If I got it correctly, AT&T may still try to enforce their patents under local law by suing the manufacturers. They also can sue them in the US because they are selling devices that infringe AT&T patents to the US.
Again, if I got it correctly, local manufacturers can sue Microsoft for selling them goods without disclosing potential liabilities.
This is one for the diplomats to untangle. Hope they enjoy it.
Maybe we could think all of his ashes are still waiting for the right spaceship to take him into interstellar space. If it did a slingshot around the Sun, it would only be better.
I think every recent voting machine in Brazil uses a Geode, which is a more modern take on the MediaGX.
It was not very successful on the desktop, but on the embedded x86 market, it's a hit.
And yes, if I segment the market enough (embedded less than 20 watt 32 bit x86 used mostly on weekends) just about every processor can become a hit.;-)
The IBM Thinkpad 701 had a very clever mechanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_keyboard) that kind of folded the keyboard while you were closing the lid. It sure should be a mechanical nightmare, but allowed IBM to reduce the width of that particular model a good one and half inch while maintaining a very comfortable keyboard.
Regarding abortion and protests what is happening is that one group wants to impose a set of rules derived from religion, morality or whatever reason they follow on another group that demands a more pragmatic set of rules that's utterly offensive to the first group.
There are proper channels to change laws and street protests are not one of them. If there are street protests it is either because those channels have failed, do not exist at all and/or citizens are not aware of them (in which case other mechanisms failed) or this minority is demanding more representation to its interests than their numbers really deserve. In other words, they are sore losers. If their numbers warrant changes in legislation, their representatives will speak on their behalf.
Almost every legislative house has some space for ordinary citizens to stand and to observe and, not that rarely, intervene. That is a nice place to be if you want your politicians to be aware of what you want. The internet also provides a very nice way to track who voted for what law and so, to guide informed voters.
You may also consider writing or calling them on the phone. It's their job to pay attention and, since your taxes pay their salaries, you should demand nothing less.
If they appear not to pay attention, you may also consider voting for someone who does. I find astonishing how few people are really interested in voting. Of those in the last street protest you saw, how many will vote on the next election?
If that doesn't help either, you may consider running for their jobs.
People should use all other resources before bringing chaos upon urban life.
As I said, it is possible to solve all issues without resorting to street protests and they are not the inevitable sign of a nice functional democracy.
A lack of street protests can mean either one of two things: a very successful system where all issues that would result in street protests are solved within the legal process before they become a real issue or a very repressive society where organizing such protests is a Very Bad Idea.
It's usually very easy to distinguish between both.
It's also very easy to transition from the good one to the bad one.
I would actually like the tidal lock as there would at least be one side permanently protected from solar radiation.
This or a decent magnetosphere that could protect the sunny side - and that could be the side-effect of having a Neptune sized object so close - a molten core and some rotation.
The 2.25G is a deal breaker: It's barely possible to escape our 1G. Those poor creatures, if there are any, will remain stuck there for a long time.
You can get away with little to no penalties on context switches by having a context-file around. This way you keep the top most used contexts on chip and only hit memory when you swap a context to/from memory - and even that can have reduced impact if it happens while you are running other on-chip contexts.
You could also avoid some switching by keeping micro-contexts - separating the context of the various units and letting the software deal with them independently. This way, if you only have use for 5 processing units in your thread, only five of them will be swapped out when the next thread has to run.
Or not. Next thing to do is to read the fine article. I got curious.
If we are considering open-source hardware added to open-source software, do we really need this complexity? Most of it exists to give the newest Intel Core 2 Duo or Opteron the illusion they are really 8088s inside an old IBM PC 5150 from the time they power-up to the time they reset themselves into more civilized modes. I find it very interesting my notebook still thinks it has an ISA bus somewhere within its guts.
The fact that an x86 computer is an ugly hack should not dissuade those who want to design elegant hardware.
Someone should give a cheap implementation of SPARC a shot. IIRC, SPARC is very fast running C code because the way its internal registers are organized - minimizing memory hits to move stuff to and from a stack.
With the current critical mass of free and open-source software, there is little to no need to use x86 processors - a cheap, Solaris or Linux based notebook or desktop would solve a whole lot of problems people use those x86 abominations for.
My 166 MHz Ultra 1 still starts Firefox 2.5 faster than my 800MHz Pentium III. Other than the different processor architectures, I can't explain this difference (of course, the PC is running Windows, but not even that could explain the performance penalty).
I really wish the industry would give up on blue LEDs.
They were interesting once, but not anymore. It seems everything needs one or more blue LEDs just to appear modern - my notebook has 16 blue LEDs scattered on top of it, 14 of them are lit now. It hurts the eye to work in low light conditions.
While the 6502 had fewer registers and instructions, it had the page-zero short addresses that allowed code to be tighter (you could load a register from memory in a two-byte instruction) and run faster. With it you had 256 "near registers" at hand.
I no longer have my 6502 and Z-80 instruction charts that say how many clock cycles instructions take, but I remember my 1 MHz Apple II was faster than my 3.something MHz MSX and that the 6502 could do more per clock cycle, on average, than a Z-80. I would even risk that adding 16-bit integers was the only thing that made the Z-80 look faster at the same clock speed.
The Z-80 had a more complex instruction set, but I find the simple and elegant 6502 to be more pleasing to work with.
And... I have to say it: The 6502 is a work of art and one of the most admired microprocessors ever designed while the Z-80 is something that grew out of an Intel 8080 and Intel was never considered a paragon of elegant design.
And, of course, the 65816 was ugly and 8086-like, but this is another discussion.
They then proceed to castrate all balances and increase their own power by playing the system and other elected officials so that laws perpetuate the new status quo.
This more or less describes present day Venezuela.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if we can make iPods large and heavy enough, people won't steal them.
Just imagine the data capacities we could reach in the 10 kilogram range...
Where are my modpoints when I need them? +1 Insightful.
If I got it correctly, AT&T may still try to enforce their patents under local law by suing the manufacturers. They also can sue them in the US because they are selling devices that infringe AT&T patents to the US.
Again, if I got it correctly, local manufacturers can sue Microsoft for selling them goods without disclosing potential liabilities.
This is one for the diplomats to untangle. Hope they enjoy it.
AIX is every bit as obsolete as zOS.
Not at all.
They are just very stable, very mature operating systems. When you reach that level, not all change is good.
Maybe we could think all of his ashes are still waiting for the right spaceship to take him into interstellar space. If it did a slingshot around the Sun, it would only be better.
I am sure he would think it to be worth the wait.
I think every recent voting machine in Brazil uses a Geode, which is a more modern take on the MediaGX.
;-)
It was not very successful on the desktop, but on the embedded x86 market, it's a hit.
And yes, if I segment the market enough (embedded less than 20 watt 32 bit x86 used mostly on weekends) just about every processor can become a hit.
The IBM Thinkpad 701 had a very clever mechanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_keyboard) that kind of folded the keyboard while you were closing the lid. It sure should be a mechanical nightmare, but allowed IBM to reduce the width of that particular model a good one and half inch while maintaining a very comfortable keyboard.
The difference in face value is not a reason for concern.
A fast change in the exchange rate is.
Issues like these can be solved.
Regarding abortion and protests what is happening is that one group wants to impose a set of rules derived from religion, morality or whatever reason they follow on another group that demands a more pragmatic set of rules that's utterly offensive to the first group.
There are proper channels to change laws and street protests are not one of them. If there are street protests it is either because those channels have failed, do not exist at all and/or citizens are not aware of them (in which case other mechanisms failed) or this minority is demanding more representation to its interests than their numbers really deserve. In other words, they are sore losers. If their numbers warrant changes in legislation, their representatives will speak on their behalf.
Almost every legislative house has some space for ordinary citizens to stand and to observe and, not that rarely, intervene. That is a nice place to be if you want your politicians to be aware of what you want. The internet also provides a very nice way to track who voted for what law and so, to guide informed voters.
You may also consider writing or calling them on the phone. It's their job to pay attention and, since your taxes pay their salaries, you should demand nothing less.
If they appear not to pay attention, you may also consider voting for someone who does. I find astonishing how few people are really interested in voting. Of those in the last street protest you saw, how many will vote on the next election?
If that doesn't help either, you may consider running for their jobs.
People should use all other resources before bringing chaos upon urban life.
As I said, it is possible to solve all issues without resorting to street protests and they are not the inevitable sign of a nice functional democracy.
The oil companies have really deep pockets. Together, they can hold an almost infinite number of politicians.
I must disagree.
A lack of street protests can mean either one of two things: a very successful system where all issues that would result in street protests are solved within the legal process before they become a real issue or a very repressive society where organizing such protests is a Very Bad Idea.
It's usually very easy to distinguish between both.
It's also very easy to transition from the good one to the bad one.
Argh! Thanks for reminding me what it really means to be PC compatible...
Does a MacBook have an 8042/8742 built into them somewhere?
Of course, from the point of view of someone in your way, you would take far too long to hit the brakes...
I would actually like the tidal lock as there would at least be one side permanently protected from solar radiation.
This or a decent magnetosphere that could protect the sunny side - and that could be the side-effect of having a Neptune sized object so close - a molten core and some rotation.
The 2.25G is a deal breaker: It's barely possible to escape our 1G. Those poor creatures, if there are any, will remain stuck there for a long time.
You can get away with little to no penalties on context switches by having a context-file around. This way you keep the top most used contexts on chip and only hit memory when you swap a context to/from memory - and even that can have reduced impact if it happens while you are running other on-chip contexts.
You could also avoid some switching by keeping micro-contexts - separating the context of the various units and letting the software deal with them independently. This way, if you only have use for 5 processing units in your thread, only five of them will be swapped out when the next thread has to run.
Or not. Next thing to do is to read the fine article. I got curious.
By settling, Apple gives 20M for the guys to go after Microsoft in a very high profile case.
Not a bad deal, IMHO. Much better than spending more than 20M in court defending from this patent as it could be used against Microsoft in the future.
I got your point, but I was not even talking bout this.
I was wondering why the hell we still have a PC inside an AT inside a 386 inside a lot of other things up to a recent x86 processor.
Do we really still need to boot PC DOS 1.0 and run Wordstar?
If we are considering open-source hardware added to open-source software, do we really need this complexity? Most of it exists to give the newest Intel Core 2 Duo or Opteron the illusion they are really 8088s inside an old IBM PC 5150 from the time they power-up to the time they reset themselves into more civilized modes. I find it very interesting my notebook still thinks it has an ISA bus somewhere within its guts.
The fact that an x86 computer is an ugly hack should not dissuade those who want to design elegant hardware.
Pad2Pad is great. My only complaint is (really) that it doesn't run well under Wine.
That's too bad. I would like to build a memory expansion for my trusty IBM z-50...
Someone should give a cheap implementation of SPARC a shot. IIRC, SPARC is very fast running C code because the way its internal registers are organized - minimizing memory hits to move stuff to and from a stack.
With the current critical mass of free and open-source software, there is little to no need to use x86 processors - a cheap, Solaris or Linux based notebook or desktop would solve a whole lot of problems people use those x86 abominations for.
My 166 MHz Ultra 1 still starts Firefox 2.5 faster than my 800MHz Pentium III. Other than the different processor architectures, I can't explain this difference (of course, the PC is running Windows, but not even that could explain the performance penalty).
I really wish the industry would give up on blue LEDs.
They were interesting once, but not anymore. It seems everything needs one or more blue LEDs just to appear modern - my notebook has 16 blue LEDs scattered on top of it, 14 of them are lit now. It hurts the eye to work in low light conditions.
Are the white ones so much more expensive?
While the 6502 had fewer registers and instructions, it had the page-zero short addresses that allowed code to be tighter (you could load a register from memory in a two-byte instruction) and run faster. With it you had 256 "near registers" at hand.
I no longer have my 6502 and Z-80 instruction charts that say how many clock cycles instructions take, but I remember my 1 MHz Apple II was faster than my 3.something MHz MSX and that the 6502 could do more per clock cycle, on average, than a Z-80. I would even risk that adding 16-bit integers was the only thing that made the Z-80 look faster at the same clock speed.
The Z-80 had a more complex instruction set, but I find the simple and elegant 6502 to be more pleasing to work with.
And... I have to say it: The 6502 is a work of art and one of the most admired microprocessors ever designed while the Z-80 is something that grew out of an Intel 8080 and Intel was never considered a paragon of elegant design.
And, of course, the 65816 was ugly and 8086-like, but this is another discussion.
Shh... I was trying hard not to Godwin-down this thread...
Many dictators start by being elected.
They then proceed to castrate all balances and increase their own power by playing the system and other elected officials so that laws perpetuate the new status quo.
This more or less describes present day Venezuela.
How long until a botnet become sentient and decides eradicate humanity? ;-)
I keep telling people those Windows machines are dangerous. This puts them on a whole new scale.