It is presumptuous for anyone to claim that computers could posess consciousness, spirituality, or a feeling of self-awareness like humans do, because we do not know exacty consciousness is.
That's a valid point. However, for the very same reason, it is presumptuous for anyone to claim that computers can't posess consciousness, spirituality, or a feeling of self-awareness like humans do.
The more interesting question, IMNSHO, is given a computer that appears to unbiased observers to exhibit consciousness, spirituality, or self-awareness, would a claim that it didn't realy posess those traits (but was "faking it") really mean anything?
After all, how do I know that you exhibit consiousness, spirituality, or self-awareness? Maybe you are faking it. Heck, maybe I'm faking it and don't even know it.
Yes, but once any party has a copy of the GPL'd code, they are free to distribute it. The copyright owner may re-release the code under a different license, or stop distributing it, but that doesn't take away the rights already granted by the earlier GPL'd release.
Effectively, Mattel will not be able to nail anyone who distributes the GPL'd code for copyright infringement, even though they own the copyright. (Unless the distribution violates the terms of the GPL.) The only way they'd prevail is to charge poeple with something other than copyright infringement.
What Mattel can do, though, is to file nuisance suits against people. Who is going to be willing to spend a lot of money defending this, even if they know they're in the right?
If I can find a copy of the code, I'll be happy to distribute it from my web site.
someone explained the philosophy behind patents and copyrights as a guarantee that ideas would eventually be released to the public and not held as secrets. That idea is so extremely and completely wrong
Actually, the idea is completely right. What you seem to have missed is that the idea is to grant a monopoly on the work for a limited time, then require that the work become public domain.
If we had no laws protecting intellectual property, we would see the production of such works fall off dramatically.
Who's proposing "no laws"? The reality is that an amazing amount of work (literature, film, music, etc.) was produced with the expectation that the copyright would only last 28 years, but that was sufficient to motivate the producers. Now they continually lobby Congress to extend the term, making the threat that if their older works are allowed to become public domain (which is what is SUPPOSED to happen), that they'll quit producing new works. Why was a 28 year term sufficient motivation in the past, but not now? It's certainly not because it's become harder to widely distribute works and make money from them. The reality is that there's plenty of money to be made in 28 years (or less), and that the owners are simply greedy. There's nothing wrong with the owners being greedy, that's actually a GOOD thing (see Ayn Rand's Virtue of Selfishness). The bad part is that Congress falls for it, and holds the needs of the producers in MUCH greater regard than the needs of consumers or society.
So Congress keeps increasing the term of copyright, such that effectively it is not for a limited time, but forever.
In another forum, someone wrote:
Doesn't the copyright thing have a length of time before becoming public domain like patents do? If that's the case it may be alright to use it in the way you want.
And I replied:
Yes, and Congress in their wisdom has recently extended it to 95 years.
On average, over the last fourty years they've done a year-per-year increase. It appears that they intend to keep this up forever, despite the fact that Article I Section 8 Clause 8 of the US Constitution only grants the Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for LIMITED TIMES to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" (emphasis added).
The intent of the system was that by granting a monopoly for a limited time, it would encourage the creation of works which would eventually pass into the public domain, for the benefit of all. But Congress is intent on making sure that works never become public domain so long as there may be money to be made from them.
Apparently we will never again expand the body of literature or music that is public domain. Once the works are no longer making a profit, they will go out of print, because only the publisher has the rights to them. Unlike the works of Beethoven and Dickens, which may well be accessible to the public for thousands of years, the works of today's great composers and authors will likely disappear forever.
And then consider software. By the time software goes out of copyright, even if binaries still exist, the source code probably won't. Maybe people 95 years from now won't actually want to use today's software for business purposes, but they won't even be able to look at it for historical reasons.
One good thing about the patent system is that the inventor or assignee has to make maintenance payments or the patent will lapse prematurely. I strongly believe that the same thing should be done with copyrights. Once it is no longer worthwhile for the owner to pay to keep the copyright up to date, the work should enter the public domain.
I also believe that copyrights on unpublished works should be disallowed, as they do not "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". These sort of copyrights are used for software source code. In my opinion, any work for which Copyright protection is desired (published or not) should be required to be registered, and a copy (in entirety) be filed with the Copyright office, such that it is available for public inspection, and that upon expiration of the copyright it is guaranteed to be available to those that want it. Currently copyright registration is optional, although without registration there are fewer legal remedies for infringement. This does not seem to "promote the Progress" in any obvious way.
Well, enough of my ranting. For more information on copyright term extension, please see the web page:
Which discusses and has links to infomration on several current legal battles related to copyright term.
At this point I would also add that copyright protection on unpublished works such as source code is in fact completely unnecessary, as the unpublished work can be protected by trade secret law. Copyright was not intended to cover secrets, and is ill-suited to doing so.
If I were to take a more radical position, I might suggest that to secure copyright on object code, perhaps it should be required to also copyright the source code it was generated from, and deposit both with the copyright office. This would better serve to guarantee that the work would eventually not just become public domain, but also be usable as a base for further development. Merely having the object code become public domain without the source code is of much less value to society. In this scenario, a legitimate defense against claimed copyright infringement would be that the source code deposited by the copyright owner was incomplete or otherwise unusable to build the object code.
Of course, realistically I realize that there is little chance of getting any sort of copyright reform to restore the intended purpose. But if we don't educate people as to what the intended purpose was, the chance is zero.
They could keep the bunker for use in future time rollover crises, such as Y2038. Although it didn't get as much press as Y2K, I've sometimes heard people predict horrible problems for Y2000K, so maybe they should start preparing now.
Or maybe they should set aside the equipment until then. They could put it all in the same warehouse in which they're storing the Ark of the Covenant.
What's wrong with the price tag? Didn't you even read the article before replying? It says "less than $10 per playback hour vs. $250 per playback hour for flash-media storage units."
Is it possible to use cheap RAM rather than expensive FLASH
Cheap RAM? I don't know where you're buying it, but around here (Silicon Valley), RAM still costs on the order of a dollar a megabyte. And at 128 Kbps, that megabyte only plays for about a minute. Using RAM isn't going to make the player much cheaper than a flash-based player, and the battery life will be worse. Besides, if your battery goes dead you'll have to reload the player. Doesn't sound like a fantastic idea to me.
I don't really see the point of 5GB in a portable player. If I can get a few hours of music in a player I'm happy.
The point is that I don't have to decide which few hours of music I want to listen to before I leave on the trip. I can just load up a substantial part of my collection and choose later.
There's definitely a market for flash-based players that store only a few hours. There are lots of products that address this market. But there's probably also a market for high-end devices like this one.
My complaint about it is that the disk stores too little. IBM makes 12G drives in the same form factor and with the same shock resistance and power consumption as the 4G drive chosen for the PJB. Hopefully they will offer an even more expensive model with the 12G drive.
IBM also makes 25G drives that are only twice the size (17mm tall vs. 9.5mm), but still have very good shock resistance and power requirements. I'd be willing to pay even more to have a PJB with one of those, although it would have to be 9.5mm thicker. 18G is enough to store my entire CD collection, so 25G would leave me room for some expansion.
Alternatively, a model that the drive can easily be swapped would be OK. My Toshiba Libretto palmtop uses drives in this form factor, and although Toshiba doesn't consider the drive to be user-swappable, it was design so that this can easily be done, and I swap drives on it frequently.
C'mon for fsck's sake... this is UNIVERSITY RESEARCH, and it's *vital* technology to mankind. Get your greed out of the picture.
Have you considered that part of the reason people do research like this is that there's some chance to make some money on it, both for the personal benefit of the researchers (sometimes), and for the benefit of the institution, which helps them fund more research?
Patents only last 20 years (currently, in the US). I doubt that anyone is going to die in the next 20 years due to the technology being patented, that would otherwise have been saved.
I'm unhappy about the patent system, but my reason is primarilly that they issue too many patents on obvious stuff. I haven't seen the patent application for this, and biochemistry is not my field, so I have no way to judge whether this stuff is obvious or not.
My other gripe is that the patent office grants patents on genetic sequences that exist in nature. To my way of thinking, those don't constitute "inventions".
Unfortunately, NASA took the last two (perfectly good!) Saturn V's and laid them out as lawn ornaments in Houston and Huntsville.
When I visited KSC in 1990, seeing that Saturn V was quite a mixed-emotions experience. On the one hand, it was pretty neat to be able to get that close to a real spacecraft. On the other hand, I just about cried over what a waste it was to have taken a perfectly good spacecraft, laid it out, and left it exposed to the elements and vandals.
It was a bit of a disappointment that the high point of the tour was when the bus stopped by the fenced-in area that one of the crawlers was parked in, so that we could stare through the fence. The crawler's awesome, but it was the only thing other than the Saturn V that we got close to.
There was a really stupid stop on the bus tour at the building that they said had been used for Apollo astronaut training. I expected that they would show us some of the training equipment or some such, but instead they had turned it into an incredibly poor-quality "replica" of launch control. They had someone fabricate a whole bunch of "control consoles" that bore no resemblance to the real thing; they were just four different designs of panels with switches and blinky lights.
The "museum" was slightly interesting, although I was disappointed that they couldn't even be bothered to make the sentences on the placards gramatically correct.
It's really a shame that rather than NASA employing people who care about it to run the visitor center and tours, they just contract it out to a company that only sees it as a way of fleecing tourists.
Unless it's been substantially overhauled in the last ten years, I'd advise people to skip visiting KSC unless it's already on their route to somewhere else, or unless they can arrange a VIP tour.
That figure seems to be somewhat anecdotal. I'd like to see some facts backing it up.
From personal experience I know that it is possible to purchase 1394 chips in volume from Symbios (now part of LSI Logic, IIRC) and Philips for under $5 in volume.
From anyone else's point of view, that's still anecdotal. AFAIK, the only authoritative way to get pricing on the chips is to get quotes from the vendors.
Because, frankly, even complete USB chipsets aren't that cheap.
Certainly they are. You can get the silicon for a low speed (1.5 Mbps) USB device from Cypress for under $1 in volume; the high-speed (12 Mbps) chips aren't much more.
Lets not forget where the standard for those tailgate chips you mention came from.
That's quite true. And I wasn't trying to slam the ATA committee. But I do believe they should push the ATA-over-1394 (SBP/tailgate) harder, rather than inventing a new but inferior interface.
Wouldn't serial-ATA be significantly cheaper to implement than Firewire, because it is strictly a point-to-point protocol and doesn't need to worry about bus arbitration and such
A good question, but the answer is that there would be very little difference in cost because at the physical layer, 1394 is also point-to-point. The complexity buried inside the 1394 chips is probably slightly higher than for Serial ATA chips, but that makes little difference to the cost. Once it's integrated onto the same die with the microprocessor and a lot of the other drive electronics, the difference in cost will be completely negligible.
Similarly, at the host end of things, there's no reason a 1394 host adapter would cost more than a Serial ATA host adapter, if they were integrated into the South Bridge of the chipset.
And if you want to add additional 1394 or Serial ATA ports to your computer, host adapter chips or cards for either should have comparable prices.
Note: when I talk about comparable prices, I'm referring to the hypothetical situation where they are manufactured in comparable volumes. Obviously if one is manufactured in much higher volumes than the other, it will be cheaper.
1. [...] Explain to me why Apple includes ATA drives inside the G4 when it has an internal Firewire port?
Because ATA drives are currently cheaper than 1394 drives. Not due to any inherent manufacturing or materials cost, but simply because Apple doesn't drive the hard disk market, PCs do. If PCs and Macs ubiquitously had support for 1394, the drives would appear and would ultimately be cheaper than both ATA and SCSI drives.
The same is true for Serial ATA drives. You can bet that the first Serial ATA drives will NOT be cheaper than equivalent Parallel ATA drives. That will only happen as they ramp the volume.
If there was customer demand, they could start ramping production of 1394 drives now. Why should we wait until mid 2001 for them to start ramping Serial ATA? (I addressed this question in my earlier post.)
2a. You do not need topology internal to the computer. So hubs and daisychaining is meaningless.
You need a non-trivial topology any time you want to hook up more devices than you have dedicated ports.
2b. Since four ports of Serial ATA could technically operate in parallel (the bandwidth is not shared), four devices have a combined available bandwidth of 600 MB/s, as opposed to firewire's 400 Mbps (~40 MB/s)
If manufactured in equivalent quantities, hardware support for four 1394 ports (at 3.2 Gbps by 2001) should not cost more than four Serial ATA ports.
2c. The max bandwidth of firewire, 3.2 Gbps, is ~320 MB/s, making it about the same speed as two Serial ATA ports running at the initial speed (which is not the maximum bandwidth)
Sure, but why compare two Serial ATA ports to only one 1394 port? With either interface the per-port cost will be about the same, but 1394 will offer 3.2 Gbps at about the same time that Serial ATA 1X will offer 1.5 Gbps. Probably sooner, in fact.
3. Serial ATA is a point to point protocol. There is no master.
Of course there's a master. The computer is the master; the disk drive is the slave. 1394 supports any mix of masters and slaves. If all you want to do is add one disk drive to a PC, you don't need that capability. But why restritct yourself if you don't have to?
4. Serial ATA is already supported under both windows and linux, past the extent of IEEE1394. This is because Serial ATA uses the same protocol as regular ATA, and thus works exactly the same on an OS level. Unless you look at the chipset, the OS probably will not know it isn't using parallel ATA.
If you want to realize the claimed 1.5 Gbps performance of Serial ATA 1X, you'll probably need a different hardware-level register interface, with different device driver software (at the lowest level; some higher-level driver code may stay the same).
It is true that 1394 hardware interfaces are not register-compatible with ATA ports, but 1394 drivers are already written.
5. ATA is a cheaper solution than Firewire. Currently all firewire drives are actually ATA drives with a ATAFirewire chip inside, so Serial ATA reduces their cost, as well as requires a smaller engineering cost to change the chips on the drive to be native Serial ATA.
Parallel ATA is cheaper today because it is manufactured in high volumes. Neither Serial ATA nor 1394 drives will be cheaper than Parallel ATA until and unless drives incorporating those interface start get manufactured in high volumes. Once the volumes are that high, Serial ATA or 1394 drives should be cheaper to manufacture than Parallel ATA, because they can use chips with lower pin counts, smaller board footprint, and fewer connector pins or edge fingers.
Since both Serial ATA or 1394 offer the potential for higher performance than Parallel ATA at lower cost, but both would cost about the same amount, why not prefer the one with greater flexibility and performance.
What makes you think that Serial ATA is a proprietary interface??
Bad choice of words on my part. What I really meant was "a new and incompatible interface". Why use one of those, instead of a superior existing interface?
The ideas behind Serial ATA are quite sound. The problem is that there is already an existing standard which accomplishes all that Serial ATA does, and much more, and is not inherently any more expensive.
That standard is IEEE-1394, also known as FireWire or i-Link.
Like Serial ATA, 1394 runs at very high speed over inexpensive cabling consisting of only two pairs of signal lines and one pair for power. The cabling does not impede airflow like parallel ATA cables.
Like Serial ATA, 1394 can be used to transfer data to or from ATA (IDE) interfaces, completely transparently to the host.
Like Serial ATA, 1394 can be (and is) implemented in extremely cheap chips. In fact, there are sub-$5 "tailgate" chips which provide a single-chip 1394-to-ATA adapter. If 1394 was integrated into the drive instead of Parallel ATA, the drive could actually be cheaper than it is now.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 can also be used to connect SCSI devices, digital cameras, digital audio and video, TCP/IP networking, and many other categories of devices. 1394 already appears to be the interface of choice for most upcoming consumer electronic gear.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is already a recognized standard, and work is already underway to extend it to speeds of up to 3.2 Gbps.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 supports complex topologies: devices with multiple 1394 ports for daisy chaining and hubs. This provides considerable flexibility in how devices are hooked up.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 supports multiple masters on the same bus.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is available NOW, and is already built into some computers.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is already supported by Microsoft Windows, and to some extent, Linux.
So why do we need a new standard?
Part of the problem is probably Intel. Initially they announced that they were a supporter of 1394, and that they would build support for it into all of their chipset. They did this with USB, and now it's hard to buy a PC without USB. But when push came to shove, for some reason they didn't do it. Apparently this is due to their work on "USB 2", which pushes the speed of USB into the same range as 1394, but unfortunately still has most or all of the limitations of USB.
Part of the problem is probably Apple. They made ridiculous royalty demands ($1/port), and scared many vendors away. They've since backed down to much more reasonable numbers, but some of the damage was done.
Part of the problem is probably the ATA committee itself. They may be experiencing "NIH" syndrome, preferring to invent a new standard rather than using an existing one, no matter how suited the existing one is.
Part of the problem is just the standard chicken-and-egg question. If computers don't have 1394 interfaces, why should disk manufacturers build 1394 into disk drives? If disk drives don't have 1394, why should computer manufacturers build 1394 into the computers? Of course, serial ATA may have the same problem, but it may be less pronounced. The very fact that serial ATA is less functional may make it an easier sell from a marketing point of view.
What should be done? IMNSHO, they should scrap the proprietary Serial-ATA interface, and adopt 1394 as the official Serial ATA standard.
Re:fix cableing screwups with power on the line?
on
Cheap Gigabit Ether
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would be interesting to see what it is doing with the extra pairs of cables.
My understanding of 1000BASE-T is that it uses all four pairs, transferring 250 Mbps on each. This matches the statement in the NatSemi press release that a quad transformer is needed. This means that unlike 100BASE-TX, you won't be able to run full-duplex.
and switches are supposed to just pass it through.
Switches don't pass the extra pairs through. They're left open. (How would the switch know which port to pass them through to?)
AT&T's MERT (which is actually referenced in this patent!) did basically the same thing as RT-Linux.
I also dispute that the claims of this patent are non-obvious. I proposed a similar scheme when I worked at Telebit and we wanted to merge our router and modem code bases for a low-cost product. The modem had hard real-time requirements, so we were going to run the router operating system as a task under the modem's operating system. Neither I nor my coworkers thought this was a super-advanced non-obvious technique that should be patented.
As it turned out, I came up with an even better method for building the product, but we didn't end up using it because the price of modem chipsets had dropped enough to make it unnecessary.
One way that they could stop us from using MP3 would be to make the sale of MP3 players illegal. That isn't going to happen because the precedent has already been set - software and hardware for MP3 playback is already legally being sold.
That does not in any way prevent them from lobbying for a new law banning sales of non-SDMI-compliant digital music players. At best it just means that the MP3 player you buy before such a ban will probably be grandfathered in.
You may think this is unlikely, but they've successfully banned VCRs that aren't affected by Macrovision. This means that new 8mm VCRs actually have to have special circuitry added to detect Macrovision, because their normal AGC circuit is unaffected (unlike most VHS decks).
The record companies wanted the cheaper menium so they just decided to stop making vinyl albums and went with CDs.
Sure they wanted to, but the reality is that they didn't stop pressing vinyl until the public stopped buying it.
They'd love to force you to buy SDMI rather than CDs, but they're not stupid enough to stop pressing CDs while there's still big money to be made on them.
But I thought that another prong of the RIAA attack on MP3 was to create copy-protected CDs that couldn't be ripped, except maybe by proprietary software.
Well, if they succeed in creating a copy protected CD, I won't buy it, since it won't play on my existing player or in my CD-ROM drive.
And if it will play on my existing player and in my CD-ROM drive, it's not copy-protected, is it?
Under AIX, all available memory that is normally free memory under other unixes, gets allocated to buffer cache for all filesystems on the box.
Which is, of course, also how things are currently done in Linux. It's a better approach than the traditional fixed size cache, but your proposal to allow per-filesystem limits seems like a good idea to me. In fact, I've had some situations where I would have liked a per-file limit, so one disk-intensive application didn't throw everything else out of the buffer cache.
This type of "immortality" is useless to each of us as individuals. When you die, whether your brain pattern has been perfectly copied into computer format or not, YOU cease to exist.
Suppose for a moment that when your brain was to be uploaded, you went to sleep, and your "meat" body didn't wake up again. "That's horrible!" you might say. "I'd be dead!".
But how do you know that this doesn't happen to you every time you go to sleep (or are otherwise rendered unconscious)? You *think* that you're the same person you were yesterday, but how can you be sure? Maybe yesterday's you is dead.
A thought experiment:
What if there was a way to replace the biological neurons in your brain with artificial ones (perhaps nanotechnology)? If this was done all at once, presumably you'd make the same claim about "YOU cease to exist". But what if only a small amount of them were replaced? With artificial neurons programmed to act exactly like those replaced, and wired into your brain exactly as the natural ones were? Say you replaced about 0.1% of your neurons. Wouldn't you still be you? And if you went in the next day to have another 0.1% replaced? After three years your entire brain would be artificial. Would you still be you at that point? If not, at what time did the old you "die"?
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The more interesting question, IMNSHO, is given a computer that appears to unbiased observers to exhibit consciousness, spirituality, or self-awareness, would a claim that it didn't realy posess those traits (but was "faking it") really mean anything?
After all, how do I know that you exhibit consiousness, spirituality, or self-awareness? Maybe you are faking it. Heck, maybe I'm faking it and don't even know it.
Effectively, Mattel will not be able to nail anyone who distributes the GPL'd code for copyright infringement, even though they own the copyright. (Unless the distribution violates the terms of the GPL.) The only way they'd prevail is to charge poeple with something other than copyright infringement.
What Mattel can do, though, is to file nuisance suits against people. Who is going to be willing to spend a lot of money defending this, even if they know they're in the right?
If I can find a copy of the code, I'll be happy to distribute it from my web site.
Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer.
So Congress keeps increasing the term of copyright, such that effectively it is not for a limited time, but forever.
In another forum, someone wrote:
And I replied:At this point I would also add that copyright protection on unpublished works such as source code is in fact completely unnecessary, as the unpublished work can be protected by trade secret law. Copyright was not intended to cover secrets, and is ill-suited to doing so.
If I were to take a more radical position, I might suggest that to secure copyright on object code, perhaps it should be required to also copyright the source code it was generated from, and deposit both with the copyright office. This would better serve to guarantee that the work would eventually not just become public domain, but also be usable as a base for further development. Merely having the object code become public domain without the source code is of much less value to society. In this scenario, a legitimate defense against claimed copyright infringement would be that the source code deposited by the copyright owner was incomplete or otherwise unusable to build the object code.
Of course, realistically I realize that there is little chance of getting any sort of copyright reform to restore the intended purpose. But if we don't educate people as to what the intended purpose was, the chance is zero.
Or maybe they should set aside the equipment until then. They could put it all in the same warehouse in which they're storing the Ark of the Covenant.
Personally I think it's a good deal, and I'll probably buy one.
They're using 2.5 inch disks, and they get 4G on a disk.
There's definitely a market for flash-based players that store only a few hours. There are lots of products that address this market. But there's probably also a market for high-end devices like this one.
My complaint about it is that the disk stores too little. IBM makes 12G drives in the same form factor and with the same shock resistance and power consumption as the 4G drive chosen for the PJB. Hopefully they will offer an even more expensive model with the 12G drive.
IBM also makes 25G drives that are only twice the size (17mm tall vs. 9.5mm), but still have very good shock resistance and power requirements. I'd be willing to pay even more to have a PJB with one of those, although it would have to be 9.5mm thicker. 18G is enough to store my entire CD collection, so 25G would leave me room for some expansion.
Alternatively, a model that the drive can easily be swapped would be OK. My Toshiba Libretto palmtop uses drives in this form factor, and although Toshiba doesn't consider the drive to be user-swappable, it was design so that this can easily be done, and I swap drives on it frequently.
Patents only last 20 years (currently, in the US). I doubt that anyone is going to die in the next 20 years due to the technology being patented, that would otherwise have been saved.
I'm unhappy about the patent system, but my reason is primarilly that they issue too many patents on obvious stuff. I haven't seen the patent application for this, and biochemistry is not my field, so I have no way to judge whether this stuff is obvious or not.
My other gripe is that the patent office grants patents on genetic sequences that exist in nature. To my way of thinking, those don't constitute "inventions".
It was a bit of a disappointment that the high point of the tour was when the bus stopped by the fenced-in area that one of the crawlers was parked in, so that we could stare through the fence. The crawler's awesome, but it was the only thing other than the Saturn V that we got close to.
There was a really stupid stop on the bus tour at the building that they said had been used for Apollo astronaut training. I expected that they would show us some of the training equipment or some such, but instead they had turned it into an incredibly poor-quality "replica" of launch control. They had someone fabricate a whole bunch of "control consoles" that bore no resemblance to the real thing; they were just four different designs of panels with switches and blinky lights.
The "museum" was slightly interesting, although I was disappointed that they couldn't even be bothered to make the sentences on the placards gramatically correct.
It's really a shame that rather than NASA employing people who care about it to run the visitor center and tours, they just contract it out to a company that only sees it as a way of fleecing tourists.
Unless it's been substantially overhauled in the last ten years, I'd advise people to skip visiting KSC unless it's already on their route to somewhere else, or unless they can arrange a VIP tour.
From anyone else's point of view, that's still anecdotal. AFAIK, the only authoritative way to get pricing on the chips is to get quotes from the vendors.
Certainly they are. You can get the silicon for a low speed (1.5 Mbps) USB device from Cypress for under $1 in volume; the high-speed (12 Mbps) chips aren't much more.Similarly, at the host end of things, there's no reason a 1394 host adapter would cost more than a Serial ATA host adapter, if they were integrated into the South Bridge of the chipset.
And if you want to add additional 1394 or Serial ATA ports to your computer, host adapter chips or cards for either should have comparable prices.
Note: when I talk about comparable prices, I'm referring to the hypothetical situation where they are manufactured in comparable volumes. Obviously if one is manufactured in much higher volumes than the other, it will be cheaper.
The same is true for Serial ATA drives. You can bet that the first Serial ATA drives will NOT be cheaper than equivalent Parallel ATA drives. That will only happen as they ramp the volume.
If there was customer demand, they could start ramping production of 1394 drives now. Why should we wait until mid 2001 for them to start ramping Serial ATA? (I addressed this question in my earlier post.)
You need a non-trivial topology any time you want to hook up more devices than you have dedicated ports. If manufactured in equivalent quantities, hardware support for four 1394 ports (at 3.2 Gbps by 2001) should not cost more than four Serial ATA ports. Sure, but why compare two Serial ATA ports to only one 1394 port? With either interface the per-port cost will be about the same, but 1394 will offer 3.2 Gbps at about the same time that Serial ATA 1X will offer 1.5 Gbps. Probably sooner, in fact. Of course there's a master. The computer is the master; the disk drive is the slave. 1394 supports any mix of masters and slaves. If all you want to do is add one disk drive to a PC, you don't need that capability. But why restritct yourself if you don't have to? If you want to realize the claimed 1.5 Gbps performance of Serial ATA 1X, you'll probably need a different hardware-level register interface, with different device driver software (at the lowest level; some higher-level driver code may stay the same).It is true that 1394 hardware interfaces are not register-compatible with ATA ports, but 1394 drivers are already written.
Parallel ATA is cheaper today because it is manufactured in high volumes. Neither Serial ATA nor 1394 drives will be cheaper than Parallel ATA until and unless drives incorporating those interface start get manufactured in high volumes. Once the volumes are that high, Serial ATA or 1394 drives should be cheaper to manufacture than Parallel ATA, because they can use chips with lower pin counts, smaller board footprint, and fewer connector pins or edge fingers.Since both Serial ATA or 1394 offer the potential for higher performance than Parallel ATA at lower cost, but both would cost about the same amount, why not prefer the one with greater flexibility and performance.
Bad choice of words on my part. What I really meant was "a new and incompatible interface". Why use one of those, instead of a superior existing interface?That standard is IEEE-1394, also known as FireWire or i-Link.
Like Serial ATA, 1394 runs at very high speed over inexpensive cabling consisting of only two pairs of signal lines and one pair for power. The cabling does not impede airflow like parallel ATA cables.
Like Serial ATA, 1394 can be used to transfer data to or from ATA (IDE) interfaces, completely transparently to the host.
Like Serial ATA, 1394 can be (and is) implemented in extremely cheap chips. In fact, there are sub-$5 "tailgate" chips which provide a single-chip 1394-to-ATA adapter. If 1394 was integrated into the drive instead of Parallel ATA, the drive could actually be cheaper than it is now.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 can also be used to connect SCSI devices, digital cameras, digital audio and video, TCP/IP networking, and many other categories of devices. 1394 already appears to be the interface of choice for most upcoming consumer electronic gear.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is already a recognized standard, and work is already underway to extend it to speeds of up to 3.2 Gbps.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 supports complex topologies: devices with multiple 1394 ports for daisy chaining and hubs. This provides considerable flexibility in how devices are hooked up.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 supports multiple masters on the same bus.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is available NOW, and is already built into some computers.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is already supported by Microsoft Windows, and to some extent, Linux.
So why do we need a new standard?
Part of the problem is probably Intel. Initially they announced that they were a supporter of 1394, and that they would build support for it into all of their chipset. They did this with USB, and now it's hard to buy a PC without USB. But when push came to shove, for some reason they didn't do it. Apparently this is due to their work on "USB 2", which pushes the speed of USB into the same range as 1394, but unfortunately still has most or all of the limitations of USB.
Part of the problem is probably Apple. They made ridiculous royalty demands ($1/port), and scared many vendors away. They've since backed down to much more reasonable numbers, but some of the damage was done.
Part of the problem is probably the ATA committee itself. They may be experiencing "NIH" syndrome, preferring to invent a new standard rather than using an existing one, no matter how suited the existing one is.
Part of the problem is just the standard chicken-and-egg question. If computers don't have 1394 interfaces, why should disk manufacturers build 1394 into disk drives? If disk drives don't have 1394, why should computer manufacturers build 1394 into the computers? Of course, serial ATA may have the same problem, but it may be less pronounced. The very fact that serial ATA is less functional may make it an easier sell from a marketing point of view.
What should be done? IMNSHO, they should scrap the proprietary Serial-ATA interface, and adopt 1394 as the official Serial ATA standard.
I also dispute that the claims of this patent are non-obvious. I proposed a similar scheme when I worked at Telebit and we wanted to merge our router and modem code bases for a low-cost product. The modem had hard real-time requirements, so we were going to run the router operating system as a task under the modem's operating system. Neither I nor my coworkers thought this was a super-advanced non-obvious technique that should be patented.
As it turned out, I came up with an even better method for building the product, but we didn't end up using it because the price of modem chipsets had dropped enough to make it unnecessary.
You may think this is unlikely, but they've successfully banned VCRs that aren't affected by Macrovision. This means that new 8mm VCRs actually have to have special circuitry added to detect Macrovision, because their normal AGC circuit is unaffected (unlike most VHS decks).
They'd love to force you to buy SDMI rather than CDs, but they're not stupid enough to stop pressing CDs while there's still big money to be made on them.
And if it will play on my existing player and in my CD-ROM drive, it's not copy-protected, is it?
- The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein
- Ringworld by Larry Niven
- Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
- A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
- Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
- The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke
- The Humanoids by Jack Williamson
- Heart of the Comet by Gregory Benford and David Brin
- Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward
- The Giants Novels (trilogy) by James P. Hogan
- Voyagers by Ben Bova
- Blood Music by David Brin
Sorry that I don't have time to write any details about these!But how do you know that this doesn't happen to you every time you go to sleep (or are otherwise rendered unconscious)? You *think* that you're the same person you were yesterday, but how can you be sure? Maybe yesterday's you is dead.
A thought experiment:
What if there was a way to replace the biological neurons in your brain with artificial ones (perhaps nanotechnology)? If this was done all at once, presumably you'd make the same claim about "YOU cease to exist". But what if only a small amount of them were replaced? With artificial neurons programmed to act exactly like those replaced, and wired into your brain exactly as the natural ones were? Say you replaced about 0.1% of your neurons. Wouldn't you still be you? And if you went in the next day to have another 0.1% replaced? After three years your entire brain would be artificial. Would you still be you at that point? If not, at what time did the old you "die"?