Posts by Lennart Sorensen
125 posts • joined Tuesday 1st January 2008 21:57 GMT
I believe most of the SGI machines had all of the video card mapped in the CPU memory space so everything could access everything else.
Of course it used to be video cards had their memory mapped into the memory space of the PC, although there wasn't as much acceleration then, so allowing the CPU a fast way to write updates to the video card made sense. Once we got 3D chips with hundreds of MB of ram, the 32bit memory space started getting a bit tight and they stopped doing that for all the memory. No reason a 64bit machine couldn't allow everything to be mapped into one memory space though, unless you want to support running 32bit software still.
Wine won't help. After all the fact it is NOT emulation means it won't do anything to help run x86 instructions on an arm. So unless crysis is recompiled for arm, you won't have any hope of running that.
So what ebay should have done (and obviously did not), is to simply hide the dormant accounts, then wait and see if anything broke, and if it did, unhide them again and fix the bug that made it select the wrong accounts. Simply deleting data is not a good idea.
Posted in Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant
Re: Quite frankly.....
Actually secureboot is all about virus protection (and probably a bit about Microsoft making it harder for other OSs than Windows 8 to run on a machine).
it is not at all about pirating and does nothing to prevent it.
Totally invalid averages
How can you say that a company that scores 17 one yeah, but doesn't make the top 20 the other six years has an average of 17? It is clearly much higher than that given in six of the seven years it ranked worse than 20th.
By their averaging methods a company that got a 1 in one year and NR in the other 6 years would have an average of 1, while a company that got a 2 in all seven years has an average of 2. Clearly that's wrong.
I am not good at statistics, but I am not as bad as they are.
So how is this new again?
This sounds like exactly the same PCS that my Prius V has, which I got in the summer, and the videos about Prius V PCS on youtube on Toyota's channel from January certainly sounds a lot like this. Did they mean to announce this in November last year maybe?
So I am confused.
The ITS stuff sounds new (and clearly isn't available), but the rest doesn't.
Re: The entire article reads like it's wishful thinking
Everything I have seen so far shows end users do NOT like Windows 8's new interface. It is confusing and unproductive and very unintuitive.
I think people were a bit too harsh on Vista, but Windows 8 is getting exactly what it deserves so far.
I for one despise Android.
I hate Android. It ruined what was finally becoming an interesting cell phone market with openMoko and similar projects in the works. Fully open cell phones. Now they are all gone, because google came along claiming to be an open source phone system, while being no such thing.
Also I don't want anything to do with java, which seems to be about the only way to do applications on Android. iphone is much better there, but the locked down policies of Apple ruin that one.
No wonder I am sticking with a plain old feature phone for now. If I can't add applications to it myself, then I don't need a smart phone at all.
Re: Another day another dollar
I think the new UI is ugly. It reminds me of lotus notes from many years ago (which also had giant solid colour boxes and was an atrocious user interface). And if you don't have a touch device (and really how many of those have you seen around on a desktop), then the interface is just plain clumsy. The simple test the register posted today quite accurately represents exactly what I would expect to see happen. It is a confusing mess of an interface and clearly not well thought out. The primary interface MUST be designed for the primary input devices of the majority of users, which is a mouse and keyboard. Microsoft can add new stuff to make touch interfaces easier to use, but they have to keep the majority of users happy, and windows 8 won't do that. The tabletpc features in vista (and to some extent XP tablet version) worked quite well and in no way interfered with using it without the stylus. That worked.
Re: Windows 8, the first Microsoft OS since DOS that needs a keyboard
Oh you just drag the metro app off the bottom of the screen to close it. Obviously. :)
And that is part of why I don't want to deal with any friend or family member moving the Windows 8. it is so completely impossible to know what to do by looking at it.
Re: Another day another dollar
Well no. There is a difference.
In the past every new user interface thing Microsoft did to windows was pretty much an improvement. Not sure about ribbons yet, but they are not awful.
The Windows 8 changes on the other hand are awful. It is unusable. Everything has become confusing, difficult to use, and much more effort to do what you are used to doing.
Windows Vista was: Nice interface, shame about the performance issues.
Windows 8 is: Nice performance, shame about the interface issues.
That's a huge problem. I hope Windows 7 stays for sale for a LONG time. I hope Windows 8 last no longer than Vista did when the replacement comes out.
Re: Niagara SPARC?
So what? If you want single thread performance, a power7 is hard to beat. If you want that at the same time as power efficient, well guess what, that isn't going to happen any time soon. If you want a super computer cluster that is power efficient, a power4 is a much better choice. Actually the power A2 isn't bad either.
IBM seems to understand that it isn't one size fits all.
I can barely remember the last time an interesting new sparc came out. Hopefully some time soon a new one will (but it won't be from Oracle that's for sure). It's a lovely instruction set that just happens to be highly neglected by its makers.
Re: Niagara SPARC?
Have you seen the clock speeds IBM runs cores at? Nothing wrong with having 8 cores with 4 threads each when you have CPUs clocked at 5GHz. Try getting intel to do that with their designs. Never mind Oracle.
So for single thread performance IBM is currently very hard to beat.
P54C is nothing at all like the Pentium II
The P54C is a P5 core. The Pentium II was a P6 core. Those are very very different. The P6 had out of order execution, and was the first intel chip to translate x86 instructions into micro ops that were then executed on a more risc style core. The P54C is a plain old native x86 design where instructions are executed in order.
For building a chip with lots of cores that run predictable code, the P54C design is not a bad choice. The P6 core is much more complex and uses a lot more transistors, especially for the instruction translation system and handling out of order execution.
So yes the P54C is close in time to the Pentium II, but about as far apart in design as two intel cores could be.
Re: I cannot let this pass.
You ruin bacon by putting parmesan on it? You are mad. Bacon tastes great. You don't ruin it by putting stale old cheese on it. I don't even want to think about what black pudding would do to it.
Re: Mostly agree
Of course the admins don't agree. They have to guess which version of java needs to be installed to run the piece of crap, and try to make sure it doesn't conflict with the version of java needed by another piece of crap they already had to deploy. After all java developers don't ever tell you what environment they developed it for.
Re: Python?
The way python wants indentation done these days is just fine. The requirement in python is that your indentation is consistent. That is all. Originally python had a mandatory indentation style, but that is no longer true. And if you don't think consistent indentation of your code blocks should be mandatory, then you shouldn't be programming at all. Pick anything you want for indentation, but always use that within a given file.
If you want scary use of whitespace as syntax, have a look at perl. That's scary. <$foo> is not the same as <$foo >
Hmm, so nic.ca and nic.mil don't exist, nic.edu and nic.org are something else entirely (and not registrar info). So does anyone actually know that nic.* is supposed to be a useful domain name?
I thought microsoft specifically has said they deleted the start menu code in windows 8 so there is no way of undoing their stupid UI change.
Everything other than the new UI is very nice, but the Ui changes are just a deal breaker. Hidden things are bad UI design on a desktop and those are now required knowledge to use windows 8.
Re: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats"
But the current compatibility pack only gives you office 2007 support, which would be Office Open XML as Microsoft originally intended it which is ECMA 376 version 1. The ISO standard is ECMA 376 version 2, which is what office 2013 will now finally support writing (2010 can read them, but not write them). The ISO standards process did manage to fix some of Microsoft's stupidities even while Microsoft was trying to ram it through, and of course this meant that there was no actual support for the ISO standard in any Microsoft product until office 2010 which could read them, and now office 2013 which can supposedly write them.
So unless they update the compatibility pack for office 2000 and 2003 (and office 2007 for that matter) to allow reading the ISO standard of OOXML, then you are simply lost once 2013 starts writing proper OOXML files (2010 users can still read those though, so that's OK). 2007 and older users will be conveniently left out.
Re: and not a peep about the ARM version of Windows 8 causing this
Actually my understanding is that everything Microsoft ever does is little endian, so I don't think they will have any endian mess to deal with. Even Windows NT on powerpc and mips was little endian unlike most OSs run on those systems. Most ARM systems are little endian these days too so windows being little endian on ARM is nothing unusual.
Re: Why and Why Now?
Simple: Pixar sells Renderman. They make lots of money doing that. Since one of the features of Renderman that can give you really really nice output is subdivision surfaces and not very many tools support them, then giving away code and data structures and patents to allow other tools to add support for this, will make people better able to use Renderman which means people will be more likely to buy Renderman to take advantage of its ability to render subdivision surfaces rather than some other rendering tool.
After all if you can work faster and better and create better detail using tools that use subdivision surfaces, then you would want to do that right? Then after you choose to do so, Renderman becomes the obvious tool to use for actually rendering your output in the end, so you give your money to Pixar.
I never did consider plasma an option. Of course given I am only now upgrading from a CRT, I am personally skipping straight to front projection DLP. I will admit that is never going to be a huge share of the market for TV though. OLED would be nice if it gets cheaper, but LED backlit LCD is quite nice. Plasma can just go the way of laser disc as far as I am concerned. It won't be missed.
I looked at the github for windows tool. I was highly disappointed to find that it is ONLY a github tool rather than a nice git tool for windows. What a sad waste of time. Why would you want to use a tool that only works with one site? Who wants that kind of vendor lockin? OK, I suppose they are targeting windows users, but still. Very disappointing.
Re: Branching good, GIT BAD
Strangely I find bazaar to be the most incomprehensible command line I have seen in a long time. Git makes pretty good sense in most cases.
Bazaar also does far less than git. If you don't know that, then you clearly haven't used it.
Last I checked, June was the 6th month of the year, and the 3rd (and hence last) month of the second quarter, so wouldn't the next quarter be the one going from July to September? Clearly a quarter has not just begun if it is June. In fact a quarter is about to end. Someone needs to check their calendar, and it isn't Intel.
No not really. Some users always whine about changes. But overall the more technical users have in my experience liked the improvements in new versions of windows. Windows 8 on the other hand seems almost universally disliked. It is the first time I just can't be bothered to play around with the new version. It is too slow and difficult to work with and simply annoying. I even liked the interface changes in vista (the search to filter menus just by typing in most windows was brilliant), even though vista had other issues. So over all new windows versions have improved the UI. Windows 8 hasn't improved it, it has ruined it.
Of course I didn't miss program manager at all since I never liked it in the first place. Norton desktop for windows was an excellent product to make windows 3.1 actually usable in a way program manager never could. Windows 95 and NT4 on never had a need for such a thing. Windows 8 on the other hand is going to need 3rd party work to make the basic task bar work again. The metro start screen is simply unacceptable to a keyboard and mouse user.
Magic screen areas that pop stuff up when you go there are a bad idea. It is already hard enough to explain right click menus to casual users. if you can't see it then it does not exist and you can't use it. That means it is impossible for a casual user to find anything in windows 8 because of its magic screen corners. It is simply a terrible idea and it will fail very badly.
I always wondered if linux stood a chance against windows on the desktop, given linux was always trying to catch up. Apparently the real threat to windows on the desktop is microsoft, through the fact they are actively trying to destroy it.
In the past when a new version of windows was in development, you would see the press going "Look at this nifty new thing they are doing". With windows 8, must press has been "The interface has been broken." You would think microsoft could take a hint, but they have decided that they are willing to destroy the desktop market to attempt to get into the phone and tablet market. I doubt it will work.
And why does metro have to be so bland and ugly looking compared to the pretty stuff done in the past?
Of course you would not actually ever use internaldomain.local but rather internaldomain.anythingelse would you? After all .local is reserved for use by zeroconf and you break all sorts of things if you use .local for your windows domain. Sure microsoft used to have an example in their documentation that used .local, but they changed that years ago and even wrote a domain rename tool to help repair the damage, not that anyone seems to ever get around to fixing this mistake. Instead the mac and linux users and anyone else that has a system that supports zeroconf just have to suffer.
I always thought it was as simple as this to get a linux laptop:
Go to lenovo's website, pick a machine, make sure it does not have AMD graphics, make sure to select an intel wifi adapter, buy it, then install your linux distribution of choice.
Intel wifi always just works with linux, and AMD graphics frequently just don't with linux, so if you keep those two details in mind you have a perfectly nice linux laptop.
And most importantly you don't end up with a Dell machine.
Re: ofcourse, there are backdoors
Actually most routers do not. They have ways that given physical access you can reset the password or in many cases the whole configuration.
My dlink wifi router has a reset button, as do many others.
Resetting the password on ruggedcom's routers required serial console access to the boot loader. They have no backdoor. Of course they are also more likely to be connected to a public network than a switch would be.
Re: Lefty righty
Well you are slgihtly wrong.
1080p which is 1920x1080 becomes 1920x540, so 540p. Half the lines go left, half the lines go right. Still get 1920 pixels per line though.
Of course how long will it take before someone makes a screen that is natively 1920x2160 and then makes passive 3D with 1920x1080p for each eye. After all 4k x 2k screens are being worked on.
Posted in Man recreates ZX81... in Lego
How dull.
I looked expecting someone had built an 8bit CPU and such out of Lego, and that would have been something. Making a chunk of Lego look like a ZX81 is really a "Who cares". Not even particularly well done at that.
Oh so that's what BBX was supposed to mean.
Wow it had never occurred to me that BBX was supposed to be BlackBerry X or BlackBerry 10. It seemed like a silly name. At least now they have to just call it BB10 or conveniently, BB X. :)
Posted in Happy 40th birthday, Intel 4004!
Nope you got it right.
Nehalem was a follow on to penryn. That is what it said. That means penryn came first. Where is the problem?
All it says it penryn was the first 45nm part and the nehalem was a follow up 45nm part.
So your objection seems to be to agree with what it said.
Posted in Happy 40th birthday, Intel 4004!
It was. But if you are building a calculator and intel can design and build you one chip for $5 or so to do the job, or you can use twelve existing chips costing way more than $5 (and making the calculator bigger), which would you go with?
Who cares if the 4004 is overkill for a desk calculator. It's cheap and small.
Range is too big, no one can remember the words, and it isn't catchy, so no one cares to remember the words. Most people have heard of it, so at least it has that.
I believe they meant "small vocal range" of the song, not of the singer. After all if the range of the song is huge, most people can't comfortably sing along.
So it does describe the song, but absolutely not the singer.
Posted in Ten... in-ear headphones
Actually you can.
You can tell the difference. The better question is, do you care about the difference enough to justify over 5 times the price? For most people that is certainly going to be a no.
As for the hdmi cable, digital signal is digital signal and as long as the cable isn't so crappy it corrupts the digital signal, then there will be no difference at all. So no there is no difference, hence no one can hear one no matter what they believe.
I do think the Shure 215 or 315 model would have been much more reasonable and interesting to review. The 535s are really not what most people are interested in. The lower models have the same cable design, but only a single driver (well two for the 425), but include a few less accessories. The 215's cost $99 in north america, so probably 89 or 99 pounds in the UK as per typical ripoff pricing done by north american companies.
Posted in IBM gets fat on Oracle-HP Itanium spat
Well...
Freescale makes POWER chips, although not anywhere near as fast as what IBM makes. But they make them. I believe others could choose to do so too.
Sparc is made by others as well, but again, not with nearly the same performance as the Fujitsu ones. There are some sparc compatible chips made in China, just like there are MIPS64 chips made in China (which are looking very interesting).
The only truly dead ones are Alpha and PA-Risc, and if volumes are anything to go by, Itanium which never lived in the first place.
Posted in VMware whitewashes self in open source
Yeah who really cares.
I sure don't care what VMware is up to anymore. They were impressive years ago, but these days they are irrelevant. KVM is much better and more flexible to use.
I can file bug reports on KVM and be listened to. VMware won't even accept a bug report without a support contract. And even if you manage to give them one, they don't really seem to care. Who needs them.
And yeah who needs another OS, which really does seem to be what they are trying to turn the hypervisor into. What's wrong with the Linux OS sitting underneath their hypervisor in many cases?
You failed to.
Maybe the reason isn't the best, but it certainly is a mandatory feature of any new version of a product. This is why all products (except FCP X apparently) has it.
If you cut off your existing customer base, you are committing suicide. Why should anyone ever trust you again?
You just don't get it do you.
New versions of software should at least give you the choice of moving to a new version on a given project if you want to.
Solidworks can always read old projects in new versions. That's how essentially all software upgrades work. Apparently Apple has forgotten. They might as well have given it a new name given it is a new product with nothing to do with the old one at all, other than the general idea of what it is to be used for.
So solidworks is backwards compatible, FCP X is not. I can't even think of another product where that has ever happened. It would be commercial suicide for any company to release a new version that can't open files from previous versions. You don't need to be able to save in previous formats (although often you can), but you do very much need to be able to load from previous formats.
Posted in BioWare latest hack victim
I wonder.
I really hope they didn't mistake me legitimately logging into my account a few days ago (trying to download the latest patch to NWN which I was having trouble finding on my machine) with the idea of someone hacking the system.
I just followed the link in an email from when I bought stuff from the old bioware store (which unfortunately isn't there anymore, so I can't redownload the add on modules I had bought some years ago. Oh well hopefully I can find them somewhere on one of my disks). Plenty of broken links on the old forum server unfortunately.
Sure would be nice if they would keep all the patches around on their new support server, but apparently they don't care about older games they released anymore.
I hope they include a transfer cable too.
Hopefully that new console comes with a transfer cable to get all your saved games and other data transferred to that new console.
I suspect it could be a specific version of DVD drive in a few boxes that is causing a problem. Certainly they used different DVD drives over the years and with different firmware versions over time as well on those drives, so most likely it has turned out one has a problem.
Re: (wrong) notes
Actually USB3 _is_ full duplex, unlike USB 1 and 2. This is also how USB3 gained the ability to do interrupts rather than always having to be polled. The dedicated lanes for transfers in both directions allow devices to issue messages when they want to rather than only when asked to. I believe it can even do DMA, which should reduce CPU needs a lot too.
Not that I think eSata is going away (I sure hope not), but USB3 doesn't actually look too bad.
Maybe IE lost the download race because you couldn't download it
I tried to download IE9 using IE8 on windows 7. I kept getting a server connection error. Finally I tried with firefox 4 and what do you know, it downloaded the IE9 installer and started the install.
Congrats Microsoft. You made me use the competition to get your new browser.
Good riddance
Maybe this time intel will accept that VLIW is crap for general purpose CPUs running typical software. How many times do they have to make the same mistake? Too bad the itanium took out so many better CPUs with it (the alpha, the high end MIPS (although MIPS seems to have survived), I don't think pa-risc was ever great, so who cares about it). Just about took out SGI for good too.
Not quite the same as rockband 3.
Rock band 3 works by using a special midi enabled guitar (or the 150ish button plastic toy if you want that instead). The midi guitar has sensors in every fret on every string so that it can show on screen where your fingers are compared to where they need to be. A regular midi enabled guitar (not that they are that common) would only send the notes played.
Now the guitar for rock band 3 is a proper electric guitar with a jack to connect to an amp, so it could be connected to the input for this "game" if you wanted, but it sounds like this one will work by analyzing the sound (and hence making sure you are in tune as well), rather than by midi. So you can use any electric guitar you want with this one, unlike rock band 3 that only works with a couple.
Re: Wrong cunclusion is wrong
They do NOT in fact run x86 instructions on the chip. They added some new instructions to the MIPS instruction set to make it more efficient for qemu to emulate x86 in software. x86 is very different than MIPS, and uses lots of offset addressing, which MIPS doesn't have. So they added new instructions to support that type of addressing efficiently, which makes qemu able to be much faster and efficient at doing software x86 emulation. Without qemu though, it is just a MIPS chip with some new non standard MIPS instructions. They are not x86 instructions in themselves.
Re: what about the legacy???? → #
It's not Microsoft's job to support old hardware. That's the job of the hardware vendor. Now if they don't care about their old hardware anymore, that's just too bad. Microsoft didn't write the drivers in the first place and they don't have the specs to do it either, nor much interest in doing so. You could always choose to not buy new things from that vendor anymore if they don't value your interests as a customer (I have certainly done so for some companies for that exact reason).
If you want support for legacy hardware, use an OS that has source code for the drivers so they can be maintained in the future independently of the financial interests of the vendor.
