Everyone mentions the Athlon being at 700 MHz, and how Intel introducing their 700 MHz Coppermines doesn't make them the fastest (in MHz). However, mentioned at the top of the article:
[Intel] said it will unveil 15 processors [...] including the much-anticipated chip family, codenamed Coppermine, with speeds
above 700 MHz.
(Emphasis mine.) Now this means to me that Intel will be introducing either a) 15 new processors 700+ MHz, or b) the Coppermine processors will be 700+ MHz. I imagine b) is correct. However, until AMD brings out its 750 Athlon (and drives the price of the 500 down again, go AMD!) Intel will have the MHz (which is all that rags and marketroids care about) edge.
Slightly off-topic, the new PIII Xeon are codenamed "Cascades." Is this pronounced kass-kades or kass-kad-ees or something entirely different?
...but the Taiwan quake came after RAM prices had been rising for about 2 months.
Back in July/August, I could get a 64 MB DIMM for (canadian prices) $69. From there it went to $79, then $99, and then $130. And then it just skyrocketed to $200+ and then the quake hit (peaked at about $269). Since then it's slowly been going down - about $239 now. This is all for 64 MB of RAM, folks.
There were some theories floating around that distributors were holding back, or that perhaps RIMM (Rambus) production was causing the lower numbers, or any number of things. Personally I think it's probably a combination of greed (christmas season coming up, after all), lower numbers (Rambus, demand) and a little bit of the earthquake - though that might have just been an excuse for RAM distributors to jack the price up.
Anyone else see some corrolaries between RAM prices and gas prices? I just saw gas below 60 cents/litre today for the first time in months. I think both are ripping the consumer off because we've no choice.
It was/dev, sometime in late August. I was very afraid that it had been a malicious act, but once I looked over it I came to the conclusion that it was an honest mistake. The maintainer of makedev just screwed up, is all, and it was fixed the next day, as always.
Yes, I know - Anand's about one year younger than me. Maybe I'm naturally a better writer than him, but I can recognise that he needs to work on it a lot. Michael is better, but both need a good proofreader/editor to go over their work before they post it.
As it is, though, they get good information out quickly, and once you can look past the piles and piles of irrelevant benchmarks and instances of terrible writing, it's a very good site for tech information.
I'm sorry, Anandtech is a good site, but they do not write well. Mixed metaphors, confused tenses, and awkward sentences are the rule of the day there. That's not to say I don't read the reviews with interest (though I do skip over the very long and tedious piles of benchmarking most of the time), but it's very painful reading for someone who knows how to write well, or has read a lot of good writing.
In that case, BP actually is violating the GPL. Corel specifically stated that the beta licensing agreement applied only to their code, and not to all other licenses for the software.
BP does not have the right to not distribute, or make available through written offer, the source code to anything under the GPL which they are distributing/selling. That seems to be something they don't understand, and it should very nicely, but very forcefully, explained to them.
...another 3D chipset ATI will tell us non-MS/Mac OS users to screw off regarding.
Sorry, ATI, but I don't subscribe to your "proprietary technology" anymore. I made the mistake of buying one of your cards before when I didn't know better; I'll not make the same mistake again. There are a lot of cards which are better than yours who actively support free development - like Matrox and nVidia - and I'll not be shackled with your wholly proprietary support - or lack of any support - again.
Back in my BBS days, I was rather naive (to say the least) and wasn't very well-versed in the ways of the BBS. I went to page the Sysop of this particular BBS, and lo and behold! he was there. I proceeded then to have a lengthy (30+ minute) conversation with this sysop, after which I sent him a nice mail thanking him for humouring me (some of his answers were pretty bizzare, so I went along with them!)
It was only after I myself had begun setting up a BBS that I came across this BBS door program. I don't remember what it was called, but it pretended to be a chat program. Basically, it responded to specified keywords with a random sentence from a huge flatfile database, and even pretended to have typooo^H^Hs from time to time.
I then realised that I'd been had!
Some sysop must have been laughing his ass off at this young kid who went by the handle "Orion", chatting away with a very crude AI and being suckered into it the whole way.
I look back on those days and wonder how I missed it. But it just goes to show you that, as much as you might be fooled by a computer, we've got a long way to go before we reach anything approximating independent thought. Personally I don't think it'll ever happen - but it might be neat to be proven wrong.
The point of having well-tested encryption algorithms is that they aren't supposed to have those weaknesses. Using a one-time-pad more than once can give a good cryptographer the method of finding your key (and thus your unencrypted messages) but for "normal", math-based encryption, this isn't supposed to be possible. If it was, we wouldn't be using things like RSA (which, btw, does have some known weaknesses, but hasn't been totally cracked), IDEA, etc.
If Slackware used to include it, they did so illegally. That's probably why it's not in there anymore. Read DOOMLIC.TXT (available in, e.g., the xdoom source, or lxdoom, or any number of other doom derivitives) while you still can; it was a remarkably restrictive license, which pretty much everyone who hacked on it disregarded (and id didn't seem to care). Now that it's legal to redistribute/modify/etc, we don't have to worry anymore.
How does a game engine relate to a programming interface? And who cares that DirectX 7 provides you with the ability to do what DOOM did 7 years ago? The point of having the DOOM source code is to improve and enhance DOOM, not to make new and different engines based upon another engine (though that is a possibility.)
Furthermore, DOOM is completely and utterly different from DirectX 7. DirectX 7 is a library; DOOM is an application. People don't link their program with libdoom.so; they do so with DirectX.so (or whatever it is in the Windows world). It's comparing apples and oranges.
I e-mailed John not too long ago asking about this, as I wanted to package up lxdoom for Debian. The old Doom license expressly forbid redistribution of any kind, which meant that DOOM and its derivatives couldn't be redistributed, even in the non-free section of Debian.
I'm greatly appreciative of this, John. I asked for a legally-able-to-redistribute license and you gave us more than we could have ever hoped. Way to go, id!
I guess that some of that magic cryptography dust must have fallen out of the 'States. After all, we all know that the only people capable of producing cryptography software (and cracking it) are in the United States, right?
And here's where I breathe a long sigh of relief, because I use a 2048-bit DSA key in GnuPG. Even if it isn't true, I'm sure that the state-of-the-art in cracking techniques (such as those used by the US' No Such Agency) can crack RSA 512-bit in a very short time. Yes, I think I'll be using my long keys for a long while to come.
I'm not talking about movie-esque mad scientists. I'm saying that one completely reasonable step, after another completely resonable step, after another completely reasonable step, ad infinitum, leads to something that, seen from the "big picture" is absolutely horrid.
Sure, we don't have much cosmic importance. We're a tiny mote on a tiny planet orbiting a small star on the arm of an average galaxy flying through infinite space. But, another way to look at it is: We're all we are likely to find! We're all that matters to us! If we wreck us, what else is there?
I'm not talking about religion as a reason not to play with life. In fact, I didn't ever actually say that I believe in creationism; truth is, I don't. (Why create a miracle when you can use the natural processes of the universe?) What I'm trying to say is that playing with life and the creation of it - artificially, in a not-too-well-understand manner (sexual reproduction is well understood) - could prove to be disastrous. Imagine, if you would, someone who creates, for example, a Wooly Mammoth from some DNA samples we were able to find. Said wooly mammoth (and some of its kin; we found a bunch of variated DNA, or modified it to be variated [it's a hypothetical situation after all]) breeds, propogates, and starts, say, killing people. We're not hunter-gatherers any more, after all. Those people who were killed would undoubtedly have been, for example, alive, had these not been made. (For a little while, at least.)
Now this is a pretty simplistic example, and not too terrible in terms of human life lost. But how about when geneticists get cocky, and for example, bring back smallpox, or make AIDS communicable by simple air. Not so simple.
I'm all for progress. But we mustn't get ahead of ourselves. For the first time in history, we have at our disposal more than we understand - more than we're mentally and ethically ready to accept. This isn't the sort of thing we can do lightly, because it brings up so many interesting and difficult questions later on. Why did the mammoth go extinct? Was it a climate change? If so, why would it live now? If not, what killed it? Was it humans? Why wouldn't we just kill it again? Could it survive? Why suffer another mammoth to live on this earth when all its kin are gone? Wouldn't that be a terribly lonely existence?
I'm encouraging further thought. Clone a wooly mammoth. Heck, clone a human. Do whatever, and then wash your hands of the consequences - it was in the name of science, after all. Don't accept responsibility for your actions. Or - do accept responsibility, and maybe think "Ok, so we can bring wooly mammoths back. Should they be brought back? I did see Jurassic Park, after all."
That's not a bad question, really. But there's something about playing with life - not just having someone or something's life in your hands, after all then all (carn,omn)ivores would be playing God - but actually creating life that is somehow sacred. For example, I don't think that, given the chance, even the most brilliant geneticist/biologist/etc would want to try to recreate life as it happened on this earth: we couldn't hope to do it better than whatever process brought us here, and would probably fuck it up horribly.
The problem with tinkering with life is that we don't really understand it. Nuclear reactors? sure, we pretty much understand them. The physics of throwing a ball? pretty simple, really, given that you don't want to put relativity into the equation (and who would, on such a short distance?) But Life? That's a bit too steep an order. Whether God caused us to be by sheer force of will, or He caused a comet to crash into the earth carrying amino acids, or whatever happened, God or no, we don't understand the process fully. We couldn't hope to recreate it. It's when you're dealing with things like life and genetics that you start to question why or if you should do certain things.
My opinions on Free Software are well known and publicised. It's therefore, with some annoyance, that I want to respond to ESR on his charge that Free Software "held us back for 15 years".
I ask, held us back against what? Seems to me that many (most?) quality pieces of Free Software were produced before the advent of "Open Source" - before it was even conceived. gcc and the whole GNU project, X, Linux, the BSD flavours, to name a few.
So, essentially, everything we needed was completed before ESR, Bruce Perens (sp?) and their cronies came along and started praching the Open Source mantra.
In my mind, Open Source has accomplished nothing of any importance to us. Netscape said that one of the major reasons for the NPL and MPL release of much Netscape software was because of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" - and, as it later came out, because of Jamie Zawinski's evangelism within the company. In other words, ESR had something to do with it, but Open Source wasn't even around then.
No, I haven't forgotten people like Apple with the monstrosity of a license like the APSL which it peddles. In my mind that shows the negatives of Open Source - that such crap can go on and be accepted and welcomed. Companies should come to us on our terms - on the terms of Free Software - and not the other way around.
Grow up, Eric. It's your New Hacker's Dictionary and all, but I can't help but notice there's an entry for open source in it. Why not tell people what Free Software is? Without it, there would be no Open Source.
However, in a lot of cases, the author has put in a clause which says that the software can be licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2, or (at your option) any newer version - which means that many programs would have "built in" support for GPL 2.1 or whatever.
9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. I suggest, mildly, that RMS releases the GPL 2.1, which defines what "distributing" a program is. I think, probably, that saying that dissemination and use within a company, including possible 3rd party testers/developers would be best. Outside of a company, however, should be considered true 'distribution.'
Of COURSE they have to distribute the source to beta testers. That's under the GPL. However, they can tell the beta testers under contract NOT to exercise their rights to redistribute it.
First, you don't have to release any changes you make.
Second, anyone to whom you distribute any GPL'd software must be granted the rights that you were granted, under the GPL. That means that if you sell a person a CD containing e.g. the Linux kernel, you have to make available the source, either in the same distribution, or with an offer good for (I believe) 2 years.
Third, the rights under the GPL (remember IANAL) do not preclude a contract (ie: NDA) being signed by beta testers. True, the beta testers must have their rights fulfilled under the GPL. However, Corel can have the beta testers sign an NDA which says "even though we have these rights, we won't exercise them" (these rights being redistribution, perhaps modification (though peer-review should be encouraged in this situation)).
I hope this clears things up. If you've any further questions just ask.
I assume you don't ever make any spelling errors in Swedish, or French, or English for that matter. These people are based in.nl - English is not their first language. Sure, they should have run it through a spell checker first. But accusing them of being 'kiddies' when they are writing in a second, third, fourth, whateverth language, and doing a fairly good job of it.
I second this. I already *know* that my next computer won't be running an Intel processor. Whether it's an Athlon, an Alpha, or a PowerPC, I'm not sure. All I want is to have some *choice*! Manufacturers, take IBM's specs on the PowerPC motherboard and *MAKE* *THEM*! I know I'd buy one.
.. and that's that my question didn't get answered. I actually really did want it answered, and it was very quickly moderated up to 5, but then some rogue moderator came along and decided to make things difficult for everyone else, and moderated my post as flamebait.
Ok, I'm as sick and tired of everyone complaining about moderation, censorship, and those sorts of things as anyone else. But the system plain doesn't work unless people honestly and fairly moderate things. I guess I'll just e-mail Alan directly to ask him the question.
Of course, now it's up to 5 again - after the questions had been sent to Alan. gah.
Actually, in the off chance Alan's reading this article: Alan, how much of your software development is done because of a contract, and how much just for the fun of hacking?
Slashdot Mirror
Slightly off-topic, the new PIII Xeon are codenamed "Cascades." Is this pronounced kass-kades or kass-kad-ees or something entirely different?
Back in July/August, I could get a 64 MB DIMM for (canadian prices) $69. From there it went to $79, then $99, and then $130. And then it just skyrocketed to $200+ and then the quake hit (peaked at about $269). Since then it's slowly been going down - about $239 now. This is all for 64 MB of RAM, folks.
There were some theories floating around that distributors were holding back, or that perhaps RIMM (Rambus) production was causing the lower numbers, or any number of things. Personally I think it's probably a combination of greed (christmas season coming up, after all), lower numbers (Rambus, demand) and a little bit of the earthquake - though that might have just been an excuse for RAM distributors to jack the price up.
Anyone else see some corrolaries between RAM prices and gas prices? I just saw gas below 60 cents/litre today for the first time in months. I think both are ripping the consumer off because we've no choice.
It was /dev, sometime in late August. I was very afraid that it had been a malicious act, but once I looked over it I came to the conclusion that it was an honest mistake. The maintainer of makedev just screwed up, is all, and it was fixed the next day, as always.
As it is, though, they get good information out quickly, and once you can look past the piles and piles of irrelevant benchmarks and instances of terrible writing, it's a very good site for tech information.
I'm sorry, Anandtech is a good site, but they do not write well. Mixed metaphors, confused tenses, and awkward sentences are the rule of the day there. That's not to say I don't read the reviews with interest (though I do skip over the very long and tedious piles of benchmarking most of the time), but it's very painful reading for someone who knows how to write well, or has read a lot of good writing.
BP does not have the right to not distribute, or make available through written offer, the source code to anything under the GPL which they are distributing/selling. That seems to be something they don't understand, and it should very nicely, but very forcefully, explained to them.
Sorry, ATI, but I don't subscribe to your "proprietary technology" anymore. I made the mistake of buying one of your cards before when I didn't know better; I'll not make the same mistake again. There are a lot of cards which are better than yours who actively support free development - like Matrox and nVidia - and I'll not be shackled with your wholly proprietary support - or lack of any support - again.
It was only after I myself had begun setting up a BBS that I came across this BBS door program. I don't remember what it was called, but it pretended to be a chat program. Basically, it responded to specified keywords with a random sentence from a huge flatfile database, and even pretended to have typooo^H^Hs from time to time.
I then realised that I'd been had!
Some sysop must have been laughing his ass off at this young kid who went by the handle "Orion", chatting away with a very crude AI and being suckered into it the whole way.
I look back on those days and wonder how I missed it. But it just goes to show you that, as much as you might be fooled by a computer, we've got a long way to go before we reach anything approximating independent thought. Personally I don't think it'll ever happen - but it might be neat to be proven wrong.
The point of having well-tested encryption algorithms is that they aren't supposed to have those weaknesses. Using a one-time-pad more than once can give a good cryptographer the method of finding your key (and thus your unencrypted messages) but for "normal", math-based encryption, this isn't supposed to be possible. If it was, we wouldn't be using things like RSA (which, btw, does have some known weaknesses, but hasn't been totally cracked), IDEA, etc.
If Slackware used to include it, they did so illegally. That's probably why it's not in there anymore. Read DOOMLIC.TXT (available in, e.g., the xdoom source, or lxdoom, or any number of other doom derivitives) while you still can; it was a remarkably restrictive license, which pretty much everyone who hacked on it disregarded (and id didn't seem to care). Now that it's legal to redistribute/modify/etc, we don't have to worry anymore.
How does a game engine relate to a programming interface? And who cares that DirectX 7 provides you with the ability to do what DOOM did 7 years ago? The point of having the DOOM source code is to improve and enhance DOOM, not to make new and different engines based upon another engine (though that is a possibility.)
Furthermore, DOOM is completely and utterly different from DirectX 7. DirectX 7 is a library; DOOM is an application. People don't link their program with libdoom.so; they do so with DirectX.so (or whatever it is in the Windows world). It's comparing apples and oranges.
I'm greatly appreciative of this, John. I asked for a legally-able-to-redistribute license and you gave us more than we could have ever hoped. Way to go, id!
And here's where I breathe a long sigh of relief, because I use a 2048-bit DSA key in GnuPG. Even if it isn't true, I'm sure that the state-of-the-art in cracking techniques (such as those used by the US' No Such Agency) can crack RSA 512-bit in a very short time. Yes, I think I'll be using my long keys for a long while to come.
Sure, we don't have much cosmic importance. We're a tiny mote on a tiny planet orbiting a small star on the arm of an average galaxy flying through infinite space. But, another way to look at it is: We're all we are likely to find! We're all that matters to us! If we wreck us, what else is there?
Now this is a pretty simplistic example, and not too terrible in terms of human life lost. But how about when geneticists get cocky, and for example, bring back smallpox, or make AIDS communicable by simple air. Not so simple.
I'm all for progress. But we mustn't get ahead of ourselves. For the first time in history, we have at our disposal more than we understand - more than we're mentally and ethically ready to accept. This isn't the sort of thing we can do lightly, because it brings up so many interesting and difficult questions later on. Why did the mammoth go extinct? Was it a climate change? If so, why would it live now? If not, what killed it? Was it humans? Why wouldn't we just kill it again? Could it survive? Why suffer another mammoth to live on this earth when all its kin are gone? Wouldn't that be a terribly lonely existence?
I'm encouraging further thought. Clone a wooly mammoth. Heck, clone a human. Do whatever, and then wash your hands of the consequences - it was in the name of science, after all. Don't accept responsibility for your actions. Or - do accept responsibility, and maybe think "Ok, so we can bring wooly mammoths back. Should they be brought back? I did see Jurassic Park, after all."
The problem with tinkering with life is that we don't really understand it. Nuclear reactors? sure, we pretty much understand them. The physics of throwing a ball? pretty simple, really, given that you don't want to put relativity into the equation (and who would, on such a short distance?) But Life? That's a bit too steep an order. Whether God caused us to be by sheer force of will, or He caused a comet to crash into the earth carrying amino acids, or whatever happened, God or no, we don't understand the process fully. We couldn't hope to recreate it. It's when you're dealing with things like life and genetics that you start to question why or if you should do certain things.
I ask, held us back against what? Seems to me that many (most?) quality pieces of Free Software were produced before the advent of "Open Source" - before it was even conceived. gcc and the whole GNU project, X, Linux, the BSD flavours, to name a few.
So, essentially, everything we needed was completed before ESR, Bruce Perens (sp?) and their cronies came along and started praching the Open Source mantra.
In my mind, Open Source has accomplished nothing of any importance to us. Netscape said that one of the major reasons for the NPL and MPL release of much Netscape software was because of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" - and, as it later came out, because of Jamie Zawinski's evangelism within the company. In other words, ESR had something to do with it, but Open Source wasn't even around then.
No, I haven't forgotten people like Apple with the monstrosity of a license like the APSL which it peddles. In my mind that shows the negatives of Open Source - that such crap can go on and be accepted and welcomed. Companies should come to us on our terms - on the terms of Free Software - and not the other way around.
Grow up, Eric. It's your New Hacker's Dictionary and all, but I can't help but notice there's an entry for open source in it. Why not tell people what Free Software is? Without it, there would be no Open Source.
However, in a lot of cases, the author has put in a clause which says that the software can be licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2, or (at your option) any newer version - which means that many programs would have "built in" support for GPL 2.1 or whatever.
9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. I suggest, mildly, that RMS releases the GPL 2.1, which defines what "distributing" a program is. I think, probably, that saying that dissemination and use within a company, including possible 3rd party testers/developers would be best. Outside of a company, however, should be considered true 'distribution.'
Of COURSE they have to distribute the source to beta testers. That's under the GPL. However, they can tell the beta testers under contract NOT to exercise their rights to redistribute it.
First, you don't have to release any changes you make.
Second, anyone to whom you distribute any GPL'd software must be granted the rights that you were granted, under the GPL. That means that if you sell a person a CD containing e.g. the Linux kernel, you have to make available the source, either in the same distribution, or with an offer good for (I believe) 2 years.
Third, the rights under the GPL (remember IANAL) do not preclude a contract (ie: NDA) being signed by beta testers. True, the beta testers must have their rights fulfilled under the GPL. However, Corel can have the beta testers sign an NDA which says "even though we have these rights, we won't exercise them" (these rights being redistribution, perhaps modification (though peer-review should be encouraged in this situation)).
I hope this clears things up. If you've any further questions just ask.
... is in bad taste. (Um, maybe /I/ should have read this over before posting? heh)
I assume you don't ever make any spelling errors in Swedish, or French, or English for that matter. These people are based in .nl - English is not their first language. Sure, they should have run it through a spell checker first. But accusing them of being 'kiddies' when they are writing in a second, third, fourth, whateverth language, and doing a fairly good job of it.
I second this. I already *know* that my next computer won't be running an Intel processor. Whether it's an Athlon, an Alpha, or a PowerPC, I'm not sure. All I want is to have some *choice*! Manufacturers, take IBM's specs on the PowerPC motherboard and *MAKE* *THEM*! I know I'd buy one.
Ok, I'm as sick and tired of everyone complaining about moderation, censorship, and those sorts of things as anyone else. But the system plain doesn't work unless people honestly and fairly moderate things. I guess I'll just e-mail Alan directly to ask him the question.
Of course, now it's up to 5 again - after the questions had been sent to Alan. gah.
Actually, in the off chance Alan's reading this article: Alan, how much of your software development is done because of a contract, and how much just for the fun of hacking?