The x86 architecture, well, is just plain silly by today's standards...
A RISC CPU and a few DSPs could perform a lot of set-top applications, with tremendmous savings in both power usage and perhaps area (size).
High Performance doesn't not mean +100W consumption. If you don't need 4-way out-of-order execution (which is a really, really, really complicated thing to implement), complicated branch prediction, large multi-level caches, etc, then your power consumption will be ** A LOT ** less.
The fact is that many signal processing applications, don't require large amounts of memory, and they are highly parallelizable. Their algorithmns tend to be much more predictable.
Also, all processing & interrupt delays are known precisely in DSPs (this is a requirement in realtime stuff). This is also why caches, etc are not desirable, since their performance is not constant.
Simple DSPs can outperform desktop PCs for a great many applications, using 1/100th the power, cost, etc....
What we need is some higher order statistical processing... We should take data such as industrialization, CO2 production, ice cap area, etc and calculate such features as Bicoherence, Tricorrelation, etc... . Let some real math show the real story.
I remember reading an article recently, that just after the RPC bugs became know even Microsoft switched to Linux servers (because its own server were so insecure).
Thus, SCO should sue Microsoft. I'm sure there would be people willing to pay for courtroom seats on that trial!
A little math here, assuming people spend an average of 10s (1/360 hour) looking at one spam message.
(Yes, the average/. reader spends less than 1s, but not everyone is that fast).
Further assume that the average computer uses 200w (0.2kw) on average. (Probably less, but probably much more when you figure in all the routers, servers, etc that it traveled through).
1 Million Spam Messages / ( 0.2/360 ) = 555 kW*h per Spam
Doesn't seem like much, but keep in mind that is 2 YEARS of electricity (with copious use of A/C and electric heater) for my U.S. located home.
If there are ~200 Million voters, then sending 1 campaign message to each of them would burn enough fossil fuels to power my entire high school graduating class's homes for 3 YEARS...
And who is to say that only one candidate will send one message?
Unfortunately slashdot is even worse. The time I have spent reading articles.... Well, better not go there...
If we make special printers and special versions of Adobe Photoshop, won't criminals use something else?
What NEW feature is going to help them counterfit more easily?
I mean, there is already enough pirated software going around... Why should the counterfitters even bother upgrade?
Besides, there is already _plenty_ of support behind open-source projects like GIMP.
Open-source software can always be 'unpatched' of any bill detection / DRM type stuff...
I mean really.... this is just another 'fence' to keep *honest* people out!
The answer to gun control IS NOT to make every gun in the world a BB gun. Likewise, the answer to preventing counterfitting is not by modifying old tools....
Remember the extreme anti-piracy measures of software in the late 80s/ early 90s? Were there not tools circulating that disabled most of the copy-protection schemes?
How will someone with a debugger not make the same kind of tool to combat these CS versions of graphics software?
If Steve Jobs is so great, why does AOL suck so much?
Not to start a flamewar, but I believe that not sucking and appealing to the general public in terms of features, usuability, etcare not necessarily mutually exclusive....
Well Henry Miller, you should learn a little more on India first, before you make such a gross comment....
There may be many languages in India, but knowing just 2-3 would allow one to communicate with a large segement of the population.
Hindi is an official 'national' language of India. The idea is that people in all states would speak Hindi as well as their local language. Most of the central/northern states speak languages derived from Sanskrit (which I believe Hindi to be one). Even though many of these languages have different scripts, the sounds and words are fairly simliar.. Much like the way French, English, Spanish have some simliar words and very simliar scripts. (The Indian languages differ much more in script than those European languages).
This means you can go to many places in India and speak Hindi and be understood.
Now the educated in India also speak English. While they may have some accent, they often speak English very well, and with perfect grammar. There are many sounds in any/all of the Indian languages that do not exist in the English Language. I mean to say that they make many more distinctions between two sounds than an American English speaker would make. For example, there are two different "r" and two different "rh" sounds in Bengali, but they sound absolutely identical to American English speakers. Granted, some sounds in the English language do not exist there (like the sound for x).
Now there is a small catch to this idea of Hindi being the universal language. The South Indian languages are not derived from Sanskrit. The adoption of Hindi as a national language caused *quite* a bit of resentment there. Thus they have adopted English and their common language.
Thus an English-only speaker can fare better than an Hindi-only speaker there! Keep in mind, Hydrabad is located in Southern India, which is where I would guess that a large number of the outsourced jobs are going.
Lastly, there are more people that speak Bengali in India than there are Americans in the US.
The Indian film industry cranks out more than 800 films per year, with a large part of that being Hindi....
Speaking of jobs to outsource, I wish law were outsourced there. Lawyers there are very modest, and do not charge the exorbitant fees that they do here.
Granted, people in some rural villages may not know Hindi or English. But then they probably have no use of technology jobs or tourism. They lead simple lives, don't need a lot of money (they are self-sufficient), don't need a car, don't pay huge insurance premiumns, don't live in a polluted cities, don't fight rush-hour traffic, and don't suffer from the kinds of stress that we do...
Do you think that Americans don't have an accent? If we outsourced tech support to rural Louisiana/Mississippi/Alabama, the people in western and northern US states wooden't understood a thang!
Could someone please explain how a long (several kms) unshielded wire is different than an antenna?
It would seem to me that transmitting "broadband" data, which will span a wide range of frequencies if it is going to be high-speed (and immune to noise), isn't going to just cause broadband interference?
Cable modems get away because the cable itself is coaxial and thus shielded.
Even most telephone wire is buried in the ground...
But powerlines? I just don't see how it is going to work
What better way to divert public attention than to make the public look up at the stars?
The timing of the Martian probes seemed planned to coincide with the Iraq stuff.
Its been almost 10 years and the WWW is supposed to be a major achievement over gopher....
Time to dig up all those gopher standards dicussions and bickering from the days of yore...... Oh wait, there weren't any! Gopher was really nice in that respect.
I had rimuhosting.com's service for a few months. ($19.95, 64MB ram, 4GB disk, 30GB transfer).
Tech support was extremely responsive and helpful. They are available from late at night to afternoon (due to them seemingly located in Asia).
I ran Gentoo there, with a custom file system that I had setup at home. They were extremely helpful with this.
UML's are great for most things -- except for compiling large programs.
If you want to run Gentoo Linux, I recommend you keep a duplicate of your system image at home, compile updates there, sync (unison/rsync) your packages directory, and emerge the packages. Of course, with binary-based distrobutions, this is not even a problem.
UMLs (on any provider) don't do well in applications where there is high disk utilization, otherwise I would highly reccommend using a commercial UML provider, and I would definitely recommend Rimuhosting as a good choice.
I think now they even have a page where you can view the status of, and reboot your UML machine without any assistance.
You live in a NYC apt and a 3ft ethernet cord doesn't cover your entire apartment? wow...
Re:Forgive my ignorance...
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
That's how I recently caught Chicken Pox! (from sitting behind a coughing kid for 4 hrs in a plane, on the ground).
Even without any technology involved, the kid is still 'untracable' as I don't even know his name or remember what he looked like.
Airport security is a strange thing. Years before 9/11, they took down my name, address, and ham radio callsign, just because they found me carrying an HT (handietalkie) onto the plane. Yet, I seriously doubt they would ever take down the corresponding info for every traveller with a laptop! Figures...
But seriously, the best place to upload a virus would be www.windowsupdate.com. The "Automatic Updates" agent in Windows would be all too happy to install it for you!
Slashdot Mirror
Is "dwarf star" still PC?
Or should we call it "Volumetrically Challenged"?
Legal bickering is the business of the RIAA and SCO.
Why the hell are open-source software groups getting into this? Perhaps we have been infiltrated with evil, phb M$, SCO, etc agents...
--
I wish to quote a famous saying:
"You idiot! Shazbot!"
The x86 architecture, well, is just plain silly by today's standards...
A RISC CPU and a few DSPs could perform a lot of set-top applications, with tremendmous savings in both power usage and perhaps area (size).
High Performance doesn't not mean +100W consumption. If you don't need 4-way out-of-order execution (which is a really, really, really complicated thing to implement), complicated branch prediction, large multi-level caches, etc, then your power consumption will be ** A LOT ** less.
The fact is that many signal processing applications, don't require large amounts of memory, and they are highly parallelizable. Their algorithmns tend to be much more predictable.
Also, all processing & interrupt delays are known precisely in DSPs (this is a requirement in realtime stuff). This is also why caches, etc are not desirable, since their performance is not constant.
Simple DSPs can outperform desktop PCs for a great many applications, using 1/100th the power, cost, etc....
Britney Spears may be a millionaire, but thats not from music alone.
And whatever she has, I'm sure the recording company has much much much more $$$$$.
What we need is some higher order statistical processing... We should take data such as industrialization, CO2 production, ice cap area, etc and calculate such features as Bicoherence, Tricorrelation, etc... . Let some real math show the real story.
And the journalists can all go to hell...
I remember reading an article recently, that just after the RPC bugs became know even Microsoft switched to Linux servers (because its own server were so insecure).
Thus, SCO should sue Microsoft. I'm sure there would be people willing to pay for courtroom seats on that trial!
I used knoppix and it's variants to recover about 180Gig of data just in the last week.
That's a lot of pr0n!
Little typo above, but the result is correct... 1 Million Spam Messages * ( 0.2/360 ) = 555 kW*h per Million Spam
A little math here, assuming people spend an average of 10s (1/360 hour) looking at one spam message.
/. reader spends less than 1s, but not everyone is that fast).
(Yes, the average
Further assume that the average computer uses 200w (0.2kw) on average. (Probably less, but probably much more when you figure in all the routers, servers, etc that it traveled through).
1 Million Spam Messages / ( 0.2/360 ) = 555 kW*h per Spam
Doesn't seem like much, but keep in mind that is 2 YEARS of electricity (with copious use of A/C and electric heater) for my U.S. located home.
If there are ~200 Million voters, then sending 1 campaign message to each of them would burn enough fossil fuels to power my entire high school graduating class's homes for 3 YEARS...
And who is to say that only one candidate will send one message?
Unfortunately slashdot is even worse. The time I have spent reading articles.... Well, better not go there...
If we make special printers and special versions of Adobe Photoshop, won't criminals use something else?
.... this is just another 'fence' to keep *honest* people out!
What NEW feature is going to help them counterfit more easily?
I mean, there is already enough pirated software going around... Why should the counterfitters even bother upgrade?
Besides, there is already _plenty_ of support behind open-source projects like GIMP.
Open-source software can always be 'unpatched' of any bill detection / DRM type stuff...
I mean really
The answer to gun control IS NOT to make every gun in the world a BB gun. Likewise, the answer to preventing counterfitting is not by modifying old tools....
Remember the extreme anti-piracy measures of software in the late 80s/ early 90s? Were there not tools circulating that disabled most of the copy-protection schemes?
How will someone with a debugger not make the same kind of tool to combat these CS versions of graphics software?
Sheesh!
If Steve Jobs is so great, why does AOL suck so much?
Not to start a flamewar, but I believe that not sucking and appealing to the general public in terms of features, usuability, etc are not necessarily mutually exclusive....
Well Henry Miller, you should learn a little more on India first, before you make such a gross comment....
There may be many languages in India, but knowing just 2-3 would allow one to communicate with a large segement of the population.
Hindi is an official 'national' language of India. The idea is that people in all states would speak Hindi as well as their local language. Most of the central/northern states speak languages derived from Sanskrit (which I believe Hindi to be one). Even though many of these languages have different scripts, the sounds and words are fairly simliar.. Much like the way French, English, Spanish have some simliar words and very simliar scripts. (The Indian languages differ much more in script than those European languages).
This means you can go to many places in India and speak Hindi and be understood.
Now the educated in India also speak English. While they may have some accent, they often speak English very well, and with perfect grammar. There are many sounds in any/all of the Indian languages that do not exist in the English Language. I mean to say that they make many more distinctions between two sounds than an American English speaker would make. For example, there are two different "r" and two different "rh" sounds in Bengali, but they sound absolutely identical to American English speakers. Granted, some sounds in the English language do not exist there (like the sound for x).
Now there is a small catch to this idea of Hindi being the universal language. The South Indian languages are not derived from Sanskrit. The adoption of Hindi as a national language caused *quite* a bit of resentment there. Thus they have adopted English and their common language.
Thus an English-only speaker can fare better than an Hindi-only speaker there! Keep in mind, Hydrabad is located in Southern India, which is where I would guess that a large number of the outsourced jobs are going.
Lastly, there are more people that speak Bengali in India than there are Americans in the US.
The Indian film industry cranks out more than 800 films per year, with a large part of that being Hindi....
Speaking of jobs to outsource, I wish law were outsourced there. Lawyers there are very modest, and do not charge the exorbitant fees that they do here.
Granted, people in some rural villages may not know Hindi or English. But then they probably have no use of technology jobs or tourism. They lead simple lives, don't need a lot of money (they are self-sufficient), don't need a car, don't pay huge insurance premiumns, don't live in a polluted cities, don't fight rush-hour traffic, and don't suffer from the kinds of stress that we do...
Do you think that Americans don't have an accent? If we outsourced tech support to rural Louisiana/Mississippi/Alabama, the people in western and northern US states wooden't understood a thang!
Whats next?
GPL Martian Lander?
Now we can make a 'Virtual Martian Lander' and add our own mods to it....
Sheeesh!
What is Microsoft going to do with the rights to an universal file format? (Not like they use any...)
Could someone please explain how a long (several kms) unshielded wire is different than an antenna?
It would seem to me that transmitting "broadband" data, which will span a wide range of frequencies if it is going to be high-speed (and immune to noise), isn't going to just cause broadband interference?
Cable modems get away because the cable itself is coaxial and thus shielded.
Even most telephone wire is buried in the ground...
But powerlines? I just don't see how it is going to work
In the US, the following crimes are ranked from most severe to least.
1. Being a teenager and copying music illegally.
(distant 2nd)
2. Being part of un-organized crime and killing somebody
3. Being part of organized crime and sell pirated software
4. Being a president/politician/company and stealing money
5. Being part of organized crime and killing someone.
6. Being a lawyer that takes 50% of the settlement. Oh Wait, that is legal!
It seems the more severe and more 'illegal' the offense is, the weaker the punishment is...
That's why I'm highly in-favor of open-source DRM software....
Intels future is so bright, they need sun glasses!
Now we will be able to read a book by the light of the CPU as well as that of the screen....
What better way to divert public attention than to make the public look up at the stars? The timing of the Martian probes seemed planned to coincide with the Iraq stuff.
Its been almost 10 years and the WWW is supposed to be a major achievement over gopher....
Time to dig up all those gopher standards dicussions and bickering from the days of yore...... Oh wait, there weren't any! Gopher was really nice in that respect.
My, how we have progressed!
I had rimuhosting.com's service for a few months. ($19.95, 64MB ram, 4GB disk, 30GB transfer).
Tech support was extremely responsive and helpful. They are available from late at night to afternoon (due to them seemingly located in Asia).
I ran Gentoo there, with a custom file system that I had setup at home. They were extremely helpful with this. UML's are great for most things -- except for compiling large programs.
If you want to run Gentoo Linux, I recommend you keep a duplicate of your system image at home, compile updates there, sync (unison/rsync) your packages directory, and emerge the packages. Of course, with binary-based distrobutions, this is not even a problem.
UMLs (on any provider) don't do well in applications where there is high disk utilization, otherwise I would highly reccommend using a commercial UML provider, and I would definitely recommend Rimuhosting as a good choice.
I think now they even have a page where you can view the status of, and reboot your UML machine without any assistance.
You live in a NYC apt and a 3ft ethernet cord doesn't cover your entire apartment? wow...
That's how I recently caught Chicken Pox! (from sitting behind a coughing kid for 4 hrs in a plane, on the ground).
Even without any technology involved, the kid is still 'untracable' as I don't even know his name or remember what he looked like.
Airport security is a strange thing. Years before 9/11, they took down my name, address, and ham radio callsign, just because they found me carrying an HT (handietalkie) onto the plane. Yet, I seriously doubt they would ever take down the corresponding info for every traveller with a laptop! Figures...
But seriously, the best place to upload a virus would be www.windowsupdate.com. The "Automatic Updates" agent in Windows would be all too happy to install it for you!
Can hackers, crackers, and file sharers take advantage of this public WiFi?
Now why would they want to do a thing like that?
With all those fans buzzing, its no wonder you can' hear the sound of the keyboard clicking!