Uhh what the fuck? Windows XP worked perfectly fine with the ISP. Windows Vista doesn't. That's **Microsoft's** regression. Linux users were never mentioned, as it assumes they have followed the standard all along and don't release new distributions who break standards for no purpose other than to break them. This should give **Microsoft** a bad name for not being able to release a new version of their own OS without breaking virtually every component in the process.
"Calm down and get some real evidence of wrongdoing like a packet capture of private information going out over the wire before you cry wolf."
Because it's not at all possible if they're being sneaky enough to read files they really shouldn't be reading in the first place, they wouldn't ever dare encrypt it before they sent it back to a central server. Oh no, that'd be faaar too clever.
Possible rational reasons for stupidity and violation of trust don't cut it when it comes to privacy. "Oh, the government's reading your mail? Well, that's probably because they think you're a terrorist. Don't worry, they'd never do anything evil with what they read."
..is more necessary. Nothing sucks more than traffic jams on the Information Super Highway. No way to signify that better than being as absolutely obnoxious as possible
In other words, Google put in the first bid and set the auction's floor. The only bad news here is that Google bid such a huge amount to start with; this spectrum could easily go for $10 Billion, and I wouldn't be surprised with a number higher than that. Roughly, that's 10% of Google going into just buying the rights to use the spectrum, not including building all of the necessary equipment to run it, hiring the people that will run it, and figuring out a business model to provide access to it.
I can't "feel" a difference on my desktop with 2GB of RAM, but on my laptop which only has 1, and a much slower disk, the improvement is pretty noticeable (as in from "nearly unusable for lots of access applications [trackerd]" to "smooth as silk").
It's funny the kernel devs are just now talking about this, I discovered this almost 6 months ago on the Ubuntu forums while glancing around for a fix for my laptop's ridiculous sound issues.
Yes, but where in Hell are you going to find an FPGA big enough/fast enough to run a full OpenSPARC implementation?
The real advantage is two-fold. First, people become more familiar with the architecture by literally seeing what that architecture does, which means compilers optimize better for it, which means people are more likely to use SPARC. Secondly, students will use it to make derivatives and spread the SPARC architecture. There's already efforts to make a small SPARC based off a single T1 core, perhaps more models like it are planned for the future.
Could someone fork it/make a knock-off? Of course they can, but hopefully you're moving faster than they are, and likely Sun's got more money to print the chips than you do, and has the connections to make them better than you can. I personally like the idea of Open Hardware. It could end up being like Linux or ARM: Everyone ends up using it, but everyone adds their own touches to make it different/better.
"Application folders and "drag and drop installation" won't work on Linux..."
I think what you meant to say was "that won't work across Linux OSes." It'd work perfectly fine for one distro, or one distro-family based on one common repository that is in lock-step for API/ABI compatibility. It'd work perfectly fine in the Ubuntu family of OSes, for example, but take that same package and try to install it on, let's say Red Hat, and it all goes out the window.
Believe it or not, we've already solved this problem with Package Management. Whether we dress up the package as a nice little icon, or we put its name in a list with hundreds of others, or allow you to install it through the command line just by knowing its name, it really doesn't make any difference at all. Synaptic could have just as easily worked by adding icons for each of the programs it allows to be installed, and letting you drag them over into some "Applications" folder, and have it in the background run all of the necessary steps to install that application. It doesn't really matter how you present it to the user, just as long as it's friendly and very easy to use.
You misunderstand; one group said "We need to connect our servers to the switches with a faster connection." The other group said "we need to make our network backbone more robust by adding faster connections between buildings and such." The group that needed faster server-switch speeds don't need 100Gbps, they just need better than what they've got. The group that needed faster building-building/infrastructure links didn't believe 40Gbps is fast enough.
Guess what? The market doesn't give a shit, they just want multiples of 4 in one socket, period. Even AMD admits it was a mistake not to go MCM; Intel got the drop on them, and has deepened their lead quite substantially, leaving AMD sitting on their hands with no competitor for far, far too long (and their upcoming competition will quite frankly devastate them in the short run, however in the long run...).
Intel had the option to rest on its laurels; they don't like to work any harder than necessary to remain on top, and the Core marchitecture gave them a huge.. well I'll say it.. "Leap Ahead" of the competition. Unfortunately, Intel's more of a bunny; hop a few times then get tired and sit around, whereas AMD is more of the turtle (slow to market, but rather constant). Well all know who wins the race.
You mean waste more electricity right? Cheaper the processor, the more goodies they knock out of the chip to keep the price down. That $70 Celeron is built without SpeedStep. The $110 Core 2 has the full sized Smart cache and SpeedStep. The Celeron might be 80% as fast as the Core 2, but the Core 2 will probably use 60% of the energy, meaning the net win (if you can afford to spend $40 more bucks) goes to the Core 2.
In all honesty, it makes the most sense to buy the most "featureful" chip at the bottom of the clock bracket and overclock it. Not only will you have all of the features those chips ship with, you'll likely have more performance than the CPUs at the top of the bracket. You might cut the lifetime of the chip down, but computers today are such commodities that hardly anyone cares if the chip burns out after 3 years instead of 10; they won't be using that chip by then anyways.
...why do you feel the need to do that every time one dies? Do yourself a favor; get a brown cardboard box, put the CFL in it, put the box in your garage. When the box is full, send them for recycling all at once. 12 gallons of gas per bulb is a lot, but 12 gallons per 100 bulbs is barely anything (you'd likely spend more money bringing them home from the store).
What a wonderful response. I guess you completely missed the fact that about 85-90% of computers that ship have Windows pre-installed; you can't choose NOT to buy it, and you can't get a refund for it without jumping through a million hoops (or in the case of Toshiba laptops, there's a sticker on the outside that says "You will not receive a rebate for Windows, period."
So yeah, when the day comes that computer companies decouple Windows from their machines, I'd personally consider not running to the Justice Department every time they fuck up their software in a way to lock users in or make it more difficult for users to use something else. But on that day we'll also see Hell hit absolute zero, pigs will start designing interstellar spacecraft, etc.
Which brings us to the question of why we're looking at Mars at all, and instead we don't turn our cameras to Venus.
Venus is nearly the same mass as Earth so it has roughly the same gravity. The surface is a lot hotter and the atmosphere is a lot denser, but it seems to me it'd be much more feasible to scrub an atmosphere than invent a new one, all someone needs to do is come up with a solution (or multitude of solutions) for turning the bulk CO2 of the Venusian atmosphere into something else (perhaps hydrocarbons, carbon nanotubes, hell it could be graphite or diamonds for whatever reason).
Venus doesn't have a magnetosphere either, but it at least maintains its atmosphere and perhaps if it were left at least more dense than our atmosphere it would protect people from the radiation of space (or perhaps with the same machines we invent to do CO2 scrubbing we can make an Ozone layer too?)
Hell, if we were so bold as to do it, we could ship the gasses off Venus and onto Mars and inhabit both. Venus should still have plenty of atmosphere after we've bled off the excess junk within it to remain habitable. (I guess the only real question left is water, which we'd have to convert from whatever trace we could pull out of the atmosphere).
"I thought we had finally put the "megahertz myth" behind us."
Do you even know what the Megahertz myth is? It's completely irrelevant in this context; we're talking about overclocking one architecture (from 2.66GHz to almost 4GHz), which means we should see a fairly nice scaling of the performance within these numbers (and if it's not 1:1, we should have a reason for it, such as drawbacks within the architecture itself).
Now if we were talking about a 2.66GHz Intel chip in comparison to an X.XXXGHz AMD chip, that'd matter. But within the same company and same architecture, the "myth" isn't a myth at all, it's factual and is how frequency scaling should work.
It's in svn, check it out, read through it, commit some code. It's getting further and further along every single time I check up on it.
The GTK+ bindings for WebKit will enable WebKit to run in GNOME; of course you'd need to write a complete browser (or find a way to hack it into Galeon or Epiphany), but because the generic widget-set in WebKit can be re-implemented with just about any widget toolkit you want (WxWidgets, GTK+, Qt, etc), it makes the engine extremely generic (which is the greatest thing about WebKit).
The Carbon port is what allows Safari (a Carbonized app) to run in Windows. Think Safari:Firefox::WebKit:Gecko.
It's been based on KHTML/Konq since conception. If you want to use Safari (or its equivalence in Linux), just use Konq.
The only reason it runs on Windows now is because Adobe put a shit-ton of work into WebKit/WebCore to make their Apollo product, and now Apple's using the benefit of their partial-Carbon port to port Safari over and use the Win32-ized WebKit to power it.
The real good thing that's happening in WebKit/WebCore right now is the work going on to make it work with GTK+/GDK. Once that happens we'll have a web browser that looks and feels native to every major UI toolkit out there.
"Insulating hydrogen tanks is a decidedly non-trivial task, especially when you want ultra light weight for a rocket. It's rather far from obvious what the best answer is."
Aerogel. Ultra-light weight, best thermal insulator known to mankind (other than a vacuum, which is another possibility). Nobody makes it in sufficient volume though, but that could change if NASA got behind it.
In other news, we got our hands on an early version of this press release:
HELL, Earth. June 8th, 2007. (NASDAQ: HELQ) Hell has Frozen Over.
In a shocking event, Hell has taken on an icy interior today. Says one demon, "It's actually quite nice, what with the flying bacon and all." Operators of the Infernal Furnace spoke to us briefly: "All the sudden our computers froze", "We were installing a Microsoft Service Pack and all the sudden a penguin came on the screen and the whole environment changed." Hell has scheduled a press conference to happen later this week where we will receive an update on this situation.
Representatives at Microsoft were not available for comment.
Well, the patent is pretty clear about what it's "inventing". They state they take the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria (which is the smallest discovered natural free-living bacteria), and then strip out about 101 genes (which they list in a table), leaving 381 genes plus or minus a 3 or 4 genes.
The question is, have they actually made this bacteria, and does it actually live, reproduce and die like a bacteria should? At this point it's not clear they invented anything, more than just taking a bacteria, removing some genes and patenting the result (which they could theoretically do indefinitely until they find some combination that works). Furthermore, it's not clear they're actually inventing anything at all, but rather optimizing the organism by removing defective/defunct versions of other genes (essentially stripping the whitespace, which might actually be a bad thing; one of the reasons DNA is durable is entron regions, DNA that can be damaged or mutate without affecting the organism).
The linked article says they've half-way succeeded creating this thing (55 of 101 possible knock-outs yields a living result). Is that enough grounds to allow this to be patented? It's not up to me to say, but it's an interesting question.
Register the image of your face as a Servicemark. Sue anyone who tries to post it without your permission. "Defend" your mark by not letting arbitrary people take your picture. (I would say Trademark, but in most cases Trademarks are only applicable when you're selling something, Servicemarks are applicable at any point you may perform a service...)
Of course, you'd have to be a really paranoid SOB to really care that much. But hey, it's legal (as long as you claim your face is the legal entity that does your service, whatever service that may be).
"For most applications, 80 cores will probably hurt performance, and at the very least will be idling and wasting power doing NOPs most of the time."
We can throw away the whole idea of NOPs when it comes to this chip and the technologies we have today. If we're not using the core, simply turn the core off, it's just going to be wasting energy, and you can turn the core back on pretty damn quick (~100's of ns) if you need it. Since these cores are virtually cache-less already, there's no huge to-memory penalty we get with today's enormous cores when they shut down to lower energy states, and it makes sense to have an on-chip load balancer which will make sure no one core gets over taxed and is on more than any other core.
Lastly, we don't need to change the apps as much as people think we do. For the applications that make sense to parallelize, great, do it. For the ones that don't, don't. It's not going to hurt anything if you don't. You still get N.mGHz speeds on your mono-core app, and to be truthful, it's highly likely that's more than your app will ever need, especially ones that spend most of their time I/O bound (word processors (keyboard), web browsers(network)).
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Uhh what the fuck? Windows XP worked perfectly fine with the ISP. Windows Vista doesn't. That's **Microsoft's** regression. Linux users were never mentioned, as it assumes they have followed the standard all along and don't release new distributions who break standards for no purpose other than to break them. This should give **Microsoft** a bad name for not being able to release a new version of their own OS without breaking virtually every component in the process.
"Calm down and get some real evidence of wrongdoing like a packet capture of private information going out over the wire before you cry wolf."
Because it's not at all possible if they're being sneaky enough to read files they really shouldn't be reading in the first place, they wouldn't ever dare encrypt it before they sent it back to a central server. Oh no, that'd be faaar too clever.
Possible rational reasons for stupidity and violation of trust don't cut it when it comes to privacy. "Oh, the government's reading your mail? Well, that's probably because they think you're a terrorist. Don't worry, they'd never do anything evil with what they read."
..is more necessary. Nothing sucks more than traffic jams on the Information Super Highway. No way to signify that better than being as absolutely obnoxious as possible
In other words, Google put in the first bid and set the auction's floor. The only bad news here is that Google bid such a huge amount to start with; this spectrum could easily go for $10 Billion, and I wouldn't be surprised with a number higher than that. Roughly, that's 10% of Google going into just buying the rights to use the spectrum, not including building all of the necessary equipment to run it, hiring the people that will run it, and figuring out a business model to provide access to it.
That is, of course, if they don't get out-bid.
Or better yet, bond the memory to the cores like Intel and IBM are working on.
I can't "feel" a difference on my desktop with 2GB of RAM, but on my laptop which only has 1, and a much slower disk, the improvement is pretty noticeable (as in from "nearly unusable for lots of access applications [trackerd]" to "smooth as silk").
It's funny the kernel devs are just now talking about this, I discovered this almost 6 months ago on the Ubuntu forums while glancing around for a fix for my laptop's ridiculous sound issues.
Yes, but where in Hell are you going to find an FPGA big enough/fast enough to run a full OpenSPARC implementation?
The real advantage is two-fold. First, people become more familiar with the architecture by literally seeing what that architecture does, which means compilers optimize better for it, which means people are more likely to use SPARC. Secondly, students will use it to make derivatives and spread the SPARC architecture. There's already efforts to make a small SPARC based off a single T1 core, perhaps more models like it are planned for the future.
Could someone fork it/make a knock-off? Of course they can, but hopefully you're moving faster than they are, and likely Sun's got more money to print the chips than you do, and has the connections to make them better than you can. I personally like the idea of Open Hardware. It could end up being like Linux or ARM: Everyone ends up using it, but everyone adds their own touches to make it different/better.
"Application folders and "drag and drop installation" won't work on Linux..."
I think what you meant to say was "that won't work across Linux OSes." It'd work perfectly fine for one distro, or one distro-family based on one common repository that is in lock-step for API/ABI compatibility. It'd work perfectly fine in the Ubuntu family of OSes, for example, but take that same package and try to install it on, let's say Red Hat, and it all goes out the window.
Believe it or not, we've already solved this problem with Package Management. Whether we dress up the package as a nice little icon, or we put its name in a list with hundreds of others, or allow you to install it through the command line just by knowing its name, it really doesn't make any difference at all. Synaptic could have just as easily worked by adding icons for each of the programs it allows to be installed, and letting you drag them over into some "Applications" folder, and have it in the background run all of the necessary steps to install that application. It doesn't really matter how you present it to the user, just as long as it's friendly and very easy to use.
You misunderstand; one group said "We need to connect our servers to the switches with a faster connection." The other group said "we need to make our network backbone more robust by adding faster connections between buildings and such." The group that needed faster server-switch speeds don't need 100Gbps, they just need better than what they've got. The group that needed faster building-building/infrastructure links didn't believe 40Gbps is fast enough.
Adding both takes care of both groups of people.
Guess what? The market doesn't give a shit, they just want multiples of 4 in one socket, period. Even AMD admits it was a mistake not to go MCM; Intel got the drop on them, and has deepened their lead quite substantially, leaving AMD sitting on their hands with no competitor for far, far too long (and their upcoming competition will quite frankly devastate them in the short run, however in the long run...).
Intel had the option to rest on its laurels; they don't like to work any harder than necessary to remain on top, and the Core marchitecture gave them a huge.. well I'll say it.. "Leap Ahead" of the competition. Unfortunately, Intel's more of a bunny; hop a few times then get tired and sit around, whereas AMD is more of the turtle (slow to market, but rather constant). Well all know who wins the race.
You mean waste more electricity right? Cheaper the processor, the more goodies they knock out of the chip to keep the price down. That $70 Celeron is built without SpeedStep. The $110 Core 2 has the full sized Smart cache and SpeedStep. The Celeron might be 80% as fast as the Core 2, but the Core 2 will probably use 60% of the energy, meaning the net win (if you can afford to spend $40 more bucks) goes to the Core 2.
In all honesty, it makes the most sense to buy the most "featureful" chip at the bottom of the clock bracket and overclock it. Not only will you have all of the features those chips ship with, you'll likely have more performance than the CPUs at the top of the bracket. You might cut the lifetime of the chip down, but computers today are such commodities that hardly anyone cares if the chip burns out after 3 years instead of 10; they won't be using that chip by then anyways.
...why do you feel the need to do that every time one dies? Do yourself a favor; get a brown cardboard box, put the CFL in it, put the box in your garage. When the box is full, send them for recycling all at once. 12 gallons of gas per bulb is a lot, but 12 gallons per 100 bulbs is barely anything (you'd likely spend more money bringing them home from the store).
"Don't like it? Don't buy it"
What a wonderful response. I guess you completely missed the fact that about 85-90% of computers that ship have Windows pre-installed; you can't choose NOT to buy it, and you can't get a refund for it without jumping through a million hoops (or in the case of Toshiba laptops, there's a sticker on the outside that says "You will not receive a rebate for Windows, period."
So yeah, when the day comes that computer companies decouple Windows from their machines, I'd personally consider not running to the Justice Department every time they fuck up their software in a way to lock users in or make it more difficult for users to use something else. But on that day we'll also see Hell hit absolute zero, pigs will start designing interstellar spacecraft, etc.
Which brings us to the question of why we're looking at Mars at all, and instead we don't turn our cameras to Venus.
Venus is nearly the same mass as Earth so it has roughly the same gravity. The surface is a lot hotter and the atmosphere is a lot denser, but it seems to me it'd be much more feasible to scrub an atmosphere than invent a new one, all someone needs to do is come up with a solution (or multitude of solutions) for turning the bulk CO2 of the Venusian atmosphere into something else (perhaps hydrocarbons, carbon nanotubes, hell it could be graphite or diamonds for whatever reason).
Venus doesn't have a magnetosphere either, but it at least maintains its atmosphere and perhaps if it were left at least more dense than our atmosphere it would protect people from the radiation of space (or perhaps with the same machines we invent to do CO2 scrubbing we can make an Ozone layer too?)
Hell, if we were so bold as to do it, we could ship the gasses off Venus and onto Mars and inhabit both. Venus should still have plenty of atmosphere after we've bled off the excess junk within it to remain habitable. (I guess the only real question left is water, which we'd have to convert from whatever trace we could pull out of the atmosphere).
"I thought we had finally put the "megahertz myth" behind us."
Do you even know what the Megahertz myth is? It's completely irrelevant in this context; we're talking about overclocking one architecture (from 2.66GHz to almost 4GHz), which means we should see a fairly nice scaling of the performance within these numbers (and if it's not 1:1, we should have a reason for it, such as drawbacks within the architecture itself).
Now if we were talking about a 2.66GHz Intel chip in comparison to an X.XXXGHz AMD chip, that'd matter. But within the same company and same architecture, the "myth" isn't a myth at all, it's factual and is how frequency scaling should work.
http://system76.com/ Great laptops, reasonable prices, Ubuntu ships on the beasts. What more could you ask for?
It's in svn, check it out, read through it, commit some code. It's getting further and further along every single time I check up on it.
The GTK+ bindings for WebKit will enable WebKit to run in GNOME; of course you'd need to write a complete browser (or find a way to hack it into Galeon or Epiphany), but because the generic widget-set in WebKit can be re-implemented with just about any widget toolkit you want (WxWidgets, GTK+, Qt, etc), it makes the engine extremely generic (which is the greatest thing about WebKit).
The Carbon port is what allows Safari (a Carbonized app) to run in Windows. Think Safari:Firefox::WebKit:Gecko.
It's been based on KHTML/Konq since conception. If you want to use Safari (or its equivalence in Linux), just use Konq.
The only reason it runs on Windows now is because Adobe put a shit-ton of work into WebKit/WebCore to make their Apollo product, and now Apple's using the benefit of their partial-Carbon port to port Safari over and use the Win32-ized WebKit to power it.
The real good thing that's happening in WebKit/WebCore right now is the work going on to make it work with GTK+/GDK. Once that happens we'll have a web browser that looks and feels native to every major UI toolkit out there.
"Insulating hydrogen tanks is a decidedly non-trivial task, especially when you want ultra light weight for a rocket. It's rather far from obvious what the best answer is."
Aerogel. Ultra-light weight, best thermal insulator known to mankind (other than a vacuum, which is another possibility). Nobody makes it in sufficient volume though, but that could change if NASA got behind it.
I make no excuses for my bad spelling. I miss things like that all the time when I'm typing at speed.
But thanks for correcting me.
In other news, we got our hands on an early version of this press release:
HELL, Earth. June 8th, 2007. (NASDAQ: HELQ) Hell has Frozen Over.
In a shocking event, Hell has taken on an icy interior today. Says one demon, "It's actually quite nice, what with the flying bacon and all." Operators of the Infernal Furnace spoke to us briefly: "All the sudden our computers froze", "We were installing a Microsoft Service Pack and all the sudden a penguin came on the screen and the whole environment changed." Hell has scheduled a press conference to happen later this week where we will receive an update on this situation.
Representatives at Microsoft were not available for comment.
Contacts:
Lucifer,
666-666-1234
lucifer@inhell.com
Steve Ballmer,
666-666-1233
therealdevil@inhell.com
Well, the patent is pretty clear about what it's "inventing". They state they take the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria (which is the smallest discovered natural free-living bacteria), and then strip out about 101 genes (which they list in a table), leaving 381 genes plus or minus a 3 or 4 genes.
The question is, have they actually made this bacteria, and does it actually live, reproduce and die like a bacteria should? At this point it's not clear they invented anything, more than just taking a bacteria, removing some genes and patenting the result (which they could theoretically do indefinitely until they find some combination that works). Furthermore, it's not clear they're actually inventing anything at all, but rather optimizing the organism by removing defective/defunct versions of other genes (essentially stripping the whitespace, which might actually be a bad thing; one of the reasons DNA is durable is entron regions, DNA that can be damaged or mutate without affecting the organism).
The linked article says they've half-way succeeded creating this thing (55 of 101 possible knock-outs yields a living result). Is that enough grounds to allow this to be patented? It's not up to me to say, but it's an interesting question.
Build flood wall/stilts for the house (or more realistically, Flood Insurance).
Don't laugh at this, I'm being dead serious:
Register the image of your face as a Servicemark. Sue anyone who tries to post it without your permission. "Defend" your mark by not letting arbitrary people take your picture. (I would say Trademark, but in most cases Trademarks are only applicable when you're selling something, Servicemarks are applicable at any point you may perform a service...)
Of course, you'd have to be a really paranoid SOB to really care that much. But hey, it's legal (as long as you claim your face is the legal entity that does your service, whatever service that may be).
"For most applications, 80 cores will probably hurt performance, and at the very least will be idling and wasting power doing NOPs most of the time."
We can throw away the whole idea of NOPs when it comes to this chip and the technologies we have today. If we're not using the core, simply turn the core off, it's just going to be wasting energy, and you can turn the core back on pretty damn quick (~100's of ns) if you need it. Since these cores are virtually cache-less already, there's no huge to-memory penalty we get with today's enormous cores when they shut down to lower energy states, and it makes sense to have an on-chip load balancer which will make sure no one core gets over taxed and is on more than any other core.
Lastly, we don't need to change the apps as much as people think we do. For the applications that make sense to parallelize, great, do it. For the ones that don't, don't. It's not going to hurt anything if you don't. You still get N.mGHz speeds on your mono-core app, and to be truthful, it's highly likely that's more than your app will ever need, especially ones that spend most of their time I/O bound (word processors (keyboard), web browsers(network)).