First, I want to say that you are my favorite author - it's a rare privelege just to say "hey". My favorite book is Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, though I've read every one of your other books as well.
I'm not going to ask a question about the content of your books, because I believe those questions are well covered just by reading them. What I am curious about is your opinion of other people interpreting your work into other media, and your future plans.
What was your honest opinion of the Hitchhiker's Guide movie that floats around on PBS? Why the hell was Trillian a blonde? And why did Zaphod have one floppy head that never said anything? Are there any plans to do another movie from any of your books, maybe with a better special FX budget?
Also, what do you have on the burner recently? Are there any more books on the way, or another attempt at a computer game?
People like to obsess over what things are called.
That's because you can influence people's opinion by what words you use. Many words have very precise definitions and connotations. The traditional news media is really bad about this. For example, and "Freedom Fighter" is the exact same thing as an "Armed Extremist", except the "Freedom Fighter" is government approved, and the "Armed Extremist" is someone on the other side, or no side that has been properly labeled.
So what things are called is important. But only because of the preconcieved notions of their meanings. Which is how language changes.
Happiness, actually, does not equal justice, either.
Actually, the whole concept of justice is based on the pursuit of happiness. So happiness, is a sense, DOES equal justice. You have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It can't be taken away by an government, period. This is regardless of whether they think they can.
Transactions should be cooperative and voluntary.
When an artist sells me a CD, that transaction is cooperative and voluntary. When I play that CD for a friend, or show my list of CD's on Napster, that transaction is also cooperative and voluntary. What you are assuming is that some third party has a say in how two people transact.
You speak of rights as though they are granted. Rights can never be granted. You are given freewill the instant you exist in the universe. Rights can only be taken away. In the case of modern government, this is accomplished through fear. You speak as though the government has a right to cause that fear, and that you must yield to it, and ask permission to pursue happiness. All I can say is - no chance. screw that. Live Free.
As far as Napster goes, if Metallica and Dr. Dre don't want me download their songs from Napster, I'll quit. Voluntarily. However, I'll stop buying their CD's and going to their concerts as well. (Not that I've ever bought a Dr. Dre album, though I've liked Metallica since Master of Puppets.) I'll support bands that support freedom. In today's context, that means supporting bands that support Napster.
By the way, the bands Offspring and Limp Biskit have both spoke out in favor of Napster. I'm considering buying the new Offspring album, and sending them an e-mail to tell them why I bought it.
The official pricebreak is on Monday, but most orderrs placed this week will get the new pricing.
The Athlon 700 is now around $190, and the 750 is now around $245.
So the answer is - get it anywhere, just don't buy one right before the price goes down.
By the way, the next price break after this one is about the 12th of June. I think the 700 will probably be under $150, and the 750 will be under $200.
Intel started in 1968, AMD started in 1969. In the days of the 8086, AMD leased excess fab capacity to Intel, because they had better fab processes. AMD is over a year ahead on copper development, as well as a generation ahead on instruction pipelining.
Intel is not hesitant to release higher megahertz. They've been trying like hell, by pushing things as far as they can. The PIII-700 was the best example. They used an architecture for it that had a known physical limitation of 690. There yields have been awful since then. They are still admitting yield problems, and have said they will be short on faster coppermines until sometime into June.
The only problem I know of was a problem with Ultra speed video cards. This was a problem with the voltage regulators on the motherboards not providing enough voltage for these cards. It was not a problem with the chipset. Since then, motherboard manufacturers have started using better voltage regulators. There should never be any compatibility problems with AGP, since AMD helped to develop the AGP standard.
The 350 Mhz patch was a problem with timing loops in the Windows code. It was Microsoft's problem, not AMD's.
The quesion I have on compatibility is - compatibility to what? The Athlon is a supported CPU for both Windows and Linux. So the fact that it is compatible to Intel CPU's is nice to make development easier, but is almost completely irrelevant. At whatever point AMD and Intel part ways, most likely the Sledgehammer and McKinley, AMD should have as much software support as Intel does. Of course, we'll never know until it happens.
Re:The problem with Rambus compared to SDRAM...
on
Will Rambus Go Bust?
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· Score: 2
I don't think RAMBUS will ever have a clear performance advantage. With SDRAM, they can not only add more parrallel streams (DDR or QDR or 8DR), they can increase the clock while maintaining low latency.
The Athlon platform has the capability to scale to a 400Mhz bus with Quad Data Rate. RAMBUS would have to be at 6.4Ghz to keep up, and it would still have higher latency. RAMBUS has very little chance of catching up to DDR.
Re:The problem with Rambus compared to SDRAM...
on
Will Rambus Go Bust?
·
· Score: 2
The Willamette (the next generation of 32-bit Intel CPU's) and the Merced (64-bit) will have trace cache, which keeps pages based on a trace of code flow. This is probably a similar approach.
However, even with a trace cache, DDR SDRAM will probably outperform RAMBUS, because its bandwidth is higher and its latency is lower.
DDR -> 266 Mhz x 64 bit = 17024; Initial Latency -> 6 Msec + 2 Cas Cycles.
RAMBUS -> 800 Mhz x 16 bit = 12800; Initial Latency -> 50 Msec + 2 Cas Cycles.
DDR is simply faster. It's also going to be cheaper, because it uses the same access protocol as SDRAM, so southbridge chips, sockets, and the chips themselves can be manufactured with minor changes.
If RAMBUS succeeds, it will be only because Intel shoved it down people's throats. AMD has officially announced that they are in the DDR camp.
Actually, the GPL is a public license. So the issue is not just between the author and the violator or the license, but also with the public as well.
I think keeping GPL issues as a public forum is a good thing. That way, people remain aware of the issues involved in their rights under the license, and companies are less likely to get away with not observing it.
If Be wants to post a reply, they are free to do so on the Net. I'm sure Bruce would even be willing to post their reply right on the same page with his message.
The early K6's supported OpenPIC, but it was dropped in the later models.
The Athlon is an Alpha EV-6 protocol. The multiprocessing is point to point, and will be done with a protocol format, much like a switching hub.
The first chipset to support it should be the AMD 760, which should be out later this year. By this time, the Thunderbird processor, with full speed cache should be out as well. This will make the Xeon change their price/performance model to compete.
It's more a northbridge issue than an OS issue. In a point to point protocol, each processor needs its own northbridge chip on the motherboard, which gives each processor full bandwidth to the rest of the system. Once the multiple northbridges are present, implementing multiprocessor support in the OS should be trivial. The code should be essentially identical to supporting a dual P3, except the performance characteristics will completely different because of the full bandwidth of the multiple northbridge chips. A multiple P3 uses a single northbridge chip and GTL bus, which gives diminishing returns on more than a couple of processors.
Or... you can go with real time hardware encoding, like a Matrox RT2000 or Digisuite card. The encoding is done on the video card so the processor really just has to handle the command stream. One of these type of cards is somewhere in the $1200 range, but that's still less money than a higher range Xeon.
This is probably because the PIII/Aluminummine processors use a fully associative cache, instead of a 4-way or an 8-way associative cache. This basically means that the cache is very good at optimizing itself for the most commonly accessed data, but also means that the cache doesn't scale as well to large amounts. I don't know what the cache association is on the G4 (I could go look, but I'm lazy, so I'll leave that for whoever isn't) but that probably has something to do with this issue.
I have one word to add - Thunderbird. Full speed cache in good amounts, for about 10% of the price of a Xeon. Also, faster clockspeeds (somewhat relevant in this case) - the Thunderbird 1250 should be out in the next couple of months. Multiprocessing won't be available until the AMD 760 chipset comes out later this year, but if you can wait, I think the AMD Thunderbird is going to be a good choice over the Xeon.
Actually, your state attorney general handles things like this on a daily basis, and may have more time and interest in the case than the FTC. I'm not sure if they'd spend much time on a $19 charge, though, unless you could assert that it was general policy to screw people out of this same money. Depends where you live, too. If you live in a fairly unpopulated state, you'll have a better chance of getting help. If you live somewhere like New York city or California, the attorney general's office is probably too busy with "more important things".
What would be really cool is to take the pressure sensitive fractal drawing tools in painter and put them into Corel Draw. Definitely some cool possibilities.
Yes, Windows 98 does have a 2 Gb file size limit. Each file on win98 has to be less than 2 gb. It has nothing to do with the size of the partition. There is a hack which uses an extra bit from the sign to get 4 gb files, but then there is no guarantee that you'll be able to transfer them anywhere.
There was an episode of 60 Minutes about 10 years ago where Diane Sawyer went to a market where there were gypsy pickpockets. She had a bunch of stuff in her purse and pockets that she didn't mind losing, and had a good inventory. However, she also had her keys, stashed as far down in her purse as possible, in a little pocket in the very bottom.
She lost a bunch of trivial stuff, and proved her point. However, somebody also got the keys from the bottom of her purse - the one thing that she really didn't want to lose.
The moral of the story - if you are doing this to acknowledge the fact that there really are crackers, purely for educational purposes, then you might learn something. If you are doing it because you think it will distract anyone from the stuff you really don't want to lose, you are probably sorely mistaken. It might even give you a false sense of security, which is a bad thing.
I still disagree that it's unrealistic. MPEG-4 was not around when these formats were introduced. And I think we could even do better than that. MPEG-1 is 3 generations behind, in terms of space and quality. DVD's use MPEG2, which is great for quality, but not necessarily for space. I still think that if you combine MPEG-4 with a large block format you could get DVD quality under 640 meg. (Basically, the concept of large block compression, is a compression scheme which only has positive returns on large data sets, such as tokenizing on simlarities between data.)
I agree that this is a bad idea. There is program I have to maintain that uses a homebrew string class. Everytime the program crashes, it's in the string class. I think anyone who writes their own string class deserves to be shot. The bounds checking that is necessary to do it correctly is hard to do without bugs. At least with a built in string class, the bugs have been flushed out by the multitudes of programmers who use the standard libraries.
That program was originally written in 1997. I think String became pretty much standard in 1998. It's now taught as part of the language.
Re:Great news?? I think not...
on
More on LinDVD
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· Score: 2
One thing we could aim for is to get together and create a competing open format. I know it sounds nuts, but it could be the eventual goal. When Linus first created Linux, he thought of it as just a project for a few people, and it spead like wildfire.
What if we take MPEG-4, combine it with some sort of large block compression, and create a format that will fit DVD quality in 640 megabytes, which will then go on a CDR. Then we convince independent movie studios to support it, and we enjoy independent movies on our computers. If the market for them gets big enough, maybe it will spread to the mainstream stuff. Even if it doesn't, a new point of view probably wouldn't hurt most of us.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I want to say that you are my favorite author - it's a rare privelege just to say "hey". My favorite book is Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, though I've read every one of your other books as well.
:-)
I'm not going to ask a question about the content of your books, because I believe those questions are well covered just by reading them. What I am curious about is your opinion of other people interpreting your work into other media, and your future plans.
What was your honest opinion of the Hitchhiker's Guide movie that floats around on PBS? Why the hell was Trillian a blonde? And why did Zaphod have one floppy head that never said anything? Are there any plans to do another movie from any of your books, maybe with a better special FX budget?
Also, what do you have on the burner recently? Are there any more books on the way, or another attempt at a computer game?
Oh, and don't forget your towel.
6 times 8 equals 42. And the meaning is "Sorry for the inconvenience" (For all the time you spent looking).
People like to obsess over what things are called.
That's because you can influence people's opinion by what words you use. Many words have very precise definitions and connotations. The traditional news media is really bad about this. For example, and "Freedom Fighter" is the exact same thing as an "Armed Extremist", except the "Freedom Fighter" is government approved, and the "Armed Extremist" is someone on the other side, or no side that has been properly labeled.
So what things are called is important. But only because of the preconcieved notions of their meanings. Which is how language changes.
But you can criminalise it, which is what is slowly but surely happening.
And when you do that, it usually becomes more popular, and the underground has to get tighter to compensate for the criminalization.
Happiness, actually, does not equal justice, either.
Actually, the whole concept of justice is based on the pursuit of happiness. So happiness, is a sense, DOES equal justice. You have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It can't be taken away by an government, period. This is regardless of whether they think they can.
Transactions should be cooperative and voluntary.
When an artist sells me a CD, that transaction is cooperative and voluntary. When I play that CD for a friend, or show my list of CD's on Napster, that transaction is also cooperative and voluntary. What you are assuming is that some third party has a say in how two people transact.
You speak of rights as though they are granted. Rights can never be granted. You are given freewill the instant you exist in the universe. Rights can only be taken away. In the case of modern government, this is accomplished through fear. You speak as though the government has a right to cause that fear, and that you must yield to it, and ask permission to pursue happiness. All I can say is - no chance. screw that. Live Free.
As far as Napster goes, if Metallica and Dr. Dre don't want me download their songs from Napster, I'll quit. Voluntarily. However, I'll stop buying their CD's and going to their concerts as well. (Not that I've ever bought a Dr. Dre album, though I've liked Metallica since Master of Puppets.) I'll support bands that support freedom. In today's context, that means supporting bands that support Napster.
By the way, the bands Offspring and Limp Biskit have both spoke out in favor of Napster. I'm considering buying the new Offspring album, and sending them an e-mail to tell them why I bought it.
The filing cabinet is located at the nearest Galactic public records office, near Alpha-Centuri.
Dell has a huge advertising co-op with Intel. Intel essentially funds their advertising budget. AMD is fighting an uphill battle getting Dell.
It has nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with money.
The official pricebreak is on Monday, but most orderrs placed this week will get the new pricing.
The Athlon 700 is now around $190, and the 750 is now around $245.
So the answer is - get it anywhere, just don't buy one right before the price goes down.
By the way, the next price break after this one is about the 12th of June. I think the 700 will probably be under $150, and the 750 will be under $200.
Far more time? What?
Intel started in 1968, AMD started in 1969. In the days of the 8086, AMD leased excess fab capacity to Intel, because they had better fab processes. AMD is over a year ahead on copper development, as well as a generation ahead on instruction pipelining.
Intel is not hesitant to release higher megahertz. They've been trying like hell, by pushing things as far as they can. The PIII-700 was the best example. They used an architecture for it that had a known physical limitation of 690. There yields have been awful since then. They are still admitting yield problems, and have said they will be short on faster coppermines until sometime into June.
The only problem I know of was a problem with Ultra speed video cards. This was a problem with the voltage regulators on the motherboards not providing enough voltage for these cards. It was not a problem with the chipset. Since then, motherboard manufacturers have started using better voltage regulators. There should never be any compatibility problems with AGP, since AMD helped to develop the AGP standard.
The 350 Mhz patch was a problem with timing loops in the Windows code. It was Microsoft's problem, not AMD's.
The quesion I have on compatibility is - compatibility to what? The Athlon is a supported CPU for both Windows and Linux. So the fact that it is compatible to Intel CPU's is nice to make development easier, but is almost completely irrelevant. At whatever point AMD and Intel part ways, most likely the Sledgehammer and McKinley, AMD should have as much software support as Intel does. Of course, we'll never know until it happens.
I don't think RAMBUS will ever have a clear performance advantage. With SDRAM, they can not only add more parrallel streams (DDR or QDR or 8DR), they can increase the clock while maintaining low latency.
The Athlon platform has the capability to scale to a 400Mhz bus with Quad Data Rate. RAMBUS would have to be at 6.4Ghz to keep up, and it would still have higher latency. RAMBUS has very little chance of catching up to DDR.
The Willamette (the next generation of 32-bit Intel CPU's) and the Merced (64-bit) will have trace cache, which keeps pages based on a trace of code flow. This is probably a similar approach.
However, even with a trace cache, DDR SDRAM will probably outperform RAMBUS, because its bandwidth is higher and its latency is lower.
DDR -> 266 Mhz x 64 bit = 17024;
Initial Latency -> 6 Msec + 2 Cas Cycles.
RAMBUS -> 800 Mhz x 16 bit = 12800;
Initial Latency -> 50 Msec + 2 Cas Cycles.
DDR is simply faster. It's also going to be cheaper, because it uses the same access protocol as SDRAM, so southbridge chips, sockets, and the chips themselves can be manufactured with minor changes.
If RAMBUS succeeds, it will be only because Intel shoved it down people's throats. AMD has officially announced that they are in the DDR camp.
Actually, the GPL is a public license. So the issue is not just between the author and the violator or the license, but also with the public as well.
I think keeping GPL issues as a public forum is a good thing. That way, people remain aware of the issues involved in their rights under the license, and companies are less likely to get away with not observing it.
If Be wants to post a reply, they are free to do so on the Net. I'm sure Bruce would even be willing to post their reply right on the same page with his message.
The early K6's supported OpenPIC, but it was dropped in the later models.
The Athlon is an Alpha EV-6 protocol. The multiprocessing is point to point, and will be done with a protocol format, much like a switching hub.
The first chipset to support it should be the AMD 760, which should be out later this year. By this time, the Thunderbird processor, with full speed cache should be out as well. This will make the Xeon change their price/performance model to compete.
It's more a northbridge issue than an OS issue. In a point to point protocol, each processor needs its own northbridge chip on the motherboard, which gives each processor full bandwidth to the rest of the system. Once the multiple northbridges are present, implementing multiprocessor support in the OS should be trivial. The code should be essentially identical to supporting a dual P3, except the performance characteristics will completely different because of the full bandwidth of the multiple northbridge chips. A multiple P3 uses a single northbridge chip and GTL bus, which gives diminishing returns on more than a couple of processors.
Or... you can go with real time hardware encoding, like a Matrox RT2000 or Digisuite card. The encoding is done on the video card so the processor really just has to handle the command stream. One of these type of cards is somewhere in the $1200 range, but that's still less money than a higher range Xeon.
This is probably because the PIII/Aluminummine processors use a fully associative cache, instead of a 4-way or an 8-way associative cache. This basically means that the cache is very good at optimizing itself for the most commonly accessed data, but also means that the cache doesn't scale as well to large amounts. I don't know what the cache association is on the G4 (I could go look, but I'm lazy, so I'll leave that for whoever isn't) but that probably has something to do with this issue.
I have one word to add - Thunderbird. Full speed cache in good amounts, for about 10% of the price of a Xeon. Also, faster clockspeeds (somewhat relevant in this case) - the Thunderbird 1250 should be out in the next couple of months. Multiprocessing won't be available until the AMD 760 chipset comes out later this year, but if you can wait, I think the AMD Thunderbird is going to be a good choice over the Xeon.
Actually, your state attorney general handles things like this on a daily basis, and may have more time and interest in the case than the FTC. I'm not sure if they'd spend much time on a $19 charge, though, unless you could assert that it was general policy to screw people out of this same money. Depends where you live, too. If you live in a fairly unpopulated state, you'll have a better chance of getting help. If you live somewhere like New York city or California, the attorney general's office is probably too busy with "more important things".
What would be really cool is to take the pressure sensitive fractal drawing tools in painter and put them into Corel Draw. Definitely some cool possibilities.
Yes, Windows 98 does have a 2 Gb file size limit. Each file on win98 has to be less than 2 gb. It has nothing to do with the size of the partition. There is a hack which uses an extra bit from the sign to get 4 gb files, but then there is no guarantee that you'll be able to transfer them anywhere.
There was an episode of 60 Minutes about 10 years ago where Diane Sawyer went to a market where there were gypsy pickpockets. She had a bunch of stuff in her purse and pockets that she didn't mind losing, and had a good inventory. However, she also had her keys, stashed as far down in her purse as possible, in a little pocket in the very bottom.
She lost a bunch of trivial stuff, and proved her point. However, somebody also got the keys from the bottom of her purse - the one thing that she really didn't want to lose.
The moral of the story - if you are doing this to acknowledge the fact that there really are crackers, purely for educational purposes, then you might learn something. If you are doing it because you think it will distract anyone from the stuff you really don't want to lose, you are probably sorely mistaken. It might even give you a false sense of security, which is a bad thing.
I still disagree that it's unrealistic. MPEG-4 was not around when these formats were introduced. And I think we could even do better than that. MPEG-1 is 3 generations behind, in terms of space and quality. DVD's use MPEG2, which is great for quality, but not necessarily for space. I still think that if you combine MPEG-4 with a large block format you could get DVD quality under 640 meg. (Basically, the concept of large block compression, is a compression scheme which only has positive returns on large data sets, such as tokenizing on simlarities between data.)
I agree that this is a bad idea. There is program I have to maintain that uses a homebrew string class. Everytime the program crashes, it's in the string class. I think anyone who writes their own string class deserves to be shot. The bounds checking that is necessary to do it correctly is hard to do without bugs. At least with a built in string class, the bugs have been flushed out by the multitudes of programmers who use the standard libraries.
That program was originally written in 1997. I think String became pretty much standard in 1998. It's now taught as part of the language.
What is this, a bunch of offtopic crap?
One thing we could aim for is to get together and create a competing open format. I know it sounds nuts, but it could be the eventual goal. When Linus first created Linux, he thought of it as just a project for a few people, and it spead like wildfire.
What if we take MPEG-4, combine it with some sort of large block compression, and create a format that will fit DVD quality in 640 megabytes, which will then go on a CDR. Then we convince independent movie studios to support it, and we enjoy independent movies on our computers. If the market for them gets big enough, maybe it will spread to the mainstream stuff. Even if it doesn't, a new point of view probably wouldn't hurt most of us.
Just a crazy idea, but something to consider.