"But, like it or not, this hurts Apple. *You* might not think it hurts Apple, but the only people in the position to *decide* that it hurts Apple - i.e., Apple - have decided that it *does* hurt Apple. Whether it's because of business model or arbitrary decision, that's their decision to make."
But I don't care what hurts Apple. I look out for my well-being, not theirs.
It's pretty rare for a commercial software to have conditions that I'm prepared to live with in their entirety, so I'm prepared to disregard the EULA when it suits me. If I don't run OS X on generic hardware it'll be because I don't think unsupported software is worth it, or because I don't want to take the legal risk, not because I'm looking out for Apple.
I'll do the same for Microsoft or anyone else. They're all for-profit companies, they're looking out for their bottom line before anything else. If I don't look out for my bottom line, no one else will, so that's what I'll do.
"With unchartered space, a collision is bound to happen when you slow down unless your sensors can detect something oh say the size of a buick from 1,000,000 miles ahead when you tap the brakes."
There's a risk, but's smaller than you'd think. There isn't a lot to bump into in interstellar space.
"As I understand it, the various pipelines of the Cell chip tend to be more specialized than the Coolthreads technology Sun is using on their new T1 processor."
Yes. A Cell's SPUs are not PowerPC processors, so you can't run the same code on the PowerPC front end as you do on the SPUs. Not only that, but Cell and Niagara are designed for totally different things. Cell is designed for floating-point intensive apps with pretty poor general purpose capabilities, while a Niagara has 1 floating point unit shared between all 8 cores and 32 threads but they're all good at the branchy sort of thing servers ususally run.
I think these Cell servers will be more useful for things like render farms, They'll be essentially useless as generic servers for web or database duty.
"Of course, we also don't have Large Hadron Colliders all over the universe, smashing particles together with enormous speed and accuracy, do we?"
The universe can easily put our best efforts to shame. For example, the Oh My God particle. If constant bombardment by these sorts of particles hasn't yet destroyed us, it's doubtful anything we do will make it worse.
"In other words not only is there are redshit if we fire a lazer up into space from the earth (i.e. light leaving a gravity well) but even if we just shine a laser from one point on the earth's surface to another there should be a small redshift as well. His argument is that one would expect to see such a reshift in a accelerating frame because the light is traveling farther than it would at constant velocity."
What implications does this have for the anomalous acceleration experienced by the Pioneer and Voyager proves?
Nuclear reactors don't have to use water as a coolant. They can use metals with reasonably low melting points like lead and sodium, and as another poster noted some reactor designs use inert gasses that don't change phase.
"By performing a MITM attack during the public key exchange when any connection is first established (the details of the exchange necessarily being part of the bittorrent protocol). The ISP is perfectly situated in terms of routing to do this and because keys must be exchanged early on in the session there is probably not too much overhead associated with doing so on a large scale (i.e. for many customers and many connections per customer)."
However, the according to TFA the updated BitTorrent protocol uses a shared-secret to defeat the MITM attacks, the info-hash of the.torrent file.
I pay extra for the 50 gb deal. If Shaw doesn't upgrade their network to compensate for the extra bandwidth that I'm explicitly paying for, how is that my problem?
"You've forgotten what was being discussed. One can easily download Fedora from one of the 10000 available FTP mirrors within a day or two of release. This is about downloading pirate content and software."
Is it?
When CUUG hosted a talk by RMS, we didn't have the bandwidth to host a GB+ video, so we distributed it by BitTorrent. Not only was it legal for us to distribute it in this way, RMS only consented to the video being made on the condition that it be freely distributable.
So, if Shaw starts to throttle BitTorrent, they throttle perfectly legitimate traffic like this.
But that brings up another point. In 1993, look at what SGI had compared to PCs and Macs. They had better, graphically-oriented hardware, and they had a proper OS instead of what sufficed on PCs and Macs at the time (NT notwithstanding). There was a justification, a reason why it was better, and there were graphically-oriented people on the platform, who were potential users (even if they turned out to not buy many copies).
Linux, for the most part, runs on exactly the same hardware that Windows and MacOS do, so no advantage there. They are both now protected memory, preemptive multitasking OSes, and again no advantage (at least not big enough for most people). And Linux users tend not to be the sort that need advanced photo editing, so there's even less of a market.
I realize that (or they would have collided or passed close enough that Pluto would get captured or flung out of the solar system long ago), but Pluto passes closer to the Sun than Neptune, meaning that it doesn't account for most of the mass at that distance from the Sun.
I've given this a bit of thought, and it seems to me that the term "planet" demands that the object have some special property that sets it apart from all the countless bodies in a solar system.
The only thing I can think of that makes sense in light of these new objects being discovered in the outer solar system is that the object must dominate its orbit. This excludes Pluto, since it crosses the orbit of Neptune, but that seems to be a much more elegant solution than the mental gymnastics it takes to include Pluto but exclude all the many other trans-Neptunian objects out there. The problem seems to be that too many people are unwilling to allow Pluto to lose its planet status.
Honestly, the trans-Neputnian objects probably need their own classification system that allows for larger bodies like Pluto and UB313 to have the recognition they deserve.
"Why bring Apple into a conversation about a defective XP driver?"
Because this whole issue has a very dodgy feel to it. The secrecy, the lack of a fix, etc. It seems quite weird for a software-only problem. If we're not getting the whole story and there is indeed a hardware component to the problem, it could have a serious impact on Apple and others (Linux, etc).
Also, Macbook Pros have a camera that's always connected, and it uses USB2. You can't disconnect it, so if this affects everyone, Apple will be more screwed than most.
"Well, maybe to answer your question: If you have a heavy cart to need to be moved do you?: A) Use a hurd of chickens to pull it (Sun T1) B) Use a couple of oxen (Itanium) I'm thinking B, but those chicken are 'eco friendly' so maybe some greenpeace people will help pull the cart with them."
OTOH, if you've got thousands of small carts, it makes sense to use chickens instead of oxen.
Many systems benefit more from good single-thread performance. For example, Niagara wouldn't make a good desktop chip. But the servers it's designed for deal with thousands of requests concurrently.
x86 isn't explicitly compressed like Thumb, but it still enjoys smaller code sizes than most RISCs.
It's not ideal, but I think it's fair to say that with a sufficiently large investment AMD and Intel have overcome the disadvantages, at least for laptops/desktops/small servers.
"Another thing, everyone says that x86 is now risc micro-ops under the hood. Why doesn't intel or AMD let people program straight to those micro ops, if they wanted the speed advantadge?"
These wouldn't make much of an ISA, they're quite large and are subject to change with every core revision.
One of the things I miss on Linux is PF. I like OpenBSD for other reasons, but PF is the only thing I can't do without, so I keep another box around for it.
Once I've got one of those chips with hardware-supported virtualization (AFAIK, OpenBSD doesn't get along with Xen), I'd like to try putting both together on the same box.
"Will i still be able to run background processing tasks like Compressor and handbrake yet get good foreground performance so i can email, websurf and get on with life while waiting for those 30-1 hour long tasks, instead of walking away from the machine, lest i get tempted to use it and really slow down the renders."
With the second core, I imagine it has a decisive advantage for things like this. The reviews I've seen all make a point of saying how responsive the machine is.
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed GMail can handle that quite easily. The price for leaving it open is restarting daily.
The Session Saver extension helps make restarting easier though, as it allows you to restore the previous state of the browser.
"But, like it or not, this hurts Apple. *You* might not think it hurts Apple, but the only people in the position to *decide* that it hurts Apple - i.e., Apple - have decided that it *does* hurt Apple. Whether it's because of business model or arbitrary decision, that's their decision to make."
But I don't care what hurts Apple. I look out for my well-being, not theirs.
It's pretty rare for a commercial software to have conditions that I'm prepared to live with in their entirety, so I'm prepared to disregard the EULA when it suits me. If I don't run OS X on generic hardware it'll be because I don't think unsupported software is worth it, or because I don't want to take the legal risk, not because I'm looking out for Apple.
I'll do the same for Microsoft or anyone else. They're all for-profit companies, they're looking out for their bottom line before anything else. If I don't look out for my bottom line, no one else will, so that's what I'll do.
"(Having multiple cores)... inside a chip is like having more than one engine under the hood of a car."
No, it's like having multiple cylinders inside an engine.
"With unchartered space, a collision is bound to happen when you slow down unless your sensors can detect something oh say the size of a buick from 1,000,000 miles ahead when you tap the brakes."
There's a risk, but's smaller than you'd think. There isn't a lot to bump into in interstellar space.
"As I understand it, the various pipelines of the Cell chip tend to be more specialized than the Coolthreads technology Sun is using on their new T1 processor."
Yes. A Cell's SPUs are not PowerPC processors, so you can't run the same code on the PowerPC front end as you do on the SPUs. Not only that, but Cell and Niagara are designed for totally different things. Cell is designed for floating-point intensive apps with pretty poor general purpose capabilities, while a Niagara has 1 floating point unit shared between all 8 cores and 32 threads but they're all good at the branchy sort of thing servers ususally run.
I think these Cell servers will be more useful for things like render farms, They'll be essentially useless as generic servers for web or database duty.
"Of course, we also don't have Large Hadron Colliders all over the universe, smashing particles together with enormous speed and accuracy, do we?"
The universe can easily put our best efforts to shame. For example, the Oh My God particle. If constant bombardment by these sorts of particles hasn't yet destroyed us, it's doubtful anything we do will make it worse.
Forgive me for my lack of physics knowledge...
"In other words not only is there are redshit if we fire a lazer up into space from the earth (i.e. light leaving a gravity well) but even if we just shine a laser from one point on the earth's surface to another there should be a small redshift as well. His argument is that one would expect to see such a reshift in a accelerating frame because the light is traveling farther than it would at constant velocity."
What implications does this have for the anomalous acceleration experienced by the Pioneer and Voyager proves?
We could set off every nuke we have and it wouldn't measurably affect the moon's orbit.
Nuclear reactors don't have to use water as a coolant. They can use metals with reasonably low melting points like lead and sodium, and as another poster noted some reactor designs use inert gasses that don't change phase.
I was proposing a limit on total transfer for longer periods, like a month.
Why not just give people a limit on how much bandwidth they're allowed to use and leave it to them to decide how much of that goes towards P2P?
"By performing a MITM attack during the public key exchange when any connection is first established (the details of the exchange necessarily being part of the bittorrent protocol). The ISP is perfectly situated in terms of routing to do this and because keys must be exchanged early on in the session there is probably not too much overhead associated with doing so on a large scale (i.e. for many customers and many connections per customer)."
.torrent file.
However, the according to TFA the updated BitTorrent protocol uses a shared-secret to defeat the MITM attacks, the info-hash of the
I pay extra for the 50 gb deal. If Shaw doesn't upgrade their network to compensate for the extra bandwidth that I'm explicitly paying for, how is that my problem?
"You've forgotten what was being discussed. One can easily download Fedora from one of the 10000 available FTP mirrors within a day or two of release. This is about downloading pirate content and software."
Is it?
When CUUG hosted a talk by RMS, we didn't have the bandwidth to host a GB+ video, so we distributed it by BitTorrent. Not only was it legal for us to distribute it in this way, RMS only consented to the video being made on the condition that it be freely distributable.
So, if Shaw starts to throttle BitTorrent, they throttle perfectly legitimate traffic like this.
But that brings up another point. In 1993, look at what SGI had compared to PCs and Macs. They had better, graphically-oriented hardware, and they had a proper OS instead of what sufficed on PCs and Macs at the time (NT notwithstanding). There was a justification, a reason why it was better, and there were graphically-oriented people on the platform, who were potential users (even if they turned out to not buy many copies).
Linux, for the most part, runs on exactly the same hardware that Windows and MacOS do, so no advantage there. They are both now protected memory, preemptive multitasking OSes, and again no advantage (at least not big enough for most people). And Linux users tend not to be the sort that need advanced photo editing, so there's even less of a market.
It means Pluto isn't the dominant body at that distance from the Sun. Even if it isn't at that distance from the Sun most of the time.
By my proposed definition of "planet", that is the most important criteria.
I realize that (or they would have collided or passed close enough that Pluto would get captured or flung out of the solar system long ago), but Pluto passes closer to the Sun than Neptune, meaning that it doesn't account for most of the mass at that distance from the Sun.
I've given this a bit of thought, and it seems to me that the term "planet" demands that the object have some special property that sets it apart from all the countless bodies in a solar system.
The only thing I can think of that makes sense in light of these new objects being discovered in the outer solar system is that the object must dominate its orbit. This excludes Pluto, since it crosses the orbit of Neptune, but that seems to be a much more elegant solution than the mental gymnastics it takes to include Pluto but exclude all the many other trans-Neptunian objects out there. The problem seems to be that too many people are unwilling to allow Pluto to lose its planet status.
Honestly, the trans-Neputnian objects probably need their own classification system that allows for larger bodies like Pluto and UB313 to have the recognition they deserve.
"Why bring Apple into a conversation about a defective XP driver?"
Because this whole issue has a very dodgy feel to it. The secrecy, the lack of a fix, etc. It seems quite weird for a software-only problem. If we're not getting the whole story and there is indeed a hardware component to the problem, it could have a serious impact on Apple and others (Linux, etc).
Also, Macbook Pros have a camera that's always connected, and it uses USB2. You can't disconnect it, so if this affects everyone, Apple will be more screwed than most.
Apple passes up obvious opportunities to expand, and it works out for the best more often than not.
"Well, maybe to answer your question: If you have a heavy cart to need to be moved do you?: A) Use a hurd of chickens to pull it (Sun T1) B) Use a couple of oxen (Itanium) I'm thinking B, but those chicken are 'eco friendly' so maybe some greenpeace people will help pull the cart with them."
OTOH, if you've got thousands of small carts, it makes sense to use chickens instead of oxen.
Many systems benefit more from good single-thread performance. For example, Niagara wouldn't make a good desktop chip. But the servers it's designed for deal with thousands of requests concurrently.
x86 isn't explicitly compressed like Thumb, but it still enjoys smaller code sizes than most RISCs.
It's not ideal, but I think it's fair to say that with a sufficiently large investment AMD and Intel have overcome the disadvantages, at least for laptops/desktops/small servers.
"Another thing, everyone says that x86 is now risc micro-ops under the hood. Why doesn't intel or AMD let people program straight to those micro ops, if they wanted the speed advantadge?"
These wouldn't make much of an ISA, they're quite large and are subject to change with every core revision.
One of the things I miss on Linux is PF. I like OpenBSD for other reasons, but PF is the only thing I can't do without, so I keep another box around for it.
Once I've got one of those chips with hardware-supported virtualization (AFAIK, OpenBSD doesn't get along with Xen), I'd like to try putting both together on the same box.
"Will i still be able to run background processing tasks like Compressor and handbrake yet get good foreground performance so i can email, websurf and get on with life while waiting for those 30-1 hour long tasks, instead of walking away from the machine, lest i get tempted to use it and really slow down the renders."
With the second core, I imagine it has a decisive advantage for things like this. The reviews I've seen all make a point of saying how responsive the machine is.