I was going to sign, but decided not to. Netscape 6 IS better... sure there are a few bugs, but I can see two very good reasons for releasing it as soon as possible.
First, marketing. Every day they have that lousy 4.x browser, they suffer. Lots of people will upgrade to the latest released browser, but not nightly builds of Mozilla. Give them something that works, even if not perfectly, to build the brand instead of destroying it.
Second, these aren't showstopper bugs; it isn't worth delaying Netscape another year for all the minor bugs that have been discovered. It hurts me to say this, but that's life with web browsers. What is worth doing is releasing bugfixes after the product is out. Kind of like Microsoft does for Internet Explorer.
Isn't the credo for both dot com's and open source projects, "release early, release often"? Personally, I think they should have released as soon as it was better than Netscape 4.
Sending out emails twice is "annoying to the customer" because they receive two emails. I take it that means annoying to the potential customer receiving the spam, rather than the customer on whose behalf the spam is sent. Kind of interesting that they don't want to annoy the customer twice, but they are completely willing to put up with annoying us just once. Actually, there is one advantage to email: if I try to flame someone who sends me paper junk mail, I would probably get charged with arson.
I wonder if its usefulness will be significantly impaired if the PS2 doesn't come with a keyboard. I know that video games have decent interfaces for entering names, but I don't think they would scale well to entering programs!
I won't comment beyond this sentence on the lack of thought you put into that.
Ralph Nader will continue to talk like he does now, like he did 25 years ago, until he gets a chance to be in to act on his demands. Right now his goal is not to be president; it is to get whomever becomes president to acknowledge and deal with his concerns. If he really thought he would win his election, he would be much more conservative, because he would have to do what he says, and what he says is not realistic.
I think the whole vision is flawed. A consumer advocate is focused on being a consumer. That's evolutionary change, but if we want to go beyond being consumers, we have to reject that notion altogether, and realize that we are the ones giving money and power to corporations. Any fundamental change has to be based on that.
I don't recall them saying "Warning all Solaris users!" after eBay was cracked. I think they just don't know enough to comment on the matter. They probably aren't even aware of the issue, since I can't imagine a media outlet refusing to comment on something just because they didn't have a clue.
Some people have nothing better to do than complain. The rest of us are better off ignoring them. Would Ralph Nader talk the way he does if he had any chance at all of winning his election?
Here are some interesting figures:
rank, year, Rmax/proc, #proc, manufacturer
1  2000 0.602 8192 IBM
2  1999 0.247 9632 Intel
3  1999 0.369 5808 IBM
4  1998 0.261 6144 SGI
5  2000 1.061 1336 IBM
6  2000 1.068 1104 IBM
7  2000 9.241 112  Hitachi
8  2000 0.806 1152 IBM
9  2000 9.170 100  Hitachi
10 1998 0.823 1084 Cray Inc.
This is kind of interesting. We can see how well these systems scale at the high end, particularly looking at numbers 1, 5 & 6, which all use similar IBM processors. We can also guess that, while faster, the individual processors in the Hitachi machines are less than the 9-15 times as fast as the IBM processors, as the raw numbers suggest. I'm a bit surprised at this; I expected it to level off after a few hundred, particularly since the number of processors in these problems is probably matched reasonably well with the parallelism inherent in the program being run.
We can also see the design philosophy the different companies use. These machines aren't using super high clock gigahertz processors; they're fast, but not clock-war casualty fast. I wonder if this will change as manufacturers ramp their higher end processors to greater speeds to flex their muscle over the hyperactive x86. It may not; dissipating heat from a thousand processors must be a big enough challenge already. We can also see that the Intel processors are performing much less compared to IBM, SGI, and Cray. The Hitachi numbers are pretty amazing; they make it on the top ten with less than 1/82 the number of processors as the big IBM rig in first place. Year seems to make a big difference here as well; newer machines have faster processors. Although this means more potential bottlenecks as other parts improve at a slower rate, it also means we can get the same performance with less parallelism, which reduces the bottlenecks. At the high end we're sticking more processors in parallel, but the midrange has a lot of machines with a lot fewer processors than comparable machines from just one year ago.
For the top machines, it's all custom hardware, but we can see that even in the top 40 we're getting to a few standard supercomputer models, and by the time we get to 200 or so, we're seeing many groups of 10 or more identical machines. Not high volume, to be sure, but you can bet this is a lot more economical than the unique machines in the top positions.
From the years, we see just how many of these top level supercomputers are made each year. There are still two 1998 and two 1999 models on the list, including three of the top four, but six of the top ten are from 2000. The top machine from 1997 is back in 14th place, and from 1996 in 51st. I wonder if other machines were in there but have been dismantled. Both of those two are Crays, whereas now most of the very top spots belong to IBM.
I'm not suprised... they said pretty much the same thing about Rambus not too long ago. "Seeking to collect a toll from other companies," rather than developing their own technology was the phrase used. So they say the same thing to another company with a dumb patent that interferes with them somehow. It may be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but I think we need all the corporate assistance we can get to fight these things, particularly ones which the owners admit could probably cover every web server that exists.
Well, I've only read stuff that he wrote that has been linked to from Slashdot articles, but none of it ever made any sense. No matter what he says, my rather old PC is still vastly superior to a PS2 technologically.
Think: high bandiwidth, as in, 32 megs on my video card, and a slower (relative to a PS2) pipeline to 256 megs of main memory, with a variety of faster (relative to a PS2) bulk storage devices behind it. The PS2 gets the discount version; only 4 megs of video memory, which optimally gets updated on a per frame basis from, ooh, 32 megs of system memory, or the very high speed (relative to a PC-XT) bulk storage device. Guess what? In this scenario, the PS2 loses in it's ability to deliver, every single time. As for media delivery, who has the media to deliver? If you're streaming video, my PC has quite enough bandwidth. If you're generating 10 (oops... I mean 3) megs of procedural textures each frame, then the PS2 wins, so long as you can do it in a way that is friendly to its low grade CPU with fast vector units on the side.
Are there reasons to choose this architecture? Sure... my guess is once they decided on Rambus, they had high bandwidth memory that was expensive. This architecture probably saved them money over putting in lots of extra memory. It also does encourage some procedural stuff, since you have to store them in main memory, anyway. Maybe they think it's a neat feature and want to distinguish themselves that way.
Wow, that's a rant. Anyway, get your console based on games, not architecture. At best, the PS2 is five years perpendicular to everyone else, the same way Transmeta claims to be. And if you're counting on building up a library of good games from lots of publishers, fast, that's probably not a good place to be.
I can really see there what some of the articles were talking about. All of those shots look aliased or washed out. I do wonder how much you'd notice it when you have a high frame rate, though.
For me the epitome of high tech gaming is snes9x, so I don't care about high end video hardware so much. On the other hand, I do developoment on this box, and even after upgrading recently from a dual PII-266 to a brand new PIII-733, it still takes a long time to do stuff. And dropping from two processors to one gives a tremendous hit on responsiveness too, while doing processor intensive tasks.
Scarier though is that the people using the software I write would consider my system unacceptably low end, and will undoubtedly spend $$$ on the latest and greatest multiprocessor PC's and Mac's available.
For gamers, the bang is obviously in a big video card, rather than an expensive CPU. On the other hand, I wonder how much it would take to max out the frame rate on my TNT2 M64. Even for that old thing, my 266 was not enough when playing Descent3.
First off, the way I hear it, Betamax lost to VHS for technical reasons... VHS was first to market that would fit a whole movie on one tape. I think if Sony loses, it will be for the same reason. Compared to X-Box, PS2 is not so great.
On the other hand, if PS2 wins, it will be because the open development model of X-Box leads to a glut of crappy games, while Sony gets good developers with at least some minimal quality assurance. That's how Nintendo beat Atari so many years ago.
Personally, I think M$ will win, because Sony is pushing PS2 as a desktop computer replacement, a role for which it is completely unsuitable. It doesn't matter; if we manage to send either Sony or MS down the tubes, we're left with one larger evil corporate monopoly that wants to take over the world, instead of two smaller ones.
First off, the articles I've read are contradictory; one says it was created in France, and two others say it was created in South Africa. Then there's the question of if compressed air has enough energy density to power a car. I expect the answer is no, it doesn't, and this is a hoax.
Yeah, having read the explanation posted on the website, this is really strange. Eric Weisstein wrote both the book and the website, and now is being sued because of the website???
In a related note, mirrors, although a nice gesture, will probably only hurt the author, who did not take this site down voluntarily. Also, flaming the author won't win you any marks, not even moral outrage ones, because he is fighting this also.
Yet Another Microprocessor... supposedly true RISC this time.
I suppose the difference is they aren't targetting it at high end stuff at all at the moment. But playing PC games on an embedded device seems a bit fishy. Incidentally, the article says Playstation, not Playstation 2. That makes a lot more sense, because even if it was a high performance device, the PS2 uses RDRAM, which makes for a very different architecture that is based on a high bandwidth backbone, rather than large buffers made from cheaper memory.
Anyway, it won't be replacing your P3 or Athlon anytime soon.
Kind of funny about that. I fired up Napster a couple of days ago after a long period of Forced Internet Withdrawal (no cable modem )= ). I thought, "Gee, I'll be a good guy today and look for some new artists to download!" So I looked for some interesting stuff on their new artists page (bands resembling "Metallica"). The long and the short of it was, I couldn't find a single song by anyone matching my search on the server I was connected to. So much for that effort.
OK, I'm Canadian, so I can objectively point out all the dumb things in the interview (and the article accompanying it; Gore isn't the only idiot out there!).
So here goes my shortlist:
George W. Bush and Al Gore both have flashy Web sites; each has high-profile backing by CEOs of Internet and technology companies.
News Flash! Rich people, even rich technology company CEO's support Bush or Gore! I bet some even support both! But we can do better: Six people you have heard of will vote for Gore or Bush!
To help our readers determine how the Net would fare in their respective administrations
Because obviously the President is the person most in charge of the future of the Internet.
revealed... a sly and unscripted sense of humor. Y-LIFE: Let's begin with a geek equipment check. Are you a PC or a Mac guy?
That's right, let's reveal the sly and unscripted sense of humour by making the first question a joke. I suppose if he said, "Duh?" they would have mentioned how serious and business-like he is.
Y-LIFE: So the Vice President of the United States jacks in his laptop in a hotel room every night, just like the rest of us?
GORE: [Smiling] No, I have a secure connection. I'm on the National Security Agency, and I communicate regularly on national security matters. But how I log on--hey, I dial up from a hotel room, too, if that's all there is.
So the secure connection is an encrypted hotel dial-up connection so he can communicate on sensitive matters. Unlike the rest of us, who don't use encryption when in hotels, but only when we are at work or at home. I mean, when I have sensitive matters to discuss, I usually write them on a big banner and have an airplane pull it across the sky for everyone to see.
But my own personal journey began when I was a kid of 10, watching my dad [Sen. Albert Gore Sr.] write law authorizing the Interstate Highway System.
I didn't get online until 1977, but I had the idea of going online when I was 10, before there were any computer networks. In fact, you could probably say I invented computer networks, but don't quote me on that.
What I realized then was that the phenomenon later to be known as Moore's Law [the prediction that transistor capacity would double every 18 months] was causing a logarithmic increase in processing power
But I did invent Moore's Law! Except no one would credit it to me because I thought that multiplying by two each time was logarithmic growth; it wasn't until Moore came along that we realized it was exponential.
when I heard my dad explain how the sudden proliferation of cars after World War II would overwhelm our two-lane highway system, and that's why we needed a superhighway system.
I always thought it was the other way around--that the superhighways brought about the proliferation of cars. Perhaps his dad was in the pockets of the auto companies.
"I took the initiative in the Congress"--and then I went on to say--"in creating the Internet."
That's right, he actually didn't invent the Internet. He just created it. That's a much more modest and accurate claim.
An aide interrupted to say that the vice president was due to leave Portland State University with his entourage for the airport...
Yes, we're talking to someone who is rich and powerful. Let's just remind everyone, in case they forgot.
Yeah, and they can block only some portals.
So, despite your efforts, people in China won't be reading your Yahoo! Life interview.
Distributed intelligence is a law of nature. It is more than a technology. It's also a law of culture and politics and evolution.
No, relativity is a law of nature. "Distributed intelligence" is a dumb phrase that Gore made up.
...The details as to how it's worked out, I don't know, but we'll figure it out.
Wow! It took long enough, be he finally admitted that he doesn't have all the answers. I'm impressed. Really.
Y-LIFE: Referring to the debate over explicitly giving permission for a site to use personal data--consumers opting in--versus assuming the data can be used unless a consumer declines--opting out--are you "opt-in" or "opt-out"?
GORE: I don't think it's fair to place the burden on the consumer. It's just not practical to assume that everybody's going to be able to make that kind of sophisticated choice, especially when people are pressed and harried and overworked and trying to pay the bills. It's impossible to require them to devote valuable minutes--and sometimes more--to working their way through some damn complicated decision tree that's not written very well. Why the hell should the burden be placed on them? I feel very strongly about that, and this is often a raw decision between commerce and human values.
On the other hand, this time he won't admit that he has no clue about opt-out or opt-in. But he's sure willing to try to please everybody!
Well, there you have it folks! The very reason party strategists don't want elected officials doing interviews. Why, with intelligence like that, we might as well put "Bill from Arkansas" in power. Oops, already done that.
It could be done, but it isn't a simple problem. The two languages support a few fundamentally different features that would be difficult to make work together. Garbage collection (Java) and multiple inheritance (C++) come immediately to mind. I don't know Eiffel or Ada, but I'm guessing that they both have a limited ability to manipulate pointers directly, because that's another difficult thing to do with Java bytecode. Anyway, kudos to whoever does it; it would be a very useful thing to have.
Well the JVM obviously is such a beast. In fact, aside from support for any language, you are almost describing Java. Granted, compiling a pointer based language to Java bytecode is a non-trivial problem, but it should be possible. I read here that the Microsoft.NET platform aims to be exactly what you describe, with a bytecode that is coupled to C#, but is designed to be easy to target from other languages. With those two VM's, another would be redundant, even if it did have a cleaner and more portable design. In the end, I don't think any standardization efforts will be tremendously successful. If the whole world could agree on what bytecode was best, we wouldn't have to target different architectures for processors, either.
haha
The rest of us know we'll be flamed out of existence if we say anything good about Intel here.
Even with RDRAM, I think they got the idea right, but they got burned as early adopters of an immature technology from a juvenile company. The technology really is a superior solution that is just not ready to be used yet, and eventually, perhaps under some more compotent hands, it will get there.
As for Slashdot hating them, I don't know. I think it's because most of the Slashdot community has little clue about technology, particularly hardware, but think that using the Internet and reading Tom's Hardware make them experts. Particularly the ones who scream out every one of their ill informed opinions in posts that boil down to "I rox u suxors" posts are of that sort.
Of course, I'd be hypocritical if I said I was a whole lot better. =P
Yes, the developing world will take over the growth of the saturated market in the developed world when all of a sudden they come to their senses and realize that a Windows PC is much more important to them than basics such as food, water or electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
First, marketing. Every day they have that lousy 4.x browser, they suffer. Lots of people will upgrade to the latest released browser, but not nightly builds of Mozilla. Give them something that works, even if not perfectly, to build the brand instead of destroying it.
Second, these aren't showstopper bugs; it isn't worth delaying Netscape another year for all the minor bugs that have been discovered. It hurts me to say this, but that's life with web browsers. What is worth doing is releasing bugfixes after the product is out. Kind of like Microsoft does for Internet Explorer.
Isn't the credo for both dot com's and open source projects, "release early, release often"? Personally, I think they should have released as soon as it was better than Netscape 4.
Sending out emails twice is "annoying to the customer" because they receive two emails. I take it that means annoying to the potential customer receiving the spam, rather than the customer on whose behalf the spam is sent. Kind of interesting that they don't want to annoy the customer twice, but they are completely willing to put up with annoying us just once. Actually, there is one advantage to email: if I try to flame someone who sends me paper junk mail, I would probably get charged with arson.
I wonder if its usefulness will be significantly impaired if the PS2 doesn't come with a keyboard. I know that video games have decent interfaces for entering names, but I don't think they would scale well to entering programs!
Ralph Nader will continue to talk like he does now, like he did 25 years ago, until he gets a chance to be in to act on his demands. Right now his goal is not to be president; it is to get whomever becomes president to acknowledge and deal with his concerns. If he really thought he would win his election, he would be much more conservative, because he would have to do what he says, and what he says is not realistic.
I think the whole vision is flawed. A consumer advocate is focused on being a consumer. That's evolutionary change, but if we want to go beyond being consumers, we have to reject that notion altogether, and realize that we are the ones giving money and power to corporations. Any fundamental change has to be based on that.
I don't recall them saying "Warning all Solaris users!" after eBay was cracked. I think they just don't know enough to comment on the matter. They probably aren't even aware of the issue, since I can't imagine a media outlet refusing to comment on something just because they didn't have a clue.
Some people have nothing better to do than complain. The rest of us are better off ignoring them. Would Ralph Nader talk the way he does if he had any chance at all of winning his election?
rank, year, Rmax/proc, #proc, manufacturer
1  2000 0.602 8192 IBM
2  1999 0.247 9632 Intel
3  1999 0.369 5808 IBM
4  1998 0.261 6144 SGI
5  2000 1.061 1336 IBM
6  2000 1.068 1104 IBM
7  2000 9.241 112  Hitachi
8  2000 0.806 1152 IBM
9  2000 9.170 100  Hitachi
10 1998 0.823 1084 Cray Inc.
This is kind of interesting. We can see how well these systems scale at the high end, particularly looking at numbers 1, 5 & 6, which all use similar IBM processors. We can also guess that, while faster, the individual processors in the Hitachi machines are less than the 9-15 times as fast as the IBM processors, as the raw numbers suggest. I'm a bit surprised at this; I expected it to level off after a few hundred, particularly since the number of processors in these problems is probably matched reasonably well with the parallelism inherent in the program being run.
We can also see the design philosophy the different companies use. These machines aren't using super high clock gigahertz processors; they're fast, but not clock-war casualty fast. I wonder if this will change as manufacturers ramp their higher end processors to greater speeds to flex their muscle over the hyperactive x86. It may not; dissipating heat from a thousand processors must be a big enough challenge already. We can also see that the Intel processors are performing much less compared to IBM, SGI, and Cray. The Hitachi numbers are pretty amazing; they make it on the top ten with less than 1/82 the number of processors as the big IBM rig in first place. Year seems to make a big difference here as well; newer machines have faster processors. Although this means more potential bottlenecks as other parts improve at a slower rate, it also means we can get the same performance with less parallelism, which reduces the bottlenecks. At the high end we're sticking more processors in parallel, but the midrange has a lot of machines with a lot fewer processors than comparable machines from just one year ago.
For the top machines, it's all custom hardware, but we can see that even in the top 40 we're getting to a few standard supercomputer models, and by the time we get to 200 or so, we're seeing many groups of 10 or more identical machines. Not high volume, to be sure, but you can bet this is a lot more economical than the unique machines in the top positions.
From the years, we see just how many of these top level supercomputers are made each year. There are still two 1998 and two 1999 models on the list, including three of the top four, but six of the top ten are from 2000. The top machine from 1997 is back in 14th place, and from 1996 in 51st. I wonder if other machines were in there but have been dismantled. Both of those two are Crays, whereas now most of the very top spots belong to IBM.
I'm not suprised... they said pretty much the same thing about Rambus not too long ago. "Seeking to collect a toll from other companies," rather than developing their own technology was the phrase used. So they say the same thing to another company with a dumb patent that interferes with them somehow. It may be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but I think we need all the corporate assistance we can get to fight these things, particularly ones which the owners admit could probably cover every web server that exists.
Think: high bandiwidth, as in, 32 megs on my video card, and a slower (relative to a PS2) pipeline to 256 megs of main memory, with a variety of faster (relative to a PS2) bulk storage devices behind it. The PS2 gets the discount version; only 4 megs of video memory, which optimally gets updated on a per frame basis from, ooh, 32 megs of system memory, or the very high speed (relative to a PC-XT) bulk storage device. Guess what? In this scenario, the PS2 loses in it's ability to deliver, every single time. As for media delivery, who has the media to deliver? If you're streaming video, my PC has quite enough bandwidth. If you're generating 10 (oops... I mean 3) megs of procedural textures each frame, then the PS2 wins, so long as you can do it in a way that is friendly to its low grade CPU with fast vector units on the side.
Are there reasons to choose this architecture? Sure... my guess is once they decided on Rambus, they had high bandwidth memory that was expensive. This architecture probably saved them money over putting in lots of extra memory. It also does encourage some procedural stuff, since you have to store them in main memory, anyway. Maybe they think it's a neat feature and want to distinguish themselves that way.
Wow, that's a rant. Anyway, get your console based on games, not architecture. At best, the PS2 is five years perpendicular to everyone else, the same way Transmeta claims to be. And if you're counting on building up a library of good games from lots of publishers, fast, that's probably not a good place to be.
I can really see there what some of the articles were talking about. All of those shots look aliased or washed out. I do wonder how much you'd notice it when you have a high frame rate, though.
I wouldn't classify it as less evil. I'd just say that Sony's attempts to take over the world are more pathetic than Microsoft's.
I think you are confusing betamax with betacam. Betacam is used professionally. Betamax is dead.
Scarier though is that the people using the software I write would consider my system unacceptably low end, and will undoubtedly spend $$$ on the latest and greatest multiprocessor PC's and Mac's available.
For gamers, the bang is obviously in a big video card, rather than an expensive CPU. On the other hand, I wonder how much it would take to max out the frame rate on my TNT2 M64. Even for that old thing, my 266 was not enough when playing Descent3.
On the other hand, if PS2 wins, it will be because the open development model of X-Box leads to a glut of crappy games, while Sony gets good developers with at least some minimal quality assurance. That's how Nintendo beat Atari so many years ago.
Personally, I think M$ will win, because Sony is pushing PS2 as a desktop computer replacement, a role for which it is completely unsuitable. It doesn't matter; if we manage to send either Sony or MS down the tubes, we're left with one larger evil corporate monopoly that wants to take over the world, instead of two smaller ones.
First off, the articles I've read are contradictory; one says it was created in France, and two others say it was created in South Africa. Then there's the question of if compressed air has enough energy density to power a car. I expect the answer is no, it doesn't, and this is a hoax.
In a related note, mirrors, although a nice gesture, will probably only hurt the author, who did not take this site down voluntarily. Also, flaming the author won't win you any marks, not even moral outrage ones, because he is fighting this also.
I suppose the difference is they aren't targetting it at high end stuff at all at the moment. But playing PC games on an embedded device seems a bit fishy. Incidentally, the article says Playstation, not Playstation 2. That makes a lot more sense, because even if it was a high performance device, the PS2 uses RDRAM, which makes for a very different architecture that is based on a high bandwidth backbone, rather than large buffers made from cheaper memory.
Anyway, it won't be replacing your P3 or Athlon anytime soon.
Kind of funny about that. I fired up Napster a couple of days ago after a long period of Forced Internet Withdrawal (no cable modem )= ). I thought, "Gee, I'll be a good guy today and look for some new artists to download!" So I looked for some interesting stuff on their new artists page (bands resembling "Metallica"). The long and the short of it was, I couldn't find a single song by anyone matching my search on the server I was connected to. So much for that effort.
I was also particularly struck about how he knows both what you erased from your hard drive, and what your next credit card number will be.
So here goes my shortlist:
George W. Bush and Al Gore both have flashy Web sites; each has high-profile backing by CEOs of Internet and technology companies.
News Flash! Rich people, even rich technology company CEO's support Bush or Gore! I bet some even support both! But we can do better: Six people you have heard of will vote for Gore or Bush!
To help our readers determine how the Net would fare in their respective administrations
Because obviously the President is the person most in charge of the future of the Internet.
revealed... a sly and unscripted sense of humor.
Y-LIFE: Let's begin with a geek equipment check. Are you a PC or a Mac guy?
That's right, let's reveal the sly and unscripted sense of humour by making the first question a joke. I suppose if he said, "Duh?" they would have mentioned how serious and business-like he is.
Y-LIFE: So the Vice President of the United States jacks in his laptop in a hotel room every night, just like the rest of us?
GORE: [Smiling] No, I have a secure connection. I'm on the National Security Agency, and I communicate regularly on national security matters. But how I log on--hey, I dial up from a hotel room, too, if that's all there is.
So the secure connection is an encrypted hotel dial-up connection so he can communicate on sensitive matters. Unlike the rest of us, who don't use encryption when in hotels, but only when we are at work or at home. I mean, when I have sensitive matters to discuss, I usually write them on a big banner and have an airplane pull it across the sky for everyone to see.
But my own personal journey began when I was a kid of 10, watching my dad [Sen. Albert Gore Sr.] write law authorizing the Interstate Highway System.
I didn't get online until 1977, but I had the idea of going online when I was 10, before there were any computer networks. In fact, you could probably say I invented computer networks, but don't quote me on that.
What I realized then was that the phenomenon later to be known as Moore's Law [the prediction that transistor capacity would double every 18 months] was causing a logarithmic increase in processing power
But I did invent Moore's Law! Except no one would credit it to me because I thought that multiplying by two each time was logarithmic growth; it wasn't until Moore came along that we realized it was exponential.
when I heard my dad explain how the sudden proliferation of cars after World War II would overwhelm our two-lane highway system, and that's why we needed a superhighway system.
I always thought it was the other way around--that the superhighways brought about the proliferation of cars. Perhaps his dad was in the pockets of the auto companies.
"I took the initiative in the Congress"--and then I went on to say--"in creating the Internet."
That's right, he actually didn't invent the Internet. He just created it. That's a much more modest and accurate claim.
An aide interrupted to say that the vice president was due to leave Portland State University with his entourage for the airport...
Yes, we're talking to someone who is rich and powerful. Let's just remind everyone, in case they forgot.
Yeah, and they can block only some portals.
So, despite your efforts, people in China won't be reading your Yahoo! Life interview.
Distributed intelligence is a law of nature. It is more than a technology. It's also a law of culture and politics and evolution.
No, relativity is a law of nature. "Distributed intelligence" is a dumb phrase that Gore made up.
Wow! It took long enough, be he finally admitted that he doesn't have all the answers. I'm impressed. Really.
Y-LIFE: Referring to the debate over explicitly giving permission for a site to use personal data--consumers opting in--versus assuming the data can be used unless a consumer declines--opting out--are you "opt-in" or "opt-out"?
GORE: I don't think it's fair to place the burden on the consumer. It's just not practical to assume that everybody's going to be able to make that kind of sophisticated choice, especially when people are pressed and harried and overworked and trying to pay the bills. It's impossible to require them to devote valuable minutes--and sometimes more--to working their way through some damn complicated decision tree that's not written very well. Why the hell should the burden be placed on them? I feel very strongly about that, and this is often a raw decision between commerce and human values.
On the other hand, this time he won't admit that he has no clue about opt-out or opt-in. But he's sure willing to try to please everybody!
Well, there you have it folks! The very reason party strategists don't want elected officials doing interviews. Why, with intelligence like that, we might as well put "Bill from Arkansas" in power. Oops, already done that.
It could be done, but it isn't a simple problem. The two languages support a few fundamentally different features that would be difficult to make work together. Garbage collection (Java) and multiple inheritance (C++) come immediately to mind. I don't know Eiffel or Ada, but I'm guessing that they both have a limited ability to manipulate pointers directly, because that's another difficult thing to do with Java bytecode. Anyway, kudos to whoever does it; it would be a very useful thing to have.
Well the JVM obviously is such a beast. In fact, aside from support for any language, you are almost describing Java. Granted, compiling a pointer based language to Java bytecode is a non-trivial problem, but it should be possible. I read here that the Microsoft.NET platform aims to be exactly what you describe, with a bytecode that is coupled to C#, but is designed to be easy to target from other languages. With those two VM's, another would be redundant, even if it did have a cleaner and more portable design. In the end, I don't think any standardization efforts will be tremendously successful. If the whole world could agree on what bytecode was best, we wouldn't have to target different architectures for processors, either.
The rest of us know we'll be flamed out of existence if we say anything good about Intel here.
Even with RDRAM, I think they got the idea right, but they got burned as early adopters of an immature technology from a juvenile company. The technology really is a superior solution that is just not ready to be used yet, and eventually, perhaps under some more compotent hands, it will get there.
As for Slashdot hating them, I don't know. I think it's because most of the Slashdot community has little clue about technology, particularly hardware, but think that using the Internet and reading Tom's Hardware make them experts. Particularly the ones who scream out every one of their ill informed opinions in posts that boil down to "I rox u suxors" posts are of that sort.
Of course, I'd be hypocritical if I said I was a whole lot better. =P
I'm surprised Gore didn't come right out and say he supports Napster. After all, he DID invent it!
Yes, the developing world will take over the growth of the saturated market in the developed world when all of a sudden they come to their senses and realize that a Windows PC is much more important to them than basics such as food, water or electricity.