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I think we should all suggest this the Mythbusters to have them try and recreate this one. It should be fun, at the very least, to have them shoot high speed rocks and large amounts of electricity at a street light to see whether the effects are consistant with this photo.

flat earth is the opposite of round earth. flat earth audio manufacturers are british companies such as naim and linn. tubes are round earth. calculate your Flat Earth Points (FEP or your [tongue and check] Round Earth Points (REP

flat earth is the opposite of round earth. flat earth audio manufacturers are british companies such as naim and linn. tubes are round earth. calculate your Flat Earth Points (FEP or your [tongue and check] Round Earth Points (REP

He(Luigi) had been submitting bug reports already and Gamespy had been accepting them, fixing them, and sending him thank you letters. They sent him a C&D letter to stop him from posting software that exploits these bugs, DDoS software, cd cracks, and other stuff on his website. There was no need to post these things since Gamespy had been accepting his bug reports. Also when they noticed that he was doing this, they stopped accepting his bug reports. Read this thread for a much less biased report: here.

There is a problem with this posting in that it only tells a very small portion of the actual story. Gamespy was perfectly fine with him finding security holes and even sending him thank you notes for his work. Luigi had been posting the software that he made to find these holes and also posting cd cracking software. They sent the cease and desist letter telling him to remove these things from his website. In this case I think that Gamespy did NOT overreact because he was posting things on his site there shouldn't be released to the public. I'm ok with a person writing a program to test the security of something but I think that it's not ok to post said software publically, especially the source code. Here is the arstechnica posting on this which is much less biased in it's report of the incident here. In the end I think he should remove the stuff from the website but should face no legal action.

You're trolling, but basically Windows cheats by caching hardware details, while Linux goes through a complete redetect sequence on every boot and requires manual IDE tweaking (a big issue for both Win and Lin because modern IDE controllers aren't really compatible with each other).

Swapping your board without so much as a reinstall

But, that won't help in a recovery situation. I'd say the Windows way is a fair decision, given how infrequently mobo changes happen. Although, it would be much less painful if they supported a /REDETECT switch in the boot.ini.

Replying to myself... Linux.Ars did a short intro to Fedora here, though it is not a full review.

If you need help installing it, checkout the #fedora unofficial FAQ, it answers 90% of people's questions, and if you're new to Linux, we have thread at Ars that should help you along.

If you want to know how Fedora is, you should probably ask people that use it, it's unfortunate that such a good release is mired with the typical anti-Red Hat sentiment. What's next? "OMFG Red Hat is sleeping with my wife!"

See this discussion over at Ars Technica for more details.

Bottom line : iTunes or GEAR removes vital registry keys that prevent audio CDs from playing once you've uninstalled the software. I had to manually hack my registry to restore functionality.

Bad Apple. No Cookie.

Didn't someone mention something like this in that Ars Technica forums' discussion about the "automatic defragmentation" in Panther a few days back?

Ah yeah, it's in there! Go to the discussion and search for Firewire. In short, the poster sees the automatic defragmentation very possibly being the root of the problem.

PPC 7457 performance tweak for new PowerBooks

The second comment down is the one with good information from this discussion. Here is the choice quote:

The BTIC is a 128-entry, four-way set-associative cache that contains the most recently used branch target instructions (up to four instructions per entry) for b and bc branches. When a taken branch instruction of this type hits in the BTIC, the instructions arrive in the instruction queue a cycle sooner than they would arrive from the instruction cache. Due to an error in the processor, the BTIC may provide corrupted instructions and should not be enabled.

It appears the trojan horse theme was picked up on Ars Technica discussions, too, although not with regard to "Yellow Box."

Ars Discussion of Athalon-64 vs. G5

Ask these guy. Some of them are quite crazy, running "DC farm" and whatnot.

Well, that is reasonable, but they are using a stock install according to Dr. Aref, as I note here. And isn't that much better advertising than using a custom-built OS X or Linux?

BTW, if someone was interested in building a custom OS X, they can just use Darwin, which omits all of the Apple niceties and for which, of course, source is available.

No, Dr. Aref, the Dean of VT's College of Engineers, has said they are using the stock install of OS X, which at the time was 10.2.7. See my post here for references.

The quote is from the Mellanox CEO and he is probably using Linux to appeal to a wider audience than Mac OS X would.

There are also a few threads on steam, PlanetHalfLife, and arstechnica.

You would be mistaken.

Some of the folks in the forums over at Ars Technica has been using PS7Bench (a 21 filter test) on a 50 MB test file. Their results are summarized here.

It is interesting to note that the G5 performs significantly better on the first 12 tests than on the last 9. The tests it performs the worst on are NTSC Colors, Accented Edges, and Water Color.

Take a trip over to the Ars Battlefront.

The Photoshop benches seem to have a dual G5 significantly better than the G4. But the single processor G5s are only slightly faster than a dual 1.4 G4, depending upon what filters you use in Photoshop. (Note that the bench listed is an amalgamation of filters, but not typically arranged by how often you'd use those filter is the real world)

For scientific applications, especially those in Fortran, things are much better. The G5 is head and shoulders above everything else if you use the IBM compilers.

Take a trip over to the Ars Battlefront.

The Photoshop benches seem to have a dual G5 significantly better than the G4. But the single processor G5s are only slightly faster than a dual 1.4 G4, depending upon what filters you use in Photoshop. (Note that the bench listed is an amalgamation of filters, but not typically arranged by how often you'd use those filter is the real world)

For scientific applications, especially those in Fortran, things are much better. The G5 is head and shoulders above everything else if you use the IBM compilers.

Take a trip over to the Ars Battlefront.

The Photoshop benches seem to have a dual G5 significantly better than the G4. But the single processor G5s are only slightly faster than a dual 1.4 G4, depending upon what filters you use in Photoshop. (Note that the bench listed is an amalgamation of filters, but not typically arranged by how often you'd use those filter is the real world)

For scientific applications, especially those in Fortran, things are much better. The G5 is head and shoulders above everything else if you use the IBM compilers.

The other thing to understand is that once the G5 becomes more mainstream, apps will be compiled for it [things like making sure both FPUs are fed, getting rid of vec_dist instructions in altivec code, etc]. As of this moment, few apps know what a G5 is, and to that end, can't run on it well.

Also, the DV codec either doesn't use Altivec, or doesn't use the 2nd processor.. I can't remember which. I am sure this is in a TIL somewhere

Give it time. All will be right soon enough.

For more reading on the subject, I suggest checking out the various threads of Mac Ach. over at Ars Technica.

Also, Panther shows some *serious* gains when using a G5. Expect the 10.4 to fully exploit the processor. [It has been stated by Apple that Panther/10.3 won't be "fully optimised" for the G5/64 bit]

I admit that I know nothing about business, but it seems clear to me one of the primary goals should be to to make it as easy as possible to separate willing customers from their money. If people want to give you money, don't make them jump through hoops.

For example, an alarming number of sites I've visited require me to create an account to buy something. This is a turn-off.

• For a first-time shopper who may never visit your site again, it's an extra, unnecessary step.

• An account implies that my name, address, telephone number, email address, and credit card number are stored on file. No thanks.

• Creating an account means I have to supply a password. This means that I either make up a new password (which I will need to remember but won't should I ever return), or I re-use a password I've used elsewhere. In other words, that's either one more password I need to remember or one more place where someone can steal it.

  I have no evidence of this, but I suspect at least 90% of people re-use passwords. As a consequence, I must ask myself: do I trust your site with my password? (It suddenly strikes me as odd that I would trust a site with my credit card number but not my password, but I do.) Even if the answer is yes, that's one more decision the customer who has already decided to buy something from you has to make; that's one more point where the customer can change his/her mind.

Please, don't require accounts. Provide them as a convenience to repeat customers, but don't make them a barrier to first-timers. Make the first- timers happy, build up trust, and they'll be more likely to come back.

(If you do use accounts, it would be reassuring to know if your site hashes or encrypts passwords before storing them.)

Apple uses HyperTransport. It is in the custom chip they designed and IBM manufactures for them. It is only for the memory controller though. The FSB bus on the G5/970 is IBM's Elastic Bus. It is very similar to HyperTransport but not technically the same thing.

There's an excellent discussion at Ars on this.

"OK, some news directly from the MAXON development lab:

Of course all the following numbers are not final, no promise at all !!!!!!!

This is based on the information we have right, now, there is still a of of work to do and we still have to wait for a new compiler...

With the current CineBench a single G5 1.8GHz scores at about 188, the optimized version will maybe score at about 238...

A hypothetical single G5 2.0GHz could score at about 210 on the old CB, optimized could be 265...

A dual G5 2.0 could maybe score at about 480 with the optimized version of CB....

Depending on the new compilers and our findings (thanks a lot to Apple for being extremely helpful and cooperative) we might even crack the 500 score for the dual G5 2GHz...

Again, no promise and of course no release date ;)

Cheers, Richard"

I'll hit preview this time instead of just blindly clicking. Sorry bout that.

I read that there is a fairly large difference between the size of a gcc compiled instruction set (100k) and the XLC compiled instruction set of the same origin (700k). Presumably they are doing some pretty impressive unrolling and inlining. I got that at this dicussion here .

Manufacturers like Dell tend to use the compiler that produces the fastest benchmarks. Sometimes, that is a compiler that isn't really reliable enough to be used for anything other than benchmarks. It's worth noting that when Craig Hunter at NASA tried to compare the G5 against other processors, he found that some of the compilers that produced the fastest code (such as the Intel compiler) failed to produce correct results.

The NYT is running a short piece on the growing phenomenon of people who, solely out of necessity and not out of any real love of computers, have been forced to become tech-heads.

As consumer electronics proliferate and consumers grow increasingly disenchanted with technical support operations (which routinely charge for calls), many people are discovering that whether they want to or not, they are developing more than a little technical proficiency. Some, like Mr. Marcuse, become virtual experts. But many of these accidental techies learn only as much as they absolutely must...

Phyllis LaBaw, 45, associate athletic director at the University of South Florida in Tampa, is seldom away from her computer. As a result, she has grown self-reliant over the years without having attended a single computer-related class, she said. "You start spending time, and you're going to get to the point that eventually you're going to learn how to fix what you've botched up."

Still, for all the time they invest, most self-taught technicians would rather be doing something else.

This is a fairly big deal as people have pointed out before that GCC on PPC isn't as hot as it should be, but with that kind of muscle and money behind it it should go forwards by leaps and bounds.

You'll probably get better information from the discussion over in Ars' Mac Forum. See here and here

You'll probably get better information from the discussion over in Ars' Mac Forum. See here and here

First of all, if you are seeing the little Beachball more than once in a great while, BUY MORE RAM. In fact max out the ram in the machine. If that does not help, try this- Tweaking vnodes for enhanced performance.

Digital Shoplifting, here I come!

Ars Discussion (See towards the end of the page)

Other benches on After Effects and other programs are coming out that show that the G5 running G4 code blows away the Xeon. We can only expect things to improve with recompiled and reoptimized code.

Since the slashdot editors are probabally sleeping and won't see the million submissions concerning this till morning...The The G5 specs were leaked by apple. All of these links have the same info, they are on small sites, pick one at random to avoid slashdotting them. Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, . I'm posting anonymously to avoid karma up or down...

It might be best if people save their comments for the coming discussion in the morning, to avoid redundancy.

EgalitarianBovine makes a good point along these lines over at arstechnica:

Basically independant "modifications" are only derivative of System V when they are bundled with System V. When bundled with Linux, they are no longer derivative.

Of course this gets into the very murky area of what "derivative work" means in the software world. The FSF has been grappling with this for sometime to produce clear guidelines -- without much success, IMO.

For several days, the Ars crowd has been discussing this. The discussion is worth reading through

...there's been a raging debate about this very topic going on in the MacAch at Ars the past few days. Whatever's to be said has probably been covered there.

I believe the 85C rating is the die temperature. My crappy motherboard measures the temperature underneath the CPU. I believe you are supposed to add around 15-20 degrees to that temp to get your real temperature. That makes my 48 more like 68. Still well within acceptable temperatures, however.

I think I'm just paranoid, for some reason. I guess I spend too much time reading the arstechnica cooling forums.

They already now about this

Well to keep it short the reader basically explain how to BEND THE CASE so it no longer wobbles.
Also see this thread on Ars Technica that is about the 12" and its wobble issue.

if you're looking for 970 info, Hannibal has a decent article over at Ars Technica, and a followup is on the way. also there's a +1 thread of deth in Ars' forums.

The Huge Future Apple CPU Thread. A very informative read focusing on the PPC 970, 980, and Moto 7457.

Those 1.42Ghz G4s are not overclocked. See this thread for details. Basically, they're 1.4Ghz stamped chips from Moto (or IBM, or whoever makes them), and 20Mhz is not overclocking. In fact, the 1.42Ghz claim is just a byproduct of the bus multiplier: 167Mhz bus*8.5 Multiplier=1419.5Mhz on the processor.

There is a thread on Ars where the author checked the temp of his 12in PB against a 12in iBook. The results are a little disapointing...

PS. There is a large set of images in the thread that could bog down 56k'rs

..."a fascinating new paper on the use of data compression algorithms for allowing a machine to quickly determe aspects of a document like language and authorship." For those less mathematically inclined see report from the Economist.com.

I recently started a thread on Ars asking for information for external input boxes so I could watch cable television without the television. I received many responses and have since started to look into TV tuner cards as well as a few more external solutions.

If anyone has any other suggestions, good bad or indifferent feel free to let me know, the more choices and information I have the better.

You submit a catastrophic bug that can take down entire AD domains from inside to Microsoft, and they ignore for 3 months?
See here.

How hard is this for you to understand? What's mine is mine, not what's mine is yours, both physically and intellectually.

This is perfectly clear for physical goods and ideas that you keep to yourself, but what about ideas and works you divulge to the world? I can not simply unforget the things you have shown me. IMO, you have given up property rights when you impurify my bodily fluids with a book, song or idea. We grant creators some rights for the good of society, but they are not inalienable rights.

You can find a more extensive argument here

Your allegation that "society is breaking down" is patently untrue.

People can be locked up indefinately or assasinated without a trial. Politicians listen to those who fund them, not those who vote for them. Journalists don't tell you the truth, instead they rally behind the regime. Yes, everything is fine in the US of A.

First Question:
Apple is using the G3 and G4 processors in its computers. The G3 is made by IBM. The G4 is essentially a G3 with the addition of the AltiVec extentions.

Second Question:
NFI - The blade server line pages claim that it will run unix or windows server (and most likely linux), but this particular prototype, I don't know. I would suspect AIX.

Suspicion:
Wrong, the processor is actually made by IBM.

Theres a HUGE discussion about this CPU on arstechnica - link but its pretty technical.

This chip was not just for mac, its supposedly to make IBM more competitive in the mid-level server market.