My theory (admittedly without evidence) is market segmentation, on both ATI's and NVidia's parts. It's something that has been done for years in the tech community, across many different kinds of products.
In effect, given the costs of production, it would be a lot cheaper for both ATI and NVidia to make a single GPU, and use binary drivers to enable/disable additional pipelines, texture processing units, etc, than it would be to actually make a series of different GPUs that have those capabilities. It wouldn't surprise me much at all that other than actual clock frequency & RAM speed, the only difference between the $100 cards and the $400 cards (assuming the same family of GPU) is an ID somewhere deep on the card that allows the driver to determine how many pipelines and additional features to enable. Consider this the difference between the 'student' and 'pro' versions.:)
I'm curious about the future of LED light bulbs - the potential from a bulb w/ 60,000 hours of life and power consumption under a watt is very attractive. I know light dispersion is an issue (e.g. they just don't throw out enough light), but what's on the horizon?
None of Creative's players work well (or much at all) with Linux. Over the years, there have been a couple of OSS attempts, but none with the help of the folks at Creative.
My emailed pleadings/complaints to Creative have always been answered with something to the effect of "We don't support Linux, we don't care to put in the resources, and we won't share the inner workings with you. Thanks for considering our product."
Needless to say, I no longer consider them a company worth supporting.
I remember IBM had a demo product that would exchange virtual business cards via a handshake - it might well have been a plug-in to a Palm Pilot They theorized max xfer at 2400bps at the time - this was 1996-7 or so. Still looking for the link.
I've had a phone with Verizon for years. The number spells an easy-to-remember word, and I'm not about to give that up.
As I see it, the FCC decision puts true market forces into play - I've been locked into Verizon because I couldn't carry the number elsewhere. No longer.
Do I switch? Possibly. Verizon doesn't work in my apartment, Sprint does. Sprint has cooler phones. It'll all end up depending on who offers me the best combination of price & service.
Isn't that the way it's supposed to be? Companies competing for customers? C'mon!
For the last year or so, NVIDIA's drivers have been _reasonably_ easy to install. They've improved with the latest release. Looks like a lot of the old DOS-based BIOS-upgrade utils now.
IPO's are simply a way for the company to raise money, in exchange for (partial) public ownership of the company. The fact that insiders usually get rich in the process is incidental, but Silicon Valley has now been operating for years on the idea that this is how you get paid when you're a rank-n-file employee at a startup.
Microsoft's IPO in 1986 is an interesting case - they were dragged to the IPO kicking & screaming. Think about it - Apple started in 1976 and IPO'ed in 1981 (at the time, one of the most successful IPOs in history). Microsoft started in 1975, and still hadn't IPO'ed by 1986. So what made them do it? Their employees had been using their vested options in lieu of cash when buying houses, cars, etc. For a privately held company, that's completely illegal, and as a result, the SEC forced them to go public. Even at that point, Microsoft didn't need to raise capital publically, BillG and company wanted to retain complete control of the company.
Re:What about GPL?? Sources??
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ok, but correct me if I'm wrong here:
If you take a GPL'd application, make changes to it, and then release/sell it publically, you're under obligation to return those changes to the original creators of the application, no?
In which case, I'd expect Xandros to, at the very least, publish the source code to all the standard applications that they're using that are GPL'd.
What about GPL?? Sources??
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
What about the GPL? It seems that the only way to get the sources is by emailing feedback@xandros.com. Is that legit?
Yea right. Any city with a subway has billboards everywhere, along with enough people & traffic to make driving a car a pain in the ass.
From the perspective of a NYer - now that the city has people again, the MTA can afford to be selective about advertising. I miss the late 1980s, when the MTA would take just about anything for an ad. There used to be a proctologist who'd advertise in the system with a sign reading, in 216-point type, "ANAL WARTS?". Those didn't last long. All the schoolkids (myself included) *had* to steal one.:)
Face it. When you take the subway 30 minutes each way, twice a day, you will run out of things to read. The advertisements do get read.
Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't this simply a case of people burning copies of existing discs? MP3 being a lossy format & all, even if you grabbed all the tracks from your p2p network of choice, and burned them to disc in the original track order, CDDB wouldn't recognize it as the same disc, right?
"We've trained people that you can buy things at 3 in the morning in the nude on the Internet and make a call to anyone from anywhere on a cellphone, and the idea that CBS is going to determine when I watch `CSI' flies in the face of that trend," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "TV networks are going to have to figure out how to make money from a TV viewer that is not nailed to the chair waiting for the commercial to end."
What you call a "Common Business Practice" is also called "Illegal Leveraging of Monopoly Power" in the case of a convicted Monopolist such as Microsoft. It's a textbook violation of the Sherman antitrust act, and the states have good reason to introduce this.
No other company in the industry has this power - You think any company would take Apple seriously if they tried to pull this? Sun? IBM? Cisco? Redhat? Get real. This is what Common Business Executives *wish* they could practice, but only Monopolists can pull off.
Ok, so RMS isn't happy with Miguel supporting a technology developed by Microsoft. But the issue isn't that the technology comes out of MSFT - the bigger issue is that in the.NET infrastructure, don't all requests/authentication/charges end up going through MS? Is Miguel essentially porting.NET to Linux by doing this? Or does Mono provide a means for bypassing the central MSFT authentication?
Beyond that, I'm surprised RMS didn't make more of an issue of Miguel changing the licensing on Mono to X11 from GPL. Lord knows that it's causing a ton of controversy among Gnome developers, and I can't imaging a bigger finger in the direction of RMS myself.
It's too bad, really - I've been using Ximian/Gnome for over a year now, and parts of it are pretty darn cool. But I'm starting to think that Miguel's getting off course - perhaps it's time to re-evaluate KDE.
As I understand it, the core codebase (Darwin) is fairly agnostic - it's just another flavor of Unix, teeth, hair, a**hole & all. Darwin sourcecode is available, if not GPL'd (Doesn't Apple have their own 'open source' license?). Darwin has already been ported to other platforms.
The catch is the UI - Apple's precious UI - the part of OSX that isn't available for the world+dog. In the bad old days, Apple would fill up the ROM chips will hardware implementations of their QuickDraw API (And lordy, did those old Macs need those API calls in hardware!).
During the CHRP clone days of the mid-90s, Apple was able to put all that stuff back in software, eliminating the need for those chips. Needless to say, CHRP is quite the distant memory.
So the question remains - is Apple still using proprietary chips on the Mobo to ensure that noone can manufacture legit clones? If so, what parts of OSX rely on that hardware? How much could you get running? It'll be interesting to find out..
I'd assume that Apple continues to tie their Operating Systems to proprietary ROMs - making a generic PPC motherboard fairly useless if you're planning to run MacOS. Not like this is a new thing - since the early 80's, Apple has used their ROM chips to sue any clone manufacturers. I remember my 1992-vintage Mac emulator for the Amiga required Mac ROMs that the emulator manufacturer would not supply.
I'd love to be wrong on this one - getting more competition in the PPC-hardware space would be great, but I doubt Steve Jobs will play along - he'll take his ball home first.
I stopped using UPS to ship computer equipment when they jostled my Amiga 3000T (!) so hard as to disconnect the HD cables. Thankfully, no permenantt damage.
I've had friends work for UPS. What it boils down to is that the rank & file is generally treated pretty poorly by management, and there's little accountability vis-a-vis package damage. So employees will take out their frustrations on the boxes. I tend to use FedEx. Their relationships with employees tend to be better, and their package tracking is better too.
And no matter what, don't ship it unless you can insure it. Neither UPS nor Fedex, nor anyone else for that matter, will improve their handling unless it affects their bottom line. Your stuff is destroyed, but since it's not insured, they don't care. If the company won't let you insure it, find someone else.
Finish off the degree. The grind is getting to you, but finish it off. That's the most important thing - just get it out of the way.
After that? Take some time off. It sounds like you're burned out, and need to see something else in the world. Grab a car and take a road trip, see friends you haven't seen in ages, do something beyond the normal day-to-day crap that kills us all slowly.
And then? See how it feels. After my last break (I took three months off after a year of 90-hour, 7-day weeks), I was actually looking forward to writing code again. I was looking forward to putting everything I had learned (both good and bad) from my last job to use. The perspective you get with a break is a wonderful thing.
Done with the break and still don't want what's nearby? You've got a degree in CS. You can use it to take you to amazing places. A friend of mine (the bastard!) from college is now the SA/programmer for a geologic research expidition, sailing on a boat in the Indian Ocean. Another spent a year in Madrid, working out of the Spanish offices of his company.
We've all been there. You're sick and tired of what you're currently doing. That's why college seniors are all grumpy - they've been stuck in the same place for 3-4+ years. Find some cute sophmore to shack up with for the winter, finish off the degree, and go have an adventure.
Are there better resources out there than http://linuxvideo.org?
I like the functionality of the TiVo, but I don't want to spend the money on one - I don't need anything but a way to decode & record a cable TV signal.
TiVo - Does the TiVo come with a cable descrambler? If not, do you need to leave your cable box on the channel you want to record on?? Isn't that a huge PITA?
Hardware - Are there PCI cards out there that can accept a coaxial input & output S-Video or Composite video? (I've already got a kick-butt AGP card I'd rather not get rid of)
Cable - Does 'basic' cable (e.g. in the US, TNT/TBS/History Channel) get scrambled? Is there a way to decode in software?
Why? Because the TiVo can't be programmed from the office, and I can't move anything off the TiVo to store for later viewing. I've already got 150+ GB of available storage, I need to use it for something.
Out of curiousity - does the MS patch address the fact that CR2 puts administrator-level access in the webroot, publicly available to all? What's to keep someone from writing something that exploits this, looking for boxes that have been patched, and removing the patch - re-enabling the vulnerability to CR? Or surreptitiously opening additonal services? Or hell, simply executing del (is that the command in DOS?) c:\? It's a good thing humanity in general hasn't been more vicious yet - every single one of these boxes that have been compromised could have been rendered useless by this point.
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My theory (admittedly without evidence) is market segmentation, on both ATI's and NVidia's parts. It's something that has been done for years in the tech community, across many different kinds of products.
:)
In effect, given the costs of production, it would be a lot cheaper for both ATI and NVidia to make a single GPU, and use binary drivers to enable/disable additional pipelines, texture processing units, etc, than it would be to actually make a series of different GPUs that have those capabilities. It wouldn't surprise me much at all that other than actual clock frequency & RAM speed, the only difference between the $100 cards and the $400 cards (assuming the same family of GPU) is an ID somewhere deep on the card that allows the driver to determine how many pipelines and additional features to enable. Consider this the difference between the 'student' and 'pro' versions.
I'm curious about the future of LED light bulbs - the potential from a bulb w/ 60,000 hours of life and power consumption under a watt is very attractive. I know light dispersion is an issue (e.g. they just don't throw out enough light), but what's on the horizon?
Wasn't it only yesterday that slashdot was linking to video of an Exploding Dell Laptop?? Hmmm??
I'm calling BS - name one story broken by any media organization that precipitated a terrorist attack.
Plain and simple, this is a way for the powers-that-be to clamp down on news that makes them look bad.
None of Creative's players work well (or much at all) with Linux. Over the years, there have been a couple of OSS attempts, but none with the help of the folks at Creative.
My emailed pleadings/complaints to Creative have always been answered with something to the effect of "We don't support Linux, we don't care to put in the resources, and we won't share the inner workings with you. Thanks for considering our product."
Needless to say, I no longer consider them a company worth supporting.
Found it.
It was an IBM researcher by the name of Tom Zimmerman who created a "Personal Area Network", back in 1996: Personal Area Networks (PAN): A Technology Demonstration by IBM Research.
Looks and sounds a lot like what MSFT just patented.
I remember IBM had a demo product that would exchange virtual business cards via a handshake - it might well have been a plug-in to a Palm Pilot They theorized max xfer at 2400bps at the time - this was 1996-7 or so. Still looking for the link.
I've had a phone with Verizon for years. The number spells an easy-to-remember word, and I'm not about to give that up.
As I see it, the FCC decision puts true market forces into play - I've been locked into Verizon because I couldn't carry the number elsewhere. No longer.
Do I switch? Possibly. Verizon doesn't work in my apartment, Sprint does. Sprint has cooler phones. It'll all end up depending on who offers me the best combination of price & service.
Isn't that the way it's supposed to be? Companies competing for customers? C'mon!
Two definitely geeky things to check out in New Mexico.
The Very Large Array - Gigantic Radio Astronomy installation
The Trinity Test Site. Only open a few times a year, your chance to see where the first atomic bomb was tested.
For the last year or so, NVIDIA's drivers have been _reasonably_ easy to install. They've improved with the latest release. Looks like a lot of the old DOS-based BIOS-upgrade utils now.
IPO's are simply a way for the company to raise money, in exchange for (partial) public ownership of the company. The fact that insiders usually get rich in the process is incidental, but Silicon Valley has now been operating for years on the idea that this is how you get paid when you're a rank-n-file employee at a startup.
Microsoft's IPO in 1986 is an interesting case - they were dragged to the IPO kicking & screaming. Think about it - Apple started in 1976 and IPO'ed in 1981 (at the time, one of the most successful IPOs in history). Microsoft started in 1975, and still hadn't IPO'ed by 1986. So what made them do it? Their employees had been using their vested options in lieu of cash when buying houses, cars, etc. For a privately held company, that's completely illegal, and as a result, the SEC forced them to go public. Even at that point, Microsoft didn't need to raise capital publically, BillG and company wanted to retain complete control of the company.
Ok, but correct me if I'm wrong here:
If you take a GPL'd application, make changes to it, and then release/sell it publically, you're under obligation to return those changes to the original creators of the application, no?
In which case, I'd expect Xandros to, at the very least, publish the source code to all the standard applications that they're using that are GPL'd.
What about the GPL? It seems that the only way to get the sources is by emailing feedback@xandros.com. Is that legit?
Yea right. Any city with a subway has billboards everywhere, along with enough people & traffic to make driving a car a pain in the ass.
:)
From the perspective of a NYer - now that the city has people again, the MTA can afford to be selective about advertising. I miss the late 1980s, when the MTA would take just about anything for an ad. There used to be a proctologist who'd advertise in the system with a sign reading, in 216-point type, "ANAL WARTS?". Those didn't last long. All the schoolkids (myself included) *had* to steal one.
Face it. When you take the subway 30 minutes each way, twice a day, you will run out of things to read. The advertisements do get read.
And I still miss "ANAL WARTS?"
Hello problem?? This is solution!! Problem?? Problem??
PROBLEM, WHERE ARE YOU?!?!?!
Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't this simply a case of people burning copies of existing discs? MP3 being a lossy format & all, even if you grabbed all the tracks from your p2p network of choice, and burned them to disc in the original track order, CDDB wouldn't recognize it as the same disc, right?
"We've trained people that you can buy things at 3 in the morning in the nude on the Internet and make a call to anyone from anywhere on a cellphone, and the idea that CBS is going to determine when I watch `CSI' flies in the face of that trend," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "TV networks are going to have to figure out how to make money from a TV viewer that is not nailed to the chair waiting for the commercial to end."
Amen to that!
What you call a "Common Business Practice" is also called "Illegal Leveraging of Monopoly Power" in the case of a convicted Monopolist such as Microsoft. It's a textbook violation of the Sherman antitrust act, and the states have good reason to introduce this.
No other company in the industry has this power - You think any company would take Apple seriously if they tried to pull this? Sun? IBM? Cisco? Redhat? Get real. This is what Common Business Executives *wish* they could practice, but only Monopolists can pull off.
Ok, so RMS isn't happy with Miguel supporting a technology developed by Microsoft. But the issue isn't that the technology comes out of MSFT - the bigger issue is that in the .NET infrastructure, don't all requests/authentication/charges end up going through MS? Is Miguel essentially porting .NET to Linux by doing this? Or does Mono provide a means for bypassing the central MSFT authentication?
Beyond that, I'm surprised RMS didn't make more of an issue of Miguel changing the licensing on Mono to X11 from GPL. Lord knows that it's causing a ton of controversy among Gnome developers, and I can't imaging a bigger finger in the direction of RMS myself.
It's too bad, really - I've been using Ximian/Gnome for over a year now, and parts of it are pretty darn cool. But I'm starting to think that Miguel's getting off course - perhaps it's time to re-evaluate KDE.
As I understand it, the core codebase (Darwin) is fairly agnostic - it's just another flavor of Unix, teeth, hair, a**hole & all. Darwin sourcecode is available, if not GPL'd (Doesn't Apple have their own 'open source' license?). Darwin has already been ported to other platforms.
The catch is the UI - Apple's precious UI - the part of OSX that isn't available for the world+dog. In the bad old days, Apple would fill up the ROM chips will hardware implementations of their QuickDraw API (And lordy, did those old Macs need those API calls in hardware!).
During the CHRP clone days of the mid-90s, Apple was able to put all that stuff back in software, eliminating the need for those chips. Needless to say, CHRP is quite the distant memory.
So the question remains - is Apple still using proprietary chips on the Mobo to ensure that noone can manufacture legit clones? If so, what parts of OSX rely on that hardware? How much could you get running? It'll be interesting to find out..
I'd assume that Apple continues to tie their Operating Systems to proprietary ROMs - making a generic PPC motherboard fairly useless if you're planning to run MacOS. Not like this is a new thing - since the early 80's, Apple has used their ROM chips to sue any clone manufacturers. I remember my 1992-vintage Mac emulator for the Amiga required Mac ROMs that the emulator manufacturer would not supply.
I'd love to be wrong on this one - getting more competition in the PPC-hardware space would be great, but I doubt Steve Jobs will play along - he'll take his ball home first.
I've had friends work for UPS. What it boils down to is that the rank & file is generally treated pretty poorly by management, and there's little accountability vis-a-vis package damage. So employees will take out their frustrations on the boxes. I tend to use FedEx. Their relationships with employees tend to be better, and their package tracking is better too.
And no matter what, don't ship it unless you can insure it. Neither UPS nor Fedex, nor anyone else for that matter, will improve their handling unless it affects their bottom line. Your stuff is destroyed, but since it's not insured, they don't care. If the company won't let you insure it, find someone else.
After that? Take some time off. It sounds like you're burned out, and need to see something else in the world. Grab a car and take a road trip, see friends you haven't seen in ages, do something beyond the normal day-to-day crap that kills us all slowly.
And then? See how it feels. After my last break (I took three months off after a year of 90-hour, 7-day weeks), I was actually looking forward to writing code again. I was looking forward to putting everything I had learned (both good and bad) from my last job to use. The perspective you get with a break is a wonderful thing.
Done with the break and still don't want what's nearby? You've got a degree in CS. You can use it to take you to amazing places. A friend of mine (the bastard!) from college is now the SA/programmer for a geologic research expidition, sailing on a boat in the Indian Ocean. Another spent a year in Madrid, working out of the Spanish offices of his company.
We've all been there. You're sick and tired of what you're currently doing. That's why college seniors are all grumpy - they've been stuck in the same place for 3-4+ years. Find some cute sophmore to shack up with for the winter, finish off the degree, and go have an adventure.
Are there better resources out there than http://linuxvideo.org?
I like the functionality of the TiVo, but I don't want to spend the money on one - I don't need anything but a way to decode & record a cable TV signal.
Why? Because the TiVo can't be programmed from the office, and I can't move anything off the TiVo to store for later viewing. I've already got 150+ GB of available storage, I need to use it for something.
Out of curiousity - does the MS patch address the fact that CR2 puts administrator-level access in the webroot, publicly available to all? What's to keep someone from writing something that exploits this, looking for boxes that have been patched, and removing the patch - re-enabling the vulnerability to CR? Or surreptitiously opening additonal services? Or hell, simply executing del (is that the command in DOS?) c:\? It's a good thing humanity in general hasn't been more vicious yet - every single one of these boxes that have been compromised could have been rendered useless by this point.