Agreed. Very impressive story. And as best I can tell, they got the stroy out to enough people that the bigger sites started noticing, and things got changed. Not only impressive reporting, but reporting that made a difference. That seems to be getting rarer in a world where most reporting takes the tone of "this thing happened, and though it's important and impacts you directly, there's nothing that can be done," and, IMNSHO, ought to be rewarded.
All of this is true. However, it is much easier than what was done even just going to PIII coppermine, I believe. As CPU designs go, I think it was very cheap. I imagine the pipeline structure is the same, with tweaks appropriate to the new process. And the new process will buy some speed on its own, just not that much. It will give the P4 a bigger increase -- taking it from 2 GHz to 4 GHz last I heard; it will probably take PIII from 1GHz to 1.5GHz, a much smaller (though not insignificant) increase. But we'll never see 1.5GHz PIIIs is my guess. And while you can't just stuff in more cache, I don't think it's that hard either.
not really. There is still a PIII market, and Intel is selling to that market. It really doesn't take as much time to move the PIII to 0.13 as it would to do a redesign. I think the real problem is the Duron -- the celeron is underperforming, and so the PIII is competing in the mid-low end with slow Athlons and Durons. Hence, they needed to up the clock speed. A slight tweak to the chipset, and it's ready to go. I think the PIII will hold the mid-low market segment, and slowly ramp in clockspeed.
I thought it was really interesting. You actually get the sense these people care about the debate for the sake of the debate producing the right answer, which may or may not be their own. They clearly have very strong opinions, more or less in line with the slashdot readership and against the mpaa/riaa, but they seem to honestly want the debate to happen.
In an age of no discussion and just yelling at each other and lawsuits, it was a very refreshing read. No doub this was increased by my general agreement with the panel...
for those without time or desire or self confidence to set up a linux router/firewall, I can strongly recomend the linksys firewall/gateway. It is easy to use, and supports a reasonable variety of stuff. What are other people doing with these? I have a set of scripts that maintains a DNS entry (external) resolving back to the DHCP addr of the linksys box. Checks on occasion to update entry if needed. Any other cool things people have done with these, or related such?
It seems to me that the ISP should have common carrier status. Maybe that doesn't exist for ISPs in the netherlands, but I think it does and certainly should in the US. I think that the appropriate response for the ISP is to say that they won't remove the porn, because that creates a percieved ability for them to police ALL stuff flowing through their servers, so who knows what happens next time. I think it would be cool if all the major ISPs (and minor ones too) got together and announced that unless the gov't gave them the legal right to do their job with common carrier status, then the only way they could comply with the law would be to shut down. And produce a deadline. And kill the net when the gov't failed to respond. I know it won't happen, I just like to fantasize. Now back on topic:
create harsh sentences for anyone who makes child porn, with REALLY harsh sentences for the sick folks who then go out and have sex with kids. But don't hit the ISPs and (being really controversial here...) don't have penalties for use, because some people whose brains are wired wrong so they get off on children are responsible enough not to do anything to children, but need a way to get those fantasies out of their system or whatever.
Re:So you can't save it.. [OT]
on
CPRM Lecture
·
· Score: 2
Speaking of which, I think I have access to an older copy (which does do ASF). I don't have it, but I'm pretty sure a friend does. Email me if you can't find it online, but it'll be a few days before I reply, so go look for it online first. Also, it's GPL, so the old source should be out there if someone wants to integrate into new source and release anonymously on freenet. That'd be cool. I don't program well enough though. BTW, it's a very good tool for what it does (Linear video editing; Premiere and the like are non-linear; VDub is NOT useful for NLE tasks).
Alien computers
Star Wars most violent movie ever, despite PG rating
Can slashdot actually do anything useful? NO. (the war story)
Geek sex tips, obviously designed to invoke images of ESR in bed (with someone else)
Alien civil rights
The way it's currently looking, the republicans want to censor everything for the sake of morality on television (last I checked I can define my own and limit what I / my kids watch without their help, thank you very much), and the democrats want to "protect the children" (again, they're my kids, I'll raise them myself. Including finding a school that meets my needs. If I'm going to have kids, I'm willing to do some work to do it right.) which results in censorship at least as extreme. I don't think either major party is off the hook here.
Of course, the democratic party looks more acceptable to me for a variety of reasons, but it'll be a while before they get my vote...
A good number of my friends would seem to qualify in the eyes of Slashdot as Joe Average. They use their computers without really caring about all the details. They are aware of Linux, but wouldn't dream of using it. They rip MP3s, they play games. They don't pay attention to the articles on Slashdot.
So I have begun bringing up copy prevention (not protection) in every conversation where it is appropriate. I mention XP, SDMI, the Sound Blaster Audigy (encrypts PCI traffic), the Dataplay discs, and now this. And what is the reaction? From those who listen to music they didn't overpay for and those who don't alike, the reaction is "Wow. That's shitty." Often in those exact words. I then tell them that I (a Win2K user) don't plan to "upgrade" and will move to Linux when it better meets my needs. I explain that I won't buy this shit. They agree. I think many will follow through.
Anyway, most of them are (I think) above average computer users, but they can all understand that all of these prevent them from getting to *their* music (not the RIAAs. They paid for it and they know it).
At some point in the discussion they raise the point that "It'll get hacked soon enough." Then I paint the pessimistic (maybe not?) picture of WinXP not copying the files, not playing through an insecure player, not giving sound to an insecure driver, and that driver not giving sound to an insecure card. And then I say, so maybe you could hack the WinXP kernel. But they quickly realize that's a LOT harder or impossible in any practical sense.
So, they realize how shitty it is. And the next time the topic comes up, I mention it again. IN PASSING. I don't go off on a rant (or try not to) until and unless they ask a question, and then I answer it. And guess what? the response to a brief comment is usually "oh yeah, that shittiness" or "huh?" in which case I explain somewhat more, and they ask more questions. No one I mentioned this to said "yeah, whatever."
GET THE WORD OUT. It can be done. The consumers don't want this and they know it. They don't read Slashdot, but a large number of them know someone who does. TELL PEOPLE. It can work.
Please, before it's to late, GET OFF YOUR ASSES AND DO SOMETHING. it's not even all that hard. And I'll bet it does more than a letter to your rep (do keep them up though.. and vote.. but do this too).
I have one. OK, so it's my school's but I get to play with it. It runs a 486 33MHz, has a BW 640x480 (I think, don't remember) screen, Li ion battery, decently ok handwriting recog (similar to palm, but the glyphs are closer to normal and recognize somewhat worse. It runs DOS and windows for pen computing 1.0 (win3.11), has some networking stuff I never fixed, an 80MB 2.5" IDE disk, an external floppy, 4MB of memory (expandable to 12 if we knew where to get the card), a PCMCIA slot, and external kbd if desired, standard serial/parralel/ps2 ports, and a little thing to hold the pen. Pretty neat, never went to Linux because we didn't want to figure out the touch screen. They're several years old, we got them from Duke. Oh yeah, and they drop to 25MHz on battery power. Sound familiar? And battery life is at least the 1 1/2 hour class period.
I read a different article on this (don't have link, sorry) that suggested that these would be used to move heat between different regions of a chip. For example, cool a very hot ALU by dumping the heat elsewhere. Before you say that's stupid, in reality a more even heat distribution would decrease the maximum temperature of any given point on the chip, allowing it to run hotter on average (and hence faster). Also, it makes it easier to cool, as a greater region is in contact with the heat sink.
My high school is talking about implementing this sort of thing. Last I checked they were claiming at start of next year. More likely later than that, but still VERY cool. Course, I'll be in college by then... Ah well.
The benchmarks show 350M pixels/s rendered on a 175MHz chip with two pipelines. I don't think anyone in the PC graphics industry has ever accomplished that. (I believe the VooDoo and other really early cards were held back by time to set up all the polys on the CPU)
Second, the point stands that this is quite new to the scene and that more bandwidth won't help.
the answer is very simple: the chip doesn't need it. Read the article, look at the later benchmarks -- the chip is actually achieving its theoretical fillrate. This has never happened before in the entire history of the graphics chip industry except perhaps in their previous chips. This is amazingly new. If they gave it more memory, guess what -- the numbers would be the same. The whole point is the chip is so good at what it does it doesn't need the bandwidth. Now, if they went to four pipelines and a DDR interface, that would be cool. But, the tileing architecture may not be that fast.
If the poster had read the benchmarks, it would be obvious that the case is not so cut and dry. The card wins at some things, loses at others. It loses to the GF2GTS in some benchmarks, and beats the GF2 Ultra in others. A very cool card, and worlds beyond anything in its price range, however. This should do very good things to the low price range performance market as a whole, by pushing down other prices and by providing a cool new technology.
I think I basically agree with what you're saying. My point was that today's cpu's are more than fast enough for current applications. CPUs in three years will be more than fast enough for their applications. But todays will be horibly slow. Imagine living your life on a P100 today. It's pretty hard (yes, I've done so recently, though not normally). I think that's basically because we have new applications -- they're not stricly necessary, but I like my quick GUI, my multitasking of memory-hungry cpu-hungry apps, etc. I was just trying to produce some off-the-cuff examples of uses. One good example from a reply to my original post is real time audio/video encoding. Good for video conferencing, etc. Anyway, it just felt like slashdot of all places couldn't see a use for more CPU power in 2004.
I keep seeing this. I am of the opinion that despite this (and I agree to some point), we should keep improving them as fast as possible. The theory goes, we'll find stuff for it eventually. Perhaps someone will find a way to do reasonable AI for some game that plays like a person and learns, and doesn't just beat the player by playing perfectly at a small scale, but actually plans better. But, oh wait, it requires a CPU running in the multi-GHz range to operate effectively. We'll be glad that CPU is there when the time comes. Or some other equally intensive application. Maybe good voice synth / facial expression to go with it? and an AI to produce the dialog? that sounds good, and CPU intensive. Don't berate the fact the CPUs are faster. Years ago, todays speeds would have seemed completely unnecessary. But you can't do high-res, high-poly-count 3D without them.
Anyway, it really anoys me when the crowd of admitted techno-geeks can't see uses for more CPU power. They're out there, and when the designers have the CPU power, it will get used. The PS2 games will improve, and the story will repeat again with the PS3 -- at a level an order of magnitude (or more) higher in CPU power, and somewhat higher in gameplay (I hope).
There's another important reason: if a node can go down at any time, then it doesn't matter if I wish to run a server on my desktop. Gnutella lets me share files (many of them legal), while only remaining connected for a few hours or days at a time. If I go down, then someone else (hopefully) has the data also, so it can still propogate. P2P in its current invocations doesn't allow nicely published pages, because the clients are intended to download a single file, not a collection thereof. There are cases where I would like to be able to share my (legal) music and videos that other people want (and they do), without having to find a way to provide a server that is up 99%+ and has sufficient bandwidth for all requests. P2P provides an answer, provided other people provide mirrors (something I try to do). Also, the mirrors are so easy to create -- just download the file and *poof* there it is.
What I meant was, I have yet to write anything longer than about 15-20 pages, and don't plan to in the near future. Similar applies to spreadsheets, presentations, etc. For now, I like office. It's easy, it's sufficiently stable, important stuff I save backups and know that some other computer's install of office can read them in emergency. If I need to write something large, it will be a large enough project that I can afford to learn something better.
I've seen this posted below, but there's an even more interesting question: Not all chips off the same line are the same speed. How do you "bin" the chips? Also, suppose one chip gets a somewhat faster overall chip, but for some reason the part that does FMUL is a little slow. Maybe my application cares, maybe not. If I need a DB server or web server or anything similar, who cares? But if I'm number crunching, I care very much. Without the MHz number, there is no effective way to compare two of the same chip. I think this isn't much of a problem for the embedded market (it will run X application in real-time, guaranteed); but for the CPU market it is a big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
and tell me it's not art.
Should I take this to mean that all the limited edition sets have been ordered by those who refresh /. more often than I do?
K5
/.
Agreed. Very impressive story. And as best I can tell, they got the stroy out to enough people that the bigger sites started noticing, and things got changed. Not only impressive reporting, but reporting that made a difference. That seems to be getting rarer in a world where most reporting takes the tone of "this thing happened, and though it's important and impacts you directly, there's nothing that can be done," and, IMNSHO, ought to be rewarded.
All of this is true. However, it is much easier than what was done even just going to PIII coppermine, I believe. As CPU designs go, I think it was very cheap. I imagine the pipeline structure is the same, with tweaks appropriate to the new process. And the new process will buy some speed on its own, just not that much. It will give the P4 a bigger increase -- taking it from 2 GHz to 4 GHz last I heard; it will probably take PIII from 1GHz to 1.5GHz, a much smaller (though not insignificant) increase. But we'll never see 1.5GHz PIIIs is my guess. And while you can't just stuff in more cache, I don't think it's that hard either.
not really. There is still a PIII market, and Intel is selling to that market. It really doesn't take as much time to move the PIII to 0.13 as it would to do a redesign. I think the real problem is the Duron -- the celeron is underperforming, and so the PIII is competing in the mid-low end with slow Athlons and Durons. Hence, they needed to up the clock speed. A slight tweak to the chipset, and it's ready to go. I think the PIII will hold the mid-low market segment, and slowly ramp in clockspeed.
So, has anyone put this on Freenet yet? If so, what's the key? If not, then I'm very disappointed in Slashdot.
In an age of no discussion and just yelling at each other and lawsuits, it was a very refreshing read. No doub this was increased by my general agreement with the panel...
for those without time or desire or self confidence to set up a linux router/firewall, I can strongly recomend the linksys firewall/gateway. It is easy to use, and supports a reasonable variety of stuff. What are other people doing with these? I have a set of scripts that maintains a DNS entry (external) resolving back to the DHCP addr of the linksys box. Checks on occasion to update entry if needed. Any other cool things people have done with these, or related such?
create harsh sentences for anyone who makes child porn, with REALLY harsh sentences for the sick folks who then go out and have sex with kids. But don't hit the ISPs and (being really controversial here...) don't have penalties for use, because some people whose brains are wired wrong so they get off on children are responsible enough not to do anything to children, but need a way to get those fantasies out of their system or whatever.
Speaking of which, I think I have access to an older copy (which does do ASF). I don't have it, but I'm pretty sure a friend does. Email me if you can't find it online, but it'll be a few days before I reply, so go look for it online first. Also, it's GPL, so the old source should be out there if someone wants to integrate into new source and release anonymously on freenet. That'd be cool. I don't program well enough though. BTW, it's a very good tool for what it does (Linear video editing; Premiere and the like are non-linear; VDub is NOT useful for NLE tasks).
Alien computers
Star Wars most violent movie ever, despite PG rating
Can slashdot actually do anything useful? NO. (the war story)
Geek sex tips, obviously designed to invoke images of ESR in bed (with someone else)
Alien civil rights
Of course, the democratic party looks more acceptable to me for a variety of reasons, but it'll be a while before they get my vote...
So I have begun bringing up copy prevention (not protection) in every conversation where it is appropriate. I mention XP, SDMI, the Sound Blaster Audigy (encrypts PCI traffic), the Dataplay discs, and now this. And what is the reaction? From those who listen to music they didn't overpay for and those who don't alike, the reaction is "Wow. That's shitty." Often in those exact words. I then tell them that I (a Win2K user) don't plan to "upgrade" and will move to Linux when it better meets my needs. I explain that I won't buy this shit. They agree. I think many will follow through.
Anyway, most of them are (I think) above average computer users, but they can all understand that all of these prevent them from getting to *their* music (not the RIAAs. They paid for it and they know it).
At some point in the discussion they raise the point that "It'll get hacked soon enough." Then I paint the pessimistic (maybe not?) picture of WinXP not copying the files, not playing through an insecure player, not giving sound to an insecure driver, and that driver not giving sound to an insecure card. And then I say, so maybe you could hack the WinXP kernel. But they quickly realize that's a LOT harder or impossible in any practical sense.
So, they realize how shitty it is. And the next time the topic comes up, I mention it again. IN PASSING. I don't go off on a rant (or try not to) until and unless they ask a question, and then I answer it. And guess what? the response to a brief comment is usually "oh yeah, that shittiness" or "huh?" in which case I explain somewhat more, and they ask more questions. No one I mentioned this to said "yeah, whatever."
GET THE WORD OUT. It can be done. The consumers don't want this and they know it. They don't read Slashdot, but a large number of them know someone who does. TELL PEOPLE. It can work.
Please, before it's to late, GET OFF YOUR ASSES AND DO SOMETHING. it's not even all that hard. And I'll bet it does more than a letter to your rep (do keep them up though.. and vote.. but do this too).
OK, I'm done ranting now. bye.
I have one. OK, so it's my school's but I get to play with it. It runs a 486 33MHz, has a BW 640x480 (I think, don't remember) screen, Li ion battery, decently ok handwriting recog (similar to palm, but the glyphs are closer to normal and recognize somewhat worse. It runs DOS and windows for pen computing 1.0 (win3.11), has some networking stuff I never fixed, an 80MB 2.5" IDE disk, an external floppy, 4MB of memory (expandable to 12 if we knew where to get the card), a PCMCIA slot, and external kbd if desired, standard serial/parralel/ps2 ports, and a little thing to hold the pen. Pretty neat, never went to Linux because we didn't want to figure out the touch screen. They're several years old, we got them from Duke. Oh yeah, and they drop to 25MHz on battery power. Sound familiar? And battery life is at least the 1 1/2 hour class period.
I read a different article on this (don't have link, sorry) that suggested that these would be used to move heat between different regions of a chip. For example, cool a very hot ALU by dumping the heat elsewhere. Before you say that's stupid, in reality a more even heat distribution would decrease the maximum temperature of any given point on the chip, allowing it to run hotter on average (and hence faster). Also, it makes it easier to cool, as a greater region is in contact with the heat sink.
My high school is talking about implementing this sort of thing. Last I checked they were claiming at start of next year. More likely later than that, but still VERY cool. Course, I'll be in college by then... Ah well.
The benchmarks show 350M pixels/s rendered on a 175MHz chip with two pipelines. I don't think anyone in the PC graphics industry has ever accomplished that. (I believe the VooDoo and other really early cards were held back by time to set up all the polys on the CPU)
Second, the point stands that this is quite new to the scene and that more bandwidth won't help.
BTW, thanks for the info.
the answer is very simple: the chip doesn't need it. Read the article, look at the later benchmarks -- the chip is actually achieving its theoretical fillrate. This has never happened before in the entire history of the graphics chip industry except perhaps in their previous chips. This is amazingly new. If they gave it more memory, guess what -- the numbers would be the same. The whole point is the chip is so good at what it does it doesn't need the bandwidth. Now, if they went to four pipelines and a DDR interface, that would be cool. But, the tileing architecture may not be that fast.
If the poster had read the benchmarks, it would be obvious that the case is not so cut and dry. The card wins at some things, loses at others. It loses to the GF2GTS in some benchmarks, and beats the GF2 Ultra in others. A very cool card, and worlds beyond anything in its price range, however. This should do very good things to the low price range performance market as a whole, by pushing down other prices and by providing a cool new technology.
I think I basically agree with what you're saying. My point was that today's cpu's are more than fast enough for current applications. CPUs in three years will be more than fast enough for their applications. But todays will be horibly slow. Imagine living your life on a P100 today. It's pretty hard (yes, I've done so recently, though not normally). I think that's basically because we have new applications -- they're not stricly necessary, but I like my quick GUI, my multitasking of memory-hungry cpu-hungry apps, etc. I was just trying to produce some off-the-cuff examples of uses. One good example from a reply to my original post is real time audio/video encoding. Good for video conferencing, etc. Anyway, it just felt like slashdot of all places couldn't see a use for more CPU power in 2004.
Anyway, it really anoys me when the crowd of admitted techno-geeks can't see uses for more CPU power. They're out there, and when the designers have the CPU power, it will get used. The PS2 games will improve, and the story will repeat again with the PS3 -- at a level an order of magnitude (or more) higher in CPU power, and somewhat higher in gameplay (I hope).
There's another important reason: if a node can go down at any time, then it doesn't matter if I wish to run a server on my desktop. Gnutella lets me share files (many of them legal), while only remaining connected for a few hours or days at a time. If I go down, then someone else (hopefully) has the data also, so it can still propogate. P2P in its current invocations doesn't allow nicely published pages, because the clients are intended to download a single file, not a collection thereof. There are cases where I would like to be able to share my (legal) music and videos that other people want (and they do), without having to find a way to provide a server that is up 99%+ and has sufficient bandwidth for all requests. P2P provides an answer, provided other people provide mirrors (something I try to do). Also, the mirrors are so easy to create -- just download the file and *poof* there it is.
What I meant was, I have yet to write anything longer than about 15-20 pages, and don't plan to in the near future. Similar applies to spreadsheets, presentations, etc. For now, I like office. It's easy, it's sufficiently stable, important stuff I save backups and know that some other computer's install of office can read them in emergency. If I need to write something large, it will be a large enough project that I can afford to learn something better.
I've seen this posted below, but there's an even more interesting question: Not all chips off the same line are the same speed. How do you "bin" the chips? Also, suppose one chip gets a somewhat faster overall chip, but for some reason the part that does FMUL is a little slow. Maybe my application cares, maybe not. If I need a DB server or web server or anything similar, who cares? But if I'm number crunching, I care very much. Without the MHz number, there is no effective way to compare two of the same chip. I think this isn't much of a problem for the embedded market (it will run X application in real-time, guaranteed); but for the CPU market it is a big deal.