One thing about buying the CDs, at least the FreeBSD ones, is that you get stickers with them which you can plaster everywhere. The stickers are worth the money in themselves!
Okay, so after 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 I am getting bored of the stickers. I hope they have some nice shiny new ones for FreeBSD 4.x:-) Maybe on a cunning silver metallic background that does pretty things when you hold it up to the light and tilt it.
I have been a user of FreeBSD for around 6 months, and I like it, and how it does things a lot, although I know it isn't the be all and end all of operating systems (e.g., Linux SMP is better, but FreeBSD VM is better, etc).
This is a good move for the BSDs in general. They have been losing ground to Linux, which is the more 'media friendly' OS. It is good to see that BSDi are contributing a lot of their code (except that under NDA - still available as a plus-pack though) to the BSD code base, under the BSD license (not under some other license).
I wonder what ramifications this has for FreeBSD 4.0? It hasn't been released yet, so will it be delayed while several core BSDi components are added? I doubt it, but FreeBSD 5.0 will occur before the end of the year otherwise, as I imagine the differences between FreeBSD and BSDi are significant enough to warrant a version increase. OTOH, it could just be that they will be merged smoothly into the 4.x series...
I was called that insult as well. and I managed to embed Freshmeat in a Slashdot comment a month ago (along with a poll about how crap Slashdot's authors are, several pictures and a lot of large red text). It was on topic though, but the comments got removed by those people who say that comments don't get removed. I should have embedded Slashdot inside Slashdot - you would have seen a recursive slashdot then...:-)
Marconi did it last year as well. Marconi's could switch 16 different circuits IIRC, but this one makes no claims as to how many it can do.
Photonics has a big future, it is obviously important, but unless someone makes an optical switch that can switch thousands of different signals, on many different wavelengths, then it isn't the most newsworthy item.
I think they were single machines, servicing different areas of the country. 2 went down, leaving one machine to service the whole country, which naturally struggled under the weight. It was as software problem in the other two machines, AFAIK, and the machines were down for many many hours.
Getting past the obvious posts such as: "Where is the source code" and other stuff...
HA Linux provides:
Hot pluggable CPUs!
Hot pluggable fans, IO and power modules
SNMP support
Inter system communications
And this Linux seems destined for the telco market, designed to run in telecom systems that require major high uptime (carrier grade networking etc). After 2 or the 3 computers that service 0800 and 0845 etc numbers in the UK crashed at the same time a couple of weeks ago, this uptime is required.
I agree. Define what the data authorisation field should contain, and release the standard as "Kerberos 6 - the more secure and updated version!" and then implement the changes in all of the other implementations. Windows 2000 will be stuck with "Kerberos 5 - the old and duffed up and abused version".
They should be made to stick to standards, or to submit their ideas into the standard. There should be some kind of "Open Standards Licence", like the GPL, so that if you take a standard and make some changes to it, you have to release the changed to that standard.
Tempest works on both CRT and LCD screens, to answer to first poster.
The easiest way to foil Tempest is to cut the top 30% out of the picture - it doesn't affect image quality that much, although everything is a little more blurred than normal. The great thing is, you can put other information in the top 30% of the signal without affecting what the monitor shows to you - but to those monitoring you all they see is the top 30%. So run a simple screensaver type program that only writes to the top 30% of the signal, and plan your bomb making in the bottom 70% in perfect secrecy.
256x256 truecolour icons would take up 256k of memory. My desktop currently has around 40 different icons on it.. that would be 10Mb of my memory, and I know that with several windows open and some applications running etc that could easily go up to 160 icons, which is 40Mb of my memory.
I think that even for the most complex of icons a vector representation would result in a smaller icon than 256k! Looking at the Word icon, hmmm, that could be done in around 1k (a rectangle, a 'W', some lines of text and a stamp). Yep, vector icons are the way to go, not bitmap.
Silly me! MacOS X could be outdated with its great technology - they won't be scaling their icons down, they will have to scale them up to be legible, even at 128x128!:-)
17" by 80ppi is 1360 pixels wide, so you are using a screen roughly 12 pixels high? 14" by 80ppi is 1120, the resolution is 1360x1120 (or to be more useful, 1600x1200) which is 1,523,200 (1,920,000) pixels on the screen. Not 16320.
At 200ppi (3200x2400) there would be 7,680,000 pixels on the screen (not 40,800).
The simple solution to icons is to make them big (256x256) and truecolour, and then scale them down to fit in a certain area of the screen. Funnily enough though, at 200ppi, your biggest icon would be 1.25" on a side. I can live with 0.75" on a side icons, but any smaller... no way.
X will survive, but themes won't scale, and icons will have to be redone. I think that someone out there should start working on 256x256 icons for every program they can think of, 64x64 is just too small.
Probably why Apple has gone to display PDF in its next operating system then?
They have obviously seen this thing coming along - in a couple of years most laptops will have min 1600x1200 screens, probably 2048x1536 even, and do you want to hunt for those icons on that screen (shhh, don't even think of 200x100 character terminals).
This calls for a scalable desktop - one where things are specified in DPI and not pixels. Apple has done it. Windows hasn't, and won't until people start moaning (my taskbar is 1/8" high, I can't read the text...) but what about X?
I have a greeb "Beanie Babies" Chameleon at home which looks just like the SUSE chameleon, at I called it Munchie for some strange and twisted reason...
So I think that Munchie would be a great name for the SUSE chameleon.
Hmm, so the Transmeta x86 laptops won't be competing with Intel Mobile PIIIs and AMD K6-2+s then? The ARM is intended for a different market from the Transmeta - there might be a little overlap, but not a significant amount. Intel will bring out a 600MHz StrongARM this year which will herald amazingly fast Psions and other small PDAs.
I agree, but that is 500 operation per second on a massively parallel scale - maybe 100,000,000 threads running here.
So swapping 100,000,000 threads 500 times a second will lead to a large context switch time _if_ this was a normal program. Luckily it will be running on BrainPlatform(tm) which will virtualise the brain functions in some way. Still, this extra software adds in even more latency.
50,000,000,000 operations per second should be possible I suppose, except for the interdependencies and timing issues. 1/5000000000 isn't much though... if each brain operation translates to 1000 machine instructions that is 50,000,000,000,000 instructions per second (50 tips), double that for BrainPlatform(tm), then multiply by an arbitrary factor (say 10) to realise you will need a machine capable of 1000 tips. Currently we have 2 bips, so a factor of 500,000 is required, which is roughly 2^19, and computing power doubles every 2 years (taking Moores Law problems into consideration) so that is in 38 years time.
Assuming Moores Law and that I am the most intelligent person on Slashdot...
2015!
Uh oh... what if I am not the most intelligent person on Slashdot - there's Signal 11, and then there is that grits guy.
Of course, there might be a flaw in my assumptions. Ah yes, Moores Law will peter out at around 2012, and there will be major difficulties from 2020 onwards, so Moores Law will no longer hold.
Seriously, I imagine that the horsepower required to stimulate and excite a digital brain is not insignificant. Even with 2050's technology (assuming terabytes of memory and amazing CPU power), you would be hardpressed to handle even a single brain - work of multiprocessing power that it is.
We will need CPUs that can handle millions of threads simultaneously. I don't want my thoughts chopped up into 10ms time slices (not that the virtual hattig would notice)...
Imagine getting a BSOD just your new brain was starting to think and your old brain had been 'terminated', as you so eloquently put it...
:-)
There are plenty of stories out there about clones or brain clones/copying/transfer etc etc. It will happen one day. Even in 3001, by AC Clarke, they walk around with little devices that record everything you do - every memory, every injury, etc. 500 years later they can make a perfect copy of you at any point in your age!
Whilst I am alive there is only one of me (luckily) but if I decide to upload my brain somewhere and plug it into a simulated living environment so it lives on, then you could end up with multiple hattigs, all of them with identical memories up to the age they were uploaded, and then all diverging as they went off to think their own thing.
Of course, later on after my 50 brains have done their thinking, I could come back and download the results of their work back into my brain - 50 times the brain power as long as you can put up with the latency (download once a month or so)!
Copying is so easy with digital data, and so editable... imagine the fun you could have with a digital brain - erasing the past, making it into a policeman, putting it into a robotic cop body etc. Add a few hard links to the processor and FPU and you have a pretty excellent cyborg.
Today will be the day that Microsoft files for Chapter 11 at this rate... after cancelling Win2000 because it doesn't perform to the kind of standard that they want it to. Office 2000 will be released for Linux under the GPL.
Sun will suddenly release Java under the GPL or BSD licensing schemes.
Intel will slash chip prices across the board to just above fabrication costs.
Music will become free for anyone to download and play. Movies likewise.
All governments will merge into one big global mega government and suddenly world peace will occur.
Simply put, the Crusoes are designed for Laptops and below. This means they don't have the best IO architecture in the world, especially in the x86 world. They can handle laptop IO, and the incorporated NorthBridge supports PCI, SDRAM, DDRSDRAM etc, but no AGP support, no I2O etc. It might be possible to add an external chip to support these though.
Transmeta have created the high-end of Code Morphing processors. Having proved they work quite well, they can now concentrate on putting more of the software in silicon - e.g., better IO handling, AGP, More functional units etc, and in a year or so you can expect fast desktop Transmeta CPUs (not Crusoes though!). The Transmeta is good at running a limited number of programs at once - any more and the translation cache will keep on filling up and you will be accessing main memory more and more, which is bad - so fine for PDAs and Laptops, but bad for desktops where having 50-100 different processes running is common.
Expect a desktop Transmeta to include at least 1Mb of on-board cache as well as even more powerful silicon and software.
Remote display to low-power x-server. Hmmm, those people that use dedicated X-Servers or run their applications remotely (on the Quad Alpha, perhaps!) aren't going to like that.
Network Bandwidth: 10 mbits/s is still a reasonable amount, and that is the low-end of networks. There is little excuse for not equipping a home network with 100mbit ethernet - if you have multiple computers, you can afford a decent hub!
A 1024x768 24-bit pixmap is around 3 megs of data - 3-5 seconds to transmit over a low-end network - but Print previews will probably be much less than this in size, and could be implemented in greyscale as an option. On a reasonable network, you could update a 1024x768 image 10 times a second, ignoring latency and network usage...
So libart et al can send the 96dpi 24-bit colour image to the screen, and a 1200dpi b&w image to the printer (or PS rendering primitives). No need to include the X Server!
There is no such thing as a trade secret after the secret has been leaked.
The code was developed in Europe. You can reverse engineer for interoperability, such as to watch DVDs under Linux/FreeBSD/AmigaOS/BeOS/DOS1.0 instead of the default Windows and Mac.
An argument for industry pushed monopolisation of computer OSs - Microsoft ask the movie industry not to write players for other OSs, they comply for a nice fee (or similar) and thus M$ monopoly grows...
Still, the judge says the Plaintiff (the movie people) will not have a good chance of winning anyway. Just get the source code onto your machine now... I might look into porting livid to freebsd this side of y3000!
You can be sure that companies are going to be more interested in porting and writing games on Linux now. Over the next two years more and more Linux devices, many of them portable, will appear, and a large market for these devices will be for games, and especially network games!
You could be playing you game around the house, in the garden etc, but loading the game data from inside the house, across a bluetooth link or wireless ethernet link - basically a remote disk drive. No more having to leave the computer behind when you are forced to go into the garden/shopping/etc!:-)
Developers need to get aquainted with programming games for Linux as soon as possible. XFree86 4 will makes things even better for them
Say what you like about the quality of Intel products, but their attitude is appalling. They signed a deal with VIA to deflect the monopoly investigation they were under, and then they got pissed off because VIA made a better chipset.
This basically says that Intel wants a monopoly on chipsets. If this injunction is granted, then they will have succeeded in their aims. I think that the Federal Trade Commission should be called in to reinvestigate Intel _because_ of their behaviour towards competitors.
It is fair to be competitive, but not to be monopolistic, and then cover that up by licensing their chipset to a competitor so they can say, "look, we are good boys, we allow comptetition" and then rescind the license a few months later when they aren't being investigated.
Luckily this won't affect the AMD chipsets, so expect to see even more choice in Athlon chipsets soon.
I don't like bully-boy corporations. Lack of competition means less innovation in the market. Intel has a huge share of the chipset and motherboard market as it is.
I doubt that the companies using VIA chipsets (Compaq et al) will be too happy. Expect them to react and go 100% Athlon if this attempt to ban VIA works. If they cave into Intel and switch to Intel chipsets then I have no respect for them!:-)
The two processors have differing instruction sets - the 700MHz one has better 16bit support, for Windows (haha). The instructions sets differ, and no specs will ever be released because of this. The Morphing Software will be adapted to run on the underlying ISA. The system is fast enough to not have to run natively. The 3120 (400MHz) can run Windows perfectly.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so after 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 I am getting bored of the stickers. I hope they have some nice shiny new ones for FreeBSD 4.x :-) Maybe on a cunning silver metallic background that does pretty things when you hold it up to the light and tilt it.
I must buy a FreeBSD Daemon doll at some point...
This is a good move for the BSDs in general. They have been losing ground to Linux, which is the more 'media friendly' OS. It is good to see that BSDi are contributing a lot of their code (except that under NDA - still available as a plus-pack though) to the BSD code base, under the BSD license (not under some other license).
I wonder what ramifications this has for FreeBSD 4.0? It hasn't been released yet, so will it be delayed while several core BSDi components are added? I doubt it, but FreeBSD 5.0 will occur before the end of the year otherwise, as I imagine the differences between FreeBSD and BSDi are significant enough to warrant a version increase. OTOH, it could just be that they will be merged smoothly into the 4.x series...
They could have called it FreeBSDi :-)
I was called that insult as well. and I managed to embed Freshmeat in a Slashdot comment a month ago (along with a poll about how crap Slashdot's authors are, several pictures and a lot of large red text). It was on topic though, but the comments got removed by those people who say that comments don't get removed. I should have embedded Slashdot inside Slashdot - you would have seen a recursive slashdot then... :-)
Photonics has a big future, it is obviously important, but unless someone makes an optical switch that can switch thousands of different signals, on many different wavelengths, then it isn't the most newsworthy item.
I think they were single machines, servicing different areas of the country. 2 went down, leaving one machine to service the whole country, which naturally struggled under the weight. It was as software problem in the other two machines, AFAIK, and the machines were down for many many hours.
HA Linux provides:
And this Linux seems destined for the telco market, designed to run in telecom systems that require major high uptime (carrier grade networking etc). After 2 or the 3 computers that service 0800 and 0845 etc numbers in the UK crashed at the same time a couple of weeks ago, this uptime is required.
They should be made to stick to standards, or to submit their ideas into the standard. There should be some kind of "Open Standards Licence", like the GPL, so that if you take a standard and make some changes to it, you have to release the changed to that standard.
Tempest works on both CRT and LCD screens, to answer to first poster.
The easiest way to foil Tempest is to cut the top 30% out of the picture - it doesn't affect image quality that much, although everything is a little more blurred than normal. The great thing is, you can put other information in the top 30% of the signal without affecting what the monitor shows to you - but to those monitoring you all they see is the top 30%. So run a simple screensaver type program that only writes to the top 30% of the signal, and plan your bomb making in the bottom 70% in perfect secrecy.
See more here: Ross Anderson's Page at Cambridge University. Includes special fonts designed for Tempest fooling.
~~
Following up to my own post...
256x256 truecolour icons would take up 256k of memory. My desktop currently has around 40 different icons on it.. that would be 10Mb of my memory, and I know that with several windows open and some applications running etc that could easily go up to 160 icons, which is 40Mb of my memory.
I think that even for the most complex of icons a vector representation would result in a smaller icon than 256k! Looking at the Word icon, hmmm, that could be done in around 1k (a rectangle, a 'W', some lines of text and a stamp). Yep, vector icons are the way to go, not bitmap.
Silly me! MacOS X could be outdated with its great technology - they won't be scaling their icons down, they will have to scale them up to be legible, even at 128x128! :-)
~~
Dodgy Maths Mate...
17" by 80ppi is 1360 pixels wide, so you are using a screen roughly 12 pixels high? 14" by 80ppi is 1120, the resolution is 1360x1120 (or to be more useful, 1600x1200) which is 1,523,200 (1,920,000) pixels on the screen. Not 16320.
At 200ppi (3200x2400) there would be 7,680,000 pixels on the screen (not 40,800).
The simple solution to icons is to make them big (256x256) and truecolour, and then scale them down to fit in a certain area of the screen. Funnily enough though, at 200ppi, your biggest icon would be 1.25" on a side. I can live with 0.75" on a side icons, but any smaller... no way.
X will survive, but themes won't scale, and icons will have to be redone. I think that someone out there should start working on 256x256 icons for every program they can think of, 64x64 is just too small.
~~
Probably why Apple has gone to display PDF in its next operating system then?
They have obviously seen this thing coming along - in a couple of years most laptops will have min 1600x1200 screens, probably 2048x1536 even, and do you want to hunt for those icons on that screen (shhh, don't even think of 200x100 character terminals).
This calls for a scalable desktop - one where things are specified in DPI and not pixels. Apple has done it. Windows hasn't, and won't until people start moaning (my taskbar is 1/8" high, I can't read the text...) but what about X?
~~
I have a greeb "Beanie Babies" Chameleon at home which looks just like the SUSE chameleon, at I called it Munchie for some strange and twisted reason...
So I think that Munchie would be a great name for the SUSE chameleon.
Otherwise, call it "Bud"...
~~
~~
So swapping 100,000,000 threads 500 times a second will lead to a large context switch time _if_ this was a normal program. Luckily it will be running on BrainPlatform(tm) which will virtualise the brain functions in some way. Still, this extra software adds in even more latency.
50,000,000,000 operations per second should be possible I suppose, except for the interdependencies and timing issues. 1/5000000000 isn't much though... if each brain operation translates to 1000 machine instructions that is 50,000,000,000,000 instructions per second (50 tips), double that for BrainPlatform(tm), then multiply by an arbitrary factor (say 10) to realise you will need a machine capable of 1000 tips. Currently we have 2 bips, so a factor of 500,000 is required, which is roughly 2^19, and computing power doubles every 2 years (taking Moores Law problems into consideration) so that is in 38 years time.
Oh. Okay.
~~
Assuming Moores Law and that I am the most intelligent person on Slashdot...
2015!
Uh oh... what if I am not the most intelligent person on Slashdot - there's Signal 11, and then there is that grits guy.
Of course, there might be a flaw in my assumptions. Ah yes, Moores Law will peter out at around 2012, and there will be major difficulties from 2020 onwards, so Moores Law will no longer hold.
:-)
~~
"50 brains is all you will ever need."
:-)
Seriously, I imagine that the horsepower required to stimulate and excite a digital brain is not insignificant. Even with 2050's technology (assuming terabytes of memory and amazing CPU power), you would be hardpressed to handle even a single brain - work of multiprocessing power that it is.
We will need CPUs that can handle millions of threads simultaneously. I don't want my thoughts chopped up into 10ms time slices (not that the virtual hattig would notice)...
~~
:-)
There are plenty of stories out there about clones or brain clones/copying/transfer etc etc. It will happen one day. Even in 3001, by AC Clarke, they walk around with little devices that record everything you do - every memory, every injury, etc. 500 years later they can make a perfect copy of you at any point in your age!
~~
Of course, later on after my 50 brains have done their thinking, I could come back and download the results of their work back into my brain - 50 times the brain power as long as you can put up with the latency (download once a month or so)!
Copying is so easy with digital data, and so editable... imagine the fun you could have with a digital brain - erasing the past, making it into a policeman, putting it into a robotic cop body etc. Add a few hard links to the processor and FPU and you have a pretty excellent cyborg.
Sweet!
~~
Sun will suddenly release Java under the GPL or BSD licensing schemes.
Intel will slash chip prices across the board to just above fabrication costs.
Music will become free for anyone to download and play. Movies likewise.
All governments will merge into one big global mega government and suddenly world peace will occur.
Futurama will get funny.
~~
Simply put, the Crusoes are designed for Laptops and below. This means they don't have the best IO architecture in the world, especially in the x86 world. They can handle laptop IO, and the incorporated NorthBridge supports PCI, SDRAM, DDRSDRAM etc, but no AGP support, no I2O etc. It might be possible to add an external chip to support these though.
Transmeta have created the high-end of Code Morphing processors. Having proved they work quite well, they can now concentrate on putting more of the software in silicon - e.g., better IO handling, AGP, More functional units etc, and in a year or so you can expect fast desktop Transmeta CPUs (not Crusoes though!). The Transmeta is good at running a limited number of programs at once - any more and the translation cache will keep on filling up and you will be accessing main memory more and more, which is bad - so fine for PDAs and Laptops, but bad for desktops where having 50-100 different processes running is common.
Expect a desktop Transmeta to include at least 1Mb of on-board cache as well as even more powerful silicon and software.
~~
No, don't put it in the X-Server. Why?
Remote display to low-power x-server. Hmmm, those people that use dedicated X-Servers or run their applications remotely (on the Quad Alpha, perhaps!) aren't going to like that.
Network Bandwidth: 10 mbits/s is still a reasonable amount, and that is the low-end of networks. There is little excuse for not equipping a home network with 100mbit ethernet - if you have multiple computers, you can afford a decent hub!
A 1024x768 24-bit pixmap is around 3 megs of data - 3-5 seconds to transmit over a low-end network - but Print previews will probably be much less than this in size, and could be implemented in greyscale as an option. On a reasonable network, you could update a 1024x768 image 10 times a second, ignoring latency and network usage...
So libart et al can send the 96dpi 24-bit colour image to the screen, and a 1200dpi b&w image to the printer (or PS rendering primitives). No need to include the X Server!
~~
The code was developed in Europe. You can reverse engineer for interoperability, such as to watch DVDs under Linux/FreeBSD/AmigaOS/BeOS/DOS1.0 instead of the default Windows and Mac.
An argument for industry pushed monopolisation of computer OSs - Microsoft ask the movie industry not to write players for other OSs, they comply for a nice fee (or similar) and thus M$ monopoly grows...
Still, the judge says the Plaintiff (the movie people) will not have a good chance of winning anyway. Just get the source code onto your machine now... I might look into porting livid to freebsd this side of y3000!
~~
You can be sure that companies are going to be more interested in porting and writing games on Linux now. Over the next two years more and more Linux devices, many of them portable, will appear, and a large market for these devices will be for games, and especially network games!
You could be playing you game around the house, in the garden etc, but loading the game data from inside the house, across a bluetooth link or wireless ethernet link - basically a remote disk drive. No more having to leave the computer behind when you are forced to go into the garden/shopping/etc! :-)
Developers need to get aquainted with programming games for Linux as soon as possible. XFree86 4 will makes things even better for them
~~
Say what you like about the quality of Intel products, but their attitude is appalling. They signed a deal with VIA to deflect the monopoly investigation they were under, and then they got pissed off because VIA made a better chipset.
This basically says that Intel wants a monopoly on chipsets. If this injunction is granted, then they will have succeeded in their aims. I think that the Federal Trade Commission should be called in to reinvestigate Intel _because_ of their behaviour towards competitors.
It is fair to be competitive, but not to be monopolistic, and then cover that up by licensing their chipset to a competitor so they can say, "look, we are good boys, we allow comptetition" and then rescind the license a few months later when they aren't being investigated.
Luckily this won't affect the AMD chipsets, so expect to see even more choice in Athlon chipsets soon.
I don't like bully-boy corporations. Lack of competition means less innovation in the market. Intel has a huge share of the chipset and motherboard market as it is.
I doubt that the companies using VIA chipsets (Compaq et al) will be too happy. Expect them to react and go 100% Athlon if this attempt to ban VIA works. If they cave into Intel and switch to Intel chipsets then I have no respect for them! :-)
~~
~~