I have been using AudioGalaxy and MusicCity Morpheous for a while now, ever since this whole Napster controversy started and I went out looking for alternatives. Morpheous is growing and a notable difference is present from it's earlier days. You can search for a song and 99% of the time you'll be able to download the full version in good quality. Yesterday I used AudioGalaxy for the first time in a few months and I was shocked to be greeted with a page full of red "x"s on my first search. When I clicked on the name of one of the songs I got a nice little message "You cannot download this song because it is copyrighted material." Well that's the first time I ever saw that on AudioGalxy, and it's the last time I'll use AG. It really is unfortunate though, you can do some cool stuff with AG like leave your sattellite running on your home computer, then go to the AG website at work and tell it to download songs. Now you can still download things, but the names are all skewed as to avoid copyright detection (I assume.)
1) My microwave at home displays "ENJOY YOUR MEAL" when it's finished cooking something, I'd sure love it if instead of cheesy LED's I heard a sexy voice saying "come and get it, baby."
2) Text messengers for blind people. You know those little IM devices all the kiddies have? Well just put brail on the keys and have one of these chips installed... there you go.
3) Watches. The next time somebody says "what time is it?" you just press a button and the voice chip in your watch simulating someone who sounds extremely pissed off shouts the time.
"We are looking at devices that don't necessarily have a really powerful processor on board," said Hezi Saar, product marketing manager at Winbond. "Usually most of the accessories for handheld devices don't have the power to run text-to-speech algorithms and they don't have the huge memory capacity to support this feature."
OK, so just imagine that in the near future anything and everything will have one of these small, low cost chips. Now, imagine the possibilities! Everyone I'm sure has their own ideas on how cool this could be, so go ahead and reply with yours!
OK, well, first of all, I've played both. Like I said, the GameCube runs circles around the XBox. The animation is smoother, the control is more responsive, the load times are shorter, etc, etc.
Secondly, they could be telling and outright lie, but in a press release by Nintendo which I unfortunately can't find right now, I read that the processor was a modified design that originated from a general purpose PPC and was designed specifically for the GameCube. Now, you may not believe that, but that's not the only time I've heard it, and based on the performance of the thing, I don't doubt it.
Not quite. I'm sure even people who _dont_ know x86 assembly language will realise all you don't need any extra instructions at all. Simply reorder them:
mov C, A
add C, B
True, but that's going to create some stalls, and is still two commands rather than one:
add C, A, B
as with the PPC chip.
Tell me about it, I do have more then CE, two letters even, namely MCSE and even I had to stop when they started throwing around the heavy stuff
So an MCSE is more than a degree in Computer Engineering? Right. Listen, I know Devry has nice commercials, but don't beleive everything you see on TV.
I mean, A = A + B is supposed to make sense even if B isn't equal to zero.
OK, I understand that to get an MCSE you only have to have a 3rd grade math level, so I'll try and keep this simple. The author was referring to computer instructions, not chalkboard equations, therefore A=A+B means "Store in A the result of the addition of the previous A and B." This is the convoluted way x86 does things, ie: add a,b
This article is extremely informative and gives you a good insight into how these processors are designed, as well as how they compare. I disagree with the poster though, you don't need a CE or EE degree to get the idea of what's going on. I'm a CE and I had classes on this sort of thing so yes I could follow all the gritty details, but I think the author did a good job of explaining things so that most people could understand. Also, I thought the author summed things up perfectly saying:
The preceding discussion should make it clear that the overall design approaches I outlined in the first article can be seen in the execution cores of each processor. The G4e continues its "wide and shallow" approach to performance, counting on instruction-level parallelism to allow it to squeeze the most performance out of code. The P4's "narrow and deep" approach, on the other hand, uses fewer execution units, eschewing ILP and betting instead on increases in clock speed to increase performance.
This is exactly the case. Unfortunately the popular masses don't understand all of this wide vs narrow stuff, so they go for the higher clock speeds. In reality, Intel is really pulling one over on us, charging more money and all we're getting is a higher clock rate, not a whole lot of performance gain. PPC has proven itself time and time again to be the better processor, but unfortunately they aren't used in very popular machines (mostly Macs,) so we don't get to reap the benefits.
On a related note, this article touches on one of the many reasons why the Gamecube will run circles around the Xbox. GameCube's processor is a 485Mhz PPC designed specifically for video games, while the Xbox just uses a common Pentium running at 733 MHz.
This all brings up a good question: why haven't Macintosh's or GameCube's marketers come up with a bench mark to put next to the processor speed? Maybe I missed it, but I've never seen a Macintosh commercial saying "comes with a G4 800 MHz, comparable to a P4 1.5 MHz." There might be too many legalities involved to do something like that, but it seems like they need to educate people somehow of the non 1 to 1 relationship between clock speeds of P4s and PPCs.
I just went to the site to check it out, and I have to say it's really nicely done, and I'm sure there's a lot of great information there, but I read the first article about a new subset of normal numbers, and my brain hasn't hurt that much since MthSc 410!!! Thank God I'll never have to look at that stuff again!
(this is humor, I'm not slighting math as I think it's the most important subject, especially in early education, but that article is rather confusing to anyone who hasn't been working with that level of stuff for several years)
Well, now there's 6 very rich Attourney Generals, or at least they're more wealthy then before this case. It's the perfect scheme too, they reject the plan because they say it's "a slap on the wrist," not enough punishment, but in effect rejecting the plan eliminates any punishment at all... pure genious I tell you, pure genious.
And start making open source porno. Just have a bunch of people take clips and append them to the original. Eventually you'll have a full length feature film. Well maybe not "full length," I mean you are a CS major after all...
Well, here's our next generation of college-millionaires. They can sign a nice spiffy contract with the RIAA and mod this thing to spit out home addresses and phone numbers, complete with a detailed map for "physical evidence." Let's hope that's not as easy as it sounds and the RIAA never gets that capability.
Actually, I'm sure the app just uses information that is already being transmitted to create the graph. It might use extra clock cycles but not extra bandwidth, and if you're that concerned about it, just turn it off, or don't use it.
The problem is that these set top boxes are very proprietary, and these companies aren't going to just let any old person start mucking around in them. I'd love to be able to do that, but it's just not going to happen.
The way the set top is designed, you have different layers of functionality. The 3rd party software is built at the highest, most abstract layer. So, if you're a cable company with 10 million subscribers, Motorola or whoever the set top maker is will work with you and your software group to develop a user interface for all the set tops on your network. This requires a lot of lawyers, contracts, and politics though, and like I said I don't think you'll be getting any support in that area any time soon. There is, however, a project for open source TV, but I don't know how much progress they've made. I agree with you though, it would be nice to be able to program your STB however you wanted it, especially since cable companies are usually going to do the quickest cheapest thing they can do to get it out the door.
I agree with your statements, and I've read similar articles in scientific periodicles. Those articles, however, are usually well hidden and no longer than half a page, because they aren't very popular. So why is rational thought about the O-zone not popular? Well it's not sensationalist, it doesn't give people something to "fight" for, and people who are "environmentally concious" just hate to admit that they are wrong.
Another thing that I don't think you touched on, our climate goes in cycles. I don't recall the exact dates, but I know that some time ago in recent history (1960's maybe?) all of the popular scientists were warning of global cooling. That's right, the earth was getting too cold and there was going to be another ice age if people didn't do something about it. Our climate is not as stable as some would imagine, and contrary to popular beleive we humans have nothing to do with it. Yes, in large cities there is smog, but that is a microclimate just around the city, and it dissipates in the atmosphere and goes away eventually, doesn't affect the global environment. The global climate is something that is very dynamic and not easily understandable. One thing is for certain though: there is no proof that we have a problem with the O-zone layer.
Well as with everything, Europe is definitely country to country different moreso than US is state to state. I was speaking of several UPC channels, Avante, Reality TV, Expo, and Innergy, all of which have annoying logos and are uniquely European.
The TV channels in Europe for the most part have big, ugly logos that are always showing (well, during the programs anyway, maybe not commercials.) These things really are annoying and get in the way. Usually on US TV the logos are transparent and so they don't really get in the way. Lately though, with the flag in the logos, they are a bit more intrusive, but I think we can handle that given the situation at hand. I think this is not a big deal over here in the USA, mostly a European issue.
Did you happen to notice the amount of applications you installed when compared to Windows? I also installed Mandrake 8.1 and it was around a 2 GB install. I setup a dual boot so I also installed Win 98. After installing Win and all my applications I had used around 4 GB. Additionally, I have much fewer applications under Windows.
It's easy to point to certain features in a new OS as examples of progress, but end-users often find that a new OS performs like molasses compared to the version they were using.
So why does that happen? Well I'll tell you my educated guess: every year, electrical and computer engineers make amazing advances with comptuer hardware, making RAM more plentiful and less expensive, making hard drives larger and faster, implementing devices like L2 cache to decrease read/write times, and most popularly making Processors faster than ever (at least by clock speed.) You would think that these advances would make all software simply fly, be faster and more responsive than ever, and you'd have unlimited storage space for your files. However, that's not the way it is, and somehow, you still run out of disk space, don't have enough RAM, and have programs running slow (on a 2 GHZ Machine!!!) So what is it? Programmers. "Computer Scientists," rather than improving on software that ran well on old architectures, go by the thought process "well now that we have all this power, why don't we use it all" and so they end up writing applications and OS's that hog all the newly available extra resources. I'm not saying all Comp Sci's do this, I mean look at Linux, it's pretty damn efficient. When it comes to commercial apps though like Windoze, rather than make something extraordinarily efficient that runs on the newest machines, they say "well the hardware takes care of efficiency, let's just make something with a lot of bells and whistles." What you end up with is grossly large applications that sloth along on extremely powerful machines that have the capability to be so much more. This is yet another reason to use Linux.
Pretty simple, it's not software, it's a film. It's just like a VHS tape, only they add in extras sometimes. You could do the same thing with VHS, but there aren't that many VHS drives for PC's.
1. COMPUTING somebody accessing another's computer: somebody who uses computer expertise to gain unauthorized access to a computer system belonging to another, either to learn about the system or to examine its data
2. COMPUTING computer enthusiast: somebody who is very interested or skilled in computer technology and programming
The popular concept of hacker is and has been for a while definition 1. Calling Linux users and programmers by that definition is wrong. The technical secondary definition of the term hacker is in fact computer enthusiast. That definition, however, is extremely rarely used. I in fact have never heard it being used that way, and in this article, definition 1 was clearly being implied.
Don't worry, I remember those days. My point was just that similar to glittery gloves and Members Only Jackets, calling a computer enthusiast a "hacker" is out like the fat kid in dodgeball.
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I have been using AudioGalaxy and MusicCity Morpheous for a while now, ever since this whole Napster controversy started and I went out looking for alternatives. Morpheous is growing and a notable difference is present from it's earlier days. You can search for a song and 99% of the time you'll be able to download the full version in good quality. Yesterday I used AudioGalaxy for the first time in a few months and I was shocked to be greeted with a page full of red "x"s on my first search. When I clicked on the name of one of the songs I got a nice little message "You cannot download this song because it is copyrighted material." Well that's the first time I ever saw that on AudioGalxy, and it's the last time I'll use AG. It really is unfortunate though, you can do some cool stuff with AG like leave your sattellite running on your home computer, then go to the AG website at work and tell it to download songs. Now you can still download things, but the names are all skewed as to avoid copyright detection (I assume.)
No, no, that's "polk flied lice"
1) My microwave at home displays "ENJOY YOUR MEAL" when it's finished cooking something, I'd sure love it if instead of cheesy LED's I heard a sexy voice saying "come and get it, baby."
2) Text messengers for blind people. You know those little IM devices all the kiddies have? Well just put brail on the keys and have one of these chips installed... there you go.
3) Watches. The next time somebody says "what time is it?" you just press a button and the voice chip in your watch simulating someone who sounds extremely pissed off shouts the time.
Well, that's it for now...
"We are looking at devices that don't necessarily have a really powerful processor on board," said Hezi Saar, product marketing manager at Winbond. "Usually most of the accessories for handheld devices don't have the power to run text-to-speech algorithms and they don't have the huge memory capacity to support this feature."
OK, so just imagine that in the near future anything and everything will have one of these small, low cost chips. Now, imagine the possibilities! Everyone I'm sure has their own ideas on how cool this could be, so go ahead and reply with yours!
OK, well, first of all, I've played both. Like I said, the GameCube runs circles around the XBox. The animation is smoother, the control is more responsive, the load times are shorter, etc, etc.
Secondly, they could be telling and outright lie, but in a press release by Nintendo which I unfortunately can't find right now, I read that the processor was a modified design that originated from a general purpose PPC and was designed specifically for the GameCube. Now, you may not believe that, but that's not the only time I've heard it, and based on the performance of the thing, I don't doubt it.
Not quite. I'm sure even people who _dont_ know x86 assembly language will realise all you don't need any extra instructions at all. Simply reorder them:
mov C, A
add C, B
True, but that's going to create some stalls, and is still two commands rather than one:
add C, A, B
as with the PPC chip.
Tell me about it, I do have more then CE, two letters even, namely MCSE and even I had to stop when they started throwing around the heavy stuff
So an MCSE is more than a degree in Computer Engineering? Right. Listen, I know Devry has nice commercials, but don't beleive everything you see on TV.
I mean, A = A + B is supposed to make sense even if B isn't equal to zero.
OK, I understand that to get an MCSE you only have to have a 3rd grade math level, so I'll try and keep this simple. The author was referring to computer instructions, not chalkboard equations, therefore A=A+B means "Store in A the result of the addition of the previous A and B." This is the convoluted way x86 does things, ie: add a,b
This article is extremely informative and gives you a good insight into how these processors are designed, as well as how they compare. I disagree with the poster though, you don't need a CE or EE degree to get the idea of what's going on. I'm a CE and I had classes on this sort of thing so yes I could follow all the gritty details, but I think the author did a good job of explaining things so that most people could understand. Also, I thought the author summed things up perfectly saying:
The preceding discussion should make it clear that the overall design approaches I outlined in the first article can be seen in the execution cores of each processor. The G4e continues its "wide and shallow" approach to performance, counting on instruction-level parallelism to allow it to squeeze the most performance out of code. The P4's "narrow and deep" approach, on the other hand, uses fewer execution units, eschewing ILP and betting instead on increases in clock speed to increase performance.
This is exactly the case. Unfortunately the popular masses don't understand all of this wide vs narrow stuff, so they go for the higher clock speeds. In reality, Intel is really pulling one over on us, charging more money and all we're getting is a higher clock rate, not a whole lot of performance gain. PPC has proven itself time and time again to be the better processor, but unfortunately they aren't used in very popular machines (mostly Macs,) so we don't get to reap the benefits.
On a related note, this article touches on one of the many reasons why the Gamecube will run circles around the Xbox. GameCube's processor is a 485Mhz PPC designed specifically for video games, while the Xbox just uses a common Pentium running at 733 MHz.
This all brings up a good question: why haven't Macintosh's or GameCube's marketers come up with a bench mark to put next to the processor speed? Maybe I missed it, but I've never seen a Macintosh commercial saying "comes with a G4 800 MHz, comparable to a P4 1.5 MHz." There might be too many legalities involved to do something like that, but it seems like they need to educate people somehow of the non 1 to 1 relationship between clock speeds of P4s and PPCs.
I just went to the site to check it out, and I have to say it's really nicely done, and I'm sure there's a lot of great information there, but I read the first article about a new subset of normal numbers, and my brain hasn't hurt that much since MthSc 410!!! Thank God I'll never have to look at that stuff again!
(this is humor, I'm not slighting math as I think it's the most important subject, especially in early education, but that article is rather confusing to anyone who hasn't been working with that level of stuff for several years)
Well, now there's 6 very rich Attourney Generals, or at least they're more wealthy then before this case. It's the perfect scheme too, they reject the plan because they say it's "a slap on the wrist," not enough punishment, but in effect rejecting the plan eliminates any punishment at all... pure genious I tell you, pure genious.
And start making open source porno. Just have a bunch of people take clips and append them to the original. Eventually you'll have a full length feature film. Well maybe not "full length," I mean you are a CS major after all...
(humor)
Rock 'n Roll!
Get butt-naked!
Alchohol really helps, seriously.
...like Computer Engineering. But only if you can "hack" it.
Well, here's our next generation of college-millionaires. They can sign a nice spiffy contract with the RIAA and mod this thing to spit out home addresses and phone numbers, complete with a detailed map for "physical evidence." Let's hope that's not as easy as it sounds and the RIAA never gets that capability.
Actually, I'm sure the app just uses information that is already being transmitted to create the graph. It might use extra clock cycles but not extra bandwidth, and if you're that concerned about it, just turn it off, or don't use it.
The problem is that these set top boxes are very proprietary, and these companies aren't going to just let any old person start mucking around in them. I'd love to be able to do that, but it's just not going to happen.
The way the set top is designed, you have different layers of functionality. The 3rd party software is built at the highest, most abstract layer. So, if you're a cable company with 10 million subscribers, Motorola or whoever the set top maker is will work with you and your software group to develop a user interface for all the set tops on your network. This requires a lot of lawyers, contracts, and politics though, and like I said I don't think you'll be getting any support in that area any time soon. There is, however, a project for open source TV, but I don't know how much progress they've made. I agree with you though, it would be nice to be able to program your STB however you wanted it, especially since cable companies are usually going to do the quickest cheapest thing they can do to get it out the door.
I agree with your statements, and I've read similar articles in scientific periodicles. Those articles, however, are usually well hidden and no longer than half a page, because they aren't very popular. So why is rational thought about the O-zone not popular? Well it's not sensationalist, it doesn't give people something to "fight" for, and people who are "environmentally concious" just hate to admit that they are wrong.
Another thing that I don't think you touched on, our climate goes in cycles. I don't recall the exact dates, but I know that some time ago in recent history (1960's maybe?) all of the popular scientists were warning of global cooling. That's right, the earth was getting too cold and there was going to be another ice age if people didn't do something about it. Our climate is not as stable as some would imagine, and contrary to popular beleive we humans have nothing to do with it. Yes, in large cities there is smog, but that is a microclimate just around the city, and it dissipates in the atmosphere and goes away eventually, doesn't affect the global environment. The global climate is something that is very dynamic and not easily understandable. One thing is for certain though: there is no proof that we have a problem with the O-zone layer.
Well as with everything, Europe is definitely country to country different moreso than US is state to state. I was speaking of several UPC channels, Avante, Reality TV, Expo, and Innergy, all of which have annoying logos and are uniquely European.
The TV channels in Europe for the most part have big, ugly logos that are always showing (well, during the programs anyway, maybe not commercials.) These things really are annoying and get in the way. Usually on US TV the logos are transparent and so they don't really get in the way. Lately though, with the flag in the logos, they are a bit more intrusive, but I think we can handle that given the situation at hand. I think this is not a big deal over here in the USA, mostly a European issue.
Did you happen to notice the amount of applications you installed when compared to Windows? I also installed Mandrake 8.1 and it was around a 2 GB install. I setup a dual boot so I also installed Win 98. After installing Win and all my applications I had used around 4 GB. Additionally, I have much fewer applications under Windows.
It's easy to point to certain features in a new OS as examples of progress, but end-users often find that a new OS performs like molasses compared to the version they were using.
So why does that happen? Well I'll tell you my educated guess: every year, electrical and computer engineers make amazing advances with comptuer hardware, making RAM more plentiful and less expensive, making hard drives larger and faster, implementing devices like L2 cache to decrease read/write times, and most popularly making Processors faster than ever (at least by clock speed.) You would think that these advances would make all software simply fly, be faster and more responsive than ever, and you'd have unlimited storage space for your files. However, that's not the way it is, and somehow, you still run out of disk space, don't have enough RAM, and have programs running slow (on a 2 GHZ Machine!!!) So what is it? Programmers. "Computer Scientists," rather than improving on software that ran well on old architectures, go by the thought process "well now that we have all this power, why don't we use it all" and so they end up writing applications and OS's that hog all the newly available extra resources. I'm not saying all Comp Sci's do this, I mean look at Linux, it's pretty damn efficient. When it comes to commercial apps though like Windoze, rather than make something extraordinarily efficient that runs on the newest machines, they say "well the hardware takes care of efficiency, let's just make something with a lot of bells and whistles." What you end up with is grossly large applications that sloth along on extremely powerful machines that have the capability to be so much more. This is yet another reason to use Linux.
Pretty simple, it's not software, it's a film. It's just like a VHS tape, only they add in extras sometimes. You could do the same thing with VHS, but there aren't that many VHS drives for PC's.
So if they win, let's all go scratching DVD's and sending them back, just to be pains in the ass. I'll go first!
OK, if you want to get technical:
hacker [hákr ] (plural hackers) noun
1. COMPUTING somebody accessing another's computer: somebody who uses computer expertise to gain unauthorized access to a computer system belonging to another, either to learn about the system or to examine its data
2. COMPUTING computer enthusiast: somebody who is very interested or skilled in computer technology and programming
The popular concept of hacker is and has been for a while definition 1. Calling Linux users and programmers by that definition is wrong. The technical secondary definition of the term hacker is in fact computer enthusiast. That definition, however, is extremely rarely used. I in fact have never heard it being used that way, and in this article, definition 1 was clearly being implied.
Don't worry, I remember those days. My point was just that similar to glittery gloves and Members Only Jackets, calling a computer enthusiast a "hacker" is out like the fat kid in dodgeball.