When you are designing architectures for 7 or so years out, you need a powerful crystal ball, but no such thing exists. AMD just guessed wrong about the nature of future applications. Intel guessed wrong with the Itanium also. Maybe the common thread is you have to fit existing apps instead of the other way around.
What this really shows, IMHO, is that you need diversity to survive in the long run. This not only true of the cpu/computer business. The real reason that Intel looks like the winner right now is not that they had a better crystal ball or a single better design team, but rather that they were working on several different designs simultaneously, and one of those, although unerappreciated at first, turned out to be a real winner.
Actually, what did they really release? I remember some time ago, there was a lot of excitement right here on/. about ati releasing the first part of the documentation, which was basically a list with names and addresses of registers but little or no actual explanations. (Although I guess if you have programmed graphics drivers before, you'd be able to guess a lot from the names...)
The point is, it was said that that these particular docs were only barely sufficient to implement basic things like mode-setting and 2D-support and maybe TV-Out, but certainly not 3D-acceleration. There was a promise by ati to release even more documentation in the future to allow these things, but so far, I haven't seen anything. I did some googling to find out if maybe I've missed something, but that turned up very little. Even the X.Org wiki didn't help much.
So, does anyone here know a bit more? What's the real status of the released docs? Is there enough to do a real implementation with all the little things like RandR, dual head support, TV-Out and 3D-support, or is ati just stringing us along, pretending to be one of the good guys?
Windows - Almost useless, squeezed between useful keys. Fortunately my Linux systems ignore this key.
Under Linux, you can use the left and right windows keys to cycle through virtual terminals (at least in Gentoo). Also, using Beryl/Compiz without Windows keys turns out to be hard.
After this New Years party, my only resolution is "stay away from hard liqour, especially vodka".
Maybe in a few hours I can stop thinking about alcohol again and come up with some more interesting resolution.
(DJB's license forbade distribution of modified source - you can only distribute patches. You man not distribute binary files that result from any modification from the distribution source. I argue that it isn't open source at all.)
Really? I always thought that DJB never clearly attached any license to his work, but told people they were brainwashed for thinking they even needed one, which started all the confusion in the first place... But maybe that was just djbdns.
Burnt paper is often still decipherable, as long as it hasn't crumbled to ashes. And most of the time it doesn't do that on its own. Also, the winds from the fire will make larger pieces of half-burnt paper fly away in random directions faster than you can catch it.
If you really want to make sure, you'll have to think of something else.
Could run this on a 10W ($100) panel without too much trouble.
More like 50W worth of solar panels and a good pack of batteries. Unless you only want the thing to be accessible during the day and when the weather's fair so the panels give at least 50% of their maximum output.
why does there have to be a need? will too many make the net too heavy or something?
More TLDs mean higher load for the Internet's root servers. And it's more than just linear - the higher the number of existing TLDs, the higher the probability that a given nameserver does not have the NS records for a given TLD's zone in its cache, and so will have to ask the root servers the next time someone asks for a domain under that TLD.
I suspect this is a sneaky marketing ploy; they'll have a steady stream of quad-cores coming off the production line where one core doesn't pass all the required tests; now all they need to do is disable the faulty core and box it as a triple-core.:-)
Your point being? This gives us a cheap, still quite good, three-core processor where otherwise there would have been no processor at all. I don't see anything wrong with that.
I actually think that a 3 core system is fairly smart.
If I have 2 CPU's, one of them always suffers because it is then in charge of context switching. If I have 3 CPU's, two to do the work, and one to monitor and distribute the work, I might have 2 "pure" CPU's doing the work without lag..
Hm, AFAIK, in a multiprocessor system, every processor/core runs its own kernel image and also does its own context switching and scheduling. The tricky part is more in deciding which process/thread will run on what processor and which processor will handle which incoming hardware interrupt. (Also, locks, mutexes, semaphores and the like suddenly get a lot more tricky to do right.)
Probably because the die is easier to work with if its shape is not too far from a square - and a single row of 3 dies would make a lengthy and narrow rectangle. (Just a hunch, though, I don't even know the dies really are easier to work with if they're square.)
It will be, in a few weeks. Moreso in a few months as the drivers improve. Performance tuning is one of the open source methodology's strengths.
Weeks? Months? I think you are overly optimistic here. Even if AMD releases the full spec with 3d support and everything, it will likely take at least a year before we've got a fully working, production quality Open Source driver for these cards.
Just look at how long it's taking the nouveau project to come up with something working. Granted, they're in a much worse position, having to figure out the cards by themselves with no official documentation whatsoever, but still, it's a lot of work to go from 900 pages worth specs to a working, tested and optimized driver that implements all that.
Google's server farms are distributed around the world. both coasts and in between as well as Ireland, Belgium and elsewhere. That was an extremely US-centric thing to say.
You missed what I think is the most important benefit of a real desktop:
The ability to place the keyboard, monitor and mouse completely independently from one another (cable length permitting). This alone is reason enough for me to never want to use a laptop when I could be using a desktop computer.
Maybe that part of the definition should be changed to "it is massive enough that its own mass forces it into the form of a sphere or something close to that".
The total number of valid keys does not matter, what matters is how many keys you have to produce on average before you hit one that works. If a 100 millionth of all possible keys will work, then you will have to produce, on average, 100 million keys before you hit one that works.
I don't know exactly how hard it is to produce these keys and (more importantly) check whether they are valid, but I'd guess that the computing power required to produce one Vista key in this manner is probably more expensive than a legit Vista license.
(But then again, there's no factual basis for the 0.000001% number either, so it's all just wild guesses anyway...)
Slashdot Mirror
And frankly, what with all the annoying blinking animated ads on the new page, viewing this without flash is definitely the better way.
What this really shows, IMHO, is that you need diversity to survive in the long run. This not only true of the cpu/computer business. The real reason that Intel looks like the winner right now is not that they had a better crystal ball or a single better design team, but rather that they were working on several different designs simultaneously, and one of those, although unerappreciated at first, turned out to be a real winner.
Meaning if the US slips into tyranny now, not one of us is going to see the end of it...
You mean just like they did in China and North Korea?
Actually, what did they really release? I remember some time ago, there was a lot of excitement right here on /. about ati releasing the first part of the documentation, which was basically a list with names and addresses of registers but little or no actual explanations. (Although I guess if you have programmed graphics drivers before, you'd be able to guess a lot from the names...)
The point is, it was said that that these particular docs were only barely sufficient to implement basic things like mode-setting and 2D-support and maybe TV-Out, but certainly not 3D-acceleration. There was a promise by ati to release even more documentation in the future to allow these things, but so far, I haven't seen anything. I did some googling to find out if maybe I've missed something, but that turned up very little. Even the X.Org wiki didn't help much.
So, does anyone here know a bit more? What's the real status of the released docs? Is there enough to do a real implementation with all the little things like RandR, dual head support, TV-Out and 3D-support, or is ati just stringing us along, pretending to be one of the good guys?
Under Linux, you can use the left and right windows keys to cycle through virtual terminals (at least in Gentoo). Also, using Beryl/Compiz without Windows keys turns out to be hard.
After this New Years party, my only resolution is "stay away from hard liqour, especially vodka". Maybe in a few hours I can stop thinking about alcohol again and come up with some more interesting resolution.
Really? I always thought that DJB never clearly attached any license to his work, but told people they were brainwashed for thinking they even needed one, which started all the confusion in the first place... But maybe that was just djbdns.
The Core line of processors is based on the Pentium M, which was developed in Isreal.
That's funny if true, because in German, the word "böse" (also spelled "boese" when umlauts are not available) means "evil".
Burnt paper is often still decipherable, as long as it hasn't crumbled to ashes. And most of the time it doesn't do that on its own. Also, the winds from the fire will make larger pieces of half-burnt paper fly away in random directions faster than you can catch it.
If you really want to make sure, you'll have to think of something else.
I'm certain holding on to those interface protocols for three years longer was worth a whole lot more to them than what they could have saved here.
More like 50W worth of solar panels and a good pack of batteries. Unless you only want the thing to be accessible during the day and when the weather's fair so the panels give at least 50% of their maximum output.
More TLDs mean higher load for the Internet's root servers. And it's more than just linear - the higher the number of existing TLDs, the higher the probability that a given nameserver does not have the NS records for a given TLD's zone in its cache, and so will have to ask the root servers the next time someone asks for a domain under that TLD.
Your point being? This gives us a cheap, still quite good, three-core processor where otherwise there would have been no processor at all. I don't see anything wrong with that.
If I have 2 CPU's, one of them always suffers because it is then in charge of context switching. If I have 3 CPU's, two to do the work, and one to monitor and distribute the work, I might have 2 "pure" CPU's doing the work without lag..
Hm, AFAIK, in a multiprocessor system, every processor/core runs its own kernel image and also does its own context switching and scheduling. The tricky part is more in deciding which process/thread will run on what processor and which processor will handle which incoming hardware interrupt. (Also, locks, mutexes, semaphores and the like suddenly get a lot more tricky to do right.)
What about one row of 3? Just sayin' ...
Probably because the die is easier to work with if its shape is not too far from a square - and a single row of 3 dies would make a lengthy and narrow rectangle. (Just a hunch, though, I don't even know the dies really are easier to work with if they're square.)
Weeks? Months? I think you are overly optimistic here. Even if AMD releases the full spec with 3d support and everything, it will likely take at least a year before we've got a fully working, production quality Open Source driver for these cards.
Just look at how long it's taking the nouveau project to come up with something working. Granted, they're in a much worse position, having to figure out the cards by themselves with no official documentation whatsoever, but still, it's a lot of work to go from 900 pages worth specs to a working, tested and optimized driver that implements all that.
Only if you know about it in the first place. It appears even most slashdotters don't.
You missed what I think is the most important benefit of a real desktop: The ability to place the keyboard, monitor and mouse completely independently from one another (cable length permitting). This alone is reason enough for me to never want to use a laptop when I could be using a desktop computer.
AFAIK it was a disused PDP-7...
Maybe that part of the definition should be changed to "it is massive enough that its own mass forces it into the form of a sphere or something close to that".
The total number of valid keys does not matter, what matters is how many keys you have to produce on average before you hit one that works. If a 100 millionth of all possible keys will work, then you will have to produce, on average, 100 million keys before you hit one that works.
I don't know exactly how hard it is to produce these keys and (more importantly) check whether they are valid, but I'd guess that the computing power required to produce one Vista key in this manner is probably more expensive than a legit Vista license.
(But then again, there's no factual basis for the 0.000001% number either, so it's all just wild guesses anyway...)