poor people have shown themselves to lack money management skills--by definition
No poor people have shown themselves to lack money gathering skills--by definition. Money management is different, and a lot of poor people are good at spending money only on things they need because they have no other choice.
The ported parts are licensed under the cddl. I imagine some parts which reach deep into the kernel will require reimplementation as opposed to porting and it would make sense for those parts to be under a bsd license. The cddl is designated by the Free Software Foundation as a Free Software GPL-incompatible license. It is a derivative of the mozilla public license. Due to the requirements of the GPL it is easy to be GPL-incompatible. The LGPL is more sensible in this regard. Of course GPL-incompatibility is not a problem for a BSD licensed operating system. Being designated a Free Software license means it does protect the four freedoms which all in the free software movement hold so dear. You can read the text of the CDDL here.
Almost 100% of the displaced evacuees (including the forced evacuees) are black. Almost 100% of the evacuees who voluntarily left and have money, resources, vehicles, etc, are white. I don't know if the fear amongst blacks was "well-founded" but it was certainly damn-near universal and definitely based on race. I'd argue that there's a case for this one, too.
I live in Southeast Texas. We have an evacuation center in Beaumont. Many black people showed up to the center pre-hurricane landfall. We have some white people who have showed up too and many more people have showed up post-hurricane landfall. New Orleans was 68% black, so seeing a lot of black people shouldn't be surprising. New Orleans is also 20% below the poverty level. The large number of people without cars had no way to get out. Fear didn't have much to do with it. Also there have been a number of hurricanes to miss New Orleans contributing to a sense of invincibility. People just get a bunch of non-parishable food and fill the bathtub with clean drinkable water before the storm hits like their fathers and father's fathers did before them and survived.
Like I said before I live in Southeast Texas and we've had our share of near hits over the past few years. I remember as a child we use to do the same thing, treat hurricanes as an occasion for a party and just ride the thing out. Until 1992 when Andrew grew in strength at the last minute and threatened to hit us. That was the first time I remember our region receiving evacuation orders. What followed was a complete and total debacle. As everyone tried to use the same road to get out all at once at the last minute the traffic came to a halt. We moved 15 mph and not continously either, it was all stop and go. If it had hit us, I wouldn't be making this post. A van on a road ain't the greatest place to be in the middle of a hurricane. That situation was scary as hell.
After that warning shot across our bow, we got much more serious about planning evacuations. I don't know if we were the ones who came up with contraflow lane reversal, but after that we started using it. We set up evacution centers all across the state to handle massive evacuations. We have had a number of evacuations since then that have gone much better. We still try to make a party of it though. Go to some other city, get a hotel room, eat out at all these restaurants we don't have in our town. Treat it like a vacation. This makes evacuations somewhat expensive, but going and living in a highschool gym somewhere for a few days isn't anybodies idea of a good time.
Evacuating major metropolitan areas isn't exactly a cakewalk even when everybody has cars and a tank of gas. There is always some who think they can ride it out and a mandatory evacuation isn't actually mandatory. At least not in Texas, here it's just a declaration no one will help you if you stay. The mayor was lucky to be able to get 80% of his population out of the city pre-landfall. Maybe he could have done better pre-landfall, maybe not. Afterwards, well getting 100,000 people out of a city with one road out left and getting food, water, and medicine in to keep people alive while you do it, and conducting rescue operations, while the criminal portion of your city is in open insurrection just can't be easy. I'm sure a congressional commitee will thoroughly investigate and discover just what went wrong.
Like I said a lot of black people showed up pre-landfall so some of them had the resources to get out, but then a lot of them didn't too. Blacks aren't a homogeneous group of people you know. One should not make widespread generalizations about who has what resources. There are plenty of poor dead white people in Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes amongst others. The reason they aren't on tv is because the media has trouble imagining important things happening outside the city. As if no one lived in the parishes outside the city.
I'm sorry I guess I wasn't entirely clear. I wasn't trying to deny the existence of global warming. I was denying global warming is now or ever would be responsible for an increase in number or intensity of hurricanes. Several of those studies started with the assumption that global warming was real and were trying to determine the affect it would have on hurricanes.
What makes more sense, is what was done in Gavelston after it was wiped off the face of the map in 1900 by a hurricane. They dredged the surrounding inland waterways and raised the entire island by some 17 feet. In areas of New Orleans that require existing structures be razed could have this done.
This was made substantially easier by the fact that most of the 2,100 buildings raised in the process, including the 3,000 ton St. Patrick's church, were already on stilts. Also they didn't have skyscrapers. Even then the raising of the city and the seawall was made a National Historical Civil Engineering Landmark.
There is also some karma in play here that an intense hurricane which was probably intensified by CO2 induced global warming, thanks to abnormally warm temperatures in the Atlantic and Gulf, would lead to devastation in Louisiana which is at the heart of the oil and gas part of the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. and is responsible for much of America's CO2 pollution capacity.
Hurricanes are powered by the differential in temperature between the water and the atmosphere. Since global warming increases the temperature of both the water and air the affects on hurricanes are small compared to the natural variablity of hurricanes according to NOAA's faq.Here is NOAA's page listing the number of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes going back to 1850. The data from 1944 onwards is considered accurate with data on storms that actually strike the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts considered to be accurate back to 1899. They have graphs of 1944 to near present of the number of named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes. Note that these graphs do not resemble monotonically increasing functions, but instead are closer to periodic funcions. Here is the NOAA faq page stating the increase in number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes since 1995 is due to the hurricane cycle. Note that 1991-94 are the quietest four years in the post-1944 record.
Hurricanes form when passing over 80F water not 94F. Systematic aircraft reconnaissance of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin starts in 1944. Data on tropical storms and hurricanes which hit the US East and Gulf Coasts is beleived to be reliable back to 1899. Here is the data on the number of named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes since 1851. Note that one does not observe a continuous increase in any of those categories, that the largest number of hurricanes occured in 1969 and the largest number of major hurricanes in 1950. Here is NOAA's faq page on how global warming might affect hurricanes. They state any change in the number of tropical storms and hurricanes when one assumes global warming will occur is small when compared to the natural variability. Finally here is NOAA's faq page discussing the hurricane cycle. Note that 91-94 are the four quietest post-1944 years on record which blows quite a big hole in the global warming causing increase in hurricanes hypothesis. Testability indeed.
Not that I think we should be paranoid, I think this hysteria over terrorism is exactly what both sides want (the government gets to take more control and the terrorists get to disrupt our way of life and our happiness)
Yes, these shows get unfairly dumped. However, you have to remember that TV's a business, not an art form. It's a business built on the whims of a constantly changing mass-market audience. [snip] It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the numbers these guys use to figure out of a show is worth the risk or not are about as accurate as a Magic 8-ball.
Everytime I think of tv executives I think of the episode of futurama where bender meets some tv executives
Network President: Greetings gentlemen, you already know my Execubots. Executive Alpha, programmed to like things that are seen before.
Exec Alpha: Hey hey hey.
Network President: Executive Beta, programmed to roll dice to determine the fall schedule.
Exec Beta: (rolls dice) More reality shows.
Network President: And Executive Gamma, programmed to underestimate middle America.
Exec Gamma: It's funny, but is it going to get them off their tractors?
Then I think about how fox canceled Family Guy which was subsequently shown as reruns on Cartoon Network which then became the first cable network to ever beat the broadcast networks in the ratings in the Tonight Show timeslot. Then I laugh. TV execs don't know what they're doing.
How WalMart harms society is becoming clearer now (such low wages that people go on public assistance -- that is, you and I pay their wages since WalMart doesn't pay them enough to live on; not really having low prices except on heavily advertised and key items that draw attention; etc.)
Walmart's wages and benifits are no lower than those of their small business competitors in small towns. I understand in some metropolitan areas grocery stores employ people full-time instead of hiring high school students part-time which strikes me as bizarre but I guess in those cases I can see the "harm". On prices I do comparison shop on items I buy weekly and the Walmart prices generally are lower though not always.
I was gonna moderate in this article, but I've been lurking on the Open Graphics project mailing list for a few months so now I have to reply. I'm about two weeks behind on reading the list so some of what I say might be a bit out of date, but not as out of date as the Wiki. The Open Graphics Project has done the high level design of the card. A company will be formed to produce the card. The verilog (source code) for the graphics pipeline will not be open source, though it may be available under a non-commercial license or NDA. Timothy Miller is the guy behind it, and he hasn't determined yet under what terms the graphics pipeline can be released that won't bankrupt the company. The verilog for parts of the card will be (and in some cases already are) licensed under the LGPL. These parts include a PCI/AGP interface, a PCIe interface, the memory controller, the VGA controller, and various component parts of the graphics pipeline such as adders and things which might be considered useful for other projects. The high level design work for the graphics pipeline is pretty much done, and a C++ simulation of the graphics pipeline has been created and is available under the LGPL. Last I checked it was not yet hooked up to Mesa for testing and driver writing purposes.
They plan on making two card versions, a FPGA and an ASIC. The FPGA card should be released in November for $500ish and the ASIC in second quarter 2006 for $200ish. The FPGA card will have at its core a Xilinx S34000. It will implement a 3D rasterizer and fixed-function fragment processor that conforms to most of OpenGL 1.3 (see simulater) running at 200Mhz. It should be able to run Quake3 comfortably. I'm not sure if it will be faster or slower than ATI's 9100 which has open source drivers. The ASIC version will be faster than the FPGA version. The FPGA card will have pins so people can connect it to other devices for their own projects. The free as in beer Xilinx Webpack is necessary to compile verilog into a bitstream for the FPGA card. Webpack Version 7.x runs under linux but does not support the 3S4000. Webpack version 6.x supports the 3S4000 and runs under Wine. They believe they can lobby Xilinx to get the Webpack 7.x to support the 3S4000.
Originally Tech Source, the company Timothy Miller works for that produces 2d graphics cards for Unix workstations in the medical market, was going to be producing the cards. Tech Source decided the cards would not be profitable. Undeterred Timothy and two other Tech Source employees will be forming a new company to produce the cards. They should be able to produce a few FPGA prototypes for a few thousand dollars out of their pocket. Then they will accept pre-orders for the FPGA cards and deliver them 4 weeks thereafter. Then they will need at least $1 million investment to produce an ASIC version of the card.
Last thing we need is more dumb telecom legislation.
Now if congress would get off their ass and put together a real bill that governed fiber bandwidth intelligently, we'd be in business.
A bill governing fiber bandwidth would not be telecom legislation how again? Maybe you mean it would be intelligent instead of stupid, but I somehow doubt it would manage to leave Congress that way.
During the original broswer war, IE was on almost every major platform. It was available on Windows as far back as Windows 3.1, Mac OS 7.5 and higher, and even Solaris; the only sizable community that didn't get IE was the Linux/BSD group (that community used Netscape 4.x until Mozilla or Konqueror became usable; I don't know which came first since I was a Windows user back then).
In addition to Solaris, IE was also available for HP-UX though not Irix. I was seriously considering picking up a used SparcStation off e-bay and forwarding IE through X11 to my linux box in those days, but I was a poor college student and couldn't spare the $50 or so they went for. I think Konqueror became a web browser at KDE 2.0, but there were many sites it did not render correctly. Opera for linux was the first good browser on the linux platform I came across. I'm not sure when it first came out, I "discovered" it sometime after KDE 2.0 I think. I had still been using Netscape at the time, so Opera was like bread from heaven. Mozilla didn't come out for a few more years after that.
Well, you say, they can't charge for free software.
Sure, they can. Any price they want. No one generally tries selling open source software because who would buy what you can download for free. Then again people are stupid so maybe there is a lot of money to be made selling oss software to the unsuspecting.
Its astonishing to contemplate the turn around from previous American apathy to a nation which now readily embarks on politically motivated military action.
It really shouldn't be that astonishing. We have more than once in our history gone from strong feelings of isolationism to OMG there is a world out there and it affects us, let's kick its ass.
Is that market share by units shipped or by percentage of market in terms of money spent? I think the latter would be the relevant number as far as "winning" would be concerned and think the link is about the former, although I could believe either way. After all if Walmart proves anything, it's that there is a lot of money to be made in high volume low margins. Of course if all the companies are making a profit are any of them really losing?
The Cell is just a PPC with 8 little miniprocessors tacked on. The miniprocessors have explicit control over and direct access to the contents of their own cache, but can only access data in awkward ways; and are super-optimized for vector/SIMD instructions and floating point operations, but are not so good at algorithmic or complex flow operations.
And the floating point operations are only single not double precision. While that may be fine for a game console, I imagine it will limit the Cell's usefulness in certain applications in which having vector/SIMD instructions would be extremely useful.
Personally, I was less than impressed with ep. 1, but I didn't think it was terrible. I thought ep. 2 was better. The romantic scenes were very annoying, because Lucas can't write good emotional dialogue and Hayden Christiansen can't emote realistic emotion (except for whiny discontent). However, I loved everything else about ep. 2. And after seeing ep. 3, I have a new appreciation for the romantic scense. Ep. 3 wouldn't have made any sense at all without them. It's utterly necessary that Anakin actually has a reason for his fear.
Spoiler Warning... Spoiler Warning
Everyone says Lucas can't write good dialogue or direct very well, and after watching episode 2, I was inclined to agree, after all I've believed Natalie Portman was falling in love with guys in movies since she was 12, and episode 2 didn't convince. But after seeing episode 3, I'm not so sure. Considering that I was moved from revulsion of Anakin to pity for Vader by the dialog/acting in episode 3, "Master Skywalker there's too many of them. What do we do," and "Where is Padme? Is Padme safe," I think it might be a good idea to consider why the romantic scenes in episode 2 so utterly fail to convince.
On the episode 2 dvd, there are some deleted scenes between Anakin and Padme, that I think really would have added to the movie in helping to explain why exactly she was falling in love with Anakin. Also in the audio commentary during the scene where Anakin is "surfing" on the creature, the special effects guy says he knew immediately when Lucas told him about it it would be the hardest scene to do, and he tried to get Lucas to cut it, but Lucas wanted the scene in. The special effects guy almost seemed to be apologizing for the scene. Anakin's "surfing" really does look pretty fake. I think that knocked out people's suspension of disbelief, and is why the scene is so weak. I also think it's pretty clear the film needs a scene like that right about there, it's just been done badly. They should have redone that scene as something more visually believable.
I think episode 3 is the best movie of both trilogies, my previous favorite being Jedi. Sith makes Vader a very tragic figure, he's ruined not just his own life, but the lives of everyone he cares about for ultimately nothing. His actions destroy the very thing he is trying to save. Like I said before my previous favorite was Jedi not Empire the typical favorite. I don't usually like "dark" films. I generally want everything to work out in the end, but Sith is in my opinion such a great tragedy that it is my favorite of the films.
Apple is on record for offering to jointly attempt to make the important parts of WebCore cross-platform, similar to the situation with Gecko.
I thought they suggested the KHTML team adopt WebCore wholesale. It should probably be noted that large portions of WebCore are written in Objective-C++, a language a stock install of GCC doesn't compile. This makes adopting WebCore completely infeasable.
Interesting. So when did they decide to switch from the XCS2000? (The chip listed in the spec sheet.)
Before they decided there would be an ASIC version of the card, they were doing everything possible to keep the price for the FPGA card from going over $200. Once they decided to do an ASIC card it was decided the FPGA version could go over $200 and those who really wanted one could pay it. The XCS2000 has only 40 of some sort of unit and it became clear from the design they have that they would probably need just a little bit more. Also I don't think it is taking up most of the XC3S4000, just more than the XCS2000 can handle. They still want to keep the design as small as possible because the more logic gates you use on the FPGA, the more transistors you use on the ASIC, and that means higher costs.
So presumably it's going to have better performance than the existing graphics cards which are fully supported by open source drivers, such as the Savage found on VIA M10000 Mini-ITX systems?
Definitely faster than the VIA Unichrome aka ProSavage and the various intel embedded chipsets. I am not sure if it will be as fast as the ATI Radeon 8500/9100 which is the current fastest graphics card supported by oss drivers, but I don't think they make those anymore so once the existing supplies run out that card is no longer a competitor. Besides ATI isn't releasing the spec's for anymore of their cards. If this card is successful, more advanced designs will come out later.
I do not know hardware, but I assume that FPGA card is the same as ASIC, except that it can be reprogrammed.
This is not true. The ASIC will be faster and cheaper than the FPGA for that is the nature of ASIC's. The advantage the FPGA has is that people can reprogram it to do other things, which some people have expressed an interest in.
In any event no one is asking for money yet. At this stage the only thing they need are a few thousand dollars, which they will pay for out of pocket, and the time of the hardware engineers. If I am reading things right, an actual FPGA product should be available round early November according to the current schedule with pre-orders being about a month before that. I am sure it will be reannounced on slashdot when the time for pre-orders comes. The verilog code to make the FPGA function like a graphics card will be fully completed late December, and the linux drivers finished in early January. How soon they go ASIC after the FPGA card is fully functional doesn't appear to be stated on the list, but to go ASIC they will need around one million dollars for the NRE alone. I can't imagine where that kind of money is gonna come from.
I'm not up on US politics, is this a usual thing done by most parties when in government or is this something strange?
It was normal under the spoils system which was started by Andrew Jackson in 1829 and ended by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. That is the wikipedia article with the most information on the subject. You can still do this sort of thing with some jobs, but it is frowned upon because it was such a disaster the first time it was done.
Slashdot Mirror
Strictly speaking they didn't survive. I mean I don't see any petrosaurs running around today.
Sorry, sorry. Couldn't resist.
No poor people have shown themselves to lack money gathering skills--by definition. Money management is different, and a lot of poor people are good at spending money only on things they need because they have no other choice.
This isn't true. The US has population growth without immigration and the children immigrants have when they come here.
The ported parts are licensed under the cddl. I imagine some parts which reach deep into the kernel will require reimplementation as opposed to porting and it would make sense for those parts to be under a bsd license. The cddl is designated by the Free Software Foundation as a Free Software GPL-incompatible license. It is a derivative of the mozilla public license. Due to the requirements of the GPL it is easy to be GPL-incompatible. The LGPL is more sensible in this regard. Of course GPL-incompatibility is not a problem for a BSD licensed operating system. Being designated a Free Software license means it does protect the four freedoms which all in the free software movement hold so dear. You can read the text of the CDDL here.
I live in Southeast Texas. We have an evacuation center in Beaumont. Many black people showed up to the center pre-hurricane landfall. We have some white people who have showed up too and many more people have showed up post-hurricane landfall. New Orleans was 68% black, so seeing a lot of black people shouldn't be surprising. New Orleans is also 20% below the poverty level. The large number of people without cars had no way to get out. Fear didn't have much to do with it. Also there have been a number of hurricanes to miss New Orleans contributing to a sense of invincibility. People just get a bunch of non-parishable food and fill the bathtub with clean drinkable water before the storm hits like their fathers and father's fathers did before them and survived.
Like I said before I live in Southeast Texas and we've had our share of near hits over the past few years. I remember as a child we use to do the same thing, treat hurricanes as an occasion for a party and just ride the thing out. Until 1992 when Andrew grew in strength at the last minute and threatened to hit us. That was the first time I remember our region receiving evacuation orders. What followed was a complete and total debacle. As everyone tried to use the same road to get out all at once at the last minute the traffic came to a halt. We moved 15 mph and not continously either, it was all stop and go. If it had hit us, I wouldn't be making this post. A van on a road ain't the greatest place to be in the middle of a hurricane. That situation was scary as hell.
After that warning shot across our bow, we got much more serious about planning evacuations. I don't know if we were the ones who came up with contraflow lane reversal, but after that we started using it. We set up evacution centers all across the state to handle massive evacuations. We have had a number of evacuations since then that have gone much better. We still try to make a party of it though. Go to some other city, get a hotel room, eat out at all these restaurants we don't have in our town. Treat it like a vacation. This makes evacuations somewhat expensive, but going and living in a highschool gym somewhere for a few days isn't anybodies idea of a good time.
Evacuating major metropolitan areas isn't exactly a cakewalk even when everybody has cars and a tank of gas. There is always some who think they can ride it out and a mandatory evacuation isn't actually mandatory. At least not in Texas, here it's just a declaration no one will help you if you stay. The mayor was lucky to be able to get 80% of his population out of the city pre-landfall. Maybe he could have done better pre-landfall, maybe not. Afterwards, well getting 100,000 people out of a city with one road out left and getting food, water, and medicine in to keep people alive while you do it, and conducting rescue operations, while the criminal portion of your city is in open insurrection just can't be easy. I'm sure a congressional commitee will thoroughly investigate and discover just what went wrong.
Like I said a lot of black people showed up pre-landfall so some of them had the resources to get out, but then a lot of them didn't too. Blacks aren't a homogeneous group of people you know. One should not make widespread generalizations about who has what resources. There are plenty of poor dead white people in Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes amongst others. The reason they aren't on tv is because the media has trouble imagining important things happening outside the city. As if no one lived in the parishes outside the city.
I'm sorry I guess I wasn't entirely clear. I wasn't trying to deny the existence of global warming. I was denying global warming is now or ever would be responsible for an increase in number or intensity of hurricanes. Several of those studies started with the assumption that global warming was real and were trying to determine the affect it would have on hurricanes.
This was made substantially easier by the fact that most of the 2,100 buildings raised in the process, including the 3,000 ton St. Patrick's church, were already on stilts. Also they didn't have skyscrapers. Even then the raising of the city and the seawall was made a National Historical Civil Engineering Landmark.
Hurricanes are powered by the differential in temperature between the water and the atmosphere. Since global warming increases the temperature of both the water and air the affects on hurricanes are small compared to the natural variablity of hurricanes according to NOAA's faq. Here is NOAA's page listing the number of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes going back to 1850. The data from 1944 onwards is considered accurate with data on storms that actually strike the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts considered to be accurate back to 1899. They have graphs of 1944 to near present of the number of named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes. Note that these graphs do not resemble monotonically increasing functions, but instead are closer to periodic funcions. Here is the NOAA faq page stating the increase in number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes since 1995 is due to the hurricane cycle. Note that 1991-94 are the quietest four years in the post-1944 record.
Hurricanes form when passing over 80F water not 94F. Systematic aircraft reconnaissance of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin starts in 1944. Data on tropical storms and hurricanes which hit the US East and Gulf Coasts is beleived to be reliable back to 1899. Here is the data on the number of named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes since 1851. Note that one does not observe a continuous increase in any of those categories, that the largest number of hurricanes occured in 1969 and the largest number of major hurricanes in 1950. Here is NOAA's faq page on how global warming might affect hurricanes. They state any change in the number of tropical storms and hurricanes when one assumes global warming will occur is small when compared to the natural variability. Finally here is NOAA's faq page discussing the hurricane cycle. Note that 91-94 are the four quietest post-1944 years on record which blows quite a big hole in the global warming causing increase in hurricanes hypothesis. Testability indeed.
I dunno, sounds a bit paranoid to me.
Everytime I think of tv executives I think of the episode of futurama where bender meets some tv executives
Then I think about how fox canceled Family Guy which was subsequently shown as reruns on Cartoon Network which then became the first cable network to ever beat the broadcast networks in the ratings in the Tonight Show timeslot. Then I laugh. TV execs don't know what they're doing.
Walmart's wages and benifits are no lower than those of their small business competitors in small towns. I understand in some metropolitan areas grocery stores employ people full-time instead of hiring high school students part-time which strikes me as bizarre but I guess in those cases I can see the "harm". On prices I do comparison shop on items I buy weekly and the Walmart prices generally are lower though not always.
I was gonna moderate in this article, but I've been lurking on the Open Graphics project mailing list for a few months so now I have to reply. I'm about two weeks behind on reading the list so some of what I say might be a bit out of date, but not as out of date as the Wiki. The Open Graphics Project has done the high level design of the card. A company will be formed to produce the card. The verilog (source code) for the graphics pipeline will not be open source, though it may be available under a non-commercial license or NDA. Timothy Miller is the guy behind it, and he hasn't determined yet under what terms the graphics pipeline can be released that won't bankrupt the company. The verilog for parts of the card will be (and in some cases already are) licensed under the LGPL. These parts include a PCI/AGP interface, a PCIe interface, the memory controller, the VGA controller, and various component parts of the graphics pipeline such as adders and things which might be considered useful for other projects. The high level design work for the graphics pipeline is pretty much done, and a C++ simulation of the graphics pipeline has been created and is available under the LGPL. Last I checked it was not yet hooked up to Mesa for testing and driver writing purposes.
They plan on making two card versions, a FPGA and an ASIC. The FPGA card should be released in November for $500ish and the ASIC in second quarter 2006 for $200ish. The FPGA card will have at its core a Xilinx S34000. It will implement a 3D rasterizer and fixed-function fragment processor that conforms to most of OpenGL 1.3 (see simulater) running at 200Mhz. It should be able to run Quake3 comfortably. I'm not sure if it will be faster or slower than ATI's 9100 which has open source drivers. The ASIC version will be faster than the FPGA version. The FPGA card will have pins so people can connect it to other devices for their own projects. The free as in beer Xilinx Webpack is necessary to compile verilog into a bitstream for the FPGA card. Webpack Version 7.x runs under linux but does not support the 3S4000. Webpack version 6.x supports the 3S4000 and runs under Wine. They believe they can lobby Xilinx to get the Webpack 7.x to support the 3S4000.
Originally Tech Source, the company Timothy Miller works for that produces 2d graphics cards for Unix workstations in the medical market, was going to be producing the cards. Tech Source decided the cards would not be profitable. Undeterred Timothy and two other Tech Source employees will be forming a new company to produce the cards. They should be able to produce a few FPGA prototypes for a few thousand dollars out of their pocket. Then they will accept pre-orders for the FPGA cards and deliver them 4 weeks thereafter. Then they will need at least $1 million investment to produce an ASIC version of the card.
A bill governing fiber bandwidth would not be telecom legislation how again? Maybe you mean it would be intelligent instead of stupid, but I somehow doubt it would manage to leave Congress that way.
In addition to Solaris, IE was also available for HP-UX though not Irix. I was seriously considering picking up a used SparcStation off e-bay and forwarding IE through X11 to my linux box in those days, but I was a poor college student and couldn't spare the $50 or so they went for. I think Konqueror became a web browser at KDE 2.0, but there were many sites it did not render correctly. Opera for linux was the first good browser on the linux platform I came across. I'm not sure when it first came out, I "discovered" it sometime after KDE 2.0 I think. I had still been using Netscape at the time, so Opera was like bread from heaven. Mozilla didn't come out for a few more years after that.
Sure, they can. Any price they want. No one generally tries selling open source software because who would buy what you can download for free. Then again people are stupid so maybe there is a lot of money to be made selling oss software to the unsuspecting.
It really shouldn't be that astonishing. We have more than once in our history gone from strong feelings of isolationism to OMG there is a world out there and it affects us, let's kick its ass.
Is that market share by units shipped or by percentage of market in terms of money spent? I think the latter would be the relevant number as far as "winning" would be concerned and think the link is about the former, although I could believe either way. After all if Walmart proves anything, it's that there is a lot of money to be made in high volume low margins. Of course if all the companies are making a profit are any of them really losing?
And the floating point operations are only single not double precision. While that may be fine for a game console, I imagine it will limit the Cell's usefulness in certain applications in which having vector/SIMD instructions would be extremely useful.
Spoiler Warning
Everyone says Lucas can't write good dialogue or direct very well, and after watching episode 2, I was inclined to agree, after all I've believed Natalie Portman was falling in love with guys in movies since she was 12, and episode 2 didn't convince. But after seeing episode 3, I'm not so sure. Considering that I was moved from revulsion of Anakin to pity for Vader by the dialog/acting in episode 3, "Master Skywalker there's too many of them. What do we do," and "Where is Padme? Is Padme safe," I think it might be a good idea to consider why the romantic scenes in episode 2 so utterly fail to convince.
On the episode 2 dvd, there are some deleted scenes between Anakin and Padme, that I think really would have added to the movie in helping to explain why exactly she was falling in love with Anakin. Also in the audio commentary during the scene where Anakin is "surfing" on the creature, the special effects guy says he knew immediately when Lucas told him about it it would be the hardest scene to do, and he tried to get Lucas to cut it, but Lucas wanted the scene in. The special effects guy almost seemed to be apologizing for the scene. Anakin's "surfing" really does look pretty fake. I think that knocked out people's suspension of disbelief, and is why the scene is so weak. I also think it's pretty clear the film needs a scene like that right about there, it's just been done badly. They should have redone that scene as something more visually believable.
I think episode 3 is the best movie of both trilogies, my previous favorite being Jedi. Sith makes Vader a very tragic figure, he's ruined not just his own life, but the lives of everyone he cares about for ultimately nothing. His actions destroy the very thing he is trying to save. Like I said before my previous favorite was Jedi not Empire the typical favorite. I don't usually like "dark" films. I generally want everything to work out in the end, but Sith is in my opinion such a great tragedy that it is my favorite of the films.
I thought they suggested the KHTML team adopt WebCore wholesale. It should probably be noted that large portions of WebCore are written in Objective-C++, a language a stock install of GCC doesn't compile. This makes adopting WebCore completely infeasable.
Before they decided there would be an ASIC version of the card, they were doing everything possible to keep the price for the FPGA card from going over $200. Once they decided to do an ASIC card it was decided the FPGA version could go over $200 and those who really wanted one could pay it. The XCS2000 has only 40 of some sort of unit and it became clear from the design they have that they would probably need just a little bit more. Also I don't think it is taking up most of the XC3S4000, just more than the XCS2000 can handle. They still want to keep the design as small as possible because the more logic gates you use on the FPGA, the more transistors you use on the ASIC, and that means higher costs.
Definitely faster than the VIA Unichrome aka ProSavage and the various intel embedded chipsets. I am not sure if it will be as fast as the ATI Radeon 8500/9100 which is the current fastest graphics card supported by oss drivers, but I don't think they make those anymore so once the existing supplies run out that card is no longer a competitor. Besides ATI isn't releasing the spec's for anymore of their cards. If this card is successful, more advanced designs will come out later.
This is not true. The ASIC will be faster and cheaper than the FPGA for that is the nature of ASIC's. The advantage the FPGA has is that people can reprogram it to do other things, which some people have expressed an interest in.
In any event no one is asking for money yet. At this stage the only thing they need are a few thousand dollars, which they will pay for out of pocket, and the time of the hardware engineers. If I am reading things right, an actual FPGA product should be available round early November according to the current schedule with pre-orders being about a month before that. I am sure it will be reannounced on slashdot when the time for pre-orders comes. The verilog code to make the FPGA function like a graphics card will be fully completed late December, and the linux drivers finished in early January. How soon they go ASIC after the FPGA card is fully functional doesn't appear to be stated on the list, but to go ASIC they will need around one million dollars for the NRE alone. I can't imagine where that kind of money is gonna come from.
It was normal under the spoils system which was started by Andrew Jackson in 1829 and ended by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. That is the wikipedia article with the most information on the subject. You can still do this sort of thing with some jobs, but it is frowned upon because it was such a disaster the first time it was done.