Well if the player has a composite or s-video output, you can hook it up through the RF converter that came with your atari, though for S-Video you'd have to get a simple S-Video -> Composite cable.
A side note about RF converters - Radio shack used to sell such a composite to RF converter for around $5, but as soon as DVD players took off, and they didn't have RF out ("in from antenna, out to TV") like VCRs, they put the RF converter into a nice molded box and started charging $30. Demand went way up and so did price, for an item likely to be used with only the oldest TVs without composite video input. They effectively price gouged their poorest customers, ouch - but I sure bet it was a cash cow.
Anyway, if there is no composite or s-video out on the new players, you'll need a video processor that has analog out, which should cost, oh I dunno, at least a $1000 bucks. Such a processor would replicate a lot of the circuitry in the player, but not being mass produced and likely designed for some wider application, it would cost a bundle. It would have to decode the digital stream, downconvert it, and then modulate it into analog, and then you would have to feed it through an RF converter to a channel on your TV.
There are too many TVs that still don't have digital inputs though, so expect the initial players to have analog out. Something like the PS3 especially wouldn't want to exclude such a large part of the market. Its just not something companies see a need to advertise as there is nothing special or new about it.
You can't take a competitors recipe and hope to change it "just enough" to make it look like your own. Like recipes GUIs involve a balance.
If your making coleslaw decide to cut the amount of mayonaise in half, your probably going to want to cut back on the sugar and vinegar too, unless you want to end up with pickled vegetables instead of coleslaw. This requires understanding what makes coleslaw enjoyable. Someone who has chanced upon coleslaw for the first time and is trying to imitate _and_ tweak it, just so that it doesn't taste too much like the original, will probably end up making something entirely different.
Same goes for GUI design, you can't slap competitor's ideas in there without understanding what made original recipe great, plain and simple. Market surveys may say people are interested in a competing product X, but without an understanding of why, you can only end up with a superficial and inferior imitation.
Microsoft has accelerated what appears to be their old GUI with GPU hardware and the result looks smooth and slick, but this only makes the old thorns look more enticing. It's amazing how much they pigeon-hole into the start menu, when most of the time users go straight for "Programs". Games, Music, and Pictures? Set Program Access and Defaults? Help and Support? Computer?!?! Even Programs is not categorized in terms of user goals, or sometimes not even even by application name, but by meaningless brands.
Like a good chef, MS management needs a vision to work towards, not a mish-mash of market surveys that say what to put in next. I bet there will be a link for MS' new blogging service on the Longhorn desktop, but little UI coherency implicit in the design. That starts with the OS and extends into the applications, where accomplishing most basic user goals should be implicit in the design - that means avoiding unnecessary clutter, and sticking to things that the user will find immediately useful in a given context.
But no, not for Longhorn, which will probably be more like a french onion soup without the sweet onions to temper the hardiness of the beef - with maybe a candybar thrown in there for good measure. Edible or even not bad, but definitely lacking some things and having too much of others.
So his network clients can be port scanned, but the servers are in a DMZ that must be authenticated into. The advantage is that a user can now run all kinds of specialized apps that need open ports, and the admin can avoid micromanaging regulations based on specific client needs, but it opens a whole other can of worms.
Maintaining a 100% secure client OS and specialized applications aside, if a user were to download a malicious program or visit a malicious page with a new IE exploit, couldn't his authenticated computer act as a gateway to the DMZ portions? But I guess this would happen in the case of a firewall anyway.
Now the thing is if the user takes advantage of this and starts running applications that open ports, he no longer has to be lured into running a malicious program, he just needs to be running an exploitable program. It seems that this would make it easier for an attacker to compromise a pre-determined target, simply by scanning around rather than luring an actual person.
Of course the upside would be simplified management, because certain applications that were considered too "fast and loose" before are now ok. But systems aren't so secure that once you pry into even a lower privileged client, that you won't be able to somehow escalate those privileges and access the DMZ server farm. As soon as you break into a client, local exploits come into the playbook, and it only gets easier at that point, unless your local OS and internal network authentication are uncrackable.
That would be a tall claim, as any user input into the network authentication system can be recorded and played back via a locally compromised OS. From there, authenticate into the DMZ and look for local server exploits. Am I missing something?
I realize he is weighing the risks and benefits, but the risks here seem too high, especially with users allowed to run network applications that take inbound connections. Any compromise there could open the machine and network to the world of local exploits.
Most users I've noticed are perplexed with explorer and its interface. They know specific hierarchies like My Documents and Program Files, but as soon as you drop them into an unfamiliar shell hierarchy, they aren't sure "what to click on" or what in general is possible.
A new interface based in windows shell may be organized the same as others but is functionally different, and people end up looking for things that they are "allowed" to click, like they might an exe in Program Files, or a doc in My Documents. It is far from intuitive, as these custom hierarchies don't necessarily order things intuitively and even when they do, functionality varies from object to object whether you click, double click, or drag and drop.
Functionality of different actions should be implicit in the design, so they can be inferred by those unfamiliar with what actions are possible in a particular application context. Now if windows made it standard that right clicking on an object should not only bring up object-specific options, but also describe simply what drag and click operations are available with respect to that object, then these interfaces might not be such a mystery.
People aren't that dumb, they'll learn given context sensitive documentation like this. Finding their way to documentation is otherwise too frustrating, as it is often mired in a web of unfamiliar material. The frustration the average joe faces at a PC is enough to make him learn, if given a more accessible way to find the immediately relevant sources. He doesn't need to understand why the whole damn system works to find one particular solution, he'll generalize that with enough access to particular solutions.
...Microsoft serious about all this other shit it never came up with, but will gladly "innovate" on.
Nigga please. I been told this shit a million times. When they gain the foresight to come up with a good idea from it's foundations, then I'll trust them to innovate on that core. These people don't understand anything, they just take ideas and self-righteously claim an understanding they don't have. That understanding comes from surveys that hardly depict what the framers of that technology intended, but what joe blo understands of it, and that's where innovation comes to mean mediocrity. They need real visionaries, not superfical ones like Ballmer, who doesn't have a clue what the underlying technologies he is working with are truly capable of.
Well, my source is my memory, but I dug up this article from The Register. To quote:
Of course there was no reason for this. Brad Silverberg, the Microsoft exec who finally left the company last week, but who in an earlier life had been responsible for Windows 95, emailed Allchin on 27 September 1991: 'after IBM announces support for dr-dos at comdex, it's a small step for them to also announce they will be selling netware lite, maybe sometime soon thereafter. but count on it. We don't know precisely what ibm is going to announce. my best hunch is that they will offer dr-dos as the preferred solution for 286, os 2 2.0 for 386. they will also probably continue to offer msdos at $165 (drdos for $99). drdos has problems running windows today, and I assume will have more problems in the future." Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future.:-)'"
There is also talk in the article of the specific parts in Windows 3.1 where the incompatibilities were introduced.
I believe one facet of this case was Microsoft's intentional breaking of Win 3.1 under Dr. DOS, which had a decent marketshare and better product at the time. They wouldn't be out-designed so they decided to play the bully. Like a kid who wants something so bad he takes it when no one is looking.
Good for IBM, though the market has still not recovered - but yet we've got these goons in Washington taking fat checks to keep the monopoly going strong. This is no small problem, and it is only going to get worst without some corrective action from congress.
For all of you taking about the branch prediction issue AnandTech has brought to light, that is in light of modelling physics in the game world. That can be pretty chaotic all the collisions and what not, but that is not what I am talking about.
I am talking about extracting data from streams of user input. Not modelling physical consequences in the game world, which does involve lots of branching.
Imagine an SPE taking raw video and running a tight algorithm to detect particular movements. This could be an incredible form of control. The PS3 could for example analyze video of say someone playing a fake set of drums and synthesize the music in real-time.
Now imagine another SPE taking that video feed + an EEG feed, and independent of the algorithm to read the player video input, studying it for correlations with respect to when the user makes a mistake with respect to its world, the game rules. It could use those inferences to screw with the player!
The control of neural response should be pretty rapid with respect to changing game factors. You would have to force the computer to make false inferences the way you try to fool a real human player.
I bet if such an EEG input device came about there would be some debate over whether to let console "condition" kids at this level.
7 SPEs for vector processing = bayesian learning goodness
Those 7 SPEs with their bandwidth will be able to take inputs like video, sound, even EEG data from the brain. Combine this with bayesian learning techniques and the machine will infer what factors in the raw data correlate with its advantage in the game world. Imagine a game that can sense your fear with the right "helment" perhiperal containing active electrodes.
All the people who are saying SONY/IBM wasted die space on the SPEs don't realize why they called it the CELL.
It acts like the human brain.
The SPEs will be used for inference. Much like freud described our ego, the cognitive part of our brains.
The PowerPC chip to model the game world and to work toward certain ends with respect to the game, based on results inferred from data going through the SPEs. This sounds like the behavioral part of the brain. What freud called the id, if you are looking for a biological analog.
I just though of something else. A cell powered robot would be incredibly powerful. With the right algorithms to recognize critical feedback for a particular task, the cell could allow the robot to respond quickly to complex stimuli, filtering and focusing on the few elements which are relevant to the task. Think of a robot capable of competitevely playing a physical sport, given the right "muscles".
Also, while AI and physics performance are limited in some respects, as I mentioned in the last post, I just realized the cell could come up with some neat AI and physics by recognizing patterns in human players imitating them, through fast computation involving bayesian logic. This should be incredibly effective if done right, as the possible counter-moves could be based in some sort of self-refining, relationally accessed, and pre-calculated data set, cutting down on branch predictiction intensive processing by the PPE unit.
Those SPEs will be pretty useful for massaging and distilling large streams of data, which should make the cell great at tasks like video recognition and real-time market analysis. The cell may not be that revolutionary as parallelism has been touted in academia for a long time now, but the DSP like capabilities + parallelism will make the cell much more capable of responding quickly to complex sensory input than commodity hardware currently allows.
I picture the PS3 using a camera as a very flexible form of input to allow for more creative game design. Super-fast compression and decompression also come to mind, which could be useful for more complex and fluid internet play.
Recent articles have said the cell will have some hickups with physics and AI, because those tasks benefit from branch prediction, but this should be made up for by the fact that the cell will be able to recognize input at a far more human level than present technology affords.
Thanks for the lengthy and well reasoned response. I wasn't aware of the legal grey area with respect to cracks. I suppose if there were a bona fide contract rather than an EULA saying that this implementation can only be used in certain ways, it would be more enforceable.
I think a lot of posters are getting mixed up in the legal vs. contractual intellectual property issues here. If an EULA is no less "sneaky" than a regular contract, then why in principle should it be ignored?
The only explanation I see is that at the base of these arguments justifying the cracking of crippleware is a thinly veiled implication that copyright itself is an abomination. One must ignore copyright to justify this behavior, because one needs copyright in the first place to dole out limited versions of those rights via contract.
Those who take this route must realize that even the GPL is a contract based in the fact that someone originally owns copyright to the work. It does not transfer ownership into the public demain but rather grants specific freedoms on the basis that certain usage conditions are met. Basically, if you don't like the rules, don't use it, but feel free to go write your own implementation.
So next time some company "borrows" GPLed code and doesn't release the code changes they incorporated into their binary, think about how instrumental copyright is in enforcing GPL.
And people, please don't be fascist and jump on me with abusive responses. I am only exploring ideas, not advocating the enforcement of them. I myself am not convinced of the need for copyright, but am not studied enough to draw firm conclusions. The point is to spark open and reasoned discussion in the face of doubt.
Do the slashdot editors think that all information should be considered like the information in radio waves? That once the information comes your way, you can do with it as you please? This would view would make cracking a shareware program perfectly ethical, if we are to believe the slashdot editors are ethical.
No price anywhere. Can it unseat the competition? Who knows?
The use of Honda's unrelated Type-R performance label tells me they are appealing to quality by association to something they deserve no merit for.
The review site talks up the need for a beefy PSU, but shows no methodical testing whatsoever.
Seems to me the editors are a bit detached from if not journalistic integrity, at least some base duty they have to give us relevant stories. This is a clue to the sort of fuzzy logic is used when choosing submissions. Choices seem related more to pandering than genuine identification with the interests of slashdot readers.
No wonder they got rid of John Katz, lest it be too obvious. He writes for MSN now.
Microsoft has real problems and here is why - they approach the market reactively, "innovating" by relying on surveys, focus groups, market analysis, whatever you want to call it. To sum it up -
if (no complaint)
stick to status quo else
fix complaint
The problem is that complaints are usually symptoms of larger problems, and by tacking on simple fixes, Microsoft usually just ends up with a convoluted framework for whatever product they happen to be fixing.
Your average joe doesn't understand the potential of new technology, he is just reacting to the new-fangled features you just put in. This is why technology design by survey fails miserably. You need someone who fully understands what is at the edge of current technology, and who can creatively apply it in ways that enhance the average joe's life. I don't get the impression that Ballmer gets this idea. In fact, I have heard through the grapevine that the problem is ingrained in Microsoft company culture, and no one challenges it, because the company is conservatively micro-managed from the top.
Microsoft gets away with this model because the average joe is unaware of innovative concepts while they are new, before Microsoft has copied them. But the software remains clunky, akin to cars of the old days, where you cranked the thing up by hand and put up with the smell, noise, and the breakdowns - because there was still a tangible benefit. People thought this was the nature of cars back then, and accepted it because they couldn't see any better. Better engineering will eventually make computer systems easier to use and more reliable, analagous to what the Japanese did to the auto industry. Aside from good design the Japanese automakers popularized the use of statistics to test their components to make sure the performed reliably, carefully revising materials and design based on what worked, rather than going with the what was most available on the market. The computer industry could use that same sense of perfection, followed through with design by people who understand both people and the techonology, and of course lots of unit testing.
Microsoft hasn't re-invented itself as management would like shareholders to think, it has only re-hashed itself into something superficially better in order to avoid any more slip. Until the old guard leaves, that isn't likely to happen. This can be witnessed in the company's financials - growth continues, but is slowing in a growing market, despite a monopoly. If you want to make some dough, invest in some Apple stock and watch Microsoft sink in the long run - since it is pretty clear that they will be sticking to their guns with Ballmer. I've never owned a Mac but I've used a few and I see them as the next best thing, especially with the affordable mini model out, a good architecture to boot, and style that drops Microsoft right on its ass.
A "community blog" you say? Who came up with this term? Sounds like something the mass media latched onto to ensure ratings continuity with the already hyped up topic of blogging.
A blog is a personal public journal.
Slashcode sites facilitate public discourse, among many members, on an ongoing stream of stories and topics.
Forums facilitate public discourse, among many members, on a mostly static set of major topics.
So where is the relation between the later and the former two? Should all sites that let individuals post messages publicly, in any form, be considered some form of blogging? I am curious who first coined this "community blog" term. I have a feeling that most people who have participated in these sorts of sites, before the advent of blogging, don't see them as blogging sites. So why let the term be pushed on us? I for one don't want to be called a blogger in the blogosphere. The natures and origins of blogs vs. slashcode vs. forums vs. even usenet seem to be quite different to me. Thankfully no one has called usenet a blog yet, but who knows. The use of the word blog strikes me as a form of stereotyping that I try to avoid. After all, content is what matters over format.
How densely is the data stacked on the Z-Axis, and how much of an improvement in density is this over the usual systems? And what is the underlying technology that allows such stacking?
These are important technical questions that are glossed over in the article. They mention 23 gigabytes per square inch by 2007, but little more. In fact it reads like a press release/product announcement. This barely qualifies as news for nerds.
I don't think he means that we should use FPGAs to do things that dedicated hardware would be much better for. FPGAs would allow today's computers to perform the tasks of many dedicated pieces of hardware, not quite at their level, but fast enough for enough applications to make it worthwhile. Increased versatility my friend, that is the reason.
An extra reason for the slashdot crowd would be the open source potential. Wide availability would attract developers to open source FPGA projects and could lead to some neat hardware in time. Including hardware that might not have been developed otherwise, as companies are reluctant to gamble on new technologies that don't have a clearly forseeable and sizeable market.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if the player has a composite or s-video output, you can hook it up through the RF converter that came with your atari, though for S-Video you'd have to get a simple S-Video -> Composite cable.
A side note about RF converters - Radio shack used to sell such a composite to RF converter for around $5, but as soon as DVD players took off, and they didn't have RF out ("in from antenna, out to TV") like VCRs, they put the RF converter into a nice molded box and started charging $30. Demand went way up and so did price, for an item likely to be used with only the oldest TVs without composite video input. They effectively price gouged their poorest customers, ouch - but I sure bet it was a cash cow.
Anyway, if there is no composite or s-video out on the new players, you'll need a video processor that has analog out, which should cost, oh I dunno, at least a $1000 bucks. Such a processor would replicate a lot of the circuitry in the player, but not being mass produced and likely designed for some wider application, it would cost a bundle. It would have to decode the digital stream, downconvert it, and then modulate it into analog, and then you would have to feed it through an RF converter to a channel on your TV.
There are too many TVs that still don't have digital inputs though, so expect the initial players to have analog out. Something like the PS3 especially wouldn't want to exclude such a large part of the market. Its just not something companies see a need to advertise as there is nothing special or new about it.
At least you can change them.
r s_defeat_fingerprint_sensors/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/16/gummi_bea
You can't take a competitors recipe and hope to change it "just enough" to make it look like your own. Like recipes GUIs involve a balance.
If your making coleslaw decide to cut the amount of mayonaise in half, your probably going to want to cut back on the sugar and vinegar too, unless you want to end up with pickled vegetables instead of coleslaw. This requires understanding what makes coleslaw enjoyable. Someone who has chanced upon coleslaw for the first time and is trying to imitate _and_ tweak it, just so that it doesn't taste too much like the original, will probably end up making something entirely different.
Same goes for GUI design, you can't slap competitor's ideas in there without understanding what made original recipe great, plain and simple. Market surveys may say people are interested in a competing product X, but without an understanding of why, you can only end up with a superficial and inferior imitation.
Microsoft has accelerated what appears to be their old GUI with GPU hardware and the result looks smooth and slick, but this only makes the old thorns look more enticing. It's amazing how much they pigeon-hole into the start menu, when most of the time users go straight for "Programs". Games, Music, and Pictures? Set Program Access and Defaults? Help and Support? Computer?!?! Even Programs is not categorized in terms of user goals, or sometimes not even even by application name, but by meaningless brands.
Like a good chef, MS management needs a vision to work towards, not a mish-mash of market surveys that say what to put in next. I bet there will be a link for MS' new blogging service on the Longhorn desktop, but little UI coherency implicit in the design. That starts with the OS and extends into the applications, where accomplishing most basic user goals should be implicit in the design - that means avoiding unnecessary clutter, and sticking to things that the user will find immediately useful in a given context.
But no, not for Longhorn, which will probably be more like a french onion soup without the sweet onions to temper the hardiness of the beef - with maybe a candybar thrown in there for good measure. Edible or even not bad, but definitely lacking some things and having too much of others.
So his network clients can be port scanned, but the servers are in a DMZ that must be authenticated into. The advantage is that a user can now run all kinds of specialized apps that need open ports, and the admin can avoid micromanaging regulations based on specific client needs, but it opens a whole other can of worms.
Maintaining a 100% secure client OS and specialized applications aside, if a user were to download a malicious program or visit a malicious page with a new IE exploit, couldn't his authenticated computer act as a gateway to the DMZ portions? But I guess this would happen in the case of a firewall anyway.
Now the thing is if the user takes advantage of this and starts running applications that open ports, he no longer has to be lured into running a malicious program, he just needs to be running an exploitable program. It seems that this would make it easier for an attacker to compromise a pre-determined target, simply by scanning around rather than luring an actual person.
Of course the upside would be simplified management, because certain applications that were considered too "fast and loose" before are now ok. But systems aren't so secure that once you pry into even a lower privileged client, that you won't be able to somehow escalate those privileges and access the DMZ server farm. As soon as you break into a client, local exploits come into the playbook, and it only gets easier at that point, unless your local OS and internal network authentication are uncrackable.
That would be a tall claim, as any user input into the network authentication system can be recorded and played back via a locally compromised OS. From there, authenticate into the DMZ and look for local server exploits. Am I missing something?
I realize he is weighing the risks and benefits, but the risks here seem too high, especially with users allowed to run network applications that take inbound connections. Any compromise there could open the machine and network to the world of local exploits.
Click the link in his comment, he blatantly stole it and advertised that he did, but still got modded up.
Most users I've noticed are perplexed with explorer and its interface. They know specific hierarchies like My Documents and Program Files, but as soon as you drop them into an unfamiliar shell hierarchy, they aren't sure "what to click on" or what in general is possible.
A new interface based in windows shell may be organized the same as others but is functionally different, and people end up looking for things that they are "allowed" to click, like they might an exe in Program Files, or a doc in My Documents. It is far from intuitive, as these custom hierarchies don't necessarily order things intuitively and even when they do, functionality varies from object to object whether you click, double click, or drag and drop.
Functionality of different actions should be implicit in the design, so they can be inferred by those unfamiliar with what actions are possible in a particular application context. Now if windows made it standard that right clicking on an object should not only bring up object-specific options, but also describe simply what drag and click operations are available with respect to that object, then these interfaces might not be such a mystery.
People aren't that dumb, they'll learn given context sensitive documentation like this. Finding their way to documentation is otherwise too frustrating, as it is often mired in a web of unfamiliar material. The frustration the average joe faces at a PC is enough to make him learn, if given a more accessible way to find the immediately relevant sources. He doesn't need to understand why the whole damn system works to find one particular solution, he'll generalize that with enough access to particular solutions.
...Microsoft serious about all this other shit it never came up with, but will gladly "innovate" on.
Nigga please. I been told this shit a million times. When they gain the foresight to come up with a good idea from it's foundations, then I'll trust them to innovate on that core. These people don't understand anything, they just take ideas and self-righteously claim an understanding they don't have. That understanding comes from surveys that hardly depict what the framers of that technology intended, but what joe blo understands of it, and that's where innovation comes to mean mediocrity. They need real visionaries, not superfical ones like Ballmer, who doesn't have a clue what the underlying technologies he is working with are truly capable of.
There is also talk in the article of the specific parts in Windows 3.1 where the incompatibilities were introduced.
I believe one facet of this case was Microsoft's intentional breaking of Win 3.1 under Dr. DOS, which had a decent marketshare and better product at the time. They wouldn't be out-designed so they decided to play the bully. Like a kid who wants something so bad he takes it when no one is looking.
Good for IBM, though the market has still not recovered - but yet we've got these goons in Washington taking fat checks to keep the monopoly going strong. This is no small problem, and it is only going to get worst without some corrective action from congress.
For all of you taking about the branch prediction issue AnandTech has brought to light, that is in light of modelling physics in the game world. That can be pretty chaotic all the collisions and what not, but that is not what I am talking about.
I am talking about extracting data from streams of user input. Not modelling physical consequences in the game world, which does involve lots of branching.
Imagine an SPE taking raw video and running a tight algorithm to detect particular movements. This could be an incredible form of control. The PS3 could for example analyze video of say someone playing a fake set of drums and synthesize the music in real-time.
Now imagine another SPE taking that video feed + an EEG feed, and independent of the algorithm to read the player video input, studying it for correlations with respect to when the user makes a mistake with respect to its world, the game rules. It could use those inferences to screw with the player!
The control of neural response should be pretty rapid with respect to changing game factors. You would have to force the computer to make false inferences the way you try to fool a real human player.
I bet if such an EEG input device came about there would be some debate over whether to let console "condition" kids at this level.
Repeat after me.
7 SPEs for vector processing = bayesian learning goodness
Those 7 SPEs with their bandwidth will be able to take inputs like video, sound, even EEG data from the brain. Combine this with bayesian learning techniques and the machine will infer what factors in the raw data correlate with its advantage in the game world. Imagine a game that can sense your fear with the right "helment" perhiperal containing active electrodes.
All the people who are saying SONY/IBM wasted die space on the SPEs don't realize why they called it the CELL.
It acts like the human brain.
The SPEs will be used for inference. Much like freud described our ego, the cognitive part of our brains.
The PowerPC chip to model the game world and to work toward certain ends with respect to the game, based on results inferred from data going through the SPEs. This sounds like the behavioral part of the brain. What freud called the id, if you are looking for a biological analog.
Hrmmm... Just some thoughts.
...your getting shit on all the time?
I just though of something else. A cell powered robot would be incredibly powerful. With the right algorithms to recognize critical feedback for a particular task, the cell could allow the robot to respond quickly to complex stimuli, filtering and focusing on the few elements which are relevant to the task. Think of a robot capable of competitevely playing a physical sport, given the right "muscles".
Also, while AI and physics performance are limited in some respects, as I mentioned in the last post, I just realized the cell could come up with some neat AI and physics by recognizing patterns in human players imitating them, through fast computation involving bayesian logic. This should be incredibly effective if done right, as the possible counter-moves could be based in some sort of self-refining, relationally accessed, and pre-calculated data set, cutting down on branch predictiction intensive processing by the PPE unit.
Those SPEs will be pretty useful for massaging and distilling large streams of data, which should make the cell great at tasks like video recognition and real-time market analysis. The cell may not be that revolutionary as parallelism has been touted in academia for a long time now, but the DSP like capabilities + parallelism will make the cell much more capable of responding quickly to complex sensory input than commodity hardware currently allows.
I picture the PS3 using a camera as a very flexible form of input to allow for more creative game design. Super-fast compression and decompression also come to mind, which could be useful for more complex and fluid internet play.
Recent articles have said the cell will have some hickups with physics and AI, because those tasks benefit from branch prediction, but this should be made up for by the fact that the cell will be able to recognize input at a far more human level than present technology affords.
Thanks for the lengthy and well reasoned response. I wasn't aware of the legal grey area with respect to cracks. I suppose if there were a bona fide contract rather than an EULA saying that this implementation can only be used in certain ways, it would be more enforceable.
I think a lot of posters are getting mixed up in the legal vs. contractual intellectual property issues here. If an EULA is no less "sneaky" than a regular contract, then why in principle should it be ignored?
The only explanation I see is that at the base of these arguments justifying the cracking of crippleware is a thinly veiled implication that copyright itself is an abomination. One must ignore copyright to justify this behavior, because one needs copyright in the first place to dole out limited versions of those rights via contract.
Those who take this route must realize that even the GPL is a contract based in the fact that someone originally owns copyright to the work. It does not transfer ownership into the public demain but rather grants specific freedoms on the basis that certain usage conditions are met. Basically, if you don't like the rules, don't use it, but feel free to go write your own implementation.
So next time some company "borrows" GPLed code and doesn't release the code changes they incorporated into their binary, think about how instrumental copyright is in enforcing GPL.
And people, please don't be fascist and jump on me with abusive responses. I am only exploring ideas, not advocating the enforcement of them. I myself am not convinced of the need for copyright, but am not studied enough to draw firm conclusions. The point is to spark open and reasoned discussion in the face of doubt.
Do the slashdot editors think that all information should be considered like the information in radio waves? That once the information comes your way, you can do with it as you please? This would view would make cracking a shareware program perfectly ethical, if we are to believe the slashdot editors are ethical.
How about legality? Any lawyers reading this?
No price anywhere. Can it unseat the competition? Who knows?
The use of Honda's unrelated Type-R performance label tells me they are appealing to quality by association to something they deserve no merit for.
The review site talks up the need for a beefy PSU, but shows no methodical testing whatsoever.
Seems to me the editors are a bit detached from if not journalistic integrity, at least some base duty they have to give us relevant stories. This is a clue to the sort of fuzzy logic is used when choosing submissions. Choices seem related more to pandering than genuine identification with the interests of slashdot readers.
No wonder they got rid of John Katz, lest it be too obvious. He writes for MSN now.
I knew it was the millenium falcon! That was so worth the $10.
...and then throw that shit out unless it tastes like a chocolate candy bar.
Microsoft has real problems and here is why - they approach the market reactively, "innovating" by relying on surveys, focus groups, market analysis, whatever you want to call it. To sum it up -
if (no complaint)
stick to status quo
else
fix complaint
The problem is that complaints are usually symptoms of larger problems, and by tacking on simple fixes, Microsoft usually just ends up with a convoluted framework for whatever product they happen to be fixing.
Your average joe doesn't understand the potential of new technology, he is just reacting to the new-fangled features you just put in. This is why technology design by survey fails miserably. You need someone who fully understands what is at the edge of current technology, and who can creatively apply it in ways that enhance the average joe's life. I don't get the impression that Ballmer gets this idea. In fact, I have heard through the grapevine that the problem is ingrained in Microsoft company culture, and no one challenges it, because the company is conservatively micro-managed from the top.
Microsoft gets away with this model because the average joe is unaware of innovative concepts while they are new, before Microsoft has copied them. But the software remains clunky, akin to cars of the old days, where you cranked the thing up by hand and put up with the smell, noise, and the breakdowns - because there was still a tangible benefit. People thought this was the nature of cars back then, and accepted it because they couldn't see any better. Better engineering will eventually make computer systems easier to use and more reliable, analagous to what the Japanese did to the auto industry. Aside from good design the Japanese automakers popularized the use of statistics to test their components to make sure the performed reliably, carefully revising materials and design based on what worked, rather than going with the what was most available on the market. The computer industry could use that same sense of perfection, followed through with design by people who understand both people and the techonology, and of course lots of unit testing.
Microsoft hasn't re-invented itself as management would like shareholders to think, it has only re-hashed itself into something superficially better in order to avoid any more slip. Until the old guard leaves, that isn't likely to happen. This can be witnessed in the company's financials - growth continues, but is slowing in a growing market, despite a monopoly. If you want to make some dough, invest in some Apple stock and watch Microsoft sink in the long run - since it is pretty clear that they will be sticking to their guns with Ballmer. I've never owned a Mac but I've used a few and I see them as the next best thing, especially with the affordable mini model out, a good architecture to boot, and style that drops Microsoft right on its ass.
A "community blog" you say? Who came up with this term? Sounds like something the mass media latched onto to ensure ratings continuity with the already hyped up topic of blogging.
A blog is a personal public journal.
Slashcode sites facilitate public discourse, among many members, on an ongoing stream of stories and topics.
Forums facilitate public discourse, among many members, on a mostly static set of major topics.
So where is the relation between the later and the former two? Should all sites that let individuals post messages publicly, in any form, be considered some form of blogging? I am curious who first coined this "community blog" term. I have a feeling that most people who have participated in these sorts of sites, before the advent of blogging, don't see them as blogging sites. So why let the term be pushed on us? I for one don't want to be called a blogger in the blogosphere. The natures and origins of blogs vs. slashcode vs. forums vs. even usenet seem to be quite different to me. Thankfully no one has called usenet a blog yet, but who knows. The use of the word blog strikes me as a form of stereotyping that I try to avoid. After all, content is what matters over format.
Just make a RAID array of 3D hard disks.
How densely is the data stacked on the Z-Axis, and how much of an improvement in density is this over the usual systems? And what is the underlying technology that allows such stacking?
These are important technical questions that are glossed over in the article. They mention 23 gigabytes per square inch by 2007, but little more. In fact it reads like a press release/product announcement. This barely qualifies as news for nerds.
I don't think he means that we should use FPGAs to do things that dedicated hardware would be much better for. FPGAs would allow today's computers to perform the tasks of many dedicated pieces of hardware, not quite at their level, but fast enough for enough applications to make it worthwhile. Increased versatility my friend, that is the reason.
An extra reason for the slashdot crowd would be the open source potential. Wide availability would attract developers to open source FPGA projects and could lead to some neat hardware in time. Including hardware that might not have been developed otherwise, as companies are reluctant to gamble on new technologies that don't have a clearly forseeable and sizeable market.
...the bear wouldn't look anything like this, now would it?