They cannot limit you from making your own benchmarks, publishing them, recommending them, etc.
However, if they can prove that you are either 1) Providing misinformation about their products or 2) Slandering them or their products, etc
Then they will take it out on you. But if you detail your method of benchmark, sys configs, etc, and you aren't fudging the numbers, then they should be able to reproduce the exact same results if they wanted.
You are expected, as a professional, to know the products intimately. If MS has been known to provide misleading information, then you not only have a right but a responsability to find out for yourself whether their product holds up to their claims or not.
Man has a desire to control and change his environment to suit his needs/desires rather than change himself to suit his environment.
Technology? The result of someone wanting to change an aspect of an item normally out of their control. It is NOT tragic, it is a choice to take a different path with different consequences.
As far as all the hoopla about various Utopia being police states, if the people living there want to live under those conditions, who are we to look at them badly? Ok, so I can't wear my 'get rid of the dongle' t-shirt, but perhaps I'm willing to give that up if it also means that the red light district and porn shops no longer exist in MY environment.
Of course others will think I'm not really living, or that I'm raising my children in a barbaric manner. But who are you to deny me the right to change my environemt to suit my needs? If I own an island, I can prevent you from ever entering the scene. You have absolutely no reason to complain about my existance, because, in theory, it does not affect your environment. If you want the 'benefits' I have, you have to live according to my rules as well.
Technology is trading one future for another. Certianly the coal industry causes many deaths that otherwise wouldn't have happened, but if you look at the benefits and the deaths it prevents (steal, electricity, heat, etc) it far outweighs the detriment to society (looking at the few statistics we have at our command. We can't truly evaluate the impact on the atmosphere of the planet, but we know how it has affected the planet, and we can reasonably presume it will continue the same low effects it has for the past 100 years. And yes, we can measure that, Scientists have sealed bottles of air that are decades and centuries old.)
-Adam
P.S. There are serious safety issues concerning Hamburgers. 1. Hamburgers become unstable at high voltages 2. Hamburgers will not stop a high velocity bullet from 1000metres 3. Hamburgers will fail to restrain a crash victim at 120 km/hr 4. Hamburgers are inadequate as a ground proximity warning device in aircraft. 5. Hamburgers are known to have been eaten by 90% of fatal disease suffers.
All the research that has been done on electromagnetic radiation has been mostly inconclusive. 'They' have shown that at very high levels it may affect the brain of most mammals, but they really don't know why or how. They have pulled magic values out of their hats for regulatory purposes (ie, handheld phones can only emit x watts since the antenna is y millimeters from the head, while car and attache phones can emit x*10 watts since the antenna is located further away)
Therefore there are two forces affecting the regulations: The phone and semiconductor companies (ie, motorola) and the regulatory forces who are trying to be cautious. You can think of it a little like the tobacco industry in that when a negative report comes out, the corporate organizations tout other positive reports and ignore the bad reports (or make them go away if possible). If a report comes out inconclusive or positive, these organizations push it out into the open.
But then, if you've ever had an MRI then you have experienced magnetic radiation that far surpasses that emitted by a cell phone, though at a different frequency, and with different effects.
Then we could go into the radiation emitted by your monitor, computer, keyboard, mouse, etc. Not as great, but many people are sitting in front of them for longer in one day than they would use a cell phone in a month's time.
I wouldn't be too concerned about it, unless you can change your habits. The only thing that is certian is that you should spend only as much time in such fields as you need to...
-Adam
A Klingon programmer's top 12 phrases: #6 Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
The simple fact: Larger corporations tend to move more slowly and carefully, they are unable (due to commitments to their shareholders and employees) to set up risks where they might take a bad fall. They tend to have a large overhead as well as a large profit. If MS were to drop win98 from $99 to $98, they would lose millions of dollars a month, which they can't afford to lose. They tend to have employees which demand high salaries which they can't shove off easily.
Small companies can make large risks. Small companies have little overhead. Small companies can get dirt-cheap employees that are really good because they can bill themselves as 'the next big thing' which will vault said employee up to positions where they can demand high salaries and force the company to move more slowly.
-Adam
To minimize loss and damage in a quake, try not to own things.
To sell that inexpensively they are either expecting to sell a load of these things, or they are using off-the-shelf parts (power supplies, cases, maybe even ps/2 mice and keyboards).
-Adam
The paperless office will come soon after the paperless toilet
Someone has to administer the tlds. Might as well be the people who have the experience.
-Adam
If an infinite number of rednecks, driving an infinite number of pickups, fired an infinite number of shotguns at an infinite number of road signs, they would reproduce all the great works of literature in Braille.
The cable modem they give you is much closer to a router than a modem. They can program it remotely to do a number of things, on of which is to block access to certian ports, and to accept connections to its own ports. It probably even does NAT and a few other router-ish and bridge-ish things...
-Adam
"So, like, does that mean that if we put everyone on the world on Australia, we'd shift the earths center of gravity enough to sink australia, and give Greenland more land?"
While it does have a slightly bad tone to it, the article makes a few good points:
1) People gravitate to linux because it's the underdog 2) Linux is not a top notch server 3) Linux is ideal for embedded and semi-embedded computers
Linux outperforms many other systems in serving in many situations, but it's not 'quite there yet'. (I know, it will be. Real Soon Now (TM))
I think a main reason for him to write such an article is to counter all the hype surrounding Linux. It is absolutely true that there are many people and businesses out there that are applying Linux to their problems because of the hype surrounding it. Many of them are failing, perhaps because Linux isn't a good solution to their problem, partially because they aren't putting forth the effort to make it work, etc. But mostly because they are being told from every angle that Linux is the new kid on the block that fits every hole possible. It's not there yet.
First, this cannot be proven to be an original idea. Alien3 used barcodes on the back of prisoner's necks, etc. (I haven't read the patent,/.ed, but I assume they patented a specific method/type/algorithm/place or something along those lines.)
Second, I can carry a laser barcode scanner that works well past a few hundred feet, scan someone's visible barcode (when they show it to an officer, at the bank, etc) and use it. It is then a simple matter of painting over my own with makeup, and redoing the barcode in makeup.
-Adam
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left. -Oscar Levant
One the one hand, I can't believe that they'd name one of their visible hosts something as suggestive as neosilicon. However, I can't believe they would name it that specific name for any reason other that a function it serves.
-Adam
Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
I don't buy it. There are so many hurdles to overcome for clockless logic... I doubt there will be anything usable in that area for several years, if not decades.
No, I don't know what they are doing, but I guess I don't care. There are other issues that I can effectively apply my time to which are much more productive than discussing what a company may or may not be doing.
Of course, I just think that Intel is holding off on the Merced and others because they're the ones fab-ing the new Transmeta chip...;-)
Well, if the chip contains more info than is printed on the card, it is less likely that someone will say, "But I didn't buy that!!" The extra info transmitted will show that that exact card was used. If they still have the card, bingo, they used it.
I had a website ask for my 'security' number on my credit card once, explaining that there are an additional 3 digits printed on the signature strip of my card. I looked, and sure enough, there they were. If you look at the microsoft licence keys you have to type in for windows, the win98 is HUGE! I imagine as people ask for more secure credit cards, cc companies will change to using more info to verify that someone is using a good card. An automated process of entering a large amount of info is needed (like the bar codes for ms keys).
Go to http://www.chipcenter.com/circuitcellar/july99/c79su5.htm to see what's inside that beast: ---------- Peeking under the hood reveals the secret: a high-performance chip set combining the Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer. The Emotion Engine, pictured in Figure 3, whose name aptly reflects its lofty ambition, might best be described as a single-chip Cray. It contains a beefy 64-bit MIPS CPU supplemented with two vector processing units with a total of ten floating-point multipliers and four dividers. Running at 300 MHz and exploiting 128-bit on-chip buses, the Emotion Engine blows through 3D graphics at a stunning pace. A floating-point matrix routine, consisting of 7 multiplies, 12 multiply-adds, and a divide takes only 7 cycles.
The image data is passed to the Graphics Synthesizer (see Figure 4), which integrates both the rendering engine and the 4-MB DRAM frame buffer using the latest embedded DRAM process. The reason for putting the DRAM on the same chip isn't to save a few bucks, but to achieve ultra-high 48-GBps bandwidth thanks to a 2560-bit (!) on-chip bus. ----------
Suffice to say, I want one of these on a graphics card for my PC...
-Adam
"Walking on water and developing software to specification are easy - as long as both are frozen" - Edward V. Berard.
Sorry for the rude awakening, but you simply didn't know.
-Adam
Re:Look at embedded systems to see where we're goi
on
LinModems?
·
· Score: 1
Ah, but you'll also note that even if it is a five percent drop in performance/while/ using the modem, you are effectively losing 22.5MHz on a 450MHz. The cost of a 450 PIII is $285 or lower, thus you end up with $15 lost from the CPU to the modem,/while/ the modem is in use. Given that you'll save greater than $15 on the modem, you'll end up saving more than you would with a hardware modem. Now, if you are playing quake or a game over the modem, you would be considered stupid to buy anything less than a hardware modem, you can't afford that performance drop.
But if you are buying 1000 PCs to sell to home users then you can have a significant cost savings, since they will likely only run a few programs (browser, mailreader, word processor) when they use their modem. Since *nix is becoming mainstream(or is on a path which may take it mainstream) then these companies are hoping to be in the game when it starts. Then you have all the kids who want a linux box but can't afford the hardware. $15 makes a big difference.
Anyway...
-Adam
"We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know." -W H Auden
Look at embedded systems to see where we're going
on
LinModems?
·
· Score: 2
Nothing new. Embedded systems have long been implementing software features instead of hardware peripherals to save cost(and weight/size). The bottomline is that hardware will _always_ cost more than software. If you can stand the 1% performance hit, and it's worth the price cut, then there's no reason not to. As processors get faster and hardware gets smaller, software will dominate in our cost-cutting world.
-Adam
"The rich live hand-to-mouth too-just on a higher level." -John Guare
For linux to make an inroad into the easy pc market, they need a company focused on customer service - Because the Easy PC spec is aimed at users who can barely operate their toaster, and who *will* call the company about 10 times a year for support for the lifecycle of the product.
So the company must build, load, and support these machines, while selling them at a low cost. While the software could be open(free) source, the hardware and support could not.
Any takers?
-Adam
Oh where, oh where has my little.sig gone, oh where, oh where could it be?
It's more like RedHat offering you a car through a dealer, but the dealer finding out you're underage. No car. Redhat isn't responsible, they did what they could for you, the laws guiding the item that they offered you won't allow it, and Redhat has no way of knowing beforehand who is ineligible. You should take it two ways:
1) It's a nice gesture for those who've reported bugs in the past 2) RedHat wants their stock to go way up, so why not invite extra people to participate who normally wouldn't trade stocks? We're not above that sort of thing...
Slashdot Mirror
They cannot limit you from making your own benchmarks, publishing them, recommending them, etc.
However, if they can prove that you are either
1) Providing misinformation about their products
or
2) Slandering them or their products, etc
Then they will take it out on you. But if you detail your method of benchmark, sys configs, etc, and you aren't fudging the numbers, then they should be able to reproduce the exact same results if they wanted.
You are expected, as a professional, to know the products intimately. If MS has been known to provide misleading information, then you not only have a right but a responsability to find out for yourself whether their product holds up to their claims or not.
-Adam
Look, this entire issue can be summed up thus:
Man has a desire to control and change his environment to suit his needs/desires rather than change himself to suit his environment.
Technology? The result of someone wanting to change an aspect of an item normally out of their control. It is NOT tragic, it is a choice to take a different path with different consequences.
As far as all the hoopla about various Utopia being police states, if the people living there want to live under those conditions, who are we to look at them badly? Ok, so I can't wear my 'get rid of the dongle' t-shirt, but perhaps I'm willing to give that up if it also means that the red light district and porn shops no longer exist in MY environment.
Of course others will think I'm not really living, or that I'm raising my children in a barbaric manner. But who are you to deny me the right to change my environemt to suit my needs? If I own an island, I can prevent you from ever entering the scene. You have absolutely no reason to complain about my existance, because, in theory, it does not affect your environment. If you want the 'benefits' I have, you have to live according to my rules as well.
Technology is trading one future for another. Certianly the coal industry causes many deaths that otherwise wouldn't have happened, but if you look at the benefits and the deaths it prevents (steal, electricity, heat, etc) it far outweighs the detriment to society (looking at the few statistics we have at our command. We can't truly evaluate the impact on the atmosphere of the planet, but we know how it has affected the planet, and we can reasonably presume it will continue the same low effects it has for the past 100 years. And yes, we can measure that, Scientists have sealed bottles of air that are decades and centuries old.)
-Adam
P.S. There are serious safety issues concerning Hamburgers.
1. Hamburgers become unstable at high voltages
2. Hamburgers will not stop a high velocity bullet from 1000metres
3. Hamburgers will fail to restrain a crash victim at 120 km/hr
4. Hamburgers are inadequate as a ground proximity warning device in aircraft.
5. Hamburgers are known to have been eaten by 90% of fatal disease suffers.
The list goes on.......
All the research that has been done on electromagnetic radiation has been mostly inconclusive. 'They' have shown that at very high levels it may affect the brain of most mammals, but they really don't know why or how. They have pulled magic values out of their hats for regulatory purposes (ie, handheld phones can only emit x watts since the antenna is y millimeters from the head, while car and attache phones can emit x*10 watts since the antenna is located further away)
Therefore there are two forces affecting the regulations: The phone and semiconductor companies (ie, motorola) and the regulatory forces who are trying to be cautious. You can think of it a little like the tobacco industry in that when a negative report comes out, the corporate organizations tout other positive reports and ignore the bad reports (or make them go away if possible). If a report comes out inconclusive or positive, these organizations push it out into the open.
But then, if you've ever had an MRI then you have experienced magnetic radiation that far surpasses that emitted by a cell phone, though at a different frequency, and with different effects.
Then we could go into the radiation emitted by your monitor, computer, keyboard, mouse, etc. Not as great, but many people are sitting in front of them for longer in one day than they would use a cell phone in a month's time.
I wouldn't be too concerned about it, unless you can change your habits. The only thing that is certian is that you should spend only as much time in such fields as you need to...
-Adam
A Klingon programmer's top 12 phrases:
#6 Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
I put a lean copy of the text here
http://ubasics.com/adam/commodity.shtml
Enjoy!
-Adam
I put a copy of the text of the article here
http://ubasics.com/adam/commodity.shtml
Enjoy!
-Adam
The simple fact:
Larger corporations tend to move more slowly and carefully, they are unable (due to commitments to their shareholders and employees) to set up risks where they might take a bad fall.
They tend to have a large overhead as well as a large profit. If MS were to drop win98 from $99 to $98, they would lose millions of dollars a month, which they can't afford to lose.
They tend to have employees which demand high salaries which they can't shove off easily.
Small companies can make large risks.
Small companies have little overhead.
Small companies can get dirt-cheap employees that are really good because they can bill themselves as 'the next big thing' which will vault said employee up to positions where they can demand high salaries and force the company to move more slowly.
-Adam
To minimize loss and damage in a quake, try not to own things.
To sell that inexpensively they are either expecting to sell a load of these things, or they are using off-the-shelf parts (power supplies, cases, maybe even ps/2 mice and keyboards).
-Adam
The paperless office will come soon after the paperless toilet
I never said that they were the only ones qualified. Simply that they had experience in doing so.
-Adam
Someone has to administer the tlds. Might as well be the people who have the experience.
-Adam
If an infinite number of rednecks, driving an infinite number of pickups, fired an infinite number of shotguns at an infinite number of road signs, they would reproduce all the great works of literature in Braille.
The cable modem they give you is much closer to a router than a modem. They can program it remotely to do a number of things, on of which is to block access to certian ports, and to accept connections to its own ports. It probably even does NAT and a few other router-ish and bridge-ish things...
-Adam
"So, like, does that mean that if we put everyone on the world on Australia, we'd shift the earths center of gravity enough to sink australia, and give Greenland more land?"
While it does have a slightly bad tone to it, the article makes a few good points:
1) People gravitate to linux because it's the underdog
2) Linux is not a top notch server
3) Linux is ideal for embedded and semi-embedded computers
Linux outperforms many other systems in serving in many situations, but it's not 'quite there yet'. (I know, it will be. Real Soon Now (TM))
I think a main reason for him to write such an article is to counter all the hype surrounding Linux. It is absolutely true that there are many people and businesses out there that are applying Linux to their problems because of the hype surrounding it. Many of them are failing, perhaps because Linux isn't a good solution to their problem, partially because they aren't putting forth the effort to make it work, etc. But mostly because they are being told from every angle that Linux is the new kid on the block that fits every hole possible. It's not there yet.
-Adam
"You stay here, while we go get help..."
First, this cannot be proven to be an original idea. Alien3 used barcodes on the back of prisoner's necks, etc. (I haven't read the patent, /.ed, but I assume they patented a specific method/type/algorithm/place or something along those lines.)
Second, I can carry a laser barcode scanner that works well past a few hundred feet, scan someone's visible barcode (when they show it to an officer, at the bank, etc) and use it. It is then a simple matter of painting over my own with makeup, and redoing the barcode in makeup.
-Adam
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left.
-Oscar Levant
One the one hand, I can't believe that they'd name one of their visible hosts something as suggestive as neosilicon. However, I can't believe they would name it that specific name for any reason other that a function it serves.
-Adam
Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
I don't buy it. There are so many hurdles to overcome for clockless logic... I doubt there will be anything usable in that area for several years, if not decades.
;-)
No, I don't know what they are doing, but I guess I don't care. There are other issues that I can effectively apply my time to which are much more productive than discussing what a company may or may not be doing.
Of course, I just think that Intel is holding off on the Merced and others because they're the ones fab-ing the new Transmeta chip...
-Adam
Wandering the wondering path.
Well, if the chip contains more info than is printed on the card, it is less likely that someone will say, "But I didn't buy that!!" The extra info transmitted will show that that exact card was used. If they still have the card, bingo, they used it.
I had a website ask for my 'security' number on my credit card once, explaining that there are an additional 3 digits printed on the signature strip of my card. I looked, and sure enough, there they were. If you look at the microsoft licence keys you have to type in for windows, the win98 is HUGE! I imagine as people ask for more secure credit cards, cc companies will change to using more info to verify that someone is using a good card. An automated process of entering a large amount of info is needed (like the bar codes for ms keys).
-Adam
Does anyone have a link to a transcript?
-Adam
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
-- Indian proverb
Go to http://www.chipcenter.com /circuitcellar/july99/c79su5.htm to see what's inside that beast:
----------
Peeking under the hood reveals the secret: a high-performance chip set combining the Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer. The Emotion Engine, pictured in Figure 3, whose name aptly reflects its lofty ambition, might best be described as a single-chip Cray. It contains a beefy 64-bit MIPS CPU supplemented with two vector processing units with a total of ten floating-point multipliers and four dividers. Running at 300 MHz and exploiting 128-bit on-chip buses, the Emotion Engine blows through 3D graphics at a stunning pace. A floating-point matrix routine, consisting of 7 multiplies, 12 multiply-adds, and a divide takes only 7 cycles.
The image data is passed to the Graphics Synthesizer (see Figure 4), which integrates both the rendering engine and the 4-MB DRAM frame buffer using the latest embedded DRAM process. The reason for putting the DRAM on the same chip isn't to save a few bucks, but to achieve ultra-high 48-GBps bandwidth thanks to a 2560-bit (!) on-chip bus.
----------
Suffice to say, I want one of these on a graphics card for my PC...
-Adam
"Walking on water and developing software to specification are easy - as long as both are frozen" - Edward V. Berard.
Sorry for the rude awakening, but you simply didn't know.
-Adam
Ah, but you'll also note that even if it is a five percent drop in performance /while/ using the modem, you are effectively losing 22.5MHz on a 450MHz. The cost of a 450 PIII is $285 or lower, thus you end up with $15 lost from the CPU to the modem, /while/ the modem is in use. Given that you'll save greater than $15 on the modem, you'll end up saving more than you would with a hardware modem. Now, if you are playing quake or a game over the modem, you would be considered stupid to buy anything less than a hardware modem, you can't afford that performance drop.
But if you are buying 1000 PCs to sell to home users then you can have a significant cost savings, since they will likely only run a few programs (browser, mailreader, word processor) when they use their modem. Since *nix is becoming mainstream(or is on a path which may take it mainstream) then these companies are hoping to be in the game when it starts. Then you have all the kids who want a linux box but can't afford the hardware. $15 makes a big difference.
Anyway...
-Adam
"We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know."
-W H Auden
Nothing new. Embedded systems have long been implementing software features instead of hardware peripherals to save cost(and weight/size). The bottomline is that hardware will _always_ cost more than software. If you can stand the 1% performance hit, and it's worth the price cut, then there's no reason not to. As processors get faster and hardware gets smaller, software will dominate in our cost-cutting world.
-Adam
"The rich live hand-to-mouth too-just on a higher level."
-John Guare
For linux to make an inroad into the easy pc market, they need a company focused on customer service - Because the Easy PC spec is aimed at users who can barely operate their toaster, and who *will* call the company about 10 times a year for support for the lifecycle of the product.
.sig gone, oh where, oh where could it be?
So the company must build, load, and support these machines, while selling them at a low cost. While the software could be open(free) source, the hardware and support could not.
Any takers?
-Adam
Oh where, oh where has my little
It's more like RedHat offering you a car through a dealer, but the dealer finding out you're underage. No car. Redhat isn't responsible, they did what they could for you, the laws guiding the item that they offered you won't allow it, and Redhat has no way of knowing beforehand who is ineligible. You should take it two ways:
1) It's a nice gesture for those who've reported bugs in the past
2) RedHat wants their stock to go way up, so why not invite extra people to participate who normally wouldn't trade stocks? We're not above that sort of thing...
-Adam