Having said that, Dragon works fairly well, provided you modulate your speech.

If you want a laugh with Dragon, turn away from the screen and talk normally, then look at what it has transcribed..

Longsoon-3 (they already built a world ranking supercomputer based on Longsoon-2)

Longsoon-3 is 4 cores on a die and 4 Mb on L2 cache on chip, running at > 1.25 GHz

see http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MM.2009.30 for more

My RAQ2 is still going strong, home server, uses according to a kill-a-watt meter about 20 watts, which I could reduce significantly by replacing the old 80 gig IDE with a laptop drive and adapter.

Apart from that, runs stone cold, fanless, so silent, and 100% reliable.

I've tried to talk up MIPS / Cobalt before, but it has fallen on stony ground, frankly I think most /. readers just have zero hands on knowledge of these devices.

The RAQ550 and XTR (got 2 each of them too) were abominations by comparison with the 2, also got two 4's running 550 OS.

Long live MIPS

DAD!! I found you at last.... when can I move my compuH^H^H^ self back home?

... if you are riding down the road and see an object (such as a pothole or large stone or piece of exhaust pipe) that you wish to avoid, THE LAST THING YOU DO IS LOOK AT IT, because you do ride where you look.

This is a lesson that bikers learn the hard way, you fall off and get hurt.

Car drivers are different, so you will have car drivers who notice obstacles in the road as being more visually interesting than the blacktop itself, and promptly drive though / over / into all of them.

"Rubbernecking" also means that every single accident suddenly becomes a gravitational black hole, and the possibility of any vehicle passing it without adding to it approaches zero.

The steering wheel works perfectly well, just ask Michael Schumacher, if you are going to mess with that then go directly to fully automated, cut the human right out of the control system.

there is no such thing as privacy, get used to it.

He was in a position to know which way the wind was blowing, and he called it, correctly.

Now I wonder what soundbite we will be hearing in 2020?

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough.

dd/mm/yyyy I purchase PS3 in exchange for cash, sure, there is a legally binding and enforceable contract right there.

dd/mm/yyyy+1 *MY* property downloads a software update, there is no legally binding and enforceable contract here, because;

a/ nothing of value was EXCHANGED.
b/ no legal document was signed by me.

Or otherwise enter into a legally binding and enforceable contract, such as by the exchange of something else of value, such as money?

In the EU at least, this EULA isn't even worth the current to power the pixels it is transiently displayed upon.

Considering that people use unmetalled roads mainly for walking, or the pony and trap, which is not that demanding. The major high capacity loads are transporting foodstuffs. Therefore I doubt that widescale metalled roads and interstates will do much to boost the economy.

That is exactly the point, in the States, Greyhound (now owned by Stagecoach I believe) and here in the UK National Express and Stagecoach DO NOT CONTROL THE motorways / interstate.

connectivity and bandwidth should be classed as INFRASTRUCTURE, not a private toll road.

Really, fuck Virgin, and BT, and everyone else, they have their corporate fingers in enough other pies.

Japan, Korea, Sweden, all these countries prove that there is NO VALID REASON WHATSOEVER that this infrastructure cannot be put in to place.

Corporations have had a decade to do this (and they have had the money / subsidies / grants too, especially in the US) and they have chosen to do nothing. FUCK THEM, and the horse they rode in on.

This is more important to society than some CEO getting a fat bonus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

Called the UK.

In some ways I am lucky, I live in the south-west, a city called Exeter, 40 miles from Plymouth and the Mayflower Steps for the yanks. In some ways this is lucky because this region is used to market test many products and technologies before they get a nationwide launch.

In 2001 BT first offered ADSL, it was 128/512 kbit, and used the green alcatel stingray / frog thing.

In 2004 Telewest took over the cable TV/telephone company, and put in the internet as a cable option, I switched.

Today I can get either max 8 mbit adsl over (twisted pair) copper, or max 50 mbit cable over (coax) copper.

Due to traffic shaping and throttling and oversold contention ratios, I can max out the 8 mbit adsl at a rock solid 6 mbit and actually achieve a greater throughput than I can from the theoretically far faster (up to) 20 mbit cable package.

The only other alternative was either ISDN or horrendously expensive leased line, which started at around 30k bucks per annum for 2 mbit.

I spent 5 years up until 2004 trying to convince the cable company to provide internet over their pipes, and quite frankly even though I was talking to senior managers they just didn't "get it".

I have to tell you that nothing has changed, they still don't "get it", "it" being the internet.

They still think in dial up terms of pence per minute, or utility terms of pence per kWh or cubic foot.

Frankly speaking the UK economy is fucked, and none of the politicians get it either, especially not the pirate party, in the run up to the general elections.

What we need is a MASSIVE public works deal, just like the yank New Deal when they built the interstates, and roll out SYMMETRIC cable AND ipv6 to every home, set a target, project to be completed within 3 years.

Since we are starting today we need to future proof, so it has to be gigabit each way.

It has to be fibre / laser, not anything on copper, or anything wireless.

It will have the same effect as the building of the interstates, it will open and enable markets that previously did not exist.

Even allowing for overspends, it would come in at less than 50 billion UK pounds, and that spread over 3 years.

All slashdotters, ask yourself this, can you see any opportunities for yourself, and your company, if you were told this was being rolled out in your area? project starting in 4 months and completed in 40?

gigabit up/down and ipv6, does this enable anything you can't do now? things that will generate revenue and stimulate the economy? things that will have a benefit for society that can't just be measured in dollars and cents?

discuss.

RISC can do a surprisingly heavy lift, pound for pound...

My old RAQ2 didn't even have heatsinks on the CPU...

... and it's broken networking.

Fact is, off the top of my head, I can't think of a single piece of application software that is written properly with the network in mind, and by that I mean that in the manual it lists *precisely* what inbound and outbound ports and protocols it uses, and *why* in each case.

In most cases port selection is pick a random number between 1024 and 50000, pick a random protocol, start pinging and fingering, and then wonder why the application doesn't play nicely with your firewall / router / ip tables / etc

For the home user Draytek / Vigor have for many years now been making fairly nice little boxed, with a browser based admin that should in theory be more than adequate for anything the home user would want, and far better than you get in a generic router / firewall.

What happens? User fires up X app or Y game and things don't work, and guess what, the firewall / router gets the blame.

I can remember spending a day as a well paid external consultant in the offices of a specialist financial company that managed investments for the privately wealthy, hello, lots of new bits of application software that I had never heard of before, and one in particular just wasn't working properly.

I did all the usual, looked at configs, sniffed, even RTFM in some depth, in the end I said balls to it and rang the published and stayed on the line until I was connected with a coder.

The result?

Sorry sir, that software is written to work on a standalone machine ONLY, it was not written to network between multiple installs on multiple machines on a network.

Too bad that the financial company, and the computer company that called me in, had just installed a new network with 12 new desktop machines running 98 and a new server running nt 3.5, and decided to have 3 or 4 of those machines run this package in question, and a couple of others.

In hindsight, the funniest thing of all was when I told the company director, and the director of the hardware company that hired me to fix the product that they had sold, what the problem was... naturally enough I got the blame.

Six months later I met the director of the financial company, he had finally parted ways with the hardware company, and would I consider coming in and sorting their network out.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Once bitten by assholes, forever shy.

Seriously, lots of guys / cops / teachers falsely accused of various shit could rent these at a thousand bucks a month, and still end up way ahead on money alone, plus they'd keep their jobs and reputations.

and it is interesting how the skies are clear of contrails, and also the lack of periodic flights from the local airport, the landing path for which is *directly* overhead at an altitude of a few hundred metres. This includes turboprop aircraft like the Dash jobbies being grounded.

Of course everyone is talking about stranded passengers, nobody is talking about stranded air mail and stranded cargo.

It is interesting to me just how dependent we (and we in Europe are a lot less dependent on flights than USAians) have become on the jet aircraft, and how useless people have become, they just sit in the airports expecting some one else to get them to their destination...

ferries, channel tunnel, trains, automobiles, nope, just won't do... I have driven from London to Athens in less time than many of these people have been sat in airports wringing their hands... I also suspect that it may be CHEAPER to hire a car and drive back home, than to attempt to live in an airport for a week.

interestingly, lots of travel insurance companies are simply shrugging their shoulders when people try to make claims over this, sorry, act of god, not covered by insurance.

BTW, back in the day, we used to hear the sonic boom from Concorde, I have heard some talk that while a 747 cruises at 39,000 feet, Concorde's ceiling of 60,000 feet meant that it could have flown OVER these dust clouds...