Looks like they've got some real scaling problems then. That's a 5-fold increase in power consumption for an 80% increase in clock speed. Looks like VIA's taken a page from the Pentium 4 design team when it comes to upping the clock speed of a chip design...
You realize that, in the example you gave, it was your friend's inaction that caused him to have to pay the cancellation fees? He decided that he had other priorities during those three days. Fine. But if he decided that he had more important things to do than test his cellphone (something that takes 20 seconds), then he should be prepared to deal with the consequences (either no service, or a cancellation fee.)
But that's not the real problem. The real reason that the US cellphone market SUCKS is the FCC. By artificially raising the entry barrier to such heights, they prevent the creation of any new competitors. We're left with the same group, albeit a group that constantly reshuffles, rebrands, and renames themselves to make it look as though there's an active market. If we get rid of such governmentally-enforced barriers, we'd have real competition. As it is now, we have three companies working together to keep the market locked in place.
if the DHS etc took protective action at the ISP level?
Oh please god.... no....
Think of what you're saying! The same group of people who color-code our paranoia, who decide that waterbottles are dangerous, and who advise us to purchase duct tape... you want to turn to them for help securing the Internet? Do you have any idea how painful that would be?
No -- the responsibility here lies with the users and (to some extent) the carriers. If the user's machines are infected, disconnect them. If the carriers detect a large, coordinated traffic pattern, investigate -- and if it's a DDOS attack, block it at the firewall level (before the traffic leaves your network segments.)
And if the heat problem is not solvable - that may be a serious marketing problem for chip makers and computer manufacturers.
Amen to that. On the bright side though, if chip growth stagnates for too long, software developers will have to start optimizing and writing streamlined code. That's never a bad thing.
I think we're long overdue for an architecture change, by the way. Can't we just start transitioning out of x86? It's well past its limits -- a Core 2 Duo generates a TON of heat, compared to an equivalent POWER chip. I mean, sure, it's way better than a Pentium 4, but it's still a kW hungry beast. Its FP performance is great -- compared to other x86 chips. Compared to other architectures though, it needs work.
POWER's not that alien either -- it's got a lot of the "improvements" that Intel/AMD have been trying to bolt onto the x86 architecture. Difference is, these improvements already exist, are well tested, and well-performing. Want multi-core? SPARC and POWER have got it. Want high-speed multithreading? Look to the Niagra II. Want virtualization? Look to POWER.
Geek fantasy: IBM open-sources the POWER architecture, Intel licenses it and starts producing a high-end chip, AMD competes. Intel and AMD start to use the improvements on their x86 chips, and, in an effort to one-up one another, start producing high-end desktop POWER-based chips. This trickles down, and soon, the x86 and POWER architectures are in competition. POWER, being a better, more modern design, eventually overtakes x86 (starting with high-end desktop usage, and trickling down to the lower-end.) Multi-core POWER chips (or SPARC, depending on the fantasy) often run with one or two cores dedicated to x86 emulation for backwards compatibility. Microsoft, having just released Blackcomb, finds their target chip slowly relegated to emulation, concurrent with the development of their next OS. Unable to use the existing codebase (which is, by this time, highly x86-centric), Microsoft is forced to roll out a new OS, built from scratch. Using some of the lessons learned from Microsoft Research, a new OS is built, embracing the core values of security, modularity, and portability. While the OS is good, the lost development time provides the boost that *nix needed. Linux takes marketshare, as does Mac OS X. During Microsoft's transition period, Apple seizes the opportunity, and releases Mac OS X for all x86 boxes. The driver situation is a little rocky at first, but open source helps ease the pain. By wholeheartedly supporting open source development, Apple leverages their work, soon gaining support across the board. Already having years of experience with the POWER chips, their dual-platform OS development allows them to provide compatible OS's for POWER and x86 computers -- and translation software (already written) helps unify the two.
Here's what's always struck me as weird about the "using open wireless is theft" argument:
1) If your device is capable of (and designed for) broadcasting (and recieving) a signal to (and from) any device, and you fail to disable this functionality, a third party has no way of knowing whether the open nature of the device is intentional or not.
2) People who answer "oh, but you know its not intentional... these people wouldnt let you walk into their house and use their stuff without their knowledge would they?" are missing the point. It's not analogous to entering someone's home. If you were to hand out cellphones (all on your cellular plan) to everyone who walked by your house -- just giving them out with no explanation, and no limitation -- would someone who uses one of the phones be at fault?
1. To anger one's customer base in a flagrant manner. Ex: "2KGames really Sonyed us with that SecuROM stuff."
2. To desperately seek relevance in a market in which your success is dwindling. Ex: "Did you hear that Sony's going to add a TV Tuner and DVR to the PS3?"
I get 6m/768k with 6 static ip addresses and no port blocking or restriction on servers for $100/month.
You do realize how pathetic that is by non-American standards, right? $100/month for 768kbit upstream? Jesus H. Christ. "No port blocking or restriction on servers" isn't an added feature, it's a GODDAMN INTEGRAL PART OF HAVING AN INTERNET LINK YOU COMBASTARDS!
BTW, I'm not yelling at you Finkployd -- I'm just seriously shocked at how badly American ISPs are raping their customers.
an entire friggin' city swamped by cut-rate dikes bursting (from a hurricane that never even hit the city)
You do realize this was done by a rampantly corrupt government in bed with contractors, right?
Actually, _that_ is the greatest threat. The private market works great -- PROVIDED the government is not corrupt. When it is, and when politicians allow business to seduce them with $$, _that's_ when we get the problems.
In countries where the government does not sanction regional monopolies, bandwidth is cheap and plentiful, driven by competition. In the US, in my state, a 1.5Mbit connection costs $40 a month, and is oversold to the point where I'm lucky to get 750kbit down. Why? My local telcom (AT&T) has an EXCLUSIVE deal with the town, such that they are the only provider authorized to provide "high-speed" access. With no competition allowed, why should AT&T try and improve?
It's not a public domain code repository to pillage to your heart's content -- it's Open Source (TM), and there are rules about what you can and can't do with it.
Not surprisingly, this is one of the hardest things to convince PHB's of. They seem (at least my boss seems) to believe that it's GPL == free (in all senses of the word.)
Sirius satellite radio into a reference Dolby FM transmitter (25 uS) and pipe it around the house using 75-ohm coaxial cable, then into various tuners from Marantz.
Not to rain on your audiophile parade, but I'd just like to point out that you are pumping a 64-96kbps lossy stream into gear capable of accurately reproducing every compression artifact. Just thought you might want to know;-)
1) This is not a free market. Despite all the politicians' fancy rhetoric, America is not a free market economy. Nowhere close.
2) The RIAA is known to more or less bribe politicians and other authority figures.
Please don't conflate a corporate-owned, government controlled economy with a minimalistic, free market-based economy. They're two entirely different animals. In a free market in which government does NOT accept bribes from corporate interests, the RIAA would claim "ZOMG HE STOLEZ OUR FILES", to which the court would respond "Prove it." In America, the court responds "Mr. Defendant, prove you didn't." In a truely free market, copyright infringement is treated as a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine no more than the cost of the goods copied. In America, copyright infringement is a serious crime, punished by fines severe enough to financially cripple a citizen for life.
America is rotten. It claims to have a free market, yet government is bought and paid for by corporate interests. This reflects poorly, not on the concept of a free market, but on the leaders in power.
Giant cities with extremely poor mass transit systems, along with a slumping economy, mean that you may have no other way to get to a workplace in order to make money.
Bohemian as it sounds, you don't _need_ to get to your workplace. As the parent correctly pointed out, you only need food, (some) clothing, shelter, and every once in a great while, medicine. The only reason you "need" to get to the workplace is because you "need" money to buy the things you think you "need". There are, in fact, local jobs available. Unless you live in an extremely rural area (in which case, you're probably far more self-sufficient anyways), you can frequently find work close-by. Granted, they may not have the comforting glow of flourescent lights, or even the luxury of as much money as you'd like -- but there are always ways to get the necessities. You don't "need" a good job, or even an OK one -- you just prefer it.
Before anyone accuses me of being some survivalist nut, I'd like to point out that I'm an admin/coder sitting in comfortable air conditioning as I write this...
Researchers find hole, act like 1337 733ns about it. Company can't be sure that they've fixed hole, so they temporarily disable the reportedly-vulnerable function.
there's really no open source offering that comes remotely close to Visual Studio 2005 and C#
I'd actually contest that. C# is basically a me-too version of Java, and Visual Studio 2005 is... well... crap. I'd much rather use Eclipse and Java than VS2005 and C# any day.
Same here -- over 200 APs, site-wide. A ton of iPhones amongst the higher-ups (i.e. the people with money for flashy toys.) Zero problems so far. Then again, we have enough APs and site bandwidth to support about 300% of normal load, so you can take this example with a grain of salt...
I realize that I may be treading on shaky NDA ground, but I can say that Leopard makes some serious advances in this respect. I don't know if QuickTime and AppKit are fully multi-threaded yet -- but I can say that they seem to be a hell of a lot closer than in Tiger. Also, xnu has had a HUGE amount of work put into it in an effort to reduce locking situations, and it seems to have paid off -- a lot of stuff that would cause a UI hang in Tiger is no longer an issue in Leopard. It also seems that CoreVideo/CoreAnimation have been written with SMP situations in mind.
That's about all I can say without the black helicopters descending on^NO CARRIER
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
on
Vista is Watching You
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· Score: 1
Now most PC games can be played on Linux through a DirectX emulator, however there is almost always a performance hit, and often it's as bad as half your framerate going down the drain...the games are just heavily optimized for Windows (most Mac games are the same way...~20% performance hit on the same machine if you use OSX instead of bootcamping into Windows
Don't say that dude -- people might beleive you!
Yes, Wine does have a performance hit associated with it (about 1-2% in past benchmarks), but it's frequently made up for by the fact that you're not running on Windows. WOW, UT, etc are good examples of this -- they run with _better_ framerates on the same machine under Wine/*nix than under Win32. CrossOver (on the Mac) doesn't add a 20% hit either -- the worst I've seen there is about 1-2 fps drop.
Have you used the new MacBooks? The hard drive and RAM can both be swapped in a total of 5 minutes. Remove the battery, undo two screws, and you have the HD. Pull out the lever, and you have the RAM. That's it.
There are some other details she proposes, some of which are head-scratchers such as "The detector can not consume significant amount of CPU time (say > 90%) for more then, say 1 sec."
I know it makes me a nerd to say this, but she just got sexier for pointing that out. Seriously, that's a really good observation on her part -- comparing the timing of a system call to see if it might be intercepted by a rootkit is a damn good idea, and might stand a chance at busting even the sneakiest kits.
Again, I call bullshit. Yes, Dreamhost does oversell like crazy. They even admit to it!. But they actually will let you use all the bandwidth and disk you're given. All of it.
Right now, a quick look at my panel shows that I'm using 64.1GB of space (as of last measurement). This month, I've moved over 1TB of HTTP traffic alone (I've used another 20GB or so of FTP traffic). No black mercedes. No phonecalls. Not even a damn e-mail from Dreamhost.
As Dreamhost points out, the only usage-related issue they'll cut you off for is CPU usage. For serving static content (i.e. not PHP pages), Dreamhost actually kicks ass. They really will let you hit both your quotas. Sure, you won't be able to run the next iTunes Movie Store off one of their shared hosts, but you can actually use all the space and not get so much as an e-mailed warning.
That actually might make this a good case for the EFF. If they sue Microsoft, Microsoft's defense will be:
We didn't distribute it -- we just pointed people to a place that was.
At which point, the we'll have legal precedent for the defense of BitTorrent trackers.
If the EFF loses, we get precedent, if they win, the MS patent threat is neutralized. Sounds like a good idea to me! (But IANAL).
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like they've got some real scaling problems then. That's a 5-fold increase in power consumption for an 80% increase in clock speed. Looks like VIA's taken a page from the Pentium 4 design team when it comes to upping the clock speed of a chip design...
Well, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. uses ODE for its physics, and I thought it did a pretty good job in that dept.
Now also might be a good time to take a look at the source for Tor too...
You realize that, in the example you gave, it was your friend's inaction that caused him to have to pay the cancellation fees? He decided that he had other priorities during those three days. Fine. But if he decided that he had more important things to do than test his cellphone (something that takes 20 seconds), then he should be prepared to deal with the consequences (either no service, or a cancellation fee.)
But that's not the real problem. The real reason that the US cellphone market SUCKS is the FCC. By artificially raising the entry barrier to such heights, they prevent the creation of any new competitors. We're left with the same group, albeit a group that constantly reshuffles, rebrands, and renames themselves to make it look as though there's an active market. If we get rid of such governmentally-enforced barriers, we'd have real competition. As it is now, we have three companies working together to keep the market locked in place.
Oh please god.... no....
Think of what you're saying! The same group of people who color-code our paranoia, who decide that waterbottles are dangerous, and who advise us to purchase duct tape... you want to turn to them for help securing the Internet? Do you have any idea how painful that would be?
No -- the responsibility here lies with the users and (to some extent) the carriers. If the user's machines are infected, disconnect them. If the carriers detect a large, coordinated traffic pattern, investigate -- and if it's a DDOS attack, block it at the firewall level (before the traffic leaves your network segments.)
Amen to that. On the bright side though, if chip growth stagnates for too long, software developers will have to start optimizing and writing streamlined code. That's never a bad thing.
I think we're long overdue for an architecture change, by the way. Can't we just start transitioning out of x86? It's well past its limits -- a Core 2 Duo generates a TON of heat, compared to an equivalent POWER chip. I mean, sure, it's way better than a Pentium 4, but it's still a kW hungry beast. Its FP performance is great -- compared to other x86 chips. Compared to other architectures though, it needs work.
POWER's not that alien either -- it's got a lot of the "improvements" that Intel/AMD have been trying to bolt onto the x86 architecture. Difference is, these improvements already exist, are well tested, and well-performing. Want multi-core? SPARC and POWER have got it. Want high-speed multithreading? Look to the Niagra II. Want virtualization? Look to POWER.
Geek fantasy: IBM open-sources the POWER architecture, Intel licenses it and starts producing a high-end chip, AMD competes. Intel and AMD start to use the improvements on their x86 chips, and, in an effort to one-up one another, start producing high-end desktop POWER-based chips. This trickles down, and soon, the x86 and POWER architectures are in competition. POWER, being a better, more modern design, eventually overtakes x86 (starting with high-end desktop usage, and trickling down to the lower-end.) Multi-core POWER chips (or SPARC, depending on the fantasy) often run with one or two cores dedicated to x86 emulation for backwards compatibility. Microsoft, having just released Blackcomb, finds their target chip slowly relegated to emulation, concurrent with the development of their next OS. Unable to use the existing codebase (which is, by this time, highly x86-centric), Microsoft is forced to roll out a new OS, built from scratch. Using some of the lessons learned from Microsoft Research, a new OS is built, embracing the core values of security, modularity, and portability. While the OS is good, the lost development time provides the boost that *nix needed. Linux takes marketshare, as does Mac OS X. During Microsoft's transition period, Apple seizes the opportunity, and releases Mac OS X for all x86 boxes. The driver situation is a little rocky at first, but open source helps ease the pain. By wholeheartedly supporting open source development, Apple leverages their work, soon gaining support across the board. Already having years of experience with the POWER chips, their dual-platform OS development allows them to provide compatible OS's for POWER and x86 computers -- and translation software (already written) helps unify the two.
Well... that's my dream anyways.
Here's what's always struck me as weird about the "using open wireless is theft" argument:
1) If your device is capable of (and designed for) broadcasting (and recieving) a signal to (and from) any device, and you fail to disable this functionality, a third party has no way of knowing whether the open nature of the device is intentional or not.
2) People who answer "oh, but you know its not intentional... these people wouldnt let you walk into their house and use their stuff without their knowledge would they?" are missing the point. It's not analogous to entering someone's home. If you were to hand out cellphones (all on your cellular plan) to everyone who walked by your house -- just giving them out with no explanation, and no limitation -- would someone who uses one of the phones be at fault?
sony - v.
1. To anger one's customer base in a flagrant manner. Ex: "2KGames really Sonyed us with that SecuROM stuff."
2. To desperately seek relevance in a market in which your success is dwindling. Ex: "Did you hear that Sony's going to add a TV Tuner and DVR to the PS3?"
I get 6m/768k with 6 static ip addresses and no port blocking or restriction on servers for $100/month.
You do realize how pathetic that is by non-American standards, right? $100/month for 768kbit upstream? Jesus H. Christ. "No port blocking or restriction on servers" isn't an added feature, it's a GODDAMN INTEGRAL PART OF HAVING AN INTERNET LINK YOU COMBASTARDS!
BTW, I'm not yelling at you Finkployd -- I'm just seriously shocked at how badly American ISPs are raping their customers.
an entire friggin' city swamped by cut-rate dikes bursting (from a hurricane that never even hit the city)
You do realize this was done by a rampantly corrupt government in bed with contractors, right?
Actually, _that_ is the greatest threat. The private market works great -- PROVIDED the government is not corrupt. When it is, and when politicians allow business to seduce them with $$, _that's_ when we get the problems.
In countries where the government does not sanction regional monopolies, bandwidth is cheap and plentiful, driven by competition. In the US, in my state, a 1.5Mbit connection costs $40 a month, and is oversold to the point where I'm lucky to get 750kbit down. Why? My local telcom (AT&T) has an EXCLUSIVE deal with the town, such that they are the only provider authorized to provide "high-speed" access. With no competition allowed, why should AT&T try and improve?
It's not a public domain code repository to pillage to your heart's content -- it's Open Source (TM), and there are rules about what you can and can't do with it.
Not surprisingly, this is one of the hardest things to convince PHB's of. They seem (at least my boss seems) to believe that it's GPL == free (in all senses of the word.)
Sirius satellite radio into a reference Dolby FM transmitter (25 uS) and pipe it around the house using 75-ohm coaxial cable, then into various tuners from Marantz.
;-)
Not to rain on your audiophile parade, but I'd just like to point out that you are pumping a 64-96kbps lossy stream into gear capable of accurately reproducing every compression artifact. Just thought you might want to know
Yep. Greed's a bitch.
On a related note: great job guys. It looks like you took your cues from XFree86 -- I guess you were inspired by how well that worked out....
pro-corporate, free-market types
That's me, so I'll respond.
1) This is not a free market. Despite all the politicians' fancy rhetoric, America is not a free market economy. Nowhere close.
2) The RIAA is known to more or less bribe politicians and other authority figures.
Please don't conflate a corporate-owned, government controlled economy with a minimalistic, free market-based economy. They're two entirely different animals. In a free market in which government does NOT accept bribes from corporate interests, the RIAA would claim "ZOMG HE STOLEZ OUR FILES", to which the court would respond "Prove it." In America, the court responds "Mr. Defendant, prove you didn't." In a truely free market, copyright infringement is treated as a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine no more than the cost of the goods copied. In America, copyright infringement is a serious crime, punished by fines severe enough to financially cripple a citizen for life.
America is rotten. It claims to have a free market, yet government is bought and paid for by corporate interests. This reflects poorly, not on the concept of a free market, but on the leaders in power.
Giant cities with extremely poor mass transit systems, along with a slumping economy, mean that you may have no other way to get to a workplace in order to make money.
Bohemian as it sounds, you don't _need_ to get to your workplace. As the parent correctly pointed out, you only need food, (some) clothing, shelter, and every once in a great while, medicine. The only reason you "need" to get to the workplace is because you "need" money to buy the things you think you "need". There are, in fact, local jobs available. Unless you live in an extremely rural area (in which case, you're probably far more self-sufficient anyways), you can frequently find work close-by. Granted, they may not have the comforting glow of flourescent lights, or even the luxury of as much money as you'd like -- but there are always ways to get the necessities. You don't "need" a good job, or even an OK one -- you just prefer it.
Before anyone accuses me of being some survivalist nut, I'd like to point out that I'm an admin/coder sitting in comfortable air conditioning as I write this...
Researchers find hole, act like 1337 733ns about it. Company can't be sure that they've fixed hole, so they temporarily disable the reportedly-vulnerable function.
Yawn.
Look, if you're obeying the law, then you have nothing to hide, and shouldn't hide anything.
If I have nothing to hide, then why do you need to see?
there's really no open source offering that comes remotely close to Visual Studio 2005 and C#
I'd actually contest that. C# is basically a me-too version of Java, and Visual Studio 2005 is... well... crap. I'd much rather use Eclipse and Java than VS2005 and C# any day.
Same here -- over 200 APs, site-wide. A ton of iPhones amongst the higher-ups (i.e. the people with money for flashy toys.) Zero problems so far. Then again, we have enough APs and site bandwidth to support about 300% of normal load, so you can take this example with a grain of salt...
I realize that I may be treading on shaky NDA ground, but I can say that Leopard makes some serious advances in this respect. I don't know if QuickTime and AppKit are fully multi-threaded yet -- but I can say that they seem to be a hell of a lot closer than in Tiger. Also, xnu has had a HUGE amount of work put into it in an effort to reduce locking situations, and it seems to have paid off -- a lot of stuff that would cause a UI hang in Tiger is no longer an issue in Leopard. It also seems that CoreVideo/CoreAnimation have been written with SMP situations in mind.
That's about all I can say without the black helicopters descending on^NO CARRIER
Now most PC games can be played on Linux through a DirectX emulator, however there is almost always a performance hit, and often it's as bad as half your framerate going down the drain...the games are just heavily optimized for Windows (most Mac games are the same way...~20% performance hit on the same machine if you use OSX instead of bootcamping into Windows
Don't say that dude -- people might beleive you!
Yes, Wine does have a performance hit associated with it (about 1-2% in past benchmarks), but it's frequently made up for by the fact that you're not running on Windows. WOW, UT, etc are good examples of this -- they run with _better_ framerates on the same machine under Wine/*nix than under Win32. CrossOver (on the Mac) doesn't add a 20% hit either -- the worst I've seen there is about 1-2 fps drop.
Have you used the new MacBooks? The hard drive and RAM can both be swapped in a total of 5 minutes. Remove the battery, undo two screws, and you have the HD. Pull out the lever, and you have the RAM. That's it.
There are some other details she proposes, some of which are head-scratchers such as "The detector can not consume significant amount of CPU time (say > 90%) for more then, say 1 sec."
I know it makes me a nerd to say this, but she just got sexier for pointing that out. Seriously, that's a really good observation on her part -- comparing the timing of a system call to see if it might be intercepted by a rootkit is a damn good idea, and might stand a chance at busting even the sneakiest kits.
Bullshit.
Again, I call bullshit. Yes, Dreamhost does oversell like crazy. They even admit to it!. But they actually will let you use all the bandwidth and disk you're given. All of it.
Right now, a quick look at my panel shows that I'm using 64.1GB of space (as of last measurement). This month, I've moved over 1TB of HTTP traffic alone (I've used another 20GB or so of FTP traffic). No black mercedes. No phonecalls. Not even a damn e-mail from Dreamhost.
As Dreamhost points out, the only usage-related issue they'll cut you off for is CPU usage. For serving static content (i.e. not PHP pages), Dreamhost actually kicks ass. They really will let you hit both your quotas. Sure, you won't be able to run the next iTunes Movie Store off one of their shared hosts, but you can actually use all the space and not get so much as an e-mailed warning.
That actually might make this a good case for the EFF. If they sue Microsoft, Microsoft's defense will be:
We didn't distribute it -- we just pointed people to a place that was.
At which point, the we'll have legal precedent for the defense of BitTorrent trackers. If the EFF loses, we get precedent, if they win, the MS patent threat is neutralized. Sounds like a good idea to me! (But IANAL).