If I recall correctly, in the early to mid 90's, when the HDTV definition was being hashed out, it required $50,000 worth of computer equipment to decode a full-blown HDTV signal.
Look for it to be built into an Intel chip in a few years, and handhelds a few years after that. I wouldn't worry about this particular video version.
> The analogy I like is who has more light: if
> everyone 100 light bulbs but all mine are 100 watt
> and everyone elses are 60 watt,
It's interesting you bring up light bulbs since they are in exactly the same boat as processors.
Bulb companies now compete on power useage, so the old 100 watters, for example, now only use 89 watts or something like that, producing the same amount of light. Back in the good old days, wattage was more or less synonymous, much like Hz was in processor chips (even between Intel and Motorola for Apple.) Now it isn't.
Bulbs have an easy-to-use brightness measurement, lumens, that they all brag about on their labelling, now.
AMD is (should) do a similar thing, just use "P IV MHz equivalency" as the number.
I would like to add that, just because the vast majority of the hoi polloi spend a lot of time on the big corporate sites doesn't bode ill for anything. They're the same people that make the vast majority of daytime TV be soap operas, game shows, and trashy talk shows.
If someone would just get an easy-to-use micropayments system going then maybe small sites could survive a little more. Like a small button on the welcome page that said "click here to pay $1.00 to have 1 year's access." Click, bam, in, no worries, no hassles, no credit card entry crap each time, etc. etc. etc.
Perhaps he just forgot to check the "No Score +1 Bonus" box. I forget once in awhile. (It would be nice to have an option on your personal page to make it default to checked.)
> Crocodile Dundee is going come to my home, rip my
> hands off my keyboard and carry me back to aussie
> land on his back.
Crocodile Dundee has his hands full with legal troubles over that giant pigsticker (self-defense? Irrelevant.)
Also, he is currently being sued by not only people whose heads he stepped on climbing through the subway, but also people who were "scared, leading to permanent emotional disability" when he threw the can of corn to knock out the purse snatcher.
Also, he is being sued by the purse snatcher because of pain and suffering because, well, was getting the purse back really worth knocking him out? His rights to not be knocked out are more important than getting the purse back. Criminal charges may even arise out of this against Dundee, too.
> Being a Canadian, I'm not too worried...unless
> the CRTC forces 30% Canadian content down my
> throat! (Ever heard a Canadian radio
> station...they're all awful!)
You have trials (e.g. Homolka) where publication of info is made illegal during the trial. What if Canada tried to extradite a "radio-free Canada Internet" individual who posted info in the US about it to Canadian-oriented newsgroups, etc.?
As for Canadian content, well, Mr. Dressup r00lz! Bless his soul...and your Olympic coverage is magnitudes better, though lately CBC Olympics have been having "up close and personal" crap creeping into it. Just like MTV and music, US networks find that they get higher ratings for the Olympics broadcasting things other than the events themselves.
"MTV: Music First! We now return you to The Real World..."
Just think of a car on an assembly line. Each car takes hours, if not days, to build, yet one runs off the line every minute and a half. The timing of this is the length of the longest stage in the assembly process.
Pipelining is a processor's version of an assembly line. The execution of an instruction is broken up into many steps, the longest of which is (ideally) one clock cycle. Thus you can execute 1 instruction per clock cycle.
The time to execute N instructions is the time for the first instruction to make it thru + (N - 1) * length of longest step. If a processor had 20 steps and each step was 1 clock cycle, the time would be 20 * (clock cycle) + (N - 1) * (clock cycle) assuming no difficulties with...
Of course, there are difficulties since one step may be dependent on the result of a previous step, so feeding this info forward stage after stage is quite the hardware trick. This is most difficult for branching test instructions (if-then goto, else don't goto) and even more effort is put into designing chips that can, in parallel, get the execution of BOTH paths underway, and then throw away the results of the not-taken path after it is determined that path won't be taken.
Then there's superscalar, where steps are done in parallel in hopes of doing even better than one instruction per cycle. That's an even worse nightmare in trying to keep the information feeding forward.
> Since God is Good, acting against him is Evil. Is
> the logic simple enough for you to see?
Yes.
Premises:
1. God is good (in the usual sense of the word, corollary: and therefore, deserving of worship)
2. God exists
3. God is infinitely powerful/all powerful
Observation (just another premis):
4. I observe evil around me that God could end with infinite ease, yet He does not.
Conclusion:
One of the premises are wrong.
1. Maybe God doesn't exist
2. Maybe God isn't infinitely and all powerful
(thus is just a "superhero" at best [and a
sleepy one at that].)
3. Maybe God isn't good.
Take your pick. I reject notions of God being good "not in the usual sense", nor of "there are things Man Was Not Meant to Know/God Works In Mysterious Ways"
Infinite power + Allowing Evil To Happen = God is Evil (second best excuse) or God Doesn't Exist (indeed, why propose Him in the first place?)
> Keep in mind that the constitution was written to
> be understood by common people in the 1700's. If
> it doesn't come right out and say something, it
> isn't in there.
Actually, it was written to prevent power-hungry, intelligent thugs from issuing any number of laws whose purpose was to extend the thug's power over people.
Chief among those thugs were thugs who also use religious fervor to gain power. The two put together was really a bad idea.
(Of course, extending a viscious claw of control over every person's life is bad when the thug is using religion, but it's A-OK if the thug is using quasi-religious class warefare rhetoric. This is actually even worse because, whereas you cannot prove the existance of a god who can hide from you infinitely well, you can "disprove" systems based on class warefare rhetoric, simply by looking at their "test results" in various countries around the world.
Indeed, the rhetoric is identical (just switch "the people" for "god", and "evil greedy businessmen" for "evil satan followers/jews") as are, sadly, the emotions knowingly invoked in the "common people" by said thugs. "I'm rich already; don't worry about me. Just authorize me the power to bash those other rich people over the head and bring them under my armed control, and I'll make your life better. I promise.")
Re:Similar experience, but perhaps not for Mac's
on
Pentium IV Hits 2 Ghz
·
· Score: 2
> I'm not interested in games, and frankly can't
> imagine what I would use a 1Ghz cpu for, never
> mind 2Ghz.
That's a problem Microsoft is going to run into as well as Intel (and they know it.) 500MHz is more than enough for anything, including DVD software decoding, outside of 3D games.
You need no more computer? You need no more Intel or Windows more than 95.
> The appliance makers (you know, those devices
> you *will* be plugging into house power)
My dishwasher mocks me. The instructions say the camera on the front is so it can know when someone is in front of it so it won't blast hot steam out the vents in the front when drying. I ask the dishwasher if it is spying on me, it replies "No. Go back to bed."
> Will we start seeing UPS systems that are also
> Firewalls/Routers?
Yes! All that and more in the new PCMCIA Ethernet/Cable modem/DSL/PowerLine Modem(TM)/56k super-combo card from 3COM! Compact Flash version coming soon, only $49.95 MSRP.
(And still I'd still bet people would complain here about the cost.)
> Now, the utilites make their own contracts with
> the town to be a monopoly for that town
Therein is the flaw in Connecticut's system, yet capitalism still takes the heat for this socialist decision ("instead of the state putting the wiring in and licensing to run over it".)
The most a city might do, and even this is suspect, is require any incoming company to wire the whole city within x number of years. Companies, some of whom are soulless, will of course take advantage of politicians and say, well, gee, it'll be expensive, we'll want a monopoly. Thus let it be...
> We all know that our "Friends" at the power
> company are as good of a monopoly as we could
> possibly ever know - perhaps even better than the
> phone/telco monopolies because deregulation
Not in a European country, never! A battle between two giant government-protected coercive monopolies? Each one bleating to ignorant politicians about how they, and only they, have the right to offer The People internet service at grotesque second-by-second rates?
All this and crippled, bloodless versions of hit games, including the upcoming Duke Nukem: ForeverFightingDaisys.
Way back when I put the Mac version, shareware, of Othello up against the Microsoft Othello that came with Windows 3.x. Set them up for person vs. computer, and fed the output of one into the other and vice versa.
Kept the MS one on hard, the Mac one slaughtered it on medium. Put the Mac one on easy, MS one caught up and was winning. With about 1/5 tiles to go, jammed the Mac one up to max difficulty, and it pulled it out!
Six years later bought a PC for home since that was the only game that had large numbers of games you'd actually want to play (tired of waiting a year to see if, maybe, the very most popular would get ported.)
I work for one of the Fortune 10 and I would kill to ONLY have one half hour a week of stupid meeting.
To start off with, there's a stupid, ONE and a half hour meeting on Mondays to spread the general crap the supervisor got from his manager at his stupid meeting, followed by a roundtable of what everyone's up to, which most people use to talk about little problems instead of saying "nothing" and nodding to the next person in line...
Slashdot Mirror
If I recall correctly, in the early to mid 90's, when the HDTV definition was being hashed out, it required $50,000 worth of computer equipment to decode a full-blown HDTV signal.
Look for it to be built into an Intel chip in a few years, and handhelds a few years after that. I wouldn't worry about this particular video version.
> The USA is AFAIK one of the only countries with
> unmetered local calls. [and the UK is not]
Why? Hmmmm...
International Workers of the World, unite!
Look for...the Union Label.
Just say...Union, yes!
Big, bloated government unions with coercive monopolies that can, legally, jail any competitors.
Socalism now, socialism forever!
If you really knew what Communism was, you'd pray for it!
> The analogy I like is who has more light: if
> everyone 100 light bulbs but all mine are 100 watt
> and everyone elses are 60 watt,
It's interesting you bring up light bulbs since they are in exactly the same boat as processors.
Bulb companies now compete on power useage, so the old 100 watters, for example, now only use 89 watts or something like that, producing the same amount of light. Back in the good old days, wattage was more or less synonymous, much like Hz was in processor chips (even between Intel and Motorola for Apple.) Now it isn't.
Bulbs have an easy-to-use brightness measurement, lumens, that they all brag about on their labelling, now.
AMD is (should) do a similar thing, just use "P IV MHz equivalency" as the number.
I don't understand this, either. Apple suffers from the same MHz issue, even though their chips are fastest of all at crunching.
MHz is only a valid measurement if the instructions are comparable (not, CISC vs. RISC) and the chips are pegged at 1 instruction per Hz (not, again.)
So, just advertising "Just as fast as a Pentium IV XXX GHz processor!" doesn't cut it with the masses who want a quick and dirty number.
That's fine, as long as the number they pick is the MHz of the equivalent PIV chip. Now shouldn't the AMD 1.4 GHz be rechristened the AMD 2000?
Sadly, high speed pictures are not on high speed link. Site crushed.
> surf with images off, you will save yourself and
> me the bandwith to load that stupid banner
Makes pr0n surfing, or surfing for that JLo or Sandra Bullock picture that just hits the spot a little pointless, doesn't it?
Sorry, wrong answer.
I'll take a country based on freedom to one based on Democracy any day. Democracy is "three wolves and a sheep voting on dinner".
I would like to add that, just because the vast majority of the hoi polloi spend a lot of time on the big corporate sites doesn't bode ill for anything. They're the same people that make the vast majority of daytime TV be soap operas, game shows, and trashy talk shows.
If someone would just get an easy-to-use micropayments system going then maybe small sites could survive a little more. Like a small button on the welcome page that said "click here to pay $1.00 to have 1 year's access." Click, bam, in, no worries, no hassles, no credit card entry crap each time, etc. etc. etc.
Perhaps he just forgot to check the "No Score +1 Bonus" box. I forget once in awhile. (It would be nice to have an option on your personal page to make it default to checked.)
> They were selling the software in the U.S.
That might be enough.
> Not only that but Dmitri was describing hour to
> crack it in his talk. That alone is enough to nab
> him.
In a country without guarantees of free speech, perhaps. Not in the US, though.
> Crocodile Dundee is going come to my home, rip my
> hands off my keyboard and carry me back to aussie
> land on his back.
Crocodile Dundee has his hands full with legal troubles over that giant pigsticker (self-defense? Irrelevant.)
Also, he is currently being sued by not only people whose heads he stepped on climbing through the subway, but also people who were "scared, leading to permanent emotional disability" when he threw the can of corn to knock out the purse snatcher.
Also, he is being sued by the purse snatcher because of pain and suffering because, well, was getting the purse back really worth knocking him out? His rights to not be knocked out are more important than getting the purse back. Criminal charges may even arise out of this against Dundee, too.
> Being a Canadian, I'm not too worried...unless
> the CRTC forces 30% Canadian content down my
> throat! (Ever heard a Canadian radio
> station...they're all awful!)
You have trials (e.g. Homolka) where publication of info is made illegal during the trial. What if Canada tried to extradite a "radio-free Canada Internet" individual who posted info in the US about it to Canadian-oriented newsgroups, etc.?
As for Canadian content, well, Mr. Dressup r00lz! Bless his soul...and your Olympic coverage is magnitudes better, though lately CBC Olympics have been having "up close and personal" crap creeping into it. Just like MTV and music, US networks find that they get higher ratings for the Olympics broadcasting things other than the events themselves.
"MTV: Music First! We now return you to The Real World..."
Well, normally you wouldn't invade another country to do this.
Still, even in that case, Noriega should have been tried as some kind of international war criminal (if that applied).
Just think of a car on an assembly line. Each car takes hours, if not days, to build, yet one runs off the line every minute and a half. The timing of this is the length of the longest stage in the assembly process.
Pipelining is a processor's version of an assembly line. The execution of an instruction is broken up into many steps, the longest of which is (ideally) one clock cycle. Thus you can execute 1 instruction per clock cycle.
The time to execute N instructions is the time for the first instruction to make it thru + (N - 1) * length of longest step. If a processor had 20 steps and each step was 1 clock cycle, the time would be 20 * (clock cycle) + (N - 1) * (clock cycle) assuming no difficulties with...
Of course, there are difficulties since one step may be dependent on the result of a previous step, so feeding this info forward stage after stage is quite the hardware trick. This is most difficult for branching test instructions (if-then goto, else don't goto) and even more effort is put into designing chips that can, in parallel, get the execution of BOTH paths underway, and then throw away the results of the not-taken path after it is determined that path won't be taken.
Then there's superscalar, where steps are done in parallel in hopes of doing even better than one instruction per cycle. That's an even worse nightmare in trying to keep the information feeding forward.
> Since God is Good, acting against him is Evil. Is
> the logic simple enough for you to see?
Yes.
Premises:
1. God is good (in the usual sense of the word, corollary: and therefore, deserving of worship)
2. God exists
3. God is infinitely powerful/all powerful
Observation (just another premis):
4. I observe evil around me that God could end with infinite ease, yet He does not.
Conclusion:
One of the premises are wrong.
1. Maybe God doesn't exist
2. Maybe God isn't infinitely and all powerful
(thus is just a "superhero" at best [and a
sleepy one at that].)
3. Maybe God isn't good.
Take your pick. I reject notions of God being good "not in the usual sense", nor of "there are things Man Was Not Meant to Know/God Works In Mysterious Ways"
Infinite power + Allowing Evil To Happen = God is Evil (second best excuse) or God Doesn't Exist (indeed, why propose Him in the first place?)
> Keep in mind that the constitution was written to
> be understood by common people in the 1700's. If
> it doesn't come right out and say something, it
> isn't in there.
Actually, it was written to prevent power-hungry, intelligent thugs from issuing any number of laws whose purpose was to extend the thug's power over people.
Chief among those thugs were thugs who also use religious fervor to gain power. The two put together was really a bad idea.
(Of course, extending a viscious claw of control over every person's life is bad when the thug is using religion, but it's A-OK if the thug is using quasi-religious class warefare rhetoric. This is actually even worse because, whereas you cannot prove the existance of a god who can hide from you infinitely well, you can "disprove" systems based on class warefare rhetoric, simply by looking at their "test results" in various countries around the world.
Indeed, the rhetoric is identical (just switch "the people" for "god", and "evil greedy businessmen" for "evil satan followers/jews") as are, sadly, the emotions knowingly invoked in the "common people" by said thugs. "I'm rich already; don't worry about me. Just authorize me the power to bash those other rich people over the head and bring them under my armed control, and I'll make your life better. I promise.")
> I'm not interested in games, and frankly can't
> imagine what I would use a 1Ghz cpu for, never
> mind 2Ghz.
That's a problem Microsoft is going to run into as well as Intel (and they know it.) 500MHz is more than enough for anything, including DVD software decoding, outside of 3D games.
You need no more computer? You need no more Intel or Windows more than 95.
> The appliance makers (you know, those devices
> you *will* be plugging into house power)
My dishwasher mocks me. The instructions say the camera on the front is so it can know when someone is in front of it so it won't blast hot steam out the vents in the front when drying. I ask the dishwasher if it is spying on me, it replies "No. Go back to bed."
> Will we start seeing UPS systems that are also
> Firewalls/Routers?
Yes! All that and more in the new PCMCIA Ethernet/Cable modem/DSL/PowerLine Modem(TM)/56k super-combo card from 3COM! Compact Flash version coming soon, only $49.95 MSRP.
(And still I'd still bet people would complain here about the cost.)
> Now, the utilites make their own contracts with
> the town to be a monopoly for that town
Therein is the flaw in Connecticut's system, yet capitalism still takes the heat for this socialist decision ("instead of the state putting the wiring in and licensing to run over it".)
The most a city might do, and even this is suspect, is require any incoming company to wire the whole city within x number of years. Companies, some of whom are soulless, will of course take advantage of politicians and say, well, gee, it'll be expensive, we'll want a monopoly. Thus let it be...
> We all know that our "Friends" at the power
> company are as good of a monopoly as we could
> possibly ever know - perhaps even better than the
> phone/telco monopolies because deregulation
Not in a European country, never! A battle between two giant government-protected coercive monopolies? Each one bleating to ignorant politicians about how they, and only they, have the right to offer The People internet service at grotesque second-by-second rates?
All this and crippled, bloodless versions of hit games, including the upcoming Duke Nukem: ForeverFightingDaisys.
My company springs for $2500 MSDN liscenses for every programmer, and there are a lot of them.
Information does want to be free, you know.
Way back when I put the Mac version, shareware, of Othello up against the Microsoft Othello that came with Windows 3.x. Set them up for person vs. computer, and fed the output of one into the other and vice versa.
Kept the MS one on hard, the Mac one slaughtered it on medium. Put the Mac one on easy, MS one caught up and was winning. With about 1/5 tiles to go, jammed the Mac one up to max difficulty, and it pulled it out!
Six years later bought a PC for home since that was the only game that had large numbers of games you'd actually want to play (tired of waiting a year to see if, maybe, the very most popular would get ported.)
I work for one of the Fortune 10 and I would kill to ONLY have one half hour a week of stupid meeting.
To start off with, there's a stupid, ONE and a half hour meeting on Mondays to spread the general crap the supervisor got from his manager at his stupid meeting, followed by a roundtable of what everyone's up to, which most people use to talk about little problems instead of saying "nothing" and nodding to the next person in line...