How could they do this without using reverse-engineered specs? They need specs from _Apple_ to guarantee compatibility, and as other posters have pointed out, they aren't getting them.
Maybe that's what it takes. It's been done before and it will be done again. They got LinuxPPC running on G3 fairly quickly. It's not against the law, Apple hasn't forbidden it, sure it's work. It has been done by hobbiests, if Be wanted to do it they could too, there is nothing stopping them. It might even be easier for them now that they have 2 opensource OSes to examine. increase efficiency by modifying code for the new processor, but the OS wouldn't _break_. Such is not the case, I am told, with G3-based systems.
I'll agree with that. There is a lot more backwards compatibility in intel-land.
It would be far more unusual if they didn't pick NeXT, I mean that was Steve's second child.
It doesn't sound like Apple has done anything negative or said anytihng negative towards Be though. They are competitors. Just sour grapes on Be's part. Anyhow, they've ported to Intel and have a nice little cult following, what more could they honestly expect?
Free speech protects you from the government, it has nothing to do with saying nasty thing about some company or group of people and having them hate you. It doesn't explicitly make any provisions for anonymity. There is a difference between being able to speak out and not being able to speak out and then there can be consequences for speaking out. It's only a matter of time, we will end up with anonymous registries, you can speak anonymously but if you slander or say anything to hurt somebody they will reveal you because it's not supposed to be a cloak for that purpose. Information is too powerful and it is too easy to do damage with it, and we as a society are way too immature to deal with it. Free speech requires responsibility, anonymous free speech requires even more.
If you're a whistleblower then you go to the authorities or media who, in turn, should responsibly deal with the situation and your identity, you don't air your problems in a public forum anonymously. It won't fix the problems and it only stands to hurt the organization that has the problems, at that point your free speech is an act of aggression and not an act of whistleblowing. The only case where there may be no authorities is if it is the government you are blowing the whistle one but you're given explicit protection to speak against them. The Xircom case involves a pseudowhistle blower who lacked any responsibility, you should get in trouble for that.
I think anonymous registries will be a good thing for this reason: what happens when the companies and the government catches on to the information revolution? I'm thinking about what happened a few years ago with all those anti-scientologists on the net. The church of scientology is a big and powerful organization and it legally shut a lot of people down by controlling information. Think of a microsoft of IBM or tobacco company controlling the information. If you want to have your privacy and the ability to slander and defame people and companies there will be serious motivation for those companies and the government to start mastering information and the value of tracking down "anonymous" people will be much higher. The other side of that coin is to have registered anonymity and as soon as you start crossing the line of legality someone can get a subpoena and learn your identity. Of course this is going to cause some serious issues with the civil libs and the privacy nuts who absolutley refuse to be numbered but it's going to happen if people continue to abuse anonymous speech.
Is this true or is it just hearsay? I just don't see that jiving with Linux and the GPL so well.
I think it is deplorable that Be doesn't support their PowerPC based customers. They've marketed the OS as platform independant but it's not and if you want support it sounds like you're stuck with a pentium, that's not so bad but they should stop claiming it's cross platform.
The fact is that if they wanted to, they could support G3 macs, there is no question about that. The fact is also that once they support the current generation of g3s they will always support the current generation of g3s, they may not support G4s or future G3s but they will support current G3s. It's not different than being on Intel in that respect, in fact you are guaranteed that if you want to support newer Intel chips you will probably end up writing some code. There isn't a moving target. I really think this is just an attempt to try and smear Apple, but I also understand that Be doesn't have a huge staff either.
I don't question that there is bad blood, but how does Apple have a surly attitude towards Be? I've been under the impression that it was the other way around. After all, Be is made up of a bunch of disgruntled ex-Apple employees. Has Apple done anything to hurt Be or been outspoken against them?
Moon doesn't have any atmosphere. We can get around part of the problem by wearing space suits but what about all the cosmic debris that hits the moon every day? It's all pock marked with craters because there isn't any atmosphere to burn up or slow down all the rocks that crash in to it. I think that makes the moon a less than good candidate for off-Earth population.
Some kind of stellar mining operation maybe, even a fuel depot for your trips to Mars but I don't think you'd want to by Lunar realistate and build a big geodesic dome house.
I say pollute it, if we can safely get our pollution there, which we cannot do yet.
I'm no expert on how compaq functions but the same people are running the alpha show as were when DEC existed. What this means to me, and I work for a very large corporation, is that Compaq doesn't care enough about the alpha to be worried about it. Alpha is still a big and expensive project but since it's not one of the crown jewels Compaq has loosened the reigns a little. That gives the alpha people the ability to be flexable and do stuff, like port the compilers to linux, that they never could have done when alpha was a flagship product. (if it ever was..)
I think it could potentially mean some other things about funding, the alpha team may not feel they are getting funded enough to compete with PowerPC and Sparc so they could be embracing free products to defray some of the costs.
Both of those things are good for us end-user type consumers because it means alpha will get competitive in ways PowerPC and Sparc cannot and it means extra good support for us alpha linux users but it also means the big picture of alpha could be grim. This would also explain why they have revealed their plans well into the future, a lot further than they usually do (microprocessor teams work for years and years before the product is released, the next couple chips are always well in to the pipeline by the time you can by a current chip but Dec has never really announced a chip a generation early like the 21364)
And it was amazing. The special effects are unlike anything I've seen before, they totally blend in. The story isn't half bad either, kind of a bittersweet ending but I thought it was completely enjoyable.
Of course it could have been 45 minutes of black screen and I probably would have enjoyed it if they called it starwars..
I think the hype is deserved, initially I didn't think the movie would live up to the hype but I think it does for the most part. There are a few things I'm not so sure about, how they are going to make the connection from III to IV, for example and they kind of lose some of that cool 1970's style "sci-fi look" that the original new hope had. They also intentionally leave you hanging and wanting more but it was a good movie overall.
I personally got quite a kick out of the java support one. Can MS even ship java right now?
The security issues are somewhat valid, linux itslef is secure but a kernel isn't too interesting. Various daemons and servers have been littered with buffer overflows and holes to breech. They get fixed fast though but if you were running a major business fast might not be good enough. Of course you can very easily secure a linux system. NT is also filled with bugs, the security was just patched on to it about 6 months before 1.0 shipped, it wasn't designed in from the start and it shows. You could probably root an NT box as quickly as anyone could do a linux box.
The damage you can do is different, on a linux box you can potentially use a buffer overflow to get root access and do just about anything you want to do to the system. On NT, depending on the holes, maybe you can get access to login information or maybe you can delete some files or something. You still need console access to an NT machine if you had some really ambitious plans. A hole is a hole, either way, but a whole on linux can leave your system completely unprotected.
If Linux wins then there is the easy excuse that it wins when you bring in the best experts to setup your server, but who in the real world does that?
If it loses then we lose on a big stage with a lot of important people there to get egg on their faces, if they let their pride get in the way.
The upside is that if we lose and we have the right people there, we can diagnose the situation and learn to make it better. Hopefully there would then be a fix within a couple months and linux would truly match or outperform NT (assuming it doesn't) I don't like how MS is so willing to let this test happen at their lab.
It's all going to come down to spin in the end and it will be a good test of who's more the market darling, MS who has worked the media for years and years or Linux who is the new kid on the block with all the cool toys.
This isn't a really big thing. Keys of this length have always been on the fringe of "secure" as computers get faster and algorithms improve the "secure" keysize will gradually become bigger and bigger.
This is not a factoring breakthrough. To break your 2048bit key it will take a breakthrough (if one even exists to be found, you know that whole P!=NP discussion?) or a radical breakthrough in computation.
It never stops amazing me how many people step up to bat for AMD.
Nothing against them, I wish them the best and I think competition is good but why should anyone believe that these benchmarks are incorrect? (why should they believe them?) The K7 has impressive sounding specs but I've never known a chip company to underestimate their product's performance. Intel has never exaclty sat on their butts while a competitors made something amazing either, it sounds like the K7 and the P3 are about the same, as I would expect it.
I'm guessing that the K7 will perform on par with Intel's best and it's cost will also be on par with Intel's.
x86 will never be the "high performance" platform. AMD and Intel are going to be making some very fast chips but it will still be easier to make an Alpha or a PowerPC that runs quicker. x86's thing is price/performance and legacy software. If you want pure performance there are much better alternatives. (just about everything is better...)
Are you sure IBM demoed a 64bit chip at 1GHz? I could have swore it was a modified 604, being as how IBM still doesn't have a single chip 64bit implementation other than the 620...
Me too, I wouldn't underestimate Intel anytime soon. Nobody in the chip business has their resources and they could probably deliver a string of flops before they got in to real trouble (arguably the x86 line has been a string of flops... but I meant in terms of marketplace performance)
They also have their hands in many other aspects of the PC business. The main reason PCs have the price performance edge they do is because Intel controls the chipsets, a lot of the motherboard market, controllers, etc.. We have yet to see K7 prices, K7 systems could end up costing more like alphas because they are using a lot of alpha parts. Not to build them up but Intel is a very formidable foe and AMD hasn't been cutting profits.
I thought that was a nice touch. Nothing quite like a little paranoia.
For a company as powerful as they are, I was really impressed with Intel's behavior up until fairly recently (the last couple years.) It seems like they are really pushing the limits in the same way MS does (not that they are explicitly unethical but they dance close enough to the line that it makes you question it)
I can understand some things, they are being attacked by a lot of different companies on a lot of different levels but it's getting pretty bad. Semantic has no reason at all to list this program as a virus or a trojan, Intel needs to come up with a better scheme.
These "waste of timers" just don't seem to get it. Linux was a duplication of work already done. the whole GNU project is primarily a reimplementation job.
If someone wants to code, then more power to them. Who's to judge whether or not it is "worth it?"
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Maybe that's what it takes. It's been done before and it will be done again. They got LinuxPPC running on G3 fairly quickly. It's not against the law, Apple hasn't forbidden it, sure it's work. It has been done by hobbiests, if Be wanted to do it they could too, there is nothing stopping them. It might even be easier for them now that they have 2 opensource OSes to examine. increase efficiency by modifying code for the new processor, but the OS wouldn't _break_. Such is not the case, I am told, with G3-based systems.
I'll agree with that. There is a lot more backwards compatibility in intel-land.
It doesn't sound like Apple has done anything negative or said anytihng negative towards Be though. They are competitors. Just sour grapes on Be's part. Anyhow, they've ported to Intel and have a nice little cult following, what more could they honestly expect?
If you're a whistleblower then you go to the authorities or media who, in turn, should responsibly deal with the situation and your identity, you don't air your problems in a public forum anonymously. It won't fix the problems and it only stands to hurt the organization that has the problems, at that point your free speech is an act of aggression and not an act of whistleblowing. The only case where there may be no authorities is if it is the government you are blowing the whistle one but you're given explicit protection to speak against them. The Xircom case involves a pseudowhistle blower who lacked any responsibility, you should get in trouble for that.
I think anonymous registries will be a good thing for this reason: what happens when the companies and the government catches on to the information revolution? I'm thinking about what happened a few years ago with all those anti-scientologists on the net. The church of scientology is a big and powerful organization and it legally shut a lot of people down by controlling information. Think of a microsoft of IBM or tobacco company controlling the information. If you want to have your privacy and the ability to slander and defame people and companies there will be serious motivation for those companies and the government to start mastering information and the value of tracking down "anonymous" people will be much higher. The other side of that coin is to have registered anonymity and as soon as you start crossing the line of legality someone can get a subpoena and learn your identity. Of course this is going to cause some serious issues with the civil libs and the privacy nuts who absolutley refuse to be numbered but it's going to happen if people continue to abuse anonymous speech.
I think it is deplorable that Be doesn't support their PowerPC based customers. They've marketed the OS as platform independant but it's not and if you want support it sounds like you're stuck with a pentium, that's not so bad but they should stop claiming it's cross platform.
The fact is that if they wanted to, they could support G3 macs, there is no question about that. The fact is also that once they support the current generation of g3s they will always support the current generation of g3s, they may not support G4s or future G3s but they will support current G3s. It's not different than being on Intel in that respect, in fact you are guaranteed that if you want to support newer Intel chips you will probably end up writing some code. There isn't a moving target. I really think this is just an attempt to try and smear Apple, but I also understand that Be doesn't have a huge staff either.
I don't question that there is bad blood, but how does Apple have a surly attitude towards Be? I've been under the impression that it was the other way around. After all, Be is made up of a bunch of disgruntled ex-Apple employees. Has Apple done anything to hurt Be or been outspoken against them?
I like "freedomeware" better anyways.
Darn.. Sure would be cool though.
What kind of effort would it take? You know the question I'm asking...
Some kind of stellar mining operation maybe, even a fuel depot for your trips to Mars but I don't think you'd want to by Lunar realistate and build a big geodesic dome house.
I say pollute it, if we can safely get our pollution there, which we cannot do yet.
Now how about IBM helps us get AIX binaries running under linuxPPC?
I think it could potentially mean some other things about funding, the alpha team may not feel they are getting funded enough to compete with PowerPC and Sparc so they could be embracing free products to defray some of the costs.
Both of those things are good for us end-user type consumers because it means alpha will get competitive in ways PowerPC and Sparc cannot and it means extra good support for us alpha linux users but it also means the big picture of alpha could be grim. This would also explain why they have revealed their plans well into the future, a lot further than they usually do (microprocessor teams work for years and years before the product is released, the next couple chips are always well in to the pipeline by the time you can by a current chip but Dec has never really announced a chip a generation early like the 21364)
Just my slant on it.
Of course it could have been 45 minutes of black screen and I probably would have enjoyed it if they called it starwars..
I think the hype is deserved, initially I didn't think the movie would live up to the hype but I think it does for the most part. There are a few things I'm not so sure about, how they are going to make the connection from III to IV, for example and they kind of lose some of that cool 1970's style "sci-fi look" that the original new hope had. They also intentionally leave you hanging and wanting more but it was a good movie overall.
I like BSD but I'm not convinced that it would win. It would most likely do better though.
Either way, this is great news. Congratulations Richard!
The security issues are somewhat valid, linux itslef is secure but a kernel isn't too interesting. Various daemons and servers have been littered with buffer overflows and holes to breech. They get fixed fast though but if you were running a major business fast might not be good enough. Of course you can very easily secure a linux system. NT is also filled with bugs, the security was just patched on to it about 6 months before 1.0 shipped, it wasn't designed in from the start and it shows. You could probably root an NT box as quickly as anyone could do a linux box.
The damage you can do is different, on a linux box you can potentially use a buffer overflow to get root access and do just about anything you want to do to the system. On NT, depending on the holes, maybe you can get access to login information or maybe you can delete some files or something. You still need console access to an NT machine if you had some really ambitious plans. A hole is a hole, either way, but a whole on linux can leave your system completely unprotected.
If it loses then we lose on a big stage with a lot of important people there to get egg on their faces, if they let their pride get in the way.
The upside is that if we lose and we have the right people there, we can diagnose the situation and learn to make it better. Hopefully there would then be a fix within a couple months and linux would truly match or outperform NT (assuming it doesn't) I don't like how MS is so willing to let this test happen at their lab.
It's all going to come down to spin in the end and it will be a good test of who's more the market darling, MS who has worked the media for years and years or Linux who is the new kid on the block with all the cool toys.
to Cipheromicon, TC May's cipherpunk FAQ.
This isn't a really big thing. Keys of this length have always been on the fringe of "secure" as computers get faster and algorithms improve the "secure" keysize will gradually become bigger and bigger.
This is not a factoring breakthrough. To break your 2048bit key it will take a breakthrough (if one even exists to be found, you know that whole P!=NP discussion?) or a radical breakthrough in computation.
THe K6-3 is beating the PIII at what? NOPs?
Nothing against them, I wish them the best and I think competition is good but why should anyone believe that these benchmarks are incorrect? (why should they believe them?) The K7 has impressive sounding specs but I've never known a chip company to underestimate their product's performance. Intel has never exaclty sat on their butts while a competitors made something amazing either, it sounds like the K7 and the P3 are about the same, as I would expect it.
I'm guessing that the K7 will perform on par with Intel's best and it's cost will also be on par with Intel's.
x86 will never be the "high performance" platform. AMD and Intel are going to be making some very fast chips but it will still be easier to make an Alpha or a PowerPC that runs quicker. x86's thing is price/performance and legacy software. If you want pure performance there are much better alternatives. (just about everything is better...)
Are you sure IBM demoed a 64bit chip at 1GHz? I could have swore it was a modified 604, being as how IBM still doesn't have a single chip 64bit implementation other than the 620...
They also have their hands in many other aspects of the PC business. The main reason PCs have the price performance edge they do is because Intel controls the chipsets, a lot of the motherboard market, controllers, etc.. We have yet to see K7 prices, K7 systems could end up costing more like alphas because they are using a lot of alpha parts. Not to build them up but Intel is a very formidable foe and AMD hasn't been cutting profits.
For a company as powerful as they are, I was really impressed with Intel's behavior up until fairly recently (the last couple years.) It seems like they are really pushing the limits in the same way MS does (not that they are explicitly unethical but they dance close enough to the line that it makes you question it)
I can understand some things, they are being attacked by a lot of different companies on a lot of different levels but it's getting pretty bad. Semantic has no reason at all to list this program as a virus or a trojan, Intel needs to come up with a better scheme.
If someone wants to code, then more power to them. Who's to judge whether or not it is "worth it?"