"I doubt it will really work. The technique itself will be patented and will come at a cost to printer manufacturers to implement, whereas it will make the printers particularly unattractive to anyone on a budget."
That's wishfull thinking. You can easily make chips for a very small fraction of the price of these cartridges. So much so that any "piracy" that is being stamped out will mean more profit for the original manufacturer.
Chips in mass production have two mayor cost components: design and die-size. Now I don't know how much IP overhead there will be, but rest assured that the variable costs (related to die-size) will be extremely low. Especially since some of these cardridges tend to already contain electronics.
First of all, there are true 8 cores on a T1 (Niagara) chip (T2000 is the server if memory serves me right). There are 4 threads per core, which make sure that the ALU's and FPU's are used to the full. Now, there was some problems with floating point operations and crypto operations because not every core possessed these functionalities. The Rock processor, with 16 "processing units" (4 cores, 4 processing units each), 16 FPU's and crypto-processors will set this right.
Note that these chips are created to deliver a good application server performance, while still showing a strong price point and power/performance ratio. If the data I found it correct, each T1 processor uses something like 56 Watt to do what it has to do. I wonder if your little test took this seriously, using two AMD CPU's running full speed. Also, if anywhere possible, loading the chips with 96 threads will make the scheduler go ape. Better use a thread pool of 8 threads (or 16 or 32) instead. So even if AMD comes out with this 4 core
But I agree on one thing: hyperthreading does very little. I would be just as happy with a T1 using only two threads. Two threads on a single core sometimes can make a 10-20% performance difference. If Intels hyperthreading is any indicator, this difference can go either way. I created a crypto cracking application which run much *slower* when hyperthreading was enabled (using 8 threads out of convenience). If hyperthreading is not (or cannot be) done correctly, it's better to leave it out altogether. It seems that the notion of processing units on the Rock processor targets this issue.
I agree, and it's completely idiotic to see this go to 5+ informative when it is so blatantly wrong. Anyway: try bluemsx to see what this is all about, if only to see MS Basic 1.0 load up on your computer. I've owned Canon, Philips and Sony MSX computers, all with MicroSoft Xpress software on it. They were quite popular in Spain, the Netherlands, Brasil and Russia (some of those actually were send into space). Reliable as hell, and you can still buy Zilog Z80 processors (e.g. also used in the first Nintendo Gameboy).
The bigger problem is that, indeed, the browser accepts data from any source to be put in a page, as well as allow communications to any destination. This can be images, video's, web-casts, posts, redirects, css pages - the works. To make matters worse, you cannot even trust links anymore, you never know what the scripting which is behind the link is going to do. This is just like Outlook displaying mails in Internet explorer, it's damn convenient at times, but it's really, really bad for security.
Now, if you would have to do this over again, sites should only accept data from and communications to a single domain and it sub-domains (e.g. slashdot.org and images.slashdot.org). Links to outside pages should be highlighted, and scripts should not be able to influence them. Of course, this would mean that you cannot use cross site cookies, counters, off-site images etc. These should be implemented/pushed to the original site (or maybe you could do something with a sub-domain).
Yes, this would be a lot of work, and yes you would loose just a bit of functionality. But think of the security advantages of this approach. Even better, think of the annoyances that you would loose, no more waiting for pages while a (&*^(*& ad or page counter fails to load. Frames were a horrible idea, but it would have been a lot better if the frames all originated from the same site, I know that.
"I first read about it over a month ago when Dell shipped a "critical update" for some of their laptops for this issue."
I didn't know about it. And now I find out I could have heard about this interesting issue if you would have taken the time to post to slashdot. Who is the slacker, slashdot, the poster or you? Blah frickin' blah indeed.
It seems this one is quite a bit smaller as well. Furthermore, it has 256 MB flash instead of max 16 for the gumstix I saw. Then again, you can easily upgrade the memory of the gumstix using SD or compact flash. And the gumstix seem to have more options. Of course, it depends on the price as well. The gumstix seem to be pretty sweetly priced, we'll just have to wait for the prices of these.
Just for browsing? A hole OS? What about portable applications? The only problem with portable Firefox is that for some reason you cannot use two instances of Firefox at the same time, but otherwise...
"and all you need to use it is another computer to plug it into."
Or a router with USB, hell, a television set with USB. You could probably also use the USB port just to power the device. So then you would have a mini PC with a network interface.
Call me when you hit 3Mbps on a UMTS connection, would you? This is a shared medium, and I don't believe the 3 Mbps for a second. Even if you go over 3 Mbps, I would still have a 3 Mbps connection to my laptop. Since I won't be downloading Blueray disks over Bluetooth, that will be ample, and thus far from useless. Things only get obsolete when people stop using them; Bluetooth is therefore far from obsolete. Many *cars* nowadays come with Bluetooth standard.
From an article on Radio-Electronics.com: "Of all the features included in Bluetooth 2, it is the enhanced data rate (EDR), facility that is giving rise to the most comment. In the new specification the maximum data rate is able to reach 3 Mbps, a significant increase on what was available in the previous Bluetooth specifications."
Most new devices come with BT2 as standard. My new laptop will surely have BT2, it's nicely enough for stereo headphones and at 375 KB/s (around 300 KB/s after anti-collision etc I suppose) there should be very little reason not to use Bluetooth. It uses much less power and might be able to talk to handsets as well. Huge bonuses over Wi-Fi if you ask me. The question is if it is a strong enough signal without strong antenna.
I don't know if you are trying to be funny, but three of such lines would get you fired from my company. And that is how it is supposed to be. If you really write such comments, you need to grow up. You first try and better a person and if he/she does not cooperate, you fire that person (that's why it is three warnings, really, otherwise you would have been fired right away).
"Plans for hotels include a distributed antenna system with a converged voice and data network, having all access points located in the telecom closet, up to four antennas used for coverage, and up to four access points used for bandwidth."
Dunno, if it is an astroturf, then they probably don't want the author to write articles like this. Sounds like a clueless person on the technical side of things.
Can anyone please explain what this means? I presume these antenna's are fixed to the access points, so of course there are four of both. And then there are four access points all in the same closet? What's the use of *that*? Or are there four locations, each with its own antenna, with four access points each? Is that even possible?
I was in Portugal/Lisbon and they had these billboards already. Could not see the speaker, but it must have been behind the paper somewhere. Damn annoying, even if I could not hear what they were saying. It was something like 'ring' 'ring' and then a lady said you needed to go to some operator. God, if I would have lived in that city I would have demolished every billboard I could find. Then again, this is a country where they have someone shouting over the speakers during a soccer game on the top of their lungs. The *whole* game. So they are probably not that bothered about it.
I'm sorry, but personal data is worth money. So, inherently, the bad companies make more money, even if they sell a little less. This can keep their price down. Of course, I won't buy from them, and I find that good quality service is more or less linear with good privacy. Other buyers fortunately think so as well. So the good companies still have a business case, but they are somewhat more expensive most of the time.
Just compare it with television. The ones with the most (annoying) commercials make the most money, and have the blockbuster movies first.
Bah, he ran Win2k for a long time before that. 4 months might not be much to get to know an operating system (and the apps around it of course) but WinXP is not *that* much different from Win2k. And you don't want to go and install Vista on a older PC.
My Windows 2K box is almost unusable because of the way Windows tends to install USB drivers. It installs a different driver for each port, and there is a maximum as well. Now I am maxed out and I need to restart my machine to get any new USB device (new being new OR old hardware on a different port) working. And you say Linux has flawed USB support? My Windows XP laptop, *when* and *if* it comes out of power safe mode does not have that problem yet (only two USB ports) but notifies me everytime I plugin a device that I should be using USB 2.0 ports. Which I don't have (company laptop).
"Making such a big deal out of startup time seems pretty pointless too."
I don't know. Current PC desktops (at least Windows XP and earlier computers) suck at suspend to RAM. So I still have to pay a lot of money to the electrical company (and make the earth a bit hotter) if I don't switch the freakin' thing off once in a while. Also they're pretty loud. So, yes, I do care about startup times - although I would more like it if Microsoft did the right thing and fixed OS and driver support for suspend to RAM. The computer should switch off all fans if this happens. Then - and only then - will I forget about startup times.
Besides, they did also test startup times, but I don't think they made a big deal out of it: "Just for fun, we thought we'd throw in a Boot timing as well, just to see how long the OS takes from the time the button is pushed until the desktop is ready to use." Yeah, that's really making a big deal out of it. Making your statement rather trollish.
Um, if you can parallelize many threads, you can just use a construct that tries to determine if they should be run in parallel, or just sequentially. So you can have x threads for x processors, and just schedule the tasks between them. If there are more tasks then threads, some will run sequentially. This can save quite some time, because the processor does not need to switch between threads all the time. In Java this is performed through Executors, with the ThreadPoolExecutor being one of the more sensible Executor implementations. Of course, you still have the communications to think about, but overloading does not look like much of a problem. Especially if you keep doing things sequentially; then you are overloading one of the processors for sure.
Yes, they should clearly opt for the conservatives (aka Tories) over labour for this. That would make a *huge* difference. Not. Besides that, there are many important things for a government to consider. Just opting out of one party because of a single issue like this is madness. This is a drawback of a democracy (and of most other governmental structures I suppose), you cannot really vote for single issues.
Have you tried configuring it to the full? You can even change screens, processors, hard drives and add a dedicated videocard. It won't take on other dimensions, but seems to be the only real constraint.
Slashdot Mirror
"Anyone who thinks that stores don't have a right to protect their own property has lost all touch with reality."
Anyone who took that first message about shopping cart DRM seriously isn't either, so join the club.
"I doubt it will really work. The technique itself will be patented and will come at a cost to printer manufacturers to implement, whereas it will make the printers particularly unattractive to anyone on a budget."
That's wishfull thinking. You can easily make chips for a very small fraction of the price of these cartridges. So much so that any "piracy" that is being stamped out will mean more profit for the original manufacturer.
Chips in mass production have two mayor cost components: design and die-size. Now I don't know how much IP overhead there will be, but rest assured that the variable costs (related to die-size) will be extremely low. Especially since some of these cardridges tend to already contain electronics.
First of all, there are true 8 cores on a T1 (Niagara) chip (T2000 is the server if memory serves me right). There are 4 threads per core, which make sure that the ALU's and FPU's are used to the full. Now, there was some problems with floating point operations and crypto operations because not every core possessed these functionalities. The Rock processor, with 16 "processing units" (4 cores, 4 processing units each), 16 FPU's and crypto-processors will set this right.
Note that these chips are created to deliver a good application server performance, while still showing a strong price point and power/performance ratio. If the data I found it correct, each T1 processor uses something like 56 Watt to do what it has to do. I wonder if your little test took this seriously, using two AMD CPU's running full speed. Also, if anywhere possible, loading the chips with 96 threads will make the scheduler go ape. Better use a thread pool of 8 threads (or 16 or 32) instead. So even if AMD comes out with this 4 core
But I agree on one thing: hyperthreading does very little. I would be just as happy with a T1 using only two threads. Two threads on a single core sometimes can make a 10-20% performance difference. If Intels hyperthreading is any indicator, this difference can go either way. I created a crypto cracking application which run much *slower* when hyperthreading was enabled (using 8 threads out of convenience). If hyperthreading is not (or cannot be) done correctly, it's better to leave it out altogether. It seems that the notion of processing units on the Rock processor targets this issue.
I agree, and it's completely idiotic to see this go to 5+ informative when it is so blatantly wrong. Anyway: try bluemsx to see what this is all about, if only to see MS Basic 1.0 load up on your computer. I've owned Canon, Philips and Sony MSX computers, all with MicroSoft Xpress software on it. They were quite popular in Spain, the Netherlands, Brasil and Russia (some of those actually were send into space). Reliable as hell, and you can still buy Zilog Z80 processors (e.g. also used in the first Nintendo Gameboy).
The bigger problem is that, indeed, the browser accepts data from any source to be put in a page, as well as allow communications to any destination. This can be images, video's, web-casts, posts, redirects, css pages - the works. To make matters worse, you cannot even trust links anymore, you never know what the scripting which is behind the link is going to do. This is just like Outlook displaying mails in Internet explorer, it's damn convenient at times, but it's really, really bad for security.
Now, if you would have to do this over again, sites should only accept data from and communications to a single domain and it sub-domains (e.g. slashdot.org and images.slashdot.org). Links to outside pages should be highlighted, and scripts should not be able to influence them. Of course, this would mean that you cannot use cross site cookies, counters, off-site images etc. These should be implemented/pushed to the original site (or maybe you could do something with a sub-domain).
Yes, this would be a lot of work, and yes you would loose just a bit of functionality. But think of the security advantages of this approach. Even better, think of the annoyances that you would loose, no more waiting for pages while a (&*^(*& ad or page counter fails to load. Frames were a horrible idea, but it would have been a lot better if the frames all originated from the same site, I know that.
"I first read about it over a month ago when Dell shipped a "critical update" for some of their laptops for this issue."
I didn't know about it. And now I find out I could have heard about this interesting issue if you would have taken the time to post to slashdot. Who is the slacker, slashdot, the poster or you? Blah frickin' blah indeed.
It seems this one is quite a bit smaller as well. Furthermore, it has 256 MB flash instead of max 16 for the gumstix I saw. Then again, you can easily upgrade the memory of the gumstix using SD or compact flash. And the gumstix seem to have more options. Of course, it depends on the price as well. The gumstix seem to be pretty sweetly priced, we'll just have to wait for the prices of these.
Just for browsing? A hole OS? What about portable applications? The only problem with portable Firefox is that for some reason you cannot use two instances of Firefox at the same time, but otherwise...
"and all you need to use it is another computer to plug it into."
Or a router with USB, hell, a television set with USB. You could probably also use the USB port just to power the device. So then you would have a mini PC with a network interface.
"Depends on how much power you want. Diode lasers are easy..."
World domination?
Insightful maybe, incredibly off topic as well. Do we want rants like this modded insightful each time they appear. I think not.
Call me when you hit 3Mbps on a UMTS connection, would you? This is a shared medium, and I don't believe the 3 Mbps for a second. Even if you go over 3 Mbps, I would still have a 3 Mbps connection to my laptop. Since I won't be downloading Blueray disks over Bluetooth, that will be ample, and thus far from useless. Things only get obsolete when people stop using them; Bluetooth is therefore far from obsolete. Many *cars* nowadays come with Bluetooth standard.
"Bluetooth is so slow it's useless."
From an article on Radio-Electronics.com: "Of all the features included in Bluetooth 2, it is the enhanced data rate (EDR), facility that is giving rise to the most comment. In the new specification the maximum data rate is able to reach 3 Mbps, a significant increase on what was available in the previous Bluetooth specifications."
Most new devices come with BT2 as standard. My new laptop will surely have BT2, it's nicely enough for stereo headphones and at 375 KB/s (around 300 KB/s after anti-collision etc I suppose) there should be very little reason not to use Bluetooth. It uses much less power and might be able to talk to handsets as well. Huge bonuses over Wi-Fi if you ask me. The question is if it is a strong enough signal without strong antenna.
That's one weird title for the content of your response.
I don't know if you are trying to be funny, but three of such lines would get you fired from my company. And that is how it is supposed to be. If you really write such comments, you need to grow up. You first try and better a person and if he/she does not cooperate, you fire that person (that's why it is three warnings, really, otherwise you would have been fired right away).
"Plans for hotels include a distributed antenna system with a converged voice and data network, having all access points located in the telecom closet, up to four antennas used for coverage, and up to four access points used for bandwidth."
Dunno, if it is an astroturf, then they probably don't want the author to write articles like this. Sounds like a clueless person on the technical side of things.
Can anyone please explain what this means? I presume these antenna's are fixed to the access points, so of course there are four of both. And then there are four access points all in the same closet? What's the use of *that*? Or are there four locations, each with its own antenna, with four access points each? Is that even possible?
I was in Portugal/Lisbon and they had these billboards already. Could not see the speaker, but it must have been behind the paper somewhere. Damn annoying, even if I could not hear what they were saying. It was something like 'ring' 'ring' and then a lady said you needed to go to some operator. God, if I would have lived in that city I would have demolished every billboard I could find. Then again, this is a country where they have someone shouting over the speakers during a soccer game on the top of their lungs. The *whole* game. So they are probably not that bothered about it.
I'm sorry, but personal data is worth money. So, inherently, the bad companies make more money, even if they sell a little less. This can keep their price down. Of course, I won't buy from them, and I find that good quality service is more or less linear with good privacy. Other buyers fortunately think so as well. So the good companies still have a business case, but they are somewhat more expensive most of the time.
Just compare it with television. The ones with the most (annoying) commercials make the most money, and have the blockbuster movies first.
Bah, he ran Win2k for a long time before that. 4 months might not be much to get to know an operating system (and the apps around it of course) but WinXP is not *that* much different from Win2k. And you don't want to go and install Vista on a older PC.
My Windows 2K box is almost unusable because of the way Windows tends to install USB drivers. It installs a different driver for each port, and there is a maximum as well. Now I am maxed out and I need to restart my machine to get any new USB device (new being new OR old hardware on a different port) working. And you say Linux has flawed USB support? My Windows XP laptop, *when* and *if* it comes out of power safe mode does not have that problem yet (only two USB ports) but notifies me everytime I plugin a device that I should be using USB 2.0 ports. Which I don't have (company laptop).
"totally new format"
MMC new? USB new? No license fees? Bring 'em on!
"Making such a big deal out of startup time seems pretty pointless too."
I don't know. Current PC desktops (at least Windows XP and earlier computers) suck at suspend to RAM. So I still have to pay a lot of money to the electrical company (and make the earth a bit hotter) if I don't switch the freakin' thing off once in a while. Also they're pretty loud. So, yes, I do care about startup times - although I would more like it if Microsoft did the right thing and fixed OS and driver support for suspend to RAM. The computer should switch off all fans if this happens. Then - and only then - will I forget about startup times.
Besides, they did also test startup times, but I don't think they made a big deal out of it:
"Just for fun, we thought we'd throw in a Boot timing as well, just to see how long the OS takes from the time the button is pushed until the desktop is ready to use."
Yeah, that's really making a big deal out of it. Making your statement rather trollish.
Um, if you can parallelize many threads, you can just use a construct that tries to determine if they should be run in parallel, or just sequentially. So you can have x threads for x processors, and just schedule the tasks between them. If there are more tasks then threads, some will run sequentially. This can save quite some time, because the processor does not need to switch between threads all the time. In Java this is performed through Executors, with the ThreadPoolExecutor being one of the more sensible Executor implementations. Of course, you still have the communications to think about, but overloading does not look like much of a problem. Especially if you keep doing things sequentially; then you are overloading one of the processors for sure.
Yes, they should clearly opt for the conservatives (aka Tories) over labour for this. That would make a *huge* difference. Not. Besides that, there are many important things for a government to consider. Just opting out of one party because of a single issue like this is madness. This is a drawback of a democracy (and of most other governmental structures I suppose), you cannot really vote for single issues.
Have you tried configuring it to the full? You can even change screens, processors, hard drives and add a dedicated videocard. It won't take on other dimensions, but seems to be the only real constraint.