Putting a bunch of astronauts in a pressurised, pure oxygen environment with unshielded electrical equipment and lots of highly flammable material seems pretty dangerous too.
Changing the design of the door so it can't be opened to coincide with this 'test' seems pretty dangerous as well.
Deliberately fitting under-engineered seals to booster rockets, assuming they would fail but hoping you'd be lucky is pretty damn dangerous too.
So if NASA have problems with 'crackers', then i'd say thats the least of their problems.
Sure, but when youre stuck with a sys admin who 'just doesn't feel comfortable' working with anything that doesn't have a big, thorny Microsoft butt-plug attached to it, 'bad network grammar' seems to be a minor problem.
If it was up to me, i would simply remove MS Proxy Server 2 and replace it with a Linux (maybe BSD) box running ipchains (or the BSD equivalent) and squid. I would do it on a smaller box, for less money, and it would perform better, be more transparent to the users, support more OSes, and need very little maintenance.
I've told my sys admin all of this, and he thinks it would be a good idea, but basically, he's afraid of what happens when you try and remove that barbed butt-plug.
Its been jammed tightly up his ass for years, and it's working its way slowly towards the brain.
I presumed this just wouldn't work, but now i think about it, it *should* work fine.
A bit more network traffic is a small price to pay for feeling at home on my computer again.
Thanks
Re:For those of you who have never heard of blende
on
Blender Goes Freeware
·
· Score: 1
Then you haven't toyed with Max/Lightwave enough to know that Blender, in it's current incarnation, offers little in the way of competition.
I have used Blender, and seen it make some good progress from its earlier versions. I think it has a bright future, and i am keen to use it myself, but theres just no way it can currently replace my 3D tools. (Lightwave, Hashs Animation Master)
The animation tools aren't intuitive at all, the modelling tools leave a hell of a lot to be desired - NURBS/Splines are next to useless for complex work without blends/trims, and theres no support for subdivision-surface modelling/animation in any useful form (sure you can subdivide a model, but then youre stuck with that complex polygonal geometry, and can't manipulate the original 'cage' object.
The renderer is just plain bad compared to Max, and way, way behind Lightwave's awesome renderer. RIB output for BMRT would be good.
What blender needs is to concentrate on a market, like game modelling/animation (this is, apparently, exactly what they are doing) and provide specialised tools for this market.
What i want to see is the following: (in no particular order)
Cycle-based animation tools. Make it simpler to create seamless walk, fight, die cycles in Blender than in any other package. IK would be nice, but not essential, as i would prefer to have a great cycle editor, even if i was restricted to FK.
Subdivision Surfaces - Model and animate with low-res cages and output multi-resolution meshes for game content. Ditch Splines/NURBS etc, cos they basically suck, especially for animation.
UV Mapping - Be able to unwrap meshes for painting in the GIMP etc. Procedural textures are next-to-useless for game stuff, so don't focus on them.
When you select an object, have move/rotate/scale tools accessible from a wireframe globe that appears at the objects center (A/W has a name for this but i forget it)
Onion skin - be able to show next/previous frames of an animation sequence 'ghosted' in the view window.
Interpolation - have multiple methods of angle interpolation. i.e. Avoid gimbal lock at all costs. Be able to easily toggle between rotating an object in local and world coordinates.
Object morphing tied to the skeleton- be able to edit an object at vertex level, and tie those changes to the rotation/translation/scale of a bone. i.e. for bulging muscles, good looking joints that deform smoothly over a wide range of motion.
Realtime playback - be able to preview animations in realtime smoothly with a variable frame rate. Be able to selectively toggle GL/Wireframe for groups of objects. (blender may already support this)
If blender had all that stuff, then it would be really useful to me, and to a lot of other people too.
I read somewhere that a good deal of Berlin's drawing is done via OpenGL.
Does this mean that, on a linux machine with robust hardware OpenGL (not really a reality now, except maybe with a new SGI workstation) that my OpenGL card's T&L engine would conceivably be able to take all the load of drawing windows etc off the CPU? Not that it takes all that much CPU power now, but more free CPU is always good.
That they could be beautifully textured, moved 'in' and 'out' of the screen to give a real sense of depth with 'proper' depth-cueing and fog effects?
I don't know whether renderman-style displacement shaders are going to be possible in realtime, but that would be pretty awesome... cubic mapped bump-maps go part of the way there, but don't actually deform objects like displacement shaders do..
Theoretically, you could use the OpenGL to implement window stacking etc. With shadows, lens flares and all sorts of wild stuff that would leave Aqua users asking 'how come your desktop looks cooler than mine?'
I'm a bit of a 3D artist (http://hammer.prohosting.com/~ikekrull/), and the thought of having a themeable, pseudo-3D windowing system makes me drool...
(A 'true' 3D window system, in which you can rotate windows around an axis parallel to the screen surface is probably useless outside of a 'true' 3D environment like a CAVE or one of those fancy new DTI monitors.)
This is almost certainly not going to be a reality in the near future with berlin, but i'd love to see it happen.
Maybe if GTK+ was ported to run inside the Unreal or Quake3 engine....
Compared to MacOS X, and even Win2K/MacOS 9, This GUI is, to my eye, quite clunky and downright ugly.
Granted, its in the early stages of development, but it looks no better than any of the other projects like KDE 2, Helix Gnome, EFM etc.
Seriously, i think its time to do away with X for a single-user desktop. Its obviously going to require too much work to make it support drag n drop/antialiased fonts at the lower levels, so thats being implemented in GNOME/KDE etc.
I just hope GNOME is not totally dependent on X, so that the lower layers of the GUI could conceivably be replaced by something better. Unlikely, i guess.
X might be very useful for remote windowing apps, but i don't run any of those, and i doubt that more than 20% of the linux community need to either.
Grow up Jon, If anybodys to blame for the 'mega corporation', it's people like you.
You don't actually think the people who run these companies have the imagination to concieve such grandiose conspiracies against the 'individuals', do you?
This is the stupidest thing i've ever heard. I'm so glad i've put the time into learning Linux, cos at least i have an alternative to this nightmarish mess.
I'd just like to say a big thank you to all the immensely generous and talented individuals who have helped Linux and other free OSes become what they are today, because i'd hate to think where i'd be without you.
Why do we need another standard?? Surely providing a suitable DOM and XSLT specification for XML would be enough. And for gods sake why not just bite the bullet and put a JVM on these phones? And if the CPUs aren't powerful enough.. Then make a phone with a decent friggin CPU. If you can sell an i-Opener for US$99, a Playstation for US$100, surely you can sell a US$200 phone that has an equivalent processor in it. I am thoroughly unimpressed with WAP, especially with the patents etc. I would think that using HTTP and javascript over a wireless link (which has been around for years before WAP) constituted prior art in a big way. IMHO, its basically irrelevant. If i need to port my HTML stuff to WAP, well, i'll cross that bridge when i come to it, becuase it seems like it will be a totally trivial task, and not actually worth my attention till my customers actually want it. Theres nothing compelling about surfing the web on a 1" screen, and its even less compelling playing gay-ass games like tic-tac-toe. Maybe something like a color palmpilot with a decent size screen on one side, a phone keypad/mic/earpiece (with separate LCD) on the other side would suit me quite nicely, but a crappy Nokia cellular with a tic-tac-toe game?? uh, nope..
MS Proxy Server 2 has pretty much been engineered to block anything but Windows-based clients. Windows users get an 'MS Proxy Client' that lets most software, including telnet etc. function fine if you're on windows.
Makes you kind of sick and just cements the notion in my head that MS software needs to be banished from my computers like the cancerous disease it is.
I used to admin a network of macs. When i arrived, they were behind a MS Proxy Server firewall. so no FTP access etc.
I replaced it with a 486-based Linux router that ran off a single floppy. Never skipped a beat, supported all proxy services the MS Proxy did and let the Macs use ftp etc. I use my linux box at home to do the same thing, although there is only one machine behind it.
In my current job, i am also behind an MS Proxy firewall, so when i try and run the BeOS to test it, i can't surf the web or anything. I have a linux box on my desk too, which is also cut off from the outside world.
Unfortunately everyone else in the office uses Windoze, so theyre not too happy with the idea of me replacing the Proxy Server, and our sys admin refuses to contemplate the idea of actually becoming competent with TCP/IP networking or any of the other technologies he works with every day, instead relying on the Microsoft 'Tools' to muddle through.
The only thing Proxy Server does that an ipchains-based setup won't is to forward HTTP packets based on the URL in them - i.e. you can have all requests for 'http://myorganisation.com/images/' sent to one server, and all requests from 'http://myorganisation.com/html/' sent to another server.
Quite nifty, but i'm sure there are free alternatives for this type of thing. I know there are commerical BSD-based firewalls that do this very well.
How come you UNIX users get all the good software?
on
Wine Works Towards 1.0
·
· Score: 1
Dont the Wine developers know that Windows is used by over 90% of computer users?
Current Web Browsers don't even support PNG properly, much less MNG. For christs sake, animated GIFs are still the only way to put animation on a web page without plugins. This is innovation and progress?
in this web-based world, JPEG2000 offers nothing to the end user until their browser supports it, and supports it properly.
So i won't be holding my breath, and frankly, couldn't be much more apathetic about the adoption of wavelet compression, which was invented frickin years ago.
Great, now even taking a website off the planet won't render it immune to copyright lawsuits.
Alteon switches do this i think..
on
Linux Failover?
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· Score: 1
I recently attended a seminar on Alteon's switching gear.
These things have all sorts of cool features and CPU-power up the yin-yang. They also do heartbeat-style stuff and they look like they mop the floor with practically all other switches/routers for performance and scalability. They can do cool things like examining session ids in packets, and 'binding' a client to a specific server for preserving session state. All in hardware, and all in realtime.
The seminar was one of the more informative ones i have attended. Check them out.
I don't work for them or anything, and don't believe everything i say without further research, but you can find them at www.alteon.com
Am i wrong in thinking that a Celeron is using exactly the same technology as the Xeon, but with a smaller cache - i.e. they both have on-die cache, as opposed to P2s (not sure about P3s, do the new ones have on-die cache?)
Cos it seems odd to me that a 550 Mhz Xeon costs about 8 times as much as a 550 Mhz Celeron, even though they are essentially the same design.
Does Intel use Xeon dies with broken caches as Celerons?
The fact that the idiots who make policy for the government with regard to computers seem to favour making it a crime to publish information on computer crime i.e. publishing on the internet the fact that a security hole exists in their OS would be a crime, as well as extending laws for the criminal acts themselves. (Of course it is explicitly legal to tell somebody, or to print in a newspaper that a security hole in said OS exists).
These suggested reforms don't seem to have anything to do with events in New Zealand, but are driven by US and other countries policies.
They seem to favour a situation which ensures nobody in this country actually knows anything about their computers, and then makes them responsible for using them intelligently.
Why don't we just unplug them all, go back to the farm and fuck sheep until our economy corrodes away to nothing, and then our entire country can be bought by some giant US corporation. Yeah, thatd be great.
Of course its in the US's best interests to bog down everyone else in restrictive 'digital copyright' and 'computer crime' laws, while their own government departments openly flout all of them under the auspices of 'National Security'.
And of course US 'National Security' extends to every other country in europe and the pacific where Echelon etc. exists.
This is like the US-led WTO calling for 'Free Trade' and then generously subsidising it's industries so they can compete.
This is like the US demand for India and Pakistan to lay down their nuclear arms when they happily point their enormous nuclear arsenal at Russia.
If our government wasn't so deluded, then maybe this country might stand a chance of benefiting from the IT revolution, instead of being trampled into the mud, like every other small country by the US.
Yeah right... Rendering performance on any SGI system lags way behind what you can achieve with a much cheaper x86/Alpha box.
Show me a $5000 SGI MIPS machine that outperforms a $2500 generic x86 box for rendering and i'll eat this post.
Using a cluster of those cheap boxes, you'll be able to render a hell of a lot more frames for a lot less $$$ in the same amount of time than anything SGI can provide.
MIPS based SGIs are nice for interactive work, but their CPUs just don't have the price/performance to be a viable option down on the render-farm.
SGI ships a box that looks useful to me. Their previous Visual Workstations were ridiculous.
Proprietary RAM, a slow graphics subsytem that was non-upgradeable and you couldn't run standard NT on it.
These things are just standard x86 clones in a pretty case. Thats not necessarily a bad thing.
As evidenced by the success of the iMac, a pretty case more than offsets major bad points like a technically inferior OS. (this does not apply to IRIX)
The only thing that differentiates this box from a Dell machine or similar is that it has OpenGL drivers for it's video card.
From what i read, it looks like they implement their OpenGL functionality in hardware on a custom chip which is a very good thing. I just hope NVidia or SGI can sell these into the consumer space, since i am very disappointed with the OpenGL performance of my TNT2.
I do wonder why SGI are going with Intel CPUs and a crap 32bit PCI bus though. I guess this is sort of necessary to run NT on... surely an EV-6 bus with Athlon or Alpha CPUs would be more in line with the architectural choices made for their MIPS IRIX machines?
Sony release the 'DreamCast Emulator for PSX2' and MS will be real, real pissed when the 'X-Box Emulator for PSX2' is released, before the X-Box even ships.
This just means more money for Sony, since Dreamcast owners will now buy more Playstation Games.
To me, this looks like something of a desparate act.. How does Sega derive any additional revenue from this? I guess they'll sell a few copies of Bleem, but with the current legal climate in the US with regard to copyright infringement etc, surely Sony could claim Sega are circumventing a copyright protection mechanism - i.e. PSX discs are intended to be used only in PSX consoles, and have a special mechanism to prevent them being copied or played in other players. Bleem have already won in court, but whats to stop Sony from re-suing Sega for a similar infringement and winning?
Personally, i think Sega has every right to do what they are doing, but Sony certainly has the $$$ to buy the law, at least in the US.
The previous case was heavily based on the fact that PCs did not directly compete with the consoles for sales - i doubt this holds true with regard to Dreamcast vs PSX/PSX2.
Perhaps i would buy a dreamcast if i knew my warezed PSX games would run on it, since they won't run on a PSX2 until MOD chips or similar devices become available for it (Which is when i'll consider buying a PSX2). I know thats 'wrong' and all, i guess i'm just an evil man.
I'm all for this capability being provided, i just don't see it as being a very pivotal decision for Sega, as it simply cements Sony's position as the manufacturers of the One True Console in the minds of everyone.
You'll be waiting a while for Quake on a 16/20Mhz Dragonball.
The Palm simply *doesn't* have the horsepower to do anything like quake at an acceptable framerate (say, 10+ fps), and i'll eat this post if proved otherwise.
Some subset of OpenGL might have been ported to the Palm, but that doesn't mean it can render several thousand polygons per second in a multiplayer environment.
When the StrongARM Palms become available, then you might see more true 3D apps, but don't hold your breath.
Woohoo! Now I can print out those sexy shots of the cast of 'Friends' and share them with my greedy little hacker mates.
These devices will be able to print out hundreds or thousands of copies for easy distribution via the US Postal system!
Better open every letter and check it in case it contains copyrighted material...
They'll turn off their TV sets!! LOST REVENUE!! LOST REVENUE!! WHy would they sit through hours and hours of boring shite when they can see just the images they want printed out in GLORIOUS PHOTO-REALISTIC COLOUR!!!
I just hope the paper that these printers use will have an MPAA tax on them like audio media intended for recording does.
Slashdot Mirror
Putting a bunch of astronauts in a pressurised, pure oxygen environment with unshielded electrical equipment and lots of highly flammable material seems pretty dangerous too.
Changing the design of the door so it can't be opened to coincide with this 'test' seems pretty dangerous as well.
Deliberately fitting under-engineered seals to booster rockets, assuming they would fail but hoping you'd be lucky is pretty damn dangerous too.
So if NASA have problems with 'crackers', then i'd say thats the least of their problems.
Sure, but when youre stuck with a sys admin who 'just doesn't feel comfortable' working with anything that doesn't have a big, thorny Microsoft butt-plug attached to it, 'bad network grammar' seems to be a minor problem.
If it was up to me, i would simply remove MS Proxy Server 2 and replace it with a Linux (maybe BSD) box running ipchains (or the BSD equivalent) and squid. I would do it on a smaller box, for less money, and it would perform better, be more transparent to the users, support more OSes, and need very little maintenance.
I've told my sys admin all of this, and he thinks it would be a good idea, but basically, he's afraid of what happens when you try and remove that barbed butt-plug.
Its been jammed tightly up his ass for years, and it's working its way slowly towards the brain.
Yes! this is exactly the sort of solution i need.
I presumed this just wouldn't work, but now i think about it, it *should* work fine.
A bit more network traffic is a small price to pay for feeling at home on my computer again.
Thanks
Then you haven't toyed with Max/Lightwave enough to know that Blender, in it's current incarnation, offers little in the way of competition.
I have used Blender, and seen it make some good progress from its earlier versions. I think it has a bright future, and i am keen to use it myself, but theres just no way it can currently replace my 3D tools. (Lightwave, Hashs Animation Master)
The animation tools aren't intuitive at all, the modelling tools leave a hell of a lot to be desired - NURBS/Splines are next to useless for complex work without blends/trims, and theres no support for subdivision-surface modelling/animation in any useful form (sure you can subdivide a model, but then youre stuck with that complex polygonal geometry, and can't manipulate the original 'cage' object.
The renderer is just plain bad compared to Max, and way, way behind Lightwave's awesome renderer. RIB output for BMRT would be good.
What blender needs is to concentrate on a market, like game modelling/animation (this is, apparently, exactly what they are doing) and provide specialised tools for this market.
What i want to see is the following: (in no particular order)
Cycle-based animation tools. Make it simpler to create seamless walk, fight, die cycles in Blender than in any other package. IK would be nice, but not essential, as i would prefer to have a great cycle editor, even if i was restricted to FK.
Subdivision Surfaces - Model and animate with low-res cages and output multi-resolution meshes for game content. Ditch Splines/NURBS etc, cos they basically suck, especially for animation.
UV Mapping - Be able to unwrap meshes for painting in the GIMP etc. Procedural textures are next-to-useless for game stuff, so don't focus on them.
When you select an object, have move/rotate/scale tools accessible from a wireframe globe that appears at the objects center (A/W has a name for this but i forget it)
Onion skin - be able to show next/previous frames of an animation sequence 'ghosted' in the view window.
Interpolation - have multiple methods of angle interpolation. i.e. Avoid gimbal lock at all costs. Be able to easily toggle between rotating an object in local and world coordinates.
Object morphing tied to the skeleton- be able to edit an object at vertex level, and tie those changes to the rotation/translation/scale of a bone. i.e. for bulging muscles, good looking joints that deform smoothly over a wide range of motion.
Realtime playback - be able to preview animations in realtime smoothly with a variable frame rate. Be able to selectively toggle GL/Wireframe for groups of objects. (blender may already support this)
If blender had all that stuff, then it would be really useful to me, and to a lot of other people too.
I read somewhere that a good deal of Berlin's drawing is done via OpenGL.
Does this mean that, on a linux machine with robust hardware OpenGL (not really a reality now, except maybe with a new SGI workstation) that my OpenGL card's T&L engine would conceivably be able to take all the load of drawing windows etc off the CPU? Not that it takes all that much CPU power now, but more free CPU is always good.
That they could be beautifully textured, moved 'in' and 'out' of the screen to give a real sense of depth with 'proper' depth-cueing and fog effects?
I don't know whether renderman-style displacement shaders are going to be possible in realtime, but that would be pretty awesome... cubic mapped bump-maps go part of the way there, but don't actually deform objects like displacement shaders do..
Theoretically, you could use the OpenGL to implement window stacking etc. With shadows, lens flares and all sorts of wild stuff that would leave Aqua users asking 'how come your desktop looks cooler than mine?'
I'm a bit of a 3D artist (http://hammer.prohosting.com/~ikekrull/), and the thought of having a themeable, pseudo-3D windowing system makes me drool...
(A 'true' 3D window system, in which you can rotate windows around an axis parallel to the screen surface is probably useless outside of a 'true' 3D environment like a CAVE or one of those fancy new DTI monitors.)
This is almost certainly not going to be a reality in the near future with berlin, but i'd love to see it happen.
Maybe if GTK+ was ported to run inside the Unreal or Quake3 engine....
Compared to MacOS X, and even Win2K/MacOS 9, This GUI is, to my eye, quite clunky and downright ugly.
Granted, its in the early stages of development, but it looks no better than any of the other projects like KDE 2, Helix Gnome, EFM etc.
Seriously, i think its time to do away with X for a single-user desktop. Its obviously going to require too much work to make it support drag n drop/antialiased fonts at the lower levels, so thats being implemented in GNOME/KDE etc.
I just hope GNOME is not totally dependent on X, so that the lower layers of the GUI could conceivably be replaced by something better. Unlikely, i guess.
X might be very useful for remote windowing apps, but i don't run any of those, and i doubt that more than 20% of the linux community need to either.
Grow up Jon, If anybodys to blame for the 'mega corporation', it's people like you.
You don't actually think the people who run these companies have the imagination to concieve such grandiose conspiracies against the 'individuals', do you?
Is it considered a criminal act under current law to deliberatelym run this program on your computer?
This is the stupidest thing i've ever heard. I'm so glad i've put the time into learning Linux, cos at least i have an alternative to this nightmarish mess.
I'd just like to say a big thank you to all the immensely generous and talented individuals who have helped Linux and other free OSes become what they are today, because i'd hate to think where i'd be without you.
Getting big-titted sluts to do your levels for you instead of actual level designers
Why do we need another standard?? Surely providing a suitable DOM and XSLT specification for XML would be enough. And for gods sake why not just bite the bullet and put a JVM on these phones? And if the CPUs aren't powerful enough.. Then make a phone with a decent friggin CPU. If you can sell an i-Opener for US$99, a Playstation for US$100, surely you can sell a US$200 phone that has an equivalent processor in it. I am thoroughly unimpressed with WAP, especially with the patents etc. I would think that using HTTP and javascript over a wireless link (which has been around for years before WAP) constituted prior art in a big way. IMHO, its basically irrelevant. If i need to port my HTML stuff to WAP, well, i'll cross that bridge when i come to it, becuase it seems like it will be a totally trivial task, and not actually worth my attention till my customers actually want it. Theres nothing compelling about surfing the web on a 1" screen, and its even less compelling playing gay-ass games like tic-tac-toe. Maybe something like a color palmpilot with a decent size screen on one side, a phone keypad/mic/earpiece (with separate LCD) on the other side would suit me quite nicely, but a crappy Nokia cellular with a tic-tac-toe game?? uh, nope..
MS Proxy Server 2 has pretty much been engineered to block anything but Windows-based clients. Windows users get an 'MS Proxy Client' that lets most software, including telnet etc. function fine if you're on windows.
Makes you kind of sick and just cements the notion in my head that MS software needs to be banished from my computers like the cancerous disease it is.
I used to admin a network of macs. When i arrived, they were behind a MS Proxy Server firewall. so no FTP access etc.
I replaced it with a 486-based Linux router that ran off a single floppy. Never skipped a beat, supported all proxy services the MS Proxy did and let the Macs use ftp etc. I use my linux box at home to do the same thing, although there is only one machine behind it.
In my current job, i am also behind an MS Proxy firewall, so when i try and run the BeOS to test it, i can't surf the web or anything. I have a linux box on my desk too, which is also cut off from the outside world.
Unfortunately everyone else in the office uses Windoze, so theyre not too happy with the idea of me replacing the Proxy Server, and our sys admin refuses to contemplate the idea of actually becoming competent with TCP/IP networking or any of the other technologies he works with every day, instead relying on the Microsoft 'Tools' to muddle through.
The only thing Proxy Server does that an ipchains-based setup won't is to forward HTTP packets based on the URL in them - i.e. you can have all requests for 'http://myorganisation.com/images/' sent to one server, and all requests from 'http://myorganisation.com/html/' sent to another server.
Quite nifty, but i'm sure there are free alternatives for this type of thing. I know there are commerical BSD-based firewalls that do this very well.
Dont the Wine developers know that Windows is used by over 90% of computer users?
How come theres no Windows port?
:)
Current Web Browsers don't even support PNG properly, much less MNG. For christs sake, animated GIFs are still the only way to put animation on a web page without plugins. This is innovation and progress?
in this web-based world, JPEG2000 offers nothing to the end user until their browser supports it, and supports it properly.
So i won't be holding my breath, and frankly, couldn't be much more apathetic about the adoption of wavelet compression, which was invented frickin years ago.
Great, now even taking a website off the planet won't render it immune to copyright lawsuits.
I recently attended a seminar on Alteon's switching gear.
These things have all sorts of cool features and CPU-power up the yin-yang. They also do heartbeat-style stuff and they look like they mop the floor with practically all other switches/routers for performance and scalability. They can do cool things like examining session ids in packets, and 'binding' a client to a specific server for preserving session state. All in hardware, and all in realtime.
The seminar was one of the more informative ones i have attended. Check them out.
I don't work for them or anything, and don't believe everything i say without further research, but you can find them at www.alteon.com
Am i wrong in thinking that a Celeron is using exactly the same technology as the Xeon, but with a smaller cache - i.e. they both have on-die cache, as opposed to P2s (not sure about P3s, do the new ones have on-die cache?)
Cos it seems odd to me that a 550 Mhz Xeon costs about 8 times as much as a 550 Mhz Celeron, even though they are essentially the same design.
Does Intel use Xeon dies with broken caches as Celerons?
The fact that the idiots who make policy for the government with regard to computers seem to favour making it a crime to publish information on computer crime i.e. publishing on the internet the fact that a security hole exists in their OS would be a crime, as well as extending laws for the criminal acts themselves. (Of course it is explicitly legal to tell somebody, or to print in a newspaper that a security hole in said OS exists).
These suggested reforms don't seem to have anything to do with events in New Zealand, but are driven by US and other countries policies.
They seem to favour a situation which ensures nobody in this country actually knows anything about their computers, and then makes them responsible for using them intelligently.
Why don't we just unplug them all, go back to the farm and fuck sheep until our economy corrodes away to nothing, and then our entire country can be bought by some giant US corporation. Yeah, thatd be great.
Of course its in the US's best interests to bog down everyone else in restrictive 'digital copyright' and 'computer crime' laws, while their own government departments openly flout all of them under the auspices of 'National Security'.
And of course US 'National Security' extends to every other country in europe and the pacific where Echelon etc. exists.
This is like the US-led WTO calling for 'Free Trade' and then generously subsidising it's industries so they can compete.
This is like the US demand for India and Pakistan to lay down their nuclear arms when they happily point their enormous nuclear arsenal at Russia.
If our government wasn't so deluded, then maybe this country might stand a chance of benefiting from the IT revolution, instead of being trampled into the mud, like every other small country by the US.
Yeah right... Rendering performance on any SGI system lags way behind what you can achieve with a much cheaper x86/Alpha box.
Show me a $5000 SGI MIPS machine that outperforms a $2500 generic x86 box for rendering and i'll eat this post.
Using a cluster of those cheap boxes, you'll be able to render a hell of a lot more frames for a lot less $$$ in the same amount of time than anything SGI can provide.
MIPS based SGIs are nice for interactive work, but their CPUs just don't have the price/performance to be a viable option down on the render-farm.
SGI ships a box that looks useful to me. Their previous Visual Workstations were ridiculous.
Proprietary RAM, a slow graphics subsytem that was non-upgradeable and you couldn't run standard NT on it.
These things are just standard x86 clones in a pretty case. Thats not necessarily a bad thing.
As evidenced by the success of the iMac, a pretty case more than offsets major bad points like a technically inferior OS. (this does not apply to IRIX)
The only thing that differentiates this box from a Dell machine or similar is that it has OpenGL drivers for it's video card.
From what i read, it looks like they implement their OpenGL functionality in hardware on a custom chip which is a very good thing. I just hope NVidia or SGI can sell these into the consumer space, since i am very disappointed with the OpenGL performance of my TNT2.
I do wonder why SGI are going with Intel CPUs and a crap 32bit PCI bus though. I guess this is sort of necessary to run NT on... surely an EV-6 bus with Athlon or Alpha CPUs would be more in line with the architectural choices made for their MIPS IRIX machines?
I am having major trouble with Network Solutions. They just plain didn't send me a username and password to manage my domain.
Of course, they happily registered the domain and took my money.
After 2 weeks and numerous emails and no action i'm pretty frustrated.
I would urge anyone thinking of doing business on the internet to steer clear of Network Solutions, they are pretty sloppy at what they do.
I am kicking myself for registering with them.
Sony release the 'DreamCast Emulator for PSX2' and MS will be real, real pissed when the 'X-Box Emulator for PSX2' is released, before the X-Box even ships.
Revenue stream for Sega??
This just means more money for Sony, since Dreamcast owners will now buy more Playstation Games.
To me, this looks like something of a desparate act.. How does Sega derive any additional revenue from this? I guess they'll sell a few copies of Bleem, but with the current legal climate in the US with regard to copyright infringement etc, surely Sony could claim Sega are circumventing a copyright protection mechanism - i.e. PSX discs are intended to be used only in PSX consoles, and have a special mechanism to prevent them being copied or played in other players. Bleem have already won in court, but whats to stop Sony from re-suing Sega for a similar infringement and winning?
Personally, i think Sega has every right to do what they are doing, but Sony certainly has the $$$ to buy the law, at least in the US.
The previous case was heavily based on the fact that PCs did not directly compete with the consoles for sales - i doubt this holds true with regard to Dreamcast vs PSX/PSX2.
Perhaps i would buy a dreamcast if i knew my warezed PSX games would run on it, since they won't run on a PSX2 until MOD chips or similar devices become available for it (Which is when i'll consider buying a PSX2). I know thats 'wrong' and all, i guess i'm just an evil man.
I'm all for this capability being provided, i just don't see it as being a very pivotal decision for Sega, as it simply cements Sony's position as the manufacturers of the One True Console in the minds of everyone.
You'll be waiting a while for Quake on a 16/20Mhz Dragonball.
The Palm simply *doesn't* have the horsepower to do anything like quake at an acceptable framerate (say, 10+ fps), and i'll eat this post if proved otherwise.
Some subset of OpenGL might have been ported to the Palm, but that doesn't mean it can render several thousand polygons per second in a multiplayer environment.
When the StrongARM Palms become available, then you might see more true 3D apps, but don't hold your breath.
Woohoo! Now I can print out those sexy shots of the cast of 'Friends' and share them with my greedy little hacker mates.
These devices will be able to print out hundreds or thousands of copies for easy distribution via the US Postal system!
Better open every letter and check it in case it contains copyrighted material...
They'll turn off their TV sets!! LOST REVENUE!! LOST REVENUE!! WHy would they sit through hours and hours of boring shite when they can see just the images they want printed out in GLORIOUS PHOTO-REALISTIC COLOUR!!!
I just hope the paper that these printers use will have an MPAA tax on them like audio media intended for recording does.