Well, AMD has already thought of this. In case you haven't noticed, AMD is no longer in the business of catching up with Intel. They are poised to take a bite out of Intel's ass.
Need evidence? Okay. The reasons Intel became so wildly successful in the processor market is due to a number of factors. But I think the most obvious one should be that they did what no one else had done at the time; they made their next-gen processors backward-compatible. This, of course, elated consumers because it meant that they didn't have to throw away all of their familiar software (and sometimes hardware) to get the performance boost that a new CPU would offer.
Now, fast forward to the late 90's. Intel dominates the market, but sees a threat, so it does what nearly every company does when in fear of seeing their previously solid sales figures start to dwindle due to competition. They change their product to make it incompatible with their old product line, but most importantly their competitor's product line. Then then sit and pray that brand recognition will propel them through the transition.
In the current case of AMD and Intel, this may or may not work. But AMD has a distinct advantage. They didn't wait for Intel to make their move first, but set to work on their next major cashcow product. We know it as Sledgehammer: AMD's 64-bit chip to compete directly with Intel's. The advantage lies in that AMD's chip will be backwards compatible with the 32-bit x86 architecture, while Intel's will not. To see why this is an advantage, I direct you towards the first paragraph of this post.
(In Intel's defense, they claim that they will have an x86 emulator ready at the time their IA64 chip ships. How well this will work in comparison to backwards-compatible 32-bit hardware instructions remains to be seen...)
Riiiight, you deliver me a development CV-22 aircraft and I'll get right to debugging that as soon as I download the source code from Boeing's website.
CDROMs basically use the same technology. Optically scanning a flat surface. Sorry, but there doesn't seem to be any need to reinvent the wheel... or disc as it may be.
That might be the case, but then you can make the same jump of logic by saying that CD-ROMs are "basically" the same as a floppy disk, because they store data on a disc, reading in a circular pattern, and then you can say a floppy disk is "basically" the same as magnetic core memory because they both work off storing bits magnetically. But when you step back and look at the whole picture, you begin to realize that data printed to a sheet of paper really has nothing to do with magnetic core memory, other than they both store data in one way or another.
What I'm looking for is a storage medium that doesn't decay with time. Paper burns and yellows, floppies and hard drives lose their can get erased. Maybe CDs are ok, but I don't know what the lifespan is.
My idea of archiving information on paper was not borne from the intention of solving any of those problems. In fact, I can only think of two primary advantages to this method over that of a floppy disk.
1) Ability to store, transmit, or copy the data as easily as any document (examples: store it in a binder, fax it to someone, or xerox it)
2) Ability to hide information in a format that most people wouldn't suspect.
From what I understand, this sounds somewhat like a project that I had dreamed of around 8 years ago. Basically, my idea was to eventually create a system that archived my data on a sheet of paper to be scanned back in for recovery. (Regular home printers and scanners would do just fine.)
The initial testing stage was to simply compress and then uuencode (possibly with some adjustments to the character set) any random file, print it out, and then OCR it back in and do the deuuencoding. This can theoretically be done with common tools available for years now, but 1) I've never owned a scanner in my life 2) Any large amount of data would take up lots of paper, and would require a lot of work as well.
Eventually, I would move further towards my own designs: namely inventing an encoding scheme that would allow a lot of information to be saved on the paper, perhaps up to or exceeding a megabyte. This would, of course, also require new software to decipher the data that was encoded onto the paper.
I used to dream of a world where software developers shipped the latest version of their programs on a few sheets of paper rather than a floppy disk or CD-ROM...
(It also would occur to me how funny and ridiculous it would be to store one's encoded pr0n archives in a regular binder...)
This seems to be the pervailing attitude among those at Microsoft and elsewhere: users are stupid, so stupid that we must make all their decisions for them.
You haven't turned on your television or been out to the mall lately, have you?
You have a really good point, but I don't think M$ would get as far with Microsoft Linux as you think. You see, the vast majority of what makes Linux tick is GPL'ed, which means that if M$ modifies *any* of it, they'd have to release their source as well. (Freely, even.)
Conversely, if M$ wanted to keep their distribution nearly as closed as they do their current OSes, they *might* be able to do things like closed-source kernel modules or daemons that would be required to be present for their commercial software to run. But this would be difficult for them in the long run, and I think M$ would much rather keep with their existing OSes than go hacking up their own mediocre version of Linux simply for the sake of being able to call it "Linux."
It may have been published, but IIRC, it was copyrighted and trademarked to the nth degree, and anyone else who attempted to build a copy of it would have been dragged out and shot.
The standard myth goes that the people from Phoenix Semiconductor (or might have been Compaq) called in a group of electronics engineers who had never used an IBM computer, put them in an empty room and had them reverse engineer an IBM bios without the benefit of being able to reference any documentation regarding the chip. This was supposedly difficult, but the result was a BIOS chip 100% compatible with IBM's without violating any of IBM's copyrights.
Those in the know are welcome to provide any links or additional information. Especially tell me if I'm wrong, because I am, from time to time.:)
Haha, I'd have loved to hear that one. Sorta reminds me of a retouched photo I once saw of a billboard. Imagine a B&W photo of a pretty woman lost in thought, with the following words in the foreground:
Pregnant? For free information and advice, dial 1-800-YER-WHAT?!
The two best jokes I've seen on the net this year were the color Squant (I even fell for it, albiet with a lot of questions in my head), and The Register's announcement of a $20 million advertising deal between them and Micro$oft.
Um, maybe you're correct, but I've always understood inertia to mean objects resting, moving, or traveling in a straight line and all that jazz. Whereas momentum had to do with the amount of force behind whatever is moving. Ah, whatever.
Well, I did want to mention this in my original post, that yes the earth is slowing down, but by far the greatest factor has to do with the very slow cooling of the earth's mantle and core. Not anything that mankind could do without some tremendous source of energy as of yet undiscovered.
I remember reading about it in geology class, but the exact reason escapes me. My memory is a bit hazy these days, you see.
This reminds me of something funny I once heard a few years back. I was talking to one of my dad's friends who was postively convinced (and just a little drunk) that mankind was slowing down the rotation of the earth by launching lots of rockets and space shuttles from it.
I shit you not.
Nevermind that a rocket's thrust is completely insignificant in any timeframe compared to the inertia of the earth. And that they take off vertically rather than horizontally.
As he was trying to explain this apparent trajedy to me, he got pretty pissed because I had fallen off my chair laughing. Oh, where would we be today without people like this to provide us with this sort of knee-slapping hilarity...
No you haven't. The Register pretty much beat everyone on the net to the April Fool's pranks. Their fool was posted sometime in the evening of March 31.
AND they preempted every single "large company buys unlikely competitor" joke this year. The Register, overdoing it, and overdoing it well.
A long long time ago, I entered a web seach on Alta Vista, with the query "peronal homepage". Note that I misspelled it "peronal" instead of "personal". Nearly every search engine turns up a ton of "peronal homepages":
http://www.google.com/search?q=peronal+homepage
Google turns up about 418. Anyway, I remember that it was about half an hour before I noticed that I had spelled "personal" wrong...
Don't give out your email address to anyone you know personally. Even then, be careful: my mom sent me one of those electronic greeting cards where the company also sold all email addresses entered to spammers.
A web search that doesn't turn up porn.
Eh, still working on that, I suppose. But Google's pretty good.
In a recent discussions with Tony Cox, head engineer of Microsoft Gaming Relations, he informed me that Microsoft is currently looking at ways of opening up parts of DirectX, with the aim of getting the technology onto non-Windows platforms.
When I read this paragraph, two things immediately spring to mind. One, that this journalist is experiencing a temporary mental sickness. Two, that this Tony Cox guy is a Secret Tux Operative.
When, I ask, *when* has Microsoft ever been known to do something solely for the benefit of a community or industry? Unless I haven't been keeping up to date with the Microsoft Corporation Ethics Department, it has been my experience that whatever Microsoft does, it does it for money.
In other words, if MS is going to open up DirectX, then it's probably part of some larger strategy involving a transistion to the X-Box, or Windows, or maybe even an inverted version of their Embrace and Extend tactic. Say, maybe DirectX becomes the undisputed standard in the future, but only Microsoft products will have the really cool features. Every kid and his dog (not to mention developers) wants a system with the most features, right?
I do think, however, that this article was pretty good overall. It just seems a little too optimistic.
A lot of my spam now shows that type of disclaimer. (well, it did before I switched accounts). The most common line goes something like:
<BEGIN PASTE>
"Duruing your recent visit to our affiliate, <some fake site>, you "opted-in" to our email promotion campaign to alert savvy web users to outstanding online offers. This is not Spam. We are adhereing to <some fake law>, <some fake section>, <some fake paragraph>, where it states that <what we are doing is compleltely legal, you turd>. If you wish to be removed from this mailing list, plase vist <fake web address> or reply to this email message with only the word REMOVE. <...which won't work, because we forged the headers, haw haw.>
COMPLETELY FREE PENIS ENLARGMENT, PLEASE CALL THIS INTERNATIONAL NUMBER TO ORDER YOUR KIT TODAY!
Out here, Comcast delivers cable internet to some places in the city. I'm out of range, so I'm still on a plain old dialup, but a few of my friends have reported speeds up to 8Mbps. (That's bits per second.) This shocked and amazed me, becuase I've heard that cable internet is only like $20-30 per month on top of your regular cable bill. Much cheapter than DSL for certain. Can anyone verify this?
In the early days, I've also heard a lot of rumour about how cable internet was basically shared bandwidth with the rest of the neighborhood. ie- If the kid down the street starts downloading massive warez, your connection is pretty much hosed for the night. Can anyone verify this either?
Slashdot Mirror
For those who wish not to register with Apple's crazy crazy system:
user: goatsecx
pass: goatsecx
Direct Link to the
x86 gzipped image.
Well, AMD has already thought of this. In case you haven't noticed, AMD is no longer in the business of catching up with Intel. They are poised to take a bite out of Intel's ass.
Need evidence? Okay. The reasons Intel became so wildly successful in the processor market is due to a number of factors. But I think the most obvious one should be that they did what no one else had done at the time; they made their next-gen processors backward-compatible. This, of course, elated consumers because it meant that they didn't have to throw away all of their familiar software (and sometimes hardware) to get the performance boost that a new CPU would offer.
Now, fast forward to the late 90's. Intel dominates the market, but sees a threat, so it does what nearly every company does when in fear of seeing their previously solid sales figures start to dwindle due to competition. They change their product to make it incompatible with their old product line, but most importantly their competitor's product line. Then then sit and pray that brand recognition will propel them through the transition.
In the current case of AMD and Intel, this may or may not work. But AMD has a distinct advantage. They didn't wait for Intel to make their move first, but set to work on their next major cashcow product. We know it as Sledgehammer: AMD's 64-bit chip to compete directly with Intel's. The advantage lies in that AMD's chip will be backwards compatible with the 32-bit x86 architecture, while Intel's will not. To see why this is an advantage, I direct you towards the first paragraph of this post.
(In Intel's defense, they claim that they will have an x86 emulator ready at the time their IA64 chip ships. How well this will work in comparison to backwards-compatible 32-bit hardware instructions remains to be seen...)
Riiiight, you deliver me a development CV-22 aircraft and I'll get right to debugging that as soon as I download the source code from Boeing's website.
I've never heard of this Cauzin SoftStrip... perhaps you might provide a picture or link?
CDROMs basically use the same technology. Optically scanning a flat surface. Sorry, but there doesn't seem to be any need to reinvent the wheel... or disc as it may be.
That might be the case, but then you can make the same jump of logic by saying that CD-ROMs are "basically" the same as a floppy disk, because they store data on a disc, reading in a circular pattern, and then you can say a floppy disk is "basically" the same as magnetic core memory because they both work off storing bits magnetically. But when you step back and look at the whole picture, you begin to realize that data printed to a sheet of paper really has nothing to do with magnetic core memory, other than they both store data in one way or another.
What I'm looking for is a storage medium that doesn't decay with time. Paper burns and yellows, floppies and hard drives lose their can get erased. Maybe CDs are ok, but I don't know what the lifespan is.
My idea of archiving information on paper was not borne from the intention of solving any of those problems. In fact, I can only think of two primary advantages to this method over that of a floppy disk.
1) Ability to store, transmit, or copy the data as easily as any document (examples: store it in a binder, fax it to someone, or xerox it)
2) Ability to hide information in a format that most people wouldn't suspect.
From what I understand, this sounds somewhat like a project that I had dreamed of around 8 years ago. Basically, my idea was to eventually create a system that archived my data on a sheet of paper to be scanned back in for recovery. (Regular home printers and scanners would do just fine.)
The initial testing stage was to simply compress and then uuencode (possibly with some adjustments to the character set) any random file, print it out, and then OCR it back in and do the deuuencoding. This can theoretically be done with common tools available for years now, but 1) I've never owned a scanner in my life 2) Any large amount of data would take up lots of paper, and would require a lot of work as well.
Eventually, I would move further towards my own designs: namely inventing an encoding scheme that would allow a lot of information to be saved on the paper, perhaps up to or exceeding a megabyte. This would, of course, also require new software to decipher the data that was encoded onto the paper.
I used to dream of a world where software developers shipped the latest version of their programs on a few sheets of paper rather than a floppy disk or CD-ROM...
(It also would occur to me how funny and ridiculous it would be to store one's encoded pr0n archives in a regular binder...)
This seems to be the pervailing attitude among those at Microsoft and elsewhere: users are stupid, so stupid that we must make all their decisions for them.
You haven't turned on your television or been out to the mall lately, have you?
You have a really good point, but I don't think M$ would get as far with Microsoft Linux as you think. You see, the vast majority of what makes Linux tick is GPL'ed, which means that if M$ modifies *any* of it, they'd have to release their source as well. (Freely, even.)
Conversely, if M$ wanted to keep their distribution nearly as closed as they do their current OSes, they *might* be able to do things like closed-source kernel modules or daemons that would be required to be present for their commercial software to run. But this would be difficult for them in the long run, and I think M$ would much rather keep with their existing OSes than go hacking up their own mediocre version of Linux simply for the sake of being able to call it "Linux."
It may have been published, but IIRC, it was copyrighted and trademarked to the nth degree, and anyone else who attempted to build a copy of it would have been dragged out and shot.
The standard myth goes that the people from Phoenix Semiconductor (or might have been Compaq) called in a group of electronics engineers who had never used an IBM computer, put them in an empty room and had them reverse engineer an IBM bios without the benefit of being able to reference any documentation regarding the chip. This was supposedly difficult, but the result was a BIOS chip 100% compatible with IBM's without violating any of IBM's copyrights.
Those in the know are welcome to provide any links or additional information. Especially tell me if I'm wrong, because I am, from time to time.
That was why I believed it at first. I was just sorta thinking they had given it an official name.
Now Mandrake can finally ship 8.0!
Haha, I'd have loved to hear that one. Sorta reminds me of a retouched photo I once saw of a billboard. Imagine a B&W photo of a pretty woman lost in thought, with the following words in the foreground:
Pregnant? For free information and advice, dial 1-800-YER-WHAT?!
I observed this also.
The two best jokes I've seen on the net this year were the color Squant (I even fell for it, albiet with a lot of questions in my head), and The Register's announcement of a $20 million advertising deal between them and Micro$oft.
Um, maybe you're correct, but I've always understood inertia to mean objects resting, moving, or traveling in a straight line and all that jazz. Whereas momentum had to do with the amount of force behind whatever is moving. Ah, whatever.
Well, I did want to mention this in my original post, that yes the earth is slowing down, but by far the greatest factor has to do with the very slow cooling of the earth's mantle and core. Not anything that mankind could do without some tremendous source of energy as of yet undiscovered.
I remember reading about it in geology class, but the exact reason escapes me. My memory is a bit hazy these days, you see.
I meant to say "momentum" in place of "inertia" up there. Danged physics definitions.
This reminds me of something funny I once heard a few years back. I was talking to one of my dad's friends who was postively convinced (and just a little drunk) that mankind was slowing down the rotation of the earth by launching lots of rockets and space shuttles from it.
I shit you not.
Nevermind that a rocket's thrust is completely insignificant in any timeframe compared to the inertia of the earth. And that they take off vertically rather than horizontally.
As he was trying to explain this apparent trajedy to me, he got pretty pissed because I had fallen off my chair laughing. Oh, where would we be today without people like this to provide us with this sort of knee-slapping hilarity...
Your link to RFC1313 is either slashdotted or broken.
No you haven't. The Register pretty much beat everyone on the net to the April Fool's pranks. Their fool was posted sometime in the evening of March 31.
AND they preempted every single "large company buys unlikely competitor" joke this year. The Register, overdoing it, and overdoing it well.
A long long time ago, I entered a web seach on Alta Vista, with the query "peronal homepage". Note that I misspelled it "peronal" instead of "personal". Nearly every search engine turns up a ton of "peronal homepages":
http://www.google.com/search?q=peronal+homepage
Google turns up about 418. Anyway, I remember that it was about half an hour before I noticed that I had spelled "personal" wrong...
A web page without banner ads.
My web page.
A practical way to stop spam.
Don't give out your email address to anyone you know personally. Even then, be careful: my mom sent me one of those electronic greeting cards where the company also sold all email addresses entered to spammers.
A web search that doesn't turn up porn.
Eh, still working on that, I suppose. But Google's pretty good.
In a recent discussions with Tony Cox, head engineer of Microsoft Gaming Relations, he informed me that Microsoft is currently looking at ways of opening up parts of DirectX, with the aim of getting the technology onto non-Windows platforms.
When I read this paragraph, two things immediately spring to mind. One, that this journalist is experiencing a temporary mental sickness. Two, that this Tony Cox guy is a Secret Tux Operative.
When, I ask, *when* has Microsoft ever been known to do something solely for the benefit of a community or industry? Unless I haven't been keeping up to date with the Microsoft Corporation Ethics Department, it has been my experience that whatever Microsoft does, it does it for money.
In other words, if MS is going to open up DirectX, then it's probably part of some larger strategy involving a transistion to the X-Box, or Windows, or maybe even an inverted version of their Embrace and Extend tactic. Say, maybe DirectX becomes the undisputed standard in the future, but only Microsoft products will have the really cool features. Every kid and his dog (not to mention developers) wants a system with the most features, right?
I do think, however, that this article was pretty good overall. It just seems a little too optimistic.
A lot of my spam now shows that type of disclaimer. (well, it did before I switched accounts). The most common line goes something like:
<BEGIN PASTE>
"Duruing your recent visit to our affiliate, <some fake site>, you "opted-in" to our email promotion campaign to alert savvy web users to outstanding online offers. This is not Spam. We are adhereing to <some fake law>, <some fake section>, <some fake paragraph>, where it states that <what we are doing is compleltely legal, you turd>. If you wish to be removed from this mailing list, plase vist <fake web address> or reply to this email message with only the word REMOVE. <...which won't work, because we forged the headers, haw haw.>
COMPLETELY FREE PENIS ENLARGMENT, PLEASE CALL THIS INTERNATIONAL NUMBER TO ORDER YOUR KIT TODAY!
<END PASTE>
Out here, Comcast delivers cable internet to some places in the city. I'm out of range, so I'm still on a plain old dialup, but a few of my friends have reported speeds up to 8Mbps. (That's bits per second.) This shocked and amazed me, becuase I've heard that cable internet is only like $20-30 per month on top of your regular cable bill. Much cheapter than DSL for certain. Can anyone verify this?
In the early days, I've also heard a lot of rumour about how cable internet was basically shared bandwidth with the rest of the neighborhood. ie- If the kid down the street starts downloading massive warez, your connection is pretty much hosed for the night. Can anyone verify this either?
The latter is only true, afaik.