And the quality HTML award goes to...
on
Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
... Charles Connell, for creating more "lousy" software. Call me crazy, but I would think that if you wanted to rant about "lousy" software you'd have the presence of mind to write decent-enough HTML so that the character " didn't show up as ? and bullets didn't show up as the character Y.
I'm just curious: why not digitize a music stream into non-copyright-infringing blocks (however many seconds are legal), Reed-Solomon code all the blocks, then distribute all the blocks to a variety of servers?
Then only the actual reassembly of the blocks into a complete file would (possibly) be illegal...
Ahh, sounds like you have a ditch-digging job! Your hoity-toity attitude towards entertainment reveals your true calling.
Some of us that actually use our brains during the day really do prefer some mindless entertainment now and then. After a week's worth of databases, high-performance computing, and PhD research, do I want to watch Shakespeare or play Myst? No, of course not. I'll take the next mindless action movie or computer game on the market.
I'll buy the Throne of Bhaal expansion back for BG2 instead,
D2 is enjoyable if you can play multiplayer cooperative on a fast LAN.
On the other hand, Baldur's Gate sucks on a LAN. Even a fast LAN. (Never mind that Baldur's Gate has a teenage storyline or took zillions of hours to play because you'd repeatedly get killed by kobolds. How boring.)
24 bit color and 32 bit color
There's a good reason for that; that extra byte isn't used for anything except to keep memory alignment. That's why 32bit video modes are much faster than
24bit video modes
Yes, now this is watching crap fly. That has got to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard, with the possible exception of the salesman at Best Buy telling someone their 14.4k modem will transmit 14,000 bytes per second.
Ever consider that you can have (and usually do have) 24-bit color in a 32-bit video mode?
Ever consider that video memory may not be layed out as RGB_RGB_RGB_RGB_, but instead may be layed out in planes of Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha?
Ever consider that the extra 8 bits are used as alpha channels, stencil buffers, or Z-buffers on 3D hardware?
Apparently your knowledge of graphics hardware is inversely proportional to your/. ID. If you're going to spew crap/troll, at least make it slightly plausible.
I'm just curious - why not make Gnutella a P2P network with distributed song bits? E.g., it's part of 'fair use' to reproduce some small time segment of a song; why not just spread those bits around to a variety of peers and then go and grab each of those bits from a variety of peers to reassemble the song?
Couple that with the technology that Digital Fountain uses (a method of streaming media via UDP that can reconstruct the original media despite some significant packet loss %) and it should be possible to build a legal distributed P2P network that one could illegally download MP3s from;)
Servers need
high memory bandwidth, and latency is not really an issue
<SARCASM>
Wow. Then I guess that all those computer engineering researchers have it wrong.
</SARCASM>
Duh. Latency is the killer. Cache design, compiler scheduling algorithms, prefetch instructions: all these things are designed to combat latency. When your server with its high latency high bandwidth memory screeches to a halt on a TLB miss, don't come whining to me.
Indeed. An even easier example of this is to watch the promotions they have on TV for something like "The 40 Greatest Polkas Ever" - $18.99 for two casettes, $24.99 for 2 CDs.
If this doesn't mystify you greatly, it should. The source for both manufacturing methods is exactly the same - does it really cost $3 more to manufacture a CD vs. a casette?
But that same book costs $90 if you put the simple word 'Text' in front of it. You can't tell me that a college textbook, that goes through
minor revisions every few years, costs that much to make.
My my, second post on the same article. A record for me.
I've had discussions with a college professor of mine who wrote the book that we used for a class (VLSI Digital Signal Processing Systems: Design and Implementation, by K.K. Parhi). It's a graduate-level textbook, and it cost me $101.30. I remarked to him one day that it was the first book that cost me over $100 (thank goodness I'm in engineering and not an art student, rumor has it those color plates in those books go for upwards of $500); his remark to me that to set the process up for printing, binding, proofing, revisions, etc. was pretty high. And, since it was a graduate textbook, the distribution was pretty low.. leading to the $101.30 price tag on it.
If you want to complain about book price, explain to me why in the past few years the price of popular paperbacks has risen so much. I used to be able to get paperbacks for $4. About a week ago I bought the last book by Robin Cook; it cost me $8 for the same number of pages. Go figure.
Yes, there is price-fixing going on, but not to the tune that you like to imagine...
Apparently you've never tried to resell audio CDs from major labels.
I used to work for an Internet broadcasting company (*cough* NetRadio *cough*). They streamed tracks off CDs as well as sold them. Not only did they have to pay royalties to ASCAP, BMI, and others just to stream the CDs, the lower bounds on the prices we could charge for CDs were fixed by the record companies themselves.
That's right. We could decide to charge more for a CD, but never less. Not even if we had a special promotion or wanted to use a product as a loss-leader; we could not drop that CD for less than the mandated lower bound. And that was for every CD.
I used to have an average opinion of the record companies. Then I worked for NetRadio. Now my opinion of the record companies is much lower.
One of the recent Forbes magazines had the Virgin CEO wrapped up in the American Flag looking patriotic. Yeah, he's living the American dream, but patriotic? What a crock.
Batteries, Batteries, Batteries!
Running a fast CPU takes quite a bit of energy, and nobody is going to want a calculator that uses up four AAA batteries in 4 hours.
Sheesh. Am I the only guy here that remembers that calculators used to come with power adapters?;)
Heck, those old HPs with the plasma tube readouts wouldn't even run on batteries. The plasma tubes themselves required somewhere in the 50-200V for the bias voltage, IIRC..
Robert Brown & I hashed this out awhile ago on the Beowulf mailing list.
The nicest thing about the SGI machines is that they have low-latency interconnect. Complete cache coherency is on the order of nanoseconds - not your microsecond latency on SCI or Myrinet, or your millisecond latencies on Ethernet (and those latter latencies are for data transfer only). A lot of supercomputing tasks can be done by a cluster of Linux machines these days; but for exactly the class of applications you're talking about (lots of communication/contention) this is the machine you'd want to run it on. The other class of applications (of course) is detailed simulations with a fine grid size - where else can you get 1TB of shared memory?;)
As far as the kernel goes, it's been scaled from 1..512 processors. There is almost no kernel overhead in computational code to begin with anyway (sure, that simulation may run for 100 hours, but it makes about 1000 system calls), but Irix does a pretty decent job of staying out of the way (aside from periodic stupidness of the scheduler anyway).
No offense, but comparing Linux/BSD/whatever kernel overhead to commercial high-end UNIX overhead is like comparing apples to oranges. Sure, Linux may scale to 8 processors ok, but that's way different than scaling to 512 (which is very difficult to do).
As others have pointed out, at some point in the playback process the audio becomes anlog.
If you give me a high-quality CD player there is nothing to prevent me from opening the case up and sticking a high-quality sampler right in front of the preamp. Assuming that the sampler is connected to a computer I have an instant MP3 encoder. Whee. Additional low- or high-frequency 'protection'? No problem - either an analog bandpass filter or Fourier transform will do the trick!
I've thought about this for quite some time. Technically, here is no such thing as pay-per-{view,listen}. Eventually it has to be presented as aural or visual stimulation to the audience's eyes or ears. At that point the content can no longer be protected. Whether the content is grabbed straight from the wire or recorded via videocamera, the content is technically available to everyone.
Legally, this is an entirely different issue, of course..;)
I really believe that the first company releasing a first class DocBook/XML editor for a price under $100 will make an absolute killing in the marketplace.
I agree that an XML editor for under $100 would make a killing. Not DocBook though - there are a lot of things that DocBook lacks support for (my Ph.D. thesis being one of them).
What I would love to see would be an editor that would allow me to easily generate a DTD, easily edit XML based off that DTD, then easily generate style sheet(s) for the media that I'd like to publish it on. My thesis is a perfect example - the university has a specific format (the DTD), I need to generate the thesis itself (the XML), and I'd like to publish it both on paper, as HTML, and as plain text (the style sheet(s)).
Even better yet, as I anticipate the thesis being a cobbling together of several papers, I'd like to be able to import XML elements from the previous papers into the thesis to save time.
So far I haven't found anything even remotely close to resembling good XML tools. James Clark's XML/SGML tools are a start, but I don't want to have to remember dozens of tags when I edit (for that matter, I don't want to have to know the exact DTD or stylesheet syntaxes) off the top of my head..
Open-source benchmarks? Next thing you know I'll be open-sourcing my plans for world domination.
Seriously, there are exactly two benchmarks that really make any difference:
The general-purpose benchmark (e.g. SPEC) which gives a pretty good indication of how fast an architecture is relative to other architectures, and
The specific benchmark, or "How much wall clock time will it take my application to run on this machine?"
Of these two benchmarks, the second is obviously the most important. (Surprisingly, the Quake FPS freaks aren't far off from the truth here).
Anyone that really wants to know about benchmarking should read the relevant papers or at least read The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis by Raj Jain (and no, I'm not a shill for Barnes & Noble but that's one spot where you can get the book).
If Van Smith got paid for that article, he should be forced to eat it... byte by byte (sorry, couldn't resist:-). -Brazilian
Re:I'm on a SLIC - Can I get DSL?
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
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· Score: 1
According to US-Worst, DSL can't be used over SLICs. I don't know about ISDN. From what I could infer SLICs are line-multiplexing devices that inherently limit the available bandwidth from customer to CO to that required for voice/modem; hence no DSL.
(WHY was that question moderated down to a -1?? Believe it or not that was a valid and useful question to anyone considering getting DSL in fast-growing suburbs (as some are served by SLICs and can't get DSL), and certainly relevant to the discussion at hand).
Unless something changes radically in the next 25 days, the only way they could call it a beta is if the final release is designated omega;)
Personal experience: I've attempted to use various incarnations of the milestone builds on Solaris, Irix, and Linux. The Solaris build has died every time I've attempted to run it. I think I could probably get the Irix build running except for the latest standard GTK libs I built don't have the same soname as the ones the milestone is built against (!). I did finally manage to get M14 running on Linux. Try running HTML 4.0 with CSS1/CSS2 through it sometime though - bet you don't get 5 pages through it before it dies. Seems to me that the browser is about as stable as group I elements in water;)
I do have to admit though that for the most part M14 did what I expected it to; it is still lacking in some of the standards areas but in that respect it is way ahead of IE5.
How often do you people on average purchas distribution CDs? I'd like to say that I've steadily upgraded my systems to the 2.2 kernels from SLS with kernel 0.98pl5...;) but that is not the case, as I purchased a different machine and put a Slackware distribution with a 1.2 kernel on it (and have upgraded ever since). The second machine I came into owning I didn't even use a distribution - I spun a ramdisk from the first one that contained drivers for the network card, then tarred the contents of the original machine over to the second.
Then again, I'm too cheap to pay even a couple of bucks for a distribution CD. Not that I wouldn't mind having one around - I had to borrow one here not too long ago because I spazzed and removed my v5 libc from my root partition and forgot that/sbin/mount was still using it..;)
Maybe I am not understanding but what will become of my old television? Will PBS be taken away from me so that I have to make a several THOUSAND dollar investment just to watch something that is supposed to be FREE.
The FCC has mandated that all broadcasts will be digital by 2006 (with applied-for exceptions, of course). The years from now through 2006 are transition years, with broadcast stations broadcasting both traditional analog and the new digital format on a pair of channels.
I found it curious that the FCC would force people to purchase new televisions to let people watch TV, but it appears that there will be a large market for set-top decoders that will down-convert a digital TV signal to an analog signal displaying on your old set. Odds are these decoders will cost as much as a traditional analog TV ($250 US), though.
From my point of view, the convergence to a single large digital media pipe to the household is a GOOD thing. It immediately yields the economic benefit of having redundant hardware eliminated between the computer and the TV/DVD/etc.
As for the TVs costing thousands of dollars - yes, the early adopters will have to pay the megabucks to get the digital signal, but like most items the cost will decrease as more people adopt the (admittedly required) standard.
Or maybe you'll just end up putting a TV tuner card into your computer for $250 that displays HDTV in all its glory on your already high resolution monitor.
This reconfigurable machine is a bunch of BS. Here's why:
The fastest reconfigurable Xilinx FPGA is a 200MHz part.
Assuming that you can do 1 FLOP in one cycle, that means that their machine would need 16 TFLOPS / 200MHz = 80,000 computational elements.
This same FPGA has 500,000 gates per chip. Assuming that you could fit 100 floating-point pipelines onto this FPGA (5,000 gates per pipeline), this would mean that they would need 800 FPGAs. Does this fit in their box that they said? I think not!
Think about it from the power side as well. If we assume that those FPGAs are 5W chips, that's a total of 4kW of power consumption. Minimum.
And we haven't even breached the subject of adding support components like real logic elements for control, RAM for storing any kind of software that is needed, I/O subsystems, software support layers (Oh yeah, that's right, maybe Viva is the real-language OS that the government has been secretly developing all these years to do mind control on us all;)
Slashdot Mirror
... Charles Connell, for creating more "lousy" software. Call me crazy, but I would think that if you wanted to rant about "lousy" software you'd have the presence of mind to write decent-enough HTML so that the character " didn't show up as ? and bullets didn't show up as the character Y.
Then only the actual reassembly of the blocks into a complete file would (possibly) be illegal...
Some of us that actually use our brains during the day really do prefer some mindless entertainment now and then. After a week's worth of databases, high-performance computing, and PhD research, do I want to watch Shakespeare or play Myst? No, of course not. I'll take the next mindless action movie or computer game on the market.
I do have to admit, though, that I had to find out the hard way that you couldn't "wish" for the Amulet of Yendor ;)
D2 is enjoyable if you can play multiplayer cooperative on a fast LAN.
On the other hand, Baldur's Gate sucks on a LAN. Even a fast LAN. (Never mind that Baldur's Gate has a teenage storyline or took zillions of hours to play because you'd repeatedly get killed by kobolds. How boring.)
Yes, now this is watching crap fly. That has got to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard, with the possible exception of the salesman at Best Buy telling someone their 14.4k modem will transmit 14,000 bytes per second.
Ever consider that you can have (and usually do have) 24-bit color in a 32-bit video mode?
Ever consider that video memory may not be layed out as RGB_RGB_RGB_RGB_, but instead may be layed out in planes of Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha?
Ever consider that the extra 8 bits are used as alpha channels, stencil buffers, or Z-buffers on 3D hardware?
Apparently your knowledge of graphics hardware is inversely proportional to your /. ID. If you're going to spew crap/troll, at least make it slightly plausible.
Couple that with the technology that Digital Fountain uses (a method of streaming media via UDP that can reconstruct the original media despite some significant packet loss %) and it should be possible to build a legal distributed P2P network that one could illegally download MP3s from ;)
What? Pay 0.005$US each day to read Slashdot? You must have that backwards - Slashdot should pay me 0.005$US each day I read it.
Bah, only to a CS majors. Only EEs know what the first-level programming languages are. ;)
<SARCASM>
Wow. Then I guess that all those computer engineering researchers have it wrong.
</SARCASM>
Duh. Latency is the killer. Cache design, compiler scheduling algorithms, prefetch instructions: all these things are designed to combat latency. When your server with its high latency high bandwidth memory screeches to a halt on a TLB miss, don't come whining to me.
If this doesn't mystify you greatly, it should. The source for both manufacturing methods is exactly the same - does it really cost $3 more to manufacture a CD vs. a casette?
My my, second post on the same article. A record for me.
I've had discussions with a college professor of mine who wrote the book that we used for a class (VLSI Digital Signal Processing Systems: Design and Implementation, by K.K. Parhi). It's a graduate-level textbook, and it cost me $101.30. I remarked to him one day that it was the first book that cost me over $100 (thank goodness I'm in engineering and not an art student, rumor has it those color plates in those books go for upwards of $500); his remark to me that to set the process up for printing, binding, proofing, revisions, etc. was pretty high. And, since it was a graduate textbook, the distribution was pretty low.. leading to the $101.30 price tag on it.
If you want to complain about book price, explain to me why in the past few years the price of popular paperbacks has risen so much. I used to be able to get paperbacks for $4. About a week ago I bought the last book by Robin Cook; it cost me $8 for the same number of pages. Go figure.
Apparently you've never tried to resell audio CDs from major labels.
I used to work for an Internet broadcasting company (*cough* NetRadio *cough*). They streamed tracks off CDs as well as sold them. Not only did they have to pay royalties to ASCAP, BMI, and others just to stream the CDs, the lower bounds on the prices we could charge for CDs were fixed by the record companies themselves.
That's right. We could decide to charge more for a CD, but never less. Not even if we had a special promotion or wanted to use a product as a loss-leader; we could not drop that CD for less than the mandated lower bound. And that was for every CD.
I used to have an average opinion of the record companies. Then I worked for NetRadio. Now my opinion of the record companies is much lower.
One of the recent Forbes magazines had the Virgin CEO wrapped up in the American Flag looking patriotic. Yeah, he's living the American dream, but patriotic? What a crock.
Heck, those old HPs with the plasma tube readouts wouldn't even run on batteries. The plasma tubes themselves required somewhere in the 50-200V for the bias voltage, IIRC..
There are other applications of CS. Most of the obvious ones are math related.
The nicest thing about the SGI machines is that they have low-latency interconnect. Complete cache coherency is on the order of nanoseconds - not your microsecond latency on SCI or Myrinet, or your millisecond latencies on Ethernet (and those latter latencies are for data transfer only). A lot of supercomputing tasks can be done by a cluster of Linux machines these days; but for exactly the class of applications you're talking about (lots of communication/contention) this is the machine you'd want to run it on. The other class of applications (of course) is detailed simulations with a fine grid size - where else can you get 1TB of shared memory? ;)
As far as the kernel goes, it's been scaled from 1..512 processors. There is almost no kernel overhead in computational code to begin with anyway (sure, that simulation may run for 100 hours, but it makes about 1000 system calls), but Irix does a pretty decent job of staying out of the way (aside from periodic stupidness of the scheduler anyway).
No offense, but comparing Linux/BSD/whatever kernel overhead to commercial high-end UNIX overhead is like comparing apples to oranges. Sure, Linux may scale to 8 processors ok, but that's way different than scaling to 512 (which is very difficult to do).
Heh. I'm sure you could get it to go at least 200mph with gravity assist ;)
If you give me a high-quality CD player there is nothing to prevent me from opening the case up and sticking a high-quality sampler right in front of the preamp. Assuming that the sampler is connected to a computer I have an instant MP3 encoder. Whee. Additional low- or high-frequency 'protection'? No problem - either an analog bandpass filter or Fourier transform will do the trick!
I've thought about this for quite some time. Technically, here is no such thing as pay-per-{view,listen}. Eventually it has to be presented as aural or visual stimulation to the audience's eyes or ears. At that point the content can no longer be protected. Whether the content is grabbed straight from the wire or recorded via videocamera, the content is technically available to everyone.
Legally, this is an entirely different issue, of course.. ;)
I agree that an XML editor for under $100 would make a killing. Not DocBook though - there are a lot of things that DocBook lacks support for (my Ph.D. thesis being one of them).
What I would love to see would be an editor that would allow me to easily generate a DTD, easily edit XML based off that DTD, then easily generate style sheet(s) for the media that I'd like to publish it on. My thesis is a perfect example - the university has a specific format (the DTD), I need to generate the thesis itself (the XML), and I'd like to publish it both on paper, as HTML, and as plain text (the style sheet(s)).
Even better yet, as I anticipate the thesis being a cobbling together of several papers, I'd like to be able to import XML elements from the previous papers into the thesis to save time.
So far I haven't found anything even remotely close to resembling good XML tools. James Clark's XML/SGML tools are a start, but I don't want to have to remember dozens of tags when I edit (for that matter, I don't want to have to know the exact DTD or stylesheet syntaxes) off the top of my head..
Seriously, there are exactly two benchmarks that really make any difference:
Of these two benchmarks, the second is obviously the most important. (Surprisingly, the Quake FPS freaks aren't far off from the truth here).
Anyone that really wants to know about benchmarking should read the relevant papers or at least read The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis by Raj Jain (and no, I'm not a shill for Barnes & Noble but that's one spot where you can get the book).
If Van Smith got paid for that article, he should be forced to eat it... byte by byte (sorry, couldn't resist :-). -Brazilian
(WHY was that question moderated down to a -1?? Believe it or not that was a valid and useful question to anyone considering getting DSL in fast-growing suburbs (as some are served by SLICs and can't get DSL), and certainly relevant to the discussion at hand).
Personal experience: I've attempted to use various incarnations of the milestone builds on Solaris, Irix, and Linux. The Solaris build has died every time I've attempted to run it. I think I could probably get the Irix build running except for the latest standard GTK libs I built don't have the same soname as the ones the milestone is built against (!). I did finally manage to get M14 running on Linux. Try running HTML 4.0 with CSS1/CSS2 through it sometime though - bet you don't get 5 pages through it before it dies. Seems to me that the browser is about as stable as group I elements in water ;)
I do have to admit though that for the most part M14 did what I expected it to; it is still lacking in some of the standards areas but in that respect it is way ahead of IE5.
Then again, I'm too cheap to pay even a couple of bucks for a distribution CD. Not that I wouldn't mind having one around - I had to borrow one here not too long ago because I spazzed and removed my v5 libc from my root partition and forgot that /sbin/mount was still using it.. ;)
The FCC has mandated that all broadcasts will be digital by 2006 (with applied-for exceptions, of course). The years from now through 2006 are transition years, with broadcast stations broadcasting both traditional analog and the new digital format on a pair of channels.
I found it curious that the FCC would force people to purchase new televisions to let people watch TV, but it appears that there will be a large market for set-top decoders that will down-convert a digital TV signal to an analog signal displaying on your old set. Odds are these decoders will cost as much as a traditional analog TV ($250 US), though.
From my point of view, the convergence to a single large digital media pipe to the household is a GOOD thing. It immediately yields the economic benefit of having redundant hardware eliminated between the computer and the TV/DVD/etc.
As for the TVs costing thousands of dollars - yes, the early adopters will have to pay the megabucks to get the digital signal, but like most items the cost will decrease as more people adopt the (admittedly required) standard.
Or maybe you'll just end up putting a TV tuner card into your computer for $250 that displays HDTV in all its glory on your already high resolution monitor.
The fastest reconfigurable Xilinx FPGA is a 200MHz part.
Assuming that you can do 1 FLOP in one cycle, that means that their machine would need 16 TFLOPS / 200MHz = 80,000 computational elements.
This same FPGA has 500,000 gates per chip. Assuming that you could fit 100 floating-point pipelines onto this FPGA (5,000 gates per pipeline), this would mean that they would need 800 FPGAs. Does this fit in their box that they said? I think not!
Think about it from the power side as well. If we assume that those FPGAs are 5W chips, that's a total of 4kW of power consumption. Minimum.
And we haven't even breached the subject of adding support components like real logic elements for control, RAM for storing any kind of software that is needed, I/O subsystems, software support layers (Oh yeah, that's right, maybe Viva is the real-language OS that the government has been secretly developing all these years to do mind control on us all ;)