"Matsushita Electric, in close cooperation with Microsoft, will develop a high-performance personal computer suited to the advanced image-processing demands of the 21st century," said Dr. Yoshitomi Nagaoka, vice president of Matsushita Electric's AVC Company..."
Ah, yeah. You found proof that a large (perhaps the largest) electronics manufacturer on the planet is doing something together with the largest software manufacturer on the planet.
Now if we had some sort of open source 3D drivers to take advantage of this
Tsss, you didn't even _try_ to look, now did you?
It's very simple; GTK+ can now use Cairo. Cairo uses Glitz. Glitz uses Mesa for OpenGL. Mesa uses DRI to interface with the hardware. DRI drivers implement hardware acceleration under X, using DRM drivers. DRM drivers are kernel drivers.
These layers are handled by at least 3 or 4 totally different organizations. Fortunately software engineers are known for their fabulous communication skills.
So, yes, the DRI drivers fully support 3D hardware, and there are quite a few available, with source.
Why is it that according to P.C. all people are equally best at everything? People are different, and if you study them and it comes out that men are better at something than women, why must it be that you are immediately misogynist?
Since you (and many other) apparently have very clear, logical, thinking, but can't think more than one step ahead, I'll spell it out.
Follow it through.
"Women are Bad at Math" is a generalization, I think we can all agree to that. Even if there's truth in the statement, there are loads of women that are better at math than loads of men.
Generalization become discrimination. When generalizations are/become 'known facts', people get a chance to be selective, based on 'facts'.
So why would I hire a women for a math job? They are bad at it, says it right here!
Not only that, the majority of people have an inclination to follow the easy path. In this case it would result in less women studying math, because they know in advance that they are worse at it, so what's the point?
To get back to your original question:
Why is it that according to P.C. all people are equally best at everything?
You mis-represent the PC here. The PC don't think all people are equal good at something. They don't care if all people are equally good at everything.
PC people think that everyone should have the same opportunity to be best at something.
Global temperature has risen, fallen, and risen since 1880, even though carbon dioxide levels have steadily risen. In fact, for 30 years between 1940 and 1970 the temperature dropped all that it had gained in the past 50 years. Overall in the past 120 years global temperature has risen 1 degree celsius.
Uhmm... Source?
If you are going to debate in a science discussion isn't it common to quote yer source?
(KH's: you can leave your hillarious 'you must be new here' & 'welcome to Slashdot' posts; I'm not)
Apple is doing nothing legally, technically, ethically, morally or wrong.
If anything, it _does_ show Apple's true color. Which is that they are just as any other big corporation and will resort to crippling one product to increase the sales of another product, and/or lock out a competitor. (don't be fooled, they deliberately removed the functionality, being perfectly aware of it)
So long as they are not a monopoly that's probably legal.
Support the bills already in the House and Senate that will fix this, instead of fantasizing about how the 2004 election was "stolen" (it wasn't).
As others have pointed out, you don't know if the 2004 election was stolen, simply because you can't know. There's no trail. Simple as that. Anyone claiming that it was or wasn't stolen is merely speculating.
I'm not a voter in this country, but I seriously distrust people that scream so loud about the election NOT being stolen, saying everybody should shut the hell up and get over it.
People should not shut the hell up, it's the only way the municipals will learn that they have to get machines that have a paper trail.
I agree that there's very little use in auditing the results or as the story poster suggest, disassembling the code on voting machines. I bet 90% of the slashdotters can write a piece of code that replaces itself at the end of the day with a 'proper' version. (for those needing more clarification: consider voting software that's rigged, at the end of the day, or even before just to be safe, it overwrites itself with the non-rigged version. There'll never be any evidence of the rigged version running on the box).
Having access to source code does practically nothing (although I personally believe that people _should_ have access to it). There's no way for a voter to verify that the software running on the box is actually the software they have the source for (see above about why this is impossible to prove _after_ the elections).
Until there is a bill that requires a paper trail I don't think people need to be as critical as can be about the 2004 election.
I bought one of their chassis which is entirely fan-less (and a _LOT_ cheaper than this thing, I think less than $200.-). The case is butt-ugly, but you can move the cooling system to a purtier case if you want.
Very weird to turn on your PC and hear absolutely nothing. I used CompactFlash for the OS (although you could also network boot).
I actually would buy more of these if I could.
It always seemed that they did very poorly in the marketing department, I think with a good US rep they would have done very well.
Think about it. America had been attacked. America looked weak, open, an inviting target. America's "liberal" openness was implicated in it (not withstanding YEARS of Airline industry fighting and lobbying against stronger security measures on their planes).
To vote against it seemed to be voting in favor of what happened. And no politician in their right mind wants to ever create a sense that they are a tool of the boogeyman.
Well, I can perhaps understand that argument. But my point actually was that the "we weren't allowed to read it before we voted" argument is just BS. If that's the 'excuse' that people make for voting for PATRIOT, then I think that's just lame.
In fact I would lose all confidence in such a person because they apparently are not willing to stand up and say 'no, this is not right, we have to read it first'. They had that power. Perhaps after they had read it they would have still voted for it, but again, this is just a terrible excuse.
"It's my understanding the bill wasn't printed before the vote -- at least I couldn't get it. They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote."
I'm sorry, but I just don't get that. Why the hell did they vote? It's similar to the whole paperless evoting. Why would you vote on such a machine? I would simply refuse, _and_ make a BIG fucking whoopla about _why_ I refused to vote.
They're just lame excuses. If you are voting for something you'd better make damn sure that (a) you know what the hell you're voting on and (b) you're vote gets counted as it's supposed to.
It's about time people stood up for themselves. The whole freaking world is in the shits because of all this...
I suppose, but ACPI is also an gawdawful piece of shit. I did BIOS development for a while. Imagine that (how to put this nicely) a lot of BIOS developers are, let's say, 'stuck in their ways'. Not all BIOS guys are like this, but to be a good BIOS person, you'd need a fairly large amount of experience, and it being BIOS and all, this results in a lot of people that think DOS is still a Pretty Neat Thing(tm). Assembler programmers who think that coding in C has too much of a performance hit. (again, this is a generalization, not all BIOS coders are like this at all, but still)
So along come a bunch of assholes who decide that the best way to get this power management thing going is to do it by creating an entirely new language/syntax. It's almost like a programming language but not quite. Bottom-line, my guestimate is that there are about one persons out there that really like the ACPI language. It's not very obvious, you probably really need some training before you should be allowed to mess with it.
Practically it goes more like this: the board manufacturer buys a reference BIOS for a certain reference board. The thing is, most boards end up being a little different from a reference board _especially_ in the power management section. So now the BIOS engineer needs to modify the ACPI code to match the board. Great, so (s)he goes ahead and does that. Then installs Windows XP, tests a couple of things like hibernate, or god forbid, stand-by. didn't crash? Ship it.
There are no proper regression tools to make sure ACPI is implemented correctly. It's very hard to debug/test/insure any changes you make to reference code, because it's like a bytecode language (imagine debugging Java with all you have is bytecode). Even worse, a lot of ACPI code runs in SMM mode, which is hard to work with and debug (even some of the hardware ICEs don't really support SMM mode properly)
And then managers tend to not understand why you'd all of a sudden have to spend 40 hours extra just to test this one little item on the requirements list called 'ACPI'.
In other words: - management doesn't understand that ACPI support requires probably almost as much effort as the rest of the BIOS. - BIOS engineers tend to not really like dealing with ACPI in the first place, so they are not going to bring this to managements attention.
Result: ACPI support is just one big hack, in a lot of cases just copied straight from the reference design and the engineers are only going to work on it when they get dragged into it kicking and screaming (when the support people start to complain about ACPI related issues).
When you really think about it, by nature wireless networking can never be too secure. I mean, your data is being broadcasted across the air to another point. Think about it.
I guess that's an understandable misconception about security. But security has by nature nothing to do with wireless or wired.
Good security is based on the principle that other people WILL have access to your encrypted data.
Unfortunately, the people that implemented security in the wireless protocols did a piss-poor job and left it vulnerable to (known!) attacks.
However, if you just ran IPSec or something over your wireless connection, you'd be fine.
Just to clarify, before I'm getting wise-ass responses; I realize the crack software may be the ideal tool to confirm your key is A-OK. BUT, that software is not for the faint-of-heart.
Getting raw packets etc, is not something everybody knows how to do, but it would be great if they could verify their key was fine.
(and then that software could send the key back to the original web-site, so they can keep a list of fine keys that are now known, so they are not fine anymore. Yeah yeah, I know...;-D)
saw the headline and thought "I don't care. I just want a basic cell phone." ?
Good point, this probably makes sense for a lot of people. I personally look at these things as a portable internet terminal. You kinda need the cell-phone part for your connection. To me that's a more useful device than a cell-phone, but since you are carrying it around anyway, it's nice to have it be a cell-_phone_ at the same time.
But, I'm not sure this is 'the' one. The GPS is not built in, and it's questionable whether the browser supports JavaScript. I personally would like a small qwerty keypad.
Always have to dissapoint me, don't ya? The GPS is an ADD-ON... BFD.
There are too many devices like this available already. Sure, some of the specs are nice (screen/camera resolution), but again, no mention of the browser supporting JavaScript.
Regardless of the outcome of the election, the world will remember the statement you as a country gave to the world today.
Nice generalization. Just remember that the people that voted against the incumbent wanted to make a very different statement. Believe you me, it's a very sad day for a lot of US citizens (and residents, like myself)
And actually, about 50% of the VOTERS support Bush, not 50% of Americans.
One interesting thing to do would be to lock up a all the electronic voting machines in precincts in Ohio and Florida (Broward and Miami-Dade in particular where there is huge Democratic vote to suppress). Look in particular for precincts where exit polls said one thing and the machines said something else. Be sure to set the date back to the day of the election, set them exactly like they were on election day, and start entering votes on them in a semi random way at about the same rate voters would on all or most of the machines, and see if after a full day of voting they report an accurate vote.
Not a terrible idea, but consider the following psuedo-code:
This is not a rant _against_ your post at all, I think you have some very interesting points, and I just want to add that there is only one single way to do electronic voting and that's with a paper trail. I can't believe anyone would accept anything else. Even if the machines had Open Source software, *who* really is able to make sure that the correct executable is being used? You could maybe come up with some fancy encryption scheme, but you still have to assume that the polling machine is being delivered by non-trusted people, making this really very complex.
Why are things being made so complex? It's pretty simple, if you can randomly check the machines against their paper trail, all you have to do is count the pieces of paper, count what the stated vote is for and add it all up. They can print the vote in Arial 72pt bold so that there's never _ever_ any misunderstanding. If there's one single paper vote that's off by what the machine reports, well then that's a big fucking problem.
(12:45AM PDT it's pretty much certain that Bush is winning) Just to get modded down as flamebait I will finish that off with some math I learned from Bill O'Reilly:
So considering the voting result, we are in one big fucking problem. So if I simply do the math, then (voting machine mismatch == big fucking problem, and bush == big fucking problem -> bush == voting machine mismatch)
Slashdot Mirror
"Matsushita Electric, in close cooperation with Microsoft, will develop a high-performance personal computer suited to the advanced image-processing demands of the 21st century," said Dr. Yoshitomi Nagaoka, vice president of Matsushita Electric's AVC Company..."
Ah, yeah. You found proof that a large (perhaps the largest) electronics manufacturer on the planet is doing something together with the largest software manufacturer on the planet.
Quite something. Who'd have thought?
Now if we had some sort of open source 3D drivers to take advantage of this
Tsss, you didn't even _try_ to look, now did you?
It's very simple;
GTK+ can now use Cairo.
Cairo uses Glitz.
Glitz uses Mesa for OpenGL.
Mesa uses DRI to interface with the hardware.
DRI drivers implement hardware acceleration under X, using DRM drivers.
DRM drivers are kernel drivers.
These layers are handled by at least 3 or 4 totally different organizations. Fortunately software engineers are known for their fabulous communication skills.
So, yes, the DRI drivers fully support 3D hardware, and there are quite a few available, with source.
Troll. But dammit, I'll bite anyway.
Well, I'd call this a troll, so I'll bite.
Why is it that according to P.C. all people are equally best at everything? People are different, and if you study them and it comes out that men are better at something than women, why must it be that you are immediately misogynist?
Since you (and many other) apparently have very clear, logical, thinking, but can't think more than one step ahead, I'll spell it out.
Follow it through.
"Women are Bad at Math" is a generalization, I think we can all agree to that. Even if there's truth in the statement, there are loads of women that are better at math than loads of men.
Generalization become discrimination. When generalizations are/become 'known facts', people get a chance to be selective, based on 'facts'.
So why would I hire a women for a math job? They are bad at it, says it right here!
Not only that, the majority of people have an inclination to follow the easy path. In this case it would result in less women studying math, because they know in advance that they are worse at it, so what's the point?
To get back to your original question:
Why is it that according to P.C. all people are equally best at everything?
You mis-represent the PC here. The PC don't think all people are equal good at something. They don't care if all people are equally good at everything.
PC people think that everyone should have the same opportunity to be best at something.
Global temperature has risen, fallen, and risen since 1880, even though carbon dioxide levels have steadily risen. In fact, for 30 years between 1940 and 1970 the temperature dropped all that it had gained in the past 50 years. Overall in the past 120 years global temperature has risen 1 degree celsius.
Uhmm... Source?
If you are going to debate in a science discussion isn't it common to quote yer source?
(KH's: you can leave your hillarious 'you must be new here' & 'welcome to Slashdot' posts; I'm not)
Incidentally, not suggested by him but by me: It can crack where it stands.
Of course had you used a tennis ball instead of an egg, you'd have never thought of that. What's your point?
OK, gotta hand it to ya, you outdid me!
:-D
Good job!
Nothing is free
:-)
Thank you.
PS: My sig has been implying this for a while.
Apple is doing nothing legally, technically, ethically, morally or wrong.
If anything, it _does_ show Apple's true color. Which is that they are just as any other big corporation and will resort to crippling one product to increase the sales of another product, and/or lock out a competitor. (don't be fooled, they deliberately removed the functionality, being perfectly aware of it)
So long as they are not a monopoly that's probably legal.
It's easy:
Dutch = legal prostitution
Holland = girls in clogs
Netherlands = legal Mary-Jane
Amsterdam = (Dutch | Holland | Netherlands)
Furthermore Amsterdam is to be found in Copenhagen.
This is pretty much what a Californian girl insisted was the truth, even after seeing my NetherDutch passport.
Little did I know.
Yep. They actually work.
Isn't that the most common response from someone who just got tricked into a pyramid scheme?
(no offense, my sig has been like this for a while now; if you don't understand it, define the word 'free' to us)
Support the bills already in the House and Senate that will fix this, instead of fantasizing about how the 2004 election was "stolen" (it wasn't).
As others have pointed out, you don't know if the 2004 election was stolen, simply because you can't know. There's no trail. Simple as that. Anyone claiming that it was or wasn't stolen is merely speculating.
I'm not a voter in this country, but I seriously distrust people that scream so loud about the election NOT being stolen, saying everybody should shut the hell up and get over it.
People should not shut the hell up, it's the only way the municipals will learn that they have to get machines that have a paper trail.
I agree that there's very little use in auditing the results or as the story poster suggest, disassembling the code on voting machines. I bet 90% of the slashdotters can write a piece of code that replaces itself at the end of the day with a 'proper' version. (for those needing more clarification: consider voting software that's rigged, at the end of the day, or even before just to be safe, it overwrites itself with the non-rigged version. There'll never be any evidence of the rigged version running on the box).
Having access to source code does practically nothing (although I personally believe that people _should_ have access to it). There's no way for a voter to verify that the software running on the box is actually the software they have the source for (see above about why this is impossible to prove _after_ the elections).
Until there is a bill that requires a paper trail I don't think people need to be as critical as can be about the 2004 election.
CalmPC? (original link is dead, here's a review.
I bought one of their chassis which is entirely fan-less (and a _LOT_ cheaper than this thing, I think less than $200.-). The case is butt-ugly, but you can move the cooling system to a purtier case if you want.
Very weird to turn on your PC and hear absolutely nothing. I used CompactFlash for the OS (although you could also network boot).
I actually would buy more of these if I could.
It always seemed that they did very poorly in the marketing department, I think with a good US rep they would have done very well.
Hydrogen IS an efficient way of storing energy derived from solar, nuclear, wind, hydro or other sources.
Well, how efficient is it really? I'm hearing that generating Hydrogen by electolysis is _not_ very efficient, but by using natural gas is.
Also I'm hearing that the output is not _just_ water.
I'm no expert on this subject so can anyone shed some light on this?
they also derive code of (and are violating the rights of) Wine, FreeType and QEmu
Just a pit-nick; AFAIK FreeType is distributed under a license which does not require redistribution of source.
Think about it. America had been attacked. America looked weak, open, an inviting target. America's "liberal" openness was implicated in it (not withstanding YEARS of Airline industry fighting and lobbying against stronger security measures on their planes).
To vote against it seemed to be voting in favor of what happened. And no politician in their right mind wants to ever create a sense that they are a tool of the boogeyman.
Well, I can perhaps understand that argument. But my point actually was that the "we weren't allowed to read it before we voted" argument is just BS. If that's the 'excuse' that people make for voting for PATRIOT, then I think that's just lame.
In fact I would lose all confidence in such a person because they apparently are not willing to stand up and say 'no, this is not right, we have to read it first'. They had that power. Perhaps after they had read it they would have still voted for it, but again, this is just a terrible excuse.
"It's my understanding the bill wasn't printed before the vote -- at least I couldn't get it. They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote."
I'm sorry, but I just don't get that. Why the hell did they vote? It's similar to the whole paperless evoting. Why would you vote on such a machine? I would simply refuse, _and_ make a BIG fucking whoopla about _why_ I refused to vote.
They're just lame excuses. If you are voting for something you'd better make damn sure that (a) you know what the hell you're voting on and (b) you're vote gets counted as it's supposed to.
It's about time people stood up for themselves. The whole freaking world is in the shits because of all this...
ACPI support is absolutely essential on a laptop.
I suppose, but ACPI is also an gawdawful piece of shit. I did BIOS development for a while. Imagine that (how to put this nicely) a lot of BIOS developers are, let's say, 'stuck in their ways'. Not all BIOS guys are like this, but to be a good BIOS person, you'd need a fairly large amount of experience, and it being BIOS and all, this results in a lot of people that think DOS is still a Pretty Neat Thing(tm). Assembler programmers who think that coding in C has too much of a performance hit. (again, this is a generalization, not all BIOS coders are like this at all, but still)
So along come a bunch of assholes who decide that the best way to get this power management thing going is to do it by creating an entirely new language/syntax. It's almost like a programming language but not quite. Bottom-line, my guestimate is that there are about one persons out there that really like the ACPI language. It's not very obvious, you probably really need some training before you should be allowed to mess with it.
Practically it goes more like this: the board manufacturer buys a reference BIOS for a certain reference board. The thing is, most boards end up being a little different from a reference board _especially_ in the power management section. So now the BIOS engineer needs to modify the ACPI code to match the board. Great, so (s)he goes ahead and does that. Then installs Windows XP, tests a couple of things like hibernate, or god forbid, stand-by. didn't crash? Ship it.
There are no proper regression tools to make sure ACPI is implemented correctly. It's very hard to debug/test/insure any changes you make to reference code, because it's like a bytecode language (imagine debugging Java with all you have is bytecode). Even worse, a lot of ACPI code runs in SMM mode, which is hard to work with and debug (even some of the hardware ICEs don't really support SMM mode properly)
And then managers tend to not understand why you'd all of a sudden have to spend 40 hours extra just to test this one little item on the requirements list called 'ACPI'.
In other words:
- management doesn't understand that ACPI support requires probably almost as much effort as the rest of the BIOS.
- BIOS engineers tend to not really like dealing with ACPI in the first place, so they are not going to bring this to managements attention.
Result:
ACPI support is just one big hack, in a lot of cases just copied straight from the reference design and the engineers are only going to work on it when they get dragged into it kicking and screaming (when the support people start to complain about ACPI related issues).
When you really think about it, by nature wireless networking can never be too secure. I mean, your data is being broadcasted across the air to another point. Think about it.
I guess that's an understandable misconception about security. But security has by nature nothing to do with wireless or wired.
Good security is based on the principle that other people WILL have access to your encrypted data.
Unfortunately, the people that implemented security in the wireless protocols did a piss-poor job and left it vulnerable to (known!) attacks.
However, if you just ran IPSec or something over your wireless connection, you'd be fine.
Just to clarify, before I'm getting wise-ass responses; I realize the crack software may be the ideal tool to confirm your key is A-OK. BUT, that software is not for the faint-of-heart.
;-D)
Getting raw packets etc, is not something everybody knows how to do, but it would be great if they could verify their key was fine.
(and then that software could send the key back to the original web-site, so they can keep a list of fine keys that are now known, so they are not fine anymore. Yeah yeah, I know...
I would have liked to see a tool that will verify if your chosen key is 'secure' or not.
Would have made the crack software look a little less black-hat, to the uninitiated.
Just an idea.
saw the headline and thought "I don't care. I just want a basic cell phone." ?
Good point, this probably makes sense for a lot of people. I personally look at these things as a portable internet terminal. You kinda need the cell-phone part for your connection. To me that's a more useful device than a cell-phone, but since you are carrying it around anyway, it's nice to have it be a cell-_phone_ at the same time.
But, I'm not sure this is 'the' one. The GPS is not built in, and it's questionable whether the browser supports JavaScript. I personally would like a small qwerty keypad.
Always have to dissapoint me, don't ya? The GPS is an ADD-ON... BFD.
There are too many devices like this available already. Sure, some of the specs are nice (screen/camera resolution), but again, no mention of the browser supporting JavaScript.
Regardless of the outcome of the election, the world will remember the statement you as a country gave to the world today.
Nice generalization. Just remember that the people that voted against the incumbent wanted to make a very different statement. Believe you me, it's a very sad day for a lot of US citizens (and residents, like myself)
And actually, about 50% of the VOTERS support Bush, not 50% of Americans.
Not a terrible idea, but consider the following psuedo-code:This is not a rant _against_ your post at all, I think you have some very interesting points, and I just want to add that there is only one single way to do electronic voting and that's with a paper trail. I can't believe anyone would accept anything else. Even if the machines had Open Source software, *who* really is able to make sure that the correct executable is being used? You could maybe come up with some fancy encryption scheme, but you still have to assume that the polling machine is being delivered by non-trusted people, making this really very complex.
Why are things being made so complex? It's pretty simple, if you can randomly check the machines against their paper trail, all you have to do is count the pieces of paper, count what the stated vote is for and add it all up. They can print the vote in Arial 72pt bold so that there's never _ever_ any misunderstanding. If there's one single paper vote that's off by what the machine reports, well then that's a big fucking problem.
(12:45AM PDT it's pretty much certain that Bush is winning)
Just to get modded down as flamebait I will finish that off with some math I learned from Bill O'Reilly:
So considering the voting result, we are in one big fucking problem. So if I simply do the math, then (voting machine mismatch == big fucking problem, and bush == big fucking problem -> bush == voting machine mismatch)
$315 on eBay right now: right here
Not affiliated either, just a 10 second froogle search.