Why don't cable companies just meter bandwith, like any other vital utility (gas, electric, water, etc)? I'd happily $.05/GB or whatever it costs them, as long as I didn't have to worry about violating their rules.
Does any company do this yet? It seems technically feasible, considering how much smarts are in cable modems these days...
I hate to point out the obvious, but being that slashdot is an open forum, Microsoft (and their lawyers) will surely be watching for the most interesting questions, and preparing appropriately non-controversial answers for them. Ergo, anything you ask here is likely to get a marketing non-answer, rather than a real answer....
That's just great. I hope that anyone with half a brain who reads this article takes it with an incredibly large grain of salt. If you are using one or two drives, IDE might be comparable to SCSI (as long as your have the drives on separate channels!) for most "workstation" type applications. Any more than that, and SCSI is the way to go (or Fibre Channel...). Here are just a few reasons:
- tagged command queuing (multiple outstanding I/O requests to a single drive) - disconnect (drive does not "hog the bus" while waiting for an I/O to complete) - you can have up to 15 drives per channel (compared to 2 on IDE) with minimal performance impact - 15,000 RPM SCSI drives are available, although they do require extensive cooling.
It really burns me when some idiot claims SCSI is dead just because he doesn't see any reason to use it on his POS desktop system. A friend of mine recently set up a PCI-X based system with 8 SCSI channels and lotsa drives, and benchmarked it at over a gigabyte a second transfer rates (yes, that's 1024+ MB/s). It'll be a long time before you see that with IDE anything.
(Serial-ATA does promise to bring many improvements to the low end of storage, but by the time it gets common, SCSI will be even further along with Ultra320, etc)
I search the list for my name... not there, so I searched the list for my email address... not there.... so I looked around for something resembling my name or email address...
somehow, they managed to butcher it very badly - the last letter of my username was wrong, and the domain name has a dot where there should have been an 'o'. At first I thought this was some clever anti-spam technique, but other email addresses seem to be valid. Lets hope the DOJ doesn't screw up the settlement too (fingers crossed).
When Kurt Vonnegut was first writing "Slaughterhouse 5", he told a friend that it was an "anti-war" book. The friend replied that he might as well write an "anti-glacier" book. War is inevitable. Sure, war sucks, I hate it as much as anyone else. But the fact is, as long as there are humans that disagree with each other (i.e. as long as there are humans....), there will be war. The interesting thing is that with the development of more & more powerful weapons (atomic bombs, smart bombs, bio-war, lasers, etc etc etc), the cost of a true, all out war like WWI or WWII is getting so ridiculously high that it will either never happen again, or if it does, that's pretty much the end of humanity. Einstein said something like: "I don't know what World War Three will be fought with, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones"
yes, but,/dev/urandom isn't really random... if gzip was 'smart' enough, it could figure out the seed & algorithm for/dev/urandom and just save the output data that way. We don't really have any good way of generating really random data, so theoretically all data is not random and therefore arbitrarily compressible. In practice, of course, this is bullshit, and I think this press release will prove to be as well.
Actually, from what I've read, for the most part the interface presented to the driver will be identical (or nearly identical) to that used by PCI. I doubt that any new bus standard which drastically changes the driver interface will be very popular.
to everyone who is saying "sure, you always have to trade quality for speed"....
Yes, that is true, but that misses the point. When I read a review/comparison of video cards, I am assuming that the benchmarks are based on fairly real-world situations. That what makes Quake 3 such a great benchmark - almost every gamer has played it, and is at least generally familiar with how torturous it is to the standard video card. Everyone also knows that you can improve the FPS by lowering resolution, using 16-bit textures, etc etc
When I look at a comparison of Quake benchmark scores on, say, Tom's hardware, they are meaningful because they are a comparison of video cards, all else being equal. If ATI is specifically lowering quality on Quake3 (not just the Quake3 engine, but the game itself) to increase FPS rate, clearly they are doing this to stand out in such comparisons, and clearly this is - if not outright fraudulent - misleading and manipulative.
Take a look at this article, its in German, but the pictures are worth 1000 (english) words. Mouse over the ATI pics to see the "cheat" version versus the normal ATI version. Clearly they are sacrificing image quality for speed.
First, my point was more that there are non-hardware-specific programming things that Nvidia has spent alot of time perfecting - things that ATI has yet to get right, because of the numerous problems I experienced trying to play games on the Radeon. Second, ATI could potentially use optimization tricks & such that they learn from studying the Nvidia driver to improve their own hardware & software architecture.
Patent protection is designed to prevent this sort of thing, but enforceability then becomes an issue. Suppose ATI releases closed-source drivers that steal librally from Nvidia open-source driver. How can Nvidia prove this without disassembling and studying ATI's driver? (which I believe is a violation of the DMCA or something, and not necessarily admissable in court) Even supposing they do have evidence of patent violation, such a court case could drag on for years, etc etc etc. Its far easier (from a management point of view) for Nvidia to just leave the driver closed. Sure it would be great if everybody were 100% open about all this stuff, but hey, thats just not the way it is.
(BTW - I'm not implying ATI has or would do such things....)
I would guess that, specifically in Nvidia's case, they spend alot of time ironing out bugs and incompatibilities, and to open-source the code would give away all that hard-earned IP to competitors. For example, I will NEVER buy an ATI video card. I bought a Radeon a few months ago, installed it, and instantly ran into compatibility problems. On some games, the ATI drivers were so shitty as to make the game unplayable. So I returned the card and bought an Nvidia card. Bingo - no problems. Clear this is not a hardware spec issue, its just that Nvidia's driver developers spend far more time fixing incompatibilities and other misc. stuff. Open-sourcing the driver would basically be providing R&D for the competition.
In addition, alot of advanced hardware (i.e. 3D accelerator tricks) use complicated interfaces that may actually be patentable. If Nvidia opens up their driver, ATI can see how they, say, accelerate certain AGP operations, and then incorporate that idea into their own product. Strike two against Nvidia open source.
I personally work for a company that produces a product based on another companies chip. We write our own (Windows) drivers for the chip, and therein lies all our Value(TM). If we were to open-source our driver, there would suddenly be absolutely no reason for us to exist. Sure, open source is great for alot of generic hardware (NE2000 network card, for example), but for anything sufficiently complex, you'll have a hard time convincing a company to simply give away design secrets.
With hard drive speeds where they are nowadays, there's really no point to RAM disks, except in very specialize high-end applications (i.e. databases). Even in those cases, your probably better off with a machine that can handle huge amounts of RAM (Alpha, Sparc, and Itanium can all handle terabytes of address space, i think) and an OS that can do decent filesystem buffering.
ha! right, and whos going to make those laws? the same people you want to kick out of government?
the system we have is the best one so far in the history of the world. Who cares if some dumb texas oil billionaire can get elected by having his brother rig the vote? At least the trains run on time....
``We need a database behind that, so when you're walking into an airport and you say that you are Larry Ellison, you take that card and put it in a reader and you put your thumb down and that system confirms that this is Larry Ellison,'' he said.
Ok, Larry, and what happens when someone steals your card and your thumbprint?
This is reactionary and stupid. A national ID card will only promote a police state, and if that happens, the terrorists have already won.
Crypto backdoors sound good, but in reality they won't help at all. The biggest part of the problem, as you pointed out, is just figuring out what is encrypted and what isn't. According to this article, the hijackers were sending each other unecrypted emails. If they couldn't even intercept unencrypted messages, how do they think backdoors will help?
One basic assumption of crypto backdoors is that people will actually use crypto that has the backdoor capability. Its like trying to limit encryption to 128 bits or 4096 bits or whatever it is these days. You can just write your own encryption program (or download & hack the source to some existing program) and create 65536 bit encryption if you want. Sure, its illegal, but if you don't want the feds to find out about your nefarious plans, so what?
Believe me, we can expect a lot more stupid, reactionary legislation in the coming weeks & months (am I the only one who doesn't feel any safer knowing that the guy on the plane next to me doesn't have his Bic disposable razors????). Thank god we haven't locked up all the Arab-Americans because they could be terrorists...
Token ring belongs in computer history. Maybe it was great when it first came out, but its has been displaced by other cheaper, more reliable technologies (i.e. ethernet). Obviously no one would run 1000 node unswitched ethernet. Likewise, no one who has any concerns about reliability should use token ring as their main network.
but... protocals should be designed to withstand broken, even pathologically broken, operating systems. Ergo, ethernet is extremely popular because, among other things, its fairly fault-tolerant, in that a fault on one node causes minimal disruption on other nodes. Token ring, however, is so stupidly easy to break its a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't cable companies just meter bandwith, like any other vital utility (gas, electric, water, etc)? I'd happily $.05/GB or whatever it costs them, as long as I didn't have to worry about violating their rules.
Does any company do this yet? It seems technically feasible, considering how much smarts are in cable modems these days...
... and i almost forgot, they make even more bad ass boxen:
t e/ doc/ES7000_Orion_230_Specifications.pdf
http://www.unisys.com/eprise/main/admin/corpora
up to 32 CPUs, 64GB RAM, 64 PCI slots. No word on Linux support though
Unisys sells some 8 CPU boxes, see here: http://www.unisys.com/products/midrange__servers/e s2085r__8_d_processor__server.htm
We have a 4 CPU version at work, its a pretty bad-ass PC
Think about orders of precedence, and it will come to you...
Here's the site of the company that's making this thing:
http://www.stepupcomputing.com/
Wonder if they'll sell an OS-less version, so we don't have to pay the Windows tax?
I hate to point out the obvious, but being that slashdot is an open forum, Microsoft (and their lawyers) will surely be watching for the most interesting questions, and preparing appropriately non-controversial answers for them. Ergo, anything you ask here is likely to get a marketing non-answer, rather than a real answer....
:-)
Just something to keep in mind
AI should have ended 20 minutes earlier...
I sense a trend
I'm suprised no one mentioned yet... but the Fibre Channel industry is one of the few segments of the computer industry that is actually growing these days. (see here). Storage in general will probably grow (or at least not significantly decline) for a long, long time. A quick search on Monster shows a lot of jobs out there.
That's just great. I hope that anyone with half a brain who reads this article takes it with an incredibly large grain of salt. If you are using one or two drives, IDE might be comparable to SCSI (as long as your have the drives on separate channels!) for most "workstation" type applications. Any more than that, and SCSI is the way to go (or Fibre Channel...). Here are just a few reasons:
- tagged command queuing (multiple outstanding I/O requests to a single drive)
- disconnect (drive does not "hog the bus" while waiting for an I/O to complete)
- you can have up to 15 drives per channel (compared to 2 on IDE) with minimal performance impact
- 15,000 RPM SCSI drives are available, although they do require extensive cooling.
It really burns me when some idiot claims SCSI is dead just because he doesn't see any reason to use it on his POS desktop system. A friend of mine recently set up a PCI-X based system with 8 SCSI channels and lotsa drives, and benchmarked it at over a gigabyte a second transfer rates (yes, that's 1024+ MB/s). It'll be a long time before you see that with IDE anything.
(Serial-ATA does promise to bring many improvements to the low end of storage, but by the time it gets common, SCSI will be even further along with Ultra320, etc)
I search the list for my name... not there, so I searched the list for my email address... not there.... so I looked around for something resembling my name or email address...
somehow, they managed to butcher it very badly - the last letter of my username was wrong, and the domain name has a dot where there should have been an 'o'. At first I thought this was some clever anti-spam technique, but other email addresses seem to be valid. Lets hope the DOJ doesn't screw up the settlement too (fingers crossed).
When Kurt Vonnegut was first writing "Slaughterhouse 5", he told a friend that it was an "anti-war" book. The friend replied that he might as well write an "anti-glacier" book. War is inevitable. Sure, war sucks, I hate it as much as anyone else. But the fact is, as long as there are humans that disagree with each other (i.e. as long as there are humans....), there will be war. The interesting thing is that with the development of more & more powerful weapons (atomic bombs, smart bombs, bio-war, lasers, etc etc etc), the cost of a true, all out war like WWI or WWII is getting so ridiculously high that it will either never happen again, or if it does, that's pretty much the end of humanity. Einstein said something like: "I don't know what World War Three will be fought with, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones"
This is also my understanding : contention of the PCI bus. . . . SCSI is a much better option for fast disk access
What? How will using SCSI sidestep the PCI bus contention issue?
yes, but, /dev/urandom isn't really random... if gzip was 'smart' enough, it could figure out the seed & algorithm for /dev/urandom and just save the output data that way. We don't really have any good way of generating really random data, so theoretically all data is not random and therefore arbitrarily compressible. In practice, of course, this is bullshit, and I think this press release will prove to be as well.
Anyone know if this will wokr on the 3Com Audrey? I haven't been able to find out if generic USB storage devices work on QNX...
Actually, from what I've read, for the most part the interface presented to the driver will be identical (or nearly identical) to that used by PCI. I doubt that any new bus standard which drastically changes the driver interface will be very popular.
to everyone who is saying "sure, you always have to trade quality for speed"....
Yes, that is true, but that misses the point. When I read a review/comparison of video cards, I am assuming that the benchmarks are based on fairly real-world situations. That what makes Quake 3 such a great benchmark - almost every gamer has played it, and is at least generally familiar with how torturous it is to the standard video card. Everyone also knows that you can improve the FPS by lowering resolution, using 16-bit textures, etc etc
When I look at a comparison of Quake benchmark scores on, say, Tom's hardware, they are meaningful because they are a comparison of video cards, all else being equal. If ATI is specifically lowering quality on Quake3 (not just the Quake3 engine, but the game itself) to increase FPS rate, clearly they are doing this to stand out in such comparisons, and clearly this is - if not outright fraudulent - misleading and manipulative.
Take a look at this article, its in German, but the pictures are worth 1000 (english) words. Mouse over the ATI pics to see the "cheat" version versus the normal ATI version. Clearly they are sacrificing image quality for speed.
First, my point was more that there are non-hardware-specific programming things that Nvidia has spent alot of time perfecting - things that ATI has yet to get right, because of the numerous problems I experienced trying to play games on the Radeon. Second, ATI could potentially use optimization tricks & such that they learn from studying the Nvidia driver to improve their own hardware & software architecture.
Patent protection is designed to prevent this sort of thing, but enforceability then becomes an issue. Suppose ATI releases closed-source drivers that steal librally from Nvidia open-source driver. How can Nvidia prove this without disassembling and studying ATI's driver? (which I believe is a violation of the DMCA or something, and not necessarily admissable in court) Even supposing they do have evidence of patent violation, such a court case could drag on for years, etc etc etc. Its far easier (from a management point of view) for Nvidia to just leave the driver closed. Sure it would be great if everybody were 100% open about all this stuff, but hey, thats just not the way it is.
(BTW - I'm not implying ATI has or would do such things....)
I would guess that, specifically in Nvidia's case, they spend alot of time ironing out bugs and incompatibilities, and to open-source the code would give away all that hard-earned IP to competitors. For example, I will NEVER buy an ATI video card. I bought a Radeon a few months ago, installed it, and instantly ran into compatibility problems. On some games, the ATI drivers were so shitty as to make the game unplayable. So I returned the card and bought an Nvidia card. Bingo - no problems. Clear this is not a hardware spec issue, its just that Nvidia's driver developers spend far more time fixing incompatibilities and other misc. stuff. Open-sourcing the driver would basically be providing R&D for the competition.
In addition, alot of advanced hardware (i.e. 3D accelerator tricks) use complicated interfaces that may actually be patentable. If Nvidia opens up their driver, ATI can see how they, say, accelerate certain AGP operations, and then incorporate that idea into their own product. Strike two against Nvidia open source.
I personally work for a company that produces a product based on another companies chip. We write our own (Windows) drivers for the chip, and therein lies all our Value(TM). If we were to open-source our driver, there would suddenly be absolutely no reason for us to exist. Sure, open source is great for alot of generic hardware (NE2000 network card, for example), but for anything sufficiently complex, you'll have a hard time convincing a company to simply give away design secrets.
It was discontinued about a year ago.
With hard drive speeds where they are nowadays, there's really no point to RAM disks, except in very specialize high-end applications (i.e. databases). Even in those cases, your probably better off with a machine that can handle huge amounts of RAM (Alpha, Sparc, and Itanium can all handle terabytes of address space, i think) and an OS that can do decent filesystem buffering.
ha! right, and whos going to make those laws? the same people you want to kick out of government?
the system we have is the best one so far in the history of the world. Who cares if some dumb texas oil billionaire can get elected by having his brother rig the vote? At least the trains run on time....
``We need a database behind that, so when you're walking into an airport and you say that you are Larry Ellison, you take that card and put it in a reader and you put your thumb down and that system confirms that this is Larry Ellison,'' he said.
Ok, Larry, and what happens when someone steals your card and your thumbprint?
This is reactionary and stupid. A national ID card will only promote a police state, and if that happens, the terrorists have already won.
Crypto backdoors sound good, but in reality they won't help at all. The biggest part of the problem, as you pointed out, is just figuring out what is encrypted and what isn't. According to this article, the hijackers were sending each other unecrypted emails. If they couldn't even intercept unencrypted messages, how do they think backdoors will help?
One basic assumption of crypto backdoors is that people will actually use crypto that has the backdoor capability. Its like trying to limit encryption to 128 bits or 4096 bits or whatever it is these days. You can just write your own encryption program (or download & hack the source to some existing program) and create 65536 bit encryption if you want. Sure, its illegal, but if you don't want the feds to find out about your nefarious plans, so what?
Believe me, we can expect a lot more stupid, reactionary legislation in the coming weeks & months (am I the only one who doesn't feel any safer knowing that the guy on the plane next to me doesn't have his Bic disposable razors????). Thank god we haven't locked up all the Arab-Americans because they could be terrorists...
Token ring belongs in computer history. Maybe it was great when it first came out, but its has been displaced by other cheaper, more reliable technologies (i.e. ethernet). Obviously no one would run 1000 node unswitched ethernet. Likewise, no one who has any concerns about reliability should use token ring as their main network.
er, yes, linux is broken, in this regard
but... protocals should be designed to withstand broken, even pathologically broken, operating systems. Ergo, ethernet is extremely popular because, among other things, its fairly fault-tolerant, in that a fault on one node causes minimal disruption on other nodes. Token ring, however, is so stupidly easy to break its a joke.