Actually, the SUV is just a station wagon with 4WD, really big wheels and high ground clearance. It's the high ground clearance that wrecks the aerodynamics and makes them so energy inefficient (plus the high center of mass makes them likely to flip over). But the station wagon is a tried and true design that is very good at moving both people and cargo. In fact I know of no better general purpose car to have than a station wagon.
"2. If you think the SPARC is a poorly designed processor, you need your head checked."
If you don't think SPARC is a poorly designed processor you need to wake up from your trendy x86 bashing and smell some benchmarks done in the last 5 years. SPARC hasn't been competetive for a long time. The only reason it's still around is because of Solaris and the fact that it scales well when you want to use a very large number of processors. But with Sun investing in Opteron technology they will likely stop making SPARCs soon. They've already stopped developing future SPARC designs.
The Omnibook 300 also had built-in ROM to hold the operating system and so forth. It was a damn fine computer for its time. Hell, I still use one on occasion...it's lighter and more usable than most modern superthins. The 386 processor is kind of showing its age, though...
Bullshit! I write number crunching scientific apps for a living and I wouldn't touch Java with a 10-foot pole. I don't know a single person who would. Generally it's C++ or Fortran (Fortran is alive and well in scientific computing and the language of choice for a lot of apps).
Of course, most number crunching apps are multiplatform anyway because if you don't care about a GUI it really isn't that hard to write multiplatform code.
"There was a widespread belief among physicists that there's nothing more to discover in physics."
Bullshit. Yeah, there were a few people who made proclamations like that but none of the good physicists ever believed it. And it sure as hell wasn't a 'widespread belief'. Get your facts straight.
'Your "different opinion" is conspicuous and suspicious. You have no reason to like the other product better than the iPod; you just insist that you do.'
Yikes, either the parent was a clever troll or Slashdot group think is even worse than I thought it was.
You are not allowed to question the collective. Please report for re-education immediately.
Christ, do you work for Infinium or something? You've made three posts on this topic saying essentially the same thing.
[H]ard|OCP may have written a rather unflattering piece about Infinium and their CEO, but you can hardly blame them if their claims are true. (They insist that they are. I personally have no clue. Can you actually debunk their claims?)
And the only reason [H]ard|OCP sued Infinium is because Infinium kept threatening to sue them and demanding they take things off their website. But the [H]ard guys have enough confidence in their story that rather than enduring a constant barrage of legal threats they took the initiative and essentially sued Infinium just to keep Infinium from threatening to sue them.
I really hate how this issue keeps coming up after so many years and yet so few people actually have their facts straight. Honestly I don't even care very much anymore, but if you're going to use Clinton as an example you should at least be accurate.
What you never hear in regards to Clinton's famous court appearance is that before 'lying under oath' he asked the judge to define 'sexual relations'. The judge defined it as intercourse. Only after that did Clinton claim he did not have sexual relations.
Now, I will not argue that he was being dishonest. I will not argue that he was being weasely. But lying under oath? If you can't go by the judge's definition of a term then what can you go by?
"The Xbox is one of the most innovative consoles to ever hit the market. First and foremost, it's the first console to ever include a hard drive."
Honestly, I just don't get what's so 'innovative' about that. The word innovation seems to have become so overused it has lost most of its meaning.
Putting a hard drive in a console is not hard. It's something that would have been relatively easy to any manufacturer to do, it was simply never considered worthwhile. The problem is that it's bulky and raises the cost of the machine too much. The only reason MS was able to do it in the XBox is because they didn't have to care about actually making a profit. That's innovation?! You'll notice that the XBox 2 has no hard drive...
As an American living in the US I agree with you. I honestly can't think of a single American car I would actually want to own...I've only ever bought European cars so far. There are a number of Japanese cars I wouldn't mind having either, but I just don't purchase that many cars...
"AMD has release what, 4 incompatable sockets in the past year?
939, 940,754, 740"
What the heck is socket 740? There's no such thing, at least not for AMD. Do you mean socket A? That's been around for years.
"And soon it will be releasing another socket, socket 900."
I don't know where you heard that, but it's simply not true.
"Im sure they had other socketed versions that they never made public."
I'm not even sure what you mean by that. How on earth can you have a socket format that isn't made public? A socket format is by definition a public standard. Do you mean something they use for internal testing or development? Why do you even care? How does it effect you in any way.
"to make things worse is that AMD has stated that they wont be putting PCI Express on socket A (Athlon) or socket 754 systems.
"So, all those people that went out and bought a socket 754 motherboard are screwed when PCI express starts to be rolled out."
OK, this just made me really confused. How on earth do you plan on getting PCI Express without upgrading your motherboard?! Are you going to solder it on or something? The only situation I can imagine in which this is possibly relevant is if you want to upgrade your motherboard without upgrading your processor, but honestly how often does that happen? Upgrading to PCI Express is going to be a major investment anyway, as you're going to have to buy new cards, so you might as well get a new processor while you're at it.
"in contrast, the Socket 7 arch for Intel lasted from the introduction to PCI to the introduction of AGP. I have a socket 7 motherboard with 2 ISA, 4 PCI and an AGP slot that i can run anything from a p133, P233, and the AMD K7 processor line."
Socket 7 lasted so long primarily because of AMD and their Super 7 initiative. They did this because back then they did not have the clout among motherboard manufacturers to introduce an entirely new standard. This wasn't all fine an dandy, though. AMD really was put at a disadvantage in the marketplace because of the old bus standard they were stuck to. Intel had no interest in keeping socket 7 going that long and abandoned it early on.
Oh, and there is no way a socket 7 motherboard can support a K7. A K6, certainly, but not a K7.
"Also, going from vinyl to CD/DVD took decades and is simply un-comparable to the stupidity of AMD changing their sockets 3-4 times in a year."
It's also an uncomparable market. Music is a commodity item which most people own lots of and want standard players to be able to play. Processors are an expensive item that most people don't have more than one of and would never, ever, purchase without the motherboard anyway. The comparison is pointless.
Why does everybody seem to think that Fermilab is some kind of sensitive facility? News flash: Fermilab is a basic research facility, not a top secret weapons lab. Their security is lax because they really don't have anything to hide. All their results are available to the public anyway. After all, that is sort of the whole point of basic research. And it's not like the compromised computer was part of the control system or anything. Fermilab has a lot of computers. The place is huge.
Besides which, if you actually read about the case you'd realize that this guy had access to the computers anyway and all he did was crack the root password to increase his disk quota. Now, I'm not saying that's a good thing but it's more like abuse of a computer lab than anything.
"There's an obvious alternative: embed the processor into the KVM kiosk, and into every other general-use device. All you carry around is your data, because that's the only component that is useful to personalize."
This was done back in the day. It was called the floppy disk. Of course these days we laugh at the capacity of floppies, but there was a time when the only storage computers had was the floppy disk you put in! It's sort of sad that we've moved away from this concept, but nobody can agree on a friggin standard. You might claim that CD-RWs are it, but most machines don't have the capability to write to them and even those that do can't do it nearly fast enough.
This is really a technical problem (don't expect to see a successor to the floppy disk, since if you don't make the heads part of the disk it can't be competetive in performance but if you do it will make the media cost too damn much). Maybe some sort of flash technology will do it someday, but right now flash is just too expensive and too small.
"There's a second alternative, too. You don't carry around anything, except maybe a general-purpose access device for reaching your home computer. Every device you use in public or carry around is just a gateway to your home server. It doesn't get much more elegant than that."
This can sort of be done today. I leave my computer running all day, ssh into it from the lab and even run X applications on it (and everyone bitches about the networking stuff in X...do you people have any idea how useful it is?), but I can't do the same thing anywhere because most places don't have the right software installed and don't have the bandwidth (I am lucky enough to have my computer at home hooked into the same campus-wide network as the machine in the lab). I don't see either of those problems going away anytime soon.
Processors are cheap (well, cheap processors are cheap...that doesn't mean that the latest Pentiums and Athlons are, but most people don't need that). If you can improve compatability and utility by putting the processor in there then I say go for it.
It's a sad truth that Moore's Law doesn't say anything about heat.
The trend of every generation of processors requiring bigger and fancier coolers than the previous generation is not just laziness or incompetence on the part of the designers, as so many slashdotters seem to dismiss it. The fact of the matter is that while we increase the number of transistors and their switching frequency, the amount of heat produced increases faster than it would be reduced by using smaller transistors.
The death of the constant speed increases in the PC industry may very well be caused by heat before any other factors. Expect to see more and more fancy cooling solutions in the future. In fact, I would predict that water cooling is almost set to go mainstream. That will help for a little while, but the problem remains: If you want to live on the high end, then things are going to be hot.
Everyone ranting about how this is inherently stupid since the key is just on the motherboard should actually read the article and note that the key is actually going to be stored on a removable device of some sort. So the idea is you carry the key with you at all times and just plug it into the computer when you want to use it. When the key is not in the computer the data cannot be read.
Of course this still doesn't explain the silly Kazaa claims, however that is another issue altogether. In fact this whole thing seems kind of useless since if the government were to confiscate your computer or something you'd think they could just subpoena the key as well, and it does nothing to protect against hackers since the key has to be in your computer for you do use it. Turning it off when you're not using it would be just as effective. About the only thing this is good for is in case somebody steals your computer when you're away. But it could work for that.
You speak as if that's in the past. The big OEMs still do it, particularly for high volume budget systems where the margins are slim and saving a few bucks on manufacturing each unit outweighs the fixed cost of having to design custom hardware.
Still, this is primarily a motherboard layout problem and the other standards mentioned are still followed.
So China is trying to become more high tech. WTF is wrong with that? Do you want the earth's most populous nation to consist mostly of peasants forever? Your entire xenophobic post fails to explain why this is such a bad thing.
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That's why I use Debian. Given their release cycle I'll probably be dead before they hit version 10 ;)
Um...that really depends on the cook. And the law firm, for that matter.
Who says lawyers are necessarily more mature than cooks? That seems like a pretty inane statement to me.
Actually, the SUV is just a station wagon with 4WD, really big wheels and high ground clearance. It's the high ground clearance that wrecks the aerodynamics and makes them so energy inefficient (plus the high center of mass makes them likely to flip over). But the station wagon is a tried and true design that is very good at moving both people and cargo. In fact I know of no better general purpose car to have than a station wagon.
Of course station wagons aren't sexy...
"2. If you think the SPARC is a poorly designed processor, you need your head checked."
If you don't think SPARC is a poorly designed processor you need to wake up from your trendy x86 bashing and smell some benchmarks done in the last 5 years. SPARC hasn't been competetive for a long time. The only reason it's still around is because of Solaris and the fact that it scales well when you want to use a very large number of processors. But with Sun investing in Opteron technology they will likely stop making SPARCs soon. They've already stopped developing future SPARC designs.
Nevermind that HP did this in 1993
The Omnibook 300 also had built-in ROM to hold the operating system and so forth. It was a damn fine computer for its time. Hell, I still use one on occasion...it's lighter and more usable than most modern superthins. The 386 processor is kind of showing its age, though...
Bullshit! I write number crunching scientific apps for a living and I wouldn't touch Java with a 10-foot pole. I don't know a single person who would. Generally it's C++ or Fortran (Fortran is alive and well in scientific computing and the language of choice for a lot of apps).
Of course, most number crunching apps are multiplatform anyway because if you don't care about a GUI it really isn't that hard to write multiplatform code.
"There was a widespread belief among physicists that there's nothing more to discover in physics."
Bullshit. Yeah, there were a few people who made proclamations like that but none of the good physicists ever believed it. And it sure as hell wasn't a 'widespread belief'. Get your facts straight.
'Your "different opinion" is conspicuous and suspicious. You have no reason to like the other product better than the iPod; you just insist that you do.'
Yikes, either the parent was a clever troll or Slashdot group think is even worse than I thought it was.
You are not allowed to question the collective. Please report for re-education immediately.
Christ, do you work for Infinium or something? You've made three posts on this topic saying essentially the same thing.
[H]ard|OCP may have written a rather unflattering piece about Infinium and their CEO, but you can hardly blame them if their claims are true. (They insist that they are. I personally have no clue. Can you actually debunk their claims?)
And the only reason [H]ard|OCP sued Infinium is because Infinium kept threatening to sue them and demanding they take things off their website. But the [H]ard guys have enough confidence in their story that rather than enduring a constant barrage of legal threats they took the initiative and essentially sued Infinium just to keep Infinium from threatening to sue them.
It's been only 30 years away the whole time!
I really hate how this issue keeps coming up after so many years and yet so few people actually have their facts straight. Honestly I don't even care very much anymore, but if you're going to use Clinton as an example you should at least be accurate.
What you never hear in regards to Clinton's famous court appearance is that before 'lying under oath' he asked the judge to define 'sexual relations'. The judge defined it as intercourse. Only after that did Clinton claim he did not have sexual relations.
Now, I will not argue that he was being dishonest. I will not argue that he was being weasely. But lying under oath? If you can't go by the judge's definition of a term then what can you go by?
"The Xbox is one of the most innovative consoles to ever hit the market. First and foremost, it's the first console to ever include a hard drive."
Honestly, I just don't get what's so 'innovative' about that. The word innovation seems to have become so overused it has lost most of its meaning.
Putting a hard drive in a console is not hard. It's something that would have been relatively easy to any manufacturer to do, it was simply never considered worthwhile. The problem is that it's bulky and raises the cost of the machine too much. The only reason MS was able to do it in the XBox is because they didn't have to care about actually making a profit. That's innovation?! You'll notice that the XBox 2 has no hard drive...
As an American living in the US I agree with you. I honestly can't think of a single American car I would actually want to own...I've only ever bought European cars so far. There are a number of Japanese cars I wouldn't mind having either, but I just don't purchase that many cars...
Man, you beat me to it. I mean, hell, I love manga and all, but to use it as an example of a non-nerdy book? Strange...
"AMD has release what, 4 incompatable sockets in the past year? 939, 940,754, 740"
What the heck is socket 740? There's no such thing, at least not for AMD. Do you mean socket A? That's been around for years.
"And soon it will be releasing another socket, socket 900."
I don't know where you heard that, but it's simply not true.
"Im sure they had other socketed versions that they never made public."
I'm not even sure what you mean by that. How on earth can you have a socket format that isn't made public? A socket format is by definition a public standard. Do you mean something they use for internal testing or development? Why do you even care? How does it effect you in any way.
"to make things worse is that AMD has stated that they wont be putting PCI Express on socket A (Athlon) or socket 754 systems.
"So, all those people that went out and bought a socket 754 motherboard are screwed when PCI express starts to be rolled out."
OK, this just made me really confused. How on earth do you plan on getting PCI Express without upgrading your motherboard?! Are you going to solder it on or something? The only situation I can imagine in which this is possibly relevant is if you want to upgrade your motherboard without upgrading your processor, but honestly how often does that happen? Upgrading to PCI Express is going to be a major investment anyway, as you're going to have to buy new cards, so you might as well get a new processor while you're at it.
"in contrast, the Socket 7 arch for Intel lasted from the introduction to PCI to the introduction of AGP. I have a socket 7 motherboard with 2 ISA, 4 PCI and an AGP slot that i can run anything from a p133, P233, and the AMD K7 processor line."
Socket 7 lasted so long primarily because of AMD and their Super 7 initiative. They did this because back then they did not have the clout among motherboard manufacturers to introduce an entirely new standard. This wasn't all fine an dandy, though. AMD really was put at a disadvantage in the marketplace because of the old bus standard they were stuck to. Intel had no interest in keeping socket 7 going that long and abandoned it early on.
Oh, and there is no way a socket 7 motherboard can support a K7. A K6, certainly, but not a K7.
"Also, going from vinyl to CD/DVD took decades and is simply un-comparable to the stupidity of AMD changing their sockets 3-4 times in a year."
It's also an uncomparable market. Music is a commodity item which most people own lots of and want standard players to be able to play. Processors are an expensive item that most people don't have more than one of and would never, ever, purchase without the motherboard anyway. The comparison is pointless.
Holy shit, that harmonica tune at the beginning is the Free Software Song.
Warning: Do not actually listen to if you value your ears.
Why does everybody seem to think that Fermilab is some kind of sensitive facility? News flash: Fermilab is a basic research facility, not a top secret weapons lab. Their security is lax because they really don't have anything to hide. All their results are available to the public anyway. After all, that is sort of the whole point of basic research. And it's not like the compromised computer was part of the control system or anything. Fermilab has a lot of computers. The place is huge.
Besides which, if you actually read about the case you'd realize that this guy had access to the computers anyway and all he did was crack the root password to increase his disk quota. Now, I'm not saying that's a good thing but it's more like abuse of a computer lab than anything.
"There's an obvious alternative: embed the processor into the KVM kiosk, and into every other general-use device. All you carry around is your data, because that's the only component that is useful to personalize."
This was done back in the day. It was called the floppy disk. Of course these days we laugh at the capacity of floppies, but there was a time when the only storage computers had was the floppy disk you put in! It's sort of sad that we've moved away from this concept, but nobody can agree on a friggin standard. You might claim that CD-RWs are it, but most machines don't have the capability to write to them and even those that do can't do it nearly fast enough.
This is really a technical problem (don't expect to see a successor to the floppy disk, since if you don't make the heads part of the disk it can't be competetive in performance but if you do it will make the media cost too damn much). Maybe some sort of flash technology will do it someday, but right now flash is just too expensive and too small.
"There's a second alternative, too. You don't carry around anything, except maybe a general-purpose access device for reaching your home computer. Every device you use in public or carry around is just a gateway to your home server. It doesn't get much more elegant than that."
This can sort of be done today. I leave my computer running all day, ssh into it from the lab and even run X applications on it (and everyone bitches about the networking stuff in X...do you people have any idea how useful it is?), but I can't do the same thing anywhere because most places don't have the right software installed and don't have the bandwidth (I am lucky enough to have my computer at home hooked into the same campus-wide network as the machine in the lab). I don't see either of those problems going away anytime soon.
Processors are cheap (well, cheap processors are cheap...that doesn't mean that the latest Pentiums and Athlons are, but most people don't need that). If you can improve compatability and utility by putting the processor in there then I say go for it.
Er...why? Yeah, it will have two CPUs but even then it will still be slower than one real CPU.
It's a sad truth that Moore's Law doesn't say anything about heat.
The trend of every generation of processors requiring bigger and fancier coolers than the previous generation is not just laziness or incompetence on the part of the designers, as so many slashdotters seem to dismiss it. The fact of the matter is that while we increase the number of transistors and their switching frequency, the amount of heat produced increases faster than it would be reduced by using smaller transistors.
The death of the constant speed increases in the PC industry may very well be caused by heat before any other factors. Expect to see more and more fancy cooling solutions in the future. In fact, I would predict that water cooling is almost set to go mainstream. That will help for a little while, but the problem remains: If you want to live on the high end, then things are going to be hot.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is doing British comedies now? Sweet!
Thank you! I'm not the only one who thought that...
Everyone ranting about how this is inherently stupid since the key is just on the motherboard should actually read the article and note that the key is actually going to be stored on a removable device of some sort. So the idea is you carry the key with you at all times and just plug it into the computer when you want to use it. When the key is not in the computer the data cannot be read.
Of course this still doesn't explain the silly Kazaa claims, however that is another issue altogether. In fact this whole thing seems kind of useless since if the government were to confiscate your computer or something you'd think they could just subpoena the key as well, and it does nothing to protect against hackers since the key has to be in your computer for you do use it. Turning it off when you're not using it would be just as effective. About the only thing this is good for is in case somebody steals your computer when you're away. But it could work for that.
You speak as if that's in the past. The big OEMs still do it, particularly for high volume budget systems where the margins are slim and saving a few bucks on manufacturing each unit outweighs the fixed cost of having to design custom hardware. Still, this is primarily a motherboard layout problem and the other standards mentioned are still followed.
All I have to say to this is...go China!
So China is trying to become more high tech. WTF is wrong with that? Do you want the earth's most populous nation to consist mostly of peasants forever? Your entire xenophobic post fails to explain why this is such a bad thing.