Centrino is a chipset that includes a wifi device. If your home PC was equipped with a wifi card and the system ran some game the same with or without it, would it really be news?
How about if we could get Intel to provide some real drivers for Linux? The joke goes, Does it run Linux? but in this case, goddamn, I wish it did.
Well, with no apps, it will wither and die like everything else IBM tried to make that wasn't connected to Microsoft.
But seriously folks, this isn't about PC architecture. Unless the thing has an x86 emulation layer, it's dead in the water in regards to the PC market. Even Apple, with their much vaunted G-chips have to emulate the x86 hardware so that users can run their Windows programs.
It's a good idea, but it's more likely that Intel will develop something similar for the x86 than IBM will woo the PC market over to the Cell.
The problem is that you are trying to shoehorn your lifestyle choice into the real world of creators and users. You forget the one central tenet that pretty much defines the Western civilization. Creators are primarily motivated by money.
While there may be a few 'inventors' who sit in their basements thinking up inventions for the sake of having fun, the vast majority of creators who generate useful inventions work for real companies for real salaries. This is irrefutable.
But by taking away the ability to patent, and subsequently license, the invention (which you and your smelly friends would love to restrict) you remove any incentive for a company to innovate anything. If they can rip off the next guy who created something, then basically they are gaining knowledge for free. So why invent?
As for your industry which "is being held back by software patents", I defy you to name some area in which the state of the art is not the state of the art. Patents hold nothing back, as we all know that patents are fully open and can be incorporated into further designs based upon the base patent.
In addition, companies cross license patents all the time. When one company infringes on another company's patent, there is usually a pretty thick cross-pollinization of patent infringements across the board, so they agree to license patents to each other at no fee so they can both use the patents freely. This encourages the creation of new inventions, as companies would rather hold patents which can be cross-licensed than to sit on their ass and let every patent holder come and extract a ton of licensing fees.
Patents beget patents. Patents are for inventions, so if patents encourage invention, they must also necessarily encourage progress.
These imports are usually not so bad. They are pretty cheap and if you can ignore the audience laughing and the occasional guy standing up and going to the bathroom, it's pretty much the same thing.
And who's to say that the NSA hasn't had this technology available to them for a while?
And if they have quantum encryption, their quantum decryption (code breaking) devices are probably a little more advanced than what those two companies *cough*flybynight*cough* are selling.
Looking at the literature, Linux and Unix in general seems to be designed to keep processes as lightweight as possible. OTOH, Windows processes are a little heavier and take longer to start up.
Then, OTOH, Windows threads are very lightweight compared to the equivalent thread model in Linux. Benchmarks have shown that in multi-process setups, Unix is heavily favored, but in multi-threaded setups Windows comes out on top.
When it comes to multi-processors, is there a theoretical advantage to using processes vs threads? Leaving out the Windows vs Linux debate for a second, how would an OS that implemented very efficient threads compare to one that implemented very efficient processes?
If it can scale to 16 procs well, it will scale to 64 procs well.
Until you start talking about double that amount of procs, which is what Windows Server does these days, or hundreds of procs, which is what Cray has been doing for years, scalability at this small "scale" (haha) is not very impressive.
FreeBSD, the dying operating system that it is, still supports SMP on many procs much better than Linux. That's no one's fault, but jumping up and down saying how good Linux SMP is without looking at the competition makes you look a little foolish.
This is the work of IBM and the rest of the "services" oriented consultants. KPMG, Anderson, etc. A group of highly paid morons.
But in the long run, services is actually the driving force in computing. Products are fine, but upon those products is a whole ecology of companies providing support, enhancement, and integration of those products, tailored for each individual company.
In fact, this is what makes Open Source software so attractive. It sure as hell isn't good to be the company developing the software, but it is really good to be a service provider using that software. No longer do you need to pay for the software, you only need to pay for support.
I guess this could be a double edged sword for customers, though. It seems that there would be an incentive to keep OSS as obtuse and inscrutable as possible to maximize support income. This obviously wouldn't happen with a commercial product that has to prove its worth by being easier to use and generally better than the equivalent OSS package, just to compete.
Anyway, so what? So a few people have some problems with their ISP. This is New York we're talking about. The city is a hellhole anyway, what's a little more screwed up services going to do? Bring the city to a halt? Not likely.
The customers of course get what they deserve here. The only real ISPs that have any serious clout are run directly by the phone companies. All other ISPs run on the phone company lines at the good graces of the phone companies. That someone came along and hijacked the domain is not even a surprise.
But that hash table is patented. It's a hell of a fight to get around a government-granted monopoly.
Then again, this is P2P we're talking about, so it's not like we're expecting them to close up shop because they are violating some ambiguous law.
P2P is here to stay. It's doubtful that this company will win in the long term because the technology is already out there used by millions of users. The genie, so to speak, is out of the bottle.
What amazes me is that Mars, a planet with a third the mass of Earth, has two moons whereas we only have one. Saturn has 35 moons! And two rings!
I wish Earth were as cool as that.
As for dropping loads onto other planets, I'm not so sure this is really a great idea. If there is life up there and we pop an Earth-bacteria near it, there's no telling how bad a disaster it would be for the life colonies on Titan. If anyone remembers in Star Trek 3 when a small worm was dropped on Genesis, it evolved into a huge mutant worm that attacked Kirk and McCoy. With no natural predators, a tiny bacterium could become the worst enemy of whatever life there is on that rocky moon.
Steve Jobs is perhaps the greatest computer company CEO of all time. His company puts out the best hardware available today. The software delivered by Apple is second to none (especially compared to Windows *yecch*)
I await each MacWorld for product introductions and can't get enough of the Mac rumor sites.
I own the original iPod, the iPod mini, and the iPod shuffle. It shuffles and doesn't need an LCD!
From the lowest level of Mac Mini to the highest level of XServe rack servers, Apple products are "insanely great". Steve Jobs is the one who brought this all together.
I'd like to meet the man in person one day. I've only had opportunity to see his live casts at MacWorld. What an opportunity to meet one of the most influential shapers of our computing experience today.
Working with these two companies closely (lots of PSP and big screen TVs delivered this year), there is one thing that I've noticed with regards to these two companies.
Matsushita is the good guys. They license their technology out at very low prices, and if a competitor invents a similar technology, they are very unlikely to bring down the weight of their patent portfolio on them.
Sony, OTOH, is the typical portfolio protector. They are very difficult to work with because their tight-fistedness with patents and IP means that everything they do needs to be negotiated and agreements have to be made between many different IPR holders just to come up with a new product.
This is also why Matsushita (Panasonic, if you didn't know) is almost universally loved and Sony continues to put out shoddy merchandise.
While he obviously meant it to mean that Earth is somehow delicately balanced and any movement in one direction or another will topple the climate for the worse, the fact of the matter is that the Earth has a natural environmental cycle that balances itself out over time.
So thousands of years ago there was an ice age followed by the long warm age we live in now. Before that there were other ice ages and warm ages. We put sulfur into the atmosphere, it comes down as acid rain, but somewhere else the sky is blue and the birds are singing. Just because we "damage" one area does not mean that we cannot improve another area.
Even in the case of climate warming, an increase in warmth leads to higher oceanic evaporation which leads to more cloud cover which counteracts the heating caused by the Sun (which is far greater a heat source than our piddly output) which then leads to global cooling again which leads to less oceanic evaporation which leads to less cloud cover which leads to... and so on and so forth.
There is a problem with polluting because it makes our environment unlivable, much live a fish tank can't support aquatic life if there isn't a certain amount of care put towards keeping it clean. But on the large scale, global warming is one of those things that is coming, we can't do anything about it, and will go away whether we are here or not by that time.
I just installed an 800Gb hard disk in my system. I have a gigabyte worth of webmail space (more than that, if you consider that I can send myself gmail invitations). Storage is, as they say in the vernacular, very inexpensive.
Even in cameras where storage is tight, the bounds of memory is expanding all the time. Whereas a couple years ago the average storage card size was a measly 64Mb, today we are talking about gigabytes of storage memory inside our *cameras*!
So let's say we can squeeze another 30% of pictures onto a card. Does that really help us? Not really, if you consider that the compression itself rides atop JPEG compression and that computing time needs to be accounted for.
Currently, the fastest continuous shooting digital camera (the Nikon D2X) can only take 4 shots in a row before its memory buffers get full and the whole camera becomes useless. Compare that with the 9 shots per second F5 and you can see that the speed of shooting isn't going to cut it for digital cameras.
We need a compression method that is lossless, not one that creates compact files. Space is cheap, CPU cycles aren't.
The mass of these stars must be outrageous. Could it be possible that they are already black holes that we are able to see only because we are already within the event horizon of the stars' gravitational pulls?
Though many years late, Windows XP is what WinNT4.0 should have been, much less NT3.51.
Fully featured, responsive, and with the new security built into SP2, practically invulnerable to virii or hacker intrusion. (God help you if you want to run with the firewall down, but that goes for anything, don't it?)
The upshot of this is that anyone still down in the dark ages with NT4 ought to seriously think about upgrading to XP. With an upgrade package, it will cost a whole lot less to deploy as all the devices in NT4 are already supported under XP, so there's no need to worry about hardware support like on other operating systems.
Also good news for Microsoft, they can finally pull some of those developers off that project and put them to work getting XP and Longhorn more bulletproof.
"To use an analogy, it's a little bit as if Ford was selling cars with defective brakes. If I realised that there was a problem, opened the hood and took a few pictures to prove it, and published everything on my Web site. Then Ford could file a complaint against me," added Tena.
Well, you see, with a physical object like a car, minor variances in materials and manufacturing can lead to random defects showing up in any specific vehicle.
With software, unless the media it came on is damaged, it is unlikely that the version that you bought is different from the others sitting next to it on the shelf. Binary copies are exact copies.
The analogy also doesn't hold because it isn't like "opening the hood" (though I wonder why you'd open the hood to inspect the brakes, but I digress) and taking a look. It is more like he hooked up wires to the control box and did a packet scan on the computer signals in the computer.
I've been all over the U.S. and can understand the reluctance of the phone companies to provide service to some areas. There just isn't enough population in some areas to seriously consider putting in the wires to bring high speed internet to these areas.
Most of the U.S. is farmland. Very little of it is what you call "Blue States". And as anyone who studies these things can tell you, farmland doesn't have the population density of even relatively small cities. So you wonder why you don't get broadband out in the sticks? It's because you don't have enough neighbors.
It's one of the prices you pay for peace and quiet.
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Centrino is a chipset that includes a wifi device. If your home PC was equipped with a wifi card and the system ran some game the same with or without it, would it really be news?
How about if we could get Intel to provide some real drivers for Linux? The joke goes, Does it run Linux? but in this case, goddamn, I wish it did.
Well, with no apps, it will wither and die like everything else IBM tried to make that wasn't connected to Microsoft.
But seriously folks, this isn't about PC architecture. Unless the thing has an x86 emulation layer, it's dead in the water in regards to the PC market. Even Apple, with their much vaunted G-chips have to emulate the x86 hardware so that users can run their Windows programs.
It's a good idea, but it's more likely that Intel will develop something similar for the x86 than IBM will woo the PC market over to the Cell.
The problem is that you are trying to shoehorn your lifestyle choice into the real world of creators and users. You forget the one central tenet that pretty much defines the Western civilization. Creators are primarily motivated by money.
While there may be a few 'inventors' who sit in their basements thinking up inventions for the sake of having fun, the vast majority of creators who generate useful inventions work for real companies for real salaries. This is irrefutable.
But by taking away the ability to patent, and subsequently license, the invention (which you and your smelly friends would love to restrict) you remove any incentive for a company to innovate anything. If they can rip off the next guy who created something, then basically they are gaining knowledge for free. So why invent?
As for your industry which "is being held back by software patents", I defy you to name some area in which the state of the art is not the state of the art. Patents hold nothing back, as we all know that patents are fully open and can be incorporated into further designs based upon the base patent.
In addition, companies cross license patents all the time. When one company infringes on another company's patent, there is usually a pretty thick cross-pollinization of patent infringements across the board, so they agree to license patents to each other at no fee so they can both use the patents freely. This encourages the creation of new inventions, as companies would rather hold patents which can be cross-licensed than to sit on their ass and let every patent holder come and extract a ton of licensing fees.
Patents beget patents. Patents are for inventions, so if patents encourage invention, they must also necessarily encourage progress.
If you create something really novel, even if it is in software, why *shouldn't* you be able to get a patent on it?
These imports are usually not so bad. They are pretty cheap and if you can ignore the audience laughing and the occasional guy standing up and going to the bathroom, it's pretty much the same thing.
And who's to say that the NSA hasn't had this technology available to them for a while?
And if they have quantum encryption, their quantum decryption (code breaking) devices are probably a little more advanced than what those two companies *cough*flybynight*cough* are selling.
How much training is required to operate this thing reliably? With voice training, you can get any piece of software to ignore non-operator commands.
But I'm loath to sit out in the cold just to program the stupid thing in my sleigh.
How big a deal is it to take a fraction of a second to change the song anyway? We do it all the time with the radio, A/C, and speedometer already.
Looking at the literature, Linux and Unix in general seems to be designed to keep processes as lightweight as possible. OTOH, Windows processes are a little heavier and take longer to start up.
Then, OTOH, Windows threads are very lightweight compared to the equivalent thread model in Linux. Benchmarks have shown that in multi-process setups, Unix is heavily favored, but in multi-threaded setups Windows comes out on top.
When it comes to multi-processors, is there a theoretical advantage to using processes vs threads? Leaving out the Windows vs Linux debate for a second, how would an OS that implemented very efficient threads compare to one that implemented very efficient processes?
Would there be a difference?
If it can scale to 16 procs well, it will scale to 64 procs well.
Until you start talking about double that amount of procs, which is what Windows Server does these days, or hundreds of procs, which is what Cray has been doing for years, scalability at this small "scale" (haha) is not very impressive.
FreeBSD, the dying operating system that it is, still supports SMP on many procs much better than Linux. That's no one's fault, but jumping up and down saying how good Linux SMP is without looking at the competition makes you look a little foolish.
This is the work of IBM and the rest of the "services" oriented consultants. KPMG, Anderson, etc. A group of highly paid morons.
But in the long run, services is actually the driving force in computing. Products are fine, but upon those products is a whole ecology of companies providing support, enhancement, and integration of those products, tailored for each individual company.
In fact, this is what makes Open Source software so attractive. It sure as hell isn't good to be the company developing the software, but it is really good to be a service provider using that software. No longer do you need to pay for the software, you only need to pay for support.
I guess this could be a double edged sword for customers, though. It seems that there would be an incentive to keep OSS as obtuse and inscrutable as possible to maximize support income. This obviously wouldn't happen with a commercial product that has to prove its worth by being easier to use and generally better than the equivalent OSS package, just to compete.
End a brandname in 'x'. Lead it with an 'e'.
Those were the days...
Anyway, so what? So a few people have some problems with their ISP. This is New York we're talking about. The city is a hellhole anyway, what's a little more screwed up services going to do? Bring the city to a halt? Not likely.
The customers of course get what they deserve here. The only real ISPs that have any serious clout are run directly by the phone companies. All other ISPs run on the phone company lines at the good graces of the phone companies. That someone came along and hijacked the domain is not even a surprise.
It can correct its flightpath, but it can't react to obstacles. A cliff would kill it, as would a tree.
What would happen if we dropped something intrinsically warm like a slab of uranium on Titan
But that hash table is patented. It's a hell of a fight to get around a government-granted monopoly.
Then again, this is P2P we're talking about, so it's not like we're expecting them to close up shop because they are violating some ambiguous law.
P2P is here to stay. It's doubtful that this company will win in the long term because the technology is already out there used by millions of users. The genie, so to speak, is out of the bottle.
What amazes me is that Mars, a planet with a third the mass of Earth, has two moons whereas we only have one. Saturn has 35 moons! And two rings!
I wish Earth were as cool as that.
As for dropping loads onto other planets, I'm not so sure this is really a great idea. If there is life up there and we pop an Earth-bacteria near it, there's no telling how bad a disaster it would be for the life colonies on Titan. If anyone remembers in Star Trek 3 when a small worm was dropped on Genesis, it evolved into a huge mutant worm that attacked Kirk and McCoy. With no natural predators, a tiny bacterium could become the worst enemy of whatever life there is on that rocky moon.
Steve Jobs is perhaps the greatest computer company CEO of all time. His company puts out the best hardware available today. The software delivered by Apple is second to none (especially compared to Windows *yecch*)
I await each MacWorld for product introductions and can't get enough of the Mac rumor sites.
I own the original iPod, the iPod mini, and the iPod shuffle. It shuffles and doesn't need an LCD!
From the lowest level of Mac Mini to the highest level of XServe rack servers, Apple products are "insanely great". Steve Jobs is the one who brought this all together.
I'd like to meet the man in person one day. I've only had opportunity to see his live casts at MacWorld. What an opportunity to meet one of the most influential shapers of our computing experience today.
Without tactile feedback, waving fingers in the air and making funny gestures to do things is a waste of time and customers will hate it.
You can use your optical mouse without it touching the tabletop too, but it isn't at all a reasonable way to operate it.
The Hulk was such a smash hit. This is going to be 4 times better.
Nothing at all like a weaker version of The Incredibles.
Working with these two companies closely (lots of PSP and big screen TVs delivered this year), there is one thing that I've noticed with regards to these two companies.
Matsushita is the good guys. They license their technology out at very low prices, and if a competitor invents a similar technology, they are very unlikely to bring down the weight of their patent portfolio on them.
Sony, OTOH, is the typical portfolio protector. They are very difficult to work with because their tight-fistedness with patents and IP means that everything they do needs to be negotiated and agreements have to be made between many different IPR holders just to come up with a new product.
This is also why Matsushita (Panasonic, if you didn't know) is almost universally loved and Sony continues to put out shoddy merchandise.
"Earth in the Balance"
... and so on and so forth.
While he obviously meant it to mean that Earth is somehow delicately balanced and any movement in one direction or another will topple the climate for the worse, the fact of the matter is that the Earth has a natural environmental cycle that balances itself out over time.
So thousands of years ago there was an ice age followed by the long warm age we live in now. Before that there were other ice ages and warm ages. We put sulfur into the atmosphere, it comes down as acid rain, but somewhere else the sky is blue and the birds are singing. Just because we "damage" one area does not mean that we cannot improve another area.
Even in the case of climate warming, an increase in warmth leads to higher oceanic evaporation which leads to more cloud cover which counteracts the heating caused by the Sun (which is far greater a heat source than our piddly output) which then leads to global cooling again which leads to less oceanic evaporation which leads to less cloud cover which leads to
There is a problem with polluting because it makes our environment unlivable, much live a fish tank can't support aquatic life if there isn't a certain amount of care put towards keeping it clean. But on the large scale, global warming is one of those things that is coming, we can't do anything about it, and will go away whether we are here or not by that time.
I just installed an 800Gb hard disk in my system. I have a gigabyte worth of webmail space (more than that, if you consider that I can send myself gmail invitations). Storage is, as they say in the vernacular, very inexpensive.
Even in cameras where storage is tight, the bounds of memory is expanding all the time. Whereas a couple years ago the average storage card size was a measly 64Mb, today we are talking about gigabytes of storage memory inside our *cameras*!
So let's say we can squeeze another 30% of pictures onto a card. Does that really help us? Not really, if you consider that the compression itself rides atop JPEG compression and that computing time needs to be accounted for.
Currently, the fastest continuous shooting digital camera (the Nikon D2X) can only take 4 shots in a row before its memory buffers get full and the whole camera becomes useless. Compare that with the 9 shots per second F5 and you can see that the speed of shooting isn't going to cut it for digital cameras.
We need a compression method that is lossless, not one that creates compact files. Space is cheap, CPU cycles aren't.
The mass of these stars must be outrageous. Could it be possible that they are already black holes that we are able to see only because we are already within the event horizon of the stars' gravitational pulls?
Though many years late, Windows XP is what WinNT4.0 should have been, much less NT3.51.
Fully featured, responsive, and with the new security built into SP2, practically invulnerable to virii or hacker intrusion. (God help you if you want to run with the firewall down, but that goes for anything, don't it?)
The upshot of this is that anyone still down in the dark ages with NT4 ought to seriously think about upgrading to XP. With an upgrade package, it will cost a whole lot less to deploy as all the devices in NT4 are already supported under XP, so there's no need to worry about hardware support like on other operating systems.
Also good news for Microsoft, they can finally pull some of those developers off that project and put them to work getting XP and Longhorn more bulletproof.
This is an agreement, a policy, a promise, anything you want to call it.
But it is not a contract.
"To use an analogy, it's a little bit as if Ford was selling cars with defective brakes. If I realised that there was a problem, opened the hood and took a few pictures to prove it, and published everything on my Web site. Then Ford could file a complaint against me," added Tena.
Well, you see, with a physical object like a car, minor variances in materials and manufacturing can lead to random defects showing up in any specific vehicle.
With software, unless the media it came on is damaged, it is unlikely that the version that you bought is different from the others sitting next to it on the shelf. Binary copies are exact copies.
The analogy also doesn't hold because it isn't like "opening the hood" (though I wonder why you'd open the hood to inspect the brakes, but I digress) and taking a look. It is more like he hooked up wires to the control box and did a packet scan on the computer signals in the computer.
I've been all over the U.S. and can understand the reluctance of the phone companies to provide service to some areas. There just isn't enough population in some areas to seriously consider putting in the wires to bring high speed internet to these areas.
Most of the U.S. is farmland. Very little of it is what you call "Blue States". And as anyone who studies these things can tell you, farmland doesn't have the population density of even relatively small cities. So you wonder why you don't get broadband out in the sticks? It's because you don't have enough neighbors.
It's one of the prices you pay for peace and quiet.