I'm sorry...I tried to like Mozilla, I really did. But here's my tale of woe...
I installed Mozilla on my fiance's brand new Windows install (sorry, but she's not a Linux geek). She is, however, a hardcore Netscape user and really refuses to use IE. So I figured a good bet would be to install Mozilla.
I installed Mozilla RC1 and everything was good to go. However, then she ran into some Flash content. For whatever reason, Mozilla seems to not be able to handle *some* Flash, and a plugin is unavailable...
Ok, no big deal, who needs it anyway. However, then she wanted to do something for work that required Java. Ok, no problem, grab the JRE & the Java plugin from Mozilla's links. Did so, installed, and it even prompted to install the plugin to Mozilla. I let it do so...however, the next time we get to a Java site, poof it says "you need a plugin".
I asked a guy at work, who told me I had to search around and update a few config files to get the Java plugin to work. I have not done this and likely won't...Mozilla has become in my mind another example of how the OpenSource community can build solid products w/o any thought to usability.
I'm assuming NS doesn't have these issues and will give it a shot. But come on, it's not 1994, you guys can get Mozilla to install plugins correctly.
AMD did not officially announce that Duron is no more, they merely stated in their earnings conference call that by the end of the year they expect to be producing nothing but Hammer & Athlon.
The Hammer will be the performance processor while the Athlon will be the value processor. They were also quick to point out that by that point it will actually be cheaper for them to make Athlons than it is for them to make the current Duron and that those Athlons will be available for equivilent to Duron prices now without the Duron limitations (in other words, full L2 cache, etc.)
With that said...like all conference calls of this nature, it was forward looking and merely states their plans, not necessarily fact.
You state that apps will grow faster here, but as a PDA developer, I'd have to ask for my motivation. If I have a great new app I want to write, why would I write it for this thing?
First off, it has no install base...yes I realize this is a catch-22 argument, but as a late arrival on the scene, they have to contend with that.
Second, the early adopters are likely to be very pro-Linux crowd, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's yet to be shown that software developers can make any money with this crowd. If these folks pay $500 for the device, it's unlikely they'll want to pay me $10 for my app as they expect things in Linux to be free (as in beer).
So from a business perspective, I'd be better off writing for Palm (due to install base) and WinCE (because people who by MS tend to fork out $$$). What's my incentive to port to the Zaurus?
I use a 2-disk RAID-1 mirror for redundancy on my small home server (does web serving over biz class DSL for a few sites). It's a 3ware card/w 2 Maxtor IDE drives. They perform amazingly well and it cost next to nothing ($100 for the card, $100 for each drive). So far neither drive has failed in about a 1 year uptime/w only minor breaks.
The problem is that then you have to allow any arbitrary application on your system to talk to any arbitrary server (to verify the version vs. the latest). If you do so, then you have to watch that traffic to make sure things aren't getting sent up to the central server you don't want to be sent up.
Now with open source stuff this isn't as big an issue as with closed source, but you still have the potential for someone to abuse the system.
Say you have utility X v1 that does a function. One day it tells you there's a new version (v2) that's much better, so you let it upgrade w/o thinking. v2 gets installed and then the next time it runs it sends up arbitrary data from your system. It doesn't help you if a peer review a day later tells you not to upgrade, it's already too late for you. So that means you now have to closely check all the source of any app you install and you can never let it say "Yes, always update" w/o thinking about it.
Except of course that drive manufacturers tend to use the exact same drive for IDE & SCSI drives just/w different controllers slapped on to them.
The reason you don't hear about SCSI failures is that the nunber in use compared to IDE is small due to the home PC explosion. I suspect the failure rate is the same, there's just a lot fewer SCSI drives out there.
Woah there cowboy. The Apollo that burned on the launch pad was Apollo 1 in a pre-flight test.
After that they skipped ahead to Apollo 7, so there was no 2 through 6.
Of the 7 craft designed to land on the moon (Apollo 11 through 17), there was a single failure (Apollo 13) that showed that NASA equipment is built durable and that inginuity can solve very challenging problems.
Now that TiVo is in the satellite receivers, it won't matter. Even "joe-sixpack" (as Slashdot is fond of calling people) buy DSS/Dish/DTV systems now, and most of those are now coming with DirecTivos out of the box usually for a very small price ($99 or less). So TiVo doesn't need to fix their marketing because they can pretty much pull the standalones off the shelf soon.
No need to add the MPEG encoder either. They'll likely keep it as a DirecTV only solution. The reason being that they don't have to absorb the cost of the extra hardware and because in the future you'll see DirecTV sending signals to XBox 2 (or Homestation or whatever it's called) that lets it know whether or not it can record a given program. This would obviously be unavailable with an Analog->MPG2 solution (like TiVo), but would get MS in good/w the media providers.
These Durons are based on the Morgan core, which for all intents and purposes is the same as the Athlon XP processors, but/w less cache. This means you get SSE & instruction pre-fetch, like the XP, as well as lower power dissipation.
The T-Birds are based on an older core that didn't have those enhancements, but did have more L2.
So basically, given an equal clock speed, the rankings of the processors would be:
Old Duron -> Athlon T-Bird -> New Duron (this article) -> Athlon XP
The caveat is that in certain apps where L2 is the deciding factor, the T-Bird might be faster, but as a general rule, the core enhancements of the newer Durons (and XPs) outweigh the larger L2.
Hope you can pay the doctor & vet bills/w your eggs and cheese. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but I think things might be a little harder than you anticipate.
You can get 5gb PCMCIA hard drives from Toshiba that will plug into an iPaq (assuming you have the PCMCIA adapter). It makes the device extremely bulky for a PDA, but if you need the storage, it's there.
Anyone have a link to the problems aluded to in the article with early 2.4 kernels? I've got a machine at work that swaps quite a lot and is running 2.4.2... I know it's due for an upgrade, but I'd like to know a little more specifically what was wrong back then...Thanks.
It's unfair to call DS1 a failure just because of early engine and navigation problems. It successfully completed its mission (and then went beyond the call of duty with the landing) and now is just being put to the test again. DS1 was an extremely successful mission, not a "malfunction".
On two local news channels last night they gave the helpful tip of "If your system seems slow and infected, just reboot and it'll be fixed, but you can download this patch if you really feel like it..."... Argh, is it that much to ask for the news channels to get it right for once? We don't need to keep this up every month.
If you have the MS Embedded Toolkit which enables you to build WinCE apps, you get an "emulator" of sorts. Unlike the PalmOS emulators it doesn't really pretend to be a device (it doesn't use the iPaq ROM or anything), instead it's just another target you can build your apps for and it behaves sorta-kinda-mostly like the real devices, but there are some UI glitches amongst other problems.
While you make a decent point, it's not entirely accurate. Right now IDE ATA-100 drives can theoretically peak up to 100MB/sec. Admittedly this doesn't happen often, but in sequential trasnfers it's common for them to sustain 40MB/sec or so. For non sequential transfers seek time will kill you more than throughput anyway. But you're right that this will ultimately be a bigger problem then it is now.
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I'm sorry...I tried to like Mozilla, I really did. But here's my tale of woe...
I installed Mozilla on my fiance's brand new Windows install (sorry, but she's not a Linux geek). She is, however, a hardcore Netscape user and really refuses to use IE. So I figured a good bet would be to install Mozilla.
I installed Mozilla RC1 and everything was good to go. However, then she ran into some Flash content. For whatever reason, Mozilla seems to not be able to handle *some* Flash, and a plugin is unavailable...
Ok, no big deal, who needs it anyway. However, then she wanted to do something for work that required Java. Ok, no problem, grab the JRE & the Java plugin from Mozilla's links. Did so, installed, and it even prompted to install the plugin to Mozilla. I let it do so...however, the next time we get to a Java site, poof it says "you need a plugin".
I asked a guy at work, who told me I had to search around and update a few config files to get the Java plugin to work. I have not done this and likely won't...Mozilla has become in my mind another example of how the OpenSource community can build solid products w/o any thought to usability.
I'm assuming NS doesn't have these issues and will give it a shot. But come on, it's not 1994, you guys can get Mozilla to install plugins correctly.
It is with TiVo. It comes in the box.
AMD did not officially announce that Duron is no more, they merely stated in their earnings conference call that by the end of the year they expect to be producing nothing but Hammer & Athlon.
The Hammer will be the performance processor while the Athlon will be the value processor. They were also quick to point out that by that point it will actually be cheaper for them to make Athlons than it is for them to make the current Duron and that those Athlons will be available for equivilent to Duron prices now without the Duron limitations (in other words, full L2 cache, etc.)
With that said...like all conference calls of this nature, it was forward looking and merely states their plans, not necessarily fact.
You state that apps will grow faster here, but as a PDA developer, I'd have to ask for my motivation. If I have a great new app I want to write, why would I write it for this thing?
First off, it has no install base...yes I realize this is a catch-22 argument, but as a late arrival on the scene, they have to contend with that.
Second, the early adopters are likely to be very pro-Linux crowd, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's yet to be shown that software developers can make any money with this crowd. If these folks pay $500 for the device, it's unlikely they'll want to pay me $10 for my app as they expect things in Linux to be free (as in beer).
So from a business perspective, I'd be better off writing for Palm (due to install base) and WinCE (because people who by MS tend to fork out $$$). What's my incentive to port to the Zaurus?
I use a 2-disk RAID-1 mirror for redundancy on my small home server (does web serving over biz class DSL for a few sites). It's a 3ware card /w 2 Maxtor IDE drives. They perform amazingly well and it cost next to nothing ($100 for the card, $100 for each drive). So far neither drive has failed in about a 1 year uptime /w only minor breaks.
The problem is that then you have to allow any arbitrary application on your system to talk to any arbitrary server (to verify the version vs. the latest). If you do so, then you have to watch that traffic to make sure things aren't getting sent up to the central server you don't want to be sent up.
Now with open source stuff this isn't as big an issue as with closed source, but you still have the potential for someone to abuse the system.
Say you have utility X v1 that does a function. One day it tells you there's a new version (v2) that's much better, so you let it upgrade w/o thinking. v2 gets installed and then the next time it runs it sends up arbitrary data from your system. It doesn't help you if a peer review a day later tells you not to upgrade, it's already too late for you. So that means you now have to closely check all the source of any app you install and you can never let it say "Yes, always update" w/o thinking about it.
Too much potential for abuse.
Except of course that drive manufacturers tend to use the exact same drive for IDE & SCSI drives just /w different controllers slapped on to them.
The reason you don't hear about SCSI failures is that the nunber in use compared to IDE is small due to the home PC explosion. I suspect the failure rate is the same, there's just a lot fewer SCSI drives out there.
Woah there cowboy. The Apollo that burned on the launch pad was Apollo 1 in a pre-flight test.
After that they skipped ahead to Apollo 7, so there was no 2 through 6.
Of the 7 craft designed to land on the moon (Apollo 11 through 17), there was a single failure (Apollo 13) that showed that NASA equipment is built durable and that inginuity can solve very challenging problems.
The current roadmap says availability of the chip in Q4, so you'd have to assume Q4 or Q1/03 for motherboards.
Now that TiVo is in the satellite receivers, it won't matter. Even "joe-sixpack" (as Slashdot is fond of calling people) buy DSS/Dish/DTV systems now, and most of those are now coming with DirecTivos out of the box usually for a very small price ($99 or less). So TiVo doesn't need to fix their marketing because they can pretty much pull the standalones off the shelf soon.
You're referring to Greenbank, West Virginia, which is part of the NRAO. You can get info about it here. It's pretty cool. I've been there 3 times as part of an astronomy group when I was in college.
No need to add the MPEG encoder either. They'll likely keep it as a DirecTV only solution. The reason being that they don't have to absorb the cost of the extra hardware and because in the future you'll see DirecTV sending signals to XBox 2 (or Homestation or whatever it's called) that lets it know whether or not it can record a given program. This would obviously be unavailable with an Analog->MPG2 solution (like TiVo), but would get MS in good /w the media providers.
These Durons are based on the Morgan core, which for all intents and purposes is the same as the Athlon XP processors, but /w less cache. This means you get SSE & instruction pre-fetch, like the XP, as well as lower power dissipation.
The T-Birds are based on an older core that didn't have those enhancements, but did have more L2.
So basically, given an equal clock speed, the rankings of the processors would be:
Old Duron -> Athlon T-Bird -> New Duron (this article) -> Athlon XP
The caveat is that in certain apps where L2 is the deciding factor, the T-Bird might be faster, but as a general rule, the core enhancements of the newer Durons (and XPs) outweigh the larger L2.
Hope you can pay the doctor & vet bills /w your eggs and cheese. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but I think things might be a little harder than you anticipate.
You can get 5gb PCMCIA hard drives from Toshiba that will plug into an iPaq (assuming you have the PCMCIA adapter). It makes the device extremely bulky for a PDA, but if you need the storage, it's there.
Yes, but PC133 is up as well, so it's not as if DDR has increased while PC133 stayed low, it's just that memory in general is higher.
Anyone have a link to the problems aluded to in the article with early 2.4 kernels? I've got a machine at work that swaps quite a lot and is running 2.4.2 ... I know it's due for an upgrade, but I'd like to know a little more specifically what was wrong back then...Thanks.
Actually the stand alone TiVo uses 2 chips. The PPC chip is for interface, etc, but there's a separate encoder/decoder chip in the box.
The DirecTivos don't have the second chip (and hence are cheaper) because they just dump the satelite feed to disk.
It's unfair to call DS1 a failure just because of early engine and navigation problems. It successfully completed its mission (and then went beyond the call of duty with the landing) and now is just being put to the test again. DS1 was an extremely successful mission, not a "malfunction".
On two local news channels last night they gave the helpful tip of "If your system seems slow and infected, just reboot and it'll be fixed, but you can download this patch if you really feel like it..." ... Argh, is it that much to ask for the news channels to get it right for once? We don't need to keep this up every month.
Just a reminder the Sony Clie 710c (and the newer 610c that's coming out) both support 320x320 screen res.
Yeah I know. I don't mean to put the burden of this on MS, I would certainly settle form emulators from Compaq, HP, etc.
If you have the MS Embedded Toolkit which enables you to build WinCE apps, you get an "emulator" of sorts. Unlike the PalmOS emulators it doesn't really pretend to be a device (it doesn't use the iPaq ROM or anything), instead it's just another target you can build your apps for and it behaves sorta-kinda-mostly like the real devices, but there are some UI glitches amongst other problems.
Sorry, IIIe's didn't have a flash ROM (kept costs down), so no, it won't work on a IIIe.
While you make a decent point, it's not entirely accurate. Right now IDE ATA-100 drives can theoretically peak up to 100MB/sec. Admittedly this doesn't happen often, but in sequential trasnfers it's common for them to sustain 40MB/sec or so. For non sequential transfers seek time will kill you more than throughput anyway. But you're right that this will ultimately be a bigger problem then it is now.