Conventional U235 reactors as used in the US wont "blow up" (not with a nuclear type explosion, anyway).
Even with all the control rods out, the fuel isn't enriched enough (that whole weapons grade vs non-weapons grade thing) to sustain a chain reaction of sufficient speed/energy to blow nuke-style.
What is more likely is the reactor core melting/exploding from heat/water pressure. This all lives in a containment building. The big worry here is china syndrome (where the whole messs gets so hot that it just melts through the floor, and then keeps on sinking into the earth.
Incidentally, before any of those things go, the heat exchanger is probably likely to burst as well. The chernobyl accident was a complicated and dodgy heat exchanger failure, complicated by a bad reactor design that made it tricky to operate safely.
However, it's still as much about drivers as it ever was. With reasonable confidence, i can say that no amount of electronics will make you as good a driver as schumacher or montoya. After all, we're talking about drivers that can out-brake ABS, out perform traction control, etc etc. Electronic aids only go so far. And the cars dont steer themselves (yet).
That the cars happen to shift gears faster than a human ever could is a nice touch. Friday i rode in a car (BMW E46 M3) which had an electronic clutch system and the shifts were breathtaking.
Well, i hope someone mods me up, because there are a lot of +5 posts in this thread that are patently false or pure speculation.
Whereas what I am about to say is neither.
1) FreeBSD is NOT driving the majority of hotmail. I am not interested in TheRegister or anyone else's "investigative" reporting. The overwhelming majority of machines (by machinecount) are running windows 2000 (or maybe even something later, by now, in trial rollouts ?)
FreeBSD is still used in a few specific places, just like SunE4500 machines are still used at the mailstores. However, when you've got > 10 farm machines per mailstore, and the freebsd machines are just scattered here and there for specific purpose roles (some dns and some inbound mail, iirc), its obvious that the balance of all computers currently in the hotmail system are windows.
So, please give up the tired "hotmail is unix" arguments. Hotmail is a mix of things, all of which are moving towards windows based on the principle of "low hanging fruit" - i.e. whatever is easiest to migrate is getting done first.
Obviously the Sun boxes wont be getting windows on them anytime soon, so dont expect them to get replaced until someone decides "ok, it is now cost justified to get big x86 machines and more importantly re-write all of our STORE system to work on x86+windows and throw out the MILLIONS of sun hardware/software investment we have"
As far as someone else saying all these free-bsd competant people working on rotor - thats pretty much a load of shit. Maybe some of the people working on rotor had worked at hotmail, but i very, very much doubt it. It's a microsoft RESEARCH project. MSR is essentially a research university with no undergrads. MS just pays a bunch of brilliant people to think about shit, and sometimes that rolls into products years down the road, and sometimes it doesnt. There are more people doing interesting things with UNIX at MSR than there are on slashdot (because most slashdotters frankly dont do interesting things, as far as computer science research goes:) MS is not necessarily so pompous as to suggest to some of the top minds in computer science that they should run Windows to do their experiments and research on.. when frankly to a researcher a computer is a computer, and the concepts applied have little to do with the host os.. its a matter of convenience for the researcher..
So, the type of work that went on to produce Rotor isn't exactly the sort of thing some random FreeBSD admin could pull off. I mean, think of the scope of what was done here...NET ontop of windows was analyzed for all the windows calls it made, as well as the MS C runtime library. ALl those calls were re-implemented in a portable layer ontop of UNIX (freebsd, specifically.. so far i've found some freebsd specific bits in the code.. so much so that porting it to openBSD is requiring source changes)
How many BSD admins are competant to write a Win32-on-top-of-BSD compat library ?
Now consider that Rotor was done with just under 5 people, afaik, in the timeframe of something like about 1 year.
2) "Some people" have copies of the Rotor source, and are toying with porting rotor to other platforms.
Rotor is done on FreeBSD because Microsoft HATES the GPL. Microsoft HATES the GPL because it shuts them off. I can't understand how anyone is confused by this. GPL means NO closed source software. GPL means all interop with closed software is RISKY, because some judge COULD interpret the GPL in such a way that MS would have to give away all/any of their source on a royalty free basis.
How do you think MS feels about putting its most valued asset in the hands of some techno-incompetant judge ? There are more lawyers at microsoft trying to understand the GPL and possible GPL interop/challenge/implication scenarios then there probably are at the FSF. (ok, this is speculation.. i dont know how many FSF lawyers there:)
Understand that The Source is the crown jewels to MS. They're willing to let other people look at the jewels, they're willing to let other people help them make the jewels nicer...so long as they retain control and can set the rules.. they're MICROSOFT's jewels after all.. not anybody elses.
MS does not understand how to make money or exist the way they do today in a GPL-world. It is not clear anyone else knows how to do this either - i humbly submit the dismal track record of commercial opensource software companies, and the growing pains and reorganizations, etc etc.
So. Rotor is an implementation of CLR/CLI that DOES let you run.NET applications on UNIX. To ALL of you naysayers and trolls that were saying "it will never happen", ".NET is another windows lockin strategy", and so forth, the line to EAT MY ASS is forming now.
in Summary, of _COURSE_ it wasn't done on GPL. There are absolutely NO advantages to ANYBODY of GPL'd software over BSD license. Microsoft isn't in any hurry to try and get people to use GPL because it SCREWS them. BSD gives everyone what they want out of a license, except those people that want to destroy commercial software development. Rotor is a research project showing that not only is it legal to do a unix.NET, but a couple of bright people can write it and do so in about a years time.
And their efforts have been given to the UNIX community.
So, someone please humour me by finding the microsoft evil in all of this. I think its time some of you suck it up and realize that there are people at microsoft that _DO_ realize there are other platforms, and DO want.NET to be succesful everywhere.. even if they think that an MS hosted OS may be the best place to develop for or run.NET apps, there is no longer anything saying "you have to".
ALso, the "Java is the true cross platform solution,.NET isn't" camp can also get in the "eat my ass" line, right behind all the vaporware naysayers:)
XP doesn't require ACPI to be disabled on all boards, far from it. This is quite an incorrect leap to assume that because some random tech says they needed to ditch ACPI to get XP certified, that XP cannot work with ACPI.
The best board to get right now are the MSI Athlon boards. XP certified, fast as crap, rock solid.
Buying shitty hardware may save you some money up front, but you'll pay through the teeth down the road.
Sure. I had been playing Halo all night and the next morning my fiance came into the room while the lights were out and i was half asleep. As my eyes opened at the noise, I saw her silhoetted(sp) in the doorway and she was walking torwards me. I jumped backwards (well, to the other side of the bed) and screamed.
So yeah, video games have an effect on me.
Luckily, I never had the urge to shoot her with my assault rifle, because:
1) i dont have the lucidity to grab an assault rifle while im half asleep 2) i dont keep an assault rifle in my bedroom 3) IM NOT A MALADJUSTED FUCKING MORON
If you had the technology to scan year book photos of popular people, and easily apply it to 3d geometry in a lifelike manner, you'd blow all your time and money making a FPS game ?
I don't think so.
Where's your sense of adventure man ? I think a few quicktime VRs of the head cheerleader sucking off the principal would be a better use of technology.
Not to mention the entire football team in an accordion-stack of anal sex 40+ people long, wearing YMCA outfits.
he asked if anyone had any insider info or knowledge about it.
what would qualify you to know wether or not microsoft has windows running on x86-64 ?
do you work at amd ? do you work at MS ? i suspect that at either of those places, you wouldn't be allowed to talk about it if they _did_ have it working.
he asked for insider info on the status of win64 on amdx86-64, and you give him a post about porting his software to linux.
so, what reason do you have to belive that you know what the status/existance of that project may or may not be ?
Disclaimer: heres what I've heard from "credible sources" You may want to verify this with a bunch of benchmarks.
What actually happens is that W2k thinks it has 2 CPUs, when it really has say 1.3 effective CPUs (hyperthreading isn't a 2x perf speedup by any means!!)
This sends the scheduler into fits on w2k. Additionally, it means you cant use a copy of w2k licensed for 2 cpus on a 2 cpu box if each cpu features hyperthreading, since it will look like a 4 cpu box.
Basically, stay away from hyperthreading unless you're using xp, or some other OS that handles it right (do any other oses handle it right ?)
You overestimate the brilliance of compiler writers.
LIW and VLIW were tried before. They flopped, because compilers were dumb then. Compilers stayed dumb until midway through the RISC era. Now RISC and CISC are the same, compilers are reasonably bright, and intel is trying its own hacky LIW thing. The compilers are smart enough for a generation 1 LIW design to work, but there may or may not be any indication that they'll be smart. And as each successive subarchitecture of IA64 happens, the compiler will need to change or the chip will need to handle previous generation instructions. Intel is not true LIW in this regard - you should be able to run unmodified IA64-1 bins on IA64-2 chips.
So, some brains are still in the IA-64 chip, meaning the compiler wont have to be _as_ smart, but they'll still need to be smart, and you'll still need a new compiler for each IA64 implementation to get max performance.
project gotham racing has this huge disclaimer screen on it every time you boot it up.. it says something along the lines of the following:
the cars depicted in this game do not necessarily represent how the cars would behave in real life in similar situations. In any case, street racing is highly dangerous and nothing you do in this game should be attempted in any vehicle, on public roads, in real life.
SUV's are classified as trucks, and as such have lax emissions and fuel economy restrictions.
It is very unfortunate that they are so popular, because they tear up the roads, are wasteful of essentially every resource, and do nothing especially well (except kill other drivers, while tyipcally saving the brick-headed morons that buy them)
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We'll rely less on oil when its cheaper to do something else. Oil companies aren't stupid and have been working on synthetic and alternate fuels for decades. Auto makers are doing similar work - BMW has been making prototype hydrogen powered 7 series cars for 3 generations of that line (nearly 20 years).
Don't think of SUV's as cars. Think of them as signs of obesity and idiocy.
Most modern _cars_ get pretty good as mileage. Most japanese 4 bangers are > 30 mpg for highway driving. The latest corvette has a 50% overdrive 6th gear that lets it coast on the highway getting nearly 27mpg - for a car that has a 4 second 0-60 time (unheard of for any car under 6 figures).
Most "work" trucks are also reasonably fuel efficient because of how they are driven. They have poor mileages because they have large displacements to generate the torque required for the work they do. Diesel truck have it even better, since Diesel is about 11% more fuel efficient than gasoline.
So, generally the auto industry has made great leaps and bounds in complying with increasing fuel efficiency requirements while still meeting the demands and expectations of consumers.
Incidnetally, all the cars that suffer from gas guzzler tax are usually high performance vehicles, not cars made by lazy companies. The new BMW M3 has one of the most efficient motors ever produced - 333 horsepower from 3.2 liters, thats greater than 100 horsepower per liter, all with normal aspiration. Even so, the M3 is hit with the gas guzzler tax because at 8000 rpm (its redline) its going through quite a bit of fuel.
Essentially these regulations are putting performance car makers in a bind. The cost of a performance car is passed onto the consumer.
Meanwhile, SUV's are classed as trucks and have utterly abysmal fuel economy. They damage more people, more roads, and more property than other types of vehicles. It is statistically and intuitively obvious that letting soccer moms drive 5000 pound vehilcles with silver-dollar sized brakes in stop on go traffic in a 20 minute commute is a huge problem. If you want real reform for fuel efficiency, roadway saftey, etc, then i suggest requiring SUV's to be treated like trucks in terms of vehicle and drivers licensing is a great idea. Driver education in the united states is pitifully inadequate and putting heavier, less stable, less performant, and less economical vehicles in the hands of the blindfolded masses has borne out to be a bad idea again and again. Requiring people to get different licenses based on weight class of vehicle might be a good start.
1) no employer i've ever worked for has told me to take part in some online poll or to vote a particular way..
2) presumably, online polling systems don't allow floods of thousands of votes from the same IP. The vast majority of outbound http (and other) traffic from the redmond microsoft campus comes from a small set of machines named "tideXX.microsoft.com" - the outward facing proxy/firewall machines. If you see 23420394 votes coming from tide07.microsoft.com, wouldn't you ignore 23420393 of them ?
3) i can describe several times where microsoft employees _did_ want to collectively participate in an external online poll about something but were told not to.
People have a lot of interesting ideas about what goes on inside microsoft. In my experience, it is no where near as "black helicopters" and "do it or else" as you people seem to want to beleive it is.
As far as poll stuffing and what not, I suspect the public feedback on the microsoft settlement was vastly polluted by anti-MS zealots, and do not think it represents the populace at large. When I think about the number of people that are net savvy, extra motivated, and rabidly politically minded, the vast majority seems to fall squarely on the slashdot or ABM crowd. Which seems more likely to you - bill gates telling everyone at MS to go submit feedback to an online poll ? Or Larry ellison and scott mcnealy telling all their employees that if they want their options to ever get in the black, theres a certain website they had better visit ?
IGN is the biggest bunch of cube fanboys on the planet. _Nintendo_ couldn't write pro-nintendo spin that good..
Every f'king article IGN does on xbox is for "insiders" only..
I've been done with ign for a long time...
The reality of the situation is that most games cost $50, and if you play a game for 10 hours thats $5/hour, and its a sliding scale of how much you're willing to pay for 1 hour of entertainment, and how many hours you think you can get out of a game. For instance, i'd much rather buy a moderately amusing video game than see a movie - i or any number of other players can enjoy a game for _at least_ 10 hours. A movie out here runs like $8 for 90 minutes..
Many of the largeish RPGs take 30-50 hours to beat. Those are probably worthwhile.
The best thing to do is sit down with the game a bit and play it. When thats not possible, you get to wade through the hype and decide what you want to beleive..
Do you have any non-men-in-black links to back up the "100 mpg" carburetor ?
a) fuel injection has been more fuel efficient than carburettion since like, 1980
b) many vehicles are hit with a gas-guzzler tax because they dont meet some fuel efficiency standard. that cost is directly passed to consumers, meaning a higher price point for a given car, meaning less attractiveness compared to some other vehicle which is more fuel efficient
c) things like CAFE and other clean air / efficient fuel laws penalize automakers that dont meet draconian fuel efficiency standards.
in other words, fuel efficiency is a _major_ cost issue for car makers. the prices of the cars go up if they aren't fuel efficient, and the carmakers actually get fines if they dont ship cars in a certain range of efficiencies... to the extent that some foreign cars will never come to us shores because of the pentaly imposed..
for example, BMW just designed and built a brand new engine factory because they figured out how to get approx 15% fuel economy improvement. This is a major leap forward in engine design. All future BMW engines will incorporate this technology (valvetronic)
So, tell me who's sitting on a 100mpg _carburettor_ that actually works, and is a relevant choice for application in a US motor vehicle ? Because i'd be curious to see what mathematics comes up with a scenario where sitting on it is better than putting it in a car...
Im sure you've donated way more money to various charities than he has. Why don't you add up all the charitible contributions of pure outright cash you've made in your lifetime. Why don't you then add in the market price of the goods and services you or your business create, that you've donated to similar charities.
Why don't you add in all of the infrastructure investments you've made in various emerging technologies (take a peek at how many dsl/cable providers MS has dumped money into and lost big time) to try and further the state of consumer electronics and software.
Add up all the good you've ever done for anybody, in your whole life.
Now put that number against what Gates has done in year, or even a month. My suspicion is you don't even come close.
In listening to Gates speeches, I've never gotten the impression that hes a megalomaniac. If anything, he's a remarkably normal person,( in spite of being the worlds richest man and all. )He drives himself to work, has a roughly normal sized office, etc etc.
Despite being worth more than any musician or movie star, and depite having more fanatical critics and detractors (just look at the comments here..) than just about anybody, he doesn't have some huge staff of leather jacketed thugs that follow him around protecting his "security zone" or any other such nonsense. (contrast this with some of the glam MTV stars).
Nobody is faultless. There's that hillarious photo of gates in a police lineup, after all. (I'd love to know the story behind that, btw).
There are probably plenty of things he's done that piss you off or are downright illegal.
But if you're looking for the worlds ultimate most evil hated criminal, there are probably better choices than gates.
So he happens to make a lot of money, and is at the helm of a very successful company.
Get a fucking grip. It's not like he killed 6 million jews or 40 million russians, or 90% of the native americans with his evil-gates-smallpox.
Incidentally, If you want a better example of a rich megalomaniac, cast your scrutiny on Larry Ellison.
Not only is he one of those "its important you know how rich i am" types, but hes constantly eating his own foot. It's hillarious.
But like Gates, Ellison's not anybody deserving of the sophomoric hatred that you (and others, and me, once upon a time) seem to send his way.
Someone on the other side did. It must have sounded good to MS, so they ran with it.
So, the judge said No to a settlement that MS was agreeable to, and that the OTHER side proposed. Had he/she said yes, it would have been over.
Instead, a bunch of lawyers will make more money, a few political careers will be furthered, and really, nobody will get any money out of MS except some lawyers (on both sides).
I don't think NASA is sending the right message. I hope any civilizations don't figure this out, because if they do, I don't think they'll be on friendly terms when they come to visit us. The message contains detailed information on human anatomy..
I decoded the message and got:
http://www.mattevans.org/nasa_message.html
warning: this isn't a link, because the message we're sending isn't a good one. View at your own risk. You may be ashamed of the scientific community:(
Yeah. Sega and Sony would never do something dumb like put a modem in a game machine..
Oh wait:
Dreamcast had built in 56k modem
Your recollection of consoles seems limited.
fyi, I had to return my dreamcast because it kept hanging in the same place on the same game. The replacement did not. On the other hand, my XBox has not had any troubles.
Additionaly, the overwhelming majority of the first batch of playstation 1s are now dead, due to CD-Rom failure. Most died after a relatively short amount of time. Additionally, there have been 40 revisions of PS1, 32 of them anti-piracy fixes.
Oh, and I suppose you never got the blinking red light on your 8 bit NES that meant you had to blow on the cartridge, the NES, the cartridge, and the NES again over and over until the thing actually started the game without any weird sprite corruption (if at all )..
The point is, every new console has had failed units. It's a consumer electronics device, and its being treated as such. There is nothing to suggest that XBox is having a higher failure rate than any other console launch..despite the fact that its running a hard disk and that it was put together by a company with no previous experience in building a consumer electronics devices of this type.
Ever since the first rumblings of XBox hit slashdot, people have been badmouthing it. First it was vapourware. Next, no one was going to support it. Then, it was "gamecube will be more powerful".
Yet XBox exists, has more launch titles than Gamecube, and has stunningly better graphics and audio than any other platform gaming platform.
By any measure, XBox has thus far been an outstanding success. Sony is competing based on exclusives, inertia, and branding.. Nintendo is competing with a targeted audience and value pricing. If the microsoft rule of 3 holds true for XBox (MS "gets it right" at version 3), then there may not be a nintendo or a sony console by the time XBox 3 arrives.
I suspect that there is some critical mass of installed units that XBox needs before there will be any real migration away from Sony.. but if that mass is reached, the additional capabilities and ease-of-development may shift sony out of the "Default" spot.
And lets be honest..for all you Gamecube fanboys...Gamecube is such an "also ran".
Hardcore gamers will buy it because they buy every system, and because nintendo will publish the n+1 version of the few relevant franchises they have. Just like for N64 there was a Mario game and 2 Zelda games, so shall there be Mario and Zelda games for Gamecube (well, they've been promised). And there will be the usual assortment of Pokemon and other stuff. Big deal. PS1 broke the gaming industry wide open inspite of N64 and its franchise power, and its stranglehold on the child market. Nintendo may increase its share of the "mario game" and "early childhood" markets, but both of those are shrinking percentages of the overall gaming market.
In an odd twist of fate, assuming Xbox adoption doesn't really happen..._Microsoft_ may be the one whos product fails (to sony) even though it had better technology. That would certainly be a delicious irony on the usual slashdot tale:)
Maybe the writing is on the wall for US based software developers ?
I remember the hoax interview with Stroutstrup about why he invented C++.. it went something like this..
"IBM trained lots and lots of people to become C programmers.. and they got really good at it... and there was no money to be made in C development... so i came up with C++, something so hiddeously complex so as to once again put a premium on good developers"
Sounds like there are lots of cheap developers for real now. And with everyone pushing towards component software or distributed anonymous systems, eventually someone will figure otu to use the Indian Foo.c or bar.pl. Economically, no one is oging to pay some american to re-implement bubble sort in perl in an air conditioned bright office on prime real estate for much longer.
In 10 years, will we all sound like washed up UAW members, bitching about "those damn japs and their jap robots" ?
Disclaimer: IANAROC (I am Not A Resident Of China)
I just took one of those fancy "heres how the other half lives" college courses.
How will reducing software licensing costs transform china in 30 years, when its been an agrarian society for thousands, and poverty stricken for a couple hundred, at least ?
Imagine something similar to anonymizer.com, but completely distributed. You have a local ingress to the proxy network, and before your http sessions leave, you select the country/ip you'd like the egress to come from. Your connections are encrypted while on the proxy network, and its decentralized to be impossible to legally shutdown. You just need one or more computers on the proxy network in each locale you want to impersonate, willing to run the proxy software.
You could manually choose the locale of egress, or have it just randomize each connection for you. The latter might make targeted content not work at all (i imagine peoplewill embed detected locales into URLs, so it might suck to get
foo.com/ENU/index.html
but then get
images.foo.com/JPN/title.jpg
displayed in the html.
Oh, i think IPv6 throws a huge wrench in all of this, btw. (geolocation)
Slashdot Mirror
Conventional U235 reactors as used in the US wont "blow up" (not with a nuclear type explosion, anyway).
Even with all the control rods out, the fuel isn't enriched enough (that whole weapons grade vs non-weapons grade thing) to sustain a chain reaction of sufficient speed/energy to blow nuke-style.
What is more likely is the reactor core melting/exploding from heat/water pressure. This all lives in a containment building. The big worry here is china syndrome (where the whole messs gets so hot that it just melts through the floor, and then keeps on sinking into the earth.
Incidentally, before any of those things go, the heat exchanger is probably likely to burst as well. The chernobyl accident was a complicated and dodgy heat exchanger failure, complicated by a bad reactor design that made it tricky to operate safely.
F1 isn't everyones cup of tea.
However, it's still as much about drivers as it ever was. With reasonable confidence, i can say that no amount of electronics will make you as good a driver as schumacher or montoya. After all, we're talking about drivers that can out-brake ABS, out perform traction control, etc etc. Electronic aids only go so far. And the cars dont steer themselves (yet).
That the cars happen to shift gears faster than a human ever could is a nice touch. Friday i rode in a car (BMW E46 M3) which had an electronic clutch system and the shifts were breathtaking.
this is no longer true.
you can use 36bit physical memory in some PCs
Windows (advanced server SKU's, i beleive) exposes this as something called PAE i think.
Additionally, you should read about the Unisys ES7k. THe first windows 2k datacenter certified machine. It has a very high ram and cpu count.
Actually grain elevator explostions are a _serious_ problem. A friend of mine did a presentation on them in elementary school.
Grain elevators dont exactly "spill corn".
If they break, you get mini-hiroshima.
Wow.
:)
Here's me:
Str: 16
Int: 11
Wis: 14
Dex: 10
Con: 14
Chr: 10
Strong, Dumb, Clumsy, Ugly.
I knew there was a reason I was always wanting to play dwarf barbarians when i was a kid
Well, i hope someone mods me up, because there are a lot of +5 posts in this thread that are patently false or pure speculation.
:)
.NET ontop of windows was analyzed for all the windows calls it made, as well as the MS C runtime library. ALl those calls were re-implemented in a portable layer ontop of UNIX (freebsd, specifically.. so far i've found some freebsd specific bits in the code.. so much so that porting it to openBSD is requiring source changes)
:)
.NET applications on UNIX. To ALL of you naysayers and trolls that were saying "it will never happen", ".NET is another windows lockin strategy", and so forth, the line to EAT MY ASS is forming now.
.NET, but a couple of bright people can write it and do so in about a years time.
.NET to be succesful everywhere.. even if they think that an MS hosted OS may be the best place to develop for or run .NET apps, there is no longer anything saying "you have to".
.NET isn't" camp can also get in the "eat my ass" line, right behind all the vaporware naysayers :)
Whereas what I am about to say is neither.
1) FreeBSD is NOT driving the majority of hotmail. I am not interested in TheRegister or anyone else's "investigative" reporting. The overwhelming majority of machines (by machinecount) are running windows 2000 (or maybe even something later, by now, in trial rollouts ?)
FreeBSD is still used in a few specific places, just like SunE4500 machines are still used at the mailstores. However, when you've got > 10 farm machines per mailstore, and the freebsd machines are just scattered here and there for specific purpose roles (some dns and some inbound mail, iirc), its obvious that the balance of all computers currently in the hotmail system are windows.
So, please give up the tired "hotmail is unix" arguments. Hotmail is a mix of things, all of which are moving towards windows based on the principle of "low hanging fruit" - i.e. whatever is easiest to migrate is getting done first.
Obviously the Sun boxes wont be getting windows on them anytime soon, so dont expect them to get replaced until someone decides "ok, it is now cost justified to get big x86 machines and more importantly re-write all of our STORE system to work on x86+windows and throw out the MILLIONS of sun hardware/software investment we have"
As far as someone else saying all these free-bsd competant people working on rotor - thats pretty much a load of shit. Maybe some of the people working on rotor had worked at hotmail, but i very, very much doubt it. It's a microsoft RESEARCH project. MSR is essentially a research university with no undergrads. MS just pays a bunch of brilliant people to think about shit, and sometimes that rolls into products years down the road, and sometimes it doesnt. There are more people doing interesting things with UNIX at MSR than there are on slashdot (because most slashdotters frankly dont do interesting things, as far as computer science research goes
MS is not necessarily so pompous as to suggest to some of the top minds in computer science that they should run Windows to do their experiments and research on.. when frankly to a researcher a computer is a computer, and the concepts applied have little to do with the host os.. its a matter of convenience for the researcher..
So, the type of work that went on to produce Rotor isn't exactly the sort of thing some random FreeBSD admin could pull off. I mean, think of the scope of what was done here..
How many BSD admins are competant to write a Win32-on-top-of-BSD compat library ?
Now consider that Rotor was done with just under 5 people, afaik, in the timeframe of something like about 1 year.
2) "Some people" have copies of the Rotor source, and are toying with porting rotor to other platforms.
Rotor is done on FreeBSD because Microsoft HATES the GPL. Microsoft HATES the GPL because it shuts them off. I can't understand how anyone is confused by this. GPL means NO closed source software. GPL means all interop with closed software is RISKY, because some judge COULD interpret the GPL in such a way that MS would have to give away all/any of their source on a royalty free basis.
How do you think MS feels about putting its most valued asset in the hands of some techno-incompetant judge ? There are more lawyers at microsoft trying to understand the GPL and possible GPL interop/challenge/implication scenarios then there probably are at the FSF. (ok, this is speculation.. i dont know how many FSF lawyers there
Understand that The Source is the crown jewels to MS. They're willing to let other people look at the jewels, they're willing to let other people help them make the jewels nicer...so long as they retain control and can set the rules.. they're MICROSOFT's jewels after all.. not anybody elses.
MS does not understand how to make money or exist the way they do today in a GPL-world. It is not clear anyone else knows how to do this either - i humbly submit the dismal track record of commercial opensource software companies, and the growing pains and reorganizations, etc etc.
So. Rotor is an implementation of CLR/CLI that DOES let you run
in Summary, of _COURSE_ it wasn't done on GPL. There are absolutely NO advantages to ANYBODY of GPL'd software over BSD license. Microsoft isn't in any hurry to try and get people to use GPL because it SCREWS them. BSD gives everyone what they want out of a license, except those people that want to destroy commercial software development. Rotor is a research project showing that not only is it legal to do a unix
And their efforts have been given to the UNIX community.
So, someone please humour me by finding the microsoft evil in all of this. I think its time some of you suck it up and realize that there are people at microsoft that _DO_ realize there are other platforms, and DO want
ALso, the "Java is the true cross platform solution,
XP doesn't require ACPI to be disabled on all boards, far from it. This is quite an incorrect leap to assume that because some random tech says they needed to ditch ACPI to get XP certified, that XP cannot work with ACPI.
The best board to get right now are the MSI Athlon boards. XP certified, fast as crap, rock solid.
Buying shitty hardware may save you some money up front, but you'll pay through the teeth down the road.
Sure. I had been playing Halo all night and the next morning my fiance came into the room while the lights were out and i was half asleep. As my eyes opened at the noise, I saw her silhoetted(sp) in the doorway and she was walking torwards me. I jumped backwards (well, to the other side of the bed) and screamed.
So yeah, video games have an effect on me.
Luckily, I never had the urge to shoot her with my assault rifle, because:
1) i dont have the lucidity to grab an assault rifle while im half asleep
2) i dont keep an assault rifle in my bedroom
3) IM NOT A MALADJUSTED FUCKING MORON
If you had the technology to scan year book photos of popular people, and easily apply it to 3d geometry in a lifelike manner, you'd blow all your time and money making a FPS game ?
I don't think so.
Where's your sense of adventure man ? I think a few quicktime VRs of the head cheerleader sucking off the principal would be a better use of technology.
Not to mention the entire football team in an accordion-stack of anal sex 40+ people long, wearing YMCA outfits.
_Thats_ putting technology to work.
he asked if anyone had any insider info or knowledge about it.
what would qualify you to know wether or not microsoft has windows running on x86-64 ?
do you work at amd ? do you work at MS ? i suspect that at either of those places, you wouldn't be allowed to talk about it if they _did_ have it working.
he asked for insider info on the status of win64 on amdx86-64, and you give him a post about porting his software to linux.
so, what reason do you have to belive that you know what the status/existance of that project may or may not be ?
Disclaimer: heres what I've heard from "credible sources" You may want to verify this with a bunch of benchmarks.
What actually happens is that W2k thinks it has 2 CPUs, when it really has say 1.3 effective CPUs (hyperthreading isn't a 2x perf speedup by any means!!)
This sends the scheduler into fits on w2k. Additionally, it means you cant use a copy of w2k licensed for 2 cpus on a 2 cpu box if each cpu features hyperthreading, since it will look like a 4 cpu box.
Basically, stay away from hyperthreading unless you're using xp, or some other OS that handles it right (do any other oses handle it right ?)
You overestimate the brilliance of compiler writers.
LIW and VLIW were tried before. They flopped, because compilers were dumb then. Compilers stayed dumb until midway through the RISC era. Now RISC and CISC are the same, compilers are reasonably bright, and intel is trying its own hacky LIW thing. The compilers are smart enough for a generation 1 LIW design to work, but there may or may not be any indication that they'll be smart. And as each successive subarchitecture of IA64 happens, the compiler will need to change or the chip will need to handle previous generation instructions. Intel is not true LIW in this regard - you should be able to run unmodified IA64-1 bins on IA64-2 chips.
So, some brains are still in the IA-64 chip, meaning the compiler wont have to be _as_ smart, but they'll still need to be smart, and you'll still need a new compiler for each IA64 implementation to get max performance.
project gotham racing has this huge disclaimer screen on it every time you boot it up.. it says something along the lines of the following:
the cars depicted in this game do not necessarily represent how the cars would behave in real life in similar situations. In any case, street racing is highly dangerous and nothing you do in this game should be attempted in any vehicle, on public roads, in real life.
SUV's are classified as trucks, and as such have lax emissions and fuel economy restrictions.
It is very unfortunate that they are so popular, because they tear up the roads, are wasteful of essentially every resource, and do nothing especially well (except kill other drivers, while tyipcally saving the brick-headed morons that buy them)
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We'll rely less on oil when its cheaper to do something else. Oil companies aren't stupid and have been working on synthetic and alternate fuels for decades. Auto makers are doing similar work - BMW has been making prototype hydrogen powered 7 series cars for 3 generations of that line (nearly 20 years).
Don't think of SUV's as cars. Think of them as signs of obesity and idiocy.
Most modern _cars_ get pretty good as mileage. Most japanese 4 bangers are > 30 mpg for highway driving. The latest corvette has a 50% overdrive 6th gear that lets it coast on the highway getting nearly 27mpg - for a car that has a 4 second 0-60 time (unheard of for any car under 6 figures).
Most "work" trucks are also reasonably fuel efficient because of how they are driven. They have poor mileages because they have large displacements to generate the torque required for the work they do. Diesel truck have it even better, since Diesel is about 11% more fuel efficient than gasoline.
So, generally the auto industry has made great leaps and bounds in complying with increasing fuel efficiency requirements while still meeting the demands and expectations of consumers.
Incidnetally, all the cars that suffer from gas guzzler tax are usually high performance vehicles, not cars made by lazy companies. The new BMW M3 has one of the most efficient motors ever produced - 333 horsepower from 3.2 liters, thats greater than 100 horsepower per liter, all with normal aspiration. Even so, the M3 is hit with the gas guzzler tax because at 8000 rpm (its redline) its going through quite a bit of fuel.
Essentially these regulations are putting performance car makers in a bind. The cost of a performance car is passed onto the consumer.
Meanwhile, SUV's are classed as trucks and have utterly abysmal fuel economy. They damage more people, more roads, and more property than other types of vehicles. It is statistically and intuitively obvious that letting soccer moms drive 5000 pound vehilcles with silver-dollar sized brakes in stop on go traffic in a 20 minute commute is a huge problem. If you want real reform for fuel efficiency, roadway saftey, etc, then i suggest requiring SUV's to be treated like trucks in terms of vehicle and drivers licensing is a great idea. Driver education in the united states is pitifully inadequate and putting heavier, less stable, less performant, and less economical vehicles in the hands of the blindfolded masses has borne out to be a bad idea again and again. Requiring people to get different licenses based on weight class of vehicle might be a good start.
1) no employer i've ever worked for has told me to take part in some online poll or to vote a particular way..
2) presumably, online polling systems don't allow floods of thousands of votes from the same IP. The vast majority of outbound http (and other) traffic from the redmond microsoft campus comes from a small set of machines named "tideXX.microsoft.com" - the outward facing proxy/firewall machines. If you see 23420394 votes coming from tide07.microsoft.com, wouldn't you ignore 23420393 of them ?
3) i can describe several times where microsoft employees _did_ want to collectively participate in an external online poll about something but were told not to.
People have a lot of interesting ideas about what goes on inside microsoft. In my experience, it is no where near as "black helicopters" and "do it or else" as you people seem to want to beleive it is.
As far as poll stuffing and what not, I suspect the public feedback on the microsoft settlement was vastly polluted by anti-MS zealots, and do not think it represents the populace at large. When I think about the number of people that are net savvy, extra motivated, and rabidly politically minded, the vast majority seems to fall squarely on the slashdot or ABM crowd. Which seems more likely to you - bill gates telling everyone at MS to go submit feedback to an online poll ? Or Larry ellison and scott mcnealy telling all their employees that if they want their options to ever get in the black, theres a certain website they had better visit ?
Oh _please_.
IGN is the biggest bunch of cube fanboys on the planet. _Nintendo_ couldn't write pro-nintendo spin that good..
Every f'king article IGN does on xbox is for "insiders" only..
I've been done with ign for a long time...
The reality of the situation is that most games cost $50, and if you play a game for 10 hours thats $5/hour, and its a sliding scale of how much you're willing to pay for 1 hour of entertainment, and how many hours you think you can get out of a game. For instance, i'd much rather buy a moderately amusing video game than see a movie - i or any number of other players can enjoy a game for _at least_ 10 hours. A movie out here runs like $8 for 90 minutes..
Many of the largeish RPGs take 30-50 hours to beat. Those are probably worthwhile.
The best thing to do is sit down with the game a bit and play it. When thats not possible, you get to wade through the hype and decide what you want to beleive..
Do you have any non-men-in-black links to back up the "100 mpg" carburetor ?
a) fuel injection has been more fuel efficient than carburettion since like, 1980
b) many vehicles are hit with a gas-guzzler tax because they dont meet some fuel efficiency standard. that cost is directly passed to consumers, meaning a higher price point for a given car, meaning less attractiveness compared to some other vehicle which is more fuel efficient
c) things like CAFE and other clean air / efficient fuel laws penalize automakers that dont meet draconian fuel efficiency standards.
in other words, fuel efficiency is a _major_ cost issue for car makers. the prices of the cars go up if they aren't fuel efficient, and the carmakers actually get fines if they dont ship cars in a certain range of efficiencies... to the extent that some foreign cars will never come to us shores because of the pentaly imposed..
for example, BMW just designed and built a brand new engine factory because they figured out how to get approx 15% fuel economy improvement. This is a major leap forward in engine design. All future BMW engines will incorporate this technology (valvetronic)
So, tell me who's sitting on a 100mpg _carburettor_ that actually works, and is a relevant choice for application in a US motor vehicle ? Because i'd be curious to see what mathematics comes up with a scenario where sitting on it is better than putting it in a car...
Yeah, that Gates is a real monster alright.
Im sure you've donated way more money to various charities than he has. Why don't you add up all the charitible contributions of pure outright cash you've made in your lifetime. Why don't you then add in the market price of the goods and services you or your business create, that you've donated to similar charities.
Why don't you add in all of the infrastructure investments you've made in various emerging technologies (take a peek at how many dsl/cable providers MS has dumped money into and lost big time) to try and further the state of consumer electronics and software.
Add up all the good you've ever done for anybody, in your whole life.
Now put that number against what Gates has done in year, or even a month. My suspicion is you don't even come close.
In listening to Gates speeches, I've never gotten the impression that hes a megalomaniac. If anything, he's a remarkably normal person,( in spite of being the worlds richest man and all. )He drives himself to work, has a roughly normal sized office, etc etc.
Despite being worth more than any musician or movie star, and depite having more fanatical critics and detractors (just look at the comments here..) than just about anybody, he doesn't have some huge staff of leather jacketed thugs that follow him around protecting his "security zone" or any other such nonsense. (contrast this with some of the glam MTV stars).
Nobody is faultless. There's that hillarious photo of gates in a police lineup, after all. (I'd love to know the story behind that, btw).
There are probably plenty of things he's done that piss you off or are downright illegal.
But if you're looking for the worlds ultimate most evil hated criminal, there are probably better choices than gates.
So he happens to make a lot of money, and is at the helm of a very successful company.
Get a fucking grip. It's not like he killed 6 million jews or 40 million russians, or 90% of the native americans with his evil-gates-smallpox.
Incidentally, If you want a better example of a rich megalomaniac, cast your scrutiny on Larry Ellison.
Not only is he one of those "its important you know how rich i am" types, but hes constantly eating his own foot. It's hillarious.
But like Gates, Ellison's not anybody deserving of the sophomoric hatred that you (and others, and me, once upon a time) seem to send his way.
For now. VS.NET will do the majority of this stuff for you.
Which is when ASP.NET will come into its own, btw.
Micrsoft didn't propose that settlement.
Someone on the other side did. It must have sounded good to MS, so they ran with it.
So, the judge said No to a settlement that MS was agreeable to, and that the OTHER side proposed. Had he/she said yes, it would have been over.
Instead, a bunch of lawyers will make more money, a few political careers will be furthered, and really, nobody will get any money out of MS except some lawyers (on both sides).
I don't think NASA is sending the right message. I hope any civilizations don't figure this out, because if they do, I don't think they'll be on friendly terms when they come to visit us. The message contains detailed information on human anatomy..
:(
I decoded the message and got:
http://www.mattevans.org/nasa_message.html
warning: this isn't a link, because the message we're sending isn't a good one. View at your own risk. You may be ashamed of the scientific community
Yeah. Sega and Sony would never do something dumb like put a modem in a game machine..
:)
Oh wait:
Dreamcast had built in 56k modem
Your recollection of consoles seems limited.
fyi, I had to return my dreamcast because it kept hanging in the same place on the same game. The replacement did not. On the other hand, my XBox has not had any troubles.
Additionaly, the overwhelming majority of the first batch of playstation 1s are now dead, due to CD-Rom failure. Most died after a relatively short amount of time. Additionally, there have been 40 revisions of PS1, 32 of them anti-piracy fixes.
Oh, and I suppose you never got the blinking red light on your 8 bit NES that meant you had to blow on the cartridge, the NES, the cartridge, and the NES again over and over until the thing actually started the game without any weird sprite corruption (if at all )..
The point is, every new console has had failed units. It's a consumer electronics device, and its being treated as such. There is nothing to suggest that XBox is having a higher failure rate than any other console launch..despite the fact that its running a hard disk and that it was put together by a company with no previous experience in building a consumer electronics devices of this type.
Ever since the first rumblings of XBox hit slashdot, people have been badmouthing it. First it was vapourware. Next, no one was going to support it. Then, it was "gamecube will be more powerful".
Yet XBox exists, has more launch titles than Gamecube, and has stunningly better graphics and audio than any other platform gaming platform.
By any measure, XBox has thus far been an outstanding success. Sony is competing based on exclusives, inertia, and branding.. Nintendo is competing with a targeted audience and value pricing. If the microsoft rule of 3 holds true for XBox (MS "gets it right" at version 3), then there may not be a nintendo or a sony console by the time XBox 3 arrives.
I suspect that there is some critical mass of installed units that XBox needs before there will be any real migration away from Sony.. but if that mass is reached, the additional capabilities and ease-of-development may shift sony out of the "Default" spot.
And lets be honest..for all you Gamecube fanboys...Gamecube is such an "also ran".
Hardcore gamers will buy it because they buy every system, and because nintendo will publish the n+1 version of the few relevant franchises they have. Just like for N64 there was a Mario game and 2 Zelda games, so shall there be Mario and Zelda games for Gamecube (well, they've been promised). And there will be the usual assortment of Pokemon and other stuff. Big deal. PS1 broke the gaming industry wide open inspite of N64 and its franchise power, and its stranglehold on the child market. Nintendo may increase its share of the "mario game" and "early childhood" markets, but both of those are shrinking percentages of the overall gaming market.
In an odd twist of fate, assuming Xbox adoption doesn't really happen..._Microsoft_ may be the one whos product fails (to sony) even though it had better technology. That would certainly be a delicious irony on the usual slashdot tale
Maybe the writing is on the wall for US based software developers ?
I remember the hoax interview with Stroutstrup about why he invented C++.. it went something like this..
"IBM trained lots and lots of people to become C programmers.. and they got really good at it... and there was no money to be made in C development... so i came up with C++, something so hiddeously complex so as to once again put a premium on good developers"
Sounds like there are lots of cheap developers for real now. And with everyone pushing towards component software or distributed anonymous systems, eventually someone will figure otu to use the Indian Foo.c or bar.pl. Economically, no one is oging to pay some american to re-implement bubble sort in perl in an air conditioned bright office on prime real estate for much longer.
In 10 years, will we all sound like washed up UAW members, bitching about "those damn japs and their jap robots" ?
Disclaimer: IANAROC (I am Not A Resident Of China)
I just took one of those fancy "heres how the other half lives" college courses.
How will reducing software licensing costs transform china in 30 years, when its been an agrarian society for thousands, and poverty stricken for a couple hundred, at least ?
A gnutella like multi-proxy system.
Imagine something similar to anonymizer.com, but completely distributed. You have a local ingress to the proxy network, and before your http sessions leave, you select the country/ip you'd like the egress to come from. Your connections are encrypted while on the proxy network, and its decentralized to be impossible to legally shutdown. You just need one or more computers on the proxy network in each locale you want to impersonate, willing to run the proxy software.
You could manually choose the locale of egress, or have it just randomize each connection for you. The latter might make targeted content not work at all (i imagine peoplewill embed detected locales into URLs, so it might suck to get
foo.com/ENU/index.html
but then get
images.foo.com/JPN/title.jpg
displayed in the html.
Oh, i think IPv6 throws a huge wrench in all of this, btw. (geolocation)