(On a side note, which is better: C++ or Lisp?)
You're kidding, right? If not, then I think a good answer can be found by backing up two sentences in your post: "Which is better depends a lot on the task I want to do". There. In my case, Lisp is better than C when freshman courses require me to use it (um, it was Scheme actually). Luckily, that hasn't happened since 1994.;^)
Um, yeah, I'm something of an SF buff, so I've read about that a couple of times, but I chose not to mention it in the comment, since it's not exactly resolved... Thanks for pointing it out, though.
No amount of network technology can cure the problem of latency. Sure, it can be minimized, but there will always be a lower limit to the amount of latency in information transmission between any two points in space. This limit, of course, is set by the speed of light. I think "~8ms per timezone" is a useful guideline in approximating latencies between points on Earth. It can be fun to ping stuff whose geographic location you know roughly, and let your mind boggle a bit over how far from the theoretical minimum real-world latencies are. For example, a ping from my desk in Stockholm to www.amazon.co.uk requires roughly 160 ms to make it back--and England is one timezone from Sweden... Now, I know nothing about the route taken (didn't trace it), and how loaded that particular machine is (with all you guys boycotting, perhaps only Amazon's own staff is single-clicking it these days), but still...
OK, I'll bite. I'm just a software dude playing around with electronics on the side, so... Anyway, here goes nothing:
Probably something to deal with the fact that the board containing the LEDs for the clock is rotating, so transferring signals to them becomes kind of complicated.
A kind thin board featuring strips of copper and lots of holes drilled on a standardized grid. Dead handy for building circuits without using real printed circuit boards
No idea, sorry.
Likewise.
A PIC 16C84 is a wonderful microcontroller made by Microchip. It's a RISC design, and uses a Harvard architecture. Commonly clocked at 4 MHz, which lets it execute 1 million instructions per second. Very popular among us hobbyists because it stores its program in 1024 words of EEPROM, thus making it easily erasable and reprogrammable using just electricity--no UV light or anything like that.
A DIP resistor, I would guess, is another name for a "resistor network", which is just a bunch (seven or eight seems common) of resistors mounted in a standard DIP (that's dual inline package) capsule. Very handy when you need lots of same-value resistors for e.g. LED current limiting.
"16C84" is just a shorter form of "PIC16C84", of course. The word programmer in this context referes to a piece of specialized hardware which is used to transfer instructions into the EEPROM of the chip. The net is full of build instructions for those, and they're all pretty nice and simple.
Um, again, please note that I'm just an electronics hobbyist, not a real expert (TM). Anyway, I hope that clears some of it up for you.
The OP (evanbd ) said: "The FSB can't sustain it anyway.", so you're kind of missing the mark, there IMO. Do the calculation: at 200 MHz effective clockrate, a 128-bit wide bus can transmit 2.98 GB/s. And IIRC, the EV6 bus isn't 128 bits wide, but only 64. That's not even a third of the bandwidth handled by this memory controller, so it does seem a bit too hefty. For one processor, that is... I never understood if the Mamba chipset is for SMP or not. If it is, then things look differently.
Read the article, perhaps? The thing is that Motorola is requiring dealers to send them their customer data. This makes it possible, of course, for Motorola to do direct "e-commerce" with these customers, thereby cutting the dealers out of the loop. Being a cheap bastard, I'm all for cutting stuff out of the loop between a manufacturer and myself, but this definitely strikes me as a profoundly disturbing way of doing things. If, like many of the deaqlers mentioned in the article, you spend 10+ years building up a customer database (and related actual relationships, I hope), it's not right for the original manufacturer to just come and demand that data! Note that Motorola threaten the dealers; saying they will cancel the dealership if the dealer fails to supply the required data. Also, it says in the article that Motorola will check the recieved data for accuracy. This is really, really sickening.
"The box", which is called the GScube by Sony, contained 16 modified PS2 rendering pipelines, and also 16 PS2 Emotion Engine CPUs. It weighs in at a neat 512 MB of video memory.;^) Since then, Sony has apparantly decided the box was to weak, and upped it to 64 rendering pipes. Yummy. At SIGGRAPH, it was fed data from an SGI Origin 3x00 server. I've read somewhere that the incoming bandwidth into the GScube is somewhere around 2.1 GB/s. Whoo-hoo.
From the article:
As it struggles to cut costs and earn profits after losing at least $1.5 billion over the last six years...
Um, OK. I knew Amazon didn't go that well, but how do they manage to lose that kind of money? Is every book sold at loss, or what? I don't remember getting the few books I've bought from them (way before this 1-Click parody, so back off:) delivered by Britney Spears, either... What have they done with all that cash? The more I think about it, the more a bookstore sounds like the optimal thing for an online just-in-time shopping site. They don't need giant warehouses, no giant shops (of course), no shop staff, no nothing. Sure, I guess they have quite the machine park, but a couple of million dollars should buy you that. Have they burnt it all on advertising, or what?? I guess my limited knowledge of economics and accounting really adds to my confusion, here...
Um, hello? Abrash works for Microsoft, OK? In fact, as he states in response to the first question, he's a "Software Development Engineer (the generic Microsoft developer title), Xbox Advanced Technology Group". I don't think the motive behind the article is a direct attack against MS, although the Slashdot editorial team seem to enjoy such attacks as much as the next geek. Rather, I think the interview (which was posted by Daily Radar a few days ago) is cool, since it really asks someone who knows his stuff when it comes to graphics hacking.
1) Your MAC address is already embedded in every single packet going out of your Ethernet card, no matter what protocol you're using. It's the
way Ethernet works.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that my MAC address is visible in the other end of the connection. Typically, packets from my machine pass through at least one router/switch/gateway on their way to some other Internet host, and then the MAC address gets replaced by that of the switch. The only globally-visible addressing scheme used on the Internet is, of course, IP addresses. I'm sure everyone already knows this, but your post really made it sound like it wasn't so. Still, I think this makes the case "against" IPv6 slightly stronger...
Yes. I really am a moron.
Ah. That perhaps makes it less necessary to wonder why the authorities in Norway should be contacted, when Slashdot gets hacked by a couple of guys in the Netherlands...
Um, according to this page over at Daily Radar, Spaceworld 2000 was on August 23. That's more than a month ago, dammit! Surely, this can't be news to many?
Why should such long-reaching standardization be necessary? The way I see it, all that is needed is that the protocol used by any one game, say Quake 3 Arena, is standardized across platforms. To me, as a programmer, that sounds like a no-brainer anyway, so... The purpose of WAP was to create a protocol for wireless applications (doh!), but in the case of consoles and computers connected to the Internet, that protocol already exists--it's called IP. Sure, it could make sense for the industry to form some kind of committe to standardize some higher-level network API (like DirectPlay), but I don't see that happening any time soon. It's all about interoperability, and it's hard to beat good old UDP-over-IP for that. Already standardized and implemented, and rather well-known by programmers. Hardware vendors just need to make sure that an API to access it (not necessarily the traditional "sockets" API, although it might make sense due to experience and documentation etc.) is available, and voila!
Since the PS2 uses USB, keyboard availability shouldn't be a (hardware) problem. Any standard USB keyboard should work. It's interesting to note that Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to use all parts except the connector of the USB standard for the Xbox. This means that while the machine could communicate with any keyboard, you can't connect it, since the plug won't fit. Also, in a recent interview, they stressed the point that the Xbox is a console, not a slimmed-down PC. Weird. Perhaps they don't know about Turbine?;^)
One simple suggestion: read more books. I'd recommend the late (and sorely missed) Richard W. Steven'sTCP/IP Illustrated, Volume I: The Protocols as a starting point. It's a great book, and really easy to follow. It's $70 that will really help you understand stuff.
I seem to remember that, as well. If you drop the focus on PalmOS, then there are several combined phones and PDAs out there. The most known one is the (semi-ancient, but recently software-upgraded) Nokia 9110i, and the brand-spanking-new Ericsson R380. These are GSM phones, of course...
Slashdot Mirror
...and repeated several times each day.
(On a side note, which is better: C++ or Lisp?) ;^)
You're kidding, right? If not, then I think a good answer can be found by backing up two sentences in your post: "Which is better depends a lot on the task I want to do". There. In my case, Lisp is better than C when freshman courses require me to use it (um, it was Scheme actually). Luckily, that hasn't happened since 1994.
Um, yeah, I'm something of an SF buff, so I've read about that a couple of times, but I chose not to mention it in the comment, since it's not exactly resolved... Thanks for pointing it out, though.
No amount of network technology can cure the problem of latency. Sure, it can be minimized, but there will always be a lower limit to the amount of latency in information transmission between any two points in space. This limit, of course, is set by the speed of light. I think "~8ms per timezone" is a useful guideline in approximating latencies between points on Earth. It can be fun to ping stuff whose geographic location you know roughly, and let your mind boggle a bit over how far from the theoretical minimum real-world latencies are. For example, a ping from my desk in Stockholm to www.amazon.co.uk requires roughly 160 ms to make it back--and England is one timezone from Sweden... Now, I know nothing about the route taken (didn't trace it), and how loaded that particular machine is (with all you guys boycotting, perhaps only Amazon's own staff is single-clicking it these days), but still...
- Probably something to deal with the fact that the board containing the LEDs for the clock is rotating, so transferring signals to them becomes kind of complicated.
- A kind thin board featuring strips of copper and lots of holes drilled on a standardized grid. Dead handy for building circuits without using real printed circuit boards
- No idea, sorry.
- Likewise.
- A PIC 16C84 is a wonderful microcontroller made by Microchip. It's a RISC design, and uses a Harvard architecture. Commonly clocked at 4 MHz, which lets it execute 1 million instructions per second. Very popular among us hobbyists because it stores its program in 1024 words of EEPROM, thus making it easily erasable and reprogrammable using just electricity--no UV light or anything like that.
- A DIP resistor, I would guess, is another name for a "resistor network", which is just a bunch (seven or eight seems common) of resistors mounted in a standard DIP (that's dual inline package) capsule. Very handy when you need lots of same-value resistors for e.g. LED current limiting.
- "16C84" is just a shorter form of "PIC16C84", of course. The word programmer in this context referes to a piece of specialized hardware which is used to transfer instructions into the EEPROM of the chip. The net is full of build instructions for those, and they're all pretty nice and simple.
Um, again, please note that I'm just an electronics hobbyist, not a real expert (TM). Anyway, I hope that clears some of it up for you.I had somehow messed it up on Slashdot's user config pages, I think. Try again. ;^)
The OP (evanbd ) said: "The FSB can't sustain it anyway.", so you're kind of missing the mark, there IMO. Do the calculation: at 200 MHz effective clockrate, a 128-bit wide bus can transmit 2.98 GB/s. And IIRC, the EV6 bus isn't 128 bits wide, but only 64. That's not even a third of the bandwidth handled by this memory controller, so it does seem a bit too hefty. For one processor, that is... I never understood if the Mamba chipset is for SMP or not. If it is, then things look differently.
Oh, I don't know, but at least since this was written... ;^)
Read the article, perhaps? The thing is that Motorola is requiring dealers to send them their customer data. This makes it possible, of course, for Motorola to do direct "e-commerce" with these customers, thereby cutting the dealers out of the loop. Being a cheap bastard, I'm all for cutting stuff out of the loop between a manufacturer and myself, but this definitely strikes me as a profoundly disturbing way of doing things. If, like many of the deaqlers mentioned in the article, you spend 10+ years building up a customer database (and related actual relationships, I hope), it's not right for the original manufacturer to just come and demand that data! Note that Motorola threaten the dealers; saying they will cancel the dealership if the dealer fails to supply the required data. Also, it says in the article that Motorola will check the recieved data for accuracy. This is really, really sickening.
[...] it would also make Rob look like the better man ;^)
Um, but it would also make Rob sound like pretty much like a "corporate drone", right?
"The box", which is called the GScube by Sony, contained 16 modified PS2 rendering pipelines, and also 16 PS2 Emotion Engine CPUs. It weighs in at a neat 512 MB of video memory. ;^) Since then, Sony has apparantly decided the box was to weak, and upped it to 64 rendering pipes. Yummy. At SIGGRAPH, it was fed data from an SGI Origin 3x00 server. I've read somewhere that the incoming bandwidth into the GScube is somewhere around 2.1 GB/s. Whoo-hoo.
From the article: :) delivered by Britney Spears, either... What have they done with all that cash? The more I think about it, the more a bookstore sounds like the optimal thing for an online just-in-time shopping site. They don't need giant warehouses, no giant shops (of course), no shop staff, no nothing. Sure, I guess they have quite the machine park, but a couple of million dollars should buy you that. Have they burnt it all on advertising, or what?? I guess my limited knowledge of economics and accounting really adds to my confusion, here...
As it struggles to cut costs and earn profits after losing at least $1.5 billion over the last six years...
Um, OK. I knew Amazon didn't go that well, but how do they manage to lose that kind of money? Is every book sold at loss, or what? I don't remember getting the few books I've bought from them (way before this 1-Click parody, so back off
Um, hello? Abrash works for Microsoft, OK? In fact, as he states in response to the first question, he's a "Software Development Engineer (the generic Microsoft developer title), Xbox Advanced Technology Group". I don't think the motive behind the article is a direct attack against MS, although the Slashdot editorial team seem to enjoy such attacks as much as the next geek. Rather, I think the interview (which was posted by Daily Radar a few days ago) is cool, since it really asks someone who knows his stuff when it comes to graphics hacking.
1) Your MAC address is already embedded in every single packet going out of your Ethernet card, no matter what protocol you're using. It's the way Ethernet works.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that my MAC address is visible in the other end of the connection. Typically, packets from my machine pass through at least one router/switch/gateway on their way to some other Internet host, and then the MAC address gets replaced by that of the switch. The only globally-visible addressing scheme used on the Internet is, of course, IP addresses. I'm sure everyone already knows this, but your post really made it sound like it wasn't so. Still, I think this makes the case "against" IPv6 slightly stronger...
Yes. I really am a moron.
Ah. That perhaps makes it less necessary to wonder why the authorities in Norway should be contacted, when Slashdot gets hacked by a couple of guys in the Netherlands...
Weird. I haven't found the jack for that on my PalmPilot yet. Hearing this, I know it has to be there, somewhere. ;^)
Um, according to this page over at Daily Radar, Spaceworld 2000 was on August 23. That's more than a month ago, dammit! Surely, this can't be news to many?
Why should such long-reaching standardization be necessary? The way I see it, all that is needed is that the protocol used by any one game, say Quake 3 Arena, is standardized across platforms. To me, as a programmer, that sounds like a no-brainer anyway, so... The purpose of WAP was to create a protocol for wireless applications (doh!), but in the case of consoles and computers connected to the Internet, that protocol already exists--it's called IP. Sure, it could make sense for the industry to form some kind of committe to standardize some higher-level network API (like DirectPlay), but I don't see that happening any time soon. It's all about interoperability, and it's hard to beat good old UDP-over-IP for that. Already standardized and implemented, and rather well-known by programmers. Hardware vendors just need to make sure that an API to access it (not necessarily the traditional "sockets" API, although it might make sense due to experience and documentation etc.) is available, and voila!
Since the PS2 uses USB, keyboard availability shouldn't be a (hardware) problem. Any standard USB keyboard should work. It's interesting to note that Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to use all parts except the connector of the USB standard for the Xbox. This means that while the machine could communicate with any keyboard, you can't connect it, since the plug won't fit. Also, in a recent interview, they stressed the point that the Xbox is a console, not a slimmed-down PC. Weird. Perhaps they don't know about Turbine? ;^)
One simple suggestion: read more books. I'd recommend the late (and sorely missed) Richard W. Steven'sTCP/IP Illustrated, Volume I: The Protocols as a starting point. It's a great book, and really easy to follow. It's $70 that will really help you understand stuff.
I seem to remember that, as well. If you drop the focus on PalmOS, then there are several combined phones and PDAs out there. The most known one is the (semi-ancient, but recently software-upgraded) Nokia 9110i, and the brand-spanking-new Ericsson R380. These are GSM phones, of course...
Bluetooth is spread-spectrum, so I doubt it qualifies as "easily sniffable". But then again, I'm a (software) hacker, not an EE whiz. ;^)
Hm, don't you have any basic tools on your system? xmag tells me that color is 396CA3. There. ;^)
Um, yeah, or perhaps a way to make us turn green due to UV-radiation! Now that would really be cool... He he. He he.