Can't Intel theoretically release a P4 chip, chipset, motherboard, etc, for RDRAM, and then an otherwise identical solution, but otherwise call it PV with DDR-SDRAM support and maybe a few other goodies, and just flush Rambus down the toilet?
I'm willing to agree that *both* candidates lie, and that neither is particularly trustworthy.
One thing I can put against Bush, however, is that ID software resides in Texas, and that Texas is responsible for the most violent games in the world, right now. *grin*
Likewise, that his is also the gun-state (I think. Did I get that wrong?). And the cowboy state.
Still, that seems to be the way politics works. You represent the most voters, you get the most voters. If you screw them over (by going back on your word, by violating your 'contract') you can get kicked out, replaced, or just not elected.
Dunno, I still haven't seen any reason to vote for Gore yet. His ISP/monitoring plan bothers me.
Bush calls for faulty filtering software, which I can live with because I, and many I know, can circumnavigate around it.
Gore, however, wants ISP level controls and filters and checks available to parents, and not for the parents to do it themselves! Which means anyone else with proper authority can also check on the activities of anyone on the internet, because an ISP cannot differentiate between a kid and a parent at the same terminal at home.
Dunno, look up Joyce Klinger's question and both responses to see what I'm talking about, page 3 of the debates.
Controlled access in a public institution. Not saying I agree with it, but a library has to dictate it's choices based on morals, bandwidth, resources, allocations, etc anyway.
A library does not have unlimited bandwidth. It seems as reasonable to stop porn as it does anything else. I do have concerns when he wants to filter violence and pornography, but it doesn't seem a bad idea to filter it in general.
Bush does have points for mentioning:
"But I'm going to remind mothers and dads: The best weapon is the off-on button, and paying attention to your children and eating dinner with them."
I don't know enough about Nader to vote for him. But I think I'm more comfortable with Bush, than with Gore.
When/how did you interpret Bush as regulating speech from his debates? Perhaps it was something outside his debate, but it would seem that Bush has no interest in censorship, from his response to Joyce Klinger as regards the Internet, Hollywood, morals, etc.
I think I'm voting for Bush, if only for the lesser of two evils.
I was struck by the comments generated when one Joyce Klinger asked about morality and Hollywood and violence, and children.
He talks about character education in schools, filters in the public libraries(as you alluded to), after school programs etc.
But what 'impressed' me was his voice against censorship. Yes, you can talk to Hollywood and such, and ratings would be helpful, and controls would be helpful, but, he says:
"I'm going to remind mothers and dads: The best weapon is the off-on button, and paying attention to your children and eating dinner with them..."
So, unless you're just reading sound bites or something, Bush qualifies as a candidate.
Gore, on the other hand, wanted ISPs to have "parents' protection page every time 95% of the pages come up. And a feature that allows parents to automatically check, with one click, what sites your kids have visited lately."
Which sounds like a privacy nightmare for kids and families. Who gets access to this information *other* than parents?
Reverse engineering can be defined on so many levels it isn't right to just broadly categorize it as theft!
When we figure out how quantum mechanics work, we are essentially reverse engineering it (from God, the universe, whatever).
There is no judgement on that practice, only on the applications derived from the knowledge gained!
In a similar way, reverse engineering a product can be said to be similar. Intel produces a high commodity, high volume, very popular part.
Is it fair for AMD to produce a plug in replacement part to try to make a profit?
Yes. There's nothing illegal about that, it's just commercialism/capitalism.
Now, as for the gritty details of reverse engineering... As long as you don't take the work that someone else has done, there's not way to qualify that as theft. You haven't taken their research, you haven't taken their documents, you haven't taken their personal. All you have done is taken their product, which you own if you purchase it, and analyzed it, which is fair use if anything is, and watched it work, which is no more or less wrong than trying to find another particle in the quantum menagerie.
Trade secrets are not legally protected. Patents are. Do we want company trade secrets disclosed? Of course not! But they are only trade secrets while they are unknown, and the minute they are known, they are not trade secrets.
Reverse engineering has given us the PC! It has given us PSX emulators, Gameboy emulators, Linux SAMBA(I think), DeCSS, and loads of other things. In a competitive landscape, reverse engineering seems downright commendable!
Of a user trained by the machine, and not the machine designed to accomodate the user!
Of course there should always be system integrity checks available to the user for the paranoid among us (scandisk, fsck, etc)...
But one would imagine a properly designed computer system has the capability of *never* having corrupted data! The machine would be pointing out to the user that FileA.ext was lost due to problems, and that the user needs to check on the integrity of the data, or that the data seems to be okay, does the user want to double check, or that nothing seems to be wrong.
It's like... driving your car to the grocery, and then checking the oil, air, gas, transmission fluid, and brake fluid. The analogy is broken because the car didn't die, ala Windows, but it should be that the machine should be smart enough to tell you when something is wrong. I think.
So IBM's own webpage lists the price as about $500 per copy of Linux installed on their S/390, with about 2500 copies of Linux being run, for a base cost of $1.2M.
This is a hard number that *IBM* is providing on their site, not just educated guesses on my part. They are actually willing to support that many copies, evidently.
The price varies with how buff a machine you want, I assume, but again, this is one of my baseless guesses.
Are we at least willing to grant that IBM does have expertise in their own hardware, and that their numbers aren't baseless and useless?
This is hearsay from previous/. posts, but the only way to get similar results from a HA cluster...
Is to run something like a cluster of over 1k machines, I think.
I remember reading about price/performance numbers, and doing some quick math on/., and finding than 1 IBM mainframe, the S390 I think, can run some 1300 copies of Linux reasonably, though I may get the number wrong. That would mean a price of about $400 per running copy of Linux(which translates to 1300 $400 PCs)
So the mainframe, for some purposes, is *cheaper*, more reliable, has more bandwidth, has better IO, is more configurable, has less complexity, and is much niftier. Not to mention easier to manage than 1k machines in some room somewhere!
It occurred to me that the O->E conversion may be skipped entirely if the O data is encoded in such a way that the 'header' can be read without doing some sort of fancy decoding, interpretation, then switching.
Of course, this brings an optical switch into the realm of analog computing, instead of digital, but hey...
Dunno if this is even possible inside of a fiber, but can one encode a holographic signal into the header? This depends on the signal being coherent in the fiber, but if you can take the signal and recombine it with a similarly coherent signal, you can get data out. This data is still optical, perhaps in the form of a grid pattern(barcode here!) which can be read and interpreted. At this point it would seem an electrical device is still needed to operate the switch...
I dunno, how do they really encode this information? Just binary pulse data?
The current scientific definition of organic is "containing carbon", meaning Carbon == Organic, while Carbon != Coming from something alive.
Organic LEDs could concievably be a product of bioluminescent creatures, but they aren't. They just happen to use carbon, instead of silicon/germanium, etc.
USB is a 4 wire standard; 2 for power/ground and 2 for signal. All you add to the ADC then would be the 2 signal wires, assuming that there is hardware on the monitor end and the PC end to handle the power conversion (as opposed to having 2 sets of power on the cable, though stupid engineering could very well have allowed for that as well). This is speculation on my part.
So you can conceivably get rid of the wiring and shielding necessary for the power, if it rides along the same line as the monitor's power lines.
You don't get an argument that it will take more engineering to get the wires, at different clocks, shielded, flexible, and working. On the other hand a new solution was needed for next generation displays, at least as defined by VESA, due to the fact that clock/refresh was increasing, display size/resolution was increasing, and the old VGA cables could not handle the bandwidth, limited at 150MHz, to the 2GHz limit of the newer interface.
See <a href="http://www.vesa.org/news81798.html">this page</a> for more info.
Your second point is also noted; but it is definitely an engineering solution, and not one that is insurmountable. I suspect Apple's future plan is to integrate Firewire as well into the cable, and produce a product with only one cable out the back:
ADC.
Speakers would migrate to USB, which collapses into the ADC, while video, firewire, and power are also provided by the ADC(Advanced Display Connector, if it's adopted outside of Apple, I would hope). Networking, of course, would be wireless.
And it isn't the cable that your saving money on; it's the ports and complexity and chipsets on the motherboard that get condensed. Say future PCI/AGP chipsets collect USB and FireWire functionality onto them. Instead of 3 or 4 chips, you now have 1 chip running all four functions. Instead of 3 ports, you now have one. Engineering wise, this makes placement and layout easier, I think, as well as heat disippation and traces simpler.
This has nothing to do with the stupidity of the user, though stupid people definitely benefit/gain from this arrangement. It is a convenience thing too. One less cable to package and ship. One less cable to test and try. One less cable to produce and buy. A $2 cable, a $1 in chips, $3 in ports, across a million machines => $6 million not spent. And since Apple seems to be shipping in the millions a year, I don't think saving $10-20 million is something one can laugh at easily...
Considering that's 250 engineers for a year of about $80k, it would be worth it if it cost 5 engineers 3 years of development time to design/implement this, at $100k salaries. One year of sales, if it's even close to $6mil saved, is enough to warrant the cost/difficulty in implementation.
My numbers are pure guesswork and rough numbers, nothing scientific. But on cost analysis, it isn't *outrageous* for Apple to implement something like this...
On the user end, it really is 2 less cables: Instead of video, power, and USB, it is only ADC.
Mindshare is important for a business selling an image, lifestyle, and name. As for the file-sharing dilution problem, all it takes is for 'interface' gateways that translate one network to another. So that a search on Gnutella gets routed to random machines that, automagically, happen to speak Gnutella and Freenet and Napster, etc, protocols. If, for example, you had a translator for Mojonation to search Gnutella, Freenet, or Napster, it would just look like the entire Gnutella, Freenet, or Napster network is just another user with a large number of files to offer.
Same from the other end.
As for the 'totdc' thing, it just means Mojonation won't allow Gnutella, Napster, etc, to plunder the Mojo network without some function of uploads as well.
I would think that putting the USB connection in the same cable (as the video and power) is the added functionality; less cost, less space, less hardware, less clutter. It's usability issue in which people need not figure out where cables go, etc.
IE, if Apple decided to eliminate cables altogether in their nextgen G4 tower by going wireless (wireless USB, keyboard, mouse, speakers), the added functionality is *zero* clutter, zero confusion, zero space loss.
I do enjoy being awarded karma points and all... but it feels bad to have gotten an +1 Insightful for admitting I didn't read the article entirely, though I guess one could argue I could get points, +1 underrated, for even reading the article, or being man enough to admit to being wrong/incorrect, but still... It just feels embarassing to have my admission of incorrectness highlighted like that.
Oh well, thank you, whichever moderator decided to bless me with this karma point ^^
The problem is that it's always been a war of control, whether it be money, wealth, power, information, distribution, production, access, choice, priviledge, rights, whatever.
For whatever reason, people will try to take from you whatever you are not willing to fight to protect. If you do not care for you rights, people, in their own self interest and for their own gain, will find a way to take away and use your lack of rights. If you do not care for your property, same. Lifestyle? Choices? whatever.
It's not corporate feudalism, whatever that truly means. If I'm not mistaken, corporate feudalism is about the submission/submersion of the individual to the group/division/company/corporation.
Akin to traditional feudalism, where the peasant swore fealty to the knight/samurai, who in turn owned his loyalty to a lord, up the chain of greater and greater lordships up to an emperor, king, ruler, or eventually, God.
In this case, it would be translated to employee's loyalty to boss, who's loyalty is to the division, who's loyalty is to the organization, which perhaps would then owe loyalty to the parent company, and upwards until we get to the corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
What, Intel can't release P4 with Rambus support, and then a quarter later, release the P5 with DDR-SDRAM support? Or the P4a?
The nick is a joke! Really!
Can't Intel theoretically release a P4 chip, chipset, motherboard, etc, for RDRAM, and then an otherwise identical solution, but otherwise call it PV with DDR-SDRAM support and maybe a few other goodies, and just flush Rambus down the toilet?
The nick is a joke! Really!
I'd give you karma points if I could!
Anyway, I find out I match with one Harry Browne, and am a liberal libertarian ^^
The nick is a joke! Really!
There are definitely more than two candidates.
The only two I'm at all familiar with right now is Bush and Gore.
I've heard Nader vaguely, and throughout this thread/slashdot post, Brown mentioned.
I'm behind on the times, unfortunately. My vote would go to the person that would do the least damage to our country, I think.
I saw your sig, but didn't follow the link. Just did, now.
The nick is a joke! Really!
I'm willing to agree that *both* candidates lie, and that neither is particularly trustworthy.
One thing I can put against Bush, however, is that ID software resides in Texas, and that Texas is responsible for the most violent games in the world, right now. *grin*
Likewise, that his is also the gun-state (I think. Did I get that wrong?). And the cowboy state.
Still, that seems to be the way politics works. You represent the most voters, you get the most voters. If you screw them over (by going back on your word, by violating your 'contract') you can get kicked out, replaced, or just not elected.
Dunno, I still haven't seen any reason to vote for Gore yet. His ISP/monitoring plan bothers me.
The nick is a joke! Really!
Bush calls for faulty filtering software, which I can live with because I, and many I know, can circumnavigate around it.
Gore, however, wants ISP level controls and filters and checks available to parents, and not for the parents to do it themselves! Which means anyone else with proper authority can also check on the activities of anyone on the internet, because an ISP cannot differentiate between a kid and a parent at the same terminal at home.
Dunno, look up Joyce Klinger's question and both responses to see what I'm talking about, page 3 of the debates.
The nick is a joke! Really!
Gore still seems slimier than Cthulu.
=)
The nick is a joke! Really!
It doesn't seem to radical...
Controlled access in a public institution. Not saying I agree with it, but a library has to dictate it's choices based on morals, bandwidth, resources, allocations, etc anyway.
A library does not have unlimited bandwidth. It seems as reasonable to stop porn as it does anything else. I do have concerns when he wants to filter violence and pornography, but it doesn't seem a bad idea to filter it in general.
Bush does have points for mentioning:
"But I'm going to remind mothers and dads: The best weapon is the off-on button, and paying attention to your children and eating dinner with them."
I don't know enough about Nader to vote for him. But I think I'm more comfortable with Bush, than with Gore.
The nick is a joke! Really!
You just gave your argument against Gore; what is it that Bush has said that makes him against a free or open internet?
The nick is a joke! Really!
When/how did you interpret Bush as regulating speech from his debates? Perhaps it was something outside his debate, but it would seem that Bush has no interest in censorship, from his response to Joyce Klinger as regards the Internet, Hollywood, morals, etc.
The nick is a joke! Really!
I think I'm voting for Bush, if only for the lesser of two evils.
I was struck by the comments generated when one Joyce Klinger asked about morality and Hollywood and violence, and children.
He talks about character education in schools, filters in the public libraries(as you alluded to), after school programs etc.
But what 'impressed' me was his voice against censorship. Yes, you can talk to Hollywood and such, and ratings would be helpful, and controls would be helpful, but, he says:
"I'm going to remind mothers and dads: The best weapon is the off-on button, and paying attention to your children and eating dinner with them..."
So, unless you're just reading sound bites or something, Bush qualifies as a candidate.
Gore, on the other hand, wanted ISPs to have "parents' protection page every time 95% of the pages come up. And a feature that allows parents to automatically check, with one click, what sites your kids have visited lately."
Which sounds like a privacy nightmare for kids and families. Who gets access to this information *other* than parents?
The nick is a joke! Really!
Reverse engineering can be defined on so many levels it isn't right to just broadly categorize it as theft!
When we figure out how quantum mechanics work, we are essentially reverse engineering it (from God, the universe, whatever).
There is no judgement on that practice, only on the applications derived from the knowledge gained!
In a similar way, reverse engineering a product can be said to be similar. Intel produces a high commodity, high volume, very popular part.
Is it fair for AMD to produce a plug in replacement part to try to make a profit?
Yes. There's nothing illegal about that, it's just commercialism/capitalism.
Now, as for the gritty details of reverse engineering... As long as you don't take the work that someone else has done, there's not way to qualify that as theft. You haven't taken their research, you haven't taken their documents, you haven't taken their personal. All you have done is taken their product, which you own if you purchase it, and analyzed it, which is fair use if anything is, and watched it work, which is no more or less wrong than trying to find another particle in the quantum menagerie.
Trade secrets are not legally protected. Patents are. Do we want company trade secrets disclosed? Of course not! But they are only trade secrets while they are unknown, and the minute they are known, they are not trade secrets.
Reverse engineering has given us the PC! It has given us PSX emulators, Gameboy emulators, Linux SAMBA(I think), DeCSS, and loads of other things. In a competitive landscape, reverse engineering seems downright commendable!
The nick is a joke! Really!
Microsoft would probably say, if Tux2 takes off...
<em>Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System.</em>
The nick is a joke! Really!
Of a user trained by the machine, and not the machine designed to accomodate the user!
Of course there should always be system integrity checks available to the user for the paranoid among us (scandisk, fsck, etc)...
But one would imagine a properly designed computer system has the capability of *never* having corrupted data! The machine would be pointing out to the user that FileA.ext was lost due to problems, and that the user needs to check on the integrity of the data, or that the data seems to be okay, does the user want to double check, or that nothing seems to be wrong.
It's like... driving your car to the grocery, and then checking the oil, air, gas, transmission fluid, and brake fluid. The analogy is broken because the car didn't die, ala Windows, but it should be that the machine should be smart enough to tell you when something is wrong. I think.
The nick is a joke! Really!
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/linux config/
So IBM's own webpage lists the price as about $500 per copy of Linux installed on their S/390, with about 2500 copies of Linux being run, for a base cost of $1.2M.
This is a hard number that *IBM* is providing on their site, not just educated guesses on my part. They are actually willing to support that many copies, evidently.
The price varies with how buff a machine you want, I assume, but again, this is one of my baseless guesses.
Are we at least willing to grant that IBM does have expertise in their own hardware, and that their numbers aren't baseless and useless?
The nick is a joke! Really!
This is hearsay from previous /. posts, but the only way to get similar results from a HA cluster...
/., and finding than 1 IBM mainframe, the S390 I think, can run some 1300 copies of Linux reasonably, though I may get the number wrong. That would mean a price of about $400 per running copy of Linux(which translates to 1300 $400 PCs)
Is to run something like a cluster of over 1k machines, I think.
I remember reading about price/performance numbers, and doing some quick math on
So the mainframe, for some purposes, is *cheaper*, more reliable, has more bandwidth, has better IO, is more configurable, has less complexity, and is much niftier. Not to mention easier to manage than 1k machines in some room somewhere!
The nick is a joke! Really!
It occurred to me that the O->E conversion may be skipped entirely if the O data is encoded in such a way that the 'header' can be read without doing some sort of fancy decoding, interpretation, then switching.
Of course, this brings an optical switch into the realm of analog computing, instead of digital, but hey...
Dunno if this is even possible inside of a fiber, but can one encode a holographic signal into the header? This depends on the signal being coherent in the fiber, but if you can take the signal and recombine it with a similarly coherent signal, you can get data out. This data is still optical, perhaps in the form of a grid pattern(barcode here!) which can be read and interpreted. At this point it would seem an electrical device is still needed to operate the switch...
I dunno, how do they really encode this information? Just binary pulse data?
The nick is a joke! Really!
The current scientific definition of organic is "containing carbon", meaning Carbon == Organic, while Carbon != Coming from something alive.
Organic LEDs could concievably be a product of bioluminescent creatures, but they aren't. They just happen to use carbon, instead of silicon/germanium, etc.
The nick is a joke! Really!
I see what you mean, then.
USB is a 4 wire standard; 2 for power/ground and 2 for signal. All you add to the ADC then would be the 2 signal wires, assuming that there is hardware on the monitor end and the PC end to handle the power conversion (as opposed to having 2 sets of power on the cable, though stupid engineering could very well have allowed for that as well). This is speculation on my part.
So you can conceivably get rid of the wiring and shielding necessary for the power, if it rides along the same line as the monitor's power lines.
You don't get an argument that it will take more engineering to get the wires, at different clocks, shielded, flexible, and working. On the other hand a new solution was needed for next generation displays, at least as defined by VESA, due to the fact that clock/refresh was increasing, display size/resolution was increasing, and the old VGA cables could not handle the bandwidth, limited at 150MHz, to the 2GHz limit of the newer interface.
See <a href="http://www.vesa.org/news81798.html">this page</a> for more info.
Your second point is also noted; but it is definitely an engineering solution, and not one that is insurmountable. I suspect Apple's future plan is to integrate Firewire as well into the cable, and produce a product with only one cable out the back:
ADC.
Speakers would migrate to USB, which collapses into the ADC, while video, firewire, and power are also provided by the ADC(Advanced Display Connector, if it's adopted outside of Apple, I would hope). Networking, of course, would be wireless.
And it isn't the cable that your saving money on; it's the ports and complexity and chipsets on the motherboard that get condensed. Say future PCI/AGP chipsets collect USB and FireWire functionality onto them. Instead of 3 or 4 chips, you now have 1 chip running all four functions. Instead of 3 ports, you now have one. Engineering wise, this makes placement and layout easier, I think, as well as heat disippation and traces simpler.
This has nothing to do with the stupidity of the user, though stupid people definitely benefit/gain from this arrangement. It is a convenience thing too. One less cable to package and ship. One less cable to test and try. One less cable to produce and buy. A $2 cable, a $1 in chips, $3 in ports, across a million machines => $6 million not spent. And since Apple seems to be shipping in the millions a year, I don't think saving $10-20 million is something one can laugh at easily...
Considering that's 250 engineers for a year of about $80k, it would be worth it if it cost 5 engineers 3 years of development time to design/implement this, at $100k salaries. One year of sales, if it's even close to $6mil saved, is enough to warrant the cost/difficulty in implementation.
My numbers are pure guesswork and rough numbers, nothing scientific. But on cost analysis, it isn't *outrageous* for Apple to implement something like this...
On the user end, it really is 2 less cables: Instead of video, power, and USB, it is only ADC.
So it may not be such a big deal on our end...
The nick is a joke! Really!
Think out of the box, Jafac.
Mindshare is important for a business selling an image, lifestyle, and name. As for the file-sharing dilution problem, all it takes is for 'interface' gateways that translate one network to another. So that a search on Gnutella gets routed to random machines that, automagically, happen to speak Gnutella and Freenet and Napster, etc, protocols. If, for example, you had a translator for Mojonation to search Gnutella, Freenet, or Napster, it would just look like the entire Gnutella, Freenet, or Napster network is just another user with a large number of files to offer.
Same from the other end.
As for the 'totdc' thing, it just means Mojonation won't allow Gnutella, Napster, etc, to plunder the Mojo network without some function of uploads as well.
The nick is a joke! Really!
I would think that putting the USB connection in the same cable (as the video and power) is the added functionality; less cost, less space, less hardware, less clutter. It's usability issue in which people need not figure out where cables go, etc.
IE, if Apple decided to eliminate cables altogether in their nextgen G4 tower by going wireless (wireless USB, keyboard, mouse, speakers), the added functionality is *zero* clutter, zero confusion, zero space loss.
The nick is a joke! Really!
Except that you have to use an Apple product with it...
Is there any info on using the display with a non-Apple product?
On the other hand, the question doesn't give us enough info on why the Apple display wouldn't work for him/her?
The nick is a joke! Really!
I do enjoy being awarded karma points and all... but it feels bad to have gotten an +1 Insightful for admitting I didn't read the article entirely, though I guess one could argue I could get points, +1 underrated, for even reading the article, or being man enough to admit to being wrong/incorrect, but still... It just feels embarassing to have my admission of incorrectness highlighted like that.
Oh well, thank you, whichever moderator decided to bless me with this karma point ^^
The nick is a joke! Really!
The problem is that it's always been a war of control, whether it be money, wealth, power, information, distribution, production, access, choice, priviledge, rights, whatever.
For whatever reason, people will try to take from you whatever you are not willing to fight to protect. If you do not care for you rights, people, in their own self interest and for their own gain, will find a way to take away and use your lack of rights. If you do not care for your property, same. Lifestyle? Choices? whatever.
It's not corporate feudalism, whatever that truly means. If I'm not mistaken, corporate feudalism is about the submission/submersion of the individual to the group/division/company/corporation.
Akin to traditional feudalism, where the peasant swore fealty to the knight/samurai, who in turn owned his loyalty to a lord, up the chain of greater and greater lordships up to an emperor, king, ruler, or eventually, God.
In this case, it would be translated to employee's loyalty to boss, who's loyalty is to the division, who's loyalty is to the organization, which perhaps would then owe loyalty to the parent company, and upwards until we get to the corporation.
At least, that's what I think...
The nick is a joke! Really!
You're right.
I missed that, when reading that.
But there's still the point/clause about "commercial purpose", right? I did get that right, didn't I?
The nick is a joke! Really!