12/6 Is it worth getting a portable MP3 player?
\_ I got the RCS Lyra as a gift. it's pretty simple to use. Comes
\_ I'm looking to sell my 32mb Rio PMP300. I don't know what
it's worth, so make an offer. -jkwan
\_ I'll Buy That For A Dollar!
\_ I got the RCA Lyra as a gift. it's pretty simple to use. Comes
with 32MB card (64 MB cards are available). a cable connects to
both your parallel & keyboard port (not OR, it's AND), which i
found kinda odd. it uses RealJukebox to transfer the music, which
is quite fast.
\_ it connects to the keyboard port only for the higher power
capacity line available there. The communications are
all over the parallel.
\_ If you like the music that is published only in mp3 form, then
it seems like it's worth it. It would be a bitch to have to
rip and encode from CDs to get your collection.
\_ I guess its not worth it if most of your music is in
CD format. I guess CDR's are better if most
of your collection is in CD format.
\_ Huh? CD ripping is trivial. It's read time plus setup time
which is no different than CD-r setup time. Where do you
people get this stuff from?
\_ So what are people using nowadays (say on the windows
platform) to rip and convert quickly? Is there any
share/freeware program that does this to 128KBps
nicely/simply?
\_ Audiocatalyst is good for Windows
\_ is perfectly reasonable and legal to rip your OWN CD's for your
own use in things like a portable mp3 player. Its called
'fair use'.
12/7(?) Can anyone point me to a good CISC vs. RISC article / paper? Thanx.
\_ No, most designers avoid CISC if at all possible. Intel chips
allow for their legacy CISC ISA to run on their modern
chips but that's just a hack (CISC instructions are decoded
into micro-RISC ops). Basically, many things will not work
unless what you execute are RISC instructions (pipelining,
Tomasulo dynamic execution, etc...). Intel chips suffer in
that all instructions must pass through one extra level of
decoding which could effect branch prediction recovery and
because variable length instructions can cross cache block
boundries instruction causing miss penalties and rates to go up.
\_ Which is why the x86 line was predicted to die 10+ years ago
and oh wait, no, it's still here and still in 90+% of
computers from workstations on down and moving into the low
end server market.
\_ Wasn't the consensus that the argument is meaningless?
Most chips today have the best qualities of both.
\_ This is true. There are no more true CISC or RISC chips
being produced today.
\_ most chips now days have RISC-properties. people
today seem to be confused about what the terms
RISC and CISC really means so depending on what your
definition is, most chips are RISC.
\_ But with everyone adding extensions like UltraSparc
VIS & Intel MMX to the instruction sets, most chips
are CISC too.
\_ I'd say, "RISC-like". True RISC was only an ideal
and a theory anyway.
\_ Patterson & Hennessey
\_ something like "A case for RISC" from Computer Architecture
News" by David Patterson (1980). There's also a very famous
dissertation from a Berkeley student. If you give me some
time I'll look it up.
\_ - D. Patterson & D. Ditzel, "The Case for the Reduce
Instruction Set Computer," Computer Architecture
News 8,6 (Oct 15, 1980)
- Manoils Katevenis, "Reduced Instruction Set
Computer Architecture for VLSI," PhD Dissertation,
EECS, UC Berkeley, 1982.
--jeff
\_ "Why my x86 r00lz y0r powermac!!!11", Dudester69!11
\_ Here's your paper:
"Real World Consumers: by Consumer Man#232
A pc is $700. A mac is $1500. My 10 yr old kid can't tell the
difference, and the 15 year old tells me linux won't run on a
mac, oh and he wants a laptop, like in that movie he saw.
Gee, I wonder what I'm buying for christmas."
\_ PC R))LEZ!! MAC DR))LEZ!!!1
\_ Are what they said still more or less valid, now that
it's been two decades and the industry has been moving
fast?
\_ kubi seemed to have recommended the reading to us.
he didn't recommend anything more recent but probably
because more recent work in architecture isn't
focused on ISA as much as it was in the 80's
--jeff
\_ Even x86 implementations have some sort of RISC
core that is given a CISC interface. RISC introduced
follow-up letters at http://www.reason.com/9610/ltr.sl.html
a number of principles that are still considered
valid such as uniform instruction length, pipelining,
on and on.
\_ There's an article in a past issue of "Reason" magazine about
history's influence in choice between technologies. It didn't talk
about RISC vs. CISC, but it talked about PC/DOS/Windows vs. Mac,
QWERTY vs. Dvorak, Beta vs. VHS, etc. I don't have the issue with
me right now though. -- yuen
\_ Do you mean: http://www.reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.html (and
follow-up letters at http://www.reason.com/9611/ltr.sl.html
[url fixed]
\_ _excellent_ article.
\_ Wow! Yeah, that's the article I read. I didn't know the
\- helpful. /- not helpful.
magazine has a web site. -- yuen
\_ Your tenses do not match. ^has^had
\_ actually that is just fine. He read the article in
past. HE didn't know the web site existed in the
present. Those are two different statements.
If you are gonna be a grammar cop get it right.
\_ Your tenseness is showing. Loosen up.
\_ Your value-add is null.
\_ Found this article on the subject:
http://www.ars-technica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc-1.html |
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