I'd like to see a standard connector for computers. That is, a connector that would look mostly like a DVI-connector, carrying the following technologies:
Ethernet
DVI Video
Stereo Audio
USB 2.0
DC Power
Then units like mobile phones, portable terminals, music players can develop into real computers. In fact, I look forward to seeing complete computers the size of an iPod.
The great thing now would be a standard form factor of such computer-in-a-box. Because then there could be laptops sold without the computer itself (keyboard+display+battery+dvdunit). There can be computer connectors in internet cafes, aircrafts, TVs. You can also easily imagine a beowulf cluster of these! (with proper rack hardware).
Why would this happen? The core computer (cpu, memory, disk/solid state storage, graphics adapter, NIC, usb controller) will soon be cheaper than the rest of a laptop. It then doesnt really make sense with motherboards with multiple and expensive (price/space) connectors for cpu/memory/disk. The only connectors that will make sense are the one mentioned above (USB, DVI, Ethernet, Audio, Power). And I say this despite I am a Mac user who would like to see Firewire everywhere.
Another thing could happen instead: things can be very virtual. Maybe you just bring your virtual machine on a USB-stick or SD-card. This can happen soon - USB sticks of 16Gb are available for a decent price. Then in an aircraft/internet cafe/TV you just plug your USB-stick in, and they provide you with a virtalisation host (like QEMU or VMware player, or both).
Of course, when you are not connected the unit can still function, like a PDA, Phone, MP2-player, like Microsoft envisions.
I have an HP nc6200 laptop and I cant agree with you. The display is very poor. The touchpad is to the left of the center so after a while I have pain in my hand. It does produce noise. It looks like some piece of military equipment compared to Apples design (my private laptop is a 5 years old PowerBook).
I would rather pay for a un-DRM'ed mpeg4 rip direct download then buy the DVD
I seriously believe that if they (Media Industry) put up their own BitTorrent search engine and their own BitTorrent-tracker, and seeded their own content, people (like you and me) would pay for it.
You would pay for the "torrent file", which in this case would be copyrighted.
I also seriously believe this will never ever happen;)
So, basically it is quite possible to emulate both ways with decent perforance. Still, I think it was harder to emulate PPC on x86 than the other way around.
How do you mean? Virtual PC for Apple/PPC emulated x86 quite well. I think a 500MHz PPC-processor was roughly able to emulate a 350 MHz Pentium Equivalent Processor.
Emulating a CISC architecture on a RISC architecture is not that hard. The other way around is much harder - you cant very well emulate a PPC/SPARC/MIPS on a x86-computer. Then you would suffer 10x clock-for-clock reduction.
And since the 386 consisted of 275000 transistors while modern cpus have more than 200 millions transistors the cost/waste of backwards compability with the 386 is very little.
I appreciate your comment. I have replied to the guy who made the first comment on my original post. My answer to your post would be quite the same so I will not post the same thing twice.
I dont find your comment off-topic or very wrong. But I will explain myself a bit more. If you are about to build a house (private home) there are laws, rules and standards about:
- height of steps in stairs
- standard height of roof
- depth and width of kitchen furniture/equipment
- pipes in the walls where to put electric cables
- who is allowed to install electical equipment
- insulation, windows and radiators (if in a cold country)
- symbols for drawings
- what drawings are to be made (for different craftsmen)
- estimation of cost
If you are about to build a new computer system (lets for example say a commersial GUI application), you need to make decisions about:
- Development model (upfront / Extreme / ad-hoc)
- What platforms to support
- What development platform to use
- How do we test
- How do we design and document
- How much will it cost
There are no easy answers to these questions. Not until you answered these questions you can start using existing standards and best practices - and then you find that there are many to choose.
Lets take the design/drawings as an example. A "construction architect" is (I guess) very clear about what drawing are expected of him. The carpenter needs one. The electrician needs another one. The water/ventilation-guy needs another one. All symbols are standardised, and if different in different countries you can easily translate. So, when the architect is done the craftmen get what they need to do their job.
On the other hand, a "software architect", has basically no standardised method of delivering a design to the programmers. You can quite easily imagine two proficient and successful software architects who produce complely different sets of specifications for the same piece of software.
You say that there are version control, automated builds, automated unit testing and bug databases. But none of these are really standardised. They are all internal/local/private complex solutions for the problem that "there are no standardised ways to do things".
Software is very complex - arguably more complex than construction and manufacturing. But software is not "close to consensus", "almost done" or "mature" as are construction and manufacturing.
That is why I believe that CS will be around for very long...
Compare computer science to other science - like architecture. Computer Science is still very immature with very few true best practices and standards. It will not die anytime soon.
Remember the 4th-Generation-Languages that were supposed to make programming unnecessary? Where are they today?
Ask innoviative organisations like BitTorrent, Apple, Google or Blizzard if they see Computers Science be obsolete any time soon. I dont think so.
I agree with you but I fail to see how it can be similar to the "same-birthday problem". Did you make a mistake or do you know something about how to search for keys that I dont know about?
more than 30 billion years for one valid key...presuming they didnt find a qualified (yet brute force) way to guess keys...
Remember the DVD-crack long ago. The key was 40 bits, but for different reasons the key was in practice just 26 bits. Knowing a bit about the encryption made it possible to not search all keys and a DVD could be read within seconds, not years.
I couldnt find the download. People on Slashdot seems to be unusually confused about how this thing works - even those who claimed to read the article. I didnt find the article/method very confusing, but I dont know enough about Vista to tell if it COULD work or not. Are people confused because someone made something up that can not work? There are other cases where evil people have distributed trojans this way.
They will send you another invoice and threaten to report you to "Kronofogdemyndigheten" - basically a part of the Tax Authority in Sweden that collects money from people who refuse/fail to pay.
If this happens you need to protest in writing. If they send it to Kronofogden you need to protest to them. You may end up in court (which is where it will be decided if you should pay or not) and you need to show up and protest there too.
If you fail to protest properly (and many people do because it can be complicated for ordinary people) you will get a mark in Kronofogdens registry indicating that you are not perfectly and responsibly paying your bills. It cannot be revoked and will automatically go away only after several years.
If you want anything in Sweden like borrowing money, or signing a contract for a landline phone, a mobile phone with subscription/invoices, a rental appartment, a credit card, a qualified job you are in practice fucked up if you have a mark with Kronofogden.
All Swedes have a personal ID that is used for everything so there is no way anyone who cares will not notice you failed to pay a bill.
So, you have two options:
1) Pay
2) Refuse in writing, carefully, over and over again
As you understand - paying can seem like the best option.
If you run a business and make a mistake it will/may cost you.
I would agree with you unless there exist companies who send things to customers they never ordered. If you receive such a thing you have two option: fight or pay up.
Amazons case is even worse: they sell for a very low price ($0), and then increase the price afterwards. What if they (Amazon) get away with it. Then companies are free miscalculate whatever they want and charge consumers afterwards.
This is not exactly unique for Amazon. It is quite common that companies send goods to people (mostly registered customers) that they have not ordered, and supply an invoice. People either have to just pay, or to call the company, complain and return the goods.
It is easy to suspect that Amazon did this on purpose.
In Sweden politicians are talking about writing a law that will basically give the cunsumers the right to keep whatever is sent to them, even if they never ordered it.
I sometimes order things from my Cable-TV/Internet-provider on their webpage. The conditions are often very unclear - to the point I suspect they are vague on purpose.
So, the perceived bad thing about x86 compared to PPC/MIPS/ARM is the ugly and arcane instruction set. The x86-64 is a real 64-bit processor, with a percieved bad and expensive x86 backwards compability.
In fact, this is not so much of a problem. Compability with the Intel 386 is roughly what is meant with x86-compatible. The transistor count for 386 is 275000 (Wikipedia). The new Core 2 Duo contains 291 million transistors. That means that with less than 0.1% of the processor transistor it can fully implement a 386, and run it much faster than in the old days since it would be built with much smaller/faster technology.
Of course this is a simplification, but considering that x86 can be implemented in 275000 transistors, it shouldnt require so many transistor in a modern cpu to translate x86 instructions into internal RISC instructions (which is exactly what Intel did since long).
Thus, the extra cost/penalty for implementing a more than 20 years old instruction set in a modern CPU is virtually zero.
When it comes to compilers... I almost always found to my disappointment that my C programs compiled with GCC run faster on Intel than on PowerPC (for the same clock frequency). I guess much more work has simply been put into x86 compilers.
I dont think this article says much to the Slashdot audience. It is really targeted at poeple who find IT confusing and needs to get an idea of what it is. It categorises and simplifies - maybe in a useful way for people who need an introduction. But again: not for the slashdot audience. Move on.
Linux always strategic to Red Hat - Not to Oracle
on
Will Red Hat Survive?
·
· Score: 1
Yes Red Hat will survive (or, at least not die because of Oracle).
There are those who want a supplier of just a linux system. Linux will always be strategic to Red Hat, but Oracle can change and will never be so Linux-focused.
There are lots of people out there, who, for different reasons, dont want anything to do with Oracle.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see a standard connector for computers. That is, a connector that would look mostly like a DVI-connector, carrying the following technologies:
Then units like mobile phones, portable terminals, music players can develop into real computers. In fact, I look forward to seeing complete computers the size of an iPod.
The great thing now would be a standard form factor of such computer-in-a-box. Because then there could be laptops sold without the computer itself (keyboard+display+battery+dvdunit). There can be computer connectors in internet cafes, aircrafts, TVs. You can also easily imagine a beowulf cluster of these! (with proper rack hardware).
Why would this happen? The core computer (cpu, memory, disk/solid state storage, graphics adapter, NIC, usb controller) will soon be cheaper than the rest of a laptop. It then doesnt really make sense with motherboards with multiple and expensive (price/space) connectors for cpu/memory/disk. The only connectors that will make sense are the one mentioned above (USB, DVI, Ethernet, Audio, Power). And I say this despite I am a Mac user who would like to see Firewire everywhere.
Another thing could happen instead: things can be very virtual. Maybe you just bring your virtual machine on a USB-stick or SD-card. This can happen soon - USB sticks of 16Gb are available for a decent price. Then in an aircraft/internet cafe/TV you just plug your USB-stick in, and they provide you with a virtalisation host (like QEMU or VMware player, or both).
Of course, when you are not connected the unit can still function, like a PDA, Phone, MP2-player, like Microsoft envisions.
I have an HP nc6200 laptop and I cant agree with you. The display is very poor. The touchpad is to the left of the center so after a while I have pain in my hand. It does produce noise. It looks like some piece of military equipment compared to Apples design (my private laptop is a 5 years old PowerBook).
I am upgrading (my other computer) right now. If anything goes wrong I'll tell you.
I seriously believe that if they (Media Industry) put up their own BitTorrent search engine and their own BitTorrent-tracker, and seeded their own content, people (like you and me) would pay for it.
You would pay for the "torrent file", which in this case would be copyrighted.
I also seriously believe this will never ever happen ;)
SGI? Well, they went bankrupt but they still sell Itaniums.
Ahh... well... yes... I forgot ;)
So, basically it is quite possible to emulate both ways with decent perforance. Still, I think it was harder to emulate PPC on x86 than the other way around.
How do you mean? Virtual PC for Apple/PPC emulated x86 quite well. I think a 500MHz PPC-processor was roughly able to emulate a 350 MHz Pentium Equivalent Processor.
Emulating a CISC architecture on a RISC architecture is not that hard. The other way around is much harder - you cant very well emulate a PPC/SPARC/MIPS on a x86-computer. Then you would suffer 10x clock-for-clock reduction.
Considering your low Slashdot-ID you should know ;)
And since the 386 consisted of 275000 transistors while modern cpus have more than 200 millions transistors the cost/waste of backwards compability with the 386 is very little.
My PSP has a battery time of 7h for games or watching movies. With a 700MHz CPU it would probably be shorter.
Battery time together with the larger display was the reason I got a PSP instead of a vides iPod.
Sleeping with Apple?
I appreciate your comment. I have replied to the guy who made the first comment on my original post. My answer to your post would be quite the same so I will not post the same thing twice.
I dont find your comment off-topic or very wrong. But I will explain myself a bit more. If you are about to build a house (private home) there are laws, rules and standards about:
- height of steps in stairs
- standard height of roof
- depth and width of kitchen furniture/equipment
- pipes in the walls where to put electric cables
- who is allowed to install electical equipment
- insulation, windows and radiators (if in a cold country)
- symbols for drawings
- what drawings are to be made (for different craftsmen)
- estimation of cost
If you are about to build a new computer system (lets for example say a commersial GUI application), you need to make decisions about:
- Development model (upfront / Extreme / ad-hoc)
- What platforms to support
- What development platform to use
- How do we test
- How do we design and document
- How much will it cost
There are no easy answers to these questions. Not until you answered these questions you can start using existing standards and best practices - and then you find that there are many to choose.
Lets take the design/drawings as an example. A "construction architect" is (I guess) very clear about what drawing are expected of him. The carpenter needs one. The electrician needs another one. The water/ventilation-guy needs another one. All symbols are standardised, and if different in different countries you can easily translate. So, when the architect is done the craftmen get what they need to do their job.
On the other hand, a "software architect", has basically no standardised method of delivering a design to the programmers. You can quite easily imagine two proficient and successful software architects who produce complely different sets of specifications for the same piece of software.
You say that there are version control, automated builds, automated unit testing and bug databases. But none of these are really standardised. They are all internal/local/private complex solutions for the problem that "there are no standardised ways to do things".
Software is very complex - arguably more complex than construction and manufacturing.
But software is not "close to consensus", "almost done" or "mature" as are construction and manufacturing.
That is why I believe that CS will be around for very long...
Compare computer science to other science - like architecture. Computer Science is still very immature with very few true best practices and standards. It will not die anytime soon.
Remember the 4th-Generation-Languages that were supposed to make programming unnecessary? Where are they today?
Ask innoviative organisations like BitTorrent, Apple, Google or Blizzard if they see Computers Science be obsolete any time soon. I dont think so.
I agree with you but I fail to see how it can be similar to the "same-birthday problem". Did you make a mistake or do you know something about how to search for keys that I dont know about?
more than 30 billion years for one valid key ...presuming they didnt find a qualified (yet brute force) way to guess keys...
Remember the DVD-crack long ago. The key was 40 bits, but for different reasons the key was in practice just 26 bits. Knowing a bit about the encryption made it possible to not search all keys and a DVD could be read within seconds, not years.
I couldnt find the download. People on Slashdot seems to be unusually confused about how this thing works - even those who claimed to read the article. I didnt find the article/method very confusing, but I dont know enough about Vista to tell if it COULD work or not. Are people confused because someone made something up that can not work? There are other cases where evil people have distributed trojans this way.
Is this a HOAX?
Here comes a lesson from a socialistic country ;)
They will send you another invoice and threaten to report you to "Kronofogdemyndigheten" - basically a part of the Tax Authority in Sweden that collects money from people who refuse/fail to pay.
If this happens you need to protest in writing.
If they send it to Kronofogden you need to protest to them.
You may end up in court (which is where it will be decided if you should pay or not) and you need to show up and protest there too.
If you fail to protest properly (and many people do because it can be complicated for ordinary people) you will get a mark in Kronofogdens registry indicating that you are not perfectly and responsibly paying your bills. It cannot be revoked and will automatically go away only after several years.
If you want anything in Sweden like borrowing money, or signing a contract for a landline phone, a mobile phone with subscription/invoices, a rental appartment, a credit card, a qualified job you are in practice fucked up if you have a mark with Kronofogden.
All Swedes have a personal ID that is used for everything so there is no way anyone who cares will not notice you failed to pay a bill.
So, you have two options:
1) Pay
2) Refuse in writing, carefully, over and over again
As you understand - paying can seem like the best option.
If you run a business and make a mistake it will/may cost you.
I would agree with you unless there exist companies who send things to customers they never ordered. If you receive such a thing you have two option: fight or pay up.
Amazons case is even worse: they sell for a very low price ($0), and then increase the price afterwards. What if they (Amazon) get away with it. Then companies are free miscalculate whatever they want and charge consumers afterwards.
This is not exactly unique for Amazon. It is quite common that companies send goods to people (mostly registered customers) that they have not ordered, and supply an invoice. People either have to just pay, or to call the company, complain and return the goods.
It is easy to suspect that Amazon did this on purpose.
In Sweden politicians are talking about writing a law that will basically give the cunsumers the right to keep whatever is sent to them, even if they never ordered it.
I sometimes order things from my Cable-TV/Internet-provider on their webpage. The conditions are often very unclear - to the point I suspect they are vague on purpose.
Parent post is all you need to read about this story. Lets wait a few days at least before with the speculations.
In fact, this is not so much of a problem. Compability with the Intel 386 is roughly what is meant with x86-compatible. The transistor count for 386 is 275000 (Wikipedia). The new Core 2 Duo contains 291 million transistors. That means that with less than 0.1% of the processor transistor it can fully implement a 386, and run it much faster than in the old days since it would be built with much smaller/faster technology.
Of course this is a simplification, but considering that x86 can be implemented in 275000 transistors, it shouldnt require so many transistor in a modern cpu to translate x86 instructions into internal RISC instructions (which is exactly what Intel did since long).
Thus, the extra cost/penalty for implementing a more than 20 years old instruction set in a modern CPU is virtually zero.
When it comes to compilers... I almost always found to my disappointment that my C programs compiled with GCC run faster on Intel than on PowerPC (for the same clock frequency). I guess much more work has simply been put into x86 compilers.
I dont think this article says much to the Slashdot audience. It is really targeted at poeple who find IT confusing and needs to get an idea of what it is. It categorises and simplifies - maybe in a useful way for people who need an introduction. But again: not for the slashdot audience. Move on.
Yes Red Hat will survive (or, at least not die because of Oracle).
There are those who want a supplier of just a linux system. Linux will always be strategic to Red Hat, but Oracle can change and will never be so Linux-focused.
There are lots of people out there, who, for different reasons, dont want anything to do with Oracle.
It feels great I could make my European-point-of-view comment without starting a flame-war :)
I have unfortunately never been around Chicago (just in Minneapolis airport). It is a pity that next time I visit USA will be to Orlando...