What else are they going to do? They are working in other areas: advanced architecture (williamette, itanium) and Mhz (0.18 process). If increasing the cache also gets them a speed boost, however small, they'll do that too. You will always have a set of customers that are screaming for any amount of speed, regardless of the cost. Xeon is for them.
In addition, I'm sure it doesn't hurt them when comparing against Sparc, Alpha, PowerPC, etc. These all have a ton of cache (8MB!! in the case of high-end Sparcs) and, as we have discussed, more cache implies more speed to most people.
As always, when looking at cache, you compare bang for buck. Adding cache costs money, lots of money sometimes. Some processor architectures get more mileage out of added cache than others.
For example, the G4 seems to love cache and screams faster and faster as you add it. Apple/Motorola have found the 1MB cache level to be their sweetspot, most bang for buck. On the other hand, the PIII is not as cache loving. Giving it another 0.75MB doesn't do it all that much good, so why waste the money? Their sweetspot seems to be 0.25MB.
To compare cache amounts, without taking the processor itself into account, is almost as dumb as comparing clock rates (Mhz).
I would like to add that this isn't too different from the access logs that a web server keeps. A webmaster knows exactly how many hits the server is taking, and from that can do a reasonable job of getting an actual count of people visiting the site. Mix into that voluntary demographic information, sex, age, etc., and the webmaster has a lot of info to go on.
Nielsen goes farther, possibly too far, by gathering statistics for all shows, similar to gathering the "logs" from multiple sites. They also force demographic information from their participants.
I would argue that with this Tivo, web sites, etc., that forced demographic info would not be required. Nielsen could grab it from voluntary sources and let statistics do the rest. Also, Nielsen would not need to track everyone across the channels or the net. Only those that are interested in participating with demographic info. The remainder of the population would be tallied as a simple "view".
Don't know about you, but my compiler is open source, therefore I can look for compiler inserted backdoors as well. Same goes for libc and the kernel.
It would be very easy to "booby trap" the gcc source. Catch is that you have to get people to trust you and download your version. Go ahead and try; you won't be trusted long. Oh, and BTW, make sure you post your modifications. Wouldn't want to break the GPL now. I'm sure after your booby trap is found, people will gladly roast you for a GPL violation.
Putting whether DVD is a good technology aside, it blows as a medium. But as far as a medium goes, it redefines "closed." To distribute a DVD movie, you must license the technology; to play a DVD movie, again you must license. Pay to play.
Compare this to the historically most successful medium, paper. No one owns the patent to make paper, and you don't have to pay license fees to read it. As a result, no one controls what can be put on paper.
As long as your movie distribution format is closed, you better get used to someone else telling what you can and cannot see on it.
That said, I doubt that Lucas isn't doing DVD to protest a closed medium. More likely, he is protesting that it isn't his closed medium.
I can report with confidence that my car, which has electronic injection and ignition, has not crashed in the 4 years and 100,000 miles that I have driven it.
We have already started infiltrating our engines with electronics, and with good results. My midsize sedan gets 30 mpg with all the power I could want. Even back in the stone age days of '96 when a Pentium-166 was a fast computer. In fact, the only things that have needed replaced/failed on my car are pesky mechanical crap: brakes, struts, etc.
Do not confuse the reliability of your desktop PC with the reliability of embedded systems. They are structured and developed very differently, with an emphasis on reliability.
Or if one has customers that demand frontpage, these aren't hard to find, and doesn't want to run MS IIS to support them.
If you install Frontpage extensions with apache, be very careful with security. Do not allow shell access to the machine and Do not trust MS's mod_frontpage for Apache. There is an alternate mod_frontpage (not the darkorb one) that is based on suexec. I don't have the link here at work, but I can post it from home, if you are interested.
Sure, frontpage is still an insecure piece of crap, but I have it so that it never sees the light of root, in fact each site has its own userid. Therefore, the only thing that can get screwed is my user's pages, one at a time. I'm not responsible for that, and they know the risks.
Wow. Thankfully, I didn't find the same in the Linux Frontpage extensions. I looked in both version 3.0 for Frontpage 98 and version 4.0 for Frontpage 2000.
I can't tell you how much it drives me nuts to have to load Microsoft software on my Linux web servers. So much so that I don't even trust their setuid wrapper. Each site runs as a dummy user, which owns their files.
I'm not sure the idea of common carrier status translates to German. In the US it is at least hoped that ISPs are common carriers. I don't believe it has been tried in court, yet. Please tell me if it has.
Interestingly, since AOL pulled the content, they were no longer common carriers. If an ISP monitors or censors their customer's content in any way, they endanger their common carrier status. I worked for an ISP that had a policy to not remove anything, even when asked by customers, for this reason. It was up to the customers to fight it out, bring legal action against eachother, etc. But, you better believe that the ISP helped the authorities in any way they could (assuming proper permits, etc), just like a phone company.
Even if you are told about an incident, offensive is in the eye of the beholder. Illegal is a different story. In my mind, this company should have gone to the authorities to prosecute those performing the illegal act. After the appropriate permits, warrants, etc. had been presented, AOL would have only been in trouble if it didn't help. Maybe I should start a country...
Start another X server at 1024x768. You get to the first using ctrl-alt-f7 and the second at ctrl-alt-f8 (this is assuming 6 virtual consoles, pretty standard on RedHat systems). You will have to play with xinits and startxs, but it works. I play this trick all the time to play Starcraft which requires 640x480x256.
Heh. But the angular momentum would be a bitch. Imagine trying to maneuver a 7 pound gyroscope, spinning at 100,000 RPM! Now, imagine an airplane full of these, going into a bank curve...
Size is the only dead end in site for hard drives.
Speed. The average hard drive is spinning at 7200 RPM nowadays. At this speed, there is an average latency of 4.6ms just to spin the track under the head. You can't do much about this except spin the disk faster. At 10000 and 15000 (thanks Seagate), you still have 3ms and 2ms, respectively. This is on top of any time needed to move the head itself. With most access times <8ms in the low end and <5ms in the high end, this ceiling isn't too far off. Sure you can spin the disk faster, but this gets expensive (money, energy, and heat).
Size. I think the article addresses this quite nicely. If we hit the ceiling here, we can increase the surface area. But this again gets expensive in all ways and precludes a 100 GB laptop drive in a 1.5 in width and 1 watt power consumption. You know you want it.
Reliability. To me, this is the biggest problem. Hard drives are the most relied upon moving part in a computer and yet are the first thing to go in most systems (followed closely by the power supply, who's death is usually hastened by a power hungry hard drive spinning up and down). RAID (or similar) can tackle this, but is expensive in all ways and requires the user's attention.
Finally, I won't argue that hard drives will meet their doom in 5 years, hell we don't even have a suitable replacement yet (only stuff in research). I just figure they will be a story that I will tell to my grand children.
It's like tv, only on tv you only have to see an add every 15 minutes or so -- a respectable amount of time (if you ignore the product placements,that is...)
Its difficult to compare ads on the net to ads on TV. When surfing the net, my browser doesn't uncontrollably stop showing the web page and force me to view adds, like the regular commercial breaks on TV. Also, banner ads are not subliminal, like product placements. Consumers know where the ads are and are free to ignore them much easier than on TV.
I would agree with you if I thought their goal was only to be a catalyst for great discussions, but I believe their actual goal is to make money. This is hard to do without banner adds or at least some control over what the user sees. If they allow any IRC client access, then they have no control.
So, they have done what any good business does; captivate an audience, make a niche, then reap the profits.
Huh? Linux is not a micro-kernel based OS. MacOS X, the Hurd, and NeXTOS are, but not Linux.
The question should be, how can they compete against a free as in source OS like Linux. Their answer is to make Be free as in beer. Time will tell if it works, but I'm really not sure that Be and Linux are competitors in the first place. Not many people would use Be as a server OS and, on the flip side, not many people would use Linux on a desktop. This may change, but I think Be needs to grab some market share on the desktop first before trying to attack Linux.
Therefore, I see this really as an attempt by Be to compete with Windows and MacOS. What better way to get people to try it than to give away a mostly functional version for free? If customers like it, they will come back for the professional version.
I understand your point, that a buyer needs to concentrate at the services in your area and not the actual phone.
But, I really feel the need to defend my Sprint PCS phone. I concede that they don't have a unlimited off-peak plan, almost. They do have an off-peak option that for $10 gives you 200 minutes for free and clear plans and 500 minutes for standard plans. While not optimal, remember that free and clear plans have free long distance, this is 5 cents/min long distance on a cell!
Now, about using it... absolutely wonderful. Since most of my calls are long distance, free and clear is perfect. Their coverage area is most of the urban US. I'm covered in NJ where I live and work, NY when I have to go there, OH where my folks live, and most of the other places I find myself traveling. All for the same price. Does anyone else beat them in coverage area (without roaming fees)? If so, you might get me to switch.
All of the extras are included, caller ID, voice mail, 3-way, call waiting, numeric paging. But these are a given when talking digital phones.
Finally, my favorite part, no contracts! When they come up with better plans, you can switch. You have to buy the phone, but when their phones start at $100, this isn't too bad.
So, yes it comes down to who you are and what is available in your area. For me, no contract was first and foremost, followed closely by coverage area and cheap long distance. Sprint PCS fits this bill nicely.
The other way to handle this is set your mail server up to always relay through your ISP/DSL provider. To the ISP, your mail server will be like any other customer and the message will be sent on to its destination by the ISP's server which has a static IP and is trusted.
Still, what's the point? There are hosting companies that will do it for free, if you want to put up with some advertising... Then again, I do a lot of things that are pointless, just because I can...
Dude, its still pretty cool and I'm betting that at least a couple slashdot readers haven't seen it. Maybe you should post somewhere else and leave us lOsers to our non-news.
Very cool. I hadn't thought of the "forcing you to learn" aspect. This was something that irritated the hell out of me in undergrad., students only consuming what they were fed and not thinking. They might as well save themselves some years and get a tech. degree.
You got me thinking about using something like this to continue education. I did my college years; I'm not interested in repeating them.
Are you implying that the laws the US government sets for its citizens apply when dealing with foreign countries? What color is the sky in your world?
The laws of a country apply only on that country's soil. If you break them, that country prosecutes you by their laws. Simple. And who says a country shouldn't be able to break laws if it is willing to accept the penalties when caught? I break the law every day, speeding to work, and am willing to pay the ticket when caught.
Espionage is a part of the world we live in, unless every country suddenly and voluntarily gives it up. Otherwise, if you want to compete, you gotta do it. Imagine if around 1960, the US had given up all of its nukes, leaving the USSR with the nuclear advantage, simply because nukes were bad.
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What else are they going to do? They are working in other areas: advanced architecture (williamette, itanium) and Mhz (0.18 process). If increasing the cache also gets them a speed boost, however small, they'll do that too. You will always have a set of customers that are screaming for any amount of speed, regardless of the cost. Xeon is for them.
In addition, I'm sure it doesn't hurt them when comparing against Sparc, Alpha, PowerPC, etc. These all have a ton of cache (8MB!! in the case of high-end Sparcs) and, as we have discussed, more cache implies more speed to most people.
once you look at xeons you get into the price range of the good stuff (IBM, Alpha, SUN etc.)
While true, the "good stuff" doesn't run NT.
As always, when looking at cache, you compare bang for buck. Adding cache costs money, lots of money sometimes. Some processor architectures get more mileage out of added cache than others.
For example, the G4 seems to love cache and screams faster and faster as you add it. Apple/Motorola have found the 1MB cache level to be their sweetspot, most bang for buck. On the other hand, the PIII is not as cache loving. Giving it another 0.75MB doesn't do it all that much good, so why waste the money? Their sweetspot seems to be 0.25MB.
To compare cache amounts, without taking the processor itself into account, is almost as dumb as comparing clock rates (Mhz).
I would like to add that this isn't too different from the access logs that a web server keeps. A webmaster knows exactly how many hits the server is taking, and from that can do a reasonable job of getting an actual count of people visiting the site. Mix into that voluntary demographic information, sex, age, etc., and the webmaster has a lot of info to go on.
Nielsen goes farther, possibly too far, by gathering statistics for all shows, similar to gathering the "logs" from multiple sites. They also force demographic information from their participants.
I would argue that with this Tivo, web sites, etc., that forced demographic info would not be required. Nielsen could grab it from voluntary sources and let statistics do the rest. Also, Nielsen would not need to track everyone across the channels or the net. Only those that are interested in participating with demographic info. The remainder of the population would be tallied as a simple "view".
Don't know about you, but my compiler is open source, therefore I can look for compiler inserted backdoors as well. Same goes for libc and the kernel.
It would be very easy to "booby trap" the gcc source. Catch is that you have to get people to trust you and download your version. Go ahead and try; you won't be trusted long. Oh, and BTW, make sure you post your modifications. Wouldn't want to break the GPL now. I'm sure after your booby trap is found, people will gladly roast you for a GPL violation.
Putting whether DVD is a good technology aside, it blows as a medium. But as far as a medium goes, it redefines "closed." To distribute a DVD movie, you must license the technology; to play a DVD movie, again you must license. Pay to play.
Compare this to the historically most successful medium, paper. No one owns the patent to make paper, and you don't have to pay license fees to read it. As a result, no one controls what can be put on paper.
As long as your movie distribution format is closed, you better get used to someone else telling what you can and cannot see on it.
That said, I doubt that Lucas isn't doing DVD to protest a closed medium. More likely, he is protesting that it isn't his closed medium.
I can report with confidence that my car, which has electronic injection and ignition, has not crashed in the 4 years and 100,000 miles that I have driven it.
We have already started infiltrating our engines with electronics, and with good results. My midsize sedan gets 30 mpg with all the power I could want. Even back in the stone age days of '96 when a Pentium-166 was a fast computer. In fact, the only things that have needed replaced/failed on my car are pesky mechanical crap: brakes, struts, etc.
Do not confuse the reliability of your desktop PC with the reliability of embedded systems. They are structured and developed very differently, with an emphasis on reliability.
Diesels ain't that great at -40F anyways. You generally need to keep the block warm, either with a heater in the block or by leaving them running.
So, if the block is already being kept warm, getting the electronics up to a working temperature shouldn't be that difficult.
These folks are just trying to unload stock after their solar-powered flashlight business tanked.
Next we'll see them unloading the flashlights as a means to light the solar panel.
Or if one has customers that demand frontpage, these aren't hard to find, and doesn't want to run MS IIS to support them.
If you install Frontpage extensions with apache, be very careful with security. Do not allow shell access to the machine and Do not trust MS's mod_frontpage for Apache. There is an alternate mod_frontpage (not the darkorb one) that is based on suexec. I don't have the link here at work, but I can post it from home, if you are interested.
Sure, frontpage is still an insecure piece of crap, but I have it so that it never sees the light of root, in fact each site has its own userid. Therefore, the only thing that can get screwed is my user's pages, one at a time. I'm not responsible for that, and they know the risks.
Wow. Thankfully, I didn't find the same in the Linux Frontpage extensions. I looked in both version 3.0 for Frontpage 98 and version 4.0 for Frontpage 2000.
I can't tell you how much it drives me nuts to have to load Microsoft software on my Linux web servers. So much so that I don't even trust their setuid wrapper. Each site runs as a dummy user, which owns their files.
I'm not sure the idea of common carrier status translates to German. In the US it is at least hoped that ISPs are common carriers. I don't believe it has been tried in court, yet. Please tell me if it has.
Interestingly, since AOL pulled the content, they were no longer common carriers. If an ISP monitors or censors their customer's content in any way, they endanger their common carrier status. I worked for an ISP that had a policy to not remove anything, even when asked by customers, for this reason. It was up to the customers to fight it out, bring legal action against eachother, etc. But, you better believe that the ISP helped the authorities in any way they could (assuming proper permits, etc), just like a phone company.
Even if you are told about an incident, offensive is in the eye of the beholder. Illegal is a different story. In my mind, this company should have gone to the authorities to prosecute those performing the illegal act. After the appropriate permits, warrants, etc. had been presented, AOL would have only been in trouble if it didn't help. Maybe I should start a country...
Start another X server at 1024x768. You get to the first using ctrl-alt-f7 and the second at ctrl-alt-f8 (this is assuming 6 virtual consoles, pretty standard on RedHat systems). You will have to play with xinits and startxs, but it works. I play this trick all the time to play Starcraft which requires 640x480x256.
Heh. But the angular momentum would be a bitch. Imagine trying to maneuver a 7 pound gyroscope, spinning at 100,000 RPM! Now, imagine an airplane full of these, going into a bank curve...
Size is the only dead end in site for hard drives.
- Speed. The average hard drive is spinning at 7200 RPM nowadays. At this speed, there is an average latency of 4.6ms just to spin the track under the head. You can't do much about this except spin the disk faster. At 10000 and 15000 (thanks Seagate), you still have 3ms and 2ms, respectively. This is on top of any time needed to move the head itself. With most access times <8ms in the low end and <5ms in the high end, this ceiling isn't too far off. Sure you can spin the disk faster, but this gets expensive (money, energy, and heat).
- Size. I think the article addresses this quite nicely. If we hit the ceiling here, we can increase the surface area. But this again gets expensive in all ways and precludes a 100 GB laptop drive in a 1.5 in width and 1 watt power consumption. You know you want it.
- Reliability. To me, this is the biggest problem. Hard drives are the most relied upon moving part in a computer and yet are the first thing to go in most systems (followed closely by the power supply, who's death is usually hastened by a power hungry hard drive spinning up and down). RAID (or similar) can tackle this, but is expensive in all ways and requires the user's attention.
Finally, I won't argue that hard drives will meet their doom in 5 years, hell we don't even have a suitable replacement yet (only stuff in research). I just figure they will be a story that I will tell to my grand children.It's like tv, only on tv you only have to see an add every 15 minutes or so -- a respectable amount of time (if you ignore the product placements,that is...)
Its difficult to compare ads on the net to ads on TV. When surfing the net, my browser doesn't uncontrollably stop showing the web page and force me to view adds, like the regular commercial breaks on TV. Also, banner ads are not subliminal, like product placements. Consumers know where the ads are and are free to ignore them much easier than on TV.
I would agree with you if I thought their goal was only to be a catalyst for great discussions, but I believe their actual goal is to make money. This is hard to do without banner adds or at least some control over what the user sees. If they allow any IRC client access, then they have no control.
So, they have done what any good business does; captivate an audience, make a niche, then reap the profits.
Thank you! Here I am reading all the bitches and trying to find the bad grammar. I read and re-read the article and just didn't get it.
Photons definitely have a nonzero stress tensor and as a result do produce gravity.
Yup, thus explaining why halogen lamps always seem to catch any airborne object.
Huh? Linux is not a micro-kernel based OS. MacOS X, the Hurd, and NeXTOS are, but not Linux.
The question should be, how can they compete against a free as in source OS like Linux. Their answer is to make Be free as in beer. Time will tell if it works, but I'm really not sure that Be and Linux are competitors in the first place. Not many people would use Be as a server OS and, on the flip side, not many people would use Linux on a desktop. This may change, but I think Be needs to grab some market share on the desktop first before trying to attack Linux.
Therefore, I see this really as an attempt by Be to compete with Windows and MacOS. What better way to get people to try it than to give away a mostly functional version for free? If customers like it, they will come back for the professional version.
I understand your point, that a buyer needs to concentrate at the services in your area and not the actual phone.
But, I really feel the need to defend my Sprint PCS phone. I concede that they don't have a unlimited off-peak plan, almost. They do have an off-peak option that for $10 gives you 200 minutes for free and clear plans and 500 minutes for standard plans. While not optimal, remember that free and clear plans have free long distance, this is 5 cents/min long distance on a cell!
Now, about using it... absolutely wonderful. Since most of my calls are long distance, free and clear is perfect. Their coverage area is most of the urban US. I'm covered in NJ where I live and work, NY when I have to go there, OH where my folks live, and most of the other places I find myself traveling. All for the same price. Does anyone else beat them in coverage area (without roaming fees)? If so, you might get me to switch.
All of the extras are included, caller ID, voice mail, 3-way, call waiting, numeric paging. But these are a given when talking digital phones.
Finally, my favorite part, no contracts! When they come up with better plans, you can switch. You have to buy the phone, but when their phones start at $100, this isn't too bad.
So, yes it comes down to who you are and what is available in your area. For me, no contract was first and foremost, followed closely by coverage area and cheap long distance. Sprint PCS fits this bill nicely.
The other way to handle this is set your mail server up to always relay through your ISP/DSL provider. To the ISP, your mail server will be like any other customer and the message will be sent on to its destination by the ISP's server which has a static IP and is trusted.
Still, what's the point? There are hosting companies that will do it for free, if you want to put up with some advertising... Then again, I do a lot of things that are pointless, just because I can...
I bow before his enlightenedness.*grovel, grovel*
Dude, its still pretty cool and I'm betting that at least a couple slashdot readers haven't seen it. Maybe you should post somewhere else and leave us lOsers to our non-news.
Thank you.
Very cool. I hadn't thought of the "forcing you to learn" aspect. This was something that irritated the hell out of me in undergrad., students only consuming what they were fed and not thinking. They might as well save themselves some years and get a tech. degree.
You got me thinking about using something like this to continue education. I did my college years; I'm not interested in repeating them.
we should violate our own rules?
Are you implying that the laws the US government sets for its citizens apply when dealing with foreign countries? What color is the sky in your world?
The laws of a country apply only on that country's soil. If you break them, that country prosecutes you by their laws. Simple. And who says a country shouldn't be able to break laws if it is willing to accept the penalties when caught? I break the law every day, speeding to work, and am willing to pay the ticket when caught.
Espionage is a part of the world we live in, unless every country suddenly and voluntarily gives it up. Otherwise, if you want to compete, you gotta do it. Imagine if around 1960, the US had given up all of its nukes, leaving the USSR with the nuclear advantage, simply because nukes were bad.