I did not say you are wrong, I said the thing you quoted from the article is unlikely to happen.
You are right, much time have passed since NT 3.1. Those days microkernels was thought to be the state of art, the future of kernels. Smart people claimed that as the hardware evolve, the performance gap between monolithic kernels and microkernels will become negligible and the robustness of microkernels will make it superior. But it did not happen. Today, monolithic kernels dominate the desktop market, the only exception is OSX with its Mach kernel. The quasi-micro NT kernel was turned into a bloated monolithic kernel, BeOS died, and Hurd... hasn't really born yet. Conclusion: monolitic design is still the way to follow.
Now back to the original topic: I don't really see any reason for userland graphics except stability. It WILL decrease performance, which is cruical for the VGA cards, and might result in driver incompatibility I think. If I'm right, then it will take quite some time to write compatible drivers for older cards (assuming that nvidia and ati is willing to write for their own cards). And Microsoft does not have time, they already decided to leave out WinFS from Longhorn. They can't postpone Longhorn beyond 2006 because that would be too big pull for desktop Linux/BSD. And I guess by 2006 ReactOS will become a usable OS too.
Actually the whole graphic subsystem was in userland in Windows NT 3. It was bulletproof but slow and it did not allow the low level hw access needed for DirectX, so they moved it into kernel with NT 4.0. And I'm quite sure it will stay there.
If you'd read the article you would know that a stock 4-socket Opteron mainboard used, turned into a 8 CPU system. Such simple (cost effective?) upgradability is a very good reason in my optinion. And if you take into account that both Intel and AMD decided to go for dual-core, it might be the most logical way to improve the performance of the chips.
"The up and coming JPEG 2000 standard has been prepared along these lines, and agreement reached with over 20 large organisations holding many patents in this area to allow use of their intellectual property in connection with the standard without payment of license fees or royalties. It is of course still possible that other organisations or individuals may claim intellectual property rights that affect implementation of the standard, and any implementors are urged to carry out their own searches and investigations in this area."
Sadly both wavelet and fractal compression appears to be a minefiled, so a solution for free lossy image compression is yet to come. On the other hand, I believe there are some nearly lossless algorithms not encumbered by patents. They might be the solution for the situation, as they provide much better compression than PNG while making only non-perceptible (really!) changes to the image.
Actually everything else in the room hit by the sunlight get way beyond 84F before either the window glass or the air inside the room. They start to radiate and heating up the air, much sooner than glass. And a typical window glass has neligible surface connection with other material than air and air has poor heat conduction and storage (sorry I don't know the exact English name of these physic attributes) capabilities, I think it is an educated guess that glass gets hot slower than air, thus this temperature boundary can be a real issue. (Though I have never made such measurements.)
There are thousands of (unofficial) software patents in the EU. They are not protected by law (yet?), therefore they are not enforceable, but they do exist.
Do you know that 84.7% of all statistics are made up?
Seriously, Windows NT has been 32bit since the very begining, only WOW (Windows on Windows, the subsystem that provides Win16 compatibility) contains some 16bit code.
Only one of the 4 videocards can use AGP, so the other 3 must be (probably fanless) PCI cards, those don't generate too much heat. Just think about 3D intensive games, where both top notch CPUs and videocards are running on full load. It produces much more heat but it still can be handled. (Though the newer videocards are getting loud.)
1. When we say "high speed", what bandwidth are we talking about? The article says: It has already signed up Lucent Technologies to provide equipment that currently supports data speeds of up to 2 megabits per second (mbps). The gear ultimately could support speeds of up to 14.4mbps.
2. How accessible is this high speed for today devices like say, mobile phones? Can I use my cell phone to browse at high speed? No, it will be available for the yet to come 3G mobiles that have been promised for many years already. I have a feeling that we will need to wait more for them and when they become available they will be called 4G, skipping 3G. We have seen such thing a couple of times already.
The actual meaning and the layout of the buttons on the wheel is secret and varies by driver, but usually there are buttons for setting the balance and torque of the brakes, the pitstop speed limiter, the differential, the ratio of fuel and air, and probably much more.
The reason for the death of the API is probably GNU/Linux. A closed set of poorly documented APIS doesn't compare to much to "We'll give you the source code" Microsoft Developer Network has comprehensive documentation about the Microsoft APIs. When I was developing for Windows platform, I never needed any documentation other than MSDN. And if you want source code, you can download the SDKs for free. Though it contains only sample codes, I wonder how many Linux developers looked at the sources of the APIs they use. I have never did such a thing.
I haven't tried Theora yet, but I tried On2's VP3 codec (on which Theora is based), and it performed very well against the MPEG-4 codecs, I really liked it.
The second loop is traversed backwards in the C++ version while it is not in the Java version. Don't ask me why.
There is an instruction called loop in the x86 instruction set which decreases the value of the register cx by 1 on every iteration, until it becomes 0. So by writing decrementing for loops, it could be transformed to a mov and a loop. Two decades ago it was faster than increasing a variable, checking if it reached the required value and if it's less then jumping to the begining. But nowadays x86 processors work different, and loop became slower than the jumping method. It seems the writer of this code forgot this one. Anyways, the optimizing compilers don't generate loop instructions for decrementing for loops anymore.
I don't believe this convergence. What's the point of making a device that works as a tv and a cellular phone? I wouldn't like to carry a 50 inch large mobile everywhere, and I can't imagine a family sitting around a cellular phone and watching soap operas on the 3 inch display of it. This is nonsense. Having a mobile capable of playing films can be nice, but don't tell me that these universal devices will rule the world and render every one function device useless. Swiss knives are lame.
Actually the difference between viruses and worms is that worms are standalone programs while viruses need to infect other executables to be effective.
The default windows 2000 install does not support harddisk sizes over 128gb. SP3 enables the support for 48bit LBA, thus solving this problem. Here's the related MSKB article.
I don't think it would worth to keep UNIVAC running, do to it's massive power consumption and need for contionus maintenance. Here is a site about UNIVACs today that might be interesting for you.
Zealots don't hate an OS because it's inferior. They hate it because it's other than their beloved OS. I guess you have noticed already that Linux zealots like only the distribution they use and say that it's the only good OS, every other distributions suck. I think it's rather about pride. If one can't do something with Windows, he says Windows sucks and won't even try to solve the problem. If he's having trouble with Linux he says Linux is a great system but I still need to learn more about it, and probably also makes a joke about the lameness of Windows.
If Linux doesn't take the way of standardization then another OS will and Linux will never get widespread. But when every newbie can use it, it will be a shame for having problems with Linux, as it is with Windows now.
Don't forget that those RAID controllers are just toys for the kiddies. Industrial grade RAID controllers have on board processor and memory, and they do optimize the read access for RAID 1 arrays. Though they don't halve seek time on two disk arrays, they still provide noticeable speedup for reading.
The bigger news here, for me, is that Linux just jumped way up on my totem pole of respect.
I wonder where Windows NT is on your totem pole, because it had SMP support years before Linux 2.0. And ACPI support and journalizing filesystem support and modules (drivers) support and so on... I know I will be modded down for such blasphemy.
Anyways OpenBSD has (at least had last year) scalability issues, it scales pretty bad, and it needs to be solved ot get SMP really effective.
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I did not say you are wrong, I said the thing you quoted from the article is unlikely to happen.
You are right, much time have passed since NT 3.1. Those days microkernels was thought to be the state of art, the future of kernels. Smart people claimed that as the hardware evolve, the performance gap between monolithic kernels and microkernels will become negligible and the robustness of microkernels will make it superior.
But it did not happen. Today, monolithic kernels dominate the desktop market, the only exception is OSX with its Mach kernel. The quasi-micro NT kernel was turned into a bloated monolithic kernel, BeOS died, and Hurd... hasn't really born yet.
Conclusion: monolitic design is still the way to follow.
Now back to the original topic: I don't really see any reason for userland graphics except stability. It WILL decrease performance, which is cruical for the VGA cards, and might result in driver incompatibility I think. If I'm right, then it will take quite some time to write compatible drivers for older cards (assuming that nvidia and ati is willing to write for their own cards). And Microsoft does not have time, they already decided to leave out WinFS from Longhorn. They can't postpone Longhorn beyond 2006 because that would be too big pull for desktop Linux/BSD. And I guess by 2006 ReactOS will become a usable OS too.
Actually the whole graphic subsystem was in userland in Windows NT 3. It was bulletproof but slow and it did not allow the low level hw access needed for DirectX, so they moved it into kernel with NT 4.0. And I'm quite sure it will stay there.
If you'd read the article you would know that a stock 4-socket Opteron mainboard used, turned into a 8 CPU system. Such simple (cost effective?) upgradability is a very good reason in my optinion.
And if you take into account that both Intel and AMD decided to go for dual-core, it might be the most logical way to improve the performance of the chips.
What about the gmail notifier Firefox extension?
Sadly both wavelet and fractal compression appears to be a minefiled, so a solution for free lossy image compression is yet to come.
On the other hand, I believe there are some nearly lossless algorithms not encumbered by patents. They might be the solution for the situation, as they provide much better compression than PNG while making only non-perceptible (really!) changes to the image.
Actually everything else in the room hit by the sunlight get way beyond 84F before either the window glass or the air inside the room. They start to radiate and heating up the air, much sooner than glass. And a typical window glass has neligible surface connection with other material than air and air has poor heat conduction and storage (sorry I don't know the exact English name of these physic attributes) capabilities, I think it is an educated guess that glass gets hot slower than air, thus this temperature boundary can be a real issue. (Though I have never made such measurements.)
There are thousands of (unofficial) software patents in the EU. They are not protected by law (yet?), therefore they are not enforceable, but they do exist.
Do you know that 84.7% of all statistics are made up?
Seriously, Windows NT has been 32bit since the very begining, only WOW (Windows on Windows, the subsystem that provides Win16 compatibility) contains some 16bit code.
Only one of the 4 videocards can use AGP, so the other 3 must be (probably fanless) PCI cards, those don't generate too much heat.
Just think about 3D intensive games, where both top notch CPUs and videocards are running on full load. It produces much more heat but it still can be handled. (Though the newer videocards are getting loud.)
1. When we say "high speed", what bandwidth are we talking about?
The article says: It has already signed up Lucent Technologies to provide equipment that currently supports data speeds of up to 2 megabits per second (mbps). The gear ultimately could support speeds of up to 14.4mbps.
2. How accessible is this high speed for today devices like say, mobile phones? Can I use my cell phone to browse at high speed?
No, it will be available for the yet to come 3G mobiles that have been promised for many years already. I have a feeling that we will need to wait more for them and when they become available they will be called 4G, skipping 3G. We have seen such thing a couple of times already.
The actual meaning and the layout of the buttons on the wheel is secret and varies by driver, but usually there are buttons for setting the balance and torque of the brakes, the pitstop speed limiter, the differential, the ratio of fuel and air, and probably much more.
The reason for the death of the API is probably GNU/Linux. A closed set of poorly documented APIS
doesn't compare to much to "We'll give you the source code"
Microsoft Developer Network has comprehensive documentation about the Microsoft APIs. When I was developing for Windows platform, I never needed any documentation other than MSDN. And if you want source code, you can download the SDKs for free. Though it contains only sample codes, I wonder how many Linux developers looked at the sources of the APIs they use. I have never did such a thing.
I haven't tried Theora yet, but I tried On2's VP3 codec (on which Theora is based), and it performed very well against the MPEG-4 codecs, I really liked it.
Here you can find an article about iPod vs Ogg Vorbis.
Ogg is a format. Vorbis is the name of the audio codec, and Theora is the name of the video codec. Ogg is the container, just like avi.
The second loop is traversed backwards in the C++ version while it is not in the Java version. Don't ask me why.
There is an instruction called loop in the x86 instruction set which decreases the value of the register cx by 1 on every iteration, until it becomes 0. So by writing decrementing for loops, it could be transformed to a mov and a loop. Two decades ago it was faster than increasing a variable, checking if it reached the required value and if it's less then jumping to the begining.
But nowadays x86 processors work different, and loop became slower than the jumping method. It seems the writer of this code forgot this one. Anyways, the optimizing compilers don't generate loop instructions for decrementing for loops anymore.
I don't believe this convergence. What's the point of making a device that works as a tv and a cellular phone? I wouldn't like to carry a 50 inch large mobile everywhere, and I can't imagine a family sitting around a cellular phone and watching soap operas on the 3 inch display of it. This is nonsense. Having a mobile capable of playing films can be nice, but don't tell me that these universal devices will rule the world and render every one function device useless. Swiss knives are lame.
Actually the difference between viruses and worms is that worms are standalone programs while viruses need to infect other executables to be effective.
The default windows 2000 install does not support harddisk sizes over 128gb. SP3 enables the support for 48bit LBA, thus solving this problem.
Here's the related MSKB article.
The blasphemer? He was running that way! *points to random direction*
I don't think it would worth to keep UNIVAC running, do to it's massive power consumption and need for contionus maintenance.
Here is a site about UNIVACs today that might be interesting for you.
Zealots don't hate an OS because it's inferior. They hate it because it's other than their beloved OS. I guess you have noticed already that Linux zealots like only the distribution they use and say that it's the only good OS, every other distributions suck.
I think it's rather about pride. If one can't do something with Windows, he says Windows sucks and won't even try to solve the problem. If he's having trouble with Linux he says Linux is a great system but I still need to learn more about it, and probably also makes a joke about the lameness of Windows.
If Linux doesn't take the way of standardization then another OS will and Linux will never get widespread. But when every newbie can use it, it will be a shame for having problems with Linux, as it is with Windows now.
Don't forget that those RAID controllers are just toys for the kiddies. Industrial grade RAID controllers have on board processor and memory, and they do optimize the read access for RAID 1 arrays. Though they don't halve seek time on two disk arrays, they still provide noticeable speedup for reading.
The bigger news here, for me, is that Linux just jumped way up on my totem pole of respect.
I wonder where Windows NT is on your totem pole, because it had SMP support years before Linux 2.0. And ACPI support and journalizing filesystem support and modules (drivers) support and so on...
I know I will be modded down for such blasphemy.
Anyways OpenBSD has (at least had last year) scalability issues, it scales pretty bad, and it needs to be solved ot get SMP really effective.
I wonder
I know I will be modded down for such blasphemy.