Of course there is no organized dark force that has nefarious plans for cameras. The only thing the first step / slippery-slope argument assumes is that human nature is what it is. It assumes that successive groups of well-meaning, but not terribly forward looking politicians will each build on what the prior group has done until we end up with a very sophisticated survelliance network.
That network will nominally only be for the prevention of crime, but is ultimately so tempting of a tool that it will (not may, but will, because again, human nature is what it is, and for every 1000 or so ethical people, there is always at least one bad apple) be used in a less then honorable fashion, perhaps something along the lines of watergate, or Hoover's abuse of the FBI, or the whole CoIntelPro scandal, or any other of the numerous, well-documented, government abuses of power that are the result of simple human nature.
We need a national camera survellience system just like we need instant, on-demand wiretapping of every phone in the country. After all, if the FBI were listening in on every conversation, so many crimes could be prevented. Right?
I bought mine from them and am happy with it, although I too replaced the power supply with one from PC Power & Cooling.
It is a great case, the drive bays are in a whole different compartment from the motherboard, which makes it very easy to work on without having to totally disassemble. The site above has multiple images, including the internal assembly.
At this point, both HP and Sun have announced plans to (eventually) phase out CDE and replace it with Gnome as their primary desktop. HP, at least, has even committed to shipping Gnome with the next update to HPUX, due sometime mid 2nd half of this year...
I would expect that he could. Nancy Reagan did that, well as close to that as she could. She got her own external phone-line installed in the whitehouse specifically so she could call her astrologer and not have to worry about her conversations being subject to any kind of public exposure due to using government owned equipment.
Page Copying
I don't think SGI's hardware does it, so that would need OS support, but other vendors, like HP, support page caching, or at least cache-line levels of page-caching in the hardware.
Page Migration
With a page cache, then you probably do need page migration. But, for a large number of applications, it is sufficient to default to 'local allocation' such that that whatever thread allocates the memory gets it from node/cell local memory. Sure, there are pathalogical cases where that doesn't work at all, but for the general case, it works quite well. I thought I saw in there that SGI's work included local-allocation.
User level hints
Being able to specify location at allocation goes a long way for this, I don't know, but I would suspect that the work going to local-allocation would include the ability to hint for remote-allocation too.
Partitioning and seperate OS instances
I haven't looked at it for while, but I think the current 2.4.x kernel supports linux-on-linux. E.g. you can boot and run a second (or third, or fourth) linux kernel as a process on the first linux kernel. I believe the impetus for this development was to make kernel debugging easier, but it seems like it would be just a couple of steps away from a poor-man's OS partitioning system. Now, if you want fault isolation and online-replacement, you'll probably have to go quite a bit further than the current implementation, but I think Sun with their E10k is the only common box short of mainframes that support this kind of thing today - although most vendors have announced that they want to get there (SGI had their Cellular IRIX project canned a few years back, I don't know what they are doing today, probably nothing because it is more of a feature that the commercial world cares about, than the technical world which is SGI's primary market).
800MHz vs 1.4GHz
In this case, comparing Itanic to current RISC cpus on a frequency basis is pretty valid for floating-point (SGI's market) as almost all current RISC cpus have the same number of functional units as Itanic does (2 FP). Itanic to McKinley is a harder comparison to make because the people who know how many functional units McKinley has, aren't allowed to post that information here on Slashdot due to signing NDAs, but it would be really messed up if McKinley had less units than Itanic does...
SGI has been working on NUMA support for Linux for quite a while now. They've been the ones doing the discontiguous memory patches and a bunch of other related things.
If you read the notes under some projects, you'll see that they already have a mips64 port in-house that they are running today on the O3K which they are using as a testbed for the stuff they want to run on Itanic.
What seems odd to me is that it is pretty clear that Itanic will not be cost nor performance competitive when it finally ships - all the other big boys have said they aren't going to bother with Itanic for anything but 1-4 way type boxes. McKinley (the successor to Itanic) is looking pretty good, recent reports say that it will debut at 1.4GHz around the end of the year (whereas Itanic can barely do 800MHz today).
Although it doesn't talk about it on their website, they provide sponorships for people who find their own jobs. You will have to work as a contractor where MyBizOffice is your employer of record, but doesn't actually provide you with a job, you still have to find it yourself. But, one of the many benefits that mybizoffice provides is that even when you change who you are actually doing work for, you keep the same visa sponorship as well as benefits like health insurance and retirement.
I use them myself, but not for visa sponorship because I don't need it.
In the US at least, it has already been ruled that languages, including programming languages, can not be considered intellectual property (imagine someone patenting English...). Now, specific implementations of languages are copyrightable, but not the syntax itself. That's why Sun got to beat MS up over Java - MS licensed Sun's Java implementation. On the flip side, HP has decided they don't like Sun's embedded Java and have implemented their own (Chai or micro-chai, something like that) and Sun can't do a thing about it.
Actually, the FCC has become involved in regulating content over cable. Like most government agencies, their #1 goal is to expand while their official directives are only secondary.
One example that comes to mind is the current regulation on the display of hard pore cornography in an unscrambled form. It is currently illegal for most (probably all) cable carriers to transmit unscrambled corn over cable. The justification is just an extension of that used to regulate the air waves - the chance that someone might mistakenly receive cornography and is too feeble to change the channel.
The way I see it, if all televisions have V-Chips in them, then there is no longer an excuse for the FCC to regulate content on the airwaves. I look forward to live hard-core pr0n on broadcast tv, tagged with the appropriate v-chip setting so that people who do not want to see hard-core porno for free, can set their tv's to automatically filter it out.
Same thing for video games. The sooner all video game machines have v-chips, the sooner we can get the most extreme perverted stuff in games for everybody - no need to have the stores like Wal-Mart censor what they sell, anyone who doesn't want to see live nude girls on their x-box (or should that be their XXX-box) can set their v-chip to filter them out.
IBM's current p680 box (up to 24 Power3 IV cpus) does implement a kind of multi-threading already it is too coarse to be called SMT, but it is multi-threading. As it is now, each processor 'presents' itself as two cpus to the OS. They say that it took less than 5% of the chip real-estate to support this multi-threading. If you look at their benchmark results on Spec and TPC, it seems to have paid off quite well.
You laugh, but Vulcan Ventures, the investment vehicle for Paul Allen (you know, Microsoft Co-Founder) has been buying up lots of cable companies over the last few years.
Here's just one story talking about it (the first good one that came up in google):
As a long time contractor who has worked on DoD and DoJ contracts I can say that unless the contract explicitly names the developed code as "a work for hire" the ownernship defaults to the developer. This is the same rule that applies for any intellectual property - photography, painting, writing, etc - unless specified otherwise the creator owns the copyright.
Now, it is entirely possible that the contract does specify work for hire, but we don't know that and as the default is otherwise, you are one very wrong ac...
They need only be unique on a single subnet. If you take a look at a sun with multiple nic's, they all have the same mac address, which is derived from the machine's hostid. Similarly, as the other poster already mentioned, almost all nic's have software reprogrammable mac addresses.
See John Varley's Steel Beach (and Golden Globe to a lesser extent) where the ability to genetically modify one's self is common place. People routinely switch sexes, attributes and entire body types, and in the context of the stories such changes are morally neutral, no more controversial than trends in fashionable clothing are today.
DirectTV and all the other satellite broadcasters have all bought into the anti-fair-use agenda of the MPAA and the RIAA. DirectTV has recently issued a statement embracing the DVI spec which limits the quality of output to anything other than a display device with an encrypted datastream. They may even go so far as to cripple the over-the-air HDTV receivers that some DirectTV boxes come with in order to be compliant with that spec. Boxes that people paid good money for with the expectation that they would perform the same function tomorrow that they do today.
Furthermore, all the satellite broadcasters have made it clear that they will sue the pants off any company that would dare to make a card for your PC that could receive and decrypt the digital video stream from the satellites (even with appropriate access control). This interefers with my fair use because I could really use such a card in my home-theatre pc (htpc) to digitally scale the video up for better display on my hi-def television.
I, and hundreds if not thousands of others, already use htpc's to scale DVD's up with a quality beyond what any consumer-grade DVD player can do. Some of us also have HDTV tuner cards from companies like HiPix and Hauppauge that let us do the same and time-shift with hi-def tv broadcasts. Then there is the audio-scaling software that will resample 44KHz 16-bit cd (and mp3) audio up to 192Khz 24-bit audio for better playback via high-quality DACs.
I guess my point here is that an htpc is a very functional piece of hardware today, but DirectTV and co are actively preventing people like me from using that functionality with their product.
Sure, it is their choice, but it is an assinine choice and they do not deserve any false accolades for being "fair-use friendly" when they really aren't.
PS, so what if the infrastructure is expensive? Nobody made them put those satellites up there, and there is no god-given, nor government-given right to make a profit just because you spent a lot of money yourself.
You've forgotten about the penchant of hardcore unix freaks to prounce initialisms, for example: etc - "et-see", tcsh - "teesh", vi - "vie", fsck - "f-suck" and so on. So, the hardcore are saying:
IBM - "ib-em"
XML - "zimel"
SGI - "siggy"
HPUX - "H-PUCKS"
AIX - "aches"
...
To the truly hardcore, anything can be pronounced.
Its not that RPN is confusing, it is that once you learn RPN, you can never go back. Now that my last HP calculator is dead and I really can't justify the price of another RPN model, I have to use the unix "dc" command to do all my math because I just can't reliably use an infix calculator anymore.
All my engineering buddies who bought RPN calcs have exactly the same disability now too.
RAMBUS is the WRONG comparison to make here. You know what happened with RAMBUS? They got patents granted by the USPTO as well as patent offices for a larger number of other countries. These patents applies to SDRAM and DDR SDRAM. So, with patents in hand, RAMBUS has been strong-arming all SDRAM manufacturers to license both the SDRAM and the RAMBUS patents with the SDRAM patents costing significantly more than the RAMBUS patents - they've also said that if any manufacturer disputes them, the fees for RAMBUS and any other patents that they hold will be much higher for the disputer. All Asian SDRAM manufacturers except one have already caved to RAMBUS. The American manufacturers are putting up a fight, but who knows how it will turn out.
So, if the CPRM were to really go the way of RAMBUS expect to see 4C sue everybody in sight who offers a CPRM-disabled product. You can bet the entertainment industry would be 100% behind such suits too. They killed DAT and Beta, and are trying their hardest to kill anything else useful.
For those who want to see the uncut version do wait for the DVD. It is scheduled for release in March. Other benefits to the DVD release are:
1) 16:9 picture, no pan & scan (although having been shot for television, the director probably did a decent job framing for 4:3)
2) Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, the best you are going to get from the network is Dolby Surround
3) No commercials!
4) No waiting for the next night's episode.
Myself, I am going to skip the airing. If the reviews are good, I'll get the DVD instead.
It is not a monopoly, it is the monopoly's evil brother, an oligopoly (market control by a few large, often interconnected, players). Oligopolies are usually just as bad as monopolies, sometimes worse because our anti-trust laws are not as strong wrt to them as they are for pure monopolies.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet they don't have any of those genetically engineered kangaroos that launch stinger missiles...
http://www.loeschfamily.net/home/kangaroo.html
Of course there is no organized dark force that has nefarious plans for cameras. The only thing the first step / slippery-slope argument assumes is that human nature is what it is. It assumes that successive groups of well-meaning, but not terribly forward looking politicians will each build on what the prior group has done until we end up with a very sophisticated survelliance network.
That network will nominally only be for the prevention of crime, but is ultimately so tempting of a tool that it will (not may, but will, because again, human nature is what it is, and for every 1000 or so ethical people, there is always at least one bad apple) be used in a less then honorable fashion, perhaps something along the lines of watergate, or Hoover's abuse of the FBI, or the whole CoIntelPro scandal, or any other of the numerous, well-documented, government abuses of power that are the result of simple human nature.
We need a national camera survellience system just like we need instant, on-demand wiretapping of every phone in the country. After all, if the FBI were listening in on every conversation, so many crimes could be prevented. Right?
http://www.directron.com/yy0221bk.html
I bought mine from them and am happy with it, although I too replaced the power supply with one from PC Power & Cooling.
It is a great case, the drive bays are in a whole different compartment from the motherboard, which makes it very easy to work on without having to totally disassemble. The site above has multiple images, including the internal assembly.
At this point, both HP and Sun have announced plans to (eventually) phase out CDE and replace it with Gnome as their primary desktop. HP, at least, has even committed to shipping Gnome with the next update to HPUX, due sometime mid 2nd half of this year...
Better watch out for Colonel Panic then...
I would expect that he could. Nancy Reagan did that, well as close to that as she could. She got her own external phone-line installed in the whitehouse specifically so she could call her astrologer and not have to worry about her conversations being subject to any kind of public exposure due to using government owned equipment.
I don't think SGI's hardware does it, so that would need OS support, but other vendors, like HP, support page caching, or at least cache-line levels of page-caching in the hardware.
Page Migration
With a page cache, then you probably do need page migration. But, for a large number of applications, it is sufficient to default to 'local allocation' such that that whatever thread allocates the memory gets it from node/cell local memory. Sure, there are pathalogical cases where that doesn't work at all, but for the general case, it works quite well. I thought I saw in there that SGI's work included local-allocation.
User level hints
Being able to specify location at allocation goes a long way for this, I don't know, but I would suspect that the work going to local-allocation would include the ability to hint for remote-allocation too.
Partitioning and seperate OS instances
I haven't looked at it for while, but I think the current 2.4.x kernel supports linux-on-linux. E.g. you can boot and run a second (or third, or fourth) linux kernel as a process on the first linux kernel. I believe the impetus for this development was to make kernel debugging easier, but it seems like it would be just a couple of steps away from a poor-man's OS partitioning system. Now, if you want fault isolation and online-replacement, you'll probably have to go quite a bit further than the current implementation, but I think Sun with their E10k is the only common box short of mainframes that support this kind of thing today - although most vendors have announced that they want to get there (SGI had their Cellular IRIX project canned a few years back, I don't know what they are doing today, probably nothing because it is more of a feature that the commercial world cares about, than the technical world which is SGI's primary market).
800MHz vs 1.4GHz
In this case, comparing Itanic to current RISC cpus on a frequency basis is pretty valid for floating-point (SGI's market) as almost all current RISC cpus have the same number of functional units as Itanic does (2 FP). Itanic to McKinley is a harder comparison to make because the people who know how many functional units McKinley has, aren't allowed to post that information here on Slashdot due to signing NDAs, but it would be really messed up if McKinley had less units than Itanic does...
See: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/
If you read the notes under some projects, you'll see that they already have a mips64 port in-house that they are running today on the O3K which they are using as a testbed for the stuff they want to run on Itanic.
What seems odd to me is that it is pretty clear that Itanic will not be cost nor performance competitive when it finally ships - all the other big boys have said they aren't going to bother with Itanic for anything but 1-4 way type boxes. McKinley (the successor to Itanic) is looking pretty good, recent reports say that it will debut at 1.4GHz around the end of the year (whereas Itanic can barely do 800MHz today).
Call these guys:
http://www.mybizoffice.com/
Although it doesn't talk about it on their website, they provide sponorships for people who find their own jobs. You will have to work as a contractor where MyBizOffice is your employer of record, but doesn't actually provide you with a job, you still have to find it yourself. But, one of the many benefits that mybizoffice provides is that even when you change who you are actually doing work for, you keep the same visa sponorship as well as benefits like health insurance and retirement.
I use them myself, but not for visa sponorship because I don't need it.
In the US at least, it has already been ruled that languages, including programming languages, can not be considered intellectual property (imagine someone patenting English...). Now, specific implementations of languages are copyrightable, but not the syntax itself. That's why Sun got to beat MS up over Java - MS licensed Sun's Java implementation. On the flip side, HP has decided they don't like Sun's embedded Java and have implemented their own (Chai or micro-chai, something like that) and Sun can't do a thing about it.
Actually, the FCC has become involved in regulating content over cable. Like most government agencies, their #1 goal is to expand while their official directives are only secondary.
One example that comes to mind is the current regulation on the display of hard pore cornography in an unscrambled form. It is currently illegal for most (probably all) cable carriers to transmit unscrambled corn over cable. The justification is just an extension of that used to regulate the air waves - the chance that someone might mistakenly receive cornography and is too feeble to change the channel.
The way I see it, if all televisions have V-Chips in them, then there is no longer an excuse for the FCC to regulate content on the airwaves. I look forward to live hard-core pr0n on broadcast tv, tagged with the appropriate v-chip setting so that people who do not want to see hard-core porno for free, can set their tv's to automatically filter it out.
Same thing for video games. The sooner all video game machines have v-chips, the sooner we can get the most extreme perverted stuff in games for everybody - no need to have the stores like Wal-Mart censor what they sell, anyone who doesn't want to see live nude girls on their x-box (or should that be their XXX-box) can set their v-chip to filter them out.
IBM's current p680 box (up to 24 Power3 IV cpus) does implement a kind of multi-threading already it is too coarse to be called SMT, but it is multi-threading. As it is now, each processor 'presents' itself as two cpus to the OS. They say that it took less than 5% of the chip real-estate to support this multi-threading. If you look at their benchmark results on Spec and TPC, it seems to have paid off quite well.
You laugh, but Vulcan Ventures, the investment vehicle for Paul Allen (you know, Microsoft Co-Founder) has been buying up lots of cable companies over the last few years.
1 95 305,00.html
Here's just one story talking about it (the first good one that came up in google):
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2
Now, Allen isn't as tight with MS as he once was, but perhaps there is more to your parody than even you realize...
As a long time contractor who has worked on DoD and DoJ contracts I can say that unless the contract explicitly names the developed code as "a work for hire" the ownernship defaults to the developer. This is the same rule that applies for any intellectual property - photography, painting, writing, etc - unless specified otherwise the creator owns the copyright.
Now, it is entirely possible that the contract does specify work for hire, but we don't know that and as the default is otherwise, you are one very wrong ac...
They need only be unique on a single subnet. If you take a look at a sun with multiple nic's, they all have the same mac address, which is derived from the machine's hostid. Similarly, as the other poster already mentioned, almost all nic's have software reprogrammable mac addresses.
See John Varley's Steel Beach (and Golden Globe to a lesser extent) where the ability to genetically modify one's self is common place. People routinely switch sexes, attributes and entire body types, and in the context of the stories such changes are morally neutral, no more controversial than trends in fashionable clothing are today.
DirectTV and all the other satellite broadcasters have all bought into the anti-fair-use agenda of the MPAA and the RIAA. DirectTV has recently issued a statement embracing the DVI spec which limits the quality of output to anything other than a display device with an encrypted datastream. They may even go so far as to cripple the over-the-air HDTV receivers that some DirectTV boxes come with in order to be compliant with that spec. Boxes that people paid good money for with the expectation that they would perform the same function tomorrow that they do today.
Furthermore, all the satellite broadcasters have made it clear that they will sue the pants off any company that would dare to make a card for your PC that could receive and decrypt the digital video stream from the satellites (even with appropriate access control). This interefers with my fair use because I could really use such a card in my home-theatre pc (htpc) to digitally scale the video up for better display on my hi-def television.
I, and hundreds if not thousands of others, already use htpc's to scale DVD's up with a quality beyond what any consumer-grade DVD player can do. Some of us also have HDTV tuner cards from companies like HiPix and Hauppauge that let us do the same and time-shift with hi-def tv broadcasts. Then there is the audio-scaling software that will resample 44KHz 16-bit cd (and mp3) audio up to 192Khz 24-bit audio for better playback via high-quality DACs.
I guess my point here is that an htpc is a very functional piece of hardware today, but DirectTV and co are actively preventing people like me from using that functionality with their product.
Sure, it is their choice, but it is an assinine choice and they do not deserve any false accolades for being "fair-use friendly" when they really aren't.
PS, so what if the infrastructure is expensive? Nobody made them put those satellites up there, and there is no god-given, nor government-given right to make a profit just because you spent a lot of money yourself.
You've forgotten about the penchant of hardcore unix freaks to prounce initialisms, for example: etc - "et-see", tcsh - "teesh", vi - "vie", fsck - "f-suck" and so on. So, the hardcore are saying:
IBM - "ib-em"
XML - "zimel"
SGI - "siggy"
HPUX - "H-PUCKS"
AIX - "aches"
...
To the truly hardcore, anything can be pronounced.
Its not that RPN is confusing, it is that once you learn RPN, you can never go back. Now that my last HP calculator is dead and I really can't justify the price of another RPN model, I have to use the unix "dc" command to do all my math because I just can't reliably use an infix calculator anymore.
All my engineering buddies who bought RPN calcs have exactly the same disability now too.
RAMBUS is the WRONG comparison to make here. You know what happened with RAMBUS? They got patents granted by the USPTO as well as patent offices for a larger number of other countries. These patents applies to SDRAM and DDR SDRAM. So, with patents in hand, RAMBUS has been strong-arming all SDRAM manufacturers to license both the SDRAM and the RAMBUS patents with the SDRAM patents costing significantly more than the RAMBUS patents - they've also said that if any manufacturer disputes them, the fees for RAMBUS and any other patents that they hold will be much higher for the disputer. All Asian SDRAM manufacturers except one have already caved to RAMBUS. The American manufacturers are putting up a fight, but who knows how it will turn out.
So, if the CPRM were to really go the way of RAMBUS expect to see 4C sue everybody in sight who offers a CPRM-disabled product. You can bet the entertainment industry would be 100% behind such suits too. They killed DAT and Beta, and are trying their hardest to kill anything else useful.
Didn't Alpha finally go the brainiac route with the latest model? I'm pretty sure it is an out-of-order processor.
Anybody remember NeXTStep?
Sun pledged to use it for their primary user interface after Openlook but then ended up doing the Motif/CDE thing instead.
I'll believe it when it ships.
For those who want to see the uncut version do wait for the DVD. It is scheduled for release in March. Other benefits to the DVD release are:
1) 16:9 picture, no pan & scan (although having been shot for television, the director probably did a decent job framing for 4:3)
2) Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, the best you are going to get from the network is Dolby Surround
3) No commercials!
4) No waiting for the next night's episode.
Myself, I am going to skip the airing. If the reviews are good, I'll get the DVD instead.
It is not a monopoly, it is the monopoly's evil brother, an oligopoly (market control by a few large, often interconnected, players). Oligopolies are usually just as bad as monopolies, sometimes worse because our anti-trust laws are not as strong wrt to them as they are for pure monopolies.