I get bandwidth from my isp, they get it from 2 or three places... and it goes "up the line" until you get networks that are simply moving traffic that doesn't belong to them..
Does UUNet create bandwidth ? Does sprint ? Why dont they create a bunch more ?
Where is the top of the food chain of bandwidth ?
Obviously, its in their interest to keep charging ridiculous fees.
Why doesn't someone else "make more bandwidth" ?
I pay $65/mo for 128/768 DSL with static ip. I think thats because tahts what I'm willing to pay, not because theres any cost structure supporting that price.
There is no peice of technology that I can think of that doesn't become trivial amortized over even a year. Yet T1 and DS3 line charges are still astronomical. Why ?
ISP's overselling bandwidth implies that they cant afford more upstream, implying that upstream bandwidth is expensive, which I've seen plenty of evidence of. Why is this upstream b/w so damn much money ?
Sorry for the incoherency. I just don't understand the cost structure for broadband.
We've all read the article about the psycho software engineering team that does the space shuttle software. They still make a small number of mistakes with each release. On the order of 1 or 2 of them makes it to NASA, iirc, but they're still bugs.
Consider the limited scope of what the shuttle is doing, versus what most network/operating systems do.
Look at the pre-common criteria schemes. There was only one product I saw that received an A1 certification. It was some sort of network encryption device.
iirc, A1 meant provably secure by design, followed by implementation. (again, iirc) No network operating system is listed in that category.
Scheiner (sp) wrote an interesting artcile on encryption and how it relates to security, effectively using the analogy that hoping encryption thwarts attacks is akin to putting a few sharp objects in your front yard and hoping a burglar stumbles into them.. e.g. Typically we can "prove" that an encryption algorithm is impractical to attack, but we already know that most attacks come from implementation defects as opposed to poor designs.
So, I've never heard of an unhackable system.
Software has the very difficult task of making a decision that a human would make, without having all the sensory input and context that a human would have. Finally, it has to be written by (at some point down the line of automation) a human, one who makes mistakes and assumptions.
Some inside Microsoft understand this _Very_ well.
It may have come out of thier mouths at various times as "when linux has our market share, linux will have a similar number of vulnerabilities".
When phrased that way, people often scoff.
However, if you accept that microsoft's installed base contributes to them being a common target of attacks (without considering the relative quality of the software), then it seems reasonable to presume that as the popularity of a system increases, the frequency of people looking for exploits on that system will also increase. If you beleive there are always more bugs and exploits to be found, then it also follows that more vulnerabilities will be discovered.
Summary ? Part of MSes high number of security holes has to do with installed base size. (*1)
As linux popularity increases, it seems reasonable that the number of linux vulnerabilities reported will increase as well.
Yet when MS says "if linux were as big as us, they'd be just as insecure", some people dismiss it outright.
You say yourself that for many reasons, one OS should not dominate the industry. I agree. How many "linux will rule the world" zealots would agree ? Are they who do not, as forward looking as you or I?
*1 - This is not an excuse, a bigger part of MSes high number of security holes has to do with assumptions made during product design, and default configuration choices.
No. W2k was an evolution of NT4. Thats why it says "Based on NT Technology" every time it boots, and on the box, iirc:)
That said, W2k was a significant evolution over NT4. It's probably fair to say change(NT4, W2k) >> change(W2k, XP).
Many systems in NT4 were re-written for W2k, obviously. For instance, lots of systems were made restartable for W2k because people hated how often you had to reboot NT. Similarly, in W2k people got irate with the speed of w2k booting. So for XP, that was specifically targeted, and, afaict, much improved.
So while the XP pro "kernel" isn't the same as the NT4 server kernel, they're the same lineage, and I'm not sure I'd quantify the code churn as being on the scale of linux 1.x -> linux 2.x or more like linux 2.2->linux 2.4.
I think you'll find that the First windows NT, while not widely used, came out in a similar time frame to what I claim.
Remember, NT and OS/2 were intermingled in the early days. OS/2 2.x was out in the Win 3.1 time frame. IIRC, MS was already working on NT when OS/2 2.1 shipped.
Obviously you could construct a definition of "informed" that I wouldn't qualify for, but the assumptions you've made about me are unfortuneate, and because i've been shooting from the hip all day, I'll respond to them anyway
1) I've spent a lot of time with linux. Not as much lately, but "enough".
I've also spent a lot of time with OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX, and even NeXTSTEP. Infact, I would wager to say that I know Solaris and "general unix" stuff far better than I know windows.
Please dont assume that because I've reached a different conclusion than you that I'm ignorant.
2) I've tried to learn as much as possible about every system I've come in contact one. I haven't "decided" that _any_ of them do everything i need done well. I envy you in that you have found that linux seems to meet all of yours. At the current time, my home network consists of windows 2000, windows ce, macos 9, openbsd, solaris 2.6, and irix 6.5. If there were one OS that met every requirement, i'd save a lot of time and money, i think.
So, while its too bad that we see things differently, it'd be nice if in the future, you could leave me out of the "just some other microsoftie that doesn't know linux" bucket.
That said, do you have any pointers for how i can further educate myself in order to see how senseless i am ?
1) There is no integrated development environment and toolchain for general purpose C/C++ coding for Linux that is comparable in integration and featureset to something like MSVC on Win32, or even something like ProDev for Irix or Workshop for Solaris.
2) Gnome/KDE are more than WM's. When someone says "there are no environments for linux", people bitch about how Gnome/KDE are more than that. When someone says "there are multiple competing unfinished environments", someone says "they're just window managers".
Two points are obvious -
2a) if slashdotters wobble about these things being WMs or Environments, how are potentially inexperienced developers supposed to figure it out in a reasonable amount of time ?
2b) Each window manager does things slightly differently. So does each web browser. Case in point - write a configuration for a window manager. Now convert it for use with a different one. Ha ha.
3) You cant say XP isn't proven, and then later say XP is just NT all over again. XP has _10 years_ of OS development behind it. Not the same as 30 years of UNIX, but its still a bit of a stretch to call the guts of XP "unproven" in the same breath as saying "its really just W2k with some extra gui bits".
4) "Not directly test" = "Not tested"
Bullshit. Of course, maybe _you_ can't build the bridge from repetitive testing to intelligent testing on changed subsets, but I know for a fact MS internally has a toolchain which gives statistical test coverage assurances based on deltas between binaries. Guess thats what happens when you have a group like MSResearch at your disposal.
There may very well be things that are demonstrably false in what MS has released. You haven't mentioned any of them, if there are.
Common slashdotter tactics used in your message include:
- "I am an Armchair legal expert"
- "I get to have it both ways" (its a WM, its an environment, what is it ?)
- "Your test isn't good enough for me" (because it doesn't say what I want it to say)
Ok, we have people talking on the internet in a chat room about a game this simulates using the internet to hack places where people are talking like the current internet is like a simlulation game!
Actually its quite likely that the US knows the location of every russian ship within some radius and russia knows the location of every US ship, within some radius.
After all, we know where all their ports and navy bases are. A ship of a given maximum speed can only move so much in a given non-satellite-covered time window. We see the thing as soon as it goes to sea, and if we dont have an eye pointed at it for 5 hours, when we look again we know its somewhere within a 5 hour radius, as you allude to.
I mean really. How hard is it to say "oh yeah, i think thats a ship, its the only thing leaving a 3 mile wake anywhere in this picture"
Disclaimer - I'm not in the navy, and I think Tom Clancy is cool. Flame away:)
I'm just saying theres no such thing as an innocent. I didn't say that that justifies anything.
Statistically this is obvious. If you load crime statistics for various crimes, and multiply by the number of adults in the building when it was destroyed, im sure you'll get plenty of "non-innocent" people. Rapists, a murderer or two, sex offenders, probably zillions of white-collar offenders.
It's not relevant, but theres no way you can look anyone in the face and seriously beleive in the idea of "innocence". Everyone in that building (unless theres some sort of convent, and even then, thats only according to _one_ possible moral structure) had done something wrong at some point in their life.
Also, I dont see where you pull the slaughtering muslims thing from. I suspect most of the people in the WTC pushed pens or keyboards all day. It really has no bearing though.
Anyway, getting to the point:
I am a US citizen. I realise the US has a lot of enemies. This puts me in potential danger, 24 hours a day. However, I also think the US does a generally good job, and we have a reasonably competant military. Knowing that no matter what, you cant please everyone, i'm hedging my bets and living here, even though it might be safer to live elsewhere.
I lucked out. I happened not to get killed on sep 11th. Maybe I wont be so lucky next time.
Similarly, the "innocents" in afghanistan are there because they haven't left. You might say "they're not allowed to leave" or some such bullshit. They know what their government stands for. They know the consequences of harboring terrorists. It's not like this is a surprise. The president spends a month saying "we will fuck up any nation that doesn't bend over backwards for us". We've been dropping leaftlets on the poor people for months. If anyone in the village can read, they've got a pretty good chance of "Getting the message".
The "innocents" in afghanistan know that their country has pissed us off, and we're going to be bombing the fuck out of it, pretty much indiscriminantly.
But they're still there.
If i were an afghani citizen, Instead of burning US flags and effigies of president Bush and celebrating in the streets over the attack (the innocence is really shining through, dont you think ?), I'd be saying "gosh, the US has more bombs than we have grains of sand, and we've really pissed them off, and i bet their just dying to turn my shithole country into a glass garden. Maybe I should pack my shit and move before my organs get turned into stucco."
I'm not "interested" in wether or not something is justified. Obvioiusly the taliban and washington have different ideas about justice. Thats the way it is.
For the first time in a long time, the US is more interested in getting shit taken care of then not stepping on other peoples toes. Too fucking bad for people with toes. You've been warned.
Before you can see things with any clarity, you must admit - no one is innocent. Everyone has choices. How you make your choices is what makes you human.
If you're an "innocent civilian" in afghanistan - tough shit. You have an important choice to make, with at least 3 obvious options:
1. Fight your countries corrupt government internally, probably end up getting killed
2. Flee from your corrupt government because you know they're stepping on the wrong toes, probably end up getting kiled
3. Do nothing, let it be someone else's problem, decide by indecision that you support the practices of your government, get killed by US or coalition fire/bombs.
Either way, you die, and you even get to choose how.
All you're really guaranteed in life is a shot at choosing how you die. No one, not even the US, has the power to deny that choice to people.
So next time you look upon history with rosy colored glasses - leave out innocence. Its a figment of the popular imagination. And it really muddy's the water.
Why is that a good idea ? How does that help anyone besides the developers receiving the money ?
It doesn't. Virtually no consumer anywhere on the face of the planet will benefit from improvements made to gcc, KDE, Redhat, or any other open source proejct. People already bright enough, motivated enough, and software-religious enough to use those products will benefit. Guess what, they're already using them.
This is a settlement to a class action suit that consumers filed alleging that microsoft unfairly priced products. They _wanted_ the MS stuff and paid for it, but on the tails of other court cases, decided they could get some money back.
The software you mention has been free and available the entire time. They could have bought it then. They chose not to, apparently.
The government also sought in its court filing to clarify key provisions surrounding the secrecy of Microsoft's technology to prevent consumers from making illegal copies of music or movies. Part of the settlement allows Microsoft to keep secret any information that might violate the security of such anti-piracy technology, and critics charged that Microsoft might use the exemption to hide details about many of its products.
But the government told the judge that Microsoft must disclose to competitors all the capabilities of its anti-piracy music technology under the latest version of Windows, called XP. Microsoft can't use the security exemption as a pretext for broadly keeping details about its software secret, lawyers said.
I'm no big fan of DRM technology, but the whole premise is that its obscure and heard to interact with. There is no provably secure or correct DRM scheme - all you can do is make the software a pain in the ass to figure out. So by ordering MS to disclose a bunch of stuff on how the DRM works, it probably contributes a great deal to crackability, thus nullifying its use anyway.
Regardless of your moral/ethical/whatever opinions on DRM, requiring too much info be leaked from the DRM technology utterly invalidates and destroys the usefulness of the DRm technology. Which means MS will just have to think of something else that they _wont_ have to reveal secrets about.
The Unified Memory that exists in Xbox is there IN THE METAL.
Games get unfetted access to hardware. The OS runs the "dashboard", and is the gateway for access to disk/filesystem. The OS is not managing your resources, theres no VM or any bullshit like that. On the other hand, the game writers dont need to care aout the voltage level coming off of pin 2 of the 3nd controller. (if they dont want to)
XBox is very much all about gaming. It is just as much a specific gaming machine than any dreamcast or PS2. The fact that it does a lot more than either of these should be a _benefit_, not a reason to say "its a pc".
Games not using hard drives ? Gosh, silly of Sony to decide after the fact that they'd start shipping one for PS2. Every XBox game will utilize the hard disk in various interesting ways - because Xbox decided that gaming could really be improved with a HD as part of the standard system. Load times are faster, levels are larger, you can save a bunch of save games on the hd (and saving is faster, and you dont have to buy a memory card that you fill up after playing 4 games)
Not to mention the ethernet connector. I love my dreamcast, but how stupid is it that i have a home lan and DSL but i would need to use a 56k modem (and tie up my only line) to use any of DCs broadband features. All to get a connection thats slow and laggy ? No thanks. With Xbox's ethernet adapter you can make lan games with a crosover cable or a hub, or eventually you'll be able to go online for MMORPGs and a number of other things.
So yeah. Ethernet, insane graphics capability, hard disk - they aren't needed for the games of today. But xbox isn't about the games of today.
In other news, Slashdot readers were less than shocked when a clueless fanboy was incorrect on every point made in a post.
stripped down PC
Ah yes, stripped down in the sense that the NV2A Xbox GPU is more powerful than any nVidia card you can get ?
PS2 superior... specific gaming system
Ooh this one is funny. Guess what CPU the PS1 uses ? MIPS R3000. Same thing the SGI Indigo's used as well as the DECstation 5000s, not to mention a zillion embedded devices. The PS2 again uses a MIPS 4000 family CPU. Again, off the shelf stuff.
The NES, Masterdrive, Genesis, SNES, PS1, Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, gamecube, and XBox have all used off the shelf CPUs. And all of them except maybe XBox and Gamecube have been cpus that are already effectively obsolete in the desktop space.
So don't delude yourself about "real console hardware".
Besides. Superior is many things, graphics, audio, usability, features, and most importantly - games.
Dreamcast was NOT a windows box. Dammit i wish people would stop talking about shit they are ignorant of.
Sega and Microsoft made a Windows CE target for the dreamcast hardware, so you could IF YOU WANTED TO, develop your GAME using Windows CE. The Windows CE was _purely_ optional and it was on the GAME DISC, not the console.
Now, on to xbox:
No xbox i've ever played or seen has crashed.
The "green screen of death" picture everyone made such a big deal out of was a developer/debug unit...
Finally, its a bit different than "Windoze" and a Pentium.
Saying XBox is Windows + pentium is saying PS1 is an SGI Indigo with gcc. If you're such a brilliant damn embedded engineer, please tell me how microsoft can fit 30 or 100 or whatever it is many MEGABYTES of windows code into the xbox roms ?
Let's review:
The XBOX uses a PII based cpu.
It has 64MB of UMA memory.
It completely omits the traditional PC northbridge/southbridge/whatever chips for its own purposes.
It has a GPU that YOU CANNOT BUY FOR A PC.
It runs a Windows 2000 _derived_ kernel _in rom_.
As an embedded engineer, you of all people should realize that sticking an x86 family proc in something doesnt' make it any more of a PC than having an R3000 in a playstation makes it a Silicon Graphics machine.
So please, stop lending your profession to your incorrect analysis. It continues the spread of incorrect information, and it makes you look like a big dumbass.
(Even more so than all my profanity makes me look like one)
i beleive licensing delays and what not, but that would be a function of the MS legal department... you of course know how "efficient" the legal system is (when you're not wrongfully sueing or imprisoning someone, anyway)
Gates occasionally gives speeches and presentations. Is he coming up with lies then ? He might be delivering lies he previously made up, but unless he can think one conversation and give another, hes not thinking up new lies during these times.
Now and then, gates will have meetings with microsoft employees. He'll sit and listen for a while, then ask questions. His questions tend to be pretty "insightful" (unlike your post, moderation or otherwise). Does he just have a list of standard insightful questions that someone else made him, so as not to distract from his busy schedule of concocting new lies (which he is never able to deliver based on my argument in the last paragraph) ?
Steve Ballmer said that he loves microsoft. Was he lying ? How long did it take him to invent that lie ?
On a related note, this article touches on one of the many reasons why the Gamecube will run circles around the Xbox. GameCube's processor is a 485Mhz PPC designed specifically for video games, while the Xbox just uses a common Pentium running at 733 MHz.
What horseshit. All console CPUs are outright or adapted cores of commodity outdated CPUs.
the gamecubes cpu is not any more specifically designed for gamecube than the R4300 was "specifically designed" for the nintendo 64.
Does the fact that XBox has a different memory system, "northbridge", cache size, etc, mean its 733mhz proc was "specially designed" for xbox ? You wont find any of the xbox core components in anything besides an xbox... it must all be CUSTOM ENGINEERED FOR GAMING!
I try not to be a fan boy, I only ask that others do the same. Have you played anXbox ? What about a gamecube ? Have you done performance testing on their respective processors ? What about their GPUs ?
You can speculate all you want to, but dont write some article about how "I've taken CE classes, I can tell that gamecube whoops xbox". It just smears your credibility all over the place.
In reality, Intel is really pulling one over on us, charging more money and all we're getting is a higher clock rate, not a whole lot of performance gain
This is a debatable point. I think it is wrong to conclude intel is "pulling one over on us". It has been demonstrated that as more EU's are added, the effectiveness and utilization of EU's goes down. The quest for ILP comes to a crashing screeching halt before you even get to 4 EU's. IIRC, only one processor-scheduled CPU is designed with more than 4 EUs.
The necessity of the chip to extract ILP in realtime is what leads us to these big hairy controllers and limited clock speeds. Controller shrink was what led to RISC in the first place, and now that we've had to add in superscalar "goo" there's hardly a difference between the CISC philosophy and the RISC one. Never mind that Intel chips have been re-writing CISC instructions as multi-EU uops forever.
The point is, adding additional EU's has been desmontrated to be of dubious merit. Right NOW, the P4 speed improvements come from SSE2, just like the G4's speed improvements come from AltiVec. Both do essentially the same thing, although i've read more about AltiVec and it seems "cooler":)
The difference is this - When the P4 core hits 3ghz, its retire rate will just destroy anything a G4 or Athlon will do. Intel took the pipeline length hit NOW and will reap the benefits later.
They also spent the time to get their prediction units as top notch as possible, because iirc statistically there will be > 3 conditional branches in progress in those ridiculous 20 stage pipes:)
So - the problem with intel's approach - a single instruction takes longer to complete, and the fill/drain penalty for mispredictions is high.
The retire rate however, is amazing, and the clock rate ramping ability is similarly amazing.
Your assertion that MOTs approach _relies_ on adding additional EU's is surely incorrect, because "everyone" knows that controller complexity is again dominating cpus, and much of that is dedicated to extracting and managing ILP on 4 or less EUs (and that it just isn't there beyond 4.. i think the Power4 was supposed to have 6 EUs, and the Alpha 364 or 464 was going to have 8 ?)
Intel has already "side stepped" the SuperScalar risc EU problem with IA64 - Thats what LIW does. LIW is interesting again now because of the reliazation that controller extracted ILP was too expensive and not good enough for the performance increases needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually..
Where _does_ bandwidth come from ?
I get bandwidth from my isp, they get it from 2 or three places... and it goes "up the line" until you get networks that are simply moving traffic that doesn't belong to them..
Does UUNet create bandwidth ? Does sprint ? Why dont they create a bunch more ?
Where is the top of the food chain of bandwidth ?
Obviously, its in their interest to keep charging ridiculous fees.
Why doesn't someone else "make more bandwidth" ?
I pay $65/mo for 128/768 DSL with static ip. I think thats because tahts what I'm willing to pay, not because theres any cost structure supporting that price.
There is no peice of technology that I can think of that doesn't become trivial amortized over even a year. Yet T1 and DS3 line charges are still astronomical. Why ?
ISP's overselling bandwidth implies that they cant afford more upstream, implying that upstream bandwidth is expensive, which I've seen plenty of evidence of. Why is this upstream b/w so damn much money ?
Sorry for the incoherency. I just don't understand the cost structure for broadband.
Because humans make mistakes.
We've all read the article about the psycho software engineering team that does the space shuttle software. They still make a small number of mistakes with each release. On the order of 1 or 2 of them makes it to NASA, iirc, but they're still bugs.
Consider the limited scope of what the shuttle is doing, versus what most network/operating systems do.
Look at the pre-common criteria schemes. There was only one product I saw that received an A1 certification. It was some sort of network encryption device.
iirc, A1 meant provably secure by design, followed by implementation. (again, iirc) No network operating system is listed in that category.
Scheiner (sp) wrote an interesting artcile on encryption and how it relates to security, effectively using the analogy that hoping encryption thwarts attacks is akin to putting a few sharp objects in your front yard and hoping a burglar stumbles into them.. e.g. Typically we can "prove" that an encryption algorithm is impractical to attack, but we already know that most attacks come from implementation defects as opposed to poor designs.
So, I've never heard of an unhackable system.
Software has the very difficult task of making a decision that a human would make, without having all the sensory input and context that a human would have. Finally, it has to be written by (at some point down the line of automation) a human, one who makes mistakes and assumptions.
Great. I can see the news article now..
"New synapse research makes frat party rape easier than ever!"
I'm betting it shows up in Maxim, February 2002 issue.
"Mission Critical" does not imply C. Infact, it points away from C.
Unless you're writing an operating system, why use C ? What does it buy you ?
IIRC, the Avionics system of the F-15 is done in Ada, because its "Safer" than C. I'd say thats "Mission Critical".
I too am weary of perl, but like everything else, its the right tool for _some_ jobs, arguably, some pretty important jobs.
Some inside Microsoft understand this _Very_ well.
It may have come out of thier mouths at various times as "when linux has our market share, linux will have a similar number of vulnerabilities".
When phrased that way, people often scoff.
However, if you accept that microsoft's installed base contributes to them being a common target of attacks (without considering the relative quality of the software), then it seems reasonable to presume that as the popularity of a system increases, the frequency of people looking for exploits on that system will also increase. If you beleive there are always more bugs and exploits to be found, then it also follows that more vulnerabilities will be discovered.
Summary ? Part of MSes high number of security holes has to do with installed base size. (*1)
As linux popularity increases, it seems reasonable that the number of linux vulnerabilities reported will increase as well.
Yet when MS says "if linux were as big as us, they'd be just as insecure", some people dismiss it outright.
You say yourself that for many reasons, one OS should not dominate the industry. I agree. How many "linux will rule the world" zealots would agree ? Are they who do not, as forward looking as you or I?
*1 - This is not an excuse, a bigger part of MSes high number of security holes has to do with assumptions made during product design, and default configuration choices.
No. W2k was an evolution of NT4. Thats why it says "Based on NT Technology" every time it boots, and on the box, iirc :)
That said, W2k was a significant evolution over NT4. It's probably fair to say change(NT4, W2k) >> change(W2k, XP).
Many systems in NT4 were re-written for W2k, obviously. For instance, lots of systems were made restartable for W2k because people hated how often you had to reboot NT. Similarly, in W2k people got irate with the speed of w2k booting. So for XP, that was specifically targeted, and, afaict, much improved.
So while the XP pro "kernel" isn't the same as the NT4 server kernel, they're the same lineage, and I'm not sure I'd quantify the code churn as being on the scale of linux 1.x -> linux 2.x or more like linux 2.2->linux 2.4.
Follow the lineage back
:)
XP->W2k->NT4->NT 3.51->NT3.1, iirc.
I think you'll find that the First windows NT, while not widely used, came out in a similar time frame to what I claim.
Remember, NT and OS/2 were intermingled in the early days. OS/2 2.x was out in the Win 3.1 time frame. IIRC, MS was already working on NT when OS/2 2.1 shipped.
So, I stand by my claim (for now
Fine. I live in seattle, you can meet me here.
Obviously you could construct a definition of "informed" that I wouldn't qualify for, but the assumptions you've made about me are unfortuneate, and because i've been shooting from the hip all day, I'll respond to them anyway
1) I've spent a lot of time with linux. Not as much lately, but "enough".
I've also spent a lot of time with OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX, and even NeXTSTEP. Infact, I would wager to say that I know Solaris and "general unix" stuff far better than I know windows.
Please dont assume that because I've reached a different conclusion than you that I'm ignorant.
2) I've tried to learn as much as possible about every system I've come in contact one. I haven't "decided" that _any_ of them do everything i need done well. I envy you in that you have found that linux seems to meet all of yours. At the current time, my home network consists of windows 2000, windows ce, macos 9, openbsd, solaris 2.6, and irix 6.5. If there were one OS that met every requirement, i'd save a lot of time and money, i think.
So, while its too bad that we see things differently, it'd be nice if in the future, you could leave me out of the "just some other microsoftie that doesn't know linux" bucket.
That said, do you have any pointers for how i can further educate myself in order to see how senseless i am ?
1) There is no integrated development environment and toolchain for general purpose C/C++ coding for Linux that is comparable in integration and featureset to something like MSVC on Win32, or even something like ProDev for Irix or Workshop for Solaris.
2) Gnome/KDE are more than WM's. When someone says "there are no environments for linux", people bitch about how Gnome/KDE are more than that. When someone says "there are multiple competing unfinished environments", someone says "they're just window managers".
Two points are obvious -
2a) if slashdotters wobble about these things being WMs or Environments, how are potentially inexperienced developers supposed to figure it out in a reasonable amount of time ?
2b) Each window manager does things slightly differently. So does each web browser. Case in point - write a configuration for a window manager. Now convert it for use with a different one. Ha ha.
3) You cant say XP isn't proven, and then later say XP is just NT all over again. XP has _10 years_ of OS development behind it. Not the same as 30 years of UNIX, but its still a bit of a stretch to call the guts of XP "unproven" in the same breath as saying "its really just W2k with some extra gui bits".
4) "Not directly test" = "Not tested"
Bullshit. Of course, maybe _you_ can't build the bridge from repetitive testing to intelligent testing on changed subsets, but I know for a fact MS internally has a toolchain which gives statistical test coverage assurances based on deltas between binaries. Guess thats what happens when you have a group like MSResearch at your disposal.
There may very well be things that are demonstrably false in what MS has released. You haven't mentioned any of them, if there are.
Common slashdotter tactics used in your message include:
- "I am an Armchair legal expert"
- "I get to have it both ways" (its a WM, its an environment, what is it ?)
- "Your test isn't good enough for me" (because it doesn't say what I want it to say)
Nice job, ace.
Ok, we have people talking on the internet in a chat room about a game this simulates using the internet to hack places where people are talking like the current internet is like a simlulation game!
Oh, so you've beaten Metal Gear Solid 2 also ?
Actually its quite likely that the US knows the location of every russian ship within some radius and russia knows the location of every US ship, within some radius.
:)
After all, we know where all their ports and navy bases are. A ship of a given maximum speed can only move so much in a given non-satellite-covered time window. We see the thing as soon as it goes to sea, and if we dont have an eye pointed at it for 5 hours, when we look again we know its somewhere within a 5 hour radius, as you allude to.
I mean really. How hard is it to say "oh yeah, i think thats a ship, its the only thing leaving a 3 mile wake anywhere in this picture"
Disclaimer - I'm not in the navy, and I think Tom Clancy is cool. Flame away
Genetically Engineered...
Bansai Anime Pleasure Drones.
I bet there's some species of animal where the female copulates and then leaves immediately. (without killing the mate, if you please)
Once again, I'm looking to the porn industry to lead the way into this new technological realm.
I'm just saying theres no such thing as an innocent. I didn't say that that justifies anything.
Statistically this is obvious. If you load crime statistics for various crimes, and multiply by the number of adults in the building when it was destroyed, im sure you'll get plenty of "non-innocent" people. Rapists, a murderer or two, sex offenders, probably zillions of white-collar offenders.
It's not relevant, but theres no way you can look anyone in the face and seriously beleive in the idea of "innocence". Everyone in that building (unless theres some sort of convent, and even then, thats only according to _one_ possible moral structure) had done something wrong at some point in their life.
Also, I dont see where you pull the slaughtering muslims thing from. I suspect most of the people in the WTC pushed pens or keyboards all day. It really has no bearing though.
Anyway, getting to the point:
I am a US citizen. I realise the US has a lot of enemies. This puts me in potential danger, 24 hours a day. However, I also think the US does a generally good job, and we have a reasonably competant military. Knowing that no matter what, you cant please everyone, i'm hedging my bets and living here, even though it might be safer to live elsewhere.
I lucked out. I happened not to get killed on sep 11th. Maybe I wont be so lucky next time.
Similarly, the "innocents" in afghanistan are there because they haven't left. You might say "they're not allowed to leave" or some such bullshit. They know what their government stands for. They know the consequences of harboring terrorists. It's not like this is a surprise. The president spends a month saying "we will fuck up any nation that doesn't bend over backwards for us". We've been dropping leaftlets on the poor people for months. If anyone in the village can read, they've got a pretty good chance of "Getting the message".
The "innocents" in afghanistan know that their country has pissed us off, and we're going to be bombing the fuck out of it, pretty much indiscriminantly.
But they're still there.
If i were an afghani citizen, Instead of burning US flags and effigies of president Bush and celebrating in the streets over the attack (the innocence is really shining through, dont you think ?), I'd be saying "gosh, the US has more bombs than we have grains of sand, and we've really pissed them off, and i bet their just dying to turn my shithole country into a glass garden. Maybe I should pack my shit and move before my organs get turned into stucco."
I'm not "interested" in wether or not something is justified. Obvioiusly the taliban and washington have different ideas about justice. Thats the way it is.
For the first time in a long time, the US is more interested in getting shit taken care of then not stepping on other peoples toes. Too fucking bad for people with toes. You've been warned.
No one is innocent.
Ever.
Before you can see things with any clarity, you must admit - no one is innocent. Everyone has choices. How you make your choices is what makes you human.
If you're an "innocent civilian" in afghanistan - tough shit. You have an important choice to make, with at least 3 obvious options:
1. Fight your countries corrupt government internally, probably end up getting killed
2. Flee from your corrupt government because you know they're stepping on the wrong toes, probably end up getting kiled
3. Do nothing, let it be someone else's problem, decide by indecision that you support the practices of your government, get killed by US or coalition fire/bombs.
Either way, you die, and you even get to choose how.
All you're really guaranteed in life is a shot at choosing how you die. No one, not even the US, has the power to deny that choice to people.
So next time you look upon history with rosy colored glasses - leave out innocence. Its a figment of the popular imagination. And it really muddy's the water.
Why is that a good idea ? How does that help anyone besides the developers receiving the money ?
It doesn't. Virtually no consumer anywhere on the face of the planet will benefit from improvements made to gcc, KDE, Redhat, or any other open source proejct. People already bright enough, motivated enough, and software-religious enough to use those products will benefit. Guess what, they're already using them.
This is a settlement to a class action suit that consumers filed alleging that microsoft unfairly priced products. They _wanted_ the MS stuff and paid for it, but on the tails of other court cases, decided they could get some money back.
The software you mention has been free and available the entire time. They could have bought it then. They chose not to, apparently.
from the article:
The government also sought in its court filing to clarify key provisions surrounding the secrecy of Microsoft's technology to prevent consumers from making illegal copies of music or movies. Part of the settlement allows Microsoft to keep secret any information that might violate the security of such anti-piracy technology, and critics charged that Microsoft might use the exemption to hide details about many of its products.
But the government told the judge that Microsoft must disclose to competitors all the capabilities of its anti-piracy music technology under the latest version of Windows, called XP. Microsoft can't use the security exemption as a pretext for broadly keeping details about its software secret, lawyers said.
I'm no big fan of DRM technology, but the whole premise is that its obscure and heard to interact with. There is no provably secure or correct DRM scheme - all you can do is make the software a pain in the ass to figure out. So by ordering MS to disclose a bunch of stuff on how the DRM works, it probably contributes a great deal to crackability, thus nullifying its use anyway.
Regardless of your moral/ethical/whatever opinions on DRM, requiring too much info be leaked from the DRM technology utterly invalidates and destroys the usefulness of the DRm technology. Which means MS will just have to think of something else that they _wont_ have to reveal secrets about.
The Unified Memory that exists in Xbox is there IN THE METAL.
Games get unfetted access to hardware. The OS runs the "dashboard", and is the gateway for access to disk/filesystem. The OS is not managing your resources, theres no VM or any bullshit like that. On the other hand, the game writers dont need to care aout the voltage level coming off of pin 2 of the 3nd controller. (if they dont want to)
XBox is very much all about gaming. It is just as much a specific gaming machine than any dreamcast or PS2. The fact that it does a lot more than either of these should be a _benefit_, not a reason to say "its a pc".
Games not using hard drives ? Gosh, silly of Sony to decide after the fact that they'd start shipping one for PS2. Every XBox game will utilize the hard disk in various interesting ways - because Xbox decided that gaming could really be improved with a HD as part of the standard system. Load times are faster, levels are larger, you can save a bunch of save games on the hd (and saving is faster, and you dont have to buy a memory card that you fill up after playing 4 games)
Not to mention the ethernet connector. I love my dreamcast, but how stupid is it that i have a home lan and DSL but i would need to use a 56k modem (and tie up my only line) to use any of DCs broadband features. All to get a connection thats slow and laggy ? No thanks. With Xbox's ethernet adapter you can make lan games with a crosover cable or a hub, or eventually you'll be able to go online for MMORPGs and a number of other things.
So yeah. Ethernet, insane graphics capability, hard disk - they aren't needed for the games of today. But xbox isn't about the games of today.
Xbox is about the games of tomorrow.
In other news, Slashdot readers were less than shocked when a clueless fanboy was incorrect on every point made in a post.
stripped down PC
Ah yes, stripped down in the sense that the NV2A Xbox GPU is more powerful than any nVidia card you can get ?
PS2 superior... specific gaming system
Ooh this one is funny. Guess what CPU the PS1 uses ? MIPS R3000. Same thing the SGI Indigo's used as well as the DECstation 5000s, not to mention a zillion embedded devices. The PS2 again uses a MIPS 4000 family CPU. Again, off the shelf stuff.
The NES, Masterdrive, Genesis, SNES, PS1, Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, gamecube, and XBox have all used off the shelf CPUs. And all of them except maybe XBox and Gamecube have been cpus that are already effectively obsolete in the desktop space.
So don't delude yourself about "real console hardware".
Besides. Superior is many things, graphics, audio, usability, features, and most importantly - games.
no. YOU are wrong.
:)
The xbox GPU is NOT the GF3 gpu. The XBox GPU has an additional shader unit, and one "other thing", iirc, that the gF3 chipset does not.
the nForce is not a UMA chipset. XBOX is absolutely a UMA system. thus, i feel 95% confident in saying xbox is not nforce.
if you want to keep this up, i'll go find links
stop right now with how wrong you are.
Dreamcast was NOT a windows box. Dammit i wish people would stop talking about shit they are ignorant of.
Sega and Microsoft made a Windows CE target for the dreamcast hardware, so you could IF YOU WANTED TO, develop your GAME using Windows CE. The Windows CE was _purely_ optional and it was on the GAME DISC, not the console.
Now, on to xbox:
No xbox i've ever played or seen has crashed.
The "green screen of death" picture everyone made such a big deal out of was a developer/debug unit...
Finally, its a bit different than "Windoze" and a Pentium.
Saying XBox is Windows + pentium is saying PS1 is an SGI Indigo with gcc. If you're such a brilliant damn embedded engineer, please tell me how microsoft can fit 30 or 100 or whatever it is many MEGABYTES of windows code into the xbox roms ?
Let's review:
The XBOX uses a PII based cpu.
It has 64MB of UMA memory.
It completely omits the traditional PC northbridge/southbridge/whatever chips for its own purposes.
It has a GPU that YOU CANNOT BUY FOR A PC.
It runs a Windows 2000 _derived_ kernel _in rom_.
As an embedded engineer, you of all people should realize that sticking an x86 family proc in something doesnt' make it any more of a PC than having an R3000 in a playstation makes it a Silicon Graphics machine.
So please, stop lending your profession to your incorrect analysis. It continues the spread of incorrect information, and it makes you look like a big dumbass.
(Even more so than all my profanity makes me look like one)
That depends a lot.
If you do "fiber channel the right way", then you have DUAL fiber ports PER drive. The disks for the Sun A5000 FC JBOD cabinet are this way.
Seagate makes dual FC-AL attach drives. You should look at them.
what does xbox have to do with zapstation ?
The two are absolutely in no way competitors.
i beleive licensing delays and what not, but that would be a function of the MS legal department... you of course know how "efficient" the legal system is (when you're not wrongfully sueing or imprisoning someone, anyway)
You are, politely, a fucking dumbass.
Gates occasionally gives speeches and presentations. Is he coming up with lies then ? He might be delivering lies he previously made up, but unless he can think one conversation and give another, hes not thinking up new lies during these times.
Now and then, gates will have meetings with microsoft employees. He'll sit and listen for a while, then ask questions. His questions tend to be pretty "insightful" (unlike your post, moderation or otherwise). Does he just have a list of standard insightful questions that someone else made him, so as not to distract from his busy schedule of concocting new lies (which he is never able to deliver based on my argument in the last paragraph) ?
Steve Ballmer said that he loves microsoft. Was he lying ? How long did it take him to invent that lie ?
Oh, I forgot to address this in my other reply:
On a related note, this article touches on one of the many reasons why the Gamecube will run circles around the Xbox. GameCube's processor is a 485Mhz PPC designed specifically for video games, while the Xbox just uses a common Pentium running at 733 MHz.
What horseshit. All console CPUs are outright or adapted cores of commodity outdated CPUs.
the gamecubes cpu is not any more specifically designed for gamecube than the R4300 was "specifically designed" for the nintendo 64.
Does the fact that XBox has a different memory system, "northbridge", cache size, etc, mean its 733mhz proc was "specially designed" for xbox ? You wont find any of the xbox core components in anything besides an xbox... it must all be CUSTOM ENGINEERED FOR GAMING!
I try not to be a fan boy, I only ask that others do the same. Have you played anXbox ? What about a gamecube ? Have you done performance testing on their respective processors ? What about their GPUs ?
You can speculate all you want to, but dont write some article about how "I've taken CE classes, I can tell that gamecube whoops xbox". It just smears your credibility all over the place.
In reality, Intel is really pulling one over on us, charging more money and all we're getting is a higher clock rate, not a whole lot of performance gain
This is a debatable point. I think it is wrong to conclude intel is "pulling one over on us". It has been demonstrated that as more EU's are added, the effectiveness and utilization of EU's goes down. The quest for ILP comes to a crashing screeching halt before you even get to 4 EU's. IIRC, only one processor-scheduled CPU is designed with more than 4 EUs.
The necessity of the chip to extract ILP in realtime is what leads us to these big hairy controllers and limited clock speeds. Controller shrink was what led to RISC in the first place, and now that we've had to add in superscalar "goo" there's hardly a difference between the CISC philosophy and the RISC one. Never mind that Intel chips have been re-writing CISC instructions as multi-EU uops forever.
The point is, adding additional EU's has been desmontrated to be of dubious merit. Right NOW, the P4 speed improvements come from SSE2, just like the G4's speed improvements come from AltiVec. Both do essentially the same thing, although i've read more about AltiVec and it seems "cooler"
The difference is this - When the P4 core hits 3ghz, its retire rate will just destroy anything a G4 or Athlon will do. Intel took the pipeline length hit NOW and will reap the benefits later.
They also spent the time to get their prediction units as top notch as possible, because iirc statistically there will be > 3 conditional branches in progress in those ridiculous 20 stage pipes
So - the problem with intel's approach - a single instruction takes longer to complete, and the fill/drain penalty for mispredictions is high.
The retire rate however, is amazing, and the clock rate ramping ability is similarly amazing.
Your assertion that MOTs approach _relies_ on adding additional EU's is surely incorrect, because "everyone" knows that controller complexity is again dominating cpus, and much of that is dedicated to extracting and managing ILP on 4 or less EUs (and that it just isn't there beyond 4.. i think the Power4 was supposed to have 6 EUs, and the Alpha 364 or 464 was going to have 8 ?)
Intel has already "side stepped" the SuperScalar risc EU problem with IA64 - Thats what LIW does. LIW is interesting again now because of the reliazation that controller extracted ILP was too expensive and not good enough for the performance increases needed.