That's funny, yesterday I've been bitten by this f**ing thing and now I see it on Slashdot.
I saw the hype about new driver and since I needed a new graphics card I thought it would be nice to show appreciation. I was a little disappointed that it took several hours to debianize their crappy RPM packages, but I guess that's the price of using the best distribution. And then when I'm done I get this stupid message about my non-cheap, non-no-name 8500 card being unsupported. I was about to kill someone. If the computer case wasn't closed already, I would probably have ripped the card off and thrown it out of the window.
I'm not green yet, but...
on
Green Geeks?
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· Score: 1
I live here and I spend as much time as I can climbing mountains, snowboarding and motorbiking around. I love technology for the most part, but I don't think we can sustain the current rate of production without impairing the environment. I'm not a hard-core environmentalist, but I do want our little planet preserved, at the very least as long as I'm around; some day it will not be my problem any more, but I wouldn't mind having some children and maybe they'll find it nice to breathe clean air too.
If a program was evolved in a semi-random way and not designed, then apparently useless code might in fact be significant. Just not in a way that we understand. Maybe it just slows down the CPU (or DNA production, as another post says) for a while and avoids a race condition that would otherwise break the useful part of the code.
Oh, by the way, if it was useless, how could errors in it affect our health?
...scientists found out that mass extinction of entire species (say, dinosaurs) may only happen about once in a hundred million years or so.
Come on, if it was any different, there would be records of unexplained explosions all over history books, not to mention that at least some of the holes would still be visible.
Um... Cool features, yes. Cooler than bash, Un*x init scripts or KDE, just to mention what I currently like, I'm not sure. It *was* great back then, but the world has changed. Several years ago, when I was still using the Amiga exclusively but things started to look ugly (think Commodore going bankrupt and all that followed), a question came up in my mind: what if all the money Microsoft spent in going from MS-DOS to Windows NT/2000/XP would have been used on AmigaOS? Where would we be today? When development on the AmigaOS basically stopped, M$ was still years away from a working alternative to the ugly-graphical-shell-over-DOS mess, and 32 bits was closer to their upper memory limits than to their basic data types.
That's right, you can have arbitrarily sized holes between struct members, but I'm pretty sure they are guaranteed to be stored in the order of declaration.
Also every compiler I have ever come across stores struct and class members in the order they are declared in the source file. I don't think that's guaranteed by either C or C++, [...]
The point is, the Amiga is not dead (and I have an A3000/68040 in perfectly good shape on my desk to back that up), but it hasn't evolved for more than 10 years and this new toy is the proof: it's just standard PC hardware with a PowerPC CPU. Nothing in there remotely resembles the Amiga hardware. You might as well spend the same money on an Athlon + modern mobo + lots of memory and get far superior performance; if you really want some Amiga feeling from time to time, just install UAE.
What defined the Amiga was the integration between the OS and the hardware. The OS alone on standard hardware doesn't make much sense IMHO: Linux or *BSD or, hell, even Windows is better these days. I don't know what hardware does currently offer something like the extreme multimedia capabilities of the original Amiga hardware+software because I'm not interestad in that kind of stuff, but certainly it's not standard PC hardware. I guess you would have to buy a Silicon Graphics or something like that.
Forget the "near" part, it was true realtime, and more so than anything else I have seen on any other desktop OS. That said, I completely agree: I would love to have AmigaOS on a phone or a PDA, for example.
Are you joking? AmigaOS 1.x stable? I guess you're tinkering with the wrong Linux distro if that's really what you think. ("The" linux distro for me is Debian, but of course YMMV.)
By the way, this new Amiga is nowhere like a true Amiga in terms of chipset. It's just a PowerPC with PCI, AGP, USB and all the usual stuff you'll find in a not-so-modern PC. Note the southbridge (what would *that* have been called in the original Amiga?) is a now-outdated Via part, the same I have in my PC.
That doesn't work. If you did encrypt it in the first place, it's because you anticipate the message will be intercepted. You just can't call up the bad guy a day later and say "hey, here's yesterday's message, but encrypted with a new key -- please throw away the old one and start from scratch".
It already works like this, as far as I know. Example: the FreeType bytecode interpreter, which is shipped in source code but disabled in the binaries as supplied by most distributions.
May I remind you of a similar story found in the Bible? The point is, nobody is required to donate anything. If one does, he deserves a big thank you, no matter if the donation is relatively small or absolutely big or whatever.
Yes, but AFAIK he wrote most drivers after he started working on Beowulf, as he found it useful to have good networking for the cluster nodes. So this did not really influence his decision.
Not being a kernel hacker, I don't know how much of a second-class citizen a non-BK user might become.
Not at all. By this metric, those who use BitKeeper become "0-class" citizens because they have some clear advantages, but the others just keep doing things as they did -- i.e. diff and patch. No disadvantages.
And you don't understand how modern processors really work. First, they have several levels of cache memory exactly because you don't want to go out to main memory too often. Second, they have many more registers than the assembly instructions can see: register renaming, speculative eeecution and all those tricks reorganize instructions so that the CPU core doesn't really have to move data back and forth between memory and registers so often.
IANACPUD (I'm not a CPU designer) so I'm not going to try to descripe this stuff further, but articles abound. Here are some:
Into the K7, Part One and Into the K7, Part Two
IANAA either, but I guess that if you know how much slower than c they are, *and* you know how much energy they give out when they interact, you can calculate their supposed mass pretty accurately. Now that would be an interesting accomplishment.
It's woefully short on details, and the explanations as to why a camera that can record 1M frames per second is limited to a playback of only 103 frames [...]
Memory problems, I suppose. They say each pixel is its own memory. I guess that getting 1 million frames per second through any kind of bus to any kind of memory is going to be tough. AGP isn't going to cut it.;)
Slashdot Mirror
zisofs maybe?
That's funny, yesterday I've been bitten by this f**ing thing and now I see it on Slashdot.
I saw the hype about new driver and since I needed a new graphics card I thought it would be nice to show appreciation. I was a little disappointed that it took several hours to debianize their crappy RPM packages, but I guess that's the price of using the best distribution. And then when I'm done I get this stupid message about my non-cheap, non-no-name 8500 card being unsupported. I was about to kill someone. If the computer case wasn't closed already, I would probably have ripped the card off and thrown it out of the window.
I live here and I spend as much time as I can climbing mountains, snowboarding and motorbiking around. I love technology for the most part, but I don't think we can sustain the current rate of production without impairing the environment. I'm not a hard-core environmentalist, but I do want our little planet preserved, at the very least as long as I'm around; some day it will not be my problem any more, but I wouldn't mind having some children and maybe they'll find it nice to breathe clean air too.
If a program was evolved in a semi-random way and not designed, then apparently useless code might in fact be significant. Just not in a way that we understand. Maybe it just slows down the CPU (or DNA production, as another post says) for a while and avoids a race condition that would otherwise break the useful part of the code.
Oh, by the way, if it was useless, how could errors in it affect our health?
Just get a fireproof safe which is large enough to hold your data and yourself.
...scientists found out that mass extinction of entire species (say, dinosaurs) may only happen about once in a hundred million years or so.
Come on, if it was any different, there would be records of unexplained explosions all over history books, not to mention that at least some of the holes would still be visible.
Um... Cool features, yes. Cooler than bash, Un*x init scripts or KDE, just to mention what I currently like, I'm not sure. It *was* great back then, but the world has changed. Several years ago, when I was still using the Amiga exclusively but things started to look ugly (think Commodore going bankrupt and all that followed), a question came up in my mind: what if all the money Microsoft spent in going from MS-DOS to Windows NT/2000/XP would have been used on AmigaOS? Where would we be today? When development on the AmigaOS basically stopped, M$ was still years away from a working alternative to the ugly-graphical-shell-over-DOS mess, and 32 bits was closer to their upper memory limits than to their basic data types.
That's right, you can have arbitrarily sized holes between struct members, but I'm pretty sure they are guaranteed to be stored in the order of declaration.
Also every compiler I have ever come across stores struct and class members in the order they are declared in the source file. I don't think that's guaranteed by either C or C++, [...]
Yes, it is.
The point is, the Amiga is not dead (and I have an A3000/68040 in perfectly good shape on my desk to back that up), but it hasn't evolved for more than 10 years and this new toy is the proof: it's just standard PC hardware with a PowerPC CPU. Nothing in there remotely resembles the Amiga hardware. You might as well spend the same money on an Athlon + modern mobo + lots of memory and get far superior performance; if you really want some Amiga feeling from time to time, just install UAE.
What defined the Amiga was the integration between the OS and the hardware. The OS alone on standard hardware doesn't make much sense IMHO: Linux or *BSD or, hell, even Windows is better these days. I don't know what hardware does currently offer something like the extreme multimedia capabilities of the original Amiga hardware+software because I'm not interestad in that kind of stuff, but certainly it's not standard PC hardware. I guess you would have to buy a Silicon Graphics or something like that.
Forget the "near" part, it was true realtime, and more so than anything else I have seen on any other desktop OS. That said, I completely agree: I would love to have AmigaOS on a phone or a PDA, for example.
Are you joking? AmigaOS 1.x stable? I guess you're tinkering with the wrong Linux distro if that's really what you think. ("The" linux distro for me is Debian, but of course YMMV.)
By the way, this new Amiga is nowhere like a true Amiga in terms of chipset. It's just a PowerPC with PCI, AGP, USB and all the usual stuff you'll find in a not-so-modern PC. Note the southbridge (what would *that* have been called in the original Amiga?) is a now-outdated Via part, the same I have in my PC.
That doesn't work. If you did encrypt it in the first place, it's because you anticipate the message will be intercepted. You just can't call up the bad guy a day later and say "hey, here's yesterday's message, but encrypted with a new key -- please throw away the old one and start from scratch".
It already works like this, as far as I know. Example: the FreeType bytecode interpreter, which is shipped in source code but disabled in the binaries as supplied by most distributions.
May I remind you of a similar story found in the Bible? The point is, nobody is required to donate anything. If one does, he deserves a big thank you, no matter if the donation is relatively small or absolutely big or whatever.
Don't you mean a lot of Kapor?
Yes, but AFAIK he wrote most drivers after he started working on Beowulf, as he found it useful to have good networking for the cluster nodes. So this did not really influence his decision.
;)
Of course I might be wrong. Just ask him.
Not being a kernel hacker, I don't know how much of a second-class citizen a non-BK user might become.
Not at all. By this metric, those who use BitKeeper become "0-class" citizens because they have some clear advantages, but the others just keep doing things as they did -- i.e. diff and patch. No disadvantages.
And you don't understand how modern processors really work. First, they have several levels of cache memory exactly because you don't want to go out to main memory too often. Second, they have many more registers than the assembly instructions can see: register renaming, speculative eeecution and all those tricks reorganize instructions so that the CPU core doesn't really have to move data back and forth between memory and registers so often.
IANACPUD (I'm not a CPU designer) so I'm not going to try to descripe this stuff further, but articles abound. Here are some: Into the K7, Part One and Into the K7, Part Two
IANAA either, but I guess that if you know how much slower than c they are, *and* you know how much energy they give out when they interact, you can calculate their supposed mass pretty accurately. Now that would be an interesting accomplishment.
That's one nice thing about kuro5hin -- most users write like professional journalists.
Do you mean that they write very good prose about things they don't really understand?
(disclaimer: not really reading much kuro5hin -- this was meant to be a joke, nothing more)
[ ] Evil Empire that decides what's good for us
(I suppose IBM could fill this in if they really want)
Except that it was said in the press release. ;)
What about spatial toys like Legos, Erector Sets and Lincoln Logs?
Erector what? To his daughter?
It's woefully short on details, and the explanations as to why a camera that can record 1M frames per second is limited to a playback of only 103 frames [...]
Memory problems, I suppose. They say each pixel is its own memory. I guess that getting 1 million frames per second through any kind of bus to any kind of memory is going to be tough. AGP isn't going to cut it. ;)