Most people I know and know of tend to have 100% original DVDs. One person I know was tempted by the availability of heaps of cheap discs in China, but generally people are honest.
Even people who don't have moral qualms about this tend not to run off copies for their friends for many reasons, because it's a hassle. It takes a long time when its easier to just lend a friend a disc.
The people who actually cause most harm to the industry are the ones who sell the pirated discs. This sort of technology isn't going to deter them. If it can be circumvented, they'll find out how. The costs are insignificant against profits.
I'll nitpick and point out that it is possible to write an application that will take code in one assembly language and translate it to another. Or in fact convert from any turing complete language to another as long as you don't need human readability or efficiency. I've written such an application myself.
I don't know whether this counts as a compiler since I'm not 100% sure of the definition, but it's possible, and it's even possible to be fairly efficient and bug free. And it's not like you're going to need speed for an intro to x86. Most of the examples will only run for a few hundred cycles.
Surely they purchased the company for a reason. The staff would have been part fo that reasons.
Laying off that many staff in a fit of pique would create a perfect opportunity for a competitor to set up a company that does pretty much the same thing with the same employees.
Most of the specs for the PS2 were hype. The Dreamcast was a very competent system, but everyone was assured that the PS2 was going to be so many lightyears ahead. And while it was probably a better performing system, there were probably times the DC could outperform it. But the PS2 was the system everyone would go for just because according to the hype, it was so much better.
Now, the cell could be interesting. It will certainly give a performance boost in some of the areas where that's needed. It's uncertain whether it will help everywhere. The actual speed increase remains to be seen.
I remember someone justifying this. I don't know whether it was official MS position or just someone important at the company explaining it, but he was arguing that any library used by IE was part of IE.
This included all network connectivity, text rendering, GUI components. everything.
To be honest though, there's no reason not to include libraries to make writing a browser easy. Even the URL validation stuff and HTML rendering can reasonably be included in a library. Just don't include iexplore.exe
Mind you, I completely lost trck of the cases, and forgot why MS was obliged to remove these. If they were obliged to allow their competitors to buy a redistribution licence that allows them to add their own software to the default install, I could understand it, but this seems like only half a solution.
Is processing speed really the most important part of a database? I'd have thought database (i.e. disk) size was a much greater concern, and a perfectly reasonable measure to base the tiered pricing on.
This is how the market is supposed to work. I don't know why it doesn't. Of course, it's difficult to change once you're locked in, but people considering a new installation really need to learn to take other systems into account.
Software is simply a component. Adding 256 Megs of RAM will cost about the same for my old 300MHz K6-2 as it will for a reasonably fast modern CPU.
In the end it's all about supply and demand. If they price it at an amount targetted at the Sunfire F25K, then they'll simply lose the business of the local database user. So they use number of processors as a means for segmentation. This means they can charge a lot to people who can afford a lot, and less to people who can't afford as much. Fair enough, but this isn't about fairness. It's about maximising profits. I could go into more detail, but this guy has already written a long winded article about the subject.
The P4 has a 20 stage pipeline. 20 stage pipelines are very inefficient, giving a big penalty for a branch misprediction, and requiring a lot of logic to handle the complexity of waiting that long for a result.
One one core you can run 4 single precision floating point operations at once, OR 4 32bit-sized integers OR 8 word-sized operations, OR 16 byte-sized operations...
All well and good, but they must be non-dependent. If operation 2 depends on the result of operation 1,or we have a lot of branching then you're dividing that performance by 4 or 8 or 16. This sort of result is not all that common for most applications that need this sort of performance, but it does happen.
Only in the same way that a G5 is. Through emulation.
What good is a new chip, no matter how fast it is, if you can't run anything on it?
No use at all. What's your point;) But seriosuly, we can expect to see softrware written for this. It has a lot of potential applications, and most serious number crunching hardware has a custom OS.
How fast will this chip be at general purpose stuff? Who cares if it can do 100GFLOPS on a couple operations.
That's a good question. Vector units are optimised for a certain class of operations - those where exactly the same set of operations are run on a large number of items. For a graphical application, with procedural textures we can expect very good performance, but this will fall off considerably for general purpose desktop application type stuff. This probably doesn't matter too much. These actually don't need the sort of performance modern chips can offer.
I'm a little concerend about the clock rate. How are they getting this sort of speed? There are ways to do this, but most of them would reduce the efficiency or increase size. Hardly seems to make sense to do this when it's a lot easier to simply add more processing cores.
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone is honest, why then is their business wildy profitable?
I said "most people".
The article says piracy causes 4% loss. Which doesn't seem an unreasonable guess. 4% of Hollywood's revenue can spread quite far.
Most people I know and know of tend to have 100% original DVDs. One person I know was tempted by the availability of heaps of cheap discs in China, but generally people are honest.
Even people who don't have moral qualms about this tend not to run off copies for their friends for many reasons, because it's a hassle. It takes a long time when its easier to just lend a friend a disc.
The people who actually cause most harm to the industry are the ones who sell the pirated discs. This sort of technology isn't going to deter them. If it can be circumvented, they'll find out how. The costs are insignificant against profits.
Why? What did Oracle do to Peoplesoft?
I'll nitpick and point out that it is possible to write an application that will take code in one assembly language and translate it to another. Or in fact convert from any turing complete language to another as long as you don't need human readability or efficiency. I've written such an application myself.
I don't know whether this counts as a compiler since I'm not 100% sure of the definition, but it's possible, and it's even possible to be fairly efficient and bug free. And it's not like you're going to need speed for an intro to x86. Most of the examples will only run for a few hundred cycles.
It's still possible that someone would find a way. Especially because office space is a lot easier to come by than factory space.
I was looking at it from Microsoft's point of view. They could possibly sue if this happened. But they might not win.
It's possible, and quite likely that nobody would try this out of fear of Microsoft, but Microsoft doesn't know this for sure.
Surely they purchased the company for a reason. The staff would have been part fo that reasons.
Laying off that many staff in a fit of pique would create a perfect opportunity for a competitor to set up a company that does pretty much the same thing with the same employees.
Most of the specs for the PS2 were hype. The Dreamcast was a very competent system, but everyone was assured that the PS2 was going to be so many lightyears ahead. And while it was probably a better performing system, there were probably times the DC could outperform it. But the PS2 was the system everyone would go for just because according to the hype, it was so much better.
Now, the cell could be interesting. It will certainly give a performance boost in some of the areas where that's needed. It's uncertain whether it will help everywhere. The actual speed increase remains to be seen.
Write soem T&C's with really nasty clauses, get /. to link to you, and then announce later that it was all a joke. Heaps fo free advertising!
Strange. I seem to be coming up with this sort of idea a lot recently.
Looking at the article, I have no idea (btw - do you happen to know how many channels you can get over raw ATM?).
But a very useful potential feature is video on demand. They could do this as a real VoD system, with potentially hundreds of videos.
If they have half a brain cell,
These are TV execs. Don't get your hopes up.
Personally, I'd be tempted to fire someone whop chose MS even if it did work, if that was their only reason for choosing them.
I remember someone justifying this. I don't know whether it was official MS position or just someone important at the company explaining it, but he was arguing that any library used by IE was part of IE.
This included all network connectivity, text rendering, GUI components. everything.
To be honest though, there's no reason not to include libraries to make writing a browser easy. Even the URL validation stuff and HTML rendering can reasonably be included in a library. Just don't include iexplore.exe
Mind you, I completely lost trck of the cases, and forgot why MS was obliged to remove these. If they were obliged to allow their competitors to buy a redistribution licence that allows them to add their own software to the default install, I could understand it, but this seems like only half a solution.
Is processing speed really the most important part of a database? I'd have thought database (i.e. disk) size was a much greater concern, and a perfectly reasonable measure to base the tiered pricing on.
This is how the market is supposed to work. I don't know why it doesn't. Of course, it's difficult to change once you're locked in, but people considering a new installation really need to learn to take other systems into account.
Software is simply a component. Adding 256 Megs of RAM will cost about the same for my old 300MHz K6-2 as it will for a reasonably fast modern CPU.
In the end it's all about supply and demand. If they price it at an amount targetted at the Sunfire F25K, then they'll simply lose the business of the local database user. So they use number of processors as a means for segmentation. This means they can charge a lot to people who can afford a lot, and less to people who can't afford as much. Fair enough, but this isn't about fairness. It's about maximising profits. I could go into more detail, but this guy has already written a long winded article about the subject.
Salshdot.org used to put slashdot in a frame with a banner ad up top. Taco got a lot of hate mail from that one.
Stop stealing the air then. It's not yours and you;re taking it.
The P4 has a 20 stage pipeline. 20 stage pipelines are very inefficient, giving a big penalty for a branch misprediction, and requiring a lot of logic to handle the complexity of waiting that long for a result.
One one core you can run 4 single precision floating point operations at once, OR 4 32bit-sized integers OR 8 word-sized operations, OR 16 byte-sized operations...
All well and good, but they must be non-dependent. If operation 2 depends on the result of operation 1,or we have a lot of branching then you're dividing that performance by 4 or 8 or 16. This sort of result is not all that common for most applications that need this sort of performance, but it does happen.
Is it compatible with x86 in anyway?
Only in the same way that a G5 is. Through emulation.
What good is a new chip, no matter how fast it is, if you can't run anything on it?
No use at all. What's your point;) But seriosuly, we can expect to see softrware written for this. It has a lot of potential applications, and most serious number crunching hardware has a custom OS.
How fast will this chip be at general purpose stuff? Who cares if it can do 100GFLOPS on a couple operations.
That's a good question. Vector units are optimised for a certain class of operations - those where exactly the same set of operations are run on a large number of items. For a graphical application, with procedural textures we can expect very good performance, but this will fall off considerably for general purpose desktop application type stuff. This probably doesn't matter too much. These actually don't need the sort of performance modern chips can offer.
I'm a little concerend about the clock rate. How are they getting this sort of speed? There are ways to do this, but most of them would reduce the efficiency or increase size. Hardly seems to make sense to do this when it's a lot easier to simply add more processing cores.
True. Just thought I should mention it as a point of order.
When you put it like that, the answer is obvious.
Sky writing.
Clauses 7 and 8, and the preamble mention patents.