" Transmeta's market was always mobile computing,"
Actually, that's not true. I recall that Transmeta really thought that their "code-morphing" bullshit would be good enough to win processor sockets in desktop and perhaps even server boxes. I remember all of the hype: "Software running on the processor will translate x86 or PPC or whatever instructions on-the-fly and applications won't know the difference."
It didn't make any sense to me then, and I couldn't see how it could do its "emulation" fast enough to be reasonable. I mean, why replace a 1 GHz (at the time) processor with one that runs like it's a 66 MHz 486?
They also claimed that the "software" "code morphing" allowed it to use less power than a hardware implementation of the same instruction set. The thinking was that "it's a RISC machine, therefore it uses less power." Indeed it does, but the translated code crawls...
Turns out that my initial impressions were correct, and when the geniuses at Transmeta realized that their products would never compete in the desktop space, the chips were remarketed as low-power (both in watts and CPU horsepower) devices best suited to low-end, low-power-draw mobile applications.
Malicious hacker's (sic) and spammer's (sic) make for more secure computer systems. If everybody played nicey-nice, then it is likely that laziness would result in serious security flaws that would go unfixed.
If everybody placed nicey-nice, then there'd be no need for security in the first place.
If it weren't for the Plague then a part of the population today would not be immune to HIV.
Congratulations! You've presented the best reason for banning human cloning.
"I can hardly wait for People for the American Way and other so-called non-partisan groups to start predicting the end of civilized life on the planet if another judicial conservative is appointed to the court. It's a great way for them to raise money."
funny how the Xtian right and their so-called non-partisan allies have been predicting the end of civilized life on the planet if another judical liberal is appointed to the court. And they've been raising money hand over fist in anticipation of a fight over SCOTUS nominations, and they've already indicated that they're going to spend it.
"I don't know who wrote the `I did not protest because...' stuff."
It was Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
"Until about the time AOL appeared, Compuserve was even requiring new users to purchase their access software for $25. The boxed kit included nothing more than a floppy disk and a very sparse user manual."
Actually, you could connect to CompuServe using your modem and a terminal emulator. After logging in, you'd be presented with a simple text menu. Remember "go [forum name]"?
They charged for the Windows interface, WinCIM ("compuserve information manager"), which put a pretty (or not, depending on your POV) face onto the underlying terminal emulator.
At some point, they needed to face reality and made WinCIM available for free.
Once AOL bought 'em, the end was near, and I dumped it when the MIDI/Music forums closed. Luckily, most of the people there moved on to a couple of web forums, most notably the Live-Audio Board.
"Lets boycott Amazon and hit them where it hurts the most. Lets not buy from them, lets not work for them, lets stop promoting them. There are other good etailers who don't seek to own the net."
I haven't bought from Amazon in years -- ever since I first read about Bezos' anti-union stance. His argument, that "this is the New Economy and the old rules no longer apply," is clearly bullshit, since his company is really no different from any mail-order catalog. Let's see, you still need people to work in the warehouses. It doesn't matter whether the orders come in over the Internet, or the phone, or by snail mail.
OK, lemme rephrase: Spending billions of dollars that you don't have to buy market share basically defined the "New Economy." Has Amazon shown any profits?
"I fully endorse another trip to the moon. I'd even donate money to the venture."
Well, I would imagine that some small fraction of your federal income tax will go towards paying for this.
Given the choice between paying for a new moon shot and paying for the clusterfuck in Iraq, I'll shoot the moon. Given the choice between either of those two and making health insurance available to all citizens, well, it's a no brainer.
"They don't release the specs because the hardware is generally full of bugs that they work around in their drivers. Different versions of the hardware have their own bugs and work arounds. Sometimes I think they're too embarassed to release the specs for fear the would would see what a dogs breakfast some of their work amounts to."
Hey, you're decribing 3dLabs. Having seen the massive docs for a couple of their chips, all I can say is, "You've gotta be fucking kidding."
I mean, really -- registers where the documentation is simply, "this register exists" and that's that. Or the video input port that required days of experimentation to get it to accept digitized data. Or the interlacing mode that just doesn't work. Or the complete lack of timing diagrams for any of the signals (except for the obvious PCI/AGP lines, which are identical to the PCI spec). I could go on, but all I can say is that I'm glad I don't have to work with that piece of shit any more.
"Assuming I don't fry the mobo, bend pins on the CPU or squirt thermal compound all over the place, I should be good to go. Just to be sure, I'm going to pet my cats for luck:)"
Just make sure you touch something that's grounded (or wear a grounding wrist strap) before you start assembling your computer...
"As for service, I should have stated is SUPPOSED to be a service position, thus the low pay. Never turns out that way though."
.. and why should public service be a low-paying job? OK, other than the obvious fact that private-sector service jobs also pay poorly. What public services do you think are deserving of low pay? Firemen? Police officers? Teachers? Think about what services your local property taxes fund -- and then think about how your community will function without them.
Put another, very obvious way: You get what you pay for. If you want a high-quality education system, you have to pay for it. If you want the best cops on the beat keeping crime at bay, you have to pay for it. If you want a fire truck at your house one minute after the 911 call, you have to pay for it.
And, no, I don't see how education, crime-fighting and fire-fighting can be performed with more efficiency by private-sector for-profit corporations.
"It is time to overcome this socialist, fascist propoganda that the government is `the people'."
If you weren't such an uninformed ass, you'd realize that socialism and facism are orthogonal concepts.
Socialism essentially means a classless state and "the people have the power." Fascism, on the other hand, is where the state has all of the power and individuals have none -- a totalitarian regime where subjects are told what to do, and when and how to do it.
"Let's illustrate this with an example. Imagine a Texas municipality decides to implement broadband. Let's even say that they hold a referrendum to determine whether or not to do it. 75% of the population decides they want it. The problem is that 100% of the population gets taxed to pay for it. Those 25% who voted against it are just plain screwed - they're paying for a service that they didn't want."
Let's use a different example. 100% of the population gets taxed to fund a war that 49% of the people voted against. That 49% of the population is just plain screwed.
"And actually, while I would agree that most roads are not toll roads, street lights certainly DO have a fee. I'm sure that the method by which you pay it varies by locality. Here in my county my water utility (why water? who knows) levies a fee of $3.50 a month. Some of you may not get this broken down like I do on my bill, but trust me, you pay for it, whether it's exposed in a fee or hidden in property taxes."
So, you advocate not having street lights? If a vote was held today in your municipality, would they vote to remove street lighting?
"However, that the state would consider passing a law to enforce capitalism is just backwards. Just don't write laws! Legislators don't seem to understand that is an option. You don't have to legislate everything! Jeez! I don't want wifi welfare or wifi regulated monopolies. I want the option of placing my money where I want."
Read a lot of the comments here. You'll see that many people don't have a choice for their broadband service. Oh, wait, actually, there IS a choice -- between two monopolies (the phone company and the cable company), neither of which win any awards for customer service, quality of product, etc.
"And let me toss a bone to the socialists: If the majority of a municipality voted by due process in that town (local referendum, popularly elected officials, whatever)want wifi welfare, then have that option, no matter how much I personally dislike it. The state just doesn't need to concern itself with such matters."
... which is the point of most of the discussion here.
With Government, you can only elect your officials once every few years.
With corporations, you vote with every penny you spend. Which happens to be every day for me.
Guess what option give more power to the people?
Funny, I haven't spent one penny on any of Halliburton's products, yet that company still exists.
"Another zealot chiming in here. What limit do you recognize to your neighbor's power to vote himself into your wallet? If 50% + 1 neighbor votes that you have to buy them go-carts and HBO, is that exceeding their previous limits? Do Majoritarians recognize any moral limits, or is the definition of moral 50% + 1 of the voters?"
Sounds like you're arguing for the rights of a minority party to fight against the tyranny of the majority.
Pray tell, what do you think about judicial filibusters?
"While at the same time getting 2000% disinformation and more bias than FOX news!"
The Daily Show has never claimed to be anything OTHER than fake news.
Also, you might want to check out the list of Daily Show guests. Let's see: former Homeland Security boss Tom Ridge was on a couple of weeks ago. Pat Buchanan has been on several times. so has William Kristol, Richard Vigurie, Zell Miller, etc. Not exactly liberal icons.
This is all ancient history, but DAT was killed by a similar DRM scheme. Consumer DAT machines were sold with S/PDIF digital interfaces, whereas pro machines (like the ubiquitous Panasonic SV-3700) had both S/PDIF and AES/EBU.
The main difference between the two interfaces (other than the obvious -- S/PDIF is on unbalanced 75-ohm coax and AES/EBU is on balanced RS422) is that S/PDIF machines have to honor the SCMS ("serial copy management system") bit in one of the control subframes. AES/EBU does not.
SCMS works in the same way as this "new" scheme. As you record from a digital source (over S/PDIF), the recorder looks at the state of the SCMS bit in the incoming data stream. If the bit is set, then the machine will refuse to record. If the bit is not set, then the machine will gladly record -- but it inserts a set SCMS bit into the the recorded data. So when you go to copy your copy, you're locked out.
This, in and of itself, didn't kill DAT. DAT was killed because pro machines were substantially more expensive than the consumer machines (I remember paying a grand for a TASCAM DA-30 when DAT was still very much a viable format). Consumers weren't willing to pay a lot more to get a feature they wanted -- the ability to make copies of copies.
"Those that ignore history are condemned to repeat it." Or something like that.
Now, of course, S/PDIF still exists. I know that some S/PDIF interfaces (the CardD Digital, for one) let you disable SCMS. The most common use for S/PDIF these days is digital transfer from a DVD player to a home-theatre multichannel amp. Dunno if you can route that audio to a digital recording device and have it record.
"I call bullshit. I have an FX5200 as well. While I can play Doom3 with it [on an AMD64 at 2.2Ghz with 1GB of DDR400] it's not at 'max settings'.
It's playable but it does lag in certain sequences even on modest settings. A 6800 would certainly make for a decent improvement.
I agree. I thought Doom3 would run fine on an Athlon XP 2000+ (1 GB SDR DRAM) box with a 5200, and it does, but not at anything other than "okay quality" video. I get stutters when it tries to deal with very complex scenes.
"Though for my case the 5200 is enough power."
Yeah, I know -- for everything else (including WORK, like PCB layout and microcontroller code compiling and FPGA simulation/fitting), the machine and graphics card are more than adequate. Now, the dual 19" (not flat) CRTs are buggin' me, so it looks like a pair of 20" Apple Cinema displays are in my future -- but my graphics card doesn't have DVI out, so... the upgrade cycle continues.
First of all, Subversion has no tags. They might call them "tags" but they are really just branches. I consider this a bit of a flaw but whatever.
1) remember the revision number of the repository which has the "good" code. Write it on a stick note or something. This is as close to a "tag" as you'll get. Then just tell your build process "revision #123124 is the one to use".
Ah, you don't get it -- to "tag" a release, you simply copy the head to your "tag." You can even mark the tag as read-only. Then you tell the production people to check out the tag. It's really simple.
"100wpm == 500cpm. 500cpm x 1 hour == 30,000 keypresses. Hitting 20 million won't take *that* long."
Do some math. Even if you were able to sustain 100,000 keystrokes in an 8-hour day, which is doubtful (forget 240,000 keystrokes at the rate you quote), 20 million keystrokes would take 200 days, which is basically one working year. And that's 20 million keystrokes PER KEY, so one could expect the keyboard to last a lot longer.
Face it, the Cheez-Doodle crumbs will damage the keyboard before the keys wear out due to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's not true. I recall that Transmeta really thought that their "code-morphing" bullshit would be good enough to win processor sockets in desktop and perhaps even server boxes. I remember all of the hype: "Software running on the processor will translate x86 or PPC or whatever instructions on-the-fly and applications won't know the difference."
It didn't make any sense to me then, and I couldn't see how it could do its "emulation" fast enough to be reasonable. I mean, why replace a 1 GHz (at the time) processor with one that runs like it's a 66 MHz 486?
They also claimed that the "software" "code morphing" allowed it to use less power than a hardware implementation of the same instruction set. The thinking was that "it's a RISC machine, therefore it uses less power." Indeed it does, but the translated code crawls...
Turns out that my initial impressions were correct, and when the geniuses at Transmeta realized that their products would never compete in the desktop space, the chips were remarketed as low-power (both in watts and CPU horsepower) devices best suited to low-end, low-power-draw mobile applications.
If everybody placed nicey-nice, then there'd be no need for security in the first place.
If it weren't for the Plague then a part of the population today would not be immune to HIV.
What? Unfortunately, no one is immune to HIV.
Congratulations! You've presented the best reason for banning human cloning.
"I can hardly wait for People for the American Way and other so-called non-partisan groups to start predicting the end of civilized life on the planet if another judicial conservative is appointed to the court. It's a great way for them to raise money."
funny how the Xtian right and their so-called non-partisan allies have been predicting the end of civilized life on the planet if another judical liberal is appointed to the court. And they've been raising money hand over fist in anticipation of a fight over SCOTUS nominations, and they've already indicated that they're going to spend it.
It was Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
Agreed! And people who fail to make this distinction aren't "loosers," they're just plain fucking morons.
Read comment #119, which starts at "This is now officially the Anti-Liberty Court."
Quoting the Freepers only displays your ignorance.
Actually, you could connect to CompuServe using your modem and a terminal emulator. After logging in, you'd be presented with a simple text menu. Remember "go [forum name]"?
They charged for the Windows interface, WinCIM ("compuserve information manager"), which put a pretty (or not, depending on your POV) face onto the underlying terminal emulator.
At some point, they needed to face reality and made WinCIM available for free.
Once AOL bought 'em, the end was near, and I dumped it when the MIDI/Music forums closed. Luckily, most of the people there moved on to a couple of web forums, most notably the Live-Audio Board.
I haven't bought from Amazon in years -- ever since I first read about Bezos' anti-union stance. His argument, that "this is the New Economy and the old rules no longer apply," is clearly bullshit, since his company is really no different from any mail-order catalog. Let's see, you still need people to work in the warehouses. It doesn't matter whether the orders come in over the Internet, or the phone, or by snail mail.
OK, lemme rephrase: Spending billions of dollars that you don't have to buy market share basically defined the "New Economy." Has Amazon shown any profits?
Well, I would imagine that some small fraction of your federal income tax will go towards paying for this.
Given the choice between paying for a new moon shot and paying for the clusterfuck in Iraq, I'll shoot the moon. Given the choice between either of those two and making health insurance available to all citizens, well, it's a no brainer.
fuck rebates. I won't buy anything that has a mail-in rebate. Either take the $20 off at point-of-sale, or I won't buy the product.
Hey, you're decribing 3dLabs. Having seen the massive docs for a couple of their chips, all I can say is, "You've gotta be fucking kidding."
I mean, really -- registers where the documentation is simply, "this register exists" and that's that. Or the video input port that required days of experimentation to get it to accept digitized data. Or the interlacing mode that just doesn't work. Or the complete lack of timing diagrams for any of the signals (except for the obvious PCI/AGP lines, which are identical to the PCI spec). I could go on, but all I can say is that I'm glad I don't have to work with that piece of shit any more.
Just make sure you touch something that's grounded (or wear a grounding wrist strap) before you start assembling your computer ...
Put another, very obvious way: You get what you pay for. If you want a high-quality education system, you have to pay for it. If you want the best cops on the beat keeping crime at bay, you have to pay for it. If you want a fire truck at your house one minute after the 911 call, you have to pay for it.
And, no, I don't see how education, crime-fighting and fire-fighting can be performed with more efficiency by private-sector for-profit corporations.
If you weren't such an uninformed ass, you'd realize that socialism and facism are orthogonal concepts.
Socialism essentially means a classless state and "the people have the power." Fascism, on the other hand, is where the state has all of the power and individuals have none -- a totalitarian regime where subjects are told what to do, and when and how to do it.
Let's use a different example. 100% of the population gets taxed to fund a war that 49% of the people voted against. That 49% of the population is just plain screwed.
So, you advocate not having street lights? If a vote was held today in your municipality, would they vote to remove street lighting?
"However, that the state would consider passing a law to enforce capitalism is just backwards. Just don't write laws! Legislators don't seem to understand that is an option. You don't have to legislate everything! Jeez! I don't want wifi welfare or wifi regulated monopolies. I want the option of placing my money where I want."
Read a lot of the comments here. You'll see that many people don't have a choice for their broadband service. Oh, wait, actually, there IS a choice -- between two monopolies (the phone company and the cable company), neither of which win any awards for customer service, quality of product, etc.
"And let me toss a bone to the socialists: If the majority of a municipality voted by due process in that town (local referendum, popularly elected officials, whatever)want wifi welfare, then have that option, no matter how much I personally dislike it. The state just doesn't need to concern itself with such matters."
Funny, I haven't spent one penny on any of Halliburton's products, yet that company still exists.
Sounds like you're arguing for the rights of a minority party to fight against the tyranny of the majority.
Pray tell, what do you think about judicial filibusters?
The Daily Show has never claimed to be anything OTHER than fake news.
Also, you might want to check out the list of Daily Show guests. Let's see: former Homeland Security boss Tom Ridge was on a couple of weeks ago. Pat Buchanan has been on several times. so has William Kristol, Richard Vigurie, Zell Miller, etc. Not exactly liberal icons.
Under the law, corporations are treated just like individuals.
The main difference between the two interfaces (other than the obvious -- S/PDIF is on unbalanced 75-ohm coax and AES/EBU is on balanced RS422) is that S/PDIF machines have to honor the SCMS ("serial copy management system") bit in one of the control subframes. AES/EBU does not.
SCMS works in the same way as this "new" scheme. As you record from a digital source (over S/PDIF), the recorder looks at the state of the SCMS bit in the incoming data stream. If the bit is set, then the machine will refuse to record. If the bit is not set, then the machine will gladly record -- but it inserts a set SCMS bit into the the recorded data. So when you go to copy your copy, you're locked out.
This, in and of itself, didn't kill DAT. DAT was killed because pro machines were substantially more expensive than the consumer machines (I remember paying a grand for a TASCAM DA-30 when DAT was still very much a viable format). Consumers weren't willing to pay a lot more to get a feature they wanted -- the ability to make copies of copies.
"Those that ignore history are condemned to repeat it." Or something like that.
Now, of course, S/PDIF still exists. I know that some S/PDIF interfaces (the CardD Digital, for one) let you disable SCMS. The most common use for S/PDIF these days is digital transfer from a DVD player to a home-theatre multichannel amp. Dunno if you can route that audio to a digital recording device and have it record.
It's playable but it does lag in certain sequences even on modest settings. A 6800 would certainly make for a decent improvement.
I agree. I thought Doom3 would run fine on an Athlon XP 2000+ (1 GB SDR DRAM) box with a 5200, and it does, but not at anything other than "okay quality" video. I get stutters when it tries to deal with very complex scenes.
"Though for my case the 5200 is enough power."
Yeah, I know -- for everything else (including WORK, like PCB layout and microcontroller code compiling and FPGA simulation/fitting), the machine and graphics card are more than adequate. Now, the dual 19" (not flat) CRTs are buggin' me, so it looks like a pair of 20" Apple Cinema displays are in my future -- but my graphics card doesn't have DVI out, so ... the upgrade cycle continues.
1) remember the revision number of the repository which has the "good" code. Write it on a stick note or something. This is as close to a "tag" as you'll get. Then just tell your build process "revision #123124 is the one to use".
Ah, you don't get it -- to "tag" a release, you simply copy the head to your "tag." You can even mark the tag as read-only. Then you tell the production people to check out the tag. It's really simple.
The Enter key is the wrong size. Real Enter keys are L-shaped.
Do some math. Even if you were able to sustain 100,000 keystrokes in an 8-hour day, which is doubtful (forget 240,000 keystrokes at the rate you quote), 20 million keystrokes would take 200 days, which is basically one working year. And that's 20 million keystrokes PER KEY, so one could expect the keyboard to last a lot longer.
Face it, the Cheez-Doodle crumbs will damage the keyboard before the keys wear out due to use.