Although your rant has merit, you picked on the wrong rantee. I work for a fabless semiconductor company architecting extremely low-cost 8051-based smartcards. And it is 8051s that own the mass 8-bit market; Z80 & HD64180 are passe. This has been the case for years, hence my original point about complete dunderheads being required to cough up that amount of money on a game plan based on a dead architecture.
Go ahead, tell me I am trolling, but how on earth did a company with an ancient, 8-bit architecture manage to get idiots to throw $280M at it? My cat will design you an old 8-bit architecture for 1/10,000 of that and I promise she won't file for chapter 11.
Did they REALLY expect a Z80 with a TCP/IP stack to set the world on fire enough to pay back $280M? QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLARS!?!?!
There are an awful lot of small, dead, open source projects out there. I was looking today on Sourceforge for something and row after row of 0.0% project activity hits came up. Maybe this is to do with attention spans, or maybe for smaller projects it is tough putting GPL code out there.
A GPL-ed open source app that I wrote has so far had >1200 downloads in 2 months, yet only six people have fed anything back (five of them were complementary). Admittedly this is on Windows, where maybe there are cultural differences.
When you are charging for your work you can at least look at the cash and feel that you are doing a good job; if you are deliberately setting out to give your work away then all there is in the way of repayment is feedback or help. Maybe that makes people feel uncomfortable to the extent they might rather have paid for the software?
Dude, if someone is going to make silicon they're ready to make the scripts and synthesis constraints, that's not the problem. Jtag in particular is easy, I have written a full JTAG TAP myself in VHDL and even a BSDL compiler (in C++).
With the price of mask sets (the company I am working for is creating a new SOC design in 0.25u: mask cost $250K) the problem is getting credible validation that the CPU is a complete clone and is fully debugged.
Knowing that the masks cost $250K, and that litigation may tie up their product or cost them bigtime, a $400K license and the royalty from ARM for most companies is just another NRE (Nonrecurring Engineering Charge) that they're happy to pay.
What's sad is that ARM presumably bullied the poor student chap when in truth they were on at least questionable legal ground assuming it was a ''cleanroom implementation'', which it very much sounds like from the EE Times article.
No Troll intended on Heinlein, but it sads me up to reflect how the exquisite, quirky writers with the intricate things to say don't always get the recognition. Even though Phil Dick was certainly all that (eg, Valis), and excellent with it, I wonder how much of his mass popularity here is due to the continuing thing with films being made of his stories.
How much of the voting will in hindsight show ephermeral trends (eg, the loathsome Hubbard).
There's a great article on the myths surrounding Tunguska at http://www.jamesoberg.com/ufo/tungus.html. A Russian scientist in the sixties used a model with matchsticks for trees to compute the height and angle of the explosion from the pattern of damage of the trees. From the website:
''Aerodynamics experts in Moscow conducted an experiment about twenty years ago in an effort to simulate Tunguska's blast patterns. The scientists used a charge of explosives suspended over a board covered with miniature "trees" represented by matchsticks. In addition to the single blast point a string of smaller charges were added to reproduce the hypersonic shock wave of the object's ballistic passage through the upper atmosphere.
When the explosives were triggered, a blast pattern strikingly similar to the "butterfly" pattern of the actual Tunguska site was created in the matchstick forest. Although this experiment conclusively demonstrated that the strange pattern was due entirely to a large object that exploded naturally, the experiment's results were still being misinterpreted or misquoted years afterward.''
I looked at the source and saw a single ASCII '-' character, using IE and Netscape. It should display and on Netscape it does display. On IE it does NOT.
Nor is it fixed in IE 6.0.2600 that ships with XP.
I find it reassuring to know that there is at least one person for whom 'USENET' does not mean a huge, fast, distributed pr0n and mp3 delivery system:)
Tucows and GPL?
on
LWN in Trouble
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Hm, I wondered if Tucows was in trouble a couple of weeks ago. I submitted a GPL Windows app I wrote (Nographer) in the hope they would include it on their site, and it was rejected without explanation.
As I think the app is pretty neat (it is a HTTP NNTP bridge, effectively turning USENET into a website), and they later sent a couple of emails boasting about how I could pay to improve my visibility on their site, I had a sneaking suspicion maybe GPL software was not quite what they had based their business plan on.
Actually there seems to be something of an impedence mismatch althogther having Windows and GPL in the same sentance.
Oh, yes, that's a 'real impartial review'... it reads more like some oil-haired watchdripping toothshiner trying to sell you a car.
Excellent! All we need now is Phil Dick
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 4
Slashdot! First you run a story on Jack Vance, now Zelazny! If you do a review on Phil Dick's work you'll be batting a thousand.
I read Lord of Light when I was 16, and I went out and bought everything else I could of his, especially the Courts of Chaos series. By coincidence I rered Dilvish The Damned the other week, it is still as good as I remembered it.
Zelazny had (he died a couple of years ago as I recall) a unique tone to his work; he wasn't afraid to stitch in some poetic stuff amongst the swords and wizardry. Again like Vance he had an eye for sketching credible women in his stories.
Pleasant to see him mentioned here where he might posthumously gain new readers!
But you PROMISED me...
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 5
...if I ticked the box I would NEVER see anything by Jon Katz again!!!!
A switching power supply tries to match the high voltage mains supply to a lower voltage, low current load by rapidly charging up an inductor (the charge is stored as a magnetic field in the inductor) from the mains supply, then electronically disconnecting the inductor from the mains supply and giving it to the load to discharge. When the load has sucked out enough from the inductor to bring it to some low threshold level, the inductor is given back to the mains to be charged again. This is repeated thousands, even hundreds of thousands of times a second.
The lighter the load is, the less time is spent charging the inductor from the mains and it is discharged slower by the load. So the technique is adaptive to varying loads. While the load has the inductor, very little power is drawn from the mains.
There are variations on the technique to try to minimize the RF problems with abruptly switching between the mains and the load repeatedly, and the unlocked frequency of the switching in the plan outlined above, but that's basically how they work.
Bullshit. When nVidia started up it had patent problems up to wazoo, and look at them now. Roxio == Adaptec, they have a history and this junk is unlikely to kill them.
However, my only experience of "Roxio" software was Easy CD Creator which was a pile of poo, so if you were looking for an excuse not to buy shares in them that is a far better reason.
I feel sorry for the family members of the guys at Rambus and Gracenote who act like this, can you imagine how they act at Christmastime?
I tripped over Jack Vance when I was a kid reading random science fiction from my local library. His writing has had a measurable impact on my vocabulary and way of speaking in real life!
Maybe once or twice a book you will read some choice of phrase that is so succinct that it will stay with you and many years later you will find it on your own lips... eg, "flexible tactics" (retreat from battlefield), "attenuation of circumstance" (in light of ascension to noble station blocked).
Lately his books have been either short story collections or long fantasy-type 2- or 3-book series. But IMHO his best work is in the middle, like the Demon Princes series (nothing to do with demons).
Sure his stories have common elements, like a young male hero forced into a situation where he has to forge a path through powerful incumbants that either actively oppose him or at least wish him no well; but his women as well as the men in the story are sketched with such understanding of their motives and internal dialogues, the path of the story so well structured, and the events along the way so eerie and interesting that every book has something new in it.
If you can remember Windows 95, this had an awesomely buggy USB stack causing misery for everyone involved. It was improved in 95 Release 2, then in 98, again in 98 SE and there is a different stack in Windows 2000. Different USB devices react differently across those different operating systems causing support nightmares.
Since there are no volume USB 2 peripherals out there yet this is no loss to anyone. USB 2 is backward compatible with all the USB 1.1 peripehrals out there, so it will not stop Intel getting USB 2 on to motherboards. Maybe by the end of the year or the beginning of next year there will be support for USB 2 in the OS and then we will see the peripherals in volume.
In the meanwhile, I shall be using Firewire hard drives and USB for lower bandwidth applications.
You misunderstand what Napster will become: it will mutate into a vast pockmarked pimp for crypto-protected ''product'' that will only play the places you paid for. They don't want to ''change everything for the better'', they just want to be allowed to live so they can shovel cash at the bloated cold-eyed Lords of Contracts and dream of their exit strategy of selling out to sleek deadfaced shinybeetle chequestrokers.
The Forces of Darkness have embraced crypto as a means to extend enforcement of arbitrary limitations for profit (moving it into Windows for example, with driver signing: DRM content will not play unless all your drivers have the crypto to prove they are ''legit''; Intel are pushing a design to encrypt the actual video data between the PC and the display unit) and things will get plenty worse and more restricted before they get better.
The only upside is that so far pushing the crypto into the eyes and ears of the users is not currently economically feasible, otherwise they'd be looking at that too; that means that ultimately the content can always be hijacked if a modest loss of quality is acceptable.
''Our Zero-Install JavaScript microserver transforms static Web pages into Dynamic HTML user interfaces by wiring them into a peer-to-peer XML message bus. By sidestepping the cost and incompatibilities of Java or ActiveX applets, ESP app developers can immediately leverage the massive installed base of 4th-generation Web browsers. Furthermore, choosing to route across the KNN can leverage our pre-provisioned real-time content, security, peering with wireless carriers, and personalized prioritization engine to deliver the right information, at the right time, on the right device, to the right people & programs.''
Good job they went stealth, buzzwords this dense could easily have ripped space-time.
The goatsex / shockpic thing is nasty and hateful, but I have to admire the misplaced zeal in finding new ways to herd unwilling and horrified traffic in front of things they didn't want their brain troubled with this lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
Although your rant has merit, you picked on the wrong rantee. I work for a fabless semiconductor company architecting extremely low-cost 8051-based smartcards. And it is 8051s that own the mass 8-bit market; Z80 & HD64180 are passe. This has been the case for years, hence my original point about complete dunderheads being required to cough up that amount of money on a game plan based on a dead architecture.
Go ahead, tell me I am trolling, but how on earth did a company with an ancient, 8-bit architecture manage to get idiots to throw $280M at it? My cat will design you an old 8-bit architecture for 1/10,000 of that and I promise she won't file for chapter 11.
Did they REALLY expect a Z80 with a TCP/IP stack to set the world on fire enough to pay back $280M? QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLARS!?!?!
There are an awful lot of small, dead, open source projects out there. I was looking today on Sourceforge for something and row after row of 0.0% project activity hits came up. Maybe this is to do with attention spans, or maybe for smaller projects it is tough putting GPL code out there.
A GPL-ed open source app that I wrote has so far had >1200 downloads in 2 months, yet only six people have fed anything back (five of them were complementary). Admittedly this is on Windows, where maybe there are cultural differences.
When you are charging for your work you can at least look at the cash and feel that you are doing a good job; if you are deliberately setting out to give your work away then all there is in the way of repayment is feedback or help. Maybe that makes people feel uncomfortable to the extent they might rather have paid for the software?
Dude, if someone is going to make silicon they're ready to make the scripts and synthesis constraints, that's not the problem. Jtag in particular is easy, I have written a full JTAG TAP myself in VHDL and even a BSDL compiler (in C++).
With the price of mask sets (the company I am working for is creating a new SOC design in 0.25u: mask cost $250K) the problem is getting credible validation that the CPU is a complete clone and is fully debugged.
Knowing that the masks cost $250K, and that litigation may tie up their product or cost them bigtime, a $400K license and the royalty from ARM for most companies is just another NRE (Nonrecurring Engineering Charge) that they're happy to pay.
What's sad is that ARM presumably bullied the poor student chap when in truth they were on at least questionable legal ground assuming it was a ''cleanroom implementation'', which it very much sounds like from the EE Times article.
No Troll intended on Heinlein, but it sads me up to reflect how the exquisite, quirky writers with the intricate things to say don't always get the recognition. Even though Phil Dick was certainly all that (eg, Valis), and excellent with it, I wonder how much of his mass popularity here is due to the continuing thing with films being made of his stories.
How much of the voting will in hindsight show ephermeral trends (eg, the loathsome Hubbard).
There's a great article on the myths surrounding Tunguska at http://www.jamesoberg.com/ufo/tungus.html. A Russian scientist in the sixties used a model with matchsticks for trees to compute the height and angle of the explosion from the pattern of damage of the trees. From the website:
''Aerodynamics experts in Moscow conducted an experiment about twenty years ago in an effort to simulate Tunguska's blast patterns. The scientists used a charge of explosives suspended over a board covered with miniature "trees" represented by matchsticks. In addition to the single blast point a string of smaller charges were added to reproduce the hypersonic shock wave of the object's ballistic passage through the upper atmosphere.
When the explosives were triggered, a blast pattern strikingly similar to the "butterfly" pattern of the actual Tunguska site was created in the matchstick forest. Although this experiment conclusively demonstrated that the strange pattern was due entirely to a large object that exploded naturally, the experiment's results were still being misinterpreted or misquoted years afterward.''
Well spotted, dude. And from 1996 too!
This thing about devices ''not being powerful enough'' for IP is completely bogus. You can get very good TCP/IP stacks that operate on an 8051.
I looked at the source and saw a single ASCII '-' character, using IE and Netscape. It should display and on Netscape it does display. On IE it does NOT.
Nor is it fixed in IE 6.0.2600 that ships with XP.
Nasty little bug!
I find it reassuring to know that there is at least one person for whom 'USENET' does not mean a huge, fast, distributed pr0n and mp3 delivery system :)
As I think the app is pretty neat (it is a HTTP NNTP bridge, effectively turning USENET into a website), and they later sent a couple of emails boasting about how I could pay to improve my visibility on their site, I had a sneaking suspicion maybe GPL software was not quite what they had based their business plan on.
Actually there seems to be something of an impedence mismatch althogther having Windows and GPL in the same sentance.
Tampons and Beer... that'll need a lot of marketing to overtake Gin and Tonic.
Oh, yes, that's a 'real impartial review'... it reads more like some oil-haired watchdripping toothshiner trying to sell you a car.
Slashdot! First you run a story on Jack Vance, now Zelazny! If you do a review on Phil Dick's work you'll be batting a thousand.
I read Lord of Light when I was 16, and I went out and bought everything else I could of his, especially the Courts of Chaos series. By coincidence I rered Dilvish The Damned the other week, it is still as good as I remembered it.
Zelazny had (he died a couple of years ago as I recall) a unique tone to his work; he wasn't afraid to stitch in some poetic stuff amongst the swords and wizardry. Again like Vance he had an eye for sketching credible women in his stories.
Pleasant to see him mentioned here where he might posthumously gain new readers!
...if I ticked the box I would NEVER see anything by Jon Katz again!!!!
Access to patents. That's why Alpha has any worth at all.
Alpha has been a dead duck for years. Amazing how long things can go on after they start to emit the stench of death.
A switching power supply tries to match the high voltage mains supply to a lower voltage, low current load by rapidly charging up an inductor (the charge is stored as a magnetic field in the inductor) from the mains supply, then electronically disconnecting the inductor from the mains supply and giving it to the load to discharge. When the load has sucked out enough from the inductor to bring it to some low threshold level, the inductor is given back to the mains to be charged again. This is repeated thousands, even hundreds of thousands of times a second.
The lighter the load is, the less time is spent charging the inductor from the mains and it is discharged slower by the load. So the technique is adaptive to varying loads. While the load has the inductor, very little power is drawn from the mains.
There are variations on the technique to try to minimize the RF problems with abruptly switching between the mains and the load repeatedly, and the unlocked frequency of the switching in the plan outlined above, but that's basically how they work.
Hollywood has been casting by head for years :)
Bullshit. When nVidia started up it had patent problems up to wazoo, and look at them now. Roxio == Adaptec, they have a history and this junk is unlikely to kill them. However, my only experience of "Roxio" software was Easy CD Creator which was a pile of poo, so if you were looking for an excuse not to buy shares in them that is a far better reason. I feel sorry for the family members of the guys at Rambus and Gracenote who act like this, can you imagine how they act at Christmastime?
I tripped over Jack Vance when I was a kid reading random science fiction from my local library. His writing has had a measurable impact on my vocabulary and way of speaking in real life! Maybe once or twice a book you will read some choice of phrase that is so succinct that it will stay with you and many years later you will find it on your own lips... eg, "flexible tactics" (retreat from battlefield), "attenuation of circumstance" (in light of ascension to noble station blocked). Lately his books have been either short story collections or long fantasy-type 2- or 3-book series. But IMHO his best work is in the middle, like the Demon Princes series (nothing to do with demons). Sure his stories have common elements, like a young male hero forced into a situation where he has to forge a path through powerful incumbants that either actively oppose him or at least wish him no well; but his women as well as the men in the story are sketched with such understanding of their motives and internal dialogues, the path of the story so well structured, and the events along the way so eerie and interesting that every book has something new in it.
http://www.faxme.co.uk is going to paid-for too... this is definately a trend.
In the end it should be a good thing, as most of the free services ultimately have no path to profit or even being able to sustain themselves.
If you can remember Windows 95, this had an awesomely buggy USB stack causing misery for everyone involved. It was improved in 95 Release 2, then in 98, again in 98 SE and there is a different stack in Windows 2000. Different USB devices react differently across those different operating systems causing support nightmares.
Since there are no volume USB 2 peripherals out there yet this is no loss to anyone. USB 2 is backward compatible with all the USB 1.1 peripehrals out there, so it will not stop Intel getting USB 2 on to motherboards. Maybe by the end of the year or the beginning of next year there will be support for USB 2 in the OS and then we will see the peripherals in volume.
In the meanwhile, I shall be using Firewire hard drives and USB for lower bandwidth applications.
You misunderstand what Napster will become: it will mutate into a vast pockmarked pimp for crypto-protected ''product'' that will only play the places you paid for. They don't want to ''change everything for the better'', they just want to be allowed to live so they can shovel cash at the bloated cold-eyed Lords of Contracts and dream of their exit strategy of selling out to sleek deadfaced shinybeetle chequestrokers.
The Forces of Darkness have embraced crypto as a means to extend enforcement of arbitrary limitations for profit (moving it into Windows for example, with driver signing: DRM content will not play unless all your drivers have the crypto to prove they are ''legit''; Intel are pushing a design to encrypt the actual video data between the PC and the display unit) and things will get plenty worse and more restricted before they get better.
The only upside is that so far pushing the crypto into the eyes and ears of the users is not currently economically feasible, otherwise they'd be looking at that too; that means that ultimately the content can always be hijacked if a modest loss of quality is acceptable.
''Our Zero-Install JavaScript microserver transforms static Web pages into Dynamic HTML user interfaces by wiring them into a peer-to-peer XML message bus. By sidestepping the cost and incompatibilities of Java or ActiveX applets, ESP app developers can immediately leverage the massive installed base of 4th-generation Web browsers. Furthermore, choosing to route across the KNN can leverage our pre-provisioned real-time content, security, peering with wireless carriers, and personalized prioritization engine to deliver the right information, at the right time, on the right device, to the right people & programs.''
Good job they went stealth, buzzwords this dense could easily have ripped space-time.
The link above actually maps to
o n. html%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20% 20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20 %20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%2 0%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20% 20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20 %20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%2 0%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20% 20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20 %20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%2 0%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20% 20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20@goatse.cx/
http://www.tomshardware.com%2frambus%2fcomparis
The goatsex / shockpic thing is nasty and hateful, but I have to admire the misplaced zeal in finding new ways to herd unwilling and horrified traffic in front of things they didn't want their brain troubled with this lifetime.
Now why don't you use your powers for good?