Well, I wouldn't say profit, but banking some of the money (say 10-20%) as a fall-back would be a really good idea. Use it to fight legal cases, use a certain percentage of the interest from it to buy more ads, and let it grow.
*wild tangent, but related*, maybe we could use some of that money to start centralizing Linux and its related software. Pull all of the smaller open source companies into one conglomerant, run everything *sourceforge, bugzilla databases, mailing lists, yawn, etc* off of one server so that absolutely anyone looking for software can just say "Oh, you know what, I want software to do XXXXXX, let's go to #####.com." Currently, the closest thing we have is freshmeat to announce new releases and sourceforge, but sourceforge's bandwidth budget is so limited that searching often goes down, and freshmeat can be intimidating.
One last statement and I'll shut up. Instead of us just listing the features of our software, why not COMPARE the features of our software? We leave so much to the reviewers, that people then would have to hunt down if they want to read it, which in many cases they don't; they just want to know how to make presentations and not pay an assload for the software, and get the same kind of functionality as Powerpoint, etc etc. If we actually advertise all of the functions/advantages Mozilla Firefox has over Internet Explorer, and then provide the user with a nice, clean installation (with Windows 98/2k/XP style waiting screens..), then word of mouth will be a great advertising force. The main thing is, we need to stop letting the software speak for itself: we need to speak for it, demonstrate it, support it, document it, and make it available. This is what ALL good companies do, or they fail.
I know I've posted this before, but how long will it be until Apple realizes what they're missing? Slap that LCD on a current generation iPod (or iPod mini if you really want to make a lightweight device), port QuickTime video to it, and poof, a pocket sized multimedia device that will put most anything else on the market to shame.
I think it's the logical progression to see PDA's start to take on parts from laptops/desktops. PDA's are really the Laptop's of our generation. A USB host controller is awesome because of all of the USB devices that exist. USB Networking is a definite plus, but most everything is going to Bluetooth/WiFi anyways.
Either way, this is a damned cool PDA, even if hella expensive, and I can't wait to see something like this, but cheaper, or any of the improvements from above are added (micro hd, minus usb host controller, plus wifi AND bluetooth, plus quicktime/some movie player).
Well, I never said every SUV is horrible on gas but MOST are, and on top of that, My (soon to be; *shakes fists at parents*) Car is cheaper in just about any way you want to look at it (yes, even maintainance is cheap around here.). Until I see an SUV-gas/electric hybrid, I doubt you'll be trouncing my fuel economy;).
SUVs the way most people drive and purchase them is the problem. They're expensive enough to where people will want them, they're practically invencible on the road *I feel sorry for anyone in a collision with a full-sized one*, and some are even outside of the normal gas economy brackets the government uses to tax cars (Hummer, Ford Excursion aka House on Wheels). These are gross abombinations. I can justify someone having an SUV hauling a boat and a family for a trip to the lake/ocean, I can justify having a small SUV for a soccor mom *note: forrester is GREAT for this*, but come on.. how many people really need those grizzly gas eaters they drive around? Everyone should own a nice car, and everyone should get to splurge a little.. but as their every day driving vehichle, this is absurd. And I can't believe they haven't felt the gas prices at over 2$ a gallon.
Do you know how much energy goes into *name an energy collection technique* (Clue: Quite a lot).
The question isn't how much energy goes in, it's HOW MUCH COMES OUT. The three technologies you name can't produce the kinds of power we need. Wind, maybe, waves, no, plant-oils, only in combination with other hydrocarbons with current technology.
Nuclear energy is the right avenue to take.. but the question is can we do it safely, and will we not just create more nuclear waste? Seems like we could create nuclear devices that never needed to be repowered, since radioactive material stays radioactive for a long long time. But I'm not in the mood to work that out..
Maybe we should look into the big nuclear orb in the sky that has powered life on earth since long before our existance: the sun?
The sun? We've been harnesting the sun for thousands of years for our energy, why not keep going? We know we can grow things with the sun, we know the sun's rays can be converted into heat to turn a turbine, we know that the sun's radiation can be converted directly into electrical energy. From that alone, we have enough to power ourselves for quite a while.. Question is, when will everyone be convenced there is a problem, and when they are convenced, how willing will they be to give up their SUV's?
Yeah, and I love it.. but I have to define so many damned ones that it's almost defeating. I like having the artists in the bar on the lefthanded side which is why I usually define a playlist for each of the genres *if I only have one or two artists in it*, or for the artist's themselves. It's very awesome, and quite effective.
Seems like this is the hot bullet, I'll give it my shot.
RFTA to find out a lot of things like conversation tracking, ease of use, good spam defense, 10 meg attachments, and most of all to me, the brilliant layout of the metadata.
As I stated here, users today are really into knowing everything about that email even before they open it. So when they do open it, they're not surprised by anything. This is why traditional webmail sucks: the spam these days slips right under most filters used by Yahoo! and Hotmail and the big others. It's also a lot harder to know what someone is replying to without having a lot of those ugly "<"'s everywhere. GMail gets rid of the need for that.
Also, if you're a busy person like me, and you don't even have enough time to carry around a laptop, and instead use a computer whereever you go, Gmail is great. This is the advantage of webmail over outlook (Outlook is really starting to close this gap with Outlook Titanium. It's almost the whole feel of Outlook through the browser.) and Eudora.
Google also throws in their great search engine into the mix. "Computer, *churp sound*, give me all emails from this date from this specific person dealing with the Cardassian entrenchment of Yardin-5."
All and all, GMail is what webmail should be. Hey, they're even throwing in a Gig of storage!
Google's trying to have complete immersion in data, and combine with it the useful metadata people are not accustom to, like the easy conversation tracking that I've read about. It just seems like they're trying to push a more database-like look at our data so that it's quicker, faster, and easier to use. And a great way of pushing to that people is having a great large boat of space (1 Gig, with most emails I send and recieve totalling to 50kb, that's a lifetime's worth of email in one location).
Just because you're not used to this presentation of metadata, doesn't mean it's not good. Look at Nautilius' new file view. I hate it, everyone else seems to love it. Just goes to show you that the interfaces really are different from person to person. Now if only GNOME would embody that spirit some more and let me move around my toolbars within applications *shakes fists*. Oh well, can't ask for everything.
p.s. This is my theory on why iTMS is doing so well. You're really not buying a copy of the song , you could pirate that anyways. You're buying a copy of the song with a complete set of metadata, which is really hard to come by over P2P. And it's worth 99c to me to buy a song with completed metadata instead of having to complete it all myself. But once again, iTunes even fails for me, because I need a better way of looking through my artists and songs. I mean the UI is great, but it's just not perfect for me, if you understand that. Just goes to show you how important the presentation of the metadata is (and how Google has always been genius at it; KISSing always (keep it simple shorty;).
the "Trickle Down" theory of CPUs. As seen in the 1990s, Intel would introduce the Pentium XXXmhz as a high end chip, and then move it down the price scale until the Pentium XXXmhz was a lowend chip.
A better model might be 1980s computing -- when "high end" and "low end" systems used completely different cores.
Kinda glad you said this. This is pretty much how were probably about to see business done. Intel first needs to obsfuscate the difference between Pentium M and Pentium 4 to the general public, sorta how AMD named the new-core Athlons "Athlon 64", new-core server chips "Opteron", and they're still working on Athlon XP's afaik. This makes the Low-end chip of the x86-arch, and the high class of the x86-64.
Intel's problem will be making people see that the new Pentium M's are actually faster than the Pentium 4's because of the sequential naming pattern of the Pentium line. I bet someone somewhere is catching hell for suggesting that these "Netburst Williamettes" should be called Pentium 4 and it not be a direct successor of the original Pentium.
The low-end Intel Chips ("affectionally" known as the Celeron [sell-eron]) will now be Pentium 4's, and the newer, faster Pentium M is at a loss because it really shouldn't be branded Pentium 5, but it really shouldn't be branded Pentium 3. It's really a hybrid of Pentium 3 and 4 technology and design, and there really isn't a name for technological hybrids except for.5's, and that's not a pretty name...
Anyways, getting back to the point, AMD will have Operton Verses Xeon (Pentium-4 based Yamhill will probably give the Xeon the much needed 64-bit instructions, the Pentium-4 hyperthreading ability will probably be left in, and all of this will be ported into the Pentium M by it's third revision to try to get a one-core economy back running agian). The Lower end market will see the Pentium M verses the Athlon 64 and the extreme low end will see the Athlon XP-based Duron's verses the Pentium-M based Celerons (and possibly, if they can't get M's made fast enough, Pentium 4 Cellies instead).
Hate to reply to myself, but I was a bit too liberal in my explaining the passing back.. most of the xeon chips were a lot like their normal chip brothers and sisters, except with different cache sizes and different configurations of on and off die caches. Im sure someone could find a better example of past server-desktop handoffs, but I can't think right now...
Depends on how far you want to go back. If you go all the way back to the day of the original Pentium Processor, then yes. But if you go forward to look at the Pentium Pro to the Pentium 2's and the first Xeon's, then you'll see this "passing back" that I'm talking about. Most of their Xeon improvements are actually put into the Pentium !!!, and the Pentium !!! Xeon tested a lot of things out that they used later when they moved to Flip Chip packaging. AMD had the same vision of Intel, make cheap chips, but they started a little late and mostly played catch up. They were never too keen on innovation (I give them 3d Now! and it's extensions, but this only came after MMX, and never got as popular like SSE and MMX did (yes, I do remember when they declared MMX as dead technology). AMD's in the same position as Intel was in around 1996 *which for me, was ages ago, almost 10 years..*. They created their form of the Pentium Pro (P6), the 64-bit x86-64 archetecture. Right now though, x86-64 is too expensive to take home, but is great for midrange servers. See what I mean?
I do this thing all the time, but I never write it down in the form I did today... fun exercize really and it seems that everyone else enjoyed it. Maybe I should do it more often...
Computers took a depressing turn from what I thought they'd be though. It seems as with everything that companies like Intel, AMD, IBM and Sun all turned their backs to innovation and instead went headlong for scaling. But then again, this was actually the paradigm of the time: taking something and making the most use of it as possible (Linux's birth and extension, Microsoft's use of DOS, for computer world examples). More or less the economy of today is geared toward disposable goods because of the saturation of product. Dell boomed as big as they did because they simplified choice, they prodived the durability that Intel's known for, and priced their product as competitively as possible.
We're just now starting to see innovation again I believe, which is good because the durability of a product isn't as important to people now, but the economy of it is. Today, Dell makes machines that fail pretty quickly (the Dell lab at our school has been replacing Hard Disks, Floppy Drives and Motherboards to the point that it's cheaper now to buy a whole new computer than it is to fix an old one), but they're cheap to buy and cheap to operate. This reflects what people want now, verses the durability they used to seek. Markets like today's are geared toward innovation, and markets like that of the late 1990's is geared more to the tweak and ship approach.
But then again, I'm still young and back when the real innovation was being done, I could do nothing more than read about it in magazines and think on how neat the different ideas were. Sad to say I'm only 18 and didn't have the firm understanding of most of the mechanics of Computer Science and how it relates to business as I do today. Hope that answers your question.
How on earth does that defeat the whole idea of checksuming? A "checksum" is defined as A simple error-detection scheme in which each transmitted message is accompanied by a numerical value based on the number of set bits in the message. The receiving station then applies the same formula to the message and checks to make sure the accompanying numerical value is the same. If not, the receiver can assume that the message has been garbled.. When a user wants to download a song, s/he generally wants the whole song, and not just a segment of it. Therefore, the whole value of the song is checksummed, not just the packet. (well the packet is too depending on the protocol, but this isn't what's in question.)
So simply, look at the problem again, and then post.
That doesn't make it any harder to checksum the MP3. Changing the metadata doesn't change the data. If anyone implemented a smart MP3 checksum program, it'd simply remove any ID3 tags and checksum what's left: the actual frames of music.
We do not want this. Please take it back. We have enough reality TV shows as it is, who in the HELL would want them on the internet???
Signed,
Conserned Slashdotter.
PS, please tell Al Gore "Thanks for your brilliant contributions".
It's not only about scaleability. Processors are fast enough; this is evident by companies simply masking the processor's actually speed spec (note: not performance spec). No, the next war will be one of innovation, simply because the market's really tired of the same old thing, just faster. AMD's extension of x86 is the perfect example of this. Even though it's performance is on par with (and maybe a little faster, but not enough to matter, a couple percent, 10 at most) the other chips in it's class (really high end P4's), AMD's selling lots of these chips. The reason's simply that it's something new. Same reason the iPod mini's are doing well, same reason the G5 Macs are doing a lot better than the G4's ever did. The key word is innovation.
Moving a speedstep chip to a desktop is a huge sign of innovation, and of environmental conciousness (if they decide to leave all of the speedstep stuff enabled, which I fear they won't, since they didn't on the Pentium M-based Celeron M's). Having extremly low power desktops will make desktops smaller, which will free up room for a) more computers, b) deeper integration of computers (like the minipcs being used as Tivo's, car installations, etc etc), and c) profit!
It's all around a good decision, and a very predictable one.
C) Neither. More likely that Nvidia will move to the straight CPU market and compete along side of AMD and Intel. They understand though right now the market is bad for that, and instead make great chipsets for AMD (while being the underdogs, they're also a very good ally to have if they actually do attempt to shift into desktop processors).
ATi on the other hand, while they also make chipsets for Intel and AMD, they are much more concentrated on the Video market, and they really always have been (best 2d quality, bar none since a long time ago).
Intel on the other hand, is starting to shift gears to a more mobile computing based company. They know the future of computers is in having them everywhere we go. Now that computers are finally cheap enough to be everywhere, the next step is to have them WITH us everywhere we go. Intel's been focused on Mobile computing for a long time (StrongARM processors, and the -M series of all the pentiums, including the Pentium M itself). Their switch to having Pentium M on the desktop was really a have-to case, as AMD is really starting to encroach on their midrange server and high end desktop markets. They're simply not stupid enough to continue to sell a chip that nobody wanted in the first place. The Pentium 4 was nothing more than a time saver and a way to develop and test technologies that they would need in the future for their server markets. (Hyperthreading was existant on the OLDEST Pentium 4 hardware, though not enabled since it was still very primative). And as you've noticed, lots of the Pentium 4 technologies have already been ported over into other product lines.
AMD is more and more concentrated on taking the server room from Intel. Once they've done this, they'll trickle home just the same way as Intel processors did in ages ago. And they're willing to sacrifice it all on their gamble that the industry won't shift off of x86 simply because it's too deeply embedded. They're not willing to bet on Microsoft and other software giants NOT creating software for a different platform (since Microsoft is really the end-all, be-all for the software), and instead, they embraced this lockin and extended it. The OS doesn't have to be natively compiled and optimized for their platform, and that gives them a huge advantage over the Itanium iron that they were aiming for. When performance really failed to hit the spec of highly optimized Itanium 2 code, they simply shifted gears and aimed it at Xeon instead. This was smarter because they know if they can get businesses to optimize and recompile, Xeon hardware will have to be left behind.
IBM on the other hand, says "fuck everyone else, we're doing it our own way". Working with Apple they developed a platform and got it some market share quickly. Next step: get it more market share by pushing Linux (which is outside of the control of the corporate giant of Microsoft, although this is being challenged by SCO, who was evidently paid off by Microsoft to launch such attacks and alligations). Not that Linux is any faster than anything written in Windows, but that it's cheaper, open, endlessly flexible and faster to update than anything Microsoft can throw at it. This is a safe bet. They're also aiming for the Itanium giant, and have nailed it pretty well with the Virginia Tech terascale project. Many say this is a win for Apple, when really, it's a win for PPC, which is IBM's baby.
Microsoft is really the key card right now. If they port Windows to PPC, it could royally screw both Intel, and AMD out of business. Luckily, Microsoft would take a lot of flac for doing this because of the companies that are so entrenched in X86 optimized code, that moving over to PPC would cost them millions, and they could simply move to x86 Linux instead of the next version of Windows.
So really, CPU's are becoming a lot like CPU's, but the industry doesn't care, and is in a very intersting position with Microsoft at the head. What I'd love to see is nVidia release a chip on a
problem: hash injection. write a program that, when ran, virally or not, would replace the hash tables within the client with bad hashes. this instantly stops the client from accepting any files except bad files. even in a system where the hashes arent held by the user, but the user can vote on good or bad hashes, these kinds of p2p viruses can really cause some serious damnage to the network.
One good think kazaa implemented (and was instantly client hacked for) was that sharers got higher precedence in downloading. They really should take the next step to sharers of good files get precedence. But then you have hacks like botvoting, and simply reverse engineering the protocol used and setting the variable in memory to whatever the top limit is. That's the problem with most p2p systems.
Not only that, media search engines are so centralized if the RIAA giant launches on it, it's toast. P2P is really the only thing that's still legal for trading anything, and everyone knows this. P2P doesn't really have as many security flaws as you think, but it does have trust problems that most other forms of data transmission don't. You can never be too sure who the data's coming from, and whether or not it can be considered good data.
Trust systems could be added to Kazaa or any other network really, but the problem is all the circumventers out there really don't like this, because they want that level of obscurity. That's why we really need P2P systems built from the ground up with this trust relationship in place, like WASTE.
They're going to put an end to what the RIAA's doing with Kazaa and other sharing agents now, or that they're going to extend it to other Filesharing networks? And what about having a decentralized file signature service which checks signatures of the songs against known good and bad songs?
The signing program would kinda work, but it'd have to be more centralized than most P2P networks for security reasons... more of a reason to move to Secure P2P like WASTE.
I completely agree with you except for one little point:
Any technology can be used for good or evil, especially technology that makes energy
Making energy would defeat Law of Conservation of Energy (and most likely Law of Conservation of Mass, since that's how most of the energy we're accustom to seeing is expressed). IANAP, but it really does get irritating to see this in writing... I guess you could reform it as:
Any technology can be used for good or evil, especially technology that deals with releasing or storing energy.
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Well, I wouldn't say profit, but banking some of the money (say 10-20%) as a fall-back would be a really good idea. Use it to fight legal cases, use a certain percentage of the interest from it to buy more ads, and let it grow.
*wild tangent, but related*, maybe we could use some of that money to start centralizing Linux and its related software. Pull all of the smaller open source companies into one conglomerant, run everything *sourceforge, bugzilla databases, mailing lists, yawn, etc* off of one server so that absolutely anyone looking for software can just say "Oh, you know what, I want software to do XXXXXX, let's go to #####.com." Currently, the closest thing we have is freshmeat to announce new releases and sourceforge, but sourceforge's bandwidth budget is so limited that searching often goes down, and freshmeat can be intimidating.
One last statement and I'll shut up. Instead of us just listing the features of our software, why not COMPARE the features of our software? We leave so much to the reviewers, that people then would have to hunt down if they want to read it, which in many cases they don't; they just want to know how to make presentations and not pay an assload for the software, and get the same kind of functionality as Powerpoint, etc etc. If we actually advertise all of the functions/advantages Mozilla Firefox has over Internet Explorer, and then provide the user with a nice, clean installation (with Windows 98/2k/XP style waiting screens..), then word of mouth will be a great advertising force. The main thing is, we need to stop letting the software speak for itself: we need to speak for it, demonstrate it, support it, document it, and make it available. This is what ALL good companies do, or they fail.
I'd like to see a beowoof cluster of those!
I know I've posted this before, but how long will it be until Apple realizes what they're missing? Slap that LCD on a current generation iPod (or iPod mini if you really want to make a lightweight device), port QuickTime video to it, and poof, a pocket sized multimedia device that will put most anything else on the market to shame.
I think it's the logical progression to see PDA's start to take on parts from laptops/desktops. PDA's are really the Laptop's of our generation. A USB host controller is awesome because of all of the USB devices that exist. USB Networking is a definite plus, but most everything is going to Bluetooth/WiFi anyways.
Either way, this is a damned cool PDA, even if hella expensive, and I can't wait to see something like this, but cheaper, or any of the improvements from above are added (micro hd, minus usb host controller, plus wifi AND bluetooth, plus quicktime/some movie player).
Well, I never said every SUV is horrible on gas but MOST are, and on top of that, My (soon to be; *shakes fists at parents*) Car is cheaper in just about any way you want to look at it (yes, even maintainance is cheap around here.). Until I see an SUV-gas/electric hybrid, I doubt you'll be trouncing my fuel economy ;).
SUVs the way most people drive and purchase them is the problem. They're expensive enough to where people will want them, they're practically invencible on the road *I feel sorry for anyone in a collision with a full-sized one*, and some are even outside of the normal gas economy brackets the government uses to tax cars (Hummer, Ford Excursion aka House on Wheels). These are gross abombinations. I can justify someone having an SUV hauling a boat and a family for a trip to the lake/ocean, I can justify having a small SUV for a soccor mom *note: forrester is GREAT for this*, but come on.. how many people really need those grizzly gas eaters they drive around? Everyone should own a nice car, and everyone should get to splurge a little.. but as their every day driving vehichle, this is absurd. And I can't believe they haven't felt the gas prices at over 2$ a gallon.
Do you know how much energy goes into *name an energy collection technique* (Clue: Quite a lot).
The question isn't how much energy goes in, it's HOW MUCH COMES OUT. The three technologies you name can't produce the kinds of power we need. Wind, maybe, waves, no, plant-oils, only in combination with other hydrocarbons with current technology.
Nuclear energy is the right avenue to take.. but the question is can we do it safely, and will we not just create more nuclear waste? Seems like we could create nuclear devices that never needed to be repowered, since radioactive material stays radioactive for a long long time. But I'm not in the mood to work that out..
Maybe we should look into the big nuclear orb in the sky that has powered life on earth since long before our existance: the sun?
The sun? We've been harnesting the sun for thousands of years for our energy, why not keep going? We know we can grow things with the sun, we know the sun's rays can be converted into heat to turn a turbine, we know that the sun's radiation can be converted directly into electrical energy. From that alone, we have enough to power ourselves for quite a while.. Question is, when will everyone be convenced there is a problem, and when they are convenced, how willing will they be to give up their SUV's?
Norton (Symantec) is already working on that.. but they find it hard to use an Antivirus program on an Anti-virus.
Oh.. we're talking about human viruses...
Yeah, and I love it.. but I have to define so many damned ones that it's almost defeating. I like having the artists in the bar on the lefthanded side which is why I usually define a playlist for each of the genres *if I only have one or two artists in it*, or for the artist's themselves. It's very awesome, and quite effective.
Seems like this is the hot bullet, I'll give it my shot.
RFTA to find out a lot of things like conversation tracking, ease of use, good spam defense, 10 meg attachments, and most of all to me, the brilliant layout of the metadata.
As I stated here, users today are really into knowing everything about that email even before they open it. So when they do open it, they're not surprised by anything. This is why traditional webmail sucks: the spam these days slips right under most filters used by Yahoo! and Hotmail and the big others. It's also a lot harder to know what someone is replying to without having a lot of those ugly "<"'s everywhere. GMail gets rid of the need for that.
Also, if you're a busy person like me, and you don't even have enough time to carry around a laptop, and instead use a computer whereever you go, Gmail is great. This is the advantage of webmail over outlook (Outlook is really starting to close this gap with Outlook Titanium. It's almost the whole feel of Outlook through the browser.) and Eudora.
Google also throws in their great search engine into the mix. "Computer, *churp sound*, give me all emails from this date from this specific person dealing with the Cardassian entrenchment of Yardin-5."
All and all, GMail is what webmail should be. Hey, they're even throwing in a Gig of storage!
Google's trying to have complete immersion in data, and combine with it the useful metadata people are not accustom to, like the easy conversation tracking that I've read about. It just seems like they're trying to push a more database-like look at our data so that it's quicker, faster, and easier to use. And a great way of pushing to that people is having a great large boat of space (1 Gig, with most emails I send and recieve totalling to 50kb, that's a lifetime's worth of email in one location).
;).
Just because you're not used to this presentation of metadata, doesn't mean it's not good. Look at Nautilius' new file view. I hate it, everyone else seems to love it. Just goes to show you that the interfaces really are different from person to person. Now if only GNOME would embody that spirit some more and let me move around my toolbars within applications *shakes fists*. Oh well, can't ask for everything.
p.s. This is my theory on why iTMS is doing so well. You're really not buying a copy of the song , you could pirate that anyways. You're buying a copy of the song with a complete set of metadata, which is really hard to come by over P2P. And it's worth 99c to me to buy a song with completed metadata instead of having to complete it all myself. But once again, iTunes even fails for me, because I need a better way of looking through my artists and songs. I mean the UI is great, but it's just not perfect for me, if you understand that. Just goes to show you how important the presentation of the metadata is (and how Google has always been genius at it; KISSing always (keep it simple shorty
the "Trickle Down" theory of CPUs. As seen in the 1990s, Intel would introduce the Pentium XXXmhz as a high end chip, and then move it down the price scale until the Pentium XXXmhz was a lowend chip. A better model might be 1980s computing -- when "high end" and "low end" systems used completely different cores. Kinda glad you said this. This is pretty much how were probably about to see business done. Intel first needs to obsfuscate the difference between Pentium M and Pentium 4 to the general public, sorta how AMD named the new-core Athlons "Athlon 64", new-core server chips "Opteron", and they're still working on Athlon XP's afaik. This makes the Low-end chip of the x86-arch, and the high class of the x86-64.
.5's, and that's not a pretty name...
Intel's problem will be making people see that the new Pentium M's are actually faster than the Pentium 4's because of the sequential naming pattern of the Pentium line. I bet someone somewhere is catching hell for suggesting that these "Netburst Williamettes" should be called Pentium 4 and it not be a direct successor of the original Pentium.
The low-end Intel Chips ("affectionally" known as the Celeron [sell-eron]) will now be Pentium 4's, and the newer, faster Pentium M is at a loss because it really shouldn't be branded Pentium 5, but it really shouldn't be branded Pentium 3. It's really a hybrid of Pentium 3 and 4 technology and design, and there really isn't a name for technological hybrids except for
Anyways, getting back to the point, AMD will have Operton Verses Xeon (Pentium-4 based Yamhill will probably give the Xeon the much needed 64-bit instructions, the Pentium-4 hyperthreading ability will probably be left in, and all of this will be ported into the Pentium M by it's third revision to try to get a one-core economy back running agian). The Lower end market will see the Pentium M verses the Athlon 64 and the extreme low end will see the Athlon XP-based Duron's verses the Pentium-M based Celerons (and possibly, if they can't get M's made fast enough, Pentium 4 Cellies instead).
Just an interesting look at what might happen...
Hate to reply to myself, but I was a bit too liberal in my explaining the passing back.. most of the xeon chips were a lot like their normal chip brothers and sisters, except with different cache sizes and different configurations of on and off die caches. Im sure someone could find a better example of past server-desktop handoffs, but I can't think right now...
Depends on how far you want to go back. If you go all the way back to the day of the original Pentium Processor, then yes. But if you go forward to look at the Pentium Pro to the Pentium 2's and the first Xeon's, then you'll see this "passing back" that I'm talking about. Most of their Xeon improvements are actually put into the Pentium !!!, and the Pentium !!! Xeon tested a lot of things out that they used later when they moved to Flip Chip packaging. AMD had the same vision of Intel, make cheap chips, but they started a little late and mostly played catch up. They were never too keen on innovation (I give them 3d Now! and it's extensions, but this only came after MMX, and never got as popular like SSE and MMX did (yes, I do remember when they declared MMX as dead technology). AMD's in the same position as Intel was in around 1996 *which for me, was ages ago, almost 10 years..*. They created their form of the Pentium Pro (P6), the 64-bit x86-64 archetecture. Right now though, x86-64 is too expensive to take home, but is great for midrange servers. See what I mean?
I do this thing all the time, but I never write it down in the form I did today... fun exercize really and it seems that everyone else enjoyed it. Maybe I should do it more often...
Computers took a depressing turn from what I thought they'd be though. It seems as with everything that companies like Intel, AMD, IBM and Sun all turned their backs to innovation and instead went headlong for scaling. But then again, this was actually the paradigm of the time: taking something and making the most use of it as possible (Linux's birth and extension, Microsoft's use of DOS, for computer world examples). More or less the economy of today is geared toward disposable goods because of the saturation of product. Dell boomed as big as they did because they simplified choice, they prodived the durability that Intel's known for, and priced their product as competitively as possible.
We're just now starting to see innovation again I believe, which is good because the durability of a product isn't as important to people now, but the economy of it is. Today, Dell makes machines that fail pretty quickly (the Dell lab at our school has been replacing Hard Disks, Floppy Drives and Motherboards to the point that it's cheaper now to buy a whole new computer than it is to fix an old one), but they're cheap to buy and cheap to operate. This reflects what people want now, verses the durability they used to seek. Markets like today's are geared toward innovation, and markets like that of the late 1990's is geared more to the tweak and ship approach.
But then again, I'm still young and back when the real innovation was being done, I could do nothing more than read about it in magazines and think on how neat the different ideas were. Sad to say I'm only 18 and didn't have the firm understanding of most of the mechanics of Computer Science and how it relates to business as I do today. Hope that answers your question.
How on earth does that defeat the whole idea of checksuming? A "checksum" is defined as A simple error-detection scheme in which each transmitted message is accompanied by a numerical value based on the number of set bits in the message. The receiving station then applies the same formula to the message and checks to make sure the accompanying numerical value is the same. If not, the receiver can assume that the message has been garbled.. When a user wants to download a song, s/he generally wants the whole song, and not just a segment of it. Therefore, the whole value of the song is checksummed, not just the packet. (well the packet is too depending on the protocol, but this isn't what's in question.)
So simply, look at the problem again, and then post.
That doesn't make it any harder to checksum the MP3. Changing the metadata doesn't change the data. If anyone implemented a smart MP3 checksum program, it'd simply remove any ID3 tags and checksum what's left: the actual frames of music.
And thus, the next generation of Apple computer cases was born.
Dear 1995,
We do not want this. Please take it back. We have enough reality TV shows as it is, who in the HELL would want them on the internet???
Signed,
Conserned Slashdotter.
PS, please tell Al Gore "Thanks for your brilliant contributions".
It's not only about scaleability. Processors are fast enough; this is evident by companies simply masking the processor's actually speed spec (note: not performance spec). No, the next war will be one of innovation, simply because the market's really tired of the same old thing, just faster. AMD's extension of x86 is the perfect example of this. Even though it's performance is on par with (and maybe a little faster, but not enough to matter, a couple percent, 10 at most) the other chips in it's class (really high end P4's), AMD's selling lots of these chips. The reason's simply that it's something new. Same reason the iPod mini's are doing well, same reason the G5 Macs are doing a lot better than the G4's ever did. The key word is innovation.
Moving a speedstep chip to a desktop is a huge sign of innovation, and of environmental conciousness (if they decide to leave all of the speedstep stuff enabled, which I fear they won't, since they didn't on the Pentium M-based Celeron M's). Having extremly low power desktops will make desktops smaller, which will free up room for a) more computers, b) deeper integration of computers (like the minipcs being used as Tivo's, car installations, etc etc), and c) profit!
It's all around a good decision, and a very predictable one.
C) Neither. More likely that Nvidia will move to the straight CPU market and compete along side of AMD and Intel. They understand though right now the market is bad for that, and instead make great chipsets for AMD (while being the underdogs, they're also a very good ally to have if they actually do attempt to shift into desktop processors).
ATi on the other hand, while they also make chipsets for Intel and AMD, they are much more concentrated on the Video market, and they really always have been (best 2d quality, bar none since a long time ago).
Intel on the other hand, is starting to shift gears to a more mobile computing based company. They know the future of computers is in having them everywhere we go. Now that computers are finally cheap enough to be everywhere, the next step is to have them WITH us everywhere we go. Intel's been focused on Mobile computing for a long time (StrongARM processors, and the -M series of all the pentiums, including the Pentium M itself). Their switch to having Pentium M on the desktop was really a have-to case, as AMD is really starting to encroach on their midrange server and high end desktop markets. They're simply not stupid enough to continue to sell a chip that nobody wanted in the first place. The Pentium 4 was nothing more than a time saver and a way to develop and test technologies that they would need in the future for their server markets. (Hyperthreading was existant on the OLDEST Pentium 4 hardware, though not enabled since it was still very primative). And as you've noticed, lots of the Pentium 4 technologies have already been ported over into other product lines.
AMD is more and more concentrated on taking the server room from Intel. Once they've done this, they'll trickle home just the same way as Intel processors did in ages ago. And they're willing to sacrifice it all on their gamble that the industry won't shift off of x86 simply because it's too deeply embedded. They're not willing to bet on Microsoft and other software giants NOT creating software for a different platform (since Microsoft is really the end-all, be-all for the software), and instead, they embraced this lockin and extended it. The OS doesn't have to be natively compiled and optimized for their platform, and that gives them a huge advantage over the Itanium iron that they were aiming for. When performance really failed to hit the spec of highly optimized Itanium 2 code, they simply shifted gears and aimed it at Xeon instead. This was smarter because they know if they can get businesses to optimize and recompile, Xeon hardware will have to be left behind.
IBM on the other hand, says "fuck everyone else, we're doing it our own way". Working with Apple they developed a platform and got it some market share quickly. Next step: get it more market share by pushing Linux (which is outside of the control of the corporate giant of Microsoft, although this is being challenged by SCO, who was evidently paid off by Microsoft to launch such attacks and alligations). Not that Linux is any faster than anything written in Windows, but that it's cheaper, open, endlessly flexible and faster to update than anything Microsoft can throw at it. This is a safe bet. They're also aiming for the Itanium giant, and have nailed it pretty well with the Virginia Tech terascale project. Many say this is a win for Apple, when really, it's a win for PPC, which is IBM's baby.
Microsoft is really the key card right now. If they port Windows to PPC, it could royally screw both Intel, and AMD out of business. Luckily, Microsoft would take a lot of flac for doing this because of the companies that are so entrenched in X86 optimized code, that moving over to PPC would cost them millions, and they could simply move to x86 Linux instead of the next version of Windows.
So really, CPU's are becoming a lot like CPU's, but the industry doesn't care, and is in a very intersting position with Microsoft at the head. What I'd love to see is nVidia release a chip on a
Yes, it was discussed before, but it is confirmned now. Instead of industry insiders saying it, it's news professionals. Who do you trust more?
problem: hash injection. write a program that, when ran, virally or not, would replace the hash tables within the client with bad hashes. this instantly stops the client from accepting any files except bad files. even in a system where the hashes arent held by the user, but the user can vote on good or bad hashes, these kinds of p2p viruses can really cause some serious damnage to the network.
One good think kazaa implemented (and was instantly client hacked for) was that sharers got higher precedence in downloading. They really should take the next step to sharers of good files get precedence. But then you have hacks like botvoting, and simply reverse engineering the protocol used and setting the variable in memory to whatever the top limit is. That's the problem with most p2p systems.
Not only that, media search engines are so centralized if the RIAA giant launches on it, it's toast. P2P is really the only thing that's still legal for trading anything, and everyone knows this. P2P doesn't really have as many security flaws as you think, but it does have trust problems that most other forms of data transmission don't. You can never be too sure who the data's coming from, and whether or not it can be considered good data.
Trust systems could be added to Kazaa or any other network really, but the problem is all the circumventers out there really don't like this, because they want that level of obscurity. That's why we really need P2P systems built from the ground up with this trust relationship in place, like WASTE.
They're going to put an end to what the RIAA's doing with Kazaa and other sharing agents now, or that they're going to extend it to other Filesharing networks? And what about having a decentralized file signature service which checks signatures of the songs against known good and bad songs?
The signing program would kinda work, but it'd have to be more centralized than most P2P networks for security reasons... more of a reason to move to Secure P2P like WASTE.
I completely agree with you except for one little point:
Any technology can be used for good or evil, especially technology that makes energy
Making energy would defeat Law of Conservation of Energy (and most likely Law of Conservation of Mass, since that's how most of the energy we're accustom to seeing is expressed). IANAP, but it really does get irritating to see this in writing... I guess you could reform it as: Any technology can be used for good or evil, especially technology that deals with releasing or storing energy.