Actually the xbox is a multi-core ppc derivative. Tri-core, inorder execution. (interesting actually) The PS3 is powered by the cell. The core is also a power derivative.
In a simple analysis, the Cell processor can be split into four components: external input and output structures, the main processor called the Power Processing Element (PPE) (a two-way simultaneous multithreaded Power ISA v.2.03 compliant core), eight fully-functional co-processors called the Synergistic Processing Elements, or SPEs, and a specialized high-bandwidth circular data bus connecting the PPE, input/output elements and the SPEs, called the Element Interconnect Bus or EIB.
Its interesting what they tried to achieve with the cell. Unfortunately coding games to effectively utilize parallel processors still remains an incredible challenge.
I don't see sparc dying anytime soon. It is manufactured by a variety of chip companies and I'm sure any of them would license the tech to keep producing their own. If anything, it might go the way of the arm and fragment, but retain the same basic instruction set. I don't see oracle giving up such lucrative hardware sales anytime in the future either. They might gobble up all the good parts and leave the rest of sun to slowly bleed to death but I think its going to be a slow death. Oracle is going to do to court sun's previous best customers and a lot of those people are running oracle on sun hardware and have invested a great deal in that marriage. I think the sparc platform still has some life left in it performance wise, but time will tell if they actually invest in further development or make the old switcheroo to PPC or God forbid x86-64
You might be able to help me. I know this is totally off topic, but I have this old peugeot sound data systems alpha. When I turn it on I get only a blue screen. The case has a lock and I haven't been able to break the lock yet. I wanted to drill it out, but didn't want to get metal shavings all inside. I'm thinking that I have to though. Do you know anything about a blue screen on alphas? Couldn't tell you what OS it was running or anything. Just thought it would be a lot of fun to get a non x86 box running again for a change. The sparcstation 20s I have are too ancient to do anything with. (Ebay might want the dual ross hypersparcs 120mhz though.......)
The Xbox360 code base is in great part Windows for PPC.
Apparently just the DirectX API was carried over. I don't think there is anything else that is the same. This comes from the developers themselves. Even the kernel is custom for the xbox.
Yeah, its tragic, but I didn't see anything out of place with their current rules of engagement. Clearly those cameras looked like weapons to me, and it doesn't take much more than a well placed rpg on a low flying helicopter to take it down. This is what happens when you turn a neighborhood into a war zone. Clearly there are going to be non-combatant casualties. Those soldiers were doing exactly what they were trained to do: kill people. There is nothing wrong with finding something you love in life. If you love to kill people, then the military would be a perfect fit for you. I'm not trying to say that everything the US military has done in Iraq was right (if any of it ever was), but you can't put the blame on the soldiers because I think I would have probably reacted the same way given the initial appearance of the situation. Journalists throw themselves into the middle of conflict and many have died in Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan and a whole bunch of other places. They know they are taking risks. Tragic this photographer died for no apparent reason, but I who would you blame? The soldiers firing? The commanding officer that ordered them to fire? He only knew what they saw as that information was relayed to him. I didn't see anything in this video that seemed out of place with waging war in busy populated streets. Especially a war against insurgency where essentially the whole populace is potentially a threat to your soldiers. Anyone want to tell me I'm wrong? How would YOU (and not you the parent, just anyone I mean) fight a war in Iraq with the current hand we have been given? Its a fucking boiling clusterfuck of blood and oil and sand festering like a gangrenous wound. The best irony? BP got most of the oil in the end. The fucking british were in this with us from the start and got the crown jewels while we footed the bill. Anymore between the brits and the americans, I just can't figure out who's fucking who! They sure as hell share the same bed.
to enter the program into memory the altair used an interesting trick. the front panel switches could set the address counter to an address, which could then be incremented. You put the computer into a wait state to enter the data to be written to the memory, then advanced the address counter.
Interesting post. Older computers operated similarly to this. The altair was really a throwback to the early days of computing where registers were entered by hand via switches and the program or rather the machine could be halted to change things in between. I'm rather glad we at least have a mouse and keyboard now.:)
There is an excellent series that PBS did in the 80s on the early history of computing. It ends up in modern times, which at the time was I believe like 84 or 85, so it definitely gives an interesting perspective, especially where computers where headed. I'm pretty sure you can find a torrent of it, but I also believe that that it is on youtube. It is called "The Machine that Changed the World" Well worth a watch or three. Also I just ran into this on youtube. Great. Now my day is shot.:)
You know I was going to make a joke about macs in croatia and my amazement at one in native croatian to boot, but then that got me thinking that I didn't know hardly anything about croatia's history, yet alone its actual geographic location. (yeah, i'm a dumb american, so stereotypical, but hey the eastern bloc countries are kind of a jumbled mess) This led to a fascinating wikipedia read and a bunch of photos....
I mean it looks BEAUTIFUL. Croatia is pretty small too if my I'm reading this map I'm looking at right. I'd love to go there if I could only get a passport.:(
This is going to be interesting to see how this ends up playing out. My guess is that eventually they will just the firewall between permanently, or maybe not. I'm just glad I don't live in china.:)
Ultima IV and V were pretty decent. By Ultima VII the series was so overly self referential that I don't think hardly anyone but old fans would have enjoyed it. Ultima VII still did a lot of stuff that was really innovative then and even now, but was certainly more than a little campy when it came to plot. The ultima games haven't really aged all that well IMO, but are still a lot of fun. The Underworld games were awesome too. Most people seem to forget that Ultima Online was one of the very first MMORPGs too. I would say that the influence of Lord British is still being felt. I don't think he is the visionary that Warren Spector or Peter Molyneux became, but he got pretty filthy rich off of those "shitty" games, and influenced a whole new generation of game development. He deserves credit for quite a bit.
There. Maybe we can get a 2000 post discussion all saying the same two words. Then maybe crap like this won't make it to the front page anymore. I mean really. Who voted this shite up? When did slashdot become digg?
I don't think you can get away from this mode of operation. The way a computer's internals are stacked is basically vertical with the processor on top. Between the processor you have the BUS and then the RAM and the I/O that feeds to the BIOS and the rest of the board. With RAM and FSB speeds exceeding 1ghz you still have a sizable barrier when talking to a 2-3ghz processor. Clearly part of the solution is to dump all kinds of cache next to the CPU (L1), but that costs a great deal and adds to the silicon used. My processor has something like 512kb per core. I think the newer athlons have 1-2mb per core. Compared to a 486 at 16k that is a huge increase in cache. Its not really the computer, nor is it the way SMP is designed to work. The problem is really the programming. A lot of tasks just don't scale well. The bulk of your processing in a data intensive task is still going to fall to some thread that simply can't be split easily. Tasks that you can break into workable chunks are ideal for parallelism. Video encoding....file compression....image processing....data sorting....but there are so many things that are hard to effectively multithread. Rendering HTML for instance. Sure you can throw each tab in a thread, and that would be a nice improvement, but at the same time I don't see how you could effectively thread out a render. Software will eventually start taking advantage of more cores and then some of the inherent problems in how smp is implemented will eventually rear their ugly heads (which is what I *think* the article is about....like I RTFA or anything LOL) but I think we have to get beyond quad cores and start seeing software that actually starts utilizing more than one core effectively. I have a quad core I use at work and most of the time only a single cpu or maybe two is ever pegged. I quite honestly can't think of what I would need an 8 core machine for and I use photoshop all day which should be software that is fairly demanding. The 2 cores in my laptop really feel like more than enough for just about any task I can throw at it. Coming from years and years of single cpu machines, having 2+ cores certainly makes things a lot more snappier.
Don't hold your breath. Its already been reported on multiple sources that the colors are not nearly as saturated as they are in an ips display. The videos I've seen were pretty impressive. For a tablet device I thought it was good enough and while the movie I saw demoed looked somewhat washed out, it was still certainly viewable. I would say it was certainly on par with older passive matrix displays if not a bit better. I mean the color and contrast. It certainly updates fast. Part of the usability of tablet would be using it in direct sunlight. I mean if you are indoors all the time, you might as well just use a laptop. A tablet you can whip out and check your e-mail in the street in direct sunlight would be pretty sweet. I think the downside of the reflective mode is that it is more or less gray scale. I would imagine they will figure out how to do color in reflective mode, while still allowing a backlit mode. I mean hell, the original game boy color was reflective! Something tells me that cost is the issue.
600mhz. 128mb RAM. Not very exciting. Maybe with an a9 and a tegra it would be sexy, but nah its not hitting the right geek buttons. Also the cost. I could buy a compaq q60 laptop for a little more. I know several people with them. None of them have problems, unlike the acer I ended up with. (damned flimsy screens!) If this were a sub $100 purchase I would be creaming my pants right now, but not at $270. I'd love a n900, but that costs nearly $500. The mini 5 looks pretty good, but I don't think it is going to be less than $100. ditto the nexus one. its a nice phone and all but also in the $500 range. No everyone has half a grand to just dump on the latest mini computing device and not everyone is ok with being locked into 2 year contracts with scummy cell phone companies. When these devices start coming down near the $100 mark, it will be a total game changer. Now this $100 device can accomplish 99% of what 75% of the population currently uses a computer for to begin with. Communication and browsing. Forget the cheap laptop revolution. This is going to be even bigger. Throw in 3/4g and cheap data plans and you could have a decent web browsing experience anywhere. I don't know why there hasn't been an emergence of these devices already. They keep promising them, but something tells me the costs just aren't down enough yet. Look at the mp3 player market. $100 gets you like a sansa fuze. (which are great, sound great, and I highly recommend) I think the nano is like $130 or something at best buy. I don't see how they can make the screen size 10x larger and throw in a decent arm and some ram and keep it at under $100. Maybe in like 2 years, but I still see these devices sitting at the $2-400 range for a while.
Not only that, but compounded with network lag which can easily add 50-100ms on top of that. So now you are two frames behind. At 60fps that is fast, but to the twitch fps gamers, it would probably certainly be noticeable.
I then proceded to show him where to obtain free porn without needing to visit the sites that were infecting his computer.
Never let an AC take you to a porn site.......next thing you know its goatse all over your screen and "looking at gay porn" blaring out of your speakers!!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the xbox is a multi-core ppc derivative. Tri-core, inorder execution. (interesting actually) The PS3 is powered by the cell. The core is also a power derivative.
In a simple analysis, the Cell processor can be split into four components: external input and output structures, the main processor called the Power Processing Element (PPE) (a two-way simultaneous multithreaded Power ISA v.2.03 compliant core), eight fully-functional co-processors called the Synergistic Processing Elements, or SPEs, and a specialized high-bandwidth circular data bus connecting the PPE, input/output elements and the SPEs, called the Element Interconnect Bus or EIB.
Its interesting what they tried to achieve with the cell. Unfortunately coding games to effectively utilize parallel processors still remains an incredible challenge.
I don't see sparc dying anytime soon. It is manufactured by a variety of chip companies and I'm sure any of them would license the tech to keep producing their own. If anything, it might go the way of the arm and fragment, but retain the same basic instruction set. I don't see oracle giving up such lucrative hardware sales anytime in the future either. They might gobble up all the good parts and leave the rest of sun to slowly bleed to death but I think its going to be a slow death. Oracle is going to do to court sun's previous best customers and a lot of those people are running oracle on sun hardware and have invested a great deal in that marriage. I think the sparc platform still has some life left in it performance wise, but time will tell if they actually invest in further development or make the old switcheroo to PPC or God forbid x86-64
You might be able to help me. I know this is totally off topic, but I have this old peugeot sound data systems alpha. When I turn it on I get only a blue screen. The case has a lock and I haven't been able to break the lock yet. I wanted to drill it out, but didn't want to get metal shavings all inside. I'm thinking that I have to though. Do you know anything about a blue screen on alphas? Couldn't tell you what OS it was running or anything. Just thought it would be a lot of fun to get a non x86 box running again for a change. The sparcstation 20s I have are too ancient to do anything with. (Ebay might want the dual ross hypersparcs 120mhz though.......)
The Xbox360 code base is in great part Windows for PPC.
Apparently just the DirectX API was carried over. I don't think there is anything else that is the same. This comes from the developers themselves. Even the kernel is custom for the xbox.
Yeah, its tragic, but I didn't see anything out of place with their current rules of engagement. Clearly those cameras looked like weapons to me, and it doesn't take much more than a well placed rpg on a low flying helicopter to take it down. This is what happens when you turn a neighborhood into a war zone. Clearly there are going to be non-combatant casualties. Those soldiers were doing exactly what they were trained to do: kill people. There is nothing wrong with finding something you love in life. If you love to kill people, then the military would be a perfect fit for you. I'm not trying to say that everything the US military has done in Iraq was right (if any of it ever was), but you can't put the blame on the soldiers because I think I would have probably reacted the same way given the initial appearance of the situation. Journalists throw themselves into the middle of conflict and many have died in Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan and a whole bunch of other places. They know they are taking risks. Tragic this photographer died for no apparent reason, but I who would you blame? The soldiers firing? The commanding officer that ordered them to fire? He only knew what they saw as that information was relayed to him. I didn't see anything in this video that seemed out of place with waging war in busy populated streets. Especially a war against insurgency where essentially the whole populace is potentially a threat to your soldiers. Anyone want to tell me I'm wrong? How would YOU (and not you the parent, just anyone I mean) fight a war in Iraq with the current hand we have been given? Its a fucking boiling clusterfuck of blood and oil and sand festering like a gangrenous wound. The best irony? BP got most of the oil in the end. The fucking british were in this with us from the start and got the crown jewels while we footed the bill. Anymore between the brits and the americans, I just can't figure out who's fucking who! They sure as hell share the same bed.
to enter the program into memory the altair used an interesting trick. the front panel switches could set the address counter to an address, which could then be incremented. You put the computer into a wait state to enter the data to be written to the memory, then advanced the address counter.
Interesting post. Older computers operated similarly to this. The altair was really a throwback to the early days of computing where registers were entered by hand via switches and the program or rather the machine could be halted to change things in between. I'm rather glad we at least have a mouse and keyboard now. :)
There is an excellent series that PBS did in the 80s on the early history of computing. It ends up in modern times, which at the time was I believe like 84 or 85, so it definitely gives an interesting perspective, especially where computers where headed. I'm pretty sure you can find a torrent of it, but I also believe that that it is on youtube. It is called "The Machine that Changed the World" Well worth a watch or three. Also I just ran into this on youtube. Great. Now my day is shot. :)
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=2AB505056203F80F
http://bradkaya.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/ipod-indian.jpg
My God! It looks totally like a face!
You know I was going to make a joke about macs in croatia and my amazement at one in native croatian to boot, but then that got me thinking that I didn't know hardly anything about croatia's history, yet alone its actual geographic location. (yeah, i'm a dumb american, so stereotypical, but hey the eastern bloc countries are kind of a jumbled mess) This led to a fascinating wikipedia read and a bunch of photos....
Is it really as idyllic as this?
http://www.i-travel.bg/052/images/EXC/croatia%20(2).jpg
http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/places/images/photos/photo_lg_croatia.jpg
http://www.eurotravelpages.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/croatia.jpg
I mean it looks BEAUTIFUL. Croatia is pretty small too if my I'm reading this map I'm looking at right. I'd love to go there if I could only get a passport. :(
This is going to be interesting to see how this ends up playing out. My guess is that eventually they will just the firewall between permanently, or maybe not. I'm just glad I don't live in china. :)
did they cock-block google? I haven't seen anything new on this since they moved to .hk.
Weird that lost post just broke slashdot. Boy is the D2 getting buggy these days......
And I was just about ready to fire a "Cue that's no moon in 3... 2... 1..." post!
ok bad example. warren spector is a pure genius though!
Ultima IV and V were pretty decent. By Ultima VII the series was so overly self referential that I don't think hardly anyone but old fans would have enjoyed it. Ultima VII still did a lot of stuff that was really innovative then and even now, but was certainly more than a little campy when it came to plot. The ultima games haven't really aged all that well IMO, but are still a lot of fun. The Underworld games were awesome too. Most people seem to forget that Ultima Online was one of the very first MMORPGs too. I would say that the influence of Lord British is still being felt. I don't think he is the visionary that Warren Spector or Peter Molyneux became, but he got pretty filthy rich off of those "shitty" games, and influenced a whole new generation of game development. He deserves credit for quite a bit.
Ass Ventura: Crack Detective
Best porno title EVER!
Fuck idle.
There. Maybe we can get a 2000 post discussion all saying the same two words. Then maybe crap like this won't make it to the front page anymore. I mean really. Who voted this shite up? When did slashdot become digg?
They had webcams in the 80s?
Does it make you sick after a while?
I don't think you can get away from this mode of operation. The way a computer's internals are stacked is basically vertical with the processor on top. Between the processor you have the BUS and then the RAM and the I/O that feeds to the BIOS and the rest of the board. With RAM and FSB speeds exceeding 1ghz you still have a sizable barrier when talking to a 2-3ghz processor. Clearly part of the solution is to dump all kinds of cache next to the CPU (L1), but that costs a great deal and adds to the silicon used. My processor has something like 512kb per core. I think the newer athlons have 1-2mb per core. Compared to a 486 at 16k that is a huge increase in cache. Its not really the computer, nor is it the way SMP is designed to work. The problem is really the programming. A lot of tasks just don't scale well. The bulk of your processing in a data intensive task is still going to fall to some thread that simply can't be split easily. Tasks that you can break into workable chunks are ideal for parallelism. Video encoding....file compression....image processing....data sorting....but there are so many things that are hard to effectively multithread. Rendering HTML for instance. Sure you can throw each tab in a thread, and that would be a nice improvement, but at the same time I don't see how you could effectively thread out a render. Software will eventually start taking advantage of more cores and then some of the inherent problems in how smp is implemented will eventually rear their ugly heads (which is what I *think* the article is about....like I RTFA or anything LOL) but I think we have to get beyond quad cores and start seeing software that actually starts utilizing more than one core effectively. I have a quad core I use at work and most of the time only a single cpu or maybe two is ever pegged. I quite honestly can't think of what I would need an 8 core machine for and I use photoshop all day which should be software that is fairly demanding. The 2 cores in my laptop really feel like more than enough for just about any task I can throw at it. Coming from years and years of single cpu machines, having 2+ cores certainly makes things a lot more snappier.
Don't hold your breath. Its already been reported on multiple sources that the colors are not nearly as saturated as they are in an ips display. The videos I've seen were pretty impressive. For a tablet device I thought it was good enough and while the movie I saw demoed looked somewhat washed out, it was still certainly viewable. I would say it was certainly on par with older passive matrix displays if not a bit better. I mean the color and contrast. It certainly updates fast. Part of the usability of tablet would be using it in direct sunlight. I mean if you are indoors all the time, you might as well just use a laptop. A tablet you can whip out and check your e-mail in the street in direct sunlight would be pretty sweet. I think the downside of the reflective mode is that it is more or less gray scale. I would imagine they will figure out how to do color in reflective mode, while still allowing a backlit mode. I mean hell, the original game boy color was reflective! Something tells me that cost is the issue.
$1500? The price I just saw was $2500 on their website! Insane! I could build like 6 computers for that much money!
600mhz. 128mb RAM. Not very exciting. Maybe with an a9 and a tegra it would be sexy, but nah its not hitting the right geek buttons. Also the cost. I could buy a compaq q60 laptop for a little more. I know several people with them. None of them have problems, unlike the acer I ended up with. (damned flimsy screens!) If this were a sub $100 purchase I would be creaming my pants right now, but not at $270. I'd love a n900, but that costs nearly $500. The mini 5 looks pretty good, but I don't think it is going to be less than $100. ditto the nexus one. its a nice phone and all but also in the $500 range. No everyone has half a grand to just dump on the latest mini computing device and not everyone is ok with being locked into 2 year contracts with scummy cell phone companies. When these devices start coming down near the $100 mark, it will be a total game changer. Now this $100 device can accomplish 99% of what 75% of the population currently uses a computer for to begin with. Communication and browsing. Forget the cheap laptop revolution. This is going to be even bigger. Throw in 3/4g and cheap data plans and you could have a decent web browsing experience anywhere. I don't know why there hasn't been an emergence of these devices already. They keep promising them, but something tells me the costs just aren't down enough yet. Look at the mp3 player market. $100 gets you like a sansa fuze. (which are great, sound great, and I highly recommend) I think the nano is like $130 or something at best buy. I don't see how they can make the screen size 10x larger and throw in a decent arm and some ram and keep it at under $100. Maybe in like 2 years, but I still see these devices sitting at the $2-400 range for a while.
because they don't know any better? (obviously)
Not only that, but compounded with network lag which can easily add 50-100ms on top of that. So now you are two frames behind. At 60fps that is fast, but to the twitch fps gamers, it would probably certainly be noticeable.
I then proceded to show him where to obtain free porn without needing to visit the sites that were infecting his computer.
Never let an AC take you to a porn site.......next thing you know its goatse all over your screen and "looking at gay porn" blaring out of your speakers!!