VA linux will see to it that by the time The Public gets silicon, linux will be running on it. The day you can order a merced system from dell with win2000, you'll be able to get a redhat-based merced system from VA.
Colo (internet and telecom) sites should have vending machines that sell these for like $500 each. I know I've been at a site and gotten screwed (no pun intended) because I didn't have a particular tool to open chassis X or tighten connector Y.
That's where the market for them is... where people need them and don't have any substitutes.
I honestly don't think humans could destroy the Earth even if we tried. Yeah, we can wipe out almost all life as we know it (ie. ourselves) without much effort. But the natural state of our planet tends towards balance. Nature is a stronger force than we *in the long run*. Scortched Earth may not be a nice place to raise children for a few thousand or hundred thousand years (which although a long time by our standards is just a few seconds in the Great History Of Time(tm)), there's no way we could kill *everything* let alone destroy the planet itself.
Granted, I sure don't want to be living in NYC when some other country presses the big red button. (Maybe afterwards I would wish that I had been there...)
Making money, owning property, starting wars, etc. are all (on some level) done for one reason: sex. Humans do these things to increase their own 'attractiveness' to others in order to either attract mates, put them in a "higher" class, or provide for offspring. That's what it breaks down to in the end. Yeah, it's Freudian, but it's right. When AI "organisms" reach the level of intelligence of humans, they certainly won't be there long. Whether they reach this by human hands or their own self-development started at a lower level, they *will* have an evolutionary rate faster than we can imagine (as stated in the predictions above). Whether AI is one sentient form spread through hundreds of devices or many separate entities (which of these actually happens we probably won't be able to determine even after it happens), they'll be learning and building themselves to be better without the need for money, land, etc. But I diverge -- the point is, being smarter than us (not smarter... more intelligent), they'll realize that wars, etc., don't give them any advantage, evolutionary or otherwise, and will just go on with their own "culture." (Besides, they don't need real estate the way we do; space is great when you don't need oxygen and you want to vent heat off your CPUs...)
-Chris (Who hopes they read this and let him live when the wars DO start.)
Years of the media using hackers as a synonym for "someone who cracks systems" has made it an acceptable use. Stop fighting it and deal.
Of anyone in the media, Dvorak knows this. He's started using hacker because it's the only word most of the Real World understand. This guy HAS been in the industry longer than you. Don't pull the argument that "when I was young we just had [mechanical relays | punch cards | TRS-80 | IBM XT | iMac ]."
I just wanted to post before someone else bitched about it.
Not without seriously voiding your warranty. The only upgrade paths are from third-party places that hack open the case and swap out the ram card. It isn't particularly a project for the weak of heart.
Gee. I don't recall anyone posting this kind of message about sysadmins.. I mean, how many of us have been paged or called at 3 AM to run in and reboot a server, router or something else. (And it's certainly not WORK that my PHB is doing at 3AM...:P )
Of course, the day will come when Talking Barbie says "Installing Linux is hard!" and both computer activists and womens' rights activists beat up Mattel.
So I got this feeling from reading it that this chip must have a shitload of registers (I mean, everything they're doing is all about avoiding memory i/o it seems), so I started grepping... it's certainly very register-based. But here was the good part:
> These improvements include a gated store > buffer and a large plurality of additional > processor registers
"large plurality" sounds to me like a whole boatload more than the ones we used in those silly MIPS simulators to learn assembly theory and certainly more than any x86 chip I've seen.
I also saw some references to VLIW conversion, so I did another grep; I think this is one of the best paragraphs, and it's not in Greek...
---------- FIG. 2 is a diagram of morph host hardware designed in accordance with the present invention represented running the same application program which is being run on the CISC processor of FIG. 1(a). As may be seen, the microprocessor includes the code morphing software portion and the enhanced hardware morph host portion described above. The target application furnishes the target instructions to the code morphing software for translation into host instructions which the morph host is capable of executing. In the meantime, the target operating system receives calls from the target application program and transfers these to the code morphing software. In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the morph host is a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor which is designed with a plurality of processing channels. The overall operation of such a processor is further illustrated in FIG --------
This pretty much gives away what people have been saying since the beginning. Morphing hardware AND software elements that work in conjuntion to provide (drum roll) a fast as HELL computer. And it will run software we already have. And pretty darn near anything you throw at it. Want to be a Playstation for a day? How about an O2? Now switch back to Pentium II so you can type up that report and then become a G4 so you can make the graphics to insert in the presentation that accompanies it.
This thing will be doing the code morphing in parallel (which is what this invention seems to be... the morpher) and then run it on another fast chip that's related to one of the earlier patents. And it will all be controlled by a little driver that turns into a "layer 1 vmware" (now that our computers will need an OSI layer model...:P )
It doesn't sound to me like this chip is actually doing the emulation; just the translation, and then buffering it so another chip can pick it up from there and run with the instructions... which would make sense with everything else you said.
It's old news.:) They've been shipping supercooled boxen for over a year. The 800mhz athlon they've been hyping for a few months now; it's about time Tom got one and reviewed it. Speaking of Tom, anyone else think the quality of his site has gone down very quickly in about the past 18 months? I haven't seen a big motherboard roundup or anything useful for a while. I don't give a flip about the seven-chapter analysis of 32 video cards that's taken three months to come together; we need more variety. I've tried to find a replacement tech website to fill my needs, and the closest thing I can find is Ars Technica, but occasionally they have reviews by people who either don't understand the technology or are just plain cheap (not "economical") about using it. Don't say AnandTech... there's just too much attitude spewing out of that site.:) -Chris (Footnote: KryoTech's PCs may very well be the only worthwhile product to *ever* come out of South Carolina...:P )
Plus, not all labels are "bad" or in any other way microsoft-like, just the huge and disgustingly overgrown ones. There are a lot of indie labels out there (ask your local college radio station) that love MP3 and anything else that makes it cheaper for them to get music out there. (Well, that and the fact they love anything trendy.:> )
I love the cars and computers comparison, because this is where it comes in.:)
I don't CARE what the difference is between 10W30 and 10W40 motor oil is. I don't care what my "CV joint" is. I don't have to know the difference between shocks and struts to drive my car. I never want to have to do more than put gas and windshield wiper fluid in my car in order to drive it. When I use my car, I want to get in, turn the key and go somewhere. Yes, I *do* have to know about the steering wheel, turn signal, gas and break pedals, but I don't have to know anything technical about the vehicle to use it properly.
That's how computers *HAVE* to be. Slashdotters and geeks in general have to get over this elitist view that newbies (and the general public) must learn how to do X, Y, and Z just to get their brand spanking new Linux install to a usable level and then do A, B, and C to get Whizz-Bang New Game(tm) working. Linux CAN fulfil this role, much better than Windows (or BeOS at this point). From a technical point, it's better than MacOS, so us geeks like it, but that has to be the target for a UI. Not just a GUI... the ENTIRE USER INTERFACE. Macs don't have ejects on the floppy drives for a purpose; it simplifies things. Yeah, us PC geeks get pissed off when we can't get our disk out when we want to, but that's life.
In order to win in the Real World, you have to cater to the masses -- NOT MAKE THE MASSES CATER TO YOU. Granted, many companies have made the public bend over backwards in the past (utilities come to mind real fast), but if it isn't easy to use, do what users need, or doesn't work, then they will move on to something else.
-- Here's the back-on-topic part:
Linux MAY be more than Mom needs right now, but she certainly doesn't need $400 worth of Microsoft OS and programs just to email Junior, surf the web, and type up her resume. As in the Dvorak article yesterday, when PCs get to be sub-$300 items, the OS and basic set of utilities and programs better clock in at free or darn close or it will completely screw the vendor. If we want Linux to be on there instead of WindowsCE, we better get a UI For Dummies on there. And fast.
You forget. Office apps, virus checkers, norton utilities have computer science majors to install them, either for Dell's seasonal drive image or at XYZ, Inc.
As charming and witty as those first couple of posts are, this is a BIG deal. (Okay, everyone else will say this, too.)
While all the gnome, redhat, etc people involved can pat themselves on the back, this does point out some things that are really small that *NEED* to be done... off the top of my head I can think of:
1. Autorun. 2. a dummy-fied RPM/DEB/any other kind of package installer/viewer/uninstaller that can be used cross-distribution and cross-version with similar functionality to the dreaded "add/remove programs" control panel 3. less jargon.:) (While "tarball" is a great term for geeks to use, it certainly isn't an intuitive word. For that matter, neither are many of the other things unixfolk take for granted. "grep" comes to mind real quick.)
We're getting there. While things may be in a state now where linux+gnome/kde+icewm/enlightenemnt/* may be "mom friendly". It's certainly not friendly to someone who's going to be installing hundreds of programs cluelessly every day -- like your average computer using teenager.
> i won't say that i've been exactly thrilled > with/.'s quality of late,
Okay, someone else noticed it, too. It seems to me like they've been focusing on "volume" instead of quality (or relevance?). I can't seem to reload often enough in a day; there are just too many stories posted. If I forget to check during my lunch break, I'm doomed that evening when I have to read through four screens of garbage with two worthwhile stories...
Meanwhile, everyone on the system is posting long comments that don't say anything just so people think "it's long, I'll moderate it up" so they can be moderators.
Aggghhh! Slashdot is going to hell and it's taking all of us with it!
As much as I love and worship John Dvorak (my VERY first pc book was "Dvorak's Guide to Telecommunications" [side note: in 1986, this books said ISDN was about to become the wonderful digital phone standard...]), he has no connection to the Dvorak keyboard. That was designed by Dr. (something) Dvorak, who came up with the layout long before our Dvorak was ever born (as in pre-1900).:)
All the more reason to invest in Cisco: the only current tech company that *definately* will still be around in 10 years. No one can displace them.
Just think of the upgrade potential they have... (and people think MS have a corner on a market)
-Chris
To achieve ipv6 critical mass..
on
CNN On IPv6
·
· Score: 3
I think copyleft or thinkgeek should re-release an updated version of Vinton's classic (legendary?) t-shirt to promote IPv6 and get people more interested in using it...
IP (more) over everything. -or- IP over everything from anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
VA linux will see to it that by the time The Public gets silicon, linux will be running on it. The day you can order a merced system from dell with win2000, you'll be able to get a redhat-based merced system from VA.
-Chris
1. run linux?
2. run rc5des? (and how many keys will it get?)
3. run beos?
4. have drivers in the next kernel?
-Chris
+and a thingy that tells me if the socket I'm feeling is a DB15, DB9, DB25, or PS2, DIN, or RJ11 or RJ14
AND, which direction the socket is facing!
-Chris
Colo (internet and telecom) sites should have vending machines that sell these for like $500 each. I know I've been at a site and gotten screwed (no pun intended) because I didn't have a particular tool to open chassis X or tighten connector Y.
That's where the market for them is... where people need them and don't have any substitutes.
-Chris
I honestly don't think humans could destroy the Earth even if we tried. Yeah, we can wipe out almost all life as we know it (ie. ourselves) without much effort. But the natural state of our planet tends towards balance. Nature is a stronger force than we *in the long run*. Scortched Earth may not be a nice place to raise children for a few thousand or hundred thousand years (which although a long time by our standards is just a few seconds in the Great History Of Time(tm)), there's no way we could kill *everything* let alone destroy the planet itself.
Granted, I sure don't want to be living in NYC when some other country presses the big red button.
(Maybe afterwards I would wish that I had been there...)
-Chris
Making money, owning property, starting wars, etc. are all (on some level) done for one reason: sex.
Humans do these things to increase their own 'attractiveness' to others in order to either attract mates, put them in a "higher" class, or provide for offspring. That's what it breaks down to in the end. Yeah, it's Freudian, but it's right.
When AI "organisms" reach the level of intelligence of humans, they certainly won't be there long. Whether they reach this by human hands or their own self-development started at a lower level, they *will* have an evolutionary rate faster than we can imagine (as stated in the predictions above). Whether AI is one sentient form spread through hundreds of devices or many separate entities (which of these actually happens we probably won't be able to determine even after it happens), they'll be learning and building themselves to be better without the need for money, land, etc.
But I diverge -- the point is, being smarter than us (not smarter... more intelligent), they'll realize that wars, etc., don't give them any advantage, evolutionary or otherwise, and will just go on with their own "culture." (Besides, they don't need real estate the way we do; space is great when you don't need oxygen and you want to vent heat off your CPUs...)
-Chris
(Who hopes they read this and let him live when the wars DO start.)
Guess what, guys: dictionaries (and Jargon Files) don't define language. Usage does.
Years of the media using hackers as a synonym for "someone who cracks systems" has made it an acceptable use. Stop fighting it and deal.
Of anyone in the media, Dvorak knows this. He's started using hacker because it's the only word most of the Real World understand. This guy HAS been in the industry longer than you. Don't pull the argument that "when I was young we just had [mechanical relays | punch cards | TRS-80 | IBM XT | iMac ]."
I just wanted to post before someone else bitched about it.
-Chris
Not without seriously voiding your warranty. The only upgrade paths are from third-party places that hack open the case and swap out the ram card. It isn't particularly a project for the weak of heart.
-Chris
Example:
http://www.efig.com
http://www.8megspalm.com
http://www.dataslice.com
For every lab I administer, I would MUCH rather have proprietary and/or "quirky" drivers to the complete lack of drivers that are out there now.
:)
You may say that windows has buggy drivers, but there's not a current desktop printer out there that won't work under win32.
-Chris
The Only cover that anyone from slashdot would need for their laptop:
In large, friendly letters, it says "Don't Panic!"
-Chris
Gee. I don't recall anyone posting this kind of message about sysadmins.. I mean, how many of us have been paged or called at 3 AM to run in and reboot a server, router or something else. (And it's certainly not WORK that my PHB is doing at 3AM... :P )
-Chris
Of course, the day will come when Talking Barbie says "Installing Linux is hard!" and both computer activists and womens' rights activists beat up Mattel.
-Chris
So I got this feeling from reading it that this chip must have a shitload of registers (I mean, everything they're doing is all about avoiding memory i/o it seems), so I started grepping... it's certainly very register-based. But here was the good part:
:P )
> These improvements include a gated store
> buffer and a large plurality of additional
> processor registers
"large plurality" sounds to me like a whole boatload more than the ones we used in those silly MIPS simulators to learn assembly theory and certainly more than any x86 chip I've seen.
I also saw some references to VLIW conversion, so I did another grep; I think this is one of the best paragraphs, and it's not in Greek...
----------
FIG. 2 is a diagram of morph host hardware designed in accordance with the present invention represented running the same application program which is being run on the CISC
processor of FIG. 1(a). As may be seen, the microprocessor includes the code morphing software portion and the enhanced hardware morph host portion described above. The target
application furnishes the target instructions to the code morphing software for translation into host instructions which the morph host is capable of executing. In the meantime, the target
operating system receives calls from the target application program and transfers these to the code morphing software. In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the morph host is a
very long instruction word (VLIW) processor which is designed with a plurality of processing channels. The overall operation of such a processor is further illustrated in FIG
--------
This pretty much gives away what people have been saying since the beginning. Morphing hardware AND software elements that work in conjuntion to provide (drum roll) a fast as HELL computer. And it will run software we already have. And pretty darn near anything you throw at it. Want to be a Playstation for a day? How about an O2? Now switch back to Pentium II so you can type up that report and then become a G4 so you can make the graphics to insert in the presentation that accompanies it.
This thing will be doing the code morphing in parallel (which is what this invention seems to be... the morpher) and then run it on another fast chip that's related to one of the earlier patents. And it will all be controlled by a little driver that turns into a "layer 1 vmware" (now that our computers will need an OSI layer model...
-Chris
It doesn't sound to me like this chip is actually doing the emulation; just the translation, and then buffering it so another chip can pick it up from there and run with the instructions... which would make sense with everything else you said.
-Chris
It's old news. :) They've been shipping supercooled boxen for over a year. The 800mhz athlon they've been hyping for a few months now; it's about time Tom got one and reviewed it. Speaking of Tom, anyone else think the quality of his site has gone down very quickly in about the past 18 months? I haven't seen a big motherboard roundup or anything useful for a while. I don't give a flip about the seven-chapter analysis of 32 video cards that's taken three months to come together; we need more variety. I've tried to find a replacement tech website to fill my needs, and the closest thing I can find is Ars Technica, but occasionally they have reviews by people who either don't understand the technology or are just plain cheap (not "economical") about using it. Don't say AnandTech... there's just too much attitude spewing out of that site. :) -Chris (Footnote: KryoTech's PCs may very well be the only worthwhile product to *ever* come out of South Carolina... :P )
Ouch. A BS or BA at my school costs $120,000... give or take a year. If it's possible to get an honorary doctorate for $10K, sign me up!
</joke>
-Chris
Plus, not all labels are "bad" or in any other way microsoft-like, just the huge and disgustingly overgrown ones. There are a lot of indie labels out there (ask your local college radio station) that love MP3 and anything else that makes it cheaper for them to get music out there. (Well, that and the fact they love anything trendy. :> )
-Chris
> the phone company is trying to get an injunction against me
/.. :)
I'd imagine that of all those mentioned, the phone company *loves* you. Especially if you're on a metered phone plan or are paying them for DSL.
I know they love me and my addiction to
-Chris
I love the cars and computers comparison, because this is where it comes in. :)
I don't CARE what the difference is between 10W30 and 10W40 motor oil is. I don't care what my "CV joint" is. I don't have to know the difference between shocks and struts to drive my car. I never want to have to do more than put gas and windshield wiper fluid in my car in order to drive it. When I use my car, I want to get in, turn the key and go somewhere. Yes, I *do* have to know about the steering wheel, turn signal, gas and break pedals, but I don't have to know anything technical about the vehicle to use it properly.
That's how computers *HAVE* to be. Slashdotters and geeks in general have to get over this elitist view that newbies (and the general public) must learn how to do X, Y, and Z just to get their brand spanking new Linux install to a usable level and then do A, B, and C to get Whizz-Bang New Game(tm) working. Linux CAN fulfil this role, much better than Windows (or BeOS at this point). From a technical point, it's better than MacOS, so us geeks like it, but that has to be the target for a UI. Not just a GUI... the ENTIRE USER INTERFACE. Macs don't have ejects on the floppy drives for a purpose; it simplifies things. Yeah, us PC geeks get pissed off when we can't get our disk out when we want to, but that's life.
In order to win in the Real World, you have to cater to the masses -- NOT MAKE THE MASSES CATER TO YOU. Granted, many companies have made the public bend over backwards in the past (utilities come to mind real fast), but if it isn't easy to use, do what users need, or doesn't work, then they will move on to something else.
--
Here's the back-on-topic part:
Linux MAY be more than Mom needs right now, but she certainly doesn't need $400 worth of Microsoft OS and programs just to email Junior, surf the web, and type up her resume. As in the Dvorak article yesterday, when PCs get to be sub-$300 items, the OS and basic set of utilities and programs better clock in at free or darn close or it will completely screw the vendor. If we want Linux to be on there instead of WindowsCE, we better get a UI For Dummies on there. And fast.
-Chris
You forget. Office apps, virus checkers, norton utilities have computer science majors to install them, either for Dell's seasonal drive image or at XYZ, Inc.
Games are installed by users. Only.
-Chris
As charming and witty as those first couple of posts are, this is a BIG deal. (Okay, everyone else will say this, too.)
:) (While "tarball" is a great term for geeks to use, it certainly isn't an intuitive word. For that matter, neither are many of the other things unixfolk take for granted. "grep" comes to mind real quick.)
While all the gnome, redhat, etc people involved can pat themselves on the back, this does point out some things that are really small that *NEED* to be done... off the top of my head I can think of:
1. Autorun.
2. a dummy-fied RPM/DEB/any other kind of package installer/viewer/uninstaller that can be used cross-distribution and cross-version with similar functionality to the dreaded "add/remove programs" control panel
3. less jargon.
We're getting there. While things may be in a state now where linux+gnome/kde+icewm/enlightenemnt/* may be "mom friendly". It's certainly not friendly to someone who's going to be installing hundreds of programs cluelessly every day -- like your average computer using teenager.
-Chris
> i won't say that i've been exactly thrilled /.'s quality of late,
> with
Okay, someone else noticed it, too. It seems to me like they've been focusing on "volume" instead of quality (or relevance?). I can't seem to reload often enough in a day; there are just too many stories posted. If I forget to check during my lunch break, I'm doomed that evening when I have to read through four screens of garbage with two worthwhile stories...
Meanwhile, everyone on the system is posting long comments that don't say anything just so people think "it's long, I'll moderate it up" so they can be moderators.
Aggghhh! Slashdot is going to hell and it's taking all of us with it!
-Chris
As much as I love and worship John Dvorak (my VERY first pc book was "Dvorak's Guide to Telecommunications" [side note: in 1986, this books said ISDN was about to become the wonderful digital phone standard...]), he has no connection to the Dvorak keyboard. That was designed by Dr. (something) Dvorak, who came up with the layout long before our Dvorak was ever born (as in pre-1900). :)
-Chris
All the more reason to invest in Cisco: the only current tech company that *definately* will still be around in 10 years. No one can displace them.
Just think of the upgrade potential they have... (and people think MS have a corner on a market)
-Chris
I think copyleft or thinkgeek should re-release an updated version of Vinton's classic (legendary?) t-shirt to promote IPv6 and get people more interested in using it...
:)
IP (more) over everything.
-or-
IP over everything from anywhere.
You get the idea.
-Chris