if you're in need of 64-bit computing, then please go and buy one, they already exist and work quite well. I've no doubt that 64-bit processing would be great if it were cheap, but the desktop doesn't need it. (unless you are a workstation user, but you are in the minority then)
the last quote from the article seems like a big duh to me. 'If it doesn't save us money we have no intrest in it'. Well yeah, if you buy something and it costs more for you to have it then it provides in value to you, then you should probably not buy it in the first place. This is common knowledge.
That said, 64-bit processing just doesn't seem to be needed for the majority of tasks yet. We've had 64-bit computers for years now and it's not like there is a great demand for them. If you needed a 64-bit computer before, then you've already got one and everyone in 32-bit land is fine and happy. Until Doom 3 requires a 64-bit processor to play, then the common man will not need a 64-bit processor.
In the common PC, the major bottlenecks are the RAM and hard drive anyway, not the CPU.
But I know that it costs me more then 10 bucks to get even an OEM copy of windows. I was saying that if BE (or MS) charged me 10 bucks for a copy of their os then I would gladly pay it. Which is another reason that I always get the cheapbytes (or similar) versions of linux distros when I get the CD's. I don't use support so I don't pay for it.
The OS should always be free to the home user IMO. I've only paid for one OS, that was Win 3.11/DOS back when it came as part of my computer. Since I started to build all my systems from scratch, I've yet to pay the MS tax again. I believe that in order for an os to be sucessful in this day and age it has to have a low barrier to entry on 2 fronts, cost and development. It has to be cheap to get on your machine and cheap for others (or yourself) to develop software for. BE should to have given away the OS and sold applications. Made an application approval procedure so that an app would be 'certified', but given the core OS away for free (or low cost, like 10 bucks). 60-100 dollars was too much to switch to an OS that had few applications. Linux, *BSD has the lowest barrier to entry yet, almost nothing. MS has a much higher entry point, you have to buy both the OS and the tools to make stuff on it. For the casual hacker, the dev tools are expensive on MS (like me). Increasing the size of your network is crucial, look at fax machines, the only reason fax machines are valuable in todays world is because almost everyone has one. There are much better tools for sending documents to people, but fax machines are everywhere and thus are the medium of choice for many types ot transactions.
if real sys-admins that knew what to do were incontrol instead of MSCE monkeys. I'm not doubting that a MSCE can do what the degree trains them to do, but it doesn't help them learn how to think.
If real professionals had been hired, then I think that all the worms that are still circulating would not have gotten as far in the first place.
But I really ment that they didn't have to make crappy games just so that they could fit in the smaller carts, some were just as good as the full size ones. Though generally the crappier games ended up on the smaller format because well good games usually want more space.
Where's the robot's, flying cars, videophones (never will there be widespread video phones), and other such gadgets that were supposed to happen from fifty years ago?
PC's have invaded like no other, and I don't want to say that we haven't made progress, cause we have.
But space travel will not happen in our lifetime. Sorry, you can hope and dream all you want, but only a handful of people will have made it into space by the time that you are old and grey.
Mass space transportation requires either a massive leap in technology, or a changing of the sacrifices that we are willing to make to get there.
I hate statements like the last line in said story.
It shows no thought whatsoever. Besides, since the age of nintendo, games have been coming to usin the form of... a card. The TurboGraphix 16, all it's games came on cards.
The Sega master system which came out only a year after the nes, also used cards to deliver game. I had about 10 of them. They were really good games too, like Spy vs Spy. Not stupid little crappy games, but full games just like on the carts. Though they were usually a little bit smaller in data size. (as well as physical).
Also don't forget about those awesome card-cds, that are basically a cd cut down to the size of a card and can be put in the cd player.
open source compiler, and an open source dev platform.
The problem with programming languages is that they are only as useful as the number of people that can write compatable code. Perl would be useless if you had to write everything in Perl and couldn't link to C code. You have to have as many interfaces out of your world as possiable.
Priceless event. going into space is a priceless event in our lifetimes. Unless you are an astronaut, you will never going to be able to orbit the earth from way up above. Space travel has shown to be just simply not a possibility to us normal people.
You can always make more money, but you might never get the chance to goto space.
How could you not love the fact that you never had to run scandisk ever again once you are running with NTFS? YOu can install win2000 with Fat 32 and it will work fine. But if your system ever crashes, which does happen, you will have to wait while scandisk is run.
HyperThreading works by letting 2 threads execute at the same time. So basically, if one thread stalls, then the other runs. Or if one thread is only using the FPU then the other can use the integer ALU. Basically it increases the efficiency of the processor. But it's not always going to work, one major problem with the whole idea is that it requires a TON of cache on the proc to work well. If one thread is stalled, then it slaps the other thread in the processor, of course it has to be in the cache, which means that they have to somehow decide how to divide up the internal caches between two processes. Which means that you will probably get more missed cache hits.
So if you are writing code that you think is stalling already, the I would venture to state that trying to use hyperthreading on the same proc will not increase your performance.
Does anyone put their computer 'on the internet' anymore? Most people who have a dsl line have a firewall, or at least a NAT that shuts down most services there.
You can live in the stone age of cell phones if you want.
I bet that running a ftp server that has the same content will result in less traffic even if the movie is downloaded more often. Why? Because of the crosstalk inherit in the p2p protocols.
That's the main area where video games directly competes with movies. Arcades are dwarfed by movie theaters. I don't know about the movie rentals as compared to game rentals, probably fairly even.
for the money. Most people realise that you get like 50+ hours of enjoyment out of a good game while you only get a couple of hours out of a cd until it becomes background music. With the exception of that rare album that you play until your roommate destroys your stereo in retribution.
Also video games have multi million dollar budgets, are in development for years. Most albums are produced with at most a couple hundred thousand dollars, and composed in only a few months. Video games are big business, and may eclipse movies (if they haven't already).
Too bad that most people think that this theory is crazy and will never happen.
Pay-per-view is the holy grail for the music publishers. (not the artists, it's actually the death of art) I hope that if they ever do get this passed that there is some sort of riot, but unfortunatly it will be silently accepted like everything else.
I would think that requires rebuilding the whole thing anyway. So it might not actually improve it.
Also you have to ensure that the simulator has zero bugs, which means simulating the bugs in the original equiptment which their code depends on.
Writing a perfect software simulation of hardware is IMO a job as equally hard as just rewriting the original code.
It's not like they have millions and millions of lines of code, the original rom must to have been less then 64k or so. They just have to rewrite the code in a language that is more maintainable which machine code is not.
Slashdot Mirror
if you're in need of 64-bit computing, then please go and buy one, they already exist and work quite well. I've no doubt that 64-bit processing would be great if it were cheap, but the desktop doesn't need it. (unless you are a workstation user, but you are in the minority then)
the last quote from the article seems like a big duh to me. 'If it doesn't save us money we have no intrest in it'. Well yeah, if you buy something and it costs more for you to have it then it provides in value to you, then you should probably not buy it in the first place. This is common knowledge.
That said, 64-bit processing just doesn't seem to be needed for the majority of tasks yet. We've had 64-bit computers for years now and it's not like there is a great demand for them. If you needed a 64-bit computer before, then you've already got one and everyone in 32-bit land is fine and happy. Until Doom 3 requires a 64-bit processor to play, then the common man will not need a 64-bit processor.
In the common PC, the major bottlenecks are the RAM and hard drive anyway, not the CPU.
But I know that it costs me more then 10 bucks to get even an OEM copy of windows. I was saying that if BE (or MS) charged me 10 bucks for a copy of their os then I would gladly pay it. Which is another reason that I always get the cheapbytes (or similar) versions of linux distros when I get the CD's. I don't use support so I don't pay for it.
The OS should always be free to the home user IMO. I've only paid for one OS, that was Win 3.11/DOS back when it came as part of my computer. Since I started to build all my systems from scratch, I've yet to pay the MS tax again.
I believe that in order for an os to be sucessful in this day and age it has to have a low barrier to entry on 2 fronts, cost and development. It has to be cheap to get on your machine and cheap for others (or yourself) to develop software for.
BE should to have given away the OS and sold applications. Made an application approval procedure so that an app would be 'certified', but given the core OS away for free (or low cost, like 10 bucks). 60-100 dollars was too much to switch to an OS that had few applications.
Linux, *BSD has the lowest barrier to entry yet, almost nothing. MS has a much higher entry point, you have to buy both the OS and the tools to make stuff on it. For the casual hacker, the dev tools are expensive on MS (like me).
Increasing the size of your network is crucial, look at fax machines, the only reason fax machines are valuable in todays world is because almost everyone has one. There are much better tools for sending documents to people, but fax machines are everywhere and thus are the medium of choice for many types ot transactions.
if real sys-admins that knew what to do were incontrol instead of MSCE monkeys. I'm not doubting that a MSCE can do what the degree trains them to do, but it doesn't help them learn how to think.
If real professionals had been hired, then I think that all the worms that are still circulating would not have gotten as far in the first place.
But I really ment that they didn't have to make crappy games just so that they could fit in the smaller carts, some were just as good as the full size ones. Though generally the crappier games ended up on the smaller format because well good games usually want more space.
Do you mean IE?
Oh that was a low blow.
if you don't want to goto space, then what are you doing on /. This is news for nerds, not news for people who want a yacht. ;p
Where's the robot's, flying cars, videophones (never will there be widespread video phones), and other such gadgets that were supposed to happen from fifty years ago?
PC's have invaded like no other, and I don't want to say that we haven't made progress, cause we have.
But space travel will not happen in our lifetime. Sorry, you can hope and dream all you want, but only a handful of people will have made it into space by the time that you are old and grey.
Mass space transportation requires either a massive leap in technology, or a changing of the sacrifices that we are willing to make to get there.
Have you ever heard of a little thing called Pokemon?
Guess who makes it? Yeah, nintendo.
They never left the playing card arena. Just cause you never owned a pack of Nintendo 'playing' cards doesn't mean that they stop making them.
I hate statements like the last line in said story.
It shows no thought whatsoever. Besides, since the age of nintendo, games have been coming to usin the form of... a card. The TurboGraphix 16, all it's games came on cards.
The Sega master system which came out only a year after the nes, also used cards to deliver game. I had about 10 of them. They were really good games too, like Spy vs Spy. Not stupid little crappy games, but full games just like on the carts. Though they were usually a little bit smaller in data size. (as well as physical).
Also don't forget about those awesome card-cds, that are basically a cd cut down to the size of a card and can be put in the cd player.
very cool stuff.
open source compiler, and an open source dev platform.
The problem with programming languages is that they are only as useful as the number of people that can write compatable code. Perl would be useless if you had to write everything in Perl and couldn't link to C code. You have to have as many interfaces out of your world as possiable.
Priceless event. going into space is a priceless event in our lifetimes. Unless you are an astronaut, you will never going to be able to orbit the earth from way up above. Space travel has shown to be just simply not a possibility to us normal people.
You can always make more money, but you might never get the chance to goto space.
How could you not love the fact that you never had to run scandisk ever again once you are running with NTFS? YOu can install win2000 with Fat 32 and it will work fine. But if your system ever crashes, which does happen, you will have to wait while scandisk is run.
I hate scandisk
already a Pepsi machine in the current version.
Not a big surprise... art imitates life... the sims DRM is next.
Because it's the same as sending an email.
but I don't think that it's any different then A Beautiful Mind in the relationship it has with science.
Now there's a science related movie that grips you.
One of my favorite science related films.
Gattaca maybe?
Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, Resident Evil.
HyperThreading works by letting 2 threads execute at the same time. So basically, if one thread stalls, then the other runs. Or if one thread is only using the FPU then the other can use the integer ALU. Basically it increases the efficiency of the processor.
But it's not always going to work, one major problem with the whole idea is that it requires a TON of cache on the proc to work well. If one thread is stalled, then it slaps the other thread in the processor, of course it has to be in the cache, which means that they have to somehow decide how to divide up the internal caches between two processes. Which means that you will probably get more missed cache hits.
So if you are writing code that you think is stalling already, the I would venture to state that trying to use hyperthreading on the same proc will not increase your performance.
Does anyone put their computer 'on the internet' anymore? Most people who have a dsl line have a firewall, or at least a NAT that shuts down most services there.
You can live in the stone age of cell phones if you want.
that it's not the movies as much as the protocol.
I bet that running a ftp server that has the same content will result in less traffic even if the movie is downloaded more often. Why? Because of the crosstalk inherit in the p2p protocols.
What about video sales?
That's the main area where video games directly competes with movies. Arcades are dwarfed by movie theaters. I don't know about the movie rentals as compared to game rentals, probably fairly even.
for the money. Most people realise that you get like 50+ hours of enjoyment out of a good game while you only get a couple of hours out of a cd until it becomes background music. With the exception of that rare album that you play until your roommate destroys your stereo in retribution.
Also video games have multi million dollar budgets, are in development for years. Most albums are produced with at most a couple hundred thousand dollars, and composed in only a few months. Video games are big business, and may eclipse movies (if they haven't already).
Too bad that most people think that this theory is crazy and will never happen.
Pay-per-view is the holy grail for the music publishers. (not the artists, it's actually the death of art) I hope that if they ever do get this passed that there is some sort of riot, but unfortunatly it will be silently accepted like everything else.
Apathy.
I would think that requires rebuilding the whole thing anyway. So it might not actually improve it.
Also you have to ensure that the simulator has zero bugs, which means simulating the bugs in the original equiptment which their code depends on.
Writing a perfect software simulation of hardware is IMO a job as equally hard as just rewriting the original code.
It's not like they have millions and millions of lines of code, the original rom must to have been less then 64k or so. They just have to rewrite the code in a language that is more maintainable which machine code is not.