Resting on their laurels while adressing some problems with the Athlon line. It's not going to give them any new wins, but if Intel doesn't do anything good with the P4, it could work. The P4 certainly isn't going to win anything on its own, but if it gets good compiler support and 3rd party chipsets to drop the price (ie. ditch Rambus and use DDR), it would likely be far superior.
Second is the 64 bit stuff. x86-64 is one of the lamest ideas to come out of a high tech company since boo.com, and everyone who so much as looks at the name knows it. The only way it could go anywhere is if the competition was, what, several years late, having difficulty ramping to high clock speeds, requiring major new compiler technology, and probably many more things as well. Since they've met the first few requirements, I'll hold off on judgement.
They are counting on Intel to screw up. From the past, this may work. It's not really a good thing to count on. Innovation often fails too, but I hope they don't just go into a holding pattern with the Athlon. That was a big win for them; to do well they have to follow it up with others now.
The links to tech documents are fake. I can't see any 92% failure rate; the document doesn't exist. Read the links before moderating up some moronic troll.
I'm not really sure. I'm at UofT, living in Toronto. I know that around here, and around Waterloo, there are a number of options available. I did a Google search and came up with NorthPoint DSL and DSL Inc.. NorthPoint claims to have "national" service, but I don't know if that means the whole country or just "Toronto, and Scarborough also."
I'd agree with you that we'd still be paying $50/ month in 10 years, but there is too much competition. If you go to http://dsl.ca and look at their home service, it starts at $35/ month. I don't know about the service quality, but I know that you are wrong.
I suppose it's obvious from the context, but I meant "The government shouldn't say who gets rich or not," rather than "The govermnment should say who gets rich or not."
Well, being Canadian, my view here is a bit skewed, but I do have one. The government should be promoting (by legal means where necessary) fair competition.
A government shouldn't stop a coroporation from forming. Even a monopoly. What the government should do is prevent monopolies from artificially maintaining themselves. Better yet, they should promote competition.
Similarly with people. High tech fields are, to me, great examples of capitalism. Anyone can get rich or go broke, depending upon their abilities. Still, this isn't a natural condition. The government should say who gets rich or not. The government should, through public education and other infrastructure make sure that everyone has a shot at this according to their abilities.
That's really what this is about: giving people better opportunities. Take them or leave them. It's not going to give anyone a fair shake at toppling Intel or Microsoft, but if that's your goal, then you shouldn't be held back by anything other than your abilities.
I don't pretend to be libertarian, but I am a capitalist.
But this is a Good Thing. The job of government isn't to do everything for us, but to put all people on a better grounds to compete. For many small businesses, that is high speed Internet access. For many people in remote areas, better Internet access means better access to basic educational resources. The CRTC has done a good job with telecom; in Canada we have a lot of competition, and prices are good. As for the $50 (Canadian!) cap on consumer broadband, we still get better service than the vast majority of Americans are able to get. I think the CRTC has been pretty reasonable with this, as we have a lot of competition in the broadband market (I can get @Home, Bell Sympatico DSL, or DSL from a number of other third parties, all in the $50 or less range). That wouldn't be there if there was no money to be made in it.
Some other large software packages work like this already. Personally, I think it doesn't make much sense for a product you run on your personal computer, as opposed to something where you are actually buying services that require ongoing expenditures from the manufacturer. Still, you can see that with windowsupdate and officeupdate, they are moving to a more service oriented model, even for their pre-.NET products. The more interesting questions will be cost of a subscription, and if subscriptions include new versions. I'm sure it will cost more, but it could be that it will not be a whole lot more, and if they put in infrastructure for tracking subscriptions, it could save a lot of effort when they ask for assurance of license compliance.
It looks to me like the floating point performance was the main thing hampering the P4's. As a non-gamer who doesn't do much graphics, but does regularly use the full integer capacity of my computer, I think the P4 was significantly faster. I think they did a lot of work to reduce branch misses, and it paid off. I'd also like to see the further improvement when (if?) we get a mature chipset using RDRAM, as it is a much faster breed of memory. There are issues with it, but because of the immature hardware to work with it, we've only seen the bad side so far, not the good.
I'm with Jonathan here. What is needed is a survey of the state-of-the-art using real-world like data (grime and partial prints and whatever--someone would need to study and find out what the range of real world fingerprint conditions are), with both hits and misses in the data sets tested. That would give some measure of the effectiveness of fingerprinting as a forensic identification technique.
On another level, if it really is scientific (and please don't confuse scientific with useful in the real world), there really ought to be some repeatable technique that is used to do this. If there is no such technique, fingerprint identification is not science, even if it is a useful method of identification.
They saw something that looked like it could make money. So they decided that rather than let some corporation do it, they would do it themselves. You can bet that they would charge at least as much as Verisign, and probably much more. That's what happens when you get a monopoly, be it private or public. At least with Verisign there is the potential that someone else could do the same thing some day.
And if anyone asks me how I know that CP lets through goatse.cx, I'll say that Millennium told me!
Seriously, though, they ought to ban search engines... after all, the search engines might have indexed more than them, and you could get around them that way. I mean, if you're going to shoot yourself in the foot, you might as well take your leg off at the same time.
I hear it's because initially most OS X apps will run in the OS 9 compatibility layer, which is a VM running OS 9. It's not a happy solution, because OS 9 is less well behaved than Windows 3.1 apps running on an NT box (which is a very comparable situation). When OS X comes out, it can use one processor for OS 9 and everybody is happy, since most people using it will have SMP. Not to mention the all good side effects of having SMP for everything else in OS X when the older stuff becomes mostly irrelevant.
I've no plans to buy a P4 in the next year, anyway. On the other hand, it probably means quite a bit to the people who actually will buy them. Personally, I've been running SMP for several years, and when I "upgraded" to a much faster single processor box, I was so disappointed that I will not consider another single CPU desktop PC. It is much faster, but when the processor is busy it lags in a way that my old box didn't.
Anyone else think that making the TLD's have many different lengths is a bad thing? I can just see everybody who types in yyy.museum putting in yyy.museum.com instead. That wouldn't happen nearly as much if they kept the TLD's to three or four characters.
On a time scale, this works wonderfully for daily updates where a slightly popular piece of content is pretty sure to be mirrored nearby. But for slashdot, it would probably generate just as much traffic (or more, depending on the overhead of requesting updates to the latest second). For dynamically generated content using what-have-you, it would just not work at all. All my slashdot pages say "Pink Daisy" on them somewhere... I'm sure no one else would desire to cache those. I could find my computer at work cacheing a copy of slashdot for each of my coworkers, who skips over it for the latest version. Also, and I'm not entirely sure about this, I thought that old content becoming less popular and being removed was one of the serious difficulties with Freenet.
Re:Theres only one thing left to do...
on
Iridium Saved?
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· Score: 2
Sounds good to me. Someone got venture capital to give me to start this thing?
My business plan is to shoot down crazy satellites one by one with a "laser". I'll hire a bunch of Anonymous Cowards to build it, then launch it into space.
If it works especially well, I'll start shooting down normal satellites one by one, also, and if I ever get to shooting down satellites owned by companies that make money, I'll demand ransom before shooting them down, and maybe you can get some return on your investment.
I see they have a proven winner at the helm
on
Iridium Saved?
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· Score: 1
The former president, chairman and CEO of Canadian Airlines. I guess he jumped ship from one defunct company to kill another defunct company.
I think recent experience has shown that lawmakers are predisposed to making intellectual property and various other non-physical works into things that can be owned. Music and software code come immediately to mind.
I've not thought about this enough to formulate my own views on the ownership of domains, but I expect that they will be considered private property that can be owned outright, and they will be treated accordingly. Thus, the public databases will go away, as, barring an outright change in the attitude of lawmakers, they should.
Perhaps it went onto one of our naval vessels, and collapsed some poor rusted out deck. What a sad end to a noble operating system!
what happens when an error occurs
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 1
Right now, the only recourses available are throwing out ballots and recounting. Electronic ballots would simplify this.
First, no miscounts. Every ballot gets counted, every ballot gets counted correctly. A recount would be meaningless.
Second, spoiled ballots would be obvious. Spoiling a ballot is a political choice, and would have to be supported by any electronic system. The difference? No chance of miscounting spoiled ballots, and less chance of accidentally spoiling a ballot.
As for Florida, we're no better off. A poorly designed electronic ballot could be confusing. We know what the votes said, but there's nothing we can do about it. We can't recount to get the right answer, because the ballots are good, they just don't say what the people who voted want them to say. A revote wouldn't work either, because voting demographics would change drastically if it was suddenly up to one county to determine the next president. The only plus is that with electronic ballots, it would be easier to make and maintain national standards.
This is the hackers challenge: to take something like this poor little box, that no one should be able to screw up, and screw it up. To make it into something new and more interesting, sure, but fundamentally, to screw it up.
But unless one of the things screwed up is the business model, no one minds what the hackers do. The real person to protect the device from is the clueless newbie. I'm sure the only reason is that there are so many more of them than us, but I find it funny that the things we have to work so hard to get around are put there in futile attempts to safeguard the device from people who have no idea what is going on.
First, Bush is supposed to get a majority of votes, but lose the election. Now Gore gets a majority of votes, but looks like he'll lose the election.
Second, Florida (and Michigan and California) are declared Gore instantly when the polls close. Bush leads in all, with a respectable margin, for some time. Gore comes back in Michigan and California, but eventually Florida is declared undecided. Then it turns Bush! That's when it gets interesting.
Third, Bush is declared winner. Gore congratulates him on victory. And then takes it back! No one can accuse him of dishonesty this time; Florida is declared undecided again.
Fourth, no one knows who won. Bush leads by almost a thousand votes in Florida, the deciding state, as I write this. Slim margin, maybe, but that's up from 500 earlier in the evening. Unfortunately, the margin is just too small, and we won't know until most of the absentee ballots are received by mail.
So finally, the dilemma: obviously I can't wait up for the results, since they probably won't be known for several days. So, do I go to bed now, or do I start coding in earnest? Bed, yeah, it's just an assignment that isn't due until tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
Second is the 64 bit stuff. x86-64 is one of the lamest ideas to come out of a high tech company since boo.com, and everyone who so much as looks at the name knows it. The only way it could go anywhere is if the competition was, what, several years late, having difficulty ramping to high clock speeds, requiring major new compiler technology, and probably many more things as well. Since they've met the first few requirements, I'll hold off on judgement.
They are counting on Intel to screw up. From the past, this may work. It's not really a good thing to count on. Innovation often fails too, but I hope they don't just go into a holding pattern with the Athlon. That was a big win for them; to do well they have to follow it up with others now.
The links to tech documents are fake. I can't see any 92% failure rate; the document doesn't exist. Read the links before moderating up some moronic troll.
I'm not really sure. I'm at UofT, living in Toronto. I know that around here, and around Waterloo, there are a number of options available. I did a Google search and came up with NorthPoint DSL and DSL Inc.. NorthPoint claims to have "national" service, but I don't know if that means the whole country or just "Toronto, and Scarborough also."
I'd agree with you that we'd still be paying $50/ month in 10 years, but there is too much competition. If you go to http://dsl.ca and look at their home service, it starts at $35/ month. I don't know about the service quality, but I know that you are wrong.
I suppose it's obvious from the context, but I meant "The government shouldn't say who gets rich or not," rather than "The govermnment should say who gets rich or not."
A government shouldn't stop a coroporation from forming. Even a monopoly. What the government should do is prevent monopolies from artificially maintaining themselves. Better yet, they should promote competition.
Similarly with people. High tech fields are, to me, great examples of capitalism. Anyone can get rich or go broke, depending upon their abilities. Still, this isn't a natural condition. The government should say who gets rich or not. The government should, through public education and other infrastructure make sure that everyone has a shot at this according to their abilities.
That's really what this is about: giving people better opportunities. Take them or leave them. It's not going to give anyone a fair shake at toppling Intel or Microsoft, but if that's your goal, then you shouldn't be held back by anything other than your abilities.
I don't pretend to be libertarian, but I am a capitalist.
But this is a Good Thing. The job of government isn't to do everything for us, but to put all people on a better grounds to compete. For many small businesses, that is high speed Internet access. For many people in remote areas, better Internet access means better access to basic educational resources. The CRTC has done a good job with telecom; in Canada we have a lot of competition, and prices are good. As for the $50 (Canadian!) cap on consumer broadband, we still get better service than the vast majority of Americans are able to get. I think the CRTC has been pretty reasonable with this, as we have a lot of competition in the broadband market (I can get @Home, Bell Sympatico DSL, or DSL from a number of other third parties, all in the $50 or less range). That wouldn't be there if there was no money to be made in it.
That is almost enough to convince me that UCITA and the DMCA and all that are good things. Just to see this bizarre case in court.
Some other large software packages work like this already. Personally, I think it doesn't make much sense for a product you run on your personal computer, as opposed to something where you are actually buying services that require ongoing expenditures from the manufacturer. Still, you can see that with windowsupdate and officeupdate, they are moving to a more service oriented model, even for their pre-.NET products. The more interesting questions will be cost of a subscription, and if subscriptions include new versions. I'm sure it will cost more, but it could be that it will not be a whole lot more, and if they put in infrastructure for tracking subscriptions, it could save a lot of effort when they ask for assurance of license compliance.
It looks to me like the floating point performance was the main thing hampering the P4's. As a non-gamer who doesn't do much graphics, but does regularly use the full integer capacity of my computer, I think the P4 was significantly faster. I think they did a lot of work to reduce branch misses, and it paid off. I'd also like to see the further improvement when (if?) we get a mature chipset using RDRAM, as it is a much faster breed of memory. There are issues with it, but because of the immature hardware to work with it, we've only seen the bad side so far, not the good.
On another level, if it really is scientific (and please don't confuse scientific with useful in the real world), there really ought to be some repeatable technique that is used to do this. If there is no such technique, fingerprint identification is not science, even if it is a useful method of identification.
They saw something that looked like it could make money. So they decided that rather than let some corporation do it, they would do it themselves. You can bet that they would charge at least as much as Verisign, and probably much more. That's what happens when you get a monopoly, be it private or public. At least with Verisign there is the potential that someone else could do the same thing some day.
Seriously, though, they ought to ban search engines... after all, the search engines might have indexed more than them, and you could get around them that way. I mean, if you're going to shoot yourself in the foot, you might as well take your leg off at the same time.
*as previously seen on "Ducktales"
I hear it's because initially most OS X apps will run in the OS 9 compatibility layer, which is a VM running OS 9. It's not a happy solution, because OS 9 is less well behaved than Windows 3.1 apps running on an NT box (which is a very comparable situation). When OS X comes out, it can use one processor for OS 9 and everybody is happy, since most people using it will have SMP. Not to mention the all good side effects of having SMP for everything else in OS X when the older stuff becomes mostly irrelevant.
I've no plans to buy a P4 in the next year, anyway. On the other hand, it probably means quite a bit to the people who actually will buy them. Personally, I've been running SMP for several years, and when I "upgraded" to a much faster single processor box, I was so disappointed that I will not consider another single CPU desktop PC. It is much faster, but when the processor is busy it lags in a way that my old box didn't.
Anyone else think that making the TLD's have many different lengths is a bad thing? I can just see everybody who types in yyy.museum putting in yyy.museum.com instead. That wouldn't happen nearly as much if they kept the TLD's to three or four characters.
On a time scale, this works wonderfully for daily updates where a slightly popular piece of content is pretty sure to be mirrored nearby. But for slashdot, it would probably generate just as much traffic (or more, depending on the overhead of requesting updates to the latest second). For dynamically generated content using what-have-you, it would just not work at all. All my slashdot pages say "Pink Daisy" on them somewhere... I'm sure no one else would desire to cache those. I could find my computer at work cacheing a copy of slashdot for each of my coworkers, who skips over it for the latest version. Also, and I'm not entirely sure about this, I thought that old content becoming less popular and being removed was one of the serious difficulties with Freenet.
My business plan is to shoot down crazy satellites one by one with a "laser". I'll hire a bunch of Anonymous Cowards to build it, then launch it into space.
If it works especially well, I'll start shooting down normal satellites one by one, also, and if I ever get to shooting down satellites owned by companies that make money, I'll demand ransom before shooting them down, and maybe you can get some return on your investment.
The former president, chairman and CEO of Canadian Airlines. I guess he jumped ship from one defunct company to kill another defunct company.
I've not thought about this enough to formulate my own views on the ownership of domains, but I expect that they will be considered private property that can be owned outright, and they will be treated accordingly. Thus, the public databases will go away, as, barring an outright change in the attitude of lawmakers, they should.
Perhaps it went onto one of our naval vessels, and collapsed some poor rusted out deck. What a sad end to a noble operating system!
First, no miscounts. Every ballot gets counted, every ballot gets counted correctly. A recount would be meaningless.
Second, spoiled ballots would be obvious. Spoiling a ballot is a political choice, and would have to be supported by any electronic system. The difference? No chance of miscounting spoiled ballots, and less chance of accidentally spoiling a ballot.
As for Florida, we're no better off. A poorly designed electronic ballot could be confusing. We know what the votes said, but there's nothing we can do about it. We can't recount to get the right answer, because the ballots are good, they just don't say what the people who voted want them to say. A revote wouldn't work either, because voting demographics would change drastically if it was suddenly up to one county to determine the next president. The only plus is that with electronic ballots, it would be easier to make and maintain national standards.
But unless one of the things screwed up is the business model, no one minds what the hackers do. The real person to protect the device from is the clueless newbie. I'm sure the only reason is that there are so many more of them than us, but I find it funny that the things we have to work so hard to get around are put there in futile attempts to safeguard the device from people who have no idea what is going on.
Second, Florida (and Michigan and California) are declared Gore instantly when the polls close. Bush leads in all, with a respectable margin, for some time. Gore comes back in Michigan and California, but eventually Florida is declared undecided. Then it turns Bush! That's when it gets interesting.
Third, Bush is declared winner. Gore congratulates him on victory. And then takes it back! No one can accuse him of dishonesty this time; Florida is declared undecided again.
Fourth, no one knows who won. Bush leads by almost a thousand votes in Florida, the deciding state, as I write this. Slim margin, maybe, but that's up from 500 earlier in the evening. Unfortunately, the margin is just too small, and we won't know until most of the absentee ballots are received by mail.
So finally, the dilemma: obviously I can't wait up for the results, since they probably won't be known for several days. So, do I go to bed now, or do I start coding in earnest? Bed, yeah, it's just an assignment that isn't due until tomorrow.