Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Hardware, Lexis, Free
More RAM than I can afford. RyanT5000 writes "The article referenced in "Getting Rid of the Disks" incorrectly states that the maximum RAM for a 32-bit Intel compatible system is 4 GB. This was true up to and including the original Pentium processor, and it makes a lot of sense (after all, 2^32 = 4 294 967 296). However, with the Pentium Pro, Intel added 4 pins to the address bus, expanding the maximum physical address space to 64 GB (using paging, since it still uses 32 bit addressing). I would assume AMD has a similar feature. If you're on Windows, you'll need a server version to get above 4 GB, but most major Linux/BSD/etc. OSes support it. This would probably be cheaper (and definitely faster) than SCSI SSDs. If you need more than 64 GB of solid state storage, you probably shouldn't be running on an Intel."
"Free" always makes people suspicious. imevil writes "A while ago slashdotters asked some questions to the GNUWin II team. Well, here are the answers. In the meantime, more people joined the team, and more languages were added (this one looks pretty cool)." There's also a short article about GNUWin running at NewsForge.
On a related note, cos(0) writes "According to this(1), this(2), and other stories, many people are interested in running open source, high-quality software on MS Windows. The author of this site provides an up-to-date CD image of the latest versions of numerous high-quality OSS applications (complete list on the site), updated monthly, downloadable via BitTorrent. (The same site also offers a web-based Code Beautifier.)"
Cool distribution method! (And if you're on dialup, $5 seems like a great bargain -- Are you listening, Cheapbytes?)
Toys are so tempting to the wallet ... OrenWolf writes "Ars Technica Has a review up of BroadQ's QCast Tuner software. Unlike the earlier /. review, this article goes into great detail about the technical capabilities of the software. A must read for PS2 owners looking for a PC-PVR-esque solution."
Yeah, but does this review include any original software? ;) And david_adams writes "Slashdot linked to an article I wrote last month about my experience with a CDMA2000 1x wireless network from SprintPCS. It sparked quite a bit of controversy, but not for the reasons I expected. Because I called Sprint's service 3G in the title, but admitted it was 2.5G in the first paragraph, I heard from people on both sides, chiding me on the one hand for calling it 3G, and on the other for calling it 2.5G. I decided to research and write a new article to get to the bottom of it. What is truly 3G? Where is the line between 2.5G and 3G?"
The time to wait is now! ThunderDawg writes "Intel resumed Canterwood Pentium 4 3 GHz 800FSB shipments yesterday. TAFKAEFKAF (The Anomaly Formerly Known as Errata Formerly Known as Flaw) was corrected with a software patch.
Intel is again shipping its new 3GHz Pentium 4 processor, a week after it halted shipments due to the discovery of an "anomaly," an Intel spokesman said Monday. PC makers that use the chip in their systems have been supplied with a software update to fix the issue, George Alfs, an Intel spokesman said. Vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer, and Gateway introduced desktop systems based on the chip when it was released on Monday last week. The issue with the 3GHz Pentium 4 with support for an 800MHz system bus occurs only in rare circumstances and users are unlikely to be affected, according to Alfs."
I'd take google and a strong AI any day. hondo77 writes "A bit of a followup to this article from back in February, LexisNexis has been named the publisher of official reports by the California Supreme Court, according to this press release. "The public will have free access to the official text of the opinions at a Web site hosted by LexisNexis linked to the court's Web site." IANAL but it doesn't sound ominous to me."
There's also Cygwin, which is a sort of mini-distro for Windows complete with XFree and a few basic window managers (fwm and OpenBox among them). Great package manager, lots of mirrors and great quality overall. It sometimes beats booting into Debian =)
Note that you'll want to run it in NT4 or better (IMO), but it's a very nice introduction to UNIX-like environments, especially the X server support (since bash is not very flashy). It's actually quite neat to have a full screen X session running on top of the Windows desktop.
It also ships with the GNU toolchain so you can even write your own little aps (console, GTK or plain X).
Ummm, large X86 systems from Dell, HP, Unisys and others already support the full 64GB of ram that the architecture allows. Sure not everyone (or even many) who uses Linux needs large PAE support but it would be nice for those who do. Of course most of the people I know who wanted to use large amounts of ram on x86 are waiting for Opteron because generally if you need that much ram you need it all for one or two processes and that doesn't work with PAE. btw if you think no one wants access to large chunks of ram on x86 then you haven't dealt with people with large databases or who route large ASIC's/cpus. It costs shedloads to buy Sun's with lots of ram, an Opteron or Xeon with the same amount of ram will probably cost about 1/3rd as much, which when you are talking about dozens of systems adds up to a lot of money. (My back of the envelope calculation was that for our ASIC group it would save somewhere in the neighborhood of about a quarter million a year =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Get large systems fron Dell, HP, IBM, or Unisys and you get large memory support, up to 64GB for most of them on the largest x86 servers. The low end 1 and 2 way chipsets don't support large amounts of memory because PAE support takes a lot of silicon that just isn't needed by 99.9999% of the people who buy such systems. That and you'd need more slots as the largest commonly available ram modules are 1GB, though 4GB modules are seen a little more often these days.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'd always thought that the boasts about 3G's speed seemed overblown. I bought a Toshiba 2032 3G cellphone/pda last December and it just never seemed to be all that fast at fetching my email or pulling up a map in Yahoo. I never knew that Sprint's (Qualcomm's?) implementation only barely meets 3G speed requirements. I feel sort of ripped off, but as the author of the article points out, $10 a month for unlimited data service is really hard to complain about, even if it is only around 128 kbps. I think I should try to stop buying into this "wonderful" cutting edge technology so early and start assuming that claims are exaggerated.
The BIOS controls the writable state of the microcode and it is always off as shipped to the consumer.
The manufacturers can burn the update on machines where it is enabled then turn the option off or move the chip to a machine where it is disabled.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
already publishes a lot of official reporters. I believe Lexis publishes some as well. It's really not a big deal. There are no copyrights in court opinions (or they can't be exploited anyway; there's some case out there saying that). They're free to the public as far as I know. Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw both make their money adding additional content to opinions (e.g. headnotes, their own pagination). But they also do business publishing reporters.
Untrue. Linux can do 32 GB; at work I test and benchmark this stuff (for example see here and here). Linux can also probably do 64 GB, though we haven't tested this because we don't have enough memory slots on our development platforms.
Now, in this case, LN has gotten the contract to be the official publisher of the Cal. case reports; West had previously had the contract. This isn't really a big deal for the public as such; after all, somebody has to publish them, at least as far as the dead tree version is concerned. The actual text of the opinions will remain in the public domain, of course, and lawyers (and the public) will still be able to get them from LN, Westlaw, the local law library, web sites, or any of a number of other sources.
It's interesting to note that often, publishers lose money on the things they publish as the "official" publisher. Several states, for example, set insanely low prices for their codes, particularly when you consider that they are heavy-duty, hardbound volumes. Publishers do it, of course, because they expect to sell other things to attorneys in those states, and figure there's money to be made on those items. Whether this is the case with the Cal. reports, I don't know.
Disclaimer: I do work for LN, but the above are entirely my own opinions.
Well, last time I looked at it, it worked like this: There is a default version, probably rom-masked, on chip. Then, at _each_ boot, the bios uploads an updated microcode to volatile memory on chip. And finally, the OS or anything else running at ring-0 can upload a new version.
Typically, this is fairly black-box (undocumented) binary code you get from your vendor (intel/amd/whatever).
Basically, if software is already running at Ring 0, you are in trouble anyway. It can wipe the HD, flash the bios, whatever.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
The IA-32 architecture (32-bit x86) allows 4gb of linear virtual address space. (It allows a larger segmented address space, but those segmented addresses get mapped into the 4gb linear space.)
Versions of the x86 architecture implemented by the Pentium Pro and beyond allow more than 4gb of physical address space, and thus allow (with the appropriate chipset and OS support) machines with more than 4gb of RAM; you just can't have more than 4gb of that memory mapped into the virtual address space at any given time (those presumably being the "paging tricks" to which you refer; mmap() and other memory-mapping APIs, and multi-tasking, are your friends here).
CONTENTS OF THIS COMPACT DISC
Package Version(s) License(s) Web site
Mozilla 1.0.2 / 1.3 / 1.4a MPL/LGPL/GPL http://www.mozilla.org
A web browser suite designed for standards compliance, performance and
portability.
OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 LGPL/SISSL http://www.openoffice.org
The leading international office suite that will run on all major
platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through
open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.
Phoenix 0.5 MPL/LGPL/GPL http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix
A branch of Mozilla that aims for a small file and memory footprint
while retaining Mozilla's functionality, standards compliance, and portability.
Phoenix has been renamed to Firebird, but that name has not yet been used.
Thunderbird 2003-04-16 MPL/LGPL/GPL http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/minotaur
A cross platform stand-alone mail application.
PuTTY & PSFTP 0.53b MIT http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty
Telnet, secure Telnet (SSH) and secure FTP (SFTP) clients, giving you
the ability to manage remote hosts and transfer files.
FileZilla 2.1.6 GPL http://filezilla.sf.net
A graphical FTP/SFTP client with multi-language support, drag & drop
support, upload/download queues, ability to resume transfers and much more.
7-Zip 2.30 beta 30 LGPL http://www.7-zip.com
A file archiver with support for 10 formats, 38 languages, Windows
Explorer integration and a powerful command-line version.
Gaim 0.61 GPL http://gaim.sourceforge.net
A versatile instant messaging program, capable of supporting nine
different IM protocols.
The GIMP 1.2.4 (prerelease) GPL http://www.gimp.org
A very powerful image editor, comparable to Adobe Photoshop.
(Included prerequisite: GTK+ 1.3.0)
TightVNC 1.2.8 GPL http://www.tightvnc.org
A great client/server software package allowing remote network access to
graphical desktops. With VNC, you can access your machine from everywhere
provided that your machine is connected to the Internet.
(VNC is an abbreviation for Virtual Network Computing)
CDex 1.50 beta 10 GPL http://cdexos.sourceforge.net
A utility for extraction (ripping) of audio files from an audio CD.
Psi 0.8.7 GPL http://psi.sourceforge.net
One of the best GUI clients for the Jabber instant messaging protocol.
Freenet webinstall GPL http://freenet.sourceforge.net
Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network, which pools the power of member
computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store, much
like a global hard drive. The main aim of Freenet is to help preserve freedom
of speech on the Internet.
Tux Racer 0.61a GPL http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net
Tux Racer lets you take on the role of Tux the Linux Penguin as he races down
steep, snow-covered mountains. Enter cups and compete to win the title! Tux
Racer includes a variety of options for gameplay, including the ability to race
courses in fog, at night, and under high winds.
Celestia 1.3.0 GPL http://www.shatters.net/celestia
A real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three
dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to
the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any
of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.
Emacs 21.2
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
FWIW, every Intel chip since the Pentium Pro has had downloadable microcode. AFAIK, the instructions that are handled by the microcode are notably slower, so not all of them are handled there. I don't have much information about that, though...
The microcode (at least with the p3 and before, probably still so with the p4) isn't stored on the CPU permanently--it needs to be uploaded on every system boot. For this reason, at least some motherboard manufacturers store the microcode in the BIOS and upload it on boot. I also believe that Win2k and above automatically upload the microcode as well, but I'm not sure on that.
I don't know whether AMD's processors support upgradable microcode (and, quite honestly, am too lazy to look right now), but I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
Here's a good (but dated) article explaining this feature. The short answer: they used encryption plus security-through-obscurity (no internal documentation!). This would be cool to hack for good, too -- imagine if you ran one major application that could be sped up with one additional specialized instruction!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Living in South Korea, I've gotten the chance to use a friend's CDMA2000x1EV-DO phone (mine is still stuck at CDMA2000). It's pretty good here, you can get real-time streaming video even on the subway. Content is decent, and of course as it grows more popular, more content will be developed.
One of my contacts in SK Telecom last year was mentioning the 4G research, and it looks like it will be amazing (although a long time coming).
AFAIK microcode updates are signed or at least protected by a MAC, so it isn't that trivial to update...
Additionally, the CPU might only allow one update (remember, the update is volatile) after the CPU is reset which is always done by the BIOS in current systems. So, a malicious program would have to inject the (correctly signed) new microcode before the BIOS performs its upload.
But this opens interesting possibilities like running some time-intensive OPS until the CPU core shuts down due to overheating *eg*
http://www.theopencd.org/
It's not the same ISO, but it also seems to include a lot of good open source windows applications.
* OpenOffice.org 1.0.1
* DictInstall 0.9.3.2
* AbiWord 1.0.1
* Beonex Communicator 0.8.1
* FileZilla 2.1.1
* Putty 0.52
* WinVNC 3.3.3r9
* XChat 1.8.10a
* Audacity 1.0
* CDex 1.40
* 7-Zip 2.24
* NetTime 2.0b6
* Win Privacy Tray 0.5.5
* Sokoban YASC 1.53
* Celestia 1.2.4
I am the county law librarian at one of the California County Law Libraries.
Before the court unification(Joining the muni court with superior court) We do serve as court library. But with the unification, things are very different. Some county law library still function as court library. While some had became very independent of the court.
If you live near the county seat of a larger county, then you have access to county law library that is as good as most law firm library. I had compare notes with several firm law library, and I have a bigger material budget compares to most of them. They have the advantage in that they only have to collect materials in the subject area their firm specialized in. While I have to spread my collection dollars thin on many different subjects.
California appellate court decisions are already being posted on the Judicial Council(The state's version of Judicial Conference) web site.
http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov
What new about this contract is that the older case, going back to 1850s will be aviliable free. And the cost of getting new volumes will be cheaper than what west is charging now. But I suspect West will just increase the price on West's California Reporter.(The unofficial one)