I'm using a JVC-HM-DH5U D-VHS deck connected to a Sony HS-20 digital projector via HDMI. I often see dropouts and HDCP renegotiation between the deck and projector during viewing. It's especially apparent during resolution shifts between HD and SD recordings. The renegotiation can take several seconds during which the screen completely blanks, so it's not a minor blip during playback.
If these issues aren't ironed out soon, I expect the first and second generation of HD disc players will not operate with displays with the quality that consumers expect.
1) I have not read the OSx86 website. I read only the article linked in the submission. Let's be clear, there was discussion of hacking OS X on intel. This should be fairly easy given that Darwin exists to help folks boot a workable kernel. Plus, as you said, there were links offsite which may or may not have helped readers install OS X/Intel on their systems. The question becomes, is the OSx86 site in violation because some members posted a link to another site - regardless of the legality of that offsite content? IANAL. Perhaps one might want to respond.
2) I think you're confusing Trademark law with Copyright law. Copyrights ownership is always retained on a work, whether it is illegally duplicated or not.
3) Some people whine that their rights to free speech extend beyond the rights of corporations to extract a profit from the public through their easy access to lawmakers. It's a policy debate. Some people disagree with each other. Good thing we have that right, eh?
Yes. You clearly don't understand the "New Math". This is why they're getting patents for Warp Drives rejected by imbecile patent officers while you twiddle away your life flipping bits with that keyboard. Get yourself a Ph.D in net.kookery before it's too late!!!
The RK05 drive would take more than 1KW alone. But let's be honest here, we could go all the way back to ENIAC, each step finding systems which consumed more power then the last. Hell, at work we just dumped an AlphaServer 8600 which fit into several cabinets and took three phase into the back of the unit. Weeee!!!
"The OSx86 Project Web site stated Apple had served it with a notice on Thursday citing violations of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the site was reviewing all of its discussion forum postings as a result."
They were served with a notice, meaning threat of legal action. While a lawsuit may or may not have been filed, certainly Apple's lawyers are threatening legal action. If you read the article on SLAPP, you'll see that since the goal is to squelch public participation, expensive court proceedings are a final option. Often SLAPP suits fail in court for the corporate entity, because most hinge on specious legal grounds. Spend your opponent into oblivion and make specious legal claims in the press... that's the weapon of choice for corporate lawyers.
I like my instruction/data fetch cycle on 16 bit word boundaries, thank you! So you think you're fancy 64 bit address range is all that. With your Sun Enterprise this, and your CG3 megapixel sbus card that. Well, when I need to access memory out of its 32KW boundary I have to set an offset vector. And I like it that way! So my RK05 only stores 2.5MB per removable pack. And it consumes more than 1 KW. And my house lights dim every time it spins up. Well, I like it that way!
What, I'm supposed to run some pansy Macintosh 8600 with all its fancy pictures of a dekstop with flippy disks and overlapping windows, and dialog boxes, and a mouse with only one button? BAH!
OK, after reading TFA, this strikes me as more a SLAPP (Strategic lawsuit against public participation) lawsuit by Apple than any government intervention. It appears that Apple served their ISP with notice of a possible DMCA violation, and so the ISP (or the site administrators) shut the site down in order to verify the claims made by Apple. No judge has filed an order, however.
So: are links to remote sites which convey possibly nonviolent criminal information worth squelching in the public interest? And should a private entity have the inherent right to enforce their interest without a court order (as appears to be the case here)? Because that's what misuse of SLAPP is all about.
I'm sitting here in front of a PDP-11/73 running RSX and trying to copy a 250 block file from this CDC-80 dishwasher 80MB hard drive to an RX08 8" floppy disk. It's taking freak''n forever! DEC addicts, go ahead and flame me, but why do you insist on using this ancient junk? Try something a little more modern. Like an Osborne. Or even a TRS-80. Sheesh!
Lets see if I've caught your argument. You're saying that since crystal defects are uniformly dispersed randomly across the wafer, therefore reducing die size doesn't actually increase yields. This is the cruz of your argument, right?
But doesn't reducing die size also increase the number of units per wafer? And doesn't that also increase yields per wafer?
Yeah. That's absolutely true. But it's also particularly useful for branch prediction, which the PPE (and Xenon) aren't particularly good at either. Compilers can't optimize to reduce branching - coders have to manually do that. And, of course, with each branch comes a stall as fetches have to go out to main RAM - not cache. Time to flush the cache.
Now, it may turn out that my OOE gripes aren't realistic. Both Sony and Microsoft have opted to dump OOE in their respective chips. Maybe for good reason. Still, I fail to see the point behind including a VMX unit on the PPE, given all the silicon assigned to SPEs which perform basically the same function. Perhaps someone directly involved in coding to Cell iron might comment?
No. It is not a claim -- per se -- but speculation based on the incredibly large die size. The fact that IBM is ready to ship blade systems in 3q only says that they can get a sufficient supply to meet their expected (very small) market. Sony with the PS3 is quite a different animal. They'll need to manufacture several million units in the first year, which means that any yield problems (even small ones) with the Cell will impact them significantly more than IBM (or other third party Cell blade manufacturers).
Smaller lithographic process equals smaller die area per chip. Smaller die area equals less risk of crystal wafer defects per chip. Less risk of defects equals greater yields. That simple.
Yes. Really. Because using a smaller lithographic process allows the manufacturer to reduce the total die size in area per chip. This reduces the risk of silicon crystal defects per chip. Other advantages, such as running at a lower voltage and reduced heat dissipation are secondary.
Sony has already opted to disable an SPE in order to increase chip yields in the PS3. A 220mm2 die size is remarkably large, and poorly suited for good yields. Perhaps I'm wrong here, as I certainly don't have numbers to back up any assertions on actual yields. OTOH, I wasn't particularly impressed with the article you linked either. That read more like a press release than news.:)
The more I read about Cell the less enthusiastic I am about the design. It's just eight SIMD vector units tuned best for calculating single precision floats. The local memory store seems more a hindrance than an advantage, especially at only 256KB a pop. The EIB interconnect bus is quite fast, but moving data in and out of each SPE from main RAM requires a DMA transfer for each operation. s-l-o-w. And finally you have the PPE, a basic PPC with the out of order execution unit hacked away yet keeping the traditional VMX (Altivec) unit. Why didn't they toss the VMX unit and try to keep OOE? For that matter, why did they need eight SPEs? Die space is already way too big at 90nm!
Gotta say: Microsoft is already in the game and taking marketshare. Sony better act quickly, or they're gonna lose this round.
IBM must be having fab problems with Cell at 90nm. Perhaps they want to wait for the transition to 65nm for better quality control. I bet if IBM and Sony had decided to go with six SPEs per Cell rather than eight, and cut the die down in size, they wouldn't be having these problems.
If this is true it will give MS and the 360 a huge advantage in the marketplace. Further, I don't think Cell is going to be significantly more powerful than the Xenon, even with single precision floating point (the vast majority of Cell die space). I think IBM and Sony really stumbled here, both from a technology perspective - and now from a manufacturing and quality control perspective.
Wow. Maybe Microsoft really has kicked both their asses. In everything, from new technology, manufacturing, and time to market. Sheesh!
Re:Difficult to measure material's properties?
on
Flexible Body Armor
·
· Score: 1
Sure. The material may be a dramatic advance. Conducting a few experiments might even tell the researcher enough to make a factual statement on its physical properties. *sigh* I was just annoyed by that quote in the article. As if by saying, "well - it's tough to measure its properties - but hey, this shit's pretty cool!" Bah.
and implied it had a future as military body armor, then a researcher stated that no one knew exactly how tough the material was because it was difficult to test. That was the part I quoted, and then responded to.
Long ago there used to be an old DEC tool that first appeared in RT-11 called: pip. It stood for "Peripheral Interchange Program". What did it do? It copied data from one device to the next. If you had data sitting on a CDC-80 (80MB fixed disk) connected to an Emulex disk controller and wanted to copy your data to an RX08 8" floppy disk, that was the tool to use. The closest tool in 'NIX would be: dd. Nobody complained about pip being bundled with the operating system. Nobody thought it was "feature creep" - because copying data about turned out to be pretty useful.
Does Aero come even close in utility for a user?
Difficult to measure material's properties?
on
Flexible Body Armor
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But Phil Green, research director at d3o Labs, says it is difficult to precisely measure the material's properties because the hardening effect only last as long as the impact itself.
Certainly a researcher could take a sample of this material and strike it with increasing force using a material with known hardness. That might get them an answer beyond: "we don't know." I'm skeptical of this material's utility in a military application. Particularly as body armor against high velocity bullets and shrapnel. Woven carbon and Kevlar seem still unmatched in its capacity to take a high impact round. But, like I said, an assault riffle and a material sample could answer that question in minutes...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using a JVC-HM-DH5U D-VHS deck connected to a Sony HS-20 digital projector via HDMI. I often see dropouts and HDCP renegotiation between the deck and projector during viewing. It's especially apparent during resolution shifts between HD and SD recordings. The renegotiation can take several seconds during which the screen completely blanks, so it's not a minor blip during playback.
If these issues aren't ironed out soon, I expect the first and second generation of HD disc players will not operate with displays with the quality that consumers expect.
Oh shit. The question would appear to be: how much more can they possibly do? Haha. I just tripped over myself!
Duhhhhhhh
I'm kind of curious, because I didn't see any question in the write-up at all. Just a bunch of assertions. See: Begs The Question...
I'll take these points one at a time:
1) I have not read the OSx86 website. I read only the article linked in the submission. Let's be clear, there was discussion of hacking OS X on intel. This should be fairly easy given that Darwin exists to help folks boot a workable kernel. Plus, as you said, there were links offsite which may or may not have helped readers install OS X/Intel on their systems. The question becomes, is the OSx86 site in violation because some members posted a link to another site - regardless of the legality of that offsite content? IANAL. Perhaps one might want to respond.
2) I think you're confusing Trademark law with Copyright law. Copyrights ownership is always retained on a work, whether it is illegally duplicated or not.
3) Some people whine that their rights to free speech extend beyond the rights of corporations to extract a profit from the public through their easy access to lawmakers. It's a policy debate. Some people disagree with each other. Good thing we have that right, eh?
Yes. You clearly don't understand the "New Math". This is why they're getting patents for Warp Drives rejected by imbecile patent officers while you twiddle away your life flipping bits with that keyboard. Get yourself a Ph.D in net.kookery before it's too late!!!
Time for some young-uns to update the Elements of Style... I'm at a loss to understand all this newfangled verbiage!
I'm glad we agree that the facts are not in dispute.
The RK05 drive would take more than 1KW alone. But let's be honest here, we could go all the way back to ENIAC, each step finding systems which consumed more power then the last. Hell, at work we just dumped an AlphaServer 8600 which fit into several cabinets and took three phase into the back of the unit. Weeee!!!
Oh, I read it. From TFA:
"The OSx86 Project Web site stated Apple had served it with a notice on Thursday citing violations of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the site was reviewing all of its discussion forum postings as a result."
They were served with a notice, meaning threat of legal action. While a lawsuit may or may not have been filed, certainly Apple's lawyers are threatening legal action. If you read the article on SLAPP, you'll see that since the goal is to squelch public participation, expensive court proceedings are a final option. Often SLAPP suits fail in court for the corporate entity, because most hinge on specious legal grounds. Spend your opponent into oblivion and make specious legal claims in the press... that's the weapon of choice for corporate lawyers.
I like my instruction/data fetch cycle on 16 bit word boundaries, thank you! So you think you're fancy 64 bit address range is all that. With your Sun Enterprise this, and your CG3 megapixel sbus card that. Well, when I need to access memory out of its 32KW boundary I have to set an offset vector. And I like it that way! So my RK05 only stores 2.5MB per removable pack. And it consumes more than 1 KW. And my house lights dim every time it spins up. Well, I like it that way!
What, I'm supposed to run some pansy Macintosh 8600 with all its fancy pictures of a dekstop with flippy disks and overlapping windows, and dialog boxes, and a mouse with only one button? BAH!
OK, after reading TFA, this strikes me as more a SLAPP (Strategic lawsuit against public participation) lawsuit by Apple than any government intervention. It appears that Apple served their ISP with notice of a possible DMCA violation, and so the ISP (or the site administrators) shut the site down in order to verify the claims made by Apple. No judge has filed an order, however.
So: are links to remote sites which convey possibly nonviolent criminal information worth squelching in the public interest? And should a private entity have the inherent right to enforce their interest without a court order (as appears to be the case here)? Because that's what misuse of SLAPP is all about.
I'm sitting here in front of a PDP-11/73 running RSX and trying to copy a 250 block file from this CDC-80 dishwasher 80MB hard drive to an RX08 8" floppy disk. It's taking freak''n forever! DEC addicts, go ahead and flame me, but why do you insist on using this ancient junk? Try something a little more modern. Like an Osborne. Or even a TRS-80. Sheesh!
That was a highly informative post.
Lets see if I've caught your argument. You're saying that since crystal defects are uniformly dispersed randomly across the wafer, therefore reducing die size doesn't actually increase yields. This is the cruz of your argument, right?
But doesn't reducing die size also increase the number of units per wafer? And doesn't that also increase yields per wafer?
Yeah. That's absolutely true. But it's also particularly useful for branch prediction, which the PPE (and Xenon) aren't particularly good at either. Compilers can't optimize to reduce branching - coders have to manually do that. And, of course, with each branch comes a stall as fetches have to go out to main RAM - not cache. Time to flush the cache.
Now, it may turn out that my OOE gripes aren't realistic. Both Sony and Microsoft have opted to dump OOE in their respective chips. Maybe for good reason. Still, I fail to see the point behind including a VMX unit on the PPE, given all the silicon assigned to SPEs which perform basically the same function. Perhaps someone directly involved in coding to Cell iron might comment?
No. It is not a claim -- per se -- but speculation based on the incredibly large die size. The fact that IBM is ready to ship blade systems in 3q only says that they can get a sufficient supply to meet their expected (very small) market. Sony with the PS3 is quite a different animal. They'll need to manufacture several million units in the first year, which means that any yield problems (even small ones) with the Cell will impact them significantly more than IBM (or other third party Cell blade manufacturers).
Smaller lithographic process equals smaller die area per chip. Smaller die area equals less risk of crystal wafer defects per chip. Less risk of defects equals greater yields. That simple.
Yes. Really. Because using a smaller lithographic process allows the manufacturer to reduce the total die size in area per chip. This reduces the risk of silicon crystal defects per chip. Other advantages, such as running at a lower voltage and reduced heat dissipation are secondary.
Sony has already opted to disable an SPE in order to increase chip yields in the PS3. A 220mm2 die size is remarkably large, and poorly suited for good yields. Perhaps I'm wrong here, as I certainly don't have numbers to back up any assertions on actual yields. OTOH, I wasn't particularly impressed with the article you linked either. That read more like a press release than news. :)
The more I read about Cell the less enthusiastic I am about the design. It's just eight SIMD vector units tuned best for calculating single precision floats. The local memory store seems more a hindrance than an advantage, especially at only 256KB a pop. The EIB interconnect bus is quite fast, but moving data in and out of each SPE from main RAM requires a DMA transfer for each operation. s-l-o-w. And finally you have the PPE, a basic PPC with the out of order execution unit hacked away yet keeping the traditional VMX (Altivec) unit. Why didn't they toss the VMX unit and try to keep OOE? For that matter, why did they need eight SPEs? Die space is already way too big at 90nm!
Gotta say: Microsoft is already in the game and taking marketshare. Sony better act quickly, or they're gonna lose this round.
IBM must be having fab problems with Cell at 90nm. Perhaps they want to wait for the transition to 65nm for better quality control. I bet if IBM and Sony had decided to go with six SPEs per Cell rather than eight, and cut the die down in size, they wouldn't be having these problems.
If this is true it will give MS and the 360 a huge advantage in the marketplace. Further, I don't think Cell is going to be significantly more powerful than the Xenon, even with single precision floating point (the vast majority of Cell die space). I think IBM and Sony really stumbled here, both from a technology perspective - and now from a manufacturing and quality control perspective.
Wow. Maybe Microsoft really has kicked both their asses. In everything, from new technology, manufacturing, and time to market. Sheesh!
Sure. The material may be a dramatic advance. Conducting a few experiments might even tell the researcher enough to make a factual statement on its physical properties. *sigh* I was just annoyed by that quote in the article. As if by saying, "well - it's tough to measure its properties - but hey, this shit's pretty cool!" Bah.
But your point is well taken.
and implied it had a future as military body armor, then a researcher stated that no one knew exactly how tough the material was because it was difficult to test. That was the part I quoted, and then responded to.
Long ago there used to be an old DEC tool that first appeared in RT-11 called: pip. It stood for "Peripheral Interchange Program". What did it do? It copied data from one device to the next. If you had data sitting on a CDC-80 (80MB fixed disk) connected to an Emulex disk controller and wanted to copy your data to an RX08 8" floppy disk, that was the tool to use. The closest tool in 'NIX would be: dd. Nobody complained about pip being bundled with the operating system. Nobody thought it was "feature creep" - because copying data about turned out to be pretty useful.
Does Aero come even close in utility for a user?
But Phil Green, research director at d3o Labs, says it is difficult to precisely measure the material's properties because the hardening effect only last as long as the impact itself.
Certainly a researcher could take a sample of this material and strike it with increasing force using a material with known hardness. That might get them an answer beyond: "we don't know." I'm skeptical of this material's utility in a military application. Particularly as body armor against high velocity bullets and shrapnel. Woven carbon and Kevlar seem still unmatched in its capacity to take a high impact round. But, like I said, an assault riffle and a material sample could answer that question in minutes...