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."
While theoretically you can put up to 64 gigs into a recent IA32 machine, my understanding is that in Linux at least the practical limit is 16 gigabytes. After that the page tables won't fit in kernel space.
I'd expect that most other OSes have limits like that due to architectures designed when nobody was close to using a full 4 gigs.
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).
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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