Opportunity was missed a few years ago, when certain 64 bit non-intel systems were capable of emulating 32 bit x86 code faster than similarly priced wintel machines ran it natively.
The performance gap no longer is big enough for a platform switch to be worth it, and no companies other than IBM and Intel are big enough to continue developing CPUs competitively. I dont see how anything other than a well aimed nuclear strike can change this.
IBM has a very good 64 bit CPU available. HP recently aquired the Alpha, SUN and SGI have 64 bit CPUs, thought apparently not very good ones. None will run windows software natively, but apparently neither will the intel one, so why not take this opportunity to dump the i86 architecture altogether?
What percentage of transistors on the PIV was devoted entirely to backwards compatibility again?
Re:Enviorment, not Genes for personality...
on
The Taste of Pain
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yeah, and what's more, why aren't all americans violent religious zelots?
Its not an alternative to litigation imo. The net result is still the same: opera users get garbled pages when looking at msn.com
What do you think Time/Warner would do if Microsoft happened to control 90% of the worlds cable television subscriptions and decided to broadcast CNN only with the image shifted partially off the TV screen, in order to promote their own MSN/NBC ?
What would Daimler-Crysler do if Microsoft controlled 90% of the worlds petrol stations, and suddenly decided from now on petrol would be poured about a foot to the left of your car rather than into your petrol tank, if you happen to drive a Mercedes?
Solarisx86 was available free or at a symbolic price years ago. I fell for it, and besides not working properly, it managed to destroy my CD-ROM by making the arm whack back and forth violently all the time during the painstakingly slow installation process.
For a single CPU low end box used for non commercial purposes, there were no advantages at all, and it took a lot of effort to get (most of) your linux or *BSD software compiled and running on it
It was interesting for learning purposes though.
Do you know if it is any more suitable for a PC now? Taking into account that the average PC now is about 5 to 10 times more powerful, and Solarisx86 has been developed for a few years more?
One of our customers still uses a 13 yr old version of our product! They were happy with the way it worked, and are only upgrading now.
You probably squeeze more money out of a company if you sell them Wintel products, as they would need upgrades every year or two and a lot of tech support...
Is mannes space flight still really worth the trouble? We have excellent computers and communications technology now, cheap, small, replaceable computers, that do not need a life support system or atmosphere, does not need the extra expenses in redundancy and security that manned space flight needs, and if something goes wrong, only money is lost, no lives.
Basically with unmanned space flight you get far more value for money at a far lower risk...
The AS/400 and its predecessors have had a database oriented file sysem for centuries (in Moore-law years).
I find it a nuicance from a programmer's point of view, and indeed it can get quite messy when you have about 100 different Libraries on your 400, each with a few dozen Objects, some of them with another few hundred members etc etc. From the point of view of the application, and the end user (who will typically have only a single version of a few applications installed on his dedicated database server), it is the greatest thing since sliced silicon.
I think it predates the hierarchical filesystem by a lifetime as well (again in Moore's law years).
I agree. With a chemistry set you can do 19th century chemistry. It will be of no use whatsoever to prepare for a return to school.
A much better preparation for a chemistry course would be brushing up your statistical mathematics and linear algebra, mixing chemicals is engineering, not chemistry nowadays.
If Washington were to impose a boycott on China, or export restrictions on certain technology, they would not be able to buy new CPU's. This could harm a rapidly growing economy more than it would harm the military.
Its not really relevant that Washington would probably never do that, what is relevant is that they could. During the cold war, export of advanced technology to communist countries was tightly controlled for example. It has happened before.
It is just like the question why China felt the need to start their own space program when they could have their satelites put in orbit reliably and cheaply by the Russians. They didnt want to completely depend on that, nor did they want the Russians to always exactly know what the Chinese were putting in orbit and for what purpose.
There is probably also the ideological factor. Self sufficiency was always high on the list of ideological priorities for the ruling party. It has been one of the pillars of Maoist ideology no longer to depend on the former western colonial powers (yes, the USA too occupied parts of Chinese cities in the 19th century and used military power to advance business interests, just like the Europeans did). North Korea has taken this to extreme levels for example, it resembles a Theocracy more than a mere communist dictatorship. Ideological, rather than rational motivations are not always entirely logical. This is no different with our own western liberal ideology.
What would a 386, 486 or pentium with windows and a NIC cost nowadays? Up to $50? It would still execute those old x86 apps and games fastre and probably more reliably... This sounds like a university research project. Useless but cool.
Ask yourself, have you ever really seen the moon? I thought not. Sure, you see a luminous object in the sky from time to time, but that could be anything. Most likely it is a remnant of the cold war. Do you think it is coincidence that prior 1945 not a single reference or mention has been made of this so called "moon". The ancient egyptians were avid star gazers. Don't you think it is a little bit odd that they never even noticed this so called "moon"? And how about Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, none of them ever bothered to mention this so called "moon".
I pose to you, that prior to 1945 this "moon" did not exist, and that what we now call the "moon" is in fact a nuclear weapon.
Something like that already exists over here. Of the price of any blank writable CD the bulk goes to our equivalent of the RIAA. Even if you use it to backup data or software or pictures, or record your own music on it in your home studio. Blank CDs cost about the same as recorded ones because of this.
You have to actively disable it in Windows 2000 advanced server release if you dont have macs on your network, installed by default and easy to configure. Thats only $4000, not including the cost of the sys admin that you will need to hire.
Heh, 1000 comments so noone is going to read this.
The BBC micro's response to trying to renumber a BASIC source with steps of 0:
Silly.
Re:Monsanto akin to evil corporations from the mov
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
Selling third world farmers infertile seeds so they have to keep buying your seeds with the full knowledge that these sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile is so nefarious, mere words cannot convey the feelings of disgust I feel.
It is more offensive that they use planes to spray herbicide over fields of farmers who refuse to buy their product, just to see if their crop is resistant, and then sueing those farmers whose seed stock was pollenated by their neighbours monsanto patented GM crop.
Patenting genes is infinitely more evil than software patents...
You have no idea how unhappy most people with autism related disorders are.
All the things that nearly everyone considers the most important things in life, such as friendship, love, social acceptance, relationships are made incredibly difficult. This is not just the prejudice of society, the attempts at social interaction by people with low emotional intelligence really are incredibly annoying, and often downright hurtful.
Autism related disorders do not make someone more intelligent or more apt at technical skills. It is just that certain technical- or scientific fields are the only way in which some of them can find a place in society. The ones that don't have these skills, often end up as the smelly homeless people you step over in the street.
Neither is autism a prerequisition for success in a technical profession. Believe it or not, most highly intelligent people are also highly social. Looking at students in university, the most successful ones are usually the highly social ones, and *not* the complete and utter spods.
Limited social intelligence and fine motor control can make life a living hell, especially for kids. It is a disability that has a very severe impact on the quality of life. To suggest it is merely a 'perception problem' of society is no different from claiming deafness isn't a disability, but our cultures reliance on sound is.
Slashdot Mirror
Opportunity was missed a few years ago, when certain 64 bit non-intel systems were capable of emulating 32 bit x86 code faster than similarly priced wintel machines ran it natively.
The performance gap no longer is big enough for a platform switch to be worth it, and no companies other than IBM and Intel are big enough to continue developing CPUs competitively. I dont see how anything other than a well aimed nuclear strike can change this.
IBM has a very good 64 bit CPU available. HP recently aquired the Alpha, SUN and SGI have 64 bit CPUs, thought apparently not very good ones. None will run windows software natively, but apparently neither will the intel one, so why not take this opportunity to dump the i86 architecture altogether?
What percentage of transistors on the PIV was devoted entirely to backwards compatibility again?
Yeah, and what's more, why aren't all americans violent religious zelots?
uhm, wait a minute...
Green shirt with blue pants is a good combination!
Where can I buy it?
Its not an alternative to litigation imo. The net result is still the same: opera users get garbled pages when looking at msn.com
What do you think Time/Warner would do if Microsoft happened to control 90% of the worlds cable television subscriptions and decided to broadcast CNN only with the image shifted partially off the TV screen, in order to promote their own MSN/NBC ?
What would Daimler-Crysler do if Microsoft controlled 90% of the worlds petrol stations, and suddenly decided from now on petrol would be poured about a foot to the left of your car rather than into your petrol tank, if you happen to drive a Mercedes?
Solarisx86 was available free or at a symbolic price years ago. I fell for it, and besides not working properly, it managed to destroy my CD-ROM by making the arm whack back and forth violently all the time during the painstakingly slow installation process.
For a single CPU low end box used for non commercial purposes, there were no advantages at all, and it took a lot of effort to get (most of) your linux or *BSD software compiled and running on it
It was interesting for learning purposes though.
Do you know if it is any more suitable for a PC now? Taking into account that the average PC now is about 5 to 10 times more powerful, and Solarisx86 has been developed for a few years more?
One of our customers still uses a 13 yr old version of our product! They were happy with the way it worked, and are only upgrading now.
You probably squeeze more money out of a company if you sell them Wintel products, as they would need upgrades every year or two and a lot of tech support...
Is mannes space flight still really worth the trouble? We have excellent computers and communications technology now, cheap, small, replaceable computers, that do not need a life support system or atmosphere, does not need the extra expenses in redundancy and security that manned space flight needs, and if something goes wrong, only money is lost, no lives.
Basically with unmanned space flight you get far more value for money at a far lower risk...
I think Red Hat is a couple of orders of magnitiude too small for that :)
There is a reason why there are only about half a dozen companies in the world that can afford to develop high end CPUs
I've never seen a 400 without the library file system... New ones will have the IFS on top of it though.
The AS/400 and its predecessors have had a database oriented file sysem for centuries (in Moore-law years).
I find it a nuicance from a programmer's point of view, and indeed it can get quite messy when you have about 100 different Libraries on your 400, each with a few dozen Objects, some of them with another few hundred members etc etc. From the point of view of the application, and the end user (who will typically have only a single version of a few applications installed on his dedicated database server), it is the greatest thing since sliced silicon.
I think it predates the hierarchical filesystem by a lifetime as well (again in Moore's law years).
I agree. With a chemistry set you can do 19th century chemistry. It will be of no use whatsoever to prepare for a return to school.
A much better preparation for a chemistry course would be brushing up your statistical mathematics and linear algebra, mixing chemicals is engineering, not chemistry nowadays.
If Washington were to impose a boycott on China, or export restrictions on certain technology, they would not be able to buy new CPU's. This could harm a rapidly growing economy more than it would harm the military.
Its not really relevant that Washington would probably never do that, what is relevant is that they could. During the cold war, export of advanced technology to communist countries was tightly controlled for example. It has happened before.
It is just like the question why China felt the need to start their own space program when they could have their satelites put in orbit reliably and cheaply by the Russians. They didnt want to completely depend on that, nor did they want the Russians to always exactly know what the Chinese were putting in orbit and for what purpose.
There is probably also the ideological factor. Self sufficiency was always high on the list of ideological priorities for the ruling party. It has been one of the pillars of Maoist ideology no longer to depend on the former western colonial powers (yes, the USA too occupied parts of Chinese cities in the 19th century and used military power to advance business interests, just like the Europeans did). North Korea has taken this to extreme levels for example, it resembles a Theocracy more than a mere communist dictatorship. Ideological, rather than rational motivations are not always entirely logical. This is no different with our own western liberal ideology.
What would a 386, 486 or pentium with windows and a NIC cost nowadays? Up to $50? It would still execute those old x86 apps and games fastre and probably more reliably... This sounds like a university research project. Useless but cool.
My TiVo thinks I'm a sad geek with no life and a problem with alcohol and impulsive violence...
My TiVo is my only friend!
Did you know the word gullible isn't in any dictionary ?
Ask yourself, have you ever really seen the moon? I thought not. Sure, you see a luminous object in the sky from time to time, but that could be anything. Most likely it is a remnant of the cold war. Do you think it is coincidence that prior 1945 not a single reference or mention has been made of this so called "moon". The ancient egyptians were avid star gazers. Don't you think it is a little bit odd that they never even noticed this so called "moon"? And how about Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, none of them ever bothered to mention this so called "moon".
I pose to you, that prior to 1945 this "moon" did not exist, and that what we now call the "moon" is in fact a nuclear weapon.
Something like that already exists over here. Of the price of any blank writable CD the bulk goes to our equivalent of the RIAA. Even if you use it to backup data or software or pictures, or record your own music on it in your home studio. Blank CDs cost about the same as recorded ones because of this.
You have to actively disable it in Windows 2000 advanced server release if you dont have macs on your network, installed by default and easy to configure. Thats only $4000, not including the cost of the sys admin that you will need to hire.
Heh, 1000 comments so noone is going to read this.
The BBC micro's response to trying to renumber a BASIC source with steps of 0:
Silly.
Selling third world farmers infertile seeds so they have to keep buying your seeds with the full knowledge that these sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile is so nefarious, mere words cannot convey the feelings of disgust I feel.
It is more offensive that they use planes to spray herbicide over fields of farmers who refuse to buy their product, just to see if their crop is resistant, and then sueing those farmers whose seed stock was pollenated by their neighbours monsanto patented GM crop.
Patenting genes is infinitely more evil than software patents...
Never try to self diagnose...
You have no idea how unhappy most people with autism related disorders are.
All the things that nearly everyone considers the most important things in life, such as friendship, love, social acceptance, relationships are made incredibly difficult. This is not just the prejudice of society, the attempts at social interaction by people with low emotional intelligence really are incredibly annoying, and often downright hurtful.
Autism related disorders do not make someone more intelligent or more apt at technical skills. It is just that certain technical- or scientific fields are the only way in which some of them can find a place in society. The ones that don't have these skills, often end up as the smelly homeless people you step over in the street.
Neither is autism a prerequisition for success in a technical profession. Believe it or not, most highly intelligent people are also highly social. Looking at students in university, the most successful ones are usually the highly social ones, and *not* the complete and utter spods.
Limited social intelligence and fine motor control can make life a living hell, especially for kids. It is a disability that has a very severe impact on the quality of life. To suggest it is merely a 'perception problem' of society is no different from claiming deafness isn't a disability, but our cultures reliance on sound is.
At $3000? no way.
:)
And in my case: not ever at any conceivable price, I'm far too vain to buzz around in such an uncool vehicle