Minimum resources my ass! You can get a nice Microchip PIC16F877 for about $5 that will absolutely kill the motorola chip. Yeah, you have to program it in assembler, but that is extremely simple to learn. I picked it up in about 3 hours of playing around, reading sample code and the datasheet. The only other things you need are a couple of miscellaneous components and a programmer (which can be built for less than $10).
Sure there's a way around - you just need to solder a jumper to the mobo. But it's physically impossible to reflash the main bios in an unmodified xbox.
It also had really shitty HTML and CSS support for a looong time. It's still not great. At least Mozilla got rendering -- the most important part of a browser -- nailed down from the start. Opera is still playing catch-up there.
So, someone who knows about North Bridge-South Bridge, 128-bit encryption, bootstrap process etc. (an XBox hacker for you) has less than enuff skills for a word-processor? Crazy.
No, not really. It takes different kinds of skills to do these things. A good word processor requires good program design and planning skills, as well as a lot of patience and dedication to perfect it and do the really boring stuff (i.e. hacking Microsoft word formats or fixing GUI bug). Hell, the whole thing seems boring and often unrewarding.
Hacking the xbox requires good hardware skills and some low-level programming experience, as well as a bit of ingenuity. It requires zero planning, zero design, and very little programming, all low-level. This is a totally different kind of work, one that might be much more interesting and possibly more rewarding. What's more exciting, correctly parsing a Word document or getting the Xbox to boot Linux?
Spending $200 for an XBox - not to play games, but to somehow get Linux working on it is some sort of fun game? Breaking securtiy keys, understanding 600 page books on Xbox design, believing all these cock-and-bull logic of MS losing money and sleep over this XBox - only lunatics could call this 'shit for fun'.
What are you smoking? Someone who would want to hack an xbox would rarely, if ever, play games on it. It is extremely fun to try to get it to do your thing if you know what you are doing. That doesn't only apply to the xbox, pretty much all hardware is like that. Hell, part of the fun comes from the fact that there are no 600-page books about xbox design.
Also, hacking rarely involves breaking keys. That's usually the best-designed part of the system. It's like trying to break a strong lock on a glass door.
Some of us do it for money, as well as fun.
You would earn more money more easily if you did almost anything else. It's not a way to become the next Bill Gates.
Judging by your post, I doubt you even nkow the architecture of the thing.
Given that my post has almost nothing to do with the xbox, I don't see where you get that conclusion. You are simply trolling.
There are many aspects to free software. They also contribute -- who use, send bug reports, a few dollars and help other misguided folk from wasting their talents and energy from promoting proprietary shit.
People will do what they want and you are not going to change that. Calling other people "misguided" for contributing to a free project is a little immature. Many successful free software projects are someone's hobby. Do you also criticize model rocket enthusiasts because you think model trains are more useful?
Have you actually TRIED using freenet? The network is totally busted. It's written in JAVA, for fuck's sake. I haven't seen anything yet that worked well that was written in java. Not to mention that it is a haven for child pornographers et al. And it might actually store child porn on your hard drive. Finally, it doesn't have the most basic p2p network capability: searching. Basically, avoid freenet like the plague.
Better contribute to some useful GNU projects, such as AbiWord - there's many of them out there that need attention.
Why the hell don't YOU contribute? Everyone loves to spout off, but few people have the necessary skills. I doubt that anyone working on xbox-linux would have both the skills and the interest to work on Abiword. You do realize that people do this shit for fun, right? If I can have fun improving abiword, I'll do it. If I can have more fun hacking the xbox (a decidedly more interesting activity), then I'll do that. Shut up, stop bitching, read a programming book, and start contributing yourself. That's how free software works.
What the fuck are you talking about? You can't sell stuff with strings attached. With software, you OWN the disc, and you can do whatever with it (just not the bits that are on it). With hardware, you OWN it. It's yours. There may be patents protecting it and copyright protecting any embedded software, but the hardware cannot come with a license, because it's SOLD. You don't lease an xbox, you BUY an xbox.
When I am on a dialup connection, I pay for the time I am connected.
This isn't the case in the US and many other countries that have gone to flat-rate Internet access. If spam is such a big problem for you, why don't you get your ISP to install a filter so you don't have to download it? After all, the admins spend time battling spam, right?
Have you any idea how much time they spend battling spam?
Yes. I know several network admins and they spend exactly ZERO time battling spam. It's very easy to lock down a network so that there is no outgoing spam, and blocking incoming spam is not their problem.
Without spam, your connection might even have been cheaper because bandwidth cost would have gone down!
Why would bandwidth cost have gone down? It would have remained the same. The ISP might shave a few dollars off the cost of their connection, but it won't be passed on to the consumer.
You have the nerve to trivialize a problem which wastes millions of people's time, money and bandwidth.
Here's one such problem: Slashdot. It wastes people's time, money, and bandwidth (like what I'm doing right now). Yet people still use it. I guess the three aren't such precious resources, are they?
Damn, my site is in English only. I AM DISCRIMINATING AGAINST THOSE WHO DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH!
Anyone can learn English. A disabled person usually can't overcome his/her disability.
If I run a site, who says I have an obligation to give anyone access to my site? I can block whoever I want to block.
Actually, there are laws to prevent that kind of thing if you are in the US. Especially discriminating against the disabled -- ever hear of the ADA? Granted, it hasn't been applied to the web much yet, but there's no reason it couldn't.
And here you come, Mr. spam apologist, blaming sites for trying to prevent spam.
Where'd you get that one from? I don't blame sites for trying to prevent spam. I blame them (and the parent poster) for being selfish and ignorant.
Spam leads to these countermeasures, which inconveniences blind people. But then you call spam a minor inconvenience. In other words, you are the one trivializing the problems blind people are facing.
That's one astounding leap of logic there. First, I'm not trivializing the problems blind people are facing. I'm pointing out that many of them are due to idiots who come up with excessive security measures to cure a minor problem.
And what if the site didn't use anti-spam measures? Maybe it would go out of business. And then no one would be able to use its services. Maybe that is a better option to you?
That is indeed a better option. Then, people might actually care.... you are the one trivializing the spam problem...
How big of a problem IS it? Unless you are a retarded AOL user who puts his real email address into every porno site, you aren't going to receive much of it. I get maybe two spams a week, which Mozilla successfully filters before I even see them. And that's with my email posted on all kinds of mailing lists that are easily searchable from google.
Even if you get a few dozen spams a week, it's not much of a problem. Oh well, you have to spend a couple of minutes deleting it. Too fucking bad. I think you can make a case that junk postal mail costs you money, too -- after all, you have to throw it away and most people pay for garbage collection. It's just that there's such an imperceptibly small amount of money involved that nobody will ever care about it except a few rabid slashdotters.
If anyone is in favor of discrimination here, it would be you.
And I'm discriminating against whom? Where the hell did you get that idea?
Let's see here... We have tons of spam (a minor inconvenience, if anything) versus discriminating against a group of people. You are in favor of discrimination, which is extremely selfish and egotistic. What the hell makes you better than a person in a wheelchair, anyway?
I would really find it amusing if you got permanently paralyzed and had to ride around in a wheelchair. Or lost your vision. I think you would change your tune pretty damn fast.
Also, I don't see why the hell Slashdotters are so upset about spam. It's really not much of a problem for most people, given that we now have fairly nice filters that manage to virtually eliminate it. Please don't tell me it costs anything extra for the ISP to receive more e-mail. If it did, running a mailing list would be prohibitively expensive.
Also, I would want to see a spammer that uses OCR or speech recognition to mass-register accounts. After all, you don't need thousands of accounts and you can simply sit a human down and have them type the text on the images (or listen to the audio). You could easily register a few hundred accounts that way. Besides, most spam is now sent through hijacked servers, not free email services.
Sorry, but there are no international agreements regarding unlicensed spectrum. Unlicensed use of the 2.4GHz band is a privilege, not a right, and is permitted only in the US and a few other countries. The FRS walkie-talkies are a purely US thing, and are illegal to use in most other countries. Hell, many countries confiscate them (and other unapproved RF equipment) at the border.
The reason boycotts are seldom resorted to is because their effectiveness is equal to zero. Businesses won't give a flying fuck if a CD manufacturer refused to press someone's CDs because they weren't sure of the copyright status. It's a perfectly valid reason, anyway, and I don't see why the hell Slashdotters are getting so upset with it. If I run a CD manufacturing company, I have the right to reject any and all job offers, regardless of the reason.
No, you (probably) can't go blind from getting it into your eye or breathing fumes. It's not the methanol that's so toxic, it's the byproducts which are formed when it's digested (like formaldehyde). Virtually all methanol poisoning cases occur when people substitute it for ethanol and drink it.
Actually, the libraries don't lose ALL government funding, just the computer improvement money. My city's medium-sized library gets only about $5K a year (and that's with 50-80 computers), and they are likely to reject the filters (since it would cost them more money to install them).
The technology you are using to put your ill-formed thoughts onto the Internet mainly comes from semiconductor devices invented for the first aerospace applications where weight and space were at extreme premiums.
Integrated circuits are really an extension of transistor technology, which was invented by Bell Labs. I don't think the aerospace program had much to do with them.
However, it's difficult for me to believe that they could have fudged the systems to such an extent that the G5 is twice as fast in Photoshop and Mathematica.
If Photoshop and Mathematica were a realistic set of applications, I would have agreed with you. They are not. Photoshop has always been known to be optimized for Macs. With Mathematica, everything depends on the problem you are solving. Clearly, Apple picked two quite odd apps which were known to run faster. I'm sure this is in no way representative of the actual peformance.
Read the testing methodology in the Veritest whitepaper. The test was as fair as it could have been.
No, it's not. That would be like benchmarking videocards in 16-color mode. It's not a realistic test, so the results cannot be trusted. Besides, why would you turn off features that greatly increase performance other than to cheat in the test?
The only two relevant metrics here are: a) performance alone b) price/performance
The Apple loses on both of these. It's not only slower, but also more expensive. I don't see how there's a "clock speed handicap" -- nobody forced Apple to make them so slow.
As long as no two processes want to do something at the same time, two processors indeed won't gain you anything.
You do realize that computers have shared RAM, right? They can't access it at the same time. They also have shared hard drives, video memory, and pretty much everything else. This extra overhead pretty much kills any speed advantage you may get from 2 procs. Almost always, a single processor with a 2x higher clockspeed is significantly faster than a box with two slower processors. The only time you might get an advantage is if you are doing intensive calculations with zero I/O. But that's almost never the case in real-world usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Minimum resources my ass! You can get a nice Microchip PIC16F877 for about $5 that will absolutely kill the motorola chip. Yeah, you have to program it in assembler, but that is extremely simple to learn. I picked it up in about 3 hours of playing around, reading sample code and the datasheet. The only other things you need are a couple of miscellaneous components and a programmer (which can be built for less than $10).
Sure there's a way around - you just need to solder a jumper to the mobo. But it's physically impossible to reflash the main bios in an unmodified xbox.
It also had really shitty HTML and CSS support for a looong time. It's still not great. At least Mozilla got rendering -- the most important part of a browser -- nailed down from the start. Opera is still playing catch-up there.
You never had to patch the Linux kernel to get ALSA. It could easily be compiled separately.
So, someone who knows about North Bridge-South Bridge, 128-bit encryption, bootstrap process etc. (an XBox hacker for you) has less than enuff skills for a word-processor? Crazy.
No, not really. It takes different kinds of skills to do these things. A good word processor requires good program design and planning skills, as well as a lot of patience and dedication to perfect it and do the really boring stuff (i.e. hacking Microsoft word formats or fixing GUI bug). Hell, the whole thing seems boring and often unrewarding.
Hacking the xbox requires good hardware skills and some low-level programming experience, as well as a bit of ingenuity. It requires zero planning, zero design, and very little programming, all low-level. This is a totally different kind of work, one that might be much more interesting and possibly more rewarding. What's more exciting, correctly parsing a Word document or getting the Xbox to boot Linux?
Spending $200 for an XBox - not to play games, but to somehow get Linux working on it is some sort of fun game? Breaking securtiy keys, understanding 600 page books on Xbox design, believing all these cock-and-bull logic of MS losing money and sleep over this XBox - only lunatics could call this 'shit for fun'.
What are you smoking? Someone who would want to hack an xbox would rarely, if ever, play games on it. It is extremely fun to try to get it to do your thing if you know what you are doing. That doesn't only apply to the xbox, pretty much all hardware is like that. Hell, part of the fun comes from the fact that there are no 600-page books about xbox design.
Also, hacking rarely involves breaking keys. That's usually the best-designed part of the system. It's like trying to break a strong lock on a glass door.
Some of us do it for money, as well as fun.
You would earn more money more easily if you did almost anything else. It's not a way to become the next Bill Gates.
Judging by your post, I doubt you even nkow the architecture of the thing.
Given that my post has almost nothing to do with the xbox, I don't see where you get that conclusion. You are simply trolling.
There are many aspects to free software. They also contribute -- who use, send bug reports, a few dollars and help other misguided folk from wasting their talents and energy from promoting proprietary shit.
People will do what they want and you are not going to change that. Calling other people "misguided" for contributing to a free project is a little immature. Many successful free software projects are someone's hobby. Do you also criticize model rocket enthusiasts because you think model trains are more useful?
You can't flash the bios. That's disabled in hardware.
Have you actually TRIED using freenet? The network is totally busted. It's written in JAVA, for fuck's sake. I haven't seen anything yet that worked well that was written in java. Not to mention that it is a haven for child pornographers et al. And it might actually store child porn on your hard drive. Finally, it doesn't have the most basic p2p network capability: searching. Basically, avoid freenet like the plague.
Better contribute to some useful GNU projects, such as AbiWord - there's many of them out there that need attention.
Why the hell don't YOU contribute? Everyone loves to spout off, but few people have the necessary skills. I doubt that anyone working on xbox-linux would have both the skills and the interest to work on Abiword. You do realize that people do this shit for fun, right? If I can have fun improving abiword, I'll do it. If I can have more fun hacking the xbox (a decidedly more interesting activity), then I'll do that. Shut up, stop bitching, read a programming book, and start contributing yourself. That's how free software works.
What the fuck are you talking about? You can't sell stuff with strings attached. With software, you OWN the disc, and you can do whatever with it (just not the bits that are on it). With hardware, you OWN it. It's yours. There may be patents protecting it and copyright protecting any embedded software, but the hardware cannot come with a license, because it's SOLD. You don't lease an xbox, you BUY an xbox.
And, where can I get one for $179.99? With a case, a hard drive and a Geforce 3 video card?
When I am on a dialup connection, I pay for the time I am connected.
This isn't the case in the US and many other countries that have gone to flat-rate Internet access. If spam is such a big problem for you, why don't you get your ISP to install a filter so you don't have to download it? After all, the admins spend time battling spam, right?
Have you any idea how much time they spend battling spam?
Yes. I know several network admins and they spend exactly ZERO time battling spam. It's very easy to lock down a network so that there is no outgoing spam, and blocking incoming spam is not their problem.
Without spam, your connection might even have been cheaper because bandwidth cost would have gone down!
Why would bandwidth cost have gone down? It would have remained the same. The ISP might shave a few dollars off the cost of their connection, but it won't be passed on to the consumer.
You have the nerve to trivialize a problem which wastes millions of people's time, money and bandwidth.
Here's one such problem: Slashdot. It wastes people's time, money, and bandwidth (like what I'm doing right now). Yet people still use it. I guess the three aren't such precious resources, are they?
Damn, my site is in English only. I AM DISCRIMINATING AGAINST THOSE WHO DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH!
... you are the one trivializing the spam problem ...
Anyone can learn English. A disabled person usually can't overcome his/her disability.
If I run a site, who says I have an obligation to give anyone access to my site? I can block whoever I want to block.
Actually, there are laws to prevent that kind of thing if you are in the US. Especially discriminating against the disabled -- ever hear of the ADA? Granted, it hasn't been applied to the web much yet, but there's no reason it couldn't.
And here you come, Mr. spam apologist, blaming sites for trying to prevent spam.
Where'd you get that one from? I don't blame sites for trying to prevent spam. I blame them (and the parent poster) for being selfish and ignorant.
Spam leads to these countermeasures, which inconveniences blind people. But then you call spam a minor inconvenience. In other words, you are the one trivializing the problems blind people are facing.
That's one astounding leap of logic there. First, I'm not trivializing the problems blind people are facing. I'm pointing out that many of them are due to idiots who come up with excessive security measures to cure a minor problem.
And what if the site didn't use anti-spam measures? Maybe it would go out of business. And then no one would be able to use its services. Maybe that is a better option to you?
That is indeed a better option. Then, people might actually care.
How big of a problem IS it? Unless you are a retarded AOL user who puts his real email address into every porno site, you aren't going to receive much of it. I get maybe two spams a week, which Mozilla successfully filters before I even see them. And that's with my email posted on all kinds of mailing lists that are easily searchable from google.
Even if you get a few dozen spams a week, it's not much of a problem. Oh well, you have to spend a couple of minutes deleting it. Too fucking bad. I think you can make a case that junk postal mail costs you money, too -- after all, you have to throw it away and most people pay for garbage collection. It's just that there's such an imperceptibly small amount of money involved that nobody will ever care about it except a few rabid slashdotters.
If anyone is in favor of discrimination here, it would be you.
And I'm discriminating against whom? Where the hell did you get that idea?
x
Let's see here... We have tons of spam (a minor inconvenience, if anything) versus discriminating against a group of people. You are in favor of discrimination, which is extremely selfish and egotistic. What the hell makes you better than a person in a wheelchair, anyway?
I would really find it amusing if you got permanently paralyzed and had to ride around in a wheelchair. Or lost your vision. I think you would change your tune pretty damn fast.
Also, I don't see why the hell Slashdotters are so upset about spam. It's really not much of a problem for most people, given that we now have fairly nice filters that manage to virtually eliminate it. Please don't tell me it costs anything extra for the ISP to receive more e-mail. If it did, running a mailing list would be prohibitively expensive.
Also, I would want to see a spammer that uses OCR or speech recognition to mass-register accounts. After all, you don't need thousands of accounts and you can simply sit a human down and have them type the text on the images (or listen to the audio). You could easily register a few hundred accounts that way. Besides, most spam is now sent through hijacked servers, not free email services.
Sorry, but there are no international agreements regarding unlicensed spectrum. Unlicensed use of the 2.4GHz band is a privilege, not a right, and is permitted only in the US and a few other countries. The FRS walkie-talkies are a purely US thing, and are illegal to use in most other countries. Hell, many countries confiscate them (and other unapproved RF equipment) at the border.
The reason boycotts are seldom resorted to is because their effectiveness is equal to zero. Businesses won't give a flying fuck if a CD manufacturer refused to press someone's CDs because they weren't sure of the copyright status. It's a perfectly valid reason, anyway, and I don't see why the hell Slashdotters are getting so upset with it. If I run a CD manufacturing company, I have the right to reject any and all job offers, regardless of the reason.
No, you (probably) can't go blind from getting it into your eye or breathing fumes. It's not the methanol that's so toxic, it's the byproducts which are formed when it's digested (like formaldehyde). Virtually all methanol poisoning cases occur when people substitute it for ethanol and drink it.
Actually, the libraries don't lose ALL government funding, just the computer improvement money. My city's medium-sized library gets only about $5K a year (and that's with 50-80 computers), and they are likely to reject the filters (since it would cost them more money to install them).
The technology you are using to put your ill-formed thoughts onto the Internet mainly comes from semiconductor devices invented for the first aerospace applications where weight and space were at extreme premiums.
Integrated circuits are really an extension of transistor technology, which was invented by Bell Labs. I don't think the aerospace program had much to do with them.
However, it's difficult for me to believe that they could have fudged the systems to such an extent that the G5 is twice as fast in Photoshop and Mathematica.
If Photoshop and Mathematica were a realistic set of applications, I would have agreed with you. They are not. Photoshop has always been known to be optimized for Macs. With Mathematica, everything depends on the problem you are solving. Clearly, Apple picked two quite odd apps which were known to run faster. I'm sure this is in no way representative of the actual peformance.
Nice troll. Actually, OS X is NOT Unix, despite what apple brainwashed you to believe. It's also pretty shitty, given its microkernel nature.
Read the testing methodology in the Veritest whitepaper. The test was as fair as it could have been.
No, it's not. That would be like benchmarking videocards in 16-color mode. It's not a realistic test, so the results cannot be trusted. Besides, why would you turn off features that greatly increase performance other than to cheat in the test?
The only two relevant metrics here are:
a) performance alone
b) price/performance
The Apple loses on both of these. It's not only slower, but also more expensive. I don't see how there's a "clock speed handicap" -- nobody forced Apple to make them so slow.
As long as no two processes want to do something at the same time, two processors indeed won't gain you anything.
You do realize that computers have shared RAM, right? They can't access it at the same time. They also have shared hard drives, video memory, and pretty much everything else. This extra overhead pretty much kills any speed advantage you may get from 2 procs. Almost always, a single processor with a 2x higher clockspeed is significantly faster than a box with two slower processors. The only time you might get an advantage is if you are doing intensive calculations with zero I/O. But that's almost never the case in real-world usage.
How does "each" make the subject plural? Then, "machine" should be plural, as well.
"Each student should bring their own machines?" This looks wrong.
Now, if you made it plural:
"All students should bring their own machines" is actually OK.