i mean seriously, i'm being kind of silly here, but i was trying to point out that where you draw the line for what _has to_ come with an OS vs. what _can_ gets fuzzy as you integrate more things.
of course the solution would be some sort of brilliant API for cross-application communication:)
Actually people are still free to choose Quicktime or RealVideo - in fact, Real is doing very well for someone who is apparently competing with a monopoly. I still see more windows-oriented media sites that use.ra than anything else (sometimes they offer both.ra and.wma or.asf, but rarely do they not offer.ra).
I fail to see how MS packaging extras with their OS and charging for the combination rather than selling them separately and not totally integrating them and allowing you to buy another player is abuse of monopoly status. It may not be very nice to integrate the player but you still can (and many people do) use other players.
MS does a lot of horrible things but I don't see this being one of them.
hi, i know this is a little off topic, but you seem to know a lot about the GPL and this seems a good place to ask this question.
the reason software companies exist (to some degree) is that the people who want to use the software do not have the time/ability to write the software - so they pay other people to do it. for something like, say, music studio software, this could be a lot of work - so the development cost is divided among all the buyers...
my question is, how would something like this be organized under the GPL? it may take years for such a piece of software to finally make back its money (not sure about this 100%), so if one were to make the source code openly available, how would one be compensated for software written for someone else? or would you have to charge everyone before you wrote it - then what if you didn't finish?
anyway it's these kinds of issues - do you know much about this? is there an faq? there is a _lot_ of reading material on the fsf site and i haven't yet come across something like this..
I can imagine it now, a wristwatch which will vibrate when it hears bullshit or better yet one that screams "BULLSHIT". That whould be a lot of fun in meetings!
I already have one - I programmed my watch to beep every second.
I'd LOVE to go to Mars - but I'd expect that the second would be the same here or there, and not to have to measure frequencies in "Martian Hertz" or have a "Martian Heart Rate" or EVER say "Sol" instead of "Day",
ahhh, but won't you be surprised when you get up there and you sound like Barry White..;)
I was being pedantic and playing devil's advocate, not really arguing that it made _sense_ to define the second differently. That's how it's defined now but not originally - maybe a Celsius/Centigrade sort of a thing. Doesn't matter anyway, because what you say makes much more sense in practical terms.
I am wondering, though, if "cosmic rays" would mess with a digital watch. I'm not making this up - I'm pretty sure they affect digital circuits much more out in space. Anyone...? (google-lazy and I know someone out here will know)
I thought the whole point was to not have it be digital? Anyway, are you talking from a UI perspective or an implementation perspective?
Also..
This idiocy of the longer 'Martian second' has got to stop.
Well technically, the second is defined in terms of planetary rotation, so there is some merit to the concept of a Martian second. (Remember, they divided the hour into "minute" (small) pieces, then divided it a "second" time, and then potentially even a "third" time, aka in the C64 1980s as a "jiffy":)
There are probably other OS's that they would be more willing to use for this as well - more known reliable ones for embedded applications, like VxWorks (which I've heard but not confirmed that the government uses for these sorts of things).
more accurate way of keeping time IMHO would be to keep the length of the second the same, and add 39 minutes worth per 24h: an "extended" 12h +19:30m watch face if you like, maybe with a colored "pie slice" for the extra time period - instead of losing seconds.
At first I thought you were smoking crack, but then I realized I misunderstood. You're right, there is a better solution - the simplest might have been to adjust the # of seconds in a 'minute'. or number of minutes in an 'hour'. Assuming that's possible.
Your suggestion presents an interesting problem, I think. What does the minute hand do during the final 39 minutes?:) I can't think of anything offhand.
Hm... Well, what I was saying was that instruction stream and data stream are (in theory) completely unrelated. IA64 does indeed have a larger instruction size that IA32.. but what I was talking about in the post (I guess it wasn't obvious?) was that a 64 bit IA32 architecture would mean that the instructions are still 32 bits, but the data stream is 64 bits. For IA64 this is obviously not the case.
Honestly from the tone of your post it's hard to believe you'll listen, but I want it to be clear that data stream and instruction stream size are unrelated - and you've proved it yourself by showing the 41 bit instruction size but 64 bit data size of IA64.
This is all tangential anyway since this thread wasn't about IA64.:)
They don't go to the same management briefings, the support people never hang around the water cooler with the sales people, and in general are the last to know in any such policy changes. Thus would be the least likely to know where I could get a power supply.
Just the other day I heard two guys over by the water cooler talking about the availability of certain types of legacy power supplies. Go figure.;)
You know, I'm sure the reason that this stereotype exists is because outsourcing _in general_ will give bad results if the place you outsource to is not properly researched. Since the trend these days has been to outsource overseas, it seems natural that people would associate that bad qualities with the "overseas"ness, and not the fact that it's being outsourced.
That's just a guess.:)
The main reason I can see for not outsourcing (or even for having international development - it's been a problem even internally at some companies I've worked for) is that you disconnect the workers at some level from the management, and this allows for the management to become disconnected and have no clue what's going on, and it allows the workers to slack or do things that aren't required.
Do you have any thoughts on these issues..? (genuinely curious)
really? i'm unfamiliar with MMX so i'm sure you're right about that. are they doing full 64-bit addresses? the alpha didn't even do that, i was never sure why.
I agree with you on just about everything (unique for slashdot?;)... especially about the EV8 team and processor - unfortunately instead (as you probably know) they've simply reassigned the entire ev8 team to "fix" itanium. We'll see how that goes:\
According to theregister's article (go read it!:) as well as what I've heard about this and the AMD chip, the 64-bit extensions will be just like the 32-bit extensions were for the original pentium. In other words - it will be backwards compatible without the crummy emulation.:)
Intel was the market leader, but they weren't completely stupid. The x86 architecture is one of the worst imaginable - the pentium pro's design involves a pipeline that was some obscene number of stages deep (i forget, but it was in the double digits). If someone would like an explanation of what this means, please reply and I'll post it, but I'll keep things simple for now.
Essentially Intel saw that there was only so far they could take the x86 architecure, and realized that to stay successful, someone would have to eventually replace it with something. They decided it should be them (while in the meantime presumably working on this backup plan). The problem is that IA64 (itanium) is kind of crappy - it's a very academic design which lacked a lot of forethought (if anyone wants me to soapbox on this reply as well please)...
I once met Bob Colwell (one of the head architects an Intel - I think he's an Intel fellow) and asked him what he thought about the Intel architecure.. he responded "oh, it's crap".. but he defends supporting it by saying that it's the only way to continually support the code base, and they've done a good job of extending it - I bet most people back then would have never guessed it would come as far as it has.
An old joke:
q: What're the two worst microarchitecures out there?
a: Sun and X86, obviously.
q: What're the two most successful microarchitectures out there?
a: Sun and X86.
I guess DEC should have stuck with VAX
really, the lesson there is that code/install base _is_ very important - and Intel was trying, in the best way they saw how to bridge the gap to a new architecture which they had control of(which might have worked if IA64 didn't, well, IMHO suck).
When they talk about 64-bit processors, they are talking about the data stream, not the instruction stream. In the articles linked, they only discuss 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture - which has mostly 32 bit instructions (and of course legacy support), which means that there is no additional bandwidth for instructions. Also, it stands to reason that all the old instructions will still use the 32-bit data they were using before (so no extra data bandwidth either).
One benefit to having a 64-bit data stream is that you (should) have increased bandwidth - a data-fetch instruction can now fetch 64 bits at a time instead of the old 32 bits at a time (yes, you need more pins for this).
You also have greater accuracy for floating-point operations, and a higher maximum value for integers. This can speed up things considerably if, under a 32-bit architecture, you need to implement workarounds for this extended accuracy.
There are a lot of applications where you can take advantage of the extra bits (the more the merrier). Bitmasks for one thing, and lots of graphcis and vector operations can be modified to be twice as fast when you have twice the data stream. I don't remember the specifics of how these are implemented, maybe someone else can elaborate on these.
interesting.. i wouldn't have interpreted what i'd said the way you interpreted it.. but you have a good point..
is it your opinion, though, that if guns were NOT written in to the constitution (or arms, at least. but i can't imagine life without arms) that they WOULD be outlawed entirely?
i'd only like to add that the reason for outlawing cell phones isn't quite that they divert your eyes from the road (i think). rather, if you've ever driven with a cell phone, you know that it's hard to look at your blind spot, or turn your head at all really to get proper visibility (which is similar, yes).. and also, you lose a hand.
incidentally, i was once almost hit by a woman who was driving her car and holding TWO cell phones! one with a hand, and one cradled with her shoulder.
that is a valid point only in a purely legal sense - which is assuming that the laws are complete and just in everyone's eyes. my analogy wasn't meant to present a legal argument - rather, an argument of reason (which is completely different)...
is there a non-legal reason you see it as a bad analogy?
hm.. well, i have a response, and am very interested in actually discussing this, because personally i'm still kind of unresolved on the issue..
and if you aren't giving it your full attention you should lose your license (IMHO).
that's a fair enough thing to say.. let's see...
what if you're sleepy at the wheel? what if you're flipping radio stations? what if you're talking to someone and they say something funny and you laugh, and are distracted for a second? what if you see a distracting billboard? what if you start sneezing? what if you hear bad news on the radio? what if you're looking at your gas meter or the clock?
all of these things take some amount of time, and you can get into an accident in the right circumstances while doing any of these - just as easily as if you were answering the cell phone. should they all be outlawed?
then there's the argument that if you get INTO an accident, and it's proved you were negligent in some way, how about then? should your license be revoked? but then, how do you PREVENT these accidents? is it be not allowing any of these things?
i like the insurance sort of response... in the case of the accident you mentioned, the driver behind was simply following too closely - and also, answering a phone is more distracting than talking on one (most distracting? dialing one. very dangerous. give yourself a few BLOCKS with that;).
i think there are certain things that, when combined, are clearly irresonsible - for example, tailgating while dialing your phone. but dialing your phone on an empty road isn't so bad. tailgating, in fact, is much more dangerous inherently.
Slashdot Mirror
i mean seriously, i'm being kind of silly here, but i was trying to point out that where you draw the line for what _has to_ come with an OS vs. what _can_ gets fuzzy as you integrate more things.
of course the solution would be some sort of brilliant API for cross-application communication :)
However, don't all linux distributions come with BASH?
I fail to see how MS packaging extras with their OS and charging for the combination rather than selling them separately and not totally integrating them and allowing you to buy another player is abuse of monopoly status. It may not be very nice to integrate the player but you still can (and many people do) use other players.
MS does a lot of horrible things but I don't see this being one of them.
the reason software companies exist (to some degree) is that the people who want to use the software do not have the time/ability to write the software - so they pay other people to do it. for something like, say, music studio software, this could be a lot of work - so the development cost is divided among all the buyers...
my question is, how would something like this be organized under the GPL? it may take years for such a piece of software to finally make back its money (not sure about this 100%), so if one were to make the source code openly available, how would one be compensated for software written for someone else? or would you have to charge everyone before you wrote it - then what if you didn't finish?
anyway it's these kinds of issues - do you know much about this? is there an faq? there is a _lot_ of reading material on the fsf site and i haven't yet come across something like this..
thanks!!!
I already have one - I programmed my watch to beep every second.
ahhh, but won't you be surprised when you get up there and you sound like Barry White.. ;)
I am wondering, though, if "cosmic rays" would mess with a digital watch. I'm not making this up - I'm pretty sure they affect digital circuits much more out in space. Anyone...? (google-lazy and I know someone out here will know)
Also..
This idiocy of the longer 'Martian second' has got to stop.
Well technically, the second is defined in terms of planetary rotation, so there is some merit to the concept of a Martian second. (Remember, they divided the hour into "minute" (small) pieces, then divided it a "second" time, and then potentially even a "third" time, aka in the C64 1980s as a "jiffy" :)
and the one giving "Mad Props" to the watchmaker gets a 5? :) (no offense to the giver of props!)
There are probably other OS's that they would be more willing to use for this as well - more known reliable ones for embedded applications, like VxWorks (which I've heard but not confirmed that the government uses for these sorts of things).
I have to ask this because really I don't know and I'm curious. Are digital watches more/less accurate than well-made analog watches?
At first I thought you were smoking crack, but then I realized I misunderstood. You're right, there is a better solution - the simplest might have been to adjust the # of seconds in a 'minute'. or number of minutes in an 'hour'. Assuming that's possible.
Your suggestion presents an interesting problem, I think. What does the minute hand do during the final 39 minutes? :) I can't think of anything offhand.
Honestly from the tone of your post it's hard to believe you'll listen, but I want it to be clear that data stream and instruction stream size are unrelated - and you've proved it yourself by showing the 41 bit instruction size but 64 bit data size of IA64.
This is all tangential anyway since this thread wasn't about IA64. :)
Just the other day I heard two guys over by the water cooler talking about the availability of certain types of legacy power supplies. Go figure. ;)
That's just a guess. :)
The main reason I can see for not outsourcing (or even for having international development - it's been a problem even internally at some companies I've worked for) is that you disconnect the workers at some level from the management, and this allows for the management to become disconnected and have no clue what's going on, and it allows the workers to slack or do things that aren't required.
Do you have any thoughts on these issues..? (genuinely curious)
I agree with you on just about everything (unique for slashdot? ;)... especially about the EV8 team and processor - unfortunately instead (as you probably know) they've simply reassigned the entire ev8 team to "fix" itanium. We'll see how that goes :\
According to theregister's article (go read it! :) as well as what I've heard about this and the AMD chip, the 64-bit extensions will be just like the 32-bit extensions were for the original pentium. In other words - it will be backwards compatible without the crummy emulation. :)
Intel was the market leader, but they weren't completely stupid. The x86 architecture is one of the worst imaginable - the pentium pro's design involves a pipeline that was some obscene number of stages deep (i forget, but it was in the double digits). If someone would like an explanation of what this means, please reply and I'll post it, but I'll keep things simple for now.
Essentially Intel saw that there was only so far they could take the x86 architecure, and realized that to stay successful, someone would have to eventually replace it with something. They decided it should be them (while in the meantime presumably working on this backup plan). The problem is that IA64 (itanium) is kind of crappy - it's a very academic design which lacked a lot of forethought (if anyone wants me to soapbox on this reply as well please)...
I once met Bob Colwell (one of the head architects an Intel - I think he's an Intel fellow) and asked him what he thought about the Intel architecure.. he responded "oh, it's crap".. but he defends supporting it by saying that it's the only way to continually support the code base, and they've done a good job of extending it - I bet most people back then would have never guessed it would come as far as it has.
An old joke:
q: What're the two worst microarchitecures out there?
a: Sun and X86, obviously.
q: What're the two most successful microarchitectures out there?
a: Sun and X86.
I guess DEC should have stuck with VAX
really, the lesson there is that code/install base _is_ very important - and Intel was trying, in the best way they saw how to bridge the gap to a new architecture which they had control of(which might have worked if IA64 didn't, well, IMHO suck).
When they talk about 64-bit processors, they are talking about the data stream, not the instruction stream. In the articles linked, they only discuss 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture - which has mostly 32 bit instructions (and of course legacy support), which means that there is no additional bandwidth for instructions. Also, it stands to reason that all the old instructions will still use the 32-bit data they were using before (so no extra data bandwidth either).
One benefit to having a 64-bit data stream is that you (should) have increased bandwidth - a data-fetch instruction can now fetch 64 bits at a time instead of the old 32 bits at a time (yes, you need more pins for this).
You also have greater accuracy for floating-point operations, and a higher maximum value for integers. This can speed up things considerably if, under a 32-bit architecture, you need to implement workarounds for this extended accuracy.
There are a lot of applications where you can take advantage of the extra bits (the more the merrier). Bitmasks for one thing, and lots of graphcis and vector operations can be modified to be twice as fast when you have twice the data stream. I don't remember the specifics of how these are implemented, maybe someone else can elaborate on these.
is it your opinion, though, that if guns were NOT written in to the constitution (or arms, at least. but i can't imagine life without arms) that they WOULD be outlawed entirely?
i'd only like to add that the reason for outlawing cell phones isn't quite that they divert your eyes from the road (i think). rather, if you've ever driven with a cell phone, you know that it's hard to look at your blind spot, or turn your head at all really to get proper visibility (which is similar, yes).. and also, you lose a hand.
incidentally, i was once almost hit by a woman who was driving her car and holding TWO cell phones! one with a hand, and one cradled with her shoulder.
is there a non-legal reason you see it as a bad analogy?
and if you aren't giving it your full attention you should lose your license (IMHO).
that's a fair enough thing to say.. let's see...
what if you're sleepy at the wheel? what if you're flipping radio stations? what if you're talking to someone and they say something funny and you laugh, and are distracted for a second? what if you see a distracting billboard? what if you start sneezing? what if you hear bad news on the radio? what if you're looking at your gas meter or the clock?
all of these things take some amount of time, and you can get into an accident in the right circumstances while doing any of these - just as easily as if you were answering the cell phone. should they all be outlawed?
then there's the argument that if you get INTO an accident, and it's proved you were negligent in some way, how about then? should your license be revoked? but then, how do you PREVENT these accidents? is it be not allowing any of these things?
i like the insurance sort of response... in the case of the accident you mentioned, the driver behind was simply following too closely - and also, answering a phone is more distracting than talking on one (most distracting? dialing one. very dangerous. give yourself a few BLOCKS with that ;).
i think there are certain things that, when combined, are clearly irresonsible - for example, tailgating while dialing your phone. but dialing your phone on an empty road isn't so bad. tailgating, in fact, is much more dangerous inherently.
enough rambling for now? :)
Why is that analogy any better? (i'm really asking here, not attacking)