Is your sports car useful? In any way? I have a theory that it's easier to stay out of an accident if you have good brakes, cornering and acceleration. I.e. a sports car. They may not crash as well as a Mercedes, but they won't crash as often either (if you're a good driver).
A lego desk is less functional than a regular desk. It costs far more. It is a demonstration of the lack of maturity of the person who ordered it.
Does anyone else remember when legos were toys? Now they're on the same level as plaster of paris or stretched canvasses. Consumable art media. The previous lego projects here like the gun and the big lego Tux were at least disassemblable.
This is just a silly art project that some tasteless joker decided that he'd whine about until he got. I'm not faulting the artist for creating it, he wouldn't have even thought of it without being under contract.
Another reason I'm disgusted is the wastefulness of the whole project. Legos wouldn't need to be so expensive if people didn't keep using them up permanently in art projects. Lego went to a lot of work to make their bricks reusable.
We're in a spoiled, wasteful society. The lego desk is a demonstration on a higher order than almost anything I can think of.
Do they realize that they have just totally screwed themselves? I never liked sony anyway, but now I'll never buy anything from them again.
From now on, I'll check the labels of CDs. If it comes from those bastards, I won't buy it. I'll download it even if I wouldn't have otherwise.
Doesn't the idiot realize that he is representing a large company that does more things than publish music? They'll never sell me another walkman. Stupid arrogant jerks.
So, how would they propose to block napster access at my computer? Hack into it? Change my netfilter rules? Good luck. How are they going to stop OpenNAP, Gnutella or freenet? There is no conceivable way to do so. You'd have to shut down all traffic on the internet. AT&T, Sprint, MCI and all of the other carriers might have something to say about that. They're quite a lot more important to the economy than sony.
This is so far out of line that I have to wonder if it's a hoax. No one in their right minds would make statements amounting to 'we'll hack the computers of all of the people in the world to protect our corporate interests'. This Heckler jackass has just gotten his company in a lot of trouble.
1. You show me a way to enter C code with a voice system and _then_ I'll throw out my keyboard. I could just see it: "up, up, up, left brace..." Screw that.
2. Processors don't have to spend 2/3 of their time waiting around for data. Real ones at least. I have a 533MHz alpha that does 980 MFLOPs, don't tell me it's waiting around most of the time.
3. I doubt that anyone will want to use Lithium batteries in ten years because fuel cells will have been out for 8 years.
4. If we have a quarter terabyte of main magnetic memory, what is the terabyte of optical disk for? It's the only moving part in the computer, what the hell do we need it for? Magnetic memory is static.
5. What about the network connection? OC-192? Better? I'd personally vote for some type of ATM, especially if we're going to use it for all of our communications. QOS is important, I don't want to lose frames on my movie just because someone calls..
6. They think that absolute security relies on thumbprints? Give me a break (or break-in). What we really need is to make sure that IPv8 is double-key encrypted at all levels.
7. There's nothing that they describe that is going to take a Cray to process. What does the typical secretary need with a supercomputer? A voice activated webpad is about enough. Gamers are another story entirely. Immersive VR is going to take more than they've got scheduled anyway.
No one knows what the language will look like in the year 2300 that scientists and engineers use, but they'll call it FORTRAN.
But seriously, I'm glad that Watcom's doing this. It won't affect me for several years (and then only if they integrate their optimization techniques into gcc). But I think that it is a good idea nonetheless.
I mainly use Alphas, so Compaq's compiler set (which does include F95) is good for me. I wish that they would open its source, but I don't really care since it works. They typically generate code that's 3.5 times faster than gcc, so maybe better optimization is possible for Intel boxes, too.
I work at home, so anything annoying is my own damn fault. That having been said, I find that my most annoying aspects are temperature control and noise. I decided that, for convenience, I'd be in the same room as the computers. They're noisy so I built a big enclosed rack, soundproofed it and installed the quietest fan I could find to vent it. The only problem is the air conditioner, which has to run 10 months/yr even though I live in Kansas. I got a quiet model, but it still makes a lot of noise. Not to mention that since the computers like it cold and I don't, it's never really the right temperature in here. I need to get the AC ducted into the computer case.
Ergonomically speaking, I'm OK. The desk is at the right height, there's plenty of space and I'm facing the door so I'm comfortable and not paranoid. I have natural light in the daytime and indirect halogen light at night. Since I got the laptop, I can move around more, but I need to get more of the house wired for ethernet...
Now all I need is a laptop cooling unit that doesn't make much noise and has a space for a mousepad...
First off, have half of the class use KDE and the other half use GNOME. We need another warring set of tribes. Let's set them off as early as is possible. While they're at it, have half use vi and half emacs, half use BSD and half use Linux, half use one indent style and half use another...
But seriously, I think a good, mind-stretching programming excercise is artficial life. Genetic algorithms are really simple to program and can do some amazingly complex things. Have a prisoner's dilemma robot contest. Here is a really fantastic book on the subject.
We finally have the opportunity here to redesign the actual configuration interface for UNIX programs. If we recoded the apps to use XML, we could have a consistent interface. Heck, we could use PyGNOME and use the same program to administrate and configure all of the apps.
I'd really like to see something like this done just for the sake of showing up all of those windoze zombies. You want a consistent, graphical interface without the idiotic registry? Use Unix! You prefer command line? Keep using UNIX! Used to MacOS? You're using UNIX!
Sometimes people just amaze me. You know, there are libraries where you can read FOR FREE! It's an abberation that lately people have chosen to own everything that they read. So what if it is a little inconvenient to go to the library or take books back?
Why the hell does everyone want their own home library? What advantage does it give you? If the book isn't from O'Reiley, there's almost no chance that you can't wait until morning to go get it. Why don't you check the book out and then, if you like it, buy it. Why buy a book whose quality is unknown to you? All the dust jacket reviews are going to be glowing. That's why they put them there.
Sorry for the rant. This whole situation strikes me as ridiculous.
Cripes! you're right... I think that if anyone got around to thinking about it, they'd throw him in jail for fraud. How are _we_ supposed to know that the 75% hasn't been achieved? Can't he lie?
OK, so we know that it is almost impossible for the scheme to result in his publishing the book (excpet if he decides to do so just for the normal amount of money). So why would he get to keep the money? Who knows how many people are going to be ripped off from this scheme. He ought to have some preset dollar amount that requires him to publish the whole book. Like whatever he would be getting as an advance. Otherwise it's premeditated wire fraud.
The easiest solution is to get your copy from someone other than the official website. Then he'll think that only one person dl'd the installments.
This is such a bunch of shit. His books have a lot of variance in quality, so we may all be defrauded for a crappy book (with the inevitable cliffhanger). This scheme is not the way to go about internet publishing. We need micropayments, badly.
I could really clean up! All the idiots that live around here are probably betting on the outcome already (I live in Kansas). I just have to feign interest.
Thanks Slashdot! (BTW, I'm kidding. I don't cheat on bets.)
Lots of money wasted here. Everyone has experienced net lag and knows intuitively that pictures take a long time to load. So we have gotten used to looking for the text first, then looking at the pictures that may actually be loaded by then. If everyone would just use the ALT tags like they're supposed to, I wouldn't ever look at pictures.
Oh well, why can't they waste money in my direction? =-p
Yes, these things will totally kick ass, but if you use gcc and glibm it would be like running 80 octane gasoline in a Corvette. This is a brand new architecture that the gnu development is years behind on. Compaq has compilers, libraries and prebuilt apps that run _much_ faster. I don't think anything has been done to gcc since the EV5 architecture.
The Compaq tools are mostly available for free, but you can't compile kernels with them. We're trying to catalog what can actually be compiled with them but most Linux system source assumes that you are using gcc. Sad, really. I'm sure that things would run much better when using a compiler that actually knows how many execution units the processor has...
OK, fine. Post it to usenet from a Library computer.
The point is that there is no trade secret at this point anyway. The spec has been published, there was no reasonable precautions taken to keep the spec from getting published.
Once some enterprising hacker actually distributes source code that undoes M$'s screwed up misimplementation, anonymously, they won't be able to undo it. If it gets published on Usenet fully anonymously, like from a fake acount on some bootable CDROM Linux distro in some computer lab somewhere, it will be too late to do anything but spin control. 'Oh no! h4x0rz stole my spec!'
Who gives a shit at that point? The source code is public domain... The standards complied to in the public domain source code are whatever they end up being. If they happen to coincide with M$'s standards, so be it. Who could say that the code was designed to follow M$'s spec?
M$ did this itself last year trying to break the AOL IM format. AOL kind of won that one, but it was because M$ gave up once AOL broke its own code, not wanting to use broken code on purpose, for once.
I still think that the issue for/. goes away once a program that happens to work like the spec says gets to be public domain.
What at this point is stopping us from just reverse engineering the stupid M$ extension and removing their last possible thing to say about this issue? Is anybody working on this already?
The way I see it, when the disputed, disturbed specification is in GPL'd source code, they won't have any legal recourse. Why sue someone to remove a link to something that is already implemented?
How badly could they have screwed it up? This is _microsoft_ we're talking about here! They couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. How much work could it possibly be? A couple of days for some UberhHacker?
Once the fix is GPL'd, with no authors mentioned anywhere, who could they sue? What would they sue? It's like Gnutella; who do you persecute?
Maybe I'm just naive but this seems pretty obvious at this point.
I was at Iowa State University in the past. There is a nutty math professor who wants to blow up the moon. He believed that the moon being absent would turn Earth into paradise. The name began with an A, I think. I don't really remember.
We all had lots of fun when his plan made the cover of the Weekly World News....
About the only thing I can get my dual-604e processor card to do (with an SMP kernel) in my 7500 is crash. There aren't enough Linux developers who even know anything about PPC, let alone SMP PPC. I think that there's one guy who used to work on it.
Other people have gotten other kinds of SMP macs to boot, some even have no problems. But there's probably only about 5 people in the world running SMP linux on macs.
In short, don't expect any linux to work on this architecture for years. 2004 would be a reasonable guess for full support, iff people actually care enough to try to get linux to work at all. Which is still doubtful, esp. considering that you can run MacOS X on these by the time you will be able to buy them. Who would invest time in porting yet another unix clone to a system that only a few thousand people will be able to buy? LinuxPPC.org hasn't gotten any support from Apple in about 2 years, why should they change anything now?
Thanks to TechWatch the people who did this now know that they need to use a better plastic, a sharper defined mold and better quality stickers. They'll spend a few bucks 'fixing' these issues and be back to ripping people off.
I second the vote for adding a CPUID field for what MHz the chip was designed to run at. Overclockers wouldn't care but it would prevent this from becoming yet another reason to get a good 'ol Intel chip instead.
There doesn't seem to be much in the world that people won't try to get away with. Too bad the people who did this are probably in some unidentifiable third world country.
Think, these people had to spend a minimum of $100000 for a limited production run on the replacement casings and stickers. They had some financial backing, probably. Can you imagine their business plan: "We need money so we can pay for staff, tools and supplies so we can rip off optimistic people looking for bargain processors"...
What a pain in the ass. Yet another sign that the world is coming to an end.
Anyone else notice that the picture here looks like the sticker has been peeled off and replaced? I also cringe at the poor quality of resoldering the resistors in this one. EEEk!
It's too bad that you can't find out for sure whether the processor is fake without voiding your warranty. Maybe AMD can help us out here and let us ask them about the serial numbers. I guess we should all expect tampering more often.
There is no way anyone will be able to use human genes in any practical sense before their patents expire. Let them go ahead and patent the genes. It lets them think that they're getting something useful enough to justify the enormous expense of sequencing the genes. Then they totally make up some possible function for the gene, which is almost guaranteed to be the wrong function. Then they get the patent applied for. After that, they do the actual research to find out what the gene is for, which takes many years.
By the time they have something useful like a drug that either enhances or supresses the funciton of the gene, the patent on the gene is about to expire, esp. since they probably said it was for something that it turns out that it doesn't actually do.
OK, then they have the patent expiry time on the drugs they developed, but they actually earned the patent there.
Net result: The gene sequence is published, along with what the actual use for it is, sometime within the patent period, but not near the beginning of it. The minimum time to get this research done is on order of 10 years. This isn't like 'Internet Time' here. This is acutally difficult to do.
Letting the companies get pretty much worthless patents (since they won't be able to further innovate the gene and renew their patent) is the only possible way to get the research done. It is extremely expensive to do this work.
So, within about 30 years, we'll be able to say with some confidence that we have the genome mapped correctly and no one will own the genome anymore. Remember that quite a few genes have multiple affects on how a person develops and some take 50-75 years to have any symptoms. This research is going to take a long, long time. The best way to speed it up is through cloning experiments, which are illegal.
Enough. I know this was offtopic. My on-topic opinion is that I hope that 24/7 sues the pants off of doubleclick and they both lost major amounts of money to legal fees. Meanwhile, I use Junkbuster.
I'm serious. We should hollow some asteroids out and make a kick-ass space station.
Solar power out there is about as good as on the surface of the Earth. Enough of it and we could melt some holes. Heck, by then we may have better nuclear power like a working cold or warm fusion.
Even an M type asteroid has some silicates in it, so that's where we get the oxygen, if we don't get it from an ice asteroid. Carbon is easy, we have too much of it in Earth's atmosphere anyway, CO + O2 makes an OK rocket fuel. We just take extra fuel along and have fuel cells producing CO2 for our plant life. Humans don't really need all that much nitrogen, just for amino acids and some less reactive component of the atmosphere. It doesn't take much.
I'm not proposing hollowing the ENTIRE thing out, just start hollowing... We'd have to pick a good spot, but that thing has thousands of miles of surface area. I'd worry about digging in and finding radioactive metals, I wouldn't want to build a colony near any uranium deposits.
It sure sounds like good thing to do in the 21st century. What else is there to do?
I think it is an important discovery, not necessarily the asteroid, the radar imaging technique. I'm pretty impressed that they could do this with a _ground_based_ radar dish. That is completely amazing. 135 miles long may seem big but this thing is 200 million miles away. That kind of imaging quality from a single dish is almost unheard of.
Secondly, this is an interesting discovery since a lot can be guessed about how this thing formed from its shape. Femur shaped asteroids would have to be formed by stretching the material while it was cooling. Maybe a molten lump of material flew past a bigger asteroid and got pulled apart, then managed to cool without going back into a ball.
Let's hope it's not Earth shattering. If this was on a collision course with us, we'd all have to move...
Slashdot Mirror
Is your sports car useful? In any way? I have a theory that it's easier to stay out of an accident if you have good brakes, cornering and acceleration. I.e. a sports car. They may not crash as well as a Mercedes, but they won't crash as often either (if you're a good driver).
A lego desk is less functional than a regular desk. It costs far more. It is a demonstration of the lack of maturity of the person who ordered it.
Does anyone else remember when legos were toys? Now they're on the same level as plaster of paris or stretched canvasses. Consumable art media. The previous lego projects here like the gun and the big lego Tux were at least disassemblable.
This is just a silly art project that some tasteless joker decided that he'd whine about until he got. I'm not faulting the artist for creating it, he wouldn't have even thought of it without being under contract.
Another reason I'm disgusted is the wastefulness of the whole project. Legos wouldn't need to be so expensive if people didn't keep using them up permanently in art projects. Lego went to a lot of work to make their bricks reusable.
We're in a spoiled, wasteful society. The lego desk is a demonstration on a higher order than almost anything I can think of.
Do they realize that they have just totally screwed themselves? I never liked sony anyway, but now I'll never buy anything from them again.
From now on, I'll check the labels of CDs. If it comes from those bastards, I won't buy it. I'll download it even if I wouldn't have otherwise.
Doesn't the idiot realize that he is representing a large company that does more things than publish music? They'll never sell me another walkman. Stupid arrogant jerks.
So, how would they propose to block napster access at my computer? Hack into it? Change my netfilter rules? Good luck. How are they going to stop OpenNAP, Gnutella or freenet? There is no conceivable way to do so. You'd have to shut down all traffic on the internet. AT&T, Sprint, MCI and all of the other carriers might have something to say about that. They're quite a lot more important to the economy than sony.
This is so far out of line that I have to wonder if it's a hoax. No one in their right minds would make statements amounting to 'we'll hack the computers of all of the people in the world to protect our corporate interests'. This Heckler jackass has just gotten his company in a lot of trouble.
1. You show me a way to enter C code with a voice system and _then_ I'll throw out my keyboard. I could just see it: "up, up, up, left brace..." Screw that.
2. Processors don't have to spend 2/3 of their time waiting around for data. Real ones at least. I have a 533MHz alpha that does 980 MFLOPs, don't tell me it's waiting around most of the time.
3. I doubt that anyone will want to use Lithium batteries in ten years because fuel cells will have been out for 8 years.
4. If we have a quarter terabyte of main magnetic memory, what is the terabyte of optical disk for? It's the only moving part in the computer, what the hell do we need it for? Magnetic memory is static.
5. What about the network connection? OC-192? Better? I'd personally vote for some type of ATM, especially if we're going to use it for all of our communications. QOS is important, I don't want to lose frames on my movie just because someone calls..
6. They think that absolute security relies on thumbprints? Give me a break (or break-in). What we really need is to make sure that IPv8 is double-key encrypted at all levels.
7. There's nothing that they describe that is going to take a Cray to process. What does the typical secretary need with a supercomputer? A voice activated webpad is about enough. Gamers are another story entirely. Immersive VR is going to take more than they've got scheduled anyway.
In short, the forbes article is a fluff piece.
No one knows what the language will look like in the year 2300 that scientists and engineers use, but they'll call it FORTRAN.
But seriously, I'm glad that Watcom's doing this. It won't affect me for several years (and then only if they integrate their optimization techniques into gcc). But I think that it is a good idea nonetheless.
I mainly use Alphas, so Compaq's compiler set (which does include F95) is good for me. I wish that they would open its source, but I don't really care since it works. They typically generate code that's 3.5 times faster than gcc, so maybe better optimization is possible for Intel boxes, too.
I work at home, so anything annoying is my own damn fault. That having been said, I find that my most annoying aspects are temperature control and noise. I decided that, for convenience, I'd be in the same room as the computers. They're noisy so I built a big enclosed rack, soundproofed it and installed the quietest fan I could find to vent it. The only problem is the air conditioner, which has to run 10 months/yr even though I live in Kansas. I got a quiet model, but it still makes a lot of noise. Not to mention that since the computers like it cold and I don't, it's never really the right temperature in here. I need to get the AC ducted into the computer case.
Ergonomically speaking, I'm OK. The desk is at the right height, there's plenty of space and I'm facing the door so I'm comfortable and not paranoid. I have natural light in the daytime and indirect halogen light at night. Since I got the laptop, I can move around more, but I need to get more of the house wired for ethernet...
Now all I need is a laptop cooling unit that doesn't make much noise and has a space for a mousepad...
First off, have half of the class use KDE and the other half use GNOME. We need another warring set of tribes. Let's set them off as early as is possible. While they're at it, have half use vi and half emacs, half use BSD and half use Linux, half use one indent style and half use another...
But seriously, I think a good, mind-stretching programming excercise is artficial life. Genetic algorithms are really simple to program and can do some amazingly complex things. Have a prisoner's dilemma robot contest. Here is a really fantastic book on the subject.
We finally have the opportunity here to redesign the actual configuration interface for UNIX programs. If we recoded the apps to use XML, we could have a consistent interface. Heck, we could use PyGNOME and use the same program to administrate and configure all of the apps.
I'd really like to see something like this done just for the sake of showing up all of those windoze zombies. You want a consistent, graphical interface without the idiotic registry? Use Unix!
You prefer command line? Keep using UNIX! Used to MacOS? You're using UNIX!
World domination... Cool...
Sometimes people just amaze me. You know, there are libraries where you can read FOR FREE! It's an abberation that lately people have chosen to own everything that they read. So what if it is a little inconvenient to go to the library or take books back?
Why the hell does everyone want their own home library? What advantage does it give you? If the book isn't from O'Reiley, there's almost no chance that you can't wait until morning to go get it. Why don't you check the book out and then, if you like it, buy it. Why buy a book whose quality is unknown to you? All the dust jacket reviews are going to be glowing. That's why they put them there.
Sorry for the rant. This whole situation strikes me as ridiculous.
Cripes! you're right... I think that if anyone got around to thinking about it, they'd throw him in jail for fraud. How are _we_ supposed to know that the 75% hasn't been achieved? Can't he lie?
OK, so we know that it is almost impossible for the scheme to result in his publishing the book (excpet if he decides to do so just for the normal amount of money). So why would he get to keep the money? Who knows how many people are going to be ripped off from this scheme. He ought to have some preset dollar amount that requires him to publish the whole book. Like whatever he would be getting as an advance. Otherwise it's premeditated wire fraud.
The easiest solution is to get your copy from someone other than the official website. Then he'll think that only one person dl'd the installments.
This is such a bunch of shit. His books have a lot of variance in quality, so we may all be defrauded for a crappy book (with the inevitable cliffhanger). This scheme is not the way to go about internet publishing. We need micropayments, badly.
I could really clean up! All the idiots that live around here are probably betting on the outcome already (I live in Kansas). I just have to feign interest.
Thanks Slashdot! (BTW, I'm kidding. I don't cheat on bets.)
Lots of money wasted here. Everyone has experienced net lag and knows intuitively that pictures take a long time to load. So we have gotten used to looking for the text first, then looking at the pictures that may actually be loaded by then. If everyone would just use the ALT tags like they're supposed to, I wouldn't ever look at pictures.
Oh well, why can't they waste money in my direction? =-p
Yes, these things will totally kick ass, but if you use gcc and glibm it would be like running 80 octane gasoline in a Corvette. This is a brand new architecture that the gnu development is years behind on. Compaq has compilers, libraries and prebuilt apps that run _much_ faster. I don't think anything has been done to gcc since the EV5 architecture.
The Compaq tools are mostly available for free, but you can't compile kernels with them. We're trying to catalog what can actually be compiled with them but most Linux system source assumes that you are using gcc. Sad, really. I'm sure that things would run much better when using a compiler that actually knows how many execution units the processor has...
DCG Inc, now owned by Atipa would sell alpha mobo's with processors stuck in their special tower case but otherwise empty. www.dcginc.com
Alphas have always had a special ATX RF plate, they take ATX PS's but some need 630W units. So, you probably want to get the case...
www.alphalinux.org
The link is a vendor list, alphalinux.org is a nice place to look for info. Also check comp.os.linux.alpha .
You won't be able to get a new alpha for less than $3500US, but used ones are available for cheap, sometimes free.
Yes, they were. As a result of the settlement from Intel 'borrowing' trade secrets from Digital.
This was good for Digital, now Compaq since they didn't have to ramp up production themselves.
They were also manufactured by Samsung, who also made alpha motherboards.
Now IBM is making them under a nice, normal contract. Just because they can...
OK, fine. Post it to usenet from a Library computer.
/. goes away once a program that happens to work like the spec says gets to be public domain.
The point is that there is no trade secret at this point anyway. The spec has been published, there was no reasonable precautions taken to keep the spec from getting published.
Once some enterprising hacker actually distributes source code that undoes M$'s screwed up misimplementation, anonymously, they won't be able to undo it. If it gets published on Usenet fully anonymously, like from a fake acount on some bootable CDROM Linux distro in some computer lab somewhere, it will be too late to do anything but spin control. 'Oh no! h4x0rz stole my spec!'
Who gives a shit at that point? The source code is public domain... The standards complied to in the public domain source code are whatever they end up being. If they happen to coincide with M$'s standards, so be it. Who could say that the code was designed to follow M$'s spec?
M$ did this itself last year trying to break the AOL IM format. AOL kind of won that one, but it was because M$ gave up once AOL broke its own code, not wanting to use broken code on purpose, for once.
I still think that the issue for
What at this point is stopping us from just reverse engineering the stupid M$ extension and removing their last possible thing to say about this issue? Is anybody working on this already?
The way I see it, when the disputed, disturbed specification is in GPL'd source code, they won't have any legal recourse. Why sue someone to remove a link to something that is already implemented?
How badly could they have screwed it up? This is _microsoft_ we're talking about here! They couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. How much work could it possibly be? A couple of days for some UberhHacker?
Once the fix is GPL'd, with no authors mentioned anywhere, who could they sue? What would they sue? It's like Gnutella; who do you persecute?
Maybe I'm just naive but this seems pretty obvious at this point.
Naw, make that:
And all I ask is a tall ship
And a star to steer her past..
I'm not kidding with the following:
I was at Iowa State University in the past. There is a nutty math professor who wants to blow up the moon. He believed that the moon being absent would turn Earth into paradise. The name began with an A, I think. I don't really remember.
We all had lots of fun when his plan made the cover of the Weekly World News....
Monday.. Work.. Ick.. Later.
About the only thing I can get my dual-604e processor card to do (with an SMP kernel) in my 7500 is crash. There aren't enough Linux developers who even know anything about PPC, let alone SMP PPC. I think that there's one guy who used to work on it.
Other people have gotten other kinds of SMP macs to boot, some even have no problems. But there's probably only about 5 people in the world running SMP linux on macs.
In short, don't expect any linux to work on this architecture for years. 2004 would be a reasonable guess for full support, iff people actually care enough to try to get linux to work at all. Which is still doubtful, esp. considering that you can run MacOS X on these by the time you will be able to buy them. Who would invest time in porting yet another unix clone to a system that only a few thousand people will be able to buy? LinuxPPC.org hasn't gotten any support from Apple in about 2 years, why should they change anything now?
Thanks to TechWatch the people who did this now know that they need to use a better plastic, a sharper defined mold and better quality stickers. They'll spend a few bucks 'fixing' these issues and be back to ripping people off.
I second the vote for adding a CPUID field for what MHz the chip was designed to run at. Overclockers wouldn't care but it would prevent this from becoming yet another reason to get a good 'ol Intel chip instead.
There doesn't seem to be much in the world that people won't try to get away with. Too bad the people who did this are probably in some unidentifiable third world country.
Think, these people had to spend a minimum of $100000 for a limited production run on the replacement casings and stickers. They had some financial backing, probably. Can you imagine their business plan: "We need money so we can pay for staff, tools and supplies so we can rip off optimistic people looking for bargain processors"...
What a pain in the ass. Yet another sign that the world is coming to an end.
Anyone else notice that the picture here looks like the sticker has been peeled off and replaced? I also cringe at the poor quality of resoldering the resistors in this one. EEEk!
It's too bad that you can't find out for sure whether the processor is fake without voiding your warranty. Maybe AMD can help us out here and let us ask them about the serial numbers. I guess we should all expect tampering more often.
There is no way anyone will be able to use human genes in any practical sense before their patents expire. Let them go ahead and patent the genes. It lets them think that they're getting something useful enough to justify the enormous expense of sequencing the genes. Then they totally make up some possible function for the gene, which is almost guaranteed to be the wrong function. Then they get the patent applied for. After that, they do the actual research to find out what the gene is for, which takes many years.
By the time they have something useful like a drug that either enhances or supresses the funciton of the gene, the patent on the gene is about to expire, esp. since they probably said it was for something that it turns out that it doesn't actually do.
OK, then they have the patent expiry time on the drugs they developed, but they actually earned the patent there.
Net result: The gene sequence is published, along with what the actual use for it is, sometime within the patent period, but not near the beginning of it. The minimum time to get this research done is on order of 10 years. This isn't like 'Internet Time' here. This is acutally difficult to do.
Letting the companies get pretty much worthless patents (since they won't be able to further innovate the gene and renew their patent) is the only possible way to get the research done. It is extremely expensive to do this work.
So, within about 30 years, we'll be able to say with some confidence that we have the genome mapped correctly and no one will own the genome anymore. Remember that quite a few genes have multiple affects on how a person develops and some take 50-75 years to have any symptoms. This research is going to take a long, long time. The best way to speed it up is through cloning experiments, which are illegal.
Enough. I know this was offtopic. My on-topic opinion is that I hope that 24/7 sues the pants off of doubleclick and they both lost major amounts of money to legal fees. Meanwhile, I use Junkbuster.
I'm serious. We should hollow some asteroids out and make a kick-ass space station.
Solar power out there is about as good as on the surface of the Earth. Enough of it and we could melt some holes. Heck, by then we may have better nuclear power like a working cold or warm fusion.
Even an M type asteroid has some silicates in it, so that's where we get the oxygen, if we don't get it from an ice asteroid. Carbon is easy, we have too much of it in Earth's atmosphere anyway, CO + O2 makes an OK rocket fuel. We just take extra fuel along and have fuel cells producing CO2 for our plant life. Humans don't really need all that much nitrogen, just for amino acids and some less reactive component of the atmosphere. It doesn't take much.
I'm not proposing hollowing the ENTIRE thing out, just start hollowing... We'd have to pick a good spot, but that thing has thousands of miles of surface area. I'd worry about digging in and finding radioactive metals, I wouldn't want to build a colony near any uranium deposits.
It sure sounds like good thing to do in the 21st century. What else is there to do?
I think it is an important discovery, not necessarily the asteroid, the radar imaging technique. I'm pretty impressed that they could do this with a _ground_based_ radar dish. That is completely amazing. 135 miles long may seem big but this thing is 200 million miles away. That kind of imaging quality from a single dish is almost unheard of.
Secondly, this is an interesting discovery since a lot can be guessed about how this thing formed from its shape. Femur shaped asteroids would have to be formed by stretching the material while it was cooling. Maybe a molten lump of material flew past a bigger asteroid and got pulled apart, then managed to cool without going back into a ball.
Let's hope it's not Earth shattering. If this was on a collision course with us, we'd all have to move...