I'm guessing that these new chips use the same MPEG acceleration as their older models. When I had a Nehemiah running at 1Ghz on a Gentoo setup it was an absolute bitch to get Unichrome support. I believe that has all been sorted out now and the software is more stable. My box used to play both DivX at 720p and H.264 at 720p without any problems. For H.264 you are locking up the box and can't do anything else, for DivX it was more like 20% cpu.
For encoding - just don't bother. I thought that encoding H.264 might work out well because the box was on 24/7, but it encoded at less than 1fps. While my main desktop box would encode a DVD in about 8 hours, the via would take about 6 days of running flatout at 100% utilisation. Unless there is hardware support for encoding, and open source drivers then don't even think about it.
There are different grades of flash chip, with varying amounts of write cycles. The problem with the kind of flash that you get in a usb keyring is not that flash is limited in the number of writes, but that cheap low-end flash is. The kind of solid state storage in a drive can take millions of write cycles, which combined with a file-system that spreads the writes evenly across he chip will give a decent lifespan.
Cost is still a major issue though. The article only has one number in it, that densities will go up to 160Gb. Do you think they'll take a cheque for that, or you do you have to spread and touch your toes in person?
Aha, in that case it was I that misunderstood you (and apologies to Billasour). Although what I thought you were saying still makes sense. No matter which profile they go for, the length of time away from Earth is substantial. Simulations into the effects of long-term spaceflight should take that into account. Also, the closed system environment is still an interesting challenge, and I'd like to see anyone who could maintain a local ecosystem for the entire duration of a mission.
As far as what you were actually saying goes:) you both make a good point that the psychological impact is going to be affected by the ratio of flight-time to surface-time. Even if the flight-time is relatively shorter, the return journey may have the largest impact because the climax of the mission has already been and gone, and in some sense the astronauts are killing time until they can get home.
Erm, ok I'm going to try and not sound trollish for once. Did you understand the post you replied to, and did you read the article that you linked to? The round-trip time for the 30-60 day mission profile is estimated at 400-650 days. Which is exactly in the range that the GP proposed such an experiment should last. Because the crew are going to be just as confined and isolated on the trip as they will be on the surface.
That's quite strange. Maybe I've been lucky but I've never been charged for any of the bizarre "deformed" SMS messages that I've been sent. This includes spam from weird numbers.
Something that I've only seen recently is MMS shortcuts, that appear in your inbox like a regular sms. Luckily my handset puts a small world on the message icon, because the default action for these messages is to fire up gprs and go to the url in the message. These are really nasty, given the ripoff price of data access.
What if I tell you that that word 31552 in the new Harry Potter book is "below"? I've just shared material that is clearly copyrighted, have I infringed the copyright? What if I expand this out to a whole sentence - quoting passages is considered fair use. I've shared copyrighted material but there has been no infringement. It's easy to see that 20000 of us could each quote a single sentence in the book, if you reassemble all the quotes together then you could reconstruct the entire book.
Nobody has pushed this question in court AFAIK, and yet that is the basis of a p2p network. Every person being slapped with damages for distributing to 100000 people couldn't have uploaded enough material to have performed that distribution. They may have uploaded several small chunks to individual people - but at what stage does that become illegal?
What if we take this to a logical extreme and consider a p2p network where each connection serves to indicate a single bit in the source file? What if I don't tell you explicitly but tell you to "guess high". Good luck trying to legislate over that, it will never work.
I'm amazed that you've managed to prove quite so concisely that nobody on slashdot reads the posts, let alone the articles. So after reading your post I'm wondering which form of psychotic disorder you suffer from, and if you've been diagnosed.
So, you've had an epiphany about power generation that says that anyone with basic technical skills could build a device in a week that would produce free limitless power. Is there any particular reason that you haven't gone ahead an built this device? If it's that easy, and all of the physicists and engineers are pissing in the wind with fusion power then why not demonstrate to them the error of their ways?
When you "see signs" that others know about this, do you also experience paranoia that they are coming to get you? Or witness strange meaning in coincidences that are all around you? I really don't know what's scarier, that so many people replied without actually mentioning anything that you'd said, or that somebody with mod points thought that you were insightful about easy the power generation problem is...
Nice. I think you've stitched up all the major avenues of discussion with the first post. Another alternative that made slashdot last year some time was the theory that our galaxy was not conducive to intelligent until recently. The idea is that gamma-ray bursts from pulsars would kill off all life near by. Over time the rate of these events has dropped until the time between them is roughly the length of time for an intelligent species to evolve. At the moment our galaxy is undergoing a phase-transition from an environment that is hostile to life surviving long enough to evolve intelligence, to one that would allow it. So in some sense, all of the intelligent species are "recent" innovations in the galaxy.
It's an interesting theory, but it is just one possible explanation. James Annis' paper describes it well.
VLIW is effectively a kind of cross between SIMD and MIMD. The EUs inside the processor are each addressable separately by a field within the instruction, so in each instruction you issue a LOAD/STORE sub-instruction, an INT instruction... etc. The compiler has a lot of work to do to fill the slots, but the decode logic is much easier but the scheduling is less flexible. In SIMB you issue one identical instruction to many cores, in MIMD you basically have separate threads. VLIW is not about multi-processing, it's just a way of shifting the decoding/scheduling burden from hardware to software.
The patent description (like most) is quite opaque and shit. It sounds as if they are describing a programable switch fabric used as an interconnect between processing cores. The idea being that any processor can seize control (act as the master) and program the fabric, then tell the slave units to perform some computation so that the results are routed back efficiently.
Claim 6 which somebody else has pointed out is likely to be the basis of the suit describes a network of processors which each have local memory, where it can be addressed as one large shared memory by asking the target processor to fetch and send / receive and write the information.
The Cell doesn't infringe this patent because the internal communication network is a fixed topology token ring bus. There is not a flexible master in the system because the Cell is asynchronous in the sense that the smaller slaves are not comparable to the main core. From the way they've written the wording it seems as if this is what they mean by synchronous, although it is mixed in with an example of communication barriers for multiple processors. All bets are off about exactly what they meant there.
Either way, it doesn't matter as the patent is completely invalid. All Sony would have to do is mention Inmos and the Transputer, and any of the patents that they filed in the 1980s which predate, and overlap this patent. In particular the implementation of channel negotation between multiple transputers as a reconfiguration of a switching fabric by any of a number of identical processors acting as a master.
Of course, this will play out as a patent dispute in a US court, so all bets are off. Toss a coin, see who wins.
Ahh, whoops. Now I look like a bit of a tit. Sorry for being patronising I didn't realise that from your previous post.
Ok, so serious question. At the moment we have a way of building applications, as code talking to the various X APIs. HTML/css/javascript etc are a different way of building apps. You want to replace the entire desktop with the web style way of doing it - but isn't this just reinventing the wheel. I'm not trying to troll here, but I just don't see what's so cool with replacing one bunch of language / APIs with another in this context. But then again I didn't really see the point of active desktop in IE4. So what is so cool about rewriting the desktop/applications in HTML and friends?
In TFA it points out that the morse coder transmitted the entire phrase verbatim, whereas the text messager used abbreviations and slang. So, no, it would appear that he could hit..- faster that you can tap the 8 key twice. If you seen the speed that a morse operator works at, compared to the spongey unresponsive keys on a mobile then it's not a big suprise really.
A more interesting test would be to choose a phrase that can be texted verbatim using t9. That's very close to one key per character and should be a closer result.
Perhaps it's not just that I read the article, but also that I understood it. I get the impression that you didn't. The "clear" mention of compositing is:
Bringing all these Web technologies together with the newest generation of Linux display technology, called window compositing, allows Pyro to integrate native applications as an intrinsic part of the overall Web Desktop, seamlessly merging the two.
I'm not sure how much you know about a desktop/windows under X so I'll go from basics. When you render content to a window you update the client window. This is the part inside the standard window manager decoration that draws the borders / close buttons / title bar etc. Inside the client window of a normal browser, the browser draws a bunch of controls (address bar / buttons / tabs etc) and then the content within a child window of the client window. To "run" a web-app alongside other windows seamlessly all you need to do is remove the extra frame from the content window with the controls.
This can be done in javascript on a standard browser. There is no need to write a new window manager, and window managers shouldn't be concerned with the contents of the windows they manage. They should be neutral to the applications. Their aim is to run webapps seamlessly alongside native apps. This is not a problem currently. It doesn't require a solution. If it did then a custom window manager would not be a good way of solving it.
They describe all this in non-technical hype and buzzwords, as quoted above and then throw in that they can solve this using compositing. Compositing is the process whereby a window is rendered to an offscreen buffer in OpenGL so that processing can be applied to the image before display. Normally this is used for drop-shadows / proper transparency and other special effects. It has no connection to what they've described at all. Hence the questions.
Maybe I'm being naive, but how would this be different to running a separate browser window for each page, without any navigation controls. You know, like some really nasty site interfaces do before you navigate away from them really quickly...
What is the point? Why does it need a separate window manager? Why on earth does the summary mention compositing when it doesn't appear in the article?
I haven't looked at the API so I don't know if this would true (disclaimer aside), but if there is a stable API between the user-space part and the kernel - doesn't that make reverse engineering from a trace easier? If I can perform action A 20 times, and then check a log of the driver traces from the kernel then I can infer which bits to twiddle to make things happen. Anyone know if this is the case?
Right. So, in reality, demonstrating to the rest of your fellow primates that you're willing to steal things from people means that you endorse stealing as a means of acquisition. You're waiving your right not to have the same thing happen to you. It's self-destructive, and simply not rational.
No. If the amount that you can steal is less than the expected return on your reputation then it's irrational. In a situation where the amount that you can steal is more than the expected return on your reputation then it's rational to steal. But morality is not simply rational behavior. It's a view of the correctness of actions relative to the perceived value system of the person whose morals you are discussing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing that these new chips use the same MPEG acceleration as their older models. When I had a Nehemiah running at 1Ghz on a Gentoo setup it was an absolute bitch to get Unichrome support. I believe that has all been sorted out now and the software is more stable. My box used to play both DivX at 720p and H.264 at 720p without any problems. For H.264 you are locking up the box and can't do anything else, for DivX it was more like 20% cpu.
For encoding - just don't bother. I thought that encoding H.264 might work out well because the box was on 24/7, but it encoded at less than 1fps. While my main desktop box would encode a DVD in about 8 hours, the via would take about 6 days of running flatout at 100% utilisation. Unless there is hardware support for encoding, and open source drivers then don't even think about it.
There are different grades of flash chip, with varying amounts of write cycles. The problem with the kind of flash that you get in a usb keyring is not that flash is limited in the number of writes, but that cheap low-end flash is. The kind of solid state storage in a drive can take millions of write cycles, which combined with a file-system that spreads the writes evenly across he chip will give a decent lifespan.
Cost is still a major issue though. The article only has one number in it, that densities will go up to 160Gb. Do you think they'll take a cheque for that, or you do you have to spread and touch your toes in person?
Aha, in that case it was I that misunderstood you (and apologies to Billasour). Although what I thought you were saying still makes sense. No matter which profile they go for, the length of time away from Earth is substantial. Simulations into the effects of long-term spaceflight should take that into account. Also, the closed system environment is still an interesting challenge, and I'd like to see anyone who could maintain a local ecosystem for the entire duration of a mission.
:) you both make a good point that the psychological impact is going to be affected by the ratio of flight-time to surface-time. Even if the flight-time is relatively shorter, the return journey may have the largest impact because the climax of the mission has already been and gone, and in some sense the astronauts are killing time until they can get home.
As far as what you were actually saying goes
Erm, ok I'm going to try and not sound trollish for once. Did you understand the post you replied to, and did you read the article that you linked to? The round-trip time for the 30-60 day mission profile is estimated at 400-650 days. Which is exactly in the range that the GP proposed such an experiment should last. Because the crew are going to be just as confined and isolated on the trip as they will be on the surface.
That's quite strange. Maybe I've been lucky but I've never been charged for any of the bizarre "deformed" SMS messages that I've been sent. This includes spam from weird numbers.
Something that I've only seen recently is MMS shortcuts, that appear in your inbox like a regular sms. Luckily my handset puts a small world on the message icon, because the default action for these messages is to fire up gprs and go to the url in the message. These are really nasty, given the ripoff price of data access.
I've never seen a UK contract where you pay for incoming texts. Who are you with, and which tarrif are you on?
(So I know who not to change to next time)
Are you sure?
What if I tell you that that word 31552 in the new Harry Potter book is "below"? I've just shared material that is clearly copyrighted, have I infringed the copyright? What if I expand this out to a whole sentence - quoting passages is considered fair use. I've shared copyrighted material but there has been no infringement. It's easy to see that 20000 of us could each quote a single sentence in the book, if you reassemble all the quotes together then you could reconstruct the entire book.
Nobody has pushed this question in court AFAIK, and yet that is the basis of a p2p network. Every person being slapped with damages for distributing to 100000 people couldn't have uploaded enough material to have performed that distribution. They may have uploaded several small chunks to individual people - but at what stage does that become illegal?
What if we take this to a logical extreme and consider a p2p network where each connection serves to indicate a single bit in the source file? What if I don't tell you explicitly but tell you to "guess high". Good luck trying to legislate over that, it will never work.
More worryingly than that - why start a program designed to cut down on bad software patents in the UK. Software patents aren't legal over here...
Sure, try it. Where does he explain why he hasn't built it?
I'm amazed that you've managed to prove quite so concisely that nobody on slashdot reads the posts, let alone the articles. So after reading your post I'm wondering which form of psychotic disorder you suffer from, and if you've been diagnosed.
So, you've had an epiphany about power generation that says that anyone with basic technical skills could build a device in a week that would produce free limitless power. Is there any particular reason that you haven't gone ahead an built this device? If it's that easy, and all of the physicists and engineers are pissing in the wind with fusion power then why not demonstrate to them the error of their ways?
When you "see signs" that others know about this, do you also experience paranoia that they are coming to get you? Or witness strange meaning in coincidences that are all around you? I really don't know what's scarier, that so many people replied without actually mentioning anything that you'd said, or that somebody with mod points thought that you were insightful about easy the power generation problem is...
If I remember correctly its O(n!) and it gets called super-exponential. But it's been a while and my memory may be off.
I had the exact same plan... although I was going to call the AI Rio. We should really get together sometime...
Nah. Spore will come out sooner or (probably) later. Then it will feel much more like Black and White...
Nice. I think you've stitched up all the major avenues of discussion with the first post. Another alternative that made slashdot last year some time was the theory that our galaxy was not conducive to intelligent until recently. The idea is that gamma-ray bursts from pulsars would kill off all life near by. Over time the rate of these events has dropped until the time between them is roughly the length of time for an intelligent species to evolve. At the moment our galaxy is undergoing a phase-transition from an environment that is hostile to life surviving long enough to evolve intelligence, to one that would allow it. So in some sense, all of the intelligent species are "recent" innovations in the galaxy.
It's an interesting theory, but it is just one possible explanation. James Annis' paper describes it well.
VLIW is effectively a kind of cross between SIMD and MIMD. The EUs inside the processor are each addressable separately by a field within the instruction, so in each instruction you issue a LOAD/STORE sub-instruction, an INT instruction ... etc. The compiler has a lot of work to do to fill the slots, but the decode logic is much easier but the scheduling is less flexible. In SIMB you issue one identical instruction to many cores, in MIMD you basically have separate threads. VLIW is not about multi-processing, it's just a way of shifting the decoding/scheduling burden from hardware to software.
The patent description (like most) is quite opaque and shit. It sounds as if they are describing a programable switch fabric used as an interconnect between processing cores. The idea being that any processor can seize control (act as the master) and program the fabric, then tell the slave units to perform some computation so that the results are routed back efficiently.
Claim 6 which somebody else has pointed out is likely to be the basis of the suit describes a network of processors which each have local memory, where it can be addressed as one large shared memory by asking the target processor to fetch and send / receive and write the information.
The Cell doesn't infringe this patent because the internal communication network is a fixed topology token ring bus. There is not a flexible master in the system because the Cell is asynchronous in the sense that the smaller slaves are not comparable to the main core. From the way they've written the wording it seems as if this is what they mean by synchronous, although it is mixed in with an example of communication barriers for multiple processors. All bets are off about exactly what they meant there.
Either way, it doesn't matter as the patent is completely invalid. All Sony would have to do is mention Inmos and the Transputer, and any of the patents that they filed in the 1980s which predate, and overlap this patent. In particular the implementation of channel negotation between multiple transputers as a reconfiguration of a switching fabric by any of a number of identical processors acting as a master.
Of course, this will play out as a patent dispute in a US court, so all bets are off. Toss a coin, see who wins.
Not for long. If you wait a few more weeks you'll be able to swim...
Ahh, whoops. Now I look like a bit of a tit. Sorry for being patronising I didn't realise that from your previous post.
Ok, so serious question. At the moment we have a way of building applications, as code talking to the various X APIs. HTML/css/javascript etc are a different way of building apps. You want to replace the entire desktop with the web style way of doing it - but isn't this just reinventing the wheel. I'm not trying to troll here, but I just don't see what's so cool with replacing one bunch of language / APIs with another in this context. But then again I didn't really see the point of active desktop in IE4. So what is so cool about rewriting the desktop/applications in HTML and friends?
Best rant ever.
+1 Ironic.
In TFA it points out that the morse coder transmitted the entire phrase verbatim, whereas the text messager used abbreviations and slang. So, no, it would appear that he could hit ..- faster that you can tap the 8 key twice. If you seen the speed that a morse operator works at, compared to the spongey unresponsive keys on a mobile then it's not a big suprise really.
A more interesting test would be to choose a phrase that can be texted verbatim using t9. That's very close to one key per character and should be a closer result.
I think you'll find that 18 is relatively young (in about ten years or so). You're just not old enough to appreciate the GP's comment.
I'm not sure how much you know about a desktop/windows under X so I'll go from basics. When you render content to a window you update the client window. This is the part inside the standard window manager decoration that draws the borders / close buttons / title bar etc. Inside the client window of a normal browser, the browser draws a bunch of controls (address bar / buttons / tabs etc) and then the content within a child window of the client window. To "run" a web-app alongside other windows seamlessly all you need to do is remove the extra frame from the content window with the controls.
This can be done in javascript on a standard browser. There is no need to write a new window manager, and window managers shouldn't be concerned with the contents of the windows they manage. They should be neutral to the applications. Their aim is to run webapps seamlessly alongside native apps. This is not a problem currently. It doesn't require a solution. If it did then a custom window manager would not be a good way of solving it.
They describe all this in non-technical hype and buzzwords, as quoted above and then throw in that they can solve this using compositing. Compositing is the process whereby a window is rendered to an offscreen buffer in OpenGL so that processing can be applied to the image before display. Normally this is used for drop-shadows / proper transparency and other special effects. It has no connection to what they've described at all. Hence the questions.
Multithreaded H.264
Real-time encoding...
Maybe I'm being naive, but how would this be different to running a separate browser window for each page, without any navigation controls. You know, like some really nasty site interfaces do before you navigate away from them really quickly...
What is the point? Why does it need a separate window manager? Why on earth does the summary mention compositing when it doesn't appear in the article?
I haven't looked at the API so I don't know if this would true (disclaimer aside), but if there is a stable API between the user-space part and the kernel - doesn't that make reverse engineering from a trace easier? If I can perform action A 20 times, and then check a log of the driver traces from the kernel then I can infer which bits to twiddle to make things happen. Anyone know if this is the case?
No. If the amount that you can steal is less than the expected return on your reputation then it's irrational. In a situation where the amount that you can steal is more than the expected return on your reputation then it's rational to steal. But morality is not simply rational behavior. It's a view of the correctness of actions relative to the perceived value system of the person whose morals you are discussing.