First they are putting WiFi HotSpots inside McDs' now "free" music (with purchase) they already have fatty foods, they obviousily have dropped the family marketing tack and are concentrating on nerds as their targeted customers, the'll be serving webpages on Apache/Linux/Perl next!
The PSP looks pretty cool, the processor specs are impressive and the UMD disk sounds very interesting. Much discussion has centered on the DRM and serial # imposed on the UMD and many are discussing the MP3 or general storage capabilities. But I have seen no mention if the UMD are pressed (ROM) or read/write I assume that they are indeed like DVD's and can't be written, this seems to fit with Sony's copy protection interests. There is way too much hardare and capabilities in the PSP that Sony wouldn't put significant efforts into protecting thier investment and blocking all copying efforts. The games will not be cheap and they will probably set the console(handheld) at a loss to get sales of the game disks at what I would guess to be ~$50.
The only problem is read-write is never mentioned these maybe CD-ROM like, you buy the game and need a memory card for game saves. They haven't mentioned using it a user storage medium, so it maybe pressed at the factory, this has the benifit of removing the risk of copying at least until someone comes up with a PC compatible reader, and if they keep a few specs secret there maybe not copying for quite a while. Sony has been pretty active in protecting their copyrights.
'Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line.'
And yet, loaded on the computer sitting beside me, I have a beta of what I would consider Red Hat 10 (or, at least 9.1). Are they seriously suggesting that those of us that rely on Red Hat's reputation as one of the drivingcompanies behind Linux switch to another company to continue getting a FREE >Operating System? Isn't that the point of Linux in the first place?
They do NOT say that they will not have follow on products just no a product in the "Red Hat Linux line", so they may be changing names to signify a new business model or some variant on that. Their business is based on Linux so I can't see them going away from that but changes in their business model (support contracts or 900 number or whatever) maybe required to grow the company.
If a company wants to enhance its value a few inventions and patents can be much more worth while that years of hard work. In todays market IP can be very valuable many companies like Rambus and Qualcomm, while they have products exist mostly as patent holders and receive much of their income/market cap from their patent portfolio. The writer doesn't discuss what type of invention he made, it maybe worthless in the market or it could be worth huge piles-o-cash. I the company gave $2000 or something like that they would get more patents (I know there is a legal cost involved with filing a patent, which should gate which patents get pursued) they have more chances at hitting the big one and the company doing well. I know the econcomy is down (beleive me, I know) but taking advantage or the appearance of taking advantage of their employees creates a lot of bad feelings, people put in less effort and bail as soon as another job presents itself. As the only saying goes "penny wise dollar foolish" treat people well and they will treat you well.
AOL is not doing this malicously they are plugging a security flaw. This seems like a good and responsible thing not an abuse, if AOL used this for thier own ads this would be bad but plugging a open hole is a benifit for thier mostly nontechnical users. You may not like AOL but this sounds good.
Open vs. Closed souce isn't the issue. Yes open source avoids this type of problem, but it could have been avoided by a half decently run company. Appgen left its paying customers out in the cold when it went out of bussiness. They could have opened the source code or provided the key generator or whatever they need to do to provide thier customers with what they bought/contracted for. Appgen couldn't have disappeared overnight even quickly failing companies take months and months to go away and they can ussually unload thier products to competitors at pennies on the dollar or help customers in someway. Appgen acted irresponsibly if they stranded thier customers, open source might have helped but comericial products are difficult to allow open source but at the end of the day Appgen failed it customers!!!!
The big question for me is will games be limited to 32MBs or will some games allow the user to use the full 128MB? They have two versions, this is confusing to interested buyers, do I go cheap or do I go big features. The only difference that I'm aware of is the larger memory, which should only at 10-15 dollars to the price. If they wanted lots of memory for holding movies MP3s etc... they should have given all units 128MB and only made one unit. If the games will be limited to 32MB the 128 is only for program and data storage while in Palm mode which is find but probably overkill for a great portion of the market, SD cards are pretty cheap and offer better (no battery) long term storage. Having a new product with a bit open question as to which model is more appropriate was a huge marketing SNAFU (read fuck up) if there was only one price I would have bought one as soon as I saw it, now I want to wait till I see where its going before I buy!
The document lists one and only one case. I don't doubt that SCSI has performance benfits that is pretty well known. I've always wondered why they don't upgrade IDE with a better command set much like SCSI, well they haven't they just increase the clock speed and offer better buffering. So there is a valid case for a comparison between SCSI and IDE. This review does one and only one test which proves that SCSI wins on one test this is not a good article. He reads one and only one file. The real question is how well IDE and SCSI operate under real multi-treaded OS conditions. Slashdot editors should be rejecting this article in favour of one with a real indepth analysis. SCSI will win but not for the reasons listed in this article.
People working on defense and national secuirity (black) projects have been getting jobs for years with no problems, how secret can your database be???? There are usually on a couple of unique features which you hand wave about and 99% of the work is generally pretty simillar to whatever the competition is working on so there is no secret. NDAs are ussually most interested in devluging info to competitors. "I worked on next gen databases" is good enough for listing in a resume. You need to get the interview before this is a real issue anyway. Once at the interview discuss the 99% of what you did and if they ask questions about the other 1% explain that it is covered by NDA. When push comes to shove, you need to get a job and NDAs can't restrict you from getting a job. NDAs have proven to be pretty worthless in court, you don't have an option but to sign thier terms, so it is not really a valid contract and what are they going to do anyway, how will they find out what has been discussed??? You need a job, make some effort to protect thier IP, but don't go overboard, if you're looking for work they didn't take care of you.
Going to smaller geometries is a standard tactic, so this is surprising but the more supprising that they intend to skip 0.13um which is still leading edge,.09um is still pretty risky and expensive. 0.13um would have cut the die size in half, while.09 reduces by 75% which is better but the reliability of.09 and the extra effort to go to the latest process when you need 20 million parts/year this sounds like a major risk that shouldn't be allowed to limit the move of the PS2 marketing push. I find it somewhat strange that "Cell" is getting so much press and interest, nobody has built a chip at.065um yet and this may take years if they can fit 8 processors at 65nm they should be prototyping 4-6 processors at.09 or 2-4 at.13. The cell seems to be more of a marketing ploy rather that real technology or atleast that all thats getting out. Does a game system need 1 trillion ops/sec???? for game play? A workstation with this capability would make a lot more money, your own nuclear resarch on PS3????
If you always repalce @ with at then the change to the spambots is minimal and they get the address anyway. Many websites only display the beginging of the mail address and registered users must request the full address or use a mail entry screen to forward the email to the user without devulging the email at all and giving them privacy until they want to respond to you (your email is entered and provide as the replyto address.
Skip the $9/hr or even $25/hr you should set milestones and get a lump sum, plus some sort of starting amount to make sure that they are serious. Lump sums are easier for the company and they won't get supprizes if they expect to pay $5k for feature X it costs $5K not 1000 hrs * $9/hr because you ran into problems. This is somewhat risky but as you are a student any money coming in is good. Estimate your time add 30-100% and set that as the lump sum. If you come in under time you make money, if you go over you'll know better for next time. But hourly is a bad move for both you and the company they don't know how much each fetaure will cost and thus become hesitant and worried that you won't concentrate or try and rip them off by overcharging hrs. You know how much you're getting so you can plan purchases and school expenses.
OK, flash based parts CF, SM, MMC, SD, USB Key, or whatever do have a finite life this is true, but the life is much longer than any reasonable use. Old parts when FLASH was a new technology had lives of 1000 cycles, and yes this is somewhat limiting. But todays FLASH is 10,000 to 100,000 cycles most flash storage controlers (for whatever format) move data arround so the "wear" on the "drive" is evenly spread across the blocks (sectors). So if you have a 64MB card lets say 32MB for software and 32MB for email/data storage and you get 32MB/day of email then the card will last 10,000 days worst case. 10,000/365 days/year = 27.4 years technology will have progressed well beyond this in this time so the machine will become useless well before the FLASH. Even if you are REAL popular and get 320 MB of mail a day thats still 2.7 years which given the price of flash and a heavy useage pattern is a reasonable price. The FLASH manufatures are guarenteeing 10,000 cycles, this does not mean that 10,001 cycles will be a failure, 10,000 is a minimum so it will probably last atleast 30% more. Even at 10,000 cycles the flash starts to fail, much like a hard disks sectors going bad and they do faster than 10,000 cycles, so some of the blocks will fail at some point after 10,000 cycles and if the controller works correctly it will pull that sector out of the rotation so the storage size will slowly decrease over time so it will have an effective size of 63MB then 62MB sometime after the 10,000 cycles. So I don't really see an issue. Some FLASH parts may fail sooner, but so may any technology and I would trust FLASH more than a HDD or RAM DISK (which goes away very quickily if there are any (ANY) power fluctuations.
I understand that BeOS is well done and some say that it advances the state-of-the-art is OS design and usability and its great that it has been open sourced to allow code and apps to the public. That said, why would anyone want to start using an effectively end of life OS, is there that much that can be done with the OS? I see all these people putting effort into reviving BeOS or AmigaOS or C64 OS's with TCP/IP and ethernet is this at all useful. If the best features of BeOS live on in Linux I do see that as a benifit but what gain is there in spending the time and effort in reviving a dead horse?
Well lets see, ATX is getting replaced by BTX, so if I remeber correctly from Kindergarten the next new technology will be CTX, DTX and ETX. I just love it when a plan comes together! (A-Team circa 1984).
With devices like the Palm Zire at $99 why do you invent a "low cost" device at $400??? The Zire 71 has colour, integrated camera, lots of memory, memory card (SD/MMC), 320x320 screen what else do people need? Startup hardware companies just don't make sense anymore buy a standard platform or have some far east company (China, Singapore, Taiwain, Malayasia....) build a standard or copy a standard, write some custom software for you're app and you are done. These guys had some blue sky idea that they could become rich selling to the poor, and then got over confident and suffered from the old standard featue creap and instead of getting rich they will be looking for a new job. They were supposed to be going low cost, but they have obviously failed. There are plenty of $400 devices on the market already I think there are PocketPC devices below $300 what is missing is the India specific stuff, and thats what they should be concentating on!!!
Everyone seems to be commenting on how relaible old HP calcs were. The real story is that a calcuclator even a graphing one requires a 32bit 75MHz processor. This blows my mind why does a calculator need a 75MHz processor. ARM9 is way overkill they should have, assuming that they really wanted to use an ARM stick with the ARM7 which is fine for basic computation it just misses the support for caches and longer pipelines. The ARM7 is smaller (smaller die lower cost), and lower power (longer battery life). Hardware design seems to be more about bragging rights that producing a good product. The SW guys all want to use C++ so they don't have to understand the processor, C++ is ussually 20-30% slower than C and 100-400% slower than assembly and assembly is what a calculator's code should be written in.
Spec's don't list PCI or AGP slot so doesn't look like upgrading is an option. Have you tried changing settings??? Often there are some compatability controls that can make things better. The graphics processor is realatively recent so it should be decent but not great at games, often more memory is more of a issue try increasing ram, it makes everything faster and so even if it doesn't improve game play the machine will be more fun to use.
We've all seen the marketing about how wired we'll be in the future, downloading video to watch our favorite TV show at the beach etc... . But I've never seen any predictions how much this is going cost the end user. The cell carriers are fighting for market share and not making too much now, deploying 3G is going to cost a LOT of money (huge piles). I think that they expect the usage will go up, but I'm paying something like $40 for 600 minutes (weekdays, free nights and weekends yada yada yada). Seems to me that if rates stay the same and my usage goes up by a factor of 2x or 3x then the bill is going to go up 2x, 3x or worse. Thats 600 minutes = 10hrs month, a phone call from a good friend can easily take an hour, so 10hrs/month can get used up pretty fast. Surfing the WWW can waste hours and hours (didn't get to bed till 3:20am because I had an idea that I wanted to research and lost track of time, following all the links on Google looking for the right info).
I have a suspision that 3G is going to be more than 2/2.5G cellular and its only really usefull if its always avialable so I would want to use a lot more minutes but I'm not that interested in signing up for a plan thats >$40, maybe a little more but I'd need a lot more than 600 minutes. I see 3G getting quite a few "early adopters" then quickly declining as people economize.
Slashdot Mirror
First they are putting WiFi HotSpots inside McDs' now "free" music (with purchase) they already have fatty foods, they obviousily have dropped the family marketing tack and are concentrating on nerds as their targeted customers, the'll be serving webpages on Apache/Linux/Perl next!
The PSP looks pretty cool, the processor specs are impressive and the UMD disk sounds very interesting. Much discussion has centered on the DRM and serial # imposed on the UMD and many are discussing the MP3 or general storage capabilities. But I have seen no mention if the UMD are pressed (ROM) or read/write I assume that they are indeed like DVD's and can't be written, this seems to fit with Sony's copy protection interests. There is way too much hardare and capabilities in the PSP that Sony wouldn't put significant efforts into protecting thier investment and blocking all copying efforts. The games will not be cheap and they will probably set the console(handheld) at a loss to get sales of the game disks at what I would guess to be ~$50.
Its great that drivers are available for this new chipset, but is this really worth being a /. topic???
The only problem is read-write is never mentioned these maybe CD-ROM like, you buy the game and need a memory card for game saves. They haven't mentioned using it a user storage medium, so it maybe pressed at the factory, this has the benifit of removing the risk of copying at least until someone comes up with a PC compatible reader, and if they keep a few specs secret there maybe not copying for quite a while. Sony has been pretty active in protecting their copyrights.
'Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line.'
And yet, loaded on the computer sitting beside me, I have a beta of what I would consider Red Hat 10 (or, at least 9.1). Are they seriously suggesting that those of us that rely on Red Hat's reputation as one of the drivingcompanies behind Linux switch to another company to continue getting a FREE >Operating System? Isn't that the point of Linux in the first place?
They do NOT say that they will not have follow on products just no a product in the "Red Hat Linux line", so they may be changing names to signify a new business model or some variant on that. Their business is based on Linux so I can't see them going away from that but changes in their business model (support contracts or 900 number or whatever) maybe required to grow the company.
If a company wants to enhance its value a few inventions and patents can be much more worth while that years of hard work. In todays market IP can be very valuable many companies like Rambus and Qualcomm, while they have products exist mostly as patent holders and receive much of their income/market cap from their patent portfolio. The writer doesn't discuss what type of invention he made, it maybe worthless in the market or it could be worth huge piles-o-cash. I the company gave $2000 or something like that they would get more patents (I know there is a legal cost involved with filing a patent, which should gate which patents get pursued) they have more chances at hitting the big one and the company doing well. I know the econcomy is down (beleive me, I know) but taking advantage or the appearance of taking advantage of their employees creates a lot of bad feelings, people put in less effort and bail as soon as another job presents itself. As the only saying goes "penny wise dollar foolish" treat people well and they will treat you well.
AOL is not doing this malicously they are plugging a security flaw. This seems like a good and responsible thing not an abuse, if AOL used this for thier own ads this would be bad but plugging a open hole is a benifit for thier mostly nontechnical users. You may not like AOL but this sounds good.
Open vs. Closed souce isn't the issue. Yes open source avoids this type of problem, but it could have been avoided by a half decently run company. Appgen left its paying customers out in the cold when it went out of bussiness. They could have opened the source code or provided the key generator or whatever they need to do to provide thier customers with what they bought/contracted for. Appgen couldn't have disappeared overnight even quickly failing companies take months and months to go away and they can ussually unload thier products to competitors at pennies on the dollar or help customers in someway. Appgen acted irresponsibly if they stranded thier customers, open source might have helped but comericial products are difficult to allow open source but at the end of the day Appgen failed it customers!!!!
The big question for me is will games be limited to 32MBs or will some games allow the user to use the full 128MB? They have two versions, this is confusing to interested buyers, do I go cheap or do I go big features. The only difference that I'm aware of is the larger memory, which should only at 10-15 dollars to the price. If they wanted lots of memory for holding movies MP3s etc... they should have given all units 128MB and only made one unit. If the games will be limited to 32MB the 128 is only for program and data storage while in Palm mode which is find but probably overkill for a great portion of the market, SD cards are pretty cheap and offer better (no battery) long term storage. Having a new product with a bit open question as to which model is more appropriate was a huge marketing SNAFU (read fuck up) if there was only one price I would have bought one as soon as I saw it, now I want to wait till I see where its going before I buy!
The document lists one and only one case. I don't doubt that SCSI has performance benfits that is pretty well known. I've always wondered why they don't upgrade IDE with a better command set much like SCSI, well they haven't they just increase the clock speed and offer better buffering. So there is a valid case for a comparison between SCSI and IDE. This review does one and only one test which proves that SCSI wins on one test this is not a good article. He reads one and only one file. The real question is how well IDE and SCSI operate under real multi-treaded OS conditions. Slashdot editors should be rejecting this article in favour of one with a real indepth analysis. SCSI will win but not for the reasons listed in this article.
People working on defense and national secuirity (black) projects have been getting jobs for years with no problems, how secret can your database be???? There are usually on a couple of unique features which you hand wave about and 99% of the work is generally pretty simillar to whatever the competition is working on so there is no secret. NDAs are ussually most interested in devluging info to competitors. "I worked on next gen databases" is good enough for listing in a resume. You need to get the interview before this is a real issue anyway. Once at the interview discuss the 99% of what you did and if they ask questions about the other 1% explain that it is covered by NDA. When push comes to shove, you need to get a job and NDAs can't restrict you from getting a job. NDAs have proven to be pretty worthless in court, you don't have an option but to sign thier terms, so it is not really a valid contract and what are they going to do anyway, how will they find out what has been discussed??? You need a job, make some effort to protect thier IP, but don't go overboard, if you're looking for work they didn't take care of you.
Going to smaller geometries is a standard tactic, so this is surprising but the more supprising that they intend to skip 0.13um which is still leading edge, .09um is still pretty risky and expensive. 0.13um would have cut the die size in half, while .09 reduces by 75% which is better but the reliability of .09 and the extra effort to go to the latest process when you need 20 million parts/year this sounds like a major risk that shouldn't be allowed to limit the move of the PS2 marketing push. I find it somewhat strange that "Cell" is getting so much press and interest, nobody has built a chip at .065um yet and this may take years if they can fit 8 processors at 65nm they should be prototyping 4-6 processors at .09 or 2-4 at .13. The cell seems to be more of a marketing ploy rather that real technology or atleast that all thats getting out. Does a game system need 1 trillion ops/sec???? for game play? A workstation with this capability would make a lot more money, your own nuclear resarch on PS3????
What are we talking about the 88K for? it has been obselete for a long time.
If you always repalce @ with at then the change to the spambots is minimal and they get the address anyway. Many websites only display the beginging of the mail address and registered users must request the full address or use a mail entry screen to forward the email to the user without devulging the email at all and giving them privacy until they want to respond to you (your email is entered and provide as the replyto address.
Skip the $9/hr or even $25/hr you should set milestones and get a lump sum, plus some sort of starting amount to make sure that they are serious. Lump sums are easier for the company and they won't get supprizes if they expect to pay $5k for feature X it costs $5K not 1000 hrs * $9/hr because you ran into problems. This is somewhat risky but as you are a student any money coming in is good. Estimate your time add 30-100% and set that as the lump sum. If you come in under time you make money, if you go over you'll know better for next time. But hourly is a bad move for both you and the company they don't know how much each fetaure will cost and thus become hesitant and worried that you won't concentrate or try and rip them off by overcharging hrs. You know how much you're getting so you can plan purchases and school expenses.
OK, flash based parts CF, SM, MMC, SD, USB Key, or whatever do have a finite life this is true, but the life is much longer than any reasonable use. Old parts when FLASH was a new technology had lives of 1000 cycles, and yes this is somewhat limiting. But todays FLASH is 10,000 to 100,000 cycles most flash storage controlers (for whatever format) move data arround so the "wear" on the "drive" is evenly spread across the blocks (sectors). So if you have a 64MB card lets say 32MB for software and 32MB for email/data storage and you get 32MB/day of email then the card will last 10,000 days worst case. 10,000/365 days/year = 27.4 years technology will have progressed well beyond this in this time so the machine will become useless well before the FLASH. Even if you are REAL popular and get 320 MB of mail a day thats still 2.7 years which given the price of flash and a heavy useage pattern is a reasonable price. The FLASH manufatures are guarenteeing 10,000 cycles, this does not mean that 10,001 cycles will be a failure, 10,000 is a minimum so it will probably last atleast 30% more. Even at 10,000 cycles the flash starts to fail, much like a hard disks sectors going bad and they do faster than 10,000 cycles, so some of the blocks will fail at some point after 10,000 cycles and if the controller works correctly it will pull that sector out of the rotation so the storage size will slowly decrease over time so it will have an effective size of 63MB then 62MB sometime after the 10,000 cycles. So I don't really see an issue. Some FLASH parts may fail sooner, but so may any technology and I would trust FLASH more than a HDD or RAM DISK (which goes away very quickily if there are any (ANY) power fluctuations.
I understand that BeOS is well done and some say that it advances the state-of-the-art is OS design and usability and its great that it has been open sourced to allow code and apps to the public. That said, why would anyone want to start using an effectively end of life OS, is there that much that can be done with the OS? I see all these people putting effort into reviving BeOS or AmigaOS or C64 OS's with TCP/IP and ethernet is this at all useful. If the best features of BeOS live on in Linux I do see that as a benifit but what gain is there in spending the time and effort in reviving a dead horse?
How about using this same theory for my salary.
I want to get paid 80K = 80*1024 = 81920, not a measily 80,000.
I think everyone could use a 2.4% pay increase!!!!
Well lets see, ATX is getting replaced by BTX, so if I remeber correctly from Kindergarten the next new technology will be CTX, DTX and ETX. I just love it when a plan comes together! (A-Team circa 1984).
With devices like the Palm Zire at $99 why do you invent a "low cost" device at $400??? The Zire 71 has colour, integrated camera, lots of memory, memory card (SD/MMC), 320x320 screen what else do people need? Startup hardware companies just don't make sense anymore buy a standard platform or have some far east company (China, Singapore, Taiwain, Malayasia ....) build a standard or copy a standard, write some custom software for you're app and you are done. These guys had some blue sky idea that they could become rich selling to the poor, and then got over confident and suffered from the old standard featue creap and instead of getting rich they will be looking for a new job. They were supposed to be going low cost, but they have obviously failed. There are plenty of $400 devices on the market already I think there are PocketPC devices below $300 what is missing is the India specific stuff, and thats what they should be concentating on!!!
Everyone seems to be commenting on how relaible old HP calcs were. The real story is that a calcuclator even a graphing one requires a 32bit 75MHz processor. This blows my mind why does a calculator need a 75MHz processor. ARM9 is way overkill they should have, assuming that they really wanted to use an ARM stick with the ARM7 which is fine for basic computation it just misses the support for caches and longer pipelines. The ARM7 is smaller (smaller die lower cost), and lower power (longer battery life). Hardware design seems to be more about bragging rights that producing a good product. The SW guys all want to use C++ so they don't have to understand the processor, C++ is ussually 20-30% slower than C and 100-400% slower than assembly and assembly is what a calculator's code should be written in.
Too Much Free Time
Spec's don't list PCI or AGP slot so doesn't look like upgrading is an option. Have you tried changing settings??? Often there are some compatability controls that can make things better. The graphics processor is realatively recent so it should be decent but not great at games, often more memory is more of a issue try increasing ram, it makes everything faster and so even if it doesn't improve game play the machine will be more fun to use.
We've all seen the marketing about how wired we'll be in the future, downloading video to watch our favorite TV show at the beach etc... . But I've never seen any predictions how much this is going cost the end user. The cell carriers are fighting for market share and not making too much now, deploying 3G is going to cost a LOT of money (huge piles). I think that they expect the usage will go up, but I'm paying something like $40 for 600 minutes (weekdays, free nights and weekends yada yada yada). Seems to me that if rates stay the same and my usage goes up by a factor of 2x or 3x then the bill is going to go up 2x, 3x or worse. Thats 600 minutes = 10hrs month, a phone call from a good friend can easily take an hour, so 10hrs/month can get used up pretty fast. Surfing the WWW can waste hours and hours (didn't get to bed till 3:20am because I had an idea that I wanted to research and lost track of time, following all the links on Google looking for the right info).
I have a suspision that 3G is going to be more than 2/2.5G cellular and its only really usefull if its always avialable so I would want to use a lot more minutes but I'm not that interested in signing up for a plan thats >$40, maybe a little more but I'd need a lot more than 600 minutes. I see 3G getting quite a few "early adopters" then quickly declining as people economize.
Good thing all these techies are saving you from "reading the F****** manual" I'll send you a bill for the time wasted reading your post.