I don't see why. CDs are physically cheaper to make. Think about it, even at commodity prices even things like 8051s are still $1 or two per chip if not more. And they've been around longer than the CD.
Integrated circuits are more expensive to make than pressed pieces of plastic/metal. And always will be.
In any case, the point is that other architectures CAN perform far better than x86 without the variable opcode length, prefixing and other nonsense. They don't produce large amounts of executable either.
How many of them can natively run code written for the 16-bit variant of their line that was produced 30 years ago?
While most would claim that native 8086 and heck even 32-bit pmode support really isn't needed in the day and age of "long mode," dropping them would be a huge pain and at that point you might as well just go straight to a new ISA.
However, that said, it's still kinda cool that you can boot something as primitive as DOS on a box made today. Not that I have install media around... or run MSFT OSes...
Um, 2-4Gbyte flash drives are already commonly available. The loss versus a CD is the cost. A CD probably costs a penny or two to make in bulk (not including fixed overhead), whereas a 4GB flash costs $60.
So instead of buying a game for $50 you'd pay $110 just to have it on a flash drive?
Where this may actually come in handy, hint: recycling, is you buy a game at a store, they load YOUR thumb drive with the installer, you can then back it up if you want to. Thus eliminating the waste of shipping, packaging, and media.
That's less true than you think. I walked into a Zellers a couple months ago [zellers is basically like a Target or K-Mart] and they had two just sitting there in the display case.
I think nowadays you're more likely to find one than say 6 months ago.
This is about the 3rd or 4th comment along these lines. Slashdot is not a social networking website. It's a new aggregator that allows users to comment on things.
If you're going to associate things, make sure they're at least comparable.
And slashdot isn't full of little kids, it's full of angry depressed A-type personalities who think the "Internet Meanie/Tough Guy (tm)" routine is original. That they have to be pricks to feel good about themselves... On facebook they're not overtly mean, just really stupid.
Do what you want. I don't judge the quality of my life by the number of friends, but yet, the quality of friends. And while I'm not blessed with an easy life, or even a pleasant personality, I really don't "miss" not having 3000 friends who hang around, but wouldn't get my back when I need them.
But given you know jack all about my life, I won't take your "pity" at any value other than a passing sentiment no more important than a smile at a cute girl at the cinema. (i.e., after this post I won't think about it again)
I've "met" a half dozen people from my high school days. And beyond the initial "hey!" messages on Facebook we haven't spoken or written a word since. We weren't really friends then, and we're not now. Just because we went through the same schools and happen to know each others names and faces, doesn't make us "friends."
And the couple of friends I did make in college and since, I'm in touch with outside of "the net." If I want to know what my friends are up to I just call them and drop by.
Not younger, stupider. I've seen 30-something people type like "u r having a good times lolz? sees you at the pubs" and all that shit. Let's face it, 90% of the world is full of really stupid people, a good 9% of the remainder are moderately smart, and the last 1% are the genius academic monkey type. I'm in the 9% group or so. So while I'm not a brainer, I do appreciate an occasional well constructed sentence, properly spelled words, and maybe a conversation beyond the level of "let's get us some drank!"
And yeah, I've hit the crossing point where most people in "movies of the summer" are younger than me, which is sad given I'm only 25...
I was on facebook for kicks and I quickly realized it's full of little kids and their horrible grammar. In every group I joined [from singles groups to music/piano player groups] there was a continual barrage of horribly misspelled postings, lots of retarded "lols" and all that jazz. Nobody takes any of the serious chatter serious, and the fun chatter is just asinine like "join this group to keep facebook alive!" or whatever.
Frankly, if you're not a moron, or some attention whoring pre-schooler, I don't see why people would care about it. Not like the "friends" you have online map to anything realistic in the "real world." And no, joining the "let's keep facebook!" group won't influence whether facebook is alive and kicking or not.
This isn't fucking word association, pay attention. We're talking MSFT products. As in, if you haven't used a bunch of them [say from the DOS days onwards] you probably don't have anything to bitch about.
That's the stupidest rant I've read all day. It's only cool to hate on MSFT if you're old enough to remember using DOS. If your entry to computers was Windows 98 you might as well shut up since you don't know what you're missing anyways.
That said, not an MSFT fan in the slightest, but if you're going to rant against them at least make sense and stop pulling rancid poser comments out of your ass.
I think it's the opposite. I think most people are capable of advanced lines of thought, they just choose not to because to them it's work.
Like, if they have to use a password that is hard to guess [er, remember] then they look at the service as "unfriendly." If they have to wrap their minds around trivial concepts like public and private keys, then the solution is too hard (honestly, if you can't figure out public/private keys you're probably operating on the mentality level of a severely retarded 8 yr old).
I'm sorry, but at the age of 14 I was capable of figuring out on a high level how RSA worked. I didn't understand all of the math, but I at least got the idea that the private key decrypts what the public key encrypts, how to distribute them, etc. And that was almost 12 years ago when the PGP was less common place.
We have technology that can trivially encrypt/sign your emails, like pgp and enigmail. Just people refuse to spend the 15 mins it takes to learn the software because *throws up hands* it's too hard. Face it, people are lazy, deceitful creatures that seem to blame everyone but themselves for their shortcommings. (and yes, I misspelled that word because my browser failed to correct for me!).
Should point out that hacking is not a crime, never has been, never will be [at least without totally eroding all freedoms first]. A hacker is simply someone who takes the time to see how the world around them works. They're not script monkeys who instigate virus attacks, those are criminals.
Stop reading/watching Faux News et al. and get your damn facts straight.
People should be able to call themselves a hacker without fear of reprisal, for it's the hackers who will inevitably find many of the flaws in the world that the corporate greedmongers want hidden. I mean who do you think are the people finding all of the buffer overflows, protocol mistakes, etc in services you use on a daily basis? If hackers went away companies could easily get away with insecure practices and billing like however they feel like.
It's the people who stop questioning how the world works that should get a bitchslap upside the head.
Back it up to something with at least 60G of usable space? An 80G drive is only 64$ CAD or so. If the data is that important you'll just buy a USB enclosure, 80G drive and copy it overnight.
It's like the people who bitch at how bad customs are in the states or how it's nearly a "police state." Yet, every time I fly to the states customs is a breeze, and when I get where I'm going people are not mean or out to get me or whatever.
Personally I'm not against going to China because of the government. Mostly, I'd be afraid of getting lost in the noise. So many people, where English isn't a dominant or common language. Would be a hell of an experience trying to get around.
Wow, defensive much? Maybe you're just rationalizing your poor driving skills?
In my case what happened was I was merging right onto a road (with the little pedestrian triangle island thingy). There was a pedestrian crossing so I stopped before the lines, then after I stopped on the other side [like you're supposed to] to wait for the cars going straight to pass by. The guy behind me thought I was just gonna "gun it" [his words] to get in front of the car that was coming. Sadly, that's not how the law works, you yield right of way to flow through traffic. In either case, he should have been going slow enough to stop in a hurry. Most likely, he too was looking down the on coming lane and didn't see that I had stopped. In short, he was too impatient and not paying attention.
Despite what you said, I actually commit to my mistakes. For example, if I get in the wrong lane, say I get in a turning lane by accident. I don't weave around to get out, I just take the turn like a man, then find a place to pull a u-turn and get back to the right direction. Similarly, if I'm too close to stop at a yellow, I don't slam on the breaks, I just keep up the pace and go through the yellow, etc.
You can drive at the appropriate speed and not be an unsafe unaware driver. In fact, most people probably speed not because they're aware of the speed they're doing but because they just put their foot to the pedal and find whatever speed "feels right." I mean honestly, probably less than 1% of cars in the city use cruise control. Which is why their speed is rolling up and down all over the place. I on the other hand, have no problem using cruise control on about 95% of my trip into work (in city driving, over about 12km). Not only do I save on gas, but my speed is predictable which in turn makes me a safe driver not only through my actions, but because any aware driver around me would be able to predict my speed and actions as well.
Again, this isn't about "can he pull it off". What if someone merged lanes inappropriately in front of him? Sure they'd be at fault, but at 140mph the accident will be a lot more fatal than it would at 65mph [or 55 whatever the limit may be].
Believe it or not, actually I don't give a shit if you believe it or not, speed limits aren't to impose the mans will on the little guy. They're actually there for a reason. Until you can admit that speed limits serve a purpose, you shouldn't be driving on the road.
That said, I too agree that in certain areas it's likely that a higher limit will be statistically indistinguishable in terms of safety as a lower limit. However, unless you change the limit or the law, that's not how to act. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and in many cases it actually doesn't matter. Speeding in the city, for example, usually does not get you any further ahead than people who do the limit [I know, I catch up to them all the time on my trips to/from work]. So why bother wasting the fuel and wear on the car accelerating to stupid speeds just to slam on the brakes at the next red.
And on longer trips it rarely matters anyways. For example, to my brothers place is 494km. At the posted limits, it would take about 5h29m to get there. At 10 over [100kph] it would take 4h56m, and at 15 over it would all ttake 4h42m. Yet in reality, when I did the trip last at 105kph on cruise [where I could] it actually took about 5h20m anyways. Basically, at best, doing 10-15 over "makes up" for all the stop/go that happens around the cities where there are intersections. In reality, on that trip, you'd have to try and pull off like 120kph [30 over] to really make a dent in the ETA. At that speed, you're going way too fast [most sections are unlit, curvy, and through hills], and will get pulled over. So it's best to do the limit, or 10 over, and just take it easy.
This guy was doing way more than a mere 18mph over the limit, when you start hitting 70mph over the limit that's just excessive, insane, and very dangerous [despite what he might have said]. Sure the car could take it, but the roads can't.
Unless you're buying a $50 tv from Walmart, it will have some combination of component, svideo, ybrcr or coax. And for the record, my digital receiver [like probably most others] will output in composite or coax. So unless your TV only comes with UHF antenna hookups, it will be able to use the receiver.
I'm sorry but I just don't see it as a valid excuse. Maybe if all digital receivers only output'ed HDMI or whatever, then maybe sure. But they'd be stupid to kneecap their market without at least component outputs.
All this initiative is about is to stop wasting RF bandwidth with analogue TV signals. It wastes a lot of bandwidth that could be better used with digital broadcasts (which take less RF bandwidth). This isn't about trashing component/coax outputs. In fact, it has nothing to do with over coax analogue either (though I suspect they'll stop around the same time).
Where I live you can buy a digital receiver [standard def] for like $100, or rent one for $4/mo from the provider. If you can afford cable, chances are you can afford a $100 receiver. And with that you get a way better signal [at least compared to normal analogue coax], and on some channels 5.1 surround. Oh the horror.
What's wrong with attaching a digital receiver to your analogue tv? I mean Analogue TV just means the encoding of the signal. no reason a digital receiver couldn't output as component, svideo, or YBrCr [sp?]. If you bought a tv in the last 10 years that doesn't have component input, you either shop at the salvation army, or got ripped off. Hint: Most video game consoles have component outputs since the N64 days [and earlier]. That's more than 15 years ago.
Right now I have "digital cable" attached via component to my NTSC standard def TV. Works just fine. And it's hardly a fancy tv. I basically bought the first run of a mill 27" TV I saw.
Well strictly speaking digital content requires less bandwidth, which means you could pack more content in the same band. It's also more tolerant to noise which means the picture is either there or not [and more likely to be there than not].
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but we're a long way off from $2 flash drives
And at anyrate, if you're just packing it, why not make it a "rom drive?" That'd be cheaper.
The idea I was suggesting is to re-use an existing product. As in, you can go and get a new game stored on your flash.
Tom
I don't see why. CDs are physically cheaper to make. Think about it, even at commodity prices even things like 8051s are still $1 or two per chip if not more. And they've been around longer than the CD.
Integrated circuits are more expensive to make than pressed pieces of plastic/metal. And always will be.
Tom
In any case, the point is that other architectures CAN perform far better than x86 without the variable opcode length, prefixing and other nonsense. They don't produce large amounts of executable either.
... or run MSFT OSes ...
How many of them can natively run code written for the 16-bit variant of their line that was produced 30 years ago?
While most would claim that native 8086 and heck even 32-bit pmode support really isn't needed in the day and age of "long mode," dropping them would be a huge pain and at that point you might as well just go straight to a new ISA.
However, that said, it's still kinda cool that you can boot something as primitive as DOS on a box made today. Not that I have install media around
Tom
Um, 2-4Gbyte flash drives are already commonly available. The loss versus a CD is the cost. A CD probably costs a penny or two to make in bulk (not including fixed overhead), whereas a 4GB flash costs $60.
So instead of buying a game for $50 you'd pay $110 just to have it on a flash drive?
Where this may actually come in handy, hint: recycling, is you buy a game at a store, they load YOUR thumb drive with the installer, you can then back it up if you want to. Thus eliminating the waste of shipping, packaging, and media.
Tom
Well yeah questions not asked/answered
...
1. Yield, what are the production hazards, just because it's smaller than NAND flash doesn't mean it's cheaper.
2. Wear. How many re-writes can it suffer?
3. What temperatures can it run at, etc, etc, etc
Tom
That's less true than you think. I walked into a Zellers a couple months ago [zellers is basically like a Target or K-Mart] and they had two just sitting there in the display case.
I think nowadays you're more likely to find one than say 6 months ago.
Tom
This is why being a pedantic little ass-clown isn't fun. So don't do it.
This is about the 3rd or 4th comment along these lines. Slashdot is not a social networking website. It's a new aggregator that allows users to comment on things.
If you're going to associate things, make sure they're at least comparable.
And slashdot isn't full of little kids, it's full of angry depressed A-type personalities who think the "Internet Meanie/Tough Guy (tm)" routine is original. That they have to be pricks to feel good about themselves... On facebook they're not overtly mean, just really stupid.
Do what you want. I don't judge the quality of my life by the number of friends, but yet, the quality of friends. And while I'm not blessed with an easy life, or even a pleasant personality, I really don't "miss" not having 3000 friends who hang around, but wouldn't get my back when I need them.
But given you know jack all about my life, I won't take your "pity" at any value other than a passing sentiment no more important than a smile at a cute girl at the cinema. (i.e., after this post I won't think about it again)
Tom
This.
I've "met" a half dozen people from my high school days. And beyond the initial "hey!" messages on Facebook we haven't spoken or written a word since. We weren't really friends then, and we're not now. Just because we went through the same schools and happen to know each others names and faces, doesn't make us "friends."
And the couple of friends I did make in college and since, I'm in touch with outside of "the net." If I want to know what my friends are up to I just call them and drop by.
Not younger, stupider. I've seen 30-something people type like "u r having a good times lolz? sees you at the pubs" and all that shit. Let's face it, 90% of the world is full of really stupid people, a good 9% of the remainder are moderately smart, and the last 1% are the genius academic monkey type. I'm in the 9% group or so. So while I'm not a brainer, I do appreciate an occasional well constructed sentence, properly spelled words, and maybe a conversation beyond the level of "let's get us some drank!"
...
And yeah, I've hit the crossing point where most people in "movies of the summer" are younger than me, which is sad given I'm only 25
I was on facebook for kicks and I quickly realized it's full of little kids and their horrible grammar. In every group I joined [from singles groups to music/piano player groups] there was a continual barrage of horribly misspelled postings, lots of retarded "lols" and all that jazz. Nobody takes any of the serious chatter serious, and the fun chatter is just asinine like "join this group to keep facebook alive!" or whatever.
Frankly, if you're not a moron, or some attention whoring pre-schooler, I don't see why people would care about it. Not like the "friends" you have online map to anything realistic in the "real world." And no, joining the "let's keep facebook!" group won't influence whether facebook is alive and kicking or not.
Tom
Ahhh let's stop fighting. We both hate MSFT, that's good enough in my books.
This isn't fucking word association, pay attention. We're talking MSFT products. As in, if you haven't used a bunch of them [say from the DOS days onwards] you probably don't have anything to bitch about.
That's the stupidest rant I've read all day. It's only cool to hate on MSFT if you're old enough to remember using DOS. If your entry to computers was Windows 98 you might as well shut up since you don't know what you're missing anyways.
That said, not an MSFT fan in the slightest, but if you're going to rant against them at least make sense and stop pulling rancid poser comments out of your ass.
64Gbit is only 8Gbyte which is still fairly big, but not enough to store 40 DVD movies (hell it could hardly hold two).
Me thinks whomever wrote the summary was a bit off to lunch that day.
Tom
Yeah except that 128Gbit is 16Gbyte.
Tom
I think it's the opposite. I think most people are capable of advanced lines of thought, they just choose not to because to them it's work.
Like, if they have to use a password that is hard to guess [er, remember] then they look at the service as "unfriendly." If they have to wrap their minds around trivial concepts like public and private keys, then the solution is too hard (honestly, if you can't figure out public/private keys you're probably operating on the mentality level of a severely retarded 8 yr old).
I'm sorry, but at the age of 14 I was capable of figuring out on a high level how RSA worked. I didn't understand all of the math, but I at least got the idea that the private key decrypts what the public key encrypts, how to distribute them, etc. And that was almost 12 years ago when the PGP was less common place.
We have technology that can trivially encrypt/sign your emails, like pgp and enigmail. Just people refuse to spend the 15 mins it takes to learn the software because *throws up hands* it's too hard. Face it, people are lazy, deceitful creatures that seem to blame everyone but themselves for their shortcommings. (and yes, I misspelled that word because my browser failed to correct for me!).
Tom
Should point out that hacking is not a crime, never has been, never will be [at least without totally eroding all freedoms first]. A hacker is simply someone who takes the time to see how the world around them works. They're not script monkeys who instigate virus attacks, those are criminals.
Stop reading/watching Faux News et al. and get your damn facts straight.
People should be able to call themselves a hacker without fear of reprisal, for it's the hackers who will inevitably find many of the flaws in the world that the corporate greedmongers want hidden. I mean who do you think are the people finding all of the buffer overflows, protocol mistakes, etc in services you use on a daily basis? If hackers went away companies could easily get away with insecure practices and billing like however they feel like.
It's the people who stop questioning how the world works that should get a bitchslap upside the head.
Back it up to something with at least 60G of usable space? An 80G drive is only 64$ CAD or so. If the data is that important you'll just buy a USB enclosure, 80G drive and copy it overnight.
Tom
It's like the people who bitch at how bad customs are in the states or how it's nearly a "police state." Yet, every time I fly to the states customs is a breeze, and when I get where I'm going people are not mean or out to get me or whatever.
Personally I'm not against going to China because of the government. Mostly, I'd be afraid of getting lost in the noise. So many people, where English isn't a dominant or common language. Would be a hell of an experience trying to get around.
Wow, defensive much? Maybe you're just rationalizing your poor driving skills?
In my case what happened was I was merging right onto a road (with the little pedestrian triangle island thingy). There was a pedestrian crossing so I stopped before the lines, then after I stopped on the other side [like you're supposed to] to wait for the cars going straight to pass by. The guy behind me thought I was just gonna "gun it" [his words] to get in front of the car that was coming. Sadly, that's not how the law works, you yield right of way to flow through traffic. In either case, he should have been going slow enough to stop in a hurry. Most likely, he too was looking down the on coming lane and didn't see that I had stopped. In short, he was too impatient and not paying attention.
Despite what you said, I actually commit to my mistakes. For example, if I get in the wrong lane, say I get in a turning lane by accident. I don't weave around to get out, I just take the turn like a man, then find a place to pull a u-turn and get back to the right direction. Similarly, if I'm too close to stop at a yellow, I don't slam on the breaks, I just keep up the pace and go through the yellow, etc.
You can drive at the appropriate speed and not be an unsafe unaware driver. In fact, most people probably speed not because they're aware of the speed they're doing but because they just put their foot to the pedal and find whatever speed "feels right." I mean honestly, probably less than 1% of cars in the city use cruise control. Which is why their speed is rolling up and down all over the place. I on the other hand, have no problem using cruise control on about 95% of my trip into work (in city driving, over about 12km). Not only do I save on gas, but my speed is predictable which in turn makes me a safe driver not only through my actions, but because any aware driver around me would be able to predict my speed and actions as well.
Again, this isn't about "can he pull it off". What if someone merged lanes inappropriately in front of him? Sure they'd be at fault, but at 140mph the accident will be a lot more fatal than it would at 65mph [or 55 whatever the limit may be].
Believe it or not, actually I don't give a shit if you believe it or not, speed limits aren't to impose the mans will on the little guy. They're actually there for a reason. Until you can admit that speed limits serve a purpose, you shouldn't be driving on the road.
That said, I too agree that in certain areas it's likely that a higher limit will be statistically indistinguishable in terms of safety as a lower limit. However, unless you change the limit or the law, that's not how to act. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and in many cases it actually doesn't matter. Speeding in the city, for example, usually does not get you any further ahead than people who do the limit [I know, I catch up to them all the time on my trips to/from work]. So why bother wasting the fuel and wear on the car accelerating to stupid speeds just to slam on the brakes at the next red.
And on longer trips it rarely matters anyways. For example, to my brothers place is 494km. At the posted limits, it would take about 5h29m to get there. At 10 over [100kph] it would take 4h56m, and at 15 over it would all ttake 4h42m. Yet in reality, when I did the trip last at 105kph on cruise [where I could] it actually took about 5h20m anyways. Basically, at best, doing 10-15 over "makes up" for all the stop/go that happens around the cities where there are intersections. In reality, on that trip, you'd have to try and pull off like 120kph [30 over] to really make a dent in the ETA. At that speed, you're going way too fast [most sections are unlit, curvy, and through hills], and will get pulled over. So it's best to do the limit, or 10 over, and just take it easy.
This guy was doing way more than a mere 18mph over the limit, when you start hitting 70mph over the limit that's just excessive, insane, and very dangerous [despite what he might have said]. Sure the car could take it, but the roads can't.
Tom
Unless you're buying a $50 tv from Walmart, it will have some combination of component, svideo, ybrcr or coax. And for the record, my digital receiver [like probably most others] will output in composite or coax. So unless your TV only comes with UHF antenna hookups, it will be able to use the receiver.
I'm sorry but I just don't see it as a valid excuse. Maybe if all digital receivers only output'ed HDMI or whatever, then maybe sure. But they'd be stupid to kneecap their market without at least component outputs.
All this initiative is about is to stop wasting RF bandwidth with analogue TV signals. It wastes a lot of bandwidth that could be better used with digital broadcasts (which take less RF bandwidth). This isn't about trashing component/coax outputs. In fact, it has nothing to do with over coax analogue either (though I suspect they'll stop around the same time).
Where I live you can buy a digital receiver [standard def] for like $100, or rent one for $4/mo from the provider. If you can afford cable, chances are you can afford a $100 receiver. And with that you get a way better signal [at least compared to normal analogue coax], and on some channels 5.1 surround. Oh the horror.
Tom
What's wrong with attaching a digital receiver to your analogue tv? I mean Analogue TV just means the encoding of the signal. no reason a digital receiver couldn't output as component, svideo, or YBrCr [sp?]. If you bought a tv in the last 10 years that doesn't have component input, you either shop at the salvation army, or got ripped off. Hint: Most video game consoles have component outputs since the N64 days [and earlier]. That's more than 15 years ago.
Right now I have "digital cable" attached via component to my NTSC standard def TV. Works just fine. And it's hardly a fancy tv. I basically bought the first run of a mill 27" TV I saw.
Tom
Well strictly speaking digital content requires less bandwidth, which means you could pack more content in the same band. It's also more tolerant to noise which means the picture is either there or not [and more likely to be there than not].
Tom