Forgive me if I use the term 'engineered obsolescence' a bit more broadly than I should have. I don't mean component failure specifically, and certainly not with respect to warranty duration.
Do you know if this $100 laptop is upgradable? I'm sure that as the lustful fires of consumerism awaken in these nations' loins, they'll want harder, better, faster, stronger laptops that these corporations will be all too happy to *sell* them, as the OLPC simply doesn't meet the gluttonous standards of a modern consumer. It looks to me kind of like what a drug dealer might do with 'free samples'.
I can't believe I am admonishing an Anonymous Coward for reading the summary and the article but not the first post and its thread...
But here goes: shame on you, and the poster above you too!
"Novel" here means simply new or unique, a fresh way of doing things, a word with very positive connotations. Small wonder that Novell coopted the word by adding an extra "l". It doesn't seem extremely novel to me, as I've already said - it seems like a fancier version of Tandy's DeskMate shell. But then I haven't tried it out myself yet.
You can't expect any commitment from a coward like him.
Personally I think the whole $100 laptop thing is a huge marketing gimmick to prime the populations of third-world countries for consumerism (Linux aside, $100 cost aside, it still falls victim to engineered obsolescence). You and I can do a lot more by donating to charities or 'adopting' a child through a group like World Vision.
I used to work for an electronics recycling company, whose business was increasing partially because of SB20 and SB50 and partially because a lot of companies were no longer being allowed to ship their junk computers (many components of which are toxic waste) to third-world countries to be disposed of or scrapped, as opposed to properly recycled stateside, for a fee. We got all kinds of junk, from Dreamworks to Viewsonic, but I couldn't handle the third-world pay anymore.
I think the "OLPC" is just a first wave in a new corporate strategy to "legitimately" dump difficult-to-dispose-of old hardware and then sell new hardware in developing countries.
Transistor counts for server CPUs are typically inflated by the massive onboard cache (level 2 and sometimes level 3) these chips have. I believe with POWER chips that the L3 cache is off-die but on the socket with the cores, so I wouldn't be surprised if POWER6's transistor count is being artificially inflated.
I do understand that AMD approaches the multi-core issue and SMP in general a bit more elegantly than Intel, and that this has a lot to do with HyperTransport, but Intel just beat them at their own game and they will have a lot of work to do in the *NEAR* future to get back to where they've been since the launch of the Athlon processor (first to 1GHz, first to seamless 64-bit x86 desktop among their most shining achievements).
AMD wasn't very much about low-cost for the last couple of years - FX and X2 chips were historically overpriced until Core 2 hit the scene - there was a 40%-60% price drop on the X2 dual-core chips at about that time if you'll recall. That means two things to me: insane profit margin and no need to compete with the floundering NetBurst.
CPU performance matters tremendously. Application performance disk-bound? Don't make me laugh. My system has 2GB of system RAM, as I hope today's Vista-ready machines do - when I load a large program (like a game) that I've already loaded since my computer has been turned on, it doesn't even read the HDD, nor does it jitter when loading new areas in games like Oblivion. I turned off my page file a long time ago. User input bound? Maybe if you're writing INPUT N$ statements in BASIC. Don't forget that Vista is around the corner for most of the world, no matter how bad it is.
DDR2 didn't help or hurt AM2 very much so I don't think memory subsystem bandwidth (or latency) is your answer either. Don't forget that media encoding, scientific applications, CAD, and gaming are what sells the high-margin computers that both Intel and AMD care a great deal about, and what drives technology in general (they can't sell if it they can't market it). AMD still has a relative deathgrip on the 8-way server market but its hold on 2- and 4-way servers that it rightfully wrested from Intel's grasp is rapidly slipping away due to Woodcrest and Kentsfield's rather nice performance per watt.
HTX slots might be an interesting toy for the future, and perhaps wonderfully applicable to server/render farms, but I don't see a product or a killer app yet.
You're 100% correct that we're fairly strapped for cash because of Iraq, as Bush has spent the combined budget for a full-fledged moon colony and a manned Mars expedition (which he promised in what, 2001? 2002?) in Iraq, with far less impressive results, but do you really think we've been hunting Osama bin Laden for even the last three or four years? Give me a break. Some people believe he may have even died of natural causes in 2002 but that sounds a bit far-fetched.
Just our luck that Bush's dad "had it out" with the one secular Arab nation in the Middle East, with the most advanced womens' rights, that didn't directly support al Qaeda, the one that didn't have any nuclear proliferation capabilities, as opposed to Pakistan, India, Iran, and North Korea, and as I imagine, many more in the future. Boomers are going to have childhood flashbacks of Bert the Turtle ducking and covering for the foreseeable future.
It's also worth noting that North Korea has one of the largest armies in the world (bigger than the People's Republic of China if you count reserves!), and if they do indeed possess chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, this would be very different from invading a sandbox that couldn't even fight off Iran (with our help).
I always read at -1, but never mind...
Considering that IBM has been supporting Linux since 1998 (around when I picked up my Red Hat 5 discs) and has invested billions of dollars into open-source software, and that current POWER architecture-based systems are available with enterprise virtualisation built around a Linux kernel, signs point to...yes. IBM even has a midrange line of servers that are only available with Linux installed.
That's all right, I still find myself stumped by analog processors, like the valve body in a GM 700R automatic transmission. *shudder*
Anyway, here goes:
Basically they take a tiny wafer-thin piece of silicon, use chemical to scrape out millions of little transistor shapes onto its surface, and strap a buckin' bronco of a clock crystal on it that shakes it like a salt shaker, or like jello jigglers on free-based cocaine.
Thusly, the outrageous oscillating action of Mr. crystal causes the tiny transistorized citizens to go into a tizzy, but they're all right because they're not hollow and fragile like vacuum tubes, so they get all busy and start swinging their logic gates open and shut kind of like an electron square dance.
The speed that the crystal is eventually set at is the maximum speed at which the transistors can go about their daily lives, such as munching on electrons and crapping them out, organising meetings, forming PTA (parent-transistor association) clubs, and dipping into the cache without generally spontaneously combusting or reverting back to silicon amoebas. Each time the crystal wiggles its booty constitutes one clock cycle, and the number of operations per cycle varies based on the processor and the types of instructions the poor transistors must labor over.
Clock speed has been historically limited by various things, including level 2 cache memory timings (remember this stuff has been running at CPU speed for about 5 years now!), motherboard design, pipeline depth, heat dissipation, ALU and/or FPU limitations, or even the leakage the P4 was subject to at 4GHz+ clockspeeds. Right now I believe it's the fault of lazy hardware engineers at Intel and even AMD. Dual-core and quad-core is an easy out for expensive, fast-sounding hardware just like it is for the video card market right now, and the burden of performance improvement has been shifted to software engineers (reducing bloat, multithreading applications, both of which can only go so far). IBM is hopefully going to prove this with a higher-clocked POWER chip or two that maintains the efficiency they have a reputation for, although we may never see the return of single-core CPUs for performance systems.
I gave myself a headache trying to read your table, I hope you don't mind. I also apparently missed the 3GHz Opteron launch in '06...but things still don't look good for AMD.
Hexekonta seems to be the way 60 was written in Greek of biblical times, at least that's how I learned it and how it shows up in my Greek texts of the new testament.
For an extra bit of trivia, the number of the Beast is abbreviated in my Greek 'Textus Receptus' as the three letters Chi Xi Sigma, or for short.
You say that like it's automatically a bad thing. Being *properly* educated about something like copyright law could motivate students to actually do something about it.
The agency in question probably had their 'independent consultant' ask focus groups composed of educators questions from the perspective of "What can we do to make educating about copyright law easier?" or "How can we integrate this into a classroom environment?" and realised they didn't have a mascot like the anti-drugs/smoking lobbies or PETA have available for curricular brainwashing purposes. It's a good thing they stopped there or poor Canada might have something truly heinous to deal with.
What's wrong with an independent consultant that was hired by a licensing agency asking educators questions specifically about copyright education? The alternative seems downright illogical to me.
You don't really think that Access Copyright would waste their time asking educators what they needed in the classroom in general terms, do you? That's the government's job to find out. The licensing company involved with the focus groups and other committees that gave birth to Captain Copyright was interested solely in how to provide educators with something that they could easily use to educate schoolchildren about copyright law. I can't imagine any of the questions they asked the educators had anything to do with classroom size, text books, or new equipment, except in the context of copyright education.
I bet a hundred bucks that deep-vein thrombosis incidence mortality rates jump at least 500% in the unemployed 16 to 24-year-old demographic in the next month.
You might be surprised. Teachers or educators, however you'll have it, face the issue of copyrights, royalties, and public performance caveats all the time. If you don't cough up to the copyright owner beforehand, public performance of copyrighted works can potentially cause a bundle of trouble. A librarian I know told me her branch pays $400/year to be able to show Disney films at the library. I'm sure that some of them would enjoy having a dedicated curriculum resource to integrate with Social Studies or what-have-you-these-days.
I durst not defend Captain Copyright, of course. He's even lamer than anti-drug or anti-smoking mascots (remember the South Park episode "Butt Out"?), which on the whole don't seem to be particularly effective at informing or even brainwashing young minds.
You must be new here! You've posted to the wrong article.
Re:It's compatible with the other VMWare products!
on
VMware Fusion goes Beta
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
This is exactly why I think the "mindshare" comment is off-base, a completely misused cliche if there ever was one. VMWare is a respectable product for other platforms that's been around for quite a while, not exactly IBM but still a very fancy tool in the general virtualisation market. This is more like a big fancy MMORPG that was formerly PC-only migrating to the Apple Macintosh platform. The Mac users are happy about the game but overjoyed about being able to play it with a much larger market, the PC users, as well.
I'm looking forward to lower-level video hardware access myself. Windows crashing back to a MacOS X desktop when it blue-screens rather than restarting my entire PC is a personal wet dream of mine.
Something Awful has typically defended against legal threats by laughing in their antagonists' faces and posting their pathetic e-mails in the Legal Threats section of the website for the whole world to see. I can't seem to recall any incident where Mr. Kyanka, at least in relation to Something Awful LLC, was sued or went to court for libel, slander, or copyright violations. I'm sure Lowtax would take the parody defense if his hand was forced, and they almost always link to the home page of an ALoD webpage, in any case.
I'm not worried. You should be, though. Leonard J. Crabs is always watching, watching and waiting....
Re:Good case why not to trust "community" services
on
ORDB.org Going Offline
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· Score: 0
They did provide the service free of charge for over five years if I'm not mistaken.
Still, you have a point. The same thing happens with other community-based products. An excellent example, although it might seem a bit puerile, can be found in pretty much every video game mod forum. There is either drama, or real life, or a new game in the series comes out, and *poof*, the mod, if it even reached a downloadable version, goes out the window and people are not even given the opportunity to "take up the mantle" as the first post said.
I have to suspend my disbelief a little bit to believe that nobody on the Great Intertron was willing to do this and at least occasionally maintain ORDB as a legacy service. I do understand, of course, the necessity of promptness in removing fixed mail servers from the list, although that wasn't really very prompt in practice, was it?
I happened to run into an accidental open relay mail server during an onsite consultation (I ended up completely restructuring their deployment and getting ripped off). Most of the MILLIONS of e-mails were coming from China and/or Taiwan, and this was only a few months ago. Are the ORDB people sure they're not going to bring back the open relay problem by shutting down their admittedly useful services?
While the cancer of spam may have metastasized to other parts of the Internet, it doesn't mean it can't grow back in the places these guys are abandoning. As I understand it, there are other blacklists but nothing quite like the ORDB.
17% of the population voted Bush into office in 2000, 18% in 2004.
This is taking into account total U.S. population, eligible voter turnout, and popular vote results.
So think of it this way: there is less than a 20% chance that a person you meet walking down the street actually cast a ballot for our current president.
Platt College, with three locations in Southern California and a comprehensive curriculum focused on game content creation and portfolio work. One of the only colleges with a full motion capture studio.
Cogswell Polytechnic College, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, lots of big names and a friendly culture. Been around since 1887. I went there, in fact.
Oh, wait, you guys meant slacker colleges, not actual college for learning how to make actual games.
In South Korea, even old people know how to program games. No wonder we're falling behind.
Slashdot Mirror
Forgive me if I use the term 'engineered obsolescence' a bit more broadly than I should have. I don't mean component failure specifically, and certainly not with respect to warranty duration.
Do you know if this $100 laptop is upgradable? I'm sure that as the lustful fires of consumerism awaken in these nations' loins, they'll want harder, better, faster, stronger laptops that these corporations will be all too happy to *sell* them, as the OLPC simply doesn't meet the gluttonous standards of a modern consumer. It looks to me kind of like what a drug dealer might do with 'free samples'.
I can't believe I am admonishing an Anonymous Coward for reading the summary and the article but not the first post and its thread...
But here goes: shame on you, and the poster above you too!
"Novel" here means simply new or unique, a fresh way of doing things, a word with very positive connotations. Small wonder that Novell coopted the word by adding an extra "l". It doesn't seem extremely novel to me, as I've already said - it seems like a fancier version of Tandy's DeskMate shell. But then I haven't tried it out myself yet.
You can't expect any commitment from a coward like him.
Personally I think the whole $100 laptop thing is a huge marketing gimmick to prime the populations of third-world countries for consumerism (Linux aside, $100 cost aside, it still falls victim to engineered obsolescence). You and I can do a lot more by donating to charities or 'adopting' a child through a group like World Vision.
I used to work for an electronics recycling company, whose business was increasing partially because of SB20 and SB50 and partially because a lot of companies were no longer being allowed to ship their junk computers (many components of which are toxic waste) to third-world countries to be disposed of or scrapped, as opposed to properly recycled stateside, for a fee. We got all kinds of junk, from Dreamworks to Viewsonic, but I couldn't handle the third-world pay anymore.
I think the "OLPC" is just a first wave in a new corporate strategy to "legitimately" dump difficult-to-dispose-of old hardware and then sell new hardware in developing countries.
This would have been even funnier in 1998 or earlier, when b) wasn't even an operating system, but a hacked-in DOS shell.
I read this story on CNN first as well, and my first thought at seeing the headline was nightmares about a Novell operating system.
In any event, it doesn't really sound particularly novel to me.
Transistor counts for server CPUs are typically inflated by the massive onboard cache (level 2 and sometimes level 3) these chips have. I believe with POWER chips that the L3 cache is off-die but on the socket with the cores, so I wouldn't be surprised if POWER6's transistor count is being artificially inflated.
I do understand that AMD approaches the multi-core issue and SMP in general a bit more elegantly than Intel, and that this has a lot to do with HyperTransport, but Intel just beat them at their own game and they will have a lot of work to do in the *NEAR* future to get back to where they've been since the launch of the Athlon processor (first to 1GHz, first to seamless 64-bit x86 desktop among their most shining achievements).
AMD wasn't very much about low-cost for the last couple of years - FX and X2 chips were historically overpriced until Core 2 hit the scene - there was a 40%-60% price drop on the X2 dual-core chips at about that time if you'll recall. That means two things to me: insane profit margin and no need to compete with the floundering NetBurst.
CPU performance matters tremendously. Application performance disk-bound? Don't make me laugh. My system has 2GB of system RAM, as I hope today's Vista-ready machines do - when I load a large program (like a game) that I've already loaded since my computer has been turned on, it doesn't even read the HDD, nor does it jitter when loading new areas in games like Oblivion. I turned off my page file a long time ago. User input bound? Maybe if you're writing INPUT N$ statements in BASIC. Don't forget that Vista is around the corner for most of the world, no matter how bad it is.
DDR2 didn't help or hurt AM2 very much so I don't think memory subsystem bandwidth (or latency) is your answer either. Don't forget that media encoding, scientific applications, CAD, and gaming are what sells the high-margin computers that both Intel and AMD care a great deal about, and what drives technology in general (they can't sell if it they can't market it). AMD still has a relative deathgrip on the 8-way server market but its hold on 2- and 4-way servers that it rightfully wrested from Intel's grasp is rapidly slipping away due to Woodcrest and Kentsfield's rather nice performance per watt.
HTX slots might be an interesting toy for the future, and perhaps wonderfully applicable to server/render farms, but I don't see a product or a killer app yet.
You're 100% correct that we're fairly strapped for cash because of Iraq, as Bush has spent the combined budget for a full-fledged moon colony and a manned Mars expedition (which he promised in what, 2001? 2002?) in Iraq, with far less impressive results, but do you really think we've been hunting Osama bin Laden for even the last three or four years? Give me a break. Some people believe he may have even died of natural causes in 2002 but that sounds a bit far-fetched.
Just our luck that Bush's dad "had it out" with the one secular Arab nation in the Middle East, with the most advanced womens' rights, that didn't directly support al Qaeda, the one that didn't have any nuclear proliferation capabilities, as opposed to Pakistan, India, Iran, and North Korea, and as I imagine, many more in the future. Boomers are going to have childhood flashbacks of Bert the Turtle ducking and covering for the foreseeable future.
It's also worth noting that North Korea has one of the largest armies in the world (bigger than the People's Republic of China if you count reserves!), and if they do indeed possess chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, this would be very different from invading a sandbox that couldn't even fight off Iran (with our help).
I always read at -1, but never mind... Considering that IBM has been supporting Linux since 1998 (around when I picked up my Red Hat 5 discs) and has invested billions of dollars into open-source software, and that current POWER architecture-based systems are available with enterprise virtualisation built around a Linux kernel, signs point to...yes. IBM even has a midrange line of servers that are only available with Linux installed.
That's all right, I still find myself stumped by analog processors, like the valve body in a GM 700R automatic transmission. *shudder*
Anyway, here goes:
Basically they take a tiny wafer-thin piece of silicon, use chemical to scrape out millions of little transistor shapes onto its surface, and strap a buckin' bronco of a clock crystal on it that shakes it like a salt shaker, or like jello jigglers on free-based cocaine.
Thusly, the outrageous oscillating action of Mr. crystal causes the tiny transistorized citizens to go into a tizzy, but they're all right because they're not hollow and fragile like vacuum tubes, so they get all busy and start swinging their logic gates open and shut kind of like an electron square dance.
The speed that the crystal is eventually set at is the maximum speed at which the transistors can go about their daily lives, such as munching on electrons and crapping them out, organising meetings, forming PTA (parent-transistor association) clubs, and dipping into the cache without generally spontaneously combusting or reverting back to silicon amoebas. Each time the crystal wiggles its booty constitutes one clock cycle, and the number of operations per cycle varies based on the processor and the types of instructions the poor transistors must labor over.
Clock speed has been historically limited by various things, including level 2 cache memory timings (remember this stuff has been running at CPU speed for about 5 years now!), motherboard design, pipeline depth, heat dissipation, ALU and/or FPU limitations, or even the leakage the P4 was subject to at 4GHz+ clockspeeds. Right now I believe it's the fault of lazy hardware engineers at Intel and even AMD. Dual-core and quad-core is an easy out for expensive, fast-sounding hardware just like it is for the video card market right now, and the burden of performance improvement has been shifted to software engineers (reducing bloat, multithreading applications, both of which can only go so far). IBM is hopefully going to prove this with a higher-clocked POWER chip or two that maintains the efficiency they have a reputation for, although we may never see the return of single-core CPUs for performance systems.
CPU GHz specint2000 specint/Ghz specfp2000 specfp/Ghz
Opteron 3.0 2119 706.3 2365 788.3
Intel P4 3.8 1834 483.4 2091 550.2
Intel Core2 2.66 2848 1070.6 2673 1004.8
IBM Power5 2.1 1747 831.9 3324 1582.8
I gave myself a headache trying to read your table, I hope you don't mind. I also apparently missed the 3GHz Opteron launch in '06...but things still don't look good for AMD.
Hexekonta seems to be the way 60 was written in Greek of biblical times, at least that's how I learned it and how it shows up in my Greek texts of the new testament.
For an extra bit of trivia, the number of the Beast is abbreviated in my Greek 'Textus Receptus' as the three letters Chi Xi Sigma, or for short.
You say that like it's automatically a bad thing. Being *properly* educated about something like copyright law could motivate students to actually do something about it.
The agency in question probably had their 'independent consultant' ask focus groups composed of educators questions from the perspective of "What can we do to make educating about copyright law easier?" or "How can we integrate this into a classroom environment?" and realised they didn't have a mascot like the anti-drugs/smoking lobbies or PETA have available for curricular brainwashing purposes. It's a good thing they stopped there or poor Canada might have something truly heinous to deal with.
What's wrong with an independent consultant that was hired by a licensing agency asking educators questions specifically about copyright education? The alternative seems downright illogical to me.
You don't really think that Access Copyright would waste their time asking educators what they needed in the classroom in general terms, do you? That's the government's job to find out. The licensing company involved with the focus groups and other committees that gave birth to Captain Copyright was interested solely in how to provide educators with something that they could easily use to educate schoolchildren about copyright law. I can't imagine any of the questions they asked the educators had anything to do with classroom size, text books, or new equipment, except in the context of copyright education.
I bet a hundred bucks that deep-vein thrombosis incidence mortality rates jump at least 500% in the unemployed 16 to 24-year-old demographic in the next month.
You might be surprised. Teachers or educators, however you'll have it, face the issue of copyrights, royalties, and public performance caveats all the time. If you don't cough up to the copyright owner beforehand, public performance of copyrighted works can potentially cause a bundle of trouble. A librarian I know told me her branch pays $400/year to be able to show Disney films at the library. I'm sure that some of them would enjoy having a dedicated curriculum resource to integrate with Social Studies or what-have-you-these-days.
I durst not defend Captain Copyright, of course. He's even lamer than anti-drug or anti-smoking mascots (remember the South Park episode "Butt Out"?), which on the whole don't seem to be particularly effective at informing or even brainwashing young minds.
You must be new here! You've posted to the wrong article.
This is exactly why I think the "mindshare" comment is off-base, a completely misused cliche if there ever was one. VMWare is a respectable product for other platforms that's been around for quite a while, not exactly IBM but still a very fancy tool in the general virtualisation market. This is more like a big fancy MMORPG that was formerly PC-only migrating to the Apple Macintosh platform. The Mac users are happy about the game but overjoyed about being able to play it with a much larger market, the PC users, as well.
I'm looking forward to lower-level video hardware access myself. Windows crashing back to a MacOS X desktop when it blue-screens rather than restarting my entire PC is a personal wet dream of mine.
Something Awful has typically defended against legal threats by laughing in their antagonists' faces and posting their pathetic e-mails in the Legal Threats section of the website for the whole world to see. I can't seem to recall any incident where Mr. Kyanka, at least in relation to Something Awful LLC, was sued or went to court for libel, slander, or copyright violations. I'm sure Lowtax would take the parody defense if his hand was forced, and they almost always link to the home page of an ALoD webpage, in any case.
I'm not worried. You should be, though. Leonard J. Crabs is always watching, watching and waiting....
They did provide the service free of charge for over five years if I'm not mistaken.
Still, you have a point. The same thing happens with other community-based products. An excellent example, although it might seem a bit puerile, can be found in pretty much every video game mod forum. There is either drama, or real life, or a new game in the series comes out, and *poof*, the mod, if it even reached a downloadable version, goes out the window and people are not even given the opportunity to "take up the mantle" as the first post said.
I have to suspend my disbelief a little bit to believe that nobody on the Great Intertron was willing to do this and at least occasionally maintain ORDB as a legacy service. I do understand, of course, the necessity of promptness in removing fixed mail servers from the list, although that wasn't really very prompt in practice, was it?
I happened to run into an accidental open relay mail server during an onsite consultation (I ended up completely restructuring their deployment and getting ripped off). Most of the MILLIONS of e-mails were coming from China and/or Taiwan, and this was only a few months ago. Are the ORDB people sure they're not going to bring back the open relay problem by shutting down their admittedly useful services?
While the cancer of spam may have metastasized to other parts of the Internet, it doesn't mean it can't grow back in the places these guys are abandoning. As I understand it, there are other blacklists but nothing quite like the ORDB.
Ten years ago, when I first used it on a now-defunct WWWBoard, n/t meant "no text". I'm thinking "note topic" might actually be folk etymology.
17% of the population voted Bush into office in 2000, 18% in 2004.
This is taking into account total U.S. population, eligible voter turnout, and popular vote results.
So think of it this way: there is less than a 20% chance that a person you meet walking down the street actually cast a ballot for our current president.
Platt College, with three locations in Southern California and a comprehensive curriculum focused on game content creation and portfolio work. One of the only colleges with a full motion capture studio.
Cogswell Polytechnic College, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, lots of big names and a friendly culture. Been around since 1887. I went there, in fact.
Oh, wait, you guys meant slacker colleges, not actual college for learning how to make actual games.
In South Korea, even old people know how to program games. No wonder we're falling behind.
Did you spell your name 'CosmeticLobotamy' on purpose?