The Segway thing is another good example of another product that was created at great expense because it seemed a 'cool thing to make' with no thought as to who would actually buy one.
It costs $5000 dollars. Anyone wih 5 grand spare to spend on a Segway would probably rather be seen in their BMW than pootling along the pavement on one of these.
I put this on the pile of "cool ideas that'll never work in the real world" along with picture messaging.
Well, on top of the 25x increase in the clock frequency, the pentium166 only had 1 floating point pipeline, while the modern x86 processors generally have 3 pipelines in their FPUs (not sure about the weird P4 architecture).
Add to that out-of-order execution, better branch prediction etc and you could easily have an instructions per cycle improvement of 3 times or more, giving a total increase of around 100.
It is a shame what's happening to Sun, because it's indicative of what is happening to computing in general. Sun's old machines were solid, powerful machines that just worked. I used a sparcstation 5 up until a year ago at work, and while it was dog slow, it still worked all the time, because it was built at a time and for a market that expected that computers *worked*.
Now, thanks to the whole IBM PC/Windows thing, when a computer crashes, people say "oh, that's ok, that's what computers do" and hit reset. I'm not saying I'd rather have a blade100 on my desk than a wintel box, but I wish that my winel box had some of the engineering quality from Sun.
Oh my god! Please tell me you do really know that WW2 started in 1939! The invasion of Poland, defeat of France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain. Ringing any bells?
I think they are a little confused by their own marketing speak. Apparently, it doesn't send the data, it just sends a series of pointers into an infinite matrix that allows the receiver to rebuild the data once they've decrypted it.
In other words, it's encrypted twice. Major advance.
configuring windows seems to be devolving to the level of witchcraft. Nobody has actually benchmarked the effect of making that change, people just think "it must help". What about the number of ways of associative caches?
I seriously doubt that the OS affects the use of the L2 cache any more than it affects the processor's frequency. The way data is moved into the cache is a purely CPU/chipset controlled process.
>Yippee, I can resize Safari and even IE now with >not much lag
Because it should obviously take an 867mhz processor that fries your lap while working to redraw a 1024x768 window 'almost fast enough'. What is it with GUI designers these days?
Games like Battlefield 1942 use about 14kbytes a second in bandwidth - 10 down, 4 up or so.
So, if I play 8 hours a day I use ~400meg a day. Not a small amount, but nowhere near the cap. And if you're spending that much time gaming, I doubt you're doing much else online.
Come on, a gig a day isn't bad - my 512k connection averages something like 200mb a day, and I consider myself a heavy user.
They're not trying to limit NAT or servers you run, they just won't support you if you do it. If you're up to running a LAN, I doubt you need tech support anyway.
Plus, there are still quite a few alternatives out there. ADSL is reasonably widely available in the UK. My 512k adsl is uncapped, static IP, good speed(except for the odd problem every three months or so) and 25gbp a month.
"Zogbi cites tests by Japanese manufacturers that indicate the capacitor's lifetimes are half or less of the 4000 hours of continuous ripple current they are rated for."
4000 hours for the good capacitors? That's like 6 months of continuous usage. Surely shome mistake?
From the steam tables, the boiling point of water is in about the right range (40-50C or so) at around 0.1 atmospheres. You're going to need a big pump.
Dammit, I went into computing to escape from my chemical engineering background and it's catching up with me.
All the Slashdot editors/writers/bots (whatever they are) have to do is:
1)Read submissions of stories. A simple keyword comparison could mark likely duplicate stories before they even get delivered to an editor. 2)Put stories on the front page. Again, a simple keyword check on clicking submit would prevent duplicate stories.
AAARRRGGGGH. Combined with the increasing delay between something happening and it appearing on Slashdot and decreasing quality of stories, why do I keep coming back here? For the comments I suppose.
Could somebody please add a posting FAQ to slashdot including (at least - additions anyone?) the following points:
1)"Apple Macs are more expensive than a decent x86 box. " We know that, you're paying for the engineering that goes into their design and their quality. 2)"Kde3? I use blackbox/ratpoison etc. Kde is slow! " No, KDE3 runs very fast on a reasonable machine. If you don't want to use it, that's ok. 3)"In every discussion about either MySQL or Postgres, I must mention how much better Postgres/MySQL is at $FEATURE." No, you don't. Anyone who needs to know the differences can go to the relevant websites and look them up. 4)"A new graphics card is out. When will it end!/I only just upgraded/they're too expensive" This has been said many times, and is generally said about 100 times in every relevant story. I'm guilty of this one too. Please stop.
My only worry is that nothing at all would be posted to slashdot, and I'd have to start doing some work occasionally.
Every time I see these stories I feel I've slipped into some sort of alternative fictional world or something. Surely no sensible patent system would allow the patenting of ideas that are *so* simple.
We're talking about a patent on an idea that can be implemented in like 10 lines of HTML/$(SCRIPTING_LANGUAGE). The abstract of the patent probably contains more characters than what they're patenting.
Slashdot Mirror
The Segway thing is another good example of another product that was created at great expense because it seemed a 'cool thing to make' with no thought as to who would actually buy one.
It costs $5000 dollars. Anyone wih 5 grand spare to spend on a Segway would probably rather be seen in their BMW than pootling along the pavement on one of these.
I put this on the pile of "cool ideas that'll never work in the real world" along with picture messaging.
Will somebody please tell me what the Slashdot 'editors' actually do all day.
I'm sure many Slashdot readers' jobs make us feel time is repeating itself without Slashdot helping.
Well, on top of the 25x increase in the clock frequency, the pentium166 only had 1 floating point pipeline, while the modern x86 processors generally have 3 pipelines in their FPUs (not sure about the weird P4 architecture).
Add to that out-of-order execution, better branch prediction etc and you could easily have an instructions per cycle improvement of 3 times or more, giving a total increase of around 100.
Its sexy silver magnesium-alloy casing harnesses the power of the advanced Intel Pentium III-M mobile processor,...
Huh? I had to read that several times before I realised, no, it doesn't make any sense.It is a shame what's happening to Sun, because it's indicative of what is happening to computing in general. Sun's old machines were solid, powerful machines that just worked. I used a sparcstation 5 up until a year ago at work, and while it was dog slow, it still worked all the time, because it was built at a time and for a market that expected that computers *worked*.
Now, thanks to the whole IBM PC/Windows thing, when a computer crashes, people say "oh, that's ok, that's what computers do" and hit reset. I'm not saying I'd rather have a blade100 on my desk than a wintel box, but I wish that my winel box had some of the engineering quality from Sun.
Oh my god! Please tell me you do really know that WW2 started in 1939! The invasion of Poland, defeat of France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain. Ringing any bells?
'Jim'
Gabe
Very odd.Don't feed the troll. Please move along, nothing to see here.
huh?. PDF is about as close as you get to a truly multi-platform. There are loads of free (GPL) readers out there for it.
I think they are a little confused by their own marketing speak. Apparently, it doesn't send the data, it just sends a series of pointers into an infinite matrix that allows the receiver to rebuild the data once they've decrypted it.
In other words, it's encrypted twice. Major advance.
configuring windows seems to be devolving to the level of witchcraft. Nobody has actually benchmarked the effect of making that change, people just think "it must help". What about the number of ways of associative caches?
I seriously doubt that the OS affects the use of the L2 cache any more than it affects the processor's frequency. The way data is moved into the cache is a purely CPU/chipset controlled process.
>Yippee, I can resize Safari and even IE now with >not much lag
Because it should obviously take an 867mhz processor that fries your lap while working to redraw a 1024x768 window 'almost fast enough'. What is it with GUI designers these days?
Games like Battlefield 1942 use about 14kbytes a second in bandwidth - 10 down, 4 up or so.
So, if I play 8 hours a day I use ~400meg a day. Not a small amount, but nowhere near the cap. And if you're spending that much time gaming, I doubt you're doing much else online.
Come on, a gig a day isn't bad - my 512k connection averages something like 200mb a day, and I consider myself a heavy user.
They're not trying to limit NAT or servers you run, they just won't support you if you do it. If you're up to running a LAN, I doubt you need tech support anyway.
Plus, there are still quite a few alternatives out there. ADSL is reasonably widely available in the UK. My 512k adsl is uncapped, static IP, good speed(except for the odd problem every three months or so) and 25gbp a month.
According to Netcracft.com:
The site www.parliament.uk is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Solaris.
Is Microsoft branching out into Unix software after all?
Not a Private Eye reader then? It's a joke saying in the UK.
/ ps euds/blr.htm
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/
another mention of it here:
http://members.madasafish.com/~gembeans/archive
From the article:
"Zogbi cites tests by Japanese manufacturers that indicate the capacitor's lifetimes are half or less of the 4000 hours of continuous ripple current they are rated for."
4000 hours for the good capacitors? That's like 6 months of continuous usage. Surely shome mistake?
From the steam tables, the boiling point of water is in about the right range (40-50C or so) at around 0.1 atmospheres. You're going to need a big pump.
Dammit, I went into computing to escape from my chemical engineering background and it's catching up with me.
All the Slashdot editors/writers/bots (whatever they are) have to do is:
1)Read submissions of stories. A simple keyword comparison could mark likely duplicate stories before they even get delivered to an editor.
2)Put stories on the front page. Again, a simple keyword check on clicking submit would prevent duplicate stories.
AAARRRGGGGH. Combined with the increasing delay between something happening and it appearing on Slashdot and decreasing quality of stories, why do I keep coming back here? For the comments I suppose.
Now there's a Telegraph we could do without.
they can't even understand spelling and pronounciation.
Mobilix, with an i in the middle. Like fish, chips, wit.
Obelix, with an e in the middle. Like wretch, bench,wench.
They're not the same. They're not even that similar. How did they win? Did they manage to get a deaf judge or something?
Could somebody please add a posting FAQ to slashdot including (at least - additions anyone?) the following points:
1)"Apple Macs are more expensive than a decent x86 box. "
We know that, you're paying for the engineering that goes into their design and their quality.
2)"Kde3? I use blackbox/ratpoison etc. Kde is slow! "
No, KDE3 runs very fast on a reasonable machine. If you don't want to use it, that's ok.
3)"In every discussion about either MySQL or Postgres, I must mention how much better Postgres/MySQL is at $FEATURE."
No, you don't. Anyone who needs to know the differences can go to the relevant websites and look them up.
4)"A new graphics card is out. When will it end!/I only just upgraded/they're too expensive"
This has been said many times, and is generally said about 100 times in every relevant story. I'm guilty of this one too. Please stop.
My only worry is that nothing at all would be posted to slashdot, and I'd have to start doing some work occasionally.
Every time I see these stories I feel I've slipped into some sort of alternative fictional world or something. Surely no sensible patent system would allow the patenting of ideas that are *so* simple.
We're talking about a patent on an idea that can be implemented in like 10 lines of HTML/$(SCRIPTING_LANGUAGE). The abstract of the patent probably contains more characters than what they're patenting.
works fine in 1.2.1. I couldn't personally tell you which of the filtering types looked 'better' though.
I think he did mean tool. Check this dictionary and scroll down to tool.