Of course, you'd think Mozilla would have a good chance of emulating Netscape because most of its developers worked on Netscape.
I think that's the reason it's taking so long right there - judging by the poor speed, stability, and standards compliance of NS 4.x, I think that "emulating Netscape" is the last thing Mozilla wants to do.
First of all - IANAL, but all this DVD stuff does has me considering law as a career.
Watch your wording - what you said is technically wrong on a few counts. CSS is a <b>trade secret</b>, <i>not</i> a copyright, and as such is suubject to different laws. Because of that, they could go ahead and sell an unlicensed player as long as they can prove that the CSS decryption information is in the open and therefore no longer qualifies as a trade secret.
It's not like some company couldn't go make a DVD player without a CSS license now; it's just that companies are afraid of the DVD CCA's high-paid attorneys. It may seem easy to show that CSS no longer qualifies as a trade secret, but why would any intelligent company take that kind of a risk when they can just pay a small licensing fee?
And just to clarify, the reason that Apex could get in serious trouble for selling unlicensed players is not really the act of doing so, but the act of doing so after having signed an agreement to get this information - despite the fact that it's now in the public domain. If some new company created an unlicensed player, they couldn't really be subject to a fair trade secret infringement suit, as the mere fact that they were able to gain knowledge of the secret shows that it is no longer such (not that anyone would try and go against DVD CCA lawyers to prove that anyway).
So although most companies could probably put out their own, unlicensed DVD players without breaking the law (which would be the case were CSS patented and not a trade secret), the scare tactics keep them from doing so.
Am I the only one who thinks that "copying" some of these GUI concepts is acceptable in the case where one "construct" (for lack of a better name) is noticably better than any other?
It seems that we have a fairly efficient contruct for every type of data necessary. Radio buttons and list boxes work well when one is to chose one choice out of many, checkboxes work great for simply toggling a yes/no value, and a button is. . . well, a button. These seem to work perfectly for every situtation I can conceive.
Someone posted in a patent article a while back that IBM owns a patent on pressing a "more" button to scroll to another page of text, and Microsoft owns one on scrollbars themselves. What would we do if we were unable to use either of these? There are certainly situations in which one solution is more effective than all the rest, and this is certainly one of them. It's a good thing that those are all held as defensive patents.
It seems pretty rare that these aren't suitable for the job. The only innovative control I've seen recently is IE 5's address bar (where auto-complete drops down), but that just seems to be a logical progression from the combo box.
I've also heard many people complain that "drop down and expand to the right" type menus - like the windows start menu, which pops up and selected categories are displayed to the right - are a poor way to handle such an event (many comments in the interview with the UI guy ranted about this). Then will someone tell me what's been proposed as an alternative to such?
Maybe I'm just too closed-minded, but I haven't seen much UI innovation recently and I think the Gnome - and any other desktop for that matter - is perfectly justified in copying.
Responding to the question posed along with this article - "How long until Gnome or another Open Source desktop is the recognized leader":
I don't think that such a blanket statement can really be made, as the desktop is important in both the consumer and business markets (and probably others that deserve to be distinguished from these generalized categories).
However, I'm interested in what criteria others here would use to judge such an occurance. I myself would imagine that it's just a reasonable majority - as soon as one desktop is recognized by the general public as being in more widespread use than another, I would consider it the leader.
So let me just pose this question for others to reply to: At what point would you consider a desktop as having passed that threshold? (no need to discuss if such an occurance will ever happen. ..)
I'm sick and tired of seeing all these poor console comparisons flying around. . .
First of all, megahertz is a very, very, very bad way to judge speed when comparing different chips. It's a measure of speed relative to a specific architecture, not an absolute measure for comparison. Just as you can't compare a 700 MHz x86 chip to a 700 MHz alpha chip, you can't compare a 600 MHz x86 chip (X-Box) to a 300 MHz proprietary chip (Playstation 2), as is done in the comparison pointed to in this article.
Keep in mind that x86 is 32-bit, while the nect-gen consoles (Dreamcast, Dolphin, PS2) are at 128-bit now (I believe).
Memory Bandwidth is a horrible indicator unless it's the sole bottleneck. If the components can't run fast enough, the bandwidth speed is irrelevent.
Polygon Performance seems to be the best measure I've seen so far - but that's not everything. While the original Playstation can handle more polys per second than an N64, the N64 has all kinds of better effects - trilinear filtering (I believe), better hardware anti-aliasing, etc. The X-Box's 300 million polys/sec does sound pretty damn good, but don't judge a book by its cover.
Rather than judge all this now, why don't we just wait until all these consoles come out? I, for one, buy the systems as much for the games they have as for their statistics. All these comparisons in the media are just plain stupid.
I keep seeing stuff about Real-Time Linux/programming/OSes etc. - but I still ahve no clue what the heck it is. Could someone please explain, in simple terms, what it is that all these articles are refering to?
Sure, I'd prefer no ads at all - but look at it this way: If I'm going to have to look at ads, why not look at ones that might concern and/or interest me? Heck, if it was for something I like then I might even follow the link or even buy whatever product they're advertising (the AIBO ad at the top of my/. page right now comes to mind).
If they were submitting and tracking personal information, I'd be offended. But if I just tell them my interests and get to see interesting ads, I'd happily do so.
Coincidentally, I was just reading your book, _The C++ Programming Language_, 30 minutes ago - let me take a moment to say that I'm very impressed by it. On to the question:
Recently I've seen a couple different articles calling for the 'next' programming language, something to go beyond C++. Specifically, there's <A HREF="http://www.gamespy.com/articles/devweek_b.sh tm">this piece by Tim Sweeney</A> and <A HREF="http://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/25/150238 .shtml">its coverage on slashdot</A>. Tim is the lead coder for the Unreal game engine.
In the article, he discribe's his thoughts on what new programming languages should focus on, which seems to boil down to higher levels of abstraction. One example he gives is having two arrays, A and B, and being able to add them directly (C = A + B;) rather than using a loop to do so with each individual element.
Having just read part of your book, I see that you noted that you agree with C's very low level primitive data types, which seems to be the opposite view; yet the addition of classes seems to be a move toward more complex data types.
My question is, do you think a more high-level/abstract language would be useful, or do you think that we should stick to fairly low level but complex languages like C and C++?
And, on a slightly relatated note, do you think that future languages should mimic the C/C++ grammar, or do you think a more intuititive one is possible?
My aunt received a free PC as part of the program. Now that it's discontinued, she obviously doens't need to look at the ads - so how can I get rid of them for her? Are they just programs that run in the background or is it an entire explorer shell replacement?
(I haven't seen the PC yet, but I'd like to help her out - thanks =)
That still sounds to me like your attempt to rationalize your actions - are you afraid to confess that your entertainment is killing DeCSS?
I'll come out and say it right now:
<B>I'm too greedy and selfish to give up movies to help out DeCSS.</B>
Go ahead - moderate me down to the depths of troll hell. Flame me all you want. Hate me - it's the scum like me that "ruin the entire DeCSS movement for everyone."
But at least I have the guts to admit it.
Of course the movie studios make _relatively_ little money from people buying tickets - but at that level, it's several million bucks. Even if they made NO money from ticket sales, they're still getting paid a flat fee by the theaters -- and even though I myself would not make them lose any money through the boycott, I WOULD be voting with my money.
If it were truly a worthy cause, enough people would boycott to the point where theaters would not even buy any except for independents. But I have to follow with libertarian ideals here and a free market economy, and say that people are voting with their dollars. But if there was such support for this, but they all followed your reasoning - that they individually could not impact the studios' actions - then we would still not see any changes.
If you were truly in support of DeCSS, you'd give up the movies and stop trying to provide excuses. Seeing as the studios, despite their unfair business practices, give me movies that I like, I am unable to find any reasoning strong enough to convince me to boycott movies - but at least I admit that I'm greedy and self-centered.
So now that VAndover owns Slashdot, let's see if their servers are as good as they claim: Challenge these guys to DoS/.
Think about it - if all these sites go down because of the slashdot effect, then all the people visiting them must have visited slashdot first. If the servers can hold this kinda load, what's another one or two billion more pages served per minute gonna do?
Heck, I'd be surprised if slashdot can keep getting slower at this pace much longer - it gets worse by the day.
Even better - let's sic 'em against the MPAA site. Or Amazon-the-patent-bully, or Microsoft. Or better yet, point them all at John Katz' home computer and maybe it'll stay down long enough that we can get some peace and quiet around here.
I'm not really too sure I understand HOW they do this - but can it be made faster? Seems to me like using two 386s in parallel just for the sake of doing so instead of using a high-end Athlon.
Then again, I suppose that the whole purpose of this RNA computing experiment was to show that it can be done.
One important point - it selected a WRONG answer? Lotta good it'll do if it's running fast and in parallel if it's WRONG =)
A mole is approx 6.02e23 "things" (in this case, molecules), so your estimate would be off by a factor of 2.
And I suppose that it is important to note that as long as you've got a pot of 'random' DNA, there's always the chance that no matter how much you have you may be missing one important sequence. Nevertheless, I like the idea - but how much faster <I>could</I> this solve P-NP problems? Is there any way to estimate that?
Transmeta does NOT want us programming directly in Crusoe VLIW-native code. In fact, the opcodes will NOT be the same on the 3400/5400 chips, and will probably change for all future chips (each model/variation would need its own code morphing software).
The primary reason is that they don't want to have to make these chips backwards compatible. Intel has a lot of problems with this - even the newest Pentium III's must support programs written for 386s. Intel has a hard time because it can't change these opcodes, but instead has to add new ones - hence MMX, SIMD instructions, the Katmai extensions (the P3 stuff), etc (and similarly, AMD has added 3dnow! et al).
Transmeta wants the freedom to be able to drastically change newer models of the CPU to keep it running at optimal speed/efficiency. If they wanted to allow us to write Crusoe-native code, then they'd need morphing software that allows newer models to morph old code to its own (modified) native code. In other words, a real pain in the rear and definately a problem if Crusoe can't run different "morphers" simultaneously (which I suspect it can't).
As for other morphing software to emulate other processors: I wouldn't be surprised if they allowed it to emulate some other chips - like the PPC, so it can run MacOS stuff - but it won't run nearly as well as x86 emulation will. The chip is meant to be able to morph code from many different platforms, but there are a lot of shortcuts to emphasize x86. I think that topic is addressed in the Ars Technica stuff, but basically Crusoe uses a FPU very similar to the x86 one. I think there are some other things for that in hardware, as well as the fact that we know they're dedicating most of their time to creating the x86 morphing software so it will be the most optimized.
I highly doubt that we'll be able to write our own morphers. I think that it's an extremely difficult thing to do, it would require knowledge of the Crusoe instruction set (which, as I said above, they don't want to release), and the morphing software is probably authenticated somehow. Since the morphing code is running in Flash ROM, it can be upgraded, but if someone tried to load a morpher that doesn't work they're gonna have trouble reverting back to x86.
Linus said that "Mobile Linux" is NOT a code fork - it's just the x86 version with a few modifications to make it run better on embedded platforms. Why reinvent the wheel?
Keep in mind that this is all SPECULATION - if anyone here has other information to the contrary, I'd like to hear it =)
I've always wondered what Ballmer did to get such high positions at Microsoft - from what I saw in Pirates of Silicon Valley, he just happened to be with Gates and Allen in the right place at the right time. Does he have any real CEO credentials - training, experience outside of Microsoft, or otherwise?
And the ineveitable question - Does it run Lin-- whoops, answered my own question =)
My town just started offering digital cable recently, and I've noticed a dramatic decrease in the quality of my normal old cable. Specifically, it's that kind of "see through" effect, where objects going horizontally across the screen can be seen through similarly colored objects (read: people) in front of them.
I'm under the impression that this is due to the compressions algorithms used -- the cable company is using some lossy compression to try and use less bandwidth (although Comcast blantantly denies any ghosting, shadows, or other image problems either exisiting or being their fault). It's not like I never noticed these before; it's just that the quality has gotten much, MUCH worse since digital cable began being offered. They're pobably trying to compress the image more, but I doubt that the occurance is just a coincidence.
My problem is this: While many companies and industries are using digital this and digital that ernestly, others are using it for profit. Do I really need a HDTV? I'm perfectly satisfied with my 640x480 broadcasts - there's no way I'll pay hundreds (and, not too long ago, thousands) of dollars more for a higher quality broadcast. Does anyone really expect to be able to buy a cheap TV like the ones today and a cheap digital-to-analog converter 5 years from now?
This is all just an exuse for the entire industry to go out and charge me more. Different companies are backing different standards depending on what's in their own interests, not what's best for the consumer. Frankly, I think that we're better off without some of these "standards" that are being tossed around.
Nintendo just won a permanent injunction against Bung last month. A US court ruled that the Bung carts were intended for piracy, not development, and ruled that Bung must pay Nintendo some $7 million as well as cease selling its flash carts in the US, Canada, Mexico, and (I believe) parts of Central America that the court has jurisdiction over.
As a GB Developer myself, I'm upset about the ruling - I was planning on buying a cart soon. Now you either have to have them purchased and imported by someone outside the Continent or win one in the current Bung Amatuer GB developer contest. Frankly, I doubt Bung can stay in business now, with a hung debt and a huge market dead (then again, Hong Kong is where they make all their cash off of software pirates anyways).
I think that a large percentage of the people who purchased these ARE using them for piracy, but now I have to and either continue to use an emulator or wait for my "studio" to become Nintendo licensed (soon, I hope) and purchase a several thousand dollar cart =(
I'm waiting for a watch with MP3 playback AND a decent recording device. I mean, how cool would it be to have recorded that time when I was called down to the pricipal's office for cursing, and HE cursed at ME? The ultimate irony, caught on a watch-based digital MP3 playing/recording device.
BTW, I doubt that any such recorded conversation would be valid for anything without the prior permission to record and replay anything said by the other party(ies) - but I can think of many, many times where I'd love to have some of the things people say on record to play in front of friends and such =)
. . . but if you include a year zero, then today would be November 22, 1998 -- not 1999. The millenium idicates 2000 years since the start of counting years as AD - which, no matter how you number it, will not occur for another year.
Gee, not only do they repeat week-old news with the Loki hack patches -- there was already a full story on their release -- but within 20 minutes of posting, microsith.com and several other links are already slashdotted. This site is getting too big for its own good. . .
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Slashdot Mirror
Jon Katz was never anything more than a perl script running on a Linux box! That explains. . . well, everything =)
I think that's the reason it's taking so long right there - judging by the poor speed, stability, and standards compliance of NS 4.x, I think that "emulating Netscape" is the last thing Mozilla wants to do.
First of all - IANAL, but all this DVD stuff does has me considering law as a career.
Watch your wording - what you said is technically wrong on a few counts. CSS is a <b>trade secret</b>, <i>not</i> a copyright, and as such is suubject to different laws. Because of that, they could go ahead and sell an unlicensed player as long as they can prove that the CSS decryption information is in the open and therefore no longer qualifies as a trade secret.
It's not like some company couldn't go make a DVD player without a CSS license now; it's just that companies are afraid of the DVD CCA's high-paid attorneys. It may seem easy to show that CSS no longer qualifies as a trade secret, but why would any intelligent company take that kind of a risk when they can just pay a small licensing fee?
And just to clarify, the reason that Apex could get in serious trouble for selling unlicensed players is not really the act of doing so, but the act of doing so after having signed an agreement to get this information - despite the fact that it's now in the public domain. If some new company created an unlicensed player, they couldn't really be subject to a fair trade secret infringement suit, as the mere fact that they were able to gain knowledge of the secret shows that it is no longer such (not that anyone would try and go against DVD CCA lawyers to prove that anyway).
So although most companies could probably put out their own, unlicensed DVD players without breaking the law (which would be the case were CSS patented and not a trade secret), the scare tactics keep them from doing so.
So either the patent office was screwed up back in the days of Windows 3.1 and below, or they really DO accept bribes =)
(I'm really starting to wonder now). .
Am I the only one who thinks that "copying" some of these GUI concepts is acceptable in the case where one "construct" (for lack of a better name) is noticably better than any other?
It seems that we have a fairly efficient contruct for every type of data necessary. Radio buttons and list boxes work well when one is to chose one choice out of many, checkboxes work great for simply toggling a yes/no value, and a button is. . . well, a button. These seem to work perfectly for every situtation I can conceive.
Someone posted in a patent article a while back that IBM owns a patent on pressing a "more" button to scroll to another page of text, and Microsoft owns one on scrollbars themselves. What would we do if we were unable to use either of these? There are certainly situations in which one solution is more effective than all the rest, and this is certainly one of them. It's a good thing that those are all held as defensive patents.
It seems pretty rare that these aren't suitable for the job. The only innovative control I've seen recently is IE 5's address bar (where auto-complete drops down), but that just seems to be a logical progression from the combo box.
I've also heard many people complain that "drop down and expand to the right" type menus - like the windows start menu, which pops up and selected categories are displayed to the right - are a poor way to handle such an event (many comments in the interview with the UI guy ranted about this). Then will someone tell me what's been proposed as an alternative to such?
Maybe I'm just too closed-minded, but I haven't seen much UI innovation recently and I think the Gnome - and any other desktop for that matter - is perfectly justified in copying.
Responding to the question posed along with this article - "How long until Gnome or another Open Source desktop is the recognized leader":
.)
I don't think that such a blanket statement can really be made, as the desktop is important in both the consumer and business markets (and probably others that deserve to be distinguished from these generalized categories).
However, I'm interested in what criteria others here would use to judge such an occurance. I myself would imagine that it's just a reasonable majority - as soon as one desktop is recognized by the general public as being in more widespread use than another, I would consider it the leader.
So let me just pose this question for others to reply to: At what point would you consider a desktop as having passed that threshold? (no need to discuss if such an occurance will ever happen. .
[RANT]
I'm sick and tired of seeing all these poor console comparisons flying around. . .
First of all, megahertz is a very, very, very bad way to judge speed when comparing different chips. It's a measure of speed relative to a specific architecture, not an absolute measure for comparison. Just as you can't compare a 700 MHz x86 chip to a 700 MHz alpha chip, you can't compare a 600 MHz x86 chip (X-Box) to a 300 MHz proprietary chip (Playstation 2), as is done in the comparison pointed to in this article.
Keep in mind that x86 is 32-bit, while the nect-gen consoles (Dreamcast, Dolphin, PS2) are at 128-bit now (I believe).
Memory Bandwidth is a horrible indicator unless it's the sole bottleneck. If the components can't run fast enough, the bandwidth speed is irrelevent.
Polygon Performance seems to be the best measure I've seen so far - but that's not everything. While the original Playstation can handle more polys per second than an N64, the N64 has all kinds of better effects - trilinear filtering (I believe), better hardware anti-aliasing, etc. The X-Box's 300 million polys/sec does sound pretty damn good, but don't judge a book by its cover.
Rather than judge all this now, why don't we just wait until all these consoles come out? I, for one, buy the systems as much for the games they have as for their statistics. All these comparisons in the media are just plain stupid.
[/RANT]
I keep seeing stuff about Real-Time Linux/programming/OSes etc. - but I still ahve no clue what the heck it is. Could someone please explain, in simple terms, what it is that all these articles are refering to?
Sure, I'd prefer no ads at all - but look at it this way: If I'm going to have to look at ads, why not look at ones that might concern and/or interest me? Heck, if it was for something I like then I might even follow the link or even buy whatever product they're advertising (the AIBO ad at the top of my /. page right now comes to mind).
If they were submitting and tracking personal information, I'd be offended. But if I just tell them my interests and get to see interesting ads, I'd happily do so.
Coincidentally, I was just reading your book, _The C++ Programming Language_, 30 minutes ago - let me take a moment to say that I'm very impressed by it. On to the question:
h tm">this piece by Tim Sweeney</A> and <A HREF="http://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/25/150238 .shtml">its coverage on slashdot</A>. Tim is the lead coder for the Unreal game engine.
Recently I've seen a couple different articles calling for the 'next' programming language, something to go beyond C++. Specifically, there's <A HREF="http://www.gamespy.com/articles/devweek_b.s
In the article, he discribe's his thoughts on what new programming languages should focus on, which seems to boil down to higher levels of abstraction. One example he gives is having two arrays, A and B, and being able to add them directly (C = A + B;) rather than using a loop to do so with each individual element.
Having just read part of your book, I see that you noted that you agree with C's very low level primitive data types, which seems to be the opposite view; yet the addition of classes seems to be a move toward more complex data types.
My question is, do you think a more high-level/abstract language would be useful, or do you think that we should stick to fairly low level but complex languages like C and C++?
And, on a slightly relatated note, do you think that future languages should mimic the C/C++ grammar, or do you think a more intuititive one is possible?
My aunt received a free PC as part of the program. Now that it's discontinued, she obviously doens't need to look at the ads - so how can I get rid of them for her? Are they just programs that run in the background or is it an entire explorer shell replacement?
(I haven't seen the PC yet, but I'd like to help her out - thanks =)
That still sounds to me like your attempt to rationalize your actions - are you afraid to confess that your entertainment is killing DeCSS?
I'll come out and say it right now:
<B>I'm too greedy and selfish to give up movies to help out DeCSS.</B>
Go ahead - moderate me down to the depths of troll hell. Flame me all you want. Hate me - it's the scum like me that "ruin the entire DeCSS movement for everyone."
But at least I have the guts to admit it.
Of course the movie studios make _relatively_ little money from people buying tickets - but at that level, it's several million bucks. Even if they made NO money from ticket sales, they're still getting paid a flat fee by the theaters -- and even though I myself would not make them lose any money through the boycott, I WOULD be voting with my money.
If it were truly a worthy cause, enough people would boycott to the point where theaters would not even buy any except for independents. But I have to follow with libertarian ideals here and a free market economy, and say that people are voting with their dollars. But if there was such support for this, but they all followed your reasoning - that they individually could not impact the studios' actions - then we would still not see any changes.
If you were truly in support of DeCSS, you'd give up the movies and stop trying to provide excuses. Seeing as the studios, despite their unfair business practices, give me movies that I like, I am unable to find any reasoning strong enough to convince me to boycott movies - but at least I admit that I'm greedy and self-centered.
This is NOT hemos - notice the period after his name. It's just some troll impostor which appears identical right down to the .sig - see for yourself.
Someone mod that down, and maybe one day CmdrTaco will get arround to nuking the '.' accounts.
So now that VAndover owns Slashdot, let's see if their servers are as good as they claim: Challenge these guys to DoS /.
Think about it - if all these sites go down because of the slashdot effect, then all the people visiting them must have visited slashdot first. If the servers can hold this kinda load, what's another one or two billion more pages served per minute gonna do?
Heck, I'd be surprised if slashdot can keep getting slower at this pace much longer - it gets worse by the day.
Even better - let's sic 'em against the MPAA site. Or Amazon-the-patent-bully, or Microsoft. Or better yet, point them all at John Katz' home computer and maybe it'll stay down long enough that we can get some peace and quiet around here.
I'm not really too sure I understand HOW they do this - but can it be made faster? Seems to me like using two 386s in parallel just for the sake of doing so instead of using a high-end Athlon.
Then again, I suppose that the whole purpose of this RNA computing experiment was to show that it can be done.
One important point - it selected a WRONG answer? Lotta good it'll do if it's running fast and in parallel if it's WRONG =)
A mole is approx 6.02e23 "things" (in this case, molecules), so your estimate would be off by a factor of 2.
And I suppose that it is important to note that as long as you've got a pot of 'random' DNA, there's always the chance that no matter how much you have you may be missing one important sequence. Nevertheless, I like the idea - but how much faster <I>could</I> this solve P-NP problems? Is there any way to estimate that?
Try this one out - I'm not the one who started it, but I and many others use it:
Login: slashdoteffect
Password: slashdot
Transmeta does NOT want us programming directly in Crusoe VLIW-native code. In fact, the opcodes will NOT be the same on the 3400/5400 chips, and will probably change for all future chips (each model/variation would need its own code morphing software).
The primary reason is that they don't want to have to make these chips backwards compatible. Intel has a lot of problems with this - even the newest Pentium III's must support programs written for 386s. Intel has a hard time because it can't change these opcodes, but instead has to add new ones - hence MMX, SIMD instructions, the Katmai extensions (the P3 stuff), etc (and similarly, AMD has added 3dnow! et al).
Transmeta wants the freedom to be able to drastically change newer models of the CPU to keep it running at optimal speed/efficiency. If they wanted to allow us to write Crusoe-native code, then they'd need morphing software that allows newer models to morph old code to its own (modified) native code. In other words, a real pain in the rear and definately a problem if Crusoe can't run different "morphers" simultaneously (which I suspect it can't).
As for other morphing software to emulate other processors: I wouldn't be surprised if they allowed it to emulate some other chips - like the PPC, so it can run MacOS stuff - but it won't run nearly as well as x86 emulation will. The chip is meant to be able to morph code from many different platforms, but there are a lot of shortcuts to emphasize x86. I think that topic is addressed in the Ars Technica stuff, but basically Crusoe uses a FPU very similar to the x86 one. I think there are some other things for that in hardware, as well as the fact that we know they're dedicating most of their time to creating the x86 morphing software so it will be the most optimized.
I highly doubt that we'll be able to write our own morphers. I think that it's an extremely difficult thing to do, it would require knowledge of the Crusoe instruction set (which, as I said above, they don't want to release), and the morphing software is probably authenticated somehow. Since the morphing code is running in Flash ROM, it can be upgraded, but if someone tried to load a morpher that doesn't work they're gonna have trouble reverting back to x86.
Linus said that "Mobile Linux" is NOT a code fork - it's just the x86 version with a few modifications to make it run better on embedded platforms. Why reinvent the wheel?
Keep in mind that this is all SPECULATION - if anyone here has other information to the contrary, I'd like to hear it =)
I've always wondered what Ballmer did to get such high positions at Microsoft - from what I saw in Pirates of Silicon Valley, he just happened to be with Gates and Allen in the right place at the right time. Does he have any real CEO credentials - training, experience outside of Microsoft, or otherwise?
And the ineveitable question - Does it run Lin-- whoops, answered my own question =)
My town just started offering digital cable recently, and I've noticed a dramatic decrease in the quality of my normal old cable. Specifically, it's that kind of "see through" effect, where objects going horizontally across the screen can be seen through similarly colored objects (read: people) in front of them.
I'm under the impression that this is due to the compressions algorithms used -- the cable company is using some lossy compression to try and use less bandwidth (although Comcast blantantly denies any ghosting, shadows, or other image problems either exisiting or being their fault). It's not like I never noticed these before; it's just that the quality has gotten much, MUCH worse since digital cable began being offered. They're pobably trying to compress the image more, but I doubt that the occurance is just a coincidence.
My problem is this: While many companies and industries are using digital this and digital that ernestly, others are using it for profit. Do I really need a HDTV? I'm perfectly satisfied with my 640x480 broadcasts - there's no way I'll pay hundreds (and, not too long ago, thousands) of dollars more for a higher quality broadcast. Does anyone really expect to be able to buy a cheap TV like the ones today and a cheap digital-to-analog converter 5 years from now?
This is all just an exuse for the entire industry to go out and charge me more. Different companies are backing different standards depending on what's in their own interests, not what's best for the consumer. Frankly, I think that we're better off without some of these "standards" that are being tossed around.
Nintendo just won a permanent injunction against Bung last month. A US court ruled that the Bung carts were intended for piracy, not development, and ruled that Bung must pay Nintendo some $7 million as well as cease selling its flash carts in the US, Canada, Mexico, and (I believe) parts of Central America that the court has jurisdiction over.
As a GB Developer myself, I'm upset about the ruling - I was planning on buying a cart soon. Now you either have to have them purchased and imported by someone outside the Continent or win one in the current Bung Amatuer GB developer contest. Frankly, I doubt Bung can stay in business now, with a hung debt and a huge market dead (then again, Hong Kong is where they make all their cash off of software pirates anyways).
I think that a large percentage of the people who purchased these ARE using them for piracy, but now I have to and either continue to use an emulator or wait for my "studio" to become Nintendo licensed (soon, I hope) and purchase a several thousand dollar cart =(
I'm waiting for a watch with MP3 playback AND a decent recording device. I mean, how cool would it be to have recorded that time when I was called down to the pricipal's office for cursing, and HE cursed at ME? The ultimate irony, caught on a watch-based digital MP3 playing/recording device.
BTW, I doubt that any such recorded conversation would be valid for anything without the prior permission to record and replay anything said by the other party(ies) - but I can think of many, many times where I'd love to have some of the things people say on record to play in front of friends and such =)
. . . but if you include a year zero, then today would be November 22, 1998 -- not 1999. The millenium idicates 2000 years since the start of counting years as AD - which, no matter how you number it, will not occur for another year.
Gee, not only do they repeat week-old news with the Loki hack patches -- there was already a full story on their release -- but within 20 minutes of posting, microsith.com and several other links are already slashdotted. This site is getting too big for its own good. . .
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