The reference in the post and in the article to a Xilinx XCR3128XL FPGA is incorrect - the XCR3128XL is actually a Xilinx CPLD. While both are reconfigurable, the primary difference between an FPGA and a CPLD is that an FPGA is SRAM based, and must be programmed each time it is turned on, while a CPLD is Flash based, and can keeps its configuration between power cycles. Additionally, FPGAs tend to have more logic and more features.
Based on the fact that there is a claim for a huge existing game base, I am guessing that they are actually a PC platform that will be able to play pre-existing PC games. In addition, if you look at the images on their announcement site, in the transparent front view, you can see what looks to be PCI cards sticking up, as well as a harddrive and processor heatsink profile. The form factor even looks like an ATX. My money is that they are trying remarket a low end PC as a gaming platform.
Predicted load of fifteen hundred users; unfortunately a web server failure caused the web site to tip over and dive into the ether from a hundred user load, causing severe damage (i.e., it requires a new server, not a new OS)
Think you have some slackers around the office spending all their time chatting online, spilling the beans about your financials, or just bad-mouthing the CEO? Take AIM and blow them away with our instant message monitoring software!
Either that, or an image of legions upon legions of black suited butlers swarming over the ramparts of mansions, finally rebelling in a jihad for their centuries of indentured servitude.
I know, pretty poor, but I am on the west coast, so it is barely past 8 a.m., and I haven't had any coffee!
I loved the original Dune series, all the way through Chapterhouse, must have read Dune 10+ times, and the entire series 3+ times (I know, no life). However, I was sorely disappointed by House Atreides, and couldn't even finish it. I found the the characters where extremely stiff, black and white, and uninteresting - totally lacking in the passion and subtlety found in the original series.
Anybody out there who had the same reaction to the first of Brian Herbert's Dune books have an opinion of whether things have gotten better or not? This review makes it sound like it might be worth it, but burnt once . . .
I know this is a bit off topic, but when I clicked on the link for news.google.com, there was a link at the top to a story titled "Vatican/HP To Put Library Online" (sound familiar?). Clicking on that link, I was confused to find that I was at the Slashdot article. Turns out that news.google.com is referring to the Slashdot story that refers to the news.google.com story - WHEN WILL THE INSANITY END???
I am not very knowledgeable about security issues, but I am curious if the inclusion of security modules in the kernel will provide for a single point of failure. In other words, as more programs become dependent on the kernel module for security, if an exploit becomes available, will all these dependent programs become exploitable?
I ask this specifically because of the problem the IE ran into, where it depended on security APIs from Windows, the Windows API had an exploitable bug, and ta-da, IE had an exploitable bug.
In news today, it was reported that, in an attempt to deal with a funding shortfall, SETI has spawned a daughter organization SETF (Search for Extra Terrestrial Funding). One of the biggest obstacles that SETI officials face is determining the appropriate exchange rate from the intergalactic rugblat to the dollar.
Napster had the wrong idea, if they could have worked out something with RIAA regarding this same concept they would be a leviathan. However it makes you wonder if these lawsuits weren't strategic in nature. I believe in the end, history will show that killing Napster was the worst mistake the music industry could have made. They lost control of a contained problem. It wasn't fixed. However when 26 million people scatter to the winds and start their own file sharing networks (Morpheus, Gnutella and many more) the problem is decentralized and unsolvable.
I think that the main issue is that both the MPAA and the RIAA want control of the distribution channels. At the beginning of the legal case against Napster, there was no way that Napster was going to give the RIAA and the MPAA the control they wanted - Napster thought they couldn't lose. Once Napster started to lose, the RIAA and MPAA didn't want to settle, they wanted to make an example of Napster. What better way to stop copycat Napsters than to show their business model couldn't work. There was no way they could have forseen the rise of the Peer2Peer trading. In hindsight, Jarrett Wold is right - they would have been much better able to keep control with a well-heeled Leviathan Napster than a plethora of mini-napsters. But then again, the RIAA and MPAA have been famous for being short-sighted.
I understand your reasoning, but I still maintain it is a faily large assumption. A long time ago I read a book called "Fingerprint of God" (Don't ask - grandparents asked me to) that went over some of the statistics of the formation of a planet lke the Earth, based on our understanding of how solar systems develop.
Taking into account the slant of the book as it was trying to prove the existence of God by showing how improbably a planet like the Earth would form, it still drew on quite a few statistics about how small a range of orbits is acceptable for a planet to be formed with significant oxygen, a very volatile substance, large enough to maintain it's atmosphere without being too large and having a heat and gravity problem, etc.
My point is, it is easy to say "The universe is so large, of course there must be another planet like the Earth", but we would need to actually looking at the probabilities associated with the different factors before I would be willing to lay money on it.
I must say, it is quite amazing the lengths that Intellectual Property manufacturers will go to in ofrder to "plug the analog hole". I know that there have been stories about how movies appear on Kazaa the same day the sneak preview has been shown because somebody brought in a videa camera and filmed it, but please. These videos are of terrible quality, and only help promote interest in the movie - "Hey all you hyped up fans - look at this crappy copy you can see two days early - really whets your appetite for the real thing, doesn't it?" I am just amazed that people would go to the extent of adding significant cost and complexity in order to prevent a very small group from trading crappy copies.
And most improtantly, I am sure that there will be a hack to get around the distortion - whether it is a run-time hack that fixes it as you record (difficult) or go back with some sort of filter to post-process it (maybe easier), I am sure it will happen. But bottom line, it won't matter - the people who watch these video-taped copies aren't in it for the fidelity, they are in it for seeing it first - a little more distortion won't stop them.
Dr Wayne Holland, who led the team, which is based at the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh, said the discovery provided the strongest evidence so far that other solar systems existed.
He said: "If that is the case, then why shouldn't there be planetary systems like our own that contain Earth-like planets?
"Personally speaking, I think it must be odds-on that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and I think one day we will find it - or they will find us."
I find it very interesting that they make the point that this offers evidence that other solar systems exist! I had thought that was as forgone conclusion, and we were just looking for specifica planets.
And then to take this proof, and amek the jump, if there are solar systems, then there should be earth like planets - that is a huge assumption. And finally, to go from solar system to intelligent life, that just took it from huge assumption, to science fiction. Not that I don't like science fiction, but not is a scientific article!
I can't that the RIAA is going to be happy with broadcasting Digital CD quality music for free without some sort of DRM provisions. Anybody know if the Digital Radio will include any sort of Broadcast Flag to disable recording? The article has Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy claiming that "We don't get many items where it's a win-win for everyone. There's no down side." From what I've seen, the RIAA sees a downside anytime there is Audio content that is digitized without protection.
Favorite quote from article:
Digital broadcasts use the same language as computers - a series of on and off electronic pulses.
I think they should play this like survivor, but with survival being the actual goal. Instead of giving the contestants any training, make them go into to space and try to not die. The last one to not die is the winner and get's a trip back to earth.
If it looks like more than one person is going to survive, they can have competitions - who can survive outside without a suit the longest, who can survive Bass's music the longest, who can drink the most tang without peeing or throwing up (Road Rules reference), who can ride the ISS's Robotic arm as a broncing bull for the longest, etc. This could be the ultimate in Dead Reality TV - and since it is in outer space, don't need to worry about lawsuits, or murder convictions : )
This would not be a string from the Earth to Mars, it would be a Space Elevator on Earth, and a separate one on Mars. Both of these would provide for low cost movement from planet surface to space and back. The Elevator on Earth would not have a problem with the moon, however the Mars one may - not sure. In Red Mars, this was dealt with by initiating a side-to-side oscillation in the elevator to miss the moon. While this would create additional strains on the cable, they might be within the capabilities. Addtionally, there is talk of putting an Earth based elevator on a ship at sea (think Sea Launch) to enable movement of the cable to avoid thunderstorms or large scale space debris.
The subject of small space debris hitting the carbon tube structure is a problem, but the designs deiscussed include for a couple of solutions: (1) the cable is thicker where there is a higher proportion of the orbital debris (2) The cable is actually slightly curved so that it will tend to deflect incident debris (3) the maintenance of the cable would include for cable crawlers that would routinely make runs up/down the cable to repair damages from debris.
One of the things that I find interesting about the whole process of the Space Elevator principle is the idea that after the first one, it is possible to relatively easily spawn of daughter cables, so that if the first one took 2.5 years, subsequent ones would take less than a year. Not only does this provide for additional capacity, it raises the possibility of selling cables! It also makes the first entrant into the Space Elevator arena almost automatically dominant.
Additionally, you can create a daughter cable, and then use the cable to sling the entire daughter cable to the red planet - suddenly, we have a means to get to Geo Earth orbit, a way to sling stuff to Mars (using the cable) and a way to get down to the surface of Mars, and back up! This is probably the most feasible way that I have heard of to explore Mars.
Overall, I am quite impressed by the reviews that Lindows 2.0 received - I was not expecting nearly so much praise, or for it to sound so user frienly. My main hesitation is in regards to the things left off - I want to set up a system for my siste-in-law, but we have dial-up. Downloading some of the programs that I want to have on there will be a serious pain - when I pay for a Linux distrubution, I would expect some of the mainstays of OSS to be there - Mozilla, not netscape - OpenOffice, not AbiWord, etc. Nothing against Mozilla, and AbiWord, but I would prefer to at least have the option of installing off the disks!
When Intel switched from the P3 architecture to the P4 architecture, they increased the depth of their pipeline from 10 to 20, I believe. My understanding was that this significantly increased the performance penalty for mispredicts for branches and whatnot requiring a flush of the pipeline. I am curious if adding SMT to this will increase the penalty for mispredicts even more, if both threads must be flushed or only the one. If this is the case, are there cases where the penalty would outweight the benefit?
Slashdot Mirror
The reference in the post and in the article to a Xilinx XCR3128XL FPGA is incorrect - the XCR3128XL is actually a Xilinx CPLD. While both are reconfigurable, the primary difference between an FPGA and a CPLD is that an FPGA is SRAM based, and must be programmed each time it is turned on, while a CPLD is Flash based, and can keeps its configuration between power cycles. Additionally, FPGAs tend to have more logic and more features.
Based on the fact that there is a claim for a huge existing game base, I am guessing that they are actually a PC platform that will be able to play pre-existing PC games. In addition, if you look at the images on their announcement site, in the transparent front view, you can see what looks to be PCI cards sticking up, as well as a harddrive and processor heatsink profile. The form factor even looks like an ATX. My money is that they are trying remarket a low end PC as a gaming platform.
Predicted load of fifteen hundred users; unfortunately a web server failure caused the web site to tip over and dive into the ether from a hundred user load, causing severe damage (i.e., it requires a new server, not a new OS)
Think you have some slackers around the office spending all their time chatting online, spilling the beans about your financials, or just bad-mouthing the CEO? Take AIM and blow them away with our instant message monitoring software!
Something like Buttman Jihad.
Either that, or an image of legions upon legions of black suited butlers swarming over the ramparts of mansions, finally rebelling in a jihad for their centuries of indentured servitude.I know, pretty poor, but I am on the west coast, so it is barely past 8 a.m., and I haven't had any coffee!
I loved the original Dune series, all the way through Chapterhouse, must have read Dune 10+ times, and the entire series 3+ times (I know, no life). However, I was sorely disappointed by House Atreides, and couldn't even finish it. I found the the characters where extremely stiff, black and white, and uninteresting - totally lacking in the passion and subtlety found in the original series.
Anybody out there who had the same reaction to the first of Brian Herbert's Dune books have an opinion of whether things have gotten better or not? This review makes it sound like it might be worth it, but burnt once . . .
I know this is a bit off topic, but when I clicked on the link for news.google.com, there was a link at the top to a story titled "Vatican/HP To Put Library Online" (sound familiar?). Clicking on that link, I was confused to find that I was at the Slashdot article. Turns out that news.google.com is referring to the Slashdot story that refers to the news.google.com story - WHEN WILL THE INSANITY END???
I am not very knowledgeable about security issues, but I am curious if the inclusion of security modules in the kernel will provide for a single point of failure. In other words, as more programs become dependent on the kernel module for security, if an exploit becomes available, will all these dependent programs become exploitable?
I ask this specifically because of the problem the IE ran into, where it depended on security APIs from Windows, the Windows API had an exploitable bug, and ta-da, IE had an exploitable bug.Tomorrow - Engage the cloaking device!
In news today, it was reported that, in an attempt to deal with a funding shortfall, SETI has spawned a daughter organization SETF (Search for Extra Terrestrial Funding). One of the biggest obstacles that SETI officials face is determining the appropriate exchange rate from the intergalactic rugblat to the dollar.
I understand your reasoning, but I still maintain it is a faily large assumption. A long time ago I read a book called "Fingerprint of God" (Don't ask - grandparents asked me to) that went over some of the statistics of the formation of a planet lke the Earth, based on our understanding of how solar systems develop.
Taking into account the slant of the book as it was trying to prove the existence of God by showing how improbably a planet like the Earth would form, it still drew on quite a few statistics about how small a range of orbits is acceptable for a planet to be formed with significant oxygen, a very volatile substance, large enough to maintain it's atmosphere without being too large and having a heat and gravity problem, etc.
My point is, it is easy to say "The universe is so large, of course there must be another planet like the Earth", but we would need to actually looking at the probabilities associated with the different factors before I would be willing to lay money on it.
I must say, it is quite amazing the lengths that Intellectual Property manufacturers will go to in ofrder to "plug the analog hole". I know that there have been stories about how movies appear on Kazaa the same day the sneak preview has been shown because somebody brought in a videa camera and filmed it, but please. These videos are of terrible quality, and only help promote interest in the movie - "Hey all you hyped up fans - look at this crappy copy you can see two days early - really whets your appetite for the real thing, doesn't it?" I am just amazed that people would go to the extent of adding significant cost and complexity in order to prevent a very small group from trading crappy copies.
And most improtantly, I am sure that there will be a hack to get around the distortion - whether it is a run-time hack that fixes it as you record (difficult) or go back with some sort of filter to post-process it (maybe easier), I am sure it will happen. But bottom line, it won't matter - the people who watch these video-taped copies aren't in it for the fidelity, they are in it for seeing it first - a little more distortion won't stop them.
And then to take this proof, and amek the jump, if there are solar systems, then there should be earth like planets - that is a huge assumption. And finally, to go from solar system to intelligent life, that just took it from huge assumption, to science fiction. Not that I don't like science fiction, but not is a scientific article!
I can't that the RIAA is going to be happy with broadcasting Digital CD quality music for free without some sort of DRM provisions. Anybody know if the Digital Radio will include any sort of Broadcast Flag to disable recording? The article has Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy claiming that "We don't get many items where it's a win-win for everyone. There's no down side." From what I've seen, the RIAA sees a downside anytime there is Audio content that is digitized without protection.
Favorite quote from article:
Digital broadcasts use the same language as computers - a series of on and off electronic pulses.
Now that is insightful!
I think they should play this like survivor, but with survival being the actual goal. Instead of giving the contestants any training, make them go into to space and try to not die. The last one to not die is the winner and get's a trip back to earth.
If it looks like more than one person is going to survive, they can have competitions - who can survive outside without a suit the longest, who can survive Bass's music the longest, who can drink the most tang without peeing or throwing up (Road Rules reference), who can ride the ISS's Robotic arm as a broncing bull for the longest, etc. This could be the ultimate in Dead Reality TV - and since it is in outer space, don't need to worry about lawsuits, or murder convictions : )
This would not be a string from the Earth to Mars, it would be a Space Elevator on Earth, and a separate one on Mars. Both of these would provide for low cost movement from planet surface to space and back. The Elevator on Earth would not have a problem with the moon, however the Mars one may - not sure. In Red Mars, this was dealt with by initiating a side-to-side oscillation in the elevator to miss the moon. While this would create additional strains on the cable, they might be within the capabilities. Addtionally, there is talk of putting an Earth based elevator on a ship at sea (think Sea Launch) to enable movement of the cable to avoid thunderstorms or large scale space debris.
The subject of small space debris hitting the carbon tube structure is a problem, but the designs deiscussed include for a couple of solutions: (1) the cable is thicker where there is a higher proportion of the orbital debris (2) The cable is actually slightly curved so that it will tend to deflect incident debris (3) the maintenance of the cable would include for cable crawlers that would routinely make runs up/down the cable to repair damages from debris.
One of the things that I find interesting about the whole process of the Space Elevator principle is the idea that after the first one, it is possible to relatively easily spawn of daughter cables, so that if the first one took 2.5 years, subsequent ones would take less than a year. Not only does this provide for additional capacity, it raises the possibility of selling cables! It also makes the first entrant into the Space Elevator arena almost automatically dominant.
Additionally, you can create a daughter cable, and then use the cable to sling the entire daughter cable to the red planet - suddenly, we have a means to get to Geo Earth orbit, a way to sling stuff to Mars (using the cable) and a way to get down to the surface of Mars, and back up! This is probably the most feasible way that I have heard of to explore Mars.
Overall, I am quite impressed by the reviews that Lindows 2.0 received - I was not expecting nearly so much praise, or for it to sound so user frienly. My main hesitation is in regards to the things left off - I want to set up a system for my siste-in-law, but we have dial-up. Downloading some of the programs that I want to have on there will be a serious pain - when I pay for a Linux distrubution, I would expect some of the mainstays of OSS to be there - Mozilla, not netscape - OpenOffice, not AbiWord, etc. Nothing against Mozilla, and AbiWord, but I would prefer to at least have the option of installing off the disks!
When Intel switched from the P3 architecture to the P4 architecture, they increased the depth of their pipeline from 10 to 20, I believe. My understanding was that this significantly increased the performance penalty for mispredicts for branches and whatnot requiring a flush of the pipeline. I am curious if adding SMT to this will increase the penalty for mispredicts even more, if both threads must be flushed or only the one. If this is the case, are there cases where the penalty would outweight the benefit?