When I was a kid (early 70s) the local utility used to use audio tones imposed on the local power to switch on and off street lights and to switch on off-peak rate appliances in people's homes (storage heaters, water heaters etc). They were decoded with a low-tech reed relay tuned to the right freq. It was really annoying because the sounds came thru a lot of stereos.
A friend of mine had the great idea of building his own tone generator and a few times sent morse across town in the early hours by switching on and off his suburb's street lights.
Some years later they built an aluminium smelter a couple of hundred miles away... when they brought pot lines on and off it would put enough crud on the wires to turn stuff on accidentally
reading their web page (which is admittedly very short on detail) I suspect they're rolling out a broadcast broadband service (not a DSL service - a connect to the net via radio service via transmitters on local hills - there have been several abortive attempts to do this elsewhere). This may explain why it sounds like they're giving you 802.11 and DSL - in reality they are probably giving you DSL-like speeds via a wireless medium
I don't think sync-on-green is a terrible conspiricy on Sony's part.... it's very simple - the box has a TV output (not one designed for VGA monitors) - either composite/svideo or component - that means there's only 3 wires coming out of the graphics chip (usually YPrPb - but probably able to be warped into RGB by turning off the color space converter inside). There are no seperate sync signals like there are on a VGA style monitor.
Sony are doing you a favor - they're allowing you to use RGB output on a traditional computer monitor (but it has to support sync-on-green because there's no other way to get the sync out, not enough pins on the connector).
Why does the kernel go through stable and then unstable forks? Can't it always be a stable build, like with Windows?
Because Linux development is don't in public in front of everyone, The unstable portion of Windows development is done behind closed doors and not seen by the public (given Windows past tendancy to crash when sneezed on it's arguable that some portion is really done in public).
That's the difference between open source and closed source - you get to see the stuff as it's being developed and if you want you can get involved and do some yourself. On the other hand if you only want to use the stable versions stick with the even numbered releases (2.0, 2.2, 2.4).
more likely - if you take a position in the govt. there (say join an army for example) you'll be stripped of your US citizenship.
Of course when the US invades you'll be dragged back in cuffs and charged with treason (in the court of public opinion or something similar in real life)
while internally it might be superscaler - I think what he's getting at is the VLIW instruction set that allows the architecture to expose more of the internal parallelism to the compiler
simple answer - because many of the apps they care about (quake for insance, or even DX*) aren't particularly SMP savvy - they run appear to run faster if you throw more cache at them than if you throw more CPUs at them. Of course with servers it's a different proposition, but also a different price point.
At some level today's superscaler CPUs do do exactly this with lots of sharing of stuff - they have multiple execution units that work on a single instruction stream (or 2 in the case of P4)
These days datapath width (ie 64-bits vs 32-bits) doesn't affect die area much (well maybe it does if you do a 64x64 multiply/divide but they might well punt on that)- so tossing in a 64-bit datapath with bits of it normally not being used is probably a reasonable thing to do.
They probably have to worry more about its affect on total system clock rate - that extra gate or two in the adder carry path, the extra loads on the datapath controls and a more complay decode block
Yup - the having to think about time is hard for people when they are starting out. I've spent the past decade or so building stuff out of verilog, before that I was a unix kernel hacker - coming from that environment where time and synchronisation did mean something helped - having to explicitly spec out my state machines seemed like like such a chore.
I actually like to sometimes use a verilog coding style that's more close to co-routining where the synthesis tool creates a hidden state variable for you however you have to check with your tools to see if they'll accept it [synopsys does] - old time verilog hacks throw up their hands when they see this stuff. Event when I'm not using this style and making my state machines by hand I still tend to write verilog that looks much more like traditional programming (fewer larger always statements that
do lots of things together) - my experience has been that this makes me much more productive (I can turn out >100k aggressively timed, DV'd gates per year of relatively random logic).
Recently I made the move back to doing more software - I've found my kernel driver coding skills are greatly enhanced by my time writing gates - stuff that might have been hard to find in the past is instantly obvious today because I've spent all that time designing stuff that cared implicitly with time
I assumed he'd somehow managet to squeeze apache down to run under the Lisa Unix (which was swap based and limited to actual memory on hand for mac app size [kinda like a 7.1 mac:-]...)
Under VAX/VMS, RMS (the record orienatted file system) and databases ran in an intermediate mode (Executive). The fourth mode wasn't used.
OK - here's where I get to show my age.... the 4th mode 'supervisor mode' was used fro the shell/cli (and debugger) which i mapped into the same address space as the processes that runs under it.
I found this very usefull many many moons ago when I ported the Unix v6 kernel (and later v7) to run in supervisor mode in place of the standard CLI - the device drivers called into RMS to do disk and console IO.
well the first time I plugged it all in the extension cord got way too warm.... but didn't trip a breaker (I'd had my office rewired with heavy duty power when we had the house reshingled), after I split up the boxes 7-8/cord things were ok - before the CA power price increases it cost ~$100/month now it's too expensive to run (probably $300+/month).
My boxes were bought to maximise mips/$ (not top-of-the line cpus at the time, just enough ram/disk for the problem - chip simulations, cheap network card, no floppy/cd/kbd/graphics/etc)
25 dual p650s in my home office... when I crank it all the way up I come in at somewhere in the 50-100 range on the dnet rc64 dailies. Sadly the original reason I built it has evaporated and with the current cost of CA power I just have a fraction running
No - the stockholders and pension funds are investors - the State of CA has no fiducary responsibility to make sure that their investments are sound - they have to take that responsibility themselves - they elect the board and the board on their behalf appoints the officers and oversees the running of the company - if they didn't like the board that was elected, or didn't like their appointments, or how they were running the company they should have ditched their investments right away - after all what they were doing [ie lobbying the state for fixed rates] was a very public act, it was debated in the newspapers for months before the law was passed. Personally I think they thought (just like PG&E itself) that the result would have resulted in PG&E making lots of money, and their ROI going up. I think that they were just as greedy as PG&E - either that or they were stupid and weren't paying attention to their investments, or didn't understand the industry they were investing in. Which ever way you cut it the State of CA (ie me the taxpayer) doesn't owe them shit
yeah, my reaction too - he's definitely a lost penguin (of course the 'antipodes' are a place relative to where you are or where you normally live - so he may well actually be there).
I suspect he's really one of those mythical cartoon pengiuns that wear hats and scarves and hang out with polar bears
Basically, the deregulation plan in CA was completely botched. They made the power delivery company (PG&E) buy power in the most expensive manner possible, then imposed consumer price caps, disallowing them from passing on those costs to consumers.
I remember the fight over the CA deregulation bill very well - PG&E fought FOR it and was in favor of the rate caps (really fixed rates), the consumers groups fought against them - PG&E spent a lot more money (millions!) and won. Any other story is just revisionist history
Why did they do such (now obviously) silly thing? because at the time energy prices were low and the fixed energy prices were low and the fixed prices that they got the state to put into law gave them a fixed profit - they were trying to extend their monopoly for a few years in face of deregulation. They took a bet that energy prices would remain low - it was a business decision, they didn't have to force through the fixed prices into law. As we can all see now it was a bad business decision and they are now in bankruptcy court - it serves them right - they were greedy and screwed themselves. Personally I have no sympathy.
actually I was thinking about just this issue - surely because a cable company will not allow some sorts of packets (VPNs for example) they are in fact editorializing the data flow and as such could lose their common carrier status
even some (of my own) I posted in 1985, now that's scary. And an argument (that I don't remember) from around the same time about what may have been one of the first warez postings
I tried to read the Microsoft document, but when I reached the line "There is no common integrated device electronics (IDE) for Linux" I had to stop... I couldn't stop laughing. Strangely I could swear my Linux boxes are full of IDE drives. Of course they were talking about software development infrastructure. p>
Obviously this was written by someone who has no idea what they're talking about, and not much about computers at all, perhaps the meaphorical room full of monkeys with typewriters, or a marketting person with an MBA
in rugby you're only allowed to perform mayhem on the person with the ball.... other than that Rugby is evry bit as violent as US football - plus they don't stop for add breaks (in many way it's more like soccer - the game keeps moving and doesn't stop for everyone to regain their breath every few minutes).
Of course the really tough Rugby playesr are from Tonga/Samoa/Fiji.... not only do they not play with padding or helmets.... but boots too....
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine had the great idea of building his own tone generator and a few times sent morse across town in the early hours by switching on and off his suburb's street lights.
Some years later they built an aluminium smelter a couple of hundred miles away
reading their web page (which is admittedly very short on detail) I suspect they're rolling out a broadcast broadband service (not a DSL service - a connect to the net via radio service via transmitters on local hills - there have been several abortive attempts to do this elsewhere). This may explain why it sounds like they're giving you 802.11 and DSL - in reality they are probably giving you DSL-like speeds via a wireless medium
Sony are doing you a favor - they're allowing you to use RGB output on a traditional computer monitor (but it has to support sync-on-green because there's no other way to get the sync out, not enough pins on the connector).
Because Linux development is don't in public in front of everyone, The unstable portion of Windows development is done behind closed doors and not seen by the public (given Windows past tendancy to crash when sneezed on it's arguable that some portion is really done in public).
That's the difference between open source and closed source - you get to see the stuff as it's being developed and if you want you can get involved and do some yourself. On the other hand if you only want to use the stable versions stick with the even numbered releases (2.0, 2.2, 2.4).
Of course when the US invades you'll be dragged back in cuffs and charged with treason (in the court of public opinion or something similar in real life)
while internally it might be superscaler - I think what he's getting at is the VLIW instruction set that allows the architecture to expose more of the internal parallelism to the compiler
At some level today's superscaler CPUs do do exactly this with lots of sharing of stuff - they have multiple execution units that work on a single instruction stream (or 2 in the case of P4)
They probably have to worry more about its affect on total system clock rate - that extra gate or two in the adder carry path, the extra loads on the datapath controls and a more complay decode block
I actually like to sometimes use a verilog coding style that's more close to co-routining where the synthesis tool creates a hidden state variable for you however you have to check with your tools to see if they'll accept it [synopsys does] - old time verilog hacks throw up their hands when they see this stuff. Event when I'm not using this style and making my state machines by hand I still tend to write verilog that looks much more like traditional programming (fewer larger always statements that
do lots of things together) - my experience has been that this makes me much more productive (I can turn out >100k aggressively timed, DV'd gates per year of relatively random logic).
Recently I made the move back to doing more software - I've found my kernel driver coding skills are greatly enhanced by my time writing gates - stuff that might have been hard to find in the past is instantly obvious today because I've spent all that time designing stuff that cared implicitly with time
the adult film industry will make sure it that it does become obsolete it's only because it's been replaced with something better
that's the later model imacs - the early ones basicly required you to disassemble the whole thing
when he said body art I assumed we'd all be getting new piercings ....
I assumed he'd somehow managet to squeeze apache down to run under the Lisa Unix (which was swap based and limited to actual memory on hand for mac app size [kinda like a 7.1 mac :-] ...)
OK - here's where I get to show my age
I found this very usefull many many moons ago when I ported the Unix v6 kernel (and later v7) to run in supervisor mode in place of the standard CLI - the device drivers called into RMS to do disk and console IO.
well the first time I plugged it all in the extension cord got way too warm
My boxes were bought to maximise mips/$ (not top-of-the line cpus at the time, just enough ram/disk for the problem - chip simulations, cheap network card, no floppy/cd/kbd/graphics/etc)
25 dual p650s in my home office ... when I crank it all the way up I come in at somewhere in the 50-100 range on the dnet rc64 dailies. Sadly the original reason I built it has evaporated and with the current cost of CA power I just have a fraction running
as this shows the exact details of some XP were rather misunderstood
No - the stockholders and pension funds are investors - the State of CA has no fiducary responsibility to make sure that their investments are sound - they have to take that responsibility themselves - they elect the board and the board on their behalf appoints the officers and oversees the running of the company - if they didn't like the board that was elected, or didn't like their appointments, or how they were running the company they should have ditched their investments right away - after all what they were doing [ie lobbying the state for fixed rates] was a very public act, it was debated in the newspapers for months before the law was passed. Personally I think they thought (just like PG&E itself) that the result would have resulted in PG&E making lots of money, and their ROI going up. I think that they were just as greedy as PG&E - either that or they were stupid and weren't paying attention to their investments, or didn't understand the industry they were investing in. Which ever way you cut it the State of CA (ie me the taxpayer) doesn't owe them shit
I suspect he's really one of those mythical cartoon pengiuns that wear hats and scarves and hang out with polar bears
I remember the fight over the CA deregulation bill very well - PG&E fought FOR it and was in favor of the rate caps (really fixed rates), the consumers groups fought against them - PG&E spent a lot more money (millions!) and won. Any other story is just revisionist history
Why did they do such (now obviously) silly thing? because at the time energy prices were low and the fixed energy prices were low and the fixed prices that they got the state to put into law gave them a fixed profit - they were trying to extend their monopoly for a few years in face of deregulation. They took a bet that energy prices would remain low - it was a business decision, they didn't have to force through the fixed prices into law. As we can all see now it was a bad business decision and they are now in bankruptcy court - it serves them right - they were greedy and screwed themselves. Personally I have no sympathy.
actually I was thinking about just this issue - surely because a cable company will not allow some sorts of packets (VPNs for example) they are in fact editorializing the data flow and as such could lose their common carrier status
even some (of my own) I posted in 1985, now that's scary. And an argument (that I don't remember) from around the same time about what may have been one of the first warez postings
I tried to read the Microsoft document, but when I reached the line "There is no common integrated device electronics (IDE) for Linux" I had to stop ... I couldn't stop laughing. Strangely I could swear my Linux boxes are full of IDE drives. Of course they were talking about software development infrastructure. p>
Obviously this was written by someone who has no idea what they're talking about, and not much about computers at all, perhaps the meaphorical room full of monkeys with typewriters, or a marketting person with an MBA
Better yet - maybe I should start a cut-price PC house and buy my licenses from annoyed Linux users rather than M$
Of course the really tough Rugby playesr are from Tonga/Samoa/Fiji