So your recent Intel/AMD and PPC can acheive an IPC greater than 1
Hey, what's a factor of two between friends, right?:-)
If memory serves me correctly, the 68040 was the also first piplined 68K. PPC and the latesest offerings from AMD and Intel are pipelined, of course.
I seem to recall the 68000 having a small pipeline. The 68010 definitly did which is part of how "loop mode" worked (an ALU instruction followed by a "decrment and check cc and branck back one insn" is "loop mode" and you can execute one per cycle, because it stops the first 3 stages of the pipeline).
I'm not sure what was first on the 040, maybe built in ALU? No, that was the 030, or was that an option on the 030? (the 040 I used was the 68LC040 at 25Mhz)
68K architecture may have 16 registers, but they are 16-bit, while x86 are 32-bit.
No, the 68000 had 32bit wide registers a 32bit ALU, a 16bit data bus, and a 24 bit address space (25 bits if you count the supervisor pin). I have the databooks. I have owned computers using these. I have programed them (in C mostly, but the debugging was in assembly). The Palm's CPU32 is I think based on this, which means I even still use one:-)
The 68010 was I think the same. The CPU32 might be based on this, if so I have one.
The 68020 had 32 bit data buses and a 32 bit address space, but was otherwise the same. I've used these but not owned them.
The 030 and 040 are the same but have a built in MMU, and sometimes FPU. I have used and programmed the 040 a lot, but not owned them. I have data books for both somewhere.
The 060 was super scaler but otherwise much like the 040. Never used one. Didn't have a data book for it.
If you don't beleve me, call Moto and get a free data book. Enjoy.
On top of that, you can get away with only mapping 7 or 8 (D0, D1, D2, A0, A1, A5, A6, A7), because the rest aren't often used. In PPC assembly, use most or all 32 registers at the same time is quite common, because with a RISC instruction set, you *have* to do everything in registers.
Hmmm, I sort of disagree with this. Almost every 68000 instruction uses one or two registers, most can use far more (what with the complex non-RISC addressing modes). Almost every RISC instruction uses 3 registers (sometimes one register is used twice though). Registers are extremely important in both RISC and CISC code. Not so much on stack based machines though.
I think the real reason the 68k emulators are easier then PPC emulators is 68k CPUs are not very fast. If you ignore the almost-68K CPUs like the ColdFires I think the 68k family didn't go faster then 60Mhz. Also prior to the 68030 most instructions took more then one cycle to execute. So a 600Mhz Intel/AMD/PPC can afford to spend 10 cycles doing the work of one 68k cycle and you are still as fast as the original.
On the other hand PPCs are far far faster. I have I think a 50Mhz one in my set top box, emulating that on a 600Mhz Intel/AMD would only give you 5 or so cycles to get the work done. Worse yet the one I have in my old laptop is 500Mhz, the 600Mhz Intel/AMD gets barely more then a cycle! A brand new top o the line Intel might get 4 cycles to do the work in, but that really isn't much time!
At least not for anything that does the translation on the fly. For something that does the work ahead of time and caches it like the TranMeta Crouse, or (I think!) some 68K emulators, you can do much better, if there are loops at least.
come on, RAM is CHEAP, they should have been able to put a full 8 in there or at least 4 for the same price.
RAM also uses power all the time (PalmOS and most other PDAs use RAM as "long term storage" so it has to be powered all the time). At a guess the amount of power the RAM draws has a bigger effect on battery life for people that only turn the PDA on to check some apointments and turn it off (i.e. people that don't play games or take lots of notes on a PDA).
So sure, you could up it to 4M of RAM for almost no money, but then the battery life drops signifigantly. Or the weight and cost goes up as you add more battery.
Hey at least it's not as bad as it use to be where more RAM needed more CPU power to keep search times low (more RAM leads to the assumption that people put more stuff in the PDA...; but now even th elow end Palm CPU is decently fast for searching the amout of text people tend to keep in 8M).
Of corse there is the other issue...keeping the $99 model as berift of features as possiable makes the "upsell" simpler, and failing that may increse the cahnce that people will upgrade.
On the other hand, I knew exactly what I wanted a PDA for.
On the other hand there are people who bought a PDA neither because it is trendy, nor because they knew what it would do. I bought a used Palm III because I had some vauge idea that it would help me get orginised, keep phone numbers better then my cell phone maybe, and beep before meetings so I didn't miss them. And of corse if all else failed I could play hack (a rogue ancester) while I was standing around.
So here it is a good 5+ years later and I'm on my 3rd PalmOS PDA. It has definitly helped me orginise myself. I have also seen a lot of people buy them and fail to be helped, mostly because they decide what is important enough to put in the PDA and what they will "just remember" (and then promptly forget!). Not me. I've decided I can't remember squat. If I'm not about to do it right there and then, into the PDA it goes.
There is a real market of people who value a good PDA. These people are the ones that continue to buy Palm (or PalmOS devices) over the various Windows based PDAs because they know that Palm got it right. Mostly people following the fad, people who don't know what they want, are drawn to the shiny Windows based PDAs.
There is a real problem with that theory. It assumes all your customers know enough about PDAs to buy the right one. Someone else with a vague idea that a PDA might help them may well wonder into a store and buy the prettiest looking bright shiny object that says "PDA" on a box. Now you may decide they get what they deserve, a crappy PDA with a bright shiny box. However they have most likely picked their first and last PDA. If Palm had a good PDA to fit in a nice shiney box a lot of first time consumers might pick up the Palm for all the wrong reasons... and then the rest of their PDA buys will be for the right reasons.
Remember the number one law of bisness: don't argue with a fool, take his money
Sure methanol may last way longer, but the readily availiable supply of electricity far outweighs the benefits of the longer lasting fuel cell.
Probbably, after all either the ZDnet verion of the article, or the maker said inital laptop uses would most likely have both a normal batt and a fuel cell!
When there's a plug in my coach seat flying intercontinental then prehaps I'll see the benefit of large, heavy, long time to recharge, heavy metal laden, short usage time capacitors.
US Airway's A330 flights have them. My laptop lasted half way to the UK when I was in a seat with a defectave one. Unfortunitly British Midlands doesn't and their flights are a lot cheaper.
I'm not sure the fuel cells will be the best thing for daily uses, but I would love to be able to swap one out for long flights. Much like I like lithimum ion batts most of the time, but zinc air seems like a better choice for long flights.
Frankly, something that should be in every app should *certainly* have a keyboard shortcut.
Maybe...preferences are in every app, but I don't find a strong need for a keyboard short cut (even if command-; seems to be widely used). "About app", and "Check for update" as well. But maybe I'm just in a contrary mood. I do think "hide others" should have one (which is why I'm happy it does!) Apple is also starting to push a consistent short cut for "cycle windows" which is nice.
I have some vagus suspicion that "hide others" didn't exist until after Apple removed "single user mode", and they just didn't test it long enough to decide it rated a command key. So until it got field tested they left it alone. Maybe.
Not only does Command-Tab give you back your last app, it actually cycles through all the apps you have running on the dock. [...]But, to paraphrase Dr. Strangelove, this amazing feature only saves the world if Apple tells people about it!
Well the command-tab goes-to-last-app I didn't see anywhere, but the command-tab cycles apps I definitely saw in one of Apple's flimsy almost useless documentation kits, maybe for 10.0, or "X Public Beta". I was unaware that it had changed to "go to last app then cycle" in 10.2 until I was telling someone how cool HotApp was and they said "dude command-tab does that!". Fortunately HotApp still gives the way-useful single press short cut for "copy selection to clipboard, switch to last app, paste". Amazingly useful.
I think the only thing that would make me happier is if there turned out to be an easy-to-use and universal method to navigate around buttons and fields in dialog boxes.
Does the "Full Keyboard Access" stuff found in System Preferences under keyboard settings count? If not how does it fall short? (I don't use it myself)
And the part about not using MDI style applications is in my opinion _very_ wrong. I often have 3 or more applications open when working and I find it damn confusing to look at all of them at the same time.
In 10.2 command-oprion-H is "hide all other apps"; don't want to see other apps? Use it.
Prior to 10.2 the "hide all other apps" didn't have a consistant short cut, but it was always in the same place in the application menu (second manu on the bar, between the apple and the file menus).
Personally I like having, oh, say, my IRC client up, and pushing the minimised iTunes controls between the IRC connect/notify windoes and the users window. Or maybe closing the users window and having a DVD play there. Or sticking the compile window from Project Builder below the chat area, or Backup's progress bar close to the...
Ever hit something outside the program you are working in and then spend time finding your way back?
No, never. That's not to say from time to time I don't click the wrong thing and get the app I don't expect, but I have found it trivally easy to "get back". Command-H always hids the current app in OS X, so if you didn't want the app up at all (say the pesky finder that unhides if you miss a window and click the desktop) Command-H hides it and switches you back to the last app. If you wanted that app un-hidden, you can return to the last app by doing Command-Tab in 10.2, or prior to 10.2 the shareware HotApp program let you use Opt-tab for that.
Macs are just crappy to working with if you use more than one program at a time.
Sure, if you spend zero time learning how to use them they are bad at stuff. Much like spending no time learning how to drive a car makes them bad transportation devices, and great devices for crushing expensave stuff, or spending zero time learning to interact with people in a bar makes it hard to get a date, but easy to wear a drink. Most stuff does require a little effor to learn! Sometimes the very tiny effort of finding someone who likes the thing and saying "er, why do you like it?", or "how do I do this?". Sometimes - the horror - the supreime effort of reading a book!
The gui is just not designed to let me move around with speed and ease. Linux and Windows are much better at that.
I'm not a big windows fan, but I do admit their GUI lets you madly rush about and has defaults that don't suck too hard. Linux seems about like all the other (non-Mac) Unixes and has random GUIs on top of it that conflict a bit, have defaults that suck hard, and after tons of effort in getting them tuned to how you like to operate, tend to work better then the out of the box configurations of Windows or MacOS. Or corse I expect if you spent the same effort to customise the other two you would get the same effect.
Bottom line: Macs are too expensive and slow. I like my new dual mp 2000+; it's cheaper and faster (and it runs linux properly!)
Well, they sure aren't cheap (except maybe the iBook, and maybe the DVD-writer iMac up agianst name brand PCs....definitly not as cheap as white box PCs though!).
On the other hand they sure don't seem slow. I was happally writing CD-Rs for backups watchign an IRC channel and DVD, running iTunes and nothing seemed the least bit slow. Ripping CDs seems way way faster (and simpler) then Intel-ish PCs with 2x to 4x the clock speed! Compiles seem to go by just as fast as any other IDE system (laptop, so no SCSI option). Maybe for most tasks the slowest thing is not the CPU, but the memory wall, or the disk wall, or just plain the person sitting there doing work.
Of corse I don't think I would go out and buy rack after rack of Xserve boxes for a render farm, then again, it would be one of the platforms I would evaluate. I kind of susspect the Intel-ish systems would win out there though.
You can't STEAL something that is licensed so people can use it anyway they want. Even if microsoft took the BSD TCP/IP stack, so what?
At the time MS (and even AT&T) were accused of taking code the BSD licence had one more clause then it has now. Basically a credit clause, you had to acknolage BSD in your documentation (and maybe on screen).
What's the big deal if microsoft is using BSD's TCP/IP stack, it's not like microsoft took it and said BSD couldn't use it anymore.
The big deal is BSD asked for one very small and specifc (and fair!) form of payment, and they were denyed. That makes it theft.
Fairly serious theft in my book. The university put in a pretty impressave motion for "injunctave prayer for relief" diring the AT&T vs. BSDI lawsuit on those grounds too, something about "irreparable harm to the reputation of the University"....
It won't read/var/mail anymore! This is for unix-clued MacOS X users out there who turned on Sendmail that's included with every MacOS X.
Another workaround is to make a local pop server (listening to 127.0.0.1:80 so it can't really be snooped or attacked). Point Mail.app at it (or at it plus others)
You bet your sweet bippy it's enforceable. Either that, or it's so craftily written that it will take decades of legal wrangling before any settlement is worked out.
Sure, or they figure if you sign it, you are likely to follow it even though it is illegal. In the states there are frequently a lot of unenforcable contract terms that people sign off on. Why are they there? Well my guess is lots of folks follow them, and if the companay really had a bee up it's bonnet it would be able to harass you in court a bit longer before it lost.
Can you pay the lawyers while you're out of a job for ten or more years? I think your faith in the system is a bit naive.
Well, over here a lawyer can take on a case for a percentage of the winnings, and no fee. I don't think that is legal in the UK. Of corse that tends to only happen on large cases. Also I think one can frequently get another job rather then be unemployed for ten years...
(none of this means I have any clue what laws apply in the UK... I'm not even sure what applies here, just that contrcts tend to ask for more then they can get!)
The UNIX of today still shares a lot of the same codebase and even more of the same design philosophy with the UNIX of 30 years ago.
I have read through the source code of the Unix kernel from somewhat less then 30 years ago (V6 I think, the one from the Lyon's book). I doubt you will find any code that is identical excapt by random dumb luck, or syntactic requirments (lots of lines that are merely closing braces will still match up).
Machine specific code in V6 is largely not seporated out. C was very weakly typed then (you could use an int like a pointer, without doing a cast since casts were not part of the C language at the time!).
All the data structres are simple tables or linked lists, no hashes, no complicated O(1) clock call out stuff, nothing. All dirt stupid simple.
There are plenty of de-facto UNIX standards and utilities that have been around for decades, most of which haven't been significantly enhanced since their creation.
The only one I can think of is maybe wc, I think wc had -l, -w, and -c when it was invented. On the other hand cat had zero supported options: "cat -n" was "cat a file with the name dash n", not "use line numbers and cat stdin".
There's an awful lot that hasn't changed in 30 years.
Not much. Even the original "all the world is a file" was shattered with BSD networking, never really brought back until Plan 9. About all that is really really the same is "a OS written in C"...except today's C is amazingly diffrent from the C of 30 years ago.
That isn't to say that each new generation of Unix didn't borrow hevally from the last generation (not always in code...but always in ideas). It's not to say that Unix is mostly better off for having done that (and in some ways worse off as it has sometimes been prevented from getting new solutions that are just utterly unlike the existing Unix phliophisy).
free iDisk to $100/year. I can understand charging something for iDisk, but $100 (not taking into account the $50 upgrade price (which is at least somewhat reasonable))??
FYI, Apple doubled the length of the first subscription (at least to people that sign up before the end of the month), which brings it to $25/year, which is actually kinda reasonably priced (finally!). $0 is better...but not all that fair to Apple since people could and did sign up for tons of $0 accounts!
I want to say that the book was Cyteen, but it might have been Rimrunners.
I can't say I remember the quote...but it has been a while since I read those books, rimrunners in particular was a long time ago.
(erm, pardon, dont remember the name of the book, but can describe the cover)
Please do, I know where my copy of Cyteen is.
What font do you use for your terminal windows? The default font give me hideous eyestrain after about twenty minutes
I think it is the default, Courier 14.0 pt. On the TiBook LCD it doesn't give me eyestrain, but I do have a second set of glasses for "close up" work (focus to about 4 feet).
I'm still searching for terminal settings on OSX that I can use long-term.
Well if you still can't find a set you like, you might think about shelling out $15 or $20, whatever it is for GLTerm which can use normal X fonts so you can use whatever you like on Linux/FreeBSD/SunOS/whatever. Or, you know, make it your first OSX program:-)
Does you guys who use MacOS X use a lot of terminals? I'm just curious about how much of the BSD part of MacOS X is used by people.
I always have six, two local windows, the rest ssh'ing off to various places. I have them start on boot and always in the same order so clover-2 always brings me to my home server, and clover-6 to a local window, and I know what the other 4 are too. When I'm not using them I hit clover-H to hide them all which reduces the need for virtual desktops a lot (hide and hide others are very useful for dealing with clutter...but a giant display would be better).
So, software writen today must anticipate changes to all future versions? How much sense does that make? You can still save Office XP docs in other formats, including Office 97 (or ASCII, if that floats your boat). You might lose features that are specific to the current version, but I don't see a way aroyund that other than to stop adding new features to new versions.
Sure, but what they should do is save in the oldest format that covers all the features you actually used in the document. So when you save "nothing special" you get Office 95, and when you save something supper spiffy you get the newest. You also automagically get all the backwards compatability that can be given for what you used.
Also I heard that BerkleyDB doesn't scale for big databases. I.e. for good perfomance it must fit in RAM.
It scales "just fine", as in there is a big performance drop off once you actually have to start touching the disk a lot, but it's not like anything can avoid that. The speed was much faster for large (but simple!) tables then Sybase was at the time I tested. And I do mean huge tables. Much much more data then fits in RAM, or one single disk. Or RAID shelf (at the time at least).
CJ Cherryh wrote "Life, it goes on, you know?" (erm, pardon, dont remember the name of the book, but can describe the cover)
Please do. I find a lot of the union-allience "worlds" that CJ Cherryh writes at least as depressing as the Cypherpunk stuff. Or maybe that is just her skill at putting her charactors up against such pressure.
Of corse cypherpunk tends to be "life, it goes on" too, I mean it sucks, but it drags on. don't they normally steal the vaccene, or uncover the memories, or....I mean very very few cypherpunk books are entirely soul crushing.
What I'd like to see is a plain language command line interface combined with a gui of some form. OSX is close, but not quite there. I'd like to be able to call up a command prompt and type "copy all MP3's in *this directory* (the directory chosen by a menu akin to a save dialogue) to *this disk*.
Hmmmm, imagine for a moment you have a terminal window up, and the finder. You type "mv " then fiddle around in the finder until you find the directory you want, drag it to the terminal window type "*.mp3 ", then fiddle around in the finder find "this disk", drag it to the terminal and hit return.
Is that like what you wanted?
You do know it works? Dragging files/dirs form the finger to the terminal types out their path for you, with appropriate shell escapes (many Mac paths have spaces, so that's important!).
But by hiding the shell (and making it clunky, as per Windows and DOS) or by removing it entirely (Mac) there is now a huge class of computer users who expect *everything* on the computer to be availible via GUI widgets.
Celebrate the shell! Bring back the CLI!
Er, you do know Mac OS X comes with bash and zsh and tcsh and other assorted shells...and that if you start the "Terminal" program (in/Applications/Utilities) you get one of those shells (tcsh I think...I changed it to zsh for myself)? Or in fact that if you type Of corse while less cool the Terminal windows seems to be the most useful since you can use GUI stuff and text stuff at the same time and all...
IBM Power chips are 64bits but they are actually different from PPC chips. Code written for one doesn't run on the other - something the Mac rumor mongers simply don't understand with their "Apple is going to use a IBM Power CPU" bs.
Read IBM's own tech specs on the POWER4, it does the POWER ISA, PowerAS, and PowerPC. They are not mutally exclusave. The PowerPC added a bunch of single pression FP, and dropped (or made implmentastion dependent a bunch of DP and other stuff they didn't think a Mac needed). I think the PowerAS has some stuff for using *huge* address spaces (useful for a capability baised system), but I don't know that much about PowerAS.
I don't think any affordable Mac is going to use the Power4, but Apple could do it for a hig end server, something like the X serve, but maybe 5 times the cost (since the POWER4 CPU is thought to be about twice the cost of the existing X serve!).
I also have my doubts about IBM putting AltiVec into the POWER4 (the did licence it from Moto though), and some real doubts about whether Apple would build a high end system with an AltiVec-less CPU.
If somebody had done their calculations right though, deployment costs would not have been a problem in the first place.
Sort of, yes. One problem though is a OC-192 from DC to NY costs the same amount of money whether you have one buy paying you or 85,000 of them. You have to make an assumption about how many people will buy your service so you can estimate how much each on of them has to contribute to the cost of the shared resources. If you guess too low then your prices are too high, and you can't sell enough of the product. If you guess too high you price the product too low and lose money on "each one sold" (but at least you lose less money as more sell!).
With the products WCOM sells, or at least the UUNET part almost all the cost is the backbone (shared!) and emploies (shared!). So the whole price more or less comes down to "how many will we sell". Also when spending in the area takes a downturn it drives you costs up. Which sucks.
Those are all the good reasons not to be able to accurately estimate costs. The bad reasons are they hadn't really had to in the last decade, and never really got in the habit of doing it. So low (or negative) profit products were rescued by high profit ones. In some cases without anyone knowing really. In other cases with people knowing, but it isn't really to your advantage to announce the product you are working on is losing money, now is it? (connect the dots on that on yourself)
Basically you are saying this will shoot their profit level up to where it would have been after all debts had been paid off (or a little higher then where it should have been now if things had been operated properly. . ..)
No, well above that because any capital equipment that wasn't payed for is now free. Any contracts that were the best-possible-price 3 years ago can be re-negotiated now for the new lower prices that fibers "enjoy". Only some of this is just plain being able to adjust prices back to where they should have been! A lot is stuff that really couldn't be done otherwise.
Personally, I am against proceeding on so many fronts that I forget what in the world I have still to pay over from my past battles! WorldCom got into this situation, heck, even giving them the benefit of the doubt that each one of their acquisitions was going to be profitable some day in the future (doubtful. . ..), they ate up so much so fast that now they are about to explode.
Look, this is generic bankruptcy law. It applies to the 2nd largest telcom. It apples to the little bakery down the street form you. It applies to toothpaste makers, and car makers. This isn't a talk about what is being done special because the failure was so huge, it is just what happens to a company that can't pay it's bills, but doesn't want to give up.
I'm not real fond of it myself. I don't know enough economics to tell you if it is on the whole a good thing (it does better preserve the bundled value of things then just giving WCOM's assets to it's creditors) or a bad thing. I know the bankruptcy of dot-bomb companies makes things harder on WCOM and other ISPs because they are stuck with debt form their coutmers, so maybe without such laws not as many telcos would be dragged under now. Or maybe they would. (WCOM being a special case as it looks more like book cooking got them here, not ISP debt...but it is kind of hard to tell from what I read in papers, and even when I worked there I never moved in those circles!)
*sighs* Of course I don't see why companies really bother going public, stupid from what I can see. If you don't have the revenue stream coming in already, then you don't need additional funding, you just need a better plan!
Not true. It is just the "I have a great idea, and all I need is $100,000 to make it happen, so I'll get a second morgatage on my house and do it!" writ large. I was at UUNET before it took on cash from the VCs and things were tight. After we took on the money we spent like nobodies business, and were losing money hand over fist (because we had a more expensive backbone that we had customers to pay for for a few years...but there was no real step between 10Mbit-that-blew-dead-goats-if-you-used-more-then- 6Mbits and 45Mbits!). Not long after it went public it was turning a real profit. I doubt it stopped until long after it was bought by WCOM. So the VC-IPO route worked. The merger part didn't so well because very large companies have dis-economies of scale (I do have enough econ to know that!).
No, not at all. The pre-bankruptcy price would have to cover any deployment and other initial set up costs. The post-bankruptcy price only has to cover ongoing costs because they will write off almost all of the debt. So right now a $1000/month T1 would have to cover some share of the $30B debt, including the price to build the OC-48 (or OC-192 or whatever it is now) backbone. That might in theory be $600/month of cost, leaving $400 to pay for the circuit charge, tech support, and other stuff. After bankruptcy that $600/month part goes away...or turns into $12 or so.
You can have a company that is losing money pre-bankruptcy, and makes money after without changing it's practices at all! At least in theory, I doubt the bankruptcy courts would let you do it, so they would be some un-needed changes (maybe useful ones though) to mask that.
Then the stock is really of no interest to any investors. Every company needs to grow and diversify, or investors flee.
Or it has to pay dividends. However for a bankrupt company stock price is a far off dream. If it has to wait years before it can make capital investments because that's how long it takes banks to trust, well that's how long it takes. Given how crappy the telcom market is now, and how overbuilt the networks are, there may be no need of large capital investment for as long as WCOM's credit is bad anyway!
No. Once you file, you are basically saying that you are an unreliable debtor. That means your corporate bonds are worthless. That means you cannot fund further growth. That means the capital equipment that allows you to operate at all may have have to be auctioned.
But if there is no longer a need to fund more capital growth, for example in a flat or declining market, then you don't need to fund more growth. So this disadvantage may not matter. Also they can if they achieve profitability fund more groweth by taking it out of their profits. That is how UUNET operated when it make it's T1 backbone, and the "10Mbit" backbone. There was no investment money until the T3 backbone. It is how a lot of componies operate!
That doesn't make the crappy bond rating a good thing, but the trade off is you get to avoid all old debts for a few months, and then strip off most of them (like 90% to almost 100%) before you reemrge from bankruptcy.
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Hey, what's a factor of two between friends, right? :-)
I seem to recall the 68000 having a small pipeline. The 68010 definitly did which is part of how "loop mode" worked (an ALU instruction followed by a "decrment and check cc and branck back one insn" is "loop mode" and you can execute one per cycle, because it stops the first 3 stages of the pipeline).
I'm not sure what was first on the 040, maybe built in ALU? No, that was the 030, or was that an option on the 030? (the 040 I used was the 68LC040 at 25Mhz)
No, the 68000 had 32bit wide registers a 32bit ALU, a 16bit data bus, and a 24 bit address space (25 bits if you count the supervisor pin). I have the databooks. I have owned computers using these. I have programed them (in C mostly, but the debugging was in assembly). The Palm's CPU32 is I think based on this, which means I even still use one :-)
The 68010 was I think the same. The CPU32 might be based on this, if so I have one.
The 68020 had 32 bit data buses and a 32 bit address space, but was otherwise the same. I've used these but not owned them.
The 030 and 040 are the same but have a built in MMU, and sometimes FPU. I have used and programmed the 040 a lot, but not owned them. I have data books for both somewhere.
The 060 was super scaler but otherwise much like the 040. Never used one. Didn't have a data book for it.
If you don't beleve me, call Moto and get a free data book. Enjoy.
Hmmm, I sort of disagree with this. Almost every 68000 instruction uses one or two registers, most can use far more (what with the complex non-RISC addressing modes). Almost every RISC instruction uses 3 registers (sometimes one register is used twice though). Registers are extremely important in both RISC and CISC code. Not so much on stack based machines though.
I think the real reason the 68k emulators are easier then PPC emulators is 68k CPUs are not very fast. If you ignore the almost-68K CPUs like the ColdFires I think the 68k family didn't go faster then 60Mhz. Also prior to the 68030 most instructions took more then one cycle to execute. So a 600Mhz Intel/AMD/PPC can afford to spend 10 cycles doing the work of one 68k cycle and you are still as fast as the original.
On the other hand PPCs are far far faster. I have I think a 50Mhz one in my set top box, emulating that on a 600Mhz Intel/AMD would only give you 5 or so cycles to get the work done. Worse yet the one I have in my old laptop is 500Mhz, the 600Mhz Intel/AMD gets barely more then a cycle! A brand new top o the line Intel might get 4 cycles to do the work in, but that really isn't much time!
At least not for anything that does the translation on the fly. For something that does the work ahead of time and caches it like the TranMeta Crouse, or (I think!) some 68K emulators, you can do much better, if there are loops at least.
RAM also uses power all the time (PalmOS and most other PDAs use RAM as "long term storage" so it has to be powered all the time). At a guess the amount of power the RAM draws has a bigger effect on battery life for people that only turn the PDA on to check some apointments and turn it off (i.e. people that don't play games or take lots of notes on a PDA).
So sure, you could up it to 4M of RAM for almost no money, but then the battery life drops signifigantly. Or the weight and cost goes up as you add more battery.
Hey at least it's not as bad as it use to be where more RAM needed more CPU power to keep search times low (more RAM leads to the assumption that people put more stuff in the PDA...; but now even th elow end Palm CPU is decently fast for searching the amout of text people tend to keep in 8M).
Of corse there is the other issue...keeping the $99 model as berift of features as possiable makes the "upsell" simpler, and failing that may increse the cahnce that people will upgrade.
On the other hand there are people who bought a PDA neither because it is trendy, nor because they knew what it would do. I bought a used Palm III because I had some vauge idea that it would help me get orginised, keep phone numbers better then my cell phone maybe, and beep before meetings so I didn't miss them. And of corse if all else failed I could play hack (a rogue ancester) while I was standing around.
So here it is a good 5+ years later and I'm on my 3rd PalmOS PDA. It has definitly helped me orginise myself. I have also seen a lot of people buy them and fail to be helped, mostly because they decide what is important enough to put in the PDA and what they will "just remember" (and then promptly forget!). Not me. I've decided I can't remember squat. If I'm not about to do it right there and then, into the PDA it goes.
There is a real problem with that theory. It assumes all your customers know enough about PDAs to buy the right one. Someone else with a vague idea that a PDA might help them may well wonder into a store and buy the prettiest looking bright shiny object that says "PDA" on a box. Now you may decide they get what they deserve, a crappy PDA with a bright shiny box. However they have most likely picked their first and last PDA. If Palm had a good PDA to fit in a nice shiney box a lot of first time consumers might pick up the Palm for all the wrong reasons... and then the rest of their PDA buys will be for the right reasons.
Remember the number one law of bisness: don't argue with a fool, take his money
Probbably, after all either the ZDnet verion of the article, or the maker said inital laptop uses would most likely have both a normal batt and a fuel cell!
US Airway's A330 flights have them. My laptop lasted half way to the UK when I was in a seat with a defectave one. Unfortunitly British Midlands doesn't and their flights are a lot cheaper.
I'm not sure the fuel cells will be the best thing for daily uses, but I would love to be able to swap one out for long flights. Much like I like lithimum ion batts most of the time, but zinc air seems like a better choice for long flights.
Maybe...preferences are in every app, but I don't find a strong need for a keyboard short cut (even if command-; seems to be widely used). "About app", and "Check for update" as well. But maybe I'm just in a contrary mood. I do think "hide others" should have one (which is why I'm happy it does!) Apple is also starting to push a consistent short cut for "cycle windows" which is nice.
I have some vagus suspicion that "hide others" didn't exist until after Apple removed "single user mode", and they just didn't test it long enough to decide it rated a command key. So until it got field tested they left it alone. Maybe.
Well the command-tab goes-to-last-app I didn't see anywhere, but the command-tab cycles apps I definitely saw in one of Apple's flimsy almost useless documentation kits, maybe for 10.0, or "X Public Beta". I was unaware that it had changed to "go to last app then cycle" in 10.2 until I was telling someone how cool HotApp was and they said "dude command-tab does that!". Fortunately HotApp still gives the way-useful single press short cut for "copy selection to clipboard, switch to last app, paste". Amazingly useful.
Does the "Full Keyboard Access" stuff found in System Preferences under keyboard settings count? If not how does it fall short? (I don't use it myself)
In 10.2 command-oprion-H is "hide all other apps"; don't want to see other apps? Use it.
Prior to 10.2 the "hide all other apps" didn't have a consistant short cut, but it was always in the same place in the application menu (second manu on the bar, between the apple and the file menus).
Personally I like having, oh, say, my IRC client up, and pushing the minimised iTunes controls between the IRC connect/notify windoes and the users window. Or maybe closing the users window and having a DVD play there. Or sticking the compile window from Project Builder below the chat area, or Backup's progress bar close to the...
No, never. That's not to say from time to time I don't click the wrong thing and get the app I don't expect, but I have found it trivally easy to "get back". Command-H always hids the current app in OS X, so if you didn't want the app up at all (say the pesky finder that unhides if you miss a window and click the desktop) Command-H hides it and switches you back to the last app. If you wanted that app un-hidden, you can return to the last app by doing Command-Tab in 10.2, or prior to 10.2 the shareware HotApp program let you use Opt-tab for that.
Sure, if you spend zero time learning how to use them they are bad at stuff. Much like spending no time learning how to drive a car makes them bad transportation devices, and great devices for crushing expensave stuff, or spending zero time learning to interact with people in a bar makes it hard to get a date, but easy to wear a drink. Most stuff does require a little effor to learn! Sometimes the very tiny effort of finding someone who likes the thing and saying "er, why do you like it?", or "how do I do this?". Sometimes - the horror - the supreime effort of reading a book!
I'm not a big windows fan, but I do admit their GUI lets you madly rush about and has defaults that don't suck too hard. Linux seems about like all the other (non-Mac) Unixes and has random GUIs on top of it that conflict a bit, have defaults that suck hard, and after tons of effort in getting them tuned to how you like to operate, tend to work better then the out of the box configurations of Windows or MacOS. Or corse I expect if you spent the same effort to customise the other two you would get the same effect.
Well, they sure aren't cheap (except maybe the iBook, and maybe the DVD-writer iMac up agianst name brand PCs....definitly not as cheap as white box PCs though!).
On the other hand they sure don't seem slow. I was happally writing CD-Rs for backups watchign an IRC channel and DVD, running iTunes and nothing seemed the least bit slow. Ripping CDs seems way way faster (and simpler) then Intel-ish PCs with 2x to 4x the clock speed! Compiles seem to go by just as fast as any other IDE system (laptop, so no SCSI option). Maybe for most tasks the slowest thing is not the CPU, but the memory wall, or the disk wall, or just plain the person sitting there doing work.
Of corse I don't think I would go out and buy rack after rack of Xserve boxes for a render farm, then again, it would be one of the platforms I would evaluate. I kind of susspect the Intel-ish systems would win out there though.
At the time MS (and even AT&T) were accused of taking code the BSD licence had one more clause then it has now. Basically a credit clause, you had to acknolage BSD in your documentation (and maybe on screen).
The big deal is BSD asked for one very small and specifc (and fair!) form of payment, and they were denyed. That makes it theft.
Fairly serious theft in my book. The university put in a pretty impressave motion for "injunctave prayer for relief" diring the AT&T vs. BSDI lawsuit on those grounds too, something about "irreparable harm to the reputation of the University"....
Another workaround is to make a local pop server (listening to 127.0.0.1:80 so it can't really be snooped or attacked). Point Mail.app at it (or at it plus others)
Sure, or they figure if you sign it, you are likely to follow it even though it is illegal. In the states there are frequently a lot of unenforcable contract terms that people sign off on. Why are they there? Well my guess is lots of folks follow them, and if the companay really had a bee up it's bonnet it would be able to harass you in court a bit longer before it lost.
Well, over here a lawyer can take on a case for a percentage of the winnings, and no fee. I don't think that is legal in the UK. Of corse that tends to only happen on large cases. Also I think one can frequently get another job rather then be unemployed for ten years...
(none of this means I have any clue what laws apply in the UK... I'm not even sure what applies here, just that contrcts tend to ask for more then they can get!)
I have read through the source code of the Unix kernel from somewhat less then 30 years ago (V6 I think, the one from the Lyon's book). I doubt you will find any code that is identical excapt by random dumb luck, or syntactic requirments (lots of lines that are merely closing braces will still match up).
Machine specific code in V6 is largely not seporated out. C was very weakly typed then (you could use an int like a pointer, without doing a cast since casts were not part of the C language at the time!).
All the data structres are simple tables or linked lists, no hashes, no complicated O(1) clock call out stuff, nothing. All dirt stupid simple.
The only one I can think of is maybe wc, I think wc had -l, -w, and -c when it was invented. On the other hand cat had zero supported options: "cat -n" was "cat a file with the name dash n", not "use line numbers and cat stdin".
Not much. Even the original "all the world is a file" was shattered with BSD networking, never really brought back until Plan 9. About all that is really really the same is "a OS written in C"...except today's C is amazingly diffrent from the C of 30 years ago.
That isn't to say that each new generation of Unix didn't borrow hevally from the last generation (not always in code...but always in ideas). It's not to say that Unix is mostly better off for having done that (and in some ways worse off as it has sometimes been prevented from getting new solutions that are just utterly unlike the existing Unix phliophisy).
FYI, Apple doubled the length of the first subscription (at least to people that sign up before the end of the month), which brings it to $25/year, which is actually kinda reasonably priced (finally!). $0 is better...but not all that fair to Apple since people could and did sign up for tons of $0 accounts!
I can't say I remember the quote...but it has been a while since I read those books, rimrunners in particular was a long time ago.
Please do, I know where my copy of Cyteen is.
I think it is the default, Courier 14.0 pt. On the TiBook LCD it doesn't give me eyestrain, but I do have a second set of glasses for "close up" work (focus to about 4 feet).
Well if you still can't find a set you like, you might think about shelling out $15 or $20, whatever it is for GLTerm which can use normal X fonts so you can use whatever you like on Linux/FreeBSD/SunOS/whatever. Or, you know, make it your first OSX program :-)
I always have six, two local windows, the rest ssh'ing off to various places. I have them start on boot and always in the same order so clover-2 always brings me to my home server, and clover-6 to a local window, and I know what the other 4 are too. When I'm not using them I hit clover-H to hide them all which reduces the need for virtual desktops a lot (hide and hide others are very useful for dealing with clutter...but a giant display would be better).
Sure, but what they should do is save in the oldest format that covers all the features you actually used in the document. So when you save "nothing special" you get Office 95, and when you save something supper spiffy you get the newest. You also automagically get all the backwards compatability that can be given for what you used.
It scales "just fine", as in there is a big performance drop off once you actually have to start touching the disk a lot, but it's not like anything can avoid that. The speed was much faster for large (but simple!) tables then Sybase was at the time I tested. And I do mean huge tables. Much much more data then fits in RAM, or one single disk. Or RAID shelf (at the time at least).
Please do. I find a lot of the union-allience "worlds" that CJ Cherryh writes at least as depressing as the Cypherpunk stuff. Or maybe that is just her skill at putting her charactors up against such pressure.
Of corse cypherpunk tends to be "life, it goes on" too, I mean it sucks, but it drags on. don't they normally steal the vaccene, or uncover the memories, or....I mean very very few cypherpunk books are entirely soul crushing.
Hmmmm, imagine for a moment you have a terminal window up, and the finder. You type "mv " then fiddle around in the finder until you find the directory you want, drag it to the terminal window type "*.mp3 ", then fiddle around in the finder find "this disk", drag it to the terminal and hit return.
Is that like what you wanted?
You do know it works? Dragging files/dirs form the finger to the terminal types out their path for you, with appropriate shell escapes (many Mac paths have spaces, so that's important!).
Er, you do know Mac OS X comes with bash and zsh and tcsh and other assorted shells...and that if you start the "Terminal" program (in /Applications/Utilities) you get one of those shells (tcsh I think...I changed it to zsh for myself)? Or in fact that if you type Of corse while less cool the Terminal windows seems to be the most useful since you can use GUI stuff and text stuff at the same time and all...
Read IBM's own tech specs on the POWER4, it does the POWER ISA, PowerAS, and PowerPC. They are not mutally exclusave. The PowerPC added a bunch of single pression FP, and dropped (or made implmentastion dependent a bunch of DP and other stuff they didn't think a Mac needed). I think the PowerAS has some stuff for using *huge* address spaces (useful for a capability baised system), but I don't know that much about PowerAS.
I don't think any affordable Mac is going to use the Power4, but Apple could do it for a hig end server, something like the X serve, but maybe 5 times the cost (since the POWER4 CPU is thought to be about twice the cost of the existing X serve!).
I also have my doubts about IBM putting AltiVec into the POWER4 (the did licence it from Moto though), and some real doubts about whether Apple would build a high end system with an AltiVec-less CPU.
Sort of, yes. One problem though is a OC-192 from DC to NY costs the same amount of money whether you have one buy paying you or 85,000 of them. You have to make an assumption about how many people will buy your service so you can estimate how much each on of them has to contribute to the cost of the shared resources. If you guess too low then your prices are too high, and you can't sell enough of the product. If you guess too high you price the product too low and lose money on "each one sold" (but at least you lose less money as more sell!).
With the products WCOM sells, or at least the UUNET part almost all the cost is the backbone (shared!) and emploies (shared!). So the whole price more or less comes down to "how many will we sell". Also when spending in the area takes a downturn it drives you costs up. Which sucks.
Those are all the good reasons not to be able to accurately estimate costs. The bad reasons are they hadn't really had to in the last decade, and never really got in the habit of doing it. So low (or negative) profit products were rescued by high profit ones. In some cases without anyone knowing really. In other cases with people knowing, but it isn't really to your advantage to announce the product you are working on is losing money, now is it? (connect the dots on that on yourself)
No, well above that because any capital equipment that wasn't payed for is now free. Any contracts that were the best-possible-price 3 years ago can be re-negotiated now for the new lower prices that fibers "enjoy". Only some of this is just plain being able to adjust prices back to where they should have been! A lot is stuff that really couldn't be done otherwise.
Look, this is generic bankruptcy law. It applies to the 2nd largest telcom. It apples to the little bakery down the street form you. It applies to toothpaste makers, and car makers. This isn't a talk about what is being done special because the failure was so huge, it is just what happens to a company that can't pay it's bills, but doesn't want to give up.
I'm not real fond of it myself. I don't know enough economics to tell you if it is on the whole a good thing (it does better preserve the bundled value of things then just giving WCOM's assets to it's creditors) or a bad thing. I know the bankruptcy of dot-bomb companies makes things harder on WCOM and other ISPs because they are stuck with debt form their coutmers, so maybe without such laws not as many telcos would be dragged under now. Or maybe they would. (WCOM being a special case as it looks more like book cooking got them here, not ISP debt...but it is kind of hard to tell from what I read in papers, and even when I worked there I never moved in those circles!)
Not true. It is just the "I have a great idea, and all I need is $100,000 to make it happen, so I'll get a second morgatage on my house and do it!" writ large. I was at UUNET before it took on cash from the VCs and things were tight. After we took on the money we spent like nobodies business, and were losing money hand over fist (because we had a more expensive backbone that we had customers to pay for for a few years...but there was no real step between 10Mbit-that-blew-dead-goats-if-you-used-more-then- 6Mbits and 45Mbits!). Not long after it went public it was turning a real profit. I doubt it stopped until long after it was bought by WCOM. So the VC-IPO route worked. The merger part didn't so well because very large companies have dis-economies of scale (I do have enough econ to know that!).
No, not at all. The pre-bankruptcy price would have to cover any deployment and other initial set up costs. The post-bankruptcy price only has to cover ongoing costs because they will write off almost all of the debt. So right now a $1000/month T1 would have to cover some share of the $30B debt, including the price to build the OC-48 (or OC-192 or whatever it is now) backbone. That might in theory be $600/month of cost, leaving $400 to pay for the circuit charge, tech support, and other stuff. After bankruptcy that $600/month part goes away...or turns into $12 or so.
You can have a company that is losing money pre-bankruptcy, and makes money after without changing it's practices at all! At least in theory, I doubt the bankruptcy courts would let you do it, so they would be some un-needed changes (maybe useful ones though) to mask that.
Or it has to pay dividends. However for a bankrupt company stock price is a far off dream. If it has to wait years before it can make capital investments because that's how long it takes banks to trust, well that's how long it takes. Given how crappy the telcom market is now, and how overbuilt the networks are, there may be no need of large capital investment for as long as WCOM's credit is bad anyway!
But if there is no longer a need to fund more capital growth, for example in a flat or declining market, then you don't need to fund more growth. So this disadvantage may not matter. Also they can if they achieve profitability fund more groweth by taking it out of their profits. That is how UUNET operated when it make it's T1 backbone, and the "10Mbit" backbone. There was no investment money until the T3 backbone. It is how a lot of componies operate!
That doesn't make the crappy bond rating a good thing, but the trade off is you get to avoid all old debts for a few months, and then strip off most of them (like 90% to almost 100%) before you reemrge from bankruptcy.