The screen is 1280x768 in 16x9 aspect ratio. Perfect for DVD viewing. The Crusoe processor gives 3+ hours of battery life EVEN WATCHING DVDs. The one nit was I installed a 5400 RPM hard drive to improve the performance which I highly recommend. It dual boots WinXP and Linux beautifully. And the kicker is, its only 3 lbs! Can't think of a better travel mate
This might seem a bit quaint, but floppy drives are useful for those that are interested in OS kernel development. Its quite easy to put together a bootable floppy disk. Its a bit harder to make bootable CD-ROMs. While this is probably not going to affect the move away from floppy drives, just thought I'd point it out...
I've been using a Fujitsu laptop now for about 3 months and I've decided that I will probably not buy another machine with a Crusoe chip in it. The function is fine and the clock speeds are reasonable.
The problem is, it "feels" slow. There's just this little bit of latency, particularly as something starts up for the first time, i.e. as the morphing is doing its bit. The more you are exposed to it the more annoying it becomes.
Its little things like this that are what ruin companies. Transmeta needs to do something about this or they will never make it as a mainstream desktop processor.
The fallacy of the '96 Telecom Act was that, if forced to allow competitors to have access to the physical plant, the Telcos would just roll over and allow anyone to generate revenue on the physical plant they spent all the investment to build. They did not and will not.
What needs to happen is to rethink the model, and technology is helping out here. Let the RBOCs maintain control over the physical plant, they're good at it thats what they want to do. Let IP technology and the use SIP for session management naturally wrestle control of the network intelligence from RBOCs. This way, the everybody is happy. The RBOCs get to generate revenue on the investment they have made and new service and application providers can make money off of services and applications.
FM
Gates will never allow this to happen...
on
Cringely: OS X on Intel
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Gates will never allow this to happen. If Jobs wanted to move OSX to an Intel platform, he would not be "granted" Microsoft Office to run on that platform. Moreover, its very likely that Gates would then pull Office from the OSX on Apple hardware. This would be suicide for Apple. You can beat your drums all you want and the govt. could threaten the MS monopoly and so on and so forth. In the meantime, Apple would be dead...
The only reason I use a PDA is to keep my contacts and schedule, maybe a note here and there. I recently got a Palm-powered cell phone and pitched my PDA. Anybody else wondering if PDA enabled cell phones will kill the standalone PDA market?
Theres a fundamental flaw with the theory that interior network nodes should be intelligent. The rate of progress in optical bandwidth improvement is increasing faster than Moore's Law. As a result, any intelligence that is built into the core using optical-electical-optical (OEO) technologies will actually cause the core to get slower (with respect to the overall bandwidth available) over time.
Can you ever see Microsoft applications like Office, Visio, and Project being ported to Linux, and why or why not?
FM
Re:Pardon me, but WTF is this
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 1
I have to respectfully disagree with your disagreement. You're just plain wrong. Public support for the space program is no different than its ever been, the public doesnt really care much.
All of the launchers you mention are unmanned and its common knowledge that unmanned boosters are an order of magnitude easier to construct and operate than manned systems.
As someone who spent 5 years working on flight control systems for the manned space program, I can tell you that the manned systems have always and continue to push the envelope in terms of risk. It is a credit to our "gold-plated" program that one of the other comments about space travel being safer than automobile travel is actually true.
My point is, you can focus on everyone else and criticize all you want, but by any measure, our program continues to be the envy of the world
Pardon me, but WTF is this
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 3
What a completely unnecessary, inflammatory statement. The Challenger accident did not destroy the U.S. Space Program. There have been approaching 100 shuttle missions since then. What it did was present the reality of space flight to a public that had become complacent and soft, believing in the delusion that going to space was like getting on an airplane.
The U.S. space program continues to be the most advanced and vigorous of any nation in the world, a product of the superb economic system that drives it. I'd challenge anyone to show me a program that did not have accidents and one that provided as many benefits for its nation as ours does. As a matter of fact, I'd say our program is healthier than ever, considering that a billion dollars in hardware and 7 of the most gifted people on the planet went down just 15 short years ago in the glare of the most prolific and suffocating media machine the world has ever seen.
Theres a statement in the article about the Apple chairman at the time not being able to come to terms with Be on using BeOS to replace the aging, cooperative multitasking system with a true preemptive multitasking design. I would really like to hear some details on the negotiations that took place between Be and Apple at that time. If you ask me, Be passing on Apple as a customer or an aquirer is right up there with CP/M or whatever it was passing when IBM came looking for an OS for the new PC...
I spent ALOT of time in 1990 playing M-1 Tank Platoon from Microprose. This game blew me away with its 3-D graphics (sort of 1st person shooterish, but with a tank rather than a person) but the thing that really got me was the AI. I marvelled at the games use of heuristics to coordinate attacks from both my platoon of 4 tanks and from large numbers (say 20 or so) enemy tanks using terrain for cover, etc. This was really something in 1990!
I am in a similar situation. My advice is get over it. Negotiate yourself a nice piece of the pie, in case they are able to generate any revenue as a result and don't worry about it.
Despite the socialist tendencies of the vast majority of the readers on this site, in America and the majority of the rest of the world, intellectual property is something to be guarded and profited from. If you're smart or lucky enough to have gotten there first, and documented that fact in a patent, you deserve to reap the rewards.
How interesting that yesterday's/. carried the wonderful article on Richard Stevens and today the writers of a work bearing a striking similarity, at least in subject matter, is described. I have two comments. First, I have looked at the Coriolis book and it is no where near the quality of the Steven's books. Now I don't mean this as a criticism, except in the constructive sense. The authors of the Linux stack book should realize that most people are going to exepect at least the quality that Stevens put forth for BSD or the book wont be very interesting. Second, were the authors to aspire to that level, it seems reasonable that Addison Weseley might be interested in taking over the project.
My opinion is that the 2.4 TCP/IP stack will be around for a long time, and with the improvements over 2.2, deserves a treatment in book form similar to the Stevens efforts. I would applaud the authors if they feel this way too.
I have to take exception with the basic assertion that you can do all this without specialized hardware. For the job they're talking about, special hardware is an absolute necessity, which is why they want to drop a box in.
In my work with VoiP trunking gateways, we use a real sniffer, an HP LAN Analyzer, for both 100 Mbps and Gigabit LAN sniffing. These boxes are highly specialize hardware costing $40000USD. They have 10s of MEGABYTES of fast RAM and analysis happens after the sniff is complete. If the FBI wants to do capture and analysis and filtering in realtime, SPECIAL HARDWARE IS AN ABSOLUTE NECESSITY!
The privacy issues are a real concern but the bottom line is that to do the job they are advertising, they absolutely do need a box. A Linux box, or even a farm of them running your overclocked Alpha/SCSI/133 front-side bus/ just plain ain't gonna make it.
I'd like to share with you a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species.
All mammals on this planet achieve an equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You multiply until all natural resources are consumed. The only way you can survive is by spreading to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus...
I think the motives are are much more subtle than that. The most likely short term reason why VA wants to own these sites is that it brings them positive PR. Being associated with them, particularly if they can allow the creative freedom to continue, is a big win in terms of credibility with the developers.
The big problem I see is that inevitable merger actions will likely happen over the long term. Linux.com is a competitor to/. and Sourceforge is a (IMHO superior) competitor to Freshmeat. Others will argue that there are differences between each pair but they both target similar markets. Money is insidious and as those that have profited lately from being aquired move on, I see linux.com and sourceforge becoming the more important.
While Hemos and Taco are quite vehement about keeping things the same, its important to note that thats people in mergers always say. These guys are young and they've now got lots of money. Over the long run, they'll start to have problems with their mgmt, probably small at first, but they'll build over time. Some day, it will just get to be too much and they'll strike out on their own again.
/. is not now what is was and it never will be again, just as Linux is not now what it was. The main thing here is that that doesnt matter. That that they have grown into is also interesting, although less so to me.
Only time will tell whether Transmeta's making us pay a penalty up front in the form of morphing so that they don't have to deal with backwards compatiblity in future will pan out for them from a business point of view. If all this thing does is run x86 code at lower power, they aren't going to have a market lead long. Two things are happening right now, guaranteed: Somebody is reverse engineering it The big boys are doing the same damn thing as fast as they can One of these two items will cut Transmeta's legs out from under them. Unless they get a killer app for the CPU and penetrate the market as quickly as possible, I'm not sure there's enough here to justify the effort they've gone to (read the VC dollars pumped in) I mean, if you'd just sunk $100 million into a company over 5 years and they came out with a slower x86 clone, what would you think? Oh, and I guess I have a question too? Seems like sometime in the past I was under some foolish impression that software was a lot more expensive to develop than hardware. I'm just wondering how this fits into this idea of pushing function that used to be in hardware up into software?
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The screen is 1280x768 in 16x9 aspect ratio. Perfect for DVD viewing. The Crusoe processor gives 3+ hours of battery life EVEN WATCHING DVDs. The one nit was I installed a 5400 RPM hard drive to improve the performance which I highly recommend. It dual boots WinXP and Linux beautifully. And the kicker is, its only 3 lbs! Can't think of a better travel mate
This might seem a bit quaint, but floppy drives are useful for those that are interested in OS kernel development. Its quite easy to put together a bootable floppy disk. Its a bit harder to make bootable CD-ROMs. While this is probably not going to affect the move away from floppy drives, just thought I'd point it out...
Sorry it took me a bit to get back to this. I have both XP and Redhat 6.2 running on the machine. They both have this "slow feel".
I've been using a Fujitsu laptop now for about 3 months and I've decided that I will probably not buy another machine with a Crusoe chip in it. The function is fine and the clock speeds are reasonable.
The problem is, it "feels" slow. There's just this little bit of latency, particularly as something starts up for the first time, i.e. as the morphing is doing its bit. The more you are exposed to it the more annoying it becomes.
Its little things like this that are what ruin companies. Transmeta needs to do something about this or they will never make it as a mainstream desktop processor.
The fallacy of the '96 Telecom Act was that, if forced to allow competitors to have access to the physical plant, the Telcos would just roll over and allow anyone to generate revenue on the physical plant they spent all the investment to build. They did not and will not.
What needs to happen is to rethink the model, and technology is helping out here. Let the RBOCs maintain control over the physical plant, they're good at it thats what they want to do. Let IP technology and the use SIP for session management naturally wrestle control of the network intelligence from RBOCs. This way, the everybody is happy. The RBOCs get to generate revenue on the investment they have made and new service and application providers can make money off of services and applications.
FM
Gates will never allow this to happen. If Jobs wanted to move OSX to an Intel platform, he would not be "granted" Microsoft Office to run on that platform. Moreover, its very likely that Gates would then pull Office from the OSX on Apple hardware. This would be suicide for Apple. You can beat your drums all you want and the govt. could threaten the MS monopoly and so on and so forth. In the meantime, Apple would be dead...
FMThe only reason I use a PDA is to keep my contacts and schedule, maybe a note here and there. I recently got a Palm-powered cell phone and pitched my PDA. Anybody else wondering if PDA enabled cell phones will kill the standalone PDA market?
FM
Theres a fundamental flaw with the theory that interior network nodes should be intelligent. The rate of progress in optical bandwidth improvement is increasing faster than Moore's Law. As a result, any intelligence that is built into the core using optical-electical-optical (OEO) technologies will actually cause the core to get slower (with respect to the overall bandwidth available) over time.
Something to think about...
FM
X-33 + ABL = Crossbow
AKA the space laser plane from the movie Real Genius
I'll put is straight on the line:
Can you ever see Microsoft applications like Office, Visio, and Project being ported to Linux, and why or why not?
FM
I have to respectfully disagree with your disagreement. You're just plain wrong. Public support for the space program is no different than its ever been, the public doesnt really care much.
All of the launchers you mention are unmanned and its common knowledge that unmanned boosters are an order of magnitude easier to construct and operate than manned systems.
As someone who spent 5 years working on flight control systems for the manned space program, I can tell you that the manned systems have always and continue to push the envelope in terms of risk. It is a credit to our "gold-plated" program that one of the other comments about space travel being safer than automobile travel is actually true.
My point is, you can focus on everyone else and criticize all you want, but by any measure, our program continues to be the envy of the world
What a completely unnecessary, inflammatory statement. The Challenger accident did not destroy the U.S. Space Program. There have been approaching 100 shuttle missions since then. What it did was present the reality of space flight to a public that had become complacent and soft, believing in the delusion that going to space was like getting on an airplane.
The U.S. space program continues to be the most advanced and vigorous of any nation in the world, a product of the superb economic system that drives it. I'd challenge anyone to show me a program that did not have accidents and one that provided as many benefits for its nation as ours does. As a matter of fact, I'd say our program is healthier than ever, considering that a billion dollars in hardware and 7 of the most gifted people on the planet went down just 15 short years ago in the glare of the most prolific and suffocating media machine the world has ever seen.
If it looks like its gonna take me at least as long to understand whats there as it is to rewrite it, I rewrite it.
People are starving to death in the world, and you had time for this?!!
Interesting. If true, this is just another example of why Gassee needs to be removed as head of Be. Its just blunder after blunder over there.
Theres a statement in the article about the Apple chairman at the time not being able to come to terms with Be on using BeOS to replace the aging, cooperative multitasking system with a true preemptive multitasking design. I would really like to hear some details on the negotiations that took place between Be and Apple at that time. If you ask me, Be passing on Apple as a customer or an aquirer is right up there with CP/M or whatever it was passing when IBM came looking for an OS for the new PC...
Considering 95% of the population doesnt even have phones.
I spent ALOT of time in 1990 playing M-1 Tank Platoon from Microprose. This game blew me away with its 3-D graphics (sort of 1st person shooterish, but with a tank rather than a person) but the thing that really got me was the AI. I marvelled at the games use of heuristics to coordinate attacks from both my platoon of 4 tanks and from large numbers (say 20 or so) enemy tanks using terrain for cover, etc. This was really something in 1990!
I am in a similar situation. My advice is get over it. Negotiate yourself a nice piece of the pie, in case they are able to generate any revenue as a result and don't worry about it.
Despite the socialist tendencies of the vast majority of the readers on this site, in America and the majority of the rest of the world, intellectual property is something to be guarded and profited from. If you're smart or lucky enough to have gotten there first, and documented that fact in a patent, you deserve to reap the rewards.
How interesting that yesterday's /. carried the wonderful article on Richard Stevens and today the writers of a work bearing a striking similarity, at least in subject matter, is described. I have two comments. First, I have looked at the Coriolis book and it is no where near the quality of the Steven's books. Now I don't mean this as a criticism, except in the constructive sense. The authors of the Linux stack book should realize that most people are going to exepect at least the quality that Stevens put forth for BSD or the book wont be very interesting. Second, were the authors to aspire to that level, it seems reasonable that Addison Weseley might be interested in taking over the project.
My opinion is that the 2.4 TCP/IP stack will be around for a long time, and with the improvements over 2.2, deserves a treatment in book form similar to the Stevens efforts. I would applaud the authors if they feel this way too.
I have to take exception with the basic assertion that you can do all this without specialized hardware. For the job they're talking about, special hardware is an absolute necessity, which is why they want to drop a box in.
In my work with VoiP trunking gateways, we use a real sniffer, an HP LAN Analyzer, for both 100 Mbps and Gigabit LAN sniffing. These boxes are highly specialize hardware costing $40000USD. They have 10s of MEGABYTES of fast RAM and analysis happens after the sniff is complete. If the FBI wants to do capture and analysis and filtering in realtime, SPECIAL HARDWARE IS AN ABSOLUTE NECESSITY!
The privacy issues are a real concern but the bottom line is that to do the job they are advertising, they absolutely do need a box. A Linux box, or even a farm of them running your overclocked Alpha/SCSI/133 front-side bus/ just plain ain't gonna make it.
I'd like to share with you a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species.
All mammals on this planet achieve an equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You multiply until all natural resources are consumed. The only way you can survive is by spreading to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus...
is available at http://usvms.gpo.gov but its /.'d of course
I think the motives are are much more subtle than that. The most likely short term reason why VA wants to own these sites is that it brings them positive PR. Being associated with them, particularly if they can allow the creative freedom to continue, is a big win in terms of credibility with the developers.
The big problem I see is that inevitable merger actions will likely happen over the long term. Linux.com is a competitor to /. and Sourceforge is a (IMHO superior) competitor to Freshmeat. Others will argue that there are differences between each pair but they both target similar markets. Money is insidious and as those that have profited lately from being aquired move on, I see linux.com and sourceforge becoming the more important.
While Hemos and Taco are quite vehement about keeping things the same, its important to note that thats people in mergers always say. These guys are young and they've now got lots of money. Over the long run, they'll start to have problems with their mgmt, probably small at first, but they'll build over time. Some day, it will just get to be too much and they'll strike out on their own again.
/. is not now what is was and it never will be again, just as Linux is not now what it was. The main thing here is that that doesnt matter. That that they have grown into is also interesting, although less so to me.
Only time will tell whether Transmeta's making us pay a penalty up front in the form of morphing so that they don't have to deal with backwards compatiblity in future will pan out for them from a business point of view. If all this thing does is run x86 code at lower power, they aren't going to have a market lead long. Two things are happening right now, guaranteed: Somebody is reverse engineering it The big boys are doing the same damn thing as fast as they can One of these two items will cut Transmeta's legs out from under them. Unless they get a killer app for the CPU and penetrate the market as quickly as possible, I'm not sure there's enough here to justify the effort they've gone to (read the VC dollars pumped in) I mean, if you'd just sunk $100 million into a company over 5 years and they came out with a slower x86 clone, what would you think? Oh, and I guess I have a question too? Seems like sometime in the past I was under some foolish impression that software was a lot more expensive to develop than hardware. I'm just wondering how this fits into this idea of pushing function that used to be in hardware up into software?