Of course, if SCO was stupid enough to send anyone a "bill" for Linux licensing, and was further stupid enough to do it through the mail, then they'd be subject to US laws regarding mail fraud.
If you simply pay them money for "indemnification" without having been billed for it there's all of jack you can do. You gave them money. Did you have to? No. So why the hell did you?
If they send you a receipt for having paid for the "protection" then you might have a case, but I doubt it. IANAL. If you really want an answer, pay the money to SCO and then go get legal consul. Or do so beforehand, although you'll pay far more than $700 for legal consultation and research.
Has anyone considered short selling SCO shares by using options?
It doesn't look like the options are being sold on the major markets -- a few quick checks of public stock data show no options available for SCOX. Not surprising - it's a very low volume stock with very few shares outstanding.
That said, unless you can get some very long term options, I certainly wouldn't buy them. Until the case goes to trial (2005) the stock is going to vary wildly based on market perception. Presuming the trial goes as expected it would mean the stock would drop and your options are worth something.
Options are a very dangerous way to play the market -- you pay money for them and if the stock doesn't become worth more or less than the option price (depending on the kind of option you buy) then you lose all your money. You don't even have the stock to show for it -- which could at least revalue at some point.
Unless you're very market savvy, I'd recommend staying away from options.
Although you were trying to be funny, this is exactly what they're saying.
SCO believe that Linux is, somehow, derived from their Unix IP. That would make it a "derivative work" and render the GPL invalid for covering the relevant parts.
Excepting, of course, that they've previously accepted the GPL, contributed code to Linux (as Caldera), and done other things to severely undermine their case. Not to mention that Linux is certainly not a derivative work in it's entirety -- if it was then they'd be talking smack about kernels other than just 2.4 -- and even if they are correct about derivative code being in Linux, that doesn't give them license to all the other non-derivative work done by people. Including by IBM.
n other news, bicycles around the world have been voluntarily recalled. It seems that if the rider stops moving their feet, the bike could potentially tip over.
There's a difference between a gradual decline and a sudden one. If you're bicycling at a reasonable speed and stop pedaling then you're not going to suddenly fall over -- inertia and balance will keep that from happening. Anyone who's bicycled for more than an hour or two knows this, and can tell when they're going to fall well before it occurs (barring loss of traction or obstacles...), and you're unlikely to have a "minor flaying of the skin" unless the frame is too big or you fall onto something painful (and yes, I have the scar to prove that the combination of those is bad).
In the case of the Segway, however, you've given balance over to the machine (which is good since it'd be pretty damn difficult for you to balance it yourself -- some people could, most could not, and the acceleration/deceleration method would have to be changed completely). So when it experiences a power failure there is no gradual degredation of service -- your ass is thrown off instantly. Better yet, the faster you're moving the quicker the Segway is going to lose balance. And if you were going 20 mph prior to this you're likely to experience quite a bit more than a "minor flaying" at that speed.
Actually, with power steering/braking, when the gas runs out and the motor dies, the car becomes considerably harder to control.
There's a huge difference between "harder" and "impossible". Plus cars do have manual backup for at least one of the systems -- even if every piece of electronics in your car dies you can always use the emergency brake (although I shudder to think what would happen if most people -- myself included -- tried to use the emergency brake as an actual emergency brake instead of just an added precaution against rolling while the car is off).
I suppose the equivalent of the emergency brake in the Segway is getting off -- but that may be rather dangerous at 20-25 mph or while turning. In fact, that's what caused the recall in the first place.
And, as another poster points out, low battery wasn't the only cause of failure.
The concept behind these beings [the Tines] is fascinating to me, and I would like to read more stories involving them.
If so, then try and get a copy of The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (or Threats and Other Promises, which is out of print and incredibly hard to find -- I lost my copy:( ). He wrote a short story that predates (IIRC) Fire Upon the Deep that involves the creatures. It is, as to be expected, somewhat more primative, but still a good short story.
My favorite Vinge short is Original Sin, which I find hard to describe without giving away too much. It is, fortunately, in the anthology listed above.
I'd also recommend The Peace War (which is also available as Across Realtime combined with Marooned in Realtime). This was the first thing I'd read by Vinge and I still find it an interesting book. I prefer TPW over MiR -- the latter is more of a detective story than anything else.
More accurately, this is called "judicial activism". Also known as, "when the judge substitutes his or her idea of what the law ought to do for what the text of the law really does."
Oh please. This is not at all what I'm advocating.
Congress passed a bill (twice now) authorizing the creation of a DNC list, funding it, yadda, yadda, yadda. The FTC went forth and implemented the law. Then Judge West ruled that the FTC overstepped its bounds, despite the fact that this is clearly an interstate trade issue. That's bullshit and that's a judge attempting to implement judicial activism.
I am not for judicial activism either (although I am for jury nullification, although that is also a path fraught with issues), but there must be some degree of interpretation of the law that occurs by the judge. Otherwise how do you define things like pornography? You can't. It's outright impossible. The world is not a black and white place, and the law cannot be so either. If it is, then we will be living either in an anarchy or a fascist state. Take your pick. I'd rather live in one where we assume that some degree of leeway is available for interpretation. As usual, the key is figuring out the right balance.
No. Congress authorized the creation of the list, mandated funding for it (which is largely coming from the telemarketers themselves), and set forth the terms for implementing it and what not.
There may have been an oversight in that they didn't explicitly word it so that the FTC was authorized to implement the list, but if so then it was pretty clearly that -- an oversight. The judge, upon hearing the various arguments for and against, as well as seeing the 51 MILLION signups for the list in a mere four months should've authorized the FTC to do it. Yes, the judiciary can do that and has in the past. It's called following the spirit of the law instead of the letter.
The judge, frankly, was stupid. He deserves the derision placed upon him. While he cannot be removed or replaced as a federal district judge, it's pretty damn certain that he's not going any further at this point. Of course, his position is nothing to sneeze at either, but it worries me to have such a strict justice in that position. Being a justice, particularly a high ranking one, means that you must be able to interpret the meaning behind the law; otherwise we could just do ruling by computers (and watch society fall apart as the legal system becomes so strict it's impossible to actually do anything).
Without the constraints of the old interface standards, chipset manufacturers can eliminate a lot of circuitry, and corresponding hardware interrupts
Not anytime soon. They can eliminate some traces on the motherboard since they don't need to connect certain pins on the south bridge to an interface, but that's all of 60 lines, all of which are very low speed and a complete non-issue for interference issues. They can't eliminate anything else because it's all bundled into the south bridge now. You'd have to get a chipmaker to produce a south bridge that lacks the circuitry, which is so absurdly minimal that it's not even worth doing -- just producing two different versions of the chip would eliminate any cost savings.
ISA was quite different as these things went. The bus interface was godawful, and resource sharing was dirt poor.
And besides, when's the last time you ran into IRQ, DMA, or even address conflicts on a modern PC?
hey just don't come with serial anymore, which makes remote maintenance of headless machines something you'll only be doing with your trusty legacy notebook...
Or with a USB->serial dongle, which are pretty much universal now and bug free.
If you're trying to do magic with the serial port (e.g. - trying to raise specific lines in order to talk to some esoteric device -- been there, done that) then it may not work, but if you're using standard interfaces then they work just fine. Really. They've improved the hardware and drivers since they first appeared and a lot of the issues with the first generation stuff is gone now.
It's a bunch of hardware that very few use, and slashing costs and razor-thin margins dictate that un-needed components will eventually be eliminated.
Eventually, but I'd be surprised if that was widespread in less than 5 years. Quite a few people use the hardware, actually. There's a freaking ton of keyboards and mice out there that use PS/2 ports, legions of switches and UPS's that rely on serial, and a few bazillion printers that use the parallel port. Hell, there are still printers available that only do parallel.
The Abit MAX series hasn't been the runaway favorite that Abit was hoping for. In fact, much of the community it targets - the high end case modders/gamers/geeks shun it because of the lack of older interfaces. After all, it costs nothing extra to get a different board that has just as many IDE controllers, USB ports, firewire, etc. and still has the legacy stuff on board. So why castrate yourself?
The BTX form factor still shows the legacy connectors present in the sample motherboard, and so they're likely to continue for at least one more generation of MBs/cases. I'd bet they'll be in the successor as well.
Maybe an online petition to bring back the RS-232 is in order:)
I know this was tongue in cheek, but please... RS-232 hasn't disappeared in any way, shape, or form. Virtually every PC motherboard out there still has at least one (and usually two) serial ports. About the only ones that don't are the Abit MAX series (which has removed all legacy ports), this one, and some miniITX form factor boards.
If you need a real serial port, then just avoid buying one of the 1% of boards that doesn't have one.
Every time a story is posted to/. about a board that doesn't have serial the RS-232 freaks crawl out of the woodwork. If you're smart enough to know all the uses for RS-232, then you should damn well be smart enough to buy the right board.
Oh, and I like serial too... my remote control is programmed via it (although it works fine w/ a USB->serial dongle if needed).
How on earth does the government come up with a list of _78,000_ suspected terrorists?
Oh please. It's not bloody hard. That's such a small fraction of the world population it's absurd. I'm honestly rather surprised that the list isn't larger -- certainly if the list was formed as you suggest (everyone who ever talked to anyone who ever talked to someone who might be a terrorist) it would be a hell of a lot bigger. You could probably just toss in everyone from Ireland, the Middle East, and the various ex-Soviet states in there with that kind of criteria. Get real.
A list that small would have been culled from sources almost exclusively -- both domestic and foreign intelligence services sharing information on known or highly suspected terrorists. Are there people on the list who shouldn't be? Almost certainly. Am I pleased with the various new powers granted to law enforcement agencies in the terrorist witch hunt? Not particularly. But I'm also not going to put my head in the sand and claim that it's a non-issue.
If the US government actually cared about human lives, it would be spending this type of attention on automobile safety (50k dead a year in US) or malaria (>1 million dead a year worldwide) or cancer (half a million dead in US per year).
Yes, because the US government isn't spending billions on those already. Riiiight. What crap.
How much have you donated to those causes in the last five years by the way?
Compare this to "terrorism" which has claimed maybe 5000 lives in the past 30 years.
I presume you're attempting to restrict that number to number of dead Americans, which utterly ignores the larger issue. We're in a global economy that must deal with global issues. No, I don't think the way the US is currently trying to deal with terrorism is the right way, but the death toll is certainly higher than 5000. If you include non-American lives (which I certainly would), then the death toll is probably something on the order of 5000 in the last 6 weeks, or less. And the damage to economies is considerably higher when you consider the chilling effects that come from it (both from people being afraid and from government overreaction and clamping down on people and free trade in the process -- NPR had a decent story on how Palestinian companies are going out of business in the West Bank due to Israeli restrictions). Terrorism is hardly limited to the Middle East either. Virtually every country has its extremist groups (White power in the US; IRA in Ireland; Basque separatists in Spain; etc) and it's getting worse, not better.
Instead we spend more on a "war on terror" in a year than has been spent in the entire history of cancer research.
I think you're vastly underestimating how much has been spent on cancer research, particularly in the past. Not that I wouldn't mind seeing more spent on it -- my father died of cancer and my mother had breast cancer -- but that statement is just wrong. Is the US spending too much on the "war on terror"? I'd agree. But making BS statements like you've done repeatedly does nothing but weaken your argument.
If you want to get a universal remote that actually works you'll have to spend some money, and some time, getting the right one.
I'd highly recommend the HTM MX-500/600/700/800 line ($100-400) - I replaced my Pronto with a MX-700 and it's wonderful. If you want a touch screen remote, then the answer is the Phillips Pronto line ($100-1600), but there's some pretty severe drawbacks to touchscreen remotes IMO.
I'd go into it more, but instead go read Remote Central, which has reviews on all of the major remotes, decent forums, and a good files section.
Re:are all the reviews by idiots?
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Athlon 64 Debuts
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· Score: 4, Informative
I don't want to bother going over the implications here...those that know them, do...
Fortunately, you're not one of those.
64-bit computing is not a clear win in and of iteself. If you're merely doing 32-bit calculations then odds are a true 64-bit CPU will be slower, because to do the same work you have to move twice as much data to do it -- you have to fetch a 64-bit operation instead of a 32-bit one, and ditto for data. Presuming that the actual operation takes the exact same amount of time per bit then your 64-bit CPU would be half the speed of the 32-bit CPU because it has to do twice as much work for the exact same result.
Of course, that's the simplistic case and ignores the actual case at hand. AMD's x86-64 is not a pure 64-bit CPU because it doesn't need to be. The x86 ISA is ungodly ugly (which is why nobody implements it anymore -- it may look like x86 ISA on the surface, but there isn't a modern CPU that actually implements the x86 ISA in the CPU core) and x86-64 operators are only ~10-15% longer than traditional x86 operators on average. So your operator length didn't double, and you don't need to double your instruction or combined cache just to maintain parity with old CPUs. Additionally, the current x86-64 spec only implements 48-bit addressing, which should be more than adequate for about a decade or so, so address fetches only increase in size by 50%, not 100%. Still an increase, but one that's fairly acceptable and it's a vast improvement for anytime you have to address anything >4GB in size (which is increasinly common, particularly for databases). On top of that, x86-64 adds 4 general purpose registers, which doubles or more the numper of GPRs available (the "or more" bit depends on the operation you're performing, since some of the GPR's in x86 aren't entirely GP). Yes, all modern systems have register renaming. Doesn't help much when you still only have a handful of registers available to a single process and it has to deal with only those -- the assembly code cannot know about the virtual registers, otherwise they wouldn't be virtual!
As far as the data goes, you don't have to perform 64-bit operations on all the data, nor does all of the data have to be 64-bits wide. Clearly how much impact this has will vary from program to program, but unless you're doing a bunch of operations on long long's (64-bit integers) then you probably won't see much performance difference in raw computing speed. In fact, because of the slightly larger operator size and the increased address size you're more likely to see a performance decrease, albeit a slight one.
Intel's chip is the better choice for the user who wants performance in apps that actually exist today.
Based on what?
The Athlon64 outperforms the P4 in virtually every benchmark, often by a hefty margin.
Ignore the results from the P4EE chip -- you said you wanted something that actually exists today. The P4EE will not be available until sometime in November.
On top of that the AMD Athlon64 3200+ costs ~$465, while the P4 3.2 costs ~$620. So you get slightly more power for considerably less cash. The motherboards appear to be roughly the same price for a Socket 754 board and a 865PE-based board (or you can drop more money for a 875-based board and get virtually no performance improvement -- your choice).
All of that said, if you want to buy the best x86 chip right now and money's no object -- buy Intel. Not because it's faster (it isn't), but because it's probably going to be more stable. We're talking about a 1st generation CPU on 1st generation motherboards. Not a great prescription for stability there. If money is an issue, but you still have to have the fastest thing out there, then buy an AthlonXP -- the 3200+ is about the same price as the Athlon64, but the MB's are cheaper and more stable (just as stable as P4 chips/mobo's).
If you want to be a realist and get the best bang for your buck then stop looking at the fastest chips available and start looking at the best price point -- a P42.6C or AthlonXP 2800+.
Re:Implementation or spec?
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Athlon 64 Debuts
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you implement x86 with PAE then you get 8gb.
You also get horrible performance and require different compile flags for the application.
Compile something for x86-64 and you get 48-bit addressing out of the box with no performance hits and no special flags.
Re:Indeed a fast one up on AMD
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Athlon 64 Debuts
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Though I am a die hard AMD supporter, i have to admit Intel has really pulled one up on AMD this time. The 64bit 3200+ is just about 15-20% faster than the stock and barrel Intel 32bit 3.2 GHz. Bad news for AMD this is, considering the retail price of these babies is 450 & 800$ (Normal and FX).
Yeah. I can't believe that you can get a brand new CPU that's 15-20% faster than the previous champion for only 25% less! Oh, and that's in 32-bit mode. If 64-bit computing takes hold then Intel is SOL at the moment - despite the rumors flying around about Prescott and 64-bit instructions.
Yeah, the Athlon64 3200+ is $465 (note, look at the retail price w/ heatsink to be fair), but the P4 3.2GHz is $619.
The Athlon64 FX-51 is certainly overpriced, given how miniscule the performance differences are, but that's hardly a surprise.
What Intel did pull wasn't a price/performance coup (because it isn't, by any means) but a paper launch debacle. Every single review I've seen thus far includes benchmarks for the P4 3.2EE -- which isn't available until November, and at prices similar to the Ath64-FX (based on preliminary 1000 CPU lot prices). The P4EE is competitive with the Ath64, but it's a smokescreen. You can buy an Athlon64 right now, but the P4EE is non-existant.
And BTW windows released XP 64bit Beta1 today.
Unfortunately it appears that there's a severe lack in available drivers. All the sites are having to use nVidia 5900FX's and even then can't bench any DX9 apps in Win64 due to no 64-bit DX9 being available.
Gotta ask, though, why not just develop the games in Java?
Because it's too damn slow, too damn buggy, and is lacking vital features for an OO language like destructors (finalize is completely inadequate, since it's not called until GC occurs -- and GC timeliness is not specified in the Java spec).
Yeah, I can see a cutting edge game like HL2 or D3 being written in Java. Fastest system available would get all of 10 fps.
On the other hand, I completely agree with you for the reasons why the submittor's question is impractical.
This prompts the thought that the GPUs are just monstrously powerful, far far faster than general-purpose CPUs.
Well of course they are! The leading edge GPU's have been faster than the CPUs of the day dating back to at least the GeForce, if not further. The issue, of course, is that the GPU is not general purpose and it'd do a miserable job in trying to be one. If you could code a distributed.net project to run on the highly limited GPU instruction set then, yeah, you'd jack up your processing speed, but I suspect you'd discover that the GPU is missing the capabilities you need or (more likely) that the data sets are not orthagonal. GPUs like messing with data in terms of pixels and polygons -- trying to transform the dataset for an amino acid into something the GPU could utilize might consume more CPU time than you'd gain from the GPU speed increase.
But it'd be one hell of an interesting challenge, regardless:)
Getting back to AGP/PCI/PCI-Express -- I doubt that PCI-Express will be a revelation in texturing, much for the same reasons that AGP failed. Yeah, the bandwidth is a lot bigger but by the same means the textures are growing and the computation speed of the GPUs are also growing. AGP wasn't too awful for main memory texturing if you only had to deal with 4-8MB of textures (it wasn't ideal, but you could certainly get a good framerate out of glQuake); but by the time it started getting used for that games needed 32-64MB and the latencies involved were too high. By the time PCI-Express gets utilized for main memory texturing we'll be up to 256-512MB for textures and you'll have much the same issues. The graphics card industry is now the main pusher behind new RAM standards and is adopting them before they're even finalized. Not to say that the CPU industry couldn't use the bandwidth boost too, but it's a much more dire situation on the graphics front.
The real push toward PCI-Express will come not out of need for features, but out of cost cutting -- I'd bet that PCI-Express is less expensive to implement than AGP, at least on a hardware basis. Initial costs will certainly be higher due to testing on a new and unfamiliar interface, but if you cut manufacturing costs by even $.05/card you'll pay yourself back before long. That and you ensure that people won't just migrate their graphics card when they buy a new motherboard.
Good summary -- I did forget about the 2D graphics issue. The issue was also solved by the advent of 2D graphics acceleration, which was revolutionary (for PCs, not for high end workstations) at the time and seriously offloaded the bus. The OS no longer had to tell the video card to draw individual pixels but could instead tell it to draw a line with particular endpoints or other geometrical features. Accelerated BitBLT's also vastly reduced bandwidth requirements.
Of course, this doesn't solve everything, as you point out. If you need raw frame buffer access (for, oh say, demos like you suggest) then you need bandwidth. And certainly AGP or PCI-Express has enough for pretty much anything we can throw at it in the near future.
But that's pretty much the only reason it would be very interesting, at the moment; in a mostly-3d world, graphics are fine on the regular old PCI bus.
Initial texture loading is godawful slow on the standard PCI bus. Of course, that's mostly a non-issue since the bus is still vastly faster than the HD or CD that you're loading the texture off of, but if you need to swap textures mid-level then any reduction in load time is significant. As another poster pointed out, PCI-Express may allow for faster reads from video memory (IIRC, AGP does, but only at PCI speeds -- which are inadequate as you point out. In reality they're even slower because the drivers aren't optimized for it) which will be beneficial to anyone doing rendering. I can already forsee games like HL2 or Doom3 being used for inexpensive machenima (sp?) or SFX work -- and the specialized packages should be able to exceed what they can do.
The case itself is aluminum for efficient transfer of heat
Except that it's been proven that aluminum vs steel case makes absolutely no difference as far as heat transfer is concerned. There's no thermal coupling between the case and the hot components.
multiple low speed fans
Which good PC cases have had for 5+ years.
All bits of the case are easy to access and they are absolutely quiet.
Again, in the PC world for 5+ years. It's not my fault you bought crappy cases all the time.
Looking at the BTX cases, I see nothing impressive when it comes to cooling or quiet other than perhaps the cool circular heat sink.
Again - you've apparantly been doomed by crappy cases (most large computer companies like Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. have amazingly shitty case designs). The BTX is a considerable advance -- it moves the CPU out from between two very hot components (the video card and the PS) and towards the front of the case where a fan blows directly on it. That same fan also blows over the primary chipset and can do supplementary cooling on the video card.
The rest of the specs are fairly minor -- although the picoBTX form factor having two height specs is an interesting twist.
Apple certainly does make good cases, and they but a lot of ergonomic thinking into them. They're well ahead of the huge PC vendors in this regard. But they're certainly no better than some of the reasonably priced cases you can buy if you're building your own PC.
I think I can safely assume that PCI Express has a bandwith that is much faster than that of AGP can ever have
The AGP 8x spec has a max bandwidth of 2.1GB/s, while PCI Express x16 has a bandwidth of 8 GB/s. It might be theoretically possible to create a AGP 32x spec (although I doubt it), but the obvious question would be why?
. But isn't the point of AGP that it allows you to set an arperture and use some of the system RAM as an extension of the memory on the graphics card?
No, the point of AGP was to give a single slot increased bandwidth that's needed for modern graphics cards. PCI just isn't fast enough. Intel wrote into the spec that you could get away with sharing main memory as video memory in order to reduce system costs, but in practice nobody does this except for the absolute bottom tier PCs. The performance hit is huge.
wont AGP still be better?
No. Although it's questionable that PCI-X will really provide any speed increases. AGP 8x has a negligible speed improvement over AGP 2x, and quadrupling the bandwidth again isn't likely to do much either. I'm pretty sure PCI-X can still do the main memory-as-video memory trick, but there's really no need or desire to do so. If your card doesn't have enough memory to hold the textures then you're going to have a massive speed hit when you need to get them from memory. In practice this speed hit is so severe that the amount of bandwidth has relatively little impact on things -- it's the latency that kills.
They said several times that some of the games on the list were fun, but still overhyped. I do disagree with their ordering though -- B&W was nowhere near as overhyped as Daikatana. And, as you say, B&W at least managed to deliver on some of its promises while Daikatana delivered pretty much nothing but a waste of HD and CD space.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you can. If they billed you.
Of course, if SCO was stupid enough to send anyone a "bill" for Linux licensing, and was further stupid enough to do it through the mail, then they'd be subject to US laws regarding mail fraud.
If you simply pay them money for "indemnification" without having been billed for it there's all of jack you can do. You gave them money. Did you have to? No. So why the hell did you?
If they send you a receipt for having paid for the "protection" then you might have a case, but I doubt it. IANAL. If you really want an answer, pay the money to SCO and then go get legal consul. Or do so beforehand, although you'll pay far more than $700 for legal consultation and research.
Has anyone considered short selling SCO shares by using options?
It doesn't look like the options are being sold on the major markets -- a few quick checks of public stock data show no options available for SCOX. Not surprising - it's a very low volume stock with very few shares outstanding.
That said, unless you can get some very long term options, I certainly wouldn't buy them. Until the case goes to trial (2005) the stock is going to vary wildly based on market perception. Presuming the trial goes as expected it would mean the stock would drop and your options are worth something.
Options are a very dangerous way to play the market -- you pay money for them and if the stock doesn't become worth more or less than the option price (depending on the kind of option you buy) then you lose all your money. You don't even have the stock to show for it -- which could at least revalue at some point.
Unless you're very market savvy, I'd recommend staying away from options.
All your Linux are belong to us..." etc...
Although you were trying to be funny, this is exactly what they're saying.
SCO believe that Linux is, somehow, derived from their Unix IP. That would make it a "derivative work" and render the GPL invalid for covering the relevant parts.
Excepting, of course, that they've previously accepted the GPL, contributed code to Linux (as Caldera), and done other things to severely undermine their case. Not to mention that Linux is certainly not a derivative work in it's entirety -- if it was then they'd be talking smack about kernels other than just 2.4 -- and even if they are correct about derivative code being in Linux, that doesn't give them license to all the other non-derivative work done by people. Including by IBM.
n other news, bicycles around the world have been voluntarily recalled. It seems that if the rider stops moving their feet, the bike could potentially tip over.
There's a difference between a gradual decline and a sudden one. If you're bicycling at a reasonable speed and stop pedaling then you're not going to suddenly fall over -- inertia and balance will keep that from happening. Anyone who's bicycled for more than an hour or two knows this, and can tell when they're going to fall well before it occurs (barring loss of traction or obstacles...), and you're unlikely to have a "minor flaying of the skin" unless the frame is too big or you fall onto something painful (and yes, I have the scar to prove that the combination of those is bad).
In the case of the Segway, however, you've given balance over to the machine (which is good since it'd be pretty damn difficult for you to balance it yourself -- some people could, most could not, and the acceleration/deceleration method would have to be changed completely). So when it experiences a power failure there is no gradual degredation of service -- your ass is thrown off instantly. Better yet, the faster you're moving the quicker the Segway is going to lose balance. And if you were going 20 mph prior to this you're likely to experience quite a bit more than a "minor flaying" at that speed.
Actually, with power steering/braking, when the gas runs out and the motor dies, the car becomes considerably harder to control.
There's a huge difference between "harder" and "impossible". Plus cars do have manual backup for at least one of the systems -- even if every piece of electronics in your car dies you can always use the emergency brake (although I shudder to think what would happen if most people -- myself included -- tried to use the emergency brake as an actual emergency brake instead of just an added precaution against rolling while the car is off).
I suppose the equivalent of the emergency brake in the Segway is getting off -- but that may be rather dangerous at 20-25 mph or while turning. In fact, that's what caused the recall in the first place.
And, as another poster points out, low battery wasn't the only cause of failure.
The concept behind these beings [the Tines] is fascinating to me, and I would like to read more stories involving them.
:( ). He wrote a short story that predates (IIRC) Fire Upon the Deep that involves the creatures. It is, as to be expected, somewhat more primative, but still a good short story.
If so, then try and get a copy of The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (or Threats and Other Promises, which is out of print and incredibly hard to find -- I lost my copy
My favorite Vinge short is Original Sin, which I find hard to describe without giving away too much. It is, fortunately, in the anthology listed above.
I'd also recommend The Peace War (which is also available as Across Realtime combined with Marooned in Realtime). This was the first thing I'd read by Vinge and I still find it an interesting book. I prefer TPW over MiR -- the latter is more of a detective story than anything else.
More accurately, this is called "judicial activism". Also known as, "when the judge substitutes his or her idea of what the law ought to do for what the text of the law really does."
Oh please. This is not at all what I'm advocating.
Congress passed a bill (twice now) authorizing the creation of a DNC list, funding it, yadda, yadda, yadda. The FTC went forth and implemented the law. Then Judge West ruled that the FTC overstepped its bounds, despite the fact that this is clearly an interstate trade issue. That's bullshit and that's a judge attempting to implement judicial activism.
I am not for judicial activism either (although I am for jury nullification, although that is also a path fraught with issues), but there must be some degree of interpretation of the law that occurs by the judge. Otherwise how do you define things like pornography? You can't. It's outright impossible. The world is not a black and white place, and the law cannot be so either. If it is, then we will be living either in an anarchy or a fascist state. Take your pick. I'd rather live in one where we assume that some degree of leeway is available for interpretation. As usual, the key is figuring out the right balance.
No. Congress authorized the creation of the list, mandated funding for it (which is largely coming from the telemarketers themselves), and set forth the terms for implementing it and what not.
There may have been an oversight in that they didn't explicitly word it so that the FTC was authorized to implement the list, but if so then it was pretty clearly that -- an oversight. The judge, upon hearing the various arguments for and against, as well as seeing the 51 MILLION signups for the list in a mere four months should've authorized the FTC to do it. Yes, the judiciary can do that and has in the past. It's called following the spirit of the law instead of the letter.
The judge, frankly, was stupid. He deserves the derision placed upon him. While he cannot be removed or replaced as a federal district judge, it's pretty damn certain that he's not going any further at this point. Of course, his position is nothing to sneeze at either, but it worries me to have such a strict justice in that position. Being a justice, particularly a high ranking one, means that you must be able to interpret the meaning behind the law; otherwise we could just do ruling by computers (and watch society fall apart as the legal system becomes so strict it's impossible to actually do anything).
And 51 million people in the US have decided to do so.
Without the constraints of the old interface standards, chipset manufacturers can eliminate a lot of circuitry, and corresponding hardware interrupts
Not anytime soon. They can eliminate some traces on the motherboard since they don't need to connect certain pins on the south bridge to an interface, but that's all of 60 lines, all of which are very low speed and a complete non-issue for interference issues. They can't eliminate anything else because it's all bundled into the south bridge now. You'd have to get a chipmaker to produce a south bridge that lacks the circuitry, which is so absurdly minimal that it's not even worth doing -- just producing two different versions of the chip would eliminate any cost savings.
ISA was quite different as these things went. The bus interface was godawful, and resource sharing was dirt poor.
And besides, when's the last time you ran into IRQ, DMA, or even address conflicts on a modern PC?
hey just don't come with serial anymore, which makes remote maintenance of headless machines something you'll only be doing with your trusty legacy notebook...
Or with a USB->serial dongle, which are pretty much universal now and bug free.
If you're trying to do magic with the serial port (e.g. - trying to raise specific lines in order to talk to some esoteric device -- been there, done that) then it may not work, but if you're using standard interfaces then they work just fine. Really. They've improved the hardware and drivers since they first appeared and a lot of the issues with the first generation stuff is gone now.
It's a bunch of hardware that very few use, and slashing costs and razor-thin margins dictate that un-needed components will eventually be eliminated.
Eventually, but I'd be surprised if that was widespread in less than 5 years. Quite a few people use the hardware, actually. There's a freaking ton of keyboards and mice out there that use PS/2 ports, legions of switches and UPS's that rely on serial, and a few bazillion printers that use the parallel port. Hell, there are still printers available that only do parallel.
The Abit MAX series hasn't been the runaway favorite that Abit was hoping for. In fact, much of the community it targets - the high end case modders/gamers/geeks shun it because of the lack of older interfaces. After all, it costs nothing extra to get a different board that has just as many IDE controllers, USB ports, firewire, etc. and still has the legacy stuff on board. So why castrate yourself?
The BTX form factor still shows the legacy connectors present in the sample motherboard, and so they're likely to continue for at least one more generation of MBs/cases. I'd bet they'll be in the successor as well.
Maybe an online petition to bring back the RS-232 is in order :)
/. about a board that doesn't have serial the RS-232 freaks crawl out of the woodwork. If you're smart enough to know all the uses for RS-232, then you should damn well be smart enough to buy the right board.
I know this was tongue in cheek, but please... RS-232 hasn't disappeared in any way, shape, or form. Virtually every PC motherboard out there still has at least one (and usually two) serial ports. About the only ones that don't are the Abit MAX series (which has removed all legacy ports), this one, and some miniITX form factor boards.
If you need a real serial port, then just avoid buying one of the 1% of boards that doesn't have one.
Every time a story is posted to
Oh, and I like serial too... my remote control is programmed via it (although it works fine w/ a USB->serial dongle if needed).
How on earth does the government come up with a list of _78,000_ suspected terrorists?
Oh please. It's not bloody hard. That's such a small fraction of the world population it's absurd. I'm honestly rather surprised that the list isn't larger -- certainly if the list was formed as you suggest (everyone who ever talked to anyone who ever talked to someone who might be a terrorist) it would be a hell of a lot bigger. You could probably just toss in everyone from Ireland, the Middle East, and the various ex-Soviet states in there with that kind of criteria. Get real.
A list that small would have been culled from sources almost exclusively -- both domestic and foreign intelligence services sharing information on known or highly suspected terrorists. Are there people on the list who shouldn't be? Almost certainly. Am I pleased with the various new powers granted to law enforcement agencies in the terrorist witch hunt? Not particularly. But I'm also not going to put my head in the sand and claim that it's a non-issue.
If the US government actually cared about human lives, it would be spending this type of attention on automobile safety (50k dead a year in US) or malaria (>1 million dead a year worldwide) or cancer (half a million dead in US per year).
Yes, because the US government isn't spending billions on those already. Riiiight. What crap.
How much have you donated to those causes in the last five years by the way?
Compare this to "terrorism" which has claimed maybe 5000 lives in the past 30 years.
I presume you're attempting to restrict that number to number of dead Americans, which utterly ignores the larger issue. We're in a global economy that must deal with global issues. No, I don't think the way the US is currently trying to deal with terrorism is the right way, but the death toll is certainly higher than 5000. If you include non-American lives (which I certainly would), then the death toll is probably something on the order of 5000 in the last 6 weeks, or less. And the damage to economies is considerably higher when you consider the chilling effects that come from it (both from people being afraid and from government overreaction and clamping down on people and free trade in the process -- NPR had a decent story on how Palestinian companies are going out of business in the West Bank due to Israeli restrictions). Terrorism is hardly limited to the Middle East either. Virtually every country has its extremist groups (White power in the US; IRA in Ireland; Basque separatists in Spain; etc) and it's getting worse, not better.
Instead we spend more on a "war on terror" in a year than has been spent in the entire history of cancer research.
I think you're vastly underestimating how much has been spent on cancer research, particularly in the past. Not that I wouldn't mind seeing more spent on it -- my father died of cancer and my mother had breast cancer -- but that statement is just wrong. Is the US spending too much on the "war on terror"? I'd agree. But making BS statements like you've done repeatedly does nothing but weaken your argument.
How long ago was "a few weeks"? Reznor has since bailed out from Doom3 in order to work on his own stuff. See this story.
If you want to get a universal remote that actually works you'll have to spend some money, and some time, getting the right one.
I'd highly recommend the HTM MX-500/600/700/800 line ($100-400) - I replaced my Pronto with a MX-700 and it's wonderful. If you want a touch screen remote, then the answer is the Phillips Pronto line ($100-1600), but there's some pretty severe drawbacks to touchscreen remotes IMO.
I'd go into it more, but instead go read Remote Central, which has reviews on all of the major remotes, decent forums, and a good files section.
I don't want to bother going over the implications here...those that know them, do...
Fortunately, you're not one of those.
64-bit computing is not a clear win in and of iteself. If you're merely doing 32-bit calculations then odds are a true 64-bit CPU will be slower, because to do the same work you have to move twice as much data to do it -- you have to fetch a 64-bit operation instead of a 32-bit one, and ditto for data. Presuming that the actual operation takes the exact same amount of time per bit then your 64-bit CPU would be half the speed of the 32-bit CPU because it has to do twice as much work for the exact same result.
Of course, that's the simplistic case and ignores the actual case at hand. AMD's x86-64 is not a pure 64-bit CPU because it doesn't need to be. The x86 ISA is ungodly ugly (which is why nobody implements it anymore -- it may look like x86 ISA on the surface, but there isn't a modern CPU that actually implements the x86 ISA in the CPU core) and x86-64 operators are only ~10-15% longer than traditional x86 operators on average. So your operator length didn't double, and you don't need to double your instruction or combined cache just to maintain parity with old CPUs. Additionally, the current x86-64 spec only implements 48-bit addressing, which should be more than adequate for about a decade or so, so address fetches only increase in size by 50%, not 100%. Still an increase, but one that's fairly acceptable and it's a vast improvement for anytime you have to address anything >4GB in size (which is increasinly common, particularly for databases). On top of that, x86-64 adds 4 general purpose registers, which doubles or more the numper of GPRs available (the "or more" bit depends on the operation you're performing, since some of the GPR's in x86 aren't entirely GP). Yes, all modern systems have register renaming. Doesn't help much when you still only have a handful of registers available to a single process and it has to deal with only those -- the assembly code cannot know about the virtual registers, otherwise they wouldn't be virtual!
As far as the data goes, you don't have to perform 64-bit operations on all the data, nor does all of the data have to be 64-bits wide. Clearly how much impact this has will vary from program to program, but unless you're doing a bunch of operations on long long's (64-bit integers) then you probably won't see much performance difference in raw computing speed. In fact, because of the slightly larger operator size and the increased address size you're more likely to see a performance decrease, albeit a slight one.
Intel's chip is the better choice for the user who wants performance in apps that actually exist today.
Based on what?
The Athlon64 outperforms the P4 in virtually every benchmark, often by a hefty margin.
Ignore the results from the P4EE chip -- you said you wanted something that actually exists today. The P4EE will not be available until sometime in November.
On top of that the AMD Athlon64 3200+ costs ~$465, while the P4 3.2 costs ~$620. So you get slightly more power for considerably less cash. The motherboards appear to be roughly the same price for a Socket 754 board and a 865PE-based board (or you can drop more money for a 875-based board and get virtually no performance improvement -- your choice).
All of that said, if you want to buy the best x86 chip right now and money's no object -- buy Intel. Not because it's faster (it isn't), but because it's probably going to be more stable. We're talking about a 1st generation CPU on 1st generation motherboards. Not a great prescription for stability there. If money is an issue, but you still have to have the fastest thing out there, then buy an AthlonXP -- the 3200+ is about the same price as the Athlon64, but the MB's are cheaper and more stable (just as stable as P4 chips/mobo's).
If you want to be a realist and get the best bang for your buck then stop looking at the fastest chips available and start looking at the best price point -- a P42.6C or AthlonXP 2800+.
If you implement x86 with PAE then you get 8gb.
You also get horrible performance and require different compile flags for the application.
Compile something for x86-64 and you get 48-bit addressing out of the box with no performance hits and no special flags.
Though I am a die hard AMD supporter, i have to admit Intel has really pulled one up on AMD this time. The 64bit 3200+ is just about 15-20% faster than the stock and barrel Intel 32bit 3.2 GHz. Bad news for AMD this is, considering the retail price of these babies is 450 & 800$ (Normal and FX).
Yeah. I can't believe that you can get a brand new CPU that's 15-20% faster than the previous champion for only 25% less! Oh, and that's in 32-bit mode. If 64-bit computing takes hold then Intel is SOL at the moment - despite the rumors flying around about Prescott and 64-bit instructions.
Yeah, the Athlon64 3200+ is $465 (note, look at the retail price w/ heatsink to be fair), but the P4 3.2GHz is $619.
The Athlon64 FX-51 is certainly overpriced, given how miniscule the performance differences are, but that's hardly a surprise.
What Intel did pull wasn't a price/performance coup (because it isn't, by any means) but a paper launch debacle. Every single review I've seen thus far includes benchmarks for the P4 3.2EE -- which isn't available until November, and at prices similar to the Ath64-FX (based on preliminary 1000 CPU lot prices). The P4EE is competitive with the Ath64, but it's a smokescreen. You can buy an Athlon64 right now, but the P4EE is non-existant.
And BTW windows released XP 64bit Beta1 today.
Unfortunately it appears that there's a severe lack in available drivers. All the sites are having to use nVidia 5900FX's and even then can't bench any DX9 apps in Win64 due to no 64-bit DX9 being available.
Gotta ask, though, why not just develop the games in Java?
Because it's too damn slow, too damn buggy, and is lacking vital features for an OO language like destructors (finalize is completely inadequate, since it's not called until GC occurs -- and GC timeliness is not specified in the Java spec).
Yeah, I can see a cutting edge game like HL2 or D3 being written in Java. Fastest system available would get all of 10 fps.
On the other hand, I completely agree with you for the reasons why the submittor's question is impractical.
This prompts the thought that the GPUs are just monstrously powerful, far far faster than general-purpose CPUs.
:)
Well of course they are! The leading edge GPU's have been faster than the CPUs of the day dating back to at least the GeForce, if not further. The issue, of course, is that the GPU is not general purpose and it'd do a miserable job in trying to be one. If you could code a distributed.net project to run on the highly limited GPU instruction set then, yeah, you'd jack up your processing speed, but I suspect you'd discover that the GPU is missing the capabilities you need or (more likely) that the data sets are not orthagonal. GPUs like messing with data in terms of pixels and polygons -- trying to transform the dataset for an amino acid into something the GPU could utilize might consume more CPU time than you'd gain from the GPU speed increase.
But it'd be one hell of an interesting challenge, regardless
Getting back to AGP/PCI/PCI-Express -- I doubt that PCI-Express will be a revelation in texturing, much for the same reasons that AGP failed. Yeah, the bandwidth is a lot bigger but by the same means the textures are growing and the computation speed of the GPUs are also growing. AGP wasn't too awful for main memory texturing if you only had to deal with 4-8MB of textures (it wasn't ideal, but you could certainly get a good framerate out of glQuake); but by the time it started getting used for that games needed 32-64MB and the latencies involved were too high. By the time PCI-Express gets utilized for main memory texturing we'll be up to 256-512MB for textures and you'll have much the same issues. The graphics card industry is now the main pusher behind new RAM standards and is adopting them before they're even finalized. Not to say that the CPU industry couldn't use the bandwidth boost too, but it's a much more dire situation on the graphics front.
The real push toward PCI-Express will come not out of need for features, but out of cost cutting -- I'd bet that PCI-Express is less expensive to implement than AGP, at least on a hardware basis. Initial costs will certainly be higher due to testing on a new and unfamiliar interface, but if you cut manufacturing costs by even $.05/card you'll pay yourself back before long. That and you ensure that people won't just migrate their graphics card when they buy a new motherboard.
Good summary -- I did forget about the 2D graphics issue. The issue was also solved by the advent of 2D graphics acceleration, which was revolutionary (for PCs, not for high end workstations) at the time and seriously offloaded the bus. The OS no longer had to tell the video card to draw individual pixels but could instead tell it to draw a line with particular endpoints or other geometrical features. Accelerated BitBLT's also vastly reduced bandwidth requirements.
Of course, this doesn't solve everything, as you point out. If you need raw frame buffer access (for, oh say, demos like you suggest) then you need bandwidth. And certainly AGP or PCI-Express has enough for pretty much anything we can throw at it in the near future.
But that's pretty much the only reason it would be very interesting, at the moment; in a mostly-3d world, graphics are fine on the regular old PCI bus.
Initial texture loading is godawful slow on the standard PCI bus. Of course, that's mostly a non-issue since the bus is still vastly faster than the HD or CD that you're loading the texture off of, but if you need to swap textures mid-level then any reduction in load time is significant. As another poster pointed out, PCI-Express may allow for faster reads from video memory (IIRC, AGP does, but only at PCI speeds -- which are inadequate as you point out. In reality they're even slower because the drivers aren't optimized for it) which will be beneficial to anyone doing rendering. I can already forsee games like HL2 or Doom3 being used for inexpensive machenima (sp?) or SFX work -- and the specialized packages should be able to exceed what they can do.
The case itself is aluminum for efficient transfer of heat
Except that it's been proven that aluminum vs steel case makes absolutely no difference as far as heat transfer is concerned. There's no thermal coupling between the case and the hot components.
multiple low speed fans
Which good PC cases have had for 5+ years.
All bits of the case are easy to access and they are absolutely quiet.
Again, in the PC world for 5+ years. It's not my fault you bought crappy cases all the time.
Looking at the BTX cases, I see nothing impressive when it comes to cooling or quiet other than perhaps the cool circular heat sink.
Again - you've apparantly been doomed by crappy cases (most large computer companies like Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. have amazingly shitty case designs). The BTX is a considerable advance -- it moves the CPU out from between two very hot components (the video card and the PS) and towards the front of the case where a fan blows directly on it. That same fan also blows over the primary chipset and can do supplementary cooling on the video card.
The rest of the specs are fairly minor -- although the picoBTX form factor having two height specs is an interesting twist.
Apple certainly does make good cases, and they but a lot of ergonomic thinking into them. They're well ahead of the huge PC vendors in this regard. But they're certainly no better than some of the reasonably priced cases you can buy if you're building your own PC.
I think I can safely assume that PCI Express has a bandwith that is much faster than that of AGP can ever have
The AGP 8x spec has a max bandwidth of 2.1GB/s, while PCI Express x16 has a bandwidth of 8 GB/s. It might be theoretically possible to create a AGP 32x spec (although I doubt it), but the obvious question would be why?
. But isn't the point of AGP that it allows you to set an arperture and use some of the system RAM as an extension of the memory on the graphics card?
No, the point of AGP was to give a single slot increased bandwidth that's needed for modern graphics cards. PCI just isn't fast enough. Intel wrote into the spec that you could get away with sharing main memory as video memory in order to reduce system costs, but in practice nobody does this except for the absolute bottom tier PCs. The performance hit is huge.
wont AGP still be better?
No. Although it's questionable that PCI-X will really provide any speed increases. AGP 8x has a negligible speed improvement over AGP 2x, and quadrupling the bandwidth again isn't likely to do much either. I'm pretty sure PCI-X can still do the main memory-as-video memory trick, but there's really no need or desire to do so. If your card doesn't have enough memory to hold the textures then you're going to have a massive speed hit when you need to get them from memory. In practice this speed hit is so severe that the amount of bandwidth has relatively little impact on things -- it's the latency that kills.
They said several times that some of the games on the list were fun, but still overhyped. I do disagree with their ordering though -- B&W was nowhere near as overhyped as Daikatana. And, as you say, B&W at least managed to deliver on some of its promises while Daikatana delivered pretty much nothing but a waste of HD and CD space.