From what I've heard, the 970 can be fairly efficient at both, but only when it's running at moderate clock speeds. Maybe the original numbers you had reflected a lower-speed chip.
A processor is just one part of a computer. You need to have a variety of buses and other attachments surrounding it, and they cost money too. Presumably, this new system will carry an updated surrounding architecture -- if it doesn't, a lot of people will be very pissed off.
As I understand it, Apple has not been giving it's newer desktop machines very good underlying architectures as of late. There's a lot of speculation that this is because most of their hardware development effort was going into the new G5 line.
Hmm, I've heard that Microsoft does something like this when Internet Explorer attempts to connect to IIS servers, making the IE/IIS combination appear to work really fast, but that might just be a rumor.
One thing is that data packets on the Internet tend to go across many different networks. Some error-checking routines are better than others.
Also, really all that they do is tell you that there's a good probability that the data is intact -- a certain possibility always exists that the right bits got flipped to make it look like the data is all there, but it really isn't. Having multiple layers dramatically increases the probability that the system will catch corrupted data somewhere.
Heh, I saw this article on Yahoo, and was immediately concerned. Stupid reporters cut out way too much information, and make the people on wee dialup systems think that they'll get the moon.
Anyway, I think this is primarily interesting for people on really fast connections (ranging in hundreds of megabits per second up to gigabits) with relatively large latencies (tens/hundreds of milliseconds as on a transcontinental link rather than nanoseconds/milliseconds like on a LAN), but I'm sure the research will have some effect on LANs and even the standard broadband connection. Impact on dialup and other not-quite-broadband connections would likely be miniscule.
One main issue with TCP is that it uses a "slow start" algorithm, which other people have mentioned. Real TCP stacks probably tweak the algorithm quite a bit, but from the description in Computer Networks (3rd edition, 1996) by Andrew Tannenbaum, TCP packets start off with a small "window"--how much data can be in transit at a time. The window grows exponentially as packets are transmitted and acknowledgements received until a pre-set threshold is reached, and then the window starts growing more slowly (Tannenbaum's example grows exponentially to 32kB at first, then by 1kB per transmitted packet).
If a packet is lost, the process starts over and the threshold is set to half the window size you had before the dropped packet (I imagine many systems reduce the window size by lesser amounts). Now, this particular algorithm can cause quite a bit of nastiness. It's possible the window size will never get very large. This isn't a really huge problem on low-latency links like in a LAN where you get acknowledgements really quickly, but a hyperfast transcontinental link could be reduced to mere kilobits per second even if the percentage of dropped packets is fairly low.
Additionally, this slow start algorithm will eventually force you to restart at a smaller window size. Given enough data, you'll eventually saturate the link and lose a packet, so until the window grows enough again, there will be considerable unused bandwidth. Good TCP stacks would attempt to guess the available link speed and stop growing the window at a certain point.
Smart system administrators can tweak kernel variables to make systems behave better (preventing the window from getting too small, having larger initial thresholds, for instance), but it looks like a lot of work on Fast TCP and related projects is related to making this a more automatic process and growing/reducing the transmit window size in a more intelligent manner.
Unfortunately, full opportunism (both incoming and outgoing connections being encrypted) requires you to have a static IP and control over your reverse DNS entries. I will have that someday, but I can't really afford it yet. Also, I doubt many people will jump for that in the future, but I guess one never knows..
I've noticed that certain words and phrases come and go in the news media, and sometimes other areas. For a while a few years ago, I was seeing the phrase vis-a-vis (I forgot an accent somewhere) all over the place. I even had a history professor at the time who couldn't use the word often enough. But I haven't seen it used for years now.
One thing I've been noticing recently is `N.B.' I don't really know what it means, but people use it to insert extra comments when writing or updating something.
I've been using MythTV for the past few months, which uses XMLTV to scrape certain sites for TV program guides. I've felt kind of concerned about using that software. I wouldn't mind paying someone for my TV program guide -- I just don't want the provider to know what I'm watching (one tradeoff you have with Tivo, among others).
In addition, if you have a good site that has a vested interest in providing well-formatted data for you to download, you don't have to worry every day that the website might change it's layout or whatever.. I much prefer to use something that has a defined protocol, rather than something that is always in a state of flux..
I believe there had been some experimentation with using hydrogen peroxide as a propellant on submarines back in the early part of the century -- they were basically jet-powered subs. They were very fast, possibly faster than most nuclear subs of today, but I suspect they used up fuel pretty quickly.
I would imagine that other forms of personal transportation are banned on sidewalks in San Francisco. Here in Minneapolis, you aren't supposed to ride your bike or skateboard on the sidewalk, and I think rollerblading is frowned upon too. However, the Segway is legal.
Every once in a while, a police officer gets up the guts to ticket a few bike riders on the U of MN campus, which is usually followed by a lot of outrage in the opinion portions of the campus newspaper.
Anyway, I don't think the Segway should be banned from sidewalks, but I don't think bikes and other ways of getting around should be banned either. But, if those things aren't legal, the Segway shouldn't be either, so I'm really annoyed at the government attitude about it in Minnesota.
I seem to recall that the Tivo's processor is somewhere in the range of 50-150MHz. The video encoding/decoding is offloaded onto special-purpose hardware. This means it's very hard or impossible for you to play video/audio formats that aren't hard-wired into the system -- a restriction you don't really have when you've got a PC with a GHz or so of processing power.
Biggest downside of a PC from my perspective is the noise. I put together a MythTV box for my apartment, but had to go find some new fans to quiet the sucker down..
You can do the equivalent of a season pass, and you can restrict the recording of shows in certain ways too. I'm running a MythTV box on a 1GHz Athlon. Not the greatest video quality, but I think the only things I've paid for on the system are some quieter fans and a TV tuner.. I figure it's not a bad deal for $100..
Well, I don't know how many of these "USB On-the-go"-capable devices you'll need to get in order to use it. I suppose you'll only need one thing (could be a hub, maybe even a "smart" cable), but you need something there to be a master device.
I never really liked BattleBots.. The hosts of the show were way too cardboard-ish (or football-ish, or something) for my tastes. I've enjoyed TNN's Robot Wars much more, even though it's hosted by an ex-wrestler (so I'm told.. I was never into wrestling, so I don't know). Even with what TNN has done, I think it could be much more entertaining.
Somehow, it just seems like this is a sport by and for regular people, so it's really weird to see clean-cut jocks and dressed-up chicks talking to Joe Blow from down the street. BattleBots has way too much cognitive dissonance going for my tastes, I guess..
The Pledge of Allegiance has bothered me just about as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure that I went along happily with all the other kids when we learned it in first grade, but that was the only year we recited it. Anyway, I've always been concerned about how there are different religions in this world, and that there are people who don't believe in any diety.
Anyway, I support the court's decision, but I suspect the Supremes will give it a big whack.
I'd heard that there were somewhere around 7000 screens for Spider-Man and 3500 theaters. From what I've heard in the past, figures are only given out about how many theaters are playing movies, not the number of screens. Therefore, the screen number is just an estimate. However, since both of these movies are generally playing on at least two screens per theater, and there are approximately 500 more theaters, you'd expect at least 1000 more screens to be showing Spider-Man.
But, I might have been misinformed.
Re:I don't even know the situ. and I see the bias!
on
Two Helpings of WINE
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot's biased, there's no question about that. I personally first heard about this several months ago when Jeremy White, the CEO of CodeWeavers, had a presentation on Wine at the Twin Cities LUG. That was before the license change happened. He mentioned it, and said that they were discussing a license change because a lot of people were very disappointed in the behavior of people at TransGaming.
Basically, a lot of people felt that TransGaming had stolen their work. I believe WineX had been a more open project and TransGaming had closed it up without much warning, but I only know what people told me..
Anyway, I think Mr. White's conclusion was that he didn't like what happened, but it was permissible under the license. Enough people were annoyed that a license change happened.
But now, people are saying that this stuff was stolen away from TransGaming? I just find that hard to swallow.
Admittedly, I'm a much bigger fan of GPL/LGPL than other licenses, as I would rather that my code stay in the open rather than get pulled into proprietary packages. Also, I believe GPL/LGPL reduces the problem of project forking. Who knows what would have happened if Wine hadn't been under the X11 license? I suppose Corel wouldn't have worked on it much.. Hard to say..
I think there are a lot of companies that would like to do better, but can't due to non-disclosure agreements of one kind or another. Video card vendors like Matrox and ATI can't give out all of the information on their cards due to Macrovision support on TV-output ports.
I have a laptop with an Intel chipset that has an integrated winmodem that I can't use. Intel is usually very very good about releasing specs (definitely something I'd say they're better at than AMD and Via), but due to proprietary technology, no specs are available, and I can't get the damn thing to work.
I always get confused when this happens. I always thought that the proprietary-ness of an object was contained within that object. Why companies are so scared to release info on how to get something to work is beyond me. I guess there are some decent reasons for the Macrovision problem (I hate the reasons (it's illegal in the US to not have Macrovision protection, AFAIK), but they are valid nonetheless).
I hope that Linux will pull some of these companies away from that line of thinking..
Anyway, I don't know if it's still true, but Epson used to release quite a bit of info about their printing languages. I think HP did as well, at least until they got into their winprinter phase. They seem to be loosening up.
Hmm.. I think that some of the best companies in this regard have low profiles. All of the big names I can think of have made some pretty poor choices, IMHO.. A lot of companies seem to want to release just enough information to keep Linux users happy.
I think it's best when companies release this information, though. When the specs are opened up, it means that the product can have a much longer life cycle. As long as there's someone who is interested in keeping a driver working, it'll work. I bet there's a bunch of stuff that's supported in Linux that doesn't work in Windows anymore..
I recently read a short article that was written by a Jamaican back in 1995 or 1996. It discussed the availability of e-mail in Jamaica at the time. It turned out that e-mail was mostly being used to contact people outside of the region, and it wasn't being used to communicate locally.
I just wonder if this technology would do anything to foster local communities, rather than just connecting people over great distances. Certainly, talking to a relative who is away is important, but it's important to look at what can be done to improve the local infrastructure as well.
Slashdot Mirror
nevermind, that's about as low as the PPC 970 gets, according to some stuff I'm reading at Ars Technica...
From what I've heard, the 970 can be fairly efficient at both, but only when it's running at moderate clock speeds. Maybe the original numbers you had reflected a lower-speed chip.
A processor is just one part of a computer. You need to have a variety of buses and other attachments surrounding it, and they cost money too. Presumably, this new system will carry an updated surrounding architecture -- if it doesn't, a lot of people will be very pissed off.
As I understand it, Apple has not been giving it's newer desktop machines very good underlying architectures as of late. There's a lot of speculation that this is because most of their hardware development effort was going into the new G5 line.
Heh, simple: just have a gigabyte of RAM, and let the operating system cache the whole thing ;-)
Hmm, I've heard that Microsoft does something like this when Internet Explorer attempts to connect to IIS servers, making the IE/IIS combination appear to work really fast, but that might just be a rumor.
One thing is that data packets on the Internet tend to go across many different networks. Some error-checking routines are better than others.
Also, really all that they do is tell you that there's a good probability that the data is intact -- a certain possibility always exists that the right bits got flipped to make it look like the data is all there, but it really isn't. Having multiple layers dramatically increases the probability that the system will catch corrupted data somewhere.
Heh, I saw this article on Yahoo, and was immediately concerned. Stupid reporters cut out way too much information, and make the people on wee dialup systems think that they'll get the moon.
Anyway, I think this is primarily interesting for people on really fast connections (ranging in hundreds of megabits per second up to gigabits) with relatively large latencies (tens/hundreds of milliseconds as on a transcontinental link rather than nanoseconds/milliseconds like on a LAN), but I'm sure the research will have some effect on LANs and even the standard broadband connection. Impact on dialup and other not-quite-broadband connections would likely be miniscule.
One main issue with TCP is that it uses a "slow start" algorithm, which other people have mentioned. Real TCP stacks probably tweak the algorithm quite a bit, but from the description in Computer Networks (3rd edition, 1996) by Andrew Tannenbaum, TCP packets start off with a small "window"--how much data can be in transit at a time. The window grows exponentially as packets are transmitted and acknowledgements received until a pre-set threshold is reached, and then the window starts growing more slowly (Tannenbaum's example grows exponentially to 32kB at first, then by 1kB per transmitted packet).
If a packet is lost, the process starts over and the threshold is set to half the window size you had before the dropped packet (I imagine many systems reduce the window size by lesser amounts). Now, this particular algorithm can cause quite a bit of nastiness. It's possible the window size will never get very large. This isn't a really huge problem on low-latency links like in a LAN where you get acknowledgements really quickly, but a hyperfast transcontinental link could be reduced to mere kilobits per second even if the percentage of dropped packets is fairly low.
Additionally, this slow start algorithm will eventually force you to restart at a smaller window size. Given enough data, you'll eventually saturate the link and lose a packet, so until the window grows enough again, there will be considerable unused bandwidth. Good TCP stacks would attempt to guess the available link speed and stop growing the window at a certain point.
Smart system administrators can tweak kernel variables to make systems behave better (preventing the window from getting too small, having larger initial thresholds, for instance), but it looks like a lot of work on Fast TCP and related projects is related to making this a more automatic process and growing/reducing the transmit window size in a more intelligent manner.
Heh. 1000 IP addresses for every square inch of the Earth's surface is not enough for you?
Unfortunately, full opportunism (both incoming and outgoing connections being encrypted) requires you to have a static IP and control over your reverse DNS entries. I will have that someday, but I can't really afford it yet. Also, I doubt many people will jump for that in the future, but I guess one never knows..
I've noticed that certain words and phrases come and go in the news media, and sometimes other areas. For a while a few years ago, I was seeing the phrase vis-a-vis (I forgot an accent somewhere) all over the place. I even had a history professor at the time who couldn't use the word often enough. But I haven't seen it used for years now.
One thing I've been noticing recently is `N.B.' I don't really know what it means, but people use it to insert extra comments when writing or updating something.
I've been using MythTV for the past few months, which uses XMLTV to scrape certain sites for TV program guides. I've felt kind of concerned about using that software. I wouldn't mind paying someone for my TV program guide -- I just don't want the provider to know what I'm watching (one tradeoff you have with Tivo, among others).
In addition, if you have a good site that has a vested interest in providing well-formatted data for you to download, you don't have to worry every day that the website might change it's layout or whatever.. I much prefer to use something that has a defined protocol, rather than something that is always in a state of flux..
I believe there had been some experimentation with using hydrogen peroxide as a propellant on submarines back in the early part of the century -- they were basically jet-powered subs. They were very fast, possibly faster than most nuclear subs of today, but I suspect they used up fuel pretty quickly.
I would imagine that other forms of personal transportation are banned on sidewalks in San Francisco. Here in Minneapolis, you aren't supposed to ride your bike or skateboard on the sidewalk, and I think rollerblading is frowned upon too. However, the Segway is legal.
Every once in a while, a police officer gets up the guts to ticket a few bike riders on the U of MN campus, which is usually followed by a lot of outrage in the opinion portions of the campus newspaper.
Anyway, I don't think the Segway should be banned from sidewalks, but I don't think bikes and other ways of getting around should be banned either. But, if those things aren't legal, the Segway shouldn't be either, so I'm really annoyed at the government attitude about it in Minnesota.
I seem to recall that the Tivo's processor is somewhere in the range of 50-150MHz. The video encoding/decoding is offloaded onto special-purpose hardware. This means it's very hard or impossible for you to play video/audio formats that aren't hard-wired into the system -- a restriction you don't really have when you've got a PC with a GHz or so of processing power.
Biggest downside of a PC from my perspective is the noise. I put together a MythTV box for my apartment, but had to go find some new fans to quiet the sucker down..
You can do the equivalent of a season pass, and you can restrict the recording of shows in certain ways too. I'm running a MythTV box on a 1GHz Athlon. Not the greatest video quality, but I think the only things I've paid for on the system are some quieter fans and a TV tuner.. I figure it's not a bad deal for $100..
Well, I don't know how many of these "USB On-the-go"-capable devices you'll need to get in order to use it. I suppose you'll only need one thing (could be a hub, maybe even a "smart" cable), but you need something there to be a master device.
I never really liked BattleBots.. The hosts of the show were way too cardboard-ish (or football-ish, or something) for my tastes. I've enjoyed TNN's Robot Wars much more, even though it's hosted by an ex-wrestler (so I'm told.. I was never into wrestling, so I don't know). Even with what TNN has done, I think it could be much more entertaining.
Somehow, it just seems like this is a sport by and for regular people, so it's really weird to see clean-cut jocks and dressed-up chicks talking to Joe Blow from down the street. BattleBots has way too much cognitive dissonance going for my tastes, I guess..
...and just as I'm building my fibre channel array for my home computer :-p
The Pledge of Allegiance has bothered me just about as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure that I went along happily with all the other kids when we learned it in first grade, but that was the only year we recited it. Anyway, I've always been concerned about how there are different religions in this world, and that there are people who don't believe in any diety.
Anyway, I support the court's decision, but I suspect the Supremes will give it a big whack.
Huh?!? I thought I'd heard they were planning this back in 1998 or 1999. Oh well, better late than never, I suppose.
I'd heard that there were somewhere around 7000 screens for Spider-Man and 3500 theaters. From what I've heard in the past, figures are only given out about how many theaters are playing movies, not the number of screens. Therefore, the screen number is just an estimate. However, since both of these movies are generally playing on at least two screens per theater, and there are approximately 500 more theaters, you'd expect at least 1000 more screens to be showing Spider-Man.
But, I might have been misinformed.
Slashdot's biased, there's no question about that. I personally first heard about this several months ago when Jeremy White, the CEO of CodeWeavers, had a presentation on Wine at the Twin Cities LUG. That was before the license change happened. He mentioned it, and said that they were discussing a license change because a lot of people were very disappointed in the behavior of people at TransGaming.
Basically, a lot of people felt that TransGaming had stolen their work. I believe WineX had been a more open project and TransGaming had closed it up without much warning, but I only know what people told me..
Anyway, I think Mr. White's conclusion was that he didn't like what happened, but it was permissible under the license. Enough people were annoyed that a license change happened.
But now, people are saying that this stuff was stolen away from TransGaming? I just find that hard to swallow.
Admittedly, I'm a much bigger fan of GPL/LGPL than other licenses, as I would rather that my code stay in the open rather than get pulled into proprietary packages. Also, I believe GPL/LGPL reduces the problem of project forking. Who knows what would have happened if Wine hadn't been under the X11 license? I suppose Corel wouldn't have worked on it much.. Hard to say..
I think there are a lot of companies that would like to do better, but can't due to non-disclosure agreements of one kind or another. Video card vendors like Matrox and ATI can't give out all of the information on their cards due to Macrovision support on TV-output ports.
I have a laptop with an Intel chipset that has an integrated winmodem that I can't use. Intel is usually very very good about releasing specs (definitely something I'd say they're better at than AMD and Via), but due to proprietary technology, no specs are available, and I can't get the damn thing to work.
I always get confused when this happens. I always thought that the proprietary-ness of an object was contained within that object. Why companies are so scared to release info on how to get something to work is beyond me. I guess there are some decent reasons for the Macrovision problem (I hate the reasons (it's illegal in the US to not have Macrovision protection, AFAIK), but they are valid nonetheless).
I hope that Linux will pull some of these companies away from that line of thinking..
Anyway, I don't know if it's still true, but Epson used to release quite a bit of info about their printing languages. I think HP did as well, at least until they got into their winprinter phase. They seem to be loosening up.
Hmm.. I think that some of the best companies in this regard have low profiles. All of the big names I can think of have made some pretty poor choices, IMHO.. A lot of companies seem to want to release just enough information to keep Linux users happy.
I think it's best when companies release this information, though. When the specs are opened up, it means that the product can have a much longer life cycle. As long as there's someone who is interested in keeping a driver working, it'll work. I bet there's a bunch of stuff that's supported in Linux that doesn't work in Windows anymore..
Yeah, but they don't give out all of their specs. From what I understand, some info is given out, but a lot of stuff has to be reverse-engineered..
I recently read a short article that was written by a Jamaican back in 1995 or 1996. It discussed the availability of e-mail in Jamaica at the time. It turned out that e-mail was mostly being used to contact people outside of the region, and it wasn't being used to communicate locally.
I just wonder if this technology would do anything to foster local communities, rather than just connecting people over great distances. Certainly, talking to a relative who is away is important, but it's important to look at what can be done to improve the local infrastructure as well.