I guess you've never heard of PS2 or Xbox, have you? Seems like that's a much bigger market than arcade machines. It isn't 1984, you know.
As for my "insanely bloated spec": I'd rather spend an extra $10 per arcade machine on hardware than spend millions fixing bugs and completely rewriting the software when I decide to switch to a different hardware platform. I'll probably end up with a better game, too (since I can concentrate on making a great game instead of writing math libraries in machine code and worrying about who changed some bit in some register).
If you want to learn theory, pick up a good EE book. If you want to learn practical things (which is what this is), I would think it's better to start by learning something that's actually useful today. If learning how to program some ancient graphics chip actually taught you something useful, I'd be all for it.
Unfortunately, acquiring that knowledge takes quite a bit of effort and it's completely irrelevant today. There are many cool things that are being made today (FPGAs, DSPs, all sorts of microcontrollers, and so on). You could make much cooler things by learning how to use them instead of some primitive hardware platform that's completely obsolete.
second on of the main ideas here is to learn how to be a GOOD programmer, the limitations of the system will force you to code well. this wont be like a desktop where you can have super sloppy code, but Ghz of power to force it to run.
Actually, you got it backwards. On a 2GHz machine, you can write simple, elegant code. On a small microprocessor, you will have to create kludges on top of kludges to get it to run. Your code will be buggy and unmaintainable, with hidden bugs that will take weeks to find and fix.
Good code means code that is completely free of bugs, and easy to read, modify, extend, and port. This can be done only with very high levels of abstraction, which does tax the hardware more.
These days, programmer time is much, much more expensive than hardware. Assembly code tends to perform about as fast as well-written C code, but requires 10x the time to write and debug. C is very close to assembler anyway, and a good programmer will know what the compiler will do. After some profiling and optimizations, it might even be faster than the assembler version would.
Even C is a bit too low-level for many things. Many types of games (such as MMORPGs) are much easier to write in higher-level languages like C++ or even Java. There, you aren't as concerned about performance as you are about rapid development and controlling bugs.
essentially you have to calculate and update the color of each and every pixel you want to display on the fly
This isn't fun, it's a royal pain in the ass (even if you are programming Pong). That's why everyone uses framebuffers these days. If you want fun, get an 8-bit PIC microcontroller and play around with that. At least what you will learn might come in useful someday. I really fail to see the point in learning to program obsolete video chips. Lots of work, zero payoff.
It can take a couple of hours just to install all the patches on an older machine. Considering that there are plenty of Ad-aware-resistant trojans out there these days, it can take several hours to update a machine and get rid of all the spyware.
Sorry I thought you were whining, but I've heard the "Linux vendors should give away everything for free" line way too many times. I like free stuff, but it's not reasonable to expect anyone to give everything away. I'm happy enough they contribute to KDE and such.
If you are rolling out a large number of machines (i.e. more than 20), I am sure Xandros will be more than happy to customize the distro and offer a deep discount. Companies don't buy from microsoft at $150 a copy, either. I think the reason for the weird pricing is that they are mostly aiming it at small businesses.
I am not thinking of deploying it, but I do have friends who run Windows networks and I know the real problems with running Windows.
As far as I see, it is now a lot easier to get into game programming and hardware design today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. There is a device, you know, called a PC. If you can write good games for that, who needs mad 6502 hacking skillz?
Also, the only package that's impossible to solder with a $5 soldering iron is BGA, which are not that popular. I have successfully soldered 0.5mm spacing SMD chips (about the finest they make) with a cheap soldering iron, a homemade PCB, regular solder, and a roll of Radioshack brand solder wick. If you need a complex PCB with lots of tiny plated vias and such, there are companies that will do it for a very reasonable price.
In short, I really fail to see the point of this. It's not very good for learning to program -- why would you want to learn to hack obsolete hardware? It's not good for learning hardware -- someone already did all the work for you! It's not a usable game console. What's the point?
Stop whining. The problem with Microsoft is not the price (which is currently rather low). For a business, the bigger problem is the abundance of viruses, worms, and spyware trojans. Not to mention that users can install a wide variety of unwanted apps on their work desktop, such as Kazaa, IM clients, Solitaire, and so on (this causes liability concerns and can reduce productivity). Linux is a lot easier to completely lock down. Keep in mind that a single computer that goes down costs a company hundreds of dollars (given that it typically takes 2-5 hours of sysadmin time to fix a Windows problem). That's not including lost productivity, which can easily quadruple that.
Also, if you are running an MS OS on many thousands of computers, you have no choice if MS suddenly decides to charge $1000 per copy per year for a business version of Windows. If they didn't have to compete with Linux and Mac, this would be a distinct possibility. At least Xandros has no way to lock you in, given that it's compatible with almost all other Linux distros.
I don't know about vivisimo, but Teoma, Alltheweb, and Yahoo are completely horrible. Some google searches don't work well, but overall it's much better at finding stuff.
What about a scheme where it generates a few hundred bits of cryptographic hash on each boot (hash that can be regenerated by the development station), and just xor the image with that when it writes it to flash?
Ever hear of known plaintext attacks?
Give each batch of cameras a different key, and download the key over a modem when you get a camera in that you don't have a copy of the key for.
Ummm... HELLO? If you make the firmware external, then it's rather easy to reflash it with firmware that doesn't encrypt anything. Of course, if the firmware is encrypted, you're kind of screwed. And besides, who wants to use it as a camera when it's a total piece of shit? I'd rip out the well-documented LCD module and use it in my own projects.
No matter how much you obey the restrictions of the EULA, the licenser can -- at their whim -- decide to terminate your rights to the software.
BZZZZT! Wrong answer. If you agree to a contract, then both parties have to respect it. If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't have any purpose for EULAs in the first place.
That's a pretty long time, especially considering that the heat will not stay in the lake for very long and that the amount of heat put in there is going to be much smaller.
Warming up a lake a few degrees would take a ridiculous amount of energy, more than any city could possibly put into a lake. Calculate it, it takes 4.184 joules to warm up one gram of water one degree C. There are 1640 km^3 of water in Lake Ontario. That's 1 640 000 000 000 cubic meters, which is 1.64 × 10^18 grams. 1.64e18 * 1.0 deg C * 4.184 J/g-degC = 6.87e18 J. This is 1906044444444 kilowatt-hours, which is a hell of a lot.
I can easily tell a 128 Kbps song from a CD using my $20 soundcard and a $10 pair of headphones from Wal-mart. It's not rocket science. If you actually listen to the music you will notice a BIG difference on any equipment. And if you don't care about quality, why not just tape songs off the radio?
I am pretty sure it doesn't matter, as long as I am consenting to carrying a recorder on my person. After all, reporters and journalists do it all the time. There are some states that are not "one-party consent", but many are.
In any case, I am sure the professor in this article cleared it with the university's legal department (as they are generally required to do in such cases), and some random Slashdotter's uninformed legal advice is not likely to be useful.
There is no law that prohibits "invasion of privacy". There are eavesdropping laws, but if I decide I want to carry around a sound recorder, it's my right to do that (in most states).
In an earlier test, it LOST to the other in almost all the benchmarks. Reinforces my point about the usefulness of benchmarks quite nicely, doesn't it?
Well considering that that Intel chip is more than 6 times the price of the AMD chip, if $858 matters to you at all, then AMD appears to win hands down.
This is a SERVER processor. If you are running a server, cost matters very little. Hell, you probably pay more than $800 to your janitor. Reliability, performance, and compatibility are what matters. AMD may be a better value, but Intel has a lot more experience with servers. Do you want to buy a $250K cluster to find out it doesn't work reliably with the application you want to run? All the machines I own are AMD, but I can see why somebody would buy Intel.
But yeah, you're right. *IF* you are running a single peice of software *AND* that software severely stresses a single portion of the system *AND* price is no object, then yes, there is a small chance that the Intel chip will be better for you.
Guess what: that's what a server needs to do, 24/7. Also, keep in mind that you need to evaluate the whole SYSTEM, not just a processor. You can't pick and choose parts, you have to either go with an Intel vendor or with an AMD one. So if AMD has a dodgy motherboard, it's out of the question. And that's where experience really counts.
Well, most newer games are impossible to pirate since they use a CD key to authenticate the game to the multiplayer server. You can, of course, play it by yourself, but that's usually not terribly fun.
That's because it is nearly impossible to do a scientific comparison of two different processors. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a moron.
You have to evaluate performance (possibly vs price) for your particular application. If you need a faster processor for Doom 3, look at Doom 3 benchmarks. If you need to encode video, look at video benchmarks. If you need to do integer computations, look at integer benchmarks. Xeons probably kick AMD's ass at some applications, and AMD might beat the Xeon at others. You can't just say that one is "better" than the other in general.
Dude, if he's using a $35 DVD player, it's probably with a fairly small TV. In that case, picture quality does not matter at all, since even a $35 player will be enough to use all of the TV's resolution. Finally, many people (such as me) do not honestly care about picture quality. Considering that most digital cable and satellite feeds are horribly compressed, even a $35 DVD player is an improvement -- and people happily pay hundreds of dollars for cable and satellite.
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I guess you've never heard of PS2 or Xbox, have you? Seems like that's a much bigger market than arcade machines. It isn't 1984, you know.
As for my "insanely bloated spec": I'd rather spend an extra $10 per arcade machine on hardware than spend millions fixing bugs and completely rewriting the software when I decide to switch to a different hardware platform. I'll probably end up with a better game, too (since I can concentrate on making a great game instead of writing math libraries in machine code and worrying about who changed some bit in some register).
If you want to learn theory, pick up a good EE book. If you want to learn practical things (which is what this is), I would think it's better to start by learning something that's actually useful today. If learning how to program some ancient graphics chip actually taught you something useful, I'd be all for it.
Unfortunately, acquiring that knowledge takes quite a bit of effort and it's completely irrelevant today. There are many cool things that are being made today (FPGAs, DSPs, all sorts of microcontrollers, and so on). You could make much cooler things by learning how to use them instead of some primitive hardware platform that's completely obsolete.
second on of the main ideas here is to learn how to be a GOOD programmer, the limitations of the system will force you to code well. this wont be like a desktop where you can have super sloppy code, but Ghz of power to force it to run.
Actually, you got it backwards. On a 2GHz machine, you can write simple, elegant code. On a small microprocessor, you will have to create kludges on top of kludges to get it to run. Your code will be buggy and unmaintainable, with hidden bugs that will take weeks to find and fix.
Good code means code that is completely free of bugs, and easy to read, modify, extend, and port. This can be done only with very high levels of abstraction, which does tax the hardware more.
These days, programmer time is much, much more expensive than hardware. Assembly code tends to perform about as fast as well-written C code, but requires 10x the time to write and debug. C is very close to assembler anyway, and a good programmer will know what the compiler will do. After some profiling and optimizations, it might even be faster than the assembler version would.
Even C is a bit too low-level for many things. Many types of games (such as MMORPGs) are much easier to write in higher-level languages like C++ or even Java. There, you aren't as concerned about performance as you are about rapid development and controlling bugs.
essentially you have to calculate and update the color of each and every pixel you want to display on the fly
This isn't fun, it's a royal pain in the ass (even if you are programming Pong). That's why everyone uses framebuffers these days. If you want fun, get an 8-bit PIC microcontroller and play around with that. At least what you will learn might come in useful someday. I really fail to see the point in learning to program obsolete video chips. Lots of work, zero payoff.
It can take a couple of hours just to install all the patches on an older machine. Considering that there are plenty of Ad-aware-resistant trojans out there these days, it can take several hours to update a machine and get rid of all the spyware.
Sorry I thought you were whining, but I've heard the "Linux vendors should give away everything for free" line way too many times. I like free stuff, but it's not reasonable to expect anyone to give everything away. I'm happy enough they contribute to KDE and such.
If you are rolling out a large number of machines (i.e. more than 20), I am sure Xandros will be more than happy to customize the distro and offer a deep discount. Companies don't buy from microsoft at $150 a copy, either. I think the reason for the weird pricing is that they are mostly aiming it at small businesses.
I am not thinking of deploying it, but I do have friends who run Windows networks and I know the real problems with running Windows.
As far as I see, it is now a lot easier to get into game programming and hardware design today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. There is a device, you know, called a PC. If you can write good games for that, who needs mad 6502 hacking skillz?
Also, the only package that's impossible to solder with a $5 soldering iron is BGA, which are not that popular. I have successfully soldered 0.5mm spacing SMD chips (about the finest they make) with a cheap soldering iron, a homemade PCB, regular solder, and a roll of Radioshack brand solder wick. If you need a complex PCB with lots of tiny plated vias and such, there are companies that will do it for a very reasonable price.
In short, I really fail to see the point of this. It's not very good for learning to program -- why would you want to learn to hack obsolete hardware? It's not good for learning hardware -- someone already did all the work for you! It's not a usable game console. What's the point?
Stop whining. The problem with Microsoft is not the price (which is currently rather low). For a business, the bigger problem is the abundance of viruses, worms, and spyware trojans. Not to mention that users can install a wide variety of unwanted apps on their work desktop, such as Kazaa, IM clients, Solitaire, and so on (this causes liability concerns and can reduce productivity). Linux is a lot easier to completely lock down. Keep in mind that a single computer that goes down costs a company hundreds of dollars (given that it typically takes 2-5 hours of sysadmin time to fix a Windows problem). That's not including lost productivity, which can easily quadruple that.
Also, if you are running an MS OS on many thousands of computers, you have no choice if MS suddenly decides to charge $1000 per copy per year for a business version of Windows. If they didn't have to compete with Linux and Mac, this would be a distinct possibility. At least Xandros has no way to lock you in, given that it's compatible with almost all other Linux distros.
No shit, some contracts are unenforceable. But you can't just go around revoking contracts as you please.
Are there any technical/practical reasons why this couldn't be implemented in the future?
Yes.
I don't know about vivisimo, but Teoma, Alltheweb, and Yahoo are completely horrible. Some google searches don't work well, but overall it's much better at finding stuff.
What about a scheme where it generates a few hundred bits of cryptographic hash on each boot (hash that can be regenerated by the development station), and just xor the image with that when it writes it to flash?
Ever hear of known plaintext attacks?
Give each batch of cameras a different key, and download the key over a modem when you get a camera in that you don't have a copy of the key for.
Too much hassle, don't you think?
Ummm... HELLO? If you make the firmware external, then it's rather easy to reflash it with firmware that doesn't encrypt anything. Of course, if the firmware is encrypted, you're kind of screwed. And besides, who wants to use it as a camera when it's a total piece of shit? I'd rip out the well-documented LCD module and use it in my own projects.
No matter how much you obey the restrictions of the EULA, the licenser can -- at their whim -- decide to terminate your rights to the software.
BZZZZT! Wrong answer. If you agree to a contract, then both parties have to respect it. If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't have any purpose for EULAs in the first place.
That's a pretty long time, especially considering that the heat will not stay in the lake for very long and that the amount of heat put in there is going to be much smaller.
Warming up a lake a few degrees would take a ridiculous amount of energy, more than any city could possibly put into a lake. Calculate it, it takes 4.184 joules to warm up one gram of water one degree C. There are 1640 km^3 of water in Lake Ontario. That's 1 640 000 000 000 cubic meters, which is 1.64 × 10^18 grams. 1.64e18 * 1.0 deg C * 4.184 J/g-degC = 6.87e18 J. This is 1906044444444 kilowatt-hours, which is a hell of a lot.
I can easily tell a 128 Kbps song from a CD using my $20 soundcard and a $10 pair of headphones from Wal-mart. It's not rocket science. If you actually listen to the music you will notice a BIG difference on any equipment. And if you don't care about quality, why not just tape songs off the radio?
I am pretty sure it doesn't matter, as long as I am consenting to carrying a recorder on my person. After all, reporters and journalists do it all the time. There are some states that are not "one-party consent", but many are.
In any case, I am sure the professor in this article cleared it with the university's legal department (as they are generally required to do in such cases), and some random Slashdotter's uninformed legal advice is not likely to be useful.
There is no law that prohibits "invasion of privacy". There are eavesdropping laws, but if I decide I want to carry around a sound recorder, it's my right to do that (in most states).
In an earlier test, it LOST to the other in almost all the benchmarks. Reinforces my point about the usefulness of benchmarks quite nicely, doesn't it?
Well considering that that Intel chip is more than 6 times the price of the AMD chip, if $858 matters to you at all, then AMD appears to win hands down.
This is a SERVER processor. If you are running a server, cost matters very little. Hell, you probably pay more than $800 to your janitor. Reliability, performance, and compatibility are what matters. AMD may be a better value, but Intel has a lot more experience with servers. Do you want to buy a $250K cluster to find out it doesn't work reliably with the application you want to run? All the machines I own are AMD, but I can see why somebody would buy Intel.
But yeah, you're right. *IF* you are running a single peice of software *AND* that software severely stresses a single portion of the system *AND* price is no object, then yes, there is a small chance that the Intel chip will be better for you.
Guess what: that's what a server needs to do, 24/7. Also, keep in mind that you need to evaluate the whole SYSTEM, not just a processor. You can't pick and choose parts, you have to either go with an Intel vendor or with an AMD one. So if AMD has a dodgy motherboard, it's out of the question. And that's where experience really counts.
Well, most newer games are impossible to pirate since they use a CD key to authenticate the game to the multiplayer server. You can, of course, play it by yourself, but that's usually not terribly fun.
That's because it is nearly impossible to do a scientific comparison of two different processors. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a moron.
You have to evaluate performance (possibly vs price) for your particular application. If you need a faster processor for Doom 3, look at Doom 3 benchmarks. If you need to encode video, look at video benchmarks. If you need to do integer computations, look at integer benchmarks. Xeons probably kick AMD's ass at some applications, and AMD might beat the Xeon at others. You can't just say that one is "better" than the other in general.
Dude, if he's using a $35 DVD player, it's probably with a fairly small TV. In that case, picture quality does not matter at all, since even a $35 player will be enough to use all of the TV's resolution. Finally, many people (such as me) do not honestly care about picture quality. Considering that most digital cable and satellite feeds are horribly compressed, even a $35 DVD player is an improvement -- and people happily pay hundreds of dollars for cable and satellite.