My point was that the GPL means YOU are free to do what you like with it.
It's not free for MS to do whatever _it_ likes with the software. Infact, the GPL is utterly incompatible with serious commercial software development. And RMS redefined "free" for that explicit purpose. So its foolhardy to be upset with MS about "redefining" words. You picked about the worst possible example of showing how GPL/GNU is "right" and MS is "wrong"
No one at microsoft says "Linux is distributed under the cancer license". Microsoft is of the opinion that the GPL does have a cancerous effect - the viral nature that everyone understands so well.
GPL may be a free license for end users. It is not a free license for software developers - theres quite a lot you ahve to be willing to give up in order to use GPL. And the notion that GPL gives you "so much" in exchange is ridiculous.
RMS et al were the ORIGINAL people making fuss over the word "Free". How can you fault MS for word redefinition when there exists http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
It's a whole page talkinga bout the "correct definition" of "free software".
Re:So, how long until....
on
Portable N64
·
· Score: 2
i wont make the mistake of saying "impossible", but i do feel ok about saying "highly fucking unlikely, given the hardware you mention"
1) the xbox GPU is a GF3 type core with a few extra units that the GF3 doesn't have. In other words, the XBox GPU is a more powerful one than any nVidia product you can get your hands on. A GF2 Go wont cut it. Not at all.
2) XBox is UMA.
3) XBox kernel + game code is much much smaller than any mainstream PC OS, and gets to live in kernel mode. Compare that to an emulator running on a host OS.
What personal info ? What untested database system ? What lack of choice ?
On the contrary - no one can force you to use XP, and even if you do use XP, it doesn't force you to do anything with hotmail, passport, windows media player, etc etc. Activating windows isn't even terribly instrusive. It's pretty much just clicking "ok" once and never dealing with it again.
Listen, if you think Microsoft has the power to remove choices and options from your life, you should step back and re-examine things. If microsoft could force you to do anything, dont you think they'd be all over that ? "Forcing" people to use XP, Passport, and.NET would be much cheaper than spending billions on developing, marketing, and improving them, so i think if there were a way for them to do so, they'd do it.
Yes, even for microsoft, free will is a bitch. Those pesky consumers can still click "no", "dont ever fucking bother me again", or even more damaging, they can choose to simply not buy XP.
If you've stopped making choices for yourself and instead microsoft is making decisions in your life, i submit that you should just kill yourself. Afterall, if you're not at the helm of your own ship, who is ?
How do you argue with this: One of the developers of the VB7 compiler uses Emacs for windows NT for all coding work(and not with c-mode.el, she uses her own elisp that she developed before c-mode.el was mature)
Other people inside Microsoft use vi. Theres a "vi.exe" in some of the resource kits and what not.
so, your "Most windows programmers i know" is a meaningless anecdote.
... which is apparently enough to get an "Insightful" so long as its bandwagoning on the usual "microsoft is the enemy, microsoft sucks" threads..
if L1 is implemented as a direct-mapped cache of L2, then if L2 increases, L1's hit ratio goes down.
It may be the case that no L1 is implemented this way. It is certainly the case that adding more ram will decrease the HR of an L2 cache
Wether the L2 miss penalty * frequency of L2 miss vs the PF penalty * frequency of a page fault turns out to be greater is probabably
1) workload specific
2) generally in favor of more ram at the expense of lower L2 hit ratio (because PF servicing is abysmally slow)
3) you can probalby generate a pathological case that shows either result:)
the ratios between memory heirarchies should be taken into consideration when designing any layer. For instance, increasing vastly the size of the L2 cache will make the L2 hit ratio go up, but the L1 hit ratio go down (assuming the inclusion policy is in effect - this is not always so anymore -- see the 1st generatino Duron chips)
Similarly, adding more ram to a machine _could_ slow it down in some situations because the "overall" cache hit ratio could go down.
Also, when caches get to be too large, the cache policy may need to be changed. A fully associative cache is the most flexible placement policy and can give great hit ratio for a large working set, however, a fully associaive cache search takes longer than a direct map "search" or a set-associative search.
So, if to get a large cache size they had to go to set assoc or direct mapped, then that will generally lower the hit ratio vs a cache of the same size which is fully assocaitive.
It's all tradeoffs basically. You could write a cache simulator to play around with this:)
I'm not ready to disagree with you on what flopping in japan means for worldwide success, but I will point out the following:
The saturn did ok in japan - flopped here
The dreamcast "Flopped" in japan, did ok here
the N64 "flopped" almost everywhere
Sega is now out of the console hardware business
Nintendo isn't - even though they have no arcade business, their last system flopped, and they've only got a few interesting franchises. The japanese eat this stuff up though.
I dont think xbox will take japan by storm, but i dont think MS needs it to. Pleasing the japanese video game market is weird ugly voodoo. People have tried to come up with formulas to do so but in general all you can do are try really hard and have a back up plan. The popular mantra today is "he who gets exclusive Square titles owns japan" but i look at that in one of two ways:
1) Square knows this, so may be willing to deal with whoever makes them the sweetest deal (hint: who has more money, MS or Sony ?)
2) The fickle japanese gaming market will decide that Pokemon RPG Universe Piano Simulator for gamecube is the best thing, and square will be hurting for money like no tomorrow.
In any case, i see MS putting out a good hardware platform, and having a good developer relations effort. Think of them as putting out a respectable offering, and getting their foot in the door in a new market. This is not an alltogether unheard of tactic for MS:)
So the xbox marketing campaign is 500million. Big deal - thats roughly 1 or 2% of MS's cash holdings.
In summary: they can afford to push back the japanese launch - especially if its to cushion unit volume for a great looking US launch.
5.1 digital audio output - not just in pre-recorded games either - any sound you hear can be 5.1 encoded in real time - they put in a chip to do it, iirc.
the Harddrive isn't for "installing" games - its for optional features. It will be partitioned up in a few ways.. one area will be for savegames, so you dont necessarily need to buy a $30 memory card that holds only 64k. Another area will be a place to rip music to to create soundtracks for games that support that. Finally, a good chunk of the disk will be for caching game data. I beleive there is a strict rule against using the disk for "installing" games - you have to assume anything in the 'cache' area can be blown away once the power button is hit.
Other uses for the HD have been hinted at - downloading new content from MMRPGs, saving customized models/pictures/music/whatever
It should be noted that the XBox GPU is similar to a GF3 chip, but has doubled the number of some of the units (pixel shader, and one other one, iirc).
Finally, it bears mention that it has 64mb of UMA memory. Way more than any other console. The PS/2 has 4mb. The PS2 lack of memory seems to be one of the biggest complaints against it. The original PS had 2.5mb.
So please tell me you've figured out IBMs Linux story and aren't just mindlessly eating IBM cock for breakfast.
In case you're still under a rock, IBM loves linux for the following reasons:
1) Linux is free to IBM. IBM can tell you that they'll give you Linux for free. Linux is "free" to you. Linux costs nothing. You're getting something for nothing! Yee Haw!
2) By and large, _Nobody_ has a clue as to how to make linux solve any real-world business problem. Those that do, do not need IBMs help.
3) IBM has a "little known" organization called "Global Services" which makes up a _massive_ part of their revenue. IBM Global Services would be more than happy to contract a team of its Linux Experts to custom architect a Linux Solution for your E-Business!
So, in summary: IBM gets linux, and all of your work for free. Then they sell it to anyone that will buy it for _massive_ (utterly _massive_) profits, via service contracts and custom work. Because lets be honest, when a company of PHBs (every company) wants an email/calendaring package, they need a little more handholding and infrastructure than stock sendmail and iCal. IBM GS to the rescue!
Given that I converted several hundred program from VB to VB.NET, I can speak on how different the two are.
Essentially, if you "just got by" with VB6 because of how simple a world view it could present, you may be in for a small learning curve with VB.NET
Now the good part:
If you can program in any C-family language, perl, or anything moderately more complex than VB, you're going to love VB.NET because you get to keep the simplicy of VB 95% of the time, but you get 99% of the power of C whenever you want it. These percentages are of course made up, but for those of you that are following C# and like it - VB.NET is almost the same language, what-you-can-do-wise:) They both compile to CLR, and VB and C# can use eachothers classes interchangably. Each has its own specific quirks and strengths, but in general, if you can do it with C#, you can do it with VB.NET, and if you cant, then just do that part in C# (or Managed C++) and then consume it from VB.NET.
You'll be happy to know that there is no longer a VB runtime - now theres a.NET runtime, and vb simply compiles to it. You'll also be happy to know that theres now a standalone commandline vb compiler. Best of all, theres a standard VB project type called "Console Application". No silly forms ever get involved - at all.
On the other end of the spectrum, theres a VB project template for creating Windows NT services. This was not even necessarily possible with VB6 - and to do many interesting things in VB6 you needed to import Win32 functions.
So in general, i think people that are programmers will love VB.NET - it gives all the long-time vb haters and complainers many things they've been asking for - and then some.
On the other hand, people that can barely grasp VB6 may be in trouble - the new power and flexibility of VB.NET does come at a price in terms of complexity of auto-generated code. If you're already in trouble when you accidentally go into the code window instead of the design window, expect problems with VB.NET.
IRIX has _never_ been typical. IRIX is probably the most advanced unix flavour out there.
So tell me which other unixes support this, out of the box:
1) graphics context management
2) grio
3) DSM
4) 512+ cpu single image
Do I need to go on ?
IRIX doesn't have the installed base of more popular oses for many reasons... however, none of those reasons are due to IRIX being old fashioned and technology-poor.
I'm betting you're still dreaming about owning an SGI, because your post indicates you've never spent much time with one.
Ok, I was thinking about this the other nite a bit.
Why hasn't someone started a Non-profit record label. Could that work ? Or what about a "minimum profit" record label ?
I mean, if the end users, and the artists, and everyone is getting screwed over.. there seems like there's not only an ethical reason to do so, but a good solid _market_ to get into... if you reverse the business and set it up such that the artist owns all the rights to everything, and the record company is just that - someone that makes records (and does other things like putting up money for recording studio time perhaps) then it seems like everyone involved could come out ahead.
Honestly, if a CD can be mass produced for $1, and its costing $16, and the artists aren't getting any, there has to be room for someone to cut away a _lot_ of fat in that operation.. enough to give the artists enough to make them consider switching.
Yeah, record companies take a risk when they sign someone and they spend 1m in studio time and the album flops.. but its hard to get signed to record labels now... its not like they price things as an insurance measure as opposed to a profit motive..
Someone that knows a lot more about this stuff than me should think it through. Maybe initially its only feasiable to do small-volume recordings... i.e. CDR's as opposed to pressed cds ? or maybe simultanous low bit-rate mp3/ogg distribution with all releases. Maybe just a "musical venture capital" front end for mp3.com or something.
In any case, i dont konw the economics of the music business, just what i've read. It seems like there's an incredible opportuniy for someone who loves music and has plenty of money to back it, to try and make a reasonable record label that deals with artists in a reasonable fashion. I know musicians can be crummy people, especailly with agents, lawyers, and money issues, but there doesn't seem to be the need for awful contracts and outright company ownership of artists works.
The CRAY 1, 2, XMP, etc etc are all VECTOR machines. Some of them happen to be parallel vector machines (multiple VECTOR processors)
The T3 series are the MPP boxes. Cray's bread and butter was VECTOR machines though. MPP came about because some problems aren't easily vectorizable (but can run on MPPs, oddly enough).
or what about some of the ASCI computers ? 8192 cpus, 6144 cpus, etc etc. No beowulf that big, eh ?
What is it that you really mean by beowulf ? Or is it just "the buzzword" that everyone loves and this time (for the first time in 234092384234 slashdot articles) it happens to be slightly relevant ?
The idea of shared-nothing commodity clusters isn't new, and linux isn't the only place its done , much less beowulf. Infact, Cornell ditched some SP/2 boxes to build a cluster--but they used Win2k-- and apparently they love it. You can buy such a compute cluster from Dell just like theirs if you want it.
No, i dont think the issue here was "we've never heard of beowulf" or "well, we are against beowulf because we're snobs". Maybe, just maybe, they had criteria other than "must sound like 'eowulf' when they made a decision ?
If its anything like the older Crays (SV1 stands for "scalable vector", iirc its sort of a mix of vector and traditional CPUs).. then it gets its speed from the vectorized nature of the cpu and more importantly, the problem at hand.
i was told in a CS course that the arch of the cray vector units is basically the same as the cray 1... the speeds have changed, the process has changed, the external peices have gotten much faster.. but at the core, the cray vector machines are very fast at the following type of thing:
given a vector of a given length
do foo to every element in that vector
_very_ efficiently
to see how this operates a bit better, consider how a normal cpu might do the following
for i = 1 to 64
begin
blah[i] = blah[i] + 1
end
that would end up getting compiled perhaps into something like this on a traditional cpu:
loop:
load blah[i]
increment blah[i]
save blah[i]
increment i
if i 64, goto loop
what we're seeing is that for 1 element, we do a load, an ALU op, a store, an ALU op, and a conditional branch.
to see why, you need to understand pipelining, but basically i'll make it short and easy: the instruction cache of a cpu is always stuffing the pipeline with its "guess" of what instructions should be... and its not until several of those 1.4ghz clock cycles later that you even know if you've got the right instruction... if you do, great.. if you dont, you're fucked and you flush the pipeline and start over.
conditional branches fuck this all to hell because without optimization, you've got a 50% chance of filling your pipeline with the wrong instructions.. so on a p4 with a 20+ stage pipeline you're talking about throwing away some sizable portion of those instructions... and then refilling them... now, branch predition realy helps this a lot, but conditional branches are just one problem... the load/store units of cpus also typically introduce huge pipeline delays... i.e. you need to load blah[i] but that takes 2 or 3 cycles (even from cache!! dont even think about it if you need to go to main memory) so any instructions which use blah[i] must be scheduled at least 2-3 clock cycles aftewrads...
so without keen optimization and ideal software loads, suddenly your 1.4ghz chip is stalling 2-3 instructions all the time.. and its only running like a 400mhz proc:)
so, to make traditional cpus fast, pipelineing and multiple EUs have been added. these have drawbacks (and i'velisted some of pipelinings above).
the "vector" approach is totally different. you actually have "vector" registers, and "vector instructions". the machine actually sets up "virtual" pipelines for you. so on a vector machine, the scenario above would be more like:
vectorsize=64
xv = xv + 1
(assuming xv is the vector register with your 64 elements in it)
what the cray hardware does is hooks up the peices of its cpu in a virtual pipeline that does something like this:
foreach element of vx
load
inc
save
notice that the foreach construct looks like a loop, but its not realy, its pipelined, so what actually gets sent through looks like this
load i
inc i, load i+ 1
save i, inc i + 1, load i + 2
save i+1, inc i + 2, load i + 3
save i + 2, inc i + 3, load i + 4
save i + 3, inc i + 4, load i + 5
etc etc etc
except for fill and drain, the load, inc, and save hardware units are always perfectly utilized. there is no branching or conditional logic involved.
the example i've chosen is very trivial, and may be subject to huge factual or conceptual mistakes:) the cray's amazing speed only works in situations where the problem can be expressed in vector instructions, i.e. do the same thing to a fuckload of data in such a way that the cray's hardware can pipeline it efficiently..
there are lots of interesting problems that the cray did _not_ handle well.. but for what its worth, the vector processors in the cray 1 aren't significantly different in operation and instruction set than the SV1 of today.. by many measures, cray "got it right" originally. the SV1 of today might use a normal BGA packaging on a CMOS based process, (the cray1 used discrete ECL logic and point to point wiring - all strung together by little old minnesotan women)
also the original cray 1 ran at either 100 or 80mhz, could take 32mb of ram.... i.e. for the 1970s it was faster than any desktop workstation until the mid 90s...
note that the top500 list crays are usually the T3Es.. which are a totally different beast than the vector processor.. a T3E is just a bunch of alpha CPUs on a very fast interconnect.. sort of like a "custom cluster in a box".
Ok. This is going to come off sounding a little harsh, but here it goes anyway:
You've never used a NeXT, have you ? You really dont have a fucking clue what you're talking about, do you ?
1) you didn't read the article (typical)
2) NeXT machines didn't use X-windows, they used something completely NeXT proprietary. The server process that managed the GUi was called "WindowServer". THe whole GUI was based on DPS. There _were_ Xservers for NeXT, but most were commercial.
3) what does "fully bsd style" mean ? I bet you couldn't come up with a definition for that that made any sense, but even if you could, it wouldn't be NeXTSTEP or OpenSTEP.
3a) NS used funky non-unix stuff, like NetInfo (sort of like NIS, but NeXT specific (although ports to other OSes were made))
3b) NS was not very posix compliant.. there were basic posix things missing from NS
3c) Many things in NS/OS were GNU software.. they had no issues about throwing away GPL software and replacing it with GNU as necessary.. hardly a very BSDish thing to do ? A notable example is the system compiler - gcc/objc. Other examples include the use of gnutar in many popular next packages (although I suppose this isn't a NeXT decision so much as a user community one)
4) "handle scsi devices in unix"
Uh.. wtf are you talking about ? On real hardware, SCSI is utterly brainless anyway. But its especailly so on NeXTs.. you just plug in a device and the GUI pops up a box saying "new disk, blow it away or mount it ?" Whats to configure ? Theres none of this sd0a bullshit, NS just figures it out..
so, for what its worth, i agree, NeXT boxes are cool and its too bad they were burning them.. 7+ YEARS AGO. And while everyone is entitled to an opinion, your post is like >50% erroneous as far as your "facts", and then you use these "Facts" to apparently justify ranting about something that never happened.
I was a demonstration of an audio watermarking system that did _Exactly_ this. Except it was in a very noisy confereence room. And the speakers were really shitty. And so was the microphone.
The watermark was inperceptible to me. But not to the computer with the microphone.
This demonstration was given by someone at Microsoft Research.
I don't know if this was the exact research group, but you can read about some of the watermarking work going on at MSR here:
Slashdot Mirror
I never said MS products were free. Far from it.
My point was that the GPL means YOU are free to do what you like with it.
It's not free for MS to do whatever _it_ likes with the software. Infact, the GPL is utterly incompatible with serious commercial software development. And RMS redefined "free" for that explicit purpose. So its foolhardy to be upset with MS about "redefining" words. You picked about the worst possible example of showing how GPL/GNU is "right" and MS is "wrong"
have you tried hitting msn with a non IE browser ?
It doesn't let in lynx. Should I try and change my lynx user-agent to lynz ?
i suspect the bit about doing a browserid match on Opera is probably made up - or an incorrect conclusion made from too little experimentation.
BSD is a free license.
:)
GPL is not
No one at microsoft says "Linux is distributed under the cancer license". Microsoft is of the opinion that the GPL does have a cancerous effect - the viral nature that everyone understands so well.
GPL may be a free license for end users. It is not a free license for software developers - theres quite a lot you ahve to be willing to give up in order to use GPL. And the notion that GPL gives you "so much" in exchange is ridiculous.
RMS et al were the ORIGINAL people making fuss over the word "Free". How can you fault MS for word redefinition when there exists http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
It's a whole page talkinga bout the "correct definition" of "free software".
i wont make the mistake of saying "impossible", but i do feel ok about saying "highly fucking unlikely, given the hardware you mention"
1) the xbox GPU is a GF3 type core with a few extra units that the GF3 doesn't have. In other words, the XBox GPU is a more powerful one than any nVidia product you can get your hands on. A GF2 Go wont cut it. Not at all.
2) XBox is UMA.
3) XBox kernel + game code is much much smaller than any mainstream PC OS, and gets to live in kernel mode. Compare that to an emulator running on a host OS.
What ?
.NET would be much cheaper than spending billions on developing, marketing, and improving them, so i think if there were a way for them to do so, they'd do it.
What personal info ? What untested database system ? What lack of choice ?
On the contrary - no one can force you to use XP, and even if you do use XP, it doesn't force you to do anything with hotmail, passport, windows media player, etc etc. Activating windows isn't even terribly instrusive. It's pretty much just clicking "ok" once and never dealing with it again.
Listen, if you think Microsoft has the power to remove choices and options from your life, you should step back and re-examine things. If microsoft could force you to do anything, dont you think they'd be all over that ? "Forcing" people to use XP, Passport, and
Yes, even for microsoft, free will is a bitch. Those pesky consumers can still click "no", "dont ever fucking bother me again", or even more damaging, they can choose to simply not buy XP.
If you've stopped making choices for yourself and instead microsoft is making decisions in your life, i submit that you should just kill yourself. Afterall, if you're not at the helm of your own ship, who is ?
No.
.NET services that plugin to the Microsoft .NET MyServices system"
You completely don't understand at all.
The pricing structure applies to "creating and hosting
As in, you go to MSN.com, your app is a little side-bar box that users can have on their page...
This has NOTHING to do with the cost of the VS.NET IDE, the cost of redistributing runtime components, etc etc.
No, your comparison should look more like this:
.NET Subscription Prices
vs.
Cost of hosting on a site with unfetted access to php, perl, oracle, etc
or even
Cost of getting your application on the AOL.COM home page, and plugged into everything an AOL user can do online.
Guess what - you're not going to get either for free.
You can be unconvinced all you want.
But you're still wrong.
How do you argue with this: One of the developers of the VB7 compiler uses Emacs for windows NT for all coding work(and not with c-mode.el, she uses her own elisp that she developed before c-mode.el was mature)
Other people inside Microsoft use vi. Theres a "vi.exe" in some of the resource kits and what not.
so, your "Most windows programmers i know" is a meaningless anecdote.
... which is apparently enough to get an "Insightful" so long as its bandwagoning on the usual "microsoft is the enemy, microsoft sucks" threads..
if L1 is implemented as a direct-mapped cache of L2, then if L2 increases, L1's hit ratio goes down.
:)
:)
It may be the case that no L1 is implemented this way. It is certainly the case that adding more ram will decrease the HR of an L2 cache
Wether the L2 miss penalty * frequency of L2 miss vs the PF penalty * frequency of a page fault turns out to be greater is probabably
1) workload specific
2) generally in favor of more ram at the expense of lower L2 hit ratio (because PF servicing is abysmally slow)
3) you can probalby generate a pathological case that shows either result
Apologies, I'm rusty on this stuff
the ratios between memory heirarchies should be taken into consideration when designing any layer. For instance, increasing vastly the size of the L2 cache will make the L2 hit ratio go up, but the L1 hit ratio go down (assuming the inclusion policy is in effect - this is not always so anymore -- see the 1st generatino Duron chips)
:)
Similarly, adding more ram to a machine _could_ slow it down in some situations because the "overall" cache hit ratio could go down.
Also, when caches get to be too large, the cache policy may need to be changed. A fully associative cache is the most flexible placement policy and can give great hit ratio for a large working set, however, a fully associaive cache search takes longer than a direct map "search" or a set-associative search.
So, if to get a large cache size they had to go to set assoc or direct mapped, then that will generally lower the hit ratio vs a cache of the same size which is fully assocaitive.
It's all tradeoffs basically. You could write a cache simulator to play around with this
so heres a question.
/usr/lib/sendmail fuckass@riaa.org
:)
What makes a "denial of service" attack ?
Lets say the RIAA has something on their website saying "please email any questions, comments, or concerns to fuckass@riaa.org"
Is this illegal ?
while 1
cat letter_to_riaa |
sleep 1
end
Hell. What of letter_to_riaa included an opt-out URL at the bottom ?
I'm not ready to disagree with you on what flopping in japan means for worldwide success, but I will point out the following:
:)
The saturn did ok in japan - flopped here
The dreamcast "Flopped" in japan, did ok here
the N64 "flopped" almost everywhere
Sega is now out of the console hardware business
Nintendo isn't - even though they have no arcade business, their last system flopped, and they've only got a few interesting franchises. The japanese eat this stuff up though.
I dont think xbox will take japan by storm, but i dont think MS needs it to. Pleasing the japanese video game market is weird ugly voodoo. People have tried to come up with formulas to do so but in general all you can do are try really hard and have a back up plan. The popular mantra today is "he who gets exclusive Square titles owns japan" but i look at that in one of two ways:
1) Square knows this, so may be willing to deal with whoever makes them the sweetest deal (hint: who has more money, MS or Sony ?)
2) The fickle japanese gaming market will decide that Pokemon RPG Universe Piano Simulator for gamecube is the best thing, and square will be hurting for money like no tomorrow.
In any case, i see MS putting out a good hardware platform, and having a good developer relations effort. Think of them as putting out a respectable offering, and getting their foot in the door in a new market. This is not an alltogether unheard of tactic for MS
So the xbox marketing campaign is 500million. Big deal - thats roughly 1 or 2% of MS's cash holdings.
In summary: they can afford to push back the japanese launch - especially if its to cushion unit volume for a great looking US launch.
You forgot a few other cool things the XBox has:
5.1 digital audio output - not just in pre-recorded games either - any sound you hear can be 5.1 encoded in real time - they put in a chip to do it, iirc.
the Harddrive isn't for "installing" games - its for optional features. It will be partitioned up in a few ways.. one area will be for savegames, so you dont necessarily need to buy a $30 memory card that holds only 64k. Another area will be a place to rip music to to create soundtracks for games that support that. Finally, a good chunk of the disk will be for caching game data. I beleive there is a strict rule against using the disk for "installing" games - you have to assume anything in the 'cache' area can be blown away once the power button is hit.
Other uses for the HD have been hinted at - downloading new content from MMRPGs, saving customized models/pictures/music/whatever
It should be noted that the XBox GPU is similar to a GF3 chip, but has doubled the number of some of the units (pixel shader, and one other one, iirc).
Finally, it bears mention that it has 64mb of UMA memory. Way more than any other console. The PS/2 has 4mb. The PS2 lack of memory seems to be one of the biggest complaints against it. The original PS had 2.5mb.
So please tell me you've figured out IBMs Linux story and aren't just mindlessly eating IBM cock for breakfast.
In case you're still under a rock, IBM loves linux for the following reasons:
1) Linux is free to IBM. IBM can tell you that they'll give you Linux for free. Linux is "free" to you. Linux costs nothing. You're getting something for nothing! Yee Haw!
2) By and large, _Nobody_ has a clue as to how to make linux solve any real-world business problem. Those that do, do not need IBMs help.
3) IBM has a "little known" organization called "Global Services" which makes up a _massive_ part of their revenue. IBM Global Services would be more than happy to contract a team of its Linux Experts to custom architect a Linux Solution for your E-Business!
So, in summary: IBM gets linux, and all of your work for free. Then they sell it to anyone that will buy it for _massive_ (utterly _massive_) profits, via service contracts and custom work. Because lets be honest, when a company of PHBs (every company) wants an email/calendaring package, they need a little more handholding and infrastructure than stock sendmail and iCal. IBM GS to the rescue!
I like VB.NET.
:) They both compile to CLR, and VB and C# can use eachothers classes interchangably. Each has its own specific quirks and strengths, but in general, if you can do it with C#, you can do it with VB.NET, and if you cant, then just do that part in C# (or Managed C++) and then consume it from VB.NET.
.NET runtime, and vb simply compiles to it. You'll also be happy to know that theres now a standalone commandline vb compiler. Best of all, theres a standard VB project type called "Console Application". No silly forms ever get involved - at all.
Given that I converted several hundred program from VB to VB.NET, I can speak on how different the two are.
Essentially, if you "just got by" with VB6 because of how simple a world view it could present, you may be in for a small learning curve with VB.NET
Now the good part:
If you can program in any C-family language, perl, or anything moderately more complex than VB, you're going to love VB.NET because you get to keep the simplicy of VB 95% of the time, but you get 99% of the power of C whenever you want it. These percentages are of course made up, but for those of you that are following C# and like it - VB.NET is almost the same language, what-you-can-do-wise
You'll be happy to know that there is no longer a VB runtime - now theres a
On the other end of the spectrum, theres a VB project template for creating Windows NT services. This was not even necessarily possible with VB6 - and to do many interesting things in VB6 you needed to import Win32 functions.
So in general, i think people that are programmers will love VB.NET - it gives all the long-time vb haters and complainers many things they've been asking for - and then some.
On the other hand, people that can barely grasp VB6 may be in trouble - the new power and flexibility of VB.NET does come at a price in terms of complexity of auto-generated code. If you're already in trouble when you accidentally go into the code window instead of the design window, expect problems with VB.NET.
You are so full of shit.
IRIX has _never_ been typical. IRIX is probably the most advanced unix flavour out there.
So tell me which other unixes support this, out of the box:
1) graphics context management
2) grio
3) DSM
4) 512+ cpu single image
Do I need to go on ?
IRIX doesn't have the installed base of more popular oses for many reasons... however, none of those reasons are due to IRIX being old fashioned and technology-poor.
I'm betting you're still dreaming about owning an SGI, because your post indicates you've never spent much time with one.
I think you're missing the most important case.
/dev/random to the inputs of most neural functions.. will this be enough ?
AI will be a big money maker when someone puts animatronics and and a brain inside a realdoll.
Then we'll see "hard AI".
Once the first turing test is complete (convincing a human they're conversing with a human for 5 minutes), the second test will bring itself to bear:
"Convincing a man that he is putting up with the bullshit from a real woman"
early experiemnts will of course just starting wiring
Ok, I was thinking about this the other nite a bit.
Why hasn't someone started a Non-profit record label. Could that work ? Or what about a "minimum profit" record label ?
I mean, if the end users, and the artists, and everyone is getting screwed over.. there seems like there's not only an ethical reason to do so, but a good solid _market_ to get into... if you reverse the business and set it up such that the artist owns all the rights to everything, and the record company is just that - someone that makes records (and does other things like putting up money for recording studio time perhaps) then it seems like everyone involved could come out ahead.
Honestly, if a CD can be mass produced for $1, and its costing $16, and the artists aren't getting any, there has to be room for someone to cut away a _lot_ of fat in that operation.. enough to give the artists enough to make them consider switching.
Yeah, record companies take a risk when they sign someone and they spend 1m in studio time and the album flops.. but its hard to get signed to record labels now... its not like they price things as an insurance measure as opposed to a profit motive..
Someone that knows a lot more about this stuff than me should think it through. Maybe initially its only feasiable to do small-volume recordings... i.e. CDR's as opposed to pressed cds ? or maybe simultanous low bit-rate mp3/ogg distribution with all releases. Maybe just a "musical venture capital" front end for mp3.com or something.
In any case, i dont konw the economics of the music business, just what i've read. It seems like there's an incredible opportuniy for someone who loves music and has plenty of money to back it, to try and make a reasonable record label that deals with artists in a reasonable fashion. I know musicians can be crummy people, especailly with agents, lawyers, and money issues, but there doesn't seem to be the need for awful contracts and outright company ownership of artists works.
Not So fast.
The CRAY 1, 2, XMP, etc etc are all VECTOR machines. Some of them happen to be parallel vector machines (multiple VECTOR processors)
The T3 series are the MPP boxes. Cray's bread and butter was VECTOR machines though. MPP came about because some problems aren't easily vectorizable (but can run on MPPs, oddly enough).
Let me get this straight
:)
You think feeding a bunch of World-class chess players (who are always RUSSIAN) a bunch of ALCOHOL will make any difference whatsoever ?
How many russians do you know ?
whast the biggest beowulf you've heard of ?
what does scalability mean ?
iirc, the MASPAR MPPs were 16384 Motorola 68k's.
Thats scalable - if you mean "lots of cpus".
or what about some of the ASCI computers ? 8192 cpus, 6144 cpus, etc etc. No beowulf that big, eh ?
What is it that you really mean by beowulf ? Or is it just "the buzzword" that everyone loves and this time (for the first time in 234092384234 slashdot articles) it happens to be slightly relevant ?
The idea of shared-nothing commodity clusters isn't new, and linux isn't the only place its done , much less beowulf. Infact, Cornell ditched some SP/2 boxes to build a cluster--but they used Win2k-- and apparently they love it. You can buy such a compute cluster from Dell just like theirs if you want it.
No, i dont think the issue here was "we've never heard of beowulf" or "well, we are against beowulf because we're snobs". Maybe, just maybe, they had criteria other than "must sound like 'eowulf' when they made a decision ?
If its anything like the older Crays (SV1 stands for "scalable vector", iirc its sort of a mix of vector and traditional CPUs).. then it gets its speed from the vectorized nature of the cpu and more importantly, the problem at hand.
:)
:) the cray's amazing speed only works in situations where the problem can be expressed in vector instructions, i.e. do the same thing to a fuckload of data in such a way that the cray's hardware can pipeline it efficiently..
i was told in a CS course that the arch of the cray vector units is basically the same as the cray 1... the speeds have changed, the process has changed, the external peices have gotten much faster.. but at the core, the cray vector machines are very fast at the following type of thing:
given a vector of a given length
do foo to every element in that vector
_very_ efficiently
to see how this operates a bit better, consider how a normal cpu might do the following
for i = 1 to 64
begin
blah[i] = blah[i] + 1
end
that would end up getting compiled perhaps into something like this on a traditional cpu:
loop:
load blah[i]
increment blah[i]
save blah[i]
increment i
if i 64, goto loop
what we're seeing is that for 1 element, we do a load, an ALU op, a store, an ALU op, and a conditional branch.
conditional branches fuck cpus. badly. having load stores inside inner loops, fucks cpus badly.
to see why, you need to understand pipelining, but basically i'll make it short and easy: the instruction cache of a cpu is always stuffing the pipeline with its "guess" of what instructions should be... and its not until several of those 1.4ghz clock cycles later that you even know if you've got the right instruction... if you do, great.. if you dont, you're fucked and you flush the pipeline and start over.
conditional branches fuck this all to hell because without optimization, you've got a 50% chance of filling your pipeline with the wrong instructions.. so on a p4 with a 20+ stage pipeline you're talking about throwing away some sizable portion of those instructions... and then refilling them... now, branch predition realy helps this a lot, but conditional branches are just one problem... the load/store units of cpus also typically introduce huge pipeline delays... i.e. you need to load blah[i] but that takes 2 or 3 cycles (even from cache!! dont even think about it if you need to go to main memory) so any instructions which use blah[i] must be scheduled at least 2-3 clock cycles aftewrads...
so without keen optimization and ideal software loads, suddenly your 1.4ghz chip is stalling 2-3 instructions all the time.. and its only running like a 400mhz proc
so, to make traditional cpus fast, pipelineing and multiple EUs have been added. these have drawbacks (and i'velisted some of pipelinings above).
the "vector" approach is totally different. you actually have "vector" registers, and "vector instructions". the machine actually sets up "virtual" pipelines for you. so on a vector machine, the scenario above would be more like:
vectorsize=64
xv = xv + 1
(assuming xv is the vector register with your 64 elements in it)
what the cray hardware does is hooks up the peices of its cpu in a virtual pipeline that does something like this:
foreach element of vx
load
inc
save
notice that the foreach construct looks like a loop, but its not realy, its pipelined, so what actually gets sent through looks like this
load i
inc i, load i+ 1
save i, inc i + 1, load i + 2
save i+1, inc i + 2, load i + 3
save i + 2, inc i + 3, load i + 4
save i + 3, inc i + 4, load i + 5
etc etc etc
except for fill and drain, the load, inc, and save hardware units are always perfectly utilized. there is no branching or conditional logic involved.
the example i've chosen is very trivial, and may be subject to huge factual or conceptual mistakes
there are lots of interesting problems that the cray did _not_ handle well.. but for what its worth, the vector processors in the cray 1 aren't significantly different in operation and instruction set than the SV1 of today.. by many measures, cray "got it right" originally. the SV1 of today might use a normal BGA packaging on a CMOS based process, (the cray1 used discrete ECL logic and point to point wiring - all strung together by little old minnesotan women)
also the original cray 1 ran at either 100 or 80mhz, could take 32mb of ram.... i.e. for the 1970s it was faster than any desktop workstation until the mid 90s...
note that the top500 list crays are usually the T3Es.. which are a totally different beast than the vector processor.. a T3E is just a bunch of alpha CPUs on a very fast interconnect.. sort of like a "custom cluster in a box".
Ok. This is going to come off sounding a little harsh, but here it goes anyway:
You've never used a NeXT, have you ? You really dont have a fucking clue what you're talking about, do you ?
1) you didn't read the article (typical)
2) NeXT machines didn't use X-windows, they used something completely NeXT proprietary. The server process that managed the GUi was called "WindowServer". THe whole GUI was based on DPS. There _were_ Xservers for NeXT, but most were commercial.
3) what does "fully bsd style" mean ? I bet you couldn't come up with a definition for that that made any sense, but even if you could, it wouldn't be NeXTSTEP or OpenSTEP.
3a) NS used funky non-unix stuff, like NetInfo (sort of like NIS, but NeXT specific (although ports to other OSes were made))
3b) NS was not very posix compliant.. there were basic posix things missing from NS
3c) Many things in NS/OS were GNU software.. they had no issues about throwing away GPL software and replacing it with GNU as necessary.. hardly a very BSDish thing to do ? A notable example is the system compiler - gcc/objc. Other examples include the use of gnutar in many popular next packages (although I suppose this isn't a NeXT decision so much as a user community one)
4) "handle scsi devices in unix"
Uh.. wtf are you talking about ? On real hardware, SCSI is utterly brainless anyway. But its especailly so on NeXTs.. you just plug in a device and the GUI pops up a box saying "new disk, blow it away or mount it ?" Whats to configure ? Theres none of this sd0a bullshit, NS just figures it out..
so, for what its worth, i agree, NeXT boxes are cool and its too bad they were burning them.. 7+ YEARS AGO. And while everyone is entitled to an opinion, your post is like >50% erroneous as far as your "facts", and then you use these "Facts" to apparently justify ranting about something that never happened.
Nice post, pal.
Nitpick:
cd sampling rate is 44100, thus nyquist says the max reproducible freq is 22050hz.
You'll see that all the settings on any 16bit audio software match those numbers (except dat, which is 48khz, iirc)
I bet you haven't really done this.
s p?TR_ID=MSR-TR-99-05
I was a demonstration of an audio watermarking system that did _Exactly_ this. Except it was in a very noisy confereence room. And the speakers were really shitty. And so was the microphone.
The watermark was inperceptible to me. But not to the computer with the microphone.
This demonstration was given by someone at Microsoft Research.
I don't know if this was the exact research group, but you can read about some of the watermarking work going on at MSR here:
http://research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.a
No.
The "back end" is a bunch of Sun E4500's.
The vast majority of freebsd machines are now running w2k.