Slightly offtopic (why the Ars link?)
on
Synthetic Vision
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· Score: 1
Mountains out of molehills, perhaps, but why was Ars Technica submitted as the source of the story, when it clearly came from Wired? Put another way, why not submit Google News as the source? Doc Searles' blog? Or some other random news service?
As someone who writes for a living, it's nice to be recognized as the source of the story, rather than the yahoo who figured out how to link to a story and attach some comments to it (no offense, Slashdot). Ars is a fine website in its own right, but should only be credited when it writes something of value to the community.
Put another way, that's why you comment your code, right? To point to it and say "I wrote that"?
Since the discussion will probably wander this way anyway, I thought I'd broach the subject...
Personally, I can't see where there's too much need for overclocking a CPU any more. Specifically, I think that the other components within a PC (memory, FSB, graphics CPU speed, graphics memory interface) have become as much or more important to overall PC performance as the CPU.
Now I understand the desire to overclock (wanting to save money, the engineering challenge of it all, trying to eke out more performance, pure geekiness) but it just doesn't seem to make sense. Why spend the money on a watercooling system when the next processor step up costs about the same amount of money?
(And yes, I have overclocked before...;) )
Personally, I'd rather undeclock my PC in most cases where I don't need 3 GHz for office apps. In the case where I'm running a 3D game, I'd rather someone come up with a way to add more texturing units to my graphics card than punch up my CPU with a few clock cycles.
Kep in mind that Nvidia's design arguments in creating GPUs were to relegate functions like physics and AI to the CPU, while reserving graphics-related functions for itself. And how many apps (games) have you seen recently where you can say, "Damn, that was some good AI?".
It seems reasonable that, Oracle already having garnered the attention the press for its "Unbreakable" slogan, that Microsoft try it, too. (I'll let you argue amongst yourselves whether this is in keeping with Microsoft's traditional business practices.)
Precendent's been set. But the correct response from the geek public has been to attempt to poke holes in an(y) absolutist claim, as is its obligation.
...given they fired their first chief executive and replaced him with the vp of marketing, Greg Ballard, who happened to run 3Dfx, bought card maker STB (oops!) and then sold off the company's assets to Nvidia, which then produced the underwhelming GeForceFX.
I'm not so naive to say that we're not ever going to need fuel cells, but there seems to be a point under the current paradigm where all-day computing will be a minimum, and battery life, like basic CPU processing power, will be assumed. Will we need fuel cells at that point?
I also understand that the market tends to use devices to and beyond their apparent potential (case in point: hard drives, which at one point were assumed to have WAY too much capacity, but now are used to store digital video).
I guess the question needs to be asked: if fuel cells become prevalent, to what uses will we put them?
I was more concerned with the manner in which the Guardian was doing its reporting. I know that on the Internet it's common to report "news" as "Reuters said this", but I always thought that a major U.K. publication would do a little more than play Google News, in print.
I confess I don't understand the business model here. It seems like Honest Thief is offering to pay record companies from the proceeds from an arguably untested business model, which would generate an unknown amount of money that would be divided among an unknown number of people in an unknown number of ways.
It seems to make more sense to offer the CPU cycles directly to sound production studios for post-production audio, to transform tomorrow's raspy-voiced bimbo into the sultry songbird that studios want and crave.
Just the 2003 version of an ad-driven "free" ISP service, I'm afraid.
That's the question. If you read the article, there's going to be four PCI Express x1 slots.
OK...so does that mean those are going to take the place of the PCI slots that will normally be found within a motherboard? PCI will be supported--but how many slots will we have to work with?
It's going to be really interesting, I think, to see what this does for the holiday selling season. Since it's out there now that Grantsdale is going to have such a dramatic effect on PC architecture, what is this going to do for sales of graphics cards? Of sound cards?
It looks like PCI will be supported in some way, but it's almost up to a motherboard manufacturer to come forward and say, "OK, we're only going to support one PCI slot, so figure out what you want to keep, now."
My guess is that Nvidia's NV35 will be released later this year (fall?) on AGP8X, but that it will REALLY run well on PCI Express. So--wait, or buy? An old question, but with far more significance.
That was my take on it too--it's dead. Geez--talk about frittering away a brand name. At least when Pets.com went under, they were able to sell the sock puppet.
What is the status of the Dream Park movie?
on
Ask Larry Niven
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I too consider the Dream Park books to be some of my favorites, most notably because they explore the interesection of reality and fantasy in yet another new way.
My question is this: in one of the books, you note that Dream Park has never quite gotten over the hump and been picked up by Hollywood. Can you update us if there's been any progress made?
In addition, would you say that the premise of Dream Park (where actors act out a virtual game on what is essentially a sound stage) has been made irrelevant by scifi "advances" like the Star Trek holodeck and by Jurassic Park? My analogy is the sort of disdain that people had for DareDevil whenn it first came out: that his special power was that he could see--something that had essentially been "done" on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Well, hauling out the report from Microprocessor Forum it looks like:
The core, as defined, contains 64 Kbytes of instruction cache, 32 Kbytes of data cache, and 512 Kbytes of 8-way set associative level 2 cache. Unlike the Power4, the core does not apparently contain an onboard cache controller to enable the use of off-chip L3 cache.
The front-side bus electrically runs at 450-MHz, double-clocked to an effective rate of 900-MHz, generating a peak bandwidth of 7.2 Gbytes or 6.4 Gbytes/s of useable bandwidth after transaction overhead is taken into account, Sandon said. Five instructions can be issued and acted upon at any one time, while a total of 200 instructions can be "in flight" at any time, taking into account instructions that are stored in queues.
Performance-wise, IBM believes the chip can record a benchmark of 932 on SPECint 2000 and a score of 1051 on SPECfp2000, both at 1.8-GHz. Peak SIMD GFLOPs should be about 14.4, Sandon said. Using Dhrystone MIPS, the chip should output a score of 5,220. or 2.9 DMIPS/MHz/. IBM expects the chip should test 18 million RC5 keys per second.
If you read the press release, it says that copy-protection companies like Macrovision are interested. Frankly, I'm not sure how this would work--there doesn't seem to be any benefit to the user being able to write something to the disc.
On the other hand, this might be a nice way of transporting files from one system to another. If Nintendo or Sony came out with support for this format, you could place your user files on the disc itself and not have to worry about memory cards. (Probably need a DVD version, though).
"a closed system, in which each piece of knowledge in the world is identified with a particular owner, and that owner has a right to resist its copying, modification, and redistribution".
and
"But publishers could use Palladium's controls to unilaterally limit use of their materials, such as by restricting professors to a read-only view of the article, from which they could not "cut and paste" the text."
then come exam time all the poor CompSci majors may actually be forced to suffer through the same hell that all of us gentle poets experienced in Science 085...
MWAHAHAHAHA!
(Where "research", of course, means "plagiarizing from multiple sources, not just one". Interestingly, that would mean you would need to type in a quote in a research paper but outright copying of pages would even more of a PITA.)
At ExtremeTech, they've added a list of programs that use the Macrovision software. Autodesk and Borland appear to be the largest. Then there's a whole bunch more that use the SafeDisc technology.
Re:Hey! Here's some more Cringely info!
on
The Faded Sun
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· Score: 1
Well, if you are a lawyer, shouldn't the code actually spell out the word? I'd argue that one in court:)
Hey! Here's some more Cringely info!
on
The Faded Sun
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Since you guys have managed to post every column Cringely has ever written, I thought I'd include a link to the main PBS Cringely home page! And Bob's own home page! Wow, more Cringley stuff you may have never seen!
(Mods: you know you really can't moderate this as "Offtopic", "Flamebait" or a "Troll". If you're going to mod this down, use "Unfunny," and damn you all to hell.)
"Existing law provides that 8 hours of labor constitutes a day's work. Under existing law, any work in excess of 8 hours in one workday and any work in excess of 40 hours in any one workweek and the first 8 hours worked on the 7th day of work in any one workweek is required to be compensated at the rate of no less than 11/2 times the regular rate of pay for an employee."
Read the link. That's "11/2" overtime pay, or 5.5X normal pay. Not bad!
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who writes for a living, it's nice to be recognized as the source of the story, rather than the yahoo who figured out how to link to a story and attach some comments to it (no offense, Slashdot). Ars is a fine website in its own right, but should only be credited when it writes something of value to the community.
Put another way, that's why you comment your code, right? To point to it and say "I wrote that"?
I'll second the motion. Great flick.
Since the discussion will probably wander this way anyway, I thought I'd broach the subject...
;) )
Personally, I can't see where there's too much need for overclocking a CPU any more. Specifically, I think that the other components within a PC (memory, FSB, graphics CPU speed, graphics memory interface) have become as much or more important to overall PC performance as the CPU.
Now I understand the desire to overclock (wanting to save money, the engineering challenge of it all, trying to eke out more performance, pure geekiness) but it just doesn't seem to make sense. Why spend the money on a watercooling system when the next processor step up costs about the same amount of money?
(And yes, I have overclocked before...
Personally, I'd rather undeclock my PC in most cases where I don't need 3 GHz for office apps. In the case where I'm running a 3D game, I'd rather someone come up with a way to add more texturing units to my graphics card than punch up my CPU with a few clock cycles.
Kep in mind that Nvidia's design arguments in creating GPUs were to relegate functions like physics and AI to the CPU, while reserving graphics-related functions for itself. And how many apps (games) have you seen recently where you can say, "Damn, that was some good AI?".
Stargate was...interesting, too. Apparently it was "WTF Night" on SciFi.
It seems reasonable that, Oracle already having garnered the attention the press for its "Unbreakable" slogan, that Microsoft try it, too. (I'll let you argue amongst yourselves whether this is in keeping with Microsoft's traditional business practices.)
Precendent's been set. But the correct response from the geek public has been to attempt to poke holes in an(y) absolutist claim, as is its obligation.
So that's my argument, anyway.
I'm not so naive to say that we're not ever going to need fuel cells, but there seems to be a point under the current paradigm where all-day computing will be a minimum, and battery life, like basic CPU processing power, will be assumed. Will we need fuel cells at that point?
I also understand that the market tends to use devices to and beyond their apparent potential (case in point: hard drives, which at one point were assumed to have WAY too much capacity, but now are used to store digital video).
I guess the question needs to be asked: if fuel cells become prevalent, to what uses will we put them?
I was more concerned with the manner in which the Guardian was doing its reporting. I know that on the Internet it's common to report "news" as "Reuters said this", but I always thought that a major U.K. publication would do a little more than play Google News, in print.
I confess I don't understand the business model here. It seems like Honest Thief is offering to pay record companies from the proceeds from an arguably untested business model, which would generate an unknown amount of money that would be divided among an unknown number of people in an unknown number of ways.
It seems to make more sense to offer the CPU cycles directly to sound production studios for post-production audio, to transform tomorrow's raspy-voiced bimbo into the sultry songbird that studios want and crave.
Just the 2003 version of an ad-driven "free" ISP service, I'm afraid.
OK...so does that mean those are going to take the place of the PCI slots that will normally be found within a motherboard? PCI will be supported--but how many slots will we have to work with?
It's going to be really interesting, I think, to see what this does for the holiday selling season. Since it's out there now that Grantsdale is going to have such a dramatic effect on PC architecture, what is this going to do for sales of graphics cards? Of sound cards?
It looks like PCI will be supported in some way, but it's almost up to a motherboard manufacturer to come forward and say, "OK, we're only going to support one PCI slot, so figure out what you want to keep, now."
My guess is that Nvidia's NV35 will be released later this year (fall?) on AGP8X, but that it will REALLY run well on PCI Express. So--wait, or buy? An old question, but with far more significance.
That was my take on it too--it's dead. Geez--talk about frittering away a brand name. At least when Pets.com went under, they were able to sell the sock puppet.
I too consider the Dream Park books to be some of my favorites, most notably because they explore the interesection of reality and fantasy in yet another new way.
My question is this: in one of the books, you note that Dream Park has never quite gotten over the hump and been picked up by Hollywood. Can you update us if there's been any progress made?
In addition, would you say that the premise of Dream Park (where actors act out a virtual game on what is essentially a sound stage) has been made irrelevant by scifi "advances" like the Star Trek holodeck and by Jurassic Park? My analogy is the sort of disdain that people had for DareDevil whenn it first came out: that his special power was that he could see--something that had essentially been "done" on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
If you read the press release, it says that copy-protection companies like Macrovision are interested. Frankly, I'm not sure how this would work--there doesn't seem to be any benefit to the user being able to write something to the disc.
On the other hand, this might be a nice way of transporting files from one system to another. If Nintendo or Sony came out with support for this format, you could place your user files on the disc itself and not have to worry about memory cards. (Probably need a DVD version, though).
Daily wage: $80
Pro diem: $20/day
Blowjob from strung-out 16-year-old who thinks you're the most exciting thing EVAR in her one-horse town: Priceless.
and
then come exam time all the poor CompSci majors may actually be forced to suffer through the same hell that all of us gentle poets experienced in Science 085...MWAHAHAHAHA!
(Where "research", of course, means "plagiarizing from multiple sources, not just one". Interestingly, that would mean you would need to type in a quote in a research paper but outright copying of pages would even more of a PITA.)
At ExtremeTech, they've added a list of programs that use the Macrovision software. Autodesk and Borland appear to be the largest. Then there's a whole bunch more that use the SafeDisc technology.
Damn! I forgot "Redundant"!
Well, if you are a lawyer, shouldn't the code actually spell out the word? I'd argue that one in court :)
(Mods: you know you really can't moderate this as "Offtopic", "Flamebait" or a "Troll". If you're going to mod this down, use "Unfunny," and damn you all to hell.)
Read the link. That's "11/2" overtime pay, or 5.5X normal pay. Not bad!
As long as one of those "consumers" is Carson Daly...
Hell, we've known this in California for years. The only thing slowing drivers here is traffic.
"So you want me to hack the Internet." -- from the upcoming movie The Core
Huh? Huh? You know I'm right...