In recent news it was found that "Alien Beings" have been trying to communicate with Earth for centuries via modulated starlight.
Just kidding. Honestly though, this could be looked at as another magic frequency thing. Except like Broadband in scale.
Modulate a thousand frequencies of sunlight at the same time and pass them through your transmission medium of choice (space?) and don't stress about diffraction or diffusion as long as the light reaches the other side; because your receiver is an array of several tens of thousands of carbon nanotubes that auto-magically sort out the frequencies.
Ta-da! You just transmitted the entire Library of Congress in a matter of seconds.
In -A LOT- of locales it is illegal for the soon-to-be-homeowner to do anything to the structure of the building during the construction phase. Cat5/Coax/Fiber communications cabling of any sort requires a low-voltage contractors license.
TRUST ME, it is worth your time.
There was a famous (ok semi-famous) case here in Phoenix where a guy went through all the work of getting Cat5+Coax run with conduit through several rooms of his custom home over the weekend. He came back the next weekend to finish the job only to find that the drywall was up in most of the rooms and everything he installed had been removed and junked by the General Contractor.
Being just a little upset, he decided to try and sue the General Contractor to have them pay for his time and materials and to have the General Contractor hire a sub-contractor to put in everything after the house was done.
The General Contractor filed a counter-suit for the cost of time and materials to remove all of the cabling the home-owner had installed, AND for the time and materials to replace all of the studs and beams he had drilled through to install all of the conduit.
Not surprisingly the General Contractor won. Why?
Because the home-owner wasn't. The house isn't actually yours until the final papers are signed on your final walk-through of the finished home.
The funny part is that the Judge fined the soon-to-be-home-owner several thousand daollars for trespassing on private property and performing electrical work without a license etc. ON TOP OF awarding the General Contractor the damages they requested.
Bottom line? He ended up paying about $24-thousand more for his house. And the General Contractor -refused- to allow a sub-contractor to install new cabling.
DRI/DRM are built with the kernel now, you shouldn't need to emerge. Just make sure in your make menuconfig (or whatever you use) to mark ATI RADEON support and -turn off- kernel frame buffer support.
That last one always catches people, I have yet to see anybody get dri/drm OR fglrx running with kernel framebuffer support built in.
And yes it should support anything that supports OpenGL1.1 standards.
I run gentoo on a dual pIII-600 with an ATI radeon7000 / SBlive / intelpro100. Kernels 2.4.18 through 2.4.22 took several hours of tweaking before I could even get the thing to boot correctly. ( 2.2 never had this problem )
Last week I took about 30 minutes and grabbed 2.6.3 did a clean/config/make, which took about the majority of that time, and booted into the fastest Linux box I have ever had.
2.6 booted with OpenGL without any tweaks pushing glgears to 1600fps and ALSA kicked in without errors on the emu10k1. Device drivers posed no issues for either the USB keyboard/mouse or hardrive or nework card.
No 'migration' was necessary for either windowmaker / enlightenment / blender / JACK or any of my other 100 some odd apps.
I was charged with migrating 40 Sun workstations previously in their own lab on their own switch for speed and security reasons, into a new facility and a lab with over 100 win2000 boxen and was told I had to utilize their switch for cost-cutting reasons.
So I turned on the ip6 stack in Solaris and within about 7 hours had all workstations running NFS/SSH/KERBEROS and setup an intel box running freebsd/KAME to utilize ip6-to-ip4 conversion for HTTP/SOCKS/SQUID etc.
I have encountered the same lack of current information and airfoil performance. I am a garage-engineer that produces experimental r/c aircraft somewhat regularly.
I have found several gpl/shareware programs that do help design airfoils and predict their usability, but on a small scale for r/c. And the properties obviously change for real-world aircraft.
Throwing specs around is great but really won't answer your question; as opposed to user-experience, which I can offer.
Where I work I use NEC 42" plasma screens daily, I have 2 friends with 50" pioneers plasma screens and have worked with sony plasma's previously. I have several 17-18-19" LCD's for work and 1 friend with a Panasonic LCD TV ( I believe it is 36" diag). We also use several runco hd-dlp front-projector/wall-screen set-ups and 1 samsung rear-projector dlp-tv.
In all cases if you sit closer than 6-8 feet to the plasmas' then any you will constantly notice jaggies during normal tv viewing and several types of ghosting/artifacts during any high speed action sequences. The NEC's cost us about US $9k/each.
The problem is that you buy a big screen for just that reason - real estate - and if you have to sit 10 feet away then it defeats the purpose because then your new 61" whizbang looks the size of your 27" whatzit you started out with.
Enter the LCD, They have better control over jaggies but then you are very constrained when it comes to viewing locations - you basically need to be directly in front and within about 8 feet in a well lit room in order to view it comfortably.The pc screens all run about US $1k, but the tv ran my friend US $5k.
Projectors are all about tweaking, on 2 of our runco sets we have rooms with one wall entirely of glass i.e. tons of sunlight, and the projectors are set to throw a 72" screen from 8 feet away (they are ceiling mount) and they are beautiful to see in action - no jaggies or artifacts and colors are spot-on. But it did take about 3 days of tweaking to get that with all video sources.And they cost about US $7k per set-up.
Our primary Runco set-up is a 14footx8foot screen with the projector set 20feet back. This was because even after going through all the specs before hand, the darn thing wouldn't give us the full image from the 16foot distance reccomended by the factory install team.
And after 2 weeks of tweaking the image is barely viewable with all lights off, the images ae fuzzy and color alignment is all wrong; we have to replace the bulb about every 3 and a half weeks @ US $600/bulb; and this was their top of the line dlp from 2 years ago -almost US $20k.
The samsung rp-dlp is beautiful in action and doesn't have any issue with ambient light in the room, however it did run about US $5k.
For a home setup, I have a great 36" toshiba digital tv. Complete with component connections and a sony HDTV tuner + PS2 + gamecube.
This gives the best cost/performance ratio as it cost only US $1200 plus another US $1200 for the tuner, which isn't included with any of the other set-ups.
Bottom Line: Get out to all of the showrooms you can and actually look at these things in person, You will be surprised at how good your current set-up actually compares to what is available out there.
Everyone here seems to be suffering from the same delusion that a fatter pipe means a faster line.
Boy have a I got bridge to sell you! ( and some terrific coastline property too!)
No matter how fast you can download data, all the signaling involved has to obey the laws of physics.
Expecting to get less than 20ms of latency getting from your pc to your ISP's connection to the NET is extremely unrealistic (the average T1 introduces 20ms of latency) just because of the number of signal + data processing devices involved.
Sure having a fatter pipe MAY mean that the time it takes for your packet to traverse the link is reduced, but we are still talking something on the order of fractions of a millisecond.
Considering that the average human takes 1/2 second to process visual changes in their environment, and another 7/10ths of a second to physically respond to that processing, it is highly doubtful that changing ISP's to save 10ms of latency will actually improve your fragging experience.
The reality of this is that your average path is something like this:
gaming rig hub/switch router/firewall cable/dsl modem local carrier head-end local carrier agregate routing device local carrier backbone Local carrier border routing device ISP agregate routing device ISP core routing device ISP border routing device NSP border routing device NSP core routing device NSP backbone NSP core routing device NSP border routing device ISP border routing device ISP core routing device --then if you are lucky-- ISP colo routing device ISP colo switch Gaming server
Now regardless of whether or not your traceroute actually shows those first 10 hops just to get to the NET, Your packets do make that whole trip, (just because those devices don't respond to ICMP requests doesn't mean they aren't there)
Now considering you have an average of ~4ms through each processing device, that gives you upto 40ms of latency just getting to the Net (not including transit time over the cables).
Heck I have customers running dedicated OC3's for their server farms and they are happy with their 10-20ms transit latency. Mainly because they know that even across OC192's that their coast to coast latency is going to average 80ms.
That is just using the good old speed of light to calculate transit time and an assumed average of ~4ms processing time.
I actually had to make several trips to the audiologist over this same issue, it turns out that about 60-70% of the population has hearing in the well known range of 30hz-20khz and that the rest of the popuation has various hearing ranges dictated by physical problems and/or genetics.
About 5% percent of the population has hearing far above average, mine was tested out to 10hz-42khz. So, yes, I hear TV's / Plasma screens / LCD's / Flourescent Lights and when I lived in the L.A./San Diego area I could even hear earthquakes coming about a minute before they actually would start shaking the apartment building. ( Hence the trips to the audiologist. They actually sounds kinda like a Freight Train, if you have ever stood next to the track while it goes by. Except the Doppler Effect seems greatly exaggerated - maybe the effect of the wave traveling through the ground?)
When talking to an EE friend of mine, he recalled from his TV Repair days the Capacitors would switch states around 30 thousand times / second in accordance with the power draw of the tube for the color changes that each pass of the electron gun has to make and that the larger the tube the higher the frequency. ( So if you pay attention you will actually hear the sound change with the color being displayed on-screen)
Which makes sense, because my 13" RCA caused me no end of pain, so I stopped using it, When I went to buy a new set I actually convinced the sales people to turn off the other TV's in the show room so I could go around and find the TV that was the least offensive.
My wife was unfortunate enough to "click through" and victimize herself with this thing. I happened to notice 20-30 different sessions being generated every few minutes through our firewall and started tcpdump to find out what was happening.
After finding that it did indeed have my wife's credit card number/home address/phone number I asked her what she used it for; She said that she didn't know where it came from but that it was causing her laptop to crash about every ten minutes ever since it added itself to her IE toolbar.
I then spent about 3.5 hours hacking the WinME registry trying to peel this thing out of her laptop because it's 'uninstall' doesn't!
Actually, I tried it using the sources through egcs first, then I tried Ximian, then I tried the 'preview' available directly from sun.
Each one was slightly faster than the previous version, but in our environment having easily 8-12 xterms open along with Netscape/Opera + Oracle/Informix + XMMS, Gnome just came to a crawl.
Has anybody ACTUALLY tried gnome1.4 on sparc/solaris yet?
It's slower than tar in Iceland!!
I DID have 25 solaris users clamoring for Gnome on the dekstop, and after I gave them a workstation loaded with it they were singing the praises of CDE.
How many of the un-identifiable, radiation-hardened, metal-digesting fungi/bacteria/organisms that have taken over the hull are actually going to survive their fiery plunge to earth?
And what kind of ecological warfare are they going to be capable of given the comparatively unlimited resources available?
Rambus is simply practicing the legalease they have been taught by their biggest backer -Intel-
In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if Rambus was actually a puppet company started by Intel for the sole purpose of exactly what it is doing now.
With most of Intel's smaller competitor's litigated to death or producing other items now -i.e. memory/asics/controllers, they are probably missing a healthy amount of revenue from all the licensing on cpu/core IP
Rambus never had a real product, but they duplicitously littered an 'open' industry forum with idea's that were already in their patent hopper, and when their RDRAM 'designs' didn't pan out when they hit silicon, they had millions in funding handily left over to turn around and try to nail everybody for using concepts that were never really owned to begin with.
And the announcements by Intel that RDRAM and the P4 weren't going to happen just as popular opinion about Rambus was going downhill, and that Rambus wouldn't be expecting Intel to pay royalties but will be attacking nearly every single Intel competitor in the world on every front,????
Well, that just play's into all of this a little too perfectly.
It pains me to admit this, but I AM one of those foolish few who actually own a PS2+DC+N64. Plus my 5 PC's plus my wifes PC and my 2 daughter's PC's and 2 color Gameboys.
What games are available to us are what makes our purchasing decisions.
It's pretty sad though, to see that mudslinging has moved from the political arena's main marketing tool to the Gaming Industries FUD engine.
When you actually compare the technologies, the only difference is the method that the engineers chose to acheive their design goals.
Whether or not they met those goals is entirely subjective, depending on the game, the system, the mood of the gamer reviewing the system, and sometimes, the phase of the moon.
If I recall correctly, Lucent (Bell Labs?) had a completely distrubted OS called Inferno. It used spare processor cycles and memory/drive resources from all hosts attached to the network; essentially turning the network into a server, it could account for shifts in usage and even rebuild data from hosts that were removed from the network (like RAID) I don't know what the current status of the project is now (that was about 2 years ago)
I have noticed everyone saying that the industry will survive, but has anyone seriously looked at it? The Computing industry right now is in just as big a flux as the Internet and the Global Economy (Basically all the same now right?) If the Cost of SDRAM + RDRAM are the same then the whole industry will slow down, (have you seen RDRAM prices lately?) most manufacturers are already tooled for SDRAM and most other Memory technologies really aren't slated to be introduced for another 3-5 years It looks more like the entire computing industry could be in for another shake-up unless the DOJ can act quickly enough. (Even then the US Patent Office could shut down the industry single-handedly too)
VDSL? Hate to burst your bubble....
on
VDSL Demoed
·
· Score: 1
Out in Phoenix, Arizona, USWest is currently supporting VDSL, we can get 150Channel Digital CableTV, Multiple lines of phone services, and up to 1.2Mbps Internet service, all on one pair of copper, up to 10,000ft from the c.o. The cable is great, and we haven't noticed any difference in the phone quality, but the internet only takes about a second for any page, whereas before, it would take up to a minute.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would this not be considered a re-iteration of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
.....
i.e.
reality vs. locality
OR
position vs. momentum
reciprocal values always being inverse.
Sounds the same anyway
In recent news it was found that "Alien Beings" have been trying to communicate with Earth for centuries via modulated starlight.
Just kidding. Honestly though, this could be looked at as another magic frequency thing. Except like Broadband in scale.
Modulate a thousand frequencies of sunlight at the same time and pass them through your transmission medium of choice (space?) and don't stress about diffraction or diffusion as long as the light reaches the other side; because your receiver is an array of several tens of thousands of carbon nanotubes that auto-magically sort out the frequencies.
Ta-da! You just transmitted the entire Library of Congress in a matter of seconds.
In -A LOT- of locales it is illegal for the soon-to-be-homeowner to do anything to the structure of the building during the construction phase. Cat5/Coax/Fiber communications cabling of any sort requires a low-voltage contractors license.
TRUST ME, it is worth your time.
There was a famous (ok semi-famous) case here in Phoenix where a guy went through all the work of getting Cat5+Coax run with conduit through several rooms of his custom home over the weekend. He came back the next weekend to finish the job only to find that the drywall was up in most of the rooms and everything he installed had been removed and junked by the General Contractor.
Being just a little upset, he decided to try and sue the General Contractor to have them pay for his time and materials and to have the General Contractor hire a sub-contractor to put in everything after the house was done.
The General Contractor filed a counter-suit for the cost of time and materials to remove all of the cabling the home-owner had installed, AND for the time and materials to replace all of the studs and beams he had drilled through to install all of the conduit.
Not surprisingly the General Contractor won. Why?
Because the home-owner wasn't. The house isn't actually yours until the final papers are signed on your final walk-through of the finished home.
The funny part is that the Judge fined the soon-to-be-home-owner several thousand daollars for trespassing on private property and performing electrical work without a license etc. ON TOP OF awarding the General Contractor the damages they requested.
Bottom line? He ended up paying about $24-thousand more for his house. And the General Contractor -refused- to allow a sub-contractor to install new cabling.
DRI/DRM are built with the kernel now, you shouldn't need to emerge. Just make sure in your make menuconfig (or whatever you use) to mark ATI RADEON support and -turn off- kernel frame buffer support.
That last one always catches people, I have yet to see anybody get dri/drm OR fglrx running with kernel framebuffer support built in.
And yes it should support anything that supports OpenGL1.1 standards.
I run gentoo on a dual pIII-600 with an ATI radeon7000 / SBlive / intelpro100. Kernels 2.4.18 through 2.4.22 took several hours of tweaking before I could even get the thing to boot correctly. ( 2.2 never had this problem )
Last week I took about 30 minutes and grabbed 2.6.3 did a clean/config/make, which took about the majority of that time, and booted into the fastest Linux box I have ever had.
2.6 booted with OpenGL without any tweaks pushing glgears to 1600fps and ALSA kicked in without errors on the emu10k1. Device drivers posed no issues for either the USB keyboard/mouse or hardrive or nework card.
No 'migration' was necessary for either windowmaker / enlightenment / blender / JACK or any of my other 100 some odd apps.
I was charged with migrating 40 Sun workstations previously in their own lab on their own switch for speed and security reasons, into a new facility and a lab with over 100 win2000 boxen and was told I had to utilize their switch for cost-cutting reasons.
So I turned on the ip6 stack in Solaris and within about 7 hours had all workstations running NFS/SSH/KERBEROS and setup an intel box running freebsd/KAME to utilize ip6-to-ip4 conversion for HTTP/SOCKS/SQUID etc.
ip6 just plain works. - Don't believe the hype.
I have encountered the same lack of current information and airfoil performance. I am a garage-engineer that produces experimental r/c aircraft somewhat regularly.
p ro files/NACA4.html
_ Gi nsberg/
I have found several gpl/shareware programs that do help design airfoils and predict their usability, but on a small scale for r/c. And the properties obviously change for real-world aircraft.
here are some links that may help though:
http://www.pagendarm.de/trapp/programming/java/
http://raphael.mit.edu/xfoil/
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Harold
http://www.compufoil.com
http://www.profili2.com
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~malhardy/
These are applications that I have used with mixed success. And remember - most of these are for model aircraft so YMMV.
Also just google, there are lots of others out there who have run into the same situation and started the own projects to make data available.
Throwing specs around is great but really won't answer your question; as opposed to user-experience, which I can offer.
/each.
Where I work I use NEC 42" plasma screens daily, I have 2 friends with 50" pioneers plasma screens and have worked with sony plasma's previously. I have several 17-18-19" LCD's for work and 1 friend with a Panasonic LCD TV ( I believe it is 36" diag). We also use several runco hd-dlp front-projector/wall-screen set-ups and 1 samsung rear-projector dlp-tv.
In all cases if you sit closer than 6-8 feet to the plasmas' then any you will constantly notice jaggies during normal tv viewing and several types of ghosting/artifacts during any high speed action sequences. The NEC's cost us about US $9k
The problem is that you buy a big screen for just that reason - real estate - and if you have to sit 10 feet away then it defeats the purpose because then your new 61" whizbang looks the size of your 27" whatzit you started out with.
Enter the LCD, They have better control over jaggies but then you are very constrained when it comes to viewing locations - you basically need to be directly in front and within about 8 feet in a well lit room in order to view it comfortably.The pc screens all run about US $1k, but the tv ran my friend US $5k.
Projectors are all about tweaking, on 2 of our runco sets we have rooms with one wall entirely of glass i.e. tons of sunlight, and the projectors are set to throw a 72" screen from 8 feet away (they are ceiling mount) and they are beautiful to see in action - no jaggies or artifacts and colors are spot-on. But it did take about 3 days of tweaking to get that with all video sources.And they cost about US $7k per set-up.
Our primary Runco set-up is a 14footx8foot screen with the projector set 20feet back. This was because even after going through all the specs before hand, the darn thing wouldn't give us the full image from the 16foot distance reccomended by the factory install team.
And after 2 weeks of tweaking the image is barely viewable with all lights off, the images ae fuzzy and color alignment is all wrong; we have to replace the bulb about every 3 and a half weeks @ US $600/bulb; and this was their top of the line dlp from 2 years ago -almost US $20k.
The samsung rp-dlp is beautiful in action and doesn't have any issue with ambient light in the room, however it did run about US $5k.
For a home setup, I have a great 36" toshiba digital tv. Complete with component connections and a sony HDTV tuner + PS2 + gamecube.
This gives the best cost/performance ratio as it cost only US $1200 plus another US $1200 for the tuner, which isn't included with any of the other set-ups.
Bottom Line: Get out to all of the showrooms you can and actually look at these things in person, You will be surprised at how good your current set-up actually compares to what is available out there.
Everyone here seems to be suffering from the same delusion that a fatter pipe means a faster line.
Boy have a I got bridge to sell you! ( and some terrific coastline property too!)
No matter how fast you can download data, all the signaling involved has to obey the laws of physics.
Expecting to get less than 20ms of latency getting from your pc to your ISP's connection to the NET is extremely unrealistic (the average T1 introduces 20ms of latency) just because of the number of signal + data processing devices involved.
Sure having a fatter pipe MAY mean that the time it takes for your packet to traverse the link is reduced, but we are still talking something on the order of fractions of a millisecond.
Considering that the average human takes 1/2 second to process visual changes in their environment, and another 7/10ths of a second to physically respond to that processing, it is highly doubtful that changing ISP's to save 10ms of latency will actually improve your fragging experience.
The reality of this is that your average path is something like this:
gaming rig
hub/switch
router/firewall
cable/dsl modem
local carrier head-end
local carrier agregate routing device
local carrier backbone
Local carrier border routing device
ISP agregate routing device
ISP core routing device
ISP border routing device
NSP border routing device
NSP core routing device
NSP backbone
NSP core routing device
NSP border routing device
ISP border routing device
ISP core routing device
--then if you are lucky--
ISP colo routing device
ISP colo switch
Gaming server
Now regardless of whether or not your traceroute actually shows those first 10 hops just to get to the NET, Your packets do make that whole trip, (just because those devices don't respond to ICMP requests doesn't mean they aren't there)
Now considering you have an average of ~4ms through each processing device, that gives you upto 40ms of latency just getting to the Net (not including transit time over the cables).
Heck I have customers running dedicated OC3's for their server farms and they are happy with their 10-20ms transit latency. Mainly because they know that even across OC192's that their coast to coast latency is going to average 80ms.
That is just using the good old speed of light to calculate transit time and an assumed average of ~4ms processing time.
I actually had to make several trips to the audiologist over this same issue, it turns out that about 60-70% of the population has hearing in the well known range of 30hz-20khz and that the rest of the popuation has various hearing ranges dictated by physical problems and/or genetics.
About 5% percent of the population has hearing far above average, mine was tested out to 10hz-42khz. So, yes, I hear TV's / Plasma screens / LCD's / Flourescent Lights and when I lived in the L.A./San Diego area I could even hear earthquakes coming about a minute before they actually would start shaking the apartment building. ( Hence the trips to the audiologist. They actually sounds kinda like a Freight Train, if you have ever stood next to the track while it goes by. Except the Doppler Effect seems greatly exaggerated - maybe the effect of the wave traveling through the ground?)
When talking to an EE friend of mine, he recalled from his TV Repair days the Capacitors would switch states around 30 thousand times / second in accordance with the power draw of the tube for the color changes that each pass of the electron gun has to make and that the larger the tube the higher the frequency. ( So if you pay attention you will actually hear the sound change with the color being displayed on-screen)
Which makes sense, because my 13" RCA caused me no end of pain, so I stopped using it, When I went to buy a new set I actually convinced the sales people to turn off the other TV's in the show room so I could go around and find the TV that was the least offensive.
My wife was unfortunate enough to "click through" and victimize herself with this thing. I happened to notice 20-30 different sessions being generated every few minutes through our firewall and started tcpdump to find out what was happening.
After finding that it did indeed have my wife's credit card number/home address/phone number I asked her what she used it for; She said that she didn't know where it came from but that it was causing her laptop to crash about every ten minutes ever since it added itself to her IE toolbar.
I then spent about 3.5 hours hacking the WinME registry trying to peel this thing out of her laptop because it's 'uninstall' doesn't!
Yep, it's true, there were 2 of them, They got job offers from dot-coms and left the same week.
I was the only person left who knew the root password.
It's been over a year now, and I still haven't decided whether this has been 'a good thing(tm)' or not.
Actually, I tried it using the sources through egcs first, then I tried Ximian, then I tried the 'preview' available directly from sun.
Each one was slightly faster than the previous version, but in our environment having easily 8-12 xterms open along with Netscape/Opera + Oracle/Informix + XMMS, Gnome just came to a crawl.
Ultra5 333mhz + 256Mbram, even threw in the shmat changes to no effect.
Has anybody ACTUALLY tried gnome1.4 on sparc/solaris yet?
It's slower than tar in Iceland!!
I DID have 25 solaris users clamoring for Gnome on the dekstop, and after I gave them a workstation loaded with it they were singing the praises of CDE.
Comparatively CDE IS the lesser of two evils.
IIRC there was a slashdot post about winME using the bsd tcp/ip stack M$ got from purchasing WhiteRiver (or something like that)
Yet I haven't seen their EULA giving any kind of credit for it to the BSD community.
Aren't these the same issue?
How many of the un-identifiable, radiation-hardened, metal-digesting fungi/bacteria/organisms that have taken over the hull are actually going to survive their fiery plunge to earth?
And what kind of ecological warfare are they going to be capable of given the comparatively unlimited resources available?
Rambus is simply practicing the legalease they have been taught by their biggest backer -Intel-
In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if Rambus was actually a puppet company started by Intel for the sole purpose of exactly what it is doing now.
With most of Intel's smaller competitor's litigated to death or producing other items now -i.e. memory/asics/controllers, they are probably missing a healthy amount of revenue from all the licensing on cpu/core IP
Rambus never had a real product, but they duplicitously littered an 'open' industry forum with idea's that were already in their patent hopper, and when their RDRAM 'designs' didn't pan out when they hit silicon, they had millions in funding handily left over to turn around and try to nail everybody for using concepts that were never really owned to begin with.
And the announcements by Intel that RDRAM and the P4 weren't going to happen just as popular opinion about Rambus was going downhill, and that Rambus wouldn't be expecting Intel to pay royalties but will be attacking nearly every single Intel competitor in the world on every front,????
Well, that just play's into all of this a little too perfectly.
It pains me to admit this, but I AM one of those foolish few who actually own a PS2+DC+N64. Plus my 5 PC's plus my wifes PC and my 2 daughter's PC's and 2 color Gameboys.
What games are available to us are what makes our purchasing decisions.
It's pretty sad though, to see that mudslinging has moved from the political arena's main marketing tool to the Gaming Industries FUD engine.
When you actually compare the technologies, the only difference is the method that the engineers chose to acheive their design goals.
Whether or not they met those goals is entirely subjective, depending on the game, the system, the mood of the gamer reviewing the system, and sometimes, the phase of the moon.
If I recall correctly, Lucent (Bell Labs?) had a completely distrubted OS called Inferno. It used spare processor cycles and memory/drive resources from all hosts attached to the network; essentially turning the network into a server, it could account for shifts in usage and even rebuild data from hosts that were removed from the network (like RAID) I don't know what the current status of the project is now (that was about 2 years ago)
I have noticed everyone saying that the industry will survive, but has anyone seriously looked at it? The Computing industry right now is in just as big a flux as the Internet and the Global Economy (Basically all the same now right?) If the Cost of SDRAM + RDRAM are the same then the whole industry will slow down, (have you seen RDRAM prices lately?) most manufacturers are already tooled for SDRAM and most other Memory technologies really aren't slated to be introduced for another 3-5 years It looks more like the entire computing industry could be in for another shake-up unless the DOJ can act quickly enough. (Even then the US Patent Office could shut down the industry single-handedly too)
Out in Phoenix, Arizona, USWest is currently supporting VDSL, we can get 150Channel Digital CableTV, Multiple lines of phone services, and up to 1.2Mbps Internet service, all on one pair of copper, up to 10,000ft from the c.o. The cable is great, and we haven't noticed any difference in the phone quality, but the internet only takes about a second for any page, whereas before, it would take up to a minute.
Itanium is way to close to Titanic for comfort... High-tech equilvalent to freudian slip? Could Intel be prophesizing it's own doom? Is this an Omen?