The PS2 is 18 months old, so you could argue that it is a whole "Moore's Law Cycle" behind the XBox and the GameCube (although the latter is cheaper, so is probably in the middle).
However, I agree that the PS2 has not reached anywhere near its full potential yet, whereas the XBox is using well-known hardware, and thus will be already achieving much closer to its full potetial from the start. Which means great games at launch, but they will not improve as much as the PS2 has.
Does anyone have the figures for the computing power of the Penteron/Celium III processor in the XBox vs. the computing power of the PS2's CPU and the GameCube's PPC derived processor? Of course, according to Mac users, the Gamecube will be twice as fast as the XBox despite running 148MHz slower...:)
The GameCube and PS2 both have on-die framebuffers and ZBuffers, etc. This gives then great performance for these operations (although the PS2's is a little cramped now), whereas the XBox has to access memory for these operations.
Also, what is the effect of Embedded WinXP+DX8 on the usable memory of the XBox? The GameCube may have less memory overall (but it does have very low latency 1T SRAM!), but it doesn't have to deal with possibly large operating systems...
(1) The Hard drive interface is custom - you can't just plug it into a normal PC (yet, the electrical format will probably be sussed very soon and adaptors made)
(2) The format of the hard drive may be such that you cannot even dd it.
(3) How will dd help you if you want to use a different hard drive? dd is great for copying HDA to HDB, where both HDs are the same in every respect. However, sticking in a 40GB 7200RPM drive to get more speed will not work anyway.
If you were going to make your own, the best thing to do, seeing that you say the expansion connector is basically PCI (any pictures?) would be to make a card with a PCI-PCI bridge, and then run your own PCI bus outside the Dreamcast with say 4 PCI slots on it, for you to plug in various NICs, Audigies, and other fun things (no, not an IDE RAID card!)
/Home would of course hold user filespaces. These would have their own/Applications and/Commands directory structures as well.
I forgot "/Libraries" for system libraries that are not part of the OS (e.g., libncurses) OS libraries would go into "/Linux-$VERSION-$VENDOR/Libraries of course.
So yes, these are simple remappings of the current directory structure.
and so on. It doesn't take much thought to get everything sorted out. Sorry about POSIX, but you could have a system that did run-time remapping of the old directory names to the new ones, or just invisible (in GUI filesystem apps) symlinks as above.
Taking the "/" is the root of everything... and assuming Linux
The OS is stored in/Linux-$VERSION-$VENDOR
(e.g.,/Linux-2.4.14-RedHat) - this allows you to have multiple OS directories for quick and simple upgrades. The OS would, of course, include the kernel, modules, etc - the essentials.
Common commands should have a directory, lets call it "/Commands", however, it could be "/C" (ooh, very Amiga-like, the OS that had a decent directory structure from the start - we could learn a lot from that) or "/bin" for the die hards. This would hold utilities, tools, etc - command line stuff.
Applications would be stored under the "/Applications" directory, each application would have its own directory, and in that directory you could store different versions of the software. All software could be configured to run in a chroot'd environment for security. Software could come as a MacOSX style package.
Mount other drives in the "/Drives" directory. Mount devices in the "/Devices" directory, or in the "/Linux-$VERSION-$VENDOR/Devices" directory, depending on how you want to define the scope of the OS.
Sure, this needs a little work. But it is a lot more understandable and usable than the current system.
If there ever was a rip-off of a GUI, this device has to get the award for most blatant.
Good points: The price - this is in the price range of many people. However, would the Palm m100 be a better deal because of the wealth of applications available?
Also, that website has a way too small font, and it is a fixed size so I couldn't scale it up in the browser (konqueror). Mozilla will probably fare better as its font resizing even works on sites there the stylesheet has been rude enough to specify a fixed font size instead of a relative font size.
Hey, my contract as a programmer at work means that my employer owns the stuff I program. This is entirely reasonable. So why is it that music artists, employed by their employer (RIAA member) get so upset at losing the ownership of the work they do?
They get paid more than adequate wages for what they do (if they are any good). Many of them do not write the words or the music, they just look nice and can vaguely sing. These people are not $1m/year musicians, and they earn under $100k. S-Club 7 (annoying teeny pop band in the UK) are well known, but only get this sort of wage, plus sponsorship (BT mainly at the moment). Plus they don't have to work in an office and their deadlines are measured to the nearest year, not the nearest week or day.
1) Hire a recording studio to make the album (or do it in house with a $2000+ PC that can deal with it)
2) Set up a company (cheap)
3) Set up a bank account
4) Set up a merchant account
5) Sell music online
6) PC with CD burner and CD label printer
You just need $5000 up front to set this up, maybe you could do it for a few bands. Sell entire albums for $5 (a percentage goes to the merchant bank).
Marketing is the problem. Use Napster and the other music distribution mechanisms to put out low-quality snippets and encourage people to visit your site. If the music is naff, then people will not buy, obviously!
The RIAA represent the companies that form up the RIAA: Sony, Universal, etc.
These companies are meant to represent the artists they sign up. However, they are too busy trying to grab ownership of the work that these artists do, and making money off of these artists, without giving the artists much back.
In the end, the artists should sort themselves out - they signed up for the recording deals. However, how can some singer hope to comprehend a legal contract from one of these companies? Contracts that in effect transfer ownership of the music to the company from the artist.
Musicians need to band together and work to get themselves good contracts. Contracts where they keep the ownership of the music, and the copyright, but license the record company to release their music for $x per album, for a period of y years.
Greater intelligence is needed on the side of the musicians, as in the end they are the loser in all of this RIAA monopoly shenanigens.
Erm, when I say tinker, I mean that my job is a Java programmer, and threads etc just completely die badly with FreeBSD. Locks that are as long as a threads life!
Emulated JDK (IBM) is not an option, and yes, it was tested.
So (RH) Linux was chosen, and rightly so for this appliance.
Hopefully one day FreeBSD will haev a good native JDK that is as stable and reliable as whatever the latest Linux JDK is at that time. Or we will rewrite the entire thing in C, in which case we will use FreeBSD.
And evolution. If that app ever works in FreeBSD it will be a miracle. At least KMail works, as does Mozilla Mail, and both are fine (small/fast vs large/slow though).
Heh. I use FreeBSD, but I am doing Linux again now. I don't know why - I think it is because the 4.x releases just don't have the same feel as the 3.x releases.
Still use FreeBSD on the server though. Wouldn't use anything else.
Oh. Java support. I like to tinker a lot in Java, so FreeBSDs abysmal support for it means that it gets overlooked in favour of Linux for my desktop. I use Mandrake Linux 8.1 at the moment, which is pretty good overall.
I appreciate the use of an 8-bit CPU for conserving power in such a device.
However, it is quite chunky. This could be obviated by the use of an OLED display once they are cheap enough to use. These use less power, and will be usable in the dark.
A flip-up screen cover could reveal a touch-sensitive screen area, ideal for simple apps like a calculator or simple game. The format of this device means that more advanced applications are not feasible.
What would be sensible would be for this device to become part of a cell-phone. The display is the same size, the cell-phone has a bigger battery and faster CPU, and more memory as well. The device could sync your cell-phone data with your PDA/Desktop. The cellphone will have an IR link built-into it, or bluetooth next year.
In fact, this could be a good thing for "low-end" cell-phones (i.e., not PocketPC/Symbian ones) to incorporate into them. It would give them a market differentiation for not much cost. And leave your wrist free for teling the time. And a cell phone has buttons and all that on it, making applications much more accessible.
Seriously, SlickEdit appears to be amazing, but I am an emacs man, and I like my mode of operation:
[edit stuff]
ctrl-x v v [cvs comment] ctrl-c ctrl-c
SlickEdit doesn't do CVS, but it does other code repositories.
It also has emacs emulation.
It is a lot for an editor. And I have only seen badly formatted code generated using it - sure programmer disfunction, but annoying.
You have to get comfortable with your editing environment. Once comfortable (say, a few weeks regular use) then you can evaluate it.
One thing - I hate editors that restrict you to Courier. That is a crap editing font.
kate (KDE editor) is also nice as well, and configurable. Built in console option, and multiple files open at the same time in a good GUI. Multiple highlighting modes (not as advanced as the 'old' KDE Advanced Editor though), not restricted to a fixed-width font, etc. I like it.
I used to like the old Amiga editors as well. BED. GoldED. CygnusEd. They were solid and good as well. Not relevant to the topic, but interesting anyway.
In the movie industry, Actors get paid a lot of money, and they have a union, and they go on strike together when things are bad.
In the music industry, Artists get paid sweet FA, they obviously don't have a union, and they don't go on strike to get a better deal when they are being done over.
Ao what Artists need to do is form a union, and unite against their employers, the recording industry. If they don't do this, then they don't deserve any more money.
The fact is, P2P music copying:
1) Gets music spread around more - increasing the chance of it being purchased legitimately
2) Doesn't mean that without the P2P the music would have been bought
3) or that a sale was lost as a result of the P2P download
4) Sure, some people will download music and not buy CDs as a result. These people are a significant minority who previously recorded their friends' CDs onto tape anyway
The fact is, the RIAA exist for the artists for several reasons - to provide recording facilities, and to advertise the artist. P2P does the advertising, and thus takes away one of the reasons for artists to use a major record label. The other one is less necessary as computer technology improves to the state where a personal music studio is a few thousand dollars, and can match a professional music studio from a few years ago for features.
The RIAA really need DVD Audio, with videos to differentiate their products from P2P. P2P is a competitor, and they want this competition legislated out of existence.
For example, the Static X song, Black and White (kicks ass) is available on DVD with the (kick ass) video, and other videos of the band. This is worth buying as a reasonable price.
Yes, there are many parts to the power consumption problem, and Transmeta are targetting one - the CPU (and chipset).
Displays will get lower power with OLED displays.
Drives will use less power, and also with cheaper, lower power memory (DDR-II at 1.8V), more data can be cached in RAM on a laptop instead of having the drive on.
So low power CPUs are important. If we want a laptop that can last an entire plane journey around the world, or a week in the woods, instead of lugging 4 spare batteries around with you, then you need a low power CPU.
VIA's C3 with LongHaul power management looks good. Intel have Speedstep, AMD have PowerNow. Transmeta awakened the major CPU makers to the need for low power processors. Can Transmeta stay ahead of the game? It will be hard.
However, the sizable number of laptops are actually transportable desktops. CPU power is not relevant with these devices, hence the common usage of desktop processors in these devices.
Excellent, thanks for that information. This device looks like being a damn sexy bit of stuff. Wonder whatever happened to the AmigaDE on this device though?
If Slashdot had a "Reply-To-Person-Only" option (feature for logged-in users only), I would have used that.
Well, this device runs PersonalJava applications. There are X-WIndow systems written in Java (e.g., WierdX). Hence, put WierdX on one of these devices, and you have X11.
WierdX is free, but might need some work to get it to run within the confines of PersonalJava. Also the restriction to 320x240 dislay area might be harsh for most X11 apps.
The choice of Embedded QT is good. It means compatibility with QT apps is not that far away (recompile for ARM and link to Embedded QT) and provides a single user interface that is consistent. This is so important in PDA and computer usage, that applications should not deviate from this unless there is a real need.
Does this device has networking or modem technology built-in? It doesn't have a PCMCIA card, but is does have a CF2 slot. Can you get Ethernet/etc for CF2, or is it only for memory style devices (CF, microdrive, etc)?
The EV69 (This is not the 21264B or E) is supposed to debut at 1.3GHz, have an undisclosed amount of on-die L2, takes up 82mm2 of die space, uses Copper interconnects and consumes just 65W. And rumor has it that it's pin compatible with Socket-A/462, now that the L2 is on-die.
Woo! Alpha powered computer on nForce hardware?;)
Seriously, if this turns out to be true, and within a year, then this could popularise the Alpha a bit, especially with Linux users who don't need x86! This is, of course, assuming that the processor is reasonably priced.
Alpha has always lacked a consumer level CPU, which has affected it when it comes to workstations and PCs. They have been powerhouses with 4/8MB L2 cache off-chip, etc, but if they had at each stage made a cheaper chip with 512KB L2 cache, or 256KB on-die L2 cache, especially if it was pin/slot compatible with Athlon processors, then the uptake of the processor would have been a lot higher. IMO, of course!
When they say "Reduced Instruction Set Computer", they don't mean that the number of instructions has been reduced. It is a very common misnomer.
A better name would be "Optimised ISC" or "Simplified ISC" etc. x86 is horribally restrictive with nasty modes of execution and cruft that descend from an old technology that was limited by this because of technology limits in 1976! Alpha was designed for the future in the 90's, and has no cruft or limitations in the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) created by hardware limitations.
I don't think anyone bemoans the lack of ADD R1, (R2) or whatever instructions (an add that requires a memory access at the address held in R2 to get the value to add). Also the lack of things like "POLY" (DEC VAX instruction) are not to be bemoaned.
Before saying that RISC is something it isn't, go and read about it, and preferably do a course at university about computer architecture.
And when was the last time a heatsink fell off a motherboard? The whole video is a joke, built around a stupid situation.
VIA released their C3 cool processor video that showed a C3 lasting 24 hours playing Quake with no heatsink or fan on. That was 800MHz. A similar speed Celeron hung after 5 seconds.
I am not overly religious, so I do not know my town names, etc.
Do people know where Sodom/Gommorah were? These places were smitten by god in the Old Testament, although the only film that I have seen that related to this used a nuclear blast in the background to denote "destruction by god" and obviously did not have any "alien intelligence" overtones to it at all, no sirrah!
Could a meteorite hit has sucked water from the Red Sea thus emptying it for Moses to cross?
As you can see, I am just making wild assumptions here trying to relate myths (Old Testament) with reality (Meteorite that hit 4000-6000 years ago). Didn't some religious people a long time ago date the beginning of the earth to be like 4090BC or near that anyway?
Wild, brainstorming thoughts that archeologists need to have to piece things together. It was only recently that they connected the volcanic destruction of an island in the mediterranean with the ending of a civilisation on Crete 100 miles away at the same time (i.e., huge tidal waves, killing of trade & crap weather killed the Cretian civilisation off - I forget the name of the civilisation though - Minoan?). Good TV program though.
Anyone else got a fave religious story that could be attributed to this event?
No, I generally like the Covenant series (except the last couple of books, where the depressions and sailing just got too much to handle). I just don't think that these, nor the Gap series, will make him an author to be popularly remembered in 50 years time. Although he will still be read of course, as books get handed down and all that.
I haven't read The Shining, but I enjoyed a lot of S.Kings other books (The Stand, Needful Things, Tommyknockers, Running Man, EOTD, and so on), although I have yet to read the Dark Tower series, which I hear is very good.
Of course, Fantasy has one thing really going for it - it doesn't go out of date unless it is one of those "cross-world-Earth-Fantasy-world" type books (Covenant, Last Rune, etc). I mean, a sword is a sword is a sword. It isn't a gun that is superceded by a laser whip which is superceded by a phase-disruptor-photon-destructor (emphasis on the 'or' at the end in a kind of Hawkwind style - hey, no one has mentioned Michael Moorcock yet have they?)...
That is the problem with ultra-futuristic-Sci-Fi. Unless there has been an end to civilisation or whatever, there is always a solution to every problem. Near-time Sci-Fi is more interesting (KSR Mars, Rama even) but of course will date very quickly when dates get passed. Arthur C Clarke had these problems as you all know, although that doesn't take away from the greatness of his stories - in a similar way to how we are still reading Jules Verne even though WW3 never happened, and we aren't living underground or whatever...
Slashdot Mirror
However, I agree that the PS2 has not reached anywhere near its full potential yet, whereas the XBox is using well-known hardware, and thus will be already achieving much closer to its full potetial from the start. Which means great games at launch, but they will not improve as much as the PS2 has.
Does anyone have the figures for the computing power of the Penteron/Celium III processor in the XBox vs. the computing power of the PS2's CPU and the GameCube's PPC derived processor? Of course, according to Mac users, the Gamecube will be twice as fast as the XBox despite running 148MHz slower... :)
The GameCube and PS2 both have on-die framebuffers and ZBuffers, etc. This gives then great performance for these operations (although the PS2's is a little cramped now), whereas the XBox has to access memory for these operations.
Also, what is the effect of Embedded WinXP+DX8 on the usable memory of the XBox? The GameCube may have less memory overall (but it does have very low latency 1T SRAM!), but it doesn't have to deal with possibly large operating systems...
(2) The format of the hard drive may be such that you cannot even dd it.
(3) How will dd help you if you want to use a different hard drive? dd is great for copying HDA to HDB, where both HDs are the same in every respect. However, sticking in a 40GB 7200RPM drive to get more speed will not work anyway.
http://homepages.compuserve.de/bITmASTER32/dc/dc-i de.html
With pictures, etc.
If you were going to make your own, the best thing to do, seeing that you say the expansion connector is basically PCI (any pictures?) would be to make a card with a PCI-PCI bridge, and then run your own PCI bus outside the Dreamcast with say 4 PCI slots on it, for you to plug in various NICs, Audigies, and other fun things (no, not an IDE RAID card!)
Once you know this, just make your own dual-nic interface card.
Okay, the "just" is actually quite a lot of work of course.
I forgot "/Libraries" for system libraries that are not part of the OS (e.g., libncurses) OS libraries would go into "/Linux-$VERSION-$VENDOR/Libraries of course.
So yes, these are simple remappings of the current directory structure.
and so on. It doesn't take much thought to get everything sorted out. Sorry about POSIX, but you could have a system that did run-time remapping of the old directory names to the new ones, or just invisible (in GUI filesystem apps) symlinks as above.
The OS is stored in /Linux-$VERSION-$VENDOR
(e.g., /Linux-2.4.14-RedHat) - this allows you to have multiple OS directories for quick and simple upgrades. The OS would, of course, include the kernel, modules, etc - the essentials.
Common commands should have a directory, lets call it "/Commands", however, it could be "/C" (ooh, very Amiga-like, the OS that had a decent directory structure from the start - we could learn a lot from that) or "/bin" for the die hards. This would hold utilities, tools, etc - command line stuff.
Applications would be stored under the "/Applications" directory, each application would have its own directory, and in that directory you could store different versions of the software. All software could be configured to run in a chroot'd environment for security. Software could come as a MacOSX style package.
Mount other drives in the "/Drives" directory. Mount devices in the "/Devices" directory, or in the "/Linux-$VERSION-$VENDOR/Devices" directory, depending on how you want to define the scope of the OS.
Sure, this needs a little work. But it is a lot more understandable and usable than the current system.
So a simple example would have:
(of course, you might want it all lower-case in a case-sensitive file system!).
Good points: The price - this is in the price range of many people. However, would the Palm m100 be a better deal because of the wealth of applications available?
Also, that website has a way too small font, and it is a fixed size so I couldn't scale it up in the browser (konqueror). Mozilla will probably fare better as its font resizing even works on sites there the stylesheet has been rude enough to specify a fixed font size instead of a relative font size.
Hey, my contract as a programmer at work means that my employer owns the stuff I program. This is entirely reasonable. So why is it that music artists, employed by their employer (RIAA member) get so upset at losing the ownership of the work they do?
They get paid more than adequate wages for what they do (if they are any good). Many of them do not write the words or the music, they just look nice and can vaguely sing. These people are not $1m/year musicians, and they earn under $100k. S-Club 7 (annoying teeny pop band in the UK) are well known, but only get this sort of wage, plus sponsorship (BT mainly at the moment). Plus they don't have to work in an office and their deadlines are measured to the nearest year, not the nearest week or day.
2) Set up a company (cheap)
3) Set up a bank account
4) Set up a merchant account
5) Sell music online
6) PC with CD burner and CD label printer
You just need $5000 up front to set this up, maybe you could do it for a few bands. Sell entire albums for $5 (a percentage goes to the merchant bank).
Marketing is the problem. Use Napster and the other music distribution mechanisms to put out low-quality snippets and encourage people to visit your site. If the music is naff, then people will not buy, obviously!
These companies are meant to represent the artists they sign up. However, they are too busy trying to grab ownership of the work that these artists do, and making money off of these artists, without giving the artists much back.
In the end, the artists should sort themselves out - they signed up for the recording deals. However, how can some singer hope to comprehend a legal contract from one of these companies? Contracts that in effect transfer ownership of the music to the company from the artist.
Musicians need to band together and work to get themselves good contracts. Contracts where they keep the ownership of the music, and the copyright, but license the record company to release their music for $x per album, for a period of y years.
Greater intelligence is needed on the side of the musicians, as in the end they are the loser in all of this RIAA monopoly shenanigens.
Emulated JDK (IBM) is not an option, and yes, it was tested.
So (RH) Linux was chosen, and rightly so for this appliance.
Hopefully one day FreeBSD will haev a good native JDK that is as stable and reliable as whatever the latest Linux JDK is at that time. Or we will rewrite the entire thing in C, in which case we will use FreeBSD.
And evolution. If that app ever works in FreeBSD it will be a miracle. At least KMail works, as does Mozilla Mail, and both are fine (small/fast vs large/slow though).
Still use FreeBSD on the server though. Wouldn't use anything else.
Oh. Java support. I like to tinker a lot in Java, so FreeBSDs abysmal support for it means that it gets overlooked in favour of Linux for my desktop. I use Mandrake Linux 8.1 at the moment, which is pretty good overall.
However, it is quite chunky. This could be obviated by the use of an OLED display once they are cheap enough to use. These use less power, and will be usable in the dark.
A flip-up screen cover could reveal a touch-sensitive screen area, ideal for simple apps like a calculator or simple game. The format of this device means that more advanced applications are not feasible.
What would be sensible would be for this device to become part of a cell-phone. The display is the same size, the cell-phone has a bigger battery and faster CPU, and more memory as well. The device could sync your cell-phone data with your PDA/Desktop. The cellphone will have an IR link built-into it, or bluetooth next year.
In fact, this could be a good thing for "low-end" cell-phones (i.e., not PocketPC/Symbian ones) to incorporate into them. It would give them a market differentiation for not much cost. And leave your wrist free for teling the time. And a cell phone has buttons and all that on it, making applications much more accessible.
Seriously, SlickEdit appears to be amazing, but I am an emacs man, and I like my mode of operation: [edit stuff]
ctrl-x v v [cvs comment] ctrl-c ctrl-c
SlickEdit doesn't do CVS, but it does other code repositories.
It also has emacs emulation.
It is a lot for an editor. And I have only seen badly formatted code generated using it - sure programmer disfunction, but annoying.
You have to get comfortable with your editing environment. Once comfortable (say, a few weeks regular use) then you can evaluate it.
One thing - I hate editors that restrict you to Courier. That is a crap editing font.
kate (KDE editor) is also nice as well, and configurable. Built in console option, and multiple files open at the same time in a good GUI. Multiple highlighting modes (not as advanced as the 'old' KDE Advanced Editor though), not restricted to a fixed-width font, etc. I like it.
I used to like the old Amiga editors as well. BED. GoldED. CygnusEd. They were solid and good as well. Not relevant to the topic, but interesting anyway.
In the music industry, Artists get paid sweet FA, they obviously don't have a union, and they don't go on strike to get a better deal when they are being done over.
Ao what Artists need to do is form a union, and unite against their employers, the recording industry. If they don't do this, then they don't deserve any more money.
The fact is, P2P music copying:
1) Gets music spread around more - increasing the chance of it being purchased legitimately
2) Doesn't mean that without the P2P the music would have been bought
3) or that a sale was lost as a result of the P2P download
4) Sure, some people will download music and not buy CDs as a result. These people are a significant minority who previously recorded their friends' CDs onto tape anyway
The fact is, the RIAA exist for the artists for several reasons - to provide recording facilities, and to advertise the artist. P2P does the advertising, and thus takes away one of the reasons for artists to use a major record label. The other one is less necessary as computer technology improves to the state where a personal music studio is a few thousand dollars, and can match a professional music studio from a few years ago for features.
The RIAA really need DVD Audio, with videos to differentiate their products from P2P. P2P is a competitor, and they want this competition legislated out of existence. For example, the Static X song, Black and White (kicks ass) is available on DVD with the (kick ass) video, and other videos of the band. This is worth buying as a reasonable price.
Displays will get lower power with OLED displays.
Drives will use less power, and also with cheaper, lower power memory (DDR-II at 1.8V), more data can be cached in RAM on a laptop instead of having the drive on.
So low power CPUs are important. If we want a laptop that can last an entire plane journey around the world, or a week in the woods, instead of lugging 4 spare batteries around with you, then you need a low power CPU.
VIA's C3 with LongHaul power management looks good. Intel have Speedstep, AMD have PowerNow. Transmeta awakened the major CPU makers to the need for low power processors. Can Transmeta stay ahead of the game? It will be hard.
However, the sizable number of laptops are actually transportable desktops. CPU power is not relevant with these devices, hence the common usage of desktop processors in these devices.
If Slashdot had a "Reply-To-Person-Only" option (feature for logged-in users only), I would have used that.
WierdX is free, but might need some work to get it to run within the confines of PersonalJava. Also the restriction to 320x240 dislay area might be harsh for most X11 apps.
The choice of Embedded QT is good. It means compatibility with QT apps is not that far away (recompile for ARM and link to Embedded QT) and provides a single user interface that is consistent. This is so important in PDA and computer usage, that applications should not deviate from this unless there is a real need.
Does this device has networking or modem technology built-in? It doesn't have a PCMCIA card, but is does have a CF2 slot. Can you get Ethernet/etc for CF2, or is it only for memory style devices (CF, microdrive, etc)?
Woo! Alpha powered computer on nForce hardware? ;)
Seriously, if this turns out to be true, and within a year, then this could popularise the Alpha a bit, especially with Linux users who don't need x86! This is, of course, assuming that the processor is reasonably priced.
Alpha has always lacked a consumer level CPU, which has affected it when it comes to workstations and PCs. They have been powerhouses with 4/8MB L2 cache off-chip, etc, but if they had at each stage made a cheaper chip with 512KB L2 cache, or 256KB on-die L2 cache, especially if it was pin/slot compatible with Athlon processors, then the uptake of the processor would have been a lot higher. IMO, of course!
A better name would be "Optimised ISC" or "Simplified ISC" etc. x86 is horribally restrictive with nasty modes of execution and cruft that descend from an old technology that was limited by this because of technology limits in 1976! Alpha was designed for the future in the 90's, and has no cruft or limitations in the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) created by hardware limitations.
I don't think anyone bemoans the lack of ADD R1, (R2) or whatever instructions (an add that requires a memory access at the address held in R2 to get the value to add). Also the lack of things like "POLY" (DEC VAX instruction) are not to be bemoaned.
Before saying that RISC is something it isn't, go and read about it, and preferably do a course at university about computer architecture.
In this case the processor heats up slowly, and this means the processor will shut itself off, or slow itself down.
VIA released their C3 cool processor video that showed a C3 lasting 24 hours playing Quake with no heatsink or fan on. That was 800MHz. A similar speed Celeron hung after 5 seconds.
Could a meteorite hit has sucked water from the Red Sea thus emptying it for Moses to cross?
As you can see, I am just making wild assumptions here trying to relate myths (Old Testament) with reality (Meteorite that hit 4000-6000 years ago). Didn't some religious people a long time ago date the beginning of the earth to be like 4090BC or near that anyway?
Wild, brainstorming thoughts that archeologists need to have to piece things together. It was only recently that they connected the volcanic destruction of an island in the mediterranean with the ending of a civilisation on Crete 100 miles away at the same time (i.e., huge tidal waves, killing of trade & crap weather killed the Cretian civilisation off - I forget the name of the civilisation though - Minoan?). Good TV program though.
Anyone else got a fave religious story that could be attributed to this event?
I haven't read The Shining, but I enjoyed a lot of S.Kings other books (The Stand, Needful Things, Tommyknockers, Running Man, EOTD, and so on), although I have yet to read the Dark Tower series, which I hear is very good.
Of course, Fantasy has one thing really going for it - it doesn't go out of date unless it is one of those "cross-world-Earth-Fantasy-world" type books (Covenant, Last Rune, etc). I mean, a sword is a sword is a sword. It isn't a gun that is superceded by a laser whip which is superceded by a phase-disruptor-photon-destructor (emphasis on the 'or' at the end in a kind of Hawkwind style - hey, no one has mentioned Michael Moorcock yet have they?)...
That is the problem with ultra-futuristic-Sci-Fi. Unless there has been an end to civilisation or whatever, there is always a solution to every problem. Near-time Sci-Fi is more interesting (KSR Mars, Rama even) but of course will date very quickly when dates get passed. Arthur C Clarke had these problems as you all know, although that doesn't take away from the greatness of his stories - in a similar way to how we are still reading Jules Verne even though WW3 never happened, and we aren't living underground or whatever...