I would suggest that it is more like finding someone who was born on the same hour of the same day as you.(that's 1 chance in 8766, much higher then DNA testing).
You, however, sound like you wouldn't be convinced unless the exact second was able to be reproduced.
Granted that high speed connections should be cleaner over fiber and (the dreaded) PPPOE should be able to handle whatever medium.. waiting for the phone and cable companies to implement it would be a very boring span.
While I don't disagree with your conclusion, K6's do have their own breed of SMP, which if you are constructing your own parts, you are free to develop a chipset to support it. That is all the K6's are missing, support.
BTW, as mentioned by someone else, they do not mention using K6's on the site. They do mention a 200mhz bus. Looks like CNN screwed the pooch.
It sure would be interesting to see some of the mods they did to the open source segment of the OS.
Unfortunately, they almost certainly developed their own code to do most of real interesting stuff. Another wrinkle might be that essentially we would have to wait for someone inclined to redistribute the source to buy the machine. I don't think they are under any requirement to distribute on request. Take this statement as a request for information, I don't have time to rephrase the question properly now that I am not entirely sure if it is true.
>Battery exchange stations are quite feasible... Sure, instead of replacing several gallons of liquid, they would be lugging hundreds of pounds of batteries to and from you car. Now that's service : ). For this, you get your energy in a form which may or may not pollute as much as the fuel cell, but probably more.
Get over the fuel consumption thing. That will be around until we can get that zero-point energy concept figured out.
If governments are still worried about taxing the stuffing out of something like the emissions from a methanol fuel cell, and we let them.... you might as well start killing people who stand idle too long. (producing poisonous gas without contributing anything). kidding...
I think it would make more sense if you used the fuel cell first, possibly charging the Li-ion battery with just enough juice to shut down or refuel the fuel cell. If the fuel cell runs out, then it could switch to the battery and warn you. I think this is because I would worry about a 'moving parts system' (fuel moving through electrodes) more than a solid state aparatus. Also, it would be easier to recharge the fuel cell on the fly than it is to do it with a li-ion battery (and if you are at a power source anyway, it doesn't matter)
Another idea would be to have a couple of fuel container attachements (40 hours anyone) and you would be able to take your time refueling one while it is running on the other.
(I gave up on trying to figure out if anyone said this in the thread below, which descended into non-informative). The main difference I see between the mac market at the time of the switch and the PC market at just about any time is: nobody ever controlled the pc market at any time. (excepting IBM at the start, which is almost irrelevant as this is the reason for using x86 in the first place) Apple at the time, and even pretty much now, controlled both sides of the equation. The sold you the hardware and the software. If they decided not to sell you any more 68k mac's. That's it. No other sources for new 68k macs. If gateway did this right now, you could still buy a dell. If AMD did this right now, you could still buy intel. Also, Apple was the platform. They could make an emulator that worked for everyone because there was only one platform. Who is going to make an emulator that works for all of the x86 plaforms (windows, linux, bsd, beos, etc).
>Caveat Emptor yes, but you and 50 of your friends can get something cheaper than you can alone (assuming you are all buying the same thing (at least one each). see mercata.com et al (sorry guys, they got to me last).
>Dual eth0. about time! These will make great NAT/firewalls.
They are probably talking about dual speed 10/100 here instead of more than one ethernet connection. Else they probably would have said "2 10/100 ethernet adapters". I have not seen two port ethernet cards (I have seen 4 port ones though). Since this has a 56k modem on it, that is probably meant to be the outside interface.
I guess I'll put the rest of my comments here:
Linux 2.0: I hope you can upgrade this w/o voiding the warrantee. (assumtion:linux=kernel)
No option for upgrade memory: does not bode well for future expansion.
Probably the best way would be to make three copies with a red, green and blue filter (or red, yellow, blue, whatever is applicable) and combine them in photoshop.
It is up to the conscience as a moderator to voluntarily lower the threshold in order to find the gems.
As a reader, you do nobody but yourself good or ill from not reading non-moderated AC posts. And I agree with swordgeek in that the signal to noise in a post-moderated discussion aren't worth worring about.
There is usually little reason to legitimately post anonymously. If they truly want to contribute to the community, I don't think it is too much to ask them to take responsibility (and credit). etc, etc....
Then who cares. I can build a version of java in my home network that totally breaks sun compatibility, and on top of that share it with a user on another machine of mine (well, it would be me there too, but so what). It doesn't matter to anyone if I don't release it. The whole point of the danger of the fork is that you are going to have two actively developing groups working on increasingly incompatible code confusing the market. A company can take itself out of the loop and lose the benefit of new GPL features(at least not without more development time of their own). Then they can have a version which they still can't sell. They are free to do it, but it sounds kinda braindead.
>there is no binary compatibility between versions (or in some cases, compiles) of the linux kernel.
Huh, you mean my boxes at home are totally hosed. None of my binaries work because I have gone through 3 versions and probably 10 compiles? I don't think so. Yes, I have had a thing or two break because of a kernel upgrade, but not a significant portion. I think it is more a problem with libraries than kernels.
Yes, someone else could probably have done it quicker. But I can tell you one thing, I wouldn't trust my credit card info to something you spent 2-5 hours developing the security aspects of. While I wouldn't necessarily call trying to find bugs "programming", its certainly development time.
And how about designing the interface. Sure you say, its one-button shopping, what sort of interface questions do you have about that. Well, I'm sure the web designers would like to decide which font to use for maximum effect, then there's placement. And what it does when you click it, and how it integrates into existing code.
It may be easy for one person to make alot of those decisions based on their own feelings, but I'll bet other people in the organization had different ideas. Does that mean they wasted time because they didn't let one person just do it? No, I think they probably got a product that was better integrated, even if the development time was bloated because of it.
ps-I am not clever enough to have a stand on this issue, but saying it should have only taken 50 hrs. demanded some sort of response. It's probably frivolous, but that's as far as I'll go.
Seems perhaps, but doesn't. Most of the 'claims' are prefaced by 'may' or 'could'. Not always obviously, like on the second page, it prefaces the whole page with "..the obvious ways... it could change our lives.", then it goes on with optimistic ideas.
I have little doubt that it will have an impact in 50-100 years, but I wouldn't hazard a guess. Other people don't feel that way, so be it. Some will be wrong, some may be right, some may seem over-optimistic now, but fall short of what happens... Are you saying because one person made a definitive time constrained prediction, that technology is incapable of moving beyond our imaginations in the same time period?
It actually said that nanotech could take over manufacturing, as in it might be possible. I'll also ignoring the fact that development in 50 years wouldn't exclude power supplies. Being that Dune was written thousands of years in the future, it must be an accurate story of what happened. I'm not saying there is no possibility of truth to it, but you went to an 'authority' instead of just saying: "I think it more likely that the powers that be will use it to control us rather than help us". 'Beware, even that open source program can't save your soul from the Prince that it runs on. Don't kid yourself Ted. If that machine ever got the chance, it'd kill you and everyone you care about!' (w/ apologies to M. Groening, et al)
I agree that we could probably feed everyone if we wanted to. If it were possible to synthesize food, though, you wouldn't have to be able to grow food where you are in order to survive. There are plenty of countries that are too poor to buy our groceries, but they survive because they can grow their own crops. It becomes a problem when a 'surviving' country has some sort of natural disaster, short term (flood) or long term (years long drought). In this case, being able to help themselves would be much better. After all, who wants to be indebted(even just morally) to the US?
My favorite idea would be for medical purposes; unclogging arteries, stitching capillaries, perhaps even killing cancer. We'll see.
This game is under protest, so the score doesn't matter.
Probably because the moderators saw it as being an attack on the x86 processors without much merit.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would need a straight line that long in order for it to be an antenna, and I doubt any CPU is going to have a circuit from one side to the next.(I am assuming you are talking about the CPU die traces and not the mainboard.)
Second, I doubt highly that a CPU is a very efficient transmitter. As long as you keep the case on even the most sensitive won't have any problem. Think of it in these terms.. how much power are you pumping into this chip? 3.3W or less.
This is an old topic. I am not going to give the same effort others on these pages have given to this issue.
Nope, I don't. I didn't find much info, but I saw that 1mb sram card for a Newton cost $50 in 1995. Not the same thing as what would end up on a CPU. I wouldn't be surprised if as much cost would be incurred putting on the die.
Also, remember that the processors you mention essentially have no competition. Nobody is producing compatible chips in that processor class. Things will be different when there are two high-end server x86 chips. I'm not saying I would be able to afford them, but I am inclined to believe that the prices will be competitive with current Xeon prices for a higher cache. After all, AMD has no mindshare in the high-end server market and will need to have something to offer them. Also, hopefully the increased market in the chips will lead to more development and lower prices. : P
BTW, how much of a margin do you think those products have?
I'm sure you could find a more specific place to ask any question rather than/. Sure, suggesting another place for help is great, don't get me wrong. But saying to take it somewhere else seems to me to be against the very nature of/. OTOH, a question like this probably would be answered more quickly with a judicious search on deja.com.
I think everyone is being a bit too critical about something they don't know enough about to judge. If anybody here had put together this project, in their spare time, you'd think it mighty unfair to be compared to people who make a living at this sort of thing. As for the demos, I viewed as many as I felt I had time for(10 or so). I was successful in viewing less than half of them. How many people said it didn't work at all? The demos I did see were very impressive and did in fact visually put PSI to shame. However, they didn't do the same thing. They were a 2 dimensional representation of a 3d picture, where this demo lets you change your perspective. It would be up to the author to explain what the difference is between the two simulations. But it wouldn't surprise me if most of the executable is the engine, with a proportionally small amount going towards the actual scene. So a larger scene would take proportionately less to render. As far as the code itself goes, I can say (using od and strings) that it was compiled using Borland C++(not your most lightweight languages) and there is a bunch of stuff in it that could probably be stripped (suggesting it wasn't very highly optimized). I shouldn't really get into the technical side, because that's not the point. We're talking about a new way of doing things that is displayed in a rather crude demonstration by someone who doesn't appear to make a living off of this. If the guy was open-source and written for linux, he'd have alot of support here just for making the effort. One other thing. His site is not designed well for accessing things from the front end. I found some other links by doing some searching that might give you a better idea of what this is like.
http://rsphysse.anu.edu.au/~tsb107/nervana/ apparently the old site. it has links to some mac software (don't have one). http://www.nervana.com/dev/ the development area, has a better rendered image of the island. as well as the documentation. http://www.nervana.com/download/ at one point, could dl trial versions, but has audio clips (one is a.mov file that I didn't have the appropriate decompressor) http://web1.gamesdomain.com/directd/mac/sims/nerva na-03.html download site for nervana-0.3 (mac only) http://www.nervana.com/psi/psifaq.html The psi faq, which has a link at the bottom to a demo version of the 'Real World Viewer' , which looks cool. Unfortunately any addition software I found was for mac, and I was unable to preview it. If someone else could do that, I'd appreciate it.
Sure, that sounds fine, but it is not usually 'symmetric transparency' that you have to worry about. Do you think the watchers are going to let you watch them?
Slashdot Mirror
I would suggest that it is more like finding someone who was born on the same hour of the same day as you.(that's 1 chance in 8766, much higher then DNA testing).
You, however, sound like you wouldn't be convinced unless the exact second was able to be reproduced.
Then I got DSL.
Granted that high speed connections should be cleaner over fiber and (the dreaded) PPPOE should be able to handle whatever medium.. waiting for the phone and cable companies to implement it would be a very boring span.
While I don't disagree with your conclusion, K6's do have their own breed of SMP, which if you are constructing your own parts, you are free to develop a chipset to support it. That is all the K6's are missing, support.
BTW, as mentioned by someone else, they do not mention using K6's on the site. They do mention a 200mhz bus. Looks like CNN screwed the pooch.
It sure would be interesting to see some of the mods they did to the open source segment of the OS.
Unfortunately, they almost certainly developed their own code to do most of real interesting stuff.
Another wrinkle might be that essentially we would have to wait for someone inclined to redistribute the source to buy the machine. I don't think they are under any requirement to distribute on request. Take this statement as a request for information, I don't have time to rephrase the question properly now that I am not entirely sure if it is true.
>Battery exchange stations are quite feasible...
Sure, instead of replacing several gallons of liquid, they would be lugging hundreds of pounds of batteries to and from you car. Now that's service : ).
For this, you get your energy in a form which may or may not pollute as much as the fuel cell, but probably more.
Get over the fuel consumption thing. That will be around until we can get that zero-point energy concept figured out.
If governments are still worried about taxing the stuffing out of something like the emissions from a methanol fuel cell, and we let them.... you might as well start killing people who stand idle too long. (producing poisonous gas without contributing anything). kidding...
I think it would make more sense if you used the fuel cell first, possibly charging the Li-ion battery with just enough juice to shut down or refuel the fuel cell. If the fuel cell runs out, then it could switch to the battery and warn you.
I think this is because I would worry about a 'moving parts system' (fuel moving through electrodes) more than a solid state aparatus. Also, it would be easier to recharge the fuel cell on the fly than it is to do it with a li-ion battery (and if you are at a power source anyway, it doesn't matter)
Another idea would be to have a couple of fuel container attachements (40 hours anyone) and you would be able to take your time refueling one while it is running on the other.
(I gave up on trying to figure out if anyone said this in the thread below, which descended into non-informative).
The main difference I see between the mac market at the time of the switch and the PC market at just about any time is: nobody ever controlled the pc market at any time. (excepting IBM at the start, which is almost irrelevant as this is the reason for using x86 in the first place)
Apple at the time, and even pretty much now, controlled both sides of the equation. The sold you the hardware and the software. If they decided not to sell you any more 68k mac's. That's it. No other sources for new 68k macs. If gateway did this right now, you could still buy a dell. If AMD did this right now, you could still buy intel.
Also, Apple was the platform. They could make an emulator that worked for everyone because there was only one platform. Who is going to make an emulator that works for all of the x86 plaforms (windows, linux, bsd, beos, etc).
>Caveat Emptor
yes, but you and 50 of your friends can get something cheaper than you can alone (assuming you are all buying the same thing (at least one each).
see mercata.com et al (sorry guys, they got to me last).
They are probably talking about dual speed 10/100 here instead of more than one ethernet connection. Else they probably would have said "2 10/100 ethernet adapters". I have not seen two port ethernet cards (I have seen 4 port ones though).
Since this has a 56k modem on it, that is probably meant to be the outside interface.
I guess I'll put the rest of my comments here:
Linux 2.0: I hope you can upgrade this w/o voiding the warrantee. (assumtion:linux=kernel)
No option for upgrade memory: does not bode well for future expansion.
no secure shell...
Probably the best way would be to make three copies with a red, green and blue filter (or red, yellow, blue, whatever is applicable) and combine them in photoshop.
As a reader, you do nobody but yourself good or ill from not reading non-moderated AC posts. And I agree with swordgeek in that the signal to noise in a post-moderated discussion aren't worth worring about.
There is usually little reason to legitimately post anonymously. If they truly want to contribute to the community, I don't think it is too much to ask them to take responsibility (and credit). etc, etc....
The fish bowl is definitely the BSD demon mascot.
>No it does not.
>(corp can have secret fork)
Then who cares. I can build a version of java in my home network that totally breaks sun compatibility, and on top of that share it with a user on another machine of mine (well, it would be me there too, but so what). It doesn't matter to anyone if I don't release it. The whole point of the danger of the fork is that you are going to have two actively developing groups working on increasingly incompatible code confusing the market.
A company can take itself out of the loop and lose the benefit of new GPL features(at least not without more development time of their own). Then they can have a version which they still can't sell. They are free to do it, but it sounds kinda braindead.
>there is no binary compatibility between versions (or in some cases, compiles) of the linux kernel.
Huh, you mean my boxes at home are totally hosed. None of my binaries work because I have gone through 3 versions and probably 10 compiles? I don't think so. Yes, I have had a thing or two break because of a kernel upgrade, but not a significant portion.
I think it is more a problem with libraries than kernels.
Yes, someone else could probably have done it quicker. But I can tell you one thing, I wouldn't trust my credit card info to something you spent 2-5 hours developing the security aspects of. While I wouldn't necessarily call trying to find bugs "programming", its certainly development time.
And how about designing the interface. Sure you say, its one-button shopping, what sort of interface questions do you have about that. Well, I'm sure the web designers would like to decide which font to use for maximum effect, then there's placement. And what it does when you click it, and how it integrates into existing code.
It may be easy for one person to make alot of those decisions based on their own feelings, but I'll bet other people in the organization had different ideas. Does that mean they wasted time because they didn't let one person just do it? No, I think they probably got a product that was better integrated, even if the development time was bloated because of it.
ps-I am not clever enough to have a stand on this issue, but saying it should have only taken 50 hrs. demanded some sort of response. It's probably frivolous, but that's as far as I'll go.
Seems perhaps, but doesn't. Most of the 'claims' are prefaced by 'may' or 'could'. Not always obviously, like on the second page, it prefaces the whole page with "..the obvious ways... it could change our lives.", then it goes on with optimistic ideas.
I have little doubt that it will have an impact in 50-100 years, but I wouldn't hazard a guess. Other people don't feel that way, so be it. Some will be wrong, some may be right, some may seem over-optimistic now, but fall short of what happens... Are you saying because one person made a definitive time constrained prediction, that technology is incapable of moving beyond our imaginations in the same time period?
It actually said that nanotech could take over manufacturing, as in it might be possible. I'll also ignoring the fact that development in 50 years wouldn't exclude power supplies. Being that Dune was written thousands of years in the future, it must be an accurate story of what happened. I'm not saying there is no possibility of truth to it, but you went to an 'authority' instead of just saying: "I think it more likely that the powers that be will use it to control us rather than help us". 'Beware, even that open source program can't save your soul from the Prince that it runs on. Don't kid yourself Ted. If that machine ever got the chance, it'd kill you and everyone you care about!' (w/ apologies to M. Groening, et al)
I agree that we could probably feed everyone if we wanted to. If it were possible to synthesize food, though, you wouldn't have to be able to grow food where you are in order to survive. There are plenty of countries that are too poor to buy our groceries, but they survive because they can grow their own crops. It becomes a problem when a 'surviving' country has some sort of natural disaster, short term (flood) or long term (years long drought). In this case, being able to help themselves would be much better. After all, who wants to be indebted(even just morally) to the US?
My favorite idea would be for medical purposes; unclogging arteries, stitching capillaries, perhaps even killing cancer.
We'll see.
This game is under protest, so the score doesn't matter.
Thars gold in them glands. : )
I guess you would need miners as well.
ps-how do you do preformatted text?
You can actually use 0 (at least on solaris and linux)
Probably because the moderators saw it as being an attack on the x86 processors without much merit.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would need a straight line that long in order for it to be an antenna, and I doubt any CPU is going to have a circuit from one side to the next.(I am assuming you are talking about the CPU die traces and not the mainboard.)
Second, I doubt highly that a CPU is a very efficient transmitter. As long as you keep the case on even the most sensitive won't have any problem. Think of it in these terms.. how much power are you pumping into this chip? 3.3W or less.
This is an old topic. I am not going to give the same effort others on these pages have given to this issue.
Nope, I don't. I didn't find much info, but I saw that 1mb sram card for a Newton cost $50 in 1995. Not the same thing as what would end up on a CPU. I wouldn't be surprised if as much cost would be incurred putting on the die.
Also, remember that the processors you mention essentially have no competition. Nobody is producing compatible chips in that processor class. Things will be different when there are two high-end server x86 chips. I'm not saying I would be able to afford them, but I am inclined to believe that the prices will be competitive with current Xeon prices for a higher cache. After all, AMD has no mindshare in the high-end server market and will need to have something to offer them.
Also, hopefully the increased market in the chips will lead to more development and lower prices. : P
BTW, how much of a margin do you think those products have?
I'm sure you could find a more specific place to ask any question rather than /. /.
Sure, suggesting another place for help is great, don't get me wrong. But saying to take it somewhere else seems to me to be against the very nature of
OTOH, a question like this probably would be answered more quickly with a judicious search on deja.com.
I think everyone is being a bit too critical about something they don't know enough about to judge. If anybody here had put together this project, in their spare time, you'd think it mighty unfair to be compared to people who make a living at this sort of thing. As for the demos, I viewed as many as I felt I had time for(10 or so). I was successful in viewing less than half of them. How many people said it didn't work at all?
.mov file that I didn't have the appropriate decompressor) a na-03.html
The demos I did see were very impressive and did in fact visually put PSI to shame. However, they didn't do the same thing. They were a 2 dimensional representation of a 3d picture, where this demo lets you change your perspective.
It would be up to the author to explain what the difference is between the two simulations. But it wouldn't surprise me if most of the executable is the engine, with a proportionally small amount going towards the actual scene. So a larger scene would take proportionately less to render. As far as the code itself goes, I can say (using od and strings) that it was compiled using Borland C++(not your most lightweight languages) and there is a bunch of stuff in it that could probably be stripped (suggesting it wasn't very highly optimized).
I shouldn't really get into the technical side, because that's not the point. We're talking about a new way of doing things that is displayed in a rather crude demonstration by someone who doesn't appear to make a living off of this. If the guy was open-source and written for linux, he'd have alot of support here just for making the effort.
One other thing. His site is not designed well for accessing things from the front end. I found some other links by doing some searching that might give you a better idea of what this is like.
http://rsphysse.anu.edu.au/~tsb107/nervana/
apparently the old site. it has links to some mac software (don't have one).
http://www.nervana.com/dev/
the development area, has a better rendered image of the island. as well as the documentation.
http://www.nervana.com/download/
at one point, could dl trial versions, but has audio clips (one is a
http://web1.gamesdomain.com/directd/mac/sims/nerv
download site for nervana-0.3 (mac only)
http://www.nervana.com/psi/psifaq.html
The psi faq, which has a link at the bottom to a demo version of the 'Real World Viewer' , which looks cool.
Unfortunately any addition software I found was for mac, and I was unable to preview it. If someone else could do that, I'd appreciate it.
Damnit, I tried to make those links real. Sorry.
Sure, that sounds fine, but it is not usually 'symmetric transparency' that you have to worry about. Do you think the watchers are going to let you watch them?