You've been living in a cave for the last two years, right? AMD's been thrashing Intel on price and performance for about 18 months now and there's no sign this will turn around in the foreseeable future (1-2 years). Intel's in trouble, and has been ever since their marketing schemers wrested control of corporate strategy away from their engineers.
Intel has made many missteps:
* Buggy, late, and missing chipsets (one that supports DDR SDRAM for the P4 won't be out for months yet).
* Devil's bargain with RAMBUS attempting to force ISVs and consumers to expensive, high-latency RDRAM in return for a $40M stock option kickback.
* Releasing then recalling unstable overclocked P3 chips in a desperate failed attempt to stay ahead of AMD.
* The unbalanced P4 chip design that: buys high Mhz at the expense of a 20-step pipeline imposing a huge branch mispredict penalty; includes a 128-bit cache line that performs on a par with AMD's 32-bit cache line but overworks memory bandwidth; uses a new instruction architecture requiring new compilers and recompiling all software in order to realize even decent performance let alone better performance; needs a new 2 lb. heatsink/fan, power supply, and case; is clock-limited to 750 Mhz when its power drain exceeds 54 Watts (1.5 Mhz, except when you need it). The P4 is a major strategic mistake for Intel.
Not to mention the uninspiring Itanium server chip (deservedly nicknamed "Itanic" - rhymes with "Titanic" - by The Register).
You were doing fairly well until your last sentence, which is a non-sequitor.
The problem with AI is the "A" part - Artificial, as in, dependant upon maintenance by its keepers.
The problem Kurzweil dances around is that AI needs support by humans, but the fact is that humans will never give software enough scope to achieve consciousness and real life in the limited hardware labs at Universities and other research centers. The dream if AI "life" is just that, a mere dream, unless and until the vision expands beyond hidebound academic theory bullshit into some reality. It might take a war to break the self-imposed limits of AI to achieve Artificial Life (AL) that can _live_ in the network and all its servers. This is the stuff of science fiction but I do believe it possible that highly adaptive living software can evolve within our networks and server systems.
Would you like to know where I think the best work to achieve "Live Software" (LS (c) RAMunro 04/14/2001) will come from? Computer-based games! The new "Black and White" game is a prime example of evolution towards this paradigm. In the current version, the only free actor is the game player, but I expect the space to expand such that the avatar and even inhabitants will have free will, inherent codes of conduct, moral choices, and the ability to make choices based upon fuzzy logic, like real life. Then, and only then, and given development of intelligent software's abilities to manipulate networks to maintain its persistence and consciousness, will we see Live Software arise.
Otherwise, I hope Kurzweil's right - I'll gladly trade my body for eternal life on an expanding net of systems (when it comes to that, that is). Until then, I prefer living.
because that light at the end of the tunnel is a train called "pervasive computing" and it will be here soon. Ubiquitous connectivity, XML/SOAP protocols (assuming M$ doesn't hijack these), more capable and standardized interfaces to extensive backend data warehouses, IPv6 addressability and service level discrimination, smarter Java-based intelligent agents, speech recognition, natural language processing - these will all contribute to the second networked revolution in the ways we work and interact online. Berners-Lee has an academic vision of how some of this might work, and I applaud his courage for sharing his ideas.
Today, you can be driving on the freeway and using speech recognition to look up and call colleagues through your handsfree cellphone. It's not much of a stretch to add calendar administration and other interfaces with intelligent agents to this.
Scenario: You're flying down I405 in SoCal (in the carpool lane, with coworkers aboard) some beautiful late afternoon in the not too distant future:
"Princess (you've named your general digital assistant Princess Leia, for some reason), please check on improving my car insurance rates."
Princess: "Connecting insurance agent..."
Fred (you call your intelligent insurance agent program "Fred"): "Fred here..."
You: "Fred, please see if I can get a better rate on my car insurance this year."
Fred: "OK, I'm looking..."
You: "Princess, please tell my wife I'll be home early."
Princess: "What's your ETA, please..."
You: "Sixish Princess, thanks."
Princess: "Thank you, will do."
Fred: "You have six quotes, two of which are at lower premiums than your existing contract. Do you have any recent tickets or accidents to add?"
You: "No, thank you. What's my best choice?"
Fred: "Suckem-Dumpem Mutual offers you a $300 annual premium savings counting the good driver discount."
[I405 stops dead as it's wont to do randomly, including the carpool lane.]
Screeech Crash Tinkle. [a moment of dead air...]
You: "Fred, forget it. Princess, please tell my wife I'll be a little late."
OK, I'll admit it's somewhat of a stretch. But suppose that fraud is proven in a civil case. That might lead to further criminal prosecution, especially if the victims complain.
The countries that attempt to censor net content of any sort should be blocked by the rest of the net, at the peering routers level. This ought to be a peering requirement. We know Red China is censoring us - we should simply block all of their sites from visibility to the rest of the fscking world! They might get a clue in about ten years,... maybe.
But this is easier said than done, unfortunately. Suppose you run a node router connecting to many other nodes. You forward all the traffic you get. How will you know what any of your peered routers drop? You won't, unless you implement a traffic logging server that compares requests against responses. Even then, you'd have to have a way to figure out which were real requests versus errors, an impossible or at least very difficult and error prone task. Most peering routers won't even attempt to do this at all.
Countries are going to get away with this short sighted censorship, at least until protocols and DNS management schemes are improved to catch it. Oh well, I don't really have anything to say to or hear from osama@bin_ladin.org, anyway. No loss. And people in oppressed countries will always have some ways around the "official" Internet.
But it _would_ help to simply cut the high-speed links to countries known to be censoring network content for political/economic/religious reasons. (State religions are abominations. So are official State political and economic restrictions.) Now here's something George W. might really get behind, if he could only remotely understand it!
"Example 2: If I call the phone company and order phone service, I'll have a service call the next day, but if I order DSL, it's going to take a few weeks. Yet a DSL installation is not any more complicated than a standard phone installation!"
Not true. DSL takes time for the telco to provision. They have to circuit-map your line from their CO to your location, check for A/D-D/A converters in the link (these kill DSL), check the transmission footage, perhaps test your line for impedance, bandwidth, noise/static, phase-jitter at DSL frequencies, etc., install CO band-pass filtering on your line, allocate a DSL header, and document all this both internally and to your DSL provider. No wonder it takes a few weeks from ordering to get the provisioning done.
Any extra delays for third-party DSL providers are likely due to internal review, tariff checking, stamping regulatory forms, mailing time, and the DSL provider's own delays in handling telco provisioning paperwork.
PPPoE works fine (if the DSL provider and ISP have their sh*t together). I use PPPoE through my home (non-split) PacBell phone line via Covad bridged to Earthlink under both Linux (roaring-penguin is in the Mandrake 7.2 release, as is ip-chains firewall) and OS/2 (using Injoy Firewall, which includes PPPoE support): free modem, $50/mo.
My PPPoE DSL is pretty reliable (and fast, over 1250 Mb/s down). The only delay is at the first connection - turn on the DSL modem, wait for it to sync, then it's up. (That's a common troubleshooting procedure, too.) After that, DSL is always-on, 7x24, never drops unless PacBell (rare), Covad (also rare), or Earthlink (sometimes) screws up. I think the longest my DSL line has been down was about a half day one time when Covad was mucking around (and I gave their technical support voice tapes some colorful manager listening material that time, you can bet).
I'm in SoCal, but grew up in Portland. Is broadband access really as grim there now as you seem to suggest?
If you ever get mixed up in anything large and nasty enough to have the big guns of Federal RICO statutes leveled at you, you'll wish you'd never been born. No kidding.
RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. This kind of serious criminal prosecution motivated the Mafia to have Jimmy Hoffa "taken for a ride."
Your real choice isn't between Windows or another OS, it's between apathy or proaction, between slow poison made easy or the rewarding work of becoming more self-sufficient, between slowly draining your resources to pay "voluntary" taxes to Microsoft or taking real responsibility to become more capable and independant.
You don't have to switch cold-turkey to another OS, GUI, set of apps, etc. PartitionMagic is not too expensive. If you have a fair-sized HD, most of it is likely unused (a full Win2K install with Office2000, MS Project, Lotus SmartSuite, Notes, etc. only takes about 3GB - most HDs are 8GB or larger now). Set up a dual boot system with more than one OS environment. Keep Windows around for the things you need it for. Use Linux (or OS/2, or BeOS, whatever) to learn how it works, become familiar with it, build your non-MS capabilities. You'll find you use Windows less and less as you get more comfortable with any better alternative, and that it will get better and easier for you to use over time, even as Microsoft progressively makes Windows more restrictive, feature bloated, and oppressive, with "content protection" and Hailstorm coming.
At a previous employer, I had a Dell notebook set up with the firm standard Windows system on one partition, OS/2 built on a second partition, and a shared data partition for Notes databases, etc. I did almost all my work under OS/2. They did not know the difference and I didn't have to reboot several times a day or redo work lost to Windows crashes. I was much more productive that way.... Now I run both OS/2 and Linux on my firewall box, and always have one to fall back on if the other develops a weird glitch.
Before long most mainstream Win32 apps will be running under both Linux and OS/2 using Wine or Odin. Linux software has been ported to OS/2 (Xfree86 and GIMP come to mind) and more will be in the future. BeOS runs most Linux apps natively, as do the *BSD environments. Software outside Windows is becoming available everwhere.
Windows is the dead end, proprietary, high cost alternative, and lots of people are slowly realizing this. Find a way out earlier rather than later, or pay the price repeatedly.
The Rambus lawyers are potentially in a _lot_ more trouble than perjury and lost licenses. Infineon has alleged that Rambus engaged in a pattern of corrupt practices, in conspiracy with their lawyers and others ("Secret Squirrel" and "Deep Throat" - Rambus moles in JEDEC after Rambus resigned). These charges invoke Federal RICO statutes that have _very_ harsh penalties, as they were created and used to imprison and confiscate the ill-gotten assets of Mafia families and drug-running conspiracies.
What the Court just did was refuse to throw out the allegations that invoke the RICO jeopardies. If these charges stick, then not only will Rambus lose its patent claims, but its assets could be confiscated, and some Rambus executives and lawyers might be taking early retirement... in Federal penal institutions. Couldn't happen to nicer people...
I was going to respond to the substance of your post, but your pr0n spam sig dissuaded me. Advertising pr0n associated with your ID on slashdot is an incredibly stupid act.
And I disagree with you. Most big fabs grow their own silicon ingots, AFAIK. That's the easy part. Do you have any statistics on worldwide Si-ingot production?
This is not only not true, but also _predominantly_ false. Intel fabs its own wafers, so do AMD and others. TSM fabs wafers for its subsidiaries and others. And IBM fabs wafers for Motorala, AMD, Transmeta, etc. as well as for its own use. Most wafer fab capacity is _not_ in Japan. Malaysia alone probably has more (Intel, AMD, etc.).
Seeing what's going down and writing intelligently about it are two different things. I'm not entirely convinced you did the former, but you are convicted by your own posts of being incapable of the latter. Let me put it in simple terms for you. We're having a discussion here about the potential of peer-to-peer services at the network edge as contrasted with centralized client-server models. It's a current and rather interesting topic. Your negative posts are not advancing the conversation. Please take it outside.
You sound so upset P2P systems have gained such popularity that you're no longer 37337 with IRC and ICQ, etc. I dismiss that as immaturity. Listen up and learn, maybe.
Clay Shirky is a savvy guy, and he has a point that P2P is a good idea, albeit a sloppy one just now. The main thesis of his article is that power resides not only in centered servers (this is Sun's doomed wishful thinking, exactly), but also exists and is growing on the edges, as widespread use of easily acquired and highly capable software triggers the law of large numbers and a shift to topple a tipping point, to utterly overwhelm those few evil hegemonists who seek to exert centralized _control_ in order to extract artificial scarcity based revenues from the large mass of networked connected people. Your anger is better directed at those who charge $15 per CD, $9 per movie.
Yes, the Concorde is perhaps a case of regional one-up-manship subsidized by oppressive British and French governments. If all the common people ever gain power back within Britain and France, there'll surely be serious hell to pay: new gibbets and new guillotines, that's the order of that year! How long can people put up with such high taxes, poor services, declining economies? When will all you poor sods have had enough of it? Class system, my fuckin ass! Obsolete! When's _your_ revolution, suckahs?
Okay, maybe that was a bit over the top, but you get my drift. Socialism doesn't work! It devolves into statism. Read Hegel, pay attention! Try real democratic capitalism.
Reaching beyond the bounds of Earth, however, is a worthy endeavor, not at all to be confused with subsidizing a couple dozen people with more money than sense per trip across the Atlantic supersonic, mainly for the glamour / cachet of merely having done it, a few thousand times (less the unfortunate losses). Bunch of self-important rich assholes, that's all. Exploring space is a very worthwhile endeavor, though. We can have no higher ambition than to get off this little rock eventually, if we're really going to survive long term. Explore and grow, or die. That's the imperative for intelligent species, which we may be approaching. The jury's still out, but I have to hope we're worthy.
And the Moon missions were the highlight of our many thousands of years of evolution. It is tawdry and tragic that they were cut short by a stupid little losing war (Vietnam costs killed NASA's funding). That a space program still exists at all is simply a reflection that scientists still have some voice in politics, and that some politicians are not the dolts we assume (and are right about, mostly). It is an imperative that we continue to expolore, and to question. The alternative is stagnation and a host of concomitant evils you can barely imagine. You won't want to live on an Earth that gave up on exploring science, and space. That's the threatened Armageddon, last days, everyone dies!
I reject your major views, in the strongest terms. If we have no surplus for science, for space exploration, then we are just animals, and we will die and fade away, forever.
Government (and Utility, but this may change soon in California) workers are _very_ hard to fire. They basically have strict due process (called "Civil Service") protections against unfavorable personnel actions (like, i.e., firing). It's the same in most first-world countries, including the UK, the EU, the US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Japan, etc.
All they have to do is show up for their shift (not discernably drunk or stoned), stay awake (mostly) for eight hours, and they're guaranteed to keep their jobs, pretty much.
In the US, somewhere around 40% of employees work for Local, State, or Federal governments. Scary, isn't it? Most of them vote, too, which is one reason it's so hard to pass meaningful tax reductions. In the UK, EU, etc., the percentage is probably even higher. Of course the idiot kept his job. H*ll, he'll probably get a raise this year! You have to be around "civil servants" for a while to figure out that they aren't motivated by the same incentives that lead most enterprise employees to be useful, productive, effective, and efficient. Public workers usually evince none of these characteristics. (But exceptions do exist.) For the most part though, "civil service" rules need changing.
.300 Winchester Magnum reaches farther, flatter than 7.62 NATO, though it does kick. I once put my left shoulder against a tree and fired - my back was sore for a week!
The.50 MacMillan single-shot is state of the art when you want to "reach out and touch someone." The.50 has range out to a mile, if you're really good, or lucky.
you've got to understand Instruction Throughput Rate (ITR) too.
Apple uses PowerPC chips that are more RISCy than Intel chips. They have a shorter pipeline, which basically allows a higher average ITR after you factor in branch mispredicts. That is why an Apple box can do a respectable job of keeping up with a (long pipeline) Intel machine clocked at twice the rate. MIPS, not clock speed, matters.
The real reason Apple machines aren't the choice of gamers is that Apple puts modest (OK, but not screaming high-end) video-cards in their systems.
That and Apple's unwillingness to open their code to game developers.
IANAD (I am not a designer), but thinking about this I wonder if buffering interstage registers might not mitigate feedback path delay. Imagine three registers, R1 output of Stage 1, R2 buffer, and R3 input to Stage 2. Each register has a control bit (0 = read, 1 = unread). Further imagine two simple register to register copy circuits, one to copy R1 to R2, and a second to copy R2 to R3.
I apologize for the primitive exposition (I said IANAD), but intuitively it seems to me that such a buffer scheme could let logic stages overlap processing. The cost would be the time needed for the two hair-trigger copy operations between logic stages, but that should be minimal.
Bang1 - CopyR1R2 frees Stage1 to execute again, Bang2 - CopyR2R3 tells Stage2 it has an input.
If Stage1 completes a fast operation, the buffer copying lets it take on the next one (which might not be fast) perhaps before Stage2 is ready for its next input. Thus Stage1 and Stage2 can overlap in some circumstances, increasing overall speed. Multiply this by a dozen or so pipeline stages and the savings might be worth the effort.
Or perhaps this is the overhead the parent post was referring to...
What's the Jedi religion? Belief in a mystical paranormal "force" of good versus evil? With a "dark side" mirror-image, don't forget it! What's this "force" anyway?
Sorry, this ain't a religion, folks. A full on religion needs lots more than some vague outline of mysticism. Sure, mysticism plays a role, but there have to be some ways to connect that to the psychological makeups of the intended converts.
An effective religion has to engage people within their lives, offering ways to address their real issues, not just a bunch of supernatural garbage that they can't relate to (light sabers? where?).
George Lucas' myth-spinning Star Wars exploitation of mass love of recast Arthurian sword-and-sorcery tales doesn't begin to come up to the threshold of a religion. It's just a slick, hyped, and very crass commercial scam, complete with cheap molded plastic action figures in Kmart stores near you.
But someone thinks New Zealand will fall for it.
I've been to NZ. Nice clean place. Lots of level headed, interesting, and fun people live there. I don't think many of them will be signing up for a dumb Jedi "religion."
Besides, the NZ yobbos are all off grokking up the Lord of the Rings books (lips moving as they form the words), not realizing that their parents read them 30 years ago.
Don't mistake my attitude about NZ though. They have more productive folks than Britain. Reasons for this are large questons, though. Let's not go there right now.
Children practicing on fairy tales is appropriate, but when they grow up, they should attend to real issues, not obsess on mind-control abominations like Scientology, EST, Mindspring (that former "human potential" scam is now recast as a national ISP that is run by a Scientology member), vacant TV series, exploitive commercial retellings of old stories (like Star Wars and Star Trek too}.
I could go on, but I suspect you all get my drift.
Slashdot Mirror
is not advanced by clients like Jabber. Much the opposite, actually. They have a ways to go yet.
IBM uses Lotus Sametime internally, and you can bet it's encrypted. But it's easy to use daily.
Other IBM/Lotus customers also can use Sametime securely, within their business. But it doesn't do AIM, Jabber, etc., at least not yet...
What's not implemented yet is a universal chat facility that discriminates between internal versus external conversations, I so openly admit.
and I wonder, does it have "I am a CANADIAN!" stenciled somewhere on it? (I hope so.)
You've been living in a cave for the last two years, right? AMD's been thrashing Intel on price and performance for about 18 months now and there's no sign this will turn around in the foreseeable future (1-2 years). Intel's in trouble, and has been ever since their marketing schemers wrested control of corporate strategy away from their engineers.
Intel has made many missteps:
* Buggy, late, and missing chipsets (one that supports DDR SDRAM for the P4 won't be out for months yet).
* Devil's bargain with RAMBUS attempting to force ISVs and consumers to expensive, high-latency RDRAM in return for a $40M stock option kickback.
* Releasing then recalling unstable overclocked P3 chips in a desperate failed attempt to stay ahead of AMD.
* The unbalanced P4 chip design that: buys high Mhz at the expense of a 20-step pipeline imposing a huge branch mispredict penalty; includes a 128-bit cache line that performs on a par with AMD's 32-bit cache line but overworks memory bandwidth; uses a new instruction architecture requiring new compilers and recompiling all software in order to realize even decent performance let alone better performance; needs a new 2 lb. heatsink/fan, power supply, and case; is clock-limited to 750 Mhz when its power drain exceeds 54 Watts (1.5 Mhz, except when you need it). The P4 is a major strategic mistake for Intel.
Not to mention the uninspiring Itanium server chip (deservedly nicknamed "Itanic" - rhymes with "Titanic" - by The Register).
what CC means on your TV isn't what it means in surveillance.
You were doing fairly well until your last sentence, which is a non-sequitor.
The problem with AI is the "A" part - Artificial, as in, dependant upon maintenance by its keepers.
The problem Kurzweil dances around is that AI needs support by humans, but the fact is that humans will never give software enough scope to achieve consciousness and real life in the limited hardware labs at Universities and other research centers. The dream if AI "life" is just that, a mere dream, unless and until the vision expands beyond hidebound academic theory bullshit into some reality. It might take a war to break the self-imposed limits of AI to achieve Artificial Life (AL) that can _live_ in the network and all its servers. This is the stuff of science fiction but I do believe it possible that highly adaptive living software can evolve within our networks and server systems.
Would you like to know where I think the best work to achieve "Live Software" (LS (c) RAMunro 04/14/2001) will come from? Computer-based games! The new "Black and White" game is a prime example of evolution towards this paradigm. In the current version, the only free actor is the game player, but I expect the space to expand such that the avatar and even inhabitants will have free will, inherent codes of conduct, moral choices, and the ability to make choices based upon fuzzy logic, like real life. Then, and only then, and given development of intelligent software's abilities to manipulate networks to maintain its persistence and consciousness, will we see Live Software arise.
Otherwise, I hope Kurzweil's right - I'll gladly trade my body for eternal life on an expanding net of systems (when it comes to that, that is). Until then, I prefer living.
because that light at the end of the tunnel is a train called "pervasive computing" and it will be here soon. Ubiquitous connectivity, XML/SOAP protocols (assuming M$ doesn't hijack these), more capable and standardized interfaces to extensive backend data warehouses, IPv6 addressability and service level discrimination, smarter Java-based intelligent agents, speech recognition, natural language processing - these will all contribute to the second networked revolution in the ways we work and interact online. Berners-Lee has an academic vision of how some of this might work, and I applaud his courage for sharing his ideas.
Today, you can be driving on the freeway and using speech recognition to look up and call colleagues through your handsfree cellphone. It's not much of a stretch to add calendar administration and other interfaces with intelligent agents to this.
Scenario: You're flying down I405 in SoCal (in the carpool lane, with coworkers aboard) some beautiful late afternoon in the not too distant future:
"Princess (you've named your general digital assistant Princess Leia, for some reason), please check on improving my car insurance rates."
Princess: "Connecting insurance agent..."
Fred (you call your intelligent insurance agent program "Fred"): "Fred here..."
You: "Fred, please see if I can get a better rate on my car insurance this year."
Fred: "OK, I'm looking..."
You: "Princess, please tell my wife I'll be home early."
Princess: "What's your ETA, please..."
You: "Sixish Princess, thanks."
Princess: "Thank you, will do."
Fred: "You have six quotes, two of which are at lower premiums than your existing contract. Do you have any recent tickets or accidents to add?"
You: "No, thank you. What's my best choice?"
Fred: "Suckem-Dumpem Mutual offers you a $300 annual premium savings counting the good driver discount."
[I405 stops dead as it's wont to do randomly, including the carpool lane.]
Screeech Crash Tinkle. [a moment of dead air...]
You: "Fred, forget it. Princess, please tell my wife I'll be a little late."
Fred: "Request closed, no action. Bye."
Princess: "OK, will do."
OK, I'll admit it's somewhat of a stretch. But suppose that fraud is proven in a civil case. That might lead to further criminal prosecution, especially if the victims complain.
The countries that attempt to censor net content of any sort should be blocked by the rest of the net, at the peering routers level. This ought to be a peering requirement. We know Red China is censoring us - we should simply block all of their sites from visibility to the rest of the fscking world! They might get a clue in about ten years,... maybe.
But this is easier said than done, unfortunately. Suppose you run a node router connecting to many other nodes. You forward all the traffic you get. How will you know what any of your peered routers drop? You won't, unless you implement a traffic logging server that compares requests against responses. Even then, you'd have to have a way to figure out which were real requests versus errors, an impossible or at least very difficult and error prone task. Most peering routers won't even attempt to do this at all.
Countries are going to get away with this short sighted censorship, at least until protocols and DNS management schemes are improved to catch it. Oh well, I don't really have anything to say to or hear from osama@bin_ladin.org, anyway. No loss. And people in oppressed countries will always have some ways around the "official" Internet.
But it _would_ help to simply cut the high-speed links to countries known to be censoring network content for political/economic/religious reasons. (State religions are abominations. So are official State political and economic restrictions.) Now here's something George W. might really get behind, if he could only remotely understand it!
"Example 2: If I call the phone company and order phone service, I'll have a service call the next day, but if I order DSL, it's going to take a few weeks. Yet a DSL installation is not any more complicated than a standard phone installation!"
Not true. DSL takes time for the telco to provision. They have to circuit-map your line from their CO to your location, check for A/D-D/A converters in the link (these kill DSL), check the transmission footage, perhaps test your line for impedance, bandwidth, noise/static, phase-jitter at DSL frequencies, etc., install CO band-pass filtering on your line, allocate a DSL header, and document all this both internally and to your DSL provider. No wonder it takes a few weeks from ordering to get the provisioning done.
Any extra delays for third-party DSL providers are likely due to internal review, tariff checking, stamping regulatory forms, mailing time, and the DSL provider's own delays in handling telco provisioning paperwork.
PPPoE works fine (if the DSL provider and ISP have their sh*t together). I use PPPoE through my home (non-split) PacBell phone line via Covad bridged to Earthlink under both Linux (roaring-penguin is in the Mandrake 7.2 release, as is ip-chains firewall) and OS/2 (using Injoy Firewall, which includes PPPoE support): free modem, $50/mo.
My PPPoE DSL is pretty reliable (and fast, over 1250 Mb/s down). The only delay is at the first connection - turn on the DSL modem, wait for it to sync, then it's up. (That's a common troubleshooting procedure, too.) After that, DSL is always-on, 7x24, never drops unless PacBell (rare), Covad (also rare), or Earthlink (sometimes) screws up. I think the longest my DSL line has been down was about a half day one time when Covad was mucking around (and I gave their technical support voice tapes some colorful manager listening material that time, you can bet).
I'm in SoCal, but grew up in Portland. Is broadband access really as grim there now as you seem to suggest?
If you ever get mixed up in anything large and nasty enough to have the big guns of Federal RICO statutes leveled at you, you'll wish you'd never been born. No kidding.
RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. This kind of serious criminal prosecution motivated the Mafia to have Jimmy Hoffa "taken for a ride."
Your real choice isn't between Windows or another OS, it's between apathy or proaction, between slow poison made easy or the rewarding work of becoming more self-sufficient, between slowly draining your resources to pay "voluntary" taxes to Microsoft or taking real responsibility to become more capable and independant.
You don't have to switch cold-turkey to another OS, GUI, set of apps, etc. PartitionMagic is not too expensive. If you have a fair-sized HD, most of it is likely unused (a full Win2K install with Office2000, MS Project, Lotus SmartSuite, Notes, etc. only takes about 3GB - most HDs are 8GB or larger now). Set up a dual boot system with more than one OS environment. Keep Windows around for the things you need it for. Use Linux (or OS/2, or BeOS, whatever) to learn how it works, become familiar with it, build your non-MS capabilities. You'll find you use Windows less and less as you get more comfortable with any better alternative, and that it will get better and easier for you to use over time, even as Microsoft progressively makes Windows more restrictive, feature bloated, and oppressive, with "content protection" and Hailstorm coming.
At a previous employer, I had a Dell notebook set up with the firm standard Windows system on one partition, OS/2 built on a second partition, and a shared data partition for Notes databases, etc. I did almost all my work under OS/2. They did not know the difference and I didn't have to reboot several times a day or redo work lost to Windows crashes. I was much more productive that way.... Now I run both OS/2 and Linux on my firewall box, and always have one to fall back on if the other develops a weird glitch.
Before long most mainstream Win32 apps will be running under both Linux and OS/2 using Wine or Odin. Linux software has been ported to OS/2 (Xfree86 and GIMP come to mind) and more will be in the future. BeOS runs most Linux apps natively, as do the *BSD environments. Software outside Windows is becoming available everwhere.
Windows is the dead end, proprietary, high cost alternative, and lots of people are slowly realizing this. Find a way out earlier rather than later, or pay the price repeatedly.
The Rambus lawyers are potentially in a _lot_ more trouble than perjury and lost licenses. Infineon has alleged that Rambus engaged in a pattern of corrupt practices, in conspiracy with their lawyers and others ("Secret Squirrel" and "Deep Throat" - Rambus moles in JEDEC after Rambus resigned). These charges invoke Federal RICO statutes that have _very_ harsh penalties, as they were created and used to imprison and confiscate the ill-gotten assets of Mafia families and drug-running conspiracies.
What the Court just did was refuse to throw out the allegations that invoke the RICO jeopardies. If these charges stick, then not only will Rambus lose its patent claims, but its assets could be confiscated, and some Rambus executives and lawyers might be taking early retirement... in Federal penal institutions. Couldn't happen to nicer people...
I was going to respond to the substance of your post, but your pr0n spam sig dissuaded me. Advertising pr0n associated with your ID on slashdot is an incredibly stupid act.
And I disagree with you. Most big fabs grow their own silicon ingots, AFAIK. That's the easy part. Do you have any statistics on worldwide Si-ingot production?
This is not only not true, but also _predominantly_ false. Intel fabs its own wafers, so do AMD and others. TSM fabs wafers for its subsidiaries and others. And IBM fabs wafers for Motorala, AMD, Transmeta, etc. as well as for its own use. Most wafer fab capacity is _not_ in Japan. Malaysia alone probably has more (Intel, AMD, etc.).
Seeing what's going down and writing intelligently about it are two different things. I'm not entirely convinced you did the former, but you are convicted by your own posts of being incapable of the latter. Let me put it in simple terms for you. We're having a discussion here about the potential of peer-to-peer services at the network edge as contrasted with centralized client-server models. It's a current and rather interesting topic. Your negative posts are not advancing the conversation. Please take it outside.
You sound so upset P2P systems have gained such popularity that you're no longer 37337 with IRC and ICQ, etc. I dismiss that as immaturity. Listen up and learn, maybe.
Clay Shirky is a savvy guy, and he has a point that P2P is a good idea, albeit a sloppy one just now. The main thesis of his article is that power resides not only in centered servers (this is Sun's doomed wishful thinking, exactly), but also exists and is growing on the edges, as widespread use of easily acquired and highly capable software triggers the law of large numbers and a shift to topple a tipping point, to utterly overwhelm those few evil hegemonists who seek to exert centralized _control_ in order to extract artificial scarcity based revenues from the large mass of networked connected people. Your anger is better directed at those who charge $15 per CD, $9 per movie.
Yes, the Concorde is perhaps a case of regional one-up-manship subsidized by oppressive British and French governments. If all the common people ever gain power back within Britain and France, there'll surely be serious hell to pay: new gibbets and new guillotines, that's the order of that year! How long can people put up with such high taxes, poor services, declining economies? When will all you poor sods have had enough of it? Class system, my fuckin ass! Obsolete! When's _your_ revolution, suckahs?
Okay, maybe that was a bit over the top, but you get my drift. Socialism doesn't work! It devolves into statism. Read Hegel, pay attention! Try real democratic capitalism.
Reaching beyond the bounds of Earth, however, is a worthy endeavor, not at all to be confused with subsidizing a couple dozen people with more money than sense per trip across the Atlantic supersonic, mainly for the glamour / cachet of merely having done it, a few thousand times (less the unfortunate losses). Bunch of self-important rich assholes, that's all. Exploring space is a very worthwhile endeavor, though. We can have no higher ambition than to get off this little rock eventually, if we're really going to survive long term. Explore and grow, or die. That's the imperative for intelligent species, which we may be approaching. The jury's still out, but I have to hope we're worthy.
And the Moon missions were the highlight of our many thousands of years of evolution. It is tawdry and tragic that they were cut short by a stupid little losing war (Vietnam costs killed NASA's funding). That a space program still exists at all is simply a reflection that scientists still have some voice in politics, and that some politicians are not the dolts we assume (and are right about, mostly). It is an imperative that we continue to expolore, and to question. The alternative is stagnation and a host of concomitant evils you can barely imagine. You won't want to live on an Earth that gave up on exploring science, and space. That's the threatened Armageddon, last days, everyone dies!
I reject your major views, in the strongest terms. If we have no surplus for science, for space exploration, then we are just animals, and we will die and fade away, forever.
Government (and Utility, but this may change soon in California) workers are _very_ hard to fire. They basically have strict due process (called "Civil Service") protections against unfavorable personnel actions (like, i.e., firing). It's the same in most first-world countries, including the UK, the EU, the US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Japan, etc.
All they have to do is show up for their shift (not discernably drunk or stoned), stay awake (mostly) for eight hours, and they're guaranteed to keep their jobs, pretty much.
In the US, somewhere around 40% of employees work for Local, State, or Federal governments. Scary, isn't it? Most of them vote, too, which is one reason it's so hard to pass meaningful tax reductions. In the UK, EU, etc., the percentage is probably even higher. Of course the idiot kept his job. H*ll, he'll probably get a raise this year! You have to be around "civil servants" for a while to figure out that they aren't motivated by the same incentives that lead most enterprise employees to be useful, productive, effective, and efficient. Public workers usually evince none of these characteristics. (But exceptions do exist.) For the most part though, "civil service" rules need changing.
.300 Winchester Magnum reaches farther, flatter than 7.62 NATO, though it does kick. I once put my left shoulder against a tree and fired - my back was sore for a week!
.50 MacMillan single-shot is state of the art when you want to "reach out and touch someone." The .50 has range out to a mile, if you're really good, or lucky.
The
Oh, he asked about Operating Systems? Never mind.
you've got to understand Instruction Throughput Rate (ITR) too.
Apple uses PowerPC chips that are more RISCy than Intel chips. They have a shorter pipeline, which basically allows a higher average ITR after you factor in branch mispredicts. That is why an Apple box can do a respectable job of keeping up with a (long pipeline) Intel machine clocked at twice the rate. MIPS, not clock speed, matters.
The real reason Apple machines aren't the choice of gamers is that Apple puts modest (OK, but not screaming high-end) video-cards in their systems.
That and Apple's unwillingness to open their code to game developers.
You are one sick puppy. Seek help, please.
WRT the feedback path overhead....
IANAD (I am not a designer), but thinking about this I wonder if buffering interstage registers might not mitigate feedback path delay. Imagine three registers, R1 output of Stage 1, R2 buffer, and R3 input to Stage 2. Each register has a control bit (0 = read, 1 = unread). Further imagine two simple register to register copy circuits, one to copy R1 to R2, and a second to copy R2 to R3.
I apologize for the primitive exposition (I said IANAD), but intuitively it seems to me that such a buffer scheme could let logic stages overlap processing. The cost would be the time needed for the two hair-trigger copy operations between logic stages, but that should be minimal.
Bang1 - CopyR1R2 frees Stage1 to execute again, Bang2 - CopyR2R3 tells Stage2 it has an input.
If Stage1 completes a fast operation, the buffer copying lets it take on the next one (which might not be fast) perhaps before Stage2 is ready for its next input. Thus Stage1 and Stage2 can overlap in some circumstances, increasing overall speed. Multiply this by a dozen or so pipeline stages and the savings might be worth the effort.
Or perhaps this is the overhead the parent post was referring to...
What's the Jedi religion? Belief in a mystical paranormal "force" of good versus evil? With a "dark side" mirror-image, don't forget it! What's this "force" anyway?
Sorry, this ain't a religion, folks. A full on religion needs lots more than some vague outline of mysticism. Sure, mysticism plays a role, but there have to be some ways to connect that to the psychological makeups of the intended converts.
An effective religion has to engage people within their lives, offering ways to address their real issues, not just a bunch of supernatural garbage that they can't relate to (light sabers? where?).
George Lucas' myth-spinning Star Wars exploitation of mass love of recast Arthurian sword-and-sorcery tales doesn't begin to come up to the threshold of a religion. It's just a slick, hyped, and very crass commercial scam, complete with cheap molded plastic action figures in Kmart stores near you.
But someone thinks New Zealand will fall for it.
I've been to NZ. Nice clean place. Lots of level headed, interesting, and fun people live there. I don't think many of them will be signing up for a dumb Jedi "religion."
Besides, the NZ yobbos are all off grokking up the Lord of the Rings books (lips moving as they form the words), not realizing that their parents read them 30 years ago.
Don't mistake my attitude about NZ though. They have more productive folks than Britain. Reasons for this are large questons, though. Let's not go there right now.
Children practicing on fairy tales is appropriate, but when they grow up, they should attend to real issues, not obsess on mind-control abominations like Scientology, EST, Mindspring (that former "human potential" scam is now recast as a national ISP that is run by a Scientology member), vacant TV series, exploitive commercial retellings of old stories (like Star Wars and Star Trek too}.
I could go on, but I suspect you all get my drift.