This chip might be an interesting move. We have seen leap frogs in technology adoption in developing countries.
Examples: 1. US homes are still mostly connected via copper phone lines. Developing countries which are barely starting to lay out their communications network infrastructure are laying out fiber optic lines. Whether this is good or not is still yet to be seen. Fabric switches are still incredibly expensive.
2. Cell phone technologies in Japan, Korea, and other asian countries are connected via newer and more advanced 3G CDMA digital technology. For some countries, its much cheaper to build a wireless infrastructure than it is to lay out ground cables. China is pushing their own CDMA technology.
So, with this new 64-bit CPU, maybe China will make the leapfrog into 64-bit computing. They will have a Linux system capabable of handling a 64-bit instruction set. Assuming of course, that Microsoft doesn't shutter some kind of shady deal with the Chinese government, to have them all running their servers on Windows 2000/.Net operating systems. The company making the chip will have to speed up the CPU though, but maybe they can follow Moore's Law and double every 18 months.
Who knows, maybe this will cause a revolution in China. The population will be running their systems on a more advanced 64-bit Linux system running MIPS-like instruction set. Then again.. maybe not? The market will decide.
Working with an engineer who used SGI Irix, I learned one really damn cool feature about Unix.
He was able to reset the bus, so that he could troubleshoot a RAID device, without powercycling the entire computer. It was some kind of XIO bus architecture proprietary to SGI systems I think. It was a server, with hundreds of people connecting to it, so it's not like he could powercycle the server anytime he wanted to.
From what I hear, all server class Unix systems have this feature built into their hardware/software.
Where's Linux? Oh yeah.. 99.9% of all Linux installations run on x86 hardware. Go figure.
From years of research and observation, my best scientific theory is that the average IQ of a group drops 10 points for each additional person added to the group.
He's not a Linux basher. Actually, if you take some time to check out his website, you'll notice that he's created and implemented a lot of (impressive?) technology for his night club. http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk
He has a network of a bunch of Linux boxes, all diskless, and boots off NFS. It allows the people who visit his nightclub to check the internet, chat on AIM, IRC, ICQ, and it does it in a pretty secure manner (according to him). I read the article he published on his project, and it seems quite impressive. He might run or own the nightclub, and yet, he's got time to build together a fully Linux network that safe and secure for his visitors to use.
Reading the article, anyone who knows anything about computers and about Linux, knows that he's right. I'm a Linux/Unix advocate, but yet, I am fully aware that Linux works well, but it only works well for a set of predefined criteria. Like, its a great file server, web server, dns server, etc server. And that's basically all that I use it for, just for servers. Although I did use Linux for 2 years on my Laptop computer, since I hated Windows 98. But MS Windows finally became very stable with Windows 2000, so I switched over to that.
But in reality, Linux is Linux. Most of the software available is free and open source. There are commercial versions of software available for it. Unix sofware shops have been around for decades. You can buy these software, but most people nowadays don't believe in buying software. Who can blame them, software is so damn expensive.
Remember, there's the old saying, you get what you pay for.
You can also.. write your own software. Emacs anyone?
They simply refuse to accept that technology and competition should drive down prices, and make materials available to the masses. Advances in technology and competition is what drove down the prices of computers to a level affordable by the masses.
But yet, the music industry charges $15 for a CD which cost them pennies to produce. Sure, the content is important, but if they charge $5 for a CD, then millions of people WILL buy the CDs, simply because its easier that way. And piracy will no longer become a *central* issue.
Why is it that the Congressmen cannot understand this and question the RIAA about this? Simply because they can make 100s of millions on a CD, and the industry believes that it is their right to make that much.
I'm certain that the music industry is one of the few industries out there with the highest profit margin for material content.
This is perhaps the one and only driving force behind the music industry's push to kill portable, digital music formats. They've been ripping off the naive consumers for the past 50 some-odd years, ever since the vinyl LPs were introduced. The music industry has made billions, if not trillions, and they will continue to do so, unless we the consumer, stand up and oppose them. They see this as their holy cash cow, and they want to protect it till their deaths, and I hope that MP3s will bring forth their eventual demise.
The one question that we must ask is, should these musicians be making tens of millions of dollars, when the average American makes only about $30,000 annually (give or take a few)? Granted, in a capitalist society, everyone has the potential to become a millionaire if they have the desired market skills and talents, but isn't this simply a case of pure greed? Wouldn't it be more fair if they made $250K to $500K annually instead? These are questions that we must answer, because with the continuing popularity of MP3s, we need to re-evaluate our priorities and where we think our money should go.
Gone are the days where an artist must go to a multi-million dollar digital recording studio to record their songs. Now, with the advent of computer technology, an artist can record it from home with a modest investment of a few thousand dollars, or they can pool their resources and share their own digital recording studio. This is what the music industry clings to, this was one of their arguing points, and now, it is no longer valid.
Technology should drive down the cost for the consumer, but for the past two decades, the cost of a CD has remained relatively the same (at about $15-$17 per CD), if not slightly increased. Is this fair to the consumer? Obviously not, but the deluded music industry continues to believe that it is. And for this, I hope MP3s will hasten their demise.
Why don't you just rent a 5 bedroom house with your friends, set up a cable modem or DSL connection, and then wire up the house? That's what I did to our 5 bedroom house that we're renting. We have a fast cable modem hookup for $75/month, so it costs $15/person per month. Every room is wired with a high speed category-5 cable, connected to a fast ethernet (100 MBps) switch, and in addition, we have wireless network access too, so you can bring your laptop outside into the garden or the the roof, surf the net and drink your morning coffee.
I live in Los Angeles, and my house is about 3-4 miles away from the freeway, in any direction, since there are 3 nearby freeways.
And even with this range, I can't get any acceptable transmission in my house. I'd have to go outside, and sit in my car on the sidewalk, in order to use my Cingular phone service.
Cingular only works good if you live right next to a freeway, other than that, you're screwed. Plus, the service is useless if you're stuck in a heavily fortified building with thick concrete walls. This is also true for other PCS phone systems, since the wavelengths of the radio waves that it transmits are too short to penetrate concrete walls and vast distances.
My service is up in February, I'm gonna switch over to AT&T cellular. At least with them, I'll always get service practically anywhere I am.
And yes, I'm aware that nothing I said relates to 3G technology. Maybe I'll be happy when AT&T rolls out 3G technology, but I doubt I'd ever care to use a video phone. Although I might utilize it's vast data transmission capabilities to gather information.
I just saw the demo of the Segway on Good Morning America just a few minutes ago, and I was impressed. I've heard about it a few months ago, but didn't really think too much about it. Then I saw a reporter describing the dynamics of it earlier today, and I was very sceptical. A machine that has gyroscopes built into it, so that it is impossible to fall off, redundant computer systems to back up each other, and has absolutely no engine. This sounds too good to be true. It sounds like it violates every known law of physics that I had studied for the past 4 years of college. Plus, what kind of energy system powers it? I'm sure it definitely can't violate the known laws of Entropy.
And then I saw it in action. And I was just like, "damn! I want one!"
And as for the $3000 consumer price tag, well.. how about waiting a few years, and buying it used? I'm in college, and my car is a second-hand used car, and runs great.
But anyways, it would be great if you could rent this kind of thing. Like in say, San Francisco or New York, where cars are impossible to get you anywhere. Some company can set up hundreds of rental points, where you can check in your Segway, or check it out. And where you'd rent it by the hour or by the day.
Yes, I'll still have my car. There is no way around that, but this thing is amazing. I can't wait until I get a chance to test-ride it myself.
It won't happen overnight, but yes, this thing will infiltrate the world over. The best places to market it are in the huge congested cities, such as San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Beijing, Taiwan, Shanghai, London, and any other packed metropolis. I live in Los Angeles, but notice how I excluded that city from the list of marketable places.
The man who brought the knowledge of splitting the atom and creating China's first atomic bomb was a Chinese scientist, who was educated at an American Ivy League university.
During the McCarthy era, when the guy went psycho and started accusing everyone of being communists, talk about Bill of Rights violations there, he singled out this Chinese scientist for being a communist. And later on, this scientist was expelled from the United States. Although some people thought that he was too valuable to let out of the country, others regarded him as inconsequential, and believed that he didn't have enough knowledge to build an atomic bomb.
Obviously, this Chinese scientist proved them wrong. He was sent packing to China, and when he arrived on Chinese soil, the government put him to work on the Chinese atomic bomb project. And he succeeded.
Unlike the Russians, which used spies to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb, the Chinese invention of the bomb was completely legitimate.
A Chinese-American scientist, stripped of his American citizenship, and deported back to China against his will, was the father of China's atomic bomb project.
Well, first, I technically had no clue what I was watching. I just knew the movie was something about drugs. I wanted to see another movie, but Blow as the only movie showing at 10:30pm.
But as I was watching it, I was like, "this movie is just damn pathetic." They wanted us to empathize with a drug dealer, they wanted us to feel sorry for this drug dealer, that piped drugs into the American society, and destroyed people's lives.
          The part that cracked me up the most, was when the movie ended, and the closing message said that Christine Sunshine Jung has still not visited her father in prison. That was just lame, and I just laughed my ass off when I read that.
That and plus, it was a long ass movie. I usually never have to check my watch, but at this movie, I kept constantly checking my watch. I'm just glad that it wasn't boring. There were some scenes that were funny or somewhat interesting, like when they walked into that room filled with nothing but cash.
Oh, one other interesting thing to note, was that as I was watching the movie, I thought that maybe I should have become a drug dealer. Damn, $60 million in the 1980s.. can you imagine how much that's worth now, 20 years later? If invested wisely, that load of cash, is probably worth over billions of dollars. I'd sure love some shares in Microsoft and Intel when they went public.
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This chip might be an interesting move. We have seen leap frogs in technology adoption in developing countries.
Examples:
1. US homes are still mostly connected via copper phone lines. Developing countries which are barely starting to lay out their communications network infrastructure are laying out fiber optic lines. Whether this is good or not is still yet to be seen. Fabric switches are still incredibly expensive.
2. Cell phone technologies in Japan, Korea, and other asian countries are connected via newer and more advanced 3G CDMA digital technology. For some countries, its much cheaper to build a wireless infrastructure than it is to lay out ground cables. China is pushing their own CDMA technology.
So, with this new 64-bit CPU, maybe China will make the leapfrog into 64-bit computing. They will have a Linux system capabable of handling a 64-bit instruction set. Assuming of course, that Microsoft doesn't shutter some kind of shady deal with the Chinese government, to have them all running their servers on Windows 2000/.Net operating systems. The company making the chip will have to speed up the CPU though, but maybe they can follow Moore's Law and double every 18 months.
Who knows, maybe this will cause a revolution in China. The population will be running their systems on a more advanced 64-bit Linux system running MIPS-like instruction set. Then again.. maybe not? The market will decide.
Working with an engineer who used SGI Irix, I learned one really damn cool feature about Unix.
He was able to reset the bus, so that he could troubleshoot a RAID device, without powercycling the entire computer. It was some kind of XIO bus architecture proprietary to SGI systems I think. It was a server, with hundreds of people connecting to it, so it's not like he could powercycle the server anytime he wanted to.
From what I hear, all server class Unix systems have this feature built into their hardware/software.
Where's Linux? Oh yeah.. 99.9% of all Linux installations run on x86 hardware. Go figure.
From years of research and observation, my best scientific theory is that the average IQ of a group drops 10 points for each additional person added to the group.
.NET is language independent, platform centric.
Java is language centric, platform independent.
In his defense.
He's not a Linux basher. Actually, if you take some time to check out his website, you'll notice that he's created and implemented a lot of (impressive?) technology for his night club.
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk
He has a network of a bunch of Linux boxes, all diskless, and boots off NFS. It allows the people who visit his nightclub to check the internet, chat on AIM, IRC, ICQ, and it does it in a pretty secure manner (according to him). I read the article he published on his project, and it seems quite impressive. He might run or own the nightclub, and yet, he's got time to build together a fully Linux network that safe and secure for his visitors to use.
Reading the article, anyone who knows anything about computers and about Linux, knows that he's right. I'm a Linux/Unix advocate, but yet, I am fully aware that Linux works well, but it only works well for a set of predefined criteria. Like, its a great file server, web server, dns server, etc server. And that's basically all that I use it for, just for servers. Although I did use Linux for 2 years on my Laptop computer, since I hated Windows 98. But MS Windows finally became very stable with Windows 2000, so I switched over to that.
But in reality, Linux is Linux. Most of the software available is free and open source. There are commercial versions of software available for it. Unix sofware shops have been around for decades. You can buy these software, but most people nowadays don't believe in buying software. Who can blame them, software is so damn expensive.
Remember, there's the old saying, you get what you pay for.
You can also.. write your own software. Emacs anyone?
They simply refuse to accept that technology and competition should drive down prices, and make materials available to the masses. Advances in technology and competition is what drove down the prices of computers to a level affordable by the masses.
But yet, the music industry charges $15 for a CD which cost them pennies to produce. Sure, the content is important, but if they charge $5 for a CD, then millions of people WILL buy the CDs, simply because its easier that way. And piracy will no longer become a *central* issue.
Why is it that the Congressmen cannot understand this and question the RIAA about this? Simply because they can make 100s of millions on a CD, and the industry believes that it is their right to make that much.
I'm certain that the music industry is one of the few industries out there with the highest profit margin for material content.
This is perhaps the one and only driving force behind the music industry's push to kill portable, digital music formats. They've been ripping off the naive consumers for the past 50 some-odd years, ever since the vinyl LPs were introduced. The music industry has made billions, if not trillions, and they will continue to do so, unless we the consumer, stand up and oppose them. They see this as their holy cash cow, and they want to protect it till their deaths, and I hope that MP3s will bring forth their eventual demise.
The one question that we must ask is, should these musicians be making tens of millions of dollars, when the average American makes only about $30,000 annually (give or take a few)? Granted, in a capitalist society, everyone has the potential to become a millionaire if they have the desired market skills and talents, but isn't this simply a case of pure greed? Wouldn't it be more fair if they made $250K to $500K annually instead? These are questions that we must answer, because with the continuing popularity of MP3s, we need to re-evaluate our priorities and where we think our money should go.
Gone are the days where an artist must go to a multi-million dollar digital recording studio to record their songs. Now, with the advent of computer technology, an artist can record it from home with a modest investment of a few thousand dollars, or they can pool their resources and share their own digital recording studio. This is what the music industry clings to, this was one of their arguing points, and now, it is no longer valid.
Technology should drive down the cost for the consumer, but for the past two decades, the cost of a CD has remained relatively the same (at about $15-$17 per CD), if not slightly increased. Is this fair to the consumer? Obviously not, but the deluded music industry continues to believe that it is. And for this, I hope MP3s will hasten their demise.
Why don't you just rent a 5 bedroom house with your friends, set up a cable modem or DSL connection, and then wire up the house? That's what I did to our 5 bedroom house that we're renting. We have a fast cable modem hookup for $75/month, so it costs $15/person per month. Every room is wired with a high speed category-5 cable, connected to a fast ethernet (100 MBps) switch, and in addition, we have wireless network access too, so you can bring your laptop outside into the garden or the the roof, surf the net and drink your morning coffee.
I live in Los Angeles, and my house is about 3-4 miles away from the freeway, in any direction, since there are 3 nearby freeways.
And even with this range, I can't get any acceptable transmission in my house. I'd have to go outside, and sit in my car on the sidewalk, in order to use my Cingular phone service.
Cingular only works good if you live right next to a freeway, other than that, you're screwed. Plus, the service is useless if you're stuck in a heavily fortified building with thick concrete walls. This is also true for other PCS phone systems, since the wavelengths of the radio waves that it transmits are too short to penetrate concrete walls and vast distances.
My service is up in February, I'm gonna switch over to AT&T cellular. At least with them, I'll always get service practically anywhere I am.
And yes, I'm aware that nothing I said relates to 3G technology. Maybe I'll be happy when AT&T rolls out 3G technology, but I doubt I'd ever care to use a video phone. Although I might utilize it's vast data transmission capabilities to gather information.
I just saw the demo of the Segway on Good Morning America just a few minutes ago, and I was impressed. I've heard about it a few months ago, but didn't really think too much about it. Then I saw a reporter describing the dynamics of it earlier today, and I was very sceptical. A machine that has gyroscopes built into it, so that it is impossible to fall off, redundant computer systems to back up each other, and has absolutely no engine. This sounds too good to be true. It sounds like it violates every known law of physics that I had studied for the past 4 years of college. Plus, what kind of energy system powers it? I'm sure it definitely can't violate the known laws of Entropy.
And then I saw it in action. And I was just like, "damn! I want one!"
And as for the $3000 consumer price tag, well.. how about waiting a few years, and buying it used? I'm in college, and my car is a second-hand used car, and runs great.
But anyways, it would be great if you could rent this kind of thing. Like in say, San Francisco or New York, where cars are impossible to get you anywhere. Some company can set up hundreds of rental points, where you can check in your Segway, or check it out. And where you'd rent it by the hour or by the day.
Yes, I'll still have my car. There is no way around that, but this thing is amazing. I can't wait until I get a chance to test-ride it myself.
It won't happen overnight, but yes, this thing will infiltrate the world over. The best places to market it are in the huge congested cities, such as San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Beijing, Taiwan, Shanghai, London, and any other packed metropolis. I live in Los Angeles, but notice how I excluded that city from the list of marketable places.
I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your [school] down.
If you can't beat them, then join them.
Obviously, you don't read your history books.
The man who brought the knowledge of splitting the atom and creating China's first atomic bomb was a Chinese scientist, who was educated at an American Ivy League university.
During the McCarthy era, when the guy went psycho and started accusing everyone of being communists, talk about Bill of Rights violations there, he singled out this Chinese scientist for being a communist. And later on, this scientist was expelled from the United States. Although some people thought that he was too valuable to let out of the country, others regarded him as inconsequential, and believed that he didn't have enough knowledge to build an atomic bomb.
Obviously, this Chinese scientist proved them wrong. He was sent packing to China, and when he arrived on Chinese soil, the government put him to work on the Chinese atomic bomb project. And he succeeded.
Unlike the Russians, which used spies to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb, the Chinese invention of the bomb was completely legitimate.
A Chinese-American scientist, stripped of his American citizenship, and deported back to China against his will, was the father of China's atomic bomb project.
Well, first, I technically had no clue what I was watching. I just knew the movie was something about drugs. I wanted to see another movie, but Blow as the only movie showing at 10:30pm.
But as I was watching it, I was like, "this movie is just damn pathetic." They wanted us to empathize with a drug dealer, they wanted us to feel sorry for this drug dealer, that piped drugs into the American society, and destroyed people's lives.
          The part that cracked me up the most, was when the movie ended, and the closing message said that Christine Sunshine Jung has still not visited her father in prison. That was just lame, and I just laughed my ass off when I read that.
That and plus, it was a long ass movie. I usually never have to check my watch, but at this movie, I kept constantly checking my watch. I'm just glad that it wasn't boring. There were some scenes that were funny or somewhat interesting, like when they walked into that room filled with nothing but cash.
Oh, one other interesting thing to note, was that as I was watching the movie, I thought that maybe I should have become a drug dealer. Damn, $60 million in the 1980s.. can you imagine how much that's worth now, 20 years later? If invested wisely, that load of cash, is probably worth over billions of dollars. I'd sure love some shares in Microsoft and Intel when they went public.