to the standards and they haven't. They can't even claim it's not possible because IE5 for the Mac does comply. It's a fairly obvious case where because they no longer have to compete fairly on the Windows platform they are able to apply embrace and extend to lock in the monopoly.
I realise that CNET only just noticed this but it's hardly news. The Web Standards Project made their statements on the 10th of April - 4 months ago. I think /. even covered it before.
It points out some of the things to look out for in this sort of benchmark that can skew the results towards Linux or NT. In particular Linux performs better in the case of the dataset not fitting in RAM whereas NT does better if the data can all be fit into RAM. I'm not sure what the story is with ServerBench.
How about Tetris for UT.
Did you even read the article? It's not "a new technology which allows it to print out a video screen onto paper" at all. It's a new type of video monitor. Sheesh.
There is also an issue with the size of the screen. Currently they've only managed a 6.5cm (2.5inch) model. All this inkjet talk has made people think in terms of what is currently done with paper (books, newspapers, billboards). Don't forget that they're printing onto silcon substrate. So far there's little to indicate they'll be able to make these screen any larger than they can make LCD screens.
Of course, if it's cheap enough that might not matter - replacable/upgradable screens would be cool.
Wait a minute. It was "krautt"'s submission that sounded like Intel propaganda, not timothy's comments. Here correctly pointed out that the article states that the CPU itself is probably not a fault.
I am used to it, too. I come from New Zealand and over there GST has been around for at least 10 years.
Oops, I forgot to take the stock split into account. Presumably Intel will now get 4 million shares for just over 4% of Rambus.
The fact is that even if the performance of RDRAM is better than SDRAM (and it hasn't generally lived up to expectations) there are still plenty of things to not like about RDRAM such as the heat and cost issues. Infact, just about the only thing RDRAM has going for it (in a desktop machine) is the high bandwidth and that advantage is more than nullified by DDR SDRAM.
The dual Athlon situation is quite different. The issue there is a combination of perceived lack of demand for the product and the larger degree of redesigning needed for a dual EV6 bus chipset. Unlike the Pentium family multiprocessor Athlon (and Alpha) systems have a dedicated bus to the north bridge for each processor. That means that chipset manufacturers can't leverage their existing designs to create a dual CPU chipset.
The motherboard manufacturers are not the problem here - it is the lack of a chipset from either AMD or VIA which has held the market back. Both of those companies have announced that they will have dual EV6 chipsets available this year.
You're also assuming that apart from the fees everything else is equal with regards to licensing SDRAM v licensing RDRAM. That is not true - the SDRAM IP claimed by Rambus is much weaker than in the RDRAM case.
As for Intel getting "a huge chunk of their company" - that's exactly the sort of exageration you're accusing this other guy of. Intel get less than 10%.
IMO, if Rambus does try to force price up in the SDRAM market it would be something else for the government to look at. This sort of behaviour is completely contrary to the ideals of a free market economy (from the consumer's point of view, probably not from Rambus' stockholders').
I expect the result of this will be for the RAM manufacturers to work out a new memory type that avoids the need for licenses with Rambus. If that can't be done then I expect those patents are invalid.
With Gnutella (at least) you can operate behind a firewall and use an IP address from the private address pool (RFC1918). How are they gonna track you down when the reported IP address is 192.168.0.2?
A couple of people have brought this up already. Read the stories, people! It clearly says that the movies must be screened in a theater first. That's all. It doesn't say anything about how the film is distributed to the theaters.
Exactly. It's a consistent move. Frankly I can't see why anyone would be upset about this. Why should a filmmaker care if the Academy refuses to look at their film?
It's not like they award Oscars on merit anyway.
I wouldn't go that far. There are still things you must do through an MSDOS shell. Viewing routing tables for example. Sending winpopup messages. Sure, there are gui versions of these tools but they don't come with NT.
My major problem with developing under windows is that MFC is badly designed. I haven't done enough development with gui toolkits under Linux to comment on them, but Java's Swing and AWT are both significantly better thought out than MFC.
The original story is dated as the 24 of May. The mirror at http://premier.cluelessfucks.com/ was taken down less than 2 days ago.
It takes a while before there is enough linking to it for the search engine's web crawlers to find. For example Google last grabbed /. on the 4th of April.