I thought all the fuss over the IA64 was because it was not backward compatible? The chip is used for new HP/UX 11.2 boxes and some big PC servers but there are special versions of Linux / Oracle for that. Is the issue purely performance based? When AMD announced the x86-64 chip named Hammer articles are saying things like:
"Intel's Itanium processors handle 64 bits, but the Pentium family handles 32 bits."
"The Hammer family of processors... will be able to run conventional 32 bit applications... as well as 64 bit applications"
Because when you start using transparent mods to your PC, you're blowing away any kind of FCC rating it has. When the radio starts getting static and the cell phone drops connections and the portable phone/802.11b/x10 camera quits working, put the metal back around the case.
Am I the only one thinking transparent modding a laptop with its harddrive and taking it on the tube / train and testing out that stopping cell phones is a good idea?
To me this sounds like the Napster consumer is paying twice for the service. Once to browse or connect to the Napster network, and once to download and upload the file to peers.
That sounds a bit of a scam, its like Apple charging $20 for a new piece of software but you have to download from the network (other paying customers) and not from Apple directly.
Transparent GIF's have black back grounds and edit boxes which are near the full size of the screen (e.g. a forum post box) bounce up and down the page.
I never noticed Mozilla crashing, but these two new features are silly.
New modern theme is cute but why cannot I do full screen, or importantly drag the address bar next to the menu's and the quick favourites next to the navigation tools, i.e. move the tool bars horizontally!
A not well founded statement. Intel's big super computers for example are made up of many individual nodes which are each SMP machines. In highly parallel systems the network is huge bottleneck and so by having greater number crunching on each node you gain better performance at a relatively low overhead. The future is not plain SMP or MPP but MPP'ed SMP nodes.
Actually if you go through the history before Media Player started supporting streaming media they had a seperate application similar to Real Player called Net Show. This application was available under Linux. I don't know if you can still find it though.
And if you have a decent UPS (such as the APC Smart-UPS) it can give you a perty graph of your input voltage. They even have a version of the software for Linux.
I live just south of South San Francisco and we're getting quick brown outs every night. I just invested in a nice UPS system to stop my computer barfing all the time - very handy. At work in Palo Alto (where the stage 3 was) we had to turn off all our lights and anything else we could to conserve power - one of the Hospitals put out a notice saying it was being affected!
I though Moore's 'law' was things doubled in speed in 18 months or whatever. This is a 10 fold change, so the statement should have been "Moore's law broken again".
And who called it a law? That is so egoist and quite frankly weird.
I wrote a CDDB proxy which can operate as a standalone CDDB database and includes similar fuzzy searching for CD records. I released this on Freshmeat.net last year under the GPL license. Does this mean i'm going to receive a cease and desist letter?
The first few claims on the page sound like a patent on a fuzzy logic datase search engine. I'm thinking this can be extrapolated to just fuzzy logic which cannot be right. I believe fuzzy theory is completely open and non-patentable, and hence this is as unpatentable as the concept of a database?
If you had read the previous articles you would know that Microsoft has signed a deal with Corel to port C# to Linux.
Personally I'd rather have the most RAD / Xtreme programming friendly language available. From the documents available it looks like C# will gain that baton. That's mainly because Microsoft typically use their own products, while I haven't seen anything from Sun apart from Java itself.
While it might be e-mail or email now those fantastic people in the marketing world want it to be e-mail presumably to go with e-business, e-commerce, because we're only just in the e-lectronic revolution now?
Where's my e-toaster?
That's an italic 'e' if you didn't notice because we couldn't possibly just use plain 'e' could we?
I've been running what the ftp site says is Redhat 7.0 beta or Redhat 6.9.5 (Pinstripe) and is not too bad. It only runs a 2.2.16-17 kernel but it has USB hacked in and works a treat apart from a Sony memory stick reader which instantly freezes the box. I chose the default install which looks pretty security conscious - inetd is not installed. I've added sshd and wftpd for remote access. Xfree86 versions 4.01 and 3.3.6 are installed (with glx and xvideo on 4). So you can play DVD's on 4 with the XVideo support, but drop down to 3.3.6 to use the more stable Utah-GLX drivers for Quake3. My only nags are superficial - the File manager in X is very basic, I prefer what ships with Corel Linux - which has the ability to user mount samba and nfs shares on login.
There's also several very nice OpenGL screen savers included with the many fantastic ordinary X savers already packaged.
So we have the W3 consortium and WSP commenting on Netscapes lack of reaching a current standards level, and quite rightly the growing gap of compatibility between the Netscape and MSIE browsers. But you just have to see that Netscape are trying to close the gap with Mozilla. They have realized the problems with the 4.x series of browsers and only release new versions for major bug / security flaws. They are therefore pushing forward with a newly designed next generation browser.
Netscape followed the fashion for Open Source and open collaborative development but realized after a while that the task was huge and needed to pump a lot of their own effort into the development to get somewhere in reasonable time. When we get there it will be interesting to see what happens however until that time companies / people need to settle with something that is useable. This is when Microsoft's IE started to look interesting.
The first stage was giving the users a choice, Netscape's browser (buggy but working), or Microsoft's browser (late, unfeatured - not working with the many Netscape compatible websites).
Next was Microsoft realizing they have to match Netscape's offering (IE 3). Still Netscape have the majority but only out of historical reasons.
Then Microsoft introduce v4 with Dynamic HTML, big customization options (e.g. Visual Studio, AOL browser), full screen mode, and general integration with the OS to provide developers with a new easy way of displaying data, and users with a standard interface between applications. Netscape hasn't changed.
With version 5 of MSIE we have more features to display things, and Netscape still hasn't changed.
Microsoft have yet to release a version for Linux, no doubt when Mainsoft have finished beta'ing their Linux port we shall see one. And so we have a situation in which Netscape still lives, but people are annoyed and toying with fancy systems to boot Windows to run IE or run VMWare to run Windows in Linux.
The interesting area for competition is the Mac platform, all iMacs come with Netscape and MSIE installed - users have a choice but what do Mac users love doing? Using Microsoft software! Why? Its not because they are being payed off, or that other vendors are hidden or driven out, its because Microsoft release better products.
Many users don't really care whether they use Netscape or Microsoft or Opera all they want to do is access the internet without worrying about what they are using.
Just to be as technical current tv / dvd is about 720x576 for pal which is 1.2 MB/frame dvd compression (MPEG2) offers typically 25:1 compression which drops it to 50 KB/frame, 1.2 MB/s or 9.8 mb/s.
Film producers are unlikely to want a cinema screen to look worse than dvd and are likely to be user similar technology so the 2048x1536 frames seem best fitting.
This poses an oddity as apparently companies such as Industrial Light and Magic are using 40x TV resolution for their in-house digital conversion of cinema film. If we take that figure we could be looking at 40x extra bandwidth which works out at 47.5 MB / frame uncompressed or a total size for a 90 minute film of 250 GB!
Many of the comments mentioned previously are perfectly valid however if you study the C code of many of the alogrithms they are just C ports of Java code. Almost every function is performing a calloc memory allocation and clear. It would be interesting to see the performance figures with this allocation changed. Possibilities include:
Use static memory allocation, i.e. char output[200] instead of char *output = calloc (200, 1).
Use a global memory block and cast pointers into it.
Use a 3rd party memory allocation library which can perform some kind of huge heap pre-allocation.
Another test would be of course to take some C algorithms then convert them into Java and compare the performance.
Also interesting to note is that no other typical C coding techniques are being used - such as variable localizing, all variables have been set to scope an entire function not just the loop / section it is used in. However gcc and MSVC should be able to automagically perform those optimizations for you.
Slashdot Mirror
"Intel's Itanium processors handle 64 bits, but the Pentium family handles 32 bits."
"The Hammer family of processors ... will be able to run conventional 32 bit applications ... as well as 64 bit applications"
The press anouncements also got Intel to change its mind and start developing a new 32/64 bit combo chip.
I think you'll find ideally the US would go to war with weapons that would annihilate all life and leave all buildings and weapons.
Am I the only one thinking transparent modding a laptop with its harddrive and taking it on the tube / train and testing out that stopping cell phones is a good idea?
:)
To me this sounds like the Napster consumer is paying twice for the service. Once to browse or connect to the Napster network, and once to download and upload the file to peers.
That sounds a bit of a scam, its like Apple charging $20 for a new piece of software but you have to download from the network (other paying customers) and not from Apple directly.
I never noticed Mozilla crashing, but these two new features are silly.
New modern theme is cute but why cannot I do full screen, or importantly drag the address bar next to the menu's and the quick favourites next to the navigation tools, i.e. move the tool bars horizontally!
As my physics teacher said again and again, all science is physics!
http://www.phoebe.co.uk/glwolf/
:)
A not well founded statement. Intel's big super computers for example are made up of many individual nodes which are each SMP machines. In highly parallel systems the network is huge bottleneck and so by having greater number crunching on each node you gain better performance at a relatively low overhead. The future is not plain SMP or MPP but MPP'ed SMP nodes.
read more about it here the readme for netshow is here and all the files are up one here
Actually if you go through the history before Media Player started supporting streaming media they had a seperate application similar to Real Player called Net Show. This application was available under Linux. I don't know if you can still find it though.
And if you have a decent UPS (such as the APC Smart-UPS) it can give you a perty graph of your input voltage. They even have a version of the software for Linux.
I live just south of South San Francisco and we're getting quick brown outs every night. I just invested in a nice UPS system to stop my computer barfing all the time - very handy. At work in Palo Alto (where the stage 3 was) we had to turn off all our lights and anything else we could to conserve power - one of the Hospitals put out a notice saying it was being affected!
And who called it a law? That is so egoist and quite frankly weird.
I wrote a CDDB proxy which can operate as a standalone CDDB database and includes similar fuzzy searching for CD records. I released this on Freshmeat.net last year under the GPL license. Does this mean i'm going to receive a cease and desist letter?
The first few claims on the page sound like a patent on a fuzzy logic datase search engine. I'm thinking this can be extrapolated to just fuzzy logic which cannot be right. I believe fuzzy theory is completely open and non-patentable, and hence this is as unpatentable as the concept of a database?
Personally I'd rather have the most RAD / Xtreme programming friendly language available. From the documents available it looks like C# will gain that baton. That's mainly because Microsoft typically use their own products, while I haven't seen anything from Sun apart from Java itself.
Where's my e-toaster?
That's an italic 'e' if you didn't notice because we couldn't possibly just use plain 'e' could we?
I've been running what the ftp site says is Redhat 7.0 beta or Redhat 6.9.5 (Pinstripe) and is not too bad. It only runs a 2.2.16-17 kernel but it has USB hacked in and works a treat apart from a Sony memory stick reader which instantly freezes the box. I chose the default install which looks pretty security conscious - inetd is not installed. I've added sshd and wftpd for remote access. Xfree86 versions 4.01 and 3.3.6 are installed (with glx and xvideo on 4). So you can play DVD's on 4 with the XVideo support, but drop down to 3.3.6 to use the more stable Utah-GLX drivers for Quake3. My only nags are superficial - the File manager in X is very basic, I prefer what ships with Corel Linux - which has the ability to user mount samba and nfs shares on login. There's also several very nice OpenGL screen savers included with the many fantastic ordinary X savers already packaged.
Netscape followed the fashion for Open Source and open collaborative development but realized after a while that the task was huge and needed to pump a lot of their own effort into the development to get somewhere in reasonable time. When we get there it will be interesting to see what happens however until that time companies / people need to settle with something that is useable. This is when Microsoft's IE started to look interesting.
The first stage was giving the users a choice, Netscape's browser (buggy but working), or Microsoft's browser (late, unfeatured - not working with the many Netscape compatible websites).
Next was Microsoft realizing they have to match Netscape's offering (IE 3). Still Netscape have the majority but only out of historical reasons.
Then Microsoft introduce v4 with Dynamic HTML, big customization options (e.g. Visual Studio, AOL browser), full screen mode, and general integration with the OS to provide developers with a new easy way of displaying data, and users with a standard interface between applications. Netscape hasn't changed.
With version 5 of MSIE we have more features to display things, and Netscape still hasn't changed.
Microsoft have yet to release a version for Linux, no doubt when Mainsoft have finished beta'ing their Linux port we shall see one. And so we have a situation in which Netscape still lives, but people are annoyed and toying with fancy systems to boot Windows to run IE or run VMWare to run Windows in Linux.
The interesting area for competition is the Mac platform, all iMacs come with Netscape and MSIE installed - users have a choice but what do Mac users love doing? Using Microsoft software! Why? Its not because they are being payed off, or that other vendors are hidden or driven out, its because Microsoft release better products.
Many users don't really care whether they use Netscape or Microsoft or Opera all they want to do is access the internet without worrying about what they are using.
Film producers are unlikely to want a cinema screen to look worse than dvd and are likely to be user similar technology so the 2048x1536 frames seem best fitting.
This poses an oddity as apparently companies such as Industrial Light and Magic are using 40x TV resolution for their in-house digital conversion of cinema film. If we take that figure we could be looking at 40x extra bandwidth which works out at 47.5 MB / frame uncompressed or a total size for a 90 minute film of 250 GB!
Another test would be of course to take some C algorithms then convert them into Java and compare the performance.
Also interesting to note is that no other typical C coding techniques are being used - such as variable localizing, all variables have been set to scope an entire function not just the loop / section it is used in. However gcc and MSVC should be able to automagically perform those optimizations for you.