Another reason why powers of two are popular with multicore chips is that powers of two can be laid out into rectangles. If your multicore design is basically a copy-and-paste job with a little glue logic, it's a lot easier to lay out the cores. With something like the Cell, 8 is a nice number of cores since it allows you to have two rows of four. Three is just awkward.
Some would disagree. 3 cores laid out in a triangle and each core can have a direct connection to every other core. Try doing that with 4....possible but not so nice.
Yeah, you may be right. I know the original xbox was costing M$ more money than they were selling them for but they'd make it up with game sales. Not sure if the same is true of the PS3
Not true. Most of the processing power is still there. Just no accelerated graphics.
The CELL should be enough to process it, the code hasn't been written yet.
If you're watching a video on there you're just using the 3.2GHz PPC with a frame buffer.
You're not using any of the SPU/SPE's. I think work is being done for this but it will take time.
This one is actually okay, but its because its an owl. I'm sure all the blurring is there, its just hard to notice. The eye's pupil isn't as rounded as it could have been.
What's worse is that the SPUs don't speak the same language as the CPU so you can't just take a normal task and thread it like you can on a normal SMP system; each task has to be built specifically to be handled by the SPU. Threading doesn't happen magically on other systems either. You have to explicitly create threads too.
You are right that the SPU's and the PPE don't speak the same language, but nobody writes those languages anyway. You can compile C for both of them you just have to compile them separately. On other systems you're probably compiling thread classes separately anyway.
I could see not letting iTunes do anything with it on an unauthorized computer, but charging? What bout all the other non-computer things that charge iPods now-a-days like car kits or plain old usb power adapters that go into wall sockets.
My girlfriend has a car charger, a wall charger, and an iHome which all charge her iPod.
For this to not just stay in a niche market of hackers wanting to run apache and other lame stuff that doesn't belong on a phone....
An app is needed for P2P (literally one peer to another peer... (Doesn't Zune do this?...I dunno)) transfer of DRM free music. Imaging sitting on a bus or subway and your phone says "Person XYZ has 150 songs, and 25 music videos available for you to grab, and Person ABC has 85 songs and 5 music videos available for you to grab".
If you were free to install AIM on your phone, there goes a large portion of AT&T's income from text messages. yeah, especially since you could still send real text messages on AIM by sending a message to "+1XXXYYYYYYY" where XXX is the area code and YYYYYYY is the phone number (in the US anyway) and send AIM messages to those on AIM.
I think it was a comment here that once suggested a voting system where users could ensure that their vote counted. Every registered voter has a public / private key. Votes are digitally signed by the voters. Then after the election (or during), the signed messages are posted online. Voters would be able to see that their vote counted in the right direction, and unless someone else knows your private key, nobody would be able to tell who you voted for.
The non-digital analog to this went something like this. Think of it like a system where you write down who you vote for on the top of a piece of paper. Then you tear off the top and place it in a sealed box. The bottom half is your receipt. After the election, you can compare your bottom half to every top half out there until you find the one that matches the tear pattern.
Too bad the POS3 can't even scale 720p games to 1080i. What a fucking joke! The 360 scales *all* games to 1080i as does all other *true* HD devices.
720p scaled to 1080i isn't any more *true* than 720p unscaled and letting your TV scale it for you. In fact, unless your display is natively 1080i, it is worse.
I have a 1080p display. If what you're saying is true of the 360, I could play a 720p game, have it upscaled and interlaced to 1080i on the 360 only to have it deinterlaced on my display once it gets there? That is a fucking joke! Why would I want that?
The PS3 downscales almost all games to only 480p on HD rear projection TVs. If you only want to play games at 480p then get a PS2 or anything else that's 1/2 the price. It's a steaming pile of crap.
I have an HD rear projection TV (Sony 60A2000) and only one game (just bought it on Sunday) and its giving my TV 720p for the game, and 1080p for the XMB or whatever its called, and 1080p for Linux.
Shouldn't whatever library implements the free() function set it to null? Is there any code out there that actually depends on retaining the value of somePointer after doing free(somePointer)?
Is a dangling pointer a pointer that wasn't free'd, or a pointer that was free'd but you keep the reference around anyway?
If it is talking about a pointer that wasn't free'd, I didn't think that was a problem and it was common to do. Like I said in my post above, doing a listing in my home directory the ls command left 84 pointers un-free'd.
If it is talking about a pointer that was free'd but you still keep a reference around, I don't see the problem in that either unless you're dereferencing it. But dereferencing something that is free'd is an error or bug in itself.
Is this a problem with Dangling Pointers alone or don't you also need some kind of buffer overflow to fill the place pointed to by the buffer?
On Linux, I just ran "valgrind ls" and I saw the following...
ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 4 from 1) malloc/free: in use at exit: 23,673 bytes in 84 blocks. malloc/free: 136 allocs, 52 frees, 57,621 bytes allocated.
Looks like ls has 84 allocs without free's....is this a problem?
A true random number generator would produce numbers between negative infinity and infinity. This just randomly produces 0's and 1's.
Computers by them selves are deterministic. To get random behaviour out of them you can't just have an algorithm because it will loop. You need external input. Maybe you can use CPU temp or fan RPM and consider that external input.
I've seen things before where people point web cams at lava lamps take the resulting image in whatever format and do an md5 or some other hash on it. I would bet that this new method isn't any stronger than the webcam/lavalamp implementation and a whole lot more expensive.
I'm too lazy to look up the reference but I thought someone was working on this...possibly Intel. Or maybe that was something else. I don't remember it being like a CPU that had a socket for another CPU on the top of it, I think it was more on the nano-scale.... Hmm, now I'm trying to think what they were using that technology for then...
I thought one of the big selling points of Java (over C++ back in the day) was that it would be immune to buffer overflows due to it's object representation and garbage collection mechanism. Was that just hype?
That is only for code that YOU write IN JAVA, not how the JVM is implemented by the vendor.
Also, in Java not everything is an object, there are still primitives and those primitives can overflow.
It uses GCC, but they hate it, or better yet, they hate that they have to use a product under the GPL.
Why do they hate it? They chose to use GCC probably because it was too good not to use, they made modifications to it and ship it with XCode. And because they ship a binary of modified GPL code they have to publish their changes. Why would they not like this? Because someone else could benefit from their changes? Someone else making a proprietary IDE that uses GCC for compiling? Didn't they know this when they got into it?
Wow, did you mean to post that as an anonymous coward? I wouldn't be showing off my knowledge of dirty bombs (if I had such knowledge) (which I don't) (...nor will I ever) (I love America).
Slashdot Mirror
Another reason why powers of two are popular with multicore chips is that powers of two can be laid out into rectangles. If your multicore design is basically a copy-and-paste job with a little glue logic, it's a lot easier to lay out the cores. With something like the Cell, 8 is a nice number of cores since it allows you to have two rows of four. Three is just awkward.
Some would disagree. 3 cores laid out in a triangle and each core can have a direct connection to every other core. Try doing that with 4....possible but not so nice.Yeah, you may be right. I know the original xbox was costing M$ more money than they were selling them for but they'd make it up with game sales. Not sure if the same is true of the PS3
Not true. Most of the processing power is still there. Just no accelerated graphics. The CELL should be enough to process it, the code hasn't been written yet. If you're watching a video on there you're just using the 3.2GHz PPC with a frame buffer. You're not using any of the SPU/SPE's. I think work is being done for this but it will take time.
I have played around with it and wasn't too impressed.t ion/img/res_parrot.png
t ion/img/res_claudia16.html
t ion/img/res_chouette2.html
This one looks bad...
http://www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/~dtschump/greycstora
This one you can mouse-over and have the image change on you. Again, not that impressed.
http://www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/~dtschump/greycstora
Looks very blurry.
This one is actually okay, but its because its an owl. I'm sure all the blurring is there, its just hard to notice.
The eye's pupil isn't as rounded as it could have been.
http://www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/~dtschump/greycstora
This software is okay at denoising camera photos for free, but I like neatimage and don't mind paying for it.
Too bad the cell is SIMD and not MIMD
I could see not letting iTunes do anything with it on an unauthorized computer, but charging? What bout all the other non-computer things that charge iPods now-a-days like car kits or plain old usb power adapters that go into wall sockets.
My girlfriend has a car charger, a wall charger, and an iHome which all charge her iPod.
For this to not just stay in a niche market of hackers wanting to run apache and other lame stuff that doesn't belong on a phone....
An app is needed for P2P (literally one peer to another peer... (Doesn't Zune do this?...I dunno)) transfer of DRM free music. Imaging sitting on a bus or subway and your phone says "Person XYZ has 150 songs, and 25 music videos available for you to grab, and Person ABC has 85 songs and 5 music videos available for you to grab".
...Like using Skype on via your home wifi. Unlimited "home minutes". Also unlimited "starbucks minutes" and "anywhere else there is a wifi minutes".
I thought Dell did this when you installed Linux on one of their computers. It voided the warranty.
Think there was a Slashdot article about it too.
Since apache is running on an iPhone now, it could host that iPhone exploit discussed earlier.
I think it was a comment here that once suggested a voting system where users could ensure that their vote counted.
Every registered voter has a public / private key.
Votes are digitally signed by the voters.
Then after the election (or during), the signed messages are posted online.
Voters would be able to see that their vote counted in the right direction, and unless someone else knows your private key, nobody would be able to tell who you voted for.
The non-digital analog to this went something like this. Think of it like a system where you write down who you vote for on the top of a piece of paper. Then you tear off the top and place it in a sealed box. The bottom half is your receipt. After the election, you can compare your bottom half to every top half out there until you find the one that matches the tear pattern.
Sounds like its time to buy a new TV or an external scaler if the only progressive signal you can accept is 480.
I wouldn't want Sony to put a scaler in their PS3's. It would mean that I'd be paying for your crappy research / tv shopping skills.
Rock solid and very quiet well built machine.
You must not have tried to put it in an entertainment center.
I got one on Sunday and it sounded like a damn vacuum.
Shouldn't whatever library implements the free() function set it to null?
Is there any code out there that actually depends on retaining the value of somePointer after doing free(somePointer)?
Those were my thoughts exactly in the post above.
Is a dangling pointer a pointer that wasn't free'd, or a pointer that was free'd but you keep the reference around anyway?
If it is talking about a pointer that wasn't free'd, I didn't think that was a problem and it was common to do. Like I said in my post above, doing a listing in my home directory the ls command left 84 pointers un-free'd.
If it is talking about a pointer that was free'd but you still keep a reference around, I don't see the problem in that either unless you're dereferencing it. But dereferencing something that is free'd is an error or bug in itself.
Is this a problem with Dangling Pointers alone or don't you also need some kind of buffer overflow to fill the place pointed to by the buffer?
On Linux, I just ran "valgrind ls" and I saw the following...
ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 4 from 1)
malloc/free: in use at exit: 23,673 bytes in 84 blocks.
malloc/free: 136 allocs, 52 frees, 57,621 bytes allocated.
Looks like ls has 84 allocs without free's....is this a problem?
A true random number generator would produce numbers between negative infinity and infinity. This just randomly produces 0's and 1's.
Computers by them selves are deterministic. To get random behaviour out of them you can't just have an algorithm because it will loop. You need external input. Maybe you can use CPU temp or fan RPM and consider that external input.
I've seen things before where people point web cams at lava lamps take the resulting image in whatever format and do an md5 or some other hash on it. I would bet that this new method isn't any stronger than the webcam/lavalamp implementation and a whole lot more expensive.
I'm too lazy to look up the reference but I thought someone was working on this...possibly Intel.
Or maybe that was something else. I don't remember it being like a CPU that had a socket for another CPU on the top of it, I think it was more on the nano-scale....
Hmm, now I'm trying to think what they were using that technology for then...
Why do they hate it? They chose to use GCC probably because it was too good not to use, they made modifications to it and ship it with XCode. And because they ship a binary of modified GPL code they have to publish their changes. Why would they not like this? Because someone else could benefit from their changes? Someone else making a proprietary IDE that uses GCC for compiling? Didn't they know this when they got into it?
Wow, did you mean to post that as an anonymous coward?
I wouldn't be showing off my knowledge of dirty bombs (if I had such knowledge) (which I don't) (...nor will I ever) (I love America).
I couldn't find a "minimum Vista requirement joke either"....