Even now, the last mile (ie the connection between you and your ISP) is the bottleneck in any connection. My ISP has several OC-3s and T1s, but am I getting any benefit from it? No, I'm using a fscking 56k modem! Even if every major city had several 100 Gb/sec lines between each other, giving that bandwidth to the customer is going to be a bitch (maybe wiring CAT5 into every room of every house, same as electricty and phone?).
It's too bad that so many games like this rely on security through obscurity as to their protocols (witness the massive cheating on Quake now that it's GPLed). Which means it won't ever be possible to say, create a GPLed client for Ultima Online (at least not without destroying the game with cheaters). Of course the problems of a secure exchange protocol isn't good either (higher overhead, more complexity, etc).
It's also too bad that people feel the need to cheat at something that's supposed to just be a game you play for fun, but that's another story, I suppose.
But scanning peoples hard drives doesn't seem like a very good solution to me. In fact doing it for something that is, in the long run, completely trivial makes me nervous.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. But, currently, the law doesn't (at least in the US - and that's what I worry about, being a US citizen) and that's the real problem here. Hopefully it will change soon and I'll be able to get a DVD player. Oh, well...
Remember that the DMCA is a US law, which contrary to popular belief within the US, doesn't apply anywhere else. The DeCSS code was written in Norway, so how can a US law be used against it?
Well, if you're in the US, the answer is obvious. And remember that thing with Mattel? Suing people in Canada in an American court for violating US laws.
Seems like people are getting excited for the wrong reasons (most of the posts at this point seem to be "Horay! DeCSS is legal now!").
Note that I haven't read the full ruling. But from the except given, it seems the judge is saying that computer source code (including cryptographic source code) is protected by free speech (and thus crypto export restrictions in the US are unconstitutional). Other judges have said the same thing, and I say the more the better. For the most part, you can export any kind of crypto you want now anyway, but I'd prefer that there were no restrictions of any sort, which this helps pave the way for.
However, this does very little, if anything, for DeCSS. First off, there are the issues of reverse engineering, trade secrets, etc (these points are still wrong, but they were wrong with the RIAA and MPAA brought them up in the fist place so they're probably not going away now). And anyway AFACT the ruling has nothing to do with these issues. Secondly, there is the little matter of... da-dum... DMCA. I'm pretty sure it makes DeCSS illegal, and unless/until it is shown to be unconstitutional and thrown out, DeCSS will still be an "illegal piracy tool" or something stupid like that, even though source code in general is protected (this is similiar to: photographs are protected by the 1st ammendment, but photos of nude 7 year old girls are illegal).
IANAL and any corrections/clarifications would be appreciated.
Why all the cheering for a break up?
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Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 2
To start off, IANAL. Deal with it.:P
Why is it that everyone wants to break up MS? I just don't get it. I'm not a big Windows fan (I dual boot, mostly for gaming, spend most of my time using Linux). I detest MS development tools (not to mention the Windows API). And their business practices leave much to be desired (I feel that same about Sun and a few others). But how is breaking them up going to help?
Just look at the main reason that it's so hard for OSes like BeOS, Linux, *BSD, etc to compete with MS OSes. Is it stability? Speed? Features? No! [at least I don't think so]. It's because, through historical accident, DOS and later Windows is what is shipped with most computer systems. So there's a "Microsoft Standard", but noone else knows exactly what the standard is (and it's contradictory and changes every release anyway).
Basically what I'm saying here is that if MS were forced to document their APIs, file formats, and network protocols (completely and without omission), the playing field is even. If people want to use Office on Windows 2000, they can. If instead they want to use a OSS program that converts Office 2000 docs to PostScript on Linux, they can. It seems to me this is much more benifical to everyone concerned than a breakup would be.
because my video card, Rendition V1000 (yes, it's 4 years old and way outdated), is only "supported" in Linux and not accelerated.
That's interesting. Until recently I had an i740 (with 4M of RAM), which can use the SVGA server (ie it's "supported" and not accelarated). [I'm pretty sure XFree 4 has real drivers for it, but VMware doesn't run under XFree4 yet...]. Anyway, I never had any kind of problem with video performance. Of course if this card is 4 years old it's probably got no-so-great performance in general and needs the help of specific drivers.
I'm not big in gaming or 3D cards (my Voodoo3 is just fine, thanks), but I've never heard of this card of yours, which may (or may not) mean it was never very popular. Keep in mind that people write drivers for cards that:
A) Cards they have lying around that aren't supported.
B) Cards that are really popular and *need* to be supported.
If nobody owns one of these cards, probably people won't bother. I'm still confused that the SVGA server doesn't give decent performance though...
Also, something you should keep in mind: for the most part hardware vendors are the people writing the drivers, not Microsoft. An additional problem is that binary-only drivers (or source drivers that are intentionally obscured *cough* *NVIDIA* *cough*) aren't seen as "real" drivers, so nobody uses them and the device is still seen as being unsupported. Vendors write for Windows because if they don't they go out of business.
Hopefully, with Linux owning about 25% of the server market and maybe 5-10% of the desktop markey, vendors will start realize that supporting Linux (even if supporting Linux just means giving out complete docs for the interfaces) is a good idea for their business. Well, now that some big names (HP, IBM, SGI, Intel) are starting to contribute stuff, we should start seeing more and more hardware support come through.
I'm probably more optimistic that I should be, as all of my stuff works great under Linux. BeOS 5 being another story. And 98 stopped booting for some reason (maybe time to go with NT instead?)
LOL, I meant it as a joke - it's a work of fiction:)
Yes, I know. I love Snow Crash.:) I haven't had a chance to read Cryptonomicon yet tho.
Although, it does bring up an interesting hypothesis - maybe Stephenson had it stolen - I know he would enjoy owning one... Of course, by that logic, I would be a suspect as well...
LOL, same here! It would be very cool to have one sitting on my desk or something.
This type of encryption is a mechanical version of pgp but the key combinations are limited to a very low number, thus it was broken.
Are you some weird troll, or just drunk and/or high? You're talking about 3 completely unrelated things: SSL, PGP, and Enigma. If the Germans had the technology behind PGP in the 40s, Bletchly Park et al would have been screwed.
SSL and PGP were both created in the 90s, by Netscape and Phil Zimmerman (respectively). Rather late for use by the Germans in the 40s. And considering SSL and PGP both use public key cryptography (which was not invented until the 70s), it would have been a very spectacular achievement indeed.
If you don't know how these machines were cracked, you've obviously never read the Cryptonomicon. I highly recommend it for a factual approach to code-breaking.
Kahn's The Codebreakers is actually going to be much more indepth and thorough. It's basically has history of cryptography (as known publicly) from earliest human history into the mid 60s. Presumably Stephenson got his material from Kahn, since it's the standard reference for cryptological history.
Our children will gaze on them in some distant time, years from now, and perhaps it will make them think a little - It is sad that an Enigma box was taken...i certainly hope they find the purps...but not for the same reasons you do.
They won't be doing much gazing at all if the only ones in existance are stolen for private collectors.
Why use the Athlon for integer stuff. The Intel Pentium 3 has a faster specint95 score...
Hmmm... that's funny. Ars Technica compared a 600 Mhz Athlon and a 600 Mhz P!!! and concluded that "Clock for clock, the Athlon's integer performance is undoubtedly superior to Intel's P6 core-based CPU. But heck, AMD's K6-III was, as well."
Typical bloody slashot AMD supporter with no regard for facts.
I am a AMD supporter. I like the Athlon. I detest Intel for many things, including inflicting the horror that is the x86 architecture upon the world. Alphas rock, and Athlon is as close as I'm going to get to an Alpha I can play Freespace on. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but AMD is shipping 1 Ghz CPUs. Intel's is coming out... oh, yeah... Q3!!
3D games: an Athlon would probably be your best choice. Decent FPU performance, good integer performance, won't cost you a bundle. Most games don't really benefit from SMP anyway.
I'm not too much of a gamer (except Freespace2, oh, love that game...) but I think your 3D card is much more important that CPU. For instance, I have a PII-350. I used to have an i740 video card with 4Mb of RAM. Games ran slow and at low res. Then I got a Voodoo3 3000 16Mb of memory (good drivers probably also had an effect). Games ran fast. I was happy. etc etc
Render farms, other highly parallel, low internode communction applications: commodity x86 systems, the more the better.
Or really big SGIs. Or both.:)
RT control of other systems/experimental setups: I personally prefer the StrongARM series of processors for this role, since the price/performance is practically unmatched, the documentation is through, and programming in assembly for the SA is truly a joy compared to the hideous mess that is the x86.
Do you know where I could find info about StrongARMs? I know DEC designed them and Intel bought it (it being the ARM design, not DEC!), but that's about it. I'm just thinking it would be really fun to buy an ARM (or more probably something that has an ARM in it, plus memory and control boards and etc) and mess around programming it (over the serial port of a PC?). It would become my robot slave! Wuahahahahahahahahah!!!:)
Data mining, data warehousing: I don't have any personal experience with these applications, but I have heard good things about Suns
I've also heard that in reference to file servers, etc. However, I can say with some experience (ie, the CS dept here is a Sun shop and so is where I work) that anything smaller than an Ultra2 is fscking slow. The nice big servers rock (of course), but I'm not totally convinced that an Athlon (or dual PIII or whatever) with a lot of RAM and big SCSI disks wouldn't do better (and it would certainly be cheaper).
If you're doing mathematical computations, your best bet would be a CPU good with floating point.
Well, FPU performance is good, but OTOH I happen to like really good integer performance (probably because I code silly things like crypto that doesn't use floating point at all). For that I like Alphas or Athlons. I'll bet PPCs and G4s are good for that too, but I'm not much of a Mac person.
Only problem in this case is cost, since the average Alpha system, IIRC, costs more than most x86 systems. That might not be true, so do your research.
A low end Alpha will cost more than a high end Athlon (I'm generalizing here). OTOH, the "low end" Alpha will kick the Athlons butt (much as I like Athlons, the x86 architechure limits what it can do). However, since this guy seems to really be asking about games, he probably is running Windows 9x, so he wouldn't have too much fun on a Alpha running Linux.
For actual real-time stuff (ie not games), I'd go with something ARMish. Ah, those cool little ARMs.:)
Re:This was released on the first day
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BeOS For Linux!
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· Score: 1
The linux "version" of BeOS PE was released at the same time as the windows version.
Yes, this story confused me greatly, as I got the tarball on the 28th. OTOH, BeOS is having bad booting problems (not sure what's going on...) so I haven't used it much. Oh, well, whatever...
Sorry, but that was just fucking stupid. As others have stated, it would have been cool to report a week or so ago that Taco would be quitting/. to backpack around Europe for a year and smoke weed in Amsterdam or something, then just put up a little notice on the 1st with "April Fools!".
Oh, well, subtle jokes are perhaps to much to hope for in this day and age of bad stories and humorless moderators.
Or else that the DVD CCA are clueless about technical things (not necessarily a bad thing).
Well, they did design it with horrible crappily done crypto in the first place, so I suspect it wouldn't be too hard for a skilled kernel hacker to read it's core as it runs.
Really, the only way around it is to have a hardware decryptor, and at that point you might as well get a hardware MPEG decoder as well.
Personally, I don't care. I'll rent VHS until and open video format comes out. I don't really even care about OSS that much (I mean, I use NT, Solaris, BeOS, Quake II, and whatever, along with Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, and whatever), but I can't stand the control that the MPAA has over the DVD format. Well, whatever.
I wasted way too much time playing U1-U5 on my good old Apple//e. Ultima games were always about story and quality. That seems to have gotten lost with U8+.
I always found the Might & Magic series better (though similiarly to Ultima, the later ones seemed to drop off in quality significantly). M&M II is where it's at!:) And it'll run great on a 15Mhz 386 with 4Mb of RAM and DOS 6 (trust me, I know) - don't throw that old hardware away people!
16 or 32. I'm not a big Solaris fan (though my job is administrating Sun boxen, oh well), but damn it can scale. The current state is that NT can't scale, and neither can Linux.
When I said Linux doesn't scale well, I meant in comparison to commercial Unices (mostly Solaris), rather than NT. That's something that'll have to be fixed if Linux is ever going to hit the really high end hardware (don't look at me, I like C++ and Python).
I'm glad these journaling filesystems are coming out. It's one of Linux's biggest weaknesses (besides poor scalibility to large numbers of CPUs), and somewhat of a selling point for NT vs. Linux (at least that's what I've heard - NTFS is journaling, right?). So removing that problem will be nice - fscking 18 gig disks when the power goes off suddenly sucks.:)
BTW, something people said in the summary makes me somewhat nervous about using reiserfs (follows). Personally I'll probably wait for ext3, since it's just ext2 (which we know is ok) with an extra inode for journaling data. I like the simplicity too.
Hans replied that a lot of people wanted a journalling filesystem, and that their latest patch against 2.3.51 was surviving all their in-house torture-tests. Alexander replied, Torture-tesing is no good against somebody who is hunting for races... Get into sufficiently evil state of mind and try to go through the code. Thinking "how could I exploit it". And yes, it requires understanding of what kind of calls can be forced out of VFS. Really. Been there, done that, found quite a few local DoSes and several root exploits. On ext2.
WTF? Come on. Run Lola Run was one of the best movies this year. It wasn't nominated for one thing! I was, needless to say, more than a little upset. I don't know how many of you have actually seen it, but those of you who have, I'm sure you agree with me.
YES. My roomate saw it last summer, and he told me about it endlessly until we rented it a few months ago. That was such a cool movie. I couldn't understand too much of the German (thank god for subtitles, huh?), but I enjoyed it immensely. I don't think it's really describable to anyone who hasn't see it, though. At least I couldn't, and neither could my roomate, at least beyond: "Run Lola is so good. It's fucking awesome. I love it". Oh, well, just because the Academy is going to be dorks about it doesn't me I can't like it.:)
On a different note, I found it odd that the author shrugged his shoulders at a 600 MHz SIMD Intel processor (MMX/SSE = SIMD) in the X-box when speaking so glowingly of a 200 MHz SIMD one.
OTOH, x86s, even ones with the SIMD extensions, don't have that many registers. I'm not going to go back through the article and add them up, but there are probably at least 100-200 registers throughout the PS2. That's good when you're doing a lot of math calculations on many different operands that all have to be done quickly enough to render on the screen. However, the comparison is at least somewhat valid - my PII-350 with a Voodoo3 3000 can run graphics about as well as my N64. OTOH, the N64 was a hell of a lot cheaper.:)
I guess we'll have to wait for the X-Box and then we'll see...
I mean, I still haven't seen a game come out that is better than the original Zelda, I just wonder if it is possible to create a game that captures our imagination the way the simple old stuff did.
If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (that's the N64 one). It's really good. And a new Zelda is coming out this summer... yum. Freespace and Freespace2 (both quite recent) are my fav. PC games - good storyline.
But I do know what you mean - I miss SNES Shadowrun. And on the PC, Civilization and the early Might & Magics were great games, better than anything recent I've tried in their respective genres. Not to mention Zork and Adventure. Bad graphics (or none at all!), but amazing gameplay.
Sorry, I was a bit unclear: I specifically meant software related patents (though I'll bet there are a fair number of bogus hw patents too). I'm just a moron who doesn't get enough sleep.
Spend 100 million dollars and countless man-years inventing a hyperdrive, and you deserve a 20 year monopoly.
I could not agree more. That is new, innovative technology (duh), and deserves a patent with a fairly long lifespan (20 years seems long enough for any technology, since someone who invented, say, a hyperdrive, would make trillions in 20 years).
Spend an hour putting a pretty menu on the hyperdrive computer, and if there's something patentable about that menu, the monopoly should last a week.
I really couldn't agree that any patent on something in menu is valid, but let's say we give them a week, just to keep them happy.:)
BTW, sorry for the very late response. I posted that and have been doing other stuff (like trying to get Windows 98 and BeOS 5 to boot - both seem to have died) since then. LOL, I'm really amazed that got up to 4 - I posted without my bonus since I figured no one would care about my opinion. You should have gotten an Insightful for you post, IMHO. Regards - randombit.
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Even now, the last mile (ie the connection between you and your ISP) is the bottleneck in any connection. My ISP has several OC-3s and T1s, but am I getting any benefit from it? No, I'm using a fscking 56k modem! Even if every major city had several 100 Gb/sec lines between each other, giving that bandwidth to the customer is going to be a bitch (maybe wiring CAT5 into every room of every house, same as electricty and phone?).
It's too bad that so many games like this rely on security through obscurity as to their protocols (witness the massive cheating on Quake now that it's GPLed). Which means it won't ever be possible to say, create a GPLed client for Ultima Online (at least not without destroying the game with cheaters). Of course the problems of a secure exchange protocol isn't good either (higher overhead, more complexity, etc).
It's also too bad that people feel the need to cheat at something that's supposed to just be a game you play for fun, but that's another story, I suppose.
But scanning peoples hard drives doesn't seem like a very good solution to me. In fact doing it for something that is, in the long run, completely trivial makes me nervous.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. But, currently, the law doesn't (at least in the US - and that's what I worry about, being a US citizen) and that's the real problem here. Hopefully it will change soon and I'll be able to get a DVD player. Oh, well...
Remember that the DMCA is a US law, which contrary to popular belief within the US, doesn't apply anywhere else. The DeCSS code was written in Norway, so how can a US law be used against it?
Well, if you're in the US, the answer is obvious. And remember that thing with Mattel? Suing people in Canada in an American court for violating US laws.
Seems like people are getting excited for the wrong reasons (most of the posts at this point seem to be "Horay! DeCSS is legal now!").
Note that I haven't read the full ruling. But from the except given, it seems the judge is saying that computer source code (including cryptographic source code) is protected by free speech (and thus crypto export restrictions in the US are unconstitutional). Other judges have said the same thing, and I say the more the better. For the most part, you can export any kind of crypto you want now anyway, but I'd prefer that there were no restrictions of any sort, which this helps pave the way for.
However, this does very little, if anything, for DeCSS. First off, there are the issues of reverse engineering, trade secrets, etc (these points are still wrong, but they were wrong with the RIAA and MPAA brought them up in the fist place so they're probably not going away now). And anyway AFACT the ruling has nothing to do with these issues. Secondly, there is the little matter of... da-dum... DMCA. I'm pretty sure it makes DeCSS illegal, and unless/until it is shown to be unconstitutional and thrown out, DeCSS will still be an "illegal piracy tool" or something stupid like that, even though source code in general is protected (this is similiar to: photographs are protected by the 1st ammendment, but photos of nude 7 year old girls are illegal).
IANAL and any corrections/clarifications would be appreciated.
To start off, IANAL. Deal with it. :P
Why is it that everyone wants to break up MS? I just don't get it. I'm not a big Windows fan (I dual boot, mostly for gaming, spend most of my time using Linux). I detest MS development tools (not to mention the Windows API). And their business practices leave much to be desired (I feel that same about Sun and a few others). But how is breaking them up going to help?
Just look at the main reason that it's so hard for OSes like BeOS, Linux, *BSD, etc to compete with MS OSes. Is it stability? Speed? Features? No! [at least I don't think so]. It's because, through historical accident, DOS and later Windows is what is shipped with most computer systems. So there's a "Microsoft Standard", but noone else knows exactly what the standard is (and it's contradictory and changes every release anyway).
Basically what I'm saying here is that if MS were forced to document their APIs, file formats, and network protocols (completely and without omission), the playing field is even. If people want to use Office on Windows 2000, they can. If instead they want to use a OSS program that converts Office 2000 docs to PostScript on Linux, they can. It seems to me this is much more benifical to everyone concerned than a breakup would be.
because my video card, Rendition V1000 (yes, it's 4 years old and way outdated), is only "supported" in Linux and not accelerated.
That's interesting. Until recently I had an i740 (with 4M of RAM), which can use the SVGA server (ie it's "supported" and not accelarated). [I'm pretty sure XFree 4 has real drivers for it, but VMware doesn't run under XFree4 yet...]. Anyway, I never had any kind of problem with video performance. Of course if this card is 4 years old it's probably got no-so-great performance in general and needs the help of specific drivers.
I'm not big in gaming or 3D cards (my Voodoo3 is just fine, thanks), but I've never heard of this card of yours, which may (or may not) mean it was never very popular. Keep in mind that people write drivers for cards that:
A) Cards they have lying around that aren't supported.
B) Cards that are really popular and *need* to be supported.
If nobody owns one of these cards, probably people won't bother. I'm still confused that the SVGA server doesn't give decent performance though...
Also, something you should keep in mind: for the most part hardware vendors are the people writing the drivers, not Microsoft. An additional problem is that binary-only drivers (or source drivers that are intentionally obscured *cough* *NVIDIA* *cough*) aren't seen as "real" drivers, so nobody uses them and the device is still seen as being unsupported. Vendors write for Windows because if they don't they go out of business.
Hopefully, with Linux owning about 25% of the server market and maybe 5-10% of the desktop markey, vendors will start realize that supporting Linux (even if supporting Linux just means giving out complete docs for the interfaces) is a good idea for their business. Well, now that some big names (HP, IBM, SGI, Intel) are starting to contribute stuff, we should start seeing more and more hardware support come through.
I'm probably more optimistic that I should be, as all of my stuff works great under Linux. BeOS 5 being another story. And 98 stopped booting for some reason (maybe time to go with NT instead?)
LOL, I meant it as a joke - it's a work of fiction :)
:) I haven't had a chance to read Cryptonomicon yet tho.
Yes, I know. I love Snow Crash.
Although, it does bring up an interesting hypothesis - maybe Stephenson had it stolen - I know he would enjoy owning one... Of course, by that logic, I would be a suspect as well...
LOL, same here! It would be very cool to have one sitting on my desk or something.
This type of encryption is a mechanical version of pgp but the key combinations are limited to a very low number, thus it was broken.
Are you some weird troll, or just drunk and/or high? You're talking about 3 completely unrelated things: SSL, PGP, and Enigma. If the Germans had the technology behind PGP in the 40s, Bletchly Park et al would have been screwed.
SSL and PGP were both created in the 90s, by Netscape and Phil Zimmerman (respectively). Rather late for use by the Germans in the 40s. And considering SSL and PGP both use public key cryptography (which was not invented until the 70s), it would have been a very spectacular achievement indeed.
If you don't know how these machines were cracked, you've obviously never read the Cryptonomicon. I highly recommend it for a factual approach to code-breaking.
Kahn's The Codebreakers is actually going to be much more indepth and thorough. It's basically has history of cryptography (as known publicly) from earliest human history into the mid 60s. Presumably Stephenson got his material from Kahn, since it's the standard reference for cryptological history.
Our children will gaze on them in some distant time, years from now, and perhaps it will make them think a little - It is sad that an Enigma box was taken...i certainly hope they find the purps...but not for the same reasons you do.
They won't be doing much gazing at all if the only ones in existance are stolen for private collectors.
Why use the Athlon for integer stuff. The Intel Pentium 3 has a faster specint95 score...
Hmmm... that's funny. Ars Technica compared a 600 Mhz Athlon and a 600 Mhz P!!! and concluded that "Clock for clock, the Athlon's integer performance is undoubtedly superior to Intel's P6 core-based CPU. But heck, AMD's K6-III was, as well."
Typical bloody slashot AMD supporter with no regard for facts.
I am a AMD supporter. I like the Athlon. I detest Intel for many things, including inflicting the horror that is the x86 architecture upon the world. Alphas rock, and Athlon is as close as I'm going to get to an Alpha I can play Freespace on. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but AMD is shipping 1 Ghz CPUs. Intel's is coming out... oh, yeah... Q3!!
you can make things even more efficient and not run an OS at all.
:) Sorry, couldn't resist...
So you're suggesting he run DOS?
3D games: an Athlon would probably be your best choice. Decent FPU performance, good integer performance, won't cost you a bundle. Most games don't really benefit from SMP anyway.
:)
:)
I'm not too much of a gamer (except Freespace2, oh, love that game...) but I think your 3D card is much more important that CPU. For instance, I have a PII-350. I used to have an i740 video card with 4Mb of RAM. Games ran slow and at low res. Then I got a Voodoo3 3000 16Mb of memory (good drivers probably also had an effect). Games ran fast. I was happy. etc etc
Render farms, other highly parallel, low internode communction applications: commodity x86 systems, the more the better.
Or really big SGIs. Or both.
RT control of other systems/experimental setups: I personally prefer the StrongARM series of processors for this role, since the price/performance is practically unmatched, the documentation is through, and programming in assembly for the SA is truly a joy compared to the hideous mess that is the x86.
Do you know where I could find info about StrongARMs? I know DEC designed them and Intel bought it (it being the ARM design, not DEC!), but that's about it. I'm just thinking it would be really fun to buy an ARM (or more probably something that has an ARM in it, plus memory and control boards and etc) and mess around programming it (over the serial port of a PC?). It would become my robot slave! Wuahahahahahahahahah!!!
Data mining, data warehousing: I don't have any personal experience with these applications, but I have heard good things about Suns
I've also heard that in reference to file servers, etc. However, I can say with some experience (ie, the CS dept here is a Sun shop and so is where I work) that anything smaller than an Ultra2 is fscking slow. The nice big servers rock (of course), but I'm not totally convinced that an Athlon (or dual PIII or whatever) with a lot of RAM and big SCSI disks wouldn't do better (and it would certainly be cheaper).
If you're doing mathematical computations, your best bet would be a CPU good with floating point.
:)
Well, FPU performance is good, but OTOH I happen to like really good integer performance (probably because I code silly things like crypto that doesn't use floating point at all). For that I like Alphas or Athlons. I'll bet PPCs and G4s are good for that too, but I'm not much of a Mac person.
Only problem in this case is cost, since the average Alpha system, IIRC, costs more than most x86 systems. That might not be true, so do your research.
A low end Alpha will cost more than a high end Athlon (I'm generalizing here). OTOH, the "low end" Alpha will kick the Athlons butt (much as I like Athlons, the x86 architechure limits what it can do). However, since this guy seems to really be asking about games, he probably is running Windows 9x, so he wouldn't have too much fun on a Alpha running Linux.
For actual real-time stuff (ie not games), I'd go with something ARMish. Ah, those cool little ARMs.
The linux "version" of BeOS PE was released at the same time as the windows version.
Yes, this story confused me greatly, as I got the tarball on the 28th. OTOH, BeOS is having bad booting problems (not sure what's going on...) so I haven't used it much. Oh, well, whatever...
[root@slashdot /]# rm -rf /
/]# userdel hemos
/. to backpack around Europe for a year and smoke weed in Amsterdam or something, then just put up a little notice on the 1st with "April Fools!".
or maybe just
[root@slashdot
Sorry, but that was just fucking stupid. As others have stated, it would have been cool to report a week or so ago that Taco would be quitting
Oh, well, subtle jokes are perhaps to much to hope for in this day and age of bad stories and humorless moderators.
Or else that the DVD CCA are clueless about technical things (not necessarily a bad thing).
Well, they did design it with horrible crappily done crypto in the first place, so I suspect it wouldn't be too hard for a skilled kernel hacker to read it's core as it runs.
Really, the only way around it is to have a hardware decryptor, and at that point you might as well get a hardware MPEG decoder as well.
Personally, I don't care. I'll rent VHS until and open video format comes out. I don't really even care about OSS that much (I mean, I use NT, Solaris, BeOS, Quake II, and whatever, along with Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, and whatever), but I can't stand the control that the MPAA has over the DVD format. Well, whatever.
I wasted way too much time playing U1-U5 on my good old Apple //e. Ultima games were always about story and quality. That seems to have gotten lost with U8+.
:) And it'll run great on a 15Mhz 386 with 4Mb of RAM and DOS 6 (trust me, I know) - don't throw that old hardware away people!
I always found the Might & Magic series better (though similiarly to Ultima, the later ones seemed to drop off in quality significantly). M&M II is where it's at!
What do you consider a "large number of CPUS".
16 or 32. I'm not a big Solaris fan (though my job is administrating Sun boxen, oh well), but damn it can scale. The current state is that NT can't scale, and neither can Linux.
When I said Linux doesn't scale well, I meant in comparison to commercial Unices (mostly Solaris), rather than NT. That's something that'll have to be fixed if Linux is ever going to hit the really high end hardware (don't look at me, I like C++ and Python).
I'm glad these journaling filesystems are coming out. It's one of Linux's biggest weaknesses (besides poor scalibility to large numbers of CPUs), and somewhat of a selling point for NT vs. Linux (at least that's what I've heard - NTFS is journaling, right?). So removing that problem will be nice - fscking 18 gig disks when the power goes off suddenly sucks. :)
BTW, something people said in the summary makes me somewhat nervous about using reiserfs (follows). Personally I'll probably wait for ext3, since it's just ext2 (which we know is ok) with an extra inode for journaling data. I like the simplicity too.
Hans replied that a lot of people wanted a journalling filesystem, and that their latest patch against 2.3.51 was surviving all their in-house torture-tests. Alexander replied, Torture-tesing is no good against somebody who is hunting for races... Get into sufficiently evil state of mind and try to go through the code. Thinking "how could I exploit it". And yes, it requires understanding of what kind of calls can be forced out of VFS. Really. Been there, done that, found quite a few local DoSes and several root exploits. On ext2.
Eh. Time for breakfast.
WTF? Come on. Run Lola Run was one of the best movies this year. It wasn't nominated for one thing! I was, needless to say, more than a little upset. I don't know how many of you have actually seen it, but those of you who have, I'm sure you agree with me.
:)
YES. My roomate saw it last summer, and he told me about it endlessly until we rented it a few months ago. That was such a cool movie. I couldn't understand too much of the German (thank god for subtitles, huh?), but I enjoyed it immensely. I don't think it's really describable to anyone who hasn't see it, though. At least I couldn't, and neither could my roomate, at least beyond: "Run Lola is so good. It's fucking awesome. I love it". Oh, well, just because the Academy is going to be dorks about it doesn't me I can't like it.
On a different note, I found it odd that the author shrugged his shoulders at a 600 MHz SIMD Intel processor (MMX/SSE = SIMD) in the X-box when speaking so glowingly of a 200 MHz SIMD one.
:)
OTOH, x86s, even ones with the SIMD extensions, don't have that many registers. I'm not going to go back through the article and add them up, but there are probably at least 100-200 registers throughout the PS2. That's good when you're doing a lot of math calculations on many different operands that all have to be done quickly enough to render on the screen. However, the comparison is at least somewhat valid - my PII-350 with a Voodoo3 3000 can run graphics about as well as my N64. OTOH, the N64 was a hell of a lot cheaper.
I guess we'll have to wait for the X-Box and then we'll see...
I mean, I still haven't seen a game come out that is better than the original Zelda, I just wonder if it is possible to create a game that captures our imagination the way the simple old stuff did.
If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (that's the N64 one). It's really good. And a new Zelda is coming out this summer... yum. Freespace and Freespace2 (both quite recent) are my fav. PC games - good storyline.
But I do know what you mean - I miss SNES Shadowrun. And on the PC, Civilization and the early Might & Magics were great games, better than anything recent I've tried in their respective genres. Not to mention Zork and Adventure. Bad graphics (or none at all!), but amazing gameplay.
Sorry, I was a bit unclear: I specifically meant software related patents (though I'll bet there are a fair number of bogus hw patents too). I'm just a moron who doesn't get enough sleep.
:)
Spend 100 million dollars and countless man-years inventing a hyperdrive, and you deserve a 20 year monopoly.
I could not agree more. That is new, innovative technology (duh), and deserves a patent with a fairly long lifespan (20 years seems long enough for any technology, since someone who invented, say, a hyperdrive, would make trillions in 20 years).
Spend an hour putting a pretty menu on the hyperdrive computer, and if there's something patentable about that menu, the monopoly should last a week.
I really couldn't agree that any patent on something in menu is valid, but let's say we give them a week, just to keep them happy.
BTW, sorry for the very late response. I posted that and have been doing other stuff (like trying to get Windows 98 and BeOS 5 to boot - both seem to have died) since then. LOL, I'm really amazed that got up to 4 - I posted without my bonus since I figured no one would care about my opinion. You should have gotten an Insightful for you post, IMHO. Regards - randombit.