Well that'll be why it is cheap - the vast majority of the cost will probably come from the extremely fast local memory that will be required by the processor because it is software based.
Do they mean software based in the same way that the 6800 (not 68000) was software based - an onboard ROM (well, RAM in transmetas case) that contains instructions on how to control the hardware part of the chip?
Thanks for the updates, I cannot get any of the broadcasts.
So if Microsoft suddenly enforced this law in the US, and by accident one of the disabling emails went to a user in the UK, then Bill Gates or Ballmer would get an extradition notice because they are ultimately liable for Microsofts software. The next time they came to the UK they would be arrested and thrown into Jail awaiting trial, which could take up to a year to occur. When found guilty of breaking the Computer Misuse Act (basically by knowingly hacking into a computer by having installed a backdoor into the software - altering the contents of the hard drive, and disabling software) they would go to jail and have a nice criminal record.
Who needs BackOrifice? BackOrifice will become semi-legal under this new law! (sort of:-)) All software will become mini-backorifices in a way!
I am sure you Americans will have a great time when someone in America writes a devastating virus and incorporates it into some commercial software. As it is illegal to criticise the software at all (well, that is the computer software review magazines and web sites out of business) no-one can say that it contains a virus, and when someone tries to point out that there is a virus in the software, you can charge them $5 a minute for them to tell you.
More realistically, this will either kill off commercial desktop software and pave the way for open source, or whatever. The next step will be the rest of the world, unencumbered with this law, to overtake the US. This is the single worst law that the US could pass for US economic progress! It paves the way for super-high software licensing fees, as companies sell software with 1-year licenses, and then disable the software after that year until you pay another $500 to use Word, etc.
Software companies in general are out there to screw the consumer. Prices only get low when there is a lot of competition, when competition is lacking then the company will now have a legal way to ask their customers to bend over whilst they get a got old rogering.
If I was you I would find out which companies were campaigning for this law to be passed, and then write to them saying that neither you or your company will purchase software from them in the future if they continue to pressure for this law. Spread the word around as well, your corporate manager or CEO probably won't find out until it is too late.
Another question is, will this law apply to software purchased before it is passed? If not, then people will just stop upgrading software, if they have any modicrum of intelligence.
Don't talk about it... The card is supported under Linux in 3.3.5 apparently - does no good when you are not running Linux, but are using XFree86! I run FreeBSD (yes, I know I could run X in Linux compatability mode) and it isn't supported there in 3.3.5.
I will be looking forward to trying 3.3.6 tonight! At last, I might get my S540Extreme to give me a display...
The Amiga has Arexx, an equally competant scripting language for interprocess communication and much much more. And the Amiga has a proper CLI as well - also one that is damned good if you use KingCON instead of the default built-in-ROM version!
Of course, the M$ solution is Visual Basic, a tool so entirely unsuited to the task it is laughable.
Erm, 128x128 = 16384pixels. 4 bytes per pixel = 65536bytes or 64k.
With 40 icons, that is 2.5Mbytes in total for the icons, not 20Mbytes.
With machines containing 256Mbytes that is 1% of total memory! It is also probably stored in video memory also anyway - the graphics hardware should be used to scale them quickly anyway, IMHO.
Learn your maths next time:-) (and don't hide behind "I meant MB to be megaBIT, not megaBYTE" excuses, they won't wash with me, as you would be saying that the Macs of tomorrow will be shipping with 32Mbytes of RAM)
Slashdot os not a linux site, it is a "news for nerds, news that matters" site. Not that there is much news for nerds anymore, although the last 24 hours is a lot better than the previous months...
All OSs have their problems, some more viewable and obvious than others, and some just release without fixing the errors. At least we can be sure that the 2.4 linux kernal will be mostly bug-free (I bet it will take 2 months before we are on 2.4.6:-)) when it is released.
FreeBSD is great though - I think you should not judge anything until you have used it, and there are a lot of Linuxites here who do just that! It lacks excellent SMP support though, but that should be fixed soon. I would use FreeBSD before Linux as a server platform, and both of these way before NT of any kind!
A more useful bit of data is the cost of the media on which you are copying the DVD film! A blank DVDRecordable costs quite a bit of money, and only holds 5.2Gb, compared to the 17Gb that a normal DVD can hold. Maybe you could distribute the film on large HDs, or downgrade the DVD film to VideoCD standard? The former is ridiculous, and the latter could be achieved by videoing the output of the DVD player anyway!
So whilst being able to view the DVDs under Linux/BSD/CPM etc is a valid and desirable aim, I don't see how they can claim that this is piracy? Maybe in China where they can now manufacture DVDs that are not encrypted? But why not just manufacture the pirate DVDs with the encrytion of the original master DVD anyway? It will still play!
I hope that the restraining order fails miserably, as it should in a fair society. Unfortunately, we can all see the end of our civilisation, as corporate interests overtake the rights and interests of the common person, the person who the government is meant to be protecting.
Now if they decided to implement the color version with a better OS (Penguins and Xs floating in my head).........
Strange request, in my opinion. I think that PalmOS is perfect for what it does - a simple OS that runs simple applications on a (relatively) simple device. Palms are low resource, better off than computers like the Amiga 500 and Atari ST, but in terms of computing power they are in there with a 16MHz 386 at best. X would be a nightmare and inappropriate for the task that the Palm does.
I think that the Palm should stay as it is, and add support for USB. From the USB port a CompactFlash adapter can be connected, so you can use those $600 340Mb MicroHDs. Modems/NICs/sound devices (intelligent headphones)/keyboards etc can also be spun off of the USB port (why? who cares!).
The screen on the palm should be made so that it covers the whole input area, and also have increased resolution in both axes (i.e., around 240x320). Colour is not as important as higher resolution, but the extra resolution should not be made to show more information - it should be used to show the same amount of information in a much more clearer manner. Colour models could be introduced as well, but clearly aimed for the corporate manager or geek who wants to port mame.
Sony will add support for its memory stick technology very soon, so adding another 32Mb of memory should be very simple soon - hopefully a port will be included on the IIIc, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The other day I walked into my bank. They had just replaced their old ATM machines with new ones. I thought "Great! now they'll be faster! and ooo, look, a pretty color touch screen!"
I have noticed that as well - lovely pictures of people surfing in the sunshine etc. The problem is - the old machines used to say what notes were in the machine (£5, £10, £20 etc), but the new flash ones don't - they have an unexplained indicator light that tells you when the machine is out of money. This means that you end up getting £20 notes when you want 4 £5 notes because you are catching a bus and they refuse to accept £20 notes.
So sure, use colour, but don't reduce functionality/speed/usefulness in order to implement it. The Dragonballs that provide colour funcitonality are twice as fast as the old Dragonballs that Palm use, so that should solve the speed problem anyway.
The reason is probably because the PalmOS licensees such as Sony asked for it. Sony wants to use PalmOS as the base OS for a wide range of applications, and colour is a selling point of these devices. You can bet that WinCE only sells devices because it is in colour and people do the "ooh ahh" thing over it. Psion have gone colour with the Series 7, but they are still offering the B&W version for those that only want that.
I would much rather prefer a higher resolution screen in black and white though. 160x160 works, but 240x240 or 320x320 would look really nice - much smoother characters etc. Notice I don't say that you can fit more on screen - everything stays the same physical size, but gets smoother.
Colour is only useful for highlighting things, such as importance. Since the Palm functions as an Organiser when you aren't playing SimCity, being able to see at a glance that something is important (shown in Red) or that something can be ignored (shown in Green) (or however you set up your device) is quite important. Sure, you can use bold text, or capitalised text in B&W modes - but this is limiting compared to the options provided by colour.
Battery technology is also much improved now than even a couple of years ago - and this is all helped by lower power semiconductor devices. For many people switching to colour will not impact their battery life much.
And SimCity would look so much nicer in colour wouldn't it!
Wow! I can buy a game and get the OS for it too! Brilliant.
A great marketing idea, sell the Linux version of the game with the OS, so that increases uptake of Linux ("Oh, I won't buy that version, 'cos I can't be bothered to get Linux") and it makes the box heavier, so you must be getting more, right?
Just buying the game would mean that you could update all those slightly old programs you have for little effort. And it is a great coup for SuSE, as everyone who buys Quake III will have a copy of their distribution, and wouldn't you try it out on a spare partition just because?
Things like this make me happy not to live in America. How about an option on Slashdot where posts can be moderated to 'free speech -1' and so we can select not to view the posts that are here due to free speech (but still view low rated posts). The fact is that the poster has no responsibilities for the other people on Slashdot, so the overall experience is ruined for those people. With rights comes responsibilities. If you abuse your responsibilities you should lose your rights!
Just my opinion anyway.
Nice to see that Debian is moving towards a FreeBSD style packaging system, but looking even more advanced. A hierarchical packaging system would kick ass:
All
Server
Mail
Web
Other
Games
Terminal
X
SVGAlib
KDE
Basic Components
Games
Apps
Gnome
You get the idea
So you could include as many or as few of the packages as you wanted in a distribution, that would be great.
I imagine that DRAM is not the greatest generator of heat, I have never seen cooled DRAM except in 'large' computers a long time ago. So putting the DRAM (relatively cool at 0.1 micron) under the processor (hot, but not as hot as it was when it was 0.25micron (or even 0.18 micron (if this technology is introduced when we are down to 0.13 micron sizes (some years off yet (3?))))) should not increase overall heat output by an enormous amount.
Of course, layering processor cores would be a problem, but we aren't doing that.
Motorola today said that they had found a way to make transistors 4 times smaller and be implementable in a short time-span. It reduces power consuption and allows for speed increases. This was on your favourite site.
The trench technology looks cool, burying the DRAM under the processor so it doesn't have to be next to it. That should increase yield whilst not compromising on capabilities of the processor. How much DRAM can you fit in 100mm^2? 400mm^2? That would be the amount of 2nd or 1st level cache your Athlon/Alpha processor could have built in, running at full speed!
Hmm, it is nice to see that someone is creating a spec for DVD Audio, CDs are nice, but they are plain stereo, whereas DVD Audio will include the excellent 5.1 channel sound. Also, I would hope that the sampling rate went up to at least 96kHz or more (just because it can), and maybe the bit depth will go up - maybe 20/24 or 32 bits per channel to make the sound perfect. But, are you one of those people who claim that they can tell the difference between CD Audio and high quality analogue?
Hopefully, because of the vast amount of space on the disc, some videos can be included as well. I always think, when buying a single, that it would be nice to have the video on the CD as well, mainly because it is possible, and the video has been made! Also mp3 versions could be included on the disk.
Anyway, back to the subject in hand:
The problem is that with audio you can always rerecord after it has been decrypted. If the equipment for playing Audio DVDs is of sufficient quality, then the outputs will be hi-Quality and make excellent sampling sources! So you won't stop copying of Audio DVDs that way... It is pretty pointless really - most people are happy with CDs, and CD quality sound, and if they can just rip the sound off of an AudioDVD by resampling after it has been digitised then they will!
Obviously there is a big quality hit from recording video from DVD to a standard video recording medium (the VCR). But there will be little quality hit from recording audio from an AudioDVD onto a CD-R or DVD-RAM or HD.
All "1-click" shopping is is simply storing the users' name/address/shipping info/credit card (eek)/etc in some database
I remember that back in January, amazon.co.uk were not registered with the Data Protection Act 1998 (updates 1984) (UK) which would have meant that doing any of the above would have been illegal under UK law. Does anyone know whether they are registered yet under the DPA? If not, then surely B&N could get their own back...
I think that in this case B&N will win out if people send examples of prior art to Barnes and Nobles lawyers. If no-one tells them, then I doubt that they will have fun finding said examples. It is not enough to got "I did this blah years ago" on Slashdot, you know!
What are your top 5 Unix browsers? I am talking about the browsers currently in development, not the ones that stopped development several years ago as this review included. Then a comprehensive review of these browsers can be done, seeing which one supports what standards, available plug-ins, level of png support etc.
Graphical Browsers
Netscape Communicator 4.7
Mozilla M11 --> Navigator 5 within 6 months(?)
Konqueror (within 2 months)
Opera for Linux (1 year away?)
That SVGAlib browser featured
Console Browsers
w3c - tables / frames looking very nice
Lynx - the classic powerful text browser
Emacs
Of course, you might disagree. What should happen then is a good review of the top browsers should be written to compare their features. Not a review of gif support etc, which misses the point completely!
I find Exim to be an excellent MTA. It is easy to set up, yet very powerful, and it works like a dream.
Sendmail is just a large, crufty piece of software with a lot of security holes. I know that a lot of time has been spent on it to fix these problems, but I think Red Hats money would be better spent on further developing the other MTAs out there which are better, such as Exim and qmail.
Still, any investment is better than no investment I suppose. I just dread to think what Red Hat is going to do with the results, are they going to be 'Red Hat-ised'?
Is it AMD that is just pushing out processors, which, despite their speed, are not technological leaps forward
I wouldn't call the equivalent Intel chips "technological leaps forward" myself. I think that AMD has done an awful lot of technological work. The Athlon is a much better design than the Pentium III and is therefore faster, cycle for cycle, than a P3, and that was at 0.25micron. Now it is at 0.18micron, so it is cooler and faster. AMD aren't resting on their laurels though. They are using their Lightning Data Transport to provide very fast interconnects between SMP Athlons, which will mean an even greater increase in power!
Intel has always produced good products and is on the verge of pushing past the outdated i386 architecture; AMD is, on the other hand, what it always has been, namely, a company which lags 1-2 years behind Intel.
Intel designed the i386 architecture, and it was outdated when it was designed. Since then Intel has created such 'innovations' as MMX and motherboards that aren't futureproof (because they change their processors so new processors won't work on old boards). AMD did imitate originally, but now they innovate - witness their 64-bit extensions to x86 (sure, a crock, but x86 is here and everything runs on it, and I think it will be here for another 5 years at the very least).
Intel haven't done much RAMBUS stuff - they can't get it to work properly. Putting a lot of money into a company to produce RIMMs is a lot different. Would you call Apple a company that was innovative in the TFT LCD screen market? No.
Anyway, the true innovation was done in the 80's by ARM and the '90s with the Alpha. Altivec is another great innovation. Itanium is NOT an innovation, it is the bastard child of VLIW and predicated execution, and done in a horrible way that people will laugh at in years to come. Anadium (my name for McKinley) might be better, but by then Alphas will have risen, with the £100m advertising campaign that Compaq are going to do for it!
This is just more proof that AMD has finally got something working well for once. Rumours have it that AMD could release 1GHz Athlons whenever they want, but they want to upset Intels "750MHz" day in January (the 10th) by releasing it then (or an 800/900MHz Athlon.
The Athlon is a much better design than the PIII. Now it is 0.18micron it should run cooler too. I would estimate that a 750MHz Athlon was around the equivalent of an 800MHz+ PIII.
Of course, there is the motherboard availability problems, but they are out there now in ever increasing numbers. The technology is old enough now for most of the early problems to have been ironed out.
I would like to see the spec figures for the new Athlon. Should provide interesting reading. I noticed that the FP figures for the 733MHz PIII were an abnormal jump higher than the normal PIII figures. Of course, if you really want power, then get an Alpha!
Of course, AMD has yet to concentrate on the SMP versions of the Athlon. When these arrive, Intel might start looking wistfully at its high end server market.
I am glad for this competition in the 'popular' CPU market, as it really drives prices down. Intel are on the losing end at the moment, but I imagine that they will have their day again. I don't think it will be with Itanium or IA-64 though. AMD have their own 64-bit expensions to IE-32 which they are creating, and the compatability _with speed_ issue might sway a lot of people towards AMDs offering rather than Intels EPIC monstrosity. Shame that such a old unwieldy ISA is still alive though.
I remember about a year and a half ago when Motorola confidently predicted that there would be 1GHz PPCs by the end of 1999. Strange that the one company you wouldn't have thought would have got there are within a hairs breadth of this goal.
The front page of Slashdot provides a mixture of news which may or may not be of interest to people. If you aren't interested in the topic, then don't read it. That is the simple option. There are a lot of people out there who are interested in FreeBSD, and run it at home (like me) and the news that some more software will run natively is great.
Not everybody runs Linux. I have run Linux (SUSE and Red Hat) and I have recently turned to FreeBSD 3.3. I also run AmigaOS, because I like its architecture, messaging system, ARexx, datatypes and proper shared libraries, amongst other things. Doesn't mean to say I think it rules supreme though, as it is way out of date in many areas.
Variety is the spice of life. Otherwise there would only be DOS.
Think of it this way, as you missed the whole point of the post... It isn't a new idea, it has been done before by AMD (and Motorola with their Dragonball etc) and as far as anyone here knows, the AMD K6-2+ will include an integrated graphics controller and graphics memory bus... (I doubt it, but it might)...
The embedded / one-chip-solution market is going to become huge. People will buy a PC when it comes in a black case with a small LCD screen on the front and can be stacked in the HI-FI, or embedded in the TV, etc, for less than a couple of hundred dollars. Of course, then it isn't a PC...
Of course, I believe in PCs with dedicated chips for different things. That is why the Amiga was so good in its time - dedicated graphics, sound, I/O chips etc. The all-in-one solutions are naff to me. But they will allow your mother to surf the web or whatever. I will always go for the (more expensive) dedicated stuff. Except for than damned winmodem that I bought because it didn't way winmodem on the box, so I thought it was a conventional modem... I have learnt though.
Let the processor process, the sound cards do sound (and mp3 decoding in H/W), the graphics card do graphics (and DVD decoding in H/W! Not software). You don't see software based SCSI adapters do you?
There is always a market for the crap low-end components though. I buy expensive hi-fi separates, but people wil buy $200 integrated crap-boxes with over-the-top design...
Re:That's why we told them to fuck off, and they d
on
Waiting for the Knock
·
· Score: 1
Moderate the above up, it is true.
I was at the RMS talk (in the UK) where he pointed out the new laws being introduced. This was several weeks ago, he did the whole works, etc, and I have a tonne of GNU protected stickers now.
Slashdot should be renamed U.S.Dot or SlowDot, they are really behind. Where is my Karma shield...? Argh... The pain... On the other hand, at least they put the article up, it is not RMS's fault that the peoples will worked in the UK. Anyway, I thought that they had just offloaded the controversial bits to another bill...
Slashdot Mirror
They appear to have some java bytecode running as well, and it IS possible to emulate other processors. They have done MMX but not SSI/3DNow.
They aren't opensourcing their system for coding the software part of the processor.
~~
Well that'll be why it is cheap - the vast majority of the cost will probably come from the extremely fast local memory that will be required by the processor because it is software based.
Do they mean software based in the same way that the 6800 (not 68000) was software based - an onboard ROM (well, RAM in transmetas case) that contains instructions on how to control the hardware part of the chip?
Thanks for the updates, I cannot get any of the broadcasts.
~~
So if Microsoft suddenly enforced this law in the US, and by accident one of the disabling emails went to a user in the UK, then Bill Gates or Ballmer would get an extradition notice because they are ultimately liable for Microsofts software. The next time they came to the UK they would be arrested and thrown into Jail awaiting trial, which could take up to a year to occur. When found guilty of breaking the Computer Misuse Act (basically by knowingly hacking into a computer by having installed a backdoor into the software - altering the contents of the hard drive, and disabling software) they would go to jail and have a nice criminal record.
Who needs BackOrifice? BackOrifice will become semi-legal under this new law! (sort of :-)) All software will become mini-backorifices in a way!
~~
I am sure you Americans will have a great time when someone in America writes a devastating virus and incorporates it into some commercial software. As it is illegal to criticise the software at all (well, that is the computer software review magazines and web sites out of business) no-one can say that it contains a virus, and when someone tries to point out that there is a virus in the software, you can charge them $5 a minute for them to tell you.
More realistically, this will either kill off commercial desktop software and pave the way for open source, or whatever. The next step will be the rest of the world, unencumbered with this law, to overtake the US. This is the single worst law that the US could pass for US economic progress! It paves the way for super-high software licensing fees, as companies sell software with 1-year licenses, and then disable the software after that year until you pay another $500 to use Word, etc.
Software companies in general are out there to screw the consumer. Prices only get low when there is a lot of competition, when competition is lacking then the company will now have a legal way to ask their customers to bend over whilst they get a got old rogering.
If I was you I would find out which companies were campaigning for this law to be passed, and then write to them saying that neither you or your company will purchase software from them in the future if they continue to pressure for this law. Spread the word around as well, your corporate manager or CEO probably won't find out until it is too late.
Another question is, will this law apply to software purchased before it is passed? If not, then people will just stop upgrading software, if they have any modicrum of intelligence.
~~
Don't talk about it... The card is supported under Linux in 3.3.5 apparently - does no good when you are not running Linux, but are using XFree86! I run FreeBSD (yes, I know I could run X in Linux compatability mode) and it isn't supported there in 3.3.5.
I will be looking forward to trying 3.3.6 tonight! At last, I might get my S540Extreme to give me a display...
~~
The Amiga has Arexx, an equally competant scripting language for interprocess communication and much much more. And the Amiga has a proper CLI as well - also one that is damned good if you use KingCON instead of the default built-in-ROM version!
Of course, the M$ solution is Visual Basic, a tool so entirely unsuited to the task it is laughable.
~~
Erm, 128x128 = 16384pixels.
4 bytes per pixel = 65536bytes or 64k.
With 40 icons, that is 2.5Mbytes in total for the icons, not 20Mbytes.
With machines containing 256Mbytes that is 1% of total memory! It is also probably stored in video memory also anyway - the graphics hardware should be used to scale them quickly anyway, IMHO.
Learn your maths next time :-) (and don't hide behind "I meant MB to be megaBIT, not megaBYTE" excuses, they won't wash with me, as you would be saying that the Macs of tomorrow will be shipping with 32Mbytes of RAM)
~~
Slashdot os not a linux site, it is a "news for nerds, news that matters" site. Not that there is much news for nerds anymore, although the last 24 hours is a lot better than the previous months...
All OSs have their problems, some more viewable and obvious than others, and some just release without fixing the errors. At least we can be sure that the 2.4 linux kernal will be mostly bug-free (I bet it will take 2 months before we are on 2.4.6 :-)) when it is released.
FreeBSD is great though - I think you should not judge anything until you have used it, and there are a lot of Linuxites here who do just that! It lacks excellent SMP support though, but that should be fixed soon. I would use FreeBSD before Linux as a server platform, and both of these way before NT of any kind!
~~
A more useful bit of data is the cost of the media on which you are copying the DVD film! A blank DVDRecordable costs quite a bit of money, and only holds 5.2Gb, compared to the 17Gb that a normal DVD can hold. Maybe you could distribute the film on large HDs, or downgrade the DVD film to VideoCD standard? The former is ridiculous, and the latter could be achieved by videoing the output of the DVD player anyway!
So whilst being able to view the DVDs under Linux/BSD/CPM etc is a valid and desirable aim, I don't see how they can claim that this is piracy? Maybe in China where they can now manufacture DVDs that are not encrypted? But why not just manufacture the pirate DVDs with the encrytion of the original master DVD anyway? It will still play!
I hope that the restraining order fails miserably, as it should in a fair society. Unfortunately, we can all see the end of our civilisation, as corporate interests overtake the rights and interests of the common person, the person who the government is meant to be protecting.
~~
Strange request, in my opinion. I think that PalmOS is perfect for what it does - a simple OS that runs simple applications on a (relatively) simple device. Palms are low resource, better off than computers like the Amiga 500 and Atari ST, but in terms of computing power they are in there with a 16MHz 386 at best. X would be a nightmare and inappropriate for the task that the Palm does.
I think that the Palm should stay as it is, and add support for USB. From the USB port a CompactFlash adapter can be connected, so you can use those $600 340Mb MicroHDs. Modems/NICs/sound devices (intelligent headphones)/keyboards etc can also be spun off of the USB port (why? who cares!).
The screen on the palm should be made so that it covers the whole input area, and also have increased resolution in both axes (i.e., around 240x320). Colour is not as important as higher resolution, but the extra resolution should not be made to show more information - it should be used to show the same amount of information in a much more clearer manner. Colour models could be introduced as well, but clearly aimed for the corporate manager or geek who wants to port mame.
Sony will add support for its memory stick technology very soon, so adding another 32Mb of memory should be very simple soon - hopefully a port will be included on the IIIc, but I wouldn't bet on it.
~~
The other day I walked into my bank. They had just replaced their old ATM machines with new ones. I thought "Great! now they'll be faster! and ooo, look, a pretty color touch screen!"
I have noticed that as well - lovely pictures of people surfing in the sunshine etc. The problem is - the old machines used to say what notes were in the machine (£5, £10, £20 etc), but the new flash ones don't - they have an unexplained indicator light that tells you when the machine is out of money. This means that you end up getting £20 notes when you want 4 £5 notes because you are catching a bus and they refuse to accept £20 notes.
So sure, use colour, but don't reduce functionality/speed/usefulness in order to implement it. The Dragonballs that provide colour funcitonality are twice as fast as the old Dragonballs that Palm use, so that should solve the speed problem anyway.
~~
The reason is probably because the PalmOS licensees such as Sony asked for it. Sony wants to use PalmOS as the base OS for a wide range of applications, and colour is a selling point of these devices. You can bet that WinCE only sells devices because it is in colour and people do the "ooh ahh" thing over it. Psion have gone colour with the Series 7, but they are still offering the B&W version for those that only want that.
I would much rather prefer a higher resolution screen in black and white though. 160x160 works, but 240x240 or 320x320 would look really nice - much smoother characters etc. Notice I don't say that you can fit more on screen - everything stays the same physical size, but gets smoother.
Colour is only useful for highlighting things, such as importance. Since the Palm functions as an Organiser when you aren't playing SimCity, being able to see at a glance that something is important (shown in Red) or that something can be ignored (shown in Green) (or however you set up your device) is quite important. Sure, you can use bold text, or capitalised text in B&W modes - but this is limiting compared to the options provided by colour.
Battery technology is also much improved now than even a couple of years ago - and this is all helped by lower power semiconductor devices. For many people switching to colour will not impact their battery life much.
And SimCity would look so much nicer in colour wouldn't it!
~~
Wow! I can buy a game and get the OS for it too! Brilliant.
A great marketing idea, sell the Linux version of the game with the OS, so that increases uptake of Linux ("Oh, I won't buy that version, 'cos I can't be bothered to get Linux") and it makes the box heavier, so you must be getting more, right?
Just buying the game would mean that you could update all those slightly old programs you have for little effort. And it is a great coup for SuSE, as everyone who buys Quake III will have a copy of their distribution, and wouldn't you try it out on a spare partition just because?
Okay....
Things like this make me happy not to live in America. How about an option on Slashdot where posts can be moderated to 'free speech -1' and so we can select not to view the posts that are here due to free speech (but still view low rated posts). The fact is that the poster has no responsibilities for the other people on Slashdot, so the overall experience is ruined for those people. With rights comes responsibilities. If you abuse your responsibilities you should lose your rights!
Just my opinion anyway.
Nice to see that Debian is moving towards a FreeBSD style packaging system, but looking even more advanced. A hierarchical packaging system would kick ass:
So you could include as many or as few of the packages as you wanted in a distribution, that would be great.
Of course, layering processor cores would be a problem, but we aren't doing that.
Motorola today said that they had found a way to make transistors 4 times smaller and be implementable in a short time-span. It reduces power consuption and allows for speed increases. This was on your favourite site.
The trench technology looks cool, burying the DRAM under the processor so it doesn't have to be next to it. That should increase yield whilst not compromising on capabilities of the processor. How much DRAM can you fit in 100mm^2? 400mm^2? That would be the amount of 2nd or 1st level cache your Athlon/Alpha processor could have built in, running at full speed!
Hmm, it is nice to see that someone is creating a spec for DVD Audio, CDs are nice, but they are plain stereo, whereas DVD Audio will include the excellent 5.1 channel sound. Also, I would hope that the sampling rate went up to at least 96kHz or more (just because it can), and maybe the bit depth will go up - maybe 20/24 or 32 bits per channel to make the sound perfect. But, are you one of those people who claim that they can tell the difference between CD Audio and high quality analogue?
Hopefully, because of the vast amount of space on the disc, some videos can be included as well. I always think, when buying a single, that it would be nice to have the video on the CD as well, mainly because it is possible, and the video has been made! Also mp3 versions could be included on the disk.
Anyway, back to the subject in hand:
The problem is that with audio you can always rerecord after it has been decrypted. If the equipment for playing Audio DVDs is of sufficient quality, then the outputs will be hi-Quality and make excellent sampling sources! So you won't stop copying of Audio DVDs that way... It is pretty pointless really - most people are happy with CDs, and CD quality sound, and if they can just rip the sound off of an AudioDVD by resampling after it has been digitised then they will!
Obviously there is a big quality hit from recording video from DVD to a standard video recording medium (the VCR). But there will be little quality hit from recording audio from an AudioDVD onto a CD-R or DVD-RAM or HD.
I remember that back in January, amazon.co.uk were not registered with the Data Protection Act 1998 (updates 1984) (UK) which would have meant that doing any of the above would have been illegal under UK law. Does anyone know whether they are registered yet under the DPA? If not, then surely B&N could get their own back...
I think that in this case B&N will win out if people send examples of prior art to Barnes and Nobles lawyers. If no-one tells them, then I doubt that they will have fun finding said examples. It is not enough to got "I did this blah years ago" on Slashdot, you know!
Not that they are nasty, I am sure.
What are your top 5 Unix browsers? I am talking about the browsers currently in development, not the ones that stopped development several years ago as this review included. Then a comprehensive review of these browsers can be done, seeing which one supports what standards, available plug-ins, level of png support etc.
Graphical Browsers
- Netscape Communicator 4.7
- Mozilla M11 --> Navigator 5 within 6 months(?)
- Konqueror (within 2 months)
- Opera for Linux (1 year away?)
- That SVGAlib browser featured
Console BrowsersOf course, you might disagree. What should happen then is a good review of the top browsers should be written to compare their features. Not a review of gif support etc, which misses the point completely!
I find Exim to be an excellent MTA. It is easy to set up, yet very powerful, and it works like a dream.
Sendmail is just a large, crufty piece of software with a lot of security holes. I know that a lot of time has been spent on it to fix these problems, but I think Red Hats money would be better spent on further developing the other MTAs out there which are better, such as Exim and qmail.
Still, any investment is better than no investment I suppose. I just dread to think what Red Hat is going to do with the results, are they going to be 'Red Hat-ised'?
Is it AMD that is just pushing out processors, which, despite their speed, are not technological leaps forward
I wouldn't call the equivalent Intel chips "technological leaps forward" myself. I think that AMD has done an awful lot of technological work. The Athlon is a much better design than the Pentium III and is therefore faster, cycle for cycle, than a P3, and that was at 0.25micron. Now it is at 0.18micron, so it is cooler and faster. AMD aren't resting on their laurels though. They are using their Lightning Data Transport to provide very fast interconnects between SMP Athlons, which will mean an even greater increase in power!
Intel has always produced good products and is on the verge of pushing past the outdated i386 architecture; AMD is, on the other hand, what it always has been, namely, a company which lags 1-2 years behind Intel.
Intel designed the i386 architecture, and it was outdated when it was designed. Since then Intel has created such 'innovations' as MMX and motherboards that aren't futureproof (because they change their processors so new processors won't work on old boards). AMD did imitate originally, but now they innovate - witness their 64-bit extensions to x86 (sure, a crock, but x86 is here and everything runs on it, and I think it will be here for another 5 years at the very least).
Intel haven't done much RAMBUS stuff - they can't get it to work properly. Putting a lot of money into a company to produce RIMMs is a lot different. Would you call Apple a company that was innovative in the TFT LCD screen market? No.
Anyway, the true innovation was done in the 80's by ARM and the '90s with the Alpha. Altivec is another great innovation. Itanium is NOT an innovation, it is the bastard child of VLIW and predicated execution, and done in a horrible way that people will laugh at in years to come. Anadium (my name for McKinley) might be better, but by then Alphas will have risen, with the £100m advertising campaign that Compaq are going to do for it!
Oh, for cheap, low-cost Alphas...
This is just more proof that AMD has finally got something working well for once. Rumours have it that AMD could release 1GHz Athlons whenever they want, but they want to upset Intels "750MHz" day in January (the 10th) by releasing it then (or an 800/900MHz Athlon.
The Athlon is a much better design than the PIII. Now it is 0.18micron it should run cooler too. I would estimate that a 750MHz Athlon was around the equivalent of an 800MHz+ PIII.
Of course, there is the motherboard availability problems, but they are out there now in ever increasing numbers. The technology is old enough now for most of the early problems to have been ironed out.
I would like to see the spec figures for the new Athlon. Should provide interesting reading. I noticed that the FP figures for the 733MHz PIII were an abnormal jump higher than the normal PIII figures. Of course, if you really want power, then get an Alpha!
Of course, AMD has yet to concentrate on the SMP versions of the Athlon. When these arrive, Intel might start looking wistfully at its high end server market.
I am glad for this competition in the 'popular' CPU market, as it really drives prices down. Intel are on the losing end at the moment, but I imagine that they will have their day again. I don't think it will be with Itanium or IA-64 though. AMD have their own 64-bit expensions to IE-32 which they are creating, and the compatability _with speed_ issue might sway a lot of people towards AMDs offering rather than Intels EPIC monstrosity. Shame that such a old unwieldy ISA is still alive though.
I remember about a year and a half ago when Motorola confidently predicted that there would be 1GHz PPCs by the end of 1999. Strange that the one company you wouldn't have thought would have got there are within a hairs breadth of this goal.
I like your -5 karma. -- from one message !!!
I wonder if it is going to go down anymore?
The front page of Slashdot provides a mixture of news which may or may not be of interest to people. If you aren't interested in the topic, then don't read it. That is the simple option. There are a lot of people out there who are interested in FreeBSD, and run it at home (like me) and the news that some more software will run natively is great.
Not everybody runs Linux. I have run Linux (SUSE and Red Hat) and I have recently turned to FreeBSD 3.3. I also run AmigaOS, because I like its architecture, messaging system, ARexx, datatypes and proper shared libraries, amongst other things. Doesn't mean to say I think it rules supreme though, as it is way out of date in many areas.
Variety is the spice of life. Otherwise there would only be DOS.
Think of it this way, as you missed the whole point of the post... It isn't a new idea, it has been done before by AMD (and Motorola with their Dragonball etc) and as far as anyone here knows, the AMD K6-2+ will include an integrated graphics controller and graphics memory bus... (I doubt it, but it might)...
The embedded / one-chip-solution market is going to become huge. People will buy a PC when it comes in a black case with a small LCD screen on the front and can be stacked in the HI-FI, or embedded in the TV, etc, for less than a couple of hundred dollars. Of course, then it isn't a PC...
Of course, I believe in PCs with dedicated chips for different things. That is why the Amiga was so good in its time - dedicated graphics, sound, I/O chips etc. The all-in-one solutions are naff to me. But they will allow your mother to surf the web or whatever. I will always go for the (more expensive) dedicated stuff. Except for than damned winmodem that I bought because it didn't way winmodem on the box, so I thought it was a conventional modem... I have learnt though.
Let the processor process, the sound cards do sound (and mp3 decoding in H/W), the graphics card do graphics (and DVD decoding in H/W! Not software). You don't see software based SCSI adapters do you?
There is always a market for the crap low-end components though. I buy expensive hi-fi separates, but people wil buy $200 integrated crap-boxes with over-the-top design...
Moderate the above up, it is true.
I was at the RMS talk (in the UK) where he pointed out the new laws being introduced. This was several weeks ago, he did the whole works, etc, and I have a tonne of GNU protected stickers now.
Slashdot should be renamed U.S.Dot or SlowDot, they are really behind. Where is my Karma shield...? Argh... The pain... On the other hand, at least they put the article up, it is not RMS's fault that the peoples will worked in the UK. Anyway, I thought that they had just offloaded the controversial bits to another bill...
Makes the processor ID look lame, doesn't it?