We split our national phone company, and it turns out the rates kept going up while the level of service went down.
We split up our ADSL providers in the UK, and service went up while costs went down with the exception of the services offered by the old monopolist.
They offer the worst service with the worst reliability at almost the highest cost - now imagine how bad it would be if they had no competition at all?
Yes, it is great. Unfortunately in the next couple questions he goes on to say that the underlying engine GCC uses is completely unable to deal with the complexities of the 970 and other deep and wide architectures.
It has been stated that GCC is attempting to be a 'good' solution for all architectres rather than the 'best' for any one. It's not incapable of adapting to be the best for the P970, but that would require a permanent fork from the general GCC code.
So either GCC needs a serious reworking on a fundamental level, or more likely since it already exists, they will just release a separate compiler that doesn't suck.
The advantage of using GCC is that developers can write with reasonable confidence for any platform with GCC available. I have done some heavy porting work between code written for TC/TCC and code written for GCC and it's no fun at all. By comparison code for GCC for PPC and x86 isn't that bad to chop and change.
Given the nature of Apple (who seem to like being able to use open source apps written for GCC) and IBM (who want Linux - developed for GCC - to compile on their boxes) I think they will prefer to optimise GCC as far as possible for the P970.
Given the competence of IBM and Apple programmers (especially the former) I suspect that they will do a pretty good job.
At one point in the interview it looks like IBM and Apple are working together on GCC improvements and donating the code back to the FSF.
This is a fairly big deal as people have pointed out before that GCC on PPC isn't as hot as it should be, but with that kind of muscle and money behind it it should go forwards by leaps and bounds.
With the new GCC improvements it looks like Linux on those new, remarkably cheap, P970 IBM boxes is going to be a real winner. And AFAIK Gentoo already runs on PPC fine - no one is going to be bitching about compile times with 4 1gig+ CPUs crunching away at it!
It's worth noting that there is now one truley anonymous e-mail service, anonymail, which runs off the back of the IIP IRC network. At the moment outgoing mail is limited to replies to incomming mail, but because of the nature of IIP it would be hard to impossible to find out who send what to where.
Payment for the service is by hash cash, a computationally expensive operation you must perform to be able to register, as a way of deterring spammers and other system abuses. In that respect it's better than conventional e-mail at present - no spam to my mailbox yet.
It's not going to be easy to get people to sign up really, to admit that they were computer illeterate enough not to be able to tell the difference between a real system message and a web page and/or don't know how to disable pop up ads in mozilla. However, given the litigous nature of many people, I'm sure that there will be even some Mac users claiming that the Win32 GUI is close enough that they just didn't notice...
Given that DVDRW drives are $160 or less, DVDrom drives are $80 or less, DVD players (for the TV) are $100 or less, what does it really matter? All new ones are compatible with anything, so if yours happens not to work go out and buy one that can.
The only problem with that is laptops, but slimline DVD-CDRW combo drives to retrofit to laptops are now under $200 (last time I checked, which was several months ago) and I can't immagine that a DVDRW is that much more.
Even if your drive doesn't work and you don't want to throw it away, it's possible a firmware upgrade will let it read all -R and +R media - worked for my NEC laptop. In fact it seems that some -R[W] and +R[W] writers might be upgradable to multiformat, like the Pioneer DVR 105 (identical hardware to the 106) just as soon as the hackers finish working out what needs changing in the hex image.
Ahhh, nifty - I had been contemplating buying a G5 over an AMD-64 for a while now, because of the 'it's different' factor. It might also not require me to install a commercial heat extraction system in my apartment:o)
This however is better, as I can get the hardware without paying the OS X tax or the 'shiney things' tax. Not that IBM kit doesn't have a beauty of it's own, I love their pure black evilness way more than the Apple cheese grater effect.
After all, I have no need for OS X as I find Linux less irritating to use, more flexible and more powerful. I also don't need any OS X software, so that's fine.
The only problem I can see is that Linux games tend to have x86 binaries only (like UT2k3) which might push me into buying a SMP AMD-64 system instead. Although most Linux apps will work on PPC just fine, there might be the odd one that makes me less than keen.
Still, as far as servers and corporate workstations and desktops goes, it sounds like IBM might have a winner on their hands.
It might be less of a problem from people like Dell rather than smaller firms, but I still will never truts a vendor drive image.
What if they have 'conveniently' installed something like Gator on there for you? Or even their own custom internal reporting tool? No thanks.
Now, I know that installing Windows from scratch can be said to be installing spyware (thanks to WMP etc) - but at least the crap it sends out is well documented and you stand a small chance of finding it and stopping it. With a drive image you have no idea what settings are enabled and what software is installed.
I wish i didn't live in a sucky country which wimped out of nailing Microsoft to a target and announcing open season. Is it too late to organise a class action do you think? They must have commited another antitrust violation today or something, or do they take the weekends off?
Here's hoping that exactly none of this money is used to buy upgrades to Windows XP.
In the UK a multiformat reader (a pioneer 106) is now the same price as a -R/RW only (a pioneer 105).
Last month a 105 was £200+. Two weeks later the 106 was £200 and the 105 was £100. Now the 106 is £100. (Ish, £130 inc vat - under $200 US.) Media is down to 50p a disk for -R.
For the people bitching about speed, the 106 is a 4x writer (except for DVD-R/RW) which is around 6 _megabits_/second - 4.5gb every 15 mins. You can burn off a 50gb backup in 2.5 hrs!
But in the end, it matters little what you buy, as all new players will be able to read both. It's not like VHS vs Beta, where the things were different sizes, if consolidation happens it will be because of pressure on media prices (2x DVD-RW is cheaper to manufacture than 1x DVD-R and 1x DVD+R) and not because of anything else. After all, do you know anyone who uses CDRWs reguarly? Nope, me either, so the problems with not being able to exchange DVDRW disks will be minimal - and go away entirley as most people will get dual format drives anyway.
I have been running a node with 10k down, 5k up and a 1gb store forever now (niced at -15), and the new version of the software has made a huge difference.
No longer is my CPU at 100% all the time - before when I got put in seednodes I was flatlined, even with the thing niced to -18. Now it's not even noticable.
Bandwidth usage also seems to be more steady, rather than spiking every now and again it holds steady at one number. (~85-90% of allocation.)
Responsiveness has increased slightly - it's about what you would expect from a 56k modem connection.
Run one in the background for a few days - you won't notice it, really. The more people running these things the better, even if they have no use for the system yet and throttle it right back. (10/5 on DSL adds less than 1ms to my ping on ut2k3.)
It's a shame that with the way the net is going all they will get as search results will be flash heavy sites that take 20 minutes to download on broadband, let along dial up.
Where did all the sites go that you could use wget -r to grab overnight? How about the odd few that used to offer a.tar.gz for download and offline reading.
Content over presentation is a concept that needs to be reintroduced to the net, preferably with a stick.
If you were the geek hired to program the "music-searchin-lawsuit-makin" box by the RIAA, you would make damn sure it ignored your own netblock, and quite possibly a few other class C nets you owned to put up for auction on eBay:oD
this statement is what will not alone them to open up the source code, people will be just to afraid that people will mess with the results of the system.
Security through obsurity is worthless - you can always assume that the bad guys will always find the hole in the system, and on the down side you have just made it horribly difficult (and probably illegal) for the good guys to find the problems first and tell you how to fix them.
Perhaps it's a plot by the big corporations to make sure that no devious Open Source loving communist hippies can vote. </>
<even more so> A friend of mine suggested tonight that since American power extends so far around the world, it would only be fair to let everyone vote in US elections, not just US citizens. </>
Anyone else think that their switch cube thing looks rather like 3ddesk, except that 3ddesk was designed to switch virtual desktops?
And yes, you can rig up 3ddesk to switch between Xnest sessions (logged in as different users) on Linux. I was doing this before Apple announced copying this into OS X on one of my boxes, just for the hell of it. Perhaps I can sue them for millions now?
Slashdot Mirror
We split our national phone company, and it turns out the rates kept going up while the level of service went down.
We split up our ADSL providers in the UK, and service went up while costs went down with the exception of the services offered by the old monopolist.
They offer the worst service with the worst reliability at almost the highest cost - now imagine how bad it would be if they had no competition at all?
Yes, it is great. Unfortunately in the next couple questions he goes on to say that the underlying engine GCC uses is completely unable to deal with the complexities of the 970 and other deep and wide architectures.
It has been stated that GCC is attempting to be a 'good' solution for all architectres rather than the 'best' for any one. It's not incapable of adapting to be the best for the P970, but that would require a permanent fork from the general GCC code.
So either GCC needs a serious reworking on a fundamental level, or more likely since it already exists, they will just release a separate compiler that doesn't suck.
The advantage of using GCC is that developers can write with reasonable confidence for any platform with GCC available. I have done some heavy porting work between code written for TC/TCC and code written for GCC and it's no fun at all. By comparison code for GCC for PPC and x86 isn't that bad to chop and change.
Given the nature of Apple (who seem to like being able to use open source apps written for GCC) and IBM (who want Linux - developed for GCC - to compile on their boxes) I think they will prefer to optimise GCC as far as possible for the P970.
Given the competence of IBM and Apple programmers (especially the former) I suspect that they will do a pretty good job.
At one point in the interview it looks like IBM and Apple are working together on GCC improvements and donating the code back to the FSF.
This is a fairly big deal as people have pointed out before that GCC on PPC isn't as hot as it should be, but with that kind of muscle and money behind it it should go forwards by leaps and bounds.
With the new GCC improvements it looks like Linux on those new, remarkably cheap, P970 IBM boxes is going to be a real winner. And AFAIK Gentoo already runs on PPC fine - no one is going to be bitching about compile times with 4 1gig+ CPUs crunching away at it!
It's worth noting that there is now one truley anonymous e-mail service, anonymail, which runs off the back of the IIP IRC network. At the moment outgoing mail is limited to replies to incomming mail, but because of the nature of IIP it would be hard to impossible to find out who send what to where.
Payment for the service is by hash cash, a computationally expensive operation you must perform to be able to register, as a way of deterring spammers and other system abuses. In that respect it's better than conventional e-mail at present - no spam to my mailbox yet.
Will this be the first IPv6 service to be shut down by the RIAA?
It's not going to be easy to get people to sign up really, to admit that they were computer illeterate enough not to be able to tell the difference between a real system message and a web page and/or don't know how to disable pop up ads in mozilla. However, given the litigous nature of many people, I'm sure that there will be even some Mac users claiming that the Win32 GUI is close enough that they just didn't notice...
Given that DVDRW drives are $160 or less, DVDrom drives are $80 or less, DVD players (for the TV) are $100 or less, what does it really matter? All new ones are compatible with anything, so if yours happens not to work go out and buy one that can.
The only problem with that is laptops, but slimline DVD-CDRW combo drives to retrofit to laptops are now under $200 (last time I checked, which was several months ago) and I can't immagine that a DVDRW is that much more.
Even if your drive doesn't work and you don't want to throw it away, it's possible a firmware upgrade will let it read all -R and +R media - worked for my NEC laptop. In fact it seems that some -R[W] and +R[W] writers might be upgradable to multiformat, like the Pioneer DVR 105 (identical hardware to the 106) just as soon as the hackers finish working out what needs changing in the hex image.
Ahhh, nifty - I had been contemplating buying a G5 over an AMD-64 for a while now, because of the 'it's different' factor. It might also not require me to install a commercial heat extraction system in my apartment :o)
This however is better, as I can get the hardware without paying the OS X tax or the 'shiney things' tax. Not that IBM kit doesn't have a beauty of it's own, I love their pure black evilness way more than the Apple cheese grater effect.
After all, I have no need for OS X as I find Linux less irritating to use, more flexible and more powerful. I also don't need any OS X software, so that's fine.
The only problem I can see is that Linux games tend to have x86 binaries only (like UT2k3) which might push me into buying a SMP AMD-64 system instead. Although most Linux apps will work on PPC just fine, there might be the odd one that makes me less than keen.
Still, as far as servers and corporate workstations and desktops goes, it sounds like IBM might have a winner on their hands.
It might be less of a problem from people like Dell rather than smaller firms, but I still will never truts a vendor drive image.
What if they have 'conveniently' installed something like Gator on there for you? Or even their own custom internal reporting tool? No thanks.
Now, I know that installing Windows from scratch can be said to be installing spyware (thanks to WMP etc) - but at least the crap it sends out is well documented and you stand a small chance of finding it and stopping it. With a drive image you have no idea what settings are enabled and what software is installed.
I wish i didn't live in a sucky country which wimped out of nailing Microsoft to a target and announcing open season. Is it too late to organise a class action do you think? They must have commited another antitrust violation today or something, or do they take the weekends off?
Here's hoping that exactly none of this money is used to buy upgrades to Windows XP.
Sure, i'll install the official MSN client, where do I go for the Linux download?
I work in a place that handles sensitive documents from time to time.
We only shred stuff because it makes it burn faster and more completley. Everything is incinerated, without exception.
In the UK a multiformat reader (a pioneer 106) is now the same price as a -R/RW only (a pioneer 105).
Last month a 105 was £200+. Two weeks later the 106 was £200 and the 105 was £100. Now the 106 is £100. (Ish, £130 inc vat - under $200 US.) Media is down to 50p a disk for -R.
For the people bitching about speed, the 106 is a 4x writer (except for DVD-R/RW) which is around 6 _megabits_/second - 4.5gb every 15 mins. You can burn off a 50gb backup in 2.5 hrs!
But in the end, it matters little what you buy, as all new players will be able to read both. It's not like VHS vs Beta, where the things were different sizes, if consolidation happens it will be because of pressure on media prices (2x DVD-RW is cheaper to manufacture than 1x DVD-R and 1x DVD+R) and not because of anything else. After all, do you know anyone who uses CDRWs reguarly? Nope, me either, so the problems with not being able to exchange DVDRW disks will be minimal - and go away entirley as most people will get dual format drives anyway.
You can set a max data transfer for it. Once it's done, it just shuts down. Or you can run it when you use it, it just won't be as fast.
Ack, yes, it's actually niced to 19. I'm suffering only from lack of sleep, not stupidity ;o)
I have been running a node with 10k down, 5k up and a 1gb store forever now (niced at -15), and the new version of the software has made a huge difference.
No longer is my CPU at 100% all the time - before when I got put in seednodes I was flatlined, even with the thing niced to -18. Now it's not even noticable.
Bandwidth usage also seems to be more steady, rather than spiking every now and again it holds steady at one number. (~85-90% of allocation.)
Responsiveness has increased slightly - it's about what you would expect from a 56k modem connection.
Run one in the background for a few days - you won't notice it, really. The more people running these things the better, even if they have no use for the system yet and throttle it right back. (10/5 on DSL adds less than 1ms to my ping on ut2k3.)
It's a shame that with the way the net is going all they will get as search results will be flash heavy sites that take 20 minutes to download on broadband, let along dial up.
.tar.gz for download and offline reading.
Where did all the sites go that you could use wget -r to grab overnight? How about the odd few that used to offer a
Content over presentation is a concept that needs to be reintroduced to the net, preferably with a stick.
Somewhere, in a deep dark cave, some terrorists are having a jolly good laugh.
If you were the geek hired to program the "music-searchin-lawsuit-makin" box by the RIAA, you would make damn sure it ignored your own netblock, and quite possibly a few other class C nets you owned to put up for auction on eBay :oD
Guess they should have used DRM to protect their article from being cut and pasted into slashdot.
Someone should shoot that girl's parents - as far as names go that one is worse than 'Astral'.
With all of your undoubted expertese, why do you call 'Cracking' 'Hacking'?
this statement is what will not alone them to open up the source code, people will be just to afraid that people will mess with the results of the system.
Security through obsurity is worthless - you can always assume that the bad guys will always find the hole in the system, and on the down side you have just made it horribly difficult (and probably illegal) for the good guys to find the problems first and tell you how to fix them.
Perhaps it's a plot by the big corporations to make sure that no devious Open Source loving communist hippies can vote.
</>
<even more so>
A friend of mine suggested tonight that since American power extends so far around the world, it would only be fair to let everyone vote in US elections, not just US citizens.
</>
Anyone else think that their switch cube thing looks rather like 3ddesk, except that 3ddesk was designed to switch virtual desktops?
And yes, you can rig up 3ddesk to switch between Xnest sessions (logged in as different users) on Linux. I was doing this before Apple announced copying this into OS X on one of my boxes, just for the hell of it. Perhaps I can sue them for millions now?