If you crackdown on the bogus H1B companies, that leaves a lot more for the legitimate (high-paying) companies that really are trying to bring in the best of the rest of the world.
Boosman's response is far better than Cringely's column in pointing out the real problem: device driver management.
My experience with OSX drivers is that Apple barely gets enough support from device manufacturers (DMs) to stay above water. In some cases they bring development in-house to try to improve quality. Doing so in the Darwinistic land of PC hardware is impossible: the DMs must provide good drivers. Getting OSX marketshare up to the 25-50% level necessary for DMs to pay real attention will require years. During that time, OSX-on-nonApple-HW customers would provide a stream of complaints that would tarnish Apple's reputation but, more importantly, would slow down their development of OSX and give Microsoft a chance to catch up.
I personally would love to run OSX on other hardware right now, but PC hardware is getting _so_ commoditized that prices are falling to the point where the human cost of a poor operating system may outweigh the marginal cost Apple charges for their hardware for many people.
Apple is now 100% on that commodity train and as long as their marginal cost stays rational, they'll slowly grow marketshare.
They already sold their entire patent portfolio to Microsoft several years ago (1998?) for ~$60M in an attempt to stay alive. Very sad.
Re:"the snort rule will peg the CPU on your router
on
Trustworthy Computing
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I believe this is because _any_ image is vulnerable to infection. Because Microsoft checks the header for every image file and treats it as WMF if the header matches, all jpegs, gifs, and pngs are potential vectors for the disease. A router that has to inspect _every_ image that is surfed by users behind it will immediately turn into a bottleneck.
A couple of the other comments here seem to miss this very important point:
It's not just files with ".wmf" at the end. Any image file will get unwrapped by Microsoft code and the callback will get executed. Woof.
The 2004/2005 Toyota Prius is a mid-sized car and is _surprisingly_ large inside, seating 5 adults reasonably comfortably. We typically get 45-50 mpg, but the acceleration is good and the emissions are very low.
The hype about hybrids may be overblown, but in an apples-to-apples comparison, hybrid engines are seemingly better.
Burt Rutan has said he will be one of the passengers on the 50+ test flights that will occur before they start accepting paying passengers. I'm not sure about Paul Allen, but I'd guess he would go up also.
BTW, check out this photo essay of SpaceShipOne's visit to Oshkosh this week:
Watch the DVD set in its intended order and the show is much easier to appreciate. The apparently really botched it when they aired it originally. Another reason to pray for the (corporate) deaths of the executives at Fox who managed this.
(I watched 7 seasons of Buffy on DVD and the found Firefly on DVD and really enjoyed it)
Surprisingly, all the replies to my post have valid points. I had forgotten about the PS1->PS2 strategy and it seems possible that a single-chip PS2 (which Sony wants for existing sales) would make a potential IO processor for PS3. Those under NDA already know the answer to this.
As for Xbox2 emulating Xbox, the problem with emulation in console gaming is that it needs to be near perfect (clock accurate) or frames get dropped, physics calculations start failing due to timing, or game logic/physics just turns out differently and runs down an untested path in the code. To be "backwards compatible" on a console, they need 99.x% compatibility (with maybe a couple of caveats) or it can't be advertised that way (customer support will kill them).
The Cell architecture uses the same basic CPU ISA as PPC, but has the additional FP units that need to be coded. Think SSE vs. SSE2 except somewhat worse since the only way to get real FP performance will probably be assembly.
It's interesting that all 3 console manufacturers chose IBM PPC processors this time around. It means that game developers programming in assembly language will only have to learn one. Too bad there aren't many left who do. (A fact of life when the bottlenecks move to memory/art/game-logic).
Because the GameCube used PPC, it looks like Nintendo will be the only one with an (relatively) easy backwards compatability story. The PS2 could perhaps be emulated since it was only a 300Mhz MIPS processor, but I pity the person that has to write the emulator for the pipelining stages on the VUs. Microsoft has not said whether they'll be backwards compatible, but I predict the answer is no.
Reading the article, it really is 300m/pixel. This is 400x lower resolution than the 15m Landsat data that is available as a basemap in Keyhole, Google Maps, and other providers.
The reason this data is interesting is its 15-band nature and the amount of analysis and extraction that can be done from it.
For pretty pictures, there are plenty of better sources.
They get thousands of photos a day categorized and scored. Amateur and professional photographers make great effort to gain a good reputation for both their photos and their comments.
Browse the categories and then browse the "best of"... the photos there are truly amazing.
I disagree with several of the posters here who say that rebates ought to be illegal and offer no value other than to return products to market value.
If the rebate is not paid, then that is fraud, otherwise:
Rebates are the equivalent of a flexible pricing plan that allow those people that care enough about the $20 to go through the hassle of completing the transaction. At this point most consumers are fully aware of the annoyance level and factor that in to their buying decision.
Poor/Parsimonious people who really need the product will follow through, get the discount and purchase the product. The rest will do so at some much lower hit rate (well below 50%).
This means that the price people pay varies based on need.
The result is that more people are able to buy the product so it can be manufactured and sold in higher volume (and therefore possibly at lower cost).
Regarding the cost benefit of rebates, I can state definitively that the best rebate deals at Fry's are usually selling products below cost of manufacture (eg 250G HDDs for $99, network hubs for $0). Sure, some products use rebates to return prices to the discounted price of their competitors but smart consumers can do the math, realize that, and decide if its worth the hassle.
Even without rebates, the airline industries pricing model, convenience-store pricing, and apparel industry off-season discounts are all examples of flexible pricing to capture different consumers at different times with exactly the same product.
As a lazy consumer, I wish everything were flat priced so I would never have to worry about whether I'm getting "screwed" by paying more than the best (or even average) price. Legislating flat-pricing would be nice, but I believe it would end up producing higher-priced products overall.
Ever since Maxtor announced (but didn't ship) a 320GB drive in August 2003, things have moved too slowly in the PC (3.5") drive market. Maxtor finally shipped 300G and that was king for a while before Hitachi (and now others) shipped 400G. The lack of motion is very unusual compared to the historical size increases we've seen over the last 20 years.
I think the article doesn't make it clear that manufacturers' focus has moved to several other areas:
- 2.5" drives for use in servers (density of machines, not data) - 1.8" drives for iPods (now up to 80G) - 1" drives for mini-iPods and CF cards - sub-1" drives (Cornice...) for CF and cell phones
Even though some of us need TBs of storage, most of the CE world would be happy with 10G for their music/video-recording.
Movies gross more than Games... always have, maybe always will. The stupid comparison made here is one that the game industry loves to make when trying to get mindshare... Compare movie box office versus game software/hardware sales.
If you include DVD/media sales of movies, movies win. If you don't include console hardware sales, movies win.
The movie industry (worldwide) grosses $180B. US movie industry grosses 63B. Box office only accounts for 26% of revenue.
Why is this post scored a 5? It completely misses the point that human exploration is always a dangerous business. Sure, make it as safe as possible, but no safer.
People will die... that is part of exploring the unknown.
NASA has lost 14 people in the Space Shuttle program doing something that isn't even particularly innovative. I think that if Rutan's first or second flight had crashed, he'd be up again in less than 6 months.
We have to take chances to make progress. It's what startups do at the corporate level and what explorers have done since before recorded history.
I'm surprised that no one has yet called out the voice performance by Brad Bird doing the fashionista Edna "E" Mode. Her lines, interactions with Mr/Mrs I, and her demonstration of the dangers of capes were, IMHO, the funniest lines in the movie.
This is very surprising. SGI has been waning for the last several years and the top spot on the supercomputer list has been static for two years waiting for someone to build something better than Earth at a reasonable price. For them to get 80% of the machines working in 15 weeks and get 42TFlops out of it is very impressive.
Congratulations to the remaining engineering team at Silcon Graphics!
People here are complaining that SA and TW are terrible, but they clearly never experienced the wonders of the General Instruments (now Motorola) DCT-1000, DCT-2000 (upgraded 27Mhz CPU), and the HD DCT-5100. Horrifyingly slow CPUs, single tuners that lead to long channel-change times, and, with TCI/ATT 12:1 compression (twelve channels on one 27Mbit(?) transponder) of SDTV. Comcast is rumored to have reduced the compression.
Microsoft, though, is forcing higher performance systems so that it's "TV Platform" software can be used. Moto's new DCT 6208 is an HD-PVR model with an 800Mhz CPU (wow). The problem with these higher-performance systems is that they are so expensive to make for the cable industry (duopoly pricing) that they won't get widespread distribution.
My DirecTV HD-TiVo works exactly the way my old DTiVo does, with 4 tuners (including dual OTA). The biggest problem with it is that it is still "TiVo 1" software and the Home Media Option isn't available. Something about Rupert Murdoch trying to screw TiVo by introducing boxes built by a (mostly unknown) competitor he owns.
LaserDisks have always been analog video. Later versions of them added Digital Audio tracks (including a very few with DTS), but the video has remained analog.
If you've gone to enough trouble to buy LDs, you should be looking at the price of DVDs these days and realizing that its cheaper/easier just to replace your entire collection (or the ones you really want) with DVDs and then rip those losslessly onto your HD using a $20 DVD-ROM drive.
You clearly don't understand where the revenue is in games vs. middleware. "Yummy" fees are microscopic. RW grossed less than $50K from the $1B+ that GTA3 made. Middleware is important strategically but financially is currently in the noise. EA made a strategic move and has _no_ need for even 100x the current revenues of RW at their current margins.
Many companies make a middleware bet, wrap their toolchain and game franchise around it. The mediocre ones ship one game (if they're lucky) and then die. The successful ones develop an engine, toolchain, and gameplay that they'd like to reuse for the sequels. In the past, they paid more money to RW and they were set. Now, the price is negotiable with the gorilla of the industry.
Strategically, it means every studio has to get off of Renderware ASAP or they could be crushed if EA ever looks in their direction.
Since Renderware is basically console-only, its only real competitors are/were NDL and Alchemy. Neither are as big, but both may be perceived to be needed to fight against EA.
(I'd post a disclaimer here, but its no longer relevant)
I realize you were trying to defend Sun, but in this case the vendor (SGI) has far more experience with large systems than Sun does. At every point over the last 16 years (since SGI announced the original PowerSeries on 10/4/88), SGI has always supported more processors running a single OS than Sun. Those processors were MIPS based, but the Altix architecture is derived from the bricks/bus of the Origin servers.
The flip-side of this is that SGI has been in decline for several years longer than Sun and may have lost some or all of its edge in this area.
Looking closely at the picture and the size of the lenses, I'll bet that Steve has a fake pair of those just for photos. There appears to be little or no refraction at the edges and, even with 1.7 super high index of refraction material, you would see something.
Slashdot Mirror
If you crackdown on the bogus H1B companies, that leaves a lot more for the legitimate (high-paying) companies that really are trying to bring in the best of the rest of the world.
Really?
Google Earth is one of the few things that _is_ supported on Linux at the moment.
Boosman's response is far better than Cringely's column in pointing out the real problem: device driver management.
My experience with OSX drivers is that Apple barely gets enough support from device manufacturers (DMs) to stay above water. In some cases they bring development in-house to try to improve quality. Doing so in the Darwinistic land of PC hardware is impossible: the DMs must provide good drivers. Getting OSX marketshare up to the 25-50% level necessary for DMs to pay real attention will require years. During that time, OSX-on-nonApple-HW customers would provide a stream of complaints that would tarnish Apple's reputation but, more importantly, would slow down their development of OSX and give Microsoft a chance to catch up.
I personally would love to run OSX on other hardware right now, but PC hardware is getting _so_ commoditized that prices are falling to the point where the human cost of a poor operating system may outweigh the marginal cost Apple charges for their hardware for many people.
Apple is now 100% on that commodity train and as long as their marginal cost stays rational, they'll slowly grow marketshare.
They already sold their entire patent portfolio to Microsoft several years ago (1998?) for ~$60M in an attempt to stay alive. Very sad.
I believe this is because _any_ image is vulnerable to infection. Because Microsoft checks the header for every image file and treats it as WMF if the header matches, all jpegs, gifs, and pngs are potential vectors for the disease. A router that has to inspect _every_ image that is surfed by users behind it will immediately turn into a bottleneck.
A couple of the other comments here seem to miss this very important point:
It's not just files with ".wmf" at the end. Any image file will get unwrapped by Microsoft code and the callback will get executed. Woof.
The 2004/2005 Toyota Prius is a mid-sized car and is _surprisingly_ large inside, seating 5 adults reasonably comfortably. We typically get 45-50 mpg, but the acceleration is good and the emissions are very low.
The hype about hybrids may be overblown, but in an apples-to-apples comparison, hybrid engines are seemingly better.
Burt Rutan has said he will be one of the passengers on the 50+ test flights that will occur before they start accepting paying passengers. I'm not sure about Paul Allen, but I'd guess he would go up also.
b er/53677/an/0/page/0#53677
BTW, check out this photo essay of SpaceShipOne's visit to Oshkosh this week:
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php/Cat/0/Num
[ scroll down about half way to see the pics of SS1 fly-bys and landing ]
Watch the DVD set in its intended order and the show is much easier to appreciate. The apparently really botched it when they aired it originally. Another reason to pray for the (corporate) deaths of the executives at Fox who managed this.
(I watched 7 seasons of Buffy on DVD and the found Firefly on DVD and really enjoyed it)
Never mind reverse-engineering KMZ/KML, the spec and a tutorial have just been posted on http://code.google.com./
Enjoy!
Surprisingly, all the replies to my post have valid points. I had forgotten about the PS1->PS2 strategy and it seems possible that a single-chip PS2 (which Sony wants for existing sales) would make a potential IO processor for PS3. Those under NDA already know the answer to this.
As for Xbox2 emulating Xbox, the problem with emulation in console gaming is that it needs to be near perfect (clock accurate) or frames get dropped, physics calculations start failing due to timing, or game logic/physics just turns out differently and runs down an untested path in the code. To be "backwards compatible" on a console, they need 99.x% compatibility (with maybe a couple of caveats) or it can't be advertised that way (customer support will kill them).
The Cell architecture uses the same basic CPU ISA as PPC, but has the additional FP units that need to be coded. Think SSE vs. SSE2 except somewhat worse since the only way to get real FP performance will probably be assembly.
It's interesting that all 3 console manufacturers chose IBM PPC processors this time around. It means that game developers programming in assembly language will only have to learn one. Too bad there aren't many left who do. (A fact of life when the bottlenecks move to memory/art/game-logic).
Because the GameCube used PPC, it looks like Nintendo will be the only one with an (relatively) easy backwards compatability story. The PS2 could perhaps be emulated since it was only a 300Mhz MIPS processor, but I pity the person that has to write the emulator for the pipelining stages on the VUs. Microsoft has not said whether they'll be backwards compatible, but I predict the answer is no.
Reading the article, it really is 300m/pixel. This is 400x lower resolution than the 15m Landsat data that is available as a basemap in Keyhole, Google Maps, and other providers.
The reason this data is interesting is its 15-band nature and the amount of analysis and extraction that can be done from it.
For pretty pictures, there are plenty of better sources.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it so far, but
n nl N5829
by far the best moderated photo publish/review site is PhotoSIG:
http://www.photosig.com/go/main;jsessionid=aVeK
They get thousands of photos a day categorized and scored. Amateur and professional photographers make great effort to gain a good reputation for both their photos and their comments.
Browse the categories and then browse the "best of"... the photos there are truly amazing.
I disagree with several of the posters here who say that rebates ought to be illegal and offer no value other than to return products to market value.
If the rebate is not paid, then that is fraud, otherwise:
Rebates are the equivalent of a flexible pricing plan that allow those people that care enough about the $20 to go through the hassle of completing the transaction. At this point most consumers are fully aware of the annoyance level and factor that in to their buying decision.
Poor/Parsimonious people who really need the product will follow through, get the discount and purchase the product. The rest will do so at some much lower hit rate (well below 50%).
This means that the price people pay varies based on need.
The result is that more people are able to buy the product so it can be manufactured and sold in higher volume (and therefore possibly at lower cost).
Regarding the cost benefit of rebates, I can state definitively that the best rebate deals at Fry's are usually selling products below cost of manufacture (eg 250G HDDs for $99, network hubs for $0). Sure, some products use rebates to return prices to the discounted price of their competitors but smart consumers can do the math, realize that, and decide if its worth the hassle.
Even without rebates, the airline industries pricing model, convenience-store pricing, and apparel industry off-season discounts are all examples of flexible pricing to capture different consumers at different times with exactly the same product.
As a lazy consumer, I wish everything were flat priced so I would never have to worry about whether I'm getting "screwed" by paying more than the best (or even average) price.
Legislating flat-pricing would be nice, but I believe it would end up producing higher-priced products overall.
Ever since Maxtor announced (but didn't ship) a 320GB drive in August 2003, things have moved too slowly in the PC (3.5") drive market. Maxtor finally shipped 300G and that was king for a while before Hitachi (and now others) shipped 400G. The lack of motion is very unusual compared to the historical size increases we've seen over the last 20 years.
I think the article doesn't make it clear that manufacturers' focus has moved to several other areas:
- 2.5" drives for use in servers (density of machines, not data)
- 1.8" drives for iPods (now up to 80G)
- 1" drives for mini-iPods and CF cards
- sub-1" drives (Cornice...) for CF and cell phones
Even though some of us need TBs of storage, most of the CE world would be happy with 10G for their music/video-recording.
Movies gross more than Games... always have, maybe always will. The stupid comparison made here is one that the game industry loves to make when trying to get mindshare... Compare movie box office versus game software/hardware sales.
If you include DVD/media sales of movies, movies win. If you don't include console hardware sales, movies win.
The movie industry (worldwide) grosses $180B. US movie industry grosses 63B. Box office only accounts for 26% of revenue.
reference: http://www.factbook.net/wbglobal_rev.htm
Why is this post scored a 5? It completely misses the point that human exploration is always a dangerous business. Sure, make it as safe as possible, but no safer.
People will die... that is part of exploring the unknown.
NASA has lost 14 people in the Space Shuttle program doing something that isn't even particularly innovative. I think that if Rutan's first or second flight had crashed, he'd be up again in less than 6 months.
We have to take chances to make progress. It's what startups do at the corporate level and what explorers have done since before recorded history.
I'm surprised that no one has yet called out the voice performance by Brad Bird doing the fashionista Edna "E" Mode. Her lines, interactions with Mr/Mrs I, and her demonstration of the dangers of capes were, IMHO, the funniest lines in the movie.
This is very surprising. SGI has been waning for the last several years and the top spot on the supercomputer list has been static for two years waiting for someone to build something better than Earth at a reasonable price. For them to get 80% of the machines working in 15 weeks and get 42TFlops out of it is very impressive.
Congratulations to the remaining engineering team at Silcon Graphics!
People here are complaining that SA and TW are terrible, but they clearly never experienced the wonders of the General Instruments (now Motorola) DCT-1000, DCT-2000 (upgraded 27Mhz CPU), and the HD DCT-5100. Horrifyingly slow CPUs, single tuners that lead to long channel-change times, and, with TCI/ATT 12:1 compression (twelve channels on one 27Mbit(?) transponder) of SDTV. Comcast is rumored to have reduced the compression.
Microsoft, though, is forcing higher performance systems so that it's "TV Platform" software can be used. Moto's new DCT 6208 is an HD-PVR model with an 800Mhz CPU (wow). The problem with these higher-performance systems is that they are so expensive to make for the cable industry (duopoly pricing) that they won't get widespread distribution.
My DirecTV HD-TiVo works exactly the way my old DTiVo does, with 4 tuners (including dual OTA). The biggest problem with it is that it is still "TiVo 1" software and the Home Media Option isn't available. Something about Rupert Murdoch trying to screw TiVo by introducing boxes built by a (mostly unknown) competitor he owns.
LaserDisks have always been analog video. Later versions of them added Digital Audio tracks (including a very few with DTS), but the video has remained analog.
If you've gone to enough trouble to buy LDs, you should be looking at the price of DVDs these days and realizing that its cheaper/easier just to replace your entire collection (or the ones you really want) with DVDs and then rip those losslessly onto your HD using a $20 DVD-ROM drive.
You clearly don't understand where the revenue is in games vs. middleware. "Yummy" fees are microscopic. RW grossed less than $50K from the $1B+ that GTA3 made. Middleware is important strategically but financially is currently in the noise. EA made a strategic move and has _no_ need for even 100x the current revenues of RW at their current margins.
Many companies make a middleware bet, wrap their toolchain and game franchise around it. The mediocre ones ship one game (if they're lucky) and then die. The successful ones develop an engine, toolchain, and gameplay that they'd like to reuse for the sequels. In the past, they paid more money to RW and they were set. Now, the price is negotiable with the gorilla of the industry.
Strategically, it means every studio has to get off of Renderware ASAP or they could be crushed if EA ever looks in their direction.
Since Renderware is basically console-only, its only real competitors are/were NDL and Alchemy. Neither are as big, but both may be perceived to be needed to fight against EA.
(I'd post a disclaimer here, but its no longer relevant)
I realize you were trying to defend Sun, but in this case the vendor (SGI) has far more experience with large systems than Sun does. At every point over the last 16 years (since SGI announced the original PowerSeries on 10/4/88), SGI has always supported more processors running a single OS than Sun. Those processors were MIPS based, but the Altix architecture is derived from the bricks/bus of the Origin servers.
The flip-side of this is that SGI has been in decline for several years longer than Sun and may have lost some or all of its edge in this area.
PowerSeries 140 (4x16Mhz MIPS R2000), 10/4/88.
Looking closely at the picture and the size of the lenses, I'll bet that Steve has a fake pair of those just for photos. There appears to be little or no refraction at the edges and, even with 1.7 super high index of refraction material, you would see something.
sig,
(-6.5, -8.25)