First off, satellites, surface to space, and random space experiments are exactly what NASA does. It isn't out of their realm, it *is* their realm. It isn't out of their league, because everything involving space is their league. What NASA is is that agency that sends people to space. Your first paragraph says absolutely nothing that isn't wrong, except for the opinion you put forth in the last sentance.
While private enterprise picking up space travel would be great, it isn't going to happen for a very long time. That means we need crazy inventors that have budgets to turn space into something profitable. Some companies understand that, most do not. That's what there are few companies now that have an R&D department.
So you're saying, NASA should do space research, but not in space? Space telescopes, but nobody to deploy and maintain them? You realize that none of us directly benefits because we know more history or where the next singularity probably is?
If you want pure research that might be useful, then we need to look into higher strength materials, propulsion systems, energy production, computers, etc. NASA already does this, but they are hampered by the leadership. Hell, most of the tech stuff around you was enabled by NASA research.
But fundamentally, they are the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, not the National Astronomy and Speculation Administration.
The whole point of AGP is to provide an "Accelerated Graphics Port". It *is* a high speed interface between system memory and the card. The whole reason that graphics cards keep putting more local memory on them is because system RAM is so much slower than the local RAM.
Look at the hardware available two years ago. 64MB/128MB video cards, 512MB RAM, ~2GHz CPUs, 100GB+ drives. What do many people have now? 128MB video cards, 512MB-768MB RAM, 2-3GHz CPUs, 100GB+ drives. If we keep that rate of increase, in another two years people will still have under those recommended system requirements for Vista.
I know that I'm not going to replace my displays until they die. I bought the best color clarity CRT on the market in 2000, and I bought one of the best LCDs out there when I wanted to go dual-head. Among all the people I know, there are only two times they purchased new displays: the old one broke, or they wanted to switch from a CRT to a LCD. MS and their little DRM BS can suck it. Even if I did make the mistake of downgrading to Vista, it wouldn't be until things like HDCP were torn apart, and workarounds cropped up. I'm not about to start using something until it's working right, and HDCP restricted content is certainly something that doesn't work right.
Very few people are going to actually buy Vista on purpose. They'll get it on new PCs, and they'll pirate it.
Sorry, didn't mean to accuse you of being with either of those two thugs.
I'd agree with you on it being the "natural evolution", but say that much like you have to constantly fight to maintain your freedom, you must also constantly fight to keep your government. The people of this country have been complacent for a long time, and it really threw us down the mountain. We let the checks and balanced be systematically removed with nary a complaint. You had the moronic Populists that destroyed Congress. This paved the way to massive expansion of Federal power. You have the greedy companies that did well to destroy everything at once, right after that. The whole time, you have the citizens, who do nothing except for watch.
The system the Founders devised would've kept working quite well, had it been left in place. At this point, the best scenario would seem to be to purge all the current politicians, and their cronies, toss out quite a lot of Law, get rid of the amendments that screw things up (17th: I'm looking at you), and see what happens. Of course, to do that you need to get the People's attention. Since they currently don't think anyone exists except for Democrats and Republicans, this is quite difficult.
Democrats = Republicans and that's that, unfortunately. We already had only one ruling party, and it's been that way for quite a long time. Every President that we elect, going down the line, has been worse than the last, for at least 50 years. And it seems that 75% of the country, at least, just doesn't care.
I figure first would be using more multichannel formats, and then using HD formats. Of course, that won't increase file size by an order of magnitude.
Next will be doing the same with video. We compress the hell out of video to put DVD collections up on online storage. You start going towards a lossless format on that, and it'll be huge. Just my meager DVD collection would be 160GB straight off the DVD, and that's only 40 discs (avg of 4GB each, MPEG2 compression). Uncompressed HD video would be quite a bit larger.;-)
Yeah, those guys *are* quite nice. I just like the feel on the Type V a lot more. I would be much happier if it had a little more of the "clack" that the Model M has, but the keys feel great. And the Sun keyboard has the control and caps lock keys in the right place.:)
You have a hell of a lot more direct solar to grow food with. By that virtue, you also can garner a lot more power using photovoltaics and similar, which makes the electric lights very easy. You could also just put together a fission reactor and get whatever power you need that way.
You'll need some fancy glass to block some of the UV, etc, from the light so that you don't kill the plants. You'll also need heaters, of course. It wouldn't be that much of a problem. The problem is that *we* aren't very good at growing things that way. Self-contained environments always seem to flop for us...
So... you're a Republican. Republican, meet Democrat. Exactly the same as you, but has a different name.
He's not full of crap. Listen to them speak, read what they actually write, and fill in between the lines. You have support for things like "intelligent design". You have a move towards complete control of the country at the Federal level. You have scandal after scandal. You have the fundamental failure of large portions of foreign policy.
You should think about a few things, too. Do you always vote Republican? That would make you an uninformed voter. Party-line is always the wrong way. Do you believe that your party has different goals than the Democrats? They don't, you know, they just word things different enough to come across as having different goals.
No, the politcal structure of so much of the US is completely screwed up. You have no real choice, all the major candidates are terrible. You have the rapid bloating of the Federal, removal of freedom and liberty, and paranoia has made a big comeback. It's nearly impossible to get real news about *anything*. We're working on wars/conflicts over huge parts of the world. We're entagled in massive amount of treaties and such with so many other countries; some of them bind us to the will of an entity outside of our government.
No, I'd say this administration is having issues with the world. This would be like most other administrations over the last hundred years. Everybody has issues, simply because the world *is* that complex. The issues today are just more plentiful and significant...
Then, I suppose all the silly gamer features, and the light up scroll wheel, wouldn't be very useful, eh? All those buttons that nobody else knows what they do are a great option. Especially when you try to pick it up and press a pile of them.
I use a Gyration wireless mouse on my TV. Normal two button/clickable scroll wheel. But, unlike the Logitech mice, you can use it in mid-air.
Yeah, then you get a mouse that only lasts about a week, and that you can't use if they die early. So you need a backup mouse now, with a cord on it. Which is you will probably keep using since it doesn't die on you.
Also, every rechargable mouse I've used (and that's quite a few) has been a royal pain in the ass. They die more frequently (usually every few days). My wireless mouse makes it around FOUR MONTHS on a single pair of AA batteries. That's an awful lot more convenient.
Actually, I've noticed that mice with rechargable batteries are a *huge* pain in the ass. Not only do you have the annoyance of waiting for them to recharge to use the computer again, you also get shorter battery life.
My Gyration mouse gets about four days on it's Lithium-Ion battery. My Logitech mouse at work gets three to four months on its two disposable AA batteries.
The only reason that I've ever had a wireless mouse on my desktop was when I bought a new workstation at work.
The keyboard that came with it was a Dell special "lets move all the keys around because we hate all humans" type keyboard. I couldn't use it; kept screwing up when trying to hit page up, or home, or an arrow key. I went to a few stores, and the *ONLY* keyboard that wasn't completely garbage was a damned Logitech (eww) wireless keyboard/mouse kit. The keyboard is OK, the mouse is OK. Neither are great, but they work usually. I think the range must be about three feet, unless some paper is in the way, and then it's one foot.
I would love to not have to worry about batteries in my input devices. That's why I don't have wireless stuff for my machine at home. I do have a Gyration wireless kit for my TV, but I use that from 20 feet away. I also replace the batteries in the keyboard once a year. The mouse has to be recharged every few days though, which pisses me off.
I also never have a problem with the cords on my stuff getting tangled. I pull enough cord through my desk, and then position the monitor slightly over it. No more problem.
Yeah, no kidding! You're not the only one that wants a mouse that just works, and that you won't hit fifteen buttons on accidently when you moved it out of the way to reposition your mousepad.
I would love a Sun Type 5 keyboard on my PC, but I haven't found a decent way to make on work without spending 100$. I don't need all the stupid buttons that every keyboard now seems to have. Especially Logitech, those guy are such assholes. I have an iTouch button on my keyboard! And my F keys don't work *by default*! (Also, keyboard that don't have lock key status lights aren't very useful, now are they? Grr... that would be my keyboard at work, also a Logitech unfortunately.)
I've been using a MS Wheel Mouse Optical. It's flimsy, and I had to take it apart and wrap electrical tape all around the inside to blokc out the stupid transparent light-up plastic. But it works, and it has two buttons and a scroll wheel. It was also only 10$, and I've used it for two years. I'd love to be able to buy just a classic MS mouse with optical tracking. The really comfortable ones that had the slight bend to them. Now my choices are all "game mouse ultra super 50-button crap fest of uselessness with extra light up disco ball and subwoofer option".
A thought on a way you've been able to solve that little problem since around 1978. Your keyboard has lights; make one of them flash to indicate you have a waiting message. I've had my IM client do this for me for years.
A few other ideas. The speakers in your monitor are garbage. Rather than throw 60$ in the trash on a crap mouse, buy speakers. You can keep them out of the way, and maybe buy a monitor that isn't annoyingly shaped by virtue of it not having speakers.
Also, there tends to be plenty of ways to have things notify you. First is to understand that you don't need to immediately and instantaneously reply to email. It's only email. Second is that systems have a notification area. If you set it up so that if the email icon is there, then you have mail, then you don't have the trouble any more.
I hate all the stupid lights that get put on computers now. Especially blue lights, they make me not want to buy from the company again. I took apart my mouse to specifically disable any light source that shone through the case. I don't want the distraction.
Also, oddly enough, I find that when I'm using the mouse, I am covering most of it (including all of the scroll wheel), with my hand.
Perhaps that's all that was meant. The quoted bit included that sentence about NVIDIA cards, so I figured that was intentionally included. Since that's a frequent topic of argument on slashdot, it seemed that was the point.;-)
If it was the ideology vs. practicality, then I would still argue that there wasn't a contradiction. At worst, following that logic is a practical ideology. Realistically, it's just practical to do it that way, since getting liberty back is next to impossible without a revolution. In that context, it is certainly more practical to not give up the liberty to begin with.
Truthfully, I think he was saying that he'd rather his computer works than to have companies and OSS people playing games over it. In context, that would be my guess on what was meant by "politics".
I give these desktop session environments a whirl every now and then. I've always ended up back on my pretty, fast, and unintrustive FVWM setup. Most systems already have it installed, and I wrote my config to fall back gracefully if I was on a system with a 1.x release.
This version of GNOME looks nice, so I'll give it a go. Might be something that I'll like using, but I suspect the footprint will annoy me again. Looks good enough to pursue for Windows to UNIX conversions, at least.
Just a note on video boards, and other expansion cards. You do have to produce hardware specific for your targetted platform. You can't just take a PC targetted card and use it on a Mac or UltraSPARC, despite all being PCI. You have to boostrap the cards differently to get them up and running on each. Things that aren't x86 don't have a BIOS, or ACPI, for example. That means you have to interface to the system differently on boot. You do different things to handshake on the bus, to allocate resources, etc.
The last two companies that tried to replace x86 and provide instruction compatability had the product line flop pretty hard. They were Transmeta (Crusoe), and Intel (Itanium). It's quite a shame, since both have so much more promise than x86.
A little more on video cards. The cards aren't providing compability for DirectX or OpenGL at all. They simple can do certain things in hardware that each API happens to do. The driver provides the translation from DirectX/OpenGL into whatever the card understands. NVIDIA, for example, has provided the most complete and best accelerated OpenGL implementation on the market for quite a long time now. It's part of their drivers, since you can't exactly send OpenGL across your PCI bus.;-)
Your market for slower and cheaper parts are for embedded, home market, and servers. There is no reason to provide 3d on a server or embedded device, so you don't. You use a low power and cheap video chipset instead. For home market you just shoot for cheap CPU/video/everything else. High performance add-in parts are for the enthusiast, and occasionally for the gaming enthusiast without knowledge of hardware. Why would you pay Dell another 150$ for a card only worth another 75$ if you knew hardware?
You do realize that those aren't contradictory. What NVIDIA does has no bearing on your own security nor your own liberty. You do not have to use their products, and they do not have to do anything more than they want to with same.
Liberty is the government not making laws placing restrictions upon you. It's letting you do what you want to without threat of force against you. Trading freedom for temporary security would be forever giving up some freedoms to be safer for the moment.
NVIDIA is a company; this puts them close to being a citizen. Forcing them to open their drivers would be forcing them to give up their freedom to do as they wish with their product. You aren't giving up any liberty by choosing to use their closed source driver because you aren't forced to use it. In this case, there are both open source drivers, and other vendors to choose from.
You are not giving up freedom by using Windows, MacOS, or Solaris, either. You're just choosing a product that you don't get to peek at under the hood. Saying that NVIDIA is limiting freedom is funny considering that you're using a computer that functions on thousands of components that you aren't able to take apart, change, and put back together, and distribute. It is likely running a lot of software/firmware that you don't have the right to disassemble, modify, and rerelease.
I'm sorry to hear that the UK does the same ridiculous things that most of the US does.
My current area is much better with not overfunding sports than where I grew up. I'd love to see sports be removed from schools entirely, and put in as community focused programs. That seems the most appropriate place to have such programs, as they aren't really school related. Then you still have funded sports, but you aren't funding them with money that is supposed to be for education.
My current area is also just as bad about overfunding technology toys as what you're talking about. That's the way it is all over, unfortunately. The people that want real education seem to be heavily outnumbered by those that think computers will teach their children.
I have to give you that managers are often quite inept. There's a lot of water-cooler theories about that one.;-) The most likely that I've heard is that the inept type seem to hire other inept types. Then you end up with a managerial infrastructure that makes poor decisions and doesn't understand what they're managing.
Then you have the schools that care about sports more than education. I grew up in a district that spent approx 14mil of their 30mil budget on sports programs. Thanksfully, I had excellent teachers, but that didn't last long after I graduated.
I've seen some pretty crazy things get suggested from teacher groups. I don't know where they get the ideas that most of it will help teach. Then again, I've seen some utterly idiotic ideas come through and sweet through schools. In the area that I live (NorthEast USA), we had a few really choice ones.
Interdependant math courses across three years (sequence math). Each year had parts of algebra, geometry, and trig, and you had to be able to do all of it at the end of each of the classes. The result was that you never finished one of them before moving on to something else. So you were decent at algebra, but horrid at geometry and trig.
Whole language was another one. Instead of teaching phonics and word roots, they taught language one word at a time. The result is a tremendous number of people who can't spell, nearly as many that can barely read, and quite a few illiterate people. Now we have a generation of kids that aren't really fluent in our language.
Then you have the tech obsession. People pouring money into language labs, CAD labs, graphics labs, fancy presentation systems, smart whiteboards, piles of laptops, and computers everywhere they can fit them. I'm not blaming the teachers for that one; it's the fault of teachers *and* administrators. Nobody seems to want to focus on classroom education anymore. They think throwing tech at it will somehow make kids learn better, while ignoring that you still need a solid lesson plan and teachers that keep the kids interested.
Teachers certainly are the most important thing you can put in a school. It's should be getting the good teachers and keeping out the money-sinks and bad managers that's first priority.
Anyway, I probably ranted a bit more than I should've, but there it is.
I'm not sure about VIA. They probably are doing the same thing. At the same time, they're really cheap processors, so they might not have the bells and whistles of the other companies.
I think you may have misunderstood some of what I say.
When I stated that I thought they should've gone with a SCSI based replacement, I mean that they would literally have chosen a particular type of SCSI. For example, Consumer-SCSI = SCSI3-160 w/ SCA LVD connector. There are plenty of devices out there that would match that, so there wouldn't have been a need to wait for drives. Just about everything auto-terminates and auto-ids now, so you wouldn't have needed to worry about which SCSI-ID a device had or anything. It would've provided a lot more exapandability potential, and forever banished the need to have multiple assembly lines for HD manufacturers.
I preferred PCI-X because it did meet the need, had expandibility, was available now, had hardware out, and didn't require repurchase of everything. I agree that having multiple busses wouldn't have been great, but we were already doing that with AGP. The speed hit is annoying, much like it is with USB. I've always been less annoyed with PCIe being chosen than I was with SATA.
Yes, IO-APICs a nice thing for that, finally. I always hated worrying about IRQs, especially when PNP first started and the damnable BIOS kept assigning everything on the same interrupt. Of course, you had no choice in the matter, since there were no jumpers to force settings with PCI. At least that got fixed with BIOS resource allocation tables, and then with APICs.
The funny thing is that ATA started off as a subset of SCSI, back in the 80's. They wanted a stripped down, cheaper variant for the consumer market. So they limited it to two device per port, and a subset of the SCSI command set. Then they didn't change it appreciably for 15 years.
PCIe certainly is having a fight. It further seperates "server-class" from "consumer-class". Some servers are shipping with PCIe now, along with PCI-X, but it's not that common. When PCIe was being standardized, some mainboard manufacturers had just started shipping PCI-X on consumer boards.
Now we have consumer-class - SATA, unbuffered RAM, PCIe - and server-class - SCSI, registered ECC RAM, PCI-X, multiple busses, hardware RAID. I really would've loved to see that server-class stuff trickle into consumer-class so that we could swap around hardware more, and see better prices.
I'm quite serious on that one. The internal instructions on P3, P4, Itanium, Athlon, etc. are not x86 instructions. They're much closer to a RISC architecture with an instruction translator on top.
The execute an instruction you send an opcode to the chip, with certain parameters. Those opcode were what made up the ISA. (ie: MOV, ADD, LEA) Modern chips take those opcodes, and decode them to another set of more simple opcodes. Those are then executed. AMD calls those internal instruction ROPs; Intel calls them micro-ops.
Though it wouldn't be a simple job, they could do decode for another architecture by replacing those decode units. That is was Transmeta was doing with their on-the-fly decode reprogramming.
Intel chose to use a completely different ISA on the Itanium. Because of type of ISA they created, the couldn't just use different decode units since their new one was dramatically different. Instead, they put a complicated emulation layer in that would allow legacy x86 opcodes to execute on the CPU. However, this made that legacy code much slower than native code. It was intended as a transition feature while people moved to Itanium native code.
I don't believe there are any modern processors that execute x86 instrutions on-chip. They all convert x86 to their on-chip instruction set before the execution unit gets ahold of it.
I don't know if you're working in public education, but I'm someone that works in public sector on the government side. I'll give you what is seen from that side of the fence.
Schools tend to account for over 50% of a municipality's budget. In most states, they aren't required to (and sometimes are strictly prohibited from) run their budget as just another government department. Most departments have to justify the need for money, and get approvals for expenditures. Schools get their money, and can move it around and spend it how they like, never requiring authorization from the government body that they're a part of.
That person you're talking about is likely the school system equivalent of a financial board; perhaps a business administrator or similar. They're making sure the budget monies that they get from municipal revenues are being spent in the right places. You don't want to get too detailed, though, because then you have to move money around all the time. You can't just have a massive "teaching" budget, since you need more accountability than that offers.
If you were to do it your way, you would have to allocate a pool of money to each school. Then each school would have to allocate it to different functions, and split the rest among departments, and then among teachers. That would actually reduce flexibility, because each pool of money would be quite small. You would get rid of a few administrators by making everyone be accountants.
As a teacher, your job is first to teach your students. Optimally, you shouldn't be worrying about money at all. You ask for something, and you either get it, or you get some reason why you aren't getting it. That all has to be worked out before budgets are decided. Realistically, you probably are working against a department budget, and have another small budget for your classroom for more specific things. Your department head would seem to be the person to talk to about budgets, or perhaps the school principal.
When the school systems decided their budget, they'll break down system-wide requirements, and lay down the budgets for individual schools. Those school budgets will be decided by talking to each principal and determining requirements. Then they'll go to the municipality and request that amount of money as their department budget. If it is granted, then they're done. Otherwise, they have to go and decide what school things get cut, etc.
Then pricipal of each school determines what they need by determining what the whole school requires, and then what each department within the school needs. If there is a budget cut that hits them, they need to decide what to cut.
That is why you can't just entrust the staff with the budget. There are too many things to consider, many of which are outside of a teacher's expertise. I think you'd find that if you let the teachers decide about the budget, you would have lots of classroom equipment, and buildings/grounds that are falling apart with infrastructures that don't work right. Management is just not what a teacher does, and it isn't likely to turn out well.
Intel certainly misjudged the market with Itanium, which is a shame. It would be wonderful to have chips in the consumer channel that were as good as Alphas, UltraSPARCs, PA-RISCs, etc. There are very good arguments for just dropping x86 as lacking future improvement potential. Intel managed to do that, and still have a compatibility layer for the old x86 software. If they could've gotten the price down on the Itaniums, there would probably have been a good market for them.
Instead, you have companies, like HP, that dropped their own architecture in favor of Itanium, since it *was* good enough to replace their own product. That saves them quite a bit of money.
However, we do just throw out compatability in the x86 world, sometimes. We threw out IDE and replaced it with something new. We do the same for memory interfaces, and expansion interfaces. We move around on RAM like nobody's business (FPM, EDO, SDRAM, DDR, RDRAM, DDR2). SATA already has two versions, USB has three, Firewire has two. At least SATA can be converted to and from IDE, and USB and Firewire are mostly compatible with the other variants within their standard. You can't get rid of your IDE ports, though, because there *still* aren't a huge number of optical devices with SATA ports. Then there's PCIe, which is completely incompatible with PCI/PCI-X.
We change CPU sockets constantly, mucking with the numbers of pins and type of interface. You have vendors that dropped PS/2 ports in favor of USB, but not all boards can emulate PS/2 devices properly for OS' that don't support USB HID.
Most of the time, the PC world comes up with new standards to "fix" the old ones, but ignore existing standards that already do what they're talking about. SATA came about when we could've chosen one of the SCSI standards as the new consumer storage interface. PCIe comes out when we already had PCI-X 2.0. You get something like RDRAM when there was already DDR SDRAM. Rarely are these new things any better, and you end up having to create whole new product lines, too.
The future doesn't look all that much better, either. You have a variety of display interfaces that are being pushed. Optical storage has a ton of different formats, with very little standardization. DRM is getting shoved into everything, making using the computer more difficult.
You might take a glace and think that the industry likes upgrade paths, but if you look a little deeper, you can see they don't. They want a regular stream of new standards that will force everyone to buy all new equipment.
As for evolution of the instruction set... if the ISA is broken, you do have to just throw it out to fix it. That's why all the chips on the market execute totally different instructions on-chip vs. what is being sent to them. x86 exists as nothing more than a compatibility layer for everyone.
Yeah, there are a lot of reasons. These are a few that come to mind: The Itanium was/is incredibly expensive. Too many programmers are incredibly lazy and would have to do more work. Compilers took a little while to get up to speed with IA64. Linux was the only platform that ran on it natively at release.
I would've preferred IA64 to the AMD hybrid. I also hate the stupidity that is the x86 architecture and would love to see it die. Then again, I'd also love to see IDE/SATA die and have the industry come up with a better standard; we could call it SCSI. It's be nice to use standard bus interfaces, too. We could drop PCIe and use PCI-X, instead, and be compatible with all our old PCI and PCI-X cards.
The x86 world seems to always choose the wrong answer when presented with a problem.
What can you do, though. "x86: the worst of *all* worlds."
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First off, satellites, surface to space, and random space experiments are exactly what NASA does. It isn't out of their realm, it *is* their realm. It isn't out of their league, because everything involving space is their league. What NASA is is that agency that sends people to space. Your first paragraph says absolutely nothing that isn't wrong, except for the opinion you put forth in the last sentance.
While private enterprise picking up space travel would be great, it isn't going to happen for a very long time. That means we need crazy inventors that have budgets to turn space into something profitable. Some companies understand that, most do not. That's what there are few companies now that have an R&D department.
So you're saying, NASA should do space research, but not in space? Space telescopes, but nobody to deploy and maintain them? You realize that none of us directly benefits because we know more history or where the next singularity probably is?
If you want pure research that might be useful, then we need to look into higher strength materials, propulsion systems, energy production, computers, etc. NASA already does this, but they are hampered by the leadership. Hell, most of the tech stuff around you was enabled by NASA research.
But fundamentally, they are the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, not the National Astronomy and Speculation Administration.
The whole point of AGP is to provide an "Accelerated Graphics Port". It *is* a high speed interface between system memory and the card. The whole reason that graphics cards keep putting more local memory on them is because system RAM is so much slower than the local RAM.
Look at the hardware available two years ago. 64MB/128MB video cards, 512MB RAM, ~2GHz CPUs, 100GB+ drives. What do many people have now? 128MB video cards, 512MB-768MB RAM, 2-3GHz CPUs, 100GB+ drives. If we keep that rate of increase, in another two years people will still have under those recommended system requirements for Vista.
I know that I'm not going to replace my displays until they die. I bought the best color clarity CRT on the market in 2000, and I bought one of the best LCDs out there when I wanted to go dual-head. Among all the people I know, there are only two times they purchased new displays: the old one broke, or they wanted to switch from a CRT to a LCD. MS and their little DRM BS can suck it. Even if I did make the mistake of downgrading to Vista, it wouldn't be until things like HDCP were torn apart, and workarounds cropped up. I'm not about to start using something until it's working right, and HDCP restricted content is certainly something that doesn't work right.
Very few people are going to actually buy Vista on purpose. They'll get it on new PCs, and they'll pirate it.
Sorry, didn't mean to accuse you of being with either of those two thugs.
I'd agree with you on it being the "natural evolution", but say that much like you have to constantly fight to maintain your freedom, you must also constantly fight to keep your government. The people of this country have been complacent for a long time, and it really threw us down the mountain. We let the checks and balanced be systematically removed with nary a complaint. You had the moronic Populists that destroyed Congress. This paved the way to massive expansion of Federal power. You have the greedy companies that did well to destroy everything at once, right after that. The whole time, you have the citizens, who do nothing except for watch.
The system the Founders devised would've kept working quite well, had it been left in place. At this point, the best scenario would seem to be to purge all the current politicians, and their cronies, toss out quite a lot of Law, get rid of the amendments that screw things up (17th: I'm looking at you), and see what happens. Of course, to do that you need to get the People's attention. Since they currently don't think anyone exists except for Democrats and Republicans, this is quite difficult.
Democrats = Republicans and that's that, unfortunately. We already had only one ruling party, and it's been that way for quite a long time. Every President that we elect, going down the line, has been worse than the last, for at least 50 years. And it seems that 75% of the country, at least, just doesn't care.
I figure first would be using more multichannel formats, and then using HD formats. Of course, that won't increase file size by an order of magnitude.
;-)
Next will be doing the same with video. We compress the hell out of video to put DVD collections up on online storage. You start going towards a lossless format on that, and it'll be huge. Just my meager DVD collection would be 160GB straight off the DVD, and that's only 40 discs (avg of 4GB each, MPEG2 compression). Uncompressed HD video would be quite a bit larger.
Yeah, those guys *are* quite nice. I just like the feel on the Type V a lot more. I would be much happier if it had a little more of the "clack" that the Model M has, but the keys feel great. And the Sun keyboard has the control and caps lock keys in the right place. :)
Just the food aspect, here:
You have a hell of a lot more direct solar to grow food with. By that virtue, you also can garner a lot more power using photovoltaics and similar, which makes the electric lights very easy. You could also just put together a fission reactor and get whatever power you need that way.
You'll need some fancy glass to block some of the UV, etc, from the light so that you don't kill the plants. You'll also need heaters, of course. It wouldn't be that much of a problem. The problem is that *we* aren't very good at growing things that way. Self-contained environments always seem to flop for us...
So... you're a Republican. Republican, meet Democrat. Exactly the same as you, but has a different name.
He's not full of crap. Listen to them speak, read what they actually write, and fill in between the lines. You have support for things like "intelligent design". You have a move towards complete control of the country at the Federal level. You have scandal after scandal. You have the fundamental failure of large portions of foreign policy.
You should think about a few things, too. Do you always vote Republican? That would make you an uninformed voter. Party-line is always the wrong way. Do you believe that your party has different goals than the Democrats? They don't, you know, they just word things different enough to come across as having different goals.
No, the politcal structure of so much of the US is completely screwed up. You have no real choice, all the major candidates are terrible. You have the rapid bloating of the Federal, removal of freedom and liberty, and paranoia has made a big comeback. It's nearly impossible to get real news about *anything*. We're working on wars/conflicts over huge parts of the world. We're entagled in massive amount of treaties and such with so many other countries; some of them bind us to the will of an entity outside of our government.
No, I'd say this administration is having issues with the world. This would be like most other administrations over the last hundred years. Everybody has issues, simply because the world *is* that complex. The issues today are just more plentiful and significant...
Then, I suppose all the silly gamer features, and the light up scroll wheel, wouldn't be very useful, eh? All those buttons that nobody else knows what they do are a great option. Especially when you try to pick it up and press a pile of them.
I use a Gyration wireless mouse on my TV. Normal two button/clickable scroll wheel. But, unlike the Logitech mice, you can use it in mid-air.
Yeah, then you get a mouse that only lasts about a week, and that you can't use if they die early. So you need a backup mouse now, with a cord on it. Which is you will probably keep using since it doesn't die on you.
Also, every rechargable mouse I've used (and that's quite a few) has been a royal pain in the ass. They die more frequently (usually every few days). My wireless mouse makes it around FOUR MONTHS on a single pair of AA batteries. That's an awful lot more convenient.
Actually, I've noticed that mice with rechargable batteries are a *huge* pain in the ass. Not only do you have the annoyance of waiting for them to recharge to use the computer again, you also get shorter battery life.
My Gyration mouse gets about four days on it's Lithium-Ion battery. My Logitech mouse at work gets three to four months on its two disposable AA batteries.
The only reason that I've ever had a wireless mouse on my desktop was when I bought a new workstation at work.
The keyboard that came with it was a Dell special "lets move all the keys around because we hate all humans" type keyboard. I couldn't use it; kept screwing up when trying to hit page up, or home, or an arrow key. I went to a few stores, and the *ONLY* keyboard that wasn't completely garbage was a damned Logitech (eww) wireless keyboard/mouse kit. The keyboard is OK, the mouse is OK. Neither are great, but they work usually. I think the range must be about three feet, unless some paper is in the way, and then it's one foot.
I would love to not have to worry about batteries in my input devices. That's why I don't have wireless stuff for my machine at home. I do have a Gyration wireless kit for my TV, but I use that from 20 feet away. I also replace the batteries in the keyboard once a year. The mouse has to be recharged every few days though, which pisses me off.
I also never have a problem with the cords on my stuff getting tangled. I pull enough cord through my desk, and then position the monitor slightly over it. No more problem.
Yeah, no kidding! You're not the only one that wants a mouse that just works, and that you won't hit fifteen buttons on accidently when you moved it out of the way to reposition your mousepad.
I would love a Sun Type 5 keyboard on my PC, but I haven't found a decent way to make on work without spending 100$. I don't need all the stupid buttons that every keyboard now seems to have. Especially Logitech, those guy are such assholes. I have an iTouch button on my keyboard! And my F keys don't work *by default*! (Also, keyboard that don't have lock key status lights aren't very useful, now are they? Grr... that would be my keyboard at work, also a Logitech unfortunately.)
I've been using a MS Wheel Mouse Optical. It's flimsy, and I had to take it apart and wrap electrical tape all around the inside to blokc out the stupid transparent light-up plastic. But it works, and it has two buttons and a scroll wheel. It was also only 10$, and I've used it for two years. I'd love to be able to buy just a classic MS mouse with optical tracking. The really comfortable ones that had the slight bend to them. Now my choices are all "game mouse ultra super 50-button crap fest of uselessness with extra light up disco ball and subwoofer option".
A thought on a way you've been able to solve that little problem since around 1978. Your keyboard has lights; make one of them flash to indicate you have a waiting message. I've had my IM client do this for me for years.
A few other ideas. The speakers in your monitor are garbage. Rather than throw 60$ in the trash on a crap mouse, buy speakers. You can keep them out of the way, and maybe buy a monitor that isn't annoyingly shaped by virtue of it not having speakers.
Also, there tends to be plenty of ways to have things notify you. First is to understand that you don't need to immediately and instantaneously reply to email. It's only email. Second is that systems have a notification area. If you set it up so that if the email icon is there, then you have mail, then you don't have the trouble any more.
I hate all the stupid lights that get put on computers now. Especially blue lights, they make me not want to buy from the company again. I took apart my mouse to specifically disable any light source that shone through the case. I don't want the distraction.
Also, oddly enough, I find that when I'm using the mouse, I am covering most of it (including all of the scroll wheel), with my hand.
Perhaps that's all that was meant. The quoted bit included that sentence about NVIDIA cards, so I figured that was intentionally included. Since that's a frequent topic of argument on slashdot, it seemed that was the point. ;-)
If it was the ideology vs. practicality, then I would still argue that there wasn't a contradiction. At worst, following that logic is a practical ideology. Realistically, it's just practical to do it that way, since getting liberty back is next to impossible without a revolution. In that context, it is certainly more practical to not give up the liberty to begin with.
Truthfully, I think he was saying that he'd rather his computer works than to have companies and OSS people playing games over it. In context, that would be my guess on what was meant by "politics".
I give these desktop session environments a whirl every now and then. I've always ended up back on my pretty, fast, and unintrustive FVWM setup. Most systems already have it installed, and I wrote my config to fall back gracefully if I was on a system with a 1.x release.
This version of GNOME looks nice, so I'll give it a go. Might be something that I'll like using, but I suspect the footprint will annoy me again. Looks good enough to pursue for Windows to UNIX conversions, at least.
Just a note on video boards, and other expansion cards. You do have to produce hardware specific for your targetted platform. You can't just take a PC targetted card and use it on a Mac or UltraSPARC, despite all being PCI. You have to boostrap the cards differently to get them up and running on each. Things that aren't x86 don't have a BIOS, or ACPI, for example. That means you have to interface to the system differently on boot. You do different things to handshake on the bus, to allocate resources, etc.
;-)
The last two companies that tried to replace x86 and provide instruction compatability had the product line flop pretty hard. They were Transmeta (Crusoe), and Intel (Itanium). It's quite a shame, since both have so much more promise than x86.
A little more on video cards. The cards aren't providing compability for DirectX or OpenGL at all. They simple can do certain things in hardware that each API happens to do. The driver provides the translation from DirectX/OpenGL into whatever the card understands. NVIDIA, for example, has provided the most complete and best accelerated OpenGL implementation on the market for quite a long time now. It's part of their drivers, since you can't exactly send OpenGL across your PCI bus.
Your market for slower and cheaper parts are for embedded, home market, and servers. There is no reason to provide 3d on a server or embedded device, so you don't. You use a low power and cheap video chipset instead. For home market you just shoot for cheap CPU/video/everything else. High performance add-in parts are for the enthusiast, and occasionally for the gaming enthusiast without knowledge of hardware. Why would you pay Dell another 150$ for a card only worth another 75$ if you knew hardware?
You do realize that those aren't contradictory. What NVIDIA does has no bearing on your own security nor your own liberty. You do not have to use their products, and they do not have to do anything more than they want to with same.
Liberty is the government not making laws placing restrictions upon you. It's letting you do what you want to without threat of force against you. Trading freedom for temporary security would be forever giving up some freedoms to be safer for the moment.
NVIDIA is a company; this puts them close to being a citizen. Forcing them to open their drivers would be forcing them to give up their freedom to do as they wish with their product. You aren't giving up any liberty by choosing to use their closed source driver because you aren't forced to use it. In this case, there are both open source drivers, and other vendors to choose from.
You are not giving up freedom by using Windows, MacOS, or Solaris, either. You're just choosing a product that you don't get to peek at under the hood. Saying that NVIDIA is limiting freedom is funny considering that you're using a computer that functions on thousands of components that you aren't able to take apart, change, and put back together, and distribute. It is likely running a lot of software/firmware that you don't have the right to disassemble, modify, and rerelease.
I'm sorry to hear that the UK does the same ridiculous things that most of the US does.
My current area is much better with not overfunding sports than where I grew up. I'd love to see sports be removed from schools entirely, and put in as community focused programs. That seems the most appropriate place to have such programs, as they aren't really school related. Then you still have funded sports, but you aren't funding them with money that is supposed to be for education.
My current area is also just as bad about overfunding technology toys as what you're talking about. That's the way it is all over, unfortunately. The people that want real education seem to be heavily outnumbered by those that think computers will teach their children.
I have to give you that managers are often quite inept. There's a lot of water-cooler theories about that one. ;-) The most likely that I've heard is that the inept type seem to hire other inept types. Then you end up with a managerial infrastructure that makes poor decisions and doesn't understand what they're managing.
Then you have the schools that care about sports more than education. I grew up in a district that spent approx 14mil of their 30mil budget on sports programs. Thanksfully, I had excellent teachers, but that didn't last long after I graduated.
I've seen some pretty crazy things get suggested from teacher groups. I don't know where they get the ideas that most of it will help teach. Then again, I've seen some utterly idiotic ideas come through and sweet through schools. In the area that I live (NorthEast USA), we had a few really choice ones.
Interdependant math courses across three years (sequence math). Each year had parts of algebra, geometry, and trig, and you had to be able to do all of it at the end of each of the classes. The result was that you never finished one of them before moving on to something else. So you were decent at algebra, but horrid at geometry and trig.
Whole language was another one. Instead of teaching phonics and word roots, they taught language one word at a time. The result is a tremendous number of people who can't spell, nearly as many that can barely read, and quite a few illiterate people. Now we have a generation of kids that aren't really fluent in our language.
Then you have the tech obsession. People pouring money into language labs, CAD labs, graphics labs, fancy presentation systems, smart whiteboards, piles of laptops, and computers everywhere they can fit them. I'm not blaming the teachers for that one; it's the fault of teachers *and* administrators. Nobody seems to want to focus on classroom education anymore. They think throwing tech at it will somehow make kids learn better, while ignoring that you still need a solid lesson plan and teachers that keep the kids interested.
Teachers certainly are the most important thing you can put in a school. It's should be getting the good teachers and keeping out the money-sinks and bad managers that's first priority.
Anyway, I probably ranted a bit more than I should've, but there it is.
I'm not sure about VIA. They probably are doing the same thing. At the same time, they're really cheap processors, so they might not have the bells and whistles of the other companies.
I think you may have misunderstood some of what I say.
When I stated that I thought they should've gone with a SCSI based replacement, I mean that they would literally have chosen a particular type of SCSI. For example, Consumer-SCSI = SCSI3-160 w/ SCA LVD connector. There are plenty of devices out there that would match that, so there wouldn't have been a need to wait for drives. Just about everything auto-terminates and auto-ids now, so you wouldn't have needed to worry about which SCSI-ID a device had or anything. It would've provided a lot more exapandability potential, and forever banished the need to have multiple assembly lines for HD manufacturers.
I preferred PCI-X because it did meet the need, had expandibility, was available now, had hardware out, and didn't require repurchase of everything. I agree that having multiple busses wouldn't have been great, but we were already doing that with AGP. The speed hit is annoying, much like it is with USB. I've always been less annoyed with PCIe being chosen than I was with SATA.
Yes, IO-APICs a nice thing for that, finally. I always hated worrying about IRQs, especially when PNP first started and the damnable BIOS kept assigning everything on the same interrupt. Of course, you had no choice in the matter, since there were no jumpers to force settings with PCI. At least that got fixed with BIOS resource allocation tables, and then with APICs.
The funny thing is that ATA started off as a subset of SCSI, back in the 80's. They wanted a stripped down, cheaper variant for the consumer market. So they limited it to two device per port, and a subset of the SCSI command set. Then they didn't change it appreciably for 15 years.
PCIe certainly is having a fight. It further seperates "server-class" from "consumer-class". Some servers are shipping with PCIe now, along with PCI-X, but it's not that common. When PCIe was being standardized, some mainboard manufacturers had just started shipping PCI-X on consumer boards.
Now we have consumer-class - SATA, unbuffered RAM, PCIe - and server-class - SCSI, registered ECC RAM, PCI-X, multiple busses, hardware RAID. I really would've loved to see that server-class stuff trickle into consumer-class so that we could swap around hardware more, and see better prices.
I'm quite serious on that one. The internal instructions on P3, P4, Itanium, Athlon, etc. are not x86 instructions. They're much closer to a RISC architecture with an instruction translator on top.
The execute an instruction you send an opcode to the chip, with certain parameters. Those opcode were what made up the ISA. (ie: MOV, ADD, LEA) Modern chips take those opcodes, and decode them to another set of more simple opcodes. Those are then executed. AMD calls those internal instruction ROPs; Intel calls them micro-ops.
Though it wouldn't be a simple job, they could do decode for another architecture by replacing those decode units. That is was Transmeta was doing with their on-the-fly decode reprogramming.
Intel chose to use a completely different ISA on the Itanium. Because of type of ISA they created, the couldn't just use different decode units since their new one was dramatically different. Instead, they put a complicated emulation layer in that would allow legacy x86 opcodes to execute on the CPU. However, this made that legacy code much slower than native code. It was intended as a transition feature while people moved to Itanium native code.
I don't believe there are any modern processors that execute x86 instrutions on-chip. They all convert x86 to their on-chip instruction set before the execution unit gets ahold of it.
I don't know if you're working in public education, but I'm someone that works in public sector on the government side. I'll give you what is seen from that side of the fence.
Schools tend to account for over 50% of a municipality's budget. In most states, they aren't required to (and sometimes are strictly prohibited from) run their budget as just another government department. Most departments have to justify the need for money, and get approvals for expenditures. Schools get their money, and can move it around and spend it how they like, never requiring authorization from the government body that they're a part of.
That person you're talking about is likely the school system equivalent of a financial board; perhaps a business administrator or similar. They're making sure the budget monies that they get from municipal revenues are being spent in the right places. You don't want to get too detailed, though, because then you have to move money around all the time. You can't just have a massive "teaching" budget, since you need more accountability than that offers.
If you were to do it your way, you would have to allocate a pool of money to each school. Then each school would have to allocate it to different functions, and split the rest among departments, and then among teachers. That would actually reduce flexibility, because each pool of money would be quite small. You would get rid of a few administrators by making everyone be accountants.
As a teacher, your job is first to teach your students. Optimally, you shouldn't be worrying about money at all. You ask for something, and you either get it, or you get some reason why you aren't getting it. That all has to be worked out before budgets are decided. Realistically, you probably are working against a department budget, and have another small budget for your classroom for more specific things. Your department head would seem to be the person to talk to about budgets, or perhaps the school principal.
When the school systems decided their budget, they'll break down system-wide requirements, and lay down the budgets for individual schools. Those school budgets will be decided by talking to each principal and determining requirements. Then they'll go to the municipality and request that amount of money as their department budget. If it is granted, then they're done. Otherwise, they have to go and decide what school things get cut, etc.
Then pricipal of each school determines what they need by determining what the whole school requires, and then what each department within the school needs. If there is a budget cut that hits them, they need to decide what to cut.
That is why you can't just entrust the staff with the budget. There are too many things to consider, many of which are outside of a teacher's expertise. I think you'd find that if you let the teachers decide about the budget, you would have lots of classroom equipment, and buildings/grounds that are falling apart with infrastructures that don't work right. Management is just not what a teacher does, and it isn't likely to turn out well.
Intel certainly misjudged the market with Itanium, which is a shame. It would be wonderful to have chips in the consumer channel that were as good as Alphas, UltraSPARCs, PA-RISCs, etc. There are very good arguments for just dropping x86 as lacking future improvement potential. Intel managed to do that, and still have a compatibility layer for the old x86 software. If they could've gotten the price down on the Itaniums, there would probably have been a good market for them.
Instead, you have companies, like HP, that dropped their own architecture in favor of Itanium, since it *was* good enough to replace their own product. That saves them quite a bit of money.
However, we do just throw out compatability in the x86 world, sometimes. We threw out IDE and replaced it with something new. We do the same for memory interfaces, and expansion interfaces. We move around on RAM like nobody's business (FPM, EDO, SDRAM, DDR, RDRAM, DDR2). SATA already has two versions, USB has three, Firewire has two. At least SATA can be converted to and from IDE, and USB and Firewire are mostly compatible with the other variants within their standard. You can't get rid of your IDE ports, though, because there *still* aren't a huge number of optical devices with SATA ports. Then there's PCIe, which is completely incompatible with PCI/PCI-X.
We change CPU sockets constantly, mucking with the numbers of pins and type of interface. You have vendors that dropped PS/2 ports in favor of USB, but not all boards can emulate PS/2 devices properly for OS' that don't support USB HID.
Most of the time, the PC world comes up with new standards to "fix" the old ones, but ignore existing standards that already do what they're talking about. SATA came about when we could've chosen one of the SCSI standards as the new consumer storage interface. PCIe comes out when we already had PCI-X 2.0. You get something like RDRAM when there was already DDR SDRAM. Rarely are these new things any better, and you end up having to create whole new product lines, too.
The future doesn't look all that much better, either. You have a variety of display interfaces that are being pushed. Optical storage has a ton of different formats, with very little standardization. DRM is getting shoved into everything, making using the computer more difficult.
You might take a glace and think that the industry likes upgrade paths, but if you look a little deeper, you can see they don't. They want a regular stream of new standards that will force everyone to buy all new equipment.
As for evolution of the instruction set... if the ISA is broken, you do have to just throw it out to fix it. That's why all the chips on the market execute totally different instructions on-chip vs. what is being sent to them. x86 exists as nothing more than a compatibility layer for everyone.
Yeah, there are a lot of reasons. These are a few that come to mind: The Itanium was/is incredibly expensive. Too many programmers are incredibly lazy and would have to do more work. Compilers took a little while to get up to speed with IA64. Linux was the only platform that ran on it natively at release.
I would've preferred IA64 to the AMD hybrid. I also hate the stupidity that is the x86 architecture and would love to see it die. Then again, I'd also love to see IDE/SATA die and have the industry come up with a better standard; we could call it SCSI. It's be nice to use standard bus interfaces, too. We could drop PCIe and use PCI-X, instead, and be compatible with all our old PCI and PCI-X cards.
The x86 world seems to always choose the wrong answer when presented with a problem.
What can you do, though. "x86: the worst of *all* worlds."