Believe it or not, Rambus corporation is likely no more unethical in their business practices as the DRAM manufacturers - see the Micron and Hynix squabble, with accompanying governmental levies and fines. Look to the fact that at least a few governments have cartel investigations on the books against these corporations.
Here is what can be stated most objectively:
-Rambus's RDRAM technology was, and is, technologically interesting
-The console gaming makers realized this and have used it extensively
-Intel designed the P4 around it - obviously there's some good ideas there
-Compared to conventional DRAM technology, RDRAM is unique in that it improves its latency characteristics with every generation. Have you guys read any technical documents about DDR and DDR2? DDR2 scales very poorly: latencies and timings get looser and looser while overall MHz speeds increment more and more slowly.
-To get any real benefit from DDR2 you need a dual-channel configuration which requires prohibitively complex board designs and more pcb layers on the mainboard. Compare this with RDRAM, with its lower pincount and simplified board design.
-Due to Rambus Inc's pariah status, Intel had to shy away from them. However, even Intel couldn't ignore the merits of Rambus technology and is developing a new DRAM tech suscpiciously similiar in nature to RDRAM: FB-DIMM.
One can find a good overview of FB-DIMM "fully buffered dual inline memory module" technology here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15167
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15189
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15214
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15379
Peace
No, not the same. IIRC hardware memory protection used to be a thing that only highend big iron utilized, and AMD's Opteron is the first x86 chip to have it.
Groklaw's purpose seems to be to serve as an information repository for IP law and specifically legal proceedings related to the Linux Operating System, and open-source/free software development including the GPL. To a lesser extent it provides a paralegal's insight into these issues.
This latest addition to Groklaw's site contents reduces its credibility as an objective information consolidator regarding Linux and FOSS legal issues. Why on earth is its owner turning it into a Linux fansite?
"Human beings are composed of two divergent forces. Homeostasis and Transistatis. Homeostasis is a force to maintain the current situation, and transistasis is the force of change. We're consantly fighting an internal battle with change." (ok, not an exact quote, but I get the idea don't I?)
To quote some other famous philosopher, "the only constant in the universe is change". Cultures, religions trying to resist change are fighting a losing battle. Now, it's granted that certain things are more likely to change than others, but that's up to the people who believe in them. Humans, like every other organism on this earth, are constantly evolving, adapting, changing to match their environment.
With this in mind, it's counter-intuitive to try to be static, resist change. Especially when the only method you have to resist change is to deny it, ignore it, and even prohibit it. Censuring the internet is simple evidence of this: Governments in countries like Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, etc, wish to "preserve" their existence by denying the existence of other ideas. From the beginning they should have known it was a losing battle.
The trend towards enlightenment through education seems to be unstoppable.Sure you have occasional hiccups (like the dark ages) but in the end, "change is the only constant" and those who oppose change, or the possibility of change that knowledge brings, are fighting a losing battle, and they know it.
I'm a 2nd-year at The University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, Ontario (Canada, eh?). I just helped the IT team here put up and configure our network. It's a small school, ~1600 students next September, 10Mbit ISP pipe distributed among 16 cisco access points on a 4-floor building. Currently running dual 802.11B/G with an incredibly strong signal in all corners of the building.
While I personally don't agree with being watched in a movie theatre, these guys are just trying to prevent the asshats from ripping off their stuff. If you want to watch a movie, you go to see it, rent it, or buy it. If it's really good enough to want to see then it's good enough to want to buy.
How is this a violation of rights? Security cameras are everywhere these days. I fail to see how this is any different. I do consider it a waste of time, however. Isn't the projectionist supposed to be watching the *movie* to make sure it's showing up in focus?
One thing that's kinda funny is the law that this dumbass is being charged under. Bringing a camcorder into theatres is illegal? Maybe the *use* of such devices should be illegal in a theatre, but not the mere presence. That's tantamount to charging someone with conspiracy to commit murder for owning a gun.
I believe what the theatre SHOULD do is reserve the right to confiscate any electronic equipment:)
So, zipped, it's 96KB. Whoop-dee-doo-dah-day. Running, it consumed an obscene amount of system resources on my PC. How on earth does it require 512MB RAM and 128MB framebuffer? There seems to be an awful lot of duplication of texture, geometry, and code going on here...
There are different OpenGL paths for every graphics card or architecture. You can use Architecture Review Board (ARB) standards as well. Those barely existed when DirectX and Direct3D came into being.
Because that's only one benchmark where it doesn't beat by 100%? The fact that it has a 3x lead in "call of duty" gives them a little license to make generalized claims;)
-Obscene performance boosts, on a scale I've never seen before
-fancy new effects
-massively improved image quality
-heatsink fan still pretty quiet
-basically free 4xFSAA and 8x ANISO
Weaker points of new Nvidia card:
-Expensive
-it seems that shader precision is still not as pretty as ATI's, though that may be fixed by game patches
-takes up 2 slots with the tall heatsink
-480W recommended PSU
-video processing engine isn't implemented in software yet
I don't really object to the power requirements. This thing is more complicated, bigger, and has more transistors than a P4 Extreme Edition. It consumes about 110W, of which 2/3 is the GPU die's power draw. It is certainly NOT unreasonable to require a big power supply with this thing. It seems as though ATI's solution will have a power supply recommendation as well. Simply put, if you're gonna improve performance by such a margin by means other than smaller manufacturing, you're going to increase power consumption. Get over it.
This thing isn't meant for SFF PCs or laptops, though I'm sure the architecture will be ported to a laptop chip eventually. As for the 2-slot size, well...It consumes 110W! To put this in perspective, it consumes more than any non-overclocked desktop CPU today! Think of how big your Athlon64/P4EE heatsink/fan is, then you'll realise that 2 slots aren't really that big of a problem.
My own personal reason for wanting this thing: It can play any current game at 1600x1200 with 4XFSAA and 8x anistropic filtering at a good framerate, and is the only card that can claim to do this right now:)
In that cat open source project participants must decide whether or not they're coding for themselves, or for the commonwealth of linux to take over the empire of Microsoft:) To continue coding for programmers, not users, is to contribute nothing towards a dominant linux desktop.
Vi was created in a day when user interfaces weren't that critical. Nowadays, they are. If Vi had a slightly more intuitive interface, where it trained you through getting used to it, it would be a better app.
If you're doing it for free to conquer proprietary software with your own enhanced open source stuff, you better damn well make sure that you don't just program it for yourself only. Making something better than Windows for YOU is a pitifully easy task compared to making something better than Windows in general.
The Windows 2000 programmer needs to know about the inner workings of the OS. The Windows 2000 USER needs to know about how to use the OS. There is a difference.
Successful commercial software generally has good interfaces and documentation. Other than a handful of projects, I have yet to see an open source project successful to the same scale that most established commercial software projects reach.
Perhaps the problem is that, since everyone on an OSS project is essentially a volunteer, no one volunteers to do the less glamorous work like documentation and UI study, where in the proprietary world these positions are paid??
The pitfalls mentioned in the editorial seem to be more common to open source projects than proprietary solutions, and I believe the issue may be with control.
With proprietary solutions, there are full indepth analyses of market need, product placement, user targeting, etc etc, which as far as I can tell, open source projects lack. The mentioned problem of documentation is a good example of this: if the target user is successfully identified, it should be obvious that unless the user is, himself or herself a programmer familiar with open source "documentation", a user guide covering every feature, behavior, and interface should be created. One software engineering practice (to which I subscribe to) is to create the user manual *before* coding the program, and not changing it unless there's a damn good reason.
Things that need to be expressed before my opinion:
-Microsoft does not hire retards. Their programmers are skilled.
-IBM,Sun,Novell,etc, do not hire retards. Their programmers are probably equally skilled with Microsoft's.
-Linux was inspired by Unix
-Unix is a multi-user operating system originally designed during the dawn of computing for big iron mainframes accessible by client terminals via command line.
-Computer "users" at the time of the creation and dominance of Unix knew, more often than not, how to program, do shell scripts, etc. They were very computer-literate. To use a computer in that age meant you knew how a computer worked.
-Windows began as a (more or less) single user operating system intended to run on PCs, not mainframes, and is used more often than not by people who know nothing of programming, or how a computer works abstractly.
Before you jump to say that Microsoft produces crap code, think logically. The Windows O/S may be considered to be a history lesson for all the O/S programmers out there. Learn from it. Sure, they didn't invent the GUI. Sure they weren't the first windowing O/S. But consider that Windows is the first operating system to reach the level of adoption that it has. They have to support every common architecture, network protocol, hardware design, etc, in the world.
If Windows serves any purpose to you guys at all, it is to illustrate what works, and what doesn't. From their example, user stupidity has been illustrated. Never more than now have programmers been aware of the need to balance ease of use with covering for the ignorance of a user. From their example, we've learned that the user really shouldn't be trusted to be a good admin, that firewalls are a good feature to build into an O/S, etc etc. Microsoft has proven useful in studying the effectiveness of GUI systems and their pitfalls.
Don't sit and criticize Microsoft. Take the lessons they had to learn the hard way, and use them to make better code. That's essentially what Apple did with OSX, even though for them it was a lot easier - they don't have to standardize for all hardware and software configs. They offered very limited backwards compatibility, as ugly compatibility hacks aren't good to keep in code:)
Slashdot Mirror
Believe it or not, Rambus corporation is likely no more unethical in their business practices as the DRAM manufacturers - see the Micron and Hynix squabble, with accompanying governmental levies and fines. Look to the fact that at least a few governments have cartel investigations on the books against these corporations.
Here is what can be stated most objectively:
-Rambus's RDRAM technology was, and is, technologically interesting
-The console gaming makers realized this and have used it extensively
-Intel designed the P4 around it - obviously there's some good ideas there
-Compared to conventional DRAM technology, RDRAM is unique in that it improves its latency characteristics with every generation. Have you guys read any technical documents about DDR and DDR2? DDR2 scales very poorly: latencies and timings get looser and looser while overall MHz speeds increment more and more slowly.
-To get any real benefit from DDR2 you need a dual-channel configuration which requires prohibitively complex board designs and more pcb layers on the mainboard. Compare this with RDRAM, with its lower pincount and simplified board design.
-Due to Rambus Inc's pariah status, Intel had to shy away from them. However, even Intel couldn't ignore the merits of Rambus technology and is developing a new DRAM tech suscpiciously similiar in nature to RDRAM: FB-DIMM.
One can find a good overview of FB-DIMM "fully buffered dual inline memory module" technology here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15167
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15189
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15214
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15379
Peace
Fem-bots!
No, not the same. IIRC hardware memory protection used to be a thing that only highend big iron utilized, and AMD's Opteron is the first x86 chip to have it.
Palladium was too ambitious. It's nice that they're atleast going with memory page protection.
nerd politics.
Groklaw's purpose seems to be to serve as an information repository for IP law and specifically legal proceedings related to the Linux Operating System, and open-source/free software development including the GPL. To a lesser extent it provides a paralegal's insight into these issues.
This latest addition to Groklaw's site contents reduces its credibility as an objective information consolidator regarding Linux and FOSS legal issues. Why on earth is its owner turning it into a Linux fansite?
"Human beings are composed of two divergent forces. Homeostasis and Transistatis. Homeostasis is a force to maintain the current situation, and transistasis is the force of change. We're consantly fighting an internal battle with change." (ok, not an exact quote, but I get the idea don't I?)
To quote some other famous philosopher, "the only constant in the universe is change". Cultures, religions trying to resist change are fighting a losing battle. Now, it's granted that certain things are more likely to change than others, but that's up to the people who believe in them. Humans, like every other organism on this earth, are constantly evolving, adapting, changing to match their environment.
With this in mind, it's counter-intuitive to try to be static, resist change. Especially when the only method you have to resist change is to deny it, ignore it, and even prohibit it. Censuring the internet is simple evidence of this: Governments in countries like Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, etc, wish to "preserve" their existence by denying the existence of other ideas. From the beginning they should have known it was a losing battle.
The trend towards enlightenment through education seems to be unstoppable.Sure you have occasional hiccups (like the dark ages) but in the end, "change is the only constant" and those who oppose change, or the possibility of change that knowledge brings, are fighting a losing battle, and they know it.
I'm a 2nd-year at The University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, Ontario (Canada, eh?). I just helped the IT team here put up and configure our network. It's a small school, ~1600 students next September, 10Mbit ISP pipe distributed among 16 cisco access points on a 4-floor building. Currently running dual 802.11B/G with an incredibly strong signal in all corners of the building.
Little bastard should be barred from having a license to operate any vehicle, for life.
While I personally don't agree with being watched in a movie theatre, these guys are just trying to prevent the asshats from ripping off their stuff. If you want to watch a movie, you go to see it, rent it, or buy it. If it's really good enough to want to see then it's good enough to want to buy.
:)
How is this a violation of rights? Security cameras are everywhere these days. I fail to see how this is any different. I do consider it a waste of time, however. Isn't the projectionist supposed to be watching the *movie* to make sure it's showing up in focus?
One thing that's kinda funny is the law that this dumbass is being charged under. Bringing a camcorder into theatres is illegal? Maybe the *use* of such devices should be illegal in a theatre, but not the mere presence. That's tantamount to charging someone with conspiracy to commit murder for owning a gun.
I believe what the theatre SHOULD do is reserve the right to confiscate any electronic equipment
So, zipped, it's 96KB. Whoop-dee-doo-dah-day. Running, it consumed an obscene amount of system resources on my PC. How on earth does it require 512MB RAM and 128MB framebuffer? There seems to be an awful lot of duplication of texture, geometry, and code going on here...
How are you going to improve the performance of your graphics then???? Software optimization?
Seeing as PCI-express mainboards aren't going to be common for a good year I don't see how this is signficant.
Prices *won't* come down all that much. Don't expect them to. These things aren't commodities.
There are different OpenGL paths for every graphics card or architecture. You can use Architecture Review Board (ARB) standards as well. Those barely existed when DirectX and Direct3D came into being.
Because that's only one benchmark where it doesn't beat by 100%? The fact that it has a 3x lead in "call of duty" gives them a little license to make generalized claims ;)
Strong points of new Nvidia card:
:)
-Obscene performance boosts, on a scale I've never seen before
-fancy new effects
-massively improved image quality
-heatsink fan still pretty quiet
-basically free 4xFSAA and 8x ANISO
Weaker points of new Nvidia card:
-Expensive
-it seems that shader precision is still not as pretty as ATI's, though that may be fixed by game patches
-takes up 2 slots with the tall heatsink
-480W recommended PSU
-video processing engine isn't implemented in software yet
I don't really object to the power requirements. This thing is more complicated, bigger, and has more transistors than a P4 Extreme Edition. It consumes about 110W, of which 2/3 is the GPU die's power draw. It is certainly NOT unreasonable to require a big power supply with this thing. It seems as though ATI's solution will have a power supply recommendation as well. Simply put, if you're gonna improve performance by such a margin by means other than smaller manufacturing, you're going to increase power consumption. Get over it.
This thing isn't meant for SFF PCs or laptops, though I'm sure the architecture will be ported to a laptop chip eventually. As for the 2-slot size, well...It consumes 110W! To put this in perspective, it consumes more than any non-overclocked desktop CPU today! Think of how big your Athlon64/P4EE heatsink/fan is, then you'll realise that 2 slots aren't really that big of a problem.
My own personal reason for wanting this thing: It can play any current game at 1600x1200 with 4XFSAA and 8x anistropic filtering at a good framerate, and is the only card that can claim to do this right now
In that cat open source project participants must decide whether or not they're coding for themselves, or for the commonwealth of linux to take over the empire of Microsoft :) To continue coding for programmers, not users, is to contribute nothing towards a dominant linux desktop.
Vi was created in a day when user interfaces weren't that critical. Nowadays, they are. If Vi had a slightly more intuitive interface, where it trained you through getting used to it, it would be a better app.
If you're doing it for free to conquer proprietary software with your own enhanced open source stuff, you better damn well make sure that you don't just program it for yourself only. Making something better than Windows for YOU is a pitifully easy task compared to making something better than Windows in general.
The Windows 2000 programmer needs to know about the inner workings of the OS. The Windows 2000 USER needs to know about how to use the OS. There is a difference.
A better operating system doesn't necessarily mean a windows clone. It means a better operating system.
Software with crappy or lacking documentation isn't good software, no matter what interface it uses.
Btw: one of the tenets of user interfaces is: if the user requires a manual, then the interface has failed in its task.
Successful commercial software generally has good interfaces and documentation. Other than a handful of projects, I have yet to see an open source project successful to the same scale that most established commercial software projects reach.
Perhaps the problem is that, since everyone on an OSS project is essentially a volunteer, no one volunteers to do the less glamorous work like documentation and UI study, where in the proprietary world these positions are paid??
The pitfalls mentioned in the editorial seem to be more common to open source projects than proprietary solutions, and I believe the issue may be with control.
With proprietary solutions, there are full indepth analyses of market need, product placement, user targeting, etc etc, which as far as I can tell, open source projects lack. The mentioned problem of documentation is a good example of this: if the target user is successfully identified, it should be obvious that unless the user is, himself or herself a programmer familiar with open source "documentation", a user guide covering every feature, behavior, and interface should be created. One software engineering practice (to which I subscribe to) is to create the user manual *before* coding the program, and not changing it unless there's a damn good reason.
Things that need to be expressed before my opinion:
:)
-Microsoft does not hire retards. Their programmers are skilled.
-IBM,Sun,Novell,etc, do not hire retards. Their programmers are probably equally skilled with Microsoft's.
-Linux was inspired by Unix
-Unix is a multi-user operating system originally designed during the dawn of computing for big iron mainframes accessible by client terminals via command line.
-Computer "users" at the time of the creation and dominance of Unix knew, more often than not, how to program, do shell scripts, etc. They were very computer-literate. To use a computer in that age meant you knew how a computer worked.
-Windows began as a (more or less) single user operating system intended to run on PCs, not mainframes, and is used more often than not by people who know nothing of programming, or how a computer works abstractly.
Before you jump to say that Microsoft produces crap code, think logically. The Windows O/S may be considered to be a history lesson for all the O/S programmers out there. Learn from it. Sure, they didn't invent the GUI. Sure they weren't the first windowing O/S. But consider that Windows is the first operating system to reach the level of adoption that it has. They have to support every common architecture, network protocol, hardware design, etc, in the world.
If Windows serves any purpose to you guys at all, it is to illustrate what works, and what doesn't. From their example, user stupidity has been illustrated. Never more than now have programmers been aware of the need to balance ease of use with covering for the ignorance of a user. From their example, we've learned that the user really shouldn't be trusted to be a good admin, that firewalls are a good feature to build into an O/S, etc etc. Microsoft has proven useful in studying the effectiveness of GUI systems and their pitfalls.
Don't sit and criticize Microsoft. Take the lessons they had to learn the hard way, and use them to make better code. That's essentially what Apple did with OSX, even though for them it was a lot easier - they don't have to standardize for all hardware and software configs. They offered very limited backwards compatibility, as ugly compatibility hacks aren't good to keep in code