It's not really your fault. Blame the idiots at PCI-SIG for giving PCIe such a similar name to an existing (but totally different) bus technology (PCI-X). PCIe used to be called 3GIO, I've no idea why they decided to change it.
For reference (not just for you), PCI-X is PCI on steroids, a faster, wider (64-bit) edition of the PCI bus which is used in high end servers and the Apple PowerMac G5.
PCIe (aka PCI Express aka 3GIO) is the brand new multi-channel serial expansion bus that will be appearing on consumer-level motherboards in the next few months and will eventually replace both AGP and PCI.
I'm sorry... you're claiming that a 1.13GHz P3 (of any process) has 80% of the performance of a 3.4GHz P4? That's just incorrect. Whilst it's true the P4 executes less instructions per clock than the P3, the difference isn't that big. If anything, a P3 1.13GHz would be equal to a 1.6GHz P4, and nothing much more.
Additionally, if you're talking about a publically available distributed network, it seems a little unfair that Pixar and ILM are making all this profit when I could be spending my computer cycles more wisely on a charity (or chartiable) project like curing cancer, decoding the Genome, and so forth.
If you fork, you have to pay developers. If you invest and make the Mozilla Foundation (works for other OSS organisations too) see what you need and rally to your cause, you get them to develop for you .
he thing that I noticed is that MSN/Hotmail didn't make a big splash about it. Its actually a good thing for the users. Gmail started this trend by coming up with 1 GB (yes! gigabyte) worth of space. Then yahoo joined the party with their own 100 MB version and now the latest to join in bill gates & co (aka MSN Hotmail).
No wonder MSN Hotmail isn't making a "big splash about it" considering their service has managed to cough up one fourtieth of Gmail's space and one quarter of Yahoo's space. I'd hardly call that "joining the party" - more like a desperate move. Let's hope that Gmail and a "new wave" of similar services drives these ad-ridden insecureproprietarybadly-run messes under once and for all. Who on earth would want to use MSN Hotmail when Gmail goes to full public access?
All these nifty bluetooth and WiFi solutions are fine and dandy, but don't forget IR! I don't know whether the latest Mac laptops come with IR ports, but a surprising number of PC laptops still have them. Either that, or the IR controller will come with its own base unit. Admittedly it's directional, but a laptop sitting on a table isn't a moving target and you're likely to be in its line of sight if you position it and yourself sensibly.
There are some cheap controllers out there intended specifically for presentations that come with software and so forth. Also I've seen a software package that allowed you to use standard TV and DVD controllers with your laptop's IR port (if it was sufficiently good at seeing the wavelengths that consumer devices use, which is not universal). They're often a lot cheaper than these new-fangled bluetooth devices.
I think the general sentiment of this article is very true. I remember when I bought my first digital camera, it was a case of the biggest number of pixels winning. In those days 1.0MP cameras were pretty expensive, and I remember being overjoyed that I managed to get a great deal on a Kodak that reached this "magic figure" producing 1152x864 images - rather than most of the other cameras within my price bracket at the time which were between 640x480 and 1024x768.
Skip forward to last month, and I bought my third digital camera. There were 3MP, 4MP and 5MP models within my price range, but in the end, I settled for a 4MP model with a great lens, full manual control and some nifty other features (a Canon Powershot A80, I'd recommend this model to anyone after a fortnight of snapping with it). It produces 2272x1704 images, quite a lot bigger than I'm ever likely to need.
How long has kernel 2.6 been out now? Hence, why is this "up-to-date" installer stuck at 2.4?
Re:This doesn't make any sense...
on
Java Faster Than C++?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Java isn't "emulation". Modern JVMs use a JIT (just-in-time compiler) to translate bytecode instructions into pure binary assembled object code just before it is reached in the program (hence "just in time"). This is cached, so the next time that particular code is executed, it will run at full assembler speed.
Something I've often wondered is whether this caching could be persistent, i.e. be kept between runs of the JVM. Eventually, the entire program would be translated to pure assembler with the cost of translation largely amortised across many sessions. You still keep the safety, cross platform compatibility and ease-of-programming of a bytecode language (i.e. Java, C#) but you get the bonus of the cached object code being just as fast, even during startup and shutdown.
I think you're missing the point. I bet 19 seconds of that execution time was the start-up and shutdown of the virtual machine. As the program gets bigger and bigger, this becomes less and less significant.
As someone who routinely carries a PDA, mobile phone, digital camera and USB keychain drive, I love the idea of convergence, but I don't think technology has reached the point where it's matured enough to make combination devices really as useful and as feasible as separate devices are currently. The reason? Primary battery power, IMO.
My cellphone is a fairly basic Motorola, its batteries can last for days without recharging, and I can leave it switched on at all times, day and night, just popping it into the charger as required. Sure, it doesn't have a colour screen or multimedia messaging or PDA functions, but the fact that it's always ready to use is crucial to the way I use a phone.
My PDA, on the other hand, has a big 320x320 in full colour, oodles of flash memory, sound and video capabilities, and so on. However, the way I use a PDA is totally different. If I left the PDA on for more than around 4-6 hours, the battery would be gone. Fortunately, I use the thing intermittently, only turning it on when I want to check my tasks and appointments or record a memo.
If you can make me a Smartphone that has audio and video capabilities with a large screen that can be left on all day like my current cellphone can, I'd buy it without much hesitation. But that's not the case at the moment.
Today's smartphones are cellphones with poor battery life and/or PDAs with small screens and limited abilities. They're not perfect for either task. Until they are, I'll keep carrying my separate devices, and until we see a PDA with a 4 megapixel camera with an optical zoom lens, a flash and full manual exposure control, I will keep my digicam, too.
Perhaps fuel cells are the answer, but until they're mainstream, why aren't we seeing more Smartphones that could be put into a "super low power" mode - where the colour screen is switched off and replaced by a simple 100x100 pixel mono display, and the 400MHz XScale is switched off and the phone functions run on a 1MHz VLSI to conserve battery life when the thing is sitting in your jacket pocket?
However, filtering is not without its pitfalls. I don't know how they're going to choose which sites to block, but it better not be via keywords. Otherwise you're invariably going to end up with false positives, and block perfectly legitimate sites because they contain unfortunate juxtapositions of words.
I can imagine situations, for example, where planned parenthood sites might get blocked because they have the words "children" and "sex" in close proximity. I wonder if BT has a plan to deal with kind of situation? My intution says "no".
What alternatives are there to keyword searching? Manually identifying sites? Who is going to do this, and isn't it a crime to download pages from such sites just to check whether they should be filtered?
Well, consentual adult pornography is legal in the UK, but you're right, if BT intends to block illegal material, I can see that pirate software, pirate music and pirate videos could be the next logical step.
Is this a good thing? Well, not for those of us who like our music and movies for free, but as far as companies are concerned, it probably is, although presumably they could lose a lot of business if they started blocking P2P.
IIRC, several of the UK's mobile phone providers announced they were going to block all porn for mobile internet access unless the phone owner submitted proof of age. I can't help but wonder how many people would have the nerve to ring up customer support and ask for their porn access to be restored;)
Yeah right. Is there really a world market for 1000 of these devices, or are Cisco expecting a loss on the router and have just produced it to keep their big clients happy?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really your fault. Blame the idiots at PCI-SIG for giving PCIe such a similar name to an existing (but totally different) bus technology (PCI-X). PCIe used to be called 3GIO, I've no idea why they decided to change it.
For reference (not just for you), PCI-X is PCI on steroids, a faster, wider (64-bit) edition of the PCI bus which is used in high end servers and the Apple PowerMac G5.
PCIe (aka PCI Express aka 3GIO) is the brand new multi-channel serial expansion bus that will be appearing on consumer-level motherboards in the next few months and will eventually replace both AGP and PCI.
Once again, PCI-X is not the same as PCIe (PCI Express).
I'm sorry... you're claiming that a 1.13GHz P3 (of any process) has 80% of the performance of a 3.4GHz P4? That's just incorrect. Whilst it's true the P4 executes less instructions per clock than the P3, the difference isn't that big. If anything, a P3 1.13GHz would be equal to a 1.6GHz P4, and nothing much more.
Additionally, if you're talking about a publically available distributed network, it seems a little unfair that Pixar and ILM are making all this profit when I could be spending my computer cycles more wisely on a charity (or chartiable) project like curing cancer, decoding the Genome, and so forth.
For the very last time, everyone together now, one two three...
PCI-X != PCI Express
If you fork, you have to pay developers. If you invest and make the Mozilla Foundation (works for other OSS organisations too) see what you need and rally to your cause, you get them to develop for you .
Now there's an idea to win the X-Prize!
I wonder if Ballmer could get work as a line judge - "YEEEAAARRRR OUT!". Better yet, Howard Dean.
All these nifty bluetooth and WiFi solutions are fine and dandy, but don't forget IR! I don't know whether the latest Mac laptops come with IR ports, but a surprising number of PC laptops still have them. Either that, or the IR controller will come with its own base unit. Admittedly it's directional, but a laptop sitting on a table isn't a moving target and you're likely to be in its line of sight if you position it and yourself sensibly.
There are some cheap controllers out there intended specifically for presentations that come with software and so forth. Also I've seen a software package that allowed you to use standard TV and DVD controllers with your laptop's IR port (if it was sufficiently good at seeing the wavelengths that consumer devices use, which is not universal). They're often a lot cheaper than these new-fangled bluetooth devices.
I think the general sentiment of this article is very true. I remember when I bought my first digital camera, it was a case of the biggest number of pixels winning. In those days 1.0MP cameras were pretty expensive, and I remember being overjoyed that I managed to get a great deal on a Kodak that reached this "magic figure" producing 1152x864 images - rather than most of the other cameras within my price bracket at the time which were between 640x480 and 1024x768.
Skip forward to last month, and I bought my third digital camera. There were 3MP, 4MP and 5MP models within my price range, but in the end, I settled for a 4MP model with a great lens, full manual control and some nifty other features (a Canon Powershot A80, I'd recommend this model to anyone after a fortnight of snapping with it). It produces 2272x1704 images, quite a lot bigger than I'm ever likely to need.
How long has kernel 2.6 been out now? Hence, why is this "up-to-date" installer stuck at 2.4?
Java isn't "emulation". Modern JVMs use a JIT (just-in-time compiler) to translate bytecode instructions into pure binary assembled object code just before it is reached in the program (hence "just in time"). This is cached, so the next time that particular code is executed, it will run at full assembler speed.
Something I've often wondered is whether this caching could be persistent, i.e. be kept between runs of the JVM. Eventually, the entire program would be translated to pure assembler with the cost of translation largely amortised across many sessions. You still keep the safety, cross platform compatibility and ease-of-programming of a bytecode language (i.e. Java, C#) but you get the bonus of the cached object code being just as fast, even during startup and shutdown.
I think you're missing the point. I bet 19 seconds of that execution time was the start-up and shutdown of the virtual machine. As the program gets bigger and bigger, this becomes less and less significant.
Yes, but AFAIK, it's actually one of the best understood. Check out the A-Star Search Algorithm, which I think is quite widely used.
As someone who routinely carries a PDA, mobile phone, digital camera and USB keychain drive, I love the idea of convergence, but I don't think technology has reached the point where it's matured enough to make combination devices really as useful and as feasible as separate devices are currently. The reason? Primary battery power, IMO.
My cellphone is a fairly basic Motorola, its batteries can last for days without recharging, and I can leave it switched on at all times, day and night, just popping it into the charger as required. Sure, it doesn't have a colour screen or multimedia messaging or PDA functions, but the fact that it's always ready to use is crucial to the way I use a phone.
My PDA, on the other hand, has a big 320x320 in full colour, oodles of flash memory, sound and video capabilities, and so on. However, the way I use a PDA is totally different. If I left the PDA on for more than around 4-6 hours, the battery would be gone. Fortunately, I use the thing intermittently, only turning it on when I want to check my tasks and appointments or record a memo.
If you can make me a Smartphone that has audio and video capabilities with a large screen that can be left on all day like my current cellphone can, I'd buy it without much hesitation. But that's not the case at the moment.
Today's smartphones are cellphones with poor battery life and/or PDAs with small screens and limited abilities. They're not perfect for either task. Until they are, I'll keep carrying my separate devices, and until we see a PDA with a 4 megapixel camera with an optical zoom lens, a flash and full manual exposure control, I will keep my digicam, too.
Perhaps fuel cells are the answer, but until they're mainstream, why aren't we seeing more Smartphones that could be put into a "super low power" mode - where the colour screen is switched off and replaced by a simple 100x100 pixel mono display, and the 400MHz XScale is switched off and the phone functions run on a 1MHz VLSI to conserve battery life when the thing is sitting in your jacket pocket?
Giving credit where credit is due is incompatible with the GPL ;)
(at least the method of doing so in the BSD 4 clause license)
However, filtering is not without its pitfalls. I don't know how they're going to choose which sites to block, but it better not be via keywords. Otherwise you're invariably going to end up with false positives, and block perfectly legitimate sites because they contain unfortunate juxtapositions of words.
I can imagine situations, for example, where planned parenthood sites might get blocked because they have the words "children" and "sex" in close proximity. I wonder if BT has a plan to deal with kind of situation? My intution says "no".
What alternatives are there to keyword searching? Manually identifying sites? Who is going to do this, and isn't it a crime to download pages from such sites just to check whether they should be filtered?
Well, consentual adult pornography is legal in the UK, but you're right, if BT intends to block illegal material, I can see that pirate software, pirate music and pirate videos could be the next logical step.
;)
Is this a good thing? Well, not for those of us who like our music and movies for free, but as far as companies are concerned, it probably is, although presumably they could lose a lot of business if they started blocking P2P.
IIRC, several of the UK's mobile phone providers announced they were going to block all porn for mobile internet access unless the phone owner submitted proof of age. I can't help but wonder how many people would have the nerve to ring up customer support and ask for their porn access to be restored
I wonder how much of this has gone to lawyers who are defending them from the idiots over at Verisign?
D'OH, you're right. Mod me down.
Actually it's the answer to "What is 6 times 7?".
Yeah right. Is there really a world market for 1000 of these devices, or are Cisco expecting a loss on the router and have just produced it to keep their big clients happy?