How is this thing different than a Gumstix? [gumstix.org] Perhaps the price which is about 10% less,
10%? OK, I'll grant that the $25 headline price probably isn't an accurate retail price (it probably reflects cost of manufacture, so add ~50% to get a retail price), but gumstix.org's prices suggest their cheapest system is $129, which clearly isn't even in the same league, especially when you consider that:
(1) that's a 600MHz system, not 700MHz (2) you'll need to add expansion boards and use a more expensive base board to support HDMI, bringing the total cost to $200 if you want the same features this board has (albeit with twice as much memory, plus some exposed IO pins that Braben's design lacks).
What, no Rogue? Zork? Adventure? Nexuiz? Has the Smithsonian been living under a rock?
It's not even as though these games were *only* available for Unix systems. All of them had conversion for more mainstream gaming platforms, too. Hell, I remember playing rogue-like games on my Sinclair Spectrum.
I'm not sure in what way EVE can be described as Elite's spiritual successor. OK, both are set in space, and have trading and combat elements. But there are quite a few games that came between the two that you can say that for. And:
Elite: twitch-based, emphasises accuracy of aiming, allows players complete freedom to maneuver EVE: strategic, aiming performed automatically, maneuvering is by selection from a limited set of commands (approach, orbit)
But why aren't they selling? Simple, epicly poor availability, near-zero advertising, and a gazillion made in china knock-off pads. Retail stores doesn't seem to bother stocking anything other than the Galaxy Tab, despite the Acer Iconia and Viewsonic tablets being rather respectable.
Bingo. And despite promises of 9" and 10" variants of the Galaxy Tab, they haven't appeared. So the only Android tab most people have ever seen is 7", which is (IMO) way too small to be useful. You can't use the on-screen keyboard properly, so text entry is slow. An iPad-like 9" display makes it much more convenient. A 7" tablet makes a half decent media player, and a sort-of-acceptable web browser (as long as you aren't doing stuff like posting blog entries, using discussion forums, etc.), and an adequate ebook reader, but there's not much else you can really do with it. And for most people, it's too expensive for those things.
There are a number of open source CPU cores, most notably are probably Leon and opensparc. I'm not sure, however if the OpenSPARC has been turned into an ASIC.
I'm pretty sure it has been. The design is more suited to that application than FPGA synthesis (it's quite large, compared to what you can fit on most affordable FPGAs). Synopsys's ASIC design software includes modules derived from it for reuse on users' circuits; I'd be surprised if nobody had actually implemented something they'd designed using it.
nobody is at fault regardless of the damages done by the emails
What damage was done by the emails? They have no legal force, and wouldn't have even if they were sent in response to a valid DMCA complaint. They just notify people that a file has been removed, and tell them how to counterclaim to get the file reinstated if they do have a valid licence to distribute.
As the SP, they have no say in the matter -- no matter how obviously incorrect the claim may be, they cannot say "you're full of shit" and ignore it.
This isn't quite true: they are not under a legal obligation to remove materials that are subject of a DMCA notice, so they can choose to ignore obviously incorrect claims. Doing so is risky, however, as if they are wrong they can become liable for the infringement on behalf of their customer. Most SPs, therefore, choose not to exercise their discretion in any but the most outrageous cases.
Deleting files and claiming there was a DMCA request when their wasn't isn't covered in the DMCA. It's certainly fraud and misrepresentation
It's almost certainly not fraud, as in order to be fraud the incorrect information must be supplied to somebody with hopes of gaining something from them, either money, goods or services, that they wouldn't otherwise provide. As dropbox couldn't possibly have hoped to gain anything (directly) from others by sending such notices, it is at worst a cynical attempt at spreading FUD. Misrepresentation is another matter entirely, but even then I would say it was true only if they intended the recipients of the notices to actually believe them, so if they really were sent accidentally I would still suggest that it is not misrepresentation.
Quite seriously, though, all touch-typing classes--not just in my high-school days, but in my mother's high school days--drilled into you the importance of maintaining an absolutely steady, even rhythm. You didn't slow down, even when stretching with the left pinky to hit the exclamation point, and you didn't speed up, even when you're typing T-H-E.
I'm not sure how this particular bit of lore got lost. As nearly as I can tell, the generation that has learned to "key" on computer keyboards is not being taught to keep a steady rhythm. I don't know if the importance of the steady rhythm is real or just tradition or superstition; we were taught it and I believed it and still do.
It's interesting, and although I have never had formal touch typing lessons I do find I tend to fall into a rhythm when typing long words, but unless I'm copy typing I have to pause between words to be sure I know where I'm going with my sentence, and as I spend very little time copy typing I guess that rhythm isn't very useful to me. I could see how it would be if I were copy typing though. So, what I guess I'm saying is: the way you were taught is probably the best way to copy type, but as copy typing is no longer a common activity, it probably isn't such a good way to learn now?
The "significance" of the initial M. is that he writes mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and scifi as Iain M. Banks.
AIUI, this came about by accident. He always intended to use the "M" for both, but his mainstream publisher decided that the name sounded better without it, so left it out. When he eventually found a publisher for his SF work (he wrote the earliest SF stuff first, but didn't get it published until after his first non-SF[1] novel) that publisher agreed with him that the initial sounded good, so included it.
[1] - I hesitate to call The Wasp Factory mainstream -- it is significantly farther detached from the real world than most SF, IMO.
iOS maintains a significant lead over Android, and always has, although on Slashdot ignorance is bliss, so I fully expect some replies from people ignorantly claiming this isn't true
If this is true, why do we constantly see news stories like this one that suggests that Android has a 10-15% market share lead over iOS? Where are the figures that back your assertion up?
ASICs actually got more expensive. The individual ASIC is cheaper now, but the non recurring costs of making a ASIC went up a lot. Smaller process nodes need more masks and more complicated masks. If your mask set is $2.000.000 and you are going to sell ASICs 10,000 made with it, even if the individual ASIC is free after paying for the masks, you are still at $200 per piece. The $100 FPGA is a better option then and at 10.000 pcs you are going to get a pretty large fpga for $100.
Sure. But the older processes are still available. I haven't looked at pricing for a few years, but IIRC last time I digged into this, $2M was about the right price for preparing masks for 65nm processes. However, if you went for something a few process steps older (e.g. 0.35 or 0.5 micron processes which are still readily available), you'd be looking at somewhere in the region of a hundredth that price. And a 0.35um CMOS ASIC can perform similarly to a 65nm FPGA: on both you'd expect non-trivial designs to operate with clock frequencies in the region of low hundreds of MHz.
Let's try that Google ipv6 address - http://200148600200168/ (oh, that'll be fun to explain to users)
There's this invention called DNS which makes entering an ipv6 address unnecessary: http://ipv6.google.com/ is the url you want, although for me it resolves to 2a00:1450:8002::68, so maybe the address you have is wrong?
(edit: I do note that it seems slashdot isn't IPv6-address-URL compatible, which is annoying.)
Frankly, the character isn't supposed to be very well educated, so it seems quite likely that he would say that. Not sure what you're complaining about, exactly...?
BTW, I think your first sentence should start "I hate *that* in the Twilight...". Try excising the subordinate clauses, and you end up with with "I hate Jacob Black says something", which parses as "(I hate Jacob Black)[noun phrase] says[verb] something[direct object]". I don't think that's what you wanted to say.
Sweet! You mean to say that all websites and application specific servers for mobile phones have been migrated to ipv6! Awesome!
Why would you think this is necessary? Here's how it works:
1. Mobile device sends DNS request to ISP's IPv6 DNS servers for AAAA record. 2. DNS server does recursive lookup, doesn't find any records, sends request for A records instead. 3. DNS server receives response to A record and translates to an AAAA record containing::ffff:0:[ipv4 address], returning it to device. 4. Mobile device connects to address returned, which is intercepted by ISP's routers which perform NAT for the device, connecting to the original IPv4 address. 5. Profit!
See... it is entirely possible for a mobile device to connect to public web sites and application servers that do not have IPv6 support, without that mobile device requiring an IPv4 address.
Lucky you. My ISP won't even be trialling IPv6 until June. A proper rollout is unlikely to happen this year, from all I can gather. My understanding is that this is likely to be the case for most UK ISPs, as BT didn't finish implementing the infrastructure until quite recently (amazingly, the designs for a network upgrade they called "21st century network" didn't originally include IPv6 support...).
And I don't consider tunnelling to be an appropriate answer. Even the most local tunnel providers I can find add an extra 4 or 5 hops to my packet routes, resulting in a 50%+ increase in latency to many sites. IPv6 will only be useful when I'm using it natively, directly to my ISP's routers. Which isn't going to happen any time soon.
A/22 is pretty much nothing, so what you're saying is that an ISP looking for addresses can get pretty much nothing from APNIC. Thus, they're basically out.
A/22 is probably enough for a moderate-sized ISP to run NAT for all of their customers. Which is the point: IPv4 addresses are being rationed to the point where end users won't be able to get them any more. That's not *quite* the same thing as being out. IPv6 transition won't be mandatory, as long as you can do everything you want to do from behind NAT (as most users can).
Yes, but it also means you don't have to figure out how to persist your objects to your database, how to transfer them seamlessly from one box to another in a load balanced environment, how to manage the lifetime of per-user and per-session objects, how to set up your system to locate the URLs of your web services, how to send messages from one object to another on a remote machine, how to store your resources so that they can be altered without recompilation, and many other things...
Sure, J2EE takes a while to learn. But it provides a whole load of features that would take a lot longer to write if you had to do them from scratch.
Does anyone write "Pure.Net apps" though? A serious question, as I can't think of an app that I've written that is pure.Net. I always need to include some pInvoke (Platform Invoke or Windows API calls), which can make code less than portable (depending on memory packing / variable alignment, pointer size, etc.). However, since I write code to help maintain our Windows images and also as utilities for users (not as large applications), perhaps my perception is a bit skewed.
I need to use p/invoke in about half of my projects, usually to shell functions (e.g. requesting information about explorer shell items, building context menus, and the like). That's necessary for seemless integration with the desktop. But I suspect p/invoke to windows api functions will still work, it's only p/invoke to a custom dll or using a non-MS COM object/activex control that is likely to fail, so we should both be in the clear...
... including the claim that its 16 bit address bus allowed expansion to 65K of memory./me didn't realise the use of decimal rather than binary capacity multipliers in marketing claims was so old.
Come on, buying a tech item in a 3rd-world country [...]
Even when that country is responsible for something like 50% of the world's production of tech items? China may be a rule unto itself, but it's hard to describe it as 3rd world.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this thing different than a Gumstix? [gumstix.org] Perhaps the price which is about 10% less,
10%? OK, I'll grant that the $25 headline price probably isn't an accurate retail price (it probably reflects cost of manufacture, so add ~50% to get a retail price), but gumstix.org's prices suggest their cheapest system is $129, which clearly isn't even in the same league, especially when you consider that:
(1) that's a 600MHz system, not 700MHz
(2) you'll need to add expansion boards and use a more expensive base board to support HDMI, bringing the total cost to $200 if you want the same features this board has (albeit with twice as much memory, plus some exposed IO pins that Braben's design lacks).
What, no Rogue? Zork? Adventure? Nexuiz? Has the Smithsonian been living under a rock?
It's not even as though these games were *only* available for Unix systems. All of them had conversion for more mainstream gaming platforms, too. Hell, I remember playing rogue-like games on my Sinclair Spectrum.
Agreed, along with its spiritual successor EVE.
?
I'm not sure in what way EVE can be described as Elite's spiritual successor. OK, both are set in space, and have trading and combat elements. But there are quite a few games that came between the two that you can say that for. And:
Elite: twitch-based, emphasises accuracy of aiming, allows players complete freedom to maneuver
EVE: strategic, aiming performed automatically, maneuvering is by selection from a limited set of commands (approach, orbit)
Volumes can't be measured in "km" or "m", but "km^3" or "m^3".
I suspect he C&P'd a superscript 3 character (U+00B3), which as a non-US-ASCII character is stripped out by slashcode when comments are posted.
But why aren't they selling? Simple, epicly poor availability, near-zero advertising, and a gazillion made in china knock-off pads. Retail stores doesn't seem to bother stocking anything other than the Galaxy Tab, despite the Acer Iconia and Viewsonic tablets being rather respectable.
Bingo. And despite promises of 9" and 10" variants of the Galaxy Tab, they haven't appeared. So the only Android tab most people have ever seen is 7", which is (IMO) way too small to be useful. You can't use the on-screen keyboard properly, so text entry is slow. An iPad-like 9" display makes it much more convenient. A 7" tablet makes a half decent media player, and a sort-of-acceptable web browser (as long as you aren't doing stuff like posting blog entries, using discussion forums, etc.), and an adequate ebook reader, but there's not much else you can really do with it. And for most people, it's too expensive for those things.
There are a number of open source CPU cores, most notably are probably Leon and opensparc. I'm not sure, however if the OpenSPARC has been turned into an ASIC.
I'm pretty sure it has been. The design is more suited to that application than FPGA synthesis (it's quite large, compared to what you can fit on most affordable FPGAs). Synopsys's ASIC design software includes modules derived from it for reuse on users' circuits; I'd be surprised if nobody had actually implemented something they'd designed using it.
nobody is at fault regardless of the damages done by the emails
What damage was done by the emails? They have no legal force, and wouldn't have even if they were sent in response to a valid DMCA complaint. They just notify people that a file has been removed, and tell them how to counterclaim to get the file reinstated if they do have a valid licence to distribute.
One more thing:
As the SP, they have no say in the matter -- no matter how obviously incorrect the claim may be, they cannot say "you're full of shit" and ignore it.
This isn't quite true: they are not under a legal obligation to remove materials that are subject of a DMCA notice, so they can choose to ignore obviously incorrect claims. Doing so is risky, however, as if they are wrong they can become liable for the infringement on behalf of their customer. Most SPs, therefore, choose not to exercise their discretion in any but the most outrageous cases.
Deleting files and claiming there was a DMCA request when their wasn't isn't covered in the DMCA. It's certainly fraud and misrepresentation
It's almost certainly not fraud, as in order to be fraud the incorrect information must be supplied to somebody with hopes of gaining something from them, either money, goods or services, that they wouldn't otherwise provide. As dropbox couldn't possibly have hoped to gain anything (directly) from others by sending such notices, it is at worst a cynical attempt at spreading FUD. Misrepresentation is another matter entirely, but even then I would say it was true only if they intended the recipients of the notices to actually believe them, so if they really were sent accidentally I would still suggest that it is not misrepresentation.
Quite seriously, though, all touch-typing classes--not just in my high-school days, but in my mother's high school days--drilled into you the importance of maintaining an absolutely steady, even rhythm. You didn't slow down, even when stretching with the left pinky to hit the exclamation point, and you didn't speed up, even when you're typing T-H-E.
I'm not sure how this particular bit of lore got lost. As nearly as I can tell, the generation that has learned to "key" on computer keyboards is not being taught to keep a steady rhythm. I don't know if the importance of the steady rhythm is real or just tradition or superstition; we were taught it and I believed it and still do.
It's interesting, and although I have never had formal touch typing lessons I do find I tend to fall into a rhythm when typing long words, but unless I'm copy typing I have to pause between words to be sure I know where I'm going with my sentence, and as I spend very little time copy typing I guess that rhythm isn't very useful to me. I could see how it would be if I were copy typing though. So, what I guess I'm saying is: the way you were taught is probably the best way to copy type, but as copy typing is no longer a common activity, it probably isn't such a good way to learn now?
Unfortunately, the theatrical is only in Dolby 2.0 and the video hasn't been remastered like the re-release, but it's certainly better than VHS.
AIUI, the theatrical version on these DVDs is a direct copy of the content of the laserdisc.
The "significance" of the initial M. is that he writes mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and scifi as Iain M. Banks.
AIUI, this came about by accident. He always intended to use the "M" for both, but his mainstream publisher decided that the name sounded better without it, so left it out. When he eventually found a publisher for his SF work (he wrote the earliest SF stuff first, but didn't get it published until after his first non-SF[1] novel) that publisher agreed with him that the initial sounded good, so included it.
[1] - I hesitate to call The Wasp Factory mainstream -- it is significantly farther detached from the real world than most SF, IMO.
iOS maintains a significant lead over Android, and always has, although on Slashdot ignorance is bliss, so I fully expect some replies from people ignorantly claiming this isn't true
If this is true, why do we constantly see news stories like this one that suggests that Android has a 10-15% market share lead over iOS? Where are the figures that back your assertion up?
ASICs actually got more expensive. The individual ASIC is cheaper now, but the non recurring costs of making a ASIC went up a lot. Smaller process nodes need more masks and more complicated masks.
If your mask set is $2.000.000 and you are going to sell ASICs 10,000 made with it, even if the individual ASIC is free after paying for the masks, you are still at $200 per piece. The $100 FPGA is a better option then and at 10.000 pcs you are going to get a pretty large fpga for $100.
Sure. But the older processes are still available. I haven't looked at pricing for a few years, but IIRC last time I digged into this, $2M was about the right price for preparing masks for 65nm processes. However, if you went for something a few process steps older (e.g. 0.35 or 0.5 micron processes which are still readily available), you'd be looking at somewhere in the region of a hundredth that price. And a 0.35um CMOS ASIC can perform similarly to a 65nm FPGA: on both you'd expect non-trivial designs to operate with clock frequencies in the region of low hundreds of MHz.
It's a wiki, for god's sake, couldn't you have deleted the image ref?
Let's try that Google ipv6 address - http://200148600200168/ (oh, that'll be fun to explain to users)
There's this invention called DNS which makes entering an ipv6 address unnecessary: http://ipv6.google.com/ is the url you want, although for me it resolves to 2a00:1450:8002::68, so maybe the address you have is wrong?
(edit: I do note that it seems slashdot isn't IPv6-address-URL compatible, which is annoying.)
Frankly, the character isn't supposed to be very well educated, so it seems quite likely that he would say that. Not sure what you're complaining about, exactly...?
BTW, I think your first sentence should start "I hate *that* in the Twilight...". Try excising the subordinate clauses, and you end up with with "I hate Jacob Black says something", which parses as "(I hate Jacob Black)[noun phrase] says[verb] something[direct object]". I don't think that's what you wanted to say.
Sweet! You mean to say that all websites and application specific servers for mobile phones have been migrated to ipv6! Awesome!
Why would you think this is necessary? Here's how it works:
1. Mobile device sends DNS request to ISP's IPv6 DNS servers for AAAA record. ::ffff:0:[ipv4 address], returning it to device.
2. DNS server does recursive lookup, doesn't find any records, sends request for A records instead.
3. DNS server receives response to A record and translates to an AAAA record containing
4. Mobile device connects to address returned, which is intercepted by ISP's routers which perform NAT for the device, connecting to the original IPv4 address.
5. Profit!
See... it is entirely possible for a mobile device to connect to public web sites and application servers that do not have IPv6 support, without that mobile device requiring an IPv4 address.
Why? I already have an inet6 address
Lucky you. My ISP won't even be trialling IPv6 until June. A proper rollout is unlikely to happen this year, from all I can gather. My understanding is that this is likely to be the case for most UK ISPs, as BT didn't finish implementing the infrastructure until quite recently (amazingly, the designs for a network upgrade they called "21st century network" didn't originally include IPv6 support...).
And I don't consider tunnelling to be an appropriate answer. Even the most local tunnel providers I can find add an extra 4 or 5 hops to my packet routes, resulting in a 50%+ increase in latency to many sites. IPv6 will only be useful when I'm using it natively, directly to my ISP's routers. Which isn't going to happen any time soon.
A /22 is pretty much nothing, so what you're saying is that an ISP looking for addresses can get pretty much nothing from APNIC. Thus, they're basically out.
A /22 is probably enough for a moderate-sized ISP to run NAT for all of their customers. Which is the point: IPv4 addresses are being rationed to the point where end users won't be able to get them any more. That's not *quite* the same thing as being out. IPv6 transition won't be mandatory, as long as you can do everything you want to do from behind NAT (as most users can).
Yes, but it also means you don't have to figure out how to persist your objects to your database, how to transfer them seamlessly from one box to another in a load balanced environment, how to manage the lifetime of per-user and per-session objects, how to set up your system to locate the URLs of your web services, how to send messages from one object to another on a remote machine, how to store your resources so that they can be altered without recompilation, and many other things...
Sure, J2EE takes a while to learn. But it provides a whole load of features that would take a lot longer to write if you had to do them from scratch.
It's a reference to the type of tea [wikipedia.org], as an alternative to Java—tea vs. coffee, get it?
Err... why did you put [wikipedia.org] in there without a link? Are you trying to drive us crazy?
Does anyone write "Pure .Net apps" though? A serious question, as I can't think of an app that I've written that is pure .Net. I always need to include some pInvoke (Platform Invoke or Windows API calls), which can make code less than portable (depending on memory packing / variable alignment, pointer size, etc.). However, since I write code to help maintain our Windows images and also as utilities for users (not as large applications), perhaps my perception is a bit skewed.
I need to use p/invoke in about half of my projects, usually to shell functions (e.g. requesting information about explorer shell items, building context menus, and the like). That's necessary for seemless integration with the desktop. But I suspect p/invoke to windows api functions will still work, it's only p/invoke to a custom dll or using a non-MS COM object/activex control that is likely to fail, so we should both be in the clear...
... including the claim that its 16 bit address bus allowed expansion to 65K of memory. /me didn't realise the use of decimal rather than binary capacity multipliers in marketing claims was so old.
Come on, buying a tech item in a 3rd-world country [...]
Even when that country is responsible for something like 50% of the world's production of tech items? China may be a rule unto itself, but it's hard to describe it as 3rd world.