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."
I think it's interesting that California chose Lexis, but perhaps not as ominous as it would seem. As part of their obligation to provide true public access to the law, many (or maybe most) courts have law libraries.
Yes, it's on paper, yes, it's not searchable from the comfort of your home... but I think that's what you pay for when you get the access through Lexis or Westlaw's online service.
Many law libraries even have searchable case law on archived CDs, or cheap/free alternatives (like Loislaw and Lexis One.
Remember, lots of legal treatises (and perhaps some other states' "official publications") are published by LexisNexis, as are any books that used to be published under the Matthew Bender name...
That's my purse! I don't know you! -- Bobby Hill
I was just looking into motherboards this afternoon, and most of the newest P4 motherboards only support 4 gig -- and the older ones only support 3 or 2 gig.
Go check out Tom's Hardware if you don't believe me.
So maybe the chip does support 64GB (I don't have a link for that)... the limit could be the chipset, the motherboard makers, or perhaps its just the max size of RAM available?
Design for Use, not Construction!
I understand that the way around that one is to use large pages, to decrease the overhead for each page. Pages can be of variable sizes. I'm not a kernel expert, but there was a talk on this topic at the last Ottawa Linux Symposium.
The comp.sys.tex has been overrun by spam, and there hasn't been a single TeX related post in half a year. Additionally, the Boston TeX symposium has been cancelled this year, and probably won't be back next year.
Publishers seem to be abandoning TeX as well. O'Reilly, Sams, Microsoft press, and Morgan Kaufmann, as well as most other leading publishers, either no longer accept TeX/DVI submissions, or never did. The only remaining big TeX publishers would seem to be Addison Wesley and MIT Press, and they both prefer PageMaker postscript output.
Furthermore, it is no longer possible to buy a new printer that will print DVI output. If you want DVI, you need to scrounge ebay, or university garage sales.
I kow there are still TeX devotees, people who still write letters (and web pages and email!) in TeX, but they seem to be a dying breed.
It's useful for cross-platform development...ssh with X tunnelling into a Linux server lets you run emacs, DDD, etc. across the network with reasonable speed for debugging Linux apps from a Win32 desktop. It saves the hassle of rebooting to switch between them when both of your desktop machines are Win32 boxen.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
A quick thought popped into my head when you said microcode patch: If infact it is patchable with an executable which fixes the microcode, isn't it likewise "patchable" by a virus or something of some sort, rendering the processor completely useless? I would assume that the microcode controlled non-trivial things, since they went all the way of releasing a patch for it. Just a thought - please tell me if its true? Thanks. -Uchi
Interesting that the fix is a software fix. While this sounds like some sort of BIOS patch or the like, apparently the P4 has downloadable microcode so perhaps it's actually reprogramming the chips themselves. Dvorak, of PC Magazine fame, had a conspiratorial article once about the threat that this presents in that information on how to reset the microcode in the hands of a virus writer could be devastating (and achieve the holy pinnacle of computer vandals of actually damaging hardware, and least perceptably).
On a whole other topic, isn't it about time that Intel dumped the "Pentium" name? Pentium of course was named to be a variation of pent*, meaning 5, which was natural given that it followed the 486. Here we are how many years later still using the term "Pentium" despite a processor core that shares virtually nothing with its predecessors. Will we have a "Pential Pentium"? Should the HT P4 be a Pentium Pentium? And of course naming the newly designed mobile chip "Pentium M" was an absolutely moronic branding maneuver. Maybe they should call their consumer 64-bit processor the "Triber SX"?
I digress but just wanted to complain about Intel naming conventions as of late.
Dvorak, of PC Magazine fame, had a conspiratorial article once about the threat that this presents in that information on how to reset the microcode in the hands of a virus writer could be devastating (and achieve the holy pinnacle of computer vandals of actually damaging hardware, and least perceptably).
Perhaps I shouldn't say this.... because perhaps I am unleashing some evil from my mind on the world that should never be unleashed...
Ah, what the hell, let's open pandora's box!!!
What if you wrote a virus that simply overclocked some part on the computer? If the processor was software overclockable (I don't overclock much so I don't know...) you could perhaps have a virus that would simply change the clock multiplier from say... 6x to perhaps 10x. That would fry the chip? I don't know much about CPU overclocking, but I know that video overclocking is easily done.
Alot of people use either Nvidia or ATI cards, and i know the Nvidia cards share the detonator driver set (on windows), not sure about ATI. What if you had something that just forced the card to it's Max??? And if you have a program that controls fans... turn them off? Just have the virus try for ATI cards, Nvidia cards, and susecptable CPUs, and mobo's with controlable fans- then send them through the roof. Sure your computer would run faster for a few seconds... but i remember a Tom's Hardware where they took the fan off an Athalon, and it burst into flames...
I hope I never see this virus in my inbox...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
The problem with the 4GB limit (and under more realistic assumptions, 2GB) has little to do with the maximum memory a system can use.
The problem comes from how much memory a single user-space process can use, which on IA32, as I said above, comes out to only 2GB, reliably.
As a simple example of why this matters, let's say you have a system that needs tons of memory, like for rendering complex scenes or serving a huge database. Each process will want as much RAM as possible, but on IA32 (well, on any architecture, but the current problem only really applies to cheap-and-popular IA32), can only use up to the addressable limit.
So you might think that you could use a machine with 64GB for a number of slightly smaller (but still memory-hungry) tasks. The flaw with that idea? Get real. If you need that much memory for one task, you need to dedicate the machine to doing that task. If you need to do rendering on your huge DB server, you need to upgrade BADLY
Of course if the power goes out, you could still lose things that were not yet sync'ed up. Better to have a UPS on your system in that case.
More significant, perhaps, is that Google's approach to searching is unlikely to work nearly as well for legal documents as it does for the web. The trick to Google is that web documents are frequently updated, so that two sites can each reference each other. That doesn't work for most other kinds of documents, which are set when first written and can't refer to anything published after they were. That means that Google's whole approach of recursively defining the importance of a document's links according the importance of the links coming to it won't necessarily work.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
As for why they don't come up with a new trademarkable name, I'm really not sure. I suppose they figure that "Sexium" would just get too many giggles and not be taken seriously, so any new name would have to be just pulled out of their ass. After all the time spent getting people who know nothing about computers to learn the term "Pentium," I don't think they want to have to start all over again. For the most part, they'd rather keep the marketing advantage of numbers (so that people know "4 is better than 3") while prefixing it with a trademarked term, so that other people can't copy their naming scheme.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/sunfire15k/inde x.xml
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:) Rip boards out, take CPU's, memory & I/O offline and keep the OS running .... nice! And even better, add 'em back in...
Sometimes, you just need the memory.
I have a pair of E10k's at work that each have 64gb of RAM in them, and could probably stand to use some more
When we replace them with SF 15k's, we'll probably go with 256GB of memory each
Yeah, so really, there are OS's that can not only address, but use (and efficiently too!) that much memory
You don't know the meaning of Super Duper Ultra F'n Cool until you dynamically reconfigure a 10k/15k... It's just awe-inspiring.
--DM
Anonymous because I'm too lazy to log in.. if you read this, fine.
1. Microcode patches get flushed every RESET. The virus could do far worse to the system.
2. You won't get any speed improvements -- microcode patches are __slow__ since a. microcode in general is slow, and b. the patch space is slower than the ROM in general
3. microcode patches are very _stepping_ dependent -- you'd have to rewrite the patch (prior to encrypting it) for each stepping of each processor.
4. future processors will probably have more robust (think PKI) infrastructure for patches. Currently, you would have to look at the mask to figure out how the encryption worked.
About the best you could do with a patch would be to fix anti-overclocking features or enable multiple threads on a single threaded processor.