Slashback: Zoning, Linking, Fooling

Tonight Slashback brings you updates (below) on the video card ATi isn't really putting out, home-brewed electronic multi-room temperature control, NPR's linking policy, and more. Enjoy!

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."

Comments

Of course

[gusnz]

We always knew that the existing measurement system was thicker than two short Plancks :).

fundamental constants

[s20451]

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.

Re:fundamental constants

[jbuhler]

> My car gets 50 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.

That would be roughly 0.0025 miles/gallon. What do you drive, a Sherman tank?

Fake graphics and dual GPU cards

[yakfacts]

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.

Re:"Timing" of screws

[CharlieG]

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