I think they are referint to 256 bit INSTRUCTIONS - it's a VLIW after all and they want to be able to issue as many ops per clock as possible.
Given that TM's JIT-recoding to VLIW's been around for a while i guess they know by now if they can get usefull ILP out of such a wide instruction word.
Their approach to low power - basicly gating every clock in sight even though it plays havoc with the tools most other people use is becoming more common (and the tools are evolving too). It works because they only turn on the parts of the chip that are being used at anyone time and a very small granularity - in the past people like Intel tend to do things like stopclk duty cycle modulation (stops the clock to everything for some percentage of the time) - this still means you're wasting energy when you are running
I believe "find the buffer overflow" is actually a Windows game.... some junior hacker seems to win a couple of times a month at the m,oment
Re:Copyrights and patents
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
Copyrights are harder to just throw away. I'd like to see recognition that it's individuals that hold copyrights and that they last no longer than their creator.
While in principal I agree with you you need to handle the corner cases - for example "struggling writer finally writes the great novel and the suddenly dies leaving wife and young chilren" etc etc. Better to do something like "for real people life of creator, or spouse or surviving dependants to age 21, for companies or when rights are sold to companies 10 (insert arbitrary number here) years"
Of course a large part of the problem is that unlike real people companies can, in principle, last for ever - resulting in such craziness as the mickey-mouse-preservation-act thingy
Please remember - no spoilers 'till it's played on
on
The Truth Revealed
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
If enough people purchase XBoxes, the product may reach critical mass that probably will reduce its production costs even more
I design hardware (and software) for a living - there's no way M$ will get their production costs down on the current xbox hardware (BTW check out the gamecube to see people who have a clue about integration). Their biz plan depends on making money back on their cut of the titles they are selling - every box you buy and don't buy software for hurts M$'s bottom line - this is SOP in the game console world.
Of course M$ is a very big company so as long as the non-gamer sales of xboxes is a few % they probably don't care, but if it goes up to say 50% (people building farms... I'd love to load up that linux/verilog farm of xboxes for chip design) M$ have a problem on the order of the various cheapo internet terminal people (Idreama?) who's business model involved giving hardware away cheaply and making it back on the back end with services and didn't anticipate a large part of their sales going to linux hackers
no - not the SBA, he means the BSA - he's scared of thousands of pimply faced, knock-kneed boy scouts at the door - with knots.... and their sisters trying to sell cookies...
yeah - I'm just waiting for the next generation of kids (who've grown up on cable and satellite and maybe never lived with an off-the-air feed) to start making comments like "he's stealing cable, he's got one of those antenna thingys on hiw roof".
To close, if you're mac is so great, shut the hell up
but I use a Linux laptop.... this kind of makes my point for me - remember Occam's razor - maybe someone who posts simply means what they say and doesn't have some hidden secret agenda
Mac users meanwhile wouldn't shut up about how good their macs were...as if they were trying to compensate for...something.
Or maybe they were just enthusiastic about their computer in a way you weren't about yours. Sometimes the truth is right in front of you and not a paranoid conspiricy about people's secret thoughts
actually there was a really fun addon done for the Mac years ago which, whenever anyone emptied the trash, caused Oscar to come out and sing "I love trash". Many parent lost important files because of this....
reminds me of a (true) story from my past, a distant relative of mine was the local NZ equivalent of the FCC inspector who chases down illegal transmitters (both he and I were hams which was how I heard him tell this story).
He was chasing some annoying sparky interference out in the country near where he lived, it was being radiated from a power line and he tracked it down to a particular pole.... there was nothing special about this pole untill he looked behind it and noticed a camoflauged wire that went down the pole and disapeared into the ground - someone was onbviously stealing power. Following the wire (it was buried) he went into a nearby barn where he found a still with a noisey thermostat.... he went and grabbed the farmer and explained the problem, then helped the farmer put some caps on the thermostat to stop the emissions... he claimed the international radio regs protected the 'confidentiality of radio transmissions' and he couldn't turn the guy in... however I suspect a flagon or two of the local hooch may have been involved:-)
And what a fun EULA - there's a bunch of countries it can't be exported to "Cuba, Indian, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Montenegro, North Korea, Pakistan, Serbia, Sudan or Syria" presumably "Indian" is new country somewhere.After all it would be really bad if Montenagro had to pay for their software (actually I kind of imagine SENDING GASP to a country might be considered an act of war).
You also can't use it for the development of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons for for missile technology..... plonking it on as a warhead in it's own right is I guess OK:-)
In other parts it warns you that the software is "NOT FAULT TOLERANT" (which I take to mean has bugs [a great admission to note in a law suit]) and one is not to use the software in places where it's failure might be a bad idea (aircraft, nuclear facilities, weapons, life-support etc) - having a heart-attack when you see the bill from the BSA is apparently OK though.
Also if you disagree with any of the terms or the EULA you are apparently supposed to return the software to them within 10 days.... so download a copy or 10 today and pop in in the email if you don't like it - each and every time you don't like it....
remember when you purchase the software you get it from a retailer and/or hardware manufacturer - you enter into a contract with THEM, not M$, by the time you open the EULA the contract has already been consumated
1) A offers something for sale (like the right to use some software) at a price
2) B pays the price
3) A is then obligated to provide the service
silly little stickers don't apply, shrink wrapped agreements don't apply either (because the transaction occurs when B pays the money, not when they open the box)
Besides remember your contract is with the retailer who sold you the box/computer/whatever, not with M$ who had in turn contracted with them....
I've been in this business about 25 years - and variety is the spice of life, I've spent time doing unix kernel programming (in the early 80s), chip design (in the 90s), protocol engineering (all over), compiler design, linux kernel work (late 90s), mp3 player design, etc etc.
You have to keep learning and changing, othewise you burn out, get stuck in a rut and turn over to the dark side....
actually the power companies lobbied the state for this during the deregulation process, consumer groups fought against it - they wanted to preserve the (then) high profit margin they had and be able to make it higher by dabling in the new unregulated spot market. Their claim at the time was that they needed this to pay for the costs they were going to incurr breaking their generation facilities from their retail ones as part of deregulation.
Of course as hindsight now shows us a fixed price cuts both ways and when the Enrons of the world pushed the pricse thru the roof they were 'hoist by their own petard' now people like PG&E are bankrupt and their shareholders have no one to blame but their own companies management who manipulated the state into creating the situation they are in now
nah - as I said Fry's long ago became pretty useless - now days there are on-line parts places (and Halted's just down the st from Fry's) - but you can't browse on-line the way you could in the aisles of Fry's - looking for the combination of stuff (designing in your head as you walked) you could take home with you and build that day
How tough is it to use the USB or firewire interfaces? When one interface gets too complicated, switch to another.
No tougher than using a PCI core in an FPGA - but you can't buy a PCI or firewire core, or a USB interface chip at Frys - you used to be able to but the 74xx/PALs you need to wirewrap up a card in you garage, and turn it into a product.
I did a half dozen nubus cards when the mac II came out, a simple interface was 3 chips and a ROM - I've done PCI cores since (from scratch) its an order of magnitude or two more logic - the number of gates for all those registers that are required to configure the system put it beyond the "pal-and-jellybean" sort of designing we used to do
I paid the down payment on my first house with designs I breadboarded with stuff from Frys... now days they're still stocking the same baggies of bits the had 10 years ago - when they were state of the art.
To be fair PCI has a lot to do with it - too much overhead in the bus interface - before the advent of pci you could wirewrap a NuBus or ISA card with a few jelly-beans
well not wuite - that's what the 'sorry' page sais - it's not what the actual web page sais - it sais: 'if (!(is.ie4up) && !(is.nav6up)) {document.location.href="sorry.php"}'. Which is not the same thing as what the page displays (actually looking at the commented out old javascript it used do exactly check for windows and mac)
well tell that to Keith Henson who was sued into bankruptcy (and that didn't stop them, they kept on sueing him) then they trumped up a charge of "misdemenour terrorism" for talking about a "Tom Cruise missile" on a.r.scientology - Keith's now claiming political asylum in Canada.... but still picketing them
actually I think you were very lucky.... those guys consider the law-suit as a sort of legal sacrament.... at least their 'scriptures' (er. demented drug crazed ramblings) require the use of them on people who act against them
Much as I'd like to (and I would - I've flown big rockets for many years) I can't - you have one of those bozo web pages that can only be accessed with explorer - which doesn't run on any of my computers - doing web pages in visual basic has never been portable and probably never will be
Wait, secure as in the "keep-bad-guys-from-getting-in" way, or the "keep-me-from-performing-basic -functionality-because-I'm-presumed-to-be-a-crimin al" way?
I think "secure because the RIAA/MPAA thinks you're a criminal" - since it has this 'SD' and no IDE controller (think mp3 players with harddrives - IDE is still the cheap way to go and with an IDE it would make a great cheapo linux platform for cost sensitive markets [3rd world countries for example]) - I suspect this is one of the first hardware shots in the upcoming 'secure platforms' war we've all been dreading - a great reason to NOT use this chip
Slashdot Mirror
I think they are referint to 256 bit INSTRUCTIONS - it's a VLIW after all and they want to be able to issue as many ops per clock as possible.
Given that TM's JIT-recoding to VLIW's been around for a while i guess they know by now if they can get usefull ILP out of such a wide instruction word.
Their approach to low power - basicly gating every clock in sight even though it plays havoc with the tools most other people use is becoming more common (and the tools are evolving too). It works because they only turn on the parts of the chip that are being used at anyone time and a very small granularity - in the past people like Intel tend to do things like stopclk duty cycle modulation (stops the clock to everything for some percentage of the time) - this still means you're wasting energy when you are running
I believe "find the buffer overflow" is actually a Windows game .... some junior hacker seems to win a couple of times a month at the m,oment
Copyrights are harder to just throw away. I'd like to see recognition that it's individuals that hold copyrights and that they last no longer than their creator.
While in principal I agree with you you need to handle the corner cases - for example "struggling writer finally writes the great novel and the suddenly dies leaving wife and young chilren" etc etc. Better to do something like "for real people life of creator, or spouse or surviving dependants to age 21, for companies or when rights are sold to companies 10 (insert arbitrary number here) years"
Of course a large part of the problem is that unlike real people companies can, in principle, last for ever - resulting in such craziness as the mickey-mouse-preservation-act thingy
3 more hours ....
If enough people purchase XBoxes, the product may reach critical mass that probably will reduce its production costs even more
... I'd love to load up that linux/verilog farm of xboxes for chip design) M$ have a problem on the order of the various cheapo internet terminal people (Idreama?) who's business model involved giving hardware away cheaply and making it back on the back end with services and didn't anticipate a large part of their sales going to linux hackers
I design hardware (and software) for a living - there's no way M$ will get their production costs down on the current xbox hardware (BTW check out the gamecube to see people who have a clue about integration). Their biz plan depends on making money back on their cut of the titles they are selling - every box you buy and don't buy software for hurts M$'s bottom line - this is SOP in the game console world.
Of course M$ is a very big company so as long as the non-gamer sales of xboxes is a few % they probably don't care, but if it goes up to say 50% (people building farms
no - not the SBA, he means the BSA - he's scared of thousands of pimply faced, knock-kneed boy scouts at the door - with knots .... and their sisters trying to sell cookies ...
yeah - I'm just waiting for the next generation of kids (who've grown up on cable and satellite and maybe never lived with an off-the-air feed) to start making comments like "he's stealing cable, he's got one of those antenna thingys on hiw roof".
To close, if you're mac is so great, shut the hell up
.... this kind of makes my point for me - remember Occam's razor - maybe someone who posts simply means what they say and doesn't have some hidden secret agenda
but I use a Linux laptop
Mac users meanwhile wouldn't shut up about how good their macs were...as if they were trying to compensate for...something.
Or maybe they were just enthusiastic about their computer in a way you weren't about yours. Sometimes the truth is right in front of you and not a paranoid conspiricy about people's secret thoughts
actually there was a really fun addon done for the Mac years ago which, whenever anyone emptied the trash, caused Oscar to come out and sing "I love trash". Many parent lost important files because of this ....
actually "pigs in space" was one of the code names of Apple's first Unix (for the Mac 2)
reminds me of a (true) story from my past, a distant relative of mine was the local NZ equivalent of the FCC inspector who chases down illegal transmitters (both he and I were hams which was how I heard him tell this story).
.... there was nothing special about this pole untill he looked behind it and noticed a camoflauged wire that went down the pole and disapeared into the ground - someone was onbviously stealing power. Following the wire (it was buried) he went into a nearby barn where he found a still with a noisey thermostat .... he went and grabbed the farmer and explained the problem, then helped the farmer put some caps on the thermostat to stop the emissions ... he claimed the international radio regs protected the 'confidentiality of radio transmissions' and he couldn't turn the guy in ... however I suspect a flagon or two of the local hooch may have been involved :-)
He was chasing some annoying sparky interference out in the country near where he lived, it was being radiated from a power line and he tracked it down to a particular pole
And what a fun EULA - there's a bunch of countries it can't be exported to "Cuba, Indian, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Montenegro, North
..... plonking it on as a warhead in it's own right is I guess OK :-)
.... so download a copy or 10 today and pop in in the email if you don't like it - each and every time you don't like it ....
Korea, Pakistan, Serbia, Sudan or Syria" presumably "Indian" is new country somewhere.After all it would be really bad if Montenagro had to pay for their software (actually I kind of imagine SENDING GASP to a country might be considered an act of war).
You also can't use it for the development of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons for for missile technology
In other parts it warns you that the software is "NOT FAULT TOLERANT" (which I take to mean has bugs [a great admission to note in a law suit]) and one is not to use the software in places where it's failure might be a bad idea (aircraft, nuclear facilities, weapons, life-support etc) - having a heart-attack when you see the bill from the BSA is apparently OK though.
Also if you disagree with any of the terms or the EULA you are apparently supposed to return the software to them within 10 days
remember when you purchase the software you get it from a retailer and/or hardware manufacturer - you enter into a contract with THEM, not M$, by the time you open the EULA the contract has already been consumated
1) A offers something for sale (like the right to use some software) at a price
....
2) B pays the price
3) A is then obligated to provide the service
silly little stickers don't apply, shrink wrapped agreements don't apply either (because the transaction occurs when B pays the money, not when they open the box)
Besides remember your contract is with the retailer who sold you the box/computer/whatever, not with M$ who had in turn contracted with them
You have to keep learning and changing, othewise you burn out, get stuck in a rut and turn over to the dark side
actually the power companies lobbied the state for this during the deregulation process, consumer groups fought against it - they wanted to preserve the (then) high profit margin they had and be able to make it higher by dabling in the new unregulated spot market. Their claim at the time was that they needed this to pay for the costs they were going to incurr breaking their generation facilities from their retail ones as part of deregulation.
Of course as hindsight now shows us a fixed price cuts both ways and when the Enrons of the world pushed the pricse thru the roof they were 'hoist by their own petard' now people like PG&E are bankrupt and their shareholders have no one to blame but their own companies management who manipulated the state into creating the situation they are in now
nah - as I said Fry's long ago became pretty useless - now days there are on-line parts places (and Halted's just down the st from Fry's) - but you can't browse on-line the way you could in the aisles of Fry's - looking for the combination of stuff (designing in your head as you walked) you could take home with you and build that day
No tougher than using a PCI core in an FPGA - but you can't buy a PCI or firewire core, or a USB interface chip at Frys - you used to be able to but the 74xx/PALs you need to wirewrap up a card in you garage, and turn it into a product.
I did a half dozen nubus cards when the mac II came out, a simple interface was 3 chips and a ROM - I've done PCI cores since (from scratch) its an order of magnitude or two more logic - the number of gates for all those registers that are required to configure the system put it beyond the "pal-and-jellybean" sort of designing we used to do
To be fair PCI has a lot to do with it - too much overhead in the bus interface - before the advent of pci you could wirewrap a NuBus or ISA card with a few jelly-beans
well not wuite - that's what the 'sorry' page sais - it's not what the actual web page sais - it sais: 'if (!(is.ie4up) && !(is.nav6up)) {document.location.href="sorry.php"}'. Which is not the same thing as what the page displays (actually looking at the commented out old javascript it used do exactly check for windows and mac)
well tell that to Keith Henson who was sued into bankruptcy (and that didn't stop them, they kept on sueing him) then they trumped up a charge of "misdemenour terrorism" for talking about a "Tom Cruise missile" on a.r.scientology - Keith's now claiming political asylum in Canada .... but still picketing them
actually I think you were very lucky .... those guys consider the law-suit as a sort of legal sacrament .... at least their 'scriptures' (er. demented drug crazed ramblings) require the use of them on people who act against them
check us out! http://www.eng.uah.edu/~sli/
Much as I'd like to (and I would - I've flown big rockets for many years) I can't - you have one of those bozo web pages that can only be accessed with explorer - which doesn't run on any of my computers - doing web pages in visual basic has never been portable and probably never will be
Wait, secure as in the "keep-bad-guys-from-getting-in" way, or the "keep-me-from-performing-basic -functionality-because-I'm-presumed-to-be-a-crimin al" way?
I think "secure because the RIAA/MPAA thinks you're a criminal" - since it has this 'SD' and no IDE controller (think mp3 players with harddrives - IDE is still the cheap way to go and with an IDE it would make a great cheapo linux platform for cost sensitive markets [3rd world countries for example]) - I suspect this is one of the first hardware shots in the upcoming 'secure platforms' war we've all been dreading - a great reason to NOT use this chip