When I was resting up before flying back home from LSM I was at a hotel [Kyriad rocks btw] with MTV.de and I'd say most of the daytime shows were "pimp my ride" and "newly weds" [genre].
They played some music here and there and showed constantly repetitive SMS ads [e.g. order this ring tone, get this logo, etc].
It's like they forgot that the M stands for Music...
Also if I was a parent I'd buy my kids music on the condition they didn't watch that brainwashing bullshit that is "kids oriented television".
Frankly I'd rather a kid watched a porno then the "chocobot powerhour" that is kids programming...
What I'm saying is diversity and REAL choice is a good thing.
If Dell sold Intel *AND* ARM boxes for instance you'd have a real choice.
If you didn't lock yourself into Windows you could hop from one platform to another, not lose your programs or data. And as for gaming, get a console or two. They're better for gaming IMO and don't care what OS you run on your desktop.
The point is people think they're protected by running only wintel platforms because they don't realize there is an entire other world out there.
Like take office for instance. Only runs [well] on wintel right? What about OpenOffice? Does it only run on wintel? Nope. It also runs on SPARC and PPC in Linux, BSD and MacOS. You can probably build the source on ARM [or if there was a market it would make it there].
The sooner people just ditch windows [as painful as they might be] the better. You're basically delaying what's going to happen anyways. Why not be part of a winning team for a change and just stop trying to patch holes in a crumbling water dam?
As for power, how ignorant you are. A hundred million 400Wh boxes running are 40000MWh of power. Now granted an idle P4 box usually takes around 150Wh when you add in the 60W for the monitor that's 210Wh and you still have 21000MWh of power being used just for idling wintel machines from Dell.
Now swap out that 100W processor for a cheaper, more efficient [but not faster] and lower power ARM core at a top of 1W.... You just dropped 10000MWh of power being drawn. Keep in mind the average nuclear power plant produces less than that. [quick googling puts them in the 2000-2500MWh range].
People just have to be accepting of the fact there are CHOICES out there. Why people feel secure sticking to windows is beyond me. It's just one company which believe it or not could be gone tommorow.
Personally I'd rather be able to choose the hardware/platform combo that suited me, not the producer. I'd like to know if I did make a switch [say PPC to AMD64 or P4 to ARM or....] that I would be able to run the same applications, not lose my data, etc.
Right now windows users who use crap like office don't switch because the cost is too much. So they KEEP USING windows and producing new content on it. Thereby making the cost of switching even higher...
That's not smart, that's not even remotely intelligent.
yeah you have some fixation that cpu determines tools....
I run a dual-core AMD64 [yeah I know that's like the 10th time I've said that on Slashdot, what you wanna fight about it?] using Gentoo Linux.
My work uses Fedora Core on a Pentium4.
Guess what.
Just guess.
Oh come on, guess!
WE USE THE SAME TOOLS!
There is no reason why a ARM based linux box couldn't run GNU tools like gdb, gcc, as, make, etc... and GPL/OSS software like Gnome, xorg-x11, firefox, etc, etc, etc.
It's only idiot windows fanboys and people running very OS specific [e.g. EDA tools] software that think processor dictates OS platform.
Sure I can't use the same x86_64 binaries on an ARM but the software will recompile there just fine.
And you say "low power" as some form of disparraging remark. A 500Mhz ARM is more than powerful enough to run firefox or OpenOffice without being crippling slow.
The reason why those 624Mhz ARM based Axim's can seem slow is that they run wince and usually the cache has been crippled [or reduced].
A 500Mhz ARM with proper 64/64 cache would blow any VIA C3 or oldschool Geode out of the water in terms of MIPS and still take less power.
They're also way more scalable. Take that 500Mhz clock down to a dozen Mhz or so and basically take the same amount of power as a LED [2mA * 9V == 18mW @ 0.25mW/Mhz => 72Mhz ARM]. Granted the power draw doesn't scale linear and is dependent on usage but you can probably pack a good steady 50Mhz into 18mW with a 130nm process at a stable voltage.
Sure if your a developer or artist or performing some simulation you need a very high MIPS level that ARM can't provide.
My point though is for the hundreds of millions of people with [usually multiple] desktops out there a much lower power ARM [or heck even MIPS, but I like ARM better] based computer would be better.
If it means not using windows all the better. Let them use a real operating system like a BSD or Linux distro.
I personally don't really care if people can't use the latest Windows bloatware. It's not a fucking right and it's an eventuallity anyways [e.g. as soon as we hit a good energy crisis or two].
Personally if I owned a computer fab plant I'd edge some new tech in there so I'd be on the ground floor when something else hits big. Right now Dell banks solely on pushing Intel desktops. Look how good sole products work for car dealerships. In north america they're selling cars for less than MRSP because the public simply doesn't want what they have to sell anymore.
Similarly we'll get to a point were a 450Wh desktop is too much for simply checking a recipe online or reading an email and people will start trying to find alternatives.
Now you can be like Dell and HP and Gateway and bank your entire multi-billion dollar business solely on wintel machines. Or you can simultaneously invest into more efficient desktops/laptops that in the end cost the users less [smaller, less battery for laptops, no windows tax, etc...].
I'm also certain a decent ARM [e.g. ARM9 or similar with 64/64 cache and v6 ISA] is a hell of a lot cheaper to fab then a Pentium{4|M}.
On the same 300mm wafer with ~580 P4s you could pack ~21,700 ARM922T cores [according to here]. And the ARM922T is 130nm not 90nm like the prescott.
So clearly the ability to produce a bazillion of these things is there. The OS and associated OSS tools already exist. All that lacks is people smart enough to capitalize on it.
Um, you can build a KDE desktop on an ARM box if you wanted to [or say icewm+firefox].
The point is if people made a market for it and stopped being so arrogant about wintel you'd have proper choices.
You wouldn't be burning a kWh of power to check out the latest "funny haha email"...
But alas that's mostly a strong american philosophy. They think they have choice so they don't like being told there are other alternatives [same argument applies to public transportation in say California].
What questions? I just reread your original reply to me and you didn't have a question.
Anyways, point is the average desktop owner owns a computer that consumes way too much power for the tasks they do.
I'm sure if Dell were to order a couple dozen million ARM based desktops a year [preloaded with some form of Linux] you'd see a huge scene grow around it.
Particularly for laptops it would make sense since ARM processors take less power, are physically smaller and are easier to cool [depending on the Mhz you usually don't even need a HSF]. Lower power means you can cut the battery size/weight as well. Less cooling means you can reduce the size of the laptop overall.
etc, etc...
A 500Mhz frequency scalable ARM [v6 instruction set] with 256M of ram would go along way for 99% of laptop users.
You won't though because Dell is all about money and not about selling a good product. Innovation used to mean a technological innovation now it just means "how to turn that screw tighter".
172K of ram... in a system with a 16-bit bus? You want to rethink that? And what is "slot ram"? Ram only came in one form back then [in consumer quantities] and that was DIP.
Hand tuned a floppy drive with an oscilloscope?... how and what the fuck for?
I might have believed you had you also mentioned "Realigned the state matrix to get more tetreon emissions" or something...
amd64 is the fastest consumer desktop processor but it's hardly the most efficient.
A 25Mhz ARM processor decent cache would be more than enough for typical word processing/email/etc needs. Want multimedia? Ok get an ARM core that can scale the freq and add the v6 SIMD extensions.
For the overwelming vast majority of computer users a simple 1W ARM processor is all that is required.
An ARM920T can hit 250Mhz and requires on average 0.25mW per Mhz. That's roughly 63mW at 250Mhz!!! [see arm922t].
According to ARM this core would achieve roughly 275MIPS at max frequency which is way more than enough to decode a dvd in realtime. Granted you'd want a core with a bit more cache [this comes with 16/16] but even with a maxed out 64/64 cache the power usage at 250Mhz is probably less than 100mW.
For the average word processing task the cpu wouldn't have to clock over 16Mhz or so, which amounts to a power usage of about 4mW which is probably less than the power required for the DRAM in the system.
Heck even the ARM11 MP core would still be well below the power usage of even a VIA C3 and net you four processors in one die. According to ARM [and I think they mean per cpu] it's 0.45mW per cpu per Mhz, so at it's max freq of 550 that's 990mW.
In the MP core each core has it's own L1 data/code cache of upto 64KiB and they can talk to each other over a dedicated bus [like HT in the AMD64]. It's even compatiable with the 2.6 kernels...
Long story short... there are MUCH BETTER processors that desktops could be made of. Just people are tied into believing they need legacy software [hint: if their programs were proper the data formats would be open] or need an Intel...
Tell you what. I'd rather have a four-core ARM11 running my laptop then an AMD XP-M 2400+...
No violence, swearing: For all Violence, no blood, no swearing: 12 Violence with blood & swearing: 15 Drive a car and possibly kill people: 16 Piss away your life in the military: 17 (with parents permission) Extreme violence with blood & swearing: 18 Age you can drink at: 21 Boobies: OH MY GOD 25 AT LEAST WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN??????
Am I the only one who thinks it's odd we let them drive at 16 but they're not mature enough to see breasts yet?
So long as what the computer vendors and hardware manufacturers produce are things people can use and not just buy for the frills of it you'll have sales.
Like yeah, I *could* do my development on a 25Mhz 386 with 16M of ram...
However, I also like 19 second build times, the ability to run more indepth simulations for testing, etc...
So yes, there are needs for things like dual core multiple Ghz processors even if they seem excessive for "word processing".
Unfortunately, the amount of people on earth who truly can benefit from [say] a dual core AMD64 probably can't fill a baseball stadium.
The vast majority of home users are not developers and could easily get away with much smaller computers had their software they chose to run been so crippled.
But what do I care? All these yuppy idiots buying AMD64s to run winxp32 drive the cost down for me. So it's win win;-)
Um, really? You do realize they're mostly the same right? I mean I can tell Keiths from 1664 but I can down both just the same.
And you get a bit more of a buzz which means you don't have to drink as much [or as fast] to get sufficienctly mellow to enjoy the evening [no I don't mean totally out of control drunk].
American 2% beer just annoys me. But that's shit like Coors and what not. I'm sure S.Adams is a mighty fine brew... never tried it, prolly should.
Yes, because 160x160 pictures of the box shit comes in with tiny captions which are poorly transcribed copies of what is on the box... that's enough to make a sale from...
hehehe
Though to be honest I've been lucky and only been burned once [was a screen protector for my Ipaq, the one I ordered, labeled for my ipaq didn't fit and within 30 mins was peeling off].
Does this keep coming up? Hello, here's an idea you're on a network with OTHER PEOPLE.
Sure ddos [say] slashdot.org you'll also take down osdl, anyone at the colo with slashdot, etc, etc...
Seems every 6 months someone comes up with the briliant idea of flooding networks.
You know how you stop spam? You make it totally non profitable. You know how you do that? You stop using a 30 yr old e-mail protocol and add a hashcash or something.
For most uses of email hashcash is good enough. For things like mailing lists a whitelist would work as well.
But of course that's SO F'ING OBVIOUS that nobody will implement it.
Very true. I've been to europe a few times and the coke there tastes just like here in Canada. But the coke in the US [and pepsi] always tastes a bit off.
In NY the coke tastes bitter, on the other coast it tastes a bit bland...
I always just thought Americans were odd and they experimented with the drink to the perfect "user adoption rate".
I never said they were totally free. But what they offer me as a GPU customer is much better than ATI. First off, nvidia laptops work in linux. I own an ATI laptop [well laptop with ATI hardware] and while I can use gfx mode I lose all of the 3d capabilities in hardware.
Nvidia also has 2.4, 2.6 kernel modules for x86_32 AND x86_64.
Maybe ATI is catching up but for the longest while it was a no brainer to go with nvidia.
And yes, as I've said a dozen times before, it would be better if nvidia made the drivers public...
But what you do get uses the GL api [who cares what it is underneath? as long as stimulus + response == standard] which means you're not locked into using nvidia.
Which is why the best thing todo is nothing. If our way of life is so much better eventually natural selection will take it's toll.
It's all this outside interference that makes it screwed up [well at least makes it take way longer than it ought to because in the end natural selection will sort out the west as well].
Just prime directive [ala Star Trek] the motherfuckers and be done with.
Slashdot Mirror
no, STV as in Spewourcarpontheworld TV.
Tom
no, Merde... as in french for SHIT!
Hehehe...
Tom
No, but you can still hide in other rooms and talk quietly.
Tom
That's news to me.
...
When I was resting up before flying back home from LSM I was at a hotel [Kyriad rocks btw] with MTV.de and I'd say most of the daytime shows were "pimp my ride" and "newly weds" [genre].
They played some music here and there and showed constantly repetitive SMS ads [e.g. order this ring tone, get this logo, etc].
It's like they forgot that the M stands for Music
Also if I was a parent I'd buy my kids music on the condition they didn't watch that brainwashing bullshit that is "kids oriented television".
Frankly I'd rather a kid watched a porno then the "chocobot powerhour" that is kids programming...
Tom
6502 perhaps... 68xx series were cooler. Specially the 6809 with it's fully featured indexing modes ;-) oooh dat sexy.
;-)
Actually my first real love in the MCU world was the Atmel AVR series. A real cpu with horrible memory limitations. An engineers dream
Tom
"It's a single-user, low-latency media workstation"
You mean like a VCR?
Hehehe, sorry.
Tom
Conformist.
...].
;-)
You're clearly not into the music but some sick form of groupy love child.
Here's a tip bupsy the ability to write a song isn't solely that of BMG or Sony Music [or
There is a lot of talent out there [and no-talents but that exists in the "industry"] that doesn't or hasn't signed with a label.
Also metal is so 1980s. Cut your hair and join the rest of us in the 2000s
Tom
You're putting words into my post.
....] that I would be able to run the same applications, not lose my data, etc.
What I'm saying is diversity and REAL choice is a good thing.
If Dell sold Intel *AND* ARM boxes for instance you'd have a real choice.
If you didn't lock yourself into Windows you could hop from one platform to another, not lose your programs or data. And as for gaming, get a console or two. They're better for gaming IMO and don't care what OS you run on your desktop.
The point is people think they're protected by running only wintel platforms because they don't realize there is an entire other world out there.
Like take office for instance. Only runs [well] on wintel right? What about OpenOffice? Does it only run on wintel? Nope. It also runs on SPARC and PPC in Linux, BSD and MacOS. You can probably build the source on ARM [or if there was a market it would make it there].
The sooner people just ditch windows [as painful as they might be] the better. You're basically delaying what's going to happen anyways. Why not be part of a winning team for a change and just stop trying to patch holes in a crumbling water dam?
As for power, how ignorant you are. A hundred million 400Wh boxes running are 40000MWh of power. Now granted an idle P4 box usually takes around 150Wh when you add in the 60W for the monitor that's 210Wh and you still have 21000MWh of power being used just for idling wintel machines from Dell.
Now swap out that 100W processor for a cheaper, more efficient [but not faster] and lower power ARM core at a top of 1W.... You just dropped 10000MWh of power being drawn. Keep in mind the average nuclear power plant produces less than that. [quick googling puts them in the 2000-2500MWh range].
People just have to be accepting of the fact there are CHOICES out there. Why people feel secure sticking to windows is beyond me. It's just one company which believe it or not could be gone tommorow.
Personally I'd rather be able to choose the hardware/platform combo that suited me, not the producer. I'd like to know if I did make a switch [say PPC to AMD64 or P4 to ARM or
Right now windows users who use crap like office don't switch because the cost is too much. So they KEEP USING windows and producing new content on it. Thereby making the cost of switching even higher...
That's not smart, that's not even remotely intelligent.
Tom
Drink little I do, much coke I seek.
The taste of rum I know, desire it I do not.
Tom
yeah you have some fixation that cpu determines tools....
I run a dual-core AMD64 [yeah I know that's like the 10th time I've said that on Slashdot, what you wanna fight about it?] using Gentoo Linux.
My work uses Fedora Core on a Pentium4.
Guess what.
Just guess.
Oh come on, guess!
WE USE THE SAME TOOLS!
There is no reason why a ARM based linux box couldn't run GNU tools like gdb, gcc, as, make, etc... and GPL/OSS software like Gnome, xorg-x11, firefox, etc, etc, etc.
It's only idiot windows fanboys and people running very OS specific [e.g. EDA tools] software that think processor dictates OS platform.
Sure I can't use the same x86_64 binaries on an ARM but the software will recompile there just fine.
And you say "low power" as some form of disparraging remark. A 500Mhz ARM is more than powerful enough to run firefox or OpenOffice without being crippling slow.
The reason why those 624Mhz ARM based Axim's can seem slow is that they run wince and usually the cache has been crippled [or reduced].
A 500Mhz ARM with proper 64/64 cache would blow any VIA C3 or oldschool Geode out of the water in terms of MIPS and still take less power.
They're also way more scalable. Take that 500Mhz clock down to a dozen Mhz or so and basically take the same amount of power as a LED [2mA * 9V == 18mW @ 0.25mW/Mhz => 72Mhz ARM]. Granted the power draw doesn't scale linear and is dependent on usage but you can probably pack a good steady 50Mhz into 18mW with a 130nm process at a stable voltage.
Sure if your a developer or artist or performing some simulation you need a very high MIPS level that ARM can't provide.
My point though is for the hundreds of millions of people with [usually multiple] desktops out there a much lower power ARM [or heck even MIPS, but I like ARM better] based computer would be better.
If it means not using windows all the better. Let them use a real operating system like a BSD or Linux distro.
I personally don't really care if people can't use the latest Windows bloatware. It's not a fucking right and it's an eventuallity anyways [e.g. as soon as we hit a good energy crisis or two].
Personally if I owned a computer fab plant I'd edge some new tech in there so I'd be on the ground floor when something else hits big. Right now Dell banks solely on pushing Intel desktops. Look how good sole products work for car dealerships. In north america they're selling cars for less than MRSP because the public simply doesn't want what they have to sell anymore.
Similarly we'll get to a point were a 450Wh desktop is too much for simply checking a recipe online or reading an email and people will start trying to find alternatives.
Now you can be like Dell and HP and Gateway and bank your entire multi-billion dollar business solely on wintel machines. Or you can simultaneously invest into more efficient desktops/laptops that in the end cost the users less [smaller, less battery for laptops, no windows tax, etc...].
I'm also certain a decent ARM [e.g. ARM9 or similar with 64/64 cache and v6 ISA] is a hell of a lot cheaper to fab then a Pentium{4|M}.
P4 Prescott = 109.0mm^2
ARM922T = 3.2mm^2 [with 16/16 cache]
On the same 300mm wafer with ~580 P4s you could pack ~21,700 ARM922T cores [according to here]. And the ARM922T is 130nm not 90nm like the prescott.
So clearly the ability to produce a bazillion of these things is there. The OS and associated OSS tools already exist. All that lacks is people smart enough to capitalize on it.
Tom
Um, you can build a KDE desktop on an ARM box if you wanted to [or say icewm+firefox].
...
The point is if people made a market for it and stopped being so arrogant about wintel you'd have proper choices.
You wouldn't be burning a kWh of power to check out the latest "funny haha email"
But alas that's mostly a strong american philosophy. They think they have choice so they don't like being told there are other alternatives [same argument applies to public transportation in say California].
What questions? I just reread your original reply to me and you didn't have a question.
Anyways, point is the average desktop owner owns a computer that consumes way too much power for the tasks they do.
I'm sure if Dell were to order a couple dozen million ARM based desktops a year [preloaded with some form of Linux] you'd see a huge scene grow around it.
Particularly for laptops it would make sense since ARM processors take less power, are physically smaller and are easier to cool [depending on the Mhz you usually don't even need a HSF]. Lower power means you can cut the battery size/weight as well. Less cooling means you can reduce the size of the laptop overall.
etc, etc...
A 500Mhz frequency scalable ARM [v6 instruction set] with 256M of ram would go along way for 99% of laptop users.
You won't though because Dell is all about money and not about selling a good product. Innovation used to mean a technological innovation now it just means "how to turn that screw tighter".
Tom
Actually the 6502 which ran the Apple II was a 8-bit processor with a 16-bit address bus [do some reading].
Tom
172K of ram... in a system with a 16-bit bus? You want to rethink that? And what is "slot ram"? Ram only came in one form back then [in consumer quantities] and that was DIP.
... how and what the fuck for?
Hand tuned a floppy drive with an oscilloscope?
I might have believed you had you also mentioned "Realigned the state matrix to get more tetreon emissions" or something...
Tom
amd64 is the fastest consumer desktop processor but it's hardly the most efficient.
...
A 25Mhz ARM processor decent cache would be more than enough for typical word processing/email/etc needs. Want multimedia? Ok get an ARM core that can scale the freq and add the v6 SIMD extensions.
For the overwelming vast majority of computer users a simple 1W ARM processor is all that is required.
An ARM920T can hit 250Mhz and requires on average 0.25mW per Mhz. That's roughly 63mW at 250Mhz!!! [see arm922t].
According to ARM this core would achieve roughly 275MIPS at max frequency which is way more than enough to decode a dvd in realtime. Granted you'd want a core with a bit more cache [this comes with 16/16] but even with a maxed out 64/64 cache the power usage at 250Mhz is probably less than 100mW.
For the average word processing task the cpu wouldn't have to clock over 16Mhz or so, which amounts to a power usage of about 4mW which is probably less than the power required for the DRAM in the system.
Heck even the ARM11 MP core would still be well below the power usage of even a VIA C3 and net you four processors in one die. According to ARM [and I think they mean per cpu] it's 0.45mW per cpu per Mhz, so at it's max freq of 550 that's 990mW.
In the MP core each core has it's own L1 data/code cache of upto 64KiB and they can talk to each other over a dedicated bus [like HT in the AMD64]. It's even compatiable with the 2.6 kernels...
Long story short... there are MUCH BETTER processors that desktops could be made of. Just people are tied into believing they need legacy software [hint: if their programs were proper the data formats would be open] or need an Intel...
Tell you what. I'd rather have a four-core ARM11 running my laptop then an AMD XP-M 2400+
Tom
No violence, swearing: For all
Violence, no blood, no swearing: 12
Violence with blood & swearing: 15
Drive a car and possibly kill people: 16
Piss away your life in the military: 17 (with parents permission)
Extreme violence with blood & swearing: 18
Age you can drink at: 21
Boobies: OH MY GOD 25 AT LEAST WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN??????
Am I the only one who thinks it's odd we let them drive at 16 but they're not mature enough to see breasts yet?
So long as what the computer vendors and hardware manufacturers produce are things people can use and not just buy for the frills of it you'll have sales.
;-)
Like yeah, I *could* do my development on a 25Mhz 386 with 16M of ram...
However, I also like 19 second build times, the ability to run more indepth simulations for testing, etc...
So yes, there are needs for things like dual core multiple Ghz processors even if they seem excessive for "word processing".
Unfortunately, the amount of people on earth who truly can benefit from [say] a dual core AMD64 probably can't fill a baseball stadium.
The vast majority of home users are not developers and could easily get away with much smaller computers had their software they chose to run been so crippled.
But what do I care? All these yuppy idiots buying AMD64s to run winxp32 drive the cost down for me. So it's win win
Tom
Um, really? You do realize they're mostly the same right? I mean I can tell Keiths from 1664 but I can down both just the same.
And you get a bit more of a buzz which means you don't have to drink as much [or as fast] to get sufficienctly mellow to enjoy the evening [no I don't mean totally out of control drunk].
American 2% beer just annoys me. But that's shit like Coors and what not. I'm sure S.Adams is a mighty fine brew... never tried it, prolly should.
Tom
Yes, because 160x160 pictures of the box shit comes in with tiny captions which are poorly transcribed copies of what is on the box... that's enough to make a sale from...
hehehe
Though to be honest I've been lucky and only been burned once [was a screen protector for my Ipaq, the one I ordered, labeled for my ipaq didn't fit and within 30 mins was peeling off].
Tom
Does this keep coming up? Hello, here's an idea you're on a network with OTHER PEOPLE.
Sure ddos [say] slashdot.org you'll also take down osdl, anyone at the colo with slashdot, etc, etc...
Seems every 6 months someone comes up with the briliant idea of flooding networks.
You know how you stop spam? You make it totally non profitable. You know how you do that? You stop using a 30 yr old e-mail protocol and add a hashcash or something.
For most uses of email hashcash is good enough. For things like mailing lists a whitelist would work as well.
But of course that's SO F'ING OBVIOUS that nobody will implement it.
But I'm also the dude with a watercool AMDX2, laptop, stereo, garmin gps, two mp3 players, etc, etc.... ;-)
It would be fairly cool just to have it light up and all... though a horrible waste of power I'd say [though small by comparison].
Tom
So what you're saying is ... we make the better soft drink, beer and new age female pop stars...
;-)
booyah
hehehehe...
Tom
Very true. I've been to europe a few times and the coke there tastes just like here in Canada. But the coke in the US [and pepsi] always tastes a bit off.
In NY the coke tastes bitter, on the other coast it tastes a bit bland...
I always just thought Americans were odd and they experimented with the drink to the perfect "user adoption rate".
Tom
I never said they were totally free. But what they offer me as a GPU customer is much better than ATI. First off, nvidia laptops work in linux. I own an ATI laptop [well laptop with ATI hardware] and while I can use gfx mode I lose all of the 3d capabilities in hardware.
Nvidia also has 2.4, 2.6 kernel modules for x86_32 AND x86_64.
Maybe ATI is catching up but for the longest while it was a no brainer to go with nvidia.
And yes, as I've said a dozen times before, it would be better if nvidia made the drivers public...
But what you do get uses the GL api [who cares what it is underneath? as long as stimulus + response == standard] which means you're not locked into using nvidia.
Tom
Which is why the best thing todo is nothing. If our way of life is so much better eventually natural selection will take it's toll.
It's all this outside interference that makes it screwed up [well at least makes it take way longer than it ought to because in the end natural selection will sort out the west as well].
Just prime directive [ala Star Trek] the motherfuckers and be done with.
Tom
google and gmail are the largest data mining operations on Earth. Ever.
If you think google gets nothing out of running those services you're sadly mistaken.
Tom