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Slashback: Zoning, Linking, Fooling
Welcome to the Fantasy Hardware League Regarding our post on the allegedly upcoming Radeon 8500 MAXX, reader eyelove yu writes: "This pic is fake, as many people have suspected. HardOCP.com (on front page) quoted Rubeena Hussein of ATi as saying,'"We have no current intentions of making this or similar boards.'"
Soon we will be able to assemble an entire system created in Photoshop. Yay.
Or you could roll down the windows ... vt@home writes: "As a followup to the earlier story, here is a system that not only allows to monitor the temperature throughout the house and draw nice charts, but also does already have computer controlled vents and even allows to control the A/C unit. Basically, this is a do-it-yourself zoning system, for under $500. Of course, the source is GPLd ;)"
Next week, the sidewalks will practically be free for public use. juanfe writes: "It's not like they really had any power to enforce their previous one, but NPR modified their Terms of Use on June 27. Now, linkers do not have to submit a form asking for permission, but NPR "reserve the right to withdraw permission for any link". More commentary from others.
Nothing like hundreds of angry bloggers threatening to withhold membership contributions to their local station."
Raising a stink to the power of 10. Snarfangel writes "After seeing Yet Another Slashdot Article extolling the virtues of meretricious metrification ("Isn't it Time for Metric Time?"), I decided to fight back the only way I know how -- by subjecting an innocent website to the Slashdot effect: This site goes into great detail about the importance of being Ernst (or at least Max Karl Ernst Ludwig) Planck, especially his system of units that only depend the fundamental constants of the universe -- the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the Planck constant, and the charge of the electron. With appropriate scaling, you get a unified measurement system that is not only more logical than Le Systeme International d'Unites, but is also much better for calculating physics problems in your head.
After all, if we are going to go to all the effort to change our measurement system, why not use that same effort and get the system *right* the first time?"
On a different note, Colin LeMahieu writes "I noticed your post on metric time. I stumbled across this while looking for various computer timing related articles and found it pretty interesting. This might not be as popular as metric time, but it seems to make more sense. The whole system is based on time as a fraction of a day; it even has the scientific measurment on how to re-produce the time, as with any scientific measurement."
We always knew that the existing measurement system was thicker than two short Plancks :).
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Specifically, look at the screws on the heatsinks of each GPU. They're at exactly the same orientation on both. Someone copied the one on the left, shrunk it a bit for proportion, and copied it onto the card after rearranging the PCB a bit. Notice also the distortion in the upper surface of the heatsink, where it doesn't mesh very well with the voltage regulator behind/above it.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
That's all well and good until our managers start making us catalogue were we spent our time , at all times, by the tick....
Papa Legba come and open the gate
What if fundamental constants of the universe turn out not to be constant?
My car gets 50 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
...and why this hasn't already happened.
;).
The meter, for instance, was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the north pole and the south pole. Although now the Earth has been measured more accurately so it's off by a bit, and it's now defined by the length light travels in a vacuum in a very short time.
But really, why are we basing measurements on all these arbitrary values anyway? Like the Imperial system originated from the dimensions of some king's thumb or similar, pretty much every measurement ever devised and in common everyday use is derived from non-universal values, which have no practical upshot -- if we want to measure the Earth, we're going to include some decimal places anyway.
Personally I think this, if adopted, would make scientific calculations a bit easier. It's annoying to have to remember several different conversion constants for gravity, charge, gas constant (8.314 or similar?), and so on. And perhaps without all the continual conversions, relationships between different physical principles might become more readily apparent...?
But I guess the downside is that some calculations are always going to have funny conversion constants, especially in the non-Physics world (Avogadro's number in chemisty perhaps for instance?). So even though the metric system isn't perfect, it's the standard so we might as well use it (although this could be the web developer in me speaking). It would be too much change for too little benefit to rescale the entire number system -- convincing the general populace would be just about impossible, especially considering how much trouble some countries are still having adjusting to the metric system
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You don't understand how it works. The way it would work (based on ATi's MAXX technology) is one chip would draw one frame, and the other chip the next frame, and so on. The reason they scrapped the technology was (if I heard correctly) that it wouldn't work correctly on NT Kernel based OS'es, due to some kind of limitation on hardware communication or something. It's similar to 3dfx's SLI technology they used on their Voodoo2 and Voodoo5 lines of cards, which effectively doubled the power just by adding another chip.
It doesn't matter how constant you think something is, it'll be disproven in 50 years anyway. Full (metric) speed ahead!
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Being able to pay with your Microsoft Passport: priceless
This time, the fake GPU card would have fooled me. There are a couple things that look wrong, but it was a good enough job that I would have been fooled had I not known it was a fake.
There was a fake post here in 2000 where somebody took an Adaptec 2940 card and tweaked it a bit, then claimed it was a Russian-surplus vector-based supercomputer-on-PCI card. Ignoring the fact that the fake graphic was obvious (you could still see the Adaptec logo and QC stickers on the card), I could not believe people would fall for a "cray on a chip" from Russian surplus. While Russia is a fine country with a great history, they are not known for their high-tech electronics. This is the same country that was still uses tube computers and radios in the mid-1990s, and used to buy new pinball machines just so they could pull the 68000 CPUs. If the Russians had any infrastructure to develop such a bleeding-edge device, the certainly would not be selling it. I posted my feelings then and got flamed for it.
But I could fall for the ATI card. ATI has a history of Dual-GPU cards. I strongly disagree with the poster who said "dual is not as good"; depending on how it is done, it can be much better. Don't use Windows NT as your baseline for multiprocessor applications. Design an application (in this case, a driver) that expects to see certain CPUs in certain places and hardware that automagically divides the load. There are good ways to do this if you ALWAYS know what sort of hardware resources you will have. Systems that don't (standard Windoze or Linux applications) will suffer greatly as they try to adapt on-the-fly.
According to a tag within the file, it was Adobe Photoshop 7.0 that was used.
What a load of rubbish. No one will read this reply as I post as AC, but spoofing DNS or a web site is trivial. *Anyone*, anywhere *in the path* between a Mac box and either a root DNS server or any apple website (or akamai'd copy) can fsck-up your Mac.
/.ers re-invent the wheel yet again.
Even outside the path, it's possible to 'poison' many DNS resolvers (including maybe the one on your Mac), but even without that approach, every router, proxy, transparent cache or other link can be subverted and made to feed you trojan content.
Having your web connection subverted happens to you almost every click - I'm certain your ISP has a transparent cache, which just served you this article. How do you know it didn't serve you a bogus page with some Internet Exploder 'sploit embeded in it? Maybe the whole internet came from one PC on the other end of that phone line - did you go out and check it all yourself?
The simplest way around this is for Apple to sign their software packages, using their private key, and for you to check that signature (or your Mac to do it for you when it installs) against the public key distributed on every genuine Mac install CD (or verified by 'out-of-band' means).
This works fin for every other sensible packaging scheme (rpm uses gpg/pgp, for example), and even Mickey$oft have got the hang of it.
You could use 'ssl' (https) to access the Apple site as an alternative, but simply signing packages works best, because then it doesn't matter how you obtain them - ftp, http, cdrom, floppy, email, kazaa, ed2k. If the signature doesn't match, don't install it.
The issue then, is of Apples' disdain for simple, proven and widely used security measures, not one of having to have
Take a look at the Planck units - oddly enough, they work out to be particularly meaningful (equivalencies here are approximate see the write-up for specifics):
- new meter ("finger") = 1.616 cm
- pace = 100 new meters = 5.3 feet
- new mile = 1000 paces = U.S. mile
- gallon = (U.S. gallon + British gallon) / 2
- new gram = 3/4 oz (mass)
- new minute =
.9 minutes
and so on. Now the U.S. can skip over metric and go straight to Planck units. Brilliant!186,000 miles per second - it's not just a good idea, it's the law!
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
In fact, "metric measurement" is redundant, unless you're measuring systems of measurement.
The words "meter" and "metric" are both derived from Greek by way of Latin and French.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
It is possible, if you don't want deep linking, to just redirect to the homepage if the "referrer" isn't a site of yours.
It's not rocket science. I have seen people protect linked javascript code that way, why not "deep" pages? That way they don't have to write a usage policy to cover their wishes, it is a technical solution.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
but it would have been nicer if you'd converted it for this post.
Infuriate left and right
The [H] on the image is the HardOCP watermark thing that they place on any images on their site. So it wasn't there before they got it.. Other than that.. good post :-)
Normal people worry me!
That would be called "Timing" of the screws. In a lot of old finely made mechanical items (watches, guns) the screws ARE timed - the slots ALL line up exactly the same way. it was a craftsmanship thing
That said, with todays CNC milling machines that have what is called "Rigid tapping", or if the threads are "thread milled", it happens all the time, the tap goes in the same way each time, so if the screws are all made the same, all the screw heads come out the same. Looks strange, but it does happen
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Neither, really, although it's true that the "metric system" is based on the meter as one of the fundamental units of measure. But both words ultimately derive from the Greek word "metron", meaning "measure". That's why the little dials that measure your electricity usage, for example, are also called "meters", and why software developers use the term "metrics" to refer to measurable aspects of their systems.
surely the correct term is 'decimal' and not 'metric' time.
"Metric time" is presumably meant to imply that the system of time in question would properly belong to the metric system of units. But you'd be correct in assuming there's nothing intrinsic about "metric time" that relates it to the "metric system", other than that both systems rely heavily on powers of 10.
3dFX's SLI technology had two Voodoo2 cards working in tandem, one rendering even scanlines, the other rendering odd scanlines. Hence, Scan Line Interleave.
The tech used in the Voodoo3, 4 and 5, who's name escapes me, would break the screen up into X number of sections and hand each section to a different chip. In theory, you could scale this up to however far you'd like. As I recall, though, the 6500 card, with four chips, (TMI or TDI or somesuch, it was called) required a wallwart and a wall socket.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
here is the link to the picture of the fake radeon
FAKE!
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I'm all for starting with universal constants, but the fact remains that no matter what you start with, the units you use will remain arbitrary. Unless we want to divide time by exactly a "Planck interval of time", we're going to be scaling it. So maybe a Planck unit of time is a universal constant , but if we still use "Planck Minutes", "Planck Hours", etc, it is still arbitrary. The problem is "to the power of ten" is _not_ a universal standard. In fact our entire base-ten system is just as arbitrary as our day/24 system.
So a day isnt a universal constant. So what? Saying that we divide it by 24 is no more or less arbitrary than saying that a Planck minute is 10% shorter than a 'regular' minute. Why not multiply the Planck unit by 11 instead of 10? Wouldnt that just about clear up the 10%? [yes, I know, ~11.111, so sue me. The point is that the two are just as arbitrary]
I wasnt going to say anything, but then I took a glance at the Hex-Clock page, which actually suggested that 16 divisions were somehow less arbitrary than 24 divisions. Is there somebody out there who actually believes this?
I, personally, like the idea of using universal constants as the basis for some time scales. But to suggest that this somehow makes the way we talk about time non-arbitrary, that seems far-fetched.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
yah... with the new vaporware tool, I find that photoshop 7 allows me to create corporate FUD in half the time it used to take.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
The upper left and lower right screws actually do NOT quite match. And what about the fan power connector? That looks pretty durn real. The silk-screening around it looks pretty clean too. :).
-shrug-
I'm no photoshop guru (I prefer Gimp
I wonder why someone went to all the trouble to fake the photo and leak phony specs? It could have been part of a plan to manipulate ATI's stock price. Look at the hourly stock price chart for ATI today. ATI (ATY on TSE) opened this morning at $10.70cdn and by 10:30 am was down slightly to $10.60. The story came out on slashdot at 10:30 and within an hour had risen to its daily high of $11.08 but then closed down .23 at $10.52. Not a big spike but someone could have made money on this.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
The authentication is either non-existent, or very weak. You can get fake update packages that are really backdoors and the updater will install them if you trick it into taking them. This guy used ARP spoofing which requires you to be on the same physical network. Maybe fairly safely outside the building via 802.11, but still on the same network. Or at least already have cracked another machine on that network.
So yeah, I would say Apple needs to get it's act together and start signing it's stuff, and make the updater support signed packages. If they store the keys in the normal keychain that could even let 3rd parties using Apple's normal installer (assuming you check in the install app, not update!) do "more secure" updates. Of corse the better OSX apps are just "drag into place", and don't use an installer...
Do I have to let everyone come sit in my living room when it's hot outside?
-- Terry
In "A Deepness in the Sky" Vernor Vinge uses seconds throughout the novel. If he wants to refer to a little over a quarter hour it's one kilosecond, a megasecond comes to about eleven and a half days, an Earth year is about 31.5 megaseconds... I found it actually quite easy to convert in my head by the end of the novel.
The 8088 was a different processor from the 8086 and 80186.
Affiliate link? lol... nice try.
While a system that would depend on "the fundamental constants of the universe" is a great idea, I do not think most people on the street care to do physics problems in their head.
Rather, they will be concerned with something that regulates their behavior as greatly as the rotation of the Earth. Not fixing the time to the cycle of a day would confuse most people. Imagine having to go to work at a different time every day of the year.
This second time system also has a problem. While it looks very interesting, it is base 16. The entire argument was proposed over finding a base 10 system of time. Adding a base 16 time system to the metric system would be a step toward returning the metric system to something like the English Imperial System. Such a system would only be good for computers since it works no nicely with binary numbers. But if that is to be done with time, why not recreate the entire metric system for computers and base it on 16 and not 10?
However, when arbitrarily choosing a time system to replace the current one, the choice should probably be something made for people. Base 10 works well for those of use without physics degrees or wetware interfaces, and it fits into the original scheme of the metric system.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
The metric system was designed using the leading metrological thinking of the day, with decimals applied. It was not the only system around, there were more logical ones available. The two systems I show in parallel.
ANGLE
m circle -> 400 degrees -> 100 min -> 100 s
g circle -> 360 degrees -> 60 min -> 60 s
LENGTH.
The nautical and itenery length are the same, based on a minute arc on some circle of the earth.
m minute = kilometre = 1000 metres
g minute = mile = 1000 fathoms -> 6 feet -> 12 in & c An ell of 20 inches makes 1 mph = 1 ell/s
The km is too short, this from selecting the smallest value and underestimating it. The mile of 6080 ft Imperial, is closer to the mean.
AREA
For the sale of land, a unit of area is named. Normally square measure is used.
m are = 100 sq metres. 1 sq km = 10,000 are
g acre = 1000 sq fathoms. 1 sq mile = 1,000 acres.
The unit suggested here is a comma-unit: ie 12,345 sq fathoms = 12.345 acres.
VOLUME
Cubic measure is used to express volume measured by linear extent.
m stere = 1 cu m
g acre-foot = 1000 tuns = 36000 cu ft
tun = 36 cu ft
CAPACITY
For volume measured by bulk comparison (eg pouring), a more accurate system is used.
m litre = 0.001 cu m
g tun = 240 gallons, etc
WEIGHT (Mass)
For this, the basic weight is intended to be a capacity of water, under some conditions. In practice, a prototype is manufactured to fall in the range.
m 1 litre = 1 kg [This had a name "grave"]
g 1 tun = 2400 lb of 16 oz etc... = 0.972 lb
FINE WEIGHTS
This is a combination of the apothecaries, troy and other small measures. The pound is divided into 15 troy oz, and then according to the troy and apothecaries ounces respectively.
Standards were originally defined in terms of the jewellers weights, as jewellers often crafted the system. A grain is 1/480 of the matching ounce. The avoirdepoise oz is 437.5 troy grains, but 480 grains avoirdepoise.
The weights ran in France in the first stage of conversion is the 'system usualle', feet and pounds defined on round metric. The fine-weight usage was converted to metric. By the time that they came to drop the transitional system, the idea of dual weights had largely disappeared, and the fineweight was extended up to myriagrams, quintals, and tonnes.
MONEY
The value of a weight of silver or gold. Bullion-money has since gone out of fashion, but the franc was originally 0.1 grams of silver. cf pound, ounce, talent, mina, shekel, dram [weights that became money] vs mark, dram [money that became weight]
Converting money is the first step of introducing decimal, etc. In australia, currency decimalisation (1966) preceded metrification (1975).
Metric added some ambitious reforms that never took root, and were mercifully tapped on the head.
TIME
Division of the day, decimally. Unfortunately, the time units were already constant in Europe.
CALANDER
Grouping of days into weeks and years. This was a very localised affair. Attack on the calendar was seen, and is seen as, an attack on the core principles of society. Making a system dependant on the calender is now recognised as a folly.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
IIRC it was heat-only ... this is santa cruz we're talking about, not the gobi, or texas. (Of course, since texas is underwater right now, that's sort of silly sounding.) Anyway if any thermostat wanted heat, they all got heat, and any thermostat that wanted heat opened its own vent. More to the point, there's no server in this system, just some simple gates and some digital thermostats, and a little tiny bit of custom logic. Really, you can do the whole thing with relays, you don't even need ICs. You could probably steal every single part you needed from pick and pull if you looted some cars of their environmental systems and various relays.
Remember, the paranormal hamster says, "Hardware solutions to software problems."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
".. and it's now defined by the length light travels in a vacuum in a very short time.
But really, why are we basing measurements on all these arbitrary values anyway?"
A metre is how far light moves in 1/299,792,458th of a second. This is because light travels at the speed of 299,792,458 metres a second. See?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I have a feeling that the parent post here got modded down because he didn't sing the praises of Linux. Never mind that the focus of this guy's post was about the faked Dual GPU picture that was mentioned in this article. No no, he said RedHat was 'masochistic'.
So what? If he found it hard to use, he's to get modded down for it? Yah, clever way to respond. Too bad whoever modded 'em down didn't have the balls to tell him why. Boy you really taught him a lesson: "Linux zealots are easy to tweak."
All this over an opinion.
"Derp de derp."
With reference to water at Earth surface conditions,
,tamreF ed erreiP)
1 centimeter^3 = 1 milliliter = 1 gram = 1 degree celsius = 1 calorie
Physics is nice, but life at the surface of this planet involves one heck of a lot of practical problems involving water.
Furthermore, a measurement system based on fundamental constants is not all that helpful for solving problems at the human scale. As a portion of all math problems solved by all humans everywhere, those involving c, G, etc. are a pretty small subset. Viva Newtonian mechanics!
Now, a system that reconciled pi and e with integer values would be helpful. Unfortunately, no such system can exist. "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it".
(7361
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Dear NPR,
Your terms of use state "We reserve the right to withdraw permission for any link.". Unfortunately, you have no right to withdraw or grant permission to link to your website, as there is no law stating that permission is required to link to another entity's website.
Furthermore, it states "By using the NPR Web sites, you agree to be bound by these terms of use.". This statement also has no power because a user of the website is not aware of the terms of use upon entering the website. Even if users were made to be aware of your terms of service before entering your site, the legal weight of the terms is still quite dubious.
Thank you,
A User
At least this is what I have heard from a Russian physicist.
I saw a picture of [a Pentium V processor] on the web
For one thing, it's "Pentium 4" not "Pentium IV".
For another, Pentium 5 would be abbreviated as "P5", which is one of the generic terms used to refer to 586-generation processors such as the original Pentium, AMD's K5, and whatever Cyrix had out at the time.
Athlon and Pentium 4 are 786 processors. Pentium 5 and the Hammer series will probably be considered 886's unless Intel tries to squeeze another chip out of its Pentium 4 core (the PIII was just a PII with SSE and a couple slight optimizations to the P6 core).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Surely when I said none of the options under the fonts menu influenced the problem, you understood that I was including the options to change the fonts.